Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

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From the Heart's Basement February 2007

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Here is the third incarnation of this column of commentary; there were eight in Pulphouse in the early 90's and then a couple in Ellen Datlow's online Event Horizon in 1998. Now my little traveling whore's cubicle—Salinger's phrase from Seymour: An Introduction has come to uneasy perch in this venue. Still on the run and full of fun! or perhaps I mean Lord Weary's Castle.

Long before my Pulphouse adventure, I had abandoned most belief in the effectiveness of continued commentary on science fiction. (Frank Rich in the New York Times, for instance, seems to have had little effect upon the Iraq adventure beyond collecting slurs from the Administration and this is our government's obsessive collective adventure being anatomized in the New York Times.) It is such a marginalized field now, almost as marginalized as it was in the forties, and so few of us care about the issues it raises or fails to raise. Those of us who do really care of course, but I would measure my effect in changing science fiction as writer or commentator over these 40 years as nil. "Criticism in music has, I have decided, absolutely no function whatsoever and changes nothing" Deryk Cooke wrote a long time ago and he was likely to have known. I have come to approximately the same position vis a vis science fiction.

Still, eternity beckons—for some of us a whole lot sooner than we might like, for others unfortunately not soon enough—and in the vast, diminishing light I cannot resist the lure or even the urgency of commentary or perhaps this is another way of saying nothing left to lose. One thousand words at a time, I will cautiously engrave my own handwriting on the wall, remembering that this time it is not you but I who have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

So, then, and as John Cheever wrote, "To begin at the beginning", I evoke John Updike's New Yorker review 25 years ago of that massive David Hartwell anthology. "Science fiction," Updike wrote and I paraphrase at some distance and I hope fairly, that science fiction could never be a first rate, a significant literature, because it necessarily works at a double remove from reality. What we call realism or satire, historical or contemporary fiction, is at a single remove. It recreates the real, posits other versions of the shared or historical reality. But science fiction imposes upon that reality extrapolation. Adultery on Venus, Marry Me A Romance with auto-erotic, programmed devices. Not Rabbits but Martians running. Not a month of Sundays but a scrimble of Thursdays. The displacement bespeaks an essential frivolity or fatuity; great science fiction writers can circumvent or disguise, but they cannot dispel those qualities. Even the most rigorous science fiction (like Updike I will pass here on the allied but quite different issue of fantasy) is then incapable of true gravitas.

Is it true? Hesitantly, on a convention panel some years ago, I endorsed the essential point; like Meg Ryan's dead horse on