8

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS CAN’T WRITE FOR SOUR APPLES

Any bright high school sophomore can identify all the things that are wrong about Van Vogt.… But the challenge to criticism which pretends to do justice to science fiction is to say what is right about him: to identify his mythopoeic power, his ability to evoke primordial images, his gift for redeeming the marvelous in a world in which technology has preempted the province of magic and God is dead.

—Leslie A. Fiedler (from his essay “The Criticism of Science Fiction,” in Coordinates, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983)

ALL THE wonderful ideas, the big hypotheses and powerful images, which so often are the main and abiding appeal in a science fiction story, have had a truly pernicious effect on characterization and style in SF over the decades. Nine times out of ten, the ideas and images have so fascinated the writers and readers that the rich and imaginative settings are inhabited by bloodless or flat stock characters familiar after a hundred years of adventure fiction.

So what? Well, the fashion in fiction that we admire since the middle of the nineteenth century has been that characterization is more and more the central task of the artist in prose fiction. By developing contrary to that fashion, for the most part in cheap commercial magazines and their market, science fiction has allied itself with the aesthetic of naturalistic, journalistic prose and fast-paced commercial storytelling, full of color and plot. The highest goal of the SF writers as a group, at least through the 1950s, was to achieve the slick (versus pulp) style of storytelling, popular from Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, and Jack London up through Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. And, of course, to sell their stories to magazines such as Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Playboy, for more than the penny or two per word prevalent in SF.

But the short story as a popular and commercial form died out in the U.S. in the 1950s, with the demise of most of the major markets for short fiction. Aside from the SF field, some detective fiction, and a very few organs such as The New Yorker, Playboy, and Esquire, short fiction survives today only as a noncommercial form in the literary magazines, and in small hardcover printings with literary pretensions. SF has survived not by changing so much as by staying mostly pop lit, in its own magazine and anthology ghetto. And of course in transplanted form in the media (where somehow the SF usually gets lost in translation).

One of the reasons that SF is so frequently transplanted off the written page into media presentations is that a mediocre SF story often tells in any form as effectively as it reads on the page (see Chapter 3). Since the standard for publication in the field from Gernsback (who didn’t know English all that well but did know science and technology) through John W. Campbell, even to the present, has been clear prose that doesn’t get in the way of the science fictional content, SF writers have not until the whole New Wave controversy in the 1960s had much encouragement to develop stylistically or to focus on fully rounded characterization. Many of the best of them did anyway, but sometimes in spite of editorial discouragement from portions of their market.

All this has been a disaster in terms of the image the field has presented to literate readers, mainstream authors, and most educated outsiders who have attempted to sample science fiction over the years, only to discover that most of the positive virtues which they have been led to equate with good writing and good literature are absent or wanting in many famous SF stories and novels. The one thing no one has ever accused SF of is overliterary pretension. A whole complex of controversies have eventuated within the field, among authors and readers, because of the “clear, unadorned prose” dictums of many of the major editors (and readers, of course).

What is almost never explained outside the field (or is passed off as nonsense by outsiders) is that SF has set for itself a progressive standard of good writing that has in turn established a variety of prose techniques eminently successful at communication from author to reader within the confines of the field, which is the primary aim of all written science fiction. The SF writer is first of all talking to his friendly and receptive audience. Communication to outsiders has always been considered secondary.

At worst, this has led to clever, plotted (but in every other manner underdeveloped) fictions. For example, even within the field New Wavers attacked Analog—where admittedly such nonliterary SF still appears once or more in nearly every issue decades after John W. Campbell’s death, as editor Stanley Schmidt attempts to maintain Campbell’s editorial standards—perhaps their main paradigm of “the enemy,” as a magazine mainly devoted to publishing engineering diagrams set in prose, not real fiction. This is of course revolutionary hyperbole—the only wiring diagrams in Analog have been in the nonfiction articles—but Campbell (and later editors Ben Bova and Schmidt) had faith that his readers could read wiring diagrams if they needed to (see Appendix IV). And there have always been magazines and books recognized within the field as mostly crap.

The plain fact of the matter is that much of the best and greatest science fiction is not, according to most standards, well written. You can be convinced wholly that what SF does is good and valuable and interesting, yet if you cannot admire or like the manner in which it is done then you remain deprived of its finest pleasures. In this section, I hope to break the communication barrier between outside and inside.

If you are a writer of SF, you have to respect the facts of science. You have to know or take the trouble to learn the science particularly relevant to whatever story you write. However, by the early fifties a writer could pretty easily fake knowledge of many areas of science and technology because the body of written SF since 1926 had developed a useful repository of cliché locutions. Phrases and words such as “space warp,” “hyperspace,” and “hyperdrive” can be used in any SF story to lend scientific verisimilitude (and that old SF flavor) without explanation or lengthy rationalization because other writers in the genre have already explained and rationalized them, often in great detail, in many other stories. The core chronic (and most omnivore) readership already knows what the terms refer to, how they work, and can fill in the rationalization from common reading experience.

Basically the writer can devote a higher concentration to what is new and different in a story and to exploring the implications of, for instance, a group of courageous humans taking a spaceship (one of the earliest of the cliché words) equipped with hyperdrive (which generally means a faster-than-light space drive) through hyperspace (that abnormal space through which a ship on hyperdrive travels) to a distant and alien planet. Well, a writer might know nothing at all about how the characters really would travel, but the clichés get them from here to there and the usual concern (except in those special stories wherein the writer is introducing a new speculative device as the central focus) is those humans and that environment and their thoughts and feelings in it. And it is all scientifically possible, given the specific parameters of the story. If the writer knows that it simply won’t happen that way or, worse, can’t, then the writing is science fantasy—or just plain fantasy with a few technological details thrown in.

But it’s damn difficult for a reader with insufficient background to use the conventions and cliché locutions in order to orient himself. Without reading experience, through which you learn the protocols of the genre, you can’t tell whether you are reading good SF or bad, or fantasy that looks like SF.

Talented critics and readers have most often been led astray by their unfamiliarity with the reading protocols of SF. Their reviews and lectures often seem absurd, like someone discussing a play under the assumption that it conformed to the reading protocols of poetry. The writers and readers within the SF community who have done most of the reviewing and criticism of SF over the years have been most accurate and intelligent in their criticism and most stringently to the point.

On the other hand, the worst enemies of science fiction historically have been outside critics, often literati of stature whose taste is generally reliable in other genres, who have defended science fiction as wonderful, sloppy, energetic entertainment incapable of being good literature. The rallying cry to turn off good taste and wallow is insidious and powerful. Only one critic of substantial reputation, Robert Scholes (a leading critical theorist on the nature of narrative), has attempted to analyze science fiction prose styles to find out if and how they work—in his book Structural Fabulation (1975), he discovered that the prose styles function quite well, thank you, but no other critics have wanted to pay much attention to him on that point thus far.

So the level of reviewing and critical attention relating to SF outside the community is still pretty sad. You won’t find any ready and reliable guides handy to what is new and good, nor much agreement on which older works hold up outside the field. The best commentary in the field, if you can locate it, is by Brian Aldiss (Billion Year Spree [1973]); James Blish (The Issue at Hand [1964], and More Issues at Hand [1970]); Damon Knight (In Search of Wonder [second edition, 1967]); Samuel R. Delany (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw [1977], The American Shore [1978], Starboard Wine [1984]); Algis Budrys (Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf [1985]); Joanna Russ (How To Suppress Women’s Writing [1983], To Write Like a Woman [1995]); and Alexei and Cory Panshin (The World Beyond the Hill [1989]). These are all leading SF writers, and the bulk of their work lies in the back issues of SF magazines in the book reviews. No one has yet collected the essays of Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, Theodore Sturgeon, P. Schuyler Miller, and other major in-field figures. Anatomy of Wonder, second edition, New York: Bowker, 1982, edited by Neil Barron, is the first full-scale attempt at assessment, and is only a partial success. John Clute’s collected reviews (Strokes [1988] and Look at the Evidence [1995]) are the best ones covering the eighties and nineties available to date.

Let us back up, though, and distance ourselves a bit further from the present state of criticism. I stated, in my discussion of wonder, that some of the best science fiction is not particularly well written according to any set of accepted literary standards, and further, that it doesn’t matter much to the field one way or another as long as the story delivers. Recall C. S. Lewis’s characterization of the sensitive reader of myths who hardly notices the words. Well, what I have maintained is true as far as it goes but now it is high time to pursue the matter further.

SF writers, editors, even the more serious-minded chronic readers right from the days of H. P. Lovecraft and Doc Smith, through John Campbell and his Astounding renaissance, James Blish and Damon Knight, Algis Budrys and the Merril/Moorcock New Wave, to the present have always stood for a progressive rise in the literary standards. And SF, in each decade since the 1920s, has indeed been better written as a whole. There has been real and substantial progress. But in every decade there have been writers of exceptional talent and ability, some of them at the forefront of the field and some of them almost totally unnoticed, producing work equal to or better than what is generally being published at present.

Just as in the macrocosm of English and American literature, where a Herman Melville or a Henry Roth can be lost for a generation, so in the separate microcosm of the SF field can a writer be ignored for years. And as fashions change, whole groups or periods of writing from the past are reassessed. When Campbell succeeded in creating his golden age in the 1940s, an almost knee-jerk downgrading of the pulp SF of the 1920s and 1930s occurred. His standards also excluded such major talents from Astounding as Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett, who published throughout the decade in minor magazines. Even Arthur C. Clarke’s Stapledonian Against the Fall of Night and such writers as Kornbluth, Pohl, and Knight had to wait for the boom of the 1950s, with its new, broader standards, to gain major reputations. In the 1970s, most of the experimental writing of the 1960s remained out of fashion. Now, in the eighties and nineties, there are signs of further reassessment, with the 1950s ending a twenty-year reign as the “decade of classics.” By the end of the nineties, it appears that contemporary SF will be viewed as starting in the early 1960s and that everything before that will be defined as literary history, not living literature. All this must be amusing to Grand Master Jack Williamson, who is still alive and publishing new SF novels in his seventh decade in the field.

Each past change in standards has tended to broaden the field and therefore improve science fiction as a whole, drawing in new writers and challenging the established names to higher exploits. But so far, few authors recognized for ability to evoke wonder have lost much ground, gone out of print, because the people who read them at age twelve are still in the field in sufficient numbers to keep their works alive—although time passes and substantial reputations are now dwindling. (A few, such as some primitives from the Gernsback era, have almost disappeared, but even they could suddenly bloom again, as L. Ron Hubbard did in 1982 with his best-seller Battlefield Earth.) The sad fact is that for more than a decade the greatest writers of the thirties, forties, and fifties have begun to die—Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, and even younger masters such as Roger Zelazny, Terry Carr, Philip K. Dick, Avram Davidson, and John Brunner. For decades, if was as if the Golden Age writers were the Immortals, continuing to live and write and dominate the field. When the first edition of this book was published they were all alive. Now even the New Wavers are elder statesmen.

But the stunning fact is that writers no better than the average in the 1930s can and still do enter the field each year, are published repeatedly, and are building growing reputations based solely on their ability to evoke wonder. And now is the time to say it outright—you must take the intentions of the writers and the demands of the audience fully into account before you call someone a bad writer. We have gone along thus far admitting that the level of prose style of all but the finest SF is not up to the level of prose acceptable in even the slick commercial magazines (those that are surviving today). Now is the time to complete our argument: Prose that fulfills the conscious artistic intentions of the writer (however unfashionable) and meets the demands of the market and the audience cannot simply be called bad and left at that. In many science fiction stories the prose style functions perfectly in place and must otherwise be ignored. This is the real point Vonnegut is making as he speaks in the voice of Eliot Rosewater, and the unarticulated point of all those critics who say they enjoy reading science fiction that is unpretentious and sloppy and does not aspire to “literature.” As if the rubric “literature” were an award given by critics and reviewers, not by sensitive readers continuing to read it!

Let’s look at two writers whose popularity has endured for several decades and whose styles have been abominated in or out of the field: A. E. Van Vogt and Cordwainer Smith. Both have in common an adherence to the colorful, event-filled, one-damn-thing-after-another technique of writing.

Cordwainer Smith’s rhythmic, pseudopoetic ramblings wash over an allegorical (Christian) future universe ruled over by the Lords of the Instrumentality (the nobility). His self-conscious literary pose is undercut by a seeming lack of control over structure that is at once a Romantic posture and an oversentimentalized failing. Yet his stories are compelling to the SF audience for the evocative changes they ring on familiar and worn-down SF clichés. He is outrageous. More pointedly, at his most powerful he creates mysterious Poe-like images of half-realized but immensely suggestive transcendence. His reputation has been on the rise in the two decades since his death, especially since it was posthumously revealed that he was involved in foreign intrigue in China and elsewhere for the U.S. government and under his real name, Paul Linebarger, invented the field of study of psychological warfare in the 1940s. Even more striking, he was on the same literary magazine as L. Ron Hubbard in college.

Much more than Smith, Van Vogt is an insider’s hero whose work endures, but presents a direct challenge to any sympathetic discussion of SF. The well-known critic Leslie Fiedler offers the problem in his essay “The Criticism of Science Fiction” (Coordinates, p. 11) without attempting a solution:

Van Vogt is a test case … since any apology for or analysis of science fiction which fails to come to terms with his appeal and major importance, defends or defines the genre by falsifying it.

Van Vogt is one of the easiest targets for attack ever to expose himself by publishing SF. And he is the author of a body of work of classic status within the field and was of enduring influence on later writers as disparate as Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Charles L. Harness, and James Blish. His theory of composition, stated in “Complication in the Science Fiction Story” (as published in Of Worlds Beyond, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, ed., Chicago: Advent, 1964, pp. 53–56) is so eccentric that it bears quotation:

Think of it [the story] in scenes of about 800 words.… If you find that you have solved your scene purpose at the end of 300 words, then something is wrong. The scene isn’t properly developed. There are not enough ideas in it, not enough detail, not enough complication.

Ever since I started writing in the science fiction field, it has been my habit to put every current thought into a story I happened to be working on. Frequently, an idea would seem to have no relevance, but by mulling it over a little, I would usually find an approach that would make it usable.

Nearly all of the million words of fiction written by Van Vogt in his first decade in SF was in print in the eighties and so was most of his work from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Nearly all of it disappeared in the nineties along with the backlist of every other 1940s writer (the most famous Heinlein and Asimov works survive in print still—but that golden age is now the province of archaeology, as is that of the twenties and thirties and before), and most of the 1950s writers as well, under pressure from the evolving frontlist-driven mass market.

At the same time that Van Vogt was a recognized giant of Campbell’s golden age, certain fans such as Damon Knight (whose essay, “Cosmic Jerrybuilder,” was first published in 1945) were mounting attacks on his classics, such as Slan and The World of Null-A, on the grounds of bad plotting and poor style (and in fact bad politics—he is undemocratically in favor of monarchies and elite social classes). Knight’s essay, reprinted and expanded in the fifties and again in the sixties (in In Search of Wonder), gained in influence as Knight became the premier critic and reviewer of the fifties and a leader in the battle for higher standards. No one has taken Van Vogt seriously as a writer for a long time now. Yet he was read by SF readers for four decades and some of his work may survive.

What no one seems to have noticed is that Van Vogt, more than any other single SF writer, is the conduit through which the energy of Gernsbackian, primitive wonder stories has been transmitted through the Campbellian age, when earlier styles of SF were otherwise rejected, and on into the SF of the present. James E. Gunn comes closest to understanding the importance of Van Vogt when he says, “Van Vogt was creating the mythology of science, writing stories of science as magic or magic as science” (Alternate Worlds, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 163). The style hardly matters. And as Knight proved, Van Vogt’s awkwardness is certainly easy to ridicule—but to do so without an appreciation of Van Vogt’s virtues misses the point. Think back to our discussion in chapter 3 of magic rationalized as a source of wonder and you will gain some appreciation of Van Vogt’s authentic appeal to SF readers over the decades.

While literary criticism has never admitted complication as a virtue in fiction, complication has always been central to the mainstream of science fiction. This is derived from the focus on plot and story (above character, theme, structure, stylistic polish) and of course setting. The novels of Jules Verne were complicated by the insertion of immense amounts of scientific and technological detail. There is substantial evidence that Verne’s Victorian audience saw detail as edifying and pleasurable. That dense and almost preliterate classic of modern SF, Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (1911), has almost nothing to it but its complications. Lester del Rey described it in The World of Science Fiction: 1926–1976 (NewYork: Garland Publishers, 1979, p. 33):

As fiction, it is simply dreadful.… The plot is mostly a series of events that help to move from one marvelous device to another.

But never mind that. It is one of the most important stories ever written in the science fiction vein. It is a constant parade of scientific wonders—but they are logically constructed wonders, with a lot of keen thought behind them. The novel forecasts more things that really came true than a hundred other pieces of science fiction could hope to achieve. There is television (which was named by Hugo Gernsback), microfilm, tape recording, fluorescent lighting, radar—in fact most of the things that did eventually make up our future.

Obviously, Gernsback’s book depends entirely on its extraliterary virtues. And Van Vogt most of all sums up and transmutes this part of the science fiction tradition and transmits it forward to a large and influential body of better stylists who come after him.

But the better stylists who come after Van Vogt are not necessarily better writers of science fiction. Note the assumptions within the SF field evident in the following quotation from Of Worlds Beyond, Eshbach’s introduction to Van Vogt’s essay summarized earlier: “The writer who wishes to inject complication into his science fiction will find much of value in A. E. Van Vogt’s article. And after all, a story without some complication (if it can be called a story) is a drab affair indeed, with little chance of gaining a publisher’s check.” Keep in mind that this essay was commissioned for and included in Of Worlds Beyond, the first volume ever published on the writing of science fiction (significantly subtitled The Science of Science Fiction Writing). Also included were essays by E. E. Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Williamson, and John Taine (a pseudonym for Eric Temple Bell, then one of the great living mathematicians). And notice that Van Vogt is no literary dilettante. On page 53 of Of Worlds Beyond, he states: “I write a story with a full and conscious knowledge of technique. Whenever my mind blurs, no matter how slightly, on a point of technique, there my story starts to sag, and I have to go back, consciously thinking it over, spot the weakness, and repair it according to the principles by which I work.”

Charles Platt, in his introduction to The Players of Null-A (Boston: Gregg Press, 1977, p. xviii), surely the single best piece of writing on Van Vogt’s work, instructs us on how to read him according to his virtues:

The tangled web of shifting motives, suspicions, and loyalties grows ever more involved, against a canvas of galactic scope, until the whole picture becomes too large to be held in the reader’s imagination all at one time.… The reader really must approach [Van Vogt] with a sense of acceptance and a willingness to stay caught in the shifting moment of action; then the flavor can be enjoyed almost viscerally, just as a dream can be savored so long as one’s logical skepticism is held in temporary abeyance.

To suggest that the [work] is best read in this way is not to denigrate it as a piece of fiction, since obviously it has the additional serious content on philosophical and (perhaps unconscious) symbolic levels. Naturally, these aspects are best approached analytically, but to enjoy the novel, as an adventure, it must be read as an adventure—entailing an attitude which is not always favored by literary critics.

From this vantage, looking back on the science fiction of the last three or four decades, Van Vogt and Cordwainer Smith and a large number of others (notably Alfred Bester and Philip K. Dick) down to Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling presently have maintained the tradition of complication in SF.

The heroic efforts of Damon Knight, James Blish, and Judith Merril in the 1950s as spokespeople basically opposed to unliterary style, and in favor of the fashionable virtues of characterization and thematic complexity, were wasted in attacking such as Van Vogt. Where their efforts were effective and useful were in praise of such fine writers as Theodore Sturgeon and in examination of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, and in support of such newcomers as Philip K. Dick, Charles L. Harness, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, Gore Vidal (his Messiah), Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, Frederik Pohl, Jack Vance—all those who were establishing higher stylistic standards for future writing in the field. Ironically, in the 1960s, Knight and Blish and Merril were all carried forward on the crest of the New Wave, practically out of SF altogether—Merril, after declaring science fiction dead and speculative fiction risen from its corpse, emigrated to Canada and did leave the field for nearly two decades, to rise again in the 1980s as a founding mother of the Canadian SF movement. Blish emigrated to England, where his SF had always been read as serious literature (reviewed and supported by Kingsley Amis, Edmund Crispin, and other influential literary lights) and proceeded late in the decade to write Star Trek script adaptations and little else until his death in the early 1970s. Knight stopped writing SF almost entirely until 1982 and began editing his original anthology series Orbit, which quickly became notable for its stylistic sophistication and, on the heels of that, for its lack of popular appeal to readers of SF. Knight remains a pivotal figure in the field today, but when Judith Merril attended a SF convention in Boston in 1980, her name was unfamiliar to many of the fans. “Hah,” I overheard her exclaim. “I’ve been away long enough to escape.” More than any others, these three gave critical support to the classics of the 1950s. As critics, they increased the audience for new styles of science fiction in their time.

But if science fiction is to survive and grow in our time, it must not lose its Van Vogts and Cordwainer Smiths, who really keep SF separated from fashionable literature and open to new possibilities for complication. There must arise in every decade a new generation of critics within the field who will praise the new when it has virtue, while respecting the strengths of the old. This is once again true in the 1990s, with a variety of publications such as Locus, Science Fiction Eye, Interzone, Foundation, and The New York Review of Science Fiction carrying extensive reviews—and counterpointing the professional magazines. The seventies and early eighties were notable for a lack of any consistent criticism based on a broad appreciation for both the old and newer styles of SF.

The critics existed (Joanna Russ, Algis Budrys, Samuel R. Delany, Sidney Coleman, to name a few) but never developed the kind of thrust and influence over the decade that Knight and Blish and Merril did in the 1950s, or that the New Wave controversy generated in the 1960s. The most influential critic of the 1970s was Lester del Rey, whose dislike of any advance beyond the virtues of classic (1950s) SF was the bellwether of the decade. That he was married to the editor of the most commercially successful SF publishing program of the decade (Del Rey Books) and was responsible for the founding of the genre fantasy mass-market (see Appendix V) only cemented the authority that he had already earned as a critic and “elder statesman.” The most influential reviewer of the 1980s was Orson Scott Card, a knowledgeable and passionate critic whose shifting and sometimes seemingly contradictory attitudes are hard to correlate into a consistent aesthetic, except that he stood for better characterization in SF, a stance that blended with the zeitgeist of the younger SF writers trained in academic programs to produce the misleading cliché, “all good fiction is character driven.” (The fact is that some is and some is not—beware of the James vs. Wells problem, about which more in the next chapter).

What about the science fiction writers who can and do write extremely well, whose style bears comparison with the finest contemporary writing in the language? We have been examining those SF writers who are not stylists, attempting to show why they receive attention, praise (sometimes), and an enduring audience in the science fiction field. It is appropriate now to turn our attention to those fine writers who have suffered at the hands of critics in and out of the field for their “literary pretensions.” The list is long and honorable, from Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester through J. G. Ballard, Algis Budrys, Brian W. Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Gene Wolfe, and a large number of others.

Until the early 1950s, the science fiction field was so small and the writers so seriously underpaid that the writing of SF had to be almost entirely a labor of love. The audience supported it with love and attention, but no significant cash. One would think, then, that this environment, so similar to the environment in which the contemporary poet or serious dramatist writes, would foster a species of Romantic artiness. On the contrary, the SF field fostered an attitude of commercial cynicism. Robert A. Heinlein was from the start vocal about his position as a paid entertainer, not an artist (or artiste). Science fiction was invariably written to sell—there was never any sympathy for the pretension to writing without achieving publication—if your work didn’t sell and get printed, you were just a fan, not a writer. Fans write all the time and no one pays them for it. This situation was probably the healthiest thing that could have happened to science fiction, a crucial factor in preserving the vital field while other commercial genres were losing their audiences and writers; while poetry, for instance, became arcane, specialized, unintelligible to the uninitiated and without a general audience to support its publication. No SF writer ever left the question of audience out of consideration. After all, the audience would write you letters, send you their fanzines, walk up to you at conventions and tell you if you disappointed them. And praise you if you satisfied them. Few writers anywhere are so fortunate.

It is still true that most SF writers don’t earn their primary income writing SF, but the cash rewards are so much higher today that the author’s economic dependence on the core audience is lessening for the first time in the history of the field. Now, a hugely successful SF writer (of which there are a few) may make so much money that he or she need no longer depend on a coterie audience or even magazine or book publishers for continued income. Starting in the late 1940s, an SF writer could make some significant supplementary income from SF—and many new markets were beginning to open. Bradbury and Heinlein began to have stories published in The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, two high-paying slick-paper markets. Others wanted to follow. Van Vogt, Fredric Brown, and Jack Williamson had substantial hardcover editions of novels published by major publishers—and this became the dream of every novelist, soon to be realized by many. The young writers of the late 1940s, and the non-Campbell group from the magazines, knew that they were writing better than their predecessors, knew that markets were expanding, that they could compete with the established big names and, perhaps, surpass them.

The center of this excitement and this consciousness of a higher level of performance was New York City and specifically a group which had existed since the mid-1930s that centered around the fan club called “the Futurians” (Donald A. Wollheim, Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, C. M. Kornbluth, James Blish, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Richard Wilson, and later a wider circle including Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison, Robert Sheckley, and Michael Shaara). Those who were young writers then seemed often to fall under the literary influence of James Blish and Theodore Sturgeon, two immense talents and two of the finest self-conscious artists that the science fiction field has produced. (Also the influence of Lester del Rey, mentor to Budrys and Ellison, is often underrated.) There was a general awareness that something new and explosive was going on, that they were the writers of the future and that their work was already on a higher level than ever before in the science fiction field—a new dawning of prosperity, success, recognition was imminent. And it all worked out that way—sort of. They all made careers in SF, got paid enough to live, if not well, then well enough, and gained recognition within the field for their talents. But outside the science fiction field only one author, Ray Bradbury, ever got wide praise and recognition. Literary lights such as Clifton Fadiman, Christopher Isherwood, and other names now faded into history, praised Bradbury as part of literature, not science fiction. Note the distinction.

To give him credit, Bradbury himself never quite denied writing science fiction (as Kurt Vonnegut did successfully for years, to his enormous literary benefit). But he did allow his famous book The Martian Chronicles to appear in paperback (New York: Bantam, 1951) for nearly twenty years with an extremely complimentary introduction by Clifton Fadiman, which is devoted to denying that the book is really science fiction—sure, it uses the stuff of science fiction but it is actually the work of a literary man, not one of those SF writers; and Bradbury is quoted as saying: “Science Fiction is a wonderful hammer; I intend to use it when and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone.” In other words, I don’t think of myself as a science fiction writer so much as a writer who uses science fiction sometimes. And it’s true. Bradbury is more a fantasist who happened to grow up in science fiction fan circles.

But any one of those younger writers of the early fifties would have mortgaged their souls for that kind of literary recognition. What they had never counted on was that no matter how well they wrote, as long as it was labeled science fiction it was totally and completely beyond the literary pale. Not literature. What a numbing disappointment it was to the best writers in the SF field to find, by the end of the fifties, that the only likely way to literary respectability was to deny the SF label. This is still true in the U.S.

It was never entirely true in England, where writing SF was and is merely one strike against you. The situation there is that a novelist is a novelist, but if you write SF you’d better be excellent or you will be considered a bad novelist, your work very nearly white noise. But remember that this prejudice is part of the essential background against which Merril and the English New Wave proclaimed the birth of “speculative fiction” in the 1960s, and started a literary tradition. If writers could just get rid of that damn frustrating label, then the big guys would finally take their good work seriously.

Lester del Rey presents an unsympathetic but on the whole accurate summary of this sixties mind-set, in his book on the history of SF (The World of Science Fiction: 1926–1976, pp. 258–59). To summarize del Rey’s observations, a number of SF writers in the 1960s began to think of themselves as artists, whereas the prevalent attitude for generations had been a legacy of the field’s pulp magazine origins: that SF writers are craftsmen paid to entertain and that in the process of producing a body of work the creation of art is not excluded from possibility (after all, there was Dashiell Hammett and, in SF, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and perhaps others). The goal of these new 1960s writers was art, and they agreed among themselves that they were in fact producing good art, that in fact their science fiction was really the significant literature of the day. Of course del Rey holds this attitude in contempt and against the traditions of science fiction as well as against the real case. But I feel otherwise: that the case is by no means decided.

After all, from the mid-sixties to the present, high literary art in America has been characterized by one of its practitioners, John Barth, as “the literature of exhaustion”—all the stories have been told and retold, so that the only subject of fiction, the proper subject of fiction, is fiction itself—and we have seen a whole lot of novels about novelists writing novels, pretty narrow stuff, though brilliantly executed. Postmodern literature, which glories in marketing and borrows often from SF, values SF precisely as much as the advertising catalog copy it also borrows. It’s hardly enough to keep the mind alive and makes SF seem very alive in comparison.

There is no doubt that a significant number of science fiction writers today consider themselves literary artists, and a large number consider themselves traditional paid entertainers. But because of the newer attitude, I believe the likelihood that a work of SF may be a substantial work of literature has been greatly increased. It is not my place to declare who the real artists are and are not. But looking back over the past decades, it is evident that certain works are outstanding in their execution and will repay a reader who does not have an initiation into the special pleasures that come from long acquaintance with the SF field:

Brian W. Aldiss, The Long Afternoon of Earth (Hothouse)

Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

J. G. Ballard, The Best of J. G. Ballard

Gregory Benford, Timescape

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

Michael Bishop, Ancient of Days

James Blish, A Case of Conscience

Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

John Crowley, Great Work of Time

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Thomas M. Disch, 334 and Camp Concentration

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Gwyneth Jones, White Queen

Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers and Davy

Joanna Russ, The Female Man

Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside

Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (4 volumes)

Roger Zelazny, The Dream Master and Four for Tomorrow

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor do I think that, unless your reading tastes are particularly catholic, you would enjoy all these books. However, you would find strong literary talents, highly developed personal styles, character, thematic complexity—something to admire—in every work. Most of these works are held in high regard within the field, although several of the authors are more popular outside the field than within it (Delany, Ballard, Keyes).

By now you should recognize that there are extraliterary virtues in much of the best science fiction that give those works strong and enduring appeal within the field, although the works themselves may not communicate these pleasures effectively to outsiders, due to literary fashion both outside the science fiction field and within it. And you should be aware, although the fact has rarely been recognized outside the field, that there exist certain works of the very highest quality according to the standards of accepted literary taste. That these works have gone so long unrecognized is not a failure of the science fiction field but reflects an unwillingness on the part of outsiders to believe that searching for these works will repay the effort. Now you know more than they do.