by Gene Wolfe
The magazine area is paradoxical. Please excuse me if I flounder there for a minute or so. For at least a couple of generations, the magazines were the mainstream of fantastic literature. By the fifties, they had lost that position to paperbacks, apparently for the foreseeable future. The magazines were not widely read even in their heyday; yet if so small a clearing can be called a field, and so small a field can be said to flourish, the magazine field is decked in greenery and wild flowers. Let me show you just how small that field is: Analog has a circulation of about a hundred thousand copies. In comparison, X-Men, a Marvel Comics title, has a circulation of nearly four hundred thousand.
Fantasy and Science Fiction, which many critics point to as the best of our magazines, is reported to be increasing in circulation and growing more profitable. It’s too early to say what influence Gardner Dozois will have as the new editor of Asimov’s, but we can be sure Asimov’s won’t become dull. Amazing, which has been the weakest magazine financially, seems sure to be helped by the TV series I mentioned a moment ago, if the series achieves any popularity at all; and Amazing’s a strong magazine editorially, well equipped to take advantage of any help it gets.
But all these are very much genre magazines, ghetto magazines, magazines that circulate very much to us. And in fact Amazing’s circulation is almost exactly equal to the number of active fans in the United States. A sociologist from Antares could easily predict the existence of such magazines, their circulations, and their various editorial policies, from general descriptions of the U.S. and of fantastic literature. Neither their black difficulties nor their shining hopes in any way violate what I said about the attitude of the world at large to fantastic literature.
Omni is the exception that proves—that is, that tests—the rule. It’s a full-sized, 8½-by-11-inch magazine printed on slick paper. It has a circulation of about eight hundred and fifty thousand. And though it’s mostly concerned with the sensational parts of science—astronomy, psychology, robotics, and so on, it prints a story or two in each issue. A few years ago, half a dozen publishing companies brought out these glitzy pop-science magazines. Most of them are gone, and only Omni seems to be thriving. Several critics in the magazine field have pointed out that Omni was the only one to run fiction; but if there’s a lesson there, no one’s learned it.
It seems to me Omni doesn’t disprove what I said, but adds a corollary. We can say that though most readers despise or detest fantastic literature, readers interested in pop science are likely to be interested in fantastic literature as well.
I’m over fifty, and it’s a recognized privilege of ours to fill you in on how it used to be. So know ye that it used to be the only place you could find fantastic literature was the pulps—Amazing, Astounding, Fantastic, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Planet, Startling, Thrilling Wonder, and so on. And if you read the pulps—even something as classy as Black Mask, Ghod help you if it was Ranch Romances or Spicy Stories—you were expected to move your lips and stir your coffee with your finger. Many mothers wouldn’t let a pulp in the house; no teacher would let a pulp in her school. You can imagine how I felt when I heard they were studying our stuff in special classes. I felt awful.
I felt awful because I knew what it meant. It meant our schools had gone from graduating people who moved their lips to graduating people who couldn’t read at all—as indeed they had. A few years ago in Chicago, where I live, a college graduate registered in a fairly expensive private school because he wanted to learn to read better. The school tested him and put him in the eighth grade. This man was not retarded or handicapped in any way; he finished five years of work at the school in about two years. He was just a guy who’d graduated from a ghetto high school and gone to college on a basketball scholarship.
Those of you who are still awake may have noticed I’ve used that word ghetto twice, once referring to us, once to them. In a minute I’m going to explain that.
Right now I want to talk about what I call the Stink of Literacy. The Stink of Literacy is the thing that’s put both of us in our ghettos. A couple of hundred years ago, there were no free schools. Kids went to school if their parents could afford it, and if they felt it was a good thing to spend their money on. Read about Charles Dickens, and you’ll learn how close he came to keeping his job in the blacking factory.
The kids who did go to school read fantastic literature by Homer and Vergil, two guys who would be overseas SFWA members if they were alive today—and behind on their dues. Those schools produced H. G. Wells, of whom you may have heard. Wells was a teacher who saw there was a lot wrong with his society and felt he knew what to do about it. I don’t mean that he was the first to see it or the first to speak out. But he really did see more clearly than most. And he really did speak with a louder voice.
I suppose there are at least a thousand stories about someone who wishes and gets what he wished for and doesn’t like it. What society did to Wells and the rest was a great deal more cruel: It did almost what they had advised.
Their advice, as you probably know, was universal education. Education was to be free in the schools, books were to be free at public libraries. Everyone would read the great works of the past—and for the first time in history, we would have a memory. Everyone would read the new ideas that were shaking the world into new patterns for the future—and for the first time in history, we would have an imagination. The human race could plan its career like a human being. It would be an evolutionary step forward, not for the animal but for the mind.
And so it would have been, if their advice had been taken. What they got instead—or rather, what we got—was not universal education but universal schooling, and there is a world of difference. Very few of us realize we live in a Wellsian dystopia, and yet that is precisely the case. That it seems fantastic and absurd does not change the fact, nor make it any less true. We have lived in Wells’s dystopia all our lives, and we will live here for the remainder of our lives, in all probability.
I’m not going to go into what went wrong. That’s subject enough for a book, and I’m sure you’re even sicker of hearing me by now than I am of hearing myself. I call the thing that made it go wrong the Stink of Literacy. It’s a name like Black Hole or Dragon, and if we know what we mean when we say it, that’s enough. It’s the thing that teaches people who can read not to read. It’s the thing that teaches people who can’t not to learn. I personalize it, because it seems to me so like an impalpable being, stubborn and stupid and cruel; and because we are the children of Wells and the rest, because we are the champions of new ideas—even when so many of them have become old ideas—it does us the honor of hating us almost as much as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.
I imagine that everyone here has noticed that Shakespeare is a fantasist; A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest make that so clear that about half the professors have noticed it. But how many of you have closed Notes From Underground, as I have, and looked for the Analog logo on the cover? There are moments in that story when it seems certain the author once corresponded with John W. Campbell. I understand that a literal translation of the Russian title would be Notes From Under the Floorboards, by the way; some of you may recall a Chandler story called “Giant Killer.” No wonder then that the Stink of Literacy does us such honor—though no one else agrees, to be sure.
Now we’ve reached the question, and the question is, What shall we do? How can we break out of our ghetto? How can we win the acclaim, the dignity, and the awestruck recognition we feel to be our birthright? How can we enter the brave world around us and walk with its masters? A great many of us feel there is an answer, and it is the answer I hinted at in the beginning—we must become more like them. If we stick to the old new ideas—to the universes and the unicorns—and treat them in the ways to which the powerful have become accustomed, if we’re careful to teach that right must prevail (while painting it less bearable than wrong), if we prattle amusingly of love (as something trivial and unclean), then very, very soon they will o
pen the gates and let us out.
We too, yes, even we, shall enter the world of the blessed, the bright and colorful world of the dragon’s belly. Our books shall be like the other books, approved and unread. No child shall hammer a wooden sword, ever again. The young shall not prophesy, and the old shall cease to dream.
And we ourselves will be happy all our days, moderately honored, some of us, some of us modestly rich. We need only surrender and be eaten.
It will never happen, of course. It’s all a dream, a more idle dream than ever Alice dreamt while her sister read beneath the tree. And I might add, a far less interesting one.
I propose that we should do otherwise—that we should open our gates and pull the rest in. That we make prophecies so new that the schools cannot hand them out without having their staffs picked up by the police—and that we talk of them on the buses. That we dream dreams so wild that the scholar hoping to gorge on our decay looks up in fear and finds himself alone—and that we tell them next day at the office.
Such prophecies are easily found. Such dreams are easily dreamed. We need only look into the future of our race—not the future we are promised, not the future with which they threaten us, but the actual future we see, with its myriad millions of conflicting possibilities. We need only look into the past of our race—not the sanitized past of the schoolbooks, not the timid and careful past of the tenured professors, but the actual past, where mystery and magic meet motherhood.
The ghosts of the future fill this room, pleading in our ears for our understanding. The spells of the past have sent it flying among the stars. If those who despise us stone us as prophets, they must listen to us as prophets. If they curse us as sorcerers, they must learn to curse from us, the sorcerers.
Let us enlighten the young, and let us be condemned for corrupting the young, like Socrates. Let us awaken the old before they sleep forever, though they must read us in secret like the Kabbalah. The things I’ve talked to you about—the difficulties and successes of our books and magazines, and the rejection and misinterpretation of the films made from our ideas—are the flounderings of the human mind upon the Paleozoic shore. We are the sand in its gills; let’s not lose our grit.
The Pirates of Florida and Other Implausibilities
(1991)
Last summer in the bath, in one of those true-life adventure articles, I came across the following paragraph: “Light was failing, the spectators had gone home, and the family were somewhere trying in their various ways to get help. I was alone with the sea, the pitiless wind and rain and the occasional, desolate howling of JoJo. Still I kept on vibrating the God-names, invoking help for the dog below, who had always been special to me. Sometimes I changed the ritual and called on Pan, promising, bullying, begging, ‘Sweet, sweet Pan.’”
Well, I thought, isn’t this interesting! What a nice, crazy lady! I continued to read, learned not completely to my surprise that the dog was safe at the end of the article, and being an officious, pedantic, pushing sort of man, got out of the tub, dried myself and put on some clothes, and wrote the following letter: “Dear Editor, I am the author of two novels—Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete—laid in Ancient Greece; and as an amateur Hellenist I was much struck by the fact that [your author] appealed to Pan. I wasn’t aware that people still did that.
“Perhaps someone should point out that this god’s name meant all in everyday Greek. That is to say, the word-form is pas in the masculine nominative singular, pasa in the feminine, and pan in the neuter, strong evidence that ‘Pan’ once designated the Supreme Being. Faithfully, Gene Wolfe.”
My letter was published, and a month or so afterward I received this letter from a gentleman in Florida: “Dear Gene Wolfe, I hope this reaches you, as no address is given in your comments regarding Pan. You simply have not gotten hold of a useful source. Let me recommend a book to you, The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New Vision of Man and Nature in Cooperation, by the Findhorn Community (Harper & Row, 1975). The book is in many ways an eye-opener, and the section by Roc entitled ‘Nature Spirits’ is what you would want to read in particular. If your library does not have the book, it should have no problem in securing it on interlibrary loan. Sincerely, G. A. Carasso. P.S. Speculation on the etymology of the word Pan has only thrown you off the track.”
I had never heard of Findhorn, which I’ve since learned is a village in Scotland, or of its garden; but the fact that the author of the chapter my correspondent particularly recommended was using a fabulous Arabian bird as his byline would, I think, have caused me to prick my ears even if I had not happened to observe Rod Serling sitting at another table in Grandpa’s Deli, the Barrington bistro in which I read my correspondent’s letter.
I did exactly what he had suggested—went to the library, got them to find me a copy of The Findhorn Garden on interlibrary loan, and read Roc’s chapter on nature spirits. It told me a good deal I had not known about Pan—and in fact included an interview with him. I have not yet heard from his attorneys, and it would surprise me if I did; but it would not surprise me quite so much as it would have last summer.
Has Pan an objective existence? I don’t know—but I ask you this: does this conference have any? Would it still exist without our belief?
Before I leave The Great God Pan (to borrow a phrase of Arthur Machen’s), I would like to read you something I came across in an interesting little book called Monsters, Giants and Little Men from Mars: An Unnatural History of the Americas. The author is Daniel Cohen, formerly of Science Digest. The final sentence may not appeal to you as it does to me, but I must confess that I find it oddly poignant.
“Another dog killer is the creature dubbed Goatman. Goatman’s natural habitat is northern Prince Georges County, Maryland. He, or it, has become something of a local legend among high school students, who occasionally decorate walls or trees with the spraypaint message, ‘Goatman was here.’ Whether the Goatman legend is serious or not is difficult to determine. But every time a dog is killed under mysterious circumstances—”
Notice, by the way, that the killing of dogs under mysterious circumstances is a regular sort of thing in Prince Georges County. Where is Inspector Hound when we really need him?
“Every time a dog is killed under mysterious circumstances, or something else strange happens, Goatman is likely to get the blame.”
He is the scapegoat in other words. For those of you who missed Sunday School last week, “The goat chosen for Azazel shall be presented alive to the Lord and sent off into the desert to Azazel, in order to take away the sins of the people.” The King James has, “But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat shall be presented alive to the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.”
No mention of Azazel there, you see; and who is he anyway? Well, since I’m already way off the subject, lost myself in the desert of a digression from a quotation, let me quote another bit of Leviticus which I find suggestive. This too is from the New Catholic Study Bible: “The people of Israel must no longer be unfaithful to the Lord by killing their animals in the fields as sacrifices to the goat demons.”
The New American Bible is somewhat more forthright: “No longer shall they offer their sacrifices to the satyrs.”
To continue: “Every time a dog is killed under mysterious circumstances, or something else strange happens, Goatman is likely to get the blame. Goatman is supposed to be about the size of a man, walk like a man, and have a man’s face. However, he is covered with fur. Others say that only the lower part of Goatman’s body is covered with fur, much like Pan and the satyrs of Greek mythology. Opinions also differ on whether Goatman is a supernatural creature, or a science-fiction type of creation.” And there you have it.
May I say without being shouted down that in such cases as this it seems to me a distinction without a difference? That science fiction seems to me to be chrome-plated fantasy, that folklore seems to me fantasy in which the author is more or les
s contemporary but unknown? That just as magic realism is fantasy by a Spanish-speaking author, so myth is fantasy composed long ago by an author who spoke Greek? That legend is fantasy that is old or is thought to be?
And that all of these things are apt to intrude upon what we are pleased to call the real world, like cries in the street heard through an open window?
I said a moment ago that myth and folklore are mere districts of the larger thing we call fantasy. To pursue that a little further, I would like to read you another letter-to-the-editor of mine.
“Dear Editor, In his ‘Black Dogs: Fact or Fancy?’ [name of author] Ph.D., writes, ‘If, however, we could find some ancient cult or sect that had dogs as a symbol or totem, perhaps we could compare our black dogs with them for significance. The lack of such evidence from history indicates that the symbolism aspect of black dogs is what is important.’
“Actually no one searching for such a cult will have far to go. Black dogs were sacred to Hecate, the Ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft. See Pausanian’s Guide to Greece, Tripp’s Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology, Lurker’s Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons, etc. The fact is well known. I deal with it in some detail in Chapter XXII of my Soldier of the Mist; see also the glossary under Triple Goddess. Hecate was, of course, the dark aspect of the Triple Goddess.
“Possibly I should add that this goddess, like all the major goddesses, had many names. Of these the most interesting may be Enodia, ‘she of the roads’; and Antaia, ‘she who encounters you.’ Note that black dogs are most often encountered on the roads at night. Faithfully, Gene Wolfe.”