by Gregory Benford
Copyright 2000 by Abbenford Associates
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When I began writing science fiction, as a graduate student in 1964, it was commonplace to regard the sf field as just entering its great phase. Of course there had been the Golden Age of 1939-45, and arguably a Silver Age of the early 1950s…but 1964 was rife with the hubbub of the early New Wave, remember, and promise seemed to brim everywhere.
An academic then referred to the field as "waiting for its Shakespeare"--that is, for a towering figure who could take the form to its' heights, never to be equaled. The Bard came upon the Elizabethan stage and drama has never been the same since. Strikingly, he came early in the history of modern drama, though the Greeks had been staging great plays nearly two millennia before, and wrenched the form around until it accommodated the sensibilities of a quite different culture..
Other critics such as Brian Aldiss, particularly in his Billion Year Spree (later updated to Trillion), argued that H.G. Wells may have been the founder of modern sf and its Shakespeare all in one. Jules Verne came before, and in his attention to detail and plausibility may be said to be the founder of hard sf, but Verne mostly stuck to adventure stories, not heart-strumming dramas, "real novels." Verne was not broad enough.
Wells indeed did lay down many of the great idea-novels of the genre (though it wasn't a genre then), principally in his first decade: The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man. When has any writer had such a run, such a gusher of creation? Of course there were antecedents to many of his ideas. But he brought them to full, heartfelt dimension with true dramatic clout-and often, in novels that we would term novellas today, marvels of compression.
This he had in common with Shakespeare, who came to the young English stage and made it grow up.
But the New Wave advocates felt that truly adult sf would come only after the methods and crafts of mainstream literary styles were imported to bring to fruition sf's themes. And Tom Disch did produce Camp Concentration, Joanna Russ And Chaos Died, Samuel Delany both Nova and Dahlgren, Roger Zelazny This Immortal, Harlan Ellison in groundbreaking short stories, while Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard had their peaks as well. Sadly, most of these works are long out of print, perhaps to be revived in a zombie-like way by on-demand publishing, which will cater to small audiences wishing to catch up on some of the fine works of the last half century.
But Shakespeare? None of these authors became the commanding figure Wm. S. was in his age. (Or may have been. There is curiously little documentation of Shakespeare the man-no letters, occasional pieces, not a single original manuscript. This has led some to suppose the Edward Devere in fact wrote the works, with the actor Shakespeare as a useful front. This leads to a wholly different reading of the plays and sonnets-an intriguing possibility, reminding us that even great figures can carry with them an artful ambiguity, to this day.)
How come? Perhaps because no one can command the range of science, fiction and worldly knowledge demanded of a great novelist now. That may be why we have no looming figures of Tolstoy's scale. Science fiction, which takes on the largest issues confronting the human heart and head, demands much more than a conventional novelist needs to muster.
Maybe it's impossible to become the Shakespeare of sf any longer?
Or…could we somehow have missed him? (Or her?!)
I've seen a heady rush sweep through the field as new, powerful writers arrived, at times greeted with hosannas that suggested the arrival of The Master. Ursula LeGuin's early Ace novels led to a remarkable string: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and on into some fine work. The first edition of the Nicholls & Clute SF Encyclopedia pronounced her the best living sf writer. But while her acceptance by the mainstream is unparalleled in sf by any other than Clarke, her highly successful career since has not been of Shakespearean dimension. Perhaps this will later seem just a change in fashion, for LeGuin wrote primarily "social sf" that resonated with the questioning of fundamentals going on in the advanced nations in the 1960s and 1970s. When society reinspects itself again, her repute may benefit. To me, The Dispossessed is the best consideration of the nature of utopia literature has yet produced--and it has a scientist as its central figure.
The second edition of the SF Encyclopedia made a case for Gene Wolfe as the greatest living sf author. Admittedly, their case seemed a bit half-hearted, and they made no such case for LeGuin (fickle critics!). I like his work, he may be our best stylist--but I doubt he's our Bard, for reaching a large audience is surely a signature, and Gene is a cultivated taste.
Similarly, we saw Dan Simmons heralded by some as a writer who knew his science (not from experience; he got it from reading, just as the Bard apparently got his knowledge of, say, Italy) and had a flair for novels. He found a large audience, too. Greg Bear fit that description as well, and has produced fine work. Joe Haldeman we greeted in the mid-1970s in the backwash of the New Wave, and for a while held the record for the highest advance paid for an sf novel ($50,000--it seemed huge, then). Joe probably never thought of Shakespeare; Hemingway is his literary idol. William Gibson made a big splash in 1984 with a polished, insightful style that unhinged an aspect of techo-culture we had little glimpsed before. Further, he rode the wave created by the films Blade Runner (noir future) and Tron (virtual reality dramas, jacking in). But cyberpunk was, like social sf, a passing taste--still powerful, but not a revolution in the sense that John Campbell's first team wrought one in that distant first Golden Age.
So it seems no recent arrival is the Bard in disguise.
Consider a smaller question, then: who is the reigning figure, still alive, in modern sf? My money would be on two old favorites, Arthur Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Clarke gave us 2001 and Bradbury The Martian Chronicles, works that will live a very long while indeed. Bradbury says he's not an sf writer, but he clearly came out of the magazines that termed themselves that.
But is either our Shakespeare? Somehow I doubt that either has the range to deserve the label. Of the two, Clarke comes closest, for my money. His amusing essays and Tales from the White Hart show his comic side, while many stories and novels display his grasp of the largest scales available to the modern intellect.
It is worth pondering who we will have to fill their shoes. Among living American sf writers,. Fred Pohl and Robert Silverberg probably have spanned the greatest range, summoned up deep emotions and plumbed the reaches of many ideas. But neither of these fine gentlemen would pretend to be a Shakespeare comparable to Wells.
And maybe there's a reason for that.
Sf has become the preeminent genre, emerging from lowly pulp origins to rule the visual media. Alas, it is still a stepped-upon subsection of the lit'ry world, excluded from serious consideration, relegated to a box in the back at the New York Times Book Review.
But the written forms feed the visual ones, as many authors (like me) who have had their work purloined by screenwriters have woefully found. So we are influential, if not rich or famous. So here's an audacious thought: maybe our Shakespeare was Stanley Kubrick.
After all, in a stunning series he gave us in a mere few years Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange-all near-future works of genius, derived from novels, two of them acknowledged as sf. They showed us worlds nobody had yet visited, and made his name. When Kubrick died, he was going to resume work on a film about artificial intelligence, on which he had already lavished years of script labor, working in turn with Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw and Ian Watson. There was a flurry of speculation that Stephen Spielberg was going to take up the project, and work proceeds apace.
It's startling to entertain the notion of Kubrick as our Shakespeare-but remember, the Bard primarily wrote for a visual medium, too. And in keeping with our station in life, nobody in the general culture thinks of Kubrick as a science fiction person at all…
Still…there is a deeper problem here, rummaging around for a science fictional Shakespeare. We are the genre, the inventor of fandom itself, fanzines, big fan conventions, a fount of cultural innovation. But rather than see ourselves as a partitioned piece of literature, better to say that we are a continuing conversation.
No other genre refers back so far and so often to its Golden Age(s), citing works and comparing writers-just as this column has done. In weeding out the new but derivative, by holding it up to the light of other days, we confer Grand Master status only upon those who truly extend our mental frontiers, and relegate those who merely rearrange conceptual deck chairs to the lesser ranks (where, these days, they get stuck writing franchise fiction and work-for-hire media tie-ins, just to make ends meet.)
We inspect ideas anew in ways other genres do not. Where in mysteries, say, does one see a gang of young Turks write a three-nvoel sequence to reimagine a classic work? Yet that's what I did with Greg Bear and David Brin, when we wrote the Second Foundation Trilogy. Isaac Asimov's grand ideas rewarded revisiting, we thought, seen through the eyes of another generation. Of course, some Asimov fans thought this was overtly a bad idea. We expected that, along with the hard core of fans who do not want their view of the sacred texts challenged. All this is part of the debate, too.
Most generally, our field comprises a way for the general culture to see itself in a fresh light. Science particularly has always used sf to think about the implications of its own work. That's why so many scientists have written sf (again, like me-a phenomenon you can study further in some essays at my website, available through authorcafe.com).
Rather than look upon our great works as resembling classical symphonies, to be played in grand halls to a passive audience, think of us as a jazz band-swinging down Basin Street in full voice, blaring our messages, running new riffs on old standards, fresh melodic lines, improvisation as the blood and rhythm of the enterprise itself. Our band's sign might well read,
JAZZ, THAT'S WHAT WE ARE.
--because it's what we truly do well.
And New Orleans never needed a Shakespeare.
Gregory Benford is professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, whose latest novel is The Sunborn.
