BOOKS IN REVIEW
Raymond
Williams, The Country and the City (US: Oxford, 1973, 335p; also UK: Chatto &
Windus, perhaps with different pagination), is a mammoth survey of these complementary
themes and locations in English literature, with all their connotations. Whatever one's
proximity to or distance from Dr. Williams's clearly enunciated and superbly
sustained viewpoint, it is one of those studies that will henceforth be a must for every
student of English literature and of the country vs. city theme in human history. For the
critic of SF, it has a particular twofold relevance. First, it shows the strengths of a
methodology which does not sunder literature from history and present day life: Williams's
constant procedure is to compare the images, brasses, symbolical systems, ideologies and
value-judgments induced in the readers by a body of literature with the total
documentation of the historical reality of its age, as known from other records. In other
words, even such a genre as Pastoral is not simply a "secondary world" but a
structure whose elements have been obtained by careful selections from historical reality
and which presents an idealized, elegiac, etc., version of certain aspects and values from
such a historical reality. This approach could be a very useful corrective especially for
studies of SF, which often generates the optical illusion of dealing with hermetically
closed worlds of its own as a pure game, without relevance to important facets of our
common and increasingly inescapable historical reality.
Second, Dr. Williams--a man with an exquisitely English
feeling for roots and traditions who is yet open to winds of change--deals directly with
SF in some places. His comment on Thomas More--whom I think he misreads as the ideologist
of an "upper peasantry," equally inimical to the capitalists and to the poor--is
among the least satisfying pages of the book. But he is illuminating on Blake's "new
way of seeing the human and social order" (ppl48-50--surely it's time that we claimed
for Blake an SF relevance as great as More's); he has written what are, so far as I know,
the best pages on Richard Jeffries, putting into perspective for us his seminal After
London, the first "post-catastrophe" story in SF (pp l9l-196); and at the
end of the book, he has a chapter on "The City and the Future" (pp272-278), in
which he proceeds from Morris and Wells not only to Forster, Huxley and Orwell, but also
to Campbell, Aldiss, Clarke, Blish, and Damon Knight's anthology Cities of Wonder. Though
Dr. Williams has here only touched on some of the most prominent aspects of urban SF, his
chapter is a useful capsule presentation of such aspects, and a welcome acknowledgement
from one of the most exciting scholars and critics of the last 20 years that a survey of
any major national tradition of modern literature from the Renaissance to our day cannot
be written without taking SF into account. -DS.
DAVID
KETTERER ON SF AS APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE.
The title of David
Ketterer's book--New Worlds for
Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature
(Anchor/Doubleday, paperback $2.95; Indiana University Press, hardback $10.95; 1974;
same pagination)--incorporates an effective double meaning. In the more literal sense it
refers to those writers (both mainstream and SF) who exemplify the "apocalyptic"
mode of literature, meaning that literature which involves a symbolic transformation of
our nominal, lived reality--or Old Worlds--into visionary New Worlds: "Apocalyptic
literature is concerned with the creation of other worlds which exist, on the
literal level, in a credible relationship with the 'real' world, thereby causing a
metaphorical destruction of that 'real' world in the reader's head" (p
l3; author's italics). At the same time the title anticipates the author's unique reading
of science fiction vis-a-vis the traditions of mainstream American fiction, which
constitutes a New World literature with its own peculiar emphasis on visionary and
prophetic trends of thought.
So, apart from explications of individual works, this book
offers a new theory and a new comparative method which deliberately abandons idea oriented
criticism that looks to a Verne or van Vogt as typical or even exemplary authors (see pp x
and 182). The aesthetic component in literature and evaluative criticism remain important
to Ketterer (ppl25 and 260), and throughout he is concerned with the texture of language
and images beyond one-dimensional plots, themes, and ideas. Representative image studies
are those of arabesques in Poe, sexual innuendo in Lem's Solaris, and spirals in
Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan.
Another of Ketterer's innovations consists in developing
an entire new critical framework around the religious heritage of America. The Biblical,
Prophetic, and Millennial elements in New World thought are as influential for science
fiction as the materialistic, pragmatic, empirical, and scientific side of American
experience. This in turn leads Ketterer to countenance a recent trend that regards SF as a
"new mythology" on the one hand and as a secular displacement of the religious
consciousness on the other (see pp 76 and 333 respectively.).
Part One begins with a theoretical justification of the
term "apocalypse," followed by a trial comparison between William Blake's
America, A Prophecy and Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon. Although St.
John's Book of Revelations plays some role in the scheme of interpretation because it
envisions man and his world transformed, yet Ketterer's definition is more dependent upon
recent critics Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, emphasizing apocalypse as a
positive, heavenly vision), Ihab Hassan (The Literature of Silence, stressing
the negative, chaotic aspect of apocalypse), Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending,
explicating the temporal rhythms of the apocalyptic process), and R.W.B. Lewis' seminal
essay, "Days of Wrath and Laughter," in Trials of the Word.
Part Two encompasses a substantial reassessment of the
writings of Edgar Allan Poe as "marginally science fiction," including Poe's
cosmology in Eureka, followed by a major essay on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left
Hand of Darkness in light of Northrop Frye's correlation between the ironic
mode of literature and the archetypal mythos of winter: "Le Guin's book effects a
philosophical apocalypse ... by presenting a radically different image of man, by pointing
to the existence of a previously unsuspected outside manipulator, and ... by radically
altering man's vision of human reality" (p8l). Ketterer then turns to utopian and
dystopian narratives insofar as they impinge on his theme of satirical, philosophical, or
visionary transformations of present realities. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is
used to explore the thesis that utopian fiction necessarily fails to present a credible
alternate reality and must degenerate into fantasy, a non-credible alternate reality, or
in the role of devil's advocate, suggests itself as, in fact, a dystopia: "While
science-fictional dystopias abound, there are no genuinely science-fiction utopias"
(pll8). Conversely, Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, Jack London's The Iron
Heel, Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Robert Heinlein's The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress are all regarded as successful, if quite distinctive,
literary formulations of the actual transformation of reality.
Part Three constitutes over one half of the book, and is
given over to what the author considers the most "philosophical" of
apocalypses--the present world viewed in other terms, with a subsidiary issue in
the redefinition of man himself. The two major works are Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland
("Confrontation with mysterious phenomena leads Brown to distinguish between aspects
of experience that can be explained with reference to either internal or external factors
and between those aspects of experience that cannot presently be explained with reference
to internal or external factors" [pl79]) and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris ("A
clear line between man and reality... is hard to draw. We can't finally know to what
extent any interpretation of reality, however far out, is preferable to man's
phenomenological or anthropomorphic limitations" [p2O3; cf pp 185, 187, 202]). To the
extent that Ketterer interprets Lem in terms of a phenomenology of knowledge, Solaris
is an especially significant instance of science fiction as an epistemological
literature: e.g., "science fiction is not primarily valuable as prediction; rather,
it teaches an adaptability and elasticity of mind in the face of change" (p25).
Ketterer shifts naturally enough to phenomenological
universes and their limitations. Works on time-travel for close analysis include Mark
Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (the revelation is that
"the sixth century does not displace the nineteenth century in any real sense, nor
does the nineteenth century displace the sixth century, because there is no essential
difference between them" [p225; cf p2l3]) and John Boyd's The Last Starship
from Earth. Subsequent chapters deal with the parallel-world theme in Philip K. Dick's
The Man in the High Castle and two instances of the "new wave" style in
Brian Aldiss' Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head ("Stone
Age sensibility and mental equipment ... cause us to retread circular patterns of behavior
and thus avoid a genuine confrontation with the new" [p258]). The final section of
the book then deals with the apocalyptic implications of the alien manipulator theme,
particularly in two substantive interpretations of Herman Melville's The Confidence
Man, which points to "the unreliability of experience as a guide to truth"
(p286), and Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, a work of visionary and religious
nature (p332) and the only work for which Ketterer explicates elements derived from
Graeco-Roman mythology.
I have mentioned only those novels that Ketterer
explicates definitively. A number of other authors and their works come in for briefer,
but no less interesting, consideration. The book is well indexed, and although there is no
bibliography the footnotes are more than an adequate guide to Ketterer's authorities
(especially on mainstream American literature) and to further reading. Finally, I can draw
no more reasonable generalization about this exciting new book than that it represents an
apocalyptic transformation of science-fiction criticism, too. I believe this work will
generate anew the controversy over the uniqueness and significance of science fiction, the
philosophical implications of change, and the role of the religious vision in a secular
age.
--S.C. Fredericks
BRETNOR
RETURNS.
Twenty years after editing Modern Science Fiction: Its
Meaning and Its Future, Reginald Bretnor
has organized and edited a new collection, Science
Fiction, Today and Tomorrow (Harper & Row, $8.95). The essays are
original with this book and, although written to fill Bretnor's own table of contents,
highly eclectic; generally, they may be said to congratulate SF as being science,
prophecy, and mythology rolled into one, although several authors expressed doubts that SF
was fulfilling its potential in all these areas.
Like many of his contributors, Bretnor is in favor of
"hard-core" SF: "Science fiction cannot and must not be divorced from
science." His own essay is both provocative and irritating, since it includes an
unnecessarily large number of attacks on everything in sight, especially Marxists,
Freudians, the counter-culture, the bad pay of SF writers, and the supposedly good pay of
teachers of SF courses. Fortunately, this collection also includes valuable essays dealing
with the last two, the economics of SF publishing (Frederik Pohl) and the problems of SF
teachers (Jack Williamson).
Two "hard-core" essays are equally solid: Poul
Anderson demonstrates how to calculate the orbits and gravity of imaginary planets, and
Hal Clement discusses the anatomy of extraterrestrial beings. Bretnor and other
hard science advocates in this collection consistently invoke C.P. Snow's "two
cultures," finding that SF is significant chiefly because it single-handedly and
heroically bridges the gap. James Gunn, however, suggests that the two-culture concept is
detrimental to SF, keeping it in a ghetto separated from "mainstream" fiction.
He sees both of these divisions fading away, to the benefit of SF.
To Bretnor's credit, he unflinchingly brings in the
opposition to science as well. Alexei and Cory Panshin flatly state that "modern SF
is fantasy." While Ben Bova argues (not very convincingly) that SF has become a
"modern mythology" by interpreting science for mankind, the Panshins argue that
SF can provide this mythologic power only by developing a "Sensitive symbolic
vocabulary that can be generally understood and that is capable of representing all
aspects of the unconscious." For them, the promise of SF lies not in its mimetic
nature but in its ability to provide a new "World Beyond the Hill."
All of these essayists hope to see SF evolve into even
more powerful and imaginative forms, although they disagree as to whether this can be done
by prophesying significant scientific futures, creating new worlds of fantasy, studying
mainstream fiction for stylistic innovations, or providing deeper characterization (Anne
McCaffrey, Gordon R. Dickson). Noting that "power rests in getting masses of people
to accept your interpretation of events," Frank Herbert states this most clearly; Brave
New World and 1984 are touchstones of modern SF not because they predict the
future, create memorable characters, use mainstream style, or evoke the unconscious, but
because they help define the way in which we look at the world.
--Charles Nicol.
AN INDEX TO
AMERICAN MASS-MARKET PAPERBACKS.
I can remember the excitement I felt in 1939, first when
reading of plans for Pocket Books, and later when a display rack with the first ten or
fifteen titles appeared at a local newsstand: henceforth I would be able to buy books for
25¢ rather than 75¢ (the price of "popular copyrights") or 95¢ (the price of
Modern Library books)--for me, a difference great enough to make the buying of books
something it had never been before, a comparatively casual matter. Pocket Books, Inc., had
the field to itself for a year or so, but Avon was established in 1941, the New American
Library (as the US branch of Penguin Books) in 1942, Dell and Popular in 1943, and Bantam
in 1945. Although Donald Wollheim's anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, appeared
as early as 1943, SF was virtually unrepresented in the paperbacks until the 1950s.
The first Heinlein appeared in 1951, the first van Vogt in
1952, and the first Asimov in 1953, which was also the year in which Ballantine launched
its distinguished line with The Space Merchants, and perhaps the year in which Ace
began its exercise in quantity. Such facts can be discovered by perusing R. Reginald and M.R. Burgess, Cumulative
Paperback Index 1939-1959: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Guide to 14,000
Mass-Market Paperback Books of 33 Publishers Issued under 69 Imprints
(Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1973, $24.00). The second volume, covering the 1960s,
is planned for 1977.
-RDM.
A SPECIAL
SF ISSUE.
The Fall 1973 issue of Studies
in the Literary Imagination (Department of English, Georgia State
University, Atlanta, Ga. 30303) contains articles by W. Warren Wagar on Wells, Peter Wolfe
on Skinner's Walden Two, Robert O. Evans on Anthony Burgess, David Skilton on
Trollope's The Fixed Period, Howard Fink on Orwell, Robert M. Philmus on Swift and
Orwell, David Ketterer on "utopian fantasy," Sylvia E. Bowman on utopian views
of man and the machine, and Darko Suvin on utopias as a literary genre--all in all, a very
satisfactory collection. No price is given for the issue: "Copies will be sent to
selected institutions, libraries, and individuals upon request," whatever that means.
-RDM.
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