ABSTRACT
In his celebrated essay “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction,” Roger Luckhurst argues that science fiction is obsessed with its own imagined death, whether envisioned as an ecstatic fusion with the literary “mainstream” (the heady goal of SF’s various avant-gardes) or as a corruption of generic purity via the contagion of foreign elements (the perennial fear of SF’s irascible Old Guard). According to Luckhurst, the history of SF is marked by a series of crises in which emergent movements-“the New Wave, feminist SF, cyberpunk”—announce themselves as “transcendent death-as-births, finally demolishing the ‘ghetto’ walls,” while at the same time being denounced as “degenerescent birth-as-deaths, perverting the specificity of the genre” (43). This dialectic exposes the ideological stakes of aesthetic legitimation: the avant-gardists bemoan SF’s segregated “low-art” status and yearn for acceptance by the standards of “serious” literature, while the Old Guard decries such arty pretension and cherishes SF’s characteristic values and practices. In the eyes of the former, SF needs to be radically transformed, must die to be reborn as Art, while for the latter it is being cruelly slain by this very process of creative emancipation. According to Luckhurst, this “panic narrative” is theoretically misguided, and critical analyses of the field might move “into more constructive areas” if it were finally dispelled (47-48). Another way of grasping this dynamic, however, is as a practical problem
having to do with the way SF (or any) history is narrated: should historical development be understood as a continuous process, a teleological unfolding, or as a sporadic sequence of ruptures and deviations?1 This is a particularly potent question in the context of a genre that tends, on the one hand, to see itself in terms of the ongoing elaboration of a set of durable themes (space travel, alien life, future societies, etc.), but which is, on the other hand, notoriously marked by a boom-and-bust publishing cycle that can lay
waste to whole traditions virtually overnight (the collapse of the pulp market in the mid-1950s, for example), making for abrupt turnovers in the readership that sustains the field. Whether the history of SF is perceived as a steady development based on cumulative growth or as a succession of disruptions ushering in phases of radical overhaul depends to a large extent on the relative stress one places on conservation versus innovation: clearly, the genre could not survive as a cohesive corpus without some significant continuity of content, yet at the same time it could hardly remain a vital literature without an openness to new ideas and methods of treatment. Indeed, it is entirely possible to argue that a recurring cycle of messianic avantgardism and old-school intransigence is the very motor of SF as an historical genre; its true death might thus lie in the potential remission of this energizing and revivifying agonism. Rather than exorcizing this cycle of crisis, as Luckhurst demands, what
SF criticism ought to be doing, in my opinion, is charting more carefully and in greater material detail its basic structure and mode of operation. What are the intra-and extra-generic stakes, during particular historical periods, of the avant-garde critique of traditional SF? By what rhetorical strategies and through which specific sites do the activists for change construct and diffuse their manifestoes? How does the Old Guard respond to these provocations, and how sorely tested is SF’s subcultural network in coping with the spreading controversy? Is the conflict facilitated or hampered by the emergence and consolidation of new institutions within the field (e.g., publication venues, convention meetings) or by the ramifications of a boom-and-bust economy? What impact does the struggle have on the careers of established authors and magazines, and how do new writers and editors negotiate the resultant fallout? Is the ideological clash manifested or thematized within SF stories released during its height? Finally, what lingering effects (if any) does the dispute have on the further evolution of the genre? Which aspects of the avant-garde incursion are accommodated, in whole or in part, and which are cast off? How does conventional wisdom about what SF essentially is shift, whether comfortably or uneasily, in response to this assimilation? Obviously, these are complicated-and intricately intermeshing-ques-
tions, and I hardly have the space here adequately to address, much less try to answer, them all. But I would like to make a start by analyzing, in a comparative way, two of the most prominent and influential debates of the past several decades in SF: the New Wave controversy of the 1960s and the quarrels over cyberpunk in the 1980s. Such a comparison should permit widescale judgments about the structure of SF’s legitimation crises during the postwar era, as well as providing insight into the relationship between two of the most strident and confrontational activist movements the genre has known. In what follows, I will pursue three broad, dovetailing tracks of analysis. First, I will trace the emergence of these major avant-gardes within the context of the genre during their respective periods, seeking to specify
the local conditions that paved the way for their interventions; the focus will thus be on the immanent history of SF, its evolution as a discrete institutional formation. Second, I will examine how the New Wave and cyberpunk controversies were connected to encompassing trends in the general culture; the focus here will be on the extra-generic phenomena combatants in the debates drew upon for their polemical inspiration. Finally, I will explore ideological connections between the movements themselves; specifically, I will show how cyberpunk’s champions sought to distinguish their aesthetic and political objectives from the New Wave’s important but now-dated innovations and how the surviving partisans of the latter faction responded to the militant swagger of this fresh cohort of genre rebels. In conclusion, I will offer some meditations on how these controversies have reverberated down to the present day. 1. While acknowledging the many significant differences between the
genre of the mid-1960s, when the New Wave appeared on the scene, and the mid-1980s, when cyberpunk surfaced, it is nonetheless possible to identify three common trends prevailing in the field immediately prior to the advent of each movement. Briefly stated, these were: (1) a widespread sense of malaise among writers and fans owing to economic developments impacting the publication and dissemination of SF, combined with a dawning sense of possibility linked to the arrival of new markets; (2) the retirement or obvious decline in productivity of a number of major authors whose output had dominated the previous decade; and (3) the inchoate but growingly palpable influx of fresh thematic material, partly inhibited by prevailing orthodoxies and thus awaiting mobilization by talents less beholden to SF traditions. None of these tendencies by itself would be sufficient to explain the emergence of either avant-garde, but taken together they contributed to a climate that was favorable to calls for a radical refurbishment of SF; indeed, the manifestoes that emerged to herald the two movements made much of the purportedly baleful situation of the field and the urgent need for fresh voices and perspectives. The boom-and-bust cycle characteristic of the genre was never more in
evidence than during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the summer of 1957, 23 SF magazines were published in the United States (Ashley 179), representing a broad range of styles, from classic space opera (e.g., Science Fiction Adventures) to futuristic satire (e.g., Galaxy); three years later, the total had dwindled to six, controlled by only four editors. The pulps, which had survived since Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories debuted in 1926, had vanished utterly, replaced by the more sober-looking digests-which also were suffering financially due not only to a competition with paperback books but also to the abrupt collapse of their biggest national distributor. The result was a momentous contraction of the market, from 142 separate issues released in 1957 to a mere 60 four years later; between 1958 and 1963, only one magazine debuted-Vanguard, edited by James Blish-and it lasted a single issue (Ashley 189).
