Occasionally (less frequently all the time) I am called upon as the Town Science Fiction Writer (a role not dissimilar to that of Village Idiot) to speak to classes in the high school of my suburb in northeastern New Jersey. Genial in middle age and with my persona at reflex I can romp mindlessly through a fifteen-minute set piece on the joys and perils of the writing life, the custom of ambition and the habituation of form, and then throw the floor open to questions, which, after a grudging pause and a few glares from the English teacher, do come forth:
"What do you think of Star Wars? Do you think the sequel is better?"
"How about Stranger in a Strange Land?"
"Do you know Isaac Asimov? What is he really like?"
"The meaning of the end of 2001, I never got it. What does it say? What do you think of Planet of the Apes, by the way?"
"Is Ray Bradbury any good?"
"Did you like Star Trek: The Movie?"
Well. Did I? Not sure. A little—ah—attenuated, I thought. Never saw the series, not ever, so can't compare. Bradbury? Ray Bradbury has appeared in a science fiction magazine exactly once in the last two decades and has not published a new story or book in ten years. I don't think too much of Stranger in a Strange Land (pretty good writer on balance, though) and haven't seen The Empire Strikes Back (loved the mysteriously truncated bar scene in Star Wars, though; why did they cut it so quickly?). The ending of 2001 is metaphysical or mystic, a dream of transcendence, and Asimov is a splendidly ebullient man, an example to us all. So what? (I would like to continue but do not.) Is that all that the general public, at least as represented in the high schools, thinks of science fiction? A couple of movies, a few writers, most of whom have published very little within the confines of the field since the 1950s? Doesn't anybody know or care what's really going on? The stylistic innovations of the last decade and a half, the enormous growth of audience for all kinds of science fiction, the ten to twenty modern science fiction writers who by any literary standard are first-rate? How about them, kids? Don't you care?
Someday, if I am invited back, I'll probably put these questions after all.
In the meantime, the questions resonate, which is a fancy, literary way of saying that they will not go away. Science fiction prospered in the 1970s; in a largely debased form it became big business for the media, but in a different fashion it also flourished as literature. There are in this country over a thousand people writing science fiction of publishable quality (a decade ago there were half that number), over twelve hundred books labeled "science fiction" were published in 1979 (again, it was half that number a decade ago), and one of our middle-range professionals can now expect an advance of $15,000-$20,000 for a novel that might have brought (and glad to have it) $5,000 in 1970. Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle received a $127,500 hardcover advance, Heinlein's The Number of the Beast over $500,000 for paperback; ten years ago the highest advance ever paid for a genre science fiction novel was $12,500 for the paperback rights to Silverberg's The World Inside. The level of ambition, the dazzling achievement of our best writers, the complexity and sophistication of a form that in the memory of some of its older writers like Williamson or Simak did not even exist when they began to write . . . quite wondrous. The universities will sort this out for a century.
But for the general public, the 95 percent whose reading is of the most marginal level or less, science fiction is a couple of television series, a handful of films and four or five writers who were established well before 1950. Awareness of the category seems to be concentrated around a limited part of it: the rest of it is undiscovered.
This is depressing, but then so is the human condition. No particular reason to complain. How many high school students could name five living American novelists, three living serious composers? How many have even heard of, say, the Hudson Review, let alone have ever seen a copy? What percentage of that classroom has ever voluntarily gone to a symphony or a museum, opened Ulysses or The Great Gatsby? It is a hard time for us sensitive types in the so-called arts; if the students can name as many as five living science fiction writers they are, whether I like it or not, paying a kind of tribute to the field.
No, this is not what truly dismays. Rather it is a perception long after the fact; Buster Keaton would know how to do the take. I think that science fiction may be in severe trouble because not only the mass media but its best practitioners themselves have a clear interest in the category being known by and identified in the public consciousness with Star Wars, "Mork and Mindy," twenty-year-old novels by a couple of writers, and all that stuff floating around the cabin in Alien.
Why this is so—or at least why I perceive it to be so—would make for a complex argument extended over many a wearying and wavering paragraph, but I will try to be concise:
Science fiction, from its inception as a subcategory of American literature in 1926, until very recently was a small and largely ignored pursuit for its readers and writers. It was regarded with contempt by the academic literary nexus and ignored by the vast audience for popular culture. It had neither intellectual cachet nor, like television drama, the weight of attention.
This was unfair, to be sure, but it gave readers and writers (and editors and publishers too) the feeling that they were all collaborating on something vaguely disreputable, usually contemptible. When extrinsic events—Hiroshima, television, Sputnik, the assassinations, NASA, Apollo, Star Trek, Star Wars—caught up to or seized the science fiction vision of transcendence, when those events forced the public to grudgingly accept the field as serious business after all, most of its creators were still caught by feelings of exclusion. The enormously successful science fiction of the last decades is known by serious followers to be poor, often dreadful, exemplification of the genre . . . but better popularity and acceptance than a return to the forties and fifties when it was impossible for anyone within the field to be taken seriously by anyone without.
So science fiction may eventually dominate the eighties on the basis of its worst or at least weaker possibilities.
Too bad. Too bad indeed. No proper focus for the anger, but I know the feeling . . . to dwell in a bad marriage . . . to sacrifice passion for the sake of peace . . . to sacrifice dignity in flight of pain.
—1979/1980: New Jersey