The Stars My Consternation

Gregory Benford from the August/September 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Perhaps this comes in part because there are few feedback loops carrying information-dense dialogue. The media tie-ins have their Star Trek conventions, but they are isolated from the larger s.f. genre discussion. Further, there is a curious mismatch between the reviewing media and the reading public. One would expect an efficient market to shape book reviewing to the great strengths of contemporary America: many genres, from the hard-boiled detective to cutting-edge s.f. and techno-thrillers, on to wispy, traditional fantasy. Yet s.f. particularly is seldom noticed outside its own few magazines, except when Hollywood steals its innovations, often without credit.

In the end, Disch seems saddened because the energy of the New Wave, just breaking when he entered the field in the 1960s, hissed away into the sands of time. But the legacy of his generation is deeper, upping the stakes in the genre's perpetual battle between conventional literature's subtle, stylish stamina versus s.f.'s blunt, intellectual energies. True, Disch's fellow New Wave marchers--Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard--have largely dug in and fallen silent, but the advance of hard s.f. after them used weaponry they had devised. From Clement's beginning, hard s.f. has fashioned a whole armament of methods; mainstream mavens like Tom Clancy, and savvy insiders like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, have used some of them to carve out rich provinces of their own.

On some issues Disch closes ranks with virtually all other s.f. writers. He deplores the recent razoring of literature by critics--the tribes of structuralists, postmodernists, deconstructionists. To many s.f. writers, "postmodern" is simply a signature of exhaustion. Its typical apparatus--self-reference, heavy dollops of obligatory irony, self-conscious use of older genre devices, pastiche and parody--betrays lack of invention, of the crucial coin of s.f.: imagination. (Philip K. Dick's identity anxieties resonate with postmodernists, though, so there is some overlap.)

Some deconstructionists have attacked science itself as mere rhetoric, not an ordering of nature, seeking to reduce it to the status of the ultimately arbitrary humanities. Most s.f. types find this attack on empiricism a worn old song with new lyrics, quite retro.

At the core of s.f. lies the experience of science. This makes the genre finally hostile to such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical ground. Deconstructionism's stress on contradictory or self-contained internal differences in texts, rather than their link to reality, often merely leads to a literature of empty word games.

S.f. novels give us worlds which are not to be taken as metaphors, but as real. We are asked to participate in wrenchingly strange events, not merely watch them for clues to what they're really talking about. S.f. pursues a "realism of the future" and so does not take its surrealism neat, unlike much avant-garde work which is easily confused with it. The social-realist followers of James have yet to fathom this. The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: Life isn't like that, it is this.

The best journeys can go to fresh places, not merely return us to ourselves. Despite Disch's sad eulogy for the genre's past, which he considers its high point, I suspect there are great trips yet to be taken. But they will require courage.