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Theodore Sturgeon's "Macrocosmic God" (1941) finds itself sucked into the social contradictions that Gernsback avoided in his depiction of the innocent genius. Sturgeon tells about a genius, James Kidder, who, after some brilliant inventions of his own, increases his output by developing a race of tiny, intelligent creatures, "Neoterics." He keeps the Neoterics in a large, complex laboratory and makes them evolve rapidly. By making them solve catastrophic crises that he, the "god" of their tiny world, originates, he forces them to invent materials and techniques that he then offers to the human world. Kidder's banker, Conant, who begins as an ally, later tries to use Kidder's invention, a power transmitter, to take over the United States government. When Kidder tries to stop him, Conant attacks Kidder's island with an armed force. Kidder and his Neoterics finally defeat Conant and, with an engineer named Johansen, retreat from the world beneath an impenetrable dome. The story ends with an anxiety, familiar from horror tales, about what may happen when the Neoterics decide to leave their dome. (. . .) |
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At one level we are observing a confusion arising from the overlap of two aspects of capitalism. The entrepreneurial banker and the inventor, both essential to the mythography of technological development, represent different phases of it. The story evades the contradiction involved in admiring both of them by seeing Kidder as a social hero and Conant as a selfish villain. The good-evil dichotomy solves at the narrative level what is a moral puzzle: as Fredric Jameson puts it, how can my enemy "be thought of as being evil (that is, as other than myself and marked by some absolute difference), when what is responsible for his being so characterized is quite simply the identity of his own conduct with mine." This sort of split, as Jameson argues, is characteristic of romance. The romance narrative, which SF is often considered, with its absolute oppositions based on identity, serves an important ideological function by validating on moral grounds an antipathy whose real origin is political. After all, though Sturgeon's story seems to subscribe to the idea that Conant is a social leech while Kidder is a producer, at another level, hidden from all the world, the genius, secretly manipulating and robbing his Neoterics, is just as parasitical as the banker. (. . .) |
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The deep ambiguity in Sturgeon's story, whether conscious or not, enacts a crucial dilemma. While it cannot give up the idea of geniusafter all, Kidder, with his little world, is much like a young SF authorthe story also acknowledges the socially destructive aspect of the genius. By using |
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