“THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION IS TWELVE”
—Peter Graham
IMMERSED IN science fiction. Bathing in it, drowning in it; for the adolescent who leans this way it can be better than sex. More accessible, more compelling. And the outsider can only wonder, What’s the matter with him? What is he into, what’s the attraction, why is it so intense?
Grown men and women, sixty years old, twenty-five years old, sit around and talk about “the golden age of science fiction,” remembering when every story in every magazine was a masterwork of daring, original thought. Some say the golden age was circa 1928; some say 1939; some favor 1953, or 1970, or 1984. The arguments rage till the small of the morning, and nothing is ever resolved.
Because the real golden age of science fiction is twelve.
THIS IS a book about the science fiction field and that body of contemporary writing known as science fiction, or SF. Over the years there have been a number of books on the writing the field has produced, its artwork and illustration, histories, memoirs, even books devoted to the amateur publications of the fans. But no general attempt to describe both the literature and the specific subculture out of which the literature flows has ever been presented to the world at large. Donald A. Wollheim, in The Universe Makers, and Lester del Rey, in The World of Science Fiction 1926–1976, come closer than any others and you might try them, though both are dated. Damon Knight’s The Futurians gives some perspective on the SF world as it grew up and on one particularly influential circle (and is full of great gossip). Theodore Cogswell’s P.I.T.F.C .S. captures another moment. Various autobiographies such as Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, Frederik Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, and Jack Williamson’s Wonder’s Child present other pieces of the puzzle. But never one book for the whole.
For one thing, the world at large, especially all who do not read and do not wish to read SF, couldn’t have cared less. “Everyone” knows that science fiction is not serious literature and that since the word “science” occurs in the name you wouldn’t be interested or able to understand if you did try to read it—so why try?
Despite the fact that twelve-year-olds who read it understand it perfectly, and that millions of readers over the years have found it great fun (it is supposed to be fun), the majority of educated readers in the English-speaking world spurn SF without reading it or knowing any more about it than what “everyone” knows. Well, this book is not an attempt to convert anyone (although later on I do recommend some SF for people who have not read in the field before). What I do intend is to offer a book that informs you about an amusing and significant phenomenon that reaches into every home and family in the country and influences the way we all see the world around us.
This is an outsider’s guidebook and road map through the world of science fiction, pointing out the historical monuments, backyard follies, highways, and back streets of the SF community—a tour of main events and sideshows, and a running commentary on why the SF world is the way it is. I hope it will be particularly useful for the casually curious, the neophyte reader, and of course the person who knows people in SF and wonders why they are that way. Is your child threatened by this strange stuff, or by the companionship of lovers of science fiction? Does SF rot the mind and ruin the character? Just how wild and crazy are those SF people, and what do they really do, where do they come from, why do they stay in the SF world? This tour, if successful, should take you not only through the nooks and crannies of the SF world, but into some unsuspected aspects of the everyday world as well.
* * *
Written science fiction, like cooking, mathematics, or rock’n’roll, is a whole bunch of things that some people can understand or do and some not. We all know people who love cooking, math, or rock (perhaps all three), and others who can hardly boil water, add two plus two, or distinguish music from noise. Your present tour guide stopped trying to convert people to instant appreciation of science fiction years ago when he finally understood that most new readers have to go through a process of SF education and familiarization before they can love it. Just because someone can read does not mean that he necessarily can read SF, just as the ability to write Arabic numerals and add and subtract doesn’t mean you necessarily can or want to perform long division.
So I have set out to describe science fiction without assuming that you have read any or would even know what to do if you were faced with the text of an SF story. I will discuss as clearly as possible all the barriers you might have against understanding SF and all the barriers that SF has erected to keep from being understood by outsiders—for like the world of the circus and the carny, the SF world only wants insiders behind the scenes. And more, the SF world does not want an audience (such as the “mass audience”) who won’t take the time to learn the rules and conventions of the game. SF is special within its community, which has built complex fortifications and groundworks surrounding its treasures; and for most people, the rewards of reading SF or being an SF-type person are worthless or pernicious or even a bit scary. To one who is comfortable and has adjusted to the compromises of our culture, being or becoming something of an outsider has no advantages.
Wait for a moment though, before you make up your mind that you don’t really have to become acquainted with what is going on in this other reality. The underground world of SF interpenetrates with your daily world so thoroughly in so many ways that finding out what those relatively few people who live in the SF world are like may let you understand a lot more about how your own world operates. Besides, as Thomas Pynchon so amusingly posited in his eccentric novella The Crying of Lot 49, if you begin to look beneath the surface of everyday life, almost everyone is involved in some sort of underground activity. This kind of activity is so much a part of what everyone does (without ever seeing the big picture) that if you pull back and look at it all, the real world seems very different. That is, in one very real sense, what this book is about.
When you spot a science fiction devotee on a bus, in a library, or on lunch break in the cafeteria, she or he is identifiable only by a display of some kind: She is reading a flashy paperback that says “Science Fiction” on the cover; he is wearing a STAR TREK LIVES! T-shirt over his bathing trunks at the beach; she is quietly asking the bookseller if there is a copy of Women of Wonder in the store; he is arguing loudly with a friend that Terry Pratchett is much better than Piers Anthony (who is not truly funny) while munching a sandwich and sipping Coke.
Otherwise, there are no reliable outward signs, unless you happen to stop over at a hotel or motel anywhere in the U.S. where one of the at least weekly science fiction conventions is being held—after one look, you switch accommodations, because the whole place is filled with people in costumes, Bacchanalian howls, teenagers in capes with swords, normally dressed adults wearing garish name tags that identify them as Gork or Kalinga Joe or Conan or David G. Hartwell or Beardsley Trunion. Your immediate perception of this social situation is either “Feh!” or “Let me back off and view these weirdos from a safe distance, say at the end of tomorrow’s newscast!”
The science fiction person, you see, always lives in the SF world, but under cover of normality most of the time—except while attending a gathering of like minds such as the SF conventions given in understated flashes above. The science fiction reader may be your attorney, your dentist, your children’s schoolteacher, the film projectionist at your local theater, your wife or husband or child, happily living in two worlds at once, the real world of science fiction and the only apparent reality of everyday life.
If you have lived with or worked with a science fiction person, you will have noticed how intensely she seems to be involved in science fiction, how much she reads it, watches it, recommends to those around her that they try it, because it is her special kind of fun. And if you examine her behavior in everyday life, you may well notice an impatience with the way things are, an ironic, sometimes sarcastic attitude toward everyday things (particularly imposed tasks of a wearisome nature), a desire for change. This complex of attitudes is closely congruent to the complex of attitudes found in the normal human teenager.
In fact, a majority of all science fiction is read by readers who are under the age of twenty-one. The great change in the last twenty years is that most of the stuff popular with younger readers in large numbers is generally thought of as trash by adult SF readers—film and gaming tie-ins, series novels—really no change at all if you squint at it. The question is not how they got that way but why it should surprise anyone that they are. Teenagers are not fully integrated into the tedium of adult life and tend to view such everyday life with healthy suspicion. Quite logical. The science fiction reader preserves this attitude as long in life as his association with science fiction continues, more often these days into full maturity. (Today, the majority of readers of SF are adults who read fewer books a month than teenagers but keep at it for life.) It makes him act strangely sometimes. But mostly he feeds his head with more science fiction and continues to get the job done, whatever it is.
Nearly a thousand readers of Locus, the newspaper of the science fiction field (a semiprofessional monthly published by California fan Charles N. Brown), responded to a survey in the early 1980s, indicating that the initial involvement in science fiction of almost every respondent happened between the ages of ten and fourteen. After decades of word-of-mouth evidence, this survey simply confirmed what everyone in the SF field already knew, so no one has bothered to do another one since. This lends substance to the tradition in the science fiction world that active involvement starts early and lasts at least until the early twenties. Science fiction is an addiction (or habit) so reasonable in any teenager who can read (and many who can’t very well, in this age of Star Trek and fantasy gaming) that it is superficially a curiosity that it doesn’t always last. But it doesn’t, and most of us do end up well-adjusted more or less, resigned to life as it is known to be beyond 1984 (and soon beyond 2001).
The science fiction drug is available everywhere to kids, in superhero comics, on TV, in the movies, in books and magazines. It is impossible to avoid exposure, to avoid the least hint of excitement at Marvel Comics superheroes and Star Trek reruns and Star Wars, impossible not to become habituated even before kindergarten to the language, clichés, basic concepts of science fiction. Children’s culture in the contemporary U.S. is a supersaturated SF environment. By the time a kid can read comic books and attend a movie unaccompanied by an adult, his mind is a fertile environment for the harder stuff. Even the cardboard monsters of TV reruns feed the excitement. The science fiction habit is established early.
In some cases, accompanied by the hosannas of proud parents, a bright kid focuses his excitement on the science part and goes on to construct winning exhibits in school science fairs, avoid being arrested for computer hacking, obtain scholarships, and support proud parents in their old age with his honorable gains as a career corporate technologist. Most often, a kid freezes at the gosh-wow TV/comics/movies stage and carries an infatuation with fantastic and absurd adventure into later life. But sometimes, usually by the age of twelve, a kid progresses to reading science fiction in paperback, in magazines, book club editions—wherever he can find it, because written SF offers more concentrated excitement. This is the beginning of addiction; he buys, borrows, even steals all the science fiction he can get his hands on and reads omnivorously for months or even years, sometimes until the end of high school years, sometimes a book or more a day. But the classic symptom is intense immersion in written SF for at least six months around age twelve.
Publishers adore this phenomenon, akin to the addiction to mystery and detective fiction that flourished in the decades prior to the mid-sixties. One major publisher of SF remarked to me in the 1980s that his books are supported by twelve-year-olds of all ages. Every professional writer, editor, and publisher in the science fiction field knows that the structure of science fiction publishing is founded on the large teenage audience, which guarantees a minimally acceptable market for almost every paperback book or magazine published—it requires extreme ignorance and determination, akin to constipating oneself by an act of will, to be unsuccessful when selling science fiction to the omnivorous teenage audience of smart, alienated readers. Yet some have failed. And in the 1990s there has finally been established a large enough population of adult readers to support a regular hardcover publishing industry in science fiction—and no one believes the average hardcover is being bought by a teenager. More about this later.
What happens to science fiction omnivores? Well, obviously, most of them discover the compulsive excitement of the opposite (or same) sex, and stop reading much of anything for pleasure, most of them permanently. However, once you have been an omnivore, your life has been permanently altered, if only in minor ways. Years later, you may experience an irrational desire to watch Battlestar Galactica reruns on TV, even though you know it’s dumb stuff. You tend not to forbid your kids or kid your friends if they want a little toke of science fiction from time to time. A news report on solar energy possibilities in the near future doesn’t seem like total balderdash, just, perhaps, a bit optimistic in the short run. A front-page newspaper article on the U.S. space probe to Jupiter doesn’t read like Sanskrit or form associations with guff like spirit-rapping. Surprise! Your life has been altered and you didn’t even notice.
Discovering sex (or competitive sports or evangelical Christianity or demon rum) is not always a total diversion, though. You can, of course, read with one hand. And there are further activities open to the fan in the omnivorous stage: Hundreds, often thousands, of fans gather at conventions every weekend throughout Western civilization (the World Science Fiction Convention—generically called the “Worldcon”—was in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1995; the 1999 Worldcon may be in Australia, for the third time in thirty years) to act strangely together. To a teenage omnivore, such a weekend of license to be maladjusted in the company of and in harmony with the covertly alienated of all ages can be golden. No one much notices how you dress or act as long as you do not injure yourself or others.
Swords and capes (ah! Romance!) are particularly favored among the fat and pimply population, male and female. One wag counted seventy-two Princess Leias at the World SF Convention of 1978 in Phoenix! Star Trek costumes still abound in the mid-nineties. My favorite moment at the Worldcon in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1994 was seeing the fully costumed Klingon Butt Massage team enter a late-night party. Or you can hang out in your everyday slacks and jacket or torn jeans and T-shirt with like minds.
And right there among the crowd (at least at the Worldcon—the traditional gathering of the cliques) are all the big-name professionals, from Brian Aldiss and Poul Anderson to Timothy Zahn and David Zindell, by tradition and in fact approachable for conversation and frivolity. Although this ideal is seldom approached at large SF conventions any longer—two decades of SF media cons, at which the stars are the pros and the fans are merely consumers, have split the psyche of the whole community. My own opinion is that the growth of the consumer/producer split in the SF community has been generally a bad thing for fandom and a good thing for commerce. My advice: Seek out smaller conventions and avoid the large Northeast and West Coast ones at first. Just being there at a small con makes you a potentially permanent member of the SF family.
It’s really a big clique, you see—or rather a band of several cliques. Just like the ones you are cut out of in the local junior high or whatever, only now you are automatically a member of one until you do something beyond the pale. You might be so shy as to be tongue-tied for your first ten conventions; still, when I was younger I could walk into a room party, sit on the floor and listen to Isaac Asimov and Anne McCaffrey sing Gilbert and Sullivan—and join in. And go home and tell my friends that I spent time with Asimov last weekend. You can still find similar events today. Just so you don’t feel lonely in the arid stretches between conventions you can afford to attend, there are approximately 1,000 fan magazines produced by individuals and written by themselves and/or other fans to keep you in communication with the SF world day to day. And there is the Internet.
Today, no matter how isolated or young and ignorant or just plain shy you are, if you have access to a computer and a modem, you can visit the SF forums on the commercial services such as CompuServe, GEnie, or America Online, or the “newsgroups” of the Internet, or surf the World Wide Web, or lurk like an invisible shade watching while Mike Resnick and George Alec Effinger chat online, until you feel like joining in the SF world.
As you might have gathered, the great family aspect of SF is, in the long run, only for the most ardent—maybe 10,000 active fans in the U.S. at any time, and a few thousand more in Europe, Japan, Australia. Most often, fans mature socially enough to adjust to their home environment and just read the stuff off and on, attending, perhaps, a Worldcon every year or two to keep contact with a few friends. This is the chronic stage of addiction, following the active omnivore phase. And this stage can last for life.
If you grew up in isolation from movies, TV, and comics and have never read a work of science fiction (or if you tried one once, and found it dumb, incomprehensible, or both), you might ask, at this point, why the fuss? The answer is that even if you have kept yourself in pristine separation from the material, you are interacting daily with people who have progressed to at least a stage-one involvement in science fiction and who have altered your environment because of it.
Science fiction as written and published during the last twenty years is so diverse in every aspect that no reader except at the height of the omnivorous stage can expect to be attracted to all of it. And more science fiction has been published in the 1980s and 1990s than ever before: fifty or sixty new paperbacks every month, several magazines, even a number of hardbounds—too much even for the most dedicated omnivore to read. The quality of the individual book or story varies from advanced literary craftsmanship to hack trash, from precise and intellectual visions of the future to ignorant swordsmen hacking their way through to beautiful damsels (less than one-quarter clad) across an absurd environment. There are enough varieties of science fiction and fantasy to confuse anybody.
If you look at a wide spectrum of covers in your local SF paperback section, you begin to notice a lot of categories of science fiction. How do the advanced omnivores and chronics select what to read? By this very process: As in any other kind of book, you can tell the importance of the author of a science fiction book by the size of the author’s name on the cover. Another reliable indicator of commercial importance, or at least popularity, is how many copies of an individual title by an author the store has and how many (and how many inches) of the author’s titles are on the shelf. Martin H. Greenberg, the prolific anthologist, has kept records of such measurements (inches of shelf space) in one store for years, and swears by this as a gauge of growth and decline in popularity.
But popularity and importance aside, how do you identify whether this is the kind of SF you are looking for? By the complex symbology of the cover. Not always, of course, because the paperback industry (never mind hardcover publishers; hardcovers tend to look bland, from attempts to disguise the genre, whenever they don’t look like big paperbacks) is guilty of lack of confidence, or ignorance, leading to mispackaging fairly regularly—but in the huge majority of cases, science fiction is quite precisely marketed and packaged.
The images on science fiction covers range from futuristic mechanical devices (which connote a story heavily into SF ideas, or perhaps just science fictional clichés) to covers with recognizable computer art, perhaps a human body part, and a dark background (which connotes cyberpunk, about which more later), to covers featuring humans against a futuristic setting, with or without machines (which connote adventure SF) to covers with humans carrying swords or other anachronistic weapons (which connote fantasy or fantastic adventure against a cardboard or clichéd SF background) to hypermuscled males carrying big swords and adorned with clinging hyperzaftig females, both scant-clad against a threateningly monstrous background (which connote sword-&-sorcery or heroic-fantasy adventures, with perhaps some SF elements) to covers representing several varieties of pure fantasy (from rich romantic flowery quests to freaky supernatural horror). Every SF omnivore has sampled all the varieties of SF, from Lovecraftian supernatural horror to the swashbuckling adventure tales of Poul Anderson to the technical and literary conundrums of Samuel R. Delany. Chronic readers usually center their interests in one limited area and read everything packaged to their taste.
The net effect is that there is a rather large number of SF audiences with focused interests, all of which interlock and overlap to form the inchoate SF reading audience. Most individual books reach their targeted audience and prosper from overlap into other related audiences. Occasionally, an SF work satisfies several of these overlapping audiences at once (for example, Dune by Frank Herbert, Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, or Neuromancer by William Gibson) and reaches what the publishing industry calls the mass audience (truly humongous numbers of readers)—and then extends for a decade or more in sales into the audience that consists of normal people who decide to try the stuff and have heard three or four big names (like Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which paid most of the light bills in the period 1961 to 1981 for its publisher and allowed Mr. and Mrs. Heinlein to visit opera festivals in Europe on whim—and is still in print today).
The situation is exceedingly complex. Some say that the whole SF audience (the market) is composed of teenagers, for all practical purposes, and turns over almost completely every three to five years. This theory, the omnivore theory, eliminates all chronic readers (the actual majority) from consideration. It has the virtue of practicality from the publishing point of view, though it means you can recycle individual books endlessly and can publish practically anything, no matter how crippled, and reach a basic, dependable, supposedly profitable (though small) audience.
The most successful variant on this in recent decades is the Star Trek novel series (which indeed reaches a very large audience, nearly every title a national bestseller), but it is also the unspoken theory behind the Dragonlance books, the Star Wars novels, and many other such series. One does not seek out the one great Star Trek novel, as one does not search for the one great Pontiac or can of Snow’s Clam Chowder. One buys, one consumes.
The combined, or omnivore/chronic theory, which is the unarticulated basis behind most SF publishing, would sound something like a classier version of the omnivore theory—keep the good books in print for omnivores who pass into the chronic state and for the non-SF reader who wishes to sample the field through books or authors he has heard of, and scatter the rest of your publishing program among the three spectra (fantasy/science fantasy/science fiction) in hopes of discovering chronic sellers—works that everyone who reads SF must sooner or later hear about and read. At its best, this philosophy (if we may so dignify a marketing strategy) leads to the publishing of soaring works of the speculative imagination—but mostly it leads to carefully marketed crap.
But even that is okay. Both omnivores and chronics are patient and have long memories. They are willing to wade through a fair amount of swamp to find islands of rationality and the real thing—wonderful SF.
It’s a kind of quixotic quest, you see, admirable in its way. The SF reader is willing to keep trying, reading through rather large numbers of half-cooked ideas, brutal clichés, and cardboard characters and settings in search of the truly original and exciting and good. How many of us outside the SF field could be so determined? The SF reader has fun along the way that is not often visible to outsiders.
The SF reader sneers at fake SF, artificially produced film tie-in novels and stories, most SF films, most TV SF. This he calls sci-fi (or “skiffy”)—junk no right-thinking omnivore or chronic should read, watch, or support. But with beatific inconsistency he will pursue his own quest—through endless hours of films, cable specials, and TV reruns, Space: 1999, The Twilight Zone, Battlestar Galactica, Mork and Mindy, My Favorite Martian, and some truly horrendous paperbacks and magazines—in search of something as good as he remembers finding during his initial omnivore excitement. It is not only the media fans who support the Sci-Fi Channel. SF readers do too. This quest through the rubble is not without its rewards.
Consider: The aforementioned conventions are broken down into discrete areas of programming, and many conventions have a general or even quite limited theme. Aside from the World Science Fiction Convention, which is a general gathering of the clans, there is a World Fantasy Convention, numerous Star Trek conventions, a pulp-magazine convention (Pulpcon), Darkovercon (devoted to the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley), an SF film convention, numerous “relaxacons” (at which there is no programming—chronics and omnivores gather to party with like minds for a weekend), and literally dozens of localized conventions, ranging from hundreds to thousands of attendees: Armadillocon (Austin); Boskone (Boston); Lunacon (New York City); Westercon (West Coast); Ad Astra (Toronto); Philcon (Philadelphia); Balticon (Baltimore); Disclave (Washington, D.C.). The list is extensive, each with a guest of honor, films, panels, speeches, a roomful of booksellers, an art show, and many special events (often including a masquerade, a gaming room, and a computer room) and parties (pretty dependably twenty-four hours a day). Besides general saturnalia, these conventions build audiences for name authors (guests of honor and other featured guests) and reflect audience fascination with discrete kinds of SF.
The World Science Fiction Convention, a six-day bash, has nearly five twenty-four-hour days of programming. Conadian (Worldcon ’94), named patriotically for its northern setting in Winnipeg, had attendees who came from Japan to present the annual Japanese party after the awards, and a healthy European contingent, including Russian fans selling souvenirs to raise hard cash; feminists and those interested in women writers came for the several Women in Science Fiction events; film fans came for the twenty-four-hour-a-day film programs (a bargain); Georgette Heyer fans came for the Regency Dress Dance (yes, at a science fiction convention); some came to see and hear their favorite big-name authors—fantasy readers to see Guy Gavriel Kay and L. Sprague de Camp, Darkover fans to see Marion Zimmer Bradley, Amber fans to see Roger Zelazny; L-5 fans came to proselytize for space industrial colonies.
Of the almost five thousand attendees, a variety of audiences were represented, often recognizable from the individual package. Aside from the general run of jeaned teenagers and suited publishing types, the Star Trek fans often wore costumes from the show (Klingons were definitely in in 1994); the Regency fans dressed Regency; the heroic fantasy fans sported swords and capes; the medieval fans and Society for Creative Anachronism members dressed in a variety of medieval costumes; Spider Robinson, Canadian immigrant, played his guitar and sang well in the main corridor to a crowd of enthusiastic fans for hours at night. These people filled more than four hotels. Sponsoring similar events, Intersection, the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, had about six thousand attendees in more than ten hotels. Each reader discovers his or her special fun at conventions.
Omnivores tend to form preferences early on in their reading spree, and chronics are usually fixed for life. This is a quick rundown of the main possibilities an omnivore might fix on: classic fantasy (ghost stories, legends, tales); supernatural horror (two categories: classic—from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen to Stephen King and Rosemary’s Baby; and Lovecraftian, the school of H. P. Lovecraft and his followers); Tolkienesque fantasy (in the manner of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—carefully constructed fantasy worlds as the setting for a heroic quest, now typified by Robert Jordan’s works); heroic fantasy (the descendants of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, barely repressed sex fantasy in which a muscular, macho, sword-bearing male overcomes monsters, magicians, racial inferiors, and effete courtiers by cleverness and brute force, then services every willing woman in sight—and they are all willing); Burroughsian science fantasy (adventure on another planet or thinly rationalized SF setting in which fantasy and anachronism—sword fighting among the stars—are essentials); space opera (the Western genre paradigm of heroic action on the frontier, with clear good guys versus bad guys action, but set in space and using the traditional trappings of SF); hard science fiction (the SF idea is the center of attention, usually involving chemistry or physics or astronomy); soft science fiction (two alternate types: one in which the character is more important than the SF idea; the other focusing on any science other than physics or chemistry); experimental science fiction (stylistically, that is); fine-writing science fiction (may include a work from any of the above categories, hard though that may be to accept); single author (reads all published stories of H. P. Lovecraft, his nonfiction, the five volumes of collected letters, the volumes of posthumous collaborations, all pastiches, and so on—archetypal fan behavior). You can begin to see the enormous variety available.
The most significant development of the last decade for the future of SF is that by about the mid-sixties, enough “fine writing” had been done in the SF field so that a chronic might fixate on that aspect of SF without running out of reading matter before running out of patience. There has always been excellent writing in the SF field, but now there is an actual audience looking for it—before the sixties, literate prose was fine when it was found, but was generally irrelevant to the SF omnivores and most chronics.
The increased volume of the fine-writing category has had its effect on outsiders’ evaluation of the medium. In the seventies, the academic appraisal of SF moved from “It’s trash” to “It’s interesting trash” to “Some of it is important and worth attention, even study.” Oh, sigh. Already there are dissertations written by Ph.D.s on science fiction. In the eighties that “some of it” was reduced to “that part that can be called postmodern” (for which read cyberpunk) and most of the rest of SF was thrown back into the gutter or became “character-driven,” about which more later.
But SF is alive and still growing—not literary history—and most of the Ph.D. work is a waste of good dissertation paper because many advanced omnivores have read more SF than almost all of the Ph.D.s, and, given the categories presented above, no one has yet been able to define SF well enough so that non-SF readers can figure it out. SF readers know it when they see it, what is real and what is sci-fi (which has come to denote, among the chronics, what is probably admissible as SF but is extremely bad—able to fool some of the people some of the time).
SF people know, for instance, that Superman is real SF. In his book Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World, 1966), Sam Moskowitz tells the story of the teenage fans associated with the creation of the character and its early publication in Action Comics in 1938—and if the first generation of science fiction people had produced nothing more than Superman and Buck Rogers, the effect of science fiction on American culture still would have been profound. Because to the science fiction devotee, the attitude of SF is naturally carried over into every area of everyday life. She tends to solve problems at work with science fictional solutions or by using the creative methodology learned through reading SF. He tends to see visions of alternative futures that can be influenced by right actions in the present. She tends to be good at extrapolating trends, and especially good at puncturing the inflated predictions of others by pointing out complexities and alternatives. He tends to be optimistic about ecology through technology, has no fear of machines, and tends to be a loner.
The science fiction person never agrees with anybody else in conversation just to be friendly. Ideas are too important to be betrayed. Science fiction people, among their own kind, are almost always contentious—after all, a favorite activity is to point to an unlabeled work that may be considered SF and argue about whether or not it is, really, SF.
At that time when involvement is at its peak for the science fiction person, SF is what holds the world together. It is important, exciting, and gives the science fiction person a basis for feeling superior to the rest of humanity, those who don’t know. The early fans, the generation of the thirties, many of whom (Forrest J. Ackerman, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, and a host of others) are among the major writers, publishers, and editors of recent decades, evolved a theory to justify the superiority of science fiction people, then a persecuted, mainly teenage, minority. At the Third Annual World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein—then, as now, the most respected author in the field—gave a speech intended to define the science fiction field for its readers and authors. The theme of the speech was change, and it examined the concept and problem of “future shock” nearly thirty years before Alvin Toffler wrote his famous book.
“I think,” said Heinlein, “that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it’s written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change.” He then went on to tell the fascinated audience, in this speech that is legendary even after five decades, that he believed them to be way above average in intelligence and sensitivity—a special group:
Science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitude—not even centuries but thousands of years.… Most human beings, and those who laugh at us for reading science fiction, time-bind, make their plans, make their predictions, only within the limits of their immediate personal affairs.… In fact, most people, as compared with science fiction fans, have no conception whatsoever of the fact that the culture they live in does change; that it can change.
We can only imagine the impact of such a coherent articulation of alienation and superiority on a bunch of mostly late-adolescent men at the end of the Great Depression. Though the inferior mass of humanity laughs at us, we are the ones who know, we are the wave of the future, the next evolutionary step in the human race. If only our pimples would clear up, we could get on with changing the world. Fans are Slans! (Slan, a novel by A. E. Van Vogt serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, about a superior race living in secret among normal humans, was an instant classic in 1941.)
Adults ignore lousy technique when they are being deceived (in literature or elsewhere) if the deception supports the view of reality they have chosen to embrace. Adults stand to lose their sense of security if they don’t cling to everyday reality. Teenagers (and the other groups of people described above) have no sense of security as a rule. They are searching for something—change, a future—and unconvincing, mundane reality does not satisfy. Oddly, then, the assumptions made in a science fiction story, which are transparently assumptions and which the young social-reject of any age can share as an intellectual exercise, are more acceptable to him than the everyday assumptions made in a “serious” work of fiction about real (mundane adult) life in which he cannot or does not wish to participate.
Science fiction is preeminently the literature of the bright child, the kid who is brighter perhaps than her teachers. This is the reader to whom SF comes naturally, like the air, and becomes a refuge promising hope for the future, giving radical scenarios of difference and change.
Thus the science fiction novel or story is generally aimed at the person who has not embraced a particular set of assumptions about the way things are—this helps to explain both SF’s appeal to the young and its seeming shallowness to most “mature” readers. Science fiction is still in the 1990s often shallow in its presentation of adult human relations (most often the sole concern of most other literature), but it is profound in the opportunities it offers the reader to question his most basic assumptions, even if he has to ignore lousy technique a lot of the time to participate in the illusion. This last is easy for the omnivore and chronic reader—in fact, the minute you overcome the suspension-of-disbelief problem, admittedly much easier in the early teenage years than in later life, you tend to enter your omnivore stage. Make no mistake—you don’t lose your critical ability or literary education when you begin to read science fiction. You just have to learn the trick of putting all your preconceptions aside every time you sit down to read. Hah! You were right, this is just another piece of hack work. But the next one, or the story after that, may be the real thing, innovative, well written, surprising, exciting.
Throughout the past decade or more, there has been a growing number of adults who have discovered science fiction as a tool without discovering the thing itself. There are now many new uses for SF in the mundane world: It can be used to combat future shock; to teach religion, political science, physics, and astronomy; to promote ecology; to support the U.S. space program; to provide an index to pop cultural attitudes toward science; and to advance academic careers and make profits for publishers, film producers, even toy makers. But the business of the science fiction itself is to provide escape from the mundane world, to get at what is real by denying all of the assumptions that enforce quotidian reality for the duration of the work.
This is reflected in what really goes on at science fiction conventions. Beneath the surface frivolity, cliquishness, costumery, beneath the libertarian or just plain licentious anarchism of the all-night carousing, beyond the author worship, the serious panel discussions, and the family of hail-fellow-fan-well-met, the true core of being a science fiction person is that the convention is abnormal and alienated from daily life. Not just separated in time and space—different! There is no parallel more apt than the underground movements of the last two hundred years in Western civilization: the Romantics in England, Baudelaire and his circle in France, the Modernists, the Beats. (Note to literary historians: This would make an interesting study.) The difference is that to an outsider, it just looks like fun and games, since these people go home after a convention, go back to work, school, housewifery, unemployment, mundane reality. Or so it seems.
While they are spending time in the science fiction world, though, things are really different. How different? Let’s circle around this for a moment. For instance, at a convention you can almost certainly talk to people there who, in normal life, are removed from you by taboos or social barriers. No matter how obnoxious you are, people will talk to you unless you insult them directly, and the chances are excellent that you can find one or more people willing to engage in serious, extended, knowledgeable conversation about some of the things that interest you most, whether it is the stock market or macramé, clothing design or conservative politics, science or literature or rock’n’roll. This is now just as true of the SF bulletin boards of the Internet and the online services such as GEnie, America Online, and CompuServe, where the conversations take place every hour of every day.
Science fiction people tend not to be well rounded but rather multiple specialists; the only thing that holds them and the whole SF world together is science fiction. Actually you spend a minority of your time at a convention talking about science fiction, but the reality of science fiction underlies the whole experience and is its basis. For the duration of the science fiction experience, you agree to set aside the assumptions and preconceptions that rule your ordinary behavior and to live free in a kind of personal utopian space. A science fiction convention, like a work of science fiction, is an escape into an alternate possibility that you can test, when it is over, against mundane reality. Even the bad ones provide this context.
Harlan Ellison, writer and science fiction personality, has spoken of his first encounter with science fiction as a kid in a dentist’s office, where he discovered a copy of a science fiction magazine. On the cover, Captain Future was battling Krag the robot for possession of a scantily clad woman; the picture filled his young mind with awe, wonder, and excitement. His life was changed. He wanted more. The reason science fiction creates such chronic addicts as Harlan Ellison is that once you admit the possibility that reality is not as solid and fixed as it used to seem, you feel the need for repeated doses of science fictional realities. Today, that moment of transformation may occur while watching a film or TV, or even reading a comic book, but it still happens and creates fans, who then have the urgent desire to find others like themselves.
Of course, sometimes what you discover in the science fiction field that attracts you is not the thing itself but one of its associates. A chronic reader may actually read almost entirely classical fantasy and Lovecraftian supernatural horror, or a writer such as Fritz Leiber may spend a career writing in every variety of fantasy and science fiction, and yet always be “in the field.” There is an interesting investigation to be done someday on why the classical fantasy, a main tradition of Western literature for several millennia, is now part of the science fiction field. In the latter half of the twentieth century, with certain best-selling exceptions, fantasy is often produced by writers of science fiction and fantasy, edited by editors of science fiction, illustrated by SF and fantasy artists, read by omnivore fantasy and SF addicts who support the market. Fantasy is no longer in the 1990s just a subdivision of SF but is related to the phenomenon that confronts us in an unpredictably evolving way in the 1990s since being established in the 1980s as a separate marketing category. (See Appendix V.)
Since the 1930s, science fiction has been an umbrella under which any kind of estrangement from mundane reality is welcome (though some works, such as John Norman’s Gor series in the seventies and eighties, or the gaming tie-in novels of the eighties and nineties, both of which began life under the SF umbrella, are admitted but generally despised and generally believed to sell mostly to an audience outside any other SF audience). To present the broad, general context of the SF field, let us consider in more detail the main areas and relationships as they have evolved over the past several decades.
The general question of fantasy has been dealt with frequently, from Freud’s well-known essay on the uncanny through recent structuralist works such as Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic, and is not central to our concern with science fiction. Several things need to be said, however, about fantasy literature before we move on to varieties of science fiction. Fantasy, through its close association with science fiction since the 1920s in America, has developed a complex interaction with science fiction that has changed much of what is written as fantasy today.
H. P. Lovecraft, the greatest writer of supernatural horror of the century, a literary theoretician, and mentor, through correspondence and personal contact, to Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Donald and Howard Wandrei, and a number of others, was an agnostic, a rationalist, and a believer in science. His work was published both in Weird Tales, the great fantasy magazine between the twenties and the early fifties, and in Astounding Stories, the great science fiction magazine of its day. Almost all his acolytes followed the same pattern of commercial and literary ties to both areas.
In 1939, after the greatest SF editor of modern times, John W. Campbell, took the helm at Astounding, he proceeded to found the second great fantasy magazine, Unknown, encouraging all his newly discovered writing talents—Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Anthony Boucher, Alfred Bester, H. L. Gold, Fredric Brown, Eric Frank Russell, as well as Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, C. L. Moore, and Fritz Leiber—to create a new kind of fantasy, with modern settings and contemporary atmosphere, as highly rationalized and consistent as the science fiction he wanted them to write for Astounding. Through Lovecraft and Campbell a strong link was forged not only commercially but also aesthetically between fantasy and science fiction.
Today, and for the last four decades, the most distinguished and consistently brilliant publication in the field has been The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Anthony Boucher, from Campbell’s Unknown, was a founding editor and set the aesthetic tone), required reading for all who wish to discover the field at its best and broadest—though it has never been the most popular magazine in the field, always surpassed in circulation by more focused magazines. Its most serious competitor for top honors is Asimov’s SF Magazine, embodying the same broad and modern aesthetic position since the advent of editors Shawna McCarthy and then Gardner Dozois in the mid-eighties. In some years Asimov’s has unquestionably dominated the field, publishing much fantasy and unclassifiable fiction as SF.
After Lovecraft and Campbell, the third towering figure in fantasy so far in the twentieth century is J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy is both a classic of contemporary literature and an example of the dominant position of the science fiction field as stated above. Tolkien’s works, although hardcovers at first, were popularized in paperback through SF publishers and have spawned an entire marketing substructure to support works of world-building fantasy in the Tolkien tradition. More books appear every month featuring the quest of a single heroic figure across a detailed and rationalized fantasy world, accompanied by a group of major and minor fantasy characters and ending in a confrontation between Good and Evil, in which after a tough battle, Good always wins.
The fourth towering figure is not one person, but is a posthumous collaboration between the artist Frank Frazetta, formerly a comic illustrator, and the author Robert E. Howard, a pulp fantasy adventure hack who committed suicide the day his mother died in 1936 and who created a number of fantastic heroes, the best-known of whom is Conan the Barbarian. Howard’s works had been mostly out of print since his death, except for several small press editions and a few paperbacks, until the early 1960s. Then L. Sprague de Camp obtained the rights from Howard’s estate to arrange and anthologize the whole Conan series for the first time in paperback, and to write additions and sequels himself and with others. Through a stroke of marketing genius, comics artist Frazetta was hired to illustrate the paperback covers, which seized the imagination of the audience enough to sell in the millions of copies, established the Howard name, and made Frazetta wealthy and famous. Howard now has nearly fifty books in print in the sixth decade following his death, and a sword-swinging barbarian hero brutishly adventuring across a fantasy/historic landscape (inside a book with an imitation Frazetta cover—Frazetta’s originals from the 1960s and 70s now sell at auction for six figures) is the principal reading focus of a large number of chronic SF readers. This category, which was formerly called sword-and-sorcery fiction, is now referred to more accurately as heroic fantasy. If Mickey Spillane wrote Mike Hammer stories as SF, it would be heroic fantasy. In fact, a hundred years from now SF may have acquired Spillane’s works under this rubric.
But terminology remains slippery. Robert Jordan wrote Conan sequels before he wrote his epic Wheel of Time sequence. Since he was a heroic fantasy writer when writing the Conans, people continued to refer to his work as heroic fantasy and now, given Jordan’s great popularity, have begun to apply the phrase backward to all Tolkienesque fantasy (since Jordan’s Wheel of Time is in the tradition of Tolkien). Where this will end in the short run is confusion for all concerned. Maybe usages will become clear again in the next century.
Two areas of fantasy that are not presently annexed under the SF umbrella, or published with a fantasy logo in that marketing category, perhaps because these two areas are not presently in popular (middle-class) disrepute, are Arthurian romances and the occult horror best-seller. There are indications that these two areas may remain separate and independent—both types tend to be written by authors who have no desire to associate themselves and their works with low-class, nonliterary, low-paying (until recently) stuff. On the other hand, there are intimate links between horror and SF from Unknown and Weird Tales to the present. There are even horror conventions and fantasy conventions spawned by the SF conventions, and the writers often write and socialize across the genre boundaries. Category (non-bestseller) horror and fantasy is and always has been published for the last six decades along with SF by the SF publishers.
The only science in all the areas of fantasy is either straw-man science (which cannot cope) or black science (used by the evil sorcerer). Amoral science is a recent addition to some heroic fantasy (especially noticeable in the works of Michael Moorcock). The idea of magic as a scientific discipline was a contribution of the Campbell era. And I can generalize without fear of contradiction by saying that except in a tiny minority of cases, technology is associated with evil in fantasy literature. So it is particularly curious that the element of estrangement from everyday reality has come to yoke by itself the two separates, fantasy and science fiction, even though SF was invented to exclude “mere” fantasy. This complex of seeming contradiction will be investigated in more depth shortly. For the moment we will move on to a consideration of the subdivisions of the center of the field, science fiction.
Hugo Gernsback, who invented modern science fiction in April 1926, knew what he meant by “scientifiction” (as he named it) and assumed it would be evident to others: All that work H. G. Wells and Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe wrote (“charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” as Gernsback says in the editorial in the first issue of the first magazine, Amazing Stories). In addition to this confusion, Gernsback, an eccentric immigrant and technological visionary, was tone-deaf to the English language, printing barely literate stories, often by enthusiastic teenagers, about new inventions and the promise of a wondrous technological future, cheek by jowl with fiction by Wells, Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a growing number of professional pulp writers who wanted to break into the new market. The new thing was amorphous, formed and reformed over the decades by major editors and writers, and all the chronic readers, into the diversity that is science fiction today.
It is a source of both amusement and frustration to SF people that public consciousness of science fiction has almost never penetrated beyond the first decade of the field’s development. Sure, Star Wars is wonderful, but in precisely the same way and at the same level of consciousness and sophistication that SF from the late twenties and early thirties was: fast, almost plotless stories of zipping through the ether in spaceships, meeting aliens, using futuristic devices, and fighting the bad guys (and winning).
By now it should be obvious that we are dealing not with a limited thing but with a segment of reality. More than an alternate literary form or an alternate life-style, science fiction informs the lives of thousands and affects the lives of millions, is a fact of life more intimate than inflation whose influence is so all-pervasive that it is traceable daily in every home, through the artifacts and ideas that represent all possible futures and all possible change.