#54 = Volume 18, Part 2 = July 1991
Horst Pukallus
An Interview with Darko Suvin: Science Fiction and History, Cyberpunk, Russia....
This interview took place in June 1989 and was first published, in a briefer
German version, in Das Science Fiction Jahr 1990, ed. Wolfgang Jeschke (Munich:
Heyne Verlag, 1990).
Horst Pukallus: Dr. Suvin, you are a professor of literature, a scholar of
repute, and you were co-editor of SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES for eight years,
something that some people would think of as a contradiction in terms. But
surely you must have your reasons. What explanation is there for your special
weakness for SF?
Darko Suvin: First of all, philosophically speaking, I am a materialist, and a
materialist has to start from the material. I also did six years of science and
have a degree in chemical engineering. What would that chemist be who said "I
don't want to deal with this compound because it smells bad"?—which is not to
admit that SF must smell bad. How come there are so many literary scholars who
say, "I don't want to deal with what people really read"? SF, thrillers, and
love romances are what people really read—as different from what critics have
said was good for a hundred years. I'm not trying to turn such traditional
judgments upside down and say that we should read only SF and forget
Shakespeare. To begin with, there is a division of labor in scholarship by now;
I regret that and have during my whole career refused to be fully imprisoned in
it, so I've written about Shakespeare, Brecht, and Pirandello, as well as about
Happenings. Nonetheless, if we are in the sorrowful situation of a society split
into upper and lower social classes and therefore cultural markets, let's at
least investigate everything that exists—upper, lower, middle, or mixed. And
then, furthermore, what now considered high was not always such: in his time,
Shakespeare appealed, in great part, to social groups of his time analogous to
those that SF appeals to in our time: the Elizabethans called them the
groundlings, the popular masses. So all that I'm saying is: we live in this
system of elite versus mass literature, which I don't like too much; I think the
whole system is un-healthy; it's just as unhealthy to focus only on the elite
literature as it is to focus only on Perry Rhodan and never to read anything
else. I don't understand why all professionals would want to talk only about
"high literature" and why half or at least a fifth of them would not talk
about the reading stuff of the generality of readers. Of course the first is
important, but surely the other is also important. I think SF, thrillers, nurse
romances, etc., are very important; maybe they are bad: but then we must analyze
how and why they are bad. I have read a lot of SF books, as well as an awful lot
of psychological or "high" fiction, and I don't think SF books are
statistically worse than anything else. Maybe 95% of SF is very bad, but that is
not worse than anything else: 95% of published poetry is very bad, and yet
nobody refuses to analyze poetry.
Second: the basic events in my life were World War Two and the Yugoslav
Revolution. They were formative events, when I was very young, 11 or so. They
had consequences for my thinking: it became very easy to think of alternative
time-streams, of alternative histories, because we all lived them. When I was a
little boy there was still monarchist Yugoslavia; then we had the Fascist
occupation, we had the partisans, the revolution, post-war Titoism. These were
all alternative time-streams. It was very clear what would happen if Hitler won
the war: one didn't need to read Philip K. Dick to know it. A Nazi bomb hit 50
meters from me in 1943 or '44: in a very slightly alternative world, I'd have
died then, before my teens (and I've always felt, on the one hand, that every
extra day was pure gravy, and on the other that I have certain responsibilities
to speak for those who died that day). When Tito broke with Stalin, the
alternatives were also very clear. I was on the KGB blacklist, I learned a bit
later: in the somewhat more strongly alternative world where Stalin invaded
Yugoslavia after 1948, there was a high chance I'd have ended up on the gallows
before I'd gotten out of my teens. So you had the possibility to think of
alternative histories, of "possible worlds." I learned later that this concept
goes back to Leibniz, but I saw it first in practice, and then in print where
Leibniz also finally found it: in utopian works, fantastic voyages, etc.
So I got very interested in such books. After the War (for my generation, those
born in the 1930s, there is only one War), I read Verne, Wells, and Thomas More,
and then I went on to SF. I think my first article about SF— published in
Yugoslavia in 1957, if I remember correctly—was a kind of survey of the genre,
which lead to a book in the '60s. This possibility of catching a great number of
wave-lengths appealed to me very much, and I think that was the result of the
historical epoch I lived through. Then, at some point, I started to translate.
As well as some short stories I translated John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids
and James Blish's The Seedling Stars, for example, into the Serbo-Croatian
language. I started working in the field as a hobby; my professional specialty
is modern drama. The book I published in Yugoslavia at the beginning of the '60s
was a historical introduction, a general view of the genre, commencing with
Lucian of Samosata and leading to modern SF, to Heinlein, Gérard Klein, and the
Strugatsky Brothers. I also wrote on SF and a number of SF writers (Asimov,
Heinlein, etc.; I still have a gracious letter of thanks from Ray Bradbury) for
a Yugoslav encyclopedia. And then, when I came to teach in the US (having been
by diverse, basically political, manoeuvers deprived of the possibility of
university teaching in my own country) it was '67, a time of student revolt. The
students wanted a great number of things, from power in the university to
Science Fiction courses. The power in the university they didn't get (I remember
a breakfast discussion with Marcuse where I vainly tried to understand how
society would radically change even if they did get it), but the SF courses they
did get. Suddenly I was very marketable. I was hired to teach drama and SF at
the McGill University in '68. Student interest collapsed around '73/'74. It
collapsed, in my opinion, together with good SF; the last significant book of
that last major SF wave was Le Guin's The Dispossessed. There followed a long
period of disinterest, during which I have not been teaching SF regularly. But
interest (not just mine) seems to be increasing again now; I did a new course on
SF last year. However, I can earn my livelihood very well without SF, so that I
can speak objectively. Most academics—Germanists, Anglicists, literary scholars
in general—couldn't care less about SF. But there is no such thing as a naked
eye, there's always a brain behind the eye; even behind the photographic lens
there is the eye and brain of the photographer. In consequence, whenever you
talk about SF, you are speaking theoretically. But if you aren't conscious that
you have a theory, you can't control it, you can't criticize yourself, you don't
have the even the possibility of feed-back for self-examination. Therefore, it's
better to have an explicit than an implicit theory: your chances of being
halfway intelligent are better. But of course 90 percent of all criticism of SF
is not much good either.
HP: I would like to talk a little about cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is celebrated as
the hard SF of today, as the integration of high-tech and sub-culture, and a
claim is—not for the first time—put forward by SF authors that they are taking
over the role of mainstream literature. But I would think it has some
significance when Garcia Marquez gets the Nobel Prize and Bruce Sterling does
not. What can you say about the literary qualities of cyberpunk?
DS: I have some doubts that the label of cyberpunk is more than an invention to
help sell texts. I really don't know what is the common denominator among Greg
Bear, Lucius Shepard, Norman Spinrad, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. Norman
Spinrad has always been one of the most talented SF people around, and he may
just may have written the best cyberpunk novel—outside cyberpunk but rejuvenated
by it, so to speak. I think Shepard is a critical writer (that's a positive
judgment in my mouth), I think Gibson is a very good writer (though
unfortunately writing worse and worse in my opinion; I'm very disappointed at
the rehash in Mona Lisa Overdrive). Neuromancer was, I think, a splendid book;
half of the stories in the collection Burning Chrome were splendid; Count Zero
is halfway okay, but there Gibson already begins going downhill. Perhaps there
is a poetically just, though very high, price to be paid for writing Hollywood
scenarios (maybe in proportion to the price received for those scenarios?)....I
have just read Bruce Sterling's latest book, Islands in the Net, which is his
best book though I have some reservations about it; the rest I found pretty bad,
including Schismatrix as well as the well-nigh terrible Involution Ocean. That's
a pity, because Sterling is an intelligent and articulate person with a wealth
of ideas shooting off at undisciplined tangents. (I analyze Gibson and Sterling
at length in an essay in Foundation #46.) So I would be very dubious about
calling cyberpunk a real movement or school; it's more a group of friends
praising each other. The best people—Gibson, for instance—do have something new
to say; and it's the first new thing that's interested me (except for some women
writing SF) since The Dispossessed.
You see, I confess that I just can't read most of what has been published in the
last 15 years. I pick it up and try, from time to time, but mostly I can't; so I
have my favourite authors by now of whom I read every book, say C.J. Cherryh,
but I cannot follow the genre any longer (when I realized that, I resigned from
editorship of SFS). This may partly be a judgment on an aging critic: but I
think I have a great deal of curiosity left in me still, and I think it is
mainly a judgment on the genre. What's been happening in SF is a terrible
contamination with Fantasy. If you like Fantasy, it's okay (I myself like some
of it, from Kafka and Calvino to Tanith Lee or some Japanese). But I don't think
Fantasy is at all the same as SF; and having it half this, half that—what James
Blish once called Science Fantasy—is really horrible. Fantasy should not be
published in the same way and as if it were SF. This SF-Fantasy opposition isn't
at all the same as the one between hard SF vs. soft SF. What I think is
interesting in cyberpunk is exactly the breakdown of the distinction between
hard and soft SF—that your brain becomes the software of the new hardware, if
you wish to speak this scientific language (which, I think, is not too
important). If you wish to speak about it on a deeper level—important for
writers and critics—I do think that Gibson's books and perhaps a few of books by
other '80s authors too, have renewed the language of SF: they have integrated
the computer-hacker lingo into it. The claims of and for that social group may
be vastly overblown: I don't think their way of life is representative of the
whole world today; it's not even representative of all the young generation of
Western Europe or the US. These semi-yuppies are in fact economically the upper
class of the largely unemployed youth of today. But it is representative of a
very important little group: the media people, electronic mixers, computer
freaks—the social bearers of this cyberpunk structure of feeling. There is
something new here: there is a basically new technology and a new social
position of the group that has access to this technology, and that I find
interesting. There is the fact, for example, that Gibson's extrapolated
future—supposedly extrapolated, because I don't believe SF is extrapolation,
though it is, of course, very important that it simulates extrapolation—is a
Japanese, not a North American future. This is important not because of the
nation, but because Japanese capitalism is a corporative capitalism—a kind of
neo-feudal capitalism, if you wish—different from the US variant/variety; and
therefore Gibson's is a hypothesis about the future of capitalism: that it's
going to become more and more Japanese or corporativistic. I hope Gibson and
Sterling are wrong, but I rationally believe they are most probably right. At
any rate, the fact that they focus on this variant means something; it means
they have realized they are living in the 1980s.
HP: I've read cyberpunk books and have to say they are well-written adventure
stories. But not, I think, more than that. I was disappointed by their
characterization, in part by their style too, but mainly by their curious notion
that the world has become too difficult to understand, so that the only
principle to follow is everyone for himself (or herself). Why can't people who
think of themselves as top writers see any possibility of explaining the
multiplicity of thinking, of life-styles, of processes around the world?
DS: If we believe, as I believe, that any piece of writing is determined by its
implied reader—modern literary theory maintains there is an ideal reader
inscribed between the lines, an ideal addressee—it's not difficult to find the
ideal reader of cyberpunk: computer hackers, media mixers, technicians of TV and
radio stations, mobile young professionals, free-lancers, jet-setters who don't
care whether they work in Tokyo, London, Düsseldorf, or Los Angeles—they just
want to have their machines, they want to be part of a global network. The ideal
cyberpunk reader should be someone like Bob Geldof, a kind of global media
expert. Their position is very strange. They despise the bureaucracy, they don't
want to be mass people or peons (proletarians: that's a recurring nightmare in
Gibson), they want fun, they want sex, they want to travel around the world. And
yet they live off the despised bureaucracy. They live on the basis of
multinational capitalist prosperity. They are against it, but they are inside
the system; and the system doesn't allow you to see its workings (at best you
can murmur something about mysterious AIs). In a way I think of cyberpunk as the
beginning of post-modernism in SF. I don't like post-modernism; but it can't be
denied that the previous era—the Leninist era, or Picasso era, or Brecht era, or
whatever you want to call it, one in which the best people were propagating the
marriage between the political and the æsthetic avantgarde—has collapsed. It
collapsed partially several times, in the '30s and the late '40s and '50s; but
it has collapsed finally today, I think: there are no global alternative
theories any more. So cyberpunk is a pretty direct reflection of the social
position, not of our whole society, but of a particular group, which is very
interesting and important, but which also has its strong limitations: it's
certainly not the point of view of the whole world.
HP: Is it not the task of a writer to speak for the people who have no voice and
to explain the things these people have no means to understand on their own?
DS: Indeed, I think, all the great writers—Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, even
Joyce, I would say—have always spoken for large social groups. Workers and
farmers are usually not represented in "high literature." SF as a whole, in my
opinion, has always been written for the "middle" classes. All the statistics
we have, which are very few, say that the main age for reading SF is 13 to 25.
So it's a kind of medium for a specific social group of its own which has not
quite differentiated into upper class and lower class (a present-day student is
neither/nor). The greatest writer of SF up to the present probably is still H.G.
Wells (we could debate this, but from the standpoint of international
recognition it's certainly Wells); and about him there is a great amount of
evidence by now—biographies, documentations, critical literature—elucidating
which social groups he was writing about. And he gave his voice not to the
workers (the workers were the Morlocks) and not to the upper class (they were
the Eloi), but to the observer in between, the Time Traveller. It's very
difficult for an SF writer, I think, to write about the people, if you mean by
that the great majority of the working classes—I don't mean industrial workers,
but those whom the Japanese capitalists so nicely call the "salarymen" (and
women). The working classes have never been represented in SF in my opinion: and
I'm not sure they could be. I think SF is a literature of the in-between
classes. Which are very important, because who these classes go with determines
who wins: if they go with the upper class, the upper class wins, if they go with
the workers, then the workers win.
However, it's extremely difficult to answer your question. We would have to
analyze who Dick lends his voice to, who Le Guin gives her voice to (they're the
most important SF writers in the US of the '60s). Who do the Strugatsky Brothers
give voice to? Clearly the Russian intelligentsia, not the workers and peasants.
That's okay; I have nothing against it. One shouldn't expect too much. Your
question is a populist question. I would dearly like to answer, "Yes,
wonderful." (By the way, as a populist, you shouldn't use this quintessentially
elitist, politicized, and conservative Nobel Prize—which was given to a
Kissinger, for heaven's sake!—as an argument for quality of writing.) But to do
so, first of all you have to have writers who understand the experiences of the
workers and peasants, and secondly a reading public for whom you can write—at
least some nuclei such as existed in the Weimar Republic, when the workers went
to their singing clubs, their associations, and trade unions, and even to some
theaters (there was some theatre for workers). At that point you can have a Brecht. You can't have a Brecht today: the workers are looking at television. If
we are really materialists, we have to believe that the material circumstances
give you certain possibilities and enforce certain limitations; so it's no good
to tell the writer, "Why don't you write for the people?" Which people? The
people who are looking at television? But you could say, one can write
intelligently for a critical intelligentsia or middle class, maybe; and that's
the best we can expect, I think, realistically. That's the way I read the
ideological situation today.
HP: My concept of a writer is that of a person who takes a life-time to unfold
what s/he believes s/he has to say and to improve her or his ways of saying it.
I've the impression that the so-called cyberpunk movement is just a bunch of
talented writers who are too unsure of themselves, too impatient to think of a
message, to allow themselves time to develop their own style and literary
uniqueness. Or would you regard this as much too hard a position?
DS: Let's talk about Gibson. The trajectory of Gibson seems to me very
interesting. He's not exactly a Vietnam War deserter; but he came to Canada at
the same time they did (albeit at a very young age), and it's very interesting
and important that he lived first in Toronto and then in Vancouver. He was
getting out of the US; and the experiences in/behind Neuromancer are the
experiences at the US from the outside, to some extent, in an alienated
"Japanese-y" way. Now he's in Hollywood. writing scenarios doe sequels to
Alien. For that there is a price to pay, as I said earlier (Heinlein's TANSTAAFL). He's famous, well-paid; but his novels get worse and worse; he's
started writing about voodoo as an explanation of the world situation as he sees
it....But let me say something in defense of cyberpunk. What you are asking its
practitioners to do is to be better than history, to transcend history. In other
words, to be heroes. Very few people are heroes. Joyce was a hero: he went into
exile and wrote his thing, never mind what happened. That's a stance very few
people can maintain, and it's unfair to ask them. It's unfair to ask somebody to
be a Proust, a Joyce, or a Brecht. Market circulation is getting faster and
faster today; fashions change more and more quickly. What you say is quite
correct: these authors are impatient; they don't leave themselves time. But
that's because they are exactly suited to the times. I don't mean that they sit
down and say: What is it the market wants from us? Many do, but I think the best
do not. I think they catch—very indirectly—the spirit of the age. They are
aware of the pace of events; they know the world whirls around ever more
rapidly, so to speak. As Balzac said, writers are only secretaries of the
society: whatever society dictates to me, I write down. One out of a thousand
can be a hero and say, "I only listen to the Muse." Balzac killed himself by
writing so much; but most of us want rather to live, and have to live from
something. Thought I think you have a good point, I would defend the cyberpunk
authors at least to this extent: I think we get the SF we deserve. (No, on
second thought, I think that's not quite true: most SF is worse than we
deserve.)
HP: William Gibson spoke of cyberpunk being in the tradition of William
Burroughs. I know the work of Burroughs well and find this hard to believe.
Burroughs is at least a kind of rebel; he calls for a breakthrough into reality
—to see its true face and to understand it—while cyberpunk seems to me a form of
capitulation and a flight into a new, electronic type of inner space. Do you see
any connection between Burroughs and cyberpunk?
DS: If you analyze the plot in the major works of Gibson, it is what I call (in
my Foundation essay, "On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF") "Romeo and Juliet in Chiba
City." There is a love story between two little people, not between the owners,
the big people: the big people are horrible; those up there in the orbit are
monsters, are freaks. These little people, the computer cowboy and the street
samurai, try but can't maintain a love affair, just as Romeo and Juliet's love
affair was chopped up. The stars are against them, in this case not the
Elizabethan astrologers' stars but the little shuriken of that sleazy corporate
world. So I think there is a real rebellion in the best of Gibson; there is
sympathy for the little people; there is a very clear, cynical view of the power
struggles. In that sense, I think, the cyberpunk writers have half a dozen
forefathers: one is Bester, another is Pynchon, maybe; and certainly Burroughs,
too. So they are at the interface of SF and what is called mainstream
literature, although of course they stay inside SF. And Burroughs is the one who
showed us that the hallucinatory operators are real; in other words, a world
where drugs are normal, where killing is an everyday occurrence—the world of
high capitalism—is real. Let's say the best of cyberpunk can be read—with many
impurities—as a kind of Rousseauist rebellion. I would defend, for example,
Neuromancer very strongly. I think it is certainly politically much better
informed than the New York Times or 99 percent of the North American population.
Of course Gibson is exceptional. Even in Shepard's book Life During Wartime a
global war is going on
for years and years because two Panamanian families somewhere behind the scenes
are fighting each other! That's politically illiterate. Sterling's novel Islands
in the Net is not bad, but it's politically illiterate, too. I'm sorry, but
that's the way people get educated today.
HP: Let's switch to the other side of the world, to the USSR. Do you think the
perestroika policy has consequences for Soviet SF?
DS: I think it's too early to tell. To judge from what I know today, June 1989,
I don't think it's had great visible consequences yet in the published SF. In a
sense this is paradoxical: there are two complementary and opposed reasons for
this. First, Stalinism (Zhdanovism, Brezhnevism, what they so nicely call over
there "stagnation") has still a stranglehold on SF publishing. Second, what
used to be visible only in SF is visible in the Soviet Parliament
and in Pravda now. What used to be visible in the works of the Strugatsky
Brothers could only be published in their Aesopic, coded language. I think that
in the long run, i.e. if perestroika goes on, publishing will get unshackled.*
But then this second aspect will be the deeper one, and a good thing for Soviet
SF: it will become a normal genre, no longer responsible for the fate of the
Russian intelligentsia (which is a very heavy load for a literary genre). That
has traditionally been the role of the Russian literature. Under Czarism you had
the government and you had Tolstoy, and Tolstoy really was the voice of the
people, the voice of the peasants. I expect there will be fewer problems with
censorship. SF, including that of the Strugatsky Brothers, had terrible problems
with censorship in the USSR. We must assume that many of the best things not
only didn't get published, but never got written, because the writers knew they
would have such problems. This, I think, is now becoming a thing of the past. It
depends. The most important SF publishing house is not so much in the
government's hands as in nationalist or right-wing hands, and SF is really more
of the Sakharov or Medvedev line of thinking, what is in our newspapers called
"liberal" (which is, I think a stupid adjective in this context). So SF authors
may get to have that type of problem now—that they are "not sufficiently
Russian," not sufficiently nationalist—instead of problems with censorship; but
probably it will be a smaller problem. My main feeling about Russian SF since
the fall of Khrushchev (or, say, since '68) was that it was forced into a very
unfortunate
symbiosis—quite parallel with the symbiosis between SF and Fantasy in the US,
except that in the Russian tradition it's not with horror and other Fantasy but
with the folktale. You can see this already in the Strugatskys' Monday Begins on
Saturday; and a lot of other authors, among them the best ones, have been forced
into this symbiosis. Not "forced" in the sense that the police told them, "You must write fairy tales"; rather, the symbiosis was one way to write
something that had an æsthetic form. And the national tradition is very strong
in the Russia: people were still telling folktales in the villages one or two
generations ago. I personally feel that this tradition has some strengths,
especially when used ironically, as the Strugatskys used it. But its also very
dangerous because the folktale is an older genre, and if you want to write fairy
tales you're not going to write SF. So this main trend in good Soviet SF since
1968 is not one that I like: I think it renders SF harmless. By good SF, I mean
Bilenkin, Gor, Varshavsky, the Strugatskys, Shefner, Larionova, Bulychov, and
others. The trend was to keep it what I would call non-cognitive. I should also
add that there has been a lot of awfully bad SF published in the USSR for
ideological reasons, because a committee liked its hacks. I think that can stop
now. I don't know, but I hope so. They will then have to contend with a lot of
bad market SF: the market will find its hacks too, no doubt (often the same who
wrote for the committees, that breed is durable).
HP: Vladimir Gakov talks about a new generation of Russian SF writers —Yevgeny
Lubin, Vitali Babenko, Leonid Passanenko, for instance—and says their target is
a conformist and consumer mentality. Is this a promising new tendency?
DS: Well, maybe, but that's nothing new. This has been the language of the
Russian critics of the Strugatskys in the '60s. For example, Tale of the Troika
was interpreted as critical of a combination of bureaucratic and consumer
mentality. But to criticize consumerism is a very ambiguous thing. What does it
mean, as a slogan? Back to hunger? What kind of consumption, which type of
consumer? This has to be made much more precise for me before I start saluting
it as a big and interesting new development. On the other hand, I think Gakov is
correct: there are a lot of new names. These authors may get better
possibilities to publish, and I think they will be liberated from a double
pressure: the pressure of censorship and the pressure of being in one of the
very few places where you could have the alternatives to the official,
government line voiced publicly. For a short time Soviet SF will be, perhaps,
not so popular—and not so controversial, maybe —because it no longer has only
the choice between being ideological and political opposition or being trash.
Finally, since the Russians are a highly talented people, I wouldn't be
surprised if Russian SF—which should not be called Soviet any longer
then—becomes qualitatively equal to any other SF in the world, including British
and US.
*By 1989, unbeknownst to me, the monopoly of the State Publishing Houses was
broken and a new Press Law was coming into effect. The net result was (as I
expected) a full unshackling of publishing, so that by now everything is being
published, from the most heretic Strugatskys to the worst SF porn and kitsch.
(DS, 1990)
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