The Engines of the Night (12 page)

Tell Me Doctor If You Can That It’s Not All Happening Again

R
EPLICATION IS THE STUFF OF MARRIAGE, MIDDLE AGE,
and science fiction; the portents are heavy and the air is foul. In late 1959—as in late 1937 on a less cosmic scale—the market for science fiction was in a state of collapse. The magazines, the deaths, the distributors, the book publishers. A well-known American fan and editor, Earl Kemp, passed around the Detroit World Science Fiction Convention with a questionnaire asking responses to the question,
Who killed science fiction?
and he had enough speculations and rumblings to publish a
book
(which won an unprecedented Hugo Award in the fan magazine category a couple of years later). Dismal clumps of editors and writers gathered in bars and bedrooms to ask one another whether the field could even be said to exist anymore. There was one fairly viable magazine (
Astounding
), a couple of others obviously in distress, and a scattering of paperback book publishers, none of whom expressed much interest in paying more than small advances to writers whose work they had already published. Detroit was a terrible time; a convention which lives on in the memory of the assembled as surely postfunereal but without even the wistful gaiety of the wake.
²⁴

Many of Earl Kemp’s respondents confessed their feeling that science fiction had indeed been murdered, that its existence as an independent, functioning subgenre of American literature had reached its end just as had the sports pulp, the air war stories, combat fiction, jungle stories, and the like. (In the great pulp era of the nineteen-thirties there had been several magazines devoted to such arcana as railroad fiction or espionage. The war and paper shortages had put an end to almost all of these magazines and television in the postwar era guaranteed that they would never be revived; truly almost all of the pulp-era readers seemed to prefer television, and readers who would have come into the market after the war, of course, had no choice.) To this time, those science fiction writers who were active at the end of the era are able to talk of the late nineteen-fifties only with loathing. Most of them gave up their careers—by choice, circumstance, or a fortuitous blending of the two—and most of them never returned. The markets revived but this generation of writers was gone.

More than two decades later we know that American science fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack, it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned (although there have been little murmurs and seizures, flutters of panic). Over a thousand titles labeled “science fiction” have been published every year since 1978, no less than fifty writers can be said to be making a substantial-to-extravagant living through the writing of science fiction alone, and although the magazines have been pushed steadily to the borders of the market—only
Analog
,
Amazing
, and
Fantasy and Science Fiction
survive from the fifties; only
Isaac Asimov’s
and
Omni
have persisted from their birth in the late seventies to join them, though
Omni
publishes very little fiction—the science fiction short story lives on in the original anthology form and is the basis for many expansions to novel length. The science fiction novel has become the most reliable single category in American mass-market publishing; 15 percent of all fiction titles published are now science fiction, and most of these books are at least marginally profitable for their publisher.

Nonetheless, the dystopian undercurrent flows in science fiction; it has from the genre’s inception. (Letters in the
Astounding
of the mid-thirties were already asking where all the good stuff had gone; correspondents to
Astounding
in the late forties were expressing the hope that with the war over Campbell could now get some of the decent kind of fiction that he had been publishing before Pearl Harbor.) Perhaps it has to do with the psychic defensiveness of the science fiction reader, but it also is based upon extrinsic and verifiable realities. The writers, the more experienced editors, and the older-generation fans often wake up screaming, in minor versions of the combat flashback syndrome, from dreams that it has all happened again. “
Is
it happening again?” they ask themselves, and not only in their individual cubicles of the night. Every retrenchment in a publisher’s line, every transfer of a magazine ownership, every significant editor fired brings up the question:
the late fifties again?
Regardless of the changes in the field, expansion of at least the fringe audience, security of backlist, and the essentially benign commercial history of the last decade . . . is science fiction due nonetheless for another collapse?

The cyclical history of the field, the omens and the portents might so indicate, but science fiction writers and readers are supposed to be rationalists, and some factors which applied in 1959 do not apply now. It is no longer a magazine medium hooked to the whims of distributors and a transient audience but instead is tied into the media by conglomerate ownership and by the fact that the most successful movies of recent years—
Star Wars
,
The Empire Strikes Back
,
Alien
—have all been science fiction and have funneled new readers steadily into the field. (Most of them, alas, dropping out soon.) We all like to think too that we are older and wiser, that like Anouilh’s priest in
The Lark
we have seen it all before and thus do not need to see it again. The most powerful delusion of a career in the writing of any fiction is that one’s work grows and improves, that things need ultimately not be the same but in changing will get better . . . that there is a difference.

Still, even with the safeguards and delusions, not unlike those “safeguards” and “brakes” which economists remind us over and over again in their newspaper columns make a recurrence of the depression impossible, one cannot really be sure. There are no certainties in show biz. Conglomerate publishing can be merciless to a losing proposition (the same people who kill television series after two episodes or refuse to proceed with a pilot in the face of negative advertiser reaction are now the people who ultimately control publishing), producing fear among the writers and editors alike. At a recent world convention
²⁵
the editors were on short expense accounts and mostly in hiding; the writers entertained one another with tales of editorial treachery and incompetence, publisher stupidity and retrenchment.

Make this point: what most readers of science fiction do not know and have little reason to suspect is the degree to which the very quality of fear can be said to control the acquisition, production, marketing, and selling of science fiction in this country and how all of these subsidiary fears refract back to the first, that of the writer trying to survive by the medium who, professionally, must engage in self-censorship, must understand that there are certain stories he cannot write. The writer—the experienced writer in any event—knows that most editors acquire and publish not in an effort to be successful so much as to avoid failure.
²⁶
Defensive driving. They seek, then, that which they consider safe, and the writers who are at the mercy of these editors
²⁷
function from the same motivation. (It can be presumed that those who feel or function differently find it almost impossible to get their work into the mass market.) They must produce that which will not offend, which will not cause an editor to question the commercial viability of a book, a process leading quickly to rejection. Science fiction, like all commercial fiction (and quality lit too although in a slightly different way), can perhaps be best understood in terms of what is
not
written rather than what is. Self-censorship controls. Any writer who understands this at all will know what not to try. As good a definition of professionalism as any other.

What
is
unsaleable then? What are the taboos and limitations which have been imposed upon the field? No list can be inclusive, of course (new circumstances lead to new taboos; Larry Janifer recalls a sex book publisher of the early sixties who, keeping close eye through lawyers on the courts, would have a new list of
do’s
and
don’ts
issued every
week
; quite difficult if one had a novel-in-progress), but for general edification a partial list can be prepared. It must be made clear that the list is not immutable; it is only the fact of taboo which is constant. Buggery may come and pinko liberalism may go; old terrors will become cuddly rabbits and new beasts with rotten teeth will ease in through the windows. Even so, there will always be in this field (as in all others) certain subjects which can on only extraordinary occasions be discussed, certain approaches which can only be taken at the highest risk.

Some decades after Detroit, here is a small Common Book:

ONE: Bleak, dystopian, depressing material which implies that the present cultural fix is insane or transient and will self-destruct . . . that the very ethos and materials of the society, without the introduction of hungry invaders or Venusian outrage, will bring it down.

(The key here is
self
-destruction; there is no essential taboo against an extrapolation of the present culture which will be destroyed by the envious or by the righteous underground. The problem is an extrapolated present that without the slightest shove goes merrily to extinction. E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” published in 1902 in another country and anthologized endlessly in this field, strikes me as the kind of story which would be unpublishable in any contemporary science fiction magazine.)

TWO: Material which is highly internalized. That is, science fiction written from the point of view of a meditative and introspective central character whose perceptions are the central facet of the work, whose reactions to the events of the story are more important than the story itself. Goodbye Henry James, so long Herman Melville, get lost Saul Bellow;
The Demolished Man
would have a hell of a time getting sold by an unknown Alfred Bester in this market.

THREE: Science fiction which implies that contemporary accepted mores of sexuality, socioeconomics, or familial patterning might be corrupting, dangerous, or destructive. This appears to be a corollary to Dangerous Plot ONE but must be distinguished from it because while the first taboo would merely be against self-destructiveness, the third shuts off the possibility of serious investigation of alternatives. There has never been—as a now aged but still angry Will Sykora, chairman of the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, pointed out to me scant months ago—a communistic science fiction; that is, there has never been a body of work in science fiction done seriously analyzing the way a Marxian society might work (or fail to work) in the future or on any other planet. There similarly has never been a science fiction in which homosexuality or polymorphous perversity were considered as cultural norms (Charles Beaumont’s 1955 “The Crooked Man” evokes a homosexual society but only in a surprise ending which is supposed to make the story horrible and, for that time and
Playboy
’s audience, probably succeeded); there has never been a science fiction in which alternatives to the nuclear family were perceived as anything other than horrible (as they were in Gordon R. Dickson’s
Dorsai!
with its Warrior Creche, or Damon Knight’s “Ask Me Anything” with its kidnapped infants’ brains put into cyborgs). In the late seventies John Varley published a few short stories in which sex change was seen as a cultural norm, but then again as in Wyman Guin’s 1951 “Beyond Bedlam,” where schizophrenia was seen as the norm, the stories settled for a schematization without interposing in the narrative any character who as a surrogate reader might have raised questions on the system with which the characters—and hence the writer—were compelled to deal.

FOUR: Science fiction which owes less to classical, Aristotelian notions of “plot”—the logical, progressive ordering of events as a protagonist attempts to solve a serious and personally significant problem—than “mood” . . . that is, the events for their own sake, perceived in chiaroscuro fashion without the superficial ordering imposed by a central point of view or a problem-solving format. (This would render not only
Ulysses-Finnegan’s Wake
influences taboo in science fiction but would mean that even more modest experiments in form, such as those of Donald Barthelme, Tillie Olsen, or Grace Paley, would be unacceptable . . . indeed the bewildered reaction of science fiction editors to work of this sort is to ask, “Where’s the story?” and in terms of classical perception of plot they are, to be sure, quite right.)

FIVE: Science fiction truly at the hard edge of contemporary scientific investigation . . . science fiction which denies Einsteinian theory, the speed of light as an absolute limitation upon speed itself, science fiction which looks at Darwinism in light of recent studies which indicate that the whole question of natural selection must be reevaluated.

Editors tend to blame not themselves but the
writers
for this, and there is a small amount of truth in this; writers, particularly commercial writers, are lazy and superficial by economic and psychic necessity. “All the science I ever needed to know I got out of a bottle of scotch,” James Blish quotes an unnamed science fiction writer in
The Issue at Hand
, and John W. Campbell in his last years complained of the reluctance or inability of new writers and old to work at the frontier of scientific investigation. Still, truly original or heretic approaches to scientific thought would unsettle the preconceived reader and editorial notions of the category. There has not been—this is an extreme generalization but I will stand by it and take objections c/o the publisher, with promise to apologize in the Second Edition if necessary—a truly original scientific extrapolation in science fiction in at least ten years. Perhaps Poul Anderson’s
Tau Zero
(“To Outlive Eternity”) played with notions of relativity which had been commonly accepted up until then; perhaps Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” offered in his slow glass an entirely new, scientifically rationalized and rigorously imagined technological imposition upon the culture. Perhaps Pamela Sargent’s 1971 “The Other Perceiver,” which questioned the perception of waste and the life cycle might qualify. They are the most recent examples of science fiction which can even be proposed as at the harder edge of scientific investigation, pursued with the hard edge of rigor.