The Engines of the Night (10 page)

The Science Fiction of Science Fiction

R
OBERT SILVERBERG’S TWO 1970S STORIES,
“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (1972) and “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” (1973), are central to any analysis of the form; they are extremely important as works of literary criticism and may in that regard transcend their value as fiction (which is not to say that as fiction they are contemptible). Neither has received a great deal of attention; short stories in this category rarely do. Neither in my opinion has been properly understood, because to properly grasp these stories is, perhaps, to cease reading and writing science fiction. It is astonishing, a tribute to professionalism and the contradictory nature of the writers’ persona that Silverberg continued to write past these stories, and after a three-year pause seems to stand on the verge of yet another major career, his third in this field.

(But this is not to single out Silverberg. My own 1973
Herovit’s World
reads like the last will and testament of a bitterly exhausted writer about to quit science fiction; that posture did become mine for a time but only three years later. Between
Herovit’s World
and my public scream of pain I wrote more than fifteen additional science fiction novels and a hundred short stories. Persistence or the beckonings of the market, culture lag or most likely of all proof of Robert Sheckley’s aphorism: It is very hard to learn from something that we already know.)

To jump the argument herein right to the end and to anticipate my conclusion (a habit quite common among writers who fear the point may otherwise wriggle off like a fish and evade them forever), what Silverberg is clearly saying in both “Schwartz” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is that science fiction is doomed by its own nature and devices to be a second-rate form of literature. It can
never
aspire to the effects of the first rate, which are to break the reader (and writer) through to new levels of perception, to a reorganization of the materials of his life. It cannot do this because the purposes of science fiction, at the base, must work against this kind of heightening of insight, confrontation of self.

Yet at the same time that both of these stories drive through to the point conclusively, they are
themselves
very close to first-rate work. “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is not science fiction (it is a literary story which incorporates the genre as a metaphor for the protagonist-narrator’s condition), but “Schwartz Between the Galaxies”
is
, and the fact that the latter at least can take the reader to a conclusion which the existence of the story denies is one of those large or little paradoxes not uncharacteristic of the field. The tension between what is said and what is meant—what is indicated and what is done. It is all of a mystery.

“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” was published in
Infinity Three
, a long-departed volume of an extinct original anthology series (it reached five volumes; a sixth was compiled but never published) edited by Robert Hoskins. It is less a work of fiction than what the French might call a meditation: the nameless protagonist, employed in an unstated executive job in an anonymous corporation, discusses the role that his obsession with reading and collecting science fiction has imposed upon him. He is ambivalent about science fiction: on the one hand he feels that it is a carryover of adolescent escapism and fantasizing which, shamefully, he has not been able to put away; on the other he feels that the transcendent and predictive qualities of the genre grant him broader perspective than most of his friends in the corporate lower middle class. (But he feels vaguely embarrassed defending the genre to his friends and conceals his library.) He fornicates with a lady friend while watching the Apollo landing; the moment of orgasm, colliding with the first steps on the moon (a coincidence which would not work with ninety writers out of a hundred but which Silverberg makes appealing through dry understatement), yields only a sense of blankness, the same blankness which he feels at this culmination of the science-fictional vision. Old magazine covers and paragraphs from the classic stories drift through the protagonist’s mind toward sleep; he can chant the names of the greats and of their oeuvre. The story comes to no conclusion whatsoever but it is fair to say that if it had appeared in
The New Yorker
(where it would have fit in stylistically without a tremor) instead of
Infinity
it would have been taken as a perfectly turned template of late-century urban angst and loss as portrayed through the metaphor of escapist fiction. The story, one of Silverberg’s finest, has attracted virtually no attention, probably because it is not science fiction and its true audience (whatever that audience might be) has never found it.

“Schwartz” has attracted some attention and is science fiction; it appeared in the first issue of the Judy-Lynn del Rey occasional original anthology,
Stellar Science Fiction
, and was until late 1980 (when “Our Lady of the Stegosaurs” appeared in
Omni
, to be followed by several others) Silverberg’s apparent last short story. Schwartz, a 22nd-century physicist with psychological and emotional problems of minor crippling nature, is a science fiction fan; on a star flight he sinks further and further into the fantasies of pulp magazines while the technologized, metallic present recedes; barely able to cope with his environment Schwartz appears to sink toward clinical depression as the rocket approaches its destination and not a moment too soon.

Silverberg is reiterating the vision of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” but with less ambivalence here, possibly with less moral complexity;
²⁰
here is the speculation, quite naked, that science fiction in
any
era will be a junk medium. The science fiction of the science fiction future will partake then as ever of the elements of fantasy and escape, will serve the reader’s need for the dreamlike, will shift him (with his active collaboration) off reality.

The very purposes of science fiction in short must render it contemptible in absolute literary (or psychological) terms. Literature deals with life, the story would suggest; science fiction sends us messages of its warpage or denial. Schwartz tumbling through the black holes of the ninth millennium would yet meander through pulp imaginings, dreaming perhaps of brave astronauts making moon landings or inventing holographic television transmitters.

Like “Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” “Schwartz” is therefore less a work of fiction than of literary criticism. (Silverberg has stated that he thinks it is one of his five best; I think that a reasonably close reader would not take it that high, but it is close and detailed work and both better conceived and adventurous, if not as emotionally affecting, as “Science Fiction Hall of Fame.”) It is, in fact, a castigation of the genre which perpetrated it and in which it appears, and as such it is devastating, a demolition of the genre so compelling that one surmises that if Judy-Lynn del Rey had truly understood what Silverberg was saying she would have refused to publish the story. (This may be too harsh; Silverberg recounts that del Rey was not too happy with it on delivery, calling it something that she had not expected, but it would be more than possible for her to publish it as a politic gesture to a major career without having much use for it at all.) Certainly it is easy to see why it was Silverberg’s last short story for seven years and why after two more relatively unambitious novels (
The Stochastic Man
and
Shadrach in the Furnace
) Silverberg backed away from science fiction for several years. There is no place a serious science fiction writer can go from “Schwartz” other than to consciously cut back on the range and implication of the material. (“Lord Valentine’s Castle” and “Our Lady of the Stegosaurs,” published at the time of this writing, clearly indicate that this is, for now at least, so.)

“Schwartz” and “Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (along with a few of my own works, particularly
Herovit’s World
and
Galaxies
) are close to the final position statement but they have interesting antecedent in Samuel R. Delany’s well-known “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which appeared in
Dangerous Visions
in 1967 and won a Nebula Award; Delany tosses away in subtext what Silverberg brought up front but the clues are there. In his story the science fiction of today has become the cheap adventure fiction of the century following and is read (among others) by perverts who are sexually aroused by (desexualized) astronauts: science fiction has become tomorrow’s pornography. In one shattering throwaway description of the cheap magazines and paperbacks kept by one of the frelks (astronaut-lovers) in his apartment Delany opened a crack on Silverberg’s devastating insight: Science fiction is junk. Junk by definition misrepresents, lies, cheapens, manipulates—junk may even be said to destroy (but only if one is already open to destruction), but ultimately junk can serve only the debased purposes of those who consume it: they are not seeking enlightenment but comfort. Delany has other, and perhaps less profound, matters on his mind in this story but he foreshadows what Silverberg in the best tradition was able to explore at greater length many years later.

(Any discussion of this subgenre’s subgenre must fairly make reference as well to the late Edmond Hamilton’s 1964
Fantasy and Science Fiction
story “The Pro,” in which an old pulp science fiction writer, father of an astronaut, returns from a view of the launching to look at the dead colored magazines and books on his shelf, “lined up like little paper corpses,” and understands that not only in relation to his son’s career but to all of life his work has meant absolutely nothing, has borne no relation to any reality except the brief purposes to which his fiction was conceived and published, now of no value whatsoever. He could not get the curious reporters, looking for a human interest angle, to understand that and he could barely accept it himself but now, as The Pro stares at the collected and forgotten works, the tears come. The story was reprinted only once in
The Best of Edmond Hamilton
and this paragraph is, to my knowledge, the first printed notice it has ever received. Hamilton died in early 1977 at the age of seventy-three. All of his work is now out of print. Much of
Star Wars
and
The Empire Strikes Back
appear to be based upon a close reading of his work. At least his wife, Leigh Brackett, who herself died only a year later, was commissioned to do the original script for
The Empire Strikes Back
.)

What does all of this mean? What is the question? as Gertrude Stein is reputed to have finally said. The Silverberg stories—and Delany’s and Hamilton’s too in a different way—lead to brooding if not awfully complex speculation on the nature of the field to which I have dedicated a large proportion of my working life and most of my best creative energies. And two and a half million words of fiction. The questions are by their nature irresolute but at least they can be posed, no small step for a middle-aged genre writer. Is science fiction doomed indeed to be a second-rate literature? Does its very nature demand that?

Or is this too bleak? Might the genre be shaped or at least left open to the possibility that it could lead toward an explanation of the better rather than worse possibilities? Might science fiction become, somehow, not a literature of escape but (as Alexei Panshin has suggested) one of education for survival? Might science fiction, in short, somehow be worked around as the Futurians of the late thirties were sure it could be, to
save the world?

Science fiction to save the world
is a catechism which predates even the Futurians. The earliest practitioners of the form as defined by Gernsback believed by the early thirties in nothing less. The history of organized fandom according to the concordance of Moskowitz (footnotes by Harry Warner, Jr.) can be understood as the history of a group splitting early between those who loved science fiction for its own sake and those who saw it as a political-social instrument of change; the schism became ugly, and even uglier were some of the effects of the decades on those who believed that it
could
matter. As late as the nineteen-fifties, most of the field’s best writers—Kornbluth, Clifton, Budrys, Heinlein—and certainly almost all of its important editors, believed that the literature had the power within itself to change society, to genuinely alter institutions and personal lives. (Hubbard’s Dianetics, an invention which emerged wholly from science fiction, was an attempt to codify the personality and therapy in terms which could have been those of
Astounding
’s engineer-readers; perform the proper rituals and remove the engram, schematize the psyche and quantify the Bad Charge.)

Most science fiction writers no longer believe this. Some do but have resorted to mystical rather than practical rationalization. Panshin in his nineteen-seventies critical works
Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrow
and
SF in Dimension
posits a science fiction which will deliver universe, possibility, and transcendence. Robert Heinlein’s most recent enormous novels use the devices of science fiction as mystical extrapolation. (
Stranger in a Strange Land
, the first and best of them, found an enormous audience, a few of whom did not interpret Heinlein’s vision in exactly that way.) There is to this time a strong undercurrent in science fiction toward the use of the genre as a positive, engaging, didactic,
useful
medium for its readers. Science fiction as self-improvement; a kind of complicated Couéism for the last quarter of the century.
Getting better with science fiction
; Valentine Smith as another version of Bruce Barton’s Jesus who, whatever else He might have been, was surely one of the boys. And a hell of a salesman.

But “Schwartz” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” will simply not go away. Once read—and anyone who would consider himself a student of this genre will eventually read them—they render a statement which must be taken into account. Science fiction will
always
offer easier alternatives. Science fiction will
always
be slanted, by definition, to taking its readers out of the world. Only weak people, however—pat Freudianism and the great cult psychology movements of the seventies have taught us—want out of the world. Strong people want
in
. Strong people want to, must, deal with life as it is presented. Science fiction is a literature for the weak, the defenseless, the handicapped, and the scorned. Panacea and pap—I have presented the poles of the argument. I have no conclusion. Here is the ambivalence locked not only into the field but in me (and perhaps, although I hesitate to generalize, in every writer who ever attempted to do a serious body of work in science fiction or even took it seriously enough to start). It would be nice to conclude positively, satisfying a large portion of the readership; it would be satisfying to end negatively if only to carry through the integrity of one’s vision, but I can do neither. I have no answer nor can I even recommend where it may be sought. Science fiction is an ambivalent genre.