Campbell vs Wollheim

Jacopo Zucci's "The Golden Age" (1575)

I recently returned to Robert Silverberg's essay on the "Golden Age" of SF.

It's interesting how Silverberg characterises Campbell's influence, especially how it contrasts with Wollheim's opinion. I think, though, that they're really on the same page:

I think to start with what Campbell was looking for was something along the lines of Gernsback's "SciEng Evangelism" but with the kind of near-slick writing you could find in Merritt and Moore and other greats of the 30s (taking into account that Moore was still going strong in the 40s and on into the 50s - I'm not sure why she doesn't merit a mention here, but suspect it's because Silverberg is focusing on SCI-fi, and over the years she has been classified strongly as fantasy)

But it grows evident in the later years of the 50s and on into the 60s that he was curating Astounding/Analog with a heavy hand. Even some of his "golden boys" occasionally griped that Campbell was giving them marching orders or entirely rewriting stories. And with the end of the hot part of WW2 and the opening of the cold front with the USSR, the 50s was also kind of a "golden age" of prophesies of doom - it seems inevitable that "cold hard logic" applied to predictive SF would generate an unhealthy serving of that tone.

The key is to note which of the Campbell crew were also getting accolades from Wollheim: Heinlein in particular gets comment for his upbeat, optimistic visions of interplanetary civilization.

So yeah, the 50s is a Golden Age, but I think it's also the period in which SF began to diverge into what Wollheim called the Welles vs Verne branches - enthusiastic utopianism vs scientism. This right after SFF - the larger category - had begun to diverge (partly because of the Campbell/neoFuturian movement) into clearer fantasy and "scientifiction" streams.

Fat Cats and Hippies

Frank Zappa gave the interview this clip is from to MTV's "The Cutting Edge" in 1987. In this section he outlines a problem he saw with the music industry of the 80s - a problem he saw developing years earlier.

I hope you'll listen to the interview - it's just 4 minutes long. But for the moment here's the issue in a nutshell, and in Zappa's own words:

Mind the Gap - A Brief History of Science Fiction

There’s a strange blank in SFnal history these days:

When most people talk about SFF literature they start in the middle, with the lionized authors of the Campbell era – who doesn’t know the names Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke? – and then skip forward an entire generation to start talking about the 1980s and 1990s.

There are those of course who cry foul and point out the non-Campbell greats who had eager followers during the same era, and those who point further back to the pre-war pulps and the rich but forgotten veins that lie in the pages of Argosy and Weird Tales of the 1920s and 1930s.

Jack Vance the Magician

"The less a writer discusses his work - and himself - the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors and trapdoors with the utmost care." Vance in the afterward to "The Bagful of Dreams" The Jack Vance Treasury (2007)

August 28, 2016 would have been Jack Vance's 100th birthday.

The man had an incredible gift to spin worlds from nothing and paint them with a palette of the most vivid language imaginable.

His work is so compelling, in fact, that it’s very hard to remember that every word he wrote after 1980 (a list that includes 11 novels, 27 short stories, and a number of essays, forwards, afterwards, and footnotes) was written by a man who was legally blind and growing steadily blinder. This bibliography is impressive enough – but let’s not forget that in 1980 Vance had already been publishing stories and novels for thirty-five years.

Vance reputedly kept an arm’s length between himself and fandom, rarely exposing himself to real world scrutiny. He is said to have compared himself to a stage magician, whose power of illusion would be spoiled by revealing how his tricks were done. But I sometimes wonder if the truth is that he was actually rather shy of the attention he would have gotten if he’d put himself in the limelight.

The Truesdale Affair's Real Affront

[First, apologies for long silence - real life. I will get back to the couple of projects I had going shortly]

So, by now most of those who follow SF with any interest at all in the Hugos and Worldcon have probably heard the sordid tale of Dave Truesdale's ejection from Worldcon in reaction to how he opened his panel on the state of short fiction in SFF.

I'm not going to belabour that point, which is being quite adequately argued about in other places. What I want to talk about is the panel itself.

The Seven Ages of Fan - Part 1

Yes, the text is apropos.

Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, the world was without form, and void. And then ghughu said the Word, and the Word was Amazing.

Actually, if the truth be told, Amazing Stories is not the beginning of SF fandom in North America – indeed, not the beginning of SF publishing: certainly, Hugo Gernsback’s addition to the pulp market in April, 1926 was apparently the first periodical specifically dedicated to “scientifiction” however stories and novels of this sort had been published in pulp format for decades already. 

Arguably, the US market for primarily literary magazines was first plumbed by Frank Munsey with his (initially weekly) magazine launched in 1889 that he modestly named after himself.[1] The Argosy was added to the news-racks in 1896.  Both these published scientific romances and fantastic tales of course, but were more general literary magazines so contained many other types of story as well.  Nevertheless, interest was sufficient by the 20^th Century to support the launch of specialized fantastic literature magazines such as Thrill Book (1919) and Weird Tales (1923). These focused more on occult and weird fiction of course, but nevertheless also contained tales that today we would class as SF.

It was in this era that the first of the many Numbered Fandoms[2] arose – the beginning that eventually evolved into an entire culture of SFandom.  This story is a long one, particularly if one starts at the beginning, so perhaps I will divide it into parts. In this part, I will lead us to the end of the First Fandom and lay the foundations of a theory of Ages that I think illuminates some of the latter history of the community.

Eofandom (1919 to 1929 – the letter era)

In the beginning was void and chaos: that is to say, scientific romances and scientifiction were scattered among a variety of magazines (and of course the occasional dime novel or penny dreadful). This is not to say there were no fans – of course there were fans! But the world of fandom was still fragmentary and of limited interaction. I think though that it’s important to note that there were nodes of interest congealing, mainly through letter writing circles such as the one that formed around H.P. Lovecraft. Likewise, interest in the science and technology of the future was intensifying in the 19-teens and 1920s: the speculations and predictions of writers such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne appeared poised to come true, the economies of developed nations were bubbling at seemingly breakneck speed, and nearly every year was producing new, astonishing inventions that could actually be taken advantage of by ordinary people. [3]

A key feature here is that there were fairly well respected authors “dabbling” in scientific romances – names such as Washington Irving, James Ferinmore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Clemens, and Herman Melville – producing works we now see as having “literary merit” at the same time as the “dime novel” and “penny thriller” formats were beginning to boom in the late 19^th century. What the ‘Teens and ‘20s really brought was really a combination of the intensification of industrial and scientific development (truly incredible discoveries were being made after all, some of which shook thinking society right down to the foundations of understanding[4] – remember, this is the era of General Relativity, of Nikola Tesla’s inventions, of atoms and cosmic rays, of injectable insulin and penicillin – and an explosion of both economic fertility and mass production, which made for a strong middle class and plenty of spare cash for cheap luxuries like throw-away print.

The resulting explosion of pulp was a Darwinian soup in which publishers experimented with formats and combinations, bred and mutated and died. The side effect was that there was at least a whole generation raised with science fictional ideas not just inhabiting the pages of recreational reading, but occasionally appearing to become possible if not actually true. Naturally, this sudden blooming led to a growth of enthusiasm which manifested itself in the letters pages of the more persistent journals, and from there to the beginnings of correspondence directly between the fans themselves.

By all accounts, Lovecraft’s circle of correspondents (who were sometimes included as a result of fan mail from Lovecraft himself) was just one of a number of circles of this sort – a particularly interesting letter might lead other readers to write to its author to argue the matter or to add to it, and so on. Many such circles seem to have sprung up in the 1920s as the pulp magazines finally started to settle into what we might call genre lines, and two particular names seem to come up often in fan histories as having started a habit of monthly letters to professional magazines, resulting in extensive national networks of correspondents: Forrest J. Ackerman and Jack Darrow[5] being two particularly prominent names from the period.

This is what defines what we might call Eofandom – a sort of pre-fandom, fragmented community of individuals who just happen to have a similar interest and who are connecting in a haphazard way through ordinary correspondence.

The First Fandom (1929-1939 – the fanzine era)

Now, the Mists of Time obviously can’t last forever, and eventually it was inevitable that something would have to happen. It happened in the early 1930s. Or rather, two things happened.

The first thing that appears to have happened is this: the expansion of transportation options in the United States led to the ability of fans to travel to visit the people they had been corresponding with.[6] Naturally, this sort of travel would be best carried out in such a way as to meet several people at once – leading to the revelation that there were others nearby who had shared enthusiasms. As they say, if you get two Americans with a shared interest together they form a club – the networks began to coalesce into actual clubs. The second thing is a related matter: the printed fan magazine.[7]

No longer content to communicate solely via correspondence circles, and finally beginning to organize in a more formal way, fans who had access – either through financial resources of their “club” membership or by virtue of a close relationship with a printer – began to develop their own member publications.  Now, instead of poring over an ever-increasing and changing range of often genre-spanning serials to see and respond to letters, or painstakingly writing letters – sometimes with several duplicates – to be delivered directly to correspondents’ eyes alone, fans at the center of social clusters could compile the news, discussions, and arguments into a familiar form: typeset magazines such as The Time Traveller, Science Fiction Digest, Brass Tacker and others. The communities that began to coalesce around these publications are significant for what comes next.

Now, a key element of the First Fandom – and probably its seminal moment[8] - was probably the establishment of the Science Fiction League, which began life under the pen of Hugo Gernsback on the pages of the February 1934 issue of Wonder Stories.

Gernsback was of course an incredible entrepreneur of the popular science and “scientifiction” enthusiasm of the 1920s, and had launched (and mourned the death of) a number of magazines.  In this context, Gernsback was an experienced player, having established the American Radio League (which started life as the Wireless League) in 1909.  He had originally formed the organization as a means to defend the amateur radio community from oppressive legislation[9] but no doubt also realized the marketing and promotional value of this sort of organization. Beginning life with known writers and community notables such as Forrest Ackerman, Jack Darrow (that name again!), Edmond Hamilton, P. Schuyler Miller and others the organization proved popular and soon had chapters in the US, UK and Australia.

This, I believe is the defining feature of the First Fandom: this is a kind of Cambrian explosion marked by the emergence of coherent communities from the previous casual correspondence circles, and the rise of “official” fan organizations, and it is these dinosaur-like entities that feature so heavily in early fan history.

Here, however, both Speer and Katz urge the reader to see some kind of transition. Speer suggests that in the period between the sale of Wonder Stories in 1936[10] and the first Worldcon in 1939 there was a period of transition and conflict which lies between the “true” First Fandom and the Second Fandom. Katz on the other hand repudiates the idea of an interregnum and instead points to the shift in fan publications as the marker for a change in Era. I both agree and disagree with both.

I choose to use Speer’s Numbered Fandom nomenclature - along with the idea of an “interregnum” as he puts it, and I agree with Katz that publications are a useful marker for the character of the community at the time, but I think he puts too much stock in the idea of “focal point” magazines, which I think obscures some of the social complexity which is evident in the early narratives. And I’m fairly sure that social dynamics is a major part of this story, which of course gets reflected in the kind of communication fans are using.

With that, let’s go back to the idea of fan correspondence:

As you might guess, the coalescence of fans into groups and the revelation that these groups were connected to one another in a network led naturally to the desire to communicate. Typewriters had of course become much cheaper with the development of the classic Underwood #5[11] but typing and retyping the same letter multiple times – even with carbon paper[12] - was a chore that surely even the most ardent fan correspondent dreaded. But the industrial advances of the 20s had also brought about a revolution in the price of duplication devices such as hectographs and mimeographs. Mimeographs and their solvent stencil process were the superior option of course – thus their survival until quite recent times – but hectographs were cheaper and with the invention of the updated Ditto process in 1925 they could be used reliably for up to 100 copies.

Copying letters to one another is of course a fine fannish thing to do, but recall that these (mostly teenaged and early 20s) fans were building on a tradition that grew out of the egoboo that comes from seeing one’s letter between the covers of a favourite magazine: it was inevitable that basement newsrags would be born, and so the first fan circulars – true fanzines – came to be “printed”[13] to supplement the semi-pro magazines that were being printed by Conrad Ruppert and others with access to printing equipment at reasonable rates.  Some of the more active and enthusiastic fan groups developed their own publishing organs, some of which appear to have been really quite elaborate and even acquired subscribers from the British fan community. (again, a testament to the extended correspondence networks that had been building). Gradually, the cost (and effort) of producing real-live high-quality fan magazines like FM grew too much, particularly with the 1930s being a poor time to market small-run magazines of such specialized interest.  Subscription petered off and the field thinned.

Not that others failed to try to fill the void: efforts like Science Fiction World, The Planeteer and others were tried but each and every one seemed to flare and die – here the newly emerging hectograph and occasional mimeograph publications started to take up the slack. With Fantasy Magazine in particular out of the way, every fan could aspire to be an editor and see some kind of success in the hobby, but by all accounts the majority of the early hectograph efforts struggled – and failed – to achieve the kind of quality fandom had come to expect.

Still, when Morris Dollens began to send out his Science Fiction Collector publication (which was initially filled with fiction by Dollens, then expanded its scope as popularity increased) with an effort at higher production quality, if not content (which Speer reports as being spotty) a higher standard was set and the field improved.

And this is where the seeds of the end of the First Fandom are to be found – but this, perhaps, is merely the fertile soil. To understand more deeply, we need to go back in time once more.

Once upon a time,[14] in the Spring of 1928 to be precise – only 2 years after the launch of Amazing Stories – the organization that might well have been the first organized fanclub was formed: the Science Correspondence Club, which later changed its name to International Scientific Society in a letter by the founder Walter Dennis and various executives published in Astounding Stories of Super-Science[15], and later to the International Scientific Association, or ISA[16].

The ISA predated the SFL of course, but it was also an organization of a slightly different character – while Gernsback’s group was welcoming to science enthusiasts, it was after all primarily an organ aimed at promoting interest in science fiction (and indeed, the cynical might assume it was intended to promote interest in Gernsback’s magazine). ISA on the other hand was explicit in its aim to bring together the amateur science community and science fiction, with the understanding that an interest in scientifiction would naturally lead to an interest in science and ideally to a career in science.

It was this grand vision which seems to have spelled the end of the First Fandom, through the conflict that began in the latter half of the 30s, and came to a head in 1939.

As previously mentioned, the early 30s saw the rise of a dizzying number of fan societies of various levels of formality. Among the more formal clubs were organizations like ISA and SFL, and of course that hoary old chestnut The Scienceers.[17] ISA was surely the strongest of the field at the time, and as the earlier fan society it’s unsurprising to find that the first “conventions” were essentially ISA affairs – the first, of course, was not so much a convention as a picnic that somehow got out of hand and ended with a dozen or so NY-ISA members heading to Philadelphia in 1936 to meet with fans there, but the next two affairs could more reasonably be called conventions and surely led to the first Worldcon ever in 1939.

This is where things get a bit messy.

The fanzine and fan magazine realms had already seen their share of strife, from silliness like the Staple Wars[18] all the way to the conflict between Gernsback and The Planeteers over payment for the use of space at the Museum of Natural History that led to the club fracturing.

The beginnings of serious conflict began in 1934, however, with Wollheim’s accusation that Gernsback had been publishing stories from young authors in Wonder Stories and not paying them.[19]

This led to great rancour as Wollheim took to criticising Wonder in every respect in any venue to which he had access. As a stalwart member of ISA, Wollheim and his fellows-at-arms were no doubt both snide and ruthless in their criticisms, and once the truth came out that the deeper reason for hostility was Gernsback’s failure to pay battle lines began to be drawn between the ISA and the SFL.[20] It doesn’t appear that “dual citizenship” was by any means impossible, even in this era of conflict, nor is it entirely clear what effect Wollheim’s propaganda campaign against Gernsback really had, but it is true that Gernsback sold Wonder Stories in 1936

One venue in which Wollheim was able to voice his displeasure with little risk of editorially enforced moderation was the fanzine circuit. As mentioned, some of those early fanzines (by which I mean the hecto- or mimeographed publications) were of…ah…uncertain quality. However, they were produced by fans in small quantities and mailed or otherwise shared about, allowing communication to a larger audience than mere letters, and served to supplement what could reasonably be expected to reach publication in the print pro-zines.

The quality of these fanzines was increasing through the mid-30s, and as noted Dollens’ Science Fiction Collector set a high bar from its launch in 1936. Other such fanzines worked to reach a similar level, and unsurprisingly the fans who were most enthusiastically writing for and participating in the better ones were ultimately moved to form the first SFandom Amateur Printing Association, FAPA in 1937.

FAPA charged membership dues of $0.50, which entitled the 50 members to receive a packet containing copies of the other members hectographed fanzines. It is significant, I think, that the organizers of FAPA were Wollheim and John Michel, who were also at the center of the increasingly political ISA.

ISA was begun, as I have said, as an organ dedicated to bringing the amateur science folks together with the SF fans, believing that the two fed from one another and led invariably to if not careers in science but a scientific adult outlook. Given this, and given the political climate of the 1930s, it was perhaps inevitable that some members of the ISA would become political.

At the time, the economic situation in the United States was still hard and the SF pulps were foundering – the sale of Wonder was one thing, but Gernsback’s effort was by no means the only publication suffering from declining subscription. Interest in fandom was declining as well, as the first generation of enthusiastic fans grew up and moved on to whatever was needed to pay their way as adults.  There remained a core of enthusiasts of course, and increasingly there was a split in the community:

On the one side were those who had been active in the Lovecraft Circle and similar Weird Tales oriented SF – people who were science fiction fans because of the fantastic elements and the adventure. These were perhaps the scientific romanticists, more in league with the science fiction of Burroughs and Shelley and Doyle.

On the other side were those who saw scientifiction as deriving inevitably from science – they might enjoy things like Flash Gordon, but they were more interested in the speculations of Wells and Verne.  Their adventures too might be adventurous, but they expected them to be extrapolations from the amazing discoveries being announced all the time, a serious effort to see or at least inspire the future.

The ISA was, obviously, in the latter camp – but even this camp was not immune to fracture, and the break came in the summer of 1937.

Active in the hectograph scene, Wollheim and Michel (and also Fred Pohl) had also begun to get embroiled in a variety of leftist movements in the New York area, including the Young Communist League.  Wollheim, it should be said, was a relatively rapid convert – by Speer’s account he had been vocal in his support for a Republican candidate for president in the summer of 1936, but by the end of the year he was a communist. A rapid transition indeed!  These three men, along with Robert Lowndes, became vocal advocates of the cause of the future: the goal of a scientific socialist world state, which of course they argued would be a utopia.

At about the same time, another prominent member of the ISA, William Sykora, was president of the club but on the verge of going off to school and pursuing that logical aim of ISA membership: a career in science. Consumed by increasingly sober concerns, the elderly Sykora (he was, after all, in his 20s – the eldest of the players, we should remember) allowed himself to become emotional in his letter of resignation from the office of president of the NY-ISA and blasted the younger members for their obsession with friviolity and distraction from the “Gernsbackian ideal” of the advancement of science through SF fandom.

This, along with the political rift between Wollheim’s side and Sykora’s led to a series of intense battles fought out not only in the pages of fanzines and magazine letter sections, but also in person through the emerging convention scene.

So intense was the enmity after the break-down of the ISA over 1937 (leading ultimately to the formation of the Futurians from the ashes in 1938 – mainly fellow-travellers of Wollheim and Michel, at least in theory) that Wollheim, Michel and others worked to get Sykora ejected from the New York SFL[21] and led intense political campaigns that strained the atmosphere of the first real conventions in 1938 and 1939. Sykora, Sam Moskowitz, and James Taurasi[22] (together known as the Triumvirs, in opposition to Wollheim’s Quadrumvir) for their part were central to the organization of these two conventions – and advocates for serious, apolitical fandom. It was true that they felt SF (or rather stf) was a vehicle for the advancement of science, but they not only saw no need for a political agenda but actively opposed the communist utopia being pushed by the other side.

These two groups seem to have formed the hard nuclei of viciously opposed factions.  It was probably inevitable that after Wollheim read Michel’s manifesto[23] demanding that SFandom commit to the scientific socialist agenda (and assuming that any fan who thought would immediately agree that it was a brilliant goal) the two factions would clash and throw off sparks wherever they were in contact. The next year was filled with fanzine broadsides and manifestoes, mainly between Wollheim and Mozkowitz, and by the time of the first Worldcon in 1939, later dubbed Nycon, the conflict was in full boil. Sykora and Moskowitz barred Wollheim and others from the event, for fear they would make another scene by standing on soap boxes (not literally).  

This, I think, marks the dissolution of the First Fandom. Speer naturally disagrees – I suppose that is to be expected, considering his own place in the events of the era – seeing the rise and fall of the ISA (and similar organizations) as central to the nature of Fandom. Arnie Katz of course disagrees as well, seeing three Eras in the span I have labelled the First Fandom – there is a logic to this of course, as Katz is relying on the fanzine as a focal point to his eras, and because he bases his Era system on the idea of periods in which there is a consensus in fandom.

But the logic I am using is a little different:

I don’t think that a consensus is necessary to identify an era of fandom, but what is important is that the community is growing and at peace.  You’ll notice that this is the theme through my history here of my First Fandom – through Eofandom there is a blooming of the hobby, interest is growing, connections are building, and at the beginning of the First Fandom fans are coalescing into more or less formal groups. Fanzines and the like are an organ by which this is being achieved, but more than anything the technological development of cheap, accessible printing was simply a driver of the process – this along with convenient postal services and expanding transportation made it possible to make the transition from faceless letter-writing to publication circles and real life meetings.

This, then, is what I think is the central character of a Fandom: the essential nature of the community, how it grows and how it interacts, not any particular consensus.

However, there remains the question of how a Fandom ends and this again is a point at which I diverge from Katz and cleave a little more closely to Speer. The common thread in the early Fandom from both their narratives is this – that it ended, more or less, with the vicious political conflict between Wollheim et al and Moskowitz et al.  It’s significant, I think, that while many fans seem to have picked sides, the voices detectable in the publications that have survived seem a small minority of fandom as a whole. The disagreement may have been wider, but the determination to fight over it was not.

True, as Speer notes World War 2 began and surely news of the war was a dampening force. Likewise, though Katz disagrees with Speer’s assessment that the war era was a “transition” with no clear character he agrees that the war was a major focus. For that matter, I agree as well. But the question remains: why mark the end of the First Fandom (or if you like the Hectograph Era) in 1939?

I am concentrating on the relationships, on the health of the fan community and its growth. As such, I think that the most reasonable explanation for this agreement that the age must end in 1939 is this:

The Wollheim/Moskowitz feud and the intense politics that underlay it were exhausting to the run-of-the-mill fan. People were tired of the conflict. On the one hand, it must have seemed terribly frivolous to argue about the “purpose” of science fiction in the face of events across the Atlantic, and on the other hand the world was rapidly becoming a fraught enough place – those who had enough of strife would have preferred not to be bothered.  No doubt, this led to something of a withdrawal from fan society in order to avoid the constant feud.  On top of this, recall that much of fandom in this era was very young – enthusiastic teens[24] - but they were growing older, and with adulthood came other responsibilities. Even those who went on to work in science fiction as writers and publishers drifted away from the seething fan community simply because they no longer had time. In other words:

The end of this age is marked by gafiating fans.

This is the three point theory I will proceed with:

1.      A Fandom is an era of fan activity beyond simply enjoying SF – organization and society.

2.      A Fandom is marked by a period of growth and relative peace, regardless of the factions.

3.      A Fandom ends when conflict intensifies and resulting gafia causes a decline in fandom.

I will be disagreed with, but at the end of it I’m writing this history of Fandoms for myself, as a project to organize what I am presently reading, not for anyone else. Those who disagree are free to ignore me.

And with that, a warning:

It will be evident from the nature of this post that there is more to come. Not an encyclopedia, not immediately, but there is more.

---

[1] Indeed – Munsey’s Weekly, or Munsey’s Magazine as it was known after it went to a monthly format in 1891, has been claimed by some to be the first mass market magazine. This is a dubious claim, however, as the growth of mass-market periodicals in the US exploded in the 1860s, eventually producing a number of publications still known today such as Ladies Home Journal (1883).  Thus spake The Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age (2003, Schlup & Ryan eds). Across the Atlantic, Punch was launched in 1841 – in explicit homage to similar French magazines. While some of these were niche it’s hard to see how Munsey’s could be considered the first mass-market – unless one carefully defines “mass-market” or “magazine”, or quibbles to say that it was the first such periodical launched in the magazine format. Even so… 

[2] The concept of Numbered Fandoms was first proposed in 1939 by noted fan historian, Jack Speer (yes, this one) in his amazingly complete article on the history of fandom to that point, “Up To Now” – thankfully archived online here. This idea was revised for Fancyclopedia 2 by Speer in 1946 and of course built on by others in later years, notably Robert Silverberg, who updated the history up to the Sixth Fandom in his column in the Halloween issue of Quandry in 1952. (a copy of which I don’t seem to be able to find). Arnie Katz rethinks the theory entirely in his article in Fanstuff in November 2012 – starting at issue 25, found here and concluding in issue 26, which is here. Arnie Katz reworks the Numbered Fandom approach and creates a new “Era” based framework. While his historical analysis his excellent and his article very informative (indeed, Speer and Katz form the core of my own summary) I can’t wholly agree. Speer seems to have used fanzines and the societies and politics that surrounded them as a sign of the tone and nature of fandom at the time; Katz takes fanzine clusters as being essentially definitive of fandom. I lean to the former as you will see.

[3] Presuming income of course.

[4] Seriously – see this timeline of scientific discoveries of the 20^th Century to see some of the amazing things that we learned between 1900 and 1930.

[5] These two names come up extensively in discussions of fandom from the 1930s as the number 1 and number 2 fans of the early days, but sadly only Mr. Ackerman seems to be remembered. This article bemoans the fact – and this article demonstrates it with scans of historical letters addressed to Jack Darrow (that’s his fandom pseudonym)

[6] Though it would appear that the tale of fandom essentially starting with the pilgrimage of Forrest Ackerman to the East coast is apocryphal, according to Speer in his footnote to his article added in 1994.

[7] I hesitate to call these “fanzines” as the nature seems different from the later type. A good example of high quality fan magazine from this era is Fantasy Magazine, which was started by Conrad Ruppert in September 1932 and printed on his small hand press of the typeset variety, mostly edited by Julius Schwartz. Note that this type of magazine is actually the archetype of the “semi-pro” category recognized by the Hugos and typically had quite high production standards considering the level of resources.

[8] This is where I diverge from Arnie Katz and his focus on the fanzine: I think that rather than looking to the publication as the core of the era, we should look at the dynamics of the society that was generating.

[9] Successfully, as it happens – a letter writing campaign from the membership sparked a review of the proposed legislation, and an amended version of the Alexander Wireless Bill was signed by President Taft in 1913 containing a nearly verbatim copy of the recommendations Gernsback had given in his editorial in the Feb 1912 issue of Modern Electrics, one of his magazines at the time.

[10] It suddenly seems to me that Gernsback was at the helm of a number of sinking ships. His Quixotic promotion of the latest, important thing is something to awe the reader of any history.

[11] The first mass-produced typewriter to be produced and sold in the millions.

[12] Which is only really good for 5 duplicates at a time, for the temporally challenged among us who have never used a typewriter, much less carbon paper.

[13] Multiplicated might be a more accurate word.

[14] You knew it was coming again, didn’t you?

[15] I don’t seem to be able to narrow down the date of the name changes, but from the database of issues at isfdb it appears that Dennis’s letter must have been in either June or October 1930.

[16] Inferring from Fredrik Pohl’s words in his autobiography The Way the Future Was the change to ISA seems to have occurred in 1936.

[17] The Scienceers formed in late 1929, with the first meeting on December 11 being called by some the beginning of Fandom. Ostensibly having aims similar to those of the ISA, The Scienceers were actually mainly focused on SF, which seems to have led to its fracturing a year later at the end of 1930, when Gernsback and the President Warren Fitzgerald hosted a lecture at the American Museum of Natural History. Gernsback tempted Fitzgerald and a few others into joining his rocketry club, which left The Scienceers looking for another home (they had been meeting at Fitzgerald’s apartment). Gernsback also failed to pay the fees for the Museum venue, leaving a bunch of mid-teen fans to foot the bill – not, as it happens, was it the first financial scandal the man was involved in, nor the last – thus the moniker “Hugo the Rat.”

[18] No, really.

[19] Wollheim’s story “The Man from Ariel” was apparently not paid for, and in griping Wollheim discovered that others had been similarly bilked.

[20] I find myself wondering at the coincidence of timing between the slight against Wollheim and the launch of SFL. Could it be that Gernsback saw the dispute coming? Was there more here than just predatory commercial practices and an effort to get a sustainable level of distribution for his magazine?

[21] A nasty affair involving a motion in Sykora’s absence, blocked by the president as out of order, an impeachment, and Wollheim’s “lapdog” permitting the ejection.

[22] Who, it should be noted, was also a prominent publisher of hectograph fanzines

[23] Read the thing here – you can see why many were uncomfortable with it, particularly considering the international events then in progress.

[24] Moskowitz was 19 years old when he was chair of Nycon in 1939! NINETEEN!!!

Soft-boiled Sci Fi

In the inimitable 1980 rendition of Flash Gordon, Voltan
(Brian Blessed) brandishes the Hawk Men's giant crystal
tribute to Ming - that's hard SF, right?

In the October 9^th issue of T.P.’s Weekly [1] in 1903, journalist Robert H. Sherard quoted Jules Verne’s comment on his British peer H. G. Wells:

‘Je pensiez bien que vous alliez me demander cela,’ he said. ‘His books were sent to me, and I have read them. It is very curious, and, I will add, very English. But I do not see the possibility of comparison between his work and mine. We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon-ball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c’est très joli,’ cried Monsieur Verne in an animated way, ‘but show me this metal. Let him produce it. (T.P.’s Weekly, ii, 589) [2]

And so it was that one of the arguments of our genre began: hard vs soft.

Fast forward to today, and the battle rages on: does Star Wars count as SF? If not, why not? How about Star Trek? Battlestar Galactica? Avatar? Iron Man? Lord of the Rings?[3]  And of course, the argument boils down to the question of hard vs soft.

Traditionally [4], science fiction has typically been looked at mainly in the context of the science or engineering aspects that are presented, but of course the position these concepts have in the story varies widely.  Now, the concept of “hard” science fiction wasn’t really coined until 1957 [5] and its counterpart “soft” SF not until the 1970s [6] but it should be noted that the three types of SF identified by Asimov in his 1953 essay (which I referenced here) are already beginning to create this distinction, with his scale that goes from (effectively) “explain this thing” through “use this thing” to “how is society changed by this thing” – and of course Verne’s comment tells us that the tension has been present more or less from the beginning.

Asimov, of course, was writing at a special time in SF, more or less at the beginning of a cresting wave of “Campbellian” hard SF popularity that gave rise to the crystallization of science fiction as a discrete genre. [7] Nevertheless, the concept of “hardness” in science fiction has endured, and the modern era has even given rise to a Mohs Scale just for SF.

In general, people think of this hardness scale as having to do with “realism” – that is to say that the more realistic a work is (i.e. how closely it adheres to what we actually know about science and engineering) the harder it is.  Thus, things like A Princess of Mars are at the extremely soft end of the scale, while things like 2001: A Space Odyssey are at the hard end. 

As such things go, the scale is an interesting way to sort science fiction literature, but I see a problem with it:

The scale practically invites fans to argue over whether a work belongs in the category of science fiction at all – it creates an implicit scale of legitimacy, in other words.  Is A Princess of Mars science fiction? Or is it just sword and sorcery fantasy that happens to include other planets and atomic rifles?

Does this distinction even matter?

And in fact I think this is an important question; when you look back at the sorts of work that were being published prior to the Campbellian revolution and the de facto establishment of this scale of hardness, it becomes clear that authors routinely mixed and blended aspects of science, fantasy, and horror in their stories.  True, stories seem to lean heavily in one direction or another, but there’s no hesitation to include fantastic elements in what is essentially a science fiction tale, or to include some esoteric technology in what is essentially a horror or fantasy one. After the philosophical shift that Campbell encouraged, on the other hand, there appeared to be a fairly clear division between fantasy/horror and science fiction – with those works that straddled the gap becoming gradually more uncommon through the 50s and 60s.

Part of what drove this shift was of course the tendency toward hardness in mainstream science fiction, which makes the gap more obvious – but it also leaves some kinds of work (work that harks back to the roots of science fiction itself!) difficult to classify.

And if rigorous realism in speculative fiction is what constitutes “hard science fiction” what are we to make of books like The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien built rigorously with his knowledge of the mythology and history of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, and his intricately considered languages? Is this science fiction? Is it “hard fantasy” – can there even be such a thing as “hard fantasy”?

For that matter, how can we deal with magical realism from this kind of perspective?  Is it unusually “soft” science fiction?  Is it fantasy? Is it something else entirely? [8]

And then let's consider this side of things: if a book waves away the technical details of engineering but instead presents a detailed view of the biology and sociology of the world, is that soft? Bearing in mind the fact that the hard/soft dichotomy in SF was in conscious reference to the hard/soft division in the sciences, the answer would seem to be yes...and yet, the story may well be as rigorous a consideration of the sociological aspect as, for example, Niven's Neutron Star is a rigorous treatment of the physics of the situation.  Surely that qualifies as hard? 

I think to answer these questions we have to come to some understanding about what exactly it is that this “hardness” is referring to, and ultimately I think that the problem really lies in that the classification isn’t sufficient to deal with the two key dimensions from which people usually look at science fiction, and for an added bonus it over specifies the one dimension it actually deals with. [9]

In order to try to re-unify the genres into a more coherent means of classification (one that doesn't rely on what are essentially marketing categories rather than literary ones) I suggest that two dimensions (at least) may be needed.

Integrity

Here's the thing: consistent and coherent trumps nearly anything else when it comes to how satisfying a story is. [10] In essence, most readers will swallow nearly anything so long as it makes sense within the boundaries of the story.  This is one reason why the reflexive habit of thinking "harder" science fiction (in the usual sense) is obviously better is a problem: just because something is ruthlessly rigorous in its science doesn't make it a good story [11] - the story part is just as important.  

So there we have one criterion - or one dimension if you like: internal consistency, rigorous rules. a coherent reality from which the action derives. This, more than realism per se, is the core of what makes hard SF compelling to those who love it. Certainly, those who love what we call hard SF (and I am certainly one) love it because of the way in which the story itself is rooted in concrete facts, and how events follow in a logical progression of cause and effect, taking into account the unchanging rules of the universe.

Niven's Neutron Star is of course an example of this (SPOILER ahead - but then, if you're reading this you're almost certainly familiar with Known Space...right?): the necessity for Beowulf Shaeffer's mission [12] derives from the known characteristics of neutron stars and their consequences. The events of the mission likewise. Beowulf's actions, reactions, and eventual fate are firmly rooted in the cause and effect of known physics.

But the point I want to make here is that while Neutron Star and the many stories like it [13] rely on real-world science and the engineering that can reasonably be extrapolated from it [14] the same principle can be applied not only in SF but in fantasy as well.

No, really - consider:

George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series does contain some iconic fantastic elements, but on the whole the story proceeds according to fairly concrete rules, with very little in the way of deus ex machina introduction of new powers or abilities just to allow the plot to move ahead. In fact, much of the action is, really, grittily grounded in a fairly realistic Dark Ages/Mediaeval style world, despite the dragons and the dread prophesies and the apparently odd climate. Moreover, thus far it appears that Mr. Martin is making a serious effort to ensure that even the fantastic elements operate in a consistent, coherent way - as though they were subject to laws of nature. [15]

Similarly, C. S. Friedman's Black Sun Rising [16] seems on the surface to be fairly fantastic. But we can look more closely, and it quickly becomes clear that Friedman has thought out the implications of the Fae and their impact on Erna very carefully - everything follows rules, the Fae are consistent, and despite the trappings of ritual and myth, the "magic" her characters wield is very much like engineering.

Both science fiction and fantasy can have this characteristic of a coherent set of fundamental rules - what I call integrity - and the degree to which it has this character can vary widely, from the most rigorous examples like Neutron Star and Game of Thrones to what might be thought of as their opposites: Perry Rhodan and Narnia: tales where the rules are flexible and can be bent, broken or replaced according to the needs of the story.

These counter-examples are what make it clear that the ordinary "hardness scale" by which SF is sorted is insufficient (not to mention a useless measure of quality - but that's another argument) by itself.  Clearly, even stories with very flexible integrity can be deeply satisfying to our sense of narrative. This makes it clear that there must be another dimension with which we measure them, but what?

What over-analysis of genre fiction is complete without
some kind of artificial visualization?

Symbolism

One thing that separates Narnia from Game of Thrones, and Black Sun Rising from Neutron Star is the way in which the world is presented - the logic by which it works.

Stories like Neutron Star rely on real world science and engineering for their narrative - they may throw in bells and whistles like a presumed FTL mode of travel, exotic hull materials, or flashy aliens like the Puppeteers, but at base that's all they are: bells and whistles. The story itself runs on the fuel of a gritty, concrete set of rules that drive the cause and effect of the action. But this isn't the only way in which the engine of a story can run.

In Black Sun Rising we have an example of a world which at first glance seems to operate without logic, at the whim of mysterious forces.  As the story progresses, however, we learn that there is a coherence to the rules, but that those rules don't bear much resemblance to the gritty realism of physics - instead, the driving force is symbolism. The world runs on a magical logic, the logic of essential resonance and symbolic harmonies. Cause and effect is still the rule, but the nature of causes - and the nature of effects, of course - is radically different, because the important factor is no longer the physical facts, but the abstract, "Platonic" meaning behind them.

For a similar example, and one where the symbolic nature of the logic is more evident, we can look at a book like Ursula le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea - here the rules are more flexible, but nevertheless there is a fairly coherent pattern of cause and effect, though it is more explicitly founded on a logic of symbol and abstraction. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of Naming as the foundation of magic, and the use of the Gebbeth as Ged's nemesis, the personification of his inner failure.

This style of storytelling naturally lends itself to fantasy - indeed, where it can most evidently be seen is in things like myth and fairy tales, where the symbolic or abstract dimension is paramount. But that's not to say that symbolism can have no place in science fiction as well.

Look at the way symbolism and abstraction are leveraged in the storytelling we see in superhero comics, for example:

Superman is rendered impotent by the presence of a symbol of his shattered past: crystals of kryptonite.

Captain America lives as a personification of the essence of the democratic revolution of the post-Enlightenment era, a reminder of the ideals that the Allies were fighting for in World War 2 and later the Cold War.

The Hulk - does the symbolism here really need exposition?

Superhero stories are typically presented as rooted in science and engineering, but that's really window-dressing.  The truth is that while science and engineering may play a part, the more powerful fuel for the narrative engine is symbolism. Doctor Doom isn't a super-villain because he has technically superior tools that he uses inappropriately - he's a super-villain because he represents the arrogance of believing that technology can make a person superior, and give the right to dominate others. But the important part is this: what he does, and how he is opposed by the heroes, is driven by this super-structure of representation.

All stories, I believe, contain some degree of rigorous narrative "consequence", some degree of flexibility. All stories likewise contain some degree of concrete realism, some degree of symbol. It's the nature of things - it's the foundation of what makes us love stories that we can blend these aspects together.

Great writers carefully balance these two dimensions - abstraction and integrity - to match the tone and nature of the story being told.

For some stories, granular, concrete reality will work best. For others, symbolic drivers are a better fit.

For some stories, it's critical that effects flow naturally from causes, that the reader can clearly see the nature of the underpinning reality. For others it's less important how characters get from A to B than that they do.

Where a story falls on these dimensions doesn't make it good or bad - but a mismatch between where it lies and the nature of the story being told can be jarring, and that's where the feeling that "harder SF is better" (and its equivalent for other qualities) comes from.

--30--

1. One of several publishing ventures by T.P. O’Connor, a penny weekly that featured such names as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Joseph Conrad.  Interestingly, the journal had been launched less than a year previous to the interview in which Verne made this comment.

2. Having read Verne, the idea of him positioning himself as a technically precise SF author is actually rather amusing – even taking into account the knowledge gained in the past century.

3. No seriously: why is Lord of the Rings not science fiction?

4. Insofar as you can call it tradition with a realm of literature so young, I suppose.

5. Apparently, the first appearance in print was in Astounding Science Fiction (Nov 1957) by SF writer and critic P. Schuyler Miller in his review of the modernized novelization Campbell’s serial Islands of Space which had previously been published in the Spring 1931 issue of Amazing Quarterly. Miller, incidentally, was an amazingly prolific reviewer, with an astounding <snerk> number of entries in nearly every issue of Astounding that year – heck in quite a few years!

6. Unsurprisingly: this corresponds with the peak of New Wave, which in contrast to the Campellian “Golden Age” SF was delving more deeply into sociology, anthropology and psychology – thus the analogy to the academic division of hard and soft sciences.

7. More on this another time, but I believe that the Campbellian revolution was responsible for the “divorce” of science fiction from the more general speculative or weird fiction of the pulp era, and in turn the growth of science fiction and fantasy as independent genres combined with the boom in corporate, mass-market book-sellers in the 80s to cause The Great Delisting, a literary extinction event of amazing proportions that may never have been possible before.

8. I confess to leaning toward “something else” but for the sake of argument, let’s consider it.

9. This isn't so much a criticism of the concept of SF hardness itself, but an observation that it was intended for what is essentially a very arbitrary subset of speculative fiction, and one that doesn't seem to really reflect either the history of the genre or the reality of readers' experiences. 

10. This is part of my reluctance to include magical realism, since...well, it's the nature of the genre to be incoherent. (I mean that in a technical way, not a slur)

11. If you disagree, I have a couple of old Apple II+ operation manuals you might be interested in.

12. Fun fact: Neutron Star (Worlds of If Magazine, August 1966) was Beowulf's first appearance in Niven's universe. Part scientist hero, part Harry Lime lookalike, Beowulf may well be my favorite of Niven's characters.

13. Engineering puzzle box type stories have a long and glorious history well back into the era of the pulps, after all.

14. And in fact in Neutron Star Niven really only relies on "unobtainium" to generate the necessary "frictionless sphere of uniform density" needed to make the calculations work, if you ignore the framing.

15. Of course, Professor Tolkien is the iconic example of what might be described as "hard" fantasy, but the enormous variety of ways in which his work has been re-interpreted - not to mention the range of ways in which he himself wrote in works other than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - makes his work a tricky choice here.

16. Incidentally one of my favourite books from the 90s - I thought Black Sun Rising was amazing fantasy in an older ethos when I read it. The rest of the Coldfire Trilogy is also strong, but it was the first book that really caught my imagination.