What I learned from the Warrior-Maid of Mars

I recently came across this incredible cover for Planet Stories Summer 1950 issue and the title stories snagged my attention immediately, of course – how can you not be snagged by Margaret St. Claire and Ray Bradbury in their primes? – but I was also curious to see who else was featured, and went off looking for the contents[1].

Holy cow this is an amazing issue! Look at these titles:

On the Beat - a lost skill in writing?

I have been thinking carefully about the pulps lately, in particularly about what made some of the early pulp SF greats so enduring.  

What was it about was perusing the excellent Center for Fiction website today when I came across this article by Victor LaValle.

In a nutshell, this is the tale of two skilled and educated writers who have suddenly come face to face with the fact that narrative had never been a big part of their training.  In LaValle's words:

There's a kind of blind spot, an essential flaw, in the workshop method that contributed to our problem. In class we'd discussed each submission seriously, were schooled about our characterizations, our use of language, our voices, our ideas. But we rarely, if ever, discussed the structures of our stories. Never examined the reasons why we'd told this story in this order.

This epiphany comes to them when LaValle's friend calls in a daze, realizing that the comic book panels he has been scripting in his new job are just sudden cut scenes from conversation to conversation. What could it all mean? Did their prose stories boil down to much the same?

What they realized, suddenly, was that the demands of writing for comic books were exposing a gap in their training: it wasn't necessarily that they couldn't write a coherent narrative, but that the focus of everything they'd done so far had been elsewhere, and they were suddenly realizing: they didn't know how to think about the narrative.

A tightly written story is a beautiful thing.  Even when the characters are cut-outs, the dialogue wooden, and the cliches are thick on the ground - if the beats come just right then odds are good that's a story you will have trouble putting down.

Reading this little blurb about the way in which comic book writing had thrown their lack of narrative training into relief reminded me of my question: what was it about the best of the early pulp writers that made them work so well?

These modern writers were learning how to analyze their narratives, how to think about the attack and decay of beats, the sequence, how to build a climax and how to pull together disparate threads to make a point, all this by looking at their writing through the lens of comics.

The pulp greats?

Detective stories.

Looking back, it seems obvious. If you take a look at some of the best known names from the 30s and 40s, which is arguably the peak of pulp SF, the best were known as much for their mysteries and their detective fiction as for SF.

Look at C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner - between the two of them they turned out any number of mysteries and hard boiled detective stories.

Look at Leigh Brackett - as well known in some circles for her hard-boiled novel No Good From a Corpse and her screenplay for The Big Sleep as for any of her space opera in SFandom.

Look at Dorothy Sayer, look at Dennis Wheatley.

All of these writers worked with mystery and detective stories just as much as Arthur Conan Doyle did with his Sherlock Holmes tales and later Agatha Christie with her murder mysteries. And the one thing that ties this all together is that for a mystery of any kind to work effectively for the reader the author must master two things:

1. The timing of the story beats
2. The weaving together of divergent narratives into a whole

The proof?

Further forward, let's look at Ray Bradbury, Moore and Kuttner's young padawan - his stories may never have drifted into detective territory, per se, but they have that same fine grasp of timing and control.  He takes that mastery of tight storytelling he learned in his mentors' livingroom and applies it masterfully to build a sense of otherwordly disconnect in his Martian Chronicles stories, to misdirect and surprise in tales such as The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, to build tension in stories like Chrysalis.

Look at H. Beam Piper, whose detective slate novel Murder in the Gun Room is perhaps his best work, but whose skillful handling of timing and complex threads shows itself in his story He Walked Around the Horses and others of his paratime police series.

Look at Andre Norton, who again draws on the legacy of the pulp era greats and like them in her early work she wrote crime fiction as well as SF - and you can see that way of thinking in the structure of her Time Traders stories.

These writers were writing across genres at a time before the development of our modern silos, and the majority of the early masters wrote at a time before genre publishing was any way to make a living. Those who truly wanted to earn their bread with their type-writers couldn't possibly rely on science fiction alone - even if their output was sufficient to buy food at a penny a word (or less!) there simply weren't that many dedicated venues.  No, to pay the bills they needed to think in terms of the full range of possibilities, and they wrote not only science fiction but also crime, detective/mystery, western, fantasy, adventure, and weird fiction.

The majority of pulp era authors faded quickly of course - they burned out, perhaps, or were simply never really good enough to last.

But the best?

The best pushed on and were well known well into the 60s and 70s, before The Great Delisting - and we're starting to rediscover them again now (though of course they were never completely forgotten, just so difficult to find that only grey-haired or truly dedicated young fans would be likely to come across them).

The best of their protégés obviously learned these same rules, and added to it the next generation's ideas to enhance characterization and colour.

I think it's no mystery why so many of the best writers of the pulp era and the generation after wrote for radio, film, and TV as well as for print - many of the "beat" rules they learned transfer very well to the demands of visual storytelling.  And this, of course, is why attempting to write for comics threw the lack of focus on these rules in modern writer training into such sharp relief.

In modern writer training, the kind of close one-on-one mentoring that previous generations enjoyed is less common.  On top of that, many of the tools that those pulp masters forged and passed on to the next generation have come to be seen as "obvious" - so workshops and similar training venues tend to focus on other things: the artistry of character and colour, the feats of worldbuilding that we've come to expect.

Basically, what's happened is that literary fiction has gained the luxury of being somewhat lazy: it's become possible to obsess about painting scenes and generating atmosphere without much consideration for the other dimensions of a good story.  Make no mistake, there are great authors today - maybe better authors in some respects than in decades past (though I submit that the best of the pulp era would fare as well today as they did then). But there's hardly anyone teaching this generation of writers how to keep a beat.

Partly, I blame the siloing of genres - it's possible now to make a living writing nothing but science fiction, perhaps nothing but a specific sub-type of science fiction. And the sheer volume of writing being published is astounding - even if they wanted to, many writers can barely keep up with what their peers are writing, let alone delve into other realms of publishing to see what the others are doing.  And of course the pay is much better - oh, it's still not a lot, and the majority of writers will still need to heed that advice: "don't quit your day job" but it's no longer necessary to add crime fiction and westerns, and radio plays and TV dramas and film scripts to your bibliography just to ensure enough income to justify the time spent writing.

So if you're a writer, here's your challenge:

If you haven't done it before try this - read something in a dramatically different genre (write SF? read a western. write steam punk? try a spy thriller), pay attention to how the story works, how the narrative is built. Then and only then turn around a try something completely different. Write something new - try a new genre, try a new format!

Do you write prose? Try poetry. Try a screen play. Try a radio drama. Try thinking about how your story would work in a comic - and if you have the skills, sketch it out, see how it works.

Writers need to grow. And yes, writers can grow by simply hunkering down and hammering out what they know, refining their skills and honing down to an ever finer focus. But:

What's growth without adventure?

Try it!

Asimov's Three

The March 1939 issue in which Asimov's first published
story, Marooned Off Vesta appeared, 77 years ago!

April 6, 2016 marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Good Doctor, who sadly died in 1992 of heart and kidney failure.

Having been writing science fiction for 15 years, and having cemented his reputation with an impressive bibliography that included what is sometimes considered science fiction’s most famous story, Nightfall [1] Isaac Asimov was tapped to provide an essay for Reginald Bretnor’s [2] volume Modern Science Fiction: It’s Meaning and It’s Future (1953) where he was published alongside other big names of the era such as John W. Campbell, Rosalie Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, and Arthur C. Clarke.

The whole volume was of course mainly dedicated to the ways in which the authors imagined science fiction would impact society [3], including such titles as Science Fiction: Preparation for the Age of Science (Clarke), Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis (Philip Wylie), and Science Fiction, Morals, and Religion (Gerald Heard).  Asimov’s own contribution, Social Science Fiction, is perhaps most notable for its effort at a taxonomy of science fiction stories – which results in his assertion that there are ultimately three categories of science fiction story: Gadget, Adventure, and Social.  To illustrate, he imagines three 19th century authors writing about an “imaginary” device they tentatively call an “automobile”:

“Writer X spends most of his time describing how the machine would run, explaining the workings of an internal-combustion engine, painting a word-picture of the struggles of the inventor, who after numerous failures, comes up with a successful model. The climax of the yarn is the drama of the machine, chugging its way along at the gigantic speed of twenty miles an hour, possibly beating a horse and carriage which have been challenged to a race. This is gadget science fiction. […] 

 “Writer Y invents the automobile in a hurry, but now there is a gang of ruthless crooks intent on stealing this valuable invention. First they steal the inventor's beautiful daughter, whom they threaten with every dire eventuality but rape (in these adventure stories, girls exist to be rescued and have no other uses). The inventor's young assistant goes to the rescue. He can accomplish his purpose only by the use of the newly perfected automobile. He dashes into the desert at an unheard-of speed of twenty miles an hour to pick up the girl who otherwise would have died of thirst if he had relied on a horse, however rapid and sustained the horse's gallop. This is adventure science fiction. […] 

 “Writer Z has the automobile already perfected. A society exists in which it is already a problem. Because of the automobile, a gigantic oil industry has grown up, highways have been paved across the nation, America has become a land of travelers, cities have spread into the suburbs—and what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done? What is the solution? This is social science fiction.” (Asimov, "Social Science Fiction")

This can all of course be neatly summarized:

• Gadget story: describes how some hypothetical thing might work.
• Adventure story: describes how some hypothetical thing might be used to solve a problem.
• Social story: describes what society might look like when some hypothetical thing exists.

As anyone familiar with Asimov's work and his advocacy for SF to aim for literary achievement might predict, his essay largely advocates for the social story as being the pinnacle.

There are a couple of curious things about this position though, even ignoring the quibble (which I'm sure the Good Doctor would actually have agreed with) that it's a rare story indeed that neatly falls into just one of these categories.

One of the first thing that springs to mind is that, while Asimov doesn't obviously dismiss other kinds of fiction as unworthy, it's clear that in his opinion "social SF" is best placed to reach the "heights" of literary fiction.

While I'm right alongside Dr. Asimov in agreeing that social SF can be much harder to write, and certainly requires more writing skill than simply sketching out a neat idea in a flashy fiction wrapper, even in the era he was writing in and before it should have been obvious: the basic fact that writing a saleable story of the first two species doesn't require the type of literary skills Asimov advocated for in SF doesn't actually preclude their application.

I'm not of course suggesting that Isaac Asimov was ignorant of what came before him - on the contrary, looking at his early work in particular you can almost see the impact of previous writers in its inverse: Asimov's prose is consciously direct and unornamented, and while he develops over the course of his remarkably prolific career [4] even to the end his stories lack so much in the way of literary flourish that he has proven a slippery target for the ordinary literary critic. [5] For many, this is a huge plus: in fact, the ruthlessly plot-and-idea oriented writing that is Asimov’s hallmark is one of the things that made him so popular. [6] I’m not even suggesting that Asimov was himself without literary skill – in fact, despite constantly breaking cardinal rules of fiction (minimize exposition, show don’t tell, write natural, believable dialogue, and others) he demonstrates that he’s capable of some amazing characterization at important points in his plots (look at Liar! for example, or Second Foundation), not to mention the skillful way in which he contrived the narrative of (especially) longer tales, nesting plots and snapping together timelines in fascinating non-linear ways. [7]

No, Asimov certainly knew what he was about in developing his personal style, and I feel sure he had a good grasp of what had come before (indeed, what was still being produced by his peers when he started and into the 50s).  Where I disagree with him is really in his own words, which he gives us in his 3 paragraph author’s note at the beginning of Nemesis (1989) [8]:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing – to be ‘clear’. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally [9], or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize.  I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics –Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

You see, he is making a fundamental mistake here, I think – eschewing poetry and symbol and “art” in writing isn’t the only way to achieve clarity.  Certainly, it’s easy to become unclear if you rely too heavily on these things, but the bright imagery of Leigh Brackett’s descriptions, the rich language of Jack Vance’s satirical tweaks are anything but unclear in my mind.  And this mistake is where I think he gets his sense that social SF is where the genre is best placed to achieve literary quality.

He has taken the stance that only through clarity – by which he specifically means “unadorned writing” – can good SF stories be told (at least by him) and a relationship built with the readers.  From the perspective of this stance his idea that social SF has the best potential for literary quality makes perfect sense, I think, but it’s because the “artistic flourishes” he chose to avoid are what give stories of the first two varieties life, and his own style was in fact best adapted for painting the complex future stories he ultimately went on to write in his Robot series and in the Foundation books.

But this brings me to my second point: that I think Asimov’s idea that social SF is the realm in which science fiction was best able to aspire to literary achievement betrays the “class angst” shared by so many genre writers. 

In trying to find ways in which SF might “one day” aspire to literary greatness, Asimov makes himself complicit in placing SF – and other “genre” writing – as somehow automatically unliterary…and by extension unworthy.  In arguing for literary merit in SF he flies the flag high, but in the same motion tears it down again, somehow blind to the fact that SF was already literary: authors like Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis Stevens, Abraham Merritt and many others had already proven that, contemporaries of Asimov like Catherine Moore and Leigh Brackett [10] or the better known Ray Bradbury were still proving that, while they might not reach the heights every time (who does!) they were fully capable of it.

So where does this self-consciousness come from in genre?

I think it’s clear:

Somewhere along the line we have been convinced that stories that “merely” paint a picture of a complex object or scenario don’t count as literature.

Somewhere along the line we have been taught that stories that “merely” recounts an adventure don’t count either.

Genre writing – and science fiction in particular – have quite a lot of these kinds of stories, so obviously they don’t count as literature, right?

But of course we accept the military fantasy of the Illiad as literature, we accept the satirical travels of Gulliver as literature, we accept prose poems (which are surely no more than vivid descriptions of a scene, of a feeling), and Shakespeare’s murder mysteries (and what did you think Macbeth and Hamlet were?), we accept Beowulf, and most ironically we accept things like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Poe and Welles and Doyle and (ahem) Shelley as literature.

It’s long past time we realised that it isn’t (necessarily) the writing that makes people dismiss SF&F, detective stories, westerns, romance, etc as unworthy – it’s the formats they’ve been traditionally associated with.  Formats that were cheap, mass produced, and hungry for as much content as they could get: pulps.

Yes, this format paid little and produced a lot – not only was it hard for a writer to make a living [11] unless they produced astounding volumes for a multitude of venues, but the publications themselves had a challenge: they had to be cheap enough for nearly anyone to afford, they had to be substantial enough to seem good value for money, and they needed to produce often enough to remain visible in an incredibly competitive market.  These two factors pushed authors and publishers to pump out enormous volumes of text each and every month, so while the best writers could produce truly amazing work the fact was that any random story was probably merely mediocre. [12]

The economics of this era colours our perceptions and and the attitudes of people of the time, though I feel sure that there was an element of elitism involved as well: for the most part the pulps were dismissed as “yellow journals” without interest to authors who could publish in “legitimate” ways – and beneath the notice of the academy.  It wasn’t that there were no literary quality authors writing for the pulps, it was that they were tainted by turning to the pulps to facilitate their desire to write a kind of story that has captivated human beings for as long as there have been stories. [13]

Interestingly, I can see this phenomenon emerging again with the explosion of digital media.  It will be interesting to see if we can overcome the prejudices of our own era to see the gems hidden in the digital pulps.

--30--

1. Amazingly, published a mere 3 years after he had been inspired to try his hand at SF writing Nightfall was already Asimov’s 32nd story, though apparently only his 20th published (admittedly a remarkable acceptance rate).

2. Although little talked about today, Brentnor himself was an interesting character, whose career included writing propaganda to be sent to Japan during WW2 and membership in The Order of the Trapezoid in the 50s.  Yes, that one.  In SF, he’s mainly remembered today for his symposia and essay collections on the craft of writing it.

3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there seem to be a few Futurians in the credits…

4. Seriously: 500 books in 54 years? Even with story collections included that's remarkable. More astoundingly, he seems to have produced more than 100 of them just in his last 10 years!

5. Though not entirely impossible: Professor Emeritus James Gunn (University of Kansas/English Literature) seems to have done quite well, for one.

6. In an article published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (July 1980) Gunn noted two very interesting points about Asimov’s style: character is almost never significant, and the plot is driven forward in functional dialogue rather than action.  To quote his summary of the style: “The robot stories, and as a matter of fact almost all Asimov fiction – play themselves on a relatively bare stage.”  When I first read this comment I had an interesting thought: could it be that Asimov’s style reflected the “laboratory aesthetic” of his early era – the 40s and 50s? Anyone who has actually worked in a lab would of course sneer at the ideal as fantasy, but there can be no doubt that the whole minimalist lab filled with expanses of gleaming stainless-steel counters broken only by the occasional sleek machine and lit with the clear white of fluorescent strips was a powerful image.

7. Not that this is universally loved – personally, although I’m not a big Asimov fan (I like rich language and characterization) I think this is the most intriguing aspect of his writing, the way he could fit things together like the parts of some complex machine and make them mesh smoothly.  In light of his incredible output, the skill involved here is amazing.

8. In which, it should be said, he also takes the time to warn the reader that a) the story doesn’t (yet) connect to any of his other universes, and b) that the narrative structure is “odd”

9. And what does he think his non-linear intersecting timelines are if not experimental!?

10. Though their work was losing visibility at the time Asimov wrote his article.

11. We’re so much more fortunate now…

12. Thinking just of the venues that survived – because they realized that no matter how hungry they were to fill their pages, publishing actually bad work would be suicide.

13. Ironically, Ray Bradbury reputedly wanted to be a pulp legend like his mentors Moore, Kuttner, Brackett and Hamilton – and his failure to achieve his goal is a big part of what allowed his writing to be taken as literary rather than dismissed as pulp.  The same might be said of Orwell, whose best known works should surely be filed under SF&F.

Leigh Brackett - Queen of Space Opera

Leigh Brackett
(from Amazing Stories July 1941)

I confess: I am a big fan of old-style space operas, planetary adventure romances, and so-called science fantasy.

While I rarely if ever write that sort of science fiction, I can gobble up some of the old classics in one sitting and it's by no means difficult to understand why: these stories are pure fun.

Still, they're challenging, and it's not hard to understand why some people look down on them.  While the basic rule is "there are no rules" and scientific facts can go out the window when the story demands it, to be truly successful these sorts of stories do have to meet three touchstones:

1. The characters have to draw on key archetypes that resonate with the reader.

2. The settings must be internally consistent.

3. While deus ex machina events and "rule changes" can occur, it can't be haphazard: they must be dramatically consistent.

These kinds of stories were huge in early science fiction, and maintained a strong following even through the "hard" era of the 50s and 60s (when the market for new work in her style seemed to dry up) and as New Wave style came on the scene in the 60s and 70s. And the queen of space opera and planetary romance was Leigh Brackett, who was born 100 years ago today!

Brackett's impact still echoes in science fiction today: she entered the pulp markets near the end of their decades-long ferment of experimentation, took a genre that had been largely dismissed and sneered at, and elevated the space opera and planetary romance subgenres to an artform.  Just as we were learning how little like Burroughs' vision Mars and Venus were, she was building an intricate universe around the touchstones that make this kind of "science fantasy" not just readable but un-put-downable even in the face of obvious scientific impossibilities.

But she was by no means only a science fiction author - in fact although her first sales were SF short fiction (her first story appears to have been "Martian Quest" published in Astounding Science Fiction Feb 1940) she published other pulp genres as well and her first full novel was a hard-boiled crime novel No Good From a Corpse , which led to a series of other hard-boiled and noir works, including a number of screen plays.  Ultimately, though, she was best known for her SF stories and novels, especially those set in her version of our solar system.

Brackett's Mars and Venus started with the image painted by earlier authors like ERB - Mars as a marginal desert world of ancient and decaying civilization, Venus a wet and tropical world peopled by brash hunters - but her solar system was intricately interconnected, and many of her stories dealt with themes like the conquest of the frontier and the interplay of cultures, including the impact of colonization.  Her stories and novels sold well right up into the mid-50s, when the "harder" styles dominated and led to the death of many "sword and planet" and science fantasy venues, but she was still looked to for excellence in her chosen sub-genres.  She mastered the art of internal consistency and resonant archetype characters in a way that draws readers in.  So powerful was her mastery of these epic settings and archetype characters that L. Sprague de Camp famously bemoaned the fact that he had gone to Lin Carter first to co-author new Conan stories, saying that in retrospect Brackett's mastery of gloriously barbaric characters would have been a better fit.

After a decade writing mainly for film and TV, Brackett returned to her planetary romances in the mid-60s, and produced sporadically for the next decade until her death at the age of 62 in 1977 - in the midst of working on the screenplay for the film most often chosen as the best Star Wars episode: The Empire Strikes Back.

The debt modern SFF owes to writers like Brackett is huge, and yet she languishes largely forgotten - sadly, between The Great Culling of backlist titles in the 80s and the dominance of gritty, grimdark sorts of science fiction in the decades since she simply hasn't had the time in the limelight that is her due.

But what about now?  Perhaps the idea of ancient, decadent civilizations on Mars and solar system spanning intrigue and adventure seems a little quaint in a market that swallows up hard science fiction films like Gravity and The Martian, but then look at the resurgence of popularity for television shows like Doctor Who.  Perhaps the time has come to dust off the old space operas, perhaps re-tune them for a more modern sensibility, and let the sheer spectacle wow us again.