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Cliftonized

Here is Mark Clifton in 1952, writing passionate letters to Judith Merril in which science fiction—he perceives—is the necessary vehicle for transcendence, a means of selling humanism to the vast and shapeless masses so that they will reach a kind of spiritual holy place. Certainly, humanity is a fairly pathetic specimen but this new literature—a literature so new that it has neither lexicon nor critical formulation—will change in a generation or two the fundamental nature of society and its consequences.

And here is Mark Clifton in 1957, the Hugo has come and gone and so has his patience and most remnants of his health; he is writing Judith Merril once again and this time it is about the fen, that is what he calls them, "the fen . . . those disgusting, gullible creatures who ran after this person at the LASFS meeting as if he were some kind of god . . . oh, Judith, I thought that so much could be asked of them and it turns out that all they want are follies and amusements," Here is Jim Baen on Freund's Pacifica radio program, Hour of the Wolf, in the early morning hours in March, 1975, the new editor of Galaxy, Worlds of If having been dropped by the publishers right down the old abyss, is saying, "Actually, I'd rather not gossip about science fiction, I'd talk instead about the things science fiction is about—the important, scientific stuff, you know." And here is Baen not an hour later, "But I don't know if I should say any more about the killing of Worlds of If. My wicked masters may be listening. Meet me at Lunacon and I'll tell you more about it then." Why then, I wondered, then and now, looking through the Clifton correspondence with Martin Greenberg so many years ago or listening to Hour of the Wolf years before that . . . why do people involved in science fiction start out, most of them, thinking about time travel and cosmology, black holes and the cosmic sink, the anarchy of the dinosaurs or the origin of the asteroid belt . . . and soon enough begin to fixate upon affairs, editors, word rates, old betrayals, convention scandals, editorial relations, the history of Big Name Fans, the outlines of Courtney's Boat and the Wollheim-Futurian split in the late 1930s? People may—at least some of them the serious people like you and me—start with the content of the literature itself, its convexity and resource but ultimately it is not science fiction with which the writers editors, fans, or even the readers grapple. It is the sociology, the network, the community or the appurtenances of science fiction. We dreamed of Black Holes, the romanticist might say, and you gave us Gilda, the Whore of Mensa. We strove for an explanation of the Big Bang and we found the Big Bang, all right, and several little ones at the legendary World Con of 195-. And so on and on, toss the professionals into a SFWA meeting and they will talk about word rates and the abomination of publishers, toss the professionals and fans into a single room and they will discuss—and sometimes commit—plunder.

Truly, the last place one would seek the true matter and content of science fiction would be a SFWA meeting or a convention. Pete Hamill had an essay in the New York Post in 1974, he had shown up at something called Empiri con for a few hours in October and went away talking about all those fine young and old people "who still paused outside the hotel to look up at the stars." Dean Koontz and I giggled about that. "Look up at the stars," Dean said, "they're looking up to see if fans are flashing from the fifteenth floor."

Why is this? Like most of the nonfiction which is linear (fiction is a different thing, it is impacted and tends to emerge sub-articulately and all at once if at all), this essay wrote itself out partway as I strolled and romped the encroaching streets of the pleasingly and increasingly naked city in early heat in June: one could make parallels of a kind between science fiction and Judaism. Temple membership, the Temple Brotherhood, that kind of thing. You join Secret Synagogue in Suburbland in the early seventies or at least I did in the wistful and vagrant hope that one might be able to come to terms with Jonah, Zephaniah, Talmud, Midrash, the legends of the 36 Just or the significance of secularization in an age when the diaspora (which had been the heart of Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple) was becoming disreputable in the light of Zionism and the Israeli laws of return. One showed up at Secret Synagogue eager or at least willing to grapple with issues of this nature and was right away taken up by the scandal of the religious school run by an incompetent, the scandal of the vituperative and homosexual-hating Rabbi, the taunting Rabbi who talked mockingly of assimilationist Jews from the podium while at the same time maneuvering his salary and expense account demands through the board. One became bemused by the quarrels amongst the laity of the Brotherhood, the succession of incompetent cantors, the various miseries associated with the building fund or the power struggles amongst the Presidency. Eventually one succumbed to the realization that all else was illusion, the fires of the temple breathed the pure screed. As T.S. Eliot put it, "The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life." This temple would be the last place a thinking or an unthinking Jew would want to approach in the era of the harassed and broken diaspora.

That was the essay as it unreeled and hence the conclusions: science fiction and Judaism. One might have, at least some of us, at one time been occupied with the pure writ, ultimately however it came to costume parties, the world masquerade and the depredations of publishers. Why this confluence? Could it be that neither science fiction nor Judaism had ever achieved a satisfactory definition? Could it be then that in the consequences of a lack of definition, the worldly would eventually flood in to occupy what the spirit could not? Is Judaism a sect, a religion, a cultural group, a way of life, a series of assumptions? Is "Jew" to be defined as that which an anti-Semite would hate? Can the son of one Jewish parent be a Jew? Must the decision turn upon the sex of the parent? Similarly, then, what is science fiction? (No one really knows; no one can agree. Fair enough to say that if it's published in a science fiction magazine it is science fiction unless it's fantasy of course but if it isn't it might be science fiction as well. Absence of proof is not proof of absence as the wise Charles Platt has pointed out.) If we cannot achieve, sixty-six years after Gernsback exercised his first option, any satisfactory definition of the material, then how can we stave the invasion of the fan contingent, the incursion of the costumed and the adulterous?

Like the ten lost tribes of Israel (who are variously claimed as American Indians, Indians, blacks, Muslims, Chinese, or Jews), the lost tribes of science fiction will wander on the desert, complaining about the sandstorms and the insulting digestion of camels, unable in their lack of clear origin, destination or affinity, to be occupied by their history. Or so the column unreeled along with various strands of less metaphysical woe and contemplation on the streets of the city which never sleeps, but to no clear conclusion. What then? Define Judaism so that we can restore the demolished temple? Find a consensus Jewry so that a true brotherhood may reign? Nail down some working definition of science fiction in the purposes of sercon fandom? Anywhere one turned, the collapse to banality. One can—I think that this is a summary statement—read this stuff or one can live it and sometimes one can do both but it is too much to ask for any kind of fusion. Thinking of science, we found the fiction. Becoming, as always, what we beheld.

My friend X, mentor and advisor of many years' standing and responsible for almost everything I have learned since I finished Engines of the Night almost a dozen years ago now (which is to say that thanks to the influence of X and almost never before, I have become practical and sensible) has suggested that it is time, perhaps, that I become more specific. "I mean, all this stuff you're writing about sounds very interesting, but you should get down to cases, make some definite judgments. It's time for that, don't you think?"

Well, I don't know if I really think at all, but the point is perhaps well taken and so, here are some specifics. (I had thought that the essays on Tiptree and Asimov were targeted enough but it takes no great wisdom to point out that writing about the dead not only has produced the greatest music in the Western repertoire, but it is also excitingly safe.) If publisher, magazine, and this writer last a while, I propose that there will be more:

1) Patricia Cadigan's "Dispatches from the Revolution," a novelette published in Asimov's Magazine in 1991 and in the Mike Resnick edited Alternate Presidents in January, 1992, is probably the best story to have appeared within the confines of our field in many, many years: Cadigan's visibility, praise and recognition are significantly associated with her perceived alliance to Gibson, Sterling, et. al. but I know the secret which perhaps even she does not; she is a realist and humanist who knows more than a few tricks, that is all, and as her work moves from implants and codifying devices toward simpler and more jangling terrors it will continue to evolve. "Dispatches from the Revolution" is probably the best story about the metaphysics of the 1960s in this country to date.

2) Karen Joy Fowler is an extraordinary writer, better in the short story than the novel (although Sarah Canary, an historical novel has, as they say, lots of promise and a genuine comic vision) who is so far ahead of most of the rest of us that she is still awaiting a consensus and a critical lexicon which will be able to come to terms with her work. Just as Beethoven's last quartets were literally indescribable at the time they were first performed (mid-1820s), just as Moby Dick sank in the same manner as most of Ahab's crew when first published, so Fowler's short stories, although praised and anthologized, have not been fully encountered because they are at such a distance from evolved criticism. I would envision her work prevailing but hope that this is not Emily Dickinson's way of prevailing which I discuss.

3) This period in science fiction is reminiscent of the 1950s in one significant way: we have any number of crack short story writers, really brilliant, first-rate short story and novelette writers who either cannot do novels at all or can barely approach even their weaker short work in novel form. The strange inability of almost all the acknowledged first-rank science fiction writers of four decades ago to bring their novels anywhere to the standard of their best short stories is well known and generally accepted; the only exceptions were Alfred Bester, Phil Dick, and (perhaps) Pohl & Kornbluth collaboratively (but never individually). The gap between the novels and short stories of many of these writers was appalling and many of them (William Tenn notably, his first novel appeared in 1968, years and years after he had otherwise stopped writing and was virtually the last work he published) did not attempt or at least sell novels at all. The gap is not as great nor the situation as dramatic as it was then, but the overall shape of circumstances is the same.

It wasn't true of the sixties and seventies, in the early eighties many writers such as Gibson were making their reputation as novelists and doing short stories only incidentally. It seems to be true now and the reasons for this could be explored at length but I don't think that such discussion would be valid. It's a historical anomaly, a chance-game, a quirk of the times, that's all, and there will soon enough be strong novelists and indifferent short story writers again. And many of the present short story writers may grasp at length the exigencies of the novel. But it has left us for the moment in a rather perilous condition: fantasy continues to skew the field and one of the reasons is that there has been little strong science fiction to contravene.

4) In the least graceful years of recent history 1983 and 1984, say, I would go around mumbling that the whole cyberpunk thing was a scam; old fellas like me knew the real truth, the kids were just recycling old stuff for fun and profit for an ignorant young audience. Actually, Walter Miller, Jr., in "Izzard and the Membrane" (ASF, 5/51) with its people converted into impulses in the computer and running around inside that machine, their impulses and passions turned into binary twitches, were the computer cowboys of Gibson's holograph. Nothing, nothing new. Everything old was new again. First fandom forever. But I no longer believe this and raise this only as a pennant of fallibility; my judgments should be questioned and never are so passionately as by your woe-bedraggled but ever hopeful correspondent.

 

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