FROM No Sin But Ignorance No. 46, April 2004.
By Claire Brailey
Gregory Benford’s central interesting idea was to identify whether SF has yet had, or in fact needs, its Shakespeare Perversely, I found that its greatest interest lay in Benford’s definition of his terms. He defined Shakespeare early on as ‘a towering figure who could take the form to its heights, never to be equalled’, and supplemented this with the thought that ‘Shakespeare came to the young English stage and made it grow up’. On several occasions, he identified Shakespeare’s primary challenge to would-be imitators as his ‘range’. Against these criteria, Benford found all writers somehow lacking, but suggested that the director Stanley Kubrick might have embodied more of the qualities he was looking for.
I wonder if the task would have been easier if instead he had looked for a science-fictional Shakespeare against different criteria: rather than an icon, the embodiment of a canon, what if he looked for someone who was writing at a time when the genre was the most popular it had ever been (or, perhaps, ever would be again), who was as notable for the length of their career and for the number of works produced and preserved as for their quality and diversity — and indeed who was often equaled in terms of plot, characterisation and sheer poetry by a number of his contemporaries whose output was simply not as prolific? Someone whose work was derivative, in plot terms at least, and often rested on audience familiarity with his basic story in order to do something different with it? Someone whose jokes have often not survived either the cultural shift in standards of humour or simpler shifts in colloquial language? Someone who was, above all, popular and whose work played to all elements of the crowd in a way which can seem variously exquisitely balanced, economically astute, or disappointingly disjointed?
No, of course it wouldn’t. But it might have widened the field. It might have opened the way for more of the writers who started in pulp fiction. It might have included (with no detriment intended by association) Brian Stableford or Michael Moorcock or Iain Banks or Harry Turtledove, or even Anne McCaffrey or Piers Anthony. And it might have ended with the near-outsider, in several senses, Terry Pratchett. Like Shakespeare, Pratchett is a prolific author who uses often familiar plots and scenarios (including Shakespeare) in new ways, who is widely popular, who creates enduring characters, who has a very distinctive turn of phrase, and who — even though he may not be the greatest or more critically regarded author of his time — is likely to be remembered, due not least to the wide number of texts in circulation, the almost universal contemporary appeal, and the ready availability of copies of the text. I think there’s a more than superficial resemblance.
Definitions can be distracting. Benford himself mentioned in passing the speculation that the works of ‘Shakespeare’ were written by the Earl of Oxford, thereby cracking open the can to let slip one worm but hoping to leave the others wiggling in the darkness. By introducing to the argument all the other candidates beloved of conspiracy theorists — Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe (in which case, as Woody Allen mused, ‘If Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s works, who wrote Marlowe’s?’) — it could be a fascinating game not only to choose a Shakespeare front-man figure in SF but to attempt to establish his eminence gris as well. In such an openly pseudonymous field it seems quite tempting. John Russell Fearn, perhaps? Lionel Fanthorpe? No, it really is all too distracting: far too far not only from Benford’s respectful definition but even from my alternatives.
It will come as no surprise to those readers who know my tastes that what I’d personally like to look for is SF’s Marlowe. And, preferably to stretch a point and find one that won’t die with too much potential unrealised this time.
In the same issue of SET, Russell Blackford took a different tack — as no doubt the editors intended — picking up Greg Benford’s Kubrick proposition in order to ponder whether it is in fact cinema which has produced ‘the towering works of the genre’. Having selected and developed this hypothesis, Blackford went on to demolish it by demonstrating that the dominance of big budget movies with an SF flavour in the mainstream of popular culture is built on their popularity in the youth market. SF-like movies are kids’ stuff, and thus clearly not comparable to Shakespeare.
This approached a parody of the dismissal of all forms of SF — most damaging for novels — by the critical mainstream: the attitude, in fact, which Benford described when he noted that ‘SF has become the pre-eminent genre’ but that it is still ‘excluded from serious consideration’. I found more cause and effect in these statements than may have been intended.
Blackford went on to claim that the degraded image of SF in public perception is quite understandable, which I suppose it is if you’re willing to consider mass market mainstream movies to be the core of SF. For all that Blackford ultimately rejected the idea that the majority of SF’s masterpieces lie in the cinema, his arguments overall seemed to run on rails from which he seemed surprised the steam engine couldn’t break free and still keep moving freely. He also examined the development of the English poetic tradition, subsequently claiming that he could not find the equal of its great figures within the SF field: a proposition which surely leads the witness to agree that no, the great innovative, memorable, thought-provoking writers of science fiction in the late twentieth century are not immediately comparable to Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Yeats et al. Yet what we have from all these canonical figures is distance, building on decades or even centuries of critical acceptance and academic authority; read what the intellectuals of the day or their own contemporaries within the field said when their work was unblessed by the canon and there’ll be at least as much criticism — especially for anyone who has received popular success — as credit.
Yet when you examine SF novels it’s often clear that they are part of the same literary tradition: the most immediate and overt example to hand is Damien Broderick’s latest novel Transcension, which in its culminating vision of the transcendence of human consciousness sees the characters expressing their experience through apposite paraphrasing of Milton, Dante and the like. And no, this won’t get the popular success of the latest film or tie-in or novelisation; nor will it get the critical acclaim that it should because it’s SF.
So how can we assess our own great figures?
Russell Blackford acknowledged in his SET piece that if any of the key figures in recent SF are the equal of the literary greats of the past it is not yet obvious. And in concluding that SF’s great works are more like the product of a jazz band than a classical symphony, Greg Benford argued that ‘New Orleans never needed a Shakespeare’. To me, the strength of contemporary SF is a cumulative one, in much the same way that I consider Shakespeare’s greatest value to be as a major contributor to the vibrancy of the wider fields of Elizabethan poetry and Jacobean drama. There may be no towering individuals that we can see from here; but perhaps that’s not only because we’re too close to see but also because so many SF authors could loom so high.
(No Sin But Ignorance, No 46, April 2004, pp. 11–12)
