Free The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg Page B

raised not by a crusty Chaucer scholar, Dean of Student Affairs or member of the department of antiquities (in many places in many universities the academicization of “popular culture” is regarded as loathsome) but by one of the most experienced and sophisticated editors in the field, a credit to the genre to say nothing of a certified member of First Fandom. “What the hell is it?” he said, “a couple of lectures on the historical stuff, Wells and Verne and Chaucer and that crap which doesn’t apply, has nothing to do with American science fiction and then the thirties and Heinlein and Campbell and when it got dirty in the sixties, but really, there just isn’t that much to it. A few ideas, a few basic treatments and all of the variations; it’s just a bunch of crap. Crap, crap,” the editor mused and finished his whiskey sour and went onto other matters more pressing, although I cannot recall which.
    A few writers, a few ideas, the same old variations? Not exactly, but the point is not superficial (nor is this editor a superficial man); is there enough about science fiction as distinguished from literature itself to justify it as a separate course unit, a heady three credits toward a baccalaureate? To the editor’s point of view it would be as if a Bachelor of Music accepted in partial fulfillment a three-credit course on Khachaturian or the viole da gamba. Isn’t it part of the continuing isolation of science fiction, another aspect of literary ghettoization, to render it a separate course within a Department of English (or Sociology) as something discrete, special, impenetrable? Why can’t it simply be taught—for example, the works of Heinlein, Kuttner, Ballard, Kornbluth, Le Guin, Silverberg—as part of contemporary American literature?
    Well, for once it might throw a lot of currently employed nontenured personnel out of work and reduce tuition input into the English Department. That is not a contemptible consideration. Then too, my perception at the SFWA conferences was, appositely, that instructors of science fiction were regarded by their academic colleagues almost exactly as editors of science fiction (even unto this day) are regarded by senior trade editors in the publishing houses. With few exceptions, the only way a science fiction editor can have a major editorial career 14 is to get out of science fiction and into something else (writers too). Anything will do for the shift. Science fiction academics, already functioning at the margins of their profession, will do anything to consolidate their position, and although a few might be able to move crosswise most will use their courses and enrollments to build up small power bases . . . which they hope to carry over to other universities should the need arise. There are very practical reasons why the SFRA catalogue a decade hence may double the number of colleges again; by 1990 every college and university in this country and most of the junior colleges as well may have a course in science fiction catalogued as routinely as Intermediate Algebra first  . . . and will then seek someone to teach it.
    What does it all mean? To appropriate my friend the editor’s line, perhaps not very much. Some writers have expressed an amazing amount of (righteous) hostility toward this academicization because indeed the last person to teach science fiction in most of these places would be a science fiction writer. With tightening budgets and cuts in discretionary funding most courses now can administer their three credits without the students even meeting , for one session, a science fiction writer. Recrimination has always been the underside of these people; not inappropriately most science fiction writers have known in their hearts for years that they were generating a good deal of money for some people, very little of which ever got to them. The Harvards of the future perceived as the Bouregy Books of yesterday. Too—and although this is last it is in