Play With Feeling

Science fiction has gone to hell and Kingsley Amis is mapping it. The fans shout that SF isn't what it was (which is true) and the critics are treating it seriously at last (which is kind). That's the present situation.

Yet it's still almost impossible for the best-intentioned critic to apply his usual standards to a science fiction novel because although he can enjoy the plot, approve of the ideas and enjoy any humorous points (intentional and otherwise) which the author has made, he often finds himself hard-put to discover in the average SF book originality of style or characterisation, and he knows, that almost before he's begun reading, that any serious treatment of human affairs will not be attempted.

Various writers of previous Guest Editorials have made the point that fiction is meant to entertain. As long as it's enjoyable, they say, what the hell? - after all, we have a duty to our readers to entertain them. I may have overlooked any attempt to define this somewhat ambiguous word 'entertainment' - but that's show business, I suppose. Certainly the writer has a duty to the readers, even if it resolves into self-interest (if they don't like it, they won't buy it). Yet what seems to be forgotten is that fiction can entertain on many levels - that there is serious entertainment as well as the lighter variety, that SF is one of the most potentially flexible media for the presentation of the human drama there has been and that only lazy writers or bad writers or downright stupid writers find it impossible to stimulate the mind and the emotions at the same time.

There are many kinds of thriller story for instance, from Mickey Spillane - type titillation of our brutal instincts, through writers like Graham Greene and John Lodwick, to Jamesian of the Turn of the Screw variety which keeps our emotions high while titillating our intellect. Presumably, as science fiction grows up (which obviously it is doing in England - perhaps more than in the States, where many writers appear to have been sidetracked into the belief that 'fine writing' means inconsequential plotting and sentimentality) it will produce as many variations as there are in ordinary fiction, from comic books to - who knows? - something as massive, inspiring and complex as War and Peace.

It is with what SF can become, at its best, that I want to deal.

To say that good science fiction is essentially a romantic medium of expression (in that it deals, usually, with things on a broad scale and tends to ignore detail) is not to condemn it as unrealistic. Shakespeare combined romanticism with an almost cynical of what things were and why. The same can be said of the great modern playwright Bertolt Brecht who combines irony, satire and high romance into the most moving and dynamic plays of our time - proving that strong views do not a prison make or social injustice a cage.

Strong views do not a prison make. By this I mean that science fiction can, as John Brunner states and Lan Wright denies, be used as a vehicle for serious messages but it needn't stop the writer from telling a good story (nobody has complained, to my knowledge, that Wells' strong views spoiled The Time Machine) and I'm sure that most escapist readers will not mind so long as the 'serious' theme does not intrude, as long as the writer doesn't put long, unnatural speeches into the mouths of his characters as long as he shows what he's getting at rather than having wooden characters describing in black and white.

Speaking as one who has made all of the above mistakes I know what I'm talking about.

Lets have a quick look at what a lot of science fiction lacks. Briefly, these are some of the qualities that I miss on the whole - passion, subtlety, irony, original characterisation, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer. I want to read an author who feels what he's talking about as well as knowing it.

Many will argue that these things are lacking in westerns, thrillers, detective stories, historicals and romances. This is true of the main mass of these categories. Is it true of The Oxbow Incident, Moon Through a Dusty Window, Maigret, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Jane Eyre, all of which contain many of the qualities I listed?

Will it be true of Strife and Serenity, A Tale of Galactic Struggle?

Let us hope there will always be writers only capable of helping us escape from the ordinary world for a few hours - on the other hand there will always be writers who will want to do more than this, who will want to appeal to all the reader's senses, to strip away as much illusion as possible, to show things as they really are and to do so masterfully, with passion and craftsmanship. This is the science fiction writer I am interested in - but as yet he hardly exists.

There are signs, however, that he is beginning to come into existence - that the adult writers are beginning to write adult stories and that the day of the boy-author writing boys' stories got up to look like grown-ups' stories will soon be over once and for all as far as the discriminating editor, publisher and reader are concerned.

J. G. Ballard is one of those signs with his The Drowned World (Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963) and E. C. Tubb - after Science Fiction Adventures No. 24; years of writing some of the most entertaining SF in the field - is another who promises to be among the few who are going to turn their craft into an art at last. Brian Aldiss, in short stories particularly, looks as if he's going somewhere and the same can be said for John Brunner. As yet, all of these writers are still feeling their way and I will be very disappointed indeed if they don't eventually produce work of which, potentially, they all seem capable.

Most Readers are quite rightly demanding something more than a hyper-drive spaceship and a hero equipped with super-powers fighting against tyranny and oppression in the form of a naively delineated Galactic Empire constituted of either rascally aliens or rascally human beings. They are beginning to fell unsatisfied with SF, whether the idea of the story is new or not.

Inventions, when you come down to it, are the least of a good science fiction writer's worries. After getting his idea he must work out a coherent plot which ties in properly with the invention or extrapolation. Then he must consider his characters and whether they fit in naturally in to the framework of plot and idea. This done he must consider the implications of the story (this is he theme) and finally decide what he fells about it personally. If he is not writing automatically or is not a professional boiler of pots, he will want to put his own mark on the story because this, as well as everything else, is what the reader is interested in (otherwise why put the author's names after stories at all?).

The mistake new writers make when submitting manuscripts to New Worlds Science Fiction, for instance, is to imitate slavishly what has gone before. Mr. Carnell doesn't want to publish that which is, to all intents and purposes, what has gone before and his best writers are also his most original and independent writers who would rather say what they think than sell a story.

It is the author's attitudes, as well as his skill and style, which marks a story for a discriminating reader. If he is passionately involved in a story he should exercise his skill to involve similarly the reader.

For some reason science fiction magazines contain the work of more amateur writers than any other kind of magazine. In some ways this is good, since the potentially gifted young author has a chance to try his hand and gain from reader criticism and it also encourages him to keep writing. But on the other hand SF, is full of writers who anywhere else wouldn't have a dog's chance of being published - and they haven't developed. As far as they're concerned they haven't needed to develop since standards have, in the past, been so slow that they could go on selling their work somewhere without having to improve it.

Nowadays things are obviously changing. Standards are being raised all round, thanks partly to critics like Amis and Wilson who, although they sometimes seem to have adopted the medium to show how modern and enlightened they are and also seem to favour sociological fiction to 'pure' science fiction, have done valuable work by applying their ordinary critical standards to the field. The readership, also, has broadened, again thanks partially to the professional critics, and has obviously become much more discriminating than it was ten or even five years ago.

And aided by criticism, spurred on by discontented readers, abetted by editors, the writers are responding to the more rigorous demands of an increasingly discriminatory readership.

The bad amateur still exists, but so does the good one. The bad amateur will soon be completely excluded - the good one will have to improve before he can be published. By amateur I don't mean part-time writers, since until SF pays better, most of the writers will have to earn their livings in other fields. But naturally, as SF improves and the readership widens, rates and royalties will improve also. The good amateur writer will be helped, in the future, by a higher standard of criticism applied to a higher standard of work, by studying that work and so on, just as the writer of mainstream fiction has to do today. And of course there are always experienced editors like John Carnell who are willing to take time out to encourage and help up-and-coming writers. They needn't expect many since they are rare in most other fields of magazine fiction. At the moment the best SF falls between two stools - between the purely commercial stool and the 'literary' stool. Many of its authors write it for love and not profit, yet since the magazines which publish the greater part of the material have to sell in competition with detective magazines, westerns magazines and so on, their existence depends on love and profit.

The signs that SF is growing up are everywhere - but the proof that it has grown up is harder to find. Occasionally a novel appears which can be judged by all but the most rigorous criticism - Stars My Destination, A Case on Conscience, More Than Human, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Drowned World all contain qualities of good writing, good characterisation, good themes and interesting ideas. But they still contain flaws which, elsewhere, would be remarked upon, yet are overlooked by readers who have grown to expect flaws as being apparently symptomatic of science fiction.

They are only symptomatic at the moment - but as authors gain in stature (there won't be many, because there are never very many) they will overcome these flaws.

As the readership of SF broadens, so will the kinds of SF broaden to cater for different types of reader. The purely commercial escapist stories will remain, the half-and-half will remain, and the serious treatment of a theme within the framework of an SF plot will come into it's own.

As this happens, it is likely that good science fiction writers will no longer confine themselves just to science fiction tales and novels, and other writers, who will be more conversant with the best SF, will attempt science fiction stories. In fact, the definition between the good and the bad will become exactly the same as the definition between good and bad writing of any kind.

I said earlier that good SF is essentially a romantic medium of expression. That is to say, much of it deals with life on a grand scale, in terms of worlds and stars - with the cosmos rather than the microcosmos of Sillitoe and Braine. It describes mighty civilisations and mighty deeds, it is full of the sense of wonder ( a term incidentally a term which has never been merely confined to SF) it is, as John Brunner has pointed out, descended directly from the sagas of Scandinavia, the Mythologies of Greece and Rome and the Romances of the Middle Ages with their tales of magic and magic-aided heroes. Now gadgets and psi-powers have taken over. This kind of thing will, I feel sure, continue to form the BACKGROUND of much good SF while the means of description improve, the plots and characters become richer so that they are on par with the BACKGROUND rather than subservient to it, and the themes become more realistic, more complex.

It is my contention that a mixture of the fabulous and the familiar can produce art which comes close to defining the Truth and anything else - so long, of course, as a good artist is in control of the material.

This is what science fiction can become. This is what the best writers are evidently working towards.

A final word about an element in SF which has interested readers and critics of late. Science fiction, as Amis has pointed out, is the perfect vehicle for satire. So far it has not been particularly well exploited by most writers of magazine SF. So far I have not seen a story to equal Huxley, Orwell or even the comparatively minor stories of Bertrand Russell. Writers appear to be concerned, much as the publishers of Private Eye, with the obvious and easily-satirised elements of our society. Satire has even become a cloak to hide otherwise poor writing. Surely the object of satire is not to point out what we can all see by reading our newspapers or looking around us, but to bring some otherwise overlooked aspect of our society into perspective? At the moment the field seems to be entirely in the hands of Messrs. Frayn, Flook and Feiffer.

I'd like to see a good story satirising the satire industry.

And another point to authors - SF is becoming a legitimate field for serious expression again (Old Men And The Zoo, Clockwork Orange, etc.), and as it does so the mainstream writers are going to move in. Watch it, lads, we're going to need to be good.

Michael Moorcock