by Bruce BethkeIt seemed like a reasonable assertion. "The Friday Challenge is a science fiction-oriented writer's site..."
Really? Well, okay, I guess I can see that. We do mostly talk about SF-related stuff here. I am an award-winning science fiction writer, and so on and so forth, best-known for my published science fiction short stories and novels, etc., etc. But honestly, that's more an accident of history than anything else. I didn't start out to become the science fiction writer I'm presumed to be now. I just set out to become a writer.
I always have and still do read omnivorously. I've sold mysteries. I've sold stories to biker magazines, and therein lies a tale for another time. I've written mainstream contemporary fiction, but never sold any of it. I even subscribed to the short-lived Louis L'Amour Western Magazine for its entire print run, under the illusion that it was an open market and I might have a hope of selling stories to it. That I'm known now as an SF writer is primarily because, of all the fiction I tried to write and sell, it was the science fiction that sold the fastest, sold the most consistently, and paid the best. Positive feedback is a wondrous thing.
Of course, all the fiction I've written and sold, taken together, is but pocket lint when compared to my income from thirty years of writing nonfiction.
As I said: I'm a writer. The science fiction part of the label I wear is just a matter of public perception.
If I had to choose just one fiction writer whose career I would want to emulate, I would have trouble doing so, because I'd be torn between Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton. What? Not Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, or [insert name here]?
Nope.
But... But... Crichton?!?! He— [gasp!] He wasn't one of us!
Yes, and more's the pity. Serious science fiction people always seem to squander an enormous amount of energy squabbling over what is or is not Real Science Fiction writing, and who is or is not a Real Science Fiction writer. In the meantime the market has largely passed them by, and for the past thirty years they've been busy ignoring the fact that Michael Crichton has been, for those same past thirty years, the world's most successful creator of printed science fiction-flavored writing product—along with a substantial body of mysteries, thrillers, medical dramas, and the occasional travelogue.
But... [double-gasp!] He didn't write for the pulps! He lifted all his ideas from earlier sci-fi writers! He didn't pay his dues!
That argument might get some traction with me, if a.) the genre did not have such a rigidly defined and dogmatically enforced canon of acceptable tropes that we are all effectively required to lift from earlier sci-fi writers in the first place, and b.) I had not seen it used before, over and over, again and again. I saw it used against Margaret Atwood, when The Handmaid's Tale was a hardcover bestseller. I saw it used against Stephen King, when he suddenly catapulted to the ranks of bestsellerdom. I saw it used against Christopher Pike, when YA horror temporarily ruled the roost, and I saw it used against Kurt Vonnegut, when he had his decade in vogue. Thirty-five years or so ago I even saw it used against Ray Bradbury, in a featured editorial in one of the major SF magazines of the day. Sure, the editorial asserted, Bradbury used to be a pretty good science fiction writer. But he's betrayed the faith. I mean, just look at him! He's selling to The New Yorker. He's selling to Redbook. He's selling to The Saturday Evening Post. He's even selling to Mademoiselle, for God's sake!
Oh, I get it now. Real Science Fiction Writers are happy to be living inside the walls of a tiny literary ghetto, and wouldn't leave even if the gates were opened wide.
The ghetto analogy holds up surprisingly well. As anyone with a little experience in the 'hood knows, the primal impulse is to defend one's turf, tooth and claw. Hey, this may be a small, stupid, ugly and smelly place, but it's our small, stupid, ugly and smelly place! What are those mystery writers doing here? And holy crap, look at that! There are romance writers sneaking in, too! Sound the alarm! Hit the mattresses! Bust some caps!
Twenty years ago, when I was on the Board of Directors of the Science Fiction Writers of America and we were debating changing the name of the organization to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, I had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of a multi-page missive from one of the past presidents of the organization. In it, he railed furiously against the proposed change. After reading through his letter a few times and thinking it over, I realized that his argument essentially cooked down to this: If we let girls join the club, they'll ruin everything.
Today, twenty years later, the only thing I can see that's changed is that instead of railing against elves and unicorns, his intellectual heirs are railing against vampires and werewolves. Real Science Fiction is losing market share to paranormal romance? Why, it's enough to give a serious science fiction person The Vapors.
If I had more time and energy, I would insert a fake PSA here, encouraging people to donate generously to help find a cure for The Vapors. Many people still don't realize what a debilitating and life-changing catastrophe this disorder can be. Why, a little over a decade ago I had the pleasure of knowing a bright young woman who was deep in the throes of writing her first novel. It was a decent journeyman effort at a magical fantasy, and good enough to find a publisher—but then, she won an award for it! From a romance reader's association! Please, Dear God, say it ain't so!
And as a result she contracted The Vapors, and careerwise, it was fatal. For her next book she labored so had to prove that she was not a romance writer that she produced a story the fans of her first book were certain to hate, and even those of us who'd read her earlier short stories and were inclined to like her found nearly unreadable. The sales tanked. Her publisher said, "Thanks for playing. Next!" I honestly don't know what she's doing today.
The Vapors: someday we will find a cure. But only if you help.
There is this strange little snag in the flow of history; this singularity; this event whose subsequent effects continue to rattle and ricochet around the zeitgeist like buckshot in an empty rain barrel. In April of 1926 Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories magazine, and invented the term, "science fiction."
There was stuff published earlier that met the working definition. In fact, the first issue of Amazing Stories was filled with public-domain and unauthorized reprints of old Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells stories. (Wells, at the time, was still very much alive.) As Damon Knight wrote in his introduction to One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (Simon and Schuster, 1968)—
"There was no major nineteenth-century American writer of fiction, and indeed few in the second rank, who did not write some science fiction, or at least one utopian romance."—a point which Knight then goes on to prove by reprinting recognizably science fiction stories written by Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and others.
And yet the creation myth persists: that "science fiction" is a thing that was invented in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, and perfected by John W. Campbell Jr. in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, the myth holds that science fiction is a thing apart from all other forms of fiction: strangely deformed, perhaps, and yet exalted, in its own special way.
This assertion would have astonished H. G. Wells. The first American publications of both The War of The Worlds and The First Men in The Moon were as serials in, I am not making this up, Cosmopolitan magazine.
Yes, that Cosmopolitan magazine. The same one you see every time you get into the check-out lane at the grocery store. I don't know which thought is more likely to melt your brain; the idea that Cosmo published Wells, or that a century ago Cosmo was a serious literary magazine that rivaled Harper's and published original fiction by Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell.
And H. G. Wells. Where is the clear and bright boundary line that separates science fiction from all the rest of the world of literature?
Look again. It isn't there.
[And with that written, I'm going to have to hit the Publish Post button and call it a day. I started writing this post bright and early this morning, but the day turned into a succession of urgent interruptions, and so I've been writing this in dribs and drabs ever since, ten minutes here and twenty minutes there. I haven't even begun to write about the devastating mistake that was The Great Wall of Campbell, much less to talk about postwar fiction, or as promised, to draw a bead on Bat Durston. I guess this gives me a head-start on next week's column.]
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