Adventures of the Spherical Cow: Collected Essays

New Directions in Science Fiction

Appeared in the Washington Post in 1992.

Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews With Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers conducted and edited by Larry McCaffrey. Champagne, Illinois: University of Illionois Press; September, 1991; $12.95 trade paper, $29.95 cloth; 267 pp.

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction edited by Larry McCaffrey.  Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press; January 1992; $17.95 trade paper, $49.95 library cloth edition; 387 pp..

Kalimantan by Lucius Shepard. New York: St. Martin’s Press; January 1992; $16.95 hc; 160 pp..

Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick. New York: St. Martin’s Press; January 1992; $15.95; 101 pp.

The science fiction field was born in the nineteen-twenties, the decade of high modernism, which was also a decade of intense genrefication of the contents of American magazines.  While a few science fiction writers, most notably Kurt Vonnegut, escaped over the wall, as American literary intellectuals, the best and the brightest science fiction writers have largely been excluded from literary culture and restricted to conversing with each other.  But in this time after the ‘great divide’ between high culture and popular culture, science fiction writers are becoming integrated into American literary culture.  In two very different books, Across the Wounded Galaxies and Storming the Reality Studio, Larry McCaffrey documents this process.

Across the Wounded Galaxies, contains interviews with Gregory Benford, William S. Burroughs, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Bruce Sterling, and Gene Wolfe. The misfit in this group is non-SF writer William S. Burroughs who, despite interesting questions posed by his interviewers, emerges as a man in radical retreat from reality.  McCaffrey chose these writers “guided principally by intuition and matters of personal taste,” and because he was “drawn to authors whose thematic preoccupations overlapped their postmodernist contemporaries.” (p. 5) In contrast to Charles Platt’s Dreammakers volumes, which sought to capture the individual personalities of the writers and give a comprehensive impression of the science fiction field, McCaffrey’s approach is personal, eccentric and intellectual: “My premise is that SF’s formal and thematic concerns are intimately related to characteristics of other postmodern art forms, that SF has been influencing and influenced by these forms.  Science fiction can, in fact, be seen as representing an examplar of postmodernism because it is the art form that most directly reflects back to us the cultural logic that has produced postmoderism.” (pp. 2-3).  Because McCaffrey is an excellent interviewer whose intuition has directed him to many of science fiction’s most vibrant intellectuals, reading this book is like attending a marvellous dinner party populated by fascinating people. 

  Apparently without knowing it, what McCaffrey has documented in this book is the intellectual legacy of the Milford Conference held in Milford, Pennsylvania from the late nineteen-fifties through the nineteen-sixties—the very conference Kurt Vonnegut’s character Eliot Rosewater drops by in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to tell the assembled writers “he wished they would learn more about sex and economics and style.” (GBYMR, Dell, 1965, p. 30). Across the Wounded Galaxies shows that the post-Milford SF intellectuals know plenty about all three. 

As with most good books, one wishes there was more of it—Norman Spinrad and John Crowley are the most significant omissions; and because of the intellectual apprenticeship common to most of the writers in the book, one also have wishes for interviews with major figures of the Milford era—Damon Knight, whom Gene Wolfe claims “grew him from a bean” (p. 239 - 239), writer and radical anthologist of the fifties and sixties Judith Merrill, and SF stylist R. A. Lafferty.   Because McCaffery restricts his book to American writers, there is an aching void where interviews with Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock et. al. ought to be—one hopes for a companion volume of interviews with British SF writers.