Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (26 page)

What sane man would be a writer? Consider that he has to please himself; he may claim he does not care what he writes or how, but he must write to sell, and that elementary need alone operates to shape his choice of word-arrangements. He may claim that he does not care if he sells . . . but you can see where that leads. The writer who doesn’t care is the least free of all writers, and often a suffering slave to his own notions of excellence.

Then he has to get past an editor, who is in turn conscious of his publisher. To an at least appropriate degree, and often to a point of paranoia, the three of them are conscious of what they believe the reader wants. In many cases, there is the background influence of the distributor, who is dogmatically sure of what will sell and is often in a position to influence everything from cover design to content. The distributor is in turn marginally conscious of the retailer—the storekeeper in whose power it lies to bury a magazine behind a stack of competitors, or to return a bundle unopened, unsold.

But let us assume that the writer’s words, however shaped by conscious and unconscious modifications at all these levels, have been published, sold, and are now held before a reader’s eyes.

Can the reader read? What influences in his life have made certain words compellingly significant to him? Never mind the twelve-year-old who has stumbled across his first unabridged dictionary, and the certifiable maniac who underscores the words he likes in the publications he likes; these are the extreme cases. But they are significant; you cannot tell me that an individual sufficiently word-conscious to read for pleasure has not developed a complex tangle of reflexes triggered by words. This tangle is not the same as anyone else’s, and therefore no reader reads what the writer has written.

Not only are words an arbitrary code with less than perfect accuracy, so are letters only arbitrary marks on paper. I can read German, for instance—but not in the quasimedieval characters of the 1930s. Some groups of letters are difficult for people to read accurately—if your name is Bulger, Swensen, Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Brown or Frederic Wakeman, or if you are quite accustomed to receiving mail addressed to Algis Burdys, you know exactly what I mean. If you have a name that ends in “s,” or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands. People have certain predispositions when deciphering the code we call language—in fact, we mis-call it, for in this case we are discussing literation—one of the more infuriating of which is an apparently universal tendency to call one very clangorous SF novel “
Rouge Moon.
” (A man who wanted me to hire him once devoted three single-spaced pages to telling me what a great book that was, and not once in some twenty detailed references to its title and specific scenes therein did he even accidentally tumble to the fact the the publisher had called it
Rogue Moon.
Yet he wanted the job very badly.)

And then, poor chap, the writer has gotten his work out into print, and at least some of his readers—as frail, as tangled inside—are critics. Critics think they know everything that went on in the writer’s mind, and where he did not say what he intended to say. They correct his arrangements for him before he even makes them, and then they write essays about them.

I, fortunately, am a book
reviewer.
I only know all about editing, publishing, book production, distribution and the difference between making and missing the distributor’s tie (not an item of accessory apparel, in this case). I would not dream of telling you what goes on in the mind of any specific writer. I have some understanding of what goes on in my own mind, of course, when I am being a writer, and would be remiss if I did not ascribe my habits and prejudices to the people whose books I review. All this I write down, and send off to my editor, who marks it up and sends it to his printer, who hands it to his composing room foreman, etc., etc., and after a while you get it, complete with occasional typographical errors and idiosyncratic editing, and you understand it, don’t you?

As you know, the problem with life is that nobody understands the situation. Nonetheless, we have to get through it as best we can. If there is a scheme to it all, it is sufficiently complex and covers sufficient spacetime so that only God could account for it. It is one of the primary purposes of commercial entertainment—and of art—to compensate us for the fact that none of us are God. It is the function of a statue to capture some small slice of something that we say is real, and hold it frozen for us to walk around and look until we are satisfied that we understand it. It is the function of a commercial novel, of the sort to which most science fiction novels belong, to provide what Murray Leinster long ago called a “pocket universe.” In this universe, the rules rapidly become comprehensible, or an assurance is quickly given that the rules will become comprehensible. There is a protagonist—a hero, or a fascinating villain, who becomes the reader’s particular property, and whose movements, troubles and triumphs become the reader’s own. In this way and for some little space of time, the reader inhabits a comprehensible world, and escapes from the real one.

This escape into an organized delusion—if you will, a systematic lie—is distinguishable from psychosis only by the fact that you can walk into a store and buy a package of it, the package having been provided by someone who deals in this service. As you know, psychosis is frowned upon, whereas reading is normally acceptable. Thus commerce does confer a certain absolution on us all.

Some kinds of books are automatically more popular than others, just as some individual books are more popular than others of their same kind. This means, apparently, that there are fashions in psychosis, just as there are degrees to which individual books please their readers—that is to say, provide a delusional system yummier than someone else’s delusional system. It might even be possible to psychoanalyze a particular period of human history by running one’s finger down a list of the bestsellers. Thus, simple statistics and grubby pennies and dimes lay us all upon the psychiatrist’s couch. Never doubt that some day some earnest Ph.D. candidate will do all this for us; hopefully, not in my time or yours.

As you know, this field functioned without criticism for many years. There was no systematic effort to apply standards to science fiction as a literature. In the earliest days of magazine SF, a story was good or bad in exact relationship to the durability of its scientific rationale, which served as the silent valet on which all the shirtings of prose, characterization and plot were flung.

A little later in our history, the story did begin to be measured against certain purely literary criteria; exactly the same criteria as those applied to the stories in the westerns, crime yarns, confession, sports and air war stories published in the companion magazines belonging to the same pulp chains that included one or two SF titles. The same people who edited
Planet
, for example, also worked on
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
And John W. Campbell, Jr., sat in on the plotting conferences for
Doc Savage.
(The last time the subject was raised JWC still had two absolutely perfect murder methods stored up in the back of his mind, should Street & Smith ever revive the Man of Bronze, and JWC ever revive Street & Smith.)

Anyway, all of this was in the period that ended with the extinction of the Golden Age. The demise of The Happy Time coincides with the appearance of book review and critical columns in the magazines, and with the constitution of various conferences, schools, movements and Mafias intended to direct the course of this field in a proper manner and with a respectable goal in sight.

It’s only a coincidence, I’m sure. (Actually, I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. But to explain why I also don’t think there’s an obvious cause-effect relationship, I’d have to explain why I think the cause is the thing commonly mistaken for the effect, especially by Sam Moskowitz, and then Sam would write me another letter.)

Okay. For the past ten years, anyway, it has been literally impossible to draw SF breath without being tested for systolic and diastolic rationale-pressure. Two things have been assured every individual who has any sort of statement in this racket, and each of those two things is a fanatical audience, one pro, and the other con. (I’m waiting for my shy followers to make themselves known, by the way. We could use a show of enthusiasm, gang—the other guys arrived on the scene some time ago.)

All this
is
leading up to something. I have four books here I want to talk about, and at least three of them are intended to push some standard. At least three. I do think I should be spinning in my grave.

Actually, the reason three of them definitely push something is that no publisher who’s
au courant
(that’s French for “Be sure and run in a direction where you won’t stub your toe and say
au
!”) (Either that or German for a sort of misadventure with a cow) will let you put together an anthology for him unless it has A Higher Reason than simply containing good stories. Thank God, a sufficiently clever and conscientious editor can put together a book which contains both rationale and good reading. It just doesn’t happen very often, is all. It is easier to be clever than it is to be conscientious.

As many of you will know, science fiction is unique in commercial literature because of the nature of some of its readers. These readers, who are organized into various kinds of clubs, including a large body of individuals who declare affiliation with nothing smaller than SF itself, are collectively called “fans.” Unlike Mets fans, James Bond fans, Baker Street Irregulars, Burroughs Bibliophiles or Conan’s own Hyborean Legion, these people are not primarily aficionados of a particular character—although some of them, as noted, do subsume that narrower sort of loyalty within their larger concern.

That larger concern is what makes the crucial difference. The institution of fandom ensures that at any given time, in all corners of the English-speaking world and in significant additional precincts, there will be several thousand energetic individuals who care deeply, in detail, continuously—and with positive effect—about the ultimate destiny, good and progress of science fiction.

Because they are organized—via these various clubs and national and international bodies whose regional meetings and annual conventions provide additional social links—they are in a position to lend the field a certain dignity, via awards like the Hugo and its collateral publicity. (Among such awards, the Hugo for excellence is unique. The crime field’s Edgar, the western’s Silver Spur and motion pictures’ Oscar, like the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula, are all awards attained by impressing one’s fellow members of a guild or “academy.” The Hugo alone is awarded by the audience toward which all these excellences are presumably aimed.)

But fandom, and a fannish way of life in which some would insist that the plural of fan is “fen,” and some that Fandom Is Just A Goshdurn Hobby (usually neologized as “fijagh,” opposed to “fiawol”), would be just another Goddamned social club if it weren’t for its mailing lists.

The binding force in fandom—many of whose most active and influential members have never had eyes laid on them by more than a fraction of their peers—is the amateur publication, or fanzine (as distinguished from “prozine”—what you are reading now).

Only Sam Moskowitz knows how many fanzines there have been and not even Sam Moskowitz could tell you accurately how many are in the mail to how many readers at any given moment—just as any attempt at a fannish census would be the same as an attempt to paint all of the Golden Gate Bridge before the other end needed painting again. But there are fans of every stripe and coloration; the prozine and book collectors, something like those in the larger universe but not completely so; the conservative and radical political activists, who play out within the fannish universe those impulses toward establishmentarianism and feud which all flesh is heir to; the encyclopedists and historians; the sane and the insane, all in a jumble together—and yes, even those who are beyond the original interest which led them to discover somehow the names of a few other fannish types and to begin their entry into an arena in which they now discuss art films, sportscars, music, politics, drugs . . . almost anything but the concern which originally brought them here.

The main concern always holds the middle, however, and in that wide, undistributed place there exist spokesmen and advocates of astonishing persuasive power, sharpening the wits of all around them, pouring out an impressive succession of opinions from which some
pro tem
consensus is always emerging—perhaps to be recorded and perhaps not before the next determination submerges it but always there to be sensed.

It doesn’t matter that you couldn’t get two fans to agree what the fannish attitude is or that you couldn’t write an accurate, thorough statement of your own. What counts is a perpetual ferment of ideas, many of them not overly related to SF at all, many of them clouded by personal motives, some destroyed—or enhanced—by the typographical accidents inherent in home-typed stencil duplication, many of them demonstrably juvenile, because their advocates are, in the median, below draft age chronologically and glandularly, though not always intellectually—what counts, as I was saying, is that there is this wealth of effective expression. From it the individual fan extracts a resultant attitude toward SF—among other things—which, though individual and dynamic, is nevertheless in rough agreement with other attitudes and which changes slowly enough so that there are such things as “
a
fannish attitude,” and certain enduring institutions in the form of shibboleth.

What does this mean to Thee and Me? It means Somebody Cares—and has been caring long enough to establish a weight of tradition and a culture from which a given individual might emerge enroute toward other activities but which would remain inherent in his intellectual bones. Fandom may or may not be A conscious Way Of Life, but fanac leaves its mark. And thus it affects Thee and Me quite strongly, though thee mightn’t know who 4sJ might be or the Futurians were and Me might be a decade or three beyond trotting all 26 copies of the latest issue of
Slantasy
down to the post office in Dorothy, N.J. Because they do grow up, you know, or at least get older—or did you think science fiction writers grow on trees?