The Engines of the Night Page 6

  There are many similar cases. Here are just a few: Blish’s “Work of Art” and “Common Time,” Kornbluth’s “The Last Man Left in the Bar” and “Notes Leading Down to the Disaster,” Knight’s “Anachron,” Margaret St. Clair’s “Short in the Chest.” All of these stories appeared in second and third line magazines. It is well understood that as the doomed Kornbluth became better and better, his work drifted from the three most important magazines. His last appearance in Campbell’s magazine was in 1952 with a novelette, “That Share of Glory,” and the Gunner Cade novel collaboration with Judith Merril (“The Quaker Cannon,” a collaboration with Pohl, appeared in 1961 but Kornbluth was quite dead by that time) and although Pohl collaborations appeared in Galaxy well into the 1960s, his single byline was absent after the 1952 Altar at Midnight. The Syndic, perhaps Kornbluth’s best novel, was barely rescued for serial publication by Harry Harrison for the last issues of Science Fiction Adventures. Theodore Sturgeon appeared frequently in Galaxy through 1958 but not nearly so frequently in F & SF and with a single exception (“Won’t You Walk?” in January 1956) not at all in Astounding. And Mark Clifton, who had been Campbell’s most renowned contributor between 1952 and 1955 sold only one novelette, “How Allied,” and a 500-word humorous essay to Astounding after that latter year. Clifton’s last short stories and novel, Pawn of the Black Fleet, appeared in Amazing.

  The point of this grim, pointilistic subhistory is that although the fifties were indeed a period of growth, optimism, and experimentation for science fiction writers and readers, they were also characterized by the caution and terror which prevailed elsewhere. As the decade wandered in its sad and predictable way through the shores of political repression and public indifference, science fiction, no less than popular music or the products of General Motors, began to initiate decadence. (Defined most satisfactorily as being the elevation of form over function.) In a 1972 article by Gerald Jonas in The New Yorker, Robert Silverberg remembered why in 1959 he abandoned science fiction for several years. The magazine collapse of the late fifties had left few markets. Silverberg observed, “One of them would let you say only cheerful things about science. Another would only let you say downbeat things about science. And the others wouldn’t let you say anything at all.”

  The fifties was a festival—historians are yet to uncover its riches but they will—but it is important to note that in the festival’s wake was left (carnival people know exactly what I mean) an empty landscape, much litter, a few lives not undamaged, a lot of bills not paid and heavy recriminations for those who had tried their luck at the wheel or with the fat lady or had carried their convictions too high for the dazzling night. The editors who lasted out the decade, Gold and Campbell, had become locked into parodies of their original editorial personas (paranoia and psionics) and Anthony Boucher had departed. Campbell pitched the tents of transcendence but by 1959 only the freak show seemed to draw his attention; Gold’s shell game was rigorous but he had turned into a simple cheat. Cynical contributors knew by 1957 that they could sell Gold by toying deliberately with his agoraphobia and contributors equally cynical (there was some overlap) knew that the way into ASF was to make John Campbell himself the hero of a narrative. Meanwhile, F & SF had started a sexed-up companion, Venture (Kornbluth’s last great story, “Two Dooms,” was published there as was Walter Miller’s strong “Vengeance for Nikolai,” but the magazine nonetheless folded quickly), magazines were expiring in clumps and Philip Klass and A. J. Budrys had decided that the universities or the editorial desk were steadier and less humiliating than attempting to do serious work for editors who did not want it or readers who could not tell the difference. Many writers plain broke down; others were incapable of selling in a rapidly diminished market and were driven out. The fifties ended dismally for most science fiction writers. There is no other way to put this.

  Still the work remains and is beginning to be looked over again. In the extreme long run13 it will probably be ascertained that science fiction became both an art and contributed most of its best examples during the decade. The quality of even the top 20 percent was very high, higher than it had been before, higher than it is now.

  What do not remain are the writers.

  Very few of the major figures of the decade can be said to have had significant careers after 1960, and the few that have, significantly, stopped writing for quite a while. Pohl and Budrys became editors and only began to write science fiction in quantity again in the seventies, Alfred Bester became an editor at Holiday and was flat out from 1962 to 1975. Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon were little heard from in the sixties; Gordon Dickson and Poul Anderson carried on but Dickson had only begun to achieve prominence at the very end of the decade (Dorsai! in 1959 was his first noncollaborative novel), and Anderson, a persistent, stubborn professional, must be commended as the sole exception to prove the rule.

  The decade itself burned out these writers, one might speculate. On the other hand—to be judicious—decades burn writers out simply by being decades; the working span of a creative literary career seems for most of us to be around ten years. One does not want to make the sociologist’s error of retrospectively constructing a system that simply was not perceived at the time. There are, as has been pointed out, no literary movements, merely a bunch of writers sometimes hanging out together and trying to do their work.

  And yet—ambivalence is the currency here—science fiction writers and editors are an incestuous bunch. Historically this is a close field. In this paradigm individual assent to circumstance was multiplied.

  So let us not idealize. It offered much but was a bad time. Golden ages, all of them, look like brass from the inside; only the survivors call them golden and then because retrospective falsification is not only the sociologist’s but the human condition. It was a hard time. It was a hard time, folks: good work got rejected, careers got broken, writers lost their way, marriages lost their way, editors lost their way, the country lost its way. The fifties set us up for disaster; by the end almost any breath of energy would have felt good even if it was to lead us to the fire. For my children the fifties are the Fonz and Grease, a loveable time; to me they are Francis E. Walters and McCarthy, the Rosenbergs and Jenner, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Richard M. Nixon. Still, Presley blew them open and Bester wrote like the divine. It is a mystery.

  1979/1980: New Jersey

  Ah Tempora! Ah Portions! Ah Mores! Ah Outlines!

  TYPICALLY—SINCE THE LATE NINETEEN-FIFTIES when book publishers began to dominate the science fiction market—the science fiction novel has been written on portion and outline. The writer produces the first two or three chapters and a fairly detailed outline of the remainder of a novel (established writers may get away with less than that) and either directly or through an agent offers the material around. If it is sold, the writer gets a contract giving him the first half of the advance on signature of the contract, the remainder on delivery of the completed manuscript. (Some publishers cut the amount into thirds, the last due on publication, and others delay delivery payment until publication, but these are the exceptions and most professionals do not have to stand for it.)

  One can theorize that this system is the single important factor underlying the science fiction of the last decades and may explain why almost all science fiction novels fail on a literary, artistic, or structural level (if not all three).

  Consider the writer. Consider his condition. He has produced, perhaps, ten thousand words on the basis of which he has been paid half the total amount due. Maybe he is modestly famous or knows the editor well; call it four thousand words on paper. These words were typed months or even years before the contract. He is now faced with the necessity to write in effect an entire book for half an advance (one tends to consider spent the signature advance upon its receipt—never existed). He has not thought of his book in months or years; it is already detached; he has only the vaguest recollection of characters, incident, and plot and yet—ah
, here it is—the book is due in not more than six months and nothing to be done but to write it for exactly half the money that the publisher knows it to be worth. The alternative is to return the advance (unthinkable) or simply not deliver and wait out the publisher, but although respectable careers in this field have been built upon nondelivery, there are only a few available at any given time and even these have a cutoff point. Publishers have a stuffy tendency to go to court. Sooner or later even the weariest of us, the most venal or duplicitous must either write or get a job. (Well, one could farm out the manuscript to a struggling or unknown writer to ghost it under one’s name for the delivery money and it’s been done. But usually you need the money yourself and there is always the problem of exposure, that is if the delivery is at all publishable. There have been horrifying examples of the opposite.)

  Here is the writer. He is thirty-two or twenty-seven or perhaps forty-six years old; his being groans with resentment, his skull is drained of last year’s ideas. He hates the bastards for exploiting him and well he should because they are and do. Here too is the portion and outline. Particularly the outline.

  It is, as such things usually are, chock-a-block with incident, color, character, motivation, conflict, metaphor, pizzazz, and fire. Give them anything may be the trade secret, but promise them a partridge in a pear tree. By the twelfth day of Christmas. In fact, promise it by the tenth. What will the stupid bastards remember by the time the chips are down and the advance is paid?

  Here as well are the opening chapters. Carefully, patiently worked out they glint with promise, tumble with plot, glow with the dark and richly hued colors of invention. The time machine has jeweled dials, it has never before run so smoothly: automatic levers, brakes, and protectors to guide against temporal paradox. The protagonist’s lady friend is blonde and promising, but in her quieter moods the stranger aspects of her history emerge. The first scene between them reeks with implication and then there is that underground working to create the forces of paradox and brooding over this a somber, rigorous God . . .

  God, the writer says. Sometimes he drinks. Often he proceeds to write. Sometimes he continues to write. Every now and then he simply writes and writes to get the thing over with; like Mark Twain’s laziest preacher in the world who gave such long sermons because he got started and was too lazy to stop, it is often easier simply to get through the whole thing. Drop the blonde by the side, jettison her for good in Chapter 8, make the temporal paradox underground a figment of the protagonist’s paranoia by Chapter 12. Move those levers, spin those dials, get the damned thing back to 2214 and write the final confrontation. But get it out of the house. It is forty-five thousand words, not the contracted sixty thousand, but with all the dialogue and wide margins who the hell will know the difference? Anyway, the word from the agent is that the commissioning editor, the gullible fool, was thrown out three months ago and his contract novels are now going directly to the copy editor, who will place The Time Wizards of Lucidar between a gothic and historical. She knows nothing about science fiction; why the hell should she? No one in the house except for the commissioning editor knew anything about science fiction and he’s been fired, and replacements are being screened ever so carefully. Meanwhile, Noble Paperbacks is overinventoried with novels owed out on contract all over so why worry about it? Next year they’ll get an editor.

  It is possible by employing this fantasy to explain every defect in every science fiction novel published since, say, 1958 (when the magazine market collapsed and the magazines, through their somewhat more knowledgeable and rigorous editors, were the cutting edge of science fiction)—every truncated plot, rushed conclusion, unpredictable denouement, scientific error, sterile love scene, failed resolution. It is possible to understand all of it and to suggest that the few good novels of this era were not written on portion and outline, but this is a fantasy and may be disregarded. And by most of the readers (leave us not mention the writers) it certainly is.

  * * *

  Footnote to a fantasy: most of the important novels of the fifties originally appeared in the magazines whose editors commissioned them (like Space Merchants or Demolished Man) or worked them over pretty carefully (like Dorsai!). Most of science fiction’s few acknowledged masterpieces in the novel appeared in the early to middle years of that decade. But then the distributors collapsed and so did plenty of magazine editors.

  1980: New Jersey

  Science Fiction and the Academy: Some Notes

  ACCORDING TO LATE STATISTICS COMPILED BY the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), over a thousand colleges, junior colleges, and universities throughout the land have courses devoted solely to science fiction. This is twice the number extant in the mid-seventies, almost ten times that of a decade ago and, when one considers that in 1960 there were perhaps two such courses in the United States (one of them taught at City College in New York on an adjunct basis by Sam Moskowitz), imposing. Part of this growth has to do with simple consumer economics: science fiction is something that they’re reading, let’s register them and grant credit to keep up the enrollment. (Most college catalogues are testimony to this philosophy of desperation.) Part has to do with the agonizingly slow but continuing legitimization of the field: some science fiction writers have broken through to critical recognition in other fields, and Leslie Fiedler did none of us any harm by declaring in the early seventies that he had always loved Phil Farmer (and now admired Norman Spinrad), but could not admit this until he became, at last, a tenured Distinguished Professor.

  All of this is supposed to be good for science fiction, if not for science fiction writers, who are, with occasional exceptions, unable to teach courses for credit in their own field, made self-conscious by textual analyses and often photocopied and distributed without their knowledge or permission. The statement of the late sixties has already passed into the liturgy of the field (and has been claimed by a few): “It’s time to get science fiction out of the academy and back in the gutter where it belongs.” Analyzed out of existence, drained of mystery, codified to the final decree, science fiction, some of its writers fear, is on the way to becoming the Henry James or George Eliot of the twenty-first century.

  Still, the academicization of the field, if only marginally helpful to the writers (and the students), can hardly be portrayed as an evil: it does not seem to have done much damage. The questions are a little more basic than those above but by their definition cannot be raised at the yearly conferences of the SFRA, the association of science-fiction—teaching college academics (two of which I have attended with great glee). They can, however, be raised here, at least a couple of them.

  The pervasive question is whether the field is worth teaching, whether there is sufficient text and insight to support a full-term college-level course. Oddly, I heard this point raised not by a crusty Chaucer scholar, Dean of Student Affairs or member of the department of antiquities (in many places in many universities the academicization of “popular culture” is regarded as loathsome) but by one of the most experienced and sophisticated editors in the field, a credit to the genre to say nothing of a certified member of First Fandom. “What the hell is it?” he said, “a couple of lectures on the historical stuff, Wells and Verne and Chaucer and that crap which doesn’t apply, has nothing to do with American science fiction and then the thirties and Heinlein and Campbell and when it got dirty in the sixties, but really, there just isn’t that much to it. A few ideas, a few basic treatments and all of the variations; it’s just a bunch of crap. Crap, crap,” the editor mused and finished his whiskey sour and went onto other matters more pressing, although I cannot recall which.

  A few writers, a few ideas, the same old variations? Not exactly, but the point is not superficial (nor is this editor a superficial man); is there enough about science fiction as distinguished from literature itself to justify it as a separate course unit, a heady three credits toward a baccalaureate? To the editor’s point of view it would be as if a Bachelor of Music accepted
in partial fulfillment a three-credit course on Khachaturian or the viole da gamba. Isn’t it part of the continuing isolation of science fiction, another aspect of literary ghettoization, to render it a separate course within a Department of English (or Sociology) as something discrete, special, impenetrable? Why can’t it simply be taught—for example, the works of Heinlein, Kuttner, Ballard, Kornbluth, Le Guin, Silverberg—as part of contemporary American literature?

  Well, for once it might throw a lot of currently employed nontenured personnel out of work and reduce tuition input into the English Department. That is not a contemptible consideration. Then too, my perception at the SFWA conferences was, appositely, that instructors of science fiction were regarded by their academic colleagues almost exactly as editors of science fiction (even unto this day) are regarded by senior trade editors in the publishing houses. With few exceptions, the only way a science fiction editor can have a major editorial career14 is to get out of science fiction and into something else (writers too). Anything will do for the shift. Science fiction academics, already functioning at the margins of their profession, will do anything to consolidate their position, and although a few might be able to move crosswise most will use their courses and enrollments to build up small power bases . . . which they hope to carry over to other universities should the need arise. There are very practical reasons why the SFRA catalogue a decade hence may double the number of colleges again; by 1990 every college and university in this country and most of the junior colleges as well may have a course in science fiction catalogued as routinely as Intermediate Algebra first . . . and will then seek someone to teach it.