I Don’t Know How to Put It Love But I’ll Surely Surely Try
BACK IN THE INNOCENT EARLY SEVENTIES when it became a regular program item at the science fiction conventions, the panel on Sex and Science Fiction was a draw, guaranteed to get the audience not only awake but in motion before noon. That was a long time ago, to be sure; now the topic has subdivided like a maddened amoeba: fragmented into panels on Homophobia in Science Fiction, Feminism in Science Fiction, Stereotyped Images of Intercourse in Science Fiction, Phallic and Breast Imagery—it is quite enough to unsettle the mind of an aging man who grew up in this field on a diet of Catherine Tarrant’s judiciously copy-edited Astounding. I can barely cope.
Nonetheless, writers being either sharply ahead or seriously behind their time (usually both and simultaneously), I am just about ready now to address the subject of sex in science fiction. It occurred to me sometime in 1976 that I had spent most of the decade up until then locked in a room typing, and when I stumbled out blinking it was with the feeling that I would have to be slowly and gently reacquainted with the world. The adolescent lunge as free after-care clinic. So it is the generality with which I must deal.
Most of my contemporaries have already had their says 2 on the issue (on the Sunday morning panels not unaided by raucous shouts from the audience and bottles of beer) and now it is, as Clifford Irving did not entitle his “authorized” biography of Howard Hughes, My Turn.
Sex in science fiction. Well, then. Sex in the literature of science fiction? Or in the lives of the respective writers? Or—modesty makes one tremble—in the conventions and other social events of the field? These are significant topics, each of them, and together they induce a collective sense of woe. To deal with all within the space of a single essay not only would be an accomplishment of thundering magnitude but would be to take clinical depression to its next logical step, mania and the beginnings of acting out. A middle-aged suburbanite had best watch himself.
Accept delimitation, accept the Hemingway theory that the power comes not from what is said but what is unsaid; accept one’s condition and discuss sex in the literature of science fiction.
One can inaugurate the conference by saying that until about 1952 in American genre science fiction there was none at all. There was heavily masked, coded, templated (that last, now fashionable academese) sex to be sure: aliens carrying off women in the pulp magazines, men carried off by or carrying off machines in Astounding; men beat up on one another quite a bit in all the publications and women stood in an odd relationship to technology, usually failing to understand it.
This undertext could be explained by the merest undergraduate in Psychology 5, Introduction to Human Development, but not until Philip Jose Farmer and Sam Mines conspired as author and editor to publish The Lovers and its semisequels in Startling Stories did sexuality as an important human drive having the power to motivate, enlighten, damage, or dignify become incorporated into a genre which had already existed as a discrete subcategory for more than a quarter of a century, three hundred and twenty-five months of magazine issues, perhaps twelve thousand stories of varying lengths in which not once did anything resembling carnal knowledge occur onstage. Never.
Twenty-seven years of asceticism are not easy to deny in life as well as art. Carnality may whisk one through the barriers in an instant, but the implications often are not understood for many years. The Lovers was well-received—Mines, doubtless to his relief, got away with it clean and Farmer published a few semisequels (Mother, and Open to Me My Sister)—but matters otherwise remained unchanged. In 1958, Theodore Sturgeon was able to smuggle in cautious intimations of homosexuality and the polymorphous perverse, and nothing less than sexual passion is the lever that makes Budrys’s Rogue Moon go, but as late as 1965, science fiction was still a genre which in the main denied the existence, let alone the extent, of human sexuality.
(It became a grim or frivolous game for some of the writers who were, of course, not fools, to see what they could slip by without editorial knowledge or consent. One famously was able to get through J. W. Campbell and Kay Tarrant a description of a tomcat as a “ball-bearing mousetrap” and Asimov’s 1951 “Hostess” in Galaxy reeked of the perversity of sexual attraction between an alien diplomat and a repressed academic’s wife but these triumphs were few and, more to the point, unnoticed. If they had attracted wide attention, the writers would have paid the price.)
All of this began to end at last with Michael Moorcock’s publication in the British New Worlds, to whose editorship he had acceded after Ted Carnell, of work by writers like Ballard and Aldiss and Langdon Jones which made frank use of sexual motifs. Two years later, in 1967, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions delivered in the form of an original anthology thirty-three stories allegedly unpublishable in the magazine markets, almost half of them dealing with sexuality as the central theme. The book was successful and opened the way for many writers and anthologists who went and did likewise. In 1968 in Galaxy, Robert Silverberg was able to get “fuck you” into the sacrosanct pages by putting it in the binarese of a horny and demented computer. (In early 1970 Silverberg got The Word itself into Galaxy right after Harlan Ellison put “shit” into F & SF and just before I slid “cocksucker” into Fantastic.) 3
By the beginning of the nineteen-seventies, novels of great or relative explicitness (Silverberg’s Dying Inside, The Second Trip, and The World Inside, my own Beyond Apollo) bore the label of category science fiction. Short stories in original anthologies edited by Silverberg, Knight, Harrison, and Carr were also using sexual material. Galaxy continued to run sexually explicit work and by the mid-seventies copulation and masturbation had even made their way into Ben Bova’s Analog. By the start of the eighties, although the Promised Land was not outside these windows last time I looked (Moskowitz and I both know that the Promised Land was sacked, looted, and cleaned to the ground by 1938 at the latest), the science fiction writer, particularly the science fiction novelist, began to deal with sexuality in the same freedom that could be applied to technology, apocalypse, political repression, or bigotry a quarter of a century ago.
Why was sexuality so late in arriving? Why was the capacity to depict its full range in fact practically the last element to reach the genre, long after it had become in all other ways a viable literary medium?
The explanation is directly related to the general age of sf readership. Science fiction has always been a genre the majority of whose readers are young. Perhaps nine tenths of them are under twenty-five, close to fifty percent under sixteen. The young are exposed to parental and social sanctions of the most unpleasant sort. Playboy could break the distribution patterns and drag hundreds of imitators through the mesh, but the magazines (and until the sixties science fiction was a magazine genre) were at the mercy of magazine distributors whose wives and children (distributors being able neither to read nor write) felt that science fiction was to be aseptic. The covers were a sell but inside, where the truth lurked, the aliens’ designs were simple and wholesome. They sought not to copulate but to kill.
Almost all science fiction published in book form prior to 1965 had appeared previously in the magazines, and almost all the science fiction therein was produced by writers and editors with at least an eye and a half on the whims of the magazine distributors who simply did not want to take chances with products which were (unlike the high-priced Playboy) marginally profitable, nickel-and-diming. One distributor pullout could topple a magazine; if the publisher had a chain his entire line might be endangered.
Accordingly, a kind of least common denominator applied to magazine science fiction: if a given story could be perceived as giving potential offense to anyone, it was the path of least resistance to reject or at least edit it heavily. Catherine Tarrant at ASF and Horace Gold at Galaxy notably did so. Under the circumstances, the remarkable fact was that The Lovers sold at all—and it did, of course, appear in one of the low-paying and marginal pulp magazines of its era, a magazine so endangered already that it went out of business (through no fault of Farmer) less than two years later.
Still and in sum it is now the eighties and science fiction has not only caught on, it has caught up. The dear old field has made all of the changes and is, in the view of many of its critics (not all of them aged), no less dirty than any other branch of modern literature. The critics mutter and murmur but many of their own icons, writers who were models of restraint, have fallen off the wagon in recent years and resolved to show Harlan Ellison and Langdon Jones a couple of things.
Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves has a central section which is about nothing if not exclusively sex, and Robert Heinlein’s three most recent novels, The Number of the Beast, Time Enough for Love, and I Will Fear No Evil, are not only about sex but about sexual perversity and its endless lacunae; they are quarter-million-word investigations of subjects—transvestism, narcissism, autoeroticism, copulation—-which even Hubert Selby, Jr., or Henry Miller would not treat so obsessively. (There are entire sentences in Tropic of Cancer which have nothing at all to do with sex. Selby in Last Exit to Brooklyn went on for paragraphs.)
On balance—the panel draws to a close, the participants look wearily at the clock and the audience is shuffling in place and waving hands; sorry, no questions folks, we can hardly bear to go on even when left to ourselves—the question of sex in science fiction is one which seems to have been resolved, by simple majority, in favor of sex. The issue is important now in historical, not textual, perspective.
And that is where the real critical work of the next half century is going to be done; it will address the bigger questions. To what degree did the practical taboos under which it functioned as a form of popular literature alter science fiction? Science fiction has been regarded by the universities for a long time as a debased if energetic form of popular literature—but how much of that debasement was imposed rather than intrinsic? To what degree, in fact, may science fiction be seen as victim rather than perpetrator of its greatest weaknesses? How much false characterization, contrived plotting, coy retreat, dissimulation was forced upon writers who were working in a field which made their work contemptible to them if they were to do it at all?
In short—and this is no small point—science fiction may not have been populated by bad writers or editors but by extraordinarily good examples who, functioning under taboos which would have destroyed those less capable, were able to do more than the distributors, the wholesalers and the audience ever suspected. Science fiction, viewed from this context, might be conceived as a kind of difficult tribute to the human spirit, a monument to cunning.
And then again, it might not. It would be easier perhaps to stand with and for the Kazins and Howes, Abrahams and Charyns to argue that it was (is!) junk about people without genitals for kids of all ages who could barely read or bear to think.
But I do not think so.
I think that in its damages lies its magnificence.
I think that in those necessities suspired the truth.
1979/1980: New Jersey