Dear Sir:
How happy I was to have someone of your academic background and accomplishments turn his attention—as more and more of your cofreres seem to have been doing of late—to my sequestered precinct of genre writing, science fiction. And how exciting it was to hear you begin your evening talk: “Pornography, comics, science fiction, poetry, westerns, mysteries, and the serious novel all can and must be examined seriously by the serious critic.” And as a comic book artist worthy of such examination you cited, with a great grin, S. Clay Wilson! My reaction was, blatantly, “Right on!”—right up till your summation: “I hope science fiction does not lose its slapdash quality, its sloppiness, or its vulgarity.”
There, I grew angry.
Articulating it may sound self-righteous, but it comes down to this: Slapdash writing, sloppiness, and vulgarity (unless one means [and you didn’t] the sophisticated vulgarity implicit in Durrell’s “Good taste is the enemy of great art.”) are, no matter how you catch them, fat, diseased lice.
Some art survives in spite of them (Dreiser, Dickens, Dostoyevsky . . .); in some, the good is so infested with them you cannot separate it out (Edgar R., and William S., Burroughs, gnawing at the idea of civilization from their respectively fascist and radical positions); but slap-dashery, sloppiness, and vulgarity have only camp value—where we giggle at what we or our parents were taken in by. That giggle is embarrassed nostalgia for lost ignorance.
Sometimes writing is good in spite of sloppiness.
It is never good because of it.
Sometime before this passion for popular culture seized you, you yourself wrote an incisive description and appraisal of the psycho/social mechanics of its purveyors (you talked of Hollywood film producers and studio executives of the fifties), explaining how they were intimidated by, hated, and tried to subvert (all with the best intentions) anything they suspected to be art.
The identical mechanic operates in the publishing/editorial complex that handles “popular genres” like science fiction. And every science-fiction writer at one time or another has conflicted with it.
You would be appalled how closely your summary remarks (even to the tone of voice—a little too friendly, a little too cheerful, as if nothing really serious were being said) echo what comes from these well-intentioned people whose motivating processes you once so succinctly described.
Well—there is my anger: spent.
In the hope that some larger cultural points will fall out, I’d like to talk specifically about science fiction—not about what motivates a given writer to create a given story, or even how a particular story may be constructed, but rather about the attitudes and values of the people who contract and pay for it, and publish it once it is written, as well as those who read it and make it profitable to publish—the landscape in which I work. For an understanding of science fiction that will keep usefully fixed to its object the more “rarefied” criticism that, yes, must be done, that landscape has to be explored, if only to define the pressures it puts on production within it. It’s a landscape I feel ambiguous before. Much in it, even as I dislike it, stimulates me. Much in it that is comfortable is also destructive. And it is a landscape in change.
Forty-nine out of fifty SF novels are bought before they are written.
The good and bad points of this situation clear quickly: an editor, having paid money for a book, is more likely to put up with a certain amount of texture or substance experiment not specifically spelled out in the outline. On the other hand, the quality of the final product is never a factor in setting the price. That is left up to the individual writer’s integrity (or ability); so that “fine execution,” without which, Emily Dickenson claimed, “nothing survives,” is not economically encouraged.
A friend of mine—a Yale Younger Poet five or six years ago—published a delightful book of experimental fictions with Atheneum a few years back* (sales to date are near three hundred copies). She is at work on a novel (about a werewolf). Her husband is a corporation lawyer; they live back and forth between Europe and the United States. She is an avid science-fiction reader.
I read two or three books of current poetry each week. I have for the last four or more years. I was in a remedial reading class in elementary school; reading for me has always been hard work. I want a lot out of it because I don’t do it easily. I don’t get a lot from most fiction: I do from poetry.
My friend and I were familiar with each other’s work when we met. She was surprised to find someone who knew hers . . . At any rate, we delight in talking about writing till all hours over the bathtub Calvados she and her husband smuggled in from Norway. We agree about most things. And she worries over the reaction of her readers, using the same vocabulary and syntax I use worrying over mine . . . an odd matrix of care-passionately/don’t-care-at-all.
But for all our temperamental congruence, matched tastes, and shared aesthetic concerns, she and I are in very different professions.
Despite her awards and publications, she feels chances for the publication of her new novel or a new book of poems are more against than for her. But when, and if, she publishes again, she has no worry that an editor will force upon her his concept of what her audience wants.
I have made my living as a science-fiction writer for nearly fifteen years. I can say nothing about the golden-age editorships of Campbell, Gold, or Boucher. They were over when I entered the field. Most science-fiction writers today have not known them either. I can only talk about the editorial realities I have known.
Science fiction is a wanted commodity: publication per se, as long as my work stays within the loose bounds of SF, is not something I have had to worry about for five or six years. But all editors have their idea of what “the audience” (never themselves) wants. With a few glorious exceptions, most SF editors’ sensibilities are the result of having had to read incredible amounts of bad work in a genre that they never particularly enjoyed in the first place. So each book is a battle with an atrophied editorial image of what the editors think someone who is not them is going to like and buy.
If it stopped there, winning that battle in the court of sales would be very rewarding.
But science fiction is commercial writing in a way that Literature with a capital L has never been, even in the days of the blue-paper-covered editions of Dickens or George Eliot. Science fiction, with its set, small sales, is considered the lowest rung on the commercial publishing ladder. (To argue whether SF is the lowest or the next to lowest rung within that is a masochism we can avoid here.) The point is that in overall form, editorial policy must reflect this, even if the personal preferences of a given editor do not.
A Doubleday editor told me recently that a large publisher with good distribution can expect to sell between two and five hundred copies of a first novel in a hardcover trade edition, even one by a writer with a good reputation in the little magazines and quarterlies—five hundred if they can pass the book off as a romance that might appeal to some distorted image the sales department has of “the average housewife.”
A trade edition hardcover, first SF novel by an unknown writer with no previous magazine publication will sell between twelve and eighteen hundred copies.
The break-even point on a six- or seven-dollar book is around nine hundred.
Science fiction novels make money on the average. Ordinary novels, on the average, do not.
And the SF money made is small.
Nevertheless, since 1965, the SF audience has created a sellers’ market. Publishers have taken on some fairly far-out books to fill up their lists; and the experimental work usually seems to sell well above the break-even point, both hardcover and paperback.
“We’ve been instructed to suggest to some of our young, literary novelists,” another editor told me more recently, “that they let us bring their work out as science fiction—especially those whose work has a more imaginative, surreal, or experimental bent.” Then he frowned: “I feel pretty bad about having to do that.”
I know very well why he feels bad about it.
The bestselling hardcover science fiction novel for 1968, John Brunner’s Quicksand, sold seven thousand copies. No trade edition, hardcover science fiction novel has ever sold more than twelve thousand—except Stranger in a Strange Land, to which I’ll return.
Only one of New York’s six Doubleday bookstores stocks any hardcover SF regularly. Scribner’s bookstore may have as many as five titles at any one time—two of the titles on their SF shelf are always Stranger and 2001. Brentano’s stocks none—though recently it has been taking one or two SF titles with a clearly ecological slant. The Eighth Street Bookshop carries none. Marboro carries none.*
And 2001 and The Andromeda Strain aren’t SF anyway: Neither the words science fiction nor the initials SF appear anywhere on the hardcover or paperback editions—not even in the blurb recounting author Clarke’s past achievements. Booksellers don’t stock books labeled SF. Book distributors don’t distribute them.
They’ll tell you as much if you ask.
A crate of books reaches a distributor. The first stock boy who rips off the crate cover also removes any and all “science fiction” books and puts them in a separate pile for special, limited distribution: this is before anyone looks at author, title, or cover. Only after that pile has been made (a similar one is made for “mysteries” and “westerns”) are the books looked at and further specialization decided on. A brochure accompanying the SF books, from publisher to distributor, telling how wide an appeal this or that particular title should have, may mean the distributor will put a little more pressure on the highschool libraries or specialist bookstores which normally take these books.
If science fiction should appear only on an inside blurb and not on the outside jacket (e.g., “J. G. Ballard has been the author of some of the most acclaimed science fiction of the past years . . .”), the distributor’s incensed reaction is: “What are you trying to do? Sneak this by? Will you please label the books clearly so we can get them where they ought to go. We know how to sell books: it’s our business!”—I quote, from memory, a memo to the Doubleday art department.
People have criticized Vonnegut for not calling his books science fiction. But frankly, his publisher wouldn’t let him even if he wanted to. One editor has estimated that if Vonnegut’s next novel were to bear the words “science fiction” or the initials “SF,” simply because of the distribution machinery, his sales would be cut—even today—perhaps 75 percent. The distributor’s reaction would be: “For some reason, Vonnegut has decided to write a science fiction novel. Well, when he comes out with another, real one, we’ll put it in the stores.” A children’s book or a cookbook by Vonnegut would get wider distribution: Doubleday, Eighth Street, Brentano’s, Marboro, and Scribners all have wide selections of both.
Back as promised to Stranger in a Strange Land.
It sold some ten thousand copies in its initial trade edition in 1960. It was kept alive in hardcover through a nontrade, book-club edition for ten years, where its sales approached three hundred thousand despite a simultaneous paperback sale in the millions. After ten years the publishers finally decided, since the book-club edition was selling as well as ever, to release a new trade edition—with only the smallest “SF” in the corner of the jacket.
It sold another ten thousand copies, was unavailable in Brentano’s, Doubleday, etc. So Stranger, one of the most popular books of the last decade, has still only sold twenty thousand in a trade edition. And the trade edition of Dune, by the way, has still sold under twelve thousand.
An editor (or writer) who suspects (or even hopes) he has a book that might approach twenty-five thousand sales—and that’s not tickling the bottom rung on the ladder to best sellerdom—would be an idiot to label a book “science fiction,” even if the hero graduated from the Space Academy in the first chapter and squelched the Bug Men of Uranus in the last.
Here is a synopsis of a talk I recently heard Isaac Asimov give: James Blish, some years ago, in response to Vonnegut’s “disavowal” of science fiction (and as a slap at some writers somebody or other, around 1966, called “the New Wave”) suggested that all true and loyal (“loyal” to what, I remember wondering) science fiction writers insist that their SF books be clearly marked as such—for the prestige of the field. Ike had just published his first novel in sixteen years, The Gods Themselves, a story set in the future about the transfer of elements from universe to universe via black and white holes, and the multisexed aliens from the other universe who are involved. He was astonished, then, when Doubleday suggested the book “not be published as science fiction.”—i.e., not have the telltale words or initials anywhere on the book.
Ike, recalling Blish’s campaign, protested: “But it is science fiction! I’m a science fiction author! Put science fiction on it!”
Doubleday refused.
Over the last decade, with talk shows, popular science books, the reissue of his forties’ and early fifties’ science fiction novels, Asimov has become a familiar enough name so that a new novel by him might break that twelve thousand sales barrier the distribution machinery of SF imposes. Therefore, SF it cannot be.
Ike finally went along.
I saw the book in Brentano’s this afternoon. But, as the clerk told me when I went up to him five minutes later to ask, as I do periodically, “No, Brentano’s stocks no hardcover science fiction. The paperbacks are downstairs . . .”
You can understand my ambiguous feelings: I am delighted that the SF audience will absorb new works similar to Barthelme’s or Coover’s without any of the critical ballyhoo that the non SF audience demands before it will pay attention to anything “experimental.” But I am also painfully aware of the inequity of the labeling and distributing process that keeps the SF writer/reader concert so limited.
Practically speaking, however, this is the position I must finally take: Words mean what people use them to mean. When editors, distributors, and, when all is said and done, science fiction writers say “science fiction” or “SF,” they mean a distributor’s category synonymous with “not of interest to the general public.”
Although this does not define the field aesthetically, it certainly defines it economically.
Easily three hundred SF books are published each year. But because SF is “not of interest to the general public,” the price of an SF novel to all but about ten authors is $1,250 to $3,000 for a book, paperback or hardcover.
Therefore, you can make a decent living writing SF—if you write a lot of it: four to six novels a year. (The magazines pay so little you couldn’t possibly live on story sales, even if you were Robert Silverberg or Randall Garrett who, in the fifties and early sixties, were responsible for whole issues of SF magazines each, the stories appearing under various pseudonyms.) Many SF writers work at this rate—for years. Four such I know well are among the most intelligent men I’ve ever met. One began writing at age forty in 1962: He produced between four and ten books a year until he had a stroke in 1971. Two others, in their middle or late thirties today, having kept this pace up for six and ten years respectively, are now in the middle of year-plus writing blocks.
But virtually every great name in SF—Sturgeon, Bester, Bradbury, Knight, Merril, Leiber, Pohl, Van Vogt, Asimov, Tenn, del Rey, Clarke—any writer, indeed, who began publishing in the thirties or forties when these high-production demands became tradition—has had at least one eight-to-sixteen-year period when he could write no science fiction at all. (Heinlein seems to be the one exception: A few writers who first began writing in the fifties—Anderson, Dick, and Farmer—seem to have gotten by so far with only one or two two-to-three-year blocked periods to date.) A handful of writers, during these decade-plus dry spells, turned to other kinds of writing, or editing. The lives of most, however, during these years are an incredible catalog of multiple and exploded marriages, alcoholism, drugs, nervous collapses, and stays in mental hospitals. A third of the writers I’ve named are still “blocked.” Perhaps the same could be said of any group of creative temperaments. Still, the number of writers, age fifty, appearing at all the conventions, busily autographing reprints of their books, who consider themselves, in the blurred and boozey conversations of the “pro” parties at the worldcon, “primarily science fiction writers,” but who have written no SF since they were thirty-five (one runs out of fingers and toes) is a frightening prospect for a writer between twenty and thirty beginning in the field.
Well, H. G. Wells himself wrote no “romances of the future” after age thirty-six.
Still, it makes you wonder.
But while we are wondering, editors want/demand/connive for, and generally presuppose that your work will be turned out at this rate. And there is a crop of young writers already—Dean R. Koontz (age twenty-four with fourteen SF books), Mark Geston twenty-two with six books), Brian Stableford (twenty-four with six books)—who produce. Indeed, my own first five SF novels were finished while I was still twenty-two.
Then I spent a summer in Mt. Sinai mental hospital: Hallucinations, voices, general nervous exhaustion . . . even at that pace, I did three complete rewrites on each book.
Here is what editors and older writers who should know better have told me till I am ill with it:
1. You are not an artist, you are a craftsman.
2. You should be able to take any idea (“like that nutty one I just suggested to you”) and make a “competent” story from it.
3. Science fiction is ideas, not style. What do you care about a few words here and there; whether I cut or rewrite a paragraph just to make things fit?
5. You’re a great writer: you get your work in on time.
6. You can be as sloppy and as slapdash as you want: just tell a good story.
The whole vocabulary of “competent/craftsman/salable” and the matrix of half-truths, self-deceptions, and exploitation that it fosters are rabid making.
There are very few “ideas” in science fiction.
The resonance between an idea and a landscape is what it’s all about.
SF writers survive entirely as verbally discrete personalities—what are “Bradbury,” “Sturgeon,” “Cordwainer Smith,” “R. A. Lafferty,” “Roger Zelazny,” “Heinlein,” and “Jack Vance” if not essentially the individual narrative tones with which their ideas are put? You’d have to be style deaf to mistake a paragraph of Asimov for a paragraph of Clarke, Phil Dick, Phil Farmer, or Bob Silverberg. You’d have an easier time mistaking a sentence by Christina Stead for one by Malcolm Lowry.
Once a writer has written one good book or, often, one good story, there is an active demand from the SF audience that will absorb years of mediocre production waiting for the next high point. “Look,” I heard an agent tell his SF writer client. “If you write six books a year, I can sell them—considering you’ve just won the Hugo for best novel of the year—for $2,000 apiece. If you write two books a year—like you’ve always said you wanted to—I can sell each for $15,000!”
I mentioned that there were approximately ten authors who can command (though they don’t always) a price of more than $1,200 to $3000 per book. I’m one.
My last published SF novel, Nova, probably made more money than any of Asimov’s (discounting The Gods Themselves, which, as we noted, is not “SF”), including their numerous reprints. That would be an outright crime if the criminal act had not been committed by the publishers who bought Asimov’s books in the fifties.
Nova’s paperback sale in 1968 marked a record paid by any publisher, hardcover or paperback, for an SF novel. Since then, that record has, happily, been broken several times. Admittedly, I have a sharp agent. But, essentially, what brought about that record price was very simple, though it goes back several books.
When I got out of the mental hospital, I decided that to write the next science-fiction novel I wanted to write, I would have to take in the neighborhood of a year to do it. I never announced this to anyone. Besides my editor, I knew no one to announce it to.
The book won a Nebula for best SF novel of the year.
The book I worked on for the next year, while I was living in Europe, won a second Nebula.
Publishers, with standard two- and three-book contracts, began to bob up here and there, wondering why I didn’t sign them all.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not going to have a half dozen new novels finished any time soon. When I have one, I’ll show it to you and you can tell me how much you want to pay for it.”
And the offered price began to rise.
My not having a bale of manuscripts lying around to be sold off like yard goods, I’m sure, pushed it higher.
No author can make a sane comment on the quality of his own book, whether he has worked on it three weeks, three years, or three decades. But if a book is sold after it is written, whatever quality it does have is there to be judged, however accurately or inaccurately, by the editor buying. My book was bid for, bargained over, and eventually sold—and sold well. The only thing I did personally, however, was to stay out of the way of as many people in the field as possible while bargaining was going on. I’ve developed a reputation for being hard to find. I don’t like the editing/publishing attitudes the people who edit/publish SF have to hold, personally or practically: I stay hard to find. What they want, essentially, is reassurance that, by publishing vast numbers of bad and mediocre books and using up and discarding writers to do so, they are doing nothing wrong. And that I can’t give.
I’d like to move on to a couple of points about the general rise in intelligent interest in “popular culture”—of which the rise in interest in SF is just a part.
The first of these points must be made often:
The only reason to be interested in popular culture today is because—today—so much is being done here with vitality, skill, intelligence, and relevance.
In underground comics, there is the work of S. Clay Wilson, Richard Corben, De Spain, Bodé, Crumb . . .
In overground comics, there is the work of Neil Adams, Denny O’Neil, Jim Aparo, Barry Smith, Mike Kaluta . . .
More important, as the underground artist will be the first to tell you, you can’t really appreciate one without the other. The dialogue between them is constant.
In pornography, there’s Michael Perkins, Marco Vassi, Dirk Vandon (as well as the reprints of Alexander Trocchi) . . .
About SF itself, Clifford Simak, who began writing science fiction in the thirties, said recently:
I would hazard a guess that if a panel of competent critics were to make a survey of science fiction through the years, they would find far more praiseworthy pieces of writing in the last few years than in any previous period. And that does not exclude the so-called golden age of science fiction.*
But the current excellence, which has produced the current interest, in comics and pornography (to cite two fields with which I am somewhat familiar) must be emphasized again and again; if it is not, the historically minded critic, busily “re-evaluating the traditions,” even if he is aware of the present vitality, usually ends up talking only about Fanny Hill and Little Nemo in Slumberland.
My next point is also one I deeply feel the critics coming from “High Art” to “Popular Culture” must keep before them if their statements are to have any proportion. To make it, however, I must go somewhat afield.
Let’s take a quick (and admittedly biased) look at British poetry in, say, 1818—the year Keats finished Endymion, Byron The Prisoner of Chillon, and Shelley the first act of Prometheus Unbound—and American poetry now.
In 1818 the population of England was near twenty million, 80 percent of whom were functionally illiterate. The literate field, then, was approximately four hundred thousand. This was not only the maximum poetry audience; more germane, it was the field from which the country’s poets could come.
How many poets were there?
Coleridge-Wordsworth-Blake-Byron-Shelley-Keats . . . ? Certainly. But we can pull out over another dozen without even opening our Palgrave: Crabbe, Hunt, Reynolds, Campbell, Scott, Moore, Southey, E. H. Coleridge, Landor, Darley, Hood, Praed, Clare, and Beddoes were all writing that same year. And at this point we’ve pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel for acceptable thesis topics in British poetry for that decade.
Twenty all together!
And if you can think of five more British poets of any merit whatsoever who were writing in the year of Emily Bronte’s birth, good for you! Out of a field of four hundred thousand, that’s six poets of major interest and fourteen of varying minor interest.
In the United States today we have nearly 225 million people. Perhaps 80 percent are literate, which gives us a literate field of 180 million from which we can cull both our audience and our poets—a field fifty times as large as the field of Great Britain in 1818.
Forgive the litotes, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that, where there were six major and fourteen minor poets in England in 1818, today there are fifty times six major poets (about three hundred) and fifty times fourteen (about seven hundred) of merit and interest in America today.
The blunt truth?
These statistics are about accurate.
Three or four months ago, Dick Allen in the sacrosanct pages of Poetry (Chicago), without recourse to any statistics at all, said: “Let’s face it. There are well over a thousand fine poets working in America today.” I am, as I said, an avid poetry reader, and my own reading for pleasure certainly bears those figures out, even though I doubt I read 10 percent of what is published. Certainly, somewhat more than half of what I read is bad. This still leaves a staggering amount of incredibly fine work—most by people whom I have never heard of before and, after I’ve read another fifty books of poetry, whose names I will not be able to recall without a trip to the bookshelves or the cartons in the closet. Browsing through a bookstore, I am far more likely to find good poetry from a small, or even vanity (!) press than I am from Doubleday, Scribner’s, Harper & Row . . . I am as likely to find it in a mimeographed or offset pamphlet as I am from Black Sparrow, Oyez, or Wesleyan. I don’t write poetry—I doubt I ever will. But, short of modern science fiction, current poetry is the most exciting reading adventure I’ve ever had.
Now the academic establishment, for years, has invested amazing energy, time, money, and (above all) mystification in perpetuating the view that, somehow, Eliot, Auden, and Pound form some mysterious qualitative analog with Byron, Keats, Shelley, while (and I quote the list from the opening pages of Howard’s Alone with America:) “Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell, Lowell, Roethke, and Wilber” start to fill, along with Frost, Stevens, and Hart Crane, the places left vacant by the minor romantics of 1818. Waiting below, the hordes . . .
This, to anyone who reads poetry, is ridiculous. Even among the recently dead (O’Hara, Olsen, Plath, Spicer . . .) there are who-knows-how-many who were doing as (or more, or simply different) fine poetical work as any of the living or dead already mentioned. In general, the standards of poetry are far higher than in Shelley’s time. Few little magazines today will accept verse with as much padding as the lines that filled The Edinburgh Review. Many people will admit, in an anti-intellectual moment, that they can’t tell why the latest bit of Lowell in the New York Review of Books is any better than the latest poem by their twenty-four-year-old graduate student or poet-in-residence. Like as not, though, the reason is that both poems really are just as good. Still, most people would rather not respond to a poem at all without the reassurance of critical approbation/mystification . . . that element so necessary if a writer is to be, to whatever degree, “famous.” Fame has been used, by the academic, as a sort of mineral oil to make works of culture slip down the throats of students a bit more easily. But fame is a matter of individual attention/fascination. And, at present, there just isn’t enough of it to go around—not if you want to dole it out to poets according to merit. I think people have known this in a vaguely inarticulate way for years: it has resulted in an immense effort to propagate the lie that while the population rises geometrically, the amount of poetic excellence remains an arithmetic constant.
But, at the risk of impugning the Emperor’s tailor, barring a fantastic decrease in population and/or literacy, no one person will ever be familiar with the scope of American Poetry again. Nor can anybody be familiar with more than a fraction of the best of it—unless he or she makes that an eight-hour-a-day job, and even then it is doubtful. Consider becoming thoroughly familiar with the work of—and the influences on—three hundred writers:
So: one classic job of the (poetry) critic—the establishment of the canon of excellent work—is undoable . . . and uncheckable should someone claim to have done it.
Some nineteenth-century-oriented academics still uphold the sacred tenet of the arithmetic stasis of excellence. But to anyone who can multiply, much less read, they begin to look like fools. Yes, 99 percent of what is written is awful. And perhaps 75 percent of what is published—a microscopically small fraction of what is written—is trivial. But what is good and published would fill barns.
There are hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of American poets.
Hundreds among them are good.
One critic cannot even be acquainted with their complete work, much less have studied it thoroughly.
And I suspect one can find analogs of this situation with the novel, the theater, the dance . . .
Which brings us back to Popular Culture.
The Cartoonist Workers of America (the underground comic-artist guild) has some fifty members. A completist collector of underground comics tells me that well under a hundred artists’ work has appeared in anything that could be called a professionally printed, underground comic.
ACBA, The Academy of Comic Book Artists (the overground comic artists’ guild), has approximately one hundred fifty members, about a third of whom are writers and editors, and about two-thirds of whom are artists, colorists, letterers. A former member of the ACBA board tells me well under two hundred artists’ work appears in professional, overground comics today.
I have no figures for pornographers.
The SFWA, however (the Science Fiction Writers of America), lists some four hundred fifty active and associate members. Associate members are editors, publishers, teachers of science fiction courses, libraries interested in more extensive science fiction collections. Active members are currently working writers of which there are approximately two hundred fifty. Slightly under one hundred are fulltime, working writers. Of these, there are perhaps fifty who make the bulk of their living writing only science fiction.
And there are more comic-book artists, pornographers, and SF writers today than ever before. Still, despite venerable histories, the current production in the areas of popular culture, compared to current production in the areas of high art—poetry, for instance—is rather small.
The various areas of Popular Culture are knowable.
The various areas of contemporary High Art are not.
And this is one attraction Popular Culture has for the modern critical mind.
Artists already working in the popular fields have perhaps been attracted for similar reasons. As fame is a goad to art, there is, obviously, less competition. I can more or less keep up with the work of the fifty who, full time, write science fiction—and read poetry too. Indeed, the real competition, I feel, is with no more than ten of these. Also, I suspect, the personalized response from a specialized and enthusiastic audience is more important than the necessarily limited fame available to an artist in such a field. The artists here feel more comfortable in areas with more defined yet ultimately more flexible traditions than seem to be available in High Art.
But, abandoning the abstract for the personal: I began writing science fiction because a handful of writers I read in my adolescence (Sturgeon, Bester, Heinlein, and McLean) wrote a few books and stories that I found more moving and stimulating than anything I’d ever read. (Other things I was reading and liking? Genet’s plays, Beckett’s novels, “San Francisco renaissance” poetry, Camus, Baldwin’s essays.) A few other science fiction writers (Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and Leiber) were managing to hew clumsily—and I was aware of the clumsiness even then—great, mysterious shapes of mind, lit here and there with the coalescing energies of our new technology, but, for the most, black and unholy with mythic resonances. Their scientific, or pseudoscientific, explanations seemed to have made them brave enough to venture a step or two closer to the dark, lithic mysteries—while they shouted back descriptions of what they saw.
That was the potential and the accomplishment of science fiction. Without either, I doubt I would have wanted to write it.
I write books I have an overwhelming desire to read but cannot find on library shelf or bookstore rack. (Unlike many writers, I can reread all my published work with delight.) And I am sentimentalist enough so that when yet another bright-eyed sixteen-year-old runs up to me at some convention and blurts, in confession, that he has read my last book over five times (this is the way I read More Than Human and The Stars My Destination) I feel quite warm. And, though such an occurrence makes no comment at all on one’s aesthetic success, at least one can feel, for a moment, one has done something humane.
Last summer, in the mail, I received a copy of a master’s thesis concerned with “mythical” imagery in two of my books. Flattered as I was by the attention, I still cannot remember the author’s name or college. Most of his sixty-odd-page paper was, at worst, irrelevant, at best, amusing. He did point out two typographical errors in one of the books—he, however, did not recognize them as errors and made much of them. I have a note to myself giving the page on which they occur and will correct them next edition.
From here I turn to the buzz behind me: critics, scholars, and even some writers, asking among themselves in concerned voices whether the advent of serious criticism will “corrupt” science fiction. To me this sounds like critical megalomania. The tidal wave of well-being that sweeps from the avid fourteen-year-old who has read and reread one lovingly and hopelessly—I recall one girl who had memorized (!) a short story of mine and quoted half of it back to me till I made her stop—is more corrupting than any possible scholarly examination. (I assume “corrupting” for the writer is synonymous with “distracting.”)
I suspect the critics are in far greater danger of corruption than we are: I have run across a fair number of “corrupt” critics—that is, critics who praise worthless writers for nonexistent reasons. The amount of word-age writers of science fiction (or poetry) spend praising any kind of critic is negligible.
* The Life of Riot, by Judith Johnson Sherwin, Atheneum, New York, 1974.
* I am happy to report that the situation is somewhat changed for the better since this letter was written in 1972.
* From a speech given in Boston, September 5, 1971, reprinted in Extrapolation, 13, no. 2.