Retrospect is always an interesting tool for analysis, and
nothing brings home change as solidly as when looking at a work considering its
own contemporary period as the present – when that present was forty years ago.
The Encyclopaedia of
Science Fiction was published by Octopus in 1978, and, despite the title,
is by no means arranged as an A-Z, but is a connected series of essays by leading
names of the day – e.g., Brian Stableford, Harry Harrison, David Hardy, Patrick
Moore, Alan Frank – on various aspects of the genre.
It is almost quaint to consider the avant garde of a time long gone – this was years before the Space
Shuttle went into service, and the newest kid on the black was Star Wars, by which I mean A New Hope, which was still in its
exponential growth phase as the fan phenomenon of the era. The schism between
literary and film SF and where the money was trending could not be more clear
on this score: the cover painting/dust jacket features a medley of recognisable
images – a Foss-esque space ship, a tripod from War of the Worlds, a generic planet or two, plus Robbie the Robot
from Forbidden Planet, the space
station from 2001, and Darth Vader, a
Star Destroyer and a stormtrooper. These are all immediately recognisable
visual tropes to catch the attention of the customer in the book shop, and have
remarkably little to do with the mostly literarily-oriented contents. Indeed,
in his opening chapter, the late Robert Holdstock at the very least calls into
question the value of Star Wars as
typically Hollywood bad science fiction, with the comment: “A genre grows out
of a reader-population’s demand for ‘more of the same’, and there are always
writers – usually bad writers – ready to supply the cheap cuts of the body
literate, to fulfil the popular demand; watch out for the effect of Star Wars on the written market!” In his
chapter on SF cinema Alan Frank is considerably more charitable to the movie,
while, it cannot be overlooked, cheap knock-offs of the Star Wars model did indeed appear on bookshelves simultaneously
with the late-70s “Star-anything avalanche” in the visual idiom.
A number of interesting points jump off the page at the
modern reader looking back this far. Besides the historical chapters charting
the development of speculative fiction from Shelley onward, and the rise and
fall of the Golden Age pulps, the sense of immediacy and analysis pervading the
genre of the late ‘70s is every bit as dynamic and serious as today, or indeed as
it had been to serious thinkers a generation earlier. The doing of science
fiction, the craft of it, was brought into focus early in the volume, and a
quick review was made of the resulting writing workshops and anthologies. In
those days a small group of highly motivated professionals taught short courses
on what constituted both good writing and good SF – Samuel R. Delany, Fred
Pohl, Ursula K. Le Guinn, Harlan Ellison, Chris Priest, David Gerrold, Damon
Knight – and Holdstock comments, apropos of the anthologies springing from the “Clarion”
workshops: “The anthologies indicate one thing very clearly – that science
fiction writing cannot be taught with complete success. They are depressing
things, these collections, accumulations of images, half considered ideas, half
finished stories – the voice is monotonously similar… The stories in the
collection were much influenced by the teachers, by unlike minds… The ultimate
lesson of any such informal education is that there is nothing more important
than a writer’s own voice or vision, and this is something inborn, instinctive,
something that cannot be diminished or encouraged by anything but the writer’s
own experience.”
This suggests a certain malady inherent in the very system –
individual voice and unique perspective are smothered in either the veneer of
commercialism or the force of personality of the teacher. Perhaps it is
inevitable that in taking on board the lessons of a powerful professor one
starts to sound a bit like him or her, and this is unfortunate to say the least
when subjective expression is the medium.
I saw a cartoon which epitomises this point. Sadly I can’t
afford the agency fee to reproduce it here; suffice to say a woman is
commenting on a manuscript she has read, telling the author, “your poetry
embodies all the raw, primal emotion of the writing workshops you’ve attended.”
Say no more, eh? (Artist: Carole Cable, agency: Jantoo.)
The writer Terry Bisson in his
“Sixty Rules for Short SF(and Fantasy)” lists as tip #4, “
Never write in present tense. It makes
events less, not more, immediate. Past tense IS present tense.” His tips
are pithy, compact soundbytes of advice, some of which would benefit from some context,
but this one was perhaps a reaction to the prevalence of this device in the
modern marketplace. A recent edition of
Clarkesworld
featured seven stories, all of which were told in the first person and six of
them were in the present tense, so it would seem Mr Bisson’s objection is
something of a singular viewpoint in itself.
Clarkesworld certainly know their readership’s tastes and are
serving them.
But does this not make the same point apropos of the workshop
anthologies of the ‘70s? We work in a creative field but that creativity is not free, but bound tightly by
conceptions of what constitutes a “good” story on one hand and “good SF” on the
other. Going by Mr. Bisson’s directives, he must rate 99% of all stories
produced as bad writing, yet much of it will be in pro print. Reviews at
Goodreads are so predominantly scathing it would seem the readership for
general fiction is really, broadly not
enjoying what is published, but this is a paradox because publishers would go
out of business if they consistently failed to deliver what readers want. That
in turn suggests the bad, bad reviews are posted by a vocal minority whose
object is merely to attack, while a less aggressively motivated wider readership continues
to buy and enjoy regardless.
All of this brings into focus the notion of gatekeepers and
what they are looking for. First and foremost it has to be commercial, but
beyond that, subjective viewpoint and the constraints of specific market niche
– subgenre, orientation, length parameters, subject matter, etc., etc., etc. – present
a formidable barrier to the new writer.
Has anything changed in the 45 years since those early
courses and workshops? We still have workshops today in which writers tear each
other’s work to shreds in the name of improving it, a kind of literary feeding
frenzy in which a new writer with pages held in trembling hands is forgiven for
feeling like blood in the water for the top predators of the social circle, and
it is easy to see how such situations can get out of hand. (Here I’m thinking
back on meetings of a romance writers’ circle many years ago – passions ran hot
in more ways than one! I was there in the context of a contract printer in the
POD game but got to observe the workings of the group.)
Which brings me back to the big old hardback coffee-table
volume, with the sometimes intimidating prose of big boys playing hardball.
They all cleared the gatekeepers, and that alone gives them the edge, the right
to say what matters and what doesn’t. The mechanisms are likely unchanged
today, except by a matter of degree – the process is what it is. Today we have
electronic submission and can churn through rejections at a pace never imagined
in the paper and typewriters era, and the expectations of what constitutes good
writing have evolved: Poul Anderson’s classics from the ‘50s would be unlikely
to get past the gatekeepers who are the arbiters of public consumption today, simply
because storytelling must keep pace with the expectations of generations
experiencing change all around them at an unprecedented rate. Yes, a case can
be made that humanity has suffered in this, the human experience may be
expressly foregrounded in guidelines but it is now compressed into MTV-sized
bytes and smelling the roses equates to tedium and a lack of conciseness.
I miss the days when that big book was published. They
seemed more innocent, or maybe it was just me
who was more innocent. Whatever, it seemed the world was filled with
opportunity, and I used to read this volume, study the wealth of art it
contains, and dream big dreams – ironically not of being a science fiction
writer as such, but of telling stories that inspired me, and in my naivety I
had no real conception of the competitive shark pool awaiting anyone aspiring to do
it for real. Or maybe I did, and
that’s why I didn’t try it then.
Cheers, Mike Adamson
