Part 8 (2/2)
I can also define science fiction, as has often been done, as fiction about the interaction of human beings and technology. That will cover an awful lot of territory, but it seems to exclude such books as my own Dying Inside (which is about telepathy) and Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (which is about demography). I can, and sometimes do, fall back on the notion that science fiction is defined by a certain kind of strangeness, by an element of the unreal, of the fantastic; but you can see what a useless definition that is, since it qualifies Alice in Wonderland as science fiction, just as the humans-and-technology definition qualifies Arrowsmith. I don't think Alice in Wonderland is science fiction, nor would I willingly admit Arrowsmith to the genre. But The Book of Skulls- Here we have a novel that takes place in the early 1970s, in the United States-a straight contemporary setting, since that was when I wrote it. The narrators (there are four of them, each speaking in an individual tone of voice, and what a harrowing technical exercise that turned out to be!) are American college boys off on an Easter vacation. Nothing at all science-fictional about that; but there is nothing science-fictional about the first hour or so of King Kong, either, and certainly King Kong turns into science fiction once those dinosaurs are on the screen. Eventually the four boys of The Book of Skulls get to Arizona, where they have gone in search of the secret of eternal life; and since the attaining of immortality is one of the cla.s.sic themes of science fiction, and I have stated right there in the second paragraph of the book that that's what they're looking for, perhaps that alone is enough to qualify the book as science fiction. Surely the quest for immortality is science-fictional to the core, whether or not the characters actually find it.
And yet, and yet-and I think this is the crux of the matter-the book doesn't sound like science fiction, at least not science fiction of the sort I grew up reading more than fifty years ago. Where is the simple, functional prose of John Campbell's great old magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, in which so many of our SF cla.s.sics were born? These kids talk of dope and Sergeant Pepper, of Joyce and Kierkegaard, of s.e.x both straight and gay, of WASP country-club folkways and noisy bar mitzvahs, of all sorts of stuff that never got into Astounding. Where is lean, gray-eyed Kimball Kinnison, the Second Stage Lensman? Where is Gilbert Gosseyn of the multiple mind? Where's Captain Kirk? Luke Skywalker? The stuff in the book sounds an awful lot like the material of mainstream fiction, doesn't it? No s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, no robots, no time machines, no galactic empires, none of the familiar SF furniture, no trace of the texture of the stories that filled the beloved gaudy magazines that hooked so many of us on science fiction in the first place so long ago.
And yet-immortality-surely that's a science fiction theme!
Is it real, though, this immortality I write about here? What's the true story of these monks out there in the Arizona desert? Have they actually survived since the days of the Lascaux caves, since the era of lost Atlantis? If they have, then the book must be science fiction by anybody's definition, and never mind the furniture or the texture: A novel that has 25,000-year-old men running around in it has to be science fiction, right? Unless, of course, those 25,000-year-old men aren't 25,000 years old at all, just a bunch of cultists pulling some sort of scam, and that possibility definitely exists in the book. So is it science fiction or isn't it?
I don't know. It all depends on whether you, like Eli and Ned and Oliver and Tim, can accept the story of the fraters at face value. If you think they're genuine immortals, the book is genuine science fiction. If you think it's all some kind of nut-cult hoax, well, the book turns into some sort of dark social satire, I suppose, with science-fictional overtones. I just don't know. I wasn't there. Ask Eli. Ask Tim. Or make up your own mind.
The Book of Skulls, at any rate, was written during a particularly freaky time in American life, and is very much a book rooted in that freakiness. It is also a reasonable representative of the new sort of science fiction that evolved in that time. The novel I wrote just before it, The Second Trip, was definitely science fiction, but its tone, hard-edged and profanity-laced, is that of modern non-science-fictional fiction. The novel I wrote just after it, Dying Inside, is about a telepath, and therefore qualifies as SF, but its handling makes it a kind of borderline case. All three books have a certain contemporaneity of feel, a certain mainstreamness of approach, which is absent from such other novels of mine of that period, unchallengeably science fiction and not at all marginal, as Tower of Gla.s.s and The World Inside.
When The Book of Skulls was first published in the summer of 1972-by the respectable old mainstream house of Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe-it was received with some bafflement by reviewers outside the science fiction field, who thought it was science fiction, and by science fiction reviewers, who thought it was mainstream. Even the SF writer James Blish, one of the most perceptive of critics, was puzzled by it when he reviewed it for one of the science fiction magazines, finally deciding, ”arbitrarily,” that it qualified as fantasy because of its immortality-quest theme. He did, at least, like the book. (”Please buy it at once, and read it repeatedly; you're sure to find it important, rewarding, and quite possibly better integrated than I'm able to see. Of one thing about it I'm quite sure: It's so un.o.btrusively, flawlessly written, that even at its most puzzling it comes as perilously close to poetic beauty as any contemporary SF novel I've read.”) I was, of course, delighted by such an accolade coming from a writer I respected as much as Blish. More than thirty years later, that's still one of the reviews I treasure most. But even he had trouble figuring out where to place the book in its genre.
It was, regardless of its ambiguities, nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards that year, along with Dying Inside, which ought to settle the question of whether those books are science fiction. (A novel nominated by hundreds of people as best Science Fiction Novel of the Year is, ipso facto, science fiction, right?) In the final voting for the Hugo, which is given by science fiction readers, both Skulls and Dying Inside finished behind three novels whose value, both as science fiction and as literature, seemed to me very modest; this was to me an educational experience. The nominees for the Nebula, the award given by science fiction writers, included a couple of books of rather higher caliber, but no matter, because the same very ordinary novel by a well-known author carried off both trophies that year, and so much for the democratic process.
Over the years, though, The Book of Skulls has maintained a pa.s.sionate audience, and tattered copies of old editions pa.s.s from hand to hand, I understand, with great reverence. It has also been the center of considerable interest in Hollywood since about 1977, with any number of famous directors on the verge of making a movie from it before some Hollywood-style twist of fate intervened. I am delighted that the book will now be made available to today's readers, who will, I suppose, find some of the 1970s background details and social patterns to be of quaint historical interest, but who nevertheless are likely to find themselves caught up in the mysteries of its plot just as intensely as readers were when the book was first published a generation ago.
-Robert Silverberg.
July, 2004.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
ROBERT SILVERBERG was born in New York and makes his home in the San Francisco area. He has written several hundred science fiction stories and more than seventy science fiction novels. He has won five Hugo awards and five Nebula awards. He is a past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Silverberg's other t.i.tles include Lord Valentine's Castle, Majipoor Chronicles, The World Inside, Thorns, The Masks of Time, and The Tower of Gla.s.s. In 2004 the Science Fiction Writers of America gave him its Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement.
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