#83 = Volume 28, Part 1 = March 2001
ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
Lorenzo DiTommaso
Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction
of Philip K. Dick
Abstract. -- The
gnostic Christian themes that so characterize Philip K. Dick’s later writings
find their first manifestation in his early fiction, albeit in simplistic and
undeveloped forms. This essay identifies the dualistic elements in Dick’s pre-Time
Out of Joint (1959) short stories and novels, thereby continuing the line of
inquiry established by the author in earlier essays on the topic. Certain
methodological issues are addressed as well, including the matter of employing
Dick’s later writings and musings to interpret his earlier fiction, and the
question of whether the idios kosmos/koinos kosmos dynamic favored by
some commentators is an appropriate lens through which to interpret this
fiction.
Robert M. Philmus
Matters of Translation: Karel
Čapek
and Paul Selver
Abstract. -- Paul
Selver has frequently been attacked since the late 1980s for his treachery as a
translator—particularly with reference to his renditions of two of Karel Čapek’s
sf plays, R.U.R. (1920/21) and Bílá nemoc (1937). But Selver’s
translation of the latter, as Power and Glory, shows him to have been as
competent as most other translators, especially of sf; and this in turn reopens
the question of whether he indeed bowdlerized R.U.R. That inquiry
conduces to the discovery of evidence (mostly pertaining to a typescript now in
the British Library) suggesting that neither of the two different editions of R.U.R.
bearing Selver’s name, even when combined, represents his original work—that
both "Selver" R.U.R.s were translations by committee, as it
were. Nor can he fairly be charged, as he in effect has been, with
unfaithfulness to the second, revised edition of R.U.R. (1921), given
that he was working either from the original published Czech version or from
what one witness calls a "manuscript." Meanwhile, the defects of the
Selver, although not certainly ascribable to him, prove instructive with regard
to perceiving the meaning of Čapek’s play.
Vernon Shetley and Alissa
Ferguson
Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in Blade
Runner
Abstract. -- Blade
Runner is a film centrally
concerned with vision. Prostheses of vision—the Voigt-Kampff test and the
Esper machine—permit detective Rick Deckard to probe physical and even mental
space, and extend his search for android "replicants" into distant
rooms and into the minds of the characters he encounters. In the Esper sequence,
Deckard analyzes the photograph cherished by the replicant Leon, an analysis
that turns on the presence of a convex mirror at the center of the image. This
photograph echoes the mirror seen in Jan van Eyck’s famous painting, The
Arnolfini Portrait. Both mirrors are signs of artistic self-consciousness,
pointing to the way these works sustain an extended meditation on pictorial or
cinematic vision. In Blade Runner, the form of vision embodied by the
Esper machine—which is characterized as probing, dominating, and ultimately
lethal—is played off against a mode of vision tentatively but crucially
present in the moment when Rachael’s photograph "comes alive" in
Deckard’s hands, a mode of vision that turns on imaginative empathy.
Elizabeth
Small
Religious Institutions in Spanish Science Fiction
Abstract. -- This
article discusses three recent Spanish sf works in terms of their shared focus
on the role of religious institutions in social control and the mediation
(largely failed) of cultural/alien contact. The stories employ references to
Spain’s long religious and colonial history, as well as references to
present-day conflicts, in expressing fairly bleak visions of possible roles of
religious institutions in future human society. In discussing these stories, the
article draws connections with major works of English-language religious sf by
James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Walter M. Miller, Jr.
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