BOOKS IN REVIEW
The Dynamics of Genre: A New
Theoretical Approach
Andrzej Zgorzelski. Fantastyka.
Utopia. Science Fiction. Ze studiów nad rozwojem gatunków. Warsaw:
Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1980. 205p
Utopia. Fantastyka. Science Fiction proposes a radically new approach to the
study of "fantastic" genres and a practical application of contemporary genre
theory. Drawing on genological ideas of Ireneusz Opacki, the author defines the literary
genre as a "diachronic system which manifests itself in a sequence of synchronic
structures that differ from one another very little when only contiguous ones are
observed" (p. 189).* The principal literary-historical task of
the book consists in a "study of the way in which the fantastic evolved through
utopian writings into the modern shape of science fiction" (p. 188). This evolution
is illustrated with examples from English and American literature.The expressed aims of
the book are also literary-theoretical, as the author attempts to work out a conceptual
framework and methodology that can be extended to the study of other genres. These general
considerations are presented in the introductory section, entitled "Establishing
Perspective."
Chapter 2, "In the Maze of Terms," introduces a major contribution to
literary theory and SF study: the differentiation between the fantastic (fantastyka) and
"fantasticness" (fantastycznosé). The fantastic is defined as a
textual phenomenon which consists in the breaching of the genre laws governing the
construction of the fictional world after they have already been established in the text.
"It usually results in the confrontation of two different shapes of the fictional
world in the same text and in the characteristic reactions of the characters the narrator,
and the addressee to the changes in their world. The reactions are usually those of awe,
teror, astonishment, surprise, fear, etc." (p. 1891. These reactions
should be distinguished from those of the real reader who often feels the presence of
the 'fantastic' while comparing the fictional reality to his own universe. But such a
feeling is primarily the result of the process of reception and not the effect of the
recognition of text internal relationships. It is the text phenomenon itself that seems
more singificant in genre evolution than the changing variety of the reader's reactions.
(p. 189)
Thus the concept of "fantasticness" is identified with the process of
concretization or semiotization of the literary work by a particular reader. However, it
seems that its location in the process of semiotization of the work by the implied reader
would be more appropriate here. This "implied" semiotization has an
intersubjective character and as such transcends the whimsical character of a single
reader's response. What is regarded as fantastic is determined not so much by a comparison
with objective reality but by a confrontation of a given phenomenon with the culturally
determined image of the world shared by the community of readers to whom the work is
addressed.
As Zgorzelski leaves out of his discussion the category of the implied reader, some of
the suggestions advanced in this section seem doubtful. After all, the elimination of the
confrontation of the two worlds does not lead to the disappearance of the fantastic, which
is connected with the shape of the fictional world rather than with the responses of the
narrator or character. In Zgorzelski's formulation, the concept of the fantastic as used
in the first part of the book becomes so narrow as to refer practically only to those
works in which direct signals of the fantastic appear. The inadequacies of this
formulation illustrate the difficulties of any approach that attempts to concentrate
exclusively on textual relations. Within structural-semiotic theory an interesting
solution to this problem was offered by Lotman, who introduced the concepts of
"minus-devices" and "extra-textual relations."**
Furthermore, Zgorzelski demonstrates that the long process of evolution of
"fantastic" genres has led to the elimination of the fantastic as a textual
element. Nevertheless, throughout this long evolution "fantasticness" has
remained constant. This raises the question of whether the differentia specifica of
the fantastic are not to be looked for precisely in the process of semiotization.
Zgorzelski regards "fantasticness" as the stabilizing factor in genre evolution.
The fantastic which appears in the process of semiotization is that factor which explains
the generally accepted intuition about the fundamental similarity of both utopia and
anti-utopia, Gothic novel and SF. Moreover, the sense of the fantastic is an
intersubjectively verifiable phenomenon rather than an idiosyncratic response of a
particular reader.
Chapter 3, "At the Sources," is the longest in the book. It traces the
evolution of utopia on the basis of a discussion of major utopian writings (T. More, F.
Bacon, S. Butler, W. Morris, H.G. Wells, and A. Huxley) in which the main tendencies in
the evolution of the genre are best seen. Zgorzelski views this evolution in terms of a
"constant strife to get free from its traditional roots in the non-literary
writings" (p. 190) because at first the genre shared many features with non-literary,
non-belletristic works (as in the case of More's Utopia or Bacon's New
Atlantis). However, this suggestion does not seem to hold true even of More's Utopia,
the first text of the new genre. Non-literary structures are indeed used extensively in
utopias but what matters is not so much their origin as their function. In most cases,
these non-literary structures--e.g. the travel narrative convention--are used to increase
the verisimilitude of the story--which, in turn, is connected with the appearance of the
fantastic.
Zgorzelski's reliance on secondary sources, unavoidable in a work of this scope, leads
him to the acceptance of certain misleading and sometimes erroneous views of other
critics: for example, Mumford's opinion that the 18th century, the Age of Reason, was not
the time for writing utopias and so only a few appeared. In fact the number of utopias
written and published in that century surpasses that of the 16th and 17th centuries
combined. Hence, the suggestion that utopia reached the peak of its popularity in the 17th
century seems imprecise. What is more, the Age of Enlightenment witnessed several reprints
and new editions of More's Utopia and other earlier texts, not to mention
numerous translations from other languages, mainly French. It is also not quite exact to
say that in the 18th century, utopian treatises predominated over fictional utopias
because "the epoch of neoclassicism, rationalism, moderation and first of all the
period of conventionalization of literature did not favour the fantastic" (p. 62).
This had also been the case in previous centuries.
The synthetic ambitions of the book result in certain oversimplifications which
occasionally produce a distorted image of the particular stages of the genre evolution.
For instance, the author mentions action, events and the presentation of the narrator's
general feelings and emotions when discussing the 19th-century utopia. This gives the
false impression that these developments occurred during that period of the evolution of
the genre whereas in fact these features appear as early as the 17th-century (e.g.. Nova
Solyma, The History of the Sevarambians) and are quite common in the 18th-century
utopias (e.g., Gulliver's Travels, S. Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall,
S. Berington's Memoirs of Gaudentio di Lucca). Likewise, the emphasis on the
fictionality of the text is not a 19th-century innovation but a traditional utopian device
first introduced in More's Utopia and used extensively thereafter (e.g., Lupton's
Siuqila, Barnes's Gerania, and Godwin's The Man in the Moone).
Fantastic characters (dwarfs, giants) and language also appear early in the history of the
genre (e.g., Gerania, Man in the Moone). The introduction of
pseudo-autobiographical methods of narration has little to do with the popularity of
autobiography in the 19th century: rather it is a natural development of the traditional
first person narrator-character. Pseudo-autobiographical elements come to the fore in such
early utopias as A Voyage to Tartary or The Man in the Moone as well as
in Gullivers Travels and other 18th-century works. On the other hand the author
is right when he observes that the popularity of autobiography in the 19th century was
favorable to the preservation of this convention.
All these are in fact minor failings, unavoidable when the perspective adopted
encompasses two literary genres and nearly five centuries of their development. Moreover,
these shortcomings may be ascribed to an acute lack of reliable secondary sources.
especially detailed studies of the particular stages of the history of the two genres.
A brilliant discussion of Brave New World concludes the analytical part of the
chapter devoted to utopia. Huxley's work is viewed as a text introducing a new genre
convention--anti-utopia. Special attention is paid to temporal relations and the dialectic
of the fantastic and "fantasticness." Here Zgorzelski proposes another key
theoretical concept, "the equivalent," understood as the replacement of the
system of an automatized tradition by a single sign referring to that tradition. The
concept is then used to demonstrate the structural continuity in the evolution of utopia.
While in traditional utopian fiction the underlying contrast consists in the explicitly
articulated opposition between the world modelled upon the author's own and the fantastic
world, in the 20th century this opposition is replaced by its equivalent sign--e.g., the
title of the work, as in Orwell's 1984. Thus the underlying contrast is removed
from the text to the process of its concretization by the reader. Nevertheless, the
equivalent, being a sign of the whole system, introduces into the text the dominant
structural principle of the genre (the confrontation of the two worlds), thus preserving
the continuity of the tradition. This seems to validate arguments against the radical
version of the dynamic genre theory, which posits a complete replacement and restructuring
of all features of a given genre. After all, a total elimination of the principle of the
confrontation of the two worlds would lead to the disappearance of utopia. What is more,
the concept of the equivalent makes it possible to transcend the limitations of the
fantastic/"fantasticness" dichotomy.
Chapter 4, on the function of the fantastic in narrative prose genres of 1900-1939,
provides a general synchronic survey of what has traditionally been called SF. Discussing
various definitions of SF, Zgorzelski questions those which rely on thematic criteria. The
majority of such definitions simply provide a list of static features shared by many
different works over a 60 year period, even though narrative prose which made use of the
fantastic had undergone a number of major transformations before the first genre structure
of SF was established. Since static definitions are incapable of accounting for the
complexity of the first two stages of SF formation, an attempt is made to pinpoint the
principal evolutionary tendencies of those literary genres which employ the fantastic.
The author stresses the importance of the tradition of the utopia and its crisscrossing
with other genres, which gave rise to SF. In the same context, he mentions imaginary
history, the catastrophic-adventure novel, and new variants of the Gothic novel. All of
them employ new motifs and techniques, but none stands "in dynamic opposition to the
traditionally accepted canon of genre hierarchy and to the conventional functions of
established genres which might justify the thesis about the appearance of a new
genre" (p. 191). Nevertheless, these developments prepare the ground for the future
emergence of a new genre. Particularly important is the tendency towards eliminating the
confrontation of two worlds accompanied by the disappearance of the fantastic as an
intratextual phenomenon. Another important factor contributing to the appearance of the
new genre can be found in an ever-increasing intermixing of various genres characteristic
of 20th-century literature on a whole.
Chapter 5, "Along the Beaten Path," presents a synchronic survey of the genre
convention of SF and its major features, such as the elimination of the confrontation of
the two worlds from the text. Already the title and the first paragraphs of the text
introduce the basic temporal and spatial characteristics of the fictional world, which
though "new" from the point of view of the reader, is perfectly rational and
normal in the eyes of the narrator and characters. SF, which grew out of the genre
conventions of popular literature (utopia, novel of adventure, Gothic romance), becomes a
new genre when it begins to employ the conventions of the psychological novel and other
"higher" genres.
Three categories of texts from 1939 to 1944 are distinguished: "(1) the works
continuing the tradition of various genres preceding the SF convention, (2) the works of
the SF convention, and (3) the works manifesting some features of the later development of
the SF convention" (p. 191). It is the second group that receives the most thorough
treatment, involving an enumeration of the main determinants of SF convention: the
unification of the fictional world and the methods of making it look common and usual.
This latter phenomenon can be seen as an equivalent of the confrontation of two worlds in
earlier utopian fiction. .
Zgorzelski's concluding remarks, entitled appropriately "Broadening the
Horizon," offer a comparison between the evolution of utopia and of SF. In the case
of utopia, a single text (More's Utopia) functions as a model of the genre until
the appearance of anti-utopia (the second genre variant). On the other hand, the original
SF convention is the result of diverse structures of a series of works which violate
different conventions of many literary genres. This illustrates two general patterns of
genre evolution; the pattern followed by SF seems to be more common in the history of
literature.
The law of cyclic development manifests itself not only in the automatization and
dynamization of genre structures or disappearances and reappearances of paragenological
factors (the fantastic), but also in frequent revivals of "old" forgotten genre
structures-- e.g., Huxley's Island follows the general pattern of More's Utopia.
This apparent reappearance of automatized structures leads Zgorzelski to a
significant modification of the general scheme of genre evolution as proposed by Opacki:
beside the evolving genre structure, there are texts which follow the traditional
structures and variants formed during the earlier stages of the genre s evolution. These
texts constitute something like a "genre memory treasury." In a sense, this
treasury of automatized genre structures is one of the factors determining the
redynamization of automatized genre structures. Similar "genre memory" can be
observed even in new structures; and here again the concept of equivalence proves its
usefulness. The use of this concept enables Zgorzelski to reformulate and expand his
earlier suggestions concerning the fantastic: in the texts where the fantastic does not
appear as a factor shaping the fictional world, its equivalent may be used (a sign of the
system of the fantastic): and this would validate the reader's reception of the text as
"fantastic."
On the whole, the strength of Zgorzelski's book lies in its theoretical and analytical
sections, where the author relies primarily on the results of his own research and
insights. The principal theoretical achievement consists in the formulation of precise
methodology for the study of SF and other fantastic genres, a methodology which can
successfully be applied also to other genres. Moreover, despite some inaccuracies in the
presentation of the particular stages of the development of utopia, the book gives a
correct account of the general tendencies in the development of that genre; and as such,
it is also a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of utopia. In
comparison to these major achievements, all of the above objections turn out to be
relatively small and insignificant. There is an urgent need to make this book available in
English. Its publication in English translation would certainly provoke new discussions
and controversies concerning methodological problems in the study of SF, utopian fiction,
and other genres. What is more, it would be an important step towards bridging the gap
between the separate literary-theoretical traditions of Eastern Europe and those of the
English-speaking countries.
NOTES
* All quotations, with one exception (from p. 62), are from an
English summary appended to the book.
**Cf. Y.M. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text. trans.
R. Vroon (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1977); and the same author's Analysis
of the Poetic Text. ed. & trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976).
--Artur Blaim
Science and Science Fiction
Patricia S. Warrick. The
Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1980. 282p. $15.00
Cybernetics, a field where social and scientific concerns merge in a rather unique way,
has been of specific interest to SF writers, and a study exploring its function in a large
number of SF texts--225 short stories and novels written between 1930 and 1977, Warrick
informs us (pp. xv 95.)--is most welcome. It is a clearly-written, well-organized book;
computers have helped to achieve an objective perspective on classification and
distribution of problems connected with the role of robots and computers in SF. We are
given an extensive useful bibliography of fictional and non-fictional texts and a reliable
index. The book deals informatively with cybernetics, but not with the
"imagination," not, that is, with how cybernetics works in literary texts, not
with the specific problems, central to SF criticism, of how different modes of discourse
merge. It fails, then, in what it set out to do, but in the process raises a host of
questions highly important to SF and its (professional) readers.
Warrick, stating that "no consensus has been reached about the proper
criteria" for SF criticism (p. xiv), understands the S-F imagination to be a
"specialized form of the literary imagination": it uses theoretical science and
technology as the source for its catalytic idea or image," it is acting out its drama
"in a time other than the present, customarily the future," and it adds a
dimension of the unknown. SF, according to Warrick, "creates an image that does not
exist in reality as reality is currently perceived. This creative act has a quality of
transcendence." But so does the literary text if one holds such views on its
privileged status, and the sentence immediately following is no more successful in making
a specific statement on SF: "It represents a struggle to overcome man's present
limitation in time, space and awareness; to transport himself at least mentally to places
he has never been, to gain a new world for himself" (pp. 7ff.). All this can be done
by acts of the imagination--where is the cybernetic component?
As far as the reality of SF texts is concerned, the cybernetic component seems to have
been a hindrance in this struggle rather than a help. Warrick is disappointed about her
findings:
The study demonstrates that much of the fiction written since world War II is
reactionary in its attitude towards computers and artificial intelligence. It is often ill
informed about information theory and computer technology and lags behind present
developments instead of anticipating the future. Only a small number of the later works
demonstrate the sound grounding in science that is characteristic of writers during the
golden age of SF in the 1930s and 1940s. (p. xvii)
Throughout her study Warrick asks too much from the SF writer in terms of scientific
knowledge, and too little in terms of literary achievement. Significantly she juxtaposes
"humanistic values" and "scientific knowledge," lamenting that SF had
"seemed to offer the first really workable mediation" (p. 235). But it is, apart
from the scientific knowledge, less "humanistic values" that make for a
successful mediation, than social-psychological shrewdness and imagination and the talent
to use language in ways which facilitate access to those "new worlds." It may
just be unrealistic to expect all these qualities in one writer. There are writers like
Lem who indeed filter a great deal of sound information through a highly sophisticated,
fully developed literary imagination and who also ask a great deal of the writers of SF
and dismiss most of them. Warrick, curiously, does not really deal with Lem. For praise
she singles out Asimov, who may have sound science but is a mediocre writer, and Dick, who
is a very interesting writer but is frequently diffident about the science component. It
would be hard to argue that Dick is consistently informed or even interested in
technological developments; the idea of the robot interests him as a metaphor for
questions of interpersonal relations, of freedom and determinism.
Warrick likes Asimov because he is very positive about the potential of the man-machine
relationship. Her support for this attitude enables her to perceive and communicate
certain interesting aspects of our difficult, complex environment. She observes, for
instance, that it is precisely its man-made quality that makes the frightening potential
particularly frustrating, because we are dealing here with not understanding the
understandable (p. 20). It is important, then, to understand, not simply to reject, and
she insists that positive images, dreams of the future, are a cultural necessity (pp. 159
ff.). In her account of Asimov's achievement she stresses his emphasis on the fact that
the omniscient machines are man-made, not created by gods, and that this should give man
confidence; but neither she nor Asimov go on to ask how indeed man and machine could
cooperate in any larger, meaningful sense, taking into consideration that man is a product
of his cultural history in a different way and to a different extent than the machine is.
Asimov may have kept abreast of developments in robot technology, but his view of the
social-psychological significance of such developments is rather simplistic. Warrick's
reading of Bicentennial Man (1976), Asimov's "finest fictional work"
(pp. 71ff), is a good case in point. Here a robot decides to have his positronic brain
transplanted into an android body after he has, with the help of a human friend, achieved
legal status as a robot. Only the construction of his brain, which is the basis of his
immortality, separates him from being human. He submits to an operation which makes him
mortal, that is, fully human. This is, of course, an old human myth: the mermaid who falls
in love with the human and, in order to love him fully, has to acquire a human soul, that
is, the experience of pain and mortality. Neither the myth nor Asimov explain how the
immortal knows that it is worth it to be human, to be able to love, if they don't know
what is "human," what is "love"--understandable in a myth, but not
really in an SF text. Warrick sees the novel's profoundest message not in the narration of
the robot's urge toward the human, but "foremost" in "what Asimov leaves
unsaid" (p. 73). Here she finds--implied--Asimov's interest in showing the
impossibility of drawing a line between machine and human intelligence, the inanimate and
the animate, his insistence on the fact that man is not unique: "This view implies
that ethical behavior should extend to all systems because any organizational
pattern--human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic--represents intelligence. A sacred view
of the universe, the result not of religious mysticism but of pure logic, emerges from
this reading of The Bicentennial Man" (p. 74)
This is the explicit theme of many of Lem's texts--not the result of
"pure logic," it is true, but of social logic, not propagating a "sacred
view" of the universe, but suggesting the universe be seen as potentially accessible
and certainly a matter of man's responsibility. Lem, it seems, is too ambivalent and
ironical, too literary for Warrick's taste. Otherwise, I can't explain why she takes the
trouble to read into a fairly simple text allusions to issues that interest her and why
she is content to give rather meaningless plot summaries of Lem's texts (pp. 191ff.) which
use sophisticated narrative strategies in their attempt to deal consistently with those
same issues.
For Warrick, Asimov and Philip K. Dick are the "two American giants whose
imaginations create more abundant and brilliant models of life in an electronic future
than any others" (p. 206.). But if she does not deal critically with the fiction
component in Asimov's, she is religiously gushy about the achievement of Dick's
"terminal metaphor" (p. 207). It is, of course, her privilege to appreciate Dick
as a writer who "constantly struggles against capitulation to despair," throwing
"torches of possibility into his dark future" (p. 208); but such assertions are
not very useful to the reader who is promised a "moment of new awareness" if he
is able to "re-create and reinvent the alternative reallies" sketched by Dick
(p. 215). How this is to be achieved she does not say. Her attempt to sum up the
difference between Asimov and Dick seems to me marred by conceptual vacuity:
Asimov's metaphor is the reality defined by the contemporary scientific paradigm. It
assumes the objective existence of this reality. Dick's starting point is a fictional
reality, since he assumes reality to be a subjective construct. Thus Asimov' moving into
the future models a fictional alternative to present reality; Dick's future model is a
fictional alternative to the current fiction, or, if you will, a metafiction. (p. 215)
Such a simplistic view of concepts like "objectivity" and
"fiction"--does she mean to say that Dick's fictions differ from other fictions
in terms of their fictionality? Is fiction simply to be seen as any kind of authorial
construct? Does it not involve an addressee who supports the specific (logical) status of
fiction?--are in no way helpful in trying to understand, and evaluate, SF. With all her
insistence on rigor where scientific knowledge is concerned, Warrick herself is
insufficiently rigorous in dealing with fiction. Her own approach documents very clearly
that the merging of different modes of discourse is as difficult a task for the critic as
it is for the writer of SF.
Chapter Four, "An Aesthetics and an Approach," is meant to articulate the
"theoretical," basis of her critical evaluation of SF texts. She mentions the
work of Suvin and Russ, but she is clearly more influenced by the latter's emphasis on
scientific rigor and consistency in SF texts than by Suvin's comfortably vague
"cognitive estrangement." Russ in her own work certainly does not show much of
what she asks of SF in "Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction" (SFS 2
[1975]:112-19); she has as little science as does Dick, or less. Warrick quotes her:
"Science is to science fiction (by analogy) what medieval Christianity was to
deliberately didactic medieval fiction"; and "Without knowledge of or
appreciation of the 'theology' of SF--that is, science--what kind of criticism will be
practiced on particular SF works?" (p. 81) Perfectly adequate criticism on much of
her work, on Dick's, Le Guin's, Tiptree's, Piercy's--to name just a few of the most
interesting contemporary SF writers--is possible with virtually no reference to science.
There probably ought to be "some science" in the cases of Delany (to sort out
his over-eager application of particular "scientific" hypotheses) and Watson.
But it usually does not take more than a rather general interest and level of information
that one could expect to find among generally educated professional readers anyway.
It is significant that Warrick is uncritical of Russ's analogy: medieval Christianity,
being a system of doctrines informed by socio-psychological considerations of power and
control, in its relationship to didactic fictions expounding those doctrines, cannot
fruitfully be compared to science and its articulation in SF, precisely because the
didactic element is already built into Christianity (the evangelism, the message), but
not, of course, into science. Popularization of science, no matter how intelligently and
imaginatively done, has little to do with science. Exploration of the social impact of
science is another matter, and it is here that the potentiality of SF is centrally
located. We are, in SF, in the realm of the social, articulated in a socially,
historically constituted medium, language; and scientific rigor in the narrow sense in
which Warrick uses the term, is alien in this realm, more alien than a Martian. What is
SF? Many things, and many different things. Perhaps one ought to reconsider the usefulness
of the term; its components, it seems, are separated to an extent which makes the
mediation it calls for a premature, forced, ultimately counterproductive enterprise.
Warrick's study certainly reinforces this view.
--Dagmar Barnouw
"Conjectural Fiction" in the 18th
Century
Modules et moyens de la réflexion politique au
XVIIIe siècle. I, Récits de voyages et découvertes du monde; Moyens de diffusion:
gazettes, brochures, chansons, discours, bibliothéques. Villeneuve
d'Ascq: Publications de l'Université de Lille III [1978].(= Actes du Colloque
international des Lumières.... October 16-19, 1973). 461p. Price (Vol. 1):
FF.115,00. (Vols. II and 111 are also available.)
One of the sessions of this international conference, dealing with major aspects of
political reflection during the Enlightenment, was dedicated to "Travel Accounts,
Travelogues and World Discovery in the 18th Century." It should be regretted that
none of the communications printed here deal with extraordinary-voyage tales and utopian
fiction in so far as these two genres, typical of 18th-century genological landscape, both
draw from authentic travel accounts and seem to provide a "philosophical" frame
of interpretation for exotic mores and customs. Nonetheless, each of these studies of
erudite synthesis retains the reader's attention by providing a significant background for
the evolution of genres of conjectural fictions.
It would be difficult to over-estimate the importance of travel accounts in the
development of 18th-century European civilization. R. Mercier deals with the Utopian image
of the American colonies found in many travel stories, diaries and collections of letters,
such as those of Saint-John de Crèvecoeur (1782). Roland Mortier shows that after 1760
the "Italian voyage" becomes a distinct discursive type, the locus of a critical
reflection about social institutions, usually serving to "illustrate"
Montesquieu's basic theses. In the same way as political pamphlets and philosophical
treatises "but probably more efficiently, Coyer's, Duclos' and Dupaty's Voyages institute
a frame for the critical analysis of the Old Regime." Another kind of travel account,
dealing with the Turkish Regencies in North Africa, is presented by Denise Brahimi as a
sort of "poetic construct" betraying in fact some basic political obsessions of
pre- Revolutionary philosophers regarding despotism and absolutism. This interference of
documentary information and ideological fanstasies or "myth" should be
considered by anyone dealing with the transposition of alleged "factual data" or
cognitive paradigms into fiction. Most of the time, utopian romances, Robinsonades and
extraordinary-travels are but making manifest forms of deceitful fictionalization already
at work in so-called non-fictional discourse.
--MA
Reinterpreting Frankenstein
David Ketterer. Frankenstein's
Creation: The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality. Victoria. BC:
Univ. of Victoria [English Literary Studies series]. 1979. 124p
The current fashionableness of Mary Shelley and particularly Frankenstein can
be unsettling. We pick up still one more book or article on Frankenstein with
reluctance and suspicion, wondering what we'll find this time: what new and offbeat
thesis, what startling insight into the work or the women? The reader who picks up David
Ketterer's Frankenstein's Creation will, therefore, be more than a little
relieved to find it a thoughtful, careful study of the novel. This is not to say that it
offers a conventional or unprovocative reading of Frankenstein: Ketterer is at
some pains to argue with traditional readings and is not always able to resist the
temptation to stretch a point, but the strength of the book lies in his judicious
evaluation of existing scholarship and, especially, in his close and imaginative reading
of the novel.
Since Ketterer's thesis, as implied by the somewhat ambiguous title of the book, is
that Shelley's creation, Frankenstein's creation, and the "construct of human
reality" are analogous (ranging from rough parallels to a virtual identity), he
devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 2) to an examination of background for Shelley's
arriving at the concept and realization of her novel. Ketterer acknowledges the work of
other scholars here and simply summarizes their results, pointing out the evidence of her
reading as well as the influence of her father (William Godwin) and her famous husband on
her thought. In this chapter also, Ketterer summarizes some standard interpretations of
the novel, and particularly the Monster--Freudian readings, Marxist readings, and others.
In general, his approach is to suggest the value of these interpretations and then their
shortcomings. For example, while he grants that Mary Shelley was more politically
conservative than her husband and uneasy about grand schemes, he sees any reading of Frankenstein
as a critique of Percy Shelley's idealism as interesting but "radically
incomplete."
Ketterer's analysis of the novel (primarily, but not exclusively, the 1831 edition) is
developed in Chapters 3 and 4 through a detailed study of the relationship between
metaphor and structure. After admitting the overall sense of disjointedness and the
absence of completely logical organization in the novel. Ketterer demonstrates quite
convincingiv in these chapters the interweaving of several dominant image patterns. He
argues that these images (incest, dreams, spiritual power, and sublimity) permeate the
text and link Frankenstein with the Monster, the landscape, Walton, and Mary Shelley
herself.
Ketterer takes up the question of the Monster as Doppelganger, but argues against the
traditional readings which treat the Monster as the dark and destructive side of
Frankenstein. Ketterer sees the Monster and Frankenstein as "ambiguously
differentiated aspects of a single being" and argues that the Monster exists both as
a psychological double of his creator and as a separate and independent character.
This argument develops in such a way that it leads Ketterer in Chapter 5 to conclude
that Frankenstein has as its subject knowledge and the problematic nature of
knowledge (the nameless monster with the vague and outlandish form is a symbol for this).
Ketterer is to a large degree successful in showing that metaphoric patterns argue
throughout the novel for a blurring of distinctions between exterior and interior
realities, for the unreliability of evidence, and for the relativity of experienced
reality. Even the noted disjointedness is no real flaw, according to this reading, since
the novel offers no pilosophical answers but only suggests some possible positions.
Ketterer sees Frankenstein as a work which dramatizes the "sliding
relationship between the self and the Other."
He uses the same method to address the issue of Frankenstein's classification
as SF. He points out that when Frankenstein is considered SF, it is generally
because of Shelley's use of contemporary science and knowledge about electricity and
magnetism. He concedes that electricity "animates" the Monster and that it
played a role in Shelley's conception of the novel, but he argues that the electricity and
magnetism are both contemporary science. Ketterer, not surprisingly, would prefer to
classify Frankenstein as "Apocalyptic" literature, a term readers of
his earlier work will certainly recognize; here he defines an Apocalyptic writer as one
who "creates other worlds which, by virtue of a reading convention, exist (on a
literal level) in a credible relationship with the real world as commonly
understood."
One need not agree with every point Ketterer makes in this slim volume, nor follow him
to the limits his arguments suggest (and do not always convincingly demonstrate) with
respect to Mary Shelley's creative processes to find the approach to the novel and
Ketterer's sensitive reading of it both stimulating and useful.
--Mary J. Elkins
Rediscovering Jean Ray
Christian Delcourt. Jean
Ray, ou les choses dont on fait les histoires Paris. Nizet, 1980.
117p. FF. 50.00
Jean Ray's work occupies almost alone the position of a French counterpart to the
American "pulp" production of the 1920-1950 period. An indefatigable
dime-novelist, writing both in French (under the pseudonym Jean Ray) and in Flemish (under
the pseudonym John Flanders)--his actual name is Raymond de Kremer (1887-1964)--he is the
only representative of an SF-oriented popular production for that period. Being for all
his career a jailbird in the realm of literary hard labor, he wrote hundreds of novels,
short stories, and tales, not counting dozens of contributions to the popular and juvenile
press. Today Ray is considered to be the most fascinating popular novelist of the
"Entre Deux-Guerres" period, a writer whose frenzied imagination has suscitated
a host of fans who, in the early 1960s, began collecting and republishing his work.
From a different point of view, Ray epitomizes the inability of the SF paradigm to gain
autonomy in French popular culture before the 1950s. This is to say, if there is almost
always an S-F component in his narrative, this component, hegemonic in some of his tales,
is most of the time subordinated to "formulaic" types of fantasy, gothic plots,
tales of the supernatural and of rationalized terror, and conventions of detective stories
à la Conan Doyle. His major and most famous series, "Harry Dickson,"
partly reprinted by Marabout in the 1960s, is an explicit avatar and even a plagiarism of
Conan Doyle's formula (Dickson being "the American Sherlock Holmes," although
the action is always set in Britain), but with both strong S-F and gothic additives.
Leaving aside the outstanding imaginative gifts Ray is endowed with, his work can be taken
as a significant symptom of French cultural axiomatics: where American and English culture
early in the century tended to distinguish and clearly differentiate SF ("scientific
romance") from other genres of fantasy (mysteries, thrillers, fairy tales) and even,
in the very realm of rational conjecture, tended to fix and set specialized formulae such
as future war stories, post-catastrophe tales, cavemen stories, etc., both French canonic
and popular literatures constantly tended to reconstitute a mongrelized or bastardized
type of "non-denominational" fantasy, engendering a continuum of rational and
irrational themes. From Maurice Renard to Jean Ray, SF data always seems to have to be
complemented by elements of mystery (and its decipherment) and of horror (and its eventual
rationalization). One can contend that after Jules Verne's death, with some reservation
and significant exceptions, utopian and scientific elements in fiction are constantly
hybridized with themes of the uncanny, topoi of terror and wonder, and the
fetishism of mystery.
Mr Delcourt's monograph is mainly a first attempt at disentangling Ray's sources and
showing his tales to be a remarkably effective blend--or hodge-podge--of elements and
narrative conventions borrowed from a wide spectrum of 19th-century writers, from Dickens
to Jules Verne, Conan Doyle and Gaston Leroux; from Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe to
Maeterlinck and Gabriel de Lautrec. One should certainly add other dime-novelists such as
Marcel Allain and Léon Sazie to this list. It is a commonplace of criticism dealing with
non-mimetic genres and literary fantasy: research always shows that whatever had been
thought of as being very original at the outset in a given plot should finally be seen as
a clever pirating of one (or two, or three) previous writers. On that account, "pure
imagination" in literature is always synonymous with skillful tinkering,
"bricolage" as Lévi-Strauss says of scientific imagination. Mr Delcourt's work
belongs to the disregarded academic genre of "source studies," a genre even more
despised in the field of popular culture. His approach. however, proves very helpful. His
monograph is precise, systematic, and well-informed. It is also pleasant to read and
insightful. Jean Ray is at the same time a perfect plagiarist and a remarkably original
writer of fiction, who shows a demonic ability to transmute his literary knowledge and
revitalize it.
--MA
Andre Norton Reprinted
Andre Norton. Catseye
[1961] 192p. Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. [1952]. 253p. Storm Over Warlock [1960]. 251p. Ordeal
in Otherwhere [1964]. 191p. Boston: Gregg Press, 1980. $9.95 each vol
The Gregg Press Science-Fiction Series, edited by David G. Hartwell and L.W. Currey,
has been providing a major service to libraries, collectors, and scholars since its
inception in 1975. Among the numerous titles that have been rescued from oblivion are four
groups of Andre Norton's fiction: The Witch World Novels (7 vols., 1977: with an
introduction by Sandra Miesel), The Space Adventure Novels (6 vols., 1978: with an
introduction by Sandra Miesel), The Time Trader Novels (4 vols., 1979; with an
introduction by Thomas T. Beeler), and the four novels examined here.
The success of the Gregg Press Norton reprints is one among a number of indications
that, despite the scholarly neglect of her writing (to date, this reviewer's Andre
Norton: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography [G.K. Hall, 1980] and Carl Yoke's rare Roger
Zelazny and Andre Norton: Proponents of Individualism [State Library of Ohio, 1979]
are the only substantial studies), she is one of the most popular and most read of the
modern SF and fantasy authors and one of the most influential of the women writers. Thus,
as a people's author and an important figure in the development of the two speculative
genres, Norton's works merit the permanent place that these durable reprints offer.
While the four novels at issue here do not form as coherent a package as the earlier
Norton reprints, they are important for the places they occupy in the Norton canon and the
themes and characters they contain. Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. is Norton's first SF
novel (following two short stories: "People of the Crater," 1947, and "The
Gifts of Asti," 1948). Having sold over one million copies in the Ace paperback
edition alone, it is probably her most read novel. It is set in Cleveland (Norton's home
city), 200 years after a nuclear holocaust, and focuses on Fors, a mutant who is in search
of his birthright and is the prototype for the alienated, questing protagonist that is a
major aspect of Norton's fiction. Storm Over Warlock and its sequel, Ordeal
in Otherwhere, feature two important themes in Norton's fiction: sentient,
benevolent, and telepathetic animals and the profound value of empathy and cooperation.
Shann Lantee, another isolated protagonist and a central figure in both novels, allies
himself with two specially trained wolverines and interacts with a race of matriarchical
aliens, the Wyverns, who govern through dreams. Their cooperation illustrates yet another
major stance: Norton's extreme distaste for prejudice of any sort. Catseye is
another example of the same themes and characters that are in the Lantee volumes. Troy, a
young clerk in an exotic pet shop, discovers that he is in mental contact with a group of
caged animals and suddenly is embroiled in interplanetary cold war and espionage when he
goes to their aid.
It is to be hoped that these reprints will draw increased scholarly attention to
Norton. At worst, they continue to make the works of a fine author available to yet
another generation of readers.
--Roger Schlobin
Annotating José Farmer
Mary T. Brizzi. Philip
José Farmer. Starmont Reader's Guides to Contemporary Science
Fiction and Fantasy Authors, ed. Roger C. Schlobin. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House,
1980. 80p. $3.95 (paper)
Though labelled "Starmont Reader's Guide 3," Mary Brizzi's Philip José
Farmer is apparently the first release of an extended series of studies of SF and
fantasy authors. (39 titles are already listed, and "additional titles are steadily
being added.") I recommend this book but with a caution. While the series purports to
be "comprehensive,...appealing to both beginners and sophisticates," this first
effort is far from an all-inclusive study of its subject, and "beginners" are
likely to be buried under a welter of references.
Farmer is an excellent topic for a serious study. His work often has been underrated
because his intellectual profundity tends to be obscured by his more obvious irreverence,
sexuality, and violence and because of his appropriation of superheroes like Tarzan and
Doc Savage. On the other hand, his work abounds with literary, linguistic, mythological,
religious, and historical references with which very few readers are likely to possess
comprehensive familiarity. At its best, the Starmont Philip José Farmer can be
seen, like Southam's well-known Readers Guide to T.S. Eliot, as a very useful
annotation of Farmer's major works--and then some. Mary Brizzi exhibits an admirable
erudition in explicating a variety of Farmer's countless referents. Unfortunately, while
Brizzi herself is fairly conscious that the length of her project (about 30,000 words)
must necessarily limit her scope, she sometimes does a questionable job of deciding what
to say and what to leave unsaid.
This book seems to be a somewhat rambling "investigation," rather than a
carefully organized extrapolation of Farmer's works. Brizzi offers numerous worthwhile
insights, but rarely rounds off her discussions into fully integrated explications of
these works. Her chapter "Mimesis and Reality in The Lovers" seems the
most complete, while conclusions in any other chapters are not always well-substantiated
by her discussions. One is grateful for her remarks about Farmer's obsession with
religious symbolism, for example:
he sees religion as an inherent property of the human mind, not an artifact, but a
dimension relevant of real truth, however masked in symbol. It is this quality of Farmer's
art--the ability to take totally seriously a subject others handle as entertainment or
even a joke--that causes readers to be uneasy in the presence of what may seem blasphemy.
His attitude toward sex is similarly serious, and for this reason he comes nearer to
blasphemy and obscenity than may a less serious writer.
On the other hand, her truncated discussions of works like Venus on the Half-Shell,
which she calls "brilliant,...a serious book and quite likely an important innovative
document," remain unconvincing and her supportive discussions downright misleading.
If Venus is an important work, it is so probably because, as Claudia Jannone has
remarked, it "shows that science is no panacea; instead [Farmer] reveals how science
is the product of man's rational naivete, since he views science as reason instead of
imagination" (see "Venus on the Half-Shell as Structuralist
Activity," Extrapolation, 17 [1976]:110). It would not have been difficult
to summarize Jannone's argument in a couple of sentences, and her final point is very much
appropriate to a theme that Brizzi identifies elsewhere as basic to Farmer's work: to give
life meaning, man must play Creator. Instead, she merely mentions Jannone as having noted
that "the structuralist theme of process-overgoal is evident in the plot and
methodology of the novel," and then expends 2,000 words extrapolating Farmer's rather
obvious and, in the manner in which Brizzi presents them, apparently pointless satiric
puns
Mary Brizzi's Philip José Farmer sports a good bibliography and index as well
as her very intelligent perceptions. Furthermore, she is able to refer to specific
conversations with Farmer himself to support many of these perceptions. Finally. however,
the greatest use this book is likely to serve is as an inspiration to and source guide for
future Farmer scholars who will reconstruct these often brilliant fragments into the
well-structured crystal buildings of comprehensive extrapolation.
--Mark Siegel
A Variety of Voices
Science Fiction Voices No. 1: Interviews with Science
Fiction Writers, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer. The Milford Series:
Popular Writers of Today, vol. 23. 63p. Science Fiction
Voices No. 2: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers, conducted by
Jeffrey M. Elliot with an introduction by Richard A. Lupoff. The Milford Series: Popular
Writers of Today. vol. 25. San Bernardino: The Borgo Press. 1979. 62p. $8.95 ($2.95 paper)
It would be hard to determine exactly where the form came from (radio, TV, Boswell),
but the published interview is a popular element in the apparatus of commentary on the SF
genre in fan publications and in professional magazines. Borgo Press has undertaken to
collect published interviews in a series of books of which the first two have now
appeared. The expectations from the form are not clear. Despite the truth of Darrell
Schweitzer's comment in the brief introduction to his interviews that the interviewer
"does as little of the talking as possible," I find the difference between these
two collections to be exactly in the voice of the interviewer. The writers are there
dutifully saying what we have come to know them for--Sturgeon, Bester, Pohl, Gunn, Leiber,
Clement, Sprague de Camp in the Schweitzer volume and Bradbury, Niven, van Vogt, Anderson,
Silverberg in the collection gathered by Jeffrey M. Elliot. The problem is that Elliot's
voice comes across as monotonous, sometimes pompous, and pure hype--especially in the
uniformly overwritten short introductions to each of his interviews. The effect is to
produce a characterless book and even, what is worse, to flatten his writers to a sameness
that betrays their own individual characters. The first collection here is by far the most
successful because it contains variety and character. In his planning and organization of
the interviews and in his own voice, Schweitzer seems the more interesting Boswell.
--Donald M. Hassler
Science Fiction in Popular Culture
Thomas M. Inge, ed. Handbook
of American Popular Culture. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1978. Vol. 1: 404p. Vol Ill: 423p. $54.95
The stated purpose of this Handbook is that of consolidating, within a single
reference work, the historical and bibliographical information generated by several
decades of research into 30 different aspects of American popular culture. As the preface,
by Thomas Inge, suggests, the Handbook appears at a time when the study of
popular culture is finding a secure place for itself within academic institutions, and
when the need for bibliographical guides, of the sort available to older, more-established
disciplines, is increasingly felt. Each of the 30 entries in this two-volume set contains
a definition and history of the topic under discussion; this is followed by a summary of
scholarly treatments to date, a description of major reference works and research
collections, and an extensive bibliography of secondary literature.
The Handbook is at its most useful when dealing with those domains which have
been researched outside the boundaries of established academic disciplines, such as
sports, "Death in Popular Culture," "Popular Religion and Theories of Self
Help," and editorial cartoons. The section devoted to SF, on the other hand, like
those on the various mass media, is less ground-breaking, in that each of these domains
has, within the last several years, emerged as the focus of specialized university
courses, scholarly journals, and academic associations. The chapters dealing with these
fields are thus of use primarily in so far as they direct the researcher to other, more
comprehensive reference sources.
Given these limitations, Marshall B. Tymn's treatment of SF succeeds at outlining the
various contexts within which SF has been studied, and the major achievements of each.
Tymn is sufficiently aware of the semi-professional publishing undertaken on the fringes
of SF random to include the major fan-directed index and reprint projects which are less
likely to be covered by more academic surveys. His brief introduction and "History
Outline" make no attempt to deal with questions of generic definition, and
concentrate primarily on the dissemination of SF through the pulp magazines. (The Handbook
contains a separate entry on pulp magazines, by Bill Blackbeard, a leading authority.
It provides information useful to those investigating this aspect of SF publishing
history.)
Tymn's bibliography lists some 65 books on SF, including bibliographical indexes, genre
studies, and works dealing with individual authors or schools. (It does not include
articles published in periodicals.) Many of the entries deal with fantastic and
supernatural literature, and only a few may be said to concentrate exclusively on American
SF. The immediately notable omissions, Todorov's work on the fantastic and Suvin's study
of the SF genre, may presumably be accounted for by, respectively, a policy of omitting
foreign-language authors, and the date of the Handbook's publication.
The strengths of the Handbook's treatment of SF lie in its run-down of
existing research collections, and its lengthy description of publishing houses involved
in the reprinting of historically important works of SF. Coming as it does amidst entries
on pulp magazines and sports as popular entertainment, this guide to SF scholarship
suggests that the field is one of the more firmly based within the larger domain of
cultural studies.
--Will Straw
Nebulous Awards (1978)
Isaac Asimov et al. Nebula
Winners Fourteen, ed. Frederik Pohl. NY: Harper & Row and
Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1980. xi + 259p. $11.95 hardcover
It is one of the talents of SF publishers--a talent that connects them to milliners and
dressmakers--to make new out of old, to fabricate, for instance, anthologies by several
hands which are both redundant (since almost all of the texts published have already
appeared elsewhere) and uninteresting (since the few unpublished papers should never have
left the authors' drawers). The only challenge offered by such endeavors seems to be that
one has to find a subject or a theme common to the contributors, or some other link
between them.
The Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) publishes annually an anthology of US
Nebula Award winners. Here, after all, the anthology receives a semblance of justification
in the SFWA desire to set up a memorial for all its awarders, and also since the selection
of stories and novels is the result of a careful collective examination of that year's
production. This anthology, edited by Frederik Pohl, features award-winning narratives by
John Varley, Edward Bryant, Charles L. Grant, Vonda McIntyre, C.J. Cherryh, and Gene Wolfe
(the last two authors being no 1978 award winners, but simply considered by the
editor as having published "other outstanding stories" in 1978). Pohl has also
added, for good measure, three essays by Asimov, Spinrad, and Sprague De Camp. This hardly
reinforces the whole. In his preface, Pohl expounds his philosophy about what justifies SF
awards: they prevent average readers and potential SF converts from being discouraged by
the poor level of SF texts if they happen to pick them up indiscriminately. SF awards are
"safeguards." You can be sure that there is something about selected
texts that is "special," even if you disagree with the award voters' taste. I
should like to challenge this philosophy, which has of course nothing to envy in the logic
of mainstream literary awards: one cannot read everything and yet there is a need for
literary and social consensus. Traditionally, "high literature" awards
serve to confirm and reinforce a deceitfully biased concept of the "readable"
for a given time and place. l would hope that SF readers know better, and that they are
less sensitive to this system of awards, whose mercantile ambiguity has been often
denounced.
Since it is SFS policy to review only secondary "critical" texts, l shall
concentrate on the three essays interpsersed in the volume. "SF 1938" by Asimov
is, as expected, a sequence of nostalgic variations on the good-old-days theme. It gives a
strong feeling of déjà-vu. Spinrad's "The Future of SF" is a rather
nebulous composition on the themes of SF as big business, SF as cultural fast food, SF as
vanguard of popular culture, and SF and its future. Spinrad seems convinced that one can
speculate on the near future of SF on the basis of the late 1970s boom in the book market
and in the movies. Extrapolation at that level would seem to me quite risqué.
But let me quote Spinrad's final prediction: "in the near future.... SF will no
longer be the preserve of....a subculture.... SF is becoming part--and perhaps ultimately
a dominant part--of the mainstream of popular and literary cultures" (p. 140). I am
not so sure this is to be wished; however I am ready to challenge such a prediction.
Changes in the older fandom, changes in readership, in attitudes, and in socio-cultural
status are occurring. This is not tantamount to saying that SF is (re-) integrating with
the mainstream (even if its fetishism for literary awards make SF-dom mimic canonic
institutions). After all, the concept of mainstream itself is probably becoming a worn-out
idea.
There is only one interesting paper in the non-fiction section of this book, namely,
Sprague De Camp's "Little Green Men from Afar " in which SF is examined together
with its disquieting neighbors Pseudo-science and Cultism. De Camp has interesting
suggestions to make about types of circular reasoning typical of UFO-ology and also about
processes of reproduction of the same irrational themes through modern history. His
comparison between Von D”niken's preaching and Mrs Blavatsky's theosophical doctrine and
career is indeed illuminating. It is only to be regretted that De Camp's essay is too
short (pp. 172-85) to allow for an adequate elaboration of his point.
--MA
SF Bibliographies from G.K. Hall
Muriel R. Becker. Clifford
D. Simak: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. xliii + 149p. $18.00.
Lahna F. Diskin. Theodore Sturgeon: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. xxvii+
105p. $16.00. Robert E. Myers. Jack Williamson: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. xiii+93p.
$16.00. Roger C. Schlobin. Andre Norton. A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. xxxii+68p.
$12.00. All of the above: Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.
When I showed these new G.K. Hall bibliographies to a librarian friend of mine, she
expressed some astonishment that still-active SF writers should be receiving the sort of
minute bibliographical attention that has not yet caught up with even some classic
19th-century authors of "mainstream" fiction. Her reaction confirmed my own
suscipicion that SF, not long ago invisible in all but the most arcane reference works,
now is out to be the most indexed, bibliographied, collated, and cross-referenced body of
literature since the Pentateuch.
The present series, handsomely bound in uniform hardback volumes and scheduled to go on
and on, is undoubtedly going to be useful to scholars of SF in general and, in the case of
the Norton volume, to scholars of modern juvenile literature as well. Those working with
individual authors will find some of the volumes indispensable, but it must be cautioned
that some of them are not as thorough and error-free as their imposing appearance would
suggest.
Nor is the format quite uniform; and some of the volumes bear evidence of padding to
make a book, even to the extent of confusing the reader on occasion. Apparently Hall's
standard format consists of a preface, introduction, listings of fiction, miscellaneous
media, nonfiction, and criticism, and primary and secondary indexes. Only the criticism
sections are annotated in all volumes, though Schlobin is kind enough to annotate his
endless listing of the book reviews Norton wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to
the extent of letting us know what books she was reviewing. Diskin, on the other hand,
tantalizingly lists all the review columns Sturgeon wrote for Venture and Galaxy
without giving us a hint of what books he was writing about.
Beyond this basic format, the authors apparently were given leeway to add whatever they
saw fit, and this is where some material of questionable value comes in. Becker's book on
Simak--which in general is by far the most thorough in providing primary material--adds an
interview which only marginally touches on bibliographical issues, and five appendixes,
two of which are unnecessary since they merely repeat material in the bibliography itself.
Diskin provides us with no less than six indexes, taking up over a fifth of the volume and
testing our ingenuity, since the same story is apt to appear in three separate indexes or
more. Why not have just one primary index as in the other volumes? But Diskin about makes
up for this clumsiness by providing an innovation that is unique to her volume and that
should be continued in future volumes in the series: a subject-index to criticism,
enabling us to locate easily all the critical commentary about a given Sturgeon work. This
is extremely useful, and remedies a flaw in the standard primary and secondary indexing
format. When I tried to find critical material on Norton's Catseye in the
Schlobin volume, for example. I had to read through the entire criticism section, looking
for mentions of the book (Schlobin's book, by the way, appears to stay closer to the basic
format of the series than the other volumes). Myers also adds a useful section not in the
other volumes: a selected list of foreign editions of Williamson's works.
Most of these volumes also give the impression that more criticism has been written on
the author than actually exists. With the exception of the volume on Norton (who
apparently has been more consistently reviewed in library journals than in SF magazines),
the criticism bibliographies tend to depend heavily on reviews from popular SF magazines.
This yields a plethora of annotations quoting such useful critical judgments as "a
swell story" or "a good space adventure yarn" and raises the question of
whether the reviews selected for inclusion actually give a fair picture of the reception
of the book being reviewed. No doubt these authors were for much of their careers
discussed only in the popular magazines, but I nevertheless find faintly ominous Diskin's
introductory comment that focusing on magazine reviews was necessary because "the
literary types" associated with general periodicals ignored Sturgeon--especially
since she then proceeds to exclude from her listing a negative New York Times Book
Review review of The Dreaming Jewels (written by "literary type"
Fletcher Pratt) and a Spectator review of More Than Human.
Nor are even the citations of the popular magazine reviews always complete. On more
than a dozen occasions Myers lists signed reviews of Williamson's works as
"anonymous," including several of P. Schuyler Miller's Astounding reviews
and a couple by Robert W. Lowndes (who on occasion also gets listed simply as "The
Editor" or "R.W.L." Sometimes he signed his name this way in magazines he
was editing, but this is what interpolating brackets areforin bibliographies). Another of
Myers' "anonymous" reviews is Damon Knight's important review of The
Humanoids in Worlds Beyond. Myers makes no mention of the more accessible
reprint of this in In Search of Wonder. Nor does he list Brian Aldiss's fairly
important discussion of The Legion of Time in SF Horizons in 1964.
While these problems appear to be peculiar to the Myers volume, there were enough
errors and ambiguities in other volumes to suggest that, as a series, these books might
warrant some caution, though most of the problems are quite minor. There are several typos
in the Sturgeon volume, for example, most of them minor ("Wolheim" for Wollheim,
"Philip Strong" for Philip Stong, etc.)--although it does list a review for A Touch
of Strange in 1956, two years before the book appeared! In all but the Norton volume
(which lists no dramatic adaptations at all), the "Miscellaneous Media" sections
fail to indicate whether the authors adapted their own works for the media or whether the
adaptations were done by others. This makes a difference in cases such as the 1974 TV film
Killdozer!, which alters the original story in important ways.
One could argue, of course, that none of these criticisms address the central purpose
of these volumes--which, it seems to me, lies in their primary bibliographies. These seem
to me to be uniformly excellent and absolutely thorough, providing an instant overview of
the author's career and productivity. Becker and Schlobin go the added step of identifying
which of their author's works are SF and which are not, and Schlobin even provides an
appendix categorizing Norton's works by genre and another listing series. It probably
would be too much to ask for annotations (even partial) of primary material, but such
timesaving devices as these by Schlobin and Becker, together with Diskin's subject index
to criticism and Myers's listing of foreign imprints, would be worth keeping in mind by
anyone preparing future volumes in this series.
--Gary K. Wolfe
First Edition(s)
L.W. Currey. Science
Fiction and Fantasy Authors. A Bibliography of First Printings of Their Fiction and
Selected Nonfiction. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979. 571 + xxix p. $48.00 (+
15% outside the US).
The value of this labor of love will not be lost for students of SF. In the pages of
this handsomely produced tome, bibliologue and book dealer Lloyd Currey ("with the
editorial assistance of David G. Hartwell") has undertaken to assemble the
information necessary for "identify[ing] both first printings and any other
significant printings and editions" of "all fiction and selected nonfiction
published in book, pamphlet, or broadside format" by 215 English-language authors of
SF and/or fantasy (p. xxi). He also attempts to establish the probable order of priority
of first editions or printings found in more than one format. The authors make their
appearance alphabetically; and, where applicable, sections on "Collected Works,"
"Autobiography and Letters," books they have edited, literary adaptations of
their fictions by other hands, and a selective bibliography of critical books (but not
articles) about them follow the alphabetical listing of fiction and nonfiction titles. The
result is a reference work that every "collector, bookseller, and scholar" of SF
will want to have access to.
Like all such projects, however, Currey's has its limitations--and eccentricities--not
all of which are acknowledged in his Introduction; and these make his volume relatively
less useful to the scholar than to the bookseller and most useful to the collector.
The latter will undoubtedly be pleased to have a guide to first editions that is as free
as possible from technical cant and bibliographical pedantry. Currey does not encumber his
descriptions with data concerning the size of the book or a full citation of its
title-page and so forth; he conscientiously records only the essential characteristics of
"first...and any other significant printings." Yet even the bibliophile may find
something to regret in an austerity one consequence of which is that the reader not
otherwise knowledgeable will discover in this volume no basis for determining the scarcity
of any given title. For Currey, understandably reluctant to divulge "trade
secrets," employs no system of rarity factors; and as he offers no information on the
number of printings or editions the original publisher issued, he makes it impossible to
hazard a guess about how rare a particular work might be. The absence of information about
editions other than the first and those Currey deems "significant" is all the
more regrettable from the point of view of anyone concerned with the authority of texts,
who will wish that Currey had provided himself with further occasions for remarks of this
sort: "All U.S. editions [of Samuel R. Delany's Einstein Intersection] lack
one chapter" (p. 139; not numbered).
The most obvious limitation of Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors is
chronological. The survey extends to 1977, but goes only as far back as the 1890s.
"The choice of subject authors," Currey explains, "was not the result of
arbitrary selection. Every name represents a writer whose works influenced the science
fiction and fantasy field or...today are being read and/or collected" (p. xxvi). This
rule seems unobjectionable; and to quarrel with his application of it would at any rate be
pointless, since the principle of "more is better" should operate in an endeavor
of this kind. Yet one wonders why, to Currey's way of thinking, not only Robert Cromie and
William Golding but also Aldous Huxley and George Orwell do not qualify under his criteria
for inclusion while Fred T. Jane, say, does.
There are also some notable omissions among nonfiction titles. Olaf Stapledon's are not
mentioned at all: and works such as C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man and H.G.
Wells's Anatomy of Frustration--both of them as useful if not crucial for
understanding their author's fiction as Stapledon's are--also pass unnoticed.
The nonfiction listings underline a problem that novices, especially, will have with
this compilation and its disregard for categorical distinctions. Currey's refusal to
discriminate SF from fantasy can readily be excused, given the widespread disagreement as
to what, if anything, differentiates the two. Surely, however, it is no parlous task to
demarcate fiction and nonfiction. Yet on the whole--though not with perfect consistency
(i.e., some entries do have nonfiction under a separate rubric)--Currey fails to do so.
Despite these objections, Currey's remains an important--and heroic--effort. Students
of SF tend to be far too cavalier in regard to the texts that they, often haphazardly,
rely on. It is therefore to be hoped that this compilation of his may serve as the nucleus
for gathering together data on authoritative (and bastardized) editions as well as
corrected and expanded in ways he himself already envisions. It is also to be hoped that
Lloyd Currey, with his indisputable expertise in these matters. will direct, or at least
assist in, that undertaking.
--RMP
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