The Washington Post
August 25, 1991, Sunday, Final Edition
Modern SF: A Reader's Guide
BYLINE: John Clute
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X11
LENGTH: 1901 words
IT GETS complicated. Thirty years ago the thing called science fiction was neat enough to grasp and small enough to read, with a dozen or so writers producing a dozen or so books a year, most of them sharing certain basic assumptions about the world to come. Though the third millennium might not necessarily belong to America, Americans (they all agreed) would recognize it. But now it's 1991. Of the hundreds of genre writers out there, producing hundreds of sf and fantasy novels every year, few pay more than lip service to the future history espoused by the founding fathers of the genre. And in the creative imaginations of the best of them, the future is no longer a sure thing. It's up for grabs.
But of course it's not the future which has gotten more dubious: It's us. 1960 was in fact just as imponderable as 1991. Science fiction had simply gotten too comfy to notice. What was missing was any real interest in the murk and challenge of the real world. In the intervening years, what happened to science fiction -- despite megabuck marketing hypes which guarantee that most of it is worse than ever before -- was that some of the writers woke up. Of the 400 to 500 new books now published every year, five or ten can open our eyes when we read them.
Here are a few from the past three decades.
We will ignore books written by non-science fiction writers that happen to use the language and instruments of sf to make their points. Most of these books are terrible, and most of them -- because their authors only think to write science fiction when they wish to teach the world a lesson -- are pious. If we stick to those who write as though sf were in their blood, we should begin with Philip K. Dick, in 1962, the year he published The Man in the High Castle, which is his first great novel. It is an alternate history, though not the usual sort in which (for instance) the South wins the Civil War and saves America from the evils of industrialization. In Dick's tale, America has lost World War II, and her citizens live as clients of the dominant powers. Though the tale generates considerable excitement (it is, after all, science fiction), the book gains its startling impact through its analyses of the way a conquered folk relates to those who rule it. Previous nightmares of a defeated America had been published, but never one in which the subjugation of Americans to the terrible facts of history was taken for granted. For that reason -- because its first American readers had tended to think of themselves as exempt from history -- The Man in the High Castle is a revolutionary book.
Dick had an only intermittent knack with titles. The Man in the High Castle is good enough, but who would ever dream of picking Martian Time-Slip (1963) or Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) from the paperback racks? Those lucky enough to grab them anyway discovered two of the best novels published in the 1960s, in or out of the genre, hilarious, unsettling, convoluted, surreal, nervy, paranoid and wise. They have since been reprinted. The speedy Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was filmed as "Bladerunner" in 1982, just after Dick died young, 50 novels down the road to immortality. He was the first writer of genre science fiction to become an important literary figure. He was American to his bones, but prophets never thrive in the lands of their birth, and he may be best loved in France. The 1960s Explosion AFTER 1962, a small floodgate opened. Perhaps it was the death of JFK, the sense that history was prepared to cheat, that America was no longer immune. Whatever the case, the science fiction genre saw a sudden explosion of stories and novels by writers like Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, Roger Zelazny. Delany's best work -- like The Einstein Intersection (1966) or Nova (1968) -- treated the interstellar venues of space opera as analogues of urban life in the decaying hearts of the great American cities. As a black gay New Yorker much too well educated for his own good, Delany (now an English professor) illuminated the world the way a torch might cast light in a cellar: He shone in the dark. Disch, too, in Camp Concentration (1968) and 334 (1972), shone. Very much less an insider than Delany, he saw the New York of 334 as a Martian might, or a great bee: for his vision was faceted, remote and unsympathetic, deeply alarming. He now writes more poetry than science fiction. Both Delany and Disch wrote at the highest pitch the genre could possibly demand; both had difficulty with their genre careers; both left.
Frank Herbert, on the other hand, never had to say goodbye. In Dune (1966) and its massive sequels, he managed to find a reader-friendly venue -- comfortable old interstellar space, full of empires and princesses and villains and weapons and battles and gore -- for the telling of an epic tale whose philosophical complexities were at times impossibly daunting. On the desert planet Dune, where an anti-aging drug is grown, questions of ecology and dynasty, of decorum and the meaning-structures of the human race and everything else under a plethora of suns, were debated by a huge team of characters. Millions bought the series, which gave them the chance to learn more about more things than they ever dreamed they'd bargained for.
Ursula K. Le Guin, because she was earnest and literate and spoke becomingly upon a number of relevant themes, became a darling of the science fiction academics for novels like The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974). The first examined sex roles and their reversals with a deceptive calm; the second was one of the few Utopias ever written in America not to threaten the manufacturers of sleeping pills. Larry Niven, in World of Ptavvs (1966) and Ringworld (1970), seemed orthodox enough, an entertaining hard-sf genre writer with no complaints about a world which had done very nicely for him, but he was passionate about aliens and artifacts, and in indulging these loves he created tales so wrenchingly unconcerned with human folk that, through the distorting mirror of his vision, it almost began to seem that we could see ourselves as others saw us. And Roger Zelazny, in Lord of Light (1967), set on another planet run by the Hindu pantheon, shot meteorlike across the scene. Like Delany and Disch, he moved on to other kinds of writing.
In the UK, J.G. Ballard was writing allegories like The Drought (1965) and nightmares like Crash (1973), with little effect across the great waters; and in America, as the 1970s began, and more and more terrible genre books were published, there was a seeping away of the energies that had fired the previous decade. Robert Silverberg, an automaton of overproductivity, came to his remarkable senses betwen 1967 and 1976, during which period he produced dozens of fine tales and lots of extremely intelligent novels, of which the best may be Dying Inside (1972), but anything he published during those years will bear the mind's eye. The only new author of substance to startle the field during the first five years of the decade was the extraordinary woman who wrote as James Tiptree, Jr. Her stories, almost all of them about sex, death and exogamy, were so intense, so fervently ingenious, so burdened with the need to express themselves, that it came as no real shock to realize that she had exhausted herself before 1980. Her best work, previously scattered, was collected posthumously as Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990). The '70s and Gene Wolfe A LITTLE later, John Varley appeared suddenly with The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), a tale which made the solar system suddenly seem inhabitable, though not by the kind of humans we were accustomed to recognize; but he dwindled off. It looked as if the 1970s were a time of drought. But, almost secretly, the finest science fiction writer yet born began to publish tales and novels which -- now that they are being read with care -- seem revolutionary. The writer was Gene Wolfe, his first great books were The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and Peace (1975). It is impossible to describe them, because they work in secret, and explode under the skin. The first is the tale of a clone on a French colony planet; the second presents the lying memories of a ghost who does not know he's dead. Wolfe's masterpiece to date came a little later: the four volumes of The Book of the New Sun (1980-1983) comprise a kind of summa theologica of the instruments and uses of science fiction. Set upon Urth years hence, it is the story -- self-told, with tricks and dissembling -- of an apprentice torturer who becomes autarch of the country of his birth, who embodies the god Apollo, and who may be the Risen Christ. The tale is devout, chilling, enormous, wicked and profound. The '80s and Beyond AND INDEED, the 1980s started to fill with visions. (It might be said that the final strength of science fiction, which began in America as a pulp literature for juvenile engineers and technocrats, lies in its capacity to engender visionary works: works in which searing intensities of revelation are translated into readable tales, with plots we can recognize, and featuring characters who carry us, innocent and unprotesting, into the light of creation. Some of the books we've mentioned are, in this sense, visionary.) Under the pop felicities of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), which made cyberpunk famous for a year or so, lies a transfixed and obsessional sense that to experience the computer-driven buzz of information with one's own head is to experience nirvana. The book, which is highly readable, is a prayer to the gods of artificial intelligence. Gibson became almost the best known writer of the decade, but The Difference Engine (1990) -- which was written in collaboration with a much noisier mystagogue of the buzz of data, Bruce Sterling -- uncomfortably exposed the limits of his alluring quietism, for its portrait of a transformed alternate Britain of 1855 lacks Story. It does not seduce us into surrender. The book is, nevertheless, great fun, and its intricately sophisticated uses of sf ploys demonstrates how very far the best writers of the genre have come in making use of their tools.
Meanwhile, Greg Bear was writing what might be called cosmogony opera of enormous verve like Eon (1985), and in City of Angels (1990) scrutinized with mature gravity the future of human identity in a world dominated by nanotechnologies. Michael Swanwick, in Stations of the Tide (1991), conflated the Renaissance theater of memory with buckets of space opera gimmicks, making the outcome read like reportage from a world we'll never be bright enough to understand. And Dan Simmons, in Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990), aped Chaucer and bearded Keats to enormous advantage at enormous length in a vast space opera too complicated to remember, but too much fun to put aside.
We have mentioned 30 books, or about one in 300. Another 30 might be added. For a commercial genre in a tough old world, the total number is, in fact, impressive. These books are the pearls that grow in the oyster of science fiction. When opened, they do shine. When read, they do illuminate.
John Clute is the joint editor of the forthcoming revised edition of "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" and book columnist for Interzone magazine.
COUNTRY: UNITED STATES (98%);
GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (98%);
SUBJECT: BC-08/25/91-X11MOD BOOKS LITERATURE GENRES (90%); SCIENCE FICTION LITERATURE (90%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (89%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%); FANTASY LITERATURE (73%); WORLD WAR II (60%);
PERSON: SAMUEL R DELANY (76%); PHILIP K DICK (74%); THOMAS M DISCH (63%);
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
SERIES: Occasional
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION, UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS
TYPE: REVIEW
Copyright 1991 The Washington Post
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