Gene Wolfe’s writing has depths that only an English teacher or another writer is likely to probe. It was hours after “The Doctor of Death Island” before I figured out the ending. The Book of the New Sun was more lucid than anything Wolfe had written previously, yet it can still benefit from a critic’s attention.
Often I’ve wanted to tell Gene what his multilayered style is costing him…and I always decide not to. Writers need something to read too, you know.
At a SFRA gathering—that’s Science Fiction Research Association—I met Thomas J. Remington, critic, author of The Niven of Oz: Ringworld as Science Fictional Reinterpretation. He told me that RINGWORLD’s story line was based on The Wizard of Oz. I listened as he explained—
The Scarecrow is Speaker-to-Animals (Fear of fire; searching for intelligence).
The Cowardly Lion is Nessus (Fear of everything. More dangerous than he seems).
The Tin Woodman is Teela (Looking for a heart, for emotions).
The Wizard is Halrloprillalar (Lost wayfarer posing as a goddess).
Tourism in fairyland, with dangers and a lethal puzzle to spice the adventure. Dorothy gapes at the parade of wonders while she tries to find her way home. But the solution is much closer than the illusory goals she’s been chasing…
Remington must be right. It fits too well. I surmise that RINGWORLD seemed to be plotting itself nicely, all those years ago, because it so resembled a book I had loved as a child and then forgotten.
Algis Budrys praised my early work in the Galaxy magazines. Richard E. Geis decided I was good, and sent me his fanzines for twenty years or more. Their praise came when I most needed it.
In this field it’s easy to forget how good a critic can be. We have too few of these. But Bob Gleason remembers David Schow’s critical review of John Farris’s All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By. Schow called it the ultimate horror story—and maybe it is—but what impressed Gleason was the work Schow put into his review. He phoned Farris and anyone else who might have been involved in the building of the book, to get a feel for what had gone into it. Just to put you in perspective, Schow wrote his own best-selling horror novel, The Kill Riff. Best-selling authors are not self-designated.
I do not want all critics hanged alongside the lawyers and tax collectors. The good ones serve a purpose.
Too many writers tend to wander blindly wherever the crowd is going; too many fan critics don’t notice. Readers have seen sudden bookshelves full of after-the-bomb tales, tales of psi powers, tours of “The Enormous Big Thing,” giant meteoroid impacts, easy gender change, 1984-style dictatorships, incredible population densities, slums reshaped by advanced computer technology…
Are we wasting the vast space within the Science Fiction Country Club?
Maybe not. Maybe we crowd so close because we like each other’s company. Some of these huge, roomy ideas need to be looked at from many angles by many minds. So we explore the missing implications in alternate timelines, the multi-generation starship, gene tampering, the world of parthenogenic women, skyhooks…
Then again…Watership Down is a runaway best seller: the money’s in sapient burrowing animals. Neuromancer got terrific reviews: let’s all write about psychotic cyborg bums. Michael Moorcock and Judith Merril (critics!) support intensive psychological studies, no plots and innovative typesetting: if I set my type in an expanding spiral I’ll be just as good as Harlan Ellison.
Nope. Following trends is for second-raters…and sometimes it takes an outside critic to see a trend and blow the whistle.
An article by Joanna Russ complained that the Ringworld is unstable. That’s true, and I put attitude jets in the sequel. But Joanna implied that this is obvious; that she noticed it herself! Joanna’s education doesn’t reach that far. The instability was obvious to MIT students, and they talked.
In his review of A WORLD OUT OF TIME, Robert Silverberg wrote that my method for moving the Earth would wreck the biosphere. I asked him about that. He told me that the review was in the mail before he remembered that tidal force varies as the inverse cube. He didn’t bother to write or telephone the magazine correcting the error. It didn’t seem important.
Ursula Le Guin didn’t like my short story “Inconstant Moon.” She was appalled by my callous murder of half the Earth’s population. Yet it did win a Hugo Award, and I don’t have all that many love stories in me. I’m intensely proud of “Inconstant Moon.”
None of these traumas caused me to write letters of protest.
I once caught Jerry writing a coldly reasonable answer to a bad review. I lectured him thus: “You’re giving the publisher free material of professional quality. You’re rewarding him for trashing your book!” (Jerry makes a wonderful audience. He quotes me afterward, and gives credit!)
Then came Richard Delap’s F&SF Review, with a review of THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE.
It was an exercise in vandalism. I say that not only because the critic didn’t like the book, but because his review was loaded with factual mistakes! James Burk quoted Rod Blaine’s full name and titles, wrong, and wrote (sic) after it. He quoted me as saying that there has not been a new breed of dog in hundreds of years. Species, dammit! Species!
We wrote a letter pointing these things out. We were sarcastic, we were cutting, we were brilliant. “If you do write a reply to a bad review,” I pontificated, “at least make the publisher regret it!”
Delap had an answer to that. He refused to print our letter!
Delap and his magazine have vanished and I haven’t. But there is no defense against bad reviews, even dishonest bad reviews (though they’re easier to take). I’m still twitching from that one.
I myself have felt the critic’s compulsion.
Sacred Locomotive Flies isn’t the book that enraged me most. It’s a cheat, of course; the author frequently reminds the reader that this is fiction, that he is not bound by physics or reason or even self-consistence. But worse has been done, by better writers.
Sometimes I feel silly, getting mad because I didn’t like a book. These days I don’t even pay for them! Books arrive because I might put a cover blurb on one. I read one in five, maybe, and too often I wait for other reviews and choose from the best—which isn’t fair.
No point in demanding my money back, then. But who’s going to return my time?
Gather in the Hall of the Planets, by Barry Malzberg (as K. M. O’Donnell), still has me boiling. It’s half of an ancient Ace double. Malzberg may not consider it his best work, so I’m really taking it too seriously. But Malzberg believes himself to be a qualified critic of science fiction. That’s disturbing.
The book opens as a science fiction detective story. An alien species has been exterminating intelligent species for as long as they can remember. They always test a randomly chosen member of the species first; but no species has ever passed their test. Now it’s the protagonist’s turn.
At the end, we are asked to believe that the aliens have been exterminating whole worlds after testing not members of the target species, but each other!
Of symbolism and character development and deep psychological exploration within the novella, I will say nothing. Why bother? Malzberg posed us a puzzle story when he didn’t have a solution. Regarding matters of symbolism and metaphor, I was told early: Moby-Dick doesn’t work as anything unless he works as a whale.
Brian Aldiss does consider a certain book to be among his best; at least he’s said so in print. All I have to judge by is my own awful experience, which was not entirely Aldiss’s fault:
There was a World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg in 1970. Fans arranged for a charter flight, New York to London, return from Amsterdam. We wanted the company of our own. In practice we got little of that. We were packed like sardines; there was no way to circulate and converse.
In Amsterdam I went looking for a book. There’d be precious little of other entertainment on the flight home! I found one in English, by Brian Aldiss. The critics liked him. I remembered f
ondly The Long Afternoon of Earth.
I walked aboard that plane carrying one book, unopened, and that was Report on Probability A.
I found the opening a little slow…massively slow…I got as far as page 38 or so, pushing myself, desperate, unbelieving, before I could accept the fact that nothing was going to happen in this book.
Gradually it came back to me: the reviews by critics who were admiring but a little bewildered. Report on Probability A uses techniques developed by French novelists, a sub-genre of stories in which nothing happens. As for me, stumbling wide-eyed into a New York City morning after ten hours of sensory deprivation, I had a fixed opinion as to what had been done to me.
An author is always an egotist. Writers who are not egotists define themselves: they never send out a story to be bought. Only an egotist will believe that he can be paid serious money for writing down his daydreams.
In my paranoia I pictured a brilliant, literate, egotistical Brit with a vicious sense of humor. The critics love him, but he’s never loved them. One or another critic may think that he’s wonderful, but for superficial reasons. Again, there are critics who don’t love him. Death is too good for them; he intends worse.
To this imaginary Brit comes a brilliant, literate, vicious idea:
Write a book in which nothing happens at all. Justify it by reference to a French tradition (real or imaginary) of books in which nothing happens at all. One or two critics may guess that it’s a jape; they can be brought in on the joke. The rest…well, they’ve never understood the Brit’s writings before, and they’re leery of admitting it. They’ll praise the book, because if they don’t, the brilliant Brit will somehow make them look like idiots.
I was not comforted by this notion. I was enraged. We trusted a novelist who had dealt fairly with us before, and with what result? We are readers; we have rights!
Worst case of jet lag I ever had.
Once you know about critics, you know about literature. Literature is whatever survives the critics.
Melville lasted long enough to reach critics willing to research whaling. (The standard-issue critic is not typically lazy. He’ll do endless research, though he avoids the difficult subjects.)
Shakespeare survived the critics of Victorian times. Even Bowdler missed some of his best off-color references.
Dante wrote the first hard science fiction. His best-known work was a trilogy set in an artificial structure larger than a Dyson shell. Like the best of the hard science fiction writers to follow, he used extensive knowledge of the sciences of his day: theology, the Greek and Roman classics, early attempts at chemistry and physics, and astrology.
In Dante’s age, surviving the critics was more than a matter of bad reviews. Dante survived the wrath of the Church and the passage of centuries, and censors: parts of Inferno have been judged obscene in every age. His success may be measured by how often his work has been stolen by writers, newspaper cartoonists, animators, you name it.
The test of time has at least the virtue of being unambiguous.
The final critic is a schoolteacher.
Schoolteachers are not interested in changing the verdict of time. It’s safe to talk about H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley. Wells didn’t use anything too complicated, and a lot of what went into his work was pure fantasy. Verne didn’t know the physics of his own time. Old science becomes fantasy.
Therefore classes in science fiction typically start far back in history, with stories unlikely to be interesting to the students. They move toward modern times, losing students all the way, and never quite get there.
• • •
• • •
From THE LEGACY OF HEOROT
[with JERRY POURNELLE and STEVEN BARNES]
Have you noticed that Jerry and I worked mostly in my office? His was too small to be comfortable, and we were constantly interrupted by phone calls. He ultimately lost patience and set about building a bigger one.
For a while there he wasn’t too sane. There was no roof on his house, local bureaucrats were giving him static, the architect didn’t understand airflow, and Jerry couldn’t decide whom to assassinate first. Then suddenly there was an office. It’s huge: one great big room and three smaller ones. The airflow is geared to let me smoke and him breathe.
If collaborations are difficult, then triple collaborations are impossible. I know of only one in science fiction, and THE LEGACY OF HEOROT is it. So: how?
I think the secret is Steven Barnes.
Jerry and I are too logical, too left-brain, to write in horror mode. We don’t become frightened enough.
We would gather in Jerry’s recently expanded office space and elaborate the outline. The story changed constantly. Then Steven would come back with first-draft material on a disk. Jerry and I would tear it apart and put it back together different, week after week. It took a Steven Barnes to stand up to that and not feel threatened, and not lose the writer’s necessary arrogance either.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Call her Mama.
The taste of the river changed with the seasons. For a time the water would run sluggish and cold. Then the taste of life was scarce; the flying things were scarce; the swimming things were dead.
Later the water would race, carrying the taste of past times. Mama had seen scores of cycles of seasons. She was wise enough to ignore the ancient tastes: bodies or blood or feces of life her kind had long since exterminated, long buried in mountain ice, released as the ice melted.
In the hot season the water would be bland again, carrying only spoor of flyers and swimmers and another of her own race.
Mama’s taste was discriminating. One of her kind lived upstream. Another lived even farther upstream, and that one was a weakling. It lived where game was so scarce that Mama could taste starvation in its spoor. Not worth killing, that one, or her nearer rival would have taken her domain.
In winter there was something strange in the water, something she couldn’t identify. Not life; not interesting.
The world began to warm again…and something new was on the island. Something she had never tasted, something weirdly different, was leaving spoor in the water. It was as yet too faint to identify. Mama began to think about moving.
If she followed that spoor she would have to fight, and that was no step to be taken lightly.
By summer she could taste several varieties of prey! The things weren’t merely leaving feces in the water; she tasted strange blood too. Her rival was eating well. Was it time?
Her rival was youthful (Mama could taste that) but large. The faintness of her scent placed her many days’ journey upstream. She would be rested and fed when Mama arrived…and Mama settled back into her pool. She had not lived two scores of cycles by being reckless.
If her rival sickened, she would taste it.
Days flickered past. The time of cold had come. Ordinarily Mama scarcely noticed passing time, for the taste of swimmer meat was always the same. Nothing attacked. Her curiosity lay dormant…but it was active now, for living things were leaving spoor even in dead of winter, and blood ran down the river now and again.
Oh, the variety! Here was blood from something vaguely like a flyer. This one must have been big, a plant-eater; she had to dig far into her memory to find anything similar. That horrible chemical stench was entirely mysterious: hot metal and belly acid and thoroughly rotted grass. This unfamiliar scent, judging by its components, would be the urine of a meat eater not of her own kind. Hunger and curiosity warred with discretion, for Mama had never tasted anything like that, nor seen one either.
Once there was a living thing in the water. She snapped it up and chewed contemplatively, trying to learn of it. A swimming thing, primitive, built a little like a swimmer…
The world was warming when the river gifted her with two larger members of the same species. Bottom feeders tasting of mud, they must be breeding despite the presence of her rival ups
tream.
And that, one bright hungry morning, was the burnt blood of her own kind!
Taste of fear and speed and killing rage, taste of chemicals, taste of burning. If lightning or a forest fire had killed her rival, then an empty territory lay waiting for her upstream. If another rival, then Mama would face a formidable foe.
The swimmers were startled when Mama came forth in an eating frenzy. Swimmers were nothing; the taste did not engage her curiosity at all. But Mama’s rival would be fat now, and hyperkinetic from impact of sensory stimuli, and Mama dared not come upon her as a desperate starveling. She had not fought a serious rival in many years.
Mama had never toured the island. The others of her kind did not like visitors. The map in Mama’s mind was not made up of distances, but of the changing taste of the river.
The pond reeked of samlon blood when Mama departed. She staggered with the fullness of her belly. Three days later she was hungry but hopeful. Four mud-sucking alien fish had fallen foul of her. There would be more.
The water ran clean again. Mama understood that lesson. She had tasted the burnt meat of her daughter in the water; but the decaying corpse was gone almost immediately. Whatever killed her daughter had eaten the corpse.
Once she was able to streak off the edge of a low bluff and catch a flyer rising from below. She caught another hovering just above the water. The flyers weren’t timid enough here between territories. She fed when she could. If her enemy were to find her half starved, her body might betray her, holding her slow while her enemy boiled with speed. If she did not find enough food she would turn back.
She moved cautiously, in fear of ambush. For long stretches she paralleled the river, moving among rocks or trees or other cover where she could find it, returning to the river only when she must.
None of this was carefully thought out. Mama was not sapient. Emotions ran through her blood like vectors, and she followed the vector sum. Anger against the creature who killed her daughter. Hunger: the richly, interestingly populated territory upstream. Curiosity: the urge to learn and explore. Lust: the urge to mate with a gene pattern other than her own. And fear, always fear.