At the Divining Edge
Occasionally (less frequently all the time) I am called upon as the Town Science Fiction Writer (a role not dissimilar to that of Village Idiot) to speak to classes in the high school of my suburb in northeastern New Jersey. Genial in middle age and with my persona at reflex I can romp mindlessly through a fifteen-minute set piece on the joys and perils of the writing life, the custom of ambition and the habituation of form, and then throw the floor open to questions, which, after a grudging pause and a few glares from the English teacher, do come forth:
"What do you think of Star Wars? Do you think the sequel is better?"
"How about Stranger in a Strange Land?"
"Do you know Isaac Asimov? What is he really like?"
"The meaning of the end of 2001, I never got it. What does it say? What do you think of Planet of the Apes, by the way?"
"Is Ray Bradbury any good?"
"Did you like Star Trek: The Movie?"
Well. Did I? Not sure. A little—ah—attenuated, I thought. Never saw the series, not ever, so can't compare. Bradbury? Ray Bradbury has appeared in a science fiction magazine exactly once in the last two decades and has not published a new story or book in ten years. I don't think too much of Stranger in a Strange Land (pretty good writer on balance, though) and haven't seen The Empire Strikes Back (loved the mysteriously truncated bar scene in Star Wars, though; why did they cut it so quickly?). The ending of 2001 is metaphysical or mystic, a dream of transcendence, and Asimov is a splendidly ebullient man, an example to us all. So what? (I would like to continue but do not.) Is that all that the general public, at least as represented in the high schools, thinks of science fiction? A couple of movies, a few writers, most of whom have published very little within the confines of the field since the 1950s? Doesn't anybody know or care what's really going on? The stylistic innovations of the last decade and a half, the enormous growth of audience for all kinds of science fiction, the ten to twenty modern science fiction writers who by any literary standard are first-rate? How about them, kids? Don't you care?
Someday, if I am invited back, I'll probably put these questions after all.
In the meantime, the questions resonate, which is a fancy, literary way of saying that they will not go away. Science fiction prospered in the 1970s; in a largely debased form it became big business for the media, but in a different fashion it also flourished as literature. There are in this country over a thousand people writing science fiction of publishable quality (a decade ago there were half that number), over twelve hundred books labeled "science fiction" were published in 1979 (again, it was half that number a decade ago), and one of our middle-range professionals can now expect an advance of $15,000-$20,000 for a novel that might have brought (and glad to have it) $5,000 in 1970. Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle received a $127,500 hardcover advance, Heinlein's The Number of the Beast over $500,000 for paperback; ten years ago the highest advance ever paid for a genre science fiction novel was $12,500 for the paperback rights to Silverberg's The World Inside. The level of ambition, the dazzling achievement of our best writers, the complexity and sophistication of a form that in the memory of some of its older writers like Williamson or Simak did not even exist when they began to write . . . quite wondrous. The universities will sort this out for a century.
But for the general public, the 95 percent whose reading is of the most marginal level or less, science fiction is a couple of television series, a handful of films and four or five writers who were established well before 1950. Awareness of the category seems to be concentrated around a limited part of it: the rest of it is undiscovered.
This is depressing, but then so is the human condition. No particular reason to complain. How many high school students could name five living American novelists, three living serious composers? How many have even heard of, say, the Hudson Review, let alone have ever seen a copy? What percentage of that classroom has ever voluntarily gone to a symphony or a museum, opened Ulysses or The Great Gatsby? It is a hard time for us sensitive types in the so-called arts; if the students can name as many as five living science fiction writers they are, whether I like it or not, paying a kind of tribute to the field.
No, this is not what truly dismays. Rather it is a perception long after the fact; Buster Keaton would know how to do the take. I think that science fiction may be in severe trouble because not only the mass media but its best practitioners themselves have a clear interest in the category being known by and identified in the public consciousness with Star Wars, "Mork and Mindy," twenty-year-old novels by a couple of writers, and all that stuff floating around the cabin in Alien.
Why this is so—or at least why I perceive it to be so—would make for a complex argument extended over many a wearying and wavering paragraph, but I will try to be concise:
Science fiction, from its inception as a subcategory of American literature in 1926, until very recently was a small and largely ignored pursuit for its readers and writers. It was regarded with contempt by the academic literary nexus and ignored by the vast audience for popular culture. It had neither intellectual cachet nor, like television drama, the weight of attention.
This was unfair, to be sure, but it gave readers and writers (and editors and publishers too) the feeling that they were all collaborating on something vaguely disreputable, usually contemptible. When extrinsic events—Hiroshima, television, Sputnik, the assassinations, NASA, Apollo, Star Trek, Star Wars—caught up to or seized the science fiction vision of transcendence, when those events forced the public to grudgingly accept the field as serious business after all, most of its creators were still caught by feelings of exclusion. The enormously successful science fiction of the last decades is known by serious followers to be poor, often dreadful, exemplification of the genre . . . but better popularity and acceptance than a return to the forties and fifties when it was impossible for anyone within the field to be taken seriously by anyone without.
So science fiction may eventually dominate the eighties on the basis of its worst or at least weaker possibilities.
Too bad. Too bad indeed. No proper focus for the anger, but I know the feeling . . . to dwell in a bad marriage . . . to sacrifice passion for the sake of peace . . . to sacrifice dignity in flight of pain.
—1979/1980: New Jersey
Some Notes Toward the True and the Terrible
I first made reference to the true and terrible unwritten history of science fiction in a review of James Gunn's Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction in 1975, but did not begin to develop the concept until I spoke at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. Standing at the podium, shaking with fever, ampicillin, dread and wonder that any stranger would pay $3.75 cash on the barrelhead to listen to me,16 I said that the history of science fiction must, by definition, exist truly in the interstices, that by definition the field could be explained only by material which would be by turns libelous, private, intuitive, or paranoid and that even the most rigorous and lucid of scholarly works could deal only with symptomatic representations of the great underside of the field.
Surely I must have been anticipating that May the publication, a year and a half later, of the dense, scholarly, and invaluable Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls (the best reference work on our field which has appeared to date), because the Nicholls work manages through one intricate, brilliantly cross-referenced and almost impishly accurate volume to make clear to insiders and outsiders alike practically everything about science fiction that they would need to know to get through doctoral orals except for two factors: (a) How it got this way and (b) why it has its peculiar and binding effect upon a readership, a larger proportion of which are emotionally involved with the literature than the readers of any other genre.
The Encyclopedia reminds me of the one-line criticism of Shaw's plays: that a literate alien could, from them alone, deduce everything about humanity except that it possessed genitals. Nicholls and his staff make everything about science fiction comprehensible except the existence of a 700,000-word trade paperback about it which can expect to sell eventually well over a million copies. Try that in quality lit, mystery, or romance. The Gothic Encyclopedia? The Illustrated History of Literary Writing? Barlow's Book of Flannery O'Connor?
The true unwritten history is where the answers lie and the unwritten history cannot—by definition, he pointed out laboriously—be composed. In a spirit of scholarship and sacrifice, however, I would like to offer a few notes, leads as it were toward what it would contain and with what it would have to deal. Perhaps by the end of the twenty-first century when all of us now reading, writing, and propitiating the category are all safely dead and with the evolution of low-feed, multiplex stereophonic videotape cassette recall, the abolition of the written, that is to say, the true unwritten history might be retrieved.
To the unborn and penitent, hence, a few suggestions:
1) "Modern" science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloomsbury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90 percent of the writing and the editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one another well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other's material, married each other's wives and so on. For a field which was conceptually based upon expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular. One could fairly speculate that this insularity and parochialism were the understandable attempts of frightened human beings faced with terra incognita to hold on to one another and to make their personal lives as limited and interconnected as possible. It could be speculated further that this parochialism shut off an entire alternative science fiction. (Alexei Panshin has intimated this possibility but not this particular set of reasons.) Who is to know what writers and manuscripts not connected in any way to the Central Fifty languished in slush piles or in stamped, self-addressed envelopes? Science fiction simply was not for them; it was being cooked up in offices and bars and bedrooms and apartment houses; people would stream from Central to write it all up in their own way and send it back in (and then write up next month's issue taking up the stuff already laid down in print), but the field was based on personal access and very few writers and stories were getting into the magazines without personal acquaintance with other writers and with the editors. The first thing that Damon Knight did in the forties as a science fiction writer manque was to accept Fred Pohl's invitation to come out from Oregon to Brooklyn and live with the Futurian Club; the young Asimov was introduced to present contributors by Campbell before Asimov had sold a word; Malcolm Jameson, pensioned off by the Navy for medical reasons, began to write science fiction (and became, briefly, an Astounding regular in the mid-forties) at the urgings of his old friend and fellow Navy officer Robert A. Heinlein.
2) One of the clear symptoms of editorial decline (this ties, in a way, to the point above but only by suggestion; hear me out) is the increasing proportion of material in a magazine or book line written by a decreasing number of contributors; venery, laziness, exhaustion, or friendship seem to make almost any long-term editorship vulnerable to this condition. (I am not saying that science fiction in this case is any different from any other genre.) The Astounding of the late nineteen-fifties had narrowed to four or five regular contributors in between whom a few asteroids squeezed the short stories: Silverberg, Anvil, Garrett, Janifer/Harris, and Reynolds must have accounted for seventy percent of the magazine's contents in the period—1958 to 1962. Over at Galaxy Fred Pohl, Robert Sheckley, and Philip M. Klass must have contributed more than half the contents in the last three years of Horace Gold's editorship (1957—1960). This is not to dispute that this core group might have overtaken the magazines simply because they were the best, at least in terms of meeting the editorial vision (and there is no disputing that the Galaxy group at least includes three of the finest writers of science fiction thus far), but the consequences of such narrowing are obvious; the medium becomes insular and ambitious potential contributors become discouraged. There is, needless to say, a fine line an editor must tread between gathering the best writers he can and encouraging them . . . and buying from friends and familiars, but there is such a line of clear demarcation: Campbell in the early forties was on one side of it and in the late fifties on the other, and the quality of work and its persistence today (little of the late fifties Astounding is now reprinted) constitute judgment.
3) The clearest signal of Campbell's loosened grip and influence on the field from 1960 (the time at which his obsessive pursuit of pseudoscientific chicanery became his editorial obsession rather than weakness) is to compile a list of those writers who arose to prominence in that decade who never published in his magazine. Once for my amusement a long time ago (in the last couple of years of his life, for I hoped that he would see it) I did so and published it in Science Fiction Review. Here is a partial (I am sure to miss someone) list of science fiction writers who did not appear in Analog from the issue of January 1960 until the last issue assembled by Campbell dated December 1971: J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Larry Niven, Michael Moorcock, R. A. Lafferty, George Alec Effinger, Gardner R. Dozois, A. J. Budrys, Terry Carr, Kate Wilhelm, George Zebrowski, Norman Kagan, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Pamela Sargent, Robert Sheckley, Roger Zelazny.
Silverberg almost makes the list; his last story was in the February 1960 issue (sold, of course, in the fifties). Tiptree's first story and one other appeared in Analog; Niven's first piece, published at last in 1972, was apparently Campbell's last purchase.
And yet. And yet when I heard of Campbell's sudden death on July 11, 1971, and informed Larry Janifer, I trembled at Janifer's response and knew that it was so: "The field has lost its conscience, its center, the man for whom we were all writing. Now there's no one to get mad at us anymore."
—1980: New Jersey
Wrong Rabbit
And here is A. J. Budrys, who should know better, in a fairly recent (May 1979) issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction discussing 1940s science fiction: "Modern science fiction as you know17 was marked by a verve we do not often see these days, fueled by a pervading technological optimism and a set of ethical assumptions slightly to the right of the John Birch credo. Might was not only right, it was moral . . . technological action—exploring the physical possibilities and applying deft means of conveying maximum comfort to the maximum number of individuals—offers the best hope . . ."
It may do all of that—in the world which technology has bequeathed, only technological action can accomplish change—but Budrys is wrong about the science fiction of Campbell's first decade, and before shibboleth passes all the way into law and the forties ASF is forever characterized as being packed by the Happy Engineer, I would like to, as the man said to the committee, try to set the record straight.
The Happy Engineer is one of the great uninvestigated myths of contemporary science fiction. (Another is that Astounding/Analog was/is devoted to stories whose background is "hard science" requiring "heavy tech," but that is next Sunday's text.) The truth, as any fresh confrontation of the material would certainly make clear, is that the forties ASF is filled with darkness, that the majority of its most successful and reprinted stories dealt with the bleakest implications of technology and that "modern" science fiction (defined by Budrys as that which originated with Campbell's editorship of Astounding given him in October 1937) rather than being a problem-solving literature was a literature of despair.
Only in the fifties as Campbell's vision locked and dystopia was encouraged by Horace Gold and Anthony Boucher did Astounding begin indeed to invite in the Happy Engineer: the complexities of Heinlein became the reflexive optimism of G. Harry Stine, Christopher Anvil, Eric Frank Russell (some of the time) and the somewhat more ambivalent optimism of Gordon R. Dickson, Poul Anderson, or Randall Garrett. It would not be difficult to argue that this represented a drift from the periphery of the forties ASF: the Venus Equilateral stories of George O. Smith, say, or the Bullard series of Malcolm Jameson.
But consider the text entire. The Kuttners from the outset of their career were publishing stories of complexity and pessimism: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" and "Shock" and "What You Need" and "When the Bough Breaks"18 and the (superficially humorous) "Gallegher" series in which a drunken inventor's drunken inventions went crazy. "Jesting Pilot" and "Private Eye" and "The Prisoner in the Skull" were grim and desperate visions of the (failed) efforts to maintain autonomy and compassion in the shining, uncontrollable future. Heinlein's "Universe" is one of the grimmest visions in the history of the field; a centuries-long starflight gone astray, a civilization of the descendants of the original crew stripped of memory and reduced to barbarism.
Asimov's "Nightfall," not the best but certainly the best-known story Campbell ever published, describes the collapse of a civilization into anarchy and madness; L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, a freehand template of World War II cast into an ambiguous future, depicts—as does Heinlein's Sixth Column—the use of the machineries of destruction to destroy linear cultural evolution. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" is a solipsistic nightmare cast as a time paradox story in which the protagonist cannot escape the simple and repeated loop of his life (and has for friendship only versions of himself). Van Vogt's work, from his first story "Black Destroyer" (a murderous alien loose on a spaceship kills most of the crew; the alien is in terrible emotional distress), put vision after horrid vision of the future into ASF, paranoid reaction toward militancy ("The Weapon Shops" series), the hopelessness of human evolution ("The Seesaw"), the collapse of causality (The World/The Players of Null-A).
In the wake of Hiroshima, Campbell published a series of apocalyptic stories (Kuttner's Tomorrow and Tomorrow & The Fairy Chessmen, Chan Davis's "The Nightmare," Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses") and post-apocalyptic speculations (Russell's "Metamorphosite," Kuttner's "Fury") in such profusion that at the world science fiction convention of 1947, at which he was guest of honor, he begged for the fans' indulgence at the profusion of despair, claiming that he could only publish what the writers were delivering . . . but he was sending out pleas to cease and desist. (The writers got the message, finally, and fled to Gold and Boucher as soon as they opened shop.)
