Sunday, June 20, 2010My own vuvuzela, plus: Did women save sf?

Not to blow my own vuvuzela, but I should mention that the Year's Best SF 15, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, is available in stores this month and from the usual on-line vendors this week.  The book features twice a dozen stories including my own "This Peaceable Land; or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe."  The mass-market format probably makes it the most portable and beach-friendly of the annual year's-best anthologies, if that's a factor in your purchasing calculus.  And of course Julian Comstock is fresh out in the same format. 

Word I learned this week: Vuvuzela.

Lately I've been chained to my desk, putting the final touches on the submission manuscript of Vortex, so I don't have much else of substance to report.  But the desk where I write happens to sit next to a shelf of books of science fiction criticism and reference works, old and new . . .   In fallow moments I browse through these, and they provoked a few thoughts. 

The books I'm talking about are mainly titles from the sixties: Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder; James Blish's The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand; Algis Budrys's Benchmarks (not currently in print, as far as can tell, though Frederik Pohl's blog has this interesting anecdote about Budry's review of Stranger in a Strange Land); and Hell's Cartographers, a collection of autobiographical essays from Robert Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and Brian Aldiss. 

There wasn't much serious science fiction criticism available when these books were first published.  Thus they tend to be reviews of writers' work by other working writers -- these guys analyze fiction the way an engineer at Boeing might dismantle a Pratt & Whitney F-100 Turbofan -- and for that reason they strike me as more interesting  than purely academic criticism.

It would be fun to look at them in detail, but I have to limit myself to a few generalizations.  One thing that struck me was how nervous these writers (especially Blish, Budrys and Aldiss) seemed to be about what was then called "the New Wave."  (Blish on the subject of Delany's The Einstein Intersection winning a Nebula Award: "I stepped quietly out into the kitchen and bit my cat.")  They sensed that change was in the air, and they were far from reactionary about it, but all they could see on the horizon was (again quoting Blish), "stream of consciousness, dadaism, typographical tricks, on-stage sex, Yellow Book horror and naughty words," accompanied by "loud claims that this is the direction in which science fiction must go."

Even the autobiographical collection Hell's Cartographers at times reveals a similar mood.  It's a fine and still very readable book nevertheless.  Knight and Pohl went on to expand their articles to book length (The Futurians and The Way the Future Was, respectively), but one of the standout pieces here is the essay by Alfred Bester.  Bester had an unusual career, of which his science fiction -- including two landmark novels and a handful of superb short stories -- was merely one aspect.  "I have never been a cook, a lumberjack, a sandhog, or even a soda-jerk.  I've been a writer all my life and I don't give a damn who knows it," Bester says;  but he was, variously, a comic-book writer, a radio-script writer, an advertising writer, a travel writer . . . and a science fiction writer, which gave him an insider/outsider perspective that's probably unique.  

Consider Bester's account of his first meeting with John W. Campbell, the hugely influential and notoriously eccentric editor of Astounding (later Analog) magazine.  Bester walks into Campbell's office expecting a story session, but what he gets is an unsolicited lecture on Freudianism and Dianetics.  Contemporary psychiatry is dead, Campbell says: "Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time."  Understandably confused, but not wanting to offend an editor, Bester speed-reads the galley proofs of L. Ron Hubbard's opus and follows Campbell to a lunchroom for further analysis. You have to clear yourself of all mental and emotional blocks, Campell sternly instructs him.  All the way back to the womb, in fact.  " ‘You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook.  You've never stopped hating her for it.’

"Around me there were cries of 'BLT down, hold the mayo . . .'  And here was this grim tackle standing over me practising dianetics without a license.  The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter.  I prayed, 'Help me out of this, please.  Don't let me laugh in his face.  Show me a way out.'  God showed me.  I looked up at Campbell and said, 'You're absolutely right, Mr. Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear.  I can't go on with this.'

"He was completely satisfied.  'Yes, I could see you were shaking . . .' "

Brian W. Aldiss, another contributor to the volume, was responsible for Barefoot in the Head, a book that was making waves (ahem) at the time.  Aldiss describes Barefoot as "about a Europe overtaken by drugs . . . an entire culture gone yippie and hippie."  Blish, elsewhere, admires the book's Joyceian prose and offers it as an example of the New Wave at its best.  But how quaint these concerns now seem.

The view from 2010 is a little different, as I'm sure none of these writers would have been surprised to learn.  The major sf authors who emerged in the seventies found their own way out of the cul-de-sac of style versus content, and a great many of those authors were women -- Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) to take the two most important examples -- or men who were able to address gender issues with subtlety and wit (John Varley, say).  They wrote beautiful and often plain-spoken stories about what change might mean, not just to men and women but to masculinity and femininity -- taking science fiction to places even H.G. Wells hadn't envisioned, and doing it with what seems in retrospect a remarkable modesty.