“LET’S GET SF BACK IN THE GUTTER WHERE IT BELONGS”
—Dena Benatan
LITERARY CRITICS have a private language that they have developed over the last century, a large and precise technical vocabulary that allows them to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently, just like the medical shorthand surgeons use in the operating room or the specialized diction of philosophers. This private language is opaque to outsiders; in fact, it excludes everyone but insiders.
The leading theoretical critic in the science fiction field for over ten years, until the early 1980s, was Professor Darko Suvin of Montreal’s McGill University. He produced a series of papers and books on science fiction remarkable for their innovative critical insights and for their total lack of communication to any but a small group of advanced critics in and outside the SF field. Therefore Suvin’s name became anathema to almost everyone in the SF field, all of whom totally missed the point: that Suvin was attempting to analyze and describe what exists—using accepted vocabulary—not merely expressing his sentiments on the value of SF. The value is implied by the serious nature of the discussion, though his work is of only the most tangential relevance to the field as it is being written today, for criticism can deal only with what has happened.
Alarms reverberated throughout the fanzines and echoed through the halls of convention hotels. “SF will be destroyed if writers take critics seriously and begin to write for an audience of teachers and article-writers, the academics who rule fashionable taste in the Western world!”
This is all too true. All critics, even the best, must set up paradigms based on past literature in order to proceed to analyze a new work. Since a new work is never an utterly precise imitation of a paradigm (see Jorge Luis Borges’s wonderful fiction, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”), all new works are criticized, held up to examination against the ideal pattern, and found wanting.
The demonic paradox is that SF has always attempted to deal with change and the future, to establish new paradigms, and so has been found not just unsuccessful according to the accepted paradigms of Modernist literature (Joyce, Lawrence, Bellow, Mailer, Heller, etc.), but also completely unfashionable and therefore totally beyond the pale, unacceptable reading material for all properly educated people. And so bad critics (by far the majority of all critics), especially fashionable and popular critics whose reputations depend on defending a conservative value system based on the paradigms of the past, have lambasted science fiction consistently for decades, giving most of the serious writers in the field a serious case of paranoia, mostly justified by the facts.
What to do? The unfavorable criticism of SF by academics and fashionable book critics, who really are arbiters of taste in our society, has wounded many fine artists and writers in SF for years, to the point where some have denied writing SF at all (such as Kurt Vonnegut and Harlan Ellison, for a time) and others have accepted the critically imposed doublethink, usually phrased “This work is so good, so well-crafted, poignant and powerful that it is not really SF, it just seems to be on the surface” (examples are Ray Bradbury’s The Martin Chronicles and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon). The final proof, to fashionable critics, that SF is somehow by definition (note the irony) bad art is that the writers make money writing—oh, not a hell of a lot of money, but they care about it and are therefore tainted by commercialism. Real artists, one supposes, must be independently wealthy, have royal patrons, or starve nobly while writing on butcher’s paper. Then, too, SF writers are accused of lack of realism.
It’s actually the theoreticians such as Darko Suvin and Robert Scholes and Joanna Russ who are doing the real work of criticism—which most of the practical critics who form popular taste (after all, they write entertaining essays with clever and sharp put-downs) haven’t read because it wasn’t taught at Princeton back when they were there and besides they have not much better an understanding of the technical language of theoretical criticism than the rest of us. Reading a technical paper in any field, after all, is hard work and doesn’t score you any more points when you are writing a “critical” review for Time or Newsweek, whose audience doesn’t want accepted taste challenged anyway.
So, as it has happened, the talented amateur critics in the SF fanzines, and the writer/critics (such as James Blish, Damon Knight, and Algis Budrys), and the vocal fans who approach authors at conventions and express subjective critical reactions to SF works, have all, as a group, formed the critical audience for SF and kept the authors and the field alive and growing since the 1930s.
The SF field has created its own imprecise critical terminology (“It works/it doesn’t work”) which, until the new theoreticians of the seventies and their beginnings at synthesizing SF and “mundane” critical concepts, has been a more effective and accurate tool for surveying the science fictional landscape than any other because it takes the essential aims and foci of SF into account—especially the notion, thoroughly understood by all authors and devotees of SF, that within the confines of a respect for realism given an imagined world, innovation is a key virtue. Cordwainer Smith and Larry Niven, for instance, are writers revered in the field for their innovation, for new and colorful changes rung on standard SF situations.
But just at the moment when the first stirrings of incorporation and adaptation of traditional criticism appeared on the SF scene, in the late 1960s, a large number of the most literate and advanced SF authors and readers misunderstood the signal flags and misinterpreted the new levels of criticism as either unprovoked attacks on SF (an attempt to criticize it and them out of existence) or as a prescription for the SF of the future. Yes, after decades of paranoia and disrepute, the big guns of literary criticism are going to pay attention (ah, respectability!), and the avant-garde (for which read “the new group of writers to which I belong”) will triumph in popularity as long as I can behave and write in a manner proper to literary lions.
There was much less that was new and colorful in science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, given the enormous amount published, than in any previous decade. The recent past in SF has been a time of consolidation and wide public acceptance. But the new wider audience is unfamiliar with the peculiar innovative virtues of SF; both this audience and the reviewers, for the most part, have encouraged more psychological depth in characterization, less technical and scientific vocabulary, and near-future settings, to which a wide audience can relate without uncomfortable demands on the willing suspension of disbelief. (This is no more preferable than the short period in the late eighties and early nineties when certain SF writers, mostly associated with the cyberpunk movement, were advanced as part of the wider postmodern avant-garde by critic Larry McCaffrey and others. This ended somewhat abruptly when it was discovered that SF writers still cared about plot and logic.) If this trend continues, success really could spoil science fiction.
Already the field is showing signs of enthusiastic capitulation to a level of popular taste outside the boundaries of the genre audiences. After all, writers want to be liked, preferably by everyone, and, as we noticed earlier, SF writers are used to being paid for their work—not much, in the past, but with the enormous growth in popularity and respectability for written SF in the 1970s, the top writers in the field in the eighties and nineties are in demand and are suddenly commanding prices for their works approaching or in the six-figure range. And during the occasional periods of sudden expansion by publishers that have occurred every few years, it has become possible for almost any novice out of school to sell an SF novel for a few thousand dollars—especially if she is willing to write in a tie-in universe such as Star Trek or role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons and the like). This is particularly significant in an era when a young writer in any other field must struggle for years to get a first novel published (and most often gives up after several years of rejection). SF is a wide-open and expanding market (in economic cycles every few years, generally ever larger) amenable to partial successes.
But the cost of these enormous rewards (money, wide popularity, critical praise) is already showing in several ways. A number of young, talented writers who have read some SF have written one or several novels in the field and then stepped out of it as quickly as possible into even more commercial areas (or more literary ones), having established publishing contacts and contributed competent rehashes of SF clichés to the body of written SF. Other writers have entered SF without particular knowledge of it or regard for it because they make money there. They stay in the field but do everything possible to avoid the creative enterprise of SF, substituting creative vocabulary for innovation (James Blish once wrote a scathing denunciation of this approach to SF which he called “naming rabbits as smeerps”—they remain rabbits in spite of being cute little hopping furry smeerps). A lot of them write mostly fantasy.
Most unsettling of all to lovers of SF, some of the major writers have been seduced by prosperity into expanding the scope of their SF novels to include large casts of engaging minor characters, panoramic disasters, obligatory sex romantically described, vast superficial detail, all the elements of the fat best-seller novel: Gregory Benford and William Rotsler’s Shiva Descending (1980) and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) are examples. This is not to denigrate these books or writers, who provide at least as much real SF stuff in these fatter books as in their in-field publications. It is just that their aim is to be published in the “best-seller” category and displayed at the front of the store, not in the SF category and shelved farther back—so they make no headway for the genre if they succeed, just money.
In addition, some writers have expanded their popular works into series, especially trilogies, but also four, five, or more volumes: Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy was stretched to six volumes, all best-sellers. Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy is a standing joke, with ever more volumes. And in the 1990s even established writers in significant numbers are being well paid to write commissioned works in tie-in universes. Who is to say that any of these people are wrong in their personal choices?; but the end result is certainly a dilution of the SF enterprise (somewhat parallel to the dilution of atmosphere at very large conventions)—not the attitude that has prevailed in the field since the twenties, which has been its great strength. Enormous pressures from the marketplace have limited SF’s freedom to create new visions.
Not that any writer paid for writing is ever entirely free of the demands of the market—there have been restrictions, sometimes severe, on sex in SF, on pessimistic SF, on all sorts of things dictated by various markets. But with truly big-time commercial success, for the first time since the category developed there is pressure on all sides to downplay the former center of attention and appeal—the science fictional content—in favor of stylistic virtues, characterization, complex panoramic story, near-future setting, all of which will broaden the market for a work in this wider field and will insure more favorable critical and review response from outsiders. The only thing is that it often doesn’t sell well if it doesn’t appeal to the fans, who don’t care very much about works that downplay what is of central interest to them.
The fans have changed too. A local (as opposed to national) SF convention in 1970 and for years before that would be attended by anywhere from thirty to fifty to at most 350 fans and writers. Local conventions were held in nearly twenty areas in the U.S. and sporadically elsewhere. In 1979, there were five local conventions held on the same Memorial Day weekend in different parts of the U.S., all with attendances of from 400 to 1,000 fans. On Easter weekend in 1996 there were four conventions (Seattle, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and London), each with 1500–3000 in attendance. Obviously fandom has expanded enormously and often chaotically and is in the 1990s larger than ever. But the change is more than numerical expansion. Prior to 1970, you could make the reliable assumption that any fan, every fan, had read or should read most of the famous authors and works of science fiction, if only in order to discuss in an informed way which ones are classics.
The assumption of knowledge of SF writings has been the glue holding the whole thing together for decades, really since the very beginnings in the late 1920s. Suddenly in the early 1970s, however, the SF world began to change. A large number, then a larger number, of the people living in this world were neophytes, teenagers exposed to the SF world without being addicted to the written works. The success of Star Trek, 2001 (the film), Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune, Marvel Comics and the whole comics convention movement (an outgrowth, like the Star Trek conventions, of SF fans launching analogous conventions) all contributed much more than the magazines and the books to a sudden and profound increase in the number of fans, especially the number of fans attending conventions. And most of these new fans found the SF world through popular culture (one or more of the aforementioned pop classics), not from the omnivorous reading that characterized all earlier fans. Some of them became overnight omnivores, but many of them, perhaps most, never delved into large numbers of the stories and novels of the past.
They came too late, you see. Even by 1971, with ninety or so new SF books being published by the industry in that year, it was nearly impossible to read all the new stuff, let alone catch up on the old. At a recent convention, in a room containing nearly twenty young fans, a discussion was in progress about the early works of J. G. Ballard, works that had sent shock waves of admiration and enthusiasm (and, as I observed earlier, debate) throughout the field in the late fifties and early sixties. Only one of the twenty had read any Ballard. At the Clarion SF writers workshop in 1971, in a roomful of aspiring SF writers all of whom have since published stories and novels, only one of eighteen had ever read a novel by Philip K. Dick, surely one of the great SF masters of the previous two decades. I taught at Clarion last in 1990 and was delighted to find three or four out of nearly twenty students to be widely read in SF. By now the written SF field is no longer knowable in its entirety to the average fan or the average young author. Most don’t even try. I was a visiting professor teaching SF writing for seven summers in the 80s and 90s at Harvard University in the summer school, where the majority of students were teenagers. By the last year (1993) the younger students had read no short fiction and none of the acknowledged masters of SF before taking a writing course in the field.
Yes, the same social conditions obtain in fandom as I have discussed, but the vision of what SF is and what it can do has changed in fandom. The written word is still the primary influence, establishes the primary image of what SF is and what its possibilities might be. But it may not remain so. The younger writers and the younger fans got their initial imprint of SF from sci-fi, from media. No wonder the field is in a state of change and confusion as it escalates in the nineties. Success, growth, will certainly change SF. It already has.
The decade of the eighties was the greatest boom period in the contemporary history of SF. More people, writers, fans, and publishers entered the field than ever before. But a whole lot of that boom was illusory. You see, it wasn’t all that much a science fiction boom. A lot of the success of SF in the seventies wasn’t at the center of the field but around the edges—particularly in the field of fantasy (handled by science fiction editors and publishers, written by science fiction writers, and read by science fiction fans, but not SF—see Appendix V). The success of fantasy tended to obscure the real fact that not that much more actual SF was being written and published than in the sixties, not a boom decade. This was even more true in the eighties, when the pressure of the ever-expanding frontlist and the new breeds of category best-sellers began to drive the backlist off bookstore shelves (the bookstores did not build more shelves) and out of print.
A huge amount, in some months more than 50 percent, of the SF of the seventies was actually reprinted from earlier decades. The paperback industry was like that, always trying to capitalize on the fact that SF doesn’t date like most other fiction. Whenever an author was hot because of a good new book, all his previous books from years back returned to print. If the figures are examined closely, less than 100 new SF books appeared in any year of the 1970s—after you exclude all the fantasy. And the SF magazines dropped steadily in circulation over the decade. A strange boom. The boom of the eighties was stranger still, the decade in which the classics began to disappear in favor of a desperate quest for the present, success this month.
SF, from the 1970s until today, is a capacious umbrella for a multitude of hybrid forms of fantasy, surrealism, weird tales, and pop retreads of all SF ideas. Another breakdown in definition is happening. Perhaps we need sympathetic, knowledgeable criticism, theoretical criticism, now more than ever to keep track of where we are. Certainly we need literary history for the first time, so that we do not forget where we have been.
Do we need an academy of science fiction arts? No, because the essence of the field is change, and we do not need to be frozen in place. But maybe we need the long boom to bust, so that SF may remain knowable at all and not disappear into the agglomeration of contemporary literature, thereby losing its capacity for innovation, some of which is gained only by its juxtaposition to current literary fashion.
* * *
This juxtaposition, though, needs some further elucidation. Only a minority of the educated population of the Western world knows much or cares much about literary fashion. SF is not now and never has been fashionable among those who do care. It is and has been fashionable for decades among scientists and engineers, for whom early SF was an amusing diversion, a spur to speculation, and an inspiration for the future—a literature that took them and their real work into account even when it did not place them at the center of everything important happening in Western civilization.
Most scientists and engineers do not read SF in adult life, but many of them did at some point—many of them were early omnivores. At a cocktail party of members of the physics department from your local university, you will not find many department members or students who will deny ever having read SF, whereas at an English department party you will be hard-pressed to find any present or former readers. You will probably even find, among the physics types, one or more individuals who has a friend who is a fan, or who knows an SF writer, or who has even tried to write it himself. As long as there remains a “two-cultures” split in society (as noted by C. P. Snow), the other culture will need its nonliterary literature, SF, into which their ideas feed and feed back. For fun. And as a bridge between science and literature. With the advent of hacker culture on the computer nets and the apotheosis of William Gates, the richest man in America in the 1990s and a computer nerd, the two-cultures split does not seem to be evaporating before the twenty-first century.
Literary fashion, to those who care about it and guard it, is the Great Game of each era. Consider: It is the Elizabethan age and you wish to be a writer. You must of course be a poet and display your mastery of literary art through the sonnet form. There are certainly other poetic forms through which you can woo fame—the varieties of lyric, pastoral, epic—but the Great Game is the sonnet. If you write something such as drama, crass and popular, you can’t even publish it as part of your “works” without being ridiculed. Back to the present: Fashion dictates that you play the game of Hemingway/Faulkner/Bellow/Barth if you are a novelist (or the bigger game of Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Nabokov, Camus) in order to be admitted to the literary playing field. SF today is still to Literature as drama was to the sonnet in the age of Shakespeare: to a large extent bad art, and in the opinion of many insiders who reject literary fashion, such as del Rey, not art at all, just craftwork and fun.
That’s why a young electronics engineer, for instance, who has had just enough literary education by way of required courses to know that literature is the highly protected preserve of experts (not something you can have an opinion on, such as religion or politics), can start writing SF in her spare time, submit it for publication, and expect it to reach an open and uncritical (in the college lit course sense) audience if it is published. SF is apart from the literary game, so that any enthusiast is welcome to play—especially anyone with a scientific background of any sort who might introduce new ideas into the common repository of the SF field.
If you play the Great Game of literary art in your era, you may not make a false move or you are dead, because all your competition is making the same moves at the same time, and all but a very few must fall short of true excellence. (We can’t, after all, waste time reading the top two hundred Elizabethan sonneteers—we just read the top five or ten—and so with novelists. Few readers are so devoted as to read the top fifty.) Somehow you know that you are by definition an outsider to the Great Game when you set out to write and read SF. As we have seen, this can be enormously liberating to writer and reader.
But the threat of Literature and the mandarin culture of art is always present to seduce writer and reader away from SF. Oh, sigh, the large majority of twelve-year-olds who have their sentience first awakened by SF pass beyond it into the empyrean realms of fashionable taste—some would call it normalcy. And do not mistake their gains: They become serious and well adjusted, sometimes they even become responsible adults, an attainment of no small worth in the world of the future. But they rarely pass into the world of literary fashion, because the whole mind-set of SF discourages such a transitory game, with such likelihood of failure.
At least until recently. In the last decade or two, SF has become the only game in town for many young writers, including a bunch with knowledge of fashion and literary taste, some even with advanced writing degrees(!). They all know that fashion is a snob and they wish to be part of the few, the elite. Some play the Great Game.
The best of them whom the field honors, for instance Joanna Russ and Thomas M. Disch and John Kessel and Ursula K. Le Guin, really do manage to accomplish art and SF at the same time. But the rest use SF as a back entrance to the fields of literature while avoiding comparison to the top ten or twenty writers on top of current literary fashion. And while they may produce works of some merit to people of taste, they are becoming dangerous to the SF field just because there are so many of them, and they write so well, compared to the average SF writer, and they get published and praised by peers—but they aren’t really contributing much to the SF field. Rather, they are often taking something from it by creating a major distraction, a confusion of goals. This is one pernicious legacy of the New Wave for fans.
Dena Benatan, a young fan in the early 1970s, was one of the first to notice the post–New Wave dangers presented to the field by the new and intense interest in SF by academics and outside critics, who for the most part concentrated their attention on the younger fringes of the SF writing community, just these new young artists (now somewhat older) I have been discussing. With typical fannish humor, she coined the phrase, “Let’s get science fiction back in the gutter where it belongs,” and popularized it as the rallying cry of SF people who do not want their field preempted and used by outsiders without sincere contributions and due respect.
Benatan’s slogan is not to be confused with the not entirely coincidental movement popularized by Lester del Rey in the early 1970s, which we mentioned earlier: to paraphrase, “Let’s get back to roots, to good old-fashioned science fiction that is pure entertainment. No more aspiration to art—the ‘New Wave’ has ebbed.” Benatan and del Rey both responded to a complex of changes in the early 1970s evident to the whole field, but generally unarticulated. For the first time the SF field was large, relatively prosperous, respectable to outsiders for a variety of reasons, and even well written in many cases (more often than ever before). Given all this, why was almost everyone in the field disturbed—why wasn’t it as much fun any more?
Back in the 1950s, when the tenets of contemporary taste in SF were established in the field, the sin of “little-magazine-fiction-dressed-up-as-SF” was acknowledged as one of the deadlies right up there along with “hackwork” and “western-dressed-up-as-SF” (space opera). Damon Knight, Anthony Boucher, James Blish, Judith Merril, Theodore Sturgeon—the SF critical establishment of the 1950s—stood firmly behind the principle that SF could and should aspire to art; but of course it should stay SF while doing so.
By the late 1960s, as we have seen, Merril and others had changed position to the extent that SF that aspires to art is spec fic, and transcends the mere genre of SF (sound of warning bells, alarms, sirens, danger flags—genre about to be obliterated!). A reactionary decade ensued, during which the “SF is entertainment” dictum of del Rey, Spider Robinson, and Donald A. Wollheim (no matter how dunderheaded its expression on some occasions) seriously helped to keep the field viable as a commercial category of publishing, while Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and a few others aspired to art. Algis Budrys, who maintained the clearest vision of SF and art throughout the decade, wrote too little criticism to create a major countervailing force (equivalent to the Knight/Blish/Merril axis of the fifties). And academic criticism of the field remained too often (always excepting the theoreticians and historians) irrelevant and rather naive. The battle to keep SF in the gutter was joined.
From the outside, it is often hard to discern what has been going on. Leslie Fiedler, in his comments on SF (in What Was Literature?, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982, pp. 121–22), characterizes the proceedings somewhat patronizingly: “Only in the United States has there ever been a long-lived venture into non-elitist criticism, and that uniquely American [Fiedler seems unaware of the active participation of British, Canadian, and Australian fans, and even of German, French, and Polish contributors to the dialogue] experiment would, it seems to me, repay close examination both in terms of how it succeeded and how it failed. I am referring to the ‘fanzines.’” He goes on to present the fans as an “impassioned, cohesive and exclusivist audience, whose taste was defined by both a preference for a particular literary kind of fiction and a rejection of almost everything else, from the mimetic best-sellers their parents read to the ‘classics’ their teachers assigned.” It should be evident that something even larger than Fiedler perceived has been happening.
The battle for higher standards is real, but all the names have been changed to keep outsiders from finding out what the real issues are and have been. Insiders use slogans, ironies, arcane references, confusions in this war. Because the tangible rewards changed—more money, public acceptance (academic and social), the real rewards of the mundane world that confer power upon the SF community—this war is more meaningful than the continuing battle over names and definitions. The war to get SF back into the gutter is a real war for the minds and hearts of the SF community, and the final battles have not yet been won or lost.
What happened? Well, the 1970s was a decade of more wordage and less innovation in the field than ever before. The best 10 percent of SF was as good or better than any previous decade, especially better written as a rule according to the standards of outsiders (see the works of Le Guin, Disch, Moorcock, Russ, Budrys, Delany, Dick, et al.). But the younger, newer writers (with such honorable exceptions as Joe Haldeman, James Tiptree, Jr., Gardner Dozois, John Varley, Vonda N. McIntyre) started with less knowledge of the repository of SF ideas and less concern for the core, infield audience’s tastes and preferences than ever before (and not, like the “New Wavicles” of the 1960s, knowing it all and rejecting it as a revolutionary act).
In addition, the much larger audiences of the 1970s and 1980s were less knowledgeable and less demanding, less familiar with the classics. The field began to lose its coherence through sheer size and diffusion. The most popular and successful books were film novelizations and continuations of series (Star Wars, Star Trek books, Children of Dune, etc.), all of which outsold by miles, for instance, the winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards. The SF best-sellers, such as Piers Anthony’s Xanth series or Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, rarely won the awards for excellence in the field, were hardly ever even nominated. What a change from earlier times!
The 1970s was also the first decade of fantasy’s great success in the marketplace. As we noted earlier, with the phenomenal and enduring popularity of the Tolkien books in the late 1960s and the strong resurgence of popularity of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero, Conan, at the same time, fantasy in paperback began to appear with some regularity in the late 1960s and with increasing frequency in the 1970s.
Both of these types of fantasy—the amoral/heroic and the moral/chivalric—were and are published as parts of SF publishing programs by various houses. They take up budgets and schedule space that would otherwise be devoted to SF. In addition, supernatural horror fantasy burst into bestseller prominence noticeably and often during the decade. Although the authors of these best-sellers were sometimes graduates of the SF field, such as Stephen King, the field did not acknowledge their relationship to SF until the founding of the World Fantasy Convention in 1975. Ironically this convention began, over the following two decades, to accelerate a unification of the various types of fantasy into a self-conscious unit analogous to but separate from the SF field (with many crossover practitioners, writers, and readers). There is a huge and loyal mass audience for fantasy at the present time, but an audience of what C. S. Lewis would have called bad readers: those almost wholly uncritical and seemingly ready to reward the most repetitive and/or gory spectacles—and very powerful in its effect on what publishers publish because of vast numbers in the mass audience outside the field.
Whether the incipient self-conscious split between fantasy and SF will continue is a large question for the future. Certain estimates of the expansion of the SF field in the seventies and eighties depended upon including large numbers of fantasy books, as I have noted earlier. It turned out that the fantasy boom really masked a nearly steady state for the SF field during most of the 1980s. SF grew a bit, not a lot. A crisis of self-consciousness hit the SF field in the late eighties and early nineties that could be fruitful and productive. Several semi-professional magazines were founded in the late 1980s, of which two, Science Fiction Eye and The New York Review of Science Fiction, remain, with aggressive aesthetic agendas. Both of these support what is now known as Hard SF as central to the SF enterprise (see Appendix IV).
The SF and fantasy fields remained intimately linked and the popular success of fantasy stayed high, so proportionally less and less new SF was actually published as the marketing field expanded for lack of room in publishing schedules, truly a disaster for SF. Except that there were moments during the general expansion when major new careers were launched in SF; and SF, which is somewhat larger than before, only looks small when set next to a (now) larger object, fantasy. The SF field has never been larger, in all ways, than it is right now in the 1990s, but both doom-and-bust and popularity-and-expansion may be just around the corner, in some complex conjunction.
Oh, nostalgia for the gutter—are fans really alienated or did they just used to be? Will success finally destroy SF, when it has kept the faith through so much adversity?
The 1970s was a decade of fatigue and retrenchment and disillusionment in our culture, no new energy sources and an exhaustion of the old ones, literally or figuratively. A twelve-year-old can no longer enter the SF field and become an influential, world-famous Big Name Fan by the age of eighteen—the field is too large now, the numbers too large. One Hugo-winning fanzine in the 1960s printed only 100 copies; in the 1970s, no fanzine with a circulation less than 1,000 won the Hugo (Energumen, the traditional fanzine that won in 1973, had a normal circulation of 400 or so, but Mike Glicksohn told me he printed around 1000 copies of the last issue out in the year of Hugo eligibility), and then, in nine out of ten years, the winner’s circulation was 1,500 to 4,000 (the “semi-pros” took over). Fanzines, in the traditional sense, had become an anachronistic pleasure by the end of the eighties, by which time to a very large extent fannish communication had moved to the Internet, where it remains today.
Fandom is now dominated by fans over thirty, and there are now so many of them, after generations of fandom have passed, that there is not only no room at the top but the top is damn difficult to locate until you have been a fan for a while. Thousands of fanzines circulate every year, thousands of titles! But very few aspire to the traditional paradigms of quality. This is a new kind of adversity for the field—diffusion, loss of traditional focus.
Remember that Judith Merril and her friends in the fifties never expected the SF field to grow much larger, certainly not as large as it is now. After all, you can’t have an alienated, advanced, elite majority, now can you? Yet as SF grows and its influence on our culture increases, it begins to seem less alienated, less advanced, less elite, a mass phenomenon.
Back into the gutter means away from the elitism of high art and literary culture, but not toward the mass popularity of Rosemary’s Baby and Star Wars tie-ins (fantasy and sci-fi, respectively). Back to the gutter means back to the socially unacceptable, to the real edges of our culture, the primal energies of the play of crazy ideas, the core of wonder, to the testing of realities and the joy of prophetic vision, to the revolutionary fervor of the Futurian Society, of Campbell the editor, of Anthony Boucher and H. L. Gold, Blish and Knight, Moorcock and Merril, Harlan Ellison, and John J. Pierce.
Science fiction has been moving upward over the years from the underground, the unfashionable world, the gutter, toward the world of fashion. As the field has grown and prospered, it has continually felt the pressures of the opposing forces of art and money drawing SF writers away from the in-field audience, either toward best-seller writing forms or the various pop culture media (both being special cases of sci-fi), or toward the Great Game of fashionable literature or the counterfashion of the literary avant-garde (both being special cases of the pull toward speculative fiction).
The SF field has to resist the forces of money from commercial success outside the field, and the forces of aesthetic success according to outside standards, rules that deny the validity of the SF enterprise in and of itself. In the gutter, the pull of these forces is more elemental and therefore easier to recognize and combat—you know damn well that you are betraying the ideals of the SF field if you support or create sci-fi or that you are denying the existence of valid literary ideals in the SF field by attempting to conform to any set of avant-garde or experimental literary principles—and the rewards are generally smaller (less money on the one hand, less fame and recognition on the other—and no respectability in either case, right where you started).
The very large amounts of money and respectability the fashionable world offers that draws writers away from the SF field are beguiling in the extreme, the rewards any other writer of any kind would cherish. Under such pressure, the SF field must surely be sundered and dispersed unless it maintains a conscious independence.
“Let’s get SF back into the gutter where it belongs” is the rallying cry of those in SF who are most conscious of the need for independence, for the clarity of vision that will allow the field to endure the tension between art and money without fleeing its own center of being, diluting or rejecting its own traditional virtues. It will remain the greatest test of the inner culture of the SF world, of fandom, that it must reward the best writers in the field enough and convincingly enough to keep each of them from fleeing, from aspiring to virtues other than those we have examined in previous chapters as characteristic of SF, and from emigrating to the world of fashionable literature either for profit from or the respect of “the Establishment.”
And indeed after decades of argument now, at least the issues are becoming clearer than, for instance, during the New Wave battles of the latter 1960s. The SF field has arrived in the future and must now question the value of its own ideas of progress. The works of such authors as Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop, and Gregory Benford (to mention three winners of the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Award for best novel of the year) are accomplished and respectable contributions to the contemporary American novel, yet still in the field. The most serious reassessment of science fiction and the achievement of its writers is still to come.