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

by David G. Hartwell

  Literary fashion, to those who care about it and guard it, is the Great Game of each era. Consider: It is the Elizabethan age and you wish to be a writer. You must of course be a poet and display your mastery of literary art through the sonnet form. There are certainly other poetic forms through which you can woo fame—the varieties of lyric, pastoral, epic—but the Great Game is the sonnet. If you write something such as drama, crass and popular, you can’t even publish it as part of your “works” without being ridiculed. Back to the present: Fashion dictates that you play the game of Hemingway/Faulkner/Bellow/Barth if you are a novelist (or the bigger game of Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Nabokov, Camus) in order to be admitted to the literary playing field. SF today is still to Literature as drama was to the sonnet in the age of Shakespeare: to a large extent bad art, and in the opinion of many insiders who reject literary fashion, such as del Rey, not art at all, just craftwork and fun.

  That’s why a young electronics engineer, for instance, who has had just enough literary education by way of required courses to know that literature is the highly protected preserve of experts (not something you can have an opinion on, such as religion or politics), can start writing SF in her spare time, submit it for publication, and expect it to reach an open and uncritical (in the college lit course sense) audience if it is published. SF is apart from the literary game, so that any enthusiast is welcome to play—especially anyone with a scientific background of any sort who might introduce new ideas into the common repository of the SF field.

  If you play the Great Game of literary art in your era, you may not make a false move or you are dead, because all your competition is making the same moves at the same time, and all but a very few must fall short of true excellence. (We can’t, after all, waste time reading the top two hundred Elizabethan sonneteers—we just read the top five or ten—and so with novelists. Few readers are so devoted as to read the top fifty.) Somehow you know that you are by definition an outsider to the Great Game when you set out to write and read SF. As we have seen, this can be enormously liberating to writer and reader.

  But the threat of Literature and the mandarin culture of art is always present to seduce writer and reader away from SF. Oh, sigh, the large majority of twelve-year-olds who have their sentience first awakened by SF pass beyond it into the empyrean realms of fashionable taste—some would call it normalcy. And do not mistake their gains: They become serious and well adjusted, sometimes they even become responsible adults, an attainment of no small worth in the world of the future. But they rarely pass into the world of literary fashion, because the whole mind-set of SF discourages such a transitory game, with such likelihood of failure.

  At least until recently. In the last decade or two, SF has become the only game in town for many young writers, including a bunch with knowledge of fashion and literary taste, some even with advanced writing degrees(!). They all know that fashion is a snob and they wish to be part of the few, the elite. Some play the Great Game.

  The best of them whom the field honors, for instance Joanna Russ and Thomas M. Disch and John Kessel and Ursula K. Le Guin, really do manage to accomplish art and SF at the same time. But the rest use SF as a back entrance to the fields of literature while avoiding comparison to the top ten or twenty writers on top of current literary fashion. And while they may produce works of some merit to people of taste, they are becoming dangerous to the SF field just because there are so many of them, and they write so well, compared to the average SF writer, and they get published and praised by peers—but they aren’t really contributing much to the SF field. Rather, they are often taking something from it by creating a major distraction, a confusion of goals. This is one pernicious legacy of the New Wave for fans.

  Dena Benatan, a young fan in the early 1970s, was one of the first to notice the post–New Wave dangers presented to the field by the new and intense interest in SF by academics and outside critics, who for the most part concentrated their attention on the younger fringes of the SF writing community, just these new young artists (now somewhat older) I have been discussing. With typical fannish humor, she coined the phrase, “Let’s get science fiction back in the gutter where it belongs,” and popularized it as the rallying cry of SF people who do not want their field preempted and used by outsiders without sincere contributions and due respect.

  Benatan’s slogan is not to be confused with the not entirely coincidental movement popularized by Lester del Rey in the early 1970s, which we mentioned earlier: to paraphrase, “Let’s get back to roots, to good old-fashioned science fiction that is pure entertainment. No more aspiration to art—the ‘New Wave’ has ebbed.” Benatan and del Rey both responded to a complex of changes in the early 1970s evident to the whole field, but generally unarticulated. For the first time the SF field was large, relatively prosperous, respectable to outsiders for a variety of reasons, and even well written in many cases (more often than ever before). Given all this, why was almost everyone in the field disturbed—why wasn’t it as much fun any more?

  Back in the 1950s, when the tenets of contemporary taste in SF were established in the field, the sin of “little-magazine-fiction-dressed-up-as-SF” was acknowledged as one of the deadlies right up there along with “hackwork” and “western-dressed-up-as-SF” (space opera). Damon Knight, Anthony Boucher, James Blish, Judith Merril, Theodore Sturgeon—the SF critical establishment of the 1950s—stood firmly behind the principle that SF could and should aspire to art; but of course it should stay SF while doing so.

  By the late 1960s, as we have seen, Merril and others had changed position to the extent that SF that aspires to art is spec fic, and transcends the mere genre of SF (sound of warning bells, alarms, sirens, danger flags—genre about to be obliterated!). A reactionary decade ensued, during which the “SF is entertainment” dictum of del Rey, Spider Robinson, and Donald A. Wollheim (no matter how dunderheaded its expression on some occasions) seriously helped to keep the field viable as a commercial category of publishing, while Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and a few others aspired to art. Algis Budrys, who maintained the clearest vision of SF and art throughout the decade, wrote too little criticism to create a major countervailing force (equivalent to the Knight/Blish/Merril axis of the fifties). And academic criticism of the field remained too often (always excepting the theoreticians and historians) irrelevant and rather naive. The battle to keep SF in the gutter was joined.

  From the outside, it is often hard to discern what has been going on. Leslie Fiedler, in his comments on SF (in What Was Literature?, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982, pp. 121–22), characterizes the proceedings somewhat patronizingly: “Only in the United States has there ever been a long-lived venture into non-elitist criticism, and that uniquely American [Fiedler seems unaware of the active participation of British, Canadian, and Australian fans, and even of German, French, and Polish contributors to the dialogue] experiment would, it seems to me, repay close examination both in terms of how it succeeded and how it failed. I am referring to the ‘fanzines.’” He goes on to present the fans as an “impassioned, cohesive and exclusivist audience, whose taste was defined by both a preference for a particular literary kind of fiction and a rejection of almost everything else, from the mimetic best-sellers their parents read to the ‘classics’ their teachers assigned.” It should be evident that something even larger than Fiedler perceived has been happening.

  The battle for higher standards is real, but all the names have been changed to keep outsiders from finding out what the real issues are and have been. Insiders use slogans, ironies, arcane references, confusions in this war. Because the tangible rewards changed—more money, public acceptance (academic and social), the real rewards of the mundane world that confer power upon the SF community—this war is more meaningful than the continuing battle over names and definitions. The war to get SF back into the gutter is a real war for the minds and hearts of the SF community, and the final battles have not yet been won or lo
st.

  What happened? Well, the 1970s was a decade of more wordage and less innovation in the field than ever before. The best 10 percent of SF was as good or better than any previous decade, especially better written as a rule according to the standards of outsiders (see the works of Le Guin, Disch, Moorcock, Russ, Budrys, Delany, Dick, et al.). But the younger, newer writers (with such honorable exceptions as Joe Haldeman, James Tiptree, Jr., Gardner Dozois, John Varley, Vonda N. McIntyre) started with less knowledge of the repository of SF ideas and less concern for the core, infield audience’s tastes and preferences than ever before (and not, like the “New Wavicles” of the 1960s, knowing it all and rejecting it as a revolutionary act).

  In addition, the much larger audiences of the 1970s and 1980s were less knowledgeable and less demanding, less familiar with the classics. The field began to lose its coherence through sheer size and diffusion. The most popular and successful books were film novelizations and continuations of series (Star Wars, Star Trek books, Children of Dune, etc.), all of which outsold by miles, for instance, the winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards. The SF best-sellers, such as Piers Anthony’s Xanth series or Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, rarely won the awards for excellence in the field, were hardly ever even nominated. What a change from earlier times!

  The 1970s was also the first decade of fantasy’s great success in the marketplace. As we noted earlier, with the phenomenal and enduring popularity of the Tolkien books in the late 1960s and the strong resurgence of popularity of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero, Conan, at the same time, fantasy in paperback began to appear with some regularity in the late 1960s and with increasing frequency in the 1970s.

  Both of these types of fantasy—the amoral/heroic and the moral/chivalric—were and are published as parts of SF publishing programs by various houses. They take up budgets and schedule space that would otherwise be devoted to SF. In addition, supernatural horror fantasy burst into bestseller prominence noticeably and often during the decade. Although the authors of these best-sellers were sometimes graduates of the SF field, such as Stephen King, the field did not acknowledge their relationship to SF until the founding of the World Fantasy Convention in 1975. Ironically this convention began, over the following two decades, to accelerate a unification of the various types of fantasy into a self-conscious unit analogous to but separate from the SF field (with many crossover practitioners, writers, and readers). There is a huge and loyal mass audience for fantasy at the present time, but an audience of what C. S. Lewis would have called bad readers: those almost wholly uncritical and seemingly ready to reward the most repetitive and/or gory spectacles—and very powerful in its effect on what publishers publish because of vast numbers in the mass audience outside the field.

  Whether the incipient self-conscious split between fantasy and SF will continue is a large question for the future. Certain estimates of the expansion of the SF field in the seventies and eighties depended upon including large numbers of fantasy books, as I have noted earlier. It turned out that the fantasy boom really masked a nearly steady state for the SF field during most of the 1980s. SF grew a bit, not a lot. A crisis of self-consciousness hit the SF field in the late eighties and early nineties that could be fruitful and productive. Several semi-professional magazines were founded in the late 1980s, of which two, Science Fiction Eye and The New York Review of Science Fiction, remain, with aggressive aesthetic agendas. Both of these support what is now known as Hard SF as central to the SF enterprise (see Appendix IV).

  The SF and fantasy fields remained intimately linked and the popular success of fantasy stayed high, so proportionally less and less new SF was actually published as the marketing field expanded for lack of room in publishing schedules, truly a disaster for SF. Except that there were moments during the general expansion when major new careers were launched in SF; and SF, which is somewhat larger than before, only looks small when set next to a (now) larger object, fantasy. The SF field has never been larger, in all ways, than it is right now in the 1990s, but both doom-and-bust and popularity-and-expansion may be just around the corner, in some complex conjunction.

  Oh, nostalgia for the gutter—are fans really alienated or did they just used to be? Will success finally destroy SF, when it has kept the faith through so much adversity?

  The 1970s was a decade of fatigue and retrenchment and disillusionment in our culture, no new energy sources and an exhaustion of the old ones, literally or figuratively. A twelve-year-old can no longer enter the SF field and become an influential, world-famous Big Name Fan by the age of eighteen—the field is too large now, the numbers too large. One Hugo-winning fanzine in the 1960s printed only 100 copies; in the 1970s, no fanzine with a circulation less than 1,000 won the Hugo (Energumen, the traditional fanzine that won in 1973, had a normal circulation of 400 or so, but Mike Glicksohn told me he printed around 1000 copies of the last issue out in the year of Hugo eligibility), and then, in nine out of ten years, the winner’s circulation was 1,500 to 4,000 (the “semi-pros” took over). Fanzines, in the traditional sense, had become an anachronistic pleasure by the end of the eighties, by which time to a very large extent fannish communication had moved to the Internet, where it remains today.

  Fandom is now dominated by fans over thirty, and there are now so many of them, after generations of fandom have passed, that there is not only no room at the top but the top is damn difficult to locate until you have been a fan for a while. Thousands of fanzines circulate every year, thousands of titles! But very few aspire to the traditional paradigms of quality. This is a new kind of adversity for the field—diffusion, loss of traditional focus.

  Remember that Judith Merril and her friends in the fifties never expected the SF field to grow much larger, certainly not as large as it is now. After all, you can’t have an alienated, advanced, elite majority, now can you? Yet as SF grows and its influence on our culture increases, it begins to seem less alienated, less advanced, less elite, a mass phenomenon.

  Back into the gutter means away from the elitism of high art and literary culture, but not toward the mass popularity of Rosemary’s Baby and Star Wars tie-ins (fantasy and sci-fi, respectively). Back to the gutter means back to the socially unacceptable, to the real edges of our culture, the primal energies of the play of crazy ideas, the core of wonder, to the testing of realities and the joy of prophetic vision, to the revolutionary fervor of the Futurian Society, of Campbell the editor, of Anthony Boucher and H. L. Gold, Blish and Knight, Moorcock and Merril, Harlan Ellison, and John J. Pierce.

  Science fiction has been moving upward over the years from the underground, the unfashionable world, the gutter, toward the world of fashion. As the field has grown and prospered, it has continually felt the pressures of the opposing forces of art and money drawing SF writers away from the in-field audience, either toward best-seller writing forms or the various pop culture media (both being special cases of sci-fi), or toward the Great Game of fashionable literature or the counterfashion of the literary avant-garde (both being special cases of the pull toward speculative fiction).

  The SF field has to resist the forces of money from commercial success outside the field, and the forces of aesthetic success according to outside standards, rules that deny the validity of the SF enterprise in and of itself. In the gutter, the pull of these forces is more elemental and therefore easier to recognize and combat—you know damn well that you are betraying the ideals of the SF field if you support or create sci-fi or that you are denying the existence of valid literary ideals in the SF field by attempting to conform to any set of avant-garde or experimental literary principles—and the rewards are generally smaller (less money on the one hand, less fame and recognition on the other—and no respectability in either case, right where you started).

  The very large amounts of money and respectability the fashionable world offers that draws writers away from the SF field are beguiling in the extreme, the rewards any other writer of any kind would cherish. Under such p
ressure, the SF field must surely be sundered and dispersed unless it maintains a conscious independence.

  “Let’s get SF back into the gutter where it belongs” is the rallying cry of those in SF who are most conscious of the need for independence, for the clarity of vision that will allow the field to endure the tension between art and money without fleeing its own center of being, diluting or rejecting its own traditional virtues. It will remain the greatest test of the inner culture of the SF world, of fandom, that it must reward the best writers in the field enough and convincingly enough to keep each of them from fleeing, from aspiring to virtues other than those we have examined in previous chapters as characteristic of SF, and from emigrating to the world of fashionable literature either for profit from or the respect of “the Establishment.”

  And indeed after decades of argument now, at least the issues are becoming clearer than, for instance, during the New Wave battles of the latter 1960s. The SF field has arrived in the future and must now question the value of its own ideas of progress. The works of such authors as Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop, and Gregory Benford (to mention three winners of the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Award for best novel of the year) are accomplished and respectable contributions to the contemporary American novel, yet still in the field. The most serious reassessment of science fiction and the achievement of its writers is still to come.