This exchange outside the student/faculty cafeteria at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 7/22/89:
Bruce Sterling: Fifty years old and still writing! That would be horrible! When I'm fifty I hope I won't be still writing and involved in all this shit. I'd rather be dead than that pathetic.
Barry N. Malzberg: Oh, come on, Bruce. I'm fifty years old, well, I'll be fifty on Monday and I'm still writing or at least trying to write and I'm not pathetic.
Bruce Sterling: Oh, Barry, you're pathetic all right. You just haven't accepted it yet.
Postscript: 6/22/92: Well, we'll see, Bruce. We'll keep an eye on the situation. The obvious Yogi Berraism—It's not over until it's over—is not the one I'd bring out, though.
It sure do get late early around here, doesn't it?
Thomas M. Disch (b. Groundhog Day, 1940) didn't like Engines of the Night (Doubleday, 1982) at all, and his review of the book in the 3/82 issue of Twilight Zone, powerfully unpleasant and contemptuous, made me feel like Dempsey must have when Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, lurched across the ring and knocked him down with the first punch, then went on within a span of less than two minutes, to knock the champ, the Manassa Mauler hisself, clear out of the ring. Where did this come from? What's going on here? I sure wasn't set for that. A year and a half later, at Omni's fifth anniversary party, Disch—whose Camp Concentration, Asian Shore and 334, I note for the record, I revere; surely Camp Concentration is the best novel to come out of genre science fiction in the 1960s—took the time and trouble to explain his problems with the book of essays. "You look for defeat, you look for disaster," he said, "You come to the subject of science fiction with a burden of despair and cynicism and then you scout around for confirming examples, load the evidence so that you can make the same point over and again. First the verdict, then the trial. It's a harrowing, self-destructive exercise, a closed loop, and it's as repetitious as hell, utterly reductive."
I suppose so. I suppose I regarded science fiction reductively, noted examples of what I took to be its small or larger damages or disasters, often confused the issues of transcendence and banality, got hung up on process and found the space angels, the true quill, the echoes of transubstantiation harder and harder to find. But it was for me, as I came to think I understood our genre in the late seventies, the stink of defeat, of penury, isolation, alienation and hopelessness which seemed to cling to the lives of most science fiction writers and their outcome. One could of course cite the middle-class, clean-living exceptions, the sensible citizens who had managed to make some kind of career writing for the field full or part-time with lives no more disastrous or disgusting than those of insurance agents or middle level civil servants, but these people seemed atypical. Surveying the lives of most of the science fiction crowd throughout the arc of the field up until about 1977 (when I was busily or not so busily framing my world view) one could intimate the swamp of those lives: the furnished rooms, stick furniture, shattered marriages, abandoned children, brutalized relationships, all of it brought to greater intensity by the grandiosity of the writings and the convention circuit—the rotating mind- and body-fuck which seemed to be the paradigm of so many of these lives and connections, most of it grubby, all of it inimical to that very issue of transcendence which was supposed to have brought people into the room to begin.
Disch attacked me in the review as well for failing to name anyone in the negative. Talking in vast, gasping generalities about the swamp and the pity of it all, I would save specificities for praise, he complained, single out no one for anything other than approbation, condemn the regrettable and disastrous to synoptic generalization. Not a bad point, but what would have been the use? I might have felt that X's work was contemptible, that Y, a wretched charlatan, had been working on reputation and adulterous lurches for years, that Z was perhaps certifiably insane and certainly out of control in debased work (and ever more successful because the comic books of that sprawl ignited lust in the hearts of fans). I might have felt strongly about the fraudulence of A's career, the sexual connivance and manipulativeness of B who would risk all, it was said, for the sake of love, but would never take a check; I might have had plenty to say about D who had started out promisingly but had turned into a writer of dreadful series books, twenty or thirty of them indistinguishable and refractory of a self-contempt as embracing as it was intimidating. But to what end? What would it have gotten me? It seemed that if the essential point was made, albeit through generalizations, that specifics could only appear to be a kind of brutal score-settling and besides no one, least of all your tremulous correspondent at the age of forty and facing the apparent end of his career, wants or needs to be hated. So I let it go, brought out names only for positive citation, assaulted the anonymous or the agglomerate with the sins of science fiction, with the damages of a weird and eviscerated promise. I did not particularly spare myself but that of course does not count. (As Dr. Johnson noted that words spoken in eulogy or in the throes of love should never make a man accountable.) Faced for the second time with the issue, with the choices, perhaps I would not have done the book at all or then again perhaps I would have gone what we used to call in Watson Dormitory in Syracuse University in 1957 (what a splendid undergraduate career!) "All the Way." Who, ultimately, is to say?
But the perception—names cited or otherwise—seemed reasonable, this had been from the start a disreputable kind of writing perpetrated by people, many of whom felt themselves already on the borders of the literary if not the socioeconomic mean and who were then pushed ever further by the nature of the literature and by the social structure which, because of the ineffable, essentially undefinable nature of the genre (again, I refer to the third essay in this series), came between them and what, perhaps, they had wanted to do.
This intimation, that science fiction if not fantasy (which was a different genre eventually welded to science fiction by the exigencies of the market beginning in the mid-sixties and rendering the writers and the work interchangeable in the mass-market outlets and in the social interstices of the community) was founded upon penury, isolation, damage and failure was not purged by Engines of the Night but remained, even as I tried to make some adjustments or accommodations which would enable me to recognize this yet not discredit the best work which had been done and was continually being done if only occasionally, and my own attempts to contribute the best of which I was capable. The splice, eventually, seemed impossible, the grandiosity, even megalomania of science fiction and the personal disasters of most of its practitioners would yield to no systems theory. "My problems are irresolute, there is no peace," the protagonist of some novel I had read in the early sixties (and have now forgotten, this was the one about the guy who had decided he would give himself a year to experience life and if he felt no better at the end would kill himself, he went off to Europe and had lots of sex which in the early sixties certainly seemed the solution to anything for a lot of us, and as I recall did not kill himself but became a happily humping expatriate) and this became my mantra, recited here and there in the anterooms of science fiction conventions or commuting in an otherwise empty Chevrolet on the West Side highway. "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter," I mumbled like Ruthven, "everything is irresolute, there is no solution." If it did not work, it didn't exactly fail to work either, it was a means of getting from there to here. The Michael Ashley/Marshal Tym History of the Science Fiction Magazines (Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1985) was further input to the mantra.
This remarkable work—Silverberg said it was the finest piece of scholarship ever to have been done on the field and I agreed with him from the outset—contains essays on every science fiction magazine and original anthology series in the English language since the inception of the form; it also takes in (although not as inclusively) foreign-language publications and the semi-professional press. Long essays on the magazines, even the one- or four-issue productions like the original Cosmos or Vanguard are completed by detailed bibliographical data and what emerges from this astonishing book, as valuable now as it was then because it offers the impression of closure which scholarship of quality always must, is how much the history of our little genre is a history of failure, it is failure which has humped us from here to now and into the future . . . most of those magazines the detritus of little publishers with small ideas and negligible budgets, even the more substantial magazines victimized by the exigencies of distribution and a shallow audience and forced to pull back, change their names, change from monthly to bimonthly to quarterlies, shift editors, shift format, go toward flying saucers or to a sexed-up format. Astounding/Analog was, after Street & Smith started it anew after Clayton, always backed by substantial publishers (and to this day) and Fantasy & Science Fiction was conservatively but carefully funded but of the other magazines there was nothing comparable . . . most of them staggered along, paid what they could, strung along the contributors when they couldn't and all of them—except for Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's on whom the books remained open in 1985, eight years after inception—died. (Amazing did not to this day die but endured decades of spasms and throes and was on the borders of extinction almost continuously since the early 1950s.) Galaxy's Cheyne-Stokes lasted a full horrible decade after the acquisition by UPD, Vanguard went in a glimmering, Rocket and Space Stories hung on for four issues or six or eight but all of these magazines were essentially going South from the time they were born and they gasped or scuttled their way from the marginal to the failure with only occasional glimpses of light. Meanwhile, exceptional work was being done. Even the soundly based magazines, and there were at any given time through all the decades only three or four of them, had to exist in a gray abscess of whimsical distribution and the endured and hoped-for patience of the publishers and what was being published, remarkable as some of it was, became only a means of moving from one failure, crisis or circulatory threat to the next; there were odd remissions now and then and periods of optimism but always Vertex and Venture and Vanguard and Cosmos (in both versions from two publishers a quarter of a century apart) and Gamma and Imagination and Planet Stories staggered along, paying at the most four cents a word and surviving on the same indulgence and whim which soon enough or later were going to do them in. Science fiction was a magazine field all the way through the late sixties, it was the magazines which originated most of the important material and almost all of the writers and were the paradigm of the genre, and the magazines were marginal at best, desperate at the worst. The narrow market, the penury, the instability and uncertainty of the enterprise must have refracted powerfully into the penurious, unstable and uncertain lives of the writers; if this did not create those lives, it certainly shaped them and most of the time not for the better. Like Judaism or sex (it would take a Maimonides to offer the thesis that they were interchangeable and to then prove it; come to think of it Mark Chagall and Sigmund Freud have already tested the validity of that insight) science fiction becomes the accumulation of all forces within and without which come to bear upon its practitioners.
This being the case, then, and in conclusion, Disch: does God dictate which Jew may or may not be part of the minyan?
Does a gentleman give names and details?
You'll be 50 in 2003, Bruce. We'll discuss matters then.