The Engines of the Night Read online

  FIVE: Science fiction truly at the hard edge of contemporary scientific investigation . . . science fiction which denies Einsteinian theory, the speed of light as an absolute limitation upon speed itself, science fiction which looks at Darwinism in light of recent studies which indicate that the whole question of natural selection must be reevaluated.

  Editors tend to blame not themselves but the writers for this, and there is a small amount of truth in this; writers, particularly commercial writers, are lazy and superficial by economic and psychic necessity. “All the science I ever needed to know I got out of a bottle of scotch,” James Blish quotes an unnamed science fiction writer in The Issue at Hand, and John W. Campbell in his last years complained of the reluctance or inability of new writers and old to work at the frontier of scientific investigation. Still, truly original or heretic approaches to scientific thought would unsettle the preconceived reader and editorial notions of the category. There has not been—this is an extreme generalization but I will stand by it and take objections c/o the publisher, with promise to apologize in the Second Edition if necessary—a truly original scientific extrapolation in science fiction in at least ten years. Perhaps Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (“To Outlive Eternity”) played with notions of relativity which had been commonly accepted up until then; perhaps Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” offered in his slow glass an entirely new, scientifically rationalized and rigorously imagined technological imposition upon the culture. Perhaps Pamela Sargent’s 1971 “The Other Perceiver,” which questioned the perception of waste and the life cycle might qualify. They are the most recent examples of science fiction which can even be proposed as at the harder edge of scientific investigation, pursued with the hard edge of rigor.

  SIX: Science fiction which questions science fiction; work which questions the assumptions of the category and speculates on the effect it might have upon its readership. Silverberg’s two short stories and my own Galaxies (all cited elsewhere) are the last examples of work of this form; the most recent was published more than half a decade ago.

  SEVEN: Genuinely feminist science fiction; that is, science fiction in which women are perceived to react to events and internalize in a way which is neither a culturally received stereotype (the bulk of science fiction before 1970) nor a merely male stereotype projected onto female characters. (Most of the female-protagonist work of the post-1970 period.) The women of contemporary “feminist” science fiction are not women but male characters with female names, genitalia, and secondary sexual characteristics; most of the advance into the era of liberation has only been in terms of new labels for an old constituency. I have absolutely no conception of what a true feminist science fiction would be, and I am more than half-convinced that I could not write it (although ideally male writers could do it as well as female), but it would be like nothing we have seen before and would bear little relation to the gender-changed 1940s pulp envisionings which are passed off as feminist science fiction today. (The only truly feminist science fiction story I can bring to mind—which is not to say that there might not be others—is James Tiptree’s [Alice Sheldon’s] 1973 “The Women Men Don’t See,” which shows a degree of submission, subtlety, and converted rage in its two female characters absolutely not glimpsed elsewhere in science fiction.)

  * * *

  This dismal listing—and there is no way to characterize it other than as dismal; give it to an aspirant science fiction writer and show the aspirant how to sink a career—in no way is meant to imply my own endorsement of the tabooed viewpoints. (Some are close to my gnarled little heart and others are my own anathema. Some I could write and more than a couple do not, to me, seem worth writing at all.) What I am merely suggesting is that a science fiction novel (and almost any science fiction short story other than by an important writer) flouting one or more of the taboos listed would be very unlikely to find a publisher. (It goes without saying that more than one taboo could be assaulted in a work. Bester’s The Demolished Man, which would probably be unpublishable today, took on at least three of them; Sturgeon’s long-promised novel of which the novella “When You Care/When You Love” published in 1962 is the supposed opening section might well cut through all seven.) It is what they call in Las Vegas or Atlantic City an out bet to suggest that no more than a hundred thousand words of science fiction published throughout the ensuing decade will take on any of these strictures.

  And so the decade is launched. It is in fact well launched; the patterns of the eighties are well set: the conglomerates will dominate, fewer titles will receive more publicity, the magazines will drift away, the ambitious new writers will have a tough time. (When except for the brief glimmering between 1952 and 1955 did they not?) It would be easy to conclude with the clarion call for the ending of such taboos: liberation, ladies and gents, to the barricades, take on the stereotypes, muscle away the poltroons and the elitists, throw a flying fuck in the case of the Queen. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! as Lear pointed out (hopelessly) on the heath. If not such fervid cries, at least an ironic suggestion with a moue of the features that it might have been the very taboo-laden atmosphere of the late fifties which contributed to the near collapse of the field. A similar atmosphere prevailing today might replicate the disaster unless editors become adventurous, writers daring, readers insistent and so on. Onward! Onward with liberated science fiction!

  It would be nice to round it off that way but I am distinctly middle-aged and have been a professional science fiction writer for a long time. I have been reading in the field for three decades. I do not believe that I could sustain the call to barricades without collapsing into self-loathing chuckles and ironic gasps, the kind of laughter with which attendants in mental institutions and bartenders in writers’ heavens all over the country are so familiar. I cannot sustain that voice because I do not believe that science fiction will ever become liberated28 (what is liberation?) or that if the ragged old form did that it would be to its advantage.

  To the contrary. A true science fiction might destroy the field commercially, sending the majority of its readership away in confusion or horror. They do not read science fiction, most of them, to be disturbed but to be pacified. Science fiction indeed may be flourishing now precisely to the degree that it is saying less and saying it worse than ever before. The period of greatest economic and readership growth in the history of the field has coincided with the post-1975 shutdown of experimentation or ideological quibble. Science fiction has become big business; it intersects with the media which are feeding it and which it has fed so well, and the field is being run with negligible exceptions amongst the minor book publishers and the magazines by the very same people. Gulf & Western and Rocket Industries. The Music Corporation of Speculation. International Telephone & Terrestials.

  And brave, brave new decade to the inheritors of the mantle of Kornbluth and Kuttner and Campbell. Could the twenty-seven-year-old John W. Campbell get a job today anywhere in the industry? Would they let Horace stay in his apartment while the galleys were slipped underneath the door?

  1979/1980: New Jersey

  The Richard Nixon-John B. Mitchell-Spiro Agnew Blues

  SCIENCE FICTION IS NOT NECESSARILY a cultural microcosm (and then again perhaps it is; the boys in the back room of the fifties indeed felt they were building a better world), but confluence in the political life of the Republic and the market news was striking in the mid-seventies. The collapse of the market for “experimental,” “literary,” “avant-garde,” “downbeat,” “technophobic,” or “depressing” science fiction can be placed within virtually a month of Nixon’s speedy and insufficiently dramatic eviction from high office; by the end of 1974 the editorial doors had closed. Writers and work embodying the cutting edge of the field through the seventies were not having their calls returned, editors who had become identified with those writers and work were either losing their jobs or frantically changing policy. Gerald Ford and the era of Lucas seemed to descend upon the Republic simultaneousl
y; we know that this was not true (Ford was gone when Star Wars opened in the spring of 1977), but it feels true. Post-Watergate was when Lucas was raising the money, anyway.

  This, to be sure, is a perilous statement . . . retrospection seeks order that the ongoing reality had no time to set . . . but this matter of perceiving science fiction as a microcosm of the nation’s tumultuous, self-deluded, and ultimately disastrous politics must be briefly pursued. I have felt for a while that the eviction of Nixon was the last gasp of the contemporary left; after fifteen years of assassinations, demonstrations, murmurings, rumbles, and license, a President had actually been thrown out of office legally and the left wing recoiled as if in horror: they had, like the child in tantrum who burns down the place, never really expected that they could get away with it. Simultaneously, the right wing and great center regarded the detenancy as the last concession that the left wing would exact. “We gave you the son of a bitch,” seemed to be the implicit statement, “you made such an all-fired nuisance of yourselves that we let him go but I’m telling you for your own good: this is the last time. You kids have pulled your last prank; now it’s time to go out and get a job.”

  All the kids seemed to get the message. By 1976 Eugene McCarthy was a ghost candidate, the left wing of the Democratic party (as “represented” by the pusillanimous and disgraced Humphrey) could not even go through the motions of a primary fight, and the “liberal” Republicans had assented to the removal of Nelson Rockefeller from the vice presidency without protest. The antiwar movement had long since fragmented and collapsed and the war itself if not over was over for us. The sixties radicals were dead, in hiding, on the underside or taking up permanent rights via squatting in the middle class.

  And in science fiction, simil.

  In science fiction, the speed and force of the counterrevolution was so abrupt that many of the younger writers for years thereafter were still writing short stories and novels for a market which no longer existed. The bottom of the original anthology market fell out. Ballantine Science Fiction became Del Rey Books and proceeded in both theory and reissued fact to reconstruct the childhood of Lester del Rey. Random House quit science fiction and Pyramid quit everything and those publishers which continued were letting the word out explicitly that traditional themes and handling would be appreciated. Aldiss and Ballard fell out of the American market; Ellison, Silverberg, and the undersigned announced within a fortnight of one another in late 197529 that we would write science fiction no more, and new writers began to have more trouble finding publishers than at any time since the early sixties. Certain kinds of writing were almost unsaleable.

  It is easy—almost seductively easy one might say—by pursuing this line of confluence to say that science fiction was merely reacting to or reenacting on its own level the political climate of its time. I am not quite sure that this is so; science fiction has been a fairly self-contained circumstance since its inception whose development often moved at odds with the larger culture. (The first half of the forties, that decade of unspeakable horror, will always be known in science fiction as the “Golden Age.”) Rather, serendipity seems to be the issue; for different reasons both America and science fiction found itself in retreat from the shocks and terrors of the sixties, which as they brought the very existence of institutions into question, opened the windows on a future which was unacceptable.

  The assassinations, the war, the corruption of all political life, the decline of religion, the rise of divorce, and sexual libertarianism had opened up the same trap doors that the post-technological visions of Ballard and Aldiss, the psychological horrors of Tiptree, and the demented idealism of Lafferty had opened in science fiction, and both America (its corporate structure and institutions) and science fiction (through editors and publishers) were in fear of falling. In both cases, the forces of counterrevolution had the same desperate, unspoken assent; no one really wanted to see the country or this great escape fiction fall apart. That the President of the United States could be revealed as a simple crook, that the literature of technological transcendence should become imbued with images of how the machines were killing us was simply too much for the audience to handle. Blame them not. Their confusion became hostility and finally outrage: Nixon might be thrown out and the visions of Ballard scribbled like graffiti all over the holy gates, but now things were going to get back to normal, as quickly as possible. And they were going to stay normal for a hell of a long time. There were big plans to put everything on hold once the temple was resecured.

  It may turn around again. It may not. Years ago, the theory of cycles would apply in politics and science fiction alike and one could make reference to the metaphor of the pendulum. A society and economy controlled by conglomerates, however, a literature which is a minor subdivision of a subdivision of these conglomerates, can be manipulated to stay frozen in position (until or unless the whole thing falls apart), and in this totalitarian possibility science fiction and American life can be seen at last to become indistinguishable, to become facets of one another in the last fifth of the last century of the last millennium in which the theory of causality can be seen (or may be needed) at all to apply.

  1980: New Jersey

  Cornell George Hopley Woolrich: December 1903 to September 1968

  AT THE END, IN THE LAST YEAR, HE LOOKED three decades older. The booze had wrecked him, the markets had wrecked him, he had wrecked him; by the time that friends dragged him out in April to St. Clare’s Hospital where they took off the gangrenous leg, he had the stunned aspect of the very old. Where there had been edges there was now only the gelatinous material that when probed would not rebound.

  Nonetheless, if the booze had stripped all but bone it had left his eyes moist and open, childlike and vulnerable. That September in the open coffin, surrounded by flowers sent by the Chase Manhattan Bank, he looked young; he looked like the man who in his late twenties had loafed around the ballrooms and written of the debutantes.

  There were five names in the guest book, Leo and Cylvia Margulies of Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine leading off. Leo died in December 1975 and Cylvia divested herself of the publication about two years later.

  He died in print. The April 1968 Escapade had a story, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine had taken his stunning “New York Blues” to publish it two years later; that novelette had been written in late 1967. Ace Books had embarked upon an ambitious program of reissue which brought The Bride Wore Black, Rendezvous in Black, Phantom Lady, and others back into the mass market. Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black was in production. The Ellery Queen hardcover mystery annual had a story. Now, more than a decade later, he is out of print; an item for the specialty and university presses, an occasional republication in an Ellery Queen annual. Ace let the books go a long time past: poor sales. There are no other paperbacks. The hardcovers—what few copies remain—are for the collectors.

  “It isn’t dying I’m afraid of, it isn’t that at all; I know what it is to die, I’ve died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That’s what I can’t stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don’t you? . . . I really loved to write.”

  His mother Claire died in 1956. Shortly thereafter his own work virtually ceased. A novel—never published—found with his effects; it had been rejected all over New York in the early sixties. A few short stories for Ellery Queen and The Saint Mystery Magazine. His relationship with his mother had been the central—it is theorized that it was the only—relationship of his life; they had lived together continuously for her last fourteen years. When she died, he lived alone in one room on the second floor of the Sheraton-Russell Hotel in Manhattan surrounded by cases and cases of beer cans and bottles of whiskey, and invited the staff to come up and drink with him and watch television. Sometimes he would sit in the lobby; more occasionally he would take a cab to McSorley’s Tavern in the village. The gangrene which came from an ill-fitting shoe and which un
treated turned his left leg to charcoal, slowly, from early 1967 to April 1968, ended all that; he would stay in his room and drink almost all the time and stare at the television looking for a film from one of his novels or short stories which came on often enough and usually after 2 A.M.; between the movies and the alcohol he was finally able to find sleep. For a few hours. Until ten or eleven in the morning, when it would all start again. At the end he had almost none of his books left in the room: he had given them all away to casual visitors. Bellboys. Maids. The night manager. An employee of his literary agent. He could not bear to have his work around him anymore.

  “I got six hundred dollars from Alfred Hitchcock for the movie rights to ‘Rear Window.’ That’s all that I got; it was one story in a collection of eight that was sold in the forties by the agent H. N. Swanson for five thousand dollars; he sold everything for five thousand dollars; that’s why we all called him five grand Swannie. But that didn’t bother me really; what bothered me was that Hitchcock wouldn’t even send me a ticket to the premiere in New York. He knew where I lived. He wouldn’t even send me a ticket.”