Canadian Speculative Fiction

WHY I READ AMERICAN sf

by Robert Runté

Reprinted from Prairie Fire,
September, 1994

My love of science fiction began in Grade 6 when my best friend, Bill Seager, forced a copy of Raiders From The Rings upon me in Mr. Ramsey's math class. I was highly dubious about accepting it at first, because at the time I was reading only Freddie the Pig books. Come to that, I was still pretty skeptical about reading in general. Reading was something Mr. Ramsey made you do first period after lunch, not something one did voluntarily. Freddie the Pig was okay, but even there, I had only started reading the series when forced to it by peer pressure: If you wanted to get the in-jokes in Bill's group, you had to know the complete Freddie cannon. Now that I had finally managed all the Freddie books, it looked like Bill was trying to change the rules again, and start over with something else!

But Bill insisted, so I took it home. The first line of the book is "The raiders could hear the mauki's chant from the moment they boarded the ship from Earth." My brain ceased up. What is a "mauki"? How could a ship be "from Earth"? After another three pages of that sort of continuous non sequitur I was frantic. I had no idea what was going on, and Bill was sure to ask me tomorrow, Monday at the latest, what I had thought of it. So I forced myself to try again. And a third time. On the fourth try I got far enough to hit the word "Martian" and began to get a glimmering of what Bill had meant by "science fiction". By page 28 I was totally absorbed.

I think it fair to say Raiders From The Rings changed my life. That was the first time I ever missed supper because I could not tear myself away from a book. Rereading it as an adult, I can hardly credit that I once found this weakly plotted, badly written juvenile engrossing, but it opened up a whole new world for me. I learned to read -- really read -- because of that one book. What science fiction offered that even Freddie the Pig could not, is what sf fans refer to as the genre's "sense of wonder". By dropping the reader anywhere in time or space, sf pulls the rug out from under them and then asks what things would be like, if things were really different. By comparison with Raiders From The Rings, a talking pig from the Midwest is pretty mundane.

From that weekend on, Bill and I bicycled to the library every Saturday to scour the shelves for the telltale atom/rocket logo. We read all the sf in the children's section, then badgered our parents for their adult cards. By High School we had read close to everything there was in print, though with the advent of Star Trek and the sf boom, we started to fall behind again.

Like most Canadians of the Star Trek generation, I grew up believing that science fiction was predominantly an American genre, with a few British authors thrown in for good measure. American sf, typified by Analog under Campbell's editorship, emphasized plot and technology. Raygun-toting male engineers confronted a problem and solved it, making space safe for Democracy and the American way. The British variety tended to be more cynical, more downbeat, and less confident in the technology, as one would expect from the citizens of a declining Empire. I embraced both versions equally and even sought out the occasional French or Soviet author. But it never occurred to me that there might be a Canadian take on the genre.

After all, sf is at heart an extrapolation or projection of the present onto a clean canvas. The Enterprise is part of a future that flows naturally from the American love of technology, its belief in the melting pot, in progress, in manifest destiny, and so on. But it is hard for Canadians to read themselves into that future. For generations Canadians have seen themselves as history's bystanders. As a rule, Canadians do not go in for the sort of colourful antics (wars of conquest, dictatorships, corruption in high places, mass murders, and so on) that make for exciting reading. Our lives tend to revolve around more prosaic matters. We do not expect the things that concern us to be of interest to outsiders, or even to ourselves. I mean, how excited can you get about, say, wheat farming as a story concept? (Though when Star Trek made quadrotricale -- a Canadian-developed grain hybrid -- the central plot element of "The Trouble With Tribbles", no one thought that boring.) We tend not to see ourselves as the people who build the spaceships, but at best as the subcontractors who supply the arm for the cargo hold. Our role is neither central nor exciting. Consequently, we do not expect to see ourselves as either the subjects or authors of a genre based on a sense of wonder.

In the mid-1970s, however, I stumbled upon half a dozen examples of Canadian sf and discovered a literature whose themes, style, and structure filled a void in me that until then I had not even realized existed. In triggering my sense of identity, those first encounters with Canadian sf produced the same kind of revelation as the sense of wonder I discovered in Raiders From The Rings. I began to seek out other Canadian sf and found that, with few exceptions, I enjoyed the Canadian version of the genre as much or more than I did the American or British varieties. There are three reasons for this.

First, though this is now rapidly changing, there is still only a relatively small body of Canadian work. For a while there, at least, it was possible to read everything there was. Just as there is an added dimension to reading a book when one is familiar with how it fits into that author's larger body of work, there is something especially satisfying in understanding the interplay of an entire subgenre. Furthermore, the relatively limited number of titles means that I can still discuss any book with other Canadian fans in the reasonable expectation that they will also have read it. Thus, Canadian sf provides the same sort of close knit literary community that made sf fandom so satisfying back in the 1950s when everyone had read the same fifty classics. With thousands of sf titles published in North America each year, no one can achieve comprehensive coverage of sf as a whole anymore, so one's only recourse is to specialize.

Second, Canadian speculative fiction tends to fall nearer the literary end of the spectrum than does most mass market American sf. Thanks to the different structure of book publishing in Canada, genre lines are drawn less sharply here, so that practically every major Canadian author from Margaret Atwood to Hugh MacLennan has contributed to our growing body of sf. Similarly, genre writers are more accepted as part of the legitimate literary scene in Canada, as witness this special double issue ofPrairie Fire. This literary acceptance provides a forum for Canadian speculative writers to push the limits of the genre denied writers trying to break into the more commercially-oriented American market.

Third, the major advantage for me is that aforementioned sense of identity. Canadian sf is more likely to address my specific needs, because it arises out of the same cultural milieu. In spite of a long history of foreign influence -- first as a British colony and now as an American satellite -- the culture that evolved here is neither British nor American. Of course, the corollary is that Canadian sf often fails to hit the right cultural buttons for foreign readers. American readers and editors often complain that Canadian sf is too slow moving, too serious, and too ambiguous. Every Canadian writer I know has a drawer full of manuscripts rejected by American editors who have said that, while they personally enjoyed the story, they felt it was just too different to fit their specific market.

Fortunately the situation has been changing in recent years, as American tastes begin to reflect their own increasing doubts about the American Dream and the practical limits of technology and progress. Canadian authors have found increasing acceptance in the American market as American readers have become more interested in the traditionally Canadian themes of technophobia, alienation, and environmental issues. At the same time, the relatively recent emergence of On Spec magazine and the Tesseract anthology series, along with the continuing support of literary magazines such as Prairie Fire, have provided a much needed outlet for the development of new Canadian talent, with the result that the Canadian contribution to the genre has suddenly blossomed.

Having said all that, however, I am somewhat at a loss to explain why I often find myself reading the latest from David Weber or Terry Pratchett, when I still have a whole shelf of Canadian sf left unread.

Part of the answer may be that there is now more new Canadian material being published than I can easily keep up with. The attempt to do so occasionally starts to resemble work, just as reading every Hugo and Nebula winner became a chore when I made that a personal project. But even granted that I need an occasional break from the Canadiana section of my library, the question still remains as to why I choose the particular foreign authors I do.

On one level, it is obvious that I tend to seek out those elements I cannot get in my own national literature. This implies, for example, that the flip side of having authors who tend to work the literary end of the spectrum is that I often find myself turning to British or American authors for escapism. Just as there comes a point where one has had their fill of meat and potatoes and craves dessert, I can only absorb so much thought-provoking, life-examining, culturally-relevant literature before I need to indulge myself in some irrelevant fluff. I know that there are many excellent, heavy-duty literary figures writing genre fiction in both the US and England, but these tend not to be the foreign authors who draw me. Guy Kay's Tigana or Sean Stewart's Nobody's Son § satisfy my need for interpretive literature in ways that no other fantasy literature could, but Terry Pratchett's comic genius pushes a whole other set of buttons. Perhaps we will eventually produce a comedic writer of the Pratchett's stature (Samuel Marchbanks in Space?) but in the meantime we have no one who can touch him.

On another level, though, I remain perplexed even by my choice of escapist fare. Why do I often find myself turning to the likes of David Weber and Steve White when their militaristic, authoritarian, jingoistic projections are the very antithesis of everything I value? These writers do not so much complement what I get from Canadian sf, as refute it. If I had to define Canadian culture or Canadian sf, the easiest way would be to say: "the opposite of these guys". Yet, even while I am grinding my teeth and preparing to fling one of their books across the room in response to their right-wing politics or macho heroes, there is a certain indefinable something that keeps me turning the pages instead.

The answer ultimately must be that American authors like Weber and White still manage to stimulate my sense of wonder. There is something very 1950s about Crusade and Insurrection (their first two collaborations), and reading these novels generated within me tremendous nostalgia for my Raiders-From-the-Rings youth. Great literature or not, I grew up reading space opera and that will always remain a part of who I am.

I suspect that this must also be true for most Canadian readers and authors. American pulp fiction has become part of the Canadian heritage, along with Star Trek and Big Macs. Whatever Canadian authors contribute to the advancement of the genre, we must always acknowledge our own roots in American pulp fiction. Most of us retain a soft spot for space opera, even as we have branched out into the other, generally more sophisticated offerings from a maturing American, British -- and increasingly Canadian -- speculative literature. So, even though I anticipate that Canadian authors will more consistently address those themes that matter to me, there will always be a place in my reading for space opera, a genre that remains quintessentially American.

Having confessed to the guilty pleasure of reading Weber and White is not to say that I can take a steady diet of such books. Reading bad American sf serves the same function as watching American TV: it helps to switch my brain off after a hard day in academia. These are never the books that matter, and eventually one has to read some real literature or risk becoming permanently brain-dead, like the rest of the TV generation. Of course, there is more to American sf than just mass market schlock (though someone casually browsing the rows of Star Trek novelizations and Dragon Lance fantasies might be forgiven that impression), but there are now a sufficient number of Canadian alternatives that I no longer have to depend on the Americans for my serious reading. American pulp fiction may be part of my heritage, but Canadian sf has now achieved the necessary critical mass that the next generation will not have to choose between a sense of wonder and a sense of identity, but can have both.

One still has to read some foreign authors, of course, or risk becoming as parochial as the typical American fan. Since their authors have always dominated the genre, Americans take a sense of identity for granted in their reading, so that sf written from another view often strikes them as confusing or badly written. Canadians, on the other hand, are constantly exposed to American and British culture, so that resisting these influences has become part of our very identity. Indeed, our particular contribution to world literature -- the alienated outsider who ultimately chooses to remain outside -- could only have developed in such an environment. The emergence of a distinctive Canadian voice is unlikely to ever overcome the preponderance of American authors on genre shelves, but at least we have now reached the point where Canadians are no longer surprised to discover that we can write speculative fiction, or that it is such a satisfying read.