L’Etat c’est moi
IN MID-1969, AS THE RECENTLY APPOINTED and juvenescent (twenty-nine is not an age, as the poet should have pointed out; it is a condition) editor of the Bulletin, the semimonthly publication of the then four-year-old Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), I wrote and published an editorial mildly critical of NASA’s public relations and of the Apollo project itself. It was written in reminiscence of the December 1968 mission captained by Frank Borman in which the moon was circled and Genesis liberally quoted; the invocation of the Old Testament seemed to me a failure of church/state separation and also an interference with what might have been private responses to a voyage which struck me as overridingly significant and mystical. I said all of this in a rather halting fashion (I did not then have much of a handle on the personal essay) and kept it to a decent four hundred words and devoted the remainder of that issue, once again, to market reports, contract summaries and communications amongst SFWA members, most of whom appeared to be not greatly enamored of one another.
Cries of pain and rage descended as if by parachute upon the modest premises in New York where the hapless publication and hapless remarks had been prepared. They descended also upon the quarters of the SFWA officers and trustees and these worthies, conferring shortly thereafter, decided and rapidly informed me that my services in science fiction were more urgently needed elsewhere and right away . . . I should immediately become a full-time writer in this field, that was to say, Would I please? Now? Write only fiction, that was to say. Clearly the officers did not wish the editorship of the Bulletin to interfere with my burgeoning career, and I was sent on my way from that volunteer position with due regard and extreme haste. (I thought at the time that to be fired as a volunteer was some kind of low, but learned as the years went on that science fiction offered humiliations more intricate and absolute.)
Why? I hear a question from the back. What’s going on? I’m kind of new here; why did they fire you for what you call a few mild anti-NASA, anti-Borman remarks? NASA went down the tubes a long time ago and Borman’s working for an airline, isn’t he? On television commercials and all that. Everybody knows that Apollo didn’t play downtown. You were speaking for the majority. Unless, of course, those remarks weren’t so mild. You always had a tendency to underestimate your effect on people.
Well, maybe I did. Point conceded. Nonetheless, let me tell this in my own way; it is a shade elliptical but in the end all will come clear, as the widow said to the bishop. My correspondents seemed in the main to think of science fiction as a kind of research and development arm of a technology administered by the government.
To them—and they represented the SFWA at the time and probably now, although the focus of the argument has shifted—the field was not so much to be an arena of exploration and debate (as many of us who came into science fiction in the sixties had been encouraged by the climate of the times and Michael Moorcock to think) as it was Gernsback’s Flowering—it existed to popularize technological advance, to dazzle the unsophisticated public with visions of the machinery and miracles to come. That was what Gernsback wanted, all right (with the secondary ambition of interesting young men in science as a career—and however Hugo may have failed in that secondary aim, we now know that he succeeded completely with the first).
Of course I had taken a different view. (I usually do.) I thought at the time that I spoke for many readers and writers. The evolution of the field literarily and stylistically through the thirties and forties and the introduction (almost from the outset of Campbell’s editorship) of a strong dystopian element in speculation (which Horace Gold seized and brought to the center of the field) had led me to feel by 1969 that it was late in the day indeed, and that science fiction had a more important role to play in the culture than to serve as a cheerleader for technological advance. I thought that NASA was the public relations arm of the scientific establishment. I thought that both were pimping for Johnson’s slut of a war tucked away (so Johnson hoped) in the back district. I thought a lot of things.
I also feel, more than a decade later, that I was right, that my attitude in time prevailed not only in the country but in the field itself; that my attitude was symptomatic of much of the serious work done in the decade . . . but I am also sure that I misjudged the feelings of most of the writers and all of the editors. These people did not regard science fiction so much as a speculative medium as one functional to the prevailing standards of the culture.
There was fear in those letters. One correspondent who worked for the space industry felt that his job was threatened, that he might actually lose it if the Bulletin reached his superiors, who would find him the member of an organization whose official voice questioned their practices. (He might have been right.) The fear was less personally based elsewhere but no less palpable: where did I get off knocking NASA and the government, the President and Borman, the church and the Bible for heaven’s sake, just when the Apollo project and the enormous attention it garnered were on the verge of making science fiction an acceptable pursuit?
This was a core argument. It was not hard for me to understand it even at the time. For decades, science fiction readers and writers had been regarded by the academic/literary nexus and the media as a bizarre group, aficionados of the subliterate obsessed by the arcane; now Borman and the boys were making all those crazy stories appear somewhat predictive.
Just at the point where a science fiction writer might finally get a hearing at the universities or by a Hollywood agent, an official voice was railing against their great patron. Didn’t I—well, didn’t I understand how it used to be? Didn’t I remember how the magazines went to rout in the fifties and how for decades a science fiction writer could not even be regarded as a writer by the most miserable graduate assistant in English?
Didn’t I remember how academically connected writers had been forced to publish under pseudonyms in the forties because revelation of their sf orientation to the department head might have threatened their position? Didn’t I remember those two-cent-a-word (at the top) magazine rates and $500 all-rights book contracts?
What was wrong with me, anyway? If I had objections to the spirit or public relations of the project, why didn’t I put them in my bag of pretensions and where the moon don’t shine? Was I out to destroy science fiction? If science fiction appeared in the position of speaking against NASA or Apollo, what man in the street would ever take us seriously again? One correspondent attacked not my arguments but my grammar. Another suggested that I was merely jealous. (I had a few defenders but they came in late and semiapologetic. First Amendment and all that.)
So, tossed out, I went away at least from the Bulletin (eventually I went away from the SFWA but that is another, less interesting and symptomatic issue, and sometime later I even came back but that is the least interesting of all), but I took from the experience a not unenduring lesson. (Hard spankings are meant to do this, I kindly told my daughter: make you remember.) That lesson has been further articulated in the Collected Works—and a good thing too, since we all must write from experience and almost every full-time writer is shorter on it than he would like to admit.
The lesson was this:
Science fiction, for all its trappings, its talk of “new horizons” and “new approaches” and “thinking things through from the beginning” and “new literary excitement,” is a very conservative form of literature. It is probably more conservative than westerns, mysteries, or gothics, let alone that most reactionary of all literatures, pornography. Most of its writers and editors are genuinely troubled by innovative styles or concepts at the outset, because they have a deep stake by the time they have achieved any position in the field in not appearing crazy. This was certainly true in 1969 when the field was still a minor if marginally respectable genre. It is more true yet at the beginning of the eighties when it has become, for a concatenation of factors, perhaps the most predictably profitable part of the publishing subdivisions of many conglomerates and when licensing of Star Trek or the Lucas properties is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The conservative nature of science fiction today is no longer an intimation, not even a standard. It is a necessity.
Very difficult to squeeze the innovative stuff into the category anymore. Not impossible—note Benford, Varley, Gotschalk, X, Y and Z—but hard as hell. Why bother, eh Carter? How can you—how can I—take it seriously anymore?
1979/1980: New Jersey