ISCLAIMER: Anyone with training in psychology or psychiatry should probably close this window and check out one of Science Fiction Weekly's other fine features. Because this month I'm going to discuss mental disability, and I'm extremely unlikely to use precise terminology.
One of my favorite television series is USA's Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub as a detective afflicted with some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Poor Adrian Monk twitches, he starts, he blurts, he does all kinds of strange things—but he also sees things ordinary humans do not, and always, always solves the murder.
(Hmm, maybe he's a superhero, and this month's lead isn't so far off-topic.)
One of the reasons I like Monk is that it has encouraged me to recognize, then accept, my own Monkish habits. Straightening pictures if they happen to be crooked by an eighth of an inch. Discarding pages of prose or script because they just don't look right! (Before the days of word processors, this made for a lot of extra work.) Alphabetizing all the books in the house, and becoming perturbed when someone misfiles one....
We don't have sufficient time or space to discuss a complete list of my fears and superstitions.
Oh, wait, here's the strangest one of all: I'm afraid I'm not crazy enough to be a good sci-fi writer.
Lunacy can be found between the lines
I've been around the sci-fi and fantasy field for a generation, long enough to have had face-to-face encounters with giants such as Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick, and to have become friends with various members of the "next" generation of sci-fi (Harlan Ellison, for example, and Norman Spinrad) and the generation after that (George R.R. Martin, Gregory Benford, Nancy Kress, Greg Bear). A few years back I performed a (Monklike?) exercise by flipping through the membership directory of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and discovered that I recognized at least half of the names on every page, and that I could count at least one, sometimes more, as friends.
This litany is not recounted just to impress you with my list of famous friends, but simply to make the case that I know a lot of sci-fi writers.
And, without in any way meaning to disparage that strange and wonderful group of people—or, more specifically, to single out any of those named two paragraphs north of here—I think you could say we're all a little crazy.
That is, we live in our own worlds. At its worst, this looks a lot like obsessive-compulsive behavior. We ignore fashion. (Harlan Ellison used to complain about sci-fi writers who "toss off stories about trips to far galaxies while using slang and wearing clothing out of the 1940s"). We talk too much because we're afraid to let others speak. We follow esoteric interests to extreme, whether it's collecting toy soldiers or knowing about astronauts and cosmonauts. (I said I was including myself in this category, didn't I?)
We can be difficult to live with.
We're all Monks.
Writers' workshops give birth to weird
I have a bit of empirical support for this outrageous claim.
The noted sci-fi writer and editor Frederik Pohl (The Space Merchants, Gateway and many others) has on several occasions cited a study of writers, including sci-fi writers, which showed how we are like other writers of fiction—and how we are different. I've never seen the actual study, which was published in the Journal of Psychology back in April 1958, but I have read at least two different abstracts by Mr. Pohl:
Some 356 individuals were surveyed, grouped as general writers, artists and SF writers in such categories as "intelligence vs. defective ability," "dominance vs. submission."
Sci-fi writers scored slightly higher than the other two groups in both of the categories I've mentioned here (and there were at least a dozen).
Where sci-fi writers really pinged the meter was in a category called "adventurous cyclothymia vs. withdrawn"—which is the willingness to do something about whatever troubles you.
To propose a radical change. Hey, let's go to the moon. Let's split the atom. Let's rewrite human DNA.
Sci-fi writers rated four or five times higher than general writers or artists in this "adventurous cyclothymia."
Pohl concluded by deciding that sci-fi writers, as a rule, possess a "divine discontent."
That is, we don't like the world and try to create one of our own.
Which is what Rod Serling did ("you are traveling to another dimension") and Gene Roddenberry ("to boldly go where no man has gone before") and Chris Carter ("the truth is out there"). It's what Ridley Scott did with Philip K. Dick's vision of a future cop in a world of androids ... er, replicants.
Kurt Vonnegut, who almost qualifies as a sci-fi writer (much of his work is sci-fi, but he has never accepted the label), summed it up perfectly in his 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in which Vonnegut's hero, the rich, idealistic, frustrated Eliot Rosewater stumbles into a sci-fi writer's conference in Milford, Pa., and drunkenly proclaims—
"I love you crazy sons of bitches! ... You're all I read any more! You're the only ones who will talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to realize that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years!"
For years, a group of sci-fi writers really did hold writing workshops in Milford. (Vonnegut attended one. Frederik Pohl attended several.) At one conference, four male writers formed an intense "group-mind" with a fifth, a woman writer who claimed to have witchlike powers.
Now that's the kind of adventurous whatever that lets you create a whole new world.
I don't know if I'd score very high on that scale, but I'm glad these other writers do.
And when I hear the frequent, inevitable criticism—"All you sci-fi writers are crazy!"—my answer is, "You say that as if it's a bad thing."
When he's not obsessively straightening the papers on his desk just so, Michael Cassutt writes fiction (the forthcoming novel Tango Midnight, from Forge) and scripts (The Dead Zone).
