I read the collected proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies (Advent; 12/92) and fell into a thin and riotous doze; in that unhappy slumber I dreamed that it was the 1950s again and here I was boxed within them, not the rather feckless youth I had been but a science fiction writer, contemporary of Knight and Blish and Sheckley and Gold, high and low priests of the Reconstruction, going to the parties in Stuyvesant Town, writing letters to my peers, very few of whom answered, working away on resculpting the face of the form so that it would lead us all through this post-technological, repressed, form-is-the-opposite-of-function era we called the present time toward some glittering and transcendent millennium. Crusaders we were in the fifties, we science fiction writers, and even though the pay was difficult and the outcome random we felt ourselves to be in the service of some larger if not final purpose. Oh, how we grumbled under the strictures of editorial fiat, ah how we resented the unbelieving and retrograde litterateurs who regarded us as a sub-species! But we were comforted by our design, by the surface of our work, by the assurance of our purposes, by the whispers of Judith Merril who reminded us that the world, all of the world was science fiction and would come to our tangled and sullen land with gifts and praise, by the songs and dances of Anthony Boucher and his film and theater reviewer, Arthur Jean Cox, who knew that all of it, not just the pieces of earth which Merril regarded, was science fiction. Lil Abner was a study of genetics, the Army McCarthy hearings were a Fred Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth serial on the Galloots and the Gradarians struggling in Bubble Land for advanced credits or a new monetary system. All was pale and yet fierce in this reconstructed era and somewhere on its borders, neither quite a science fiction writer (I had too much trouble with the obdurate and ideology-driven editors to sell the good magazines, too much contempt for Palmer or even Larry Shaw to be able to sell the lesser magazines, too little patience to rewrite for Gold and Campbell, too much arrogance to believe that my real place was with Raymond Scott; I was barely able to manage three or four sales a year and my was I bitter!) nor quite a distant observer (I took all of this personally and felt great implication in the struggles to raise standard, much envy for the parties in Stuyvesant Town to which I was never invited, much fear of my colleagues in the English department who if they found out my true ambitions and sullen exercises would make sure that I never received tenure) I hung around like a freelance photographer, like some Weejee of the spirit, taking little pictures and impressionistic recursions from what I could glimpse of the tumult. Which sometimes looked to me like a Breughel landscape and at others something like Prokofiev's Field of the Dead to which the soprano in Alexander Nevsky comes without hilarity.
I dreamed that it was the fifties and that, characteristically, I was neither there nor not-there but stuck in this or that frieze of ambivalent posture watching all of it unravel before me, heading toward the great newsstand crackup of 1958 and the disastrous collapse of markets which by 1959 had put not only the writers but the genre itself out of business; I dreamed that I was there when Cogswell cranked up the English department mimeo at Ball State University and sent out the first of his broadsheets, asking for commentary and enough of a monetary contribution to keep the mimeograph in ink and stencils for another issue. "The only reason you're starting all of this now," I said to Cogswell who at that time was a fetching 41, not wearing the Brigadier's uniform which he affected at conventions but an assistant professor's tweed with white buck shoes, "is that the American News Company pulled the plug and you don't think that you have any markets left so you've decided to become a commentator and make historians of the others. If you felt the thing wasn't dead you wouldn't get near this. The trouble is," I added, with a winning smile, "the only factor which seems to energize genre writers is the imminence of their genre's death, then they turn into philosophers, decide that they have nothing to lose any more and, letting out all of their resentment in small puffs and intimations of defeat which can fill the hotel rooms or the barrooms with the gaseous sounds of their disgust, alcohol, and imminence, make philosophers of us all, or haven't you noticed?" and this little onslaught of temper or introspection did not, I dreamed, so much infuriate Cogswell as it bemused him, caused his gaze to turn inward as faster and faster he cranked the mimeograph for the initial issue of PITFCS which in continuous run would last only a few years but which seemed to have that unusual capacity—latecomer to the demise of the genre, I had a standard of comparison a decade or two later—shared with Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review or Psychotic to bring out absolutely the worst in all of its correspondents; grand masters and eminences, voyeurs and critics alike would turn into babble fools in Geis's merciless exposure and so PITFCS, lurching through the chronology and the three thousand word letters of people far less bemused and even angrier than Cogswell, turned science fiction writers to and beyond themselves in ways which would have been provocative if they had not, at the center, been so calculated and so immersed now in the self-loathing which (one could come to understand) could masquerade as loathing.
But that dialogue with Cogswell was not to continue; he was too busy with his mimeograph and with his conception of a science fiction which would be best summed by the word more: more drink, more conventions, more women (who were increasingly manifest in that tender generation), more humiliation, more magazines, more rocketships, more temerity, more inflamed discussion and the self-loathing disguised as loathing and I was busy as well in this dream with what seemed quite suddenly to be an agenda: I wanted to talk to every science fiction writer of some prominence. Kuttner and Kornbluth were unavailable to me; they had died in 1958, synchronous with the newsstand disasters and a year before PITFCS, and it is doubtful that they would have wanted to get into discussion with someone as simultaneously frivolous and angry as myself; Budrys was in a sulk—it was too late, he wanted me to know, to take any kind of interest; the time to talk with him was during the period in which he had been forming his conception of a politicized science fiction which would hide diatribe within the corpus of his alienated protagonists. Marion Zimmer Bradley did not want to speak with me; she felt that my interest was both morbid and feigned, an odd concatenation of qualities; and Zenna Henderson and Mildred Clingerman were in various kinds of career crisis and could not be reached. My plan, having been dismissed by Cogswell, was to go into the world and for spite engage all of his contributors (and some who would not deal with him) in dialogue even more penetrating or self-revealing than what they had put into his magazine but this inclusivity proved early enough to be impossible; as all who engage in wanderjahr or sexual activities must learn early or late I had to make the particular do the work of the general, had to narrow the focus so that by implication I could find an enlarged focus and so, like my sullen Ruthven in a story which I was not to write for more than twenty years (and in fact in this new dream I was not a writer at all but a kind of conduit, a camera as the late John van Druten had pointed out, an uninflected observer of circumstance and persons on whom in some overarching way I had no opinion at all) I found myself in some kind of reconverted industrial area in Redondo Beach, California, discursing science fiction and affairs of the heart with that heart attack victim, Mark Clifton, who had watched his reputation and audience implode in the late fifties and who, only a few years from his death at fifty-seven, was neither glad to see me nor cheered by the landscape of Redondo Beach which he found a poor memorial to the worst instincts of the modern, classless man, seeking some kind of identity or appurtenance in a world without history. Because I thought it was a medium for social change, Mark Clifton said, because I thought perhaps it was the only medium for social change that the politicians or the bureaucrats hadn't seized or polluted, that it was possible to sneak through the kind of attitude or ideology that might actually change people, that is if you hid it inside a plot or some kind of humor.
What did I know? Mark Clifton said after the tiniest of pauses, his postcardiac's eyes flicking through time and space with that clear perception of certain cohesive forces which at any moment could vault him straight out of his skin and into something which only in his less tense moments could he think of as "eternity," I was forty-six years old, I had read a little of it, spent most of my time in industrial psychology trying to make new men out of old men who could not bear to understand their situation, who, if they had truly understood what the corporation had done to them would have lit the fires. It was my job to keep them suppressed, to fight that epiphany, to lead them to some kind of personal adjustments rather than realizing that the system itself was what had driven them into snarling corners of themselves; of course that was a rotten thing to do, why do you think I got a heart attack so young, and I thought that writing science fiction would be a good way to redress the balance as we said in our corporate reports, set people straight, set them to concentrate upon the system's corruption rather than their own inadequacies. Well, it seemed like a reasonable idea.
It all seemed like a reasonable idea, Mark Clifton said. I had not said anything at all during this monologue, latter knowledge having deserted me (or perhaps had not come to visit), the microphone extended, the spools of the old tape recorders quite a modern thing in the early sixties turning slowly and Mark Clifton looking out at the California sunset, his eyes glimmering now with hurt or it might have only been refracted sun, but how was I to know what it was really like? I had only seen it from the outside you know, reading those magazines, then I was publishing these stories and I still didn't know but when I won that Hugo, when I started going to conventions beginning with Cleveland in 1955 when I met Judith for all the good it does us, when I really began to understand what it was like it was too late, I was far gone and my work such as it is had been folded into millions of magazines consigned like Lenin's enemies to the dustbin of history; it had all been put down some kind of rathole or to use the rhetoric of the time some kind of warp drive at two and three cents a word and what had I been given? first fandom, second fandom, secret masters of fandom, grand masters of fandom, word rates, editors, masquerades, costume balls, mimeographs, Francis T. Laney, Jr., Forrest J. Ackerman, John Campbell, Horace Gold, all of them the same, all of it part of a machinery meant to turn my purposes into next month's issue, last year's mimeograph and to the rest of them which meant all of the world except for science fiction itself it was just a bunch of dumb stuff for kids, something like comics but perhaps not quite as damaging according to Dr. Wertham. But it was pretty late to learn that and too late to do anything about it, Mark Clifton said and then became silent as the two of us watched the sun slowly ink its dazzle like a hectograph into the western sky, then plunge like an APA mailing into the extinction of the sea. In the dream I waited for Mark Clifton to say more, surely if I were to only attend, wait him out, he would emerge with some aphorism, some kind of summary of his life and his period which would approach in wisdom the statements in his letters that "Galaxy was a magazine edited by a man who fears and hates science" or "Boucher and his publication emit a stink of wine and decadence" but those insights, it seemed, had all been part of an earlier, a more patient or at least a less resigned Clifton. As was the case with so many of us, knowledge had become disillusion, was in fact synonymous with disillusion and disillusion had led to silence and so, after a while, I put away the equipment and left Clifton.
In the way that dreams often manifest, perception of chronology seemed to change; instead of moving slowly through the cluttered offices at Ball State University or the hideous, multicolored playroom in which Clifton had seemingly elected to spend his post-Astounding years I now moved with speed and force, the speed and force of a bullet or perhaps a group of science fiction writers early in the morning at a convention when in search of alcohol or some kind of closure; here I was addressing a meeting of First Fandom at the world convention in Pittsburgh in 1962. "You cannot go on this way," I said to them, "you cannot make it a private place for private affairs or reference; this will lead to decadence and lunacy and when Star Trek, when Star Wars come along in just a little while now they will take it all away from you"; here I am addressing the Cleveland world convention in 1966 in those few empty moments before the Hugo ceremonies, (Isaac Asimov will be anointed author of world's best series) before the premiere of Star Trek. "It's already happened to you," I am saying to a yawning, scattered audience as secret masters pull down the hotel walls and reveal a larger space, "Lord of the Rings was published last year and before any of you have come to understand what has happened, the imitators and the elves and dwarves are going to wipe you out, leaving you competing with one another to see who will be the last to leave the room"; here I am at a variety of meetings or academic conferences which occur over a period of years or perhaps it is months which I mean to say. In some of them I am pleading, in others ranting, in a few of them I am making indecent sexual proposals or confessions but in all of them I am brandishing the latest issue of PITFCS available to me, dragged up the line and sequestered for just this moment, "Here it is," I am shouting, "here it is, an attempt to define what is going on here and the game was already over, by the time you begin to notice what you are doing or want to shape it you've already stopped doing it" and at last I am dragged from that dream or the dream taken from me, it is 1994 or whatever the hell it is and PITFCS, sprouted or doubted into the SFWA has been gone for decades, Cogswell is dead, Bretnor is dead, Clifton is dead, Merril is in Canada, Marion Zimmer Bradley is a queen of darkness and light and I am still haplessly and helplessly, no less than Ruthven or my miserable lesser principals, trying to make some sense of it. There is no sense of it. I dream that I take this declaration in its luminescence and squalor to my wife and say, "Here, here, you make something of this" and in the sacristy and suddenness of the later quiet I see borne back from her all that was mine to give, then take, then lose, then know in the sheer and sudden darkness of the counting room.
"It means something but I'm not sure what," I dream she says. "Maybe you can't say what it means."
"You've defined science fiction," I say. Or dream I say. And awaken or dive into further light; the record on this—as so much else, ah doctor!—remains unclear.