Laughing at the Abyss

President Martin Van Buren: Like both Asimov and Mellick, he was bald, accomplished, and sideburned. Coincidence? I think not.

These days, I find it pretty easy to slip into thinking that science fiction has been around forever, and that it’s always been commercially successful (to varying degrees).   There’s an entire subculture of fandom (or, if you prefer, “geekdom”), which has sprung up and become a second home for many readers who never found acceptance anywhere else.  You can find SF published in hardback (even in Library of America editions).  There is a Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame. There are multiple awards honoring high quality science fiction, in several different countries around the world.

You get my drift. SF is taken seriously.  It must have always been that way.  Right?

Well, no.

I’ve been reading (and re-reading) some fun essays by Isaac Asimov, collected in the early-80s  (apparently out of print) volume Asimov On Science Fiction.  And to hear the late Dr. Asimov tell it (in the essay “The Brotherhood of Science Fiction”), the authors in the late 1920s and 30s experienced a sense of “isolation” and “pariahhood” from the rest of fiction.

Asimov describes the Depression-Era SF scene as “the most disregarded portion of the pulp magazine field”.  Woah…take a close look at that quote.  Pulps were the least-respected, most disposable form of fiction around at the time.  And even in that arena, early SF was looked down on.   Asimov goes on to give us the gory details, referring to early SF as “the corner with the fewest opportunities and the smallest pay — the least of the least, so to speak.”

At this point in the essay it’s tempting to blow off Asimov as a cranky old codger who probably regaled the neighborhood kids with tales of how he walked uphill both ways through a blizzard to get to school.  But then you take a look at some of the positives he identifies, and you realize he’s probably completely on the up-and-up.

You can almost see the gleam in Asimov’s eye as he recalls the “warmth and friendship” of the early SF community with transparent fondness.  The way he describes the SF community back in the day sounds a little like how I hear long-time members of the Bizarro tribe talk about the easy-going friendliness among our own.  He recalls how the SF community came to his assistance after a heart attack in the late 70s.  He enthusiastically recalled “how our sense of union rises above any feeling of ‘competition’!”  It was a tribe that hung together if for no other reason than self-defense.  “And,” writes Asimov, “it followed that those who actually strove to write for the medium had to know that they did it for love and not for money, and they had to feel themselves to be a band of brothers (note:  alas, no — or at least, very few, “sisters” back in those days).  How could there be competition when there was neither money nor renown to compete for?”

Asimov, in fact, grieves for those who came to write in the genre it its later, fatter years because they missed out on the tight-knit community formed during the time of SF’s relative obscurity.

As a newer Bizarro author, Asimov’s essay gives me hope.   Why?  Do I literally believe that Carlton Mellick III is the next Isaac Asimov?  That writing “for the love” (or for relatively low pay) is how I want to spend the entirety of my career?  Or, to the contrary, that Bizarro is destined to become as great a commercial success as SF-proper?  That answer to all of these questions is no.

Or at least, not yet.

But, for me, Asimov’s essay points out that respect (and, ultimately, profits) can come to those authors who follow the call of their muse no matter where it leads, the obvious commercial consequences at the time be damned.  That literary evolution (like its biological counterpart) is constantly producing mutations that look like burdens in one era, but become adaptations in the next.