here's nothing I hate more than being talked down to and—to be more precise—there's nothing I like less than being talked down to about science fiction. Over the years, I've worked in the field as a writer, editor and publisher in comics, magazines, television and the Web, so it irks me to be told that the cause to which I've been devoting my life is somehow less valuable than the other creative arts. And yet, that's the message constantly being broadcast by those who live and work outside of the SF world.
That message can come subtly, such as when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences overlooks the genre come Oscar time save for the special-effects categories, tossed to sci-fi like a bone; or more obviously, such as when Entertainment Weekly or Variety refers to sci-fi fans as freaks and geeks, even while gleefully tabulating each weekend's take. It can come from mainstream critics or unimaginative university professors who continue to foist on the world the canard that "if it's science fiction, it can't be any good, and if it's any good, it can't be science fiction."
It is particularly painful to me when that patronizing message is delivered by someone whose work I respect. The perpetrator at the moment is Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for same. He is a talented author, one who pulled off in that volume what I had previously thought was impossible—he managed to convey the exhilarating power and freedom of the comic-book art form at the moment of its creation, as well as the hopes and dreams of the imperfect men who built an industry, all wrapped up in prose as precise as poetry.
With friends like these ...
And then, unfortunately, I read Michael Chabon's introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. I have no complaints with the book itself, and wish now that I had skipped the editor's opening words. The stories, which include contributions by Harlan Ellison, Karen Joy Fowler, Dave Eggers and even Chabon himself, are quite good. Under other circumstances, I would have been pleased to have encountered them. It's rather the attitude with which the entire project was undertaken that I find offensive, as evidenced in the mission statement that starts off the book.
In his introduction, Chabon bemoans the supposed malaise into which fiction has fallen these days, and longs for the days
when short stories didn't worry about epiphanies, but were just gosh-darn fun:
"It was my greatest dream in life ... someday to publish a magazine of my own, one that would revive the lost genres of short fiction, a tradition I saw as one of great writers writing great short stories ... "
What lost genres? This tradition is continued monthly right here in front of us, in magazines such as Asimov's SF and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Carol Emshwiller (who won both a Nebula and a Philip K. Dick Award last weekend) would be startled to learn that until this volume hit bookstores with her latest tale, there were no more "great writers writing great short stories." I'm sure that all of the many writers out there, working at the peak of their form, creating stories that are important and fun and containing their own epiphanies, would be as bemused as I was to come across a declaration that what they were doing was dead.
Chabon then goes on to say that:
" ... while they were working on their stories, a number of the writers found within these covers reported to me, via giddy e-mails, that they had forgotten how much fun writing a short story could be. I think we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be ..."
Who are these writers? Certainly not Stephen King, who seems to chortle over every word. And who are these readers, who Chabon thinks have been trudging masochisticly along, enduring fiction only as a kind of self-flagellating penance, as if reading today were like being forced to eat one's vegetables?
I don't recognize those writers or readers. They are straw men.
But then I thought—perhaps such subterfuge is what is required for an anthology aimed at a mainstream audience to be published these days. I recently learned that The Paris Review had been unable to stir up any interest in a 50th anniversary collection containing Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges and others until the editors decided to change the title to The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horror, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953. That change in title, and the claims that title made, caused four publishers, apparently all previously uninterested, to suddenly bid for the book. The contents were unchanged; all that had altered was the marketing.
And perhaps that's all I'm truly upset with here, that it was easier for Chabon to sell his anthology if he could claim that it stood alone in a parched literary landscape. While it proved a wonderful marketing ploy, I still feel it was not the compliment to the genre that it hoped itself to be.
Chabon,
in his introduction, feared that his point of view might be a "semi-coherent, ill-reasoned and doubtless mistaken rant." Though I took issue with almost everything else he has to say in his introduction, there, at least, I fear that we're in 100 percent agreement.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His short stories can be found in the recent anthologies Angel Body and other Magic for the Soul and The Book of More Flesh.
