BOOKS IN REVIEW
Integrations
Brian Aldiss. This
World and Nearer Ones: Essays Exploring the Familiar. Kent, OH: Kent
State UP, 1981. 261pp. $6.95
This collection of essays and reviews on various topics is always well written,
intelligent--and entertaining. It is exactly the kind of informal, yet exceptionally
informative writing we used to associate with great writer-critics but which has
unfortunately been in short supply in recent years, probably more because of a lack of
intelligent and receptive readers than because our great authors are unwilling to provide
their audiences with such edifying entertainments. However, I do not wish to underrate
Brian Aldiss's achievement in this particular book and in this peculiar genre: rightly he
has been dubbed a "writer's writer" and he does not let us down here. This is a
virtuoso performance by one of the best, with wit and humor constituting the most
attractive feature of these pieces. (Those of us who have heard him deliver one of his
famous after-dinner speeches--as I did at an SFRA convention in Waterloo, Iowa, some years
ago--will automatically know what to expect; indeed, the comic speech entitled
"Looking Forward to 2001" and ironically classified in the section of the book
called "hoping" is by itself worth the price of the collection; expect some
lowbrow moments, too, in the spirit of "Monty Python.") If the anthology has a
weakness, it is in the lack of a real focus, and many readers will get lost here and there
unless they are acquainted with particular authors, stories, films, or painters (for
example, I was introduced through Aldiss's volume to the contemporary Czech SF writer,
Josef Nesvadba--heretofore unknown to me--only to find that my own university's major
library, though strong in the field of Slavic literatures, contained just one collection
of this writer's short stories in English translation, and not the one mentioned by
Aldiss). What gives the book intellectual cohesion and makes it a success is the
ever-present, ever-ingenious personality of the author.
The book doesn't limit itself to SF, although writing about SF does remain the most
substantive part of it. Aldiss is not only one of the top SF writers anywhere, but one of
SFs most important apologists across the planet. Over 100 writers from the broad modern
history of the genre come up for observations ranging anywhere from a sentence to
review-type paragraphs; some of the essays are confined to single figures like Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr. and Philip K. Dick. Perhaps, though, the most important and perceptive
essays are those on James Blish (because of that author's serious approach to the issue of
science vs. religion, or more accurately of scientific cosmology vs. religious
eschatology), Robert Sheckley (because he is so often overlooked by the academic critics;
on page 123 Aldiss links Sheckley with A.E. Van Vogt as "possibly the two SF writers
the world digs most"), and Jules Verne (the author's real life vs. his works). Other
important essays demonstrate that SF today is by no means confined to writing: its
appearance in film, TV, and art and architecture is equally significant. The films of
Steven Spielberg (before E. T, of course) come up for positive comment, but what
Aldiss says about Andrei Tarkovsky's Soviet film version of Solaris is much more
helpful and insightful in regard to so challenging and rewarding a movie. The section of
the book called "seeing" has an essay on painter G.F. Watts "as a precursor
of modern art"--and our peculiar 20th-century consciousness associated with such art.
This essay is nicely balanced against a short, but very informative history of SF
illustration from the 18th century to the pulp magazines. (Aldiss certainly does justice
to figures like Virgil Finlay, Frank R. Paul, and Emsh--and even Piranesi, M.C. Escher,
and Karel Thole get their due--but I remain curious why Hannes Bok isn't even mentioned.)
Fourteen black-and-white photos, with useful captions, help the reader a great deal with
this section on visual media. Also, the essay on the TV series, ranging from
Star Trek to The Prisoner, seems accurate and convincing (erg., Star Trek "provides
reassurance disguised as challenge" IP. 170]).
Our author also brings in related discussions of pseudo-scientific cults ("Sleanzo
Inputs I have known"), think tanks ("The Universe as Coal-Shuttle"), and
even SF criticism ("Yes, well, but..."); and various degrees of satire come into
play in every case (but see p. 101 for positive views of academic criticism of SF and its
journals, especially our own SFS).
I don't know what to say about the last section of the book, "this world,"
which consists of four travelogue journals taking us to Southern California, Trieste, the
Soviet Union, and Sumatra. All my life I've listened to the usual tourist talk from
travelers who've never gotten further into a foreigner's ways of living or thinking than
Club International or the Hilton Hotel, whereas Aldiss's varied appreciations are a
welcome tonic, refreshing and insightful. Certainly these pages have little to do with SF
per se (with the exception of a few pages on Soviet SF), but they do have a great deal to
do with a planetary consciousness, and almost everywhere in this volume Aldiss takes us on
trips into the world of today: these thoughts are grounded in our real Earth with
all its real people and problems.
To be fair, then, there are signs of a superstructure in this somewhat motley anthology
beyond the winsome ego of Brian Aldiss: one essay ("from history to
timelessness") attempts an integration of consciousness--a recurrent theme throughout
the book (the scientific mode vs. the other kind of thinking we often connect with magic
and myths, imagination and literature and art). Consider it typical of Aldiss and this
book to suggest that the main point of unity transcending these opposites--and the two
hemispheres of the brain which are apparently their source, according to recent
science--is in wit and
humor
(p. 124).
Along another axis, Aldiss integrates the past, the present, and the future (this last
is the specialty of modern SF, of course) into one unified consciousness package. Even
the opening essay of the book is a 20-page history, racing across European history from
the defeat of the Turks at Vienna in the late 18th century to Star Wars,
emphasizing
how SF developed and why it exists.
So: this is not a literary history, and not a theoretical study, but the man who wrote
it is certainly competent in either area. Mainly, Aldiss has the courage to be personal
and opinionated, to make value judgments (though he's always kind and affectionately
humorous even at his most critical), at a time when pseudo-objectivity and procrustean
classification are the fashion in writing about literature. Having read so many of
Aldiss's books, fiction and non-fiction alike, and having enjoyed this one immensely, all
I can say is I don't know anyone warmer, more completely human than Brian Aldiss.
--Casey Fredericks
Minding
the Gap
Donald M. Hassler. Comic
Tones in Science Fiction. The Art of Compromise with Nature. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. xiv + 143pp. S25.00
With books on Erasmus Darwin and Hal Clement to his credit, Donald M. Hassler would
appear to have one foot planted in the 18th century, the other in the 20th. In trying to
bootstrap himself from one to the other in this slim volume, however, he risks tripping
over his own shoelaces.
Readers of SFS will hardly fault him for trying to show historical continuity in the
development of SF, or for wanting to study SF in the light of critical insights gleaned
from contemporary literary theory. But there is a considerable gap between his aims and
his execution. The book is riddled with problems in organization and expression which
suggest at the least inattentive editing, and at worst a failure in
conceptualization.
If I read him rightly, Hassler is arguing that "hard" SF focuses on the
indeterminacy of scientific knowledge in ways that parallel certain "late
Enlightenment" writings as well as critical theories formulated by Freud and more
recent thinkers. These writers he calls "comic" because they recognize science
is "speculative" and by nature incomplete, although it may be our best approach
to what we think of as "truth." Haunting them is the sense of a fall from a
"Golden Age" of secure, unified knowledge, itself undercut by an awareness that
the belief in such a state or time is mere wish-fulfillment.
Hassler's own focus, however, is far from clear, as he himself seems to acknowledge in
calling his argument "orbital." If all he wants to do is point out certain
resemblances, circularity may work fine, but half the book might well have been
eliminated. The actual text seems to be giving us lessons in history, in reading and
evaluating (some) SF, and in understanding the nature of human knowledge. In either the
existing long form or the hypothetical short form, the reader may be entitled to ask the
purpose of the whole enterprise.
If the whole is uncertain, so are some of the parts. As examples of "hard"
SF, few would quarrel with the choice Clement, Pohl's work in the 1970s, and some of
Asimov. Le Guin, Sturgeon, and Asimov's autobiography are a bit harder to fit in. Use of
the word "comic" with little or no reference to humor or to the structural
significance of "rising" comic action may also give a reader pause. But
"irony" begins the titles of three of Comic Tone's six chapters; to
help find the range, "self-mockery" and "humility" might be even more
precise.
Hassler seems to equate deconstructionist, structuralist, and post-structuralist
critics, and claims that the 18th-century philosophe Buffon thought "like an
early structuralist or poststructuralist critic" (p. 31). His prize samples, however,
are Lem, Scholes, and Suvin, only one of whom clearly shows the kind of uncertainty
Hassler seems to prize. While his "late Enlightenment" seems to range from 1739
(David Hume) to 1818 (Jane Austen), including Buffon and Erasmus Darwin, it also has room
for such nominal Romantics as Hazlitt and Wordsworth, and may even take in Francis Bacon
and Charles Darwin. But why stop there? Given the "science" of their day, were
not Joyce, Kafka, Zola, Balzac, Milton, Roger Bacon, Leonardo, Dante, Vergil, even the Gilgamesh
poet-- just to name a few "speculative" writers omitted from this
"great tradition"--also beset by doubts concerning the limits of human knowledge
and communication?
Other pieces by Hassler do not show this much difficulty in expression. But what is one
to do with a phrase like "the freedom to speculate freely" (p. 34), with calling
Kilgore Trout a "favorite nom de plume" of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (p. 36),
with referring to Asimov as a "hack" at the same time that one is trying to
undermine "elitist" evaluation (p. 95)? Attentive editing by that author, or by
series editor Marshall B. Tymn, might not have eliminated empty rhetoric, toned down
academic jargon, and simplified overly long sentences full of jaw-breaking abstractions.
But simply careful proofreading should have eliminated the dangling modifiers, vague
pronoun references, and failures in subject-verb agreement.
A somewhat less than finished product, perhaps this book should be regarded more as
"work in progress." Some of the ideas in it are worth pursuing, and some
readings of individual texts are of passing interest. But $25.00 is a stiff price to pay
for someone else's on-the job training.
--David N. Samuelson
New Worlds and Beyond
Colin Greenland. The
Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British New Wave in Science Fiction. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. xii + 244pp. $25.00
Colin Greenland's study of New Worlds and three of its most important
contributors-- Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, and Moorcock--is an important and most welcome
contribution to the history of SF. Under Moorcock's editorship of New Worlds in
the 1960s and '70s, a group of writers assembled--Moorcock, Aldiss, Ballard, M. John
Harrison, D.M. Thomas, Langdon Jones, and the Americans Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek,
Norman Spinrad, and James Sallis--with a common perception and common goal. While
recognizing that the SF published in the American magazines and popular press was
formulaic, limited, and largely unliterary, they also realized that the images and themes
of SF were ideally suited to articulating the particular anxieties and experiences of the
modern era. Though the group never demonstrated as much genuine artistic unity as the
"movement" label suggests (in fact, Greenland observes that the New Wave was
"less a Wave than an explosion, starting at a definable centre and dissipating
swiftly in all directions" [p. 206]), they did agree on the necessity of breaking out
of the narrow limits of available literary patterns. By combining some of the motifs and
techniques of SF with the stylistic theories of "post-Modernist" fiction, they
aimed to create what one might call a "mutant" form capable of addressing the
concerns of their culture and reflecting the kind of world they found themselves
inhabiting. Their most distinctive themes were "ontological insecurity, alienation,
the hidden and hostile dimensions of media and machines, the disintegration of
objectivity into subjective worlds of inner space, the dangerously exhilarating
multiplication of 'possibilities'" (at the expense of certainty and absolute
authority of all kinds); and (as Greenland further observes), these "are all primary
concerns of their times, though they came to them rather in advance of popular assent. The
concept of entropy, a degeneration inevitable from either overorganization or chaos, is
the centre of this imaginative cluster" (p. 201).
While considering New Wave stylistic theory and practice, Greenland examines each of
these themes in detail as they manifest themselves in the pages of New Worlds and
in the novels of Aldiss, Ballard, and Moorcock. The issues are important to the history of
the genre because the New Worlds writers are among the first in SF to see their
work primarily in terms of art, to be self-conscious about the artistic possibilities of
SF and concerned with stretching those possibilities as dramatically as they could.
Greenland's study, as the first thorough examination of New Wave poetics, thus opens up a
crucial chapter in the development of the genre; for if many diehard fans rejected the New
Wave in outrage, such works did attract new readers to the genre, and new writers adopted
at least some of the aesthetic concerns and techniques first given wide exposure in New
Worlds.
The Entropy Exhibition also has relevance beyond narrow genre boundaries. In
the first place, Greenland has taken pains to place the New Worlds movement in
its cultural context. He looks at the mood of Anglo-American society during the '60s and
explores the ways in which New Wave is both a reflection of and reaction to that mood,
producing fiction which is subjective, hyperconscious, fragmented, ambiguous, horrific,
ironic, and profoundly anxious, characterized above all by what Greenland calls the
"central paradox" of the New Worlds group: "the conviction that
form is degenerating and energy dissipating, asserted with remarkable formal
resourcefulness and an energy of expression so compelling we may well call it
exhibitionist" (p. 194).
However, he also points out that the New Worlds writers were not the only ones
to arrive at this synthesis of SF and the avant garde: figures like Borges, Thomas
Pynchon, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, and Doris Lessing, though
they begin from the other ("mainstream") direction, also combine SF motifs and
generic freedoms with the stylistic and structural innovations of the avant garde. But
whereas contemporary critics have been quick to recognize the merit of these latter
writers, the likes of Aldiss, Ballard, and Moorcock are largely ignored. In fact,
Greenland identifies as one major motive for writing The Entropy Exhibition the
fact of this conspicuous neglect, the fact that writers of such caliber can be so
routinely and casually omitted in surveys of contemporary British literature.
As a result, this study, thoroughly researched (with support and advice from the
subject authors) and eminently readable, is designed not just for SF specialists--though
they are well served by it--but for critics of contemporary literature as well. For
instance, the scholarly apparatus in this book includes a chapter-by-chapter bibliography
which, for those chapters treating Aldiss, Ballard, and Moorcock, includes not only the
usual secondary sources but a primary bibliography of the major works of each author (in
the case of Moorcock's complicated oeurre, arranged helpfully according to series). Thus,
though Greenland's decision to center his discussion on New Worlds allows for a
specificity of focus which contributes considerably to the coherence of his study, The
Entropy Exhibition is far more than a simple history of an SF magazine. It
is an attempt--successful, I hope and believe--to "de-ghettoize" not only a
group of talented SF writers, but SF criticism as well.
I do, however, have two nits to pick, one with the publishers and one with Greenland
himself. The design of the text, for reasons that we can only speculate about with
puzzlement, does not provide the means for readily distinguishing between extended
quotations and the body of Greenland's text; and the result is an often maddening
difficulty in separating his words from those he is quoting. Repeatedly I was forced to
reread passages several times in order to determine the boundary between text and
quotation. Paper, we know, has gotten very expensive, but surely Routledge and
Kegan Paul could have spared the tiny amount of extra space necessary to make the
distinctions clear and avoid such sustained aggravation for the reader.
My complaint against Greenland himself is in some senses even less central to the
merits of his study. Nevertheless, I must say I find it very disappointing that in a work
which is otherwise so thoughtful and well written the author should persist in resorting
to the old, automatic and sexist phraseology which American academic writing now on
principle eschews. Such phrases as "man and his universe" are not particularly
numerous or egregious in this book, but they would have been so easy to eliminate that we
can only regret Mr. Greenland's not thinking to do so.
Despite those quibbling matters, though, Greenland's book is an essential addition to
the understanding of the history of both SF and contemporary British literature.
--Kathleen L. Spencer
"Index Learning": The Le
Guin Bibliography
Elizabeth Cummins Cogell. Ursula K Le Guin: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983. xi + 244pp. S39.95
In response to those who scoffed at his activities, a collector-bibliographer friend of
mine used to legitimate his efforts with a couplet from Pope's Dunciad: "Index-learning
turns no student pale,/Yet holds the eel of science by the tail." Though
bibliographers, collectors, and index-makers are rarely superstars, we all know that no
serious production can be mounted successfully without their behind-the-scenes work.
Thanks to G.K. Hall's Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy series of author
bibliographies--Cogell's Le Guin bibliography is the 11th in the on-going series--we are
getting a virtually complete record of the output of selected SF authors and their
critics. Some of their writing, including a few significant pieces, has appeared in
fanzines and in other out-of-the-mainstream publications, and is as slippery as an eel for
the bibliographer. Unless someone does the collecting and index-making while the author is
alive, these pieces would probably swim into oblivion. Because finding and tracking down
these ephemeral pieces is an arduous task, even with an author's help, students of Le Guin
will be in Cogell's debt for undertaking it.
Like previous volumes in the Hall series, Cogell's includes an introductory essay, a
primary bibliography, an annotated secondary bibliography, and indexes of primary and
secondary works. Particularly helpful is the title, author, and subject index to the
criticism: if one wants to find out what has been published on The Left Hand of
Darkness, she or he can consult the index and find 130 secondary works that mention
or discuss that novel. Jungian critics can use the index to locate 10 different Jungian
interpretations of Le Guin, and, I hope, try their talents on another author. This index
will be the most useful and valuable tool in the bibliography. Teachers and scholars will
save enormous amounts of time and energy, as well as avoid repeating others'
interpretations, whenever they begin at the end of Cogell's book.
Some of the earlier Hall bibliographies have included sections or appendices that are
missing from the Le Guin volume. It would be nice to have a list of translations and
foreign editions (the German translation of The Word for World is Forest was the
first separate publication of that novella), a list of awards and honors, a list of
Science Fiction Book Club editions, a list of reviews and other secondary materials
excluded from the annotated list, and, finally, a description of Le Guin collections,
especially the one Cogell consulted at the University of Oregon library archives.
Except for a couple of major slips (and a very few minor errors, which would be of
interest to textual scholars and collectors), the three-part primary bibliography (headed
"Fiction," "Miscellaneous Media," and "Nonfiction") is
comprehensive and accurate. In the Miscellaneous Media section, items B18-B22 (a poem,
three recipes, a translation, and a taped interview)--they aren't kidding when they say
miscellaneous media--are listed under 1971. They were all published in 1973. Items B57-B62
(translation of six Rilke poems) are listed under 1975. They also appeared in 1973. This
looks like the result of a mix-shuffling of index cards, or a typist's misplacing a sheet.
If Le Guin readers can be confident that they have in their hands a virtually complete
bibliography of Le Guin's works in English, collectors will have to use the list with
caution. Cogell reports that the 1977 Harper & Row edition of Rocannon's World corrects
errors in previous editions, but that is only part of the story. Harper & Row
reprinted the text as published by Ace in 1972, and, while correcting those errors which
Le Guin noted in Ace's 1966 text, did not correct the errors in the 1972 Ace text. When
the Science Fiction Book Club issued Three Hainish Novels in 1978, the errors in
previous editions were finally corrected, by Jeff Levin's careful copy-editing. The first
appearance of the corrected version of "Nine Lives," after its initial
publication in Playboy, was not in the Ace paperback edition of World s Best
Science Fiction 1970, but was in the Ace SFBC edition. Likewise, a collector who
wants the first edition of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" will get the
Doubleday SFBC edition of New Dimensions 3, not the Signet paperback listed by
Cogell.
Except for these things, the primary bibliography is, as far as I can tell, free of
substantive errors. This is no mean achievement. ("An die Musik,"
"Rakaforta," and "Discovery," the titles of Le Guin's
first published story and two of her poems, should be italicised. It matters: Discovery,
Robert F. Scott's ship, and "discovery" represent two quite different signifieds.)
Index-learning should not just hold the eel of science; it should allow others to grasp
it as well. Researchers who set out to track down out of the way publications will have an
easier time of it if the G.K. Hall bibliographers would tell their readers more about
where they can locate rare items. Le Guin's story "Cake and Ice Cream" appeared
in Playgirl in 1973, but this is not the Playgirl we see on magazine
racks. The Playgirl containing Le Guin's story, which has never been reprinted,
was published in Indianapolis and has ceased publication. Placed in motels, it was a
magazine similar to the in-house magazines slipped into the pockets on the backs of
airplane seats. If Cogell had mentioned this, as well as identifying fanzine publishers,
or listing the locations of public or private collections of fanzines containing material
by or about Le Guin, she would save interlibrary loan librarians and their patrons
frustration and headaches. I know that this information is hard (though not impossible) to
come by, but I think we can expect it from a bibliographer who has not only published an
essay on library collections of SF, but also has had access to the author and the author's
papers. Cogell lists as "not seen" two interviews which appeared in the fanzine Entropy
Negative in 1971. Jeff Levin had a copy of the original fanzine; I have a copy of
that; and Joe De Bolt has a copy of my copy. Cogell acknowledges all three of us in her
"Preface" as generous providers of information when she sought it. Apparently
she never sought this piece, which contains important information on The Left Hand of
Darkness.
The largest section in the book by far (183pp.) is the annotated secondary
bibliography. The 761 (!) entries form a comprehensive list of "significant
analyses" of Le Guin from 1966 through 1979, with some 1980 and 1981 pieces added on.
Cogell says she excluded more book reviews than any other type of secondary material,
retaining only those reviews which were 100 words long, contained a significant critical
assessment, or helped chart Le Guin's reputation. She doesn't list the reviews she
excluded, nor does she list the other types of secondary material she excluded.
Nevertheless, I know of no important piece of Le Guin criticism in English that Cogell
does not list accurately and annotate. Once in a while she offers an evaluative comment
("oversimplifies," "erroneously asserts," "adds no new
information," "clearest and most faithful"), but Cogell's annotations are
on the whole descriptive, leaning heavily on short quotations from the secondary sources
themselves. More evaluative tags would be welcome; if a piece is trivial or unimportant,
Cogell could save the researcher some time by saying so.
Some might question the inclusion under "Critical Studies" of David
McAllester's "The Astonished Ethno-Muse," an essay on ethnomusicology which
merely quotes Le Guin without adding anything to our knowledge of Le Guin's fiction. On
the other hand, anyone serious enough about Le Guin to be reading Cogell's bibliography
may welcome its inclusion, for it is evidence that Le Guin's reputation spreads beyond SF,
beyond literary studies even, and is established among political scientists, sociologists,
anthropologists, Sinologists, and musicians. We can thank Cogell for assembling the
materials for a study in reception aesthetics, something that needs to be done for Le
Guin's SF and its criticism.
Reviewing the first four Hall bibliographies, Gary Wolfe suspected that SF "is out
to be the most indexed, bibliographied, collated, and cross-referenced body of literature
since the Pentateuch" (SFS, 8 11981]:224-26). True enough. When we start to get
annotations of annotations, the cup overfloweth: item D348 in Cogell's secondary
bibliography is an annotation of Molson's annotation of A Wizard of Earthsea from
Anatomy of Wonder--all the more reason for a standard appendix in future volumes
in the Hall series, similar to the lists of excluded reviews in the Simak and Williamson
volumes. This would satisfy the bibliographer's hunger for completeness, and would relieve
the congestion caused by filler and padding in the main bibliography. If Cogell's 28-page
index is the most valuable tool in the book, her publishing career, her non-fiction, and
her critical reception, is the least valuable. Any further concentration on Le Guin
herself, especially if it produces description of her like Cogell's--"a late
twentieth-century Taoist sage sans robe, forest hermitage, and flowing
beard"--will divert us from one (the?) main task: a critical reading and
understanding of the fiction, its place in the literary systems of the '60s and '70s, and
its roles, positive and negative, in the consciousness industries of our time. And
Cogell's survey of Le Guin's critical reception can be skipped entirely, not the least
because it is so poorly written. "Grouping the essays," writes Cogell,
"reveals a variety of categories in which study has taken place and suggest the
multiple levels of her work." Never mind the subject-verb agreement error; this
sentence, like too many others in the introductory essay, is simply opaque. Readers who
want to fashion an understanding of Le Guin's critical reception can appreciate Cogell's
marking out of the ore veins, but they will have to bring up the ore, assay it, smelt it,
refine it, and mold and hammer it themselves.
--James W. Bittner
Five from the Borgo Press
Science Fiction Voices 4: Interviews with Science
Fiction Writers. Conducted by Jeffrey M. Elliot; Science Fiction Voices 5: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers.
Conducted by Darrell Schweitzer; Brian M. Stableford. Masters
of Science Fiction: Essays on Six Science Fiction Authors; The Future of the Space
Program. Large Corporations and Society: Discussions
with 22 Science-Fiction Writers. Conducted by Jeffrey M. Elliot and
David Mogen, Wilderness Visions. Science Fiction
Westerns, Vol. 1 San Bernadino CA: Borgo Press, 1981 (except the last
title, 1982). 64pp. ea. $2.95 ea. (paper)
These five booklets illustrate a particular form of fan publishing which is at best
uneven. The first two are collections of interviews: Science Fiction Voices 4 is made
up of four interviews (3500-5000 words each) with: the "editor-fan" Charles D.
Hornig (an editor for Gernsback in the 1930s who left SF for book-keeping and became a war
resister and pacifist in the 1940s); the writer Bob Shaw; the SF illustrator Frank Kelly
Freas; and the "writer-academic" Brian M. Stableford. Science Fiction Voices
5 contains eight previously published interviews (from 1500 to 4500 words) with:
Isaac Asimov, Lin Carter, Lester del Rey, Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, Frank
Belknap Long, Clifford Simak, Wilson Tucker, and Jack Williamson. The interviews in both
collections are mainly anecdotal and convey something of the author's thoughts on writing
and SF as well as descriptions of working habits and techniques.
Brian Stableford's Essays on Six Science Fiction Authors consists of five
previously published essays (4500-6500 words): "Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett:
An Appreciation" (a review of The Best of Edmond Hamilton and of The
Best of Leigh Brackett); "Locked in the Slaughterhouse: The Novels of Kurt
Vonnegut" (on seven Vonnegut novels); "Insoluble Problems: Footnotes to Barry
Malzberg's Career in Science Fiction" (on the tensions between Malzberg's purpose as
a writer and the demands of a mass readership); "The Metamorphosis of Robert
Silverberg" (a quick look at the career of "the most prolific science fiction
writer of the past two decades"); and "Utopia--and Afterwards: Socio-economic
Speculation in the SF of Mack Reynolds." With the exception of this last (and
longest) essay, these pieces are rapid overviews that do little more than enumerate plots
and themes. The Reynolds essay is more useful because it chronicles the life and work of
an author who has not been widely studied. Unfortunately, in dealing with utopian themes
in Reynolds, Stableford makes what I consider some serious oversights. Of Soviet SF, he
writes: it "presents a consistent tone of optimistic self-congratulation while being
utterly devoid of any serious socio-economic speculation" (p. 44). His ignorance
(writing in 1979) of the Strugatskys' work is followed by an even more surprising
misjudgment of utopian developments in American SF. He states that Reynolds' Looking
Backwards from the Year 2000 is "the only significant Utopian novel to be
produced in the genre during the last forty years which does not tie its utopian
pretensions to some recommendation of 'technological retreat"' (p. 45). While
"technological retreat" might fit the utopia of Russ's Female Man, it
would demand some explanation if applied to Le Guin's The Dispossessed or
Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and it is completely inaccurate in terms of
Delany's Triton--to mention only my favorite utopian novels from the
1970s. Stableford goes even further astray in his conclusion when he asserts that Reynolds
is "the only contemporary Science Fiction author to have made a serious attempt to
design a utopian society" (p. 63).
The next two books are even more typical of fan publishing. The Future of the Space
Program is made up of the responses to two questions. Fifteen SF writers (including
Dickson, Gunn, Hogan, Lupoff, Niven, Vance, Van Vogt, Vinge, Yarbo, and Zelazny) answer
the question, "What explains the present lack of citizen interest in and support for
the U.S. space program?"; while 13 writers (including six from the first group)
respond to the question, "What role can and should science fiction writers play in
working with America's major corporations in planning for society's future?" The
range of answers to the first question is summed up by Mildred Downey Brown, who
attributes the lack of interest to the perception that the space program is
"boring," or "elitist," or "costs too much" or to a
"fear of the unknown," or "the unreality of the experience," or the
attitude that "none of us will ever get there" (pp. 5-6). Other writers
criticize NASA and/or public apathy, but only one writer (Lupoff) mentions the cost of the
arms race and the possibility of diverting some of that money into the space program. Most
of the writers are in favor of continuing the space program, but none of them mentions the
militarization of space now under wav--the major reason why I think that the
space program will continue despite the public's lack of interest.
The second question deals with SF insofar as the writers address the role and function
of SF in relationship to "society's future" (as future prediction; as a way of
conditioning readers to accept change; as simply escapism), but few of the writers are
very sanguine about either the possibility or the usefulness of acting as advisors to
large corporations. If you are interested in the questions, you may find the answers at
times worth your while.
To some extent Borgo Press redeems itself with the final book under review: David
Mogen's examination of the "frontier myth" in SF. After a rather defensive look
at criticisms of the "Western"/SF link ("The study might be described as
exploring the implications of a long-standing science fiction joke," p. 15), the
author defends the legitimacy of his study by arguing for the "Americanness" of
the frontier myth and its pertinence to understanding the specifically
"American" character of SF. In his second chapter, "The Frontier Metaphor
in American Culture," Mogen examines the "Turner thesis" ("the
presence of the frontier was the crucial influence in the process of 'Americanization'
that shaped American institutions and American culture," p. 17), and the subsequent
debates around this position. Having argued that the frontier myth is important as a
"metaphor"--and not as "an accurate description of historical
processes" (p. 19)--Mogen turns to his central thesis:
Essentially science fiction has adopted new techniques to validate frontier myths.
Where the Western presents a vanished frontier whose reality is documented as convincingly
as possible, science fiction projects the frontier into the future and documents its
reality by means of scientific extrapolation. In either case the 'frontier' is made up of
factual data shaped to form a vision of the nature and significance of the American Dream.
(pp. 20-21 )
In his next chapter, "The Frontier Myth as Prophecy," Mogen develops a second
hypothesis, which will determine his choice of what SF novels to discuss. Whereas the
Western is "nostalgic" (the frontier lies in the past), in SF the dominant
emotion is often "impatient anticipation of the wonders of tomorrow" (p. 29).
Rather than consider what he calls the "metaphorical use of the frontier myth (e.g.,
in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles), Mogen is interested in the "literal"
uses of the myth in those writers for whom "the space frontier really is there,
literally there, providing a genuine alternative to the mess we've made of life on
Earth" (p. 28). In his final chapter, the author gives us a lengthy (and not very
interesting) reading of the fiction of Heinlein published as The Past Through Tomorrow
(and primarily of The Man Who Sold the Moon), followed by a brief look at
how Asimov modifies this theme (in "The Martian Way" and in Caves of Steel).
In what is perhaps the most interesting of his readings, Mogen points to a structural
inconsistency in Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants. Despite the authors'
satiric treatment of the "American frontier myth" ("which functions as an
integral part of an exploitative system for distributing power and wealth," pp.
61-62), the novel succumbs, according to Mogen, to the very myth it attempts to lay bare:
Though The Space Merchants spends much of its time lampooning the absurdity of
importing myths from our frontier past into the context of the Space Age, it finds its
resolution in the tried and true American solution to social and personal problems: escape
to the frontier. (p. 62)
While the frontier myth in SF is a plausible and interesting subject, particularly in
terms of Mogen's "reversal" of the impact of the myth, from nostalgia in the
Western to anticipation and optimism in SF, the author does not seem to follow through in
his actual readings, particularly insofar as he chooses to restrict his analysis to the SF
tradition which "employs frontier analogies to romanticise the possibilities opened
up by space travel.. ." (p. 34). Aside from problems with the "frontier
myth" itself, to which I shall return, this myth has, according to Mogen's
presentation of the debate around it, an all-embracing significance for an understanding
of both the "American character" and the Western genre--a significance which it
lacks in SF. In SF the frontier myth cannot be shown to be a central organizing myth.
More- over, in restricting himself to the "literal" use of the frontier myth,
the frontier is read in terms of a "tradition" (namely "scientific
extrapolation") which for many SF readers and critics is not the central concern or
function of the genre.
As for the frontier myth itself--and in this I am not so much criticizing Mogen as the
historians and sociologists to whom he refers (Folsom, Fussell, Slotkin, etc.)--I think
that there are some serious questions to be raised. Myths, as Roland Barthes has shown us,
are not innocent. The fact that the critics Mogen cites argue for the consideration of the
frontier myth as a "metaphor" rather than as an "accurate description of
historical processes" is an ideological operation which attempts to conceal all that
is shameful and reprehensible in the history of the American frontier (a reality to which
Mogen does allude, pp. 14-15), most especially the subjugation and plunder of the peoples
already living on the lands which became the "frontier" for the white European
immigrants. But for the critics to whom Mogen refers, the historical situation is
different: "the colonization process in American culture is a myth of nation-building
and forming the national character, rather than of simply subjugating new
territory" (p. 14; my emphasis). It is not the people who have been subjugated,
according to this account, but territory.
In these terms, the "function" of the frontier myth as a way of defining the
nature of the American character" (p. 17) takes on a new meaning. The role of the
historians and students of the frontier is to disguise as much as possible the brutal
actions of the European colonists. Consequently it would perhaps be more accurate to
describe the "frontier" as a myth whose "signified" is the
legitimization of the white Americans' own right to the land their ancestors had stolen.
The "frontier" is a metaphor which appears in a number of contemporary
discourses apart from SF--in Western films and novels as well as in history and sociology
and, more pragmatically, in advertising, the space program, or today's politics; but its
meaning cannot be given in the terms of any of those ideological discourses. Although the
"metaphor" circulates from discourse to discourse, we can only grasp its meaning
in what has been repressed in the metaphor: the actual historical rape and plunder of
America's indigenous peoples. In terms of the thematics of SF one should turn not to the
explicit opposition Mogen proposes--the "metaphorical" versus the
"literal" uses of the myth--but to the spectrum implicit in his
account, a spectrum which runs from the critical rejection of the myth of the frontier (to
use Mogen's examples: in Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest ) to Heinlein's
enthusiastic endorsement of that same myth. Others might argue further with Mogen's
analysis by pointing out that SF frontiers are not necessarily future-oriented, or that
there is a distinction to be made between inhabited and uninhabited SF frontiers, or that
the Frontier theme overlaps with the themes of the Alien and First Contact. My basic
point, however, is that to write about the frontier in SF, one must first of all examine
more critically than Mogen in fact does the "metaphor" itself.
Mogen's work is nevertheless a serious essay. But the rest of these Borgo Press
productions can be characterized as fan writing, and fan writing hardly on a par with what
can be found in a good fanzine.
--Peter Fitting
[Robert Reginald's response appears in SFS 32
(March 1984).]
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