Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

However, these particular differences should not make us wonder. American science fiction descends from the pulps; English science fiction had as its father, not Hugo Gernsback, about whom nobody outside of U.S. science fiction knows a thing, but H. G. Wells. What else? American science fiction worked itself up from the gutter of literature (though it could not fly into the sky); English science fiction has Americanized itself partly for commercial reasons, and partly has stepped into Wells’s shoes, something that should not be taken as praiseworthy. The “classical” successor to Wells, John Wyndham, worked like a huckster, seeking to supplement the work of the master and teacher by filling what was, in his eyes, a gap. But even as anyone who paints like Van Gogh today cannot become a Van Gogh, so Wyndham did not add anything major to Wells’s work. Wells worked according to the known principle of escalation, so that in The War of the Worlds, earth is attacked only by the Martians; but in Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, the author does not think it sufficient to let all mankind go blind — he foists poisonous plants upon it; but because those plants do not seem dangerous enough, he adds the gift of active motion as spice.

After all, there are two distinct traditions in science fiction: the English, with the better manners and customs of the Upper Realm, and the American, which has lived from its beginnings in the slums of the Lower Realm, this slave market, which has no overabundance of courtly manners. Also, the language of English science fiction has always been more cultivated.

Seen in isolation, a number of the traits of trivial literature, as described above, are quite unimportant. However, when added up, they form an ordered structure of the environment in which science fiction is born and gains a scanty living. These traits are clues, pointing out how in different ways the status of a work of literature is determined; it depends upon whether it is born in the Upper or Lower Realm.

Thus science-fiction works belong to the Lower Realm — to trivial literature. Thus sociocultural analysis finally solves the problem. Thus words said about it are wasted; the trial can be closed with a sigh of relief.

But this is not so. Without a doubt there is a difference between science fiction and all the neighboring, often closely related, types of trivial literature. It is a whore, but a quite bashful one at that; moreover, a whore with an angel face. It prostitutes itself, but, like Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova, with discomfort, disgust, and contrary to its dreams and hopes.

True, science fiction is often a liar. It wants to be taken for something else, something different from what is really is. It lives in perpetual self-deception. It repeats its attempts to disguise itself. Has it got the shadow of a right to do so?

Many famous science-fiction authors are trying to pass for something better than their fellow writers — the authors of such trivial literature as crime novels or Westerns. These pretensions are often spoken out loud. Moreover, in the prefaces to their books, embarrassing praise is given to the authors by the authors themselves. For instance, Heinlein often emphasized that science fiction (that is, his own science fiction) was not only equal to, but also far better than mainstream literature, because writing science fiction is more difficult. Such pretensions cannot be found in the rest of the field of trivial literature.

This does not mean that there is no standard of quality for crime novels. Here, too, we distinguish bad, boring novels and original, fascinating ones. We can speak of a first-rate crime novel — but it does not occur to anybody to consider such a hit as equal to the masterpieces of literature. In its own class, in the Lower Realm, it may be a real diamond. When in fact a book does cross the borders of the genre, it is no longer called a crime novel, just as with a novel by Dostoevsky.

The best science-fiction novels want to smuggle themselves into the Upper Realm — but in 99.9 percent of cases, they do not succeed. The best authors behave like schizophrenics; they want to — and at the same time they do not want to — belong to the Realm of Science Fiction. They care a lot about the prizes given by the science-fiction ghetto. At the same time, they want their books to be published by those publishing houses that do not publish science fiction (so that one cannot see from the book jackets that their books are science-fiction books). On the other hand, they feel tied to fandom, write for fanzines, answer the questions of their interviewers, and take part in science-fiction conventions. On the other hand, publicly, they try to stress that they “do not really” write science fiction; they would write “better and more intellectual books” if only they did not have to bear so much pressure from the publishers and science-fiction magazines; they are thinking of moving into mainstream literature (Aldiss, Ballard, and several others).

Do they have any objective reasons for surrendering to frustration and feelings of oppression in the science-fiction ghetto? Crime novels are another, an open-and-shut, case. Naturally, a crime novel reports on murders, detectives, corpses, and trials; Westerns, on stalwart cowboys and insidious Indians. However, if we may believe its claims, a science-fiction book belongs at the top of world literature! For it reports on mankind’s destiny, on the meaning of life in the cosmos, on the rise and fall of thousand-year-old civilizations: it brings forth a deluge of answers for the key questions of every reasoning being.

There is only one snag: in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it fulfills its task with stupidity. It always promises too much, and it almost never keeps its word.

For this reason, science fiction is such a remarkable phenomenon. It comes from a whorehouse but it wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored. From the time it was born, science fiction has been raised by narrow-minded slaveholders. Thomas Mann was allowed to work on one novel for fourteen years; John Brunner complains that there was a time when he had to write eight novels a year in order to stay alive comfortably. From shame, science fiction tries to keep some sides of this situation a well-guarded secret. (Often we hear from science-fiction authors how much freedom they enjoy in their work.)

Science fiction is subject to the rigid economic laws of supply and demand. It has not completely adapted itself to the “editor’s milieu,” meaning that there are recipes on how to write a science-fiction work that appeals to a certain editor and gains his appreciation (for instance, the late John W. Campbell, Jr., was an authoritative man who published only a certain easily definable kind of science fiction, and some authors knew how to foresee his demands). In Geis’s Science Fiction Review, Perry A. Chapdelaine gives us a detailed account of how he was carefully briefed by well-known science-fiction authors when he wrote his first novel. Special care was taken to include those qualities that maximize sales; no mention was made of the immanent quality of the work itself. Often the same is the case in the Upper Realm — but only for beginners. However, science-fiction authors remain minors in the eyes of their publishers — all their lives. Such circumstances breed frustration and compensatory behavior. Indeed, the same sort of thing abounds in the science-fiction ghetto. All these compensatory phenomena, taken together, clearly have the character of mimicry.

(a)

In the science-fiction ghetto there is no lack of makeshift and ersatz institutions which exist side by side with those of the Upper Realm. The Upper Realm has the Nobel Prize and other world-famous literary awards. The science-fiction ghetto has the Hugo and Nebula awards; and American science fiction poses (still) as “world” science fiction, as can be seen from anthology titles such as The World’s Best S/F.