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Con Sordino

I don't know if science fiction was ever the literature of revelation and deliverance they promised us (that is another essay in another time), but the cutting edge of the eighties is action-packed as they say and without a detectable position. Lords and Snow Queens voyage in pursuit of the lost castle, while on the other side of the planet sexes and social roles are surgically implanted; the hotline keeps communications with the universe at a low-key level while the voyagers can stop in Callahan's franchises along the way, swap a few drinks and lies; out there on the further world snake charmers practice a romantic kind of medicine and so on. It is a distance from the drowned landscapes and bombed-out craters of the late sixties, the gleaming machines and obliterated souls; even the Asimovian protagonists of a decade ago had nervous tics and a sullen intimation that matters, despite technological access, were not working terribly well, but the Snow Queen and Valentine have no such problem. Matters still work, sexes can be traded in like wardrobes and time and again the Magic Snake, rising, enacts its will. "The cutting edge of the future is reasonable, not despairing," I wrote about a year ago, but that does not quite make the case either. "The cutting edge of the future is the non-voting electorate," might have been a little better or like one of those voters swooped upon outside the polls who, even for the sake of television, will make no statement whatsoever. "Secret ballot, chief," these voters say, pushing the equipment aside, "none of your goddamned business. Leave me alone."

Not necessarily without merit. Two decades of opinion have, after all, led us to the edge of the pit where, blinking, we decided we did not like the contents very much at all; it may indeed be time, as a certain uncommunicative voter told us a while ago, to lower our voices a little. All of us. In the forties, the cutting edge of science fiction indicated that either technology would take over the world or do it in; the fifties had the same opinion of the technicians, the sixties did not, for the most part, want to have much to do with technology altogether37 and the seventies reacted to the quarreling voice of history by declaring a pox on all of them. Generalizations all, but consolidation is the key; the eighties of Lords and Queens, Hotlines and Snakes prefer to assume that the argument is settled, the landscape itself being evidence of how it was won, and to deal with the materiel itself. "He's published half a million words," someone I know said of a major figure of the late seventies, "and I don't know how he feels about a single thing; I don't know what his position is. This is not good writing or important writing."

I am not sure of this. J. D. Salinger, for instance, has published upward (barely) of half a million words and is a major figure still and might well take the same comment (we know how his characters feel but not he); one of the definitions of a certain kind of art might be that it is refractive or expressive, not demonstrative. The more interesting question—or at least the one that I would like to raise in this context—is as to how much the Unvoicing of the eighties might be ascribed to evolution (or devolution) of the genre itself; how much could be said to be imposed from without by sheer editorial or market forces.

Certainly forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties H. L. Gold, Fred Pohl, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and of doom, and in the sixties Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it. Ponderous, detached social forces, the apparent inevitability of history, can be seen in another context as coming from the cynical, short-term decisions of a small, powerful cabal; this is what Emma Rothschild wrote (of the auto industry, suburban sprawl, and the death of the cities) in Paradise Lost. Science fiction is an insular field; there has never been a point in its history in America where one powerfully placed editor could not, within a short time and for the short term, wreak change simply through using his power to buy one kind of story and reject another. The group of editors who have moved to the center of science fiction publishing in the period beginning in 1975 (science fiction is no longer a magazine field, a point which I trust does not have to be argued here) have imposed, collectively and individually, their vision upon science fiction, and the eighties cutting edge may be sheer reaction. Writers—more now than ever—must go where the market is or they go nowhere at all.

Who are these editors? Most of them (not all) have little reading background in science fiction prior to their assumption of their posts, none of them have ever written it. (The central editors of previous decades were all writers or people who had at least attempted to write in the field.) They have a scant background in the field and for many of them (again, not all) science fiction editing is a way station, an apprentice position on the way to editing something, anything, other than science fiction. Many regard the field if they regard it at all as a kind of minor league of American literature; the players may be trapped on the buses and in unhealed locker rooms, most of them, but the coaches and managers whose future is not as closely linked to their skills can hope to move on. One way to move on is to win the pennant of course but that is risky and often impossible on a low team budget; a more assured way is not to make trouble.

Not to make trouble. Conglomeratization, the fact that these editors work for minor implements of publishing companies which are in themselves merely minor, if highly visible, parts of the conglomerates is a point that has been made often and by others than myself; the Conglomeratization of publishing has had and will probably continue to have a numbing effect upon most work that does not fit neatly into the balance sheet, "literary" work, that is to say, or work of political or social controversy. But it is less a question here of censorship than of self-censorship; given only a marginal understanding of science fiction and only a superficial grasp of its history (to most contemporary science fiction editors "modern" science fiction began with Harlan Ellison, and they have only the most superficial acquaintance with the work of the forties, fifties, and even nineteen-sixties), these editors tend to publish what looks like science fiction and their view is necessarily parochial and, granted the nature of Conglomeratization, not without fear. "Most science fiction editors seem mostly to seek the assurance that they are doing nothing wrong," Samuel R. Delany writes in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, "and since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them."

The nature of professionalism is adaptation and there is no gainsaying that a clever and talented writer can produce work of consequence even under the greatest of strictures. (One need only to reflect for a moment upon the career of Gogol or Günter Grass.) Still it is all very wearying and energy that might be expended in other directions is simply to be applied more lucratively in the detail work; Castles and Queens and Hotlines can be depicted lovingly; snakes (outside of the Book of Genesis) are not political. One must go where the market is; in previous decades it was possible for a certain kind of science fiction writer to create a market but science fiction was then something of an outlaw. Now it is a minor subdivision of Pillage & Homogenize, Inc., presided over in almost all cases by the same group of people.

One could find all of this reasonably discouraging and perhaps I do but Queens and Castles are reaching an audience much larger than all of the work of the previous thirty years in toto and audiences are not contemptible to any of us; never were. That all of the Queens and Castles reek of fantasy, that the lines between science fiction and fantasy are being rapidly obliterated and that the cutting edge is moving away from science fiction as it evolved for half a century is more distressing, but that is the topic for another screed in a different time; it is the fibrillating heart of science fiction itself to which I would like to administer CPR had I but the wit, the cunning, and the cool refusal to panic.

 

—1981: New Jersey

 

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