Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

At the O. K. Corral

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Early on in what I then thought of as my "career" I had Big Plans. Also much clarity. Oh, for the clarity of yesteryear! "Tear down the walls," I wrote Harry Harrison in 1968. "Let a thousand flowers bloom. Rip down the partitions. No more genre, no more genre separation. Let Christopher Anvil compete with Wallace Markfield, let Keith Laumer and Robert Heinlein be published to Allan Drury's audience or Saul Bellow's. Sack the Nebulas, storm the gates of the Hugo, lay planks over the moat. Let us all compete for the National Book Award. No more barriers! The barriers are what kept us in, kept the others out, and we have no need of them any more." Harry Harrison, my first real friend in science fiction and still among the best, was gentle, humored me in the way that good analysts humor patients. "Sure," he wrote. "I like J.G. Ballard too. The New Wave is a very good thing.

Later, of course, I came to feel differently. The restrictions, the barrier might have cut science fiction away from a larger audience, but in commercial terms they worked. They put a floor on sales; most books categorized as science fiction could be guaranteed a certain sales figure and if the advance and print order expenses were kept modest, this meant that almost all science fiction was profitable, albeit marginally. The limitations also worked artistically in the way that Schoenberg's twelve-tone system or Bach's canons and fugues, by bringing rigid rules to composition focused composers and in fact had a liberating effect. Science fiction—like the mystery, like the Western—had a history, a canon, a clear set of practices which in its case had evolved in 1968 through a little over 40 years of deliberate self-limitation and this was a good thing, not bad at all. The thousand flowers which would have been stricken in the desert bloomed within the garden of the genre. Planted in arid waste, they would have been trampled as in fact most of the proto-science fiction published before Gernsback had been. In the early 1990's I said on a Convention panel, "I once recommended that new science fiction writers attempt to leave the category at the first opportunity. I was totally, dangerously wrong. I hope that no one was paying any attention (the only time I ever voiced that hope). Stay in the genre. Build there. Create a body of work wholly identified with the genre. Brand it as such and become a brand within the field."

One man's rather addled Pilgrim's Progress. But here we are now in the post-print Millennium and here I am struggling with Nebula Awards Showcase 2007 and that cliche (cited recently by the distinguished George W. Bush) about being careful for what one wishes haunts me. Here is Kelly Link's "Magic For Beginners," winner of the Nebula Award for best novella, as the lead story in this anthology and like that same George W. Bush pretending to hunt the Oval Office with a magnifying glass in pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction, I am or engaged in a series of futile attempts to find the science fiction content in these 16,000 words. I cannot find any at all.

What I find is a Salingeresque narrative filled with exquisite individualizing touches of a charmingly eccentric family whose lives and interactions seem to bleed over into the lives and interactions of a television family whose serial antics they watch and enjoy. The television characters are "imaginary" in the sense that they have been created, and the story's family characters are "real" (at one remove of course), but they blur into one another, perhaps making the point that television like the moves envelops us so utterly that we have lost the sense of our own lives. The characters are more real than we. (This was Walker Percy's famous point in the first chapter of The Moviegoer published almost fifty years ago . . . the movies being the culprit, of course, in that instance.)

That is certainly a valid point and Kelly Link enforces it with great charm and deadpan fealty; her group are not quite as adorable as Salinger's Glass family, but they have their moments. Charm is this story's most salient aspect and there is nothing contemptible about charm; Breakfast At Tiffany's or Member of the Wedding are, like Salinger's novels and short stories, famous works which manage with charm what Bach did with contrapuntality in his Third Orchestral Suite. By that standard, the story is irresistible.

But to try to locate this within fantasy or science fiction is exasperating; it reads like a literary refugee of my promised land of 1968 who has found sanctuary across the border and is now flourishing incognito. This story induces in me the same weariness which Sam Moskowitz might have felt reading (if he ever did read) Ballard's "Terminal Beach." What am I missing? What have they done to my song? They paved Paradise for this parking lot?

I brought these questions to the redoubtable Carter Scholz some months ago. His wise response, in his most philosophic and paternal mode, was the verbal equivalent of an exquisitely timed shrug. "We now have an audience which has lost interest in any kind of genre distinction," he wrote. "They want what they want, and receive it without any sense of genre distinction, and what is wrong with that?" I took this to be in the nature of a rhetorical question.

There is at least one other who has raised this question; Dave Truesdale, reviewing Karen Joy Fowler's (subsequently) Nebula-winning short story, "What I Didn't See" (sci-fi.com, 2003) embarked on a near tirade. He was unable to see any resemblance between this story and science fiction and the fact that it won a Nebula (two years earlier than "Magic For Beginners") croggled him. The fact that the story had been published in a genre magazine was galling enough; the Nebula gave Truesdale what Don Wollheim liked to call "the whim-whams."

Who can blame him? My inner Moskowitz has nothing but sympathy for the poor guy. The Fowler story, at least, could be called a conscious pastiche, almost a referendum on James Tiptree Jr.'s (Alice Sheldon) "The Women Men Don't See" first published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in its 12/73 issue which is a truly canonical sf story, and the Fowler work only reaches full bloom, achieves the understanding of the reader if it is seen in relation to that earlier work. Alice Sheldon herself is an important character in the story which is set in the mysterious Africa of Sheldon's childhood. At the least, this is mainstream fiction about science fiction and people associated with science fiction, a kind of story which I have written myself, and it is possible, I think, to give it a 72-hour pass if not a full passport. With much sympathy for the croggled border guard.

But "Magic For Beginners" may mark the true generational divide. I admire this story's technique and certainly recognize the writer's skill but the fact that it has won a major award sponsored by the major organization of science fiction and fantasy writers leaves me with little other than the Moskowitz Relic Award. No magic for the old guy.

—July 2008: New Jersey