Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84 SMI; site sun.uucp Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!decwrl!sun!blueskye From: blueskye@sun.uucp (Tim Ryan) Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: Science Fiction, Art, Criticism, and Sam Delany Message-ID: <2821@sun.uucp> Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 22:22:15 EDT Article-I.D.: sun.2821 Posted: Tue Sep 24 22:22:15 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 06:52:06 EDT Distribution: net Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Lines: 171 Keywords: Art, Anti-Art, Criticism, Delany, Dhalgren, Real World Someone (sorry, but I don't remember your name), recently requested that s/he would like to hear what a "real critic" had to say about life, the universe, and science fiction. Lo, and behold, there is a major critical review of the field in the October, 1985 edition of _Harper's_ magazine (available at better bookstores). Below you will find quotes from this essay. NECESSARY DISCLAIMERS: 1. I personally do not agree with everything that is quoted here. 2. The material in quotes is Copyright, 1985, Harper's Magazine Foundation, and is used without permission. That said, the author of the essay is Luc Sante', who has written for the _New York Review of Books_, _Manhattan_, _inc._, &c. This is a real, professional, mainstream critic here, folks, so listen up to what some people in the "real world" :-) think about our beloved SF. *********************************************************************** "It is hard, a century or so later, to recall science fiction's original promise. Even today, when technological boosterism is at a pitch not seen in years, the mechanical utopias envisioned back then seem remote. Just as the creative leisure once anticipated as the legacy of the machine age materialized only as consumerism and boredom, so science fiction's great horizons have shrunk. Rather than inspiring liberty, science fiction has merely generated a new set of conventions. Instead of drawing anybody onward, these conventions have led inward, to minutely embroidered variations on earlier works; sideways, to procrastination and sloth (as when science fiction disposes of social issues by resolving them in impossible conditions); and backward, to nostalgia and escapism (as when it pretends that the present never occurred). "Conventions, of course, are attributes of all literary genres, and it seems pointless to fault a genre merely for being a genre. What makes science fiction different from other genres is the hubris of its intention, which is nothing less than to depict the future, and the impossible. That it usualyy delivers pedestrian sillines is therefore thrown into much greater relief. Like modern technology, science fiction relies on mystification to disguise the fact that it is continually retailing the same product." * * * "Nor does science fiction exclude humor, but a major component of humor is irrationality, a quality feared by science fiction. Within the terms of the genre, everything must adhere to a rigorous schema. Science fiction cannot bear to leave its conundrums elegantly unresolved. Its task is to literalize, add mass, and seek a convincing solution, no matter how extravagant or dull. Science fictioneers are addicted to a form of closure, by which internal consistency is achieved at the cost of absurdity. If humans shuttle back and forth through time like commuters on the subway, the mechanism of their travel must be accounted for in a consistent and 'plausible' way. If aliens are shaped like hourglasses and exhale chlorine, their physiology must be explained in terrestrial terms. Science is not usually considered a deterrent to the spirit of invention, so the fact that it can be invoked to deadening effect in a purely literary matter is a bit surprising. But science fiction's fear of instinct and desire for respectability mark its origins in the nineteenth-century bourgeousie, a milieu famous for using science as a bludgeon." * * * "This desire to capture the enormous impact of scientific discovery on the average mind reamins a central concern of science fiction. The _Star Wars_ movies and Frank Herbert's never-ending _Dune_ saga are recent versions of the serialized space opera, in which planets, colonies, species and biosystems interact in myriad configurations." * * * "Campbell was a tyrant who encouraged tyrannical views. His guidance bore fruit in the works of such writers as Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. Heinlein's grandiose technocratic vision approaches fascism in works like _Starship Troopers_ (1959) and _Stranger in a Strange Land_ (1961), the latter once the bible of psychedelic zealotry and a major influence on Charles Manson. Hubbard, after producing acres of wordage for Campbell, tired of writing science fiction, and decided to live it, a decision that resulted in his pseudoscience, Dianetics, which had considerable impact on science fiction before mutating into the pseudoreligion Scientology." * * * "If science fiction today can be said to show a trend, it is a retrograde trend, serving up planets more distant and futures increasingly remote." * * * "Science fiction, by relying on a tradition of mediocrity, has effectively sealied itself off from literature, and, incidentally, from real concerns. From within, science fiction exudes the humid vapor of male prepubescence. The cultlike ferocity of science fiction fandom serves only to cultivate what is most sickly and stunted about the genre. "Meanwhile, in the outside world, science fiction finds work as a commercial fetish, substituting for religion. Consumers are shown a field of stars blazoned with the device "Beyond!" When associated with breakfast cereal or pickup trucks, the image of the cosmos suggests masculine adventure while promising oblivion. Anything can and does get sold this way. Nevertheless, the double seduction of bravado and of the void can most effectively be used to sell the prospect of annihilation. Perhaps it is not so much that science fiction has compromised itself as that time has caught up with it. Its once vast terrain has been thoroughly plundered; what is left is detritus, exploitable but degraded. Science and fiction can both be found elsewhere; the future, though, must still be invented." On the subject of Sam Delany and _Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand_: "Better, perhaps, that the author dispense with earthly correlatives entirely and drown the reader in extragalactic miasma, as Samuel R. Delany does in _Stars in my pocket like grains of sand_. Delany, who began publishing in the 1960's, is the only major black writer of science fiction. His books are dense and thoughtful, if perhaps a shade overwritten, as his titles might suggest (_Driftglass_, _Time considered as a helix of semi-precious stones_). On the comscreen, which for some reason hadn't turned off when I'd left, the pale colors of the ball court still pulsed: withing the pentagonal frame, among the laughter, I watched Thadeus Thant (voice like a cracked claxon, a gentle, jovial, jealous creature, who, now, at age eighty, has learned to turn jealousy into ambition)...and imperious Eulalia Thant (an impressive redhead surrounded by more jewelry than I think all of us Dyeths owned, kilos of it floating out on suspensors that kept it turning slowly about her, as she turned about her children, her spouses, a woman with an insight into juman motivations both cultivated and uncanny)... "Delany has a flair for the alien, and is quite adept at convincingly rendering the whole of distant societies. But he is sometimes hard on the reader, who must spend hours deliberating over the prbable sexes of characters ina society where everyone is referred to as "she," regardless of gender, unless he/she becomes a sexual object, and thus becomes "he." After a few hundred pages, however, the insistence has a hypnotic effect, and the conceits take on flesh. Then, near the end, the book reveals itself as a doomed-love tale with a very long setup. The setup is so skillful and the denouement so pat that the book seems abruptly to fall of a cliff. It is as though the book had ended with "and then I woke up." The love story is a homosexual one, which ought to be either incidental or boldly announced; but instead the doom, the pat ending, and even the lengthy mis-en-scene seem like camouflage slathered on out of embarassment. This is an example of science fiction's accustomed approach to a subject of burning concern--to the author or to society at large: put it aboard a rocket ship and transport it eons away where it can be detonated safely." ******************************************************************* If you've gotten this far, congratulations! The actual essay is a really nasty piece of work by someone who clearly has an axe to grind. These excerpts are offerred mostly as a basis for further discussion, because I'm sure there will be many flames about points that have been made here. Again, I disavow any personal connection or support of statement in quotes. So don't flame me personally (please! I mean it!). Tim Ryan "What goes on here is not part of the real world." Tom West Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com