And Papa Gernsback of the rigid definition? Not a single word he wrote in his entire life—and that includes novels, editorials, non-fiction, the whole shebang—is still in print.
The first major critic to come along was Damon Knight. Damon knew that science fiction was the pure quill. It annoyed him when science fiction writers didn’t know the craft of writing, and it annoyed him even more when they got their science wrong.
But what really drove him right up a tree was when they didn’t even try to make the science accurate. When, for example, they put the key in the ignition and the spaceship started up just like a car. When, for example, they put an oxygen atmosphere on Mars.
When, for example, they were Ray Bradbury.
Damon acknowledged that what Bradbury did was Art; he knew his craft too much to argue with that. But Art or not, it sure didn’t fit his notion of science fiction, and his criticisms and essays left no doubt that Ray Bradbury was a gifted imposter who should either mend his ways or stop posing as a science fiction writer.
The result? Almost every word Ray Bradbury has written for the past 60 years is still in print, and the Pulitzer committee just honored him for a lifetime devoted to science fiction. Of all the dozens of pure science fiction books Damon Knight wrote or edited, only two are in print today.
The next major critic was James Blish, not quite the writer Knight was and a hell of a lot nastier, but he knew his stuff, and that meant he knew science fiction was Important (note capital I), that no practitioner dared take it lightly, that it was just this side of sinful to be flip and flippant, and that the greatest offender was Robert Sheckley. How dare he make fun of the honored tropes and traditions of science fiction?
Okay, move the clock ahead a quick 60 years and (you saw this coming, right?) there are 11 Sheckley books in print. Of all the books, fiction and non-fiction, that James Blish wrote, only two remain available. Even his Star Trek books have gone the way of the dodo.
But more to the point, no one argues any longer that humor cannot be valid science fiction (and indeed, such humorous stories as Eric Frank Russell’s “Allamagoosa” and Connie Willis’s “Even the Queen” have won the Hugo). No one says that the science is more important than the emotional impact of a story, by Bradbury, by Zelazny, by anyone. And no one denies horror and supernatural fiction (perhaps excepting vampire novels that are thinly-disguised category romances and outsell science fiction ten-to-one) a place in our family tree.
Now you would think that after the originator of our field and our first two major critics all fell on their faces trying to keep science fiction within their rigid definitions, future generations of self-appointed Keepers of the Flame (or the Definition) would have slunk off into the shadows. But they didn’t.
At the midpoint of the 20th Century, everyone knew that sex had no place in science fiction. Our field was like a George Bernard Shaw play, which is to say that an alien, reading (or watching) it could learn everything there was to know about human beings except that we come equipped with genitals and an urge to use them. Then along came Philip Jose Farmer with “The Lovers” and its sequels, and when God didn’t strike him dead, all the writers who had been avoiding Topic Number One for years, even such traditionalists as Heinlein and Asimov, began making up for lost time…and by 1960 it was never again suggested that sex had no place in science fiction.
J. G. Ballard got a lot of grief, because clearly you couldn’t fool with the actual form of the science fiction novel. But after he did it, so did dozens of others, experimenting every which way as the New Wave was born, fought for its right to exist, and was finally incorporated into the body of the literature.
So okay, they lost a lot of battles, but there was one thing the traditionalists knew would never change, and that was that science fiction took place in outer space. Then Robert Silverberg began exploring “inner space” with books like Dying Inside, Barry Malzberg explored it with Herovit’s World, the Defenders of the Faith howled like stuck pigs, and a few years later everyone agreed that Outer or Inner Space were equally valid venues as long as the story worked.
Alternate history was okay for historians like McKinley Kantor and politicians like Winston Churchill, and the very occasional science fiction short story, but everyone knew it wasn’t really science fiction—until Harry Turtledove began proving it was on a regular basis, and suddenly dozens of writers followed suit. Now there’s no more controversy. Of course alternate history is science fiction.
And what’s driving the purists crazy these days? Just look around you.
Connie Willis can win a Hugo with a story about a girl of the future who wants to have a menstrual period when women no longer have them.
David Gerrold can win a Hugo with a story about an adopted child who claims to be a Martian, and the story never tells you if he is or not.
I can win Hugos with stories about books remembered from childhood, about Africans who wish to go back to the Good Old Days, about an alien tour guide in a thinly-disguised Egypt.
The narrow-minded purists to the contrary, there is nothing the field of science fiction can’t accommodate, no subject—even the crucifixion, as Mike Moorcock’s Nebula winner, “Behold the Man,” proves—that can’t be science-fictionalized with taste, skill and quality.
I expect movie fans, making lists of their favorite science fiction films, to omit Dr. Strangelove and Charly, because they’ve been conditioned by Roddenbury and Lucas to look for the Roddenbury/Lucas tropes of movie science fiction—spaceships, zap guns, robots, light sabres, and so on.
But written science fiction has never allowed itself to be limited by any straitjacket. Which is probably what I love most about it.
About the only valid definition that I’m willing to accept is this: all of modern, mainstream, and realistic fiction is simply a branch, a category, or a subset of science fiction.
Slush
Everyone talks about slush, but no one does anything about it. Except read it. Very reluctantly.
But it’s what keeps us going. Sooner or later just about every author you’ve ever heard of, or will ever hear of, comes out of a slush pile. Sooner or later every editor reads slush, if not all of it, then at least the slush that’s passed up the line to him by the people who are paid to read nothing but slush.
If you go to enough conventions, sooner or later you’re going to attend a panel with a title like “It Came From the Slush Pile,” in which editors discuss—humorously, it is to be hoped—the most awful stories ever to appear in their slush piles. I never participate in such panels, because I think it smacks of a certain cruelty. I don’t like making fun of people who are trying their best to become writers, and of course you never know if one of them is in the audience, sitting there being quietly humiliated by editors poking fun at his lack of skill.
Every now and then someone who has attended such a panel asks me if slush is really like that. The answer, alas, is that it’s every bit that bad and nowhere near that amusing.
So let’s talk about slush a bit, since I have never, in four decades in the publishing industry, seen a small slush pile.
Why do we have them at all?
An editor is a lot more than a purchasing agent. He has to work hand-in-glove with writers. He has to attend sales meetings. He has to sort out his budget. He has to work with his artists and his art director. He has to work with his columnists. He has to balance his issue, which becomes quite interesting when a story he was depending on—or a segment of a serial—comes in late or not at all. He has to justify what he is doing to his publisher—and when it doesn’t work, he has to justify his continuing employment to his publisher. In this field, he has to attend conventions and glad-hand authors, especially authors who are writing for rival magazines and whom he would like to have writing for his magazine. And he has to read dozens of stories every week.
The amazing part is that he gets