—Leslie A. Fiedler (from his essay “The Criticism of Science Fiction,” in Coordinates, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983)
ALL THE wonderful ideas, the big hypotheses and powerful images, which so often are the main and abiding appeal in a science fiction story, have had a truly pernicious effect on characterization and style in SF over the decades. Nine times out of ten, the ideas and images have so fascinated the writers and readers that the rich and imaginative settings are inhabited by bloodless or flat stock characters familiar after a hundred years of adventure fiction.
So what? Well, the fashion in fiction that we admire since the middle of the nineteenth century has been that characterization is more and more the central task of the artist in prose fiction. By developing contrary to that fashion, for the most part in cheap commercial magazines and their market, science fiction has allied itself with the aesthetic of naturalistic, journalistic prose and fast-paced commercial storytelling, full of color and plot. The highest goal of the SF writers as a group, at least through the 1950s, was to achieve the slick (versus pulp) style of storytelling, popular from Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, and Jack London up through Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. And, of course, to sell their stories to magazines such as Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Playboy, for more than the penny or two per word prevalent in SF.
But the short story as a popular and commercial form died out in the U.S. in the 1950s, with the demise of most of the major markets for short fiction. Aside from the SF field, some detective fiction, and a very few organs such as The New Yorker, Playboy, and Esquire, short fiction survives today only as a noncommercial form in the literary magazines, and in small hardcover printings with literary pretensions. SF has survived not by changing so much as by staying mostly pop lit, in its own magazine and anthology ghetto. And of course in transplanted form in the media (where somehow the SF usually gets lost in translation).
One of the reasons that SF is so frequently transplanted off the written page into media presentations is that a mediocre SF story often tells in any form as effectively as it reads on the page (see Chapter 3). Since the standard for publication in the field from Gernsback (who didn’t know English all that well but did know science and technology) through John W. Campbell, even to the present, has been clear prose that doesn’t get in the way of the science fictional content, SF writers have not until the whole New Wave controversy in the 1960s had much encouragement to develop stylistically or to focus on fully rounded characterization. Many of the best of them did anyway, but sometimes in spite of editorial discouragement from portions of their market.
All this has been a disaster in terms of the image the field has presented to literate readers, mainstream authors, and most educated outsiders who have attempted to sample science fiction over the years, only to discover that most of the positive virtues which they have been led to equate with good writing and good literature are absent or wanting in many famous SF stories and novels. The one thing no one has ever accused SF of is overliterary pretension. A whole complex of controversies have eventuated within the field, among authors and readers, because of the “clear, unadorned prose” dictums of many of the major editors (and readers, of course).
What is almost never explained outside the field (or is passed off as nonsense by outsiders) is that SF has set for itself a progressive standard of good writing that has in turn established a variety of prose techniques eminently successful at communication from author to reader within the confines of the field, which is the primary aim of all written science fiction. The SF writer is first of all talking to his friendly and receptive audience. Communication to outsiders has always been considered secondary.
At worst, this has led to clever, plotted (but in every other manner underdeveloped) fictions. For example, even within the field New Wavers attacked Analog—where admittedly such nonliterary SF still appears once or more in nearly every issue decades after John W. Campbell’s death, as editor Stanley Schmidt attempts to maintain Campbell’s editorial standards—perhaps their main paradigm of “the enemy,” as a magazine mainly devoted to publishing engineering diagrams set in prose, not real fiction. This is of course revolutionary hyperbole—the only wiring diagrams in Analog have been in the nonfiction articles—but Campbell (and later editors Ben Bova and Schmidt) had faith that his readers could read wiring diagrams if they needed to (see Appendix IV). And there have always been magazines and books recognized within the field as mostly crap.
The plain fact of the matter is that much of the best and greatest science fiction is not, according to most standards, well written. You can be convinced wholly that what SF does is good and valuable and interesting, yet if you cannot admire or like the manner in which it is done then you remain deprived of its finest pleasures. In this section, I hope to break the communication barrier between outside and inside.
If you are a writer of SF, you have to respect the facts of science. You have to know or take the trouble to learn the science particularly relevant to whatever story you write. However, by the early fifties a writer could pretty easily fake knowledge of many areas of science and technology because the body of written SF since 1926 had developed a useful repository of cliché locutions. Phrases and words such as “space warp,” “hyperspace,” and “hyperdrive” can be used in any SF story to lend scientific verisimilitude (and that old SF flavor) without explanation or lengthy rationalization because other writers in the genre have already explained and rationalized them, often in great detail, in many other stories. The core chronic (and most omnivore) readership already knows what the terms refer to, how they work, and can fill in the rationalization from common reading experience.
Basically the writer can devote a higher concentration to what is new and different in a story and to exploring the implications of, for instance, a group of courageous humans taking a spaceship (one of the earliest of the cliché words) equipped with hyperdrive (which generally means a faster-than-light space drive) through hyperspace (that abnormal space through which a ship on hyperdrive travels) to a distant and alien planet. Well, a writer might know nothing at all about how the characters really would travel, but the clichés get them from here to there and the usual concern (except in those special stories wherein the writer is introducing a new speculative device as the central focus) is those humans and that environment and their thoughts and feelings in it. And it is all scientifically possible, given the specific parameters of the story. If the writer knows that it simply won’t happen that way or, worse, can’t, then the writing is science fantasy—or just plain fantasy with a few technological details thrown in.
But it’s damn difficult for a reader with insufficient background to use the conventions and cliché locutions in order to orient himself. Without reading experience, through which you learn the protocols of the genre, you can’t tell whether you are reading good SF or bad, or fantasy that looks like SF.
Talented critics and readers have most often been led astray by their unfamiliarity with the reading protocols of SF. Their reviews and lectures often seem absurd, like someone discussing a play under the assumption that it conformed to the reading protocols of poetry. The writers and readers within the SF community who have done most of the reviewing and criticism of SF over the years have been most accurate and intelligent in their criticism and most stringently to the point.
On the other hand, the worst enemies of science fiction historically have been outside critics, often literati of stature whose taste is generally reliable in other genres, who have defended science fiction as wonderful, sloppy, energetic entertainment incapable of being good literature. The rallying cry to turn off good taste and wallow is insidious and powerful. Only one critic of substantial reputation, Robert Scholes (a leading critical theorist on the nature of narrative), has attempted to analyze science fiction prose styles to find out if and how they work—in his book Structural Fabulation (1975), he discovere
d that the prose styles function quite well, thank you, but no other critics have wanted to pay much attention to him on that point thus far.
So the level of reviewing and critical attention relating to SF outside the community is still pretty sad. You won’t find any ready and reliable guides handy to what is new and good, nor much agreement on which older works hold up outside the field. The best commentary in the field, if you can locate it, is by Brian Aldiss (Billion Year Spree [1973]); James Blish (The Issue at Hand [1964], and More Issues at Hand [1970]); Damon Knight (In Search of Wonder [second edition, 1967]); Samuel R. Delany (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw [1977], The American Shore [1978], Starboard Wine [1984]); Algis Budrys (Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf [1985]); Joanna Russ (How To Suppress Women’s Writing [1983], To Write Like a Woman [1995]); and Alexei and Cory Panshin (The World Beyond the Hill [1989]). These are all leading SF writers, and the bulk of their work lies in the back issues of SF magazines in the book reviews. No one has yet collected the essays of Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, Theodore Sturgeon, P. Schuyler Miller, and other major in-field figures. Anatomy of Wonder, second edition, New York: Bowker, 1982, edited by Neil Barron, is the first full-scale attempt at assessment, and is only a partial success. John Clute’s collected reviews (Strokes [1988] and Look at the Evidence [1995]) are the best ones covering the eighties and nineties available to date.
Let us back up, though, and distance ourselves a bit further from the present state of criticism. I stated, in my discussion of wonder, that some of the best science fiction is not particularly well written according to any set of accepted literary standards, and further, that it doesn’t matter much to the field one way or another as long as the story delivers. Recall C. S. Lewis’s characterization of the sensitive reader of myths who hardly notices the words. Well, what I have maintained is true as far as it goes but now it is high time to pursue the matter further.
SF writers, editors, even the more serious-minded chronic readers right from the days of H. P. Lovecraft and Doc Smith, through John Campbell and his Astounding renaissance, James Blish and Damon Knight, Algis Budrys and the Merril/Moorcock New Wave, to the present have always stood for a progressive rise in the literary standards. And SF, in each decade since the 1920s, has indeed been better written as a whole. There has been real and substantial progress. But in every decade there have been writers of exceptional talent and ability, some of them at the forefront of the field and some of them almost totally unnoticed, producing work equal to or better than what is generally being published at present.
Just as in the macrocosm of English and American literature, where a Herman Melville or a Henry Roth can be lost for a generation, so in the separate microcosm of the SF field can a writer be ignored for years. And as fashions change, whole groups or periods of writing from the past are reassessed. When Campbell succeeded in creating his golden age in the 1940s, an almost knee-jerk downgrading of the pulp SF of the 1920s and 1930s occurred. His standards also excluded such major talents from Astounding as Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett, who published throughout the decade in minor magazines. Even Arthur C. Clarke’s Stapledonian Against the Fall of Night and such writers as Kornbluth, Pohl, and Knight had to wait for the boom of the 1950s, with its new, broader standards, to gain major reputations. In the 1970s, most of the experimental writing of the 1960s remained out of fashion. Now, in the eighties and nineties, there are signs of further reassessment, with the 1950s ending a twenty-year reign as the “decade of classics.” By the end of the nineties, it appears that contemporary SF will be viewed as starting in the early 1960s and that everything before that will be defined as literary history, not living literature. All this must be amusing to Grand Master Jack Williamson, who is still alive and publishing new SF novels in his seventh decade in the field.
Each past change in standards has tended to broaden the field and therefore improve science fiction as a whole, drawing in new writers and challenging the established names to higher exploits. But so far, few authors recognized for ability to evoke wonder have lost much ground, gone out of print, because the people who read them at age twelve are still in the field in sufficient numbers to keep their works alive—although time passes and substantial reputations are now dwindling. (A few, such as some primitives from the Gernsback era, have almost disappeared, but even they could suddenly bloom again, as L. Ron Hubbard did in 1982 with his best-seller Battlefield Earth.) The sad fact is that for more than a decade the greatest writers of the thirties, forties, and fifties have begun to die—Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, and even younger masters such as Roger Zelazny, Terry Carr, Philip K. Dick, Avram Davidson, and John Brunner. For decades, if was as if the Golden Age writers were the Immortals, continuing to live and write and dominate the field. When the first edition of this book was published they were all alive. Now even the New Wavers are elder statesmen.
But the stunning fact is that writers no better than the average in the 1930s can and still do enter the field each year, are published repeatedly, and are building growing reputations based solely on their ability to evoke wonder. And now is the time to say it outright—you must take the intentions of the writers and the demands of the audience fully into account before you call someone a bad writer. We have gone along thus far admitting that the level of prose style of all but the finest SF is not up to the level of prose acceptable in even the slick commercial magazines (those that are surviving today). Now is the time to complete our argument: Prose that fulfills the conscious artistic intentions of the writer (however unfashionable) and meets the demands of the market and the audience cannot simply be called bad and left at that. In many science fiction stories the prose style functions perfectly in place and must otherwise be ignored. This is the real point Vonnegut is making as he speaks in the voice of Eliot Rosewater, and the unarticulated point of all those critics who say they enjoy reading science fiction that is unpretentious and sloppy and does not aspire to “literature.” As if the rubric “literature” were an award given by critics and reviewers, not by sensitive readers continuing to read it!
Let’s look at two writers whose popularity has endured for several decades and whose styles have been abominated in or out of the field: A. E. Van Vogt and Cordwainer Smith. Both have in common an adherence to the colorful, event-filled, one-damn-thing-after-another technique of writing.
Cordwainer Smith’s rhythmic, pseudopoetic ramblings wash over an allegorical (Christian) future universe ruled over by the Lords of the Instrumentality (the nobility). His self-conscious literary pose is undercut by a seeming lack of control over structure that is at once a Romantic posture and an oversentimentalized failing. Yet his stories are compelling to the SF audience for the evocative changes they ring on familiar and worn-down SF clichés. He is outrageous. More pointedly, at his most powerful he creates mysterious Poe-like images of half-realized but immensely suggestive transcendence. His reputation has been on the rise in the two decades since his death, especially since it was posthumously revealed that he was involved in foreign intrigue in China and elsewhere for the U.S. government and under his real name, Paul Linebarger, invented the field of study of psychological warfare in the 1940s. Even more striking, he was on the same literary magazine as L. Ron Hubbard in college.
Much more than Smith, Van Vogt is an insider’s hero whose work endures, but presents a direct challenge to any sympathetic discussion of SF. The well-known critic Leslie Fiedler offers the problem in his essay “The Criticism of Science Fiction” (Coordinates, p. 11) without attempting a solution:
Van Vogt is a test case … since any apology for or analysis of science fiction which fails to come to terms with his appeal and major importance, defends or defines the genre by falsifying it.
Van Vogt is one of the easiest targets for attack ever to expose himself by publishing SF. And he is the author of a body of work of classic status within the field and was of enduring influence on late
r writers as disparate as Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Charles L. Harness, and James Blish. His theory of composition, stated in “Complication in the Science Fiction Story” (as published in Of Worlds Beyond, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, ed., Chicago: Advent, 1964, pp. 53–56) is so eccentric that it bears quotation:
Think of it [the story] in scenes of about 800 words.… If you find that you have solved your scene purpose at the end of 300 words, then something is wrong. The scene isn’t properly developed. There are not enough ideas in it, not enough detail, not enough complication.
Ever since I started writing in the science fiction field, it has been my habit to put every current thought into a story I happened to be working on. Frequently, an idea would seem to have no relevance, but by mulling it over a little, I would usually find an approach that would make it usable.
Nearly all of the million words of fiction written by Van Vogt in his first decade in SF was in print in the eighties and so was most of his work from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Nearly all of it disappeared in the nineties along with the backlist of every other 1940s writer (the most famous Heinlein and Asimov works survive in print still—but that golden age is now the province of archaeology, as is that of the twenties and thirties and before), and most of the 1950s writers as well, under pressure from the evolving frontlist-driven mass market.
At the same time that Van Vogt was a recognized giant of Campbell’s golden age, certain fans such as Damon Knight (whose essay, “Cosmic Jerrybuilder,” was first published in 1945) were mounting attacks on his classics, such as Slan and The World of Null-A, on the grounds of bad plotting and poor style (and in fact bad politics—he is undemocratically in favor of monarchies and elite social classes). Knight’s essay, reprinted and expanded in the fifties and again in the sixties (in In Search of Wonder), gained in influence as Knight became the premier critic and reviewer of the fifties and a leader in the battle for higher standards. No one has taken Van Vogt seriously as a writer for a long time now. Yet he was read by SF readers for four decades and some of his work may survive.
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