Democrazy, The Personal Planetarium, and the American Way: The Year 1990 in Science Fiction

My most memorable images of 1990 all come from the late summer. We were stuck in a traffic jam, inching past hop fields and little Dorfs up the Autobahn from Munich to Berlin, toward what was still the East German border. All around us were “Trabbis,” little green and beige cars that sounded like motorcycles, jammed to their roofs with Western consumer goods and towing trailers loaded with wrecked Mercedeses, VWs, and mopeds. Over the radio, the Süddeutche Rundfunk played “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

Crossing the border, we all slowed down, as if no one really believed the cubicles of the East German customs inspectors were empty. But they were. The only official presence consisted in a convoy of bulldozers scooping up excess concrete. The Cold War was over.

The 1990 World Science Fiction Convention in Holland was the first Worldcon that East Bloc SF professionals attended in force. Many were experiencing their first trip to the West, and their excitement was contagious. One Rumanian SF reader, dropping by a panel in honor of Joe Haldeman, informed Haldeman that he was his favorite author; the Rumanian revealed that Haldeman’s books had been translated and were circulating in the form of typed manuscripts, passed hand to hand. A Soviet science-fiction editor told of publishing an anthology, The Green Book of Science Fiction, filled with stories using the word “green” in the title. It seems that the publisher had located a stock of green paper — Soviet publishing has been continually plagued by paper shortages — so the editors fashioned an anthology to match. The creators of the Polish SF magazine Newa Fantastika explained that their enterprise had just gone private, and they were no longer required to be Party members. Toward the end of the convention, there were many invitations: if you’re ever in Leningrad ... in Warsaw ... in Leipzig...

By New Year’s Eve, the euphoria had died down. A line had been drawn in the sand, and we were two weeks away from a brief but major war. Pat Murphy’s Nebula-nominated story “Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates,” in which the human race is nearly extinct and the machines are just learning to have sex, resonates eerily with the Gulf conflict: technologies were the combatants, and while tanks were “killed,” civilian populations sustained “collateral damage.” But in 1990, we were still innocent. We found ourselves in the middle of a Tolkien knock-off fantasy: a shadow had fallen across the Land (Kuwait), and the forces of Good and Evil were lined on opposite sides of barbed wire and mine fields. Soon the Quest into Mordor would begin!

Although science fiction is now a world literature, to my knowledge no Nebula Award has ever gone to a work in translation. The Nebula process celebrates an essentially American vision of what the field is all about, generally bypassing the Continental product and treating British SF only as a particularly promising colony. When SFWA members say, for example, that British SF exhibits an unnatural fascination with disaster, the implicit comparison is always with the good old upbeat American variety. David Brin, who during his stay in England is said to have impressed the natives with his Americanness, embodies this stance in the preface to his 1990 novel, Earth:

As writers go, I suppose I’m known as a bit of an optimist, so it seems only natural that this novel projects a future where there’s a little more wisdom than folly ... maybe a bit more hope than despair.

In fact, it’s about the most encouraging tomorrow I can imagine right now.

What a sobering thought.

Like the hero of James Patrick Kelly’s fine novella, “Mr. Boy,” in which for those who can afford it all manner of physical and genetic alterations are available, American science fiction is a boy who’s always twelve no matter how old he gets. And yet, for all its traditional callousness and native hopefulness, the field has darkened of late. Brin isn’t the only author to entertain a sobering thought or two. Most American SF writers don’t expect to ever go to the moon, nor do they imagine their grandchildren living there, nor do they necessarily feel it’s a good idea for humans to move into space. These days, travel to other planets is seen as a retreat from the crises unfolding right here on Earth. And while nobody hesitates to concoct even the most implausible nightmare scenarios, the average writer would be embarrassed to extrapolate anything resembling a healthy and functional future. As one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s characters observes in Pacific Edge, “utopia is increasingly difficult to imagine.”check this out American SF, it seems, is losing its American optimism.

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Although our Bicentennial seems to have occurred eons ago, the founding of the American Republic is (still) only about two hundred years old. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island, the last of the thirteen states, ratified the Constitution. Once political independence was won, Americans also sought intellectual independence. Thus, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution empowers Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

This is a passage to gladden the heart of any SFWA president. Article II of the SFWA bylaws seems a mere corollary to it:

The purpose of (SFWA) shall be to promote the furtherance of the writing of science fiction and related genres as a profession. In doing so, its activities shall include, but not be limited to, informing science-fiction writers on professional matters, protecting their interests, and helping them deal effectively with their agents, editors, anthologists, and producers in non-print media...

One imagines the SFWA Grievance Committee pasting this passage above their computers right before drafting particularly assertive letters to those whores of the entertainment conglomerates, publishers. What better mission in life than to enforce the will of Thomas Jefferson on Gulf & Western or Mitsubishi? As practitioners of an art that aims to “promote the progress of Science,” science-fiction writers might even be the very folks the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created Article I, Section 8. And so it is perhaps no coincidence that in 1990, on the two hundredth anniversary of the final ratification of the Constitution, SFWA, with considerable help from the enthusiastic young staff at Pulphouse Publishing, put out a worthy book, the new incarnation of the legendary Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The Professional Writer’s Guide to Writing Professionally.

As both John Clute and Brian Stableford have pointed out, the SFWA Handbook vibrates with anxiety. “The writer who only does the things he does well is dead,” Frederic Pohl explains in his essay. And after all the un-indexed chitchat about contracts, copyrights, payment, editing, promotion, reselling your work, agents, packagers, “how to make a short story long,” and “writing a series,” the reader may very well envy the dead. Is this what it means to be a “professional writer”?

To answer this question, we should perhaps return to the origins of our young republic. The American novelist Charles Brockden Brown looms large in that post-revolutionary era from which we glean so many of our heroes. Brockden Brown is often credited with being America’s first professional fiction writer, although this is not, strictly speaking, true. (The first American novelist to really support himself by writing was James Fenimore Cooper, who reaped his profits by having his books privately printed and selling them himself.) But despite its falsity, the legend of Charles Brockden Brown, First Professional Writer in America, cultural patriot and patron saint of commercial authors, has special meaning for SFWA members.

Without sponsorship, Brockton Brown realized, or sinecures from the Academy, the American writer must live from the sales of books, a prospect even more terrifying in post-revolutionary America than it is today. Brown wanted none of it; he would have been appalled to learn of his incipient reputation for professionalism. In an 1803 essay entitled “Authorship,” published in The Literary Magazine and American Register, he meditated upon the distinction between the “poor author,” who writes to support himself (a trade which is “the refuge of idleness and poverty,” definitely to be avoided if one can get work as, say, a carpenter or a blacksmith), and the “author,” a literary aristocrat who writes for the sheer joy of writing. Brown explains, “(As) there is nothing I should more fully deprecate than to be enrolled in the former class, so there is nothing to which I more ardently aspire, than to be numbered among the latter. To write, because the employment is delightful, or because I have a passion for fame or usefulness, is the summit of terrestrial joys.” Thus, when we experience discomfort at the SFWA Handbook’s grim enumeration of the “professional” author’s burdens and at the absence of any comment on the joy of writing, we feel echoes of Brown’s own quandary: how, he wondered, could one become an “author” rather than a “poor author” in a country lacking the necessary economic infrastructure? While today we have the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, state arts councils, and faculty positions in university creative writing departments, notably lacking from the SFWA Handbook is a chapter on how to get arts grants, or one on how to secure a tenure-track teaching job: the science-fiction writer is a descendant of Brown’s “poor author,” and must therefore coax pennies from the pockets of the Philistines.

And whom did the Philistines want in 1990? As the voices of the masses, the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton best-seller lists tell us that they wanted Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, and Terry Brooks. What did they want? Magic Kingdoms, Forgotten Realms, almost anything with “dragon” in the title, books based on games, and sequels that authors too weary to write themselves were able to provide with a little help from their friends, the talented younger writers coming through for their elders much as little Therru pulls Ged and Tenar’s bacon out of the fire at the end of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nebula-winning novel, Tehanu: the Last Book of Earthsea.

And, of course, Star Trek. Kirk and Spock continue to enjoy huge sales and even Thomas Pynchon, in his novel Vineland, throws in a touch of Trek for added pop-culture 60’s flavor: “...the baby with both eyes open now looking right at him with a vast, an unmistakable recognition ... This look from brand-new Prairie — oh, you, huh? — would be there for Zoyd more than once in the years to come, to help him through those times when the Klingons are closing, and the helm won’t answer, and the warp engine’s out of control.” And when we stand way back and look at the Publishers Weekly lists, in 1990 the masses wanted Stephen King, Stephen King again, V.C. Andrews (even though she’s one of those fortunate dead authors I mentioned earlier), and Jean Auel. This Pantheon won the award that Judy-Lynn del Rey once referred to as the only one that matters: the ringing of the cash register. Meanwhile, the rest of SFWA torments itself with the question posed by the hero of “Bestseller,” Michael Blumlein’s fascinating yet repellant story: “What the hell do I have to do to write a book that sells?”

Blumlein’s hero barters away his own body parts to make ends meet. In Rudy Rucker’s delightful novel The Hollow Earth, an alternate-universe Edgar Allan Poe whose manuscripts keep getting rejected comes up with a plan even bolder than self-cannibalization: “I was dazzled by the sheer effrontery of Eddie’s scheme! Counterfeiting the money of a non-existent bank!” Joe Haldeman’s novella “The Hemingway Hoax” turns on an equally audacious plan: forging a new work by one of the greats of American Letters. In the SF world, it seems, the “poor author” will try anything.

At one point Haldeman’s hero, a college English professor and minor writer, jokes, “If you recognized my name from the Iowa Review you’d be the first person who ever had.” But while most authors crave more attention, the successful ones sometimes wish it were lonelier at the top. In an essay entitled “Xenogenesis” (Asimov’s, August 1990), Harlan Ellison chronicles the atrocities perpetrated by readers against established writers. While I don’t doubt that the bulk of the horror stories he recounts are true — rude and possibly deranged people selecting authors as the targets for practical jokes, unsolicited familiarities, and worse — it’s not easy to see how, given the pluralism of the SF readership, things could be otherwise. Whatever the answer, Ellison evidently does not side with Brockden Brown; he never implies that authors should avoid the public, secluding themselves in the palaces of the literary aristocracy. Significantly, Ellison addresses his long complaint not to his fellow writers but to the very fandom from whence the abuses spring: “And those of you in the sane, courteous ninety-five per cent ... well, perhaps this concentrated jolt of nastiness will alert you to the other five percent who roam and foam among us.”

One of 1990’s truly sordid events was Simon and Schuster’s cancellation of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious novel American Psycho. The National Organization for Women campaigned against the book, claiming it was, in effect, an instruction manual for torturing and murdering women. Some of those who concurred sent Ellis pictures of himself with his eyes gouged out. Having read American Psycho, I can say that the more graphic scenes, with their enthusiastic, cooking-show prose, really do seem to invite imitation. However, NOW’s attempt at what might be called class-action censorship, and Simon and Schuster’s capitulation, are disturbing. It is not a question of whether American publishing will become more cautious — certainly no editor at Simon and Schuster will hereafter feel comfortable buying a violent book, or for tht matter, any book that might inspire a boycott — but only to what extent.

When Random House’s literary trade paperback line brought American Psycho out at the end of March, 1991, it immediately made the best-seller list, thus sparking a rash of articles in Newsweek and elsewhere on America’s disturbing taste for gore. But does the consumption of trash necessarily imply a trashy consumer? Journalists these days seem bound to characterize the mass audience as fundamentally degenerate. When this country was founded, however, popular culture was not seen as ipso facto corrupt. As Joseph J. Ellis explains in After the Revolution: Profiles in Early America Culture, “There was no presumed tension between artistic values on the one hand and ... the values of the marketplace on the other. The market, in fact, was regarded as a benign environment in which the unrestricted movement of men and ideas would create exciting new cultural possibilities.” Furthermore, early Americans regarded corporations as operating for the benefit of the public, and they had more faith in the benign nature of the marketplace than they did in the benign nature of the arts. The arts were associated with the decadent aristocracy against which America had just rebelled. These days we tend to trust the arts more than the marketplace, while simultaneously retaining an almost religious awe of popular choice, especially when sanctified by formal democracy. It’s a contradiction not easily resolved.

Literary awards, the Nebula among them, are intended to correct the errors of marketplace democracy. Like the magic drug in Lisa Goldstein’s fantasy story “The Blue Love Potion,” awards make us appreciate that which might otherwise escape our notice. Article XI of the SFWA bylaws states: “The Corporation shall present annual achievement awards to honor outstanding creative performance in the science fiction field. The award winners ... are to be chosen by a vote of the active members under procedures established by the Nebula Rules...” A vote of the active members: a quasi-elite remedying the defects of mass taste. This compensating function is not one with which the Science Fiction Writers of America feels wholly comfortable. In its heart, the organization is torn between being an academy and being an democracy; more specifically, SFWA wants to be respected like an academy but to function as a democracy. An academy defines aesthetics, handing down rules from on high; any discussion of the relation between the academy and aesthetics is tautological: A=A; the academic is the aesthetic. But SFWA also contains a bedrock of populism. As anyone who’s ever tried it knows, the single most effective way to incur the organization’s wrath is to suggest new ways to limit active membership.

Like major science-fiction conventions, SFWA has undergone considerable expansion in the last five to ten years. It’s gotten big. And like the major conventions, SFWA now contains diverse constituencies. It is any wonder that so many of the 1990 Nebula nominees can be understood as appeasing particular factions? Should we be surprised to hear people talk of John Stith’s nuts-and-bolts novel Red Shift Rendezvous “representing” hard SF on the final Nebula ballot? And as the ranks of fantasy writers swell SFWA, should we wonder that a majority of the novels nominated for the Nebula in 1990 were not, in fact, science fiction?

When members vote a work onto the Final Ballot, they are ostensibly honoring “outstanding creative performance in the field.” But behind these choices lurk political blocs and implied party platforms. (This effect is especially evident when members don’t bother to read the works they vote for.) And what are the contents of these tacit platforms? Essentially, each bloc is saying how it thinks the audience at large should behave. They’re saying that readers ought to prefer social comment over military adventure, or rigorous extrapolation over social comment, or medieval world-building over quantum-mechanical speculation, or satire over sorcery, or a “good read” over just about anything else. Implicit in this process is the assumption that the ideal audience for science fiction is SFWA itself — a notion that Pulphouse has been pursuing with great success. We attempt to re-create the audience in our own image.