Way back when I got caught up in the debate over whether the science fiction genre was dead, dying, declining or otherwise at or approaching its "end," and seeing the more dismissive responses to the suggestion, it seemed to me that some were simply reacting in the usual boosterish industry manner, still others disinclined to see any value in science fiction being its own part of the literary world doing its own thing rather than being part of the mainstream and thus prone to downplay it in their "literature envy"-afflicted way--and still others who were brushing off the discussion simply incapable of understanding what someone discussing a "genre" means by that term, no matter how much other people explain it to them. It is that last category of persons that concerns me at the moment as I consider a likelihood to which I initially paid little attention, namely that those who brushed off the talk of the genre's decline did so partly because they couldn't personally make much comparison between new science fiction and old, certainly in an open-minded way.
Discussing this now it seems only fair to get out of the way the fact that when it comes to science fiction older names have tended to have the most name recognition--Golden Age Big Names like Isaac Asimov, for example, better-known than anybody who came afterward. But those so attentive to science fiction as to have a strong opinion about the question "Is Science Fiction in Decline?" and prone to answer with an emphatic "No!" were apt to be exactly the people who read the new stuff, often a lot of it. It was also the case that they didn't look at the old stuff so much, and then not with an open mind. (Indeed, many is the time they reported having taken a glance at older work like Asimov's and shuddering at prose unbearable to their refined aesthetic sensibilities, as they made much of the social attitudes that seemed to them antediluvian.) The result was that comparing old with new they just couldn't give the old its due--whereas I did, and the fact was indispensable to my contention.
Personally I wouldn't care to stand by either the politics or the literary craftsmanship of E.E. Smith--but in the grand sweep, fecundity of imagination in regard to ye old super-science, and pound-for-pound pulp sci-fi action-adventure thrills that makes space opera what it is I have never encountered the equal of his Lensman saga, which wowed me not as a neophyte, but rather the very seasoned reader of such fiction that I was when I actually got to it. I have no illusions about the originality or accomplishments of John Campbell and his writers. (In Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry I myself stressed Campbell's debts to Wells--and indeed think he can be characterized as having given us a version of the Wellsian approach impoverished by his prejudices and obsessions.) Still, I did and do admire much of what appeared in the pages of the old Astounding under his stewardship, not least what came from the typewriter of the aforementioned Asimov, whose commitment to rationality, not least in regard to artificial intelligence and robotics, remains a touchstone for me (as it is for so many others) because of how the extreme opposite of rationality prevails in our time, the stupidities of the Frankenstein complex still dominating the field--and by way of it, the far from unimportant discourse about artificial intelligence. And if it was not without its own limitations Horace Gold's Galaxy remains for me a high point of the genre's history for its wealth of satirical-sociological science fiction, so many of the novels and short stories which made their first appearances in it--the classics of Alfred Bester, the Pohl and Kornbluth collaboration, the great Robert Sheckley--deservedly became classics. Having all that to compare the new work to enabled me to make a critical judgment of what we have today--while lacking that same basis for comparison has had those who sneer at the merits of older work less able to make any sort of judgment at all, and instead simply heeding the conventional wisdom of an era in which what is conventional wisdom is ever more misleading for anyone at all concerned with reality.
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