Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

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Arias & Barcarolles

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

From its inception as a category of publishing in this country (the first issue being Gernsback's April, 1926 Amazing Stories), science fiction was a literature of ideas. Just ask the idea people. Consider the founding editors: for Gernsback it was a literature of scientific advance, which would encourage young boys to become engineers. For Orlin Tremaine it was the thought variant, stories that would redefine or expand reality. For John Campbell it was a literature of technology's effect on human emotions, progress, way of life. For Anthony Boucher, a quaint quality old Curiosity Shoppe incorporating societal or technological change. For Horace L. Gold, the bitter comedy of it all, the expansion of the practice of human folly, stupidity, and exploitation on a twisted, multihued background. For Donald A. Wollheim, a means to show the corruption and hypocrisy of capitalist culture.

And the writers. Lots of writers. "Variegate" is the word; a tumble of writers. Engineers, sociologists, comedians, pratfall artists, feminists, masculinists, satirists, parodists, tragedians, sexual crusaders. The magazine stories and eventually the novels were filled with ideas, trembled with concepts. The prose and characterization might have often been distressingly unachieved, but this bothered the editors as little as it seemed to concern the readers. (Of course even in these early decades much was achieved. What Kuttner and Sturgeon, for instance, were able to accomplish within a span of two decades from the origination of the category is still an astonishment.)

Of course there were some anti-idea editors as well. Raymond Palmer, William Hamling, James Quinn. "Just a good story, please." Or, in Palmer's case the Shaver stories of the late 1940s, pre–von Danikin replete with cave-dwelling deteroriated robots. But in the grim joylessness with which the agenda was stated ("Just entertain us," Hamling would write in editorials, biting his lip), it could be theorized that the anti-ideas were themselves ideas. Most light or humorous science fiction had the dedicated, desiccated aspect of children's entertainment night at the 195l New York Lumber Trade Association annual. (Tip of the Hatlo Hat to my old man. That year my party favor was a chemistry set. That and trips to the Gilbert Hall of Science convinced me that I was underqualified to reassemble the universe.) A literature of ideas, all right. That was science fiction at the creation, and we still live, read, and write under that penumbra. A dreadful Young Laborer's League earnestness still pervades; Sheckley's silliness is endured and sometimes admired (although it was not admired by James Blish), but even in its time was often marginalized or dismissed as peripheral, as an indulgence. That silliness—or Horace Gold's acidity or Boucher's literature of (Mark Clifton's phrase) "wine and decadence"—were never part of the Grand Plan, not even for Gold, Boucher, or their writers. These were stories that