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Thinking About Thinking About Science Fiction

by Barry N. Malzberg

This has always been a self-referential field; years before the magic realists,
the fabulists, the post-modern allegorists and the students of John Gardner
(1933-1982) made all of this fashionable, L. Ron Hubbard was writing of the
tormenting activities of characters created by a drunken hack science fiction
writer ("Typewriter in the Sky", 1940), Peter Phillips was sending a voyager
into the unconscious of a science fiction writer who had become trapped in his
own inventions.  A prominent character in Fred Brown's Martians, Go Home!
(1954) was a science fiction writer eagerly seeking material amidst the
invading Martians and fearful that distraction would slow the pulp mills.
Word-rates, the questioning of a curious society and what might conservatively
be called self-doubt put us on the cutting edge from the beginning.
Nonetheless, until the present issue, there was no attempt to bibliographicize
what is here called "recursive" and which I would prefer to term "decadent"
science fiction.  As ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the bibliographical
impulse may be said to pursue extrinsic reality at a certain cautious—but
fixated—distance.

It is possible that this self-referentiality is built into science fiction in a
way which is extant in no other form; our reality is science fiction, the very
process of entering Plato's Cave must be to make certain ragged connections
between the assumed and the observed, often to neither advantage.  But this is
all too deep for me, I would prefer the term "decadent science fiction" all
right and would rely upon that definition of decadence into which I stumbled in
The Engines of the Night (1982)... the point at which form overtakes function.

We see decadence all around us, of course—late-millennial angst and the workout
clinic, the fictions of Andy Warhol and the enacted passions of baseball
tycoons—but dear old science fiction, responding to certain hard jolts of
function and feedback denied most of the followers of John Gardner
(nanotechnology, the Challenger explosion, heat-seeking shields after all
exist, are other than speculative now) can be expected to avoid many, if not
most, of the traps of decadence.  In the meantime, this bibliography can be
seen as a laudable attempt to commemorate a stream in science fiction and
fantasy which, however important from the outset, have not been rigorously
aligned.  Perhaps there was some fear of this; we already had trouble being
regarded as relevant or sensible, further noting how the fantasist could turn
cheerfully or guiltily upon her own devices would only make us appear more
ridiculous to the hostile.  "Decadent" is the word.

I have committed more of these sins, in short or in longer form than any living
(or, for that matter, deceased) science fiction writer; the quality may not be
high nor the originality (Kurt Vonnegut, after all, was sending up the field
long before, read the famous Milford passage in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater;
remember that the collaborator in Slaughterhouse Five was named "Howard
Campbell") but as Francis Laney, Jr. might say, no one else has been "so damned
sincere".  In sincerity, I wonder where all of this is taking us, but note that
is probably will be my fate to never know.  God bless you, Mr. Rosewater.

August 1990, Teaneck, New Jersey

http://www.nesfa.org/Music_and_Drama/DecomposersPhotos.htm