The Word Outside

First published in Warp 31, November 1982.

There is good SF and bad SF. For the purposes of this article, good SF may be considered to be SF with artistic merit. Bad SF is everything else. Artistic merit implies some concern with the human condition and/or attempts to explore the literary boundaries of the field.

Having defined my terms, I am forced to the conclusion that very little SF can be considered good, and that too much respect is paid to the rubbish. I am sick and tired of hearing people refuse to admit that any criticism of whatever imbecilic thing they happen to be into can be valid (how can you criticise perfection?), while at the same time dismissing out of hand the items in the field that can hold their heads up proudly in any literary company whatsoever—all for no particularly good reason.

I have no quarrel with a liking for crud. God knows I read and enjoy enough of it myself. But I can eat a hamburger without pretending that it is haute cuisine. Far too many SF fans consider that the hamburgers of SF really are haute cuisine; and when they come across the real haute cuisine, they spit it out in disgust. A diet composed solely of hamburgers ruins the palate. This is not just narrow-mindedness, it is closed-mindedness, and it is indefensible. Whatever happened to tolerance?

Much of this attitude stems from ignorance. A great number of SF fans read nothing but SF and have no awareness of that thing called Literature or any knowledge of the traditions that shape it and the purposes that call it forth. A good example is Brian Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head which the lumpenproletariat pushed to one side, completely missing the homage paid to James Joyce within a truly science fictional (however you define it) framework. It is impossible to have any appreciation at all of the book unless you can see that link. And that means you have got to go and read Joyce, whichever way you look at it.

Hand in hand with this ignorance of the world outside SF there often goes a total inability to appreciate that most subtle of concepts—style. My favourite example of this was an English fan I met once who was completely incapable of seeing any difference at all between the works of Cordwainer Smith and E. E. “Doc” Smith, writers about as stylistically similar as pot plants and belly-button fluff. (“They both write about spaceships and things”, he said. Ye Gods!) This attitude is the only explanation I can think of for the enduring popularity of so many SF authors who simply can’t write. I cannot read James P. Hogan, for example. The words get in the way of the story.

And finally in this catalogue of sins, there is the innate conservatism of fandom. How odd that in a literature whose main raison d’tre is a devotion to the concept that the future will be different, that change is in the air, there should be so much resistance to change within itself. Too much modern SF is rooted firmly in the past, to the styles and ideas of thirty and more years ago. This is comfortable—it is what we are used to. We don’t have to think about it. We know about space ships and time machines and linear narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end. But it seems to me (as it seemed to the avant garde new wave in the 1960s) that SF requires more than this if it is to grow and prosper and not merely stagnate. The only thing we really know about the future is that it will be new and strange and different. So we need new and strange and different ways of talking about it. We need to take the techniques developed in other fields as well as within our own, and to build on those techniques, refining and extending them. And if that leads to broken narrative and fractured prose—then so be it. At least it stretches our minds. Don’t reject William Burroughs because he is hard to understand. Make the effort, for God’s sake. Don’t condemn him because he doesn’t write safe trivialities like Edgar Rice used to.

I have said a lot of nasty words. I have said fans are ignorant and scared of new things, bigoted and only comfortable with what they know, that they have no sense of discrimination.