Castle of Days (1992) SSC

by Gene Wolfe

  11. Remember that you are a part of an ancient tradition. The Romans had their pugio or short-nosed knife, the ancient Norse their scramsax, or musical shiv, the direct ancestor of the Samuel R. Delany melody machete. All loved their knives so much that they threw them; and in fact, some loved them so much they dropped them over the side of the boat.

  12. When mere knife throwing pales, consider knife hunting. All that is necessary is to shift the target to higher grass, or (better) weeds.

  And that is all I know on the topic so far. I have devised a fantasy hero who will dash up to his enemy, snatch the dagger from her belt, run to a safe distance, and knock her unconscious with the heavy gold pommel; it gets romantic after that, but if Wagner wants him he can have him.

  Postscript. In connection with another matter, I once put a page of the Chicago Tribune in the downstairs john and doused it liberally with hydrochloric acid. Twenty-four hours later it was still in one piece, and in desperation I tried to poke it down the tube with a knife.

  The acid etched the blade. I have saved that knife, and I mean to throw it at a stamp collector.

  3.

  Books

  The Right of Things to Come

  (1978)

  When I was asked to write this presentation [for the Science Fiction Research Association in 1978], I was told to answer the following question: “Should science fiction works be viewed or evaluated differently from non-SF? If yes, then what is the distinction; if no, then is there any reason for academic research to focus specifically on SF?”

  Appropriately for a writer often characterized as a science-fiction writer, I would like to begin by offering a prediction, and I ask you to remember that when I wrote this paper I did so with no information about what the other members of this panel would say. Perhaps I will be proved a poor prophet, but I predict that every member will answer the question yes.

  If that is the case, it seems worthwhile to ask why the question should be asked at all. I think that it stems from an old debate in science-fiction criticism—a debate now largely settled by the obsolescence of one side. Back in the days when travel to the moon was thought ludicrous, an overwhelming majority of science-fiction writers were very bad writers. However, because many readers loved their stories, and because editors had to buy those stories to keep the covers of their magazines apart, it was essential that someone come up with a rationalization. That rationalization was, of course, that since science fiction was a literature of ideas, it was to be exempted from being a literature at all. Let me repeat that the demand was for an exemption—science fiction was not to be blamed if it failed to provide interesting characters, pleasurable prose, and so on. It was to be exempt.

  Although I have never believed that, it would be dishonest for me to deny that there was a good deal to be said for it, just as there was a good deal to be said for the divine right of kings. There was also a good deal to be said against it, and it was said—first, I think, by Damon Knight, and later by everyone with any claim to be a critic of the genre: James Blish writing as William Atheling, Jr., Algis Budrys, Joanna Russ, and so on. The argument is effectively over now, and has been for years; but it has left us a certain residue of obscurity. The critics stormed so effectively against the exemption that they sometimes gave the impression that the whole notion that science fiction was a literature of ideas was incorrect. Those I have named would be the first to deny that, and since they are a fairly tough bunch (particularly Joanna and A.J.) we had better take their word for it. Science fiction (which I would prefer to call speculative fiction) is a literature of ideas. It is not exempt from the requirements of literature—how could it be, when it is one? And it is properly an object of particular interest in so far as ideas are objects of particular interest.

  And no further?

  Of course not. If there is one characteristic of an idea more certain than that a cartoonist will depict it as a light bulb, it is that an idea does not end at itself. The idea of the divine right of kings has led to the nation-state, a thing as abstract as a song and far more terrible than Mary Shelley’s monster. From a human viewpoint (the only viewpoint that you and I can really take) ideas affect everything because they affect the way we view everything. When Louis XVI was to be guillotined, dozens of Frenchmen volunteered to take his place on the scaffold. Later, witnesses described his courage, and others his loss of nerve—and no doubt both sets of observers were giving perfectly accurate accounts of what they had seen.

  I find this phenomenon, by which two quite different events occur at the same place and time because there are different ideas in the brains of two observers, fascinating; and it is surely the province of speculative fiction, the literature of ideas—the rising of the moon that one sees as an island is quite different from the rising of the moon that another sees as a pale lamp.

  This preface leads me, I hope, to the first of three reasons why academic research should focus specifically on speculative fiction. Just as mainstream literature shows us how our contemporaries view the present, and historical fiction shows us how they view the past (not, of course, what the present or the past were actually like), so speculative fiction shows us how they view the future. I happen to believe that my contemporaries’ view of the past is not very important; but their view of the present is quite definitely important, and their view of the future is vital. Do you want to know what kinds of societies Americans believe possible a century or so hence? Read The Dispossessed. Have they bought the idea of replacing private with public transportation? Speculative fiction says no; you might try the excellent R. A. Lafferty story “Interurban Queen” among many others. Women’s rights? Gaining fast—see almost any story by John Varley, one of the most popular new writers. Has the family been perceived as destined to gain or to lose strength during the twentieth century? The answer is lose. Speculative fiction makes that plain all the way from A Princess of Mars through “Riders of the Purple Wage” to Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Now that I’ve said all that, let me stop and say what I did not say. I did not say that speculative fiction was responsible for those trends. It isn’t. We don’t have that kind of clout, though some of us like to think we do. And I didn’t say that those perceptions of the future reflect reality. There are many indications, for example, that the family has been growing stronger for at least fifty years—in part, I suspect, because most of us think it is on the way out. And of course I didn’t say speculative fiction is really a good prophet—that’s the business of futurology, and a mighty poor business it is, too, so far.

  The point I’m making is that science fiction does at least tell us what some people think may happen, and lets us drag those ideas out into the open where we can look at them and try to poke holes in them. Anything that does that is certainly worthy of some special attention. Speculative fiction thinks the family is likely to wink out in the next century or so, and at least partially because they have been alarmed by those predictions, people who love the family have fought for it and buttressed it in various ways.

  To take an example both closer to home and further from it, SF in the fifties perceived a future need for intense technical education. SF in the sixties and seventies has not, and the enrollments of engineering schools suffer from the attention lavished on ESP and related phenomena by a new version of the extended family in Stranger in a Strange Land.

  (Let me say now, parenthetically, that I consider this business of knowing what people think will happen to be the least important reason for giving special attention to speculative fiction, and for regarding it in a special light.)

  My next reason is going to seem wholly self-serving. It is that unless speculative fiction receives special academic attention it will receive no attention from outside its own area at all. Mainstream literature has never been hostile to fantasy, or to that branch of fantasy that we call SF. Poe, Kipling, Twain, Wylie, Vidal, Orwell, Balzac, Swift, and many, many others—most of you probably know the litany
better than I do—have written stories that could be called speculative fiction. And that, indeed, could hardly be called anything else—by an open-minded critic. But although mainstream literature has been open, mainstream criticism has been implacably closed. I am not just talking about academic criticism, though I very definitely include academic criticism. The technique is simple: when some big name—John Barth, say—writes speculative fiction, the critics pretend it is not speculative fiction. When someone who is not a big name writes speculative fiction, they pretend the book—I say “book,” Heaven help a short story—does not exist.

  Furthermore, many of the review media are closed to speculative fiction; The New Yorker is an example. Most of those that are not closed (please note that I am talking about reviews now, not criticism) ghettoize what they print.

  I am not bitter about it. I have not come here to do a Harlan Ellison or even a Bob Silverberg. I am outlining the situation that exists, and I ask you to believe that I know whereof I speak. In 1975 my mainstream novel Peace was published. It was quite well reviewed, but I would hate to tell you how many times it was called a first novel and how many times I was called a new writer. I’d had two books and forty or fifty short stories published before Peace came out.

  Now I am not going to argue that literary criticism—academic or otherwise—is valuable to the literature it deals with or to society as a whole. You are better judges of that than I, and it is certainly arguable that any critical comment on the arts does more harm than good. But if criticism is beneficial, then the writers and readers of speculative fiction are going to reap that benefit only if there is a specific focus on speculative fiction as a literary genre.

  I said that my second reason was going to appear self-serving. My third actually is self-serving. I have an ax to grind, and I want it sharp because I am fighting for my artistic life. A great many teachers have discovered (or at least think they have discovered) that there are students who will read what these teachers call “sci-fi” but will read nothing else. Whether they are correct is debatable—my own opinion is that this group is real but so small as to be of only marginal importance. But whether they are correct or not, they think they are; and they are teaching courses in speculative fiction. If they were doing it because of an earnest conviction that their students should know something about speculative fiction, I might snicker in private, but I would not be complaining about them today to this audience.

  Now, I feel that it is inevitable that if you teach a subject without caring about that subject, you will teach it badly. If you teach chemistry to girls because you think girls should learn cooking, you will teach chemistry badly. If you teach ballet to boys because you think it will make them play better basketball, you will teach ballet badly.

  Those are bold statements, I know; but I will go further. I will say that if a subject is taught thus badly and thus dishonestly, the majority of students to whom it is taught will come to hate it. Your girls may learn to stir and boil, but they will hate chemistry. Your boys may learn to leap effortlessly, but they will not willingly buy tickets to Afternoon of a Faun, or Swan Lake, or even West Side Story.

  Of course, if you don’t care about chemistry or ballet, you don’t care about that.

  I do care about speculative fiction. God help me, I am forty-seven years old, and I have cared about it ever since I picked The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, the first paperback anthology of speculative fiction, up off my mother’s car seat when I was thirteen or fourteen. I know how often it is bad, and I know how terribly bad it can be; but I love it with an irrational love, just as some people love the old neighborhood or the smell of a drag strip. I love it, and I know that the little corner of literature I like best is being used for an ambush. That’s a strong metaphor, but I am going to let it stand—it indicates that something is in danger of being killed, which is what I mean.

  I have racked my brain to come up with another subject that is being taught as badly as speculative fiction. Not sex education, not consumer economics, certainly not all those lovely courses in water skiing and skin diving, so necessary to the intellectual equipment of educated men and women.

  Don’t get me wrong. I am not demanding—or even asking—that speculative fiction be taught at all. I would be perfectly happy if it were not; it was never taught to me and I learned it anyway. But if it is to be taught, then from my viewpoint it is very urgent indeed that it is taught well, by teachers who know their subject and care about it. Such teachers may still do great damage, and they probably will. They may leave some of their students cursing Mary Shelley as bitterly as the students’ big brothers and sisters have cursed her husband. But teachers who know and care may also do some good, and unless we are willing to throw aside speculative fiction’s feeble attempts to acclimatize humankind to the cold, mist-begetting future—unless we are willing to drop that effort into the garbage with divine right—we are going to need them; and unless we are willing to give special academic attention to the study of speculative fiction and its somewhat peculiar values, we are not going to get them.

  The Ethos of Elfland

  (1988)

  Come in, and wipe those boots. You needn’t tell me what brings you; that sword and the feather proclaim you. The vast Empire of Fantasy extends eastward of my borderland house, as you know. The Kingdom of Horror burns and molders to the south, rotten and rich. North glitters the icy Foundation of Science Fiction. I know them all, and for a fee—

  Thank you. Learn then that Fantasy’s eldest of all lands, the only country older than the Flood. There Gilgamesh clasped hands with Enkidu while men talked of walling Babylon; there blind Homer sang to the ages—none of which is of consequence to you, save you claim a human descent. By the laws of your land, Fantasy should lie in ruins. Doubtless you think it does, but nothing could be further from the truth. Why, 263 new-minted Fantasy novels we saw just last year, half again what was there the year before. Makes a man’s mouth water.

  Incredible? Aye, for it bears the stamp of the place that bore it. Think it could be otherwise? Why some say Gilgamesh himself’s come back, in stories by Robert of the Silver Mountain, Bob Silverberg he’d be in your speech. Gilgamesh, think on it! Not that I credit it, not I! Credulity can stretch but so far, eh? Yet that such a tale can be told proves something.

  Facts? Indeed you must have ’em if you’re to make your mark there. Geography first. I said Fantasy borders Horror: better I’d said it laps it, for there’s much in King Stephen’s realm Fantasy claims as its own, and contrariwise. Beg pardon for that last, a silly word I picked up from the Tweedle boys; it clings like a tick. But I was brought up in Fantasy, and I fear it shows.

  Their laws differ, you understand. Fantasy’s subjects are subjects—whatever’s disbelieved: dragons and ghosts, unicorns, barbarian swordsmen, Proteus and all the other shape-shifters, giants and dwarves, princesses, fauns, ogres, trolls, and the lost lands. Old Chesterton calls the whole Elfland, after the part he likes best. Some say Faerie. Most readers don’t care, long as there’s wonder and wisdom.

  Judy-Lynn? Did you know her? Odin, how we miss her! Yes, she was a dwarf, the greatest of all, an editor at Del Rey and a citizen of Fantasy by birth. She reclaimed the Land of Oz, not just the Baum stories but the Thompson stories too. You thought there was but one? How quaint. You’ve much to learn.

  Horror lacks all native subjects, as I was telling you—citizenship’s conferred by spirit. What inspires horror is Horror’s, just as one who truly loves Big Brother’s of Oceania. Orwell’s book lies in Horror—some call it Dark Fantasy—and Science Fiction, and many a current one has a foot in Fantasy and a hand out to Horror; Down Town’s a fine example.

  Here’s what Tom o’ Tor—Tom Broken Collar—told me: Fantasy is a pagan empire; Horror’s a Christian kingdom, embracing Hell. There’s wisdom in that, but exceptions by the score. What of the host bearing the banner of Narnia, I ask you? Christian to the core, with the lion-likeness of Aslan nailed to its cross. W
hat of Tolkien-Lifegiver? Fantasy languished till he brought The Hobbit, dwarves and elves, all three Speaking Peoples linked with humans in The Fellowship of the Ring.

  Elves? Aye, Fantasy’s got elves still, though not the tall fair-folk of Lorien. Shrink an inch a year, smaller and sillier all the time—bleached smurfs, I call‘em. Think they’d slap “In the Manner of J.R.R. Tolkien” on those books? Well, friend, they do. He’s spinning like a windmill in the grave because of it, you may be sure. One day he’ll blow ’em all to Horror—beg pardon, Hell. Weird Tales is coming back. That’s a sign, mark my words. Yes, the old pulp.

  But as I was saying, the faiths are overmixed for me. I’d say rather that Fantasy’s the country of the gods—with God over them all—where the cherubim shoot arrows with Eros. In Horror, Great Cthulhu slays Satan, and is slain. How’s that?

  Good Queen Beth divides Fantasy in three. It’s worth your listening, for no one knows the place better:

  “The first is horror. It has become a major sector of the market (labels, all is labels) differentiated from other sorts of fantasy even though literary values overlap. When Steve King writes a science fiction novel, it is still marketed as horror, bought by readers as horror, and read with pleasure by people who ‘don’t read SF.’

  “Second, genre fantasy, epitomized by good old Del Rey and Ace high fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. I think of these as highly romanticized wish fulfillment, characterized by the hero or heroine’s ass being saved by intervention of some superior power—usually the subtext of these books is about abandoning one’s own desires in service to another, thus gaining virtue.

  “Last, a small group of highly literate and (usually) very inventive and quirky books having in common only their elements of the fantastic and resistance to being pigeonholed. Examples include Crowley’s Little, Big, any number of old Thome Smith novels, Pat Murphy’s Falling Woman, Tom Disch, Italo Calvino, Borges, Fuentes . . you can make your own list.