IGMS Issue 16

by IGMS

  VINGE: We've all heard that "the Golden Age of Science Fiction is thirteen." I have my own explanation for this factoid. Up to circa age thirteen we can read great, easy-to-find stories as fast as we can read. So, in the first thirteen years of life, we each exhaust that corpus. After that point, we can only read great sf as fast as it can be written (or mined from more difficult strata). So this drastic decline in perceived quality is only partly because of our increasing maturity as readers. Perhaps this is similar to what you are saying, that you noticed that when you were young you were influenced by things from some years earlier. You were reading great science fiction as fast as you could lay your hands on it. Well, it's only written at a certain rate, so the chance that the great stuff was created close to when you are currently reading is small.

  SCHWEITZER: Consider someone born in 1990. They are 19 years old now. They have a substantially larger body of science fiction to work off of. I can't think they could read it all by the time they're 13. If you hold that great science fiction started with Campbell's Golden Age in 1939, then, yes, maybe around 1950 you could master it all by the time you were 13. I don't think this is true anymore.

  VINGE: Have you talked to sf fans born circa 1990? Was the stuff that informed their science-fictional life published in the ten or fifteen years before they were born?

  SCHWEITZER: I did have an interesting conversation with that most exotic of creatures, a twenty-year-old who was an intern for George Scithers for a while. To him, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny were classic writers. Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and Edgar Pangborn, he had never heard of. Interestingly enough, he found Harlan Ellison badly dated and hard to read. Much of the stuff you and I think of as the classic core of science fiction he had never heard of and never read. I am thinking of an article by Judith Berman, called "Science Fiction Without a Future." She argued that science fiction was losing the ability to appeal to youth, or to anybody but aging Baby Boomers. So, if the old science fiction could appeal to kids, who had not been born when it was written, and modern science fiction cannot, I wonder what has been lost.

  VINGE: With regard to the twenty-year-old fan -- that is fascinating and a little discouraging. So there is a steady supply of new sf, and like duckling imprinting, that is what the new readers see and love while the older stuff is cast aside, remembered only by the older birds? As for the possibility of a longterm decline in the genre, I think there is an arc of development across the twentieth century. Did you see the introduction I wrote for the Bison Books reissue of The Skylark of Space?

  SCHWEITZER: No.

  VINGE: In the essay, I pushed my theory on the change in the quality of science fiction throughout the 20th century. I said some positive things about The Skylark of Space. I also said some negative things. The science fiction that so influenced me when I was young really does have a different value structure than the most popular science fiction of the '70s and '80s and '90s. The quality of writing that a Literature person would call good writing has much more weight in those recent stories than it did in the stories that I grew up on. On the other hand, what the earlier authors were shooting for was entirely different, and in many cases they were among the very first people that were writing about Idea X (whatever). If you're the very first person to write about Idea X, it's like the first guy who makes a fire. It doesn't matter that you don't know about chipping flint to make sparks. If you've made the fire at all, you get a lot of credit and you are blessed. And so it's conceivable that if you show your twenty-year-old friend this stuff that you and I liked so much, he would turn his nose up at it. He might say that it was just boringly written and old ideas, which probably is true. Science fiction tends to date sadly.

  SCHWEITZER: I point out that the best of Wells hasn't dated at all. I would argue against this idea. Good writing is good writing, regardless of when it was done. It is a shock to read a literate science fiction story from the 1930s, for example, but go find, say, To Walk the Night by William Sloane. This is a science fiction novel which was good enough not to be published in the pulp magazines, but as a mainstream novel, by a real book publisher. Sloane could actually write. I think that what you were experiencing with The Skylark of Space was that the quality of writing in science fiction went down sharply in the early 20th century and probably bottomed out with Gernsback, so that what we call the Campbell Golden Age is really a period of recovery. Science fiction had at least reached the pulp level again. [Vinge is laughing.] Most of what was in the Gernsback published was sub-pulp. I argue as a critic that we should never excuse bad writing on the grounds that it is old-fashioned. So I think we have to separate out such matters as how literate the writer is -- can he use words well -- or whether he can describe characters that act like human beings from the science fiction content of the story. It's a different matter.

  VINGE: Would you give somebody any gold stars for being the first person to write about a particular idea? Does that excuse them in any way for their not being able to write?

  SCHWEITZER: I would say no. It just leaves the idea lying around for someone else to pick up. I note that H.G. Wells wrote about a lot of the major ideas first, but he wrote well, and it was decades before anyone else could even approach that level.

  VINGE: You may have explained why I never warmed to much of the science fiction from the 1920s and 1930s! Still, I think there is an arc of development to the science fiction of the twentieth century, at least in terms of what a writer could get away with. When a new intellectual area opens, it's like wandering onto a beach littered with precious and semi-precious stones. It doesn't take any work to scoop them up. So, on one hand, at the beginning of such a period, you have a lot of brilliant ideas told by people who can't write very well. Then, late in the period, when the ideas have been picked over and picked over, you begin to get elaboration and really good writing, to the point where the ideas are polished up and they shine. That's great. Then very late in the period, you get into another not-so-attractive phase, where the good writing has also been done, the shining up of the emeralds has been done, and all you are doing is elaborating on the footnotes and putting little curlicues on the writing. In a way, that is a terminal phase that is almost as ugly as the initial careless squandering of gems on the beach.

  SCHWEITZER: Wells didn't squander his gems. At the very beginning, he had it all. Let me suggest, though, that what happened at least in American literature, is that mainstream literature began to equate "serious writing" with realism. Therefore the better writers became very uneasy about producing anything imaginative at all. Before long, fantastic fiction was pretty much relegated to pulp magazines only. Back in 1890, any respectable writer could produce a science fiction story, and it could be published in a major magazine. By about 1920, a new science fiction novel was more likely to be a serial in Argosy, something like The Blind Spot by Hall and Flint, and it was ghastly. But at least the Argosy writers still knew what narrative was. Then you get to the Gernsback Amazing and even that has been lost, and all that's left is a turgid lecture tour, with footnotes and diagrams, something like Ralph 124C41+. Only very slowly did the science fiction field rediscover narrative technique, and only slowly has the mainstream rediscovered imaginative fiction.

  VINGE: I think technology itself could drive the next developments in art, and much more radically than commercial disruptions such as online publication or Amazon's Kindle: Suppose the Technological Singularity happens. Then in the early years of the post-humans, we will have something that we haven't had in the last 30,000 years, the analog of the first painting or the first story or the first traveling-salesman joke. So I think that the situation for the early post-human artists will be very interesting.

  I am not disputing the analysis you made of the 20th century; this is a separate issue, a follow-on to the era of embellishment I claimed a few paragraphs above. The early post-humans will be like the early humans in that almost anything their artists do will be done for the first time. So that would be a great
time to be a post-human, to watch that process.

  SCHWEITZER: Would they have any use for human art?

  VINGE: I think so. After all, we humans make reference to animals and their works in our art. Some of the new art might be intelligible to us, since we can guess at analogies between souls, societies and processes, networks, and how those analogies would affect mortality and identity issues. But you'd have to be one of the new creatures to fully appreciate the new stuff.

  SCHWEITZER: Would they still read Hamlet?

  VINGE: Probably, and they would probably appreciate our understanding of such art as well as we do. If they ever decided to write for the animals (us!), they could probably wow the hell out of us. On the other hand, their use of Hamlet in their own art might be variously unintelligible to us, or require a lifetime of human experience in some odd context to appreciate. (What would a human joke about gopher behavior look like to another gopher?)

  SCHWEITZER: So if science fiction is reaching this decadent stage you are describing, and the only way out is for us to evolve into something more than human, what is the present-day science fiction writer to do?

  VINGE: Some form of this question applies to all art in the current era.

  Let's consider a couple of scenarios: Suppose the Singularity doesn't happen (and not because of some civilization ending violence, like nuclear war). Well, the "decadent/embellished" stage can be a lot of fun, and I imagine that in many arts there is still lots of room for hybridization between contemporary forms and with all the past forms that are now so accessible. Beyond that, how have baroque eras ended in the past? Most of those escape paths probably exist in the early twenty-first century -- except that eventually, with our easy access to almost all past forms, it is harder to mistake rehash for novelty.

  On the other hand, suppose we truly are approaching the Singularity. In that case, the cool thing for science-fiction is that at least we have the literary license to watch and speculate. I gave a talk at ICFA last year ("What Future for Fantasy?"). I made the point about artistic elaboration. We may not be into the gross excesses of such a phase, but since we have such good access to past art, we really need some form of rescue. Watch where art goes. See if we can escape into true novelty through the interaction of technology with mind and society.

  SCHWEITZER: What are you doing in the immediate future, other than planning to evolve into something else?

  VINGE: [Laughs.]

  SCHWEITZER: Surely for the short-term, you have to write books in the same manner as before.

  VINGE: Quite so. I am trundling forward with a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep entitled The Children of the Sky. It's going pretty well. It's set on the Tines World. The Tines are small pack-minds; four or five animals make a person. This lets me deal concretely with issues of identity, the subconscious, perception, and so on. In some cases I can point to a pack member and say, "That's the speech center. If we take him out, we will do this to the pack." It's a fun playground. It is also, I hope, a story that will appeal to the presently existing readership, since the superhuman readership isn't around yet -- and neither is the superhuman writer!

  SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Vernor.

  End of Part Two. Part One appeared in IGMS issue 15.

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