BOOKS IN REVIEW
- Clareson's Voices
and Slusser's Heinlein (S.C.
Fredericks)
-
A
Bibliography and 49 Reprints (Neil Barron, ed. Anatomy
of Wonder. Science Fiction) (R.D. Mullen)
- The
SF Reprint Series II: Scholarship and Commercialism ( David Russen. Iter Lunare: Or, A Voyage to the Moon; C.I. Defontenay. Star
(Psi Cassiopeia); Man Abroad: A Yarn of Some Other Century. Frank R.
Stockton. The Science Fiction of Frank R. Stockton: An Anthology; Robert Cromie. A
Plunge into Space; John Munro. A Trip to Venus; Stanley Waterloo. Armageddon:
A Tale of Love, War, and Invention; Ellsworth Douglas. Pharoah's Broker: Being
the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isador Werner (Written by Himself).
Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer [i.e. Ford Madox Ford). The Inheritors: An
Extravagant Story; H.G. Wells. The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine..
David G. Hartwell and L.W. Currey, eds. The Battle of the Monsters and Other Stories:
An Anthology of American Science Fiction; Leonard Kip, "The Secret of
Appollonius Septrio"; Robert W. Chambers, "The Repairer of
Reputations"; W.C. Morrow, "The Monster-Maker"; Morgan Robertson. "The
Battle of the Monsters"; Jack London, "A Thousand Deaths";
Simon Newcomb, "The End of the World"; Rowan Stevens, "The
Battle for the Pacific: Sorakichi--Prometheus"; William J. Henderson, "Harry
Borden's Naval Monster: A Ship of the Air" ; George Locke. Worlds
Apart.; W.S. Lach-Szyrma, "Letters from the Planets"; John Fleming
Wilson, "The Rejected Planet"; Geo. C. Wallis, "The Great
Sacrifice" ; George Parsons Lathrop, "In the Deep of Time";
Bertram Atkey, "The Strange Case of Alan Moraine"; Ellsworth
Douglas and Edwin Pallander, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves"; George
Allan England. "A Message from the Moon"; Owen Oliver, "The
Black Shadow"; George Griffith, "Stories of Other Worlds"
William Hope Hodgson. The Boats of the "Blen Carrig"; The
House on the Borderland; The Ghost Pirates; The Nightland: A Love Tale;
George Allan England. The Air Trust; Victor Rousseau [i.e. V.R. Emanuel]. The
Sea Demons; Erle Cox. Out of the Silence S. Fowler Wright. The World
Below; John Taine [i.e. Eric Temple Bell]. The Iron Star; J.M. Walsh. Vandals
of the Void; Philip Wylie. The Murderer Invisible; Friedrich Mader. Distant
Worlds; Olaf Stapledon. Last Men in London; Eden Phillpotts. Saurus; Thomas
Calvert McClary. Rebirth: When Everyone Forgot; John W. Campbell, Jr. Who
Goes There?: Seven Tales of Science Fiction.; Cloak of Aesir; Jack Finney. The
Body Snatchers; Philip K. Dick. Solar Lottery; Paul Anderson. War of the
Wing-Men; Theodore Sturgeon. Venus Plus X.; Fritz Leiber. The Big Time;
Daniel F. Galouye. Dark Universe; Jack Vance; Brian W. Aldiss. Hothouse; Samuel
R. Delany. The Jewels of Apto; Roger Zelazny. The Dream Master; Alexi
Panshin. Rite of Passage; Michael Moorcock. The Final Programme; Joanna
Russ. Alyx; D.G. Compton. The Steel Crocodile; James Tiptree, Jr. Ten
Thousand Light-Years from Home; Thomas M. Disch. 334; Norman Spinrad, ed. Modern
Science Fiction; R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin, eds. Science-Fiction Studies:
Selected Articles ) (Joe Sanders)
- Essays
on The Glass Bead Game / Magister Ludi (Franz Rottensteiner)
- Rabkin's
The Fantastic in Literature (R.D. Mullen)
- Jules
Verne by His Grandson (Charles Nicol)
- Three
Special Issues on Utopian Fiction (Marc Angenot)
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Clareson's Voices and Slusser's
Heinlein
Thomas D. Clareson, ed., Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers.
Bowling Green University Popular Press, vii+283, $4.95 pb, $12.50 hb.
This collection of essays is a modest, but solid, contribution to science-fiction
criticism. Perhaps the best gauge of the critical progress which it represents is to
compare the treatments of specific authors in this volume with relevant chapters in Sam
Moskowitz's Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow. Clareson's
authors, like Moskowitz, emphasize individual authors and their works, but with far
greater sophistication as critics and with much more success in approaching SF narratives
as literature. As well, these authors attempt to go beyond plot-summaries to
discuss the importance of SF themes for contemporary culture in areas like space
exploration, first contact with extraterrestrial life and alien intelligence, the limits
of scientific knowledge, and the implications of new forms of religious consciousness or
sexual sensibility.
Three of the essays are outstanding contributions which might become fairly permanent
additions to the secondary literature. James Gunn's "Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Lewis
Padgett et al." is a long overdue appraisal of a pair of writers who, singly
or in tandem, "contributed substantially to the evolution of science fiction during
the formative early stages of the modern period" (p 187). Excellently written, Gunn's
essay is generous and positive in its approach, emphasizing the authors' successes and
innovations, and especially their studied awareness of mainstream literary
culture and their high ideals of stylistic craftsmanship. Thus, Gunn is right to
generalize that "much of the development in science fiction over the past twenty
years has come along the lines they pioneered" (p 194). Gunn's essay is the best in
the entire collection for coordinated control of both analytical and historical levels of
interpretation. It also opens up new prospects for sympathetic treatment of other Golden
Age SF writers who have not yet received their due from academic critics.
David Samuelson's "The Frontier Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein" is the longest
and most detailed essay in the book. Those acquainted with SF criticism are accustomed to
a high quality of scholarship from Samuelson, and they will not be disappointed here (in
particular I refer the reader to the excellent footnotes to this essay, certainly one of
its outstanding features). The scale of the essay permits ample consideration of
Heinlein's innovations as one of SF's most important "frontier" artists and his
subsequent development as writer, while any number of individual novels and short stories
are opened to insightful analysis in passing. Samuelson is willing to be generous and
open-minded in his reaction to works like Starship Trooper, whose militarism
offends many critics; to Glory Road, whose ironies elude most readers and
critics; and even to Stranger in a Strange Land, whose depiction of a new
religion and sexual code is usually read in literal-minded fashion. Samuelson has happily
taken us a critical step beyond the negative and polemical evaluation of Heinlein by
Alexei Panshin, but I still think even this excellent reading focuses too much on
Heinlein's faults and failures. Also, "fantasy" remains--unsatisfactorily to
this reviewer--a negative concept (pp 132-47), which is sometimes used to mean
"improbable SF," sometimes to mean sex-and-immortality wish-fulfillments as in
Heinlein's latest novels.
Thomas L. Wymer's "The Swiftian Satire of Kurt Vonnegut" is a convincing
analysis of a writer whose own popularity has made him difficult (unlike the other, more
typical SF writers dealt with in this volume, Vonnegut has been the object of a great deal
of secondary literature, as witness the notes to the essay). Wymer transfers to Vonnegut a
critical approach that has been successful with Swift: to take into account the
"problem of the second irony." That is, the satire contains an obvious subject
for direct humorous attack (the so-called "thesis" layer), but there is a second
subject, much more ambiguous than the first, which may, at first, seem to be morally
acceptable to the satirist, but which, on further consideration, is the object of subtle,
indirect attack (the "antithesis" layer). Thus, there arise figures like Billy
Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse-Five, who seem innocent victims of a black-humored
cosmos to many readers, yet who are--in Wymer's schema--more correctly viewed as
"agent-victims," willing encouragers of the same vicious system which will
destroy them. In perceptive readings of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle
(and only meager comments on the rest; one wishes Wymer had analyzed them, too, in this
same way) the author exposes the real moral vision of Kurt Vonnegut, the satirist
who would "attempt to wake us to the world of suffering which we all ignore and to
which we contribute" (p 250); "Vonnegut's purpose is most typically to show how
we are all to blame" (p 241). Admittedly, this essay owes its formulation less to SF
criticism than to the satiric criticism of Elliott, Paulson, Kernan, and Scholes, but
Clareson was still right to include it for its high quality.
Though more modest in some ways than these first three, Thomas Clareson's two
contributions, "Clifford D. Simak: The Inhabited Universe" and "The Cosmic
Loneliness of Arthur C. Clarke" are intelligent and thoughtful. To both he brings a
broad knowledge of SF narratives and the historian's concern for the development of the
genre. In the Simak essay, for example, he discusses the final novel-form of City
against its historical genesis as piecemeal stories published earlier in the SF magazine.
I find the most interesting and provocative comment on City his statement that
Simak "brought to science fiction something of the vitality of the beast fable as a
perspective from which to make moral judgments" (p 74). In the Clarke essay, Clareson
valuably compares themes from Clarke's non-fiction with their counterparts in the SF
stories; he does a nice job of bringing Childhood's End--usually regarded as the
"exception to the rule" in Clarke's corpus--into harmony with the overall aims
of Clarke's SF vision (see especially p 223), which is a blend of science and myth; and he
makes solid generalizations, as in his recognition that in his short fiction Clarke favors
a quick, shocking punchline which "always opens new perspectives" (p 219). Both
these essays will make it easier for future critics to analyze individual works by these
authors.
Three other essays show promise as far as their authors' potential for SF criticism is
concerned, and the contributors have certainly touched on significant themes and concerns
of their respective writers. However, all are still too involved with the obvious SF
"themes" of the authors, fail to get beyond surface meanings with analysis, and
do not offer enough insights into the history and development of the given writer's works.
Curtis C. Smith's "Olaf Stapledon's Dispassionate Objectivity" is too slim an
effort to do justice to a writer who achieved so majestic a scale of composition and so
thorough a control of detail. Also, Smith loses his own objectivity as a critic by
reacting emotionally to the superman-society in Odd John (there is much more to
the book than this), and in general his essay degenerates into a polemic against
Stapledon's politics. Beverly Friend's "The Sturgeon Connection" concentrates on
the right topic--love--and is valuable as a first reading of Sturgeon, but no more than
that. The two-part essay on Ray Bradbury by Willis E. McNelly and A. James Stupple is of
mixed character: nice insights into Bradbury's peculiar poetic style (McNelly, p 173) or The
Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine (Stupple, p 178) are buried in
clichès and truisms about the SF genre.
Alfred D. Stewart's "Jack Williamson: The Comedy of Cosmic Evolution" might
have been as good as these. To emphasize, as he does, the role of Wells and the theory of
evolution in Williamson's imagination is to work in the right direction. But this essay is
sloppily written (the terms "comedy" and "tragedy" are paraded in the
essay to no useful purpose). Maxine Moore's "Asimov, Calvin, and Moses" seems to
me to present a totally artificial thesis. I fail to see how either the Foundation
trilogy or the Robot-series can be analyzed in terms of "an elaborate metaphorical
structure that combines New England Calvinism with the Old Testament Hebraic tradition of
the 'Peculiar People'" (p 88).
Jack Williamson's "Years of Wonder" is a pleasant enough reminiscence of the
heyday of the pulp magazines in the 30s and 40s by a writer who was himself a major
participant in an important phase of the maturation of SF. But, oriented as it is in the
direction of "fan culture," it is probably out of place with the rest of the
collection. In any case, it provokes the wrong kind of reader anticipations by being set
as the first essay in the book.
In sum, except for Wymer's Vonnegut these essays do not emphasize theoretical analysis;
they mainly concentrate on the biographical, historical, and developmental side of SF. The
collection is definitely a mixed one, but essays like these, with a few exceptions, can be
helpful in building a substantive body of criticism which can be equal to the best
criticism on mainstream literature. While some of the essays are just fan writing, they
are usually much better than this, and always are better in the case of the experienced
contributors.
Finally, I should compliment Popular Press for the quality of this book. It is
handsomely produced and bound, and the format is attractive. I find only one unfortunate
typographical error: on p 71 Clifford Simak's famous story is referred to as
"Huddling Peace."
George Edgar Slusser. Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (Milford
Series, Popular Writers of Today, Volume 1). Borgo Press, ii+60, pb $1.95.
Much of his major work gives the impression of being a vehicle for highly personal
political and economic opinions, so that a critic who disagrees with these views may find
himself reacting to the lectures rather than the fiction. A related danger is taking a
firm stand on what Heinlein actually believes, for many of the apparently propaganda
threads turn out to be in contradiction with one another.
Although the late James Blish composed these sentences for his "Introduction"
to Alexei Panshin's Heinlein in Dimension (1968), they also seem perfectly
suitable to pinpoint the major failings of this latest critical essay on Heinlein. It is
Slusser's purpose to confront him where he is most philosophical and didactic--a
legitimate area for critical speculation, to be sure--but he never allows for the
slightest degree of "subjunctivity" in the lectures in many of Heinlein's novels
and never considers that they might be fiction. This essay is too quick to
identify almost any opinion delivered by a major character as "the author's
message."
This is a close scrutiny of six works, set off in three contrasting pairs in such a way
as to give some view of Heinlein's accomplishments over three decades: Time for the
Stars and Double Star, Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will
Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love and Methuselah's Children,
respectively. A minor fourth chapter comments on Have Space Suit--Will Travel,
and Farnham's Freehold, and a brief biography and bibliography are also appended.
From the outset Slusser's essay concentrates on Heinlein's failures and weaknesses.
Using critical norms which are far from clear, Slusser locates two essential flaws: (1)
failure to depict the development of the "inner man," so that characters pass
from being naive young men to being worldly-wise old men, without any visible role for
maturity or the maturation-process in-between; (2) excessive pseudo-moralizing, so that
longer and longer propaganda pieces and lectures are appended to the strictly
action/adventure stories which were Heinlein's original forte. Finally, to account for an
alleged deterioration in his creative powers, which is correlated directly with the
increasing boredom of his dogmatic impreachments, Slusser posits a personality obsessed by
the problems of advancing age and impending death. Overall, we are apparently intended to
view Heinlein as an author who starts out flawed and who ends by merely being boring
and/or distasteful (variously, for materialism, power-mongering, vulgar sexuality, or
preoccupation with immortality). Only the juvenile, Have Space Suit--Will Travel,
is excused from this general condemnation.
Slusser has indeed lit on a significant idea when he notices that it is not Heinlein's
purpose to depict the inner, spiritual growth of his characters (e.g. pp 19-20). But it is
another matter to identify this as a "failure" on Heinlein's part since he
obviously prefers to concentrate on the hard, glittering, and cynical surface of human
character and value. Thus, it is gratuitous to attack him, as Slusser does, for not
writing novels which delve ever deeper into the layers of the human psyche just because
this is common among the best 20th century mainstream writers. Slusser makes the
interesting observation (pp 19 and 38) that in his later novels Heinlein turns to
fictional forms and devices common to the 18th century, but he does not follow it up.
Should this not be a clue that Heinlein's works are grounded in a different sensibility
from that which identifies some transformation of, or maturation of, man's inner being
(psyche, soul, mind) as the way to salvation? Heinlein's approach to human nature has more
in common with 18th-century fiction masters like Fielding and Sterne than with the 20th
century's psychological emphasis.
Sadly, Slusser's work belongs to that obsolete class of literary critical essay such as
Yvor Winters used to write, with the critic talking down to the author and chastising him
for his immorality, lack of intelligence, and esthetic incompetence. It is self-fulfilling
prophecy, for if one starts with the presupposition that the author's efforts are dismal,
there are no critical safeguards against finding almost anything objectionable.
Only the final words of the essay, which refer to Heinlein as "one of the most
popular and interesting authors of all time," at last call our attention to a
different critical attitude and one conducive to a more adequate assessment of his
accomplishment. A more positive criticism would evaluate, first of all, Heinlein's unique
combination of the tale of action/adventure--for which the tale of political intrigue may
serve as an analogue--with didactic/moral fiction, the latter typically couched in various
authoritative voices. Next, it would account for Heinlein's common use of a two-part
format which develops the action/adventure in the first half, the didactic/moral in the
second. Often, too, the didactic "essay" reverses the norms established for
readers' expectation in the first half (e.g. Glory Road). Third, this reversal
amounts to a kind of "generic discontinuity" and should be critically evaluated
along with parallel techniques, like sudden revelations that earlier narration was not
real first-person reportage but a diary or tape.
--S.C. Fredericks
A Bibliography and 49 Reprints
Neil Barron, ed. Anatomy of Wonder. Science Fiction. R.R.
Bowker Co., xxxi+471, $8.95 pb, $14.95 hb, plus handling.
This bibliography is intended primarily for "Public, school, college, and
university libraries desiring to develop well-rounded collections of science fiction
books, whether for recreational reading or for support of instructional programs"
(page ix). In addition to its four chapters on "periods" of SF in English
(1551-1870, 1870-1926, 1926-1937, 1938-1975), it contains a chapter by Francis J. Molson
on juvenile SF, a series of brief chapters by H.W. Hall on "research aids" (four
on secondary materials, one listing the books that have received the various awards
offered in the field, one giving a "core collection checklist," and one listing
and describing library collections), a directory of publishers, an author index, and a
title index. The individual entries are alphabetical by author within each period, with
variant titles (if known), publisher and date of first US or UK edition (with US editions
preferred if not more than a year or two later than the UK edn), publisher and price of
any in-print editions, and a "succinct plot summary, noting principal themes,
critical strengths or weaknesses, comparable works, and any awards or nominations
received" (page x).
The year 1946 saw the publication of two highly successful hardback anthologies, Groff
Conklin's The Best of Science Fiction and the Healy-McComas Adventures in
Time and Space, as well as the Arkham House edition of Van Vogt's Slan. The
success of the hardback anthologies (vastly greater than that of Donald Wollheim's
pioneering paperback, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, 1943), together with
the example of Arkham House (devoted primarily to Lovecraft and other Weird Tales
writers) led to, or at least encouraged, the establishment of a number of fan publishers
(Prime Press, Shasta, Gnome, etc.), and to the emergence of science fiction as a
commercial category comparable to westerns and mysteries, with the overall result that the
number of SF books published in the 30 years since 1946 is much larger than the number of
those published in the preceding 400 years.
If we look for an earlier year of comparable significance for SF in English, the one
that most readily strikes the eye is 1870, which saw the publication in London of The
Coming Race, Erewhon, and Five Weeks in a Balloon, the first two
being widely discussed and compared, and the third establishing the English -language
career of the first author to become world-famous as an author of science fiction. Before
1870 the only dates we find are those for the publication of individual works of some or
great importance, so that any special periodization of SF history would be less rewarding
than the traditional periods of general literary history.
Since science fiction as a recognized literary genre subsuming such earlier
forms as the utopia and the imaginary voyage may perhaps best be said to begin with Verne,
there is good reason for an SF bibliography to begin with a chapter on the genre's
prehistory of individual works defined in retrospect as SF, to continue with a chapter
entitled "The Emergence of Scientific Romance," and to conclude with a chapter
on "The Modern Period." On the other hand, there seems to be no good reason for
having a chapter between the second and last under the title "The Gernsback Era,
1926-1937," for during these years (as is recognized by Ivor A. Rogers, the author of
the chapter) we find in the pulp magazines little other than what is well described by
Thomas D. Clareson in the preceding chapter as a period in which "the motifs which
dominated the scientific romance for almost half a century lose their content... and
become no more than plot action as a new generation of writers searches for its own themes
in order to give voice to its own concerns" (p 49); except for a few isolated works,
those themes were not to find expression in books until 1946. Moreover, the degree to
which "Gernsback Era" is a misnomer for these years is indicated by the fact
that of the 73 entries in this chapter, only 20 are for books (all published after 1944)
deriving from the SF magazines. The important mainstream authors whose books figure in
this chapter (Čapek, Stapledon, Huxley) may best be seen as summing up the period that
began in 1870 and thus as clearing the ground for a new generation. In sum, it would have
been better to have had only three chapters: "SF Prehistory," "Scientific
Romance 1870-1945," and "The Modern Period."
(Let me add that one sign of the decline of scientific romance is the gradual
abandonment of the term romance in all commercial categories other than those
intended for girls.)
The primary objection to bibliographies of this kind is that they suggest an authority
they do not have. When we use a "select bibliography" we want to believe that
the compiler has actually made his selection after reading all the books of the field, but
in sober truth we know that this is seldom the case, and that the books listed derive
largely from those he has just happened to read--or, if he has made a search, happened to
find available. I do not know that anyone at this time could have made a better selection
than Robert M. Philmus has made in §1, Thomas D. Clareson in §2, Ivor A. Rogers in
§3,
and Joe De Bolt and John R. Pfeiffer in §4, and I certainly do not claim that I could
have done so, but all users of the book should understand that its lists are not complete
by any standard of books important in the history of SF. The 50 titles listed in
§1 for
1551-1870 may be in just proportion to the number listed for each of the other periods
(177 for 1870-1926, 73 for 1926-1937, 701 for 1938-1975), but it is still customary to
seek for something like completeness in the early period of any body of literature. Clareson's list seems to be lopsidedly American (with 119 US titles versus 38 UK titles
and 20 from other countries), but otherwise I will say only that I regret (on the basis of
what I have happened to read) the omission of a number of important books, e.g. The
Isle of Pines (1668), After London (1885), Vandals of the Void
(1931; see #22 below), and The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958; a strange omission
in view of Dr De Bolt's being a sociologist).
Dr Philmus's introduction to §1 is a brilliant essay on the theory of SF (nowhere else
to my knowledge has so much good sense on this subject been packed into so few pages) and
the other introductions are at least satisfactory. As for the annotations, while I would
often have expressed different opinions, still they offer little to quarrel with. There
are of course a few factual errors, but I will resist the temptation to point out those I
have happened to recognize. On the positive side, I am happy to say that the book has
cleared up several problems for me; e.g. the annotation for G.O. Smith's The Fourth
"R" shows that that book is indeed the same as The Brain Machine--see
SFS 2(1975):285.
-- R.D. Mullen
[A response by Joe de Bolt and and John
R. Pfeiffer, and a reply by R.D. Mullen, appears in SFS 11 (March 1977).]
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