David A. Layton
The Barriers of Inner and Outer Space: The Science
Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg
Abstract.--The most frequent SF hero is what Gregory Benford calls the
Competent Man, whose abilities lie dormant until unforeseen circumstances allow them to
emerge. Barry N. Malzberg's SF has no such figure. Instead, his protagonists attain
limited personal victories--when, indeed, they attain any at all. More often they are
imitation heroes or anti-heroes. Malzberg also breaks away from the SF tradition of the
problem story. The reason that his SF diverges from other SF in character and plot is that
he writes not in the Romance tradition but in the Satire tradition of SF. As Satire, his
novels show fractured consciousness, and simple problems seem insoluable. For Malzberg SF
ought to explore intensely the emotional and metaphysical crises of life in the 20th
century. To do this, he transforms typical SF tropes and devices into metaphors of
self-exploration. Not only do his characters embark on self-exploration (their status as
"heroes" being determined by their strength of endeavor), but through his SF
Malzberg also explores himself. Thus, despite his criticism of SF's "escapism,"
he sees a potential for SF to provide pertinent tropes by which to begin to assess the
difficulties of maintaining individuality against the vicissitudes of modem existence.
Robert M. Philmus
The Two Faces of Philip K. Dick
Abstract.--Within the last year or so, letters of Dick's have become
known indicating that his "relationship" with the FBI was not solely passive on
his part, nor chiefly that of victim. Over a span of six months (or more), he sent the FBI
at least 21 denunciatory communications detailing a paranoid fantasy of Dick's: that he
was a target of a worldwide Marxist conspiracy involving a multitude of agents and
agencies, SFS among them. The facts in the case admit of any number of interpretative
hypotheses, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Indeed, that the materials, especially in
relation to the many interpretations they lend themselves to, make for a Dickian novel to
rival Ubik, say, is one of only two things which can be said for certain about
this FBI affair. The other is that, to all appearances at least, Dick's behavior (whatever
his motives) was utterly reprehensible, and not merely because it was two-faced but also
by mason of its (possible) consequences.
[A response by Gregg Rickman appears in SFS
54 (July 1991).]
Cristina Sedgewick
The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern,
Megacorporate America?
Abstract.--SF has a problem: it has linked its fortunes with a
publishing industry whose raison d'être is irrelevant (perhaps even inimical) to the
interests and desires of the community of SF readers and writers. Like all postmodern
multinational corporate sectors (which it has largely become), the publishing industry
seeks to standardize its product and efficiently manage its producers and consumers in
order to maximize its profits. Writers and editors have assisted the industry in
accomplishing these objectives by subscribing to "professionalism," an ideology
that encourages writers to take editors and bookstore chain executives rather than readers
as their primary audience. Since "professionals" place pleasing their employers
above their own creativity and vision, professional SF writers censor themselves both
consciously and unconsciously in order to meet their employers' perception of the
ideological bottom line. The pressures on SF writers to toe this ideological bottom line
have become so massive that even consciously resisting writers find them difficult to
withstand. The SF community is therefore urged to wrest SF's fate from the hands of the
megacorporate publishers and bookstore chains so that diverse tastes can be served by
diverse books, something the publishing industry has no interest in doing.
[Responses by Gordon Van Gelder and Ellen Datlow,
and Cristina Segdwick's reply, appear in SFS 54 (July 1991).]
W. Warren Wagar
J.G. Ballard and the Transvaluation of Utopia
Abstract.-- The fictions of J.G. Ballard explore psychic landscapes,
rather than the interactions of human beings. In this sense, they are topographical, and
also Topographical, since the places they describe are, in the last analysis, paradises of
self-transcendence. They are not immediately recognizable as utopian, for the obvious
reason that the way thither is almost always dangerous and painful, and the end of the
journey is usually death--or so it appears to be. But the clues furnished in the stories
themselves, and in Ballard's many interviews, point to a death that is only a metaphor for
the mystic's annihilation of self in a higher reality. Most of Ballard's fictions contain
similar ingredients: a kairotic moment of transformation, a pilgrim band of
loosely-related fellow-voyagers, and a challenge to customary morality so outrageous that
it breaks through the "enamel" of convention and makes possible the escape of
the pilgrims to their paradise. Most radical critics dismiss Ballard as the epitome of
late bourgeois decadence. But perhaps he is also constructing metaphors of
postmodern
rebellion and resistance.
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