The leading theoretical critic in the science fiction field for over ten years, until the early 1980s, was Professor Darko Suvin of Montreal’s McGill University. He produced a series of papers and books on science fiction remarkable for their innovative critical insights and for their total lack of communication to any but a small group of advanced critics in and outside the SF field. Therefore Suvin’s name became anathema to almost everyone in the SF field, all of whom totally missed the point: that Suvin was attempting to analyze and describe what exists—using accepted vocabulary—not merely expressing his sentiments on the value of SF. The value is implied by the serious nature of the discussion, though his work is of only the most tangential relevance to the field as it is being written today, for criticism can deal only with what has happened.
Alarms reverberated throughout the fanzines and echoed through the halls of convention hotels. “SF will be destroyed if writers take critics seriously and begin to write for an audience of teachers and article-writers, the academics who rule fashionable taste in the Western world!”
This is all too true. All critics, even the best, must set up paradigms based on past literature in order to proceed to analyze a new work. Since a new work is never an utterly precise imitation of a paradigm (see Jorge Luis Borges’s wonderful fiction, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”), all new works are criticized, held up to examination against the ideal pattern, and found wanting.
The demonic paradox is that SF has always attempted to deal with change and the future, to establish new paradigms, and so has been found not just unsuccessful according to the accepted paradigms of Modernist literature (Joyce, Lawrence, Bellow, Mailer, Heller, etc.), but also completely unfashionable and therefore totally beyond the pale, unacceptable reading material for all properly educated people. And so bad critics (by far the majority of all critics), especially fashionable and popular critics whose reputations depend on defending a conservative value system based on the paradigms of the past, have lambasted science fiction consistently for decades, giving most of the serious writers in the field a serious case of paranoia, mostly justified by the facts.
What to do? The unfavorable criticism of SF by academics and fashionable book critics, who really are arbiters of taste in our society, has wounded many fine artists and writers in SF for years, to the point where some have denied writing SF at all (such as Kurt Vonnegut and Harlan Ellison, for a time) and others have accepted the critically imposed doublethink, usually phrased “This work is so good, so well-crafted, poignant and powerful that it is not really SF, it just seems to be on the surface” (examples are Ray Bradbury’s The Martin Chronicles and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon). The final proof, to fashionable critics, that SF is somehow by definition (note the irony) bad art is that the writers make money writing—oh, not a hell of a lot of money, but they care about it and are therefore tainted by commercialism. Real artists, one supposes, must be independently wealthy, have royal patrons, or starve nobly while writing on butcher’s paper. Then, too, SF writers are accused of lack of realism.
It’s actually the theoreticians such as Darko Suvin and Robert Scholes and Joanna Russ who are doing the real work of criticism—which most of the practical critics who form popular taste (after all, they write entertaining essays with clever and sharp put-downs) haven’t read because it wasn’t taught at Princeton back when they were there and besides they have not much better an understanding of the technical language of theoretical criticism than the rest of us. Reading a technical paper in any field, after all, is hard work and doesn’t score you any more points when you are writing a “critical” review for Time or Newsweek, whose audience doesn’t want accepted taste challenged anyway.
So, as it has happened, the talented amateur critics in the SF fanzines, and the writer/critics (such as James Blish, Damon Knight, and Algis Budrys), and the vocal fans who approach authors at conventions and express subjective critical reactions to SF works, have all, as a group, formed the critical audience for SF and kept the authors and the field alive and growing since the 1930s.
The SF field has created its own imprecise critical terminology (“It works/it doesn’t work”) which, until the new theoreticians of the seventies and their beginnings at synthesizing SF and “mundane” critical concepts, has been a more effective and accurate tool for surveying the science fictional landscape than any other because it takes the essential aims and foci of SF into account—especially the notion, thoroughly understood by all authors and devotees of SF, that within the confines of a respect for realism given an imagined world, innovation is a key virtue. Cordwainer Smith and Larry Niven, for instance, are writers revered in the field for their innovation, for new and colorful changes rung on standard SF situations.
But just at the moment when the first stirrings of incorporation and adaptation of traditional criticism appeared on the SF scene, in the late 1960s, a large number of the most literate and advanced SF authors and readers misunderstood the signal flags and misinterpreted the new levels of criticism as either unprovoked attacks on SF (an attempt to criticize it and them out of existence) or as a prescription for the SF of the future. Yes, after decades of paranoia and disrepute, the big guns of literary criticism are going to pay attention (ah, respectability!), and the avant-garde (for which read “the new group of writers to which I belong”) will triumph in popularity as long as I can behave and write in a manner proper to literary lions.
There was much less that was new and colorful in science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, given the enormous amount published, than in any previous decade. The recent past in SF has been a time of consolidation and wide public acceptance. But the new wider audience is unfamiliar with the peculiar innovative virtues of SF; both this audience and the reviewers, for the most part, have encouraged more psychological depth in characterization, less technical and scientific vocabulary, and near-future settings, to which a wide audience can relate without uncomfortable demands on the willing suspension of disbelief. (This is no more preferable than the short period in the late eighties and early nineties when certain SF writers, mostly associated with the cyberpunk movement, were advanced as part of the wider postmodern avant-garde by critic Larry McCaffrey and others. This ended somewhat abruptly when it was discovered that SF writers still cared about plot and logic.) If this trend continues, success really could spoil science fiction.
Already the field is showing signs of enthusiastic capitulation to a level of popular taste outside the boundaries of the genre audiences. After all, writers want to be liked, preferably by everyone, and, as we noticed earlier, SF writers are used to being paid for their work—not much, in the past, but with the enormous growth in popularity and respectability for written SF in the 1970s, the top writers in the field in the eighties and nineties are in demand and are suddenly commanding prices for their works approaching or in the six-figure range. And during the occasional periods of sudden expansion by publishers that have occurred every few years, it has become possible for almost any novice out of school to sell an SF novel for a few thousand dollars—especially if she is willing to write in a tie-in universe such as Star Trek or role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons and the like). This is particularly significant in an era when a young writer in any other field must struggle for years to get a first novel published (and most often gives up after several years of rejection). SF is a wide-open and expanding market (in economic cycles every few years, generally ever larger) amenable to partial successes.
But the cost of these enormous rewards (money, wide popularity, critical praise) is already showing in several ways. A number of young, talented writers who have read some SF have written one or several novels in the field and then stepped out of it as quickly as possible into even more commercial areas (or more literary ones), having established publishing contacts and contributed competent rehashes of SF clichés to the body of written SF. Other writers have entered SF without particular knowledge of it or regard for it because they
make money there. They stay in the field but do everything possible to avoid the creative enterprise of SF, substituting creative vocabulary for innovation (James Blish once wrote a scathing denunciation of this approach to SF which he called “naming rabbits as smeerps”—they remain rabbits in spite of being cute little hopping furry smeerps). A lot of them write mostly fantasy.
Most unsettling of all to lovers of SF, some of the major writers have been seduced by prosperity into expanding the scope of their SF novels to include large casts of engaging minor characters, panoramic disasters, obligatory sex romantically described, vast superficial detail, all the elements of the fat best-seller novel: Gregory Benford and William Rotsler’s Shiva Descending (1980) and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) are examples. This is not to denigrate these books or writers, who provide at least as much real SF stuff in these fatter books as in their in-field publications. It is just that their aim is to be published in the “best-seller” category and displayed at the front of the store, not in the SF category and shelved farther back—so they make no headway for the genre if they succeed, just money.
In addition, some writers have expanded their popular works into series, especially trilogies, but also four, five, or more volumes: Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy was stretched to six volumes, all best-sellers. Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy is a standing joke, with ever more volumes. And in the 1990s even established writers in significant numbers are being well paid to write commissioned works in tie-in universes. Who is to say that any of these people are wrong in their personal choices?; but the end result is certainly a dilution of the SF enterprise (somewhat parallel to the dilution of atmosphere at very large conventions)—not the attitude that has prevailed in the field since the twenties, which has been its great strength. Enormous pressures from the marketplace have limited SF’s freedom to create new visions.
Not that any writer paid for writing is ever entirely free of the demands of the market—there have been restrictions, sometimes severe, on sex in SF, on pessimistic SF, on all sorts of things dictated by various markets. But with truly big-time commercial success, for the first time since the category developed there is pressure on all sides to downplay the former center of attention and appeal—the science fictional content—in favor of stylistic virtues, characterization, complex panoramic story, near-future setting, all of which will broaden the market for a work in this wider field and will insure more favorable critical and review response from outsiders. The only thing is that it often doesn’t sell well if it doesn’t appeal to the fans, who don’t care very much about works that downplay what is of central interest to them.
The fans have changed too. A local (as opposed to national) SF convention in 1970 and for years before that would be attended by anywhere from thirty to fifty to at most 350 fans and writers. Local conventions were held in nearly twenty areas in the U.S. and sporadically elsewhere. In 1979, there were five local conventions held on the same Memorial Day weekend in different parts of the U.S., all with attendances of from 400 to 1,000 fans. On Easter weekend in 1996 there were four conventions (Seattle, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and London), each with 1500–3000 in attendance. Obviously fandom has expanded enormously and often chaotically and is in the 1990s larger than ever. But the change is more than numerical expansion. Prior to 1970, you could make the reliable assumption that any fan, every fan, had read or should read most of the famous authors and works of science fiction, if only in order to discuss in an informed way which ones are classics.
The assumption of knowledge of SF writings has been the glue holding the whole thing together for decades, really since the very beginnings in the late 1920s. Suddenly in the early 1970s, however, the SF world began to change. A large number, then a larger number, of the people living in this world were neophytes, teenagers exposed to the SF world without being addicted to the written works. The success of Star Trek, 2001 (the film), Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune, Marvel Comics and the whole comics convention movement (an outgrowth, like the Star Trek conventions, of SF fans launching analogous conventions) all contributed much more than the magazines and the books to a sudden and profound increase in the number of fans, especially the number of fans attending conventions. And most of these new fans found the SF world through popular culture (one or more of the aforementioned pop classics), not from the omnivorous reading that characterized all earlier fans. Some of them became overnight omnivores, but many of them, perhaps most, never delved into large numbers of the stories and novels of the past.
They came too late, you see. Even by 1971, with ninety or so new SF books being published by the industry in that year, it was nearly impossible to read all the new stuff, let alone catch up on the old. At a recent convention, in a room containing nearly twenty young fans, a discussion was in progress about the early works of J. G. Ballard, works that had sent shock waves of admiration and enthusiasm (and, as I observed earlier, debate) throughout the field in the late fifties and early sixties. Only one of the twenty had read any Ballard. At the Clarion SF writers workshop in 1971, in a roomful of aspiring SF writers all of whom have since published stories and novels, only one of eighteen had ever read a novel by Philip K. Dick, surely one of the great SF masters of the previous two decades. I taught at Clarion last in 1990 and was delighted to find three or four out of nearly twenty students to be widely read in SF. By now the written SF field is no longer knowable in its entirety to the average fan or the average young author. Most don’t even try. I was a visiting professor teaching SF writing for seven summers in the 80s and 90s at Harvard University in the summer school, where the majority of students were teenagers. By the last year (1993) the younger students had read no short fiction and none of the acknowledged masters of SF before taking a writing course in the field.
Yes, the same social conditions obtain in fandom as I have discussed, but the vision of what SF is and what it can do has changed in fandom. The written word is still the primary influence, establishes the primary image of what SF is and what its possibilities might be. But it may not remain so. The younger writers and the younger fans got their initial imprint of SF from sci-fi, from media. No wonder the field is in a state of change and confusion as it escalates in the nineties. Success, growth, will certainly change SF. It already has.
The decade of the eighties was the greatest boom period in the contemporary history of SF. More people, writers, fans, and publishers entered the field than ever before. But a whole lot of that boom was illusory. You see, it wasn’t all that much a science fiction boom. A lot of the success of SF in the seventies wasn’t at the center of the field but around the edges—particularly in the field of fantasy (handled by science fiction editors and publishers, written by science fiction writers, and read by science fiction fans, but not SF—see Appendix V). The success of fantasy tended to obscure the real fact that not that much more actual SF was being written and published than in the sixties, not a boom decade. This was even more true in the eighties, when the pressure of the ever-expanding frontlist and the new breeds of category best-sellers began to drive the backlist off bookstore shelves (the bookstores did not build more shelves) and out of print.
A huge amount, in some months more than 50 percent, of the SF of the seventies was actually reprinted from earlier decades. The paperback industry was like that, always trying to capitalize on the fact that SF doesn’t date like most other fiction. Whenever an author was hot because of a good new book, all his previous books from years back returned to print. If the figures are examined closely, less than 100 new SF books appeared in any year of the 1970s—after you exclude all the fantasy. And the SF magazines dropped steadily in circulation over the decade. A strange boom. The boom of the eighties was stranger still, the decade in which the classics began to disappear in favor of a desperate quest for the present, success this month.
SF, from the 1970s until today, is a capacious umbrella for a multitude of hybrid forms of fantasy, surreali
sm, weird tales, and pop retreads of all SF ideas. Another breakdown in definition is happening. Perhaps we need sympathetic, knowledgeable criticism, theoretical criticism, now more than ever to keep track of where we are. Certainly we need literary history for the first time, so that we do not forget where we have been.
Do we need an academy of science fiction arts? No, because the essence of the field is change, and we do not need to be frozen in place. But maybe we need the long boom to bust, so that SF may remain knowable at all and not disappear into the agglomeration of contemporary literature, thereby losing its capacity for innovation, some of which is gained only by its juxtaposition to current literary fashion.
* * *
This juxtaposition, though, needs some further elucidation. Only a minority of the educated population of the Western world knows much or cares much about literary fashion. SF is not now and never has been fashionable among those who do care. It is and has been fashionable for decades among scientists and engineers, for whom early SF was an amusing diversion, a spur to speculation, and an inspiration for the future—a literature that took them and their real work into account even when it did not place them at the center of everything important happening in Western civilization.
Most scientists and engineers do not read SF in adult life, but many of them did at some point—many of them were early omnivores. At a cocktail party of members of the physics department from your local university, you will not find many department members or students who will deny ever having read SF, whereas at an English department party you will be hard-pressed to find any present or former readers. You will probably even find, among the physics types, one or more individuals who has a friend who is a fan, or who knows an SF writer, or who has even tried to write it himself. As long as there remains a “two-cultures” split in society (as noted by C. P. Snow), the other culture will need its nonliterary literature, SF, into which their ideas feed and feed back. For fun. And as a bridge between science and literature. With the advent of hacker culture on the computer nets and the apotheosis of William Gates, the richest man in America in the 1990s and a computer nerd, the two-cultures split does not seem to be evaporating before the twenty-first century.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 21
