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CRAWLING HOME FROM THE FUTURE
THE WORLD OF science fiction is only one of the subworlds that contribute to our contemporary culture, from the sublime to the perverse. The effort I have expended to illuminate and clarify this particular underground and its activities has been meant to show how thoroughly the science fiction world has established itself as a significant influence upon what we may as well call the dominant culture of Western civilization.
It is in the nature of dominant cultures to assure their continued dominance by ignoring the existence of competing cultures for as long as possible or, when that is no longer possible, to attack those cultures as bad/worthless and, at the extreme limit, to integrate said culture into the dominant culture and then deny it ever existed outside. Joanna Russ’s book How to Suppress Women’s Writing gives a clear catalog of the ways in which dominance is enforced, and establishes the paradigm used on everything forbidden, including SF. The world of SF was ignored for decades and then, as we have shown, attacked as worthless for more decades. We are now in a period of transition between attack and attempted absorption, and in a period of vigorous growth within the SF world. It is not for us to say that the attempts now being made (and for the last ten to fifteen years) will not succeed in the near future. Yet considering the rather high degree of success the SF world has had thus far in the twentieth century in retaining its independence (it has already outlasted the “Beatnik” culture, which it preceded, for instance), the influence of SF is not about to abate, even though many of the images of SF are diluted or altered as they pass into general usage in our mass culture. (For example, an android, in SF, is a human simulacrum, distinct from a robot—a distinction destroyed by the “droid” R2D2 in Star Wars.) I would bet that the SF field will last as long as the technoculture (of computer nerds and the like) that considers SF its own favorite reading. And that culture is stronger in the 1990s than it was in the seventies and eighties—William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the most revered text (and the style king, the Ballard of this new wave), and Bruce Sterling is the prophet (the Moorcock to Gibson’s Ballard) who explains that culture to itself.
Through examining various aspects of SF and the SF world from a general perspective, I have tried to present a portrait of the science fiction world accessible to outsiders: its history and development, its inner struggles, the face it exposes to the public. This guided tour and maps of the terrain, the description and analysis of how the elements of the SF world are related and function in place, of how SF literature relates to the culture from which it emerges, are intended to resolve into a whole the counterculture or alternate reality: the SF field, a positive alternative to the dominant culture of our world.
You have seen how the activities of the fans and the efforts of the professionals to create works for and within the field have resulted in a uniquely powerful and independent force running separate from the mainstream for sixty years but constantly flowing into it and altering its color and consistency. As stated at the outset of this book, I am not in the business of winning converts to SF. If you wish to extend your knowledge of the field by reading further in the literature, well and good. But my major thrust has been to draw attention to the fact that not only the literature but the whole SF world is there, that it exists, that its existence should be taken into account. And that this consistent and evolving world depicted and toured is neither without worth nor necessarily evil—just, certainly, different.
What next?
Science fiction is a literature and state of mind that expresses a certain edge in human history, in the evolution of Western civilization. That edge is the crest of the wave of human knowledge and power over the material world, of the belief that knowledge is power which is the driving force of technological civilization. A hallmark of SF is the attitude, “What will we do about the future, how will we make it?” Science fiction presupposes increasing human authority in and over the physical universe. It is in no way an appropriate response to the coming inhospitable reality of “what will happen no matter what we do.” It is not a literature of acceptance.
In the next decades we may expect to see science fiction reach even greater heights of popular acceptance and influence, for it is the characteristic literature of our time. But as “our time” gives way to a truly new era, we can expect to see SF vanish into the history of literature. Something tells us that the people of the future will not be as impressed with the notion of the future as we are.
For more than sixty years now, the SF field has been with us, growing in strength, breadth, and influence until it colors our whole perception of the contemporary world. Yet it is persistently seen by the world at large as a fad that mushroomed out of nowhere just the other day—as though it all started with Star Wars—and that will no doubt vanish into dust next season or the season after that. The bloom fades from the spaceship fast in our world of enthusiasms and revolutions in public tastes. But get set for a lot more SF, because our world is still changing fast, and SF is the only literature that is well prepared to respond to change.
Indeed, we may be sure that science fiction as a separate and distinguishable field will become indistinguishable from Literature with the demise of the temporary phenomenon that spawned it: the technological revolution of the twentieth century. However, that wave of power still drives our civilization and has not yet broken. Science fiction still illuminates our group consciousness to an extent only partially recognized. In the everyday world, many artists and writers totally unrelated to the science fiction field are expressing their vision partly or wholly in images from SF, sometimes powerfully, sometimes awkwardly—architects, automobile designers, and advertising executives all use images and ideas whose ultimate source is the SF world. We are living, as I stated earlier, in yesterday’s SF future.
And tomorrow will be more like science fiction than ever, like it or not. This is not a statement of advocacy but an observation of fact. For instance, the whole international online world of the Internet has been dominated from the very start by SF fans, who lent some of their fannish lingo to The Hacker’s Dictionary, and who are all over the Internet. And the Internet is the single most potent force for communication in the world today. As the use of personal computers continues to grow, more people will in effect join cyberspace. This phenomenon is already very noticeable—but then it will recede as the new technology simply becomes part of daily life in the twenty-first century, as ordinary as the telephone.
The vision of the future, the idea of a future world as a “place” at a traceable and definable distance from this point in time, the present, with certain general association clusters (things are worse versus things are better) is almost wholly an invention of the SF field, as is the idea that through extrapolation we may apply selected causes in the present to obtain certain effects in the future, and of course the idea that the future world is very different from the present. SF literature is prophetic; it may even be predictive in very specific ways.
The fans and writers in the SF field have known these facts and taken these ideas into account since the 1930s. Some of the greatest arguments in fandom in the early days were over what the people in SF could do about their perceptions of the future, especially whether there were actions in the real world to be taken to influence the future directly. Each fan and writer has responded individually to this challenge in daily life, but the SF field as a whole has consistently rejected any group actions outside the SF world (remember the amusing story of Claude Degler and his Cosmic Circle) in favor of the primary activity of the SF field: to support through fan or professional activities the creation of more and better science fiction. Outsiders may use SF or SF images and ideas of the future, but within the world of SF, the vision of the future is its own justification, its own reward.
Meanwhile, many readers have found in SF a literature filled with useful ideas that may be applied to the conduct of life in the world today: to invent, to predict, to insulate onesel
f against the waves of scientific and technological change that sweep continuously across the sands of the twentieth century. It does no harm to the SF world to use its literature for your own purposes. I submit, however, that you do the SF world an injustice and yourself intellectual harm if you pervert the idea of the use of SF into seeing it as a medium with a purpose.
What do I predict? In the media, sci-fi will continue to be profitable and popular throughout at least the next decade. Already multitudes of projects are in the works to capitalize on the successes of the last decade. (Star Wars and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park have been the most profitable films of all time to date; Blade Runner is now widely regarded as perhaps the most important film of any kind of the 1980s; Star Trek, a failed TV show of the sixties, turned into one of the most phenomenally successful properties of the seventies and eighties, and is a whole media industry by itself in the 1990s, with a string of nearly a hundred best-selling tie-in novels, films, associated TV shows, and a rosy future.) You are going to be seeing a whole lot more sci-fi. And if we may extrapolate from the past, the consistent presentation of science fictional images will project these images into our cultural consciousness and continue to influence our perceptions of reality.
The essential response of the SF field has been to create more and better SF. Keep it light, keep it entertaining, keep it changing—the only escape is into visions of possibilities as yet unimagined, of what we will do about it when the time comes. Some SF stories predict solutions. Others warn, “This is what it will be like unless something is done now.” But most stories continue to play visionary games, and this is the mainstream of the SF field.
Science fiction is criticism of reality. More and better SF is being written and published now than ever before. The community is vigorous, active, larger than ever before.
The golden age of science fiction is still the present.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY OF THE ideas incorporated in this book are drawn selectively from the fanzines, reviews, and editorials of the last seventy years, and often from the decades of speeches and panel discussions at SF conventions and late-night personal conversations with most of the names mentioned in the text. Particularly important to the evolution of my thoughts on science fiction have been my continuing discussions with Gardner R. Dozois and Charles N. Brown over the past fifteen or twenty years. I wish to acknowledge their special contributions.
Most of all, however, for the past thirty-two years I have been in intense and continuing discussion with Paul Williams about the SF field. It was our joint idea to embody our thoughts on SF in this book, and Paul was present to comment on every page as it came from the typewriter. As special editor and collaborator, this is Paul’s book as much as mine. It still surprises us that I was the one to put the words on paper. Thank you, Paul.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS, CRITICISM, AND HISTORY
At the time of the initial drafting of this book, I was a completist in the SF field in the nonfiction area. As of 1979, I owned and had read or skimmed every book published on SF or related topics, and had furthermore skimmed every article in all the journals, and had read most of the book reviews for the previous twenty years. By the early 1990s I was still reading book reviews, skimming some of the journals but skipping most critical works and reading only the literary histories and bibliographies. I had also become a consultant on many of the reference volumes. The question is not, then, one of listing my sources but of listing for your benefit those works that you should know about to investigate SF further.
A. Two outstanding general reference works:
1. Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, second edition. Neil Barron, ed. New York and London: Bowker, 1981.
This is the essential one-volume guide to books in the SF field. The third edition, 1994, is updated in the contemporary section (it covers some newer books) but is inferior in some other respects—it is otherwise shorter, eliminating for instance all international information.
2. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Peter Nichols, general ed. New York: Doubleday, 1979. In 1993 a rewritten second edition appeared in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s), twice as long and twice as good, edited by Nichols and John Clute. This is the essential one-volume guide to people, events, books, etc. For the initiated, this is the best book to own. But you have to know what you are looking for and who wrote what before you can use it easily. A CD-Rom version is available from Grolier.
B. Criticism and History:
1. In Search of Wonder, second edition. Damon Knight. Chicago: Advent, 1967. All informed discussion of the SF field begins here.
2. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Brian W. Aldiss. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Witty, ironic, iconoclastic, knowledgeable “history” of the field that promulgates the theory that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, rather than the works of Poe or Verne, is the first true work of SF, in part because it in particular leads up to him and his friends. The revised and expanded edition (Trillion Year Spree) is augmented by many plot summaries but drops the ironic subtitle and is otherwise not superior to the original.
3. Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. James E. Gunn. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. The general facts of what the science fiction field has always seen as its history, along with loads of good pictures. The best introductory history.
4. Survey of Science Fiction Literature. 5 vols. Frank N. Magill, ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1979. This massive work contains 500 essays by 133 contributors on every book through the 1970s that anyone has ever called a major (or even moderately important) SF work. A gold mine of plot summaries and uneven criticism. A new and updated edition has been announced for the late 1990s.
5. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700–1991. 3 vols. Robert Reginald, compiler. Detroit: Gale, 1979, 1992. These oversize volumes list every book of SF or fantasy in the period covered. The second volume gives short biographies for every author listed about whom information can be found. For every reference library.
These reference and critical works contain the sum of what we know about SF. They also deliver what they promise and tell you how to find out more if you need to. The international literary history of the development of SF is only partly written even now, and much other work remains to be done. Almost every nonspecialized work on SF is merely half-good; these are among the exceptions.
SELECT GLOSSARY OF FAN LANGUAGE
The language employed by fans is a written language full of typographical tricks, contractions, acronyms, and initialese, a shorthand including coinages and borrowings from SF used as shibboleths to identify a text as a fan text and used for common communication among fans. Here are some examples loosely based on a classic fannish reference volume by Jack Speer called, of course, Fancyclopedia (1945; reprinted and expanded many times):
ANGLOFAN
a fan living in the U.K.
APA
Amateur Press Association. A group of people who publish fanzines and send them to an official editor who assembles them and mails a copy of each to each member in a regular bundle. Members comment on each other’s fanzines in a kind of group discussion.
BACOVER
the back cover of a magazine.
BHEER
beer, as in “Bheer is the only true Ghod.”
BEM
Bug-Eyed Monster. The first bit of fan slang to get into Funk & Wagnalls dictionary.
BLOG
the (nonexistent) preferred drink of fans. Fan parties and conventions often feature noxious concoctions invented for the occasion under this rubric.
CON
a gathering of fans from various localities. When the numbers are larger than a handful, short for convention.
CORFLU
correction fluid, used to correct errors on mimeograph stencils. Fan magazines are traditionally produced on
a mimeograph. (There are still fans and clubs today that treasure their mimeos and hoard mimeo paper—but most fanzines now are done on computer and then xeroxed or offset printed.)
DNQ
Do Not Quote. Indicates a secret, something not to be repeated.
EGOBOO
that which boosts the ego. The reward of fan activity, usually seeing your name in print, especially but not necessarily in a favorable context.
ET
an extraterrestrial being. (Now, of course, no longer limited to fandom since the movie.)
EYETRACKS
when you read a new book you get eye-tracks all over it and it is no longer in mint condition.
FAKE-FAN
one who hangs around with fans and enjoys their company but takes no active part in fandom and may not even be a reader of SF.
FANAC
the traditional activities of fans.
FANNISH
of or pertaining to fans. Used to distinguish a form of activity from the professional or from aspiration to the professional, or even relation to the professional. A fannish fanzine is a publication about SF fandom (not necessarily about SF at all).
FANZINE
a fan publication, an amateur magazine published by fans.
FIAWOL
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