The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (2 page)

In addition to this relative confusion, Gernsback, an eccentric immigrant and technological visionary, was tone-deaf to the English language, printing barely literate stories, often by
enthusiastic teenagers, about new inventions and the promise of a wondrous technological future cheek by jowl with fiction by Wells, Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a growing number of professional
pulp writers who simply wanted to break into the new market. Gernsback was the man who first saw science fiction as the ordinary pleasure reading of the new technological world. But his standards
were not the standards of a literary man or a modernist. They were the standards of a publisher of popular entertainment in pulp magazines – low-class, low-paying, low-priced popular
entertainment serving the mass market.

So genre science fiction became anti-modernist. It rapidly developed a loyal readership, literary conventions, and a body of specialized writers who, converted by the evangelical pitch of
Gernsback and the other early editors – chief among them John W. Campbell, Jr, who took over the helm of
Astounding
in the late 1930s and set higher stylistic standards for the genre
(his was for decades the highest-paying market) – set about improving themselves.

Of all the pulp magazine genres, science fiction was the most socially unacceptable for decades, so it attracted the alienated of all stripes, some of them extremely talented writers. By the
early 1940s the SF field had come into being. And it decided to rule the world. “Science fiction is the central literature of our time. It is not part of the mainstream. It is the
mainstream”, says Ray Bradbury, and such grandiose claims are part of the essence of the SF field. Bradbury was a teenager who published a fanzine in the late 1930s and became a writer in the
1940s under the tutelage of such established SF professionals as Leigh Brackett (who co-authored the script for
The Big Sleep
with William Faulkner, and later wrote the screenplay for
The
Empire Strikes Back
). Science fiction did not aspire to take over literature, but reality.

The field (an aggregation of people) as opposed to the genre (a body of texts) was originally a closely-knit international group of passionate readers and writers of science fiction in the 1930s
and 1940s, people who knew each other for the most part only through correspondence and rarely met. They published fanzines and sent them to one another. They developed and evolved their own
practical literary criticism and their own literary standards. Most of them were teenagers at the start – including the writers. Practically speaking, none of them had the benefit of a
literary or humanist education. They read a lot. Some of them had technical training, some a scientific education – like Wells. But they were organized, and when the economy and publishing
opportunities expanded after World War II, the SF field was ready to expand.

In its own view, science fiction had already grown up; in Campbell’s
Astounding
, the 1940s were the Golden Age of SF. But by any sensible calculation the SF field really began to
grow up after the war and blossomed with the first publications of genre science fiction in hardback books; the founding of major new magazines, such as
Galaxy
and
Fantasy & Science
Fiction
in 1949; and the growth of the mass market paperback publishing industry in the early 1950s, which discovered science fiction right away. Most of the stories in this book are post-World
War II mainly because that was the time at which the idea of revision took hold in the SF writing community, with a concomitant improvement in the fiction; it was a time when the money improved,
although not enough for any but five or six of the highest paid writers to make a living without a “day job”; and most of all it was a time of optimism in the West after the terrible
war.

The international SF Field Crew with the sudden influx of American science fiction, and a dialogue began among literatures that grew and continues to grow today. In Russia in the 1940s, one of
the key texts was a story written in response to a Murray Leinster story in
Astounding
. In France, Boris Vian translated A.E. van Vogt’s uneven English (
The World of
Null–A
) into literate French and launched van Vogt as the most important SF writer of the period in France. American science fiction, in translation or in the original, dominated the
discourse worldwide. It still does; even though there have been major writers in other languages who have made major contributions. American science fiction is still the dominant partner in all
dialogues. I have attempted, in this anthology, to provide some translations that give evidence of the growth of other traditions, but the overwhelming evidence is that American science fiction and
the American market place drive the SF world.

It is a source of both amusement and frustration to SF people, writers and readers that public consciousness of science fiction has almost never penetrated beyond the first decade of the
field’s development. Sure,
Star Wars
is wonderful, but in precisely the same way and at the same level of consciousness and sophistication that science fiction from the late twenties
and early thirties was: fast, almost plotless stories of zipping through the ether in spaceships, meeting aliens, using futuristic devices and fighting the bad guys (and winning). SF people
generally call this sci-fi (affectionately) “skiffy”, to distinguish it from the real, grown-up pure quill.

Science fiction is read throughout the English language-reading world, and in many other languages for pleasure and entertainment. But it is not read with much comprehension or pleasure by the
dominant literary culture, the writers and academics who, on the whole, define literary fashions and instruct us in the values and virtues of fashionable literatures. This is understandable given
the literary history of the genre, which has now outlasted all the other counterculture or outsider literary movements of the twentieth century. I wrote an entire book,
Age of Wonders
(1984,
1996), devoted to elucidating the nature of the field and the problems of understanding it and the literature associated with it, for outsiders, but one particular point needs to be repeated each
time the subject arises. Science fiction is read properly, as an experienced reader can, only if the givens of the story are granted as literal, so that if the story is set on Mars in the future,
that is the literal time and place. It might secondarily be interpretable as “only” a metaphor for the human condition, or for some abnormal psychological state of the character or
characters, but with rare exceptions in science fiction, the literal truth of the time and place and ideas is a necessary precondition to making sense of the story. This is because only through
this literality (the real world is pared away and reduced to an imaginable invented world, in which we can focus on things happening that could not happen in the mainstream world of everyday
reality) can the emotional significance of totally imaginary times and places and events be felt.

Kingsley Amis, in
New Maps of Hell
(1960), quotes his friend Edmund Crispin as saying, “Where an ordinary novel or short story resembles portraiture or at the widest the domestic
interior, science fiction offers the less cosy satisfaction of a landscape with figures; to ask that these distant manikins be shown in as much detail as the subject of the portrait is evidently to
ask the impossible”; he then goes on himself to say: “This is perhaps partisan in tone, but it does indicate a scale of priorities which operates throughout the medium and which, of
course, is open to objection, though this is not often based on much more than an expectation that science fiction should treat the future as fiction of the main stream treats the present, an
expectation bound to be defeated” (p. 128).

Tom Shippey, in his introduction to
The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories
(1992), comments, “ What, then, has science fiction had to offer its human readers? Whatever it is, it
has been enough for the genre to make its way into a prominent, if not dominant place in popular literary culture despite every kind of literary misunderstanding or discouragement. A very basic
answer must be – truth. Not every science fiction story, of course, can ‘come true,’ indeed . . . probably none of them do, can, or ever will. Just the same, many of them (perhaps
all of them, in some way or another) may be trying to solve a question for which many people this century have had no acceptable answer”.

In the end this anthology is a collection of attempts to get at the truth of the human condition during the twentieth century, so contoured and conditioned by science and technology. Overall,
perhaps, you can see the big picture, surely a bigger picture than any other. One might even get some intimations of the scope of the future – which of course leads us always back to the
ground at present. And perhaps we return illuminated.

David G. Hartwell

Pleasantville, N.Y.

James Blish (1921–75) was perhaps the most sophisticated of the literary critics grown inside the SF field. Though self-educated, he was respected as a
James Joyce scholar and was a music critic as well. Of all SF writers at mid-century, Blish most worshipped the Modernists and most aspired to “high” art.

Blish moved permanently to England in the 1960s, where his writing was taken more seriously as contemporary literature than in the U.S. His major achievements in science
fiction are generally regarded as the four-volume
Cities in Flight
(1970) and
A Case of Conscience
(1958), a classic theological SF novel. His short fiction, collected in
The
Seedling Stars
(1957),
The Best
of
James Blish
(1979), and several other volumes, is also a major body of work in the modern field. He also edited the first SF anthology about the
arts of the future,
New Dreams This Morning
(1966).

Perhaps his most ambitious project began with
A Case of Conscience
, about the discovery of Christian aliens without original sin, which is linked to an even larger
literary construct (Blish called it
After Such Knowledge
– essentially an ongoing theological argument) involving an additional non-genre novel about Francis Bacon,
Doctor
Mirabilis
(1964), and two fantasy novels about the end of the world,
Black Easter
(1968) and
The Day After Judgement
(1971).

At a time in the 1950s when science fiction as a whole had ignored the arts and artists as subjects for most of its history, Blish published this story. Blish said:
“Ostensibly this is a story about the future of serious music.” It is of course more broadly about art. Such writers as Brian Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany, Michael Moorcock, and Bruce
Sterling carry on the intellectual tradition of Blish today.

Instantly, he remembered dying. He remembered it, however, as if at two removes – as though he were remembering a memory, rather than an actual event; as though he
himself had not really been there when he died.

Yet the memory was all from his own point of view, not that of some detached and disembodied observer which might have been his soul. He had been most conscious of the rasping, unevenly drawn
movements of the air in his chest. Blurring rapidly, the doctor’s face had bent over him, loomed, come closer, and then had vanished as the doctor’s head passed below his cone of
vision, turned sideways to listen to his lungs.

It had become rapidly darker, and then, only then, had he realized that these were to be his last minutes. He had tried dutifully to say Pauline’s name, but his memory contained no record
of the sound – only of the rattling breath and of the film of sootiness thickening in the air, blotting out everything for an instant.

Only an instant, and then the memory was over. The room was bright again, and the ceiling, he noticed with wonder, had turned a soft green. The doctor’s head lifted again and looked down
at him.

It was a different doctor. This one was a far younger man, with an ascetic face and gleaming, almost fey eyes. There was no doubt about it. One of the last conscious thoughts he had had was that
of gratitude that the attending physician, there at the end, had not been the one who secretly hated him for his one-time associations with the Nazi hierarchy. The attending doctor, instead, had
worn an expression amusingly proper for that of a Swiss expert called to the deathbed of an eminent man: a mixture of worry at the prospect of losing so eminent a patient, and complacency at the
thought that, at the old man’s age, nobody could blame this doctor if he died. At eighty-five, pneumonia is a serious matter, with or without penicillin.

“You’re all right now,” the new doctor said, freeing his patient’s head of a whole series of little silver rods which had been clinging to it by a sort of network cap.
“Rest a minute and try to be calm. Do you know your name?”

He drew a cautious breath. There seemed to be nothing at all the matter with his lungs now; indeed, he felt positively healthy. “Certainly,” he said, a little nettled. “Do you
know yours?”

The doctor smiled crookedly. “You’re in character, it appears,” he said. “My name is Barkun Kris; I am a mind sculptor. Yours?”

“Richard Strauss.”

“Very good,” Dr. Kris said, and turned away. Strauss, however, had already been diverted by a new singularity.
Strauss
is a word as well as a name in German; it has many
meanings – an ostrich, a bouquet; von Wolzogen had had a high old time working all the possible puns into the libretto of
Feuersnot
. And it happened to be the first German word to be
spoken either by himself or by Dr. Kris since that twice-removed moment of death. The language was not French or Italian, either. It was most like English, but not the English Strauss knew;
nevertheless, he was having no trouble speaking it and even thinking in it.