The graying lensmen

There were thousands of fans in attendance at last week’s World Science Fiction Convention, but I swear that I kept seeing the same fifty faces. With the exception of a reading that I did with a few writers from Analog, all of my events revolved around the history of science fiction, which an emphasis on stories and authors from the golden age. Not surprisingly, the audience at these panels tended to skew older, and many attendees had clearly been coming to Worldcon for decades. I was almost always the youngest panelist at the head table, and I can’t be sure that I wasn’t also the youngest person in the room on more than one occasion. Whenever we discussed the genre, the same handful of names kept popping up, and many of them would have inspired blank stares from a younger crowd: John W. Campbell himself, of course, but also writers like E.E. Smith, author of Gray Lensman, and A.E. van Vogt. (At one point, at a discussion titled “Classics in the Corner,” I said: “I’m not sure how many people read E.E. Smith these days.” A lot of hands shot up, which led another panelist to observe: “This is probably the wrong room to ask that question.”) And although I was aware that the average age at Worldcon has long been higher than that at most similar gatherings, and it seems to get older every year, it felt as if I were spending the weekend at a convention within the convention—an enclave in which a vibrant but graying crowd gathers to celebrate writers, stories, and a shared history that the larger community is beginning to forget.

And these fears are far from groundless. A high point of the weekend, at least for me, was a roundtable discussion held by the academic conference about Campbell and the golden age. The tone of the panel was reverent, if not toward Campbell personally then toward his impact on the field, and the only discordant note was struck by a panelist who noted that his writing students aren’t especially interested in Campbell these days—if they’re even aware of who he was. In response, Robert Silverberg said: “You can’t see oxygen, either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” But I don’t think there’s any doubt that the dissenting voice had a point. For a lot of younger writers, Campbell is a tertiary influence, at best, and he certainly isn’t the living presence that he was for the fans and authors of an earlier generation. His place has largely been taken by more recent artists whose struggles and victories seem more urgent than those of writers whose best work was published before World War II. When you look more closely, of course, you find that their concerns are far closer to the present than they might first appear, and you can draw agonizingly important lessons from their example. But this takes time and energy that a lot of younger writers have rightly devoted to other matters. It was Campbell himself, I think, who observed that readers are essentially hiring writers to perform a service: to think more deeply about a subject than they can for themselves. And my hope is that the book I’m writing will do some of the necessary legwork, allowing writers and readers my age or younger to plunder Campbell, Heinlein, and all the rest for what they have to offer.

This only reflects my own journey, which has more in common, in many respects, with the young writers who aren’t aware of Campbell than with the older fans and authors whom I’ve encountered along the way. I came into the genre as randomly as most of us do, assembling my picture of it from an assortment of heterogenous materials: a single issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, now lost, which I got for Christmas when I was twelve and replaced a few days ago with a copy I bought at the dealer’s room at the convention; novels by writers like Madeline L’Engle, Jane Yolen, and Orson Scott Card; and the nearly simultaneous discovery of Jorge Luis Borges and The X-Files. None of it was systematic, or even conscious, and my exposures to older influences weren’t exactly in the best possible order. (When I mentioned at a panel that the first Heinlein novel I ever read was The Number of the Beast, there was an audible gasp.) I’d been writing science fiction seriously for almost ten years before I realized that I was harking back, without knowing it, to stories like “Who Goes There?” and Sinister Barrier. It wasn’t until I began thinking about this book that I sought out authors like Smith or van Vogt, and I’m constantly confronted by areas that I have yet to explore. Part of me wishes that I’d been more deliberate about it much earlier, but that isn’t how fans evolve. And in trying to go back and build myself into the kind of reader who is capable of tackling Campbell and the others on their own terms, I’ve become more conscious both of what the different generations of fans have in common and of the ways in which they continue to diverge.

But I’ve also come to realize that older and younger fans are snapshots of a single continuum. The Futurians, as I’ve noted before, were incredibly young when the fan community began—most of them were still living with their parents—and the patterns that they inaugurated are still being played out online. We think of these guys as men with white beards, but that’s only because what they alternately created and rebelled against has endured to the time of their grandchildren. (When Slan won the Retro Hugo award for Best Novel on Thursday, A.E. van Vogt’s granddaughter was there to accept it, and she got the most rapturous round of applause that I heard all weekend.) On the last night of the convention, I found myself at the Hugo Losers Party, which began decades ago as an informal gathering in George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’s hotel room and has been transformed since into a lavish event with hundreds of guests. It felt like a real moment of catharsis, after a weekend that had been charged with powerful emotions and occasional tensions, and it threw a random sampling of attendees onto the same dance floor and shook them all up. Looking around the Midland Theatre, I saw emerging writers and aging legends standing side by side, or crowding into the same elevator, and it was more clear to me than ever how one ripens into the other. Virtually everyone enters the fandom at a young age, and even if the years have started to show for some, it only puts me in mind of what James Caan reminds us in The Way of the Gun: “The only thing you can assume about a broken-down old man is that he’s a survivor.” And I should only be so lucky to survive as long.

The past through tomorrow

Precedent is merely the assumption that somebody else, in the past with less information, nevertheless knows better than the man on the spot…Tradition is something very different. To follow a tradition means to do things in the same grand style as your predecessors; it does not mean to do the same things.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet

On Thursday, I took part in a panel at the World Science Fiction Convention titled “Old Time Radio and New Tales in the Age of Podcasts.” Now that the event is safely behind me, I might as well confess that I’m not sure why I was included: I’ve written one radio play, still unaired, and I’m married to a professional podcaster, but I doubt that the organizers knew this, and nothing else in my résumé stamps me as an authority on the topic. But I’ll happily talk about anything, so I went back to review the handful of blog posts I’ve written about radio and worked up a few additional thoughts in advance. As it turned out, the panel was my fourth event in five hours, including a draining solo presentation on John W. Campbell’s work during World War II, so my energy level was pretty low. For the most part, I was content to sit back and allow the other speakers to do most of the heavy lifting, chiming in whenever I felt I had something to contribute. The one big point I wanted to make is that contemporary podcasts aren’t the same thing as classic radio dramas—if you’re writing for audio these days, you’ve got to prepare for the possibility that your listeners are giving you maybe a quarter of their complete attention. Two of my fellow panelists disagreed, saying that writers and producers had to encourage their audiences to embrace an old-fashioned “theater of the mind.” Personally, I think that this is a nice sentiment, but not particularly realistic. Still, it was all very cordial. Afterward, one of the other participants shook my hand, saying that he thought that I did a good job, and essentially apologized for taking over the discussion. “I don’t usually talk much,” he told me, “but when I’m on a panel like this, I just can’t stop myself.”

And this turned out to be a prophetic remark. The next day, the very same participant was expelled from the convention for hijacking another panel that he was moderating, using his position to indulge in a ten-minute speech on how political correctness was destroying science fiction and fantasy. I wasn’t there, but I later spoke to another member of that panel, who noted dryly that it was the first time she had ever found herself on the most controversial event of the weekend. Based on other accounts of the incident, the speaker—who, again, had been nothing but polite to me the day before—said that the fear of giving offense had made it hard for writers to write the same kinds of innovative, challenging stories that they had in the past. Inevitably, there are those who believe that his expulsion simply proved his point, and that he was cast out by the convention’s thought police for expressing an unpopular opinion. But that isn’t really what happened. As another blogger correctly observes, the participant wasn’t expelled for his words, but for his actions: he deliberately derailed a panel that he was supposed to moderate, recorded it without the consent of the other panelists, and planned the whole thing in advance, complete with props and a prepared statement. He came into the event with the intention of disrupting any real conversation, rather than facilitating it, and the result was an act of massive discourtesy. For a supposed champion of free speech, he didn’t seem very interested in encouraging it. As a result, he was clearly in violation of the convention’s code of conduct, and his removal was justified.

Either way, though, he got exactly what he wanted. If he had been allowed to stay, he would have taken it as a tacit endorsement of his approach; now, by being expelled, he gets to use this perceived injustice to whip up his sympathizers, and we’re already seeing the results online. But this kind of tactic is as old as fandom itself. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the famous incident in which the Futurians were excluded from the first Worldcon in New York. In The Immortal Storm, the historian Sam Moskowitz—who was the one who forced them to leave—says of the episode:

Looking at the circumstances in the most pessimistic light, we can see that the Futurians had everything to gain and nothing to lose. If allowed to enter, they could have disrupted proceedings, and thus proved their prior claim that New Fandom was incompetent to run a successful convention; if not allowed to enter, they could point to another prior claim of New Fandom’s being essentially dictatorial as proved. Indeed, Futurian strategy may have been devised with these possibilities foremost in mind. Whether it was or not, the Futurians stood to gain public sympathy as a result of the convention if they played their cards properly no matter what stand New Fandom took.

And although I don’t think the Futurians were organized enough to consciously act with this end in mind, it worked more or less as Moskowitz says. For while, public sympathy tipped in their favor, and while this victory was short-lived, the fact remains that what we hyperbolically call the Great Exclusion Act is just about the only thing that anybody remembers about the first Worldcon.

I doubt that the kerfuffle from this weekend will resonate for nearly as long, and I suspect that we’re more likely to remember the convention for the landmark victories by women and writers of color at the following evening’s Hugo Awards. If the stunt had taken place in the early days of fandom, it might have merited a paragraph in The Immortal Storm. (Or as Borges puts it in “Three Versions of Judas”: “His name would have helped swell the catalogs of minor heresiarchs.”) As it stands, it’s going to be little more than a footnote. But I have a hunch that it was motivated, at least on a subconscious level, by a nostalgia for the controversies that have animated fandom in the past, despite the fact that the community that we have now is larger, more diverse, and more interesting. Donald A. Wollheim, who was a better troll than anyone living today, once said of the fan William Sykora: “You got the impression that for him, it was still 1937.” You could say much the same thing about the current crop of reactionaries, both in the positions that they take and the means that they use to express them. Just as contemporary podcasters have to adjust to the realities of the medium, rather than pining for a golden age of radio that no longer exists, writers these days have to operate within a set of standards that weren’t even on the table when a lot of classic science fiction was written. And that’s just how it should be. As I’ve noted before, increasing the diversity of voices within the genre can only lead to greater innovation, and the science fiction of an earlier era didn’t succeed because of its indifference to these concerns, but in spite of it. It’s good to have a debate, but any side that remains stuck in the past—especially in science fiction—is bound to lose. And if it can’t adapt, maybe it deserves it.

MidAmeriCon Episode II: The Sequel

When the World Science Fiction Convention was last held in Kansas City, Missouri, the guest of honor was Robert A. Heinlein, the Hugo Award for Best Novel went to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and producer Gary Kurtz and actor Mark Hamill were on hand to promote an upcoming movie that was still billed by many sources as The Star Wars. In August, when the convention returns to Kansas City for the first time in thirty years, I’ll be there. To be fair, Haldeman and Kurtz will also be back, along with the likes of George R.R. Martin, and the fact that I get to attend this particular year seems like an auspicious sign. It’s Heinlein’s hometown, for one thing, and because it’s so close to the University of Kansas, it means that the annual Campbell Conference—an academic gathering named after you know who—will occur at the same time.

Last week, I received a draft schedule of my events, and it looks fantastic. I’m especially pleased by the presentation I’m set to deliver as part of the academic track on Thursday, August 18, at 4pm. Here’s the abstract of “Deadline: John W. Campbell in World War II”:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, turned down the chance to enlist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov. Instead, he forwarded defense ideas from his authors to Murray Leinster at the Office of War Information; ran the writing factory that cranked out classified sonar manuals at the Empire State Building; brainstormed responses to the kamikaze threat with Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard; and was investigated by the military for publishing a description of an atomic bomb over a year before Hiroshima changed science fiction—and the world—forever.

It’s a dry run for much of the material that I hope to cover in my book, and I couldn’t be more excited to present it. My other events include:

Writers of the Past: Retro Hugos in Perspective. Wednesday, August 17 at 4pm. Seeing the nominees for this year’s Retro Hugo awards brings a flood of recognition and familiarity for some, and a blank look from others. Join us and find out about the professional authors of the period, and the context for the year 1941. Who was just starting out? Who were the Grandmasters of the day? Which giants in the field were still journeymen in those days? Why are they still important? Moderator: Bradford Lyau. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Shahid Mahmud.

Remembering the Futurians. Thursday, August 18 at 1pm. Jack Robins, who died last year, was a founding member of the Futurians. The Futurians were instrumental in not only laying the groundwork for many fannish traditions, but also included the authors of many of the seminal works in the field from Asimov to Pohl, Kidd, and others. Let’s take a look back at their influence during a magical era when the future of science fiction and fandom was taking off. Moderator: Mark L. Olson. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Pete Balestrieri, Scott Edelman.

Do Heinlein Juveniles Stand Up? Thursday, August 18 at 2pm. Robert A. Heinlein published 12 books between 1947 and 1958 that were aimed at young adults, predominantly in the male SF market. Although many older fans have a tremendous regard and nostalgic glow for Heinlein’s juveniles, can children today enjoy them or do they seem hopelessly dated? Let’s take a dive into these books and cast an appreciative yet critical eye over them. Moderator: Dr. Janice M. Bogstad. Panelists: Brendan DuBois, Dr. Marie Guthrie, Dr. Michael Levy, Alec Nevala-Lee.

Old Time Radio and New Tales in the Age of Podcasts. Thursday, August 18 at 5pm. The classic era of radio saw science fiction shows X Minus One, Stroke of Fate, Dimension X, and others. Podcasts often use classic storytelling since many other tales from the era of Weird Fiction are out of copyright; however, there are other, newer stories that lend themselves extremely well to podcast readings. The panel discuss old and new ways of using podcasting to tell classic stories well, and bring new stories to life. Moderator: Julia Rios. Panelists: Jim Freund, David Truesdale, Alec Nevala-Lee, Tamora Pierce.

Classics in the Corner. Friday, August 19 at 11am. So much new fiction is being published, both traditionally and self-published, that nobody can read it all. But is anyone still reading the classics from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s or are they just filling up space on the shelf? Why should or shouldn’t we continue to read them, especially when they make us wince with sexist and racist language? Has the move toward diversity and inclusion reduced our tolerance for different eras, even when reading with a critical eye? Moderator: Don Sakers. Panelists: John Hertz, James Minz, Betsy Mitchell, Alec Nevala-Lee.

Techno-Thrillers. Saturday, August 20 at 5pm. Techno-thrillers can be an exciting blend of literary genres that combine science fiction, crime drama, spy stories, thrillers, etc. They can be set in outter space or take place here on Earth in the not-so-distant future. What makes them special? What sets them apart? And are they dressed up space operas? Moderator: Toni L.P. Kelner. Panelists: Greg Bear, Edward M. Lerner, P.J. Manney, Alec Nevala-Lee.

If that weren’t enough, I’m also going to be taking part in a group reading on Friday, August 19 at 12pm featuring authors from Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Editor Trevor Quachri will be there, along with former editor Stanley Schmidt and writers Ken Liu, James Van Pelt, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, and yours truly. (I’m hoping to read a page or two from my upcoming novella “The Proving Ground.”) All told, it promises to be a great weekend, and if you’re planning to attend, please drop me a line or keep an eye out for me when you’re there: I’m eager to meet and listen to everyone who wants to chat about the past and future of science fiction, the four writers featured in my book, or really anything at all. And if we’re lucky, MidAmeriCon II will be one of the few sequels that lives up to the hype. 

Nebulas and other news

I’ll be spending most of today and tomorrow at the Nebula Conference here in Chicago, which I’m delighted to be attending for the first time. After postponing it for years for no particular reason, I recently became a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I’m looking forward to taking a more active role in the community, starting right now. In particular, I’m moderating a discussion this afternoon on the legacy of John W. Campbell with a fantastic slate of panelists: Stanley Schmidt of Analog, Sheila Williams of Asimov’s, and Joe Haldeman, the legendary author of The Forever War. I’m also participating in a panel tomorrow titled “Western Narratives,” along with Jennifer Cross, Mikki Kendall, and Michi Trota. And I couldn’t be more excited to attend the Nebula Banquet and Award Ceremony—hosted by toastmaster John Hodgman—later that night. I hope to see a few readers of this blog there, and I’ll be posting about my experiences at the conference on Monday.

This also seems like a good time to round up a few other brief announcements and news items, since the next few months are going to be especially eventful. My short story “Ernesto” is being reprinted in an upcoming issue of Lightspeed Magazine, and I’ve just received the excellent news that my climate change novella “The Proving Ground,” the first story I’ve ever attempted at that length, has been picked up by Analog. I’ve also written a radio play for an episode of the new science fiction podcast The Outer Reach, which will debut this summer as part of the Howl podcasting network, and I hope to have more information about this soon. Best of all, I’ll be attending MidAmeriCon II this August in Kansas City, where I’m scheduled to deliver a presentation on John W. Campbell and his work during World War II in the academic track at the Campbell Conference. It’s going to be quite a year, and we aren’t even halfway done with it yet—so please stay tuned for more.