Memorial Day III: The End of Science Fiction


 


One of the things I look forward to in a long road trip is choosing the books on tape to listen to. Gone are the ideas of 'I should really have this book under my belt ', 'Let me give this author a try', or 'this sounds intriguing': no, I just look for the thing that will give me the most blatant narrative pleasure to make the miles melt away. I've used up all the library's George MacDonald Fraser and P.G. Wodehouse that way, and, for this trip, continue to make dents in the Dorothy L. Sayers and Patrick O'Brien. I've tried things like Umberto Eco in the past, but depth and complexity are not what's required: what I want and need on a trip is storytelling that pulls me irresistibly along, and makes me laugh and fret and guess and feel and be rewarded in the end.

I'm a science fiction kid, and would just as soon load up on that, but its availability--both in general and at my library--is weirdly spotty: There's Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey, which are thin but allowable, but only a few works from their vast repertoire; Neil Stephenson--but only an edited version of Cryptonomicon; a whole pile of Lois McMaster Bujold, who I should like but who wears on me after a while; and the Auld Canon of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, all of which I've read more than once. And the rest seem random arrivals. So many trips have got to be done with little or no SF on tape at all.

This time it was Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, a short story collection. I have an affection for Neil, of the Local Boy Makes Good variety. It's great to see someone start out in comics and break through to wider fame and appreciation. He's done some stuff (Neverwhere for one) that would make me take my hat off to him if I had a hat.
The anthology was, by and large, a good time, if exasperating in places (Neil, Neil--if you have a world in which the Old Ones have been ruling openly for millennia, would there be a man named John Watson, let alone a Victorian London? You didn't even try to make that work!), and it was nice to see the incandescent R.A. Lafferty get some props.

But the collection got me to thinking. One of the Olympian judgments I'd made about Neil was that he's found a vein of powerful stuff and has never strayed all that far from it. How the gods inhabit and inform our modern everyday life--who could take issue with that?
Well, me, I realized. Where, for example, I asked rhetorically, was his science fiction stuff? Hah? Where? And while I deeply and sicerely felt this to be a flaw, it was a bit of a cheeky assumption: what rule was there that a fantasy writer, or a horror writer, had to also write science fiction?
Well the answer to that was not far away from home plate: if you were a comics writer, you were supposed to do it all: Green Lantern as well as Dracula, Adam Strange as well as Dr. Strange. (Not to mention the odd western or detective yarn.) That was how you earned your stripes, after all. No matter that you didn't want to or found your bliss pursuing one thing--the honor of the Guild's at stake, man!

That stopped me thinking simply about Neil's awful heresy and brought me to something I'd noticed about comics lately (and that my friend Peter Sanderson had remarked on): the influx of writers from (as my old ghetto mentality put it) more prestigious fields into comics. Movie people like J. Michael Straczynski! Joss Whedon! Kevin Smith! Mystery writers like Ed Brubaker! Best-seller thriller writers like Brad Meltzer! Boy, the big time is here at last!
But there was something I'd noticed in the distribution, that echoes in my brain after thinking about Gaiman's woeful insufficiency--where were the science fiction writers?
This wasn't an absolute thing: I had delighted in seeing Paul DiFilippo (a fave of mine) writing Alan Moore's Top Ten, for example. And David Brin had his Soul-Eaters graphic novel. And sure, Straczynski and Whedon do science fiction up on the screen--but where are the folks from the real edge? Where are the comics done by Rudy Rucker and Kim Stanley Robinson? Stephen Baxter and Kathleen Ann Goonan? Allen Steele and C.J. Cherryh?
Historically, comics and science fiction have always looked to each other--often comics looking up, and SF looking down, but still part of the same thing. Why is it, then, that, with comics companies inviting writers in from elsewhere, that county seems not to have been heard from?

As the miles rolled by, I began to come to the conclusion that there were two answers to this question: a structural one and a business one. (There's also trying to get inside the brains of editors and executives--but that's neither fruitful nor palatable to pursue.)

The structural one is based on the idea that while comics theoretically are beautifully suited for science fiction, the realities of corporate big-universe-continuity comics publishing make it a lot less of a perfect fit.
Historically, I think a great deal of the romance between SF and comics was husbanded by one man: Julie Schwartz. Julie was both a pioneer science fiction literary agent, and the editor of just about all the good stuff at DC in the Fifties and Sixties. Not only did DC at that time have heavy hitters like Edmond Hamilton and Alfred Bester writing for them, but there were things like the revived Green Lantern having a backstory that looked for the world like E.E. Doc Smith's Lensmen books, and the new Atom being named after a notoriously short SF editor. Julie's books were pointed directly at the world of prose science fiction, and were immensely better for it.
But this was at the very beginning of the worlds. Before Jule and Gardner Fox and John Broome started throwing up roof beams and supporting walls, all was chaos and without form. Continuity? Wuzzat?
And over at Marvel there was even less to start with. While Julie had to play nice with the other editors at DC and acknowledge the Superman/Batman primacy, at Marvel it was just Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko just stoking the furnaces and reinventing Science Fiction Adventure--but also Mythological Adventure and Occult Adventure--and high-school soap opera adventure. But that was just them.

This is not to compare the two, but to point out that both the Julie books and the Stan books could just build and build and build--and it was the stuff of science fiction that was charging up the all-purpose power tools. And there I was , along for the ride of my life, in love with science fiction and with comics both.
One very important historical note: People of the post-Star Wars generation have no idea what it was like to grow up in a world of Shitty-Looking Science Fiction on television and the theaters. The visual aspect of SF has always been important to the expansion of the imagination--and in those antediluvian days, all we got were little scraps and orts: you read an SF novel, and every hour or so, you closed it and look at the Kelly Freas cover again, because that was all you had. And in that world--so incomprehensible with fantastically elaborate movie and TV visuals everywhere--Gil Kane , Carmine Infantino and omg Jack the King did an immense amount for the way the SF world looked. They were important.

But at this stage of the game, when Marvel and DC are not a-building but complete vast and elaborate palaces, the very things that science fiction gave to the comics then makes things uncomfortable now. Because unlike mystery or horror or even fantasy, science fiction is always about the universe. De rerum naturae. The thing that makes SF something other than westerns in funny suits is that it toys with, explains, de-explains or changs something about the Big Backdrop. If it doesn't, it's not really SF. (and the fact that fantasy very often--not always--does the same thing is the deep and odd bond between it and SF). And the problem is, while most other brands of writers will take the givens and work to improve the details, stretch the characters and fumigate the dialogue, an SF writer will want to explain, reveal or change the universe in some way. Fans d'une certaine âge would just plain love to see a Larry Niven Avengers or a Harlan Ellison X-Men--but even while we're feeling all tingly from mere contemplation, we know for certain that they'd change all the settings on those suckers. And in a world where comics continuity decisions are corporate ones, there'd be problems.
And that's the structural problem: when you have a world, even if it contains alien races, sentient machines and time travel, that doesn't change, that doesn't reveal itself in astounding new ways, it ceases to become really science fiction and becomes something else--good things like adventure romance and delicious horror--just not that voodoo that Julie and Jack did so well.

There's another and more dismal aspect to this--one which I'm sadly convinced of, and that's the demise of science fiction--the true quill--in the corporate commons. It may just be that SF people aren't at the table because they're a more isolated, outsider group. And I'm not just maundering that things have gone to hell since the lovely days of my youth--I say this because if you go into Borders into the SF section, and remove the Big Fat Fantasies, the Media Tie-Ins, and the stuff more than twenty years old, you get very little indeed. I don't know whether it's the inevitable result of shrinking literacy, or the resistible result of media consolidation as the Big Media buy the SF publishers and gut them, or the sad truth that Don Wollheims are not born every day--but it is happening.

It may very well be that if Neil proposed that his next work be hard science fiction, he might get pushed away. I have no idea. And all this might be the accident of a few years, and not an inevitable sinking into doom. There's certainly no overriding cultural necessity to it.

But it is one of the things missing from contemporary comics in the main--the lack of the true crack the sky spirit that found wildly different but wildly related stuff that re-explained the universe to me many times a month.

Posted: Wednesday - June 06, 2007 at 04:34 PM        

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