A “dear genre” letter

Among the many terms for species branches, fields, categories, classes and sorts of literature as the
funny little expatriate "genre", easy to write, difficult to use, casually in debate because it keeps
coming out John, no matter I'm saying goodbye to it anyway even if though "once upon a time we
loved one another”, this farewell is part of another larger leave-taking like the invisible odorless and
debilitating attrition of carbon monoxide a pollutant, called categorization has attacked the corpus a
readership, tunnelling its vision, dulling its taste buds and doing ruinous things to its ability simply
to compare of what else is the recognition of good writing made fifty years ago the stalls were
heavy with magazines and books presenting fiction, just fiction.

The Saturday Evening Post and liberty and Colliers bought fiction about war and love and fantastic
worlds and cowboys and thieves there were all story and Argosy and red and yellow and golden
book. Yet further back the novels of for example HG Wells and his prehistory period were written
and reviewed at read simply as romances, in such a polluted atmosphere a writer could gain fame by
his excellence, just that. This insidious pollutant has lost us the ability to read randomly to pick up a
book because we have a thirst to read to say pressurized with anticipation "tell me a story".

Whole generations have grown up afflicted. Not long ago, I handed a magazine to a ten-year-old
boy pointed to a paragraph and said "this should interest you", he got his hands on it properly and
his nose aimed and then he asked "what is it about?", note he wanted the category before he put his
eyes in gear and he wanted from sources extraneous to the matter on the page.

I am NOT for a moment suggesting that all literature be merchandise in plain red brown wrappers
we have our individual tastes and preferences and capacities and the right to gratify them and
authors and publishers have the pleasant duty of sitting to us as to what they have for us and where
it may be found.

what I do object to is that inevitable side-effect of categorization the qualitative assignment that is
once you call it “a dog story" it becomes a kids book, detective and mystery novels are
automatically heart healing and pulpy science fiction and space is spaceships and zap guns and bad
writing about sex without sex westerns are Atwell westerns and finally and most unjustly that if it's
found in a paperback especially if it's a paperback original it is in some way beneath serious
attention or serious criticism.

This is not a brief for the second-rate an insight which came to me during a hot debate in which my
opponent stated that. 9000 I sick just said this so much better, this is about Sturgeon’s law.

The office of that medallion is a small percentage of every kind of fiction as well worth reading by
any including the very highest standards and there you have the core of this plea.

As a toddler I was taught to judge people by what's in their heads and what's in their hearts and
nothing else.

I think what my mother who was English had in mind was a striations of her early environment
matters of school of background a family and fortune in the series of shocks she had to undergo
before realizing the top rating in any or some or all of these categories was no guarantee of personal
worthiness; her ultimate codification was in his valid and can be extended to political convictions
race and the appearance of an author in a disdained field or in a paperback original.

My area familiarity happens to be science fiction latterly a dreadful mystery of which more below,
but I'm willing to make of it a clearer analogy of what has happened to all of us in our overview of
all literature we must if for no other reason than to keep from being cheated be prepared to
acknowledge the existence of that small signing shining percentage of true excellence everywhere
and to seek it out and greet it and without consideration of its clothes or it's bank account or whether
or not it's parents were married or if it worships your got your away.

Ensure it what's in its head and what's in its heart and the age of the category genre thrives the
reader of genre fiction knows as my ten-year-old put it what it's about he can call it by name and
settle down with it comfortably and get exactly what he paid for it what makes it what it is Western,
gothic, detective, whatever is its parameters it may extend east and west just so far north and south
just so many degrees up a bit and usually down not much your classic Western; for example is and
must be said in the last decades of the 19th century in the American Southwest and deal with the
events concerning or peripheral to the cattle trade any variations of these specifications will not
exactly ban a narrative but the extra fun involved is like the fun summoned up by declaring deuces
9s and one-eyed Jack's wild you can expect your sourah purist to kick the table over in a passion
and there is the one of the essential quarters in this cuttin of any genre.

Everybody knows what it is its detractors know and it's an inherent its adherents know and though
they may exchange insults and challenges they do not agree on what it is they are fighting about.

I beg your pardon... they do agree on what it is they're fighting about.

So we come to science fiction which is almost at one time as genre but it isn't now and it may
never have been, the confines, the frontiers of genre fiction, are imposed from without agreed upon
by all parties before they cross the border inbound.

It is in this country that the author wrings his changes dances, his Morrises mixes his metaphors,
science fiction on the one hand shapes its own corpus by internal pressures and there is only one
body of people which knows what it is the one which says "I never read science fiction" or even "I
don't like science fiction" and each and every one of these people is just plain wrong.

Science fiction is not a genre because it has not the basic characteristics of a genre a clearly defined
operating area it cannot therefore be treated as a genre most especially by people who say they don't
like it and continue to flock to the movies and bookstores to buy it, and they do buy it.

We are in the midst of a science-fiction boom and probably still on the rising side unhappily for
some of its practitioners however it seems to be most marketable when it isn't called science fiction
and when it is written by people who never appeared on the tables of contents of analog or galaxy
or the magazine of fantasy and science fiction.

Most readers and viewers of science fiction are as unaware of what they are purchasing as was
molière's a mature gentleman that he had been all his life speaking prose, Ezekiel was writing
science fiction when he saw that flying saucer illusion of Sam asada with his acara menopause,
Cyrano wrote it as did Rabelais, Voltaire, Samuel Butler and of course Swift.

A journalist named Richard Locke held the readers of the New York Sun enthralled we're
continuing a count of a super telescope invented by the contemporary astronomer Herschel by
which he could report on the doings of the inhabitants of the moon all going well until it was
revealed that well Herschel had not invented the telescope, Locke had invented the story.

Verne, Wells of course, in Poe, the DNA of all three is strongly evident in each cell of this wise
child.
I have a book out of scriveners edited by Harry Harrison called the light fantastic which contains
science fiction by Anthony Burgess Gerald curse Kingsley Amos who once mordant Leigh
described the general public's attitude toward science fiction thus “this is good, it can't be science
fiction” and “this is science fiction, it can't be good”.

Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Graves, Eby TM Forester, Leo Szilard,
John Cheever, Rudyard Kipling and CS Lewis Tennyson wrote it and so did Stephen Vincent Benet,
only poetry rivals science fiction in its ability to create and exploit alternatives without hindrance
and without horizons.

Laterally quite a few works which any one must call unabashed science fiction like 2001 and the
Andromeda Strain have cleared the top of the charts and Kurt Vonnegut jr. won't appear lesser but
before in between these dozens of popular and provocative books and films have been unbeknownst
to most of their enthusiastic audiences de-facto science fictio: Seven days in May, dr. Strangelove,
Lord of the Flies, the Fox in the Attic, Nabokov ADA, the poor house worm, 1984, the list is
endless, exactly what then is science fiction it would be nice to be able to present a clear-cut
definition and then it could be categorized and put in its proper place; but it won't be categorized
and it won't behave like a genre and it won't even be consistently defined.

Every year there's a major convention international in scope each one held in a different City and
occasionally in a different country in between times and concurrently for the benefits of those who
can't make it to the conventions original meetings and conferences together with an increasing
number of seminars, workshops, summer courses and the like at each of these gatherings large and
small sooner or later emerges the question of a definition of science fiction.

Always, there's intense argument, often there is fighting yet in spite of the fact that these clusterings
are composed of the most devout adherents to the field and the most skilled practitioners.

None has yet come up with a satisfactory definition each as rendered and I mean render like fat with
heat and smoke seems only to evoke exceptions most seem to be cast in lumpy and uncaged prose,
all of them leak the confusion extends to publishers.

So while aware of the boom are uncertain about how to present it here's a collection containing half
mainstream or non science fiction stories and the whole package is presented as science fiction.

Here's the swords and sorcery novel topping this month science fiction line, here is another novel
barring all the folds and walls of the science fiction ID which has quote science fiction mentioned
nowhere on the jacket or in the catalogue insert.

The publishers don't know what it is or what to say it is anymore to the to the readers and writers.
The real problem in this labeling age is semantics, science fiction is a first-order misnomer ,one or
two of jewell variants short stories and a few of the amazing stories of the 30s were written in order
to teach or at least to inform in the area of hard science and had explanatory footnotes about the
chemistry or physics or astronomy used in the narrative.

Excuse me, maybe that was real science fiction, perhaps it was the only real science fiction that ever
existed.

Far away, most of what preceded it and virtually all that has followed, however, has been quite
something else it was during this brief period, however, that it acquired the label and that label has
been an unnecessary burden to it ever since.
I would like to suggest that the difficulty lies not in the widespread misunderstanding of what
science fiction is but on a misapprehension of the truly basic nature of science itself.

Everybody knows what science is (right? isn't it a guy in a white coat holding a test tube
of delight?) let us go to Mr. randoms house for a definition:ç

science: noun

1 _ A branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged
and showing the operations of general laws as the mathematical sciences.
2_ Systematic knowledge of the physical or material world
3_ Systematized knowledge in general.
4_ Knowledge as a fact or principles, knowledge gained by systematic study
5_ A particular brand of knowledge
6_ Skill, proficiency from the Middle English and the Latin Sciantia. Knowledge.

Here we have 6 clauses, 4 which mentioned system as an essential and two of which imply it we
have heard the term scientific method.

So often the commanding scientific thinking so repeatedly that the cliche has become an axiom.
Systematics has everything to do with technology but is only one of many tools in the truly basic
area which is Scientia. Our knowledge think of science fiction, then as knowledge fiction.

One of the tools of the basic scientist is speculation and though it can embody system per se much
of it may be intuitive and not systematic in any way. We can as yet understand think of science
fiction, then, as speculative fiction.

Someone wants to hypothesize that there are only three types of science fiction, although all three
may appear in a single narrative:
what if…
if this goes on...
and if only…

The operator concept in each of these is that tiny, immense, no clear word: if.

Think of science fiction then as “if fiction”. The penalties of having this body of literature called
science fiction have been Grievous to the inhabitants of several levels of the literary planet.

A writer of genuine talent, who happens to have read the form early and is faithful to her is
ghettoized for it.

Often when he tries to break into what is called a mainstream, another label, worthy of an
inquisitive essay finds that he has his fidelity forced upon him. The publisher turns him down and
wants more science fiction. I have known a writer of science fiction willing to do a mainstream
novel under a pseudonym and again be refused by a publisher who contrarily just might want to use
the writers reputation and awards in science fiction to help sell the book.

More astonishing than any product of a science fiction writers imagination is a simple fact that so
few of them arecertifiably paranoid numerically the greatest loser to this strange mistrust of the
label is the general reading public for while the science fiction not written by science fiction writers
has always had and is gaining its readership.
These works are usually structured around concepts born in the 30s and 40s and long ago
superannuated within the field. What is now happening within the field is simply extraordinary,
not only are new and exciting writers emerging like tumbleweeds, where their work is original,
pertinent, relevant, leavened and alive, caution: Sturges’s law applies still.

Yet, it is a true point why this ghettoization, this mistrust, at first blush the horrible examples of
sloppy writing and stupid horror movies seem to suffice but they don't. There is no other fields so
subject to taint by its own worst examples.

Editors and readers who are reflexively competent to discriminate between Mickey Spillane and
Graham Greene or Hopalong Cassidy in the Red Pony, seem utterly unaware of the skill, the care,
the ingenuity and the profundity of the better science fiction writers and consigned the whole field
to the 20th century wrapped up in a brightly colored comic book.

Why should this be? I think I have an answer here: Robin Scott Wilson, author and essayist
professor of English, an originator of the workshop at Clarion College quote

“One can see that modern science fiction poses a peculiar dilemma on the one hand, however,
remotely science is a tremendous influence on the quality of all of our lives, on the other, it has
penetrated ever more deeply into a temple of abstractions, whose mysteries are not understandable
to very many people.

We are being moved by forces we no longer comprehend science, which bit fair to unlock the
mysteries of the universe has itself come to constitute a mystery.

Our very nearly equal of security technology, the means the man has employed to deal with a
hostile nature has itself produced a new environment in many ways far more hostile. Something
there is that threatens us grievous, bodily harm, that promises health and longevity that leads to
technologies which poison our air, our water, our mother's milk. That is virtually eliminated
poliomyelitis, that invents cyclamates and then tells us there are carcinogens. We don't understand
what it is and it worries us that's” end quote.

There is one force driving us which at least equals the pressure of sex and that is the urge to
worship.

Take away our churches and we will worship a baseball player further we will then persistently use
his nickname. Back in the days of Rabelais, in an age of faith, it was a hip thing to tell risky stories
about priests and nuns and it's defiant reversal. Clearly an affirmation of the act of worship.

The impact of Freud on the world has its fall out of jokes about kooky psychiatrists, again an
affirmation.

Look again at professor Wilson's paragraph: Have you ever seen a more looser description of a
primitive, unpredictable, understandable, implacable deity? Do we worship science?

You can bet your holy tithe we do and do we jump at the chance of scoring something with science
as part of its name. I submit to you that this is the source of the effort to make of science fiction a
kind of hobby box for retards genre which rather frighteningly. It simply refuses to be.

I do believe that with any other name extrapolated or speculative or knowledge fiction it would not
have been so snobbishly. Savage Sabol II treated.
I will grant you for the third time that most of what is published in science fiction is inexcusable
trash, that's for the rest of it, well, the highest tribute I have ever heard paid to a writer, lies on the
words of a young lady who said: “I knew halfway through the second paragraph that I was in good
hands”.

Science fiction has produced many a pair of such hands and I genuinely envy those who have yet to
encounter them the experience which awaits, oh, just wait till you first incounter A. Lafferty, a
totally uncontrollable Irishman, so intoxicated by words and their magic and their taste and texture
and cadence that I do believe you could read them aloud to somebody who knows no English and
enchant him with sound.

Roger Zelazny who dares to place an arrogant poet as an essential member of a Mars expedition and
have him use Ecclesiastes to establish cultural contact and there's Robert Silverberg for years a
completely competent writer who in the past - seems to evolved it into a new order of magnitude or
D G Compton whose characters like yours can never be completely understood or Joanna Russ who
is not afraid of womanís or loving.

I am reminded of Sherwin Anderson's description of the quality he calls “Tandy”, Tandy is the
power to be strong, to be loved and as JG Ballard who clearly feels that there's more room and inner
space in an outer space and presents unique and subjective realities and, and, and.

Sex has at long last taken its place in the field and is, I think much less often abused in science
fiction than else where.

As to what's coming I could hardly do you a greater favor then to suggest that you get from Signet
Robin, Scott Wilson's Clarion and anthology of new writings from participants in his Clarion
College workshop, Plus essays by the staff and visiting actors so farewell to science fiction as genre
and to the larger chore of defining the field.

I sincerely hope that this is the last time I shall ever feel it necessary to try. I shall acknowledge with
writer editor anthologies Damon Knight that we are stuck with the misnomer and that quote it will
do this no particular harm if we remember that science fiction means what we are pointing to when
we say it.