Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

Substantial Fire, or Why This Column Almost Didn't Appear

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Three passes at an opening, one reaching a quarter-length of a full column, and I abandoned each in disgust. I am so tired, sometimes, of my own voice, its transmutation on the page, its bleating, whining, occasionally renunciatory tone; I know all my tricks and at this point so probably do most of you: the Personal Anecdote, the Audacious Opening, the Sweeping Generalization Taken Back In The Next Sentence. Little stabs of humor, sighs of memory and disenchantment, an abrazza for the wife and lovely kids, a wave of appreciation to the ladies and distinguished germs of the audience. I know my every move, have few surprises myself. Nonetheless, deadline beckons, beckons again, is sailing away now under Charon's guidance as I pursue it helplessly. Who was that genre I saw me with last decade?

The three abandoned attempts: 1) Astounding and Analog were always mislabeled as magazines of "hard science"; their science was about as hard as Horace Gold's Galaxy was soft. Psionics, levitation, dowsing, Dianetics, mystery, incantation, editorials bemusedly and then viciously questioning "organized science". By the 1950's the magazine had become a swamp of undigested mysticism. Fredric Brown's hectoring Martians, Randall Garrett's magicians and drunken space voyages, Mark Clifton on paranormal powers of the mind, The Dean Drive, and I could go on but I won't. In fact I didn't. At my age the act of shooting fish in a barrel (catch and release or otherwise) seemed as contemptible as baiting nursery school kids or Republicans. 2) Science fiction had an open window, an absolute opportunity in the period 1965-1975 to seize the moment, reach beyond its core audience, become the true literature of that tumultuous, tandem time. But it didn't happen that way; it sold itself—eagerly, eagerly—to Tolkien imitations, elves, dwarves, Star Trek and finally George Lucas. The game was over before Star Wars, but that film closed the door. If you wanted junk, Roddenberry and Lucas could do it far better and less mysterioso than Knight, Silverberg, Ellison and even Campbell no matter how hard some of us tried. The Pynchons, Powers, DeLillos, Lessings took a place in the canon of literature which science fiction, trumped by junk, never could. And so on and so forth. I tossed that baby in the same place as #1 because the though is by no means original, Carter Scholz was writing this 25 years ago, and it is also the kind of rat trap which can only close on the fingers of the fool who placed it. 3) Brian Stableford was writing three decades ago that science fiction was a uniquely 20th Century, early post-technological format, evolved to help technically-minded adolescents to adapt to the overwhelmingly emergent technological culture. It was a means and measure of adaptation. When that adaptation had been accomplished toward the end of the century, when (thanks as much to Lucas and Roddenberry as anyone