So I became very difficult toward the end of my course-work. Somebody would innocently cite a “law” of the organism’s supposed response, and Sheldon would erupt with, “Look, the organism you’re talking about is a laboratory rat that for two hundred years has been selected for cage life, and particularly for not biting psychologists until now it’s incapable of free life on its own.8 And if you’re solemnly telling me that ‘the animal is attracted to novelty,’ (which was the theorem), Pll tell you that if you want to see real animals in the real world, you don’t go out and present them with maximum novelty. You go where they are and try to look like a bush.”
Because while of course it’s true that caged lab rats will cluster around some new object put in their cage, it’s also true that wild animals will avoid a place where they’ve met a novel stimulus—sometimes for years.
So here was a neat problem for experimental research—to devise a way of reconciling these two contradictory behavioral “laws.” If I could do it, it would not only answer one of my own questions, but it would bring a bit of order into one corner of a messy general field.
The only trouble was that for various technical reasons, my grant advisors felt it could not be done (and was maybe a little presumptuous of me to insist). There was bit of a hassle getting the green light to try.
Well, when I started, the first thing I found was that my advisors were nearly right. It would take an hour to explain the statistical and rattish obstacles; suffice it here that twelve successive experimental paradigms proved to have bugs in them, and I estimate I hauled a quarter of a ton of rats up and down H St., winters and summers; I became almost a joke. But the thirteenth try panned out and gave a beauty answer, so clear and simple it could be reduced to a wordless cartoon. (In fact I did reduce it to a cartoon illustration; see next page.)
Everyone was pleased; the strongest skeptic among my advisors actually nominated it for the nationwide Best Dissertation of Year award, which it did not win.
My finding was, simply, that animals in a familiar environment will go to a novel stimulus (signifying they prefer it) while animals in an unfamiliar environment will avoid any more novelty and choose to go to a familiar one. All of which sounds like plain common sense, which is typical of many behavioral findings that take sweaty months or years to show under strict experimental control. And the two conflicting responses were neatly reconciled as functions of a changed state of novelty of the environment.
CA: Was it largely frustration with that specific situation that got you started writing?
Sheldon: Oh, no. The frustration was long over, and the end brought a lot of egoboo—ego-gratification, in English. I was still getting requests for reprints of that dissertation—some from behind the Iron Curtain!—at least ten years later. No, what blocked me out on science was age and health, as I noted in the Biog. I was fixed in D.C. because my husband was, and GWU was a fine place to do perceptual research—they had a distinguished psychology staff headed by Richard Walk. (American U was in one of its perrennial spasms of reorganization.) But GWU had more than its quota of distinguished female researchers—they’d been very good about that. What they needed, if I were to come on the staff, was what they had a right to expect from any new PhD—a willingness to help others’ research, the ability to dig up ones own grants, and the constitution of a healthy twenty-five-year-old Marine to teach the monster baby boom classes then coming through, many of them unable to read or write English. (I refer to white products of “good” middle-class suburban high schools here).
The health and time I didn’t have, but it took a little trouble to make me admit it. (See Biog.) And writing SF, which I had loved since my first copy of Weird Tales at age nine, was and is a wonderful activity—it’s the only free arena of literature, and if you can’t say what you want to in SF, my personal feeling is that you haven’t much to say.
However, the whole university experience contained one of the great high points of my life, and I’d like to take a moment to explain. (There was of course the pleasure of learning so much about our own wonderfully organized mechanics, but that’s not the central point here.)
Years before, I had gone into Intelligence with the vague notion that it represented in some fashion the brain, or at least the eyes and ears, of the great organism called the nation. And during the first wartime years in Photo-Intelligence, it was certainly true that we were quite literally the AAF’s eyes on our Far Eastern enemy. And within the context of an actual “shooting” war, with real enemies busily killing Americans and planning, however remotely, to invade American soil, this “seeing” function was quite enough for me.
But after the war the looking and listening and deducing struck me in a different light. (I leave out here my aversion to clandestine action, from destabilizing other people’s governments, and influencing elections, to actual assassinations and military operations like the well-named Bay of Pigs. They strike me as wholly inappropriate to Intelligence, much as if one should attempt to pick pockets with the eyeballs. More highly informed critics than I share this view and have long wanted to oust the entire clandestine-action function from intelligence proper, lock, stock, and cowboy hat. Its long-range effect, in my belief, tends to bring discredit on intelligence itself, and on the nation which employs it with anything less than superHuman care; and its net actual effects in our time have been such as we would have been better without.) Leaving this contaminating factor aside, I found intelligence now curiously unsatisfying. I felt no real zest even in the clean, harmless contest of skills which is photo-intelligence. And yet it should be satisfying, even exciting; P.I. is capable of almost miraculous feats, and all without any of the sordid aspects of spying: No one is blackmailed, or coerced, or even endangered, it has no more moral ambiguity than looking over the neighbor’s fence and counting his laundry. If the neighbor is not marshaling hostile hardware, photo-intelligence tells you that too.
Finally I realized what I missed. We were gaining knowledge, true enough, but it was not new knowledge. Everything learned was already in someone else’s head. What we were doing was merely hostile prying at other brains, not adding to the sum of knowledge in all brains. I saw that what I longed for was not in intelligence at all, but in science. Mere interHuman “intelligence” came to seem to me a debased form of science—and as it was currently played, a rather soiled, paranoid, boys’ game caricature. (I may say that as I became rather audibly disillusioned, the Great Ones of our pompous clandestine citadels became progressively and even more audibly disenchanted with me. I left to shared relief.)
But the finale of my work in science had no such disillusion. It was, quite naively, the most thrilling experience of my life.
It takes time and work to learn how to ask a meaningful, unambiguous question of nature. For instance, you have to learn everything that has already been asked in your field, and what the answers were and the statistical techniques. And after you are qualified, there is still a period when you stand, as it were, in that great Presence, dejectedly hearing it grumble, “No… No… garble in…” But you try and try, until one great day the needed cunning comes, And Everything-That-Is responds majestically, “Yes. You have truly grasped one of the hidden dimensions on which My creatures live and move.”
Time will never blur the wonder of that moment for me. Or the sadness of having come too late to the work to do more. But Oh! The joy of having ever known it at all!
CA: The definition of male and female is a great concern of your work, and gender has figured in your two pseudonyms. Do you consider yourself a women’s libber?
Sheldon: I certainly consider myself something in that nature, but the unfortunate resemblance to blubber in the expression “women’s libber” has made me reluctant to use the term. To my ear, “women’s libber” sounds like something hopelessly bulging and flabby, like those balloons clowns slap each other with. I am very strongly a feminist, but of the older school where we fought a lot of our battles alone. I have a s
ympathetic eye for a great many of the wilder manifestations of women’s lib. To me it’s a plain social movement of the oppressed, and as we learned in the labor movement and in the black movement, it takes all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to move a mass from A to B. You have to have the outrageous and you have to have the respectable. But one thing I would never want to be is the queen bee type like Clare Boothe Luce and other “top” women who seem to say, “I’ve got it made; why can’t you, little girl?” Such women typically manipulate on the basis of charm. In a war, all things are fair, true—but the women I mean tend to exploit male weaknesses solely for their own advantage. They’re no help, except when they occasionally offer the sight of a highly ranked woman doing a good job.* But sisterhood they never heard of, and they do nothing to make it easier for an ugly or charmless woman to succeed.
One of the things you notice at scientific meetings is that while the men may be any shape, including particularly the thin, long, delicate ectomorphs like Oppenheimer, the women are almost all burly mesomorphs, like Margaret Mead. It takes that kind of muscular vitality to punch through and up to where they can display their brains. But the pity of it is that your mesomorph, male or female, is often not the really tip-top brain. The truly super female brain is, I suspect, somebody’s gentle shy lab assistant, who is back home at the lab, polishing glassware or watching the animals, and dreaming ultrahigh I.Q. dreams. Which in due course—I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but read The Double Helix—will be artfully appropriated by her male boss and peddled as his own.
Until we get to the point where that gentle woman who wants to do the thinking rather than combatting for turf can succeed, we have not got it made.
Of course I’d like to help make that possible—and actually, James Tiptree, as a man, was able to do a tiny bit. But what we need isn’t tiny bits, it’s what every movement needs—numbers, organization, money, charismatic leadership, and lucky breaks. And even if “we” ever “win” equality, it’ll still be precarious. As one of my characters said, in “The Women Men Don’t See,” any equality women gain will only last as long as nothing goes seriously wrong in the society. When it does and men get scared, the first thing they’ll do is resubjugate women—and whatever went wrong will be blamed on their “liberty and licentiousness.” You will find schoolbooks still blaming the fall of Rome on the freedom of women, today.
CA: Why do your think your work improved, or “matured,” as the critics say, so rapidly?
Sheldon: Of course the answer I’m tempted to give is, “Just because I’m good, that’s all.” Or, “Because I’m old enough to know crap when I write it.” But the actual question is, Why did I write such lousy stories before I got to the good ones?
I was after all, brought up on Conrad and other large chunks of English Lit. My uncles and Mother used to recite yards of Shakespeare, taking ludicrous parts, when they’d exhausted other topics—and I pored over that Homer/Aeneid trot for a year, which has some pretty good stories. And I read the whole Arabian Nights, eating soda crackers in a cubby-hide-away under the stairs—I was a fat little girl. True, for a year or so I fell under the narcotic spell of The Saturday Evening Post’s sanctified hogwash, but that was mostly to try to find out what grown-ups did. At a pinch I could still distinguish Flannery O’Connor from Norman Mailer’s logorrhea, and I knew why I liked Fitzgerald and despised Hemingway.
But those early stories of mine are so shallow and nauseating; the only kind word you can say is that they do have plots. Why? Well, of course I was writing them late at night, for fun. I was still up to my ears in university work, and I didn’t have two neurons to pay attention to the writing with. I’d just have some experience—for instance, my “gringo friend” made me knock off and go to the races—and I’d think, “Hey, this could be a funny idea,” and I’d scribble it up (“Faithful to Thee, Terra”). I really am a frustrated comedian, see, like many black pessimists. I dearly love making funny and having laughter, but I seldom get the chance. When Bob Silverberg said that “All the Kinds of Yes” was, well, the funniest tale he’d read in years but nine-tenths of it would sail clear over most readers’ heads—that meant so much to me I can only say I’d save Bob Silverberg from a burning barn at the risk of life. Who else would so beautifully read my stuff? Oh, yes, it’s lovely to be told you’re Significant, and Drastic, and all those other nice things. But when Jeff Smith wrote me he was rolling on the couch laughing at “How to Have an Absolutely Hilarious Heart Attack”—he lit up his name in my heart for keeps.
But back to your query. I believe that when I left more demanding work, and got healthier, I saw with horror that other people were paying attention to what I was turning out. So I started to pay real attention too, and tap deeper levels of emotion. I applied to my writing the same standards I applied to reading, and sort of tried to whip it into shape. (This wasn’t as easy as it sounds—I’m still trying.) The so-called more mature work was what happened as I got the potatoes out of my mouth.
CA: Susan Wood and other critics have commented on your deftness at shifting point of view and focus within a given story. Isn’t that very difficult to do well?
Sheldon: Difficult? I was under the impression it was wrong to do it; I’m glad to hear it’s okay. You see, now you’re getting into the technicalities of writing, about which I know as much as the average rabbit. Nobody ever showed me or told me how one writes. I’ve never had any kind of detailed critique or comment on a story—and Oh, how I wish someone would! It’s very frustrating: I just write ‘em and send ‘em off into this total silence, and pretty soon a check comes back, all in silence—and that’s that. Only Gardner Dozois ever analyzed my stuff, not from the standpoint of technique, but for message. And he was so accurate I nearly quit writing. (Really; it was almost traumatic to be understood so well.)
May I tell you how I write, the only two things I know about my so-called writing technique? The first is this—and I’ve found that some other writers at least do it too—I mull over the story in my head, and in notes, until I have a complete visual-aural picture of everything; every scene, people, whether somebody hands another person something with their right or left hand, what people who aren’t even mentioned are doing—everything pictured and heard. I’d say, like a movie, but films today are all cut and fancied and are art themselves; maybe like a very dull and complete documentary. The when I have it all pictured, I tell the story, just as I would if it were a piece of life, in what I hope is a punchy way. Oh, I forgot to say that the story takes off from some idea that has fascinated me, or that I want to show in action—so the way I describe it has to build up to that.
And that’s all I know about technique, except this wonderful lesson: A schoolteacher of English once wrote about the idea that children, or “unspoiled” people write simply. She snorted in derision. (‘Scuse cliche.) “Simplicity? You ask one of those pure unspoiled childish minds to write a sentence about, say, a hippopotamus. What you get is—this is from life—Tn the case of the hippopotamus, it is big.’ It takes about five years of beating on this ‘unspoiled* writer with a two-by-four to get him to write, The hippotamus is big.’ “
When I grasped that, I knew I’d heard The Word, and went promptly out and purchased a length of two-by-four—one-by-three, actually, because of my age—and started pounding. Some day I hope to attain the sophistication to write clear, simple English.
Now James Tiptree—I’m not trying to be cute here, I mean the voice that murmurs in the darkness when all else is silence, and you’re alone—Tiptree may know something more about writing, but if so he hasn’t told Alice B. Sheldon, and I’m afraid that’s whom you’re talking with today.
CA: Are you pleased with science fiction’s growing acceptance as a genre?
Sheldon: Very much. Well, yes and no. The thing is, a good book could be written—probably has been—on why science fiction got genre-ized, or rather, ghetto-ized in the first place and in America, not in Europe. What’s happening, I
think, is that we’re just becoming part of the mainstream, the way science fiction always has been in Europe. Take Kipling again—he wrote quite a few science fiction stories. An amazing number of Europeans have—I think you could scare up one by Dickens. Any established writer who felt like it just turned his hand to the supernatural or the highly imaginative, the “what if.” There are even some technically science fiction stories—pretty sorry ones—floating around in the U.S. “mainstream” now As for Europeans, take Italo Calvino for example. He’s sold as an ordinary writer in Italy but is occasionally referred to as a science fiction writer over here, because he has the moon talking. If all the poetry in which the moon spoke was taken out of English literature and put into fantasy or science fiction, that would be pretty odd.
CA: David Gerrold has expressed the opinion that science fiction has lost some of its vitality through its increased general acceptance. Do you share that feeling?
Sheldon: I do have a certain nostalgia for the days when SF was a wild private in-group, and you were “world famous” if three hundred people knew your name. (Would you believe I got fan mail from Finland?) Of course I only came in on the end of it, but it was great to write knowing this audience of bright nuts shared your ellipses and you could use jargon like an “After-the-atom” story and know you’d be understood. Now you have to stop and explain the Law of Gravity in case the damn story is bought by Good Housekeeping.
The films are the worst menace from that point of view because they are the most banal, cutesy science fiction of thirty years ago. If the films Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T., or most of Star Trek were made into stories with concealing names but the same plots, it would be surprising if any of them could be sold as SF. What they are is an excuse for marvelous visual effects, not good stories at all.
Meet Me at Infinity Page 39