The Engines of the Night Page 9

  “Schwartz” has attracted some attention and is science fiction; it appeared in the first issue of the Judy-Lynn del Rey occasional original anthology, Stellar Science Fiction, and was until late 1980 (when “Our Lady of the Stegosaurs” appeared in Omni, to be followed by several others) Silverberg’s apparent last short story. Schwartz, a 22nd-century physicist with psychological and emotional problems of minor crippling nature, is a science fiction fan; on a star flight he sinks further and further into the fantasies of pulp magazines while the technologized, metallic present recedes; barely able to cope with his environment Schwartz appears to sink toward clinical depression as the rocket approaches its destination and not a moment too soon.

  Silverberg is reiterating the vision of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” but with less ambivalence here, possibly with less moral complexity;20 here is the speculation, quite naked, that science fiction in any era will be a junk medium. The science fiction of the science fiction future will partake then as ever of the elements of fantasy and escape, will serve the reader’s need for the dreamlike, will shift him (with his active collaboration) off reality.

  The very purposes of science fiction in short must render it contemptible in absolute literary (or psychological) terms. Literature deals with life, the story would suggest; science fiction sends us messages of its warpage or denial. Schwartz tumbling through the black holes of the ninth millennium would yet meander through pulp imaginings, dreaming perhaps of brave astronauts making moon landings or inventing holographic television transmitters.

  Like “Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” “Schwartz” is therefore less a work of fiction than of literary criticism. (Silverberg has stated that he thinks it is one of his five best; I think that a reasonably close reader would not take it that high, but it is close and detailed work and both better conceived and adventurous, if not as emotionally affecting, as “Science Fiction Hall of Fame.”) It is, in fact, a castigation of the genre which perpetrated it and in which it appears, and as such it is devastating, a demolition of the genre so compelling that one surmises that if Judy-Lynn del Rey had truly understood what Silverberg was saying she would have refused to publish the story. (This may be too harsh; Silverberg recounts that del Rey was not too happy with it on delivery, calling it something that she had not expected, but it would be more than possible for her to publish it as a politic gesture to a major career without having much use for it at all.) Certainly it is easy to see why it was Silverberg’s last short story for seven years and why after two more relatively unambitious novels (The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace) Silverberg backed away from science fiction for several years. There is no place a serious science fiction writer can go from “Schwartz” other than to consciously cut back on the range and implication of the material. (“Lord Valentine’s Castle” and “Our Lady of the Stegosaurs,” published at the time of this writing, clearly indicate that this is, for now at least, so.)

  “Schwartz” and “Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (along with a few of my own works, particularly Herovit’s World and Galaxies) are close to the final position statement but they have interesting antecedent in Samuel R. Delany’s well-known “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which appeared in Dangerous Visions in 1967 and won a Nebula Award; Delany tosses away in subtext what Silverberg brought up front but the clues are there. In his story the science fiction of today has become the cheap adventure fiction of the century following and is read (among others) by perverts who are sexually aroused by (desexualized) astronauts: science fiction has become tomorrow’s pornography. In one shattering throwaway description of the cheap magazines and paperbacks kept by one of the frelks (astronaut-lovers) in his apartment Delany opened a crack on Silverberg’s devastating insight: Science fiction is junk. Junk by definition misrepresents, lies, cheapens, manipulates—junk may even be said to destroy (but only if one is already open to destruction), but ultimately junk can serve only the debased purposes of those who consume it: they are not seeking enlightenment but comfort. Delany has other, and perhaps less profound, matters on his mind in this story but he foreshadows what Silverberg in the best tradition was able to explore at greater length many years later.

  (Any discussion of this subgenre’s subgenre must fairly make reference as well to the late Edmond Hamilton’s 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction story “The Pro,” in which an old pulp science fiction writer, father of an astronaut, returns from a view of the launching to look at the dead colored magazines and books on his shelf, “lined up like little paper corpses,” and understands that not only in relation to his son’s career but to all of life his work has meant absolutely nothing, has borne no relation to any reality except the brief purposes to which his fiction was conceived and published, now of no value whatsoever. He could not get the curious reporters, looking for a human interest angle, to understand that and he could barely accept it himself but now, as The Pro stares at the collected and forgotten works, the tears come. The story was reprinted only once in The Best of Edmond Hamilton and this paragraph is, to my knowledge, the first printed notice it has ever received. Hamilton died in early 1977 at the age of seventy-three. All of his work is now out of print. Much of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back appear to be based upon a close reading of his work. At least his wife, Leigh Brackett, who herself died only a year later, was commissioned to do the original script for The Empire Strikes Back.)

  What does all of this mean? What is the question? as Gertrude Stein is reputed to have finally said. The Silverberg stories—and Delany’s and Hamilton’s too in a different way—lead to brooding if not awfully complex speculation on the nature of the field to which I have dedicated a large proportion of my working life and most of my best creative energies. And two and a half million words of fiction. The questions are by their nature irresolute but at least they can be posed, no small step for a middle-aged genre writer. Is science fiction doomed indeed to be a second-rate literature? Does its very nature demand that?

  Or is this too bleak? Might the genre be shaped or at least left open to the possibility that it could lead toward an explanation of the better rather than worse possibilities? Might science fiction become, somehow, not a literature of escape but (as Alexei Panshin has suggested) one of education for survival? Might science fiction, in short, somehow be worked around as the Futurians of the late thirties were sure it could be, to save the world?

  Science fiction to save the world is a catechism which predates even the Futurians. The earliest practitioners of the form as defined by Gernsback believed by the early thirties in nothing less. The history of organized fandom according to the concordance of Moskowitz (footnotes by Harry Warner, Jr.) can be understood as the history of a group splitting early between those who loved science fiction for its own sake and those who saw it as a political-social instrument of change; the schism became ugly, and even uglier were some of the effects of the decades on those who believed that it could matter. As late as the nineteen-fifties, most of the field’s best writers—Kornbluth, Clifton, Budrys, Heinlein—and certainly almost all of its important editors, believed that the literature had the power within itself to change society, to genuinely alter institutions and personal lives. (Hubbard’s Dianetics, an invention which emerged wholly from science fiction, was an attempt to codify the personality and therapy in terms which could have been those of Astounding’s engineer-readers; perform the proper rituals and remove the engram, schematize the psyche and quantify the Bad Charge.)

  Most science fiction writers no longer believe this. Some do but have resorted to mystical rather than practical rationalization. Panshin in his nineteen-seventies critical works Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrow and SF in Dimension posits a science fiction which will deliver universe, possibility, and transcendence. Robert Heinlein’s most recent enormous novels use the devices of science fiction as mystical extrapolation. (Stranger in a Strange Land, the first and best of them, found an enormous audience, a few of whom did not interpret Heinlein’s vision
in exactly that way.) There is to this time a strong undercurrent in science fiction toward the use of the genre as a positive, engaging, didactic, useful medium for its readers. Science fiction as self-improvement; a kind of complicated Couéism for the last quarter of the century. Getting better with science fiction; Valentine Smith as another version of Bruce Barton’s Jesus who, whatever else He might have been, was surely one of the boys. And a hell of a salesman.

  But “Schwartz” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” will simply not go away. Once read—and anyone who would consider himself a student of this genre will eventually read them—they render a statement which must be taken into account. Science fiction will always offer easier alternatives. Science fiction will always be slanted, by definition, to taking its readers out of the world. Only weak people, however—pat Freudianism and the great cult psychology movements of the seventies have taught us—want out of the world. Strong people want in. Strong people want to, must, deal with life as it is presented. Science fiction is a literature for the weak, the defenseless, the handicapped, and the scorned. Panacea and pap—I have presented the poles of the argument. I have no conclusion. Here is the ambivalence locked not only into the field but in me (and perhaps, although I hesitate to generalize, in every writer who ever attempted to do a serious body of work in science fiction or even took it seriously enough to start). It would be nice to conclude positively, satisfying a large portion of the readership; it would be satisfying to end negatively if only to carry through the integrity of one’s vision, but I can do neither. I have no answer nor can I even recommend where it may be sought. Science fiction is an ambivalent genre.

  It is an ambivalent genre and I have been, perhaps, its most ambivalent writer. The career and Collected Works, the life itself, have been monument or mausoleum to schism. The field is one thing and yet it may be the other. I am one thing and yet the other. I, the field, may be both but somehow I doubt it. One cannot embrace multitudes; one can barely (and only then if life is lived well) embrace oneself. There is simply no conclusion.

  This genre, this thing, this science fiction, may make us better, it may make us worse. It may make us anything and then again, pace Hamilton, it may make us nothing at all, be entirely useless, a bunch of futuristic or bizarre stories. That’s all folks, take them or leave them as you will, and most of you will leave them. It is everything and nothing, better and worse. It is intolerably—and finally—merely human.

  And that is what drew me toward it. A path not of illumination but of thrall. To become at last what one beholds—and dare not know the difference.

  1979/1980: New Jersey

  I Don’t Want Her You Can Have Her—

  THE FANS WITH THEIR ACRONYMS HAVE THE NAME for it all right: GAFIATE, getting away from it all. In the active form, to gafiate. The reaction is well known. Exhaustion, loathing, and overwhelming futility attack the actifan. Enmeshed in a hardly seamless network of conventions, fanzines, correspondence, feuds, history, and obligation, he feels a poetic faintness. He ceases to respond to letters; he is seen at conventions no more. Feuds and lovers must find other objects. The fan has gafiated. Sometimes he makes an announcement to this effect. More often—gafiation by definition is silence—he allows inferences. He returns to school full time. He gets married out of the field or files for divorce within it. He runs for congress or becomes employed by a distinguished graduate division.

  Sometimes the gafiation is permanent (there are figures who will not even admit their participation in fan activity; will rip up the texts of Warner or Moskowitz undetected in bookstores). Quite often it is not. The fan, after a period of recuperation, degafiates. Once again he is seen at conventions, begins to query contributors for his reborn fanzine. APAs bristle with fresh reminiscence. Of course, in another few months or years the revulsion like malaria may set in once more: once more the pain. There are people whose lives can be defined in terms of successive involvement and flight from organized science fiction.

  The same thing happens to writers and, for that matter, casual readers. The writer will deal with science fiction no more. He cannot write power fantasies for a juvenile audience, he is restricted by the editors, enchained by taboo, he will seek a wider audience and artistic freedom in the mainstream. Suitable announcements are made. The casual reader—for that matter, the heavy reader—has lost a sense of wonder. Eyes glaze, sensibility clouds; science fiction, like the booze in the second act of The Iceman Cometh, no longer has that old kick. He will read real novels about real people. The reader and writer turn their energies to another focus—the reader, usually adolescent, at first gafiation begins to entertain a social life—but they will be back. You can count on it. Unless, of course, they are not. Permanent gafiates appear to be the rule in only one class, those who in early adolescence, for a brief period of time, read great quantities of science fiction in a brief lacuna between childhood and the onset of a purposeful sex drive. (Decades later these people will not even remember reading science fiction in quantity and they will not be lying or self-deluded—science fiction was indeed an extension of a persona that the glands’ development demolished.) All of the others, in one fashion or the other, are heard from again. They can be said to have ungafiated and the terminology and the literature have categorized that syndrome as well.

  This central ambivalence in the science fiction reader and writer—an ambivalence not common among those involved in any other kind of literature although quite familiar (in other areas) to students of abnormal psychology or those involved with the great religious institutions—is perhaps the central fact of the category, the lever to mix a metaphor into any profound understanding of this dark and troubled literature. The ambivalence comes from the conflicting perceptions of the form: Is it a true literature of the future, a forward-looking, transcendent, mind-boggling, mind-stretching form which renders its readers superior to the population, or is it just a bunch of crazy power fantasies and speculations (admittedly some of them better written than others) for the sublimation of powerless adolescents? Is it a literature whose roots are contemptible or exalting? Every one of us has felt strongly in one way and then the other through the course of our involvement and very few of us have managed to resolve the schism. Gafiation is an expression of one perception when pushed to the extreme but gafiation may itself be an act of collaboration . . . one has taken science fiction seriously enough, been moved by it to sufficient degree, to need to put an official imprimatur upon one’s rejection. Surely the millions who have read one or two science fiction stories, have not liked them particularly, and have not looked at science fiction since have not gafiated. They were never in a circumstance from which they could gafiate at all.

  The ambivalence is not only at the center of everyone’s relationship to the form but probably at the center of the genre itself. Almost all of our strong works—and a good many of the weaker ones in the bargain—have derived much of their power from the evident struggles of the writers to fuse elaborate and often bizarre speculation with character and situation which will give the speculation emotional force. “The disparate and technological, the desperate and human,” Samuel R. Delany said many years ago, this is the definition of science fiction. The desperate and the disparate, the technological and the human do not link up easily; however, the fusion can be made—Rogue Moon, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Delany’s own “Aye, and Gomorrah,” to which his remarks were afterword, indicate that it can be done—but the psychic costs for writers and readers are severe. It is, after all, what started out as a crazy literature about aliens and robots, rocket ships and planetary destruction; it was deliberately published in the most debased form and slanted to appeal to a juvenile audience. As the consequence of the decades and of the perversity of its writers and editors, the pain and implication began to be put in . . . but there is a point at which even an excellent writer, a sophisticated reader begins to question the very nature of the material to which he is devoting so much time and thought. Surely
there must be a better occupation for a grown human being than to define the world in deliberately removed form. It is better to deal with the world directly. Have an affair, get a degree in computer science, write a historical novel about events which did occur.

  Spend some time with the kids, sell off the magazine collection.

  Hence, gafiation. But there is nothing approaching a real cure for the seriously afflicted; one may amputate the limb but must henceforth live in apprehension of its loss, limp around. Sometimes it is simply easier to accept one’s condition, go back to it. Up to a point of course. And then at a lower level, satiation is reached once again and one begins to toy with the idea of gafiation, which the second or third time is hardly such a major step. After all, one has already lived through it. . . .

  There is really no solution to any of this; science fiction, as Delany hints, is the literature of irresolution. Its readers and writers will inevitably feel pulled out at some point and some will feel that way always even though few can forsake it utterly. No creators or audience for any branch of popular entertainment love and hate their form as do those involved in science fiction. (There is almost no organized fandom for westerns and mysteries; quality lit fandom is oxymoronic and there are no situation comedy conventions. There are soap opera fan luncheons and comics conventions but they appear to be commerce, not seduction.) No creators or audience hate and love one another as do science fiction people. No creators or audience can be said to hate or love themselves as do—