t may have seemed a bright idea at the time, which was the end of
the 20th century. Why not (some bright editor at Collectors Press might
well have mused) call this book that that nice Frank M. Robinson has just
delivered Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History?
--Um (this editor's soon-to-be-ex assistant might have responded)
because Mr. Robinson's really very nice book isn't um really a history at
all, and it isn't really about the science fiction of the 20th century.
--Yes? (says the editor). Your point?
--Purchasers of the book will be getting a different book (quavers
the assistant) than the one they thought they were buying.
--Your point?
And so on. This conversation is, of course, apocryphal, totally
imagined. Frank Robinson may have in fact set out to write a history of
20th century SF, and have gotten sidetracked into what he actually did
compose: which is (almost entirely) an anecdotal visual history of
American science fiction magazines from 1926, when Hugo Gernsback started
Amazing Stories, down to the 1990s, when they had become peripheral to the SF
publishing industry in America (not to mention elsewhere). Or he may have
had a hook title imposed upon him.
(A personal note: Half a decade ago I also published an
illustrated book about science fiction whose title--Science Fiction: The
Illustrated Encyclopedia--was also a misnomer. The book is a companion,
not an encyclopedia at all; but its publishers felt they needed a title
that would draw potential purchasers. So I know how it can feel to front
a book that is not exactly what its title proclaims, what its author
wrote.)
(A second personal note: Although my book bears a superficial
resemblance to Robinson's, they are in fact very different. Mine is a
word-oriented overview, with illustrations; Robinson's is a sagaciously
assembled gallery of superb illustrations, with accompanying text designed
to give the illustrations a context. Some illustrations are shared, as are
some judgments, but purchasers of my book in 1995 needn't feel there's
nothing in Robinson's book for them in 2000.)
A skewed selection of Yanks
There is still a problem, though. Perhaps the fastest way to
address it is to list some of the 20th century SF writers who are not
mentioned in the text at all: Stephen Baxter, Karel Capek, John Crowley,
Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Kress, R.A. Lafferty, Keith
Laumer, Stanislaw Lem, C.S. Lewis, Pat Murphy, George Orwell, Alexei
Panshin, Charles Sheffield, Bruce Sterling, George R. Stewart, the Brothers
Strugatsky, Michael Swanwick, Sheri Tepper, Ian Watson, James White,
Walter Jon Williams (or any other Williams), Evgeny Zamiatin, David
Zindell. An even longer salon de refusées (so far as the deeply unreliable
index is capable of telling us) could be compiled of writers (from Orson
Scott Card to C.J. Cherryh to Olaf Stapledon to John Varley to Gene Wolfe)
who are mentioned only in picture captions or in paragraphs made up of
little more than lists of names bunched indifferently together.
Some figures, on the other hand, are given a lot of room in the
book. Those taking (arbitrarily) three or more lines of references in the
index include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W.
Campbell Jr., Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison (who gets more words than
anyone), Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Palmer, E.E. Smith, H.G. Wells, Donald A.
Wollheim.
Obviously, many of the refusées fail to interest Robinson because
they did not make any significant contribution to American SF
magazines--which, given the book he wrote, is fair enough. The heroes
of the book all edited or contributed extensively to the American
magazines (though Wells only contributed reprints, and he sure wasn't
American either), which is fair enough.
But the reader needs to be warned. Done.
A vivid visual argument
And now that we know Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An
Illustrated History is not what its title claims at all--that it is not a
boneheaded attempt to define this worldwide literature in terms that
valorize a skewed selection of Yanks (all but three of them dead) who
wrote for journals (also dead)--we can begin to take joy in what Frank
Robinson has actually accomplished in the seductive beauty of his handsome
fine book.
To open it at almost any page is almost to be convinced that these
magazine covers are what really count. Robinson, who is a famed collector
of magazines, has put together an astonishingly vivid visual argument
about the primacy of context: his entire book is an argument that the
meaning of classic 20th century SF is contained in its appearance. Science
fiction is something that looks like this.
It is a case which cannot properly be conveyed in words; nor is it
a case, regardless of the subtle seducings of the eye going on, that is
likely to persuade readers and viewers of SF whose formative experiences
of the genre began after about 1960. After that date, something faded
out--certainly not the relevance of SF as a literature, for the SF of
recent decades is not only markedly better than the earlier stuff, but
also more relevant to the zeitgeist.
Something did fade away, all the same. It can be seen in the
quality of the illustrations after that date. There is no loss in
technical proficiency, and indeed an industrial high airbrush gloss more
and more dominates the latter pages of Robinson's book. But the work of
earlier illustrators (some of it crude) has a smell of discovery about
it. It is as though the first artists in the field were not doing genre
work at all, in the sense that genre painting glosses a pre-known product.
They were finding something out. And no matter how funny their techniques
may have been, there was no smirk of product-placement in what they drew.
Robinson's book brings us back to the days when SF was a
discovery, when it was an eye opener. And it's for this reason that his
book (I do not wish to name it) makes us so sad, here in 2000. For what we
do not any longer have in these latter days of SF is the ignorance to be
new.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at
the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
