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Son of the True and Terrible

There is no way in which a contemporary audience—even the contemporary audience for "serious" fiction—can understand the degree of humiliation and self-revulsion many science fiction writers suffered until at least the mid-nineteen-sixties. Philip K. Dick in a recent introduction to his collection The Golden Man, has written movingly of this; all through his first decade it was impossible for a science fiction writer to be regarded by writers in other fields or in the universities as a writer at all. College professors of English regarded the genre as subliterate; the timeless man on the street thought it crazy. Word rates were low, the readership was limited, and one operated from the outset with the conviction that work of even modest ambition would live and die within the same room that the debased did. Dick remembers meeting Herbert Gold at a party in the fifties and asking for his autograph; Gold gave him a card inscribed "to my colleague, Philip K. Dick," and Dick carried this around for years. It was the first acknowledgement from a person of literature that his work existed.

Philip Klass has an even grimmer anecdote in his essay "Jazz Then, Musicology Now" published in a 1972 Fantasy and Science Fiction "college issue." (At that time courses on science fiction at the universities were in the first flush; a little innocent capitalization never sent any of us to jail. Nor should it.) In 1945, Klass and a graduate student in English of his acquaintance met Theodore Sturgeon in an automat; Sturgeon (whose "Killdozer!" had just about then been published in Astounding) talked passionately and at length of the artistic problems of science fiction, the particular challenges of the genre, and the demands of a medium in which expository matter was of central importance to a story yet could not be permitted to overbalance it. After Sturgeon left them, Klass's friend said with an amused laugh, "These science fiction writers, they really think of themselves as writers, don't they? I mean he's talking about this stuff seriously as if he were writing literature!"

A writer who came into this field after 1965 cannot really know what it must have been like for Sturgeon and Dick, Kornbluth and Sheckley. At no time has it ever been easy to attempt serious work in this form, but after 1965 science fiction's audience had increased: there was some crossover of that audience and the audiences for literature of other sorts, and because of Sputnik, the assassinations, the Apollo Project, and the employment of the clichés of the form by certain successful commercial novelists—Drury, Wallace, Levin all had bestsellers which were thematic science fiction—the form had a certain grudging cachet; people might not know what you were writing (or care about it) but at least they had heard of it. In the nineteen-fifties the only people other than crazy kids who would even admit to knowledge of the form were a few engineering or scientific types and they kept the magazines well hidden.

There must have been a lot of rage in these fifties writers, rage and recrimination, and (most commonly) self-loathing for even being involved in the form and, after a while (because you fell into the habits and also because you became labeled), being unable to write anything else unless one was willing to repudiate the totality of one's career, adopt a pseudonym, and start all over again. That rage was fueled by low advances, capricious editors, predatory publishers, policies in the book markets which consigned any science fiction novel to a defined audience, printed or overprinted a given number of copies, and after throwing them into the market, out-of-printed the book (and then cheated on the royalty statements). It was fueled yet further by the perception that most of these writers had of the disparity between their work—galaxies, world-conquering, heroes, superheroes, galactic drives, the hounds of heaven—and their lives, which were limited, entrapped, penurious, and often drenched with alcohol. Even a moderately intelligent writer could see the disjunction and its irony; some dealt with it by writing witty and highly ironic science fiction, but others went deeper into megalomania and fantasy and their promise was lost. And none of these writers were helped by the fact that television and the movies were appropriating their work to make cheap, mass-market pap of it; sometimes they paid low rights fees (Campbell got five hundred dollars for the movie rights to "Who Goes There?"), but most often they simply plagiarized. The fifties science fiction writer was a true van Vogt protagonist: surrounded by vast, inimical, malevolent powers who regarded him without compassion, struggling to reach some kind of goal which he could not define. But unlike the Gosseyns the fifties science fiction writer had no weapon shops of Isher, no Korzybskian logic, no seesaw, no secret plans, no occasionally helpful Overlords. He had only his colleagues to help him along and they were in as much trouble as he. Under these circumstances, the body of work turned out by the twenty or thirty best is a monument to the human spirit (or its perversity) unparalleled in the history of the so-called arts.

 

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"What you have to do with this stuff," a science fiction editor said a long time ago, "is to sit down with the outline and crank it; reel it out like porn. Otherwise it doesn't pay, if you really get involved with it, try to have original conceptions or at least work them out originally you'll slow down and can't make any money. If you're going to write science fiction for a living or even as part of a living, you have to do it fast."

Without evaluating these remarks (they are true for most of us; even in the decade of five-figure advances the average return for a science fiction novel in all its editions is still about five thousand dollars), they function as partial explanation as to why no science fiction writer has published more than two or three books of the first rank.

In 1960, in fact, reviewing A. J. Budrys's Rogue Moon, James Blish stated that no science fiction writer had ever written more than one masterpiece (he concluded his review by suggesting that if Budrys were able to come back to the field and get work done, he might be the first to break the pattern), and even two decades later there is not much evidence in contradiction; Silverberg has done five or six novels which are very strong, and so has Philip K. Dick, but even now as we regard the Le Guins or Delanys or Wolfes, even James Blish himself (who was a strong writer), who can be said to have published more than two?

The economics of this business may change. Other exigencies will not. Science fiction is a difficult, rigorous, exhausting form demanding at the top the concentration and precision of the chess master and the skills of the first-rate litterateur. How often do these qualities intersect in any of us? How often can they be reproduced?

Fortunately, for most, science fiction on the scene-by-scene level can be cranked, can fill space, can be mechanically conceived and rapidly written . . . it is a genre, it does have recourse to devices and a handy stock of the familiar. But here too the schism at the center is manifest: there has never been a science fiction novel so bad that breathing in its center was not an idea which once had merit; there has never been one so good that it could not be seen at the bottom to be based upon the clichés and clutter of the form.

No, there ain't nothing so good that we cannot get a glimpse of the worst, ain't nothing so bad that it doesn't demonstrate a little of the good . . . there's the best in the worst of us, worst in the best, all of us dummies of varying workmanship and attractiveness in the service of the Great Ventriloquist who do, he surely do, give voice to us all.

 

—1980: New Jersey

 

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