It was always a taboo-laden category, a genre with its little mines and traps laid from end to end, the field of science fiction a difficult and potentially disastrous campaign for point man and platoon. Under the circumstances, the achievements of the editors and writers were remarkable; there were the magazine codes with which to contend from the beginning, and then Fred Wertham's assault upon the comics (Wertham the professor-psychologist who testified frequently to Congress) which brought about the Comics Code. This had implications for all kinds of mass-market fiction perceived as appealing to a significantly juvenile audience. Beyond this were the editorial whims, conscious perversities and demands; John W. Campbell would not permit aliens to be smarter than humans or allow any questioning of capitalism or virginity into Astounding; Horace L. Gold took out all sexual references which he could find (sometimes, as in Asimov's 1951 "Hostess," the writers either outsmarted or dared him) and was fond of saying in rejection notices that "I run a family magazine here," even though the pictures of Vicki, the French model on the back cover of the early 1951 issues of Galaxy, had caused vast expressions of horror from mothers of science-fiction-reading boys everywhere.
Then there is the background of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" as recalled by Robert P. Mills. In 1958 Mills and Keyes occasionally took the same train from Grand Central to the northern suburbs, and when Mills was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he asked Keyes if he would write a story. "Well, I have this story," Keyes said. "It's about this imbecile who becomes a volunteer for research into raising human intelligence and becomes a genius but then the experiment fails and he becomes an imbecile again. It's a parable of knowledge, you see."
Mills said, "That sounds interesting; let me take a look at it." So Keyes took the story out of a bottom desk drawer and gave it to Mills, and Mills said on the next shared train home, "I think you've really got something there, but I have a few suggestions."
Keyes broke into tears and seized Mills by the lapels. "Please," he said, "oh please, please don't tell me that I have to drop the part where Charlie becomes an imbecile again. Don't tell me that I have to have a happy ending and he stays a genius."
"Well, no," Mills said, "I wasn't thinking of that at all. I did think that maybe—"
"Because," Keyes said emotionally, still clutching Mills, "that's what Horace wanted. Horace said he would buy it for Galaxy only if Charlie didn't become stupid again, that he couldn't publish such a depressing story and I can't, I simply can't make myself do that—"
"Oh, no," Mills said hurriedly and went on to say that his suggestions had to do with a subplot in which maybe Charlie had a girl teacher and he and the teacher kind of fell in love after Charlie got smart. Keyes said that he certainly could understand that something like this would improve the story and in due course it was revised and published and the rest you know about.
But this is, to get back to the central and originating point here, a genre so laden with constraints, demands and prejudices of a historical nature that it is very difficult to believe that, in this present era or beyond, science fiction is not still laden and will not continue to be laden with traps, that insistent as editors are upon their liberation from those constraints, as careless as the writers might say they are of the need to slant or control their work, these problems and limitations remain to control limits and to incite within writers and editors alike that self-censor, which, it has been pointed out, is the most effective censor of all since it can cut off exposure not upon completion but upon inception; those flowers not blushing unseen in the desert air and winds and gravity of editorial response but simply not produced at all.
At a panel discussion at the undistinguished convention sponsored in 1989 by Columbia University's science fiction club, the issue was raised and Ellen Datlow of Omni said, "It's not like that any more; there are no taboos left."
Which, I said, was patently ridiculous. "Of course there are taboos," I said. "In fact, I can come up with ten story ideas in the next fifteen minutes that I know neither you nor any science fiction editor past or present will possibly consider on the basis of their content alone."
"Well," she said after a very long pause (not as long as Jack Benny's pause in that famous radio encounter with the thief in the back alley who said, "Your money or your life"*), "there are some taboos left."
Which there surely are. Here in 1992, in the free market, 66 years after the origin of genre science fiction, 47 years after the effective use of the atom bomb on people, one year short of the 40th anniversary of Playboy, and 19 years after the conclusion of our role in the festivities in Vietnam, are some story premises, conceptions or progressions which could not possibly be sold, regardless of the skill, the fame, the propinquity or the disingenuousness of the writer:
1) XENOPHOBIA. Fear and hatred of the alien being or terrain is an important survival trait; it has persisted in humanity throughout all of the millennia in the forms of prejudice, bigotry, nativism, jingoism, hatred of foreigners or persecution of the immigrant because ultimately it is a part of a species survival mechanism.
If the aliens come or if we meet them somewhere on the other side of the Centauris, they are likely to be malevolent, they will be at least as interested in oppressing us as in getting along; certainly in all the myriad possibilities of human-alien encounter there will be alien details whose plans are sheerly destructive. Under those circumstances, obviously, xenophobia will be a mechanism of survival and protection, and to breed xenophobia out of humanity by genetic manipulation or (more likely) through acculturation may be a form of species suicide. One can envision a time not too far from now or perhaps very far from now in which xenophobia and all of its manifestations will have become so repellent and shameful as to have virtually disappeared; then with alien contact either inaugurated or imminent, it may occur—perhaps before a disaster, perhaps only after—that xenophobia has gotten a bad press for all of the generations and that any hope for species survival and proper engagement outside our own planet may depend upon inculcating within the present and future generations of travelers (or those on Earth if the alien contact occurs here) all of those traits which the "progressive" elements have shown us are hateful, inhumane, anti-life or utterly destructive. Schools of bigotry? Practice lynchings of simulated aliens? Search for aliens or alien traits which may be particularly dangerous, a modus operandi for identifying difference and the propitiation of malice?
In a series of scenarios which could develop—probably best at novel length but certainly workable within the story—the achievement of xenophobic hatred through the devices of programmed bigotry (and the identification through psychological depth testing and social observation) might assume genuine urgency, might be linked with the ability of humanity to survive against aliens whose xenophobia has not been bred or acculturated in them, and the central figure in such a narrative would be one who is either educated to understand xenophobia as a necessary trait or who already knows this and must persuade the others.
There is some of this, masked, in the 1940s Astounding school of science fiction, manifest in writers such as Hubbard and Heinlein. These stories, however, elide the issue; they do not address xenophobic loathing of aliens as linked directly to (and predicted by) nativism, bigotry or prejudice on the part of the sturdy space captains and interstellar scouts who must fight bureaucrats as well as marauding aliens. A straightforward, acknowledged acceptance of these qualities as properly selecting the most sympathetic and alert character does not exist in that or any other kind of science fiction.
2) BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE. Or, as Freud said, "Biology is destiny." Women are constructed to bear and nurture infants; men and women are biologically designed to have sexual relations as a condition of procreation; reduced sexual attractiveness is a discouragement to perpetuation of the unattractive characteristics. Disease is a form of natural selection; lack of intelligence, left to its own devices, will select out stupidity as a characteristic of the race. To the degree that individuals or cultures wander from that biological imperative, deny the simple truth of Freud's dictum, they are risking the fury of natural selection and cultural breakdown,
To countenance forms of sexuality other than those which are procreation-driven, to deny the fundamental childbearing and nurturing responsibilities of women, to artificially maintain or subsidize an underclass incapable of surviving on its own—to incorporate this flaunting of the natural law, the biological imperative in the mores of a culture, is to seal, in the long run if not the short, the destruction of that culture and perhaps humanity itself.
What Freud called "civilization and its discontents" can be reviewed, in terms of all post-industrial politics, sociology and social systems as an inexorable denial of this biological imperative, granting sanction to roles and behavior which were never intended by the slow evolution of the species up to that point of post-industrialization.
In sum, then, all politics and social theory in the past few centuries has represented—in the name of "liberalism" or "expanding roles" or "revolution of possibilities"—as granting artificial sanction to that which of itself could never have survived, the propitiation of a population and behavioral roles which in the Hobbsian natural state or the Freudian archetype could never have evolved. Whether this is true or not, whether "evolution" is indeed an evolving of possibility and patterns, or whether it is a process which has only shifted circumstances further from true adaptation, certainly composes an interesting, even central series of questions; they are not, however, questions that can possibly be investigated within the framework of modern science fiction. (They are, not to isolate our genre, questions which in all probability can be articulated in no form of literature or academic explorations, for that matter, but it is necessarily science fiction itself to which this discussion must be limited.)
Stories such as "The Women Men Don't See" or "Houston Houston Do You Read?" or "When It Changed" can explore and question with some savagery the viability of certain common cultural assumptions, but those writers and those who have come after have not been able to explore—beyond the anger which the persistence of biology as destiny has caused—why none of the experiments with alternate systems or an ideology not tied intrinsically to biology have ever, or at least to this historical point, been successful.
3) RAPE AS THE PERPETUATION OF BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS WHICH COULD NOT OTHERWISE CARRY FORTH. This one I have actually seen in print; a professor of psychology from a southwestern university was able to obtain a grant of about $100,000 to study rape as a kind of cultural imperative for aggressive, brutal, unattractive males who otherwise might not be able to perpetuate themselves with socially desirable, upscale women. He produced a dull, portentous monograph.
If some of the traits of the rapist might, in the Hobbsian natural state, be construed as having value—will, self-determination, the primacy of demand, that certain fixity of purpose which conventional courtship behavior must often deny—then these are values which can perhaps only be perpetuated by acts which the culture regards as violent, despicable and utterly unacceptable.
All of this being the case, however, and aggressive rape having been condemned in all cultures for such an extended period of time . . . why, nonetheless, does rape persist? Has it perhaps even increased through the decades? One could theorize, in the kind of science-fiction story which will never be published, that a post-industrialized, increasingly stratified and compartmentalized society sets up barriers between classes which restrict social mobility, make it even less likely that wildly disparate gene stocks can meet.
If—going back to the issue of biological imperative—hybridization and disparate gene stocks may be viewed as important to the race (remember that "hybrid vigor" of which the high school biology or college genetics texts would give examples?), then is not rape—the attempt through male violence to achieve disparate conjoinment that the stratification and compartmentalization of society would otherwise make impossible—a biologically justifiable act? (If any act of forced or non-consensual intercourse can be defined as rape, how much of human history and its progeny can be seen as its product?)
I don't like any of these ideas much. It is perhaps unfortunate but nonetheless inescapable: I have to put a disclaimer on the record here. I don't like xenophobia or its manifestations in the life I lead; I don't think that destiny is completely based upon biology (because if it was most of us would be dead); and as the father of daughters I find rape even more horrifying than I would if I were the father of sons or no father at all, and I would find it plenty horrifying in those cases as well.
But all of these, I submit, are issues of some real and practical concern; a literature which among many other things proposes to be an instrument of social inquiry should be able to deal with these issues, should not face their prime facie exclusion. But these are not stories that are going to come to your local science fiction or book publisher anytime soon, nor will the comedies of Nazism or the merry, satirical investigations of the reading of science fiction or fantasy literature as surrogates for genuine social role-playing.
Eugene McCarthy said many years ago about campaigning for the Presidency, "Unfortunately, wanting the job really disqualifies you for it," and any strident insistence upon the right of writers and editors to investigate these issues will to the exact degree of its insistence finish one off within the commercial category with prematurity and finesse. Flowers blushingly all unseen: thus our words unspoken.