March 4, 2002

Editor, Harper’s Magazine
666 Broadway,
New York, New York

To the Editor,

Every so often a self-appointed guardian of the literary gates is called to arms to take pot shots at the literary genre called science fiction, or what is more appropriately termed speculative fiction (SF). For some reason, it is the special prerogative of SF to be infantalized by so-called mainstream critics. It is odd, but I never read mainstream critics trashing mystery or crime novels, or suspense thrillers, or cold war fiction. Of all genre fiction, only SF is repeatedly kicked in the head by literary bullies. Science fiction holds a special place for ax-grinders who for some reason simply don’t “get” imaginative literature and so must vent their frustration and spleen in presumptuous condescending “critiques” of the genre.

The latest diatribe is by L.J. Davis (“Worlds Enough: Travels in an Adolescent Genre,” Jan. 2002). "Worlds Enough" pretends to be a critical overview of the history of a genre whose status is disclosed in the subtitle. An avowed outsider, Davis pretends to a kind of glib dismissal of the historical antecedents of the modern genre, but misses the point. In order to enjoy the fantastical tales of Lucian, de Bergerac, Swift, Poe and others, one must, as Keats noted, suspend one’s belief (and disbelief) and simply enjoy the ride. I doubt very much whether Cyrano de Bergerac actually believed that faint wisps of evaporating dew would lift a man into space. His fanciful and impractical method of travel is, as any astute SF reader knows, a “gimme” - something that one must simply accept in order to proceed with the story. Whether it is dew collectors, a time machine, or faster than light travel, the “gimme” is the stock and trade of the science fiction story. It allows the writer to get to the place where the story takes place, and one either suspends one’s disbelief or one should read Raymond Carver and forget speculative fiction. The fact that de Bergerac, Kepler and others imagined going to the moon and conceived of adventures in the unknown is what distinguishes them as fabulists. That they actually created imaginative fiction is the significance of their legacy.

Davis, who by his own count has read only three living SF writers (Robinson, Stephenson and Bear - I discount Vonnegut as he more or less divorced himself from the genre forty years ago), has the temerity to claim that “something that a lot of science fiction types don’t do very well “ is write. Apparently, the aforementioned authors are emblematic of the “current sad decline” of this once “delightful” genre (though readers of Mr. Davis’s article would be hard pressed to infer that he is delighted about anything in it). To trash the history of a literary genre without the slightest familiarity of its recent history both here and abroad is disingenuous at best and pedantic at worse. Actually, its presumptuous dilettantism that doesn’t even rise to the level of pedantry.

I wonder, though, why Mr. Davis never mentions SF literary stylists such as Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons, Ursula K. LeGuin or Paul Park? Or the group of young British writers including Iain M. Banks, Ken McLeod, Ian McDonald, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley and Peter Hamilton. It must be because when one is conducting a hatchet job one only attacks targets of opportunity. Which is why he singles out Robert Heinlein’s "Stranger in a Strange Land" for special approbation. To pillory this novel, now 41 years old, is, of course, to flog a dead horse. Except for love-beaded adolescents in the late 1960’s for whom it was a kind of manifesto of the possibilities of expanded consciousness, who reads it? Very few, that’s who. It ranks 7,734 on Amazon.com’s sales list. So why beat up on a book that virtually no one cares about? Why? Because it has in fact sold millions of copies and was a crossover mainstream bestseller and represents everything that Davis despises about the genre. It is sexist, “goofy,” quasi-messianic, and “terminally stupid.” The novel offends Davis “personally.” I suggest he get over it and move on.

And while I would certainly agree that Heinlein’s most famous novel is not a great book, we read it in the ‘60’s because it offered a possibility for expanded consciousness, and because “grokking” seemed to tie in to Aldous Huxley’s "Doors of Perception" and Carlos Casteneda’s "The Teachings of Don Juan." It was a novel read for the ideas it contained, not for its literary qualities which were minimal.

And this is the very point about SF that Davis refuses to get past: that until the 1960's SF was read solely for the ideas the authors developed, not for whatever literary attributes the writer might have exhibited. Indeed, literary style was considered suspect and pretentious. Sf was about Ideas, not literary craftsmanship. And the history that Davis neglects to mention is that the man who reprinted stories by Poe, Wells, Burroughs and Verne as “scientific romances” and first published a new crop of “scientifiction” writers in “Amazing Stories” in 1926, Hugo Gernsback, wanted, as an inventor himself, above all, unwavering fidelity to the possibilities inherent in science and technology in the stories he published. His aim was to attract young boy scouts to the study of electricity and the as yet unknown field of electronics with tales of scientific derring-do.

By 1932 John Campbell had graduated from MIT with a degree in physics and began writing SF stories. By 1938 he was the editor of “Astounding Stories.” He recruited a stable of writers including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein and the so-called “golden age” of SF was born. Campbell insisted that stories published in “Astounding” be not only logically rigorous, but that the ideas explored be technically feasible, and scientifically accurate. Eventually, magazines such as “Galaxy” and “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” broadened the scope to include more sociological, psychological and literary aspects. The possibilities were, as theysay,endless. And that is just the tip of the iceberg hidden from Davis’s myopic purview.

Had Davis chose to indulge in more than a cursory overview of the genre he would have learned that since the time of the British New Wave of the 1960’s (led by editor Michael Moorcock's "New Worlds" magazine and writers such as Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner et.al., and Stanislaw Lem, a Polish writer), a new writerly sensibility has in fact influenced the last thirty years of SF writing. And while it is still the Idea that is of primary importance in, for example, Hard Science Fiction, many writers have turned their talents to the development of an ecological or sociological or psychological idea, and to unleash a literary prose style that unsettled the old guard technophiles. That C.S. Lewis penned his Space Trilogy and Kingsly Amis defended the genre in a series of lectures given at Princeton University ("New Maps of Hell") all undermine the mistaken notion that SF is a subgenre unworthy of adult considerations. Dan Simmons’s "Hyperion", for example, is cast in the mold of "The Canterbury Tales" and is infused with the spirit of John Keats (indeed, a cybrid of Keats is the protagonist of the sequel, "The Fall of Hyperion.") That Doris Lessing turned out "The Canopus in Argos" sequence of 5 SF novels, that Walter Mosely, Russell Hoban, T.C. Boyle, Margaret Atwood and Italo Calvino, et. al. have each tried their hand at speculative fiction bespeaks the fact that it is a serious genre that examines issues and ideas that cannot be presented as effectively in mundane terms.

Perhaps the most galling thing about Davis’s excoriation of SF is his descent into Paul Collins’s "Banvard’s Folly", an account of the disinterring of a chain of surrealistic coincidences that would make Oliver Stone blush. Discounting the deserved obscurity of fringe author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Davis then summarizes the passing of the so-called “hollow earth theory” torch from one Cleve Symmes to Jeremiah Reynolds to Henry Allen to Edgar Allan Poe to Bulwer-Lytton to Tesla to Marconi to Hitler. Whew! What any of this has to do with SF, however, is beyond my conceiving. Why this absurdist dead end of wackiness should be included in any discussion of the literary history of SF only goes to show to what lengths Davis will go to discredit the genre. Off on this wild goose chase, Davis actually missed the story, which is not about Poe, but one Richard Shaver who captured the attention of SF fandom from 1945-47 when he wrote a series of fantastic tales about an ancient underground civilization called Lemuria. Stories so provocative and resonant that they elicited some 2500 letters to the editor at “Amazing Stories.” (cf., John Clute "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction") The so called Shaver Mysteries were the apotheosis of the hollow earth theory in pulp fiction and it is they and not some obscure crackpot, and certainly not Adolph Hitler, who properly belong in the history of that one rather quaint (i.e., Jules Verne) SF idea, the hollow earth.

Mr. Davis’s hastily researched and digressionary dead end “critique” of the progenitors of SF masquerades as an authoritative dismissal, but it is little more than a misinformed and misguided attempt to discredit a genre that is not only vibrant and intellectually stimulating, but is, as a literary genre, the definitive glimpse into the future in which we live.