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I Don't Want Her You Can Have Her—

The fans with their acronyms have the name for it all right: GAFIATE, getting away from it all. In the active form, to gafiate. The reaction is well known. Exhaustion, loathing, and overwhelming futility attack the actifan. Enmeshed in a hardly seamless network of conventions, fanzines, correspondence, feuds, history, and obligation, he feels a poetic faintness. He ceases to respond to letters; he is seen at conventions no more. Feuds and lovers must find other objects. The fan has gafiated. Sometimes he makes an announcement to this effect. More often—gafiation by definition is silence—he allows inferences. He returns to school full time. He gets married out of the field or files for divorce within it. He runs for congress or becomes employed by a distinguished graduate division.

Sometimes the gafiation is permanent (there are figures who will not even admit their participation in fan activity; will rip up the texts of Warner or Moskowitz undetected in bookstores). Quite often it is not. The fan, after a period of recuperation, degafiates. Once again he is seen at conventions, begins to query contributors for his reborn fanzine. APAs bristle with fresh reminiscence. Of course, in another few months or years the revulsion like malaria may set in once more: once more the pain. There are people whose lives can be defined in terms of successive involvement and flight from organized science fiction.

The same thing happens to writers and, for that matter, casual readers. The writer will deal with science fiction no more. He cannot write power fantasies for a juvenile audience, he is restricted by the editors, enchained by taboo, he will seek a wider audience and artistic freedom in the mainstream. Suitable announcements are made. The casual reader—for that matter, the heavy reader—has lost a sense of wonder. Eyes glaze, sensibility clouds; science fiction, like the booze in the second act of The Iceman Cometh, no longer has that old kick. He will read real novels about real people. The reader and writer turn their energies to another focus—the reader, usually adolescent, at first gafiation begins to entertain a social life—but they will be back. You can count on it. Unless, of course, they are not. Permanent gafiates appear to be the rule in only one class, those who in early adolescence, for a brief period of time, read great quantities of science fiction in a brief lacuna between childhood and the onset of a purposeful sex drive. (Decades later these people will not even remember reading science fiction in quantity and they will not be lying or self-deluded—science fiction was indeed an extension of a persona that the glands' development demolished.) All of the others, in one fashion or the other, are heard from again. They can be said to have ungafiated and the terminology and the literature have categorized that syndrome as well.

This central ambivalence in the science fiction reader and writer—an ambivalence not common among those involved in any other kind of literature although quite familiar (in other areas) to students of abnormal psychology or those involved with the great religious institutions—is perhaps the central fact of the category, the lever to mix a metaphor into any profound understanding of this dark and troubled literature. The ambivalence comes from the conflicting perceptions of the form: Is it a true literature of the future, a forward-looking, transcendent, mind-boggling, mind-stretching form which renders its readers superior to the population, or is it just a bunch of crazy power fantasies and speculations (admittedly some of them better written than others) for the sublimation of powerless adolescents? Is it a literature whose roots are contemptible or exalting? Every one of us has felt strongly in one way and then the other through the course of our involvement and very few of us have managed to resolve the schism. Gafiation is an expression of one perception when pushed to the extreme but gafiation may itself be an act of collaboration . . . one has taken science fiction seriously enough, been moved by it to sufficient degree, to need to put an official imprimatur upon one's rejection. Surely the millions who have read one or two science fiction stories, have not liked them particularly, and have not looked at science fiction since have not gafiated. They were never in a circumstance from which they could gafiate at all.

The ambivalence is not only at the center of everyone's relationship to the form but probably at the center of the genre itself. Almost all of our strong works—and a good many of the weaker ones in the bargain—have derived much of their power from the evident struggles of the writers to fuse elaborate and often bizarre speculation with character and situation which will give the speculation emotional force. "The disparate and technological, the desperate and human," Samuel R. Delany said many years ago, this is the definition of science fiction. The desperate and the disparate, the technological and the human do not link up easily; however, the fusion can be made—Rogue Moon, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Delany's own "Aye, and Gomorrah," to which his remarks were afterword, indicate that it can be done—but the psychic costs for writers and readers are severe. It is, after all, what started out as a crazy literature about aliens and robots, rocket ships and planetary destruction; it was deliberately published in the most debased form and slanted to appeal to a juvenile audience. As the consequence of the decades and of the perversity of its writers and editors, the pain and implication began to be put in . . . but there is a point at which even an excellent writer, a sophisticated reader begins to question the very nature of the material to which he is devoting so much time and thought. Surely there must be a better occupation for a grown human being than to define the world in deliberately removed form. It is better to deal with the world directly. Have an affair, get a degree in computer science, write a historical novel about events which did occur.

Spend some time with the kids, sell off the magazine collection.

Hence, gafiation. But there is nothing approaching a real cure for the seriously afflicted; one may amputate the limb but must henceforth live in apprehension of its loss, limp around. Sometimes it is simply easier to accept one's condition, go back to it. Up to a point of course. And then at a lower level, satiation is reached once again and one begins to toy with the idea of gafiation, which the second or third time is hardly such a major step. After all, one has already lived through it. . . .

There is really no solution to any of this; science fiction, as Delany hints, is the literature of irresolution. Its readers and writers will inevitably feel pulled out at some point and some will feel that way always even though few can forsake it utterly. No creators or audience for any branch of popular entertainment love and hate their form as do those involved in science fiction. (There is almost no organized fandom for westerns and mysteries; quality lit fandom is oxymoronic and there are no situation comedy conventions. There are soap opera fan luncheons and comics conventions but they appear to be commerce, not seduction.) No creators or audience hate and love one another as do science fiction people. No creators or audience can be said to hate or love themselves as do—

Why? Because it is a crazy escapist literature and yet contains the central truth of this slaughterhouse of a century. We know this and cannot at times bear the thought of it. Nor, considering the record of the century and the horrors which the millennium hurtles toward us, is there reason why we should.

But one cannot—except in a few dramatic and pitiful instances in science fiction—voluntarily gafiate from the century.

 

1980: New Jersey

 

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