Introduction to "The Secret History of Science Fiction"

[zakk]

The novel of ideas. The novel of manners. The novel of grim witness. The novel of pure dreaming. The novel of excess. The novel of unreadability. The comic novel. The romance novel. The epistolary novel. The promising first novel. The sad, patchwork, grave-robbing, over-my-dead-body posthumous novel. The suspense novel. The crime novel. The experimental novel. The historical novel. The novel of eticulous observations. The novel of marital revenge. The beach novel. The war novel. The antiwar novel. The postwar novel. The out-of-print novel. The novel that sells to the movies before it is written. The novel that critics like to say they want to throw across the room. The science fiction novel. The metafiction novel. The death of the novel. The novel that changes your life because you are young and open-hearted and eager to take an existential leap.

—Don DeLillo


Realistic fiction leaves out far, far too much. How old is realistic fiction? How old is fantasy?

—Gene Wolfe


Introduction to "The Secret History of Science Fiction"
James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel



  1. "Angouleme" by Thomas M. Disch
  2. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
  3. "Ladies and gentlemen, This is Your Crisis: by Kate Wilhelm
  4. "Descent of Man" by T.C. Boyle
  5. "Human Moments in World War III" by Don DeLillo
  6. "Homelanding" by Margaret Atwood
  7. "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Carter Scholz
  8. "Interlocking Pieces" by Molly Gloss
  9. "Salvador" by Lucius Shepard
 10. "Schwarzschild Radius" by Connie Willis
 11. "Buddha Nostril Bird" by John Kessel
 12. "The Ziggurat" by Gene Wolfe
 13. "The Hardened Criminals" by Jonathan Lethem
 14. "Standing Room Only" by Karen Joy Fowler
 15. "1016 to 1" by James Patrick Kelly
 16. "93990" by George Saunders
 17. "The Martian Agent, A planetary Romance" by Michael Chabon
 18. "Frankenstein's Daughter" by Maureen F. McHugh
 19. "The Wizard of West Orange" by Steven Millhauser


In 1998, the Village Voice published an essay by Jonathan Lethem titled "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction" which begins with an alternative history in which Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was voted the 1973 Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In fact, though Pynchon's landmark work of postmodern fiction was indeed nominated for the Nebula that year, the award went to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Lethem called this moment "a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream."

Lethem was not the first to regret the failed rapprochement of sf and what we will call mainstream fiction; similar comments have been made by writers from Harlan Ellison to Thomas Disch to Samuel Delany to Barry Malzberg to Carter Scholz (Scholz's 1984 essay "Inside the Ghetto, and Out" was quoted by Lethem in his Voice piece). Lethem's essay was reprinted in The New York Review of Science Fiction and aroused a number of responses from within the sf field, notably a well considered piece by Ray Davis in that same magazine. Davis pointed out a number of ways that Lethem was rhetorically unfair to the sf genre and its writers [1].

Lethem was writing in the late 1990s, after two decades of hugely successful films by Spielberg and Lucas and Cameron had cemented the genre's association in the popular mind with explosions, special effects, aliens, and adventure stories. He was writing about a moment in sf's history, however, in the early 1970s, at the end of a decade of writers attempting to claim for sf the mantle of art, for whom the benchmark sf films were Stanley Kubrick's most recent efforts, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. In 1973 it seemed possible that sf might be understood as a form of fiction that could be written by adults, for adults.

We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early '70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.

This is the secret history of science fiction.


[1] Readers interested in the details of these arguments would do well to check them out: www.verysilly.org/lethem/lethems_vision.html and Davis's response at www.pseudopodium.org/kokonino/jlvls.html. An email exchange between Davis and Lethem, also reprinted in the NYRSF is available at http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/shorts/Davis_and_Lethem-Mistakes_Were_Made.html.

[zakk]

The Less Secret History

At a lecture in 1970, one of the editors of this volume heard noted sf writer Theodore Sturgeon compare the history of science fiction to the handle of a suitcase. Like the handle of a suitcase, Sturgeon said, sf had emerged from the body of literature in general, and like the handle, would eventually merge back into it.

The term "science fiction" did not exist until the 1930s. It arose out of the pulp magazines. The first successful all-sf pulp was Hugo Gernsbacks Amazing Stories, begun in 1926. But sf existed as a widely published form of fiction before Gernsback, much of it written by writers of stature. In fact, in its early years, Amazing reprinted all of H. G. Wells's scientific romances, Jules Verne's extraordinary voyages, as well as many stories by Poe. Brian Aldiss identifies the first sf novel as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. H. Bruce Franklin has made a convincing case that every major American fiction writer of the nineteenth century, from Hawthorne through Melville to Twain, wrote stories that we would today call science fiction.

Greenback's consolidation of sf into a pulp genre created a new culture and ad hoc critical standards for sf. Before then, each writer had to invent the genre for himself. After Gernsback, and especially after John W. Campbell and the rise of a critical fan community, arguments about the definitions of sf, what constituted good and bad sf, plausibility, techniques, specialty publishers, conventions, and call-and-response threads of stories all became hallmarks of the genre. When Mark Twain sat down to write his time travel novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, he did not have to reckon with the history of such stories. By 1955, within the sf magazines, such a story would have to pass muster with an active community of demanding editors, such as Campbell, H. L. Gold, or Anthony Boucher, astute critics like James Blish and Damon Knight, and fanatical readers who would have read pretty much every time travel yarn ever written. Over a forty-year period a sense of the sf genre developed. Davis suggests this community can be defined by "loose overlapping bundles of marketing techniques (including bookstore placement and publishing imprints), critical communities (including journalistic and awards systems) and interwriterly influence (including career path options and the impetus of 'I can go that one better' challenges)." All of this ghetto culture arose and solidified outside of mainstream canons and notice.

It also led to inbreeding. John Clute has described "hard" science fiction as "an idiom which treats the world as a problem to be solved, for gain." Now it is true that even during the height of the so-called "Golden Age" of the pulps there was sf that was not Campbellian (which treated the world, for instance, as a site for escapist adventure), but the canons of what constituted "good" sf were dominated, within the ghetto, by such formulations as rigorous extrapolation, scientific accuracy, plain-spoken prose, reliable narrators, clear-cut villains and heroes, definite conclusions, a positive attitude toward the future, and a belief in the rationality of the universe.

Even in the 40s and '50s, adherence to this consensus was far from universal. In the 1960s came New Wave science fiction, first in the U.K. and later in the U.S., written by a new generation of writers who brought the methods and materials of literary modernism to sf (John Brunner adapted Dos Passos, Brian Aldiss was influenced by Joyce). Members of this generation were as likely to have been English majors as engineers. The first scholarly journals, Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies, began. Damon Knight founded the Milford and Clarion workshops and the Science Fiction Writers of America, which at least at its beginning was interested as much in improving the quality of written sf as in representing sf writers as a trade organization.

So by the early 1970s, Gravity's Rainbow could, in the light of the New Wave, be seen as science fiction (it is fiction in which science — ballistics, statistics — and technology — the V2 rocket — play important roles), even if it is not extrapolative future fiction, and does not provide an adventure story, an admirable hero, or a clear-cut resolution. By the standards built up within the pulp tradition, it doesn't look much like sf, but by 1970 those standards were being challenged, if not yet overthrown, within the sf ghetto.


Distinctions without a Difference?

Lethem's polemical alternative vision of the Science Fiction Writers of America embracing Gravity's Rainbow while kicking Rendezvous with Rama to the curb is farfetched but at least possible. However he goes on to imagine an aftermath which serves up hyperbole as breathtaking as that in Swift's "A Modest Proposal." By making common cause with Pynchon and later with Don DeLillo, who published Ratner's Star in 1976, science fiction might have begun the process of decertifying itself as a genre. As Lethem puts it, "the notion of science fiction ought to have been gently and lovingly dismantled, and the writers dispersed." As it turned out, there was no consensus on either side — mainstream or science fiction — for ending the Cold War between the genres. Pynchon's hypothetical Nebula would have been an anomaly, not a turning point. In the light of the overwhelming influence of Star Trek, of Star Wars, and of E.T., it is hard to see how Lethem's vision might have come to pass.

In the years since, however, a vocal minority in science fiction has continued to advocate for writing and reading across the divide. They include some of the genre's strongest writers, whose work has garnered recognition all out of proportion to their numbers. Those who have succeeded in finding a wider readership — or worse, crossing over to publication in the mainstream — are viewed in some quarters with suspicion. Conservative fans of the genre regard them as a kind of literary carpetbagger, their work as a betrayal of sacred traditions. Call them the literary wing of science fiction, or as the critic and writer Orson Scott Card had it — punning on the term sci-fi— "li-fi writers."

At the same time, writers who have come to prominence in the mainstream have regularly ventured into what has been considered genre territory. Their work has often been greeted with bemusement or, on occasion, hostility. Certain mainstream critics, smug in their assumptions of what science fiction must be, have twisted themselves into knots to avoid endorsing the genre enterprise.

For instance, in a generally favorable 1981 New York Times review of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, Robert Alter recapitulates a plot involving galactic empires and then wonders, "Is all this, strictly speaking, science fiction?" Eventually, he decides it must be something completely different:

Let me suggest that the genre to which this kind of writing most directly belongs is what Northrop Frye has called the "anatomy" — a kind of fiction, as Frye notes, that is "a combination of fantasy and morality" and that "presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern." The most familiar instance of the anatomy for English readers, and one particularly apposite to Doris Lessing's project, is Gulliver's Travels. The fantastic assumptions of Swift's narrative are an elaborate game of perspectives, exploited, quite obviously but also quite brilliantly, to magnify and expose the pettiness, the savagery, the silliness, the brutality of our supposedly civilized lives.

It is hard to read such a passage without concluding it is an example of either ignorance or bad faith. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of science fiction can cite innumerable works that share literary DNA with Gulliver's Travels, using the perspective of extrapolated futures to examine our supposedly civilized lives. One might as well attempt to separate science fiction writers from non-science fiction writers by how often their work has appeared in The New Yorker.[2]

What all such attempts to evade the term "science fiction" share is the desire to separate the mainstream from the history of sf in the pulps. And it is undeniable that over the last forty years, increasing numbers of writers who have no career connections to the sf culture, and no knowledge of or connection to genre sf standards, have written fiction that, by the looser definition of the New Wave, or of the pre-Gernsbackian world before there was "science fiction," fits some definition of the term.

At short lengths this is a little less evident than at longer ones. Such novels as Fiskadoro, The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica, Ratner's Star, The Handmaid's Tale, Galatea 2.2, The Brief History of the Dead, Oryx and Crake, The Sparrow, Riddley Walker, The Road, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Slaughterhouse 5, Galapagos, Shikasta, Never Let Me Go, Cloud Atlas, and a dozen others, all recognizably use materials or conventions commonly associated with science fiction.

Because these writers are in many cases blissfully ignorant of sf culture, or their publishers allergic to the label, and for better or worse (and there are disadvantages as well as advantages) free of its constraints, their science fiction sometimes resembles slipstream [3] or magic realism or surrealism or metafiction more than it does sf.


[2] Which, of course, has been done. By this standard the mainstream fiction writers in this anthology are DeLillo, Millhauser, Chabon, Boyle, Lethem, Le Guin, Atwood, and Saunders, all of whom have appeared in The New Yorker more than once. The sf writers are Gloss, Scholz, Wilhelm, McHugh, Disch, Shepard, Willis, Fowler, Kelly, and Kessel, none of whom have ever been published there.

And then there's Gene Wolfe. As far as we can tell, Wolfe, aside from Ursula Le Guin, the most prolific and respected of the "genre" writers represented here, has had one story ("On the Train," 1983) appear in The New Yorker.

[3] See "Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology", eds. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

[zakk]

On the Uselessness of the Term Genre

But it seems to us that the divide between the mainstream and science fiction is more apparent than real. At its foundation is the problem of defining a genre, any genre. The word means too much, and many of its meanings are at odds with one another. When some use it as a term of commerce, others hear it as a term of art. Is it defined by form, style, or subject matter? Or perhaps by all three? Is it the vision in the mind of the writer as his fingers curl over the keyboard, a specific page in a publisher's spring catalog, or the expectation of the reader as she reads the first sentence of a new story? If science fiction is a genre, is not the mainstream also a genre, if only as defined by its negatives? Might it not be said that mainstream is that genre which does not feature aliens, vampires, cowboys, detectives, or romantic heroines? Unless it does.

The problem of defining science fiction is one which its community of readers and writers has struggled with for the last fifty years. There is a website — there is always a website — which lists fifty different definitions of the genre as proposed by some of its most accomplished writers and astute critics. None are completely satisfactory. In fact, one of the best minds science fiction has ever produced, Damon Knight, famously threw up his hands in resignation over the project and wrote, "Science fiction is what we point to when we say it." This is particularly appropriate given science fiction's current state. The territory of the genre has grown as its borders with neighboring genres — including the mainstream — have become more permeable. It is large and contains such multitudes as would have truly astounded those writers who wrote for Astounding back in the 40s and '50s. If those who struggle within its perceived but ineffable constraints can't agree on what it means, then how is it that those who know it only by reputation write with certainty about what it can and cannot accomplish?

In the same way, it is difficult to imagine how one might define the sprawl that is the mainstream genre. And who would dare to draw a boundary line between its two principle subgenres, the literary and the popular novel? It strikes us that we would all be better served to invoke the Knight exception and rely on ad hoc definitions of the mainstream, rather than build elaborate critical structures on the shifting sands of the publishing industry.

For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.


What We Point to When We Say Science Fiction

The title of this book says "science fiction." So, given our uneasiness about the strictures of genre, in what ways are the stories in this book science fiction?

One standard that has been frequently used to separate mainstream fiction from science fiction is to point to the degree to which the story in question is invested in the examination of individual characters. Wells asserted that "To show how peculiar things struck peculiar people is one peculiarity too many" in order to argue that sf is not fundamentally about character. Many a mainstream critic has agreed with him, with the assumption that "peculiar" (in the sense of individual, unique) character is the center of all literature, and that therefore science fiction is not literature.

But Wells's assertion was never universally true, even about his own fiction. In the last forty years much science fiction has turned to the exploration of

character. In this anthology you will find many stories that spend as much time on the people as they do on the premise, that use the sf background as a means to explore human beings who are as individual as any in realistic fiction. Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" turns the intrusion of female time travelers from the future into a psychological study of a lone-wolf male, his troubles with women, issues of masculinity, violence, self-doubt, and self-definition. In this nest of uncertainties, what is really happening? Millhauser, Kelly, Fowler, Willis, McHugh, and Disch's stories are not so much about technology or the future as about the people whose lives are caught up in the anxieties arising from a fantastic premise, and attempts to cope with their existential situations.

The flip side of assertions about science fiction's disregard of character is the assertion that sf is idea fiction. And this is true, for much sf. Here, again, there has been a merging, this time with the mainstream moving toward the genre. In the last thirty years postmodern fiction has challenged the centrality of characterization to literature. A postmodernist doesn't care about characters; William Gass in Fiction and the Figures of Life says characters are just black marks on paper. What is important is the game, the satirical effect, the philosophical speculation, the disruption of expectations, the beauty of the result.

So T. C. Boyle's "Descent of Man" plays absurd games with Jane Goodall's studies of primates, and George Saunders' "93990" adopts the dispassion of a scientific report to make a telling point about the inhumanity of human beings. Don DeLillo uses a space station and World War III as setting, but not subject, creating an almost love story out of the language of technology. The stories by Le Guin, Lethem, Scholz, Kessel, and Atwood likewise are not predicated on exploration of character, but instead use sf to explore ideas, make social comments, or play games.

Other modes of writing sf:

The use of the sf premise as a metaphor. In Pynchon's novel, "gravity's rainbow" is the parabola described by a V2 rocket as it is launched in Germany and arcs through the atmosphere to London. This parabolic quality is often present in sf, even in Golden Age sf— but it is increasingly evident in literary sf. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" uses the sf background to tell a political parable. Connie Willis's "Schwarzschild Radius" uses the physics of black holes as a metaphor for the isolation of men trapped in war, drawn inexorably toward their deaths. Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" literalizes the title's cliche to create a background for the exploration of a son's relationship to his father.

Metafictionalgames: Carter Scholz's "The Nine Billion Names of God" borrows Arthur C. Clarke's most famous story to mock the possibility of stable linguistic meaning. Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" playfully looks over its shoulder at pulp icons, using them self-consciously for his own purposes.

Realism of the future: "Angouleme" by Thomas Disch and "Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" by Kate Wilhelm give us everyday life in the near future. "Interlocking Pieces" by Molly Gloss brings humanist concerns to biomedical future brain transplant; similarly, McHugh's "Frankenstein's Daughter" shows us a family in the aftermath of a cloning attempt gone wrong.

Social comment: Margaret Atwood's "Homelanding" uses the concept of aliens as access to feminist truths.

The past and the present: "Standing Room Only" is a time travel story turned inside out. Like so much contemporary sf and near-sf, it shows interest in the nineteenth century as an origin and mirror of contemporary society. Likewise, "The Wizard of West Orange" uses an imaginary invention of Edison's laboratory to reveal insights about human character.


Science Fiction without the Future

You may note something missing from most of these stories, something that has become so associated with science fiction that its absence may seem to disqualify these stories as sf: the future. The future, if it appears in these stories at all, is parsimoniously doled out. "Salvador," published in 1986, at the height of the u.s. involvement in proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, was set about twenty minutes into the future. Many of these stories take place in what is essentially the present, with the addition of some small technological or social change. Others are set in the past, into which the future may intrude only as time travelers arrive. Still others are speculative only in so far as they propose an alternative history (alternative history has, for reasons that are as much matters of association as of literary theory, been accepted by most readers and publishers as a form of sf, from the time of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee)

But pre-pulp science fiction was often set in the present. Shelley's Frankenstein, the sf stories of Poe, virtually all of Jules Verne, and even most of Wells are more often than not set in the present day of the author, and involve the intrusion

of some fantastic event, justified by technology or science — Captain Nemo's Nautilus, Wells's Martian invaders — into the mundane world. It is only in the pulp magazines that the future becomes the preferred home of sf. The public image of sf arises from that future — the Star Wars films make a fetish of resuscitating the imagery of '30s pulp magazines — robots, aliens, and above all space travel. Oddly, as this image of sf has come to dominate media popular culture, written sf has moved closer and closer to the present.

The loss of the future as home ground for sf has bothered some writers, readers, and critics who embrace sf culture.[4] It seems to us that one of the consequences of the rapprochement between sf and the literary mainstream is this move to set stories in the present, and to reduce the extrapolative element in favor of experimental structure or emphasis on characterization.

Traditional sf is today broken into pieces, just as it was stitched together from pieces by Gernsback, Campbell, and the pulps. They attempted to fuse disparate reactions to the advent of the industrial age and the assaults of the scientific revolution on religion, society, and the place of humanity in the universe, along with the wild adventure and gothic romance of popular fiction, into a single genre. Are any novels more different than Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes?. For a time, in the darkness of neglect (benign or otherwise) by Literature with the capital "L", and by some procrus-tean trimming, the pulp magazines seemed to turn science fiction into a single thing. But if "genre" sf ever had a consistent core, a commitment solely to the future, that time has long passed.


[4] See "Science Fiction without the Future" by Judith Berman (http://www.judithberman.net/sffuture.html). Berman, an anthropologist who began publishing sf in the 1990s, noted with some alarm how little of the contents of the leading sf magazines is set in the future, or takes conceptual risks. She has not been the only person to worry about this.



Why Are We Here?

Which brings us back to Jonathan Lethem's essay.

Clearly we are in sympathy with the sentiment behind Lethem's essay. In a clarification following its original publication in the Village Voice, he revealed that the editors had, without his knowledge, changed his title from "Why Can't We All Just Live Together?: A Vision of Genre Paradise Lost" to "Close Encounters:

The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction." Instead of being taken as an invitation to tear down walls, as he intended, it was read by many as an indictment of a close-minded genre for failing to acknowledge a work of genius erected on its territory. This impression was reinforced by Lethem's own suspect status in science fiction: although well-published in the genre, he was also finding acceptance in the mainstream. Thus he was perceived as one of the "li-fi" crowd, probably someone who would turn his back on the genre as soon as he got the chance. Nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, Lethem's career is instructive with regards to the obstacles that remain to getting a fair reading on either side of the divide. A year after he wrote his essay, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel Motherless Brooklyn and in 2003 published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times bestseller. And yet, he reports, that for many mainstream readers and reviewers, his work in genre is either invisible or irrelevant.

While many minds still remain closed, the walls that separate the mainstream from science fiction are, in fact, crumbling. The bankruptcy of assertion that mainstream novels set in the future can't be science fiction because they're not written by science fiction writers arises out of a kind of tribalism that does not bear close scrutiny. And it is past time to ignore the likewise tribal howls of genre conservatives who demand that mainstream writers are dilettantes who need to take Remedial Science Fiction 101 before they venture in genre territory. In 2005, three of the twenty stories in The Best American Short Stories were by writers primarily known for their science fiction. And in 2008, a writer with impeccable mainstream credentials, Michael Chabon, did win the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award for The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

But these are only the latest developments in what we have decided to call The Secret History of Science Fiction. For while the vested interests that resisted rapprochement held sway these many years, there were always those who refused to be constrained either by the strictures of the mainstream genre or of that of science fiction. These writers wrote the stories that came to them in the only way they could; where they were published was, to a large extent, an accident of the times they were conceived in. We offer this collection as proof that their history need be secret no longer.

[zakk]

'Fala Melkoru na inicijativi i tekstu, i meni na skeniranju, OCRovanju i sređivanju

[scallop]

Zakk, Melkorov prst i tvoji prsti su obavili veliki posao. Čitanje je meni pojelo čitavo jutro. Kad pročitamo nešto sa čime se slažemo skloni smo da zaključimo da je to dobro napisano. Što ne znači da je dobro napisano. Znači samo da smo videli sopstveno mišljenje. Čini mi se da par decenija radim ono o čemu piše u ovom tekstu. Uspešnost je već drugo pitanje. Ali, postoji kontinualna "estetska namera". I zapitao sam se da li je trebalo da sačekam ovakav tekst da bih počeo da mislim na način kako je u tekstu napisano? I, zaključio sam da je napisano samo potvrda, uz argumente.

Bilo bi suvišno da se zadržavam na detaljima, meni je sve napisano prihvatljivo. "Li-Fi" je konačan izraz. E=mc² literature. Različitost posmatranja SF dela se iskazuje stepenom literarnog slepila. I, čini mi se, da su otkloni dioptrije u posmatranju mainstream elitizma i žanrovskog populizma. Ne postoje cvikeri koji to mogu pomiriti. To nezaustavljivo čini vreme, a ono je tako sporo.

Mislim da ovaj tekst treba dobro prevesti i turiti ga u neki od sledećih Emitora, ako bude Emiitora. Čitanje na engleskom sužava domet, pa ima efekat kao Sci-Fi kanal bez titlova. Ako već isključivo čita na engleskom, Melkor to može i ja ga izazivam!

[Melkor]

  Paul Witcover reviews The Secret History of Science Fiction


The seeds of James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel's ambitious, provocatively titled new anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, were sown in 1998, when Jonathan Lethem's controversial essay "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction" appeared in the Village Voice. Lethem asked readers to imagine an alternate history in which Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow won the 1973 Nebula Award — for which, by the way, it was nominated (Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama was the winner). In that alternate reality, the literary potential of science fiction was recognized and embraced both within and without the genre, with the result that the walls enclosing the ghetto of SF crumbled at long last. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Or did it? Kelly & Kessel have selected stories from inside and outside the genre to demonstrate that, despite the continued reliance of publishers on such marketing labels as science fiction and fantasy, "the divide between mainstream and science fiction is more apparent than real," and that "outside of the public eye," writers on both sides of the supposed divide have been producing work that, on the one hand, has the ambition and sophistication of literary fiction, and, on the other, makes use of the tropes of speculative fiction, though not necessarily labeled as such by writers, critics, or readers. This is the secret history to which the title refers.

It's a bold assertion, and I have a lot of sympathy for it. In fact, before I read this anthology, I was inclined to agree with it. But as I read these stories, I began to doubt it more and more, and finally I became convinced that Kelly & Kessel are wrong in a centrally important way, and that there really are substantial differences between genre speculative fiction of literary ambition and what is written outside the genre, even if it contains speculative elements. And I think these stories prove it: that is the secret history of The Secret History.

First off, these are wonderful stories, every one. And I applaud unreservedly any project that is likely to take readers outside their normal comfort zones — though I wonder, in this case, how many mainstream readers are going to pick up a book with this title; SF readers, on the other hand, will be drawn to it by that same title. This is a small but telling indication of the narrow yet deep fissure that really does separate speculative fiction from mainstream literary fiction.

It's worth giving the entire list of contributors in order to demonstrate how Kessel & Kelly have, for the most part, made selections that would seem sure to buttress their thesis: Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, Thomas M. Disch, Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen F. McHugh, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, Carter Scholz, Lucius Shepard, Kate Wilhelm, Connie Willis, and Gene Wolfe. (I note in passing that the editors have included stories of their own: worthy stories, to be sure, yet I wish editors would refrain from doing this, especially in an anthology that, like this one, has a polemical purpose — even the whiff of self-interest detracts from one's argument.)

That's a pretty even split between writers mainly associated with speculative fiction, those with a primarily mainstream reputation, and those, like Lethem, Chabon, and Fowler, who slip back and forth between both camps with relative ease, regardless of where they started. The stories are presented mostly in chronological order, from Tom Disch's classic "Angouleme", which appeared in 1971, to Steven Millhauser's "The Wizard of West Orange", of 2008; I suppose the editors decided to begin in 1971 in order to include Disch's story; it's hard to see another reason why that date, rather than any other, was chosen as the starting point: indeed, the logic of their thesis would seem to argue for a starting date of 1972 or 1973, when stories nominated for the 1973 Nebula would have been published.

[Melkor]

I did wonder at the absence from this list of such writers as J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, and James Tiptree, Jr., just to throw out some names from the SF side off the top of my head, each of whom would seem like a poster-child for the editors' thesis. Even stranger is the fact that, with the exception of the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, all the writers here are Americans. It seems ironic that a secret history of science fiction dedicated to the proposition that genre boundaries don't truly exist should attempt to prove that assertion from behind geographical boundaries. Also notable is the absence of writers of color. Shouldn't a secret history attempt to take minorities into account?

As I said, the stories are all strong — many of them are award winners, and at least one is so well known that it seems out of place. There is nothing secret about Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". It is a widely anthologized story, taught in many high schools, and as such is probably as well known outside the genre as inside it; unless its inclusion here casts it in a new light, making a convincing argument for a fresh interpretation, which I don't believe is the case, I don't see why some other, less well known Le Guin story couldn't have been chosen. Yet interestingly, "Omelas" is the one story here from the speculative fiction camp that I think could have been written by a mainstream writer. It's a postmodern fable, not a piece of speculative fiction.

I'm going to attempt a definition here, or at least an explanation. Speculative fiction writers are apt to treat the subjects of their speculations as if they were real, no matter how outlandish and unlikely; thus, speculative fiction of the highest quality often has a unique reality to it. It employs the tools of mimetic fiction to ground and particularize its flights of fancy, whether they be technological or magical. It takes them literally. It concretizes metaphors. But when mainstream writers venture into speculative fiction, it's all too often either a day at the playground, during which they feel free to cast aside the mimetic conventions they normally hold to in regard to plot, character, setting, etc., or a trip to the Olde Curiosity Shoppe, where they can pick and choose among exotic settings, objects, atmospheres, etc., to use as symbols and such in their own stories, which remain highly mimetic in a traditional sense. I don't mean to suggest that this distinction holds for every story published by a mainstream or speculative fiction writer, only that it expresses something true and important about the unique quality of speculative fiction. Put another way, when mainstream literary writers or readers venture into what they perceive as the realms of speculative fiction, they follow the tedious bromide of the suspension of disbelief. When speculative fiction writers and readers do their thing, they engage the engines of belief. This is a distinction borne out again and again in the stories of this anthology. Let me give some examples.

Don DeLillo is a writer that many in the SF community regard as "one of us," or at any rate a second cousin once removed. And I wouldn't dispute that; his novel Ratner's Star shows a genuine affinity for science fictional ambience, and I think he's had a strong and salutary influence on many speculative fiction writers, myself included. But his story here, "Human Moments in World War III" (1983), merely drapes itself in the trappings of science fiction, beginning with that vaguely Ballardian title. The story takes place in a space station on which two astronauts go through their routines as, below them, an apocalyptic war breaks out. But really, there is no central reason for the story to take place in space. It could just as well be set on a submarine, or in a nuclear missile silo. Even the war is secondary: or, rather, symbolic. DeLillo is following the second course set forth above: he's made a trip to the Curiosity Shoppe. Perhaps that's too harsh; what I mean is that DeLillo doesn't take any of it literally; the settings in space and in the future are not important to him in themselves but only as vehicles to transmit that certain feeling of anomie and absurd estrangement so central to all his work. This is true of Ballard as well. But here's the difference. For DeLillo, the present is like something out of science fiction. For Ballard, the present already is science fiction, only most of us don't recognize it yet. For DeLillo, it's a simile. For Ballard, reality.

In "Descent of Man" (1977), T.C. Boyle follows the first course: a trip to the playground. In this antic, satirical romp, he skewers the conventional story of marital estrangement with savage zeal, setting up a romantic triangle between the nameless narrator, his wife Jane, a primatologist, and an ape, Konrad. The story makes no pretence at verisimilitude: it is hyperbolic by intent, full of clever allusions to other works of science and of fiction, with ironic hat-tips to Darwin and Edgar Rice Burroughs, among others. Boyle's magpie approach is textbook postmodernism. Readers are not supposed to take the characters or the setting of the story any more seriously than Boyle himself does; which is to say, not at all. The point is the author's cleverness, his wit and humor and jaded sophistication, which extends even to featuring an African-American character who speaks in the kind of blackface dialect that would normally, if we weren't all so cool and beyond that, be, well, kind of offensive, especially coming from a white author. The story is a performance meant to shock yet also to be applauded. And I do applaud it, though I don't shock as easily as all that. But I will insist that, whatever heart is beating beneath its shaggy hide, it's not the heart of speculative fiction.

Now let's look at two representative stories from speculative fiction writers. If Kessel & Kelly are correct, then there should be no difference between these fictions and those of Boyle and DeLillo beyond the superficial. There should be no way that an intelligent reader of Boyle and DeLillo, familiar with their work, could misread these stories in any fundamental way, even if coming to them for the very first time. We shall see if that's the case, or if, rather, some very specialized reading skills are not required — skills that readers learn from reading speculative fiction, because speculative fiction is written in a certain way, and demands to be read in a certain way.

[Melkor]

Karen Joy Fowler's "Standing Room Only" (1997) is a remarkable story. Grounded in the most minute details of the quotidian mundane, which Fowler presents with the cool yet sympathetic exactitude of a Flaubert, it follows the day of a young girl in Washington DC — a girl who happens to be Anna Surratt, the daughter of Mary Surratt, whose boarding house was a meeting place for conspirators in the assassination of Lincoln, which took place on Good Friday 1865, the very day of Fowler's story. Little by little, the author, with exquisite control, introduces jarring elements into her account, elements that are inexplicable to Anna yet, to the sensitive reader, gradually add up to the realization that Lincoln's assassination has become a popular destination for time-traveling rubberneckers. Nowhere, however, is this stated explicitly. And so dependent is the realization upon an openness in the reader to the consideration of speculative fictional possibilities, that otherwise intelligent and acute readers, whose experience is limited to realistic, mainstream fiction, could potentially miss the climax and leave the story in a state of dissatisfied confusion. Rather than experiencing the exhilaration of reading a small masterpiece, the final revelation of which unlocks the story in emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating ways, such readers would feel they have instead read a pointless and failed story. Even if they do understand the time-travel aspect, they are likely to feel it trivializes the historic moment by taking it into woo-woo territory, reneging on what had seemed to be the promise of some small yet savory epiphany in a young girl's life. If this seems far-fetched, consider the number of mainstream readers and reviewers who did not recognize that Fowler's novel Sarah Canary might have been more accurately titled The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Fowler applies the imagination of a speculative fiction writer to Lincoln's assassination, and it doesn't result in a visit to the playground or to the Olde Curiosity Shoppe — it results in a visit to Washington DC on Good Friday 1865: yet also — and this is indispensable, because a writer of historical fiction could also take us there — to some distant, unknown, but not wholly unknowable, future. Because through the hints that Fowler drops in the story, readers can deduce certain facts about the future — our future — from which the time travelers have come: it's an integral part of what Fowler is up to, yet it's almost certain to be lost in its entirety upon a mainstream reader. The misreading is not because of Fowler's clumsiness or the reader's stupidity: it's due instead to a difference in the very DNA of speculative fiction and literary fiction, a difference that Kelly & Kessel want to gloss over. But to gloss over this distinction is really to sandpaper away the bumps and sharp edges, the grainy specificity of a particular application of the imagination that makes speculative fiction unique and vital.

Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" (1995) is another time-travel story, though a very different one in aim and execution. But it, too, presents serious difficulties to a mainstream reader. The full complexity and ingenuity — not to mention the horror — of this bravura exercise in unreliable narration may be lost on those who are unfamiliar with the history of speculative fiction and its evolution as a literary form. The plot is too complicated to recapitulate here, but suffice it to say that Wolfe presents readers with a main character, Emery Bainbridge, whose view of the world, and women in particular, is atavistic, bordering on, if not crossing into, the misogynistic. He is at the very least suicidal, and perhaps murderous: the stereotypical angry white man who shocks everyone when he goes postal. In Bainbridge, Wolfe provides a devastating deadpan satire, yet also a poignant portrait, of that SFnal archetype, the omnicompetent man: a man out of his time in the modern world, chivalric, capable, a man of action and of logic, yet also, in the right circumstances, a monster. Wolfe sticks like glue to Bainbridge's point of view, yet he also allows us to see that Bainbridge's self-perception and account of the events that take place at a remote mountain cabin during a snowstorm are not to be trusted. At the end of the novella, readers are left with three possibilities: (1) Bainbridge is crazy and has just murdered his son, his second wife, and one of his two adolescent or even preadolescent stepdaughters, taking the other as his new wife, all while under the delusion that he is responding to an incursion of time-traveling females from a future devoid of men; (2) Bainbridge is perfectly sane and, with ruthless, cold-blooded efficiency, has avenged his son's murder, protected his wife and stepdaughters, and successfully — indeed, with admirable ingenuity and resourcefulness — met the challenge of an incursion from the future... met it and turned it to his own advantage by murdering some of the invaders, stealing their advanced technology, and keeping one woman as what amounts to a sex slave; or (3) some mix of (1) and (2). I find it hard to imagine a mainstream writer even conceiving of this story, let alone executing it. And I believe its subtleties, complexities, and ambiguities — to say nothing of the dialogue Wolfe is engaging in with genre writers from Heinlein to Joanna Russ — are likely to be lost on mainstream readers. They will understand that Bainbridge is not to be trusted in his explanations and rationalizations, but in doing so, they will either dismiss the time-traveling females as delusions, evidence of Bainbridge's insanity, or they will accept the time-travel aspect of the story but search for a symbolic or metaphorical meaning without grasping the truly horrifying implications that arise when it is accepted as a brutal fact: among which is the possibility that Bainbridge, the omnicompetent man, is ensuring not only his own extinction, but that of his entire gender, not just because of what he does but because of who he is. Bainbridge, as much as the women of the future, is trapped in a time that is alien to him, the circumstances of which conspire to make him monstrous. He is the real ziggurat of the title, not the spaceship to which that term is applied in the text. Here, again, the speculative fiction writer takes seriously, as something real, what in a mainstream story would be unreal: either a delusion on the part of a character, or a bit of literary artifice inserted by the author as a symbol or metaphor, an objective correlative standing in for the "real" reality of the story.

Could the editors have made their point with stories from other authors? Perhaps they could have done a better job of it. Steven Millhauser's "The Wizard of West Orange", about the unsettling effects of a prototypical invention being developed in Edison's laboratory in 1889, is one story by a literary mainstream writer that actually enters into the realm of speculative fiction in the way I've outlined above: it takes its premise absolutely seriously. And yet, there will always be individual mainstream writers who "get" speculative fiction. Michael Chabon is another example: he's written, and written about, speculative fiction before, and his story here, "The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance", is a wonderful bit of steampunk — but only because Chabon understands and respects the special qualities of speculative fiction, not because there is no such thing, really, as speculative fiction. It's important to stress commonalities among writers across genre lines, but after having read this provocative anthology, I feel more convinced than ever that those lines, at least in the case of speculative fiction — I'm not qualified to speak to other genres — reflect more than simple marketing categories. They, too, are real.

[Melkor]

A review by Martin Lewis


The Secret History of Science Fiction is a very good collection of short stories. It is not, however, a very good anthology.

This is the third in a series of themed anthologies edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel for Tachyon. In each case, the theme has been loose, elusive and not without controversy. Feeling Very Strange (2006) set out to be the definitive slipstream anthology but, in this reviewer's eyes, it is far too partial and parochial to be regarded as such, even taking into account my objection to the definition they use as their starting point. Rewired (2007) tried to pin down the equally slippery concept of post-cyberpunk. Paul Kincaid viewed this as a mixed success in his review for SF Site, describing it as:

   "one of the best reprint anthologies I have encountered in a long time, judged purely on the quality of the stories contained within it. But if we are to take it as in any way defining or illustrating some new sub-category of SF called "post-cyberpunk," it falls woefully short."     

The Secret History of Science Fiction uses Jonathan Lethem's infamous 1998 Village Voice article, "The Squandered Promise Of Science Fiction," as a starting point to discuss literary science fiction. The hyperlink Kelly and Kessel provide to Lethem's article in the book is unfortunately already dead but you should be able to find a mirrored copy, if you search online. In brief, it posits that 1973 was a potential turning point for science fiction and that if Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon had been awarded the Nebula that year (it was shortlisted), science fiction could subsequently have been "gently and lovingly dismantled, and the writers dispersed." Obviously, this didn't happen. Lethem bemoans this as "marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream."

Kelly and Kessel believe Lethem overstates his case (as well they might). They therefore take it as their mission to prove that the promise of science fiction was not, in fact, squandered -- although this title was imposed on Lethem by his subeditors, it was actually originally "Why Can't We All Just Live Together?" -- and that since 1973 great science fiction has come both from within the genre and without:

   On one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name. (p. 8 )    

The anthology is a secret history in that it aims to present an alternative chronology of the genre since 1973, one that diverges from the public face of science fiction, one that is more likely to be to Lethem's taste. So it is slightly unfortunate that the editors start the anthology with "Angouleme" by Thomas M. Disch (originally published in 1971) and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin (listed as 1975 here but actually 1973, revised 2003). The former predates Lethem's cut-off point and is part of the New Wave movement that he explicitly praises in his article (it was included by Michael Moorcock in his definitive 1983 anthology, New Worlds). The latter is hardly a secret, it is one of Le Guin's most famous stories and winner of the 1974 Hugo for best short story. They are both impressive stories but they don't really provide much of counterargument; Lethem is an admirer of both writers and, although he alights on 1973 as a totemic "hidden tombstone" moment in his article, it is clear his problem is mostly with science fiction in the 80s and 90s.

Stories from these decades do, in fact, make up the bulk of The Secret History of Science Fiction. Before these though, there are two more representatives of the 70s: "Ladies And Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" by Kate Wilhelm (1976) and "Descent Of Man" by T.C. Boyle (1977). Wilhelm's use of reality TV is perhaps overly familiar three decades later, but her focus on two members of the audience rather than the contestants makes her story more memorable than it initially seems. Boyle is the first representative from the other side of the divide, although his story, in which the protagonist unwillingly finds himself competing for the affections of his partner with one of the chimps she studies, is not really science fiction at all. There are some nice moments of body horror but the story is overwhelmed by smugness and smartarsery (the usual complaints levelled at postmodern fiction, in other words). Sometimes this is innocent, as with the pointless factual footnotes, sometimes it is less so, as with the grotesque accent of the only black character (the janitor): "Yo's wonderin what me an Mastuh Konrad was jiving bout up dere, isn't yo?" (p. 64) Clues are lacking, but presumably this is meant to be ironic, as is the caricatured South East Asian accent of Mrs U-Hwak-Lo, because otherwise it would be straight up racist.

Putting the 70s behind us, authorial intent is similarly murky in the other weak link in the collection, "The Ziggurat" by Gene Wolfe (1995), a novella that takes up the largest chunk of the anthology. The issue here is sexism rather than racism; there is no doubt that the central character is a misogynist, what is less clear is how much Wolfe is aware of this. Either way, it is bizarrely paced and plotted and deeply unsatisfying.

The rest of the stories are much better, particularly those by what we like to call mainstream writers. (Kelly and Kessel use this term and, although I am not especially happy with it, I will use it here for ease.) They do share a similarly loose allegiance to science fiction, though. Margaret Atwood's short "Homelanding" (originally 1989 but this version 1994) is notionally a first contact story but is really only directed inwards (rather wonderfully) at the human race. Similarly Don DeLillo's "Human Moments In World War Three" (1983) places his characters in a manned military weapons platform in orbit, allowing them the space and perspective to reflect on life below. "93990" by George Saunders (2000) is as short as Atwood's piece but the opposite in tone: clinical, deadpan and with a punchline at humanity's expense. Carter Scholz's "The Nine Billion Names Of God" (1984) takes the form of a series of letters between a fictional Scholz and the equally fictitious editor of a science fiction magazine who does not take kindly to Scholz submitting the famous Arthur C. Clarke story under his own name. Like Saunders's story, it isn't SF at all, although it could be considered a kind of science fiction criticism:

   This kind of parody is effective with works of a "baroque" nature, that is, works based on the logical, exhaustive permutations of a few principles. Science fiction stories are "baroque" because they are the intellectual children of empiricism, so they tend to offer explanations, and they tend to exhaust a limited repertoire of materials. The ambition of explanations is to be complete, so such systems tend to be closed, and this closure leads naturally to repetition and counterfeiting, endlessly evident in rack after rack of books about plucky young wizards or wisecracking starship tailgunners. The sportive élan of early science fiction has spiraled into an abortive ennui, and its writers face an endgame situation, where the remaining moves are few and predictable. (p. 95)    

It is not just those writing from outside the tradition of science fiction skating the periphery either. Karen Joy Fowler's "Standing Room Only" (1997) is a typical Fowler story in that you can only tell it is science fiction if you know where it was published. It appears at first to be simply historical fiction set in Washington in the period leading up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but because we read science fiction and because we know it was originally published in Asimov's we understand that the strangers the narrator describes are actually voyeuristic time travellers. Well done us. "Schwarzschild Radius" by Connie Willis (1987) similarly takes its heft from history; in this case, Karl Schwarzchild's time on the Eastern Front in the First World War. There is no time travel here, little SF at all; instead, Willis uses Schwarzchild to create a metaphysical singularity in the centre of her story. It reads more like slipstream than SF and, in fact, it would form a nice companion piece to Fowler's "Lieserl" in Feeling Very Strange.

You will note that I have spent a considerable portion of this review talking about what is and what isn't science fiction. It is often remarked, with some truth, that SF critics get too hung up on taxonomy. At the same time, it is hard to ignore the issue when you are reviewing a book entitled The Secret History of Science Fiction. Even those stories which are unambiguously science fiction tend towards a similar type. Regardless of the background of the writer, familiar tropes such as spaceships are lacking here. Obviously this is a collection of literary SF but the two aren't incompatible (just ask M. John Harrison). Kelly and Kessel acknowledge the lack of the future in their anthology and suggest "one of the consequences of the rapprochement between sf and the literary mainstream is this move to set stories in the present." (p. 16) This is one thing but I would suggest that five stories out of nineteen set not even in present but in the past is far too many; not just any past either but, in four out of five cases, the recent American past. (The exception is Willis's, set on another continent.) Kelly and Kessel's latest effort is as parochial as their previous anthologies. This is really The Secret History of American Science Fiction; Margaret Atwood is the only contributor from outside the US.

And what of the three central writers themselves? Yes, not only is Lethem represented here but Kelly and Kessel have included stories by themselves (just as they did in Feeling Very Strange). This is extremely bad practice, a dereliction of duty and, to an extent, calls their judgement into question. In a comment on the Locus Online review by Paul Witcover which raises the same issue, John Kessel nobly takes the blame for this fact and, less nobly, attempts to justify it. However, it is impossible not to call bullshit on this feeble pretence. His story -- "Buddha Nostril Bird" -- is actually very good (much more so than Kelly's stale take on time travel, nuclear war and nostalgia) but it does not belong here on principle.

As for Lethem, Kelly and Kessel group him with Boyle, Saunders and DeLillo as a postmodernist, a writer whose stories are "not predicated on exploration of character, but instead use sf to explore ideas, make social comments, or play games" (p. 14) Yet on the very next page they say that his story "Hardened Criminals" "literalizes the title's cliché to create a background for the exploration of a son's relationship to his father." (p. 15) That sounds a lot like exploration of character to me and indeed it is. I seem to end up re-reading "Hardened Criminals" (1996) every couple of years and it grows on me more each time, not just as a character study (and Lethem excels at alienated young men) but as it becomes increasingly clear how it has provided some of the first steps towards themes he has later developed in his work.

In this context, I cannot help but compare it to "Light And The Sufferer" (1995), his story which was anthologised in Feeling Very Strange. According to Kelly and Kessel, the former is an exemplar of literary SF whereas the latter is an exemplar of slipstream. I will confess to seeing no meaningful difference between the two stories in terms of their genre. (If anything "Light And The Sufferer" is the more science fictional.) Both are told in the first person by disaffected, under-achieving young men who have casually drifted into trouble after high school, both are set (explicitly or implicitly) in Lethem's native New York and both are heightened by a single intrusion of the fantastic into the world. They paved the way for both his first realist novel of New York, Motherless Brooklyn (1998), and then his most autobiographical novel, Fortress Of Solitude (2003). (Ironically, Fortress Of Solitude is one of the few pieces of Lethem's work, along with As She Climbed Across The Table (1997) -- his tribute to DeLillo -- which I would describe as slipstream.) This comparison between these two Lethem stories empathasises that however good Kelly and Kessel are at identifying fine stories they are much less successful at matching them to the aims of their anthologies. Ultimately, judged against either of the two measures that they suggest in their introduction to The Secret History of Science Fiction, the book is a failure.

Firstly, as a rebuttal to Lethem or an attempt to show continued cross-fertilisation, this anthology is much too late. A response was needed in 1998 and that is what Ray Davis provided in an article for The New York Review Of Science Fiction entitled "Things Are Tough All Over" (it is available on his web site). Davis makes all the obvious rejoinders but also finds much to agree with and, in the exchange which followed, there is a great deal of rapprochement. Kelly and Kessel's introduction follows something of a similar path but to do so from the distance of a decade is deeply disingenuous.

So they are knocking on an open door. Kelly and Kessel admit as much when they remark that "the walls that separate mainstream from science fiction are, in fact, crumbling." (p. 17) The battle has already been won (or, perhaps more accurately, there never was a war). The situation Lethem sought clearly exists:

   Most important, a ragged handful of heroically enduring and ambitious speculative fabulators should have embarked for the rocky realms of midlist, out-of-category fiction.    

Secondly, as an actual history, an attempt to carve out the "Great Books theory of post-1970 SF" Lethem refers to, it is much too thin. A project that grand requires an anthology on the scale of The Norton Book Of Science Fiction, edited by Le Guin and Brian Attebery. (It is worth noting that the Gloss, Willis and Atwood stories collected here all also feature in that volume.) In his comment to Witcover, Kessel notes:

   we had a list of at least 20 other writers we would have liked to include in the book, including most of those you mention as we should have taken. We did not have money or space to include everything we wanted    

This explains but does not excuse. Beyond a wider range of fiction, it is unfortunate that Kelly and Kessel were unable to include the text of Lethem's essay or any of his correspondence with Davis since it is so integral to their project. On the other hand, Kelly and Kessel do like to include interstitial material between the stories in their anthologies which, in this case, means a series of quotes from the contributors on both science fiction and literature in general. However, excepting the name of the author, these quotes are irritatingly unattributed, rendering them devoid of context and diminishing their value. Each of these authors has interesting and important things to say but here they are reduced to sound bites. All taken together this means that despite the obvious quality of The Secret History of Science Fiction's contents it is impossible to shake the feeling that this anthology is far too much of a jobbing work.

Copyright © 2010 Martin Lewis

Martin Lewis lives in East London. He is the reviews editor of Vector and also regularly reviews for Strange Horizons. He blogs at Everything Is Nice.

[zakk]

Dobili smo dozvolu od Tahiona da objavimo prevod uvoda, tako da ćete ga čitati i na srpskom, zajedno sa prikazom zbirke, u Emitoru. 

[Melkor]

yeah!

@zakk 

[zakk]

Eh, hvala Radmilu na inicijativi...

(javna je tajna da radim na gurku)

[scallop]

Možda priložim nešto za taj Emitor.