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Some Notes Toward the True and the Terrible

I first made reference to the true and terrible unwritten history of science fiction in a review of James Gunn's Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction in 1975, but did not begin to develop the concept until I spoke at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. Standing at the podium, shaking with fever, ampicillin, dread and wonder that any stranger would pay $3.75 cash on the barrelhead to listen to me,16 I said that the history of science fiction must, by definition, exist truly in the interstices, that by definition the field could be explained only by material which would be by turns libelous, private, intuitive, or paranoid and that even the most rigorous and lucid of scholarly works could deal only with symptomatic representations of the great underside of the field.

Surely I must have been anticipating that May the publication, a year and a half later, of the dense, scholarly, and invaluable Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls (the best reference work on our field which has appeared to date), because the Nicholls work manages through one intricate, brilliantly cross-referenced and almost impishly accurate volume to make clear to insiders and outsiders alike practically everything about science fiction that they would need to know to get through doctoral orals except for two factors: (a) How it got this way and (b) why it has its peculiar and binding effect upon a readership, a larger proportion of which are emotionally involved with the literature than the readers of any other genre.

The Encyclopedia reminds me of the one-line criticism of Shaw's plays: that a literate alien could, from them alone, deduce everything about humanity except that it possessed genitals. Nicholls and his staff make everything about science fiction comprehensible except the existence of a 700,000-word trade paperback about it which can expect to sell eventually well over a million copies. Try that in quality lit, mystery, or romance. The Gothic Encyclopedia? The Illustrated History of Literary Writing? Barlow's Book of Flannery O'Connor?

The true unwritten history is where the answers lie and the unwritten history cannot—by definition, he pointed out laboriously—be composed. In a spirit of scholarship and sacrifice, however, I would like to offer a few notes, leads as it were toward what it would contain and with what it would have to deal. Perhaps by the end of the twenty-first century when all of us now reading, writing, and propitiating the category are all safely dead and with the evolution of low-feed, multiplex stereophonic videotape cassette recall, the abolition of the written, that is to say, the true unwritten history might be retrieved.

To the unborn and penitent, hence, a few suggestions:

1) "Modern" science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloomsbury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90 percent of the writing and the editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one another well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other's material, married each other's wives and so on. For a field which was conceptually based upon expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular. One could fairly speculate that this insularity and parochialism were the understandable attempts of frightened human beings faced with terra incognita to hold on to one another and to make their personal lives as limited and interconnected as possible. It could be speculated further that this parochialism shut off an entire alternative science fiction. (Alexei Panshin has intimated this possibility but not this particular set of reasons.) Who is to know what writers and manuscripts not connected in any way to the Central Fifty languished in slush piles or in stamped, self-addressed envelopes? Science fiction simply was not for them; it was being cooked up in offices and bars and bedrooms and apartment houses; people would stream from Central to write it all up in their own way and send it back in (and then write up next month's issue taking up the stuff already laid down in print), but the field was based on personal access and very few writers and stories were getting into the magazines without personal acquaintance with other writers and with the editors. The first thing that Damon Knight did in the forties as a science fiction writer manque was to accept Fred Pohl's invitation to come out from Oregon to Brooklyn and live with the Futurian Club; the young Asimov was introduced to present contributors by Campbell before Asimov had sold a word; Malcolm Jameson, pensioned off by the Navy for medical reasons, began to write science fiction (and became, briefly, an Astounding regular in the mid-forties) at the urgings of his old friend and fellow Navy officer Robert A. Heinlein.

2) One of the clear symptoms of editorial decline (this ties, in a way, to the point above but only by suggestion; hear me out) is the increasing proportion of material in a magazine or book line written by a decreasing number of contributors; venery, laziness, exhaustion, or friendship seem to make almost any long-term editorship vulnerable to this condition. (I am not saying that science fiction in this case is any different from any other genre.) The Astounding of the late nineteen-fifties had narrowed to four or five regular contributors in between whom a few asteroids squeezed the short stories: Silverberg, Anvil, Garrett, Janifer/Harris, and Reynolds must have accounted for seventy percent of the magazine's contents in the period—1958 to 1962. Over at Galaxy Fred Pohl, Robert Sheckley, and Philip M. Klass must have contributed more than half the contents in the last three years of Horace Gold's editorship (1957—1960). This is not to dispute that this core group might have overtaken the magazines simply because they were the best, at least in terms of meeting the editorial vision (and there is no disputing that the Galaxy group at least includes three of the finest writers of science fiction thus far), but the consequences of such narrowing are obvious; the medium becomes insular and ambitious potential contributors become discouraged. There is, needless to say, a fine line an editor must tread between gathering the best writers he can and encouraging them . . . and buying from friends and familiars, but there is such a line of clear demarcation: Campbell in the early forties was on one side of it and in the late fifties on the other, and the quality of work and its persistence today (little of the late fifties Astounding is now reprinted) constitute judgment.

3) The clearest signal of Campbell's loosened grip and influence on the field from 1960 (the time at which his obsessive pursuit of pseudoscientific chicanery became his editorial obsession rather than weakness) is to compile a list of those writers who arose to prominence in that decade who never published in his magazine. Once for my amusement a long time ago (in the last couple of years of his life, for I hoped that he would see it) I did so and published it in Science Fiction Review. Here is a partial (I am sure to miss someone) list of science fiction writers who did not appear in Analog from the issue of January 1960 until the last issue assembled by Campbell dated December 1971: J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Larry Niven, Michael Moorcock, R. A. Lafferty, George Alec Effinger, Gardner R. Dozois, A. J. Budrys, Terry Carr, Kate Wilhelm, George Zebrowski, Norman Kagan, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Pamela Sargent, Robert Sheckley, Roger Zelazny.

Silverberg almost makes the list; his last story was in the February 1960 issue (sold, of course, in the fifties). Tiptree's first story and one other appeared in Analog; Niven's first piece, published at last in 1972, was apparently Campbell's last purchase.

And yet. And yet when I heard of Campbell's sudden death on July 11, 1971, and informed Larry Janifer, I trembled at Janifer's response and knew that it was so: "The field has lost its conscience, its center, the man for whom we were all writing. Now there's no one to get mad at us anymore."

 

1980: New Jersey

 

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