Science Fiction Studies - 004 - Vol. 1, No. 4, Autumn, 1974

Science-Fiction Studies
#4 = Volume 1, Part 4, Fall 1974

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
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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
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November) intheDepartment of English and Journalism, Indiana StateUni-
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SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESpublishes articles resulting from thestudy of
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parisonand contrast, supernatural or mythological fantasy. Articles intended
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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 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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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)
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"
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-
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-
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-
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
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
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
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."
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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)
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
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
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,
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
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-
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.
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
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
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.
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-
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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.
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
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-
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
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
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,"
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-
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
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
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
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-
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"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
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
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-
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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-
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-
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
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
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-
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.
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.
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.

Science Fiction Studies - 004 - Vol. 1, No. 4, Autumn, 1974

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