Introduction to the Ebook Edition
WHEN I ASSEMBLED THIS BOOK—a conflation of essays written for various magazines in the 1970s and some entirely new work, about 50/50—in 1980, I had one small and one very large ambition. The large ambition was to utterly change the face of my time (as Mailer so winningly put it in Advertisements for Myself), bring science fiction to full literary respectability, get science fiction with me at the head of it into the literary and academic canon, bring the teeming masses to new understanding, have flowers at my feet and houris at my head all of the time. The minor ambition—I calculated that my more megalomaniac purposes were as Damon Runyon would put it at least six to five against—was to have a book on science fiction which would sell modestly, have a kind of modest permanence . . . a book which like Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder or James Blish’s The Issue at Hand would have a kind of sub-life over the many years and would, like those remarkable testaments, be regarded as required reading for any writer interested in publishing science fiction. The Knight and Blish books are irreplaceable, the first (and for a very long time the only) works of serious criticism of category science fiction, and it was my prayerful, not in this case at all megalomaniac, hope that The Engines of the Night might join those two works in the sub-basement where from time to time uninformed readers would take the volume out and appalled readers would subsequently replace it.
The work was certainly more personal than either Issue at Hand or In Search of Wonder; unlike Blish or Knight, I brought my own writing experiences (and glancingly, my personal life) into the text; it mingled attempts at objective history or criticism with cries de coeur of the most chilling sort and intentionally or otherwise emerged as a kind of masked autobiography. I had in the previous decade often said that I would write my memoirs at forty; The Engines of the Night was indeed assembled at approximately that age and it is as close to a memoir as I am likely to get. Writers, given enough time and space, will tell you everything even if they are insistent upon telling you nothing. Even Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s secrets; even Nabokov’s most private obsessions are spilled out on the pages. Sometimes you need a decoder: the Royal Russian and Big Ernie were clever guys. Sometimes you barely need a decoder as with The Engines of the Night. One can map my personal and professional odyssey over the first fifteen years of my working involvement with science fiction closely through this work.
Did I succeed? I think it fair to say that I failed in my major ambition; the Republic is still standing and science fiction remains compartmentalized within the academy and most general review media; it has had its moments over the years intervening but in the main is as despised and marginalized a category of literature as it was in 1980, which is to say somewhat despised and significantly marginalized. Nor, the last time I looked left and right, did I note flowers at my feet, houris at my lips, or even a get-well card. The minor or at least more realistic ambition stands problematic in its resolution: Engines sold about 3500 copies in its hardcover edition—not too bad for Doubleday science fiction, which wasn’t fiction—and had a modest trade edition; both have been out of print for a long time and this composes its first reissue, seventeen years after the trade edition. The work did not win science fiction’s Hugo Award and The Science Fiction Encyclopedia refers to it as “ignored.”
But then again and twenty years later I still receive occasional letters on this book (and even more occasional requests for a copy should I have any extras on hand; I no longer do); it has a reputation perhaps beyond its audience and it seems over the years to have been read by more than half of the writers who came into the field since its publication to produce any body of work, and it has perhaps an even larger percentage of readers among science fiction writers who were my contemporaries and predecessors. There was nothing quite like this work—this is not necessarily self-praise—before it was published; in its wake there have been some similar works but very few of them have been published by other than small press. (Thomas M. Disch’s Dreams Our Stuff Is Made On, published in the late ’90s, is an exception or an anomaly, modeled in small degree on Engines, which, incidentally, Disch hated; it was reviewed widely within and without the genre and won a Hugo . . . Disch, however, had relatively little to say about his own body of work, his own struggles in and then out of the genre.) This is a subterranean work. I wouldn’t call it a “cult book”—that condescension or pejorative masked as praise—but it is one whose sub-life meets the more modest version of the hopes surrounding its preparation and delivery.
How does this look more than twenty-one years later? (I delivered the work to its Doubleday editor, Patrick LoBrutto, on 10-4-80.) As a summary of my own experience and the circumstances and history of the genre in 1980, it stands reasonably well. (One reviewer pointed out that despite the original subtitle Science Fiction in the Eighties, the book had virtually nothing to say about that decade-to-come.) As a predictive work the reviews are mixed: this utterly missed William Gibson and his imitators whose stoned-out computer cowboys and dot-matrix emptiness brilliantly anticipated and became then conflated with the computer culture. Then again, there is that remarkable paragraph in the essay SF Forever which begins, “I have little idea what the science fiction of the eighties will be like—as we live through, it will seem to be very much like the science fiction of the year just before—but I have a pretty good grasp of the somber nineties,” and then lays out the present publishing situation with acerbity and dead-on compression. Here are the niche publishers, the small press, the novelizations, the media licenses, the overtaking of science fiction by fantasy coldly noted ten years before the time; a train wreck (a train wreck for me, anyway) viewed in the distant offing and absolutely nothing to be done but to describe. Here is the marginalization of science fiction, which, as Norman Spinrad and I said in virtually the same words, was to become “A small special interest at science fiction conventions.” Here is adumbrated the disappearance of a constantly replenished, knowledgeable fan base. Here, if you want to peer hard enough, is the disappearance of the magazine collector and the market for back-issues. Not bad for the time; science fiction is not, as I have been insisting for decades, a predictive medium, that was never its purpose . . . but nonetheless this was pretty good. It’s about the only prediction through the book which was. (Told you it wasn’t a predictive medium.)
Some of the book was written in elegiac mood; if not science fiction as I understood it, then at least my career was being mourned and I felt (note the introduction) that in some ways, not good ways, my career was paradigmatic of the arc of the category itself. Science fiction has produced remarkable work within its three-quarter-of-a-century category confines; “our first masterpieces began to appear in the late 1930s,” as I wrote, and there have been many since then, right up unto the present day. But at the same time that the clichés, the hardware, the very language of science fiction have utterly permeated the scientific and popular culture (this was part of Disch’s point) the category itself has become marginalized and perhaps the more arcane. The contents of a current issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine would be incomprehensible, I think, to most general readers; what is left of “true” science fiction has become utterly self-referential. I do not think that a general reader would have been as confused and put off by a 1947 or 1956 Astounding, a 1953 Galaxy as that general reader would be by the current IASFM; this is less true of Fantasy & Science Fiction only because that magazine by definition devotes some significant proportion of its contents to fantasy. Fantasy is more comprehensible to a general audience, as Judy-Lynn del Rey noted and can reach places and people that science fiction never can.
The Engines of the Night, no less than its subject—historical category science fiction—is time-bound; it is a work of its time addressing its time. This is not necessarily a bad or even a limiting issue; as I noted in an anthology afterword some years before Engines, from great rigor can come the greatest freedom, from the most specific can come the most general; surely Herr Bach of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of the Fugue would agree, so would Big Ernie whose motto in the 1920s and 1930s might as well have been “Specify, specify; particularize.” High mountains and dead leopards, that was Big Ernie, that is the science fiction propitiated by Engines; a high, cold, distant carcass; an emblem, a signatory like the book itself, the book a mark of how far at least one science fiction writer might go before he perished.
—December 16, 2001