The Engines of the Night Read online

  Why? Because it is a crazy escapist literature and yet contains the central truth of this slaughterhouse of a century. We know this and cannot at times bear the thought of it. Nor, considering the record of the century and the horrors which the millennium hurtles toward us, is there reason why we should.

  But one cannot—except in a few dramatic and pitiful instances in science fiction—voluntarily gafiate from the century.

  1980: New Jersey

  Onward and Upward with the Arts, Part II

  EVEN A MODESTLY SUCCESSFUL SCIENCE FICTION WRITER—say, a dozen short stories in the magazines and a paperback original—can get on the convention circuit, and some of them never get out. There is in this land at least one science fiction convention every weekend of the year (excepting perhaps Christmas and New Year’s), and on many weekends the aspirant has his choice of two or three. The conventions take place in large cities and small, they range in attendance from one hundred or less21 to seven thousand,22 some are longstanding and traditional (the world convention is approaching the end of its fourth decade, the Cincinnati convention its third); others are fly-by-nights or just beginning to build. One some years ago took place on trains which racketed back and forth between Washington and New York while fans trooped lively through the corridors. It is difficult to speculate the effect on nonconventioneers. (The train was not a charter.)

  The conventions are of all size and location but the programs are much the same. Fans attend, as do casual readers who live in the area (depending upon the degree of publicity), and editors and writers, and, of course, the press. There are panels on all aspects of the field, a guest of honor who delivers a guest-of-honor speech, discussion groups, movies, meet-the-pros parties. (At larger conventions many of these events occur simultaneously.) There is a costume party, a grand masquerade. Private parties are held through the premises celebrating various regions, interests, or friendships and sometimes celebrating nothing at all. The hotel bar is filled with professionals and their editors. (Fans themselves, because of age and disposition, tend to be a nondrinking crowd.) There is a good deal of fornication, not all of it indiscriminate. Old rivalries and hatreds are renewed, reworked, or broadened. Although the faces of the fans may change from region to region, those of the writers, editors, and the serious fans do not: Denver is very much like Minneapolis; Boston is Cincinnati redux.

  Science fiction—as I have written elsewhere in a different voice a long time ago—for all of its claims to being a mind-expanding, venturesome field is much like the dog-show circuit, the same handlers and judges appearing in different combinations everywhere. The world of the convention like the world of Nabokov’s Lolita is an endless series of rooms in different places, all of which look the same. Only through the souvenir shops could one tell the difference.

  For a new writer—and many an older one—it is all very heady stuff indeed. There are panels, autographs to be signed, nametags to display, new fornicatrices or drinking partners to be gained; the winds of Seattle’s heath may howl, the gales of Philadelphia may blow, but inside the hotel it is comfortable and familiar and it is unnecessary to go out at all. Most attendees do not; always one plans to sightsee but things keep on getting in the way. A science fiction writer who, like all American writers but five or six, lives in anonymity and discontent, can find at the conventions what no other writer outside the province can: recognition and an audience. The panels are attended, the guest-of-honor speeches are heard, the books are there to be autographed and every smile is a winner. It is possible for the duration of a convention—and beyond—to believe that science fiction is the world.

  It is not, of course, and in his heart the professional probably knows this, but that requires thought, and conventions work against the activity. Of the 500,000 who can be said to read as many as three science fiction books a year (this already less than a quarter of a percent of the population), only a tenth of them could be identified as serious, devoted readers, and perhaps a fifth of that tenth, or 10,000, compose that pool from which all23 convention attendees can be said to be drawn. The total convention-going population would at the best fail to fill Madison Square Garden. Early season with the Warriors in town.

  Still, at the large conventions they all seem to be there, including many beautiful women (there were almost no women at conventions until the nineteen-sixties). The drinks flow, the professionals hang out in a community of misery, the speeches draw applause, and there is always the possibility that the next request for an autograph may bring a “serious relationship.” Editors are always impressed by writers receiving adulation, so there is no mystery to science fiction writers getting on the circuit—all have been powerfully tempted; the circuit is also the reason why so many promising careers have hung at promise for years, or collapsed; still the illusion of audience is better for a writer (and more pleasant by far) than the anonymous, grinding work which is the lot of the commercial fictioneer. It is possible to combine the two—grinding work, weekend conventions—but this can bring real burnout; only a few remarkable cases have been able to work them together, and one will never know the price extracted from celebrated livers and bowels.

  The existence of the circuit is probably the central reason for a well-known phenomenon: science fiction is an art medium in which one can go from quite promising to washed up without having paused for even a day at a point between. But the last word should be that of an ex-science fictioneer (who fled both the field and the circuit a long time ago) who said, “You know, you can get a great deal of attention, real reverence at these conventions for sure. But you know when the trouble begins? It starts when you ask who in hell you’re getting this attention from.”

  1980: New Jersey

  Tell Me Doctor If You Can That It’s Not All Happening Again

  REPLICATION IS THE STUFF OF MARRIAGE, MIDDLE AGE, and science fiction; the portents are heavy and the air is foul. In late 1959—as in late 1937 on a less cosmic scale—the market for science fiction was in a state of collapse. The magazines, the deaths, the distributors, the book publishers. A well-known American fan and editor, Earl Kemp, passed around the Detroit World Science Fiction Convention with a questionnaire asking responses to the question, Who killed science fiction? and he had enough speculations and rumblings to publish a book (which won an unprecedented Hugo Award in the fan magazine category a couple of years later). Dismal clumps of editors and writers gathered in bars and bedrooms to ask one another whether the field could even be said to exist anymore. There was one fairly viable magazine (Astounding), a couple of others obviously in distress, and a scattering of paperback book publishers, none of whom expressed much interest in paying more than small advances to writers whose work they had already published. Detroit was a terrible time; a convention which lives on in the memory of the assembled as surely postfunereal but without even the wistful gaiety of the wake.24

  Many of Earl Kemp’s respondents confessed their feeling that science fiction had indeed been murdered, that its existence as an independent, functioning subgenre of American literature had reached its end just as had the sports pulp, the air war stories, combat fiction, jungle stories, and the like. (In the great pulp era of the nineteen-thirties there had been several magazines devoted to such arcana as railroad fiction or espionage. The war and paper shortages had put an end to almost all of these magazines and television in the postwar era guaranteed that they would never be revived; truly almost all of the pulp-era readers seemed to prefer television, and readers who would have come into the market after the war, of course, had no choice.) To this time, those science fiction writers who were active at the end of the era are able to talk of the late nineteen-fifties only with loathing. Most of them gave up their careers—by choice, circumstance, or a fortuitous blending of the two—and most of them never returned. The markets revived but this generation of writers was gone.

  More than two decades later we know that American science fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart att
ack, it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned (although there have been little murmurs and seizures, flutters of panic). Over a thousand titles labeled “science fiction” have been published every year since 1978, no less than fifty writers can be said to be making a substantial-to-extravagant living through the writing of science fiction alone, and although the magazines have been pushed steadily to the borders of the market—only Analog, Amazing, and Fantasy and Science Fiction survive from the fifties; only Isaac Asimov’s and Omni have persisted from their birth in the late seventies to join them, though Omni publishes very little fiction—the science fiction short story lives on in the original anthology form and is the basis for many expansions to novel length. The science fiction novel has become the most reliable single category in American mass-market publishing; 15 percent of all fiction titles published are now science fiction, and most of these books are at least marginally profitable for their publisher.

  Nonetheless, the dystopian undercurrent flows in science fiction; it has from the genre’s inception. (Letters in the Astounding of the mid-thirties were already asking where all the good stuff had gone; correspondents to Astounding in the late forties were expressing the hope that with the war over Campbell could now get some of the decent kind of fiction that he had been publishing before Pearl Harbor.) Perhaps it has to do with the psychic defensiveness of the science fiction reader, but it also is based upon extrinsic and verifiable realities. The writers, the more experienced editors, and the older-generation fans often wake up screaming, in minor versions of the combat flashback syndrome, from dreams that it has all happened again. “Is it happening again?” they ask themselves, and not only in their individual cubicles of the night. Every retrenchment in a publisher’s line, every transfer of a magazine ownership, every significant editor fired brings up the question: the late fifties again? Regardless of the changes in the field, expansion of at least the fringe audience, security of backlist, and the essentially benign commercial history of the last decade . . . is science fiction due nonetheless for another collapse?

  The cyclical history of the field, the omens and the portents might so indicate, but science fiction writers and readers are supposed to be rationalists, and some factors which applied in 1959 do not apply now. It is no longer a magazine medium hooked to the whims of distributors and a transient audience but instead is tied into the media by conglomerate ownership and by the fact that the most successful movies of recent years—Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Alien—have all been science fiction and have funneled new readers steadily into the field. (Most of them, alas, dropping out soon.) We all like to think too that we are older and wiser, that like Anouilh’s priest in The Lark we have seen it all before and thus do not need to see it again. The most powerful delusion of a career in the writing of any fiction is that one’s work grows and improves, that things need ultimately not be the same but in changing will get better . . . that there is a difference.

  Still, even with the safeguards and delusions, not unlike those “safeguards” and “brakes” which economists remind us over and over again in their newspaper columns make a recurrence of the depression impossible, one cannot really be sure. There are no certainties in show biz. Conglomerate publishing can be merciless to a losing proposition (the same people who kill television series after two episodes or refuse to proceed with a pilot in the face of negative advertiser reaction are now the people who ultimately control publishing), producing fear among the writers and editors alike. At a recent world convention25 the editors were on short expense accounts and mostly in hiding; the writers entertained one another with tales of editorial treachery and incompetence, publisher stupidity and retrenchment.

  Make this point: what most readers of science fiction do not know and have little reason to suspect is the degree to which the very quality of fear can be said to control the acquisition, production, marketing, and selling of science fiction in this country and how all of these subsidiary fears refract back to the first, that of the writer trying to survive by the medium who, professionally, must engage in self-censorship, must understand that there are certain stories he cannot write. The writer—the experienced writer in any event—knows that most editors acquire and publish not in an effort to be successful so much as to avoid failure.26 Defensive driving. They seek, then, that which they consider safe, and the writers who are at the mercy of these editors27 function from the same motivation. (It can be presumed that those who feel or function differently find it almost impossible to get their work into the mass market.) They must produce that which will not offend, which will not cause an editor to question the commercial viability of a book, a process leading quickly to rejection. Science fiction, like all commercial fiction (and quality lit too although in a slightly different way), can perhaps be best understood in terms of what is not written rather than what is. Self-censorship controls. Any writer who understands this at all will know what not to try. As good a definition of professionalism as any other.

  What is unsaleable then? What are the taboos and limitations which have been imposed upon the field? No list can be inclusive, of course (new circumstances lead to new taboos; Larry Janifer recalls a sex book publisher of the early sixties who, keeping close eye through lawyers on the courts, would have a new list of do’s and don’ts issued every week; quite difficult if one had a novel-in-progress), but for general edification a partial list can be prepared. It must be made clear that the list is not immutable; it is only the fact of taboo which is constant. Buggery may come and pinko liberalism may go; old terrors will become cuddly rabbits and new beasts with rotten teeth will ease in through the windows. Even so, there will always be in this field (as in all others) certain subjects which can on only extraordinary occasions be discussed, certain approaches which can only be taken at the highest risk.

  Some decades after Detroit, here is a small Common Book:

  ONE: Bleak, dystopian, depressing material which implies that the present cultural fix is insane or transient and will self-destruct . . . that the very ethos and materials of the society, without the introduction of hungry invaders or Venusian outrage, will bring it down.

  (The key here is self-destruction; there is no essential taboo against an extrapolation of the present culture which will be destroyed by the envious or by the righteous underground. The problem is an extrapolated present that without the slightest shove goes merrily to extinction. E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” published in 1902 in another country and anthologized endlessly in this field, strikes me as the kind of story which would be unpublishable in any contemporary science fiction magazine.)

  TWO: Material which is highly internalized. That is, science fiction written from the point of view of a meditative and introspective central character whose perceptions are the central facet of the work, whose reactions to the events of the story are more important than the story itself. Goodbye Henry James, so long Herman Melville, get lost Saul Bellow; The Demolished Man would have a hell of a time getting sold by an unknown Alfred Bester in this market.

  THREE: Science fiction which implies that contemporary accepted mores of sexuality, socioeconomics, or familial patterning might be corrupting, dangerous, or destructive. This appears to be a corollary to Dangerous Plot ONE but must be distinguished from it because while the first taboo would merely be against self-destructiveness, the third shuts off the possibility of serious investigation of alternatives. There has never been—as a now aged but still angry Will Sykora, chairman of the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, pointed out to me scant months ago—a communistic science fiction; that is, there has never been a body of work in science fiction done seriously analyzing the way a Marxian society might work (or fail to work) in the future or on any other planet. There similarly has never been a science fi
ction in which homosexuality or polymorphous perversity were considered as cultural norms (Charles Beaumont’s 1955 “The Crooked Man” evokes a homosexual society but only in a surprise ending which is supposed to make the story horrible and, for that time and Playboy’s audience, probably succeeded); there has never been a science fiction in which alternatives to the nuclear family were perceived as anything other than horrible (as they were in Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! with its Warrior Creche, or Damon Knight’s “Ask Me Anything” with its kidnapped infants’ brains put into cyborgs). In the late seventies John Varley published a few short stories in which sex change was seen as a cultural norm, but then again as in Wyman Guin’s 1951 “Beyond Bedlam,” where schizophrenia was seen as the norm, the stories settled for a schematization without interposing in the narrative any character who as a surrogate reader might have raised questions on the system with which the characters—and hence the writer—were compelled to deal.

  FOUR: Science fiction which owes less to classical, Aristotelian notions of “plot”—the logical, progressive ordering of events as a protagonist attempts to solve a serious and personally significant problem—than “mood” . . . that is, the events for their own sake, perceived in chiaroscuro fashion without the superficial ordering imposed by a central point of view or a problem-solving format. (This would render not only Ulysses-Finnegan’s Wake influences taboo in science fiction but would mean that even more modest experiments in form, such as those of Donald Barthelme, Tillie Olsen, or Grace Paley, would be unacceptable . . . indeed the bewildered reaction of science fiction editors to work of this sort is to ask, “Where’s the story?” and in terms of classical perception of plot they are, to be sure, quite right.)