Essays. Catscan Columns Read online

  A good trick. But Esther breezes through this inferno of deviate carnality, none the worse for the experience; invigorated, if anything. Updike tells us an old tale in this: that women are sexuality, vast unplumbed cisterns of it, creatures of mystery, vamps of the carnal abyss. I just can’t bring myself to go for this notion, even if the Bible tells me so. I know that women don’t believe this stuff.

  Then there’s Roger Lambert’s niece, Verna. I suspect she represents the Future, or at least the future of America. Verna’s a sad case. She lives on welfare with her illegitimate mulatto kid, a little girl who is Futurity even more incarnate. Verna listens to pop music, brain-damaging volumes of it. She’s cruel and stupid, and as corrupt as her limited sophistication allows. She’s careless of herself and others, exults in her degradation, whores sometimes when she needs the cocaine money. During the book’s crisis, she breaks her kid’s leg in a reckless fit of temper.

  A woman reading this portrayal would be naturally enraged, reacting under the assumption that Updike intends us to believe in Verna as an actual human being. But Verna, being a woman, isn’t. Verna is America, instead: dreadfully hurt and spiritually degraded, cheapened, teasing, but full of vitality, and not without some slim hope of redemption, if she works hard and does what’s best for her (as defined by Roger Lambert). Also, Verna possesses the magic of fertility, and nourishes the future, the little girl Paula. Paula, interestingly, is every single thing that Roger Lambert isn’t, i.e. young, innocent, trusting, beautiful, charming, lively, female and not white.

  Roger sleeps with Verna. We’ve seen it coming for some time. It is, of course, an act of adultery and incest, compounded by Roger’s complicity in child abuse, quite a foul thing really, and narrated with a certain gloating precision that fills one with real unease. But it’s Updike’s symbolic gesture of cultural rapprochement. “It’s helped get me ready for death,” Roger tells Verna afterward. Then: “Promise me you won’t sleep with Dale.” And Verna laughs at the idea, and tells him: “Dale’s a non-turnon. He’s not even evil, like you.” And gives Roger the kiss of peace.

  So, Roger wins, sort of. He is, of course, aging rapidly, and he knows his cultural values don’t cut it any more, that maybe they never cut it, and in any case he is a civilized anachronism surrounded by a popcultural conspiracy of vile and rising noise. But at least Dale doesn’t win. Dale, who lacks moral complexity and a proper grasp of the true morbidity of the human condition, thinks God can be found in a computer, and is properly nemesized for his hubris. The future may be fucked, but at least Dale won’t be doing it.

  So it goes, in Roger’s Version. It’s a good book, a disturbing book. It makes you think. And it’s got an edge on it, a certain grimness and virulence of tone that some idiot would probably call “cyberpunk” if Updike were not writing about the midlife crisis of a theology professor.

  Roger’s Version is one long debate, between Updike’s Protestantism and the techno-zeitgeist of the ’80s. With great skill, Updike parallels the arcanity of cyberdom and the equally arcane roots of Christian theology. It’s good; it’s clever and funny; it verges on the profound. The far reaches of modern computer science—chaos theory, fractals, simulationism, statistical physics and so on—are indeed theological in their implications. Some of their spokesmen have a certain evangelical righteousness of tone that could only alarm a cultural arbiter like John Updike. There are indeed heretic gospels inside that machine, just like there were gospels in a tab of LSD, only more so. And it’s a legitimate writerly task to inquire about those gospels and wonder if they’re any better than the old one.

  So John Updike has listened, listened very carefully and learned a great deal, which he parades deftly for his readership, in neatly tended flashes of hard-science exposition. And he says: I’ve heard it before, and I may not exactly believe in that Old Rugged Cross, but I’m damned if I’ll believe these crazy hacker twerps with their jogging shoes.

  There’s a lot to learn from this book. It deals with the entirety of our zeitgeist with a broad-scale vision that we SF types too often fail to achieve. It’s an interesting debate, though not exactly fair: it’s muddied with hatred and smoldering jealousy, and a very real resentment, and a kind of self-loathing that’s painful to watch.

  And it’s a cheat, because Dale’s “science” has no real intellectual validity. When you strip away the layers of Updike’s cyber-jargon, Dale’s efforts are only numerology, the rankest kind of dumb superstition. “Science” it’s not. It’s not even good theology. It’s heretic voodoo, and its pre-arranged failure within this book proves nothing about anything.

  Updike is wrong. He clings to a rotting cultural fabric that he knows is based on falsehoods, and rejects challenges to that fabric by declaring “well you’re another.” But science, true science, does learn from mistakes; theologians like Roger Lambert merely further complicate their own mistaken premises.

  I remain unconvinced, though not unmoved, by Updike’s object lesson. His book has hit hard at my own thinking, which, like that of most SF writers, is overly enamored of the millennial and transcendent. I know that the twentieth century’s efforts to kick Updike’s Judaeo-Christian WestCiv values have been grim: Stalin’s industrial terror, Cambodia’s sickening Luddite madness, the convulsions today in Islam … it was all “Year Zero” stuff, attempts to sweep the board clean, that merely swept away human sanity, instead. Nor do I claim that the squalid consumerism of today’s “secular-Humanist” welfare states is a proper vision for society.

  But I can’t endure the sheer snobbish falseness of Updike’s New England Protestantism. Never mind that it’s the legacy of American letters, that it’s the grand tradition of Hawthorne and Melville, that it’s what made America great. It’s a shuck, ladies and gentlemen. It won’t wash. It doesn’t own the future; it won’t even kiss the future goodbye on its way to the graveyard. It doesn’t own our minds any more.

  We don’t live in an age of answers, but an age of ferment. And today that ferment is reflected faithfully in a literature called science fiction.

  SF may be crazy, it may be dangerous, it may be shallow and cocksure, and it should learn better. But in some very real way it is truer to itself, truer to the world, than is the writing of John Updike.

  This is what has drawn Updike, almost despite himself, into science fiction’s cultural territory. For SF writers, his novel is a lesson and a challenge. A lesson that must be learned and a challenge that must be met.

  CATSCAN 4 “The Agberg Ideology”

  To speak with precision about the fantastic is like loading mercury with a pitchfork. Yet some are driven to confront this challenge. On occasion, a veteran SF writer will seriously and directly discuss the craft of writing science fiction.

  A few have risked doing this in cold print. Damon Knight, for instance. James Blish (under a pseudonym.) Now Robert Silverberg steps deliberately into their shoes, with Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction (Warner Books, 1987, $17.95).

  Here are thirteen classic SF stories by well-known genre authors. Most first appeared in genre magazines during the 1950s. These are stories which impressed Silverberg mightily as he began his career. They are stories whose values he tried hard to understand and assimilate. Each story is followed by Silverberg’s careful, analytical notes.

  And this stuff, ladies and gents, is the SF McCoy. It’s all shirtsleeve, street-level science fiction; every story in here is thoroughly crash-tested and cruises like a vintage Chevy.

  Worlds of Wonder is remarkable for its sober lack of pretension. There’s no high-tone guff here about how SF should claim royal descent from Lucian, or Cyrano de Bergerac, or Mary Shelley. Credit is given where credit is due. The genre’s real founders were twentieth-century weirdos, whacking away at their manual typewriters, with amazing persistence and energy, for sweatshop pay.

  They had a definite commonality of interest. Something more than a mere professional fraternity. Kind of like
a disease.

  In a long, revelatory introduction, Silverberg describes his own first exposure to the vectors of the cultural virus: SF books.

  “I think I was eleven, maybe twelve … [The] impact on me was overwhelming. I can still taste and feel the extraordinary sensations they awakened in me: it was a physiological thing, a distinct excitement, a certain metabolic quickening at the mere thought of handling them, let alone reading them. It must be like that for every new reader—apocalyptic thunderbolts and eerie unfamiliar music accompany you as you lurch and stagger, awed and shaken, into a bewildering new world of ideas and images, which is exactly the place you’ve been hoping to find all your life.”

  If this paragraph speaks to your very soul with the tongue of angels, then you need this anthology. Buy it immediately, read it carefully. It’s full of home truths you won’t find anywhere else.

  This book is Silverberg’s vicarious gift to his younger self, the teenager described in his autobiographical introduction: an itchy, over-bright kid, filled with the feverish conviction that to become a Science Fiction Writer must surely be the moral pinnacle of the human condition.

  And Silverberg knows very well that the kids are still out there, and that the virus still spreads. He can feel their hot little hands reaching out plaintively in the dark. And he’s willing, with a very genuine magnanimity, to help these sufferers out. Just as he himself was helped by an earlier SF generation, by Mr. Kornbluth, and Mr. Knight, and Mr. and Mrs. Kuttner, and all those other rad folks with names full of consonants.

  Silverberg explains his motives clearly, early on. Then he discusses his qualifications to teach the SF craft. He mentions his many awards, his fine reviews, his length of service in the SF field, and, especially, his success at earning a living. It’s a very down-home, pragmatic argument, with an aw-shucks, workin’-guy, just-folks attitude very typical of the American SF milieu. Silverberg doesn’t claim superior knowledge of writerly principle (as he might well). He doesn’t openly pose as a theorist or ideologue, but as a modest craftsman, offering rules of thumb.

  I certainly don’t scorn this offer, but I do wonder at it. Such modesty may well seem laudable, but its unspoken implications are unsettling. It seems to show an unwillingness to tackle SF’s basic roots, to establish a solid conceptual grounding. SF remains pitchforked mercury, jelly nailed to a tree; there are ways to strain a living out of this ichor, but very few solid islands of theory.

  Silverberg’s proffered definition of science fiction shows the gooeyness immediately. The definition is rather long, and comes in four points:

  1. An underlying speculative concept, systematically developed in a way that amounts to an exploration of the consequences of allowing such a departure from known reality to impinge on the universe as we know it.

  2. An awareness by the writer of the structural underpinnings (the “body of scientific knowledge”) of our known reality, as it is currently understood, so that the speculative aspects of the story are founded on conscious and thoughtful departures from those underpinnings rather than on blithe ignorance.

  3. Imposition by the writer of a sense of limitations somewhere in the assumptions of the story …

  4. A subliminal knowledge of the feel and texture of true science fiction, as defined in a circular and subjective way from long acquaintance with it.

  SF is notoriously hard to define, and this attempt seems about as good as anyone else’s, so far. Hard thinking went into it, and it deserves attention. Yet point four is pure tautology. It is the Damon Knight dictum of “SF is what I point at when I say `SF,’” which is very true indeed. But this can’t conceal deep conceptual difficulties.

  Here is Silverberg defining a “Story.” “A story is a machine that enlightens: a little ticking contrivance … It is a pocket universe … It is an exercise in vicarious experience … It is a ritual of exorcism and purgation. It is a set of patterns and formulas. It is a verbal object, an incantation made up of rhythms and sounds.”

  Very fluent, very nice. But: “A science fiction story is all those things at once, and something more.” Oh? What is this “something more?” And why does it take second billing to the standard functions of a generalized “story?”

  How can we be certain that “SF” is not, in fact, something basically alien to “Storytelling?” “Science fiction is a branch of fantasy,” Silverberg asserts, finding us a cozy spot under the sheltering tree of Literature. Yet how do we really know that SF is a “branch” at all?

  The alternative would be to state that science fiction is not a true kind of “fiction” at all, but something genuinely monstrous. Something that limps and heaves and convulses, without real antecedents, in a conceptual no-man’s land. Silverberg would not like to think this; but he never genuinely refutes it.

  Yet there is striking evidence of it, even in Worlds of Wonder itself. Silverberg refers to “antediluvian SF magazines, such as Science Wonder Stories from 1929 and Amazing Stories from 1932 … The primitive technique of many of the authors didn’t include such frills as the ability to create characters or write dialogue … [T]he editors of the early science fiction magazines had found it necessary to rely on hobbyists with humpty-dumpty narrative skills; the true storytellers were off writing for the other pulp magazines, knocking out westerns or adventure tales with half the effort for twice the pay.”

  A nicely dismissive turn of phrase. But notice how we confront, even in very early genre history, two distinct castes of writer. We have the “real storytellers,” pulling down heavy bread writing westerns, and “humpty-dumpty hobbyists” writing this weird-ass stuff that doesn’t even have real dialogue in it. A further impudent question suggests itself: if these “storytellers” were so “real,” how come they’re not still writing successfully today for Argosy and Spicy Stories and Aryan Atrocity Adventure? How come, among the former plethora of pulp fiction magazines, the science fiction zines still survive? Did the “storytellers” somehow ride in off the range to rescue Humpty Dumpty? If so, why couldn’t they protect their own herd?

  What does “science fiction” really owe to “fiction,” anyway? This conceptual difficulty will simply not go away, ladies and gentlemen. It is a cognitive dissonance at the heart of our genre. Here is John Kessel, suffering the ideological itch, Eighties version, in SF Eye #1:

  “Plot, character and style are not mere icing … Any fiction that conceives of itself as a vehicle for something called `ideas’ that can be inserted into and taken out of the story like a passenger in a Toyota is doomed, in my perhaps staid and outmoded opinion, to a very low level of achievement.”

  A “low level of achievement.” Not even Humpty Dumpty really wants this. But what is the “passenger,” and what are the “frills?” Is it the “storytelling,” or is it the “something more?” Kessel hits a nerve when he demands, “What do you mean by an `idea’ anyway?” What a difficult question this is!

  The craft of storytelling has been explored for many centuries, in many cultures. Blish called it “a huge body of available technique,” and angrily demanded its full use within SF. And in Worlds of Wonder, Silverberg does his level best lo convey the basic mechanics. Definitions fly, helpful hints abound. A story is “the working out of a conflict.” A story “has to be built around a pattern of oppositions.” Storytelling can be summed up in a three-word formula: “purpose, passion, perception.” And on and on.

  But where are we to find the craft of the “something more”? What in hell is the “something more”? “Ideas” hardly begins to describe it. Is it “wonder”? Is it “transcendence”? Is it “visionary drive,” or “conceptual novelty,” or even “cosmic fear”? Here is Silverberg, at the very end of his book:

  “It was that exhilaration and excitement that drew us to science fiction in the first place, almost invariably when we were very young; it was for the sake of that exhilaration and excitement that we took up the writing of it, and it was to facilitate the expression of our visions and fantasies t
hat we devoted ourselves with such zeal to the study of the art and craft of writing.”

  Very well put, but the dichotomy lurches up again. The art and craft of writing what, exactly? In this paragraph, the “visions and fantasies” briefly seize the driver’s seat of the Kessel Toyota. But they soon dissipate into phantoms again. Because they are so ill-defined, so mercurial, so desperately lacking in basic conceptual soundness. They are our stock in trade, our raison d’etre, and we still don’t know what to make of them.

  Worlds of Wonder may well be the best book ever published about the craft of science fiction. Silverberg works nobly, and he deserves great credit. The unspoken pain that lies beneath the surface of his book is something with which the genre has never successfully come to terms. The argument is as fresh today as it was in the days of Science Wonder Stories.

  This conflict goes very deep indeed. It is not a problem confined to the craft of writing SF. It seems to me to be a schism of the modern Western mindset, a basic lack of cultural integration between what we feel, and what we know. It is an inability to speak naturally, with conviction from the heart, of the things that Western rationality has taught us. This is a profound problem, and the fact that science fiction deals with it so directly, is a sign of science fiction’s cultural importance.

  We have no guarantee that this conflict will ever be resolved. It may not be resolvable. SF writers have begun careers, succeeded greatly, grown old and honored, and died in the shadow of this dissonance. We may forever have SF “stories” whose narrative structure is buboed with expository lumps. We may always have escapist pulp adventures that avoid true imagination, substituting the bogus exoticism that Blish defined as “calling a rabbit a `smeerp.’”