Again, Dangerous Visions (ed. Harlan Ellison, 1972)
This collection contains some standout stories from my beloved girls, and yet, it is much worse than Dangerous Visions. Part of the reason is that there is, I regret to say, a real eau de male backlash about many of these stories.1 To stroll through a few examples: A woman offers herself to be fucked to death (?) as atonement for the sins of humankind. A guy gets stuck on a raft with a female reporter who is a simpering coward who can barely talk. Kurt Vonnegut fantasizes about sending a rocket full of freeze-dried sperm to space. A man hooks up with a woman; the fade-to-black here goes: “Those endless legs closed, on him, all urge, going like the legs of the napalmed.”2 That one is part of a diptych and its counterpart is about a guy who refuses to sleep with a woman younger than himself because he’ll find it emasculating to have a muse.3 Then we have the entry by Piers Anthony, which is about an alternate Earth where women are used as milk cows, and which ends with a general pitch for veganism.4 In another story, “Eye of the Beholder,” a (woman) scientist realizes that a (male) artist has stumbled by accident onto what she’s trying to discover. She has the following conversation with her CIA handler:
“Paul, we’ve got to get hold of the equations he used. Every curve, every plane on this thing.”
“Equations? Lukas never finished high school. He wouldn’t know a polynomial from a dirty word.”
Cidi’s face got blotchy. She was not pretty when angry. “It’s so unfair. I sit here turning into a hag for six years, and then this idiot comes along. Damn!”
It’s bad, man! How is this stuff in the same book as “When It Changed”?5 But then… naturally it is, because these are both arising out of the same moment.6
However, I didn’t really want to talk about all this… I wanted to talk about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest.” This story is one she did not like, because she felt it was gratingly preachy, but I sort of disagree. In most Le Guin stories, or at least most of the ones that I’ve read, the drama involves “doing the right thing.” In The Dispossessed Shevek spends most of his time trying to figure out “the right thing,” then he does it. Sometimes (The Lathe of Heaven), “the right thing” is really “do nothing.” The right thing to do is generally both right morally and right in terms of its ultimate effects—it might be costly, as when Arha gives up her power in The Tombs of Atuan and becomes Tenar again—but it produces the right outcome for everybody.
In “The Word for World is Forest,” the oppressed aliens do the “wrong” thing—they indiscriminately slaughter the enemy, including a group of civilian women who had never harmed them. This is not a story of “culture clash”: they know it’s wrong. Violence has never been a part of their society and they find using it profoundly disturbing. Still, they have no other choice. They have to do it to live.
So I thought “The Word for World is Forest” is one of her least moralizing stories while also being one of her most transparently political, an interesting combination of qualities and unique among those I’ve read. (“Moralizing” here is meant neutrally.) It is also a story where I don’t think that what is playing out is ultimately a drama among different facets of Le Guin herself (which is one reason why doing the right thing usually means a harmonious ending).7 The military men in this book are distinctly not of herself and they do not correspond to instincts Le Guin has.
If I ever encounter her ghost up in the Pacific Northwest I might try to argue with her about it and tell her I think she was a bit unfair. However, despite my love of ghost stories, I do not actually believe in ghosts myself, so I think this is unlikely. I do think looking carefully at works the author did not like or viewed as a failure can help you understand what they were doing, wanted to be doing, and so on. This story is the kind Le Guin did not want to write and she mostly didn’t.
As far as my other girls8 go, “When It Changed” is one of Russ’s best stories. I don’t think “The Milk of Human Kindness” is one of Tiptree’s best. Kate Wilhelm’s “The Funeral” is fantastic. “Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon” is a lesser effort from Josephine Saxton though memorably grotesque.9
The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism (Judith Merril, collected 2016)
Judith Merril is a figure in this period of science fiction who has yet to make the jump, for me, from “significant” to “somebody I like reading.” Her contemporaries could be a little snide about her in a way that makes me want to defend her, but I’ve read a few of her stories and one of her novels, and thus far, they just don’t do much for me. Her first story (“That Only A Mother…”) is precisely the kind of science fiction story that I just do not like, where the whole thing is building up to a twist ending that does not make anything about the preceding story more interesting.10 The novel that I’ve read, The Tomorrow People, is pretty wild, in that it is one of a sub-genre of stories that could be summarized as “what if we were brainwashed by aliens, but it was good?,”11 but it’s not exactly a good novel.12
Merril was significant, but less for her fiction than her position as an editor of a year’s best “SF” anthologies for several years, beginning in 1956. There, she had the ability to codify her taste and her thoughts on the field. (She was an early and insistent champion of J.G. Ballard in America.) She made a point of looking for “SF” outside of the field. I say “SF” and not “science fiction” because she did:
The name of this book13 is SF.
SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy). Science Fantasy (or Science Fiction) is really an abbreviation, too. Here are some of the things it stands for.…
S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. (But not Spelling, without which I could have added Psychology, Civilizations, and Psi without parentheses.)
F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
Mix well. The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.…
Happy reading.
One thing that seems to characterize many of the science fiction writers I end up reading is their conflicted relationship with their chosen genre. On the one hand, Merril is grumpy about publishers who label clear science fiction texts as not science fiction.14 She’s grumpy about publishers who don’t even bother to send her review copies. She’s grumpy about the outsized attention Kingsley Amis gets with his book New Maps of Hell, simply because he’s a big figure in the mainstream.15
On the other hand, she writes things like “the fact is, I don’t think the outworn label, science fiction, means much of anything any more, except a description of an attitude,” and a clear underlying desire in these critical pieces is for science fiction to cease to be a genre. Like most people who love science fiction (including me), she is happy to conjure up the image of a terrible, dreadful, cliched text that is not the sort of thing she’s celebrating (“you’ve heard the one about the old egghead (slightly cracked, but not quite addled yet) who’s got this gorgeous girl assistant, and this formula (or Frankenstein, or maybe a giant ant). Anyhow, the old boy means well, but he just can’t stop himself.…”).
Science fiction is always dying, but I wonder if this conflicted attitude also reflects that a truly mature writer of “SF” (whatever you want that to stand for) really needs to be somebody who isn’t only reading SF. Rather than conceiving of SF as a parallel to mainstream literature or as a current within it (the second being Merril’s position), it’s more like a pond that needs new water flowing in to prevent stagnation. It is both a total way of life for many of its writers and fans (at this time) and not really sufficient as such, neither financially (too small) nor intellectually (ditto). Hence this desire to resolve the feeling of science fiction not quite being enough: just merge.
Is this still true? I’m not really sure. (I don’t really know enough.) My sort of vague hunch is that a lot of things that seemed like weaknesses in the SF ecosystem have ultimately turned out to be strengths, and part of that is because of this understanding that if you want to be a really great writer of SF you have to be reading other stuff too, whereas I think in any mainstream writing world it is easy to fall into a trap of reading only your immediate peers. It is of course very common for writers in the mainstream to lift “genre” elements now and the battle over respectability and seriousness and the rest seems to be over.
As a historical matter, though, it’s also fun to watch Le Guin and Russ get some of their first notices in here. There are some raves for Samuel Delany, too (this is about Nova,16 which Merril likes but doesn’t love):
Delany is in an almost unique position in s-f today: everybody loves him. The “solid core,” the casual readers, the literary dippers-in, the “new thing” crowd — Delany is all things to all readers. It is an untenable position — unless, of course, he gets as good as I think he will eventually be.
P.S. If you have an ereader, I suggest buying the digital copy of this book, because (according to the introduction) it is actually more comprehensive.
Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965)
Magic eight ball told me to read Dune, so I read it on the plane to Oregon. I said a bit ago that usually when people say of science fiction that the ideas are good but the writing is bad, I have no idea what they’re talking about, because usually the ideas are bad but the writing is fine. That’s true, but there are always exceptions. Dune is an exception. Well, the writing in Dune isn’t actually bad. It’s perfectly functional. But if the future Herbert portrays were not so interesting, nobody would read Dune. To put it another way, I’ve never met somebody who was at any time really obsessed with Dune who also said “Dune is great. Dune is great book.” What they say is always something like “Dune is terrible, but it’s also so good.”
I don’t feel like there’s a point to summarizing Dune here, there are two recent movies that I’m not going to watch that do it for me,17 but it is about this guy Paul who is doing his level best not to become Space Genghis Khan and, in the process, naturally becomes Space Genghis Khan. You know the whole time that he’s doomed to do exactly what he’s trying not to do, because every chapter is heading with an excerpt from future books about his deeds. Much of Dune, however, is about the space between “what is definitely going to happen” and “now.” You know, for instance, that Paul’s noble father is going to die and that nobody can save him; but when and how is another story.
On that note, one thing I did find very interesting about the book was the degree to which Herbert courts anticlimax. There are many things in the book where you are very much set up to expect some sort of dramatic outcome, but then what actually happens is less exciting than you might have thought, or is something you basically could not have anticipated.18 There are plenty of payoffs, too, but this persistent sense of groundwork laid and frustrated is one way in which Dune is (in some ways) a well-written book. Paul is going to frustrate many plans that were in motion before he was born.19 He will also frustrate his own plan of finding some way out of the future where he wages war on the universe.
It is even satirized somewhat through Josephine Saxton’s supplied biography:
Josephine Saxton is really a man who asks us not to publish his real name. He took this nom-de-plume in order to get published in what he describes as “this Age of The Great Mother.” The few details we can publish reveal that he keeps a grocery store, plays bowls at the weekends and is married with a teenage daughter who plans to be a secretary.
Is this misogynist or just sort of weird, you might ask. It’s just sort of weird.
“Behind every successful man, we’re told, there has to be a woman. Yes, but a miniskirted graduate student of the incantatory arts with a guitar slung over her shoulder? Robert Graves may be right about the fount of all poetry being the primal Mother-Mate-Mistress-Muse, the chesty White Goddess fancied up with asps and corn shucks. But must she be putting all the words, every last one, in our mouths? What are we, then, sending stations, echo chambers?”
Like ah, you thought this was terrible when it was human women—but what about when it’s female cows? Did Piers Anthony do ghostwriting for PETA? Inquiring minds…
I don’t have anything in particular against Piers Anthony, whose books were not part of my childhood and also not part of my adulthood, though I understand his works are now considered “troublingly horny.” This story makes him seem like kind of a nice guy.
This stuff also renders Le Guin’s story here, “The Word for World is Forest,” sort of unpleasant by context, as that story involves a group of women being delivered to a planet specifically for sex purposes and then mass slaughtered.
What I mean by this will (if I continue to believe it) be fleshed out in The Book but I would sort of compare to the way in a dream you are everything in the dream, including the frightening or ugly elements.
not all the girls, just the ones that are my girls
As with many other stories in both collections, it is preoccupied with the idea that we’ll cure all diseases and extend human life and this will be terrible because of overpopulation. After a certain number of these, I begin to wish to see the original story they are presumably responding to in which we cure all diseases and extend human life and it rules. Does it exist?
The ne plus ultra of this kind of story is Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star.”
This is also the premise of Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling (except vampires instead of aliens).
That said there’s a proto-Tiptree quality to it that made me wonder about Alice Sheldon’s pre-publication reading.
SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, Fourth Annual Edition (1959)
Now “science-fiction” books by science-fiction authors are simply not reviewed seriously in the major critical outlets. (These days, they are rarely reviewed, at all.) But the canny jacketeers at Lippincott have gotten around this taboo several times now by the simple expedient of not labeling their books as s-f. In this case they went a step further: the jacket flap biography explains that Mr. Miller [of A Canticle for Leibowitz] “compromised between art and engineering by writing science-fiction, until this, his first novel” (my italics — J. M.).
Then they took care to plaster the jacket with quotes from “respectable literary” names — all clearly “non-science-fiction” people, except the acceptable exception, Bradbury — saying, “It falls into no genre, certainly not science fiction,” and “It is not, really, a ‘futuristic’ novel.” (Plus one from old friend Amis, who says, “…a serious and imaginative novel….”)
Thus freed of the Curse of the Tag, an excellent novel became eligible for consideration on the level on which it was written — instead of the usual fast paragraph at the space-opera stand.
Well, if this is what it takes to persuade “literary” folk to read a good book and enjoy it — down with “science fiction,” sez I. Let’s have a new label. Or none, at all. Who knows? That way, Sturgeon might outsell Pat Frank.
Despite the last paragraph, I think this is fairly characterized as “grumpy.”
“Mr. Amis’s expertise as a critic of s-f was assigned him by reviewers who did not know the science-fantasy field, but did know, and respect (with cause), the author’s reputation as a leading ‘Angry Young Man’ novelist and essayist. His expertise as a writer — in this case a superb parodist — is not the property of the reviewers, but very much his own.”
I’ve started Nova but haven’t finished it.
I saw the first one.
Characters persist in misunderstandings you expect to have violent repercussions, but then… it’s fine. You expect one villainous character to die at Paul’s hands, but instead he dies in this almost slapstick way when the world’s eeriest toddler (that’s what the math tells me, anyway) poisons him.
The Bene Gesserit are very cool, I have to say. I have perhaps missed my calling of being a sort of evil but also sort of rad space lady Jesuit.
I liked Dune until the Harkonnens killed all the Atrides. Then, it's just battle in the desert and ride a worm, blah blah. And god help you if you try to read the sequels.
I thought Paul Kincaid’s review of the version of Last Dangerous Visions that came out recently (http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/who-is-in-danger/) was really good and contextualized both earlier volumes for me: “In both books there were good stories, in both books there were some very good stories, but they each mattered less than they did as part of the rebel army.”
Nova is a fascinating book; my darling M John Harrison gave it a negative review in New Worlds for sticking too rigidly to heroic narrative, but I have to dissent from him there. It is imo very clearly the kind of book you write before lapsing into a seven-year silence from science fiction and returning with Dhalgren.
The Alia stuff in Dune is simply so funny. In Dune Part II I could visibly see Villeneuve decide “I really do not want to deal with this right now” and so the movie remains a series of grand darkling tableaux of imperial decadence, uninterrupted by the appearance of the world’s most ridiculous assassination scene, which I think is a shame.