Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

The Conventional Wisdom

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Kurt Vonnegut called the phenomenon "Foma" . . . myths whose falsity was well understood but which we had quietly agreed to treat as if they were true. Simple comfort in an increasingly uncomfortable century. Therefore: Majority Rule. The Democratic Principal. Honest Elections. The trustworthiness of our leaders, the unimpeachable testimony of history. The benign nature of the Industrial Revolution. Flossing will prevent cavities. A just God presiding over a rational universe. Eternal life for those who follow His Commandments and take the text of the Gospels as sacrosanct. I could go on.

Perhaps I will not.

The Foma of science fiction are not as entirely embracing (we are, after all, merely another example of niche publishing) but in their quiet way they are equally pervasive. The Astounding of John W. Campbell as the repository of stories centered by "rigorous science" and "philosophical rigor". The primacy of the 1940's "Golden Age" Astounding which all alone created a huge readership and thus saved us from oblivion. The daring inventiveness of a forward-looking field of literature which made common currency in that most crucial decade of The Bomb and its terrible implication. The courage of science fiction readers and entrepreneurs during that Golden Age. ("It is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan" as Wallace MacFarlane did not quite have it.) The glorious receptivity of those proud and lonely fans to their daring literature and its profound warning. Toss that little girl from the spaceship, get the medicine to the colonies. Grim choice but science fiction readers know how unrelenting is the universe.

Again, I could go on and again I will not. As Allan Tate wrote of that Dickinson poem, I have taken a long look at the situation. My own Golden Age was spent in a cabin by the Sea of Foma and how happily I splashed on its shores.

Challenging or trying to dismantle this Conventional Wisdom is not a pleasant business. We all love science fiction so, me too. The old girl took me in and kept me warm at a time when Muriel and Harriet, the Quality Lit Sisters were quite shut of me and my landscape of the future resembled the vistas of Chan Davis's "The Nightmare".

In a corner of my stricken retrospect it is always 1951 and I am in Brooklyn, somewhere a little distance from Flatbush Avenue and three miles from Ebbets Field. There I am in the bedroom reading—again—Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories. Singing rabbits who know the world is theirs and a proud robot originally constructed as a can opener. An alcohol delivery device which will inject the stuff directly rather than forcing all that dreary swallowing business. I had a good time there and like the kids in "Mimsy Were The Borogoves" this is the place I would be now if I could find a way out. But Kuttner and Campbell and the 1940's Astounding are irretrievable, no matter what the Wayback Machine says.

And no matter the Foma, Thrilling Wonder and Planet Stories outsold Campbell's Astounding in the 1940's by a significant margin. Raymond Palmer's despised Amazing outsold Astounding by an enormous margin.