Science Fiction Studies

Abstract.--The time is long past when the history of a nation's SF was viewed merely as an extension of its local folklore. And the contemporary study of SF as a world literature would seem to call for a more detailed analysis of how the American model--which carried the genre to its current level of maturity-- affected both the historical evolution of SF as a whole and that of certain national literatures.

Such an investigation requires a look at the prehistory of the genre (inasmuch as SF, from the 17th century onward, developed as an autonomous fictional form) and the manner by which it assumed its generic identity around the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Although a number of SF-type narratives were indeed published in America during this period, the European SF model tended to dominate the genre, at least until Bellamy's Looking Backward.

Between the world wars--a period when the publishing industry in France was far from dynamic and French SF itself seemed increasingly to turn toward motifs of anti-science and the fantastic--American SF began to distinguish itself not only as a new category of publishing but also as a cogent and highly original mythos--a "new'' SF whose identity was perhaps reinforced and strengthened by its literary "ghettoization'' during the Gernsback years.

The end of World War II brought a flood of American SF into France and--despite the initial shock--ultimately served to reawaken and reinvigorate its nearly moribund French cousin. From this imported American SF production, French authors discovered new thematic models and references (R. Bradbury, P.K. Dick, et al.) which, during the subsequent decades, they have consciously imitated, adapted, modified, and--in some measure--attempted to distance themselves from. The resulting new French SF has produced a number of interesting texts like those of Michel Jeury and Serge Brussolo, but it still has not achieved the success to which it aspires, particularly in the American SF marketplace.

The reason for this is that French SF, while it needed American SF to revive and redefine itself, has not really influenced the latter since the era of Jules Verne. American SF has developed according to its own internal dictates and in the context of other English-speaking SF authors (like the British who published New Worlds). This does not mean, of course, that SF will forever remain essentially a US-derived literary form: French SF could, for example, stand as an excellent generic model for the hybridizing of SF culture and avant-garde literature.

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Glenn Grant

Transcendence Through Detournement in William Gibson's Neuromancer

Abstract.--In Neuromancer, William Gibson uses computers as a metaphor for human memory and personality. He is concerned with how easily people can change themselves, and by what methods. Memory is represented as solid traces left behind by experience, a kind of programming. For most of Gibson's characters, the inability to overcome this programming, to transcend the self, leads to a desire for self-destruction or dissolution. They seek to escape their bodies, their pasts, or their eventual deaths, and technology is the method of choice. Most often, this involves technological detournement: appropriating tools and putting them to uses for which they were not originally intended. The technological transcendence of human limits, seen in the context of the cyberpunk movement, is a liberating, evolutionary force, although its results often seem monstrous. In Gibson's work, the human need for self-transcendence is itself detourned, co-opted by governments and corporations, in order to maintain the status quo. Gibson's creative method can be seen as a kind of literary detournement, a prose-collage of semiotic elements from every branch of the cultural stream. This technique liberates him from his own creative difficulties and the strictures of the SF genre.

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Patrick D. Murphy

Reducing the Dystopian Distance: Pseudo-Documentary Framing in Near-Future Fiction

Abstract.--The ascendancy of dystopian over utopian visions in the course of the last 100 years or so has created a problem for the writers of such fictions. As dystopias have become commonplace, their subliminative dimension has increasingly triumphed over their cognitive function--which is to say that they tend to produce a cathartic elimination of anxiety rather than offering the kind of understanding that makes their readers want to act to change the world.

Recently, certain authors of near-future dystopian fictions have addressed this problem of reducing the distance between fictive and empirical world by resorting to pseudo-documentary framing. Streiber and Kunetka's Warday exemplifies the contemporaneous, journalistic variant of such a device. In consequence, theirs seems more "real'' and more truthful (as opposed to ideological) than many another dystopia. It exposes the perception that most readers have of the present as unchanging to be the illusion of a fixed observer. Meanwhile, both the framing and the structure of Warday emphasize that its vision of nuclear catastrophe is probable rather than merely possible.

The Handmaid's Tale represents a different variant of the same kind of framing. To bring home to readers the real possibility of a resurgence in the oppression of women, Atwood resorts to a first-person diary accompanied by academic discourse thereon. In this case, the pseudo-documentary framing serves for satirizing two distinct but ideologically compatible spheres of male domination as it establishes a continuity between Gilead and Nunavit.

In both instances, then, the pseudo-documentary framing is designed to thwart the modern tendency to put consciousness on autopilot. It is intended, in other words, to reduce the distance between tenor and vehicle and thereby further the fundamental purpose of this SF subgenre: to prompt readers to change the world by elaborating on its evils in terms of other worlds.

[A response by David Ketterer appears in SFS 51 (July 1990).]

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Patrick Parrinder

Wells's Cancelled Endings for "The Country of the Blind''

Abstract.--The ending of Wells's short story "The Country of the Blind'' has been much admired. In it, Nunez, the mountaineer who has entered the valley of the blind people, apparently chooses to die in the high mountains rather than submitting to an operation to remove his sight. Study of Wells's manuscripts shows that the author only arrived at this ending after considerable hesitation and indecision. In three surviving earlier versions, Nunez is apparently unable to break his emotional ties with the people of the valley. Through successive revisions, Wells was able to achieve a much richer and more complex ending for his story.

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Robert M. Philmus

Textual Authority: The Strange Case of The Island of Doctor Moreau

Abstract.--Insouciance about the reliability of editions of SF titles can sometimes be a source of embarrassment. On the other hand, deciding on an authoritative text is not always a simple matter, especially if the work in question is by H.G. Wells. The Island of Doctor Moreau is a case in point. Wells altered it on no fewer than five occasions subsequent to its original publication; and this continual revisionary process (which no single authorized edition can do justice to) is as much a meaningful aspect of the text as it is a palpable fact of Moreau's textual history.

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Ilan Stavans

Borges and Science Fiction

Abstract.--Though he was a voracious reader of Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, and C.S. Lewis (among others), Borges expressed disenchantment with SF. To be sure, certain fictions of his--"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'' and "Utopia of a Tired Man,'' for example--can be thought of as belonging to the genre. But tellingly, precious few of his writings have anything at all to do with the temporal region that SF is predominantly concerned with--i.e., he looks to the past rather than to the future; and in at least two of the three exceptions to that rule, he ventures into the future only in terms of fictive autobiography.

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Sam Moskowitz

The First Canadian Science-Fantasy Magazine

Abstract.--My title refers to Uncanny Tales. Largely made possible by war measures introduced towards the end of 1939, this Canadian publication began appearing in December of the following year and subsequently ran to 21 issues, the last of which came out in the Fall of 1943. The first three issues were chiefly--indeed, perhaps exclusively--the work of one Thomas B. Kelley. Thereafter, Uncanny Tales was managed by Melvin R. Colby, who had no scruples about taking stories from various US SF magazines and (re)printing them under a host of fictitious names.

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