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

by David G. Hartwell

  The last sentence of the Henry Kuttner story “The Proud Robot” has a literal meaning impossible outside of SF: “Ten minutes later Gallagher was singing a duet with his can opener.” Aside from the verbal delight, the pure play of words over the course of the story leading to the last line, the unusual and eccentric context (in this case the future world in which drunken inventor Gallagher builds a narcissistic humanoid robot can opener) allows us to entertain possible modes of human behavior under circumstances which do not and have not ever applied in reality.

  After all, the twelve-year-old omnivore of SF is put off by or bored with reality. He needs more than anything to put some distance between himself and the real world, which in many ways he is not equipped to handle. Aside from the social support of the SF field, he needs to experiment with experience, and written SF gives him worlds that he can play with. A twelve-year-old is not so much frightened of reality as bored by it—it is just there and he can’t do anything about it. And one of the lessons of SF, as we have seen, is that you can manipulate reality, solve problems. There is hope in the future, as well as wonders and escape. The raw hope is enough for many early omnivores. In chronics, the escape into SF worlds often fosters an attitude we might call optimism tempered by irony, or hard-won optimism—no matter how bad the future is in story after story, at least it is there and, thank heavens, different from the present. Some few are even entertained by, in Brian W. Aldiss’s phrase, “pure bracing gloom,” which by contrast illuminates the virtues or acceptability of the everyday world. This became a fashionable stance among hip young writers of the 1980s, but it passed.

  You do not read SF to examine the nature of reality—that is just a by-the-way—you pick it up for escape and entertainment, and it draws you in and takes you away, there to perform strange and unnatural acts upon your mind. Science fiction has tremendous power over receptive minds and we have seen that our whole culture almost insures a certain amount of receptivity nowadays, in most kids.

  In spite of this, only a minority of twelve-year-olds read must SF, and until very recently (the last decade or two), mostly boys. After all, there is still that word “science” to discourage girls, and there are still parents who insist that boys go outside and play, not read.

  Of particular significance is the large increase of women readers of fantasy in the SF field in recent years—in the 1990s between 25 and 40 percent of the SF audience (there is no verifiable figure more exact). Unlike the chronics of older times, they will often happily admit to a casual dislike of anything with science in it and a strong bias in favor of any world, fantasy or futuristic, that represents strong and positive roles for women. Well and good, but general attitudes which involve fairly thorough rejection of the classics of the field are certainly going to produce and have already produced changes in SF.

  Over the last twenty years for instance, the Pern novels of Anne McCaffrey, unquestionably SF, have become paradigms of contemporary fantasy (for other writers who omit the SF so carefully developed in McCaffrey’s setting). There is now a perceived difference between the female audience and the audience for women writers (which is at least 60 percent male, as far as one can tell).

  The new women writers of recent years have produced vigorous and innovative SF and fantasy way out of proportion to their numbers. It makes sense that most of the major new female SF writers of the 1970s (Suzy McKee Charnas, Vonda McIntyre, Elizabeth A. Lynn, Marta Randall, Joan Vinge, Alice B. Sheldon, C. J. Cherryh) and 1980s (Lisa Goldstein, Gwyneth Jones, Eleanor Arnason, Octavia Butler, Joan Slonczewski, Judith Moffett, Melissa Scott, and many others) would have a desire to create new and different SF worlds; if not outright feminist futures, then certainly worlds in which women are highlighted and have serious and important new roles. Many women have turned to SF reading and writing because of the historic hospitality of the field toward change and innovation, and it is probably no overstatement to say that no woman in the SF field has remained unaffected by feminism in the 1970s and beyond.

  Furthermore, the renewed passion of such diverse writers as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. Le Guin led them to create milestone works inspired by the burgeoning feminist consciousness of the 1970s. These three in particular, who had already made a significant impression on the field in the 1960s, came to real prominence in the 1970s, and among them inspired much of the productive controversy of the decade.

  The longings for future worlds of sexual equality and the sometimes violent rejection of the male-chauvinist present led to such works as Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978); Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975); Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) (her earlier The Left Hand of Darkness [1969] and Russ’s Picnic On Paradise [1968] were the first important SF novels by women to reflect new attitudes toward sexual equality); Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Heritage of Hastur (1975); Alice B. Sheldon’s (better known by her pseudonym, James Tiptree, Jr.) “The Women Men Don’t See” (1976). Pamela Sargent’s anthology Women of Wonder (1975), proved so popular that it called forth two sequel volumes, making it the most popular SF reprint anthology of the decade. It was revised and reissued with a new companion volume in 1995. And these are only some of the high spots in a list that could be doubled or tripled in length. Male writers such as (in particular) John Varley and Samuel R. Delany also made significant contributions during the decade to the consideration of future sex roles, a consideration that has remained at the center of Delany’s work for four decades.

  It is worth noting that the most serious and fruitful intellectual inspiration and innovation in SF in recent years came from women and from the controversy surrounding the works of women writers. By the end of the 1970s, it was a commonplace that women are the aliens in male-dominated human society, even in SF, and that the escape of women into SF worlds is of enormous personal and cultural significance for our immediate future.

  It matters little that most of the women writing SF command popularity with only a minority of the total SF community. The source of the power of these new women writers in the SF field is that within their own core audience of (for the most part) adolescent and young women, they are transcendently heroic. Joanna Russ cannot appear in public at an SF convention without women coming up to her, a glaze of adulation in their eyes, to tell her how much she and her work mean to them, how it changed their lives—nor can Ursula K. Le Guin nor Suzy McKee Charnas. These writers and their readers are the foremost current examples of science fiction as escape from an intolerable present day. They live in the SF world, correspond with one another, publish small-circulation magazines for each other discussing politics and life and the fiction of their courageous writers, who dare to envision and represent a world that is crucially different and better, a world they will make real.

  There is also a strong gay community within the SF field, both men and women, writers and readers, who are contributing to the free and innovative discussion of future sex roles. Again, the traditional openness of the field to personal freedom and the eccentricities of individuals has allowed the creation of futures with new and positive forms of human relations among people of varied sexual preferences. There are certain fanzines devoted to gay concerns; a specific convention, Gaylaxicon; and a full-scale bibliography on SF and gay themes, Uranian Worlds (Erik Garvin and Lyn Paleo, eds., Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983)—still available in a later and much expanded edition.

  SF is one of the first genres in which the cliché of the masculine hero versus the effeminate antagonist is no longer a requirement. Particularly significant contributions to the discussion of future sex roles began with Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), no less than a full-scale satire on the sexual taboos of Western civilization, which became a bible of sexual freedom for the generation of the sixties far outside the SF field. The works of Theodore Sturgeon, Philip José Farmer, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Michael Moorcock, Joanna Russ, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Elizabeth A. Lynn, and later Tanith Lee, Davi
d J. Skal, Storm Constantine, Geoff Ryman, Gwyneth Jones, Eleanor Arnason, and many others, have carried on the theme of varieties of sexual activity in future worlds. In the 1990s there was established the James Tiptree Jr. Award, given annually for works of “gender-bending” SF.

  Perhaps the most complex and thorough presentation of varied sex roles in the SF of the 1970s occurs in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), one of the most popular SF books of the decade and perhaps the most controversial, since the world in the novel is not specifically juxtaposed to our present reality and contains events that are unexplained and surreal. (Is it really SF?—the arguments rage on.) Delany’s novel is the most comprehensive sexual odyssey ever in the SF field and some of its power derives from the fact that the world of the book both is and is not present-day reality and that the sexual life of the characters is observed in clinical and objective graphic detail, cool and clear. For the SF field, Dhalgren was as revolutionary as Heinlein’s novel—with the advent of Delany’s masterpiece (The New York Times, in its review of Dhalgren, called Delany the most interesting SF writer in the English language today), the twelve-year-old can escape from the sexual frustrations of adolescence into a world of impossible sexual hospitality and freedom—and of course it is science fiction and not real, so you don’t have to worry about the real world and Mommy looking over your shoulder. Ha! The reading of SF is once again an act of revolution and rebellion! The great escape is still alive and well. All of Delany’s later fiction carries on the sex role complexities of Dhalgren, but perhaps the most striking of his works has been his Hugo-winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988), in which Delany explicitly connects his own sex life to the fantastic sex in his fiction.

  The power of science fiction has changed and yet remained the same. When the SF of the last decade or so is observed from some distance, its primary revolutionary impulse seems quite obviously to have been sexual politics, gay, and/or feminist. The impact of this theme on young people will certainly be reflected in our wider culture in the decades to come. Remember the impact of Stranger in a Strange Land and note that Dhalgren, which has sold more copies to date than Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, was for two decades one of the most widely read SF books outside the SF field.

  Entertainment, escape, powerful impact on the deepest levels of the human psyche flow through the conduit of SF in which the fantasies that a twelve-year-old will not allow herself in the real world suddenly confront her in clear prose on the printed page. Young women, charged with visionary energy, hang with rapt attention upon the words of Le Guin, Russ, Bradley, and Charnas. Nowhere else in the body of contemporary literature can they experience such enchantment but in these works. Believe it, these are tales of wonder.

  But these SF tales are in some ways peripheral to the concerns of the core SF audience of the 1990s. This new generation of readers is more nearly a fantasy audience than what we have commonly identified as the SF core audience—a lot of them are young women and men who will admit to a casual dislike for science and technology. It has remained for such writers as John Varley, David Brin, Orson Scott Card, and recently Sherri S. Tepper, to hold the center of the SF field in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to combine (as in Varley’s “The Phantom of Kansas,” discussed beginning on p. 137) the new thematic concerns of life-style and sexual politics with the traditional SF play of crazy ideas. Without such writers as Varley to arouse the traditional excitements of SF in the chronic audience and to satisfy the powerful needs of the new omnivores (feminists, gays, fantasy fans) who comprise an ever larger portion of the SF audience, the SF field would be in greater danger of serious fragmentation. A marked diffusion of energy is already evident through the ever larger numbers (of readers, dollars, books, everything) involved in the SF enterprise as the field escalates in the 1990s.

  The promise of escape is stronger and more beguiling than ever in science fiction as writers aim for target groups within the larger overall SF field. The variety of escapes continues to proliferate.

  5

  WHEN IT COMES TRUE, IT’S NO FUN ANYMORE

  SPACE TRAVEL, the future—that’s what science fiction is about. SF stories and the people who write them have always been enthusiastic about our future in space. So when Sputnik went up in 1957 and suddenly rockets to space were real, it was the greatest thing that could happen to the science fiction field. Right? Wrong. Science is speculative (science is fiction?). When it becomes real, it’s merely technology. Real space travel almost killed the science fiction field.

  How? Why?

  * * *

  The popular idea outside the field—that somehow the business of SF is to predict what will come true—is dangerous and mistaken, a perversion of the truth of science: Science, when it works, tells you what will happen in defined circumstances every time. This is what we were all taught in school about science and what all scientists believed about science right up until the last few decades, when things like “uncertainty principles” and “wave-particle dualities” (sometimes it looks like matter and sometimes energy) began to make hard sciences like physics and chemistry look a lot more indeterminate to the scientists themselves—but more exciting and speculative, too! These days, theoretical physicists are a happy and energetic breed, with lots of really strange theories.

  But until 1957, a whole lot of the creative energy of SF had gone into visions of space and space travel, producing a large majority of the popular enduring works up to that time. A wave of excitement and euphoria broke over SF in late 1957: Finally, it’s real! Now everyone will know that we were right all along, all during those decades when we were called space nuts (or simply nuts)—we were the ones who had faith, who knew, and now the world is at our feet!

  Within a few weeks the horrible truths began to pile up. The world didn’t care that the SF field had been right all along—aside from a few early headlines and Sunday-supplement pieces about science fiction becoming science fact, no one paid any more attention to SF than they ever had. And as 1958 wore on, it got worse: Fewer and fewer people were buying and reading SF books and magazines. During the years after Sputnik, the field declined radically.

  John W. Campbell, the leading spokesman for SF, came up with a rationalization typical of the elitist traditions of the SF family: Now that science fiction has proven its power to become real, people were frightened of it and stayed away. In a positively orgiastic fit of power fantasies fulfilled, Campbell asserted that the recession in SF would cleanse the field of those lily-livered readers who had never really believed in the first place, who had just come to SF for escapist adventure. Now the true elite could get on with the business of predicting other great things, such as the development of mental powers (psychic powers or “psi,” and Scientology).

  The truth is that in a single instant the fact of space travel turned most of the classic space travel stories of science fiction into fantasies. Every week of the new space age made more science fiction untrue. This was such a big thing for SF that no one could quite think it through at the time. Everyone knew that something was really wrong, however, and the sudden decline in SF was a numbing disappointment to everyone, coming at the end of the great boom in SF that characterized the early fifties.

  In such classics as Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” SF readers had been told in no uncertain terms that space travel would be a private enterprise, usually the inspiration of an Edisonlike inventor or visionary businessman. That the Russian government had gotten there first, that the U.S. military would follow in a bungling fashion (at least initially) boggled SF readers. Doc Smith’s The Skylark of Space, Heinlein’s Future History stories, all the classics and standard works were now no longer improbable but possible: They were dead wrong. Space travel, one of the greatest visions of generations of SF writers and fans, was real, and the euphoria of SF fans at the fact was real, but a major and confusing readjustment was suddenly necessary.

  The publication that won the Hugo award for
best amateur magazine at the 1961 World SF Convention was a fat little one-shot published in 1960 called Who Killed Science Fiction? The whole field knew that SF was contracting, maybe even dying on the vine, and of course everyone had his own theory of why. And wanted to fight about it. The SF magazines were contracting and some of them disappearing, and it was not apparent at the time that the new form of SF, the paperback, was stable and growing some, for magazines had been the primary source of SF since 1926, unchallenged. Fortunately science fiction was not dying, but it certainly was changing—and selling less—and for the first time since the beginning, writers and readers were actually leaving the family in significant numbers.

  For years afterward, no one paid much attention to some of the other significant factors in the decline of SF in those years. Frederik Pohl, among others, has repeatedly drawn attention to the simple fact that half or more of the SF publications of the fifties were pretty marginal economically, and that in the mid-fifties the largest and only national magazine distributor in the U.S. (the American News Company) was gobbled up by a conglomerate and sold off piecemeal, thus ending national distribution for about half the magazines in the U.S., including a whole lot of SF publications. Only the largest survived.