Of Pulp, Substance, and Science Fiction

Abstract

Of Pulp, Substance, and Science Fiction Gary D. Schmidt (bio) C. W. Sullivan III , ed., Science Fiction for Young Readers. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. A tenet of C. W. Sullivan's collection of essays Science Fiction for Young Readers is that science fiction—especially that for young readers—has not been accorded sufficient critical attention. This battle is, of course, one that children's literature in general has fought and, to some extent, won. But Sullivan is right in pointing out that this one subgenre has not held tightly onto its parent's coattails. Like children's literature, science fiction has had to struggle against the conception that it is not "serious" literature, or, to use the words of one of the essayists in Sullivan's collection, Millicent Lenz, that it is writing that flies below the level of critical radar (115). Indeed, to many science fiction is not the stuff that one grows up with as much as the stuff that one grows out of. When we were children, we read Tom Swift novels, but now we have put away childish things. This image of science fiction as mere pulp has, unfortunately, been confirmed in reality over and over again. One need only walk up and down the aisles of the science-fiction section of any B. Dalton bookstore to see the problem. Most—yes, most—of the stuff is silly, derivative, and slick. It is almost all paperback (which is suggestive). It attracts an audience almost exclusively male. It is often escapist, sometimes lurid, and frequendy annoyingly facile in its easy criticisms and cozy solutions. If we would only not depend on our technology, this one suggests. If we could only use our technology wisely, that one counters. If we could only take a cosmic view, a third whines. We are not alone, another tantalizes. [End Page 45] Sullivan recognizes these perceptions and sets out to challenge them. In entering these lists, the jousting Sullivan wields sixteen essays whose uniform assumption is that science fiction should be taken seriously. It would be difficult to finish this book without agreeing, as one by one the essays unhorse the derogatory stereotypes about science fiction for the young. Raymond Jones's "'True Myth': Female Archetypes in Monica Hughes' The Keeper of the Isis Light" is an incisive examination of Hughes's tracing of female development that places it in the context of mythic female roles—tumbling the perception that science fiction is exclusively male to the dust. K. V. Bailey's "Masters, Slaves, and Rebels: Dystopia as Defined and Defied by John Christopher" depicts that author's cogent portrayal of Utopia as more than the absence of distress, not to be achieved by simply dismissing technology—defeating another misconception. And Sullivan's own "Heinlein's Juveniles: Growing Up in Outer Space" suggests that a science-fiction writer such as Heinlein goes well beyond a slick and lurid plot for plot's sake to say something about how one matures—another illusion vanquished. At their best, then, this is what the essays do: assault the image of science fiction as pulp. Indeed, several of these critics claim, rather largely, that science fiction is important for its place as modern myth (Jones), or for its ability to instruct a fuddled world in critical thinking (Lenz), or for its antiwar messages (Howard Hendrix), or for its mirroring of contemporary life (Thorn Dunn and Karl Hiller). Dunn and Hiller in fact conclude that "those who teach young people have a responsibility to acknowledge the profound values to be gleaned within the realms of science fiction" (122). While if one substituted any other genre for "science fiction" the sentence would be equally true, the essays in this volume certainly affirm this point. Given these purposes, it is puzzling to find in this collection little discussion of the nature of science fiction as a genre. Perhaps Sullivan takes it as axiomatic that we all know science fiction when we see it, but this collection itself suggests otherwise. M. Sarah Smedman's "The 'Terrible Journey' Past 'Dragons in the Waters' to a 'House Like a Lotus': Faces of Love in the Fiction of Madeleine L'Engle" is an...