By John
Barnes
Reading for the Undead
I guess I have to lead off by explaining that in this, and probably in future columns, I'm going to talk about genre, and by that I do not mean the "great genres" (like drama, the novel, lyric poetry, etc. — great not in the sense of wonderful, but in the sense of real big). I also don't mean whatever combination of cover and content the publisher marketing departments are coming up with this week.
By genre, I mean the historic combination of a group of identifiable artists and works, linked by a large body of shared tropes and strategies, working for an identifiable audience of their contemporaries. Yes, I know there are people who will argue that all the genres are eternal, that Voltaire wrote science fiction and Euripides wrote melodrama and very probably that Bach wrote bebop and Leonardo drew manga. The people who do this are wielding one of the most basic anti-art tools available — the universal solvent of declaring that nothing inside the art makes a difference, that any differences are purely in the critic/viewer/buyer, and that art is not a vital purpose in human life, but at best a healthy activity. It's a strategy for suppressing art of any kind, and Orwellian in the sense that Orwell was fascinated with the ways in which totalitarians strive to re-define words so that we can't think about their meanings.
The way these uberlumpers transport themselves to their silly solipsistic universe of eternal (but meaningless) genres, in which Oedipos Tyrannos is a detective story, le Morte d'Arthur is a fantasy, and Gottfried's Tristan and Iseult is a romance, is by watering the categories down until nothing interesting is left. Once they've eliminated the hard edges and bright lines from the concept of genre (and every other critical term), they usually finish off by announcing that esthetics is all a matter of individual taste, that what's important is that we all understand how human we all are, that perspective on the human condition is what matters, and that everyone has always felt this way. Nothing to see here, kid, it's more art, happens every century, it's just like all the rest, now you've had your art, back to bookkeeping. Then, having removed any excuse for art except as a healthful activity to occupy youths and keep them off drugs, such people go home and sleep soundly, having prevented art from breaking out once again.
I despise them.
So we're going to talk about science fiction as a genre that includes, among other things, rockets, robots, and ray guns; the perspective that the universe is dangerous but can be dealt with by people who know the right stuff; a future different from the present; and aliens and time machines; plots that revolve around whatever was nifty last year in Popular Mechanics or Scientific American; changed societies where people lead lives much more wonderful or horrible than our own; and people in imagined futures looking back at our century as the old days, and so forth and so on — those are just a few of the tropes. It's a genre built around a style of reading that highly values grokking meaning from context and guessing background from linguistic and social cues (among many other strategies). It's the literature that starts approximately with Doc Smith and Hugo Gernsback (in my view, Shelley, Kipling, Verne, Wells, Conan Doyle, etc. were all appropriated by science fiction retroactively) and runs through Clarkleinimov and then fans out into everything from Philip Dick to Joanna Russ to Jerry Pournelle to Anne McCaffrey and all their innumerable literary descendants.
And it is a genre that flourished among mostly English-speaking, mostly middle-class, mostly Caucasian readers from the late 20's to the early 90's of the last century — in other words, for about seventy years.
There is nothing unusual about that figure; if you look at genres that have flourished in the past (and faded since), most of the good stuff, the stuff that is remembered long after the genre fades, falls within a span of about seventy years. The Greeks thought their best tragedies ran from mid-Aeschylus to late Sophocles, and that's about seventy years (it's hard to have any opinion of our own about that since all we've got are thirty-three plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides). Jazz gets going around 1900 and by the late 1960s it's virtually in permanent reruns. The classic American musical runs from about George M. Cohan (first musical, 1904) to Bob Fosse (mid-70s and a bit after); the first Elizabethan public playhouse was built in 1576 and Cromwell shut down the theaters in 1642; spectacle melodrama gets underway with Pixérécourt in the 1790s and doesn't do much that's new after 1875 or so.
A genre may have a long afterlife — perhaps the genre term is that it may be undead for a long time? -- following its "live" period. Jane-Austen style romances and Agatha Christie mysteries are written, read, and enjoyed today; some young musicians still take up jazz; busloads of tourists jam into Broadway to watch revivals of classic musicals and new musicals written in the classic style; and spectacle melodramas like Around the World in Eighty Days and Uncle Tom's Cabin ran in continuous performance down to World War Two.
Nor is the long undead afterlife necessarily a bad time for the art or for the artists; opera has added just a handful of works to its basic repertoire of about 70-80 regularly performed operas in the last 100 years, but it's produced plenty of fine singers and designers, and if it's a corpse it's a very well-preserved and beautiful one. Sheridan, Goldsmith, Dumaniant, Beaumarchais, and Rostand all revived "dead" forms generations after their glory days and produced some of the best work ever done in their genres, and that doesn't begin to cover just playwrights.
Nonetheless, the basic cultural work of a genre tends to be done in about seventy years, and after that it is, for good or ill, a museum art, even if it's a crowded, popular museum for a long time. A genre is alive if new works can change the genre fundamentally (e.g. the way that, say, the Campbell Astounding of the 1940s did science fiction, Showboat and Oklahoma! changed the musical, or Hammett and Chandler changed the mystery), and not if the reaction instead is to say, "Well, that's not really in the genre." A genre is alive if it is consumed by people who passionately want to see what comes next, and not if it is consumed the way people consume string quartets, Proust, or Shakespeare (i.e. through a mental filter that tells them the significance of everything all the time, and cares deeply about being identified with the "good stuff"). A genre is alive if innovations are debated, fought over, copied, and re-adapted, like Heinlein's tricks for smuggling in exposition, Ellison's use of free-form word storms, or Simak and Dick's adaptation of rendering the fictional world as a place mundane to its inhabitants). It is no longer alive if new tropes and strategies are nearly always treated as one-time stunts or experiments. If a genre has few or none of the signs of life, it is in a museum, no matter how lifelike its mounting or how many people still come to see it.
And, to return to the observation that might be the point of all this, the good stuff, the stuff that marks the contribution of the genre to the culture as a whole, tends to fall within that about-three-generation span of life. A side observation is that nearly every genre will have its own pet explanations for why it died; the disappearance of the middle-class spontaneous theatergoer and theatrical unions, the cultural change in personal integrity so that no one really believes "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" anymore, girls having better options than becoming nurses and marrying doctors, the generations of civil peace in the nineteenth century draining Gothic novels of their force, and so on and so forth. Science fiction has several versions of this, including rising irrationality, "the world is all science fiction now anyway," political correctness, political neanderthalism, and "they aren't like they were when I was a kid." What I am saying here is this: genres last about seventy years as live things. It was time. Grandma died because she was old, not because you were bad.
By the way, all I know of the art forms of cultures other than Western tends to be whatever theatre anthropologists wrote down, which is immense in volume and often very interesting, but gives me no direct experience of the art itself at all. So for all I know things may be different elsewhere. But in the West, that about-three-generations seems to be almost a law.
And according to that law, the genre health inspectors should be dropping by any minute. Science fiction would seem to be a decade or more past its expiration date.
Now, these ideas — and in particular, the notion of a genre having about three generations before it freezes into museum form — are not original with me. You can find bits and pieces of them in the philosophy of Walter Koch, Yuri Lotman's Universe of the Mind, Colin Martindale's much-maligned The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change, Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, and Goran Hermeren's Influence in Art and Literature. What I'm going to venture here is a thought or two about why this might be so; if genres are born, grow, and then die, what do they die of? And if we are in the afterlife of SF, exactly what does a reader do about it?
That, by the way, is the crux of these columns; what's a reader to do? Writers do what they please and hope to be published, so I see no reason to suggest that they do anything they don't want to do; anyway, as you'll see a bit later, I don't think the future of the genre is really in their hands.
Readers must do what they can with what is published, and at the end of all this I intend to arrive at the conclusion that science fiction is still worth reading. There's a dance in the old dame yet, even if you may have to watch out for fang marks over your carotids and listen carefully for the cry of "Braiiiins!" But nonetheless, if science fiction is now "undead," understanding what it died of, and what keeps it up and moving, is critical to getting the many pleasures one can obtain from it (some of which are more available now than when it was alive).
Here's what I think happens — why genres have limited life spans as living things.
Their deaths are built in at their origins (like other living things). At some time, just prior to the formation of the genre, there is some sort of hole in the culture, some subject the culture can't think about well, or reconcile itself to. It might be rhythm and exuberant sexuality (as with rock'n'roll). It might be the plain feelings of ordinary people, unmediated by formal analysis and classical references (as with the early Romantic poets). It doesn't matter what it is nearly as much as it matters that somewhere, there's something culturally important that the culture doesn't have a way to talk about.
A few artists (perhaps as few as one — Poe virtually invented the detective story full blown with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") produce works with a shared set of tropes that plug that hole, perhaps not completely satisfactorily. The people who feel that hole most acutely are drawn to the new solution, and they pull others with them. More tropes are added, things are tried and discarded, and the artists begin to get a sense of their theme, materials, and audience. The artists' sense of knowing what they are doing builds over time to genuine command of the form, and then to virtuosity. Meanwhile the audience gets better and better at locating this new, satisfying thing it likes, the rewards of that virtuosity increase, and as more people find that this stuff is good, and that it has something to do with what interests them, the audience grows.
In the early years, right at the start the artists and audience alike are drawn into exploring something that never was before; no one really has any experience and it's being made up as you go.
In the first generation, after perhaps ten or twenty years, you have some highly talented people who have been working at this for a while, and you have an audience which is eager and appreciative — a young audience, mostly, because it's young people who make and respond to cultural change (old people being busy in living with the changes they already made, or perhaps dying off). Now it's exciting stuff that gets better every year, and a sort of secret code among the young.
That first generation of fans grows to maturity, and now the genre is not just the badge of youth; it's also the badge of being a special, connected, with-it grownup. The second generation of artists grew up with the genre, can't remember when it didn't exist, and very often have gained technical skills that the early, more amateur practitioners didn't have. No longer having to figure out what the genre is, they can explore its still-mostly-undeveloped potential. This is the generation that produces many of the memorable works.
Along comes the third generation: the fans who learned of the genre from their parents and teachers, and the artists who grew up with a body of works already in place. If the first generation was about doing it at all, and the second generation about what you could do with it, the third generation is about doing it well. These are often the most polished works the genre will produce. This is the age of virtuosity.
But a finite number of tropes can only be combined in finitely many ways, and only a small fraction of those combinations are interesting. Furthermore, the cultural hole that gave rise to the genre is plugged, now — the genre is plugging it and getting better at plugging it every year. And the culture itself is moving on (Westerns flourished when the frontier was still in living memory, and for perhaps a generation after; the disappearance of the frontier is a quaint historical fact now, but it was a thunderclap in the culture of 1930). The surrounding culture just doesn't feel the old lack nearly as much. The genre is no longer filling a key place in people's emotional lives; it's just something they grew up reading/watching/listening to, comfort food for the brain rather than exotic cuisine.
There may still be a large audience that loves the old tropes; what's no longer there is the urgent driving need to fill that gap. The first time you go to the Lands Beyond, as Milo learns in The Phantom Tollbooth, or as Sarah learns in Labyrinth, it's because you must and you won't be entirely all right till you've been there; but after you've been there, though you can go back anytime, and it's a comforting, happy place, you usually don't go, because you have "been there, done that," and besides there are so many new things to see instead. (The Phantom Tollbooth would have had a very different and much sadder ending if Milo had kept going back to the Lands Beyond, and though Sarah is explicitly able to return to the world of the Labyrinth at any time, she tells her magical friends, at the end, that she is visiting them because she likes to see them now and then — her place is back in the real world and she's happy with that). Once the Lands Beyond are comfortable, they just aren't as Beyond as they used to be; once you can go there any time, it's less like a trip to the moon and more like a trip to McDonalds.
For the last generation of artists and audience, then, as the genre fossilizes and dies, it tends to become something like an inside joke (as with much of live theatre), a treasured family story (as with opera or jazz), or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity (as with ballet and with much of orchestral music). There is nothing wrong with that — it's just a different sort of pleasure. We might love Beethoven or Wagner but we'll never have quite that experience of sitting in the concert hall wondering what they're going to give us this time; when a detective goes down these mean streets being neither tarnished nor afraid, we want to know the details of how it comes out but one way or another the ending will be familiar; when a bookish, strong-willed heroine encounters a craggy social superior with a past that is never spoken of...well, fill in the blank. It's a genuine pleasure; it just isn't the sort of pleasure that one gets from a living genre.
By way of illustration, there's a recurring argument that Dafydd ab Hugh gets into with science fiction editors (well, there are a lot, but I'm talking about one in particular. Besides, I just wanted to mention Dafydd favorably in order to give Will and Lawrence a case of hives). Dafydd points out that the old-style sense of wonder has mostly faded from the field; the editors say that, no, it's still here all over the place, we have exploding stars and gateways to the far future and aliens who are clouds of plasma and all that, and in fact there's even more wonder than there was before because it's better described, since contemporary writers, with their better training and easier rewriting, often have better technique than the older generations did.
But Dafydd is right — part of what makes wonder work on the page is what C.S. Lewis said about myth and Brecht said about dramatic story: it keeps its power independent of the telling. It profoundly did not matter that A.E. van Vogt wrote dreadful sentences and even worse paragraphs, couldn't handle dialogue, and sometimes forgot what scene he was in; the idea of a generational starship whose crew had lost any idea of where they were and where they were going was something that could be explained, breathlessly, by any eighth grade boy to his friends, and that was what gave Rogue Ship its sense of wonder.
You could do it again better, as Heinlein did, and there was still an audience around that had never heard of such a thing and enjoyed hearing of marvels (with the added hard-sf lagniappe of "and it could really happen, man!")
You could do variations on it for a bit, with all the stories in which starships are faked ("we always run the engines at one gee of acceleration") or the crews are divided into castes of the knowing and the not-knowing, and so on, but each successive time, the idea became more familiar, the reader was more likely to guess at what was going on, and so forth, until now almost any TV space adventure could begin with the series regulars boarding an incredibly old starship "from back before FTL," and...well, so then the bookish strong-willed girl marries the craggy lord with a secret, and they reveal that the kindly old police chief was the killer, who actually stole the sword of the elf-king.
From the standpoint of "sense of wonder," it does not matter how well the old starship is described, or how finely drawn are the feelings of the crew. It does not matter that the crew have been drawn from a really fascinating non-Western tradition and the author has gotten every detail just right. It does not matter that every word of it is better than any word van Vogt ever wrote in his life, or that armies of Ph.D.s fall down and worship it as a masterpiece of style. (Well, okay, I'd like to watch that one). It no longer has that awesome shock of "this is the sort of thing that could happen in our universe."
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of novelty. Gregory Benford's "Bow Shock," last year, was a really fascinating story about how, in our present world, an alien starship might be detected at great distance, at first mistaken for other things, and then, when it was correctly identified as a starship, about the politics that would go into proclaiming its existence to the scientific community and the world at large. It was remarkably good hard SF — and I could picture a science crazed eighth grader eagerly explaining the physics to his friends (very easily as I watched my girlfriend's son do just that).
But wonder itself has become a technique; readers and writers alike now have protocols for producing and describing wonder. It can still delight us, but it cannot shock an experienced reader; we are too well-prepared to read it, get it, and move on, we already know the tactics that Benford uses to get us there, we respond to them, and as a result we experience safe wonder — getting very close to touching it but not actually having it invade our lives and take us over. Not only has technique come to substitute for wonder, but wonder has become technique.
Obviously this is not Benford's fault; he can do great things for the readers he has, but he can't make them be different readers. And contemporary editors too must deal with the audience they have, or hope to recruit; for all the singularities, nanoplagues, intelligent galaxies, starships the size of pop cans, and so forth, wonder was a phenomenon of a live genre, and science fiction is undead.
The undead status of science fiction also goes far to explain why so many serious, prominent members of the science fiction community have been on a "recruit the youth" kick for the last twenty years or so. When science fiction was a live genre, the only recruiting tactic needed was to leave the door open; kids swarmed in to get their hands on whatever was coming next (there were of course grumblings, during the New Wave and the cyberpunk uproars, that they weren't properly respecting their elders; these were very properly ignored, and the damned kids went right on reading what was coming out now, and arguing about what was in the magazines last month, and so on.)
Not any more. Google "science fiction" and "favorite" in myspace or one of the other meet-people sites frequented by the young, and you will notice that nearly all their "favorite" science fiction books are assigned in school. (1984 tops the list, usually, and Fahrenheit 451 and Ender's Game, along with a passel of YAs that you have probably never heard of, but all of them are from assigned reading lists). Much of the younger generation likes written science fiction the same way they like classical music — i.e. they consume it when required and have preferences among the things that are offered to them, but they aren't beating down any doors to get more of it.
If you look at the various programs of the various centers for science fiction stuff (which sadly cannot replace the wire rack at the back of the drug store), and at the efforts made by SFWA and various Worldcons, there is one thing that's pretty clear here: they are trying to get kids to read books that are many decades old. They are trying to get them to read the books that they enjoyed as children.
When challenged on this point, the usual response is, "Oh, we need people to write more Heinlein juveniles for today" — as if changing the fashions and the music, and inserting some slightly different sex mores (maybe the teenage boy hero makes out with a boy, that gay stuff is big, yeah, that's the ticket), would make the old tune play again. This is about as effective — but only as effective — as the various efforts to promote jazz to young audiences from the 1960s forward have been. A few younger people get interested in that old stuff as a hobby, much like the twenty-something swing dancers and tangoists I know, and most leave it lying dead where they found it. For live genres, recruiting the youth is unnecessary; for undead ones, it is mostly impossible, and the small successes you have will typically only create more of a constituency for undeadness (many high schools have jazz bands now, with kids who enjoy being in them; how good is the jazz? how innovative? how many kids become jazz listeners? how many just like the technical job of playing the instrument well, and let it go at that? It is a good, mind-expanding thing they are doing for themselves — a healthy activity — but is there any art left in it? What does it do for jazz?)
Science fiction has lost wonder because that hole is all filled in now, and youth because the rising generation is simply not interested in the same things we were. This did not happen through neglect, nor because we write gloomy stories (gloomy stories abounded in the period when sf was growing rapidly), nor because we aren't re-re-re-writing Tom Swift Jr. or Podkayne of Mars, but because the genre itself has grown old just as every genre does.
(I can promise you, though, that the science fiction community is sufficiently fossilized so that if this column is referred to or mentioned somewhere out there in the net, someone will immediately chime in to say the problem is that no one is writing Heinlein juveniles, science fiction is not optimistic enough anymore, and, if that person is a writer, besides all that is needed is for writers to just write the very best books they can for young people. This is one of the rituals of the undead, and we must allow them to practice it.)
Nonetheless, there are still plenty of reasons to read science fiction in its undead age. First of all, although the collective pleasures of a live genre are keen and sharp, the individual pleasures of an undead genre have their moments too. Jazz fans may never again sit in clubs waiting for the next new thing that could happen any night, and then be discussed till dawn when it does — but there is also something to be said for putting on the old records, late at night, and settling back with a drink and just listening and remembering, yes, it really is that good, from a perspective that from long practice can hear everything that is going on. When I go to a new realist play, even though I don't know how the specific story comes out, I do know how to watch for the finer points of acting technique, how to listen for the key lines and the well-played silences, how to see the lights and set and costume — and I have a very good time even if, topical references aside, there's nothing here that Ibsen or Chekhov wouldn't immediately recognize. So if wonder is merely a technique, well, I can still enjoy brilliantly played wonder as in "Bow Shock," Accelerando, or "The House Beyond Your Sky," rather the way that one can enjoy a suburban white girl singing the blues and hitting all of Billie Holiday's tricks, even though for her Billie Holiday is just vocal technique.
We have the skills to read science fiction, notice when it is well done, and enjoy it; why not enjoy some more of it, even if (or maybe because) the experience has become so repeatable?
Secondly, genres are more or less like volcanoes, never completely dependably dead. Rock and roll seemed to be about over when punk and wave brought it crashing back; the hardboiled had become a kind of historical, eternally in the land of Packards and trenchcoats, until a new group of writers brought it into the late twentieth century; there's no telling what may be about to bust loose and give SF another generation or two to run (though I am dead certain it will not be a reinvented optimistic Heinlein juvenile with a lot of inside-fandom jokes). If you're not at your table in the club, you won't hear it when the new player stands up and plays that riff that everyone else tries to hit again for years afterward.
In a related fashion, too, every so often great works come along in the undead afterlife of an art form — Chinatown reminded us all what noir used to be about, What's Up, Doc? dragged screwball comedies out of the tomb, Cyrano de Bergerac was in many ways the play the French romantics were trying to write, only about sixty years too late. If you're not there, you'll miss that, and it's fun to be there.
Beyond that, undead genres give birth to living ones — noir to cyberpunk, for example, or spy novels to technothrillers — and so it's worth keeping an eye on the old stump for new shoots. Just now, alternate history, paranormal romance, and half a dozen smaller subgenres are struggling to be born out of the undead stump of speculative fiction; if you had walked away, you'd never have seen that happening.
Finally, as a reader, you owe it to yourself for one additional reason: because reading science fiction teaches polysemic close reading, and it's getting to be a monosemic loose and sloppy world out there.
Monosemy, for those of you who skipped grad seminars, is one sign at a time, meaning one thing — "The cat sat on the mat," to use the example that Austin used constantly. The little meaning it has is a simple relation among three principal signs, nothing else to see here, end of it.
Polysemy is multiple signs standing for multiple things — "The door dilated" being the classic one there, which tells us that the world is different, power is cheap and reliable, it's probably in the future since we don't identify dilating doors with any past era, the viewpoint character accepts this as ordinary so he didn't just get his new Acme Dilating Door last week, and so on. Delaney gave us the wonderful example, "He turned on his left side," in which we immediately learn afterward that the viewpoint character is a robot, powering up; next he turns on his right, and presumably then warms up his head and turns that on, and so on. The words stand for things, the sentence stands for more than one thing, and the "mistake" the reader first makes in reading it stands for something else — perhaps for "You have found your way to the center of the maze, good going!"
Close reading of polysemy is dense, rich, and rewarding in a way that no other kind of reading comes close to. It is also hard work, and like most kinds of fun hard work, it takes practice to become good enough at it to just enjoy it; your first time kayaking, cross-country skiing, rock-climbing, or sailing may be (probably will be) cold, damp, muscle-straining, possibly painful, and almost nothing but work — but once you are proficient, you feel a power in yourself that you couldn't get any other way, and a joy in exercising it.
Good science fiction is a workout for good reading in general. (Yes, I have encountered those sad souls who can only read science fiction and read everything else with immense resistance and very badly — but they read science fiction badly, too, and they don't let it teach them to read better). It demands an engagement of mind, heart, attention, knowledge and every other faculty of reading that is unparalleled in any other kind of pop lit — and it does it while delivering immense amounts of fun. There is a permanent demand for literature that does that — has been since Job and the Iliad, both great depressing stories but both works that engage the whole reader out to the limit of the reader's ability. There will be more such works, as long as people with brains and talent take up writing. You want to be ready to enjoy them — and even undead, science fiction is a great playground for honing your chops while you wait.
