SUMMATION: S-F, 1961
by Judith Merril
For some years now, those of us working in what even we still quaintly call “the science-fiction field” have been increasingly aware of the floating-island nature of that “field.” And if it seemed at times that we were simply drifting out to sea, it is now becoming sharply evident that the direction of drift, all along, was into the “mainstream.” The specialized cult of science fiction (for which many of us still, and I expect will, feel a lingering nostalgia) is rapidly disappearing, as the essential quality is absorbed into the main body of literature.
More properly, I should say, reabsorbed. S-f had its beginnings in mainstream writing. The literary-sociological analysis of the compartmentalizing of this kind of fiction during the first half of the twentieth century will undoubtedly provide scholastic adventure for innumerable future thesis-writers. For those of us actively interested in the (flooded) field at the present time, it is enough to understand that the reabsorption has not been one-sided. For any prodigal to effect his return, it is necessary not only that the parent body be prepared to offer welcome, but that the wanderer has found cause to come home.
These causes have been varied and complex, ridiculous and sublime: they have included such things as the influence of “the syndicate” on magazine distribution, the International Geophysical Year, Kingsley Amis’ book of lectures and Willy Ley’s lectures on books. (The rest of the list I leave to those scholars of tomorrow.) But whatever the causes, the results are obvious.
At the beginning of 1956, when the First Annual of this series was being readied for the press, I counted thirteen science-fiction magazines in this country, and four more in England. (Most of them were quarterlies or bimonthlies; it averaged out to about ten altogether each month.) That first annual contained, proudly, three (out of eighteen) stories from sources outside the specialty magazines; the Honorable Mentions listed seven more. And the Summation pointed with a sort of ghetto pride to the fact that thirty or forty of Our Kind of Stories had crossed the line in ‘55, and found respectable lodging in literary and “slick” magazines.
This year, sixteen of the thirty fiction and verse selections are from general fiction magazines, or books. There are five s-f magazines published here, and two in England — five-and a half a month average, with the three bimonthlies.
In ‘56, I was able to include three “name” writers from outside the specialty field. This year, there are only thirteen stories by writers known in the field. Most striking is the number of writers from non-fiction fields who have made their first story efforts in s-f; most gratifying is the growing number of serious young writers who are devoting themselves equally to s-f and “quality” media.
This is the internal evidence. From outside come such items as the previously mentioned seminar of the Modern Language Association (or the word from my scout in Sausalito that s-f is the top seller in the beatniks’ favorite bookstore). There is The Twilight Zone on TV, which no one (except us Old School Ties) thinks of as s-f. There is The Saturday Evening Post, printing without special comment an average of one fantasy or s-f story per issue….
Which brings up a point. The welcome offered to s-f is warm, as only a homecoming can be. But by the same token, the critics, editors, reviewers, publishers, who are uncle and aunt, elder brother, sister, and cousins, who all stayed correctly at home while we went wandering in lurid pulp-paper lands, are not prepared to meet us on the grounds of our own choosing — and certainly not to recognize us by the identity we assumed “outside.”
Thus, much of the best science fiction published today is under wrappers and headings that either angrily disclaim the “science-fiction” label, or ignore it completely. As for the broader field defined in this book as “S-F,” the most special labeling it’s likely to get is “unusual” or “offbeat.”
The cult is dead, or at the least, moribund. But one may hope it has infused new life into the culture.
I should like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to a few of the people whose assistance becomes more and more necessary, as the source material spreads itself thin. For suggestions or submissions of material, my thanks to Madeline Tracy Brigden, of Mademoiselle; to Anthony Boucher; to Laura Cohen; and to Willard Marsh. For help in obtaining permission for stories, and in assembling the final manuscript, to Robert Mills, Frederik Pohl, Joseph Ferman, Mrs. Brigden, my family, and — far beyond the call of duty— S & S editrix, Barbara Norville. And for opinions on the selections, my especial gratitude to Virginia Blish.
Judith Merril
Milford, 1962
BOOKS
by Anthony Boucher
I have been trying for some time to understand why I, as a reviewer, am so much more resentful of uninspired routine books in science fiction than I am of similar publications in the mystery-suspense field. And I think I am beginning to see the reason.
To be sure, the current publishing standards are even lower for s-f-in-book-form than they are for mysteries. The very crudest sex-and-sadism private-eye paperbacks have a certain professional competence in keeping a story moving that is rare at any level of today’s s-f; and the suspense field is certain to provide at least one intelligent, literate, original, creative novel in a week’s reviewing load, while the s-f reviewer is lucky if he finds one over a span of months.
But why do I simply shrug and stop reading if a whodunit turns out to be weary and derivative, while I feel acutely embittered when I find the same qualities in s-f?
I see now that it is because s-f is a form which, more than almost any other, by its very nature demands creative originality. The detective story and even the more modern psychological crime novel are — like the western, the love story, the historical romance — fixed forms, in which the creative challenge lies largely in seeing what the author can do within established boundaries. S-f is — or perhaps better, should and must be a literature of stimulus and fresh horizons.
Put it this way: You are not going to complain if a large number of sonnets sound, superficially, a good deal alike; you are fascinated by what each poet manages to do within the sonnet. But if all the free verse you read, from countless divers hands, sounds pretty much the same, you are justified in thinking that poetry is in a hell of a state.
A conventional, competent, uninspired murder novel or western is a perfectly reasonable commercial commodity. Conventional, competent, uninspired s-f has no reason for existing.
This is putting the case politely. As a matter of honest fact, most of 1961’s s-f novels were conventional, uninspired… and incompetent. There were more novels in the field than in any previous year save one (1959); over half of them came from two publishers whose sole criterion of a novel seems to be a length of 50,000 words or less.