REVIEW-ARTICLES
- Charles Elkins. Searching for the Exploding Grail
(H. Bruce Franklin. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American
Imagination)
- Fredric Jameson. Critical Agendas
(George E. Slusser & Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Aliens: The
Anthropology of Science Fiction: George E. Slusser, Colin Greenland, & Eric S.
Rabkin, eds. Storm Warnings: Science FictionConfronts the Future; Giuseppa
Saccaro Del Buffa & Arthur O. Lewis, eds. Utopie per gli anni Ottanta:
StudiInterdisciplinari sui temi, la storia, i progetti)
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Charles Elkins
Searching for the Exploding Grail
H. Bruce Franklin. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination.
NY: Oxford UP, 1988. 256pp. $22.95.
I eagerly awaited the publication of War Stars. The basis for my high
expectations was Bruce Franklin's article in the July 1986 SFS (a special issue which he
guest-edited): "Strange Scenarios: Science Fiction, the Theory of Alienation, and the
Nuclear Gods." I am not disappointed. That essay of Franklin's gave readers an accurate
sense of what was to come. For those interested in the relationships between science,
technology, and culture, especially as these relationships bear upon the question of
nuclear war, Franklin's study will take its place among such distinguished works as Paul Boyers' By the Bomb's Early Light (1988), Stephen Hilgartner et al.'s Nukespeak:
The Selling of Nuclear Technology in America (1982), Robert Jungk's Brighter than
a Thousand Suns (1956), David Noble's America by Design: Science, Technology, and
the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977), Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic
Bomb (1986), Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (1982), Michael
Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political
Thought (1977), and Peter Wyden's Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (1984).
For SF scholars, Franklin's book should be read in conjunction with Paul Brians' Nuclear
Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (1987), David Dowling's Fictions of
Nuclear Disaster (1987), and most recently, Martha Bartter's The Way to Ground
Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (1988). Indeed, one could view
Franklin's book as a bridge between the first group--intellectual and cultural history and
social criticism--and the second--descriptive bibliographies and literary histories of
nuclear-war SF.
War Stars is much more than that, however. It is a superbly researched history
of the linkages among science, technology, and militarism, particularly as they developed
in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. More importantly for scholars and critics of SF,
Franklin describes how the genre not only reflected the reality of these linkages
but also created the cultural conditions which made those linkages possible.
To create the objects that menace our existence, some people first had to imagine them.
Then to build these weapons, a much larger number of people had to imagine the consequent
scenarios--a resulting future--that seemed desirable. Thus our actual superweapons
originated in their imagined history, which forms a crucial part of our culture. (p. 4)
That assertion of his represents the argument of the book--and the conceptualization
which makes War Stars so intriguing. Franklin's object is to "locate and
describe this history of the imagination from which has emerged our nemesis" (p. 4), the superweapon. True to his Marxist roots, he argues that
"since culture itself both
expresses and influences the material conditions of society, historical processes cannot
be understood without comprehending the interplay between material and cultural forces"
(p. 5). What emerges is a sophisticated analysis of this "interplay" and a splendid
demonstration of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has described in The
Interpretation of Cultures (NY, 1973) as "ideology as a cultural system" (Geertz:
193-233).
Franklin organizes his study historically, tracing the evolution of the ideology of the
superweapon through two men--Robert Fulton and Thomas Edison--and two
technological/political developments: the rise of air power and the development of atomic
weapons. In each case, he thoroughly documents the prevailing (fallacious) assumption that
technology can create weapons so terrible that war will be unthinkable, that the weapons
will be the panacea to resolve all political, economic, and social problems and will usher
in the Pax Americana, making the world safe for American capitalism and the
culture it produces.
The two chapters on Fulton and Edison are fascinating. They provide a wealth of
historical detail and a perspective very different from the usual one on these two, almost
mythological, inventors. Recalling their elementary school American history course, most
readers will associate Fulton with the invention of the steamboat. Few realize that he was
also the champion of the submarine and undersea warfare. An 18th-century rationalist, he
believed that human reason could be applied to develop a naval weapon which, in its sheer
destructive power, would eliminate all wars and would usher in the millennium of reason,
wealth, and happiness. Pursuing this vision of weapons for progress, Fulton attempted to
sell his designs to the Americans, the British, and the French. And in the name of
progress and their positive benefit to humanity, he went so far as to advocate
"experiments" to demonstrate the efficacy of his weapons--"trial runs" that included
the "blowing up English ships of war, or French, or American [ships], were there no
other, and the men on shore..." (Fulton's words, quoted on p. 16).
Possessed by messianic faith in the beneficent power of his weapons, Fulton could
imagine exploding ships full of men as 'humane experiments' to liberate the United States
and mankind....This disjunction between imagination and reality is characteristic of the
history of the superweapon in American culture. Even those responsible for the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced themselves that these were humane acts, taken
to save lives and establish the reign of peace. (p. 16)
Fulton is the prototype of the scientist, engineer, and inventor whom we run across in
the histories of science and technology--a person fired by idealism whose genius creates a
technology that has the potential to make our lives better but whose political naivetÈ
encourages him (and those who can manipulate him) to turn that technology into weapons of
enormous destructive power. Thus, along with crediting him with the development of the
steamboat, we also must give him the dubious honor of being an "early, if not the
earliest, theoretician to link the aspirations of industrial capitalism with weapons
technology...[and to offer] the first coherent statement of the ideology that evolved into
the American cult of the superweapon" (p. 11).
Fulton's heir in the late 19th century is Thomas Edison. For readers whose image of
Edison is based on Mickey Rooney's Young Tom Edison (1940) or Spencer Tracey's
portrayal in Edison, the Man (also 1940) or any one of a number of SF adventure
novels beginning with Edison's Conquest of Mars (by Garrett Serviss, 1898) and
the popular mythology that surrounds America's genius-hero, Franklin's discussion is an
eye-opener. Edison continued Fulton's interest in undersea warfare; in 1886, he became a
partner in the Sims-Edison Electric Torpedo Company "to manufacture, sell, and use
torpedoes, torpedo boats, submarine vessels, and warships" (according to his prospectus,
quoted on p. 55). He also conjured up using alternating current as a weapon of mass
destruction. In an interview in Scientific American, he exults in his vision of
being able to kill thousands quickly and efficiently:
In each fort I would put an alternating machine of 20,000 volts capacity. One wire
would be grounded. A man would govern a stream of water of about four hundred pounds'
pressure to the square inch, with which the 20,000 volts alternating current would be
connected. The man would simply move this stream of water back and forth with his hand,
playing on the enemy as they advanced and mowing them down with absolute precision. Every
man touched by the water would complete the circuit, get the force of the alternating
current, and never know what had happened to him. The men trying to take a fort by
assault, though they might come by tens of thousands against a handful, would be cut to
the ground beyond any hope of escape. (Quoted on p. 59)
Never mind that the science was wrong and the idea impracticable. Edison used his
celebrity status--or as Franklin would say, his "cultural prominence" (p. 55)--to sell
such notions: "Edison's cultural status made him a useful instrument in the
popularization and organization of what has become known as the military-industrial
complex" (p. 69). For Edison, it was "the destiny of America...to consummate this
industrialization of war," and he became "the spokesman for a new military age" (p.
72). Like Fulton before him, he argued that science would be able to end all wars by
mechanizing war and developing weapons so terrible that they could not be used.
Of course this is nonsense. A country that spends enormous sums of money developing
weapons will--ultimately, at least--use those weapons. In fact, the terror evoked by these
superweapons itself becomes a strategy of war. One can deliberately create terror and use
it to weaken the enemy's will to fight. This is the strategy behind the development and
use of air power, and it becomes the justification for the bombing of civilian
populations. (Of course, the bombing of non-white, Third World populations was
predictable.)
In America, the major proponent of air power was General Billy Mitchell, one of whose
major objectives was "total terror" (p. 96). The "mere threat of bombing a town by an
air force," he declared, "will cause it to be evacuated and all work in munitions and
supply factories to be stopped" (quoted on p. 96). It is not difficult to see where this
line of argument leads. Those who advocate the continuing build-up of nuclear weapons make
essentially the same point: the best way to keep the peace is to maintain a "balance of
terror." (Unfortunately, it has to be a "balance" because the "other side" now can do
the same thing to us.) Yet Mitchell was able to sell the idea to the American people.
"Through his agency, the cultural forces that had been leading toward a religion of the superweapon found their appropriate icons and rituals in the airplane, and their
institutional base in America's industrial infrastructure....Billy Mitchell turned the
affair with superweapons into an American romance" (p. 91).
With the development of the B-17 Flying Fortress, the foundation the US economy's
dependence on the aerospace industry was firmly laid, and between 1938 and 1942 the taboo
against the bombing of civilian populations was reversed. "From almost universal
condemnation of the bombing of cities, American society from top to bottom shifted to
almost universal approval--when America and its allies were doing the bombing. The moral
outrage against the Fascists' use of airplanes on civilian populations transmuted into a
craving to use airplanes on the enemy's civilian population" (p. 105). How this
transformation came about will be discussed shortly. For the moment, it is enough to
observe that it is a short step from approving the use of conventional bombs on civilian
targets to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In chapters 10 through 14, Franklin deals with the development of the atomic bomb and
the US government's decision to use it. Although in its factual account, this material has
been treated thoroughly elsewhere--most notably in Boyer, Jungk, Rhodes, and
Wyden--Franklin puts his own spin on it. He proposes, for example, that we might consider
the Baruch Plan, "America's postwar proposal for nuclear control and disarmament[,]...as
another specimen of American science fiction" (p. 162). Not a bad idea.
Franklin ends his account of the superweapon in the American imagination with a chapter
on Star Wars, the "ultimate technological fix" (p. 205). Despite its supporters'
protestations to the contrary, he concludes that "[t]he true purpose of Star
Wars"
is revealed by the fact that none of the various technological schemes offered under
the Strategic Defense Initiative rubric could possibly stop a determined first strike:
their only possible effectiveness as a defense would be against a Soviet retaliation
already crippled by a U.S. first strike. So the only function of this `shield' would be to
allow the use of the sword. (p. 201)
So why Star Wars? Franklin argues that there is a "rational" agenda of sorts.
The principal backers of Star Wars have a public record of wanting to destroy arms
control, maximize spending for the aerospace industry and high tech weapons development,
cut funding for social programs, devastate the Soviet economy by forcing it into an
uncontrollable arms race, neutralize the movement against nuclear weapons, and regain U.S.
nuclear supremacy. (p. 202)
Again we are caught in the trap of depending on technology to solve our political
problems. "Perhaps," Franklin reasonably suggests, "we should stop projecting the final
solution of our problems into our weapons" (p. 212).
If this were all Franklin does in War Stars, the book would be worth its
price. But he does more, and it is this "more" that is of special interest to SF
scholars and critics. War Stars is a brilliant demonstration of the social
function of SF, not as a mere reflection of some pre-existing reality but as a symbolic
system that helps to create that reality.
Franklin puts it succinctly: "Before nuclear weapons could be used, they had to be
designed; before they could be designed, they had to be imagined" (p. 131). And here he
has in mind more than the apparently true story of Leo Szilard's insight into the
possibilities of atomic fission prompted by the reading of H.G. Wells's The World Set
Free (1914). While Franklin does little theorizing in War Stars, I would
argue that what he proves can be stated in something like the following theoretical terms.
As part of the symbolic system that makes up our culture, the SF which deals with
superweapons does so by strategically naming those situations within which these weapons
are imagined, thus creating attitudes towards those situations. And "attitudes," as we
know, is another word for motives. SF helps to create the "meaning" those weapons have
for us by naming them, by describing them, and by defining those situations within which
they are or are not to be used.
Along with other symbolic productions in our culture, then, SF determines the reality
of the superweapons because it determines their meanings. In sociological terms, SF
contributes to the "definition of situation." Thomas Szasz states the same idea from a
psychological point of view in The Second Sin (Garden City, NY: 1974):
The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical
Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the
ground: whoever reaches the weapon first, shoots and lives. In ordinary life, the struggle
is not for guns but for words: whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his
adversary, the victim.... [I]n short, he who first seizes the word imposes reality on the
other: he who defines thus dominates and lives; and he who is defined is subjugated and
may be killed. (Szasz: 24-25)
SF participates in this "struggle" for definition: writers produce elaborate symbolic
structures which imaginatively explore the possibilities and meaning(s) of human
action--in this case, those possibilities involved in the writer's confronting of the
implications of the superweapon within the context of a specific cultural drama. SF thus
provides the socially meaningful forms by which readers experience the "meaning" of
these weapons (i.e., such fictions are public communications, not private fantasies).
Whether the symbol systems are cognitive or expressive, they have "at least one thing
in common," according to Geertz:
they are extrinsic sources of information in terms of which human life can be
patterned--extrapersonal mechanisms for the perception, understanding, judgment, and
manipulation of the world. Culture patterns--religious, philosophical,
aesthetic,
scientific, ideological--are 'programs'; they provide a template or blueprint for the
organization of social and psychological processes, much as genetic systems provide such a
template for the organization of organic processes. (Geertz: 216)
SF furnishes such "templates."
Franklin describes how between 1880 and 1917 there emerged a number of narratives
imagining future American wars and warning of the danger of Blacks, Indians, the British
(replaced before World War I by the Germans), or the "Yellow Peril"--in short, "the
Other" which could threaten Anglo-Saxon world hegemony and America's Manifest Destiny.
This literature had the effect of reversing America's colonial history and "establishing
what was to become a conventional pattern: the invasion of defenseless America by aliens
from across the seas. With unintended and revealing irony, that literature often perceived
the victims of domestic oppression-- Chinese `coolies,' blacks, Indians, European
immigrants--as these foreigners' confederates lurking inside the nation" (p. 21). The
pattern continues into the present in such SF films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956;
remake, 1978), Invasion U.S.A. (1985), and Red Dawn (1984), films which
afford an understanding of the social and political paranoia that in effect they would
make palatable. In addition, the likes of Samuel Barton's The Battle of the Swash and
the Capture of Canada (1888) promoted the fantasy of the "quick technological fix"
and the "fallacy of the last move," the will-o'-the wisp that the United States has
pursued in plunging the planet into the colossal arms race of our age. Faster and faster
we chase this mechanical rabbit, always believing that American technological ingenuity is
capable of creating an ultimate weapon that can grant perpetual world peace through either
universal disarmament or American global hegemony. (Franklin: 26)
People are not "born" with this belief; the "mechanical rabbit" has to be created
and made attractive enough to chase. The SF of 1880-1917 did both.
Such novels as Simon Newcomb's His Wisdom, the Defender (1900), John Stewart
Barney's L.P.M.: The End of the Great War (1915), Hollis Godfrey's The Man
Who Ended War (1908), Arthur Cheney Train and Robert Williams Wood's The Man Who
Rocked the Earth (serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, 1914-15, and
published as a book in 1915), and Edison's Conquest of Mars paved the way for the
American technological wizard who, working alone, would invent the ultimate weapon, save
the United States from its enemies, and establish the Pax Americana. In
particular these writers prepared the ground for an Edison, creating his social role and
his mythic dimensions and thereby making possible his enormous influence. Summing up the
consequences of this fiction, Franklin points out that technological advance comes not
from the dialectic between productive forces and consciousness, but from the unfettered
imagination of the American technological genius: a single brilliant invention could
change the whole course of history; even the greatest human problems can thus be solved by
a technological miracle, particularly if the miracle takes the form of something that just
might turn out to the ultimate weapon. (p. 52)
With the coming of airpower and the atomic bomb, new images were needed. Franklin
documents how "mass-produced culture helped create an environment congenial to the needs
of the aerospace industry" (p. 113). In novels and films, new metaphors were created to
communicate the "meaning" of a new situation. While America's romance with airpower
continued, the lone genius gave way to Big Science linked to industry and the "team"
concept. This is especially true for films made during the Second World War. Furthermore,
to produce an environment favorable to public acceptance of the Atom Bomb, the US
government embarked upon a campaign of secrecy and doublespeak that continues to this day.
This is one dimension of the process of social change. Such change begins with an act
of recognition of a new situation and the need for renaming, or "re-metaphoring." Old
symbols are modified or destroyed, and new symbols--and hence, meanings--created and new
attitudes evoked. Powerful sacred symbols are demystified. (If the King, for instance, is
regarded as God's representative on Earth and therefore rules by divine right, it is
hopeless and nonsensical to struggle against him. God always wins. However, if the King
can be renamed--"just a corrupt man," "a tyrant," "the Antichrist," etc.--revolution
becomes thinkable.) Yet the demystified symbols continue to lend force to the new ones
which displace them--new symbols that reinforce, call into doubt, or actively subvert the
existing social order. This process takes place in SF just as it does in all other art.
Although the strategic bomber had become an "major icon of American culture" in the
1950s (Franklin: 116), "the dissociation between the icons [of airpower] and the human
suffering they inflicted began to break down" during the Vietnam War (p. 119). America's
involvement in Vietnam--a new situation--called for new symbolic structures, new
narratives. The result: Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse
Five (1969), two novels that communicate a distinct change in consciousness about
American wars and weapons. This change in attitude owed something to the apocalyptic
visions of atomic war in SF, and especially those which emerged after the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Previously, in such novels as George Griffith's The Lord of
Labour (1906) and Roy Norton's The Vanishing Fleets (1907), as well as The
Man Who Ended War and The Man Who Rocked the Earth, superweapons abolish war
and bring about universal peace and prosperity. But starting with Pierrepont B. Noyes' The
Pallid Giant (1927) and Carl W. Spor's The Final War (serialized in 1932 in Wonder
Stories) and continuing after World War II with such novels as Nevil Shute's On
the Beach (1957), Peter George's Red Alert (1958; filmed as Dr
Strangelove in 1964), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959),
Mordechai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959), Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959),
and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (novel, 1962; film, 1964), SF
writers began to question the wisdom of the superweapon as a solution to war and to
America's political problems. During the war years, as Franklin notes, "the only
Americans exposed to any public thought about atomic weapons were the readers of science
fiction" (p. 146). Indeed, the fear and the apocalyptic visions this literature evokes
are at least one kind of antidote to the government's propaganda and the doublespeak of
advocating "Atoms for Peace" and of Edward Teller's praise of the "Super" (i.e., the
Hydrogen Bomb).
This is not the place to go into the extremely complex issue of the social functions of
art in general or even of literature. But it is important to understand just how crucial a
part literature, and SF in particular, played and continues to play in our romance with
the superweapon. What we know, think, feel, and imagine about weapons technology is to a
great degree determined by the symbolic systems within our culture which give form to
these technologies, and SF is a vital part of those systems. This is not to deny the
material reality of war, the Atom Bomb, or the arms race; real bombs kill real people.
However, the meaning this "reality" has for us is determined by the forms we
give it. Language is one of those forms, and within language, literature, and within
literature, SF. It may be that in contrast to earlier times, the major images now come
from television and film; but even so, television programs and films more or less rely on
some kind of script. Like literature proper, too, they are public communications:
they embody socially shared meanings which, as they are internalized and shape our
conduct, become material forces in our society. In effect, they are dramas of social order
which either support, question, or subvert the status quo. Franklin's major
achievement lies with having documented and concretely demonstrated how all of this works.
Fredric Jameson
Critical Agendas
George E. Slusser & Eric S. Rabkin, eds.
Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction.
Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. xxi + 243pp. $26.95.
George E. Slusser, Colin Greenland, & Eric S. Rabkin,
eds. Storm Warnings: Science
Fiction Confronts the Future. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois UP, 1987. xi + 278pp. $26.95.
Giuseppa Saccaro Del Buffa & Arthur O. Lewis, eds.
Utopie per gli anni Ottanta:
Studi Interdisciplinari sui temi, la storia, i progetti. Rome: Gengemi
editore, 1986. 825pp. 48,000 Lire.
Two new Riverside volumes confirm the pre-eminence of the Eaton conference. These
volumes are always richly satisfying, giving us, as Flaubert used to say, something to eat
and drink on every page, and raising the liveliest state-of-the-art issues, without undue
anti-intellectualism, about their respective topics--Aliens, and SF as dystopian
anticipation. These are of course two of the great, but only distantly related, thematic
attractions of SF in general; so the relatively accidental juxtaposition of the two
volumes may also offer the occasion for wondering what the connection is, in reality or in
our collective psyches, between these two equally fascinating but distinct themes.
Aliens gets fair marks on the first thing a symposium of this kind is supposed
to do--namely, to direct us to rare and unusual works that we may never have heard of
before. Whether Alexei Tolstoy fits this description I tend to doubt. But we also meet
unfamiliar stories by Terry Carr and Robert Silverberg; Greg Benford alerts us to an
unfamiliar story by himself; there is a Hungarian novel (A Thousand Years on Venus,
by Gyorgy Botond-Bolics); a welcome recommemoration of J.-F. Rosny the Elder, a wonderful
sampling of dragon iconography by George Slusser, works unknown to me by Attanasio, James
Morrow, and Barry B. Long-year (I hope they are not all made up!), Rachel Ingalls' Mrs
Caliban, and a rich sampling of UFO "documents" and news reports by George Guffey.
There are also the obligatory reconsiderations of the classics: The Tempest,
Zamiatin, Weinbaum, Sturgeon, Stapledon, and van Vogt's Slan (along with a new
classic: Gibson's Neuromancer!), a remarkably comprehensive review of Wells's
aliens by John R. Reed (one of the most valuable pieces here), a less satisfactory
discussion of Dick by Frank McConnell (who at least has the best "idea" for an essay in
this book--on dolls as aliens), an excellent article on robots by Noel Perrin; and the
usual references to a wide variety of 1950s' North American monster movies.
The first thing book reviewers are supposed to do, however, is to complain; and so I
will begin by complaining about the absence of my own favorite aliens from this list. The
reader will find nothing about the Moties and very little about Lem (whose "doublers,"
in Eden, might currently be more interesting than the by now famous sentient
Ocean named Solaris). The extraordinary flora and fauna of Star Maker surely
deserve (but don't receive) attention along with the ubiquitous Odd John. We are
treated over and over again to the tiresome devils of Childhood's End, but nobody
does anything with Rama, surely one of the most glorious projections in all
recent SF. Le Guin gets short shrift (even though The Lathe of Heaven remains one
of the most interesting meta-alien texts). Nobody mentions my candidate for Dick's
"best" alien, the slimemold Lord Running Clam, in Clans of the Alphane Moon. As
for movies, surely David Bowie (in The Man Who Fell to Earth, only cited twice in
passing) is a good deal more interesting and relevant to the topic than Kubrick's Hal from
2001. And if we're talking about dragons, where are Delany's extraordinary breed?
The point I want to draw from all this has nothing to do with personal taste, however.
It is a symptom of the cardinal weakness of the present symposium that, appearances to the
contrary, aliens are not taken seriously in it--and this, despite two very interesting
opening papers. The first, by Larry Niven, spells out some excellent natural and
scientific reasons why, even if there are more sentient life-forms in the universe than
has recently been supposed by disappointed searchers, they might not be in any good
position to contact us. That does set the mind going in the right direction, on the
objective preconditions for life, intelligence, civilization, travel and communication. In
the other essay, Benford then reminds us in the most timely fashion that when we are in
the mood for aliens, we don't want to find ourselves served up with Symbols, let alone
inner figments of various kinds of psychological projections of the Forbidden Planet variety
(though it is true that Forbidden Planet also involved some real, if extinct,
aliens and their civilization as well). The philosophical interest of the representation
of aliens in SF does not lie in their "meaning"; indeed, if any progress at all has been
made in recent literary criticism and theory, it is towards the utter discrediting of the
analysis of literary works in terms of messages and symbols--that is, pictures bearing
little meanings inside them that someone has to explain. Instead, we want the feel of
alien geography, of the agricultural layout of the Moties, and of the plants and machinery
of Eden; indeed, we want these things even more badly than we want descriptions of the
inhabitants, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. But this is not to be taken as the usual
fanzine diatribe against "lit-crit" (here, only McConnell, himself a "perfesser,"
indulges in this outworn pasttime), or as the traditional ("humanist"?) appeal to
experience and realism or referentiality. Rather, the philosophical interest of SF lies
precisely in the representational experience itself, and in the question of the limits of
our capacity to represent and tangibly to imagine alien beings by definition radically
different from us and the very opposite of our own projections.
Unfortunately, the papers in this volume tend to take the easy way out by stampeding in
the direction of the "alien in our minds" (Niven's title, and a misnomer for his paper
but very much in the spirit of what follows). Here, too, some interesting work gets done:
Eric Rabkin has a pertinent discussion of telepathy (to which I'll return); and Michael
Beehler alerts us (drawing interestingly on both Freud's uncanny and Kant's sublime) to
the exclusionary strategies always triggered by the theme (he oddly ties all this into
modernity itself, something one wants to have more fully explained). Pascal Ducommun has
well-chosen words in further fulfillment of Benford's topic (how aliens get represented in
the first place). The very interesting question of why "supermen," or at least more
"advanced" aliens, have to avoid mating is splendidly dispatched by Joseph D. Miller.
Clayton Koelb assimilates the internal theme to the ancient Platonic discussions of
inspiration and madness. Leighton Brett Cooke touches on the relationship between aliens
and human racism, while Slusser develops a subtle and elaborate theory of dragons as a
kind of interface between consciousness and its "others"--i.e., the otherness of the
various internal and external realities and forces which human consciousness must
inevitably confront.
But I'm still not satisfied; surely we read SF to get away from psychology and not to
mire ourselves more deeply in it. The revelation of the projective nature of our aliens
may come with powerful hermeneutic force as an interpretation and a demystification--this
is what happens most canonically in the now classical discovery that Wells's Martians (as
Reed again reminds us) derive from an early article on the evolutionary future of
"Man"
himself!--but the interpretative effect only works if you had taken Wells's Martians to be
non-psychological in the first place and if the discovery does something to a previously
existing, more "representational" reading of The War of the Worlds.
This can lead us on to the other feature of interest in Aliens: namely, what
it tells us about current hermeneutic or interpretative fashions. I've already mentioned
the survival of some fairly traditional criticism in terms of symbols or meanings. There
are some historical or genre pieces. Zoe Sofia treats us to an extraordinary collection of
Freudian motifs, which, by way of patriarchy, she relates to US imperialism as that
expresses itself through SF film: this is about as political as anything gets in this
collection (here I might add that Zoe's suggestion that Australia is a marginal Third
World-type country may not carry conviction for all readers). I am also surprised at the
degree to which a certain passion for dichotomies still survives: there are, the editors
tell us, "two major attitudes toward the alien encounter...the excorporating and the
incorporating encounter" (p. x). Slusser's essay in particular, as rich in references as
it is, is locked into this left lobe/right lobe logic (by way of J.D. Bernal's mysterious
doctrine of "dimorphism"). But until these "dichotomies" get combined with changing
historical circumstances that block or confirm, cause or release, them, my own experience
suggests that classification systems of this binary type end up being rather sterile and
frustrating.
None of these, however, conveys the real methodological shock of reading Aliens--which
is to find that antiquated thing called "sociobiology" still alive and kicking,
putt-putting up and down the byways of SF criticism and analysis as a kind of curious
relic of the Reagan years. Sociobiology is a kind of yuppie Social Darwinism combined with
a materialist hermeneutic of more philosophical than scientific interest. The hermeneutic
is a form of radical defamiliarization, which I suppose is worth having in the absence of
any Marxist or sociological, or even Freudian versions (with the exception, for this last,
of the Sofia piece mentioned above): what it amounts to is a dizzying ascent above
personal and existential life itself, to some "epicycle of Mercury" from which human
acts and events are seen as little more than the genetic and evolutionary statistics about
one kind of organism among others. That particular materialist perspective is good for us
and therapeutic (and it is of course also true). It also occasionally has interesting
interpretative results (as in Miller's gene-pool reading of Superman's chastity); but such
interpretations generally turn out looking like at least one of the ideologies and inner
points of view generated and projected by SF about itself. Sociobiology is in that (bad)
sense itself a kind of SF; and to the degree to which its themes are so intimately related
to those of its textual object of study, the hermeneutic offered is likely to be to that
degree less powerful and effective because less "defamiliarizing." In any case these
readings turn out to be relatively impoverished ones; and the great problem of
sociobiology as a metaphysic --namely, how Mother Nature or the species goes about
planting the signals for our collective protein-consumption or gene-pool invigoration
within the conscious individuals we also are--never gets addressed here (or anywhere else
for that matter).
But it is wrong to think, as Cooke (described in the notes as an "authority" on this
ideology) suggests, that the bad press of sociobiology stems from its racism. On the
contrary, his own illustration succeeds in demonstrating that Longyear's relatively
sociobiological story can be a vehicle for as liberal and tolerant a message on the
"racial question" as anything Hollywood has to offer. Indeed, mass culture, in its
unconscious wisdom, suggests that the current prosperity and level of development of the superstate can very well accommodate black males (and even females) into its power
elite--witness their obligatory presence on all the CIA teams and bureaucracies in the
various recent paranoia entertainment genres.
No, Mr Cooke, it wasn't the racism that was objected to in sociobiology as much as the sexism
(a topic scarcely ventured into by any of the contributors to the present symposium):
what is tiresome about it is the yuppie mimicry of the various traditional North American
forms of male or patriarchal behavior. On the other hand, since the thing itself came into
existence as a reaction against the modern feminist movement generally, it is not
surprising to find it reappearing within SF as a reaction against the great recent period
of a feminist SF (from Le Guin onwards).
None of which would be of much significance if a kindred impulse did not also seem to
animate the larger bulk of the other, non-sociobiological essays. This can be detected in
the (to me) relatively impoverished reading of "aliens" here as indices of our own
evolutionary future. That evolutionary mutation is, Rabkin argues, the deeper meaning of
the motif of telepathy, and in part I believe him. I've already brought up the case of
Wells himself; but surely the most interesting aliens are the ones who are not like us (or
like our future either). This idea can, of course, serve as the aforementioned bridge
between the two Eaton collections, and the deeper link between our fascination with aliens
and our passion for the various SF visions of the future. I'm afraid, however, that I
remain unconvinced.
But then why are we interested in aliens in the first place? I have postponed
mentioning until now a provocative essay by John Huntington in which, exceptionally, the
positive features of the friendly or benign alien are called into question. This is an
excellent tack, which (however) leads on into the unpromising continent of Lem (often
skirted here and never confronted as such), where the basic fact of life is the aliens'
essential indifference to ourselves. What I would like to affirm, though,
returning to Benford's terrain and the matter of alien representation, is that what most
deeply engages the SF reader in such texts is not particularly alien "psychology"
(whether a projection of our own or its inversion or something Lem-like and inscrutable),
nor even physical appearance, so much as the matter of the alien environment and ecology
as these determine and explain both that appearance and (above all) the phenomenon of
alien social structure itself. This was the splendor of The Mote in God's Eye (even
though biology crept in through the militaristic-imperialist back door), of Lem's Eden,
and of Star Maker; and I am amazed to find it of so little interest to the
contributors to the present volume. I can thus only laconically conclude this section by
reaffirming the propositions that otherness attaches first and foremost to the mode of
production; that social otherness comes first and primes all the other forms and facts of
the "alien"; and that it is always by the prospect of radically different societies that
we are as readers most deeply tempted.
Why we are tempted by visions of the future, including "storm warnings" about it, may
seem more obvious--thereby concealing even greater mysteries. The volume called Storm
Warnings, however, compared with Aliens, is something more of a mixed bag, or perhaps
I should say, two mixed bags, one inside the other, since the symposium includes the
inevitable mini-symposium on Orwell's 1984, which names the year of the
conference itself (this section of the book has already been reviewed in SFS No. 46). The
collection does not succeed in excluding the twin potential extremes of indulgence in SF
writing: namely, the aimless sounding off on current events (by way of offering a
home-made "extrapolation" of the future) and the equally desultory trip through a long
string of thematically related SF novels that have little else in common. The more
interesting tendencies of Storm Warnings, however, turn on the central issue of
foretelling the future, a topic which also has two poles or extremes: the historical one,
of how this has been done, and the contemporary or "future-shock" version of how we do
it now.
It is pleasant to find some valuable contributions to the historical register: Paul
Alkon's discussion (by now included in his own useful book, Origins of Futuristic
Fiction) of Felix Bodin's Novel of the Future (1834), Marie-HÈlËne Huet's
splendid essay on the future as past in Jules Verne, and also Huntington's predictably
stimulating piece on Orwell. Alkon wants to argue the semi-autonomy of the history of
forms, or, in plain Orwellian English, the emergence of modern SF from the inner
variations and experimentation of the novel form, and not from "modern times," the
bourgeoisie, technological innovation, and other such extrinsic forces. Alkon is right as
well as wrong; but it would involve a lengthy (and very interesting) theoretical
discussion to show how both kinds of determinants, inner and outer, need to be registered
in the most appropriately complex model of the genre's history. Huet notices a simple but
telling thing-- namely, that all Verne's novels take place after the supreme S-F event,
which they assume to be well-known but forgotten ("during the year 186_ the whole world
was singularly moved by a scientific experiment without precedent..." etc.). She may go a
little too far (in a Blanchotesque way) in attributing this essential oblivion of the
immediate past to all SF, but her contribution exhibits the complexities of the
tense-structures of SF in a more stimulating fashion than do the mere typologies we find
in some other contributions here. The Huntington article, which goes into the James
Burnham background in its quest for the origins and content of "Emmanuel
Goldstein's" Theory
and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, I will return to later. As for the other
pole, that of future-shock, we get ten types of prognostication in Gary Kern's essay,
which then shades off into 19th-century Russia and the horrors of the media in the US
today.
For me, though, the most interesting strand or tendency in this volume involves the
re-emergence of generic considerations (most notably with Orwell). Before saying something
about that, however, we must note the contribution of Benford, who as usual punches
through the consensual theme of the conference with his own distinctive preoccupation (no
less appropriate, I may add; indeed, its absence from the rest of the discussions is
rather noteworthy). Benford not incorrectly assumes that "storm warnings" and dystopias
have something or other to do with Utopias themselves and the Utopian imagination. He
thereupon delivers himself of a violent diatribe against the latter's more sinister,
repressive, and totalitarian features, preparing a list of five stereotypical "regressive" features of Utopias: they (1) repress difference, (2) don't change (3) are
against modernity and technology, (4) are authoritarian, and (5) enforce behavior by
internalized guilt. (These might have been endorsed by the aforementioned James Burnham
and perhaps by Orwell himself, and would have been the hottest theoretical item of any
1950s' right-wing journal, although they are somewhat shopworn today.) He then launches
into a rather offensive, personal attack on Le Guin, which he himself inadvertently
unmasks and discredits by revealing that in fact it is feminism and feminist Utopias
that are at issue here and that are responsible for all the noxious features listed above
(probably because, as he puts it, women like families better than men do: perhaps this is
a sociobiological "idea"?).
What is interesting in the Orwell material is not only that this writer has evidently
lost his Cold-War halo (the volume includes a refreshingly negative critique of 1984 by
Frederik Pohl), but also--and above all--that many of the contributors have begun to
wonder why Orwell's crude and paranoid caricature had the effect it did. Some interesting
British contributions (by Elisabeth Maslen, Colin Greenland, and T.A. Shippey, who has a
very good discussion of Newspeak somewhat burdened with a long digression on Le Guin)
document its impact and relevance, while the Russells (W.M.S. and Claire) suggest some
affinities with the apocalyptic tradition, a matter not irrelevant to Orwell's
antisemitism.
Maslen and Huntington probe deeply into the formal possibility of the propagandistic
resonance of 1984, she by way of a comparison with Doris Lessing's evolution, and
he via an analysis of the semic ambiguities of the interpolated Goldstein "book," making
the point that Orwell needed to distance 1984 from generic SF in order to leave
open the possibility of just these more "impure" and non-SF effects. This insistence on
genre marks a welcome change from the indiscriminate way in which some of the contributors
lump a whole range of SF narratives together, above all obliterating their different modes
("has happened," "might happen," "could only happen in SF," etc., etc.). The
function of a successful conference is generally to bring the participants to the point at
which they all realize what they should have done in the first place and what a really
successful conference on the topic in question would necessarily have involved. Maybe this
one might have found its fulfillment in a more rigorous distinct focus on form and
content: on modalities on the one hand, and the sociology of dystopias on the other.
More perplexing and chastening is the attempt to do justice to a volume like Utopie
per gli anni Ottanta ("Utopias for the '80s"), a collection of papers from the
first International Conference on the Study of Utopias, held in Reggio Calabria in 1983.
Running to 800 pages, this is an altogether monumental resource, ranging from Utopian
thought to Utopian practice and largely transcending Utopian discourse or the genre as
such, with essays on everything from Utopian economics to city planning, from visual
Utopias to linguistic ones, from science to art and philosophy, and--last but not
least--from Italy to the US (these countries accounting for the bulk of the participants).
Not surprisingly, historical studies loom largest here, and despite Anna Maria Battista's
interesting introduction (in which the country of Machiavelli is said to be less
"Utopian" than that of Brook Farm or the Shaker communities), much fascinating and
unfamiliar Italian material is included: from various Neapolitan experiments to the
establishment of the great poorhouses in the 18th century, which offer richer spatial
plans than anything in Foucault or Jeremy Bentham. SF and literature are decidedly
present, but somehow the stakes are raised and the issues sharpened when we arrive at
literary and representational form after a long journey, if not through reality, then at
least through the other disciplines. I particularly welcome the presence of the visual
component--from urbanism and city planning (Lucio Bertelli argues that in the ancient
world's Utopian thinking is essentially at one with the founding of new cities) to the
imaginary plans and buildings of the 1960s, so rich in Italy, of which Egidio Mucci gives
us a useful account.
I am tempted, however, to take up a previous theme and to wonder whether, in Italy,
anarchism is not somehow the equivalent of sociobiology in the US (at least insofar as it
authorizes the repudiation, not just of Marxism, but more generally of Utopia itself). If
one takes the position that the strength or prevalence of an intellectual movement stands
in direct proportion to the situation it tries to correct or resist, subvert, or
transform, then the popularity of anarchism in Europe (and particularly in the Latin
countries) is clearly proportionate to the firm tradition in those countries of the
absolute state, something which has no equivalent in Anglo-American experience. That the
anarchists are worried about power comes as no surprise; that they should also be so
committed to exchange and a market economy, however, argues a Friedmanite turn of thought
which is no longer very radical at all. These various essays on anarchist economics
(including a thoughtful but revisionist piece on labor by Carmen Sirianni, the author of
an important book on the soviets) are all so lugubriously reasonable and cautious--so
"realistic" compared, for example, to the wild extravagancies of visual movements like
those of Archizoom or Super-studio--that one wonders what they are doing in a book on
Utopias in the first place. Even the appropriate kickoff piece by Gillo Dorfles, which
ingeniously posits a linguistic Utopia in the conception of a single unified conceptual
language as poets and philosophers have so often dreamed or presupposed it, turns
anti-Utopian in its call for what exists already-- namely, linguistic multiplicity. (We
are, however, to understand that it is this multiplicity which is really Utopian, and
indeed many of the contributors strike a blow for difference and break a lance against
totalitarian uniformity and conformity, identity, and regimentation.) The problem is that
not only the founding father, Thomas More, but also the great bulk of the Utopian
tradition, seems to be ranged squarely in the second camp, busy devising ways and means to
make people similar and to exclude deviant behavior. Few of the contributors face this
dilemma--it might be more accurate to call it a real contradiction--head on; it would
presumably involve giving up Utopia altogether (and swimming with the Zeitgeist of late
capitalism) or returning to history and positing some fundamental shift in the structure
of Utopias and in the situations to which they respond and react, something only a brief
space-oriented article by Franco Buncunga contemplates doing. There is, however, an
incisive essay on reactionary and nostalgic utopias and fantasies (by Lynn F. Williams);
and the recent and still lively tradition of feminist utopias is well represented in six
or seven essays (including a valuable survey by Carol Komerten of North American feminist
utopias from 1880-1915).
On the whole, individual texts (very much including SF) get less satisfactory treatment
here than general trends do; besides the essays on feminist utopias already mentioned,
which range across such well-known figures as Russ, Charnas, and Monique Wittig, there is
a stimulating but brief article by James R. Hartnett on the outlook of black people in
current utopian discourse; a provocative reversal of Tempest criticism by William
Prouty, who sees this text as decisively anti-utopian; and a fine theoretical comparison
of Utopias with SF by Pierre-FranÁois Moreau, who suggests that Utopias are social, and
SF individual, and that the former are organized around considerations of work, while the
latter tends to be imagined in terms of the primacy of technology. This could serve as the
axis of a whole new conference in its own right!
Philosophical issues do somewhat better, although one senses some fatigue with the
classic Utopian texts themselves. Still, there are two monograph-length essays of great
quality here: a review of recent historical research on Baboeuf and the Conspiracy of the
Equals by Bruna Consarelli, and a long study of the relationship of Hegel and Marx to
Utopianism by Peter G. Stillman. Another long study of the Icarian movement by Lillian M.
Snyder is also valuable, as are essays on futurist and machine-oriented modernist currents
by Giusi M.L. Rapisarda, on Simone Weil and on Catholic social teaching, by Sergio
Bartolommei and Edward Wilson, respectively, on Utopian pedagogy in the US by Aaron H.
Schectman, and on Luk·cs's early Utopianism in the only very recently published fragments
on Dostoyevsky (this, by Elio Matassi, is truly pathbreaking).
The dissatisfaction one may sometimes (ungratefully) have with all these riches
probably has something to do with the faintness of the "current situation" in them. Only
Luigi Firpo, in his conclusions to the conference volume, evokes the new global system and
the challenges it is bound to offer Utopian thought, particularly one more and more
committed to regionalism, decentralization, and smallness. The Eaton volumes united North
Americans with a certain ideological homogeneity; there we often enough sense the
realities that provoked the thoughts and interpretations. If the Reggio Calabria
conference so often seems backward-looking, this has nothing at all to do with the Utopian
canon as such (although there is certainly no new or contemporary production present
here--even the feminist ones enumerated above are essentially old stuff by now), but
rather with the absence of any perspective for which the Utopian enterprise would remain
vital and necessary. But surely, in the twilight of late capitalism's virtually global
hegemony, with all its post-modern complacency, the Utopian imagination is very much on
the agenda!
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