The Engines of the Night Read online

  Only the rigor and discipline of the delimited can create art. Musicologists considering Bach, who worked within desperately restrictive format, will concur as will those considering the sonata form. The sonnet and the eight-bar chorus of almost all popular song and operetta give similar testimony. It was the very restraint with which science fiction was cloaked from the outset which gave the genre its discipline and force. Without the specialized format of the magazines, where science fiction writers and readers could dwell, exchange, observe one another’s practices and build upon one another’s insight, the genre could not have developed.

  The first-generation science fiction writers—those whom Gernsback, Harry Bates, and F. Orlin Tremaine brought into Amazing and Astounding after their small stock of recycled Wells and Verne had been used—worked under the most generalized influence and without canon: their work showed it. The second generation—those identified with Campbell—was composed of people who had grown up reading the early science fiction and were prepared to build upon it. The third generation, coming in the nineteen-fifties, was composed of writers who had correspondingly more sources and possibilities (and also a larger stock of ideas already proved unworkable or exhausted), and the increasing subtlety and complexity of the form through their years testifies once again to, as it were, the influence of influence . . . upon influence.

  Science fiction, as John W. Campbell once pointed out expansively, may indeed outdo all of the so-called mainstream because it gathers in all of time and space . . . but science fiction as it has evolved is an extraordinarily rigorous and delimiting medium. Like the canon and the fugue, the sonnet and the sonata, like haiku, it has its rules, and the control of those rules is absolute. Extrapolative elements, cultural interface, characteriological attempt to resolve the conflicts between the two: this is science fiction.

  The fact pervades all the decades after about 1935: no one could publish science fiction unless exposed to a great deal of it; virtually everyone who has ever sold a story has a sophisticated reader’s background in the form, usually acquired just before or around adolescence. At the underside, this has led to parochialism, incestuousness, and the preciosity of decadence (and there has been too much). In the end it may even be these qualities which finish science fiction off, make its most sophisticated and advanced examples increasingly inaccessible to the larger reading audience. But whatever happens to science fiction, it would not exist at all if it had not been given a name and a medium and for this, if we are not led to praise Gernsback, we must entomb him with honor. He was a crook, old Hugo, but he made all of us crooks possible.

  1980: New Jersey

  Anonymity & Empire

  TO THE AMERICAN LITERARY COMMUNITY—to the American arts establishment—the science fiction writers of the forties were invisible. There is no more graceful way to put this. There were, for the first half of the decade, almost no books at all: no anthologies, no reprints, no second-serial rights. Novels and stories were written for genre magazines of limited circulation, were published and went out of print, presumably forever. Asimov has written that everything about his career after 1946 came as a surprise; he had no idea at the time he was writing “Nightfall,” “Foundation,” or the robotics series that this work would live beyond the issues of the magazines in which they appeared. This did not bother him (it might have bothered others) at all: what purpose did science fiction have except to live briefly and die forever in the magazines for kids? There was sufficient reward in becoming part of the ongoing literature. The Queens Science Fiction League was certainly not the world, but for the young Asimov its approval and awe were all that he could have asked.

  It must be understood that in certain respects science fiction was no different for its writers, offered nothing less, than did the other branches of popular literature. It was pulp and appeared in the torrent of pulp magazines which by the hundreds got on in various degrees of health until wartime paper shortages and, finally, the curse of television put almost all of them in the ground by the beginning of the fifties. Western and romance writers, adventure and sports pulpeteers, also worked for a half cent to two cents a word and knew that when the magazines went off sale their work would never be seen by a nonrelative or nonlover again. (Mystery writers did have a small book market but in the pre-Mystery Writers of America days only a vanishingly small percentage of magazine work could in expanded form find a book market—and advances, averaging around $250 even for first-rank writers like Woolrich, were an insignificant part of their income.) The difference between science fiction writers and those of the other pulp genres, however, was that science fiction writers took their work seriously, put far more into it psychically and were writing (because of the dominant presence of Campbell) to a consistently higher standard, an imposed rigor and specialized background. It was impossible, then as now, to write science fiction without the most intimate reading knowledge of the form, simply because the field was advancing so quickly in its language and devices that each story either made a direct contribution to the ongoing literature or risked rejection on the basis that it did not.

  Surely—I defer to my sometime collaborator Bill Pronzini here with whom I have discussed the issue—western, romance, sports, and certainly mystery writers might have been no less serious about their work, no less dedicated or professional. They certainly were not their inferiors technically, and the anonymity must have had profound effects upon them no less than upon the science fiction writers.

  But almost all the science fiction writers were specialists. If they did not have a thorough working knowledge of the literature and the cutting edge, they did not survive. By 1940, very few of the science fiction writers who had been in Astounding prior to Campbell were still there; others had been thrown out and their names—Schachner, Schopeflin, Cummings—were legion. They had been evicted not through Campbellian malice but because they were either unable or unwilling to meet his editorial demands.

  Campbell did better—felt that he had no alternative, really—by bringing in writers who had no sales background or alternate markets at all so that he could work with them from the outset . . . and because they had no alternate markets, they were less inclined to put up a battle against Campbell’s demands.

  Most of the pre-Campbell writers were pulp generalists who wrote through the entire range of fiction magazines and for whom science fiction constituted only a small percentage of output. Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat, for instance, were enormously prolific and successful pulp writers; science fiction was only 10 percent of their output (and after their eviction less than that), but ironically they are remembered now only for their science fiction. Lester del Rey in his time did a fair amount for the confessions and sports magazines, but most of the first Campbell generation—Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, de Camp—wrote little else. (The Kuttners under their own names and a plethora of pseudonyms wrote a great deal of fantasy but did not appear, as far as can be determined, to any extent in the other category magazines. The Kuttners, however, knew where to bury all the bodies.)

  The rigor of the medium, demands of the market, and anonymity in which the work was done must have had their effect upon these writers. Asimov’s feelings are known, but one can only surmise what science fiction did to the Kuttners, who were turning in work like “Vintage Season,” “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “Shock,” “When the Bough Breaks” for a cent and a half a word; what science fiction did to van Vogt, who was turning out over two hundred thousand words of it a year working sixteen hours a day in a small apartment (and doing some confession stories too); what science fiction meant to Heinlein, who wrote Sixth Column for about $900 and “By His Bootstraps” and “Universe” for maybe $300 each—all of these writers putting out this work without an inkling that it would ever appear again or be read by other than the young core audience for the magazines.

  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 g
reat 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 says 2 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.