Science Fiction (article)

"Science Fiction" is an article originally published in The New York Times Book Review on September 5, 1965 and reprinted in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons in 1974 and the first volume of Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2012.

Summary

Vonnegut recounts how his time working at General Electric surrounded by machines influenced the writing of his first novel, Player Piano. Although many critics labeled this work as "science fiction", he states he was only reporting about a very real world around him and that science fiction has merely come to mean fiction that notices technology. Since English majors are often taught in college to despise the "dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented" scientists, most critics immediately dismiss science fiction as valueless. While science fiction is, by and large, immature literature, the vast majority of readers are themselves immature. While teaching at "a mildly unusual schools for mildly unusual high-school children", Vonnegut found that most of the boys were hungry for science fiction which presented a world in which even they could have a place, "pimples, virginity, and everything" while the real-world space programs only offered promise to the successful.

Many have embraced being labeled as science fiction writers and become similar to "members of old-fashioned big families". Vonnegut states that most such writers are "joiners" who "enjoy having a gang of their own", which is understandable given how common "meaningless social aggregations" are in human life. Some science fiction writers attempt to claim various writers among their ranks, such as Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Ralph Ellison, Gustave Flaubert, even Leo Tolstoy to give themselves respectability. However, for Vonnegut perhaps the main value of science fiction magazines, especially with the demise of short story periodicals, is that they are the only place where young, inexperienced writers can first get published and recognized. Editors and publishers of science fiction release much bad material because the good is rare, but they see a duty to encourage any writer willing to look at the relationship of humans to technology. But even within science fiction there are the truly excellent writers and stories, honored by their artificial family. As the genre becomes more mainstream, it will both gain respect and dissolve as a special outsider group. Until then, Vonnegut advises that young writers with amateurish stories could do worse than to throw in some science or even magic and send them off to science fiction magazines.

Original Version

The original version of this article published in The New York Times Book Review is largely the same, with a few textual differences. Player Piano is specifically mentioned as being re-released in hardcover the following spring. The reference to a urinal is euphemized to a "tall white fixture in a comfort station". The line about "our most impressive critics" instead states that "English majors can scarcely sign their own names at the end of a course of English instruction", and subsequently become critics. It concludes with "[a] marketing tip: the science-fiction magazine that pays the most and seems to have the poorest judgment is Playboy. Try Playboy first."

Quotes

"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

"The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works."

"Mature relationships, even with machines, do not titillate the unwashed majority. Whatever it knows about science was fully revealed in Popular Mechanics by 1933. Whatever it knows about politics and economics and history can be found in the Information Please Almanac for 1941. Whatever it knows about the relationship between men and women derives mainly from the clean and the pornographic versions of 'Maggie and Jiggs.'"