Newman.es@PARC-MAXC (12/15/82)
The December issue of Harper's magazine, now on your newsstand,
contains a wide-ranging attack on science fiction. The article,
entitled "Destination: Void", appears on page 64 of the magazine. Its
author is Arnold Klein, identified as "a poet who used to write
book reviews and animal features for the Soho Weekly News".
While the article is far too long to reproduce here in full, I'll
leave you a few inflammatory excerpts in hopes that you'll read the
whole article and carry the argument into the pages of SF-LOVERS. Any
typos are probably my own. /Ron
Grownups are reluctant to take science fiction seriously, and
with good reason: sci-fi is a hormonal activity, not a literary
one. Its traditional concerns are all pubescent. Secondary
sexual characteristics are everywhere, disguised. Aliens have
tentacles. Telepathy allows you to have sex without the nasty
inconvenience of touching. Womblike spaceships provide balanced
meals. No one ever has to grow old--body parts are replaceable,
like Job's daughters, and if you're lucky you can become a robot.
As for the adult world, it's simply not there; political systems
tend to be naively authoritarian (there are more lords in science
fiction than on public television) and are often ruled by young
boys on quests. The most popular sci-fi book in recent years,
Frank Herbert's DUNE, sold millions of copies by combining all
these themes: it ends with its adolescent hero conquering the
universe while straddling a giant worm.
. . .
Worlds are destroyed in science fiction with rather disturbing
nonchalance. Joe Haldeman, for example, has no compunction about
the planet October, wiped out in passing, in his recent ALL MY
SINS REMEMBERED, for a small breach of interplanetary peace; C.
J. Cherryh's indigo skinned Hunter of Worlds, pursuing an obscure
point of alien etiquette, is set to incinerate the planet Priamos
out of pique; and in the immensely popular RINGWORLD Larry Niven
starts an explosion in the galactic core in a way wholly
collateral to the novel's main action, which deals with the
discover of a giant doughnut-shaped world, and casually writes
*finis* to the whole galaxy. Worlds that are allowed to face The
Future in one piece are usually governed by benevolent
authoritarian regimes, or some similarly simpleminded
arrangement. Thus in his many tales Cordwainer Smith, member in
good standing of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (one of the
many self-honoring mechanisms of sci-fi, others being the Hugo,
Nebula, and Campbell awards), runs the universe with the
Instrumentality, a gang of subtle lords and ladies who partly
recall the Vatican and partly the State Department, where Smith
was once employed. . . Less utopian setups are run more modestly,
by emporers and god-emporers, and the out-and-out dystopias in
sci-fi are usually set on a weary Earth governed by moms and dads
who are either too strict or too lax.
. . .
The painstaking depictions of the ramscoop hyperdrives that
enable some young idiot to visit the terra-formed moons of
Jupiter are really glorificaitons of hypercapitalism, without, of
course, the hurble-burble of ground rent and class struggle:
there is no ATTACK OF THE SPACE LANDLORDS or CO-OP 2250 A.D.! on
the sci-fi shelves. ("When the alien Zetas first undertook to
provide heat and hot water to a rapidly cooling Earth, humanity
was delighted...until the boilers broke, and the Zetas wouldn't
fix them!" "It's buy or die in 2250 A.D., when one man owns all
the living units on Earth...")
. . .
Sci-fi writers are the most pretentious idea mongers going, but
their ideas are *stupid*. "Abstract design is all right--for
wallpaper and lineoleum. But *art* is the process of evoking pity
and terror," says the smartest man in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND,
and Doris Lessing, who has obviously caught the pomposity bug,
confidently tells us that there is "inherent in every creature
of this Galaxy a need, an imperative, towards a continual striving,
or self-transcendence, of purpose." Imagine such moonshine in a
regular novel!
. . .
Genetic engineering is the special province of women sci-fi writers,
who have thus failed, rather spectacularly, to liberate the genre from
its adolescent concerns. An interest in cloning pervades their work,
since cloning gives you babies without the bother of sex and pregnancy.
. . .
Sci-fi only *seems* creative; in fact, it merely "plays with fixities
and definites," associating, combining, and recombining the paltry
elements of experience that already lie in hand. Literature recreates
the common world and brings you into closer contact with it...Sci-fi,
on the other hand, is merest daydreaming, and mechanically escapist
daydreaming at that. A typically fraudulent method of "creating realities"
in sci-fi is magnification: the spaceship is a big car, the super-
computer a giant abacus, telepathy is extensive intuition, bilious
dystopias are aggravated parking tickets. Or reverse the direction
of something, make time go backward, turn progress into regress, aging
into rejuvenation--or make hot into cold, scarcity into plenty, weakness
into strength...But you get the idea: science fiction is always unoriginal,
essentially so--an idle toying that is the very opposite of the sustained
attention required in real art. The traditional problem of defining
science fiction thus boils away into nothing: it cannot be defined
aesthetically because it does not exist aesthetically.
. . .
Sci-fi characters are necessarily one-dimensional; since they live in
unreal worlds, they cannot be build up through observation or tested
against experience....Far from being dangerous and daring, as its
enthusiasts constantly exclaim, it is essentially *boring*, since no
one cares, or can care, about the joys or sorrows of beings on Pterapsis
IV or Terebratula VII....
. . .
Why read science fiction? Well, if you are suffering from an impacted
molar or a broken heart, sci-fi will help you to oblivion, since reading
it is as close to being dead as you can get. But even so, sci-fi has its
throbs of vexation. There is, for example, the disgusting worship of
science, pervading even those books that attack it. The first artists who
wrote about science hated it--they thought it presumptuous, unnatural,
cruel, and sick. Contemporary sci-fi has abandoned this tradition of
Hawthorne and Shelley and gone whole-hog for modernist ambivalence or
pulp paraphernalia....cjh (12/16/82)
In response to your message of Thu Dec 16 16:09:03 1982: I'm still trying to find out a bit more about this idiot and why HARPER'S (which has been pleading with me to subscribe---I'll have a nice flame for \them/ the next time that letter comes by) took his article. I have heard that he is supposed to make a profession of nastily debunking anything he can get his paws on, but this comes from fellow fen who were thoroughly annoyed when his article was spread around Loscon a few weekends ago.
aark (12/16/82)
The attack on science fiction in the December Harper's magazine reminded me of a scene in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" (surely Arnold Klein, the author of the attack, would consider this a "regular novel"). Levin and his brother are having an argument about farming in Russia. Each thinks the other is crazy, and the argument gets increasingly heated. Finally Levin's brother starts to walk out in disgust. Levin says something like, "Can't you ever admit you're wrong?" His brother replies, "Very well, I'm wrong! You're right! But I'm still leaving!" The best response to people who attack your reading tastes and go to great lengths to prove how asinine and infantile they are is to nod your head and tell them, "OK, if you think science fiction is pubescent, naive, stupid, noncreative, unoriginal, and boring, then you must be right. But I'm still going to go on reading it." And walk out. In my opinion, Arnold Klein (who was described as "a poet who used to write book reviews and animal features for the Soho Weekly News") is jealous of the interest of many people in science fiction instead of "regular novels," and the consequent lack of money being spent on those regular novels, and the royalty income going to science fiction authors instead of writers of non-science-fiction and poets like himself. I disdain to argue with a person who I perceive has this attitude, or apologize to him or her for my reading tastes. Since Klein has dismissed science fiction, I will dismiss Klein. I'll just walk out, continue spending my book money on whatever *I* want, and let Klein think whatever *he* wants about me. Alan R. Kaminsky Bell Laboratories, Naperville, IL ...ihps3!ihuxe!aark