Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

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Scattershot

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Scattershot the First: Harold Bloom coined the term "Anxiety of Influence" in the 1970's, describing the situation facing the contemporary poet, but it transports effortlessly to science fiction. Poets, Bloom theorized, are intimidated by the work of previous poets, they have to write in the penumbra of that work, at every juncture their individual voice and subject treatment must compete with all of the great (or at least distinctive) poetry of the past. In order to surmount this anxiety, which can be the cause of crippling imitativeness or outright paralysis, poets must resort to a series of strategies, most of them of Freudian cast. Kill the father, overrun the castle, and so on. This anxiety has always been a problem, Bloom wrote, but it becomes weightier with chronology, with the accumulation of work, with the gravity of history. It may be the major problem confronted by the contemporary poet. There are those who will not admit to any anxiety at all, but those "poets" are for the most part non-readers of poetry. Of which, the editors of the quarterlies will tell you, there are tens of thousands.

The problem is obviously present in dear old science fiction. Has been for a long time, certainly at any point past the furious, expansive 1930's and 1940's when (as Alexei Panshin noted) the geography of the known and unknown universe and of our collective futures was being charted. Every science fiction writer since about 1950 has had to deal with that staggering backlog of innovative material. As science fiction eased its way past a succession of birthdays, (dating that birth from the cover date, April 1926, of the first issue of Amazing Stories), the weight of circumstance, the sheer growth of the repertoire changed the way it was written, the way in which writers approached the material. You can do variations on "Nightfall" or "The Cold Equations" but you can't write them again and successors will create variations on your variations. What had happened by any mid-80's issue of Isaac Asimov's Magazine was that a reader without knowledge of the founding sources could feel helpless.

That anxiety of influence lays then on readers no less than writers; science fiction, a literature of convention and accretion, became insistently arcane almost of necessity. There may be fewer great science fiction writers than great poets (and the history of written poetry is more than a dozen times longer) but the harrowing and increasingly specialized nature of this medium may make that anxiety even more insistent. "Most of the stories I read now are cries of pain" Algis Budrys wrote in Galaxy in 1966. (1966!) "Most of the novels are funerary objects."

Scattershot the Second: I noted in an earlier column how little help the important writers of the 1940's and 1950's had. There were some tolerant editors (notably Boucher & McComas, as with Alfred Bester) and there were sympathetic readers, some of whom studied his work with the intensity that young Beethoven brought to Mozart, but those short stories and the two amazing novels were essentially written. The Demolished Man, as I have noted, was rejected by every extant publisher of science fiction before being placed with the fan press, Shasta.

Under the circumstances, the body of work emerging from category science fiction in the 1940's and 1950's has to be viewed in the aggregate as a some kind of testimony to the human spirit. Thirty years ago I reminded Bruce McAllister that Kuttner and Moore stories like "Vintage Season," "The Cure," "The Code," "Rain Check," and "The Twonky" were sold to