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Part Two Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millenium

Part I: Meditations
Introduction to Part One: Meditations

In the twenty-five years since the delivery of Engines of the Night there was a fair amount of commentary scattered through the markets. Columns for Pulphouse Magazine in the 1990s, two essays for Amazing Stories, an essay on Freud & Fantasy for the Baltimore Jewish Times of all places, an essay on J.G. Ballard probably comprise the best of this work. In the essays on Freud and Ballard, in the Pulphouse essay on PITFCS (the last of my columns for this market) the writer can clearly be seen writing over his head; many of the essays in Engines had more clarity but those late 1980s and 1990s essays came closer than anything I ever wrote to approximating in their completion what I had hoped at inception . . . I was writing to 90% of my intention there, an unusual state for any of us. (There are a few short stories in the 1990s of which I would say the same.)

In 1992 I had, with the exception of a few introductions and a couple book review columns, done no critical writing since publication by Doubleday of Engines of the Night in 1982. it was my feeling that that epiphanic work derived much if not all of its power from a contract implicit at the heart of darkness: there would be no Sons of the Engines of the Night. The book was terminal in its vision and statement; it was the finality infusing those essays which gave the work credibility, I felt, and I resisted for many years both vagrant requests and my own compulsions to attempt new critical work. "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert," said Mallarme, as quoted by Norman Mailer in Advertisements for Myself. (I know almost nothing of the decadent Mallarme, a contemporary and countryman of Claude Debussy; he was the author of the poem upon which Debussy's famous Afternoon of a Faun was based and I somehow connect him to the libretto of Pelleas and Melisande but in the tradition of science fiction writers from the dear old field's inception, I am reluctant to take the tottering steps to the bookcase or record shelf and verify this) and that seemed a reasonable position. In the decade intervening I did not abandon fiction, even at the bottom of inspiration, and there were for or five short stories a year and through this bleak time I did in fact accumulate perhaps fifty or sixty short stories and the 1985 novel The Remaking of Sigmund Freud.

I abandoned critical essays and reviewing not because I felt I had nothing to say—I had plenty to say, at least to myself, and there is absolutely no silencing that raving, chattering internal voice, that thread of consciousness and disputation which rambles on and on and turns some writers into alcoholics and almost all of them into obsessives of one sort or the other—but because I felt that I had said enough and the integrity of Engines of the Night seemed to hinge upon reasonable silence. I changed my mind after all that time, but only tentatively and cautiously; a lot has happened in the '80s and there were many things to say but it was possible that this was no longer my métier or that I had, all unbeknownst to myself, lost contemporaneity and was no longer riding the high curve. I decided that the editor would, if that were the case, make his reaction known and so would that fraction of the readership which followed this stuff; in the interim, and with even more humility than that which I cited in the introduction to Engines, I was going to find out if I had anything still useful to say and, conversely, if the field was still addressing my own concerns. My Pulphouse essays were a careful, troubled exercise, then. If writing science fiction for publication for a quarter of a century will not induce humility, nothing will.

(Well, this is not quite so. My problem with hyperbole persists. I can think of several activities which might similarly induce a great deal of humility. Playing second violin in a bad community orchestra, for instance. If Heinlein had played bad second violin, he, I once wrote to Kirk Polking, he would have been incapable of his last five novels. Being a non-fraternity student at the Syracuse University of the 1950s while carrying around a large and formless, an inexpressible and a gigantic pained lust for the maedchen of Sigma Delta Tau or Iota Alpha Pi sororities will induce humility. Being a liberal Democrat in the nineties will induce humility. Going into a barbershop anywhere and asking for a haircut and a trim will induce more than that; Jason would have tossed the Golden Fleece before undergoing such an experience. We will try not to blame all of our failings on science fiction or vice-versa.)

If, after the collapse of Pulphouse in 1993 I had found another regular platform there might have been a few more at this level but no regrets; these essays said what I wanted and on the matter of science fiction at least, there is very little to be said beyond that essay on PITFCS.

Science fiction like Marx' conception of history: that dream from which we cannot awaken. Well, Marx defined history as nightmare. I wouldn't be that melodramatic.

 

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Framed