science fiction

Science fiction’s ups and downs

Science fiction developed on two tracks, more or less. One track was formed by the occasional writings of unusually bright people or outright geniuses. Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are the exemplars of that track. The second track was pure genre fiction, written for a core genre readership, originally very immature and utterly inartistic fiction.

The genre track got started sporadically with serialized novels and short stories in pulp magazines that mostly contained adventure fiction and nonfiction rather than science fiction. That track got a big push starting in 1912 from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs—adventure writing sometimes set on Mars or Venus or deep beneath the crust of the Earth, with no pretense of science. Then in 1926, publisher and editor Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to science fiction, and the genre could pick up steam. The Skylark of Space by E.E. "Doc" Smith was a seminal "space opera," serialized in Amazing Stories in 1928. In 1930, the magazine Astounding Stories was launched, a tough competitor to Amazing and only the first of many competitors to come.

The genre writing in those magazines tended to be very clumsy and immature, even as Aldous Huxley was writing Brave New World at a high level of sophistication in the early 1930s. A gulf separated the genre track from the genius track. But the quality trend in the genre track was upward, notably at Astounding Stories under the editorship of John W. Campbell Jr. starting in 1938. Robert Heinlein especially pointed the way during the 1940s. He was distinguished by remarkable intelligence and storytelling verve rather than finesse, but what artistry he displayed was better than most in those magazines. Clifford Simak also pointed the way up. Genre fiction wasn’t yet respectable, but it was getting better.

In the 1950s, the quality of the genre track surged upward. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was launched in 1949, and Galaxy magazine in 1950, good competition to the dominant magazine, Astounding. Fritz Leiber’s 1950 short story “Coming Attraction,” published in the second issue of Galaxy, was a landmark of mature pessimism. Science fiction short stories became some of the best fiction. “Noise” by Jack Vance (in a 1952 issue of Startling Stories), “The Star” (1955) by Arthur C. Clarke, “Journeys End” (1957) by Poul Anderson, and “Flowers for Algernon” (1959) by Daniel Keyes expressed basic human dilemmas in artistic, moving, dramatic form. Ray Bradbury started publishing his best short stories in the 1950s, many of them with very dour views of life.

The paperback novel began to flourish as a vehicle for entertainment and art. Writers broke out of their magazine short-story ghetto. Ballantine Books, in particular, favored science fiction. In 1953, Ballantine published Arthur Clarke’s Childhood's End, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and The Space Merchants by the team of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, while Signet published Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. And in hardcovers, Farrar Straus and Young published Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human. What a year. The best SF novels began to be taken seriously by readers beyond genre fans. It seemed science fiction was maturing, and the gap separating genre writers and odd geniuses like Orwell and Huxley was dwindling.

So it seemed. The 1960s saw more examples of literary finesse, a continuation of the maturation with the added twist of New Wave writers pushing the boundaries of content and form. In Britain, the magazine most associated with the New Wave was New Worlds, and the best of the writers there was J.G. Ballard, who looked like the heir of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges in his surrealism, which he blended in some stories with science fiction. Writers good at SF often were good at surrealism. Genius examples of surrealism included Ballard's story "The Drowned Giant" (1965), Harry Harrison’s “By The Falls” (1969), and Keith Laumer’s “In the Queue” (1970).

Science fiction authors tended to do their best work at shorter lengths. They could maintain an intense artistic vision and polished prose for the length of a short story. They were unlikely to do that for the full length of a novel. The best-known SF novel of the 1960s, Dune, by Frank Herbert, was artistic and intelligent, though marred by an overcomplicated story line (including the ability to see the future) and reliance on what was essentially a power fantasy for a young hero. Also in that decade, Robert Heinlein published The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, one of his best novels in a remarkable career. Roger Zelazny burst on the scene as one of the most artistic and cultured writers, especially with his novels The Dream Master and Lord of Light. Philip K. Dick wrestled with psychological ideas and questions about the nature of reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik.

What was not obvious was that these two decades, the 1950s and 1960s, would be the peak. The artistic maturation process had gone as far as it would go.

In the 1970s there were more attempts at experimental SF writing, maybe a sign of overripeness. Fantasy was a growing side stream that in the 1980s and 1990s would become a dominating flood. The "young adult" fiction, meaning fiction directly aimed at adolescents, became an ever larger percentage of science fiction. And more and more writers, starting in the 1970s, seemed to base most if not all of their standards on other genre writing, especially detective and espionage fiction. The science fiction writers were looking to commercial slickness rather than to the best fiction.

The history of science fiction over the last four decades has demonstrated that a lot of the people who like SF do not know the difference between fiction for adults and fiction for adolescents, or they don’t care. In 2001, the Hugo Award for best novel, originally intended for science fiction, went to a Harry Potter book, a fantasy for children. Since then, fantasy has taken over, maybe because it doesn't require the tricky factor of plausibility.

Ideological lecturing became more common. There had always been some of it, but it became a more central, heavy-handed element, exemplified by the works of Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Ideology is an addictive drug for many people. It supplants other, more important characteristics, including human understanding, empathy, observation, imagination, and thinking ability. It drastically undercuts a writer’s art. Critics who sympathize with the ideologues’ worldviews reinforce the trend with their praises, and teachers assign the ideological books as reading for high school and college students.

Overreliance on detective and espionage genre elements became more obvious in the “cyberpunk” trend in the 1980s, with its tough-guy ragged antiheroes a step ahead of the bad guys with the guns on the gritty mean dark streets. Neuromancer (1984), a good novel by William Gibson, was the trendsetter in this category. It was in some ways remarkable because of its treatment of computers and the internet and because of its elements of gritty rough life, but its sensibilities and artistry were derived from commercial detective and espionage fiction. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were the models instead of Orwell or Huxley or other truly great writers.

Space opera became, if possible, more dominant. It typically involves minimal character development and boyish clunky stories. Warfare is overrelied upon for drama, to a grotesque extent. It often gets married to ideological messaging. And like cyberpunk, space opera has been relying to a very large extent on elements of the thriller and mystery genre. A good thriller entertains while killing time, usually without ideas or visions or thoughtful consideration of the human condition. Even the supposedly intellectual Culture novels of Iain M. Banks include a mishmash of space opera and thriller detective elements.

Science fiction has always had its space operas and detective stories just as it has always had its ideological sermonizers and its fiction aimed at young readers. But those elements have become so pervasive that I do not see any genuine visions appearing in the cracks between them. If there are original high-quality works of thoughtful speculative fiction for fully adult readers, I am not aware of them, not in the last 30 years or more, anyway. Maybe I have overlooked them.

Every now and then a "literary" writer wanders into science fiction, often someone teaching MFA creative writing courses. The less said about the results, the better. They make speculative fiction seem remarkably unimaginative, merely pretty phrasing, overused story devices, and more ideological lecturing. They have no original ideas. They seem contemptuous of storytelling and character development.

I cannot explain why the rising trend of quality in 1940s-50s-60s science fiction was not followed by even better work in the 1970s-80s-90s-00s. Maybe it was exhaustion of ideas. There are only so many times writers can speculate about space exploration or machine intelligence or future tyrannies before the stories become reminiscent of very rutted roads. Or maybe it was inbreeding. The writers and hardcore fans got to know each other only too well, and the literary agents and book editors similarly got to know the hardcore fans too well. The literary values within those circles weakened as they became insular. One warning flag came in a Thomas M. Disch essay on the subject in 1981. He saw the social inbreeding that was going on, and he described it as what might be called cliquishness and logrolling (my terms, not his). Disch was an irascible guy, so charitable people may disagree. I don't disagree.

Published SF book reviews offer bland praise. Better criticism is likely online from readers. There again you see too many rave reviews greeting old ideas as new or praising clumsy writing as artful, but you also get commentaries by readers obviously very thoughtful and able to recognize stale ideas, inept prose, undeveloped characters, incompetent storytelling, and ham-handed sermonizing.

Publishers prefer genre formulas for their marketability. Publishers may deserve a lot of the blame for the lack of individual distinction in science fiction today. But the public has been flocking eagerly to formulaic junk SF, so the publishers are not the whole explanation. I do not know why adults want to read this stuff, nor have I seen anyone else explain the trend.

I can only tell you that science fiction climbed up a slope, passed a two-decade peak, and has been coasting downhill since.

March 2014