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

by David G. Hartwell

  Where do we get these crazy ideas? From science fiction, of course.

  III

  WRITERS, FANS, CRITICS

  7

  WHY “SCIENCE FICTION” IS THE WRONG AND ONLY NAME FOR IT

  “SCIENCE” AND “FICTION” are actually an odd pair of words to be joined together in taxonomic matrimony. Science in our culture is very serious stuff—scientists are the keepers of the flame, the doctor/priests of the secret knowledge by which we live; science is truth. Fiction, on the other hand, is lies—lighthearted lies, entertainment, something to relax with when the day’s hard work is done. To most people, “science fiction” sounds much too serious to be attractive as entertainment. And if it’s fiction, it obviously isn’t real science, which means it’s probably nutty stuff about monsters from space and empires beneath the sea.

  In fact, “science fiction” is not a pair of words to people within the field but a name, a concept, as specific and ambiguous as “Los Angeles.” No two people agree on what Los Angeles does and does not include; the postal service has a different concept from the phone company; the state, county, and city governments can’t agree; certainly the people who live there don’t know whether L.A. means downtown plus Century City or everything from the mountains out to the beach, including the Valley. At the same time, it’s no problem at all going to Los Angeles; one seldom arrives at the wrong city. Taxes get paid and the buses run (very infrequently). People in far cities curse the place and everyone knows where they mean. “Los Angeles” has no concrete definition that can be agreed on, but most people know what they mean when they use the term. So too with science fiction. And like Los Angeles, “science fiction” is almost universally misunderstood by people who don’t live there.

  In fact, science fiction, like Los Angeles, is a place most people already know they wouldn’t like if they went there. Too much bad press. Science fiction shares with pornography the dubious distinction of being apart from art (the word “science” does it) and therefore lower than “real” literature. Simply put, if a work is literature it can’t be science fiction (as if the two were mutually exclusive) and the label “science fiction” on a book or magazine denotes “not literature.” There has been for all practical purposes unanimous agreement outside the science fiction field for decades that SF should be judged by its worst examples—and condemned.

  Science fiction has been condemned as fascist, sexist, subversive, poorly written, ill-conceived, utopian, pessimistic, protechnology, antihumanist, and quite a variety of unpleasant names. There must be deep cultural and/or mass psychological reasons why so much energy was expended for so many years in efforts to make sure science fiction was never judged by its best examples.

  One thing is sure: The science fiction world has expended a lot of energy in support of this condemnation. There is no real consensus in the field as to what the great works are or why—each chronic chooses his pantheon and argues it with others—and as long as the basic question of definition is unresolved, there won’t be. This seems to have helped the science fiction world feed its sense of isolated superiority. Outsiders just can’t understand. As in any clique, fraternal organization, or tribal unit, the initiated are in possession of secrets not lightly granted to others. Over the years, a fair amount of mumbo-jumbo has attached itself to science fiction and to the inhabitants of the science fiction world.

  Advanced omnivores and chronics are in possession of a number of shibboleths, an entire code language both written and spoken, which can effectively exclude outsiders from conversation without proper initiation. SF authors are in possession of a huge body of useful clichés, in common use in the field, representing often rather complex scientific and technological concepts that have been explained in depth at one time in the past in one or more classic SF works and can now be simply alluded to in a contemporary story. Once, long ago, “spaceship” was such a term.

  This mystification through language is such an integral part of the science fiction world that most authors and readers have forgotten it works that way. What it means, though, is that a mature adult confronting science fiction initially must either be able to call up (by association with SF films, TV, or other peripheral representations) enough of the conventions of science fiction to comprehend the basic language pattern or he will be lost, will have to expend omnivore-behavior efforts to “get into” science fiction. In this way, sadly, science fiction is just like medicine or any other special field or technical endeavor, unintelligible to the uninitiated because of linguistic mystification. And this feeds an entirely illusory feeling of intellectual superiority on the part of those initiated.

  But SF is not, hardly ever, about science as theory or lab work; it’s about technology, applied science, neat gadgets. Kurt Vonnegut, in Player Piano, presents an affecting scene in which the revolutionary forces, having overthrown the people and technology that oppress them, attempt to resurrect a damaged pinball machine while a radical clergyman watches. I see this as capturing a quintessential moment in our love/hate relationship with technology. The archetypal gadget of contemporary culture is the video or arcade machine. Who among us would not own one if he could? But they are pure gadgets and we cannot rationalize spending hard-earned cash that way, so we buy portable radios, big cars, digital watches (did your old watch actually wear out?), big color monitors for home computers so we can play games at home, and other useful things. Note that toys, from Buck Rogers blasters to plastic Godzillas, taken directly from science fiction, have been a major element in the toy market for decades, now perhaps the major portion. And technological progress through better gadgets has been a continuing obsession of American culture since Thomas A. Edison became a national hero in the late nineteenth century.

  When in 1896 the German scientist Roentgen published his first X-ray photos and astonished the scientific community:

  “Even Thomas Edison had ‘a severe attack of Roentgen-mania,’ according to the February 1896 Electrical World. His staff literally worked around-the-clock on the development of a fluoroscopic screen for direct viewing of X-ray images. Staff members tested more than 1,800 different chemical coatings for the screen, while Edison reportedly made music with a hand organ ‘to assist in keeping the work force awake.’” (Washington Post Health [supplement], October 10, 1995)

  Q. E. D.

  Science fiction is stuck with its name now, as it has been since 1929 (when editor Hugo Gernsback replaced the term “scientifiction” with “science fiction”), and though it seems unlikely to change, it will be illuminating to discuss the alternatives proposed and discarded over the years (and some of the names used by others before the field came into existence in 1926).

  The history of the world of science fiction dates from the birth of conscious separateness, April 1926. In the nineteenth century, one occasionally runs across locutions like “the scientific romance” in both England and America, referring to authors such as Verne and, later, Wells. And we now know of literally hundreds of novels and stories published in French, German, and English during the century before the advent of Amazing Stories that fit without any strain at all under the rubric science fiction, but this is a recent discovery, a brand-new field of literary historical research opened only in the last two decades or so. Research has turned up such curious items as the following short article from the New York Herald of September 5, 1835, which is spooky in its parallel to Gernsback’s announcement ninety-one years later—has there really been a world of science fiction hidden from us for all this time?—and announced with a headline:

  New Species of Literature

  We learn that Mr. R. A. Locke, the ingenious author of the late “Moon Story” or “Astronomical Hoax,” is putting on the stocks the frame of a new novel on a subject similar to that of his recent able invention in astronomy.… His style is nearly as original as his conception. It is ornamented and highly imaginative. He may be said to be the inventor of an entire new species of literature which we may call the “sc
ientific novel.” … We have had … crowds of “fashionable novels”; but fictitious history, founded on the discoveries and scientific hypotheses of the day, has seldom been attempted until Mr. Locke did so. In fact, Mr. Locke has opened a new vein, as original, as curious, as beautiful, as any of the greatest geniuses who ever wrote. He looks forward into futurity, and adapts his characters to the light of science.

  Hugo Gernsback reprinted The Moon Hoax by Richard Adams Locke in the September 1927 issue of Amazing, never knowing how uniquely appropriate the selection was, but knowing full well that Locke was “scientifiction.”

  Lots of actual discussion went on throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century in prefaces and introductions and in reviews about this new kind of fiction, but when Hugo named it, the name stuck for the first time (although he didn’t actually call it “science fiction” until June 1929, in the first issue of Science Wonder Stories, the second SF magazine, which Gernsback founded when he lost control of Amazing). The name competition included “scientific fiction,” a term Gernsback had coined for the fiction in his earlier magazine, Science and Invention, “pseudo-scientific stories,” “weird-scientific stories,” and even “fantascience.” Scientifiction remained in use until 1953, but from 1929 onward the name most of the fans accept has been science fiction.

  However, the science fiction world has never been quite satisfied with the name, especially because the word “science” makes so many people uncomfortable and because the boundaries of the field are so ill-defined to begin with. At first, to be friendly, a lot of people in the SF world started calling it “SF” (ess eff) to avoid the breakdown into science fiction/science fantasy—after all, it’s all one thing. But this didn’t solve problems; it simply avoided confrontation—until the mid-sixties.

  It should now be clear that the matter of definition has only been a really hot issue whenever something or someone new and innovative enters the field. Invariably, the field has accepted whoever or whatever joins with it. However, a greater or lesser part of the insiders have always raised the question, “Well, yes, this new stuff may be SF, but is it any good?” The early answer has always been, after some discussion, “Well, it’s okay, but not as good as the old stuff.”

  The New Wave polemics of the sixties aggravated the chronic readers of SF because Michael Moorcock and Judith Merril presented the new stuff as actually better than past SF. This was not traditional behavior, and certainly confused and upset lots of longtime SF people: They were pushed to the point of saying that the New Wave (discussed in Chapter 9) was not SF at all (clearly an indefensible position), and/or that it was anti-SF and no good at all (defensible but not, in the end, leading to any greater understanding of SF or the contributions of J. G. Ballard and others).

  Science fiction “means what we point to when we say it” is the famous thumb-rule of Damon Knight. Norman Spinrad, in his admirable anthology Modern Science Fiction (1974), defines SF as “anything published as science fiction,” i.e., labeled SF by the package. What these two “definitions” and others like them mean is that what science fiction means to insiders is the sum of all examples and all possible examples. Science fiction is every SF story written or to be written, the sum total of science fictional reality past, present, and future—otherwise indefinable.

  The mystery of what science fiction is is therefore preserved from outsiders. For, you see, one of the great unarticulated foundations of the SF field, perhaps the most basic at the deepest level of the field’s collective unconscious, is that the wonderful, inchoate family of science fiction all know what SF is by intuition. Knight and Spinrad know, as the gorgeous subjectivity of their own definitions orbits around them, that to the field, further definition is unacceptable—disunifying, exclusive, potentially destructive of the fragile elitism that bonds chronic reader to chronic reader to editor to writer to illustrator to the most callow neofan.

  Ah, but the desire to tame life through classification and subdivision (define and conquer) is no less strong among science fiction people than others, even though it may be a manifestation of the field’s collective death wish, if our theory is correct. Ever since Hugo Gernsback pointed his finger at scientifiction in 1926, giving it a local habitation and a name, others have attempted to clarify the field by defining it or subdividing it.

  On the surface, it seems a fine idea to an SF person to have a neat and comprehensive definition so that when outsiders ask what it is you are reading, you can tell them to go look it up in the dictionary instead of making inarticulate grunts and moans of delight and pointing to a pulp magazine or paperback, then realizing too late that you probably should have hidden the thing behind a copy of Time because this is going to be hard to explain. But even very early in the game, in the era of Gernsback, the defects of definition began to appear. Science fiction people—having no more common sense than the rest of us, from Forrest J. Ackerman and Sam Moskowitz through John J. Pierce—have continued to attempt definitions. And all of the definitions from within the field have been accepted only by the definers’ close friends, because every definition either excluded from the field one or more of the works that the whole field (or at least a significant portion of it) regarded as a classic, or at any rate as true SF, or on the other hand included so much fantasy fiction and other related forms that great hunks of Western literature were included that “everyone knows” is not SF.

  Well, not to put too fine a point on it, most SF people are eccentric as hell in one way or another (see Chapter 10), and it was necessary from the very beginnings of the phenomenon to be permissive about the oddities of fellow chronics, most especially the other guy’s oddities of taste. If space erotica is really the focus of this chronic’s habit, then you damn well don’t define it out of the field and leave the poor pervert without a home and friends—or the next thing you know, someone will define out sword-swinging, four-armed Martians who protect their beautiful humanoid egg-bearing princess and ride across the sands of Mars having wonderful adventures, and because you know you love Burroughs with an unreasoning passion, you will be homeless too. So it is all science fiction because we all agree to say it is, whirling and turning in mysterious cycles and fashions, always incorporating and growing by inclusion, feeding on all science and all fiction. This innate heterogeneity is one of science fiction’s chief literary and conceptual strengths.

  And the mystic shibboleth “science fiction” has been the bonding glue of the field. The names of great fanzines of the past, Fantasy Fiction Field, Science Fiction Review, Fantasy Times, Fantascience Digest, Amateur Science Stories, Scientifiction, Science Fantasy Advertiser, and thousands (!) of others, devoted to science fiction/fantasy fiction/imaginative literature/speculative fiction/fantascience/scientifiction or any other appellation one or more fans hung on the field, all hold and have held the field together in a great maelstrom of energy since the very beginning. Science fiction, as Kurt Vonnegut says, is written and read by joiners. This is not literally true—most readers and some writers never connect with fandom. Not all of them are social enough to actually go to conventions or even (poor lonely souls) to talk to other people about the SF they read; but anyone who reads the stuff enough to know what kind of book she wants before going into a bookstore does in fact feel a sense of identity with the field, knows secretly and with a small chill of pleasure that she is in on something, is ready to be part of the extended science fiction family. It’s sort of like being fifteen and ready to have a date—a state of heightened awareness.

  The final irony is that a definition useful for students and scholars was produced in rough form in the late 1960s and has been honed and applied by outsiders throughout the 1970s:

  A literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

  This definition was produced by Darko Suvin, the noted scholar, coin
ed phrases and all, and it works all right for a number of critics, but no one in the field except academic critics will accept or use it since it does exclude some treasured conceptions held by most of the field for decades (it doesn’t mention “science”) and besides, it is academic and therefore suspect, if not downright subversive, maybe even anti-American (Suvin is European and a Marxist critic). It smacks of the academy, of the mummification of literary energy—dry, dry, dry.

  Samuel R. Delany has pointed out in his important critical collection of essays on SF Starboard Wine that if SF is to be examined as a genre, then the subject of definition is moot—one does not attempt to define poetry or the novel or satire in order to study or discuss it. And the last decade of postmodern literary theorizing has certainly shown that a few examples will do for most academic theorists. The central problem with most academic commentary on SF is that the critic may have read fifty or a hundred “high-spots” but never have gone through an omnivore to chronic progression and so be according to in-field standards a neophyte: know, in some ways, less about SF then perhaps her students do.

  The very existence of a definition that was admitted to work fairly well would be a harbinger of doom for the field, for that lovely, permissive, eccentric, and friendly family feud that has been the science fiction surround for decades. So it is not really there as far as the field is concerned.

  Of course the most divisive and dangerous harbinger of doom on the SF horizon is really money in large amounts. Science fiction has undergone stunning inflation in recent years—it is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market, and the field (no, worse, only some of the field) has begun to experience the corrupting power of wealth. But that’s another chapter.

  8

  SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS CAN’T WRITE FOR SOUR APPLES

  Any bright high school sophomore can identify all the things that are wrong about Van Vogt.… But the challenge to criticism which pretends to do justice to science fiction is to say what is right about him: to identify his mythopoeic power, his ability to evoke primordial images, his gift for redeeming the marvelous in a world in which technology has preempted the province of magic and God is dead.