TABOOS

   Many sf stories are set in imaginary or alien societies, where taboos are an important part of the social structure; Robert SHECKLEY and Jack VANCE both wrote a lot of them. Several such stories are discussed under ANTHROPOLOGY. And sf has a reputation, not always deserved, for attackingthe sacred cows and breaking the taboos of our own society; while a few examples of this are necessarily discussed below, this entry focuses on those taboos set up not by society or by the law but by sf publishers (PUBLISHING).Sf by MAINSTREAM WRITERS has been subjected to no morecensorship than fiction in general, and indeed has often been a medium for discussing "taboo" subjects with comparative freedom, even since before the time of The Great Taboo (1890) by Grant ALLEN. Things were very different within GENRE SF, where publishers were unwilling to alienate any part of their readership, and therefore set a great many taboos into operation for a period that lasted at least from the inception of the SF MAGAZINES in 1926 until well into the 1950s. Most of these taboos relatedto SEX, profanity and RELIGION. Several examples of stories which broke religious or sexual taboos, and consequently had difficulty in finding publishers, are discussed under ALIENS. To mention a single example, Harry HARRISON had great difficulty placing "The Streets of Ashkelon" (1962) - anot extraordinarily daring story about the anthropological ignorance and stupidity of a Christian missionary on an alien planet, and about the damage he does - on the grounds that Christians might find it offensive. Similarly, although since (at least) WWII MAINSTREAM WRITERS have hadconsiderable freedom in discussing sexual matters, magazine sf and genre sf generally remained downright prudish even after the pioneering work (SEX) of Theodore STURGEON and Philip Jose FARMER.Not all subjects weretaboo. Violence, for example, was (and is) all right, and extreme conservative POLITICS (LIBERTARIANISM, SOCIAL DARWINISM) was acceptable to editors like John W. CAMPBELL Jr, whose own editorials on possible justifications for slavery (though not just for Blacks) were notorious. Campbell's ASF also exercised several quite subtle taboos in addition tothose regarding sex and profanity; notably, he strongly disliked publishing downbeat stories in which humanity was somehow unsuccessful, or outwitted by aliens. This sort of prejudice did not precisely take the form of censorship, but the writers all knew very well what sort of stories would be acceptable to which editors. (Later Roger ELWOOD, who for a while in the 1970s controlled a large percentage of the ANTHOLOGY market, was well known for his extremely conservative views, both religious and sexual.) There seems to have been a kind of unspoken agreement not to publish stories of a socialist orientation - although it may just have been that few were written, unlike the position in the early decades of the century when socialist writers like Jack LONDON were at work and being readily published. And until the 1960s Black writers, and indeed Black issues, were rare in magazine sf. Racial problems tended to be discussed symbolically, in terms of meetings with alien races, rather than directly.In the nations which until recently were often described as the communist-bloc countries, political censorship of sf, as of most forms of writing, remained ruthless, especially from the 1940s through the 1960s. As late as 1966 the Soviet writers Yuli DANIEL and Andrey SINYAVSKYwere first imprisoned and then exiled. Political censorship in these nations had its ups and downs in the 1970s, relaxing only in the late 1980s, not long before the Communist Party began losing power throughoutEastern Europe and Russia. The entries for BULGARIA, CZECH AND SLOVAK SF, HUNGARY, POLAND, ROMANIA, RUSSIA and YUGOSLAVIA all (to various degrees) document this phenomenon. Sf, of course, because of its metaphoric flexibility, whereby stories apparently set in the future on other worlds actually tell us something about our world right now, is an ideal medium for subdued political protest, as many Communist-bloc writers (and some Capitalist-bloc writers) knew very well.Moving away from politics, we findthat until the 1960s pessimism in magazine sf was largely if not entirely taboo (OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM). Cannibalism, on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable in genre sf. It turned up quite often even before the 1960s, and has been central in more recent stories like Harlan ELLISON's"A Boy and his Dog" (1969). Ellison was prominent among the ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY and magazine editors of the NEW WAVE in consciously breaking taboos, notably in his DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies, although a decade later most of these stories seemed tame enough (indeed, many were quite tame even at the time). The magazine NEW WORLDS, under Michael MOORCOCK, performed a similar function, rather earlier, in the UK; otheroriginal-anthology series like ORBIT and NEW DIMENSIONS also had an important liberating effect on what could or could not be discussed in genre sf. By 1976 Damon KNIGHT had no qualms about publishing a story advocating incest in a post- HOLOCAUST situation, Felix GOTSCHALK's "The Family Winter of 1986" in Orbit 18 (anth 1976); Knight's editorialforeword itself contained a vulgarity which would have been impossible not long before: "The family that lays together stays together." But the ground-breaking incest story in genre sf is very much older: Ward MOORE's classic "Lot's Daughter" (1954).While the 1980s have been seen, rather like the 1960s, as a period when just about anything controversial could be published in the USA and the UK, there was, especially in the USA, a kind of covert censorship operating in some areas. Sometimes this could perhaps be justifiable: Knight's vulgarity, cited above, seemed less funny once the prevalence of child abuse became publicly known. Otherwise, though, this was the period when infantilism forcefully re-entered the field, after it had been discovered how extremely young much of the audience was for smash-hit films like STAR WARS. Whenever mass-market publishers believe there is big money to be won from the youthful market, then a whole series of taboos comes into operation. (The same syndrome has always been visible in US tv programmes like STAR TREK whose audiences are known to be predominantly young; Star Trek scriptwriters still have "bibles" to tell them what issues cannot be tackled, and what kinds oflanguage cannot be used.) Thus the 1980s saw the reverse of, say, the 1950s, when book publishers offered more freedom than magazine publishers.The genre magazines of the 1980s could generally be as broad-minded as their editors wished, notably in the cases of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE in the USA and INTERZONE in the UK. But book publishers,especially those publishing series for the semi-juvenile market, were very cautious about any undue cleverness or sophistication; though, disgracefully enough, editors as usual did not seem too disturbed by violence. Obviously, many publishers paid no attention to restrictions of this sort, but it is fair to say that during the 1980s the proportion of the mass market where writers could expect to have their more sophisticated work published was shrinking relative to the hack-markets operating according to strict (and uncontroversial) formulae.We should note also that there are cultural trends perceived by editors and journalists as not being worth opposing because to do so makes people cross. In other words, new sacred cows appear every decade. It is not clear to what degree some of these trends operate in sf publishing. A good example in the early 1990s was the topic of global warming and the greenhouse effect: to express the opinion that there was no evidence that the world was getting hotter, and precious little evidence that it was likely to, was to say something disgusting.

   PN