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On Decadence

Self-plagiarism or appropriation not yet being listed as a crime on the ballots of any of the fifty states, a passage from a story introduction in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg (Pocket Books, 1976):

(I am not happy with this book. It was issued with this dangerous title far too early in a career and rather than serving as a summary or a selection amounts to a compilation of the most recent, uncollected work. Some of it is all right and some of it is not but the title is presumptuous and most of the introductory matter is so callow, self-satisfied or pejorative in a loathsome and essentially unfinished manner that years and years ago I decided that if there was any real value in this work, others would have to seek it; I would have to find other markers on the tendentious little journey to oblivion. This particular story introduction however is less callow than some and serves a point)

. . . Granted that S-F and S-F writing sit upon paranoid, megalomaniacal, solipsistic visions: do these visions have literal truth or are they merely neurotic and in extreme cases psychotic? Can they be taken seriously as serious probings of possible futures . . . or adolescents at heart? Well, are they? The . . . critical spike upon which category science fiction has been impaled by literary critics (those who deign to observe us at all) has been precisely this, that we are writing grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles and thereafter are not subject to the serious questions of form and content with which realistic/surrealistic modern . . . literature can be probed.

It can and has been pointed out in reply that the question of audience motivations or psychic symbols must be less important than the question of veracity . . . that is, these plots bear the seeds of some potential and literal truth . . . but still left is that matter of literacy and technique and most science fiction falls so far from accepted standards here that the temptation to just call the whole thing neuroses is, perhaps, overwhelming. Have hardly resisted it myself.

This is the issue, the duality upon which Engines of the Night (1982) was impaled and it is of course the central conflict which energizes almost all of the fiction as well; Engines of the Night represents in retrospect an increasingly desperate and unsuccessful attempt to find some fusion of these points of view. Yes, the rocket ships have a marvelously phallic and copulative appearance but this is the optimum path for space flight and we landed on the Moon. Yes, fantasies of alien invasion and torment are common psychotic or hallucinatory symptoms . . . but there are, almost by definition, aliens and the question of contact is one which must be confronted with some rigor because without a working model, a paradigm of such contact, we are as upon Vespucci's shores, awaiting the hammer of the far civilizations. Yes, dreams in three dimensions are hallucinatory or a kind of wish fulfillment but then there is the matter of the holograph. Much of this material can be objectified and all of it deals with what is perhaps the fundamental issue of the century in which technology has overtaken, how that technology, guided or unguided, directly or as unsought intention, will reshape the circumstances within which it operates, the way that we regard technology. This is serious material and it is not to be dismissed; it was dismissed by the central stream of American philosophy and political concerns for most of the decades of this century and part of the situation we face, a most explosive and dangerous situation, has come about because of that very diversion of concern. It is a central schism, a division which has always existed at the center of science fiction itself. Are we trying to objectify and mitigate a future or are we trying to sell copies of books and magazines and keep our audience—over half of which is chronologically under 18—happy and entertained? Are we trying to deal with the real consequences and patterning of technology or are we brainstorming, working out cryptograms, chess problems and table-top universe for the converted or those we are trying to convert? When we come at last quivering to the Queen of the Night on far Centaurus, address the new and stricken yearnings of our spacebound and transmogrified selves, are we really going to do it or are we considering the magazine codes and current needs of Berkley Books? These are questions which wracked the writers, the editors, the readers too; those who were cynical enough to regard the issue of patterning simply as a device of salability were perhaps better shielded, pace Garrett, pace Winston K. Marks, from the dilemma than other but none of us, even in Rocket Stories or Bouregy Books were untouched by those questions, all of us in one way or the other remained irresolute. It was a field emerging from mass market pulp entertainment which from the outset was caught by issues of the gravest kind, issues which intersected the arc of the century. Such might have been true of the mystery as well—all of those traps and puzzles, all those bearded detectives with their little gray cells, all those punctured and bloated bodies, ah that other intersection of tragedy and cryptogram subsumed so often in cleverness!—but the mystery never had the missionary impulse at its core; one reads science fiction implicitly believing that going to Venus was a good thing or at least not necessarily a bad thing, that going to Venus was a task worthiest of the highest application. That kind of ostensible valuation of murder, say, was never at the surface (and only rarely in the subtext) of the mystery.

So science fiction, that random kind of escapist tool, found itself pilloried on that arc of the century, harnessed willingly or unwillingly to a progression from the assembly line to the crematoria to the V-2 to the Apollo projects, to DNA and gene mapping, to the harvesting of cancer cells and the flyby Jupiter probes; this exercise of the cryptologist or the pulp fictioneer was tied, however unwillingly, to the remarkable and uncontrollable events and machinery which changed everything. At the time I wrote Engines of the Night I felt that it was essential that this duality, still insufficiently recognized, be examined and driven toward some kind of resolved state however equivocal, only in that way would the genre achieve its destiny. (What that "destiny" was I was not quite sure, higher rates for certain, perhaps better housing quarters, even a kind word from the Hudson Review. I was very much occupied with destiny as I turned 40; it seemed the proper place to be, the reasonable task of a forward-looking not-so-young fellow on the tremulous eve of his deterioration. Now I am far less concerned with destiny, finding it only another version of the "You've got to make some important decisions about your life" which was parental edict in my time and probably is today. "Make something of your life" becomes of course merely another value-free receptacle for a cycle of alternatives, surely Nixon and Kissinger and J.R. Haldeman made something of their lives, certainly Goering's or Himmler's relatives must have been proud. Destiny like goal-directed behavior may be far more trouble than whatever it is worth.)

That however does not seem to have happened in the interim; in the decade since Engines of the Night was published the irresolution has if anything only been exacerbated by the onrushing and increasingly complex technology balanced off by a mass market driven by seemingly inevitable late-capitalistic forces toward an ever-expanding and therefore simplistic audience and market base. Modern commercial fantasy can be interpreted as one response to the irresolution; the manner in which elves, dragons, thieves worlds and the underlords have overtaken and pushed science fiction (and in some interesting cases have been joined to it) can be considered a way of dealing with the problem simply by eluding the matter. The so-called cyberpunk movement (do not like this term; grates me almost as much as "sci-fi") is another form of response; those drugged-out, wired-up hipsters and messengers of the near-future are surrogates for a part of a generation which would find it easier to become machines than to truly apprehend them; the grunged-out world of Gibson and his imitators may be a fair approximation of times to shortly come (or times extant as lived by a crucial part of the college-age population) but they are also clear responses of those who find themselves powerless to the concept of living in a powerful and cruelly remote state . . . one can assume the wires of technology and become the state, each of us a nation in close conjunction to the boards and wires of transcendence. So the cyberpunk stories (which are already beginning to look thinly dated as the attention of the audience slips) simultaneously refract and direct response to the old Marxian alienation effect: deprived of any real connection to the consequences of our action, deprived in fact of any awareness of those consequences, we can elect in Neuromancer or Mona Lisa Overdrive to become those consequences, to utterly short-circuit the loop. Divination becomes prophecy becomes enactment becomes aftershock, all without any real necessity for crossing the boundaries, all within the closed and rocketing loop of feedback technology. If the cyberpunk movement had no other effect (and it did, consequences upon televisions, film and MTV are already notable) it made narcissism a true and functional value and managed to link that narcissism to the continuing skein of the field, find antecedents in the bulkier computer and cyborg devices of the '40s and '50s (Kuttner's terrifying Ghost in 1945 prefigures some of this) and drag the work toward a context which was found identifiable by a lot of people who were not otherwise writing science fiction. That is one form of irresolution masquerading as resolve; another would be the explosion of alternate histories, alternate worlds, alternate historical placements (Pergolesi in the 20th century, Arturo Toscanini managing the 1927 Yankees, an immoral, drowning Robert Kennedy comes to terms with Proxima Centauri) within the last half decade. The alternate history, parallel circumstance has been a stream of science fiction for a long time—Bring the Jubilee, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for heaven's sake, The Man in the High Castle, Of Time and Third Avenue, Sidewise in Time, The Other Celia and so on and on—but in the 1980s this subgenre of a subgenre multiplied wildly, the wild alternate histories of Howard Waldrop (Eisenhower as a rock performer, Elvis as a politician) became the most paradigmatic example of a form which has leached through all of the longer and shorter forms and has become the basis of a number of anthologies. From what does this "famous person story" (Ellen Datlow's term) proceed? Possibly from the modern perception of the utterly arbitrary and mechanistic nature of destiny and circumstances, possibly from late-century, post-technological futility, a sense that the scholars in their solemn pursuit of sequentiality and consequence have always misled us, possibly from an untethering from our own history. But even as the famous person story was perhaps spurred by existential angst, an utter sense of disconnection, so it serves more objective and hortatory purposes . . . for if history can be arranged and reconstructed, if time and the river can be so juggled, reversed or manipulated, what of serious refraction of modern physics, of the Heisenberg Principal, of the theories of plasma physics? The famous person story not only refracts but makes manipulable the most rarefied concepts at the far edge of science. All inadvertently, perhaps, but most of the right and wrong guesses alike in the 1940s Astounding were similarly inadvertent.

Certainly, that irresolution is at the heart of science fiction. (So the title essay in Engines of the Night at last reluctantly concluded.) But must it lurk ungainly and constant at the heart of the writer, must it knife and probe the far edges toward the dawn: is there, as Ruthven muttered looking at his foreign editions at 4 a.m., wheeling his dusty car towards the state border, no peace? Is this it forever, this constancy, this inconstancy? Oh the murmurous jungle of the heart; the unknown tangle of motive, the lunge and clot of ancient blood.

 

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