What we may expect in science fiction is a gradual return by New Wave writers to the basic principle that style grows out of and informs content, and a growing concern by more traditional writers with language, character, and subjective reality; and by both wilder journeys into the outer reaches of experiment. Already such trends are apparent. Greater variety is being tolerated, even encouraged, in subject, approach, and style. An increasing number of writers will be difficult or impossible to categorize. The goal will be the goal of the mainstream: each writer with his individual vision, his individual voice.
Meanwhile, mainstream vigor, where it exists, seems to derive from its contacts with popular culture: motion pictures, folk heroes, commercials, radio, television, comic strips, advertisements, modern myths, rock music and musicians, detective stories, science fiction.
We live in a pop culture—is there any other kind?—where soup cans are art and commercials are the most skillful art forms on television; literature is just beginning to recognize these facts. Contemporary fiction may have gone as far as it can go in the examination of character, even of abnormal character, and now its major prospect, as Stanley Elkin has predicted, may be the exploration of language. One alternative is to tap the source of energy in our culture—the myths and concerns that shape men's lives—and to consider them fictionally, to turn them into story.
Mainstream writers increasingly are turning to the themes and concepts of science fiction: Barth, Borges, Boulle, Burgess, Burroughs, Golding, Hersey, Lessing, Nabokov, Rand, Vercors, Vonnegut, Voznesensky, John Williams, Colin Wilson, Wouk. What they are finding are not only the vitality of popular culture and the excitement of unexplored territory (unexplored, that is, by mainstream writers) but also subjects relevant to the times in which we live and not tracked over with literary footprints, subjects with the evocative power of a freshly minted metaphor. And although these writers now may be dealing with science fiction themes at arm's length rather than in hand-to-hand engagement, as time passes they may be expected to become as knowledgeable about content and ideas as they are about technique, if they can shed the prejudices of the literary culture.
As the drunken hero of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater says to a convention of science fiction writers:
I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to Heaven or Hell.
The author of that passage, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., obtained his first recognition in science fiction magazines and books, although he later insisted that he not be labeled a science fiction writer and made his reputation in the mainstream.
Other science fiction writers are being read outside the category, and if they have not exactly been welcomed into the mainstream they have not been systematically excluded as they have been in the past. First, of course, comes the broader readership—major success in the science fiction field today depends upon hundreds of thousands of sales to occasional or infrequent science fiction readers— and then comes the recognition. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) has sold phenomenally well to the new youth culture, as has Frank Herbert's Dune (1965). Time magazine called them "good examples of how public concerns and infatuations catch up with the science fiction imagination." Older books such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (1951) and Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953) have almost never been out of print, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) had gone through eighteen printings by 1971. "Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), an extraordinary novel even by literary standards, has flourished by word of mouth for a dozen years," Time noted. More recent books may achieve similar success and status as the years provide them with the opportunity to achieve a reputation through some circuitous or underground route.
The new academic interest in science fiction—the first college course was taught by Professor Mark Hillegas at Colgate in 1962—has infiltrated most of the nation's colleges and universities and now is percolating down to high schools and even junior high schools. Such courses will have the effects of lending science fiction some respectability, probably of increasing the potential audience, possibly of misdirecting or petrifying the genre.
Some science fiction books will be brought to general public attention by an understanding reviewer in the mainstream, just as more mainstream writers will be turning to science fiction for material and inspiration—until science fiction and the mainstream will meet somewhere to the right of science fiction and to the left of the mainstream and where the works drew their tradition will be impossible to determine.
This process of reunion will be enhanced by the diminishing influence of the magazines, which like oak leaves have stubbornly clung to their small branches after the rest of their fellow pulps have moldered back to the condition from which they came. The old science fiction unity, the brotherhood of writers and editors and readers who learned only from each other and built upon each other's concepts, is dwindling as alternate methods of publication—original anthologies, paperbacks, even hard-covers have become more numerous and more important. The ghetto walls are demolished; the "us against the rest of the world" mentality is fading. The consensus future and the philosophical position on which it was built is beginning to fall apart as science fiction splinters into a hundred markets, into a thousand disparate, individual visions.
Science fiction will bring nothing to the mainstream if it surrenders to mainstream philosophies and mainstream values. Both science fiction and the mainstream will be stronger if science fiction retains its unique concepts, narrative strengths, idea orientation, detached viewpoints, and commitments that it developed over the long years of isolation.
James E. Gunn
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923, James E. Gunn received his B.S. degree in journalism in 1947, after three years in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and his M.A. in English from the University of Kansas in 1951. He has worked as an editor for a publisher of paperback reprints, as assistant director of Civil Defense in Kansas City, as managing editor of K.U. alumni publications, as administrative assistant to the Chancellor for University Relations at the University of Kansas, and now serves the University as a lecturer in English and Journalism. He teaches courses in fiction writing and science fiction. He has served as chairman of the Mid-America District of the American College Public Relations Association, and member of the Information Committee of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. He has won national awards for his work as an editor and a director of public relations. He was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America for 1971-1972.
He has written plays, screenplays, radio scripts, articles, verse, and criticism, but most of his publications have been science fiction. He started writing science fiction in 1948, was a full-time freelance writer for four years and has had more than sixty stories published in magazines; eight of his novels have been published, and his master's thesis (about science fiction) was serialized in a pulp magazine. Four of his stories were dramatized over NBC radio, one, "The Cave of Night," was dramatized on television's Desilu Playhouse under the title of "Man in Orbit," and The Immortals was dramatized as an ABC-TV "Movie of the Week" during the 1969-1970 season and became an hour series, The Immortal, in the fall of 1970. His story and screenplay, "The Reluctant Witch," is scheduled for production.
This Fortress World, 1955 (Gnome and Ace)
&nbs
p; Star Bridge, 1955 (Gnome and Ace); with Jack Williamson Station in Space, 1958 (Bantam)
The Joy Makers, 1961 and 1971 (Bantam)
The Immortals, 1962 and 1968 (Bantam)
Future Imperfect, 1964 (Bantam)
Man and the Future: The Intercentury Seminar at the University of Kansas, editor, 1968 (The University Press of Kansas)
The Witching Hour, 1970 (Dell)
The Immortals, 1970 (Bantam)
The Burning, 1972 (Dell)
Breaking Point, 1972 (Walker)
The Listeners, 1972 (Scribner's)
Alternate Worlds, An Illustrated History of Science Fiction, 1973 (Prentice-Hall)
Alexei and Cory Panshin
Science Fiction: New Trends and Old
What are trends? Perhaps we can say that trends are the small-scale movements, evolutions, progressions, and fashions that are perceived by those living within one moment and stretching to anticipate the next. Trends are arbitrary. Their background interconnections are fuzzy. Trends are cosmic twitches.
There are people who have to anticipate trends, who have to be finely tuned to trends. Dress designers. Also boutique proprietors. Or, living on rock music, as so many of us do, we might be aware that rock music has passed through a country-influenced phase, then an art song period, and now is experimenting with decadence. We might care about trends in rock music. Or those who are interested in publishing might care about the trends that affect Newsweek and the trends that affect Amazing.
Is this the right scale? We do agree that these are trends. And, if we look at what sf criticism has managed until now, we would have to admit that until now sf criticism has lived in the moment. It has questioned the meanings of individual books—as in Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder, the first major book of sf criticism. Or, as in James Blish's several books, it has questioned the professional competence presently apparent in sf. It has fitted shapes over the careers of various writers, as those careers have lengthened—as in several books by Sam Moskowitz, and in Heinlein in Dimension. It has begun to track its past, as in de Camp's Science-Fiction Handbook, and again in books by Sam Moskowitz. At its most universalizing, sf has attempted to make sense of the present in terms of the immediate past, as in Kingsley Amis's New Maps of Hell, which would have remade the sf of 1960 in the shape of the sf of 1954, only more so.
You would have to say, then, yes, sf criticism at its best has dealt in trend-snatching.
All right, if we are dealing in trends, what are the trends of the moment that seem significant?
In the past ten years, sf has played at the adaptation of myth to sf, as in stories by Roger Zelazny, Thomas Burnett Swann, Samuel R. Delany, and Emil Petaja. In the late Sixties, the most notable sf seemed to be experiments in styles copied from mainstream models, as in stories by Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, and Philip Jose Farmer. Most recently, the sf that demands attention is into decadence, as in stories by Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad and Barry Malzberg. Almost all stories at this moment are at least a bit into decadence.
If these are trends, how do we make sense of them, let alone predict what everybody will be expressing next year? Now that Robert Silverberg has slowed his writing pace, are we to assume that the phase of decadence will soon be over? Who is to be the next Writer of the Moment?
That's one kind of trend. Here's another: the often-declared and long-cherished division between science fiction and fantasy is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Independently of the year-to-year lurches of sf given above, the symbols of traditional fantasy are being accepted in modern sf stories.
Here's another: the audience for modern sf has grown ever since Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in 1926. In a time when the audience for mimetic fiction is becoming steadily smaller, sf is the one literature in the Western world whose audience is steadily growing.
Here's one last trend. Since 1926, the course of modern sf has never run smooth. Sf has had its good periods and its bad ones. As examples, sf was having a remarkably bad period when John Campbell assumed the editorship of Astounding in 1937, and was in another period of stagnation in 1960 when Earl Kemp won a Hugo for his fan publication, a symposium entitled "Who Killed Science Fiction?" But there have been other years when nobody would have been inclined to ask that question. For instance, the early years of the Forties, when Heinlein, van Vogt, de Camp, Sturgeon, and Asimov were establishing themselves, were fruitful times. So were the middle Sixties. The 1967 year's best anthology, edited by Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr, is enough to make you smile. That isn't true of the work being written at the moment. We are getting ready to trot the 1960 question out again.
These are trends enough for anyone. If it were sufficient to talk about science fiction—new trends and old—we could pick these trends up one at a time and hash them out.
But if we did, we would not know any more than we do now. We would have a handful of well-analyzed trends, but still have no complete idea of the overall significance of science fiction.
Until now, we have always looked at sf in the most present and immediate way. We have wondered about books. We have judged contemporary standards of craftsmanship. We have added up careers as totals of and-then-he-wrote. We have taken the current temperature and pulse of the field. And we have marveled at how very marvelous this marvelous and unpredictable science fiction has been.
If we try to understand trends in terms of trends, we will be unable to see the underlying unity that explains all the trends of sf that bewilder us. We suspect that until now sf criticism has been too much in the middle of an immense and radically changing thing to do more than take present bearings.
However, for the first time now it seems possible that one might view sf from a new plane and see how it can accommodate all these very different twitches, these trends. Since it seems possible, we want to try—with the editor's permission, and your indulgence—a bit of foolery.
Here is an assumption. Any unifying explanation of sf will lie in a dimension in which we are not used to looking when we think about sf. That is, any unifying explanation of sf will look strange at first. It will not be easy for some to accept at first, whatever it is, because it is strange.
With your indulgence, we will attempt a strange unifying answer. Take it as deadly serious, or take it as a joke—but consider that any unifying explanation of sf will look at least as strange as this.
Let us suppose:
It seems that if there is one conclusion made by modern psychology—Freud and all his legitimate and illegitimate heirs —that can stand as proven beyond challenge, it is this: we are in large part enigmas to ourselves.
Will we all accept this? It hasn't been a current idea for very long. The Oxford Universal Dictionary dates the first use of the word unconscious—meaning not available to the conscious mind—as an adjective to 1909, and as a noun to 1920. But now it does seem indisputably true that the unconscious exists.
None of us sees himself complete and whole. Whatever we may know about ourselves that others do not, none of us is able to see himself as others may. We may think that the way we are is just the natural way we are, and never realize that it is unusual. We may tick like a clock and never realize it; we may pulse visibly. We are able to see virtues and defects in others that we are blind to in ourselves. Ask us to explain ourselves, and we will rationalize as best we can. But some things we won't be able to talk about, some we'll forget or leave out.
We know as much as we consciously know, but our unconscious knowledge is unavailable to us. This is not willful intent to ignore what is writ plain. At least, it is not merely that. We are separated from our unconscious and we don't know how to learn to know it better.
We may try to know ourselves by self-inspection, but it doesn't work. Conscious inspection inspects the conscious. We tote up what we know of our behavior. We find reasons for the behavior. We call the conscious and the reasons "I." But we are still separated from the unconscious. We cannot know the whole of our minds.
It may be that by means of education and training, it would be possible to circumvent our inability to know ourselves. But that kind of subtle instruction is not generally available. In spite of whatever hopes we might have had, it was missing for all of us in the schools and universities.
One of the ways in which we look to discover the full range of our minds is art. If we cannot discern our minds by direct inspection, we can see them indirectly-mirrored in art. Fiction is a form of the artistic mirror. In the symbol patterns of fiction we can see our minds reflected.
We believe that our minds are the sum of our knowledge of the universe. In a story, knowledge is symbolized and committed to paper. The universe of any story is a symbol of the entire mind. Our conscious knowledge is symbolized by known things. Our unconscious is symbolized by unknown things.
This is an unusual construction of fiction. We are saying that a straight chair in a story is a symbol of consciously known things. And we are saying that an invading alien in a story who lands on the White House lawn and craves present audience with the administrator of the land is a symbol of the unconscious. If this is strange enough to move you to object, please hold your objections for a moment and see how the fit grows.
We may call the kind of story that insists on the primacy of known things "mimetic fiction." This is the product of writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Norman Mailer, John D. MacDonald, and even James Joyce and Zane Grey. In these stories, everything, no matter how strange, can or should be reduced by confrontation to the status of known things. That is, no matter how strange Joyce may get, what happens can ultimately be explained as dream, or the flow of thought, or madness.
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Page 23