The Engines of the Night

by Barry N. Malzberg

  Science fiction, as I say, stands alone in literature as being forced to judgment by its weaker examples, denied in praise of its best. Outside of literature there are other examples: the question of racial prejudice, for instance, parallels: the member of the minority must “be a good example of his race” and in so doing exhibits virtues which make him “not really like the rest of them at all” and the bad example sets the standard—“they’re all like that.” Modern music is like this: infrequent performances of it by the major orchestras as part of the subscription program often lead to venomous critical attacks upon the entire specter of the dissonant or atonal (Pierre Boulez might have been pressed off the podium of the New York Philharmonic for programming so much of that crazy modern junk), and contemporary painters, sculptors, or avant-garde directors of stage or film know exactly what I mean. Every weak example of the form is there to be used to pillory all of it. “Modern music,” “modern art,” “modern dance” become as indistinguishable for the infuriated critic (and by implication his audience) as does, pity its shriveled heart, “science fiction.”

  Is it because the genre is dangerous and threatening, implies a statement and view of the world which is unbearable for the unaccustomed? Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) theorizes so in an essay—afterword to her story “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” some years ago; postwar science fiction raised the possibility that our fate was uncontrollable and the machines were going to blow us out of existence, and the middle class as represented by the critics fled this insight, Oh please, oh please tell us that it is our swimming pools and martinis and mistresses and angst which make us so unhappy, not radioactive dust or the mad engines. After one brief, terrified look at genre science fiction in the early postwar period, the middle class flung it into furthest darkness and dived into the swimming pools of O’Hara’s or Cheever’s suburbs, the forests of Truman Capote or Eudora Welty’s night: they wanted no part of the possibility that technology had appropriated the sense or the control within their lives. But still within is that fear of the nihilistic aspect of science fiction to which they were briefly exposed, a nihilism—which like that of modern art, modern music, street theater or mime—suggests that none of the devices of preventative maintenance (adultery, alcohol, industry, prayer) really matter much at all.

  Which means that our worst examples (or even our mediocrities) will be used over and again as a club to beat away the form; that our best will be ignored and that all of it will be denied.

  Ah but still. Still, oh still. Still Kazin, Broyard, Epstein, Podhoretz, and Howe: grinding away slowly in the center of all purpose, taking us to the millennium: the engines of the night.

  1980: New Jersey

  Con Sordino

  I DON’T KNOW IF SCIENCE FICTION WAS EVER THE LITERATURE of revelation and deliverance they promised us (that is another essay in another time), but the cutting edge of the eighties is action-packed as they say and without a detectable position. Lords and Snow Queens voyage in pursuit of the lost castle, while on the other side of the planet sexes and social roles are surgically implanted; the hotline keeps communications with the universe at a low-key level while the voyagers can stop in Callahan’s franchises along the way, swap a few drinks and lies; out there on the further world snake charmers practice a romantic kind of medicine and so on. It is a distance from the drowned landscapes and bombed-out craters of the late sixties, the gleaming machines and obliterated souls; even the Asimovian protagonists of a decade ago had nervous tics and a sullen intimation that matters, despite technological access, were not working terribly well, but the Snow Queen and Valentine have no such problem. Matters still work, sexes can be traded in like wardrobes and time and again the Magic Snake, rising, enacts its will. “The cutting edge of the future is reasonable, not despairing,” I wrote about a year ago, but that does not quite make the case either. “The cutting edge of the future is the non-voting electorate,” might have been a little better or like one of those voters swooped upon outside the polls who, even for the sake of television, will make no statement whatsoever. “Secret ballot, chief,” these voters say, pushing the equipment aside, “none of your goddamned business. Leave me alone.”

  Not necessarily without merit. Two decades of opinion have, after all, led us to the edge of the pit where, blinking, we decided we did not like the contents very much at all; it may indeed be time, as a certain uncommunicative voter told us a while ago, to lower our voices a little. All of us. In the forties, the cutting edge of science fiction indicated that either technology would take over the world or do it in; the fifties had the same opinion of the technicians, the sixties did not, for the most part, want to have much to do with technology altogether37 and the seventies reacted to the quarreling voice of history by declaring a pox on all of them. Generalizations all, but consolidation is the key; the eighties of Lords and Queens, Hotlines and Snakes prefer to assume that the argument is settled, the landscape itself being evidence of how it was won, and to deal with the materiel itself. “He’s published half a million words,” someone I know said of a major figure of the late seventies, “and I don’t know how he feels about a single thing; I don’t know what his position is. This is not good writing or important writing.”

  I am not sure of this. J. D. Salinger, for instance, has published upward (barely) of half a million words and is a major figure still and might well take the same comment (we know how his characters feel but not he); one of the definitions of a certain kind of art might be that it is refractive or expressive, not demonstrative. The more interesting question—or at least the one that I would like to raise in this context—is as to how much the Unvoicing of the eighties might be ascribed to evolution (or devolution) of the genre itself; how much could be said to be imposed from without by sheer editorial or market forces.

  Certainly forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties H. L. Gold, Fred Pohl, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and of doom, and in the sixties Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it. Ponderous, detached social forces, the apparent inevitability of history, can be seen in another context as coming from the cynical, short-term decisions of a small, powerful cabal; this is what Emma Rothschild wrote (of the auto industry, suburban sprawl, and the death of the cities) in Paradise Lost. Science fiction is an insular field; there has never been a point in its history in America where one powerfully placed editor could not, within a short time and for the short term, wreak change simply through using his power to buy one kind of story and reject another. The group of editors who have moved to the center of science fiction publishing in the period beginning in 1975 (science fiction is no longer a magazine field, a point which I trust does not have to be argued here) have imposed, collectively and individually, their vision upon science fiction, and the eighties cutting edge may be sheer reaction. Writers—more now than ever—must go where the market is or they go nowhere at all.

  Who are these editors? Most of them (not all) have little reading background in science fiction prior to their assumption of their posts, none of them have ever written it. (The central editors of previous decades were all writers or people who had at least attempted to write in the field.) They have a scant background in the field and for many of them (again, not all) science fiction editing is a way station, an apprentice position on the way to editing something, anything, other than science fiction. Many regard the field if they regard it at all as a kind of minor league of American literature; the players may be trapped on the buses and in unheated locker rooms, most of them, but the coaches and managers whose future is not as closely linked to their skills can hope to move on. One way to move on is to win the pennant of course but that is risky and often impossible on a low team budget; a more assured way is not to make trouble.

  Not to make trouble. Conglomera
tization, the fact that these editors work for minor implements of publishing companies which are in themselves merely minor, if highly visible, parts of the conglomerates is a point that has been made often and by others than myself; the conglomeratization of publishing has had and will probably continue to have a numbing effect upon most work that does not fit neatly into the balance sheet, “literary” work, that is to say, or work of political or social controversy. But it is less a question here of censorship than of self-censorship; given only a marginal understanding of science fiction and only a superficial grasp of its history (to most contemporary science fiction editors “modern” science fiction began with Harlan Ellison, and they have only the most superficial acquaintance with the work of the forties, fifties, and even nineteen-sixties), these editors tend to publish what looks like science fiction and their view is necessarily parochial and, granted the nature of conglomeratization, not without fear. “Most science fiction editors seem mostly to seek the assurance that they are doing nothing wrong,” Samuel R. Delany writes in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, “and since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them.”

  The nature of professionalism is adaptation and there is no gainsaying that a clever and talented writer can produce work of consequence even under the greatest of strictures. (One need only to reflect for a moment upon the career of Gogol or Günter Grass.) Still it is all very wearying and energy that might be expended in other directions is simply to be applied more lucratively in the detail work; Castles and Queens and Hotlines can be depicted lovingly; snakes (outside of the Book of Genesis) are not political. One must go where the market is; in previous decades it was possible for a certain kind of science fiction writer to create a market but science fiction was then something of an outlaw. Now it is a minor subdivision of Pillage & Homogenize, Inc., presided over in almost all cases by the same group of people.

  One could find all of this reasonably discouraging and perhaps I do but Queens and Castles are reaching an audience much larger than all of the work of the previous thirty years in toto and audiences are not contemptible to any of us; never were. That all of the Queens and Castles reek of fantasy, that the lines between science fiction and fantasy are being rapidly obliterated and that the cutting edge is moving away, from science fiction as it evolved for half a century is more distressing, but that is the topic for another screed in a different time; it is the fibrillating heart of science fiction itself to which I would like to administer CPR had I but the wit, the cunning, and the cool refusal to panic.

  1981: New Jersey

  Corridors

  RUTHVEN USED TO HAVE PLANS. Big plans: turn the category around, arrest the decline of science fiction into stereotype and cant, open up the category to new vistas and so on. So forth. Now, however, he is at fifty-four merely trying to hold on; he takes this retraction of ambition, understanding of his condition as the only significant change in his inner life over two decades. The rest of it—inner and outer too—has been replication, disaster, pain, recrimination, self-pity, and the like: Ruthven thinks of these old partners of the law firm of his life as brothers. At least, thanks to Replication & Disaster, he has a brief for the game. He knows what he is and what has to be done, and most of the time he can sleep through the night, unlike that period during his forties when 4 A.M. more often than not would see him awake and drinking whiskey, staring at his out-of-print editions in many languages.

  The series has helped. Ruthven has at last achieved a modicum of fame in science fiction and for the first time—he would not have believed this ever possible—some financial security. Based originally upon a short novel written for Astounding in late 1963, which he padded for quick paperback the next year, The Sorcerer has proven the capstone of his career. Five or six novels written subsequently at low advances for the same firm went nowhere but: the editor was fired, the firm collapsed, releasing all rights, the editor got divorced, married a subsidiary rights director, got a consultant job with her firm, divorced her, went to a major paperback house as science fiction chief and through a continuing series of coincidences known to those who (unlike Ruthven) always seemed to come out a little ahead commissioned three new Sorcerers from Ruthven on fast deadline to build up cachet with the salesmen. They all had hung out at the Hydra Club together, anyway. Contracts were signed, the first of the three new Sorcerers (written, all of them in ten weeks) sold 150,000 copies, the second was picked up as an alternate by a demented Literary Guild, and the third was leased to hardcover. Ruthven’s new, high-priced agent negotiated a contract for five more Sorcerers for $100,000.

  Within the recent half decade, Ruthven has at last made money from science fiction. One of the novels was a Hugo finalist, another was filmed. He has been twice final balloted for a Gandalf. Some of his older novels have been reprinted. Ruthven is now one of the ten most successful science fiction writers: he paid taxes on $79,000 last year. In his first two decades in this field, writing frantically and passing through a succession of dead-end jobs, Ruthven did not make $79,000.

  It would be easier for him, he thinks, if he could take his success seriously or at least obtain some peace, but of this he has none. Part of it has to do with his recent insight that he is merely hanging on, that the ultimate outcome of ultimate struggle for any writer in America not hopelessly self-deluded is to hang on; another part has to do with what Ruthven likes to think of as the accumulated damages and injuries sustained by the writing of seventy-three novels. Like a fighter long gone from the ring, the forgotten left hooks taken under the lights in all of the quick-money bouts have caught up with him and stunned his brain. Ruthven hears the music of combat as he never did when it was going on. He has lost the contents of most of these books and even some of their titles but the pain lingers. This is self-dramatization, of course, and Ruthven has enough ironic distance to know it. No writer was ever killed by a book.

  Nonetheless, he hears the music, feels the dull knives in his kidneys and occipital regions at night; Ruthven also knows that he has done nothing of worth in a long time. The Sorcerer is a fraud; he is far below the aspirations and intent of his earlier work, no matter how flawed that was. Most of these new books have been written reflexively under the purposeful influence of scotch and none of them possesses real quality. Even literacy. He has never been interested in these books. Ruthven is too far beyond self-delusion to think that the decline of his artistic gifts, the collapse of his promise, means anything either. Nothing means anything except holding on as he now knows. Nonetheless, he used to feel that the quality of work made some difference. Didn’t he? Like the old damages of the forgotten books he feels the pain at odd hours.

  He is not disgraced, of this he is fairly sure, but he is disappointed. If he had known that it would end this way, perhaps he would not have expended quite so much on those earlier books. The Sorcerer might have had a little more energy; at least he could have put some color in the backgrounds.

  Ruthven is married to Sandra, his first and only wife. The marriage has lasted through thirty-one years and two daughters, one divorced, one divorced and remarried, both far from his home in the Southeast. At times Ruthven considers his marriage with astonishment: he does not quite know how he has been able to stay married so long granted the damages of his career, the distractions, the deadening, the slow and terrible resentment which has built within him over almost three decades of commercial writing. At other times, however, he feels that his marriage is the only aspect of his life (aside from science fiction itself) which has a unifying consistency. And only death will end it.

  He accepts that now. Ruthven is aware of the lives of all his colleagues: the divorces, multiple marriages, disastrous affairs, two- and three-timing, bed-hopping at conventions; the few continuing marriages seem to be cover or mausoleum . . . but after considering his few alternatives Ruthven has nonetheless stayed married and the more active outrage of the earlier decades has receded. It all comes back to
his insight: nothing matters. Hang on. If nothing makes any difference, then it is easier to stay with Sandra by far. Also, she has a position of her own; it cannot have been marriage to a science fiction writer which enticed her when they met so long ago. She has taken that and its outcome with moderate good cheer and has given him less trouble, he supposes, than she might. He has not shoved the adulteries and recrimination in her face but surely she knows of them; she is not stupid. And she is now married to $79,000 a year, which is not inconsiderable. At least this is all Ruthven’s way of rationalizing the fact that he has had (he knows now) so much less from this marriage than he might have, the fact that being a writer has done irreparable damage to both of them. And the children. He dwells on this less than previously. His marriage, Ruthven thinks, is like science fiction writing itself: if there was a time to get out, that time is past and now he would be worse off anywhere else. Who would read him? Where would he sell? What else could he do?