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DISCH
Here are some quotes (some of the beginning and most of the
end) of Thomas Disch's "Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills" in
the February 1992 ATLANTIC:
In 1975 I gave a talk on the theme "The Embarrassments of Science
Fiction," in which I developed a notion... that science fiction
should be accounted, and can best be understood as, a branch of
children's literature. I noted how often a taste for SF is
acquired in early adolescence... Implicit in my critique was an
agenda for an aesthetically and intellectually mature
science-fiction ...
...science fiction has never been more popular than in these past
fifteen years...
Nearly without exception, the genre works that have enjoyed such
popularity have been of the type that I characterized... as
children's literature. For while I had faintheartedly bemoaned
the genre's juvenility, more-farsighted souls -- editor's,
notably Ballantine's Judy Lynne del Rey -- had taken the same
estimate of the situation and seen an enormous untapped market.
Del Rey and those who followed in her footsteps discovered and
groomed writers like Stephan Donaldson, Terry Brooks, and Piers
Anthony, who could scale down Tolkein or Asimov from the seventh-
or eighth-grade reading levels of the overeducated fifties...
[...]
The final and most excruciating callowness of youth is what SF
readers particularly prize: Big Ideas. Now, there are some ideas
that genuinely are big, which is to say, full of implication and
repercussion. Copernicus's remodeled universe is such an idea.
But an idea need not even be valid to be big: Spengler's
_Decline of the West_ is as big as all history, and its central
thesis is pure twaddle. But when I was twenty-five, I revered
Spengler, and I was willing to accept any amount of twaddle on
faith for the sake of his system, the wonderfully lucid pattern
that provided a pigeonhole for every datum of history.
There is nothing that so militates against the sense of one's
own vast ignorance as adopting some such Big Idea, and the
young, whose ignorance is largest and rawest and most
exasperating, have a natural predilection for Big Ideas.
Marxists, Ayn Randers, Scientologists, and deconstructionists
have one thing in common: they tend to have been recruited
young. Once in the fold, they may remain there indefinitely
and turn into fossils, but twigs are bent in the teens and
twenties.
To a certain degree SF provides a natural playground for the
harmless exercise of Big Ideas, even those that are radically
unsound. Utopias that could never be implemented in the real
world are fun to explore in simulation. Witness the utopian
SF novels by writers of such diverse temperaments as LeGuin,
Suzy McKee Charnas, Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry
Pournelle. The Gaia hypothesis is also a natural for
science-fictionalization.
Indeed, SF anticipated it, in stories including Richard
McKenna's 1963 work "Hunter Come Home." However, not all
writers approach Big Ideas in a spirit of intellectual
playfulness. Some come to believe in their privileged wisdom
and become intolerant of contradiction, and this can happen
at various levels of sophistication. The most gullible can
simply report to the local Scientology recruiting office.
Others dope their SF hobbyhorses with an ideological fix.
Ursula LeGuin promotes a return to the wisdom of a Native
American never-never land. Michael Moorcock has become an
advocate of Andrea Dworkin. The tendency is always to
venture toward the current ideological limit as an inherently
more dramatic situation, which is also, however, inherently
silly.
Ideological silliness is an affliction more tolerable in the
young, and, for reasons I've tried to lay out, exactly the
same may be said of a taste for science fiction...
Disch has overreacted to
the some earnest, strident
idealists and ideologes He also seems
become something close to a horrified that anyone would
nihilist. write something based on
wish-fufillment.
This air of nihilism shows
up in his fiction, and has Me, I'd say you should
something to do with his tap into any source of
lack of success. How many energy you can find.
people would you offer a
copy of _334_ to in order
to turn them on to SF?
What bothers me about the
current state of SF is almost
exactly the opposite of what
Disch is complaining about.
There are some SF writers
willing to play around with Big
Ideas, but they *only* play
around with them. MANIFESTO
Very few writers actually take
themselves seriously enough to RAND
write a book like Ayn Rand's
_Atlas Shrugged_, which takes some
ideas and pushes them to the
ragged edge of lunacy. Like it
or not _Atlas_ is one of the truly
Great Works of the century that
every educated person has to
come to terms with. In
comparison most SF just doodles
around. If it doesn't just
photocopy.
SF, even bad SF, can do
things that other kinds of
(Actually, there's a converse fiction can't do, or doesn't
problem that bugs me some usually try to do.
times: writers with an
unconscious -- one hopes -- (Though historical
belief in patent nonsense, fiction gets close
like FTL or psionics...) sometimes.)
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