Gary K. Wolfe
A Convention of Cats
James Gunn, ed. The New
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. NY: Viking, 1988.
xx + 524pp. $24.95.
James Gunn's 1976 Alternate Worlds was literary history disguised as a coffee
table book (although some uncharitably claimed the reverse was equally true), and much the
same might be said of his new encyclopedia. Like the earlier book, it is the sort of
oversized, attractively designed, generously illustrated volume that people who do not
read SF like to buy for their friends who do. Both books are "packaged" for the
widest possible audience and targeted to the trade buyer rather than the library or
scholarly audience --although in the current case there is much evidence that the
"packager" (something called Promised Land Productions) has exerted considerable
influence over both major and minor editorial decisions. Both books strongly reflect
Gunn's more or less official perspective as to what SF is and is not; but in the New
Encyclopedia this perspective is strongly skewed by a heavy emphasis on media, which
one can only assume is the result of the packager's hopes for a wider audience, and
perhaps by the exceptional energy of the contributors who worked on the film and TV
entries.
Readers will inevitably draw comparisons with Peter Nicholls' excellent The Science
Fiction Encyclopedia (1979) and Gunn's volume is likely to come out the poorer. It is
a much shorter book than the Nicholls, with less than a third as many individual entries
and considerably fewer "theme" essays. It contains very spotty coverage of
international SF, with only five essays (apart from individual author and film entries) on
the British Commonwealth, Great Britain, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Its
treatment of scholarship is lame, with a rather weak essay by Thomas Clareson focussing
largely on conferences, and almost no essays on individual critics or scholars. (Sam
Moskowitz gets an entry, as does Michel Butor--on the strength of one essay--but there are
none for Suvin, Scholes, Rabkin, Philmus, Ketterer, Clareson, Bailey, Franklin, et al.)
Cross-referencing, which would seem to be crucial to a volume lacking an index, is
practically nil (although there is, significantly, a checklist of movie and TV entries,
and a table of contents for the theme essays). Even "referral" entries are
minimal, so that a user seeking information about Lewis Shiner (who does not merit an
entry) has no way of knowing that some of his work is discussed under
"Cyberpunk." In the generally thorough film coverage, one has to already know
that Five Million Years to Earth is one of the Quatermass series in order to find
it out, since it is only listed under "Quatermass."
In a sense, though, comparisons to Nicholls may be unfair. A volume which devotes three
times as much space to Roger Corman as to Doris Lessing cannot be said to have great
pretensions as a literary reference work, and in many ways this book belongs more in the
company of Brian Ash's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1977) or
Robert Holdstock's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978). While Gunn's book is
certainly more of an "encyclopedia" than those volumes, it is very much a
"product" in the same sense that they are. It has aspirations to being a
"browser delight" more than a scholar's tool, and indeed there are many
insightful essays by Brian Stableford, Maxim Jakubowski, Brian Aldiss, John Kessel, Ian
Watson, Brooks Landon, Robert Galbreath, Mike Ashley, Russell Letson, and many others. It
was a rewarding idea to ask a psychologist such as Alan Elms to do entries on psychology
and Cordwainer Smith, and Arthur Clarke's too-brief essay on H.G. Wells is fascinating for
what it reveals about both authors (although Gunn's avowed early intention to have living
writers write entries on themselves goes blessedly unrealized). Even when an essay is
disappointing--Susan Shwartz's monumentally titled "Myth in Science Fiction" is
only a half-page long--one often gets the feeling it is less the author's fault than the
editor's. The book, in fact, is not really edited so much as compiled; it's a collection
of hundreds of little essays by more than a hundred contributors, with little apparent
effort to achieve balance, consistency, or a coherent point of view.
Whether a book that calls itself an encyclopedia needs a coherent point of
view is of course subject to debate, but it at least needs a traffic cop. One can accept
Gunn's principle of including only those newer writers "who promised, at this early
stage in their careers, to develop a body of work" (p. vi) as an excuse for omitting
A.A. Attanasio, but what is the principle that says there should be an entry on B-film
actor Richard Carlson instead? Willis McNelly's essay on Alfred Bester claims him as
"one of the giants of the science-fiction field during its GOLDEN AGE [such caps are
the main system of cross-referencing], which his works helped define." Dutifully
going to Barry Malzberg's entry on GOLDEN AGE, we find it ended seven years before
Bester's first novel was published. Clifford Simak's death predated Robert Heinlein's, but
Heinlein's death date is recorded while Simak's isn't, thus raising questions about the
volume's actual cutoff date. I.F. Clarke's intriguing little essay titled
"Progress" mentions no SF at all, although one supposes that its purpose would
have been to discuss the ideas of progress characteristic of the genre. Someone should
have been watching for these things.
In any reference work, one might quibble with the contents of the articles themselves,
but for the most part Gunn has found knowledgeable contributors whose judgments are
defensible and sound. Sometimes the value of these essays depends upon knowing where the
contributor is coming from, however. When Poul Anderson claims that the creation of alien
worlds "must be consistent with current scientific knowledge" (p. 8), he is not
describing SF but telling us how to write it. As a writer of hard SF, Anderson is under no
obligation whatsoever to be interested in the metaphoric value of such alien worlds; as a
critic, he ignores this value and the writers who seek to exploit it at the risk of
distorting his essay, which clearly implies that alien worlds are the property of himself
and writers like him. When Orson Scott Card discusses the "mainstream"-- an
important essay, since the term is used automatically to describe any non-genre writer who
gets an entry--he makes a useful distinction between the commercial and the literary mainstream, but proceeds to rehash the most paranoid arguments about "literary"
fiction and the academic establishment (mentioning by name no culprits more recent than
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Henry James). He concludes that SF and mainstream
literature "are not likely to merge; their communities are clearly separated and
unlikely to compromise their identities" (p. 301). Gunn himself, however, in his
essay "The Future of Science Fiction" a few pages earlier, tells us that SF
"is likely to become more and more like the mainstream, and part of the mainstream is
likely to use the ideas and tropes of SF, until the two genres become almost
indistinguishable in the middle" (p. 191). Other essayists, such as David Brin on
"The Universe," are simply given topics too big to meaningfully handle.
In general, these theme essays give the volume what overall focus it has, and there are
some continuing themes in them that unmistakably reveal Gunn's editorship--the recurring
mention of SF as a "literature of change," the concern with the mainstream, the
optimistic trust in technology and science, the fascination with the mechanics and
business of SF (the latter of which gets its own entry). A few essays, such as H. Bruce
Franklin's on "Nuclear Promise and Threat," seem oddly out of place in this
context. Associate Editor Stephen Goldman's many contributions, on the other hand, may be
the most characteristic in the volume. Here, for example, is what he says about
"Superpowers":
Authors have considered such questions as What powers would confer true superiority?
How would such powers reveal themselves, and what advantages or disadvantages would they
involve? How would individuals and society as a whole respond to the possession of such
powers? How would others react to those who have such powers? What kind of world would the
presence of these extraordinary powers create? (p. 453)
He then goes on to discuss several works that address these questions, but he never
bothers to ask why SF became fascinated with this theme, or what its significance
is to authors and readers, or how the theme might be related to the changing social
history of the genre. I am not suggesting that he should have written a different essay;
merely that the essay he has written reveals the enthusiasm of an unquestioning reader who
sees this highly suggestive theme as merely one of a number of innocent speculative
questions upon which SF has worked endless clever variations. Much the same attitude
characterizes the entries on religion, alien worlds, scientists, spaceships, and several
other tropes collectively discussed by Gordon R. Dickson in an essay somewhat misleadingly
titled "Literary Conventions." By contrast, Gregory Benford's entry on
"Aliens" speculates thoughtfully on how that image has been used and misused as
"a template on which we can project our hopes and fears" (p. 11). The usefulness
of a volume such as this must surely depend in part on the questions it asks, and
therefore on the questions it answers. And as Thomas Pynchon reminds us, "If they can
get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers" (Gravity's
Rainbow, p. 251).
The kinds of question Gunn's Encyclopedia, or its editors or packagers, seem
to want you to ask are fairly simple ones focusing on the most popular aspects of the
genre. For the most part, the entries on historical figures or lesser-known authors seem
almost cursory and obligatory compared to the attention lavished on currently popular
authors and films. Thus Jerry Pournelle gets something like three times the space devoted
to Olaf Stapledon, and James Gunn's own entry is larger than Jules Verne's. The entries on
writers such as Miles J. Breurer, Henry Slesar, Raymond Z. Gallun, or Fletcher
Pratt--writers for whom we are likely to need an encyclopedia in order to gain basic
information--are so short as to be almost useless. (Breurer's entry is even shorter than
that on actor Leslie Nielsen.) Although coverage of younger writers is generally strong,
many contemporary and not-so-contemporary writers are omitted altogether, including not
only the aforementioned Shiner and Attanasio, but William Sloane, Kit Pedler, Gary K. Wolf
(not me but him), René Barjavel, Brian N. Ball, John Blackburn, Mary Gentle, Lisa
Goldstein, Rex Gordon, Michael Kube-McDowell, Karen Joy Fowler, John Lymington, Mike
Resnick, Robert Moore Williams, Rosel George Brown, Pamela Zoline, L.P. Davies, Naomi
Mitchison, James H. Schmitz, Michel Jeury, and doubtless many others whose names I will
remember only when I have reason to try to look them up.
Even the film and TV articles--which make up nearly a third of the entries--lean
ponderously toward the popular, with substantial entries on King Kong, Godzilla,
Frankenstein, and such series as Star Wars, Star Trek, and Planet of the
Apes. There are no entries, though, for lesser-known but intriguing films such as The
Quiet Earth, Memoirs of a Survivor, The Monitors, or The Final Programme.
Despite the coverage given to Mad Max and Godzilla, directors George
Miller and Inoshira Honda have no entries, but a schlock director like Arthur C. Pierce
does. Depending on whether you read Darrel Schweitzer's entry on the film or Bill Warren's
on the director, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is either "one of the
finest science-fiction films ever made" (p. 98) or "less successful" than
his earlier films and "notable mainly for its visual style and satiric point of
view" (p. 260).
In short, we are given the most information precisely where we least need it, and the
information and judgments we are given vary widely from one entry to the next.
Thus my earlier point: The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is not really
about looking things up. It is about browsing; it is about wallowing; it is about having
one's suspicions confirmed. To say that there is nothing to be learned from this book
would be invidious, because much of what is here is quite good. The major flaws lie in
arrangement, balance, and consistency, not within the essays themselves. In many cases,
the contradictions among essayists, the oddball entries, the unexplained omissions--the
very qualities that limit the book's usefulness as a reference tool--give it an energy and
a personality that are as dynamic as the field itself. When one awkwardly checks the key
to contributors at the front to discover that a particular essay was written by Brian
Aldiss or Philip Jose Farmer or Hal Clement or L. Sprague de Camp or Barry Malzberg or
Norman Spinrad, one is tempted to go back to the essay to look for clues and subtexts
about the contributor, and to reread it in a new light. It is apparent that most
contributors had no idea what others were saying, and that they were given considerable
leeway in defining their own parameters. This is hardly the road to disciplined
scholarship, but it isn't necessarily a bad idea, either--it's only bad when one considers
that this may be the only source some slothful undergraduates may turn to for the
last word on SF. What was apparently intended to be the official corporate handbook of SF
thus emerges as a cacophony of independent and often brilliant voices, reflecting the
field's refusal to get organized.
In the end, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction reminds me of a book like
Mrs. Oliphant's The Victorian Age in English Literature, published in 1892 and now
utterly fascinating because of its very lack of distancing from the material it covers. It
also reminds me of Lee Hays's comment on trying to reunite the singing group the Weavers
after 20 years: "It was," he said, "like trying to organize a convention of
cats." If The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction doesn't quite work as the
definitive reference it was originally intended to be, it works quite well as an important
artifact of the genre as it now stands, a kind of critical mirror-maze of current opinions
and perspectives. Taken in this sense, it reveals far more than it tells.
Back to Home
|