A letter from Simone Caroti

Simone Caroti writes:

Andy,

My memories of the science fiction that was new when I was growing up are mostly of movies and TV series: Terminator, Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. They shaped my sense of what SF was and what it was meant to do. In those years, most of the field’s luminaries were still alive, but from my vantage point they were fading. For a kid like me, the visions of the future of Terminator and Blade Runner packed a punch greater than what Heinlein or Asimov had to offer.

Cover art by Richard Powers (Credit: SF Encyclopedia Picture Gallery)

About a year ago, during a phone conversation with John Clute, the two of us started talking about the sensawunda appeal of space opera, and when I told him that I had a lot of trouble taking the SO of "Doc" Smith and Edmond Hamilton seriously, John laughed and said that I'd missed the nine-to-fifteen-year-old train with them. At the age when the guilty pleasures of SF turn you into a fan for life, I was watching Sarah Connor run away from the cyborg with the Austrian accent instead of reading the older stuff, and most of my contemporaries were doing the same.

And now, thirty-plus years on, my brand new science fiction is old hat too. The texts from whose vantage point I think of those others as old SF are themselves history. But while I have little trouble unpacking the cringeworthy passages from Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke with equanimity, it's much more difficult for me to distance myself from the things that were new when I was new. Nostalgia – which, in SF terms, is the feeling you get when you realize you're looking at the kind of tomorrow yesterday thought tomorrow was going to become – is easy for me to process when it's someone else's, but when it's mine … [Ellipsis in original. – A.D.]

Which brings us to our heroes with feet of clay. I keep watching for the day I realize I’ve gotten too inflexible to see the world in perspective, and to an extent I already have to struggle with myself on occasion. So Andre Norton got old, and one day she said something wrong-headed. Surely she of all people should get a pass, especially when, like you said, there’s little to no trace of homophobia in her works? And what about Heinlein, whose excesses most definitely did end up in print? Or Tolkien and Lewis? Or [again, fill in the blank]? The other problem, for me, is the extent to which we can separate the work of fiction from the writer. I have this neat little trick I perform on myself: I describe the stuff I like as somehow transcending the limitations 1) of its time and 2) of its author, whereas the stuff I can’t abide gets lumped under the label “obsolete.” Basically, I'm massively biased.

This categorization mostly works for me (but look at Marion Zimmer Bradley; what do I do about her?). However, there are writers reaching their peak today whose work I dislike on ideological grounds – John Scalzi, for example. I hate the way he preaches sometimes, and if you asked me why I’d tell you that it’s because he espouses beliefs I find obsolete. And who am I to say that and make it stick? Because when I make those distinctions I’m not being objective; it’s a pure gut reaction based on personal values that sink all the way into the world of forty years ago. So I’m obsolete too, yes?

I recently reread The Stars my Destination, and to me it appears newer today than it had when I’d originally read it – certainly more relevant than, say, any of the Transformers movies, the Twilight series, or the whole Divergent/Hunger Games/Maze Runner kinds of stories. Again, bias. Who am I to make this distinction, or even lump those titles together? Conversely, every new Dune title that comes out doesn’t seem to me to keep up with the state of the art the way Bester does – in a novel that came out in 1956!! See what I did there?

I hope this was useful. Your posts have stirred up a lot of thoughts inside my overly cramped noggin, and they’re all trying to get out of Raccoon City at once. Well, tell me what you think. I can absolutely nearly totally take it.

Simone

Simone, thanks for the fine letter. A few responses:

For most of us, the science fiction of our growing-up years is overwhelmingly movies, TV shows, comics and games. I’m no different from you, there. Yet, when I set up this blog, I perhaps chauvinistically was thinking only about prose fiction – in books and magazines – plus the artwork, non-fiction and other ancillary material published alongside it, plus the commentary (mostly non-professional) that responded to it, plus the fannish community that generated most of the commentary.

Should this blog cast its net even wider, to include media sf and its communities as well? Maybe so. We’ll see how it goes, and where the conversation takes us.

Lots of texts, I suspect, need to be embraced in adolescence, or never. My wife, Sydney, says Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one. I read it at exactly the right time; she says she waited too late. But I am always encouraged, even at age 50, by the old things I do enjoy, however belatedly, once I finally get around to reading them. This is true of all serious readers, I believe.

The “feet of clay” question is a perennial, and is unsolvable, except by the individual reader, who must decide for herself, “OK, here is where I draw the line; I can still appreciate Writer A’s works, despite all, but Writer B’s works are dead to me, because I cannot forget who Writer B was.” We all make these choices, and we should not be ashamed of making them – or of changing our minds from time to time, or of seeming inconsistent in hating the works of Writer C but loving the works of just-as-problematic Writer D. No choice is more personal than a reader’s choice of what, and whom, to read.

And I join you in a big thumbs-up for The Stars My Destination.

Onward!

Andre Norton on "evil and dangerous" gay fiction

Charles Platt’s 1983 book Dream Makers Volume II: The Uncommon Men & Women Who Write Science Fiction includes a chapter on Andre Norton, based on an interview Platt conducted at her home in Winter Park, Fla., in March 1982, when she was 70 years old.

At one point, Norton asks Platt a reasonable question about gender (though the verb he uses is “cross-examine”). From there, she very quickly steers the conversation into a discussion of gay themes and sexual themes in science fiction. Here’s the complete passage, complete with Norton’s abrupt segue. The “I” is Platt himself:

She pauses, here, to cross-examine me on how many female writers will be in Dream Makers II. Will I be including Anne McCaffrey? C.L. Moore? Leigh Brackett? Marion Zimmer Bradley?

I explain that some of them write fantasy, which I don’t enjoy.

“You class Anne McCaffrey as a fantasy writer? She is not. And she is one of the leading writers. If you leave her out, you are going to run into trouble.” She tells me this very firmly.

“Jacqueline Lichtenberg is also of importance. Her books are difficult reading, but they are interesting.”

Since most of the names that Andre Norton has mentioned have been active in the field for many decades, I ask if there are any modern women writers whom she admires.

“Of course right now I’m very upset, in the new attitude in fantasy toward homosexuality. I feel very deeply that this is wrong. At least half of the readers of fantasy are under twenty. Some of them, who are exceptional readers, are only ten or twelve.

“There’ve been some very bald books involving homosexuality. One of them fell into my hands, and I was so outraged that I simply threw the book in the garbage. And that book was up for a prize. Another was sent to me, and I opened in on a sex scene that was so absolutely nauseating that it made my physically ill!

“This trend is getting stronger and stronger. For a good many years, when I was in the library, they would not buy science fiction and fantasy books, because those were considered trash, as a result of those dreadful covers on the magazines. So I fought and fought to get them on library lists.

“I have friends who teach science fiction in high school, and they have to be so careful, now, in vetting the books because of this new trend, for fear of using anything that any parent could object to.

“I feel that all the work that I tried to do, to establish science fiction as a perfectly good form of reading, is being undermined.”

Is she objecting, for example, to the John Norman books about warriors and slave girls?

“Well, now, I’ve read exactly one of those, and I thought it was a very poor imitation of Edgar Rice Burroughs. No, those are sadistic, but another book, for example” – she asks me to omit its title – “not only described a homosexual relationship, but an incestuous one, between two brothers, in the greatest detail.

“You don’t have to go in for sensational material in order to write a good book. Some people are now writing books that would strike an impressionable young person in a very questionable fashion. This is an evil and dangerous thing.” (Platt 98-99)

This was two years before Norton was named the first female Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and 23 years before SFWA posthumously named its new young-adult-novel award in her honor.

I keep trying to read Norton’s comments, as presented by Platt, as a denunciation of explicit sex in young-adult books -- into which category Norton seems to consign all science fiction and fantasy -- and not an expression of homophobia per se. However, I find inescapable Norton’s implication that the portrayal of gay sex is especially bad for young readers because it could turn “an impressionable young person” gay, which to her would be “an evil and dangerous thing.”

My guess is that every Andre Norton Award winner, nominee and juror to date would disagree with that attitude, likely even find it abhorrent (as I do).

They were complicated people, our ancestors, Norton not the least of them. But am I suggesting SFWA rename its award? I am not.

I’m not really sure how comparable this is to the Lovecraft/World Fantasy Award situation. For one thing, Lovecraft’s racial attitudes are on display throughout his fiction; you can’t miss them. If Norton’s fiction, however, contains any homophobic themes, it’s news to me. I don’t want to make too much out of one intemperate late-in-life interview.

Moreover, Norton’s strong female characters and the example of her life and work empowered countless female sf readers and sf writers, whatever their sexual orientations, in ways Lovecraft never did. I don’t know whether she would have described herself this way, but she was undeniably a trailblazer for feminism and inclusivity in science fiction. Note, above, how readily she takes Platt to school on basic gender parity, as if she has had to do that a lot, and does not mind doing it.

Some of the field’s newfound inclusivity may have appalled her in her old age, but it nevertheless was an inclusivity she helped to inspire, throughout her long career. We all should do so much.

I am curious, of course, to know what novel involving gay brothers Norton might have been talking about, and what prize contender she threw into the trash. Suggestions are welcome. Were these by woman writers, I wonder? She must have made some connection, in her head, between “modern women writers” and gay themes. [Added later: One likely candidate emerges in this subsequent post.]

I also wonder whether the word “bald” in Norton’s phrase “very bald books involving homosexuality” is a misprint of “bad.” However, Norton could well have meant “bald” as in “blatant” or “explicit.”

P.S. I am soliciting comments from Platt, and will pass those along as I can. For the record, Platt wound up including five women writers in his book, none of them suggested by Norton, out of 28 writers total.

Source: Platt, Charles. “Andre Norton.” Dream Makers Volume II: The Uncommon Men & Women Who Write Science Fiction. New York: Berkley Books, 1983. 95-102.