Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page B

gone half-mad in the wake of Dianetics but was still the editor who essentially discovered Walter M. Miller, Jr., and who published Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” Boucher knew that science fiction was integrally literature and used Matheson, Oliver, Margaret St. Clair, Shirley Jackson and fifty others to prove it. Horace Gold, that madman and stupefying genius, was a flaming transgressive masquerading as Ben Hibbs. (“I want Galaxy to read as if it were The Saturday Evening Post fiction of the 22nd century.”) Bester, Wyman Guinn, Phil Klass, Damon Knight, Pohl & Kornbluth, to say nothing of Sheckley (as serious as Voltaire), burned the page. Fred Pohl wrote of that decade, “The only venue in which you could find the truth of mid-century America was in the science fiction magazines.
    The stereotype, the received wisdom, the canonic teaching at the time I published that essay, was that the visionary ’40s of Campbell, and the rebellious ’60s of Moorcock and Ballard, Ellison and Brunner were the more crucial decades, but in my essay I presented a different view. Coming on to 40 years later, I believe that it is my case which has edged close to the canon of received wisdom and as these dreadful post-Tolkien, post- Star Wars , post- Avatar and post- Blade Runner consequences shape our latter destiny, I am surer that if there are any miserable graduate students writing theses on the true and terrible history of science fiction, those unhappy scholars will be ever more reliant upon my argument and ever more dedicated to its substantiation.
    Meanwhile, the ever fewer who remain dedicated to what James Blish more than 60 years ago deemed “The True Quill” find ourselves on Malcolm Arnold’s vast and darkling plane, surrounded by elves and wizards who clash by night and soar the paved spaceways in the more eternal dark.
    The True Quill, science fiction as seen through James Blish’s lens, has become a subsidiary, perhaps a minor appendage to fantasy or corrupted versions of the corrupted science fiction of the post- Star Wars period. (I would like to affix responsibility equally to Star Trek, which has ten years of seniority and in the past did so but have repented; there is no fair comparison of the two properties. Star Trek , an earnest, sentimental ’30s Civilize-The-Galaxy procedure, was a failed television series which carried its influence largely to the already-convinced and it recycled a lot of familiar plots as it gave employment to recyclable science fiction writers like Sturgeon, Ellison or Spinrad. Star Wars had its corporate and engineering fix on the widest possible audience from the outset and it blew up the Foundation Series and the Lensmen into gaudy, gas-filled dirigibles that soared over the cities the way that our current travelers soar those old paved, blackened, decomposing spaceways.) “Science fiction has become a small special interest at science fiction Conventions”, Spinrad said thirty years ago (I have quoted him to distraction), and science fiction Conventions have, with few exceptions, become fantasy Conventions with just enough rocketry on the panels and in the dealer rooms to put a bit of sheen on decomposition.
    Decadent. That is what has happened to the True Quill to the degree that the TQ survives in Asimov’s, Analog, and the suburban reaches of Tor Books. “Arcane” might serve just as well in the way it describes the inaccessibility of an output which seems—to those not wholly familiar with the field—to be written in a kind of code. Horace Gold had Ben Hibbs (and for all we know the Tractor series and Mr. Moto) as a kind of aspiration. Maybe not everyone liked that stuff but at least a third of Hibbs’ readership of ten million would read it. Meanwhile, who reads Stross and McAuley or Stephen Baxter? Who reads the non-collaborative Bruce Sterling? Making no judgment of the considerable skills and fierce intelligence of these worthies, exactly who is their audience?