< previous page page_148 next page >

Page 148
science fiction is so full of stories in which the technical data are correct and soundly handled, but the people are so many zero-eyed integersas blank-faced, but not a hundredth part as meaningful, as the Kuttners' shining robots.
Damon Knight, ''Genius to Order: Kuttner and Moore," In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction (1956; rev. ed. Chicago: Advent, 1967), pp. 14445
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
James Gunn
What the Kuttners brought to science fiction, which broadened it and helped it evolve, was a concern for literary skill and culture. The Kuttners expanded the techniques of science fiction to include techniques prevalent in the mainstream; they expanded its scope to include the vast cultural tradition available outside science fiction (. . .) The significance of the Kuttners' work rests in the fact that much of the development in science fiction over the past twenty years has come along the lines they pioneered.
This is not to say that everything the Kuttners wrote (not even the stories they wrote for Astounding) was without precedent; certainly man's cultural heritage and a concern for style were a part of science fiction in its beginnings, in the work, for instance, of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, both of whom, directly or indirectly, benefited from a classical English education. And there was H. G. Wells. But those classical and literary traditions were lost in the science fiction ghetto created by Hugo Gernsback in 1926; they were replaced by newer pulp traditions of action and adventure, and eventually of scientific accuracy and informed speculation about one science after another, beginning with geography and mesmerism and progressing through chemistry, electricity, physics, and mathematics to computers, psychology, sociology, and biology.
Many areas of human experience, as contrasted with human knowledge, were considered unimportant or inappropriate to science fiction, either consciouslyas in the case of sexual relationships and such other basic functions as eating and excretingor unconsciously in areas in which writers were unaware or uneasy, such as cultural traditions and stylistic methods.
In the latter areas the Kuttners moved with growing skill and familiarity. Insofar as one can disentangle the gestalts they created, Moore seems to have contributed most of the unusual romantic involvements and perhaps all the classical references to myth, legend, and literature which served to

 
< previous page page_148 next page >