The Engines of the Night Read online

  Shrug, consider the bar bill, try Theodore Sturgeon’s nineteen-forties dictum: a good science fiction story is one whose events would not have occurred without its scientific content. This is promising—among other things, it manages to summarize, for the decade, the essence of John W. Campbell’s editorial vision in Astounding . . . but Anne McCaffrey’s dragons could not fly in Sturgeon’s science fiction and Sheckley’s work, right through his great novel Dimension of Miracles, would not fit. Nor would the visions of J. G. Ballard and his descendants; if The Terminal Beach or The Drowned World are about anything, they are about a world in which science has failed and gone away . . . and yet the works of Ballard are considered central to any understanding of post-1960s science fiction.

  James Tiptree’s famous The Women Men Don’t See has no science in it either, nor does Robert Silverberg’s 1972 novel Dying Inside, generally regarded as one of the pivotal works of the decade. (It concerns a telepath, who has lived concealing his gift, slowly losing his powers in early middle age in contemporary New York.) Then, too, Sturgeon’s definition would admit not only Arrowsmith but many novels about science—Morton Thompson’s Not As a Stranger, Peter George’s Red Alert, George P. Elliott’s David Knudsen. Any definition so inclusive would obviously attenuate a category which, however ill-defined, is very clearly understood by its readers, writers, editors and critics to be a distinct and limited (if not really limiting) form of literature.

  Perhaps one throws up one’s hands and dives back to the fifties to Damon Knight’s “Science fiction is whatever we point to when we say ‘this is science fiction.’ ” Lots of truth in that; whatever trouble we may have with definitions, there is a consensual feeling among those of us who pretend to understand the form: McCaffrey’s Dragonflight belongs in the genre and Arrowsmith does not. Check The Science Fiction Encyclopedia and the bibliographies. Still, if Knight’s path of implied least resistance is the way to go, I would prefer Frederik Pohl’s useful, provocative, and contained: “Science fiction is a way of thinking about things.”

  Science fiction, then, is a methodology and an approach. Pohl is surely on the trail of something important here, and if one could define what that way of thinking about things is, one perhaps would come as close to a working definition of science fiction as will be needed to understand almost all of it. Let me have a try at this, noting my indebtedness to A. J. Budrys, who has prowled this corridor some, most notably in his introduction to John Varley’s collection The Persistence of Vision.

  Science fiction, at the center, holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot apprehend. That is the base of the science fiction vision, but the more important part comes as corollary: the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure. What technological alteration, the gleaming or putrid knife of the future, is going to do will cut far deeper than the effects of adultery, divorce, clinical depression, rap groups, consciousness-raising, encounter sessions or even the workings of that famous old law firm of Sack, Pillage, Loot & Burn. It will be these changes—those imposed extrinsically by force—which really matter; this is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives (or at least would like to).

  Lasting, significant change, science fiction says, is uncontrollable and coming in uncontrollably; regardless of what we think or how we feel, we have lost control of our lives. When the aliens debark from their craft to deal with the colonization assignment, the saved and the unsaved, adulterous and chaste, psychoanalyzed and decompensated will be caught in their terrible tracer beams and absorb the common fate. When the last layer of protective ozone is burned out by International Terror & Trade, discussion leaders, the born again and the members of the American Psychological Association will all go together.

  This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today. Because this vision is inimical to the middle class (which has been taught that increased self-realization is increased control), because it tends to trivialize if not actually mock the vision of the modern novel and drama (the shaping of experience is its explanation), genre science fiction has been in trouble in America from the outset. It has been perceived almost from the beginning as the enemy of the culture. Science fiction has had a hearing from those who control access to the broad reading audience at only a few points in its history (I suggest 1946, 1957, and 1972) and in every case has been swiftly repudiated. The successful media science fiction of the seventies (most, though not all of it, debased adventure stories with crude science-fictional props) has forced literary science fiction into juxtaposition with the culture. The increase in readership funneled in by Star Trek and Star Wars has indicated that publishers will not permit it this time to go away . . . but science fiction is hardly, at the outset of the decade of the eighties, much more of a reputable and critically accepted genre than it was thirty years ago.

  It is my assumption that it never will be. Science fiction is too threatening.

  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 h
old 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.