Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition)

by David G. Hartwell

  Among the large number of professionals who have become professionals after spending time in fandom, a great many have maintained active status in fandom throughout their careers by simply continuing their fannish activity, along with their professional careers. A few, such as Wilson Tucker, Ted White, and Robert Bloch, are perhaps more famous in the SF field as fans than as authors, in spite of long and distinguished professional careers. This intimate connection between fan and professional, as we have noted earlier, is one of the significant factors generally unknown to outsiders and so has ordinarily made the SF field difficult or impossible to understand. Fandom is a kind of invisible empire, unless you know how to look at it. Again, I am reminded of Thomas Pynchon’s “undergrounds” in The Crying of Lot 49, mentioned in Chapter 1.

  Perhaps the best way for an outsider to approach an understanding of the interaction of fans and professionals in the SF field is to overstate the case and say that the fans are the peers of the writers and editors, and exert steady peer-group pressure on them to conform to the standards and traditions of SF and to raise those standards in particular ways. Even the professional writers who come from the ranks of SF readers, not fandom, are rapidly made aware of fandom and take it into account when thinking about the audience for their works. There are cases of professionals, such as Barry N. Malzberg, who deny any influence from fandom and deplore its standards. Yet even they are conscious of fandom and sensitive to it. Writers who are totally unaware of fandom and publish SF, while they may reach a fair audience, in turn tend to be ignored or ridiculed by fans and have a harder time finding any substantial popularity among the other readers of SF. A writer who has never been a regular science fiction reader is an almost certain failure in the field, though not necessarily to outside critics and readers, for what by now must be obvious reasons.

  A present or former fan or not, the SF writer is aware of a palpable and immediate audience. She meets them at conventions, they write her letters, send her fanzines that mention her and her work, respond in a fashion and in significant numbers unknown in any other field of literature. The fans are the SF writer’s friends as well as the core of the SF audience, whose approval indicates wider support among the general readers of SF, whose disapproval is to be risked only with care and, perhaps, at great cost.

  Just as a fan is expected to respond to SF, so the writer is expected to respond to the existence of fandom. An SF writer, to gain the support of the fans, is expected to appear at conventions (although not necessarily on the formal program) and interact personally with the fans; he is expected to answer personal correspondence from fans and to participate in some manner in fan publications. As stated above, a pro can confer recognition and fannish ego gratification upon a fan merely by writing a postcard or letter of comment to a fanzine. A professional who creates a benign persona with regard to fandom is assured of widespread and long-term support from the fan community.

  Given the foregoing, it is easy to understand that one aspect of the antipathy in fandom to the growing attention that literary critics and academics have been paying to SF in the last decade or so is that such attention from outside the field must interfere with fandom’s demand upon the writers for primary consideration. This is the first substantial challenge to the primacy and authority of fandom in the history of the field. And while this attitude has never to our knowledge been articulated in fandom, the situation has been grave for a number of years now.

  Let us pass on, for the moment, to an examination of the negative aspects of fandom. The feuds and conflicts mentioned earlier and described in pompous and grandiloquent fashion in Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm are analyzed in Damon Knight’s review of the work as “European power politics in a hatbox—scaled down, but still a politics of force, deceit and treachery. The same types emerged: the Booster, the Organizer, who frequently became the Wrecker.” (Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, p. 162.) Fan politics are often bitter and divisive. In 1939, on the occasion of the first World SF convention in New York, six leaders of the Futurians, a prominent fan club, were refused admittance (including Donald A. Wollheim, C. M. Kornbluth, and Frederik Pohl) in a political act that is remembered with rancor to this day. Fan politics is a serious game and the losers sometimes pay inordinately.

  To an outsider who sees fandom as nothing more than a time-consuming hobby, there is no more sense in it than collecting back issues of the National Geographic or, worse, nostalgia items. Fan activity is indeed time-consuming, an expense of money and effort for little tangible gain (except for that small percentage of fans who may some day catapult into the ranks of professionals). Furthermore, to an outsider viewing the attendees of an SF convention, it might well appear that to fall among fans is to fall among evil companions.

  The first substantial attack on fandom from within the ranks came in the late 1940s, in F. Towner Laney’s huge (130 mimeographed pages) and bitter memoir of his life as an SF fan and how fandom had hurt his chances to be normal and successful: Ah! Sweet Idiocy! (Los Angeles: self-published, 1948). Fandom, as described by Laney, is a hotbed of perverts, ineffectuals, and other worthless creatures, vile companions who distract one from the worthwhile pursuits of career and stable human relationships. The attitude is that fandom as a way of life is dangerous to youth and can destroy the proper and normal perspective of an adult upon the priorities of reality. Like the Snark, it will eat you, but not vanish away.

  After much fuss, fandom in the early fifties seems to have granted many of Laney’s points and, as a corrective, gotten sillier and more fannish—much less of the open political battling in and among clubs has been reported from that time on, only more personal feuds. But is this better? You don’t have to look far into fandom for evidence of childishness, petulance, name-calling, paranoia, and nearsightedness. In fact, without the delineation I have offered of the substantial influence of fandom on the SF field, it would be impossible to see anything beyond self-aggrandizing cliques treating each other badly. The legacy of feuds is in reality a legacy of competition for ego gratification, for success on the only terms recognized by fandom (“egoboo”).

  The world of fandom does not so much reject the values of mundane society as it transmutes them into a system of approval and reward—a replacement for the everyday approval and reward systems that have been unavailable otherwise to the SF writer and the fan until the last few years. As I have shown earlier, until quite recently no SF writer could expect from society either social or literary critical approval for practicing his profession, or any substantial money (certainly not enough to equal an average middle-class income). What Laney did not (could not?) recognize is that to enter fandom is to accept its value system as a viable replacement for any other.

  Of course such an acceptance can be dangerous to one’s normal life in the real world. This is why so many fans leave fandom by the time they are twenty-one. Unarticulated and, perhaps, unexamined, there exists within the heart and soul of every fan a tension between the values of mundane reality and the values of the world of fandom. The best expression of this tension is in the polar-opposite acronyms coined in 1943 and still current: FIJAGH and FIAWOL (see page 272). The population of fandom is drawn from those who are discontented with reality (a quality, as I remarked earlier, of most bright teenagers). The competitive system of fandom may satisfy them, perhaps should satisfy them, only until they are able to succeed in coping with the quotidian world in terms of gaining approval and money in their chosen careers. To the fans, of course, deserters rapidly become nonpersons in the Orwellian sense—the fannish value system must be preserved. Only those fans whose ideals and interests will not permit them to commit themselves wholly to the values of middle-class life, or whose equipment for survival in the middle-class world is poor, remain in fandom.

  But while a person remains in fandom and participates in fan activities, the system allows him to rise to whatever level he can and receive his proper share of approval and reward, his name in print in fanzines,
whatever. At a time when approval is not forthcoming in everyday life, this can be soul food. Here is a challenging and serious game in which every participant wins, more or less, each according to his deserts.

  And the writers win, too. Consider: There is damn little money and critical approval available to a contemporary poet or novelist or short-story writer—perhaps one in a thousand ever even gets a book published, and then the audience is usually only one’s peers, normally silent because they too are starving for attention and money. In a system such as this, there are not even table scraps for the SF writer—except that fandom exists and offers an alternative, the only alternative in the past, and even today, for most SF writers. Until the eighties, only Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov had outgrown the economic and other boundaries of the SF field and passed beyond the approval or disapproval of fandom into the realms of best-sellerdom. The other possibility now is the legacy of the New Wave—to write works of such transcendent literary quality that critical success outside the SF field is assured (but not money and certainly not the popularity that leads to best-sellerdom). In the long run and for most writers, the approval of fandom is still a safer bet.

  Thus, to seek the approval of fandom is of course the most natural thing in the world for a writer or editor who is or was once a fan. And it is a traditional mode for the SF writer, easy to fall into. What is also evident is that fandom may well be substituting one kind of competition for another in the writing community.

  It is interesting to examine SF writers in this light. Through wide and long-term contact with the SF writing community, I can testify that some SF writers are openly competitive and some are not, and that there appears to be no direct relationship between fandom and competitiveness. Furthermore, fandom does not generally seem to think of the professionals as competitors vying for their attention and approval but rather as individuals each trying to excel and therefore be worthy. Yet on some level the fans and writers, especially the writers who have emerged from fandom, know that there is just not enough of anything to go around, so these writers go out of their way to attend conventions and win the attention of fandom, and the fan or ex-fan writers who know the ropes and have contacts are certainly best equipped to succeed in this fashion. Perhaps in some cases the personal appeal to fandom may supersede the appeal of the written SF. (This may well have been true with Robert Silverberg in the fifties and sixties, until his ambitious works of the late sixties and early seventies—his popularity in fandom certainly seems to have been based more on his persona than upon the quality of his writing.) Yet on the whole over the years, SF writers seem to have taken to heart fandom’s ideal that each writer should strive to excel in his or her own unique manner and achieve quite individual excellence—you cannot mistake the individual voice of any major SF writer for that of another.

  Will the historic relationship between SF and fandom survive the decade of the 1990s? The chances look good at this date. Certain offshoots of fandom, e.g., Star Trek fandom or Darkover fandom, may die out, or their fires burn low as did Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom in the 1970s. Or they may split off entirely from SF, as comic book fandom seems to have done. What will keep SF fandom alive is that it seems sure to stay a part of the phenomenon of the SF field, not subordinate to it (as, for instance, football fans are subordinate to football—they are just the customers). Besides, the dominant literary culture in the U.S. and elsewhere does not seem disposed to embrace SF and preempt fandom’s role as guardian of the qualities of SF.

  Many, though not all, of the chronics and omnivores who make up the wider SF audience are aware of fandom and choose not to become fans. They hear the siren call, perhaps attend a convention or two, but are able to bind themselves to the masts of their daily lives. We have described the SF world earlier as a world which sees itself as being outside the mundane boundaries of contemporary space and time, a world of readers who have attained a new and distanced perspective on the past, present, and future. Well, fandom is the nucleus of the SF world, the center of activity out of which radiate the beams that illuminate the SF world.

  Fandom, when examined only as activities, appears to be simply an aggregation of variously eccentric hobbies. But we have seen that it is actually a whole subculture with underlying unities and coherence, of primary significance to an understanding of the SF field.

  It’s fun, too. Let us not forget that SF is exciting and entertaining escape reading and fandom is similarly an escape from an unrewarding reality into a world of fun and games. The traditions of fandom allow for release of pent-up energies, for outbursts of egregious personal behavior and exhibitionism frowned upon in daily life and, conversely, for normal personal interaction with people whose daily life is bizarre or abnormal in some way (I remember meeting at conventions everything from doctors and attorneys to pornographic filmmakers—and their stars). If you are a professional librarian and feel the desire to walk around wearing a cape, sword, and G-string, go to a convention, where, according to custom, no one will notice unless to compliment you on your originality. I once accompanied a prominent Boston SF editor new to the field to her first SF convention several years back. At the “meet-the-professionals” cocktail party on Friday evening (which was combined for efficiency with the convention masquerade contest), she expressed some wonder and discomfort at the presence of two attractive women whose costumes consisted of elaborate headdresses and makeup—they were otherwise nude. In a room containing several hundred people, no one seemed to be making a fuss over the two, who walked casually and calmly through the crowd, allowing photographs and accepting admiration. This is not, I explained, a remarkable or uncommon occurrence at a masquerade in SF, although it would certainly not be acceptable at the normal professionals’ party. After several years, the editor’s jaw was still, I believe, somewhat dropped.

  Fun and games, and keeping cool in the face of anyone else’s fun and games, are the social rules for convention attendance and for fan activity. I have seen a hundred fans sit and sing till dawn in hotel lobbies, fans in sleeping bags catching naps under tables at parties (day or night), fans wandering in drunken gaggles through motel corridors at 5 A.M. seeking the last open party, fans in deep and serious conversation with a favorite author, fans by the hundreds stripping and jumping in a hotel pool at midnight while members of the convention committee coolly explain to the hotel security officers that this is just a little swimming party and will be supervised. Within very liberal bounds, anything can happen at a science fiction convention—which is part of the fun.

  The people you play with are an essential facet of your social life. The sense of community within the SF field, especially among fans and professionals, is founded upon years of the social life of conventions and other fan gatherings, large and small. The fans and professionals eat together; drink together; play together (sleep together, exclude one another, criticize one another); act in some ways as an enormous extended family, complete with poor relations, rebellious children, and dim-witted second cousins.

  What fandom has done on a social and cultural level for or to the writers in the SF field is to provide them with a paradigm of the life of the writer quite different from the two major paradigms available to all other writers outside SF: the life of the artist (working in isolation from the marketplace to achieve art; supported by the academy, by grants, by awards, perhaps by the admiration of peers) and the life of the commercial writer (after an apprenticeship, writing books and stories or articles primarily for money for big publishers according to the dictates of the marketplace, sometimes actually achieving enough fame to qualify for mention in People magazine). Fandom has achieved a redefinition of success and reward for most SF writers.

  The life of the SF writer is a life of continual socializing and communication with a rather large audience of loyal and vocal readers together with the majority of other writers working in the field. The response of these people to a writer’s work is always in
the forefront of his consciousness and may even be the controlling factor in his writing. He feels that he belongs to the same community as all the others, no matter what the personal or professional or aesthetic differences. Most SF writers develop personae in the field identifying them with one of the two mainstream life-style types, but these personae are not (with few exceptions) recognized outside the field and so these writers are actually living the life of SF writers according to the paradigm fandom has established, until or unless they reject the field entirely (as, for instance, Kurt Vonnegut did in the late 1950s). The SF life-style may be the keystone holding the SF field in place and separating it from other genres of contemporary writing.

  But the life-style is also restrictive and not to the taste of some writers. Many SF writers, including John D. MacDonald, Richard McKenna, and Donald E. Westlake, abandoned SF entirely in favor of the success of the commercial writer. (No one I know has yet abandoned SF to live the artist’s life, since you can have all the disadvantages of an artist’s life and still remain an SF writer—although perhaps one might say that a majority of the New Wave writers of the sixties did in fact attempt the life of the artist seriously for a time.)

  Fandom, then, is at the center of a discussion of SF, without which all else flies apart. Fandom is what makes for SF a world of difference.

  IV

  THE FUTURE OF SF

  11

  “LET’S GET SF BACK IN THE GUTTER WHERE IT BELONGS”

  —Dena Benatan

  LITERARY CRITICS have a private language that they have developed over the last century, a large and precise technical vocabulary that allows them to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently, just like the medical shorthand surgeons use in the operating room or the specialized diction of philosophers. This private language is opaque to outsiders; in fact, it excludes everyone but insiders.