While he wrote fiction, James Blish secretly sent in a ton of critical essays pushing by force the entire genre to think critically about itself under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr and the title The Issue at Hand.

In it, he gave scathing rebukes of his best friends — some of his contemporary masters of science fiction — as well as editors he relied upon for future work. He took the risk that no one would discover him. Thank God he did, the genre’s better off for it.

Remember: this is the era before the internet, before blogs, message boards, forums, and substacks. Fan zines were ways of committing premeditated insider baseball.

Table of Contents

• Some Propositions
• Some Missing Rebuttals
  • • • If the story can be told without its scientific content, it’s not a science fiction story.
• Rebuttals, Token Punches, and Violence
• A Sprig of Editors
• Cathedrals in Space
• Negative Judgments: Swashbungling, Series and Second-guessing
  • prickamice meaning:
• One Completely Lousy Story, with Feetnote
• Scattershot
• One Way Trip
• The Short Novel: Three Ranging Shots and Two Duds
• The Fens Revisited: “Said” Books and Incest
• An Answer of Sorts
• A Question of Sorts

Some Propositions

In this piece, Blish as William Atheling hesitates to say whether “science fiction” is really “growing up” because of the lack of defining the phrase. He’s worried the lack of criticism at the time won’t give it the limelight that, for instance, crime novels were getting. He’s still not wrong on that front: where as crime novels are all but accepted as standard literary fare, speculative fiction — though having a moment — is still suffering from modern cultural biases.

Biases that have nothing to do with the grand historical mean of genres.

His propositions for improving criticism, which will in turn improve editors and writers, follow:

1. A huge body of available technique exists in the world of fiction and the competence of the writer — aside from talent — is determined by how much of this he can use.
2. We know the features of good narrative practice and we expect writers and editors to know no less
   • We know too that half of science fiction writers published today are wasting our time
   • And therefore every editor is flying by the seat of his pants, otherwise the authors in the previous point would never be published. They would be sent back to school.

He’s begging us to apply the minimum standards of competence required of all fiction. This is something CS Lewis did in a similar article, though on Christian Fiction. All fiction submits to the standards required of fiction per se.

He then defines science fiction as fitting Theodore Sturgeon’s definition:

A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened without its scientific content.

His examples of necessary criticism follow:

1. A story without at least one believable person in it.
2. A parable without characterization.
3. Not excusing bad stories because they’re short.
4. Ideas, wisecracks, splashes of color without plotting.
5. Phony realism that describes the entirely irrelevant with minute detail like descriptions of smoking in bad detective novels.
6. Deep purple, which offers souped-up adolescent emotion and imperfectly visualized color. He end up speaking of one Chad Oliver “who probably will write a very good story once he learns to keep his voice down.” This includes dependence on bad metaphor in the “concrete-is-abstract” mode like “Hands outstretched, she was love. She was first love, last love, all love… She was love… she was an elusive faulty of race… She was ache and anguish and doubt, fusing now into anger because she was love.” He insists on the concrete.

One of the remarkable offhand comments is that “the existence of more than thirty science fiction magazines… makes it possible for a known writer to sell virtually everything he has on hand, no matter how old or how bad.” That’s almost unthinkable in this climate — I just sold a story for the same rates that Bradbury sold The Martian chronicles. It’s the same pool of cash with thousands of folks trying their hand at it. We are in the Victorian era compared to Blish’s Elizabethan: a glut of press, a dearth of patronage.

Some Missing Rebuttals

William Atheling praises Damon Knight’s criticism in this piece.

Writing, as Redd Boggs reminds us by quote and example, is indeed an art to be acquired through discipline and devotion; and a good many writers — with the encouragement of critics who should know better, but don’t — set too much store by courage and too little by craft; this famous judgment on Sherwood Anderson applies to many lesser men.

The Issue at Hand, p. 21

Again he writes trenchant rebukes of his own contemporaries. But in praising Knight’s criticism, he convinced the publisher to compile them into In Search of Wonder, which I’ll review and summarize here eventually. He insisted that any review by Knight be read by the critiqued writer in question. This is where he says:

To be kind to a bad piece of writing is not a kindness.

The Issue at Hand, p. 22

And this has been sort of my M.O. over the years at least in private, though it hasn’t made me many friends. It has, I think, helped the writers who took me seriously as trying to help their writing craft and not merely bullying them.

I myself long for the kind of hard-hitting critique I give. I always lack for beta readers, critique partners, these sorts of things. I always want one more perspective, not because I value the vision of the criticizer — I generally do not — but because I value their capacity to catch what I intended to fix but never did; intended to put in but left out; intended to develop and forgot. It’s my memory, mostly, that needs rebuking.

One of William Atheling’s more helpful bits in this piece is critiquing the sort of “remarks which are supposed to snatch the reader’s objections right out of his mouth — (a) “I”m not making much sense, am?” and (b) “It sounded like a bad movie.” The responses, of course, are (a) No, and (b) Yes.” (24)

This emphasizes the call to get rid of self-reference, particularly drawing attention to the reader that they’re reading a book, unless the work in question is precisely about that. Which, I mean, that’s a very niche project if so.

Said the man who cares about such projects.

He critiques bad science in science fiction with the sort of well actually…

…one expects from the typical regional science fiction convention. Viola:

As science fiction, this story can probably be epitomized in the statement on page 104: “Cyanogen… is commercial potassium cyanide.” (Cyanogen is a poisonous, inflammable gas C₂N₂; potassium cyanide is a poisonous, non-inflammable, solid salt of hydrocyanic acid, KCN.)

The Issue at Hand, p. 24

The “considerably less excusable” fault in the story is that it “contains no characters.”

One of his other big critiques in this piece is leveled at Theodore Sturgeon, who seems obsessed with syzygy and writes about it in every single piece. He thinks the most exciting kind of science fiction is “the story in which the writer exploits special technological knowledge to create a situation of continuous surprise and excitement, not through tricks of plotting… but through intensive study of what a given idea might mean in terms of other ideas.”

This helps you to find out whether any story is actually science fiction. “Move the date back to the present. Would the story be changed?” (25-26)

If the story can be told without its scientific content, it’s not a science fiction story.

He also moves on to Asimov and why Asimov fell out of favor with specific stories: William Atheling believed it to be stylistic:

Asimov is a highly circumstantial writer, sharing with Heinlein and with Normal L. Knight the ability to visualize his imagined world in great detail, so that it seems lived-in and perfectly believable. He does not, however, share Heinlein’s lightness of touch; instead, he more closely resembles the elder Knight (no relation to Damon Knight) closely in writing everything with considerable weight and solidity, turning each sentence into a proposition, a sort of lawyer’s prose, which is clear without at any time becoming pellucid.

This kind of style is perfectly suited to a story which is primarily reflective in character, such as Asimov’s recent robot yarns. It is also just what is required for a story in which history is the hero and the fate of empires is under debate. What Asimov has been writing lately, however, beginning with “The Stars, Like Dust,” has been the action story, to which he seems to have turned more or less at random after his long “Foundation” project reached its culmination. And the action story simply cannot be written in that kind of style. why? Because a style that ponderous, that portentous, constantly promises to the reader much more than even the most complex action story can deliver.

The Issue at Hand, p. 30

Rebuttals, Token Punches, and Violence

He responds in this piece first to the fear that his definition will end up including Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. He thinks that’s more a matter of era — that had Arrowsmith appeared in H.G. Wells’s time, no one would have flinched at calling it science fiction. But that sort of thing wasn’t popular in the Pulitzer Prize office at the time. Or, frankly, now, considering the last few decades of winners.

Anyways.

One of his more silly points is that “the deus ex machina” is no longer a tolerable plot device.

For crying out loud people. Deus Ex Machina is Latin. It’s a calque that comes from the Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός.

That Greek comes from Aristotle’s Poetics. Don’t remain as ignorant as Blish:

As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unravelling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the ‘Deus ex Machina’—as in the Medea, or in the Return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The ‘Deus ex Machina’ should be employed only for events external to the drama,—for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element in the Oedipus of Sophocles.

Again, since Tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level, the example of good portrait-painters should be followed. They, while reproducing the distinctive form of the original, make a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful. So too the poet, in representing men who are irascible or indolent, or have other defects of character, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it. In this way Achilles is portrayed by Agathon and Homer.

Poetics by Aristotle, XV

It was never acceptable, it was simply in vogue.

He does, however, demand that “substituting funny hats for characterization” will never suffice. We must tag to know who is speaking, of course, but that’s insufficient.

From this, he belabors the point with the following:

1. Story characters need names and physical descriptions (true in general, but too sweeping: it’s a waste of time to tirelessly describe those who only appear once).
2. Stories rich in detail demand special attention to balanced plot construction
3. The minute description of the entirely irrelevant does not constitute realism
4. Metaphors which take the form “concrete-is-abstract” are imprecise, untenable, and characteristic of overwriting.

Restatement of the above, sure, but perhaps better because of that. (35)

He issues a call that we stop writing one-punchers, leveling his ire mostly at Robert Sheckley (whom I adore, see link) and one of Dick’s stories. One of the risks is that the illustration gives away the game. If you see the star in “The Stamp from Moscow,” you know the end. It’s entirely possible that this is the reason fans started freaking out about spoilers.

The second piece is that a reader might get a kick from out-guessing the writer, from figuring out the story long before the ending.

And the third is that the author can — and often does — telegraph the punch. Here’s where I agree with him, concerning Sheckley’s Watchbird:

In “Watchbird,” the reader, having watched the leading character pull the standard science fiction stupidity of failing to attach a Control to a Supposedly Benevolent Machine, is hardly going to be surprised when exactly the same stupidity is committed again. What with all the muttering that goes on in the story about there-being-something-wrong-but-I-just-can’t-put-my-finger-on-it. This particular piece of beard-muttering, I have since concluded, is almost diagnostic of the story which the author knows full well has a large logical hole in it, to which he is trying to blind you.

The Issue at Hand, p. 37

He proceeds to call O. Henry “the biggest bore of all,” something Tara would take issue with. One of the problems of this is letting the idea carry all, in which case you’re not writing a story.

He advocates rather than trying to wow the audience with a new idea — which is almost entirely impossible after so much fiction has emerged in the last two hundred years — that instead we remember:

what counts in the long run is not the idea but the point of view the writer brings to it — in other words, the set of additional ideas which the writer thinks appropriate to associate with it, a set which will vary almost completely from the one a second author would bring to bear upon it.”

The Issue at Hand, p. 38

That’s what editors mean by “fresh treatment.” And it requires us to “grapple thoroughly with the logical consequences of an idea.” He points to the contrasting lights that Damon Knight casts in Four in One: where he combines the creature that can take any shape with the struggle of escaping totalitarian society. And all in an extremely tight space. He compares this to composing, actually. “The German symphonic development tradition, in which two strong but contrasting ideas are developed at length and to their logical conclusion, one aided by the light the other casts on it.”

One of his main critiques in this article focuses on a story

…in which the authors abruptly abandon exploring their idea to take refuge in a cops-and-robbers plot (with a crew of Boy Adventurers thrown in for good measure). There is nothing in the battle of the department store, which occupies the entire last installment of the two, which depends logically from the proposition that literacy can become a universal stigma; it is just a battle, which would have been fought in about the same way regardless of the central proposition of the story.

The Issue at Hand, p. 39

I think there’s a warning in there for all folks focused on any genre, whether sincerely, ironically, in satire, or in Nabokovian generative satire. Do we follow our ideas through? Or are we simply writing beats?

He comments on Erik van Lhin, foremost of the naturalist science fiction writers at the time, who takes crimes that he hates as much as you and then “exacerbates your feelings in these matters, until you begin to wonder if the Earth will ever be clean before the last human being is exterminated.”

A Sprig of Editors

In this piece, William Atheling rants about how much time John W. Campbell spent in commissioning articles proving that “writing a long science fiction story takes careful preparation.” Atheling thought Campbell did this because his readers were ignorant of what most of the community over-lauded early on, what with T. O’Conner Sloane’s parading of the various advanced degrees of his authors (43-44).

Why Campbell made a big deal about this seems to be instructive of Atheling’s overall rational criticism: obviously the readers care or they wouldn’t keep buying the magazine and it would have a new editor, but the ones who don’t care or didn’t know, what has he gained in making a big deal of this?

It reminds me of so much pearl clutching in conventions, online forums, and blogs about what is and isn’t “good” speculative fiction.

This created a sort of false rift between “technical” science fiction or “hard” and “entertainment.” Who cares?

Most people are, more or less, like me or my bride Tara. If they read science fiction, they read broadly in the genre and they also read other genres. They take pride in learning something and also in a good story, well told. They’re not in it to read everything Amish hard science fiction and only that. Do I have a bias towards good epic fantasy? Or just epics in general? Of course, but that’s only because I favor immersion in general over getting a book done. Of course a book like The Road grabs me and hangs on for a clean eight hours, but that’s really rare for me. It takes a hell of a story to overcome my various disciplines.

And that’s what he comes around to — that it’s difficult to care how bad someone is at science in the face of remarkable stories, in the case of brilliant artistry. To display a “manifest contempt for the craft of writing as a whole” is to lose the fiction side of the science fiction equation and therefore lose the audience whole cloth (44-46).

But the observed fact must be retained as well for the sake of trust. If we can’t trust a writer when it comes to children or basic physical facts, we stop reading them as quickly as if their storytelling sucks. The masochists among us may finish a book, but they surely won’t start another.

In an inside baseball moment, he takes some space to bash Cyril Kornbluth and Columbia who took the policy that “writers are not paid until they ask for payment.” Arguing that “low and slow has been the payment motto there for at least a decade.” What is it about the industry that cares so much about dunking on writers? STILL?

It’s because of this that he says, “it’s difficult to operate a magazine one can respect out of the slush-pile.” Meaning, of course, that every good magazine has slush pile picks and commissions. It’s a blend. Even Clarkesworld is a blend, however much they favor new writers: few folks get to do the interviews there.

Cheap editors like Lowndes used three rather wicked practices:

1. They squeeze money from the back of the book to pay higher rates for the front.
2. A number of well-known authors are close personal friends and he commissions stories out of them, something he couldn’t do in another situation with lower rates.
3. He “reads his slush pile right down to the ground” with an eye for spotting new talent.

Telling to me that most editors don’t operate that way. The third is the damning for the rest, the first two damning for him. (47).

Higher rates for lead stories allowed him to see pieces by known writers around the halfway point of the manuscript’s travels rather than at the end of its journey. My favorite bit in this whole piece was when Atheling dunks on James Blish. Why is that my favorite? Because, again, Atheling is James Blish’s pseudonym. So it shows a couple of things:

1. He’s as harsh with himself as anyone else, lending credibility to his criticism.
2. He’s exceedingly devious because he uses this as a sort of smoke and mirrors to distract from the fact that he is in fact James Blish.

It’s rather masterful (48).

Cathedrals in Space

This was, by far, my favorite piece in the set because it’s a subject that — for all my reading — I’ve encountered, what, twice? Three times?

It frustrates me beyond all end that most folks ignore this subject entirely. The silence speaks volumes about the willful ignorance in the entire field. A field that insists those writing about “future religion” will get dunked on, the assumptions of the more literary part against the likes of L’Engle or Butler, or just general sci-fi editors absolutely convinced it won’t sell. If it’s addressed, it’s often addressed pedantically or with a belittling tone. Or worse, politically. Or it’s given a sort of Neo-pagan vibe or even straight up hostility that undercuts millennia of metaphysicians from Socrates to the physicist John Polkinghorne. Or the first century historian N.T. Wright or Moses ben Maimon or Galazali or Aquinas or Bonaventure or Isaac Newton or Einstein or David Bentley Hart or Fr. Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître or Da Vinci or Louis Braille or Cassini or Peter Dodson or Dumas or Descartes or Fermat or Doppler or Lavoisier or Volta or Ampére or William of Ockham or…

It doesn’t matter if you’re religious (though it’s rather personally naive to honestly believe you don’t have a complex system of personal and corporate habits and rites in private and public you’ve built up around your worldview regarding ultimate reality and the way the universe works). To say that religion is not fundamental to the entire human experience and to the historical foundation of the scientific method is about as blind in terms of observed fact as it gets. Blind enough to be its own religion that most metaphysicians label “Scientism” as rationally distinct from science and the scientific method.

Being science fiction, you can see my issue.

And so, it ought to be and therefore is perfectly acceptable to talk of religion in a dignified way. And even to debate various tenants and historical events.

Even so, few do. Sanderson alone these days seems willing to write often, boldly, not only about his religion, but about most conceivable religions that do not, in fact, exist. I am not a Mormon because Mormonism seems to me to be ignorant of several basic historical facts, within and without orthodoxy Christianity (not to mention silent about their presence of inner/outer doctrine, absolute authoritarianism, zero tolerance for criticism and questions among its missionaries while on the field, lack of meaningful financial disclosures, etc). But I adore Sanderson. And I absolutely respect how lovingly he treats religions and religious experiences not his own. Outside of his loving treatment, you have Canticle for Leibowitz and The Space Trilogy and then a smattering of more belligerent authors like Card. L’Engle, certainly. I’m not talking about authors like Ted Dekker, Frank Peretti, and *gags whilst holding nose* Tim Lahaye. Stephen Lawhead makes the cut, sure. At least Neal Stephenson in Anathem had the decency to write lovingly about monks.

But considering we have at least some bestselling authors in the field, where is the rational criticism and philosophy surrounding these works?

This is what I mean by critics treating on this subject so seldom. So, so few articles reflect meaningfully on what should be a robust conversation.

Lewis wrote a series of articles on this subject entitled Of Other Worlds, which led to debates between him and Aldous Huxley. Lewis won those, for the record, objectively and obviously so. Huxley was pissed about Lewis’s treatment of the trenches on Mars, coming in with another—

—saying that we know the trenches are empty now. Lewis’s response was essentially, “Yes, doctor, I have no doubt that you’re correct, but there seems to be some confusion here: I’m writing science fiction.” And thus Huxley missed the entire point of one of the best — if not the absolute best — science fiction trilogies of all time. I mean Dante’s better, but…

In any case, Lewis wrote about it. He was a weirdo in his time for doing so and is still considered quaint. I’ve been at these conferences. Literally hosted a talk on how Magic Reveals the Author’s Metaphysics. Half of my copanellists at that one didn’t know what metaphysics was (which isn’t really their fault, its just shows how far our education system has fallen from the “Ph” in “PhD”) and the other half were outright hostile to the idea.

Folks have recommended novels like The Book of Strange New Things, which is ignorant of the way this works and, again, treats the subject belittlingly and pedantically. I stopped The Book of Strange New Things after ten pages for the glaring errors in the field — I don’t mean errors in what this reader prefers or errors in terms of authorial hypothesis (it’s speculative fiction, speculate whatever you want — but dear God, please make it consistent). I mean it was as bad as if an earth-based system had said something equivalent to “it was a bureaucratic machine and so of course he never filled out a single requisition form.” Or “the murderer was the best man alive.” And the point isn’t satire, but sincerity. That book’s ignorant to the point of unreadability for any lay person who knows a single thing about how this forwarding agency stuff actually works. And thus, belittling and pedantic. But I’m glad it resonated with everyone who already agreed with its major premise. Good for Mr. Faber. Yet I have my own ideas as to why it didn’t sell so well outside of communities already in agreement with its major premises. And that is always the tell in power hands where speculative fiction has called the bet and entered the family pot.

So it goes.

To be clear: I don’t care about what religion writers write about and therefore critics critique. As I said with Sanderson, half of his religions are made up. But they’re dealt with not merely emotionally nor pedantically nor with a belittling tone. Heck, even my empathy for Mormon neighbors grew with his books. They’re dealt with so lovingly that they all have strong, logical intellectual systems. Aquinas interacted directly with Maimomedies and Bonaventure and Ghazali, three rather radically different conceivers of religion all living around the same time. But he did it lovingly, he and Bonaventure were good friends. Sanderson seems to get this in his bones and so, as a result, everyone feels welcome.

And with that, to Atheling’s piece:

He starts out referring to Lovecraft, who said insistence that when writing folk from other worlds, we not merely stamp “folk customs of Earth” upon them. He invokes both royalty and religion; or politics and our philosophy.

Atheling concedes tropes like the “alien princess,” or the uncertainty that we find gods or their followers on other planets. Though we find them everywhere on Earth. “Which cannot be said of royalty or other folk customs mentioned by Lovecraft; and even where we do not find specific deities, we find religion’s immediate precursor, magic.”

William Atheling thought this:

Any humanly conceivable thinking creature will arrive at magic, and hence eventually to religion in some form, before he can arrive at scientific method, since the basic proposition of the one is, in essence, a less precise form of the other. The root assumption of sympathetic magic, as any reader of Pratt/de Camp (or Frazer) already knows is “Similar actions produce similar results.

The Root assumption of scientific method might be stated in the same form: “Identical actions produce identical results.” The difference between the two assumptions, aside from the fact that the first does not work and the second does, is a matter of refinement of observation — and it is difficult to accept that any thinking creature, no matter how bug-eyed or many-tentacled, could so evolve as to arrive at the more precise formulation first.

He may, of course, have since outgrown the earlier faith, as we have not, but nevertheless traces of it would almost surely remain buried in his culture.

The Issue at Hand, p. 49-50

I take issue with this, but not for the reason he’s stating it. He’s absolutely right to rebuke Lovecraft in this manner. To say that if you want science, you first need sympathetic magic. That makes sense — especially his constructions of it. However citing Frazer is, as I’ve said many other times elsewhere, rather silly. Not only are most all of his ideas rejected by social anthropologists, he himself said he was merely speculating.

The Golden Bough, therefore, is itself a work of speculative fiction. No less than Wittgenstein said, “Frazer is much more savage than most of his ‘savages’ [since] his explanations of [their] observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves.”

It’s even worse, though. Because religion is not concerned with sympathetic magic. It’s concerned first with thinking, then with virtuous habits of living. Sometimes this involves prayer, but even in the case of prayer, there are phrases within the scientific method for the inexplicable — things like “instinct” and “spontaneous regeneration” which are words for “we have no freaking clue how this happened.” There was that particularly unsettling study of water dowsing in the desert. And so forth.

It all comes down to a priori assumptions about the way in which the world works. As all hypothesis does — you start with logic, you move towards induction, you end with logic. It always begins and ends in syllogism.

That’s where metaphysics comes in. So the better argument is to say, “For Lovecraft to believe that thinking corporeal creatures will not have disciplines concerned entirely with thinking disconnected from corporeal observation is nonsense.”

Significant quibbles aside, Atheling’s spot on to say it’s ridiculous to think that mankind won’t “export his own gods into space as surely as he exports his languages, nationalisms, and his believe in his own rationality.” That last bit shoves the knife into Lovecraft for his hypocrisy, my favorite kind of argument. Tu quoque, HP: if they can’t export their gods, how, exactly, will they export your belief that they won’t?

Genius.

Of course even the most metaphysically ignorant writer among us still admits this. I won’t name names, but several prominent atheists have the decency to populate their worlds with Muslims, Jews, Mormons, Wiccans, Eastern Orthodox, and so forth. That’s why it’s primarily the pedanticism and belittling that I take issue with, not the outright denial of the painfully obvious.

He lists Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children” as tension arising between a home god and a local god. This of course, to Heinlein’s discredit, employs the pleonastic fallacy that all of the scientism types employ — the confusion of demiurge with deity. Nevertheless, it’s a data point in the set.

He finds this extension to be fruitful for meditation, nevertheless, pointing to Arthur C. Clarke’s extension of “quaint” national borders and even our likelyhood to continue murdering one another in space. These are, at heart, philosophical questions — as I’ve said before, if Elon destroys the world in route to saving it, there will be nothing to save. A spacefaring emerald mine run by slaves, debtors, and the victims of apartheid are just as bad on Mars as here. (50)

That sort of statement is the work of speculative fiction. As with ethics, so with metaphysics.

Something fascinating happens here, though. He seems to create an apologetic for one of James Blish’s — that is to say his own — stories. In “A Case of Conscience,” Blish spends 25,000 words — more than my own novella Tap and Die:

He spends those 25,000 words in a print magazine on “an exhaustive and occasionally exhausting study of a Roman Catholic priest thrown into an ethical and theological dilemma by what he finds on a new planet.”

It’s entirely dialectical drama, though he himself admits he spent far, far too much time describing the planet and delaying the story’s centrifugal problem until two thirds of the way through — 16,000 words, three short stories worth! He finds this valuable for setting a slow and discursive tone before the “elaborate four-way argument which is the essence of the piece” and also because the details to the argument are relevant. (51)

If this sounds like Russian literature to you, you’re not alone. That can be good or bad, depending on who’s writing. If it’s Dostoevsky, it’s invariably swell. He considers his own subject matter derivative, but the narrative style unique (being a broad reader, he would know) — arguing that those who like “what Poe called ‘ratiocination’ for its own sake” would love the dilemma, pointing to Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.

Providing “handles for dissidents to grasp if they will” marks his story as robust in his own opinion of himself. I suppose that’s what he intends anyhow, though whether or not he achieved it is unlikely to be solved by himself, to himself, about himself.

He does admit this, in turn.

He admits that it should have captured them, but may not have done so — may have only ensnared “a cross-section of other writers who are in a position to appreciate how much work this kind of story takes, without being any better able to weigh its effectiveness with a non-technical reader than I am.” He fears — rightly so — that it’s so insider baseball, that it’ll just fly over the heads of readers.

He does her admit his own failures in technique. (52) He also later (57) in an Afterword to this article says that the audience did pick up and that he received many letters of visceral opinions from several sides of the argument. It ended up winning the Hugo the year it was novelized. It had multiple translations, a dramatization, a half-hour lecture on BBC’s Third Programme. But th night he finished the story, he told his wife nobody would ever buy it except the man who’d already commissioned it, because he was stuck with it.

If you’d like to read it yourself, here it is:

One of the earliest science fiction novels Lord of the World by Hugh Benson, a Jesuit. He also points to M.P. Shiel’s Lord of the Sea (particularly an anti-Zionist book that culminates in the arrival of the Messiah). Lewis’s space trilogy makes his cut.

The last seems to piss off Blish-as-Atheling the most because of Lewis’s “decidedly foggy view” of the sciences he touches. He, like others, seems to miss the point: the metascience is the point, the logic that predicates science, the syllogisms.

“The Man” by Bradbury also makes his list as a parable of the second coming. So does “Fool’s Errand” by Paul L. Payne, “an attempt to hoax a devout Jewish member of the first spaceship crew to Mars, by planting a phony cross on the planet.” The hoaxer’s boot leaves a nail and the Jewish spaceman is rightfully critical of a hobnail. Bit short to nail the Jesus to the wall with that, I reckon.

Atheling in all of this advent of Anti=Christ, advent of Messiah, advent of Next Sacrifice, advent of magical Messiah, advent of Christ the wandering Salesman scorned by His audience, advent of a false Messiah — all of this isn’t about theology in his mind, but rather a “chiliastic crisis” of the magnitude seen in 999. For whatever reason, he doesn’t see eschatology as a branch of, let alone encompassing totally, theology. I prefer to refuse to confuse the ends with means. However everything will end up, that ends is its purpose and its purpose is embedded in its form and materials and causal chain. (54)

He even points to Anthony Boucher’s “The Quest for Saint Aquin” as appearing to not fit the definition of a chiliastic crisis. But as the atomic Armageddon is apocalyptic, Boucher deduces that Aquin is a Roman Catholic and flowers it with Neo-Thomism. Atheling has his doubts as to whether Aquinas would have approved.

And here’s the kicker:

Boucher remarked of the story, in the preface to the book, that it “could almost certainly never have appeared in any magazine in the field” because of its theme. If this was so at the time — and it probably was — the appearance of Blish’s story in If affords a rough measurement of the progress of the Trent in two years.

The Issue at Hand, p. 55.

It regressed from there. Whatever Blish enjoyed on these subjects with his contemporaries, it was almost entirely squashed. Almost nothing has been written since other than Canticle and Sanderson’s books, who often gets criticized for writing about religion. Most of them have something like Clarkesworld’s disclaimer on things they will not accept:

…stories that depend on some vestigial belief in Judeo-Christian mythology in order to be frightening (i.e., Cain and Abel are vampires, the End Times are a’ comin’, Communion wine turns to Christ’s literal blood and it’s HIV positive, Satan’s gonna getcha, etc.)

Clarkesworld submission page, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200201081701/https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/submissions/

Apparently enough folks complained that they took it down because it’s no longer there. Perhaps that’s a start, but the above text delineates how hostile the environment has become for this sort of story. Again, considering folks like John Polkinghorne, the recent Cambridge chair of physics who became a priest, it seems rather quaint to use a word like “vestigial” where faith is concerned. Almost as if it’s a vestigial belief that metaphysics doesn’t exist.

It is funny that most of the stories have a Catholic frame. He’s right about that, though some of the authors are agnostics. “The choice of the most complex, best organized and oldest body of Christian dogma as an intellectual background seems only natural.” This includes the photo Miller story Crucifixus Etiam.

He and del Rey ended up making a distinction between Apocalyptic and chiliastic types (58), though they settled little. I think it’s entirely possible to write a book that simply is apologetic in tone, though not nature — that is where apologetics or theology takes center stage and neither an apocalypse nor a chiliastic crisis happens, but more of the unfolding of tradition. Of course that very unfolding is apocalypse, so you end up in a rather sticky situation.

The whole piece about himself, however, seems to be patting himself on the back for answering the question that Lewis already did in the space trilogy. And Blish won the Hugo, Lewis did not. But Lewis’s work remains and almost no one has read A Case of Conscience these days. In a similar vein, Asimov won the Hugo for the best series of all time, Tolkien did not. Telling, that.

He saw the danger though of “many more which just skate along the surface, such novels may shortly fall prey to Gresham’s Law.” Meaning bad money drives out good money — a bad penny always turns up. He’s making a call for good religious subjects, not mediocre ones. So it’s entirely possible that hamfisted agnostics and atheists who didn’t know what they’re doing drove out the good stories with mediocre ones. And here we are.

One of the examples — Believers’ World by Robert Lowndes — is more political, honestly, considering you have three identical theocracies with identical theologies but in separate locales. That’s a political novel in my book — “heresies” at that point is a social and not an intellectual term, more in line with Protestantism’s revolt than the Eastern Orthodox.

When the novelette version first appeared, Atheling proposed that Lowndes might have been mocking the sterile version of Anglicanism epitomized in T.S. Eliot’s famous line, ‘The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life’ — a precise description of what happens at the crisis of this novel.

The Issue at Hand, p. 60

Tucked away in this comes the observation that this story pulls from an Oswald Spengler line of thinking. He knows “no other story” that does this.

Probably the most interesting part of that is featuring a society that went “through vast technological and other superficial changes which did not really alter its essential cultural stage; and the colonists partook of this disorientation.”

It’s made worse by time dilation and a complete disorientation. There’s a point at which speculating goes so far into esoterica that the average reader actually needs a PhD to track with the author. At that point, is it still fiction? I suppose it is, but almost gnostic in nature.

Speaking of which, I’d even take gnostic fairy tales over agnostic ones. Thanks David Bentley Hart and 1899 for leading the charge on that front.

The last one he touches on is Stranger in a Strange Land. I, again, take issue with this one for several reasons. This was one of the best and worst scifi novels I have read, but mostly one of the worst.

I laughed aloud often: Heinlein’s humor, when it’s on point, is hilarious. And I learned several things along the way. But Good Lord, for someone so smart he can sure be a moron sometimes.

This book is a classic case of Dunning-Kruger effect — of Heinlein’s limited competence in many fields leading to an over estimation of his abilities. It has so many false assumptions nested inside further, deeper, bigger false assumptions. I mean his critique of Mormonism was class act. And of the American creed named “the Constitution” and the inquisitorial pursuits it implies. All of that was well handled and… dare I say wise?

But the first indication that MAYBE something is off is when he names an Arab character Stinky and has a woman say things like “Most of the time when a woman gets raped, it’s her fault” without any check by any character, any doubt, any internal nuance or subtext: just a bald statement of “fact.” Heinlein makes idiotic statements about the proliferation of doctoral programs without considering that there might be a reason a humanities degree takes three times as long as a biology degree: perhaps because being a decent human is the work of a life and being a decent chemist is the work of a lab.

It reminds one of the many claims Richard Dawkins makes such as the nihilistic materialism of the Third Reich (or Pol Pot or Stalin) had nothing to do with their eugenics program (or brain drain or “modification” of society through extermination). The wise do not worship at his altar of pseudo science and scientism: they know the soft sciences of sociology are predicated on the high sciences of biology which are themselves predicated upon logic, epistemology, virtue ethics, and theology. This leads him to fear folk church that might have more decency than his own ideals as much as he suspects high church in an oddly displaced anti-intellectualism, an anti-intellectualism he levels at no other field. If nothing else, I suppose that bias too proclaims the exclusivity of the church by apophatic reason.

His ignorance culminates in the same category error of Pullman, Dawkins, etc: confusing the Demiurge and analytic philosophy with the grounds of being and therefore assuming he’s making a “harsh” critique of a religious system when, in fact, he’s not in dialog with it at all.

In the end, it’s Heinlein who is the man from Mars: a smart child sitting at the adults table absolutely convinced his diatribe on popsicles is contributing to the adult conversation on racism, poverty, or just existence itself.

Is it any wonder he says so many ignorant, offensive things precisely in the places he believes himself to be most wise, most competent, most unifying?

His bald faced blasphemies are boring. His critique of religious systems is ignorant. And his moments where he says “well at least EVERYONE agrees” belie a basic misunderstanding of virtually every category of intellect his work touches.

But.

I suppose it’s popular because the futurists of the world still share his unquenchable hope in tech. Good thing futurism and the worship of technology never led to fascism at any point in history.

Atheling, however, is right to call Stranger in a Strange Land religious. Belittling, pedantic of others, but it is religious. The whole statement “Thou art God” sums up Heinlein’s thesis: every being capable of thinking is God and “that’s all the God there is.”

He’s right to critique some of Heinlein’s words like “discorporate” into “murder” and the author’s timidity on ritual cannibalism (pointing to the eucharist and, by way of Frazer, showing that Heinlein’s timidity might show, deep down, he does in fact have a line). Perhaps this is why the metaphysics of Heinlein’s world is a shambles. I think the biggest takeaway here is making sure that we think through the entirety of our metaphysics as a system of the magic of being.

But!

It is indeed thorough in the sense that he does meditate on every way his religion touches all parts of society including other religions.

Negative Judgments: Swashbungling, Series and Second-guessing

I don’t know that I agree with his idea that the “negative judgment is the peak of mentality” (71), but nevertheless Blish offers his.

Inside his first negative opinion, however, he offers something positive: if you’re going to base a story on a symbol system — chess, for instance — make it a great chess game and clear how it relates to the story. In the story he critiques, the author does neither. He calls it “straitjacket imposed upon the plot from a textbook” — certainly a warning for those of us interested in symbol systems (72). Symbolist authorial regrets such as “Harry should have married Hermione” come to mind.

The text of this story he’s critiquing consists in:

1. A set of clumsy personifications of the chessmen
2. A parenthetical passage attempting to explain the personifications by attributing them to “computers”
3. fan fic

He also rages at the author’s choice to name sides by “a system of name-keys cum typographical tricks which posses no advantages over the textbook practice of calling the elements of the game by their right names.” Sort of an inherent warning to the rest of us to avoid being merely cute.

I know I have been before.

He then follows it up with an example of echolalia like “Go Carlon! Go to Stop him” and “Good! Oh, good, my Queen” and “He will retreat, he will retreat.” In the case of triple epizeuxis (or palilogia) happens thrice in all 66 books of the bible. For this man to do it half a billion times, both in and out of dialog, in such a story is egregious.

Word to the wise.

Especially if we want “the emotional content of the story” to not by “synthetic or derivative” but to “emerge from and bear upon human beings.” For comparison he points to Danish Gambit.

After this he moves onto the poem “I’ve Got a Little List” by Randall Garrett. Garret lambasts a lot of the greats for their incompetencies — endless repeating, series-stories instead of starting something new, cliche space operas, etc.

Hot take: he thought Bradbury may have been bad for the field. But he defended him in this section against needing a “creative editor” — now, for the Bradbury lovers like FC Shultz, I think this is important. That review came out November 1953. It was one in a long line of such reviews and he wrote responding to such reviews in Fahrenheit 451, which is mostly about “creative editing” like that of Maxwell Perkins.

Defending Bradbury similarly, Atheling says that Perkins was good for Thomas Wolfe and that’s about it. He even uses a word that took five professional writers to track down, and here’s what’s interesting: we used the OED, DIGITAL AND PRINT, multiple dictionaries, could find no reference to it on Google except for by Atheling himself. It seems to be highly regional slang that sprouted up and died out immediately, used only by the speculative fiction community.

The best we can muster is this:

prickamice meaning:

1942

P. Wylie Generation of Vipers 96: Poops and prickamice of every description have got themselves public offices, fortunes, and even for what passes for literary reputations. [Ibid.] 145: Down with brother love! Down with psychology that teaches these manners are not voluntary but autonomous! Up, the ravening prickamouse! Heil, Housepainter!

He uses this in reference to editors, agents, and other literary business types that are failed writers who know less about writing than the writers themselves. I have no comment on this other than to say it taught me a word.

He does say, however, it’s audacious that such fresh college grads and trust fund kids would mouth off to writers who know better.

He turns to the Kuttner’s (CL Moore included), pointing out how readily they start a story with a narrative hook which turns to paradox, a suspension of the story for 1,000 words of lecture (typically taboo — they alone got away with it outside of Heinlein), and then a rounded off ending that resolves the paradox.

One Completely Lousy Story, with Feetnote

He defends here his incessant attacks “down among the black beetles” and “tearing newcomers to shreds” by making a point: he’s aiming at the top, the very top, the editors perpetuating bad stories.

The story he assaults that was published in Astounding Science Fiction had verbs and subject disagreement, sentences that Peter out with prepositions, idiosyncratic punctuation, dangling prepositional phrases and clauses, etc.

He defends being a grammar nazi by saying, “it makes a lot of difference, even to the best story in the world, for a writer who can’t handle his own native tongue adequately instantly loses the confidence of his readers.” He has a point.

He also levels the following:

• dialog where speakers all sound the same, brought about by focusing how something’s said rather than what is said — great advice for those focusing too much on dialect and not on internal character motivation
• Half the story is dialog and yet the characters only say something 7,500 times — everything else has wild dialog tags like chuckle, mutter, bellow, ask, lecture, argue, etc. Facial expressions get substituted for tone and tenor tags like “he smiled” and “he beamed.”
• A rather disconnected two threads of plot, one about aliens shipwrecked and another about their faking an invasion to unite Earth.

He rallies on but his point is not the incompetence of a beginner (one with whom I myself may share common traits), but rather of an editor asleep at the wheel. One who will never help the young writer grow.

Similarly, in focusing on another young writer, he says that the next writer — who is competent — shouldn’t be allowed to ‘put an emotional charge upon every event in a story (87) without depriving the really important invents in the story of meaning and making the story at least twice as long as the material justifies.’

He makes his point by pointing to the character’s reaction to an alien world’s night as being similar to his own — why that should be bathetic, Atheling can’t say. It’s as if the character said, “Yes, even here, I have hair” or “Yes, even here, objects fall to the ground.” It would be more remarkable had the opposite been true. This same writer he criticizes later for still more overwriting.

Scattershot

In this one, he compliments sensuous detail, hopeful morals. He decries naked hatred, but admires hatred that doesn’t descend into caricature. And he loathes the mere changing of nouns in order to drum up science fiction — “smeerps” for rabbits and “vilbar” for cocktail. Spec fic is always about the ideas, not mere calling names.

One Way Trip

This piece generally reflects on how an editor has no idea which of his pieces do well, which do poorly, which depress sales, which inflate sales. Once upon a time, they had letters from readers which helped:

• Spot check unpopular stories
• Passed on learning to authors as well as rebalancing forthcoming issues
• Printing letters so that readers could (1) see if they agree with one another and (2) reflect on their own pet peeves

I think some of the data in the backend likely helps these days. I’m still getting huge hits from certain stories published in the SHOWBEAR heyday and know which authors did swell.

Feedback, in other words, is essential for the health of the genre and the awards ceremonies alone will never suffice. Neither will reader preference tallies, book reviews, or ratings on Goodreads. You need actual thoughtful feedback, hard data, and active forums for healthy debate.

Neither will fan mail work.

The Short Novel: Three Ranging Shots and Two Duds

He points to the exceeding difficulties proffered by Theodore L. Thomas’s “the Weather Man” by hopping around to multiple different characters and milieus. He praises it heavily as a master craftsman who was able to see these difficulties head on and meet them. Read it here:

https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/AN/AN_1962_06.pdf

Many of his problems with the following story seemed more to stem from sexism than anything, so I’ll pass those over (though a couple of the points make sense, they’ve already been covered above).

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Here’s the thing: I’m hungry, and there’s not that much left that’s different in the rest of this book. Plus this is egregiously long at this point.

I’ll take a glimpse through the rest of the book on my lunch break. If I find something worthy in the next three sections, I’ll add it in, I doubt I will.

The Fens Revisited: “Said” Books and Incest

An Answer of Sorts

A Question of Sorts