Science fiction as Dixieland

Maud Newton, surely one of the best linkers on Internet, linked up to a recovered 1998 Village Voice article by Jonathan Lethem about "the squandered promise of science fiction," of which what I consider the choicest excerpts follow:

Though Gravity's Rainbow really was nominated for the 1973 Nebula, it was passed over for Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama, which commentator Carter Scholz rightly deemed "less a novel than a schematic diagram in prose." Pynchon's nomination now stands as a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream.

That hope was born in the hearts of writers who, without any particular encouragement from the larger literary world, for a little while dragged the genre to the brink of respectability. The new-wave SF of the '60s and '70s was often word-drunk, applying modernist techniques willy-nilly to the old genre motifs, adding compensatory dollops of alienation and sexuality to characters who'd barely shed their slide rules.

[ ... ]

SF deserving of greater attention from a literary readership is still written. Its relevance, though, since the collapse of the notion that SF should and would converge with literature, is unclear at best. SF's literary writers exist now in a twilight world, neither respectable nor commercially viable. Their work drowns in a sea of garbage in bookstores, while much of SF's promise is realized elsewhere by writers too savvy or oblivious to bother with its stigmatized identity. SF's failure to present its own best face, to win proper respect, was never so tragic as now, when its strengths are so routinely preempted. In a literary culture where Pynchon, DeLillo, Barthelme, Coover, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Steve Erickson are ascendant powers, isn't the division meaningless? But the literary traditions reinforcing that division are only part of the story. Among the factors arrayed against acceptance of SF as serious writing, none is more plain to outsiders than this: the books are so fucking ugly. Worse, they're all ugly in the same way, so you can't distinguish those meant for grown-ups from those meant for 12-year-olds.

[ ... ]

The pressure against heresy can be surprisingly strong, reflecting the emotional hunger for solidarity in marginalized groups. For SF can also function as a clubhouse, where members share the resentments of the excluded and a defensive fondness for stories which thrived in 12-year-old imaginations but shrivel on first contact with adult brains. In its unqualified love for its own junk stratum, SF may be as postmodern as Frederic Jameson's dreams, but it's also as sentimental about itself as an Elks lodge or a family.

Marginality, it should be said, isn't always the worst thing for artists. Silence, exile, and cunning remain a writer's allies, and despised genres have been a plentiful source of exile for generations of iconoclastic American fictioneers. And sure, hipster audiences always resent seeing their favorite cult item grow too popular. But an outsider art courts precious self-referentiality if it too strongly resists incorporation. The remnants of the jazz which refused the bebop transformation are those guys in pinstriped suits playing Dixieland, and the separate-but-unequal post-'70s SF field, preening over its lineage and fetishizing its rejection, sometimes sounds an awful lot like Dixieland - as refined, as calcified, as sweetly irrelevant.

Bemoaning the disappointment I've repeatedly endured at the hands of science fiction is, to those who know me well enough, a well-worn leitmotif. You'd think I'm at least as smart as children who refrain from touching red-hot burners twice, but no: I pick up a sci-fi novel, more often than not get burned by it, and no sooner have the blisters subsided than I'm back at the shelf.

Though never quite delivered on, the familiar assurance that "No, this is totally different than all those other sci-fi novels" still draws me. Of course, any book that's "totally different" from other sci-fi novels probably isn't a sci-fi novel; all I desire is that the story contains actual characters. But given what the sci-fi stuff I've read before has been like, maybe is nearly enough to set a book well apart from sci-fi in general. It's not that they're literally missing invoked human (or alien, or robot) entities; it's that they present these entities as lists of traits rather than as nuanced, thinking (as distinct from simply speaking), changing beings whose lives extend beyond the page.

I've found this problem pervasive and crippling to the genre, but, I suppose unsurprisingly, diehard fans don't seem to notice it. And if they do notice it, they don't mind. I once read some forum-dweller grumble about his wish that sci-fi's lack of character depth just stop being considered a weakness already. At a panel, I heard veteran sci-fi novelist Robert Silverberg¹ pronounce that, in the genre, character is necessarily subordinated to speculation.

Yes, Silverberg's an elder statesman and all, but that necessarily sticks in my craw. Why can't character and speculation sit on the same tier? This may seem a matter of wanting to have my cake and eat it too, but I'd say I simply want to eat my cake with an actual meal preceding it. Contra the Silverbergs and the forum-dwellers of the world, I have a hard time imagining character as but one novelistic element, equal among many; complaining that its absence is regarded as a flaw is like complaining that a computer's inability to accept input is regarded as flaw. It's a sine qua non: if your book ain't got character, your book ain't got dick, no matter how ring-shaped a world you've managed to describe within it. You can junk speculation, plot, aesthetics, form, comedy and tragedy and your work will still come out a lot better than if you'd played loose with character.

Beyond science fiction, I suppose I generally long for novels of ideas whose ideas don't displace their people. Perhaps no genre is flexible enough to provide this combination, and I'd do better to, as in any other medium, camp out in the categorical borderlands. And if I'm getting all intermedium, I could just whip out the good old "go old, go foreign" simple filter. That would let Stanislaw Lem's Solaris though, and if Tarkovsky's adaptation is anything to go by, that's the right track.

---

¹ (whose Dying Inside I am nevertheless jonesin' to read)

Comments

[Robert Silverberg]

Wow, do you misunderstand me! If I understand you, you seem to be saying that I advocate the subordination of character to speculation, whereas throughout my whole career I have worked at bringing character development to s-f, and have often been jumped on by hard-core readers for doing so. Check out DYING INSIDE and see what I mean. You state a position for me that is 180 degrees away from my actual one.

Robert Silverberg

[Sharon E. Dreyer]

Thanks for sharing this article. You are exactly correct about science fiction. I've been beaten up a time or two by disappointing novels. Then again, there are still so many that I've not had the time to read and I'll get my fingers burned again too.

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