Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  What are we to think, then, of its employment by people who are, at best, sketchily trained in its disciplines, and whose understanding has been further muddled by the fashions and rivalries of contemporary formal criticism?

  Not many years ago, when the so-called New Wave was first emerging, science fiction was given its initial taste of this sort of thing. Suddenly, with all the awed excitement of a small boy's discovery of his genitals, critics in the field itself solemnly proclaimed its symbolisms: now every rocket was a penis; the firing of each booster stage an orgasm; and every monster-haunted cave on an alien planet Mommy's womb.

  Let us assume, for fun, that they were right.

  What of it?

  If such mean, infantile comparisons do indeed reveal the wellsprings of our creativity, why—once they are recognized— must we labor them? What is so impressively profound in dredging up, and capering over, our own pre-adult drives? Why not accept them, integrate them into a more mature synthesis of our survival struggle in the world and in the universe, our goals and purposes, our relations with our fellow men—and then, as working artists, let them recede into the background? Any artist, unless we abandon all traditional definitions of what this means, must be like the accomplished fencer, the finished horseman. The fencer must practice and absorb all those exercises of cut, thrust, lunge, and parry which over several centuries have proven their effectiveness. The horseman similarly must understand his aids: reins, legs, weight, and voice. The sculptor and the painter must first master the chisel and the brush, must learn the texture of hard stone and the way colors combine on the palette. But once any of them have attained these masteries, then their preoccupation must be with what they have in hand: the bout with sabre or epee, the steeplechase or polo game, the statue or the portrait. Any underlying reasonings, any underlying drives, must be subordinated into the act of skill, the act of art, the act of love. In all this, the role of the doer's intellect must be an editorial one, monitoring the act the whole man is performing while itself remaining, not uninvolved, but—as far as possible—unswayed and undisturbed.

  Nothing is so destructive of the arts as self-consciousness in the artist—which cripples both intuition and spontaneity—and there is no better way to render him self-conscious than to over-emphasize the importance and value of hidden drives and occult meanings, real or imaginary. (In science fiction, the miserable result—now unhappily too common—is the sort of story that makes the sophisticated reader close the book with the comment, "Sorry, chum, your Psych. 1-A is showing.") Yet these meanings and motivations are the critic's stock in trade. He is compelled to seek them out and find them, and indeed often to invent them. They, and his supposed ability to sniff them out, put him above the commonalty; and when the commonalty accepts his own appraisal of himself, as it does now, he acquires power and status, and becomes another middleman—or perhaps, on the academic level, we might say middle-mandarin.

  The rise of middlemen to positions of power over the arts began with the Industrial Revolution, when a culturally insecure newly rich started to displace a more self-assured aristocracy and upper middle class as art buyers. These people needed guarantees of quality and worth, which dealers and "authorities" were only too ready to provide. This started the alienation of the working artist from the community, and gave rise to the now common fancy that artists are incapable of accurate selfevaluation, and need appropriately anointed "experts" to judge them and even to manage their affairs.JT], The pretty notion of the artist working and starving in his garret as a necessary part of the creative process not only served the middleman's purposes, but was also "romantic" enough to obscure the injustice and ugliness of the reality.

  The middle-mandarin may protest that, unlike the more commercial middleman, he doesn't get a direct rake-off from the artist's earnings. Nevertheless, his need to minimize the importance of the working artist—at least until that artist is sufficiently well known to be profitably exploitable—is just as great. As matters stand in the United States today, it is quite commonly accepted that only great or famous writers deserve a decent living, and that "hack" writers merit no support at all; I have heard this voiced by hack professors, hack lawyers, and (God save us!) even a hack proctologist.

  The attitude is reflected very clearly in the academic involvement with mainstream literature. For years, the mandarins have cried their deep concern for poetry in the Philistine society, for the short story as an art form, for the "serious" writer and especially the serious young writer; and there always seems to be money available for new university reviews, usually expensively produced, in which to publish cries and criticisms.

  But all these reviews together—and we have a regiment of them—in any year spend less than one professor's salary to purchase the work of poets and short story writers. Most of them either pay nothing whatsoever or pay in a few free copies. A very high percentage appropriate all rights. A bare half dozen offer poor pulp rates. This is indeed a magpie charity.

  What has happened to American poetry since these people made it so much their personal province? To a great extent, it has become formless, unreadable, and unintelligible; and a nation which, when it was much smaller and poorer, always supported at least some poets now can support none at all-except for an odd tame specimen or two kept as showpieces on campuses.

  What has happened to the "serious" short story since this involvement? First, on one aesthetic pretext or another, it was devitalized into the non-story: deliberately over-sensitive slices out of the meaningless lives of utterly uninteresting people, invariably larded with the toothsome obscurities so dear to the interpretive middleman.

  And what is going to happen to science fiction now? Certainly, as a group, the academic mandarins can contribute little or nothing to the field. However, what they can do to it, and especially to our younger writers, is quite another matter. One can only hope that among them there will be enough men with the prudence and good taste to walk carefully and considerately over ground they have not tilled and crops they have not cultivated.

  Dedicated teachers, and genuinely creative writers on college faculties, are of course something else again. Certainly, no one can do anything but welcome their enthusiastic interest and participation, for from now on much of the responsibility for maintaining the artistic and intellectual integrity of science fiction in the Age of Space, the Age of Alienation, the Age of Crisis will rest upon their shoulders.

  Science Fiction and the Working Writer

  Professional science fiction writers—and by this I mean those who either write full time or sincerely wish they could—face a strange situation as we enter this new age. For years, they have been prophets without honor. Now, in the dazzle of new recognitor they still run the risk of receiving honors without profit.

  As the Science Fiction Writers of America managed to convince a number of publishers a few years ago, the field depends very heavily on the professional for its steady flow of printable material. Without him, it never could maintain its quality or more than a fraction of its present volume. Yet today, despite a growing readership, he still confronts a world where the average working writer is grossly underpaid, and where in order to make a bare living he frequently has to work sweatshop hours. Let us consider the economics of writing science fiction, and then estimate the effect the market has on the producer and the product.

  The would-be professional writer enters a world where, as far as he is concerned, the tail wags the dog. The topless-bottomless dancer in a Barbary Coast night spot makes her few hundred a week by entertaining a few hundred drunks for a few hours; the dentist and the attorney and the plumber do not have to work on masses of humanity to gain a livelihood. But—with very few exceptions—the writer must be a mass producer and mass entertainer before he can hope to be financially successful; he must become a product that can be packaged and peddled to the millions. My first short story, "Maybe Just a Little One" —it was sf, by the way—I sold to Harper's. It was reprinted in Fantas
y and Science Fiction, translated into French and Spanish, and anthologized in Best From F. & S.F., which also went into a Science Fiction Book Club edition. At a very conservative estimate, it has certainly been read by half a million people, and as I have never met anyone who didn't enjoy it, I think I can fairly assume that it has given the world at least a hundred thousand individual hours of fun, and possibly a good deal more. My earnings from it total just under $360—about as much as an anesthesiologist makes using other men's techniques to put one or two patients to sleep for an afternoon.

  I cite this story simply to illustrate the fact that not only pulp writing is underpaid, and that literary level has no bearing on this economic law—a law which, by the way, operates much more harshly now than it did in, say, the '20s, when the breakeven point in sales for the hard-cover publisher was much lower than it is today and the number of magazines buying freelance fiction much, much higher.

  The effect on the professional and would-be professional is that, generally speaking, only the mass-producer can survive (which tends to militate against careful craftsmanship and to discourage the less prolific writer, regardless of his ability). As a consequence, great numbers of young people, who should at least get a fighting chance to write for a living, never get to first base—for the more the market becomes a mass-market, the more important becomes the middleman, and the harder it is for the new writer to break in. Television, which has pulled most of the rungs from the new short story writer's ladder, has not become an open freelance market; its producers will almost never even read material unless submitted through an agent. This is true also of the motion pictures. And, of the surviving magazines, an increasing number are following the practice, though fortunately it has not yet spread to the sf and mystery fields.

  Actually, the writer's best break today is given him by the standard hard-cover publisher. Royalty rates are usually at least fair; contracts can be negotiated, and the distribution system is by no means as stupidly wasteful as the paperback publisher's. As a real money-maker for writers, the "paperback renaissance" is very much a myth. The average paperback original (at, say, fifty thousand words) makes its author roughly twelve hundred dollars. This means that, limited to this market, a man who writes no faster than Thomas Mann would, if he sold every line, come out with about four thousand dollars for his year's labor. Of course, there are exceptions. There are paperback houses that do much better for their authors—but there are others who do worse. And there are paperback editions that sell and sell and sell, and keep on selling. But again, it is not the exceptions that make the rule.

  Conservative estimates, made after careful surveys of the subject, indicate that today more than three hundred college-level courses in sf are being taught in the United States. Other studies show in colleges and high schools together the courses now number about a thousand. Granting all this, and averaging out differences in pay and in the number of courses in instructors' schedules, in the colleges alone we now have probably the equivalent of at least one hundred full-time professors' salaries spent on teaching science fiction, at roughly $12,500 a year.

  There aren't fifty science fiction writers in the country averaging $12,500 a year.

  It should not be necessary for writers of real competence either to turn out a million words annually or to teach or to dig ditches on the side to keep going—any more than it is necessary for teachers or electricians or cocktail waitresses or accountants to dig ditches; and it should be a prime concern of the academic friends of writing and the writer to do everything in their power to remedy the situation. One way would be to revive the market for short stories by finding buying funds for academic magazines. If existing university and college reviews could each secure between five and ten thousand dollars a year for the purchase of short stories, and then pay approximately what the Atlantic pays now, the old freelance market for short stories would very largely be restored—and if that market's unprejudiced impersonality were restored with it, then the new writer's most important ladder would have a lot of its rungs back again.

  How much would such a program cost a year? Less than any foolish Federal project to "rehabilitate" a big-city street gang. Less than McGraw-Hill paid Mr. Irving as an advance on his fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes. Infinitely less than it costs to keep up the pretense of educating the semi-literate in one of those unfortunate colleges now required by law to accept and keep any high school graduate for a year or even two.

  Ways must be kept open for new writers to become professionals, and for professionals to maintain themselves, for the challenges and problems and opportunities presented by science fiction in the Age of Space will, more than ever, demand the maturity and expertise of the professional. Contrary to present popular belief, genius cannot be manufactured by technicians or institutions; its appearance, in any field and at any period, is very much a function of available patronage and of the number of individuals of seemingly average talent given the opportunity to work freely and independently. In science fiction especially, these men and women will require, not just a market, but one paying enough so that, instead of having to become high-pressure word machines, they can have leisure to read and think and talk, to build their individual backgrounds for interpretation and synthesis. They will have to come from many different fields, because of the natural complexity of science and technology, because of the lack of a new synthesis to replace our almost vanished general educations —and because this diversity of knowledge and experience has always been a major factor in the enrichment of a literature. They will have to be as various as the world they live in.

  The Challenge to the Writer in the Age of Space

  When the first Sputnik went into orbit, and when the first astronauts landed on the moon, almost every sf writer was, I think, asked the silly question: "Well, they've caught up with you—where do you go now?"

  The answer, naturally, was : "We just keep going."

  The progress of science and technology—as long as it receives nourishment—is open-ended and exponential, and this applies also to science fiction, which exists by leaping beyond scientific fact and theory. When and if we encounter our first space-faring alien race, science fiction writers will lose nothing—except perhaps a temporary divergence of reader interest—and will gain immeasurably. Regardless of whatever discoveries may be made, this will continue to be the case. The only danger to progress in the field lies in the intrusion of the semi- and pseudo-sciences—in the Leninization of science fiction, for example.

  Our greatest opportunities now lie, not in the overemotional rehashing of themes already long-established, but in reexploring, reevaluating, and stating them anew, as well as in devoting more attention to those we have generally ignored. Consider the recurring theme of war, on this earth and in space. Where war on earth has been concerned, by far the greatest emphasis has been on the "what ifs" of utter horror. Stories of this sort have, only too frequently, been utterly realistic—and utterly neurotic. But how many writers, comparatively, have even attempted to explore science fictional alternatives, detours away from Armageddon? A few only, mostly in hard-core sf; certainly not enough. Nor have we had enough explorations of the inevitable side effects of super-weapon development, where it is mathematically demonstrable that these weapons not only will continue to increase in power and effectiveness, but must also inevitably become simpler to produce, cheaper, and more generally available. Within the past two generations, we have seen more than one madman ruling a great nation. What of the innumerable "sovereign nations" now surrounding us, many of them just "emerging" out of savagery into military dictatorship? What of independent terrorists and criminal groups? "Disarmament" isn't going to solve that problem, because you can't disarm a technological society, or individuals in a technological society, even if they want to be disarmed. We have a fertile field for science fiction here.

  War in space, still very much with us, is quite another matter. Future all-out war on earth has generally overwhelmed the m
inds of writers with its weaponry, but in writing of space-war, the tendency has been to underestimate, not the development of cataclysmic weapons, but their effect on warfare itself. The weapons are developed and described, but they are almost never realized in the writer's mind, and so are automatically absorbed into the military behavior patterns with which he is familiar. Therefore we still find World War I aerial dogfights being reintroduced as individual combats between pilots of spaceships armed with planet-busters and moving at speeds only computers can cope with. We also keep encountering the persistent nitwittery of sword-armed space-farers—as though any race measuring its energies in star-travel terms would keep on lugging around weapons almost as primitive as stone hatchets—and of sword-and-spear-armed natives successfully repelling invaders from the stars. This sort of thing is plausible only when the board, the pieces, and the rules are artificially and logically set up and adhered to, as in Jerry Pournelle's recent A Spaceship for the King and Poul Anderson's delightful The High Crusade. But when it comes to hordes of mounted barbarians charging triumphantly against spacemen armed with laser weapons and the like—uh-uh. Anyone doubting it would do well to read a 1964 study on weapon lethality prepared for the United States Army.J81 The values it gives are illuminating:

  We can go on from there.

  Actually, there is one aspect of war in space which has not received too much thoughtful treatment in sf, and that is whether races who have not learned to control their own destructive drives can even make it into space, let alone found empires and fight wars, either against themselves or against extraterrestrials. Project the curve suggested in the study, consider it in the light of what the world is today, and it becomes obvious that unless solutions are found to some of our domestic problems, and that right speedily, the Age of Space for man may die before it can be properly born.