Science fiction is the only branch of literature whose poorer examples are almost invariably used by critics outside the form to attack all of it. A lousy western is a lousy western, a seriously intentioned novel that falls apart is a disaster . . . but a science fiction novel that fails illuminates the inadequacy of the genre, the hollowness of the fantastic vision, the banality of the sci-fi writer . . . this phenomenon is as old as the American genre itself (in fact for the first quarter century post-Gernsback, outside media would not even review science fiction), and as fresh as the latest rotten book.
Not so long ago, a weak and overextended bildungsroman by a newer writer was attacked spitefully in a publication called The Soho Weekly News; Jonathan Rosenbaum used the first two-thirds of the review to vilify and the rest to conclude that sci-fi writers could not deal with contemporary reality because they apotheosized machinery over mortality, stripped humanity in their fiction of dignity and drained it of the capacity to feel. In so saying, Rosenbaum was not only indicating complete ignorance of most of the serious work done in science fiction since the early 1950s but was patently using a novel by a young writer of indifferent reputation (and no particular standing within the field) to vilify the genre.
The unhappy case is typical. Kingsley Amis wrote a quatrain about it once upon a time. In a 1972 book of literary essays, Rediscoveries, devoted to the favorite lost novels of writers of reputation, Walker Percy, in cautiously praising Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (a novel which has never been "lost" to science fiction but which has been continuously in print since its first appearance in 1959), took the most elaborate pains to point out that although the novel had the trappings of "pop sci-fi" it had a more serious undercurrent, that elements of mysticism and religious ambivalence verging on apostasy (subjects close to Percy's own artistic sensibility) were handled in a fashion more complex than was usually the case in science fiction . . . and that the novel might actually reward study by serious readers who would otherwise find science fiction of little interest. It was almost as if Percy had to balance off his enthrallment with Canticle against a real fear that unrestricted praise, read in the wrong quarters, could threaten his credentials as a "serious" writer. Never has so trembling a testimony been given a novel. (Reminiscent of the eulogy hesitantly offered for the Meanest Man in Town, "well," the minister said after a long, awkward pause, "he never missed a spittoon.") And in a review of my own Guernica Night some years back Joyce Carol Gates took pains to make clear that the novel's concerns were, um, spiritual and metaphysical and that its virtues came from it being unlike the science fiction to which she was accustomed.
Science fiction, as I say, stands alone in literature as being forced to judgment by its weaker examples, denied in praise of its best. Outside of literature there are other examples: the question of racial prejudice, for instance, parallels the member of the minority must "be a good example of his race" and in so doing exhibits virtues which make him "not really like the rest of them at all" and the bad example sets the standard—"they're all like that." Modern music is like this: infrequent performances of it by the major orchestras as part of the subscription program often lead to venomous critical attacks upon the entire specter of the dissonant or atonal (Pierre Boulez might have been pressed off the podium of the New York Philharmonic for programming so much of that crazy modern junk), and contemporary painters, sculptors, or avant-garde directors of stage or film know exactly what I mean. Every weak example of the form is there to be used to pillory all of it. "Modern music," "modern art," "modern dance" become as indistinguishable for the infuriated critic (and by implication his audience) as does, pity its shriveled heart, "science fiction."
Is it because the genre is dangerous and threatening, implies a statement and view of the world which is unbearable for the unaccustomed? Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) theorizes so in an essay—afterword to her story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" some years ago; postwar science fiction raised the possibility that our fate was uncontrollable and the machines were going to blow us out of existence, and the middle class as represented by the critics fled this insight, Oh please, oh please tell us that it is our swimming pools and martinis and mistresses and angst which make us so unhappy, not radioactive dust or the mad engines. After one brief, terrified look at genre science fiction in the early postwar period, the middle class flung it into furthest darkness and dived into the swimming pools of O'Hara's or Cheever's suburbs, the forests of Truman Capote or Eudora Welty's night: they wanted no part of the possibility that technology had appropriated the sense or the control within their lives. But still within is that fear of the nihilistic aspect of science fiction to which they were briefly exposed, a nihilism—which like that of modern art, modern music, street theater or mime—suggests that none of the devices of preventative maintenance (adultery, alcohol, industry, prayer) really matter much at all.
Which means that our worst examples (or even our mediocrities) will be used over and again as a club to beat away the form; that our best will be ignored and that all of it will be denied.
Ah but still. Still, oh still. Still Kazin, Broyard, Epstein, Podhoretz, and Howe: grinding away slowly in the center of all purpose, taking us to the millennium: the engines of the night.
—1980: New Jersey