SCIENCE FICTION : Ultra-Modern But Anti-Modernist

When it comes to the storytelling arts, America can’t decide whether it’s proud or ashamed to be a democracy. On the one hand, we produce films, television shows and popular fiction that are in demand throughout the world: Nobody knows how to speak to and for the common man better than the American popular artist. On the other hand, we persist in measuring our literature against the more difficult, subtle and allusive works of Europe, and instead of recognizing its uniqueness, we keep coming to the conclusion that it is second-rate. After all, the assumption goes, nothing that is clear, powerful and simple enough for millions of people to understand and love can be “art.”

Science fiction, as an American-born genre, bears the scars of this long struggle. It came to life in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, which gives it unassailable credentials as a democratic art. Maligned even by the college English departments that have been forced to offer undergraduate courses in that spaceship stuff, science fiction persists in being the literature-of-choice among the brightest American adolescents, and retains a wide following among the adult reading public. Yet almost universally, those who read it and write it feel an almost pathological need to duck their heads and confess that science fiction isn’t really “literature.”

The academic-literary establishment holds that their kind of literature is superior because of its more subtle insights and techniques. Often, however, it is no longer the supposed “insight” that the establishment writes and reads for, but rather the process of encoding itself; the reward is not the discovery of truth, but rather the reassuring knowledge that the literary reader knows a secret code that lesser mortals will never understand.

Science fiction is simply one way in which the American need for plain storytelling surfaced after being nearly drowned in the flood of Modernism early in this century. Even today, the science fiction most honored and beloved within the field tends to be that which is most clear and (seemingly) simple. And no one has ever written in that plain style better than Isaac Asimov.

Asimov continues to write the same sort of fiction that interested him in the 1940s, and in his newest novel, Nemesis (Doubleday/Foundation: $18.95; 364 pp), he proves that there’s plenty of life in the old ways. An astronomer named Insigna discovers a dwarf star approaching the Solar System from the South Pole. Soon, Insigna’s deep-space settlement cuts loose from the rest of humanity and journeys at near light-speed until it reaches the new star, which Insigna has named Nemesis.

There they find a habitable planet covered with microscopic life. But Insigna’s daughter, who has a remarkable ability to interpret other people’s subtle body language, manipulates others until she can get out onto the planet’s surface, where really strange things begin to happen. Asimov’s genius is that he can use the English language to make ideas so clear that we understand them almost without effort.

John Kessel’s second novel, Good News From Outer Space (Tor: $18.95; 402 pp.), exemplifies a recent movement--lead by Kessel’s Sycamore Hill writing workshop--to create a more “literary,” academically respectable sub-genre of science fiction. “Good News” takes a hoary SF theme--aliens are already among us here on Earth--and makes it seem wonderfully fresh. In the main plot, Kessel follows three characters through wild peregrinations in an America gone mad, as they search for aliens--though not all of them realize that aliens are what they’re searching for. Kessel’s characters are all quite empty of purpose and therefore lacking in genuine human interest, but their wanderings do provide us with a guided tour through America, which Kessel’s jaundiced eye turns into a powerful satire on contemporary American trends.

The greatest strength of “Good News” is not the aliens themselves. Their purpose among us is generally unfathomable, but it seems that they take pleasure in stripping away our layers of deception and exposing long-denied human frailties. In this sense, the aliens are performing the same social function as many fiction writers.

In some ways, “Good News” can be viewed as the “opposite” of Asimov’s “Nemesis.” Where Asimov is clear, Kessel is deliciously ambiguous; where Asimov’s writing is invisible, Kessel’s is elegant--though he never resorts to the empty razzle-dazzle of the see-me-write cyberpunks.

Between these two extremes there are many good ways of writing science fiction. Kate Wilhelm’s Children of the Wind (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 263 pp) is a collection of five novellas that fully justify her stature as one of the grandes dames of the field. Four are reprints; the title story, which appears for the first time in this book, would be worth the price of the hardcover by itself.

“Children of the Wind” is about a married couple who are both devoted to creating art for an audience of children. Robert is a children’s book editor; June is an illustrator. They both think they understand their precocious twin boys. Robert persists in seeing only innocence in them; June sees darkness, a touch of utter selfishness that can only be called evil. Yet even though the consequence of one of their pranks is death, it is impossible to know whether it was an innocent accident or a deliberate plot.

The result is a powerful statement about the impossibility of knowing the true motives of others, even those we should know best. Robert was the father of two wonderful children, June the mother of a pair of diminutive fiends. That they were the same children seemed to make no difference. Robert lived in happy confidence, June in guilty fear--both with an equal claim on truth.

I have written elsewhere of my admiration for Dave Wolverton’s On My Way to Paradise (Bantam: $4.95; 352 pp), and since quotations from my remarks appear on the book jacket, I won’t belabor the point here. Enough to synopsize--this is the story of a doctor who gets caught up in interplanetary intrigue and finds himself among renegade mercenary soldiers on a Japanese corporate planet--and tell you that this book can be read with equal ease as an action-packed thriller, as a disturbing vision of the future and as a searing examination of terrible ethical dilemmas.

And while science fiction is as much an American creation as musical comedy, its very success throughout the world guarantees that Americans can’t maintain a monopoly even in this. Science Fiction From China (Praeger: $18.95; 176 pp) is a collection of translated stories that clearly draw from the tradition of American science fiction, but refresh it thoroughly.

I wish I could tell you that every story is brilliant; alas, some may be suffering from the vagaries of translation, and many, while they might be revelatory within Chinese society, feel quite unsophisticated when placed in the context of contemporary science fiction. I am dismayed at the editorial judgment that placed the weakest story first, a one-joke tale that derives from Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” And other themes are no less familiar: The planet that is the reverse of Earth; aliens who have judged us and found us dangerous and unworthy; a love affair between a human male and a robot female that turns out to be an allegory for the treatment of women by men and of exploited peoples by imperialist nations.

Perhaps the greatest value of the collection is the experience of alienness that it gives the American reader. As you read these stories, there is as much to learn from the context as from the content: In what kind of community would such an explanation be necessary? What community would accept such an event without questioning it?

We don’t have to rely on science fiction to take us to other worlds. There are other worlds almost as strange here on Earth.