The Cassutt Files
Re-Boot

These are good times for sci-fi, right? The airwaves are filled with established series (Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who) and newcomers (Journeyman, Bionic Woman, Torchwood), with some still looming (Jericho, Sarah Connor Chronicles, though apparently not New Amsterdam).

Philip K. Dick is now in the Library of America. Writers, such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Jonathan Lethem and Connie Willis, who started their careers in the sci-fi magazines can be reviewed just like any other "serious" writer.

Doris Lessing just won the Nobel Prize for literature. No, she's not really a sci-fi writer—no short stories in Asimov's or Analog—but she did publish a five-volume novel sequence, Canopus in Argos (1979-83), that, in those days, earned her some critical vilification by mainstream critics who were amazed that a, well, serious talent would waste her time writing about alien perspectives toward humans. So, on the principle that anyone who suffers as we do is one of us, Doris Lessing is a sci-fi Nobelist.

And yet ... maybe it's the time of year ... autumn days growing shorter (God knows it couldn't be age), but I find myself not only bored but sometimes irritated with the whole idea of constructing or even enjoying stories involving spaceships ... time travel ... robots and artificial intelligence ... climate change and looming apocalypse ... I even look at the crop of new sci-fi series and think, vampire cop, immortal cop, time-traveling cop. Eh.

So I wonder—why sci-fi? What is the attraction?

Why do I write the stuff?

Money isn't the answer

Barry Malzberg, a wonderfully idiosyncratic, energetic and savagely funny novelist, short-story writer and critic, wrote eloquently of the syndrome, in portraits of fictional sci-fi writers in a number of paperback novels published under the pseudonym "K.M. O'Donnell"—Dwellers in the Deep, Gather in the Hall of the Planets—along with many other works that were major influences on me when I started trying to write and sell.

In a collection of essays recently republished as Breakfast in the Ruins, Malzberg writes as Henry Ruthven, an embittered sci-fi novelist who feels he is "merely trying to hold on; he takes this retraction of ambition, understanding of his condition, as the only significant change in his inner life over the past two decades."

Ruthven adds, "If there was a time to get out that time is past and now he would be worse off anywhere else. Who would read him? Where would he sell? What else could he do?"

Yeah, something like that.

Jack Nicklaus is the best professional golfer in history (though Tiger Woods is closing in on his records). All during his storied career—indeed, probably to this day—he would begin every year with a lesson. Yes, the Golden Bear himself, winner of 18 major tournaments, would hire a teacher and go to the driving range and start over. Here is the basic grip, here is the stance.

How do you relight the fire of sci-fi writing? Like Jack Nicklaus, possibly, by going back to the basics.

You don't do it by thinking about the money. Yes, yes, only a blockhead ever wrote for any other reason, said Samuel Johnson. And while that's true-ish, writing sci-fi has never been an automatic route to riches, not in television, certainly, and not in books (with the possible exception of fantasy trilogies, but that's another topic).

No, for the proper sort of inspiration—for the most basic set of basics—it's only fair that I turn to another writer who, with Malzberg, was the other major influence on my early writing career: Robert Silverberg, author of such classic sci-fi novels as Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, The Book of Skulls, not to mention dozens of striking shorter works, such as "The Secret Sharer," "Passengers" and "Sundance."

A universe in your pocket

Silverberg began his career as a high-volume producer of adventure sci-fi during the boom years of the magazine world, when there were, at one time, 40 different titles on the stands. He was one of the most prolific writers ever. And most consciously versatile.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, he deliberately broke with his commercial past to attempt to write more ambitious works. And succeeded!

How? Silverberg possesses the, to me, unique talent of being able to analyze what he does, then act on it.

In 1973, in Those Who Can, a collection of stories and commentaries on the art of writing sci-fi edited by Robin Scott Wilson, Silverberg offered a list of the benefits a reader gets from a sci-fi story:

1. A moment of encapsulation in a pocket universe.
2. The pleasure of experiencing a well-made verbal object.
3. Acquisition of vicarious experience
4. Stimulation of thought

All of these apply, in some degree, to reading any kind of fiction, but number 1 seems especially apt for sci-fi. The attraction for a reader lies in visiting these magic landscapes, from Middle-earth to the sands of Arrakis, or Gibson's cyberspace, or the United Federation of Planets, or even the windswept plains of a post-nuclear America.

For a writer, the fun lies in imagining them. Building them. Removing yourself from the 405 freeway or the post office or mowing the lawn and taking flight—

Wait. I can almost feel it—the reason I still find myself picking up a mainstream novel, reading a few pages or even paragraphs, and setting it aside. It's crime, it's suburbia, it's whatever ...

It's not sci-fi. It doesn't let me encapsulate that pocket universe.

I've written frequently about astronauts and the space program, and I still read everything published on the subject. In his memoir, Riding Rockets, shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane recalls the painful hiatus following the 1986 Challenger disaster, when many of his colleagues were weighing their options in the space program: Stay, or go? This was particularly difficult for those selected from the military, who could return to careers in the Army, Navy or Air Force.

In fact, the military services asked the astronauts they had loaned to NASA to visit various bases during this hiatus, to be "re-greened" or "re-blued" (the colors, of course, referring to their military uniforms).

One civilian NASA astronaut with a doctorate joking asked, "What about us scientists?"

A steely-eyed Air Force astronaut looked at him. "You guys will get re-nerded."

Time to pick up those books by Charles Stross and Elizabeth Moon I've been meaning to read. And don't I need to catch up on Torchwood?