Science Fiction has always been Greater than Campbell
In the official history of science fiction, early 20th century pulp writers wrote manly men being manly on their rocket ships. John W. Campbell was the master publisher. They created the GOLDEN AGE. Eventually the GIANTS of Science Fiction — Isaac Asimov, Heinlein, maybe Clarke — emerged and that’s THE CANON. In the 1960s, the New Wave arrived with CHALLENGING books like Dhalgren by Samuel Delany and Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. Some remember Ursula Le Guin. Then Star Wars happened and Science Fiction became FUN AGAIN!!!! Cyberpunk dominated the 80s. In the 1990s, science fiction became diverse, which is great but those damn kids (SJWs, Politically Correct, whatever) don’t respect tradition.
This narrative is self-serving bullshit.
It’s also very popular bullshit. Last year Jeanette Ng won the John W. Campbell New Writer award, and rightfully condemned Campbell’s white supremacist legacy. Analog renamed the award. This year, World Con invited George R.R. Martin to host the awards. Martin spent hours praising Campbell and mispronouncing names. On the fantasy front, Robert M. Price ruined his chance to revive Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series by imposing a tedious foreword that raged against cancel culture, rape allegations, man-hating lesbian feminists, etc.
No wonder modern readers dismiss the science fiction canon as sexist, racist and badly written. Yet there’s much more to Golden Age science fiction than the well-known writers and editors. Consider Cordwainer Smith. Every generation re-discovers Cordwainer Smith. Even though he wrote in the Golden Age, he’s far removed from the Canon. No Smith character stops the narrative to deliver a lecture on the Great Man’s Great Ideas. He wrote about labor relatives and systemic oppression. Unlike Asimov and Heinlein he wrote women characters as if he actually knew and liked women. His future history wasn’t a cheap retread of past imperialist ventures.
“The Dead Lady of Clown Town” depicts the beginning of a revolution told from the perspective of historians millennia after the events. A woman who was created by accident inspires a teenage girl based on Joan of Arc. The narrator constantly reminds the reader that every scene became a legend, a song or a poem. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, two lovers are flooded with emotions after centuries of engineered perfection. They journey to find an oracle that forces them to question their very humanity. Smith took inspiration from everything including Dante’s Inferno, the Arabian Nights and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
One does not have to go very far into the Golden Age to challenge the canon. Old Hugo nominations, pulp magazines and anthologies can yield a wealth of Golden Age writing long suppressed and dismissed. In the 1967 anthology SF The Best of the Best, Judith Merril collected stories from men and women, many forgotten today but almost all more interesting than the standard Golden Age fare. Of the women writers, only Shirley Jackson is well known today, but all of them deserve recognition. Zenna Henderson was nominated for the Hugo in 1959 and influenced writers as diverse as Orson Scott Card, Connie Willis and Kathy Tyers. She wrote about extraterrestrials struggling to adapt to America while preserving their culture. Carol Emshwiller wrote esoteric magical realist stories.
Move beyond the Golden Age into the 1970s and there’s a wealth of feminist science fiction. Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin are only a few of the dozens of great women writers from the era. Yet, the publishing industry pushed back against this era by belligerently marketing misogynist garbage from late period Heinlein and Piers Anthony. Once the women writers lost prominence, Bruce Sterling could herald the beginning of cyberpunk by dismissing their contribution as “confused, self-involved, and stale.”
The erasure of women in science fiction was so widespread by 1985 that Margaret Atwood made certain to declare that The Handmaid’s Tale was not science fiction. Perhaps she truly believed that science fiction was only about spaceships and galactic empires. Most likely she understood the market. Women science fiction writers were out of print. L. Ron Hubbad, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein were producing increasingly mediocre writing even to an increasingly venerating fandom. Had Atwood’s publisher marketed her as a science fiction writer, she would have been reviewed in science fiction magazines. The reviews would have been sandwiched between Star Wars: Han Solo Woo Woo and Pedophile Unicorn by Piers Anthony. The reviewer would call her shrill.
This underscores another problem with the science fiction canon. Margaret Atwood was not the first writer to avoid the science fiction label. Both Shirley Jackson and J.G. Ballard seem to fall outside the science fiction genre. The standard history of science fiction not only erases non-white non-male voices; it also pushes the most interesting voices into different genres. George Schuyler’s Black No More is a science fiction novel from 1931, but due to its subject matter scholars have classified it as a forgotten Harlem Renaissance book.
As we celebrate diversity in today’s science fiction, we need to reevaluate the canon. There are dozens of Golden Age Science Fiction writers to re-discover including Cordwainer Smith, Carol Emschwiller, and Zenna Henderson. The erasure of science fiction outside the Asimov-Campbell-Heinlein paradigm has been forceful but not complete. Seek these writers out. Promote them. Review them. If possible bring them out of print. Let’s drop this Old Guard vs Diversity dichotomy and embrace the diversity that has always been part of science fiction.