Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  Compared with these carryings-on, with this escalation of advertising, the behavior of mainstream editors is quite shy and silent. Please compare the blurbs on the jackets of science-fiction books with those that serious publishers put on the jackets of a Saul Bellow or a William Faulkner. This remark seems to be banal, but it isn’t. Although instant coffee or cigarettes of every brand are always praised as the best in the world (we never hear of anything advertised as “second best”), Michelangelo’s frescoes and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are not offered, with the same advertising expenditure, as the best works of art possible. The activities of the publishers of trivial literature make us recognize that this literature is subject to economic laws exclusively and to the exclusion of any other laws of behavior.

  Second: I must remark that a reader of trivial literature behaves just like the consumer of mass products. Surely it does not occur to the producer of brooms, cars, or toilet paper to complain of the absence of correspondence, fraught with outpourings of the soul, that strikes a connection between him and the consumer of his products. Sometimes, however, these consumers happen to write angry letters to the producer to reproach him with the bad quality of the merchandise they bought. This bears a striking similarity to what James Blish describes in The Issue at Hand, and, indeed, this author, more than five million of whose books have been printed, said that he received only some dozens of letters from readers during his whole life as an author. These letters were exclusively fits of temper from people who were hurt in the soft spot of their opinions. It was the quality of the goods that offended them.

  Third: the market of trivial literature knows only one index of quality: the measure of the sales figures of the books. When an “angry young critic” snubbed Asimov’s Nightfall and Other Stories as old hat, Asimov put up the defense that his books, this year and for years previously, had sold excellently and that none of his books had been remaindered. Therefore he took literary merit for the relation of supply and demand, as if he were unaware that there have been world-famous books that have never been printed in large quantities. If we use this yardstick, Dostoevsky is no match for Agatha Christie. There are many fans of science fiction who have never read a novel by Stapledon or Wells in their lives, and with an easy mind I can assert that the silent majority of readers does not even know Stapledon by name. Blish and Knight agree that the public cannot distinguish a good novel from an abominable novel; and this is correct, with the proviso that they are talking about only the readers of the Lower Realm. If this generalization were valid for all readers at all times, we should have to consider the phenomenon of cultural selection in the history of literature as a miracle. For if all or almost all readers are passive and stupid beings, then who was able to collect Cervantes and Homer into the treasure troves of our culture?

  Fourth: there are crass and embarrassing differences between the relations that link the authors of Upper and Lower Realms with publishers. In the Upper Realm it is the author who alone determines the title, length, form, and style of his work, and his right to do so is guaranteed unequivocally by the letter of his contract. In the Lower Realm, the publishers appropriate these rights. We can recognize from paragraphs of the printed contracts of large science-fiction publishing houses like Ace Books that it is the publishers who can, at their own discretion, change titles, length, and even the text of a book without express permission of its author, just as fancy dictates. Naturally, the editors of the Upper Realm also make encroachments. In practice these actions are quite different; they occur before the author signs the contract — i.e., first the editors propose to the author what they want changed, and only after he has agreed is the contract made, and not one syllable says that the original manuscript must be revised. The difference is because in the Upper Realm literary texts are considered in their integrity untouchable and taboo because they are almost sacred art objects. This is an old custom, in the spirit of the historical tradition of Western culture, though the practice of publishing, even in the Upper Realm, is not always so pious and fair as we are told. However, this difference between the two realms is of great importance.

  In the Upper Realm one always strives at least to keep alive the appearance of intact virtue, in the same way as in high society women do not permit themselves to be called “prostitutes” although they indulge in open promiscuity. The “ladies” of the underworld do not have such pretensions, and it is no closely guarded secret that one can buy their favors at the appropriate price. Sad to relate, the authors of science fiction are quite similar in behavior to those “ladies,” and they do not feel the disgrace of making transactions, either, as part of which they willingly hand over their works to the publishers, who are allowed to revise the texts at will. Thus James Blish[4] tells us that his A Case of Conscience is only the length it is because his publisher at the time, owing to certain technical circumstances, could not produce a work of greater length! Just imagine if we read in the memoirs of Hermann Hesse that his Steppenwolf was only so long because his publishers… Such a disclosure would cause a shout of wrath from literary circles, but Blish’s words do not affect either him or any other author or critic because in the Lower Realm the station of a slave is taken for granted. Publishers are within their rights when changing the title, length, and style of science-fiction books as these encroachments are determined by economic considerations: they act like people who must find a purchaser for their goods, and they have a firm conviction that they work hand in glove with the author, like project leaders and advertising managers for Ford. Naturally, nobody thinks it strange that the project leader for a new model does not have the right to think up a name for it.

  However, these particular differences should not make us wonder. American science fiction descends from the pulps; English science fiction had as its father, not Hugo Gernsback, about whom nobody outside of U.S. science fiction knows a thing, but H. G. Wells. What else? American science fiction worked itself up from the gutter of literature (though it could not fly into the sky); English science fiction has Americanized itself partly for commercial reasons, and partly has stepped into Wells’s shoes, something that should not be taken as praiseworthy. The “classical” successor to Wells, John Wyndham, worked like a huckster, seeking to supplement the work of the master and teacher by filling what was, in his eyes, a gap. But even as anyone who paints like Van Gogh today cannot become a Van Gogh, so Wyndham did not add anything major to Wells’s work. Wells worked according to the known principle of escalation, so that in The War of the Worlds, earth is attacked only by the Martians; but in Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, the author does not think it sufficient to let all mankind go blind — he foists poisonous plants upon it; but because those plants do not seem dangerous enough, he adds the gift of active motion as spice.

  After all, there are two distinct traditions in science fiction: the English, with the better manners and customs of the Upper Realm, and the American, which has lived from its beginnings in the slums of the Lower Realm, this slave market, which has no overabundance of courtly manners. Also, the language of English science fiction has always been more cultivated.

  4

  Seen in isolation, a number of the traits of trivial literature, as described above, are quite unimportant. However, when added up, they form an ordered structure of the environment in which science fiction is born and gains a scanty living. These traits are clues, pointing out how in different ways the status of a work of literature is determined; it depends upon whether it is born in the Upper or Lower Realm.

  Thus science-fiction works belong to the Lower Realm — to trivial literature. Thus sociocultural analysis finally solves the problem. Thus words said about it are wasted; the trial can be closed with a sigh of relief.

  But this is not so. Without a doubt there is a difference between science fiction and all the neighboring, often closely related, types of trivial literature. It is a whore, but a quite bashful one at that; moreover, a whore with an angel face. It prostitutes i
tself, but, like Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova, with discomfort, disgust, and contrary to its dreams and hopes.

  True, science fiction is often a liar. It wants to be taken for something else, something different from what is really is. It lives in perpetual self-deception. It repeats its attempts to disguise itself. Has it got the shadow of a right to do so?

  Many famous science-fiction authors are trying to pass for something better than their fellow writers — the authors of such trivial literature as crime novels or Westerns. These pretensions are often spoken out loud. Moreover, in the prefaces to their books, embarrassing praise is given to the authors by the authors themselves. For instance, Heinlein often emphasized that science fiction (that is, his own science fiction) was not only equal to, but also far better than mainstream literature, because writing science fiction is more difficult. Such pretensions cannot be found in the rest of the field of trivial literature.

  This does not mean that there is no standard of quality for crime novels. Here, too, we distinguish bad, boring novels and original, fascinating ones. We can speak of a first-rate crime novel — but it does not occur to anybody to consider such a hit as equal to the masterpieces of literature. In its own class, in the Lower Realm, it may be a real diamond. When in fact a book does cross the borders of the genre, it is no longer called a crime novel, just as with a novel by Dostoevsky.

  The best science-fiction novels want to smuggle themselves into the Upper Realm — but in 99.9 percent of cases, they do not succeed. The best authors behave like schizophrenics; they want to — and at the same time they do not want to — belong to the Realm of Science Fiction. They care a lot about the prizes given by the science-fiction ghetto. At the same time, they want their books to be published by those publishing houses that do not publish science fiction (so that one cannot see from the book jackets that their books are science-fiction books). On the other hand, they feel tied to fandom, write for fanzines, answer the questions of their interviewers, and take part in science-fiction conventions. On the other hand, publicly, they try to stress that they “do not really” write science fiction; they would write “better and more intellectual books” if only they did not have to bear so much pressure from the publishers and science-fiction magazines; they are thinking of moving into mainstream literature (Aldiss, Ballard, and several others).

  Do they have any objective reasons for surrendering to frustration and feelings of oppression in the science-fiction ghetto? Crime novels are another, an open-and-shut, case. Naturally, a crime novel reports on murders, detectives, corpses, and trials; Westerns, on stalwart cowboys and insidious Indians. However, if we may believe its claims, a science-fiction book belongs at the top of world literature! For it reports on mankind’s destiny, on the meaning of life in the cosmos, on the rise and fall of thousand-year-old civilizations: it brings forth a deluge of answers for the key questions of every reasoning being.

  There is only one snag: in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it fulfills its task with stupidity. It always promises too much, and it almost never keeps its word.

  For this reason, science fiction is such a remarkable phenomenon. It comes from a whorehouse but it wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored. From the time it was born, science fiction has been raised by narrow-minded slaveholders. Thomas Mann was allowed to work on one novel for fourteen years; John Brunner complains that there was a time when he had to write eight novels a year in order to stay alive comfortably. From shame, science fiction tries to keep some sides of this situation a well-guarded secret. (Often we hear from science-fiction authors how much freedom they enjoy in their work.)

  Science fiction is subject to the rigid economic laws of supply and demand. It has not completely adapted itself to the “editor’s milieu,” meaning that there are recipes on how to write a science-fiction work that appeals to a certain editor and gains his appreciation (for instance, the late John W. Campbell, Jr., was an authoritative man who published only a certain easily definable kind of science fiction, and some authors knew how to foresee his demands). In Geis’s Science Fiction Review, Perry A. Chapdelaine gives us a detailed account of how he was carefully briefed by well-known science-fiction authors when he wrote his first novel. Special care was taken to include those qualities that maximize sales; no mention was made of the immanent quality of the work itself. Often the same is the case in the Upper Realm — but only for beginners. However, science-fiction authors remain minors in the eyes of their publishers — all their lives. Such circumstances breed frustration and compensatory behavior. Indeed, the same sort of thing abounds in the science-fiction ghetto. All these compensatory phenomena, taken together, clearly have the character of mimicry.

  (a)

  In the science-fiction ghetto there is no lack of makeshift and ersatz institutions which exist side by side with those of the Upper Realm. The Upper Realm has the Nobel Prize and other world-famous literary awards. The science-fiction ghetto has the Hugo and Nebula awards; and American science fiction poses (still) as “world” science fiction, as can be seen from anthology titles such as The World’s Best S/F.

  (b)

  The Upper Realm has academic and other highbrow literary journals, containing theoretical and hermeneutical articles. Science fiction also has its highbrow fanzines (Riverside Quarterly from Canada, Science Fiction Commentary from Australia, and Quarber Merkur from Austria). These are parallel, although not analogous phenomena. The highbrow periodicals of the Upper Realm command real authority in cultural life. The most famous critics and theoreticians of the mainstream are all known to the cognoscenti and to almost all intelligent readers, at least by name (e.g., Sartre; Leslie Fiedler). Yet the names of the best science-fiction critics are not known to one soul outside the inner circle of fandom, and the silent majority of science-fiction readers does not know of the existence of the highbrow magazines. Even if they did know of them, they would not care for the evaluations of the cognoscenti — i.e., they are not influenced by these fanzines when choosing the new science-fiction books they are going to buy.

  The structure of the flow of information is quite different in the Upper Realm than in the Lower Realm. In the Upper Realm the highbrow periodicals form the peak of a pyramid whose base is mass culture. The popular critics of the dailies need not agree with the judgments of the initiated highbrow experts, but if one of them opposes a man like Sartre, he knows quite well that he is fighting a world-wide authority. Nothing of this sort in science fiction. Its pyramid is hidden deep in the fan underground, the best fanzines have only insignificant circulations, and they cannot count on financial help from social or cultural institutions. (There are rare exceptions, such as New Worlds, which at one time received essential aid from certain British cultural institutions, but this is no longer the case in the United States.)

  (c)

  Science-fiction conventions are intended to form a kind of match for the meetings of the PEN Club and other similar gatherings. This also involves mimicry, because PEN meetings do not have in the slightest the character of a party that is so characteristic of science-fiction conventions. At conventions, theoretical reflections are nothing but seasoning; at PEN meetings, however, as well as at similar conferences of professional writers, they are the main course.

  I must stress that no esoteric highbrow magazine of the Upper Realm has any direct influence on the policies of publishers. These magazines possess only a purely moral authority, founded on tradition. They do not try to wage open warfare upon the typical phenomena of mass culture today (e.g., normally they hide all data about one-day best sellers) and their activity becomes visible only in the long run, as all of the institutions in the structure feed the slow process of the Upper Realm. They should be the (often quite powerless) conscience and memory of world culture, its highest tribunal, which is at the same time an unbiased witness and judge. Often this tribunal loses a single skirmish but wins the great, epic wars — just the way Great Brit
ain did. It cannot give a guarantee of today’s fame to a great, misjudged poet, but it provides a memory, helping the next generation sometimes to dig up treasures that are almost lost. In short: these tribunals are not subject to the economic rules of the market, and because of this they are able to defend the cultural heritage against the chaotic onslaught of mass culture.

  Nothing like that can be seen in the Lower Realm. Science fiction has no independent periodicals that supervise critically the whole production and form a similar fraction of the bulk of publications in the field, as in the case in the Upper Realm (measured by the yardstick of the circulation of books and especially of literary periodicals). The evidence of the best and best-known science-fiction authors is suppressed when it is contrary to the interests of the publishers — a fact that Knight reports on. The highbrow fanzines are known exclusively to a very small circle of initiated readers, and their influence on publishers’ policies is nil. These amateur magazines often publish analyses and reflections that are equal in quality to the best of what is published in the Upper Realm. But this does not change the fact that no one listens to the voices of the critics. This important fact shows clearly that it is not the immanent quality of a statement that determines its scope of action, but this radius is contingent on the broader structure of the whole network of information with which the medium that published this statement is connected.[5]It is a typical science-fiction custom that critiques are not produced independently, but are written by either the authors or the editors of anthologies, who evaluate each other’s works. This state of affairs only helps to cloud the line of demarcation between apologetics (a public-relations affair) and objective criticism.