A Major Reason for Continuing to Read That Rubbish They Call SF

First published in Phlogiston Two, July 1984.

Every so often, and usually when you least expect it, a book comes along that just reaches out and grabs you by the scruff of the neck, and shakes some poetry and wonder at you. It happens very infrequently (and these days it happens so infrequently that I am starting to suspect that my palate is becoming jaded), but when it does happen, it makes it all worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found one for a long time; but just recently I found the next best thing. I was browsing in a bookshop, and they had a whole pile of hardback SF books remaindered and selling very cheaply. So I bought them, and for the next few days I got a minor tingling in my sense of wonder. None of the books were world beaters, note of them were major works of literature, but they were well crafted and thoughtful. They told a good story, and they told it well. That is no small talent, and it deserves to be encouraged.

The books were The Golden Space by Pamela Sargent, Transfigurations by Michael Bishop, and Songmaster by Orson Scott Card.

The surprising thing is that for quite some time I have been very biased against all three writers, and I would never have bought the books if they hadn’t been sold so cheaply that I didn’t think I had anything to lose. Pamela Sargent annoyed me by her seemingly feminist polemics, Michael Bishop by his difficult, murky prose style, Orson Scott Card because he seemed to get consistently bad reviews. And so I avoided them, one and all. I had better things to read.

I was wrong.

The Golden Space deals with immortality and dramatises the evolution of society assuming that advances in genetic engineering will guarantee immortality for all mankind. Not like the trivial manner that Heinlein dealt with the subject in Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough For Love, but with imagination, and skill, and depth. Her characters live through the events she describes, and so do her readers, albeit vicariously.

Transfigurations is an expansion of a novelette called Death and Designation Among the Asadi. Indeed, the novelette forms the first section of the book, laying the background, as it were.

Superficially, the novel deals with the anthropological mysteries of the planet Bosk Veld. What is the meaning of the strange rituals of the Asadi? Why do their eyes flash and spin like pinwheels? Were they once a technologically sophisticated race reduced to primitive simplicity? The questions are explored through the investigations of three anthropologists and an intelligent ape, and the answers that they find could, perhaps, be easily guessed by most of you SF buffs out there who’ve been reading the stuff since 1926. But the answers aren’t really important per se, what is important is the reaction of the characters to both the answers, and the process of finding out. Both are presented with skill and ingenuity.

Songmaster is perhaps the most complex of the three. The ruler of the galaxy wants a songbird. He gets Ansset—a nine year old orphan who has been trained into a singer unequalled in history. The novel follows Ansset’s experiences with the ruler of the galaxy—and in time he himself takes over and rules the universe. In the hands of an unskilled writer, we all know how the story would go. It is to Card’s credit that he can take this old story and do new and skilful things with it. Ansset’s singing ability is not simply a gimmick—it is central to, part and parcel of the whole complex nature of this very clever novel.

Do you see the point that I’m making? Here we have three novels, each one of which takes a science fiction cliche and turns it into a minor work of art. And that is the major reason for continuing to read that rubbish they call SF. Down among the hacks are a lot of very skilful craftsmen—people who can take ideas so old they have foot long beards, and turn them into something new, simply by sheer technical virtuosity. They reinforce the theory that there are no new ideas in literature, merely new points of view. But to present those points of view, it is necessary to have a thorough grasp of the tools of the writer’s trade and also the ability to manipulate those tools. If you can exercise that degree of control, you might produce a minor work of art (as these writers have done) or, once in a thousand times, when everything goes exactly right, a major work. This last happens very rarely—but until it does, the more common minor works of art are a good reason to keep on reading. They happen more often than you might believe.