Science Fiction Creates Some Literary Friction : Genre Does Battle With the East Coast Establishment

Earthlings beware! At this very moment, in a parallel dimension known as the world of letters, a battle of intergalactic proportions rages.

On one side of this cosmic battlefield, occupying what most would consider the high ground of prestige, the “East Coast literary Establishment” attacks with bursts of acerbic bons mots. On the other side, boasting greater numbers and clear technological superiority, the creators and defenders of science fiction make their stand. If we are to believe some of the combatants, at stake is nothing less than the nature of the universe as we know it.

Most Recent Skirmish

The most recent skirmish in this running conflict erupted last October when Harper’s magazine published “The Temple of Boredom,” an essay by New York writer Luc Sante. Subtitled “Science Fiction, no future,” the piece derides the genre for its “hubris,” “woozy universalism” and “contrivance.”

Calling it “detritus,” and “the domain of hobbyists and hacks,” Sante argued that “Science fiction has become a dead zone useful for dumping space travel, extraterrestrials, weird inventions, time warps, extrasensory perception, biological mutations, the morals of intelligent machines, and anything else that would be of genuine scientific interest were it not fictional.”

The retaliatory strike came swiftly. Angry missives from the forces of science fiction occupied the entire letters section of the January edition of Harper’s, where the letters are reportedly still coming in.

‘Outraged Hysteria’

“What I think is most interesting about the Harper’s piece is not the intellectual argument, which any undergraduate could shred, but the vehemence of the attack, and the sense of outraged hysteria,” explained Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine professor of physics who wrote to Harper’s and was praised in other letters for his science-fiction novels, which have won two Nebula awards (an honor voted to the best novel of a given year by the Science Fiction Writers of America).

According to Benford and other stellar representatives of science-fiction writing and criticism--many of whom dropped by Benford’s Laguna Beach home on a recent Sunday to celebrate Voyager II’s Uranus flyby--there is a concerted effort being made to suppress science fiction. As evidence of that, they point rather vaguely to attacks that have appeared in literary journals, and to the fact that less than four years earlier Harper’s ran another less-than-diplomatic article on the subject.

In that essay, author Arnold Klein stated that “Sci-fi is a hormonal activity, not a literary one,” and that “Sci-fi writers are the most pretentious idea-mongers going, but their ideas are stupid .” The author went on to add, “Enthusiasts, of course, do tend to differ with this view of sci-fi.”

That, of course, does tend to understate the matter.

Calling the first Harper’s article “the exact same piece” as the October essay--which he denounced as an “intellectually dishonest hatchet job”--Norman Spinrad, a Los Angeles-based author of 10 science-fiction novels and past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, described the reaction of his colleagues and their fans: “People were very irate. They sought out the guy who wrote it and grilled him on the phone. He got lots of bad mail, lots of bad phone calls, even a few death threats.” Science-fiction writers and scholars (who call their genre “S-F” but never “sci-fi”) offer several explanations for why their literature is, as they claim, being oppressed. For one thing, devotees are convinced that the “Establishment” is rattled by science fiction’s commercial success.

“I think all this activity means that someone’s plainly worried, and this is damage minimization,” said Benford, whose writing Sante characterized as “stylistic murk.” “S-F is performing so well in the marketplace, and making so many advances in terms of both prestige and intellectual value, that some people think it has to be stopped now, or else it will gobble up the holy ground of realistic narrative.”

“Last year was the biggest year yet for science fiction,” explained Charles Brown, editor of the Oakland-based science-fiction trade journal Locus. Brown said that nobody breaks book sales figures down according to genre, but he estimated that science fiction accounted for about 20% of all sales in 1985.

A lot of science-fiction aficionados also believe that the battle lines can be defined geographically--the “genteel East” versus the “barbarian West.”

“I would tend to think of science fiction as a frontier literature, a literature that’s part of the westward spirit,” explained George Slusser, adjunct professor in comparative literature at UC Riverside and curator of that school’s 45,000-volume Eaton collection--the largest institutional collection of science fiction and fantasy.

As Slusser sees things, the Eastern literary Establishment is using acts of omission as well as commission in its strategy. In an article titled “Who’s Afraid of Science Fiction,” which will appear in the first issue of UC Riverside’s new scholarly science-fiction journal, Slusser savages Esquire magazine--and the “literary cabal” it represents--for failing to include science-fiction writers in its 1984 “summer reading” issue.

‘Deep-Seated Phobia’

“I say all this polemic is a screen for some kind of deep-seated phobia. There’s something that these people have repressed. Science fiction is fundamentally a literature that deals with the future; that deals with change and new things. But these people (Slusser mentions William Gass, Ken Kesey, Don DeLillo, Tim O’Brien and other contemporary writers) want to enshrine the old, they want to create forms that are static and almost stagnant in a sense. They’re really afraid of movement, they feel that they’ve been swept around by technological advancement, which is alien to them.”

For the most part, the alleged “enemies” in this war of the wordsmiths deny not only that they are out to destroy an upstart genre, but that they are part of any cabal.

“That’s just nonsense” Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, said of the charge that his magazine is on a crusade against science fiction. “That would be one of the most foolish crusades I can think of. . . . (Sante’s) article was a piece of criticism and that’s all it was. As far as I’m concerned, people are free to write in any way they choose, that’s their business.”

Luc Sante, author of the disputed essay, maintained, in fact, that he came up with the idea of doing an “omnibus review,” while defending the genre against his girlfriend’s charge that most scientists consider science fiction to be scientific rubbish. “I sort of changed my mind after I got deeper into the subject,” he said.

” . . . The science-fiction community’s paranoia is justified in the sense that they really do have something to be defensive about,” Sante said. “But it’s unjustified in the sense that anybody’s out to get them. The New York literary world is only too happy to make money off them.”

“These people will say, we’re here in the real world discussing real problems, while you’re off on Alpha Centauri . . . but one of the gifts of the writer is supposed to be deeper insight, and I’m afraid all I get out of most mainstream writers is an antique spiel; worn-out rhetoric,” Benford said. Don’t science-fiction writers envy the literati just a bit, though? For instance, don’t they wish they’d been invited to that PEN conference in January, where all the big names in literature got together and mulled over the big issues?

“We’d have been bored to tears,” said San Diego astrophysicist David Brin, who has won both the Nebula and the Hugo awards (the Hugo is voted on by science-fiction readers).

“I mean, that PEN meeting could have been held 50 years ago,” Benford said. “Change the writers, change the place names, and the rhetoric is the same. Which means that it’s just a bunch of dried-up dusty ideas.”

Brin jumped back into the discussion to point out what he sees as a pivotal difference between mainstream fiction and the genre in which he writes. While mainstream writers and critics view the human condition as a “fixed set of eternal verities,” and believe that “we’ll never learn from our mistakes; that there will never come a human generation that’s wiser,” most science-fiction writers think that the human condition has already “changed profoundly,” Brin said.

“This is a time unlike that of all earlier literary times, in that the fundamental ethical and moral questions can be phrased in terms of science fictional premises,” Benford added. “The ‘what ifs’ are the real issues we face. . . . Science fiction tries to get you out of the immediate social context, to try to see the world in a larger perspective.”

Willis E. McNelly, a professor of English at Cal State Fullerton, has been teaching science-fiction courses since 1965, has written “half a million words” of science-fiction criticism, and recently compiled “The Dune Encyclopedia,” a guide to the late Frank Herbert’s Dune saga.

Like almost everyone with an interest in science fiction, McNelly concedes that most writing in the genre--like most writing anywhere--is pretty lousy stuff. But that doesn’t keep him and others from speculating that the next masterpiece of our era will come from the ranks of authors writing science fiction.

Quoting from an academic essay by professor Mark Hillegas, retired from Southern Illinois University, McNelly said that a work the magnitude of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” may be on the S-F horizon. But because of prejudice against the genre, “when the great epic appears, we will not call it science fiction.”

Science fiction’s detractors write such sentiments off as a typical blend of the science fiction community’s “paranoia and hubris.”

Jonathan Post, a science-fiction writer who served as a planning engineer on an earlier phase of the Voyager mission, offered this matter-of-fact statement: “If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing science fiction.”