One thing that's turned me from modern sci-fi is The Platform. Every modern-day SF writer seems to have had a plank prior to picking up pen & pad. Should SF writers be overt moralists? Or do the polemics strip all love from the work & hamper their development as writers?
And where ARE the non-political writers in SF, anyway? Are they being published at all? Does the presence of a Platform help the editors & publishers to classify an author's work? If so, does this necessitate an author having a Platform?
Recently I came into possession of one of Dad's old books, a collection of Henry Kuttner's short stories. The foreword, by Ray Bradbury, clearly states these concerns:
"....the problem of why [obscure fiction writer Henry Kuttner's] name remains semiobscure in our genre.
"Apolitics is certainly part of the answer. When you mention Vonnegut, you polarize on the instant. Orwell, similarly. And Heinlein and Wells, and even Verne. Verne, after all, invented mad Nemo, the mirror-image reversal of mad Ahab. Nemo prowled the world teaching moral lessons to even madder militarists. Beyond this, Verne was a super-propagandist for humanities who said: you have a head, use it to guide your heart; you have a heart, use it to guide your head; you have hands with which to change the world. Head, hands, heart-- sum up all three, and remake Eden.
"I cannot recall any particularly violent ideas Kuttner put forth on politics or politicians. He seemed never to have gone through one of those nineteenth or twentieth summers where we all go a bit amok on Technocracy or Socialism or Scientology. When the fever passes and the smoke clears we wonder what happened to us for a time and are puzzled when our friends don't speak to us for a time, until they discover the hair has fallen off us and we have given up being a political gorilla and are back to being human again. If Kuttner had such a year, or month, I never knew it. And it doesn't show in his work.
"So because so much of what he wrote is not, in modern terminology, Relevant with a capital R, he is probably graded by some ten degrees down from Orwell, and twenty below Vonnegut-- which is, needless to say, a damned and awful shame. What we need is not more political cant and polarized bias, but more traffic engineers, with no particular traffic in mind save survival, to stand on the highroads leading toward the future, waving us on creatively but not necessarily banging our ears when we, children that we are, misbehave.
"Kuttner, then, was no moral revolutionary or political reformer. He was an entertaining writer. His stories are seeded with ideas and moralities, yes, but these do not cry out, shriek, or necessarily ask for change. This is the way we are, Kuttner says, what do you think of us?
"Most science-fiction writers are moral revolutionaries on some level or another, instructing us for our own good. When Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell ventured into the field it could have been predicted....that they would pop up as moral revolutionists teaching lessons and pontificating therefrom. Shaw was better at it, of course. Russell came late to the short story, but it was science fiction, and was odorous of morality.
"Here, I think, was Kuttner's flaw-- if flaw it is,and I for one do not consider it so. One cannot be polarized all the time, one cannot think politically from noon to night. That way is the way of the True Believer-- that is to say, finally, the Mad Man."
After the specifics are stripped away from current-day SF, all I am left reading is a negative quality. Without the convenient handles of politics or 'scientific innovation' or morality, I hardly see any emotion or genuine interest inherent in the work. Maybe a weak jibe, or some stilted, dated dialogue, but little else. Why should this be? |
