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It has been said that it is time that science fiction went back to the gutter where it belongs. No more anguished self-analysis, no more doctoral dissertations. We want purple tentacles and brass bras, we want our science fiction real.
Most of today’s more distinguished practitioners of the craft were attracted to the field back in the days of the pulp magazines when it was crude and coarse and everything was in primary colours. It was those early tales of derring-do in the spaceways that thrilled the Asimovs and the Pohls and the Silverbergs. That these writers subsequently went on to write skilful, subtle tales of wonder with none of the crudities of style that their reading backgrounds might have suggested is a tribute both to their sense and sensibility.
Those early pulps, the formative reading of a whole generation, are often what we mean when we talk about real SF. How else can you account for the overwhelming popularity of E. E. Smith, a writer moulded firmly in the pulp tradition. Even L. Ron Hubbard’s monumental Mission Earth dekalogy, though recently written, is redolent of its pulp roots and quite popular despite that.
What is the reason? Why is such trash so widespread?
Just turn on your television and watch the daily soaps. All human life is there, overdrawn, overwritten, badly acted by barely articulate robots who emote all over the spectrum at the drop of a hat. They are crude and simplistic and overwhelmingly popular. They quite unashamedly cater to the lowest common denominator. This has always been a winning formula ever since the days when Og son of Fire captivated his audience in the cave with tall tales about the neanderthals next door. In the 1930s, the American pulp magazines stuck closely to this formula and attracted exactly the same audience that today’s TV soaps do. You could probably make a good case for Kimball Kinnison and Clarrissa MacDougall being the Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue of their day.
Do we want to go back to that gutter? Do we really belong there? To a certain extent I think we do. I haven’t read an exciting adventure story in ages. They don’t seem to write them any more. Oh, I’ve read lots of worthy books, good books, beautifully written books, and I’ve enjoyed them, by and large. But there is something missing (anybody who says I’m pining for my lost youth will get fed to the Arcturian Octopoids).
I’ve raved on in this column before about the crudity of those early pulps, the terrible writing styles, the hackneyed plots, and I haven’t really changed my mind. Nevertheless there was a vitality in those stories, an excitement and a wonder and a fire that seems mostly to have died out now. I still can’t read the originals without getting a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side, but I can’t deny that I miss some of the thrills.
I think what I’m really looking for is a literate space opera. Where are they all?
Frank Herbert did it with Dune, but then he blew it in the sequels. It is possible that he blew it in Dune as well—after reading Dave Langford’s parody of it I can’t take the original seriously any more. (The parody is called Duel of Words and will be found in The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two.) Philip Jose Farmer had it in him to write one and he came very close with the Riverworld books. To Your Scattered Bodies Go definitely has that authentic gutter excitement. But again he blew it in the sequels.
Jack Vance actually wrote a book called Space Opera. It was about an intergalactic opera company. A delightfully conceited notion. Sometimes it helps to take an idea completely literally. L. Sprague de Camp wrote a story about a mad scientist. He was an absolute genius, but utterly insane so the authorities kept locking him up. But since he was a genius, he kept escaping again…
Some of the modern writers are obviously thinking along similar lines. I commend to your attention a young man called Allen Steele. He has written three novels, with more on the way (Lunar Descent, Clarke County—Space, and Orbital Decay) and he shows great promise. The books are very traditional, gutter science fiction (though better written than most). Predictably the blurb writers go into paroxysms of passion and proclaim him the new Heinlein, which is rubbish of course. Also, you could try ME by Thomas T. Thomas (I wonder what the T. stands for? Thomas, perhaps?) which knocked my socks off a few weeks ago.
The best of the moderns, though, is undoubtedly John Varley who has been depressingly quiet for far too long. He writes beautiful gutter SF and he writes it beautifully. No introspection, no messages, no PhD. Eng. Lit. postmodernisms. Just a story, pure and simple. Quite often, that’s the way I like ’em.
The one who straddled both worlds very uneasily was A. E. van Vogt—my very favourite bad writer. I own far more of his books than are good for me. Like the other “Golden Age” writers, he grew up in science fiction’s gutter and like them he did his best to transcend it. I don’t really think he succeeded. There was a time when his name was mentioned in the same breath as Asimov and Heinlein. He was one of the most popular of the golden age writers. Yet now his star is almost totally eclipsed. I think that’s a shame. He came raving at you in story after story, with plots that were just too large and too paranoid to comprehend. You always had the feeling that gigantic manipulations of plot were taking place off stage on the part of characters unseen and unheard. It made you wonderfully paranoid. His stories were utterly nonsensical (particularly the Null-A stories) and I often felt slightly ashamed that I seldom understood what was going on. I thought the fault was in me. It was only when others admitted that they too had no idea what was happening (or why) that I realised I wasn’t alone. Van Vogt was a truly inspired madman, and he made the gutter sing.
You can probably trace the decline in his popularity to an essay written by Damon Knight (available in In Search Of Wonder published by Advent) where he demonstrated quite conclusively just how bad a writer van Vogt really was. It is a wonderfully vicious hatchet job that leaves the victim naked, quivering and sliced to shreds.
But I don’t care. He painted images in my mind that time has never dulled—Jommy Cross running from the Slans, the evil Granny, Coeurl prowling his dying planet, the Mixed Men, and Gilbert Gosseyn himself. Only in a van Vogt novel could a character cry out “Hey! I’ve finally figured out the secret of the universe!” and really mean it (Rogue Ship. Terrible book. I loved it).
I think he failed to make the transition out of the gutter because ultimately he was only capable of writing in the images of gutter SF. When he was firing on all cylinders nobody, not even the great “Doc” Smith himself could hold a candle to van Vogt’s lunatic ravings. That is not a characteristic that the more sophisticated SF that came after him could cope with.
I started thinking along these lines recently after reading S. P. Somtow’s Moon Dance which the blurb promised me would do for werewolves what Ann Rice did for vampires. Well I read it and it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have a lot to do with werewolves. Oh they were major characters, but the book was much more a novel of manners and society than a tale about werewolves. How can a werewolf novel be slow moving for goodness sake? Well it was. Don’t get me wrong—I am not accusing Mr Sucharitkul of writing a bad book. I was actually very impressed with the novel. But I was in a gutter mood that day.
One of the nice things about my childhood was reading books with lurid covers. Utter trash that my father strongly disapproved of even more than he disapproved of rock and roll. (“If you don’t stop listening to those twanging guitars you’ll never pass your exams…”) The stories inside the lurid covers were invariably prim and proper (Kimball and Clarrissa would no more have engaged in premarital sex than they would have flown to the moon! Hmmm. I wonder if I mean that?) but there was still the attraction of the exciting ideas. These writers were thinking the unthinkable. Space travel, time travel, overpopulation, pollution, robots, aliens, black holes, computers. All sensible people paid no attention to that sort of rubbish. Everybody knew that it was silly and stupid and laughable. The New York Times had proved that space travel was impossible because there was nothing in space for a rocket to push against, and Britain’s very own Astronomer Royal had pooh-poohed the whole idea. We’d never see it in his lifetime.
Now of course all these things are common coin. They are not dangerous thoughts and neither are they silly. They don’t need to hide inside lurid covers. They are ideas whose time has come and they have been taken away from us and given to the world, the sensible world, the mundane world. That too, I think is part of the reason why SF is no longer down there in the gutter. They took the gutter ideas and legitimised them, touched up the chrome and gave them a coat of paint. That’s OK, but nothing replaced them.
Even the gutter is empty these days. There is a little stream of dirty water trickling past (L. Ron Hubbard) and it helps to cure the thirst a bit, but you can’t take it seriously any more.
When the ideas became legitimate they left a vacuum behind and nothing rushed in to fill it except for some half-baked mysticism—New Age rubbish, runes, crystals and pyramids. I don’t want any part of that; it is offensively empty minded.
Like any parent I am fiercely proud of the way my offspring has pulled itself out of the gutter and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Very proud and a little bit sad. We really did belong down there in the gutter together. Do you blame me for wanting it to continue?
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