Christmas Editorial
While it could just change with the Potter phenomenon, which has as many adult readers as juvenile, until recently that identification with juvenile fiction enabled snobbery to step in with a vengeance where literary imaginative fiction was concerned. The sf review sections, the reviews of individual titles, began to disappear from the literary pages through the eighties until by the turn of the century they had all but gone completely. Known fans of sf with a fair amount of journalistic clout continued to exercise a fairly unseemly caution in their reviewing policies. We were entering that now familiar land that Thatcher and Reagan built, where people become afraid to speak because they might lose their jobs. An interest in science fiction became what facial hair was to Captain Sensible—riseable and probably boringly nerdy (I say nothing of my own opinion of the irritating and talentless captain). Given that all of us first saw publication in magazines called Science Fantasy, Fantastic Adventures, Science Fiction Adventures and New Worlds, it would have been hard for us to deny, whether we liked it or not.
While Ballard, Aldiss, Disch and myself all had established reputations as literary writers by that time, critics began increasingly to disassociate us from our science fiction origins. We had never claimed to write science fiction as such and we chose the term speculative fiction to distinguish what we did from other kinds of imaginative fiction aimed at a popular readership, but we also were perfectly happy to describe ourselves as sf writers to those who wanted us to renounce, as it were, our earlier, less classy affilitations. We were unusual in that we all had access to publications with wide general readerships. Disch might be asked to write his opinions on the state of modern poetry (since his public reputation as a poet was probably greater than his reputation as a novelist amongst sf fans) but would rarely be asked to do a piece on current imaginative fiction. I wrote far more about London writers and the city and can hardly remember being asked to write about imaginative fiction until the BBC decided to broadcast Gormenghast as a TV mini-series. Every time I wrote a literary novel there would be at least five reviews which announced that I had left all that infantile stuff behind and was now engaged in doing grown up books. After a while, even those critics noticed that I was still clearly addicted to my earlier embarrassments and now they talk about how there are ‘two’ of me: Jekyll, the respectable literary writer, and Hyde, the slumming sword and sorcery slut. It makes me hard to trust.
This obsession with placing a writer must have something to do with power and prestige which I don’t fully understand, having had a somewhat patchy formal education and no higher education at all. I suppose that vested interests must swiftly develop amongst the formally educated and they are not likely to give up their orthodoxies lightly, so they employ snobbery in their own interest. This is also why they refuse to be interested in science. It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity. Therefore the entire raft of disciplines has to be marginalised, along with the educated fiction writers who have not rejected those disciplines, but take as strong a curiosity in the objective world as their 18th century predecessors. These are the writers who incorporate not only authentic and sometimes uncommon experience into their work, but who also make it their business to be as well informed about the sciences as the arts. Those authors who attempt to accommodate the modernist orthodoxy usually fail to please either readership. Those who remain truest to their own visions ultimately, like Peake or Ballard, take their places, in spite of orthodox resistance, in the common literary canon.
For me visionary fiction is at its best when it references modernist concerns as well as the more objective concerns with which ‘hard’ science fiction is most commonly associated and which derives most of its literary machinery from Victorian popular fiction. For this is not exactly a ‘post-modernist’ form, as we see from the variety of material published here, but more an alternative to modernism. My generation did, to one degree or another, reject the concerns and methods of modernism, but the movement found its inspiration as much in pre-modernist work as post-modernist. We had grown up in social climates which made us rather alert to the objective world and which often did not have much time for introspection. The modernist novel’s rather unsatisfactory response to the Second World War, for instance, was exemplified recently when the critic Philip Hensher said on BBC Radio 4 that the modern novel ‘couldn’t deal directly with something like the WTC attack’ but could only see it, perhaps, from the point of view of someone who was watching it and their internal, individual responses. This surprised me, of course, because I was already working on the subject. One of my more modernist responses was a comic strip with Walter Simonson, to be published in a DC anthology. Unaware of its own narrowness, Hensher’s attitude is pretty much the antithesis of what we learned from those great Americans and turned, through idiosyncratic prose, into a way of recording our experience through the symbols and methods of science fiction. It was second nature to us to respond to current events. We had spent some time and energy working out ways of doing it! We wanted to find forms which did the job well, which were something other than fancy journalism. The recent critical success of Ballard’s collected short stories shows, I think, that at least one of us was doing something right.
