Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition)

by David G. Hartwell

  Discovering sex (or competitive sports or evangelical Christianity or demon rum) is not always a total diversion, though. You can, of course, read with one hand. And there are further activities open to the fan in the omnivorous stage: Hundreds, often thousands, of fans gather at conventions every weekend throughout Western civilization (the World Science Fiction Convention—generically called the “Worldcon”—was in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1995; the 1999 Worldcon may be in Australia, for the third time in thirty years) to act strangely together. To a teenage omnivore, such a weekend of license to be maladjusted in the company of and in harmony with the covertly alienated of all ages can be golden. No one much notices how you dress or act as long as you do not injure yourself or others.

  Swords and capes (ah! Romance!) are particularly favored among the fat and pimply population, male and female. One wag counted seventy-two Princess Leias at the World SF Convention of 1978 in Phoenix! Star Trek costumes still abound in the mid-nineties. My favorite moment at the Worldcon in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1994 was seeing the fully costumed Klingon Butt Massage team enter a late-night party. Or you can hang out in your everyday slacks and jacket or torn jeans and T-shirt with like minds.

  And right there among the crowd (at least at the Worldcon—the traditional gathering of the cliques) are all the big-name professionals, from Brian Aldiss and Poul Anderson to Timothy Zahn and David Zindell, by tradition and in fact approachable for conversation and frivolity. Although this ideal is seldom approached at large SF conventions any longer—two decades of SF media cons, at which the stars are the pros and the fans are merely consumers, have split the psyche of the whole community. My own opinion is that the growth of the consumer/producer split in the SF community has been generally a bad thing for fandom and a good thing for commerce. My advice: Seek out smaller conventions and avoid the large Northeast and West Coast ones at first. Just being there at a small con makes you a potentially permanent member of the SF family.

  It’s really a big clique, you see—or rather a band of several cliques. Just like the ones you are cut out of in the local junior high or whatever, only now you are automatically a member of one until you do something beyond the pale. You might be so shy as to be tongue-tied for your first ten conventions; still, when I was younger I could walk into a room party, sit on the floor and listen to Isaac Asimov and Anne McCaffrey sing Gilbert and Sullivan—and join in. And go home and tell my friends that I spent time with Asimov last weekend. You can still find similar events today. Just so you don’t feel lonely in the arid stretches between conventions you can afford to attend, there are approximately 1,000 fan magazines produced by individuals and written by themselves and/or other fans to keep you in communication with the SF world day to day. And there is the Internet.

  Today, no matter how isolated or young and ignorant or just plain shy you are, if you have access to a computer and a modem, you can visit the SF forums on the commercial services such as CompuServe, GEnie, or America Online, or the “newsgroups” of the Internet, or surf the World Wide Web, or lurk like an invisible shade watching while Mike Resnick and George Alec Effinger chat online, until you feel like joining in the SF world.

  As you might have gathered, the great family aspect of SF is, in the long run, only for the most ardent—maybe 10,000 active fans in the U.S. at any time, and a few thousand more in Europe, Japan, Australia. Most often, fans mature socially enough to adjust to their home environment and just read the stuff off and on, attending, perhaps, a Worldcon every year or two to keep contact with a few friends. This is the chronic stage of addiction, following the active omnivore phase. And this stage can last for life.

  If you grew up in isolation from movies, TV, and comics and have never read a work of science fiction (or if you tried one once, and found it dumb, incomprehensible, or both), you might ask, at this point, why the fuss? The answer is that even if you have kept yourself in pristine separation from the material, you are interacting daily with people who have progressed to at least a stage-one involvement in science fiction and who have altered your environment because of it.

  Science fiction as written and published during the last twenty years is so diverse in every aspect that no reader except at the height of the omnivorous stage can expect to be attracted to all of it. And more science fiction has been published in the 1980s and 1990s than ever before: fifty or sixty new paperbacks every month, several magazines, even a number of hardbounds—too much even for the most dedicated omnivore to read. The quality of the individual book or story varies from advanced literary craftsmanship to hack trash, from precise and intellectual visions of the future to ignorant swordsmen hacking their way through to beautiful damsels (less than one-quarter clad) across an absurd environment. There are enough varieties of science fiction and fantasy to confuse anybody.

  If you look at a wide spectrum of covers in your local SF paperback section, you begin to notice a lot of categories of science fiction. How do the advanced omnivores and chronics select what to read? By this very process: As in any other kind of book, you can tell the importance of the author of a science fiction book by the size of the author’s name on the cover. Another reliable indicator of commercial importance, or at least popularity, is how many copies of an individual title by an author the store has and how many (and how many inches) of the author’s titles are on the shelf. Martin H. Greenberg, the prolific anthologist, has kept records of such measurements (inches of shelf space) in one store for years, and swears by this as a gauge of growth and decline in popularity.

  But popularity and importance aside, how do you identify whether this is the kind of SF you are looking for? By the complex symbology of the cover. Not always, of course, because the paperback industry (never mind hardcover publishers; hardcovers tend to look bland, from attempts to disguise the genre, whenever they don’t look like big paperbacks) is guilty of lack of confidence, or ignorance, leading to mispackaging fairly regularly—but in the huge majority of cases, science fiction is quite precisely marketed and packaged.

  The images on science fiction covers range from futuristic mechanical devices (which connote a story heavily into SF ideas, or perhaps just science fictional clichés) to covers with recognizable computer art, perhaps a human body part, and a dark background (which connotes cyberpunk, about which more later), to covers featuring humans against a futuristic setting, with or without machines (which connote adventure SF) to covers with humans carrying swords or other anachronistic weapons (which connote fantasy or fantastic adventure against a cardboard or clichéd SF background) to hypermuscled males carrying big swords and adorned with clinging hyperzaftig females, both scant-clad against a threateningly monstrous background (which connote sword-&-sorcery or heroic-fantasy adventures, with perhaps some SF elements) to covers representing several varieties of pure fantasy (from rich romantic flowery quests to freaky supernatural horror). Every SF omnivore has sampled all the varieties of SF, from Lovecraftian supernatural horror to the swashbuckling adventure tales of Poul Anderson to the technical and literary conundrums of Samuel R. Delany. Chronic readers usually center their interests in one limited area and read everything packaged to their taste.

  The net effect is that there is a rather large number of SF audiences with focused interests, all of which interlock and overlap to form the inchoate SF reading audience. Most individual books reach their targeted audience and prosper from overlap into other related audiences. Occasionally, an SF work satisfies several of these overlapping audiences at once (for example, Dune by Frank Herbert, Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, or Neuromancer by William Gibson) and reaches what the publishing industry calls the mass audience (truly humongous numbers of readers)—and then extends for a decade or more in sales into the audience that consists of normal people who decide to try the stuff and have heard three or four big names (like Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which paid most of the light bills in the period 1961 to 1981 for its publisher and allowed Mr. and Mrs. Heinlein to visi
t opera festivals in Europe on whim—and is still in print today).

  The situation is exceedingly complex. Some say that the whole SF audience (the market) is composed of teenagers, for all practical purposes, and turns over almost completely every three to five years. This theory, the omnivore theory, eliminates all chronic readers (the actual majority) from consideration. It has the virtue of practicality from the publishing point of view, though it means you can recycle individual books endlessly and can publish practically anything, no matter how crippled, and reach a basic, dependable, supposedly profitable (though small) audience.

  The most successful variant on this in recent decades is the Star Trek novel series (which indeed reaches a very large audience, nearly every title a national bestseller), but it is also the unspoken theory behind the Dragonlance books, the Star Wars novels, and many other such series. One does not seek out the one great Star Trek novel, as one does not search for the one great Pontiac or can of Snow’s Clam Chowder. One buys, one consumes.

  The combined, or omnivore/chronic theory, which is the unarticulated basis behind most SF publishing, would sound something like a classier version of the omnivore theory—keep the good books in print for omnivores who pass into the chronic state and for the non-SF reader who wishes to sample the field through books or authors he has heard of, and scatter the rest of your publishing program among the three spectra (fantasy/science fantasy/science fiction) in hopes of discovering chronic sellers—works that everyone who reads SF must sooner or later hear about and read. At its best, this philosophy (if we may so dignify a marketing strategy) leads to the publishing of soaring works of the speculative imagination—but mostly it leads to carefully marketed crap.

  But even that is okay. Both omnivores and chronics are patient and have long memories. They are willing to wade through a fair amount of swamp to find islands of rationality and the real thing—wonderful SF.

  It’s a kind of quixotic quest, you see, admirable in its way. The SF reader is willing to keep trying, reading through rather large numbers of half-cooked ideas, brutal clichés, and cardboard characters and settings in search of the truly original and exciting and good. How many of us outside the SF field could be so determined? The SF reader has fun along the way that is not often visible to outsiders.

  The SF reader sneers at fake SF, artificially produced film tie-in novels and stories, most SF films, most TV SF. This he calls sci-fi (or “skiffy”)—junk no right-thinking omnivore or chronic should read, watch, or support. But with beatific inconsistency he will pursue his own quest—through endless hours of films, cable specials, and TV reruns, Space: 1999, The Twilight Zone, Battlestar Galactica, Mork and Mindy, My Favorite Martian, and some truly horrendous paperbacks and magazines—in search of something as good as he remembers finding during his initial omnivore excitement. It is not only the media fans who support the Sci-Fi Channel. SF readers do too. This quest through the rubble is not without its rewards.

  Consider: The aforementioned conventions are broken down into discrete areas of programming, and many conventions have a general or even quite limited theme. Aside from the World Science Fiction Convention, which is a general gathering of the clans, there is a World Fantasy Convention, numerous Star Trek conventions, a pulp-magazine convention (Pulpcon), Darkovercon (devoted to the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley), an SF film convention, numerous “relaxacons” (at which there is no programming—chronics and omnivores gather to party with like minds for a weekend), and literally dozens of localized conventions, ranging from hundreds to thousands of attendees: Armadillocon (Austin); Boskone (Boston); Lunacon (New York City); Westercon (West Coast); Ad Astra (Toronto); Philcon (Philadelphia); Balticon (Baltimore); Disclave (Washington, D.C.). The list is extensive, each with a guest of honor, films, panels, speeches, a roomful of booksellers, an art show, and many special events (often including a masquerade, a gaming room, and a computer room) and parties (pretty dependably twenty-four hours a day). Besides general saturnalia, these conventions build audiences for name authors (guests of honor and other featured guests) and reflect audience fascination with discrete kinds of SF.

  The World Science Fiction Convention, a six-day bash, has nearly five twenty-four-hour days of programming. Conadian (Worldcon ’94), named patriotically for its northern setting in Winnipeg, had attendees who came from Japan to present the annual Japanese party after the awards, and a healthy European contingent, including Russian fans selling souvenirs to raise hard cash; feminists and those interested in women writers came for the several Women in Science Fiction events; film fans came for the twenty-four-hour-a-day film programs (a bargain); Georgette Heyer fans came for the Regency Dress Dance (yes, at a science fiction convention); some came to see and hear their favorite big-name authors—fantasy readers to see Guy Gavriel Kay and L. Sprague de Camp, Darkover fans to see Marion Zimmer Bradley, Amber fans to see Roger Zelazny; L-5 fans came to proselytize for space industrial colonies.

  Of the almost five thousand attendees, a variety of audiences were represented, often recognizable from the individual package. Aside from the general run of jeaned teenagers and suited publishing types, the Star Trek fans often wore costumes from the show (Klingons were definitely in in 1994); the Regency fans dressed Regency; the heroic fantasy fans sported swords and capes; the medieval fans and Society for Creative Anachronism members dressed in a variety of medieval costumes; Spider Robinson, Canadian immigrant, played his guitar and sang well in the main corridor to a crowd of enthusiastic fans for hours at night. These people filled more than four hotels. Sponsoring similar events, Intersection, the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, had about six thousand attendees in more than ten hotels. Each reader discovers his or her special fun at conventions.

  Omnivores tend to form preferences early on in their reading spree, and chronics are usually fixed for life. This is a quick rundown of the main possibilities an omnivore might fix on: classic fantasy (ghost stories, legends, tales); supernatural horror (two categories: classic—from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen to Stephen King and Rosemary’s Baby; and Lovecraftian, the school of H. P. Lovecraft and his followers); Tolkienesque fantasy (in the manner of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—carefully constructed fantasy worlds as the setting for a heroic quest, now typified by Robert Jordan’s works); heroic fantasy (the descendants of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, barely repressed sex fantasy in which a muscular, macho, sword-bearing male overcomes monsters, magicians, racial inferiors, and effete courtiers by cleverness and brute force, then services every willing woman in sight—and they are all willing); Burroughsian science fantasy (adventure on another planet or thinly rationalized SF setting in which fantasy and anachronism—sword fighting among the stars—are essentials); space opera (the Western genre paradigm of heroic action on the frontier, with clear good guys versus bad guys action, but set in space and using the traditional trappings of SF); hard science fiction (the SF idea is the center of attention, usually involving chemistry or physics or astronomy); soft science fiction (two alternate types: one in which the character is more important than the SF idea; the other focusing on any science other than physics or chemistry); experimental science fiction (stylistically, that is); fine-writing science fiction (may include a work from any of the above categories, hard though that may be to accept); single author (reads all published stories of H. P. Lovecraft, his nonfiction, the five volumes of collected letters, the volumes of posthumous collaborations, all pastiches, and so on—archetypal fan behavior). You can begin to see the enormous variety available.

  The most significant development of the last decade for the future of SF is that by about the mid-sixties, enough “fine writing” had been done in the SF field so that a chronic might fixate on that aspect of SF without running out of reading matter before running out of patience. There has always been excellent writing in the SF field, but now there is an actual audience looking for it—before the sixties,
literate prose was fine when it was found, but was generally irrelevant to the SF omnivores and most chronics.

  The increased volume of the fine-writing category has had its effect on outsiders’ evaluation of the medium. In the seventies, the academic appraisal of SF moved from “It’s trash” to “It’s interesting trash” to “Some of it is important and worth attention, even study.” Oh, sigh. Already there are dissertations written by Ph.D.s on science fiction. In the eighties that “some of it” was reduced to “that part that can be called postmodern” (for which read cyberpunk) and most of the rest of SF was thrown back into the gutter or became “character-driven,” about which more later.

  But SF is alive and still growing—not literary history—and most of the Ph.D. work is a waste of good dissertation paper because many advanced omnivores have read more SF than almost all of the Ph.D.s, and, given the categories presented above, no one has yet been able to define SF well enough so that non-SF readers can figure it out. SF readers know it when they see it, what is real and what is sci-fi (which has come to denote, among the chronics, what is probably admissible as SF but is extremely bad—able to fool some of the people some of the time).

  SF people know, for instance, that Superman is real SF. In his book Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World, 1966), Sam Moskowitz tells the story of the teenage fans associated with the creation of the character and its early publication in Action Comics in 1938—and if the first generation of science fiction people had produced nothing more than Superman and Buck Rogers, the effect of science fiction on American culture still would have been profound. Because to the science fiction devotee, the attitude of SF is naturally carried over into every area of everyday life. She tends to solve problems at work with science fictional solutions or by using the creative methodology learned through reading SF. He tends to see visions of alternative futures that can be influenced by right actions in the present. She tends to be good at extrapolating trends, and especially good at puncturing the inflated predictions of others by pointing out complexities and alternatives. He tends to be optimistic about ecology through technology, has no fear of machines, and tends to be a loner.