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Science Fiction As Picasso

Consider: perhaps not five hundred careers or a thousand but one; not all the myriad voices but one voice, not the individual struggles and destinies but the single arc of a single creator now in the middle of its sixth decade. All of the voices mingling, murmuring into one, overtones in a great chord. Science fiction as one artist. Science fiction—if you will—as Picasso.

It is not the artifacts but the vision, not the material but the theme which dominates. This has been pointed out before: it is not an original insight. Science fiction, Fred Pohl has said, is the only genre in which collaboration is commonplace, in which collaborative works of quality are prevalent because science fiction is a pool of ideas, a manner of approach; writers function less from their idiosyncratic vision (as is the case in "serious" literature) or their ability to recombine elements of the form (the mystery and western) than from their immersion in the approach. Science fiction, as Pohl said, as was recollected much earlier here, is a way of thinking about things. And that way was the subtext of the form from the beginning. We or they were going to get ourselves. But good. But awfully good.

Science fiction as a single, demented, multi-tentacled artist singing and painting and transcribing in fashion clumsy and elegant, errant and imitative, innovative and repetitious, the way the future would feel. Science fiction, born in 1926, dreaming through its childhood in the 1930s, achieving change of voice and the beginning of adult features in 1939, shooting through adolescence in the forties with all of the misdirected energy and hints of promise, arriving at a shaky legal maturity at the end of that decade with the expansion of the market and the full incorporation of a range of style and technique. Young adult in the sixties with the knowledge turned loose in a hundred ways, some toward no consequence, others foreshadowing maturity. Science fiction at thirty-five, eligible to be President! Productive of fluency. Science fiction at forty in the mid-sixties with all the hints of mid-life panic . . . chaos, fragmentation, the replication of childhood, the donning of new masks.

Science fiction, settling from its decade of panic in the mid-seventies to pursue what it had passed over when young, reworking the familiar in thoroughgoing fashion. Science fiction now at the threshold of old age, the faint whiff of alcohol and decadence as it trudges toward the millennium. Science fiction, that demented artist of which we are all but cells and cilia. Blood and bone.

Picasso went on and on, from blue period to rose, from the cubist to the surreal to the classical to the querulous serenity of old age, interrupted by flashes of self-loathing and mockery. He was not the greatest of artists but had the greatest of careers; he might have been the only painter of the first rank who was able to articulate his vision to its fullest range and implication through all of the chronology that he could have expected, able to move his career in embrace with his life until the two of them, not disjointed, could end together. Science fiction will live longer than Picasso—barring the apocalypse, our little category is going to survive 2019—and it remains to be seen how the Ticketron holders and curators of the third millennia, as they poke around our own museum, will take our works, but this much is clear.

This much is clear: we may be less than the sum of our parts but we are far, far more in the aggregate than individually we ever took ourselves to be. None of us can build science fiction, none of us can destroy it. Science fiction gave us voice and the voice, however directed, must be toward its perpetuation. The Picasso of the late nineteen-sixties savagely drawing blood from Les Demoiselles D'Avignon caused only his own veins to sing while the painting, cool and beyond caring, hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art for all the crowd to see, to pity the twisted but beckoning harlots.

 

1980: New Jersey

 

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Framed