The Engines of the Night (5 page)

The Fifties

H
ARRY HARRISON, WHO HIMSELF ONLY GOT
really going at the end, called the decade the false spring of science fiction, and Robert Sheckley, whose active early career corresponded almost exactly with the decade, shook his head when we talked about it in 1973 and said, “Well, I squeezed a couple of happy years at the beginning, anyway.” James Gunn got a portion of his master’s thesis into one of the fifty magazines that were published at some point during those years and at least twenty science fiction writers, it might have been forty, were making an accountant’s wage from their trade. By 1960 it was all gone and it was five bleak years and another country before science fiction began to look hopeful again. Now, although some of the writers are still puttering around (and some like Fred Pohl, A. J. Budrys, and Alfred Bester are having significant new careers) it all seems at a great remove—surely as frozen in time, as historical to the younger writers of this day, as the early Gernsback era seemed to my generation. And most of the work, most of the writers, need rediscovery. Many will surely never achieve it.

What happened? A lot happened. The historical theory of synchronicity was demonstrated at the end of the decade as never elsewhere before the era of the assassinations began. When it happens, it all happens together, in short. The massive American News Service (ANS), responsible for magazine distribution, was ruled a monopoly and into forced divestiture. Twenty magazines perished in 1958, and the sales of the leaders were halved. These magazines could not reach the newsstands in sufficient numbers. The audience could not find them. But the audience had already diminished; it had never been large enough to support more than a few successful magazines, a few continuing book lines, and Sputnik in 1957 had made science fiction appear, to the fringe audience, bizarre, arcane, irrelevant. There were dangerous matters going on now in near space but the sophisticated, rather decadent form which genre science fiction had become had little connection with satellites in close orbit.

And other things. Henry Kuttner and Cyril M. Kornbluth died within a month of each other in early 1958. Kuttner, one of the five major figures of the previous decade,
⁶
had left science fiction but was constantly reprinted and was only forty-four. Kornbluth, a decade younger, was indisputably at the top rank. These sudden, shattering deaths—one from a heart attack in sleep, the other from a stroke or heart attack—made a number of their contemporaries question the very sense of their careers. What had all of this gotten Kuttner and Kornbluth? “I was only twenty-three, then,” Silverberg said, “but I somehow realized right away that these two men had literally died from writing science fiction and I was afraid that I was going to die too. I had some bad months.” Dead, these writers, after ten or twenty years in the word-rate-on-acceptance mills.

By 1959, Anthony Boucher, editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, had decided to join his founding coeditor, J. Francis McComas, in the semiretirement of freelancing and H. L. Gold was getting out too. Gold, editor of
Galaxy
, had been literally paralyzed by war-induced agoraphobia; unable to leave his apartment or carry on the semblance of a normal social life, he had been deteriorating for many years, and a period of hospitalization (on a rare, terrified sally out of doors he was struck by a car) convinced him that he could continue editing no longer. Fred Pohl had already been running the magazine ex officio; he took over the title too. And by 1959 only a few steady book markets for science fiction remained. Unplanned, imitative overproduction for an audience imagined larger than it was, the curse of science fiction publishing then as now, had resulted in many publishing catastrophes and only Ace, Doubleday, and Ballantine remained as steady outlets for all but the very few writers such as Heinlein and Clarke who had broken out of the category.

John W. Campbell at
Astounding
had wandered from Dianetics to the Hieronymus Machine to the finagle factor and was just beginning to topple into Norman Dean’s Drive, meanwhile running stories by a few writers functioning under innumerable pseudonyms with virtually the same plot, conception, characters, and outcome. Only Rick Raphael (who was gone by 1965) seemed to be able to break into and sell interesting work to
ASF
in those years; Campbell had no other new writers of any visible promise.

An unhappy, airless time. An end of time for many. So emphatically hopeless that when science fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British
New Worlds
and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field’s “new literary merit,” “new relevance,” “new excitement,” “new standards of contemporaneity” as if nothing innovative had occurred before Ballard or Silverberg. Yet, as that second and less significant false spring of the late sixties and seventies also ebbs, the true dimensions of the fifties reappear, however distantly, across the murky waters. Time to reconsider.

Some historical background: at the end of the nineteen-forties, science fiction accounted for perhaps fifty books, hardcover and paperback, published commercially in a year. The field supported perhaps seven magazines, only one of which,
Astounding
, paid decent word rates (two cents a word on acceptance) or was read by other than a juvenile audience. Five years later, there were forty magazines fighting for space on the newsstands, hardcover and paperback novels and collections were coming out at the rate of two to three hundred a year, and one book editor, Donald A. Wollheim at Ace, was publishing more science fiction in a month than had appeared in all of 1943.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, appearing first in late 1949 and
Galaxy
, the first issue dated October 1950, were well-financed, carefully edited projects intended to offer
Astounding
serious competition, and by the inclusion of a wider range of style and thematic approach they sought an expansion of the audience itself. They succeeded at once—
Galaxy
was to outsell
Astounding
almost from its inception through the next five years;
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, beginning as a quarterly
Magazine of Fantasy
, went bimonthly and added sf within a year and then, as its natural audience found it, became a monthly in early 1952—and behind them, entrepreneurs picking up the scent, came a clutch of magazines. Some, like
Cosmos
,
Space
, or
Rocket Stories
, lasted only a few issues, others like
Worlds of If or Science Fiction Adventures
held through various ownerships for longer, but through 1958 although magazines would collapse, new ones would spring. The growth of the field in a spectral minute was remarkable. In 1953 there were forty or fifty times the outlets for science fiction that had existed five years earlier.

Writers who had struggled with varying degrees of success through the bleak, building years—Sturgeon, Blish, Simak—found to their astonishment that they could almost make a living. A new generation of writers who had grown up under the influence of the Campbell decade were able to leap from late adolescence into full-time freelance writing careers: Budrys, Sheckley, Dick, Gunn, Knight. The enormous expansion of the market was further signified by the fact that the three most prolific writers of the forties, Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, and van Vogt, backed away from science fiction to go into other careers
⁷
and that Heinlein, working on a long series of successful quasijuveniles for Scribner, abandoned short stories entirely as did L. Sprague de Camp, who concentrated on nonfiction.

It was a pretty good time for Francis E. Walter, General Motors, Mitch Miller’s Columbia Records popular division and science fiction alike. Some of the field’s historians (notably Fred Pohl in a 1975 essay “Golden Ages Gone Away”) do not see these factors as unrelated;
Galaxy
and
Fantasy and Science Fiction
were among the very few mass markets where, sufficiently masked, an antiauthoritarian statement could be published. There are rumors of professors and engineers trapped in the academies or industry who turned to the science fiction magazines and both read and wrote for them (pseudonymously) avidly as absolutely the
only
medium where the policies and procedures of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy were explicated fully and mocked. Cyril M. Kornbluth in a 1957 symposium spoke of the hundreds of people in advertising who had thanked him and Fred Pohl in desperation for publishing the only novel,
The Space Merchants
, that told the truth about their industry and what it wanted the world to be. (Kornbluth added characteristically that of course, for all these thanks and testimonials, the novel had not changed its target medium to the slightest degree: advertising was exactly what it had been and so, to be sure, was Cyril Kornbluth.)

One has to continue, however, by discussing what kind of work was being done to occupy the space that the publishers in their enthusiasm or simple greed had created. Say this at the outset: there has only been a trickle of novels through the fifty-five-year history of science fiction that have been consensually accepted as masterpieces, absolute examples of what the field can be at its best. With no exception that I can glimpse,
all
of them were published in the fifties. The jury on the seventies is, by definition, still out (it looks as if
Dying Inside
,
The Dispossessed
, perhaps
334
and
Shadrach in the Furnace
and
The Ocean of Night
may make it), but there is virtually no novel of the sixties, however acclaimed in its time, which does not have a substantial and influential claque in opposition, as it did then.
⁸
Forties novels of significance:
Slan
,
Final Blackout
,
Sixth Column
,
World/Players of Null-A
,
Fury
look archaic now: primitive and unfulfilled. They have fallen out of print; the most recently reissued of them, the Kuttner’s
Fury
, has not appeared since 1973. (That non-novel,
The Martian Chronicles
,
does
have a good in-print record, but Bradbury has had for decades access to the audience outside the genre and the television production has been a spur.)

Consider, though, the fifties.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
,
More Than Human
,
Double Star
,
Rogue Moon
,
The Space Merchants
,
Gladiator-at-Law
,
The Demolished Man
,
The Stars My Destination
,
A Case of Conscience
,
Bring the Jubilee
. (
All
are currently in print except for
Gladiator-at-Law
.)
Rogue Moon
won no awards;
Canticle
was published in its year. Kornbluth’s
The Syndic
copped no honors;
More Than Human
in that year. To consider that
The Demolished Man
,
The Space Merchants
, and
Baby Is Three
(the central section of
More Than Human
from which the fore and aft of the novel were flung) all appeared in
Galaxy
within a nine-month period in 1952 is to be awed.

Novels, of course, collect the attention, the reissues and occasionally the money (
The Space Merchants
, despite recent enormous advances to Silverberg, Heinlein, and Gregory Benford, may still be, over its twenty-nine-year life, the most remunerative of all genre science fiction novels) but science fiction, unlike any other category of literature, lives in the short forms. The short story or novelette seem perfectly available to the articulation and enactment of a single speculative conceit which, one could insist, is the task for which science fiction itself is most suited. The level of short-story writing during the decade in technical expertise and inventiveness has never been equaled nor have
any
short stories published within the last fifteen years had the impact upon the field and its audience of what was appearing routinely in the best-of-the-year anthologies or magazine anthologies. Until the advent of John Varley in 1975, no short story writer in two decades sprang upon science fiction as did Mark Clifton through
Astounding
.

There is probably no way in which to teach a young audience (eighty percent of science fiction readers are under twenty) that Mark Clifton, dead a long time and virtually out of print, was for a period of four years the most controversial and influential writer in the magazines. No way to teach them that Floyd L. Wallace,
Galaxy
’s Clifton who published novelettes of increasing inventiveness and technical clarity, also virtually unreprinted although alive, taught at least one writer what the conceptual limits of the science fiction novelette might be. No way to teach them that the short stories of Damon Knight and Alfred Bester, in their technical ease and ambition, struck not only readers but professionals of their own and the previous generation as miraculous—miraculous that such work could be both recognizably genre science fiction and of indisputable artistic quality. (Knight and Bester collections are available; between them, however, they have not published a dozen new stories in as many years.)

One of the hazards, not to say horrors, of age is the reconsideration of our youthful selves, the vision of subsequent heartbreak superimposed, the memory of what we became shading inexorably what we took ourselves to be. The conclusion must come that we were fools and it is this, perhaps, which has left the fifties almost bereft of significant critical reevaluation and comment. Those suited lived through the time and still feel the pain. They were naive. They wrote themselves a bill of goods and hawked it and bought it, every rotten, self-delusory item. Sure they know it now. They knew it by 1959 and it destroyed some of them. But the bill of goods seemed reasonable.