The Stars My Consternation

Gregory Benford from the August/September 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

He views this most persistent of TV shows from a fashion angle: actors in pajamas. Their starship looks much like an office from the inside, with crew in look-alike uniforms: "[T]he same parables of success-through-team-effort that can be found on such later workplace-centered sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Designing Women."

Trek was thus the prophet of the politically correct multicultural future just ahead of us, with workplace equality conspicuously displayed. Disch wrings much humor from this insight, yet surely the crucial nature of both Star Trek and Star Wars lies in their invocation of family. The strangeness of outer-space futures had before been so daunting for audiences that typically it is the backdrop of neo-Freudian horror (the Alien series, etc.). Yet even here the chilly landscape of the scientific world- view is reduced to the conventional: vampires in space; dripping goo; aliens capable only of hostile rage.

Star Trek's insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places. That is why the cultures they encountered proved so boring: "Blandness and repetition can be comforting, and comfort is a major desideratum in bedtime stories." Alas, the genre set out to do more than rock us to sleep.

The market now mirrors Disch's withering analysis. Despite his assertion that "three or four slots on the best-seller lists are occupied by SF titles," in fact their occupants are fantasy tomes, media tie-ins, and Michael Crichton clones, not actual s.f. at all. Only one true s.f. novel I can recall from the 1990s made the lists for long, Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, a media-driven sequel to a sequel to a sequel.

Indeed, Disch believes that once space travel, s.f.'s grand metaphor, proved to mean long voyages to inhospitable places, the genre reverted to fantasy-like motifs. There is truth in this, both in the rise of genre fantasy in books (now plagued with a numbing sameness and endless trilogies) and in the ascendance of Joseph Campbell (savant of the mythic archetype theory of storytelling, as used by George Lucas in Star Wars) over John W. Campbell (tough-minded editor of Astounding magazine, the font of s.f.'s Golden Age, yet also the crucible of Scientology and crank ideas like the infamous Dean Drive).

This retreat from an observable fact--that the real moon is indeed a harsh mistress--signals, to Disch, the end of s.f.'s best days. He scorns the Heinlein-Pournelle wing of hard s.f. ("Space is like Texas, only larger"), not distinguishing between libertarian and conservative elements. Disch's own politics are not easily unfolded from his novels, but he does dislike militarism and seems to view with pleasure a benevolent state run by people much like himself.

Still, the rigor of s.f.'s ongoing internal discussions appeals to him, and he nods approvingly at the "Killer Bs"--Greg Bear, David Brin, myself. He confesses a fondness for that seminal work of strict physical exploration, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity (1954). Conceptual adventures without a political agenda, as with Arthur Clarke, refresh him.

Certainly, "hardness" in the sense of scrupulous concern for the facts and methods of science remains for Disch and many others the core of the field and its always hopeful promise. Hardness has been appropriated by some for politically hard-nosed analysis, often with a libertarian bias, sometimes even with a conservative one--this last a seeming contradiction, given that this is a "literature of change."

Hal Clement's world-building took us to far exotica, to meet the strange face to face. Indeed, aliens are the most pointed s.f. motif. "If God can't be coerced into breaking his silence, at least he can send emissaries," is Disch's neat compression of science's failure to reveal the holy, and s.f.'s literary attempt to find it metaphorically in the alien. Aliens are only passingly interesting to see; what one wants to do is talk to them, sense the strangeness of another mind.

Yet this is not the focus of the movies and TV, which have turned s.f.'s aliens into horror shows or neat parables. "Screenwriters do not have the luxury that novelists enjoy of taking the time to explain things, to pose riddles and work them out, to think," writes Disch. "Such bemusements can be the glory of s.f. (as of the deductive mystery, another genre poorly served by film)," but we see it seldom in the torrent of special effects pouring from our screens.

In the late 1990s we have entered an era when special effects can show us just about anything, sometimes at surprisingly little cost. This could liberate s.f. from the standard by which it is increasingly judged: the visual. The trick is to combine ever-bigger spectacles with real thinking, historically a tough job.

I believe this to be the great challenge to the genre: to use its insights and methods to reach the huge potential audience with more than simple bangs. The western made such a transition in the 1950s, producing its finest works (High Noon, The Searchers, Shane) before running out of conceptual gas.

Written s.f. may have lesser prospects. Media tie-in work fills a (thankfully) separate section of the s.f. division in the larger bookstores. In the rising tide of media spinoff novels and "sharecropping" of imaginative territories pioneered by early greats, Disch sees the genre's probable fate: "more of the same and more of the sameness."

Need this be so? I find the quantity of well-written s.f. has never been higher, counter-balancing the media tie-in clones. This goes little noticed in the windy passageways of the literary castles, for the division of that Wells-James debate persists.

The media-tied series books typically sell less well with time, unlike creative series (mystery writer Sue Grafton's, historical novelist Patrick O'Brien's), whose readership tends to increase. This opposite gradient suggests conceptual exhaustion, the market not refertilizing. Thus are genres depleted and cast aside, as was the western.