What no one seems to have noticed is that Van Vogt, more than any other single SF writer, is the conduit through which the energy of Gernsbackian, primitive wonder stories has been transmitted through the Campbellian age, when earlier styles of SF were otherwise rejected, and on into the SF of the present. James E. Gunn comes closest to understanding the importance of Van Vogt when he says, “Van Vogt was creating the mythology of science, writing stories of science as magic or magic as science” (Alternate Worlds, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 163). The style hardly matters. And as Knight proved, Van Vogt’s awkwardness is certainly easy to ridicule—but to do so without an appreciation of Van Vogt’s virtues misses the point. Think back to our discussion in chapter 3 of magic rationalized as a source of wonder and you will gain some appreciation of Van Vogt’s authentic appeal to SF readers over the decades.
While literary criticism has never admitted complication as a virtue in fiction, complication has always been central to the mainstream of science fiction. This is derived from the focus on plot and story (above character, theme, structure, stylistic polish) and of course setting. The novels of Jules Verne were complicated by the insertion of immense amounts of scientific and technological detail. There is substantial evidence that Verne’s Victorian audience saw detail as edifying and pleasurable. That dense and almost preliterate classic of modern SF, Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (1911), has almost nothing to it but its complications. Lester del Rey described it in The World of Science Fiction: 1926–1976 (NewYork: Garland Publishers, 1979, p. 33):
As fiction, it is simply dreadful.… The plot is mostly a series of events that help to move from one marvelous device to another.
But never mind that. It is one of the most important stories ever written in the science fiction vein. It is a constant parade of scientific wonders—but they are logically constructed wonders, with a lot of keen thought behind them. The novel forecasts more things that really came true than a hundred other pieces of science fiction could hope to achieve. There is television (which was named by Hugo Gernsback), microfilm, tape recording, fluorescent lighting, radar—in fact most of the things that did eventually make up our future.
Obviously, Gernsback’s book depends entirely on its extraliterary virtues. And Van Vogt most of all sums up and transmutes this part of the science fiction tradition and transmits it forward to a large and influential body of better stylists who come after him.
But the better stylists who come after Van Vogt are not necessarily better writers of science fiction. Note the assumptions within the SF field evident in the following quotation from Of Worlds Beyond, Eshbach’s introduction to Van Vogt’s essay summarized earlier: “The writer who wishes to inject complication into his science fiction will find much of value in A. E. Van Vogt’s article. And after all, a story without some complication (if it can be called a story) is a drab affair indeed, with little chance of gaining a publisher’s check.” Keep in mind that this essay was commissioned for and included in Of Worlds Beyond, the first volume ever published on the writing of science fiction (significantly subtitled The Science of Science Fiction Writing). Also included were essays by E. E. Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Williamson, and John Taine (a pseudonym for Eric Temple Bell, then one of the great living mathematicians). And notice that Van Vogt is no literary dilettante. On page 53 of Of Worlds Beyond, he states: “I write a story with a full and conscious knowledge of technique. Whenever my mind blurs, no matter how slightly, on a point of technique, there my story starts to sag, and I have to go back, consciously thinking it over, spot the weakness, and repair it according to the principles by which I work.”
Charles Platt, in his introduction to The Players of Null-A (Boston: Gregg Press, 1977, p. xviii), surely the single best piece of writing on Van Vogt’s work, instructs us on how to read him according to his virtues:
The tangled web of shifting motives, suspicions, and loyalties grows ever more involved, against a canvas of galactic scope, until the whole picture becomes too large to be held in the reader’s imagination all at one time.… The reader really must approach [Van Vogt] with a sense of acceptance and a willingness to stay caught in the shifting moment of action; then the flavor can be enjoyed almost viscerally, just as a dream can be savored so long as one’s logical skepticism is held in temporary abeyance.
To suggest that the [work] is best read in this way is not to denigrate it as a piece of fiction, since obviously it has the additional serious content on philosophical and (perhaps unconscious) symbolic levels. Naturally, these aspects are best approached analytically, but to enjoy the novel, as an adventure, it must be read as an adventure—entailing an attitude which is not always favored by literary critics.
From this vantage, looking back on the science fiction of the last three or four decades, Van Vogt and Cordwainer Smith and a large number of others (notably Alfred Bester and Philip K. Dick) down to Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling presently have maintained the tradition of complication in SF.
The heroic efforts of Damon Knight, James Blish, and Judith Merril in the 1950s as spokespeople basically opposed to unliterary style, and in favor of the fashionable virtues of characterization and thematic complexity, were wasted in attacking such as Van Vogt. Where their efforts were effective and useful were in praise of such fine writers as Theodore Sturgeon and in examination of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, and in support of such newcomers as Philip K. Dick, Charles L. Harness, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, Gore Vidal (his Messiah), Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, Frederik Pohl, Jack Vance—all those who were establishing higher stylistic standards for future writing in the field. Ironically, in the 1960s, Knight and Blish and Merril were all carried forward on the crest of the New Wave, practically out of SF altogether—Merril, after declaring science fiction dead and speculative fiction risen from its corpse, emigrated to Canada and did leave the field for nearly two decades, to rise again in the 1980s as a founding mother of the Canadian SF movement. Blish emigrated to England, where his SF had always been read as serious literature (reviewed and supported by Kingsley Amis, Edmund Crispin, and other influential literary lights) and proceeded late in the decade to write Star Trek script adaptations and little else until his death in the early 1970s. Knight stopped writing SF almost entirely until 1982 and began editing his original anthology series Orbit, which quickly became notable for its stylistic sophistication and, on the heels of that, for its lack of popular appeal to readers of SF. Knight remains a pivotal figure in the field today, but when Judith Merril attended a SF convention in Boston in 1980, her name was unfamiliar to many of the fans. “Hah,” I overheard her exclaim. “I’ve been away long enough to escape.” More than any others, these three gave critical support to the classics of the 1950s. As critics, they increased the audience for new styles of science fiction in their time.
But if science fiction is to survive and grow in our time, it must not lose its Van Vogts and Cordwainer Smiths, who really keep SF separated from fashionable literature and open to new possibilities for complication. There must arise in every decade a new generation of critics within the field who will praise the new when it has virtue, while respecting the strengths of the old. This is once again true in the 1990s, with a variety of publications such as Locus, Science Fiction Eye, Interzone, Foundation, and The New York Review of Science Fiction carrying extensive reviews—and counterpointing the professional magazines. The seventies and early eighties were notable for a lack of any consistent criticism based on a broad appreciation for both the old and newer styles of SF.
The critics existed (Joanna Russ, Algis Budrys, Samuel R. Delany, Sidney Coleman, to name a few) but never developed the kind of thrust and influence over the decade that Knight and Blish and Merril did in the 1950s, or that the New Wave controversy generated in the 1960s. The most influential critic of the 1970s was Lester del Rey, whose dislike of any advance beyond the virtues of classi
c (1950s) SF was the bellwether of the decade. That he was married to the editor of the most commercially successful SF publishing program of the decade (Del Rey Books) and was responsible for the founding of the genre fantasy mass-market (see Appendix V) only cemented the authority that he had already earned as a critic and “elder statesman.” The most influential reviewer of the 1980s was Orson Scott Card, a knowledgeable and passionate critic whose shifting and sometimes seemingly contradictory attitudes are hard to correlate into a consistent aesthetic, except that he stood for better characterization in SF, a stance that blended with the zeitgeist of the younger SF writers trained in academic programs to produce the misleading cliché, “all good fiction is character driven.” (The fact is that some is and some is not—beware of the James vs. Wells problem, about which more in the next chapter).
What about the science fiction writers who can and do write extremely well, whose style bears comparison with the finest contemporary writing in the language? We have been examining those SF writers who are not stylists, attempting to show why they receive attention, praise (sometimes), and an enduring audience in the science fiction field. It is appropriate now to turn our attention to those fine writers who have suffered at the hands of critics in and out of the field for their “literary pretensions.” The list is long and honorable, from Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester through J. G. Ballard, Algis Budrys, Brian W. Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Gene Wolfe, and a large number of others.
Until the early 1950s, the science fiction field was so small and the writers so seriously underpaid that the writing of SF had to be almost entirely a labor of love. The audience supported it with love and attention, but no significant cash. One would think, then, that this environment, so similar to the environment in which the contemporary poet or serious dramatist writes, would foster a species of Romantic artiness. On the contrary, the SF field fostered an attitude of commercial cynicism. Robert A. Heinlein was from the start vocal about his position as a paid entertainer, not an artist (or artiste). Science fiction was invariably written to sell—there was never any sympathy for the pretension to writing without achieving publication—if your work didn’t sell and get printed, you were just a fan, not a writer. Fans write all the time and no one pays them for it. This situation was probably the healthiest thing that could have happened to science fiction, a crucial factor in preserving the vital field while other commercial genres were losing their audiences and writers; while poetry, for instance, became arcane, specialized, unintelligible to the uninitiated and without a general audience to support its publication. No SF writer ever left the question of audience out of consideration. After all, the audience would write you letters, send you their fanzines, walk up to you at conventions and tell you if you disappointed them. And praise you if you satisfied them. Few writers anywhere are so fortunate.
It is still true that most SF writers don’t earn their primary income writing SF, but the cash rewards are so much higher today that the author’s economic dependence on the core audience is lessening for the first time in the history of the field. Now, a hugely successful SF writer (of which there are a few) may make so much money that he or she need no longer depend on a coterie audience or even magazine or book publishers for continued income. Starting in the late 1940s, an SF writer could make some significant supplementary income from SF—and many new markets were beginning to open. Bradbury and Heinlein began to have stories published in The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, two high-paying slick-paper markets. Others wanted to follow. Van Vogt, Fredric Brown, and Jack Williamson had substantial hardcover editions of novels published by major publishers—and this became the dream of every novelist, soon to be realized by many. The young writers of the late 1940s, and the non-Campbell group from the magazines, knew that they were writing better than their predecessors, knew that markets were expanding, that they could compete with the established big names and, perhaps, surpass them.
The center of this excitement and this consciousness of a higher level of performance was New York City and specifically a group which had existed since the mid-1930s that centered around the fan club called “the Futurians” (Donald A. Wollheim, Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, C. M. Kornbluth, James Blish, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Richard Wilson, and later a wider circle including Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison, Robert Sheckley, and Michael Shaara). Those who were young writers then seemed often to fall under the literary influence of James Blish and Theodore Sturgeon, two immense talents and two of the finest self-conscious artists that the science fiction field has produced. (Also the influence of Lester del Rey, mentor to Budrys and Ellison, is often underrated.) There was a general awareness that something new and explosive was going on, that they were the writers of the future and that their work was already on a higher level than ever before in the science fiction field—a new dawning of prosperity, success, recognition was imminent. And it all worked out that way—sort of. They all made careers in SF, got paid enough to live, if not well, then well enough, and gained recognition within the field for their talents. But outside the science fiction field only one author, Ray Bradbury, ever got wide praise and recognition. Literary lights such as Clifton Fadiman, Christopher Isherwood, and other names now faded into history, praised Bradbury as part of literature, not science fiction. Note the distinction.
To give him credit, Bradbury himself never quite denied writing science fiction (as Kurt Vonnegut did successfully for years, to his enormous literary benefit). But he did allow his famous book The Martian Chronicles to appear in paperback (New York: Bantam, 1951) for nearly twenty years with an extremely complimentary introduction by Clifton Fadiman, which is devoted to denying that the book is really science fiction—sure, it uses the stuff of science fiction but it is actually the work of a literary man, not one of those SF writers; and Bradbury is quoted as saying: “Science Fiction is a wonderful hammer; I intend to use it when and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone.” In other words, I don’t think of myself as a science fiction writer so much as a writer who uses science fiction sometimes. And it’s true. Bradbury is more a fantasist who happened to grow up in science fiction fan circles.
But any one of those younger writers of the early fifties would have mortgaged their souls for that kind of literary recognition. What they had never counted on was that no matter how well they wrote, as long as it was labeled science fiction it was totally and completely beyond the literary pale. Not literature. What a numbing disappointment it was to the best writers in the SF field to find, by the end of the fifties, that the only likely way to literary respectability was to deny the SF label. This is still true in the U.S.
It was never entirely true in England, where writing SF was and is merely one strike against you. The situation there is that a novelist is a novelist, but if you write SF you’d better be excellent or you will be considered a bad novelist, your work very nearly white noise. But remember that this prejudice is part of the essential background against which Merril and the English New Wave proclaimed the birth of “speculative fiction” in the 1960s, and started a literary tradition. If writers could just get rid of that damn frustrating label, then the big guys would finally take their good work seriously.
Lester del Rey presents an unsympathetic but on the whole accurate summary of this sixties mind-set, in his book on the history of SF (The World of Science Fiction: 1926–1976, pp. 258–59). To summarize del Rey’s observations, a number of SF writers in the 1960s began to think of themselves as artists, whereas the prevalent attitude for generations had been a legacy of the field’s pulp magazine origins: that SF writers are craftsmen paid to entertain and that in the process of producing a body of work the creation of art is not excluded from possibility (after all, there was Dashiell Hammett and, in SF, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and perhaps others). The goal of these new 1960s writers was art, and they agreed among themselves that they were in
fact producing good art, that in fact their science fiction was really the significant literature of the day. Of course del Rey holds this attitude in contempt and against the traditions of science fiction as well as against the real case. But I feel otherwise: that the case is by no means decided.
After all, from the mid-sixties to the present, high literary art in America has been characterized by one of its practitioners, John Barth, as “the literature of exhaustion”—all the stories have been told and retold, so that the only subject of fiction, the proper subject of fiction, is fiction itself—and we have seen a whole lot of novels about novelists writing novels, pretty narrow stuff, though brilliantly executed. Postmodern literature, which glories in marketing and borrows often from SF, values SF precisely as much as the advertising catalog copy it also borrows. It’s hardly enough to keep the mind alive and makes SF seem very alive in comparison.
There is no doubt that a significant number of science fiction writers today consider themselves literary artists, and a large number consider themselves traditional paid entertainers. But because of the newer attitude, I believe the likelihood that a work of SF may be a substantial work of literature has been greatly increased. It is not my place to declare who the real artists are and are not. But looking back over the past decades, it is evident that certain works are outstanding in their execution and will repay a reader who does not have an initiation into the special pleasures that come from long acquaintance with the SF field:
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 16
