Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (27 page)

Things are a lot better today, economically speaking. It’s a huge market, and those writers who manage to establish themselves as novelists with faithful audiences can depend on selling a book or two a year forever, with none of the uncertainties involved in submitting short stories on spec to Campbell or Gold or Boucher, hoping that somebody like Lowndes would catch them (for one-third as much) if they bounced. As noted above, hardly anyone made a living wage in science fiction fifty years ago. Today there are vast platoons of full-time writers earning decent, if unspectacular, livings, and some writers make a lot of money indeed. There are also hundreds and hundreds of part-timers now whose stories and novels get published with fair regularity and who can legitimately regard themselves as professionals. I can only regard that as a positive development. Plenty of worthwhile books and stories are published every year, too, and a few great ones, though it’s harder to find them in today’s world of megapublishing than it was when the total monthly ouput of published science fiction was less than half a million words. Of course, there’s a lot of conformity to established norms, an enormous amount of derivative work being produced, but that’s only to be expected in such a vast field that needs huge quantities of material each month to sustain its own momentum. And if you don’t like writing in other people’s traditions nowadays, or want to try literary experiments that are clearly not going to reap immense sales, there’s a vigorous small-press cosmos available, both in conventional print format and, now, online as well. All in all, it’s not a ghastly time to be a science-fiction writer. It is just not a time conducive to the production of stunning work like
The Stars My Destination
or
West of the Sun
or
More Than Human
or
Fahrenheit 451,
to mention just four novels of the glorious early fifties.

I know that the kind of SF world we had fifty years ago isn’t going to come back. That just isn’t possible, in today’s bigger and noisier time, and I wouldn’t even want it to. A return to the diminished publishing conditions of the old days would mean disaster for 98 percent of today’s science fiction writers, for one thing. And it probably would come about only as a result of some general economic cataclysm that I have no desire to see.

Even so, I look back fondly at that little village that SF once was, where all of us, readers and writers both, knew what was going on all the time. We could see the boundaries of the field and we knew how we wanted to expand them, and thought we could do it. As the evolution of science fiction occurred, month by month, we perceived it happening, and to the best of our abilities we each helped that evolution along. Today, when so much is being published that nothing attains much visibility for long, and the great mass of mediocre work churned out every month crowds out excellence, it’s quite possible that a writer of the originality of Farmer or Sturgeon could arise and work in utter obscurity for a decade or more before most of us had heard about him. Even when some brilliant new book or story comes along that might cause the rest of us to reevaluate our whole approach to the concepts and techniques of science fiction, it is buried by the inexorable tonnage of material that the following month brings, and within a year or two it is forgotten.

We were heading somewhere exciting fifty years ago, as American science fiction began to emerge from its pulp-magazine origins. I don’t think we managed to get there. In the United States today, SF is just a branch of commercial fiction that tends to be regarded by discerning mainstream readers as nothing more than silly stuff for kids.

There’s a good reason for that, too: All too many of the hundreds of books a year that bear the SF label offer a commodity that’s only slightly evolved beyond the old
Captain Future
sort of thing, evil empires and mad robots and swaggering space-pirates. I can’t help but regard that as a sad situation. We had hopes, once, of making it into something more than that.

A
ll old writers of SF are self-taught. We didn’t take courses in writing SF, because there weren’t any. Most of us didn’t take courses in writing anything, because they were lectures by asses with egos. We learned how to write SF by reading it—still the basic requirement—and then imitating, as all artists do, till we got the hang of it. (Anybody who really suffers from the anxiety of influence has no business being a writer. He should go invent the wheel.)

This primitive anarchy was changed by a revolutionary discovery—the first valid method of teaching writing as an art. It’s now the method used, on all levels, everywhere, and has almost totally replaced the asses with egos. I don’t know whether it actually first appeared in Robin Wilson’s peer-group SF workshops in Clarion, Pennsylvania, but I met it as the Clarion Method, and saw it used only much later in “mainstream” workshops and writing programs. Its basic ploy is to have everyone write, read one another’s work, and critique, under strict and simple rules, with a professional writer as facilitator. The group dynamic is central, and very powerful. The pro’s experience is accessible, but the system eliminates the asinine lecture and helps minimize ego trips. It builds both critical and self-critical capacity and toughens the young writer’s delicate hide. It is a most extraordinary teaching device. If it came out of SF, as it seems to have, we should be boasting about it.

I was introduced to it, as the pro facilitator, in the first Clarion workshop, which was in Seattle in 1971. I had no experience teaching anything but French. Vonda N. McIntyre (who had been at the 1970 workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, and was running the show, while trying to grow teratoma cells in vitro in her other life) explained how it worked to me. And even with a terrified amateur in charge who didn’t know an epiphany from the
passé composé,
it worked. The twenty of them were better writers at the end of my week. They were better writers yet at the end of six weeks.

They were mostly male, that first group. In those first Clarions, women were few, and they often had a hard time of it. One of them had been savaged by the pro the week before me (no method can prevent an ass from kicking) and couldn’t write at all. (When the famous Iowa Writing School was taught entirely by Great Men, a common effect it had on the few women allowed to attend it was to keep them from writing, for years after, or forever. Some of the Great Men boasted about it.) Another young woman had wandered in from the UW English Department’s Creative Writing program and didn’t have a clue what the hell FTL was, but she was game. You had to be game, if you were a woman, because guys ruled SF, okay? This is a man’s world, ma’am. You go back and teach kindergarten now. Some of the tough guys couldn’t handle critiques from woman workshoppers at all. What they really wanted was to take orders from a man.

They were also mostly pretty young.

That’s all changed strikingly in the decades since. Clarion students now are at least half and sometimes predominantly women, and they’re mostly over thirty.

Another thing that’s changed is that SF is taught not only at the two Clarion workshops but also in writing classes and programs in respectable, even distinguished colleges and universities. Not all of them—only the intelligent ones. There are many creative writing programs in which SF is still on an Index of Loathly and Prohibited Genres. When I taught fiction writing at an undergraduate college in the upper Midwest some years ago, my students told me they were forbidden to write anything but realism, unless they could convince the professors that it was magic realism. I immediately demanded that they write me a romance, a fantasy or SF or horror story, a mystery, or a Western. The poor kids were so intimidated they had a hard time with the assignment, though there was one good ghost, and a girl wrote an excellent nursy romance. Mostly they couldn’t handle love at all, only sex. That had to do with being undergraduates. The department had another rule, which sounded arbitrary but made sense: You couldn’t end a story with a murder. They had to have the rule or all the boys would end all their stories with murders, because they didn’t know how else to stop. (
Stop me, stop meee
. . . )

I came out of this and other experiences with the belief that people under twenty are probably too young for any serious fiction-writing class, unless it focuses on deliberate imitation and on basic technique (sentence structure, syntax, and other stuff kids no longer learn in school).

I also feel that going to a high-powered workshop like Clarion before about age twenty-five is risky. The competition can be overwhelming; and the emphasis on publication, on a narrowly defined commercial professionalism, may be really destructive to a tentative, insecure originality.

There of course arises the big question about the Clarion workshops in SF, as about the huge proliferation of writing programs in the mainstream. The method has been proven: It can increase a writer’s confidence and skill. The contact with professionals is challenging and often exciting, and working with fellow writers can be a discovery of real fellowship. The experience, for many students (and teachers), both socially and artistically, is rewarding. And the publication rate of ex-Clarion students is amazingly high. But what kind of writing is coming out of these programs? If commercial publication is the standard, what’s published is likely to be ever more standardized. If what will sell easily is the highest goal to aim at, the target is going to sag pretty low. Do we need a rebirth of anarchy?

A
t an early age, I was reading H. G. Wells and Weird Tales, and almost anything that represented this world as differing from the one I perforce inhabited. I became really engaged with magazine science fiction when, or shortly after, John W. Campbell took over the editorship of
Astounding
. SF fandom was then still engaged in Gernsback worship, enthralled by H. P. Lovecraft, and delighted by tales with titles like, “The Gnurrs Come from the Woodwork Out.” I speak here of U.S. fandom, since British fandom was belly-up proletarian, ruled by a writer called E. C. Tubb, who brewed his own alcoholic drinks.

Four men have markedly changed the course of science fiction (if indeed “course” has meaning in this context): Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, Michael Moorcock, and Philip K. Dick. Oh, and I suppose one must add J.R.R. Tolkien, but he lies beyond my brief. Gernsback formed SF fandom, which remains a powerful and a unique institution. Such was the Gernsback effect that many readers of his magazine—whom I conceive of as largely unlettered blue-collar workers—believed him to have invented SF single-handedly. That was certainly never the case; indeed, it would be miserable to think that SF had crawled out of those cheap magazines, those horror-oriented yearns. “Moon of Mad Atavism” indeed!

It was Campbell who gathered real able writers to his magazine, Campbell who instructed and inspired them, who was indefatigable. True, yes, that all arteries harden in the end, but Campbell was a real-life force for many years and umpteen stories. He reigned supreme until other magazines came along, notably
Galaxy
and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
both edited by intelligent men who knew one end of a sentence from the other.

Michael Moorcock was a fantasy writer who woke one morning to find himself editing
New Worlds
. His was a divine discontent. Out went the old shags; in bustled the new mob. Americans found the (I utter the words with caution) New Wave alarming. Here were stories about men going no longer to Mars but shortly to bed, speaking not in corny lingo but of cunnilingus! Here was a new vision of the future as arriving today, of all as now, now as all, and of style as well as substance.

Those thrilling days! You felt the difference. Charles Platt, standing barefoot in Notting Hill, sold copies of
New Worlds
to the bemused populace. (This was the sixties, when the people themselves were changing and the miniskirt was the newly hoisted female flag.) The old drunken orgies, the old ragged lads that secretly hated the new, those staples hitherto of British cons, were swept away. A new, bright, engaged generation swept in. And gradually America too changed, in the same computer-savvy direction.

So to the fourth bringer of changes, Philip K. Dick. Dick was no Robert Heinlein. I had fallen under the spell of Heinlein, like many another reader. My first SF novel,
Non-Stop
(wretchedly marketed by Criterion as
Starship
) had as its inspiration Heinlein’s “Universe,” the story of generations imprisoned in a starship. I was enthralled by “Universe”; it echoed my life, when I felt myself imprisoned in circumstances not of my own creation. This was SF as metaphor. I wanted to paint it with emotion, with heart, showing the humor and tragedy—not merely the rough stuff—of people involved in this cosmic trap.

Is it not true of Heinlein that he was . . . well,
unfeeling,
caught up in his own narcissism, which became more pronounced as time went by? While his big, brash heroes swaggered to the heights of Heinlein’s popularity, Philip K. Dick was writing of the fallen, the unheroic. A parallel prompts us here. During the Italian Renaissance, when the grandeur and heroism of the adult male was being extolled in statuary and canvas and fresco, a Flemish painter, Pieter Brueghel, went to Rome and Florence to see what was going on, only to return to Antwerp to create the most striking and meaningful depictions of peasant life ever achieved. So, Dick in California gave us unforgettable pictures of the humble, the artificers, the people with success and even reality leaking from their lives.

Gradually, this vision—wistful, weird, wired, wacky, wondrous to behold—superceded the Heinleinian world-shatterers. More truthful? Your judgment depends on your temperament—and your drug bill.

Perhaps a word about Tolkien, or his followers. SF used to have a little sister, pearls in her hair, called Fantasy. Fantasy grew up to be a big tough lass and to rule the roost. She cleared herself a space among the hardware for magic and dragons and the hairy-footed. Well, we have learned to live with her; it’s still storytelling, after all.