Castle of Days (1992) SSC

by Gene Wolfe

  What seems to have helped produce it and why has it managed to attract so much attention and controversy?

  The subculture of hackers has helped produce it, of course. The attention it’s gotten has come mainly (though not exclusively) from the work of one very skillful writer: Bill Gibson. The controversy has been attracted largely (though not exclusively) by John Shirley, an ultramodern writer who would have made a marvelous eighteenth century pamphleteer. I don’t mean that Gibson doesn’t write outrageously—at times he certainly does. Nor do I mean that Shirley (and Bruce Sterling) don’t write well—they do. But I believe that my statement is generally correct.

  What makes this group of writers different from, say, the writers included in … Dangerous Visions?

  The writers included in DV were not a school, to begin with. Ellison went to authors he admired and asked for stories no one had dared print. The Cyberpunks are trying to express a single, though fragmented, worldview—if I understand them.

  Is the whole issue of “the New” in speculative fiction perhaps a red herring, since, by definition, it has always dealt with the new? Or have changes in our “reality” necessitated new formal approaches (as well as content) in our fiction?

  I’m not sure what you mean by those quotes around reality, but what the hell. The short answers are no, and yes. Granted, in an ideal world SF would deal, and deal adequately, with each new development. Here where we live, some are overlooked and others inadequately treated. The Cyberpunks have sighted an area they believe (rightly, I think) of great importance: the computer-human interface. I cannot overemphasize that this is more than merely writing about computers; what would we think of a critic who should declare that since stories about men had been written—and stories about women likewise—he saw no need for fiction about the loves and conflicts between the sexes?

  Furthermore, every new development necessitates both new approaches and new content. I said earlier that the Cyberpunks offer us a unique viewpoint. If we are to understand them, we must understand that they themselves are not unique. They are SF’s response to a particular new development. There have been similar responses to other developments in the past, and there will in all probability be still others in the future. There was a specific response—before the Cyberpunks—to the drug culture, for example, and a closely related response to rock music (read George R. R. Martin and S. P. Somtow for the latter). There was a response to the concept of the robot, in which Isaac Asimov occupied the place that Gibson has among the Cyberpunks. This is not to say that those prior responses are now in some way invalid. Nor will the Cyberpunk worldview become invalid when some further development occurs. It will remain as the branch of SF that deals with its chosen phenomena.

  Kipling’s Influence

  (1989)

  The would-be writer of short fiction can profit from reading the stories of almost any author, I believe. But there are two that he must read: Poe and Kipling. It was my good luck to encounter them both while still quite young; I attended Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, where we tots were encouraged to read stories and poems of soul-wrenching morbidity. And my mother read me—again and again in response to my repeated demands—the Just So Stories. By the time that I was old enough for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (and I was old enough while still very small), I was also old enough for the Jungle Books. Their effect on a boy named Wolfe may easily be imagined. By the time I left Poe for junior high, I knew that Kipling was a social pariah; but it was too late by then, and anyway so was I.

  I’m reading and rereading Kipling still, and I’m delighted to say that there are still a few of his tales that I have never read. One of the ten thousand things I learned from him was the timelessness of the East and the paranoia it can evoke in those from the West. Some thirty years after I learned it, it struck me that for a long while a man shot forward in time in the East might fail to understand what had happened to him. The result, “Continuing Westward,” is given here.

  “Love, Among the Corridors” had a different genesis. When I listened to the Just So Stories (and for many years after), I didn’t know they had a precursor, “The Children of the Zodiac.” It is a work in which Kipling did what Poe is justly celebrated for doing over and over: he invented a whole new kind of story, the modern literary myth or antiallegory. It is an updating of a type that has not been popular for the last thousand years, in part because it is so often confused with the sort of story that Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde wrote so well—the kind of story that Jane Yolen does brilliantly today.

  It is characteristically said of the Andersen-Wilde-Yolen story that though intended for adults, it is enjoyed immensely by children; sometimes it is actually true. But it is never true, I think, of the literary myth. It is not to the child in us that it appeals, but to the savage. At one time or another, one must have lived among wolves as Mowgli did, and Romulus.

  Nor is it favored by the academic critics, who are forever confusing it with its mirror twin. In allegory, we say, “What if a giant were despair?” Then we have the giant wrestle our hero, and so on. It has always seemed an obvious idea to me and a rather stupid one, since a giant is much more interesting than despair. Furthermore this obvious and rather stupid idea blinds many of those same people to the true nature of classical myth. They discover, for example, that Eros “is” eroticism, and when they have congratulated one another on that brilliant discovery for twenty years and more, they also discover that Eros doesn’t always behave as they “know” he should (in being Aphrodite’s son instead of her father, for example) and solemnly inform us that the mythmakers of the classical age lacked their own insight.

  But what Kipling (and the ancients) really said was much more interesting: “What if love were a woman?”

  Where Castle?

  (1988)

  I read Kipling a lot as a kid, and I’m reading him again now. What separates these dips into the British raj is most of my life. I still have his collected poetry, inscribed in my mother’s hand: Gene R. Wolfe, Xmas 1945, 1619 Vassar St., Houston 6, Tex. K3 1929.

  Well, it just goes to show you. We let one little number, that “6,” in between the town and the state, and now we have nine-digit zip codes. Extrapolation proves conclusively that within a hundred years each zip code will occupy an entire page of fine print. I’m going to hate that.

  But to get back to Kipling and me, the frontispiece shows a bald man with very small glasses and a white mustache. Although I loved some of his poems, it never occurred to me that he and I really had much in common. To start with, he was dead. I, on the other hand, was a live, gawky fourteen-year-old with hair, a nude upper lip, and big glasses.

  Lately that’s started to seem wrong. For one thing, Kipling and I have the same British agent—A. P. Watt. I haven’t yet grown a mustache, but my glasses are becoming smaller. Kipling said that England was the most interesting foreign country he had ever visited, and I feel just the same way. Kipling was born in Bombay, India; I was raised in Houston, which has the same murderously hot and muggy climate.

  Kipling wrote some science fiction, of course; but not everything he wrote was science fiction. He wrote a book about a man who compulsively recalled the ancient world; I recently finished a book about a man who compulsively forgets the ancient world: Soldier of the Mist.

  And yet I can’t escape the feeling that parallels equally valid or invalid could be found in the lives of most writers; we are shaped by our craft at least as much as Mr. Sherlock Holmes (surely as great a Kipling fan as I) found weavers and sailors to be molded by theirs. And I think most of us are shaped at least as much by the reading as the writing; it’s a poor writer who doesn’t read two or three times as much as he writes. If that’s so, then we are not only people very much like you—we are you. Publishers would like to pigeonhole us, or so it seems to me; but we are forever climbing out and going next door to visit. Because we are living people, after all, people who don’t always obey the rules because we’re s
o much older than the rules, older than Kipling, older by far than the ancient stone dwelling into which he settled after so much globe-trotting.

  Here, then, is our castle. And if it looks remarkably like a bookcase to those who don’t live here, so much the worse for them. Our home is our castle, after all; and it is our hope. Welcome to our family reunion.

  Aussiecon Two Guest of Honor Speech

  (1985)

  I would have liked to begin this speech by saying that all of us here enjoy science fiction and fantasy, which I’m going to call fantastic literature for the purposes of this talk. I would like to say that’s why we’re here. I’m not going to do it, because I know it isn’t true. Some of us are here only because our friends are. Some of us are here only because we’re into theatrical costuming. Some people, as at any other convention, have announced with pardonable pride that they never attend the programming, though I don’t suppose there are any of them in this room. Some have announced with even greater pride that they never read fantastic literature, or that they haven’t read a word of it for the past five or ten years—that they are in fact closet mundanes.

  These mundanes are a minority in fandom, even though they are a sizable and fairly vocal minority. But they aren’t a minority in the world at large: in the world outside this room. They are a sizable and influential majority comprising the people who actively dislike modern fantastic literature and those who positively detest it.

  Some of you will certainly disagree with me, so I’m going to try to buttress what I just said. Because I’m an American, I have to speak from an American perspective. Things may be somewhat better here—I hope they are—but I doubt if they’re very different.

  Books are now the principal vehicle for fantastic literature. It will come as no surprise to those of you in the book trade when I say that although books do not cause cancer, books in general do not sell as well as cigarettes. We all know that, and we all comfort ourselves with mental pictures of the ignorant yahoos who never read a book.

  We don’t like to admit that there is a far greater prejudice against fantastic literature among the people who do read them. The millions of ladies who devour endless chains of books about blameless young women who enter large decaying houses ruled by silent and surly clones of Heathcliff dislike fantasy in any form. The millions of men who rush to buy a first-contact novel by a scientist turned celebrity must be assured that his book will not be science fiction, otherwise they would not buy it. Underfinanced one-man specialty stores succeed largely because they capitalize upon the willful ignorance of the managers of general bookstores and the unwillingness of those managers to soil their shelves with books they consider trash.

  American schools—as I suppose everyone knows by now—have just passed through a generation-long sleep during which they felt it vulgar to teach their students to read at all. Those who learned did so because they were taught at home, or because they fell into the bloodstained hands of some elderly reactionary, or simply because they were born a part of that freakish group that would learn to read, and read, even if those things were forbidden under penalty of death—a prohibition that has recently moved from the realm of fantasy into that of science fiction.

  Now our schools are endeavoring to teach reading again, though by and large they have forgotten how. The clamor grew too great, you see. But believe me it wasn’t the clamor of those who felt that even teenagers should not miss J.R.R. Tolkien and Wilson Tucker. It came primarily from parents who had discovered that their older children couldn’t get jobs because they couldn’t read job applications. Secondarily it came from college professors who discovered their freshman couldn’t read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky—that they couldn’t read the dead writers upon whom the professors’ salaries depend, in other words.

  Our schools have reacted by dipping deep into the gutter to reach their students. Despite many protests, they’ve begun to teach the lowest form of popular fiction they can hand out in class without having the staff picked up by the police. I will not insult you by telling you what that is. You know what that is. And if you’ve ever suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher—as who among us has not—and if you’ve ever dreamed of watching a schoolteacher writhe and suffer the agonies of the damned, then let me assure you that you need only find and converse with a schoolteacher who has been assigned to teach one of those courses because the young person who originated it and did so well with it has left. I have come upon that agonized teacher and talked with her, and to be honest I really thought Severian himself (who sits inside my head at times) would turn away in horror. He didn’t, and I’m thoroughly ashamed of him.

  Now the professors are swimming in the wake left by the teachers like sharks after so many garbage scows. There are a few, such as Tom Clareson, who have read and enjoyed fantastic literature for years—who are in fact fans, at least in the broadest sense of the word, and who are academics only by accident, as others are architects or abbots. There is even Jack Williamson, who after decades during which he was one of the leading writers of fantastic literature took a Ph.D. and turned aside for a time to study what he had signally helped to create.

  But most of these professors have only the most superficial knowledge of the thing they profess to teach and no sympathy for it. They are the academics who have found every place around the carcasses of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky filled, and have been driven away by the teeth of the stronger, better fed first-comers. They have gone in search of an easier meal, and you know what they have found. They’re hurt to discover fantastic literature isn’t dead—listen and you’ll hear it in their voices—because they prefer their meat dead. But they will kill if they must.

  The New York literary establishment, as you probably know, is for the most part a reflection of the professors who have driven the rest away. In so far as they control it, it notices only those books that they themselves, and their relatives and friends, teach and write. For years I subscribed to The New York Review of Books, waiting for the day when it would carry reviews of fantastic literature—or rather, for the day when it would carry reviews of books openly marketed as science fiction or fantasy. That day has never come.

  In fairness to the New York establishment, or perhaps only in fairness to us, I should mention that at least one bastion has fallen. The New Yorker—a slick magazine not to be confused with the newsprint New York Review of Books I mentioned a moment ago—has come over to our side, though perhaps not very far. It has long carried fantastic fiction by Woody Allen and others (such as Thurber) who have not been identified as writers of “fantasy” or “sci-fi.” But it has recently begun to print the work of acknowledged genre writers: stories by Stanislaw Lem, presumably on the long-held New Yorker theory that continental Europeans can do no wrong; and by Ursula K. Le Guin, I suspect because the editors have been overwhelmed by the sheer quality of her work.

  The motion picture scene is somewhat brighter. I don’t have to tell you that until quite recently very few American film makers ever considered quality in conjunction with a fantastic film. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed the way, but no one followed. Then Star Wars proved that even a flawed fantastic film could be boffo at the box office if it was made with a certain integrity. Now the Australian film industry has shouted a challenge with pictures like Mad Max and Road Warrior. Even the obtuse businessmen who control our movie money and thus our independent directors must surely see they must produce films of comparable quality or lose the market.

  But no matter what happens at the box office, the reviewers remain hostile to science fiction and fantasy. It’s noticeable, for example, that the more human the aliens are in appearence, speech, and action, the more favorable the reviews—the ideal alien, from the reviewers’ viewpoint, being an actor in a check shirt or a bathing suit who is identified as an alien by the script, preferably in a voice-over. Scientific plausibility is rare, is almost never recognized when present, and is condemned as “spoiling the fun” when recognized.

  Sim
ilarly, The Return to Oz was trashed by our reviewers, not because of its flaws—and it does have some glaring ones—but because of its virtues as a fantasy. No one mentioned that Dorothy’s Kansas appeared to have been moved to Sussex by some whimsical Merlin, or that Dorothy herself had become nearly as English as Alice. The reviewers did, however, complain bitterly because the inhabitants of Oz refrained from bursting into inappropriate song at inopportune moments, and because “Princess Mombi”—as the movie’s combination of Baum’s witch, Mombi, and Princess Languidere was called—was actually scary. Poor Margaret Hamilton, who played her vindictive crone to make the tots crawl under their seats, must be turning in her grave.

  Assailed by nausea, I pass from films to television. If the cinema, always dim, is growing slightly brighter, TV seems to be darkening to compensate. Once we had a few good shows, distantly and mostly illegitimately related to fantastic literature. Twilight Zone is not yet forgotten. Particularly during its first year, Star Trek showed a glimmer of promise. Quark was often superb, and even Mork and Mindy, bathic though it was for the most part, had its moments. A fine film was made from The Lathe of Heaven and shown several times on public TV. The Muppet Show gave us five years of lighthearted fantasy, to say nothing of “Pigs in Space,” that triumphant creation by Robert A. Hoglein.

  They are all gone. Here in two flat sentences are the best things I can say about our field on American television: Dr. Who is sometimes aired. Sometimes Battlestar Galactica is not.

  A series to be called Amazing Stories has been announced for fall. We wait and hope. But we should not be deceived into thinking that Amazing Stories has resulted from a public outcry; there has been none. The networks believe they know what their public wants, and they are right. Their entertainment shows lost their more intelligent, more imaginative viewers long ago, and they have not missed them.