At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature. It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance. As the technology becomes more sophisticated and intrusive, as our lives in the postindustrial twentieth century came to be dominated in every way by technology, science fiction became more cunning in its template. We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up—this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither—despite the hostility of the culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of most of its readers—neither will science fiction. It, if no given writer, will persist; will run, with the engines, the full disastrous course.
Some notes on how it ran and how it runs follow, at length and in humility.
—1980: New Jersey
L'Etat c'est moi
In mid-1969, as the recently appointed and juvenescent (twenty-nine is not an age, as the poet should have pointed out; it is a condition) editor of the Bulletin, the semimonthly publication of the then four-year-old Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), I wrote and published an editorial mildly critical of NASA's public relations and of the Apollo project itself. It was written in reminiscence of the December 1968 mission captained by Frank Borman in which the moon was circled and Genesis liberally quoted; the invocation of the Old Testament seemed to me a failure of church/state separation and also an interference with what might have been private responses to a voyage which struck me as overridingly significant and mystical. I said all of this in a rather halting fashion (I did not then have much of a handle on the personal essay) and kept it to a decent four hundred words and devoted the remainder of that issue, once again, to market reports, contract summaries and communications amongst SFWA members, most of whom appeared to be not greatly enamored of one another.
Cries of pain and rage descended as if by parachute upon the modest premises in New York where the hapless publication and hapless remarks had been prepared. They descended also upon the quarters of the SFWA officers and trustees and these worthies, conferring shortly thereafter, decided and rapidly informed me that my services in science fiction were more urgently needed elsewhere and right away . . . I should immediately become a full-time writer in this field, that was to say, Would I please? Now? Write only fiction, that was to say. Clearly the officers did not wish the editorship of the Bulletin to interfere with my burgeoning career, and I was sent on my way from that volunteer position with due regard and extreme haste. (I thought at the time that to be fired as a volunteer was some kind of low, but learned as the years went on that science fiction offered humiliations more intricate and absolute.)
Why? I hear a question from the back. What's going on? I'm kind of new here; why did they fire you for what you call a few mild anti-NASA, anti-Borman remarks? NASA went down the tubes a long time ago and Borman's working for an airline, isn't he? On television commercials and all that. Everybody knows that Apollo didn't play downtown. You were speaking for the majority. Unless, of course, those remarks weren't so mild. You always had a tendency to underestimate your effect on people.
Well, maybe I did. Point conceded. Nonetheless, let me tell this in my own way; it is a shade elliptical but in the end all will come clear, as the widow said to the bishop. My correspondents seemed in the main to think of science fiction as a kind of research and development arm of a technology administered by the government.
To them—and they represented the SFWA at the time and probably now, although the focus of the argument has shifted—the field was not so much to be an arena of exploration and debate (as many of us who came into science fiction in the sixties had been encouraged by the climate of the times and Michael Moorcock to think) as it was Gernsback's Flowering—it existed to popularize technological advance, to dazzle the unsophisticated public with visions of the machinery and miracles to come. That was what Gernsback wanted, all right (with the secondary ambition of interesting young men in science as a career—and however Hugo may have failed in that secondary aim, we now know that he succeeded completely with the first).
Of course I had taken a different view. (I usually do.) I thought at the time that I spoke for many readers and writers. The evolution of the field literarily and stylistically through the thirties and forties and the introduction (almost from the outset of Campbell's editorship) of a strong dystopian element in speculation (which Horace Gold seized and brought to the center of the field) had led me to feel by 1969 that it was late in the day indeed, and that science fiction had a more important role to play in the culture than to serve as a cheerleader for technological advance. I thought that NASA was the public relations arm of the scientific establishment. I thought that both were pimping for Johnson's slut of a war tucked away (so Johnson hoped) in the back district. I thought a lot of things.
I also feel, more than a decade later, that I was right, that my attitude in time prevailed not only in the country but in the field itself; that my attitude was symptomatic of much of the serious work done in the decade . . . but I am also sure that I misjudged the feelings of most of the writers and all of the editors. These people did not regard science fiction so much as a speculative medium as one functional to the prevailing standards of the culture.
There was fear in those letters. One correspondent who worked for the space industry felt that his job was threatened, that he might actually lose it if the Bulletin reached his superiors, who would find him the member of an organization whose official voice questioned their practices. (He might have been right.) The fear was less personally based elsewhere but no less palpable: where did I get off knocking NASA and the government, the President and Borman, the church and the Bible for heaven's sake, just when the Apollo project and the enormous attention it garnered were on the verge of making science fiction an acceptable pursuit?
This was a core argument. It was not hard for me to understand it even at the time. For decades, science fiction readers and writers had been regarded by the academic/literary nexus and the media as a bizarre group, aficionados of the subliterate obsessed by the arcane; now Borman and the boys were making all those crazy stories appear somewhat predictive.
Just at the point where a science fiction writer might finally get a hearing at the universities or by a Hollywood agent, an official voice was railing against their great patron. Didn't I—well, didn't I understand how it used to be? Didn't I remember how the magazines went to rout in the fifties and how for decades a science fiction writer could not even be regarded as a writer by the most miserable graduate assistant in English?
Didn't I remember how academically connected writers had been forced to publish under pseudonyms in the forties because revelation of their sf orientation to the department head might have threatened their position? Didn't I remember those two-cent-a-word (at the top) magazine rates and $500 all-rights book contracts?
What was wrong with me, anyway? If I had objections to the spirit or public relations of the project, why didn't I put them in my bag of pretensions and where the moon don't shine? Was I out to destroy science fiction? If science fiction appeared in the position of speaking against NASA or Apollo, what man in the street would ever take us seriously again? One correspondent attacked not my arguments but my grammar. Another suggested that I was merely jealous. (I had a few defenders but they came in late and semiapologetic. First Amendment and all that.)
So, tossed out, I went away at least from the Bulletin (eventually I went away from the SFWA but that is another, less interesting and symptomatic issue, and sometime later I even came back but that is the least interesting of all), but I took from the experience a not unenduring lesson. (Hard spankings are meant to do this, I kindly told my daughter: make you remember.) That lesson has been further articulated in the Collected Works—and a good thing too, since we all must write from experience and almost every full-time writer is shorter on it than he would like to admit.
The lesson was this:
Science fiction, for all its trappings, its talk of "new horizons" and "new approaches" and "thinking things through from the beginning" and "new literary excitement," is a very conservative form of literature. It is probably more conservative than westerns, mysteries, or gothics, let alone that most reactionary of all literatures, pornography. Most of its writers and editors are genuinely troubled by innovative styles or concepts at the outset, because they have a deep stake by the time they have achieved any position in the field in not appearing crazy. This was certainly true in 1969 when the field was still a minor if marginally respectable genre. It is more true yet at the beginning of the eighties when it has become, for a concatenation of factors, perhaps the most predictably profitable part of the publishing subdivisions of many conglomerates and when licensing of Star Trek or the Lucas properties is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The conservative nature of science fiction today is no longer an intimation, not even a standard. It is a necessity.
Very difficult to squeeze the innovative stuff into the category anymore. Not impossible—note Benford, Varley, Gotschalk, X, Y and Z—but hard as hell. Why bother, eh Carter? How can you—how can I—take it seriously anymore?
—1979/1980: New Jersey
I Could Have Been a Contender,
Part One
Revisionist canon now holds that science fiction would have had a different—and superior—history if Hugo Gernsback, by creating Amazing Stories in 1926, had not ghettoized the genre, reduced it on the spot to a small asylum plastered with murals of ravening aliens carrying off screaming women in wondrous machines from a burning city and thus made it impossible for serious critics, to say nothing of serious writers, to have anything to do with it. After all, in the early part of the century novels of the speculative and fantastic were part of the literature; the Munsey magazines ran futuristic adventure serials all the time, and Hawthorne and Melville were writing fantasies or absurdist speculation without any damage to their literary credibility.
It simply could have gone on that way, the revisionists suggest; science fiction would not have been thrown into a charnel house which it would spend four decades trying to escape, seeking that respectability and acceptance it had possessed before Gernsback defined it and made it live by its worst examples and most debased audience.
The argument has a certain winsome charm—I believed it myself when I was but a wee lad, and some of our best or better minds hold to it right now—but is flawed. At the risk of aligning myself with Hugo Gernsback, a venal and small-minded magazine publisher whose reprehensible practices, long since detailed, were contemptible to his contributors, partners, and employees, I think that he did us a great service and that were it not for Gernsback, science fiction as we understand it would not exist. We would have—as we do—the works of fabulation in the general literature—Coover, Barthelme, Barth, and DeLillo—but of the category which gave us More Than Human, The Demolished Man, Foundation and Empire, Dying Inside, The Dispossessed, and Rogue Moon we would have nothing, and hence these works would not exist. It is possible that some of these writers, who were inspired to write science fiction by a childhood of reading, would never have published at all.
"Science fiction builds on science fiction," Asimov said once, and that truth is at the center of the form. Before Gernsback gave it a name (he called it "scientifiction," but close enough; Ackerman a few years later cast out a syllable), the literature did not exist; before he gave it a medium of exclusivity, its dim antecedents were scattered through the range of popular and restricted writing without order, overlap, or sequence. It was the creation of a label and a medium which gave the genre its exclusivity and a place in which it could begin that dialogue, and it was the evolution of magazine science fiction—slowly over the first decade, more rapidly after the ascension of Campbell—that became synonymous with the evolution of the field.
Only the rigor and discipline of the delimited can create art. Musicologists considering Bach, who worked within desperately restrictive format, will concur as will those considering the sonata form. The sonnet and the eight-bar chorus of almost all popular song and operetta give similar testimony. It was the very restraint with which science fiction was cloaked from the outset which gave the genre its discipline and force. Without the specialized format of the magazines, where science fiction writers and readers could dwell, exchange, observe one another's practices and build upon one another's insight, the genre could not have developed.
The first-generation science fiction writers—those whom Gernsback, Harry Bates, and F. Orlin Tremaine brought into Amazing and Astounding after their small stock of recycled Wells and Verne had been used—worked under the most generalized influence and without canon: their work showed it. The second generation—those identified with Campbell—was composed of people who had grown up reading the early science fiction and were prepared to build upon it. The third generation, coming in the nineteen-fifties, was composed of writers who had correspondingly more sources and possibilities (and also a larger stock of ideas already proved unworkable or exhausted), and the increasing subtlety and complexity of the form through their years testifies once again to, as it were, the influence of influence . . . upon influence.
Science fiction, as John W. Campbell once pointed out expansively, may indeed outdo all of the so-called mainstream because it gathers in all of time and space . . . but science fiction as it has evolved is an extraordinarily rigorous and delimiting medium. Like the canon and the fugue, the sonnet and the sonata, like haiku, it has its rules, and ß interface, characteriological attempt to resolve the conflicts between the two: this is science fiction.
The fact pervades all the decades after about 1935: no one could publish science fiction unless exposed to a great deal of it; virtually everyone who has ever sold a story has a sophisticated reader's background in the form, usually acquired just before or around adolescence. At the underside, this has led to parochialism, incestuousness, and the preciosity of decadence (and there has been too much). In the end it may even be these qualities which finish science fiction off, make its most sophisticated and advanced examples increasingly inaccessible to the larger reading audience. But whatever happens to science fiction, it would not exist at all if it had not been given a name and a medium and for this, if we are not led to praise Gernsback, we must entomb him with honor. He was a crook, old Hugo, but he made all of us crooks possible.
—1980: New Jersey
Anonymity & Empire
To the American literary community—to the American arts establishment—the science fiction writers of the forties were invisible. There is no more graceful way to put this. There were, for the first half of the decade, almost no books at all: no anthologies, no reprints, no second-serial rights. Novels and stories were written for genre magazines of limited circulation, were published and went out of print, presumably forever. Asimov has written that everything about his career after 1946 came as a surprise; he had no idea at the time he was writing "Nightfall," "Foundation," or the robotics series that this work would live beyond the issues of the magazines in which they appeared. This did not bother him (it might have bothered others) at all: what purpose did science fiction have except to live briefly and die forever in the magazines for kids? There was sufficient reward in becoming part of the ongoing literature. The Queens Science Fiction League was certainly not the world, but for the young Asimov its approval and awe were all that he could have asked.
It must be understood that in certain respects science fiction was no different for its writers, offered nothing less, than did the other branches of popular literature. It was pulp and appeared in the torrent of pulp magazines which by the hundreds got on in various degrees of health until wartime paper shortages and, finally, the curse of television put almost all of them in the ground by the beginning of the fifties. Western and romance writers, adventure and sports pulpeteers, also worked for a half cent to two cents a word and knew that when the magazines went off sale their work would never be seen by a nonrelative or nonlover again. (Mystery writers did have a small book market but in the pre-Mystery Writers of America days only a vanishingly small percentage of magazine work could in expanded form find a book market—and advances, averaging around $250 even for first-rank writers like Woolrich, were an insignificant part of their income.) The difference between science fiction writers and those of the other pulp genres, however, was that science fiction writers took their work seriously, put far more into it psychically and were writing (because of the dominant presence of Campbell) to a consistently higher standard, an imposed rigor and specialized background. It was impossible, then as now, to write science fiction without the most intimate reading knowledge of the form, simply because the field was advancing so quickly in its language and devices that each story either made a direct contribution to the ongoing literature or risked rejection on the basis that it did not.
Surely—I defer to my sometime collaborator Bill Pronzini here with whom I have discussed the issue—western, romance, sports, and certainly mystery writers might have been no less serious about their work, no less dedicated or professional. They certainly were not their inferiors technically, and the anonymity must have had profound effects upon them no less than upon the science fiction writers.
But almost all the science fiction writers were specialists. If they did not have a thorough working knowledge of the literature and the cutting edge, they did not survive. By 1940, very few of the science fiction writers who had been in Astounding prior to Campbell were still there; others had been thrown out and their names—Schachner, Schopeflin, Cummings—were legion. They had been evicted not through Campbellian malice but because they were either unable or unwilling to meet his editorial demands.
Campbell did better—felt that he had no alternative, really—by bringing in writers who had no sales background or alternate markets at all so that he could work with them from the outset . . . and because they had no alternate markets, they were less inclined to put up a battle against Campbell's demands.
Most of the pre-Campbell writers were pulp generalists who wrote through the entire range of fiction magazines and for whom science fiction constituted only a small percentage of output. Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat, for instance, were enormously prolific and successful pulp writers; science fiction was only 10 percent of their output (and after their eviction less than that), but ironically they are remembered now only for their science fiction. Lester del Rey in his time did a fair amount for the confessions and sports magazines, but most of the first Campbell generation—Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, de Camp—wrote little else. (The Kuttners under their own names and a plethora of pseudonyms wrote a great deal of fantasy but did not appear, as far as can be determined, to any extent in the other category magazines. The Kuttners, however, knew where to bury all the bodies.)
The rigor of the medium, demands of the market, and anonymity in which the work was done must have had their effect upon these writers. Asimov's feelings are known, but one can only surmise what science fiction did to the Kuttners, who were turning in work like "Vintage Season," "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," "Shock," "When the Bough Breaks" for a cent and a half a word; what science fiction did to van Vogt, who was turning out over two hundred thousand words of it a year working sixteen hours a day in a small apartment (and doing some confession stories too); what science fiction meant to Heinlein, who wrote Sixth Column for about $900 and "By His Bootstraps" and "Universe" for maybe $300 each—all of these writers putting out this work without an inkling that it would ever appear again or be read by other than the young core audience for the magazines.
