The situation now is that hard SF has been removed from the center of attention in the SF field by a number of forces, including literary fashion, competing modes, and marketing. Yet in the past decade hard SF has never been more popular and has in addition become more self-conscious of the “specialness” of its nature and of its literary position as the generator of paradigms, tropes, and conventions for the genre. Such leading younger writers as Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin have become vigorous defenders of hard SF. The most recent reformers of hard SF, the cyberpunks (most especially Bruce Sterling and William Gibson), have attempted a fusion of the Gothic mode, with its stylistic sophistication and noir atmosphere, and the heavily technological concerns and essential metaphysics of hard SF. The fallout from the work of in particular Sterling (see Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, with its polemical introduction) and Gibson (whose novel Neuromancer is the primary cyberpunk literary text), who adulate respectively Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, has yet to become clear. But their work has been instrumental in bringing the argument about hard SF to the forefront. And cyberpunk is always referred to in discussions of contemporary hard SF, if only to deny that the movement had any lasting effect. Today the main body of science fiction results from a mixture of literary influences (having more or less absorbed the Wellsian and integrated many of the techniques of the Modernists) and paraliterary or extraliterary influences (films, comic books, and popular science writing, to name three) and can profitably be viewed as Postmodern SF—the shadow of Postmodern high-culture literature—just as Modern SF was the shadow of Modernist literature.
Yet hard SF remains a vital current flowing through significant contemporary works in the genre and preserves its position as the repository of new ideas and images drawn from new science and technology. And it retains its anti-Modernist spirit. It is still SF with “the right stuff.” The best of it is still a model to which the rest of the genre may aspire.
Perhaps it will in the end be forced aside by a postmodern successor, or trivialized into military SF nearly exclusively (and therefore successfully marginalized), or simply steam-rollered into the ground by the hordes of character-driven young writers on the make to whom science is irrelevant. No one, in the end, will defend bad writing over good. But we agree with Frederik Pohl’s aphorism: “Good style is the problem solved.”
APPENDIX V
DOLLARS AND DRAGONS: THE TRUTH ABOUT FANTASY
(This essay, slightly revised here, was first published in The New York Times Book Review. It was written for the general audience and was intended to defend fantasy without a special lowering of literary standards. No special Olympics for fantasy writers.)
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In less than two decades—from out of nowhere, it seems—a vigorous literary subgenre has been created that accounts for nearly ten percent of all fiction sales in the United States. Mass-market publishers did it with the women’s Gothic romance. They did it with the contemporary romance genre. Now they’ve done it with fantasy.
They tried it with science fiction but it didn’t really work because they couldn’t capture enough female readers; all the polls show that the majority of readers of mass-market fiction are women. Besides, the writers kept coming up with new ideas, and new ideas are hard to market. After all, one doesn’t expect one Chevrolet or one can of tuna fish to stand above the others. New ideas throw you off and require individual effort for each book. Fantasy, like the marketing genres before it, has been made predictable, has eliminated new ideas and can now be sold as product.
Fantasy promises escape from reality. It is characteristic of fantasy stories that they take the readers out of the real worlds of hard facts, hard objects, and hard decisions into a world of wonders and enchantments, a world that need not be either frivolous or inherently juvenile.
Fantasy fiction has been a significant part of literature since the early Gothic novels (such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and William Beckford’s Vathek) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; as the form was developing, the earliest short stories were often fantasy stories. Indeed, tales of wonder and the fantastic are integral to all world literature, are as old as recorded human imaginative thought. But as far as most serious readers today are concerned, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when Victorian culture demoted it to children’s stories, fantasy fiction in English is for kids. Famous works—from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll through The Book of the Three Dragons by Kenneth Morris to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin—have tended to emerge from children’s or young adult publishing.
Fantasy for adults has been a rare, unusual, and in large part unfashionable pleasure for nearly a century. I recall that when I was assigned E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel at Williams College in 1961, the chapter on fantasy was skipped. Later I read it and was introduced to such delights as Flecker’s Magic by Norman Matson. The whole Modernist movement in literature rejected fantasy and dominated literary fashion to the extent that, for instance, James Branch Cabell’s whole body of ornate mandarin fiction is nearly lost from sight, now no more seriously considered than Tarzan of the Apes, though both were once read by adults for at least a generation.
So unfashionable did fantastic works become that fantasy was taken in during the thirties and forties under the umbrella of the growing anti-Modernist science fiction field, in such magazines as Unknown, Fantastic Adventures, and (beginning in 1949) The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The latter is still very much a living magazine, though the era of commercial fiction magazines is long gone. Still, the notion that literate adults might read fantasy for pleasure did not take hold again until recently and is still a dubious proposition for most readers, given the amount of obvious silliness, junk, and fiction for the immature on the adult fantasy bookshelves.
It all started, in terms of category publishing, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. This unique masterpiece of contemporary literature, praised by W. H. Auden and many others in the 1950s, became a cult classic and a mass-market best-seller by the 1960s. Tolkien’s sales paid the light bills for its publisher, Ballantine Books, for nearly a decade; being smart publishers, Ian and Betty Ballantine cast about looking for ways to repeat that phenomenon (as did Donald A. Wollheim, the other publisher of Tolkien, at Ace Book.) It took years.
First the Ballantines tried reprinting in paper other uniquely individual and powerfully original works excluded from the modernist canon: Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, E.R.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and his Zimiamvian Trilogy. Then, in the late 1960s, they founded the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, reprinting a book a month from sometime in the past century, bringing into mass editions nearly all the fantasy stories and novels worth reading—from William Morris’s georgeous medievalism to Evangeline Walton’s literate retellings of Welsh mythology, Clark Ashton Smith’s poetic visions, George MacDonald’s moral allegories, and H. P. Lovecraft’s magnificent darkness. And, of course, the novels of James Branch Cabell. However, to their consternation, only the Conan the Barbarian series from Lancer Books really caught on, with those now-famous Frank Frazetta covers. Associated series, such as Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series and Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, rode the crest too. Barbarian fantasy sold, and it was the conventional wisdom that it sold to teenage readers, not to the wider Tolkien audience.
Adult fantasy didn’t sell well enough in its classic forms for Ballantine to support it, and the series was discontinued after several years, leaving in print only a few contemporary monuments, such as Peter S. Beagle’s lively and sentimental classic The Last Unicorn. Yet Ballantine knew that some kind of breakthrough had been made, that there was a market out there of adults, as well as teenagers, who read and were still reading Tolkien in the millions and who could be sold fantasy if the right way could be found. And then they found it.
Lester del Rey, a Ballantine consulting editor, found it in the form of a m
anuscript by Terry Brooks entitled The Sword of Shannara. He went to Ron Busch, then the publisher of Ballantine Books, and mapped out his strategy. They would take this slavish imitation of Tolkien by an unknown writer and create a best-seller using mass-marketing techniques, and so satisfy the hunger in the marketplace for more Tolkien. Mr. del Rey, an experienced pulp editor and writer (he had edited a fantasy magazine in the fifties) knew what he was about—and it worked, much to the amazement and admiration of all the other marketers in publishing.
Shortly thereafter, the Del Rey fantasy imprint was founded, with its criteria set up by Lester del Rey. The books would be original novels set in invented worlds in which magic works. Each would have a male central character who triumphed over evil (usually associated with technical knowledged of some variety) by innate virtue, and with the help of a tutor or tutelary spirit. Mr. del Rey had codified a children’s literature that could be sold as adult. It was nostalgic, conservative, pastoral, and optimistic. One critic, Kathryn Cramer, seeking an explanation for why an American audience would adopt and support such a body of fiction, has remarked that it was essentially a revival of the form of the utopian novel of the old South, the plantation novel, in which life is rich and good, the lower classes are happy in their place and sing a lot, and evil resides in the technological North. The plot is the Civil War run backward: The South wins. That pattern seems to fit a majority of recent fantasy works well.
The covers would be rich, detailed illustrations of a colorful scene. Since unknown writers would be used, the cover art and production were often more costly than the advance paid to the writer. Through this process Mr. del Rey discovered another unknown writer, Stephen R. Donaldson—whose The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, which focuses on an ordinary man with leprosy transported into a fantasy land where he is forced to be a hero, is a work of great psychological power. (Joanna Russ has published a delicious parody, “Dragons and Dimwits,” whose hero, Thomas, points out the conspicuous unrealistic absence of meals: “By St. Marx, and St. Engels,” said Thomas, “and by St. Common Sense, I declare that neither thou nor thy people eatest or drinkest in the least (for I have never seen them do it) but subsistest upon fancies and fooleries imagined out of thin air.”) The series made Donaldson into an enormous best-seller, thus proving the repeatability of del Rey’s experiment on the largest scale in publishing.
By the late seventies, the success of the Del Rey formula was so confirmed that many other publishers began to publish in imitation. Dragons and unicorns began to appear all over the mass-market racks, and packaging codes with the proper subliminal and overt signals developed. A whole new mass-market genre had been established. One can understand it best in comparison to the toy market’s discovery that you can sell dolls to boys if you call them action figures and make them hypermasculine. Writers such as Piers Anthony, a moderately successful and respected science fiction author who switched to fantasy, and Anne McCaffrey, a science fiction writer whose novels of a world of dragons could be marketed as fantasy, became Del Rey best-sellers. Everyone wanted in.
In the eighties, most mass-market publishers did get in. Trilogies were the order of the day. Some writers complained that publishers often requested revisions to the endings of their fantasy works so that a single novel, if popular, might be extended by two more volumes. Lou Aronica, then a Bantam vice-president responsible for his company’s fantasy publishing program, was interviewed in Science Fiction Eye magazine on his program’s long-term success in publishing some works of high quality and low sales. “One of the reasons I have been able to do it for longer,” he said, “is that I’ve been a little bit more willing to sell out for my list. I’ve published books that I don’t like editorially, that I understand will sell a lot of copies.” The implications of that attitude are manifest on book racks everywhere.
In the 1990s, we as readers are the inheritors of this phenomenon. Unquestionably, it created an enormous wave of trash writing to fill the neurotic hungers of an established audience trained in the seventies and later to accept tiny nuances and gestures overlaying mediocrity and repetition as true originality. Mr. Aronica commented that negative remarks from readers and critics “are actually being echoed in the responses we’ve seen in the marketplace. A lot of epic fantasy doesn’t sell nearly as well as it used to sell, probably because there aren’t too many new avenues being taken in epic fantasy, and readers are saying, ‘Hey, I’ve read this book already, in fact I’ve read this book about fourteen times.’” It is enough to make one distrust all multivolume category works and any book with a unicorn depicted on the cover.
Yet the fantasy tradition in literature remains, at its peaks, a distinguished one. The Latin American school of magic realism, surely a literature for mature readers and widely influential in translation, is beyond the scope of this survey, but it should be noted that the editor of the respected Avon Books Latin American reprint program was also for a number of years Avon’s fantasy and science fiction editor, John R. Douglas. Authentic works of the literary imagination have emerged in recent decades and should not be ignored by association with humble (category) origins.
The various kinds of fashionable fiction in America have progressively, since the thirties, become obsessed with technique and with the nuances and gestures of ordinary characters in ordinary situations. They have exhausted in particular every avenue imaginable in illuminating the inner life of characters. Fantasy, on the other hand, manifests and dramatizes internal and psychological states, images, and struggles as external and concrete, and focuses on the external actions of its characters. Fantasy fiction takes the reader clearly out of the world of reality. Sometimes the story begins in the “real” world, but it quickly becomes evident that behind the veil of real things and people another world exists, rich and strange and magical. The fantasy takes place in a world in which moral coordinates are clear and distinct, in a landscape in which moral qualities are most often embodied in major characters other than the central character (who is usually at first portrayed as an Everyman, a fairly ordinary person of no particular consequence in the world). But the central character becomes a crucial figure in a struggle between good and evil. This pattern has rich artistic possibilities when properly executed, especially when in the hands of the finest writers working in fantasy today.
There is a body of work, much of it published originally in paperback in the last two decades, which has not generally received adequate recognition for its literary excellence because of its origins in category publishing. Samuel R. Delany has written a four-volume work set in an imaginary world, Nevèrÿon, that is a masterpiece of imagination and stylistic innovation. John Crowley’s Little, Big is a dense, literate novel that is a standard against which others are now measured. Gene Wolfe’s novels and stories—particularly the four-volume Book of the New Sun; its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun; and his novel, Soldier of the Mist—are a significant contribution to American literature and the most important body of work in the fantasy field of the eighties and early nineties.
The biggest new name of the 1990s is Robert Jordan, whose Wheel of Time series, in the tradition of Tolkien, is the biggest commercial success since Tolkien’s trilogy—an impressive achievement.
And there are books by a number of younger writers: Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, which challenges the moral assumptions of the category, and shuns magic, in prose that cuts like a blade; Orson Scott Card’s multi-volume Tales of Alvin Maker, which reimagines America according to Mormonism and retells the life of Joseph Smith, the religion’s founder; Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, which turns the hidden world of Eastern European Jews during the 1940s into a world of wonders, then transcends the Holocaust with a magical optimism; Terry Bisson’s Talking Man, which tells of a cosmic battle that begins and ends in a junkyard in Kentucky.
And there are more: Paul Hazel’s Yearwood, which breathes new life and intensity into a Celtic mythological world; Suzy McKee Charnas’s cool, literat
e biography of a vampire in today’s world, The Vampire Tapestry; Jonathan Carroll’s slick novels of the contemporary world transformed by the fantastic, including The Land of Laughs and Bones of the Moon; and Guy Gavriel Kay’s authentic reimagining of the Tolkienesque trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry. All these works have individual excellences that are expanding the boundaries of stylistic and imaginative achievement in fantasy and in contemporary literature. Look for these names to produce the innovative works of the next decade.
While genre fantasy may still dominate the market, the fantastic in literature is healthy and growing in America. There are signs that the dominance of the genre by the best-selling, intensively marketed books, while it prevails, does provide a publishing home and a supportive audience for writers and for works of quality otherwise unsupported by fashion. As a mass-market phenomenon, the fantasy field can perhaps be understood as protectively covering a small body of work that is experimenting successfully with unfashionable techniques and subject matter rejected by the general literary culture in our time. And it seems a bad time for serious adult readers to reject, wholesale, the tale of wonder and the illumination of the human condition that fantasy has brought us throughout history.
APPENDIX VI
EDITING THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
(This essay was written for the second edition, 1985, of the classic book Editors on Editing. Although it repeats a few pieces of information from the main text of Age of Wonders, it is included here for the additional dimension and for the different point of view from the one I adopted to write Age.)
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Almost all mass-market paperback editors are specialists, often multiple specialists. This has been subtly enforced upon the industry by the distribution system: Paperbacks are brought to the mass market through the national magazine distribution agencies as a secondary aspect of their business. Although the growth of the paperback bookstore is a force for change in the last fifteen years, the magazine distributors still dominate. (As one wag informed me early in my publishing career, all the distributors went to high school together in 1939 and they haven’t learned anything since.) Paperback companies publish books monthly (as do many magazines) and the unsold books are stripped of their covers and destroyed, while the covers are returned for credit. But further than that, as the selection of titles offered each month has evolved, publishers have established monthly slots to compete with and replace the older pulp magazine categories with which the distributors are familiar.
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