The science fiction person never agrees with anybody else in conversation just to be friendly. Ideas are too important to be betrayed. Science fiction people, among their own kind, are almost always contentious—after all, a favorite activity is to point to an unlabeled work that may be considered SF and argue about whether or not it is, really, SF.
At that time when involvement is at its peak for the science fiction person, SF is what holds the world together. It is important, exciting, and gives the science fiction person a basis for feeling superior to the rest of humanity, those who don’t know. The early fans, the generation of the thirties, many of whom (Forrest J. Ackerman, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, and a host of others) are among the major writers, publishers, and editors of recent decades, evolved a theory to justify the superiority of science fiction people, then a persecuted, mainly teenage, minority. At the Third Annual World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein—then, as now, the most respected author in the field—gave a speech intended to define the science fiction field for its readers and authors. The theme of the speech was change, and it examined the concept and problem of “future shock” nearly thirty years before Alvin Toffler wrote his famous book.
“I think,” said Heinlein, “that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it’s written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change.” He then went on to tell the fascinated audience, in this speech that is legendary even after five decades, that he believed them to be way above average in intelligence and sensitivity—a special group:
Science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitude—not even centuries but thousands of years.… Most human beings, and those who laugh at us for reading science fiction, time-bind, make their plans, make their predictions, only within the limits of their immediate personal affairs.… In fact, most people, as compared with science fiction fans, have no conception whatsoever of the fact that the culture they live in does change; that it can change.
We can only imagine the impact of such a coherent articulation of alienation and superiority on a bunch of mostly late-adolescent men at the end of the Great Depression. Though the inferior mass of humanity laughs at us, we are the ones who know, we are the wave of the future, the next evolutionary step in the human race. If only our pimples would clear up, we could get on with changing the world. Fans are Slans! (Slan, a novel by A. E. Van Vogt serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, about a superior race living in secret among normal humans, was an instant classic in 1941.)
Adults ignore lousy technique when they are being deceived (in literature or elsewhere) if the deception supports the view of reality they have chosen to embrace. Adults stand to lose their sense of security if they don’t cling to everyday reality. Teenagers (and the other groups of people described above) have no sense of security as a rule. They are searching for something—change, a future—and unconvincing, mundane reality does not satisfy. Oddly, then, the assumptions made in a science fiction story, which are transparently assumptions and which the young social-reject of any age can share as an intellectual exercise, are more acceptable to him than the everyday assumptions made in a “serious” work of fiction about real (mundane adult) life in which he cannot or does not wish to participate.
Science fiction is preeminently the literature of the bright child, the kid who is brighter perhaps than her teachers. This is the reader to whom SF comes naturally, like the air, and becomes a refuge promising hope for the future, giving radical scenarios of difference and change.
Thus the science fiction novel or story is generally aimed at the person who has not embraced a particular set of assumptions about the way things are—this helps to explain both SF’s appeal to the young and its seeming shallowness to most “mature” readers. Science fiction is still in the 1990s often shallow in its presentation of adult human relations (most often the sole concern of most other literature), but it is profound in the opportunities it offers the reader to question his most basic assumptions, even if he has to ignore lousy technique a lot of the time to participate in the illusion. This last is easy for the omnivore and chronic reader—in fact, the minute you overcome the suspension-of-disbelief problem, admittedly much easier in the early teenage years than in later life, you tend to enter your omnivore stage. Make no mistake—you don’t lose your critical ability or literary education when you begin to read science fiction. You just have to learn the trick of putting all your preconceptions aside every time you sit down to read. Hah! You were right, this is just another piece of hack work. But the next one, or the story after that, may be the real thing, innovative, well written, surprising, exciting.
Throughout the past decade or more, there has been a growing number of adults who have discovered science fiction as a tool without discovering the thing itself. There are now many new uses for SF in the mundane world: It can be used to combat future shock; to teach religion, political science, physics, and astronomy; to promote ecology; to support the U.S. space program; to provide an index to pop cultural attitudes toward science; and to advance academic careers and make profits for publishers, film producers, even toy makers. But the business of the science fiction itself is to provide escape from the mundane world, to get at what is real by denying all of the assumptions that enforce quotidian reality for the duration of the work.
This is reflected in what really goes on at science fiction conventions. Beneath the surface frivolity, cliquishness, costumery, beneath the libertarian or just plain licentious anarchism of the all-night carousing, beyond the author worship, the serious panel discussions, and the family of hail-fellow-fan-well-met, the true core of being a science fiction person is that the convention is abnormal and alienated from daily life. Not just separated in time and space—different! There is no parallel more apt than the underground movements of the last two hundred years in Western civilization: the Romantics in England, Baudelaire and his circle in France, the Modernists, the Beats. (Note to literary historians: This would make an interesting study.) The difference is that to an outsider, it just looks like fun and games, since these people go home after a convention, go back to work, school, housewifery, unemployment, mundane reality. Or so it seems.
While they are spending time in the science fiction world, though, things are really different. How different? Let’s circle around this for a moment. For instance, at a convention you can almost certainly talk to people there who, in normal life, are removed from you by taboos or social barriers. No matter how obnoxious you are, people will talk to you unless you insult them directly, and the chances are excellent that you can find one or more people willing to engage in serious, extended, knowledgeable conversation about some of the things that interest you most, whether it is the stock market or macramé, clothing design or conservative politics, science or literature or rock’n’roll. This is now just as true of the SF bulletin boards of the Internet and the online services such as GEnie, America Online, and CompuServe, where the conversations take place every hour of every day.
Science fiction people tend not to be well rounded but rather multiple specialists; the only thing that holds them and the whole SF world together is science fiction. Actually you spend a minority of your time at a convention talking about science fiction, but the reality of science fiction underlies the whole experience and is its basis. For the duration of the science fiction experience, you agree to set aside the assumptions and preconceptions that rule your ordinary behavior and to live free in a kind of personal utopian space. A science fiction convention, like a work of science fiction, is an escape into an alternate possibility that you can test, when it is over, against mundane reality. Even the bad ones provide this context.
Harlan Ellison, writer and science fiction personality, has spoken of his first encounter with science fiction as a kid in a dentist’s
office, where he discovered a copy of a science fiction magazine. On the cover, Captain Future was battling Krag the robot for possession of a scantily clad woman; the picture filled his young mind with awe, wonder, and excitement. His life was changed. He wanted more. The reason science fiction creates such chronic addicts as Harlan Ellison is that once you admit the possibility that reality is not as solid and fixed as it used to seem, you feel the need for repeated doses of science fictional realities. Today, that moment of transformation may occur while watching a film or TV, or even reading a comic book, but it still happens and creates fans, who then have the urgent desire to find others like themselves.
Of course, sometimes what you discover in the science fiction field that attracts you is not the thing itself but one of its associates. A chronic reader may actually read almost entirely classical fantasy and Lovecraftian supernatural horror, or a writer such as Fritz Leiber may spend a career writing in every variety of fantasy and science fiction, and yet always be “in the field.” There is an interesting investigation to be done someday on why the classical fantasy, a main tradition of Western literature for several millennia, is now part of the science fiction field. In the latter half of the twentieth century, with certain best-selling exceptions, fantasy is often produced by writers of science fiction and fantasy, edited by editors of science fiction, illustrated by SF and fantasy artists, read by omnivore fantasy and SF addicts who support the market. Fantasy is no longer in the 1990s just a subdivision of SF but is related to the phenomenon that confronts us in an unpredictably evolving way in the 1990s since being established in the 1980s as a separate marketing category. (See Appendix V.)
Since the 1930s, science fiction has been an umbrella under which any kind of estrangement from mundane reality is welcome (though some works, such as John Norman’s Gor series in the seventies and eighties, or the gaming tie-in novels of the eighties and nineties, both of which began life under the SF umbrella, are admitted but generally despised and generally believed to sell mostly to an audience outside any other SF audience). To present the broad, general context of the SF field, let us consider in more detail the main areas and relationships as they have evolved over the past several decades.
The general question of fantasy has been dealt with frequently, from Freud’s well-known essay on the uncanny through recent structuralist works such as Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic, and is not central to our concern with science fiction. Several things need to be said, however, about fantasy literature before we move on to varieties of science fiction. Fantasy, through its close association with science fiction since the 1920s in America, has developed a complex interaction with science fiction that has changed much of what is written as fantasy today.
H. P. Lovecraft, the greatest writer of supernatural horror of the century, a literary theoretician, and mentor, through correspondence and personal contact, to Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Donald and Howard Wandrei, and a number of others, was an agnostic, a rationalist, and a believer in science. His work was published both in Weird Tales, the great fantasy magazine between the twenties and the early fifties, and in Astounding Stories, the great science fiction magazine of its day. Almost all his acolytes followed the same pattern of commercial and literary ties to both areas.
In 1939, after the greatest SF editor of modern times, John W. Campbell, took the helm at Astounding, he proceeded to found the second great fantasy magazine, Unknown, encouraging all his newly discovered writing talents—Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Anthony Boucher, Alfred Bester, H. L. Gold, Fredric Brown, Eric Frank Russell, as well as Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, C. L. Moore, and Fritz Leiber—to create a new kind of fantasy, with modern settings and contemporary atmosphere, as highly rationalized and consistent as the science fiction he wanted them to write for Astounding. Through Lovecraft and Campbell a strong link was forged not only commercially but also aesthetically between fantasy and science fiction.
Today, and for the last four decades, the most distinguished and consistently brilliant publication in the field has been The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Anthony Boucher, from Campbell’s Unknown, was a founding editor and set the aesthetic tone), required reading for all who wish to discover the field at its best and broadest—though it has never been the most popular magazine in the field, always surpassed in circulation by more focused magazines. Its most serious competitor for top honors is Asimov’s SF Magazine, embodying the same broad and modern aesthetic position since the advent of editors Shawna McCarthy and then Gardner Dozois in the mid-eighties. In some years Asimov’s has unquestionably dominated the field, publishing much fantasy and unclassifiable fiction as SF.
After Lovecraft and Campbell, the third towering figure in fantasy so far in the twentieth century is J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy is both a classic of contemporary literature and an example of the dominant position of the science fiction field as stated above. Tolkien’s works, although hardcovers at first, were popularized in paperback through SF publishers and have spawned an entire marketing substructure to support works of world-building fantasy in the Tolkien tradition. More books appear every month featuring the quest of a single heroic figure across a detailed and rationalized fantasy world, accompanied by a group of major and minor fantasy characters and ending in a confrontation between Good and Evil, in which after a tough battle, Good always wins.
The fourth towering figure is not one person, but is a posthumous collaboration between the artist Frank Frazetta, formerly a comic illustrator, and the author Robert E. Howard, a pulp fantasy adventure hack who committed suicide the day his mother died in 1936 and who created a number of fantastic heroes, the best-known of whom is Conan the Barbarian. Howard’s works had been mostly out of print since his death, except for several small press editions and a few paperbacks, until the early 1960s. Then L. Sprague de Camp obtained the rights from Howard’s estate to arrange and anthologize the whole Conan series for the first time in paperback, and to write additions and sequels himself and with others. Through a stroke of marketing genius, comics artist Frazetta was hired to illustrate the paperback covers, which seized the imagination of the audience enough to sell in the millions of copies, established the Howard name, and made Frazetta wealthy and famous. Howard now has nearly fifty books in print in the sixth decade following his death, and a sword-swinging barbarian hero brutishly adventuring across a fantasy/historic landscape (inside a book with an imitation Frazetta cover—Frazetta’s originals from the 1960s and 70s now sell at auction for six figures) is the principal reading focus of a large number of chronic SF readers. This category, which was formerly called sword-and-sorcery fiction, is now referred to more accurately as heroic fantasy. If Mickey Spillane wrote Mike Hammer stories as SF, it would be heroic fantasy. In fact, a hundred years from now SF may have acquired Spillane’s works under this rubric.
But terminology remains slippery. Robert Jordan wrote Conan sequels before he wrote his epic Wheel of Time sequence. Since he was a heroic fantasy writer when writing the Conans, people continued to refer to his work as heroic fantasy and now, given Jordan’s great popularity, have begun to apply the phrase backward to all Tolkienesque fantasy (since Jordan’s Wheel of Time is in the tradition of Tolkien). Where this will end in the short run is confusion for all concerned. Maybe usages will become clear again in the next century.
Two areas of fantasy that are not presently annexed under the SF umbrella, or published with a fantasy logo in that marketing category, perhaps because these two areas are not presently in popular (middle-class) disrepute, are Arthurian romances and the occult horror best-seller. There are indications that these two areas may remain separate and independent—both types tend to be written by authors who have no desire to associate themselves and their works with low-class, nonliterary, low-paying (until recently) stuff. On the other hand, there are intimate links betwe
en horror and SF from Unknown and Weird Tales to the present. There are even horror conventions and fantasy conventions spawned by the SF conventions, and the writers often write and socialize across the genre boundaries. Category (non-bestseller) horror and fantasy is and always has been published for the last six decades along with SF by the SF publishers.
The only science in all the areas of fantasy is either straw-man science (which cannot cope) or black science (used by the evil sorcerer). Amoral science is a recent addition to some heroic fantasy (especially noticeable in the works of Michael Moorcock). The idea of magic as a scientific discipline was a contribution of the Campbell era. And I can generalize without fear of contradiction by saying that except in a tiny minority of cases, technology is associated with evil in fantasy literature. So it is particularly curious that the element of estrangement from everyday reality has come to yoke by itself the two separates, fantasy and science fiction, even though SF was invented to exclude “mere” fantasy. This complex of seeming contradiction will be investigated in more depth shortly. For the moment we will move on to a consideration of the subdivisions of the center of the field, science fiction.
Hugo Gernsback, who invented modern science fiction in April 1926, knew what he meant by “scientifiction” (as he named it) and assumed it would be evident to others: All that work H. G. Wells and Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe wrote (“charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” as Gernsback says in the editorial in the first issue of the first magazine, Amazing Stories). In addition to this confusion, Gernsback, an eccentric immigrant and technological visionary, was tone-deaf to the English language, printing barely literate stories, often by enthusiastic teenagers, about new inventions and the promise of a wondrous technological future, cheek by jowl with fiction by Wells, Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a growing number of professional pulp writers who wanted to break into the new market. The new thing was amorphous, formed and reformed over the decades by major editors and writers, and all the chronic readers, into the diversity that is science fiction today.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 3