Read The Engines of the Night Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: #Education & Reference, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Movements & Periods, #Criticism & Theory
The Engines of the Night (11 page)
It is an ambivalent genre and I have been, perhaps, its most ambivalent writer. The career and Collected Works, the life itself, have been monument or mausoleum to schism. The field is one thing and yet it may be the other. I am one thing and yet the other. I, the field, may be both but somehow I doubt it. One cannot embrace multitudes; one can barely (and only then if life is lived well) embrace oneself. There is simply no conclusion.
This genre, this thing, this science fiction, may make us better, it may make us worse. It may make us anything and then again,
pace
Hamilton, it may make us nothing at all, be entirely useless, a bunch of futuristic or bizarre stories. That’s all folks, take them or leave them as you will, and most of you will leave them. It is everything and nothing, better and worse. It is intolerably—and finally—merely human.
And that is what drew me toward it. A path not of illumination but of thrall. To become at last what one beholds—and dare not know the difference.
1979/1980: New Jersey
I Don’t Want Her You Can Have Her—
T
HE FANS WITH THEIR ACRONYMS HAVE THE NAME
for it all right: GAFIATE,
getting away from it all
. In the active form, to gafiate. The reaction is well known. Exhaustion, loathing, and overwhelming futility attack the actifan. Enmeshed in a hardly seamless network of conventions, fanzines, correspondence, feuds, history, and obligation, he feels a poetic faintness. He ceases to respond to letters; he is seen at conventions no more. Feuds and lovers must find other objects. The fan has gafiated. Sometimes he makes an announcement to this effect. More often—gafiation by definition is silence—he allows inferences. He returns to school full time. He gets married out of the field or files for divorce within it. He runs for congress or becomes employed by a distinguished graduate division.
Sometimes the gafiation is permanent (there are figures who will not even
admit
their participation in fan activity; will rip up the texts of Warner or Moskowitz undetected in bookstores). Quite often it is not. The fan, after a period of recuperation, degafiates. Once again he is seen at conventions, begins to query contributors for his reborn fanzine. APAs bristle with fresh reminiscence. Of course, in another few months or years the revulsion like malaria may set in once more: once more the pain. There are people whose lives can be defined in terms of successive involvement and flight from organized science fiction.
The same thing happens to writers and, for that matter, casual readers. The writer will deal with science fiction no more. He cannot write power fantasies for a juvenile audience, he is restricted by the editors, enchained by taboo, he will seek a wider audience and artistic freedom in the mainstream. Suitable announcements are made. The casual reader—for that matter, the
heavy
reader—has lost a sense of wonder. Eyes glaze, sensibility clouds; science fiction, like the booze in the second act of
The Iceman Cometh
, no longer has that old kick. He will read real novels about real people. The reader and writer turn their energies to another focus—the reader, usually adolescent, at first gafiation begins to entertain a social life—but they will be back. You can count on it. Unless, of course, they are not. Permanent gafiates appear to be the rule in only one class, those who in early adolescence, for a brief period of time, read great quantities of science fiction in a brief lacuna between childhood and the onset of a purposeful sex drive. (Decades later these people will not even
remember
reading science fiction in quantity and they will not be lying or self-deluded—science fiction was indeed an extension of a persona that the glands’ development demolished.) All of the others, in one fashion or the other, are heard from again. They can be said to have ungafiated and the terminology and the literature have categorized that syndrome as well.
This central ambivalence in the science fiction reader and writer—an ambivalence not common among those involved in any other kind of literature although quite familiar (in other areas) to students of abnormal psychology or those involved with the great religious institutions—is perhaps the central fact of the category, the lever to mix a metaphor into any profound understanding of this dark and troubled literature. The ambivalence comes from the conflicting perceptions of the form: Is it a true literature of the future, a forward-looking, transcendent, mind-boggling, mind-stretching form which renders its readers superior to the population, or is it just a bunch of crazy power fantasies and speculations (admittedly some of them better written than others) for the sublimation of powerless adolescents? Is it a literature whose roots are contemptible or exalting? Every one of us has felt strongly in one way and then the other through the course of our involvement and very few of us have managed to resolve the schism. Gafiation is an expression of one perception when pushed to the extreme but gafiation may itself be an act of collaboration . . . one has taken science fiction seriously enough, been moved by it to sufficient degree, to need to put an official imprimatur upon one’s rejection. Surely the millions who have read one or two science fiction stories, have not liked them particularly, and have not looked at science fiction since have not gafiated. They were never in a circumstance from which they could gafiate at all.
The ambivalence is not only at the center of everyone’s relationship to the form but probably at the center of the genre itself. Almost all of our strong works—and a good many of the weaker ones in the bargain—have derived much of their power from the evident struggles of the writers to fuse elaborate and often bizarre speculation with character and situation which will give the speculation emotional force. “The disparate and technological, the desperate and human,” Samuel R. Delany said many years ago, this is the definition of science fiction. The desperate and the disparate, the technological and the human do not link up easily; however, the fusion can be made—
Rogue Moon
,
A Canticle for Leibowitz
, Delany’s own “Aye, and Gomorrah,” to which his remarks were afterword, indicate that it can be done—but the psychic costs for writers and readers are severe. It is, after all, what started out as a crazy literature about aliens and robots, rocket ships and planetary destruction; it was deliberately published in the most debased form and slanted to appeal to a juvenile audience. As the consequence of the decades and of the perversity of its writers and editors, the pain and implication began to be put in . . . but there is a point at which even an excellent writer, a sophisticated reader begins to question the very nature of the material to which he is devoting so much time and thought. Surely there must be a better occupation for a grown human being than to define the world in deliberately removed form. It is better to deal with the world directly. Have an affair, get a degree in computer science, write a historical novel about events which
did
occur.
Spend some time with the kids, sell off the magazine collection.
Hence, gafiation. But there is nothing approaching a real cure for the seriously afflicted; one may amputate the limb but must henceforth live in apprehension of its loss, limp around. Sometimes it is simply easier to accept one’s condition, go back to it. Up to a point of course. And then at a lower level, satiation is reached once again and one begins to toy with the idea of gafiation, which the second or third time is hardly such a major step. After all, one has
already
lived through it. . . .
There is really no solution to any of this; science fiction, as Delany hints, is the literature of irresolution. Its readers and writers will inevitably feel pulled out at some point and some will feel that way always even though few can forsake it utterly. No creators or audience for any branch of popular entertainment love and hate their form as do those involved in science fiction. (There is almost no organized fandom for westerns and mysteries; quality lit fandom is oxymoronic and there are no situation comedy conventions. There are soap opera fan luncheons and comics conventions but they appear to be commerce, not seduction.) No creators or audience hate and love one another as do science fiction people. No creators or audience can be said to hate or love
themselves
as do—
Why? Because it is a crazy escapist literature and yet contains the central truth of this slaughterhouse of a century. We know this and cannot at times bear the thought of it. Nor, considering the record of the century and the horrors which the millennium hurtles toward us, is there reason why we should.
But one cannot—except in a few dramatic and pitiful instances in science fiction—voluntarily gafiate from the century.
1980: New Jersey
Onward and Upward with the Arts, Part II
E
VEN A MODESTLY SUCCESSFUL SCIENCE FICTION WRITER
—say, a dozen short stories in the magazines and a paperback original—can get on the convention circuit, and some of them never get out. There is in this land at least one science fiction convention every weekend of the year (excepting perhaps Christmas and New Year’s), and on many weekends the aspirant has his choice of two or three. The conventions take place in large cities and small, they range in attendance from one hundred or less
21
to seven thousand,
22
some are longstanding and traditional (the world convention is approaching the end of its fourth decade, the Cincinnati convention its third); others are fly-by-nights or just beginning to build. One some years ago took place on trains which racketed back and forth between Washington and New York while fans trooped lively through the corridors. It is difficult to speculate the effect on nonconventioneers. (The train was not a charter.)
The conventions are of all size and location but the programs are much the same. Fans attend, as do casual readers who live in the area (depending upon the degree of publicity), and editors and writers, and, of course, the press. There are panels on all aspects of the field, a guest of honor who delivers a guest-of-honor speech, discussion groups, movies, meet-the-pros parties. (At larger conventions many of these events occur simultaneously.) There is a costume party, a grand masquerade. Private parties are held through the premises celebrating various regions, interests, or friendships and sometimes celebrating nothing at all. The hotel bar is filled with professionals and their editors. (Fans themselves, because of age and disposition, tend to be a nondrinking crowd.) There is a good deal of fornication, not all of it indiscriminate. Old rivalries and hatreds are renewed, reworked, or broadened. Although the faces of the fans may change from region to region, those of the writers, editors, and the serious fans do not: Denver is very much like Minneapolis; Boston is Cincinnati
redux
.
Science fiction—as I have written elsewhere in a different voice a long time ago—for all of its claims to being a mind-expanding, venturesome field is much like the dog-show circuit, the same handlers and judges appearing in different combinations everywhere. The world of the convention like the world of Nabokov’s
Lolita
is an endless series of rooms in different places, all of which look the same. Only through the souvenir shops could one tell the difference.
For a new writer—and many an older one—it is all very heady stuff indeed. There are panels, autographs to be signed, nametags to display, new fornicatrices or drinking partners to be gained; the winds of Seattle’s heath may howl, the gales of Philadelphia may blow, but inside the hotel it is comfortable and familiar and it is unnecessary to go out at all. Most attendees do not; always one plans to sightsee but things keep on getting in the way. A science fiction writer who, like all American writers but five or six, lives in anonymity and discontent, can find at the conventions what no other writer outside the province can: recognition and an audience. The panels are attended, the guest-of-honor speeches are heard, the books are there to be autographed and every smile is a winner. It is possible for the duration of a convention—and beyond—to believe that science fiction is the world.
It is not, of course, and in his heart the professional probably knows this, but that requires thought, and conventions work against the activity. Of the 500,000 who can be said to read as many as three science fiction books a year (this already less than a quarter of a percent of the population), only a tenth of them could be identified as serious, devoted readers, and perhaps a fifth of that tenth, or 10,000, compose that pool from which
all
23
convention attendees can be said to be drawn. The total convention-going population would at the best fail to fill Madison Square Garden. Early season with the Warriors in town.
Still, at the large conventions they all seem to be there, including many beautiful women (there were almost no women at conventions until the nineteen-sixties). The drinks flow, the professionals hang out in a community of misery, the speeches draw applause, and there is always the possibility that the next request for an autograph may bring a “serious relationship.” Editors are always impressed by writers receiving adulation, so there is no mystery to science fiction writers getting on the circuit—all have been powerfully tempted; the circuit is also the reason why so many promising careers have hung at promise for years, or collapsed; still the illusion of audience is better for a writer (and more pleasant by far) than the anonymous, grinding work which is the lot of the commercial fictioneer. It is possible to combine the two—grinding work, weekend conventions—but this can bring real burnout; only a few remarkable cases have been able to work them together, and one will never know the price extracted from celebrated livers and bowels.
The existence of the circuit is probably the central reason for a well-known phenomenon: science fiction is an art medium in which one can go from quite promising to washed up without having paused for even a day at a point between. But the last word should be that of an ex-science fictioneer (who fled both the field and the circuit a long time ago) who said, “You know, you can get a great deal of attention, real reverence at these conventions for sure. But you know when the trouble begins? It starts when you ask who in hell you’re getting this attention
from
.”
1980: New Jersey
