This novel pleased me. It’s well-written, the characters come alive, and the author doesn’t pussy-foot. Cunningham takes three characters from childhood, bringing them up to youthful adulthood. They end up forming a precarious family and raise a shild. Nothing very extraordinary happens. But it is all done with great skill. The book is grown-up. As I turned the pages, I was reminded of my protracted struggle with the current situation in Science Fiction publishing. I grew up with Science Fiction, and I would rather write in that genre than write the sort of thing that Michael Cunningham does.
Unfortunately, the field of Science Fiction has so profoundly degenerated in the last few years that there seems no point to even trying. The Science Fiction community is simply not composed of grown-up people. I am not referring to chronological age — I know many people who were grown-up at the age of thirteen. But the Science Fiction community no longer seems to be peopled with intellectual adults. If Mr. Cunningham were writing SF, and submitting a work of this quality, tone, and technique to SF publishers, he would get nowhere. He would be confronted by moronic taboos, self-censoring cowardice, and idiotic social values. In short, he would be entering an infantile world that simply can’t be grown-up enough to permit literature, or to create it.
This has not always been the case. There was a time when Science Fiction was quite the opposite. It was where the action was. It was written and published by grown-up people to be read by grown-up people, who did not cringe in terror at the possibility of offending illiterate yokels who plant corn by the moon. Many of those grown-up people happened to be teenagers. The SF community is now considerably older in biological age, on average, than it was when I entered it. But it has rocketed from the university to kindergarden in a single generation.
So I turned the pages of this novel with a mixture of pleasure, and envy. My interests and imagery are such that I will never feel called to write a novel like this. I want to be able write within the broad and spectacular canvas of Science Fiction, unbound by time or space. I could probably never write a novel about three people working out a relationship in upstate New York. But damn it, I would like to be able to write in liberty, for a thinking audience, with some serious expectation of making a living from it.
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