Originally published on Facebook 27 March 2017.
I value great horror fiction as much as I value great science fiction, and in some ways even more, in large part because it functions as science fiction’s reciprocal complement. The subject, at core, is humanity. Horror diagnoses the problem. At its best, science fiction provides the prescription.
This is a very simplistic way of looking at it, because a lot of great science fiction is also diagnosis. Frederik Pohl, for one, in novels like JEM and stories like “A Day At the Lottery Fair,” is also addressing just what the hell’s fundamentally wrong with us. That’s the nature of literary categories: they’re ameobic, they flow into each other’s territories. However, in the broadest outline, my generalization is an accurate one.
You can also say that science fiction is a literature of ideas and that horror is a literature of dreads, and that is why it is possible to be a damn fine horror writer while working with ideas that were moldy before you were born. Really: people are still writing great, great, vampire and zombie novels, because the uniqueness they provide is not in the trope but in the human take. Stephen King hasn’t had many original ideas in his life, and he’d be the first to say so. ‘SALEM’S LOT hid that its subject was vampires for almost two hundred pages, and if you were lucky enough to read that novel when it was new and the secret was not public knowledge, you got to that revelation with a little delight and wonder that he had demonstrated what then manifested as significant balls, to tackle a premise so hackneyed and make it so fresh. But it was the humanity, his particular humanity, that was fresh. And this still goes on. I think his recent REVIVAL builds to one of the most horrifying reveals in the past decade, but honestly: I need say only one word, Lovecraft, to establish that the general idea is nothing new. The humanity, King’s specific humanity, was what was important to its impact. It is POSSIBLE to write great horror if you possess no human understanding but a first-rate thesaurus, but the odds are against you, just as it’s honestly possible to write a great murder mystery if you have no living comprehension of the reasons why human beings murder. (All you really have to possess is the wit to engineer a great locked room; see Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE.) But again, the odds are against you, and you won’t achieve that great gasp of recognition that comes when the reader sees that you have nailed a true whiff of human corruption.
Reciprocally, it is possible to be a great science fiction writer, based only on the power of your ideas, and not really have all that much brilliant to say about actual human behavior. Asimov, for instance, was aces when it came to ideas, but for the most part — and yes, I can name exceptions — his human beings were not all that much more human than his robots. I would pretty much the same thing, sans robots, about James Blish. Many engineering-driven science fiction stories are about folks who, really, seem to be about a micron deep. And I can name a few other writers of grandmaster-level who have similar shallowness, on the page, when it comes to human emotion, though I’d prefer to name those who can clearly excel on both sides of the equation. Theodore Sturgeon, for instance (one reason he was also an excellent horror writer); the aforementioned Pohl; Silverberg; Le Guin; and certainly, by God, Octavia Butler.
Categories can be blurry, and one reason this happens is that every writer of worth is a subgenre of one. I, for instance, write science fiction and horror and middle-grade adventure, but what I am really writing is a sub-sub-sub-subgenre called “Stuff That Came out Of Adam-Troy Castro’s head.” The same can be said of everybody who writes, and so we all bring different strengths and perspectives to the table. Science fiction writers can be great humanists. Certainly, when somebody writes a great Human science fiction story, it is a thing of beauty. But these generalizations have validity. This is why I am confident in saying that the very best horror writers are “better” than all but the very best science fiction writers — but then, I am talking about rarefied air in both cases, am I not?
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