ards on the table time. I've known Tom Disch, the author of The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, since 1961. Pamela Zoline and I shared a New York apartment with him 35 years ago. He has lived for periods of time in my flat in London. I was asked to write a blurb for Dreams, and did so. This is what I said (and in the same context this is what I would say again):
"Tom Disch is one of the Secret Masters of science fiction: knowing, masterful, sly, hilarious, and profound. This bible of SF insights, this devil's dictionary of sharp wisdom, is the best book on SF ever written by a practicing writer in the field."
But blurbs are tools. They are designed to point books at audiences. The audience trawled by a publisher like The Free Press--an imprint that specializes in cultural studies, political philosophy, psychological meta-speculation and so forth--does not much resemble a usual SF audience. Neither SF academics nor SF readers in general are likely to look to The Free Press for a book on SF by Thomas M. Disch (in my own lugubriously ample library, Dreams is the only book published by The Free Press, fiction or nonfiction, that has anything to do with the genre); nor would The Free Press ask for a blurb that said Hi! to the converted.
(Fittingly, The Free Press's other blurbs come from figures not primarily associated with the field: Harold Bloom; Scott Bradfield; Nicholas Christopher.)
So what would I say to a knowledgeable audience?
Much the same.
"Tom Disch is one of the Secret Masters of science fiction: knowing, masterful, sly, hilarious, and profound. Indeed he is too smart for us: not one of his 20 or more eligible volumes has won any of the field's major prizes. This apocrypha of wisecrack insights, this devil's dictionary of sharp wisdom, is the best (and, wickedly, just about the most misleading) book on SF ever written by a practicing writer in the field."
No one who has read Disch--his stories, his novels, his criticism, his poetry, his plays--will be surprised at the wit of The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, or at the deadpan schadenfreude of the insights--on writers, books, American culture in general--that frequent these pages.
But it might also be the case that no one familiar with his work will be altogether surprised at the eccentricity of the edifice of explanation he has constructed (in part, one is sure, with tongue in cheek) to explain SF to the world, nor by the occasional foot-off-the-gas passage (like the estimable but entirely routine comments on H.G. Wells).
SF does not originate with Frankenstein
SF, according to Dreams, does not after all originate in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the novel which, for many years now, Brian Aldiss has famously argued is the first real SF text. The first real SF texts, for the author of Dreams, very much contrariwise, are the hoax narratives of Edgar Allan Poe.
"America," he says, "is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe."
SF is a literature based on hoax, based on attempts to fool readers into believing, on techno-occult grounds (a phrase always immanent but never actually used in the text), that its ostensible fictions are actually true: that there's something there SF readers (being Americans) know has somehow been kept from them.
For Americans, after all, a hoax is a truth that up till now was kept from them. To believe in hoaxes is particularly easy, perhaps, for people who believe nothing can be their fault.
But where does 20th century SF fit into this?
Is the big story of 20th century American SF--the story that technocrat heroes in big rocketships will lead us into a democratic/imperial future--a hoax? Or is it, just as culpably perhaps, but very differently, a mistake?
Those who were wrong about the 20th century
It will come as no surprise that most of the authors Disch chooses to demonstrate the hoax thesis of Dreams come from outside the normal canon of significant SF writers--those who, it may be, were wrong about the 20th century. After central figures like Poe, Robert A. Heinlein or Philip K. Dick, and after J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock (with both of whom Disch was involved in creating the 1960s New Wave in England), the writers who receive the most attention in Dreams include Ignatius Donnelly, L. Ron Hubbard, Whitley Strieber, Erich Von Daniken, etc.
This is very great fun.
But it's a cut deck. A landmine. A snare and a delusion. A twisted cue, a cloth untrue, and elliptical billiard balls.
Which is not to say Disch's highly personal discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's Norton Book of Science Fiction isn't a classic of invective.
Which is not to say it's a bit of a cheap shot to tie one's only reference to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle to an extremely long quote from a notorious survivalist tract called The Turner Diaries, published first (I believe--Disch does not source the quote) in 1980 as by Andrew MacDonald; later it appeared as by William Pierce.
The execrable Turner Diaries has, by the way, become a bible for people like Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. It has never (to my knowledge) been reviewed in an SF journal, nor been used (to my knowledge) by anyone prior to 1998 as an example of SF. Furthermore--not out of a misplaced punctilio, but because I had never heard of the book--there is no entry for either Pierce or MacDonald in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, nor does any other contributor to the SFE refer to the thing.
Which is not to say books left out of the SFE aren't kosher (and MacDonald/Pierce will certainly get an entry in any future edition), nor that Tom Disch isn't entitled to startling new insights.
More a clade than a smoking gun
But it is to say that to quote a text of this sort, at length, in a study of the SF genre, and to comment amply upon that text, does controversially imply a telling connection between SF and that text. I, for one, feel there is some connection--but more a clade than a smoking gun. Certain kinds of SF can certainly lead, through a transformative evolutionary clade, to racist manuals: but to say that is to adduce a pattern of transfer and mutation not easily compressed into a natty segue.
Which is not to say...
Which is not to say...
Which is not to say I didn't love the book.
Which is to say I didn't fight it every inch.
Great! Tom (I thought). Right on!
Ouch! Tom (I thought). Elliptical billiard balls!
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all three of which earned Hugo Awards. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. 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.
