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Science Fiction Studies (SFS) is a scholarly journal that publishes articles and book reviews on science fiction (sf), broadly defined. It appears three times per year (March, July, November) and averages 150-250 pages. A representative issue contains 5-6 articles ranging in length from 5,000 to 15,000 words, 2-3 review-essays, and two dozen book reviews covering scholarly works about sf, plus a “Notes and Correspondence” section. Special issues follow the same format but are usually guest-edited.
Science Fiction Studies (SFS) is a scholarly journal that publishes articles and book reviews on science fiction (sf), broadly defined. It appears three times per year (March, July, November) and averages 150-250 pages. A representative issue contains 5-6 articles ranging in length from 5,000 to 15,000 words, 2-3 review-essays, and two dozen book reviews covering scholarly works about sf, plus a “Notes and Correspondence” section. Special issues follow the same format but are usually guest-edited.
Science Fiction Studies (SFS) is a scholarly journal that publishes articles and book reviews on science fiction (sf), broadly defined. It appears three times per year (March, July, November) and averages 150-250 pages. A representative issue contains 5-6 articles ranging in length from 5,000 to 15,000 words, 2-3 review-essays, and two dozen book reviews covering scholarly works about sf, plus a “Notes and Correspondence” section. Special issues follow the same format but are usually guest-edited.
Copyright ? 1974 by R.D. Mullenand DarkoSuvin Stanislaw Lem. Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature ... 227 Robert M. Philmus. Wells and Borges and the Labyrinths of Time ... 237 Robert H. Canary. Utopianand Fantastic Dualities in Robert Graves's Watch the North Wind Rise ... 248 DarkoSuvin. Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Recoil inthe Age of Anticipation: A Chapter inthe History of SF... 255 Change, SF, and Marxism: Openor Closed Universes?... 269 Mack Reynolds. What DoYou Mean-Marxism? ... 270 Franz Rottensteiner. InRebuttal... 271 FredricJameson. InRetrospect ... 272 Some Critical Works onSF. Peter Fitting. TwoNew Books from France... 276 Franz Rottensteiner. SomeGermanWritings onSF... 279 AliceCarol Gaar. TwoNew Books from Germany... 285 Peter Ohlin. TheDilemma of SFFilm Criticism... 287 SunkenAtlantis and the Utopia Question. C.R. La Bossiere. TheScarlet Empire: TwoVisions inOne... 290 R.D. Mullen. TheSunkenWorld: AlsoTwoVisions inOne... 292 Curtis C. Smith. The Books of Olaf Stapledon: A Chronological Survey ... 297 Notes, Reports, and Correspondence. TheSteam Manof thePrairies (RDM)... 300 23 "Classics" of SF: TheHyperionReprints (RDM) ... 300 A ResponsetoDamonKnight (Franz Rottensteiner) ... 305 Wells, Verne, and Science(Alex Eisenstein) ... 305 InResponsetoMr. Eisenstein(DS) ... 306 Four Complaints (Joanna Russ) ... 307 InResponsetoMs. Russ (RDM)... 308 TheTuck Encyclopedia (RDM) ... 309 A C.S. Lewis Secondary Bibliography (RDM) ... 309 MoreSpecial Issues onUtopias (DS) ... 309 Arthur C. Clarkeand All ThoseAwards (RDM) ... 310 SFCriticism inRomania (DS) ... 310 Among theContributors to##3-4 (RDM) ... 310 Index toVolume 1... 311 This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:38 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 226 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES EDITORS R.D. Mullen, Indiana StateUniversity DarkoSuvin, McGill University ASSOCIATE EDITOR Charles Nicol, ISU CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Ursula K. LeGuin, Portland EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS MarcAngenot, McGill University James Blish, Harpsden GaleE. Christianson, ISU Peter Fitting, University of Toronto H. BruceFranklin, MenloPark Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Mark R. Hillegas, SouthernIllinois University FredricJameson, University of California, SanDiego David Ketterer, Concordia University James B. Misenheimer, ISU Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading Robert M. Philmus, Concordia University Franz Rottensteiner, Vienna David N. Samuelson, California StateUniversity, Long Beach Donald F. Theall, McGill University SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESis published threetimes a year (March, July, November) intheDepartment of English and Journalism, Indiana StateUni- versity, TerreHaute, Indiana 47809. Editorial correspondencemay bedirected either toR.D. Mullenat TerreHauteor toDarkoSuvin, Department of English, McGill University, POB 6070 StationA, Montreal, Que., Canada H3C 3G1. SUBSCRIPTION: $5.00 a year intheUSA; $5.50 elsewherevia surfacemail; $8.50 overseas via airmail. Singlecopies, $2.00; overseas via airmail, $3.25. SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESpublishes articles resulting from thestudy of sciencefiction-including utopianfiction, but not, except for purposes of com- parisonand contrast, supernatural or mythological fantasy. Articles intended for Science-FictionStudies should bewritteninEnglish, accompanied by an abstract of fewer than150 words, and submitted intwocopies conforming totheMLA stylesheet except (1) that volume-pagereferences should follow thestyleof theMLA Bibliography, and (2) that whenthework inquestion has appeared invarious formats and henceinvarious paginations, references should benot topages but tochapters or such other divisions as theauthor has provided. 5:4 = Volume5, Page4. ?5 = Chapter 5-or the5th of thesmallest divisions numbered continuously throughout thework. ?5:4 = Book 5, Chapter 4-or somesimilar combination. #5 = Primary Work Number 5. S5 = Secondary Work Number 5. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:38 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TODOROV'S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE 227 Stanislaw Lem Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature Translated from the Polish by Robert Abernathy Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, let this attempt to ruin its reputation have as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux: At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the "diagonal" or "formalistic" sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately it ap- pears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology-and not even a useful one. This chatter that is now called structuralism has apparently dealt a mortal blow to that rudimentary scientific beginning.' I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought-one moreover which has spawned divergent tendencies, since here every author has his own "vision" of the subject-I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov's book, The Fantastic.2 THE HISTORY OF THE DEGENERATION of a conceptual apparatus that origi- nated in mathematical linguistics, after it was mechanically transplanted into the domain of metaliterature, has yet to be written. It will show how defenseless logical concepts become when they are torn out of contexts in which they were operationally justified, how easy it is, by parasitizing on science properly speaking, to bemuse humanists with pretentious claptrap, disguising one's actual powerlessness in a foreign field beneath a putatively unassailable logical precision. This will be a rather grim, but instructive, history of how unambiguous concepts turn into foggy ones, formal necessity into arbitrariness, syllogisms into paralogisms. It will, in short, deal with a retrograde trend in French critical thought, which, aiming at nothing less than logical infallibility in theory-building, transformed itself into an incor- rigible dogmatism. Structuralism was to be a remedy for the immaturity of the humanities as manifested in their lack of sovereign criteria for deciding the truth or falsehood of theoretical generalizations. The formal structures of linguistics are mathematical in origin, and are, indeed, numerous and diverse, cor- responding to branches of both pure and classical mathematics ranging from probability and set theories to the theory of algorithms. The inadequacy of all these leads linguists to employ new models, e.g. from the theory of games, since this furnishes models of conflicts, and language is, at its higher, se- mantic levels, entangled in irreducible contradictions. These important tidings have, however, not yet reached those literary scholars who have taken over a small fraction of the arsenal of linguistics and endeavor to model literary works using conflict-free deductive structures of an uncommonly primitive type-as we shall demonstrate on the example of the Todorov book. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 228 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES THIS AUTHOR BEGINS BY DISPOSING of some objections which arise in con- nection with constructing a theory of literary genres. Deriding the investi- gator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works, he asserts-appealing to the authority of Karl Popper-that for the maker of generalizations it suffices to be acquaint- ed with a representative sample from the set of objects to be studied. Popper, wrongly invoked, is in no wise to blame, since representativeness of a sample in the natural sciences and in the arts are two quite different matters. Every normal tiger is representative for that species of cats, but there is no such thing as a "normal story." The "normalization" of tigers is effected by natural selection, so the taxonomist need not (indeed should not) evaluate these cats critically. But a student of literature who is in like fashion axiologically neutral is a blind man confronting a rainbow, for, whereas there do not exist any good organisms as distinguished from bad ones, there do exist good and worthless books. And in the event, Todorov's "sample," as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy, and all of SF is repre- sented by two short stories; we get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Potocki, Bal- zac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka-and that is about all. In addition, there are two crime-story authors. Todorov declares, further, that he will pass over problems of esthetics altogether in silence, since these are beyond the present reach of his method. Thirdly, he debates the relationship of the Species and its Specimen. In nature, he says, the occurrence of a mutation does not modify the species: knowing the species tiger, we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger. The feedback effect of mutations upon the species is so slow that it can be ignored. In art it is different: here every new work alters the species as it existed heretofore, and is a work of art just insofar as it departs from a specific model. Works which do not satisfy this condition belong to popular or mass literature, such as detective stories, slushy love stories, SF, etc. Agreeing thus far with Todorov, I see what is in store for his method as a result of this state of affairs: the more inferior and para- digmatically petrified the texts which it undertakes to anatomize, the more readily it will reveal structures. Todorov, not surprisingly, omits to draw this conclusion. Further, he discusses the question of whether one should investigate genres which have arisen historically or those which are theoretically possible. The latter strike me as coming to the same thing as a history of mankind a priori, but since it is easier to formulate a foolish idea concisely than it is to refute it concisely, I will let this pass. I will however remark here that there is a difference between taxonomy in nature and in culture which structuralism overlooks. The naturalist's acts of classification, say of insects or of vertebrates, evoke no reaction on the part of that which is classified. A futurologist might say that Linnaean taxonomy is not subject to the Oedipus effect (Oedipus got into trouble by reacting to a diagnosis of his fate). On the other hand, the literary scholar's acts of classification are feedback- linked to that which is classified, i.e. the Oedipus effect manifests itself in literature. Not straightforwardly, to be sure. It is not the case that writers, upon reading a new theory of genres, run straight to their studios to refute it by means of their next books. The linkage is more roundabout. Sclerosis of paradigms, as a stiffening of intergeneric barriers, arouses authors to a reaction which expresses itself, among other ways, in the hybridization of genres and the attack on traditional norms. Theoreticians' labors are a catalyst which accelerates this process, since their generalizations make it This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TODOROV'S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE 229 easier for writers to grasp the entire space of creative activity, with its in- herent limitations. Thus the student of genres who establishes their boundaries causes writers to rebel against them-he produces a feedback loop by the very act of classification. To describe limitations on creativity thus amounts to drawing up a self-defeating prognosis. What could be more tempting than to write what theory prohibits? The constriction of the imagination which is inherent in a dogmatic mentality, such as is represented by the structuralist, manifests itself in the belief that what he has found to be barriers to creativity can never be transgressed by anyone. Perhaps there exist intransgressible structures of creativity, but structuralism has not come within reach of any such. Rather, what it proclaims to us as bounds of creativity is really quite an antique piece of furniture, to wit the bed of Procrustes, as we shall show. COMING TO MATTERS OF SUBSTANCE, Todorov first of all demolishes past attempts at defining the fantastic. After crossing off the efforts of Northrop Frye, he lights into Roger Caillois, who had the bad luck to write that a "touchstone of the fantastic" is "the impression of irreducible strangeness" (p. 35). According to Caillois, jeers Todorov, a work's genre depends on the sang-froid of its reader: if he is frightened, then we have to do with the (uncanny) fantastic, but if he keeps his presence of mind, then the work must needs be reclassified from the standpoint of the theory of genres. We will speak in the proper place of how the scoffer has here left his own method exposed to attack. Todorov distinguishes three aspects of the literary work: the verbal, the syntactic and the semantic, making no secret of the fact that these were formerly known as style, composition and theme. But their invariants have traditionally and mistakenly been sought "on the surface" of texts; Todorov declares that he will look for structures on a deep level, as abstract relations. Northrop Frye, suggests Todorov, might say that the forest and the sea form a manifestation of an elementary structure. Not so-these two phenomena manifest an abstract structure of the type of the relation between statics and dynamics. Here we first come upon the fruits of spurious methodological sophistication, that congenital trait of structuralism, for it is plain to see what our author is seeking: oppositions which come to light on a level of high abstraction. Now, this one is wide of the mark, because statics is not opposed to dynamics but is a special case of it, namely a limiting case. This is a small matter, but a weighty problem lies behind it, since it is in the same way that Todorov constructs his integral structure for fantastic literature. This, by the structuralist's decree, consists of a one-dimensional axis, along which are sit- uated sub-genres that are mutually exclusive in a logical sense. This is portrayed by Todorov's diagram: "uncanny: fantastic-uncanny: fantastic- marvelous: marvelous" (p. 44). What is the "fantastic"? It is, Todorov explains, the hesitation of a being who knows only natural laws in the face of the supernatural. In other words, the fantastic character of a text resides in a transient and volatile state during the reading of it, one of indecision as to whether the narrative belongs to a natural or a supernatural order of things. The "pure" uncanny amazes, shocks, terrifies, but does not give rise to indecision (of the kind which we would call ontological). This is the place of the horror story which presents occurrences that are frightful, extraordinary, but nevertheless rationally possible. This genre extends off the diagram to the left, merging into "ordinary" literature-as a transitional link our theore- tician mentions Dostoevski. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 230 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES The fantastic-uncanny already gives occasion to the vacillations that evoke the sense of the fantastic. This is a tale the events in which are, as its reader at first supposes, brought about by the intervention of the Super- natural. Its epilog, however, furnishes a surprising rational explanation. (Here belongs, for example, the Manuscrit trouve a Saragosse.) The "fantastic-marvelous" work is just the other way round-it supplies in the end explanations of an extramundane, irrational order, as in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's V6ra, inasmuch as the conclusion of this story forces one to acknowledge that the dead woman really rose from the grave. And finally the "pure" marvelous, which again does not give rise to any vacillations between mutually exclusive types of ontic systems, has all of four subdivisions: (a) the "hyperbolic marvelous," stemming from narrative ex- travagance, as in the voyages of Sinbad, where he speaks of serpents capable of swallowing elephants; (b) the "exotic marvelous": here too Sinbad serves Todorov's purpose, when he says that the Roc had legs like oak trees-this is not a zoological absurdity, since to long-ago readers such an avian form may have seemed "possible"; (c) the "instrumental marvelous"-the instru- ments are fabulous objects such as the lamp or the ring of Aladdin; (d) and finally the fourth type of the marvelous is constituted by the "scientific," i.e. science fiction: "these narratives, starting from irrational premises, link the 'facts' they contain in a perfectly logical manner" (pp. 56-57). Or: "The initial data are supernatural: robots, extraterrestrial beings, the whole interplane- tary context" (p. 172). And finally: "Here the supernatural is explained in a rational manner, but according to laws which contemporary science does not acknowledge" (p. 56). The scientific bibliography of the theory of "robots" forms a thick volume; there exists a world-renowned organization of astrophysicists (CETI) con- cerned with searching for signals emitted by Todorov's "supernatural beings," i.e. by extraterrestrial creatures; for our theoretician even the "interplanetary background" possesses supernatural properties. Let us however regard all these qualifications as slips of the pen. We may as well do so, since Todorov's theory would be fine if it contained only such defects. As we know, Todorov calls the fantastic a transitional boundary state on an axis whose opposite extremes signify the rational system of Nature and the irrational order of marvels. For a work to manifest its fantastic character, it must be read literally, from the standpoint of naive realism, thus neither poetically nor allegorically. These two categories, according to Todorov, exclude one another with logical necessity, hence fantastic poetry or fantastic allegory is always impossible. This second categorial axis is perpendicular to the first. Let us clarify these relationships on a "micro- example" of our own, given by a single simple sentence. The sentence "A black cloud swallowed the sun" can be taken, first of all, as a poetic metaphor (a thoroughly trite one, but that is beside the point). The cloud, we know, was only figuratively compared to a being capable of devouring the sun, since in fact it merely hid it from view. Furthermore, it is possible, by dint of contextual suggestions, to substitute for the cloud, say, falsehood, and for the sun, truth. The sentence becomes an allegory: it says that falsehood may obscure truth. Again, this is a platitude, but the relations which hold are clearly apparent, and that is what we are after. Now if instead we take the sentence literally, some uncertainties emerge which make it possible for indecision and, by the same token, the fantastic to result. The cloud, we know, "actually swallowed the sun"-but in what order of events, the natural or the marvelous? If it gulped it down as a This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TODOROV'S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE 231 fairy-tale dragon might, then we find ourselves in a fairy tale, in the "pure marvelous." But if it engulfed the sun as did a certain cosmic cloud in the novel The Black Cloud by the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, we shift to SF. In this novel the cloud is made of cosmic dust, it is a "cybernetic organism" and it engulfed the sun because it feeds on stellar radiation. The explanation acquires rationality as a hypothetical extrapolation from such disciplines as the theory of self-organizing systems, the theory of evolution, etc. To be sure, the results of our classification do not coincide with Todorov's, since for him SF is irrationalism embodied in pseudoscience. There is no point to arguing about Hoyle's Black Cloud. It is enough to note that SF is nourished by scientific revelations-e.g. in the aftermath of the heart trans- plants there appeared swarms of fictional works which described criminal gangs snatching hearts from the breasts of young people on behalf of rich oldsters. Even if this is. improbable, it assuredly does not belong to any supernatural order of things. But after all, arbitration might reconcile the conflicting viewpoints by effecting, say, within the scope of Todorov's axis, a translation of some titles, at least, toward the pole of the Rational. Things get worse when it comes to subgenres of the fantastic for which there is no place at all on Todorov's axis. To what genre should Borges' "Tres versiones de Judas" be assigned? In this work Borges invented the fictional heresy of a Scandinavian theologian, according to which Judas, not Jesus, was the true Redeemer. This is not a "marvelous" tale-no more than any genuine heresy such as the Manichean or the Pelagian. It is not an apocryphon, for an apocryphon pretends to be an authentic original, while Borges' text does not try to conceal its literary nature. It is not an allegory, nor is it poetry, but, since nobody ever proclaimed such an apostasy, the matter cannot be placed in the order of real events. Quite obviously we have to do here with an imaginary heresy, that is with fantastic theology. Let us generalize this interesting case. Let us recognize unprovable propositions, such as metaphysical, religious or ontological assertions, as forming an "actual religious credo," a confession of faith, the affirmation of a world view, if they have entered in just this guise into the repository of the historic civilizations. From an immanent standpoint it cannot be discerned from any such proposition whether it was uttered with the conviction that things are really as it claims, or whether it was enunciated non-seriously (in "ludic" fashion, thus non-assertively). If no philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer had ever existed and if Borges had invented in a story a doctrine called "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," we would accept this as a bit of fiction, not of the history of philosophy. But of what kind of fiction, indeed? Of fantastic philosophy, because it was published non-assertively. Here is a literature of imaginary ideas, of fictional basic values, of other civili- zations-in a word, the fantasy of the "abstract." On Todorov's axis there is likewise no place for fantastic history, which did not happen but might have. This is a matter of so-called PF (political fiction), telling of what might have been if Japan rather than the USA had fabricated the atomic bomb, if the Germans had won World War II, and the like. These are not uncanny tales-at any rate no more so than what has actually happened in the present century-and they are not marvelous, since it would hardly have taken a miracle to make Japanese physicists go to work building reactors, and also there is no question of the reader's being unsure about whether the narrated events are rational or irrational-and yet in just this way objective worlds are constructed, the nonexistence of which in past, present or future is an irrefragable certainty. So what sort of books are these? Beyond a doubt, ones which fabricate a fantastic universal history. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 232 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Thus our Procrustes has not made place on his meager axis even for actually existing varieties of the fantastic-let alone "theoretically possible" kinds, for which there is a fortiori no room in his bed of torture. LET US NOW TAKE A CLOSER LOOK at Todorov's axis. It is of logical an- cestry. The structuralist is indebted to the linguists, and they in turn adopted this simplest structure of exclusion from set theory, in that here the principle of the excluded middle holds: an element either belongs to a set or it does not, and 45% membership in a set is impossible. Todorov ascribes to this axis a fundamental, because definitional, significance on the highest level of abstraction. However, the essential thing is not the axis but the reader's act of decision. Reading a literary work indeed calls for decisions-in fact not just one, but an ordered set of them, as the resultant of which the genre classification of the text comes about. The reader's decisions do not oscillate in only one dimension. Assuming as a working hypothesis that these are al- ways decisions with respect to simple (binary) alternatives, thus dichotomous, one can enumerate such additional axes as: (a) Earnestness: irony. Irony is calling a statement in question, either its linguistic level (this has been done stylistically by Gombrowicz) or its ob- jective level. As a rule irony is in some measure reflexive. But lest the "deflation" of the utterance should become self-destruction on its part, this tactic stabilizes the reader's hesitancy, or renders futile the attempt at a definitive diagnosis with respect to the designated opposition. It achieves its optimum durability when the separation of an "ironic component" from a "serious component" in the text is not feasible. "Tres versiones de Judas" is of just this kind. (b) Autonomous (reflexive) text : relative text (referred to something outside itself). Todorov's "allegory" is a bag into which countless hetero- geneous matters are stuffed. Culturally local (ethnocentric) allegory is some- thing different from universal allegory. What is allegorical in the author's cultural sphere may be "mere entertainment" or "pure fantasy" for ethnically alien readers, in line with the saying: "Wer den Dichter will verstehen, muss in Dichters Lande gehen." The symbolism peculiar to Japanese prose may be unrecognizable by us, for precisely this reason. And again, symbolic character of a text does not necessarily make it allegorical. Whatever is a normative symbol (pertaining to taboo, say) of a given culture is by that very fact neither arbitrary, not fantastic, nor "imaginary" for that culture's mem- bers. Whether a given text is autonomous or relative is determined by the community of culture between the author and his readers. (c) Text as cryptogram: text as literal message. This is a variant of the foregoing opposition. The difference between the two is that in the type (b) opposition it is a matter of relations among objects (events), but in the type (c) opposition one of (linguistic) relations among utterances. Allegory is a sort of generalization signalled by events-objects (a man, as by Kafka, turns into an insect). The content of a cryptogram, on the other hand, can be anything, e.g. another cryptogram. From the fact that cryptograms exist it does not fol- low that everything is a cryptogram. From the fact that in certain cultures a part is played by themes concealed under relationships (social, familial) it does not follow that in every culture its relational character (=its structure) must be a camouflage for meanings concealed in this fashion. This is why one feels a cognitive disappointment in reading Levi-Strauss, because one cannot discover any reason, psychological, social, or logical, responsible for some meanings' functioning in the community in overt relationships (i.e. ones pub- licly called by their names), whereas others are "hidden" in the network of This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TODOROV'S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE 233 occurring relations and have to be reconstructed by abstraction. Here for eth- nological structuralism there lies in wait the same bottomless pitfall that menaces psychoanalysis, since as in psychoanalysis it is possible to impute to the analysand's every word the status of a "mask" concealing another, deeper content, so in structuralism it is always possible to hold that what occurs as relations in a culture is inconclusive and unimportant, because it repre- sents a "camouflage" for other concepts, those which will only be brought to light by the abstract model. Neither of these hypotheses can be verified, so they are non-empirical with respect both to assumptions and to methods. One could go on enumerating such oppositions. Superimposing their axes, so that they form a multidimensional "compass card," i.e. a coordinate system with multiple axes, we obtain a formal model of the situation of the reader who has to make repeated decisions about a complexly structured text. Not all texts activate the decision process along all the possible axes, but a theory of genres must take into account at least that class of decisions which cumulatively determines the genre classification of what is read. It should be emphasized that particular decisions, until they are made, are dependent variables. Once we have concluded, for example, that a text really is ironic, we have thereby altered the probabilities of specific decisions on other axes. The perfidy of modern creative writing lies just in making life-that is, semantic decisions-difficult for the reader. Such writing was emphatically initiated by Kafka. Todorov, unable to cope with Kafka's texts by means of his axis, has made a virtue of methodological paralysis, taking his own per- plexity out into the deep waters of hermeneutics. According to him, Kafka conferred "complete autonomy" on his text, he cut it off from the world in all directions. The text seems to be allegorical but is not, since there is no way of ascertaining to what court it addresses its appeal. Hence it is neither alle- gorical nor poetic nor realistic, and if it can be called fantastic, then only in the sense that "dream logic" has engulfed the narrative together with the reader. ("Son monde tout entiere obDit a une logique onirique sinon cauche- mardesque, qui n'a plus rien a' voir avec le reel." [p. 181]) Ita dixit Todorov, without noticing that he has hereby abandoned all his structuralizing. Todorov's conception of Kafka's works as totally lacking an address (as reflexive) in the real world ("n'a plus rien a voir avec le reel") has become popular also outside structuralist circles, I think, as a result of intellectual laziness. These works, boundlessly veiled in meanings, seem to signify so much at once that no one knows what they mean concretely-well, then, let it be that they simply mean nothing, whether referentially, allusively, or evocatively. If there existed an experimental science of literature concerned with study- ing readers' reactions to deliberately prepared texts, it would prove in short order that a text wholly severed from the world with regard to its meanings can be of no interest to anyone. References of expressions to extralinguistic states of affairs form a continuous spectrum, ranging from ostensive deno- tation to an aura of allusions hard to define, just as recall of things seen to our visual memory ranges from sharp perception in broad daylight to the vagueness of a nocturnal phantom in the dark. Consequently, a boundary be- tween "undisguised reference" and "hermetic autonomy" of a text can be drawn only arbitrarily, because the distinction is extremely fuzzy. A representative of impressionistic criticism might say that Kafka's writ- ing "shimmers with mirages of infinite meanings," but an advocate of scien- tific criticism must uncover the tactics which bring this state of things about, not hand the texts a charter certifying their independence of the visible This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 234 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES world. We have sketched above a way of effecting the, transition from texts which are decisionally unimodal, simple ones such as the detective story, to those which are n-modal. A work which embodies the relational paradig- matics of the "compass card" thereby sets up an zndecidability about its own meaning in that it persistently defies that "instrument af semantic diag- nosis" which every human head contains. There then takes place the stabili- zation of a shaky equilibrium at the crossroads formed by the text itself, since we cannot even say whether it is definitely in earnest or definitely ironic, whether it belongs to the one world or to the other, whether it elevates our vale of tears to the level of transcendence (as some critics said about Kafka's Das Schloss) or whether on the contrary it degrades the beyond to the temporal plane (as others said about Das Schloss), whether it is a parable with a moral expressed by symbols from the unconscious (this is the thesis of psychoanalytic criticism), or whether it constitutes "the fantastic without limits"-which last is the dodge our structuralist uses. It is strange that no one is willing to admit the fact of the matter: that the work brings into head-on collision a swarm of conflicting interpretations, each of which can be defended on its own grounds. If what we had before us were a logical calculus, the sum of these conflicting judgments would clearly be zero, since contradictory propositions cancel one another out. But the work is just not a logical treatise, and therefore it becomes for us, in its semantic undecidability, a fascinating riddle. "Single-axis" structuralism fails utterly for it, but the mechanism of undamped oscillation of the reader's surmises can be formalized by a topology of multiple decision-making, which in the limit turns the compass card into a surface representing continuous aber- rations of the receiver. However, the structuralist model even as we have thus amended it is not fully adequate to a work such as Kafka's. It falls short because its axiomatic assumption of disjointness of opposed categories (alle- gory: poetry, irony: earnestness, natural : supernatural) is altogether false. The crux lies in the fact that the work can be placed on the natural and the supernatural level at the same time, that it can be at once earnest and ironic, and fantastic, poetic and allegorical as well. The "at the same time" predicated here implies contradictions-but what can you do, if such a text is founded just on contradictions? This is made plain by the throng of equally justified but antagonistic interpretations which battle vainly for supremacy, i.e. for uniqueness. It is only mathematics and logic and-following their example- mathematical linguistics that fear contradictions as the Devil fea's holy water. Only these can do nothing constructive with contradictions, which put an end to all rational cognition. What is involved is a trap disastrous for episte- mology, in that it is an expression which contradicts itself (much like the clas- sic paradox of the Liar). Yet literature manages to thrive on paradoxes, if only on ones strategically placed-precisely these constitute its perfidious advantage! Not, to be sure, from its own resources. It has not invented such horrendous powers for itself. We find logical contradictions readymade, firstly in culture: for-to take the first example to hand-according to the canons of Christianity, whatever happens happens naturally, and at the same time it happens by the will of God, since nothing can be apart from this. The non- temporal order thus coexists with the temporal-eternity is in every moment and in every inch. The collisions of behavior provoked by this "overlapping" predication are buffered by successive interpretations of dogma, e.g. in a species of theological consent to the use of anesthesia in childbirth. Nonethe- less there is a contradiction involved which culminates in "Credo, quia ab- surdum est." Secondly, overlapping categorizations of percepts become the norm in dreams as well as in hyponoic states, thus not only in psychiatric This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TODOROV'S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE 235 symptomatology (cf. Ernst Kretschmer, Medizinische Psychologie). The co- existence in apperception of states of affairs which exclude one another both empirically and logically is, consequently, a double regularity-cultural and psychological-on which structuralism finally breaks every bone in all its "axes." Thus the whole literary-critical procrustics or catalog of adult- erations, errors and oversimplifications formed by this Introduction a la lit- terature fantastique is of value only as an object lesson illustrating the down- fall of a precise conceptual apparatus outside its proper domain. WE STILL HAVE WITH US THE DILEMMA of the hardheaded reader, who, if he is not scared by a ghost story, relabels it with respect to genre. Todorov would hold such a receiver to be an ignoramus who ought to keep his hands off literature. But when we examine the situation in which someone reads an "uncanny" or a "tragic" text and splits his sides laughing, we will realize that this situation can be explained in either of two ways. Per- haps the reader is in fact a primitive oaf who is too immature to appreciate the work, and that is an end of the problem. Or perhaps the work is kitsch and he who laughs at it is an experienced connoisseur of literature, so that he cannot take seriously what the work presents as serious, i.e. he has outgrown the work. In the second case the text really does change its genre: from a story about spirits (intentionally uncanny) or about galactic monarchs (intentionally science-fictional) or about life in high society (intentionally edifying romance) it turns into an unintentional humoresque. Todorov bars saying anything at all about an author's intentions-to mention these amounts to covering oneself with the disgrace of "fallacia intentionalis." Structuralism is supposed to investigate texts only in their immanence. But if one is free to recognize, as Todorov does, that a text implies a reader (not as a concrete person but as a standard of reception), then in accord with a rule of symmetry one should recognize that it also implies an author. Both of these concepts are indissolubly connected with the category of messages, since a message, in information theory, must have a sender and a receiver. The words of Roger Caillois about "the irreducible impression of strange- ness" as a touchstone for the fantastic represent the psychological correlate of the linguistic state of things constituted by the full-valued character of the artistic text, which guarantees that it is not kitsch. The irreducibility of the impression certifies the authentic values of the text and thereby abolishes the relativism typical for writing with unwarranted pretensions, which pro- duces kitsch as an incongruity between intention and realization. The relativism of kitsch lies in the fact that it is not kitsch for all readers, and what is more it cannot be recognized as kitsch by those who esteem it. Kitsch identified as such forms a special case of paradox within the set of literary works: namely, contradiction between the reactions anticipated by the text and the reactions which its reading actually evokes. For the uncanny is incompatible with nonsense, physics with magic, the sociology of the aris- tocracy with the scullery's notions about it, and the process of cognition with the adventures of puppets called scientists. Thus kitsch is a product counter- feited to pass for what it is not. The contradictions in interpretation of Kafka's writings not only can but must be grasped by the reader; only so, thanks to "indecision of manifold scope," will he apprehend the aura of mystery established by the text. Per contra, the contradiction specific to kitsch must remain unrecognized by its readers, since otherwise generic disqualification of what has been read will take place. The reading of kitsch as kitsch is non-immanent-the reader appeals to his own superior knowledge This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 236 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES about how a work of the given kind ought to look, and the chasm separating what ought to be from what in fact is amuses him (or offends him). Because our superior knowledge decreases as the themes of literature be- come increasingly remote from reality, kitsch takes up residence in regions inaccessible to the reader. in the palace, in the far future, among the stars, in history, in exotic lands. Every literary genre has its masterwork-ceiling, and kitsch, by a tactics of crude mimicry, pretends to have soared to such an altitude. Todorov, fettered by the immanence of his procedures, has deprived himself of any possibility of recognizing mimicry of values, and accordingly his implicit reader must, by dint of solemn exertions, see to it that the silliest twaddle about spirits sends chills up and down his spine. On pain of a structuralist curse he is forbidden to poke fun at such rubbish; since structur- alism establishes absolute equality in literature, the right of citizenship which the text usurps for itself is a sacred thing. A possible rejoinder at this point would be that idiotic stories are written for idiotic readers. And indeed, we observe this state of affairs in the book market, dominated by the laws of supply and demand. But this is not an extenuating circumstance for a theory of literature. A "theory" is synony- mous with a generalization which applies without exception to all elements of the set under investigation. Since the structuralists' generalizations balk at applying thus, or, more precisely, because when they are made to apply thus everywhere they yield such nonsense as no advocate of the school would like to acknowledge (for structural equivalence democratically places the counterfeit on an equal footing with the masterpiece), the theoreticians carry out certain sleight-of-hand manipulations when they assemble their ma- terials for public dissection. They place on their operating table, to wit, only what has already earned a respectable reputation in the history of lit- erature, and they conjure away under the table works that are structurally of the same kinds but artistically trashy. They have to proceed thus, because their method impels them toward simple texts such as the detective story, their over-weening ambitions, on the other hand, toward celebrated works. (Kitsch, being subject to relativization in the process of reception, is not the structurally simplest case, for it seeks to be one thing and is in fact another; the detective story, on the other hand, devoid of pretensions, is decisionally unimodal.) Now we can more readily understand the makeup of Todorov's bib- liography, as to the names (Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Kafla) and the works it includes. The theoretician has taken as his "sample" that which could not involve him in difficulties, since it had already passed its cultural screening examination and by that token could give him no trouble. A therapist, if he were to proceed analogously, would take as patients only robust convalescents. A physicist would test his theory only on facts that he knew beforehand would confirm it, carefully avoiding all others. Let us spare the structuralist the description which the philosophy of science would give to such a method of selecting "representative samples." A theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory. A theory of works weeded out in advance by means beyond its compass constitutes not generalization but its contrary, that is particularization. One cannot when theorizing discriminate beforehand against a certain group of works, i.e. not bring them under the scope of analysis at all. A taxonomically oriented theory can set up a hierarchy in its subject matter, i.e. assign non- uniform values to the elements of the entire set under investigation, but it should do this openly, not on the sly, and throughout its whole domain, showing what sort of criteria it employs for making distinctions and how they perform their tasks of evaluation. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WELLS AND BORGES AND THE LABYRINTHS OF TIME 237 These obligations are binding not for humanistic studies alone. They stem from the set of directives to which all scientific cognition is subject. A zoologist cannot ignore cockroaches because they're such nasty little beast- ies, nor a cosmologist ignore the energy balance of quasars because it makes his calculations blow up in his face. The sleight-of-hand artist's activities are not always and everywhere admirable. So, we conclude, if structuralism de- sires to avoid expulsion from among the sciences, it must rebuild itself completely from the ground up, since in its present state it is-in the words of Pierre Bertaux-a procedure which from its point of departure in logic has strayed into useless mythology. NOTES 'Bertaux is a Germanist, and he published the article quoted, "Innovation als Prinzip," in German in the volume Das 198. Jahrzehnt (Christian Wegner Verlag, 1969). -SL. The passage given in German in Dr. Lem's original text (from which the first sentence has been reduced to the bracketed phrase in our translation) reads as follows: "Unter 'Diagonalwissenschaften' (um den Ausdruck von Roger Caillos aufzunehmen) verstehe ich ungerfahr das, was man auch 'formalistische' Wissenschaften nennt, also Disziplinen, deren Ge- biet sich quer durch die herkommlichen Facher der Realwissenschaften zieht.... Eine Zeitlang hat man hoffen konnen, der Ansatz zu einer ahnlichen Formalisierung der Humanwissenschaften sei vom Strukturalismus zu erwart- en. Leider sieht es heute aus, also ab gerade die lautesten Vertreter des Strukturalismus ihn zu einer Mythologie hatten entarten lassen-und nicht einmal zu einer brauchbaren. Das Gerede, das jetzt den Namen Strukturalis- mus tragt, hat den urspriinglich in ihm enthaltenen wissenschaftlichen Ansatz wahrscheinlich tfdlich getroffen." -CN, RDM, DS. 2Translated by Richard Howard (Cleveland/London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University 1973) from Introduction a la litte'rature fantas- tique (Editions du Seuil 1970). All quotations from Todorov are from the pages of this translation. -RDM. Robert M. Philmus Wells and Borges and the Labyrinths of Time ...and so on to the end, to the invisible end, through the tenuous labyrinths of time. -Borges (OI 119).1 "For years I believed I had grown up in a suburb of Buenos Aires, a suburb of random streets and visible sunsets. What is certain is that I grew up in a garden, behind a forbidding gate, and in a library of limitless English books" (OC 4:9).2 These words, which begin the Prologue to the second edition of Evaristo Carriego (1955), evoke, with characteristic concision, the universe of metaphors their author, Jorge Luis Borges, still inhabits. The geography is deliberately, symbolically, vague: Borges locates the garden and the library that created him indefinitely in a labyrinthine suburb of the Buenos Aires of visible sunsets whose relation to him he is perhaps no longer certain of, or This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:35:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 238 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES at least does not choose to define. Where he is definite, circumstantial, the details reveal one of those secret plots he delights in puzzling out, and perpetrating: the enclosed garden and the library of (ambiguously) infinite books appear in his parables as metaphors of the world. "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries" wherein men seek, among a possibly infinite number of volumes, the one book which may contain their "Vindication" (L 51 ff).3 That model of man's perplexity, and of his extravagant futility, Borges offers in "The Library of Babel." In "The Wall and the Books" he suggests elaborate, tentative, and contradictory explanations of the meta- phoric significance of "the two vast undertakings" of the emperor Shih Huang Ti, "the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall" and "the burning of all the books that had been written before his time." The emperor may have be- gun these monstrous projects at the same time: the walling in of space and the incinerating of the past might have been "magic barriers to halt death" or to delimit the world so that all things might have "the names that befitted them."4 Perhaps the two acts "were not simultaneous," in which case possibly(sincethe one is destructive and the other creative) "the burning of the libraries and the building of the wall are operations that secretly nullify each other" (OI 1-2). Another of Borges' versions of this crepuscular analogy be- tween the wall and the books, the garden and the library-a mysterious correspondence that is "trying to tell us something," or has "told us some- thing we should not have missed," or is "about to tell us something" (OI 4; cp "Forms of a Legend," OI 157-62)-had appeared earlier, in "The Garden of the Forking Paths." There Borges postulates an identity the basis of which is a tautology: the infinite book and the labyrinthine garden nominally come together as The Garden of the Forking Paths, an imaginary novel by the hypothetical Ts'ui Pen predicated on the idea of time as a labyrinth. Ts'ui Pgn [says the sinologist Stephen Albert] must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am with- drawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and maze were one and the same thing. The Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude stood in the center of a garden that was perhaps intricate; that circumstance could have sug- gested to the heirs a physical labyrinth. Ts'ui P8n died; no one in the vast territories that were his came upon the labyrinth; the confusion of...[his]...novel suggested to me that it was the maze. (L 25) Ts'ui P^en conceived of a book whose labyrinthine structure depends on the notion of bifurcations in time. Stephen Albert gives an account of that book's mystery to Hu Tsun, a descendant of Ts'ui Pgn and a man who, pursued as a spy for the Germans (the story is set during the First World War), has, to elude capture temporarily and to communicate a military secret, conceived of a labyrinthine plan of evasion based on the bifurcations of space.6 At the center of that labyrinth, which is also a garden of forking paths,7 Yu Tsun's pursuer will discover the labyrinth-maker and his atrocious mystery, the murdered Stephen Albert, victim of Yu Tsun's monstrous and efficacious attempt to outwit the confines of space. The various labyrinths in the story- Ts'ui Pen's, Yu Tsun's, Borges's-fit each inside the next like a series of Chinese boxes; each is a garden of forking paths and a Garden of Forking Paths. The coincidence supposes a clandestine analogy, perhaps an identity; both the garden and library Borges has, as it were, created as models of This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WELLS AND BORGES AND THE LABYRINTHS OF TIME 239 the labyrinths of space and time. Thus in saying "I grew up in a garden...and in a library" he is esoterically confessing himself to be the creature of his own creation. (The parable "Borges and I" sets out to distinguish between the two-"I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me"-but concludes in mock despair, "I do not know which of us has written this page" [L 24647].) The self-consciousness involved in portraying oneself as the creature of one's creation is baroque, the sort of self-consciousness Velasquez graphically epitomizes in his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656). The scene is the artist's studio. In the foreground the maids of honor assume various attitudes. On the rear wall hangs what at first looks like, but is too luminous to be, another of the many paintings adorning the room: it is a mirror reflecting two figures who do not otherwise appear in the "fictive" space of Las Meninas; they belong to the "reality" outside the spatial limits of the canvas. All the same, the presence of their mirror images has the intellectual effect of confounding any nice discrimination of art from life, a confusion Velasquez deliberately intensifies by placing the mirror symmetrically in balance with a door opening on interior space also outside the confines of the space depicted (the symmetry calls attention to this baroque analogy between mirror and door). Initially, the maids of honor detract from the viewer's perception of the artist who stands self-deprecatingly to one side, in partial obscurity, poised with brush and palette before a canvas whose dimensions, it can be inferred, are similar to those of Las Meninas itself. This artist, of course, is Velasquez, who has portrayed himself in the act of painting Las Meninas from a different angle.8 Las Meninas is a compendium of baroque predilections and conceits: the fondness for paradox (which the mirror of art and life typifies); the meta- physical tricks of perspective and point of view (illustrated by the divergent angle of vision of the Velasquez who depicts himself vis-a-vis the self- portrait within Las Meninas); the tendency towards infinite regress (conscious- ness of being self-conscious...ad infinitum-perhaps in the Meninas-within- Las Meninas there is another self-portrait of Velasquez delineating the maids of honor from yet another angle). Borges shares this baroque fascination with paradoxes, metaphysical games, and infinite progressions and regresses. He titles one essay "A History of Eternity," another "A New Refutation of Time." He defends Berkeleyan idealism and also quotes with relish, twice, Hume's dictum that "Berkeley's arguments do not admit of the slightest refutation nor do they produce the slightest conviction" (OC 6:67, and L 8). He returns again and again to the paradoxes of Zeno the Eleatic and cognate regressus in infinitum.9 And in his formulation of some thoughts provoked by the Quixote, paradox, meta- physical speculation, and the idea of an infinite series converge: Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map [a reference to Josiah Royce's The World and the Individual] and the thousand and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spec- tators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal history is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they too are written. (OI 48) This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 240 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES The dreamer who is himself dreamt (in "The Circular Ruins") and the chess player who is a pawn in the hands of gods who are pawns in the hands of higher gods (in the poem "Chess") afford Borges other metaphoric disguises for similar metaphysical paradoxes. His ultimate theme-perhaps the logical consequence of the tendency of baroque self-consciousness towards self-irony-is self-betrayal. Nils Runeberg finally concludes that God "was Judas" ("Three Versions of Judas"). Of Donne's Biathanatos Borges writes: Christ died a voluntary death, Donne suggests, implying that the ele- ments and the world and the generations of men and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were drawn from nothingness to destroy Him. Perhaps iron was created for the nails, thorns for the crown of mockery, and blood and water for the wound. That baroque idea is perceived beneath the Biathanatos-the idea of a god who fabricates the universe in order to fabricate his scaffold. (OI 96). The detective Erik Lonnrot infers from what he believes to have been three murders the existence of a cabalistic pattern analogous to the tetragram- maton, the hidden name of God; he arrives at the point of the compass where he calculates the fourth and last murder will occur and finds that he is the victim of the homocidal labyrinth he has imagined; the name of the murderer (which, redundantly enough, is Red Scharlach) secretly corresponds to his own'0 ("Death and the Compass"). And Borges himself, having at- tempted to demonstrate the factitiousness, or at least ideality, of space, time, and the self, eventually must admit, And yet, and yet-To deny temporal succession, to deny the ego, to deny the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret assuagements. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not horrible because of its unreality; it is horrible because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that con- sumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges. (OI 197) For Borges, "universal history," the history of all men and of one man, is the history of the human mind, lost in the labyrinths of time, conceiving labyrinths of vast simplicity wherein to betray itself." IN AN ESSAY ON KAFKA, Borges remarks that "Every writer creates his pre- cursors"; by way of explaining this paradox, he adds: If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous selections I have mentioned [Zeno, Kierkegaard, et cetera] resemble each other, and this fact is the significant one. Kafka's idiosyncrasy, in greater or lesser degree, is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. (OI 113) Some of the authors Borges has talked about, most of whom he read in his paternal grandmother's library of "limitless English books,"12 are his pre- cursors in this sense: among them, the Hawthorne of "Earth's Holocaust" This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WELLS AND BORGES AND THE LABYRINTHS OF TIME 241 and perhaps "Wakefield," but not the Hawthorne who imagined a utopian "celestial railroad" that goes to hell (OI 56-62); Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Kipling, the writer of short stories, especially in The Finest Story in the World and Many Inventions (OC 6:73n); Oscar Wilde (OI 83-85), a translation of whose The Happy Prince was Borges' first published work; and G.K. Chesterton (OI 86-89). In that sense Poe is perhaps not a precursor (though he is more interested in the mere effect of a bizarre idea than is Borges) and H.G. Wells is certainly not.'3 His repeated praise of Wells not- withstanding, Borges has not "created" him as he has, for example, "created" the Chesterton he describes as "a monstrorum artifex": In my opinion, Chesterton would not have tolerated the imputation of being a contriver of nightmares..., but he tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations. He asks if perchance a man has three eyes, or a bird three wings; in opposition to the pantheists, he speaks of a man who dies and discovers in paradise that the spirits of the angelic choirs have, every one of them, the same face he has; he speaks of a jail of mirrors; of a labyrinth without a center; of a man devoured by metal automatons; of a tree that devours birds and then grows feathers instead of leaves; he imagines (The Man Who Was Thursday, VI) "that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something-say a tree-that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself-a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked." (OI 87) Here Borges, by enlarging details out of all proportion to their original con- text, has perceived an image of Chesterton that, as he admits, Chesterton himself would not have recognized. On the contrary, the Wells of the "scien- tific romances" (Wells's term) is recognizable even in the slightest circum- stance Borges singles out. His remark, "the conventicle of seated monsters who mouth a servile creed in their night is the Vatican and is Lhasa," accords with Wells's own summation of The Island of Dr. Moreau as a "theo- logical grotesque";'4 Wells's parable of a man who, as a consequence of the most banal oversight, must dissipate his godlike power of invisibility in futilely trying to satisfy the most basic animal demands encompasses the significance Borges discovers in a minute detail: "The harassed invisible man who has to sleep as though his eyes were wide open because his eyelids do not exclude light is our solitude and our terror." (OI 91). Borges has recorded his admiration for: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Plattner Story, The First Men in the Moon. They are the first books I read; perhaps they will be the last. I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahaseurus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written. (OI 92) He has acknowledged his specific debt to Wells's short story "The Crystal Egg" as the inspiration for "The Aleph" and "The Zahir."''5 Other "inventions" of Wells's (Wells's term again), most of which Borges never mentions, further evidence their mutual attraction for "atrocious miracles":'6 the vampiric plant in "The Strange Orchid"; an imperishable Apple of Knowledge, obtained acci- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 242 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES dentally, which cannot be located again after it has been carelessly thrown away ("The Apple"); the fanatic barbarian who sacrifices another, and then himself, to the dynamo he worships ("The Lord of the Dynamos"); a country whose topography its congenitally blind inhabitants know so well they can move through their world as if they could see ("The Country of the Blind"); eyes whose field of vision is geographically antipodal to the body they belong to ("The Story of Davidson's Eyes"); a man who returns from somewhere that is Nowhere or hell "inverted, just as a reflection returns from a mirror" ("The Plattner Story").17 Although Wells as a writer of science fiction is far more neo-gothic than baroque, Borges does not have to "create" him as his precursor: the disposition they share to pursue rigorously the "opposite idea,"'8 the conception they both have of fantasy as a mode of subversion, establishes the basis of their affinity. Only in what he says about The Time Machine does Borges come close to refashioning Wells. The Time Traveller, he asserts, "returns tired, dusty, and shaken from a remote humanity that has divided into species who hate each other...He returns with his hair grown gray and brings with him a wilted flower from the future...More incredible than a celestial flower or the flower of a dream is the flower of the future, the unlikely flower whose atoms now occupy other spaces and have not yet been assembled" (OI 10). Wells's is a parable of guarded hope (in an early published draft the Time Traveller confronts the "Coming Beast"'9 in the one hundred and twenty-first century; in the final version that encounter is postponed still further): the future is real, possibly catastrophic, but not beyond redemption; this is the testimony the flower of the future mutely offers. Borges, on the contrary, seems to regard that flower as a hieroglyphic of despair: the future is already inexorably configured in the particulate structure of present time, what will happen is already destiny.20 What for Wells is an obvious application of the theory under- lying time travel-a man who can journey into the future can also come back, into the past as it were, with a flower from that future age21-Borges trans- forms into the metaphysical paradox of a future coexisting with the present. Borges inverts the significance of the flower of the future by not assuming, as Wells does, that time is a function of space. That assumption is of course the ground of the Traveller's demonstration in the opening chapter of The Time Machine. Time, he argues, constitutes a Fourth Dimension; that is to say, "Time is only a kind of Space."22 To define time as a variable and space as the constant obviates any philosophical paradox: the flower then occupies the same space at two different times; space in that view, is continuous, and in that sense retains its identity through time-a proposition which, while it is vulnerable to theoretical objections of the sort Borges raises in citing Hera- clitus' "You will not go down twice to the same river,"23 is hardly startling to common sense. However, by reversing the subordination, by supposing, as Borges does, that space is "an episode of time" (OC 6:43), a paradox, sym- bolized by the flower, does emerge: the basis of the flower's self-identity then becomes the identity of time, the contemporaneousness, so to speak, of present and future. THE ESSAY WHEREIN BORGES ADVANCES his notion of space as an episode of time, an essay entitled "The Penultimate Version of Reality" (1928), clari- fies the central, but usually implicit, postulate of his fictions. In that dis- cussion Borges avers an "opposition between the two incontrastible concepts of space and time" to be delusory-notwithstanding the illustriousness of some of its proponents, such as "Spinoza, who gave his undifferentiated deity- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WELLS AND BORGES AND THE LABYRINTHS OF TIME 243 Deus sive Natura-the attributes of thought, that is consciousness of time, and extension, that is [consciousness] of space." "According to a thoroughgoing idealism, space is nothing but one of the constitutive patterns in the replete flux of time"; it is "situated in [time] and not vice-versa." Moreover, space is an accident in time and not, as Kant posited, a universal modality of intuition. There are whole provinces of Being that do not require it: those of olefaction and hearing. Spencer, in his critical exami- nation of the arguments of metaphysicians (Principles of Psychology, VII, iv) has elucidated that [notion of] independence and also reinforces it with this reduction to absurdity: "Whoever thinks that smell and sound implicate space as intuitive concept can easily convince himself of his error simply by [attempting to] seize the right or left side of a sound or by trying to imagine a color in reverse." (OC 6:42-43) The consequence Borges deduces from this reasoning is that a belief in the reality of space can be dispensed with: without spatial referents, without an awareness of corporeality, humanity would still continue "to weave its his- tory" (OC 6:44). Time alone is the universal substratum of perception. Borges's conception of space accounts for, and perhaps also reflects, his mature concern for geography only as the geometry of space.24 "Death and the Compass" (1942) is an instance where this is clearly the case. Less ob- viously in a story like "The Immortal" (1947) the cartographical details conform to a geometrical pattern. The antiquary Joseph Cartophilius, a manu- script of whose history is found in his copy of Pope's translation of the Iliad, begins his quest for immortality in Berenice, a seaport in Eritrea, as the Roman tribune Marcus Flaminius Rufus, and recovers the mortality he longs for "in a port on the Eritrean coast" the name of which Borges osten- tatiously withholds.25 The circularity of the geography is thus an objective correlative of the circularity of the immortal's search.26 That image of eternal recurrence, in "The Immortal" as in "A New Refu- tation of Time" (1944, 1946), represents a negation of time. Such a repudiation may afford the ultimate version of reality; at least Borges sees it as the final, perhaps logically inevitable, extension of idealist philosophy.27 Its paradoxical consequences he adumbrates in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," an encyclo- pedic account of a world that mirrors, that is inverts, the model of the uni- verse philosophic materialism proposes (the story opens, "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia" [L 3]). The inhabitants of Tlon are "congenitally idealist": the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of ex- tension and thought; no one in Tlon would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second- which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of [the] association of ideas. (L9) Here the equivalent of the Eleatic paradoxes, which call into question the (orthodox) spatial continuum by assuming the infinitesimal divisibility of infi- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 244 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES nite time as a series of discrete moments, is "the sophism of the nine copper coins," which insinuates the (in Thin, paradoxical) existence of spatial conti- nuity as the ideational adjunct of temporal continuity. To obviate the need for supposing what would subvert idealism-that it is possible for Y and Z to find certain coins that X lost at a previous time because space does persist in time independent of its being perceived-one of the philosophers of Thin formulates "a very daring hypothesis": This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found...The Eleventh Volume [of A First Encyclopedia of Tlon] suggests that three prime reasons determined the complete victory of this idealist pan- theism. The first, its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possi- bility of preserving the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of preserving the cult of the gods. (L 12). In other words, the solution to the paradox of the coins postulates the unitary nature of mind. Gradually it becomes apparent that Thin is a world in the flux of time, an amorphous world in the process of conforming to the full implications of its idealist premises. Gradually it becomes apparent that the incidental details of Borges's fiction reflect that process (the words descubrimiento and descubrir, meaning discovery and to discover, recur frequently in the story; the conversation at the outset that leads to the "discovery" of Thin concerns "a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few read- ers-very few readers-to [divine] an atrocious or banal reality" [L 21). The intellectual voyage imaginaire in search of Tlon begins with Bioy Casares' putative discovery of certain pages in Volume XVI of the 1917 edition of what is "fallaciously called" The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, pages which appear in some copies of that book (at least in one) but not in others. Later, following the demise of one Herbert Ashe, a Volume XI of the First Encyclopedia of Tlon adventitiously comes into Borges's possession. Its contradictions, when one considers the "lucid and exact.. .order observed in it" (L 8), constitute a proof that companion volumes must exist. In a postscript it is revealed that forty volumes of the encyclopedia were subsequently located "in a Memphis library" (L 17). The postscript also confirms the existence of a vast and labyrinthine conspiracy to disintegrate this world by perpetuating and spread- ing the habits of thought of an "imaginary planet": "The World," Borges asseverates, "will be Thin" (L 17-18). The facts admit, indeed demand, something more than this credulous and literal rehearsal of them. A careful examination of other details of Borges's account discloses their true and clandestine meaning. The discovery of Thin begins on the revelation that certain pages occur in some copies of a particular book but not in all; later it is learned that the encyclopedia of Tlon has, as it were, disappeared at times. Those details call to mind Ts'ui Pe^n's delphic clue to his labyrinth-"I leave to various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths" (L 25, 26)-and with it his idealist conception of the multi- plicity of time. The article purportedly contained in Volume XVI of The Anglo- American Cyclopaedia deals with Uqbar and supplies "fourteen names" as its This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WELLS AND BORGES AND THE LABYRINTHS OF TIME 245 geographical coordinates; a note to "The House of Asterion" alleges that "as used by Asterion" this number stands for infinity (L 4-5, 138). The language of T1on, in accord with idealist thought, excludes all substantives: " 'The moon rose above the river' is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo. or literally; 'upward be- hind the onstreaming it mooned' " (L 8); Axaxaxas mlo is the title of a book in one "of the many hexagons of my administration" (L 57) in "The Library of Babel." A Princess Faucigny Lucinge figures in the postscript to "Thin" in connection with a compass; in "The Immortal" Joseph Cartophilius offers "the Princess of Lucinge the six volumes...of Pope's Iliad" (L 105). The elusive pages of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia inform its readers "that the litera- ture of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlon" (L 5). The allusive pages of "Thin, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" insinuate that Borges's fictions comprise the definitive encyclopedia of Thin. The World of Borges's fictions generally, like the world of Tlin, is a predicate of idealist philosophy, which premises that nothing exists inde- pendently of perception. But if space does not exist outside the human mind, then the perceptions the mind has when waking and visions arising in a dream become indistinguishable from one another. It becomes as impossible to dif- ferentiate the imaginary Uqbar from the real world as it is to differentiate Uqbar from Thin, the fantasy from the fantasy-within-a-fantasy. (Borges illustrates this point elsewhere with the parabolic anecdote about a certain Chuang Tzu who "dreamed that he was a butterfly and when he awakened... did not know if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was a man" [01 194]). The confusion of real with imagi- nary names which proliferates in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and everywhere else in Borges's fantasies in another deliberate example of this consequence. To suppose that time as well as space is not absolute means to relinquish the temporal coordinates of individual identity. In a world where space is merely a perception, during Chuang Tzu's dream "he was a butterfly" (OI 195). In a world where time is merely a sense of time, whoever dreams he is Chuang Tzu dreaming he is a butterfly-at that moment, which is identical with the moment of Chuang Tzu's dream, he is Chaung Tzu. Any chronological de- termination to the contrary, inasmuch as it belongs to the realm of absolute time, is inadmissible. For similar reasons, the man who imagines he is immortal is immortal; if he chooses as well to think of himself as Homer, whom he conceives of as an almost speechless Troglodyte, then he is Homer; and Pierre Menard, the symbolist poet who undertakes to write Don Quixote without becoming Cervantes, has as good a claim to its authorship as Cervantes. These consequences inhere in the "idealist pantheism" of Tlon.28 "Thin, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" to some extent imitates an idealist universe: the unstated premise of the fiction posits the narrative order as the order of discovery; its narrative sequence, manifestly at variance with absolute chronology, supposedly follows exactly the sequence of the author's per- ception of events. The story abounds in accidents because causality requires space persist in time; in apparent irrelevancies because the sequence of human perceptions is not logical but random. The idealist universe wherein a sense of time derives from a web of perceptions which contradict or coincide with or complement one another is a vertiginous universe of "divergent, convergent, and parallel times," a labyrin- thine universe analogized as the Lottery of Babylon, which consigns identity to chance, or the Library of Babel, with its indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of books composed of all the possible combinations of orthographic This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 246 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES symbols. These labyrinths the mind constructs are mirrors that reflect itself and also maps of the world. "Work that endures...," Borges asserts, "is a mirror that reflects the reader's own traits and...is also a map of the world." He speaks of Wells's enduring legacy as a "vast and diversified library": "he chronicled the past, chronicled the future, recorded real and imaginary lives" (OI 91, 92). His metaphor suggests that Borges identifies this "vast and diversified library" of fantastic books in which Wells plausibly traces the absurd consequences of an idea, with the "library of limitless English books" in which Borges himself has sought a model of the universe. NOTES 101 119 = Other Inquisitions, tr. Ruth L.C. Simms (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 119. 20C 4:9 = Obras Completas, 10 volumes (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1953- 1967), Volume 4, Page 9. All citations from this source are in my own trans- lation from the Spanish. (Despite the title, this edition, by his own choice, does not include the complete work of Borges.) 3L 51 = Labyrinths, ed. and tr. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 51. 4For clarification of this idea about the names of things, see my essay, "Swift, Gulliver, and 'The Thing Which Was Not'," ELH 38(1971):62-79. 5Alexander Pope, whom Borges quotes in the epigraph of his essay, takes "Chi Ho-am-ti" (Pope's spelling) to have been simply one more enemy of learning (the Queen of Dulness praises him in The Dunciad ?3:75-78). 6In "The Wall and the Books" another of Borges' speculations is that Shih Huang Ti undertook the building of the wall so that a future emperor would "destroy the wall, as I have destroyed the books, and he will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not know it" (OI 2). Shih Huang Ti himself, in burning the books, would, according to this baroque notion, be just such a shadow and a mirror of "that legendary Huang Ti, the emperor who invented writing" (OI 2). Similarly, Yu Tsun is the negation (shadow) and inversion (mirror) of his ancestor Ts'ui Pen, of whom Yu Tsun says, "The hand of a stranger murdered him" (L 23). 7The labyrinthine nature of Yu Tsun's journey to Stephen Albert's becomes explicit as Yu Tsun reflects on the unsolicited directions given him at the Ashgrove railroad station: "The instructions to turn always to the left re- minded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point of certain labyrinths" (L 22). A road that "forked among the now con- fused meadows" takes him to the "rusty gate" which opens on Stephen Al- bert's garden: "Between the iron bars I made out a poplar grove and a pavilion" (L 23)-suggesting Ts'ui P8h's "Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude." Thus, Borges insinuates, The Garden of the Forking Paths and the Garden of the Forking Paths converge at the center of Yu Tsun's labyrinth-a spatial correlative to Ts'ui Pen's idea of "an infinite series of times...divergent, convergent and parallel" (L 28). 8 In The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 236, 662, Am6rico Castro connects some of these features of Las Meninas with those observable in Spanish literature of the Golden Age, especially in the Quixote. See also Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 171-172. 9In "La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la- tortuga" and "Avataras de la This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WELLS AND BORGES AND THE LABYRINTHS OF TIME 247 tortuga" in Discusi6n (with the second essay also in OI), "Kafka and his Precursors" in OI, and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Ficciones. There is also an allusion to Zeno in "The Lottery of Babylon" (L 34). 10Borges himself makes this point in his notes to The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969, ed. and tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni ["in collaboration with the author"] (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), p. 269: "The Killer and the slain, whose minds work the same way, may be the same man. Lbnnrot is not an unbelievable fool walking into his own death trap but, in a symbolic way, a man committing suicide. This is hinted at by the similarity of their [sic] names. The end syllable of Lonnrot means red in German, and Red Scharlach is also translatable, in [sic] German, as Red Scarlet." "The Borgesian notion of universal history as the history of all men and of one man is implicit in many of his writings, particularly in "The God's Script," "The Immortal," and "Pascal's Sphere." The last begins: "Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors" (OI 5); a corollary of this notion can be found in "The Wall and the Books," where Borges defines "sacred books" as those "that teach what the whole universe of each man's conscience teaches" (OI 3). Here and in the discussion above of Borges's baroque qualities I have made no attempt to exhaust the possible examples. 12Along with his grandmother's books Borges seems to have inherited her idiosyncratic taste in literature. In "An Autobiographical Essay" (The Aleph and Other Stories, p. 206) he recalls: "When she was over eighty, people used to say, in order to be nice to her, that nowadays there were no writers who could vie with Dickens and Thackeray. My grandmother would answer, 'On the whole, I rather prefer Amold Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.' " 13Ronald J. Christ, in The Narrow Act: Borges'Art of Illusion (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), maintains that the "authors who really influence [Borges's] work, the reflection of whose writing can be seen in his fiction, are Chesterton, Wells, and Kipling" (p. 43). Of the three, Christ focuses mainly on Wells (e.g., on pp. 144-45, 164-65); he also makes a convincing case for an affinity between Borges and De Quincey (pp. 148-210). 14Preface to The Island of Dr. Moreau in Works (The Atlantic Edition), 28 volumes (New York: Scribner's and London: Dent, 1924-1927), 2:ix. "Epilogue to El Aleph (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1968), p. 198. 16This phrase, quoted from "The First Wells" (OI 92), originally occurs in a review Borges reprints in Discusion, where he speaks of Wells as the "ancient [in the sense of ageless] narrator of atrocious miracles: that of the voyager who brings back from the future a wilted flower; of the Beast Men who gabble a servile creed in the night; of a traitor who flees from the moon" (OC 6:164-65). 17Works (see Note 14), 1:434. The same story contains this hellish specu- lation: "It may be...that, when our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we may still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we have laid" (1:445). 18Wells uses this term in his essay "Zoological Retrogression," The Gentleman's Magazine 271 (Sept. 7, 1891) :246. 19lbid., p. 253. 20Compare Yu Tsun's precept: "The executor of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past" (L 22). 21"The Flower of Coleridge" goes on to give a brief account of Henry James's Sense of the Past, where "The cause follows the effect, the reason for his [Pendrel's] journey is one of the consequences of the journey." This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 248 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Borges finds this "an incomparable regressus in infinitum" (OI 11)-that is, the future determines the past, which determines the future, and so on. Could he be hinting, by his juxtaposition, that he perceives this regress in embryo in The Time Machine (see OI 11, Note 2), where, as it were, the present identity of the Traveller is dependent on the future? 22The Time Machine, Works (see Note 14), 1:5. For a further analysis of how the Fourth Dimension functions in The Time Machine, see my essay "The Time Machine: or, The Fourth Dimension as Prophecy," PMLA 84(1969): 530-35. 23"A New Refutation...," OI 187: "I admire his [Heraclitus'] dialectic skill, because the facility with which we accept the first meaning ('the river is different') clandestinely imposes the second one ('I am different')." 24Compare this sentence from "The Man on the Threshold": "The exact geography of the facts I am going to report is of very little importance" (OC 7:143). The abstractness of space in Borges's fictions undoubtedly has something to do with his congenitally bad eyesight. Compare T.S. Eliot's discussion of Milton's "auditory imagination" in his first essay on that poet, in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), p. 157 ff. I speak of Borges's mature concern for the geometry of space because in his early work, "in books now happily forgotten, I tried to copy down the flavor, the essence of the outlying suburbs of Buenos Aires" ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition," L 181). 25Borges's footnote at this point in the text says, "There is an erasure in the manuscript; perhaps the name of the port has been removed" (L 116). 26Compare L.A. Murillo, The Cyclical Night: Irony in James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 237-238. 27See "A New Refutation...," OI 186-87. 28"Today, one of the churches of Tlon platonically maintains that...All men, in a vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare" (L 12n). Robert H. Canary Utopian and Fantastic Dualities in Robert Graves's Watch the North Wind Rise For nearly sixty years Robert Graves has thought of himself as primarily a poet; for nearly thirty years, he has publicly identified himself as a poet-servant of the eternal Muse, the White Goddess worshipped under many names in antiquity. But Graves is more familiar to the reading public as the author of historical novels like I, Claudius (1934) and of the classic auto- biography of World War I, Good-bye to All That (1929). Some critics have argued that Graves' prose works deserve as much serious consideration as his poetry, but little has been done; especially surprising is the general neglect of Watch the North Wind Rise (1949), a utopian novel about a future society which has returned to the worship of the Goddess.' I would like to suggest that the framework of this novel exhibits a duality characteristic of the genre of the "fantastic," that it provides an example of the way in This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions UTOPIAN AND FANTASTIC DUALITIES 249 which similar dualities may be found in utopian works, and that it is the very existence of such dualities which makes this novel a satisfactory vehicle for Graves's reflections on the nature of poetry, the Muse, and the women in whom she is seen incarnate. The term "fantastic" here is taken from Todorov, who sees the genre as defined by the reader's hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation for the events he observes; the fantastic is thus midway between the uncanny and the marvellous (which is often called "fantasy").2 Watch the North Wind Rise begins with the protagonist summoned into the future by the poet-magicians of New Crete and ends when he recovers conscious- ness to find himself naked outside his own door back on the night on which he had left. The dream journey can be explained either by magic or by sleepwalking. The protagonist is an English poet, Edward Venn-Thomas, who might naturally dret5m of a utopia managed by poets; on the other hand, Venn-Thomas professes to be convinced of the reality of the journey-and Graves, his creator, had recently published a long work testifying to the his- torical power of the Goddess, The White Goddess (London: Faber and Faber, 1948). Traditional tales of the fantastic have been situated within known history; alternative worlds have usually been thought of as giving complete allegiance to natural laws (science fiction) or as openly allowing for the supernatural (fantasy, fairy tale). Although set in a future alternative world, Watch the North Wind Rise maintains a certain tension between natural and super- natural explanations for what Venn-Thomas sees in New Crete, as well as for the dream-journey which takes him there. The poet-magicians who have summoned him believe implicitly in their own magic powers, but the magic which Venn-Thomas actually observes is explainable in terms of psychological suggestion and common sense; Venn-Thomas himself, as a poet, is a member of the magician caste and can work some minor feats of suggestion, which he regards with suitable skepticism: "If one used the right formula, the com- mons could be hypnotized into doing any ridiculous thing" (?22). Venn- Thomas meets the Goddess herself, incarnate in an old crone and perhaps in other forms as well, but the possibility that these are merely mortal women remains open. His attitude toward her worship remains ambivalent: "Such fantastic ingenuousness of faith! Yet, without such ingenuousness, what strength had religion?" (?19). On balance, Venn-Thomas seems to believe in the Goddess, but the reader is not required to do so. IT MIGHT BE THOUGHT THAT the uncertainties of the fantastic would be in- compatible with the demands of utopia as a literary genre, for the latter would seem to call for an ideal society constructed within the realm of natural possibility. But utopias have always been both "the good place" and "no place," and few literary utopias of any merit have failed to deal in some fashion with the obvious question of whether the ideal proposed is a possible one for natural men. Even in B.F. Skinner's positivist, small-scale, con- temporary utopia, Walden Two (1948), the author has his protagonist wonder whether the utopian community's success derives from its principles or from the temporary influence of a charismatic founder. The existence of such hesitations between the possible and impossible is, in fact, one of many such dualities in utopias, which cannot be reduced to mere blueprints for attainable social reforms. While sketching one possible ideal society, literary utopias also serve as criticisms of the author's own This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 250 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES society, of other utopias, and often of themselves. Almost by definition, utopias mediate between the ideal they propose and the actualities of the author's own society. While in dystopias the criticism of the author's society takes the form of explicit exaggeration of present trends, in utopias the criticism is more often by implicit presentation of better altematives. The contrast with the present is their reason for being, and it may be argued that the "literary value of utopian fiction depends largely upon its satiric potential."3 Graves, for example, contrasts New Crete, where the ritual murder of the Victim-King makes murder for less sacred ends seem unthinkable, and his own world, where millions die in the sense- less slaughter of war; the force of the comparison does not depend on the specific likelihood of the alternative presented, only upon its relative corre- spondence to our own ideals. The criticism of the author's own society may also be explicit, in the fashion of dystopias. In New Crete, we are told, priests are drawn from the more stupid members of the servant class. Inci- dental touches of this sort are not really out of key in a work whose principal reference point is inevitably the author's own society. The opposition between the utopia and the author's society is not, however, the only duality found in literary utopias. Utopias breed counter- utopias, and most literary utopias stand in some defined relationship to the utopian tradition itself. In Watch the North Wind Rise, we learn that New Crete was a deliberate creation of a world council, influenced by the author of a Critique of Utopias, who concluded "we must retrace our steps, or perish" (?4). Anthropological enclaves were formed, recreating earlier periods from history. New Crete was the most successful of these enclaves and now, five hundred years later, has spread its system "over a great part of the still habitable world" (?4). New Crete has thus been chosen over all utopias which extrapolate man's technological progress and has proved itself in competition with other archaic patterns. New Crete shares with many other utopias a caste system, and Watch the North Wind Rise includes both implicit and explicit satire on this feature of utopias. Implicitly, Graves criticizes those utopias in which the caste structure is hereditary; individuals are assigned to castes on the basis of their childhood behavior, and captains (the warrior caste) are not allowed to marry. Even more importantly, the highest ranking caste is that of the poet-magicians, in contrast to the intellectual or managerial elites of other utopias. Poets are here the acknowledged legislators of the human race, and poetic values rule even in economic matters: there is no money in New Crete, goods being given to those who need then in return for free gifts; no machines are allowed that are not hand-crafted, made with the hands of "love." For Graves, at least, love is a poetic value. Some of the other castes are objects of satire. We see relatively little of the commoners (the masses) or the servants (who do menial chores for higher castes). The recorders are an upper caste, but most are presented as fussy pedants. The captains ride about giving moral exhortations, much in the style (as Leiber says) "of head-boys at a British school." Venn-Thomas nick- names one captain Nervo the Fearless. Both the recorders and captains are objects for satire against the intellectual and military classes so often given high rank in utopian societies-and our own. But explicit satire of this sort is also at the expense of the structure of Graves's own utopia. The self-critical side of utopias is by no means at odds with their function as implicit criticism of the author's own time. In their focus on alternatives This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions UTOPIAN AND FANTASTIC DUALITIES 251 opposed to society as it is, utopias become societies of humors; when their authors are men of sense, the ridiculous side of the ideal is apt to be shown. Venn-Thomas decides that the lack of a money economy has dulled the wits of the people of New Crete. He has no doubts that New Crete is a more perfect society-"if I had to choose between New Cretan half-wittedness and American whole-wittedness, I was simpleton enough to choose the former and avoid stomach ulcers, ticker tape and Sunday best" (?19)-but he finds New Crete a bit bland, a bit boring. The author and the Goddess apparently agree, for Venn-Thomas has been brought to New Crete to help destroy it. His presence helps re-introduce the inhabitants to lying, jealousy, murder, and suicide. The North Wind is rising, and soon all New Crete will suffer from "an itching palm, i;arrowed eyes and a forked tongue" (?22), character- istics of modern whole-wittedness. New Crete has brought man happiness, innocence, and goodness, but at a price in other human qualities, notably reason. The world of the utopia may thus be seen as existing in opposition to the author's own society, to other utopias, and (again) to an implicit notion of human possibilities. New Crete may also be seen as both a reproduction and an idealization of Late Bronze Age Crete, a Golden Age or lost Eden though Graves's destruction of his own utopia at the end suggests that he be- lieves in the Fortunate Fall. Beyond this ambiguous relationship to a specific period, New Crete stands in an uneasy relationship with the idea of history it- self-clocks are forbidden, and few records are kept. Societies which aspire to be perfect, as utopias do, are almost inevitably static, and New Crete seems to have been created as an escape from the consequences of man's history. But to be human is to change, and change is coming to New Crete at the end of the novel. The dualities of time and timelessness, stasis and change, history and perfection are linked to those set up by the utopia's opposition to other societies by the very ambiguity that surrounds its status as a possible/ impossible world. THE TENSION SET uP by the dualities of the novel's structure is parallel to that generated by its emotional and thematic content. At some level, Watch the North Wind Rise is a projection of the conscious concerns and latent impulses of the poet Venn-Thomas-Graves. To begin with, it is obviously concerned not only with the kind of society implied by Graves's poetic values but also with the kind of society ideal for poets. The two are not identical, for the poetry of New Crete-and its music as well-is insipid and academic. In some ways, New Crete deals with poets in ways which we know (from other writings) Graves approves of. Although poets are honored as a caste, few are afforded immortality. All poetry must begin as oral poetry, for there is no paper. The best of a poet's poems may be inscribed on silver plates. The best poems of an age may be inscribed on golden plates and kept in the Canon of Poetry, which has been reduced to fifteen volumes. The details of a poet's life are kept only in verbal tradition, which re-arranges them freely. The inhabitants of New Crete do not admire poets but the Goddess who inspired them. All this sounds very Gravesian, although Venn-Thomas does not seem very pleased to find a poem of his in the Canon-"but clumsily rewritten and attributed to 'the poet Tseliot"' (?18). The failure of New Crete is the failure of the utopian ideal itself. The soft, good life which it provides its inhabitants does not arouse the strong This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 252 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES emotions which Graves thinks necessary for true poetry. Poetry is to act as a mediator between innocence and experience, good and evil, but here is only innocence and good. It is significant that the only good poet Venn- Thomas meets is Quant, a recorder. Because he is a recorder, Quant is closer to history than his fellows. Because he is a member of one caste who follows the discipline of another, Quant is a marginal man, set apart from his society; the implication is that poets are better off in worlds not run by poets. Venn-Thomas can take with equanimity a future which implies the destruction of his own non-poetic age, but he is the very agent of the destruction of the anti-poetic utopia run by poets. It is significant that it is the Goddess who has summoned Venn-Thomas to perform this task. Graves has always insisted on the cruel side of the Muse. His ideal figure of the poet has not been the poet-magician but the royal lover, who accepts his eventual fate in return for the privilege of her love: Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling Do not forget what flowers The great boar trampled down in ivy time. Her brow was creamy as the crested wave, Her sea-gray eyes were wild But nothing promised that is not performed. ("To Juan at the Winter Solstice") The love the Muse offers the poet is like the dream of New Crete itself, a momentary idyll; the poet will suffer jealousy and loss, even death, just as New Crete must undergo fearsome change at the Goddess's hands. Graves's early criticism, written before his submission to the Goddess, casts some light on his fascination with the double-edged promises of the Muse.4 He held that poetry was a product of intemal conflict between "the rival sub-personalities" of the poet, holding "apparently contradictory emo- tional ideas" (On English Poetry, pp. 123, 13). Graves himself has written of the opposition between reason and emotion in his own inheritance, between the Classical and Romantic traditions of poetry. Poetry resolves such conflicts by integration. Watch the North Wind Rise can be seen as fulfilling a similar function. Even the doubts allowed to remain about the real existence of the Goddess can be seen as satisfying Graves's latent rationalism. To see how this process of integration is achieved, we must look at the plot which unifies this novel. Soon after his arrival, Venn-Thomas begins a platonic affair with one of his host witches, Sapphire, but his sleep with her is troubled by mysterious voices that sound like his wife, Antonia. The other witch, Sally, seems to be involved with at least two of the three men at Magic House, but she treats Venn-Thomas coldly. Venn-Thomas's old flame, an adventuress named Erica, makes the first of several unexplained appearances and tells him that Sally is jealous of Sapphire. Erica is probably the Goddess in disguise, and her interpretation of Sally is naturally correct. Sally arranges for her lover Fig-bread to be killed by his horse, so that she can spread her cloak across his grave and demand that Venn-Thomas sleep with her.5 This local custom is supposed to afford the dead man's spirit rebirth in the child so conceived, but Venn-Thomas refuses her. Later that night, his wife Antonia shows up in his bedroom; he sleeps with her, only to discover that it was not Antonia but Sally working her magic on him. He This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions UTOPIAN AND FANTASTIC DUALITIES 253 goes to Sapphire, who has fled the house, and she says that she will not sleep with him until she can spread her cloak on Sally's grave. Instead, Sally arranges for Sapphire to undergo ritual death by swallowing a per- sonality-destroying drug; Sapphire does so and is reborn as a commoner named Stormbird, but first she kills Sally. Of the remaining inhabitants of the Magic House, one becomes an "elder" (spending his remaining days in the Nonsense House) and the other dies of heartbreak or suicide on hearing of Sally's death. The village is left without a poet-magician caste for protection; this fulfills a prophecy, and means that the North Wind is about to be loosed on New Crete. Venn-Thomas finds Stormbird, only to realize that he does not desire her sexually but as the daughter he and Antonia have never had. After he returns to his own time, waking to make love to Antonia, Stormbird returns as the daughter to be born from that act of love, announcing her coming in New Cretan style, by knocking three times on the door. As a utopia, Watch the North Wind Rise involves choices among opposed social ideas; as a novel, it presents its protagonist with choices among women. There are really two choices, one of which has already been made. Venn- Thomas could never really have chosen to keep Erica, for Muses cannot be kept, but in marrying Antonia he chose to temper his pursuit of the Muse with a quieter, familial love. Now Erica appears in his dream of the future, though secondary elaboration explains her presence as an incarnation of the Goddess, and Antonia seems to be present, though we are given the delayed explanation that her form was taken by Sally. Sapphire also looks a bit like Antonia-"Who are you really?" he asks her, and she replies, "The woman you love" (?3). The opposition between the attractive but evil Sally and the gentle Sapphire is, in fact, parallel to that between Erica and Antonia, and between sexual passion and familial love in general. Chapter Seventeen of the novel, "Who is Edward?" makes it quite clear that the choices involved are also choices among the rival sub-personalities of Venn-Thomas himself. He wonders whether his true self is the Ward who loved an American girl, the Teddy who loved Erica, the Ned who loves Antonia, the Edward who loves Sapphire, or none of these. Venn-Thomas's dream- solution makes a distinction between choices made as a poet and as a man. As a poet, he chooses the Erica-Muse and accepts the destruction and suffer- ing entailed by such a choice; as a man, he escapes from the whirlwind and returns to his stable home, sanctifying his sexual love for his wife by his paternal love for his yet unborn daughter. To do this is to reject the static utopia of New Crete while attempting to incorporate its values (represented by Sapphire) into his own life, to reject the necessity for evil in society (represented by Sally) while serving as its involuntary agent. On the emotional, artistic, and social level, the conflicting ideals of his rival sub-personalities are balanced and integrated in the structure of the novel. Watch the North Wind Rise has many of the characteristics of the "fan- tastic" genre, which is to be located in an area of tension between the natural and the supernatural. As a utopian fiction, it also presents oppositions be- tween notions of the possible, between social ideals, and between the idealiz- ing and satiric impulse. Such formal dualities make it a particularly appro- priate vehicle for the reflections of a poet who has always seen poetry as the result of mastering conflicting impulses. The congruence of the formal structure of the novel with the internal dynamic of its plot gives Watch the North Wind Rise an organic unity unusual in Graves's fiction and entitles it to greater attention than it has hitherto received. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 254 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES NOTES 'George Steiner, for example, sees Graves as closer to first-rank as a historical novelist than as a poet-"The Genius of Robert Graves," Kenyon Review, 22 (1960), 340-65. The lack of detailed work on Graves's novel is obvious from David E. Pownall, "An Annotated Bibliography of Articles on Robert Graves," Focus on Robert Graves, no. 2 (December 1973), 17-23. Watch the North Wind Rise (N.Y.: Creative Age, 1949) appears as the first edition in Fred H. Higginson's authoritative Bibliography of the Works of Robert Graves (London: Nicholas Vane, 1966), but some readers may know the novel from the English edition, which was published as Seven Days in New Crete (London: Cassell, 1949). The only extended treatment of this novel with which I am familiar is Fritz Leiber, "Utopia for Poets and Witches," Riverside Quarterly, 4 (June 1970), 194-205, a sympathetic summary which stresses the fantasy elements in the book. Graves's critics have seldom given the novel more than a passing sentence, and it is completely ignored by several critics otherwise particularly interested in Graves's view of the God- dess: John B. Vickery, Robert Graves and the White Goddess (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska, 1972); Daniel Hoffman, Barbarous Knowledge, Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves, and Muir (N.Y.: Oxford, 1967); and Randall Jarrell, "Graves and the White Goddess," The Third Book of Criticism (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 77-112. With the honorable exception of Leiber, critics of utopian fiction and "speculative fiction" have also neglected Watch the North Wind Rise, perhaps because because it is the only Graves novel to fall into these categories. Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970) devotes a few pages to Graves, arguing that Graves's apocalyptic ending is an arbitrary response to the "formal and experiential limitations of utopia" (p. 117); in what follows I hope to suggest that Elliott is wrong about both utopian fiction and Graves's novel. 2Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic [1970], trans. Richard Howard (Cleve- land: Case Western Reserve, 1973), p. 33. Jane Mobley, "Defining Fantasy Fiction; Focus and Form," paper presented to MMLA Speculative Fiction seminar, 1973, identifies true fantasy with magic-using other worlds (a sub- genre of Todorov's "marvellous"). Darko Suvin, on the other hand, has identified fantasy with Gothic, horror, and weird tales, categories which are excluded by Mobley's definition and which overlap Todorov's genres-"On the Poetics of Science Fiction," College English, 34 (December 1972), 372- 82, and "Science Fiction and the Genological Jungle," Genre, 6 (September 1973), 251-73. Todorov's "fantastic" might, however, be thought of as exist- ing on the borderline between Suvin's cognitive and non-cognitive estrange- ment. So long as the criteria used are made clear there is probably no great harm in such terminological confusion, though it rematins a nuisance. 3David Ketterer, New Worlds for Old (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1974), p. 101. On utopia as a literary genre, Darko Suvin, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, A Proposal and a Plea," Studies in the Literary Imagination, 6 (Fall 1973), 121-45. 4I have discussed this at greater length in "The Making of the Graves Canon: The Case for the Early Criticism," paper presented to the MLA Graves seminar, 1973. The most important early works are On English Poetry (N.Y.: Knopf, 1922), The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), and Poetic Unreason (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925). 5This scene curiously parallels one between Jason and Medea, the Golden This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 255 Fleece itself spread beneath them on their wedding night- The Golden Fleece (London: Cassell, 1944), published in America as Hercules, My Shipmate (N.Y.: Creative Age, 1945). Darko Suvin Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Recoil in the Age of Anticipation: A Chapter in the History of SF Let's be realistic-let's demand the impossible. Anonymus Sorbonensis, May 1968. The really philosophical writers invent the true, by analogy.... -Balzac. It seems most useful to define SF not by its thematic field, potentially un- limited, but by aspects that are always present in it. For any SF story these aspects are radically different agents (figures, dramatis personae) and/ or a radically different scene (existential context, locus). To use a key term of the fonnalist critics, most successfully developed by Brecht, such radically different aspects of a narrative make it appear strange; implying the possi- bility of new technological, sociological, biological, even philosophical sets of norms, the narrative in turn estranges the author's and reader's own empircal environment. As opposed to "naturalistic" ("mimetic" or "mun- dane") fiction, which aims at holding the mirror up to nature, SF is an estranged literary genre. The reason for its existence is a radically different, strange and estranging, newness. Since certain other genres use the attitude of estrangement, they are sometimes hybridized with SF and sometimes confused with it. The mytho- logical tale sees fixed, supernaturally determined relations under the flux of human fortunes. This mythical static constancy is to SF an illusion, usually a fraud, at best only an arrested realization of the dynamic possibilities of life. Myth asks ahistorically about The Man and The World. SOF asks, What kind of man?, In what kind of world?, and Why such a man (or indeed non-man) in such a world? Myth absolutizes apparently constant relation- ships from periods of sluggish social development. SF builds on variable processes from the great whirlpool periods of history, such as the 16-17th and 19-20th centuries. It is committed to a cognitive and critical approach which is blood brother to the scientific method; though SF could and did appear long before Descartes, this commitment is the rational kemel to the assertion that it is a "scientific fiction." If SF is defined by the interaction of cognition and estrangement, if it is a literature of possible and reasonable wonder or cognitive estrangement, then-notwithstanding all sterile hybridizations-it is fundamentally different from the genres derived from myth: the fairy tale, the horror story, or what is now called heroic fantasy, which are all concerned with the irruption of anti-cognitive laws into the author's empirical environment or with worlds in which such laws hold sway. SF, on the other hand, shares with "naturalistic" fiction the basic rule that man's destiny is man-other humans (or psychozoa) This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 256 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES and their devices and institutions, powerful but understandable by reason and methodical doubt and therefore changeable. In SF, then, the radically different agents and scenes are still agents and scenes of the human world.' Historically SF arose from the blending of utopian hopes and fears with popularizations of the social and natural sciences in the adventure-journey, the "extraordinary voyage," with its catalogue of wonders that appear along Ulysses' or Nemo's way. Modern SF thus has its antecedents in such his- torical forms as the Blessed Island Tale, the utopia, the "planetary novel" of the 17th and 18th centures, the Rationalist "state novel," the Romantic blueprint and anti-utopia, the Vernean "scientific novel," and the Wellsian "scientific romance." In spite of their differences, this sequence of ttypes amounts to a coherent tradition (the writers in the line of, say, Lucian, More, Rabelais, Cyrano, Swift, M. Shelley, Verne, Wells, Zamiatin, Stapledon were aware of its unity).2 It constitutes a literature of cognitive estrangement or wonder, an SF genre with various sub-genres, all of which use the old rhe- torical trope of "the impossibilities" (impossibilia) in a new and triumphant fusion with the equally old notion of the wished-for land or time; a genre in which autonomous worlds are opposed to the author's empirical environment either in explicit detail, as a "world upsidedown" (existentially in the Cock- aigne tales, politically in the utopias, etc.), or in implicit parallel, as satiri- cal or playful wonder testifying to radical other possibilities, or both. Its significant texts group themselves in distinct clusters, where different his- torical purposes developed the basic SF form into different sub-genres, from the oral tales and ancient classics, through the clusters of 1510-1660, 1770- 1830, and 1880-1910, to the cluster of the last 35 years. In between, for this is a subversive tradition, it was driven underground (e.g., the oral literature and hermetical apocrypha of the Middle Ages), or into exile (e.g., French SF after the Fronde), or into the disreputable organs of sub-literature (e.g., the U.S. pulp magazines of the period between the wars). SF thus belongs- like many types of humor-to that popular literature which spread through centuries by word of mouth and other unofficial channels, penetrating into officially accepted literature only at rare favorable moments; when it did pene- trate, however, it produced masterpieces which were sufficient to establish a tenuous yet potent intellectual tradition. Having been sustained by subordi- nate social groups, with whom it achieved and then lost historical legitimacy, this iceberg character of SF, only a fraction showing above the silent surface of officially recorded culture, is thus the result of class tensions. If SF is historically part and parcel of a submerged or popular "lower literature" expressing the yearnings of repressed social groups, it is under- standable that its major breakthroughs to the cultural surface should happen in the periods of sudden social convulsion, such as the age of the bour- geois-democratic and industrial revolutions, incubating in western Europe since More and Bacon, breaking out at the end of the 18th century, and con- tinuing into the 19th. The imaginative horizon or locus of estrangement in SF shifts radically at this time. Hitherto located in a space existing alongside the author's empirical environment (i.e., an alternative island whose radical other- ness and/or debunking parody put that environment into question), SF in the 18th century turns increasingly to a time into which the author's age might evolve. A wished-for or feared future becomes the new space of the cognitive imagination, no doubt in intimate connection with the shift from the social power of land to that of capital based on labor sold and profit gained in that time which-as the new slogan said-is money. In the 19th century, time finally froze "into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum, filled with This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 257 quantifiable 'things' [and thus] it becomes space";3 and quantified natural science made social change in one lifetime the rule rather than the exception. In this essay we shall see that the high price of a success of the industrial revolution which was linked to a failure of social revolutions led SF from the radical blueprints and rhapsodies of Mercier, Condorcet, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Blake, and Shelley to the Romantic recoil from harsh reality and in- ternalization of suffering in Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. 1. RADICAL RHAPSODY. When time is the ocean on whose further shore the alternative life is situated, Jerusalem can be latent in England: I will not cease from mental strife, Nor shall by sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. Blake's Preface to Milton fuses a strong collective activism with the Biblical tradition of such future horizons: "Jerusalem is called Liberty among the children of Albion" (Jerusalem ?54). In the Bible, old Hebraic communism- the desert tradition of prizing men above possessions-intermittently gives rise to expectations of a time when everyone shall "buy wine and milk with- out money and without price" (Isaiah) and when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation...but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid" (Micah), even to "a new Heavens and a new Earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind" (Isaiah). Christ's communism of love was resolutely turned toward such a millenium. Throughout the intervening centuries, heretic sects and ple- beian revolts kept this longing alive. Joachim Di Fiore announced a new age without church, state, or possessions, when the flesh shall again be sinless and Christ dissolved into a community of friends. By way of the 17th-century religious revolutionaries this tradition led to Blake. His age witnesses a new, lay prophetic line from Babeuf and Shelley to Marx, fusing poetry and politics and inveighing against the great Babylon of class-state, "the merchants of the earth" and "the kings of the earth who have committed fornication with her" (Revelations). As of then, the future is a new existential horizon corroding what Blake calls the "apparent surfaces" of the present, etching it in as unsatisfactory. As in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, "the great succession of ages begins anew." Apart from insignificant precursors, SF anticipation began as part and par- cel of the French Enlightenment's confidence in cognitive progress. Its "draw- ing-room communists" Mably and Morelly drew up blueprints transferring Plato's argument against private property from heavenly ideals into nature's moral laws. At the conservative end of the oppositional political spectrum, MERCIER's hero, who wakes up in Year 2440 (1770),4 dwelt in the first full- fledged utopian anticipation: in it progress had led to constitutional govern- ment, moral and technical advances (e.g., a phonograph with cries of wounded is used to educate princes), and a substitution of science for religion. The noblest expression of such an horizon was CONDORCET's Sketch...of the pro- gress of human mind (written in 1793) which envisaged a turning point in human history-the advent of a new man arising out of the "limitless perfectibility of the human faculties and the social order." Perfected insti- tutions and scientific research would eradicate inhumanity, conquer nature and chance, extend human senses, and lead in an infinite progression to an This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 258 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Elysium created by reason and love for humanity. Condorcet tried to work hard toward such a state within the Revolution, just as did "Gracchus" BABEUF, in whom culminates the century of utopian activism before Marx. Equality, claimed Babeuf, was a lie along with Liberty and Fraternity as long as property (including education) is not wholly equalized through gaining power for the starved against the starvers. An association of men in a planned production and distribution without money is the only way of "chaining des- tiny," of appeasing "the perpetual disquiet of each of us about our tomorrows." For a great hope was spreading among the lower classes that the just City was only a resolute hand's grasp away, that-as Babeuf's fellow conspirators wrote in The Manifesto of the Equals-"The French Revolution is merely the forerunner of another Revolution, much greater and more solemn, which will be the last." Even when Babeuf as well as Condorcet was executed by the Jacobins and the revolution taken over by Napoleon, when anticipatory SF turned to blueprints of all-embracing systems eschewing politics, it remained wedded to the concept of humanity as association. This applies to Blake as well as to Saint-Simon and Fourier. These two great system-builders of utopian anticipation can here be men- tioned only insofar as their approaches are found in and analogous to much SF. In a way, the whole subsequent history of change within and against capitalism has oscillated between Saint-Simon's radical social engineering and Fourier's radical quest for harmonious happiness, which flank Marxism on either side. Henri de SAINT-SIMON anticipated that only industry, "the industrial class" (from wage-earners to industrialists) and its organizational method are pertinent in the new age. The "monde renverse" where this "second nation" is scorned must be righted by standing the world on its feet again. This full reversal means, in terms of temporal orientation, "the great moral, poetic, and scientific operation which will shift the Earthly Para- dise and transport it from the past into the future," constituting a welfare state of increasing production and technological command of the whole globe by a united White civilization. This "Golden Age of the human species" is to be attained by "a positive Science of Man" permitting predictive extrapo- lation. Saint-Simon is the prophet of engineers and industrial productivity, usable equally for a regulated capitalism or an autocratic socialism. The Suez Canal as well as Stalin, and all SF whose hero is the "ideologically neutral" engineering organizer, from Verne to Asimov, or Bellamy to the feebler, utopian Wells, are saintsimonian. For all his rational organizing, Saint-Simon had forsaken 18th-century Rationalism by answering the Swiftian question "What is man?" in terms of economic life rather than of "nature" and "natural rights," even if he then retreated to positing three separate human natures or psychophysiological classes-rational, administrative, and emotive-whose representatives would form the ruling "Council of Newton," the college of cardinals of his "New Christianity." Charles FOURIER based a radically humanized economy en- tirely upon a complex series of desires. Civilization "thwarted and falsified" them whereas it could and should have increased the gratification of all passions-sensual, collective (desires for respect, friendhsip, love, and a recon- stituted family), or "serial" (desires for faction, variety, and unity). It is a world turned inside out (monde b rebours) in which the physician has to hope for "good fevers," the builder for "good fires," and the priest for "the good dead"; in which family means adultery (and Fourier enumerates with glee 49 types of cuckold), riches bankruptcy, and work a constraint; in which property ruins the proprietor, abundance leads to unemployment, This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 259 and the machine to hunger. Against this Fourier elaborated a method of "absolute deviation" which was to lead to a world where both work and hu- man relations would be a matter of "passionate attraction." Men and their passions are not equal but immensely varied, like notes in the harmonic scale, colors in the spectrum, or dishes at a gastronomic banquet, and have to be skilfully composed in a "calculus of the Destinies." Corresponding to the potential harmony of the "social movement" are series of animal, vegetable, geometric, and cosmic relationships. Thus there will be 18 different creations on Earth in this passional cosmology; ours is the first and worst, having to traverse five horrible stages from Savagery down to Civilization before as- cending through "Guarantism" (the economico-sexual welfare state of fed- erated productive associations or phalanstEres) to Harmony. At that point humanity will have cleansed the Earth of sexual and economic repression, ill- nesses, nations, the sundering of production from consumption, and the struggle for existence; and the Earth-itself a living being in love with another bisexual planet-will respond by melting the polar ice, turning the oceans into something like lemonade (all this elaborately justified by physics), and producing useful "anti-beasts" such as the anti-lion, as well as new senses for men. The blessed life of Harmony and the succeeding 16 creations (the last one seeing the end of the globe) will turn the procedures of class and power inside out: courts and priests will be Courts of Love and priesthoods of sex; armies will clean, plant, and reconstruct; work will become play and art, and "abnormality" the mainspring of society. Fourier's shattering inter- play of maniacal poetry and ironical dialectics, rooted in the deep longings of the classes crushed by commerce and industry, in a genuine folk imagination with its immense strengths and foibles, will reappear in garden cities and kibbutzin, communes and "retribalization." In his exemplary scenes and char- acters-such as Nero becoming a respected butcher in Harmony, much like Rabelais's King Anarch-he is himself writing warm SF. It will be followed in the rare but precious visions fusing relativist sociopolitics, erotics, and cosmology in SF, from Shelley through Stapledon to be Guin. Blake's and Shelley's imaginations, in spite of their dissimilar traditions, often run astoundingly parallel to this contemporary of theirs. They too rejected the orthodox division of man into body versus soul and of society into classes, as well as the merely given "human form." BLAKE championed Man's individual and collective "imaginative body" rising as a giant into a projected free fulfillment simultaneously economic, sexual, and creative. The hypocritic and cruel civilization of Church, Army, Palace, and Merchant, with its principle of selfhood, creates jealous possessiveness over children and women, shame of sexual love, and slavery to hunger and toil. Money, the cement of this fallen society, murders the poor by stunting and the rich by corrupting their imaginative needs, thus engendering sterility. Therefore Blake sang the American and French revolutions in his Promethean "Orc cycle" of the 1790s-from The French Revolution, America, and Europe to The Four Zoas-which announced the end of post-Genesis history and the ad- vent of a new divine Man in a realm of freedom (a term Marx too was to use). Revolution is identical with imagination and life, and absolutely unavoidable; but if its beginning is in politics, its end is in a joyous Joachimite Jerusalem where the body personal and the body politic shall have been redeemed. However, as the American and French experiences turned to bourgeois rule and aggressive conquests, and as English repression grew virulent, Blake's earlier work remained unpublished and unfinished. Orc aged into his Rational- ist sky-god antagonist Urizen, and Blake came to stress timeless religious This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 260 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES apocalypse and pragmatic compensation through art in place of the imminent passage through the Earthly Paradise of sexuality and benevolent nature to the Eden of creativity. His fantasies of cosmogonic history read like a gigantic inventory of later "far out" SF, from Stapledon and E.E. Smith to Arthur Clarke and van Vogt. But as different from their impoverished strainings into cosmic sensations, even the most opaque pseudomythology of the later Blake retains the estranging principle of "twofold vision" which sees the unfallen world within the fallen one, and the cognitive orientation of an "Innocence [that] dwells with Wisdom." In his last year, amid the bread riots, he persisted in his Biblical communism: "Give us the bread that is our due and right, by taking away money, or a price, or tax upon what is Common to all in thy Kingdom." SHELLEY, younger than Blake and from a higher social class, and irrev- ocably opposed to Christianity, which he saw as tyranny, marked the orienting of revolutionary toward political parable and vision rather than mythical form, toward Hellenic, Shakespearean, and scientific rather than Biblical or Miltonic traditions. His first major work, Queen Mab (1813), is an embattled vision of humanity's past, present, and future which draws on contemporary natural sciences, the philosophes such as Condorcet, and their English systematizer William Godwin for the future ideally perfectible society. Godwin's Political Justice, invoking Plato, More, and Swift's Houyhnhnms, pleaded for the equalization of property so that men could change their character, abandon war and monogamous family, and finally become immortal by the control of mind over matter. Shelley fleshes out such a Rationalist anarchism in his anticipation of a harmonious Earth rejoicing in the perpetual Spring of a fertile and gentle Nature, where "All things are recreated, and the flame / Of consentaneous love inspires all life" (?8:106.08). In the notes to Queen Mab, Shelley develops his views both on labor as the sole source of wealth, which could be reduced to two hours daily, and on the change of Earth's axis and the speeding up of the mind's perception to vanquish time by "an infinite number of ideas in a minute." Such horizons, as well as the poem's forceful attacks on the ruling political tyranny, capitalist selfishness and corruption, and church and religion, made Queen Mab, in spite of legal persecution, the bible of English working-class radicalism from Owenites to Chartists and beyond. Queen Mab is the concluding chord in the great sequence of societal and cosmic anticipations accompanying the democratic revolutions in America and France. From Diderot and Condorcet to Blake and almost all the Euro- pean romantics, two generations shared the expectation of an imminent millenium of peace, freedom, and brotherhood: Not in Utopia-subterranean fields- Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us-the place where, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all! -Wordsworth, The Prelude ?11:140-44. But the revulsion from the results of the revolutions "was terrible," observed Shelley in the Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818): "Thus, many of the most ardent and tender hearted...have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have be- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 261 come the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disap- pointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair." The shift of SF location from space to the present or im- mediate future, we can now see, was arrested and re-channelled either back into timelessness or into the staking out of anticipation in distant futures. These alternatives develop into different, twin but opposed, genres and atmos- pheres. A fantasy more tenuous, internalized, and horrific than that of the later Blake emerges as a new shudder and genre in Romantic melodrama, tale, and narrative poem. (In particular, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, using both scientific observations and the polar voyage as metaphor for the break- down of human relationships in an alienating society, had a profound effect on Mary Shelley and Poe, and through them on much subsequent SF.) On the other hand, Shelley is (together with Fourier) the great poetic forerunner of the SF extrapolative anticipation saved from arid political or natural-science didacticism by also being a parabolic analogy. In the hands of poets, whether in verse or prose, such analogy, simultaneously collective and intimate, has cosmic pretensions over and beyond sociopolitical (later also technological) anticipation. The Revolt of Islam itself is an "alternative history," the account of a loving pacifist-revolutionary couple who are defeated politically but not ruined morally because they keep faith with their personal love as well as with the future vision of "divine Equality" (?5:3). Laon and Cythna must die in this "Winter of the world," but "Spring comes, though we must, who made / The promise of its birth" (?9:25). Parallel to the satirical comedy Swellfoot the Tyrant, a sarcastic political travestyv of King Oedipus as beast- fable, Shelley's culminating statement comes in Prometheus Unbound (1820). This "lyrical drama" is a delicately tough parable in which Prometheus stands for Humanity that created evil in the shape of its oppressor Jupiter, but also for intellect and intellectuals as champions of the oppressed. In order to escape the fate of the French Revolution, or of Blake's Orc, Pro- metheus renounces hate in spite of the torments by Furies, who stand for the forces of court, church, war, commerce, and law, but also for ethical torments and despondency: political and ethical tenor are convertible in this multiply woven "fable." Jupiter is thereupon toppled by Demogorgon (the subterra- nean and plebeian titanic Necessity of nature and society, associated with sub- versive volcanic and earthquake imagery), who has been contacted by Pro- metheus's bride Asia, standing for Love or overriding human sympathy. Necessity, Love, and Hercules (Strength and armed insurrection) liberate Pro- metheus, and thus bring about the transformation of society to "Fortunate isles," a renewed life where evil and ugly masks have been stripped off all nature, and man remains Scepterless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise.... (?3:4:194-98) In the final act, even this Earthly Paradise is after "an hundred ages" superseded by Time stopping in a full unfolding of human psychic and cosmic potentiality. The universe too becomes Promethean, and the newly warmed and habitable Moon sings a paean of praise to redeemed Earth in a lyrical finale of surpassing power, imbued with the peculiarly Shelleian "Liquid splendour," often in images of vivifying electricity. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 262 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Shelley's expressionist lyricism, using poetic abstraction as an "intel- ligible and beautiful analogy" with the most precise apprehensions of mind and nature and their most sensitive historical oscillations, gives poetry the power to comprehend all knowledge. Politics, cosmology, and natural sciences such as chemistry, electricity, and astronomy are potential liberators of hu- manity, equally based on labor and Promethean thought: Our toil from thought all glorious forms shall cull To make this Earth, our home, more beautiful, And Science, and her sister, Poesy, Shall clothe in light the fields and cities of the free! Revolt of Islam ?5:51:5. And humanity cannot be whole again (he resolutely agreed with Mary Woll- stonecraft) until the state is abolished where "Woman as the bond-slave dwells / Of man a slave; and life is poisoned in its wells" (Ibid. ?8:13). Parallel to this poetry of cognition, Shelley's estrangement is the most deli- cate yet vigorous personal emotion at the sight of life enslaved, approaching it always "with a fresh wonder and an insatiable indignation";5 e.g., the line "Hell is a city much like London" (Peter Bell the Third ?3:1) is quite Swiftian. Often at the limits of the expressible-"With thoughts too swift and strong for one lone human breast" (Revolt of Islam ?9:33)-Shelley's insight into scientific and political thought as strife and sympathy between man, plane- tary nature, and time, makes Prometheus Unbound "one of the few great philosophical poems in English."6 The opus culminating in this poem-strongly imbued with political anticipation, Lucretian cosmic and anthropological spec- ulation, and utopian romance such as Paltock's Peter Wilkins (1750) and J.H. Lawrence's feminist Empire of the Nairs (1801)-is proof that SF can be supreme poetry, and vice versa. 2. ROMANTIC RECOIL. Although MARY SHELLEY was the daughter of two radical writers, Godwin (mentioned above) and the feminist Mary Woll- stonecraft, and wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus even while her husband was preparing himself for Prometheus Unbound, yet in this revealingly flawed hybrid of horror-tale and philosophical SF she expresses with considerable force the widespread recoil from Promethean utopianism, the "disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exag- geration of its own despair," which was to become a dominant tendency in subsequent English-language SF. The novel's theme is twofold: Frankenstein's creation of artificial life is the vehicle for a parable on the fate of an alienated representative individual-his Creature (called "monster" only twice, I think, in the entire book). A series of paradoxes and contradictions emerges from the opposition of these two themes and characters. Victor Frankenstein's theme shapes a horror tale about the attitudes of modern "objective" science. It is not quite anti-scientific, but is recounted as an awful warning to Walton, the explorer of icy polar regions, not to pursue discovery unless solitary imagination is allied to warm fellow-feeling. Walton's "belief in the marvellous," though fed by Romantic poetry, science, and utopian travel dreams, merely hurried him "out of the common pathways of men" and rendered him friendless; parallel to this, Frankenstein has spumed the study of language and politics, recapitulating in his personal history the ex- clusion of "human sciences" from post-Baconian science. Just as Walton is ruthlessly prepared to sacrifice his crew and his own life for "the acquirement of knowledge" equated with dominion over nature in the name of an abstract This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 263 mankind, so Frankenstein had quite scientifically concluded that "to examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death," and proudly gone about creating a human being with the aid of science instead of the traditional "divine spark" (bestowed by God or stolen from him by Prometheus) or the alchemical, magic elixir of life. For Percy (and presumably Mary) Shelley, electricity was vital energy imbued with natural human sympathy; Franken- stein used it instead with mathematics and charnel-house surgery. That his desire to break through the boundary between life and death boomerangs, in the Creature's killing all his dear ones and thus desolating his life, is in the best theological tradition; his horror and disgust when seeing his creature come alive would thus, as in a Gothic story, prefigure its behavior, just as its hideous looks would testify to its corrupt essence. But the Creature's pathetic story of coming to sentience and to conscious- ness of his untenable position provides an almost diametrically opposed point of view. His theme is both the compositional core and the real novelty or SF element that lifts Frankenstein above a grippingly mindless Gothic story. Far from being foul within, the Creature starts as an ideal 18th-century "noble savage," benevolent and good, loving and yearning for love. His ter- rible disappointment and alienation is that of the typical Romantic hero- of, as he himself points out, Goethe's Werther or a Romantically justified Miltonic Satan-wandering through mountains and glaciers. In the Creature this outcast status is projected from historical practice into biological necessity: he is caught between his vital spark of freedom and the iron grip of scorn and persecution that arises from his racial alienness. We are back on the shores of Houyhnhnmland as seen by Godwin: for in the Creature a "sensitive and rational animal" (?24), less guilty than man, is again showing up human his- tory, politics, psychology, and metaphysics. These are explained in the four books the Creature overhears being discussed during his strange education by proxy: The strange system of human society was explained to me.... I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages; but without either, he was considered ...as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I?... I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man.... Was I then a monster...? (?13) But the addition of "sensitive" to the 18th-century definition of man as a rational animal points to a great shift across the watershed of the failed democratic and the costly industrial revolution. Humanity is being shown up not only as irrational but also as cruel, in impassioned rather than satirical accents, by a suffering and wronged creature who wants to belong rather than be a detached and wondering observer. This shift exactly corre- sponds to the shift from far-off places to a present that should be radically transformed, from More's or Swift's static juxtaposition of islands and cities to the dynamic mutual pursuit of Frankenstein and his Creature across the extreme landscapes of lifeless cold and desolation, from behaviorist to senti- mental psychology, from general human nature to historical human relation- ships. Life, the central category of the Romantics, "is opposed to being in the same way as movement to immobility, as time to space, as the secret wish to This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 264 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES the visible expression."7 This hallowed status of sentient life and its genesis was threatened by a capitalist use of physical sciences which substituted "mechanical or two-way time for history, the dissected corpse for the living body, dismantled units called'individuals' for men-in-groups, or in general the mechanically measur- able or reproducible for the inaccessible and the complicated and the or- ganically whole."8 This led to a growing relevance of and fascination with automata as puzzling "doubles" of man. Before Mary Shelley, such a semi- alien twin had been treated either as a wondrously ingenious toy (in the 18th century) or as an unclean demonic manifestation (in most German Romantics); in the first case it belonged to "naturalistic" literature, in the second to horror- fantasy. The nearest approximation to an artificial creature seen both as per- fect human loveliness and (later) as a horrible mechanical construct was provided by Hoffman in The Sandman (1816). But even he oscillated between fiends and physics, and his Olimpia was seen solely through a dazzled ob- server. Mary Shelley's Creature is not only undoubtedly alive though alien, and fashioned out of human material instead of the inorganic wires of pup- petry, he is also allowed to gain our sympathy by being shown from the in- side, as a subject degradingly treated like an object. However, because of the "exaggerated despair" which Shelley accurately diagnosed, not only is human society monstrous in its dealing with the Creature, but he too is "objectively" a monster-living though unnatural, sentient and intelligent though inhuman. Clearly, the two main themes and viewpoints of the novel contradict each other. The Creature is the moral focus of this parable, so that the reader cannot treat him as a Gothic monster merelyvouchedfor by science instead of the supernatural. But vice versa, if one is to look at this as SF, important unresolved questions appear-and fundamentally, why did the Creature have to be hideous? Conceivably, though unconvincingly, the contrived accident of Frankenstein's creative haste might be discounted as just one more among the melodramatic contrivances and technical clumsinesses of this novel; even so, why should alienness have to be automatically equated with hideousness? The tenor and the vehicle of the parable are here startingly discrepant- a signal that some strong psychic censorhip is at work. As Shelley suggested in the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, we are here dealing with a gloom and misanthropy rooted in the moral ruin of the revulsion from the French Revo- lution. The hypothesis that, just as in Blake and Shelley, the relationships in Frankenstein are symbolic both of individual psychology and collective poli- tics explains the curious contradictions found in the novel. Frankenstein and the Creature are in some ways comparable to Freud's Ego and Id, but they are not reducible to such a Jekyll-Hyde relationship. The Creature is warmer and finally more intelligent than his creator, like Milton's Adam and Satan; nor can Freudism explain why the lower psychological class of Id must al- ways be thought of as lawless and destructive. However, Frankenstein can be seen as an overhasty and half-baked Shelleyan intellectual, the Godwinian philosophe-scientist who "animates" the popular masses with "no kind of property" in hopes of a new and glorious creation, only to find-in a parable of the French Revolution-that persecution and injustice exacerbate them to the point of indiscriminate slaughter and that his Prometheanism has desolated his "most cherished hopes." This supplies an historical explanation for the Creature's only partly successful fashioning and the universal revulsion felt for it. It also clarifies why at the end Frankenstein can exclaim "I ha.ve myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed." In this view he was an improper Prometheus or revolutionary intellectual-a truly new one, with more patience and love, will be presented in Prometheus Unbound. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 265 Mary Shelley's other SF novel, The Last Man (1826), is a renewed reversal of the perspectives in Prometheus Unbound. It retains and interestingly details its prospects of political liberation, but reverses its cosmic optimism by having mankind collapse in a plague which leaves the sole survivor finally even more isolated than Frankenstein or his Creature. The shift of the locale into the future (the "tale of the future" becomes six times more frequent after 1800) translates Mary's usual Gothic background into a black SF anticipation, already adumbrated in several works that followed the debacle of 18th-century hopes and often posited a new ice age (Grainville's poem Le dernier homme, 1805; the "romance-in-futurity" Last Men, 1806; Byron's poem "Darkness"; etc.). This makes The Last Man a precursor of the SF "physics of alienation" from Poe to The Time Machine and beyond. But Frankenstein remains her permanent contribution, claiming for SF the concem for a personal working out of overriding sociological and scientific dilemmas. It compromised with horror-fantasy taste by returning these dilemmas largely to biology, thus announcing the legions of menacing aliens and androids from Wells and Capek on. Yet the stress on sympathy and responsibility for the Creature transcends the sensational murders and purple patches of Mary's own novel and most SF writing on this theme (not to mention the Hollywood movies which revert to one-dimensional Gothic monsters). The urgency in Frankenstein, situated in an exotic present, interweaves intimate reactions with social destiny, enthusiasm for Promethean science with a feeling for its human results, and marries the exploratory SF parable with the (still somewhat shaky) tra- dition of the novel. This indicated the way SF would go in meeting the chal- lenge of the cruel times, and of Swift's great question about man-relocated into body and history. However, the way proved long and thorny. A number of scattered SF writings appeared in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s with the revival of utopian expectations and Romantic dreams. In Russia, V. Odoevsky wrote a mild anticipation, The Year 4338.9 In France, Souvestre disguised a sermon on the immorality of mechanized progress, which had torn down the old pieties and would therefore be destroyed by God, as possibly the first anti- utopian anticipation in The World as It Shall Be (1846), and Cabet disguised an authoritarian version of Fourier and Owen as fiction in A Journey to Icaria (1840), both only less insipid than Lamartine's liberal United Europe of France and England (1843). As a last interesting echo of the 1848 wave, C.I. DEFONTENAY revived in Star (1854) the planetary novel with a vivid description, in prose mixed with verse, of a whole planetary system with different man-like species, their physics, politics, and ethics. A utopian hu- manism and sensibility, which created even samples of Starian literature, vivi- fies his narration of their history, passing through a cosmic exodus and retum-a lone work looking forward to Stapledon. In Britain, J.F. Bray's A Voyage From Utopia, 10 halfway between Owen and Bellamy, attempted to merge Swiftian techniques with radical egalitarian propaganda. Utopias in the U.S.A., which had been published since the turn of the century, also gave some signs of reviving. But tries at colonies such as Cabet's and the Brook Farm failed, and the distance from-indeed enmity to-the every- day world increased in the North American writers of the mid-19th century. Living in the country where the bourgeois way of life progressed most rapidly, they recoiled from its optimism most thoroughly, and came to treat the wondrous novelty not in terms of Prometheus the revolutionary, but in terms of Faust, the overreacher who sold his soul to the Devil and whom Goethe had already adopted as symbol of the permanent dynamism accom- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 266 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES panying the bourgeois. The most prominent of such recoilers were Haw- thorne, Melville, and Poe. The first often used allegorical fantasy, the second a more or less imaginary voyage, and the third both. In some cases, admittedly marginal to the ensemble of their works, their fictions bordered on or passed into SF. One of the strong American literary traditions was that of the world supplying moral symbols for the writer, and in particular of the adventurous voyage as an inner quest. It flowed from various updatings of Pilgrim's Progress, from Morgan's History of the Kingdom of Basaruah (1715) to C.B. Brown, Irving (whose History of New York, 1809, has a satirical SF sketch, midway between Voltaire and Wells, of Lunarians dealing with Earthmen as Whites did with Indians), and Cooper (who wrote two rather bad satirico- utopian novels) and it culminated in Hawthorne's fiction as the working out of a hypothesis with a symbolically collective rather than individualist main character. In short, there was almost "no major 19th-century American writer of fiction, and indeed few of the second rank, who did not write some SF or at least one utopian romance.""1 HAWTHORNE usually equivocates be- tween the natural and the supernatural, so that the hypnotism and other con- trolling influences in his major romances are never more than an under- current. Even in the stories that turn on the scientist-artist, the somewhat melodramatic allegory suggests that his Faustian urge is unnatural-at worst criminal, as in "The Birthmark," and at best useless except for his inner satisfaction, as in "The Artist of the Beautiful." Only in "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1846) is Hawthorne prepared to envisage a counter-creation for a moment on its own merits. Though Beatrice is not given as spirited a de- fense as Frankenstein's Creature, she is at least an innocently wronged alien who exercises considerable passionate attraction-rather similar to the Four- ierist ideas that Hawthorne was to renounce as senseless and wicked after his Brook Farm experience, itself comparable to a poisoned Eden, But finally, her father's revolutionary creation is dismissed in an ending more akin to exorcism than to SF. On the contrary, POE took to an exemplary extreme both the autonomy of his imaginary worlds and the isolation of the individual who does not relate to a coherent community but to some metaphysical principle. Poe was more exposed than Hawthorne to a civilization that was finding the artist unnecessary except as a leisure-time entertainer for marginal social strata. History and society meant to him merely a rapidly expanding "dollar-manu- facture," a hateful democracy or Mob rule, so that his protagonist-raising the stakes in comparison with the revolts of the first Romantic generation- ignores almost all human interaction, not only in politics and work but also in sex and knowledge. Science, technology, and all knowledge have become Mephistophelean instead of Promethean powers, fascinating but leading only to dead-ends and destruction: "Poe confronts and represents, as few authors before him, the alienated and alienating quality of the technological environ- ment."12 Therefore he constructed a compensatory fantasy-world connecting an exacerbated inner reality directly to the universe. But this fantasy is a kind of photographic negative of his environment. Feeling is dissociated from the intelligence and will that normally acted upon a socially recognizable reality, and a subjective timelessness (indeed a dream or nightmare-time) or instant apprehension of horror efface any objectively measurable progress of time: personality and consciousness are here disintegrating. In the actuality "time- keeping had merged with record-keeping in the art of communication."''3 This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RADICAL RHAPSODY AND ROMANTIC RECOIL 267 Poe, the first significant figure in this tradition to live from commercial work for periodicals (even writing a story to fit a magazine illustration, as often in present-day SF), concentrated on the obstacles to communication. To him it is a maze of masks, hoaxes and cryptograms, exemplified by the recurrent manuscript in a bottle, falsely sent or mysteriously received, re- vealing truth ambiguously if at all. Most of Poe's tales existing within the horizons of terror, of flight from life and time, are horror-fantasies pretending to a private supernatural reality which is in fact based upon pre-scientific lore. In this light, Poe is the originator of what is least mature in the writing commercially peddled as SF-an adolescent combination of hysterical sensibility and sensational violence, and dissociation of symbol from imaginative consistency of any (even imaginary) world, a vague intensity of style used for creepy incantation. His protagonist is often "the perpetual American boy-man...[who] must, to express himself, go above, or away from, or beyond our commoner range of experience."14 T.S. Eliot, acknowledging his "very exceptional mind and sensibility," has even suggested that Poe's intellect was that "of a highly gifted young person before puberty."'5 Though this may not be fair to Poe, who at his best knew how to present his limitations with ironic distancing, it accurately pinpoints the emotional age of his imitators in the No-Man's- Land of fantasy passed off as SF from Haggard and Lovecraft to Bradbury and further. Three groups of Poe's works have a more direct claim to attention in this survey: those marginally using some SF conventions, those using SF for comic comment or ideological revelation, and the cosmological speculations. The first group comprises the poem "Al Aaraaf," the dialogues "Eiros and Charmion" (which mentions the destruction of Earth by a comet-caused con- flagration) and "The Power of Words," and the tales of oceanic descent culminating in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Pym appro- priates the extraordinary-voyage tradition for a metaphysical (and in the Tsalal episode passably racist) quest for purity or the unknown, presents an interesting use of correspondences between the world and the protagonist, and possibly ends with the Pole being an entrance to the hollow earth popu- larized in Symzonia (1820). The second group features anticipations like bal- loon-flights across the Atlantic and to the Moon or suspended animation (in "The Balloon Hoax," "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall," "Some Words With a Mummy," "Mellonta Tauta," "Van Kempelen and His Discovery") as hoaxes or satires on present-day certainties of progress; it includes in "The Man That Was Used Up" (1840) the first instance of a man almost totally composed of artificial organs. The most substantial among them, "Pfaall" (1840) and "Mellonta Tauta" (1850) are most strongly science- fictional. The interplanetary flight prepared by an amateur inventor in his back yard, the verisimilar flight perils and observations, and the glimpses of grotesque yet kindred aliens in the first story gave the cue to much later space-travel SF. More subtly, so did the future inventions, political satire, and cultural incomprehension of the reader's times in the second story (as also, retrospectively, in "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade") to later time-travel SF. The three "mesmeric tales" culminating in the scien- tifically motivated horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), whether used for revelation of Poe's cosmology or tongue-in-cheek sen- sationalism, are ancillary to his fantastic system of correspondences. Finally, Eureka (1848), his crowning piece of essayistic SF, explicates this highly heretical, complex web of analogies and conversions by which in Poe life This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 268 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES does not end with death, sentience is not confined to organic matter, cosmogony is analogous to individual sensibility and creativity (see "The Power of Words"), and the universe is God's coded monologue. Such mech- anistic metaphysics lead finally to solipsism: whatever the writer can imagine is as good as created, and conversely all that is created is imagined. No wonder he appealed to later lonely writers. Poe's influence has been immense in both Anglo-American and French SF (the latter has yet to recover from it). Though his ideology and time-horizon tend to horror-fantasy forms, the pioneering incompleteness of his work pro- vided SF with a wealth of hints for fusing the rational with the symbolical, such as his techniques of gradual domestication of the extraordinary, and of the "half-closed eye" estrangement just glimpsing the extraordinary. With Poe, the tradition of the moral quest became urbanized, escapist, and unortho- dox. His influence encompasses on the one hand the mechanical marvels of Verne and the dime novels, and on the other the escapist strain in some of the "straightest" U.S. SF, e.g., Heinlein's time-travelling solipsism. Both are blended in the Wellsian grotesque tradition, from some of Wells's cumu- lations of believable terrors to, say, the symbolical tales of Blish or Knight. Poe's notes stressing verisimilitude, analogy, and probability for the wondrous story made him also the first theoretician of SF. MELVIL L's whole opus is a "major contribution to the literature of created societies,"16 for he had an ingrained tendency to expand almost any subject into an allegorical microcosm of its own, and he took the Faustian quest more seriously than Hawthorne and less necrophiliacally than Poe. Mardi (1849), though somewhat formless, is an iconoclastic "extraordinary voyage" among islands of unsatisfactory mythologies, politics, and philoso- phies which blends Rabelais with memories of Polynesia. "The Tartarus of Maids," a revulsion against industrial and sexual exploitation of women, with sexual physiology masked as factory organization, is on the margins of SF by virtue of its sustained parallel between production of babies and that of paper. Most interestingly, in "The Bell-Tower" (1856), the "practical ma- terialist" merchant-mechanician protagonist, "enriched through commerce with the Levant," rising as a new force in a feudal society and raising his tower with the clock and the "state-bell," is a potent symbol for rising capital- ism and the emblematic American Liberty Bell. But his bell has been cast with an admixture of workman's blood, and the automaton created by him to be the bell's ringer, the "iron slave" who stands for all servitude from that of Negroes to that of workers, finally slays his master. The complex-even if not always congruous-religious, sexual, and political symbolism make this the nearest that mid-century narrative-prose SF has come to a Blakean ap- proach. The American SF story continued to be well represented into the second half of the 19th century, as in some stories by Fitz-James O'Brien culminating in the somber tale of microscopic fatality and elective affinity, "The Diamond Lens" (1858). But O'Brien was killed in the Civil War, and the ensuing Gilded Age was not propitious to sustained SF, which would revive only with Bellamy. Thus the period that opened with universal anticipations of liberation, with Blake's and Shelley's rhapsodies, found its central expression in the anguished immediacy of Frankenstein's costly failure, and ended in the sym- bolic gloom of representative creators from what began as liberty's first and last frontier but turned out to be a Liberty Bell cracked by the blood of the toilers. As Wordsworth precisely noted: "We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes despondency and madness" ("Resolution and This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CHANGE, SF, AND MARXISM 269 Independence"). This can be used as a characterization of the age more than of the poets it moulded, turning them from Shelley's unacknowledged legis- lating to Melville's passionate witnessing. NOTES 'I have discussed this approach to SF in "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," College English 34(1972):372-82, and "Science Fiction and the Genological Jungle," Genre 6(1973):251-73. For Bertolt Brecht's practice and theory of estrangement, see Brecht on Theatre, ed. and tr. John Willett (NY 1964), especially pp 96 and 192 (where Verfremdung, "estrangement," is wrongly translated as "alienation"). 2For Lucian's influence down to Rabelais and Voltaire, see John E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge 1903-08) and Basil L. Gilder- sleeve, Essays and Studies (Baltimore 1908). 3Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Boston 1971), p 90, and the whole essay-chapter "The Phenomenon of Reification" on pp 83 seqq. For the epistemological shift from spatial to temporal imagination see also the insights in Capital and other writings by Marx, developed by Lukacs as well as by Emst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung I-II (Frankfurt 1959) Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (NY and Burlingame 1963), and Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940). 4All the dates in the body of this essay are for first book publication. 5H.N. Brailsford, Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle (L 1930), p 221. 6Carl Grabo, A Newton Among Poets (Chapel Hill 1930), p 198. 7Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (L 1970), p 278. 8Mumford (Note 3), p 50. 9Odoevsky's text, written in 1837-39 as an epistolary novel, was never completed, presumably because of the dim prospects of its being published in Tsarist Russia, where only one fragment ever appeared (in the magazine "Utrennyaya Zarya" for 1840). It was first published in book form in 1926 (Moscow: Bibl. "Oronek"). 10Bray's book was written in 1840-41. A year later, the pressures on this radical labor leader and Chartist induced him to emigrate to the USA, and the book was first published only in 1957 (L: Lawrence and Wishart). "1H. Bruce Franklin, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nine- teenth Century (NY 1966), p x. 12David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe (Princeton 1973), p 247. 13Mumford (Note 3), p 136. 14E.H. Davidson, Poe (Cambridge, Mass. 1957), p 214. 15T.S. Eliot, in Eric W. Carlson, ed., The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ann Arbor 1966), pp 212-13. 16Franklin (Note 11), p 135. Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes? NOTE. This exchange, begun in SFS #2 by a discussion between Franz Rottensteiner and James Blish and the intervention into that discussion by Ursula K. Le Guin, H. Bruce Franklin, and Chandler Davis, and continued This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 270 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES in SFS #3 by Robert Scholes's essay, Damon Knight's letter, and, obliquely, Robert M. Philmus's dialogue, ends here with the contribution by Mack Reynolds and the final reply by Franz Rottensteiner (James Blish chose not to exercise his right to reply). The editors, finally, asked Fredric Jameson to sum up the discussion and comment on it. We hope that, for all its meanders, this debate-if taken as a whole-will have clarified what can legitimately be meant by the concepts in its title and their interactions. -DS. MACK REYNOLDS. WHAT DO YOU MEAN-MARXISM? While I agree that most SF writers are woefully ignorant about Marxism and hence have handicaps when dealing with socioeconomic subjects,I am afraid that the charges made have been too sweeping. One of the difficulties with Franz Rottensteiner's and also H. Bruce Franklin's contributions is that they don't tell us exactly what they mean by Marxism. A century after Marx and Engels did their work, the term has become somewhat elastic. One of the reasons for this is that the founders of scientific socialism never drew a blueprint of the new society. Marx's work was largely a critique of classical capitalism, and he never finished it. It gives one who wishes to call himself a Marxist a great deal of leeway. I hope that Rottensteiner and Franklin do not equate Marxism with any of the so-called communist parties, including that of the Soviet Union, the various Trotskyites, the Maoists, the Castroites, or the Titoists, not to speak of Allende's alleged Marxism in Chile. I would briefly define socialism as a society replacing capitalism in which the means of production are demo- cratically owned and operated by and for the people and in which the state has been replaced by a democratically elected govemment whose main task is to plan production. Now I have travelled extensively in all the "com- munist" countries of Europe save Albania, where they wouldn't let me in, and in none of them found such Marxian socialism. And I have read of none of it in China, Cuba, or any of the other "communist" countries. The nearest thing to it, perhaps, is Yugoslavia-and that's not very near. Certainly, the state has not withered away in any of them, as called for by Marx and Engels. Indeed, it has been strengthened beyond anything known in the capitalistic West at this time. I was born into a Marxian Socialist family. I am the child who, at the age of five or six, said to his parent, "Mother, who is Comrade Jesus Christ?"-for I had never met anyone in that household who wasn't called Comrade. While still in my teens, I joined the Marxist Socialist Labor Party and remained, very active, in it for many years, though I have since resigned, believing their program inadequate in the modem age. I have been a life- long radical and, so far as I know, have read everything written by Marx that has been translated into English, along with a great many other socialist classics. I have even taught the subject and lectured extensively in colleges, over radio, etc. In short, I think I am competent to handle the Marxian view- point, even though at present day I think much of Marx's work has become antiquated. (Much of the program presented in the Communist Manifesto [1848] has already been adopted by capitalist society.) I began writing on a full-time basis in 1949. Early in the game I realized that I was much too shaky in the physical sciences to deal with them ade- quately, so I began specializing in stories with social-science themes, es- pecially socioeconomics. Since 1949 I have sold some forty books and several hundred shorter works. I have been translated into at least nine languages, This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CHANGE, SF, AND MARXISM 271 including German. I would estimate that at least half my stories are based on political-economy themes. I simply can't understand Mr. Rottensteiner reading much SF without running into at least some of these, including some that "endorse a Marxist view of change," for example, "Ruskies Go Home!" (F& SF Nov 1960), soon to be published in enlarged form by Ace as Tomorrow May Be Different, which foresees a future in which the Soviet Union has realized all its goals and has become the most affluent country in the world. If you are interested in an attack on the Soviet Union from the Marxian viewpoint, try "Freedom" (Analog Feb 1961), in which a new Russian under- ground is attempting to overthrow the "communist" bureaucracy to form a new government more in line with the teachings of Marx. Or read "Utopian," in Harry Harrison's The Year 2000 (Doubleday 1970), in which a Marxian Socialist is thrown forward by a time-travel gimmick into the world he has worked for all his life. Believe me, I could go on and on. (Mercenary from Tomorrow and Time Gladiators have been published in German by Moewig. Both are attacks on capitalism and its present-day trends; both call for the institution of a more advanced society.) Others have listed some of the other English-language writers who have written from the Marxist viewpoint, including Jack London (who once be- longed to the same SLP I did) and Olaf Stapledon, so I won't go into this, though I'll mention the fact that two of my SF writer friends fought in the International Brigades in Spain. I didn't, though I was in the age group, for I had already become disgusted with the Stalinists, as my friends later did in the course of the civil war. I was surprised to see Mr. Franklin refer to George Orwell as an anti- Communist propagandist. Of course, it's a matter of what you mean by communist, Orwell might have been anti-Soviet Union, and so am I, but he wasn't anti-Marxist. Only by calling the Soviet Union a communist country does that accusation hold water. Marx and Engels (the names cannot be separated) used the terms social- ism and communism interchangeably, in spite of the manner in which Soviet writers have used them since. And, going by their teachings, the Soviet Union is by no means communist, or socialist. The most apt label I can think of is "State Capitalism," since they retain all the aspects of capitalism save that ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the state (the Communist Party) rather than in prvate hands. FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER. IN REBUTTAL It seems to me that many of the contributors to your symposium answer points that I did not make. I did not, for instance, particularly point out that Blish did not invent the notion that SF uniquely prepares the reader for change; in fact, I think that priority here is of no importance, and I could have discussed dozens of other writers instead. I wrote about Blish's essay simply because I happened to be reviewing George Hay's book, and because his essay provided me with a springboard to say some things I had wanted to say for some time. I also do not ask of SF writers that every one (or even one) of them be a Darwin, Freud, or Marx, nor do I hold that no intellectual achievement smaller than theirs counts; I should be quite content if SF writers managed to incorporate intelligently in fiction what greater men thought first. But obviously there is an ocean between Mr. Blish's (or Mr. Knight's) notions of what constitutes intelligence in a writer, and my own. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 272 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Contrary to Ms. Le Guin's belief I did not say a word about the potential of the SF form; and it need hardly be pointed out that my anger would be totally inexplicable if I weren't aware of the abyss between the potential of the form and its actual state. I have also been accused of not knowing Stapledon or Jack London's The Iron Heel, and only wonder that nobody threw old Bellamy at me. There were, of course, a couple of Anglo-American writers with socialist convictions, Upton Sinclair, for instance, who wrote a few utopian stories, or, in more re- cent times, Thomas McGrath with a novel like The Gates of Ivory, the Gates ot Horn (tellingly published by "Masses & Mainstream Inc."), but I was speaking about the SF field, the mass-produced SF of today, and what have these isolated men to do with the condition of American or British SF? I even know Mack Reynolds, and have read about one-third to one-half of his stories, and while I don't question the honesty of his political convictions, I am afraid that I have a very low opinion of his judgment, and I have always thought his "social SF" to be just another brand of the variety cops- and-robbers, at times undistinguishable from the work of his ideological opposite, H. Beam Piper. Nominally though, he mayindeed deal with Marxism, much in the same manner as van Vogt has dealt with "general semantics." Mr. Knight's second proof of my factual wrongness is just funny. I don't see how I, not being the happy possessor of a time machine, could possibly have known the "recent work" of such eminent writers as Richard E Peck or Dave Skal when I wrote my review of George Hay's book-in February 1971. I believe that some of the writers mentioned by Damon Knight were then still unpublished. Apparently Mr. Knight was unable to find even one story dealing with "real problems" (and so far as I know we haven't yet reached a consen- sus on what a "real problem" is; I didn't define the term in my polemics) before the revolutionary advent of Messrs. Bryant, Peck, Platt, etc. I could well name him some authors and stories that deal with what I would consider real problems-but I do not think that those rare instances are statistically relevant. FREDRIC JAMESON. IN RETROSPECT Quite as frequently as those about SF, debates about Marxism often turn out to be sham disputes in which each party means something else by the term at issue; it is therefore not surprising that, compounded, such an exchange gives us a feeling that the participants have jumped on their hobby-horses only to ride off in all directions. It is not, for instance, helpful to find Robert Scholes confusing communism (or socialism) as a type of socioeconomic organization with Marxism as a system of thought, even though I welcome his appreciation of the critical power of the latter. I would want to go on to make a more fundamental distinction than this, however, and to suggest that we must first of all make up our minds whether we are talking about the writer of SF, and the usefulness of Marxism to him, or about the reader and the critic, and the way in which a Marxist approach can sharpen their under- standing of SF works which exist already. Rottensteiner and Franklin, for instance, are speaking primarily to the writers of SF, and suggesting that their work will improve in power and in relevance if they come to some awareness of the things that Marxism has to teach us about the world we live in. I would agree, of course, although I don't imagine anyone feels that Marxist convictions could be a substitute for what is called talent, nor would they deny that works either innocent of This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CHANGE, SF, AND MARXISM 273 Marxism or hostile to it might be interesting ones (Mr. Blish mentions Shiel, and one of Rottensteiner's points is obviously that there are lots of examples in American SF). Yet this second qualification then clearly shifts the argu- ment to reader and critic, and the attitude they are to take to already existing works of SF. Before I turn to this question, I would simply add a final word on prescribing to the creative writer: the idea is probably not as shocking any more as it was during the fifties, when the critical estab- lishment worked hard to foster the notion that literature was "autonomous" and that the best writers were those "whose minds were too fine to be violated by an idea" (T.S. Eliot's tribute to Henry James). Still, one of the basic em- phases of Marxism has always been on the primacy of the situation itself-on the unique requirements of a given historical moment and a given socioeco- nomic conjuncture; this means that even a militant writer would recognize that the nature of the work to be produced has to vary according to the needs of its public. In a middle-class country like the U.S., effective political writing will be very different from what is wanted in a peasant society in the process of building socialism and learning to read. Even that kind of assess- ment, moreover, does not begin to answer the question of the effectiveness of SF itself as opposed to other types of militant literature. In the Soviet Union, for instance, it seems that great SF has served the positive and utopian function of keeping the basic goals of socialism alive (see for example Efremov's Andromeda), while in a country like our own we would expect a militant SF to serve that far more negative, critical, destructive purpose which Scholes has underscored. Mack Reynolds seems to me to shift the focus of this particular debate by suggesting that Marxism "gets into" SF, not by way of the author's politi- cal intent or conscious ideology, but rather by the nature of the literary materials he uses, which Reynolds designates, in the occurrence, as "socio- economics." This is, I suppose, a useful fallback position: we may argue at length over whether a book like The Space Merchants is genuinely radical, or ultimately merely liberal, in its effect on the audience, but if we limit our- selves to the question of raw material, then the innovative nature of that particular novel-compared, e.g., to space opera-becomes unmistakable. The same holds true for a story like Ballard's "Subliminal Man," yet Frank- lin's example strikes me as most unfortunate in another sense and raises issues which will ultimately lead into our second theme, namely the need of ideo- logical criticism in the reading of SF. For every reader of Ballard knows that the lush and diseased, apocalyptic world of that great writer is the very opposite of a committed literature, and that it is by sheerest accident that his private obsessions (entropy, illusion, the shrinkage of space itself towards some deathly center) happened, in "The Subliminal Man," to have intersected with a piece of genuinely sociopolitical raw material. Ballard's work is one immense attempt to substitute nature for history, and thus a kind of dizzying and ecstatic feeling of inevitable natural eschatology for that far more troubled sense of collective historical death which someone so steeped in the British colonial experience must of necessity feel. That part of Ballard we surely cannot recuperate by attaching it to "socioeconomics" (and I hope I have not given the impression-following Mr. Reynolds-that Marxists wish to limit SF to this kind of material exclusively; I for one would be sorry to lose the very distinctive work of a writer like Larry Niven); we must therefore envisage a different kind of approach, some deeper kind of reading which makes the relationship between Ballard's talent and his concrete experience of history more accessible and visible to us. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 274 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES At this point, of course, we have already shifted from prescription to description, from the question of what kind of SF the writer ought to produce to that equally urgent one of the way in which the reader of SF ought to use that corpus of existing works which already surrounds us. Here a Marxist critic clearly has several tactical options: he may feel that a work is likely to exercise some particularly pernicious effect ideologically, and in that case, he will want to denounce it by making it clearer to a relatively unfore- warned audience what the particular work is really up to. Such culture criti- cism, however, will inevitably single out recent works, and works, moreover, which have had enough popular success to be worth taking on. It is unlikely, in other words, that at the present day Marxists will want to denounce the undoubted ideological ambiguities of H.G. Wells with the same passion they would bring to, say, Heinlein. Criticism like this forms a public by forcing it to be a little more lucid about its enthusiasms, and by reminding it of the sometimes sorry connections between some of its favorite products and the culture industry from which they issue, by furnishing concrete demonstrations of the various ways in which such products can reinforce the status quo and discourage political action and meaningful change. So no Marxist critic would want to rule out the option of some really negative and destructive criticism of misleading and ideologically pernicious works (although I would tend to agree with Suvin in wondering whether Farmer as a writer deserves Rottensteiner's attack, and with Franklin in wondering whether, if he does, the attack is really critical enough). But per- haps it would be helpful to people who, like Mr. Philmus, find themselves locked in the sterile antithesis between analysis and evaluation (or criticism and interpretation), to point out that not all so-called ideological analysis need be of this wholly negative kind. Indeed, SF more than most types of literature relies heavily on conceptual schemes (which is to say, on ideological materials) for its construction of future or alternate universes: the term extrapolation is of course simply another word for this process, whereby elements of our own world are se- lected in accordance with this or that abstract concept or model. John Brun- ner's recent works may indeed serve as a textbook illustration of the de- pendence of SF plots on what are essentially ideological choices; for he seems to have decided to furnish us with a series of "near futures" based on systematically varied extrapolations, Stand on Zanzibar offering a near future seen through the lens of the genetic theme, The Sheep Look Up providing an alternate version in terms of ecology. (Total Eclipse may then be seen as kind of finger exercise in which Mr. Brunner's genetic theme, ingeniously combined with an older economic determinism, is projected into the classical SF tra- dition of space travel and alien contact...) Such works might then be seen as functioning somewhat like Zola's "experimental novel," giving us a kind of small-scale experimental model of various versions of what classical Marxism calls "ultimately determining instances," now genetic, now ecological, now technological, etc. But the reader would have to be aware of the nature of the experiment, which otherwise is scarcely an innocent one ideologically. Now it is true that Mr. Brunner mentions the intent of his "genetic determi- nism" somewhere along the way: " 'We're all Marxists now' is a common cry among the world's intellectuals... But today's commonplace is often tomor- row's fallacy, and arguments from biology are increasing both in scope and precision. J. Merritt Emlen...puts forward the view that modern genetic theory can provide more subtle interpretations of human behavior than is generally realized," etc. (Stand on Zanzibar, Context 15). But one wonders This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CHANGE, SF, AND MARXISM 275 whether this is enough to be make the reader aware of the quite systematic effort Brunner has made, in organizing Stand on Zanzibar, to put across this viewpoint, which of course involves the substitution of "natural" and "Scientific" considerations for political and historical ones. Yet ideological analysis can also shed light on the purely artistic structure of such a work. If, indeed, one subjects the plot structure of the overrated Stand on Zanzibar to close examination, it becomes clear that its three sub-plots come from wholly different and unequal generic traditions. The New York section, with its overpopulation and its riots and its berserk and homicidal rampages, stems directly from the classic near-future line of books like Make Room, Make Room! The episode on Yatakang, on the other hand with its totalitarian Asiatic dictatorship and its oppressed scientists, far from being SF, is simply classic espionage melodrama, even to the final reversal (become a commonplace in the works of writers like Le Carre) in which it turns out to be the "free world" rescuers who are in reality the more evil of the two adversaries. Meanwhile, the picture of the backward and peaceful African nation with its wise and kindly ruler and its mutating human species (shades of Arthur C. Clarke!), springs right out of the long SF preoccupation with superhuman and future powers. The first point to be made about such an analysis is that these three stories don't really go together, since each one demands a completely different kind of reading (a different type of generic reception, if you excuse the jargon), while their juxtaposition involves awkward shifting of intellectual gears. Such a view goes a long way towards accounting for what is unsatisfactory about the book (and another part of the explanation would underscore Brunner's unequal manipulation of the three traditions-expert in the first, relatively realistic plot, and full of wit and inventiveness in his projection of future media, his spy story is per- functory and uninventive, while the whole African episode is so frankly bad as to make one squirm). The other point to be made is that these three plots correspond to an underlying political and ideological scheme and, once unveiled as such, offer quite unacceptable political stereotypes: they amount, indeed, to nothing but the most conventional and shopworn images of the First, Second and Third Worlds respectively, and perpetuate the picture of an advanced world in which the problems are decaying cities and crime in the streets (all resulting, mind you, from overpopulation), of a second sphere of old-fashioned communist dictatorship, and finally of the enviably precapitalist and archaic rhythms of those pastoral and tribal societies of the Third World, over which the first two worlds are bound to struggle. Thus what is wrong with Brunner's book aesthetically is a direct conse- quence of what is wrong with it ideologically; and it would seem to me that if such demonstrations were more systematically practiced (of the best, not of the worst, contemporary SF) they might well be more effective in persuading the writers of SF to reexamine their philosophical positions than the rela- tively terroristic threats of Mr. Rottensteiner. I would conclude by basing the necessity of ideological analysis on the very nature of SF itself: for me it is only incidentally about science or tech- nology, and even more incidentally about unusual psychic states. It seems to me that SF is in its very nature a symbolic meditation on history itself, comparable in its emergence as a new genre to the birth of the historical novel around the time of the French Revolution. Thus, I am perhaps not so far from the position of James Blish, provided his deliberately neutralized word "change" is replaced with the substantive one of history (which may in- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 276 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES volve stasis, or imperceptible transformation, as well as the rapid change he himself tends to associate with science and technology). If this is the case, then, surely we have as readers not been equal to the capacity of the form itself until we have resituated SF into that vision of the relationship of man to social and political and economic forces which is its historical element. Some Critical Works on SF PETER FITTING. TWO NEW BOOKS FROM FRANCE. Although Pierre Versins' Encyclopedie (see SFS 1:180-81) is still the most substantial work in French on SF, it has been followed by two books of considerable import: Jacques Van Herp's Panorama de la science fiction (Verviers, Belgium 1973, 432p) and Jacques Sadoul's Histoire de la science fiction moderne (Paris 1973, 414p). Jacques Van Herp's Panorama begins with a notarized declaration by the author and Pierre Versins that the resemblances between their two books are the result, not of any sharing of manuscripts, but of more than ten years of exchanging information, and of a "concordance of tastes and opinions." This is an important warning, for like Versins' Encyclopedie, this study is a history of SF through the ages, with an emphasis on works written prior to the 20th century. SF, according to Van Herp, is not a genre, but an attitude which may be found in poetry, theatre and essays as well as in novels, and which is based on the notion of hypothesis, "the study of what could be" (p 18): SF was born in Europe, created and developed by Europeans, raised from the beginning to heights it took a long time for writers across the Atlantic to attain. Its destiny resembles that of the cinema which was invented, created and perfected in Europe. But because of the 1914 war, Hollywood became pre-eminent and, for thirty years, had people convinced that it was THE cinema. In similar fashion, American SF was anticipated by European SF which came to maturity long before the former and was at times as audacious and as frantic. But because of economic factors it remained embryonic. Then in 1950 came the shock of works from the USA. If European SF deserves to be called "infantile" it is that SF which has been written since 1950, following the bad example of American SF. (pp 19-20) The first half of this study is a 200-page survey of "les grands themes," which the author divides into twelve chapters, including looks at "thinking machines," "the race which will replace us," "modified man," "the immor- tals and the resurrected," "artificial and doctored lives," and "the twilight zone"-this last being six pages on "texts inspired by neurology, psycho- pathology, experimental psychology [and] metaphysics" (p221). The first of his longer chapters, "A la conquete de l'espace et du temps," deals with space travel, from Lucian, through Kepler, Cyrano de Bergerac, and the 19th century, to Gernsback and the USA: It's a fact: the generation of 1930 in America overdid it. A thousand light-years in two bounds, the inhabitants of Eldorado planets who This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 277 surpass men in every domain, the conquest of a galaxy in six months- and, nevertheless, one pitiful Earthman, alone, is able to overthrow an Empire. (As an American he brings with him democracy, chewing-gum, gadgets and strip-tease. Bradbury's work can only be understood as a reaction against this attitude.) No more science, but the classic love story and lots of adventure. The American public, saturated with scien- tific dissertations and badly disguised engineers' reports, wanted ac- tion. And it wanted the stars. (p 47) In his second chapter, "Dans les corridors de l'espace-temps," Van Herp points out that although the time machine is a recent invention, time travel is an eternal theme, a meditation on man's ability to change his destiny. He distinguishes four categories: voyages to the past and to the future; political fictions and "uchronies," the fourth dimension, and parallel worlds. For each category titles are listed and various works are described, but there is rarely any effort at a comprehensive survey and there is always an empha- sis on "who did it first": "the Americans think they invented this genre... But the paralel universe is not a recent invention...It comes directly from the philosophy of the Middle Ages and from Averroes" (p 77). In "Les mondes defunts et les mondes caches," the author studies at length the myth of Atlantis, both in fiction and non-fiction, before turning to lost continents, lost civlisations, and the hollow earth. And in a shorter chapter, "Les cite's futures," he discusses anticipations, utopias and anti- utopias. The two other major thematic groupings are "L'anticipation militaire" (future wars and invasions) and "Les fins du monde" (various accounts of the end of the world). In this thematic survey, the author's efforts at find- ing historical antecedents for SF themes (and the full development of those themes in French SF of the late 19th and early 20th centuries), result in a rambling, baroque catalogue of titles and plot resum6s. There are few at- tempts at synthesis or an investigation of the larger significance of the the- matic groupings, nor any systematic attempt at organizing the seemingly hap- hazard thematic categories. And there are some glaring lacunae: there is, for example, no discussion of other worlds, whether anthropologically or geo- graphically, no reference to telepathy or to the theme of first contact. The second section of this Panorama-"Les genres"-seems even more arbitrary than the first. "Works may be classified," the author writes, "from the perspective of the particular approach of the author to the subject as well as from a thematic perspective" (p223); and under the former he men- tions "engineering SF," "humorous SF," "La S.F. du delire" ("frenzied SF which dares anything," as for example, The Worm Ouroboros!) and "La S.F. d'endoctrinement" (Poul Anderson and Murray Leinster, "where every de- ception is allowed which magnifies American civilisation," p234). There are only three chapters in this section: "Le Space Opera et l'Heroic Fantasy," a very substantial chapter on "La science fiction mythologique: Merritt et Lovecraft" and a quick look at "Les juveniles." Space Opera, according to Van Herp, has two poles, Burroughs and Hamilton. In the latter, "the combat spreads over at least a galaxy, mankind confronts a hostile, alien race and the destiny of the universe is in the balance" (p237). The Burroughs type is more pictorial, "the anachronistic, baroque world of the first adventures of Flash Gordon" (p238). Turning to Merritt and Lovecraft, the author describes "poetic fiction" as that genre where "beings, things, machines are touched by an aura which transfigures them, giving them a mysterious life of their own"; a quality which is lacking in most SF and which is combined with This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:43 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 278 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES mythology in the fictions of Merritt, Lovecraft and the Belgian Jean Ray. In a very brief third section, "Les gcoles," Van Herp looks at U.S., French and Soviet SF. American SF began with Hugo Gemsback, the dis- gruntled inventor of a rather silly anti-torpedo device who tumed to pub- lishing as an outlet and who openly borrowed everything important from Jules Veme: "as in many areas, the Americans invented nothing, but uti- lizing to the maximum the home market, were able to industrialize and per- fect their production" (p276). Van Herp's anti-American bias seems to reveal a frustrated sense of outrage that a culturally backward country should go on receiving all the credit, even in France, when so many superior works in French are overlooked. He admits, however, that the best French SF seems to have been written in the 17th and 18th centuries. Finally, in the section "Problemes," the author begins with the question of attitudes towards science in SF, but his answers seem tentative and superficial. In the next chapter, "Science fiction et occultisme," he sets out to reveal the "unconscious influence of occultism in SF," but he spends four pages defining "occultism" andonlyone reviewing its influence, in the themes of living matter and the mad scientist. Again, in the chapter "Science fiction et religion" the author approaches the question from a rather superficial point of view, informing us for instance that SF is written by believers and non-believers alike whose ideas may or may not influence their work. And the chapter, "Science fiction et morale" provides him still another opportunity to display his own limitations and prejudices. American SF, he writes, tends to reflect a conventional morality in which an American's civic duties consist in "con- suming" and in being "stool-pigeons" (p346). This chapter also includes a discussion of eroticism: Americans like Farmer think they have pioneered eroticism in SF, but the French were writing erotic SF novels more than fifty years ago. And he goes on to explain why American SF is only now dealing with sexuality. There is regrettably no index and therefore no way of finding particular authors or works, but there is a long bibliography which includes references to articles and to numerous reviews in the French SF magazine Fiction. Once the reader accepts this work's blatant pro-French and pre-20th century stance, it is, like the Versins' encyclopedia, an interesting and entertaining look at the European pre-history of SF. VAN HERP'S BIASES ARE in sharp contrast to Jacques Sadoul's Histoire de la science fiction moderne whose major drawback, for this reader, lies in its dull and confining objectivity. The work is divided into two parts, "le domaine anglo-saxon" and "le domaine francais," and the proportions-300 pages for the USA as opposed to 100 pages for France-reflect a very different attitude from that of Van Herp. "SF is a branch of the literature of the imaginary," writes Sadoul, "which also includes fantastic and supernatural literature" (p16). Without assigning strict limits, he states that the distin- guishing feature of SF lies in the treatment of the material, but that he will include both Lovecraft (whose "demons are manifestly extra-terrestrials") and Tolkien (a "parallel universe") in his history. He very briefly surveys the genre prior to the 20th century before turning to his subject, modern SF: "a genre of European descent which took root in the USA where it has flourished more than anywhere else" (p21). This study is, as the author states, only a first step: a rather dull listing of dates, authors, and stories; the bare bones of a history. He proceeds chronologically, dividing American SF into seven periods: 1) "Foundation," This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:43 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 279 1911-1925; 2) "Crystallization," 1926-1933; 3) "Mutation," 1934-1938; 4) "Harvest," 1939-1949; 5) "Proliferation," 1950-1957; 6) "Recession," 1958- 1965; and 7) "Resurrection," 1966-1971. Each chapter corresponds to a period: he surveys, magazine by magazine, the important stories, stopping to present a biographical sketch or the synopsis of a story. There are few judgements or opinions, apart from statements that a story is "important" or "classic" and with only a few exceptions, as, for instance, when he writes that Ubik was Dick's last important novel: "[afterwards] the drugs had begun their destructive effects" (p248). In writing about the different magazines, Sadoul mentions that Campbell and Astounding were seminal forces in the shaping of SF, but makes only the barest indication of what this direction consisted: "for him Science was the essential, to which must be added another pole of interest: forecasting the future. Campbell thought that the role of SF was to predict the civilisation of tomorrow in a realistic, plausible and of course scientific manner" (p135). Gold's editorship of Galaxy is described only as, a "particular style he imposed on his authors" (p188), while Boucher's in- fluence is mentioned only once, as responsible for "the more literary develop- ment of recent SF" (p277). Although this work is a history, there is almost no discussion of what produced the various developments and changes in SF. In sum, it might be argued that as questionable as the thematic approach to SF may be, it at least provides some cohesive focal point, some way of juxtaposing various works, their development and mutual influence, their relation to reality and their relative merits. Brian Aldiss' history of SF suffers from some of the same failings-it is at times a simple catalogue of authors and titles-but Aldiss at least gave his work some direction by attempting to show the genre's evolution from its 19th century origins. Sadoul's section on French SF is marred by the same flaws, for although he cannot rely on the magazines to lead him through the two major periods, "Yesterday" (1905-1950), "...and Tomorrow" (1950-1972), he presents us with the same weary listing of authors, titles, and synopses-less boring, perhaps, in that the English-language reader may be less familiar with those names and titles. This book is accurate, well-indexed and attractively illustrated-Sadoul is a well-known fan and magazine collector and he has published an album of illustrations from American SF magazines, Hier, I'an 2000 (Paris 1973). But it is useful only as a reference book and most of its usefulness will disappear if and when the promised index to Versins' encyclopedia is pub- lished. (If there were an index in the present edition of Versin, I would not have made the error that I did in the last issue of SFS, in saying on pl81 that "there is no listing for England.") FRANZ RO'ITENSTEINER. SOME GERMAN WRITINGS ON SF German SF criticism can be said to have begun with the valiant, though notably unsuccessful attempt of the Karl Rauch publishing house in 1952 to start an SF series in hardcover. The four volumes published-Jack William- son's The Humanoids, Campbell's The Incredible Planet, Asimov's I, Robot, and the anthology Tberwindung von Raum und Zeit compiled by Dr. Gott- hard Giinther-were all accompanied by lengthy comments written by editor Gunther. Employing a highly sophisticated philosophical vocabulary, they were much better than the books themselves. Gunther is the author of an attempt to formulate a new metaphysics and of a book on the possible con- sciousness of machines, and has some reputation as a philosopher. Thus, German SF criticism characteristically began at the highest level of philo- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:43 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 280 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES sophical abstraction. For Dr. Gunther, SF stories were mythic fairy tales, sug- gesting a new type of metaphysics appropriate for mankind's conquest of space. He didn't think that existing SF achieved that mythos, but was only a forerunner looking into the promised land, without being able to enter it, just reserving the space for a new "American fairy tale"-a fiction denying the philosophical axiom of the uniqueness of reality, and dealing with meta- physically extreme conditions of possible future experiences. He believed that SF ideas foreshadowed a new metaphysics by implicitly criticizing the Wes- tern philosophical tradition: the inviolability of the soul (Campbell's "Who Goes There?"), the belief that man is the peak of evolution Simak's "De- sertion"), the priority of theoretical reason or pure will (Weinbaum's "The Lotus Eaters"), the accuracy of notions of time (H. Beam Piper's "Time and Time Again") or of the relationship between thinking and reality (Van Vogt's "The Monster" or Lewis Padgett's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves"). Dr. Gunther also summarized his theoretical basis for SF in Die Ent- deckung Amerikas und die Sache der amerikanischen Weltraumliteratur (Dusseldorf & Bad Salzig: Karl Rauch Verlag 1952), a companion volume to his premature series. When the SF wave later reached Germany, it was in the form of first dime novels and still later pocket books. Criticism, however, came before the thing itself became generally known, the pioneering study being Dr. Martin Schwonke's dissertation, Vom Staatsroman zur Science Fiction: Eine Untersuchung juber Geschichte und Funktion der naturwissen- schaftlich-technischen Utopie (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1957, GMt- tinger Abhandlungen zur Soziologie, vol. 2). Dr. Schwonke continued Gun- ther's theorizing in thin air, "far above the valleys where the books are" (as Peter Nicholls put it in a review of another critic in Foundation 4). Dr. Schwonke is a sociologist, and this also set a pattern. Not one of the many existing German studies is interested in SF as literature or narration. Also conspicuous by their absence are biographies, bibliographies, and his- tories. Most writers on SF in Germany start from some abstract method and principle, where the literary artifacts considered are but a means to an end. They are summarized in capsule reviews and their ideas classified insofar as they support the thesis that the author set out to prove. In a recent article in the reputable German weekly Die Zeit ("Wissenschaftsmarchen. Der Science-Fiction-Boom in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland," No. 39, 29 Sep- tember 1972), Krysmanski stressed again that the differences between good and bad SF don't matter much; only as an indicator of social trends and ideas is it worthwhile. Schwonke sees a direct and linear development from the Staatsromane (17th-18th century "state novels") and utopias to modem science fiction, listing much the same authors and books that appear in many a history of SF: More, Campanella, Andreae, Bacon, Wilkins, Godwin, Cyrano de Ber- gerac. For him SF is a manifestation of "Veranderungsdenken" (dynamic thinking). Schwonke opposes the idea that utopian thinking is a seculari- zation of the eschatological idea of Eden, for man does not master nature according to the role ordained by God. Rather, he is a rebellious, autonomous creature for whom nature is but a resource to create something transcending nature. What utopian thinking shares with fairy tales is a tendency for wish- fulfillment, the desire for another and better world. Under the influence of the progress of science and technology, however, utopian goals have lost their previous importance: the act of creation itself, the ability to make some- ting, has become essential in SF. The emphasis has shifted from the reali- zation of the best world to change as such, to a mental experimenting with This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 281 all possible alternatives, not only with desired or abhorred ones. Utopia de- velops into a much wider field of conjectural fiction: "The utopist, who was the constructor shaping the blueprint of the world in order to present it to mankind as a desirable goal, turns into the staff-strategist who prepares campaign plans for all contingencies that the future may hold in store." This line of generalizing criticism was continued in Hans-Jiirgen Krys- manski's Die utopische Methode: Eine literatur- und wissenssoziologische Untersuchung deutscher utopischer Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts (K6ln und Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1963). Starting with a detailed dis- cussion of eight important German utopian novels by Conrad, Kellerman, Hauptmann, Doblin, Hesse, Werfel, and Jiunger, Krysmanski tries to arrive at a formulation of "utopian method." He perceives this to be vital nowadays in SF, which is discussed only marginally in his book. Heavily influenced by Raymond Ruyer's L'utopie et les utopies (Paris: P.V.F., 1950), Krysmanski like Schwonke defines utopia as a proving ground for new possibilities. He differs with Schwonke mainly in that he denies a direct line of development from the "state novels" to modern "progress-oriented thought," since SF often isn't directly concerned with the future, e.g. in the experiments with time and dimension. It is rather that the "doors of perception" (Huxley) have been opened in all directions; characteristic for SF is its non-directional, free-wheel- ing speculation, which also offers a chance for the utopian novel sensu stricto to fulfill its cognitive function. "Therefore SF must be interpreted as an impulse toward the utopian novel, as a vigorous application of utopian method which, when it includes in its experiments social themes, becomes indis- tinguishable from utopia." That is, utopia becomes a special case of SF. Krysmanski, and to some degree Schwonke, have been sharply criticised in the introduction to Arnhelm Neusiiss's anthology Utopie: Begriff und Phanomen des Utopischen (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1968, Sozio- logische Texte No. 44). Neusiuss points out that the purpose of utopia wasn't and isn't just the construction of a different, but of a more humane world. He also maintains that realization is essential to utopia, whereas Krysmanski had treated it rather as an autonomous method of gaining knowledge in a speculative way. Neususs also disbelieves SF could (as was claimed by Schwonke) serve as "prognostic orientation," that task having been taken over by futurology. Neither "prognostic orientation" not a mature expression of utopian hope, SF is restricted to dim myths and fairy tales of wish-fulfillment. Jorg Hienger's dissertation Literarische Zukunftsphantastik (G6ttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1972) is in many respects the best German study of SF. Hienger offers much more detailed studies of individual stories than either Schwonke or Krysmanski, and he extracts from them an SF philosophy of change in convincing detail. The key quotation is from an Asimov essay ("Social Science Fiction" in Bretnor's Modern Science Fiction): "Either to resist change, any change, and hold savagely to the status quo, or to advo- cate change, a certain change, and no other change. Neither of these views is flexible. Both are static." SF offers a phantasmogoria of aimless changes, without distinguishing between desired and undesired changes. In SF, change itself is more important than its results. "Because the results of change are themselves subjected to change, it is, according to SF, an anthropocentric naivete to judge changes only from the viewpoint of aimed at or dreamed of changes. Of course, the march of events can temporarily further human aims and hopes, or thwart them. But on the whole the unceasing change of things existing, going beyond any goal reached, and making those given up as attainable suddenly appear in our grasp, has no intrinsic goal, and even less This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 282 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES any transcendental goal" (pp. 178-179). This analysis, which is substantiated in chapter after chapter, examining some of the most important SF topics (such as "Future Without Goal," the cataclysmic story, "Experiments with Consecutio Temporum," "Individuals Divided and Multiplied"), seems to touch upon the essence of the Anglo-American SF. It should perhaps be added that this has very little to do with "open" or "closed" systems, and much more with philosophical depth or shallowness. The more modest, relativistic "social engineering" advocated by Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies is as absent from science fiction as are the holistic Marxist notions of change. (What Popper's attitude to SF concepts of change would be may be gauged from his caustic remarks in The Poverty of Historicism about people who think that they have discovered for the first time the problem of change, which is "one of the oldest problems in speculative metaphysics.") Hienger recognizes change as the essence of SF, but without seeing any special virtue in it, since "the simple concept that our world is changing, that the old is suc- ceeded by the new, has of course never remained hidden from mankind" (p. 12). SF affirms a change without meaning, and thus may appear reac- tionary to progressive minds and radical to conservative ones. Hienger's reasoning yields some interesting insights, the most important of which is perhaps a distinction between dystopias by non-SF writers like Orwell, with their hopeless timelessness, and some dystopias by SF writers such as Von- negut's Player Piano or Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which are true to the SF credo, offering perspectives of endless turns of history. Rather less valuable than Hienger's book is Vera Graafs Homo Futurus (Hamburg and Dusseldorf: Claasen, 1971), a Ph.D. thesis which can serve as a popular introduction to SF without offering new insights or deep interpretations. Graaf begins by neatly arranging the various definitions of the genre, says something about forerunners and the history of the field, maga- zines, editors and anthologies, fandom and publishing, and then concentrates on several main topics: cosmic visions and atomic dooms, future societies (stressing especially the "giant city" and the "frontier of space," quoting the theories of historianFrederick Jackson Turner),overpopulation, manipulation, evolution and mutation, robots, and the expansion of consciousness. A chapter on utopia and dystopia, which also covers the relationship between SF and myth, concludes the book. In chapters arranged like a space-flight, two young scholars, Michael Pehlke and Norbert Lingfeld, stride over the ideological ground of science fiction in their book Roboter und Gartenlaube: Ideologie und Unterhaltung in der Science-Fiction-Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1970). The subtitle about "ideology and entertainment" indicates the aim of the authors' spear-thrust. From the viewpoint of German leftist thinking, they evaluate SF as the de- fender of the eternal status quo and as a means of conscious and un- conscious political indoctrination. False consciousness in the Marxist sense (i.e., a false understanding of the relations conditioned by economic pro- duction) is, according to them, the inherent cause for the inferior quality of SF. They put up Soviet SF as an alternative, but they do not analyze tt, it just serves as the invisible background for their judgements. What to SF authors is "openness," a trying out of conflicting possibilities, is to them "that chaotic mess of various ideologies," diagnosed by the socialist phi- losopher Ernst Bloch as typical for the world view of fascism (p. 59). They deal mostly with writers like Asimov, Heinlein or Anderson, but also discuss the notoriously fascist German dime novel series Perry Rhodan. The book is This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 283 well-written, and valuable as an exposition of a clearly stated ideological position. One cannot help noticing, however, that many of the authors criticized for their open or hidden ideological content are just as popular in the socialist countries as in the U.S.A., e.g., Isaac Asimov, or even some stor- ies by Poul Anderson. Also, they do not seem to have read the English originals but only their defaced German translations. Written on a similarly critical basis, but much more valuable, is Manfred Nagl's Ph.D. thesis Science Fiction in Deutschland: Untersuchungen zur Ge- nese, Soziographie und Ideologie der phantastischen Massenliteratur (Tui- bingen: Tiibinger Vereinigung furVolkskundel972, Untersuchungen des Lud- wig-Uhland-Instituts der Universitat Tu'bingen, vol. 30), not the least for its wealth of material. Nagl discusses not just those books that can be found in any historical study of SF, but unearths a lot of forgotten German SF stories from 1780 to the present day and other European SF current in Germany, e.g., A jovo szazad regenye [The Novel of the Coming Century], 1872, by the popular Hungarian writer M6r Jokai. The author provides detailed and persuasive expositions of the psychological mechansims at work in these works. Nagl is sharply critical of Krysmanski and in particular Schwonke, whose philological-eclectic methods he attacks as sociologically indefensible. They concentrated only on a few works of higher quality, overrated them, and declared everything else, i.e. about 90% of SF, not to be SF proper. Being a folklorist, Nagl examines the representative mass of SF, and his inter- pretations follow the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershon Legman. Convinced that SF should be socially aware and progressive, he denies its descent from utopia, understanding it rather as a genre arising apart from utopia and in direct opposition to it, as a substitution for revolution and a literature of conformism, supporting and cementing existing social struc- tures. Like Aldiss in his Billion Year Spree, Nagl puts SF into a larger con- text, but his context is not the wider world of literature, but rather the dim field of pseudo-science, crankhood, mysticism and popular superstition: all the books about hollow earths, Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, the occult, secret knowledge and hidden powers, and the many pamphlets simplifying and dis- torting evolutional ideas. There he perceives the true springs of SF, and lov- ingly traces the incorporation of those dubious ideas into SF. Small wonder then that he sees Nazi Germany as SF come true, the realization of all science-fictional dreams of fictional sciences, the crowning gothic horror of them all. He points out how this tradition was continued after World War II without a break, in particular in the fascist Perry Rhodan dime novels (about which Nagl has written an excellent analysis in the journal Zietnahe Schular- beit 22 [1969], No. 4/5, April/May 1969: "Unser Mann im All"). Perhaps Nagl has a somewhat simplified idea of the interaction between fiction and reality, but the examples he quotes are certainly horrible enough. The weakness of Nagl's method becomes most obvious when he discusses a writer like H.G. Wells, who appears in his book only as a highly skilled horror writer manag- ing to use even the silence for shock effects ("the silence fell like a thunder- clap," in The War of the Worlds). He is also unable to appreciate the gen- uine merit of limited scientific ideas, where they don't appear together with social sophistication. Science Fiction in Deutschland is a controversial, over- loaded and jargon-prone book, but highly interesting, always stimulating and sometimes brilliant. Less than brilliant is Hermann Buchner's Programmiertes Gliuck: Sozial- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 284 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES kritik in der utopischen Sowjetliteratur (Wien, Frankfurt, Zurich: Europa Ver- lag, 1970). Philosophically naiveinits generalizations, it nevertheless deserves some interest as a study of that neglected part of SF, the Soviet variety. Buchner knows only an insufficient sample of Soviet SF (principally Bul- gakov, Zamyatin, Tertz [Siniavsky], Dneprov's Island of the Crabs and two novels by the Strugatskis, Hard to be a God and Monday Begins on Satur- day), but despite this and a tendency to seek out anti-Soviet trends, he is stimulating when discussing particular works, especially the Strugatskis, whom he has translated quite well into German. In the opposite camp is Hartmut Luck, a student currently working on a thesis about Soviet SF. He is a believer in German leftism of the Chinese branch, and he judges all works of fiction according to how they conform to his dogmatic notions of the true path. Representative for his work is the article "Echo aus der Zukunft" (on Efremov's Hour of the Bull) in Sozialistische Zeitschrift fur Kunst und Gesellschaft No. 8/9 (October 1971) or his article "Die sowjetische wissenschaftlich-fantastische Literatur" in the SF issue of the same per- iodical(No. 18/19, July 1973). Among bibliographic items one must mention Heinz Bingenheimer's Transgalaxis: Katalog der deutschsprachigen utopisch-phantastischen Liter- atur 1460-1960 (Friedrichsdorf/Taunus: Transgalaxis, 1959-60). Although far from complete, not always reliable-it contains items that are neither SF nor fantasy-and ignorant of proper rules of bibliography, it is the only listing of its kind generally available. SF has also entered the classroon. The textbook publisher Diesterweg has put out two volumes entitled Science Fiction, both edited by Friedrich Leiner and Jiirgen Gutsch (Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, 1972), the one offering SF stories, the other being a handbook for teachers with a capsule history of SF, notes on the authors and on SF publishing, quotations about SF (includ- ing a good listing of existing definitions), a list of recommended stories and a bibliography of secondary literature. The current SF boom has resulted in a number of articles in the general press and in trade journals, mostly dealing with commercial aspects of the field, but occasionally also containing some criticism. For instance: "Welle mit Zukunft" in the magazine Der Spiegel (No. 11, March 6, 1972), "Die Lust am Spekulativen" by Ronald Hahn and Werner Fuchs in Buchmarkt No. 11 and 12, 1972, or a series of articles by Gert Heidenreich, Jurgen vom Scheidt, Anton Kenntemich, Hans Joachim Alpers and Manfred Bosch in Publikation No. 3 and 4 (March, April, 1972). Although SF generally isn't taken seriously as literature in Germany, there are some reputable German critics with a great interest in it, most notably the brilliant writer Helmut Heissenbuttel and the critic Heinrich Vormweg (see, e.g., his "Gedankenspiel mit unbegrenzter Moglichkeit," Siud- deutsche Zeitung, March 14/15, 1970, or "Wo die Zukunft schon begonnen hat," same paper, March 22, 1972). The great German newspapers will nowadays review SF books; but the only writers who get detailed attention are Vonnegut, sometimes Bradbury, and always Stanislaw Lem. Mention should also be made of Science Fiction Times (ed. Hans Joachim Alpers, D-285 Bremerhaven, Weissenburgerstr. 6, Germany; DM 18 per year), a semi-professional magazine devoted to SF. It contains reviews, longer essays, notes on recent writings on SF, bibliographies of new books, and really covers all aspects of the SF field. It is the most valuable of several dozen magazines produced by the very active and numerous German SF fandom. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 285 ALICE CAROL GAAR. TWO NEW BOOKS FROM GERMANY In these two volumes-Eike Barmeyer, ed., Science Fiction: Theorie und Ges- chichte(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972); Franz Rottensteiner, ed., Po- laris 1: Ein Science Fiction Almanach (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1973)-critics from North America and Western and Eastern Europe analyze the weaknesses, strengths, themes, and potentialities of SF. Having already appeared in English, seven of the twenty-one essays in Barmeyer and three of the four in Rottensteiner will not be discussed here: James Blish, "Future Recall," in The Disappearing Future, ed. George Hay (L: Panther 1970), pp 97-105; Evgeni Brandis and Vladimir Dmitrevsky, "In the Land of Science Fiction," Soviet Literature No. 5 (1968), pp 145-50; Michel Butor, "Science Fiction: The Crisis of its Growth," Partisan Review 34(1967):595-602, re- printed in SF: The Other Side of Realism, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press 1971), pp 157-65; Michael Kandel, "Stanislaw Lem on Men and Robots," Extrapolation 14(1972-73): 14-24; Stanislaw Lem, "Robots in Science Fiction," in SF: The Other Side (see Butor), pp 307-25; Darko Suvin, "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," College English 34(1972-73):372-82; Malgorzata Szpakowska, "A Writer in No-Man's Land," Polish Perspectives 14,x(1971):29-37-all the pre- ceding in Barmeyer, the following in Rottensteiner-Stanislaw Lem, "SF: A Hopeless Case-With Exceptions," SF Commentary No. 35-37, 1973; Robert Plank, "The Place of Evil in Science Fiction," Extrapolation 14(1972-72):100- 11; Franz Rottensteiner, "Kurd Lasswitz: A German Pioneer of SF," in SF: The Other Side (see Butor), pp 289-306. T HREE OF THE CRITICS IN B ARMEYERdiscuss the nature and potentialities of the utopian novel. After reviewing its background and basic meaning, Werner Krauss concludes that it retains nothing more than the charm of childhood memories. In contrast, Hans-Jiurgen Krysmanski foresees a continuation of the tradition through avant-garde forms which refine the older method by portraying futuristic possibilities. To Martin Schwonke, the utopian novel has moved from the paradigm stage to that of critical speculations upon the sufficiency of the individual. One should next read Frank Rainer Scheck's essay on the anti-utopian reaction, which he sees as a product of the con- servative, petty-bourgeois fear of technology and its potentialities for power and change. Darko Suvin has two articles in the Barmeyer volume. The first, having appeared in English, is listed above; the second is an essay on Soviet SF and traces its development from the rationalist political novel of the 18th and 19th centuries through the modern period. The most important works of the 20s were by Mayakovsky and Zamyatin. Sputnik and destalinization began the new period which included Yefremov's classical utopia and works of Dneprov, who introduced cybernetic SF into Russia. Suvin pays special attention to the Strugatsky brothers, today the most significant authors. Centered on heroes with utopian ethics, their works combine SF with poli- tics and philosophy, thus bridging the gulf between the scientific and hu- manistic modes. As a scientist and writer, Herbert W. Franke defends SF's generic relation- ship to science and technology. He asks both that the writers improve their literary techniques and that the humanists reorient their thinking toward more realistic approaches to the world's problems. In contrast, Jiurgen von Scheidt in his Jungian-Freudian analysis reduces the technological SF novel This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 286 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES to an adult fairy tale which has its source in regression and compensation. But he does grant the importance of speculative fiction as a form of visionary literature which illuminates to some extent the universal mystery. Robert Plank's stimulating essay discusses the development from aliens type A (mir- ror of human foibles) to aliens type B (popularized by Wells and now an important part of our general intellectual orientation), who possess greater psychic powers than men and are often crucial to a change in human des- tiny. Identifying them as variations on the father figure, Plank asks, "Will there be a Type C-a brother figure?" This seems to me to be an especially valuable result of the critical study of SF. Eike Barmeyer points out that the fear of strange beings reveals the basic human desire for direct communi- cation, a motif whose extreme case is total communion. He refers to the near impossibility of communication between dissimilar beings (as in Lem's Solaris-though I think there is evidence of the beginnings of communication at the end of that novel), and ends with the ultimate development of com- munication from group-mind to cosmic-mind (as in Stapledon's The Star Maker). Similarly, Curtis C. Smith identifies as Stapledon's hero a humanity which is the instrument of an unnamed and unknowable mentality. In an essay on the history and ideology of the pulp magazines Ronald M. Hahn demolishes vigorously the claim that SF has no truck with political ideology. Appropriate quotations from Perry Rhodan's adventures, Heinlein's novels, the Lensmen series, etc., display obvious traces of fascism, racism, feudalism, militarism, and imperialistic chauvinism. In his valid description of the less reflective works Hahn finds that they prize the status quo, superficial amusement, and the expansion of a reactionary ideology (in con- trast with the great utopian writings of the past). After comparing the novels of Wells and Verne, Hans Joachim Alpers notes that the essential impor- tance of both lies in their use of the possible extensions of reality rather than of subjective prophecies or presentations of an ideal world. The last two pieces in the book are by Franz Rottensteiner: a bibliography essential to those who want to do research in the field, and a hard-hitting critical essay-itself an example of the forthright criticism he calls for. He is unimpressed with the New Wave and with the reworkings of old myths, a process he considers crude, inelegant, and boring. But along with his criticism of Ellison, Spinrad, Zelazny, and Delany he praises Thomas M. Disch and J.B. Ballard for penetrating style and interesting atmosphere. Rottensteiner suggests finally that the answer to the question on the po- tentialities of SF depends on the ability of gifted writers to handle futuro- logical problems without simplifying the theoretical niveau of modern science. R OrrENSTEINER STATES THE PURPOSE of his "Almanac" Polaris clearly. It should present a selection of early and modem SF, especially by European writers, and critical essays, and this the first volume contains stories by Lem, Lasswitz, Gerard Klein, Fitz-James O'Brien, and Vladimir Colin, as well as es- says by himself, Lem, Plank, and Szpakowska, all calling for a sense of ethical responsibility and maturity on the part of those who produce SF in any medium. The only one of these that has not appeared in English is Mal- gorzata Szpakowska's analysis of Lem, which suggests that Lem is concerned with the structure of the given world at least as much as with "literature." In his view, science and technology have brought us to the point where we can choose the biological make-up of humanity. This fact reforms the existen- tial condition of man: there are now no constants, only variables. SF should fill the present void with the creation of values. Therefore, its flight into the This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 287 sphere of empty game or of trickery is extremely irresponsible and an offense against aesthetics and morality. SF has before it a task which science cannot assume-of giving answers as to the purposes of technological development. Szpakowska concludes that Lem has displayed a tendency to move into the realm of philosophy, possibly out of despair over today's SF. PETER OHLIN. THE DILEMMA OF SF FILM CRITICISM Writers on SF films-such as John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (International Film Series 1979), Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disas- ter," in her Against Interpretation (1965), J.P. Bouyxou, La science fiction au cinema (Paris: Union Generale d'editions 1971), and the various contributors to Focus on the Science Fiction Film, ed. William Johnson (Prentice-Hall 1972)-confront a basic problem: not only is the genre as difficult to define as that of written SF, but there seems to be a consensus that it is drastically different in its use or abuse of elements that have come to be recognized as standard in SF. Instead of a more or less scientific exploration of a hypothetical problem in some kind of future space (social, technological, historical, or cultural), the films have decidedly apocalyptic tone. They seem to deal with the themes of loss of individuality and the threat of knowledge, most neatly combined in a scientific experiment gone wrong and thereby unleashing a monstrous force upon the world (cf Baxter, p. 11); as Susan Sontag's famous essay suggests, the SF film is characterized by the imagi- nation of disaster. There may be various reasons for this difference. For one, there is a literary tradition for SF going back to the Renaissance and beyond, where- as the cinema in its two modes, the documentary and the fictional, has a very short tradition consistently stressing the effects of the marvelous and strange, not only explicitly as in Melies's A Trip to the Moon (1902) but also implicitly as in the documentary shock effect of Lumilere's train charg- ing into the station. Secondly, the socioeconomic conditions of the market- place for the two products are different. Nearly all writers venturing into Hollywood are struck by the budgetary pressures on the "aesthetic" object (cf Robert A. Heinlein's "Shooting Destination Moon" in Focus) and, like Pierre Kast, find that "the childish socioeconomic structure of film pro- duction gives rise to childish films" (Focus, p. 69). The marketplace conditions for SF writing, within the history of pulp magazines and paperback publish- ing, might have been somewhat similar, but the difference in financial scope means a qualitative increase in the pressures toward "childishness." Perhaps the most important reason suggested is that the difference be- tween SF writing and SF cinema might be inherent in the two media. Sontag, for example, suggests that the film medium is necessarily strong on the im- mediate representation of the extraordinary and its sensuous elaboration but weak on science, whereas language is eminently suited for the abstract play of ideas but cumbersome when it comes to direct description. John Baxter, similarly, argues that an SF film is an intellectual impossibility, usually succeeding as cinema in proportion to the degree in which it fails as SF; the resulting compromise leaves us with a sensuous medium which can provide us with the poetry of the atomic age, but is separated from the traditions of either cinema or SF. Many film makers and novelists echo these assumptions about the nature of the two media: Alain Renais, among others, contrasts the concrete descriptive immediacy through which an image reveals anything and everything, with the subtle exploratory power of This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:36:59 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 288 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES words through which ar, SF writer is perfectly free not to describe the monster, or whatever, in detail (Focus, p. 166). But his argument is only superficially cogent. A film maker like Eisen- stein based his whole aesthetics on the assumption that he could indeed express anything on film. His proposal, at one time, to film Marx's Das Kapital indicates that he found the more subtle levels of abstraction and emotion simply a challenge to bring out the neglected power of cinema as a narrative medium. The complex relationship between sound and image, description and narration, in, say, a Bresson film, suggests that the dis- tinctions between the two media are by no means easy to define. And Kubrick himself, according to Arthur C. Clarke-The LQst Worlds of 2001 (Signet 1972), p. 189-has declared that if something can be written, he can film it, a point that Clarke seems willing to concede him, at least if con- straints of time and money are removed. These questions raise the important issue of the relationship between SF and words. For it makes a difference if one assumes that the genre of SF is a purely literary one, and thus can be translated into another medium only under great stress, or if one argues that the genre is not confined to literature but can-like, say, the pastoral-be used in different modes and media. In fact, most definitions of SF are designed to accomodate pri- marily prose narratives: there is comparatively little SF in poetry or drama, and what little there is frequently takes its place among other works not in SF but in "mainstream" literature. Given the generic confusion in the area, it is hardly surprising that most writing about SF films is vague or arbitrary on definitions and weak or inconsistent in aesthetic judgments. A writer like J.P. Bouyxou, for example, because he rejects the reactionary politics that he sees as a neces- sary consequence of the socioeconomic basis of the movie industry, ends up with such a tight definition of the SF film-as an exploration of a parallel world-that he can find only a limited number of films to fit the genre (pp. 23-24, 147,416), and those films seem much less SF than simply examples of an avant-garde aesthetic (an aesthetic, by the way, which in this case seems based on the logical, if absurd, notion that all film by definition is a narrative generated by technological means, and thus a kind of science fiction). Bax- ter's opinion on the intellectual impossibility of the genre and on its specific sensuousness makes him particularly disposed to appreciate the pale grey flatness of, say, Jack Arnold's films (It Came from Outer Space, 1953, The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), their skillful use of the medium and its devices, such as the exploitation of the frame as stage, and the creation of tension by character rather than style. Truffaut has argued that it is this stress on the texture of everyday life that is important in grade Z films (Focus, p. 48), but Baxter's approach prevents him from going beyond this perception to a more clearly defined aesthetic criterion for why a given SF film is better than any other. The problem with much of this kind of writing is that a formal analysis rapidly finds itself in a dilemma. In order to judge the significance of formal phenomena that otherwise would not have much aesthetic validity, the critic begins to assess their typicalness as evidence of a sociocultural pop mythology, and what started out as a formal analysis quickly turns into a kind of pseudo-allegorical interpretation of prevailing patterns of audience behavior. This is certainly true of Sontag's essay, which moves from the aes- thetics of destruction in formal terms towards a thematic allegory in which the imagery of disaster is seen as the sign of an inadequate response to This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SOME CRITICAL WORKS ON SF 289 the human condition in the 20th century and indicates a morally neutralizing complicity with the abhorrent. In many ways this movement is contrary to the whole character of Sontag's critical stance; that she should follow it when writing about SF films seems indicative. In many ways, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a touchstone for the dilemma of SF film criticism. Thematically, it clearly belongs to the genre; yet all those more or less formalistic categories devised to validate the genre to date-to make, say, a film like Godzilla (1955) an object of interest-seem ludicrously out of place with 2001. Consequently, SF fans find it impure, while film fans with aesthetic predilections find it naive and pre- tentious. Baxter sees it as a space-age documentary which-since film as a medium is less precise than words-is beautiful but whose point is soon for- gotten or lost. Bouyxou finds in it a "documentary frigidity" except for the "decorative extravagance" of the Jupiter trip. Harry Geduld, on the other hand, viewing the film in a tradition that goes back to Melies, finds that it is curiously anti-humanist and that it takes its own pretentiousness with deadly seriousness (Focus, p. 146). Michel Ciment finds that "Kubrick has conceived a film which in one stroke has made the whole science-fiction cinema ob- solete," and recognizes that "what makes any critical approach to 2001 unusually difficult is the film's specifically visual quality, which sets it outside all the familiar categories of the cinema" (Focus, pp. 135, 140). Ultimately, of course, the polarization of opinion into those who want to keep their pleasures simple, their genres pure, and popular tastes clearly removed from the celebration of kulchur, and those who grudgingly admit that the popular taste occasionally achieves something of lasting significance, seems futile. The importance of Kubrick's achievement is surely not that he brought a kind of metaphysical pretension to a "trivial" genre, or that he developed a popular genre with a visual virtuosity that takes it beyond its generic value (although he may have done both things). Rather, his film is important because it brings to bear on this genre all the economic, technological, and aesthetic resources of a major undertaking-and at the same time presents an analysis of the aesthetic-social conditions of design underlying such an undertaking, in terms of perceptual strategies, cultural habits, or expressive conventions. In other words, it is simultaneously an SF film and a cinematic commentary on the rules or constraints that govern our present conception of such films (and of SF itself). As Michel Ciment hints, the projection into the future of the moment when scientific exploration reaches its boundaries and encounters a science beyond space and time (i.e. magic) becomes an analysis of the scientific and cultural conditions that govern our present description of the world. That description, the shapes, colors, forms, textures, rhythms of everything from weightless toilets to interplanetary communication problems, is explored with almost limitless virtuosity by Kubrick. In this way he has turned to his advantage what Guy Gauthier describes as one of the most puzzling paradoxes of SF, namely, the fact that the artist's imagination can reach out ahead of science within certain limits, "but not ahead of art, that is ahead of itself' (Focus, p. 98). It is Kubrick's self-conscious awareness of all these conditions that takes his film beyond the traditional genre distinctions, and indicates the directions of the criticism we now need. It is not enough simply to group together certain works on the basis of more or less vague thematic similarities. Surely any attempt to come to terms with SF as a genre will at least either have to place it within the larger tradition of literary history, or contemplate it, ahis- torically, as one of many cultural forms (such as pastoral, utopian literature, This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 290 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES myths) available at any given moment to the artist. Similarly, SF films can only be understood and analyzed either in the context of the history of cinema itself, or, alternatively, as one of many narrative modes imaginatively and socially available in the medium. The analysis of the complex inter- actions of such points of view has barely begun. Sunken Atlantis and the Utopia Question: Parry's The Scarlet Empire and Coblentz's The Sunken World C.R. LA BOSSIERE. THE SCARLET EMPIRE: TWO VISIONS IN ONE Oscar Wilde's well-known pronouncement-"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better world, sets sail. Progress is the reali- zation of Utopias."-with its glaring non sequitur and petitio principii, provides many students of 20th-century utopian (i.e., in the main, dystopian) literature with final-chapter hope. Dystopias, it would appear, leave too little hope. D-503's return to equations and obedience in We, Winston's abdication to terror in 1984, the Savage's suicide in Brave New World, the inanity of the Pelphase and the cannibalism of the Gusphase in The Wanting Seed, and the apparent inevitability of fiat voluntas tua in A Canticle for Leibo- witz, do not satisfy the evidently continuing need for a vision of earthly per- fection. It is indeed difficult to have one's cake and eat it too. As Dos- toevski reminds us, bread and freedom are incompatible. An analogous and immediately related problem exists in utopian literary criticism. No one, I think, would deny that Huckleberry Finn, The Time Machine, and Major Bar- bara are, as works of the literary imagination, clearly superior to The Strange Republic of Bangour, A Modern Utopia, and Back to Methuselah, respective- ly. The reason is quite simple: forms in blueprints of ideal states lack any appreciable individuation. Utopias tend to argue discursively: dystopias, to argue movingly. News from Nowhere appears to be the sole significant exception in the past hundred years, largely because its vision incorporates the mythical-romantic view of man, with its emphasis on the life of the imagination. Infrequently do we recognize in visions of earthly perfection any "real" individuals; characters tend to be either diaphanous or merely argumentative, forms who little resemble men and women as we know them. And yet, J.C. Garrett, having underlined the dangers inherent in utopian- ism, and having mentioned the dubious literary merit of Looking Backward and Walden 11, the two most influential literary utopias ever written in the United States, concludes his Utopias in Literature Since the Romantic Period (Christchurch 1968) on this note: "The Utopian dream is as old as man- kind; it is unlikely to die as long as men yearn for a better world." Mustapha Mond proves a more perceptive and persistent critic when he argues that Shakespeare has no place in man's earthly paradise. An explicitly optimistic dystopia, it would seem, would satisfy all needs. In such a work the author would avail himself of the resources of the satirist, but would at the same time present a vision of perfection: Bellamy inverted and turned novelist. Such a work would score attempts to reduce men to robots, but would at the same time present a permanently stable world of This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SUNKEN ATLANTIS AND THE UTOPIA QUESTION 291 free and creative individuals dedicated to self-fulfillment and progress. David McLean Parry's The Scarlet Empire (1906) is a rare attempt to fuse the two visions; his areas of success and his areas of failure in this work are sympto- matic. The story begins with an unsuccessful suicide attempt by an avid young socialist. Man's inhumanity to man crushes him; "possessed with bitterness," he leaps from a pier. Through the intervention of 713, the young man suddenly finds himself in the Social Democracy of Atlantis, the Scarlet Em- pire. He is elated: "A social democracy-exactly what I have been dreaming of for years!" Here all men, he is told, are treated equally. No more than a few minutes pass, however, before the hero begins to suspect that this state may not be exactly what he had hoped for: 713 informs him that all citizens of Atlantis must carry a "verbometer," a device ensuring that no citizen excedes his daily word-quota. Physicians, he learns soon after, much to his chagrin, are incompetent; diagnosis and medication are by numbers. Gradu- ally he discovers that the people of Atlantis have also been reduced to numbers. The government is dedicated to concretizing the metaphor "all men are created equal": the tall must marry the short, the beautiful the ugly, the yound the old, the intelligent the stupid. Everyone wears the prescribed garb, and eats the same portions of the same food at the same time. Any deviation incurs swift and severe punishment. Selected by lot for the legis- lature, the hero maliciously pursues this logic by proposing that all citizens chew their food the same number of times, and that all walk at the same pace. Abundant supplies of "lethe-weed" keep the people content with their drab existence. The state persecutes all "atavars," throwbacks to primitive in- dividualism; and yet, as the hero eventually learns, the state itself is con- trolled by a clique of atavars-a deformed dwarf, a disgusting hag, and two equally repulsive colleagues. Periodic public executions satisfy the citi- zens' occasional lust for excitement, and serve to keep them in a state of fear-induced conformity. Zamiatin, Orwell, and Huxley have presented us with similar nightmares, reductions to absurdity of utopian dreams. Prescience alone, however, does not make for literary excellence. The atavars in control of the Scarlet Em- pire are relatively powerful characters, as grotesque, as insidious, as cun- ning as Quilp, Fagin, and Madame Defarge (a citizen who has the temerity to ask for a second portion of food is likened by the narrator to Oliver Twist). The hag, proud of her ugliness, allows the ingenuous hero, whom she suspects of political subversion, to ensnare himself in his own passions. She carefully notes his reactions at the trial of a beautiful atavar, places temp- tation in his path, and waits patiently. The dwarf, equally suspicious, offers a share of political power, hoping to damn him through either acceptance or refusal. The hero and his beloved Astraea, the atavar he had seen at the trial, fade in comparison: they are mere collages of ideal qualities, recipes for perfection. He is the archetypal Yankee individualist, honest, strong, re- sourceful, kind to his friends, ruthless to his enemies, courageous, and ap- preciative of the merits of gunpowder and six-gun. She is the ravishingly beautiful maid, obedient to her man, tender, and helpless. Without knowing it, Parry was of the party of the dwarf and hag (Bonario and Cecilia seem transparent next to Volpone and Mosca). In the end the hero shoots his way out; and, accompanied by Astraea, 713, and a doctor befriended early in the story, returns to the surface via a submarine filled with treasure stolen from a museum. A stray torpedo smashes through the barrier that holds back the sea, and thus ends the nightmare. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 292 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Whatever merit as literature this novel possesses lies in its satire; its affirmation is downright naive. The urge to project patterns of earthly per- fection seems to mitigate against wit, complexity, and individuation. In the conclusion of The Scarlet Empire, the utopian theme emerges clearly: per- fection exists here and now in the 1906 USA. The hero, who has recounted his adventures and conversion for our edification, informs us that after his escape he, Astraea, and their companions fulfilled themselves complete- ly: he as a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist (the loot from Atlantis proved useful); Astraea as his mate, a perfect wife, hostess, and mother; 713 as an "ultra individualist" and eminent doctor of medicine; and the other doctor as a brilliant researcher-entrepreneur dedicated to the progress of mankind. All enjoyed peace, happiness, wealth, and civil liberties in the land of capitalism and progress-a satisfying conclusion for a writer who had parlayed a small hardware business into a factory employing 2800 men in 1904, and who had been elected president of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1902. The greatest good for the greatest number may appear a reasonable and attractive doctrine, but, one suspects, only to those who belong to the greatest number. Meritorious writers and their creations have always been unfortu- nately few. Parry, insofar as he is a utopian, would have us believe he is of the majority; he and critics who would have worthwhile books of the literary imagination and utopia prove less consistent philosophers and less perceptive critics than the Grand Inquisitor and Mustapha Mond. The following lines from Cousin-Jacques' Nicodeme dans la lune, a play performed in Paris in 1790-91, might be adapted to serve as an epilogue to The Scarlet Empire: "Tous ceux qui n's'ront pas contens/ En France d'leux fortune:/ Afin d'mieux leur temps,/ Pourront v'nir avec moi dans la lune." R.D. MULLEN. THE SUNKEN WORLD: ALSO TWO VISIONS IN ONE Stanton A. Coblentz's The Sunken World (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1928; book form 1949) resembles, contrasts with, and presumably derives from The Scarlet Empire. Coblentz's sunken Atlantis fascinated me so greatly when I first read the story at 13 that I have never forgotten it. Having reread it, I still find it interesting and only wish that the author's command of language and understanding of thought, character, nature, and plot had been sufficient for him to have realized his purposes more fully. My intention here is to argue briefly against the widespread notion presented so vigor- ously above by Professor La Bossiere, the notion that it is simply not possible to write utopias that are comparable to dystopias in literary distinction or even in ordinary SF interest. My method will be the comparison of the two books in their treatment of diction, thought, character (differences between things of the same species), nature (differences between species), and plot, in an effort to show that Coblentz's novel is superior to Parry's and that its superiority has nothing to do with the fact that it is a utopia and Parry's novel a dystopia. The two are like each other, like most SF novels, and indeed like most fiction of any kind in being quite undistinguished in diction. Except for a few stabs at lower-class dialect by Coblentz, no appreciable effort is made in either book to distinguish the language of one person from that of another or even to differentiate conversational dialogue from the running narrative of the protagonist-narrator. Since neither author is a master of language, neither is able to render either thought or character with any precision or vividness. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SUNKEN ATLANTIS AND THE UTOPIA QUESTION 293 What we get in the way of thought consists simply of conventional argu- ments-for or against socialism, for or against capitalism, for or against the concept of man as inherently indolent, etc. The rendering of character is equally crude: in Parry's story the hero and heroine and their two allies are good by definition since they seek to escape the oppression of the bad people, of whom some are bad in that they manipulate the law in their efforts to victimize heroine and hero while others are bad merely in that they abide by and seek to enforce the foolish laws of a foolish society; in Coblentz' story there are no good-bad distinctions, the conflicts being intellectual and comic rather than moral and melodramatic. We are thus left, as we are in nearly all SF novels, with matters of nature and plot. In both novels the physical environment differs so greatly from our own-or from that of the authors-that it must be said to be a dif- ference in nature rather than in character. We have in each story a world that sank beneath the sea 3000 years ago but that somehow survived with roofs and walls that hold back the water and with sources of light, heat, and air that replace the sun and the atmosphere. In The Scarlet Empire the sur- vival was accidental in a way that is never adequately explained: "these gi- gantic columns which you admire so much are the petrified forests of the Garden of Eden. You cannot see their branches here below, but if you could ascend...you would find that great limbs spread out in all directions, support- ing a dome which seems a mass of foliage and mineral matter impervious to water" (?7). In The Sunken World the submergence was planned: a dome of glass was constructed over a large area and "intra-atomic heat" was used "to sink the whole island to the bottom of the sea" (?12). Each of the nar- rators is taken on a tour of the enclosed world, but whereas the Coblentz world is described in considerable detail, the Parry world is hardly described at all: The Sunken World is thus a more rewarding novel than The Scarlet Empire on the basis of the interest that science-fiction readers take in the attributes of any imaginary world. In each book the political and socioeconomic environment also differs in nature from our own (i.e., the United States of 1903, 1928, or 1974) in that it is socialist and equalitarian rather than capitalist and graded, and in character if not in nature from modem socialist states in that the equality has a completeness far beyond anything known in our world: in Coblentz the Atlanteans live in comfort and plenty supplied by two hours of work a day, and devote their leisure to artistic and intellectual endeavors; in Parry they live in abject poverty, with four-fifths of the people working fifteen hours a day under whips wielded by the other fifth, who are not much better off since they must wield the whips for the same fifteen hours, must eat the same food, etc., and even the members of what Professor La Bossiere calls the ruling clique gain only venial rewards by their rule. The government of Coblentz's utopia is a direct democracy (the population being held at 500,000 to make this possible), with the few administrators being chosen by exami- nation; the government of Parry's dystopia is representative democracy, with legislators and administrators being chosen and all work-assignments (includ- ing the wielding or the working under the whips) being made by lot. Al- though neither novel gives us anything more than the banalities of routine utopian/dystopian exposition, Coblentz's world is again detailed with greater fullness and coherence and therefore is superior in ordinary SF interest-or, to say it in a different way, would surely be of much greater interest to any bright 12-year-old just becoming aware of utopian/dystopian pos- sibilities. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 294 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Finally, there should be in each novel a spiritual environment resulting from the isolation of the society from the rest of humanity, but only Coblentz makes anything of this, Parry being content to attribute all the evils of his Atlantis simply to socialism. The utopian Atlantis came into being as a result of the decision of the Atlanteans that they could create and maintain a just society only if they isolated themselves from the wicked world, but now after 3000 years the political parties of utopian Atlantis include an Industrial Reform Party, a Party of Artistic Emancipation, a Party of Birth Extension, and even a Party of Emergence whose members argue that although the plans of the founders were almost perfect, they were deficient in that they "did not leave room enough in Atlantis for adventure" (??22-23). In sum, Coblentz' story is superior to Parry's in that whereas the latter is simplistic enough for its dystopia to be perfectly bad, the former is sufficiently complex for its utopia not to be perfectly good. Both novels are somewhat incoherent in plot. (In the analysis used here, plot is defined as the interaction of protagonist and environment, with the environment of the protagonist including the personal [his friends and ene- mies], the sociocultural, the sociophysical, the geophysical, or whatever, and with the organizing principle of the plot being a change in the thought, character, or nature of the protagonist or environment, or in their relation- ship.) The Scarlet Empire begins with a change-in-thought plot, but our hero has already learned his lesson by the end of ?6, whereupon the plot of ??7-41 becomes one of melodramatic adventure in which our hero rescues a maiden in distress, wins her love, plunders a museum of great wealth (pagan temples in unenlightened lands being fair game for enlightened adventurers from the civilized world), shoots his way free, destroys his enemy (some five million people), and escapes to happiness ever after as a rich man with a beautiful and adoring wife in the best of worlds, the USA. Having said all this in full agreement with Professor La Bossiere's statement that Parry's "affirmation is downright naive," we must add that there is an ugly develop- ment in the character of the protagonist-who goes from simple greed at the sight of the jewels stored in the museum (?11) to the self-righteousness of declaring that the five million people killed by a torpedo from his sub- marine were "overwhelmed by the wrath of God," were a "nation that through its worship of Social Equality went down to destruction" (?41)-a development which is probably merely a reflection of the naive self-righteous- ness of the author but which might possibly be read as the overall plot of a novel that has self-righteous robber-baron greed as its ultimate object of satire. In ??1-14 of The Sunken World the plot seems to center on a conflict between the narrator and his commanding officer for the leadership of the crew of submariners who have accidentally arrived in a country which they are told they will never be permitted to leave, but from ?15 on the commander and crew simply cease to figure in any important way in the story. Forced to back up and start over, we find that in ??11-32 the story is concerned chiefly with the inability of the obtuse narrator to grasp the realities of his sociocultural environment, and with the resulting foolishness of his behavior. From the beautiful Aelios, who serves as his cicerone and as the expounder of Atlantean orthodoxy, he learns that in the centuries before the submer- gence, the Atlanteans applied themselves less and less to "the pursuit of the beautiful" and more and more to "construction of huge and intricate ma- chines, of towering but unsightly piles of masonry, of swift means of loco- motion, and of unique and elaborate systems of amusement," and that with This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SUNKEN ATLANTIS AND THE UTOPIA QUESTION 295 their "lightning means of travel and lightning weapons of aggression" they "began to swoop down occasionally upon a foreign coast, picking a quarrel with the people and finding some excuse for smiting thousands dead." But of the Atlanteans, "not all...were savages, and not all approved of [the] policy of international murder," and so an "Anti-Mechanism" party of beauty- lovers arose to argue that Atlantis's "best human material was being used up and cast aside like so much straw," that "its best social energies were being diverted into wasteful and even poisonous channels," that "its too- rapid scientific progress was imposing a wrenching strain upon the civilized mind and institutions," and that there was "only one remedy, other than the natural one of oblivion and death, and that remedy was in a complete metamorphosis, a change such as the caterpillar undergoes when it enters the chrysalis, a transformation into an environment of such repose that society might have time to recover from its overgrowth and to evolve along quiet and peaceful lines" (?13). But the fact that he is in a society that has achieved and abjured a triumph over nature, that has renounced the pursuit of power and glory, and that has isolated itself from the rest of the world so that it might follow the ways of peace and art, does not prevent our hero from continuing to assume the universal validity of the values of his own world. And so at the first opportunity he rises in a public assembly to deny that he and his companions are the "barbarians" the Atlanteans take them to be, and to claim that they are instead "representatives of the highest of modern civili- zations": My description of the growth and attainments of the modern world was listened to with interest, but with a lack of comprehension that I thought almost idiotic. Thus when I declared that the United States was a leading nation because of its population of a hundred million, its rare inventions and its prolific manufactures, my hearers merely looked blank and asked how the country ranked in art; and when I stated (what is surely self-evident to all patriotic Americans) that New York is the greatest city on earth because of its tall buildings and its capacity for housing a million human beings in one square mile, my audience regarded me with something akin to horror, and one of the men-evidently a dolt, for he seemed quite serious-asked whether no steps had been taken to abolish the eviL But it was when describing my own career that I was most griev- ously misunderstood. Had I confessed to murder, the people could not have been more shocked when I mentioned that I was one of the crew commissioned to ram and destroy other ships; and I felt that my prestige was ruined beyond repair when I stated that I had entered the war voluntarily. (?13) There are a number of incidents that illustrate the obtuseness of our hero, but since we have heard it all before, in Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmsland, we can content ourselves with three examples. At the annual Pageant of the Good Destruction, where films are shown of pre-Submergence Atlantis (films that cause one of his companions to exclaim, "By the holy father, if we're not back in the old U.S.A.!"), he muses to himself that he "had never known anything quite so ugly as the scenes we now witnessed" (?15). When he has completed the course of study that qualifies him for citizenship, and has been made the Official Historian of the Upper World, he sets himself to write This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 296 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES "a grand resume of modern achievement...to show the steps by which that achievement had been consummated, and to picture in general the course of those social fluctuations, those invasions, battles, slave-raids, civil conflicts, religious persecutions, crusades, economic revolutions, industrial tumults and international blood-feuds that had brought civilization to its present high es- tate" (?25). And when he sees in a museum a display of weapons used by the Atlanteans in their war-making days, he exults "at the proof of or superiority:...the bayonets were fully half a foot shorter than our own; the machine guns...had obviously not half the killing capacity of ours," etc. (?26). But although this conflict between protagonist and environment gives us the utopian dual vision by opposing Atlantis to the United States (with our twin, ancient Atlantis), it does not develop as a plot but instead merely runs on an even course until it peters out in what can hardly be called a climax but must still serve as the only evidence of any change of thought in the protagonist: when attempting to write on "Social Traditions and Insti- tutions in the Upper World" he finds that the "the further I proceeded the harder the work became, for the more I learned of Atlantis the more difficult it appeared to represent the earth in a light that was not merely pitiable" (?33). Our second plot having faded away, we must once again back up and start over. That our hero is an unreliable narrator is obvious from the beginning, and near the end of ?22 we learn with disconcerting suddenness what should have been made evident by diction but was not: that the beautiful Aelios is also unreliable, for if happiness and freedom were as complete in Atlantis as she claims, there would surely be no need for such political organizations as the Industrial Reform Party, the Party of Artistic Emancipation, the Party of Birth Extension, and the Party of Emergence. It soon becomes obvious that this incident, together with the following chapter (in which our hero is instructed in the principles of the Party of Emergence by its leader, a "fiery spirit, audacious thinker, and trustworthy friend"), is a prelude to the concluding action of the novel (??27-35), in which the people of At- lantis assume the role of protagonist. The appearance of a crack in the great dome shatters the calm of the people of Atlantis: "most of them [were] so transformed that I could hardly recognize them as citizens of the Sunken World; for they were chattering wildly, or pacing distractedly back and forth, or uttering half-hysterical ex- clamations; and one or two of them were muttering or mumbling to them- selves, or moving their lips silently in what might have been prayer" (?27). The crack is soon repaired to the complete satisfaction of the majority of the committee of scientists and engineers assigned to the problem, and calm returns. One member of the committee submits a minority report holding that the repairs will prove adequate for only five or six years, and urging "the immediate erection of a new glass bulwark against the affected portion of the wall," which can probably be completed in time, "prodigious though the effort will necessarily be," but the other members of the committee testify at length on "the scientific unsoundness of Peliades' theories," and disprove "his views to their own satisfaction and that of the people" (?28). Even so, the Party of Emergence wins many new supporters for its policy of allowing a portion of the population to emigrate to the surface, and seems to be headed for victory in a referendum on the matter until the publication of our hero's History of the Upper World turns the entire country against mak- ing any contact with the barbarians of the upper world (??29-31). And so for This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE BOOKS OF OLAF STAPLEDON 297 six years the unadventurous descendants of the builders of the great dome do nothing whatever to ensure that it will continue to make life possible in their enclosed and isolated world, and make no plans for escape if the dome should fail-as fail it does (??32-35). To THE BEST of my no doabt limited knowledge in this field, no utopog- rapher has ever defined utopias as either "perfect" worlds or "permanently stable"worlds; this strawman is the creation of those who deride any belief in the possibility of improving the human condition. Since the utopian world, even though much more nearly perfect than our own, is still imperfect, there is room in it for conflict of various kinds and hence for the kinds of action portrayed in plotted as opposed to simply expository fiction. Just as we find in dystopian fiction a conflict between protagonist and environment in which the protagonist is in the right, so we would expect to find in utopian fiction a conflict in which the protagonist is in the wrong or a conflict which tests the strength of the society-and such conflicts we do find in The Sunken World, even though they are poorly handled. My proposition in this essay has been that it is quite possible to write utopian novels of literary distinction or, at least, of considerable SF interest. When I began writing it seemed necessary to argue the proposition in the abstract, but that is no longer necessary (and this essay may have lost its purpose), for the proposition has been trium- phantly demonstrated by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1974 novel, The Dis- possessed. Curtis C. Smith The Books of Olaf Stapledon: A Chronological Survey For each of the books listed below, the date, publisher (in London unless otherwise indicat- ed), pagination, and height are those of the first edition. References are to chapter, with Pref- ace indicated by ?P and Introduction by ?I. The present listing is complete for books and booklets; I am at work on "The Uncollected Pieces of Olaf Stapledon: A Preliminary List- ing," which will include at least one pamphlet not listed here. Si. "William Olaf Stapledon, 1886-1950," in NCBEL 4:741-42. Omits #10; classifies #12 as non-fiction. S2. Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fan- tasy. Reading, Pa: FantasyPress, 1949. Contains ##13, 16, 18. S3. To the End of Time: The Best of Olaf Stapledon. Ed. Basil Davenport. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953. Contains Davenport's "The Vision of Olaf Stapledon" and ## 3 (abridged), 6, 7, 14, 18. #1. Latter-Day Psalms. 1914 (Liverpool: Henry Young, vi+52p, 19cm). Unorthodox re- ligious poetry, with some poems on social ques- tions. Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets" is quoted on the title-page. #2. A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of the Relations of Ethics and Psychology. 1929 (Methuen, ix+277p, 191/2cm). Essay. In this in- vestigation of the good, Stapledon concludes that it is the fulfillment of objective teleological activity. In a complex and paradoxical discus- sion of determinism and free will he covers ground to be fictionalized in ## 3, 4, 7. In dis- cussing ecstasy and moral zeal he introduces a hierarchy of consciousness that is to inform much of his later work. #3. Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. 1930 (Methuen, xi+355p, 191/2 cm). SF; a future history that extends from the present through the fall of the First Men (Homo sapiens) and the rise and fall of 'succeeding human species to the death of the 18th (the Last Men) 2,000,000,000 years hence. Narrated by one of the Last Men through the mind and pen of one of the First, who "thinks he is merely con- triving a work of fiction" (?I). The plot has been summarized by another Stapledonian nar- rator: "We saw Man on his little Earth blunder through many alternating phases of dullness and lucidity, and again abject dullness. From epoch to epoch his bodily shape changed as This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:37:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 298 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES a cloud changes. We watched him in his des- perate struggle with Martian invaders; and then, after a moment that included further ages of darkness and of light, we saw him driven, by dread of the moon's downfall, away to in- hospitable Venus. Later still, after an aeon that was a mere sigh in the lifetime of the cosmos, he fled before the exploding sun to Neptune, there to sink back into mere animality for fur- ther aeons again. But then he climbed once more and reached his finest intelligence, only to be burnt up like a moth in a flame by irresist- ible catastrophe" (#7?10). For one instance of the book's influence on subsequent SF, see Arthur C. Clarke's Introduction to The Lion of Camarre & Against the Fall of Night (NY: Har- court 1968). #4. Last Men in London. 1932 (Methuen, viii+312p, 191/2cm). SF; described by Stapledon as "complementary" to #3: "In both, the same Neptunian being speaks, formerly to tell the story of man's career between our day and his, now to describe the spiritual drama which, he tells us, underlies the whole confused history of our species, and comes to its crisis to-day" (?P). Although the narrator draws on the re- ports of other Neptunian investigators of the world of the First Men (including some who follow the ancestry of man back to a pre-sim- ian species of "philosophical lemurs" [?5:2]), and views the period 1900-1930 through the minds of various persons, the story is concerned primarily with the life and mind of Paul, who "epitomize[s] in his character, his circumstanc- es, and his reaction to my influence, the spirit- ual crisis of your age, and indeed the doom of your species" (?3:1), and whose experiences in World War I and as a teacher and writer would seem to parallel Stapledon's own. The last chap- ter contains an account of "submerged super- men," including one who makes and then aban- dons plans to change the world-an account that ends with the statement that the narrator "may tell on another occasion" the story of another superman, "of the utopian colony which he founded, and of its destruction by a jealous world" (?9:2; cf #6). #5. Waking World. 1934 (Methuen, vii+ 280p, 19cm). Essay on the relations between animal and human nature, on personality and society, on art, on the value and danger of mod- ern science, on history, philosophy, and religion. The final chapter broadens the discussion to the cosmic level of #7 and also to the need for revolution and what revolution means. #6. Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest. 1935 (Methuen, v+282p, 19cm). SF. The childhood and development of the supernormal Odd John, his international search for others of his kind, the setting up of a colony of super- normals in the South Pacific, and the colony's eventual decision to destroy itself rather than submit to control by Homo sapiens. Although this is obviously the story forecast in #4, the narrator is not the Neptunian but simply an Englishman. And although we are told that John wrote an "amazing document...purporting to give an account of the whole story of the cos- mos" (?22), the narrator of #7 cannot be identi- fied with John. #7. Star Maker. 1937 (Methuen, xii+339p, 20'/2cm). SF; cosmic history on so vast a scale that the 2,000,000,000-year history of mankind is treated as a mere incident (see #3), but still with most of the story devoted to a tour through utopias and dystopias of various kinds. The nar- rator muses on the relationship of his wife and himself as a "microcosm of true community" (?1:1) and then imagines himself as a disembod- ied mind travelling through space and time, first to planets inhabited by intelligent races that have not yet fonned a true community or world mind (??3-), on each of which he adds a new "collaborator" to the communal mind that is making the tour (?5:1); second, when the com- munal mind has become sufficiently lucid (?9: 1), to planets and systems which have through telepathy been made into "minded worlds" and which eventually unite to form a minded gal- axy (?9); third, to the cosmos as a whole, which is now a minded cosmos that includes the minds of stars and nebulae as well as of planet-dwell- ing races (??10-12 & 13:1); and finally, the narrator having become the cosmical mind, to the presence of the Star Maker (?13:2), where he witnesses the birth and death of our cosmos and learns that its entire duration occupies only a moment of "hypercosmical" time (?13:3). Having from this vision constructed a myth of creation (??14-15), he awakes to muse once again on the possibilities of earthly community (?16). The philosophical import of this journey from hearthside to Star Maker and back is dis- cussed briefly by Stapledon in #10?12:1. #8. New Hope for Britain. 1939 (Methuen, vi+190p, 19cm). Essay on "what in Britain is worth fighting for, and what should be abol- ished; what Britain's role should be in relation to the rest of the world" (?P). #9. Saints and Revolutionaries. 1939 (Me- thuen, ix+162p, 191/2 cm). Essay. Saints believe in a change of heart resulting from self-knowl- edge and self-mastery; revolutionaries believe it necessary to change the structure of society first, and see preoccupation with the private soul as selfish. #10. Philosophy and Living. 1939 (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 2 paperback volumes, 461p, 18cm); not listed in S1. A topical intro- duction to philosophy. Central to Stapledon's metaphysics in "the co-reality of parts and whole, and of terms and relations within the whole," and the objective existence of both men- tal experience and the eternal universe (?11: 3c); central to his ethics is the definition of the good as "the free functioning and full develop- ment of the capacity for knowing-feeling-striv- ing" and of moral development as the willing of this free functioning and full development for all other conscious beings (?7:6); central to his politics in the concept of "personality in com- munity," which seeks to avoid the hypostati- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE BOOKS OF OLAF STAPLEDON 299 zation of either the individual or the society (?9:3). Economic determinism is "by far the most significant" of theories of social change, but we must "refrain from setting it up as an absolutely and universally true principle, save in the loosest possible sense" (?12:1). On re- ligious matters Stapledon is agnostic and skep- tical (e.g., with respect to personal immortal- ity, "no such possibility should be allowed to play a guiding part in the conduct of a man's life"), but he believes it "surely probable that this desire for the fulfilment of personality-in- community plays a very large part in the uni- verse" (?12:1). #11. Beyond the "Isms." 1942 (Secker and Warburg, 128p, 18cm). Essay covering much the same ground as #9, but perhaps more explicit in defining the transcendent principle of "spirit" as that which makes us able to recognize the ab- solute rightness of the way of love, intelligence, and creative action and also to live intermittent- ly by the way. We need both to worship the spir- it and to be agnostic and skeptical about the universe. #12. Darkness and the Light. 1942 (Methuen, viii+181p, 19cm). SF; future history outlining two possibilities for the future of humanity. In a world that has come to be dominated by two great empires, the Tibetans have remained in- dependent and have developed the best of East and West as both saints and revolutionaries (cf #9). In the future of darkness they are crushed, and herd-mindedness triumphs throughout the world; in the future of light they suc- ceed in overthrowing the empires and in the eventual establishment of a world-wide utopia on the basis of personality in community (cf #10). In a precarious advance with numerous crises, spiritual "forwards" acquire much of the cosmic perspective which concludes #7, but in penetrating the veil that has hidden the deeper reality (a concept rejected in #10?12:3), they find not the glory of the Star Maker but instead "incomprehensible horror" relieved only by faint evidence that this deeper reality is not the "whole ultimate reality" (?10:2). #13. Old Man in New World. 1944 (Allen and Unwin, 36p, 19cm). SF. Thirty years after the founding of the New World Order, the Old Man, one of the Fathers of the Revolution, is sad- dened to see that the younger generation is re- volting against revolutionary values and mov- ing back toward the individual and idiosyncratic (cf #9). #14. Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord. 1944 (Secker and Warburg, 200p, 19cm). SF; the Frankenstein theme in an exploration of the complex relationship between animal and hu- man nature: the tragically isolated Sirius, a dog with an artificially heightened intelligence that makes him in some ways more but in others less advanced that Homo sapiens, both rebels against and longs to join mankind (cf#5). #15. The Seven Pillars of Peace. 1944 (Com- monwealth, 15p, 22cm). Pamphlet presenting a seven-point plan for peace, involving economic, political, and religious reorganization of the world. #16. Death Into Life. 1944 (Methuen, vi+ 159p, 19cm). SF; a briefer and less grandiose cosmic history than #7, with "Interludes" that relate episodes in the narrator's life to the vis- ions of the cosmic traveller, a member of the crew of a bomber destroyed in battle, who awakens as "the crew's spirit, and then the spirit of the killed in a certain battle, and then the spirit of Man, and then of this whole cosmos, and then at last the very Spirit herself, yearning toward the Other" (?7:[2]); that is, toward a third version of ultimate reality (cf ## 7 and 12). #17. Youth and Tomorrow. 1946 (St. Bo- tolph, llip, 22cm). Essay covering Stapledon's major philosophical and social ideas, but con- cerned especially with the passage of time. More personal than many of Stapledon's books, with numerous episodes drawn from early life, which illustrate changes in the quality of life since his childhood in the late Victorian period. Once again (as in #3) Stapledon stresses that man's evolution is eternal-there will be no static, un- mitigated bliss. #18. The Flames: A Fantasy. 1947 (Secker and Warburg, 84p, 19cm). Unresolved SF. A parapsychologist confined to a madhouse tries to convince a friend that he has been contacted by a race of flames formerly resident in the sun, who wish humanity to join them sym- biotically in a quest to achieve union with the cosmic spirit of advanced flames and worlds. Wavering between faith in and distrust in the motives of the flames, the parapsychologist dies in a fire, perhaps murdered by the flames-who may at any moment (if the story of the para- psychologist is true) destroy or take over man- kind. #19. A Man Divided. 1950 (Methuen, 187p, 19cm). Novel (borderline SF); a fictionalization of #10?8:3, "The Upper Reaches of Human Per- sonality." The story of Victor Smith who alter- nates between long periods in the merely hu- man or unawakened state and shorter periods in the fully human or awakened state; cf the hu- man-superhuman struggle in #6 and the animal- human struggle in #14. #20. The Opening of the Eyes. Ed. A.Z. Stapledon. Preface by E.V. Rieu. 1954 (Me- thuen, xiii+97, 19cm). Essay; posthumous. De- votional prose in the tradition of mystical works of the "way." Stapledon struggles toward un- ion with the "Dark-Bright." ?20 describes an experience that may be the genesis of #3. Sam Moskowitz at the end of his study of Stapledon (?16 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963, reprinted as Introduction to the 1974 Hyperion Press edi- tion of #12) sees this essay as describing a re- ligious breakthrough: "He [Stapledon] had accepted God." Other readers have found it to be as paradoxical and unorthodox as any of Stapledon's books. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 300 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Notes, Reports, and Correspondence The Steam Man of the Prairies and Seven Other Dime Novels. E.F. Bleiler has edited Eight Dime Novels (Dover, $3.50), a 9 by 12 book containing photolithic reprints of five- cent periodicals published between 1881 and 1905 in the dime-novel format of that period, apparently a 4-page or 8-page newspaper fold- ed twice to produce a booklet of 16 or 32 pages. Along with Old and Young King Brady, Dead- wood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Frank James, Nick Car- ter, Frank Merriwell, and the Horatio Alger hero of the month, we have a youthful genius named Johnny Brainerd who builds a steam engine in the shape of a man and uses it with amazing results in hunting for gold and fighting bad guys, in The Steam Man of the Prairies, by Edward S. Ellis, originally published in 1865 and said to be the first SF dime novel. -RDM. 23 "Classics" of SF: theHyperion Reprints. In her Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (L 1957), Margaret Dalziel remarks that the study of such fiction is "full of interest for the reader who is prepared to undertake it in cheerful resignation to the fact that he is unlikely to discover any lost treasures" (p4). I must confess that there was a time when what drove me on in the read- ing of the SF of 50, 100, or 200 years ago was my adherence to the theory that since literary critics had always been prejudiced against SF, there were probably some lost masterpieces to be rediscovered; that is, it took me many a year to learn that this prejudice is largely an American phenomenon of the last 50 years or so, and that such SF masterpieces as have been written have all been pretty well accepted as part of mainstream literature, in Britain if not in the US. Although these 23 books have all been advertised as if they were lost master- pieces, not more than five of them (## 1, 3, 9, 19, 23), and perhaps only three (I have not read ## 3 and 9), can be counted as master- pieces in any sense. Having thus done my duty by literary stan- dards, I must now express my enthusiasm for the series and my gratitude to Hyperion Press and Sam Moskowitz, the series editor, for mak- ing them available in these substantial and reasonably priced editions, for as badly written, and as badly thought, as most of these novels are, we still need them all if we are to come to understand what SF has been and what it is. Not that the readers of SFS are going to learn all that from this brief report: I will mere- ly list the books and make a few comments on them-nostalgic comment in some part, for most of these are books that I read in my childhood or adolescence, mostly in a 5-year period (19- 28-1932) during which I not only read all the pulp magazines publishing SF, but also sought out and obtained all the back numbers of Amaz- ing Stories and many of Weird Tales, Blue Book, and Argosy All Story Weekly. Each of the books is a photolithic reprint of some earlier edition, 51/2 by 81/2, printed on good paper, and sewn in signatures; the pub- lisher is Hyperion Press, 45 Riverside Ave., Westport, Conn. 06880. The reasonableness of the prices (given below for hardback/paper- back) can be seen in connection with #9, an- nounced in 1971 by McGrath at $42.00 (but never published) and offered here at $13.50/ 5.50. ## 1, 3, 9, and 22 are not available for this report, but I have been assured that they are even now being printed. #1. Robert Paltock. The Life and Adven- tures ot Peter Wilkins. 1751 (but here an edition with introduction by A.H. Bullen, d. 1920). $10.95/4.50. Not available for this report. This minor classic of English literature, the third most popular of the 18th-century imaginary voy- ages (albeit a poor third to Crusoe and Gulliver) and never long out of print, is an example of the SF of the white man's burden: Peter teaches the arts of war and other advantages of advanced civilization to a race of winged people. Sam Moskowitz, Brian Aldiss, the NCBEL, and oth- ers to the contrary, it is not set in a world in- side the earth: the action takes place, first, on a small island similar to Burroughs's Caspak in that it is completely encircled by high cliffs but open to the sky; second, in a larger country surrounded by towering mountains and lying in the supposedly temperate regions of the south pole. #2. W.H. Rhodes. Caxton's Book: A Col- lection of Essays, Poems, Tales and Sketches. Ed. Daniel O'Connell. With an "In Memorium" signed W.H.L.B. 1876. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $8.95/3.75. This memorial volume, assembled by friends of the author, a San Fran- cisco lawyer who had written some newspaper and magazine pieces under the name Caxton, contains one well-known SF story of the hoax type, "The Case of Summerfield," a sequel to that story, and four other stories of considerable SF interest, together with a number of poems and essays. The "In Memorium" is of interest in indicating that SF was a recognized genre in 1876 but was believed to be something rather new: "His fondness for weaving the problems of science with fiction, which became afterwards so marked a characteristic of his literary efforts, attracted the especial attention of his profes- sors [at Harvard in the 1840s], and had Mr. Rhodes devoted himself to this then novel de- partment of letters, he would have become, no doubt, greatly distinguished as a writer; and the great master of scientific fiction, Jules Verne, This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES, REPORTS, AND CORRESPONDENCE 301 would have found the field of his efforts al- ready sown and reaped by the young southem student" (pp6-7). #3. Percy Greg. Across the Zodiac. 1880. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $13.50/ 5.50. J.O. Bailey treats this book as a landmark in the history of SF (Pilgrims, pp67-69), and it is the one "classic" of SF that I want most to read, but it has not yet come my way. ##4-5. George Griffith. The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror. With [17 magnificent] illustrations by Fred. T. Jane. 1893 (but here an 1894 edition issued before the death of Tsar Alexander, November lst). With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $11.50/4.75. Olga Romanoff: or The Syren of the Skies. 1894 (with an errata slip: 'In view of recent events in Russia.... For the obviously necessary alter- ations in the text the reader is referred to the Ninth Edition of [#3]."). With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $10.50/4.25. In Voices Prophe- sying War (1966) IF. Clarke dismisses Griffith with the following: "a new race of journalists like Louis Tracy, George Griffith, and William Le Quex.... had a standard formula for dealing with every situation: a major anxiety of the mo- ment plus a racy and exciting narrative plus the introduction of eminent contemporary fig- ures who would talk to the reader in the intimate manner favored by the Daily Mail" (p65). Whe- ther Griffith's contributions to the future-war story deserve more than this I cannot say, hav- ing read few of the books that Professor Clarke regards as important in that sub-genre and thus being unable to make comparisons. What can be said is that these highly sensational and melo- dramatic stories are more in line with-would appear in matters of story-telling to be more directly ancestral to-modern popular SF than Wells's stories, though their influence is of course indirect, Griffith not having been pub- lished in the US and having been long out of print in Britain. Set ten years in the future, Angel is con- cerned with the building of the first successful aircraft, which combine the principles of "Jules Verne's imaginary 'Clipper of the Clouds' and... Hiram Maxim's Aeroplane" (p42); the use of a fleet of these aircraft by the international ni- hilist-socialist-anarchist Brotherhood under the leadership of Natas and his daughter (the eponymous Natasha) to save England from conquest by Russia and France (eventually with help from America, the US branch of the Bro- therhood having overthrown the Plutocracy, torn up the wicked Constitution, and joined the US with Britain in an Anglo-Saxon Federation); and the establishment of a world-wide reign of peace and justice on the basis of socialist-demo- cratic government and monarchical pageantry (Edward VII and the German and Austrian emperors being allowed to keep their thrones), a reign guaranteed by the monopoly of air- power that the Brotherhood wields from its base in an idyllic region of Africa. The chief villain of the story is Tsar Alexander/Nicholas (Alex- ander having died between the 8th and 9th editions), and the final scene in which the Tsar appears is typical of much in the book: From here they [the Tsar and his high min- isters, in chains] were marched on to the first Siberian etape, one of a long series of foul and pestilential prisons which were to be the only halting-places on their long and awful journey. The next morning, as soon as the chill grey light of the winter's dawn broke over the snow-covered plains, the men were formed up in line, with the sleighs carrying the women and children in the rear.... "Forward!" the whips of the Cossacks cracked, and the mournful pro- cession moved slowly onward into the vast, white, silent wilderness, out of which none save the guards were destined ever to emerge again. (p385) Set in 2030, Olga Romanoff is concerned with the efforts of the eponymous villainess (who seduces our hero and thus obtains the secret of aerial navigation) to reestablish the throne of her ancestors, with the great aerial battles waged between her forces and those of the Brotherhood, with the waming of impending doom received from the Martians, and with the coming of the comet that wipes out human- ity save for those members of the Brotherhood who found shelter deep underground. Both novels abound in pageantry and for- mal situations (regiments on parade, sessions of Parliament, assemblies of heads of state, etc.) and in set scenes that cry out for the stage of melodrama; e.g., from Angel, with Natasha holding the floor at a meeting of the Execu- tive Council of the Brotherhood: "You have asked for a bride, Michael Robu- roff, and she has come to you, and I can promise you that you shall sleep soundly in her embrace. Your bride is Death, and I have chosen to bring her to you with my own hand, that all here may see how the daughter of Natas can avenge an insult to her womanhood. "You have been guilty of treachery to the Brotherhood, and for that you might have been punished by any hand; but you would also have condemned me to the in- famy of a loveless marriage, and that is an insult that no one shall punish but my- self. Look up, and, if you can, die like a man." Roburoff took his hands from his face, and with an inarticulate cry started to his feet. The same instant Natasha's hand went up, her pistol flashed, and he dropped back again with a bullet in his brain. (p275). The introductions are valuable in that they give us some information on Griffith not available elsewhere; less so in their effort to make Grif- fith one of the most influential writers of his day. #6. Gustavus W. Pope, M.D. Journey to Mars. The Wonderful World: Its Beauty and Splendor: Its Mighty Races and Kingdoms: Its This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 302 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Final Doom . 1894. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $12.95/5.25. This verbose and slow- moving story, quite the silliest of these 23, is Mr. Moskowitz's candidate for an honor much disputed among Burroughsians, that of being the chief source for Barsoom. I can't see that he has much of a case: the Mars depicted here is pre-Lowellian, with the continents and seas named as on the maps in Richard A. Procter's Old and New Astronomy (1892), with canals cut to prevent floods and to "equaliz[e] our climate from equator to poles" (p150), with a popu- lation "nearly seven times that of Earth" and all living in utopian comfort (p196), with people who live only for about a hundred years (p337) and are all of human size except for a very few members of an immigrant race, who may attain ten feet (p175), and with virtually all monstrous animals having been cleared off the planet ages ago (p178). Pope outdoes Griffith in his devotion to pag- eantry and is unrivalled in the observance of all the formalities on every occasion: our hero is introduced around on Mars as "Lieutenant Hamilton of the Navy of the United States of America, the greatest Republic on the Terres- trial Globe," and one of the high points of his tourof Mars occurs during a "magnificent naval spectacle" when his hosts honor him by raising "the STAR SPANGLED BANNER" (pp195- 209). But as fascinated as we may be with the extensive depiction of Martian high society in all the splendor of its parades, fetes, balls, as- semblies, the book is perhaps most interesting in its treatment of race. In this world in which wickedness of any kind is almost entirely un- known, there are five pure races living together in complete harmony, and one race of wicked mongrels: "We pure Martians regard intermar- riages of our different races with abhorrence. Such alliances are contrary to the laws of God and Nature and produce great deterioration of the original stock and dreadful degeneracy of offspring" (p279). This belief is supported "as a great physiological truth" by an auctorial foot- note on the same page: "The moral, mental and physical degeneracy of the greater part of [Ter- restrial] semi-civilized and barbarous races is due to these admixtures." But these sentiments are expressed as it were in odd-numbered chap- ters while in those with even numbers a great though unspoken love is developing between our hero and a Martian princess. The book ends with the Martians making desperate plans to survive an apparently inevitable doom resulting from the dislodgement of the Martian moons by a meteor shower (and with the wicked King of the wicked mongrels threatening to frustrate those plans unless our heroine becomes his bride). I can't wait to read the sequel (A Jour- ney to Venus, 1895): the Martians will of course survive, but will hero and heroine allow their great love to lead them into the loathesome crime of miscegenation? #7. L. Frank Baum. The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale founded on the Mysteries of Electricity and the optimism of its devotees. It was written for boys, but others may read it. Illustrations by F.Y. Cory. 1901. With intro- duction by David L. Greene and Douglas G. Greene. $8.95/3.75. Ozians or Baumians (how- ever called) will of course be interested in this book; others will find it a pleasant enough tale. With an electrical gun that will render any foe unconscious for an hour, and with an anti-grav- ity device worn like a wrist-watch, our youthful hero flies over the world having adventures of many kinds until he finally decides that it's "no fun being a century ahead of your time" (p245). The authors of the modest and informative in- troduction (professors respectively of English and history) are members of the International Wizard of Oz Club. #8. Robert W. Chambers. In Search of the Un- known. 1901. With introduction by Sam Mos- kowitz. $8.95/3.75. The farcical adventures of a young zoologist searchingin various parts of the world for specimens of prehistoric or mythi- cal animals and for love; in each case he loses the specimen and the girl. The introduction at- tempts to make a case for Chambers, one of the best-selling novelists of his time, as an impor- tant writer of SF, but these slick-magazine stor- ies are quite routine both as SF and as romantic comedy. #9. Gabriel de Tarde. Underground Man. With introduction by H.G. Wells. 1905 (1896 as Fragment d'une histoire future). $7.50/2.95. One of the four books unavailable for review, and one I have not read. Tarde's reputation as sociologist and criminologist makes one hope that this may be an important novel. #10. William Wallace Cook. A Round Trip to the Year 2000. Serialized 1904; here a 1925 dime novel. With introduction by Sam Mosko- witz. $9.50/$3.85. A farcical story with some ingenious ideas not very well worked out; e.g., since books about the year 2000 are very popu- lar in 1901, a number of 1901 writers have gone to 2000 via suspended animation and there have made a solemn pact not to tell the truth in the books they will publish in 1901 if they can find a way to go back. The last avatar of the dime novel was a thick little book of about 300 pages, 41/4 by 7, side-stapled, and selling for 15?. The introduc- tion to the present edition states that this novel has been "unjustly neglected by academics in- terested in science fiction because of the absurd prejudice, baldly stated in several learned jour- nals, that a work published only as 'a cheap paperback' is not worthy of critical evaluation," But I have never said any such thing, and I doubt that any other scholar ever has. What I did say, poorly expressed, on one occasion (SFS 1:2) is that "references should not be made to the pages of cheap paperbacks or other editions not likely to be found in libraries" (i.e., should instead be made to chapters); and on an earlier occasion, in connection with a projected bibliog- raphy of SF books published before 1946, that in our search for titles we could ignore books of This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES, REPORTS, AND CORRESPONDENCE 303 certain kinds, including any "published only as a cheap paperback," whichwould not rule out the inclusion of any such book that we hap- pened to run across, or already knew of, and considered worthwhile. We already knew of the present book (it is listed in a bibliography by Thomas D. Clareson, Extrapolation 1(1959):8, and is one that I read as a child), and since it is one that I consider worthwhile (in a minor way), it would have been included. On the other hand, if we had missed it, it would have been no great loss. #11-12. Garrett P. Serviss. A Columbus of Space. Illustrated. 1911. With introduction by A. Langley Sears. $9.50/3.95. The Second Deluge. Illustrated. 1912. With introduction by Joseph Wrzos. $10.95/4.50. The first of these is a boys' story about a journey to Venus and wild adventures thereon. The second is a much more interesting and substantial work though marred by bad style (Serviss could write only at the top of his voice): an astronomer's warning that Earth is about to pass through a watery nebula; the vain efforts of the hero to get the world to prepare for the coming disaster; his own building of an enormous ark that makes possible the saving of a few hundred people. The intro- ductions are sober and informative. #13. George Allan England. Darkness and Dawn. 1914. With an introductory essay by the author, "The Fantastic in Fiction." 13.95/5.95. An engineer and his secretary wake up in their skyscraper office to find that perhaps a thou- sand years have passed since they mysteriously lost consciouaness, and that they are apparently the only people alive in a New York City that lies in ruins. Later they find a tribe of small ape-like creatures that they take to be descended from Negroes, who might have been immune to whateverit was that killed off everyone else, and would surely have degenerated to an animal- like condition in the absence of Whites to guide them (?1:19). At long last they find some Mer- ucaans (?2:24), not very prepossessing but at least White! and so capable of being uplifted and brought back to a technological civilization, which our hero and heroine set out to do. A few years later they have trains running, planes flying, and the beginnings of a socialist utopia. All in all, pretty routine stuff both as adventure story and as racist-socialist vision. The intro- ductory essay, written for a writer's magazine, is interesting in showing that England was both half-proud and half-defensive about being a writer of such wild stuff as SF. #14. Victor Rousseau. The Messiah of the Cylinder [also pbd as The Apostle of the Cyl- inder]. Illustrated by Joseph Clement Coll. 1917. With introduction by Lester Del Rey. $9.50/ 3.85. Though sentimental and melodramatic, this novel is interesting as a direct imitation of Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and as an ex- tensive Catholic-conservative critique of Wells- ianism. The introduction by Lester Del Rey is surprisingly ill-informed about the history of the anti-utopian novel and about the content of this book, which is not especially concerned with socialism (and is indeed more anti-capitalist than anti-socialist), but is instead an attack on Soulless Science in general and eugenics in par- ticular. The illustrations are excellent, surpassed in this group of books only by those in #4. #15. Milo Hastings. City of Endless Night. 1920. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $9.95/3.95. One of the many post-war books in- spired by fear of a resurgent Germany, this story was serialized as "Children of 'Kultur'," the word Kultur having been made infamous by Allied propaganda in World War I, and like #14 is primarily an attack on Soulless Science (and especially eugenics), here seen as peculiarly German. In this imagined future all the world is peacefully united except for Germany, which continues under the Kaisers to nourish dreams of world dominion, and which survives in a vast underground Berlin so strongly fortified that it can withstand any force of arms brought against it. Even more sentimental and melo- dramatic than #14, and much less interesting. Sam Moskowitz can always be relied upon to present some intriguing new information on the history of popular SF: who would have be- lieved that any SF was ever published in True Story Magazine (as this story was) or that SF was once a regular feature of Physical Culture? #16. Harold Lamb. Marching Sands. 1920. With introduction by L. Sprague de Camp. $9.50/3.75. Harold Lamb graduated from the pulps to considerable success as a writer of popular history and biography. Mr. de Camp tells us that Lamb "became prodigiously learn- ed in Asian history and languages," which I do not doubt; but such learning does not show up in this book, which is merely a routine lost- race romance that can be counted as SF only if all such stories are so counted. #17. Ray Cummings. The Girl in the Golden Atom. 1923. With introduction by Thyrill L. Ladd. $9.95/3.95. In the late 20s and early 30s Argosy All-Story Weekly ran four serials in each issue, of which one was always SF or fantasy, and for a year or two in that period half the latter were written by Ray Cummings. It went something like this: "The Sea Girl" by Cum- mings, then a serial by Ralph Milne Farley, then "The Snow Girl," then a serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, then "The Shadow Girl," then one by Austin Hall, then "Princess of the Atom," then one by Burroughs, then, having run out of girls, "Beyond the Stars," and so on and on. Cummings was advertised as a former secre- tary to Thomas A. Edison, as the American H.G. Wells, and as the author of a "trilogy of matter, time, and space," all of which I found very impressive until it grew on me that he had very little to say and had long since said it all. The original novelette of this title, which was combined with a six-installment sequel to form the book, is famous among fans as having initiated the SF story set in the world of the atom (reached by taking a size-diminishing drug) or the world "Beyond the Stars," in which This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 304 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES our cosmos is a mere atom (reached by taking the drug that enables you to return from the infinitesimal world), which would be all very well if there were any worthwhile stories of this kind. All in all, this poorly written and poor- ly imagined story is second in silliness only to #6. The introduction is adulatory rather than in- formative, except that it does tell us that Cum- mings was never Edison's secretary. #18. A. Merritt. The Metal Monster. Serial- ized 1920; here as #41 of the Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1946. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz (?12 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963). $7.95/2.95. This story belongs to a rather odd but once very common category: the story in which the hero, adventuring in some remote part of the world, finds, not a lost race (or, as here, not only a lost-race) but an invader from outer space (or the fourth dimension, or the geological past, etc.). Here the invader is a col- lective being composed of millions of metal beings, evidently engaged in nothing more than amusing itself in and of itself, and apparently completely indifferent to man (though willing to destroy the enemies of the one human being it has deigned to recognize). Correctly characterized by Mr. Moskowtiz as the Lord of Fantasy, A. Merritt, who wrote the purplest prose of any SF writer between the early Shiel and the young Bradbury, dif- fered from Cummings in that he did not wear out his welcome, publishing only two novelettes, eight serials, and a few short stories over a period of 16 years, and amassing the largest and most enthusiastic audience of any fanta- sist-an audience that endured through reprint- ings in Amazing Stories (where I first read The Moon Pool and "The Face in the Abyss"), in various other pulp magazines, in hardback edi- tions (with The Metal Monster as the one exception), and finally in paperback editions, down to just a few years ago (though some of the books are still in print). I remember being astonished a few years ago when Brian Aldiss wrote that Merritt could not write-could not plot, could not draw character, had a beastly style-could only confect (SF Horizons #1, 1964, p34), and then, upon rereading some of the books, finding that he was quite right. Even so, Merritt was certainly the most imaginative of all the imitators of Haggard, and any SF writer who aroused so much enthusiasm over so long a period deserves at least some attention from students of SF. And while I think Mr. Moskowitz's claim of philosophical profundity for The Metal Mo uter quite absurd, I agree with him that this is probably Merritt's best book. #19. Karel Capek. The Absolute at Large. 1927 (1922 as Tovarna na absolutno). With in- troduction by William E. Harkins. $8.50/3.50. This masterpiece of satiric comedy by the author of R. U.R. is concerned with the world-catas- trophe that follows the invention and wide- spread use of the Karburator, which effects the complete disintegration of matter and so not only produces limitless power but also frees as immaterial residue what has hitherto been con- fined: the pantheistic Go,. The introduction is by the author of Karel Capek (Columbia Uni- versity Press 1962). #20. Philip Wylie. Gladiator. 1930. With in- troduction by Sam Moskowitz (?17 of Explorers of the Intinite, 1963). $9.95/3.95. The late Phil- ip Wylie was the author of a number of icono- clastic best-sellers, and a great favorite among college students in the 1940s. I remember read- ing this book in 1930 or 31 in a book-club edition issued in wraps, and have never for- gotten the sentence that expresses its what-if basis: "Make a man as strong as a grasshopper- and he'll be able to leap over a church" (p6). This then is the story of a young man as strong as a grasshopper who seeks something better to do than leaping over churches but can find no tasks worthy of his strength. According to Mr. Moskowitz the creators of the Superman comics found their inspiration in this book, perhaps most directly in this passage: "What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in the world, mightier than the machine? He made himself guess an- swers for that rhetorical query. '...I would be a criminal, I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and destroy. I would be a secret invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the earth; I would be a secret detective, following and summarily punishing every crimi- nal until no one dared commit a felony"' (p232). Though several cuts below Odd John or The In- visible Man in vividness and power, this is one of the best of the superman stories. #21. David H. Keller, M.D. Life Everlasting and other Tales of Science, Fantasy, and Hor- ror. Edited and with a critical and biographical introduction by Sam Moskowitz. 1947. $10.50/ 4.25. Keller, a psychiatrist, was the most popu- lar of the new writers recruited by Hugo Gems- back for his magazines, and much as I hate to admit it, these unbelievably crude stories (serialized in the 20s and 30s) were among the special favorites of my adolescence, perhaps be- cause of their strange combination of senti- mentality and callousness. #22. Stanley G. Weinbaum. A Martian Odys- sey and Other Science Fiction Tales: The Col- lected Short Stories of Stanley G. Weinbaum. A composite volume containing A Martian Odyssey and Others (1949), The Red Peri (1952), some uncollected material, an autobiographical sketch, and an introduction by Sam Moskowitz (perhaps ?18 of Explorers of the Infinite)$13.50/ 5.75 Not available for this report. Wein- baum published his first SF story, "A Martian Odyssey," in 1934 and another ten before his death in 1935; twelve more appeared in the magazines, some completed by other hands, in the years 1936-1943. He has become a heroic figure to, and a special favorite of, SF writers. The title story ranked second in the SFWA bal- loting for the best short stories of all time; Isaac Asimov regards the appearance of that story as an epoch in the history of SF, and believes This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES, REPORTS, AND CORRESPONDENCE 305 that Weinbaum would have been the greatest of all SF writers if he had lived (see his intro- duction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum [Ballantine 1974]), and Sam Moskowitz views him in much the same terms. While I cannot share in this enthusiasm, it is certainly worth pondering. #23. Olaf Stapledon. Darkness and the Light. 1942. With introduction by Sam Mosko- witz (?16 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963). $7.50/2.95. A masterpiece; for further comment see Dr. Smith's essay in this issue. -RDM. A Response to Damon Knight. I cannot share Mr. Knight's conviction that it would be very interesting or very difficult fo find out why crude efforts are so popular in the SF field (see SFS 1:220). Knight apparently is of the persuasion-which strikes me as naive-that there is a definite correspondence between lit- erary quality and popularity, and that the pop- ularity of bad work is therefore an unusual and difficult problem. Whereas I think that while there certainly is a positive correlation with such factors as readability, story-telling or day-dreaming, there is no such positive corre- lation between the total literary quality of a story and its popularity. Indeed, I am convinced that a very high literary quality would be quite detrimental to popularity, that mediocrity is the safe road to success in SF, and that good work can become really popular only if it also has strong virtues of old-fashioned story-telling (such as Le Guin's work). The results of the var- ious popularity contests and Mr. Knight's own criticism seem to be ample proof of this. What Mr. Knight seems to want now is not criticism but market research. I for one certainly see no reason why I should travel to the U.S.A. just in order to find out why an unimportant writer is relatively popular. And before asking the readers, a critic should ask himself. If I followed Mr. Knight's logic, the most interesting critical problem in SF just now would be "Perry Rho- dan"-for this series is really so much more popular than Farmer's work, besides being so much worse. -Franz Rottensteiner. Wells, Verne, and Science. Darko Suvin's note on "Wells and Earlier SF" is remarkable for its pleasing ecumenicism. There is indeed a strong appearance that Wells was a fulcrum in the development of SF: a writer whose work is at once the premier culmination of volumi- nous older traditions in SF, both "low-brow" and "high," as well as the inception of a new. modern form, which eventually divides again into "low" and "high" forms, mainly along commercial class-lines. Of course, the pulp SF magazines of the 30s derive more from Verne than Wells, as a rather direct result of Gernsback's propagan- distic intentions-which fought a losing battle against the dominant veins of pulp adventure drawn from Haggard, Burroughs, etc. Poe's scientific gothicism, and Mary Shelley's gothic scientism, for all their chronological primacy, are distinctly minor threads in early pulp SF, notwithstanding the viewpoints and preferences of such critics as Aldiss and Ketterer (ignoring, for the nonce, Weird Tales and Lovecraft). The Wellsian influence was mainly submerged with- in this sea of cross-currents, and stories of a basically Wellsian character emerged intermit- tently at best, only gradually coming into their own as a major literary force-at first in Astounding under Campbell, more clearly later on in Galaxy under Gold. Meanwhile, in the upper echelons of liter- ary endeavor, Wells became the major touch- stone (and often the major inspiration) for SF writing from Olaf Stapledon through Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. By the late 40s and 50s, there was a confluence of the two Wellsian streams in the magazines, but not in the main- stream of "serious" modem fiction, where SF cropped up only as an occasional sport, even unto the 60s. In the middle 60s, mainstream writers began to raid the SF idiom for "fresh" expression, while some of the writers who worked within the idiom proceeded to raid the avant-garde (mainly of the past) in self-con- scious attempts to "arrive" in the manner of their outer-world confreres. (Earlier, Ray Brad- bury had arrived because he outdid all others in the department of self-consciously florid metaphors.) All the while, from Ballard to Vonnegut, these literary climbers kept Wells just in sight, out of the corners of their eyes. But in the process, their view of him became rather distorted (not to mention their impression of the nature of SF since Wells). One conse- quence, I think, is a tendency to see the early Wells as some kind of proto-surrealist who had little interest in the plausibility of his constructs, while Verne is cast as the hyper-accurate scien- tific writer. I hope that somewhere I may find who it was that first christened Wells the "English Jules Verne." Verne reacted one way to that epithet, and Wells in another. As Suvin implies, Wells was certainly rankled by the phrase. He felt his stories as somehow finer than Verne's work. Verne, however, thought the comparison too laudatory; he must have felt Wells a tre- mendous threat to what he apparently conceiv- ed to be his private literary preserve. "But show me this metal!" cried Verne sarcastically of Wells's hypothetical Cavorite, asserting that Wells was "not very scientific." And so Wells, in a manner very like his denial of literary in- tent to Henry James, accepted the criticism, and made of it a silk purse, an aesthetic: his scien- tific explanations, he admitted, were merely ploys to make the impossible momentarily ac- ceptable, after which the consequences were developed in a realistic, humanized fashion. As well, an atmosphere of recognizable characters and ordinary life helped him to "domesticate the impossible" for his readers. Only one im- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 306 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES possibility was allowed per story; the writer of fantasy must maintain "a rigid exclusion of other marvels" from any one narrative, lest he made the singularly marvelous seem dull, and the whole story silly, by association with a pro- fusion of fantastic details. "Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen." This definitive statement, however, was written in 1933, for the preface to The Scien- tific Romances (In US as Seven Famous Nov- els, 1934). There is little doubt that this essay is largely an outgrowth of the mutual displeas- ure that exercised Wells and Verne: the second paragraph begins with a straightforward denial of any similarity to Verne's work, followed by a subtly lefthanded examination of Verne's raison d'gtre.) The observations therein cer- tainly contain a large measure of truth, but just as surely, they do not embody the whole truth. The cozy frame of The Time Machine does much, perhaps, to "domesticate" the mar- velous device, but none of it can domesticate the Eloi, the White Sphinx, the Morlocks, or the final solar eclipse. And there are two fantastic notions at the heart of the story-one a dimen- sional speculation, the other bio-social and fundamentally unrelated to the first. Contrary to the elder Wells's pronounce- ments, his early science journalism indicates that he viewed his speculations as much more than mere fantasy. Consider, for example, the closing lines of "The Extinction of Man": "If some poor story-writing man ventures to figure this sober probability in a tale, not a reviewer in London but will tell him his theme is utterly impossible. And when the thing happens, one may doubt if even then one will get the recog- nition one deserves." Even now, Wells nas not received the recog- nition he deserves. His scientific rigor is dis- regarded or impugned; the monstrous Ozyman- dian lie of Verne is still abroad, beclouding the exquisite construction of Wells's scientific speculations. To be sure, he was not particularly strong in physics; but his nodding acquaintance with it was a damn sight more intimate than Verne's. Much of the criticism of how Wells used the scientific knowledge of his period depends for its continued currency on outright misread- ing of Wells's text! Even Darko Suvin perpet- uates one such-without, I am sure, any con- sciousness of doing so. For me, it is the most irritating, because this particular dead horse has now been beaten into hamburger. The obfus- cation here is that Cavor's sphere is propelled by antigravity. Suvin does not give a name to his assumption, but it seems fairly implicit as the source of his own confusion over the work- ability of Cavorite: "Cavor's sphere...as describ- ed would, it seems, immediately fly off from any center of gravitational attraction regardless of Wells's shutters"! This would be valid if indeed Cavorite were a mass-repelling substance, be- cause then the total repulsive force would de- pend on the total mass of Cavorite contained by the sphere, independent of the substance's physical distribution. But this is simply not the case-not "as described"! Cavorite is a compound that insulates ordinary matter from gravitational attraction-it is, in Wells's phrase, "opaque" to gravity. This is not the same as "a metal that does away with the laws of gravi- tation" (Veme's words). Nor is the sphere built of Cavorite, as Verne would have it, but rather the shutters only are coated with this material. When closed, they cover the entire surface of the sphere, cutting it off from Earth's gravity, but not from Earth's rotational energy, which heaves it into space. Thereafter, one or more shutters open toward the Moon allows that body to attract the vehicle. (With the shutters open, of course, the vehicle has its normal weight and will not move from its resting place.) The rest, as we say in the trade, is orbital mechanics-we may assume that Cavor is math- ematically competent for the task, as Wells does. Of course, if it were Verne, he would give us a lot of figures, most of which would be wrong. Wells is by no means perfect, but his "scien- tific credibility" has had (and still has) an un- deservedly bad press. Cavorite may well be im- possible to create but it is the kind of impos- sibility that cannot be easily demonstrated- whereas Verne's cannon could have been de- molished on paper at the time he wrote. If Cavorite could exist, its effects would be as Wells describes. -Alex Eisenstein. In response to Mr. Eisenstein. I am in sym- pathy with a number of Alex Eisenstein's points, such as the one about the development of post- Wellsian pulp and non-pulp SF traditions, about Wells's ping-pong game with Verne across the decades, etc. However, I would not think Wells cared very much for physics except insofar as he realized that the scientifically ignorant but by-science-impressed reader of his "scientific romances" had to be hoodwinked into believing that the Time Machine, Griffin's invisibility, or Cavorite were possible, or at least not mani- festly impossible. Wells's heart, and the raison d'Atre of his early SF, was in menacing socio- biological and cosmological evolution. Thus the vague non-sequiturs about the fourth dimension in The Time Machine seem to me quite subordi- nate to-in fact not much more than plausible motivation for-the Time Traveller's sequence of horrific visions. If one takes them in that way, it could be argued that this sequence (rendered possible by the device of the Time Machine) is the one novelty in that story, as are the Selenites in The First Men in the Moon. I will, however, readily acknowledge that, whereas Wells's discrimination -between a story in which anything is possible and one that keeps the marvelous under strict control seems to me basic for any theory of SF as different from fantasy, his insistence on one impossibility per story seems to me theoretically unclear and in need of further discussion (perhaps one gen- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:39 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES, REPORTS, AND CORRESPONDENCE 307 eral idea manifesting itself in a number of structural elements might fill the bill?). As concerns Cavorite, in particular, I am afraid that, though I have perpetrated six years of science studies and obtained a European de- gree equivalent to the M.Sc., I still do not under- stand how rolling up the steel sections of Cavor's sphere "after the fashion of a roller blind" (FMM ?3) would fully prevent the anti-gravity effect. Cavorite is not an anti-gravity force but a substance "impervious to gravitation" (?3), and in ?2 we get a careful explanation of how everything above a sheet of it laid on the ground (such as the roof and the air up to the limits of the atmosphere) would instantly become weightless and fly off into space. I don't see how one could shield Cavorite from itself: a force can become neutralized by a substance cannot. Therefore, even when fully rolled up as a win- dow-shade (say into three circles around the sphere which could be called its tropic of Can- cer, tropic of Capricorn, and Arctic circle), the gravitation between the Earth and those (say) three rows of rolled-up Cavorite blinds around a room-sized sphere will still be cut off. It would seem to me that the same effect which made the experimental sheet of Cavorite fly off into space would lift the sphere too-regardless of the fact that most of the sphere would be sub- ject to gravity-after the fashion of a very rapid balloon uplifted by the effect of the weightless air above the rolled up (but still sizable) blinds. Thus, contrary to Alex Eisenstein, I do not think that if Cavorite could exist, its effects on the sphere would be as Wells describes them. I am not sure about all this, and perhaps a physicist reader of SFS could enlighten us further. (But let me quote a relevant passage from "A Sci- entist Looks at Science Fiction," by J.H. Frem- lin, Professor of Applied Radioactivity, Uni- versity of Birmingham, U.K., published in Alta: The University of Birmingham Review, 2, ix (1969):134, "[Cavorite] contradicts the Laws of thermodynamics. To cover the space ship with Cavorite 'blinds' would require as much mechanical work as would be needed to remove the space ship to an infinite distance from the Earth and their removal would liberate enough energy to turn the whole ship into a gas much hotter than the surface of the Sun.") Until then I would be inclined to treat Cavorite as so much entertaining and stimulating mum- bo-Jumbo, exactly like the Time Machine, Da- vidson's eyes, the New Accelerator, or other pseudo-scientific devices introduced by Wells in order to validate new visions. These visions and not the devices are, to my mind, what makes Wells's writings SF. The devices themselves were, apparently, taken over and readapted by Wells from subliterary SF-and I still think The History of a Voyage to the Moon, with its totally logical counteraction of earth-repellent power, is a good bet for being the source of Cavorite. None of this precludes a search for further sources, and, perhaps most important, a study of how Wells transmogrified them. Let me use this occasion to add another note about prob- able sources for Wells's catastrophes in "The Star" and In the Days of the Comet. It seems to me that these stories refer back not only to Poe's holocaust in "The Conversation of Ei- ros and Charmion" or to Flammarion's La Fin du monde (1893) but also-and I think primarily -George Griffith's refashioning of Flammarion in Olga Romanoff, and to Kenneth Folingsby's (pseud.?) Meda: A Tale of the Future (1892), which introduces an earth changed for the bet- ter by a comet which altered the composition of atmospheric gases. (Also, Meda's future Britons of small size and with large heads may well have given some pointers to Wells's early aliens. As for Olga Romanoff, it was the Griffith novel I had principally in mind-with a subsidiary role for The Angel of the Revolution-when speak- ing about the debts Wells's The War in the Air owes to him; but perhaps the name of Griffin testifies to that even earlier.) -DS. Four Complaints. Science-Fiction Studies is most welcome, especially any Lem, which I turn to avidly. I have asked our library to subscribe. But I have some complaints. First, Ursula Le Guin, for all her insight, is too kind a reviewer. She picks a rather ob- vious piece of satire as the best in View From Another Shore-a very necessary but still rather uneven book. And I would like to say that what is so "Russian" about the Strugatskys is that they know what feudal conditions are like. Americans have never known; Russians knew well into the 20th century what a backward peasantry and the terrific gap between classes meant. It is this realism that informs Hard to Be a God. It is truly a spendid book. Second, I have a bone to pick with Robert Scholes. In talking about the ideology of This Perfect Day and The Sheep Look Up he ne- glects the quality of the books. Levin's brain- less behemoth doesn't, I think, intend the mild- ness Scholes finds in it; it's just diluted Huxley, period. And Brunner (who writes much better) makes what I consider the elementary error of a propagandist: propaganda must somehow be- come a source of energy, not just a collection of horror stories. Sheep is energy-sapping, depres- sing, and apathy-making. Either we must have the energy of agit-prop (like Waiting for Lefty) and hence some success within the novel, or at least anger and the will to fight, or we must have analysis-the reason for Brecht's famous "cooling-off' effect. It's to make one think. Neither Levin (consider the biology in the book!) nor Brunner (who at least gives one a whole, accurate novel) provides either energy or real social analysis. In fact, they're both bad books; Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! which is infinitely simpler and less urbane is nonetheless a better book on the subject, far more alive, and more communicative of hope simply through its own dramatic energy. The This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:39 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 308 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES very melodrama helps. Third, I agree with Damon Knight. (no com- plaint) Third, Reginald Bretnor's anthology of es- says is a bad book by and large. There are a few good essays, which your reviewer mentions. There is an awful lot of superficial stuff, which your reviewer doesn't mention. (Where is Sil- verberg, Knight, Delany, Carr, Wilhelm, Sallis, et al.?) None of us is first-rate next to the standard Lem sets up, but there are degrees. Fourth, about David Ketterer's book, New Worlds for Old. It's not Mr. Ketterer's book in particular, but two beefs I've long had about lit. crit.-the first, that I earnestly believe NWFO to have been written with a dissertation advisor or other conscience (perhaps Mr. K's own) standing over his shoulder and making him link SF to some "respectable" tradition, so that poor old Wieland comes in again and Melville and whatever makes SF look harmless, ancient, respectable-and not itself. The second point is related to symbol-hunt- ing, but not exactly linked to it. (For example, in "Wieland" even I can find two puns Mr. K didn't: "wee" land [tiny] and "we" i.e. "our" land-US = USA.) This sort of thing can go so far that it falls right through the (inevitably) porous texture of any work and comes through the other side. It becomes totally creative in the bad sense. Moreover, to find certain patterns in books- the novel, the human condition (only one?), the American experience (whose?) and so on is useful, sometimes. But in so much literary criticism a kind of eerie quasi-causality takes over, so that we end up believing Wieland, say, to have been written by The American Ex- perience playing footsie with The Apocalyptic Imagination, and not by poor Charles Brockden Brown, who somehow gets lost in the shuffle. Untouched by human hands, you might say: ideas causing ideas, traditions giving birth to books, and noneofit having anything to do with real history, real economics, real politics or geography or people (who, after all, not only write the stuff but buy it and read it). Just once, Mr. K takes a stab at speculating why a con- vention has remained a convention, e.g. the pas- toral garden as the Perfect Place, and can only conclude that somehow the garden has gained the status of a convention. As Stephen Marcus mentioned in The Other Victorians, no one seems to wonder what social or personal pur- poses conventions actually serve. Why do some "stick" and others not? I should add that Mr. K's chapter on Vonne- gut was excellent and his exegesis on Poe so good that someone really ought to write those stories because Poe didn't. As Aldiss says in Billion Year Spree, Poe knows but can't say. My thesis is that some stories must be told in the arabesque way because they're too silly to tell any other way. (Lovecraft is far worse in this respect.) "In a moment of mental alie- nation-..... Well! But I must jib at his praise of John Boyd's The Last Starship from Earth, which (although it lends itself well to K's thesis) is not even a passable book. It's awful, in the pejorative sense. The sophomoric nerd who tells the story isn't the narrator; he's John Boyd, the author, as a look at any other Boyd book can verify. Mr. K has fallen through the book again and come out the other side with his own origi- nal creation. What we need for literature is a lot less of the Novel and The Tradition and The Imagi- nation and The Human Condition and a lot more of what really mediates between all these ab- stractions. Otherwise literary criticism is like finding a correlation between the sunspot cycle and the stock market (there is one, by the way; the sunspot cycle correlates with a lot of things) and instantly declaring a simple, causal relation between the two. Joyce Carol Oates recently complained of some article in which the symbolism of a nar- rative was discovered by the act of finding the Old English root of a particular word-a root whose meaning is no longer associated with the word-and this in a narrative written by some- one whose knowledge of anything but 20th-cen- tury English is zilch. This is the worst possible extreme of the kind of thing I'm complaining about-it's acting as if the language wrote the novelist, not vice versa. In fact, it's magical thinking. It's getting so that every time I see a defi- nite article, I blench. Sorry, the definite article. (For Boyd-watchers, Sex and the High Com- mand is a good example of Boyding.) I had said nasty, vicious things about Mr. Ketterer's book in my earlier letter. Then realiz- ing I'd read only the first 5 pp. (and blenching), I read the whole book. It's not as bad as I thought, and some of it's quite good, but it's part of a bad school. Or so I believe and so write you. -Joanna Russ. In response. Since Ms. Le Guin and Messrs. Scholes, Nicol, and Ketterer can all defend themselves quite adequately, I will confine this response to the statement that "someone really ought to write those stories because Poe didn't," which could apply to Mr. Ketterer's essay in SFS #3 as well as to the Poe chapter in New Worlds for Old. When the essay was first submitted to SFS, my reaction was similar to Ms. Russ's: i.e., I felt that many of the annotations just would not do, and so began an epistolary argument with Mr. Ketterer that lasted for many months (and forced me to reread Poe)-an argument which in the end went almost entirely his way. That is, although he accepted two or three of my suggestions, in nearly all cases he persuaded me that what he had found in the tales was actually there instead of, or as well as, what I had found; and though I would still annotate some of the tales in a somewhat different way (selecting different details on the basis of a somewhat different emphasis), I have no doubt at all as to This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES, REPORTS, AND CORRESPONDENCE 309 the legitimacy of each of his annotations-or, if you will, that "those stories" are stories that Poe wrote. New Worlds for Old has come in for a good deal of discussion in the few months since its publication, some of it enthusiastic and some of it wrathful. Mr. Ketterer expects to reply to some of the adverse criticism in an early issue of SFS. -RDM. The Tuck Encyclopedia. Volume 1 (Who's Who: A-L) of a much heralded and certainly indispensable work, Donald H. Tuck's The En- cyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (8?/2 x 11,230 2-column pages) has been published by Advent Publishers, P.O. Box A3228, Chicago, Ill. 60690, $20.00. Volume 2 (1976?) will com- plete the "Who's Who" and include a title-index; Volume 3 (1977?) will be devoted to magazines and paperbacks (covered to some extent in the "Who's Who") and to pseudonyms and miscel- laneous matters. The "Who's Who" attempts a complete list- ing of everyone connected with the field: au- thors, illustrators, editors, critics, prominent fans, etc. A special feature of the work is that it lists the contents of all collections and antholo- gies. In each author-article we find first, a brief biographical sketch; second, "Series," each item listing each of the stories in a given series with specification of the magazine or book in which it appears; third, "fiction," i.e. books, with items like the following for the Poul Anderson novel: High Crusade, The. (ASF, sr3, July 1960) (Doubleday, 1960, 192 pp., $2.95; 'Dolphin': C351, 1962, pa 95?~) (Doubleday, Toronto) (Kreuzzug nach fremden Sternen [Ger- man], UZ: 298, 1961) (Croaziata spaziale [Italian], Cosmo: 105, 1962) (Les croises du cosmos [French], Denoel: PF 57, 1962, pa) (Macfadden: 50-211, 1964, 160 pp., pa 50?; 60-399, 1968, pa 60?) An English Knight in the Middle Ages captures an alien space ship and sets out to conquer the stars. Entertaining. Finally, where appropriate, "Nonfiction," with items of the same kind. Although the general rule is to exclude au- thors whose books have not been reprinted since 1945, this rule is waived for anthologies or for other books that the editor deems important. The result is that while we find no article for Robert Cromie or Percy Gregg, we do find ar- ticles, complete with biographical sketches, for Mary Griffith ("Three Hundred Years Hence" having been reprinted in 1950) and Elizabeth Gaskell (so that the eleven stories in Cousin Phyllis may be listed). There are also attempts at complete SF-and-fantasy listings for such prominent authors as H. Rider Haggard, but with the modest disclaimer that no attempt has been made to list all the early editions. Any work of this kind is bound to contain many errors, both typographical (as in the Ray Cummings article, where the date for The Sha- dow Girl in Argosy is wrong under "Series" but right under "Fiction") and factual (as in the Haggard article, which in effect states that only one copy is in existence of The Lady of the Heavens, an error obviously deriving from a misreading of the Scott bibliography). It is my impression that this work is much more reliable for the recent authors (to which it is primarily devoted) than for the earlier authors; in sum, if you use it for an author also listed in NCBEL or some similar work, you'd better cross-check. (Not that NCBEL doesn't contain errors; indeed, there may be as many in its Haggard article as in Mr. Tuck's.) Finally, Mr. Tuck is a bit severe on academ- ics, especially I.F. Clarke, whose Tale of the Future is said to be "not complete even within the limits of its selection" (as if this weren't true of all bibliographies) and to be "of value for books not within the scope of this Encyc- lopedia" (as if the chronological arrangement were not in itself of value, and as if a reader might not wish to check Mr. Tuck's annotations for content against those of another bibliograph- er). -RDM. A C.S. Lewis Secondary Bibliography. Joe R. Christopher and Joan K. Ostling have com- piled an extraordinarily inclusive work in C.S. Lewis: An Annotated Checklist of Writings about him and his Works (Kent State University Press, $15.00): not only books, pamphlets, ar- ticles, theses, and dissertations on Lewis and his work, but also book reviews, news items, and books and articles that just happen to men- tion Lewis in passing; e.g., Heinlein's chapter in Basil's Davenport's The Science Fiction Nov- el, where Lewis is mentioned three times. While I am not expert enough in Lewis scholarship to assess the completeness of this work, I can't imagine these 389 pages as anything less than exhaustive. -RDM. More Special Issues on Utopias. After the revolts which culminated in 1968 and re-acti- vated the supposedly dead and buried utopian yearnings, study and discussions of as well as symposia on utopias-literary and otherwise- have again become highly fashionable. In addition to the special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination reported in SFS #3, two more special issues have come to my attention. The first is #434 (April 1974) of the prestigious Paris monthly Esprit, representing the Left- Christian or"personalist" current among French intellectuals (which also had one of the first special issues, if not the first, that any "main- stream" journal devoted to SF, back in the 19- 50s). The issue is entitled "L'Utopie ou la raison dans l'imaginaire" (Utopia, or Reason in the Realm of the Imaginary), it devotes 125 pages to that subject, and comprises nine essays by Jean-Marie Domenach (the director of the re- view and one of the leading French intellect- This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:38:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 310 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES uals), Franqois Chirpaz, Lucie Giard, Henri Desroche (who besides an essay on Fourier con- tributes an excellent discussion of utopian secondary literature), Richard Gombin, Paul Virilio, and Paul Goodman. The second periodical is Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 1973) of Comparative Literature Studies, which devotes 100 pages, titled "Utopian Social Thought in Literature and the Social Sciences," compiled by guest-editor Professor Herbert Knust, to the proceedings of the eponymous symposium at the University of Illinois-Cham- paign. After an introduction by Harry G. Haile, the social-sciences part of the Symposium is represented by Irving Louis Horowitz and Hel- mut Klages, and the literature part by Darko Suvin, Walter H6llerer, Richard Figge, and Pet- er Demetz, with the summary of a panel dis- cussion among the participants. To the Sym- posium are added two essays on utopian lit- erature by Gorman Beauchamp and Lyman Tower Sargent. -DS. Arthur C. Clarke and All Those Awards. The fact that Rendezvous with Rama has won not only the two major awards for best SF novel of 1973 but also three other recently established awards certainly calls for comment of some kind. As an old-fashioned materialist almost as much irritated by psi as by spiritualism, and as co-editor of a journal that has in its first volume published two essays on Clarke's myst- ical novels, I am especially pleased that he has had this success with a novel that represents his other (and I think better) side, and I wish that some one of the scholars concerned with SF would submit to SFS an article on the rational novels and stories that would have made Clarke a major figure in SF even if he had never written his Stapledonian works. -RDM. SF Criticism in Romania. Special issues have been devoted to SF by the Cluj cultural weekly Tribuna and the prestigious Bucharest monthly Viata Romanesca. Of its sixteen newspaper- size pages, Tribuna #51 (1973) devotes about ten to articles and interviews on SF, and most of the rest to SF itself. The special issue of Viata Romanesca, the organ of the powerful Union of Writers, carries in its 192 pages ten major essays on SF by Romanian critics, three by foreign ones (diplomatically one each from France, USA, and USSR), and a number of notes and reviews, as well as some SF stories. From these two special issues one can also learn that Romanian fandom publishes by now two fan- zines-in Bucharest and Timisoara-and that al- ready in 1972 the various SF clubs or "circles" met in a national convention. Any future survey of Eastern European SF criticism would have to mention a number of very able Polish academ- ics, and the great interest in Hungarian circles evidenced by the special issue of Helikon (#1, 1972), the comparative-literature journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, devoted to SF. Still, the number of indigenous critics in Ro- mania, and the level of the major contributions in issues such as the Viata Romanesca one- which is thoughtful and well-informed, if some- times a bit starry-eyed when faced with exotic Anglophone achievements-bear out the remark in my Introduction to Other Worlds, Other Seas that in the Warsaw Pact countries-besides the Soviet Union and the always exceptional Lem- the only significant national body of SF as well as a parallel body of knowledgeable criticism of SF existed in Romania. -DS. Among the Contributors to ##3-4 are sev- eral who have contributed articles or reviews to RQ (see SFS 1:140): C.R. LA BOSSIERE, Royal Roads Military College; DOUGLAS BARBOUR, University of Alberta, who has also appeared in Foundation; CURTIS C. SMITH, University of Houston at Clear Lake City, who has contrib- uted to Extrapolation and the SFWA Bulletin; S.C. FREDERICKS, Indiana University, who publishes in various journals devoted to clas- sical studies; and DAVID KETTERER, who is now a colleague of ROBERT M. PHILMUS, Sir George and Loyola of Montreal having merged to form Concordia University, and who shares with Dr. Philmus the rare distinction of having published as article on SF in PMLA. Published earlier this year by Yale was Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, by ROBERT SCHOLES, Brown University, whose views on Tzvetan Todorov differ somewhat from those expressed in this issue by Stanislaw Lem as translated by ROBERT ABERNATHY, Univers- ity of Colorado, who published some 40 stories in the SF magazines between 1942 and 1956. ROBERT H. CANARY, who has an article forth- coming in Extrapolation on SF as fictive history, is co-editor of Clio: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History (Greenquist Hall, University of Wis- consin-Parkside, Kenosha, Wisc. 53140, $4.50 a year), which will soon publish articles on SF by Patrick Parrinder, who appeared in our first issue, and DARKO SUVIN, who has recently published on SF in Genre and Comparative Lit- erature Studies. PETER FITTING, University of Toronto, has been contributing reviews to Locus: The Newspaper of the SF Field (tri-week- ly, 18 issues $6.00, POB 3938, San Francisco, Ca. 94119), a useful publication for students of SF. -RDM. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:39:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions INDEX TO VOLUME 1 311 Index to Volume 1 BY CONTRIBUTOR Angenot, Mark. Jules Verne and French Lit- erary Criticism. 33. Barbour, Douglas. Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. 164. Blish, James. A Reply to Mr. Rottensteiner (Change...). 86. Canary, Robert H. Utopian and Fantastic Du- alities in Robert Graves' Watch the North Wind Rise. 248. Davis, Chandler. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Change...). 92. Eisenstein, Alex. Wells, Verne, and Science. 305. Fitting, Peter. SF Criticism in France. 173. -. Two New Books From France. 276. Franklin, H. Bruce. A Response from a Marxist (Change...). 90. Fredericks, S.C. David Ketterer on SF as Apoca- lyptic Literature. 217. Gaar, Alice Carol. Two New Books From Ger- many. 285. Hughes, David. The Early Science Journalism of H.G. Wells. With R.M. Philmus. 98. Huntington, John. The Unity of Childhood's End. 154. Jameson, Fredric. Generic Discontinuities in SF: Aldiss' Starship. 57. -. In Retrospect (Change...). 272. Ketterer, David. The SF Element in the Work of Poe. 197. Kleiner, Elaine L. Panspermia. 138. Knight, Damon. A Reaction to SFS #2. 219. La Bossiere, C.R. Parry's The Scarlet Empire: Two Visions in One. 290. Le Guin, Ursula K. European SF: Rottenstein- er's Anthology, the Strugatskys, and Lem. 281. -. On Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. 41. -. Surveying the Battlefield (Change...). 88. Lem, Stanislaw. On the Structural Analysis of SF. 26. -. Remarks Occasioned by Dr. Plank's Essay "Quixote's Mills." 78. -. The Time Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring. 143. -. Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature. 227. Mullen, R.D. The Books and Principal Pamph- lets of H.G. Wells. 114. -. Coblentz's The Sunken World: Also Two Vis- ions in One. 292. -. 23 "Classics" of SF: The Hyperion Re- prints. 300. -. Notes. 3, 55, 136, 137, 138, 139, 222, 223, 300, 308, 309, 310. Nagl, Manfred. SF, Occult Sciences, and Nazi Myths. 185. Nicol, Charles. Bretnor Returns. 220. Ohlin, Peter. The Dilemma of SF Film Criticism. 287. Parrinder, Patrick. Imagining the Future: Zam- yatin and Wells. 17. -. Note. 138. Philmus, Robert M. A Dialogue Between Ide- aphilos and Philologos. 214. -. The Early Science Journalism of H.G. Wells. With D.Y. Hughes. 98. -. The Shape of SF: Through the Historical Looking Glass. 37. -. Wells and Borges and the Labyrinths of Time. 237. Pierce, John J. Rynin in English. 138. Plank, Robert. Quixote's Mills: The Man-Ma- chine Encounter in SF. 68. Rottensteiner, Franz. In Rebuttal (Change...). 271. -. On an Essay by James Blish (Change...). 84. -. Playing Around With Creation: Philip Jose Farmer. 94. -. A Response to Damon Knight. 305. -. Some German Writings on SF. 279. Reynolds, Mack. What Do You Mean-Marx- ism? (Change...). 270. Russ, Joanna. Four Complaints. 307. Samuelson, David N. Clarke's Childhood's End: A Median Stage of Adolescence? 4. Scholes. Robert. Novels by Brunner and Levin (Change...). 213. Smith, Curtis C. The Books of Olaf Stapledon. 297. Suvin, Darko. H.G. Wells and Earlier SF. 221. -. Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Recoil in the Age of Anticipation: A Chapter in the History of SF. 225. -. Raymond Williams and SF. 216. -. SF Writers, the Great Consensus, and Non- Alignment. 135. -. The Significant Context of SF: A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. 44. -. Notes. 139, 216, 221, 306, 309, 310. BY TITLE. Aldiss History, The. RDM. 136 Arthur C. Clarke and All Those Awards. RDM. 310. Award for Lem, An. DS. 139. See also A Cor- rection. 223. Bellamy Redivivus. RDM. 139. Bilingual Wells, A. RDM. 139. Books and Principal Pamphlets of H.G. Wells, The-Mullen. 114. Books of Olaf Stapledon, The. Smith. 297. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:39:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 312 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Bretnor Returns. Nicol. 220. Change, Marxism, and SF: Open or Closed Uni- verses? Rottensteiner, et al. 84, 213, 269. Clarke's Childhood's End: A Median Stage Of Adolescence? Samuelson. 4. Coblentz's The Sunken World: Also Two Visions in One. Mullen. 292. C.S. Lewis Secondary Bibliography, A. RDM. 309. David Ketterer on SF as Apocalyptic Literature. Fredericks. 217. Dialogue Between Ideaphilos and Philologos, A. Philmus. 214. Dilemma of SF Film Criticism, The. Ohlin. 287. Early Science Journalism of H.G. Wells, The. Hughes and Philmus. 98. European SF: Rottensteiner's Anthology, the Strugatskys, and Lem. Le Guin. 181. Four Complaints. Russ. 307. Generic Discontinuities in SF: Aldiss' Starship Jameson. 57. Imagining the Future. Zamyatin and Wells. Par- rinder. 17. H.G. Wells and Earlier SF. DS. 221. In Rebuttal (Change...). Rottensteiner. 271. In Response to Mr. Eisenstein. DS. 306. In Response to Ms. Russ. RDM. 308. In Retrospect (Change...). Jameson. 272. Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism. Angenot. 33. Index to American Mass-Market Paperbacks RDM. 222. Marxism, Modernism, and SF. Parrinder. 138. Marxist Criticism. RDM. 55. More Special Issues on Utopias. DS. 309. New Book by Moskowitz, A. RDM. 137. Note in Correction. RDM. 56. Notes in Retrospect. RDM. 3, 55. Novels by Brunner and Levin (Change...). Scholes. 213. Playing Around with Creation: Philip Jose Farmer. Rottensteiner. 94. On an Essay by James Blish (Change...). Rotten- steiner. 84. On Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. Le Guin. 41. On the Structural Analysis of SF. Lem. 26. Panspermia. Kleiner. 138. Parry's The Scarlet Empire:Two Visions in One. La Bossiere. 290. Quixote's Mills: The Man-Machine Encounter in SF. Plank. 68. Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Response in the Age of Anticipation: A Chapter in the History of SF. Suvin. 255. Raymond Williams and SF. DS. 216. Reaction to SFS #2, A. Knight. 219. Remarks Occasioned by Dr. Plank's Essay "Quixote's Mills." Lem. 78. Reply to Mr. Rottensteiner, A (Change...). Blish. 86. Response from a Marxist, A (Change...). Frank- lin. 90. Response to Damon Knight, A. Rottensteiner. 305. Rynin in English. Pierce. 138. SF Bibliography. RDM. 56. SF Criticism in France. Fitting. 173. SF Criticism in Romania. DS. 310. SF Element in the Work of Poe, The. Ketterer. 197. SF, Occult Sciences, and Nazi Myths. Nagl. 185. SF Writers, the Great Consensus, and Non- Alignment. DS. 135. Shape of SF, The: Through the Historical Look- ing Glass. Philmus. 37. Significant Context of SF, The: A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. Suvin. 44. Some Contemporary Material on Frankenstein. RDM. 223. Some Critical Works on SF. Fitting et al. 276. Some German Writings on SF. Rottensteiner. 279. Some New Checklists. RDM. 139. Special SF Issue, A. RDM. 223. Steam Man of the Prairies, The, and Seven Other Dime Novels. RDM. 300. Surveying the Battlefield (Change...). Le Guin. 88. The Ten Percent. RDM. 55. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Change...). Davis. 92. Thomas M. Disch as Poet. RDM. 138. Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring, The. Lem. 143. Todorov's Fantastic Theory of literature. Lem. 227. Tuck Encyclopedia, The. RDM. 309. Twenty-three "Classics" of SF: The Hyperion Reprints. Mullen. 300. Two New Books from France. Fitting. 276. Two New Books from Germany. Gaar. 285. Unity of Childhood's End, The. Huntington. 154. Utopian and Fantastic Dualities in Robert Grav- es' Watch the North Wind Rise. Canary. 248. Wells and Borges and the Labyrinths of Time. Philmus. 237. Wells, Verne, and Science. Eisenstein. 305. What Do You Mean-Marxism? (Change...). Reynolds. 270. Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. Barbour. 164. This content downloaded on Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:39:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions