The Best of Science Fiction 12

Introduction: Fish out of Water, Man Beside Himself Judith Merril

We do not know who discovered water — [a small folder. Picture: orange fish against streaks of green and blue.] — but it was almost certainly not a fish. [And inside:] Anybody's total surround, or environment, creates a condition of nonperception.

It might have been intended as the essential statement on the motives, mode, and modus operandi of science fiction. Actually, it was an advertisement for a firm of industrial consultants, quoting Marshall McLuhan.

... sudden relevance to contemporary thinking. He orbits in the same system as R. D. Laing and McLuhan ...

That one was from a 'mainstream' London review of The Disaster Area, a collection of stories originally published in the s-f magazines of the fifties, and early sixties.

Well, one has one's little snobberies: best-seller philosophy, pop technology, two-culture professors — obviously, McLuhan. But I had just discovered Laing. And Edward Hall, Eduardo Paolozzi, Sagan and Shklovskii, John Barth. And, suddenly, Sgt. Pepper!

Take Sputnik I — October 1957 — as a not-so-arbitrary dividing line. Until then, the only body of literature seriously attempting to discuss contemporary man (meaning, man in a self-made synthetic environment) was science fiction.

But ... the times they are a changin' ... Dylan and Heller, for a start. Eiseley, Koestler, Fuller, Hoyle. And now: Ornette Coleman, Claes Oldenberg, Ed Emshwiller, Jarry and Borges, Burroughs and Michaux, Vonnegut and (sudden relevance!) Bailord — all popping up big, 'in', no longer enclave heroes but cultural phenomena ... getting better all the time ... Okay, so I read McLuhan.

In 1952, Reginald Bretnor wrote a brilliant predictive essay for his critical anthology Modern Science Fiction:

In science fiction, man is the proper study of the writer — man, and everything man does and thinks and dreams and everything man builds, and everything of which he may become aware — his theories and his things, his quest into the universe, his search into himself, his music and his mathematics and his machines ...

Science fiction's emergence as a genre is rooted in our failure to understand the scientific method and to define it adequately ... This new awareness ... is growing, despite educational conventions which inhibit it, despite a literary convention which almost universally excludes it ...

Eventually, we will again have an integrated literature. It will owe much, artistically, to non-science fiction. But its dominant attitudes and purposes ... will have evolved from those of modern science fiction.

Asturias, Bulgakov, Singer, Nabokov, Martinson, Grass, Cortazar, Transatlantic Review, International Times, Cavalier, Ambit, The Realist, Esquire, Kubrick, Fellini, Lester, Godard, Ralph Nader, Mark Lane, Dr. Spock, Malcom X, The Diggers, Bertrand Russell's War Trials, Ramparts, Report from Iron Mountain, Burgess, Elkin, Updike, Hawkes, Friedman, Calisher, Southern, Landolfi, Martin, Barthelme. What do you read? or read about: The Delphi prediction; RNA memory transfer; moon landings; artificial hearts; multimedia, light shows, psychedelic art: 'God is dead' buttons and badges, 'Reality is a Crutch'. (Some of it is new; some is just starting to happen. Trotsky called it the Theory of Combined and Unequal Development.) I read McLuhan. In 1951, in The Mechanical Bride, he said:

No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national ...

The magic that changes moods is not in any mechanism. It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

When that was written, 'mainstream' fiction was still strait-jacketed in a 'realism' left over from the certainties of nineteenth century mechanics and pure reason, and the science fictionists were almost alone in their efforts to seek new, remote, enlightening, if difficult, perspectives. Last year another Lit Prof, Robert Scholes, published a book called The Fabulators (Oxford):

The writer who is willing to accept the word as his medium ... must move away from the pseudo-objectivity of realism toward a romance or an irony which will exploit language's distinctly human perspective on life. In competition with the cold and lid-less eye of the cinema the sightless book must turn to the dark world of the imagination, illuminating it by the uniquely human vision to be found in words ...

Fabulation, then, means a return to a ... less realistic and more artistic kind of narrative: more shapely; more evocative; more concerned with ideas and ideals, less concerned with things. I am not proposing here an airy program for the future. I am talking about what is going on all around us.

SF: Speculative Fabulation. A satisfactory solution at last for my abbreviation-in-search-of-an-extension?

'Science fiction' now means many different things to many people; but what it meant that was, for a short time, important is no longer so. Bretnor was right, and the time is now: his 'integrated literature' is 'going on all around us'.

My favourite button-badge says Reality is a Crutch. You will find much 'nonrealism' about 'reality' in this book, and a good bit of 'realism' about 'unreality'; also much more about men, media, and the 'McLuhan Age', among other things.

What they have in common could be called outerness. Maybe what SF really stands for is Space Fish?