NEW WAVE: THE GREAT WAR OF THE 1960s
Cele Goldsmith is … with Judith Merril, god-mother to the American New Wave of the 1960s. She published all the Young Turks, most of them for the first time, in the magazines she edited.… As Merril did with her opinion-moulding Year’s Best SF Stories, Goldsmith had to create a climate for the kind of fiction she enjoyed.
—Michael Moorcock (Introduction to Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar [Clarkston, GA: White Wolf, Inc., 1995])
CONFLICT AND ARGUMENT are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once. And the woman who launched a thousand polemics was Judith Merril, author, reviewer, and anthologist. A charismatic personality in SF since the late 1940s, Merril was an active social figure in the SF world and a bearer of higher literary standards in her reviews. But it was in her anthologies that her crusading spirit was most evident.
Merril produced the annual Year’s Best SF volumes from 1956 until 1968, the most important “books of record” in the field in those years. In them, she made it her personal crusade to break down the growing proliferation of artificial categories in the field (hard SF, science fantasy, fantastic fiction, and many others) by calling everything by the letters “SF.” But this was only the beginning of her mission. In the late fifties and early sixties, she began to discover and identify instances of good SF writing outside the field, not merely in an attempt to bring writers like Jorge Luis Borges and George P. Elliott and Robert Nathan to the attention of the science fiction world but quite intentionally to blur and ultimately obliterate the distinctions between science fiction and the rest of contemporary literature, to bring science fiction back into the mainstream. In this she was opposed by the prestigious John W. Campbell, who claimed that science fiction is so comprehensive in its conception, possibilities, settings, etc., that all the rest of literature is just a special case, and a limited one at that, of science fiction.
Merril, no whit deterred, proposed in the early sixties that the field change its name to speculative fiction, redefining SF (ess eff) to be equal to and congruent with spec fic (speculative fiction, that term introduced by Heinlein in his 1941 Denvention—Denver Worldcon—speech). She had a point, in that no one could deny that SF had never been defined. But as it turned out, the field wasn’t going to accept her as its “onlie definer.” What followed was the greatest battle in modern SF history, the New Wave controversy.
To summarize six years of battle in a couple of paragraphs: Two groups of writers, almost all young and new to SF, took up Merril’s rallying cry and revolutionized science fiction by infusing into the field the entire range of literary techniques available to the contemporary writer of the avant-garde. One group was loosely centered around Merril and the Milford, Pennsylvania, annual SF writers conference (Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Virginia Kidd, James Blish, Gordon R. Dickson, Theodore Sturgeon and others) in the U.S., and to a lesser but significant extent around Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing and Fantastic in the early 1960s. The other (larger, more coherent, and more radical) was centered around the British magazine New Worlds (1964–1970), and its editor, Michael Moorcock. New Worlds had reached the extreme point, just before the end in 1970 or so, where it was hard to tell the fiction from the paid advertising, it was so experimental.
For five or six years, New Wave and speculative fiction were au courant in the science fiction world, but by the end of the sixties, Merril was a political refugee living in Canada, New Worlds’s British Arts Council grants had run out and the magazine folded, and young writers were beginning to admit in public to being science fiction writers again. The science fiction world settled back to digest and incorporate an enormous transfusion of literary technique, the new blood of a whole generation of diverse talents such as Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, and a host of others who would be writers by damn, not just science fiction writers. Poof! No more strict stylistic limitations on how a science fiction story is told.
What Moorcock and Ballard and Brian Aldiss in England, and Merril and Delany and Russ and Disch and Harlan Ellison in the U.S., stood for—now that we have the advantage of historical perspective—was that SF is a special case of that category, literature, and as such may have as its goal the achievement of “high art” (the literary level of Joyce, Proust, Pound, Eliot). To the extent that, before the sixties, SF did not aim for this level of achievement, we can perceive a failure of nerve in the field as a whole, traceable to the famous argument between Henry James and H. G. Wells. A good capsule discussion of how the James versus Wells bout influenced the development of SF is presented in the important and generally neglected essay introduction to the anthology In Dreams Awake, by Leslie Fiedler (New York: Dell, 1975, p. 16). The situation, complicated by a growing split between British and American SF according to which aesthetic dominated locally, is one of the unexamined roots of the present state of SF that future literary historians will have to untangle and examine. For present purposes only the surface situation applies to our considerations.
At the end of years of ever more serious disagreement between Wells and James, Wells finally was understood to stand for communicating ideas to a large audience through journalistic (unornamented) prose, and James for a complex prose art that would stand for eternity like a cathedral, whole and entire, regardless of the size of the congregation. The Jamesian aesthetic became a pillar of literary Modernism.
Gernsback and, later, Campbell were prophets of the Wellsian aesthetic—as was Robert A. Heinlein. The first significant challenge to this was the Merril/Moorcock effort. And to make the matter more pleasingly ironic, we might note that it was not until later in Wells’s career that he solidified into his aesthetic position, particularly in the teens and twenties. In the 1890s, as the radical, pessimistic young writer of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau (enthusiastically praised by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, among others), and just after the turn of the century, as the author of utopian fictions based on technological progress, Wells was in no fashion the prophet of popular optimism he later became. It was as he moved further in the direction of optimism and popularity, as his position in society became more and more that of cultural guru, that Wells became James’s enemy, evidently to James’s dismay.
Robert A. Heinlein, of all the famous authors of SF between Wells and the present, most clearly and effectively caught the optimistic and technological problem-solving mode of the later Wells and adapted it in a body of work unparalleled in its popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. And Heinlein himself was a dominating personality in the SF field, perhaps second in influence only to John Campbell during those two great decades. But not only was Robert A. Heinlein changing in the 1960s (starting with Stranger in a Strange Land, which became a well-known underground classic); a new writer, J. G. Ballard, whose stories began appearing in England in the late 1950s, had become a focus of controversy.
The first work of Ballard’s to appear in the U.S. was “Prima Belladonna,” a sensitive, intense story of love and bizarre emotional states (more than vaguely reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”) set in Vermilion Sands, a surreal science fictional version of decadent future America. It was Ballard’s first published work in Britain and was reprinted in Judith Merril’s second annual Year’s Best anthology (1957). Even in this first story, the kernel of what became Ballard’s characteristic auctorial tone was present—a kind of tortured clinical detachment, raked into the surreal.
Most of the readership of science fiction (oh well, why not admit it—most readers) are style deaf, can make only such gross distinctions as easy-to-read and hard-to-read, normal prose and complicated stuff, Hemingway and Joyce, Wells and James, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. Science fiction, with a few notable but acceptable exceptions, remained until the early sixties firmly entrenched in the Campbellian (in the footsteps of the later Wells) aesthetic of clean, precise, naturalistic writing for every situation. (The three stylistic mavericks of most high repute—Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury—never repudiated the general standards and coexisted peacefully.)
Here is a piece of exemplary writing within a science fiction story, from the famous “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey (a 1938 piece from Campbell’s Astounding), quoted from In Dreams Awake (p. 147):
She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.
“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen.… Mmmm … Helen of Alloy.”
“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”
And a better than average example from “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon, the man regarded as perhaps the best stylist of the day, which was included in Merril’s 1957 The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy anthology (New York: Dell, 1957, p. 236):
He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild … free, rather … but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine.
And here is a paragraph from Ballard’s “Prima Belladonna,” in the same anthology (p. 221):
Harry groaned. “Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.”
It should come as no surprise that only a small minority of the SF field recognized Ballard as a revolutionary talent. To most of the field, he was an incursion of white noise. In the paragraphs above, del Rey’s, Sturgeon’s, and Ballard’s characters are observing an attractive woman, but there the similarity ends. While both del Rey’s and Sturgeon’s prose is recognizably in the Campbellian tradition, neither Ballard’s prose nor his characters relate to this tradition. Ballard’s characters live in a world where the inmost emotional states and the most complex intellectualizations are the surreal surfaces of their lives. They speak, act, and think abnormally. Ballard’s stories are juxtaposed to reality in order to embody certain artistic insights which cannot be manifest within the confines of Campbellian SF.
Ballard continued to produce such stories into the early 1960s and then emerged as a novelist with four disaster novels, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. These and subsequent fictions made him the most controversial SF writer of the time. The novels were just as rich and strange as the stories; and, in an era when SF readers could still read every single work published, since there were still only about ten new SF books (at most) in any given month, and often less, the novels began to be talked about.
They were against the grain of SF, even called anti-SF by some, while hotly defended by others. In December of 1966, Algis Budrys launched a full-scale attack in the review column of Galaxy magazine against Ballard and his influence on SF, to which we will return. In 1968, Merril edited England Swings SF, a concentrated dose of the new British fiction, widely reviewed in the U.S.; Michael Moorcock had already taken over the editorship of the magazine New Worlds in 1964. They raised the works of Ballard as the standard of the “new thing” in SF. Ballard was the avatar of change in SF, and Merril and Moorcock were his prophets. Excitement gripped the SF world as open conflict raged, and confusion reigned for years. It was the battle of the New Wave.
From the standpoint of the present, the whole great battle is best illuminated in the U.S. through the writings of the forces who summarized the opposition. (Everything went differently in England, where the controversy resulted in a serious aesthetic gap between British and American SF that persists to this day.) At the end, the opposition succeeded in turning attention away from style (and letting stylistic freedoms gained in the 1960s persist) toward an opposition between optimism and pessimism in SF.
In 1971, John J. Pierce (later to become editor of Galaxy) published “Towards a Theory of Science Fiction,” a rewrite of his 1968 paper “Science Fiction and the Romantic Tradition” (self-published as an issue of his fanzine Renaissance). This was nothing less than an attempt to save SF by starting a “back to roots” movement. Pierce invoked Wells’s film Things to Come, which ends with a great optimistic rallying cry, as an antidote to the pessimistic likes of Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Beckett in the contemporary world; he quoted at length from Robert A. Heinlein’s essay on the science fiction novel in The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism, ed. Basil Davenport (Chicago: Advent, 1959) which attacks “sick” contemporary fiction and proposes SF as a countervailing force; he marshals the forces of C. S. Lewis and Ayn Rand, Lester del Rey and Colin Wilson, James Branch Cabell and Donald A. Wollheim. Pierce’s message was that true science fiction is in deadly danger. After nearly a decade of battle, true SF lies wounded and bleeding on the battlefield (p. 31):
The influence of the New Wave has led to a general collapse of critical standards for science fiction. Mrs. Merril may have dropped out of sight, Ballard may be having trouble turning out any more of his “condensed novels” (verbal montages that have succeeded his catatonic disaster novels), New Worlds may barely manage to survive from one issue to the next … but the damage has been done. There is a mystique among critics and editors to the effect that science fiction cannot have any standards of its own, but must be used only as a “vehicle” or even as a “vocabulary” for some other art form.
There had been anti-SF before the advent of the New Wave, said Pierce, but never before had the critical establishment in science fiction embraced it. Even Damon Knight and James Blish, the paragons of criticism in SF, “eagerly curried favor” with the New Wave, and Knight used his influence as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America to promote the movement. Pierce stated (p. 30):
“New Wave” [is] an effort to bring science fiction to the mainstream by sacrificing its values and traditions and substituting those of the mainstream.
“New Wave” writers pretend to be breaking “conventions,” but in fact they merely ape mainstream conventions. Ballard apes Dadaism, and surrealism. Disch imitates social realism, symbolism, Sartrean nausea and other clichés. Brian Aldiss, a convert to the “New Wave,” imitated Robbe-Grillet in one novel [Report on Probability A] and Joyce in another [Barefoot in the Head]. New Worlds is full of pastiches of Kafka and Beckett. Ellison and some of his followers even incorporate the elements of supernatural horror. True, science fiction writers have borrowed styles before—but their plots and ideas were their own.
In “New Wave” fiction, science always leads only to disastrous results; humanity is always presented as evil, helpless and insignificant; the universe is always a nightmare beyond rational comprehension; and the philosophy is always nihilistic or deterministic. The “New Wave” writers claim to be individualistic but this is merely a question of style and approach; the followers of Ballard take a cold and detached view towards their subject matter.…
Meanwhile, “New Wave” advocates deliberately misrepresent the history and traditions of science fiction: to read some of their arguments, one would believe nothing existed before 1964 but gadget stories and pulp adventure with cardboard characters, naive utopianism and the like—that science fiction was devoid of serious ideas and problems. Science fiction has become a genre without honor in its own house.
Pierce quite clearly saw the New Wave movement as the great enemy of science fiction as he perceived it through the filter of his obvious limitations of taste and so on. His essay was the rallying cry of the old guard—hear again the poignant irony of Pierce’s pained patience as he explains that they claim to be individualistic, those “New Wavicles,” but their differences are not in the content or the plots, where it matters, but in style and approach. To Pierce and the whole SF field prior to the New Wave, style was synonymous with ornament, suspect, not often the subject of critical discussion and, when discussed, usually downgraded as some kind of pretentious excrescence. Of course, as we mentioned above, everyone knew that Sturgeon “had style,” or Alfred Bester, or Cordwainer Smith, but how these stylists worked was not discussed. I once asked Darko Suvin why he ranked many other writers higher than Sturgeon and he brushed me off with, “He’s merely a stylist.” Blish and Knight, the best critics in the field, spent most of their time cutting to ribbons style that did not function in place, that did not advance the story without getting in the way. Damon Knight states his critical credo in In Search of Wonder (p. 1): “that science fiction is a field of literature worth taking seriously, and that ordinary critical standards can be meaningfully applied to it: e.g., originality, sincerity, style, construction, logic, coherence, sanity, garden-variety grammar.” In his reviews, perhaps the most important body of reviewing in the 1950s, Knight stood for the transition from the “complex, cerebral, heavy-science-plus-action phase, toward a more balanced and easily digestible mixture of technology and human emotion” (p. 94). He observed and analyzed this change over the course of the decade, and produced works of his own that substantiated and legitimized in part the new 1950s SF, which is still the dominant paradigm of SF to this day.
The mixture of technology and human emotion Knight observed in such works as Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the works of Dick, Wilson Tucker, Pohl, Kornbluth, Blish, Budrys, Pangborn, Harness, Asimov, Vonnegut, Robert Sheckley, Jack Vance, and Bester all represent what we see as the central images of science fiction at its best.
Pierce’s fears were not, as it turned out, justified. What was dying out in the 1960s was not Pierce’s true SF, which never flourished more than in the decade following Pierce’s paper, but the Campbellian aesthetic, which was already dying out in the early 1950s with the advent of respectable alternatives to Campbell’s magazine, Astounding: Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic, and a host of short-lived brethren edited by everyone from Damon Knight to Lester del Rey. Every possible mixture of SF and fantasy was published in the 1950s. Writers went off in all directions, and most of the names and novels and stories that publishers identify today as SF classics were first written and published. By 1956, when Judith Merril published her first annual Year’s Best SF anthology, she continually referred to SF as “science-fantasy” to represent the broad and imprecise nature of the field as it had developed by the mid-fifties. By this time as well, John W. Campbell was already saying that Astounding was the only magazine left really devoted to science fiction, that most of the rest of the field was publishing fantasy under the SF rubric.
Well, as we have seen, it was hard to tell the science fantasy from the science fiction, impossible in fact, as long as the stylistic norm established by Campbell for both fields in Astounding and Unknown dominated. The reason that Moorcock and Merril could get a real argument going over Ballard in the early sixties was that Ballard had finally and blatantly broken the stylistic conventions of SF and it was hard not to notice. And, of course, Ballard was more or less successfully ignored by the field for more than half a decade before the New Wave really got underway (his first stories and novels were praised generally from 1959 to 1963 or ’64). And to give Pierce credit for some real perception, by the early 1970s he was looking back on more than five years of argument, and a substantial amount of amateur or failed literary experimentation, which had produced more heat than light but had certainly released a whole lot of energy.
As I have mentioned, Algis Budrys produced one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent. Note the ringing scorn and righteous indignation with which his discussion vibrates:
A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don’t think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster—be it wind or water—comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his comfort builds a huge pyramid to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators to help him out in dealing with deep water.
Budrys goes on to discuss this kind of science fiction in sarcastic phrases such as “the author’s characters … produce the most amazing self-destructive reactions while making reasonably intelligent and somewhat intellectual mouth noises.” And, referring to Thomas M. Disch’s highly praised (especially by Judith Merril in a review in Fantasy and Science Fiction) first novel, The Genocides, which Budrys believes is a Ballard imitation: “respectable friends of mine wedded to the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man, [feel] that the book is unrelieved trash, ineptly written, pretentious, inconsistent and sophomoric. I personally feel that it reflects a deep and dedicated study of the trappings of a book [by Ballard] everybody says is good.”
In conclusion, Budrys meditates that “it’s not going to be easy to arrive at a snappy verdict on this general new kind of science fiction. For one thing, it’s fundamentally different from most previous writing in the field—until you go back to H. G. Wells.… (In fact I can see a book called Cartography of Chaos, some ten years from now using the new mode as a demonstration that all U.S. science fiction between say 1930 and 1960 did not derive from classical sources, and that the importance of J. G. Ballard rests in his having singlehandedly returned the field to its main form.)”
For all his distaste and suspicion, Budrys does hit in passing upon the crucial fact that the early Wells was indeed pessimistic in tone, not at all the man who later wrote Things to Come. Wells had changed by the time SF was born, and the dark and pessimistic mode of Ballard and the New Wave was indeed closer to the classical sources of SF than the optimistic, problem-solving literature of John W. Campbell.
And now in the eighties and nineties the New Wave has long ebbed, but the legacy of that controversy is that certain areas in which SF was shallow prior to the advent of Ballard are now regularly treated in depth. Budry’s friends, “wedded to the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man,” were actually wedded to clear naturalistic prose fictions in which the scientific knowledge of the protagonist was a priori adequate to solve whatever problem the plot posed (and said protagonist better not have too many disturbing personal problems to prevent him from fighting off the antagonist until the problem is solved). Budrys’s friends who maintained that Disch’s The Genocides is “unrelieved trash, ineptly written” were wedded to a commercial magazine tradition that did not admit much stylistic variation and certainly did not permit practitioners any pessimistic assumptions. (As you will recall, there had been that absolute furor over the pessimistic little story by Tom Godwin, “The Cold Equations,” in Astounding in 1954.)
Pierce and other surviving believers in science and in Man were and still are unable (or unwilling) to appreciate the humane and literary virtues of any part of SF that might assume that science may be inadequate to solve a problem, or individual humans inadequate to face the problem well. But, ironically, pessimism is still as unfashionable in SF today in the 1990s as it was in 1954 or 1966 or 1971. Most SF is still optimistic in its basic assumptions, but that optimism is not now as shallow as it often was before the advent of the New Wave.
The evolution of the New Wave in England differs significantly from what we have just followed in the U.S., and a rift still exists today in the field between the two environments. While Merril, Moorcock, and Ballard intersected at a crucial interstice in 1965, their lines were never parallel. Significantly, literary politics in the 1950s in England are the root of the divergent British line.
Important figures in the literary establishment in England began to accept and defend SF as valuable contemporary writing. Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Edmund Crispin, C. S. Lewis, and others defended SF hotly, eloquently, and in public in the late fifties and early sixties, so that when the New Wave broke, the British were receptive to the new writers as part of a new generation. Still, of course, there were those who rejected SF as literature in England as in the U.S. So the British leaders of the New Wave invested their considerable polemical talents in denying that SF was in any way different from Literature. They felt a need to do this in order to achieve the final breakthrough into total literary respectability in their home territory. The U.S., of course, would follow, as it so often does, the dictates of English taste. Or so they seemed to think.
The assertion the British speculative fiction writers made that most disturbed and offended the chronics and omnivores of the sixties and beyond in the U.S. was that “anything can happen in speculative fiction.” That assertion, if accepted, would destroy the rule-of-thumb boundary between fantasy and science fiction, removing from active consideration by SF readers and writers that element of scientific plausibility and possibility of a science fictional idea “coming true.” It was not just anti-Campbell (Campbell was still alive, editing his magazine, and very vocal); the assertion reduced the entire edifice of highly developed and rationalized locutions that had come to characterize and enhance the reading protocols of SF to a series of meaningless conveniences (at worst), or at any rate to convenient words and phrases useful in lending atmosphere to the work but essentially no more meaningful or significant in place than any other locutions. Thus were the classics of modern SF devalued in favor of the instant “classics” of the New Wave.
The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely. Had they prevailed, they would have ended the continual development and use of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special paraliterary or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field.
It is interesting to follow the state of British SF, where the New Wave did indeed dominate for a time. The present British writers of SF are either writing predominantly fantasy (Michael Moorcock) or a peculiar breed of science fiction which denies all the advantages of conventional SF in favor of intense psychological investigation of character in a rather sketchy or unrationalized SF setting (exceptions include Brian W. Aldiss), or of richly ornamented prose portrayals of surreal and/or grotesque settings inhabited by abnormal characters. Damn little wonder there. Arthur C. Clarke, the grand old man of British SF, is a literary model for (perhaps) Paul J. McAuley and Stephen Baxter. The rest, except for the fantasists and the feminists, are mentored by the sixties. The New Wave won and contemporary British SF writers are proud of it. Perhaps I leave out too much, but this summary is more unfair and incomplete than untrue.
At the 1979 World SF Convention in Brighton, England, most of the younger British SF writers seemed a bit embarrassed in the presence of Clarke, who ignored the whole controversy and continued to write conventional SF throughout, remaining the most popular English SF writer in the world. This is in spite of the fact that he has never written a fully rounded character in his career, that being irrelevant to the strengths of his best fiction.
At the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton, the programming was based on the presupposition that contemporary SF began in the sixties and that the American writers of the fifties and before were literary history. This attitude did not prevail in the U.S. At the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, the U.K. editors said in effect that fantasy has more or less eliminated SF from their market. John Clute, the leading British SF reviewer, has all but proclaimed the death of SF. We shall see.
Eliot Rosewater (Vonnegut’s great defender of SF in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater) admitted that “science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples,” but he declared that it didn’t matter. “The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime when the issues are galaxies, eons and trillions of souls yet to be born” (p. 27). The choice was clear to Rosewater: craftsmen or prophets—and he chose. But the issues are not as clear as Eliot stated them and it is time we addressed some hard questions.
First of all, with a few notable exceptions, the best SF writers choose to write the way they do, and all of the best of them develop quite individual and characteristic styles which sound their recognizable voices, strong and clear. Second, there is in fact as much range of stylistic variety within the confines of SF as there is in the mainstream of contemporary British and American prose fiction today. This variety was underplayed for decades, but the virtue of the New Wave controversy is that for nearly three decades now it has been emphasized. A large number of the best SF writers have produced works outside the field, often winning awards ranging from the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar to the American Book Award. But their major work has still been in the field and most often unrecognized outside.
There is no denying that most of the classics of SF from the fifties and before are written in a fairly homogeneous journalistic prose. Until thirty years ago, ornamented styles were unacceptable to most SF editors. It was only with the breakdown of control by dominating editors beginning in the late 1950s that writers in general began to diverge substantially from the progressively cleaner and more precise naturalistic prose that was characteristic of all but a tiny minority of SF literature. This loosening of imposed control resulted in many prodigies and some grotesques: the New Wave, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert’s Dune, Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, the advent of Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and a host of other individual talents. No longer did almost all SF sound somehow the same to the sensitive ear. The new writers of the sixties most often took as their models the earlier mavericks Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester, self-conscious stylists who had survived the earlier decades, and of course J. G. Ballard. The list is incomplete.
Frankly, though, in all but the best examples, the new variety of styles actually detracted from the focus on big ideas that had given power to the field up to the sixties. The generation of the sixties stood upon the shoulders of giants and for the most part copped their ideas—and wrote them up better than before. As the literary virtues of SF got more and more impressive over the decade of the sixties, the ideas got spread thinner and thinner. This was, as noted earlier, the time when SF began to lose the excitement of space and space travel. The early 1970s are the years of what Brian Aldiss has called “life-style SF,” novels and stories taking place in near-future SF settings in which the focus is not on the events of the story so much as on the life-style of the characters. Oh, yes, and there was a bust in the market for SF about this time (1969–1971), in retrospect no surprise. There was very little excitement about the science in SF in those days, and it looked to many people in the community (remember John J. Pierce) as if the New Wave might have permanently damaged the field by deemphasizing science to the point where it became merely a literary device to enhance verisimilitude in future settings. Less wonder, to be sure.
Although SF emerged from the 1970s stronger and more energetic than ever before, it seems that the raw energy of overarching ideas has been permanently tamed by higher levels of prose craftsmanship. There may never again be a fantastic and open repository of big ideas of the sort that space travel provided for decades to the SF field. The online world of the cyberpunks, cyberspace, was a vein that played out in only a few years, leaving only attitude (and a new setting for SF writers who go about using it in differing ways) behind in the mid-nineties. And alternate-history SF, in fashion from the late eighties through the mid-nineties, has produced few contemporary masterpieces (but see, for instance, Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, or perhaps John Crowley’s Great Work of Time) perhaps because it generally limits the scale of its big ideas to historical probabilities. Perhaps the bright hope for the field lies in the influx, in the last few years, of scientists and engineers writing SF part-time—perhaps they can provide, if only in rudimentary form, the “grammatical models” SF needs to keep growing images of power and wonder. It seems to me that they are succeeding and that the field is strengthening again in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, category publishing in general seems to have reverted to the images of the mythic past, dragons and monsters and magic, even astrology, as the most popular source of inspiration. And the result is more fantasy and science fantasy than SF. It’s beginning to get boring, too; pseudopoetic, pretentious, and basically foggy-minded. The fantasy audience seems to be a whole lot less critical and demanding than the inner SF community, satisfied with whatever magical images are given it and eager for more. SF has never drawn on and catered to an uncritical audience—the critical standards of SF omnivores and chronics have simply been different from establishment literary fashion. If there is a separate fantasy community, it communicates largely in the online world, where discussions of the most popular fantasy writers such as Robert Jordan are vigorous and numerous, rather than at conventions and through fanzines. There is to my knowledge no center of critical theory or location (or publication) that represents a consensus on standards of what works and what doesn’t, what’s good and what’s not. So the growth of fantasy and the fantasy audience may well represent a danger to the SF community as yet unrecognized and unarticulated. Perhaps the next genre war will be the Fantasy War. It may be going on now. It may even be over.