Pierce quite clearly saw the New Wave movement as the great enemy of science fiction as he perceived it through the filter of his obvious limitations of taste and so on. His essay was the rallying cry of the old guard—hear again the poignant irony of Pierce’s pained patience as he explains that they claim to be individualistic, those “New Wavicles,” but their differences are not in the content or the plots, where it matters, but in style and approach. To Pierce and the whole SF field prior to the New Wave, style was synonymous with ornament, suspect, not often the subject of critical discussion and, when discussed, usually downgraded as some kind of pretentious excrescence. Of course, as we mentioned above, everyone knew that Sturgeon “had style,” or Alfred Bester, or Cordwainer Smith, but how these stylists worked was not discussed. I once asked Darko Suvin why he ranked many other writers higher than Sturgeon and he brushed me off with, “He’s merely a stylist.” Blish and Knight, the best critics in the field, spent most of their time cutting to ribbons style that did not function in place, that did not advance the story without getting in the way. Damon Knight states his critical credo in In Search of Wonder (p. 1): “that science fiction is a field of literature worth taking seriously, and that ordinary critical standards can be meaningfully applied to it: e.g., originality, sincerity, style, construction, logic, coherence, sanity, garden-variety grammar.” In his reviews, perhaps the most important body of reviewing in the 1950s, Knight stood for the transition from the “complex, cerebral, heavy-science-plus-action phase, toward a more balanced and easily digestible mixture of technology and human emotion” (p. 94). He observed and analyzed this change over the course of the decade, and produced works of his own that substantiated and legitimized in part the new 1950s SF, which is still the dominant paradigm of SF to this day.
The mixture of technology and human emotion Knight observed in such works as Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the works of Dick, Wilson Tucker, Pohl, Kornbluth, Blish, Budrys, Pangborn, Harness, Asimov, Vonnegut, Robert Sheckley, Jack Vance, and Bester all represent what we see as the central images of science fiction at its best.
Pierce’s fears were not, as it turned out, justified. What was dying out in the 1960s was not Pierce’s true SF, which never flourished more than in the decade following Pierce’s paper, but the Campbellian aesthetic, which was already dying out in the early 1950s with the advent of respectable alternatives to Campbell’s magazine, Astounding: Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic, and a host of short-lived brethren edited by everyone from Damon Knight to Lester del Rey. Every possible mixture of SF and fantasy was published in the 1950s. Writers went off in all directions, and most of the names and novels and stories that publishers identify today as SF classics were first written and published. By 1956, when Judith Merril published her first annual Year’s Best SF anthology, she continually referred to SF as “science-fantasy” to represent the broad and imprecise nature of the field as it had developed by the mid-fifties. By this time as well, John W. Campbell was already saying that Astounding was the only magazine left really devoted to science fiction, that most of the rest of the field was publishing fantasy under the SF rubric.
Well, as we have seen, it was hard to tell the science fantasy from the science fiction, impossible in fact, as long as the stylistic norm established by Campbell for both fields in Astounding and Unknown dominated. The reason that Moorcock and Merril could get a real argument going over Ballard in the early sixties was that Ballard had finally and blatantly broken the stylistic conventions of SF and it was hard not to notice. And, of course, Ballard was more or less successfully ignored by the field for more than half a decade before the New Wave really got underway (his first stories and novels were praised generally from 1959 to 1963 or ’64). And to give Pierce credit for some real perception, by the early 1970s he was looking back on more than five years of argument, and a substantial amount of amateur or failed literary experimentation, which had produced more heat than light but had certainly released a whole lot of energy.
As I have mentioned, Algis Budrys produced one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent. Note the ringing scorn and righteous indignation with which his discussion vibrates:
A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don’t think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster—be it wind or water—comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his comfort builds a huge pyramid to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators to help him out in dealing with deep water.
Budrys goes on to discuss this kind of science fiction in sarcastic phrases such as “the author’s characters … produce the most amazing self-destructive reactions while making reasonably intelligent and somewhat intellectual mouth noises.” And, referring to Thomas M. Disch’s highly praised (especially by Judith Merril in a review in Fantasy and Science Fiction) first novel, The Genocides, which Budrys believes is a Ballard imitation: “respectable friends of mine wedded to the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man, [feel] that the book is unrelieved trash, ineptly written, pretentious, inconsistent and sophomoric. I personally feel that it reflects a deep and dedicated study of the trappings of a book [by Ballard] everybody says is good.”
In conclusion, Budrys meditates that “it’s not going to be easy to arrive at a snappy verdict on this general new kind of science fiction. For one thing, it’s fundamentally different from most previous writing in the field—until you go back to H. G. Wells.… (In fact I can see a book called Cartography of Chaos, some ten years from now using the new mode as a demonstration that all U.S. science fiction between say 1930 and 1960 did not derive from classical sources, and that the importance of J. G. Ballard rests in his having singlehandedly returned the field to its main form.)”
For all his distaste and suspicion, Budrys does hit in passing upon the crucial fact that the early Wells was indeed pessimistic in tone, not at all the man who later wrote Things to Come. Wells had changed by the time SF was born, and the dark and pessimistic mode of Ballard and the New Wave was indeed closer to the classical sources of SF than the optimistic, problem-solving literature of John W. Campbell.
And now in the eighties and nineties the New Wave has long ebbed, but the legacy of that controversy is that certain areas in which SF was shallow prior to the advent of Ballard are now regularly treated in depth. Budry’s friends, “wedded to the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man,” were actually wedded to clear naturalistic prose fictions in which the scientific knowledge of the protagonist was a priori adequate to solve whatever problem the plot posed (and said protagonist better not have too many disturbing personal problems to prevent him from fighting off the antagonist until the problem is solved). Budrys’s friends who maintained that Disch’s The Genocides is “unrelieved trash, ineptly written” were wedded to a commercial magazine tradition that did not admit much stylistic variation and certainly did not permit practitioners any pessimistic assumptions. (As you will recall, there had been that absolute furor over the pessimistic little story by Tom Godwin, “The Cold Equations,” in Astounding in 1954.)
Pierce and other surviving believers in science and in Man were and still are unable (or unwilling) to appreciate the humane and literary virtues of any part of SF that might assume that science may be inadequate to solve a problem, or indiv
idual humans inadequate to face the problem well. But, ironically, pessimism is still as unfashionable in SF today in the 1990s as it was in 1954 or 1966 or 1971. Most SF is still optimistic in its basic assumptions, but that optimism is not now as shallow as it often was before the advent of the New Wave.
The evolution of the New Wave in England differs significantly from what we have just followed in the U.S., and a rift still exists today in the field between the two environments. While Merril, Moorcock, and Ballard intersected at a crucial interstice in 1965, their lines were never parallel. Significantly, literary politics in the 1950s in England are the root of the divergent British line.
Important figures in the literary establishment in England began to accept and defend SF as valuable contemporary writing. Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Edmund Crispin, C. S. Lewis, and others defended SF hotly, eloquently, and in public in the late fifties and early sixties, so that when the New Wave broke, the British were receptive to the new writers as part of a new generation. Still, of course, there were those who rejected SF as literature in England as in the U.S. So the British leaders of the New Wave invested their considerable polemical talents in denying that SF was in any way different from Literature. They felt a need to do this in order to achieve the final breakthrough into total literary respectability in their home territory. The U.S., of course, would follow, as it so often does, the dictates of English taste. Or so they seemed to think.
The assertion the British speculative fiction writers made that most disturbed and offended the chronics and omnivores of the sixties and beyond in the U.S. was that “anything can happen in speculative fiction.” That assertion, if accepted, would destroy the rule-of-thumb boundary between fantasy and science fiction, removing from active consideration by SF readers and writers that element of scientific plausibility and possibility of a science fictional idea “coming true.” It was not just anti-Campbell (Campbell was still alive, editing his magazine, and very vocal); the assertion reduced the entire edifice of highly developed and rationalized locutions that had come to characterize and enhance the reading protocols of SF to a series of meaningless conveniences (at worst), or at any rate to convenient words and phrases useful in lending atmosphere to the work but essentially no more meaningful or significant in place than any other locutions. Thus were the classics of modern SF devalued in favor of the instant “classics” of the New Wave.
The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely. Had they prevailed, they would have ended the continual development and use of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special paraliterary or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field.
It is interesting to follow the state of British SF, where the New Wave did indeed dominate for a time. The present British writers of SF are either writing predominantly fantasy (Michael Moorcock) or a peculiar breed of science fiction which denies all the advantages of conventional SF in favor of intense psychological investigation of character in a rather sketchy or unrationalized SF setting (exceptions include Brian W. Aldiss), or of richly ornamented prose portrayals of surreal and/or grotesque settings inhabited by abnormal characters. Damn little wonder there. Arthur C. Clarke, the grand old man of British SF, is a literary model for (perhaps) Paul J. McAuley and Stephen Baxter. The rest, except for the fantasists and the feminists, are mentored by the sixties. The New Wave won and contemporary British SF writers are proud of it. Perhaps I leave out too much, but this summary is more unfair and incomplete than untrue.
At the 1979 World SF Convention in Brighton, England, most of the younger British SF writers seemed a bit embarrassed in the presence of Clarke, who ignored the whole controversy and continued to write conventional SF throughout, remaining the most popular English SF writer in the world. This is in spite of the fact that he has never written a fully rounded character in his career, that being irrelevant to the strengths of his best fiction.
At the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton, the programming was based on the presupposition that contemporary SF began in the sixties and that the American writers of the fifties and before were literary history. This attitude did not prevail in the U.S. At the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, the U.K. editors said in effect that fantasy has more or less eliminated SF from their market. John Clute, the leading British SF reviewer, has all but proclaimed the death of SF. We shall see.
Eliot Rosewater (Vonnegut’s great defender of SF in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater) admitted that “science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples,” but he declared that it didn’t matter. “The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime when the issues are galaxies, eons and trillions of souls yet to be born” (p. 27). The choice was clear to Rosewater: craftsmen or prophets—and he chose. But the issues are not as clear as Eliot stated them and it is time we addressed some hard questions.
First of all, with a few notable exceptions, the best SF writers choose to write the way they do, and all of the best of them develop quite individual and characteristic styles which sound their recognizable voices, strong and clear. Second, there is in fact as much range of stylistic variety within the confines of SF as there is in the mainstream of contemporary British and American prose fiction today. This variety was underplayed for decades, but the virtue of the New Wave controversy is that for nearly three decades now it has been emphasized. A large number of the best SF writers have produced works outside the field, often winning awards ranging from the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar to the American Book Award. But their major work has still been in the field and most often unrecognized outside.
There is no denying that most of the classics of SF from the fifties and before are written in a fairly homogeneous journalistic prose. Until thirty years ago, ornamented styles were unacceptable to most SF editors. It was only with the breakdown of control by dominating editors beginning in the late 1950s that writers in general began to diverge substantially from the progressively cleaner and more precise naturalistic prose that was characteristic of all but a tiny minority of SF literature. This loosening of imposed control resulted in many prodigies and some grotesques: the New Wave, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert’s Dune, Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, the advent of Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and a host of other individual talents. No longer did almost all SF sound somehow the same to the sensitive ear. The new writers of the sixties most often took as their models the earlier mavericks Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester, self-conscious stylists who had survived the earlier decades, and of course J. G. Ballard. The list is incomplete.
Frankly, though, in all but the best examples, the new variety of styles actually detracted from the focus on big ideas that had given power to the field up to the sixties. The generation of the sixties stood upon the shoulders of giants and for the most part copped their ideas—and wrote them up better than before. As the literary virtues of SF got more and more impressive over the decade of the sixties, the ideas got spread thinner and thinner. This was, as noted earlier, the time when SF began to lose the excitement of space and space travel. The early 1970s are the years of what Brian Aldiss has called “life-style SF,” novels and stories taking place in near-future SF settings in which the focus is not on the events of the story so much as on the life-style of the characters. Oh, yes, and there was a bust in the market for SF about this time (1969–1971), in retrospect no surprise. There was very little excitement about the science in SF in those days, and it looked to many people in the community (remember John J. Pierce) as if the New W
ave might have permanently damaged the field by deemphasizing science to the point where it became merely a literary device to enhance verisimilitude in future settings. Less wonder, to be sure.
Although SF emerged from the 1970s stronger and more energetic than ever before, it seems that the raw energy of overarching ideas has been permanently tamed by higher levels of prose craftsmanship. There may never again be a fantastic and open repository of big ideas of the sort that space travel provided for decades to the SF field. The online world of the cyberpunks, cyberspace, was a vein that played out in only a few years, leaving only attitude (and a new setting for SF writers who go about using it in differing ways) behind in the mid-nineties. And alternate-history SF, in fashion from the late eighties through the mid-nineties, has produced few contemporary masterpieces (but see, for instance, Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, or perhaps John Crowley’s Great Work of Time) perhaps because it generally limits the scale of its big ideas to historical probabilities. Perhaps the bright hope for the field lies in the influx, in the last few years, of scientists and engineers writing SF part-time—perhaps they can provide, if only in rudimentary form, the “grammatical models” SF needs to keep growing images of power and wonder. It seems to me that they are succeeding and that the field is strengthening again in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, category publishing in general seems to have reverted to the images of the mythic past, dragons and monsters and magic, even astrology, as the most popular source of inspiration. And the result is more fantasy and science fantasy than SF. It’s beginning to get boring, too; pseudopoetic, pretentious, and basically foggy-minded. The fantasy audience seems to be a whole lot less critical and demanding than the inner SF community, satisfied with whatever magical images are given it and eager for more. SF has never drawn on and catered to an uncritical audience—the critical standards of SF omnivores and chronics have simply been different from establishment literary fashion. If there is a separate fantasy community, it communicates largely in the online world, where discussions of the most popular fantasy writers such as Robert Jordan are vigorous and numerous, rather than at conventions and through fanzines. There is to my knowledge no center of critical theory or location (or publication) that represents a consensus on standards of what works and what doesn’t, what’s good and what’s not. So the growth of fantasy and the fantasy audience may well represent a danger to the SF community as yet unrecognized and unarticulated. Perhaps the next genre war will be the Fantasy War. It may be going on now. It may even be over.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 18
