Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site druri.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!bellcore!allegra!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!drutx!druri!dht From: dht@druri.UUCP (Davis Tucker) Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE FICTION TODAY, PART III Message-ID: <1092@druri.UUCP> Date: Tue, 28-May-85 10:53:55 EDT Article-I.D.: druri.1092 Posted: Tue May 28 10:53:55 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 31-May-85 00:59:52 EDT Organization: AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver Lines: 139 THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE FICTION TODAY PART III: Self-Censorship And The Science Fiction Establishment by Davis Tucker ______________________________________________________________________________ I recently had the weird pleasure of reading a book by K. W. Jeter, "Dr. Adder". Not to make any assumptions, but I doubt you've heard of him. This book is deeply disturbing, dealing in a morass of human degradation, genital mutilation, castration fears, religion, hopelessness, sexual attraction for amputees, insanity, paranoia, and many other horrible things that humanity has buried in its collective subconscious. It's also very apparent that this is a very good science fiction novel. It has depth and breadth of character- ization, great imagination, a wonderful sense of extrapolation, no puns, a well-conceived plot, and an interesting narrative point of view. It's a little reminiscent of "The Stars My Destination" in its scope and grittiness and unwillingness to temper its anger or sugar-coat its themes. Its main character is an amoral, indecisive young man who happens to have had a famous father. Its title character, in some ways the hero of the book, is a doctor who tailors prostitute's bodies into horrible but lucrative mutations or mutilations. I like to think of myself as very open-minded, but novels like this one make me see how shallow that perception of myself is. This novel challenges the reader's ability to accept a scenario that is in all ways horrible and hopeless, with no exit. The reader is bludgeoned at almost every page with some new perversion, some new plot twist, some new means of making the human condition even more alien and unsettling. Despite all of this, it is doubtful that any reader of "Dr. Adder" will come away from it without enrichment, without appreciation, and without the opinion that this is a very good novel. It is that apparent - the talent of this author shows very clearly. Yet this novel took 12 years to reach publication. Science fiction fans like to think of the genre as being on the cutting edge of writing, of being experimental, of being fresh and new and un- inhibited. Nothing could be further from the truth. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" would never have been published by a science fiction house - the editors would have said "too weird", "no spaceships", "how did the girl get up into the sky - with anti- gravity devices?", "no dirt-eating, sorry", "why did you start out with the end of the story?", and other such nonsense. If anything, the science fiction establishment, fans, and writers are pretty hidebound and more conservative in their approach to something new than their mainstream counterparts. For all the lip service paid to nourishing new talent, there's precious little crumbs being spread around, and most of those are to new authors who resemble old ones, who rehash the same old themes in the same old manner, as previously stated. But let's leave sleeping dogs lie. It's certainly not any overt censorship that's being perpetrated on us, such as the movie industry put over itself in the 30's and 40's, or the censorship that banned Henry Miller, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and a host of other European writers in the first half of the 20th Century on our shores. And that's what makes it so difficult to eradicate, or even find. It's the editor who suggests to a new author, "Well, everything's fine except this one passage where the woman assumes the shape of a man and goes home and rapes her mother... they won't take that in ANALOG, and we can't take it here." It's the reader who tells all his friends not to read so-and-so's latest work because it's not *really* science fiction. It's the Nebula Awards, the Hugos, it's in every science fiction publishing department and magazine office. It's in every reader. Everyone has an idea of what that elusive ghost "science fiction" is, and even if sometimes he or she is a little fuzzy about what it is, there's certainly no doubt about what it isn't. And that mindset, which all of us have to one degree or another as regards science fiction (me, I don't care what anybody says, I'm not reading any "Little Fuzzy" novels), is at the root of this self-censorship. It is all-pervasive in such a tiny community. From readers who stop reading the "Gor" novels because of their obnoxious sexism, to editors who refuse to publish a novel they know is outstanding because it doesn't fit into one neat category or another, to authors who continue to churn out predictable material because they know it will sell, it binds us all together in very tight chains of the mind. And it begins from that hidebound definition of "science fiction". There are a multitude of reasons to never read a "Gor" novel, and sexism is one of the minor ones. I'm not going to go over the old ground of Hugo Gernsback and his "scientifiction", of the other pulps that contributed to defining in unfortunately negative terms what "science fiction" is. Suffice to say that prior to these idea magnates, the popular readership of the world and the U.S. did not consider H. G. Wells or Jules Verne or various others to be writing "science fiction" of any distinguishable sort. And let's not delude ourselves - the fiction in the pulps was always aimed at primarily juvenile audiences, and continued in that vein for quite awhile (until today? hmmmm...). But due to these factors of history, we have forged a sort of collective definition which has forced many of us to resort to self-censorship to retain our definition. This is not about sex or foul language, necessarily - though try to think of the last short story you read in any of the science fiction magazines where a character said something more nasty than "shit" or "goddamn" (and I'll lay you 2-1 odds that character wasn't a woman). Or try to think of a story in one of those magazines which dealt with the subject of sexuality, as opposed to having sex in it. Science fiction, which so many of us have thought of as being imaginative and radical, has turned out to be provincial, dull, and conservative (even when being radical - re: "Starship Troopers", "Farnham's Freehold", etc. by Robert Heinlein). It's like the slave who chains himself to the wall every night. That's okay, we all can read what we want to read, but let's not indulge in hypocrisies of freedom as we put on our chains. I don't know anyone who reads "bodice rippers", or "surging sagas" (historical romance novels aimed at the female market) who claims that they have any importance whatsoever beyond being a good read. There's no hypocrisy in enjoying trash for being trash. But there certainly is in claiming literary worth for "Battlefield Earth" or "Dragonriders Of Pern" or "The Number Of The Beast". Well, that's all for today, kids. Tune in next week as we take a new tack on the seas of criticsm - "THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE FICTION TODAY, PART IV: Fantasy, Or How To Hack A Hobbit And Build A Balrog In One Easy Lesson". I'll leave you with an extended quote from Phillip K. Dick in his afterword to K. W. Jeter's novel, "Dr. Adder". "Here was not just a good novel; here was a great novel... Very simply, it is a stunning novel and it destroys once and for all your conception of the limitations of science fiction. This is, of course, why so many years had to pass before it saw print... "I don't wish to fall back on the easy statement that DR. ADDER was ahead of its time. It wasn't. It was right on the nose. What was wrong was this: the field of science fiction was *behind* the times. I have no doubt that if DR. ADDER had been published in 1972 it would have been a blockbuster of a commercial success, and what is more, its impact on the field would have been enormous. The field has been growing weak. It has for years become ossified. A stale timidity has crept over it. Endless novels about sword fights and figures in cloaks who perform magic... have been cranked out, published, sold, and the field of science fiction has been transmuted into a joke field... "History does judge you, publisher, author, and reader alike... I am writing this Afterword for you the reader, not for K. W. Jeter. I am writing this to tell you, Forget your timid preconceptions of what a science fiction novel should be like. Forget the little people... and sword fights on imaginary planets. This novel is about *our world* and so it is a dangerous novel... Which is terrific. This is precisely what we need."