Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  I had read Poe and Verne and Twain and Stephenson and Dunsany and Bierce and Wells and Cabell. I had read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula (I'd read his ghost stories also), and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and Leroux's Phantom Of The Opera and Machen and Coppard. But I had never heard of science fiction.

  I don't believe that it grew very much in our town. I missed it because it was growing out of big city asphalt and concrete, out of megapolitan blocks and neighborhoods. When we moved to Tulsa in 1920, hardly any of the residential streets were paved, and there were still cotton-tail rabbits to be caught in every block. Our own street wasn't paved till I was twelve years old,. I have never lived in big city circumstances where this exotic and sometimes ratty growth appeared.

  What did I miss by not having early encounters with SF? I had a reasonably happy childhood and do not believe that I was deprived in any way. And going back years later and reading the early pulps leaves me puzzled. Where was it, where was it? It had the air of being very near, but there wasn't much of it between the covers of those magazines. There was more of it on the covers themselves.

  Lots of those who carry on about their early encounters with SF have recounted their embarrassment at the gaudy and garish covers, have told about themselves hiding the magazines when they carried them home, on account of their gaudiness. Yeah, and then opening the things in private to treasures unimaginable. But I suspect that this is a stereotyped false memory. I doubt if there was any case of it actually happening.

  The covers were the best part of those old magazines, by a long ways. The covers were ‘right’. And I can understand the opening of the magazines in feverish anticipation of magic and adventure and treasure. I can understand doing it two or three times. But how dumb the kids must have been to keep doing it when they found out that none of those things were on the inside of those magazines. Well, at the very least there must have been an ambiguity (apparently forgotten by the persons after they have become adults) every time it was done. The contents of those things didn't assay at all high in treasure or magic or adventure, nor even very high in interest. It must have taken a lot of self-hypnotism to plow through one of them.

  The only analogy I can think of is of an old moth-eaten magician, bumbling and on the drink, trying to get through an old repertoire of tricks and busting on every one of them. He has the patter, but it is thick-tongued and inconsequent now. And yet people still watch him with anticipation and hope, for most of those people are boys, and they have a hunger for magic.

  And there's something else. Though the moth-eaten magician is always there, busting every day, he has a genial cousin who passes through town at irregular intervals, and this cousin performs real magic with real style. (This is the first piece of a parable: pay attention.)

  And there is still the air of magic about old moth-dust himself. There is still the rumor that he can do magic, that he has done it, that he may do it again. Well, he's the only magician in town, and if magic should happen to come along where else would it light?

  And there was the smell of magic in those magazines. It wasn't there to direct scrutiny, but there were glints of it that might be caught by the corners of the eyes and ears. And there were clear, though crude, pictures of magic on the covers.

  And there were those talented and genial kindred. They weren't surnamed ‘science fiction’, but there was a family resemblance. They appeared sometimes in the magazines themselves as reprints. And some of the magazine readers made discovery of them. Many of them were British, and even continentals. But some were American. Even Rube Goldberg's gadgetry-satire cartoons were consanguine to the newly-named science fiction. And the books, the books, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Hilton's Lost Horizon, Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Gibbon's The Red Napoleon, Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots. There were things by Kafka and Don Marquis and Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis and Olaf Stapledon; they were all very good, and they were not called science fiction. George Bernard Shaw wrote a number of plays, from Doctor's Dilemma (1906) through Press Cuttings, Back to Methuselah, Apple Cart, On The Rocks, Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Geneva, Farfetched Fables (1949), that were very close kindred to science fiction. But they were not called science fiction. They were called Minor Shaw, which was almost always better than Major Shaw. Lon Chaney films were very close to science fiction. A lot of these things were dripping with wonder and magic. They were exciting. They were elegant and weird at the same time.

  Why then did virtue go out of the related things when the name science fiction was applied to them? And why did the kids pass up all the good stuff that was all around them and dig out the tedious and worthless stuff? Perversity, sheer perversity.

  For there was no virtue in the Amazing Stories that Hugo Gernsback began to publish in 1926, other than that in the reprints of Poe and Verne and Wells that he included in early issues. And there was no virtue in Science Wonder Stories that he began to publish in 1929.

  Some of the Gernsback writers, Leinster and Williamson, wrote good stories (especially novels) later, but they didn't write anything good for Gernsback. Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales beginning in 1923 often had good stories in it, but they didn't fall under the ‘science fiction’ stigma.

  Things moved on for a decade or so. But before you move on with them, tear the covers off those old Gernsback magazines and save them. But burn the magazines themselves in unquenchable fire.

  Astounding Stories of Super Science Fiction began to publish in January of 1930. Among the writers for Astounding were E.E. Smith and John W. Campbell along with some of the old Gernsback writers.

  Then, in 1938 (sharp intake of break here and rather stereotyped gestures of anticipation) Campbell became editor of Astounding, and the so-called ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ began.

  In 1939, Campbell became editor of Unknown also, but I believe that the Campbell nation rates this as a little bit less golden than Astounding.

  Wait a minute. I've got a bright red corduroy shirt and it makes me brave when I wear it. There. I've got it on. I'm ready.

  Aldiss wrote in ‘Billion Year Spree’ “It is easy to argue that Hugo Gernsback was one of the worst disasters who hit the science fiction field.” Well wrote.

  But it is probably dangerous to argue that John W. Campbell was the worst disaster ever to hit science fiction (Oh that damn screaming! It's so predictable, so half-witted, so loud!), and yet it's quite true.

  Campbell had such writers as Van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov, Horace Gold, Sturgeon, Ron Hubbard, Hal Clement, Russell, Simak, Kuttner, Bester, Sheckley, Del Rey, de Camp, Poul Anderson, and fifty others who were and are indistinguishable from one another. And the named ones are said to be the best (really most of them weren't) not the worst of the Campbell writers. But none of them were very good. It wasn't just that the Emperor hadn't any clothes. He hadn't any skin even. He was plain obscene.

  My own idea of what happened is that Campbell extracted the brains of all of them, put them in bottles (I wonder whatever happened to that row of bottles), and inserted a programmed roll into each head.

  So they were programmed, and some of them still are. The programming was fairly good, though it did make them too much alike. Well, that is one explanation for the mysterious, but not very interesting, actions of that diminishing bunch of fellow.

  Another explanation which I have heard is that Campbell had a strong personality and will and that he impressed them on a number of writing persons of flaccid personality and will.

  And the high works of these impressed persons are known as the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. Aw reptile dirt, they were no such thing! They are tedious and pompous. And yet there is a certain competence and fair narrative flow in the way these practitioners manipulated the small repertoire of stories that were allowed to them.

  Van Vogt and Alfie Bester took a walk from it for a few years, and so they partly escaped the fate. Ron Hubbard jumped the fence into greener pastures. But
most of the others were caught and branded and impressed forever.

  They were impressed with a sort of advocacy science, with the whole corpus of stereotyped falsehoods of secular liberalism, with the fascism which is the only logical conclusion to the secular liberal premise, with a look-backwards attitude. They were impressed with second-rate and outdated science and with third-rate fiction. And most of all they were impressed with Campbell's unique contributions: pomposity and tedium. But, as it happened, all these things were entering their period of popularity, so it went well with the horses in that stable.

  Lèse Majesté? No, they no longer behead people for that. All they do is boycott them and slander them and excoriate them.

  Take off whose shoes? Who is impinging on holy ground? Dammit, the Campbell corral was not so pumpkin-picking holy as all that!

  But the Campbellites still compose the establishment of science fiction. And they are all of a single clone-flesh. Wound one of them and you wound them all.

  After that things got better for several decades. Magazines began to appear outside of the Campbell authoritarianism, magazines in which stale science, stale fascism, and backward viewing were not mandatory.

  Horace Gold started the magazine Galaxy and it was the best in the field for more than a decade until Gold was forced to leave it because of his health. And Anthony Boucher with McComas started Fantasy and Science Fiction which remained good though spotty under several editors. Then a whole cavalcade of SF magazines, more than twenty of them, began to publish. There were also anthologies of original stories. There were some good novels around this time: Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Bester's The Stars My Destination, Sturgeon's More than Human, Van Vogt's Rogue Ship, Clarke's Childhood's End. Well no, none of them except Canticle could be called great novels, but these and a dozen more were good novels.

  Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted.

  This was the ‘Little Golden Age of Science Fiction’, a long-term thing that still goes on with always a few lights sparkling. It began during the fraudulent ‘Golden Age’ of the Campbellites, and it has proved to be a genuine (though always pretty thin if taken at any particular temporal cross-section) thing that adds up to excellence when it's heaped together. Its best things are very good, and the other ninety-five percent of them shrivel and die. Science Fiction can be a wonderful instrument and people are beginning to learn how to play it.

  The moth-eaten magician really could work magic, and his own regeneration was one of his best tricks. He had escaped from the dead hands of Gernsback and Campbell, and he would escape from others. The grisly and concurrent corpse had more dead hands than two (it was really a form of octopus or devil-fish) and it would continue to impose them. Well, it was never promised that we would be free of octopodes (that's the more elegant of the several plurals that dictionaries give), for no other field is free of them. But live right and trust in the moth-eaten magician and all will be well.

  I began to write in 1959 when I was already a forty-five year old man with quite a few disabilities. I write as well as I am able to, and I reach for a few things that are beyond me. I do not cheap-jack it. When the things come out a little bit dim, they are still the best that I can do.

  My first short stories were published in 1960 and my first novels in 1968. I myself thought and still think that they are very good, but they have never sold well. I have some faithful followers (I know there are at least a hundred for I know that many of them by name) who think that my works are tops, who believe that even my bad things are good. But a hundred or even quite a few hundred devoted fans won't quite get it done. The break-even point is probably nearer a hundred thousand. I go out with my lantern into the crags sometimes looking for another ninety-nine thousand. I find a few more of the wonderful folks but not the thousands of them.

  Science fiction has always promised much more than it delivers, and it has always defrauded its customers with shoddy merchandise. Well, what it promises is magic and wonder, for the SF story is wonder or it is nothing at all. But wonder by its very nature is rare and hard to come by. So if science fiction fails miserably in nineteen out of twenty it still may be a modified success, and it is.

  It remains mostly a literature of kids and for those with the hearts of kids; but there is another side of this kid stuff. There is the science fiction prototype of the untimely-aged child, of the child born old. SF has been afflicted of these. Some of the lauded SF boy wonders were senile before they were fifteen, and senility remains their stock of trade. But others of the SF people are chronologically normal; and good kids-literature is always a pleasure for everyone to read.

  SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. SF people are pushovers for every false fad and political ploy that comes along. And yet the incidence of patsies in SF likely isn't as high as it is in the general public. There isn't any really living or unfolding science in science fiction and there never has been. Even the great Wells remained a full generation behind things in his science. There are presently a few SF writers who had their other fame in the field of anecdotal science or advocacy science, but they aren't contemporary on real science. Only Hoyle and Clarke among SF writers have been real scientists, and only Clarke has been competent both as scientist and as fictioneer.

  The fact is that the fans will average out, allowing for their greater youth, as somewhat more intelligent than the professionals in the genre. This also happens in rock music, many of the professional sports, and quite a few of the popular arts.

  In new tricks, SF lags far behind main-line fiction, even behind daytime soap opera and the corniest of porn. SF is barely catching up with Joyce and Proust now. And why do they bother? John Brunner in Stand on Zanzibar in the late 1960s was just coming on to some of the techniques of John Dos Passos of the 1920s.

  Science fiction, compared to other literatures and even to wall-scratching, is uninventive, un-daring, rigid, utterly conservative (the ‘New Wave’ was more backward by about fifty years than even the ‘Old Wave’ had been); but is it necessarily inferior to all other writings, in particular to main-line writing? Is it anywhere superior to these other allied things?

  Yes it is, here and there, in quite a few ways. It will average out as good as any of them, better than most. Inventiveness and daring and flexibility are not for everybody. There are other things. Even in insufferable pomposity, SF may not be as offending as main-line writing.

  In fine detail SF is often superior to other literatures, but I have trouble finding an analogy that will set this out clearly. So I'll quote, as Aaron Copeland earlier quoted, a paragraph from Winthrop Sargeant's Jazz Hot and Hybrid (1946):

  “The jazz musician has a remarkable sense of subdivided and subordinate accents in what he is playing, even though it be the slowest sort of jazz. This awareness of minute component metrical units shows itself in all sort of syncopated subtleties that are quite foreign to European music. It is, I think, the lack of this awareness in most European ‘classical’ musicians that explains their well-known inability to play jazz in a convincing manner.”

  The analogy is very close. Science fiction does have a remarkable sense of subdivided and subordinate accents that main-line writing usually lacks. This awareness of minute component noumenal units shows itself in all sorts of syncopated subtleties that are quite foreign to main-line writing. It is, I think, the lack of this awareness in most main-line writers that explains their well-known inability to write science fic
tion in a convincing manner.

  Jazz, by the way, is uninventive, un-daring, rigid, and utterly conservative compared to all other musics, particularly the classical. All it has is textured (sometimes monumental) content, and fine detail. And that might add up to more than any of the other sorts of music have.

  Hilaire Belloc once wrote that genius is only the ability to think in several different categories. If he were right, and he was partly right, then science fiction in every department of it would be crammed with geniuses. And it is a fact that science fiction people, fans, readers, writers, editors, buffs generally, are almost all of them able to think in several different categories. And not a tenth of the people outside of science fiction have this ability. This isn't necessarily a sign of higher intelligence, but it is a sign of a somewhat different kind of intelligence. And it is a property of science fiction. People who don't have this curious ability will hardly ever be interested in science fiction, and they will spit it out if it is fed to them.

  This ability is a major plus for science fiction. It may as well be incorporated here in the definitive definition:

  “Science fiction is simply the ability to think in several different categories.”

  And then there's a couple of minuses for science fiction. There is the ‘Trail of the Serpent’ syndrome. Contemporary SF is marred by a strong blend of inferior pornography. Well, SF had already been partly taken over by the Heroic Tedium people, and pornography has always been very nearly the ultimate in tedium. Some of the pushers of porn in SF even pretend that there is an element of bravery or barrier-breaking in introducing it. But there is no trace of that. Porn and SF do not go together well. They go together about like pancakes and pulpo a la gallega for breakfast. The pornography is the pulpo or octopus.