by Ben Bova
Science fiction, by contrast, was exploring new territory and spawned many minirevolutions that really did open new ground.
The Campbellians, writers of what is now called “hard science fiction,” insisted on fiction that took real science seriously.
Once Heinlein pointed the way, more and more writers in the 1950s began to regard character-in-society as another vital aspect of what they considered “good” science fiction. Even the hard SF writers began to follow suit, insofar as they were able.
The New Wave of the 1960s began to allow literary pyrotechnics to slip in front of the story—but rarely so far that the reader couldn’t see how the tale still conformed to the requirements of the other kinds of science fiction.
Through all this period—the 1930s to the 1970s—there were groups of writers starting up minimovements; there were stars who sometimes spawned imitators or staked out lonely territory; there were manifestos and attacks and the occasional death threat, thus certifying how serious everybody was.
But underneath all of this was one deep, significant fact: the audience for science fiction kept growing. They were hungry for new work, new voices; they demanded that we take them to new worlds and new cultures and new technologies that would stretch their minds.
Each new movement, each new star, increased the number of readers—and the number of kinds of science fiction there were. In fact, looked at with historical perspective, it is clear that through this period science fiction was literature.
Of course the writers and works from older literary movements did not disappear, especially because the institution of the university English department gave them an artificial lease on life; anyone who studied official literature was taught to despise science fiction and continue to admire or at least imitate the transformative writers of modernism.
But only science fiction was explosively productive of new critical standards, new literary perspectives, new kinds of stories.
And then it ended.
Because it always ends.
By the late 1970s, which is precisely when I entered the field, we’d pretty much dried up. Momentum carried us forward; but the revolution was over, and, try as we might, nobody could come up with a new one. All the kinds of science fiction already existed.
Yes, yes, I know. Cyberpunk. As a movement it was born of Bruce Sterling’s attack on the consensus sci-fi that had emerged—everybody seemed to be writing fiction set in each other’s futures. To show what should be happening, if the sci-fi revolution was to continue, Sterling pointed to the work of William Gibson as an example.
But the resulting “movement” did not consist of new ways of writing fiction or even a new flowering of innovative futures, as Sterling had hoped. Instead, it resulted in imitation—people who picked up on the superficial aspects of Gibson’s work and imitated it. A mere category.
In other words, science fiction was doing just what modernism had done a generation before: it still pretended to have revolutions, but they were cosmetic, not substantive. You would buy and read cyberpunk rather the way you would buy and read Star Wars novels.
I am saying nothing against the individual writers of cyberpunk—or Star Wars novels. There is nothing inherently good about revolutions—literary or otherwise. They are only good if they lead to something good. And even when literary revolutions pass their peak and become the establishment, they can still nurture wonderful writers who produce powerful works of fiction.
My point is merely that the revolution was over.
Here are some of the indications:
1. We recognize all the kinds of science fiction and nobody is making new ones. There are time travel stories, alternate histories, anthropological sci-fi, techno-porn, military sci-fi, literary sci-fi (merging two revolutions past their prime), adventure sci-fi, social commentary sci-fi, hard sci-fi…Maybe I’ve overlooked something but as far as I can determine, there hasn’t been a new kind of science fiction since the late 1970s.
2. We are becoming annoyingly respectable. More and more universities are teaching science fiction courses, and not just as a way to beef up the enrollment in English courses. We have a new generation of professors who grew up on Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness and Foundation and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Childhood’s End and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
3. Derivative writers in other genres are now stealing from us. Many of the “postmodern” writers in the literary field were and are able to “prove” they were and are different from modernism by…writing science fiction.
4. Our penetration of the public consciousness is complete. It’s hard to find a single important idea in science fiction that is not already familiar to the well-read portion of the general public. And through movies and television shows, which are finally catching up with print sci-fi, our field’s ideas have reached far beyond the audience of readers.
5. Our space on the shelves in the bookstores is shrinking. Science fiction’s ability to generate new stars is declining. The public no longer looks to us to take them places they have never been. They look to us now as a way to get back to where they have been before and want to return—not a revolutionary, but a conservative impulse. The media tie-in novels are not an aberration, they are the primary way that many, perhaps most, people experience all science fiction.
When a literary revolution has stopped being productive of new ways of telling stories or kinds of stories to tell, it may not be dead, but it’s dying.
Not in the sense that its tools and tricks will disappear, but in the sense that its boundary no longer has any particular reason to exist. When science fiction is studied a century from now, it will be studied as a closed period of literature, and I believe that the close will be marked somewhere between 1980 and 2000.
What took the place of science fiction? What was the new revolution, or at least the new generation, that supplanted us?
Let’s keep in mind that there isn’t necessarily a new generation. A literary movement can die by dissolving its boundaries; it doesn’t have to be killed.
But I think that the enormous burst of creativity in the mystery genre in the 1980s and 1990s may well come to be seen as the literary forefront. Certainly the mystery field broke into many different kinds of mystery just the way science fiction had in the decades before. In the 1960s there were mystery stars, of course, and there had even been something of a movement with the “hard-boiled detective” novel, but it was in the 1980s and 1990s that mystery broke open into the multifaceted genre that, like science fiction, allows people to write vastly different fictions that are still regarded as being “in category.”
So we have cozies and hard-boiled detectives, yes, but we also have historicals and mystery romances and legal thrillers and comic mysteries and police procedurals and…
It had been to the advantage of sci-fi not to be set in the real world; mystery had the advantage of being set there. We had “sense of wonder”; they had “trusted reality.”
But that revolution is over, too. It isn’t that the repetitions of Law & Order killed the genre—just like science fiction, there are still excellent novels being written. But there are no new kinds. The nonprint media have brought all the existing kinds to the saturation point, but that was because all the innovation was over and it was safe to go there now, just as Star Trek and Star Wars proved that science fiction was dying or dead as a literary genre, but did not cause that death.
If mystery is dead, what’s next?
Again, it could be nothing. It’s quite possible to have establishment literature and commercial publishing categories proceed without anything new or important coming along at all. (Though that might easily be a clear symptom of a culture in decline.)
But there might be a new movement, and it might also be fantasy.
How can fantasy be the “new” movement? It’s older than dirt!
Yes, of course, but not as a category and not as a movement.
Before the invention of the
novel (yes, even the novel was once a literary revolution), there was the romance, and when we read the pre-novel romances, we recognize them as what would now be called fantasy. The variations tended to be in subject matter (Arthur and Britain; Roland and Charlemagne) and the nation of origin.
But it wasn’t a category, because that was all there was. The novel was a rebellion against it, an insistence on realistic characters in realistic settings; tales of common people (though usually still of a moneyed class—no surprise; who was buying the books?); and prose that echoed the vernacular instead of elevated, poetic, heroic language.
Fantastic elements continued, of course, cropping up in gothic, horror, and other categories of fiction.
And there were writers who almost made it a category—George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany. The popularity of Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz books could have led to a literary movement. But any such movement was killed by lumping them in with “children’s literature,” which effectively forbade adults to take them seriously.
But fantasy smoldered there, a fire that could never quite be put out. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were in the generation that grew up on the fantasy elements of children’s literature—talking animal tales, fairy stories—as well as being of the last generation to be nursed on Homeric and Virgilian gods. When science fiction came along, they recognized it as having potential to recover the magical experience of their childhood reading and imagining—certainly sci-fi contained plenty of magic and plenty of gods, however they might be disguised behind machines.
But Tolkien never got around to writing his science fiction project, and Lewis’s is, in my opinion, not very good. Instead, both of them did their finest fiction writing in the area of fantasy, transforming it in the process.
Lewis’s Narnia series was not transformative, of course—it remained children’s literature and religious literature. But his novel Till We Have Faces took a god-story and remade it as an adult novel—that is, realistic in its handling of the details of milieu and highly personal in its handling of character.
Tolkien’s The Hobbit was also, like Narnia, intended to be (and sold as) children’s literature. But as he flailed about in the Old Forest, struggling to find a story that could be a sequel to The Hobbit, he came upon his character Strider in the inn at Bree and recognized that he was not writing children’s literature at all anymore.
The others in the Inklings, Tolkien’s literary society, were eventually unsupportive of the endeavor as they realized that Tolkien was really Serious about The Lord of the Rings and meant to go on and on. And when the novel came out, the British publisher, Gollancz, scarcely knew how to market it. Yes, it was a sequel to The Hobbit, but it was most emphatically not children’s literature; they knew it was important and wonderful, but what in the world do you call it?
All those languages, all that adult politics, and the surprising dearth of magic. High heroic prose of elf and human lords mixed with the common speech of the hobbits. How do you sell such a thing?
You just print it. Because it turned out that the audience for romance had not gone away. It was still there, snatching bits of it wherever they could be found—in horror, in children’s literature, in fairy tales, in science fiction. But Tolkien showed how it could be done openly, as a goal in itself.
When The Lord of the Rings came to America, Ian Ballantine led the fight to publish it as a serious work of fiction rather than children’s literature. It was hard to break out of the niche into which fantastic literature had been crammed.
Lester del Rey tried to do for fantasy what Gernsback had done for science fiction—create it as a publishing category. At first there were reprints of the books that had inspired Tolkien and Lewis. Then, inevitably, there were the books that were shameless imitations of Tolkien—but they sold. Tolkien had, in fact, spawned a category.
Not yet a movement.
But there were stirrings. Nobody could call Donaldson’s first Thomas Covenant trilogy derivative of Tolkien, or at least not just of Tolkien. And there were others who did work that was new.
Fantasy, as a living movement, was fully born as a hybrid, as Atheneum published library hardcovers of fantasy novels in the children’s fiction category, and then Del Rey published the paperback as adult category fantasy. Suddenly the jacket copy on fantasy books no longer had to look like Tolkien or refer to Tolkien.
McKillip’s The Throme of the Erril of Sherill and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and The Riddlemaster of Hed, as well as LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy, came out as children’s literature precisely at the time that children’s lit was purportedly becoming painfully realistic, with Judy Blume leading the charge toward fiction that was about real children in the real world.
The realistic children’s writers had their own movement within their field, an enormously productive one. The fantasy writers moved out of kid lit, however, and found a welcome in the shadow of science fiction.
I saw a few bookstores that tried to separate the categories, but it was both impossible and pointless. Readers who came looking for books by the stars didn’t want to have to worry about whether Glory Road was fantasy or sci-fi—it was Heinlein, and it should be where Heinlein books were grouped. Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away had to be shelved right along with his Ringworld.
There were fantasy writers who never wrote sci-fi, and scifi writers who never wrote fantasy. But there was enough crossover among writers and readers that it was just annoying to have to check two sections in the bookstore.
Over the years, however, the balance has shifted. Fantasy is fragmenting and growing. The fragmentation begins with dominant writers who stake out a territory.
Stephen King, Thomas Tryon, and Dean Koontz worked the same territory on the border between horror and psychological fiction, with Clive Barker adding a bit more blood to the mix.
Rowling’s Harry Potter series spawns another subcategory, which is usually put in the children’s section of the bookstore, but in fact draws many of the same readers—some young, some old.
But not all young adult fantasy owes a debt to Rowling. Shannon Hale, Hillary Bell, Tamora Pierce, Brandon Mull, Mette Ivie Harrison, and many others are writing highly original fantasies that echo all the adult subcategories and show them to be every bit as inventive and resourceful.
Anne Rice launched the vampire subcategory that is now subdividing further, with, of course, many writers riding the line between YA and adult fiction—Stephenie Meyer comes to mind.
Trilogies and series dominate, but the exciting thing, for me, is the way that the current crop of fantasy writers steal from every source and make it work. The South American magic realists provoked English-language imitations, but one can hardly call Terry Bisson’s fiction “derivative.”
I remember back in 1988, when I read Bruce Fergusson’s seminal “In the Shadow of His Wings,” thinking: this is fantasy as the most serious world-creating sci-fi writers would do it. Fergusson himself didn’t follow up, but the method thrives, as Robin Hobb, George R. R. Martin, Kate Elliott, Brandon Sanderson, and Lynn Flewelling have created masterpieces of thoroughly created worlds that, instead of imitating Tolkien’s choices, imitate his method of creation.
In all these subcategories, the writers show themselves capable of creating enduring characters without sacrificing the great strengths of fantasy: noble deeds and heroic prose, literalized metaphors of real-world power, thick world creation, and nostalgia for an imagined golden age—both in the past of the world and in the past of the reader, as the reader recovers versions of both childhood and ancient lore.
There is, of course, much wretched work—but that is true of every literary movement.
Fantasy and media-based sci-fi aren’t pushing “real science fiction” off the shelves; the readers and writers are doing that. And it’s not really a matter of pushing great work away—terrific writers who want to write and sell science fiction have plenty of opportunities, and sci-fi writers can still command broad stretches of that
section in the bookstore.
Rather, science fiction, by its own decadence and fading away, is creating a vacuum that something was going to fill. We should be glad that what is now taking its place is a movement so harmonious with science fiction.
The way I see it, fantasy isn’t so much a new revolution as a new generation. Science fiction was no longer a vibrant movement; the revolution was won; so some of the best writers struck out for new lands in which to set tales that used all the skills they had learned from science fiction’s many subrevolutions, and the category they found was fantasy.
So fantasy is not destroying or even replacing sci-fi so much as it is fulfilling it and continuing to evolve it.
During all those years that romance was suppressed, it kept squeezing itself out because readers—including those who also became writers—hungered for the magic that the novel rejected.
With science fiction first, and now with fantasy, heroic romance found ways to burst again into bloom. One generation created the seeds of the next. There is no need for the two generations to quarrel. They grew in the same soil and share most of the same literary DNA.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE, SHORT STORY
THE WOMAN IN SCHRÖDINGER’S WAVE EQUATIONS
EUGENE MIRABELLI
Not every nominated story can win a Nebula Award, but the field of science fiction and fantasy is so rich with talent that even a story that did not win is well worth inclusion in this anthology: witness Eugene Mirabelli’s “The Woman in Schrödinger’s Wave Equations.”
Gene Mirabelli is the author of six novels, plus short stories, poems, and many journalistic pieces. He admits to being at least seventy-six years old. Mirabelli taught in the graduate writing program at the State University of New York at Albany during its heyday, and currently contributes political articles and reviews to an alternative newsweekly with a focus on the arts.
