If I had to come forth with an analysis of the anger that lies inside me, which expresses itself in so many subliminations, I would guess that probably what arouses my indignation is seeing the meaningless. That which is disorder, the force of entropy — there is no redemptive value of something that can’t be understood, as far as I am concerned. My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything I’ve seen and done, and fashion it into a work that makes sense. I’m not sure I’ve been successful. First, I cannot falsify what I have seen. I see disorder and sorrow, and so I have to write about it; but I’ve seen bravery and humor, and so I put that in, too. But what does it all add up to? What is the vast overview that is going to impart sense into the entirety?
What helps for me — if help comes at all — is to find the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile. I’ve been researching ponderous and solemn theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be processed and secreted in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I started on the article on Indian philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an eight-volume learned reference set that I esteem. The time was 4:00 A.M.; I was exhausted — I have been working endlessly like this on this novel, doing this kind of research. And there, at the heart of this solemn article, was this:
“The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient. . . . The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different only because there are different sorts of experiences ‘of’ them. Yet if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects. . . .”
In other words, by applying Ockham’s razor to the basic Epistemological question of “What is reality?” the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external world is a “superfluous hypothesis”; that is, it violates the Principle of Parsimony — which is the principle underlying all Western science. Thus the external world is abolished, and we can go about more important business — whatever that might be.
That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate (and Buddhist idealism probably is the ultimate of both) and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists (they also proved that the self doesn’t exist, either). As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, whom I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of “the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks.” I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away.
“Book Review” of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980)
This is MIT Press’s first effort to cope with the reality of science fiction. Although less than 300 pages, it weighs almost a pound and a half, compared to Ballantine Books’ edition of Ted Sturgeon’s classic More Than Human, which weighs exactly a quarter pound. Therefore Warrick’s book must be six times as important as Sturgeon’s. Her study, Warrick tells us, “is based on 225 stories and novels written between 1930 and 1977.” She states her conclusions up front in her introduction: “This study demonstrates that much of the (science) fiction written since World War II is reactionary in its attitude toward computers and artificial intelligence. It is often ill informed about information theory and computer technology and lags behind present developments instead of anticipating the future.” She then goes on to present a fully developed aesthetic approach by which to judge SF (here she does quite well). The three SF writers whom she deals with most fully are Asimov, Lem, and myself. I get the impression she considers the three of us important, and here lies my quarrel with her. As far as I am concerned the concept “important” is of no use in judging SF. I could quarrel with the vague style of the book (for instance, I cite “… a prison of false illusions” as being not only a double negative but also verbose, and “A shower of bizarre metaphors trails from Dick’s imagination as it journeys through the patterns of possibilities in the evolving reciprocal relationship between man and his artificial constructs” and “He throws torches of possibility into his dark future, and their flashes of light reveal a survival,” etc., as boring and sophomoric and a waste of the reader’s time). But I would prefer to quarrel with the purpose of the book instead, and start out by saying that it has no purpose. It is a parasitic thing, and its very existence suggests that SF as a field is beginning to die, because only an entity waning and failing attracts such suckers as the academic sports of this sort. As Jesus says in Matthew 24:28: “Wherever the corpse is, there will the vultures gather.”
The main complaint expressed repeatedly by Warrick in this book is SF’s tendency to emit warnings about the dangers of technology — dangers to individual humans and human society generally. Well, it is just too bad, but it is a fact: Science fiction writers worry about trends, worry about possible dystopias growing out of the present, and this is a cardinal value of the field. Admittedly, there was a time when science and progress were assumed to be identical. If we worry now we have cause to. This is not due to ignorance of the state of the world and the breakthroughs in science. Warrick devotes an entire chapter to my stories and novels that deal with robots, and she quotes me — fairly — as saying: “The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living towards reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical.” Am I not to be allowed to view this with alarm? Who will legislate what SF writers will be allowed to write and to worry about? This book praises me by terming my writing important but it arrogates to itself the role of arbiter of viewpoint and proper concern. Viewpoint and concern in SF are a transaction among author, editor, and reader, to which the critic is a spectator. If the reader enjoys what I write, there you have it. If he does not enjoy it, there you have nothing. “Important” is a rule from another game that I am not playing. I did not begin to read or write SF for reasons dealing with importance. When I sat in high school geometry class secretly reading a copy of Astounding hidden within a textbook I was not seeking importance. I was seeking, probably, intellectual excitement. Mental stimulation.
If SF becomes annexed to the academic world it will buy into its own death, despite what Delany, Russ, Lem, and Le Guin may think; as with a single mind they woo academic approval as if it were some ultimate court. However, I look to my left and see a coverless, tattered copy of the July 1952 Planet Stories — my first published story appeared in it, and I received a lot of kidding from serious-minded people for selling to such a market and for reading such a “trashy” magazine, to use Lem’s favorite term of derision. Frankly I would prefer the derision to the new praise; SF is now palatable to the educated, the lofty, and I say, Let me out. Professor Warrick’s pound-and-a-half book with its expensive binding, paper, and dust jacket staggers you with its physical impression, but it has no soul and it will take our soul in what really seems to me to be brutal greed. Let us alone, Dr. Warrick; let us read our paperback novels with their peeled eyeball covers. Don’t dignify us. Our power to stimulate human imagination and to delight is intrinsic to us already. Quite frankly, we were doing fine before you came along.
“My Definition of Science Fiction” (1981)
I will define science fiction, first, by saying what SF is not. It cannot be defined as “a story (or novel or play) set in the future,” since there exists such a thing as space adventure, which is set in the future but is not SF. It is just that: adventure, fights, and wars in the future in space involving superadvanced technology. Why, then, is it not science fiction? It would seem to be, and Doris Lessing (e.g.) supposes that it is. However, space adventure lacks the distinct new idea that is the essential ingredient. Also, there can be science fiction set in the present: the alternate-world story or novel. So if we separate SF from the future and also from ultra-advanced technology, what then do we have that can be called SF? We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: It is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society — that is, our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate-world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which it is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society — or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or a bizarre one — this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about.