In a sense this anonymity may have been liberating—one of the benefits of writing without a sense of posterity or audience may be a great and abounding freedom, the conviction that since what one is doing really does not matter one can, accordingly, do anything one wants—and the texts and commentaries of the time indicate that to a degree all the writers felt this way. It was a new kind of fiction being written in a different fashion; the knowledge that it was breakthrough literature of a sort might have been comforting to writers who could rationalize that what they did was too ambitious for a mass audience. Nonetheless, the record makes clear that almost all of this generation were finished by the end of the decade and looking for other things to do. Heinlein had turned (after a few stories for Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, the first mass-magazine science fiction in decades) to the juvenile book market and was writing on contract for Scribner's with only a few "adult" novels—The Puppet Masters, Double Star, The Door into Summer—serialized in the magazines. L. Ron Hubbard with A. E. van Vogt and Katherine MacLean had disappeared into the Dianetics Institute, from which the latter two emerged to write again only a decade and a half later. L. Sprague de Camp turned to nonfiction, juveniles, and a scattering of fantasy and was a small factor in fifties science fiction. Asimov had taken a doctorate in biochemistry, and in 1949, after a few months of excruciating ambivalence, took a full-time teaching position at Boston University (the controlling aspect of his decision being that he had never made nor had any reason to believe that he could ever make a living from science fiction).1
The Kuttners had returned to school at USC, seeking undergraduate degrees in psychology and then going on to graduate work; Henry did a series of mysteries for Harper's but with the exception of "Humpty Dumpty" (finishing off the series published immediately thereafter by Ballantine as Mutant), never appeared in Astounding in the decade and only once in Galaxy (and once in Fantasy and Science Fiction). Del Rey and Sturgeon stayed in the hunt but changed their markets, Sturgeon publishing only one story in ASF in the nineteen-fifties and del Rey a bare scattering. The creation and expansion of the book market for science fiction, the restoration to print (in certain cases highly remunerative) of the work written in anonymity must have been highly gratifying to these writers, but it appeared to inspire none of them to return to the steady production of science fiction. An entire new generation—one could say several generations—of science fiction writers were needed to pursue the vastly expanded category in the fifties and of course they presented themselves. Among them were the finest writers who had ever worked in the form, and collectively they gave science fiction its great decade.
But the first Campbell generation did not play a significant role in the science fiction of the fifties. Nor did Campbell: he stayed behind, doing exactly as he had been doing; but science fiction had been taken from him and, as the decade went on, surely he knew it. His magazine began to enact his increasing bewilderment and recrimination. The price the forties had imposed had been exacted; the battle had, long after the fact, been won . . . but only after the writers had ceased to fight. This late outcome from early and lonely struggle must have been the true bitterness of the decade for these writers, and why so very few of them, although relatively young long after the decade, were unable to reproduce their best work.
Anonymity is at least an openness of promise; outcome, whatever it may be, is a weight upon the heart.
—1980: New Jersey
I Don't Know How to Put It Love But I'll Surely Surely Try
Back in the innocent early seventies when it became a regular program item at the science fiction conventions, the panel on Sex and Science Fiction was a draw, guaranteed to get the audience not only awake but in motion before noon. That was a long time ago, to be sure; now the topic has subdivided like a maddened amoeba: fragmented into panels on Homophobia in Science Fiction, Feminism in Science Fiction, Stereotyped Images of Intercourse in Science Fiction, Phallic and Breast Imagery—it is quite enough to unsettle the mind of an aging man who grew up in this field on a diet of Catherine Tarrant's judiciously copy-edited Astounding. I can barely cope.
Nonetheless, writers being either sharply ahead or seriously behind their time (usually both and simultaneously), I am just about ready now to address the subject of sex in science fiction. It occurred to me sometime in 1976 that I had spent most of the decade up until then locked in a room typing, and when I stumbled out blinking it was with the feeling that I would have to be slowly and gently reacquainted with the world. The adolescent lunge as free after-care clinic. So it is the generality with which I must deal.
Most of my contemporaries have already had their says2 on the issue (on the Sunday morning panels not unaided by raucous shouts from the audience and bottles of beer) and now it is, as Clifford Irving did not entitle his "authorized" biography of Howard Hughes, My Turn.
Sex in science fiction. Well, then. Sex in the literature of science fiction? Or in the lives of the respective writers? Or—modesty makes one tremble—in the conventions and other social events of the field? These are significant topics, each of them, and together they induce a collective sense of woe. To deal with all within the space of a single essay not only would be an accomplishment of thundering magnitude but would be to take clinical depression to its next logical step, mania and the beginnings of acting out. A middle-aged suburbanite had best watch himself.
Accept delimitation, accept the Hemingway theory that the power comes not from what is said but what is unsaid; accept one's condition and discuss sex in the literature of science fiction.
One can inaugurate the conference by saying that until about 1952 in American genre science fiction there was none at all. There was heavily masked, coded, templated (that last, now fashionable academese) sex to be sure: aliens carrying off women in the pulp magazines, men carried off by or carrying off machines in Astounding; men beat up on one another quite a bit in all the publications and women stood in an odd relationship to technology, usually failing to understand it.
This undertext could be explained by the merest undergraduate in Psychology 5, Introduction to Human Development, but not until Philip Jose Farmer and Sam Mines conspired as author and editor to publish The Lovers and its semisequels in Startling Stories did sexuality as an important human drive having the power to motivate, enlighten, damage, or dignify become incorporated into a genre which had already existed as a discrete subcategory for more than a quarter of a century, three hundred and twenty-five months of magazine issues, perhaps twelve thousand stories of varying lengths in which not once did anything resembling carnal knowledge occur onstage. Never.
Twenty-seven years of asceticism are not easy to deny in life as well as art. Carnality may whisk one through the barriers in an instant, but the implications often are not understood for many years. The Lovers was well-received—Mines, doubtless to his relief, got away with it clean and Farmer published a few semisequels (Mother, and Open to Me My Sister)—but matters otherwise remained unchanged. In 1958, Theodore Sturgeon was able to smuggle in cautious intimations of homosexuality and the polymorphous perverse, and nothing less than sexual passion is the lever that makes Budrys's Rogue Moon go, but as late as 1965, science fiction was still a genre which in the main denied the existence, let alone the extent, of human sexuality.
(It became a grim or frivolous game for some of the writers who were, of course, not fools, to see what they could slip by without editorial knowledge or consent. One famously was able to get through J. W. Campbell and Kay Tarrant a description of a tomcat as a "ball-bearing mousetrap" and Asimov's 1951 "Hostess" in Galaxy reeked of the perversity of sexual attraction between an alien diplomat and a repressed academic's wife but these triumphs were few and, more to the point, unnoticed. If they had attracted wide attention, the writers would have paid the price.)
All of this began to end at last with Michael Moorcock's publication in the British New Worlds, to whose editorship he had acceded after Ted Carnell, of work by writers like Ballard and Aldiss and Langdon Jones which made frank use of sexual motifs. Two years later, in 1967, Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions delivered in the form of an original anthology thirty-three stories allegedly unpublishable in the magazine markets, almost half of them dealing with sexuality as the central theme. The book was successful and opened the way for many writers and anthologists who went and did likewise. In 1968 in Galaxy, Robert Silverberg was able to get "fuck you" into the sacrosanct pages by putting it in the binarese of a horny and demented computer. (In early 1970 Silverberg got The Word itself into Galaxy right after Harlan Ellison put "shit" into F & SF and just before I slid "cocksucker" into Fantastic.)3
By the beginning of the nineteen-seventies, novels of great or relative explicitness (Silverberg's Dying Inside, The Second Trip, and The World Inside, my own Beyond Apollo) bore the label of category science fiction. Short stories in original anthologies edited by Silverberg, Knight, Harrison, and Carr were also using sexual material. Galaxy continued to run sexually explicit work and by the mid-seventies copulation and masturbation had even made their way into Ben Bova's Analog. By the start of the eighties, although the Promised Land was not outside these windows last time I looked (Moskowitz and I both know that the Promised Land was sacked, looted, and cleaned to the ground by 1938 at the latest), the science fiction writer, particularly the science fiction novelist, began to deal with sexuality in the same freedom that could be applied to technology, apocalypse, political repression, or bigotry a quarter of a century ago.
Why was sexuality so late in arriving? Why was the capacity to depict its full range in fact practically the last element to reach the genre, long after it had become in all other ways a viable literary medium?
The explanation is directly related to the general age of sf readership. Science fiction has always been a genre the majority of whose readers are young. Perhaps nine tenths of them are under twenty-five, close to fifty percent under sixteen. The young are exposed to parental and social sanctions of the most unpleasant sort. Playboy could break the distribution patterns and drag hundreds of imitators through the mesh, but the magazines (and until the sixties science fiction was a magazine genre) were at the mercy of magazine distributors whose wives and children (distributors being able neither to read nor write) felt that science fiction was to be aseptic. The covers were a sell but inside, where the truth lurked, the aliens' designs were simple and wholesome. They sought not to copulate but to kill.
Almost all science fiction published in book form prior to 1965 had appeared previously in the magazines, and almost all the science fiction therein was produced by writers and editors with at least an eye and a half on the whims of the magazine distributors who simply did not want to take chances with products which were (unlike the high-priced Playboy) marginally profitable, nickel-and-diming. One distributor pullout could topple a magazine; if the publisher had a chain his entire line might be endangered.
Accordingly, a kind of least common denominator applied to magazine science fiction: if a given story could be perceived as giving potential offense to anyone, it was the path of least resistance to reject or at least edit it heavily. Catherine Tarrant at ASF and Horace Gold at Galaxy notably did so. Under the circumstances, the remarkable fact was that The Lovers sold at all—and it did, of course, appear in one of the low-paying and marginal pulp magazines of its era, a magazine so endangered already that it went out of business (through no fault of Farmer) less than two years later.
Still and in sum it is now the eighties and science fiction has not only caught on, it has caught up. The dear old field has made all of the changes and is, in the view of many of its critics (not all of them aged), no less dirty than any other branch of modern literature. The critics mutter and murmur but many of their own icons, writers who were models of restraint, have fallen off the wagon in recent years and resolved to show Harlan Ellison and Langdon Jones a couple of things.
Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves has a central section which is about nothing if not exclusively sex, and Robert Heinlein's three most recent novels, The Number of the Beast, Time Enough for Love, and I Will Fear No Evil, are not only about sex but about sexual perversity and its endless lacunae; they are quarter-million-word investigations of subjects—transvestism, narcissism, autoeroticism, copulation—which even Hubert Selby, Jr., or Henry Miller would not treat so obsessively. (There are entire sentences in Tropic of Cancer which have nothing at all to do with sex. Selby in Last Exit to Brooklyn went on for paragraphs.)
On balance—the panel draws to a close, the participants look wearily at the clock and the audience is shuffling in place and waving hands; sorry, no questions folks, we can hardly bear to go on even when left to ourselves—the question of sex in science fiction is one which seems to have been resolved, by simple majority, in favor of sex. The issue is important now in historical, not textual, perspective.
And that is where the real critical work of the next half century is going to be done; it will address the bigger questions. To what degree did the practical taboos under which it functioned as a form of popular literature alter science fiction? Science fiction has been regarded by the universities for a long time as a debased if energetic form of popular literature—but how much of that debasement was imposed rather than intrinsic? To what degree, in fact, may science fiction be seen as victim rather than perpetrator of its greatest weaknesses? How much false characterization, contrived plotting, coy retreat, dissimulation was forced upon writers who were working in a field which made their work contemptible to them if they were to do it at all?
In short—and this is no small point—science fiction may not have been populated by bad writers or editors but by extraordinarily good examples who, functioning under taboos which would have destroyed those less capable, were able to do more than the distributors, the wholesalers and the audience ever suspected. Science fiction, viewed from this context, might be conceived as a kind of difficult tribute to the human spirit, a monument to cunning.
And then again, it might not. It would be easier perhaps to stand with and for the Kazins and Howes, Abrahams and Charyns to argue that it was (is!) junk about people without genitals for kids of all ages who could barely read or bear to think.
But I do not think so.
I think that in its damages lies its magnificence.
I think that in those necessities suspired the truth.
—1979/1980: New Jersey
Memoir from Grub Street
I edited Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories, bimonthly science fiction magazines, from April 1968 to October 1968; it was not the best of times but was hardly the worst either (although in my youthful exuberance I then thought it was). I was the magazines' only employee, edited them from my bedroom, delivered the copy-edited, blurbed manuscripts to the printer, proofed the galleys. Art and layout were handled by the publisher from his home, the publisher assuming more expertise in these areas (he had to be right) than I. Eventually, a dispute over control of the art—I commissioned a couple of covers but the publisher did not want to use them and I threatened to quit if he didn't—caused me to be fired by telephone on a Sunday afternoon just as the Giants were about to score a touchdown (prophetically they did not), but that is not the subject of this essay nor is my salary ($100 a month to start, merit increases up to $150 right before the end), nor is my self-image at the time as the logical successor to Hugo Gernsback, T. O'Conor Sloane, Raymond Palmer and Paul Fairman. I was quite young.
Amazing, after Ziff-Davis publishers precipitately dumped it and its miserable sister in 1965 because of declining sales (although their last editor, Cele L. Goldsmith, was certainly the best magazine editor extant then), had fallen upon desperate times; the publisher had acquired it, if not for a song, at least for a medley, and it was his hope to float it along by access to the magazine's backlist (Ziff-Davis had purchased all serial rights, granting unlimited reprint). Joseph Ross was his first editor, Harry Harrison unhappily the second and I ambivalently the third: only when Ted White began his ten-year stewardship and commenced to make real inroads on the publisher's obduracy did the publication or its companion have any impact again.
No, my editorship was of little moment and although I was able to find and publish some expert work (Lafferty's "This Grand Carcass," "Yet," Wodhams' Try Again, Richard C. Meredith's first novel, We All Died at Breakaway Station), I never thought of myself as much more than an adequate editor. I was able to separate good from bad and publish the better; this seemed the minimum requirement but I have subsequently learned that in contemporary publishing it is the last. My tenure was obviously too short to matter and the circulation of the magazines—possibly 24,000—would guarantee that whatever I did would be at the margins of a marginal field.
The real point of this reminiscence has to do with the submissions I faced and how they were handled, and it is this which might have relevance now. Consider the situation: Amazing and Fantastic were magazines at the bottom of the extant market. Unlike all the others, they paid on or after publication and, with a single exception (Tom Disch's literary agent fought like a trooper), paid a top rate of two cents a word. They were necessarily perceived by any writer at any level as publications to be placed on the absolute bottom of the list; I would see only what Playboy, Analog, Galaxy, Worlds of If, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Venture, and New Worlds had rejected.4
Nonetheless, the magazines which at that time were publishing only 12,000 words of original material an issue—three stories of average length or a long novelette and a short one—received through the six months of my tenure an average of one hundred manuscripts a week. The scripts came from unknown and unpublished writers in preponderance, of course, but at least 25 percent of them, week after week, were signed by recognized names: some of them, like Leiber or Lafferty, at the top of the market as then constituted; others, like Wodhams, Koontz, Meredith, or David R. Bunch, well in the middle range.
Most of the manuscripts were, to be sure, not publishable, but 15 percent of them (and more than half of those turned in by the professionals) were, and at least a third of that 15 percent, or five manuscripts a week, were outstanding. It is no exaggeration to recall that I received throughout my editorship sixty stories a month which by any standard I could ascertain were as good as or better than anything published in the competing magazines.
I was only able, because of space limitations, to buy perhaps twenty of those stories and perhaps another fifteen which were of lesser standard, which means that I rejected consciously about forty stories which were better than some I bought.5 The word rate in all cases but that of Leiber and Disch was a penny a word on publication or shortly thereafter and all of the writers, every one of them, were glad to accept the terms. The stories were published, one of them (the Lafferty) was in a best-of-the-year collection and a couple more wound up in author collections.
The remainder vanished.
