The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

. . . And speaking of overspecialization, I have not yet made reference to The Categories.

“Science fiction” has about the same utility as a label, by now, as “beatnik” does. To the majority of readers, both words describe something exotic, ultramodern, oddball, egghead, and probably unwashed. To the respective and only slightly overlapping in-groups, the labels have a proud, bold, modern feel, full of truth, beauty, and the Keatsian assurance of “all ye know, and all ye need to know.”

Certainly, to the “outsider” majority, and sometimes even to the “ins,” both words are definable more in terms of costume than anything else . . . unless the something else is status. No one calls Picasso a “beatnik,” and it is not just the absence of beard that sets him apart from other wearers of sandals and turtlenecks.

Most publishers use “categories” to determine costume—or “packaging,” as the trade calls it. Science fiction, like fantasy, crime, suspense, Westerns, doctor and nurse stories, sex, love, war, is a “category.” And then there are “novels”—the non-category category, where subject does not matter, because either the book or the author is considered serious or literary or popular. (1984 and The Disappearance were serious books; The Lord of the Flies and Brave New World were literary; Fail Safe and Earth Abides popular; More Than Human and A Canticle for Liebowitz were science fiction: the latter in spite— or perhaps because?—of the publisher’s overfervent denials.)

I don’t mean it is impossible for an author to step out of his “category.” Just almost impossible. And sometimes it is as hard to break into the ghetto as out of it—

“Benefactor” was first published in 1958—but its first sale was in 1964, to Francesca van der Ling of SSI, who found it in a 1959 issue of the Indian magazine Thought—which had reprinted it from a 1958 U.S. edition of the Socialist Call-where it had been published originally without payment.

Now, James T. Farrell’s place among twentieth-century American authors has long survived both the shocked gasps of the thirties at the “realism” of Studs Lonigan, and the horror of the forties at the “leftist” politics of the thirties.

But this time he had stepped out of character: out of his specialty. Hollywood is not the only American scene where typecasting prevails.

And believe me, Isaac Asimov would have as much trouble selling a realistic novel (no matter how good) about the Chicago Irish as James Farrell had with “Benefactor.”