In Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, our drunken hero crashes a convention of science-fiction writers. "I love you sons of bitches," he says. "You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."
Star-Schlock. Rosewater feels the same way when he is sober, although he finds it necessary to note that most science-fiction writers can't write "for sour apples."
A fairer estimate lies somewhere between drinks. Although writers from Poe and Hawthorne to William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess and Doris Lessing have written what could be called science fiction, professional science-fiction writers have rarely been encouraged to be good stylists as well. This is partly because SF publishing and marketing methods make little distinction between the kind of star-schlock in which intergalactic cops battle hypothyroid blobs, and a well-wrought literary work in which far-reaching concepts and social problems are dramatized with intelligence, wit and verbal skill. Even the better SF writers often find it necessary to clutter their prose with spectacular appliances and baptize their earthlings with names full of such Siamese vowels and miscegenated consonants as in Tklook and Klaarv.
More important, critics and reviewers who confer literary status rarely know much about science or technology. Most science-fiction writers, however, browse knowledgeably through specialized journals where many of them find the metaphorical seeds of their novels and short stories. Some, like Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke, are trained scientists. Even journeymen practitioners of SF are likely to know more about literature than most novelists and critics know about science. And in the 20th century, ignorance of the fundamentals—and social implications—of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics constitutes an embarrassing form of illiteracy.