IN MEMORIAM
Mark Clifton
Edmond Hamilton
Cyril M. Kornbluth
Henry Kuttner
". . . the aggregate amount I paid out as an editor to everybody, over a period of thirty years from 1939 to 1969, as editor of Astonishing Stones and Super Science Stories, as editor of the Star series of original anthologies for Ballantine, as editor of more than a dozen reprint anthologies over that period and finally as editor of Galaxy, If, Worlds of Tomorrow, and others for nearly a decade—the total of checks, for all of them put together, to every contributor, is probably about [a] quarter of a million."
—Frederik Pohl 1979
"Almost everybody in science fiction tends to stay in science fiction."
—Henry Morrison 1978
Introduction to the 2001
Electronic Book Edition
When I assembled this book—a conflation of essays written for various magazines in the 1970s and some entirely new work, about 50/50—in 1980, I had one small and one very large ambition. The large ambition was to utterly change the face of my time (as Mailer so winningly put it in Advertisements for Myself), bring science fiction to full literary respectability, get science fiction with me at the head of it into the literary and academic canon, bring the teeming masses to new understanding, have flowers at my feet and houris at my head all of the time. The minor ambition—I calculated that my more megalomaniac purposes were as Damon Runyon would put it at least six to five against—was to have a book on science fiction which would sell modestly, have a kind of modest permanence . . . a book which like Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder or James Blish's The Issue at Hand would have a kind of sub-life over the many years and would, like those remarkable testaments, be regarded as required reading for any writer interested in publishing science fiction. The Knight and Blish books are irreplaceable, the first (and for a very long time the only) works of serious criticism of category science fiction, and it was my prayerful, not in this case at all megalomaniac, hope that The Engines of the Night might join those two works in the sub-basement where from time to time uninformed readers would take the volume out and appalled readers would subsequently replace it.
The work was certainly more personal than either Issue at Hand or In Search of Wonder. Unlike Blish or Knight, I brought my own writing experiences (and glancingly my personal life) into the text; it mingled attempts at objective history or criticism with cries de coeur of the most chilling sort and intentionally or otherwise emerged as a kind of masked autobiography. I had in the previous decade often said that I would write my memoirs at forty; Engines of the Night was indeed assembled at approximately that age and it is as close to a memoir as I am likely to get. Writers, given enough time and space, will tell you everything even if they are insistent upon telling you nothing. Even Hemingway's and Faulkner's secrets, even Nabokov's most private obsessions are spilled out on the pages. Sometimes you need a decoder: the Royal Russian and Big Ernie were clever guys. Sometimes you barely need a decoder as with Engines of the Night. One can map my personal and professional odyssey over the first fifteen years of my working involvement with science fiction closely through this work.
Did I succeed? I think it fair to say that I failed in my major ambition; the Republic is still standing and science fiction remains compartmentalized within the academy and most general review media; it has had its moments over the years intervening but in the main is as despised and marginalized a category of literature as it was in 1980, which is to say somewhat despised and significantly marginalized. Nor, the last time I looked left and right, did I note flowers at my feet, houris at my lips, or even a get-well card. The minor or at least more realistic ambition stands problematic in its resolution: Engines sold about 3500 copies in its hardcover edition—not too bad for Doubleday science fiction, which wasn't fiction—and had a modest trade edition; both have been out of print for a long time and this composes its first reissue, seventeen years after the trade edition. The work did not win science fiction's Hugo Award and The Science Fiction Encyclopedia refers to it as "ignored."
But then again and twenty years later I still receive occasional letters on this book (and even more occasional requests for a copy should I have any extras on hand; I no longer do); it has a reputation perhaps beyond its audience and it seems over the years to have been read by more than half of the writers who came into the field since its publication to produce any body of work, and it has perhaps an even larger percentage of readers among science fiction writers who were my contemporaries and predecessors. There was nothing quite like this work—this is not necessarily self-praise—before it was published; in its wake there have been some similar works but very few of them have been published by other than small press. (Thomas M. Disch's Dreams Our Stuff Is Made On published in the late '90s is an exception or an anomaly, modeled in small degree on Engines, which, incidentally, Disch hated; it was reviewed widely within and without the genre and won a Hugo . . . Disch however had relatively little to say about his own body of work, his own struggles in and then out of the genre.) This is a subterranean work. I wouldn't call it a "cult book"—that condescension or pejorative masked as praise—but it is one whose sub-life meets the more modest version of the hopes surrounding its preparation and delivery.
How does this look more than twenty-one years later? (I delivered the work to its Doubleday editor, Patrick LoBrutto, on 10-4-80.) As a summary of my own experience and the circumstances and history of the genre in 1980, it stands reasonably well. (One reviewer pointed out that despite the subtitle Science Fiction in the Eighties, the book had virtually nothing to say about that decade-to-come.) As a predictive work the reviews are mixed: this utterly missed William Gibson and his imitators whose stoned-out computer cowboys and dot-matrix emptiness brilliantly anticipated and became then conflated with the computer culture. Then again, there is that remarkable paragraph in the essay Science Fiction Forever which begins, "I do not know what the science fiction of the eighties will be, it probably will look very much like the science fiction of today as we live through it, but I am fairly certain of what the science fiction of the nineties will be," and then lays out the present publishing situation with acerbity and dead-on compression. Here are the niche publishers, the small press, the novelizations, the media licenses, the overtaking of science fiction by fantasy coldly noted ten years before the time; a train wreck (a train wreck for me, anyway) viewed in the distant offing and absolutely nothing to be done but to describe. Here is the marginalization of science fiction, which, as Norman Spinrad and I said in virtually the same words, was to become "A small special interest at science fiction conventions." Here is adumbrated the disappearance of a constantly replenished, knowledgeable fan base. Here, if you want to peer hard enough, is the disappearance of the magazine collector and the market for back-issues. Not bad for the time; science fiction is not, as I have been insisting for decades, a predictive medium, that was never its purpose . . . but nonetheless this was pretty good. It's about the only prediction through the book which was. (Told you it wasn't a predictive medium.)
Some of the book was written in elegiac mood; if not science fiction as I understood it, then at least my career was being mourned and I felt (note the introduction) that in some ways, not good ways, my career was paradigmatic of the arc of the category itself. Science fiction has produced remarkable work within its three-quarter-of-a-century category confines; "our first masterpieces began to appear in the late 1930s," as I wrote, and there have been many since then, right up unto the present day. But at the same time that the clichés, the hardware, the very language of science fiction have utterly permeated the scientific and popular culture (this was part of Disch's point) the category itself has become marginalized and perhaps the more arcane. The contents of a current issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine would be incomprehensible, I think, to most general readers; what is left of "true" science fiction has become utterly self-referential. I do not think that a general reader would have been as confused and put off by a 1947 or 1956 Astounding, a 1953 Galaxy as that general reader would be by the current IASFM; this is less true of Fantasy & Science Fiction only because that magazine by definition devotes some significant proportion of its contents to fantasy. Fantasy is more comprehensible to a general audience, as Judy-Lynn del Rey noted and can reach places and people that science fiction never can.
Engines of the Night, no less than its subject—historical category science fiction—is time-bound; it is a work of its time addressing its time. This is not necessarily a bad or even a limiting issue; as I noted in an anthology afterword some years before Engines, from great rigor can come the greatest freedom, from the most specific can come the most general; surely Herr Bach of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of the Fugue would agree, so would Big Ernie whose motto in the 1920s and 1930s might as well have been "Specify, specify; particularize." High mountains and dead leopards, that was Big Ernie, that is the science fiction propitiated by Engines; a high, cold, distant carcass; an emblem, a signatory like the book itself, the book a mark of how far at least one science fiction writer might go before he perished.
—December 16, 2001
Introduction to the
Original Edition
These essays were written by a man whose first science fiction story appeared in the late nineteen-sixties, who rose to minor prominence in the early to mid-seventies, watched his career suddenly (and not entirely on his own responsibility) plummet in the middle of the decade, and who spent the last of the seventies lurching toward the Bethlehem of 1980, not so much trying to be born again, as to assess the roughness of the beast. The career in many ways paralleled the arc of political and social consciousness through that period: the questioning of institutions and institutionally propounded insight, the rocking of those institutions, and then, after Nixon's eviction in the middle of the period, a speedy and effective counterrevolution which got some of us out of the temple right quick.
I have not had (I raise my right hand) the most successful or prominent career in science fiction in the seventies but I have had, I think, the most clearly symptomatic—the career which did indeed most survive in reaction to the larger political and social developments of that time. The perspective is peculiarly mine, of course; I make no claims for its universality. If anything, I argue the other way: for its particularity. No one right now could regard science fiction in quite this way.
Any of us who read or write in the field can make that statement, of course. We behold what we have become. But if there is any particular cachet to my perspective it comes because my career is, perhaps more than some, metaphoric.
And then, maybe it is not. My career is no way for a young science fiction writer; I am no model of a Modern Major General. Reading and writing a lot of science fiction over a long period (and long it has been) will if nothing else grant humility: modestly garbed in sackcloth and cosmeticized with ashes, I sally beyond the mirror at my own risk now and in only a modestly adventurous spirit.
But I never, as I kept on reminding myself through the decade, had possessed ambitions which were initially large-scale. Science fiction had not been much more than an experiment. How far could I go . . . what could I get done . . . what could I say . . . how much could I get through, before they caught on or caught up? was the basic question. What would science fiction do—not so much to the world, but to me?
I found out. Surely did.
—1980: New Jersey
The Number of the Beast
Well, what is it? Fifty experts—as the old Yiddish saying might have it—will produce fifty-one definitions. Still, we all try; here I am in Collier's Encyclopedia:
"Science fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effects of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history."
Workable and cautious, but it does not evade what could be called the Arrowsmith problem—Sinclair Lewis's novel, that is, which all of us science-fictioneers would instinctively agree is not of the genre, would probably fall into it under the terms of this definition. Certainly, technological (medical) change is an important aspect of this novel as are the effects of science upon the protagonist and his marriage. Clearly, my definition would also exclude some of the whimsical short stories of Robert Sheckley, whose bemused characters face the absurdities of a slightly disorienting metaphysics in the recognizable present: there is nothing technological about these stories, much less concern with technological change, and yet they appeared, most of them, in Horace Gold's Galaxy and fit indistinguishably into the format of that magazine. On the basis of this kind of work Sheckley was recognized in his early career as one of the most promising of the new writers. My definition would also exclude Randall Garrett's Darcy series, whose novels and novelette depict an alternate present in which magic has assumed the role of science and modern science never found its way into being discovered. Change, to be sure, but not technological change: here is genre science fiction that deals with technological absence.
Shrug, consider the bar bill, try Theodore Sturgeon's nineteen-forties dictum: a good science fiction story is one whose events would not have occurred without its scientific content. This is promising—among other things, it manages to summarize, for the decade, the essence of John W. Campbell's editorial vision in Astounding . . . but Anne McCaffrey's dragons could not fly in Sturgeon's science fiction and Sheckley's work, right through his great novel Dimension of Miracles, would not fit. Nor would the visions of J. G. Ballard and his descendants; if The Terminal Beach or The Drowned World are about anything, they are about a world in which science has failed and gone away . . . and yet the works of Ballard are considered central to any understanding of post-1960s science fiction.
James Tiptree's famous The Women Men Don't See has no science in it either, nor does Robert Silverberg's 1972 novel Dying Inside, generally regarded as one of the pivotal works of the decade. (It concerns a telepath, who has lived concealing his gift, slowly losing his powers in early middle age in contemporary New York.) Then, too, Sturgeon's definition would admit not only Arrowsmith but many novels about science—Morton Thompson's Not As a Stranger, Peter George's Red Alert, George P. Elliott's David Knudsen. Any definition so inclusive would obviously attenuate a category which, however ill-defined, is very clearly understood by its readers, writers, editors and critics to be a distinct and limited (if not really limiting) form of literature.
Perhaps one throws up one's hands and dives back to the fifties to Damon Knight's "Science fiction is whatever we point to when we say 'this is science fiction.'" Lots of truth in that; whatever trouble we may have with definitions, there is a consensual feeling among those of us who pretend to understand the form: McCaffrey's Dragonflight belongs in the genre and Arrowsmith does not. Check the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and the bibliographies. Still, if Knight's path of implied least resistance is the way to go, I would prefer Frederik Pohl's useful, provocative, and contained: "Science fiction is a way of thinking about things."
Science fiction, then, is a methodology and an approach. Pohl is surely on the trail of something important here, and if one could define what that way of thinking about things is, one perhaps would come as close to a working definition of science fiction as will be needed to understand almost all of it. Let me have a try at this, noting my indebtedness to A. J. Budrys, who has prowled this corridor some, most notably in his introduction to John Varley's collection The Persistence of Vision.
Science fiction, at the center, holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot apprehend. That is the base of the science fiction vision, but the more important part comes as corollary: the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure. What technological alteration, the gleaming or putrid knife of the future, is going to do will cut far deeper than the effects of adultery, divorce, clinical depression, rap groups, consciousness-raising, encounter sessions or even the workings of that famous old law firm of Sack, Pillage, Loot & Burn. It will be these changes—those imposed extrinsically by force—which really matter; this is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives (or at least would like to).
Lasting, significant change, science fiction says, is uncontrollable and coming in uncontrollably; regardless of what we think or how we feel, we have lost control of our lives. When the aliens debark from their craft to deal with the colonization assignment, the saved and the unsaved, adulterous and chaste, psychoanalyzed and decompensated will be caught in their terrible tracer beams and absorb the common fate. When the last layer of protective ozone is burned out by International Terror & Trade, discussion leaders, the born again and the members of the American Psychological Association will all go together.
This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today. Because this vision is inimical to the middle class (which has been taught that increased self-realization is increased control), because it tends to trivialize if not actually mock the vision of the modern novel and drama (the shaping of experience is its explanation), genre science fiction has been in trouble in America from the outset. It has been perceived almost from the beginning as the enemy of the culture. Science fiction has had a hearing from those who control access to the broad reading audience at only a few points in its history (I suggest 1946, 1957, and 1972) and in every case has been swiftly repudiated. The successful media science fiction of the seventies (most, though not all of it, debased adventure stories with crude science-fictional props) has forced literary science fiction into juxtaposition with the culture. The increase in readership funneled in by Star Trek and Star Wars has indicated that publishers will not permit it this time to go away . . . but science fiction is hardly, at the outset of the decade of the eighties, much more of a reputable and critically accepted genre than it was thirty years ago.
It is my assumption that it never will be. Science fiction is too threatening.
