Science Fiction Studies - 001 - Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973

Science-Fiction Stu d ies
Volu me 1
Part 1
Spring 1973
David N. Samu els on.
Clarke's Child hood 's End :
A Med ian Stage of Ad oles cence? . . . 4
Patrick Parrind er.
Imagining the Fu tu re: Zamyatin and Wells . . . 17
Stanis law Lem.
On the Stru ctu ral Analys is of Science Fiction . . . 26
Marc Angenot.
Ju les Verne and French Literary Criticis m . . . 33
Robert M. Philmu s .
The Shape of Science Fiction:
Throu gh the His torical Looking Glas s . . . 37
Urs u la K. Le Gu in.
On Norman Spinrad 's The Iron Dream . . . 41
A, B, and C.
The Significant Context of SF:
A Dialogu e of Comfort Agains t Tribu lation.
Trans cribed and ed ited by Darko Su vin ..... 44
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES 3
Science-Fiction Stu d ies , Volu me 1, Part 1, Spring 1973,
Copyright 1973
by
R.D. Mu llen and Darko Su vin.
SUBSCRIPTION to the fou r parts of Volu me 1--
Spring 1973, Fall 1973, Spring 1974, Fall 1974--
is $5.00. The parts ord ered s eparately are $2.00 each.
ADDRESS all commu nications to
Scierice-Fiction Stu d ies , Department of Englis h,
Ind iana State Univers ity, Terre Hau te, Ind iana 47809.
EDITORS
R.D. Mu llen, Ind iana State Univers ity
Darko Su vin, McGill Univers ity
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Elaine Kleiner, Ind iana State Univers ity
Mary Lu McFall, Ind iana State Univers ity
EDITORIAL BOARD
James Blis h, Harps d en
Gale E. Chris tians on, Ind iana State Univers ity
Robert G. Clou s e, Ind iana State Univers ity
Peter Fitting, Univers ity of Toronto
H. Bru ce Franklin, Menlo Park
Northrop Frye, Univers ity of Toronto
Mark R. Hillegas , Sou thern Illinois Univers ity
David Ketterer, Sir George Williams tJnivers ity
James B. Mis enheimer, Ind iana State Univers ity
Patrick Parrind er, Cambrid ge Univers ity
Robert M. Philmu s , Loyola College, Montreal
Franz Rottens teiner, Vienna
Donald F. Theall, McGill Univers ity
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES pu blis hes articles res u lting from the
s tu d y of s cience fiction--inclu d ing u topian fiction, bu t not, except for pu r-
pos es of comparis on and contras t, s u pernatu ral or mythological fantas y.
Articles intend ed for Science-Fiction Stu d lies s hou ld be written in Englis h,
accompanied by an abs tract of fewer than 200 word s , and s u bmitted in
two copies conforming generally to the d ictates of the MLA s tyle s heet, ex-
cept that references s hou ld not be mad e to the pages of cheap paperbacks
or of other ed itions not likely to be fou nd in libraries (cf the next
paragraph).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA. Unles s there is ind ication to the contrary,
each book cited in thes e pages was pu blis hed in hard back in the United
States and /or the United Kingd om in the year s pecified . Information of
greater particu larity is given only when d eemed neces s ary to the valid ity
of a page-reference. When the work in qu es tion has been pu blis hed in
variou s formats and hence in variou s paginations , references are mad e
4 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
not to pages but to chapters or to such other divisions as the author has
made.
5:4 Volume 5, Page 4.
?5= Chapter 5--or the 5th of the smallest divisions
numbered continuously throughout the work.
?5:4 ==Book 5, Chapter 4--or some similar combination.
?5/?4 =-Chapter 5 in one version, Chapter 4 in another.
15 Note 5 in this series of notes.
David N. Samuelson
Childhood's End: A Median Stage of Adolescence?
This article appeared in different form in Mr. Samuelson's University
of Southern California
dissertation "Studies in the Contemporary American and British Science Fiction Novel,"
which is Copyright 1969 by David N. Samuelson.
Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End is one of the "classics" of modern
SF, and perhaps justifiably so. It incorporates into some 75,000 words a
large measure of the virtues and vices distinctive to SF as a literary art
form. Technological extrapolation, the enthronement of reason, the
"cosmic viewpoint", alien contact, and a "sense of wonder" achieved
largely through the manipulation of mythic symbolism are all important
elements in this visionary novel. Unfortunately, and this is symptomatic
of Clarke's work and of much SF, its vision is far from perfectly realized.
The literate reader, especially, may be put off by an imbalance between
abstract theme and concrete illustration, by a persistent banality of style,
in short, by what may seem a curious inattention to the means by which
the author communicates his vision. The experience of the whole may be
saved by its general unity of tone, of imagery, and of theme, but not
without some strain being put on the contract implicit between author
and reader to collaborate in the "willing suspension of disbelief'.
Although much of Clarke's SF is concerned with sober images of
man's probable future expansion of technological progress and territorial
domain, often despite his own worst nature, in a number of stories and at
least three novels he conjures up eschatological visions of what man may
become, with or without his knowing complicity. Against the Fall of Night
(1948) is a fairy tale of a boy's quest for identity in a sterile technological
society far in our future; confined in setting and narrative focus, it
provides adolescent adventure, a veritable catalogue of future technology,
and a cautionary parable in a pleasant blend. 2001: A Space Oclyssey
(1968, "based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke")
ON CHILDHOOD'S END 5
credits a mysterious device of alien manufacture with two quantum jumps
in man's evolution, from pre-man, and to super-man; its choppy structure,
detailed technology, sparse suggestiveness of the evolutionary process, are
ail admirably suited to cinematic presentation, but not untypical of
Clarke's work on his own, as a close examination of Childhood's End
should demonstrate.
From the moon-bound rockets of the "Prologue" to the last stage of
the racial metamorphosis of mankind, familiar science fictions guide us
gradually if jerkily through Childhood's End. Besides futuristic
technological hardware, we are shown three rational utopian societies
and mysterious glimpses of extra-sensory powers. Reducing all of these,
however, practically to the status of leitmotifs, the theme of alien contact
is expanded to include something close enough to the infinite, eternal, and
unknowable that it could be called God; yet even this being, called the
Overmind, is rationalized, and assumed to be subject to natural laws.
Two stages of advanced technology are shown us, one human, one
alien. The first, ca. 2050 A.D., is said to consist mainly in "a completely
reliable oral contraceptive . . . an
equally infallible method of identifying
the father of any child. . .
[and
] the perfection of air transport" ( ?6) . Other
advances vary in seriousness and significance: a mechanized ouija board,
a complete star catalog, "telecaster" newspapers, elaborate undersea
laboratories, plastic "taxidermy", and central community kitchens. The
technology of the Overlords, the guardians of man's metamorphosis, in-
cludes non-injuring pain projectors, three-dimensional image projectors,
cameraless television spanning time as well as space, vehicles that move
swiftly without the feeling of acceleration, interstellar travel, and the
ability to completely transform the atmosphere and gravity of their adop-
ted home planet. In this book, none of these developments is treated in
any detail, and together they amount to no more than a suggestive sketch,
serving as the merest foundation for the hypotheses built up from and
around them.
Technology accounts in part for the utopian social organizations
projected in this book, and also for their failings. Technologically en-
forced law and order, technology-conferred freedom of movement and
sexuality, help to establish a worldwide "Golden Age", but the
elimination of real suffering and anguish, combined with the humans'
sense of inferiority, results in mild anxiety, resentment, and lethargy. To
make utopia really utopian, an artists' colony is established, on the
traditionally utopian, locale of an island, but the colonists don't regard
their creations as having any real value. Whether Clarke could imagine
predictable great art is irrelevant, since their futility underscores the in-
significance of New Athens in the larger context: for the Overlords, the
island is a gathering-point for them to observe the most gifted human
children in the first stages of metamorphosis. Besides being unimportant,
however, utopia is unreachable; just as technology can not make everyone
happy on Earth, so is it insufficient for the supremely rational and scien-
tific Overlords. Their placid orderliness, their long lives, may excite our
envy, but they in turn envy those species which can become part of the
Overmind.
Thus Childhood's End is not really utopian, as Mark Hillegas con-
tends,' so much as it is a critique of utopian goals. Whatever the social
mnachinery, and Clarke is extremely sketchy about how this society is run,
peace and prosperity are inadequate; the people of New Athens need
something more to strive for. This particular "utopia" is only a temporary
st+-ge in man's development. Theoretically, he could go in the direction of
enlarging his storehouse of empirical knowledge; this is the way of the
Overlords, without whom man could not have defused his own self-
destrective tendencies. Yet, paradoxically, the Overlords are present in or-
der to cut man off from entering their "evolutionary cul de sac" to insure
that he takes the other road, parallelling the mystical return of the soul to
God.
On the surface, Clarke seems to commit himself to neutral ex-
trapolation. Science and technology may have their limitations, but they
can increase our knowledge and improve our living conditions. The
technological power of the Overlords may be totalitarian, but their dic-
tatorship is benevolent and discreet. From the "scientific" viewpoint of
speculative biology, even the predestined metamorphosis of mankind
could be seen simply as an evolutionary step, proceeding according to
natural law, with no necessary emotional commitment, positive or
negative. There is a value system implicit in this reading, of course, which
the narrator seems to share with the characters. The supreme represen-
tatives of reason and science, the Overlords, are thinkers and observers in
general, and manipulators and experimenters in their role as mankind's
guardians. The few human characters with whom we have any chance to
identify also exhibit a scientistic attitude, i.e. the belief that science can
discover everything. Stormgren resists the fear that the as-yet invisiblJe
Overlords may be Bug-Eyed-Monsters, and muses on man's absurd super-
stitions: "The mind, not the body, was all that mattered" (?3). Jean
Greggson's clairvoyance is supported by Jan Rodricks' researches, and
counterpointed by the study of parapsychological literature by the
Overlord Rashaverak. George Greggson, when his son begins to dream of
alien planets, is reassured by Rashaverak when he confides "I think
there's a rational explanation for everything" (?18). Even Jan Rodricks
retains his faith in reason in the face of the inexplicable glimpsed on the
Overlord's home planet. Only hysterical preachers and befuddled women
apparently have any doubts.
Yet there is some doubt about reason's power, engendered by the
basic science fictions of the book, the aliens, both those who guard and
guide mankind, and that toward which man is evolving. The Overlords'
espousal of scientific knowledge is open to suspicion. They admit they can
not comprehend the Overmind and that certain mental faculties (intui-
tion, e.s.p.) are closed to them. They are repeatedly deceptive about their
appearance and their mission. First they say they have come to prevent
man's self-destruction, and that man is doomed never to reach the stars.
They later proclaim being sent by the Overmind to oversee man's
metamorphosis, and then admit engaging in scientitic observation of that
transformation for their own purposes. Meanwhile one man does reach
the stars, returning to find that the children of man will indeed reach, and
perhaps inherit, the stars, but only by means of a kind of self-destruction.
Only toward the end do the Overlords confess that their name, made up
by their human subjects, is an ironic one, given their own subject circum-
stances.
It may be that their duplicity is necessary, that man must be readied
for closer approximations of the truth; science and reason both deal with
the world by means of approximations. But even their closest
approximations may be far from tht truth. becaust of their inability to
comprehend, because of further duplicity, or both. They resemble
physically that figure of European folklore known as the "Father of Lies"
their names are suitably devilish, and even their home planet is
reminiscent of Hell: the light from its sun is red, the inhabitants fly
through the dense atmosphere, Jan sees their architecture as dystopianly
functional and unornamented. If he were better versed in literature, he
might also recognize the Miltonic parallel of the Overlords' having
conquered this world after being forced to leave another. The Overlords
are certainly well-versed in human mythic thinking: they require their
first contacts to "ascend" to their ship, they assume a guise of om-
nipotence and omniscience, and Karellen makes his first physical ap-
pearance in the Christ-like pose of having "a human child resting trust-
fully on either arm" (?5).
Starkly contrasting with the Overlords' anthropomorphic shape and
thinking processes is the totally alien Overmind, evoking images of
unlimited power used for unknowable purposes. To the human observer it
appears as a living volcano on the Overlords' planet; its power is also
made visible in the actions of the children of Earth, who convert their
planet to energy in order to propel themselves to an unknown destination.
Yet these visible manifestations seem to be mere side-effects, insignificant
to the purposes of the being. The Overlords claim to know something of its
behavior and composition, from having observed other metamorphoses, as
Karellen indicates: "We believe--and it is only a theory--that the Over-
mind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the
universe. By ncw it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the
tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere.
When it knew that you were ready, it sent us here to do its bidding, to
prepare you for the transformation that is now at hand." The change
always begins with a child, spreading like "crystals round the first nucleus
in a saturated solution" (?20). Eventually, the children will become
united in a single entity, unreachable and unfathomable by any in-
dividual, rational mind. This is the extent of the Overlords' knowledge,
and it may not be reliable; but the metaphor of crystallization can hardly
be adequate to describe the transformed state. All they can really know,
when the Overmind summons them, is that they are to serve as "mid-
wives" at another "birth", and they go like angels at God's bidding, but
"fallen angels" unable to share in the deity's glory.
On the surface, this inability to understand the Overmind is merely a
sign of its strangeness and vastness, which may some day become com-
prehensible to reason and science--after all, how would a human writer
describe something totally alien?--but underneath we feel the tug of the
irrational, in familiar terms. The Overmind clearly parallels the Oversoul,
the Great Spirit, and various formulations of God, while the children's
metamorphosis neatly ties in with mystical beliefs in Nirvana, "cosmic
consciousness", and "becoming as little children to enter the Kingdom of
God". It is therefore fitting that the Overmind be known only vaguely and
indirectly, and the confidence of any individual in isolation that he will
come to understand this being rings as hollow as the boasts of Milton's
Satan. Thus the interplay between the Overlords and the Overmind may
be seen as a reworking of the old morality-play situation of the Devil
trying to steal away from God the souls of men. These Devils appear to be
devoted servaints carrying out God's orders, but the Overlords also never
stop trying to bring Him down to their level, and they manage to convince
the reason-loving men of the story that, just as our faith in science tells
us,
everything has a natural explanation. Those men are doomed, however,
and only the "children of man" may be saved in this Last Judgment and
Resurrection, leaving the continuing struggle between two faiths to rever-
berate in the mind of the reader.
If the reader is thoroughly indoctrinated in the simple paradigms of
ostensibly neutral but implicitly scientistic popular SF of the Verne-
Gernsback-Campbell tradition (and Clarke can hardly have anticipated a
much larger audience in 1949-53), he can be expected to take the side of
reason, science, and Western man, with perhaps a slight anxiety over their
alliance with Devilish aliens. But the reception Childhood's End received
from mainstream reviewers suggests quite a different reading; for them
the eschatological theme was what made the book worthwhile, not the
Overlords' continuation of man's tradition of systematic inquiry, or the
successive approaches to technological utopia.2 They, and many readers
since, have sensed in Clarke a streak of sentimental mysticism, which
makes some of his SF quite congenial to their own views, unconstrained
by the scientist's straitjackets of skepticism, proof, and unbending rules.:3
For all of Clarke's reputation for conservative extrapolation, quite
justified by much of his fiction as well as his non-fiction, he apparently
pushes more buttons when he strays from 'confident expectation of
technological change into what may be termed watered-down theological
speculation.4
Even if a work of SF could be totally neutral in its extrapolations
from the findings and theories of the physical and/or social sciences, those
extrapolations would have to reach the reader by means of
characters,
events, situations described in words which offer at least analogies to his
own experience. Every word, and every word-construct, picks up meanings
from other contexts in which we have seen it, and the more perceptive the
reader is to his own psychology, and to a wide range of literature, the
more meanings and patterns will accrue to his interpretation. The less a
work of SF is anchored in incremental extrapolation from actual ex-
perience, the freer we can expect the reign given to a mythologizing ten-
dency.5 Positive reactions to imaginary situations will be associated not
only with utopia, and its heretical premise of man's perfectibility, but also
with the mythological parallel between utopia and Heaven, whereas
negative reactions will summon up dystopian and Hellish coptexts. The
situation is complicated further by the alliance in medieval Christian
tradition between the Devil and forbidden knowledge, including science,
and by the post-Romantic reversal of values which opposes an oppressive
Judeo-Christian God to ideals of progress, growth, and process. For Blake
perhaps the ringleader of this revolt, the oppressive God was allied with
Newtonian science, an "absentee landlord" of an unjust social order, and
the Devil's strength was passion, disorder, wilfulness, refusal to accept
the rules as absolute limitations. Accordingly, Blake depicted Milton as
on Satan's side, Shelley sympathized with Prometheus, and Goethe with
Mephistopheles (before letting Faust "cop a plea" because he meant
well); Zamyatin's underground, which seeks to overthrow the perfect or-
der of the "United State", clearly has reason for calling itself "MEPHI".6
Clarke seems quite aware of the affinity between alien beings in
science fiction and the apocalyptic and demonic imagery of mythological
fantasy.7 By deliberately choosing devil-figures as spokesmen for scien-
tific, or scientistic, thought, he establishes a growing tension between con-
flicting emotions as the climax of the novel nears, and the reader is
almost forced to make a choice between two extreme positions. If he is
scientifically-oriented, he is offered the possibility of being like the
Overlords, individualistic, isolated, able to understand things only by ap-
proximations from the outside; this is the way of "the Devil's party", but
not in a Blakean, rather in a medieval sense. If the reader is more-
mystically-oriented, he is offered the possibility of giving up the respon-
sibilities of maturity, giving himself over to imagination and the
irrational, and submerging his individuality in a oneness with God. This
is not the only choice available to' man outside the medieval tradition, and
Clarke's awareness that this choice might be untenable for a work of SF,
ostensibly written for a more enlightened audience, may be partly respon-
sible for his prefacing the paperback edition of Childhood's End with the
cryptic statement: "The opinions expressed in this book are not these of
the author". But this is certainly not the only work in which his "normal"
skepticism toward technocracy has modulated into myth.
In dealing with any theme of larger scope than ironing out the bugs in
advanced technological hardware, it may be difficult for an SF writer to
avoid mythic structures." And some have argued, like Samuel Delany,
that "to move into an 'unreal world' demands a brush with mysticism".9
Despite the continuing antagonism between devotees of science and myth.
our age has seen numerous creative and critical attempts to link the two,
such as by opening up the definition of myth to a flexibility undreamt by a
true believer."' But the critically sensitive reader does have the right to
expect the writer of SF to use the myth, rather than be used by it, i.e. to
make the whole book work on science-fictional terms. The Universe may
or may not be comprehensible to reason, but the mythico-religious presen-
tation of the Overmind and the children's metamorphosis does not seem
to me consonant with serious exobiological speculation. It may be
probable, as Clarke writes elsewhere, that alien beings superior to us
exist, but it seems highly improbable that they are so analogous to the
gods and devils of our imagination." Systematic inquiry and testing may
yet turn up scientific verification of e.s.p., but a quasi-religious ex-
planation, tied to the Stapledonian fantasy of a group-mind and to the
fruitless "researches" of spiritualism, turns the reader away from disin-
terested speculation toward simple wish-fulfillment.'2 Not limited to
verified fact, scientific speculation, in or out of narrative fiction, normally
tries to domesticate the unknown in theoretical terms not so
openly con-
tradictory of known realities. In
turning
his
critique of scientism into a
supernatural fable, Clarke has considerably stretched the limitations of
science, if not of SF.
His mechanical wonders and quasi-utopian communities are familiar
conventions; aliens, too, are acceptable as science fictions. The Overlords
are obviously present to the senses, and
psychologically human, and
through them we receive the theory that almost explains the Overmind.
This science-fictional domestication. however. is undercut bv failings in
literary domestication. For example, it is not reasonable that aliens
should be so similar to long-established European (and European only)
folklore. And this is tied to another affront to credibility in Clarkie's use or
e.s.p. Contradicting himself in successive paragraphs, Karellen declares
that man's science could not encompass e.s.p., and that he was sent to
put
a stop to apparently successful studies of e.s.p. (?20). Such research having
been kept from fruition, Karellen is apparently forced to use traditional
spiritualist terms to explain e.s.p., i.e. these powers are real, have long
been labelled but not verified, and have some connections with the Over-
mind. Clarke's own demonstrations are similarly vague, and decidedly un-
scientific: the children's dreams, powers, and cosmic dance are responses
to the Overmind, while Jean's clairvoyance, accomplished by means of a
ouija board (!), is "explained" by her being a "sensitive". Perhaps if we
can accept at face value the Overmind. we should not cavil at a little
spiritualism, but it does seem a bit unfair to explain one "impossibility"
(e.s.p.) by means of another (Overmind), in turn comprehended only par-
tially by yet another (Overlords). This use of the deus ex machina may
have a noble history, and it may be convenient in daydreams and fresh-
man themes on God, but it is at least suspicious in an art form dedicated
to projecting "possibilities". Even if we accept all of these improbabilities
in the context of the story, giving in to the fable, Clarke has another sur-
prise for us. A reader who is aware, as Damon Knight is for example, of
the evidence for Satan's medieval European origin out of bits and pieces
of pagan myth, may well object to the rewriting of history needed to make
the Devil part of the mythology of all peoples, caused by a racial memory
(or premonition) of the future.'3
Gaffes of this magnitude not only upset all but the most hypnotic
suspension of disbelief at the moment, but they also raise doubt as to the
reliability of the narrator, and the credibility of the whole narrative.
Clarke may want us to question the omniscience of science and the
adequacy of the Overlords; Karellen's speech denigrating the ability of
human science to deal with e.s.p. can be fitted into either pattern, or both.
But undermining the veracity of the narrator is a dangerous game to play
with a reader already aware that the subject matter is tenuously anchored
fantasy.
Why does Clarke even attempt this explanation of mythology? Why,
in an SF novel, does he fill several pages with a spiritualistic seance?
Neither was necessary to the theme it would appear, or to the book as a
whole. The Overlords' parallel with the Christian Devil could have been
left unexplained, without impairing them as alien beings or as literary
symbols; the explanation given is worse than none at all. The seance func-
tions peripherally to show the similarity between human and Overlord
minds, and to foreshadow the role of Jean Greggson's children as first
contacts with the Overmind. It also serves to point up man's boredom
with the Golden Age and the ridiculous ends which his technology can be
made to serve, namely the production of mechanized ouija boards, but
Rupert Boyce, whom the party characterizes, is an unimportant figure,
and the success of the seance undercuts the satire. The least important
purpose the seance serves is to provide Jan Rodricks with the catalogue
number of the Overlords' home star; his visit to the museum to consult the
catalogue is equally irrelevant to his stowing away on the starship, which
will go where it will, with or without his knowledge of its destination. The
problem which seems to exist on an SF level is essentially a literary one:
not fully in control of his materials, Clarke has attempted more than he
can fulfill.
The "cosmic viewpoint" which Clarke praised in 1962 in a speech ac-
cepting UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science'4 is
common in SF, as is its negative corollary, inattention to details. Besides
leading writers into multi-volumed "future histories", the cosmic
viewpoint encourages close attention in smaller works only to the major
outlines and the background. The characters are frequently left to fend
for themselves, as it were, in a jungle of disorderly plots, melodramatic in-
cidents, and haphazard image-patterns, which are symptomatic of an un-
balanced narrative technique. Unity, if there is any in such a composition,
frequently is maintained only by an uninspired consistency of style and
tone, and by the momentum built up in the unwary reader by the
breakneck pace of events. Childhood's End, like many books inferior to it,
suffers from just such a disproportionate emphasis on the large,
"significant" effects, at the expense of the parts of which they are com-
posed.
Structurally, disproportion is evident in Childhood's End in several
ways. The three titled sections are balanced in length, but not in space,
time, or relationships between characters and events. Each succession of
actions breaks down into almost random fragments of panoramic
chronicle, desultory conversation, and tentative internal monologue. Part
of the problem may be that the novel "just growed" from a novelette,'5, but
that is symptomatic of Clarke's failure to bring his theme down to
manageable human dimensions. The effect might be similar if he had
written several stories of varying length and intensity, then tried to con-
nect them up to an outline-summary of future history. The point-of-view is
uniformly third-person-omniscient, yet the narrative duties seem divided
between an awe-struck spectator at a cosmic morality play, and a disin-
terested observer of ordinary human events. The historian-spectator is at
least involved in his theme, which he attempts to match in grandeur by
panoramic wide-angle photographs and impressive-sounding
generalizations or sententiae. But the detached observer gives us "slices of
life"--political negotiating sessions, a party, a visit to a library, a press
conference, a group meeting, a counseling session, a sightseeing trip--
which haven't much life, and fails to reveal the principles behind his
slicing. Individual episodes stubbornly resist integration with the whole,
but they can not stand up independently, because they are "illustrations"
insignificant in themselves. Clarke's intent seems to be to counterpoint the
great, slow movement toward metamorphosis with the everyday activities
that people, ignorant of their contribution to the whole, carry on indepen-
dently, activities such as he often treats in his fiction of the predictable
future, where plot is a peg on which to hang the background, and
melodrama adds a little spice. But where the background is a large ex-
panse of space and time, and the context involves the larger mysteries of
life, such stagey effects as Stormgren's kidnapping, the Overlords' intellec-
tual striptease, and the explanation of one mystery by another, are un-
necessary, irrelevant, annoying, and finally self-defeating.
Either a unified plot or a more carefully developed poetic structure
might have been preferable to the awkward misfit of this particular essay
in counterpoint. But Clarke is apparently unable to imagine a plot
adequate to the scope of his framework; his "predictive" novels are
equally plotless and even his tale of the far future is made up of a series of
accidental occurrences, set into motion almost haphazardly by the
adolescent hero's desire for change and adventure. So the counterpoint
structure was attempted for Childhoods End, and the result is a
hodgepodge of pretentious chronicle, apologetic melodrama, and super-
ficial sketches of static unrelated, individual scenes. Even if we regard the
book as an elegy for mankind, for the end of personal and racial
"childhood", the elegiac tone is inconsistent, and insufficient to maintain
unity over 75,000 words without a more carefully wrought "poetic struc-
ture", and the lame, pedestrian style of the novel seems particularly in-
congruous for a poem.
As it is practically plotless, the novel is also almost characterless.
Against the ambitious theme and tremendous scope, individuals and their
merely personal problems are bound to look somewhat insignificant. The
unknown bulks extremely large, and the attitude of the characters is
stereotyped, not in the heroic mold, whose calculated respect for size and
power allows for action, but in the passive mold, whose awe and reverence
we normally term "religious". Man the Creator, acting, progressing, con-
tinually making changes in his environment, whom I would consider the
ideal (if not the most common) protagonist of SF, gives way to man the
Creature, full of fear and wonder and more than willing to follow orders
when an encounter with an incalculable unknown power forces him to ad-
mit how small he is and how little he knows. '" Although the fear of racial
annihilation is counterbalanced by pride in man's being "chosen", this
revaluation of the inevitable as somehow "good" has an orthodox
religious ring to it, contrasting sharply with the heresy and hubri.s which
have characterized science in modern civilization.'7 Puny on an absolute
scale, man's achievements are respectable measured against the present;
his potential, symbolized by the Overlords, is by no means slighted. To
preserve this respectability, despite the awesome realities beyond, Clarke
does show us representative moments of the better, i.e. rational selves of
certain men.
Stormgren, George, Jan, and Karellen are the only major characters;
one of them is involved in every episode we are shown, not merely told
about. All males, actively questing for knowledge, they all appear con-
fident and rational, unless belief in rationality in the face of the incom-
prehensible is itself irrational. Even their mental processes are shown to
us in formal, grammatical sentences, with no trace of irrational stream-of-
consciousness. Given little to do, however, they seem no more than
marionettes in this cosmic puppet-show. Only Karellen, long-lived,
revisiting a familiar pattern of events, scientifically detached and curious,
has any real stature. Behind his posturing, lecturing, and deceit, his sense
of tragedy makes him the most human of all; his intellectual stubbornness
is like that which doomed his prototype, Milton's Satan, to a similarly
tragic and isolated immortality.
A resigned acceptance, common to all four characters, is largely
responsible for the elegiac tone pervading the book. Stormgren knows he
will never see the Overlords, George knows man has lost his future as
man, Jan knows he can not survive cut off from humankind, and Karellen
knows he will never find the kind of answers that he seeks. It is the
reader's knowledge of impending doom that makes the characters' incon-
sequential behavior and sunny dispositions seem ironic; juxtaposition, a
"cinematic" technique, accomplishes what style does not. Although Clarke
sometimes stumbles over awkward circumlocutions, trite sententiae,
pedantic speech-making, and labored humor, the pedestrian lucidity and
uncomplicated vocabulary of his style seldom draw the reader's attention
away from the events being described. I feel the author's presence only
toward the end, where his style does manage to impart a sense of melan-
cholic majesty to the spectacle. His attempt at generating a "sense of won-
der", which ranges from "gee-whiz" impressions of the Overlords to awed
contemplation of man's fate, is most successful as the children grow more
confident in the testing of their powers, and it culminates in the
cataclysmic shock witnessed by Jan up close, then by Karellen far in the
distance. The note of regret, though cloying and sentimental at times (Jeff
Greggson's dog mourning his master lost in dreams, his parents' final
farewell just before their island community blows itself up), also gains in
depth with this echoing crescendo.
The major source of unity, besides the figure of Karellen and the
basic consistency of style and tone, seems to lie in certain image-patterns
and the repetition of significant motifs. The dozen or so allusions to
figures from folklore and history, while they may be intended to add
depth to the narrative, are so haphazardly chosen and introduced as to
seem unrelated to the whole. On the other hand, the apocalyptic and
demonic imagery of the Overlords and the Overmind is so persistent as to
lay down at the symbolic level a morality play contradicting the rational
message on the surface. The majority of patterns function somewhere in
between these two extremes, mainly as unifying factors. The power of
Stormgren, and his superiority over the human masses, are echoed by the
Overlords' power and superiority over him, and by the Overmind's power
and superiority over them. Karellen's reference to humans as beloved pets
reminds us of his attitude toward Stormgren, and is reinforced by the
dog's loneliness. A widening perspective is seen in the Overlords' intellec-
tual striptease, in the emphasis given e.s.p., in Jan's discovery of what lies
beyond the solar system, in frequent panoramic views of space and time,
of Earth and human society. The frustrated takeoff of the Prologue's
moon-rockets is echoed by Karellen's edict that "the Stars are not for
Man", and by Jan's discovery of the edict's essential if not literal truth
(are the children still "man"?). This frustration is counterbalanced by
Stormgren's "ascent" to Karellen's ship, by flights of Overlord ships away
from Earth (including the one Jan stows away on), and by the final depar-
tures of both children and Overlords. And the final transformation of the
children into a fully symbiotic, super-organic life form is foreshadowed by
images of other kinds of togetherness, progressively becoming more com-
pressed: the fifty starships hovering over world capitals that turn out to be
projections of just one, the mob demonstration broken up by Stormgren,
the gangsters' "conference" broken up by Karellen, the entrance of
Karellen with the children, the party where the seance is held, the artists'
colony whose sense of community rests on its individual members, and a
single family dissolving as its children become something else.
If Childhood's End is not a fully satisfying literary experience, it does
illustrate certain characteristics of SF at its best, and it does exhibit
literary virtues. Respect for rational thought, construction of a cosmic per-
spective, relentless pursuit of extrapolative hypotheses, and a genuine
evocation of the sense of wonder are each positive achievements, on their
own terms. The whole, however, is flawed, not only by deficiencies in style,
characterization, and narrative structure, which could presumably be
corrected by revision, but also by a fundamental dichotomy between op-
posing goals.'8
Algis Budrys sees Clarke's problem as commercial wilfulness;
after
identifying him as the author of "a clutch of mystical novels", Budrys
chides Clarke for his "fixed and pernicious idea of how to produce a
saleable short story [and presumably a novel]. That idea is to introduce
an intriguing technological notion or scientific premise, and then use it to
evoke frights or menaces. [Thus he can] raise a formidable reputation for
profundity by repeating, over and over again, that the universe is wide
and man is very small."'9 Budrys' criticism is pertinent as far as it goes,
but it is limited; Clarke has shown more variety, and capacity for growth
than Budrys would allow, and the flaws in Childhood's End are only
partly, I think, due to the author's eye for a dollar.
Certainly, Clarke is a commercial writer, a member of the second
generation of pulp magazine writers consciously turning out SF. Thus he
has one foot firmly planted in the SF magazines of the 1920's and 1930's,
with their infantile dependency on Bug-Eyed Monsters,-slam-bang action,
and technological artifacts treated as objects worthy of awe and wonder.
But he is also rooted in a "respectable" British literary tradition. Blake,
Shelley, Mary Shelley, Hardy, Butler, Morris, Wells, Doyle, Stapledon,
Huxley, C. S. Lewis, and Orwell all wrote works in which they showed
science and technology as demonic, at least potentially. This tradition is, I
believe, still entrenched in Anglo-American humanistic circles, affecting
like blinders many academics and reviewers, and that part of the literate
public for whom they remain arbiters of literary taste.2"1 Rather than a
critical appreciation for science, they tend to inculcate fear and hostility
toward it; by abdicating their function as a knowledgeable, foreseeing
counterbalance, they make more likely the technocratic state they profess
to anticipate with abhorrence.2'
Given these traditions, neither of which I would call mature, Clarke
and other second generation writers for the SF magazines had little that
was adequate out of which to construct a coherent critique of science and
scientism. If Childhood's End is a "classic", it is partly because it is a
hybrid, a respectable representative of that period during which SF
magazine writers were first trying to reach out to a literary audience, as
well as to their more habitual readers. An ambitious effort, better than
people outside the pulp field thought it capable of achieving, it is also an
abortive effort, an impressive failure, the flaws of which are indicative of
the problems frequently attendant upon the literary domestication of SF.
It has a high seriousness that sets it apart from the ordinary pulp science
fiction novel of any generation, but it barely lives up to its name. An at-
tempt at maturity, Childhood's End is no more than a median stage of
adolescence.
California State University, Long Beach
NOTES
'Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the
Anti-Utopians (1967),
ppl53-54.
2For reviews of Childhood's End after publication, see James J.
Rollo, Atlantic Monthly Nov 1953, p112; William Du Bois, NY Times
Aug. 27, 1953, p23; Basil Davenport, NYTBR Aug. 23, 1953, p19; Groff
Conklin, Galaxy Mar. 1954, ppl18-19; H.H. Holmes
(Anthony Boucher
[W. Anthony White]), NY Herald-Tribune Book Review
Aug. 23, 1953,
p9; P. Schuyler Miller, Astounding Feb. 1954, pp51-52.
3A compendium of reviews, among other things, of a later work
may
be found in Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick's 2001
(New
American Library 1970). The propensity of
humanistic, and
scientific,
critics of SF to see it through different-colored glasses I have explored in
some detail in "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: A Study in the
Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Science Fiction with Reference to
the Cultural Division Between the Sciences and the Humanities," B.A.
Thesis, Drew University, 1962.
4Not only has Clarke been publicly lionized for his quasimystical
novels, but of his short stories that have been anthologized by both
academic and commercial editors, theological speculation seems more
rewarded than technological extrapolation. Cf W.R. Cole, A Checklist of
Science Fiction Anthologies (1964, privately printed). A survey of more
recent anthologies, especially those intended as textbooks, bears out this
predominance.
-This argument is derived from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
(US 1957), esp ppl41-150.
6Blake's Milton, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Goethe's Faust, and
Zamyatin's We are just a few of the works that reflect this Romantic
tradition. For a further discussion of the Romantic hero as, among other
things, a "fallen angel", see W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood: or the
Romantic
Iconogral)hy
of the Sea (1950).
7This subject has been explored in some depth by Robert Plank in
The Emotional Significance of Imcginar-v Beings: A Stuidv of the Intet-ac-
tion Between Psychopathology, Literature, and Realitv in the Modern
World (1968).
8Northrop Frye sees these structures as underlying even the most
realistic fiction; see Anatomy of Criticism (US 1957), ppl31-40 and
pcassini.
9Samuel R. Delany, "About Five Thousand One Hundred and
Seventy-Five Words," in Thomas D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of
Realism (1971), p144. Cf Alexei Panshin, "Science Fiction in Dimension,"
in Clareson. For opposing views see Stanislaw Lem, "Robots in Science
Fiction," in Clareson, and Darko Suvin, "On the Poetics of the Science
Fiction Genre," College English 34(1972 ):372-82.
"'Cf Joseph Campbell's discussion of the functions of myth in The
Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), esp "Prologue: The Monomyth";
Northrop Frye, The Modern Century (Canada 1967), esp pplO5-20;
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (4v 1959-68), passim.
"Clarke's sober speculations may be found, for example, in The
Promise of Space (1968), ?29 "Where's Everybody?", and in Voices from
the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (1965), ?[17] "Science and
Spirituality", where in both instances he draws comparisons to what
might be "godlike" qualities in the aliens. Cf Plank (?7).
'2Again, Clarke has paid more serious attention to e.s.p. and the idea
of the group mind in his non-fiction; see Profiles of the Future (1962; 1973
with addenda), ?17 "Brain and Body"; Voices from the Sky (1965), ?[18]
"Class of '00". He has also attacked "The Lunatic
Fringe" for their
gullibility, as in a chapter of that name (?[20]) in Voices. The relation-
ship of e.s.p. to wish-fulfilment is also explored by C.E.M. Hansel, E.S.P.:
A Scientific Evaluation (1966), which debunks the notion made popular
by Rhine that e.s.p. has been empirically verified, and by Robert Plank,
"Communication in Science Fiction," in Samuel I. Hayakawa, ed., Our
Language and Our World (1958).
'3Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science
Fiction, rev ed (US 1967), p188. Knight wrongly accuses Clarke of having
the Overlords encounter man in prehistory; Clarke writes that people
assumed this (?6), but later corrects this impression with the future-
memory explanation (?23). On the amalgamation of the Devil image, in
the particular shape Clarke chose for his Overlords, in the late European
Middle Ages, see Bernard J. Bamberger, Fallen Angels (US 1952), pp208-
32; Maurice
Gargon
and Jean Vinchon, The Devil: An Historical, Critical
and Medical Study, tr Stephen Haden Guest (1930); Pennethorne Hughes,
Witchcraft (1952), ?8; Ernest Jones, Nightmare, Witches, and Devils (US
1931), ppl54-59. The theory of prehistoric encounters with aliens has, of
course, been given wide dissemination quite recently by Erich von
Diiniken in Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1969)
and Gods from Outer Space (1971), both tr by Michael Heron. By a quirk
of fate, the original title of von Dainiken's first book translates literally as
"Memories of the Future".
'4Reprinted from UNESCO Courier as "Kalinga Award Speech" in
Arthur C. Clarke, Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age
(1965).
'5"Guardian Angel," New Worlds, Winter 1950, is basically the same
story as Part One of Childhood's End; revision removed some poor repar-
tee, added more background, and diminished slightly the dependence on
melodramatic effect.
'6Cf Algis Budrys' comments on the "inertial school" of SF, with
specific reference to Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, and Knight, in Galaxy Dec
1966, ppI28-33.
'7This is not to say that Clarke is an orthodox adherent to any
religion; his caricatures of the true believer, Wainwright, in the early
pages of Childhood's End, and of the lunatic fringe in Voices from the Sky
(? 12),
seem sincere
enough,
and his non-fiction
writing
is
steadfastly
on
the side of man's continued exploration and expansion of knowledge. But
his flirtation with the mythic imagination is also continuous, even in his
non-fiction, suggesting at least a humble regard for the limitations of
IMAGINING THE FUTURE: ZAMYATIN AND WELLS 17
science and a dependency upon an anti-scientific literary tradition as a
source of imagery.
'In revising the early drafts of 2001: A Space Odyssey (see The Lost
Worlds of 9001 [1972]), in adapting "Guardian Angel" for inclusion in
Childhood's End (see 1 15), and in revising Against the Fall of Night for
republication as The Cit.y and the Stars (1956), which he declared to be
the "final, definitive version" in his introduction to the omnibus volume
From the Ocean, From the Stars (1958), Clarke showed some ear for style
and tone, but seems to have concentrated primarily on logical or aesthetic
consistency of scenes in context.
"'Galaxy Oct 1967, p190.
2(Although it has now been over ten years since the publication of
that cause celebre, C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution (1960), many of its accusations still ring true.
21Two notable exceptions are Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious
Entertainment (1964), and Martin Green, Science and the Shabby Curate
of Poetry (1965). The best critiques of science and technology, however,
seem to be written by scientists, e.g. Nigel Calder, Technopolis (1969).
Patrick Parrinder
Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells
A literature that is alive does not live by yester-
day's clock, nor by today's, but by tomorrow's.
--Yevgeny Zamyatin'
In his recent critical biography of Zamyatin, Alex M. Shane writes
that the question of Wells' influence on Zamyatin's We "has not yet
received extensive, systematic study."2 This is just as well, for the connec-
tion between Zamyatin and Wells raises problems that cannot be solved
by the systematic study of influences, or by the purely content-oriented ap-
proach that most critics of the anti-utopian novel have adopted. In com-
paring Zamyatin and Wells, we should at least seek to ask, how should
(or how can) science fiction be written?
Zamyatin's reputation in the English-speaking world owes much to
George Orwell, who both used We as one of the sources of Nineteen
Eighty-Four and asserted that Huxley must have drawn upon it in Brave
New World.3 It has become usual to place We in the line that includes
those books and other anti-utopias such as Forster's "The Machine Stops"
and Golding's Lord of the Flies. Apart from Zamyatin, this is a very
English tradition--not merely dystopian, but deliberately and consciously
anti-Wellsian--and Mark R. Hillegas has recently argued that their rejec-
tion of Wells' values has concealed the basic indebtedness of all these
writers to Wells' visions and methods. In Zamyatin's case, Hillegas shows
that We reproduces the broad topography of the Wellsian future romance:
the dehumanized
city-state
with its huge apartment blocks, its dictator-
ship, its walls excluding the natural world, and its weird House of An-
tiquity, is built of elements from When the Sleeper Wakes, "A Story of the
Days to Come", and The Time Machine.4 Yet this tells us little about the
spirit in which We was written. The present essay will emphasize two
facts which have been noted but hardly taken into account by previous
critics. The first is that, so far from being a deliberate anti-Wellsian,
Zamyatin was the author of Herbert Wells (1922), a sparkling but little
known essay that puts forth its subject as, in some sense, the prototype of
the revolutionary modern artist. The second is that Zamyatin was himself
a notably original modernist writer, and not merely the precursor of
Huxley and Orwell. To pass from The Time Machine to We is to enter a
world where the topography may be similar, but the nature of experience
is utterly changed, so that we are faced with two quite different kinds of
imagination. In this crucial respect, the "modernist" status that Zamyatin
conferred on Wells in theory was in practice reserved for himself alone.
A marine architect by profession, and an ex-Bolshevik who had been
imprisoned after the 1905 revolution, Zamyatin was building icebreakers
in North-East England when the Tsarist regime was overthrown. He
returned to Russia in September 1917, and became a leading figure
among the left-wing writers of Petersburg until his outspoken and
heretical views came in conflict with the rigid cultural controls of the
1920s. We, his major imaginative work, was written in 1920-21, banned in
the Soviet Union, and published in English translation in 1924. In
ideological terms, it is an expression of his qualms about the technocratic
developments of Western civilization, with a sardonic relevance to the
Bolshevik ideal, notably in the portrayal of the "entropic" stabilization of
the once-revolutionary state, and in the restatement of Dostoyevsky's eter-
nal opposition of freedom and happiness. At the same time as writing We,
Zamyatin, like most of his fellow writers, found himself engaged in
educational work and in the organization of new revolutionary publishing
houses. One of the first foreign authors to be republished was H. G. Wells.
(His works had been abundantly available under the Tsar.) Zamyatin
supervised a series of Wells translations between 1918 and 1926, and Her-
bert Wells, a survey of the whole of his work up to the 1920s, was a by-
product of this,5
Two factors dominated Zamyatin's enthusiasm for the English writer.
There was Wells' standing as a creator of modern myths: Zamyatin saw
the scientific romances, which were his chief interest, as a species of fairy
tale reflecting the endless prospect of technological change and the
rigorously logical demands of scientific culture. They were the fairy tales
of an asphalt, mechanized metropolis in which the only forests were made
ul)
of factory chimneys, and the only scents were those of test tubes and
motor exhausts. Thus they expressed a specifically Western experience:
for the reader in backward Russia, the urban landscapes which had
produced Wells, and not only those he described, belonged to the future.
Zamyatin was enough of a determinist to feel that Wells's expression of
the twentieth-century environment alone constituted an essential moder-
nity. He denotes this side of Wells by the symbol of the aeroplane soaring
above the given world into a new and unexplored element. Just as the
terrestial landscape was transformed by the possibility of aerial
photography, war and revolution are now transforming human prospects.
Zamyatin calls Wells the most contemporary of writers because he has
foreseen this, and taught men to see with "airman's eyes".
He was forced to admit that Wells himself had "come back to earth",
however, in the sense of abandoning science fiction for the realistic social
novel. While suggesting that his social novels were old-fashioned and
derivative beside the scientific romances, Zamyatin used the whole range
of Wells's writings to support this second theme, that of Wells as a
socialist artist. He quotes passages from Wells's introduction to a Russian
edition of his works (1911) in which he declares himself a non-Marxist,
non-violent revolutionary--in other words, a heretical socialist like
Zamyatin himself. The most surprising twist in the argument is the
discussion of Wells's most recent phase, his conversion to belief in a
"finite God" which was announced in Mr. BRitling in 1916. Wells's
wayward and short-lived attempt to combine rationalism and religion
later appeared as an absurdity even to himself, but for Zamyatin it was
proof of his independence and of his imaginative daring. In the aftermath
of the war, Wells's earlier visions had already come true. "The whole of
life has been torn away from the anchor of reality and has become fan-
tastic," Zamyatin wrote. Wells's response had been to pursue his method
further, until it touched the ultimate meaning of life. The resulting fusion
of socialism and religion was a boldly paradoxical feat recalling the
joining of science and myth in the early romances:
The dry, compass-like circle of socialism, limited by the earth,
and the hyperbole of religion, stretching into infinity--the two are so
different, so incompatible. But Wells managed to breach the circle,
bend it into a hyperbole, one end of which rests on the earth, in
science and positivism, while the other loses itself in the sky.
Although it made a stir at the time, Wells's spurious religion hardly
merits this engaging metaphor. The figure of the circle bent into a hyper-
bole is associated with the spiraling flight of the aeroplane. Both are
found elsewhere in Zamyatin's writings, serving as cryptic images of his
theory of art.
In the essay "On Synthetism" (1922), he divides all art into three
schools represented by the symbols +,
-,
--
(affirmation, negation, syn-
thesis)."; Art develops into a continual dialectical sequence as one school
gives way to the next. The three schools of art in the present phase are
naturalism (+), symbolism and futurism (-), and "neorealism" or "syn-
thetism" (--), a post-Cubist and post-Einsteinian art which embraces the
paradox of modern experience in being both "realistic" and "fantastic".
Characterized by incongruous juxtaposition and the splintering of planes,
Synthetism is identified in the work of Picasso, Annenkov, Bely, Blok, and
of course Zamyatin himself. But this is only a temporary phase, for each
dialectical triad is subject to an ongoing process of replacement and suc-
cession which observes an eternal oscillation between the extremes of
revolution and entropy. Development is a succession of explosions and
consolidations, and "the equation of art is the equation of an infinite
spiral."
These ideas are the formula of Zamyatin's commitment to permanent
revolution and to the heretical nature of the artist. They are related to his
view of Wells in various ways. In the section of Herbert Wells entitled
"Wells's Genealogy", we read that the traditional utopian romance from
More to Morris bears a positive sign--the affirmation of a vision of earthly
paradise. Wells invents a new form of "socio-fantastic novel" with a
negative sign; its purpose is not the portrayal of a future paradise, but
social criticism by extrapolation. There is some ambiguity abouit these
categories, and Zamyatin does not elaborate on them, but it seems evident
that there must also be an anti-utopian form marked (--). When we follow
the struggle of D-503 to achieve social orthodoxy in We, and more
fleetingly as we contemplate the brainwashed Winston at the end of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, the impossibility of our imagining such a future at
all--in any full sense--is what the author confronts us with. Is this perhaps
the negation of the negation?
Such reasoning would limit Wells to an intermediate place in the
dialectic of anti-utopia. Zamyatin usually sees him in a more general way
as epitomizing the dynamic quality of the contemporary imagination. The
aeroplane spiraling upward from the earth is not just Wells but a symbol
of contemporary writing as a whole.7 Moreover, Wells's success in terms of
actual prophecy confirmed his position as a vanguard artist, and indeed
as a "neorealist." Destroying the stable picture of Victorian society with
his strange forward-looking logic, he had foreseen the revolutionary age
when reality would itself become fantastic. Zamyatin credited him with
the invention of a type of fable reflecting the demands of modern ex-
perience--speed, logic, unpredictability. Yet for all this there was one area
in which he lagged behind: "language, style, the word--all those things
that we have come to appreciate in the most recent Russian writers." One
of Zamyatin's metaphors for art is "a winding staircase in the Tower of
Babel." He heralded the verbal and syntactical revolution generating
language that was "supercharged, high-voltage," and he tried to create
such a language in the writing of We.
We is written in the form of a diary. It is true that D-503,
the
diarist,
makes some conscientious attempts to explain his society to alien readers,
but the social picture which emerges (the sole concern of
ideologically
minded critics from Orwell onwards) is essentially revealed through the
medium of the future consciousness, and even the future language, which
are Zamyatin's most radical conceptions. The reflection that a new society
entails new consciousness and language, and that these can only be
adequately suggested by a "futuristic" fictional technique, seems obvious
once stated. Yet it is Zamyatin's imagination of these conditions--his
revelation of the future through its writings--that establishes We as a
uniquely modernist work of science fiction.
Hillis Miller has written that "the transformation which makes a
man a novelist is his decision to adopt the role of the narrator who tells
the story."8 It is from this point of view that the contrast between the in-
fluential Wellsian model of the science-fiction fable, and the form that
Zamyatin created, is more clearly seen.
Wells's concern is with
facing the
unknown; Zamyatin's,
with
being
the unknown. Wells's narratives always have a fixed and familiar point of
reference. Like Swift and Voltaire, he exploits the Enlightenment forms of
the travelogue and the scientific report. In his early romances there is
always a narrator who brings weird and disturbing news and yet wins our
confidence at once by his observance of anecdotal conventions. His
audience is either today's audience or that of the very near future, and his
assumptions are those of contemporary scientific culture. In The Time
Machine, the Time Traveller sets out armed with expectant curiosity,
quick wits, and a cheerful acceptance of danger--the very type of the disin-
terested explorer. He is also equipped to formulate Social Darwinist
hypotheses, and he arrives by trial and error at unanticipated but
presumably correct conclusions. At the end, however, we are casually told
that the Traveller "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of
Mankind" (?17/?13) even before he set out. The information is held back
so that nothing shall interfere with his confidence in the value of ex-
ploration--"the risks a man has got to take" (?4/?3). Similarly, in The
Island of Doctor Moreau, Prendick is a rational, eye-witness observer who
only emerges as insanely misanthropic in the final pages. By such con-
cealments the displacement of the whole narrative is avoided.
The reversal in each of these stories shatters the confidence with
which Wells's observers set out, but there is no substitute for rationalism
as a method. In The War of the Worlds, we are told at the outset that the
humanist conception of the universe has been destroyed, but the narrator
addresses us in the established terms of rational discourse, and then
reassures us of his own essential normality: "For my own part, I was
much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of
papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as
civilization progressed" (?1:1). In each case, what is portrayed is a
biological or anthropological endeavor; the book is an exposition both of
an alien society and of the attempts of a representative bourgeois observer
to know it empirically (hence the importance of the observation of the
Martians from the ruined house, a literal "camera obscura"). The
narrator in The War of the Worlds is drawn to the Martians, although he
does not reject human norms as completely as Gulliver does. Both Swift
and Wells recognized the inherent destructiveness of rationalism. Wells's
attempt to play down the perception appears more deliberate than Swift's
insofar as he was obliged to make a more conscious choice of "eighteenth-
century" narrative forms.
In later romances Wells dropped the rational observer in favor of
characters who directly participate in the alien world. Since his
imaginative interests were more genuinely anthropological than political,
however, the result is the cruder and less exacting form of adventure
narrative typified by When the Sleeper Wakes. There are some interesting
half-experiments which reveal something different: The First Men in the
Moon, with its split between the earthbound Bedford and the disin-
terested rationalist Cavor; and In the Days of the Comet, a regrettably
slipshod attempt to view the present from the perspective of the future.
But Tono-Biungay represents Wells's only major advance in technique,
with its use of the autobiographical form to combine social analysis and
the pragmatic impressions of an uncertain and somewhat manic narrator.
Not only is science eventually symbolized as a destroyer, but the whole
novel embodies a displacement of sociological discourse to express the
drama of radical individualism in the hero's consciousness. This marks an
interesting development in the social novel, but in science fiction the
Wellsian model remained that of the adaptation of Enlightenment
narrative forms based on the rational, objective observer.9
'l'he effect of moving from Wells's romances to We'0 might be com-
pared to the experience of Zamyatin's narrator as he passes beyond the
Green Wall of the city:
It was then I opened my eyes--and was face to face, in reality, with
that very sort of thing which up to then none of those living had seen
other than diminished a thousand times, weakened, smudged over by
the turbid glass of the Wall.
The sun--it was no longer that sun of ours, proportionately
distributed over the mirror-like surface of the pavements; this sun
consisted of some sort of living splinters of incessantly bobbing spots
which blinded one's eyes, made one's head go round. And the trees--
like candles thrusting into the very sky, like spiders squatting flat
against the earth on their gnarled paws, like mute fountains jetting
green. . . . (?27).
This is a new reality, neither seen through a glass (a recurrent mode of
vision in Wells), nor even in the light of scientific reason.
Experience is
splintered and blinding; the head whirls and the self loses its centre of
gravity. The writer is at the mercy of disparate impressions, and
merely
records his conflicting impulses as they mount to a nauseous intensitv.
Although he tries to control his
unruly
consciousness
by
a "rational"
method, it is the method of a
society
not our own.
We begins with a directive inviting all numbers to compose poems or
treatises celebrating the One State, to be carried on the first flight of the
space-rocket Integral as an aid to subjugating the people of other planets.
To the narrator, D-503 (the builder of the Integral) this is a divine com-
mand, but to us the forcing of a "mathematically infallible happiness"
(?1) is brutally imperialistic. The value of space travel itself is thus called
into question (a very un-Wellsian touch), by means of the ironical device
of a narrator who worships mathematical exactitude and straight lines.
Yet as soon as the alienness of D-503's values has been established, it
becomes clear that he himself is internally torn. He undertakes literary
composition as a duty to the state, but chooses to write, not a poem in ac-
cordance with the approved public literary genres (the poetry of the One
State is about as rich and varied as that of the
Houyhnhnms), but a sim-
ple record of his day-to-day impressions. The conflict of group and private
consciousness signified by the novel's title is thus outlined by his initial
choice of mode of writing; he thinks to express what "We" experience, but
his record becomes irretrievably subjective. Already as he begins the diary
his "cheeks are flaming" and he feels as though a child stirred inside him
--dangerous signs, for the irrationality of sensation and of the
philoprogenitive emotion are motifs of rebellion throughout the novel (0-
90's longing for a child parallels D-503's creative instinct, and during the
brief revolutionary outbreak in the One State couples are seen
shamelessly copulating in the public view). As he writes his diary, D-503
becomes increasingly conscious of the lack of continuity in his thoughts
and the disruption of logical processes; finally he goes to the doctors, who
diagnose the diseased growth known as a soul. A healthy consciousness,
he is told, is simply a reflecting medium like a mirror; but he has
developed an absorptive capacity, an inner dimension which retains and
memorizes. The disease is epidemic in the State, and universal fantasiec-
tomy is ordained to wipe it out. Superficially D-503 develops a soul as a
result of falling in love with the fascinating I-330, but really it is con-
stituted by the act of writing. It is his identity as a man who wishes to
write down his sensations that throws D-503 into mental crisis.
Fittingly, it is the diary which betrays him, together with his
rebellious accomplices, to the secret police. It may seem that the one error
of the "mathematically perfect state" was to encourage its members to
engage in literary expression at all--as in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451,
things might run more smoothly if all the books were burnt. But can we be
sure of this? At the end, as the rebellion is crushed, D-503 undergoes fan-
tasiectomy and watches the torturing of I-330, sensible only of the
aesthetic beauty of the spectacle. Notwithstanding our reaction, this ap-
pears to be an exemplary tale from the viewpoint of the One State--and
might even have been what its propaganda chiefs wanted. Certainly an
undue concentration on the political message of We should not obscure
Zamyatin's attempts to suggest the ultimate inexpressibility of his future
society; its experience and its culture are structured in ways we can never
fully understand. The narrator tries to explain things for the benefits of
alien peoples stuck at a twentieth-century level of development, but he
also feels himself to be in the position of a geometrical square charged to
explain its existence to human beings: "The last thing that would enter
this quadrangle's mind, you understand, would be to say that all its four
angles are equal" (?5). A similar argument may apply to the status of the
book itself.
The classic satirical utopia establishes a social picture through in-
congruous comparisons, and We does this too; the work of ancient
literature most treasured in its future society is the book of railway
timetables. But Zamyatin suggests a more disturbing and bewildering
alienness than this method can convev. A new experience is rendered in
an unprecedented language, or perhaps languages, for D-503's diary is a
theatre of linguistic conflict. His "orthodox" selfhood is expressed through
a logical discourse, syllogistic in form and drawing repeatedly on
mathematics, geometry, and engineering for its stock of metaphors. (There
are obvious resemblances to the aggressively "technocratic" style of
Zamyatin's essays.) This is the language in which citizens of the One State
are trained to reconstruct the infallible reasoning behind the State's bald
directives. Even women's faces can be analyzed in terms of geometrical
figures, circles and triangles--providing some striking instances of literary
Cubism. However, this orthodox, mathematic language is unable to sub-
due the whole of D-503's experience. He may see his brain as a machine,
but it is an overheated machine which vaporizes the coolant of logic. He
becomes uncomfortably self-conscious, and his mental operations are no
longer smooth and automatic. His analysis of I-330's face reveals two
acute triangles forming an X--the algebraic symbol of the unknown. More
unknowns supervene, and his memory is forced back to the symbol of
unreason in the very foundation of the mathematics he was taught as
school-- VT the square root of minus one. Soon he confronts the existence
of a whole "universe of irrationals," of 'IT solids lurking in the non-
Euclidian space of subjective experience. To his diseased mind,
m,athematics, the basis of society, seems divided against itself.
The X or unknown element in We always arises within personal ex-
perience. It is identified first in the meeting with 1-330, and we sense it in
the quality of dialogue--probing, spontaneous, and electric--which clashes
sharply with the formulaic responses of the narrator's orthodox discourse.
He has been taught to reduce everything to a mathematical environment,
but as soon as he describes impressions and people, his account takes on
an acutely nervous vitality. As the diary proceeds, the hegemony of or-
thodox discourse diminishes, and the "splintered" style of We is
established--the shifting, expressionistic style which is the basic ex-
perience of Zamyatin's reader. The narrator's mood and attention are
constantly changing; sensations are momentary and thoughts, whether
"correct" or heretical, are only provisional; utterances are charac-
teristically left unfinished. D-503 is encouraged to bear with the confusion
of his kaleidoscopic language by the vaguely pragmatic expectation that
self-expression must somehow lead to eventual order and clarification.
Yet in fact it leads to the consciousness of a schizoid identity from which
only fantasiectomy can rescue him-
We does describe a revolution in the streets, but the narrator's in-
volvement is only accidental, for the real battleground is within his
head." The languages involved are futuristic languages, and (with some
lapses) the fixed points to which D-503 can refer are different from ours;
thus once his experience has transcended the limitations for which he has
been programmed, he is unable to make
elementary distinctions between
dream and reality. It is Zamyatin's resolute attempt to enter the
unknowns of consciousness as well as of politics and technology that
makes We one of the most remarkable works of science fiction in
existence.
Not its artistic techniques, but its topography and social
arrangements (down to Sexual Days and pink tickets) have passed into
the subsequent tradition. Verbal innovation and weird experience are
part of the stock-in-trade of science-fiction writers, but where the basic
assumptions of story and characterization remain unchanged, this is no
more than a kind of mannerism. Ivan Yefremov, author of the popular
Soviet space-tale Andr-omeda, outlines a typical attitude:
The mass of scientific information and intricate terminology used in
the story are the result of a deliberate plan. It seemed to me that this
is the only way to show our distant descendants and give the
necessary local (or temporal) colour to their dialogue since they are
living in a period when science will have penetrated into all human
conceptions and into language itself.'2
What is conferred is "local colour," and this is done by the insertion of
scientific jargon into the emotive narrative of sentimental fiction. My im-
pression is that, despite the variety of available styles and the consciously
manneristic way in which a more sophisticated writer like Ray Bradbury
uses them, science fiction has preserved a rigid combination of futuristic
environment and conventional form. No doubt there are exceptions.
William Golding's The Inheritors involves a highly imaginative projection
of "alien consciousness" as I have defined it here. An interesting and
perhaps more representative case, however, is that of the one English
novel which transmits Zamyatin's direct influence--Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
"Newspeak," perhaps Orwell's most original conception, is based
upon developments in the science of propaganda which Zamyatin hardly
foresaw. Its penetrating critique of the political uses of language extends
what Orwell had done in some of his essays. Yet Newspeak is only the
public rhetoric of Oceania, it is relegated to an Appendix in the novel, and
it is not scheduled for final adoption until 2050. Winston Smith still
speaks Standard English, and the famous opening sentence in which the
clocks are striking thirteen is an effective example of "local colour." Win-
ston, like D-503, is a diarist, but the narrative does not consist of his
diary--which is an economical record of things understood and concluded,
and not a day-by-day journal of uncertainties and confusions. Winston's
diary is an outlet for his rebellious thoughts, but D-503's rebellion is in-
separable from his writing. Nineteen Eighty-Foulr is thus partly a
domestication of the rootless, modernist technique of We. It is a novel
grounded in the tradition of English realism and in the wartime London
landscape, with an appended vision of linguistic change.
Zamyatin does not seem to have doubted that science fiction could be
a major literary genre; Wells wrote his masterpieces in the conviction that
it could not. In this essay I have tried to suggest some considerations
which might apply to science fiction as a mode of imagination, and to
outline two models of major expression within it. The first is the Wellsian
model--the humanist narrative fable in which a man whom we accept as
representative of our culture confronts the biologically and an-
thropologically unknown. The second, realized by Zamyatin, aims to
create the experience and language of an alien culture directly. Each
model thus extends social criticism into a more tentative probing of
rational epistemological assumptions. The books I have considered are
essentially future fantasies in the sense that the century in which they are
set does not greatly matter. But there is a third kind of novel, concerned
with the very near future, of which Nineteen Eighty-Fouii and Vonnegut's
Player Piano are examples. These novels are science fiction in the sense of
including new gadgetry as well as new social institutions, and they may be
of great political importance. What I would say of them is that their
"feel" now seems very close to that of the contemporary realistic novel.
Perhaps reality has indeed become fantastic, as Zamyatin predicted, and
we may apply the label of realism to novels of the "recent future" as well
as of the recent past.
King's College, Cambridlge
NOTES
'Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yetigeny Zaimyaitin,
trans. & ed. Mirra Ginsburg (1970), plO9. The sentence quoted is from
26 SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES
"On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters" (1923).
2Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of
Evgenij Zamjatin
(1968),
p140.
3George Orwell, Review of We (Tribune Jan. 4, 1946) in The Collec-
ted Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell
and Ian Angus (1968), 4:72-75.
4Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the
Anti-Utopians (1967), pp99-109.
'The text of Herbert Wells followed here is that of the first edition
(published in pamphlet form by Epoka, Petersburg, 1922) as translated by
Lesley Milne in Patrick Parrinder, ed., H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage
(1972). The essay also appears in Zamyatin (?11)
"On Synthetism" appears in Zamyatin (911).
7See, e.g., "On Literature. . ." in Zamyatin (?1), plll.
"J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968), p62.
9The reading of Wells's romances presented here is a development of
that outlined in my H.G. Wells (1970), p16 ff.
'?The text of We followed here is that of the translation by Bernard
Guilbert Guerney (1970) except that the heroine is referred to not as "E-
330" but as "I-330", as Zamyatin intended.
"'Tony Tanner--in City of Words (1970), p82(UK)/p70(US)--points
out that the heroes of many recent American novels are trying to get away
from all political commitment, whether pro or anti. Similarly, D-503 is
unwillingly led into conspiracy, and tricked by both sides.
'2Quoted on the dust-jacket of Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale
(Moscow 1960).
Stanislaw Lem
On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction
In the early stages of literary development the different branches of
literature, the genological types, are distinguished clearly and un-
mistakably. Only in the more advanced stages do we find hybridization.
But since some crossbreedings are always forbidden, there exists a main
law of literature that could be called incest prohibition; that is, the taboo
of genological incest.
A literary work considered as a game has to be played out to the
finish under the same rules with which it was begun. A game can be emp-
ty or meaningful. An empty game has only inner semantics, for it derives
entirely from the relationships that obtain between the objects with which
it is played. On a chessboard, for example, the king has its specific
meanings within the rules of the play, but has no reference outside the
rules; i.e., it is nothing at all in relation to the world outside the confines
of the chessboard. Literary games can never have so great a degree of
ON THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE FICTION 27
semantic vacuum, for they are played with "natural language", which
always has meanings oriented toward the world of real objects. Only with
a language especially constructed to have no outward semantics, such as
mathematics, is it possible to play empty games.
In any literary game there are rules of two kinds: those that realize
outer semantic functions as the game unfolds and those that make the un-
folding possible. "Fantastic" rules of the second kind--those that make the
unfolding possible--are not necessarily felt as such even when they imply
events that could not possibly occur in the real world. For example, the
thoughts of a dying man are often detailed in quite realistic fiction even
though it is impossible, therefore fantastic, to read the thoughts of a dying
man out of his head and reproduce them in language. In such cases we
simply have a convention, a tacit agreement between writer and reader--
in a word, the specific rule of literary games that a lows the use of non-
realistic means (e.g., thought-reading) for the presentation of realistic
happenings.
Literary games are complicated by the fact that the rules that realize
outer semantic functions can be oriented in several directions. The main
types of literary creation imply different ontologies. But you would be
quite mistaken if you believed, for example, that the classical fairy tale
has only its autonomous inner meanings and no relationship with the real
world. If the real world did not exist, fairy tales would have no meaning.
The events that occur in a myth or fairy tale are always semantically con-
nected with what fate has decreed for the inhabitants of the depicted
world, which means that the world of a myth or fairy tale is ontologically
either inimical or friendly toward its inhabitants, never neutral; it is thus
ontologically different from the real world, which may be here defined as
consisting of a variety of objects and processes that lack intention, that
have no meaning, no message, that wish us neither well nor ill, that are
just there. The worlds of myth or fairy tale have been built either as traps
or as happiness-giving universes. If a world without intention did not
exist; that is, if the real world did not exist, it would be impossible for us
to perceive the differentia specifica, the uniqueness, of the myth and fairy-
tale worlds.
Literary works can have several semantic relationships at the same
time. For fairy tales the inner meaning is derived from the contrast with
the ontological 'properties of the real world, but for anti-fairy tales, such
as those by Mark Twain in which the worst children live happily and only
the good and well-bred end fatally, the meaning is arrived at by turning
the paradigm of the classical fairy tale upside down. In other words, the
first referent of a semantic relationship need not be the real world but
may instead be the typology of a well-known class of literary games. The
rules of the basic game can be inverted, as they are in Mark Twain, and
thus is created a new generation, a new set of rules--and a new kind of
literary work.
In the 20th century the evolution of mainstream literary rules has
both allowed the author new liberties and simultaneouisly subjected him
to new restrictions. This evolution is antinomical, as it were. In earlier
times the author was permitted to claim all the attributes of God: nothing
that concerned his hero could be hidden from him. But such rules had
already lost their validity with Dostoevsky, and god-like omniscience with
respect to the world he has created is now forbidden the author. The new
restrictions are realistic in that as human
beings we act
only
on the basis
of incomplete information. The author is now one of
us;
he is not allowed
to play God. At the same time, however, he is allowed to create inner
worlds that need not necessarily be similar to the real
world,
but can in-
stead show different kinds of deviation from it.
These new deviations are very important to the
contemporary author.
The worlds of myth and fairy tale also deviate from the real
world,
but in-
dividual authors do not invent the ways in which they do so: in
writing a
fairy tale you must accept certain axioms you haven't
invented, or
you
won't write a fairy tale. In mainstream
literature, however, you are now
allowed to attribute pseudo-ontological qualities of your personal, private
invention to the world you describe. Since all deviations of the described
world from the real world necessarily have a meaning, the sum of all such
deviations is (or should be) a coherent strategy ;r semantic intention.
Therefore we have two kinds of literary fantasy: "final" fantasy as in
fairy tales and SF, and "passing" fantasy as in Kafka. In an SF story the
presence of intelligent dinosaurs does not usually signal the presence of
hidden meaning. The dinosaurs are instead meant to be admired as we
would admire a giraffe in a zoological garden; that is, they are intended
not as parts of an expressive semantic system but only as parts of the em-
pirical world. In "The Metamorphosis", on the other hand, it is not inten-
ded that we should accept the transformation of human being into bug
simply as a fantastic marvel but rather that we should pass on to the
recognition that Kafka has with objects and their deformations depicted a
socio-psychological situation. Only the outer shell of this world is formed
by the strange phenomena; the inner core has a solid non-fantastic
meaning. Thus a story can depict the world as it is, or interpret the world
(attribute values to it, judge it, call it names, laugh at it, etc.), or, in most
cases, do both things at the same time.
If the depicted world is oriented positively toward man, it is the
world of the classical fairy tale, in which physics is controlled by morality,
for in a fairy tale there can be no physical accidents that result in
anyone's death, no irreparable damage to the positive hero. If it is orien-
ted negatively, it is the world of myth ("Do what you will, you'll still
become guilty of killing your father and committing incest."). If it is
neutral, it is the real world--the world which realism describes in its con-
temporary shape and which SF tries to describe at other points on the
space-time continuum.
For it is the premise of SF that anything shown shall in principle be
interpretable empirically and rationally. In SF there can be no inex-
plicable marvels, no transcendences, no devils or demons--and the pattern
of occurrences must be verisimilar.
And now we come near the rub, for what is meant by a verisimilar
pattern of occurrences? SF authors try to blackmail us by calling upon the
omnipotence of science and the infinity of the cosmos as a continuum.
"Anything can happen" and therefore "anything that happens to occur to
us" can be presented in SF.
But it is not true, even in a purely mathematical sense, that anything
can happen, for there are infinities of quite different powers. But let us
leave mathematics alone. SF can be either "real SF" or "pseudo-SF".
When it produces fantasy of the Kafka kind it is only pseudo-SF, for then
it concentrates on the content to be signaled. What meaningful and total
relationships obtain between the telegram "mother died, funeral mon-
day" and the structure and function of the telegraphic apparatus? None.
The apparatus merely enables us to transmit the message, which is also
the case with semantically dense objects of a fantastic nature, such as the
metamorphosis of man into bug, that nevertheless transmit a realistic
communication.
If we were to change railway signals so that they ordered the stopping
of trains in moments of danger not by blinking red lights but by pointing
with stuffed dragons, we would be using fantastic objects as signals, but'
those objects would still have a real, non-fantastic function. The fact that
there are no dragons has no relationship to the real purpose or method of
signaling.
As in life we can solve real problems with the help of images of non-
existent beings, so in literature can we signal the existence of real
problems with the help of prima-facie impossible occurrences or objects.
Even when the happenings it describes are totally impossible, an SF work
may still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems. For example,
the social, psychological, political, and economic problems of space travel
may be depicted quite realistically in SF even though the technological
parameters of the spaceships described are quite fantastic in the sense
that it will for all eternity be impossible to build a spaceship with such
parameters.
But what if everything in an SF work is fantastic? What if not only
the objects but also the problems have no chance of ever being realized, as
when impossible time-travel machines are used to point out impossible
time-travel paradoxes? In such cases SF is playing an empty game.
Since empty games have no hidden meaning, since they represent
nothing and predict nothing, they have no relationship at all to the real
world and can therefore please us only as logical puzzles, as paradoxes, as
intellectual acrobatics. Their value is autonomous, for they lack all
semantic reference; therefore they are worthwhile or worthless only as
games. But how do we evaluate empty games? Simply by their formal
qualities. They must contain a multitude of rules; they must be elegant,
strict, witty, precise, and original. They must therefore show at least a
minimum of complexity and an inner coherence; that is, it must be forbid-
den to make during the play any change in the rules that would make the
play easier.
Nevertheless, 90 to 98 percent of the empty games in SF are very
primitive, very naive one-parameter processes. They are almost always
based on only one or two rules, -and in most cases it is the rule of inversion
that becomes their method of creation. To write such a story you invert
the members of a pair of linked concepts. For example, we think the
human body quite beautiful, but in the eyes of an extraterrestrial we are
all monsters: in Sheckley's "All the Things You Are" the odor of human
beings is poisonous for extraterrestrials, and when they touch the skin of
humans they get blisters, etc. What appears normal to us is abnormal to
others--about half of Sheckley's stories are built on this principle. The
simplest kind of inversion is a chance mistake. Such mistakes are great
favorites in SF: something that doesn't belong in our time arrives here ac-
cidentally (a wrong time-mailing), etc.
Inversions are interesting only when the change is in a basic
property
of the world. Time-travel stories originated in that way: time, which is
irreversible, acquired a reversible character. On the other hand, any inver-
sion of a local kind is primitive (on Earth humans are the highest
biological species, on another planet humans are the cattle of intelligent
dinosaurs; we consist of albumen, the aliens of silicon; etc.). Only a non-
local inversion can have interesting consequences: we use language as an
instrument of communication; any instrument can in principle be used for
the good or bad of its inventor. Therefore the idea that language can be
used as an instrument of enslavement, as in Delany's Babel-I 7, is in-
teresting as an extension of the hypothesis that world view and
conceptual
apparatus are interdependent; i.e., because of the ontological character of
the inversion.
The pregnancy of a virgo immaculata; the running of 100 meters in 0.1
seconds; the equation 2 x 2=7; the pan-psychism of all cosmic phenomena
postulated by Stapledon: these are four kinds of fantastic condition.
1. It is in principle possible, even empirically possible, to start em-
bryogenesis in a virgin's egg; although empirically improbable today, this
condition may acquire an empirical character in the future.
2. It will always be impossible for a man to run 100 meters in 0.1
seconds. For such a feat a man's body would have to be so totally recon-
structed that he would no longer be a man of flesh and blood. Therefore a
story based on the premise that a human being as a human being could
run so fast would be a work of fantasy, not SF.
3. The product of 2 x 2 can never become 7. To generalize, it is im-
possible to realize any kind of logical impossibility. For example, it is
logically impossible to give a logical proof for the existence or non-
existence of a god. It follows that any imaginative literature based on
such a postulate is fantasy, not SF.
4. The pan-psychism of Stapledon is an ontological hypothesis. It can
never be proved in the scientific sense: any transcendence that can be
proved experimentally ceases to be a transcendence, for transcendence is
by definition empirically unprovable. God reduced to empirism is no
longer God; the frontier between faith and knowledge can therefore never
be annulled.
But when any of these conditions, or any condition of the same order,
is described not in order to postulate its real existence, but only in order
to interpret some content of a semantic character by means of such a con-
dition used as a signal-object, then all such classificatory arguments lose
their power.
What therefore is basically wrong in SF is the abolition of differences
that have a categorical character: the passing off of myths and fairy tales
for quasi-scientific hypotheses or their consequences, and of the wishful
dream or horror story as prediction; the postulation of the incommen-
surable as commensurable; the depiction of the accomplishment of
possible tasks with means that have no empirical character; the pretense
that insoluble problems (such as those of a logical typus) are soluble.
But why should we deem such procedures wrong when once upon a
time myths, fairy tales, sagas, fables were highly valued as keys to all
cosmic locks? It is the spirit of the times. When there is no cure for cancer,
magic has the same value as chemistry: the two are wholly equal in that
both are wholly worthless. But if there arises a realistic expectation of
achieving a victory over cancer, at that moment the equality will dissolve,
and the possible and workable will be separated from the impossible and
unworkable. It is only when the existence of a rational science permits us
to rule the phenomena in question that we can differentiate between wish-
ful thinking and reality. When there is no source for such knowledge, all
hypotheses, myths, and dreams are equal; but when such knowledge
begins to accumulate, it is not interchangeable with anything else, for it
involves not just isolated phenomena but the whole structure of reality.
When you can only dream of space travel, it makes no difference what you
use as technique: sailing ships, balloons, flying carpets or flying saucers.
But when space travel becomes fact, you can no longer choose what
pleases you rather than real methods.
The emergence of such necessities and restrictions often goes un-
noticed in SF. If scientific facts are not simplified to the point where they
lose all validity, they are put into worlds categorically, ontologically dif-
ferent from the real world. Since SF portrays the future or the ex-
traterrestrial, the worlds of SF necessarily deviate from the real world,
and the ways in which they deviate are the core and meaning of the SF
creation. But what we usually find is not what may happen tomorrow but
the forever impossible, not the real but the fairy-tale-like. The difference
between the real world and the fantastic world arises stochastically,
gradually, step by step. It is the same kind of process as that which turns
a head full of hair into a bald head: if you lose a hundred, even a
thousand hairs, you will not be bald; but when does balding begin--with
the loss of 10,000 hairs or 10,950?
Since there are no humans that typify the total ideal average, the
paradox of the balding head exists also in realistic fiction, but there at
least we have a guide, an apparatus in our head that enables us to
separate the likely from the unlikely. We lose this guide when reading
portrayals of the future or of galactic empires. SF profits from this
paralysis of the reader's critical apparatus, for when it simplifies physical,
psychological, social, economic, or anthropological occurrences, the
falsifications thus produced are not immediately and unmistakably
recognized as such. During the reading one feels instead a general distur-
bance; one is dissatisfied; but because one doesn't know how it should
have been done, is often unable to formulate a clear and pointed criticism.
For if SF is something more than just fairy-tale fiction, it has the
right to neglect the fairy-tale world and its rules. It is also not realism,
and therefore has the right to neglect the methods of realistic description.
Its genological indefiniteness facilitates its existence, for it is supposedly
not subject to the whole range of the criteria by which literary works are
normally judged. It is not allegorical; but then it says that allegory is not
its task: SF and Kafka are two quite different fields of creation. It is not
realistic, but then it is not a part of realistic literature. The future? How
often have SF authors disclaimed any intention of making predictions!
Finally, it is called the Myth of the 21st Century. But the ontological
character of myth is anti-empirical, and though a technological
civilization may have its myths, it cannot itself embody a myth. For myth
is an interpretation, a comparatio, an explication, and first you must have
the object that is to be explicated. SF lives in but strives to emerge from
this antinomical state of being.
A quite general symptom of the sickness in SF can be found by com-
paring the spirit in ordinary literary circles to that in SF circles. In the
literature of the contemporary scene there is today uncertainty, distrust of
all traditional narrative techniques, dissatisfaction with newly created
work, general unrest that finds expression in ever new attempts and ex-
periments; in SF, on the other hand, there is general
satisfaction,
contentedness, pride; and the results of such comparisons must give us
some food for thought.
I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radical
changes effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead SF
into a crisis which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more and
more apparent that the narrative structures of SF deviate more and more
from all real processes, having been used again and again since they were
first introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms. SF
involves the art of putting hypothetical premises into the very complicated
stream of socio-psychological occurrences. Although this art once had its
master in H.G. Wells, it has been forgotten and is now lost. But it can be
learned again.
The quarrel between the orthodox and heterodox parts of the SF
fraternity is regrettably sterile, and it is to be feared that it will remain so,
for the readers that could in principle be gained for a new, better, more
complex SF, could be won only from the ranks of the readers of main-
stream literature, not from the ranks of the fans. For I do not believe that
it would be possible to read this hypothetical, non-existent, and
phenomenally good SF if you had not first read all the best and most com-
plex works of world literature with joy (that is, without having been
forced to read them). The revolutionary improvement of SF is therefore
always endangered by the desertion of large masses of readers. And if
neither authors nor readers wish such an event, the likelihood of a
positive change in the field during the coming years must be considered as
very small, as, indeed, almost zero. For it would then be a phenomenon
of the kind called in futurology "the changing of a complex trend", and
such changes do not occur unless there are powerful factors arising out of
the environment rather than out of the will and determination of a few in-
dividuals.
POSTSCRIPT. Even the best SF novels tend to show, in the development
of the plot, variations in credibility greater than those to be found even in
mediocre novels of other kinds. Although events impossible from an objec-
tive-empirical standpoint (such as a man springing over a wall seven
meters high or a woman giving birth in two instead of nine months) do not
appear in non-SF novels, events equally impossible from a speculative
standpoint (such as the totally unnecessary end-game in Disch's Camp
Concentration) appear frequently in SF. To be sure, separating the
unlikely from the likely (finding in the street a diamond the size of your
fist as opposed to finding a lost hat) is much simpler when your standard
of comparison is everyday things than it is when you are concerned with
JULES VERNE AND FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM 33
the consequences of fictive hypotheses. But though separating the likely
from the unlikely in SF is difficult, it can be mastered. The art can be
learned and taught. But since the lack of selective filters is accompanied
by a corresponding lack in reader-evaluations, there are no pressures on
authors for such an optimization of SF.
Krakow
Translated by Franz Rottensteiner and Bruce R. Gillespie, with some
editing by DS and RDM.
Marc Angenot
Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism
From the first studies of the so-called merveilleux scientifique in such
essays as J. Aubry's "Le roman moderne d'hypoth&se scientifique" (La
Revue des Idees, 1906 No. 37) to the latest monograph by Henri Baudin,
La science-fiction (Paris 1971), all French students of SF have granted a
prominent position to those works of Jules Verne published under the
collective title Les voyages extraordinaires. Most of them regard the thirty
novels and stories as a limit a-quo of modern SF and social utopia. This
opinion has been reinforced by the fact that such SF writers of the early
20th century as Paul d'Ivoi, Gaston Lerouge, Maurice Renard, and Jean
de la Hire fell rapidly into discredit and seemed doomed to oblivion
(though some of them are being rediscovered today). This essay will sur-
vey the most significant works published in French on Verne, with em-
phasis on certain recent publications.
At first sight Verne's life appears to have been that of a grand
bourgeois of the provinces. He lived in Picardy during the main part of his
career, and his novels were all first published in a quite reputable and
safe family periodical, the famous Magazin d'Education et de Recreation
of his publisher and friend J. V. Hetzel. But after Verne's death in 1905,
scholars were refused access to his archives, and the Verne family showed
such jealous discretion that important episodes in his life are still veiled
in shadow. The standard biography, Jules Verne: Sa vie et son oeuvre
(Paris 1928), by Mme. Allotte de la
Fuye,
Verne's niece, though useful,
fails to clear up many of the mysteries.
Verne's work also seems simple and clear at first sight. For a long
time critics tended to measure its merits by its accuracy in technological
prophecy, ignoring both the archaic aspects of Verne's "inventions" and
the glaring technical contradictions and impossibilities on which they
were often based.
Present-day critics are studying Verne's imaginative gifts, narrative
techniques, and world view, passing over the illusory scientific or
parascientific value of the novels, which has at last come to be considered
simply irrelevant. Nobody today would
try to link Verne's
originality with
his so-called prophecies. Moreover, it has become obvious that he was not
even the first writer to orchestrate scientific themes that had
previously
lain fallow. Pierre Versins, the
indefatigable Swiss student of SF and
utopia has clearly demonstrated that all of Verne's inventions--travel
to
the moon, submarine ships, artificial
satellites, live
fossils, super ex-
plosives, serial vehicles--had been described in
previous utopian ro-
mances. Verne's genius is not to be found in the
origination of discrete
concepts.
Before World War II Verne was generally considered a, paraliterary
phenomenon, and his admirers, gathered around the "fanzine" Bulletin
de la SociJte Jules Verne (1935-1938), saw themselves as a small group of
passionate amateurs. But already in the mid-20s the surrealists had
drawn attention to the place Verne deserves among the great imaginative
writers. It is interesting to set certain obsessive situations in Verne's
narrative side by side with recurrent images in surrealism: the sub-
terranean world, the city seen as a Gothic-novel castle, the voyage to the
abyss, the land of plenty, the undeciphered message, etc. Such interest
bore fruit during and after World War II, when three comprehensive
studies were published in rapid succession: Bernard Frank, Jules Verne et
ses Voyages (Paris 1941); Rene Escaich, Voyage a travers le monde ver-
nien (Brussels 1951); and Ghislain de Diesbach, Le tour de Jule Verne en
80 livres (Paris 1969).
Critics now began to study the novels in terms of myth, and
sometimes from an ambiguous psychoanalytical point of view. In the
1950s, instead of what had been considered a pedagogical picture of scien-
tific progress ad usum delphini, they began to discover a secret work
developing along the ritual steps of initiation: preliminary purification,
perilous travel, ordeal, attaining the point supreme, death and trans-
figuration. Pure fantasy is clearly rejected by the author of Le Chateau
des Carpathes (The Carpathian Castle), for the enigma always yields to a
rationalist explanation. Unlike Wells or E. R. Burroughs, Verne has no
sympathy with telepathy, spiritism, parapsychology--and yet his imagery,
even though hidden by a positivist and didactic phraseology, goes far
beyond the most unbridled dreamings of his contemporaries.
The reader of Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of
the Earth) is enthralled by the inimitable didactic tone of the passages
that explain the theory of central fire, the geology the carboniferous age,
or the habits of the great reptiles--a tone that transfigures the most
pedestrian lecture into a kind of mysterious incantation. But in the
romanesque episodes the reader also discovers a secret message analogous
to the message of the parchment that induced Professor Liddenbrock and
his nephew to plunge into the crater.
Grottoes, subterranean passages, caves, abysses: the images of hidden
depths are repeated in many of the novels. And in Vernean initiatory
travel, truth is nocturnal, subterranean, locked up in shadows. This theme
has been studied by Michel Butor, a novelist of the first rank and a critic
who has reflected shrewdly on the nature of narrative. His essay in
Reper-,
JULES VERNE AND FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM 35
toire I (Paris 1962). "Le point supreme et l'Age d'or 'a travers quelques
oeuvres de Jules Verne" contributed greatly to the recognition of Verne's
genius. This theme has also been tackled by S. Vierne: "Deux voyages
initiatiques en 1864: Laura de George Sand et le Voyage au centre de la
terre" in Melanges George Sand (Paris 1969). In addition to Journey to
the Center of the Earth, Verne wrote at least three other extremely in-
teresting examples of the initiatory romance: The Adventures of Captain
Hatteras, The Carpathian Castle, and Black Indies.
Marcel More has written two pioneering volumes of
essays: Le tres
curieux Jules Verne and Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne
(Paris
1960 and 1963). His method is difficult to define. He seems to apply him-
self at one moment to a narrow biographical problem and at another to a
conventional theme: Verne and the sea, Verne and music. But More is
never banal: facing a writer who so often used the cryptogram motive, he
evidently started with the conviction that there was a cypher to be found
in the Voyages, underground strata to explore--concealed signs and secret
passages connecting the ill-known life of the novelist with his work. If
More' is from time to time questionable, he is always stimulating.
More made a valuable contribution to Verne studies by demon-
strating that Verne's sources were not confined to the scientific literature
of his time. It is of course important that Verne read scientific journals
carefully, but it is more striking to find in his novels the influence of--or
even references to--utopian socialists like Fourier and Saint-Simon, Ger-
man and English romanticists, or Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bakunin.
More insists upon a parallel between Verne and Villiers de l'Isle
Adam. A contemporary of Goncourt and Maupassant, Auguste de Villiers
de l'Isle Adam (1838-1889) can be considered the last true representative
of romantic fantasy, the last Gothic novelist. His novel L'Eve future
(which deals with an- artificial woman fashioned by Thomas A. Edison--or
rather, a romanesque, mysterious, and far from historical avatar of the
fam(,jv American engineer) combines in a fascinating way scientific
themes (the use of electricity, the building of a robot) and romantic
dreamings (Edison's laboratory having become a sort of Castle of
Otranto, Villiers rediscovers the themes of the Liebestod, the eternal
feminine, etc.). The confrontation of the author of The Future Eve with
the author of The Carpathian Castle, a very similar novel, is quite
revealing. Such confrontations could be extended, and one could find a
place for Verne among such 19th Century writers as Charles Fourier,
Eugene Sue, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Gobineau, Le'on Bloy--all ambiguous
social visionaries, politically reactionary in many respects, but still
rebels,
radical social
critics,
and dauntless aesthetic innovators.
Pierre Macherey has made an interesting but questionable con-
tribution to the Marxist interpretation of Verne in Pour une theorie de la
production litteraire (Paris 1966), which contains both a chapter on Verne
and one on Defoe as Verne's "thematic ancestor". In the differences be-
tween Robinson Crusoe and The
Mysterious Island, Macherey
finds a
changing bourgeois ideology
with
respect
to
technology
and man's
power
over nature. More important-for our purposes is the fact that Macherey
takes Verne's novels as a means of exemplifying and illustrating a thesis
on links between ideology and narrative. He sets out to find a method that
would allow the literary theoretician, first to detect the unique
"ideological project" that has determined the central topic of the work un-
der study (in Verne's case, "man's rule over nature"), then to describe the
figuration imaginaire and symbolic system put into the service of that
project, and finally to produce some hypotheses on the interaction of
ideology and narration. But Macherey's theories are disappointing when
put into practice. He remains within a very simple-minded, vulgar-
M
arxist, Plekhanovian tradition, somewhat refurbished on the surface.
The result is a simplification of the links that probably do connect the
author's imagery with his world view and ideological themes.
A socio-political study that I find much more relevant than
Macherey's is Jean Chesneaux's Lecture politique de Jules Verne (Paris
1971). Chesneaux does not deny the importance of Verne's interests in
science and technology, or in theoretical, somewhat whimsical
speculations, but he argues that these interests are subordinated to a
"comprehensive political analysis of man's relation to nature". He studies
the political ideologies with which Verne's work is embued, ideologies to
which attention had previously been drawn only in Kenneth Allott's
English-language study, Jules Verne (London 1943). He distinguishes the
influence of the 1848 style of humanitarian socialism, the presence of
some Fourierist and Saint-Simonian topics, the expression of an am-
biguous anticolonialism combined with a virulent Anglophobia
(Measuring a Meridian, Off on a
Comet).
Behind his surface bourgeois
conservatism, Jules Verne--a very secret man, as More has pointed out--
concealed audacious political views.
Intended first of all for a teen-age audience and apparently dedicated
to a pedagogical glorification of moderate and positive bourgeois values,
Verne's narratives incurred no reproaches from the educators of his time.
Even so, it is not difficult to find in them a network of themes and theses
tending toward socialism, phalansterism, or even anarchism. The grand
bourgeois of Picardy, anticommunard and antidreyfusite in his correspon-
dence, produced a work which glorifies social rebellion and political
revolution, a work in which Captain Nemo, Robur the Conqueror,
Mathias Sandorf, and Kaw Dzher rise up against a besotted, enslaved,
and condemned society. In Robuir the Con quer-o; and even more clearly
in Maithias Sandorf, Verne rediscovers the narrative structure of the
romantic popular novel: deliberately separated from society, the
Promethean hero sets out as knight-errant and avenger to redeem the
social order he has condemned by rescuing the oppressed and punishing
the villains.
There have also been various attempts at a formalist reading and
structural description of Verne's work, which has proved intriguing to
many of the critics involved in the radical renewal of literary theory in
France in the last ten years. In 1966 there was a special Jules Verne issue
of L'Arc (No. 29) with essays by Jean Roudaut, Michel Foucault, and
Michel Serres, and in 1970 there were essays by Serres (Critique, April)
and Roland Barthes (Poetiqlue, No. 1). These critics insist on a very subtle
system of transformations, a set of motives immanent to the text, and of-
ten tend to a mythical explanation. In his L'Arc essay (pl8), Serres argues
that Verne "collected and hid under the sediments of picturesque
exoticism and up-to-date science, almost the whole European tradition of
mythology, esotericism, initiatory rites, and mysticism." I would be
THE SHAPE OF SCIENCE FICTION 37
reluctant to accept such a view.
From our survey of the recent criticism of Verne's work it is apparent
that we are witnessing an evolution of critical attitude in France toward
the genres of which Verne's work is representative: social utopia, science
fiction, and fantastic romance--genres long considered only from narrow-
minded points of view. The most important contemporary critics and
philosophers have contributed to the clarification of Verne's very rich and
complex output. Step by step, eliminating many misreadings, they have
been winning for Verne a first-rank position in the history of French
literature. This evolution is of course related to the present upswing in
French studies of SF, which are showing signs of vitality after a long
period in which the neglect of SF was relieved only by archaic, gossipy.
and inadequate commentary.
McGill University.
Robert M. Philmus
The Shape of Science Fiction:
Through the Historical Looking Glass
J.O. Bailey. Pilgr-ims Thr olugh S)ace and Time: Tr ends an(l Pat-
terns in Scientific and
Utolpian
Fiction. [Facsimile of original
1948 edition.] With a Foreword by Thomas D. Clareson.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972.
Roger Lancelyn Green. Into Other Worlds: S)ace-Flight in Fic-
tion from Luician to Lewis. UK 1958.
Sam Moscowitz. Exp)lorers of the Infinite:
Shapers
of Science Fic-
tion. US 1963.
"Mulst a name mean someting?" Alice asked doubtfully."
"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short
laugh: "my name means the shape I am... .With a name like
yours, you might be any shape, almost."
In the study of a genre as such, Alice's doubt is an occupational hazard.
Generic names must mean something. The problem SF poses in this
regard is that its name is not, as it were, Hlumpty Dulmpty but Alice. The
name does not in itself and by convention evoke the "shape" and identity
of what it designates; and because it does not, what science fiction
designates must be identified--that is, stipulated. But stipulative
definitions are open to the charge of being more or less arbitrary; and
therein lies, in Humpty Dumpty's sense, the "glory"--meaning "a nice
knock-down argument."
This is not to say that no consensus exists about what science fiction
is and the shape or shapes it may assume. All three books whose
reassessment here has been occasioned by the reprinting of J. 0. Bailey's
Pilgrims Through Space and Time undertake, at least in part, to define
the shape of SF by examining the literary history of the genre, and all
three agree, at least in part, on what works have a place in that history.
Comparing the three books also reveals, however, that neither a general
similarity in approach nor agreement on what specifically is to be ap-
proached suffices to guarantee similar conclusions about the shape SF has
or should have. The differences arise from how the three authors variously
arrange their material and what they choose to attend to.
With few exceptions, Sam Moskowitz organizes Explorers of the In-
finite chronologically by author. Cyrano, Fitz-James O'Brien, Jules Verne,
Frank Reade, Jr., H.G. Wells, M.P. Shiel, E.R. Burroughs, A. Merritt,
Karel Capek, Hugo Gernsback, H.P. Lovecraft, Olaf Stapledon, Philip
Wylie, and Stanley G. Weinbaum have chapters named after them (as
does Frankenstein). Within these chapters, at more or less appropriate
chronological points, Moskowitz subordinates those whom, by im-
plication, he considers lesser figures: Francis Godwin, Swift, George Grif-
fith, Aldous Huxley, and so forth. . . (Stevenson, Bulwer-Lytton, Robert
Cromie, Samuel Butler, Jack London, and E.M. Forster, among others,
Moskowitz forbears to mention
altogether).
Explorers offers rather uneven, though uniformly sketchy, thumbnail
accounts of the SF Moskowitz deems important through the early 1950s.
Preceding these synopses are often thumbnail biographical data on the
author concerned. What relevance such data might have Moskowitz never
makes clear, except insofar as his principle of organization implies that
the shape of science fiction is to be found by investigating its shapers.
However questionable this thesis might be, his book conceals another
still more questionable. In the chronological arrangement of Explorers
one begins to suspect a polemical purpose: an argument that SF "evolves"
from primitive--hence less valuable--into modern, and higher, forms. That
modernity is Moskowitz's chief criterion of value becomes evident in the
very first chapter of Explorers when he patronizingly describes mid-
seventeenth-century Europe as "not too long out of the Dark Ages" and
"slowly freeing itself from an appalling concretion of superstition and
ignorance" (p23). The naive belief in epistemological progress which this
sentiment betrays underlies Moskowitz's value judgments about SF as
well; and as the criterion of judgment it surfaces on the very last page of
his book, where he bemoans SF's "loss of direction and cessation of
evolution as a literary type during the early 1950s."
If Moskowitz's assumptions about literary value are not conducive to
a sympathetic understanding of SF that is not "modern," his misunder-
standings are considerably aggravated by his intellectual irresponsibility.
He would no doubt disclaim any pretentions to be a scholar, and
assiduously avoids anything so pedantic as a footnote (or a bibliography,
for that matter). Instead, he uncritically purveys the opinions he in-
discriminately picks up from sources he does not bother to cite; and
THE SHAPE OF SCIENCE FICTION 39
sometimes the result is that a point which, put judiciously, might be
debatable, becomes, in his rendition, ludicrous. He avers, for example,
that "Literally dozens of instances of borrowing from Cyrano can be
detected in Gulliver's Travels. The most obvious are the Houyhnhnms, in
which Swift put men in a very poor light by comparing them to birds and
beasts. . ." (p30). This kind of reasoning resembles what a reviewer in TLS
once called the Fluellen approach to literary comparison: "If you look in
the maps of the 'orld," Fluellen tells Gower, "I warrant you sall find, in
the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations,
look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also
moreover a river at Monmouth".
At other times Moskowitz's logic is equally cogent. Concerning The
Time Machine he argues: it "is not used as a vehicle for presenting
utopian concepts, since the civilizations described are decadent. It is not a
warning story, since the period in which it is laid is long past the peak of
man's future Golden Age. Nor is the slightest attempt made at satire"
(p134). The view here is not, one would suspect, derivative: who else could
have said such things? After reading remarks like those just quoted, one
almost feels compelled to qualify Dr. Johnson's sentence as too lenient:
this book is both good and original; but where it is good, it is not original,
and where it is original, it is not good.
As an introduction to the history of SF, Into Other Worlds is much
more satisfactory than Explorers. Green presents his material
chronologically according to a cosmographical scheme, so to speak: he
classifies the "space-flights" he discusses on the basis of their planet of
destination. Within this framework he offers extracts from a number of
early and not readily available texts, beginning with Lucian, along with
some useful background information. His summaries gradually become
more and more perfunctory as he approaches the twentieth century; and
Out of the Silent Planet is one of the few works from which he quotes at
length among the science fiction of the last hundred years or so.
Green, like Moskowitz, has prejudices about SF which only become
apparent in the course of reading his book. Green's biases about the shape
SF should have evidence themselves in what he says, in what he ignores,
and in his deviations from a cosmographical arrangement of his material.
He has an antipathy for SF which demythologizes religious dogma or
otherwise presents ideas which are incompatible with what might be
called dogmatic ecumenical Christianity (a la C.S. Lewis). For this reason
he has no sympathy for Cyrano: he judges the lunar Eden of The States
andl Empires of the Moon to be in bad taste and cannot find any positive
philosophy in either of Cyrano's tvovages imaginaires. De Bergerac, he
claims, "used his new worlds merely for the purpose of satirising the
old,
an unfortunate departure . . . which was to influence the stories of jour-
neys into other worlds for nearly two centuries" (p45). Predictably, he is
hostile towards Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men he describes as
"the cosmic tragedy of a race of megalomanic materialists" (pl62). He en-
dorses (p118) the criticism of War of the Worlds advanced in Olit of the
Silent Planet while omitting Lewis' prefatory qualification that Wells
provides more than a view of an alien universe. And, perhaps most absurd
of all his judgments, he declares that Cavor's messages at the end of The
First Men in the Moon "allow Wells to sketch one of his typical Utopias of
scientific progress"
(p141).
Green's bias against secular visions educed from more or less scien-
tific ideas no doubt accounts for his ignoring most modern SF. As far as
Into Other Worlds is concerned, twentieth-century American SF, for
example, hardly exists. At the same time, Green singles out C. S. Lewis,
along with David Lindsay, for a special place in his book. Instead of
grouping Silent Planet with the space-flights to Mars, and Perelandra and
Arcturus with the voyages to sundry other planets, Green reserves his last
chapter for them alone. Moreover, he declines to comment on Lindsay's
opus, for which he echoes Lewis' vague praise.
The inference from Green's book, then, is that SF should have a
religious moral; or, lacking that, have no moral at all. He does not scruple
about distinctions between SF and pure fantasy because such
discriminations are not relevant from his other-worldly point of view.
Though neither acknowledges the fact, both Moskowitz and Green
undoubtedly owe something to Pilgrims Through Space and Time--as do
all other students of SF. Ideas about the shape of SF need to be informed
by some knowledge of how the genre came to be what it is, of its history;
and that knowledge is impossible without a bibliography. Bailey's most
important contribution to the study of science fiction in English is
bibliographical. Without help from sources now taken for granted like
Everett Bleiler's Checklist of Fantastic Literature and Marjorie
Nicolson's Voyages to the Moon (both published after Pilgrims), he ar-
duously put together a list of titles which remains the basis of further
bibliographical investigations.
This list (though not presented as such), annotated and arrayed
chronologically under headings like "The Cosmic Romance" (with sub-
categories like "In Space," "In Time," "In Space-Time"), constitutes the
first half of Bailey's study. The second half seeks to go beyond this kind of
Dewey Decimal Classification by offering generalizations on the shape of
science fiction in chapters entitled "Scaffolding: Structure, Narrative
Method, and Characterization"; "Substance: Conventions and Content-
Patterns"; "Inventions and Discoveries"; and "Creeds."
Regarded as a source of bibliographical information, the first part of
Pilgrims is remarkably thorough, considering that it was the first effort in
that direction. While a few relevant works, understandably enough,
escaped Bailey's notice, he did locate most of the pre-20th-century books
that have a place in the history of SF (along with some, like Orlando
Furioso, that perhaps do not). His summaries vary in point of adequacy;
and he is more unpredictable than either Moskowitz or Green in regard to
what aspects he selects to summarize. Whether he focuses on the vision or
the invention usually depends on what category he assigns a book to. Oc-
casionally his classifications are wilful (David Russen's Iter Lunare, for
instance, is subsumed as a "Wonderful Journey"), but most often they are
at least arguable.
Viewed as an annotated bibliography, Pilgrims is, unfortunately, not
always reliable. Some of its errors--and not all of them are enumerated
here--are simply factual and might have been emended before the text
was reprinted. Among these are the assertions that Robert Paltock is the
author of John Daniel (p21; authorship actually belongs to Ralph Morris)
and that in Bishop Godwin's The Man in the Moone Domingo Gonsales
ON NORMAN SPINRAD'S THE IRON DREAM 41
ascends to the moon directly after "fleeing ... from brigands" (p17; Gon-
sales says he is trying to escape the clutches of cannibalistic savages).
Other misstatements of Bailey's involve serious misreadings: the French
Voyage to the World of Cartesius does not, as Bailey avers, defend
Descartes, it satirizes his theories (see pp2O-21); Margrave, far from being
"the hero" of Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story (p31), is, according to Lyt-
ton, a villainous materialist; and "'supernatural' visitations from non-
Euclidean space," despite Bailey's implication (p71), have nothing to do
with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
As a critical study, Pilgrims suffers from a lack of connection. The
cataloguing approach, which in the first half of Pilgrims discourages
hypotheses about resemblances between SF and, say, the Gothic novel or
satire, typifies the second half of Bailey's study as well. There he provides
lists of things like "Optimistic Ideas" and "Pessimistic Ideas," "Points of
View," "Endings," and so forth. To be sure, many of the generalizations
Bailey offers are valid, and some of them are more than trivially true; but
they are treated as discrete from one another, without any sustained at-
tempt at giving them coherence as a
unitary vision of the
shape science
fiction has.
While Bailey does raise questions about the substance of SF, none of
the critics reviewed here examines seriously the meaning of SF or asks
whether there may be meanings the genre is particularly and peculiarly
qualified to express. In this sense they do treat SF as if it were a Humpty
Dumpty, a shell. Or perhaps only fragments of a shell.
Loyola College, Montreal
Ursula K. Le Guin
On Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream
Adolf Hitler's Hugo-winning novel of 1954, Lord of the Swastika, pre-
sented by Norman Spinrad as The Iron Dream (Avon 1972), is an extraor-
dinary book. Perhaps it deserves the 1973 Hugo, as well.
On the back cover Michael Moorcock compares the book with "the
works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Sir Oswald
Mosley.... It is the very quintessence of sword and sorcery." None of the
authors mentioned is relevant, except Mosley, but the reference to sword
and sorcery is exact. The Iron Dream can be read as a tremendous parody
of the subgenre represented by Moorcock's own Runestaff saga, and by
Conan the Barbarian, and Brak the Barbarian, and those Gor books, and
so on--"heroic fantasy" on the sub-basement level, the writing of which
seems to be motivated by a mixture of simple-minded escapism and
money-minded cynicism.
Taken as a parody of S&S, the book hits all its targets. There is the
Hero, the Alpha Male with his muscles of steel and his clear eyes and his
manifest destiny; there are the Hero's Friends; there are the vile,
subhuman enemies; there is the Hero's Sword, in this case a truncheon of
interesting construction; there are the tests, quests, battles,
victories,
culminating in a final supernal super-victory of the Superman. There are
no women at all, no dirty words, no sex of any kind: the book is a flawless
example of clean obscenity. It will pass any censor, except the one that
sits within the soul.
A parody of S&S, however, is self-doomed. You cannot exaggerate
what is already witlessly exaggerated; you cannot distort for comic effect
something that is already distorted out of all reality. All Spinrad can do is
equal the crassest kind of S&S; no one could surpass it. But fortunately he
has larger game in mind.
There is another kind of book of which this can be said to be a parody
or oblique criticism, and that is the Straight SF Adventure Yarn, as it is
called in manly-modest disclaimer of its having any highfalutin
philosophical/intellectual message, though, in fact, it usually contains a
strong dose of concentrated ideology. This is the kind of story best exem-
plified by Robert Heinlein, who believes in the Alpha Male, in the role of
the innately (genetically) superior man, in the heroic virtues of militarism,
in the desirability and necessity of authoritarian control, etc., and who is
a .very persuasive arguer for all these things. Here The Iron DLream may
have an effect as a moral counterweight: for in reading it, reading all the
familiar things about the glory of battle, the foulness of enemies of the
truth, the joys of obedience to a true leader, the reader is forced to remem-
ber that it is Hitler- saying these things--and thus to qiestion what is
said, over and over. The tension and discomfort thus set up may prove
salutary to people who are used to swallowing the stuff whole.
And, of course, the book is not merely satirising the machismo of cer-
tain minor literary genres, but the whole authoritarian bag. It is, like all
Spinrad's serious works, a moral statement.
The beauty of the thing is the idea of it: a novel by an obsecure hack
named Hitler. The danger, the risk of it is that that idea is embodied in
255 pages of--inevitably--third-rate prose.
This may not bother Spinrad. There are obvious parodic elements in
the style, which is prudish, slightly stiff, and full of locutions such as
"naught but", but in fact the style is seldom very much worse than
Spinrad's own, before Hitlerisation. Since he is one of the best short story
writers in SF, perhaps the best, I doubted my own instinct here,
and
checked back with the stories in the collection The Last Hlurrah of the
Golden Horde (Avon, 1970). Vivid, imaginative, and powerful, the stories
make their impact through their ideas and despite their prose. They
are
mostly written on about the level of this sentence from "Once More, With
Feeling": "There was an expectant tension in her voice that he couldn't
fathom but that rippled the flesh of his thighs." Like most prose
described as "punchy," "gutsy," "hard-hitting," Spinrad's is actually a
highly over-intellectualised style. Nobody who responds sensually and per:
ceptually to the sound and meaning of words could write or can read that
sentence with satisfaction. How do you fathom a tension? with a plumb-
line? How does her tension ripple his thighs? does it make little waves
ON NORMAN SPINRAD'S THE IRON DREAM 43
like grass in the wind on the skin, or little ridges like a washboard?--Of
course one isn't expected to ask such questions, one isn't supposed to react,
to the false concreteness of the verbs except in the most generalised and
fuzzy way--just as with political slogans and bureaucratese. What
Spinrad is after is an idea, a moral idea; of the world of emotions and
sensations, nothing exists but a vague atmosphere of charged violence,
through which the reader is hurled forward breakneck towards the goal.
To read a Spinrad short story is to be driven at top speed across the salt
flats in a racing car. It's a powerful car and he's a great driver. He leaves
the other racers way behind.
But a novel isn't a racing car. It is much more like a camel caravan,
an ocean. liner, or the Graf Zeppelin. It is by essence large, long, slow, in-
tricate, messy, and liable to get where it is going by following a Great Cir-
cle. Variety of pace, variety of tone and mood, and above all complexity of
subject, are absolutely essential to the novel. I don't think Spinrad has
faced that yet. His three long books are over-extended short stories. And
they have been relative failures, because you do not make a novel by just
stretching out a story.
But, in this case, does it matter? How can a novel by Adolf Hitler be
well-written, complex, interesting? Of course, it can't. It would spoil the
bitter joke.
On the other hand, why should one read a book that isn't interesting?
A short story, yes. Even a book of a hundred or a hundred and twenty
pages. At that length, the idea would carry one through; the essential in-
terest of the distancing effect, the strength of the irony, would have held
up. And all that is said in 255 pages could have been said. Nobody would
ask Spinrad to sacrifice such scenes as the winning of the Great Trun-
cheon by the hero Feric and the subsequent kissing of the Great Trun-
cheon by the Black Avengers, or the terrific final scene. These are
magnificent. They are horribly funny. They are totally successful tours de
force. But the long build-ups to them are not necessary, as they would be
in a novel; rather they weaken the whole effect. Only the high points mat-
ter; only they support the ironic tension.
As it is, the tension lags; and I am afraid that those who read the
book clear through may do so because their insensitivity allows them to
ignore the distancing which is the book's strength and justification. They
will read it just as they read Conan, or Starshi)
Trool)ers,
or Goldlfinger
--
as good, clean fun. What's the harm in that? it's all just made up, it's all
just fantasy, isn't it?--And so they will agree with "Homer Whipple" of
N.Y.U., who provides, in the Asterword, the last twist of Spinrad's knife.
After all it can't, Dr. Whipple says, happen here.
This--the misplaced suspension of disbelief--is the risk Spinrad ran,
and surely knew he was running. If he loses, he loses the whole game. And
that will be a disaster, for he is (unlike most of the cautious practitioners
now writing SF) playing for high stakes. His moral seriousness is intense
and intelligent, but he does not moralise and preach at us. He gambles; he
tries to engage us. In other words, he works as an artist.
He has done, in The Iron
Dream,
something as outrageous as what
Borges talks about doing in "Pierre Menard" (the rewriting of I)on
Quixote, word for word, by a twentieth-century Frenchman): he has at-
tempted a staggeringly bold act of forced, extreme distancing. And distan-
cing, the pulling back from "reality" in order to see it better, is perhaps
the essential gesture of SF. It is by distancing thatSF'achieves aesthetic
joy, tragic tension, and moral cogency. It is the latter that Spinrad aims
for, and achieves. We are forced, in so far as we can continue to read the
book seriously, to think, not about Adolf Hitler and his historic crimes--
Hitler is simply the distancing medium--but to think about ourselves: our
moral assumptions, our ideas of heroism, our desires to, lead or to be led,
our righteous wars. What Spinrad is trying to tell us is that it is hap-
pening here.
Portland, Oregon
A, B, and C
The Significant Context of SF:
A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation
A [A is an SF fan trying to become an SF writer; he has a B.A. in
English literature]. I have just been asked to teach, in a nearby com-
munity college, a course in SF, in the "Science and Literature" slot, en-
titled "SF and Future Shock". So I'm thinking of subscribing to SFS, just
as to Extrapolation or a number of fanzines, because I hope to find in it
articles about people like Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, or Ballard, which I
can use in my course.
B [B is a graduate student of literature]. I have lately become
somewhat interested in SF because it seems to me some nuggets of social
criticism can be found in it, though it feels entirely too comfortable in the
Amerikan Empire for my taste. If SFS will--as difterent from the mutual
back-scratching and, as far as I can understand, meaningless little feuds
in the fanzines--bring out the ideological function of SF as a branch of
mass literature to keep the masses quiet and diverted, I might read it in
the university library and use it in my freshman course "Literature and
Changing the World".
C
[C
is a university professor in an English department]. I am
fascinated by SF as an example of modern urbanized folklore, which is of
greatest theoretical interest for anybody interested in poetics and its
paradigms. I do not mean that we have to stick to structuralist orthodoxy
--indeed, what is so fascinating about SF is how its paradigms evolved out
of the oral legend, the voyage extraordinaire, the utopia, the Swiftian
satire, etc., under the impulse of scientific popularization,
sociopolitical changes, etc. I will subscribe to SFS on a trial basis
hoping it will not be either pragmatic and positivistic, as A would like,
nor forget that it deals with a genre of literature out of which you cannot
THE SIGNIFICANT CONTEXT OF SF 45
pick ideas--critical or otherwise--like raisins out ot a cake, as B would
seem to want.
B. Whatever I seem to you to want, I hope you will agree we do not
need one more among the unconscionable overpopulation of academic or
quasi-academic journals. If SF is worthy of sustained critical attention...
A. Hm. I fear that too much of that will kill it off cleanly.
C. Scholarly and critical attention, I would say.
B. If you wish--I don't see the difference between them. Anyway, we
must first of all ask "What are the uses of SF?".
C. Better, "What are and what could be the uses", and furthermore,
"What can criticism tell us about them, and which type of criticism can
tell us anything significant about them?".
A. SF is the literature of change, more realistic than realism.
B. Ah, but is it? I spent some time yesterday with the UN. Statistical
Yearbook 1971, a pastime I recommend to you two gentlemen as quite
eye-opening, and culled some figures out of it which I wish to enter into
the record of this discussion. I have divided them into two columns, DC
for Dominant Countries (Europe with USSR, North America, South
Africa, Australia, and New Zealand), and RW for Rest of the World, and
rounded all figures off. So here goes.
DC RW
Population 1070 2560 millions
Energy Production
(in coal equivalent)
4500
4.3
2500 million tons
1.0 tons per head
Newsprint Consumptiqn 16,900
15.8
4,500 million kilograms
1.8 kilograms per head
Income* 1900 200 $ U.S. per head
Book Production** 370,000
344
90,000 titles
35 titles per million heads
*The ways of UN statistics being inscrutable, the DC statistic here
includes Japan but not the USSR and is thus valid for 925 million
people; the RW statistic includes only Africa and Asia without
the Socialist countries and thus is valid for 1600 million people.
_HWithout-again the
mysterious omission!--the P.R. of China.
To point out the moral: not only each country, but also our old Terra, as
A might say, is divided--despite our unprecedented technical capacities for
making it finally inhabitable in a fashion befitting human potentialities--
between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are concentrated in the
nations comprising about 30% of mankind, which--as happens--are also
almost exclusively White. The economy and therefore the communication
system (including book and periodical dissemination) of the haves differs
radically from that of the have-nots. More than 80% of all book-titles are
written by and published in the "have", and therefore politically
dominant. countries.
C. 'This is a fascinating exercise in literary sociology, to which one
should, however, add that, as we know, the number of copies per title is
disproportionately higher in North America and Europe than anywhere
else, so it's only fair to assume that over 90% of all books produced and
consumed in the world circulate in a closed circuit, in what you called the
politically (and you should have added
economically)
dominant countries.
B. And of course if we added Japan to those countries, and since the
rest of the world quite rightly concentrates on textbooks and similar im-
mediate necessities, we see that "literature" or "fiction" in the sense
developed by the European civilization with the rise of mass
printing and
a bourgeois world view, is in 70% of the world totally unknown... Or if it
is known, it is confined to an extremely thin stratum of
intellectuals,
and
it functions as very effective shop-window dressing for the imperialist
ideology that more and bigger means better--that, say, the para-military
NASA Moon program is the realization of SF dreams. Thus, it conditions
and channels in that direction the expectations of people.
C. For better or for worse, it does seem inescapable to conclude that
our normative circle of teaching, reading and criticizing "fiction" (a term
I'm increasingly dubious about anyway), with all our supporting in-
stitutions such as foundations or ministries for culture, prizes and clubs,
editors and publishers, kudos and heartbreaks, bestsellers and near-
starvations, is a charmed closed circle.
B. Irrelevant to the majority of mankind. And if you see, from some
other statistics I will spare you, that even within the 30% of the white
bourgeois civilization there are entire social
groups that do not consume
literature but newspapers, comics, movies or TV, if anything--then that
majority becomes quite overwhelming. Then we have to conclude that SF
is written for a petty-bourgeois reader, who is indoctrinated by some
variant of a late-capitalist, often wildly Individualistic ethos.
C. Well, I would make all kinds of reservations to this big leap of
yours, such as saying SF is here and now written for such a reader, and
that of course there are exceptions, as we know that corporation
executives and air-force generals, who are certainly not petty-bourgeois,
also read it. And anyway what do you mean -by petty-bourgeois--
shopkeepyr?9
B.
No, obviously
I mean anybody who is not a worker or farmer
working with his hands, nor a capitalist employing people to work for
him, but in between. The three of us discussing SF are all petty-bourgeois.
A. Now that you have again noticed me, let me ask you one little com-
mon-sense question: if SF is all that irrelevant to anybody, except perhaps
in the past and to the virtuous socialist society in Russia and China, why
bother with it? And with a magazine devoted exclusively to it? Why don't
you just go away (to B) into the streets or jungles, or (to C) into your well-
upholstered ivory tower study, and leave us who love SF in peace?
B. First of all, I never said anything about "socialist" societies. In
Cuba and China there is, as far as I know, and I tried hard to know, prac-
tically no SF; in the Warsaw Pact countries, it has its own troubles which
we can save for another discussion. Secondly, even if the circuit within
which SF happens comprises only, say, 10% of the world population, it is
an extremely important 10% and quite worthy of investigation.
A. But you would investigate them only as petty-bourgeois worms
wriggling
under
your microscope?
C. Well, I don't know what B would do, but I would plead for the in-
troduction
of another factor into our
equation. We have so far talked
about the present, or better, synchronic, and thus necessarily
sociopolitical context of SF. But it also has a temporal, diachronic context
as a genre. Now if you'll allow me to go on about this a bit, I have just
been going through E.D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation (1971) for a
graduate seminar, and Hirsch--however one may disagree with him on
other issues--argues persuasively (as do other people such as R.S.
Crane,
Claudio Guillen, etc.) that for any utterance, an essential part of its con-
text--by which I mean "the traditions and conventions that the speaker
relies on, his attitudes, purposes, kind of vocabulary, relation to his
audience," etc. (Hirsch 86-87 )--is represented by its genre. A literary
genre is a collective system of expectations in the readers' minds, stem-
ming from their past experience with a certain type of writing, so that
even its violations--the innovations by which every genre evolves--can be
understood only against the backdrop of such a system. The properties of
a genre enforce meanings for any given readership. The basic property of
all present literary genres is that they are a mode of "leisure activity",
made possible by certain existential situations--by normative economic
possibilities and political decisions, such as limiting the working time to
so many hours per week, putting
a certain price upon the reading, etc. As
other genres, SF is integrated into the normative system of "literature"--
first by opposition to it, then as marginal, now sometimes aspiring to the
status of socially approved "high" literature, etc.
A. If I translate what you have been saying into plain English, it says
that SF is a recognizable group of works distinct from other groups, which
we knew anyway. So why the whole fuss?
C. Ah well, the good old Anglo-Saxon empirical common-sense! But
unfortunately, following your logic we would need no science at all,
because we all know that a rocket can go to the Moon anyway. Well,
perhaps we do, but did we until somebody studied it with a lot of
equations and technical jargon? You mean that gravity is self-evident? Or
that social gravity--the power-relationships in society, which enmesh
culture too--is self-evident? No, what you nicely call "the fuss" is just the
sound of specialized science at work. Yes, so far I have used a certain
specialized discourse to say that SF is distinct from, but also linked with,
other literary genres, which are distinct from, but also linked with, other
forms of human behavior within certain normative social expectations.
But only such a specialized discourse can eventually provide us with a
way of using the sociopolitical insights of friend B, without forgetting that
we are--as you will agree--dealing with literature. For the most important
principle in any genre, as Aristotle suggested some time ago, is its pur-
pose, which is to be inferred from the way the genre functions. That pur-
pose channels the genre into determined social forms; it unifies the
writers and readers by means of "a notion of the type of meaning to be
communicated" (Hirsch 101). Thus, genres are strictly culture-bound,
historical and not metaphysical, they are "guiding conceptions that have
actually been used by writers" (Hirsch 109); and no criticism of SF has a
chance of being relevant if it does not first identify the purposes of the
chunk of SF it is considering--a story, the opus of a writer, the works of
a period, etc.
A. Why not simply ask the writer?
C. Ah, but common sense is a very limited instrument in scholarship.
The writer may be dead, or he may have forgotten, or--most importantly--
he may not be right about the purpose of his tale: the creature has a life of
its own if it is more than a plug or had. It communicates something to the
readers even if the author is unknown.
A. OK, why not ask the readers? Here this sociology stuff could
finally be of some use: just send them forms with questions.
C. Of course, the critical community should try to assemble as much
information as possible about the author's overt purpose and about the
ways his work was accepted by different categories of readers. But again,
what readers--those of the publication date or of today? Opinions about
Shakespeare, say, have shifted radically through time, and just imagine
how radically they will shift about Arthur Clarke. And why should not all
readers of a given time be collectively on the wrong track? The history of
Athenian first prizes for tragedy is almost as sad as that of the Hugo
Awards. No, I'm afraid that the critic's final evidence is the interaction of
his own knowledge and sensibility with the words on the page. In that
respect, the formalists were right and we all have to start by applying
their insight: when judging literature, one begins by a close reading of it
and a discussion of its compositional, characterological, ideational,
rhetorical and other inner relationships.
B makes a grimace and a skeptical sound.
A. Well, such things may after all be useful in my teaching, and I
hope SFS will concentrate on them, and never mind the sweeping
theories.
C. No doubt, both B' sociological context and your "pragmatic for-
malism" should have a place under the sun--if done real well. There are
too few good SF critiques around for a good review to be able to stick to
any scholarly "line". But now we come to my main conclusion which, I
think, transcends both your positions. For I maintain that there is no way
to understand what one is reading unless one has an approximately full
knowledge of the range of the words and the meanings of their jux-
tapositions. This knowledge forms part of historical semantics, that is, it
pertains to ever changing social tastes, which differ from period to period,
from social class to social class, from language to language. And so, con-
sistently intelligent forlmalist criticism leads to consistently intelligent
sociological criticism, and i'ice versa; or better, both must fuise for a
criticism that uwill be able to render justice to any literary genre, and in
particular
to SF.
B. This may all be very interesting, but don't you think that we live in
a catastrophic world, with genocidal warfare, starvation in half of the
world, rising tensions within Amerika itself, ecological collapse, very
possibly an economic crisis, and so on, all looming threateningly ahead?
And is not therefore the usual SF-as-escape ludicrously irrelevant to us
too, not oniy to the other 90% of the world? And shouldn't it therefore be
judged by how much it serves the cause of a liberated mankind?
A. There you go again! Can't you liberate mankind without SF?
C. Well, precisely, I think if you want to liberate mankind--which I
am much in favour of--you cannot start by asking for servitude. I think
SF cannot be your handmaid, but it could be your ally--and an ally is
treated with consideration and met half-way. For SF, as all literature, has
always (and I think this is the answer to A's objection about why bother)
existed in a tension between the sociologically dominant tastes of its
readership and its own bent toward the truly, the radically new. This has
always been an ideologically subversive genre, and most of its very visible
weaknesses today can be traced back to strong existential pressures on its
writers and readers.
A. Well, I would admit some of that exists, even in the U.S.A.--just
think about the troubles Tom Disch had with
Camp Concentration and
Norman Spinrad with The Iron D,-earm. But this was finally rectified....
B. That's not the most important category. A more sophisticated
weapon is financial: hunger has the power to kili, and enforce obedience,
more surely than bullets. That is called repressive tolerance, I believe.
And I would like to see in SFS critics with enough information and guts to
take a long cool look at the powerful shapers of taste and enforcers of or-
thodoxies in SF, such as magazine editors and publishing houses.
C. Serious structural investigations could, and I hope will be under-
taken of phenomena such as Campbell's enforcing of his various or-
thodoxies, or the normative publishing format of 60-80 thousand words
for SF novels 1940-1965, and the deep consequences such taboos have had
on U.S. SF. And similarly crass taboos should be shown up from other
countries and ideological climates. However, the most insidious pressures
on SF are neither administrative nor commercial, but psychological. Most
of us, readers and writers, have been to some extent brainwashed. . .
A and B [in chorui.s]. Speak for vourself!
C. ... brainwashed, even if with wailing and gnashing of teeth, into
the broad individualistic consensus. Many SF writers
probably
do not
feel
too unhappy in their little niche within the one-dimensional vision of the
world; after all, they have invested great pains into the carving out of that
niche. Yet the temptation of being creative somehow, wondrously, pops up
here and there even against such terrible pressures--a "mission of
gravity", indeed. But creativity has then to pay a high price for emerging:
instead of the straight vertical of creative liberation, we get a bent
ballistic curve, or, in some exceptionally powerful take-offs, at best a
tangent. Yet a tension persists between social institutions--the centres of
political, financial and ideological power--and the writer struggling to cut
a path through their jungles armed only with a typewriter and some
paper. That tension between entropy and energy, between the existential
powers-that-be and the creative reaching out toward a vision of the new,
is always rekindled and always revolutionary. And it would seem to me
the goddam duty of the critic to be always on the side of the writer in his
subversions of what exists.
B. Marx called that "a pitiless criticism of all that exists".
C. Quite. Including Marxist orthodoxies. For the demand that we go
into the streets or jungles or the rice fields of Honan is, here and now at
least--(and that might change)--impractical for most of us, and therefore
sectarian. It would, I think, create that very state of emergency, when all
specifically humanized pliisuits are abolished in favour of direct measures
for collective survival, which we are--or at least I am--trying to avoid.
B makes another grimace.
C [somewhat hastily]. This is, of course, not a sneer at working, or if
need be fighting, in the streets, jungles or rice fields: it simply
acknowledges that the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness-through-
reading-SF, or in other words, that the autonomous criteria of all art, in-
cluding very much SF, will (if we are only consistent enough to hold fast
to them without deviating under the pressure of irrational, exploitative
and class-bound prejudices) lead us toward a classless humanism. [Pon-
tificating]. Thus, all art works against dehumanization in direct propor-
tion to its significance established according to its own autonomous
criteria.
A. You mean according to whether there is a poetic theme, a clear
plot, consistent characterization, effective composition, and so on?
C. Yes, I mean that too. But beyond those aspects common to all art,
I mean that SF has a particular historically determined, scholarly
recreatable and critically evaluatable purpose. And I contend that the
minimal common denominator of that purpose, the source of its creative
pathos and the reason for its existence, is something that I like to call
cognition--a central and informing concern for conceiving and discussing
radically new views and understandings of human relationships and
potentialities (even when they are masked as Nautiloids or what not).
That is the specific poetry of SF. Therefore, SF which is significant by the
most immanent, inner or formalist criteria imaginable, will necessarily
clarify hitherto mystified and obscured relationships. It will permit us a
better orientation in our common world; it will militate against class,
nationalist, sexist or racist obscurantism which prettify the exploitation of
man (and nature) by man. I may be too optimistic, but I truly believe that
SF at its best does its bit of such a "production of man by man", and does
it in a powerful and inimitable way. This is to my mind the answer to
"Why SF?", or what are and could be its uses. And if SFS can contribute
to the understanding of both how and also how come SF does that, then
the question of "Why SFS?" will also have been answered.
B
[not qulite persuaded]. Well, let's hope so, but . . .
C [not quite per.suiaded]. Well, let's wait and see, but . . .
The disculssion went on for quite some time, but lack of .space in SFS
forces us to cut it short here.
Montreal.
Transcribed and edited by Darko Sllin.

Science Fiction Studies - 001 - Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Science Fiction Studies - 001 - Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Science-Fiction Stu d ies

You might also like