Back | Next
Contents

The Richard Nixon John B. Mitchell Spiro Agnew Blues

Science fiction is not necessarily a cultural microcosm (and then again perhaps it is; the boys in the back room of the fifties indeed felt they were building a better world), but confluence in the political life of the Republic and the market news was striking in the mid-seventies. The collapse of the market for "experimental," "literary," "avant-garde," "downbeat," "technophobic," or "depressing" science fiction can be placed within virtually a month of Nixon's speedy and insufficiently dramatic eviction from high office; by the end of 1974 the editorial doors had closed. Writers and work embodying the cutting edge of the field through the seventies were not having their calls returned, editors who had become identified with those writers and work were either losing their jobs or frantically changing policy. Gerald Ford and the era of Lucas seemed to descend upon the Republic simultaneously; we know that this was not true (Ford was gone when Star Wars opened in the spring of 1977), but it feels true. Post-Watergate was when Lucas was raising the money, anyway.

This, to be sure, is a perilous statement . . . retrospection seeks order that the ongoing reality had no time to set . . . but this matter of perceiving science fiction as a microcosm of the nation's tumultuous, self-deluded, and ultimately disastrous politics must be briefly pursued. I have felt for a while that the eviction of Nixon was the last gasp of the contemporary left; after fifteen years of assassinations, demonstrations, murmurings, rumbles, and license, a President had actually been thrown out of office legally and the left wing recoiled as if in horror: they had, like the child in tantrum who burns down the place, never really expected that they could get away with it. Simultaneously, the right wing and great center regarded the detenancy as the last concession that the left wing would exact. "We gave you the son of a bitch," seemed to be the implicit statement, "you made such an all-fired nuisance of yourselves that we let him go but I'm telling you for your own good: this is the last time. You kids have pulled your last prank; now it's time to go out and get a job."

All the kids seemed to get the message. By 1976 Eugene McCarthy was a ghost candidate, the left wing of the Democratic party (as "represented" by the pusillanimous and disgraced Humphrey) could not even go through the motions of a primary fight, and the "liberal" Republicans had assented to the removal of Nelson Rockefeller from the vice presidency without protest. The antiwar movement had long since fragmented and collapsed and the war itself if not over was over for us. The sixties radicals were dead, in hiding, on the underside or taking up permanent rights via squatting in the middle class.

And in science fiction, simil.

In science fiction, the speed and force of the counterrevolution was so abrupt that many of the younger writers for years thereafter were still writing short stories and novels for a market which no longer existed. The bottom of the original anthology market fell out. Ballantine Science Fiction became Del Rey Books and proceeded in both theory and reissued fact to reconstruct the childhood of Lester del Rey. Random House quit science fiction and Pyramid quit everything and those publishers which continued were letting the word out explicitly that traditional themes and handling would be appreciated. Aldiss and Ballard fell out of the American market; Ellison, Silverberg, and the undersigned announced within a fortnight of one another in late 197529 that we would write science fiction no more, and new writers began to have more trouble finding publishers than at any time since the early sixties. Certain kinds of writing were almost unsaleable.

It is easy—almost seductively easy one might say—by pursuing this line of confluence to say that science fiction was merely reacting to or reenacting on its own level the political climate of its time. I am not quite sure that this is so; science fiction has been a fairly self-contained circumstance since its inception whose development often moved at odds with the larger culture. (The first half of the forties, that decade of unspeakable horror, will always be known in science fiction as the "Golden Age.") Rather, serendipity seems to be the issue; for different reasons both America and science fiction found itself in retreat from the shocks and terrors of the sixties, which as they brought the very existence of institutions into question, opened the windows on a future which was unacceptable.

The assassinations, the war, the corruption of all political life, the decline of religion, the rise of divorce, and sexual libertarianism had opened up the same trap doors that the post-technological visions of Ballard and Aldiss, the psychological horrors of Tiptree, and the demented idealism of Lafferty had opened in science fiction, and both America (its corporate structure and institutions) and science fiction (through editors and publishers) were in fear of falling. In both cases, the forces of counterrevolution had the same desperate, unspoken assent; no one really wanted to see the country or this great escape fiction fall apart. That the President of the United States could be revealed as a simple crook, that the literature of technological transcendence should become imbued with images of how the machines were killing us was simply too much for the audience to handle. Blame them not. Their confusion became hostility and finally outrage: Nixon might be thrown out and the visions of Ballard scribbled like graffiti all over the holy gates, but now things were going to get back to normal, as quickly as possible. And they were going to stay normal for a hell of a long time. There were big plans to put everything on hold once the temple was resecured.

It may turn around again. It may not. Years ago, the theory of cycles would apply in politics and science fiction alike and one could make reference to the metaphor of the pendulum. A society and economy controlled by conglomerates, however, a literature which is a minor subdivision of a subdivision of these conglomerates, can be manipulated to stay frozen in position (until or unless the whole thing falls apart), and in this totalitarian possibility science fiction and American life can be seen at last to become indistinguishable, to become facets of one another in the last fifth of the last century of the last millennium in which the theory of causality can be seen (or may be needed) at all to apply.

 

1980: New Jersey

 

Back | Next
Framed