The Critics, Lord Love ’Em

The critics are secure in their opinions, and I suppose that’s a good thing.

The critics also have very short memories, and I suppose that’s what leads them to be so secure in their opinions. In fact, I can think of no other reason.

Our first major crtitic was Damon Knight, whose most important reviews and opinions were collected by Advent Press in three separate editions of In Search of Wonder. He took Ray Bradbury to task for all the flaws in his science. Yeah, the same Ray Bradbury who became the only science fiction writer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, when he was awarded one last year for his lifetime contribution to science fiction.

Never one to pull his punches, Knight also stated that Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft bored him. Although they both died in the mid-1930s, and Damon was still writing in the 1990s, there’s an awful lot of Howard and HPL available today, and almost none of Damon.

The next major critic was James Blish, who knew critics had to answer for faulty judgments and wrote most of his criticism as “William Atheling, Jr.,” the best of which were collected in two volumes, The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand. He couldn’t stand the fact that Robert Sheckley wrote one funny story after another in the 1950s, in a field that was created to explore serious extrapolations. But 50 years later Sheckley was a Worldcon Guest of Honor, and humorists like Douglas Adams and Sir Terry Pratchett were living on the bestseller list, while almost all of Blish’s serious extrapolations were long out of print.

When the New Wave came along, a lot of the critics announced that science fiction had finally come of age, and pronounced hard science dead. Damned good thing no one ever told Vernor Vinge or Greg Bear or Greg Benford or Catherine Asaro or Sir Arthur C. Clarke or that whole crowd.

There was a time when the critics were shocked that science fiction acknowledged that there were two sexes, and that girls were more than just lumpy boys who were there to hold the hero’s horse (or spaceship), or to be rescued when they were one grope away from a Fate Worse Than Death. Then along came Philip Jose Farmer, and then Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna Russ, and the entire New Wave, and suddenly there wasn’t a critic around who hadn’t always known that science fiction was the perfect vehicle for examining the differences—and relationships—between the sexes.

If you look at the bookstores today, you’ll see that the critics have kept their perfect record intact.

Back about thirty years ago two writers came up with major innovations. The brilliant William Gibson became the partial creator, most popular practitioner, and poster child for cyberpunk, and the critics adored it, pronouncing it to be nothing less than Science Fiction Come of Age (their Pronouncement of Choice).

At the same time Anne Rice decided that far from being ghoulish, blood-sucking, unclean dead things, vampires were actually kind of sexy. Critics laughed and snickered.

Okay, move the clock ahead to December of 2009, and take a look at the results. Gibson has pretty much abandoned cyberpunk, and I’d be surprised if the field is producing three cyberpunk novels a year. But I’d be equally surprised if we were publishing less than one vampire romance (excuse me: “paranormal romance”) a day, and it looks like next year there will be almost as many zombie romances as legitimate science fiction novels.

Wherever would we be without the critics?