Fantastic Metropolis

As importantly, genuine and unique stylists can be found within the pages of many magazines (for example, The Third Alternative)—writers whose voices cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. Such voices provide hope for the future, because the field as a whole appears to have lost, along with its imagination, its imaginative voice. How ironic that issue after issue of magazines devoted to fiction about the most bizarre and wondrous events should also seem devoted to publishing most often the work of realists and miniaturists whose limpid, workmanlike prose displays none of the sense of wonder supposedly evoked by their stories as a whole. It is one thing to chose to write clear, lucid prose, quite another to write this way because you have no choice. Too often as writers and readers, we do not demand more of ourselves, and we do not give more of ourselves to our endeavors. We forget the process of the journey and are interested only in the finish, thereby forfeiting any subtlety, and any joy of language, that might illuminate and suffuse our work. I truly believe that the field (specifically science fiction and, to a lesser extent, fantasy) is in danger of becoming a provincial literature, of regional importance only (horror is already there), its concerns and interests foreign to the world at large. We’re like a rock in the middle of a raging river that is defined mostly by its resistance to the river. Because the rock forces water around it, it might appear to be of some significance, but the fact remains: the rock is stationary, the river is going somewhere.

The problems outlined above are made worse by the ignoble aims and attitudes of some of the writers and editors in the field. Every time a critic writes a good review to curry favor or a publication cuts a negative review because of some constituency to be mollified, the field loses a little more of its vitality. Every time another sharecropped universe novel or incredibly stupid theme anthology comes out, the field becomes more chronically diseased. Every time another anthology editor buys a story not yet written from a writer willing to prostitute him or herself, the field bleeds from another self-inflicted wound.

So I issue a challenge, in the name of the imagination, to everyone reading this polemic. I challenge you with the points set out above, but I also challenge you with a list of names: Angela Carter, Steve Erickson, Ben Okri, Alasdair Gray, Peter Carey, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Mervyn Peake, Timothy Findley, A.S. Byatt, Mordechai Richler, Peter Hoeg, Edward Whittemore, Italo Calvino, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ian McEwan, Vladimir Nabokov, Madison Smart Bell. If you haven’t a clue who these writers are, then you have missed some of the best imaginative fiction ever written.

Perhaps the best way to end is with a metaphor: When you look at a map, you see lines that indicate the boundaries of countries, but when you fly over that same land, you see only the hills, the forests, the rivers. The river doesn’t know that part of its course runs through Belgium and another part through France. Similarly, the imagination doesn’t care about boundaries either—it can’t exist when it has boundaries.

We need to be free of our self-created shackles, in order to bring to bear the full depth and breadth of our imaginations on the humor and heartbreak and weirdness of the human soul. My sincerest hope is that someday there will be no artificial borders, that someday we will be able to fly over the world of fiction and find that those totalitarian, utterly meaningless demarcations between the SF, fantasy, horror, and the mainstream have fallen away before the very ludicrousness of their own existence… and as dusk shapes and contours the land, we can see below us the very bright lights of the best among us, guiding us back to truths we should have known all along…