BOOKS IN REVIEW
American Science Fiction Summarily
Treated
Thomas D. Clareson. Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction.
["Contributions
to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy," No. 16.] Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1985. xiv + 248pp. $29.95; Science Fiction in America,
1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources.
["Bibliographies and Indexes in American Literature," No. 1.] Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1984. xiv + 305pp. $35.00
These two books provide important source material for the study of SF, particularly as
it developed in popular American fiction during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The annotated bibliography includes basic publication information and plot summaries for
838 books, arranged alphabetically from Abbott's Flatland to Zamiatin's We. Most
of the entries are by American writers, but as these opening and concluding items
indicate, British and (less often) Continental writers are listed when they had a
significant impact on the field. This principle--which Clareson follows in Some Kind
of Paradise as well--seems to me eminently sane, but the Abbott and Zamiatin entries
reveal deficiencies in the bibliography: "Abbott" is erroneously cited as
"Abbot," and the description of We omits the translator's name. (Indeed,
aside from the statement that We is an "attack upon the U.S.S.R. [that] has
never been published in Russia," there is no indication that the book was originally
written in Russian, although it was first published in English translation.) A spot check
of other entries, however, reveals only a few minor errors, so these problems with the
first and last entries may be atypical. Two indices--one each for authors and for
titles--help to make the bibliography easy to use, especially for those of us who want a
quick plot summary of an out-of-the-way novel whose author we cannot recall.
I would find the bibliography annotations more helpful if they included frequent
cross-references between entries, but for connections among various SF works of this
period we can always turn to Some Kind of Paradise, a sort of critical history of
American SF (with, again, consideration of significant non-American contributors to the
field). Here, as in the bibliography, Clareson casts a wide net, including discussions of
many works that seem to me to belong to the realms of fantasy, horror, or adventure
fiction; but the focus is certainly on fiction that is related to the development of SF in
America. Within the given period and genre, few works of undeniable significance are
omitted, although in the description of the Gothic tradition from The Castle of
Otranto on, it seems curious that there is no discussion of James Hogg's Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), one of the most complex and
intriguing Doppelganger novels ever written. Again, I would have expected at least a
brief mention of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), either in the
part of the utopia chapter dealing with societies ruled by women or in the chapter on
voyages to lost or previously undiscovered lands. The references to hundreds of other
works, however, compensate for the places where Clareson has missed an obviously important
novel or story.
Because few readers will be familiar with more than a small fraction of the many
narratives that Clareson discusses, Some Kind of Paradise necessarily includes a
great deal of plot summary. The summaries are, in fact, the strong point of the volume:
although on occasion Clareson provides us with real insights into the works, his critical
interpretations and evaluations are generally perfunctory. There is also much less
background material than I would have expected in a critical study of this sort: after the
first chapter, which includes an overview of technological, demographic, and economic
developments in late 19th and early 20th-century America, the book concentrates on plot
elements, showing how various authors used a narrative formula like the journey to an
unknown land or the description of a utopian society. The relative paucity of critical
commentary is especially annoying because the materials dealt with here are so rich in
political, economic, and psychological implications. Hence, while the book describes many
plots dealing with racial matters--"yellow peril" stories of Asian invasions of
America, for example, and tales involving a hero's relationship to an exotic non-Caucasian
woman--there is little analysis of the implications of these motifs or of the forces that
caused them to be so popular, so that we are left with little more than the raw materials
for a real critical study.
One final problem with Some Kind of Paradise is that the paragraph development
is sometimes confusing. In the Acknowledgments, for example, Clareson writes that he
"put aside" SF "until I needed a dissertation topic. Professor Harold Whitehall
and others at Indiana University encouraged my early suggestions for a topic, but it was
such teachers as Robert Spiller, Thomas Haviland, Maurice Johnson, and Allen Chester who
conducted the final oral examination in 1955" (p. ix). I thought I understood from this
that Clareson was a PhD candidate at Indiana, where Whitehall encouraged his work and
Spiller and the others mentioned above formed his dissertation committee; but two pages
later, in the Introduction, I came across the statement that Clareson "began [his]
formal study of the emergence of American science fiction at the University of
Pennsylvania under Professor Robert E. Spiller" (p. xi). A check with The Directory
of American Scholars reveals that Clareson took his M.A. at Indiana and his PhD at
Penn; had he taken more time to indicate that sequence of events in the Acknowledgments, I
would have followed him without having to consult a reference book.
It seems petty to quibble about the front material, but similar problems appear in the
main text, where the lack of coherence can be distracting. Take, for instance, these
sentences dealing with Edgar Rice Burroughs:
For more than thirty years something about him and his adventures appealed to a wide,
popular audience. Supposedly that audience was predominantly adolescent males. (Such a
judgment ignores a basic fact, one which pairs him with the indomitable hero of the 1930s,
Doc Savage. In the 1960s Ballantine Books reissued both Tarzan and the Doc Savage titles,
never letting either go out of print.) (p. 188)
The "judgment" that "ignores a basic fact" is apparently the idea that
Tarzan's devotees were mainly teenaged males, but what the "basic fact" might be,
and how the rest of the quoted material bears on the appeal of Tarzan for adolescent boys,
is far from clear.
Despite their shortcomings, both books contain important material on a significant
aspect of American popular culture. No one who plans serious work on early American SF can
afford to ignore Clareson's contributions to the study of this field.
--Patrick A. McCarthy University of Miami,
Florida
Zelazny Deserves Better
Theodore Krulik. Roger
Zelazny.
NY: Ungar, 1986. xiv + 178pp. $15.95
The first thing to say about Theodore Krulik's Roger Zelazny is that it's a
hell of a lot better than the only other volume in Ungar's Recognition Series on Science
Fiction and Fantasy which I have seen--the truly awful Samuel R. Delany by Seth
McEvoy. This may not be saying much, but Krulik has at least done his "homework,"
reading all the texts and interviewing Zelazny, at great length, on a number of thematic
concerns. Of course, McEvoy had corresponded with Delany, which meant that he had at least
a few pages of intelligent writing in his book--the few pages of Delany's letters or
original texts he quoted. Actually, "homework" may be the telling word here, for Krulik is a highschool teacher, and the (now) two examples of Ungar's criticism I have
perused appear to be aimed at high school students, if indeed they are aimed at anyone.
Krulik's approach is breezy and off-hand, which leads to more than a few awkward
sentences. It is also determinedly biographical and thematic, as such chapter titles as
"Wondrous Wordsmith," "Immortality and Interstellar Relations," "Flawed
Knights," and "Visions and Deities" demonstrates. Very early on, Krulik describes
Zelazny, whom he visited for a week of interviews, and points to what he perceives as the
physical, emotional, and mental similarities between the author and his various
protagonists. Throughout, he is given to redundant and simplified plot summaries, always
brought forward in the service of a thematic reading of each text. The plot summaries are
especially annoying. Whom are they for? Certainly not anyone who has read the books. My
guess is that they are part of the general strategy of this series, nobly offering young
readers who have not read a particular author a chance to discover why he or she is really
worth reading. But I must say I can't quite see the value of such an approach, since those
who tend not to pick up fiction on their own are highly unlikely to pick up a non-fiction
book which has no other purpose than to entice them towards the fiction they refuse to
read.
And of course there are definite critical problems with the breezy,
"tell-the-story" approach, as Krulik's reading of the Pei'an religion in To Die
in Italbar and Isle of the Dead shows. Krulik first tells us that Francis
Sandow "has control of an alien god" (p. 38), only to say a few pages later that
"two deities rip and tear up [a] planet in their battle, oblivious to the
endangerment of their human hosts" (p. 40). Ignoring the ugliness of a word like
"endangerment," this is simply poor reading on the most superficial level; and it's
also the kind of thing a good copy-editor would have caught and checked. Other
infelicities I think good editing would have saved readers from include an immense amount
of unnecessary repetition over and above the redundant plot summaries: such as the four
references to the narrator's lack of a name in My Name is Legion. A number of
dumb typos don't help matters. The lack of such editing, here and in the Delany volume,
suggests that Ungar thinks it has a sure market for books on SF and simply isn't bothering
to take the trouble to provide that market with anything of real value. The ghetto lives
on.
Nevertheless, Krulik is an enthusiastic reader of Zelazny, and it is clear that he
really enjoys the man's writing. Moreover, within his limitations he is willing to judge,
and does suggest that some books are better than others. But the thematic approach
obstructs any really interesting critical thinking at every turn (I speak as someone who
knows just how dangerous such an approach can be, since it has done great damage to the
study of Canadian Literature over the past few decades). Krulik keeps coming back to
certain texts as he shifts from theme to theme, but the problem is clear. The stories
appear to be interesting only insofar as the themes are. Nowhere are the textural
qualities that mark Zelazny's best writing as unique and memorable ever explored. Four
times, for example, Krulik refers to Delany's brilliant essay, "Faust and Archimedes:
Disch, Zelazny," yet he never elicits anything more out of it than that the twined themes
of immortality and suicide are to be found in Zelazny's work. If SF's version of Virginia
Woolf's "Common Reader" couldn't figure that out on her own, nobody could, for the dedicated fans are among the more sophisticated readers of genre.
Actually, what's really disappointing about this little book is how far short of its
subject it falls. It would be mean to expect anyone to approach a Delany's brilliance, but
Krulik never even tries to approach Delany's comprehension of the complex network of
style, form, and energy of performance in Zelazny. If you want to learn something about
Zelazny's writing, Delany's few pages offers more solid information than Krulik's nearly
200 pages do. Zelazny's comments in the interviews are occasionally intriguing, but as
they are mostly autobiographical, they do little to add to our sense of what the writing
is really about, what it does. I return to certain Zelazny texts because they offer me a
particular kind of delight, a delight which can only be found in texts. The most
interesting criticism I know helps me to understand how texts engage a reader, or they at
least register for me some of the complexities of a text's texture. Krulik's book told me
nothing I could not or had not figured out for myself, and I believe the same could be
said for any fairly well-read SF reader. Certainly, as far as the readers of SFS are
concerned, it would only be a waste of time and money to invest in this book.
--Douglas Barbour University of Alberta
William Sims Bainbridge. Dimensions of Science Fiction.
Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1986. 278pp. $20.00
Bainbridge is a Harvard sociologist who has looked into delinquency, Satanic and other
cults, the Shakers and other Utopian communities. About time, some would say, that he
turned his analytical techniques on the readership of SF. Actually, he is also a
third-generation reader of SF and has contributed an article on the "shape" of it to
this journal (see
SFS, 5 [1978]: 165-71). It is his clear
affection for the genre, if anything, that compromises the objectivity of his study...and
greatly increases its value for the common reader.
Bainbridge sees the SF subculture of writers, editors, and fans as a tangle of social
movements promulgating radical "ideologies." He separates these into three
varieties:
each urging a different course for the human future, each proposing its own plan as the
most rewarding choice and warning that the alternatives would impose undesirable costs.
Hard science is the traditional form of SF, based on speculations about technology
and the physical sciences. New wave is more concerned with literary technique,
the psychology of characters, and the social sciences. The fantasy cluster
is a collection of subgenres more concerned with magic than with the sciences,
its largest province being sword-and-sorcery, a form of literature that rejects the modern
world and most of contemporary culture. (p. 7)
As a sociologist, Bainbridge is much concerned with his research method, which is
statistical. His primary data base is a set of 595 responses to a questionnaire
distributed at the 1978 Iguanacon World SF Convention held in Phoenix, Arizona. Among
other things, he asked respondents to rate 140 authors (including two fake ones with whose
non-existent works 46 conventioneers claimed familiarity!), and from their answers he
constructs, or reproduces from other surveys, 10 sets of figures and 25 tables. Some
readers may agree with Bainbridge that these quantitative displays form the firm core of
his contribution to knowledge. I cannot say whether the sociology subculture will find his
uses of such concepts as "ideology," "radicality," and even "deviance"
sufficiently orthodox.
I prefer the rest of the book, which emanates from Bainbridge's wide reading of SF and
its students, and harks back in its way to an earlier "arm-chair" kind of analysis,
at once more literate and philosophical. It is this aspect of Bainbridge's exposition that
produces the many story summaries and speculative extrapolations on the power of
imagination, women in SF, and enlightenment and transcendence, as well as moments like
this:
At the time of Iguanacon, editor Ted White explained, 'The phrase most
commonly linked with that of SF over the past thirty or more years is "sense
of wonder." A[n] SF
reader cannot help but have this sense, this almost mystical awe at the grandiose wonders
of our vast universe, and the magical delight in exploring those wonders.' For decades
fans have lamented the loss of wonder in the most recent SF. In the old days, some say,
there was a sense of wonder, but no longer. To some thoughtful critics, like Alva Rogers,
this sense of wonder lay not in the stories themselves but in the shock of first contact
with SF experienced by young readers: 'In the final analysis a Sense of Wonder is the
priceless possession of the youthful discoverer of SF; it may last for a short fleeting
instant, or it may stay with him for a number of years. At any rate, it is sooner or later
lost, seldom to be recovered.' (pp. 24-25)
Let us hope some such feeling continues to sustain the social scientist as he toils at
his log-linear analyses of the inexhaustible modes of deviance.
--Richard Dwyer
Florida International
University
Visual and Verbal Expressions of
Sexuality
Donald Palumbo, ed. Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature.
["Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy," No. 18.] Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1986. xviiii + 305pp. $35.00; Eros in
the Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film.
["Contributions
to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy," No. 21.] Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1986. xxxvi + 290pp., illus. $35.00
There is much to be learned about the genres of SF and fantasy and their relationship
to our understanding and expressions of sexuality. Donald Palumbo's two editions of essays
on this subject (compiled from papers given at the 1982 and 1983 International Conferences
on the Fantastic in the Arts and National Popular Culture Association Meetings) certainly
make one aware of this, both in the realm of literature (Erotic Universe) and in
the visual arts (Eros in the Mind's Eye).
In his preface to Erotic Universe, Palumbo correctly claims that this volume
"identifies the most salient concerns, themes, viewpoints, and motifs evident in a
broad spectrum of the literature itself" (p. xvi). The same claim can be made for Eros
in the Mind's Eye, and anyone seeking points of departure in this area might find the
essays and the appended bibliographies of use. However, anyone looking for fresh ways to
examine the nature of, and the relationships among, sexuality, SF, fantasy, psychosexual
theory, and feminist issues, will have to look very hard. Although the essays of Erotic
Universe are categorized under "Theory," "Themes," and "Feminist
Views," in actuality they are mostly thematic studies which analyze specific novels
according to appropriate motifs and ideas. For example, Judith Bogert's "Survival:
The Search for an Ethic in a Changing World" begins with an assertion that a society is
often caught between the need to establish moral codes in order to ensure stability and
the need to challenge those codes to allow for change. This then becomes the theme which
she traces in a number of SF novels, essentially abandoning theoretical considerations for
textual illumination.
The nature of content in SF poses interesting and problematic issues in theorizing
about sexuality. William M. Schuyler, Jr, in "Sexes, Genders, and Discrimination,"
believes that philosophers (and I assume theoreticians) would do well to listen to SF
writers:
What philosophers have needed is a stock of examples already worked out in great
detail, and some have realized that for many problems, such a stock can be found in
science fiction. Specifically, science fiction provides a remarkable range of closely
analyzed approaches to human sexuality. (p. 46)
This statement provokes certain questions about relying on the content of SF for
authoritative evidence (a reliance motivated by the resemblance between SF and scientific
method). Virginia Allen and Terri Paul argue, in "Science and Fiction: Ways of
Theorizing about Women," that "good science fiction has a mandate to explore ideas
that do not fit within the prevailing paradigm" (p. 170). The problem arises when a
social or psychological theorizing is attempted on the basis of literary content. Many of
the essays in the two volumes under review made me realize that students of SF must be
clearly aware of the source and nature of a novel's content-- its value and limitations as
a source of authority. Can literary analysis of SF enter into and contribute to the
discourse of other speculative disciplines? Perhaps; not, however, by the analytical
methodology of some of these essays, not through the content of a novel or film, but
possibly through the discourse, the means by which the content is created, as literary
(not scientific, philosophical, or sociological) discourse.
Brooks Landon's essay "Eve at the End of the World: Sexuality and the Reversal of
Expectations in Novels by Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, and Thomas Berger" is the best of
the lot, because he understands the above issue. Landon is the only one who clearly
differentiates a novel's content and its discourse, taking into consideration
post-structuralist theory (he is the only one to mention Eric Rabkin's very important The
Fantastic in Literature). It is no coincidence that Landon chooses three authors
who assume the images of women to be the product of patriarchal discourse, who
"attempt to recast or re-energize images of women in formula literature..." (p. 62)
within that discourse. Landon clearly knows the literature which he writes about and, as
he points out, his "discussion of these three novels, although it need not be too
theoretical, raises a number of theoretical issues" (p. 63). He is responsibly
provocative, and so are the authors he chose.
The feminist readings of SF in both volumes yield few new insights into the issues of
feminism, although someone not fully "consciousness-raised" will become sensitized
to the reality that we live in a patriarchal society characterized by a sadomasochistic
pattern of dominance and submission, which has become gender-aligned (to put it simply,
women lack power). That perception, Palumbo's feminist essayists indicate, is what many SF
and fantasy writers have taken as the basis for further--fictionalized--speculation.
Probably the most intriguing concept in this regard--one that feminists tend to ignore--is
that there is power in submission. That is a point Schuyler makes ("this masochism arises
not from a desire to submit but from an urge to dominate"); but he then cavalierly
dismisses the whole issue with "so much for the dominance-submission theory of gender
difference" (p. 54).
The Freudian readings yield about as much as the feminist ones. Andrew Gordon's
"The Power of the Force: Sex in the Star Wars Trilogy" (in Eros...)
is one of the better examples of this approach, accurately identifying the psychosexual
dimensions of the relationships between the protagonists of the trilogy.
The best analyses of single works are Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith's
"Again, The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny or Homophobia?" (in Erotic
Universe); and Anthony Ambrogio's "Alien: In Space, No One Can Hear
Your Primal Scream" and John Kilgore's "Sexuality and Identity in The Rocky
Horror Picture Show " (both in Eros...). Anyone wishing to understand this
popular cultural phenomenon must read Kilgore's essay. He accurately identifies Rocky
Horror as a post-modernist text, one which parodies the themes and conventions of
our sexual discourse, "but with an affectionate touch, striving less for ridicule
than for illumination. It prefers to make the sexual subtext explicit" (p. 155)--a
subtext that reveals our fears of the transsexual dimensions of our sexuality.
Eros in the Mind's Eye proposes the same thorough treatment of "the
depiction of sexuality in fantastic artworks employing visual media, primarily
two-dimensional art and film" (p. xv), as was proposed for literature in the companion
volume Erotic Universe. Essays in this volume focus on visual arts, high and
popular, from Medieval through contemporary. Actually, this volume deals with two very
different genres--the purely visual of the plastic arts and the visual narrative of film.
The essays on the plastic arts are predominantly informative and are addressed to anyone
interested in knowing what exists iconically. The essays on film focus exclusively on
narrative content; and since none deals with the cinematic dimension of film, they could
have easily been included in the volume on literature.
Finally, I would like to observe that publishing conference papers is fine, but that
there is a difference between hearing a paper and reading that same paper. Clever rhetoric
and cute expressions which enliven a reading become annoying when seen in print.
Apparently Palumbo did not take this into account when he asked contributors for revision.
--Kenneth E. Johnson
Florida International
University
A Utopian Synthesis
Guy Bouchard, Laurent Giroux, & Gilbert Leclerc. L'Utopie aujourd'hui.
Montréal &
Sherbrooke: Presses de l'Université de Montréal & Éditions de l'Université de
Sherbrooke, 1985. 272pp. $23.50
As its title indicates, the object of this work is twofold. First of all, its authors
give an up-to-date account of theoretical research on the concept of utopia. And, as the
second meaning of the title implies, they analyze the point which the utopian imagination
is at in our contemporary world, and use it as a source of social criticism.
In effect, utopia has always lain at the heart of historical progression; it fills
ideological lacunae in that it represents a human aspiration towards the Ideal City. The
resurgence of related studies since the 1960s is proof of its importance today. The
authors provide a minute account of theoretical knowledge of their subject as they analyze
the connections between utopia and philosophy, sociology, and literature. They further
expand their study by presenting their own hypotheses on utopia and the possible
directions such thinking might take. Despite a certain long-windedness, this book can be
considered a rigorous tool with which to approach the phenomenon of utopia.
In the lead essay, "L'Utopie: naissance, croissance, mort...et résurrection"
("Utopia: Birth, Growth, Death...and Resurrection"), Laurent Giroux analyzes
different philosophies as utopian, from Plato to Callenbach. He examines the possible ways
one might go beyond both ideological anchoring in a social context and linkage to the
future of contemporary humankind. Giroux's diachronic study follows a dialectic movement.
Utopia was born in the very foundations of the Platonic City, which is voluntarily
utopian and oriented towards an ideal of rationality. But, Giroux says, this type of
rationality, which was later stripped of wisdom and confiscated by power, has rendered
inoperable all other utopias which tried to overthrow this resulting tyrannical
rationality. Utopia, then, had become an illusion by which one can conquer political power
and its legitimation.
Retracing the growth of the philosophical utopias from Kant and Hegel to Marcuse, the
author emphasizes that Platonic tyranny has taken the form of technocracy. On the other
hand, he notes that the resolutions to realize utopia throughout history were
paradoxically thwarted by economic, technological, and political powers.
Utopia finds itself, therefore, confronted by a kind of death or impasse rather than
its potential liberator. In Heidegger's philosophy, Giroux looks for the explanation of
the nature of humankind's rapport with technology and the possibility of a utopian path.
In contemporary times, the interaction of human beings and nature has been warped to make
profit a way of life. The essence of humanity has been left by the wayside. Heideggerian
philosophy proposes entry into freedom over our destiny by not using plan or forethought.
There are, though, backroads (chemins de chantier ) which Giroux considers to be
utopian in essence. The actual realization of these openings finally brings us, according
to the author, back to the Platonic dream of Good, which cannot be realized voluntarily,
without imposition and therefore without self-destruction. Consequently, he feels that
the utopian dream of Good is part of the essence of humanity, and therein lies our
freedom.
Gilbert Leclerc's contribution to the volume, "L'Éducation permanente comme
modèle utopique" ("Continuing Education as Utopian Model"), is interesting in that
it examines the actualization of a utopian idea. Continuing education, by virtue of its
rapid development and consecration as well as, most especially, its universality, strikes Leclerc as being utopian in its essence: having become synonymous with complete
educational reform, it is also a means of recasting society in an Educational City. He
defines utopia and continuing education according to the Weberian notion of ideal types,
and then puts the utopian models for education in a historical context which shows them
engendering social praxis and thereby forwarding the process of social development.
Bulking largest in the volume is Guy Bouchard's "Eutopie, dystopie, para-utopie et
péri-utopie" and its lengthy continuation "L'Hétéropolitique de l'histoire"
("The Heteropolitics of History"). In the first of these essays, Bouchard describes
utopia as standing "at the confluence of the novel and theory, where idealized
sociopolitical themes are integrated into an eidetic fiction" (p. 165), and thence as
being an integral part of SF, especially in its eutopian and dystopian manifestations. The
latter Bouchard distinguishes from two other less familiar concepts: para-utopia,
designating non-fiction texts with idealized socio-political contents, and peri-utopia,
signifying fictional texts with non-idealized socio-political contents. With reference to
works by Orwell, Boulle, Bruss, and others, Bouchard then concentrates on dystopian
writings in an effort to determine the function of utopia: to awaken the political
conscience of readers, to criticize the present and thus provide an insight into the
future. Alluding to a large range of utopian ideologies (millenarianism, Marxism,
anarchism, etc.), he demonstrates in his own way the link between utopia and history.
Largely influenced by Ernst Bloch, he points to the alliance between utopian and
revolutionary impulses and makes a case for the urgency of inaugurating a utopian
"heteropolitics" within the context of human development and evolution. In the face
of expanding theoretical research on utopia, L'Utopie aujourd'hui offers a
synthesis of already-recognized ideas which also opens up new ways of exploring its
subject.
--Sophie Beaulé
McGill University
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