Christmas Editorial
Before Nader there was Pohl and Kornbluth. When they wrote The Space Merchants, some fifty years ago, they knew exactly what they were talking about and their prescience, in our modern consumerist global economy, is remarkable. Their non-sf social novels show a keen criticism of fifties America which only the privileged white middle class looks back on with pleasant nostalgia. Dick, Bester and a number of others all shared this instinct for the social realities and it is not surprising that they had the huge influence they had on modern literature, not to mention modern graphic novels. An astonishing number of British writers, including Rushdie, Martin Amis and Fay Weldon celebrate Philip K. Dick as a major influence and went on record as fans in a piece done for The Daily Telegraph about five years ago. As I’ve said elsewhere, Aldiss, Ballard, myself and a few others shared this attraction to the more humanistic forms of American sf precisely because it did seem to reflect our own experience and attitudes. We were actually repelled by the gentlemanly tones of John Wyndham and the nursery tones of Professor Tolkien, though both were peopleof great charm and generosity whose acquaintance I’m glad to have had and Wyndham’s conscious feminism was years ahead of its time.
I looked to sf, as I looked to R&B, not only as a particular stimulus, but as a potential medium, which had no academic criticism at all, scarcely any reviewers and was so marginalised from orthodox society that it was almost invisible. Blues was a marginal enthusiasm in the general culture until white boys and white jazzmen began to modify the form for a popular audience. Once Elvis began singing Big Mama Thornton’s (also modified) ‘Hound Dog,’ the process took a few years to get itself firmly set on the road to the Spice Girls and the boy bands. Students of rock and roll will recall that there was a deliberate movement to remove the ‘rough edges’ from the music and push the real rockers off the charts to introduce the ‘college singer’. Pat Boone became the benchmark. That the college market then modified into the Beach Boys and Pat made a bizarre comeback attempt in black leather, is proof, that, in the arts at least, good can indeed come out of bad. But it does involve change. Unfamiliar material. I have seen science fantasy, as I used to call it, undergo a similar process. Rock and roll now has its own critics and newspapers, just like science fiction. They share one thing, at least, by implication, if nothing else, they describe standards and make the writer far more self-conscious about what they are doing. They begin to quarrel with details or modify their work within an accepted range of what you can and can’t do… They are more interested in reproducing an already experienced frisson than in creating a fresh one. Instead of expressing their own experience, they begin to produce something which is essentially the same thing as French academic painting or English narrative painting of the 19th century. Gradually, by this means, they develop norms and expectations in the common reader. Just as a Victorian viewer trained to find narrative in a painting finds only ‘chaos’ in an impressionist, so the conventional sf critic, editor or reader is disturbed by the unfamiliar in a book. They are often quite aggressive in their dismissals of these unconventional fantasies… These people consider themselves lovers of the imagination. This is no doubt a question of their self-esteem rather than any empirical standard I’ve been able to find.
Until Kingsley Amis took an interest in New Maps of Hell, sf didn’t know what it could or couldn’t do. When I started, it could be anything we wanted it to be. Of course, that was before we hit the very orthodox hard-core sf fans whose response to our work has scarcely changed in fifty years. These boys and girls don’t want anyone taking away their big throbbing machines or loveable vermin. As I said at Armadillocon recently, the sf fan world offered New Worlds nothing but antagonism. We triumphed in spite of it and our influence went far beyond the sf field. But Amis, in the end, came to hate what Ballard and I were doing while Richard Hamilton (whose Kennedy As An Astronaut is still in the Tate Gallery) feared we were dropping the very imagery he loved and was using ironically in his pop-art paintings. But those were in the days when there was nothing odd about a panel at the Brighton Arts Festival including Ballard, Disch, Edouardo Paolozzi, A.J. Ayer, Michael Kustow, Director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts, Edward Lucy Smith, John Calder, the publisher and George MacBeth, then head of the BBC poetry department.
What changed this?
The most obvious change was the coming of Star Wars and the blockbuster success, once pirated into the real world by Don Wollheim himself, of Lord of the Rings. Del Rey and Ballantine (who had once tried to commission a set of Edgar Rice Burroughs clones from me and then settled for John Norman) began an almost instant cloning industry with the success of Tolkien’s first close imitators. The industry had found out what sold. Previously it was all weird stuff to them, so they’d give whatever it was a go. They had no benchmarks. They even tried publishing translated imaginative fiction (which among other things gave the film world Planet of the Apes). Moreover the publishing firms were family owned, had few or no shareholders to answer to, and advances were lower. Anthony Cheetham, the father of cheque-book publishing, had not yet left Eton. They had not learned that big advances make big publicity. They were closer to the venture capitalists that publishers originally started as. It meant a quirkier and far more adult publishing programme for those few publishers, like Faber and Faber or Cape, who understood the literary merit of Aldiss, Dick, Ballard and others. For about ten years, ending in the late 70s with the first Star Wars movie, the culminating advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the unarguable realities of demographics, and the upcurving success of LOTR to a generation who were told it was literature, speculative fiction was a perfectly respectable literary form reviewed and noticed by the educated public. Star Trek, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings (and their clones) identified the form solidly as a juvenile medium with a fundamentally juvenile readership, something an adult had to explain away as a weakness. This was further proven by the deserved success of Terry Pratchett and later, of course, by the J.K. Rowling phenomenon. Without disliking her, I believe Rowling perfectly exemplifies that blending of ingredients with the necessary element of a juvenile or pseudo-juvenile protagonist to ensure the full commercial potential. Add a tone that tells you this is not really going to hurt you and bingo! You have the fairground thrill of the century. Context is everything, pards. You have to start by telling the reader this is really all a story. You do it through tone, if you have any sense. A little mild social commentary can be added, too, of course, to give something a suitable sense of depth.
