The Engines of the Night

by Barry N. Malzberg

Silence.

  1980: New Jersey

  Give Me That Old-Time Religion

  SCIENCE FICTION DOES NOT—PERHAPS IT CANNOT—depict the future. What it does, as A. J. Budrys pointed out back in 1969, is to offer sentimentalized versions of the past or brutalized versions of the present transmuted into a template of the familiar. The future cannot by definition be portrayed; it will require a terminology and ethos which do not exist. Perhaps true science fiction, an accurate foreshadowing of the future if such a thing were at all possible, would be incomprehensible. It is important to point out, however, that as futurologists not only our devices but our credentials are miserable.

  It is true—a notorious example—that as late as 1967, no science fiction writer had understood that the landing on the moon would be tied into the media and that it would be observed by several hundred million people including that long-distance station-to-station caller, Richard M. Nixon. None of us. The closest any came was Richard Wilson in a short-short story, “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer,” in a 1965 issue of Galaxy, which speculated that the first landing on Mars, witnessed by most of the population of this planet on Intermedia, would expose the astronauts to the hypnotic and mind-shattering powers of the Secret Martians, who would turn the minds of most of us to jelly.

  Not such bad thinking for fifteen hundred words, this story, and handled with Wilson’s customary lucidity and élan (he is a charter member of the science fiction club larger than Hydra and even more filled with bitterness: Underrated Writers, Inc.), but it had very little to do with the conditions that NASA and the networks were jointly evolving, and the question of mass audience was strictly for the subplot, a means of setting up the satiric point. Wilson takes the NASA-CBS I Saw It Coming Award but only by default, and since the award pays only in honor (of which NASA and CBS have offered us little), Wilson will have to be content with his membership in the club and 1969 Nebula for “Mother to the World.”

  For the rest of us—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, and the sixties visionaries too, the movers and shakers who were attempting to write Street (as opposed to Street & Smith) Science Fiction—no honor whatsoever and no excuse. That a genre built upon visionary format whose claim to public attention through the early decades had been based upon its precognitive value should have utterly failed to glimpse the second or third most significant social event of the decade is—one puts on one’s tattered prophet’s robes—quite disgraceful.

  Pointless to blame the readership. The readership may not be interested in the visionary, the dangerous, the threatening, or the difficult, that is true, but their expectations have been formed by what has been given them. Great writers make great audiences. The solemn truth is that as NASA and the networks conspired to reduce the most awesome events of the twentieth century to pap between advertisements and other divertissements, most of us were in the boondocks, slaving away on our portions and outlines and our little short stories, trying to figure out what new variation of Eric Frank Russell we could sneak by Campbell, what turn on a 1947 plot by van Vogt out of a 1956 novel by Phil Dick might work this one last time for Fred Pohl’s Galaxy. While we slogged on through the mud of the sixties, bombs bursting in air, recycling the recyclable for one thousand dollars in front money, the liars and technicians were working ably to convert the holy into garbage and a damned good job they (and we) made of it too. The liars and the technicians put the space program out of business by the mid-seventies. Perhaps it might have been different if we had stayed on the job . . . but then again we all know that science fiction has almost nothing to do with the future so why feel guilty? I don’t. And “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer” is still around somewhere for proof that we had a handle on it, so there.

  No guilt at all. I was just one of the boys.

  1980: New Jersey

  SF Forever

  I HAVE LITTLE IDEA WHAT THE SCIENCE FICTION of the eighties will be like—as we live through, it will seem to be very much like the science fiction of the year just before—but I have a pretty good grasp of the somber nineties. Here is how it will be: mass-market science fiction will edge toward fantasy. Fully 75 percent of novels published under the label will be what we would have defined five years ago as fantastic; some of these books will do extraordinarily well and others will not but there will be little to choose qualitatively. The books that will do well simply will have larger print orders and publicity, which may in certain cases go to television or movie theaters. Series books or novels set against a common background will predominate and writers will (with one another’s consent and cooperation) use one another’s backgrounds freely. Some series will originate with publishers who will farm them out to various writers and pay flat fees, hold the copyrights. “Hard” or technologically rigorous work will occupy the same small corner of the market that “literary” science fiction does now.

  “Literary” science fiction and many backlists will be in the hands of the specialty publishers whose present-day precursors will in the nineties be as influential as medium-sized paperback firms are now. The specialty publishers will range from one-person operations not unreminiscent of the Gnome or Shasta of the fifties to large and well-staffed organizations that will be subdivisions of conglomerate divisions; the arm for “serious” literature. These specialty publishers in the aggregate will be responsible for hundreds of books a year—the major publishers, amongst them, will do only forty or fifty—and sales will range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. All of the larger specialties will have experimented with trade and mass-market paperbacks and will now and then do well enough to bring a title to the attention of the majors, who will do a big edition.

  The audience for written science fiction—a hard base of half a million with another two or three million who can be brought in for an occasional title—will remain stubbornly, inflexibly unchanged. This constant will be the barrier against which the specialists will time and again collide and which will cause the weaker publishers to fail since the audience will, once again, be unable to expand with expanded titles.

  There will be about as much work of quality as always but none of it will come from the mass-market publishers.

  The magazines and the science fiction short story will have little role in the market. The few magazines will serialize some mass-market novels and give some new writers a marginal audience for their first attempts. These two or three magazines will all be owned by the same conglomerate, will be under the same editorship, and will pay approximately the word rates which prevailed in the nineteen-fifties.

  1980: New Jersey

  What I Won’t Do Next Summer, I Guess

  HERE ARE A SELECTION OF PLOT IDEAS guaranteed unsaleable in the science fiction market of yesterday, today, and any variant of tomorrow. Sorry to bring this up again, folks, but the end is nigh and one must have a unity of vision:

  An intelligent culture on a far planet is not carbon-based but perhaps silicone- or silver-based. There is no “organic” deterioration after death and therefore these creatures make no distinction between the living and the dead. The dead remain in residence, are fornicated with, talked to, manipulated, used as the subjects of advertisements, given responsibilities (obviously met poorly; they are shiftless) for work, child care, and so on.

  The dead are obviously less efficient at most of these tasks than the living but they are humored and tolerated as the senile or extremely aged are in our own culture, and because they do not register organic collapse, their presence is not actively unpleasant. In fact, it is kind of reassuring. As well as possible the inhabitants of this culture put a good self-denying face on the inadequacies of the dead just as Victorians would cover up for batty, incontinent relatives on their premises.

  A group of missionaries from a carbon-based culture land on this planet, survey the situation, and are of course horrified. Gently but very firmly they teach the natives the difference between the “dead” and the “living” and the necessity to “bury” and “put away t
he memory of” the dead.

  Slowly their message works its way through the culture and slowly the natives reach an understanding of the difference between “life” and “death.”

  Needless to say they are filled with spiritual terror when they realize that the dead are quite different from them and that this difference has to do with the extinction of consciousness. The culture in the face of death’s apprehension goes mad, becomes dysfunctional, the natives turn upon the missionaries and kill them and then begin to slaughter one another. The only way to control death, they surmise, is to administer it themselves. (If “death” is a conscious, perpetrated condition rather than an unhappy inevitability, it can be manipulated, threatened, offered, or denied.) The culture becomes a charnel house; it becomes centered around the rituals and ordeals of murder.

  It does not last much longer.

  * * *

  A Messianic figure in an alternate or future civilization is homosexual and preaches that only through conversion to homosexuality can the present human condition change and the time of Revelation and Reconstruction begin.

  The reason for this is practical: universal homosexuality will cancel procreation and bring the ongoing generations to a halt, ending humanity within about a century. This Messiah has prophetic conviction and textual justification; he overcomes all of the manifold social resistance and brings about that era which soon enough will bring to fruition all of the prophecies mysteriously locked within the Book of Daniel.

  * * *

  A science fiction editor who hates the field and is incapable of understanding it rejects every promising writer and idea which is presented, preferring to deal with a tight circle of friends, who in return for the editor’s contracting for debased material, offer kickbacks. The relative success of the line and the kickbacks enable the editor to amass a sufficient amount of money to become a publisher, where he continues his policies successfully until his house sets the standard for all science fiction. He is finally undone by his success: expansion means that he must hire staff editors, the editors merrily interpose themselves between the publisher and the writers and they conduct their business exactly as the publisher does, which is to say that they buy from friends and take kickbacks. Unfortunately, several of the manuscripts that slip through are of sufficient originality and technical facility to sell badly. The publisher loses his commanding edge in the market; by the time he fires his staff and seizes control, it is too late, his imprint has lost its reliability and predictability for the audience, and before he can sell to a conglomerate he goes bankrupt. His third wife takes their remaining assets and leaves him. He contracts boils.

  (It is the template which is the problem here. Make the product matter transmitters rather than novels and you might sell this. To a friend. For a consideration.)

  1980: New Jersey

  Come Fool, Follify

  THE EDITOR AND I WERE TALKING ABOUT large science fiction conventions. Editors and writers, fans and mistresses who have hated one another, some of them for forty years, come by the thousands and dwell in the same space for three days. Old passions, old griefs; it must be understood that envy and recrimination in science fiction are higher per capita than anywhere except, possibly, the reform wing of the New York Democratic Party. “It doesn’t mean anything, though,” the editor said calmly, “if these people were really serious, they’d kill each other.”

  The capsulization of science fiction. In print and behind one another’s backs we33 will revile, condemn, curse, and whisper scurrilities of the most urgent sort: face to face we are mild and reasonable individuals. Old enemies buy one another fresh drinks; new lovers and old whisper confidences in the corners. Publishers of venomous fanzines will ask writers for autographs. As the editor said, if we were serious, we would almost certainly kill but the key to science fiction—perhaps for all I know the key to the Ultimate Mystery—is that it is not a serious field at all. In its gnarled little heart it is, in fact, frivolous.

  The nature of the form counsels frivolity. Consider the reader’s slack-jawed wonder: faster-than-light travel, haunting sea beasts on the jovian plain, mutiny on the Antares bypass, alternate and mysterious worlds in which dragons can fly and understand Elizabethan English . . . and then it is time for dinner, the chemistry assignment or the subway transfer. Escape reading, you know. If the reader were to really deal with this material on the level apparently offered, he would be quite unable to make the changes: how can one carry on even the gestures of one’s life if one is rocketing over Jupiter astride a sea beast? One reads science fiction—even at the age of eight one had better read it this way—in contract; just kidding you know. Not to be taken straight. The same failsafe factor seems to operate within the science fiction reader34 as within the American consumer; no one really believes all those ads, you know. One could go quite insane if one accepted the vision of America squeezed through the interstices of automobile, deodorant, or cosmetic commercials. Everyone over the age of two (might it be one?) in the United States knows that ads are . . . well, just ads. As science fiction is just science fiction.

  Simil, the writer. Four cents a word, maybe five, portions and outlines, magazine rates, editors, special intergalactic issues, put an 8 1/2" x 11" in the machine and let it go. Whoops! and a flight to Mars. Whee! and an invasion of the capitol by the hired assassins of Merm. Whap! and a parallel universe in which time runs contrawise rather than causally. And how much of this can I get done before dinner, and is New Dimensions paying on acceptance these days? The first fine exhilaration of youth becomes, with any kind of persistence at all, the routine of middle age; if it did not, if one began to dwell in these universes, take the Merm seriously, incur a deep sense of obligation to imbue the imagined circumstance with the consequence that one knows in the real—35

  The effects of writing science fiction in quantity and over a period of time have been amply discussed, the carryover is not insignificant and the damages are evident. One does, as a science fiction writer, tend to hate a little more richly, cleave a little more tightly, recriminate somewhat more sensationally . . . but only up to a point and quickly beyond that lassitude sets in. It is one thing to despise the old colleague who stole your plot idea from a forgotten Ace Double and got it into hardcover; it is another thing to plot against the wretched editor who bought that book and rejected your own while also making love to your ex-mistress and blackening your name around town; it is another to come up against the swine in the hotel bar36 and deal with the situation. A handclasp will suffice and a word of cheer; after all, the son of a bitch may be back in the market someday. Your old colleague who is somewhere upstairs drunkenly fornicating with your ex-wife has been doing this kind of thing since 1953 and you are only one of his victims—he’s done more to others, and besides if you recall, you did the same thing to him when you swiped that Worlds of If short story idea, a really lovely pivot for your own 1964 Pyramid novel. Who knows what he might be saying about you? Besides, the old bastard is consultant now for a medium-sized paperback firm and your agent has some portions and outlines on offer; he might even buy them. Then again, he might not. It depends upon who is on his good side in the next month or so and this convention is certainly no time to throw down the gauntlet. Is it? Let’s be reasonable now. Besides, a scene would only make the future more difficult; there’s no end to this, you see, for a lifetime he and you and the editor (at least until the editor is fired) are going to be showing up at these things and a Philadelphia riot would only lead to a coda in Boston, a recapitulation in St. Louis, a scherzo and variations in London two years from now.

  Better to take your losses and live with them. You do—one does, after all—have to deal with these people for the duration; they have been around. All of you have been around since 1953; why should anything change now? Or next week? You take your losses, you stick the editor with the bill, you look for a new mistress or a now unembittered older one. You go through the weekend and you go home, wherever that may be. If
you were serious, yes, you might kill the bastards but then again, if they were serious, they would kill you, right? Every loss a gain; every action a reaction, the great mid-century vision of the middle class and science fiction is nothing—anyone who ponders this for five minutes will see it clearly—if it is not a middle-class phenomenon.

  1980: New Jersey

  The Engines of the Night

  SCIENCE FICTION IS THE ONLY BRANCH OF LITERATURE whose poorer examples are almost invariably used by critics outside the form to attack all of it. A lousy western is a lousy western, a seriously intentioned novel that falls apart is a disaster . . . but a science fiction novel that fails illuminates the inadequacy of the genre, the hollowness of the fantastic vision, the banality of the sci-fi writer . . . this phenomenon is as old as the American genre itself (in fact for the first quarter century post-Gernsback, outside media would not even review science fiction), and as fresh as the latest rotten book.

  Not so long ago, a weak and overextended bildungsroman by a newer writer was attacked spitefully in a publication called The Soho Weekly News; Jonathan Rosenbaum used the first two thirds of the review to vilify and the rest to conclude that sci-fi writers could not deal with contemporary reality because they apotheosized machinery over mortality, stripped humanity in their fiction of dignity and drained it of the capacity to feel. In so saying, Rosenbaum was not only indicating complete ignorance of most of the serious work done in science fiction since the early 1950s but was patently using a novel by a young writer of indifferent reputation (and no particular standing within the field) to vilify the genre.

  The unhappy case is typical. Kingsley Amis wrote a quatrain about it once upon a time. In a 1972 book of literary essays, Rediscoveries, devoted to the favorite lost novels of writers of reputation, Walker Percy, in cautiously praising Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (a novel which has never been “lost” to science fiction but which has been continuously in print since its first appearance in 1959), took the most elaborate pains to point out that although the novel had the trappings of “pop sci-fi” it had a more serious undercurrent, that elements of mysticism and religious ambivalence verging on apostasy (subjects close to Percy’s own artistic sensibility) were handled in a fashion more complex than was usually the case in science fiction . . . and that the novel might actually reward study by serious readers who would otherwise find science fiction of little interest. It was almost as if Percy had to balance off his enthrallment with Canticle against a real fear that unrestricted praise, read in the wrong quarters, could threaten his credentials as a “serious” writer. Never has so trembling a testimony been given a novel. (Reminiscent of the eulogy hesitantly offered for the Meanest Man in Town, “well,” the minister said after a long, awkward pause, “he never missed a spittoon.”) And in a review of my own Guernica Night some years back Joyce Carol Oates took pains to make clear that the novel’s concerns were, um, spiritual and metaphysical and that its virtues came from it being unlike the science fiction to which she was accustomed.