SCIENCE FICTION:
SAM J.LUNDWALL ' |
WHAT IT'S AL/BOUT
SCIENCE
FICTION: Three
definitions:
"Science
fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the
'willing suspension of disbelief on the part of its readers by utilizing an
atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in
physical science, space, time, social science and philosophy."
— Sam Moskowitz
"Science fiction is what you find on the
shelves in the library marked science fiction."
—
George Hay
"Science fiction doesn't exist."
— Brian W. Aldiss
SCIENCE
FICTION: WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT
Illustration
for From the Earth fo the
Moon by Jules Verne.
WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
Sam J. Lundwall
¿1
ace books
a Division of Charier Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
science fiction: what it's all about
Copyright ©, 1971, by Sam J. Lundwall
This
is a revised, enlarged, and specially translated edition of a work first
published in Sweden under the title: Science Fiction—Fran begynnelsen till vara
dagar, and which is copyright ©, 1969, by Sam J.
Lundwall, for Sveriges Radios forlag. Translated by the
author.
An
Ace Book. All
Rights Reserved.
Cover
art by Dean Ellis. For Ingrid
Author's
acknowledgments: For
invaluable help and suggestions given to me during the work on this revised
edition I am grateful to Alvar Appeltofft, Kenneth Bulmer, E. J. Carnell, Alan
Dodd, Philip J. Harbottle, George Hay, Archie Mercer and L. Sjdanov. And, of
course, to Donald A. Wollheim, who encouraged me to undertake the job of
translating and revising the book.
- S.J.L.
Printed in U.S.A.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Donald A. Wollheim 7
1. THE FANTASTIC NOVEL 13
2. THE PREHISTORY 26
3. UTOPIA 41
4. THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE 58
5. THE MAGIC UNREALITY 74
6. OUT IN THE UNKNOWN 116
7. WOMEN, ROBOTS AND OTHER PECULIARITIES 143
8. THE MASS-CULTURE STRIKES 180
9. THE MAGAZINES 199
10. FIAWOL! 216
11. THE FUTURE 228
NOTES 242
BIBLIOGRAPHY 245
INDEX 247
INTRODUCTION
by Donald A. Wollheim
We
science fiction readers whose native language happens to be English—that is to
say we American, we Canadian, we British, and we Australian science fiction
readers—tend to a curious sort of provincialism in our thinking regarding the
boundaries of science fiction. We tend to think that all that is worth reading
and all that is worth notice is naturally written in English. In our
conventions and our awards and our discussions we slip into the habit of
referring to our favorites as the world's best this and the world's
best that. The annual American science fiction convention calls itself the
World Science Fiction Convention, though every now and then it deigns to allow
itself to meet overseas, but always with a strong cord attached so that it will
return the next year to its "natural" heliocentric American habitat.
Of
course we recognize with some moderate historical condescension that once
there was a famous founding father named Jules Verne and that he was French.
And we pay tribute to the fact that in the oldest issues of American science
fiction magazines series appeared that had been translated from the German.
Somehow, we also assume that abroad, in non-English speaking lands, there
probably may be some local writers and even local magazines turning out
stories and novels in the native tongues, but obviously going unnoticed and
scarce worth translating.
To one sensitive enough to think about it and
to
realize how provincial such a viewpoint surely must
be, it comes therefore as something of a bewildering discovery upon going abroad
to Western Europe or to Japan to find that these prejudices have real basis.
Scan the published science fiction in Germany, or Holland, or Italy, Spain,
Japan, France, Sweden, Denmark and —lo!—you will find that from eighty to
ninety percent of it is indeed from English originals! Translations galore
into every language, but always of the same American and British masters we
honor in their original editions.
We
come back to wondering how this came to be so. We come back perhaps also not a
little pleased that this is so. What a pat to the ego to discover that
"our" science fiction does indeed dominate the Western world and that
the Hugos given as "World's Best" by some predominantly American
readerhood may be quite justified in that designation.
(It
goes without saying that all this does not apply to that mysterious world of
literature masked by the unreadable Cyrillics of the Russians. There we hear
rumors of a vast literature of science fiction having little in common with
our own—of writers whose fame extends behind that side of the Iron Curtain but
not on our side and where our Big Name writers are scarcely known over in that
unexplored hemisphere.)
Surely,
in the days of Hugo Gernsback's first magazines there were European writers of
equal caliber with our own. Somehow, though, in the intervening decades, there
has been a lapse. Somewhere the potential of European imaginative fantasy has
been shunted aside.
What
then is the true perspective of science fiction in literature? What is science
fiction that it so seizes the minds of youth? What is science fiction today and
what was it in the past? What does it mean to literature and society? In
short—science fiction: what is it all about?
I myself tried to answer this in a book
entitled The
Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today published by
Harper & Row this year (1971). My views therein represent more the
philosophical overview of the answers.
Perhaps
a further enlightening perspective on this problem is to be found, not from
someone at the center of this American-British dominated literature such as
myself, but from a qualified observer on the perimeter —someone to whom English
is a foreign language to be learned and mastered by hard study in order better
to appreciate the ideas contained therein; ideas which may not be present in
such quantity in the literature of a language limited by a much smaller
audience. Such an observer has the advantage of both appreciating the virtues
that exist and noting the oversights. He can see more closely the values of
non-English-language writings, both past and present, and compare them with
the giants we acclaim today. He can evaluate the impact of our writers in
translation and he can point out the demerits of our perhaps overinflated
self-importance in this field.
Such
an observer is the author of this book, Sam J. Lundwall, a native of Sweden, student of science fiction and so
sufficiently skilled in English as to have been able to translate this work
itself into the English you see before you.
Sam J. Lundwall, still below thirty in age, started off, as most s-f writers
do, as an active reader, as an active fan, and rapidly rose to the top of the
small but very intensely competitive Swedish s-f fan world. Publisher
of one of those fan magazines that briefly dominate those microcosms. Science Fiction Nytt, a journal of news and reviews, he became a
leading authority on the subject of science fiction. Evidence of his status was
confirmed bv his first professional publication, a comprehensive
Bibliography of Science
Fiction and Fantasy in
the Swedish language, published in 1964, and soon to reappear in a third and
further enlarged edition. Reading English fluently, he became as versed in the
writings of the United States and England as any of our native collectors and
fans, and being talented, began to assert himself in the cultural sphere of
his own country.
In
the past several years, Lundwall has been connected with the
government-operated Radio Sweden, and has written and produced television
shows, directed plays, held down disc-jockey tasks in pop music, and has himself composed and sung folk music. He is widely known in
his native land for his work in that field and has appeared on popular
recordings in both 45 and long-playing records—and is soon to appear on
casettes. Most recently, Lundwall has become the editor of a new line of
paperback science fiction for the Stockholm publishers, Askild & Karnekull,
primarily translations but also to include original novels.
I
first met Sain Lundwall when Radio Sweden sent him to England with a camera
crew to interview science fiction personalities and to do a
coverage of the annual British Science Fiction Convention, held that
year at Oxford. I had the pleasure of working with him on that project and was
myself interviewed, and I am told subsequently—ahem—starred in one such showing
over the Swedish television network.
In
any case, this apparently started the directors of Radio Sweden to thinking
about science fiction and what it all meant and they commissioned Sam J. Lundwall
to write a book about it. That book, whose title was Science Fiction-, frdn begynnehen till vara
dagar, was
published in 1969 and was an immediate success. We understand that it went into
two or three printings —which is phenomenally good for Sweden. Essentially that
book is the same as the one you have in your hand now.
It
has been translated into English by its author, at my request, and in so doing
Lundwall has slightly enlarged it, revised certain sections to be of greater
interest to an English-reading audience, corrected some minor items, added
others, and generally improved the work. Most of the original illustrations are
included with this new translation and a few extra ones added.
Although I think I know a lot about science,
fiction, I found it fascinating. Lundwall gives a depth to the field we do not
find among other writers on the subject. He presents both a history of science
fiction, a study of its roots and backgrounds, and a commentary. He covers it
in all its aspects: books, magazines, comics, fans and fandom, juvenilia,
series characters, and literary giants. He does this with accuracy and yet with
wit. He does not stint in his admiration nor withhold his scorn when such
attitudes seem to be called for. He can be bluntly harsh or admiringly
applauding.
No
one will agree with everything he says ...
I certainly do not . . . but reading
him is educational, stimulating, and exciting. He brings to science fiction the
perspective we dearly need—someone on the European perimeter, able to praise
where praise is deserved, and able to prick overblown balloons when they need
such deflation.
I commend this book to everyone who reads
science fiction or who wants to know more about it. Sam J. Lundwall is
eminently capable of telling the world what it's all about.
— Donald
A. Wollheim
1. THE FANTASTIC NOVEL
There is a very short story, attributed to
Fredric Brown, which better than any explanation gives an insight into the
world of thought that is the substance of science fiction. It is exemplarily
short, three sentences, and goes, approximately, as follows:
After the last atomic .war, Earth was dead;
nothing grew, nothing lived. The last man sat alone in a room. There was a
knock on the door . . .
I do not say that this is the archetype of all
science fiction, or even that it is typical of the genre as such; but I can
safely assert that if anything can be said to constitute the heart of the
field, call it Sense-of-Wonder or whatever you wish, it must be found somewhere
in those three sentences. For those readers who prefer more emphasis on the
specula-rive scientific element in their science fiction, there is another and
more venerable example, from Bishop John Wil-kins' novel A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet (1638):
Yet
I do seriously, and upon good Grounds, affirm it possible to make a Flying
Chariot, in which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it, as shall
convey him through the Air. And this perhaps might be made large enough to
carry divers Men at the same time, together with Food for their Viaticum, and Commodities for Traffique.
So
that nonwithstanding all these seeming impossibilities, 'tis likely enough,
that there may be means invented of Journeying to the Moone. And how happy
shall they be that are first successful in this
attemptl
It might be thought that this is all pretty
obvious and old hat, but how obvious it might seem
this day, it was certainly not obvious in the year 1638. The first moon landing
did not take place until July 20, 1969, which was somewhat later than the good
Bishop had expected, but obviously there was both foresight and (some might
say) some accuracy in the story. Personally, I do not think that John Wilkins
did prophesy anything, least of all Apollo XI, but
in 1638, this was Sense-of-Wonder in capital letters.
This
might be called the We-told-you-so-didn't-we science fiction. The third example
is of a somewhat later date, and if the earlier samples did not evoke the
specific feeling of Sense-of-Wonder, perhaps this one will:
The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing
less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands
we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it;
they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires;
they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only
use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a
continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter
rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough
their larders would soon be full again.
Their
tower stands on the other side of that river known to Homer—ho rhoos Okeanoio, as he called it—which surrounds the world.
And where the river is narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins'
gluttonous sires, for they like to see burglars rowing easily to their steps.
Some nourishment that common soil has not the huge trees drained there with
their colossal roots from both banks of the river.
There the Gibbelins lived
and discreditably fed. (1)
The principal characters of this story are by
science fiction aficionados fondly referred to as BEM's, or Bug-Eyed Monsters;
hostilely inclined creatures of some disagreeable land, often green and
decidedly slimy. The BEM's belong to the sf arsenal in the same degree as the
old faithful ray guns and the space ships, and even though they nowadays only
seldom twine their tentacles around the beautiful (and seminude) heroine's attractive
figure, as the noble space-hero raises his trusty atomic blaster somewhere in
the background, they still prosper in blissful abandon in the branch of sf
that is known as Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery. It is the old fairy tale all
over again, complete with the dragon and the milksop princess and the magic
sword and the bags of tax-free gold. The above example is from Lord Dun-sany's
short story The
Hoard of the Gibbelins (1912),
which is a moral story with an unusually credible ending; the monsters devour
the hero. The most well-known representative for this branch of science
fiction is otherwise. J. R. R. Tolkien's mighty trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring, which contains all the time-honored
ingredients, including BEM's, called Ores. They are small, malignant and
guaranteed atrocious.
Now
the friend of order and discipline might ask how a literary genre with the
pretentious name of science fiction can contain such disparate elements as
space-flight and fire-breathing dragons. Where is the logic? And,
above all, the definition of the genre?
The
melancholy fact is that there does not exist any unitary
definitions of the genre. Or rather, there exists about as many perfectly valid
definitions as there are readers of what I here for simplicity's sake call
science fiction. (For myself, I would prefer the term Speculative Fiction as
being more descriptive.) The sf buffs present in this connection certain
resemblances to a select club where the venerable old men in the reading room
have sat and slept in their moldering easy-chairs since the early twenties,
with Amazing Stories and Astounding SF over
their white heads; this is the Old Guard, which reads their science fiction
with the emphasis on science,
expecting nothing in the
way of purely literary merits and, consequently, getting nothing of that land.
Every deviation from the rule of scientific accuracy is a scathing sin against
all decency.
The lovers of Space Opera are huddled behind
enormous piles of Startling
Stories, Captain Future Magazine, Thrilling Wonder Stories and the collected works of E. E. Smith, and
follow with glowing eyes the latest super-scientific adventures of the
glorious Space Patrol in the Crab Nebula, where green BEM's of the most
atrocious sort are plotting vile schemes against Humanity. Atomic blasters
blast, heroines cry, and the space ships leap in and out of hyperspace like
frightened hens.
Right by, one can discern the Horror-lovers
with their blood-curdling Weird Tales and
H. P. Lovecraft. European members of this group might be more
fond of E. T. A. Hoffmann. They are a small and persecuted minority, far
from loved by the Amazing
readers.
The
Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery" groups are crowded together in a small
room behind the reading room, from which they look rancorously out toward the
sleeping gentlemen, thoughtfully fingering at their gleaming broadswords.
They are also a minority, but literarily acceptable since the recent upswinging
interest in adult fantasy, and in strong need of lebensraum.
The group of social reformers sit by the bar,
where they exchange views on the future overpopulation, the food crisis,
environment pollution, the goal of Humanity etc., anxiously watched by the H.
G. Wells phalanx which stands somewhere between the reading room and the bar
and doesn't know exactly where they belong.
The "New Wave" advocates keep
themselves company out in the cloak-room. This is a collection of bearded and
long-haired persons who experiment with new literary forms; they are loud and
bothersome and do not have deference for anything, not even for the founder of
the club, old Uncle Hugo Gernsback, and they are regarded with deep distrust by
all other members. Some of them are said to be supported financially by the
Establishment. The members of the science fiction community are deeply worried.
And
yet all those factions and branches are only different sides of the same coin,
and the division into branches is the unhappy consequence of the labeling that
the genre was subjected to around the turn of the century. The early writers of
this particular literature, all the way from Lucian, Cyrano de Bergerac, Swift,
H. G. Wells, etc., based their themes upon scientific facts known or suspected
during their rimes, never suspecting that this particular branch of literature
should be more "scientific" than any other. Their works were often
woven around scientific achievements of a more or less speculative nature,
granted, but so are many other works of literature than can't in any way be
considered science fiction. The science was a background for the idea,
something that the reader could suspend his disbelief with, not an end in
itself a la Popular
Mechanics. This
label was glued to the genre around the turn of the century, when book and
magazine distributors suddenly got books like The War of the Worlds and Looking Backward on then-hands. The distribution system demanded a designation on these
oddities; obviously, they were not love stories, and they were not Wild West or
war stories, even if they contained elements of all these fields. Some
enterprising gentleman leafed through these things that littered his surroundings,
and discovered that they dealt with inventions of various kinds; time machines,
space vehicles and other funny things. This must, then, be scientific adventures,
and, consequently, it was labeled (among other, even more curious noms de
plume) Scientific Romances. It had to have some name, didn't it?
Then
came Hugo Gemsback, a Luxembourg-bom naturalized American, who published a
technical magazine called Modern Electrics. He had the commendable ambition to disseminate new theories and
speculations in literary form, and in this respect he published some science
fiction in his magazine, the most well-known being his own novel Ralph 124C41 + which you probably/ haven't read. There is no
need to feel badly about that, though, because the novel is completely
unreadable. Gemsback was a good engineer and editor, but a dull writer, and Ralph 124C41-\- turned out as an unendurable bore of a novel,
with great amounts of technical innovations—TV-telephones, weather control, synthetic
food etc.—but the human angle of the story, par-
IRatprj 124Œ
41 4*
■Its ZLECnUCAL
MACAZIHC FOX EVWYBOOV*
The
first installment of Ralph
124C41 + appeared
in this issue.
ticularly the compulsory love interest, was constantly
on the level of the current masterpiece of drivel, the penny dreadful. Yet Ralph 124C41-\- formed the standards for science fiction for
decades to come, and it was not until the forties that a lasting improvement
set in. Some of the writers of sf have not changed yet. A sample from the first
chapter of Ralph:
As the vibrations died down in the laboratory the big man rose from the
glass chair and viewed the complicated apparatus on the table. It was complete
to the last detail. He glanced at the calendar. It was September 1st in the
year 2660. Tomorrow was to be a big and busy day for him, for it was to witness
the final phase of the three-year experiment. He yawned and stretched himself
to his full height, revealing a physique much larger than that of the average
man of his times and approaching that of the huge Martians.
His physical superiority, however, was as
nothing compared to his gigantic mind. He was Ralph 124C41-\-, one of the greatest living scientists and one of the ten men on the whole planet earth
permitted to use the plus sign after his name. Stepping to the Telephot on the side of the
wall he pressed a group of buttons and in a few minutes the faceplate of the
Telephot became luminous, revealing the face of a clean-shaven man about
thirty, a pleasant but serious face.
As soon as he recognized the face of Ralph in his own Telephot he smiled
and said, "Hello, Ralph."
"Hello, Edward, I wanted to ask you if
you could come over to the laboratory tomorrow morning. I have something
unusually interesting to show you. Look."
He stepped to one side of his instrument so
that his friend could see the apparatus on the table about ten feet from the
Telephot faceplate.
Edward came closer to his own faceplate, in
order that he might see further into the laboratory.
"Why, you've finished it!" he
exclaimed. "And your famous—"
Ralph 124C41-\- is still widely considered to be the first
real, unalloyed science fiction novel; which of course is to stretch truth a
long, long way. Actually, it is but one of the hundreds of Utopian novels that
deluged the market around the turn of the century, propagandizing for some
political or social idea or another.
The
great classic in this field was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887, which was a worldwide bestseller in 1880 and
immediately was followed by a flood of plagiarisms. Ralph 124C41-^-, which was serialized in twelve parts starting
April, 1911, was only one of these badly written, badly thought-out
plagiarisms, lacking even the social pathos that, despite the inferior literary
qualities, had made Looking
Backward an
important literary event, influencing millions of readers over the world.
Bellamy's novel gave words to the hopes and dreams of an unprivileged and
suffering lower class, seeking their Utopia in socialism, telling, in fact,
more about the world of 1887 than about the highly improbable Utopia of the
year 2000. It was, essentially, a pamphlet, not a novel in our sense.
Gemsback's crude imitation was neither. There was science, but a science
without meaning, coulisses without depth and without the slightest hint of
contemporary significance. And whereas Looking Backward immediately catapulted into world fame, Ralph stayed in the science fiction field, which Gernsback made into a
specialized literature.
This science fiction (called
variously scientifiction or scientific fiction) went into full bloom in April
1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched the sf magazine Amazing Stories, which still is being published, although the
only thing the Amazing
of today has in common with
Gemsback's magazine is the title. Amazing contained
scientific adventures, with the emphasis on the scientific side. An imposing array of experts in different sciences were
attached to the magazine, and every story was allegedly subjected to examination
as for its scientific accuracy. Considerably less interest was devoted to the
literary merits; the plot could be unlikely and downright absurd, the
characters stereotyped; nothing mattered as long as the imagination was kept
within what was right and proper. The ray guns came (carefully checked by
experts in physics and electronics), the fair heroine got into position, more
slender and scantily dressed than ever before, and the BEM's of the Andromeda nebula
started-up their gyroscope ships and prepared to participate in the common joy.
The youthful readers of Amazing sighed
with happiness, but there were others not quite that positive toward the
phenomenon. The U.S. columnist Bernard De
Voto wrote in 1939:
This besotted nonsense is from the group of
magazines known as the science pulps, which deals with both the World and the
Universe of Tomorrow and, as our items show, take no great pleasure in either . . . The science discussed is idiotic beyond any possibility of exaggeration,
but the point is that in this kind of fiction the bending of light or
Heisenberg's formula is equivalent to the sheriff of the horse opera fanning
his gun, the heroine of the sex pulp taking off her dress. (2)
The "idiotic science" that De Voto lamented over was the numerous stories dealing with landings on the
Moon, atomic bombs, satellites and other absurdities.
When
one speaks about the origins of modem science fiction, one should keep this
American development in mind. Gemsback
separated speculative
fiction from mainstream literature, put the emphasis on the scientific aspects
and endowed it with a designation not too different from the one already in
use. Science fiction appeared. The name was not new in any respect; the exact
literary translation, naturve-tenskaplig
roman, was
used in a Swedish science fiction magazine as early as 1916, and while Gemsback
probably never had heard
about this illustrious magazine, much less its designation of the genre, he
could not have failed to be familiar with the widely used term scientific romances.
Orson
Welles's reputed radio dramatization of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, gave the genre a push forward; the specialized sf magazines grew like
mushrooms, the first "World Science Fiction Convention" (strictly
for the U.S.A.) was held in New York on July 2, 1939, and speculative
literature, which hitherto had been a predominantly European phenomenon,
suddenly became something typically American. Literary critics who have done
surveys of the genre have often made fun of the sf buffs' eagerness to drag in
Lucian and Milton and other literary giants in the field; and Gernsback's space
ship-and-monster literature had surely not much in common with Milton. But
Gemsback only isolated the technical aspect of the genre; that the whole field
now is called science fiction can hardly be blamed on the readers—or the
writers.
In
order to make some semblance of order in the definitions, science fiction was
divided into two general branches: on one hand sf as such, which principally
deals with man and his relation to scientific and sociological innovations,
probable physical occurrences like catastrophes etc., and on the other hand
fantasy, where the scientific side is removed and the logic is constructed to
suit the idea—e.g. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy, which is rigorously logical within its own compass, even
though elves, dwarfs, fire-breathing dragons, giants and malignant magicians
hardly belong to the physical reality such as we see it.
A simplified definition would be that the
author of a "straight" science fiction story proceeds from (or
alleges to proceed from) known facts, developed in a credible way, whereas the
author of a fantasy story starts with an idea and builds a world around it. The
question of whether a certain story of imagination is a fantasy or a science
fiction work would depend upon the device the author uses to explain his
projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device of saying:
"This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science, which
is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas not yet
quite explored but suspected," then one could call it science fiction. But
if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it,
in other words, just to say: "Here is a fairy tale I'm going to tell
you," then it is fantasy. It could actually be the same story.
Many fantastic stories and novels these days
are set upon another world inhabited by people, and if the author of a
particular work was to start off by saying, "There is a world in space
inhabited by people, and the natural laws of this world are somewhat different
from ours, and they are magical," one could, generally speaking, say that
this is fantasy. But if he says, "Here is this world,"—and it is the
same story—leaving implications that this is the result of a colonization
experiment from Earth of a thousand or two thousand or ten thousand years
before, then it would suddenly become a science fiction story, because the
reader has got a basis for suspending his disbelief. This could really happen,
somewhere, somewhen. Fantasy is taking the author on his word,
science fiction is taking him in on a logical assumption. He explains something
in a logical way.
Fredric
Brown gives in the introduction to his collection of short stories Angels and Spaceships (1954) a good example of the diffuse borders
that separate science fiction from fantasy. He uses the story of King Midas.
Kind Midas did the God Bacchus a favor, and got the customary wish as a reward.
Midas wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. The wish was
granted, but Midas soon found that the precious gift had certain drawbacks. He
asked Bacchus to take the gift back, which was granted.
Now,
this is certainly fantasy, and nobody expects this to happen in our orderly
world. But, says Fredric Brown, let us now translate it to science fiction:
Mr. Midas, who runs a Greek restaurant in the
Bronx, happens to save the life of an extraterrestrial from a far planet who is living in New York anonymously as an observer for
the Galactic Federation, to which Earth for obvious reasons is not yet ready to
be admitted. Same offer of reward, same request. The extraterrestrial, who is
master of sciences far beyond ours, makes a machine which alters the molecular
vibrations of Mr. Midas' body so his touch will have a transmuting effect
upon other objects. And so on. It's a science fiction story, or could be made
into one. (3)
So much for the difference between science
fiction and fantasy. It is really the old fairy tale once again, using the symbols of
today—or, as the case may be, the never-never lands of myths—to give
entertainment as well as comments to contemporary or suspected processes.
Science fiction/ fantasy is really not so much a
literary genre as a point of view. We live in a scientific age, thus the
emphasis on science. The renewed interest in mysticism and metaphysics, as
exemplified in works by Hermann Hesse and the "New Wave" authors of
science fiction is now challenging the scientific aspect, but though the forms
might change, in the end it is all the same thing. Science fiction of today is
-neither particularly scientific, nor a specific literary genre, but
designations are needed, so for simplicity's sake let's call it science
fiction.
And
why does one read this particular literature? There are lots of theories about
what constitutes an avid reader of science fiction, from the extremely
flattering (inside the sf fandom) to indulgence or condescension (from the
in-appreciative outsider). Exactly what this Something
is, no one has succeeded in finding yet, even though the phenomenon has been
given a name: Sense of Wonder. If you have Sense of Wonder, then you can
appreciate science fiction. This obviously doesn't clarify matters much; however,
I can say why I personally read it.
When
I started to read science fiction seriously, about twenty years ago, it seemed
to be offering a subversive thing, the prospect of change. Changes recur
constantly in science fiction: changes in our environment, our future, our attitudes. No matter what you do, or how much you try to
hold back the forces of amelioration, things are going to change. Now, the idea of change is deeply subversive
to the Establishment, it must always be, and I think this is where H. G. Wells
was subversive, this is why, in fact, he has never been really accepted into
English literature. What he said was, in effect, that never mind whether it is
going to be better or worse, it is going to be different.
This
is, in my opinion, what makes the science fiction point of view different and
makes it stand apart from mainstream literature, indeed the quality that makes
it recognizable regardless of the literary form in which it is presented, be
it that of the traditional fairy tale, the thriller, the religious allegory,
the action story or what have you. Science fiction's strength has always been
in its ideas, not in its forms, and the merits of the genre lie not in its
paraphernalia of rockets, machines and distant worlds but in the message that
nothing, absolutely nothing can be taken for granted, and that we always must
be prepared for changes, both in our attitudes and in our environment. There
has been a widespread notion that science fiction, according to its name,
should predominantly deal with the technological hardware of future
civilizations, and in Hugo Gemsback's time this was probably true—but Ralph 124C41 -|_ was written sixty years ago, and the science
fiction field has not exactly stood still since then.
"It
isn't really science fiction's business to describe what science is going to
find," Frederik Pohl said in the introduction to his Ninth Galaxy Reader anthology (1965). "It is much more science
fiction's business to try to say what the human race will make of it all. In
fact, this is the thing —the one thing, maybe the only thing—that science
fiction does better than any other tool available to hand. It gives us a look
at consequences. And does it superbly."
At
its best, science fiction fills this function, and does it well. The ray
gun-and-monster branch's contribution to this end is usually small, but no one
is pretending that all science fiction is great literature. Ninety percent of
all science fiction is crud, the sf writer Theodore Sturgeon once said; but,
on the other hand, ninety percent of everything is
crud!
2. THE PREHISTORY
The
pursuit of the origins-of science fiction in the mists of the dim and distant
past has always struck me as a little bit funny; it is following an established
academic tradition whereby when someone asks you about something, you immediately
have got to turn around and look behind you, to see where it started. For
science fiction, which is mainly based on the future and what it might bring,
this tendency seems to me somewhat odd. It is an attempt, I think, to make the
subject respectable, providing an image for it, because you are not supposed
to suddenly produce something new, it is very upsetting, you are not supposed
to do that, you are supposed to prove that it came from somebody respectable
with a long gray beard yesterday. In literature, age means respectability, no
matter what the contents.
Science
fiction is, actually, a very modem phenomenon, the result of the latest
century's industrial, scientific and social revolution, and even though the
ancient Greeks busied themselves both with Moon travels and robots, they did
not live in the atmosphere of constant change that is so characteristic for our
century, and which is the essential thing about (and the motivating force
behind) all science fiction. Science fiction is, if perhaps not the only contemporary
literature, undoubtedly the most typical literature of our time, the most
sensitive indicator of social and intellectual tides. This is, of course, no
new phenomenon. The chansons
de geste of
the Middle Ages faithfully reflected the rigid feudal
society of its time, and later, when the power of the Church and the nobility
was reduced due to social reforms and upheavals, the picaresque novel appeared
as an expression of the skepticism that was bom
out of the new times. The fantastic novel, in
the form we know it, appeared first during the Age of Enlightenment, with
political satirists like Voltaire (Micromegas) and
Lud-vig Holberg (Nicolai
Klimii Iter Subterraneum), at about the same time as authors like the Marquis de Sade explored
the subconscious in works like One Hundred Days in Sodom and Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk. It
is interesting to note the pyramidal success of Mary Woll-stonecraft Shelley's
novel Frankenstein, which, published in 1818, apparently gave
voice to widespread misgivings toward the industrial revolution with its theme
of forbidden knowledge coupled with Shelleyian romantic ideals. The
Neo-romanticist (and, consequently, anti-scientific) ideals of the cultural
elite of the time found its voice in multitudes of fantastic novels of this
type, in the same way as the fears of the advancing technology later was voiced
in works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and,
more recently, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! where the specter of overpopulation has taken the
place of Frankenstein's monster as the experiment turning against its creator.
This literature was— and is—typical of a world and a time in rapid change, with
insecurity and great hopes and misgivings for the future. Science fiction of
this type would obviously have been unthinkable in ancient Greece.
But
of course there are old Greeks to be found, if one searches long enough. Some
sf historians have searched until they have turned blue in the face, and have
unearthed the most astounding discoveries, from the ancient Indian Veda books to the Apocalypse. In Sweden, some enthusiastic scholars seriously
maintain that Dante Alighieri's religious allegory Divina Commedia was the first real science fiction work,
with the radiant Beatrice the first astronaut. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress has also been nominated to science fiction's
hall of fame, which, needless to say, strikes me as being somewhat odd.
Cyril Kombluth said in The Science Fiction Novel (1964) that "Some of the amateur
scholars of science fiction are veritable Hitlers for aggrandizing their field.
If they perceive in, say, a sixteenth century satire some vaguely speculative
element they see it as a trembling and persecuted minority, demand Anschluss, and proceed to annex the satire to science
fiction."
This
is, of course, a way to enlarge the field and enrich its image with some
respectable names, if one professes to the one among the many definitions which
asserts that it is the situation which makes sf—whether it is a
scientific-sociological situation, or a fantastic fairyland with dragons,
magicians etc.—and that the basis of the story is how man reacts in this
situation. It can be a Utopian society, a visit to the Moon or Hades, a society
where murder is socially acceptable, or one where eating is surrounded by as
many taboos as sexuality is in our own society.
What
reactions will such a situation start, and what will the consequences be? If
one proceeds from this definition— and it is largely accepted in sf circles—one
can find a lot of science fiction in ancient literature. The most commonly
quoted example is Lucian of Samosata (born around 125 A.D.), who wrote a number
of satirical dialogues based on fantastic ideas, e.g. Icaromenippos, or a Journey through the Air and A True Story. Icaromenippos describes a journey to the Moon with the aid of strapped-on wings, during
which the protagonist not only gets the opportunity to visit the Selenites, but
also Heaven, where he is invited to a feast among the Gods and witnesses how
Zeus deals with the prayers that are sent up to him. (God, let my father die;
God, make me rich and famous; God, please kill my wife, etc.) Menippos looks
down at Earth from his elevated position and is far from encouraged by what he
sees.
I
saw Ptolemaios sleep with his sister, Lyismachos' son
plotting against his father's life, Antiochus Seleu-kos' son being in secret
collusion with his stepmother Strantonike, Alexander in Thessalia being
murdered by his wife, Antigones sharing bed with the wife of his son and
Attalos' son give his father poison. Furthermore, I saw how Arsakes killed his
wife and how the eunuch Arbakes drew his sword against Arsakes. The
Medier
Spalinos was dragged by his feet from the drinking-bout by his men, crushed
behind his eyes with a golden goblet. Similar visions met me both
among Scythes and Thracians in the royal palaces; everywhere fornication,
murder, intrigues, blackmailings, perjuries, terrorism and treachery within the
families ... in one word a variegated and diversified picture.
Icaromenippos is, strictly speaking, a satire of the conventional
type, and science fiction only by the situation (the Moon journey and the visit
to the Gods). The plot is fantastic, but it is certainly not speculative in any
way. The same goes in even higher degree for A True Story, which is a parody on the obviously mendacious
narratives of journeys that flourished in Lucian's time. The travelers are
swallowed by a whale, visit the Moon, participate in a magnificent battle off
the Moon (the first space battle, one might say), and meet scores of fantastic
creatures, each more improbable than the other. "Be it understood," Lucían says in the foreword to A True Story, "that I am writing about things which I
have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others—which, in fact, do
not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist."
These
are probably the only true words in the whole "true story."
A
close parallel to the satires of Lucian were the works of Savinien Cyrano de
Bergerac, who, apart from being the long-nosed and touchy hero of a well-known
play by Edmond Rostand, used his poisoned pen with the same elegance as his
rapier in the novels Histoire
comique des
états et empires de la Lune
(1648-50) and Histoire comique des états et empires du Soleil (1662). As far as the satire goes he is very
like Lucian, it is a merciless lashing of his contemporaries, but Bergerac's
methods of traveling to the Moon are interesting. In the first journey, he
filled a number of bottles with dew (everyone knows that the sun attracts the
dew), tied the bottles to his waist and went away. The second time he travels,
somewhat unwillingly, by
rocket propulsion. He drops down in the Garden of
Eden, meets the prophet Elias and gets thrown out after having insulted the
worthy prelate. Later, on the Moon, he is jailed for maintaining that the Moon
is a satellite to Earth; a dangerous view, since the prevalent opinion on the
Moon is that it is the other way around. It is a witty and intelligent satire,
but hardly science fiction in our sense of the word.
This
also goes for the English priest Francis Godwin's novel The Man in the Moone: or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales (1638), in which the protagonist is left to
die on the island St. Helena, but unexpectedly recuperates and tames a number
of wild swans in order to have them carry him back to the mainland. It turns
out, however, that it is time for the swans' annual emigration to the Moon, and
the good Domingo Gonsales comes suddenly to a world where the inhabitants are
nine yards tall and flies through the atmosphere of the Moon with the aid of
artificial wings. The main point of this story is also the satire. Just as the
previously mentioned novel by John Wilkins—being based upon the assumption that
travels to the Moon might be possible, and developing this idea in a speculative
way—obviously is science fiction, Francis Godwin's satire cannot by any stretch
of imagination be considered one.
World literature is abundant with satires of
this type, from Francois Rabelais's Les Limes des faictz et diets hé-roiques du noble Pantagruel (1532-64), a humorous and satirical
masterpiece, in which the giant Pantagruel travels through known and unknown
countries, searching for the answers to all questions, finally finding them in
the Oracle of the Golden Bottle, which simply tells him Trinkl (Drink!), over Ludvig Holberg's The Subterranean Journey of Niels Klim (1741), a Swiftian excursion into the
netherworlds, Voltaire's Micromegas (1752)
in which a Sirian and a Satumian visit Earth and get ample opportunities to be
astounded by the human foolery, Samuel Butler's anti-Utopian Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and on to the presentday's horror
visions like 1984,
Brave New World, Make Room! Make Room! and The Space Merchants.
There
is a bond uniting for example Lucian and the science fiction of today. The
device of transferring contemporary anomalous states of things to an imaginary
world on the Moon, forgotten valleys or the future, in order to subject them to
a hard-hearted scrutiny in the disguise of overstatement, is still used in
science fiction, but whereas the Moon-and-Forgotten-Valley satires dealt with
contemporary problems, the science fiction author of today particularly works
with subjects of a social, political or scientific nature that are likely to
become topical in the near or foreseeable future. John Wilkins' A Discourse Concerning a New World and a New
Planet, being
speculative rather than satirical in nature, is very modem in this respect, as
attested by his foreword where he says that:
It is my Desire, that by Occasion of this
Disclosure, I may raise up some more Active Spirit to search after other hidden
and unknown Truths. Since it must needs be of great Impediment unto the Growth
of Sciences, for Men still to Plod on upon beaten
Principles, as to be afraid of entertaining any thing that may seem to
contradict them. An Unwillingness to take such things into Examination,
is on of these Errours of Learning in these times observed by the judicious
Verulam. Questionless there are many secret Truths, which the Ancients have
passed over, that are yet left to make some of our Age Famous for their
Discovery.
The Moon, being nearest to Earth and most
easily accessible for observation, was the first and foremost goal for
adventurous spirits seeking a place to show off their political or scientific
theories. The first attempt that I know of traveling to more distant places is
the German astronomer Eber-hard Christian Kindermann's novel Die geshwinde Reise auf dem Luft-schiff nach
der obern Welt, welche jiingsthin fiinf Pers^onen angestellet (1744), in which the author has made use of
the Italian Jesuit Francesco Lama's theory of making a vehicle rise in the air
with the aid of evacuated metal spheres which—Lama thought—would become lighter
than the air and thus lift the vehicle. Neither Kindermann nor Lama seem to
have given much thought to atmospheric pressure on the metal spheres, as
attested by Guerick's evacuated globes of 1654, which could not be pulled apart
by fourteen horses. Kindermann's travelers nevertheless managed to construct
their space vehicle and steered, in a manner reminiscent of the hot-air
balloons of the brothers Montgolfièr,
toward Mars. Kindermann
was, however, not the only scientist who was fooled by Francesco Lama's theory.
It is known that Carl von Linné, the famous Swedish naturalist, thought the
idea perfectly sound and argued for it in his book Iter lapponicum (Journey through Lapland, 1732).
The
real breakthrough for science fiction came with the late industrialization,
when the universe suddenly threw its gates wide open and nothing was impossible
any longer. The holy machine was placed in the high seat, and with its help one
could accomplish absolutely anything. This was the time of the unlimited belief
in progress, and Queen Victoria sat with the sleeping fions at her feet and watched benevolently how the sky was darkened by smoke
from railways and steelworks. In 1851, the first World's Fair was organized in
London, arranged around the architectural masterpiece of the time, the Crystal
Palace in Hyde Park, a magnificent construction in glass and steel, 115 feet
high under the central dome. The whole Fair covered an area of 700,000 square
feet, and during five and a half months more than 17,000 exhibitors displayed
the grandest of human ingenuity and culture for six million visitors.
When
the ninth World's Fair was arranged in Paris in 1889, the number of exhibitors
exceeded 50,000, and the Fair was visited by more than twenty-six million
people. This time the main attraction was the 1,000 feet high Eiffel Tower, the
eighth wonder of the world, and a suitable symbol for the boundless
self-confidence of industrialization. Two thousand years earlier, Archimedes
had said, "Give me a fixed point to "stand on, and I will move the
Earth."
The
Victorians had the fulcrum, and electric power would move the lever.
Jules
Verne explored the interior of Earth in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), shot people to the Moon in a hollow cannonball in From the Earth to the Moon (1865), traveled around the world's oceans in the marvelous submarine Nautilus, complete with Wilton rugs and crystal
chandeliers and the melancholy Captain, previously Maharajah, Nemo, in 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869),
repeated the performance in
the air with Rdbur
the Conqueror and Master of the World in which the current Übermensch, the engineer Robur, flies around the world in the airship Albatross, a heavier-than-air vehicle that is a hundred feet long and looks like a sailing
ship with seventy-four masts that carry helicopter rotors, and which could make
James Bond green with envy anytime. In The Mysterious Island, a loose sequel to the more well-known 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea, a talented engineer was able to turn a dead island into a mechanical
Victorian paradise, without any other equipment than his scientific knowledge
plus a little bit of discreet assistance from the inevitable deus ex machina, the old graying Captain Nemo, who had retired
from piracy and now devoted himself to charity from the bottom of a volcano.
The
novel The Begum's Fortune was modeled as industrialization's
apotheosis, with two super-cities, one humanistic (French) and one industrial
(German). The holy machine had already begun to be dangerous, though, and sure
enough it is the humanists in France-Ville that stand for the dream of the
future, while the Stahlstadt
of the German Doctor
Schultze is described as hell on Earth. The evil doctor unfolds his philosophy
for the captured hero:
My friend . . . Right-Good-Evil are purely
relative, and quite conventional words. Nothing is positive but the grand laws
of nature. The law of competition has the same force as that of gravitation. It
is folly to resist, while to submit and follow in the way it points out is
only wise and reasonable, and therefore I mean to destroy Doctor Sarrasin's
city. Thanks to my cannon, my fifty thousand Germans will easily make an end of
the hundred thousand dreamers over there, who now
constitute a group condemned to perish. (4)
There
was already a fly in the ointment. The future-dreamers had discovered that the
machine's civilization was as bad as the preceding one. When Verne wrote Propeller Island, the floating city of the future, Milliard
City, became a Utopist's paradise, a temple of Mammon and
the holy science, with escalator-like pavements, magnificent marble palaces,
concert halls where the greatest musicians of the time appeared. It was
town-shaping on a gargantuan scale, as were the two cities in The Begum's Fortune, built by the immensely rich and offering
undreamed-of luxury to a population of 10,000 inhabitants, of whom no
one owned less than five million francs. The science is perfect—and yet this
gigantic island is doomed to disaster, because its creators can't control the
powers they themselves have set in motion.
In a
later novel, For
the Flag (1896),
the traditional mad scientist, here called Thomas Roch, lets a new war's hell
loose over the world. He uses guided missiles, with a payload comprised of something disquietingly like an atomic bomb, and
with this anachronistic weapon in their hands, a group of pirates proceed to
threaten all Atlantic shipping as well as America's Eastern Coast from their
base in the Bermuda Islands, in a manner rerriiniscent of Ian Fleming's Moonraker. This does not imply that Jules Veme
prophesied either the ICBM or James Bond, nor did he prophesy the modem
submarine or Apollo
XL By reading up intelligently on the technical
developments of his time, he was able to speculate on possible future
developments, in the same way as later science fiction writers have done and
still do. A somewhat more nearsighted form of this speculation is now done
under the name of "future research" in private and military research
centers. The science fiction writers—Veme and others—are not working with
"future research." They are speculating in probabilities, and the
mass destruction weapon was, of course, a possibility
in Jules Verne's time.
The Victorians' confidence in the future
stood unbroken in the shadow of the new steel wonders, the Utopists evoked the
new world, where the machines would take over the workers' role and make
mankind happy and prosperous over a single night. Certain writers, notably
Jules Veme and H. G. Wells, had, notwithstanding, gotten a touch
of the hangover. In 1888, H. G. Wells wrote the first outline of the novel
The Chronic Argonauts, later retitled The Time Machine, in which he foresaw a future where the
machine civilization had created two separate human races, the Mor-locks and
the EloL The Morlocks were descended from the factory workers of our time, who
had been forced down into subterranean machine cities, where during millennia
they had changed into repulsive, cannibal creatures who used the refined—and
retarded—Eloi, the remainders of the ancient upper class, as food.
The
idea was again brought forth by the German author Thea von Harbou in the novel Metropolis (1926), a masterpiece of drivel, which
despite that, contains social implications that stood
in glaring contrast to the type of Utopias that were popular at the time.
H. G. Wells, who at this time still deeply distrusted all Utopian schemes, had
for a long time been preoccupied with the original bête humain and all its possible transformations. He believed, like many others, that
most of our moral character is but results of habit and circumstances, and that
man had undergone only "an infinitesimal alteration in his intrinsic
nature since the age of unpolished stone." This belief was brought forth
in a number of novels, notably The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau. The latter work, first published in 1896, was
obviously influenced by Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, telling of Dr. Moreau's
experiments in vivisection in order to create men out of animals. Scholars have
pointed out the similarities between Kipling's "Law of the Jungle"
and Wells's "The Sayers of the Law"; but, Ingvald Raknem says in his
excellent study of H. G. Wells:
While
Kipling's "Law of the Jungle" is a kind of idyllizing romance of
jungle life, Wells's pictures of the Beast Folk are a veiled presentation of
mankind trying to rise above the animal stage and worshipping their maker.
Wells's chapter is indeed a demonstration of the process of development of man
from the animal stage to that of a social and spiritual being, and a '
revelation of the superficiality of this transformation. (5)
These views were hardly in accordance with
the beliefs of the progressive-minded generation of the nineties. One critic
could only explain it "as a morbid aberration of scientific
curiosity," it was the "perverse quest after anything . . .
sensational," and "only an extreme instance of the horrible, the
weird and the uncanny which characterize all his writings." Even those
critics who attempted to see the positive sides of the novel misunderstood him
completely:
The
strong reactionary effect which is produced at the close of the story and the
terrible fate which is meted out to the impiously daring vivisectionist are the
saving points of the book. (6)
These reactions were again repeated in 1897,
when H. G. Wells's next novel, The War
of the Worlds, was
published and met with anguished cries from the once again disappointed
critics:
There are episodes that are so brutal,
details so repulsive, that they cause insufferable distress to the feelings.
The restraint of art is missing. We would entreat Mr. Wells to return to his
earlier methods—to the saner, serener beauty of those first romances that cast
their spell upon our imagination, and appealed to our finer sensibilities. (7)
This
notwithstanding, Wells continued his excursions into the world of modern man.
In the novel The War in the Air (1907)
he described with horrifying fullness of detail all
the horrors of a modern war, horrors that only
seven years later would turn out to be far worse than he ever could have
visualized.
"I
pointed out," Wells said later, "that the war in the air by making
the war three-dimensional, would obliterate the war-front and with that the
possibility of separating civilians from the belligerent, or to put an
effective end to the war. This, I said, must not only sharpen but also change
the common man's attitude to the ear. He cannot any longer regard it, as we did
with the Boer War, as a lively spectacle, where his participation can be
compared to that of a paying spectator at a cricket-match." (8)
In 1903, Wells had pointed out, in the short
story The Land Ironclads, the revolution that would be the result of
the tanks. The story directly leads the thought to the ruin of the Austrian
cavalry during the first World War. It was the old
world that rode out toward the machine guns, with gleaming epaulets, flags and
sparkling flourishes of trumpets. The new world stood in gray uniforms behind
the steel-blue, functional machines and swept -away the cavalry as with an
unconcerned giant's hand. The innocent romanticism of the turn of the century
that was voiced in, for instance, novels like André Laurie's Les Exiles de la Terre (1889), in which the scientists visit the Moon by making a giant magnet
and simply pulling down the satellite, was on its way
out. In other novels people went on interplanetary sight-seeing trips, as in
John Jacob Astor's A
Journey in Other Worlds (1894) and George Griffith's Honeymoon in Space (1900) where the whole civilized paraphernalia was present, including
lace curtains for the windows and frosty punch to the coffee as the bold
travelers went around in the solar system, from the warlike Martians to the
ethereal Venusians. These were the good old days, and when the beastly Martians
or the stupid crew attacked, there was always an Eton-educated gentleman
present to put a bullet or two between the villain's eyes.
World
War I abrupdy changed this. In 1920, the Czech writer Karel Capek wrote the
play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), in which the
robots took over the world, much in the same manner as the newts later did in
Capek's novel War
with the Newts (1936).
The play was an attack on the "scientific barbarism" which Capek
foresaw in the rise of nazism and fascism. The play
was a success and was put on the stage all over the world; it was also filmed.
The play is noted for being the source of the word "robot" in English
and a number of other languages. The mechanical honeymoon was obviously over.
The Victorians died with the Titanic and
were buried in World War I.
"A jolt as the World War was
needed," H. G. Wells later wrote, "to make the British people see
that nothing stood still . . . All history is adaptation, and the only
fundamental difference between our time and the past is the unprecedentedly
changed scale and pace in which the necessity of adaptation has asserted
itself." (9)
There was, once again, the message of the
irrevocable change, now said with the experience of the World War's hell. After
World War I, it became, of natural causes, fashionable to be a pacifist, and
lean young men with Macassar-oil in their hair walked around in the salons and
argued that there never would be war again. H. G. Wells wrote the novel The World Set Free (1914) in which he prophesied new wars and
the final weapon, the atomic bomb. After that, he sat back and waited. He
didn't have to wait long.
3. UTOPIA
"Where do you want to partake of your
dinner, madame? On the ground floor, in one of the big halls
one, two or more storeys up? We have dining halls up to the eleventh
floor. We also have private rooms, up to the fourteenth floor. Please make up
your mind. The first elevator starts within one minute . . . My good ladies and
gentlemen . . . Here we have the second elevator with octagonal parlours that
hold fifty guests each. Here is the third elevator . . . Please step
insidel"
It
was one of the employees of the Central Hotel, an Escalator Major, who
organized the ascendent to the dinner. The Central Hotel was situated in the
old HumlegSrden, or rather in the place where this ancient park had been, and
approximately on the spot where, five hundred years ago, a small building had
been erected for the Royal Library, which was the name given to the
government's rather insignificant collection of books during the days of the
kingdom.
New guests arrived constantly, most of them
by air-velocipedes, air-cabs and other flying vehicles. Only a small number,
perhaps a couple of hundreds, let themselves be hoisted up from the ground
floor. The others steered right into one of the upper floors, where the
vehicles were received in a number of velocipede stables, checked and guarded
. . .
When
you entered one of the great dining-halls, you found that they were filled with
bustling activity. Around the extensive buffets that lined the walls thronged
the guests that didn't have the time to sit down for a real meal, but instead
quickly swallowed some of the
universal-energy-extract pills that always were available and made it
possible to eat in seconds the equivalent of two or three ordinary meals.
The
guests that had more time on their hands sat at big or small tables, richly
decorated by pieces of art made by the many newly discovered metals. At every
table there were a certain number of buttons, similar to those that in ancient
times were used for the so-called electric bell system, and on every button the
name of a dish could be read. This was the menu of the time. You pressed a
button, and immediately the desired dish appeared from the floor and was pushed
over to the table. Waiters or waitresses were nowhere to be seen, but every
time that a dish appeared on the table, an electric signal went to one of the
cashiers by the entrance, where a machine immediately noted down the dish along
with the number of the guest that had ordered it, and at the exit the guest
must pay his bill before he walked out.
The
Central Hotel was, like all other restaurants in Stockholm, amply supplied with
eat- and drinkables from all parts of the world. One could have kangaroo-steak,
tapir ham, peacock breast and other meat dishes from faraway places, everything
fresh. The animal might have been killed the day before by one of the modem
butchering- and hunting-machines and sent to the hotel by air freight. . .
"Look what we have won by putting
science into the kitchen!" exclaimed Aromasia, as she brought her guests
to a table in one of the big halls of the Central Hotel.
"But
the poetry!" objected the poet. "Where is the poetry?"
"It seems you never can forget your
railroad-poetry," Aromasia. remarked smilingly,
reading the food buttons.
"Alas!
Where is now the poetry of the home!" continued the poet. "In the
old days the husband gathered his family around their own table. Now the whole
family goes to a restaurant and sits down in a public hall together with total
strangers, and eats there. Can
this be called family comfort? Do you know what
in the old days was meant by domestic bliss?"
"Yes,"
interjected Aunt Vera, whom Aromasia also had invited to dinner, "with
domestic bliss was meant that the housewife should do all the work and perhaps
stand by the stove herself, if she wanted to make sure that the food wasn't
ruined. She should be the servant of her husband and the whole family. All
domestic care, all troubles rested on her. This was the domestic bliss of the
old times."
This long extract from the Swedish writer
Claes Lundin's delightful Utopian novel Oxygen och Aromasia (1879) is very typical of one aspect of the Utopian literature, namely
the dream of the country of happiness as the place where all wishes have come
true, where everything is orderly and beautifully thought-out, and where one,
above all, lives in freedom from want. The beautiful, wonderful
Schlaraffen-land or Cockaigne or lubberland all rolled into one improbable
thing, the country where dissenters are shot at sight and the laws are obeyed
immediately or else. What makes Lundin's novel a strange bird in the peculiar
world of the Utopias is its democratic inclination and its humor. Lundin is
obvioulsy not taking his Utopia entirely seriously. When the
beautiful artist Aromasia plays the scent-organ, the "Odophore," for
a group of devoutly groaning members of the local Society, both the scent-organ
and the Utopia split wide open with a stench that abruptly terminates the
heavenly concert. Lundin's description of the future evening papers The Rapacious Wolf and Next Week's News are not overly serious either.
Lundin
described his Utopia with a pinch of humor, even if it contains all the time-honored
ingredients of a true Utopian tale, including space ships (exactly like the cavorite sphere later described by H. G. Wells in First Men on the Moon), suspended animation, matter-transmitters and
(almost) universal peace. Plus an anachronistic dissenter, a
rather stupid poet. Weather control and TV telephones also appeared.
Title page for Claes Lundin's novel, 7873.
It should be noted that this novel was
written five years before Hugo Gernsback, the "father of modem science fiction,"
even was bom. Actually, Oxygen och Aromasia was at least sixty years before its time, being more modem than any
science fiction written in the U.S.A. before 1930, both in imagination and
quality of writing. Lundin even considered women as human beings, something
that didn't dawn upon most sf writers until the middle of the twentieth
century.
Other
Utopias are considerably less foreseeing and—of course—not at all interested in
the well-being of its poor citizens. As a rule, they show a
contempt of men that would give them an honored place in the section for
anti-Utopias. The inventors of these narratives from the burning hell have,
with few exceptions, regarded themselves as Big Brother himself, who knows best
and therefore is best suited to decide what is best for his fellow citizens.
Unswerving obedience is the foremost principle of every well-arranged Utopia. I
do not know how they have planned to dispose of the citizens that perchance
should turn out to have different views on this; probably a firing squad was
to be included somewhere.
The
real horror in this sub-genre of science fiction is, of course, Plato, the old
Nazi, who in his dialogue The Republic outlined
a Utopia that leaves most others far behind. The first Commandment is naturally
obedience before authorities, in this case equivalent to Plato and his friends.
Moreover, every citizen's station in the society is fixed since birth, and
under no circumstance is someone from the unworthy lower class permitted to
ascend to higher positions. Race prejudice is systematized, and put into
practical use, following a pattern that later on should be very familiar.
After some typical comparisons to the breeding of dogs and the value of
"pure" races, Plato turns to Man:
It follows from our former admissions, that
the best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and
the worst with the worst in the fewest, and that the offspring of the one must
be reared and that of the other not, if the flock is to be as perfect as
possible. And the way in which all this is brought to pass must be unknown to
any but the rulers, if, again, the herd of guardians is to be as free as
possible from dissension. We shall, then, have to ordain certain festivals and
sacrifices, in which we shall bring together the brides and the bridegrooms,
and our poets must compose hymns suitable to the
marriages that then take place. But the number of marriages we will leave to
the discretion of the rulers, that they may keep the number of the citizens as
nearly as may be the same, taking into account wars and diseases and all such
considerations, and that, as far as possible, our city may not grow too great
or too small. Certain ingenious lots, then, I suppose, must be devised so that
the inferior man at each conjugation may blame chance and not the rulers.
And
on the young men, surely, who excel in war and other pursuits we must bestow
honors and prizes, and, in particular, the opportunity of more frequent
intercourse with the women, which will at the same time be a plausible pretext
for having them beget as many of the children as possible. And the children
thus born will be taken over by the officials appointed for this . . . The
offspring of the good, I suppose, they will take to the pen or crèche, to
certain nurses who live apart in a quarter of the city, but the offspring of
the inferior, and any of those of the other sort who are bom defective, they
will properly dispose of in secret, so that no one will know what has become of
them. (10)
It is interesting to compare texts and see how
near the Nazis came to achieving the ideals of Plato. Jacques Delarue describes
in his book The
History of the Gestapo how
the, possibly Plato-inspired, system of the Nazis worked:
. . . The S.S. man did not have
the right to marry without the authorization of his superiors. His fiancee
had to prove her Aryan descent back to 1800 if
she wanted to marry a simple S.S. man or non-commissioned officer, and back to
175Ó if she was to marry an officer. Only the Hauptamt, the head office, could validate the proofs
provided and give the necessary authorization. Furthermore, the girl had to
undergo a certain number of medical examinations and physical tests. She must
be capable of ensuring issue to the race of Herrenvolk. After the marriage the
bride had to attend one of the S.S. special schools, where she was indoctrinated
with the political education ,and "ideology which
springs from the idea of racial purity". . .
Himmler's system achieved its apotheosis with
the creation of the Lebensborn—the fountain of life—a sort of human stud farm
where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic traits could, free from all
conjugal bonds, procreate with S.S. men also chosen according to the same
criteria. The children bom of these unions were fruits of a planned eugenics
and belonged to the State, and their education was ensured in special schools.
In theory they were destined to form the first generation of pure Nazis,
fashioned in the ovum . . . (11)
It
should be pointed out that the theory of "racial purity" worked out
as badly for the Nazis as it should have for Plato and his philosopher friends.
The pure-bred Aryans turned out to have an intellectual standard grossly below
the average, and they did show a percentage of mental deficients four or five
times higher than the normal. Or perhaps this is the sign of the Nazi/Plato
thoroughbred; what do I know?
Other
Utopias are somewhat more humanitarian than the Third Reich of Plato. St.
Thomas More's Utopia (1516)
(from the Greek au
topos, nowhere)
is light-years removed from The Republic. More
has taken over the communistic society from Plato, but actually distributed a
little bit of freedom to the people, keeping only ninety percent or so for the
king. He is openly anti-militaristic, and even permits diverging religious
faiths. The people of Utopia are merry, easy and without fear of the gods, and
have a religion which favorably separates from the one of More's
own time, foremost in that they maintain that:
. .
. a lesser pleasure might not stand in the way of a greater, and that no
pleasure ought to be pursued that should draw a great deal of pain after it;
for they think it the maddest thing in the world to pursue virtue, that is a
sour and difficult thing; and not only renounce the pleasures of life, but
willingly to undergo much pain and trouble, if a man has no prospect of a
reward? (12)
As for religion, the nice advocate of Free
Thought, King Utopus, gave every man of Utopia free liberty to believe in
whatever religion suited him:
. . . only he made a solemn and severe law
against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to
think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by
chance, without a wise overruling Providence . . . and they now look on those
that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so
noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast's; thus they
are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of
a well-ordered commonwealth. (13)
This, in a nutshell, is the theory of Utopian
life and code of conduct, not only for More's novel, but for all Utopian
societies: Think what you wish, but think right.
More's
Utopia is divided into two parts. The first is a
vigorous attack on social evils of his time—despotism, intrigues, ruinous
wars, an almost criminal taxation and a cruel legal system. The second part is
the actual Utopian novel— a description of the imaginary communist society on
the island of Utopia. The first part of the book is hard and uncompromising;
the second is idyllic, and in fact the actua. origin
of the Utopian never-never land. The complete book is a work of scathing social
criticism in which More's England contrasts glaringly to Utopia.
More
was later beheaded by his king, Henry VIII, and somewhat later canonized,
though not on account of this book.
A
century after More, the Italian Dominican friar
Tom-maso Campanella wrote The City of the Sun, which to a great extent is an antithesis to Plato, but with Big Brother
still present. Campanella's society is clearly socialistic, based on an
authoritarianism that must seem less than desirable for a modem man. Children
belong to the State, marriage as an institution is dissolved. All citizens are
dressed in identical uniforms. The material prosperity is considerable, but
here, as in all other Utopian societies, actual freedom seems to have been
caught in a wedge under the writer's enthusiasm. He is obviously incapable of
understanding that man might want something more than food, sleep and housing.
Utopian
novels have many faults, the most obvious seem to be
their single-mindedness and inability to regard man as a thinking, illogical
creature with a will of his own. They are sort of sagas, really, or fairy
tales, and even though all the classical Utopias—from Plato's dream of the
Dorian ideal society over Augustino's Theocracy, Joachim di Fiore's "third
society," Thomas More's Utopia and
on to the ideal creations of Owens, Fouriers, Cabet, Saint-Simon and Huxley—were
based on the factual conditions of their times, none has succeeded in making
the speculation viable. Except in cases like More's Utopia, which clearly is an attack on the appalling
social conditions of More's time, all Utopias are little but oversimplified
escapist dreams.
In
our time, the Utopian novel has found a worthy successor in works like those of
Mickey Spillane, with their almost erotic dreams of fulfilled sadism. Not to
mention the real Utopian literature of our time, the specialized Utopias of
pornography, where everything is possible: the Pomo-topia. This is not science
fiction, though. What speculation there is, is purely
on the monetary side—even though the Pornotopia obviously is fantastic enough.
The
big fault with all Utopian literature is that it is illogical and muddily
thought-out; it must always be. Chesterton once remarked that:
The weakness of all Utopias is this, that
they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and
then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They
first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very
ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor car or
balloon.
The second objection—and this one might be
even more serious—is that Utopias invariably are boring. Again, they must be
so; this is in the nature of the Utopia. If everything is tops, what is there
to live for? "I don't want comfort," cries Aldous Huxley's John
Savage to the World Controller.
"I want God, I want poetry, I want real
danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want
sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond,
"you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
Mr.
Savage does, heartily. And through Mr. Savage's reactions toward the apparent
Utopia, a Utopia that has all the classical properties including unlimited
food, drink and sex, Brave
New World suddenly
comes out as an anti-Utopian novel. The Utopian society described in the Fourth
Book of Gulliver's
Travels is
viewed in the same way: (The Houyhnhms) may have all the reason, but the Yahoos
have all the life. Voltaire's Candide voluntarily leaves Eldorado because it is
boring. The anachronistic poet in Claes Lun-din's Oxygen och Aromasia almost becomes mad in the all-too perfect
world he is imprisoned in, and dies while trying to escape to the Moon with a
newly invented space ship. The perfect Utopia bears in itself the seed of the
anti-
Utopia. The perfect Utopia is like an army camp: you
get fed, clothed and exercised, and nice people do your thinking for you. But
who wants to live in an army camp for the rest of his life?
This
violently totalitarian attitude is (with few exceptions) characteristic of all
Utopias, whether they appear on unknown islands, in the Earth's interior or on
the Moon, and could, as far as the implications go, as well be put into the
section for horror visions, together with 1984 and Brave New World. Plato's The Republic, for example, could easily be changed into a
true horror novel by making the narrator not one of the ruling elite, but one
of those "inferior" citizens whose offspring was to be disposed of.
The new Utopian writers are not quite that naive, and do not persist in
constructing their ideal states as concentration camps. In, for example, Ismar
Thiusen's Looking
Forward (1883),
it was completely natural that the fair young ladies of the year 3,000 A.D.
should be kept locked in, permitted to step outside only in the company of
broad-shouldered old hags with daggers in their hands. Nowadays the young women
might even go on three-week space tours together with the hero, without any
other chaperons than their own accommodating consciences. If the old hag shows
up, the hero probably would kick her out. This is, of course, a result of the
more liberal outlook on sexuality and personal freedom of our days.
On
the whole, the science fiction writers of today entertain a commendably
suspicious attitude toward their ideal states, basing their speculations on the
sound assumption that man will continue to be what he is, even though his
environment will change. He will neither be saint nor slave, and the Utopia
must be constructed according to this. In return, Utopia has grown considerably
in size, and does hardly circumscribe itself to Earth or an insignificant part
thereof. James Hilton's ethereal Shangri-La peacefully dreams away the years in
splendid isolation behind impenetrable mountain ranges, but out in the starry
void new empires appear—and disappear. The U.S. sf writer Isaac Asimov's
well-known trilogy Foundation
(1942-49) depicts a future
that makes all other imagined societies bleak in comparison:
... At the beginning of the thirteenth
millennium, this (development) reached its climax. As the center of the
Imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of generations and located, as it
was, in the central regions of the Galaxy among the most densely populated and
industrially advanced worlds of the system, it could scarcely help being the
densest and richest clot of humanity the Race had ever seen.
Its
urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the
land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city.
The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This
enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative necessities
of the Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of the
task. . . . Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce
of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor.
. . . (14)
The central theme of all Utopian literature
is Power. Power to change the environment, power to maintain
the private or human individuality. The novels of Jules Verne belong,
with few exceptions, to this branch, as well as most of the science fiction
that was written during the time of the late industrialization. It was power to
send man to the Moon, power to place man over the natural laws; with the help
of human genius, power to create the ideal state on Earth. With a rough
generalization, one can say that the Utopian novel dominated science
fiction—with shining exceptions like H. G. Wells—until the nineteen thirties,
when the Depression quickly put an end to the most naive hopes for the future.
It is interesting, though, to note that H. G. Wells, who started with anti-Utopias
like When the Sleeper
Wakes (1899) and The Time Machine (1895), in time became increasingly
reactionary, until the scientific progress and evolutionary process whose end
results are so gloomily predicted in the early stories, are held forth as the bases
for desirable brave new worlds in, for example, A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). A Modern Utopia describes the modern welfare state, governed
by the usual Utopian rational elite, called Samurai, and the result is a world ruled by
efficiency, proving, as many of Wells's subsequent works did, that he had no
fondness for socialism in its classical sense, or even for democracy. This
message is also brought forth in the other two mentioned novels, strange as it
may seem when one knows that Wells once was an active member of the British
Fabian Society, a socialistic movement. In these novels, Wells suddenly returns
to the time-honored totalitarian state reminiscent of the government system proposed,
among others, by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis and by Plato in The
Republic; a
meritocracy with Science (or Philosophy) as an obedient servant standing behind
the Masters. It is Utopia in all respects, chemically free of everything that
possibly could make life worth living. The British critic David Lodge has
observed regarding A
Modern Utopia that:
In a sense it was a generous attempt on
Wells's part to imagine a social structure which would make available to
everyone the kind of success and happiness he had personally achieved in the
teeth of great disadvantages. Or, more cynically, you could call it the paradise
of little fat men.
This
also goes, in a lesser degree, for Aldous Huxley, creator of one of the most
fierce and intelligent anti-Utopian novels, Brave New World, who as an old man wrote a straight Utopian
novel, Island
(1961) which is about as
stimulating as any of the old stiff-legged and impossible Utopias.
The
Utopian novel is escapist, as all dreams of the unattainable must be, and the
science fiction writers of today are all too practical to go on escapist
Utopian sprees. One of the very few exceptions I know of is the noted sf writer
Theodore
Sturgeon's novel Venus
Plus X (1960),
which depicts a Utopia in the classic sense, complete with universal
brotherhood, understanding, intelligence, love and no dissenters in sight. That
the novel still manages to convey a message
is entirely due to Sturgeon's obvious skills as a writer, plus the fact that this particular Utopia is built upon sexual and
moral standards that in themselves make the novel interesting. Apart from that,
this is Schlaraffenland all over again, and no beautiful machinery can make it
credible. The societies created by other sf writers are far, far removed from
this
A
short story by Robert Sheckley, Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay (1969), joyously describes a seemingly perfect Utopia, a sentient city which is programmed to guard its inhabitants from all
dangers, and to give them everything they can wish for. It behaves exactly as
carpingly patronizing as an anxious mother, and the inhabitants can't wait to
get out of it. Another short sf story describes a future where criminals are
frozen into suspended animation and left for thawing in some distant Utopian
future where people know how to handle them. The protagonist awakes in this
future, is taken on a sight-seeing tour of the perfect Utopia, and soon becomes
seized by claustrophobia. The continuance of Utopia is guaranteed by a simple
surgical incision that is performed while the citizen is still a baby, and
secures him a happy and peaceful life, free from unnecessary
curiosity and rebelliousness. The protagonist has to choose between going
through the operation and becoming a socially well-adjusted individual, or
getting thrown out into the wilderness where the scattered remnants of various
underdeveloped races live in horrible destitution. He chooses the savages.
In
this story the good Utopians enjoyed themselves by spying on the appalling
destitution of the savages through hidden TV cameras. In a recent story by
Harlan Ellison, The
Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World, the citizens of a future Utopia fetch Jack
the Ripper and force him to prowl the sterile streets, killing and vandalizing,
in order to satisfy the Utopians' demands for more and more
perverted amusements. The citizens of More's esoteric
Utopia were not unacquainted with the idea either. Of course they were
strongly opposed to wars and such themselves, and in times of war the foremost
task of the priests was to prevent (not preclude: that might put the soldiery
out of jobs) unnecessary bloodshed. In the neighboring country Zapolet,
however, live heartless, uncivilized brutes who are
willing to fight Utopia's wars. The Utopians pay these killers to wage their
wars for them, and complacently regard how they butcher each other. For their
own part, the Utopians prefer assassinations, and assassins are both honored
and well paid.
Imagined
societies are still created in science fiction, but they are far from the
escapist Utopias of yore. Robert A. Heinlein's and Isaac Asimov's highly
complicated future societies are good examples of this. They are, on the whole,
better than the societies of today, just as our world on the
whole is better than that of a hundred years ago, but they are not
perfect. No world will ever be perfect because man isn't, and no deus ex machina in the form of a brilliant new religious
concept or some wonderful mechanical gadget will ever do the work for him.
When
steam power was introduced, it was thought to pave the road to Utopia; well, it
didn't, and neither did electricity, even though it certainly made life better.
Later, atomic power, worldwide communications and space flight each in its own
way contributed to the general welfare, but Utopia is still unattained. It will
always be. Utopias make for interesting escapist reading at times, but they
certainly have no place in reality.
The
English professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's epic trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring (1954-55) probably comes as close to a Utopia
as anything that has been written during the last fifty years, with its
innocent Rousseauian escapism, but even here dangers always lurk in the shadows,
threatening to tear the gossamer security into fragments at the first sign of
weakness. Also, the story evolves in a mythical ancient past, well before man.
When man is mentioned, it is as something threatening, something that will
cause the destruction of the fairyland. Utopias, the science fiction writers
seem to say, cannot exist. If they, notwithstanding, should exist, they could
never work. And if they, against all common sense, should work, they would not
be of any use anyway.
4. THE
AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE
Many
science fiction writers are incurable misanthropes. This might be the result of
an uncommonly pessimistic inclination or a general perspicacity, but the fact
is, that few modem sf writers have found reason to regard the future with any
great hope. (I am now speaking of those works that deal with the future as a
consequence of the present day, not those that depict a future situation
according to its own terms. These will be discussed in a later chapter.) The
future will turn out to be just like our own time, they observe—only worse. And
then they summon forth a hell on Earth where the citizens are kept at bay by
Thought Police and the big industrial trusts rule the people with a more or
less obvious line of hard advertising, toward ever-increasing consumption and
consequently rising opulence for the shareholders. The social dreams of the
Victorians have been exchanged for scathing social criticism that, while most
often based on cold, hard facts, sometimes topples on the borders of defeatism;
the latter is commonly known as the "New Wave" syndrome of science
fiction. The "fact" anti-Utopian novel, speculating in the results of
processes already at work in our own time, might show a future k la Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!, in which the year 1999 moves toward its end and New York is
over-populated with thirty-five million desperate inhabitants, where hunger
riots are the order of the day and where the minimum living space, as
prescribed by law, is four square yards per person. Without
water or outflow. The environment pollution has long ago passed the
limit where it was merely catastrophic. Human lives are worthless. Over it all hovers the specter of the final war as a black, threatening
shadow. And after the novel, the author adds a list of
THE
AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE
recommended reading which proves that it probably will
rum out to be much worse. Or The Jagged Orbit (1969) by the brilliant British sf writer John Brunner, in which the
twenty-first century is ruled by the huge, ruthless Gottschalk weaponry combine
which sells weapons to anyone, anywhere, with predictable results; or Teenocracy (1969) by Robert Shirley, in which the
teen-agers have taken over the U.S.A. for good, which means that if you ain't
hip, you're out The members of the Cabinet are chosen by a sort of Russian
roulette, and the President is a tough rock star, name of The Fab. It makes one
long for the uncomplicated golden days of 1984.
As
late as 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World,
originally as a conscious
parody of H. G. Wells's Men Like Gods, as a horror vision of something that was
possible but highly improbable: the artificial, promiscuous, dragged and
enslaved humanity of the year 632 A.F. (After Ford). The most effective tool to
keep the citizenry at bay was the same apathy drug, Soma, that Thomas More invented for the people of
Utopia. Fifteen years later, the novel was furnished with a new foreword, in
which Huxley sadly observed that the horror vision was not as distant as he in
1931 had thought Huxley still thought that sanity existed, even though it was a
rather rare phenomenon; he was convinced that it could be achieved and that he
would like to see more of it. A critic retorted that Huxley was a sad symptom
of the failure of an intellectual class in time of crisis. Huxley replied, and
pointed out the real sinners:
The
benefactors of humanity deserve due honor and commemoration. Let us build a
Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the rains of one of the
gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would
inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words: Sacred to the
memory of the World's Educators. SI MONUMENTUM REQUIR-IS CIRCUMSPICE.
Novels like George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and Karin Boye's
Kallocain
(1940) are even more
apparent in their fear of what man will do next. Both describe fascistic
societies in a not too distant future, both are in a sense allegories on events
that already had taken place when they were written. The authors are certain
of their good cause, and do not squander on powder and shot. The terror is
absolute, and the evil of the dictators is limitless. In 1984, O'Brien, the
interrogator, says:
"Do you begin to see, then, what land of
world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic
Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and
treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world
which will grow no less but more merciless as
it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more
pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice.
Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except
fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall
destroy—eveiything." (15)
This was in 1949, when the author looked back
at the second World War and began to fear for the
probable evolution of the totalitarian state. Today, more than twenty years
later, the dictatorate is usually more discreet—on the surface, that is—and the
science fiction writers hardly expect the future dictators to use the same
means as Big Brother of Orwell's noveL The future belongs to the multinational
corporations, and against them nations and Big Brothers will cut poor figures.
The earlier horror vision was founded on terror as a means for slavery. But a
reign of terror means ineffectiveness, it reduces the
Holy Production, and, even worse, the consumption. When the anti-Utopian writer
of today looks into the probable future, he sees a consumption-oriented society
which is not too far removed from ours, with a treacherous mdcictrination that
is far more effective than Big Brother's boots. Orwell is hopelessly out. No
more than five years after the first publication of 1984,
the brilliant U.S. writer duo Frederik Pohl and
Cyril M. Kombluth brought out another sf novel, in which the new totalitarian
state was shown in its fullest and most horrible detail:
"I don't have to tell you men that
Point-of-Scale has its special problems," Harvey said, puffing on his thin
cheeks. "I swear, the whole damned Government
must be infiltrated with Consies! You know what they've done. They outlawed
compulsive subsonics in our aural advertising—but we bounced back with a list
of semantic cue words that tie in with every basic trauma and neurosis in
American life today. They listened to the safety cranks and stopped us from
projecting our messages on air-car windows—but we bounced back. Lab tells
me," he nodded to our Director of Research across the table, "that
soon well be testing a system that projects direcdy on the retina of the eye.
"And
not only that, but we're going forward. As an example I want to mention the
Coffiest pro—" He broke off. "Excuse me, Mr. Schocken," he
whispered. "Has Security checked this room?"
Fowler
Schocken nodded. "Absolutely clean. Nothing but the usual State Department and House of
Representatives spy-mikes. And of course we're feeding a canned
play-back into them."
Harvey relaxed again. "Well, about this
Coffiest," he said. "We're sampling it in fifteen key cities. It's
the usual offer—a thirteen-week supply of Coffiest, one thousand dollars in
cash and a week-end vacation on the Ligurian Riviera to everybody who comes in.
But—and here's what makes this campaign truly great, in my estimation—each
sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely
habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It
would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for
him to go right on drinking Coffiest—three cups with every meal and a pot
beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar." (16)
This nice picture from our
advertisement-infected future comes from Pohl/Kombluth's brilliant novel Gravy Planet, later retitled The Space Merchants, which tells about a not too distant future in
which the big corporations have taken power and Money is king. The New York of The Space Merchants is diametrically opposite the London of 1984,
but in the end the slavery is all the same. Big Brother kicks his subjects into
obedience; the new industrial tycoons drug them. "If you want a picture
of the future," O'Brien says in 2984, "imagine a boot stamping on a
human face—forever." It hardly matters much to the victim if the boot
bears the sign of a Swastika or a Coca Cola bottle. The difference is that in
the latter case the victim can even be made to pay for the privilege of being
trampled upon.
Pohl/Kombluth
have written a number of sf novels on this theme, among others Gladiator-at-Law (1955), which is an acid settlement with the
multi-national corporations like Philips, General Electric, Kodak and so on.
The distance of Orwell's boot-state is enormous. Here the world is ruled by a
number of giant corporations which write their own laws, fight regular battles
with competitive companies and unite only in the idea of the holy profit.
In
Qrwell's dictatorship the citizen can revolt, as Winston does, by escaping the
system for a time, away from the spy eyes and the Thought Police. Or by turning
out to be stronger than his tormentors, as Professor Burden in David Karp's One (1953), a more terrifying version of 1984 in which the protagonist is
subjected to a thorough brainwashing within a government experiment concerning
the best way to keep the citizenry in line. Professor Burden wins in a way: the
government has to kill him. But in Gladiator-at-Law there is no Thought Police, no Ministry of Love. The industry doesn't
need any executioners, it needs consumers. The British sf writer J. G. Ballard
depicts in a short story, The Subliminal Man, an even more ingenious way to keep consumption up and people down; I
have an uneasy feeling that the idea isn't entirely impossible.
A
large neon sign over the entrance (to the supermarket) listed the discount—a
mere five percent—calculated on the volume of turnover. The highest discounts,
sometimes up to twenty-five percent, were earned in the housing estates where
junior white-collar workers lived. There, spending had a strong social incentive,
and the desire to be the highest spender in the neighborhood was given moral
reinforcement by the system of listing all the names and their accumulating
cash totals on a huge electric sign in the supermarket foyers. The higher the
spender, the greater his contribution to the discounts enjoyed by others. The
lowest spenders were regarded as social criminals, free-riding on the backs of
others.
Luckily this system had yet to be adopted in
Franklin's neighbourhood—not because the professional men and their wives were
able to exercise more discretion, but because their higher incomes allowed them
to contract into more expensive discount schemes operated by the big
department stores in the city. (17)
The theme is, as I have said, widely used in anti-Utopian science fiction of today, and it
seems as if the sf writers more and more now have turned from the earlier war
and natural catastrophe themes to the results of our economic and environmental
(mis)management and its impact on man. This way science fiction comes into the
contemporary social and political debate, where it probably can do a lot of
good through its unique qualifications for presumption-free evolution and
behavior analysis.
Personally,
I believe there is a far more intelligent and
presumption-free debate going on in the decried science fiction genre than in
many of the so-called conscious and, for most people, incomprehensible,
cultural magazines that are embraced with such great benevolence by the
critics. That these critics never have come in contact with the genre, other
than the Sunday paper's comic strip section, is not the sf writers' fault
Science
fiction has thus by its anti-Utopian branch returned to Lucian and his
critical scrutiny of the follies of his time. The difference is partly that the
objects for the satire of today are not present yet, though in most cases
clearly recognizable as trends, and partly that the anti-Utopian writers of
today are so clearly disillusioned. When an improvement comes in sight, it is
immediately strangled by the conversationists, as for example in a short story
by Mack Reynolds, Subversive.
A new corporation called
Freer Enterprises starts to sell gadgets for their real value. Soap is sold for
three cents a bar, an electric razor for one dollar, a loaf of bread for one
cent. Of course, Freer Enterprises are not allowed to go on like this. The
Bureau of Economic Subversion (which in a final, clumsy and decidedly uncalled-for
backtracking turns out to be a front for the evil Communists) intervene and execute the conspirators of Freer Enterprises.
Because where would the profits go if everything was priced according to its
real value?
"Why,
the consumers would be able to buy commodities at a fraction of the present
costl" says Mr. Flowers of Freer Enterprises.
Mr.
Tracy, the evil Communist, "pounds the table with fierce emphasis."
"What
would they buy with them?" he asks. "They'd
all be out of jobs!"
The
horrible thing is that Mr. Tracy is perfectly right and he will probably be
even more so with time.
Robert
A. Heinlein, one of science fiction's most brilliant and most keenly-debated
writers, has outlined a similar problem in a short story, Let There be Light, which is part of his Future History Series, a grand collection of stories and novels that charts an ultra-reactionary future that might
make Senator Goldwater giddy with joy. Here, a scientist who is somewhat
ignorant in the ways of the world invents a combined light source and
sun-powered energy source with an efficiency of ninety-eight percent that
promises to wreak havoc with the power monopoly. Of course the inventor
succeeds in the end, but before that Heinlein has given a pungent exposé of the powers that hold back amelioration.
Anti-Utopian
science fiction is abundant with descriptions of future societies in which the
now barely hidden sadism has been dragged out in the open and entered as an
integral part of the everyday life. I have mentioned Frederik Pohl's and Cyril
M. Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law
in which the big industries
settle their business by regular battles.
These
tendencies have been brought further in novels like Robert Sheckley's The Tenth Victim (1966); here intending citizens are provided
with licenses for murder and go out into life to kill other like-minded people
who otherwise would have started wars and mixed up innocent bystanders in
their private bloodthirstiness. The reasoning is seductive:
Though it gave the appearance of the utmost
modernity, the Hunting Game was, in principle, not new at all. It was a
qualitative reversion to an older, happier age when paid mercenaries did the
fighting and non-combatants stayed on the sidelines and talked about the crops.
History is cyclical. An overdose of yin
changes irrevocably into yang. The day of the professional (and frequently
non-fighting) army passed, and the age of the mass army began. Farmers could no
longer talk about their crops; they had to fight for them. Even if they had no
crops to fight for, they still had to fight Factory-hands found themselves involved in Byzantine intrigues in lands beyond
the sea, and shoe clerks carried weapons into alien jungles and across frozen
mountain-tops.
What
did they do it for? In those days it all seemed very clear. Many reasons had
been given, and every man adopted the rationale which suited his own particular
emotionality. But what seemed obvious at the time became less so as the years
passed. Professors of history argued, experts in economics demurred, psychologists
begged to differ and anthropologists felt it necessary to point out.
The farmer, shoe clerk and factory-hand
waited patiently for someone to tell them why they were really being killed.
When no clear-cut answer was forthcoming, they became irritated, resentful and
sometimes even wrathful. Occasionally they would turn their weapons upon their
own rulers.
That, of course, could not be countenanced.
The growing intransigency of the people, plus the technological possibility of
killing everyone and everything, definitely overloaded the yang, thereby
bringing forth the yin.
After five thousand or so years of recorded
history, people were finally beginning to catch on. Even rulers, notoriously
the slowest men to change, realized that something had to be done.
Wars were getting nobody nowhere;
but there was still the problem of individual violence which untold years of
religious coercion and police instruction had failed to curb.
The answer, for the moment, became the
Legalized Hunt. (18)
Today we have the commonly accepted
violence-pornography in the form of Wild West movies, usually of Italian make,
which should be enough for anyone's bloodthirstiness. Contemporary folk heroes
like Mike Hammer and James Bond also murder right and left, and display a
remarkable contempt of men that obviously makes their millions of fans happy.
This is, however, a violence by proxy that in the long
run can't satisfy the real connoisseur.
One can, of course, go a bit farther out
beyond the violence that TV and cinemas are distributing to devoutly drooling
humanity, and give violence free rein with well-paid mercenaries, armed with
science's latest and most sophisticated tools of murder. This would be real
war, with beautiful close-ups of torn entrails and dying soldiers, realistic
gas attacks with real mustard gas and machine guns and real dum-dum bullets.
Then the whole thing would be distributed via TV all over the world to the
peeping toms, and the worst killers would become national heroes like James
Bond and Donald Duck (and the Green Berets) that every schoolboy would want to
emulate. TV's coverage of the Vietnam war shows that
we are not too far from this. The U.S. sf writer Mack Reynolds has outlined a
probable development on these lines in the novel Frigid Fracas (1963), in which the somewhat degenerate
Major Joseph Hauser with the aid of a clever PR man rises through the ranks to
general and the declared hero of all children. The British film director Peter
Watkins recently used a similar idea in the movie The Gladiators (1969), although he didn't give much interest
to the cynical gamble for power that goes on behind the battlefield.
Man
is obviously a killer by instinct, this most sf writers seem to be movingly
unanimous about. But all sf writers do not regard this as something wholly non possumus. Robert A. Heinlein—formerly a professional
military man, and since many years one of the sf genre's most brilliant
writers, much-debated but always interesting—delineates in the novel Starship Troopers (1959) with obvious enthusiasm a future
society in which the citizens have to go through military training with the
hereto attached consequences, before they are permitted the minimum democratic
right of voting. Military service is of course open to everyone, regardless of
sex, face, mental and physical handicaps and so on, anything else would be
undemocratic. It is the military indoctrination that is important—and the
result is, predictably enough, a remarkably stable society with high morale,
strong discipline, a one-party system and all the rest. Actually, this novel
belongs rightly to the Utopian novels, as it describes an ideal society—ideal
at least from Heinlein's point of view—and what few dissenters there are in the
story all see the light before the^tory ends. Even the despised father of the
hero, a rotten, cowardly pacifist, grabs a gun and earns his citizenship the
hard way. The only thing that makes it less than a classical
Utopian novel is that it contains so much violence and gore that no sane
Utopian would stay there for five seconds. Utopians are a peaceful lot;
Heinlein is not.
Now,
this sounds like a thoroughly fascist state, and Starship Troopers has been subjected to a murderous criticism
in sf circles, especially after it was awarded with science fiction's highly
coveted Hugo Award in 1959. Myself, I would rather leave than love a country run along the lines of Heinlein's Utopia. But Heinlein has
constructed his society with a logic that is rather seductive (you can accuse
Heinlein for a lot of things, but never for faulty logic). In Heinlein's world
the right to vote is thus a privilege that has to be earned with a specified,
individual contribution of work. He proceeds, probably rightly, from the
assumption that a person who is too lazy to earn this privilege also is too
lazy to revolt against the established order of things. Thus,
no "silent majority." If we look at our own society, the idea
does not look so foolish. A great deal of the voters in the Western world do,
as is well known, not vote so much on party platform as on the party
candidate's appearance and morale, their own parents' political preferences
and so on. A right to vote that had to be earned with hard labor in two or
three years would probably be exercised with much more consideration.
Heinlein's thesis seems, in short, to be that lazy people without knowledge of
politics should not be permitted to participate in something as serious as
politics. And who can dispute that?
What
can be discussed is the fact that military service is the only chance to prove
that you are not a lazy slob. And the horrible pacifists are already from the
start excluded from any possibility of changing the rules. There are no conscientious
objectors in Heinlein's world. Just voters (war veterans) and
non-voters (draft-dodgers, effeminate snobs, pacifists and other animals of low
standing). The belief in authority and the individual subjection that
the military system impresses upon its disciples is—although commendable in a
situation of war—hardly worth striving for in a democratic society.
Starship Troopers has, as I have said, been the cause of a very lively debate for and against the military establishment, in magazines, fan magazines (fanzines) and at least one sf novel,
Harry Harrison's witty and intelligent Bill, the Galactic
Hero (1966), a Catch-22 on a magnificent cosmic scale. Whatever views one might take on the matter,
one can't deny that Starship Troopers has done a lot of good in this respect, by stimulating an interesting
debate. It is disturbing, and what shall good science fiction do, if not
disturb?
As
for the end-of-the-world type of science fiction that is most commonly
associated with the genre, the sf writers have shown a remarkable wealth of
imagination, all the way from the famous French astronomer and author Camille
Flammarion's novel La
Fin du Monde (1911),
that dealt with the slow death of Earth ten million years hence, over more
recent works like Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think (1947), wherein a new type of fertilizer mutates devil's grass which,
ultimately, kills everything oh Earth; Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959)
in which the final atomic war is triggered by mistake, leaving Earth a smoking
wasteland, and the many end-of-the-world novels of J. G. Ballard where Earth
alternately is flooded or dried up or more or less torn to bits by winds. It is
interesting to note the upswing of this type of anti-Utopia during the high
points of the Cold War, showing the extermination of mankind in a thousand
imaginative ways but always conveying a deep
distrust in man's ability to behave as a thinking
animal.
This
is, of course, the old Frankenstein trauma that is the basis of all
anti-Utopian science fiction, the belief that sooner or later man's
achievements will turn against their creator, be it the new society, man's
inborn instincts or the hydrogen bomb. This apocalyptic tradition is not
reserved exclusively for science fiction, but I think I am safe in asserting
that nowhere else have these misgivings been voiced so repeatedly as in this
particular genre.
I
have already said that science fiction by its very nature must be a subversive
thing, as it points out that there will always be changes, something that no
establishment wishes to admit. The anti-Utopian novel is the most obvious ex-
Cover of Caesar's Column by Ignatius Donnelly, first published under a
pen-name in 1890.
ample of this, as asserted in the treatment given
anti-Utopian writers by totalitarian states not only in the past, but right
now. The Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin is perhaps one of the most well-known
examples, although not by any means the only one. Zamyatin (who died in exile
in 1937) is one of the Russian authors—from Isaac Babel to Tulij Daniel and
Abram Tertz—who have been crushed or silenced because of their incisive social
criticism. In 1924, his novel We was published in translation outside Russia. It was a forerunner to 1984
and Brave New World—in many respects actually more chilling than
these more well-known works, dealing with a future super-communist society in
which even the word "I" is forbidden as being a danger to the state.
The novel earned Zamyatin complete censure and he was faced with renouncing his
work or keeping silent. Zamyatin was lucky—he received permission to leave
Russia. Other writers have not been as lucky. The fate of Abram Tertz and Tulij
Daniel is well-known—both of them had written science fiction criticizing the
Communist state.
In
1969, the well-known Russian science fiction writers Arkadi and Boris
Strugatsky, who are considered the best authors of Soviet science fiction and
the only ones comparable to the best U.S. authors, were silenced by the Soviet
authorities on account of four satirical sf stories dealing with bureaucracy
and the right of a state to interfere with social development on other planets
(read: countries). At the other end of the political spectrum, similar things
have recently taken place in Spain, when the Political Police seized all the
copies of an issue of the Spanish sf magazine Nueva Dimension.
This is, of course, not something that has
happened only to science fiction. On the whole, the sf field has been spared
the most mindless acts of the political censors. But with more and more writers
turning to the science fiction story as a means to convey social criticism, it
might be safe to assert that we will see more of this in the future.
It should be pointed out that criticism does
not necessarily mean negativism. With so many of the well-known works of
science fiction being anti-Utopian, the whole genre has gotten a somewhat
undeserved reputation as being largely negativisric and defeatist in attitude,
longing, in effect, back to the "good old days" that never existed
anyway, and deadly afraid of what the future might bring. Actually, most sf
writers seem to believe in progress, even though few are so naive as to believe
that the future will be all roses. Also, the anti-Utopian branch of science
fiction occupies only a comparably small portion of the medium as a whole.
Nevertheless, the anti-Utopian branch, with its roots in ancient satirical
writings, has always proven to be the most popular outside of the circle of sf
aficionados, and most easily recognized by the critics as
"Literature."
"Straight"
science fiction, being more optimistic in its outlook, and dealing more with
the future as such, delineates future societies where conditions are vastly
different from what they are here and now and constructs plot and human
behavior as results of these assumptions—colonization of far worlds, new means
of travel, new forms of (not necessarily evil) governments and so forth. Yet
"straight" science fiction has never achieved the same impact on the
literary scene. The reason for this might be that while the anti-Utopian novel
is old as a literary phenomenon, the "straight" science fiction,
depicting the future on its own terms, describing it as not necessarily better
or worse but different,
then taking this at its
face value and trying to make the best of it, is new, and, therefore, somewhat
suspicious.
Personally, I find the anti-Utopian science
fiction extremely interesting—but it shows only one side of the matter. It is
anti but never pro; it gives criticism, but never even attempts a solution.
Just as the Utopian story is escapist, its antithesis is defeatist; it must
always be so. There is an unfortunate tendency in all literature to view all
changes with the deepest suspicion and to put the worst construction on
everything new. It would be very strange indeed if this did not pervade science
fiction to a degree as well. No doubt many people in the year 2025 will look
back to the wonderful golden days of 1971 when everything was so much better,
and regard the new star ships and what-have-you with grave misgivings, feeling
the ground rock beneath their feet. This is as it should be, and the
anti-Utopian novel has done a lot of good by pointing out faults in society's
machinery—but one should not stare oneself blind on this side of the coin.
In
1660, the Italian Jesuit Francesco Lama was certain that God never would permit
the construction of airships, because they could be used to throw things down
at people. Airships are being used to throw things down at people,
and in a much more horrible way than the good Lama ever envisaged, too, but
they also are used to transport people in a perfectly peaceful way, and on the
whole, it has been of much more good than evil, notwithstanding the old, often
repeated cry that If-God-had-meant-us-to-fly/write /
travel/live-he-would-have-given-us-wings/ pens/wheels/hospitals. Well, he
didn't; we did it ourselves.
Basically, the anti-Utopian novel is just a
way of saying (as Cyril M. Kornbluth puts it in The Science Fiction Novel,) "I will show you what will happen if you
don't listen to me and do as I say," as opposed to the Utopian message of
"See here how beautiful and orderly everything will be if you make me
dictator over the world." The difference is slight, and in the end they
both come down to the same thing: an inability to face the present world. The
anti-Utopian novel is interesting, and as a means of powerful social criticism,
unsurpassed. It should be read with a pinch of salt, though. The future isn't
all sour grapes.
5. THE MAGIC UNREALITY
When one comes to the type of science fiction
that completely abandons the accepted idea of this universe for the benefit of
another, more or less self-made one, so-called Fantasy, the question immediately
arises as to which literature, properly speaking, does this branch of the
genre belong, and why. Enthusiastic sf scholars have made remarkable plunges
down into world literature and returned with the most astounding discoveries,
from the Sumer epic of Gilgamesh to the old Norse
Eddas, the Arabian Nights and so forth, not to mention the fairy tales of Hans
Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. With this definition, The Sleeping Beauty would make science fiction of prime quality,
and Mother Goose would be a must in every true sf fan's library. Even the definition by situation that usually is applied to
"straight" science fiction, gives peculiar results here. So,
for example, we find religious allegories like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia among the works of science fiction, something
that undoubtedly would have surprised the authors.
Fairy
tales and religious allegories have existed since time immemorial, but the
particular literature or point of view that we call Fantasy is, despite all
eager efforts to prove the opposite, a comparably new occurrence, that appeared
during the nineteenth century with works like Lewis Carroll's (Charles L.
Dodgson) Alice
in Wonderland (1865),
The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
The difference between the traditional fairy
tales and these works may seem slight—but there is a definite difference. We
don't believe in demons, werewolves, fire-breath-
ing dragons and the rest (well—most of us
don't), but once, and this wasn't too long ago, we certainly did. Everyone knew
that these creatures existed; they were not imagination, they were fact.
Sometimes they were seen. The fabled creatures of ancient and not too ancient
times were a lot more familiar to those people than outer space is to the
average man of today. Thor lived once, and the Earth was flat; and seven
crystal spheres encircled the world of man. Of course we don't believe in this
today, and any work of fiction assuming that these legends are true is purely
fantasy. The difference lies in that the old sagas told about things that were
considered facts, while modern fantasy—is fantasy.
Terry
Carr says in his introduction to New Worlds Of Fantasy/2 (1970) that ". . . fantasy springs from and operates on a basis of
emotional symbolism, just as dreams do. Fantasy is, in fact, the literary
equivalent of dreams." This is a good point, and tells a lot about the
mechanisms of fantasy. Just as in dreams, anything can happen, anything at
all. What logic and natural laws there are, can be
changed at the slightest whim. And there are nightmares as well, as attested by
the veritable armies of monsters, ghouls and malignant magicians who live in
blissful abandon in this sub-genre of science fiction.
Most
fantasy stories are based on an existing tradition of sagas and popular
conceptions. This is exceptionally obvious in works like Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) and James Branch Cabell's stories from
Poictesme—not to mention the Irish writer Lord Dunsany, heavily influenced by
ancient folklore, who in his turn has influenced most modem fantasy writers.
But it is striking in how high degree the authors have created their own
universes, with highly specific natural laws, and how this has been done as a
sort of intellectual game: creating worlds as frameworks to the narrative and
molding them into shape with complete disregard for commonly accepted logic,
much in the same way as the absurdists, Ionesco and Alfred Jarry and others,
later did. It is also interesting to note that while many of these works of
fantasy are commonly considered to be juvenile stories, e.g. Alice in Wonderland, they • are actually highly sophisticated
works that require an adult mind to comprehend them to their fullest extent.
Still, they can be read and appreciated by anyone. As opposed, I might add, to
some of the modern absurdist works.
Among
the works of fantasy one can also find a number of stories bordering on far-out
science fiction of the usual type, very intelligent and satirical works built
within a framework of pure, undiluted fantasy; for example the French artist
J. J. Grandville's sick, mystifying Un Autre Monde (1844),
a hallucinatory vision in which steam-powered robots give mechanical concerts,
where marionettes have formed kingdoms of their own and the botanical garden
boasts a section for real, living heraldic animals. Grand-ville, a well-known
illustrator of his time, was probably the world's first surrealist painter of
the Dali school. He died in 1847 in a mental institution, his last works, done
just a week before his death, being two strange, frightening surrealistic
dream visions.
It
is, of course, in the nature of fantasy literature that one can't draw up
straight orientation lines for its development. The Italian writer C.
Collodi's (Carlo Lorenzini) strange children's book Pinoccio (1880) with its touches both of Gothic horror
and time-typical moral story, undoubtedly belongs to
this genre, as well as the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson's Moomin books and the English philologist J. R. R.
Tolkien's trilogy The
Fellowship of the Ring. The English priest and Shakespeare scholar Edwin Abbott's mathematic
fantasy Flatland:
A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), which is a square's (a geometric square, not a human one)
description of its two-dimensional world, is likewise fantasy in the literal
sense of the word.
The
greater part of the fantasy literature that has been written during the last
fifty years belongs, however, to the more easily handled groups of science fantasy (fantasy on an alleged scientific or logical
basis, where the Newtonian cosmic system has been exchanged for one with a
mystical or purely homemade basis) and Sword <br Sorcery (swords and monsters of various kinds,
usually with a strong influence of ancient Nordic folklore, including elves,
giants, fire-breathing dragons, magicians and so forth).
The
heritage from ancient mythology is considerable in the latter type of fantasy,
and primarily the Gothic novel seems to have furnished a lot of its
time-honored ingredients, from chivalrous feats to artificial creatures of all
kinds —homunculi, golems, living dead and such, besides the usual ghoul ballet
and its malignant conjurers. The Gothic novel, which appeared for the first
time with Horace Wal-pole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) had obvious connections with the chansons de geste of the Middle Ages, the Arthurian legends and
the legends of Charlemagne, of which especially Ludovico Ariosto's poetical
work Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532) seems to have made lasting
impressions. Orlando
Furioso was
a tale of chivalry with a motif from the alleged heroic deeds of Charles the
Great, written in the style of the time. The plot is utterly dramatic, alternating
between the pathetic and the grotesque, with lots of heroic deeds, swords,
blood and thunder. Moreover, it contains some really imaginative episodes in
the story of Asdolf's journey to the Moon and his highly improbable adventures
there. This whole genre was murdered by Cervantes with Don Quixote (1605), and when its pitiable remnants again
crawled inside the book covers, more than one hundred and fifty years later, it
was thus in the guise of the Gothic tale.
The
Castle of Otranto, and
the literary genre that it gave birth to, can make the hair stand on end on the
most obdurate person. It is a genre that almost exclusively occupies itself
with dilapidated castles under the light of the werewolf moon, sepulchers with
disagreeable contents, evil magicians, compacts with the Devil, noble heroines
whose primary mission is to be abducted by all and sundry; noble heroes with
peculiar names, kindhearted old men with noble features, old ladies with
horrible secrets, and assorted monsters of the most horrible sort. The
intrigues are usually complex onto the borders of insanity, and to complicate
it all further, half of the characters are usually related to the other half,
which gives birth to interesting incestuous situations a la some of the
current teenage magazines.
This
ghastly literature was, of course, a product of its time, in the same way as
the current science fiction literature is the product of our specific
situation. It belongs, partly, to the Romanticism of the eighteenth century,
the longing back to times when everything was better (the old days were always better), as well as the Romanticist's
well-known faiblesse for ruins and forgotten passages and such. But there was
probably also a much more substantial connection with the real world. The
Marquis de Sade makes an interesting observation in his L'Idée sur les Romans (1800) regarding the Gothic tale:
This
genre . . . was the inevitable product of the revolutionary shocks with which
the whole of Europe resounded. For those who were acquainted with all the ills
that are brought upon men by the wicked, the romantic was becoming somewhat
difficult to write, and merely monotonous to read: there was nobody left who
had not experienced more misfortunes in four or five years than could be
depicted in a century by literature's most famous novelists: it was necessary
to call upon hell for aid in order to arouse interest, and to find in the land
of fantasies what was common knowledge from historical observation of man in
this iron age.
The "iron age" was the world in
which people lived—if live it can be called—in indescribable conditions,
condemned to a life of appalling suffering for the crime of being bom; the
world in which scholars spent years and healthy salaries arguing with learned
friends about the placing of a comma in a poem and deciphering ancient stone
tablets. The lower classes were starving, and in France, Marie Antoinette suggested
that if the peasants didn't have bread, "let them eat cake." The
Marquis de Sade chronicled the horrors of the time in a much more naked and
effective way than any of his contemporaries, frequently repeating his
conviction that, in modem civilization, virtue is persecuted—while crime not
THE
Castle of
Otranto, a
STORY.
Translated By
WILLTAM MARSHAL,
Gent.
from tie
Original Italian of
ONUPHRIO MURALTOV
Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Ox ran to.
L O N
D O
Nj
tt'mlti for Tho. Lownds ia FJeet-Streeft MDCCLXV.
Title page of the first edition. 79
only pays fabulous dividends, but, in the
skillful hands of the man who is master of himself, goes unpunished.
Basically,
the early Gothic tale was only the romans de moeurs in a new overcoat, still convinced that virtue will be rewarded in the
end and vice justly punished, finding pleasure in "the beautiful horror
which delights while it saddens," a sort of horror pornography, if you
like. However much due to the influence that the Marquis had
on his contemporaries, with works like Justine ou les
Malheurs de la Vertu, La Philosophie dans le Boudoir and Les 120 Journées de Sodome, a change set in, in the
Gothic tale. Vice did not always get punished. The Gothic tale became,
not a picture of the contemporary world, but of its undercurrents of despair
and hopelessness. The ghosts are within ourselves, as
the tormentors of the Marquis' novels are projections of ourselves. In the
imitation of the Marquis de Sade and, in a sense, of the Gothic tale as a
whole, I can mention a modern work, Pauline Réage's painful and grandiose
novel Histoire d'O (1954), which chronicles a woman's willful
subjection to complete slavery of the most horrible land. The Gothic tale had
all this, although in a very inarticulate way, and this might be the chief
reason why. outside of the sheer horror content, it is
still readable. Its real terrors are real, but merely hinted at.
The Castle of Otranto, the first of the Gothic novels, had much in
common with the romans
de moeurs like
Manon Lescaut and Fanny Hill—the
pornographic interest was exchanged for the horror interest, but basically it
was the same story, only much more crude. Instead of
the bedroom we have the sepulchral chamber; instead of love, terror; instead
of fornication, death (in womb-like subterranean passages). In later Gothic
tales these two subjects, sexuality and death, were combined to form peculiar
necrophilian situations. This is especially the case with Matthew Gregory
Lewis's The
Monk, which will be
discussed later on. But in The Castle of Otranto, sex was exchanged wholesale for horror, and after a lot of gruesome
spine-tingling occurrences, virtue was rewarded just as it should be.
The
action is laid in the castle of Otranto, where the terrible sovereign Manfred
reigns in the place of the rightful owner, who went out to participate in the
Holy War and never returned. A terrible
ancient prophecy haunts the background, and one day a giant helmet flops down
in the courtyard, bashing in the empty head of Manfred's son Conrad, who
quickly passes away, leaving Manfred with Conrad's bride-to-be, the beautiful
Isabella. Manfred starts making unpleasant advances, just in the line of what
one could expect of such a man, and before you know it, the circus is going
full blast with bleeding statues, hollowly groaning ghosts, new giant articles
of clothing that appear from nowhere when you least expect it, and other merry
occurrences calculated to raise the spirit of any thrill-seeking reader. The
atmosphere is gloomy, but all ends well despite everything. Manfred enters a
monastery and the hero, a young and noble-looking lad who spends his days in
the subterranean vaults of the castle, occupying himself with saving the life
of all and sundry and finally turning out to be (surprise! surprise!) the
long-lost heir to the castle, gets Isabella. The novel was originally published
under the nom de plume of Onuphrio Muralto, "Canon of the Church of St.
Nicholas at Otranto," and "translated from the original Italian by
William Marshal, Gent." In the preface of the first edition, Mr.
"William Marshal" speaks highly and without the slightest trace of unbecoming
modesty of his own work:
The principal incidents are such as were
believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have
nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is purest Italian . . . The beauty
of the diction, and the zeal of the author (moderated however by singular
judgment) concur to make me think the date of composition was little antecedent
to that of the impression . . . There is no bombast, no similes, flowers,
digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Every thing tends directly to the
catastrophe. Never is the reader's attention relaxed . . . The characters are
well drawn, and still better maintained. Terror, the author's principal
engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted
by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant
vicissitude of interesting passions . . .
The unexpected success of the novel did,
however, send Messrs. Muralto and Marshal back to whence they had come from,
and Horace Walpole, himself an eccentric with many traits of the sovereign
Manfred in his novel, stepped forth into the limelight to accept the applause.
An
even better proof of the popularity of the novel was the flood of Gothic tales
that immediately deluged the market; Ann Radcliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), William Beckford's Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)—a variation of the legend of the
Wandering Jew—and a veritable torrent of lesser but guaranteed blood-curdling
works. The market for Gothic horror was substantial, and the offered goods
satisfied all demands for perversions.
The
culmination came with the young Englishman Matthew Gregory Lewis' novel The Monk (1796), which was a collection of atrocities
of the worst possible kind, performed around the terrible mad monk Ambrosio, who is seized by wicked desires vis-á-vis his virtuous sister, and sells his soul to
the Devil in order to satisfy his lusts. Ambrosio dogs the poor woman through moonlit castles
and monasteries, sends demons after her, murders her friends and relatives and
behaves in general in a way that hardly speaks of any particularly Christian
temper. In between, he executes serenades at his desired's window, at which the
instruments are handled by ghouls and demons with disagreeable looks, and the
lyrics are of a kind that hardly could have improved the young woman's sleep,
for example the song "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine" which
later on was translated and subjected to some negligible changes and became
known as the well-known and much loved Swedish "folk-song" "Hjalmar och Huida." Lewis' original text is even worse than the
macabre Swedish version. The fair Imogine has promised to wait for her beloved,
the gallant knight Alonzo, while he slaughters the heathen in distant
countries, but soon enough she forgets all about the promises she has made and
prepares to marry someone else. And with good cause, one should think, as the
gallant knight has died. The betrayed lover returns to Imogine's wedding as a
decaying corpse, and "The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept
out,/And sported his eyes and his temples about,/While
the spectre addressed Imogine." The bridegroom dies on the spot, and the
grim Alonzo carries the unfaithful Imogine down to the nether regions. The
castle is hurriedly deserted, and from that day, no one sees the charming
couple again. But—
At midnight four times in
each year does her spright,
When
mortals in slumber are bound, Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, Appear in
the hall with the Skeleton-Knight,
And shriek as he whirls her
around.
While they drink out of
skulls newly torn from the grave,
Dancing round them the
spectres are seen: Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave They howl: "To the health of Alonzo the Brave And his consort,
the False Imogine!"
After this softening, the monk Ambrosio rapes
his poor sister in the monastery's sepulchral chamber, kills her and receives
his punishment in good order. The novel was a scandal and Lewis had to rewrite
parts of it. It is now available complete and unabridged in case someone should
want something special and the Marquis de Sade, who seems to have influenced
Lewis a great deal, isn't enough. (19)
The great classic of this genre, and the one
that definitely brought the Gothic tale into the realms of science fiction
came, however, in 1818. It was the result of the then twenty-one years old Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley's Swiss journey with the poet Shelley (Shelley was at
this time still married elsewhere, but his wife was pointedly not invited) two
years earlier. A typical portion of the text to evoke the
right feeling:
It was on a dreary night of November that I
beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to
agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that
I might infuse the spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the
panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the
half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it
breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How
can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch
whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs
were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!
Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries
beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness;
but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes,
that seems almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they
were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
The object of this tender reflection is, of
course, Frankenstein's monster, the greatest matinee idol of all time and
probably the most unappreciated BEM that ever has been created in a mad
scientist's gloomy laboratory. The monster is a tender creature in Shelley's
spirit, but his pathetic attempts to establish contact with human beings
inevitably ends in failures because of his horrific appearance. His gross
ignorance of fundamental human behavior also complicates his existence. There
is a tender scene in the novel, in which the monster meets a small child by a
woodland lake and plays together with her. The play ends in catastrophe as the
monster notices the beautiful water lilies floating in the lake, and throws the
girl into the water, believing that she also will float like a water lily. The
members of the local village congregate in the bushes, armed with hayforks,
flaming torches, etc., and the monster seeks asylum with an old hermit who
luckily is blind and teaches him to behave like a real gentleman.
With
time, the monster becomes really human, smokes a pipe, takes a drink before dinner, and starts to regard passing young
ladies in a way that can't be misunderstood. He returns to Doctor Frankenstein,
demanding that he create a female
for him. Frankenstein firmly declines, and the monster retaliates by killing
off Frankenstein's friends and relatives, whereupon Frankenstein and the
monster pass the remainder of the novel stalking each other around the world.
Frankenstein dies in the arms of a whaler in the Arctic Ocean, and the monster
disappears in the eternal Arctic night to die as well.
At
its best, Frankenstein
is a moving tragedy with a
contemporary significance. Harold Bloom writes in an afterword to an American
pocket edition that:
The
greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley's novel is
that the monster is more
human than his creator.
This nameless being, as much a modern Adam as his creator is a modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful,
more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all able to give the
attentive reader that shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic
recognition compels a heightened realization of the self. (20)
However, the novel only seldom manages to
climb over the level of the then current ten cent romance or "penny
dreadful." Frankenstein's
strength lies in its
implications, not its literary qualities. As it is, Frankenstein is not only a Gothic horror tale, but also the archetype of the anti-Utopian novel, as
well as a unique introduction into the world of the Romantics: William Blake,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and so forth.
The
theme of Frankenstein
was not new, any more than
other themes of Gothic literature. The artificial man, or homunculus, can be
traced back to the legend of Daedalus, who built an artificial man for King
Minos of Crete, and the homunculus can also be found in the Finnish epic Kalevala. In Faust, Goethe
describes the creation of a homunculus by magical means, and his source was
probably the old Jewish legend of the Golem, a homunculus molded in clay and
infused with the spark of life by the rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel in Prague,
to defend the Jews against their tormentors. Golem turned against his creator,
just as Frankenstein's monster later did, and was stopped only when the rabbi
succeeded in taking away the paper inscribed with magical signs that gave life
to the monster. This legend, one of the most recurrent in alchemistic dreams,
was later used as the basis for a famous novel by Gustav Meyrink, Der Golem (1915).
Frankenstein
was, at any rate, a
thundering success, and was staged as a play all over Europe. The greatest
success came later with the numerous films. The first came in 1910, produced by
Edison Company ("Many repulsive situations have been eliminated,"
said the official press release), followed in 1915 by the Ocean Film
Corporation of New York's Life Without Soul and then, in 1931, by James Whale's classic Frankenstein with Boris Karloff as the monster. Up to 1969,
twenty Frankenstein movies had been released, most of them with very slight
connections to the original novel. Werewolves, vampires and living dead were included
as a matter of course, and in one film the poor monster even became a rock n
roll star. Titles like I
Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) and Frankenstein
versus the Space Monsters (1965) speak for themselves. One of the latest editions to the
Frankenstein myth, made by the reputable Hammer Films in England, bears the
title Frankenstein Must be Destroyed. As far as the films are concerned, I am inclined to agree.
The second great movie star of the horror romance, is the charming Count Dracula, an East European
gentleman with sleek hair and burning eyes, not unlike Rudolph Valentino. The
worthy count has been the subject of more movies than even his fellow-official
Frankenstein's. monster. His heyday came in the
thirties, and his popularity seems to have rivaled that of a present-day pop
star. Bela Lugosi, the good count's alter ego, said in 1935 that everyday he
received as many letters as any romantic screen idol, ninety-seven percent of
which came from women. (21)
The
origin of Dracula and his blood-sucking brethren comes of course from ancient
popular beliefs among the people of Asia and East Europe. The root of it lies
probably in the ancient belief that the dead* thirst after life-force, usually
identified with blood. In Nordic popular belief, these creatures went by the
name of Pukes,
evil spirits, who nightly
climbed down through the chimneys to nauseate the sleepers and suck the blood
out of them. They also made a living as servants to the local witches, stealing
milk and other useful necessities.
The
first Gothic tale concerning itself with the exploits of the vampires was in
the 1819 published story The Vampire by
the Italian J. W. Polidori, who belonged to the group around Shelley and Byron
and recorded it during the horror-story competition that gave birth to Frankenstein. The story was published in Lord Byron's name,
to his exasperation, and proved to be an immediate success.
With
the Irish writer Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897),
the vampire appeared in the elegant top-hat-and-tails form that we now are
accustomed to. The vampire is here a gloomy Transylvanian count who entices an
innocent young man, the lawyer's assistant Jonathan Harker, to his terrible
castle in order to prepare for his emigration to England and, at the same time,
feed his vampirous sisters with the young man's blood. The novel is written in
the form of a diary, and tells circumstantially of the count's attempts to kill
the hero and how he later on appears in London, heralded by an army of rats,
bats and other unpleasant animals. The ancient Slavic legend-making is
scrupulously utilized, and Dracula follows all of the Gothic tale's rules of
conduct all the way to his grandiose destruction on the desolate plains of
Transylvania while the wolves howl in the background and the heroine swoons in
the hero's hairy arms. It is an excellent novel, and a good representative of
the Gothic tales.
The
movie adaptations are legion, from Robert Vignola's The Vampire (1913), over F. W. Mumau's classic Nosferatu (1922) and Tod Browning's even more classic Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi as the count, to the
present-day films like Billy
the Kid Meets Dracula (1966)
and Roman Polanski's delightful Dance of Vampires (1967) where the count at last is exposed as a homosexual, and which
ends with everybody turning out as vampires. In the U.S.A. Dracula appears in
various forms in immensely popular "come into my coffin" type TV shows,
he is the big hero of the day, and according to an article by Raymond Lamont
Brown, 6,500,000 women fans regularly watch ABC's Drac-ula-type TV show Dark Shadows. (22). It is so sick it is probably true.
The
sf writer Richard Matheson has used the motif in the novel ƒ am Legend (1954) which takes place in a future wherein
everyone is a vampire. He even gives a scientific explanation of sorts to the
phenomenon.
The
werewolf, the last of the Big Three heroes of our time is, while a fairly
ancient Central European mythological figure, rather
new in the Gothic horror tale. The belief in werewolves or lycanthropes
probably sprang from the suspicions of fooled game hunters that the wolf, or
whatever it might have been, actually was a human being transformed into the
animal. In France, during the sixteenth century, many werewolf-trials took
place, during which people were charged with doing various atrocities while
werewolves, and summarily burned at the stake.
The
first novel dealing with the subject at any length was Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris (1933), the classic tale of the man changing
into a wolf, prowling the streets of Paris at night, looking for something in
which to sink his fangs. Endore drew heavily from the ancient werewolf
tradition, even to the point of making the poor man, Bertrand Chaillet, a
werewolf because he was bom on Christmas Eve. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888) is of course an earlier example of the
theme of man turning into monster. Jekyll/Hyde is actually just the werewolf theme, that of the bête
humain dressed
up with a slight scientific explanation. H. G. Wells used the theme with a twist in The Island of Dr. Moreau; he changed beasts into men. A more recent
novel by Clifford D. Simak, The Werewolf Principle (1967), takes the theme a bit further: the protagonist of this novel is
a triple werewolf, able to change himself into no less than three different
animals—a wolf, a sort of alien intellect, and a man. He even finds himself a similarly
equipped werewolf-girl at the end.
Otherwise,
the werewolf is chiefly known through the horror movies—and, of course, through
the ghastly horror comic magazines with which the market is abundant. The less
said about these the better, though. I have
a strong stomach, but these horror comics (made for children, mind you!) make
it turn like a merry-go-round. The films are nicer.
The
first one, The
Werewolf of London (1934),
told of the usual scientist, whose misguided research turned him into a howling
wolf, whereupon he was firmly dispatched, although not until he had given his
money's worth in torn throats, spilled guts, etc. The werewolf as a serial
character came with The
Wolf Man (1941)
starring Lon Chaney, Jr. as the beastly hero. He managed to get shot in the end
of the film, but nevertheless rose from the grave with moonlight reflecting on
his glistening fangs, to howl himself through a number of increasingly silly
horror films, starring against every monstrosity in sight, from Frankenstein's monster
to Dracula and Abbott & Costello. Among the
interesting additions to the modem werewolf myth, one might mention ƒ Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)—with Michael Landon of Bonanza fame as the howling and hairy hero—and Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory (1961), with its theme song "The Ghoul
in School."
The film The Fly (1958), in which the scientist almost
succeeds in changing himself into a common housefly, obviously belongs to this
genre—although the clumsy scientist succeeds only partially. Only his head is
transformed. Tsk, tsk.
To
my knowledge, only two serious films have been based on the werewolf theme—both
of them built on Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They
are Victor Fleming's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), with Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner—a strangely
moving story; and Jean Renoir's he Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1960), in which the scientist, Jean-Louis
Barrault, actually becomes an elegant, interesting man while under the
influence of the drug. Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor also plays along these lines, changing the awkward and shy scientist
into a sleek-haired and thoroughly disgusting Elvis Presley-type hero at the
downing of a retort of sickly-smelling liquid.
It is still horror,
although not exactly of the classic type.
Among
the post-Gothic authors, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) towers like a giant. His
psychological insight and almost tender handling of his themes made him in a
way the first serious Gothic writer, obsessed with pain and death, but using
the obvious horror elements only as means to convey a deeper significance. The
familiar picture of Poe is epitomized in two lines from a poem in his short
story Ligeia; but it is far from the complete picture:
And
much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the Soul of
the Plot.
Poe was rather more complex than that. People
who disliked Poe's writings, asserted that Poe wrote horror stories for their
own sake; that he "had no heart." Chauncey Burr retorted in his Memoir (1850) that:
Poe was undoubtedly the greatest artist among modem authors; and it is his
consummate skill as an artist that has led to these mistakes about the
properties of his own heart. That perfection of horror which abounds in his writings, has been unjustly attributed to some moral defect
in the man. But I perceive not why the competent critic should fall into this
error. Of all authors, ancient or modem, Poe has given us the least of himself
in his works. He
wrote as an artist. He
intuitively saw what Schiller has so well expressed, that it is an universal phenomenon of our nature that the mournful, the
fearful, even the horrible, allures with irresistible, enchantment. He probed
this general psychological law, in its subtle windings through the mystic
chambers of our being, as it was never probed before, until he stood in the
very abyss of its center, the sole master of its effects.
Although Poe is renown
for his Gothic horror stories, he also wrote a number of other works; his The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is considered the first detective story,
featuring as well Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later
remolded somewhat as Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote a number of science
fiction stories, and even a humorous story, The Man That Was Used Up (1840), in which a remarkably good-looking
man turns out to be made up almost solely of protheses. It is interesting to
note that Poe's most horrific story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), a Gothic tale in all respects,
generally was accepted as science fact, and
during Poe's lifetime reprinted in England in the Popular Record of Modern Science as The Last Conversation of a Somna-bule and later as a pamphlet entitled Mesmerism, In Articulo Mortis. A reception as curious as the theme of the
story.
Among Poe's science fiction works, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans
Pfaall (1836)
and The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym's Adventures (1838) are the most noted. Hans Pfaall is a
satirical variant of the old Moon journey; a balloon made of old newspapers
lands in Rotterdam, and a dwarf climbs out of the gondola with the astounding
news that he has just returned from the Moon. The story consists of the dwarf's
narrative of his journey and the meeting with the people of the Moon. He
concludes the story by promising to tell of his adventures on the Moon later
on. It is apparent that his story probably is a joke on the good citizens of
Rotterdam. The story might be a commentary on Richard Locke's reputed
"discovery" of life on the Moon the preceding year, a revelation that
was attributed to the English astronomer Sir John Herschel and was announced
in the New
York Sun; real
yellow press journalism, without doubt.
Arthur
Gordon Pym is a
very ordinary sea story, until Pym comes to an island in Antarctica inhabited
by peculiar black aborigines who get scared out of their wits at the sight of
white objects. They slaughter everyone aboard the ship, excluding Pym and
another man, who then proceed on to the Pole in'a canoe, pursued by large white birds who terrify
the aborigines. The novel ends with Pym and his friend being pulled down in a whirlpool at the Pole. The novel is unfinished, but it is probable that
Pym was meant to drop down into some inner world of the usual type. Jules Veme
later wrote a sequel, The
Ice Sphinx (1897),
which, however, did not include any inner world.
Poe
wrote some other science fiction works, of which Mellonta Tauta especially, a picture of a future world in
the style of present-day sf, is notable. His chief works were in the Gothic
horror tradition, though, and it is stories like The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Cask of Amontillado (1846) and poems like The Raven (1845) that have given him his reputation as
one of the greatest examiners of the dark undercurrents of man's mind, comparable
even to the Marquis de Sade.
Despite
the popular acclaim that met Poe's works, he lived in genteel poverty—and often
not even that. When the book Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared, Poe's only payment consisted of a few complimentary copies of the volume.
The poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845, and Poe became, without
question, a famous man. "The bird beat that bug all hollow," he
remarked. During Poe's lifetime, the poem appeared in eleven periodicals as
well as in book form. Still, Poe was even more troubled and impoverished than
before. He became an occasional heavy drinker, and his wife Virginia's death
in 1847 made his private sufferings all the worse. He died two years later,
still impoverished, still suffering, still famous.
In
ironic contrast to this, stands the value placed on Poe's letters after his
death. A six-sentence letter to the Philadelphia publishers Lea &
Blanchard, in'which he suggested that ". . . you receive all profits (of
a collection of stories) and allow me twenty copies for distribution to friends
. . ."was less than a century after his death auctioned for $3,000, and
recently a rare unpublished letter was auctioned for $5,200 to a New York
manuscript dealer.
Poe's
significance for the modern short story can hardly be overestimated. He has
influenced Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Baudelaire,
among many others, and the modem science fiction genre owes a great and obvious
debt to his' works. It is known that The Fall of the House of Usher—unquestionably
one of the masterpieces of short stories—influenced many artists to a great
degree; among them was Debussy, who admitted to being "obsessed" by
Poe and this story, and attempted to set the story in the form of a
"symphony on psychologically developed themes."
These
days, Poe is most well-known for the numerous films that he has been subjected
to—chiefly by American International Pictures, whose vigorous director Roger
Cor-man has been grinding out for years a steady flow of low-budget,
low-quality adaptations from Poe's stories. These mosdy have very slight
connections with the original works —characterized by lots of fire and gore and
sepulchers and burning castles and Vincent Price. They are interesting, in a
sadistic way, but they don't have anything which makes Poe's work living and
breathing and significant. They are painted backdrops with gory fronts and no
content.
Poe laid the groundwork for the present-day
fantasy— but the now prevalent type of fantasy came later on with two writers,
both of whom utilized remarkable horror elemerits in their works. The writers
were H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson.
Hodgson's
(1875-1918) novel The
House on the Borderland (1908) is a narrative from a strange and repulsive world far beyond our
reality. Two tourists find a lonely house situated at the edge of an
unfathomable abyss during a walking-tour in a desolate part of Ireland. Before
leaving the house, they find a diary kept by the last owner of the house,
describing his experiences and the hideous underworld forces that focus on the
place. It tells of the narrator's travels within the house, to other galaxies,
to the center of the Universe and the fights with an inhuman
"pig-people" who live in the abyss beneath
the house. An aura of undefinable terror pervades the story, conjured not so
much by the obvious terror elements as by the feeling of insecurity and
alienness that is the keynote of this novel. Hodgson's novel is a typical
example of the "new Gothic tale" that after the turn of the century
began to appear, in which the time-honored vampires, living dead and so on
slowly were being eased out for the benefit of far more fantastic creatures and
plots. Hodgson's use of modern symbols in a traditional Gothic setting heralded
the coming of the "science fantasy." This method is brought further
in his novel The
Night Land (1912),
which depicts a world of total darkness millions of years hence, peopled with
monstrous beasts and the remnants of humanity living in metal pyramids. With
this novel, conjuring terror with the symbols of today, Hodgson actually
became one of the first modern science fiction writers.
Howard
Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a name practically synonymous with modern
fantasy literature, not so much by his own works—his greatness as an. author is
disputed and from a literary viewpoint he is at best mediocre—as by the
enormous influence he had on the writers who later on would shape science
fiction literature: Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner and others. Lovecraft
was the most diligent contributor to the U.S. fantasy magazine Weird Tales, and he corresponded with almost all of the
hopeful youngsters who later on would be writers;
he read their manuscripts, corrected them and
gave advice. The stories of his kindness toward these aspiring writers are
legion. Lin Carter says in the introduction to a collection of Lovecraft
stories that:
He was one of the most amazing letter writers
of all times; at the peak of his voluminous correspondence, he was writing
fifteen or twenty letters a day. Nor were they brief notes; as his disciple,
friend, and sometimes collaborator August Derleth has written, "they sometimes
covered thirty, fifty, or even seventy typewriter-sized pages, closely
written." (23)
Lovecraft also wrote a number of stories and
articles gratis for the fan magazines (fanzines) that were published in sf
fandom, taking up a substantial part of his time and leaving less time for more
profitable writings, which might have been one of the reasons for the poverty
in which he lived at the end of his life.
Lovecraft's
works are mostly pronounced horror stories, featuring demons of the worst kind:
ghosts, ghouls, living dead and such things. The heritage from the Gothic tale
is obvious, but Lovecraft is far more devilish and detailed than the Gothic
writers ever were. Madness, unmentionable rituals and fear beyond all reason
figure prominently in his stories, often coupled with acute claustrophobia; the
horrid events usually take place in subterranean vaults and sepul-chers,
incredible ancient ruins and narrow passages deep under the modem cities, where
indescribable creatures haunt the protagonist down and down until merciful
madness darkens the poor man's mind forever. Black magic and rituals performed
in ancient sepulchers are common occurrences in Lovecraft's stories, the dead
walk again and ancient gods appear regularly.
Many of these stories are powerful, but they
tend to be somewhat monotonous with time. His most enjoyable works are probably
the dream-fantasies The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1925), The
Silver Key (1926),
and Through the Gates of
the Silver Key (1932),
all of them clearly influenced by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany. They are set
in strangely beautiful never-never lands of imagination, far removed from the
morbid fantasies of his other works.
In
1939, two sf fans, August Derleth and Donald Wan-drei, started a publishing
house, Arkham House, to publish works by H. P. Lovecraft and others. They also
published eight issues of a fantasy magazine, Arkham Sampler, 1948-49, featuring among other works, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
So much for the horror. I should perhaps point out that this branch
of science fiction does not solely occupy itself with vampire castles and living
dead. The greater part of the fantasy literature is noticeably temperate when
it comes to the horror elements, and uses the fantastic situation in the same
way as the more scientifically inclined branch of the genre, to construct a
situation and follow it to its logical conclusion. I can mention Fredric
Brown's What
Mad Universe (1949),
a parody on the clichés
of science fiction, in
which the protagonist drops down into a world dreamed up by a young and ardent
science fiction fan. In Robert A. Heinlein's Magic, Inc. (1940) magic is a socially accepted
occurrence, and is used in everyday business life.
A
great part of the fantasy that is written today is, however, of the
time-honored blood, sword and hero type and actually just the adventure story
in its most straightforward form, featuring giants, magicians, beautiful
princesses and the usual broad-shouldered hero with lots of muscles and no brow
and eyes not an inch apart. It is the fairy tale all over again, with the
monsters bigger and more horrible than before, and perhaps a wee bit more
sadistic, but that is about the only difference. It is pure entertainment with
a good measure of escapism thrown in, and it never purports to be anything
else. You might call it a kind of Wild West in the never-never lands of
unbridled fantasy. There are, of course, works of singularly literary qualities
here as well as in the Wild West genre, as we shall see later on. This
sub-branch of science fiction is called Heroic Fantasy, or Sword ir
Sorcery, both
of them exceptionally fitting names.
L.
Sprague de Camp, in his foreword to an anthology of heroic fantasy defines it
as:
. . . stories laid
in an imaginary world, superficially somewhat like ours, but a world where
magic works and machinery has not been invented. Sometimes this world is that
in which the story-teller imagines ours was like in prehistoric times.
Sometimes he fancies it will exist in the distant future, when the sun has
dimmed, science and civilization have decayed, and magic has once again come
into its own. Sometimes the scene is a world in another universe parallel to
ours, where the laws of nature are different. (24)
In the foreword to another collection of
fantasy stories (25), de Camp stresses the high entertainment value of this
fiction, and ridicules the contemporary social novel ("should an heiress
marry her chauffeur?") and the acknowledgment of sex as a driving force
of man ("stories that reduce human beings to animated sets of genitalia
with legs and other parts vaguely attached"). I agree with the high
entertainment value of fantasy, but as for the rest, I don't. There is a lot to
say about, for example, the undercurrents of sex in Heroic Fantasy. I will
take this up in a later chapter.
This
mixture of ancient Nordic sagas and Gothic tales that is called Heroic Fantasy
or Sword & Sorcery appeared regularly chiefly in the U.S. magazine Weird Tales, without which the branch probably never
would have become what it is today. It had existed in the form we now know it
for some time, indeed since before the rum of the century, but Weird Tales encouraged writers like L. Sprague de Camp,
Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard who were to rise to
predominance in the field. It proved immensely popular, but after World War II
interest in the branch waned noticeably; obviously people had had enough of
murder and violence. De Camp writes that:
The cause, however, was the trend of the
time, in mainstream fiction and also in science fiction, towards stories with a
strongly subjective, sentimental, psychological slant. In such tales, the
anti-hero was often a wretched little twerp who could never do anything right.
Instead of providing the reader with a heroic model with whom he could for the
moment identify himself, giving himself a warm glow of vicarious heroism, the
writer presented his reader with a protagonist so ineffectual and contemptible
that the reader—the writer hoped—would enjoy the thought that at least he was
better than that.
(26)
After having delivered this unabashed praise
to escapism, de Camp goes on to note the renewed interest in Heroic Fantasy
("The Hero shall ride again!") and in this respect he is undoubtedly
right. Old classics are reissued by the score together with new stories of
blood, thunder and well-sharpened swords. The spectrum goes all the way from
the gentle novels of James Branch Cabell to the sadistic tales of Robert E.
Howard and the almost Dickensian Gormen-ghast triology
of Mervyn Peake. The source of this sudden interest in fantasy might be partly
attributed to the success of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy; however, looking at the state of the
world—the real world —today, I can well believe there are some deeper reasons,
too. There was a similar interest in heroes and mighty deeds in Hitler's
Germany. Richard Wagner's Der Ring der Ni-belungen, a heroic Sword & Sorcery fantasy of no mean qualities, was not the
only work of its type popular at the time.
First
among the writers of Heroic Fantasy stands Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth
baron of Dunsany (1878-1958), holder of one of the most ancient baronial titles
in the British Isles and an aristocrat of the time-honored British big white
bwana lion hunter type, the author of more than sixty books of drama, poems and
fantasy (with a quill pen, his biographers note). His fantasy stories—built on
elements heavily drawn from old Anglo-Saxon folklore and sprinkled with myths
of his own making, characterized by a robust handling of the fantastic themes
of monsters, heroes and elves as well as an almost tender, richly poetic
language—influenced most of the following writers of the genre.
One
might say that he practically invented the pastoral never-never land for
fantasy. It had, of course, been there all along, in the fairy tale, but these
tales had very seldom been written for anyone over the age of twelve. The
Gothic tale only made use of the most ghastly elements of the old sagas.
Dunsany used it wholesale, with his own details added, and did it for adult
readers. He didn't use quite as many swords and spilled guts as his successors,
though; that was for lesser geniuses to invent. Most of his books are now out
of print, but two volumes of Dunsaniana have recently been issued under the
editorship of Lin Carter.
Far
away from Lord Dunsany's elves and magicians, and yet closely related to him in
the use of ancient myths, although utilizing them with a greater awareness and
more humor (and, many think, too much long-windedness) stands James Branch
Cabell (1879-1958). His novels are usually set in a world bearing traits of
classic mythology as well as the medieval world of Southern Europe. The country
of Cabell's fantasy books is called Poictesme, a place bearing some^modest
relations with medieval Provence but actually a land of Cabell's own creation,
formed under the influence of Cabell's extensive knowledge of medieval romance
and ancient myths from all parts of the world.
The
cycle of books that chronicles the adventures of kings, magicians and common
people in this country is called collectively Biography of the Life of Manuel, Manuel being a swineherd who by various
devious means rises to the position of Count of Poictesme. The story of his
life is told in the second volume of the Biography (there are twenty of them, in all), Figures of Earth, while he appears as a much-revered statue in
the third, The
Silver Stallion. From
having been a thorough rascal in his life, he is now considered as being
something very close to a saint; and this is a way of turning things that can
be found in all Cabell's fantasy works. Cabell is a romanticist with a difference,
knowing that no object of admiration is quite worth the emotion it causes.
Cabell is at the bottom disillusioned, and his humor, ranging from sarcasm to
farce and burlesque only underlines this. Jurgen (1919), Cabell's most well-known novel, is a
typical example of Cabell's subtle style. He regards his protagonist with the
same kind indulgence with his many bad traits as he earlier showed toward
Manuel in Figures
of Earth. They
don't behave like gentlemen, they are cowards and liars, you can never trust
them, but such as they are, such is man and has always been.
Cabell
looks at his figures, whether they are Achilles or Helena, the god Bacchus,
mother Azra, the Devil or God, with the same irony; and Jurgen's hypocritical
talks as he wanders from bed to bed in the strange lands of ancient sagas and
myths becomes a quiet satire on all the ideals of religion and morality, of
patriotism and romantic love. Nothing is really what it seems to be, he says,
and when Jurgen gets the chance to fulfill his dreams in the shape of Queen
Helena, the unattainable, he shies away because he is afraid of what hè might
come to know. Jurgen
became the source of
Cabell's fame as a writer, when the U.S.A.'s self-appointed moral guardian,
John S. Sumner, boss of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, tried to
suppress the book on charges of obscenity. Cabell was acquitted after a court
battle that lasted for two years, and suddenly found himself a famous man. Jurgen has never been out of print since then. The
guardians of morals are always the best advertisers for the very books they
dislike. Which, of course, proves Cabell's thesis.
Actually, Cabell is far from immoral, and
moreover rather difficult to get at. His works are abundant with references and
metaphors that only a thoroughly classically educated reader can appreciate to
their fullest extent, and his archaic, elegant prose makes him something of an
anachronism in our day.
Cabell has been received with both utter
enthusiasm and utter dislike. From having been one of the best-known American
authors, he suddenly disappeared completely from fame in the early thirties,
and it was not until very recently that he was rediscovered by any number of
readers. The true aficionados have, of course, been here all along. The renewed
interest in fantasy has brought Cabell back with fanfares, but only time will
tell if he is back to stay or, as a critic has put it, "will be left alone
to sardonic contemplation in the ivory tower built by his art."
Turning
around completely, we come to Edgar Rice Burroughs, father of Tarzan, son of
the apes, and a number of other hairy acquaintances—the absolute opposite of
everything that Cabell stands for. Burroughs wrote a lot of Heroic Fantasy,
actually making his debut with a novel called Under the Moons of Mars (1912), later retitled A Princess of Mars, the first of his renowned Martian novels, in
which an able-bodied young man named John Carter transports his astral body to
Mars, here called Barsoom, where horrible monsters spend their time chasing
wonderfully beautiful princesses over the wastelands. It appears that this
novel may have been influenced by a little-known novel by an English author,
Edwin L. Arnold's Lieut.
Gulliver Jones (1905;
recently reissued by Ace Books as Gulliver of Mars). Richard A. Lupoff, an authority on Burroughs, says in a foreword to Arnold's novel that:
. .
. Gulliver Jones's Mars and John Carter's Barsoom bear such a resemblance as to
stretch the long arm of coincidence far beyond the breaking point. Following
Gully's unscientific advent on Mars (and John Carter's apparent astral
projection to the red planet is hardly more feasible than Jones's flying
carpet), he encounters a civilization remarkably like that of ERB's
books, even down to the curious absence of old people and small children from
Martian society.
Jones
meets his Dejah Thoris—she is Princess Heru —and his Heliumites—the
magnificently conceived Hither People. He duplicates Carter's rescue of Dejah
as recounted in A
Princess of Mars, and
Carter's voyage down the Iss as described in Burroughs' The Gods of Mars. And his return to Earth near the end of
Arnold's book parallels Carter's return at the end of Princess. (27)
Eleven more Martian books followed, most of
them with John Carter as the main figure, and contemporaneously with these
Martian stories and the equally fantastic Tarzan novels (twenty-seven in all, a great deal of
them of the monster-and-lost-empire type) he ground out four novels of Carson
Napier's adventures among the creatures of Venus, three Moon novels and nine
novels dealing with Pellucidar, the subterranean world, the latter with the
hero David Innes as the most common denominator. The Earth being hollow and
provided with a small central sun, in Pellucidar everything is about as it is
here, only more wild and more monstrous. Here David
Innes lived merrily with swords and gorgeous princesses, now and then in
company with the great Tarzan, who flopped down into the subterranean world
when he didn't have anything else to do. The first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core, came in 1922.
Burroughs'
fantasy novels have proved immensely popular, despite the fact that every one
of them on close scrutiny turns out to be rather old hat. This not only goes
for the Pellucidar books—the hollow Earth is one of the oldest and most common clichés
of science fiction, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth being only one among many works utilizing
this idea. Likewise, the Burroughs adventure formula doesn't differ much from
other action novels.
The answer might lie in the quick,
breathtaking pace of the stories, and the skillful handling of the prose.
Burroughs was out to write entertainment, and this he did, splendidly. It is far
from great literature—you hardly know more about the people in the stories when
you finish them than when you began—but there is suspense in them from
beginning to end, and in Heroic Fantasy, this is what counts. The Rev. Henry
Hardy Heins has in his preface to a book about Burroughs' life and works found
yet another reason to the greatness of Burroughs' novels:
ERB
knew the difference between right and wrong, and he spun his yams so that there
was never any doubt in his reader's mind either. His heroes and villains,
together with the characteristics of each, were painted in unmistakable terms
of black and white. And he was always scmpulous to keep his stories clean, even though they might also include violent
battles and the spilling of countless buckets of blood. This is why it seems
downright foolishness to me to hear of anyone alleging that Burroughs' works
are unfit for children. Actually, taken in toto, they depict most clearly the relative merits of Good
and Evil, along with an exaltation of the simple virtues such as honesty,
kindness and family devotion—with the opposing vices often played up in order
to intensify the contrast. (28)
To me, this seems to be a pretty good
explanation as to why Burroughs never should have seen print at all and why (as
actually once was done in Burroughs' home town, Tar-zana) his books should be
banned in every library ever frequented by people under the age of fifteen
years. Perhaps the Rev. Heins thinks that "the spilling of countless
buckets of blood" belongs to the "simple virtues" of life. I
don't. I much prefer "dirty" (and natural) sex to the senseless
killing so exultantly praised by this Burroughs advocate.
The
"clean" virtues listed by the Rev. Heins above are, however, common
for all Heroic Fantasy heroes; they kill like maniacs, but they are clean (which probably means that all of them still are virgins; how they
should be able to have clean consciences after what they have done, escapes
me). The facets of Good and Evil are also very easily
discernible; everyone intellectual or not broad-shouldered enough is a baddie.
Same goes for everyone with physical deformities. Tis a
beautifully uncomplicated world, this one.
One
of the very few cases of Heroic Fantasy heroes turning out to be somewhat less
than spotlessly clean in word and deed, is in Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd
and the Gray Mouser, two dubious heroes working with poison and
Illustration by J. Allen St. John for
The Master Mind of Mars by E. R. Burroughs
daggers when the need arises, drinking themselves
drunk when the chance comes and harboring foul thoughts most of the rime. They
are by far the most interesting and individual heroes I have encountered in
this particular type of fiction—but they are quite alone. It should be noted
that Fafhrd has a sex life—something almost unique in this collection of
oversized eunuchs.
Modern
Heroic Fantasy takes place in a strange world of sword-toting heroes,
terrifying monsters and women (usually princesses) almost too beautiful to be
true. The scene of action may change, the monsters might vary in size and
shape, but the fundamental idea is always the same. The heroes usually sport
magic swords, with which they without any great compunction murder peonle right
and left. Their attitude toward the heroines is also far from gallant. If they
are of the rare type equipped with a sex drive, they usually rape her on the
corpse of the murdered antagonist, whereupon they kill her as well and scamper
off toward new gory heroic deeds. The rest of their time these heroes divide
between damp caves where miscellaneous shady magicians wander about conjuring
beasts, and the sackings of one defenseless city or another. There is a lot of
gore in these stories, and action enough for ten ordinary novels in every one
of them.
Usually,
the Heroic Fantasy, or Sword & Sorcery, is so absurd that no one ever can
take it seriously, which admittedly weakens some of the objections against it
as to its overemphasis on violence. True, fantasy takes a lot of "suspension
of disbelief to appreciate it as entertainment, but it is really no more
improbable than the typical story of the broad-shouldered private eye who
fights fifteen Russian agents single-handedly and shoots beautiful blondes in
the belly. It's just the setting that is different. Basically, I believe that
Heroic Fantasy shares with the Wild West and the tough detective story the
trait of being essentially Utopian: that is, to again quote de Camp,
"providing the reader with a heroic model with whom he for a moment (can)
identify himself, giving himself a warm glow of vicarious heroism." As
far as entertainment goes, I can't see anything wrong with this. Though I still
dislike the overemphasis on violence.
The
masters of this particular form of entertainment are generally considered to be
the American writers Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and the British Michael Moorcock. Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) is the crowned king of the branch, practically canonized by his many
fans and followers. Howard, a man with an unhappy mother complex who committed
suicide when his mother died, created in his stories a never-never land called Hy-boria, in which his gigantic and unbelievable
sadistic hero Conan carried on like a devil, killing women,
children and old bootmakers with the same merry spirit. Conan was a great ladies' man as well, and all the wonderfully beautiful
queens were crazy about him. The stories of Conan and his bloody sword appeared chiefly in the magazine Weird Tales during the thirties. They have also been
published as books (six of them, plus an additional one, Return of Conan by Björn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp). Howard also created a number of other equally fearless heroes,
Al-muric and Bran Mak Mom being some of the most Conan-esque. Conan has proven immensely popular in fantasy circles, a "Hyborian
Legion" was formed in 1955,
and fanzines are to this
day published, devoting themselves to the exploits of The Hero. Conan's
originality is not so great as to necessitate any deep analysis; it is basically
the time-honored adventure formula all over again, but for anyone looking for
good, clean murder, slaughter and sadism, this is a must. This formula for
Heroic Fantasy has been admirably exemplified by Michael Moorcock, who should
know, as:
A)
Hero must get or do something,
B)
Villain disapproves,
C)
Hero sets out to get what he wants anyway,
D) Villain
thwarts him one or more times (according
to length of story), and finally
E) Hero,
in face of all odds, does what the reader
expects of him. (29)
This goes for all Heroic Fantasy, but
Howard's heroes are even less subtle than the others of the branch. They go
from start to finish like steamrollers, pausing only to wipe the blood from
their swords, and if the exploits are downright impossible, that's part of their
undeniable charm. According to E. Hoffman Price in A Memory of R. E. Howard, Howard made his heroes so simple so that when
"you get them in a jam ... no
one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate
themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot, or slug
themselves into the clear." (30)
Fritz
Leiber is in many ways a strange bird in the world of Heroic Fantasy. His
heroes, notably Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, are not only cutpurses and rogues,
they only kill when they have to (a most uncommon trait in this fiction) and
they even have sex urges (Conan once sported one, too, in Return of Conan, but it was censored by the publisher).
Leiber's heroes also have a humorous trait that makes me rather favorably inclined
toward them. Leiber doesn't seem to take his heroes quite as seriously as his
fellow Heroic Fantasy writers. It should be noted that Fritz Leiber has shown
himself well acquainted with the art and uses of ancient magic, as shown not
only in his Heroic Fantasy stories but also in a number of other works. Most
notable is his novel Conjure
Wife (1953), one of the
most frightening and thoroughly convincing horror stories of this century,
dealing with witchcraft in the peaceful setting of a university town. This is
fantasy, although hardly of the heroic type—which also to a degree goes for his
Gather, Darkness! (1943), the story of a
battle between pseudo-religion and pseudo-magic. In Gather, Darkness! Leiber actually proved that the gulf between "straight"
science fiction and Sword & Sorcery can be spanned with good results,
using elements from the two branches and uniting them into a powerful work of
imagination.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) is the third
of the Big Three of the magazine Weird Tales' "golden
years" of 1928-39, the others being H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
His works consisted of "Weird Heroic Fantasy" (another sub-branch;
they come and come) that stands closer to the old Gothic school of magicians,
ruins and ghosts than any other contemporary fiction. His Zothique stories are set in a dim and distant future,
millions of years hence, in which magic has reappeared and incredibly ancient
empires are slowly sinking back into oblivion as the deserts spread out,
creating, to quote Lin Carter, "a dark world of older mystery, where
luxurious and decadent kings and wandering heroes quest and adventure across
dim landscapes, pitting their strength and wisdom against powerful wizards and
alien gods; under a dying sun." The picture is painted with
bold strokes and with an almost beautiful language, creating a truly alien
world, in style somewhat reminiscent of Arabian Nights, where
one is easily convinced that everything can happen. The theme was later used
by Jack Vance in The
Dying Earth (1950),
a collection of interconnected short stories set in the incredibly distant
future where strange science goes hand-in-hand with magic and where the ancient
cities of super-science still rise toward the darkening sky in moldering
splendor. But the going, I can
assure you, is as rough as always in Heroic Fantasy.
Michael Moorcock (1939-)
is a paradox in the field; he is well-known as one of the leading writers and
advocates of the avant-garde "New Wave" science fiction, but most of
his best-known and most liked novels come under the heading of the
sweat-gore-and-murder Heroic Sword & Sorcery Fantasy. His hero is
sometimes known as Elric of Melnibone, the unhappy possessor of a magic sword
called Stormbringer. Elric is an albino and bearer of gloomy secrets that hath
no name. He is of the melancholy sort. He starts the day with a hand-to-claw
combat with dragons in the small hours of the morning, and sacks a couple of
cities before lunch. The women are mad about him, but when Elric has butchered
his last adversary for the day, he stubbornly rides away toward the sunset,
completely unmoved by the rejected women's hysterical bawls. Tis a hard and lonely task, to be a Hero.
Actually, Elric of Melnibone stands a cut
above most other heroes; he is a tragic personality possessing some traces of
individuality, and his battle against the powers of Chaos is both intelligent
and engrossing. Sometimes he even behaves like a human being. Every time he has
killed one of his lifelong comrades or his dear wife or so, he cries a bit; I think this is a nice, human touch. He
has also been caught in the act of thinking, which
is very unusual for heroes and in fact an almost unprecedented occurrence. And
in the end of the two-volume saga of Elric, The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965), everything goes to the dogs, which
perhaps is the nicest and most human of all.
Since
the mighty Elric lately has been butchered by his own untrustworthy sword (a
very unusual finish), Moorcock has turned to another almost analogous hero,
Dorian Hawkmoon, who is Duke of Koln and has an evil black gem embedded in his
skull. This disagreeable jewel threatens to come alive at any moment and eat
his brains, and Dorian Hawkmoon is thus as melancholy as Elric of Melnibone.
The four volumes chronicling these adventures—The Jewel in the Skull (1967), The Mad God's Amulet (1968), The Sword of the Dawn (1968), and The Runestaff (1969)-are quite similar to the story of
Elric of Melnibone, with lots of magic, abducted princesses, evil wizards,
magic swords, monsters and so forth. I have been told that there is a great
deal of allegory and hidden meaning in these stories. Knowing Michael
Moorcock's other works, it would not surprise me, but I have so far been unable
to detect it
Abraham
Merritt (1884-1943) was one of the foremost writers of Sword & Sorcery
fantasy. He is still considered the best by many aficionados, and it is true
that in his particular field he has few equals. (31)
Merritt's
most well-known novels are The Moon Pool (1918)
and its sequel Conquest
of the Moon Pool (1919)
which tell of subterranean monsters, a collection of decidedly untrustworthy
creatures harboring foul plans against humanity. The idea was later readopted
by a man with strong imagination, Richard S. Shaver, who in the years 1945-48
got a number of novels dealing with the monster-infested underground published
in the sf magazine Amazing
Stories. The awed readers learned that the evil Lemurians and the Atlanteans in
times of yore had gone underground and now were sending up rays toward us
unknowing people. Many fell for this rubbish, and Amazing's circulation rose rapidly. Loud protests from
the not-so awed sf fandom and the rest of the magazine's writers put an end to
the Shaver tales, however, and the Shaver fans had to go back to their flying
saucers again.
The
best known fantasy writer, and the one who almost single-handedly brought out
the fantasy into public awareness, however, is undoubtedly the English
philologist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-). His epic
trilogy The
Fellowship of the Ring (1954-55) has by now sold in the millions, and a veritable Tolkien-cult
has appeared. There are Hobbit clubs everywhere, where the members appear in
typical dresses, take names from the trilogy, perform rites from the books and
so forth. Learned books are written about Tolkien and his world, and in sf
fandom equally scholarly fanzines are published, discussing the trilogy,
Tolkien's use of the Anglo-Saxon myths that form its basis, the literary
shaping and so forth. How many fanzine pages that during the last years have
been devoted to speculations about Tolkien's next work, The Silmarittion, I don't even care to guess.
Personally,
I see this popularity as a very positive thing,
leading, as it were, to a renewed interest in fantasy and almost forgotten
fantasy writers like Mervyn Peake, E. R. Eddison, David Lindsay and James
Branch Cabell. One might, however, ask why Tolkien turned out to be the
catalyst that opened up the gates for fantasy literature. He is far from unique.
Tolkien fans point to the grand scope of the trilogy (actually a tetralogy, The Fellowship of the Ring is preceded by another book, The Hobbit, from 1937, giving the prehistory of the magic
ring). There are also many attractive traits in the traditional fairyland in
which the story is laid. It is based directly on Anglo-Saxon and Nordic
mythology, with Midgard (Middle Earth) as the center of the world. In this
Midgard live the small peace-loving, pipe-smoking and tea-drinking Hobbits in
their cozy dens in the Earth, amid elves, trolls, dragons, white and black
magicians and all the other attributes of the fairy tale. The mythology is
painstakingly constructed (Tolkien is the author of a number of scholarly works
on Nordic and ancient Anglo-Saxon literature) and over everything hovers a
gossamer veil of nostalgia, goodness and the victory of justice and
righteousness over all evil forces.
This
means that Tolkien's "books are rather conservative in their oudook, more
so, actually, than most fantasy works, as they usually are very keen in
adapting new viewpoints and the new order of things and following them to their
more or less logical conclusions. Tolkien's Midgârd is in many ways not so much a creation of unbridled imagination as a
conservative man's Utopia, where an old white-haired philologist can expect to
study to his heart's delight without being disturbed by the coarse populace
and their cries of justice, food, freedom, human rights and other trivialities.
What we have here, is H. G. Wells's "paradise of little fat
men" once again. William Ready, in his book Understanding Tolkien, has rightly pointed out that:
(Tolkien) is a most intolerant and
conservative.man, as the English are, in the end. The
Hobbits are all sorts and degrees, rich and poor, upper, middle and lower
classes, but Hobbit lower classes are forelock-tugging yokels as divorced from
their own dreams and agony as the Irish creatures of Somerville and Ross, the
grinning, bowing, house servant-slaves of the old South, the quaint little
'tween-maids of the Victorian ménage,
the cottagers who hedged
and thatched and plowed for the gentry while their children went into domestic
service in the Big House . . . The class structure is apparent all through
Tolkien's description of Hobbit life. They are nonintellecrual, as he is in
this day and age. He shares a lot of their tastes, or he would if he could.
There is no understanding or appreciation of new-fangled ways. They would no
more give house room to an abstract painting than they would read a Westron
text if they didn't have to. He places them ...
his characters, in an archaic society where the song resounded:
"God bless the Squire and his relations
And keep us all in our proper stations." (32)
Catherine R. Stimpson, in her study ]. R. R. Tolkien, goes even further, saying that:
(Tolkien's) popularization of the past is a
comic strip for grown-ups. The Lord of the Rings is almost as colorful and easy as Captain Marvel. That easiness is perhaps the source of
Tolkien's appeal ... To those who
pride themselves on cynicism, an adolescent failure,
he spews forth a reductive, yet redemptive, allegory of the human urge to
fail. For those who actually long for security, he previews a
solid moral and emotional structure. His authoritarianism is a small
price for the comfort of the commands: Love thy Aragorn; fear the Nazgul. (33)
A great deal of Tolkien's appeal probably
lies in a nostalgic longing for the good old days of yore when life was nice
and secure and people knew their place; in other words, as I have pointed out
earlier a sort of Utopia where the sun always shines and the grass is greener
and the evil dragon always can be slain by a gallant knight. The story of
Frodo's quest for the magic ring, together with his wiseacre servant Sam, Gandalf
the magician, and a group of dwarves, is taken directly out of the old fairy
tales, but yet very human and the heroics are held on a believable level. It
doesn't take long until the reader is carried away and accepts it all,
including wizards and dragons and the rest. It is fantasy on a high level,
where black is black and white is white and Galdalf, the secure old
father-figure, is always present somewhere. The small, kindhearted Hobbits'
desperate longing to go back to the peace and quiet of teapot and pipe in the
womblike Earth-dens stands in glaring contrast to Sauron's army of living dead
and the black sky that hangs threateningly over the terrible Mordor, Sauron's
kingdom in the east. This is a fitting symbol of industrialization, socialism
and all the dangers of the new age that threaten to destroy the secure life of
the good old days. The magic ring is science and knowledge with power over the
world, and when Frodo finally overcomes himself and
manages to destroy the ring, the factories of Sauron crumble to dust, the
machines grind to a standstill, the horrors of industrialization are aborted.
Frodo returns to his peaceful village, defeats the remainder of the revolting
lower classes (aptly described as some kind of sub-human creatures) and later
leaves for a place more fit for a gentleman. It is a beautiful description of
the upper class's inability to face change, and the efforts of the same to
fight evolution, although I am sure Tolkien never consciously meant it that
way. The Fellowship of the
Ring is the protest of an
old man against everything new, and the fairy tale brings all his hidden fears
out in the open.
Outside
the English-speaking countries, Heroic Fantasy fiction is quite scarce; in
Scandinavia indeed almost nonexistent, possibly due to the fact that the Eddas
are read in school and any modem Heroic Fantasy must seem rather pale in
comparison. However, if I might be permitted to entertain my parochial side, I
should mention the Finnish (but Swedish-Ianguaged) writer and artist Tove
Jansson, whose delightful Moomin books have been cherished by children and
adults alike for more than twenty years. The Moomin books, which in later years
have become increasingly adult, drop the security of the beautiful never-never
land on behalf of a deeper psychological significance, and tell of the
Moomin-rrolls. These are humanized animals that look rather like small, furred
hippopotami with long tails (except that they walk upright) that until a couple
of books ago lived peacefully in the Moomin valley amid a number of bizarre
creatures; the nasty and very negative Little My, the gloomy Muskrat, the
not-too-bright Hemulen and some very unlikely
acquaintances as well, such as The-Thing-Which-Lives-Under-The-Sink. It is a
delightful fantasy, but in no way naive. The world is, on the whole, good, but
not altogether so. The Moomins and their friends are small and insignificant
creatures, and outside the Moomin valley darkness is closing in. In some of the
latest Moomin books, particularly The Invisible Child and Moominpappa
at Sea the
fantasy has been brought to a heightened awareness of the outside world and
the forces of change. Instead of fighting change, as Tolkien's Hobbits do, the
Moomin-trolls face it. They leave the happy Moomin valley, venturing out into
the insecurity of the outside world, shadowed by dark clouds that billow up
like reflections of the darkness over Tolkien's Mordor. Moominpappa stands in
the lighthouse tower, far out in the raging sea, gazing out over the endless
horizon where everything can happen and where nothing is as it once was.
With
the risk of evoking the wrath of every science fiction old-timer, I am
including the Space Opera branch of science fiction in this chapter, as being
the direct descendant of the fantasy tale. It is really the same branch, only
with some of the old symbols exchanged for new. The Space Opera was prevalent
in science fiction from the late twenties to the early forties, appearing in
the pulp magazines of the time—Amazing Stories, Astounding, Thrilling Wonder Stories and others. They were crude stories, usually
lacking even the simplest literary merits. People were painted in black or
white, nothing else and the only thing in them more idiotic than the scientific
theories was the immature handling of the compulsory love interest
Nevertheless,
they conveyed a Sense-of-Wonder, and this to an extent
that probably never has been surpassed. When things started rolling, by golly,
it really started.
Whole galaxies crumbled
before the atomic cannons, and the evil alien monsters were slaughtered by the
quintillions by the heroes and their faithful friends. The galactic patrols
roamed the void, spreading Pax Terra at
blaster-point, and scientific miracles were as common as apple pie. Nothing,
absolutely nothing, is impossible in Space Opera. It might be a lot of rubbish,
but I can't resist liking it.
This
branch of science fiction is, of course, closely related to the fairy tale and
the Heroic Sword & Sorcery Fantasy, with the magic sword exchanged for the
atomic blaster and the magic for super-science. Wizards have become scientists,
with thick spectacles added to their long beards, wearing white smocks instead
of the multicolored cloaks of yore. Instead of the cabalistic magic signs, we
have equally meaningless formulae that, to a present-day
reader, promises exactly the same things that the magic words once did.
The monsters look about the same as before. The setting is somewhat more
original, drawing ideas not from the ancient sagas but from contemporary
science. Instead of the book of magic, we have books of mathematical tables;
instead of the philosophers' stone, uranium; instead of the pentagram, the
computer.
This
is truly the modem fairy tale, gigantic in scope, utilizing worlds of an
entirely new type, creating, in effect, something that never existed before out
of time-honored materials. The basic formula is, of course, the good old
traditional one, with gallant knights and evil adversaries and quests hither
and thither, but the scope is decidedly brand-new. Or perhaps I should say
was—forty years or so ago. It is still very much popular, though, as attested
by new pocket editions of the old Space Opera novels.
The
Space Opera aspect of science fiction will be discussed in the next chapter,
but it is interesting to note here that the branch, together with an increasing
interest in traditional fantasy, is again gaining in popularity. The
miraculous adventures of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark and Lensman series,
Jack Williamson's The
Legion of Space, A. E. van Vogt's Slan (an interesting mutant novel, aside from its Space Opera merits), Edmond
Hamilton's Captain
Future and
so forth are being reissued and, apparently, very well received. It might be
the old Utopian dream of man conquering matter again, and the dream of easy
solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.
In a
world ridden by anxiety and fear, the exploits of star heroes and swordbearers
alike must be of considerable interest. The Space Opera regards the future with
hope and a positive attitude, although mostly overly naive and sometimes openly
escapist. But as a contrast to the defeatist attitude of many recent works of
science fiction, it certainly serves a purpose. Perhaps this particular branch
is overdoing it; but that is the prerogative of writers anywhere, anytime.
6. OUT IN
THE UNKNOWN
Barchay rode into the Comanche village alone,
on the back of a swaybacked horse that he had caught and broken himself, five
years past. He had been traveling westward six days and six nights from the
encampment on the distant eastern shore of the continent, feeding himself en
route with whatever his gun could bring down.
He sat stiffly upright in the saddle, head
staring forward so solidly and so massively that it might seem his neck had
calcified. He had spent the whole trip in much the same posture, as the hooves
of the horse carried him along, westward, and in a sense backward in time as
well. It was twenty years since he last had visited this particular Comanche
village, or indeed the flat lake country here in the west at all. And he was
the first white man to venture out of the encampment on the ocean shore since
the massacre, three months since, when the sullen Comanche had risen suddenly
to claim eight hundred settlers' lives.
This
run-of-the-mill Wild West story doesn't seem to be able to defend its place in
a book on science fiction—and indeed it does not. But substitute the sullen
Comanches for the equally sullen V'Leegs of some distant frontier planet, the
horse for a "pink running-beast," the white settlers for Earthmen and
the gun for a blaster, and you suddenly have the opening sequences of a
"science fiction" story by a well-known sf writer (34) which tells of
how the lean-hipped and broad-shouldered hero Barchay returns to the V'Leeg
village to have a look at his mixed-breed son, the result of an earlier visit
to the local chieftain's daughter. The
story is as much science fiction as the quoted
opening implies, which is nothing. Now, I don't have anything against Wild
West stories, not even one based on a plot as old and feeble as this one—but I
dislike badly written Wild West, and I object most strongly to having it
masqueraded as science fiction. Unfortunately, this example is far from unique.
Theodore
Sturgeon, one of the most brilliant writers of science fiction, has said that
"a science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a
human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all
without its scientific content" Damon Knight, another of the living giants
of the genre, has suggested that the word "speculative" should be
inserted before "scientific," which would "clearly divide true
science fiction from even the best imitations."
Even
without Damon Knight's amendment, the quoted story is revealed for what it is:
a very, very crude imitation, using the symbols of science fiction without any
of their meanings. Knight's amendment makes it even more obvious: this is
definitely not science fiction.
Science
fiction has shown that it can accommodate itself to all possible overcoats and
still exploit its unique possibilities to the fullest extent, still exist as
unquestionable science fiction. There are social satires like Pohl/Kombluth's The Space Merchants (1952), crime mysteries like Alfred Bester's
brilliant The
Demolished Man (1953),
historical fiction like Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1952), spy thrillers like Eric Frank Russell's Wasp (1957), way-out avant garde like Brian W. Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head (1969), military propaganda like Robert A.
Heinlein's Star-ship
Troopers (1959),
anti-military works like Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965), powerful poetry like Harry
Martinson's Aniara
(1956) and even
pornographic science fiction, as shown by some of Philip Jose Farmer's recent novels
for Essex House. Not to mention religious novels like James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958). And, of course, the
numerous weird and horror science fiction stories, with which the genre
abounds. Obviously, the genre can also accommodate Wild West yarns,
dealing with the opening of new frontiers by tall, lean and sunburned
(space-bumed) men brandishing ugly Colts (blasters) and stealing land from the
Indians (the aliens), but using the old science fiction paraphernalia doesn't
make it science fiction. It still is Wild West to me.
I
have already mentioned the Space Opera stories of the twenties and the
thirties, which originally sprang directly from the pulp Wild West yarns, but
still managed to turn out as something entirely new in pulp fiction. Their
world was the fairyland of super-science, and even if the heroes were molded in
the time-honored knight and cowboy formula, they nevertheless existed and
committed their heroic deeds under conditions vastly different from the fiction
of old. Granted, the literary quality was low, and the science was, with few
exceptions, corny, but this was easily overlooked, and, I feel, with good
cause. The sf writers were chartering new seas far from the well-trodden lands
of predictability and security, and this was, in itself, good. The literary
writers would come later on, basing their imagination upon foundations laid
under a wild spree of heroic star-jumping improbability. Today, when science
fiction writers are leaving "outer space" and instead concentrating
on the "inner space" of man's mind, they are merely repeating the
lamented pulp writers' works, treading into an unknown world where conditions
are so different from the ones around us as to seem
paradoxical or completely senseless to us. It is still the "strange
encounter" tale.
These were the formative years of science
fiction as a separate literary genre, a process started by Hugo Gems-back when
he published the first real science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926, and furnished the genre with a name
of its own. The magazines "with their gaudy and dynamic covers which
promised every reading adventure imaginable" shaped the development of
the genre, providing it not only with readers and fans but with a needed and
very creative "feedback" system between writers and readers through
the letter columns. The Space Opera reigned unchallenged, and is now looked
back on with considerable nostalgia. Alva Rogers' description of one of the
Space Opera classics in his book on Astounding gives
a good picture of the Space Opera's impact:
Who can ever forget the thrill of reading The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson for the first time? The
first part of this classic began in the April issue and ran for six
breathtaking installments. The adventures of John Star, Giles Habibula, the
mighty Hal Samdu, and Jay Kalam on the evil world of the Medusae, the planet
Yarkand, as they fought to save the lovely Ala-doree Anthat and the secret
weapon, AKKA, which she alone held in her mind and which was the only salvation
of Earth, were high adventure indeed with a Sense of Wonder in ample measure.
(35)
It has been pointed out that around the turn
of the century, a large number of writers not usually associated with science
fiction used the media as a vehicle for satire or pure entertainment, but that
their numbers sharply decreased during the twenties and onward, leaving only a
few accepted literary writers like Aldous Huxley and Andre Maurois using the
versatile tool of science fiction to some degree. The reason for this might be
traced down to the pulps, which at this time were shaping the science fiction
genre, minting, as it were, its own coinage which was negotiable only within
the field.
The
genre, at this time, developed both too fast and too slow. Too fast in the
respect that it used a world of super-science that didn't exist and for which
conditions were not yet present, which made the genre incomprehensible for many
people. And too slow in that its authors were crude and unsophisticated when it
came to purely literary merits, which gave the field a reputation as simple and
illiterate. This, of course, hardly encouraged mainstream writers to try their
hand in the field. A story like Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space, while packed to the gills with Sense-of-Wonder,
must necessarily seem very crude in comparison with the sophisticated
mainstream writing of the time. Critics were still largely overlooking the
unique merits of this admittedly crude science fiction, pointing out only the
low literary standards. Myself, I suspect that this is to a large degree just a
way to give the genre a blow below the belt, by criticizing a facet that
doesn't have anything to do with its aims. The strong points
of the early American science fiction was not beautiful language but the
scope of plots and ideas.
Let
me exemplify with the grand old master of the Space Opera, E. E. Smith, Ph.D.
(1890-1965), or "Doc" Smith as he was called by his faithful readers,
whose galactic sagas containing mile-long space ships, spectacular space battles
between the galaxies, Bug-Eyed Monsters and heroes and villains literarily out
of this world, has made its author the target of considerable criticism both
from without and within sf circles. His exploitation of science is sheer madness,
and is apt to give even the most indulgent reader headaches. It is, however,
not the scientific validity that is central in E. E. Smith's space yams. When
he started writing his debut novel The Skylark of Space in 1915, few had dared to venture outside the solar system in science
fiction. The sf writers cautiously kept themselves to the thoroughly beaten
tracks of Jules Veme and the Utopian societies. E. E. Smith threw up the gates
to the great unknown, the infinite universe where everything could happen,
where no accepted theories held force and insecurity was at a maximum.
It was the vision that was important, not the
loyalty to accepted science. Out there was an unknown universe that no one had
dared to look at, and E. E. Smith, who couldn't write two sentences without
becoming pathetic, gazed out into it with both eyes. Science had to bend knees
for the Sense-of-Wonder, and the literary quality was a secondary matter. The
sf readers willingly overlooked his nonexistent writing talents. They were
looking for other things.
Since
the days of E. E. Smith, the literary standards of science fiction have risen
considerably. We now have great numbers of writers in the field who have the
Sense-of-Wonder and literary abilities to translate this into enjoyable form.
"The wilting suspension of disbelief that Coleridge designated as one of
the poet's chief aims the sf writer achieves by creating worlds of illusion
that are highly unfamiliar, yet made believable by a logically constructed
background for the story—logical, that is, according to its own terms; and
peopled by people acting logically out of the assumptions implicit in the
construction of the imaginary world. This imaginary world still stands far
away from our reality, but it is nevertheless there. It works in a logical way.
And that, when you think of it, makes sf no more unbelievable than, say, a historical novel placed in ancient South America. There
is a society, mores, rules of behavior completely unfamiliar for a contemporary
Western man, yet a skillful writer can make it all seem natural enough, and,
working from that, hang some facet of his plot on some assumption unique for
this imagined society.
Robert
A. Heinlein is the unquestioned master of this art of constructing societies as
background and motivating forces for his plots. Sometimes the carefully
delineated background actually gets to be more interesting than the story plot
it is made to support; e.g. Isaac Asimov's complicated robot society of The Caves of Steel or the advertising-society background of
Pohl/Kombluth's The
Space Merchants. This,
I might add, despite the fact that the plots in question are both intelligent
and of considerable value in themselves.
There
are, of course, writers who don't give a fig for logic, being content with
presenting the idea all by itself. The grand example of this is Ray Bradbury,
who is scared to death of anything remotely connected with science and
obviously doesn't have the faintest inkling of elementary scientific facts. The
greater part of Bradbury's production consists of horror stories a la The October Country (1955) and nostalgic pictures of departed
youth, like Dandelion
Wine (1957), which
literally drips with sentimentality. His science fiction works are essentially
anti-Utopian, depicting, as in Fahrenheit 451, a
society where writers aren't appreciated at all; or The Pedestrian, which takes place in a future where it is
forbidden to walk alone at night in the city. The future is bringing science
and change and, like
J. R. R. Tolkien, this scares the author. Science is bad, he seems to say;
everything new is bad. Only the twenties were good.
Ray
Bradbury has always been, to me, a very reactionary writer, whose strength lies
in his colorful artistic handling of the prose, a prose that comes nearer to
poetry than anything else in this field, and through
this Bradbury has in fact made sf literarily acceptable to a degree that it
probably never would have been without him. This is significant for the critics views on science fiction, as sf is a pronounced idea
literature, and Bradbury is known for his weak plots and ideas. His power lies
in his flowery language, and he is, in fact, a striking example of Marshall
McLuhan's thesis that the Media is the Message. Behind the magnificent
cathedrals of sparkling, flowing words there is usually nothing but a vague
dissatisfaction with everything that the future might bring.
Bradbury's
specific contributions to sf literature have been two chiefly anti-Utopian
novels: the 1984-ish Fahrenheit
451 (1953), telling of a fireman
in a not-so-distant future U.S.A., where the fire brigade bums books and the
antisocial people who own them; and The Martian Chronicles (1950), a number of short stories welded into continuity, dealing with
the colonization of the planet Mars. The latter is a telling
example of the American agony of the Indian" massacres, a magnificent
chronicle of the death of a refined culture beneath the boots of the invaders,
but, as all of Bradbury's works, utterly naive and from a scientist's point of
view, crazy. Bradbury's Mars with its sweet spring evenings and blue
skies belongs more to the American Middle West of Bradbury's nostalgic dreams
than to the hard reality.
Bradbury is one of the few science fiction
writers who have been accepted in literary circles. The reason for this
indulgent attitude can be discussed, but it certainly isn't because of his
plots. It is, of course, nice having the literati on one's side, although putting the
emphasis—as in Bradbury's case—on qualities springing not from science
fiction's own unique merits but on literary merits present in any
best-selling slick fiction, I think they are doing the
genre a great disservice. Science fiction is a field with its own qualities
and possibilities, and it should be recognized not for its handling of standard
literary tools but for its handling of tools and themes unique for the field.
Many sf writers of today are quite eager to push sf into mainstream literature,
thus perhaps gaining a larger audience. Myself, I do not think this is either
possible or desirable. It would be, I fear, to yank out its teeth, making it
yet one.of the many domestic house-trained fields of literature. Science
fiction is not the greatest literature in the world, but it has certain
valuable properties. I would like to keep those undiluted. Kingsley Amis and
Robert Conquest have made some fitting observations in their foreword to their
anthology Spectrum
2:
Science fiction, in fact, has had to grow up
under its own power, developing its standards from within, from among its own
writers, editors, and readers. This may have slowed it down, for self-criticism
does not flourish under conditions of intellectual isolation. And yet we cannot
feel that what might be called the provincial status of science fiction has
been altogether to its disadvantage. To put it no higher, people like
ourselves have been enabled to put in a couple of decades of stimulating
reading in a field where the writ of the more portentous type of literary
critic does not run. In the last thirty or forty years there has been far too
much self-consciousness about "significance," self-importance about
"art," self-approval about "extending the bounds of moral
awareness," with a corresponding lack of regard paid to older ideas of
what fiction can and should provide: entertainment as well as edification,
profusion and novelty of ideas as well as technical originality, speed and
suspense and surprise in narrative as well as depth of psychological probing.
These older ideas have, in our own day, found an important custodian in science
fiction . . . the traditional first aim of most sorts of writer has always been
to please the reader, that even the most ambitious
poetry, as Rosetti puts it, must be "amusing." Science fiction
writers cannot but share this aim, while "mainstream" fiction, all
too often, found its more intelligent writers becoming unreadable, and its more readable writers becoming unintelligent (36)
I
understand that "entertain" and "amuse" are singularly
dirty words in literary circles, nevertheless I firmly believe a good story
should do both of these things. Science fiction usually does; it might be the
heritage from the lamented pulp magazines. The literary world is crowded with
ivory towers housing unappreciated geniuses. Happily, we don't have much of
this in science fiction—yet. A science fiction writer who finds it beneath his
dignity to be thought-provoking and entertaining doesn't stay long in the
field.
Science
fiction has always been somewhat unorthodox, in this, as well as other
respects. Being based mainly on the question What would happen if ... P it often has no use for the standard literary
tools of mainstream fiction, and is, consequently, hard to judge by the gauges
used for fiction describing familiar and predictable situations. It presents an
equation that consists of nothing but unknowns.
The
most commonly quoted example on this is Robert A. Heinlein's brilliant story By His Bootstraps (1946). Here the protagonist goes thirty
thousand years into the future, is received by himself as a middle-aged man,
goes back to make himself go into the future so that he can become the
middle-aged man, fights with one time-version of himself that has not
understood the meaning of it yet and tries to stop the first time journey, and
becomes with time the middle-aged man who with diverse tricks induces himself
as a young man to join him. Now, none of the values applicable to ordinary
fiction can be used to judge this story-except that one about entertainment and
readability. The story has no central character; no psychological depth in
describing the protagonist is needed. He is merely a pawn caught in a paradox
of time; in a sense, time itself and its effects is the central character. It
is a dazzling show of speculative logic, based on assumptions that do not exist
here and now, but still are extremely fascinating.
Time
travel—to continue with the specific themes of science fiction—is one of the
most versatile tools of speculation in the genre, and it has given birth to a
staggering number of stories, based on paradoxical assumptions like, What would happen if I went back in time and
killed my grandfather before he had an issue? We now even have the well-known
"Guardian of Time," of science fiction, doing his noble deed of
keeping past history as it is and getting grandfather-killers and Jesus-savers
and the like out of the way. One of the best of these ingenious variants on the
theme is a recent novel by Robert Silverberg, Up the Line (1969), telling of the decidedly immoral adventures
of Judson Daniel Elliot III, Time Service Courier. He is far removed from any
hint of heroism in the preserving of the past; actually, he conducts guided
tours for the idle rich to the highlights of human enterprises, like the sack
of Rome and the Black Plague and such things. One of his nice fellow Couriers
is enjoying himself by tracing his female ancestors and seducing them. The
protagonist doesn't do so badly either, even if he restricts himself to one
female ancestor. This is probably what would happen if time travel were
feasible, booming tourist trade and things. Think of guided tours to Europe
with time paradoxes added.
And
this is also a story without a human central character; it is still our friend
the temporal paradox sitting in the high seat, reducing human heroes and
villains to puppets doing as well as they can within the framework of the
paradox, but still trapped. In fact, Judson Daniel Elliot III gets himself
stuck in a beautifully impossible paradox at the end of the novel. The puppets
are entangling themselves.
Sometimes they manage to make complete asses
of themselves, too. Like in Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1952), which is set in the 1940's in an
America where the South won the Civil War—with disastrous results for the North.
A time machine is invented by a group of scientists, and a historian goes back
to the Battle of Gettysburg to have a look at the fun, changing the outcome of the whole war in the process
and ending up creating the world as we know it. There is also a similar theme
used in John Brunner's Times
Without Number (1962,
1969) in which the Spanish Armada did not perish and went on to do its job,
resulting in a vastly different world with a busy Inquisition, Time Corps and
gleaming rapiers. Until the protagonist makes a mistake and the Armada perishes
and here we are again.
Which
takes us into the paradoxes of the parallel worlds: the probable world in which
Germany won the first, or the second World War, or the
one in which Jesus escaped from the cross. Philip José Farmer has written a beautiful story, Sail On, Sail On, set in a parallel world in which the Church
has taken a more positive stand toward the sciences than it has done in our
world, in which Columbus' flagship is equipped with radio, and—as a final touch—the
Earth really is flat. Columbus flops over the edge with a
bewildered splash and America remains undiscovered, because there is no
America.
Next
step is the big-brother of the time machine, the machine that enables one to
go from one parallel world to another. It might seem like just a variation on
the old joumey-to-other-worlds story, but it is not. There is a whole brand-new
set of paradoxes^ in the parallel-world theme.
Robert
Sheckley has given a nice example of this in his novel Mindswap (1966), which, apart from an ingenious new
means of traveling—by exchanging minds with some creature on the planet one
wants to visit, instead of going there in person—contains a beautiful twist of
the story of the man finally coming home after a wild journey through the
parallel worlds. Marvin Flynn returns alive and well to his home town of
Stanhope, New York, but is sometimes troubled by the thought that perhaps he
has not returned to his own world after all. Perhaps he is somewhere else, and
his memory and perceptions are deceiving him:
He lay beneath Stanhope's familiar green sky
and considered this possibility. It seemed unlikely; for did not the giant oak
trees %still migrate each year to the south? Did not the huge red sun move across
the sky, pursued by its dark companion? Did not the triple moons return each
month with their new accumulation of comets?
So Marvin Flynn is content again, marries the
daughter of Stanhope's leading real estate dealer, and stays in his home town.
Nothing, he assures himself, has changed.
This
is science fiction's "message" of the changing world again; that
nothing should be taken at face value, that nothing
will go on being what it is. We might cling desperately to the good old ways,
hoping for security in conservatism, but we are only fooling ourselves.
"Nothing is permanent except our illusions," Sheckley says in his
novel. He is so right.
This
way of regarding our everyday world as something entirely different from what
we think it is, has resulted in probably the most chilling horror story I have
ever read, Mimic,
by Donald A. Wollheim. It
features monsters of a particularly repulsive type, but it is not the monsters
as such that makes this story so effective—it is the implications given by the
story. Ghouls and ghosts and the like scarcely scare anyone nowadays, not even
if they appear in a modem or futuristic setting. What Wollheim did in this
story—and I believe he was the first to spot this approach—was to create a
truly modem terror tale, telling of a kind of insect that adopted a protective
mimicry suitable to make them survive in a modem city. They look—almost—like
men. But the overcoat and hat is all part of the insect's body. This is not as
farfetched as it might seem—nature has endowed many otherwise defenseless animals
with a protective mimicry that makes them look like other and more dangerous
creatures. It could as well happen to man, only there are no insects as big as
man—as far as we know.
"Nature
practices deceptions in every angle," Wollheim says in the story.
"Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter
how unlikely."
If
this doesn't seem grand enough in scope, we can move over to the dazzling
cosmic panoramas of Olaf Stapledon,
"the most titanic imagination to ever write science
fiction," to quote a well-known critic. His first and most famous novel, Last and First Men (1930), tells the history of mankind from
1930 to the end of recorded time, two billion years in the future, in a manner
reminiscent of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Like a history book of the future, it tells
of the Americanized era and its end, the rise of Patagonia as a world center of
culture and its downfall; the appearance of an intelligent race of apes that
enslaves mankind until they fall and mankind builds new civilizations, creating
gigantic artificial brains that first aid and then rule mankind, and finally
replaces man with artificially created supermen. This revised mankind moves to
Venus, evolving into winged creatures, and after millions of years farther on
to Neptune, where mankind finally ends when the sun goes nova. The novel is
not fiction in the usual sense of the word; it has no hero, no villain, no
central character, no central theme but that of mankind's relationship to its
constandy changing environment. It is gigantic in scope, creating, in effect,
an entirely new type of fiction. The philosophical concepts in the book are as
grandiose as the cosmic sweep—Stapledon was a Doctor of Philosophy, and the
author of a number of scholarly philosophical works. It might well be science
fiction's most adult and thought-provoking book, transcended only by the same
author's The
Star Maker (1937),
a work which describes the history of the entire universe, reducing the cosmic sweep
of The Last and First
Men to an insignificant
footnote in the books of history. In this monumental work, Stapledon also
succeeds in describing a deity, something that no one has done before or after
him. These two works are easily the most original works of science fiction, and
their influence on later writers has been tremendous. Stapledon was not only
the first to create the Galactic Empires, now so sadly common in the genre, he
was the first sf writer to appreciate the thorough alienness of nonhuman
creatures, and to base the plot on their alien psychological makeup instead of
the usual hard action monster opera. The theme of following mankind into the
distant future was later used by other writers, notably by Brian W. Aldiss in
his collection of stories Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (1960) and Starswarm (1964). The British sf writer Arthur C.
Clarke has written his own highly original variation on Stapledon's idea of the
Cosmic Mind in Childhoods
End (1953) as well as a
novel set in a future one billion years hence, Against the Fall of Night (1953), later revised as The City and the Stars (1956), that obviously is heavily influenced
by Stapledon. One might say that in the same way as E. E. Smith opened up the
universe, Stapledon opened up time.
True,
there had been stories set in the distant future before, the most notable
being Camille Flammarion's Ten Million Years' Hence and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, but whereas all these earlier writers used the distant future as a
background for various political or sociological ideas in the Utopian or
anti-Utopian vein, or, as in the case of Flammarion, for scientific
speculation, Stapledon delineated a future based on terms of its own. It had no
connections whatsoever with our world, making it so strange as to be
incomprehensible but still logical according to its own terms. Not necessarily
good or bad, but different.
And this might be the
greatest contribution of science fiction to modern literature: the ability to
appreciate an alien situation not in relation to our own political or
sociological situation but to its own unique possibilities.
This
is, in fact, what in my eyes makes science fiction unique in contemporary
literature: the willingness and ability to step out from the familiar
environment and using a more or less alien situation as the basis for a logical
sequence of events that might or might not have some relevance to us. This is
also what has compelled many science fiction writers to do away with the
time-honored literary tools like characterization and such that—while a
fantastic tool in the hands of, for example, Dostoevski—never can achieve the
same usefulness in science fiction where the central character is not man
himself but his environment. In order to describe new things you must have new
literary tools. This is also the reason why the "New Wave" authors
now find themselves in a dead end; instead of turning to new forms they have
turned back to the old literary tools of surrealism, an art form that was dead
thirty years ago.
In this
respect, I would like to give some space to two science fiction writers who
have worked in the field since the formative days, hatching more plots and
superbly intelligent ideas than probably any others, as well as minting much of
the literary coinage of present-day science fiction. Despite avant-gardism and
"New Wave" they are still writing sf, and I believe they will go on
doing so long after the most vociferous critics of this "reactionary"
and "old-fashioned" science fiction have dropped out. I am referring
to Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. I can't say I like both of them
wholeheartedly, but they are master craftsmen— an art that seems to be waning
these days—as well as highly intelligent and original writers who have the
whole wide field at their fingertips. Both have a solid scientific background,
both became addicted to sf at an early age and were engaged in fan activity,
and both made their debut in the same sf magazine, Astounding: Asimov with the short story Marooned of} Vesta in March, 1939, Heinlein with Lifeline in August, 1939. (1939 was a good year for
new sf writers; the well-known sf author Alfred Bester made his debut that year
with the short story Broken
Axiom in the April issue of
Thrilling Wonder Stories, and A. E. van Vogt first appeared in sf with Black Destroyer in the July issue of Astounding.) I do not say that they are typical sf
writers, but if one were to put up a gauge for what constitutes a good sf
writer, Asimov and Heinlein would come very close to it
Isaac Asimov, bom in Russia in 1920 but a
U.S. citizen since 1923, is associate professor of biochemistry at Boston
University Medical School, although his teaching duties now are confined to
occasional lectures. (His Ph.D. thesis in chemistry, written in" 1948, was
entitled "The Kinetics of the Reaction Inactivation of Tyroserose During Its Catalyzing of the Aerobic Oxidation of
Catechol.") He is the author of well over one hundred books ranging from Understanding Physics, a layman's guide to physics, to science
fiction. His most well-known sf work is probably the Foundation trilogy, already mentioned, a wide-sweeping
epic telling of the decline and fall of a Galactic Empire, bearing more than
passing similarities to Edward Gibbon's work on the Roman Empire, as well as
obvious influence by Toynbee and other philosophers of history.
His
robot stories have influenced the whole field; his "Three Laws of
Robotics" can now be found wherever robots congregate, and it is
indubitably thanks to him that the myriads of clanking robots that once
galloped over the pages of the sf magazines now have been made much more
credible.
The
robot occupies a great part of Asimov's production, with collections like I, Robot (1950) and The Rest of the Robots (1964), and novels like The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequel The Naked Sun (1957). In both these novels Asimov has used
one of the most common themes of science fiction, that of the future super-city
a la Metropolis; by utilizing a mass of small details he succeeds in making
the city real, alive and breathing, as it were. The whole complicated city
machinery is described in minute detail, focusing on the everyday routine in a
city that bears no resemblance at all to our world. The plot in both novels is
based on crimes carried out in this mechanized world— but crimes that are a
function of the environment, not some cloak-and-dagger adventure loosely pasted
on a fantastic background. The crime would be unthinkable in any environment
other than this highly advanced city, and Asimov unfolds the story with
murderous logic, at the same time giving a highly convincing picture of a way
of life that we might be heading into right now.
Even in the way-out imaginative stories, the
plot becomes credible by Asimov's accentuating of the situation's effect upon
men. One example is The
End of Eternity (1955),
in which a strange temporal organization hovers somewhere outside of the flow
of time, guarding time against such anachronisms as, for example, submachine
guns in Caesar's time.
Asimov is, despite his thoroughness, a man of
grand, sweeping views. Robert A. Heinlein,
on the other hand, is a
realist, a man who never would create the Asimovian Galactic Empires. (These
Empires pop up now and then in Heinlein's novels, granted, but they are
light-years removed from the majestic sweep of Asimov.) Heinlein was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, started as an engineer,
then switched over to a military career from which he retired, due to illness,
as permanently disabled, in 1934.
After holding a variety of
jobs he finally started writing science fiction in 1939. He has never left it since.
Heinlein writes highly enjoyable and thought-out adventures
set in the future, distinguished above all by the brilliantly worked-out
future societies in which the action takes place. The future he delineates is
practical, down-to-earth, and filled with details. His success here might be
due to bis technique of, to quote Sam Moskowitz, "taking the future for
granted," by making his characters understand their particular environment
and behave according to this. His works seem to be narrated by a sldllful journalist who is there as it happens, and no sf writer can do
better than that.
His political views are frequently berated,
tending to be uncomfortably conservative with a lot of Übermenschen ideology thrown in,-but this is usually
overshadowed by the quality of his writings. You might not like his societies,
but you get interested in them. His Future History Series starts with the first Moon shot in The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), financed by a private consortium led by a typical Heinlein hero, a space-crazy multibillionaire (Money is Might
in Heinlein's world) of the John Wayne type. The series
progresses with a great number of short stories and novels to the very Heinleinesque
future six hundred years hence. It is a masterpiece of logical extrapolation and belongs to every true sf fan's
standard reading.
The
novel Star ship Troopers (1959), with its naive worship of the military establishment, is distasteful
and excelled only by his Farnham's Freehold (1964),
a novel of the distant
future wherein the Negroes have taken power with no house-trained Uncle Toms in
sight. Heinlein's archetypical
hero functions as a mouthpiece
for Heinlein's anti-Negro philosophy, when he doesn't stand at attention by the
flag or tell his children that Charity Begins at Home and It Should Stay There,
Dammit. Typical Heinlein is also the novelette Coventry, in which all the people in the U.S.A. who do not
share the government's opinions are thrown together in gigantic concentration
camps (the "love it or leave it" philosophy, worked out to
perfection), where life is so bad that the protagonist soon becomes a good U.S.
citizen and gets himself a job as a government spy in the camp, ratting on his
buddies who are naïve enough to regard him as their friend. The story
could be one of a ruthless opportunist feathering his own nest at others'
expense; but it is not, at least not in the author's eyes. He is, in Heinlein's
eyes, the man who sees the light of reason, and does the only sensible thing.
Heinlein
is a man who believes in strict norms, God and Country, but above everything
else in Holy Individualism. Socialism is worse than death, and must be fought
at all costs. Dictatorships are not good either, but preferable to giving
dissenters a say. Heinlein has embroidered this theme in various ways, e.g. in Sixth Column (1941) in which, from Heinlein's point of
view, the very untrustworthy Eurasians win the World War and treat the U.S.A.
to some inhuman atrocities à
la Vietnam, until a group
of Army men from a strongpoint beneath a mountain use religion and some devious
science to scare away the ugly intruders. The novel Revolt in 2100 (1953) describes a future religious
dictatorship—a well-used idea in sf, but here more logically utilized than
usual—in which the Church uses all the modern paraphernalia with mass
communication, hysterical mobs and a screaming demagogue to keep the citizenry
at bay.
The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) describes a Moon colony where most of our accepted norms are
outdated, where the patriarchate is fully developed (a typical trait of
Heinlein: women are seldom considered as anything more than pieces of flesh in
his worlds; in fact, there is an absolute nonportrayal of any reasonable
female), and the war cry is There ain't no such thing as a free lunch! (TAN-
STAAFLI)
meaning that charity stays at home and you can never hope to get help from
anybody: goodness is weakness, altruism is treason, honesty
is death. The Moon colony honors absolute freedom, the right of anyone to do
whatever he wants and to hell with the weaker and poorer ones, and soon enough
trouble brews with Earth. The protagonist, a tough John Wayne-ish engineer of
the typical Heinlein model, straightens out the situation with the aid of an
omniscient deus
ex machina in
the form of a computer, and life on the Moon goes on as before. The novel gives
a terrifying picture now propagandized by, among others, the U.S. demagogue
Ayn Rand.
Stranger
in a Strange Land (1961)
is in many respects an antithesis to most of Heinlein's fiction. It is by far
his most best-selling novel, telling the story of Valentine Michael Smith, sole
survivor of the first expedition to Mars, born and educated there, who returns
to Earth as a superman. He carries a brand-new religious concept with him, the
way of "Grok," and develops into a modern Messiah figure, ultimately
killed by his fellow men. The novel is sparkling with humor, satire and wit,
and is both shocking and immensely entertaining, a
very mature work. We can still glimpse the auctorial Heinlein behind Valentine
Michael Smith's message of love and devotion and freedom, and I distrust this
novel as much as his other ones, but there is no doubt that this is a
magnificent piece of work, creating a fabulous many-faceted world inhabited by
real characters. It has been a magnificent "underground" best seller,
probably due to its mysticism and "peace" message brought forth in
the Martian religion. Also, Valentine Michael Smith is the super-hippie of all
super-hippies.
Mr.
Smith of Mars is yet one more of Heinlein's supermen; his heroes are always a
cut above the common people. With the mind of a computer as in Starman Jones (1953) there is a boy who has a photographic
memory and rises in ranks to astrogator (space navigator) because he just
happens to have every astrogator table in his head. Or a broad-shouldered
patriarchal pioneer of the old Wild West type as Mr. Famham of Farnham's Freehold. They are described as human beings, with
human faults, including self-pity and an ability to make mistakes, but they
always stand heads above other people. They have talents. As a critic has pointed out, all Heinlein's
protagonists are at bottom Heinlein himself, and Heinlein likes himself.
Heinlein
might be a reactionary, but he is never false. He depicts the future as a
function of today; it is a dangerous world, an insecure world where nothing is
like ours and where nothing can be taken as certain, but it is always exciting
and it promises unlimited possibilities for those who dare to grapple with it
on its own terms. I believe Heinlein has done more than any other writer to
prepare youth for the big adventure, the Future. Whatever can be said about
Heinlein in other respects, this is enough to give him an exceptional position
in the genre.
Heinlein
has, of course, another side, the side that creates intellectual puzzles like By His Bootstraps or the malicious story Magic, Inc., in which he derides the whole U.S. economic
system by putting magic into everyday business life, complete with insurance
against black magic, witch doctors and visits to the Devil to complain about
unhealthy business methods. This is a lighthearted, witty Heinlein using a
fantastic assumption for all its worth, never for a moment caring whether it is
possible or not. It is great fun even if you don't believe a word of it, and
this is surely a sign of successful suspension of disbelief: the art of
creating improbable worlds and inviting the reader in, making him happy to join
the fun.
Asimov and Heinlein as well as other
"old" sf writers are today regarded by the way-out "New
Wave" advocates as old-fashioned and highly illiterate. In short, they
ain't hip enough. The "New Wave" of today is turning back to the old
surrealism of Alfred Jarry and Boris Vian, which of course is new for science
fiction, although hardly new as a literary technique. The main difference is, I
think, a difference in attitudes, a basic distrust on the part of the
"New Wave" in the theme of inevitable change that is the undercurrent
of all good science fiction. What the "New Wave" seems to say is, in
effect, that if it is new, it must be bad, and if it looks good it must surely
hide a rotten core somewhere.
We
have many examples of this in the "New Wave" which represents those
former sf readers and writers who have given up hope for humanity and believe
the world is doomed in the next thirty years, using the media to voice their
distrust in anything that smacks of deviation from the old, sure ways of life
and conduct. We can see this difference clearly in most experimental sf of
today, as compared to the more "orthodox" sf. The "New
Wave" of today is very, very pessimistic, whereas science fiction in
general is not. There is of course a lot of social criticism in all science
fiction, there must always be, but it is usually of the constructive kind,
offering new ideas and sometimes solutions, not just death-wishes.
To
take just one example, Frederik Pohl has written a number of biting and very
funny stories dealing with future societies that have backfired in some way. In
The Midas Plague (1951) it is overproduction (paradoxically a
problem even today, despite the fact that most of the world is starving). The
whole economic system has been turned upside-down as the result of robots
taking over production and raising the output to such a degree that all human
citizens have a set quota for consumption. Rich people are, of course,
privileged with low consumption quotas and are permitted to live in humble
houses and even apartments, while the poor people are forced to drag out their
existence in magnificent marble palaces, surrounded by hundreds of robot
servants, perfumed fountains, ten-course dinners and billions in the bank. The
actual plot of the story (a minor part of the story, actually; here is a
typical example of background idea and presentation overshadowing plot) centers
around young Miss Cherry Elon, who to the accompaniment of a lot of ominous
mutterings from her very rich parents, marries a poor but ambitious young man
who only has a billion-dollar palace and countless robots to offer her. The
marriage is on the verge of breaking up, lock, stock and barrel, due to little
Cherry's inability to cope with this dreary life, when the husband finds a
brilliant solution to the whole overproduction problem, and immediately gets
promoted to a ramshackle hut in the most posh part of the city. The robots
simply are furnished with a consuming instinct that can be varied according to
need (like introducing a yearning for midi or maxi skirts when the
weaving-mills want to sell more cloth). The robots start consuming like mad,
and the poor humanity can return to a more natural consumption level. Happiness
reigns.
This
story is a wry comment upon contemporary occurrences, and yet entertaining—a
good sf story in all respects. It also has the daring to treat a serious
problem with humor, something well never find in a "New Wave" version
of the same idea. I have seen a fair number of "New Wave" stories
dealing with the overproduction specter, and there hasn't
been one not ready to throw in the towel from the very beginning. This
goes for all other anti-Utopias as well. This might be the intellectual, modem
way of seeing things; I call it defeatism, and the obvious solution to the
problem in Pohl's story would be to get high on booze and acid and drop out as
fast as possible. Pohl doesn't see it that way. I prefer Pohl—for many reasons.
I
might have given the impression that I regard everything new in sf as bad; I do
not. On the contrary, the sixties have seen a tremendous rise of literary as
well as imaginative qualities of science fiction, due mostly to experimentation
with new ideas by old hands at the genre, such as Philip K. Dick, Robert
Sheckley and Robert Sflverberg, as well as new writers like Roger Zelazny and
Samuel R. Delany. Zelazny in particular is a prose-poet of singular power, the
unlikely combination of the dreamlike poetry of Dylan Thomas and the narrative
powers of Ernest Hemingway. He is an example of the new breed of sf writers who
are turning from what we might call the "hardware" of outer space
and the mechanical devices exploring these frontiers to the
"software" of man's mind, the "inner space" of thought and
feeling, the subjective experience of the environment His Nebula-awarded
novelette He
Who Shapes (1964),
later enlarged as the novel The Dream Master (1966), is based on the theme of psychology engineers being able to
enter a man's mind, to experience his thoughts, to live in his dreams and
control them.
Typical
of this new trend also is the theme of a recent novel by Brian W. Aldiss, Barefoot in the Head (1969), which is set in a Europe bombed back
to the stone age of thought and feeling by a very new kind of catastrophe: not
hydrogen bombs or robots or any of the other environment-changing machinery,
but by the "Acid Head War," something that changes man's mind rather
than his environment This novel, like many other "New Wave" novels,
is essentially a novel of drop-out, giving little in the way of constructive
analysis of the contemporary scene or the imaginary future, but it is a
promising step out from the well-trodden paths of sf, which might prove to be
very rewarding. Aldiss is here, in fact, using the old catastrophe theme of sf
in an entirely new way, pointing out consequences that have never before been
suspected.
Significant
of this is Aldiss' handling of the well-used theme of overpopulation in the
novelette Total
Environment (1968),
which deals with a vast experiment in the effects of maximum population
density. By furnishing this experiment with an unlimited food supply, Aldiss
has drastically altered the traditional formula for stories dealing with overpopulation,
creating a whole new condition and using this as the basis for sociological and
psychological speculation. The changes wrought by these assumptions come in the
inhabitants' minds, rather than in their physical behavior. It is interesting
to note that Aldiss' experiment actually has been performed by Dr. John Calhoun
of the National Institute of Mental Health, using mice and unlimited food and
water. These experiments, as reported in a national news magazine (37), in fact
have turned out much more horrible than those of Brian Aldiss.
So,
once again we have speculative writers standing on the frontiers of actual
research, looking forward. The rockets of the thirties and the forties have had
their time; new symbols and themes are needed. If these new themes can be found
in "inner space," then let it be so. But constructive,
please.
A great deal of science fiction today consists
of social criticism in one form or another, and as I have already said, it is
mainly defeatist in attitude. They are, as C. M. Kombluth has pointed out,
"not statements which may be proved true or false as the reader might seem
fit, but exclamations telling the reader how the writer feels and not what he
thinks. Insofar as they are social criticism they are shrieks: 'Everything is
badl I'm frightened by this rotten world! I can't do anything; it's all like a
nightmare! Save me, somebody, save me!' " (38)
This
kind of querulousness leaves at least me rather cold, being nothing but the
fear of change all over again—and this in a literary genre whose strength and
fascination lies in its ability to face change and make the best of it. The
inability of certain writers and editors of science fiction to face our
changing world with anything but screaming fear has led to the paradoxical
situation of editors to judging, to quote Damon Knight, "the quality of a
science fiction novel (as) inversely proportional to the amount of science
fiction in it."
Science
fiction stands out by its ability to cope with the changes of environment,
values and conduct, and if you take that away, you have nothing left except a
literature screaming bloody murder at the slightest hint of anything new and
unsuspected. This is retreating to the warm, secure womb, and I definitely do
not think that it is science fiction's business to do so. The world and the
human race are now faced with very real and pressing problems, and what we need
are solutions or attempts at solutions, not literary drop-outs. It is, of
course, easier to blame someone else (society, one's mother, whatever comes
handiest) and turn anti-intellectual than to face the problems and try to take
a part in the inevitable change, doing something about it. Thus we have the
"New Wave," refusing to do anything but scream for help because they
can't cope with the world in which they are living. This literature is, of course,
significant and even interesting as a sign of the sickness in our time, but I
think we've had a little too much of it during the last years.
At its best, science fiction is a magnificent
vehicle for social analysis, as well as entertainment, pointing out bad
solutions and offering new ones, speculating on the end-products of processes
already at work, experimenting with entirely new concepts and their effects on
man and his world. This is something that no other branch of fiction can do,
and this is enough to give science fiction a unique position. The main body of
science fiction is indeed doing this, and anti-future, anti-change and anti-man
writings of the "New Wave" type are really nothing but a small,
though extremely vociferous, footnote to the genre. Science fiction cannot but
gain by experimentation with new forms and ideas, but this experimentation
should be done with an adult mind, looking forward into the future rather than
running away from it. The moment we lose our Sense-of-Wonder and become scared
instead of interested in what we see, be it good or bad, and refuse to cope
with these new assumptions to the best of our abilities, we won't have science
fiction anymore.
7. WOMEN, ROBOTS AND OTHER PECULIARITIES
Science fiction is on the whole a very
progressive literature when it comes to freedom and equality, but there are
things in the field that can make even the most narrow-minded prelate look like
a veritable light-bearer. Foremost among these dark spots stands Woman. Robots and green monsters are often treated
in a way that is far from enviable, but robots nowadays are socially
acceptable and usually described as man's best friends; and green monsters
have, since the merry monster days of the pulp magazines, risen in the ranks to
wise creatures equipped with all human attributes except appearance. The woman
in science fiction remains what she was, a compulsory appendage. I will give a
telling example from the leading sf magazine Analog (February 1969). The cover of this particular
issue is adorned with a fair young woman, holding a cute little baby in her
motherly arms. The picture relates to the novelette A Womanly Talent, written by Anne McCaffrey (a woman, mind
youl) considered one of the best sf writers of today. The novelette contains an
illustrative picture of a space woman's everyday life. Lajos, the hero, has
come to Ruth to get some consolation after a failure:
Ruth transferred her attention to his
muscular back. She loved the line of him, the broad double plateau of his shoulder
blades with the small mounds of hard muscle, the graceful curve that swept down
to the narrow waist, the hollow of his spine, the Grecian beauty of his
buttocks. She quickly suppressed a flare of desire. This was not the time to
intrude sex on his personal anguish. And she knew that her intense sexual
hunger for hirn stemmed from a yearning for the
child of his seed. A daughter, tall and fair, with Lajos's
dimples in her cheek. A son, strong-backed and arrogant,
with thick black straight hair.
This hunger for his child was so primal, it paralyzed the sophistication overlaid by
education and social reflexes. Nowadays a woman was expected to assume more
than the ancient duties required of her. Nowadays, and Ruth smiled to herself,
the sophists called those womanly talents Maintenance, Repair and Replacement,
instead of housekeeping/cooking, nursing and having babies, but the titles
didn't alter the duties nor curb the resurgent desires. And when you got down
to it, men still explored new ground, even if it were alien ground, and
defended their homes and families. (39)
This is, in a nutshell, the most modern view
on womanhood in science fiction. The holy cry seems to be "Woman, know
thy place!" and even though women usually are present in the space ships,
they are generally treated like some kind of inferior creature. Love scenes
between hero and heroine are generally not encouraged, even though some sort
of marital bliss usually is hinted at as a reward for faithful service. Here is
-an example from one of the Space Opera classics, Edmond Hamilton's The Comet Kings (1942), a Captain Future adventure, in which
we find the brave Captain in a moody scene with Joan, his faithful yes-woman:
"Why Joan, what's the matter?
"Oh,
nothing—I'm just foolish," she muttered. "But I can't help feeling a
little sorry to leave the comet."
He
did not understand. Joan looked up at him with deep emotion in her fine eyes.
"Out there, Curt, you belong to the
whole System. I know you love me, but duty comes first—your
obligation to use your scientific powers to help the System peoples.
"But if we'd been forced to remain on
the comet world, cut off forever from the outside, nothing else
would have come between us. It could have been a paradise for us. But it's lost now."
Curt Newton bent and kissed
her.
"Joan, don't feel like that. Someday
when our work is done, we'll find our own paradise. I know a little asteroid
that's waiting for us. It's just like a garden.
Someday."
With chintz curtains in the living room and
Colonial furniture, no doubt. Anything to make the litde wife happy. The sex
roles are as unyielding as the metal in the space ship's hull; emancipation is
an unknown word. In a world where women at last are beginning to be recognized
as human beings, science fiction still clings to the views of last century. If
a daring member of one of the current women's liberation movements stepped out
into the men's world of the future, she'd probably be shot on sight. The Gothic
writer Horace Walpole once dubbed the suffragettes "hyenas in
petticoats," and while the sf writers of today are not that bad, they
still hold to the old mother-children-and-kitchen image as far as women are
concerned. They might be bright and look like Playboy bunnies, but don't let that fool you. What
they really want is home and husband and lads, and their bodies and occasional
brains are nothing but the bait to lure the man into the trap. If she persists
in being a career woman, she must be queer in some way like, for example, Dr.
Susan Calvin in Isaac Asimov's noted robot series, who loves robots more than
men.
The classic function of the woman, as
depicted in gaudy colors on the covers of the pulp magazines, was to follow the
hero as a kind of reverentially listening Dr. Watson. By her obvious ignorance
of the most elementary things she would give the hero the opportunity to launch
into long explanations as to why the devious Hrrgians had invaded the Solar
System, or the workings of the new Space Warp. Betweentimes she should be
abducted by some horrible green monster with lots of fangs, which lovingly
wound its tentacles around her appetizing form and disappeared with her. The
hero himself only grudgingly wound his tentacles around the heroine, who,
notwithstanding, loved him with a hopeless (and virtuous) passion, longing for
the sweet moment when the mighty man would give up his toil for the Universe
and retire with her to the already mentioned paradisal asteroid.
In
her private life, the female appendage usually was daughter to some ancient
professor with long white hair and thick spectacles who earned his keep by
inventing curious machines now and then. In practice, she mosdy served as an
eye-catcher on the magazine covers, dressed in some very curious and decidedly
unsafe transparent spacesuit and some scant lingerie. The artist Earle Bergey
was especially noted for his seminude cover girls. One of his covers for Startling Stories (Winter 1945) shows the fair-haired girl
looking on at some sort of robot gathering, dressed in nothing but boots, a
bikini and a space helmet. Without air tubes, it should be noted. The hero must
be more shy, or just more intelligent, because he
sports a bulging space-suit that covers everything except his lecherous hands.
So much for the pulp science fiction. It has been about the same ever since.
It
has always been a constant source of surprise to me that science fiction, which
has given so much attention to understanding and respecting other races and
life forms so utterly, seldom has seen fit to be just a teeny-weeny bit progressive
when it comes to the sexes. Probably this indifference to females as being
anything other than decorative appendages has its source in the early sf that,
above all, concerned itself mainly with scientific adventures and speculations,
not human beings. The hero/scientist was important, as were the usual standard
equipment of robots, space ships, aliens and so on. The woman, except as a
concession to the demand for some puerile love interest, was not. Perhaps some
of the younger readers of the magazines appreciated the sight of the scantily
dressed females on the magazine covers, but that was about all. Women were
purely decorative, period. That the woman's position in the society could be
discussed and used as a basis for speculative fiction never occurred to the
otherwise progressive writers. It has hardly
Although women occupy minor roles in most
science fiction, they often show up idealized on the covers of fan magazines,
as the above example indicates.
occurred to some of them yet. Robert A. Heinlein, who
still firmly believes that women are fit only for the harem, is a striking
example of this. Even a progressive writer like H. G. Wells, who had firm
opinions regarding woman's right to personal and sexual freedom, kept his sf
writing free of any ideas to this end. The debate around women's liberation
was reserved for novels like Ann Veronica.
This,
of course, led to making the woman in sf into a piece of furniture, to be admired and—perhaps—used, but never to be
taken seriously. "An embracing machine without any trace of either
intellectual life or creative talent," as the Swedish artist Siri Derket
has put it. One of the most prominent sf writers, Isaac Asimov, voiced some
years ago many sf writers' attitude toward the female, in Startling Stories' letter column:
There is a great deal of significance, I
think, in the fact that the four stories in the September issue of Startling Stories did not contain a single female character.
Of course, I would be the last to claim that all females be abolished. Women,
when handled in moderation and with extreme decency, fit nicely in
scientific-tion at
times. However,
the September issue goes to prove that good stories can be written even with
the total absence of the weaker sex.
There
are some fans that claim "human interest" a necessity in stf, since otherwise stories degenerate into uninteresting
scientific or semi-scientific recitals. That is a very correct stand, or would
be if it were not that these one-track-minded fans know no other form of human
interest than the love interest. (40)
It should be pointed out that this was said
thirty years ago; but it is significant that the attitude in science fiction as
a whole has changed very littie since then. During these thirty years, science
fiction has changed in every respect: the blasters have made room for
penetrating psychological criticism and debate, and of the sf writers of that
time, only a handful are active today. Yet the woman
is the same now as she was then. She shouldn't be in sf in the first place. If
she nevertheless manages to get into it, she shall know her place. Period.
Of
course, I am not demanding that all science fiction should contain women or
even treat them as human beings —I am decidedly against stock characters, and
those sf writers who think that women should be kept in the harem should of
course be allowed to keep them there—in their fiction—but I find it curious, to
say the very least, that only a very small number of sf writers have bothered
to base stories upon the assumption that the woman's position might be
different in another society. And I mean entirely different, not just some reactionary
viewpoint taken up and used all over again, like the walking and talking wombs
of Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward or
Robert A. Heinlein's The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Frederik
Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth devote a part of their novel Search the Sky (1954) to a wry, tongue-in-cheek account of a
world run by women, the result of an interstellar colonization that has lost
contact with Earth. The result is an upside-down society in which men are
regarded as a sort of inferior creature, fit only for procreation purposes and
the like. They have no voting rights, and career men are frowned upon, even
though there are radical women around who have "got nothing against men in
business; that's old-fashioned prejudice." Nevertheless, the (male)
protagonist is regarded as little more than a talking parrot when he starts to
explain things to a leading businesswoman. She admires not him, but the
heroine. "You've got a right to be a proud woman, believe me," she
says. "The way he got through it, without a single stumble! Never saw
anything like it in my life."
It is Earth all the way down to the last
little detail, just with the roles of man and woman exchanged. Women always try
to seduce some poor young man, and, if pregnancy results, he is forced to pay
her a monthly allowance. The protagonist is even subjected to an attempted rape
by a drunk (female) truck driver. And suddenly he
isn't a hero any longer—he's just a decorative piece of furniture, to be
admired and used. If this seems farfetched, look around you. You have it
everywhere here and now, only it is the other way around.
Robert
Sheckley has taken up another aspect of woman vs. society in a short story, A Ticket to Tranai (1955), a story which, apart from giving some
intelligent comments upon man's love/hate relationship with his machines—the
protagonist gets a job disimproving robots, because they're so good they're
causing inferiority feelings in their human operators—shows the ultimate in
man-wife relationship. Wives are kept solely for entertainment. Betweenwhiles
they are kept in a stasis field that makes them nonexisting until the husband
decides he needs company; then she is available at the flick of a switch. This
also makes the women very long-lived, as they do not age while in the stasis
field. The hero, a young, innocent man with the significant name of Goodman,
fresh from Earth and on his way to marry a young woman, finds the idea
disgusting. "It hardly seems fair to the woman," he says.
Melith laughed. "My dear friend, are you
preaching the doctrine of equality of the sexes? Really, it's a completely
disproved theory. Men and woman just aren't the same. They're different, no
matter what you've been told on Terra. What's good for men isn't necessarily—or
even usually—good for women."
"Therefore
you treat them as inferiors," Goodman said, his reformer's blood beginning
to boil.
"Not at all. We treat them in a different manner from men, but not in an inferior manner. Anyhow, they don't object." (41)
They surely don't. One of the reasons for
this might be that they can be sure to outlive their husbands by a couple of
hundred years; and of course they are spared the toil and drudgery of everyday
life, being taken out of stasis only on special occasions: romantic moonlit
evenings, parties and the like. Young Mr. Goodman, refusing to see the merits
of this system, disconnects the stasis generator immediately after the marriage
ceremony, giving his dear young wife in return the wonderful life of a suburban
housewife. It ends, predictably, in catastrophe, when she meets the traveling
salesman who promises to take her out of the stasis field once a week at
maximum. Exit good intentions.
The
late British sf writer John Wyndham (John Beynon Harris, 1903-1969) takes up
the problem in his novel Consider Her Ways (1961). Here, all men have died after being exposed to a deadly virus,
originally intended as a rat poison. Women, however, turning out to be immune,
create a peculiar world, reminiscent of an ant-community, with queens, workers,
soldiers and so forth. Procreation is done by way of parthenogenesis. A woman
in our time gets in mental contact with one of these future women. The ensuing
dialogue, which takes up most of the novel, might not give much new blood to
the debate, but it is still a healthy sign of science fiction recognizing the
problem.
At the beginning of the twentieth century
women were starting to have their chance to lead useful, creative, interesting
lives. But that did not suit commerce: it needed them much more as
mass-consumers than as producers—except on the most routine levels. So Romance
was adopted and developed as a weapon against their further progress and to promote
consumption, and it was used intensively.
Women must never for a moment be allowed to
forget their sex, and compete as equals. Everything had to have a
"feminine angle" which must be different from the masculine angle,
and be dinned in without ceasing. It would have been unpopular for manufacturers
actually to issue an order "back to the kitchen," but there were
other ways. A profession without a difference, called "housewife,"
could be invented. The kitchen could be glorified and made more expensive; it
could be made to seem desirable, and it could be shown that the way to realize
this heart's desire was through marriage. ...
The air was filled with
frustrated moanings. Women maundered in front of microphones yearning only to
"surrender," and "give themselves," to adore and to be
adored. The cinema most of all maintained the propaganda, persuading the main
and important part of their audience, which was female, that nothing in life
was worth achieving but dewy-eyed passivity in the strong arms of Romance. The
pressure became such that the majority of young woman spent all their leisure
time dreaming of Romance, and the means of securing it. They were brought to a
state of honestly believing that to be owned by some man and set down in a
little brick box to buy all the things that the manufacturers wanted them to
buy would be the highest form of bliss that life could offer. .. .
You
see, the great hopes for the emancipation of women with which the century had
started had been outflanked. Purchasing-power had passed into the hands of the
ill-educated and highly-suggestible. The desire for Romance is essentially a
selfish wish, and when it is encouraged to dominate every other it breaks down
all corporate loyalties. The individual woman thus separated from, and yet at
the same time thrust into competition with, all other women was almost defenseless;
she- became the prey of organized suggestion. When it was represented to her
that the lack of certain goods or amenities would be fatal to Romance she became
alarmed and, thus, eminently exploitable. . . . Thus, she became, in a new, a
subtler way, more exploited, more dependent, and less creative than she had
ever been before. (42)
From this female point of view, there is a
short step to the male one, brilliantly exemplified in the before-mentioned
Sheckley story. It is obviously written in jest, but it carries a good deal of
truth, using as well the science fiction media to its fullest extent. A piece
of advice given to Mr. Goodman at the wedding is especially revealing of the
prevalent male attitude. Compare this to the quote from John Wynd-ham's novel:
ADVICE TO A NEW HUSBAND
You have just been married and you expect,
quite naturally, a lifetime of connubial bliss. This is perfectly proper, for a
happy marriage is the foundation of good government. But you must do more than
merely wish for it. Good marriage is not yours by divine right. A good marriage
must be worked fori
Remember that your wife is a human being. She
should be allowed a certain measure of freedom as her inalienable right. We
suggest that you take her out of stasis at least once a week. Too long in
stasis is bad for her orientation. Too much stasis is bad for her complexion
and this will be your loss as well as hers.
At intervals, such as vacations and holidays,
it's customary to let your wife remain out of stasis for an entire day at a
time, or even two or three days. It will do no harm and the novelty will do
wonders for her state of mind.
Keep in mind these few common-sense rules and
you can be assured of a happy marriage.
— By
the Government Marriage Council. (43)
Robert Sheckley is an exceptional man in many
respects; this is written as a satire. Most other sf writers apparently believe
that this way of treating women not only is sound but also desirable.
Then
we come to sex in science fiction. This is easily dealt with, because it occurs
very, very seldom, and then in a very immature way. Sex in science fiction is
for procreation purposes only, and as such merely
hinted at. Sex for sheer pleasure is almost unknown. Granted, science fiction
has come a long way since the pulp age when Theodore Sturgeon seemed to be the
only sf writer to understand that man (and even woman) was equipped with a sex
drive. Most sf writers haven't realized this yet; it will be a stunning shock
for them when they do. One of the utterly few sf works that I know of, dealing
with heterosexual sex for the pleasure of it, is a short story by Frederik
Pohl, Day Million (1966); and that is a mighty strange love
story by any standards. The young lovers use machines to do the job for them.
It should also be noted that this particular story first was published in Rogue, a men's magazine, not in an
sf one.
And
if you, against all odds, should get a perfectly normal couple to do the thing
without the aid of sophisticated machinery, you can bet it is described in a
way that changes the tender love act into some revolting parody of human love.
In Anne McCaffrey's already-mentioned novelette A Womanly Talent, we find a love scene described, not as one
would expect, as a tender act of love, something to be cherished and to be
happy for, but reduced to the vibrations of a couple of needles in a
"coital graph," supervised by a couple of white-smocked, bored
voyeurs:
Op Owen glanced at the two graphs, the
needles reacting wildly in response to the sexual stimuli mutually enjoyed.
Lajos's graph showed the normal agitated partem; Ruth's graph matched his
except for the frenetic action of the needle, trying valiandy to record the cerebrally
excited and conflicting signals its sensitive transistors picked up. The
needle gouged deep into the fragile paper, flinging its tip back and forth. . .
. (44)
"That
was most incredible. The most prodigious performance I have ever
witnessed," one of the white-smocked voyeurs gasps when the meter dance
has subsided. I agree with him, but for quite different reasons: I think it's
sickening.
Anne McCaffrey is in every respect a thinking
woman and an intelligent writer who surely can do much better than this, and I
am inclined to regard this example as what I would like to call the sf
contamination, for this way of reducing the sex act to a mechanical,
emotionless electronic copulation is an attitude found everywhere in the genre.
It might be partly attributed to the genre's preoccupation with mechanical
devices and a subsequent disregard for everything human and emotional, but the
main reason is that the genre as a whole is so puritanical that it runs away
and hides, screaming with fear, at the sight of a penis. Not that there aren't
exceptions, but they are extremely scarce. As for realizing that love and sex
are motivating forces of man, handling the theme with tenderness, not as a
gimmick but as something beautiful, there's only Theodore Sturgeon and perhaps
one or two more. And Sturgeon's stories of this kind are very marginally
science fiction.
William
Tenn has described the very complicated sexual system of a species that has no
less than seven sexes in Venus and the Seven Sexes (1949), a hilarious story that depicts a truly alien way of propagating
the species, and the same author's The Masculine Revolt (1965) is set in a not so future U.S.A. where the women rule and
resistance starts with the introduction of the codpiece as a part of men's attire.
"MEN ARE DIFFERENT FROM WOMEN!" say the ads. "Dress differently! Dress maculinist! Wear
Poly glow Men's Jumpers with the Special Polly glow Codpiece!" This leads immediately to the war of the
sexes, in which the men strengthen themselves with slogans like "Behind
every successful woman there stands an unsuccessful man!" and "A man
who enjoys no power during the day cannot be powerful at night. An impotent man
in politics is an impotent man in bed. If women want lusty husbands, they must
first rum to them as heroic leaders."
This
story is an intelligent satire on the heavily enforced sex roles of man and
woman today, done with a great deal of humor, but it is one of the very few
works of science fiction to use the theme of sex vs. society.
Philip
José Farmer, the only U.S. writer I know of that
ever has seriously mixed science fiction and pornography, jumped into
prominence in the sf field with his (decidedly unpomographic novel The Lovers (1952) which dealt with sexual relations
between a human male and an extraterrestrial insect that had developed a
protecting mimicry exacdy like a woman. The moral aspects are interesting, but
the story is weighted down by the usual monster and blaster ballet Farmer later
wrote a number of short stories dealing with sexual relations between
extraterrestrials as well as between humans and extraterrestrials,
that might be the most intelligent and mature stories of this kind in
science fiction. They were later collected in book form as Strange Relations (1960).
Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr., the most biting satiricist of science fiction, has based a short
story, Welcome
to the Monkey House (1968),
originally published in Playboy, on
the curious sexual mores of a very near future. The story is set in a future
in which overpopulation is acute, seventeen billion human beings are squeezed
together on Earth and procreation is the greatest sin possible. Women are
organized in desexualized murder patrols—equipped with leather boots, whips and
the other usual sado-masochistic paraphernalia— which carry out euthanasia by
request. The moral problems of birth control are solved in an ingenious way,
which is worthy of describing more closely. It turns out that it is a crime
against Nature to use preventives; it must lead to Hell, immortality, the ruin
of civilization and so on and so on. The answer to this is a pill that doesn't
in any way impair the ability.to procreate. It just
makes the citizen completely numb from the waist down. The pill is so
effective that "you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to
recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and
he wouldn't miss a syllable." Thus science and morals go hand in hand.
This
marvelous way of ethical birth control was thought up by a man who was shocked
at seeing some apes copulating in a zoo, and immediately went home to invent a
pill that "would make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian
family to see." In Vonnegut's story, the savior comes in the form of the
depraved Billy the Poet who starts abducting women, taking them off the pill
and teaching them the facts of life. This is a good satire on contemporary
morality, and I would like to see followers to it.
Homosexuality is a theme that science fiction
has kept its hands at a good distance from, even if cautiousness now seems to
lessen here as well as in other literary fields. Theodore Sturgeon, one of the
utterly few sf writers who isn't afraid of stepping outside the nice, solid and
secure parameters of accepted sexual mores has described a smooth-functioning
space ship team of two men, bound together by a homosexual relationship of a
rather complex nature, in the short story The World Well Lost (1953). He included as well a pair of
extraterrestrial homosexual creatures, which gives a new, almost tender and
(for some people) shocking picture of this type of sexual bond. Predictably,
Sturgeon became the target for much attention after writing this story. "I
wrote an emphatic sort of tale about some homosexuals," he says,
"and my mailbox filled up with cards drenched with scent and letters
written in purple ink with green capitals."
Sturgeon has for some years been taking love
apart in his stories, to see what makes it tick (love, not Romance; that's
quite another thing), and this has resulted in a number of short stories and
novels in which the plot is nothing more than a background, a way of making the
characters express themselves. Many of his best stories are not science fiction
even in the broadest sense of the word. I have an uneasy feeling that this is
what makes Sturgeon great: that he doesn't care about gimmicks and environment
at all, just the characters themselves. He is the absolute antithesis of Robert
A. Heinlein, to whom environment is all and the characters just a part of the
overall picture.
Sturgeon
has, however, written one undiluted sf novel dealing with different sexual
mores: Venus
Plus X (1960) takes place in a Utopia of sorts, created and inhabited by people
who are neither men nor women but something else, who reproduce by grafted
uterus and surgery, a kind of artificial parthenogenesis, if you like. It turns
out that these people, the Ledom, are people of Earth, ordinary humans who are
bom as males and females, but artificially altered to their new physical status.
In this society, in which sex as we know it does not exist, men court and marry
men.
Only
there are no men or women, just a kind of neuter. The protagonist is
broad-minded enough to overlook all this, but when it is disclosed that these
people willingly have changed themselves into something that, to him, seem like
homosexuals, revulsion immediately takes indulgence's place. "You're the
rottenest pack of perverts that ever had the good sense to hide in a
hole," he cries.
A sort of rustie went through (the
Ledoms)—movement, not sound. Finally, "What changed you, Charlie Johns?
You thought very well of us a few hours ago. What changed you?"
"Only
the truth."
"What truth?"
"That there is no
mutation."
"Our
doing it ourselves makes that much difference? Why is what we have done worse
to you than a genetic accident?"
"Just because you do
it."
Charlie heaved a deep breath, and almost spit as he said, "Philos told me
how old a people you are. Why is what you do evil? Men
marrying men. Incest, perversion, there isn't anything rotten you don't
do."
"Do you think," said
Mielwis courteously, "that your attitude is unusual, or would be if the
bulk of mankind had your-information?"
"About a hundred and two percent
unanimously." Charlie growled.
"Yet a mutation would have
made us innocent."
"A
mutation would have been natural . . . We'd exterminate you down to the last
queer kid . . . and t stick that one in a side-show. That's all I
have to say. Get me out of here." (45)
In other words, Sturgeon seems to say (and
this makes me fear that the seeming open-mindedness of sf toward the habits of
extraterrestrial creatures might not go so deep after all, nor be so
spectacular) that alien ways of conduct are all right, as long as those
performing them are alien enough, e.g. obviously nonhuman creatures. But if some being resembling you behaves in a way that is revolting
to you, then good-bye indulgence and broad-mindedness. The attitude toward
extraterrestrial creatures in science fiction during the last thirty years has
changed from open hostility to indulgence and sometimes to something bordering
on self-contempt, as I will show later on, and I wonder when the habits of man
himself will be met with the same open-mindedness.
The
more exclusive variants of sex like sadism, masochism, necrophilia, fetishism
and so forth can be found in ample measures in the Sword & Sorcery Heroic
Fantasy. Despite the cries from some advocates of this type of entertainment
that it is pure and virginal and clean, there is sex to be found everywhere;
sublimated in various ways, but still there, and in fact the overshadowing
ingredient. There is sex—but an immature, infantile sex where the copulation is
the sword-fight and the orgasm is the death of the opponent. Women are
invariably beautiful, desirable and, beneath their exquisitely sculptured
bodies, completely sexless. The symbols of sex (breasts and so forth) are
there, but sex itself can be found only in a grotesquely sublimated form. Like
in the Wild West story, the sex urge has been transformed into violence and
death in the manner of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. It is
interesting to note the close correspondence between the numerous maltreatments
of heroes in Heroic Fantasy by various exotic goddesses, queens, etc., and
Krafft-Ebing's description of masochism as:
... a peculiar
perversion of the mental Vita sexualis consisting in its victim being
overmastered in his sexual feelings and thoughts by the concept of being completely
and utterly subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, being
treated de haut en bas and humiliated and even maltreated by that person . . .
After giving the reader his money's worth of
masochism, however, the hero can be found getting the upper hand, making the
woman obedient and subjective by the power of his penis.
The
hero's sword-penis is used a lot, although mostly on other males. The
conclusion of Michael Moorcock's saga of Elric of Melniboné even goes as far as to give a beautiful example of auto-eroticism
coupled with sex fright:
He turned his head to one side and saw (the
sword) leave the ground, sweep into the air and then rush down on him.
"Stormbringer!"
he cried, and then the
hellsword struck his chest, he felt the icy touch of the blade against his
heart, reached out his fingers to clutch at it, felt his body constrict, felt
it sucking his soul from the very depths of his being, felt his whole
personality being drawn into the runesword . . . Elric of Melniboné, last of the Bright Emperors, cried out, and then his body collapsed, a
sprawled husk beside its comrade, and he lay beneath the mighty balance that
still hung in the sky.
Then
Stormbringer s shape began to change, writhing and curling above the body of the
albino, finally to stand astraddle it.
The entity that was Stormbringer . . . looked down on the corpse of Elric of Melniboné and smiled.
"Farewell, friend. I was
a thousand times more evil than thou!" (46)
Philip José Farmer, the unorthodox chronicler of man's hidden desires, has in a
recent novel, A
Feast Unknown (1969),
amused himself by taking up all these tendencies and collecting them into one
single, morbid and on the whole quite terrifying story dealing with the sex
deviations of a Heroic Fantasy Hero.
Farmer is unique in science fiction—for many
reasons. There exists—to return to the more everyday land of sex— a striking
example of the results of an attempt to inject some sex in sf. The example is
from 1938, but could as well be from a much more recent date. At that time, a
new magazine Marvel
Science Stories tried
to jazz up science by a pinch of sex. For that magazine Henry Kuttner, later on
one of sfs most influential writers, wrote four stories with a sexy angle. They
were published in the first two issues of the magazine, and the unanimous howl
of wrath that followed this unprecedented proceeding resulted in the magazine
dropping the subject as a hot
potato. Kuttner was scandalized for a long time afterward. Science fiction's
foremost chronicler, Sam Moskowitz, attempts to account for this phenomenon in
his book Seekers
of Tomorrow (1967),
in which he says that:
. . . science
fiction is a literature of ideas. The people who read it are entertained and
even find escape through mental stimulation. Sex, vulgar or artistic, is
available to them in countless forms if they wish it, but the type of
intellectual speculation they enjoy is presented only in science fiction. (47)
Which is seductive enough, if you are of the
opinion that sex and related activities never can be of any interest from a
speculative/intellectual point of view. I do not share this opinion. Neither
apparendy does Sam Moskowitz, who in a sudden volte-face comes to the
conclusion that Philip Jose Farmer's novel The Lovers not only is brilliant science fiction, but
that its sex content is what makes it brilliant.
There
can be many reasons to this underdevelopment of sex as a serious subject in
science fiction, but one of the most important, I believe, is the overshadowing
interest in purely scientific innovations that have for so long formed the
basis for hard-core science fiction. Psychology and speculations in sexuality
didn't belong to the sciences that were fostered by writers and editors.
Also,
a great part of the readership of sf has, and
is, composed of adolescent boys who regard sex as something filthy (a view
shared by many adults as well), and this can't encourage any digressions in
sex. To all this is added the fact that most science fiction is written in the U.S.A., and the U.S.A. is perhaps the most puritanical
country in the world. With its dread of sexuality, where extravaginal
copulation in some states means twenty years in jail for the participants and
where fornication is a criminal offense, you can't hope for much
open-mindedness regarding sex anywhere, least of all in science fiction.
There
are now promising signs of particularly European sf writers recognizing sex as
a permissible theme for science fiction, and I hope they will prove to be the
start of a new and more human attitude in this respect. Unless, of course, the
sf writers all have sublimated away the sex urge into the virile space ships
and super-cities of the future.
If we turn to the plight of robots and alien
creatures in science fiction, we will immediately find a positive and humane
attitude of a kind that very seldom is shown toward females. This has, of
course, not always been the case. The precursors of the robots of today's
sf—from the mechanical men of the Arabian Nights and
the Finnish Kalevala
to the chemically created
men like the legends of Golem and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—have invariably turned out to be either
machines of war and destruction (Sinbad the Sailor's encounter with robots in
the Arabian Nights takes place in a tomb, where the robot cuts
off the heads of a couple of' grave-robbers) or monsters turning against their
creators, like the Golem and Frankenstein's monster. The robots of Karel
Capek's play, from which the word robot originated
(actually, these figures were not what we now call robots, mechanical men, but
chemically created creatures, homunculi, now
known in science fiction as androids) even went as far as to try to wipe out
mankind. The opera lover also remembers the female robot Olympia of Jacques
Offenbach's The
Tales of Hoffmann (based
on three stories by the German horror master E. T. A. Hoffmann, who decidedly
belongs to the anti-man league. These robots were undoubtedly of the
anti-scientific type, the anti-development,
See-what-a-hell-on-Earth-science-and-prog-ress-is-creating monster.
In
present-day sf the robots are mostly depicted as utterly humanitarian
creatures with all human virtues and then some. The danger comes from the giant
computers or the social system which never can be completely trusted. The
robots are often maltreated and subjected to aggression of all possible lands,
but they are always willing to turn the other steel cheek. Unless, of course,
they have been programmed wrongly, in which case it obviously is man's fault,
not the robot's.
The
reason for this sudden change from fear to deep friendliness and esteem for our
mechanical brethren can be traced largely back to one single person, who
practically single-handedly has mapped out the guiding lines for the specific
science fiction science known as Robotics, which now is included in every true
sf writer's handbook in future societies. The man is Isaac Asimov.
During
the forties Asimov wrote a number of short stories dealing with robots, in
which he disarmed the dread of robots so effectively that it never since has
been able to show its ugly head again. The robots of Asimov's world" were
so programmed that they never could do anything unexpected, as distinguished
from the women and the androids, who were equipped
with all too much of a will of their own. This was accomplished through the
Three Laws of Robotics that was—and is—the robot's equivalent to the Ten
Commandments. With the significant difference that the ■ robots are
constitutionally incapable of breaking their laws:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or,
through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by
human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as
long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws cover all robot activities, with
the anxiety for man's safety first and the robot's last. Armed with this feasible
precautionary measure, Asimov got to work, writing a number of now classical
robot thrillers, usually following the same basic formula:
1. Robot inexplicably violates the First or
Second Law.
2. U.S. Robots & Mechanical Men Inc. puts
their foremost expert on robots, the robot psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin, on
the case.
3. Dr. Susan Calvin proves that the robot has been
acting according to programming all along, and in
fact not violating the Laws of Robotics.
Sometimes Dr. Susan Calvin is not present,
and the formula of the stories might vary somewhat, but the basis is always
the same: The robot starts to act peculiarly because it is physically or
psychologically stuck, and the human protagonist uses the Laws of Robotics to
get it unstuck again. It might seem like a weak formula, but it is decidedly
not. Asimov's razor-sharp logic has worked wonders with these stories.
Asimov's
collected stories of Susan Calvin and her infallible robots (7, Robot, 1950, and
The Rest of the Robots, 1964) have proven remarkably vigorous, and
have to my knowledge never been out of print. This might be due to the fact
that Asimov's robots are extremely dependable creatures, almost the only
dependable things that exist in science fiction. They bring about a feeling of
paternal confidence. And Susan Calvin, the super-intelligent old spinster
(sicl) is so genial that you can't dislike the robots she loves so dearly.
Other
writers have had much more sordid experiences with robots: e.g. Robert
Silverberg with the short story The Iron Chancellor, wherein a sturdy household robot is subjected to reprogramming by the
dexterous son of the family and ends up beating the whole family to death— but
such mishaps are rare.
The robot dread, such as is brought forth in
anti-science, anti-Utopian Faustian novels like Frankenstein or R.U.R., comes from a time when the Machine
still was the thing to fear, and the exploration of nature's darkest secrets
still was supposed to take place in the engineer's chromium-shining workshop.
Today the fear manifests itself in other forms. Robots never do any harm; they
rather resemble nice, friendly St. Bernard dogs. We have a beautiful example of
the old, wise, man-loving robots doing their good deeds in Clifford D. Simak's
brilliant, award-winning novel City (1952).
Here we find the robots taking over man's duties when man leaves Earth for a
new existence on Jupiter, serving as mentors for the new rulers of Earth, the
dogs. Jenkins, the old, old robot, sits before the crackling fire in the old,
old mansion of the Websters, absently stroking the silken fur of a dog,
dreaming of mankind as the night closes in. The robots don't even behave like
man any longer. They are man.
Lately
we have also seen the appearance of a completely new kind of robot—the machine
that is guided by a human brain in such a way that the machine is the human being, with the whole human body exchanged for a mechanical
one that not only tries to imitate the human body but is made for a specific
use. A truck, a tank, a space ship. These Cyborgs (which I gather should mean Cybernetic Organisms)
are human beings in every respect save appearance; they have an identity, they
live, they die, they have hopes, they make mistakes. Some of them even love. (A
land of mechanophilia, I guess.) The U.S. sf writer Anne McCaffrey has written
a series of short stories dealing with "Helva, the singing ship," a
girl born so deformed that her parents were given the choice of euthanasia for
her, or a future as an encapsuled "brain" with a mechanical body. She
becomes a star ship, using the ship in exactly the way she would have used her
human body, and in time she even falls in love with her captain. The love
interest could have been lifted right out from the pages of True Romance, but it nevertheless is encouraging to see
some human emotion displayed. In fact, Helva must be the most individual character
of all the pseudo-humans to turn up in science fiction since the loving robot
women of Lester Del Rey's Helen O'Loy (1938),
who ended up marrying her inventor and lived happily ever after.
But
if man has succeeded in taming his robots, this is not the case with the
androids. They are disagreeably like man in all respects save the ability to
procreate. The androids are manufactured in android factories and are sent out
into the society with a production number stamped on the forehead. This number
is the only thing that tells them apart from human beings; they even have a sex
urge, and they are, like human beings, utterly undependable.
If
you liken the robot to a big, nice dog, the android resembles an intelligent,
untamable cat. The android's attitude to the commandments is the same as man's: an amused indulgence.
The
android is, in short, the incalculable factor in the equipment that belongs to
the sf writer's workshop, and is in this respect filling a function reminiscent
of the first robots. He is man's creation, but not his slave. While the rest of
man's environment is clearly recognizable as his own creation, a product of
his own work, the android is a highly independent being, a constant bad conscience, that desperately tries to break free of man's
grip, toward an identity of his own.
It
is the guilt for the Negroes, the Indians, the Jews, the Vietnamese, the people
of South America and mankind's rape of weaker individuals that comes back' in
the android. We have a typical example in Algis Budry's cynical story Dream of Victory, in which a sizable part of Earth's population
consists of androids after an atomic war that has killed most of humanity.
After the catastrophe the androids were needed to keep the wheels of
civilization going, but with the birth rate soaring, they are eased out from
jobs that are needed for humans. The androids, who have built up civilization
almost by themselves after the war, are getting desperate at the prospect of
being exterminated. The story describes the gradual degradation of an android,
Stac Fuoss, from office boss—a position taken over by a human employee—to
alcoholic, part-time worker and murderer. Fuoss's tragedy lies not in his
debasement but in the fact that his victim is a human being, his mistress. This
becomes the start of hate campaigns directed against the androids, as the
hurnan's hate, based on guilt feelings, bursts out in the open.
The
android functions as sfs contribution to the race debate. The robots pose no
problem, because they just obey, and -the extraterrestrials are so different
from us that some kind of understanding must be found in the end. But the
androids—that's another thing. Just like Negroes, Indians, Mexicans
and what-have-you, they must be kept down at all costs, never for a moment
being permitted to regard themselves as equals to The White Man. Because if
they did, they might get it into their heads to demand equal rights, and that
would mean the end of White Man's supremacy.
In a
postscript to his novel Venus Plus X, Theodore Sturgeon quotes the results of a
U.S. poll dealing with the equality of humans with differently colored skin.
Equality is written into the U.S. Constitution, but this belief is apparently
not embraced by many U.S. citizens. Sixty-one percent thought that all men were
equaL The same people then were asked if Negroes were
equal to whites . . . "and with the very next breath four percent said
Yes—and this without the sound of a shifting gear." Now, what would the
reaction be if the same question was applied to androids—a creature that in
some ways might be superior to man? The instinct for self-preservation demands
that these beings are considered inferior, no matter what logic says, and
exterminated as soon as possible. If we had androids, the whole world would
turn into a gigantic Selma, Alabama.
Clifford D. Simak has written an sf novel, Time and Again (1951),
in which the androids are waging a sort of guerrilla war against mankind,
asking for nothing but the right to stay alive. And the (human) man who thinks
that all living creatures have a right to live is hunted by various "Man
First" organizations. In a recent novel by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969), the androids turn out to be somewhat less than friendly toward
mankind, indeed suffering feelings of resentment and inferiority toward the
world of organic life. In the world of 1992, when the third world war has left
precious little animal life left, this is grave. So there we have a special
corps of bounty hunters, particularly the hunter Rick Deck-ard with the
full-time job of tracing and tolling androids.
If
the sf writer nowadays is inclined to take the side of the android against his
tormentors, this is even more the case when we come to the human mutations,
usually depicted as being superior to man in some, respect. Mutations usually
manifest themselves as physical or psychical deformations; but evolution is a
chain of mutations, and it seems probable that a new type of man (perhaps
suited to an environment polluted by atomic fallout, DDT, detergents and so
forth) will evolve and take over the world with the same right as homo sapiens took over the world from Cro-Magon. This
would obviously mean trouble.
One
of the grand classics of science fiction dealing with this theme is Olaf Stapledon's Odd
John (1935), which tells of a boy born with
super-intelligence, as far removed from man as man is from the apes. He tries
to create an ideal state, but is hunted down and ultimately killed. Stapledon
later wrote another novel using the same theme, Sirius (1944),
in which a dog is equipped
with human intelligence. It does not work out.
To
take other examples, we can take the plight of tele-paths in a world of
nontelepaths. The classic here is A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1940),
in which a group of
telepaths, the result of a psionic experiment, fight for their existence
against the rest of humanity. They win (of course) but not because mankind
approves of their gift. Wilson Tucker's Wild Talent (1954) is another novel based on this theme. Van
Vogt's novel is weighted down by the usual Space Opera paraphernalia and a
vague Übermenschen ideal. Tucker describes his protagonist Paul
Breen as an utterly alone, uncertain man, exploited because of his talent by
people who hate and despise him. He is possessed by doubts of his right to five
in a world that isn't his.
In
John Wyndham's novel The
Chrysalids (1955; also published as Re-Birth), the mutants are a couple of children who grow
up after the Great War, when large parts of Earth still are deadly wastes, and
where the fear of deviating individuals finds typical expression in religion.
The Norm is man in God's image, no deviation from the Norm is permitted. Keep Pure the Stock of the Lord and In
Purity Our Salvation are
some of the cries with which the clergy fortifies itself for the heretics'
fire, murder and other atrocities. A child born with an extra finger or toe
must be killed, women who give birth to deviating
children are regarded as unclean and are punished. The novel is an indictment
of biogtry and a denunciation of conformity, as well as a moving plea for
sanity in a world that has seen precious little of sanity when it comes to
people behaving differendy from ourselves.
Brian
Aldiss has used the theme of superman with a difference in a short story, Visiting Amoeba, which retells the story of superman
succeeding man. This theme has been used many times before, notably by Olaf
Stapledon in his magnificent Last and First Men, but Aldiss' treatment of the idea is rather different, placing the event
in a dim and distant future in which our universe is old and tired, the power
is ebbing and humanity fives a ghostlike existence on its millions of worlds.
Man's chapter is finished, and beyond the galaxies a new world is created, a
young and vigorous world, whose sole inhabitant makes his way to man's central
world, followed by chaos and destruction. As the end approaches the central
world, he explains the inevitable for the last Emperor:
"I
wanted man to be aware of what is happening to him," you said at last.
"That much was owed him. I —we owed it. You are—our fathers. We are your
heirs . . ."
He touched you gently, asking in a firm
voice, "What should be told to the people of the Galaxy?"
You
looked out over a city now pricked with lights, and up to the evening sky. You
found no comfort there or in yourself.
"Tell them again what a galaxy is,"
you said. "Don't soften it. They are brave. Explain to them once more that
there are galaxies like grains of sand, each galaxy a cosmic laboratory for the bold experiments of nature. Explain to them
how little individual lives mean compared to the unknown goals of the race.
Tell them— tell them that this laboratory is closing. A newer one, with more
modem equipment, is opening just down the street." (48)
From this the step is short to our friends
the extraterrestrials, lovingly referred to as BEM's, Bug-Eyed Monsters, who
without question are the most common denominator of science fiction since the
days of Lucian. BEM's mean not only carnivorous monsters of all kinds and
sizes, but any extraterrestrial that has the bad luck to come into contact with
man. We know them from thousands and thousands of lurid magazine covers
adorned with nubile females being menaced in gaudy colors by slimy, drooling,
fanged and constantly hungry monstrosities that, inside the magazine,
inevitably get blasted to atoms by our other friend the good ol' hero. Lately,
the alien has changed somewhat, from the old murderous creature to a being with some curious habits but still a fascinating personality. Sometimes the BEM is the hero, and man is the
monster. Things have changed.
The
classic BEM appeared in 1897. This was the year of the Stockholm Fair,
organized to commemorate King Oscar II's twenty-five-year reign, "the
ultimate manifestation of Swedish genius and taste," to quote a panegyric
brochure. These were good times, at least for some, and the bourgeoisie partook their table dTidte at Hufvudstadshotellet at the reasonable
price of seventy cents, or a bottle of Muscato Passito at Tavema degli Artisti
in the "Old Town" of the Fair. The lower classes could get a plate of "tasty, nourishing soup" at simpler eating-houses for
five cents. Such was life in Stockholm. But in England great things were
happening: the Martians landed in Surrey.
Those who have never seen a living Martian can
scarcely imagine the strange horror of their appearance. The peculiar V-shaped
mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow bridges, the absence of a
chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth,
the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a
strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement, due to
the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary
intensity of the immense eyes—culminated in an effect akin to nausea. There
was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy
deliberation of their tedious movements unspeakably terrible. Even at this
first encounter, this first glimpse, I was
overcome with disgust and dread.
This description is, of course, taken from H.
G. Wells's novel The
War of the Worlds (one of the most one-sided wars of science
fiction) which first was published as a serial in the London Cosmopolitan Gazette in the secure year of the Stockholm Fair. Wells
was not the first writer to make use of hostile extraterrestrials, but he gave
them the physical appearance that later on became so sadly notorious. Long
after the last of Wells's monsters put its slimy tentacles down to rest, its
brothers, sisters, cousins and close friends marched on over the book pages and
the movie screens in a never-ending stream. Some looked like overgrown frogs or
cabbage-worms, others belonged to the families of
insects or snakes or were of some nondescript amorphous shape. Most of them had
tentacles which they used to strangle some of the less important members of the
space ship's crew. Some BEM's ate humans, others were
content just to kill them. All were decidedly anti-human. The future was
depicted as a jungle through which man must fight his way, always on guard
against hostile aliens of all kinds.
The
basic idea, particularly during the years of the pulp magazines, was that the
outer world—whether it was space, other civilizations or the future—was hostile
toward man, that man must fight against this hostile outer world with all his
ingenuity, changing it to suit his needs. The BEM's were a part of the picture,
just like interplanetary space and the insecurity that always follows
scientific innovations. The friendly aliens were few and far between, and when
they appeared it was only to help man against some other bestial creature with
wily plans against mankind. Early science fiction almost without exception
started from the assumption that we, the human race (usually we, the White
Anglo-Saxon Protestants) were in the right, and everything else were ogres.
The
reason for all this, I believe, can be traced back to the specific American
pioneer romanticism, when the European settlers were opening new frontiers,
fighting the aboriginal inhabitants who, understandably enough,
resisted being invaded and killed. In America, the aboriginal inhabitants were
slaughtered and their civilization raped and looted and destroyed. The new
Americans didn't intend to let anyone do the same to themselves.
By depicting these aliens as monsters, they can find excuses for the slaughter.
The Wild West genre is a typical example of American guilt for the Indian
massacres being sublimated into pride of the extermination of these red-skinned
monsters, these savages, these maniacs. The science fiction of the pulp era has
many similarities with the Wild West stories. The White Man is coming to take
over, and if the original inhabitants resist, then exterminate them.
The
War of the Worlds is interesting as an example. The British
Empire has a history almost as bloody as that of the U.S.A., and the guilt
feelings of an intelligent and sensitive Englishman are as heavy as those of
an American. The Martians had obviously set their minds to conquer Earth in the
same way as the British conquered India, and the result would probably have
been as disastrous for the British as it had been for the Indians. The superior
war machinery of the British had its counterpart in the Martian's heat rays and
robots. Man doesn't stand a chance. When the miracle occurs, it appears in the
form of an inconsiderable microbe which is deadly for the Martians. Earth is
saved—but not by man. Rightly, we should have been killed just as the Indians
were.
Since Wells, mankind has been subjected to a
veritable torrent of monster invasions featuring every conceivable monstrosity
and then some, from the usual slimy-tentacled green BEM's from some distant
planet or another to the armies of Terran's mutated or prehistoric or just
plain impossible beasts, type King Kong, which seem to adorn every movie
screen in sight. Most of these creatures belong more to the improbable world of
the hard-core horror or fantasy story, giving very little of what I would call
the constructive monster approach—that of using the aliens to convey an idea.
It should be noted that when the BEM appears in serious science fiction, the
emphasis is not put on the horror angle, but on the alien's way of reacting to
our environment, or man's attitude to the alien.
The
French writer Andre Maurois has taken up an interesting side of the monster
theme in his short story Fragments of a World History (1926). This takes place in the world of
1963, which is toppling on the brink of a new world war. The war hysteria is
spreading and the war seems inevitable—then someone remembers H. G. Wells's
novel. The leading newspaper trusts pool their resources and start to spread
bits of mystic news over the world-news of aggression from some unknown source.
The carefully worked-out technique in doing this has been used many times
since:
1. They
evoke fear and belief in mystical and fatal
phenomena.
2. They explain that these phenomena are caused
by one or more knowingly acting beings, and try to find them.
3. They expose the aggressors, and the war
starts.
After a long cogitation it is decided to
appoint the inhabitants of the Moon as aggressors, as the Moon obviously is
devoid of life, and one month after the "exposing" of the wily
aggressors, the propaganda machinery goes at full blast. Carols like "Man
first" and "Death to the Moon" echo in the streets, and in
Berlin the crowds sing the new chorale Hate Against the Moon. In London, the hysteria takes somewhat
different outlets, and the most popular ditty is Oh, Stop Tickling Me, Man in the Moon, Stop
Tickling, Stop, Oh! Stop! A weapon is invented in the form of a heat
ray, and "retaliation" is undertaken with a lot of patriotic noise
and flag-waving. Then it turns out that the Moon is inhabited, and three days later the Selenites strike back. The dreaded
war is a fact, but now with an incredibly more dangerous adversary. Exit the
good idea.
Maurois
depicted his extraterrestrials as thinking creatures that acted logically and
in fact were as worthy of respect as any human being; this he brought forth in
a number of short stories during the twenties. Maurois was, however, a representative of the European school of speculative fiction, and it
took a long time before these ideas got a handhold in the U.S. sf magazines.
The breakthrough came with Stanley G. Weinbaum (1900-1935), who during his
short life managed to change the prevailing attitude toward the BEM's as cruel
monsters to that of seeing them as definite personalities, acting not out of
malice, but of a logic of their own; sometimes incomprehensible, but always
there. His debut story, A Martian Odyssey (1934),
was originally written as a parody of science fiction, featuring a number of
very curious BEM's. The planet of Mars of Wein-baum's story was furnished with
flora and fauna that would have given a scientist ulcers,
but it was not the scientific accuracy that was important: it was the fact that
for the first time in science fiction, BEM's acted as individual beings. They
were mighty strange in all respects—few sf writers have, in fact, managed to
create alien beings as strange as Weinbaum's—but they were definite
personalities. You could reason with them. At least with
those that had the physical abilities of reasoning with someone outside of themselves.
The
attitude toward BEM's didn't change overnight as a result of Weinbaum's story, but they have never been the same since,
either. They still entertain grave misgivings toward man, sometimes open
hostility, but there are always reasons for their attitudes, and perhaps they
can be put right without blasters.
A
typical example of this attitude is Harry Harrison's novel Deathworld (1960), which is set on a planet inhabited
by monsters of the most horrible land possible. Every animal, every insect,
every growth on this planet seems to be possessed by one single thought: to
kill as many human beings as possible. The colonizers have dug themselves down
behind impenetrable steel barriers and venture out from these forts only in
armored tanks fitted with flamethrowers, machine guns and cannons. The
children are taught to handle guns at the age of four years, and are ruthlessly
drilled to act quicker than quick when attacked. One second of inattention
means certain death. The colonists arm themselves to their teeth as the
attacks become more fierce and harder to repel.
Actually,
the planet is not particularly hostile; but all living things are very, very
sensitive to aggressive thoughts. And show me the man who isn't aggressive. . .
.
This
question of communication has been used as the theme for a good many science
fiction stories, one of the most far-reaching being a novel by Brian W. Aldiss,
The Dark Light-Years (1964). An interstellar expedition is confronted
with an alien species, the Utods, that possess physical
and mental powers greatly above man. They are also quite amiably inclined—but
there is one catch. They literally wallow in filth. Their own filth, that is.
The prospect of acknowledging these creatures as man's equals or even superiors
is too much. Also, the Utods are so alien in then-concept of life and logic
that no communication is possible. Aldiss is here giving yet another example of
the problem stated by Theodore Sturgeon in his Venus Plus X:
the inability to grant to
another being the right to act in a way that is abhorrent, by faith or by
custom, to yourself. In our culture, the most despised sexual perversion is the
one in which sexual pleasure is derived out of the fetish of feces. Think of an
alien race of coprophiles ... I admit
the thought is rather grisly, but it is not impossible. (Copro-lagny is
actually one of the most widespread sexual perversions.) The man who thinks
himself unprejudiced because he has black, yellow, brown or pink-colored
friends, should search himself for his reactions to an openly copro-philic
being.
This
problem of seeing the inner qualities of a being fundamentally different from
ourselves is exemplified in a somewhat less grisly way by the Irish sf writer
James White in the novel All Judgment Fled (1968). This takes place in a near future, thirty or forty years from
today, when man is just beginning to push out to Mars and Venus in small six-men space ships. The story starts with a gigantic alien
space ship coming into the solar system, completely out of control, and going
into orbit. A research team is sent out to investigate the ship, and is faced
with a number of alien creatures. The crux of the plot is that out of the life
forms found on the ship, only one is an intelligent agency, but because no
communication is possible, the problem is to find out which of the species is the intelligent one, and which are the animals. This is a
story of logical deduction, but also a highly suspenseful story and, in all,
an example of good science fiction at its best.
James
White is well-known in science fiction for a number of extremely intelligent
and humanitarian short stories dealing with confrontations with
extraterrestrials, particularly his stories set in a kind of orbiting hospital
where alien beings are given medical help. Some of these stories have been
collected in book form as Hospital Station (1962). He explained the background for his stories dealing with the
man-alien confrontation in a TV program I produced for Swedish TV at the
British sf convention in Oxford, 1969:
I am, of ocurse, preaching a little bit by
having extraterrestrials as well as human beings living and working together.
. . . We are having difficulties enough living together when we just have
slightly different • colored skins, and I want to show a future where people
with six eyes can live together peacefully and cooperate with people with two.
That's the way I hope it will be, and that's the way I hope it will be on Earth
before we meet the extraterrestrials.
This
is a remarkable change from the monster philosophy of the pulp magazines, and
an attitude that the science fiction field should be proud of. In the
above-mentioned TV program, John Brunner mentioned a scale for assessing the
value judgment in fiction, worked out by an American sociologist. In the
original project, this scale was applied to magazines like Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal and so forth, and it was discovered that the ideals implicit in fiction
of this kind were comfortable, conservative to the point of being reactionary,
bourgeois, middle-class, and if not intolerant toward minority groups, at
least patronizing toward them. A young woman in California decided to do her
doctorate thesis by applying the same standards to one month's samples of
science fiction magazines, and she came up with the interesting discovery that
the implied values tended to be humanitarian, progressive, forward-looking
and, as for minority groups, she said, in science fiction even the robots were
treated like human beings.
Which, of course, is an encouraging thought. Thus we now have the paradoxical situation
in which the debased monster suddenly has been elevated to Nice Guy, putting
man into the role of the evil monster, or at least into the role of the obtuse
country hick faced with the splendid Galactic Empire that runs the Galaxy and
treats man like some amusing pet animal. The men who think they are just
different are quickly put straight again, as in this example from a short story
by William Term, Betelgeuse
Bridge (1951):
"Not
only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it'll be very important in what
you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a
hurry are like a crowd of Caribbean Indians trying to analyze the rifle and
compass from what they know of spears and windstorms. These creatures belong to
a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we're a bunch of
backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that's about to be opened
for exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can't measure
up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn
fast." (49)
"Whew! 1492, repeat performance!"
comments Dick, and not entirely without reason. It turns out, however, that the
snail-like aliens actually are decadent and quite stupid, even if they manage
to swindle Earth out of every ounce of fissionable material. They are "the
profligate, inadequate and sneak-thief heirs of what was once a soaring
race." And soon enough man steps in to take up his rightful place as the
leader of the Galaxy. Hurray.
Tenn's
story can be seen as a sort of intermediate link between the time-honored
monster philosophy and the attitude which seems to be gaining strength in sf
today, that of considering man as one of many races, with his own unique
possibilities, neither animal nor superman, just one thinking being among
others. James White's Hospital
Station is,
I think, a splendid example of this attitude, fight-years removed from the
patronizing views implicit in, e.g. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles wherein the Martians are depicted as some
land of degenerate creatures, unable to keep their civilization going when the
Terran immigrants come; or the kill-and-kill attitude of novels like Robert A.
Heinlein's Starship
Troopers in
which the only good extraterrestrial is a dead extraterrestrial and
cold-blooded murder is the word of the day.
Today we even have a fair number of sf
stories bordering on self-contempt in their attitude toward man vs. extraterrestrials,
e.g. The Genocides (1965) by Thomas M. Disch, in which malignant
extraterrestrials have taken over Earth, farming it for their own purposes,
with man living as vermin in the fields, hiding from his new masters; or like
William Tenn's highly intelligent novel Of Men and Monsters (1968), wherein mankind is reduced to the role of rats living in the
walls of the alien colonizer's houses. This is often no more than a reversing
of the coin of yore, but it is still a step forward.
At the moment, science fiction seems to be in
a somewhat
monster-free period, concentrating more on man's own
achievements than confrontation with more or less malignant extraterrestrial
BEM's. However, the monsters come and go, and we will probably have them back
again before long. The latest real monster period occurred in 1958, when the
U.S. sf expert Forrest J. Ackerman started the horror magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland with gory stills from Hollywood's extensive monster repertory
accompanied by texts dripping with Ackermanian irony. The first issue sold
300,000 copies, and some sf magazines fought with hands and claws and tentacles
to be first to the smorgasbord. First of them all was W. W. Scott, editor of
the now defunct sf magazine Super-Science Fiction, who immediately changed the policy of his magazine, telling his writers
that monsters now was the word of the day and start writing about them, please.
(50)
The
monster craze soon faded away, leaving the BEM's where they belonged, as one
useful tool of sf among others. Famous Monsters is
still being published, larger and sicker than before, but this magazine, as
well as its imitators, is predominantly aimed at kids of eight to twelve years
old. The letter column of Famous Monsters, with its photos of horribly dressed-up boys, is pathetic and unpleasant.
Working miniature guillotines can be bought by postal order, and
monster-minded kids are encouraged to join the magazine's club, chairman of
which, according to the illustrations, is a putrid corpse with an unpleasant
leer. Famous Monsters has very little to do with science fiction,
but it seems to be popular. As distinguished from science fiction, which
usually holds very humanitarian views toward alien creatures, this type of
monster magazine consistently puts a sign of equality between physical and
mental deformities. Wherever this might lead, it will obviously not be toward a
greater understanding of differendy shaped creatures, human or non-human.
8. THE MASS-CULTURE STRIKES
I might have given the impression that science fiction is strictly reserved
for the printed word. It is not. Superman has
wandered about in space and future since 1938, in company with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and
the Fantastic Four and some fourteen thousand other curious
creations of the comic strip. The green monsters and a good assortment of
ghouls, etc. make life merrier for their young readers, and the film industry
is beyond all description. In volume, the printed word only occupies a small
portion of the veritable torrent of more or less probable, intelligent or
enjoyable science fiction that can be found today. Even the largest sf
magazines seldom manage to climb over 100,000 copies in circulation; in fact,
they are more likely to stay around 50,000. Even the sf pocketbooks, which are
printed in first editions anywhere from 40,000 to 150,000 copies, seem small in
comparison to the circulation of the comics. This is, of course, not unique for
science fiction; every literary field.finds itself deluged under the mass of
comics and TV. That comics, TV shows and films almost always are crude to the
point of being idiotic, is part of the mass culture, and is surely not science
fiction's fault. It has given the genre an undeservedly bad reputation in
certain circles, though.
To start with the comics, the most well-known
science fiction comic strip was manufactured by a U.S. artist who had learned
the trade by doing Blondie
and similar ones. The
artist was Alex Raymond, known for his Secret Agent X-9 and Rip Kirby strips,
and the sf strip was, of course, Flash Gordon, "the
Prince Valiant of outer space" as an enthusiastic chronicler has put it.
The first installment of the adventures of this broad-shouldered and very Aryan
hero
among green monsters, beautiful space women and
hateful fiends with clearly Asiatic countenances, was published on January 7,
1934. Since then he has been giving his money's worth in magazines and
newspapers around the world, in the company of his slightiy doting fiancee Dale
Arden and the mad scientist Dr. Zarkov. Flash
Gordon usually occupies himself fighting with an extraterrestrial (but very human)
Emperor called Ming, a baddie of no mean resources, who must be even more
feeble-minded than Flash, because he always is outwitted in the end.
During
the years that Alex Raymond drew Flash Gordon, its
greatest asset was its crisp and clean style and its skillful use of shadow,
but it has since become quite simpler. Raymond died in 1956 in a car accident,
but the strip had been taken over already in 1951 by one Dan Barry. Barry's
attitude toward his job doesn't differ much from any sf writer's. "The
scientist's job," he says, "is to get men into space and on the
planets. Mine is to presume he is already there and to carry on with the uses
and misuses of the accomplishments." (51) Unfortunately, very little of
these good intentions can be found in the strip.
Those
readers who were young at the time probably remember the Flash Gordon radio
series, the novels (at least six of them, to my knowledge), the pop-up books,
the coloring books and the last but not least the curious films featuring
Buster Crabbe, who played Tarzan before he dropped the loincloth in favor of
Flash Gordon's trusty blaster. These films now have gone on to camp fame, being
featured in museums and moon-ins. And as for the comic strip, those who want to
recapture the nostalgic .feelings can get the old Flash Gordon adventures in
book form from the Nostalgia Press at $12 a copy. The same publisher has also,
by the way, brought out the old Buck Rogers strips
at $12.50. Take your pick.
Flash Gordon is still going strong, with an estimated
readership of sixty million persons. The same does not apply to Buck Rogers, however. He first appeared in a novelette by
the U.S. sf writer Philip Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D., in the August, 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. The story dealt with the adventures of Anthony Rogers, an engineer who
is overcome by some kind of radioactive gas in an abandoned coal mine in
Pennsylvania, and subsequently sleeps into a future five hundred years hence,
where world domination is in the hands of Mongolians, and the center of world
power lies in inland China, with the inhabitants of the U.S.A. one of the few
people unsubdued. These rulers of Earth are called the Han Airlords, and
are—for a North American—a singularly obnoxious Oriental race that actually
comes from outer space (shades of the BEM again). In Armageddon 2419 A.D. and its sequel The Airlords of Han (1929, Anthony Rogers leads the resistance
against the invaders, much in the same way as the American Indians fought
against the European settlers, only with the significant difference that in
this case the natives win.
These
novelettes, brought together and published in one volume by Ace Books, are
justly considered classics of science fiction, not due to their purely literary
merits—they are indeed very few—but because of the grand Sense-of-Wonder that
pervades them. The openly racist attitude can easily be overlooked (it is the
old Yellow Peril all over again, as infantile as ever before or after), and
what we have is actually an sf story of merit, featuring a number of interesting
scientific innovations that, in one form or another, actually are among us
today: like the bazooka, the jet plane, the walkie-talkie. It is still
readable, which is more than can be said about most pulp fiction of that time.
The
idea was picked up by John F. Dille, president of the National Newspaper
Syndicate, who hired Philip Now-lan to write the continuity of a comic strip
based upon these novelettes. Dick Calkins, a cartoonist on his staff, was
assigned to draw the strip, and it appeared under the somewhat changed name of
Buck Rogers 2429 A.D. in 1929. Each year the strip's title was
updated by one to keep up the five hundred years' difference, until finally the
name was stabilized as Buck
Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century. During the first two years, the strip followed the original novelette
quite closely, but with time new characters and new adventures were introduced
until it bore virtually no resemblance to the original work. When Sputnik I went up in 1957, it provided a temporary circulation boost for Buck, but
eventually the strip died. During the last ten years or so Buck Rogers had changed so much that it held no resemblance
at. all to the original strip; in fact, it was little
more than a poor copy of Flash Gordon. Yet Buck Rogers during the first twenty years was a highly
original sf comic strip, possibly the best of all the space strips of the time.
During the thirties, Buck
Rogers also
appeared as a highly successful radio series, sponsored by Cocomalt and written
and produced by Jack Johnstone, who also wrote and produced the Superman radio shows. This was ages ago, though, and Buck Rogers now occupies that special niche of sf
reserved for particularly cherished objects of childhood nostalgia. Buck's
creators are now dead as well.
What
made Buck Rogers unique among science fiction comic strips,
and in fact makes it readable to this day, was its sense of humor. Buck himself
appeared as a lanky youth, devoid of the most obnoxious heroic traits, who
wandered about in a highly improbable interstellar space in the company of the
beautiful Wilma, old Dr. Huer (Hehl Hehl) and a broad-shouldered hero,
encountering all kinds of curious civilizations and grave perils, including
(during W.W. II) some remarkably malignant Mongolian aliens, and an evil robot
emperor who rebuilt the whole company to robots.
The
fantasy was wild unto the borders of insanity and close on the heels of our
heroes, the local villains Killer Kane and his beautiful companion Ardala
followed. Killer Kane differed favorably from the traditional comic strip
baddies, though. He was a pathetic, henpecked boob, who was constantly pushed
around by Ardala, who had all the brains of the outfit. One could always count
on Killer Kane to make an ass of himself, either through sheer clumsiness or
chicken-heartedness (he could not stand the sight of blood). The unhappy
villain was time and again caught and brought to the Rehabilitation Center of
the Solar System, but this kind of treatment always seemed to fail miserably
where Kane was concerned, and he was always willing for a new try and a new
failure. The snip, in fact, seldom seemed to take itself seriously, and this
quality, together with its obvious entertainment value, made it into something
rather special in the comic strip department of science fiction.
The
greatest of all comic strip heroes, both inside and outside of science fiction,
however, is the mighty Superman,
who has delighted mankind
with the sight of his gaudy underwear since 1938. In that year, two
enthusiastic sf fans named Joseph Shuster and Jerry Siegal after five years of
hard efforts succeeded in syndicating the super-strong overman. Superman broke like a bombshell on the comic market,
and put its imprint on the whole field. Tightly-dressed and cloaked supermen
appeared immediately from every conceivable nook and cranny, and National
Periodical Publications, which owned the hero, had to work overtime suing the
plagiarists. One of the most well-known imitators, Captain Marvel, is interesting as one of the super-stars of
the time, Eando Binder, used to write the bold captain's merry
adventures—alternating with Mickey Spillane.
Superman
quickly became the declared hero of all kids, and during World War II, he also
was distributed to the fighting troops, who probably needed all the
encouragement they could get. Superman magazine
rose to a circulation of 1,400,000 copies, and the Superman films, now decidedly more camp than
suspenseful, spewed forth, together with radio shows ("Faster than a
speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings
in a single bound! Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's . . .
SUPERMAN!"). The Man of Steel became the foremost figure in U.S.
mythology. He is still there.
The
story of Superman's origin on the planet Krypton, how the planet was threatened
with disaster and how he was put into a small rocket and sent away to Earth
seconds before the whole planet exploded, growing up on Earth and assuming a
false identity as newspaperman Clark Kent, spending most of his time doing
various good deeds in the most complicated way possible, has been told so many
times in the strip that I don't have to go into any greater detail. It should be
noted, though, that the Man of Steel has grown increasingly mightier during the
years, and whereas he in the old days grunted and sweated considerably as he
lifted a small house or drained a lake, he can now be found moving whole
cities, destroying small planets with his fists ("WHAMMI") and
jumping through time without even getting slightly flushed by the effort.
He
is still extremely vulnerable to the super-radioactive element Kryptonite,
though, a fact that is being used again and again and again as an excuse to get
a new adventure rolling. He can always get help from his old friends Batman and
Robin, though. And occasionally his feeble-minded friends and well-wishers, the
reporters Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson of The Daily Planet, have to help him out. As a reward for long and faithful service, Lois
Lane finally was granted connubial bliss with her hero Superman in 1969, but apparently the deal fell
through; they were divorced after one day. I guess a superman is more fun to
admire at a distance than to live with. This short union never produced any
offspring, which is a pity in a way. We would have got a super-superman with
Lois Lane's brains and Superman's build. On the other hand it could—ghastly thought—have turned out the other way.
The
science fiction slant of Superman has
always been strong, and this not without a cause. The creators of the figure
were enthusiastic sf fans, and in sf fandom they are, in fact, known more for
the fact that they did publish the first sf fan magazine, "fanzine."
It was natural that they stayed within the sf field with Superman as well. They were, however, not permitted to
go on working with their figure for long. Joseph Shuster drew the daily strip
up to
1947, after
which he was eased out, and then did strips
for Action Comics,
Superman, Worlds Fair Comics and
All Star Comics alternating with ten other artists up to
1948. After that, both the creators were kicked
out.
That
the sf motif nevertheless stayed strong was due to the editor who took over Superman and its many sister magazines after the
war—Mort Weisinger, once a noted science fiction fan. With the aid of
storywriters like Edmond Hamilton, Eando Binder and Jerry Siegal, he filled the
Superman
magazines to the gills with everything from time travels to parallel worlds,
and became in practice the editor of the biggest sf magazine that ever existed.
The magazines were, to be sure, aimed at a rather low age level, but the
boundless imagination should have influenced these readers to not a mean
degree.
Entertaining
Comics' science fiction magazines Weird Science and Weird Fantasy belong rightly among the real science fiction
magazines, as they mainly published science fiction and fantasy stories in
comic strip form. These comic magazines were published from 1950 to 1956, in
the end as one magazine under the name Weird Science-Fantasy, using stories by Ray Bradbury and other sf writers of the time, drawn by
artists like Al Williamson and Wallace Wood. They were of a remarkably high
quality, compared to other comic magazines, and are now real collector's items.
These magazines are, in fact, the only ones which ever have tried to inject
some quality, sf-wise, in the comic field in the U.S.A. It is perhaps
significant that they did not last long.
Among
the new sf comics that now are deluging the market, Marvel Comic's curious
super-heroes are the most interesting. The Amazing Spider-Man, The Iron Man, Fantastic Four,
The Mighty Thor, The X-Men and all their innumerable friends, well-wishers and foes, which in their
utter lack of any pretense of credibility and logic are something unique in
the comic industry. The man behind all these bizarre creations is one Stanley
Lieber, commonly known as Stan Lee, who now spends much time addressing
university audiences. In these circles, Marvel Comics is, according to a
college student quoted in Esquire, considered
as "the twentieth-century mythology and (Stan Lee) as this generation's
Homer."
Stan
Lee himself sees his grotesque fantasies as fulfilling the same function that
myths, legends, tales of romance and fairy stories did for earlier generations.
His heroes are supermen and superwomen in the worst meaning of the word, but
they still have very human weaknesses and faults.
The Mighty Thor is a very American variation that Snorre
Sturlasson
probably would have much trouble recognizing, despite the headgear and the
constantly battle-ready Mjol-ner. Actually, this Thor is a crippled doctor
whose nurse despises him but is in love with his broad-shouldered alter ego. The Amazing Spider-Man is privately an insecure, guilt-ridden
teenager who has no luck with girls and catches a cold every time he goes out
in his hero tights. The majority of the members of the Fantastic Four range from feeblemindedness to outright
imbecility. In all, Marvel Comics' heroes are highly original and, in their
best moments, quite refreshing.
Lately
the science fiction comics have been given a new slant with the introduction of
the Frenchman Jean-Claude Forest's sexually outstanding heroine Barbarella, renowned through Roger Vadim's film with Jane
Fonda in the role as the sex machine of the future. Barbarella first appeared in 1962 in the French magazine
V, and can now be bought in book form. Barbarella is
interesting especially from a pornographic point of view. She cohabits with
robots, fallen angels and green monsters without discrimination, and is in
this way an interesting departure from the usual sexless sf comic. Nowadays,
Barbarella is quite pass6, and her place has been taken over by even more
unbiased space women with constantly battle-ready bodies, e.g. the U.S. sadomasochistic
Phoebe Zeit-Geist, the French Jodelle and the Italian Satanik.
In the nice, carefree days of yore, the
heroine was abducted by the monsters; today she hunts them up and rapes them.
Aside
from the comics, the unflagging search for the lowest common denominator in
science fiction entertainment has been the time-honored privilege of the TV
industry which, in this respect, has scored beautiful hits in bad judgment and
extraordinary low quality. The TV version of science fiction only seldom
manages to reach beyond the crudest Space Opera, and it is significant that the
most popular U.S. TV series, Star Trek, which
has created a fandom all its own, stubbornly held to the standards current in
the pulp magazines of the thirties. This despite the fact that the
writers included Big Names of science fiction like
Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison. One of the programs, The Menagerie, even won a Hugo Award, a constant source of
wonder to me.
"Star
Trek was a gourmet's dream
to a land full of starving science fiction fans," an enthusiastic fan
recently wrote in a fanzine (52). "Originally, a virgin thought in the
mind of its creator, Gene Roddenberry, this personification of class took root
in the unlikeliest of fields—network television." And, fired by mounting
enthusiasm, the writer went on to say that, "Indeed, if Shakespeare had
been alive today he might very well have written for Star Trek—the thinking man's Buck Rogers."
This
description is perhaps more significant of the enthusiasm shown by Star Trek's superfans than for the actual qualities of
the series. Having had the dubious pleasure of seeing a fair number of the Star Trek programs in the line of duty, as a producer
at Swedish TV (I did not buy the series), I can only say that if Shakespeare
were alive and kicking today, he just might find some more rewarding field to
work in.
This
sf series, brought out by NBC, has, however, given birth to an unparalleled
following, in the wake of which comes the usual offers of icons and holy
objects—at a price. For $2.00 you can get a set of three "Genuine space
ship insignia, exactly as seen on TV, worn by the crew of the Enterprise on their uniforms!!!" $1.00 brings you
eight frames from the film discarded in the film company's cutting-room,
featuring "climactic moments of crisis, suspense & decision" or
"monsters & alien beings" or a host of other equally interesting
things. There are insignia stickers, two-color water-mount decals, Star Trek letterheads, Star Trek memo pads, "official biographies"
of the various characters of the series (" 'Fascinating . . .' says Mr.
Spock"), Flight Deck Certificates (Standard and Deluxe), color postcards,
bumper stickers and an "Official Newsletter," all of which can be
obtained for a healthy price. If you are a superfan you can even buy all the
scripts for the first Star
Trek season—for
$150.00
There is a whole industry catering to the needs of the
fans.
It
appears that Star
Trek isn't grabbing
European fans in the same way as the U.S. ones; nevertheless, Mr. Spock
recently managed to be voted England's No. 2 TV personality, with Jim Kirk of
the same series as No. 5. In Germany, an earlier TV series similar to Star Trek, the Space Patrol, proved
to be a success, but not such a great one as its U.S. counterpart.
TV
seems to have taken a liking to Space Opera. We have Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, The Invaders and a host of other quite similar creations. A look in TV Times shows that during a typical summer week (June
26 to July 4, 1969) the ten big TV networks showed not less than sixty-five
science fiction programs, about half of them feature films of the usual horror
type, with the rest Space Opera serials like Star Trek, Thunderbirds and the like. In Japan, a country almost more
Americanized than the U.S.A., there is an abundance of local Space Opera
super-heroes, including the grinning and samurai-swinging Kyaputen Uru-tora (Captain Ultra), who leads the Space Patrol
toward new victories aided by his trusty pals Joe and Hack. Another of the
popular Japanese Space Opera series, Reinbo Sentai Robin,' features the "Rainbow Space Association," composed of Captain
Robin; Professor, the brain of the outfit; Wolf, b crack shot; Lily, a robot nurse; Benkei, a
super-strong robot; Pegasus, a ridable robot that can operate on land, in the
sky and undersea; and Bell, who has ears three thousand times more sensitive
than any human being. None of these series are particularly good—to say the
very least.
British
TV shows a fair amount of science fiction, ranging from Star Trek and the home-manufactured Doomsday Watch and Dr. Who to
more serious series like The Prisoner and Out of the Unknown, the latter featuring dramatizations of
stories by John Brunner, Robert Sheckley, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov et al. This particular sf series could perhaps best
be compared with the U.S. Twilight Zone, whose
producer, Rod Serling, has been awarded the coveted Hugo Award twice for his
outstanding TV works.
The real villain is, however, the movie
industry, with its flood of monsters and broad-shouldered space heroes. It has
done more to give the genre a bad reputation than all the literary critics in
the world. Good science fiction films have been done, to be sure, but the great
number of sf films are nothing but monster operas of
the worst possible kind, slapped together for the benefit of malignant kids.
The
first feature films ever made were actually science fiction—I am thinking of
films like George Melies' A Trip to the Moon (1902) and An Impossible Voyage (1904), both based on stories by Melies' fellow-countryman Jules Verne.
George Melies, owner of the Théâtre
Robert-Houdin in Paris, was
a popular magician and specialist in electromechanical marvels. He saw the
movie as an entirely new media in which he could achieve effects never before
conceived. Buying a camera from the father of French movies, Louis Lumière, Melies set about discovering the possibilities of this new media, and
within a few years he had invented almost the entire repertory of the trick
film as it is now, from double exposure to stop motion, fades, dissolves and
animation. Until the war ended his career as a producer in 1914, he made a
great number of "transformations, tricks, fairy tales, apotheoses,
artistic and fantastic scenes, comic subjects, war pictures, fantasies and
illusions." He usually appeared himself in these films, together with
girls from the Folies
Bergère.
Melies' films were pure fantasy, absurd
dramas played out in a never-never land of imagination where everything could
happen and invariably did. He was, in fact, a product of and the foremost
filmatic example of the belief in the unlimited possibilities that the new
time promised—the old magic coupled with the science of the new time to form a
universe of new worlds. World War I not only put an end to Melies' own
excursions into these worlds of unbridled happy imagination, it was also the
source of the neo-roman-ticist "Gothic" horror film that, in a manner
reminiscent of the written science fiction, has created the modem science
fiction film.
To make a long and-rather
complicated story very short, it began in a way with Robert Wiene's classical
expressionist film Das
Kabinett von Doktor Caligari
(1919). Originally it was to have been directed by
Fritz Lang, and, telling the story of Doctor Caligari's use of a sleepwalker to
commit nocturnal atrocities, gives a horrifying insight into the German psyche:
the wish to create Führers
whom one could follow
blindly. It is a magnificent piece of nightmarish absurdity, using horror
elements of "inner space," if you like, strengthening the effect by
the ingenious use of unrealistic decor.
The
theme of man creating his own masters from within was again brought forth in
Paul Wegener's Der Golem, Wie er in der
Welt Kam (1920), based on Gustav Mey-rink's novel, which in turn was based on the old Jewish legend of
the homunculus, the artificially created man. The Golem turned against his
creator, destroying him, as did man's own subconscious
in John S. Robertson's Dr. Jekytt and Mr. Hyde, based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel.
The
scars left by W.W. I were clearly to be seen in the German films
of the time, like W. F. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, in which an inhuman monster seeks world
domination with the aid of volitionless victims; and particularly in Fritz
Lang's classic film, Dr.
Mabuse der Spieler (1922) and its sequel The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933).
Dr. Mabuse is in many
respects another Caligari, who seeks power through terror, the creation of fear
and anarchy from which he will emerge as the undisputed leader.
It has been said that these two films were
aimed at the Nazis, but this is a matter of considerable doubt. Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the scripts for his films, was an avowed Nazi and
a member of the Nazi Party, and Lang himself was on the most cordial terms with
the ruling Nazi elite. Dr.
Mabuse der Spieler was actually an attack on the destroyed
Communist Party. As for its sequel, Goebbels
suppressed it (at the same
time offering Lang the job as head of the German film industry) and Lang fled
to the u.S.A. to make, among other films, the classic Fury (1936).
In many respects this is an
antithesis to his earlier films, in which an innocent man is made the victim of
credulity, ignorance and hate which grows into a lynching. He had, to be sure,
already looked at this side of the coin in M (1932), in which a sexually
perverted man, ridden by fear for himself yet unable
to break himself free, is hunted down by police and gangsters alike. Perhaps M and Fury
are portraits of the
society envisaged by Lang as the result of Dr. Mabuse's dreams, had they become
reality.
The
themes of the German horror film were reflected in the U.S.A. by films like
James Whale's Frankenstein
(1931) and, more notably,
by Tod Browning's Freaks
(1932), probably the most
chilling horror film ever made, featuring not the usual cosmetic Hollywood
monsters but real human beings, malformed and mutilated, who played the
highlights of a traveling freak show. These "monsters" were portrayed
as human beings, despite their appalling appearances, and the film was made
with a sensitivity, almost tenderness, that lifts it
high above the crude monster operas of the time. It should be noted that the
film immediately was suppressed by the film company and subsequently banned in
most countries until the mid-sixties. Werewolves and green monsters are one
thing, apparendy; the real thing must never be shown.
E.
B. Shoedsack's King
Kong (1933) actually
conveyed glimpses of something like an understanding of this inhuman creature
in its theme of "Beast betrayed by Beauty," the monster as a victim
of circumstance in about the same way as an earlier Frankenstein's monster had
been, but this is on the surface only. Underneath, it is Monster vs. Human,
nothing more. In the gloomy years of the Depression, we still had Dr. Mabuse
around, though larger and with considerably more hair on his chest. And with The Werewolf of London (1935) we have the monster craze going full
blast.
Aside from a few optimistic films like
Alexander Korda's and H. G. Wells's Things to Come (1936),
which actually offered a glimpse of hope to humanity, the science fiction film
seemed to be obsessed by the destruction envisaged by the German film of the
twenties. It deluged the market with monsters of the most curious kind and
offered futures with no future at all, a trend that is as strong today with
films like Joseph Losey's The Damned (1961)
Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville
(1965) and Francois
Truffaut's Fahrenheit
451. The Japanese film
directors like Inoshiro Honda devoted much of their efforts after W.W. II to
films depicting the horrors of the atomic war, in the guise of spectacular monster
films, Rhodan,
Godzilla, et al.
Lately,
there has been an interesting departure from the gloomy predictions, with films
like Roman Polanski's delightful Dance of Vampires (1967), an elegant and witty parody on Hollywood monster films; and
Stanley Kubrik's and Arthur C. Clarke's magnificent 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), "the first ten-million-dollar
religious film," to quote Arthur C. Clarke. 2001 is not the only sf film to use hard technology as the basis for
metaphysical speculation, but it is surely orie of the very few to even try to
be intelligent and mature. Mostly, the sf films are a sorry lot, content with
using the symbols of the German horror films of the twenties without the
meaning, creating horror for its own sake, conveying nothing, saying nothing,
meaning nothing. We have the Monster, the Hero, the
Heroine. Apart from that, and a lot of gore, there is nothing to be found. No
meaning, no wit, no intelligence, no nothing.
American
science fiction films are, with very few exceptions, synonymous with Monsters.
The slimier, the better. The cinema-goer lives happily
in a curious world of vampires, zombies, werewolves, mutated giant insects,
robots, androids and assorted extraterrestrials. We have masterpieces like Attack of the Giant Leeches, Earth vs. the
Giant Spider, Zombies of the Stratosphere, The
Creature With the Atom Brain and so on and so on ad nauseam. The
film industry still revels happily in the over-simplified world that written
science fiction was grateful to leave thirty years ago, and the poor cinema-goer
thinks that this is the way it should be. This is decidedly not the way it
should be, but try to explain that to a film producer.
The horror film (and science fiction is
equivalent to horror in ninety percent of the films), since the thirties, has been
based on certain cliches that seem changeless. The Mad Scientist (a kind of
Americanized Mabuse or Caligari without the brains) is still running around
in his foggy castle—or, if he is modern, in a chrome-sluning laboratory with
lots of gadgetry, somewhere in the Mojave Desert-constantly attended by his
ugly creations and the hunchbacked assistant, traditionally named Fritz, Karl
or Ygor. (These creatures usually speak broken German; a nice linguistic
touch.) This assistant, who like his mad master is a pronounced sadist, usually
dedicates his spare hours on moonlit stormy nights to whipping the Heroine, a
shapely young woman with blonde hair and cow eyes. When no heroine is at hand,
he hunts her up, alleging that he carries tidings from her lover (the Hero) or
her father, a nice old man who usually experiments with the Forbidden Secrets
of Nature and expires before the movie ends. The Heroine then sheds a couple of
glycerin tears over his mangled body, but soon finds solace in the hairy arms
of the Hero. Like the Heroine, the Hero is as close to being a moron as you can
get without being locked up, and it is a constant source of wonder to me that
they manage to stay alive for even a couple of minutes.
The Mad Scientist and the Monster are
half-brothers, and go privately under the name of Boris Karloff. Sometimes,
however, he is portrayed as a slightly depraved and depressed nobleman
harboring Dark Secrets in the best Gothic Romance and Eugene Sue manner, in
which case he calls himself Vincent Price. If he becomes a monster as a teenager
(an advanced puberty problem, unknown at the time of Freud) he can be found
singing in the Swedish Folk-parks during the summer, using his spare time being
a cowboy star, name of Michael Landon. The scientists
dispute which of these is the most horrid one.
Close
on the heels of the Monster comes the film about the Son of the Monster. This
son is a disreputable creature with a number of atrocities and starving film
producers on his conscience. Probably he was created on a dark night, while the
werewolf Moon shone over the cozy crypt, and Dracula played the violin in the
churchyard. The unhappy mother keeps herself out of sight, as well she might.
Perhaps she is at work making another son, because this one won't last more
than a couple of hours, at the most.
When
at last the whole family has done its duty, from sisters, cousins, nephews,
grandsons and little Orphan Annie, the situation becomes so desperate that
Abbott and Costello end the epic with The Monster Meets Abbott and Costello, whereupon everyone concerned gratefully
forgets about the whole thing. The Monster changes tights and starts a new
career as The
Monster From the Black Lagoon, and there we are again.
Lately
we have seen significant changes in the monster film, due to the scientific
miracles of our time. Thus the Monster more and more often comes to Earth in
cute little flying saucers, calling himself Mxtrwpqtrl. The more intelligent
extraterrestrials dress themselves up as humans, calling themselves Fritz, Karl
or Ygor, whereupon they immediately wheedle the scantily-dressed Heroine out to
the desert, maintaining that Love or something is involved. The Heroine
willingly follows the handsome Monster, who, however, harbors evil plans and
only wants to use her to Conquer the World. The
Heroine gets mad, and is saved by her boyfriend who is a scientist and almost
unbearably nice. After some clumsy heroics, during which the Monster almost
laughs himself to death, letting himself be killed without further ado, the
Hero blasts eveiything to pieces and escapes with his Heroine toward the
sunrise while the studio orchestra plays like mad in the background.
Sometimes
the Hero is aided by a Nature-catastrophe. He gets very moved by this, and
utters some wise comments about the Fugitiveness of All Evil and the Results of
Tampering With Nature. Whereupon he smiles
melancholically with his blinding white teeth and marries the Heroine.
Sometimes
the Hero comes to the Monsters. This is an entirely new move in the genre, and
the film producers are rightly proud of themselves. The only difference is,
actually, that here we have the Hero going on like a maniac on the Monsters'
homeground, not the other way around, which makes a fantastic difference. An
extraterrestrial who visits
Earth
is always a Monster, and should be treated as such. A Hero who comes to another
planet with his faithful Heroine at his heels is on the other hand worth both
admiration and obeisant reception, and if he doesn't get this, it is bad for
the extraterrestrials. Why, the Hero says, should I waste my breath on nice
words when an atomic bomb gives the same result and more definitely?
In
these days of space race and cold war, the Hero sometimes lands on the distant
planet only to find that another ship has beaten him. Its crew members have
clearly Asian features and go by names like Fritzky, Karlsky and Ygorsky. They
are both wily and spiritually hunchbacked, and can't even play baseball. They
are also in agreement with the monstrous inhabitants of the planet.
Civilization is obviously in grave danger, and the situation is saved only when
the nice Heroine with a regretful giggle presses the atomic blaster into
Ygorsky's back and (by mistake) presses the trigger. Thereafter she collapses
into the Hero's arms and is carried back to the ship which thunders away
through space seconds before the planet explodes with a very loud, bang that
almost drowns out the string-band.
Cabbage-worms,
grasshoppers, spiders, etc. are also very popular in these films. They are then
mutations, and considerably larger than the tiny
creatures that in summertime skid around inside the reader's shirt. Often they
have mutated with the aid of radioactive radiation, but they are as often the
result of the Heroine's father's horrible experiments in the desert. This is
very scientific, and gives the film producer unsought opportunities to babble
about science and technology and E=mc3 and other things that
neither he nor the moviegoers know a thing about.
The
father usually dies early in the film, and the experiments are continued by
his hunchbacked assistant by name of Fritz, Karl or Ygor, who is a bad 'un with
evil plans vis-a-vis the world. The overgrown insects now give the public their
money's worth in destroyed cities, massacred people, a ruined Empire State
Building, etc., whereupon the Hero comes charging in, looking for his beloved,
the Heroine, who has been abducted by the perverted assistant.
The
Hero mobilizes some bald professors and the U.S. Army, and then the story is about
ended.
When
the last explosion has died out, the Hero and the Heroine stand amid the
smoking remains of the Monster and the hunchbacked assistant, spreading pieces
of pungent wisdom around, accompanied by the string-band. This unexpected
happy ending makes the moviegoer mad with joy, and verifies once again cinema's
undisputed value as the giver of good, wholesome and clean entertainment. As
the advertisements so truthfully say: Go to the movies—and give your life a new
meaning]
9. THE MAGAZINES
Talking to a hardened old-time sf buff about
the old pulp magazines is likely to induce a near-religious misting around the
eyes as the great names are invoked—E. E. "Doc" Smith, Edmond
Hamilton, Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, Stanley G. Weinbaum and others of
the "golden years" of Amazing Stories, Astounding, Startling Stories, Weird Tales, Thrilling
Wonder Stories, et al. Often,
to the accompaniment of nostalgic sighs, the sacred tablets are hauled out:
the cherished magazines printed on coarse, cheap yellowed paper with its
characteristic smell; the stock illustrations depicting as many hackish
science-fictional situations as you could care for; the old stories; the letter
columns with all the Big Names, then only loudmouthed cubs; the illustrations
by Finlay; the gaudy covers by Paul, Schneeman, Wesso, Bergey and Brown. There
is nothing like them, and the magic of these names are equal to those of New
Orleans and Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Johnny Dodds for an old-timer
jazz lover. Indeed pulp age sf is as different from present-day science fiction
as is the old New Orleans jazz from John Coltrane or the subde lyrics of the
Beatles. "True, we now have the paperbacks, and a great thing they are,
too," writes Alva Rogers in a study of the pulp years of Astounding SF, "but they are not the same as the pulps,
nor will they ever be." (53)
For
an outsider, these magazines and the writers of the time must seem rather
crude, compared with the slick and literary magazines of today, presenting
writers handling the media with an increasing skill that was unheard-of thirty
or forty years ago. Science fiction has indeed changed immensely since the
pulp era, as has all literature, and I think it would only be fair to use a
somewhat different yardstick
for these admittedly crude magazines of the
past, than for those published today. They are like vintage cars, which were
tops in their field once-upon-a-time and still are cherished by the
aficionados even though they compare very unfavorably with the four-wheeled
dinosaurs of today. They show their age, but they were nevertheless
instrumental in starting the science fiction field as we know it today,
creating to a large degree not only its readership but its authors as well,
and, of course, guiding the genre's development.
Without
the science fiction pulps, we would now have no organized sf fandom, no sf
conventions, no fan magazines and pretty few sf writers. i doubt if there would be much American science fiction at all. For the
hard-core science fiction magazines, i.e. those wholly devoted to science
fiction, first appeared in the U.S.A., with the result that the U.S.A. is the
country where most science fiction is written and published now. The British
magazines of the turn of the century, like the Strand Magazine and others which habitually published science
fiction, were as their European counterparts
mainstream magazines with a more or less pronounced sf slant.
The beginning came around W.W. i, when the new science showed its most ugly face,
and the grandiose dreams of the affluent - future became more realistic.
Popular scientific magazines spewed forth, from the
venerable French La
Science et la Vie with
its many editions in various countries, to Hugo Gernsback's The Electrical Experimenter, Science and
Invention, Radio News, Modern Electrics and so forth. Many of these magazines speculated in future scientific
developments. La
Science et la Vie devoted much of its space to articles about
communications with the Martians and descriptions of the Moon voyages to come.
Many of its covers could actually have been taken from any self-respecting
science fiction magazine of a later date.
Hugo
Gernsback's magazine Modern
Electrics was
enlivened with science fiction serials between the scientific articles, from Ralph 124C41 + to Jacque Morgan's The Scientific Adventures of Mr. Fosdick, the latter appearing as a serial until the
magazine folded in 1913. These magazines
did
not actually create modem science fiction—H. G. Wells, the first modem science
fiction writer had already been writing mature sf for many years, and he was
far from alone in Europe doing this—but whereas these authors primarily had
been writers concentrating upon the impact of change on man, the new American
magazines brought forth a new breed of science fiction writers. These were
technicians and scientists with a negligible literary talent, who developed
their theories of the probable scientific advances in literary form. True,
there had been scientists writing before, the most notable being the French
astronomer Camille Flammarion, but these scientists saw themselves primarily as
popularizers of science, and were careful not to speculate too freely. Also,
these speculations had been limited to books, and rather scholarly ones, at
that. The specialized magazines, dealing more or less exclusively with science
fiction, brought a great change to the whole field. Unorthodox U.S. scientists
like Hugo Gemsback and Ray Cummings, once the secretary of Edison, worked on in
the time-honored Utopian tradition. They wrote stories that were far less
subtle than the works of, for example, H. G. Wells, Francois Maurois or the
Swedish sf writer Claes Lundin, but were typical of the new type of Scientific
Romances that was to become something specially American. All this happened in
the U.S. sf magazines.
Besides
these magazines representatives also appeared for fantasy, in the footsteps of
the Gothic tale, e.g. the U.S. Thrill Book, which
started in 1919, and Weird
Tales, which
started in 1923 and for many years was the starting point for many of the great
names of the genre, from H. P. Love-craft to Henry Kuttner and Ray Bradbury.
At
this time, Sweden had a Hugo Gemsback of its own, by the name of Otto Witt, who
in practice was more Gemsback than Gemsback himself. His magazine Hugin, which appeared with its first regular issue
on April 7, 1916, can with good reasons be regarded as the first attempt to
make a science fiction magazine.' In the premiere issue of Hugin, Witt writes an introduction that is quite
revealing of his particular brand of Sense-of-Wonder:
You have seen the fairyland of science.
Everything in this country is a scientific romance. The forest is simple and
real, the paper is the fantasy. The waterfall is trivial and ordinary; the
turbine, the dynamo and the generator—they are
the poems . . . And (Hugin) knows well what types of language it must use to
make itself understood in our age. They are:
The
Scientific Fiction
The
Technical Causerie
The Idea-stimulating Sketch
The
Adventure Story and
The
Scientific Fairy Tale
Which seems well enough. Actually, Hugin was a rather sorry thing to behold, filled to' the gills with patriotism
and a "Sweden right or wrong" philosophy that was outdated even
then. Witt's propensity for obscure "scientific" innovations like the
"electrolite" (a kind of super-fertilizer working with "animal
electricity") that made him the target for considerable ridicule,
didn't make things better. Altogether eighty-five issues of Hugin were published up to the last issue at Christmas, 1919. The literary
quality was pitifully low, and Witt's sense of logic seemed to sleep around
the clock (he wrote every word in the magazine himself), but the honor of
having published the first sf magazine undoubtedly belongs to him.
The
first pure science fiction magazine of the type we are used to, i.e. a story
magazine in which writers other than the editor/publisher were allowed to
appear came in 1926, three years after Otto Witt's death. Publisher and editor
was, of course, Hugo Gernsback, and the magazine was Amazing Stories. Already in 1923, Gernsback had published a
"Scientifiction Issue" of his popular technical magazine Science and Invention (August, 1923), containing half a dozen
science fiction stories. Originally, he planned to publish his specialized sf
magazine under the title Scientifiction. An inquiry among the readers of Science and Invention in 1925 did not give any encouraging results, however, and when the sf
magazine finally materialized in April,
' Ions»
<5» stt tttdliv* atti wtUjp* g lmti iwtfalser och leaflet.
BDGM Sr eiï«îes popuKrvelwu ;
HupKg I detts cub alba boa be -
lydclse. f
ftBGBl B&onmttt gie&timi* f ■udeo I format 111» ned d.-tu och * opp till 45 safer J* Bottunct.
iVcmnncrafwlwnrir/ 5 Itf, pr al, for 2 i kvjrtil to. It 50.
Ldsnumutpeùt 30 Ere W jSravSgar ^ «B.rc4. •
Ic^mimKmi'rfri&yf<5r:S«nstaPr««
5 fcyrin.
RnUktSr ocfc «lt/tlMrH
OHO Kilt *
Hugin's standard
format.
1928,
it was under the more forceful title of Amazing Stories. The success of this particular name is best attested to by the
subsequent flood of sf magazines with rather similar tides, like Astonishing, Astounding, Stirring, Fantastic,
Startling and
so forth.
Jules
Veme and H. G. Wells appeared regularly for a time, until Gernsback had managed
to get together his own group of writers, mosdy scientists with good
imaginations but painfully lacking in literary talents. This was the beginning
of the "pulp era" of science fiction, the name derived from the
low-quality paper on which Amazing and
its contemporaries were printed. Under Gernsback's guidance the Space Opera
writers appeared, and the circulation rose rapidly to a top of 100,000 copies,
according to an editorial in the September, 1929 issue.
At
this time, however, Gernsback had already been separated from Amazing, which now was published by Teck Publications
under the editorship of T. O'Conor Sloane, another scientist, who carried on in
Gernsback's footsteps with wild interplanetary adventures until 1938, when the
editorial chair was taken over by a sf fan named Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer had
a weakness for mysticism, and the magazine promptly became filled with stories
set in Adantis and Mu and the subterranean worlds. The latter were usually
written by Richard S. Shaver, a welder who produced his stories, as facts,
alleging them to be transcriptions of voices from the underworld, etc. This
whole affair raised quite a furor in sf circles, but it is nevertheless
reported to have raised the circulation of Amazing to a peak. In 1950, Palmer left Amazing for flying saucer magazines like Oilier Worlds and Imagination.
In his place came Howard Browne, who
immediately came under attack from the sf fans but nevertheless raised the
circulation of the magazine to new peaks. After many ups and downs, Amazing is now little but a shadow of its former
self, filling much of its space with reprints from a happier time.
Long before this, a number of other sf
magazines had seen the light of day. Hugo Gernsback went bankrupt at the end of
1928, losing all his magazines, his radio station and his home. He was totally
ruined. He had kept the list of subscribers, though, and in the beginning of
1929 he sent out a circular letter to all his former subscribers, asking for
subscriptions to a new magazine resembling Science and Invention. He still had the reputation as the best
editor and publisher in the field, and he is said to have received 20,000
subscriptions of one dollar each. Gemsback was back in business again, and in
June and July the same year he started two new sf magazines, Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories.
The
competition hardened, especially after Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog
Science Fact—Science Fiction) appeared in January, 1930. Originally tided Astounding Stories of Super-Science, it was published by Clayton Magazines under
the editorship of Harry Bates until March, 1933; then in October, 1933, it was
bought by Street & Smith, Inc. which published it as Astounding Stories, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine. In December,
1937, the legendary sf fan, writer and editor John W. Campbell took over.
Probably no other editor has influenced the science fiction field as much as
John W. Campbell; he was, at any rate, the undisputed long of the "golden
years" of American science fiction. He was, and is, a man of many varied
interests and one can, in fact, follow the ups and downs of these interests in
the sf field as a whole.
From 1926 until the mid-thirties, Gemsback
was the undisputed master of the sf field, and Gemsback's god was the Machine.
During his reign science fiction was a matter of super science, magnificent scientific innovations that
played the leading part in the stories. Heroes and villains alike were reduced
to beauteously ringing voices that sang the praise of the Machine.
Campbell changed the genre by demanding
science fiction in which the effect of the innovation or the occurrence on man
was the principal thing. Scientific correctness came in second place. Campbell
put the emphasis on the relations between man and his environment, with
environment the variable factor: What would happen if ... P During the course of some years science fiction changed into something
new, and the new writers who Campbell discovered and encouraged—Isaac Asimov,
Clifford D. Simak, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, etc.—set about spreading
the message to the other magazines.
Even
the old Weird
Tales, which
traditionally had kept itself to the horror fantasy branch of science fiction,
was influenced, although the Lovecraft-school was predominant until the
magazine folded in 1954. It is possible that Campbell's accentuation of man's
situation in a changing world was one of the reasons for the discontinuation of
Weird Tales. There simply wasn't any need for it any
longer.
The
circulation of the science fiction magazines rose as a result of the new trend.
The genre even began to be accepted by mainstream literary critics. Orson
Welles's famous radio dramatization of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, gave a boost to the
whole, field; people who hitherto never had given the genre much attention
bought the magazines featuring the type of monsters that briefly had terrified
a whole nation. Within the next eight months seven more science fiction
magazines were launched. (54)
In 1943, Donald A Wollheim, one of the
front-rank personages both in sf fandom and the professional sector, edited an
anthology of science fiction short stories, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, featuring works by the "new" sf
writers, which became thereby the very first science fiction anthology.
World
War II brought a new dimension to science fiction; with the end of the forties,
social criticism became more frequent in U.S. sf magazines. Two new sf
magazines, that Soon were to be leading in the field,
appeared: The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949) and Galaxy (1950). The sociological satire was foremost
represented by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kombluth's stories about the
advertising-industry-or trust-ruled future. Time for the
grand views again, with the emphasis on the change of society on account of a
certain stimuli: unlimited power; religion coming into full undisputed power;
and the colonization of other planets; the American Way of Life in absurdum. The writers created their societies with great care, incorporating the
characteristics they needed, stocking them with people and examining the
result.
Galaxy's
editor Horace L. Gold's interest
in social criticism and satire as well as lighter literary standards
influenced the direction of science fiction as much as Astounding's John W. Campbell had influenced it ten years
earlier. This time the change was not that great—as the writers who Campbell
had discovered now stood on their own feet and worked within the field
according to their own private views—but the trend toward social criticism was
there. It became more pronounced as Frederik PohL at the beginning of the
sixties, became editor of Galaxy.
Galaxy
has now slipped behind
somewhat, and the foremost U.S. sf magazine of today is commonly considered to
be The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a serious magazine with high literary
standards and the recipient of a number of Hugo Awards for outstanding
achievements in the sf field. Analog, still
edited by the indestructible John W. Campbell, is of course still in the front
ranks.
England has for the most part followed the
signals from the U.S.A. The first British sf magazine, Scoops, came in 1934, a juvenile magazine of few
merits that was discontinued after twenty issues. Walter Gillings, a noted
British sf fan, later edited sixteen issues of the first adult British sf
magazine, Tales
of Wonder, 1937-42,
chiefly using U.S. material. Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, which was published in eighty-five issues
from January, 1951 to October, 1957 under the editorship of H. J. Campbell
(not to be confused with John W. Campbell) was actually a pocket-book series
with a letter column, etc. These magazines mosdy reprinted stories from U.S. sf
magazines, however-even if British writers like John Russell Fearn, E. C. Tubb
and Kenneth Bulmer appeared regularly.
England still lacked a focal point for
science fiction, where new writers could be published. This focal point came as
four magazines, the most noted being New Worlds. New Worlds started as a mimeographed amateur magazine
published by John "Ted" Carnell during the pre-war years. In 1946, New Worlds was transformed into a professional magazine,
published by Pendulum Publications Ltd., still edited by John Camell, and three
issues were published before Pendulum went out of business in 1948.
After
that, Nova Publications was formed primarily by a group of London fans headed by Leslie Flood, John Wynd-ham, Frank
Cooper, Eric C. Williams, G. Ken Chapman and Ted Carnell. This successfully
launched New
Worlds again
from No. 4 in 1948; started a sister magazine, Science Fantasy, in the summer of 1950, the first three issues
under the editorship of Walter Gillings, after which John Carnell edited both
magazines. Both ran bimonthly until the end of 1953 and were financially very
successful; New
Worlds had a circulation of 18,000 copies during this period, the highest any British
magazine had ever attained.
Printing
problems arose at the end of 1953 when the publisher wanted to make both
magazines monthly. At this time another publishing company, Maclaren & Sons
Ltd., became interested and eventually refinanced Nova Publications, making it
possible for John Camell to enter the field as full-time managing editor in
March 1954; New
Worlds became
a monthly. The first issue of the reconstituted company's New Worlds contained, among other things, Arthur C.
Clarke's short story The
Sentinel from
which, many years later, the basic plot of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 was to be taken.
Science
Fantasy remained
a bimonthly and ended with No. 64 in April, 1964, the same month in which New Worlds ended with No. 141. During these long, highly
successful ten years, New
Worlds and Science Fantasy had proven the starting point for a number of now well-known British sf writers like John Brunner and J. G.
Ballard, and in fact created a serious and intelligent science fiction of a truly British type. The fact that Britain today boasts some of the best
and most influential writers of science fiction in the world can largely be
traced back to John Camell and his magazines.
Nova Publications during these years had also
published another sf magazine, Science Fiction Adventures, on a bimonthly basis from March, 1958 to No. 32 ending in May, 1963. It
started originally as a straight reprint from the U.S. edition, then from No. 7 onward it published British writers. A U.S.
edition of New
Worlds was
published briefly in 1962 (five issues), but the venture didn't prove too successful.
In
1964 it was decided to cease publishing the magazine, partly due to the loss
of the Australian market. The tide rights of New Worlds and Science Fantasy were
sold to Roberts & Winter Ltd. in London. They subsquendy published them as
paperback-sized magazines, but they never attained their former glory or
circulation. The tide of Science Fantasy was
changed to Impulse
SF but this did nothing
for its image and it was finally discontinued. Michael Moorcock, the foremost
of Britain's "New Wave" advocates, edited and published New Worlds as an avant-garde magazine with some sf
connections, with the assistance of a grant from the London Arts Council.
Michael Moorcock's New
Worlds published
a number of highly original science fiction avant-garde stories; most notably,
Brian Aldiss' Barefoot
in the Head and Norman Spinrad's Bag Jack Barron, both as serials. This particular brand of
avant-garde science fiction did not appeal to large groups of readers, though,
and the magazine has now been discontinued. The title of New Worlds, after a run of twenty-four years, has ceased.
Meanwhile
John Carnell, who is far from "New Wave," has continued as an editor
of sf, with a difference. He edits a book series called New Writings in SF, published in Britain by Dobson Books Ltd.
(hardcover) and Corgi Books (paperback), while Bantam Books publishes them in
the U.S.A. New Writings in SF, which can be considered a sf magazine of sorts, has been phenomenally
successful, the total British editions up to No. 16 passing the half million
mark in paperback. The idea of new stories in paperback format was of course, not new. It
had originated with Frederik Pohl's Star SF series
in the 1950s, and since then we have seen a number of book series devoted to
publishing new stories of science fiction. They have editorials and sometimes
even interior illustrations, and it would not surprise me a bit to see letter
departments included as well. They don't accept subscriptions, though. Not yet,
anyway.
The
fourth sf magazine of those playing a principal part in the development of
British science fiction was the Scottish magazine Nebula Science Fiction, edited and published by Peter Hamilton. It
went on for forty-one issues, from Autumn, 1952 to June, 1959, presenting some
of the best British sf writers, including E. C. Tubb, Kenneth Bul-mer, John
Brunner, Eric Frank Russell, William F. Temple etc., whilst Brian W. Aldiss,
now a science fiction superstar, made his first appearance here with T. U.S. writers were reprinted, although infrequendy. There was an attempt
at an American edition beginning with No. 30 dated September, 1958 that ran
monthly to No. 39, June, 1959.
The
most recent addition to the British sf magazine market is Vision of Tomorrow, published originally by the Australian
Ronald E. Graham Pty Ltd. and edited and produced in England under the
editorship of Philip J. Har-bottle. At the time of this writing, the Australian
publisher has discontinued the magazine, and it is doubtful whether a new
British publisher will be found. Originally conceived as a reprint magazine,
inspired by the editor's and publisher's wish to reprint works of the late
John Russell Fearn, it appeared with its first issue in August, 1969, with a
policy to "publish new stories only, limited to British, Australian and
Commonwealth, and European contributors. The editor is noted for contacting
British sf writers of the fifties —who published in Nebula and the old New Worlds, and who faded out with the advent of the
"New Wave" and slump in British sf magazines—and encouraging them to
return to writing.
Sweden, being a small country, has
nevertheless managed to support sf magazines with circulations close to those
of the British and U.S. ones. I have already mentioned Otto Witt's curious
magazine Hugin.
It was obviously an early
try in the field, but it left few marks. The first hard-core science fiction
magazine in Sweden did not come until 1940, when AB Nordpress in Stockholm
launched the weekly pulp magazine Jules Verne-Magasinet, featuring short stories and serialized novels from the U.S. pulps. At
its peak it had a paid circulation exceeding 80,000 copies a week, which is
quite a lot for a country of less than eight million people. All the great
names of the contemporary U.S. sf magazines appeared regularly: Henry Kuttner,
Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury,
and Edmond Hamilton's Captain
Future novels
were serialized.
Unfortunately, the literary quality was low,
to a high degree resulting from crude translations, and when reading through
the magazine now, one often has to agree uncomfortably with a contemporary
critic's judgment on the magazine's contents as "blood-dripping
drivel."
The
sf hegemony didn't last long in this magazine. Already at the end of 1941 the
first sport and mystery stories appeared, together with comic strips with no
connection whatsoever with science fiction. A new subtitle of the magazine, Veckans Aventyr (The Adventures of the Week) also appeared in
the logo, and within some years the magazine had changed its name to this new
tide. The magazine existed until 1947, when it finally drowned in a flood of
Wild West, sport and mystery stories and was discontinued, mourned by none
except a handful of aficionados. A check shows that in the 332 issues of the
magazine were published 770 short stories and installments of serials, and of
those 537 can be considered science fiction.
The
title Jules Verne-Magasinet
has now been brought back
to life by a Swedish sf fan, Bertil Falk, who publishes it as a small,
semiprofessional magazine.
Jules
Verne-Magasinet never
put a mark on Swedish science fiction, mainly because it did everything to
discourage Swedish sf writers and fans—probably stories were cheaper when
bought from the U.S.A., so the Swedes had to keep their stories to themselves.
The genre did not get a break until two sf fans in Jonkoping, Karl-Gustav and
Kurt Kindberg, launched a monthly sf magazine that took the genre seriously,
and encouraged Swedish writers and fans as well. The magazine was Hapna (Be Astounded).
The first issue came in March, 1954, and even
though it started reprinting British and U.S. science fiction, it soon began
publishing Scandinavian writers as well. Hapna, in fact, started Swedish fandom in the same
way as Hugo Gernsback's Amazing started
U.S. fandom, giving the fans a steady supply of good contemporary sf as well as
the opportunity of contacts via the letter column. When Hapna finally folded in January, 1966, the fandom and the writers it had
nursed were able to stand on their own feet. Without Hapna, I strongly doubt there would have been much
sf interest to speak of in Sweden today.
At
the time of this writing, plans are under way to start Hapna again, under the new name of Tidskrift for Science Fiction (Magazine of Science Fiction), with Sam J. Lund-wall as editor.
Galaxy
had a Swedish edition from
August, 1958 to June, 1960. Nineteen issues were published in all—as compared
to the 130 issues of Hapna.
The Swedish Galaxy, published by Classics Illustrated, was
largely a copy of the U.S. original, with few—very few—original stories thrown
in. For some reason, it never caught on with the Swedish readers, and the
publisher turned his interest elsewhere, notably to Swedish editions of Mad and Help.
A
Norwegian edition of Galaxy,
Tempo-Magasinet, appeared
briefly in 1953-54, and a short-lived Finnish edition of Galaxy also appeared in the late fifties. Apart from
that, no other Scandinavian sf magazines have appeared outside Sweden.
As
for the rest of Europe, Western Germany has been rather active, sf-wise,
particularly through the publishing of German editions of U.S. magazines. Galaxy appeared for some years in a German edition
called Galaxis
Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has also appeared in a German edition. The
Germans seem more interested in book series than magazines, though, and a
magazine like Anabis
with its circulation of
1,000 copies is more like a fanzine than a magazine.
Germany has a lively sf fandom (as attested
by the 1970 World SF Convention at Heidelberg), brought to life by
Utopia
Magazine in
1953, but to this date this fandom apparently has been unable to produce any
science fiction writer of quality. The local Big Names, Walter Emsting and K.
H. Scheer, devoted their efforts wholeheartedly to the type of Space Opera yams
that were popular in other countries twenty or thirty years ago, and it seems
likely that both book series and the few short stories produced will stay at
the monster-and-blaster level. Germany's Herr Science Fiction Walter Ernsting,
who more or less dictates German science' fiction, is now responsible for a
kind of weekly Space Opera magazine featuring the ubermensch Perry Rhodan. These magazines sell at a rate
of 300,000 copies a week, and have now been published in more than 450 issues.
They have reportedly sold more than 60,000,-000 copies
(1) and have now appeared in the U.S.A. as well.
Austria's foremost sf magazines have been Uranus and Star Utopia, both
published by Josef and Maria Steffek in Vienna, using mosdy U.S. material.
Science
fiction has also filled much of the space in the French magazines Fiction and Galaxie. Satellite, another French magazine, has used a good amount of French material,
resulting in a number of very promising native writers, e.g. Michel Ehrwein
and Pierre Versins. There is also a fine printed and illustrated
semi-professional fanzine, Horizons du Fantastique, which uses entirely French material, critical and also short stories.
France boasts a large number of journals and magazines devoted to the
supernatural, some of which with some stretch of imagination can be considered
fantasy (except that the readers consider this particular fantasy the gospel
truth).
The leading sf magazine in Spain, Nueva Dimension, lives a somewhat insecure existence, lately
attested to by the seizing of all copies of its No. 14 issue on June 26, 1970,
by the Spanish Political Police, on the grounds that the issue in question
contained material dangerous to the security of the Spanish State. The
offending piece of science fiction turned out to be a story by an Argentinian
writer, dealing with the Basques and a time machine. Nueva Dimension has been described as "perhaps the most
distinguished sf magazine in the world in typography, selection, world
coverage, and artistic taste." It has, moreover, published a good number
of U.S. sf writers, including Harry Harrison and Theodore Sturgeon, as well as
European masters of the avant-garde, like Boris Vian.
Spain
is not the most sf-oriented country in the world; and from the official
reaction to an in all respects innocent sf story, I would guess that the genre
doesn't stand too much chance to reach its full potential.
Science
fiction in Italy thrives under a much more benevolent political climate,
boasting two magazines: the excellent Nova SF, published
and edited by Ugo Malaguti; and the Italian edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Oltre il Cielo, edited by "Ingénier Silvestri," which now has been published
in more than 150 issues and is in the process of creating a rather lively sf
fandom. Oltre
il Cielo has
developed a number of promising young sf writers, e.g. Lino Aldani, Sandro
Sandrelli and Roberta Ram-belli. Lino Aldani might be the most interesting. His
stories often deal with sexual and moral problems, and
this with an open-mindedness that one very seldom finds in sf elsewhere. A
good number of his stories have been translated, most of them into French. In
1963, eight issues of a magazine called Futuro were published, wholly devoted to Italian sf
writers.
The
Soviet Union, as well as other East-European countries, although having a fair
number of sf writers and traditions in science fiction, has not yet produced a
science fiction magazine, to my knowledge. The closest thing to a sf magazine
that I have encountered is a fan magazine, Sci-Fi, published in Hungary by a youth club. A
Russian literary magazine aimed at the foreign market, Soviet Literature, devoted a complete issue (No. 5, May, 1968)
to science fiction, printing among other things a novelette by the Polish sf
writer Stanislaw Lem, Cor
Serpentis, and
this might be a hopeful sign.
So much for the magazines. It should be added that science fiction is a
pronounced short story literature, whose ideas and treatment of ideas to a
large degree are best suited for the concentrated short story format—something
that has been clearly shown by a great number of long-winded, verbose novels
that would have been much better off with their wordage cut in half.
To
paraphrase Alva Rogers' observation in the beginning of this chapter, we now
have the paperbacks, and a good thing they are, but the magazines are something
else entirely. During the last thirty-five years science fiction has changed
completely, from a crude and naive pulp literature into a sophisticated tool
for entertainment and good, intelligent speculation, developing its standards
from within with very little or no help from the outside mainstream literary
world. This is a magnificent feat, and the principal part of the honor belongs
to the magazines. Them, and no one else.
10. FIAWOL!
The somewhat cryptic heading above is the
most enthusiastic sf fan's war-cry when it comes to explaining the happiness
of being a sf fan, and especially a sf fan in sf fandom. Translated into plain
English it means Fandom
Is A Way Of Life, and as a motto it isn't entirely unrealistic.
This fandom encompasses the international sf movement, comprised of all sf and
fantasy readers who are active and interested enough to seek contact with-
like-minded people in one way or another, through amateur magazines (fanzines),
clubs, letters or conventions. SF fandom is unique in the way it has grown
continuously and spread over the world, since its beginning in the U.S.A. in
the twenties. As I have mentioned earlier, there are now even sf
clubs and fanzines in the East Bloc. The main reason for this is probably the
fact that sf fandom is not anything like an organization with central offices
and so on. You gain entry by being interested enough to write someone a letter
or subscribing to- a fanzine, and you can't get kicked out again unless you do
it yourself—a not uncommon thing, called Gafia (Getting Away From It All). During the forty-plus years of sf fandom,
only a couple of persons have managed to make such complete asses of themselves that they have found themselves outcasts. The sf
fans are generally very broad-minded.
A diligent fan might rise in the ranks to BNF
(Big Name Fan); an honorary title that means absolutely nothing except that he
is known to a sufficient number of people, through fanzine publishing or
letter-writing or whatever it might be. The fans of the thirties—now lovingly
referred to as "First Fandom"—are to a great degree still active in
the field as well-known writers, publishers and editors, e.g.
Isaac Asimov, Donald A. Wollheim, Ray
Bradbury and John Camell, who now play an important part in the evolution of
the genre.
Practically
all sf writers of today come from sf fandom. They discovered it through the
letter columns of the sf magazines, participated enthusiastically in the sf
conventions and published mimeographed or offset printed fanzines with
circulations of perhaps a hundred copies, in which they (at least sometimes)
discussed science fiction, fought innumerable feuds and polished their talents
until the day they were accepted in the professional sector. The contact between
professional writers and their readers has since the beginning of sf fandom
been maintained via the fanzines.
Writers,
editors, etc. write regularly (and gratis) in the fanzines, participate in the
discussions in the letter columns and visit the conventions as ordinary
members. (There are, of course, conventions limited to professionals in the
field, like the Science Fiction Writers of America's annual awards dinner.) The
democracy is absolute, and there are very few signs of submissiveness toward
the Big Names to be found.
The
Big Names contribute to the fanzines on the same conditions as other
contributors.
This
has created a fruitful feedback system which, as Kingley Amis has pointed out,
has kept most sf writers away from the ivory towers of the mainstream writers.
We have an interesting example of this in the fierce debate regarding the pros
and cons of the "New Wave," that is waged not between critics but
mainly between writers and readers. Which, in my opinion, is
the only way a debate should be handled. The writer, after all, is
writing for his readers—or he should be, anyway—not for his critics.
The
Hugo Award of science fiction is another example of the democracy of this
field, whereby the readers are permitted to voice their opinions regarding the
science fiction published during the past year. For once, the literary critics
are equal with the readers, and the results of the Hugo votings give, I believe, a much more truthful picture of a science fiction work's impact
than all the professional critics in the world.
When
Amazing Stories started modern science fiction forty-five
years ago, few norms of the genre existed. Since then, the field has developed
into a highly complex literature with obvious literary qualities that to a
great extent are the result of - the exchange of ideas and the criticism voiced
in sf fandom. This is also the source of the U.S.A.'s dominance in the sf
field. Fandom started in the U.S.A. as a result of Amazing Stories and other early sf magazines. The first
pronounced sf writers came from this U.S. fandom, and when this modem science
fiction appeared in other countries, good science fiction was written only in
one place, the U.S.A.
In England, where sf fandom appeared after
the U.S. one, readers and writers had the advantage of writing in the same
language as the U.S. fans, and were thus able to participate in the internal
debate in a way that wasn't possible for aficionados in other countries.
Today, following a rise of interest in science fiction over the world, writers
find it easier than before to get published in their native languages, and the
magazines that during recent years have appeared both in Europe and South
America promise a development similar to that of the U.S.A.: first a local
fan-dom, and then writers who know how to use the tools of the trade. As in the
U.S.A., European mainstream writers turning to science fiction mostly seem to
repeat the themes of yesterday's science fiction. There are innumerable painful
examples of this.
The
beginning of this sf fandom was due to—as almost everything in modem science
fiction—Hugo Gemsback's magazine Amazing Stories, notably the letter column Discussions. The
mass of letters streaming into sf magazines has always been a source of wonder
for people outside the field. During the pulp era, the magazines often
contained ten to fifteen pages of letters, discussions and more or less private
feuds between writers-editors-readers. The sf fans have always kept their
contacts mainly through letters, and the large readers' departments of the
magazines have been the traditional meeting-places for readers and writers
alike. Discussions
became a natural center for
debates, contacts were established between readers, and only a couple of years
after the start of Amazing
Stories, the
first fanzine appeared.
First
of all were Cosmic
Stories and Cosmic Stories Quarterly, carbon-copied fanzines produced by two young
fans who had met through the letter department of Amazing Stories. They were Jerome Siegal and Joseph Shuster,
later famous as originators of Superman. At
about the same time the Science Correspondence Club was formed under the benevolent guidance of Hugo Gemsback, as a club for
sf fans. It was later reorganized as the venerable International Scientific Association. The club published a mimeographed fanzine
called The
Comet, to
which the Big Names of the day contributed regularly. The department of rockets
and space was written by an unknown German sf fan named Willy Ley. The Comet devoted, however, most of its space to the
new science, and perhaps this was not exactly what the sf fans hungered for.
A club called The Scienceers was formed in New York; and in July, 1930 the
first "pure" sf fanzine was published,
The Planet, featuring short stories written by members of
the club, reviews of films and books, and news and gossip from sf fandom. Similar fanzines appeared from other clubs
and fans: The
Time Traveller, Science Fiction, SF Digest, The
Fantasy Fan, etc.
The fans got into contact with each other through these fanzines, new clubs
appeared all over the U.S.A., and in the beginning of the thirties a sort of
loosely organized sf fandom appeared in England as welL with the founding of
The British Science Fiction Association. The first British sf convention was
held in Leeds on January 3, 1937, only three months after the first U.S.
convention.
U.S.
fandom got its first Cinderella tale in November, 1933, when old Uncle Gemsback
suddenly employed the publisher of the fanzine The Fantasy Fan as editor for his magazine Wonder Stories. The new editor was a seventeen-year-old boy
named Charles Hornig, and Homig immediately started to encourage new writers
from sf fandom. This was later repeated by other sf fans who after years as
fans and fanzine publishers became professionals in the field, e.g. Donald A.
Wollheim, one of the super-fans of the time, now a recognized writer and a
leading publisher in the genre.
The first great' sf organization in the
U.S.A., The
Science Fiction League, was founded in 1934, again with Hugo Gemsback as the father; and later
the New York branch of a sf-slanted organization called International Scientific Association (ISA) started planning for a national
gathering of sf fans. The convention, instigated by Donald A. Wollheim, took
place in Philadelphia in October, 1936, with about forty attendees. Three years
later the first "World SF Convention" was held in New York,
coinciding with the New York World's Fair. This "World Convention"
originally was to have been sponsored by the ISA with Donald A. Wollheim as
chairman. Later, due to feuds and the break-ing-up of the ISA, a group of fans
including Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Dirk Wylie, Robert Lowndes and Donald A.
Wollheim founded The
Futurian Society of New York to handle the convention. More feuds started, another group known as New Fandom appeared, and when the World SF Convention
finally started on July 2,
1939, New Fandom had been given the run of the show. Far from
being the unifying factor in a feud-ridden fandom, this "World" convention
actually started more feuds than any other event of the time. Feuds still are
common in sf fandom; they make for interesting happenings, at any rate.
The
U.S.A. is, if I may say so, a rather provincial country in many respects, and
even though "World SF Conventions" were held every year from 1939 onward, the first real World SF Convention wasn't held until 1957, in London. U.S. fandom slowly began to understand that there actually
existed a world outside the borders of the U.S.A., and at the 27th World
Science Fiction Convention, held in St. Louis, U.S.A., over Labor Day weekend, 1969, a motion was passed (to the accompaniment of loud protests from the
conservatives present), affecting the future of the Conventions and the Hugo
Awards. It reads as follows:
1.
The name of the sf convention now held in North America and styled the
"World Science Fiction Convention should be changed to the North American
Science Fiction Convention (NASFiC).
2.
A true World (or International) Science Fiction Convention (or Congress,
etc.) being desirable, it is recommended that a committee be set up at St.
Louis to confer with similar committees and individual fans in Europe, the
Pacific, etc. to suggest suitable mechanisms for holding such conventions.
3.
To maintain the continuity of the name "World Science Fiction
Convention" the following interim plan is suggested. The World Science
Fiction Convention title shall rotate through continental zones in a prearranged
manner. One of these zones shall be North America. The fans of each zone shall
determine as they see fit which convention in their zone shall assume the title
"World Science Fiction Convention" when the title is resident in
their zone. In North America the NASFiC would automatically assume the title
when the title is resident in North America.
4.
The numbering of the NASFiC shall continue the numbering from the former World
Science Fiction Conventions in order to preserve continuity when dealing with
hotels.
The Hugo Award, a counterpart to the Oscars
of the film industry, was first presented at the 11th World SF Convention in
Philadelphia, 1953. Willy Ley received an award for excellency in fact
articles, Philip José Farmer as best new author, Galaxy and Astounding SF as
best magazines, Forrest J. Ackerman as No. 1 fan personality, and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester as best novel. The Hugo (so
named in honor of Hugo Gemsback, who later was presented with a Special Award
at the 18th World SF Convention in Pittsburg in 1960) is an English language award, that can be given only to materials presented in
English and first translations into English. The categories are Best NoveL Best
Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Dramatic Presentation, Best
Professional Magazine, Best Professional Artist, Best Fan Artist, Best
Fanzine, Best Fan Writer and Special Award (the latter in 1969 presented to
astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins "for best Moon landing
ever"). There are usually a couple of special awards, like Big Heart
Award, First Fandom Award, etc. The Hugo Award has now been recognized by
pub-fishers also, and an award-winning novel can be sure to have this fact
advertised in bold letters on the covers of forthcoming editions.
The
recipients of the Hugo Award are voted for by the members of the World SF
Convention. This is also the case of the British Fantasy/Science Fiction Award,
which was instituted by the British Science Fiction Association and first
presented at the British SF Convention at Yarmouth at Easter, 1966, on the
basis of a poll taken amongst the Association's members. The winner (on his
general record rather than for any specific book) was John Brunner. John
Sample of the Heicon
promotion.
Brunner
won another British SF Award in 1970, for his novel Stand on Zanzibar.
The
Australian Ditmars
award and the Swedish Alvar award are presented to recipients of the respective countries in about
the same way, by the members of the national convention.
The
Nebula, the award given to worthy recipients by the Science Fiction Writers of
America at their annual convention, differs somewhat from the Hugo and its
sister awards. It is given by professionals in the field to other professionals
as a token of estimation, and it appears that these professionals sometimes
have quite different views on what has been the best sf published during the
preceding year than the fans have. The award, which consists of a spiral nebula made of metallic glitter and a specimen of rock
crystal embedded in a block of clear lucite with a black base, as different
from the Hugo space ship, is given to the Best Novel, Best Novella, Best
Novelette and Best Short Story. An annual collection of Nebula award-wirining
stories is published both in hardcover and paperback.
During the last decade, science fiction
fandom has begun showing signs of developing into a truly international occurrence
in which aficionados from all parts of the world might find friendly souls. The
28th World Convention in Heidelberg, Germany in 1970 became a meeting-place for
readers, writers and editors from all parts of the world, and this, in my
opinion, can't help but broaden the understanding between rivaling groups
within this microcosm. Fandom as a whole has been a far from homogenous body,
constandy racked by feuds, as attested to by Sam Mosko-witz's very revealing
account of the unbelievable state of U.S. fandom up to W.W. II, The Immortal Storm (Atlanta: ASFO Press, 1954, 269 pp.). Harry
Warner, Jr., another sf fan who has been in fandom since its beginning, has
written another book dealing with U.S. fandom in the forties, All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969, 359 pp.).
I do
not believe that fandom suddenly has become all nice and friendly and working
together toward some future goal of science fiction for everyone, but fandom
has obviously matured a lot since the tumultuous prewar years. The personal
feuds between some fans in the U.S.A. also must seem quite uninteresting when
seen against a backdrop of an international sf fandom. After all, sf fandom is
composed of a number of people who happen to be interested in science fiction,
and even if there are some people in it who appear to be more interested in the
paraphernalia of clubs, fanzines and conventions than in the actual literary
media, the overall picture is one of a large number of individuals devoting
themselves to a common interest. No one pretends that theirs is the best of all
possible interests or mankind's salvation, but they are wholeheartedly involved
in this fandom of intelligent and readable literature that gives a lot of food
for thought and the possibility of meeting like-minded people.
For many years there has
existed a number of fanzines which specialize in news about occurrences in
fandom, book reviews, professional news and the like. The most venerable of
these, the U.S. Science
Fiction Times has
not been seen for a long time now, but until it ceased it had published more
than 460 issues. At the moment, we have the U.S. Luna Monthly, SFWA Bulletin, Science Fiction
Review, Locus, etc.;
the British Vector
and Speculation; the German SF Times; The Swedish Science Fiction Nytt; the French Le Sac a Charbon, Horizons de
Fantastique, and
so forth.
Emblem of the Scandinavian S.F. Union.
Added to this are all the fanzines, these
mimeographed or offset printed publications that sometimes have all the
attributes of the professional magazines except the circulation; e.g. Tom
Reamy's Trumpet
and Leland Sapiro's Riverside Quarterly. Not to mention all the specialized fanzines that are devoted to certain
writers, like the James Branch Cabell Society's Kalki, edited by James Blish, and the numerous E.
R. Burroughs and J. R. R. Tolkien fanzines. These fanzines are hard to obtain
for the uninitiated, but they are usually well worth the trouble.
The
literary quality of the fanzines is much higher than would be expected from
amateur publications, many of their contributors and publishers being
professionals in the field. The debates in these are far more unprejudiced than
those carried on in the largely circulated magazines' letter or editorial
departments; actually, most of the debates in science fiction are carried on
in these fanzines. And there are a number of highly original writers and
illustrators working in these fanzines, whose works probably would have much
trouble getting published in the large magazines. And this is not because the
quality is inferior.
congresso europeo
di fantasclenza
Poster for the 1st "European SF Convention".
The sf fanzines are labors of love—many of
them, as I have mentioned, having a true professional
look—not only as regards the quality of the contents but also from their
outside appearances. They range all the way from the unsophisticated
single-sheet fanzine written out in ten copies by way of carbon copies, to
200-page mammoths written out on an IBM electric typewriter with
"executive" differential type spacing and carbon paper tape, printed
in four-color offset with glossy covers. The contents vary from the
letter-fanzine, consisting of little but letters to the editor and his more or
less witty comments, and up to the scholarly literary magazine with articles
by Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and John Brunner and a letter column that
is graced by every Big Name of sf that can be imagined and then some.
Some
of these fanzines are so staggeringly intellectual that one hardly dares to
read them. A Swedish fanzine, Science Fiction Forum, appeared in 1969 with an issue (No. 40) of 240 mimeographed pages,
closely written with even right margins, and printed in an overall circulation
of one hundred copies. I shudder to think of the work put into that monster of
a fanzine.
In a
field which has been met with precious little understanding by outside
critics, science fiction fandom has created its own standards of quality. Via
the fruitful feedback system between readers, writers and editors it has
succeeded in transforming an admittedly crude literature into a suitable tool
both for entertainment and social criticism as well as a literature of no mean
literary qualities. The editors of the magazines have always been predominant
in influencing the development, but the readers always have known their
preferences as well—and they have had the chance of making themselves heard.
This is democracy to a degree that never has occurred in any other literary
field, and it has given remarkable results. Whatever the faults and
shortcomings of this sf fandom, it has succeeded in improving its literature
throughout the years—and who can hope to do better than that?
11. THE FUTURE
And what can be expected of the science
fiction to come? "It's difficult to prophesy, especially about the
future," the Danish artist Robert Storm Pedersen once said, and I am
certainly not prophesying. Certain tendencies can be traced in present-day
science fiction, though. Twenty years ago, science fiction devoted itself mosdy
to the probable effects of man's contact with the outer world, extraterrestrial
creatures and so on. Even the Moon shot was as much sf as it could be. Today
the speculative element in the Moon shot is obviously gone, a story dealing
with the first landing on the Moon is science fact, not fiction (at least not in the sf sense of the word), and within the
next decade, stories dealing with the first Mars landing will probably meet the
same fate.
I
believe science fiction will go farther out—but in a speculative rather than a
distance sense. Inter- and extra-galactic voyages have been commonplace
occurrences in science fiction since the days of E. E. Smith. I believe that
the next decade will witness a change in the science fiction field as great as
that of the preceding forty years. A new breed of science fiction writers are
on their way in, as attested to by, for example, Ace Books' excellent Ace Science Fiction Special series. Here we, interestingly enough, not
only find writers of singular power who were completely unknown ten years ago,
but also a number of names well-known in sf who are experimenting with new
forms, minting the sf coinage of the next decade as it were.
The
traditional action-story will, of course, be with us, spreading its particular
form of Sense-of-Wonder in a way that no kind of "new" sf can hope to
encompass. But apart from that I see two distinct directions for science
fiction,
directions that, each in its own way, can enrich the
genre, giving it a new vitality and a new meaning. The first is the avant-garde
"New Wave" science fiction that hopefully will find its own
vernacular before it drowns in its own four-letter words or loses itself in the
surrealistic cathedrals of words that it has created itself. The second is the
fantasy-slanted, very absurd and often very funny brand of science fiction
represented by, among others, Robert Sheckley.
Sheckley,
according to himself, no longer writes anything that doesn't amuse him, and what amuses him—and a growing number of readers—is
a highly improbable world where absolutely nothing works as one would expect it
to work. Sheckley uses the old Sense-of-Wonder philosophy with all the
traditional gimmicks attached, but in his peculiar never-never land the
machines live a life of their own, and the result comes actually much closer to
wild fantasy than the thundering space ship armadas of E. E. Smith.
In
two of his latest books, Mindswap (1966)
and Dimension of
Miracles (1968),
Sheckley has placed very ordinary men in a universe where none of the usual
natural laws work, where black is white and planets are built by greedy cosmic
building-contractors, where the machines act like resentful and petty human
beings, and the dizzying views fall flat to the ground at the first inquisitive
examination. They are cosmic revues with the common man as the bewildered
common denominator. Even if Sheckley's obvious delight in his ideas sometimes
tends to degenerate into pure idea acrobatics, his stories and novels are
consistently original, and Sheckley's grand sense of humor—an
all too seldom found commodity in present-day science fiction—sometimes
elevates his fantasies into the bizarre universes of Franz Kafka and Boris
Vian. Because underneath the absurd humor, Sheckley is
deadly serious. He has something to say, an idea, a meaning, and he uses
absurdity to put it across to the reader.
This absurdity, or whatever you would like to
name it, can also be found in the comparatively new type of mature fantasy that
has become increasingly popular in the U.S.A. during recent years. I don't just
mean black humor like
Joseph
Heller's brilliant Catch-22,
but more the symbol-laden
mysticism of, for example, Hermann Hesse, whose novel Steppenwolf in 1969 sold 360,000 copies in thirty days in
the U.S.A. This is encouraging, because Hesse is human and wise, but one of the
principal reasons for his popularity must be his inclination toward mysticism. Sidd-hartha alone is a kind of new gospel, while his Steppenwolf's denunciation of the social contract and
strong emphasis on the individual's eternal divine nature is obviously attracting
millions of people.
We
find this mystical experience in many science fiction works of today, notably
in the works of Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany—not to mention Philip K.
Dick. Along with those come works like Avram Davidson's highly personal
treatment of the literary Vergil figure in The Phoenix and the Minor (1966), a powerful metaphysical experience
placed in a strange never-never land of classical time. The mysticism of this
work is again brought forth quite differently in a recent work of Roger
Zelazny, Damnation
Alley (1969), a cruel novel set in a future after the catastrophe, in
which Hell Tanner, the last survivor of the exterminated cycle gangs, fights
his way across a blasted continent teeming with symbols of guilt and failure.
The sf stories" belonging to this group
that John Camell calls "medieval futurism"—future technologies with
heavy overtones of the feudal systems of the Middle Ages, sometimes with
accompanying magic, etc.—would seem to fit in here as well. Although to me this
particular sub-branch of science fiction seems more of an offshot of mysticism,
being essentially action-stories built on the fronts of the mystical
experience.
One of the curious occurrences of science
fiction today is the sudden rise of interest in fantasy, particularly on
campuses. It started with J. R. R. Tolkien, but is rolling on with a renewed
interest in Mervyn Peake, James Branch Cabell and a number of more modem
fantasy writers as well. Personally, I am inclined to see this as yet another example
of the attraction of mysticism—fantasy is appearing in exacdy the same circles
that have been embracing the
Transcendental
Meditation fad, among others—and if it is so, we will probably see much more
fantasy coming during the next decade. Kenneth Buhner, a well-known sf writer,
says in a letter that:
As to why I think (a fantasy magazine) is
needed these days, I see the disarray into which the sf magazines are falling
and feel that fantasy will be the medium in which what we sf people have been
for so long trying to do can be successfully carried on. There is also a
tremendous interest in fantasy at the present time, not just in sword and
sorcery, and this probably stems in part from a rejection of scientific
materialistic values, due to the obvious and many times rammed home reasons
even the Sunday color magazines are aware of. I think that many of the values
being rejected are still capable of viable use in the present world and in the
future; but they need to be restated and this is where fantasy can come in with
fresh methods of presentation, new slants and a whole modem and up-dated
format of entertainment. The messages will then continue to get through . . .
I'm all for the modem world and whilst I deplore a great deal of what is being
done and allowed to be done, and omitted, in the name of progress, I am still
completely convinced that the values of the past cannot all be tossed aside—the
old baby and the bathwater syndrome again—and that examples of conduct and
thinking will indicate where we need to look for guidance of and from the
future.
The
"New Wave" is, of course, another offspring of Hermann Hesse's
mysticism, only as yet more crude and lacking the understanding of the symbols
used. The "New Wave's" brand of mysticism is known as "inner
space," and J. G. Ballard, one of the "New Wave's" most
well-known advocates, and the author of a number of brilliant excursions into
the universe of mytsical experience, as early as 1962 stated his aims as:
I would like to see more psycho-literary ideas,
more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time-systems,
synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the remote, sombre half-worlds
one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics, all in all a complete
speculative poetry and fantasy of science.
In other words, a denunciation of the real
world, a return to the abstract, the incomprehensible, the metaphysical. That this can be done while retaining the
powers of communication between writer and reader, offering an insight into
the dream world of abstractions and mysticism, has been proved not only by the
early writers of the absurd such as Alfred Jarry, but also by J. G. Ballard
himself in novels like The
Crystal World (1966).
Here, a crystalline disease engulfs Earth, transforming the eternal forests
into shimmering caverns of diamonds where men run, arms stretched out like
ruby crosses, and the trees raise their flaming cathedrals up toward the
unmoving, shimmering sky.
Ballard
has, together with his fellow "New Wave" writers, been subjected to
fierce criticism from the old sf garde who do not think this is science
fiction. I do not agree with this wholeheartedly, as the "New Wave"
is a sign of change within the field, and if the field is incapable of change
it would surely be extinct before long. However, it is certain that few
"New Wave" writers have found their vernacular; instead they retreat
into some land of impotent absurdity that says nothing, conveys nothing and
means nothing.
There is also a marked rise in the use of
obscenities in the "New Wave," which strikes me as completely unnecessary.
A recent novel by Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron, is practically a collection of obscenities. And Spinrad is far, far from
alone in this. Now, I am far from being a prude. I was bom and reared in a
country where tolerance toward sex in all its forms is considered important. I
consider myself open-minded as far as sex is concerned. Yet I find it curious,
to say the very least, the way certain "New Wave" writers can't write
three words without using one or two obscene words. Frequent use of obscenities
might shock some people, but in the long run this is more childish than
effective. Samuel Mines, a well-known editor, has observed that:
I expect this in low intelligence and crude
tastes. When I find reasonably well-educated individuals afflicted with the
same compulsion I am forced to either of two conclusions: that they are so
immature they are still trying to impress by shock value, or they are in need
of therapy. Look it up in a good psychiatric textbook—Tourette's syndrome is
well-known to psychiatrists: The obsessive need to employ obscenities in
speech ... I am not arguing for a
lily-white phoniness in writing. I'm for realism, not euphemism. I'm not
shocked by four-letter words. I simply think they debase our style and our
level of expression. I'm complaining about the needless overdone vulgarity which some writers without
taste apparendy think is realism. (55)
The "New Wave" science fiction is
filled with a general sense of defeat, a wish to turn away from the hard
realities of this world, and perhaps this obsession with vulgarities is
just one result of this. It does not make for great literature, though, and it
certainly does not take the sf genre forward. This, of course, also goes for
all the literary tools that have led this "New Wave" into a dead end
with no way out. The Polish sf writer Stanislaw Lem recendy observed that the
"New Wave" authors:
. . . feel that all
the "realism" in "serious" sf was but a myth gone to the
dogs and that there should be a change in
the future, but they do not know how to effect such a change, and therefore
eagerly seize upon such literary paradigms as surrealism, which is only an
indication of their intellectual poverty. For new things require new forms and
surrealism has already become a historical factor in the stream of art. (56)
So much for the new directions in the
English-speaking countries. Outside England and the U.S.A., the sf writers are naturally far less
sophisticated, and most local Big Name sf writers actually belong more to the
pulp era of sf than to the present-day field. Swedish attempts at science
fiction are often interesting, but far from original, e.g. Sven Del-blanc's Homunculus, which is the old Frankenstein story told again in a modern setting. There are, however, a
number of Swedish mainstream writers, like P. C. Jersild, Ann-Margret
Dahlquist-Ljungberg and Arvid Rundberg, who often use science fiction as a
literary tool with exceptionally good results, and more are appearing. It
should be noted, though, that none of these writers ever have had any
connection with sf or sf fandom previously to their writing sf, and the themes
employed are thus often old hat for the aficionado.
A
quality sf book series exists, published by Askild
& Kamekull Forlag AB and edited by Sam J. Lundwall. Actually, with close
to forty sf novels published in Sweden during 1970, science fiction is doing
better than ever in this country.
Denmark
has been remarkably well-fumished with sf during the latest years, much due to
the efforts of Jannick Storm, the editor of a sf book series, published by
Hassel-balchs Forlag. Jannick Storm is an advocate of the "New Wave"
in science fiction, and many of the new sf works published by native writers are
also quite New Wave-ish, e.g. Knud Holten's recent Suma-X. Other interesting recent Danish sf novels
include Sven Holm's Termush
and Anders Bodelsen's Frysepunktet (The Freezing Point).
Norway has no less than two diligent
"New Wave" advocates, Jon Bing and Tor Age Bringsvaerd, the authors
of a number of short stories and plays, as well as editors of anthologies of
way-out science fiction. A recent Norwegian sf novel, Axel Jensen's Epp, was awarded the Abraham Woursell European Literature Award in 1966.
Germany,
although with literary progenitors in sf from E. T. A. Hoffmann, Kurd Lasswitz
and Hans Dominik, has yet to produce one single sf writer of class. Sf in
Germany means usually Perry Rhodan; there are Perry Rhodan comic strips, Perry
Rhodan films, hundreds of Perry Rhodan clubs, Perry Rhodan conventions,
anything you can name and then some. This Captain Future-copy apparently is
just what the Germans like, and other German sf is about on the same level as
this Cosmic Hero. There are two dime novel series, Moewig's Terra Nova and Zauberkreis'
Zauberkreis SF, both principally featuring translations, as does the Heine, Moe-wig and Goldmann Space Pocket Books.
Italy has advanced during recent years with a
number of interesting sf writers, e.g. the already-mentioned Lino Aldani,
Sandro Sandrelli and Antonio Belloni, the latter unquestionably of the old
school of sf. Among the sf fans who lately have
emerged as writers are Luigi Naviglio, Riccardo Levehgi and Carlo Bordoni, all
three publishers of fanzines. Italy has traditions since the turn of the
century with the old Jules Veme-follower Emilio Salgari and his collaborator
Luigi Motta, who among other things produced a plagiarism of Bernhard Kellerman's Der
Turme called 11 Tunnel Sotto il Mare. Later Italian writers have shown considerable
more independence, for example Italo Calvino, a bizarre writer of quality on a
level with the best written in the U.S.A. today. The publishing house Adrian in
Rome publishes a sf book series called Alpha Centauri; while
Ugo Malaguti, the editor and publisher of the sf magazine Nova SF, is the editor of a series of sf classics
published by Libra Editrice, as well as one series of contemporary sf, Mondo di Domani.
Austria recendy witnessed a science fiction
first, when the Austrian Volksbuchverlag
published a book on science
fiction, Spuren ins all—Science Fiction—Das Seltsame Fremde (Trails into Space—Science Fiction—The
Strange Alien One), written by Winifried Bruckner, editor of the Austrian
Workers Union's magazine Solidarität.
The book was given away
free by the Chamber of Workers as a gift to all young workers in Austria.
The
interest in science fiction is also growing in the East European countries,
where science in all forms is encouraged and science fiction sort of comes
along. Russia has traditions from Konstantin Tsiolkovskij, the original
inventor of the three-stage rocket, who wrote a number of quite heavy novels in
the field. Ivan Yefremov's Andromeda has
been translated into a number of languages, and Egen Zamyatin's We is one of the classic anti-Utopias of science fiction. Among the
publishers that habitually publish science fiction, Molodaja Gvardija, Mir,
Detgiz, Znanije and Mysl are the leading ones, with" Mir being the
publisher that translates most American and European science fiction into
Russian, as well as Russian science fiction into other languages. Popular
Soviet writers like I. Lukodianov, Gueorgui Martinov, Boris and Arkady
Strugatsky, Anatoly Dneprov, Ilya Varshavsky and others are habitually
translated into a number of languages including English,
Spanish, Italian, German and so on.
In
1967, Molodaja Gvardija published a book of analyses of science fiction and
presentations of certain sf writers, Fantastika-67, that
dealt with, among others, Ray Bradbury, Stanislaw Lem, Boris and Arkady
Strugatsky, Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke and Clifford D.
Simak. In 1970, the Soviet Academy of Sciences' pubhshing house Nauka published a book on science fiction, Russian Soviet Science Fiction Novel, written by Anatoli] Britikov, which not only
gives a thorough and very positive account of Soviet science fiction from the
sixteenth century until now, but also devotes much space to sf development in
the U.S.A. and Europe. The most well-known Russian sf writers, the brothers
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, the only ones comparable in quality to the best
American sf authors, are subjected to considerable praise in this book; which
is interesting, in view of the news early in 1970 that they had been
blacklisted in Russia on account of some rather politically outspoken sf
novels dealing, among other things, with a powerful country's "right"
to "liberate" smaller countries. Apparently, they were not censored,
at least not as much as the news had implied. In fact, the Strugatsky brothers
seem now to be more popular than ever in Russia. Late in 1970, the magazine Junost, with a circulation exceeding
1,900,000
copies, started serializing their novel Hotel in the Mountains, a sf- novel as outspoken as any of their earlier works.
The
very popular sf book series SF of the World, which
presents sf novels from the U.S.A. and Europe as well as from Russia, was
originally to have been published in fifteen volumes, but proved so popular
that it now will be published in at least twenty volumes. Recent volumes in
this series have included a novel by Clifford D. Simak and an anthology of
Scandinavian science fiction. Another popular book series, the Almanach Nautshnoy Fantastiki, a pocket series that features science fiction
from all parts of the world, is even turning to the avant-garde "New
Wave" style of sf. A recent novel (No. 9) features, among others, a very
way-out short story by J. G. Ballard.
Russian
magazines and newspapers also print a large amount of science fiction,
particularly magazines like Vok-rug Sveta, Znanije-Sila, Teknika-molodezji and Nauka i zjisn, all
of them with very large circulations, approaching the millions. Vokrug Sveta (circulation: 2,700,000 copies) in particular
has printed a lot of U.S. and European science fiction, mostly of the social
criticism type, like Robert Bloch's Nightmare Number Four, a short story (or prose-poem) dealing with the advertising industry and
the ultimate advertising gimmick. It might be presumptuous to talk about a
Soviet science fiction boom, particularly not in the field of social
criticism—the official Soviet reaction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's recent Nobel
prize in literature speaks for itself—but the interest in the genre is
certainly large, and on the rise.
Poland's
greatest sf writer Stanislaw Lem is also increasingly popular, not only in his
native country. His recent novel Solaris has
been published both in London and New York as the first of his many sf novels
to see print in English. Solaris is
an extremely interesting sf novel and a very sophisticated one, dealing with
the concept of an imperfect God, one who is omnipotent but without omniscience,
and the problems of communication between a group of human explorers and this
strange entity. Stanislaw Lem has also
|
|
|
Elf] |
I |
|
Illustration from a recent Soviet s-f novel.
written a book about science fiction, devoting
special chapters to modem U.S. sf writers.
A
veritable sf boom seems to have appeared in Romania, with a stream of book and
magazine sf. The venerable magazine Viata Romaneasca recently devoted a complete issue to science fiction, presenting a
number of native and foreign writers. Sf book series are being published, with
most of the material being of native make. Romanian sf writers like Victor Kembach,
Valdimir Colin and Adrian Rogoz are immediately reviewed in the literary
magazines when they publish new sf novels.
In
East Germany the big name is Carlos Rasch, an author with a number of sf novels
to his credit, and also the driving force behind the East German publishing of
British and U.S. science fiction.
In
all these East European countries there exists a more or less pronounced sf
fandom, and now and then local fanzines have found their way through the Iron
Curtain. It is all in the beginning stages as yet, but I am certain that the
next decade will see East Europe taking new initiatives in the sf field. The
U.S.A. will without doubt hold its position as the country where most sf is
published, but I would not be surprised if Europe within the next ten or twenty
years takes the lead in high-quality science fiction.
Science
fiction is in rapid change, as everything is now. This is quite natural, and it
is as natural that this development shouldn't be taken quiedy by the old-time
sf buffs, many of whom have been active since Hugo Gemsback started his first
sf magazine, and now regard the new trends with pminous mutterings. There is
still much talking about the "good old days," with which is meant the
"golden" forties, and this is certainly very human and nothing to be
surprised about. The revolutionary has an unhappy tendency to grow stiff with
time and regard the ideals of his own youth as the apex of all development,
spending the autumn of his life reminiscing about the good days of yore and
complaining of the lousy times of today. The "Angry Young Men" of
Britain are a typical example of revolutionaries who have become good,
reactionary members of the Establishment. Bertrand Russell was one of the very
few who managed to keep his intellect open to the end; but he was considered a
very, very curious man.
That
the science fiction readers and writers should be different in this respect
would obviously be to hope for the impossible. Those who weren't fifteen years
old when E. E. Smith wrote his thundering Space Operas, with the mile-long
space ships and the spectacular machines, have great difficulties in finding
anything interesting at all in them. A reader of today who doesn't have his
mind filled to the bursting point with nostalgia can only observe that most of
the pulp sf was terrible literature, that the love interest was taken direcdy
from the sugar bowl, that the science was idiotic and the dizzying views hardly
more than backdrops, sea stories on a cosmic leveL
The
science fiction of today is incomparably more sophisticated, and while the sf
of today stands on foundations laid by the sf of the thirties and the forties,
we should understand that what was good then must not necessarily be good now.
In the same way, the sf of thirty years hence will probably be completely
incomprehensible for those of us who grew up with the sf of today. And no doubt
we will complain about the superficiality of the genre and dream back with
tear-filled eyes to the "golden" sixties or seventies when there still
was Sense-of-Wonder to be found.
John
W. Campbell, one of the old guard who hasn't lost his Sense-of-Wonder, even
though he has been working in the sf field since 1930 and has been one of the
outstanding editors of sf since 1937, gives some poignant comments to this
phenomenon in the preface to a tear-dripping book about Campbell's magazine Astounding. The book is written by Alva Rogers, who holds
to the view that the pulp Astounding of
the thirties and the early forties truly was of the "golden" age of
science fiction. It is a sentimental book, a nostalgic
look back at the author's youth—something that the author admits in a
foreword. Campbell tears the nostalgic mood to pieces with obvious delight in
his preface. The grand finale is worthy of reproducing; and it will also form
the end of this study in science fiction:
So what about the Great Old Authors (please
remember that 1940 was almost a quarter century ago)? Well, they're convinced
that they already know how to write and aren't gonna be told what they should
write by that dictatorial, authoritarian, uncooperative CampbelL They aren't
going to sell their immortal birthright to Great Authorhood for any mess of dollars!
And granted that the Sense of Wonder is gone, in large part,
because the Old Fans are old now. But the Great Old Authors are old,
too! Most of them got their scientific' orientation back in the early
tJiirties, and they've been running on it ever since. How many of them are in
contact with actual research work being done today—and getting the feel for the
major direction of science now? Who's
done any extrapolation of the possibilities of super conductive systems, for instance?
They know that science fiction is about
rocket ships —so they persist in using rocket ships in stories of the
centuries-hence future, when it's perfecdy obvious the damn things are
hopelessly inefficient and impractical as useful transportation. And the Great Old Authors
will not recognize that we've already told these stories; that we've already exercised our Sense of Wonder wondering
about those ideas.
Will
somebody tell me why the Great Old Authors will not get off their literary
tails and consider something new? They hate me for shoving new concepts and
new ideas at them—and damn me for their lack
of Sense of Wonder!
The
world rolls on and we either roll with it or get left behind to mumble about
the Good Old Days. If you think science fiction is getting dull, it just
possibly could
be you. And I've got a
pretty good idea of what's wrong but I don't know anything that can be done
about it.
I don't know of anybody who's growing any younger. ... (57)
Notes
1. Lord Dunsany. The Hoard of the Gibbelins. From The Book of Wonder, London, 1912.
2. "Doom Beyond Jupiter," Harper's Magazine, September, 1939, pp. 445-48.
3.
Fredric Brown. Angeb
and Spaceships. London:
Four Square, 1962, p. 8.
4.
Jules Veme. The
Begum's Fortune. N.Y.:
Ace Books, 1969, pp. 103-04.
5.
Ingvald Raknem. H.
G. Welk and His Critics. Oslo: Universitetsförlaget,
1963, pp. 395-96.
6. The Critic, July 25,
1896.
7. The Daily News, January 21, 1898, p. 6.
8. H. G. Wells. Experiments in Autobiography.
9. Ibid.
10.
Plato. The
Republic. Book
V. N.Y.: Putnam's Sons, 1930, pp..461-63.
11.
Jacques Delarue. The History of the Gestapo. London: Corgi, 1966, pp. 80-81.
12.
Ligeia Gallagher. Mare's Utopia and Its Critics. Chicago: Scott, Foreman &
Co., 1964, p. 38.
13.
Ibid. p. 59.
14.
Isaac Asimov. Foundation.
London: Panther, 1960, p. 12.
15.
George Orwell. 1984. N.Y.: Signet, 1961, p. 220.
16.
Frederik
Pohl & Cyril
M. Kornbluth. The
Space Merchants. London:
Digit Books, 1961, pp. 7-8.
17.
J. G. Ballard. The
Subliminal Man. From
The Disaster Area. London: Panther, 1969, pp. 64-65.
18. Robert Sheckley. The Tenth Victim. London: May-
flower, 1966, pp. 22-23.
NOTES
19.
George
Matthew Lewis. The
Monk. N.Y.: Grove Press,
1959, p. 308.
20. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. N.Y.:
Signet, 1965, p. 214.
21.
Carlos
Ciarens. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. N.Y.: Putnam's Sons, 1967, p. 62.
22. The World's Biggest Bloodsucker. Luna
Monthly, January,
1970, p. 8.
23.
H. P. Lovecraft. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. N.Y.: Ballentine Books, 1970, p. viii.
24.
L. Sprague de Camp (ed.). The Spell of Seven. N.Y.: Pyramid, 1965, p. 7.
25.
L. Sprague de Camp (ed.). The Fantastic Swordsmen. N.Y.: Pyramid, 1967, p. 10.
26.
L. Sprague de Camp (ed.) The Spell of Seven. NY.: Pyramid, 1965.
27.
Edwin L. Arnold. Gulliver of Mars. N.Y.: Ace Books, 1970, p. 6.
28.
Richard A. Lupoff. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure. N.Y.: Ace Books, 1968, p. 11.
29.
Michael Moorcock. Putting a Tag on It. AMRA, No. 15,
1961, p. 16.
30.
Red Boggs. Does
Conan Need Suspenders? AMRA, No. 14, 1961, p. 16.
31. A. Merritt. The Ship of Ishtar. N.Y.: Avon Books, 1951.
32.
William Ready. Understanding
Tolkien. N.Y.:
Paperback Library, 1969, p. 48.
33.
Catherine R. Stimpson. J. R. R. Tolkien. (Columbia Essays on Modem Writers. 41) N.Y.: Columbia University, 1969,
p. 43.
34.
Robert Silverberg. Journey's End. From
Dimension Thirteen. N.Y.: Ballantine, 1969, p. 183
35. Alva Rogers. A Requiem for Astounding. Chicago:
Advent, 1967, p. vi.
36. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. Spectrum 2. London: Pan Books, 1965, pp. 8-9.
37. Stewart Alsop. Dr. Calhoun's Horrible Mousery. Newsweek, August 17, 1970, p. 9.
38. Cyril M. Kornbluth in The SF Novel. Chicago: Advent, 1964, pp. 98-99.
39. Anne McCaffrey. A Womanly Talent. Analog, February,
1969, pp. 19-20.
40.
Startling Stories, November, 1939, p. 115.
41.
Robert Sheckley." A Ticket to Tranai. From Citizen
in Space. N.Y.:
Ballantine, 1962, p. 134.
42.
John Wyndham. Consider
Her Ways. London:
Penguin, 1965, pp. 49-51.
43.
Robert Sheckley. A Ticket to Tranai. From Citizen
in Space. N.Y.:
Ballantine, 1962, p. 136.
44.
Anne McCaffrey. A
Womanly Talent. Analog, February, 1969, p. 54.
45.
Theodore Sturgeon. Venus Plus X. N.Y.: Pyramid, 1968, pp 151-52.
46.
Michael Moorcock. Stormbringer. London:
Mayflower, 1968, pp. 188-89.
47.
Sam Moskowitz. Seekers
of Tomorrow. N.Y.:
Ballantine, 1967, p. 395.
48.
Brian Aldiss. Visiting
Amoeba. From
Galaxies Like
Grains of Sand. N.Y.:
Signet, 1960, p. 144.
49.
William Tenn. Betelgeuse
Bridge. From The Wooden Star. N.Y.: Ballantine, 1968, p. 117.
50. Science Fiction Times. No. 298,
1958, p. 1.
51.
"Where Are They Now?" Newsweek, August
4, 1969, p. 8.
52.
Steve. Vertlieb. Inside a Starship Captain. L'Incroyable Cinema, No. 3, 1970, p. 35.
53.
Alva Rogers. A
Requiem For Astounding. Chicago: Advent, 1967, p. vi.
54.
L. Sprague de Camp. Science Fiction Handbook. N.Y.: Hermitage, 1953, p. 17.
55.
Samuel Mines. Those
Four-Letter Words. Luna Monthly, July, 1969, pp. 9,
18.
56.
Luna Monthly. August,
1969, p. 6.
57.
Alva Rogers. A
Requiem for Astounding. Chicago: Advent, 1967. p. XXI.
Bibliography
Books dealing with science
fiction.
Amis,
Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1960, 161 p.
Ackerman, Forrest J. The Frankenscience Monster. N.Y.: Ace Books, 1970,
191 p.
Atheling, William, Jr., (James Blish). The Issue at Hand. Chicago: Advent, 1964,
136 p.
Bleiler, Everett F. The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publ., 1948,
455 p.
Bretnor, Reginald (ed.). Modern Science Fiction, Its
Meaning and Its Future. N.Y.: Coward-McCann, 1953,
294 p.
Clarens, Carlos. An Illustrated History of
the Horror Film. N.Y.: Putnam's Sons, 1967.
Carter, Lin. Tolkien: A Look Behind
the Lord of the Rings. N.Y.:
Ballanüne Books, 1969, 214 p.
Davenport,
Basil (ed.).
The Science Fiction Novel:
Imagination and Social Criticism. Chicago: Advent, 1964,
160 p.
De Camp, L. Sprague. Science Fiction Handbook. N.Y.: Hermitage, 1953, 328 p.
Gallagher, Ligeia. More's Utopia and Its
Critics. Chicago: Scott, Foreman & Co., 1964,
182 p.
Green,
Roger Lancelyn. Into Other Worlds. N.Y.: Abelard-Schuman, 1957, 190 p.
Knight, Damon. In Search of Wonder. Chicago: Advent, 1967,
306 p.
Lupoff, Richard A. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure. N.Y.: Ace Books, 1969, 315 p.
Metcalf, Norman. The Index of Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1965. N.Y.: Stark, 1968, 253
p.
Moskowitz, Sam. Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science
Fiction. N.Y.:
World, 1963.
------ . Seekers
of Tomorrow. N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1967,
450 p.
Rogers, Alva. A Requiem For
Astounding. Chicago:
Advent, 1964, 224 p.
Tuck, Donald H. Science
Fiction Handbook. Tasmania:
1959, 396 p.
Warner, Harry, Jr., All Our Yesterdays. Chicago: Advent, 1969, 336 p.
Wollheim, Donald A. The Universe Makers. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1971.
Abbott, Edwin,
Flatland, by, 76 Abraham Woursel European
Literature Award, 234 Ace Science Fiction Special
Series,
228 Ackerman, Forrest J,
179 Air-Conditioned Nightmare,
The,
58-73 Aldani, Lino, 235
Aldiss, Brian W., 3
Barefoot
in the Head, by,
127,
139 Galaxies Like Grains
of
Sand,
by, 130 Total Environment, by, 139 Visiting Amoeba, by, 169 The Dark Light Years, by, 175
Alpha Centauri, series, 235 Amazing Stories, magazine, 15,
109,
110, 114, 181, 199 Amis, Kingsley, 124 Analog, magazine,
143 Andersen, Hans Christian, 74 Apollo XI, 14,
35 Appeltoft, Alvar, 2 Archimedes, 33 Ariosto, Ludovico
Orlando
Furioso, by, 77 Arkham Sampler, fantasy
magazine, 96 Arnold, Edwin L.
Lieut.
Gulliver Jones, by,
101 Asimov, Isaac, 56, 131, 217
Foundation,
by, 51-52, 132
The
Caves of Steel, by,
121, 132
Marooned off Vesta, by, 131 The End of Eternity, by, 132
I, Robot, by,
132
The Rest of the Robots,
by, 132 The Naked Sun, by, 132 Understanding
Physics,
by, 131 Askild & Kamekull Forlag,
10, 234 Astor, John Jacob
A Journey in Other Worlds,
by, 39
Astounding, magazine,
114,
131, 240 Award(s), in sf Abraham Woursel
European Literature, 234 Big Heart, 222 First Fandom, 222 Hugo, 189, 190, 221, 222, 223
Babel, Isaac, 71 Bacon, Francis
The
New Atlantis, by, 53 Ballard, J. G., 69
Crystal World, by, 232
The Subliminal Man, by, 62-63
Barbarella, 187, 188 Barrault, Jean Louis, 90
Beades, 199 Beckford, William
Vathek, by, 82
An Arabian Tale, by, 82 Begum's Fortune, novel,
See: Industrialization Bellamy, Edward, 149
Looking
Backward, by, 20 Belloni, Antonio, 235
BEM's (Bug-Eyed Monsters) 14, 15, 84, 170, 171, 173, 174, 179
called Ores, 15
of the Andromeda nebula, 21
Bergerac, Savinien Cyrano de,
17, 29 Bergey, Earle, 146 Bergman, Ingrid, 90
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man, by,
117
Broken
Axiom, by, 131 Bibliography of Science Fiction (1964),
in Swedish, 9 Bignola, Robert
The
Vampire, by, 88
Bing, Jon, 234 Blake, William, 86 Blish, James
A Case of Conscience, by, 117
Bloom, Harold, 85 Bodeisen, Anders
Frysepunktet,
by, 234 Bond, James, 24, 35,
66, 67 Boye, Karin
Kallocain,
by, 59-60 Bradbury, Ray, 94,
112, 217
The October Country, by, 121
Dandelion Wine, by, 121
Fahrenheit 451, by, 121,
122
The Pedestrian, by, 121 Martian Chronicles, by, 122,
178 Bringsvaerd, Tor Age,
234 British Fabian Society, 53 Brothers Grimm, 74 Brown, Fredrik, 13
Angels ir Spaceships, by, 23
What
Mad Universe, by, 96
Brown, Raymond, Lamont, 88
Browning, Tod, 88 Bruckner, Winifried
Das Seltsame Fremde, by, 235
Brunner, John, 177
Stand on Zanzibar, by, 27 Times Without
Number, by,
27
The
Jagged Orbit, by,
29 Buck Rogers strips, 180, 181,
182 Budrys, Algis,
Dream
of Victory, by, 166
Bulmer, Kenneth, 2 Bunyan, John
Pilgrim's Progress, by, 27, 74 Burr, Chauncey
Memoir,
by, 90 Burroughs, Edgar
Rice, 101, 102, 103, 104 Under the Moons of Mars,
by, 101 Tarzan
novels, by, 102 At The Earth's Core, by, 102
Buder, Samuel
Erewhon,
by, 31 Byron, George
Gordon, Lord, 87
Cabell, James Branch, 75, 98,
99,
100, 110, 230 Biography
of the Life of
Manuel,
by, 99 Figures of Earth, by, 99,
100
The
Silver Stallion, by, 99
Jurgen,
by, 100 Calvino, Italo, 235
Camp, L. Sprague de, 97, 98 Campanella, Tomaso
The
City of the Sun, by,
49 Campbell, John W., 240, 241
Capelc, Karel
Rossum's Universal Robots, by, 40
War With the Newts, by, 40 Captain Future, magazine, 16 Camell, E. J., 2 CameD, John,
217, 230 Carr, Terry
New Worlds of Fantasy, by, 75 Carroll, Lewis
Alice in Wonderland, by, 74, 76
The Hunting of the Snork, by, 74
Carter, Lin, 95, 108 Cervantes, Miguel de,
Don Quixote, by, 77 Chaney, Lon, Jr.,
The Wolf Man, by, 89 Chesterton, G. K., 50 Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End, by, 130
The City and the Stars, by, 130
Colliers, magazine, 177 Collodi, C.
Pinoccio,
by, 76 Comet,
The, magazine, 219
Conquest, Robert, 124 Cosmic
Stories, magazine,
219 Cosmic Stories
Quarterly,
magazine, 219 Cosmopolitan Gazette,
publication, London, 171
Dahlquist-Ljungberg,
Ann
Margaret,
234 Daniel, Julij, 71 Dante, Alighieri
Divina
Commedia, by,
27, 74 Davidson, Avram
The
Phoenix and the Mirror,
by, 230 De Voto, Bernard, 21
Delany, Samuel R., 138, 230 Delarue, Jacques
The History of the Gestapo, by, 27, 74 Delblanc, Sven
Homunculus,
by, 234 Dick, Philip K.,
138, 230
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by,
167 Disch, Thomas M.
The
Genocides, by,
178 Dodd, Alan, 2 Dominik, Hans, 234 Donald Duck, 67
Donnelly, Ignatius, 70 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 91 Dunsany, Lord, 75, 96, 99
The Hoard of the Gibbelins,
by, 15
Eddison, E. R., 110 Elias, prophet, 31 Ellison, Harlan
The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the
World, by, 54 Endore, Guy
The Werewolf of Paris, by, 88
Famous
Monsters of Filmland, magazine,
179
Farmer, Philip José, 117 Sail
On, Sail On, by,
127 The Lovers, by, 155 Strange
Relations, by,
156 Feast Unknown, by, 160
Finney, Charles
The Circus of Dr. Lao, by, 75
First Fandom Award, 222 Flammarion,
Camille, 55 La Fin du Monde, by, 69 Ten Million Years Hence, by,
130 Flash Gordon, 180, 181-183
Fleming, Ian
Moonraker,
by, 35 Fleming, Victor
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by, 90 For the Flag, novel, 35 Fourier, F. M. C, 49 Frankenstein's
monster, 84, 85, 87
Futurian
Society of New York,
The, 220 Futuro,
magazine, 214
Galaxy, magazine, 206 Gemsback, Hugo, 8, 16, 17, 21,
45, 200-205, 217, 219, 239 Ralph 124C41+, by,
18 Gibbon, Edward
Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, by,
129 Gilgamesh, Sumer epic of, 74 Gladiator-at-Law, by Pohl &
Kombluth, 62, 65 Godwin, Francis
The Man in the Moone, by, 31
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Faust,
by, 86 Gonsales, Domingo
A Discourse
of a Voyage Thither, by, 31 Grandville, J. J., 76 Griffith, George
Honeymoon in Space, by, 39
Hamilton, Edmund
The
Comet Kings, by,
144 Hammer, Mike, 66 Hdpna,
magazine, 211, 212
Harborde, Philip J., 2 Harbou, Thea, von
Metropolis, by, 36
Harrison, Harry
Make Room! Make Room!
by, 27, 58 Bill, the Galactic Hero, by,
69, 117 Deathtvorld, by,
175 Hasselbalchs Fôrlag,
234 Hay, George, 2, 3
Heinlein, Robert A., 56, 65,
121, 133, 134 Let There be Light, by, 64 Future History Series, by,
64,
133 Starship Troopers,
by, 67,
68, 117, 133, 178 Magic, Inc., by, 96, 136 The Man Who Sold the
Moon, by, 133 Revolt in
2100, by, 134 By His Bootstraps, by, 125,
136
Farnham's
Freehold, by,
133 The Moon Is a Harsh
Mistress, by, 134, 135 Stranger in a Strange Land,
by, 135 Starman Jones, by,
135 Heins, H. H., 102 Heller, Joseph
Catch-22,
by, 230 Hemingway, Ernest,
138 Herschel, John, 92 Hesse, Hermann, 24 Steppenwolf, by, 230 Siddhartha, by, 230 Hilton, James, 51 Histoire comique des états et empires de la Lune, by, Rostand,
29 Histoire comique des états et empires du Soleil, by Rostand,
29 Hodgson, William Hope, 94 The
House on the Borderland, by, 94 The Night Land, by, 94
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 16,
234 Holberg, Ludwig
Nicolai Klimii Iter Sub-
terraneum,
by, 27, 131 Holten, Knud
Suma-X, by, 234
Homer, 14 Homunculi,
162 Horizons du
Fantastique,
magazine, 213,
225 Howard, Robert E., 97, 98,
106, 107 Hugin,
magazine, 201, 203 Huxley,
Aldous, 49, 53, 119 Brave New World, by, 27,
53, 59
International Scientific
Association, 219, 220
Invaders, The, TV
program, 190
Ionesco, Eugene,
75
Janson, Tove
Moomin books, by, 76 Jarry,
Alfred, 75, 136 Jensen, Axel
Epp, by, 234
Jersild, P. C, 234 Jules
Verne-Magasinet, magazine,
211
Kafka,
Franz, 229 Kalevala, Finnish epic, 86, 162
Karloff, Boris, 86 Karp, David
One, by, 62
Kindermann, Eberhard Christian Die
geschwinde Reise auf dem Luftschiff, by,
32, 33
Kipling, Rudyard, 36 Knight, Damon, 140 -Kombluth, Cyril, 27, 61,
140 Kuttner, Henry, 94
Ladies' Home Journal, 177 Lama, Francesco, 32, 33, 73 Land of the Giants, TV
program, 190 Landon, Michael, 89 Lang, Fritz
Dr.
Mabuse der Spieler
(film), by, 192 The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse
(film), by, 192 Fury (film),
by, 192 Lasswitz, Kurd, 234
Laurie, André
Les Exiles de
la Terre, by, 39
Leiber, Fritz, 94, 97, 103, 106,
107
Conjure Wife, by, 107
Gather,
Darkness, by, 107 Lern, Stanislaw, 233
Cor Serpentis, by, 214
Solaris,
237-239 Levehgi, Riccardo, 235 Lewis, Jerry, 90 Lewis, Matthew Gregory
The
Monk, by, 27, 80, 82 Lindsay, David, 110 Linné, Carl von
Iter
lapponicum, by, 33 Locke, Richard, 92 Locus, publication, 224 Lodge, David, 53 Lovecraft, H. P., 16, 94, 95
The Dream-Quest of Unknown
Kadath, by, 95
The Silver Key, by, 95
Through the Gates of the Suver Key, by, 95-96
Lucian of Samosata, 17, 170
Icaromenippos, by, 28
Looking Backward, by, 17,
20
Journey Through The
Air,
by, 28
A True Story, by, 28,
29 Lugosi, Bela, 88
Lundin, Claes, 50
Oxygen och Aromasia, by,
43,
144 Lundwall, Sam J., 9, 10, 11,
234
McCaffrey, Anne, 165
Womanly Talent, by, 154 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 206, 207, 214 Malaguti, Ugo, 235 Martinson,
Harry
Aniara, by, 117 Marvel Science
Stories,
magazine, 161 Matheson,
Richard
I am Legend, by, 88 Maturin, Charles
Melmoth
the Wanderer, 82
Maurois, Andre, 119
Fragments of a World History, by, 173 Melies, George
A Trip To The Moon (film), by, 191
Impossible Voyage (film), by, 191 Menippos, 28 Mercer, Archie, 2 Merritt, Abraham
The
Moon Pool, by,
109 Meyrink, Gustav
Der
Golem, by,
86 Midas, king, 23 Mines, Samuel, 233 Mir, publisher, 236 Modern Electrics, 17, 200 Molodaja Gvardija, publisher, 236 Mondo di Domani, series, 235 Montgolfier brothers, 33 Moomin
books, 113-114 Moorcock, Michael, 106, 160
The Stealer of Souls, by, 109
Stormbringer, by,
109 The Jewel in the Skull, by, 109
The Mad God's Amulet, by, 109
The Sword of the Dawn,
by, 109 The Runestaff, by,
109 Moore, Ward
Greener Than You Think,
by, 69
Bring the Jubilee, by, 117, 126
More, St. Thomas
Utopia,
by, 47-48 Moskowitz, Sam,
3, 133
Seekers of Tomorrow, by, 161
Mother Goose, 74
Motta, Luigi, 235 Mumau, F. W.
Nosferatu (film), by, 88, 192
Naviglio, Luigi, 235 Nebula award, 138, 223 Nebuty Science Fiction,
magazine, 210 New Fandom, group, 221 New Worlds, magazine, 210 Nova SF, magazine, 235 Nowlan, Philip
Armageddon, 2419, by, 181 The
Airlords of Han, by, 181
Nueva Dimension, magazine, 71, 213
Offenbach, Jacques
The Tales of Hoffmann, by, 162
Oltre il Cielo, magazine, 214 Orwell, George 1984, by, 59 Owen, R., 49
Peake, Mervyn, 98, 110, 230 Plato, 46
The
Republic, by, 45
See:
Utopia Playboy, 145, 156 Plunkett, E. J. M. D., 98 Poe, Edgar
Allan,
Tales
of the Grotesque and
Arabesque,
by, 92 Ligeia, by, 90 The Raven, by, 92 The Murders in the Rue
Morgue,
by, 91 The Man That Was Used
Up,
by, 91 The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar,
by, 91 The Last Conversation of
a Somnabule, by, 91 The Unparalleled Adventure
of One Hans Pfael, by, 91 The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym's Adventures, by, 91, 92 MeUonta
Tauta, by,
92 The Fall of the House of
Usher,
by, 92, 93 The Cask of Amontillado,
by, 92 Pohl, Frederik, 138 Star, sf series, 209 Ninth
Galaxy Reader, by,
25, 61
The
Midas Plague, by, 137
Day
Million, by, 154
Polanski, Roman
Dance of Vampires, by, 88 Polidori, J. W.
The Vampire, by, 87 Popular Mechanics, 17 Popular Record of Modern
Science, 91 Presley, Elvis, 90 Price, E. Hoffman
A Memory of R. L. Howard, by, 107
Price, Vincent, 93
Queen
Victoria, 33
Rabelais, François
Les Livres des faictz et
diets héroïques
du noble
Pantagruel,
31 Radio Sweden, 10 Rand, Ayn, 135 Rasch,
Carlos, 239
Ready, William
Understanding Tolkien, by,
111
Réage, Pauline
Histoire d'O, by, 80 Renoir,
Jean
Le
Testament du Docteur Cordelier,
by, 90 Rey, Lester Del,
Helen
O'Loy, by, 165 Reynolds, Mack
Subversive, by,
64
Frigid
Fracas, by, 67 Rhodan, Perry, 235 Rogers, Alva, 119, 215 Rogue, magazine, 154 Roshwald, Mordecai
Level
7, by, 69 Rostand, Edmund, 29 Rundberg, Arvid,
234 Russell, Bertrand,
240 Russell, Eric Frank
Wasp, by, 117
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 159
Sade, Marquis de
L'Idée sur les Romans, by, 78
One Hundred Days in Sodom, by, 27, 80, 83 Saint-Simon, C. H., 49 Sandrelli, Sandro, 235 Saturday Evening Post, magazine, 177
Sci-Fi, magazine,
214 Science Correspondence Club, 219
Science Fiction Forum, 227 Science Fiction: Fran
begynnelsen till vara
dagar, 10 Science Fiction League, The,
220
Science Fiction Nytt,
journal (Swedish), 9, 225 Science Fiction Review, 224 Science Fiction Writers of
America,
217, 223 Search
the Sky, novel
by Pohl and Kombluth,
149
Secret Agent X-9 series, 180 Serling, Rod, 190 SF Times (German),
225 SFWA Bulletin,
224 Shaver, Richard S., 109
Sheckley, Robert, 138, 229 Street of Dreams, Feet of
Clay,
by, 54 The Tenth Victim, by, 65 Mindswap, by, 127, 229 A Ticket to Tranai, by, 150 Dimension
of Miracles, by,
229
Shelley, Mary
Wollstonecraft, 83-85
Frankenstein, by, 27, 85, 162
Shelley Perry Byshee, 86
Shirley, Robert
Teenocracy, by, 59
Shuster, Joseph, 219
Siegal, Jerome, 219
Silverberg, Robert, 138 Up the Line, by, 126 The Iron Chancellor, by, 164
Simak, Clifford d.
The Werewolf Principle, by, 89
City, by, 164 Time
and Again, by,
167 Sjdanov, L., 2
Smith,
Clark Ashton, 97, 106
Zothique,
by, 108 Smith, E. E., 16,
240
The
Skylark, by,
120 Soviet Literature, magazine, 214
Space Patrol, TV program, 190
Space Pocket Books, 235 Speculation,
publication, 224 Spillane,
Mickey, 49, 184 Spinrad, Norman
Bug Jack Barron, by, 232 Stapledon, Olaf
Last and First Men, by, 129, 169
The Star Maker, by,
129
Odd John, by, 168
Sinus,
by, 168 Star
Trek, TV program, 189-190
Startling Stories, magazine,
16, 146, 148, 199 Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, by,
89
Stimpson, Catherine R.
J.
R. R. Tolkien, by, 112
Stoker, Bram
Dracula,
by, 87, 89, 192 Storm,
Jannick, 234 Strugatsky, Arkadi, 71 Strugatsky, Boris, 71 Sturgeon, Theodore,
25, 167, 175
Venus Plus X, by, 54, 157, 167
The World Well Lost, by, 157
Super-Science-Fiction, 179 Superman,
magazine, 180, 183, 184,
185
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels, by, 31
Tarzan, 101, 103 Tempo-Magasinet, magazine, 212
Tenn, William
Venus
and the Seven Sexes,
by, 155 The Masculine Revolt, by, 155
Betelgeuse Bridge, by, 177 Of Men
and Monsters, by,
178
Tertz, Abram, 71
The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction, 207 The
Space Merchants, by,
Pohl
& Kombluth, 62 Thiusen, Ismar
Looking
Forward, by,
51 Thomas, Dylan, 138 Thrilling
Wonder Stories,
magazine, 16, 114, 131,
199
Time Tunnel, TV program, 190
Tolkien,
J. R. R., 98, 110, 111,
122,
230 The Fellowship of the
Ring, trilogy, by, 15, 22,
56,
76, 110, 113 Tracy, Spencer, 90 Tsiolkovskij, Konstantin, 236 Tucker, Wilson
Wild
Talent, by,
168 Turner, Lana, 90 Twilight
Zone, TV program,
190
Utopia,
magazine, 213 Valentino, Rudolph, 87
Vance, Jack
The
Dying Earth, by,
108 Vector, publication, 224 Veda books, 27 Verne, Jules, 3, 7
Journey to the Center of the
Earth,
by, 34, 102 The Ice Sphinx, by, 92 From the Earth to the
Moon,
by, 34 Propeller Island, by, 35 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea,
by, 34 Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World, by, 34 Mysterious
Island, by, 34
Vian, Boris, 136, 229 Vision
of Tomorrow,
magazine, 210 Vogt, A. E. van
Black Destroyer, by, 131 Shm, by, 168 Voltaire, F. M.
Micromegas,
by, 27, 31 Vonnegut, Kurt,
Jr.
Welcome to the Monkey
House, by, 156
Wagner,
Richard
Der Ring der Nibelungen, by, 98
Walpole, Horace, 82, 145 The Castle of Otranto, 77
Watkins, Peter, 67
Wegener, Paul
Golem (film),
by, 192
Weinbaum, Stanley G.
A Martian Odyssey, by, 174
Weird Fantasy, magazine, 186
Weird
Heroic Fantasy, magazine,
107-108
Weird Science, magazine, 186
Weird Tales, magazine, 16,
94, 97, 106 Welles, Orson, 21 Wells, H. G.,
16, 17, 24 The War
of the Worlds,
by, 21, 37, 171 The Time Machine, by, 36, 52
The
Island of Dr. Moreau,
by, 36, 89 The
War in the Air, by,
37 The Shape of Things
to
Come,
by, 53 Men Like Gods, by, 53, 59 A Modem Utopia, by, 53 When the Sleeper Wakes,
by, 52
The
World Set Free, by,
40 The Land Ironclads, by, 39
White, James All Judgment Fled, by, 176 Hospital Station, by, 176, 178
Wiene, Robert
Das
Kabtnett von Doktor Caligari, by, 192 Wilkins, John, Bishop, 14, 31 A Discourse concerning a New World and Another
Planet, by,
13, 132
Williamson, Jack
The Legion of Space, by, 119
Wollheim, Donald A., 2, 5, 11, 217
Mimic,
by, 128 Pocket Book of Science
Fiction, The, by, 206
Universe Makers, The, by,
8,9
Wonder
Stories, magazine,
220
World Science Fiction Convention at
Heidelberg, 212,
224
World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis, 221
Wyndham, John
Consider Her Ways, by, 151
Chrysalids,
by, 168
Yefremov,
Ivan
Andromeda, by, 236
Zamyatin, Yevgeny We, by, 71, 236
Zauberkreis
SF, 235
Zelazny, Roger, 230
He
Who Shapes, by, 138 The Dream Master, by 138
Damnation Alley, by, 230
SCIENCE FICTION
IS THE "IN" THING IN THE WORLD TODAY...
SCIENCE FICTION
IS WHAT'S DOING IN TODAY'S HEADLINES
AND TOMORROW'S BIG NEWS...
"Lundwall
presents both a history of science fiction and a commentary. He covers it in
all its aspects: books, magazines, comics, fans and fandom, juvenilia, series
characters, and literary giants . . Reading him is
educational, stimulating, and exciting. I commend this book to everyone who
reads science fiction or who wants to know more about it."
—DONALD A. WOLLHBIM