In a series of scenarios which could develop—probably best at novel length but certainly workable within the story—the achievement of xenophobic hatred through the devices of programmed bigotry (and the identification through psychological depth testing and social observation) might assume genuine urgency, might be linked with the ability of humanity to survive against aliens whose xenophobia has not been bred or acculturated in them, and the central figure in such a narrative would be one who is either educated to understand xenophobia as a necessary trait or who already knows this and must persuade the others.
There is some of this, masked, in the 1940s Astounding school of science fiction, manifest in writers such as Hubbard and Heinlein. These stories, however, elide the issue; they do not address xenophobic loathing of aliens as linked directly to (and predicted by) nativism, bigotry or prejudice on the part of the sturdy space captains and interstellar scouts who must fight bureaucrats as well as marauding aliens. A straightforward, acknowledged acceptance of these qualities as properly selecting the most sympathetic and alert character does not exist in that or any other kind of science fiction.
2) BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE. Or, as Freud said, "Biology is destiny." Women are constructed to bear and nurture infants; men and women are biologically designed to have sexual relations as a condition of procreation; reduced sexual attractiveness is a discouragement to perpetuation of the unattractive characteristics. Disease is a form of natural selection; lack of intelligence, left to its own devices, will select out stupidity as a characteristic of the race. To the degree that individuals or cultures wander from that biological imperative, deny the simple truth of Freud's dictum, they are risking the fury of natural selection and cultural breakdown,
To countenance forms of sexuality other than those which are procreation-driven, to deny the fundamental childbearing and nurturing responsibilities of women, to artificially maintain or subsidize an underclass incapable of surviving on its own—to incorporate this flaunting of the natural law, the biological imperative in the mores of a culture, is to seal, in the long run if not the short, the destruction of that culture and perhaps humanity itself.
What Freud called "civilization and its discontents" can be reviewed, in terms of all post-industrial politics, sociology and social systems as an inexorable denial of this biological imperative, granting sanction to roles and behavior which were never intended by the slow evolution of the species up to that point of post-industrialization.
In sum, then, all politics and social theory in the past few centuries has represented—in the name of "liberalism" or "expanding roles" or "revolution of possibilities"—as granting artificial sanction to that which of itself could never have survived, the propitiation of a population and behavioral roles which in the Hobbsian natural state or the Freudian archetype could never have evolved. Whether this is true or not, whether "evolution" is indeed an evolving of possibility and patterns, or whether it is a process which has only shifted circumstances further from true adaptation, certainly composes an interesting, even central series of questions; they are not, however, questions that can possibly be investigated within the framework of modern science fiction. (They are, not to isolate our genre, questions which in all probability can be articulated in no form of literature or academic explorations, for that matter, but it is necessarily science fiction itself to which this discussion must be limited.)
Stories such as "The Women Men Don't See" or "Houston Houston Do You Read?" or "When It Changed" can explore and question with some savagery the viability of certain common cultural assumptions, but those writers and those who have come after have not been able to explore—beyond the anger which the persistence of biology as destiny has caused—why none of the experiments with alternate systems or an ideology not tied intrinsically to biology have ever, or at least to this historical point, been successful.
3) RAPE AS THE PERPETUATION OF BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS WHICH COULD NOT OTHERWISE CARRY FORTH. This one I have actually seen in print; a professor of psychology from a southwestern university was able to obtain a grant of about $100,000 to study rape as a kind of cultural imperative for aggressive, brutal, unattractive males who otherwise might not be able to perpetuate themselves with socially desirable, upscale women. He produced a dull, portentous monograph.
If some of the traits of the rapist might, in the Hobbsian natural state, be construed as having value—will, self-determination, the primacy of demand, that certain fixity of purpose which conventional courtship behavior must often deny—then these are values which can perhaps only be perpetuated by acts which the culture regards as violent, despicable and utterly unacceptable.
All of this being the case, however, and aggressive rape having been condemned in all cultures for such an extended period of time . . . why, nonetheless, does rape persist? Has it perhaps even increased through the decades? One could theorize, in the kind of science-fiction story which will never be published, that a post-industrialized, increasingly stratified and compartmentalized society sets up barriers between classes which restrict social mobility, make it even less likely that wildly disparate gene stocks can meet.
If—going back to the issue of biological imperative—hybridization and disparate gene stocks may be viewed as important to the race (remember that "hybrid vigor" of which the high school biology or college genetics texts would give examples?), then is not rape—the attempt through male violence to achieve disparate conjoinment that the stratification and compartmentalization of society would otherwise make impossible—a biologically justifiable act? (If any act of forced or non-consensual intercourse can be defined as rape, how much of human history and its progeny can be seen as its product?)
I don't like any of these ideas much. It is perhaps unfortunate but nonetheless inescapable: I have to put a disclaimer on the record here. I don't like xenophobia or its manifestations in the life I lead; I don't think that destiny is completely based upon biology (because if it was most of us would be dead); and as the father of daughters I find rape even more horrifying than I would if I were the father of sons or no father at all, and I would find it plenty horrifying in those cases as well.
But all of these, I submit, are issues of some real and practical concern; a literature which among many other things proposes to be an instrument of social inquiry should be able to deal with these issues, should not face their prime facie exclusion. But these are not stories that are going to come to your local science fiction or book publisher anytime soon, nor will the comedies of Nazism or the merry, satirical investigations of the reading of science fiction or fantasy literature as surrogates for genuine social role-playing.
Eugene McCarthy said many years ago about campaigning for the Presidency, "Unfortunately, wanting the job really disqualifies you for it," and any strident insistence upon the right of writers and editors to investigate these issues will to the exact degree of its insistence finish one off within the commercial category with prematurity and finesse. Flowers blushingly all unseen: thus our words unspoken.
A Formal Feeling Comes
After great pain,
a formal feeling comes.
—Emily Dickinson
Genre. Where would we science fictioneers, mysterists and romanticists be without it, and yet at what price the sheltering storm? "Seeking to give this context, science fiction denies us context," my collaboratrice, the sullen and inestimable Kathe Koja says, and so it does.
In order to sell Camp Concentration as science fiction—and he had no other place to commission it or send it in the 1960s—Thomas Disch turned the virus which sharpened and rotted its narrator's brain into a reversible and controllable phenomenon.
In order to make Quicksand a viable commodity for the Doubleday science fiction editor who paid for it, John Brunner was compelled to drain the ambiguity from the mysterious mental patient treated by his dark and ferocious psychiatrist in the institution and make her an alien. Brunner's ambiguous set of theatrical players in his contemporaneous novel The Productions of Time (1967) were eventually defined for NAL's science Scion editor as aliens who, under their alien director, were seeking to take over our planet under the cloak of repertory theatre. Or something like that.
"It is so science fiction!" Harlan Ellison shouted at Robert Hoskins, the Lancer editor of the Infinity original anthologies when Hoskins said that "Pennies on a Dead Man's Eyes" was a good story but not science fiction. "The guy's an alien! He's an alien!" (Didn't sell with Hoskins, who rejected it anyway. Ejler Jakobssen published it in Galaxy.)
The presence of the work within the context of science fiction forces presupposition upon the audience: what is the thing doing here unless it is fantastic or extrapolative? Slack-jawed, in search of ever newer wonders, the science fiction reader (don't blame me for this characterization, take it up with the James Blish estate; that is how he described his audience in "Issue at Hand") awaits the expected wonders in the story before him; if the eventual explanation does not push or place the story within the expected definition of the genre, the story—virtually by definition—will not be in Stirring Wonder Tales or Beta Stories #26, and the writer has been deprived, because of this necessity of that range of ambivalence, possibility or implication which can be (although all too often is not) part of the full range of technical possibility allowed by the writing of fiction.
This imposed necessity wrecked more of Alice Sheldon's work, I think, than we can ever know. Sheldon, one of the most powerful, subtle American writers of her time, wrote a great deal of remarkable science fiction but she also wrote a good many short stories—"The Women Men Don't See," "Morality Meat," even "The Screwfly Solution"—which bear the imposed gimmicks and contrived extrapolative resolutions of a writer conscious of her markets and determined to sell there.
The strictures did Joanna Russ no particular good in The Female Man or its adumbrating "When It Changed"; the alienness of the backgrounds lowered the implication of the story.
In the later Orbit anthologies, of which there were twenty-one, Damon Knight did explore the limits and the possibilities, published a few stories which involved no extrapolative or technologically altered material at all, but this series of anthologies, in many ways an investigation of the ways in which expectations could be manipulated or deliberately tricked, lost sales, interest and any centrality through the last half of its issues and disappeared without attracting particular notice or regrets.
I think of Reginald Bretnor's "The Doorstop," a mysterious, ambiguous story (Astounding, November 1956; Merril's Year's Best in 1967 and reprinted in the 1956 edition of the Greenberg/Asimov retrospective best of the year anthologies for DAW) in which an unhappy, yearning, lost scientist deep in middle age discovers an artifact in his back yard strangely lit from within and possibly of alien origin. He turns it into the chemists and physicists for evaluation and finds that this thing which he calls "the doorstop" reawakens the vulnerability and depth of feeling which he had for science and for all human possibility so many years ago; the alienness of this artifact, perhaps a mysterious beacon from the stars, acquaints him with his own sense of loss and slow reawakening. If this story were not in a science fiction magazine, it would have retained its tension and resonance until the end and perhaps beyond: is the thing indeed alien and does it beckon a way to the things beyond the stars? Or does this strange object function only as a means of mocking the scientist's fallen condition and his own gullibility and terrible sense of loss? It is a story which could have gone either way or could have backed from clear explanation, but the reader of Astounding Science Fiction or Year's Best Science Fiction knows that there will have to be closure, and that closure will make explicit the alien origin of the artifact (in this case it is a signal device and rapid corrosion indicates that the aliens will be returning very soon) and the relative objectivity of the scientist's response.
This is a subtle story by a good writer (Bretnor never really got his due, but then again very few writers get what they deserve unless they get more than they deserve; and the issue of misjudgement, the follies of underestimation no longer interest me as they did a decade or two ago and perhaps they do not interest me at all) and its effects are carefully calculated but they are wasted; the provenance of the story takes away all sense of mystery, just as the fact that Tiptree's "Beam Us Home" appeared in a science fiction magazine ensures that the protagonist is an astronaut wrecked in orbit, dying, and not the kid who watched Star Trek become as child or adult utterly dislocated from reality. Again, the provenance of the story has managed to deny the central effect which it might have sought.
This is clearly a problem; it is why people like Leslie Fiedler or John Updike, Edmund Wilson or Anatole Broyard have always greeted with contempt and hollow laughter the more florid assertions of science fiction writers and readers that this is the true quill, the central literature of the age, the stuff of the post-technological era and the true myths of our golden and engineering age. Yes and no, as the literary agent said; yes in that science fiction by definition and history is better able than any other literary form to refract what is going on as human functioning and destiny has been placed at the mercy of technology but no in that science fiction, in order to retain its categorical integrity, must cut off a whole range, perhaps the greater range, of solutions and explorations.
Updike (reviewing the David Hartwell Book-of-the-Month Club science fiction anthology a couple of years ago) stated in The New Yorker that science fiction was doomed, regardless of its genius and the high caliber of some of its writers, to being a second-rate form eternally because it must of necessity lean upon the extrapolative and impossible. This is not so, it is not exactly the issue at all, but it is fair to say that the science fiction markets, the integrity and nature of the genre itself have forced those conclusions upon the writers. It might be possible to open up science fiction or for that matter fantasy and to work it through to levels of ambiguity or projective possibility barely glimpsed; but how this could be done and managed within a generic format geared wholly to audience expectation is not only beyond Updike, it is quite beyond me.
"This is a good novel and I'd love to publish it," John W. Campbell said in a note to Brunner's agent, Joseph Elder, when Productions of Time was offered to Analog in 1966. "But I see no way that I could do so; there is absolutely no science fiction, nothing at all until past the halfway point and then the science fiction seems irrelevant to the story." Who said that Campbell had lost his editorial grip by the mid-sixties? (Heaven forfend that I had.) His response showed acute insight into Brunner's problem and heroic solution; Brunner wanted to write a mainstream novel but couldn't get a contract and probably couldn't sell it, wrote half of one anyway, then backed and filled and cheated and fudged so that NAL would publish the novel as science fiction and not give him any trouble.
It is clearly a problem, not perhaps the worst which the revered old field has had but one which is signatory; it has chased that diminished form which we call modern science fiction (the encroachments of fantasy, fabulation and the spinoff televised novel have reduced genre science fiction to something of a special interest within its own categorization) toward formats of jargon and wired futures which impose from the outset a dislocation, a sense of difference so vast that generic requirements are fulfilled at the outset and the writer then feels some relative freedom to induce levels of ambiguity as shifting areas of extrapolation. Good enough, I suppose, but intensely limiting and tending to drive the work toward a kind of parochialism, a specialty of jargon and reference which keeps out the marginal reader or confuses those on the borders; impossible to theorize much beyond this, but if readership of genre science fiction (as opposed to fantasy, Star Trek and Star Wars imitations and series novels) is indeed less in absolute numbers than was the case twenty years ago, these impositions might function as part of the explanation. And then again perhaps they would not; the critic being offered a sense of ambiguity, an appreciation of ambivalence which has been denied the fictioneer.
But what, then, ultimately is left? Some radical critics and theologians, among whom I do not include myself (although it composes a vast yearning to do so), have theorized that after the Holocaust, modern assimilative institutionalized Judaism in this country was finished, there was simply no way after Hitler and the ovens and the six millions that the rabbis could sell to those parts of the middle class which still paid any attention to the synagogues the proposal that being a good, a practicing, a faithful Jew had anything at all to do with the true nature of contemporary life. As a friend of mine proposed, "After the Holocaust, there are only two kinds of Jews left: those who are atheists and those who cannot take a hint." Still, the synagogues were there, the institutions were in place, the rituals and customs and engines of this mainstream Judaism were still there and necessitous, something had to be done.
For those institutions and because true religiosity and faith had become evidently something irrelevant or to be mocked, what were left were the triune stanchions: Hitler, the Holocaust, and Israel. Israel became the engine which drove the diaspora in the United States; the spectre of Hitler, revived and sweeping across the lands, necessitated a place of exile; and of course the Holocaust as rehearsal for even greater disasters. These three factors became the machinery of modern Reform and Conservative Judaism, which in the absence of a credible, saleable religious creed or basis of belief needed all the help and all of the specters that they could get. "The spirit killeth but the letter giveth life," Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote (in one of the Four Quartets) more than half a century ago; and the letter became the Israeli bond appeal, Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat and anyone else who could be called to mind.
A cynical and despairing view of a cynical and despairing time, and perhaps not wholly true, but what else could keep the synagogues going? The faith of the Kabbalic kings, the holy orders of the shtetl, the beloved rebbe, the believing and faithful tzaddik in Talmudic garb committed to the restoration of the law? The Last of the Just had been loaded into the ovens, as Andre Schwartz-Bart's great novel noted; in his absence the idea of Justice was a very, very difficult sell indeed.
Trivializing as it may be, unjust (and perhaps blasphemous) as it might be to juxtapose, one could make something of the same call on science fiction. Something happened to science fiction at about the time of the Apollo missions, something which was the culmination of many visible technological failures and misapprehensions: Hiroshima, germ warfare, nuclear shelters, television, napalm, Vietnam, the disastrous Apollo 13. Perhaps the future was not benign, perhaps the fundamental posture of science fiction—that the future would work and humanity, by so accommodating itself to extrapolative forces and their implication was educable, could be improved, could be changed and expanded in meaningful ways—was wrong.
Perhaps genre science fiction as agonizingly developed through Amazing and Thrilling Wonder and Campbell and Gold and the literary and extrapolative adventures of the decades was in error, the fundamental assumptions were wrong, the future made no sense whatsoever, there were no causes but only causal linkages, and even Kuttner's blundering robots or Kornbluth's blasted astronauts or draftees were imprisoned by assumptions of ultimate honor which simply did not exist. Even the dystopians and bearers of alarm who had run through the streets of the city hand in hand with the prophets of different kinds had believed in the practical value of their craft and the existence of favorable alternatives (even though people and institutions were too stupid to accept them).
But what if the whole deal was wrong? What if the corrupt, blackened little heart of science fiction had at last been first seen and then removed and then in the cold, stricken, despicable light of Apollo 13, Watergate, the collapse of institutions and the abandonment of its audience to its own devices been revealed to be as much of a lie as Gernsback's promise in 1926 to educate young boys toward scientific careers? What then?
Well, what then? Star Trek of course and Star Wars and the consequences of the Tolkien rediscovery of the mid-sixties which had flung out the detritus of elves and dwarves and imitative work through the decade and which now, in the mid-seventies, began to overtake science fiction itself, lightless, heartless, corrupt, revealed old science fiction which had neither the means nor the certainty to fight back. In the empty space left by the wreckage of the 13th Apollo, in the chasm through which the splinters of the spent Challenger fell and fell and fell, what was left to take up that space but the elves, dragons, Skywalkers and Kirks which had been imported from movies, television, Tolkien or the common folk wisdom of the media and placed in those places where science fiction had been? The rabbis had no ethic for post-Holocaust Judaism; they had little explanation or rationale for the death of the Last of the Just either. What they had was the Israeli bond appeal, the travelogue of the Nazarene and the ever-available specter of Hitler now repaying some of his awful culpability by functioning as the best fund raiser the synagogue and the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith ever had.
Well, it is all very interesting and speculative. Of course science fiction and Judaism have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! Where it comes down is not my department, said Werner von Braun.
