In what is almost certainly a misguided attempt to increase Fortean Bureau's readership without resorting to pornography and to infuse it with a bit more literary currency without appealing to either facts or reason, the Tolberts have asked me to write a little something for them every month. Welcome to it. Please kill me.

Writing an essay column for a science fiction magazine is the easiest thing in the world, so long as one sticks to a variation on one of two tried-and-true themes:

1. Popular discussions of real scientific research, usually of the gee-whiz ain't that sumptin school.

2. If the publisher has foolishly hired a non-scientist, the column will simply endlessly till the soil of our genre's second theme: impotent fist-shaking, especially impotent fist-shaking at:

Well, my Random Topic generator tells me that I should begin this column with 2a, but unfortunately, the literary elite loves science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Yes, it's true. We may cast off our propeller beanies and rejoice, my friends, for we have arrived! Behold! Writing for the online version of one of America's best-loved used bookstores, Powell's, literary writer Michael Cunningham acknowledges that he is quite impressed with science fiction, fantasy and horror (which he calls "thriller"). Cunningham writes that Michael Marshall's The Straw Man "proved to be so smart and dense, so politically astute, as to bear comparison to Don DeLillo."

Ugh, I hope nobody shows Michael Marshall Cunningham's review, as DeLillo's intelligence, density, and political savvy is pretty much limited to this sort of stuff, from Americana:

Even this gobbledygook would be fine if not for the first-person narration. Certainly, an arch author can peer down at his banal creations and render them thusly so that we're all in on the joke against the poor schlub of a character, but to have someone think of himself this way while heading toward a hotel rather than suicidally flinging himself at an onrushing bus or fissure of steaming magma just boggles the imagination.

Cunningham also digs the science fiction, and name-checks titles by the usual suspects:

Cunningham says "As it turns out, the novel of ideas is alive and well. It just tends to be kept in particular sections of bookstores and libraries." Sweet Christmas, he's right! And imagine what Cunningham would think of SF had he read something by Gibson other than his shittiest book. Twenty pages into Pattern Recognition, the poor guy's head would have exploded.

Cunningham decided to read all this stuff because he is working on a novel that will employ "certain genre devices" (I hope it has waldoes and ansibles in it) but actually, he has tried his hand at SF before, after a fashion. His multi-generational saga Flesh And Blood follows the family of Constantine Stassos from the man's arrival in the States from Greece in 1950 and through the 20th century to about thirty years from now. As a chronicler of the Greek-American experience, Cunningham makes one hell of an Irishman, and his near-future isn't all that different from his 1998. Or 1978 for that matter. But now that he's read some SF --and I recommend anyone who would like to write SF to read some first--the sky is most assuredly the limit.

Much of the struggle between SF and literary fiction in both its realist and postmodernist modes comes, I think, from the classes at which these modes were initially aimed. In The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, John Carey's clever study of the modernists, Carey contends that a middle-class hatred of the masses led the modernists to explicitly and purposefully write to exclude the nearly literate working class from literary culture. The endless layers of cant and oblique reference were esoteric by design--intellectuals could only keep their place near the top of the social heap by inventing modernism.

The working class got its literature too, in the form of pulps and popular magazines. The massive changes of the Industrial Revolution informed the gadget stories of early science fiction; a yearning for a mythical pastoral past where noblesse oblige was the rule inspired fantasies; Westerns kept the myth of the rugged individual going; and life in the proletarian wards were more than sufficient fodder for tons of crime and horror and horror stories. They got theirs in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly; we got ours in Planet Stories. But as economic base informs cultural superstructure, the Chinese wall the modernists built couldn't last. The working class needed more education to keep the increasingly complex economy going, so we got ourselves summa that thar culture anyways. Plus, the genres of pulp fiction actually had something to say about our swiftly tilting planet. Now everyone has cell phones and nobody has much time for bourgeois intellectuals. It's like a friggin' Utopia we've got here, people, except that the ruling class still has all the damn money…and now they're hillbilly idiots like us!

Change doesn't impact everyone equally. The upper classes are able to keep change at bay through the maintenance of various reactionary traditions (society pages in the papers, boarding schools, golf lunches, sending the poor off to die in foreign wars, you name it) but not indefinitely. The fictions of the middle class, both realist and postmodernist, lag behind social change, and often have little to do with now, much less the future. Thus the endless re-examinations of the post-war era and all the literary titles set in the end of the Cold War coming today, rather than, say, in 1993. Or 1973. The 2030s of Cunningham's Flesh And Blood smacks of the early 1990s, and Don DeLillo's half-assed attempts at overclocking boil down to little more than "Geez, there sure are lots of billboars and logos about, eh?" The modern descendents of the pulp genres, on the other hand, are striving ahead.

When a writer embraced by the middle classes is discovered to have a shaky provenance and a habit of reading the icky-poo pulps, folks are simply amazed. Allen Barra of Salon.com seems to think that we should be impressed that Borges could keep from peeing his pants, much less write, because he read the antecedents of today's genre fiction. "A great deal of highfalutin' American and European writers left little or no impression on him," Barra says of Borges by way of lecturing various Borges critics and biographers. Instead, the high-school dropout who lived with his mama did read Dunsany, Machen, and H. G. Wells.

As we used to say on the mean streets of Brooklyn, "Golly!"

Barra nonetheless insists that Borges was the last great modernist, which leads me to wonder if he has ever read Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, a book in which Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares send up modernism and modernist literacy criticism on nearly every page. Here's what I insist: Borges was the last great pulp writer. Don't believe me? Ask Michael Cunningham. Now that he's up to speed on the skiffy, I'm sure he'll agree. The politicians tell us that the American middle class is dying, and I think that's just swell, especially if we can bury their literature with them. If anyone wants to read about how we live now, well, the genres handle it just fine.

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