#6 = Volume 2, Part 2 = July 1975
|
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Scholes' Structural Fabulation
Let a prominent Joyce scholar loose in the fields of science fiction and what do you
get? A condemnation of the failure of SF to live up to the standards of prose and
construction set by the master? A microscopic examination of every symbol and allusion,
every error and flaw in a random dozen tests? Not if the scholar is Robert
Scholes; in this case, you get a stirring introduction to SF viewed at a
slightly skewed angle: Structural Fabulation: An Essay
on Fiction of the Future (University of Notre Dame Press, 111p,
$6.95).
Speaking as an academic to other academics (in four lectures originally delivered at
Notre Dame), Scholes seductively argues the legitimacy of SF as an art form and the need
for it as an antidote to much that plagues contemporary literature and society. It is not
science fiction per se which he presses upon his audience, however, but
structural fabulation, so defined as to comprise "the best" of science fiction,
and to spill out beyond traditional SF boundaries.
Starting from the proposition that all we know are fictions (models of reality), he
surveys the contemporary dead-ends of realism (which can not be fully real), fantasy
(which can not escape from our models of reality) and meta-fiction (stories about the
impossibility of writing believable stories). If the historical present as a viable
time-frame for fiction is receding (as did mythical eternity, the legendary cycle, and the
ideal time of fairy tales before it), its logical successor is future time, in which we
can openly deal with self-acknowledged models of reality. Doris Lessing serves as a
representative case in point.
Building on frameworks erected in previous books, Scholes constructs a theoretical (and
genealogical) model for the genre of romance. As opposed to pure romance, didactic romance
(termed fabulation) divides into dogmatic and speculative fabulation, the latter further
subdividing into pseudo-scientific sublimation and structural fabulation. In similar
fashion, he shows the drama giving way to the novel as a dominant form, and the novel
itself passing through sentimental, socio-historical, and psychological dominant modes,
correlated with social change. Then he suggests that the concept of historical man
(progressing through the conquest of implicitly congenial nature) is giving way to one of
structural man (operating within the limits of a closed system of indifferent nature).
Given man's need for fictions as a means of both sublimation and cognition, he asserts
that only SF can provide both for our modern conception of man's place in the cosmos.
Having provided historical and theoretical pedigrees for his version of SF, Scholes
then proceeds from the general to the particular. Although all art estranges and
defamiliarizes objects, he maintains (with Darko Suvin) that SF estranges conceptually.
A sensitive reading of a passage from Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" illustrates
the point in the microcosm of style; consideration of the four legitimate
versions of Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" demonstrates the elasticity of a
"minimal SF" concept. Brief analyses of Stapledon, Herbert and Brunner suggest
speculative, sublimative and (future) historical perimeters for SF, and a full chapter on
Le Guin offers her Earthsea trilogy and The Left Hand of Darkness as pinnacles of
achievement in both concept and style.
A natural outgrowth of Scholes' concern for a poetics of fiction, visible in The
Nature of Narrative (co-authored with Robert Kellogg) and last year's Structuralism
in Literature, Structural Fabulation provides a clearer strand of argument
than did The Fabulators, his earlier attempt to apply his theories to examples of
contemporary fiction. Short as it is, this book carries enough theoretical baggage with it
that one need not consult its predecessors (though I'm glad I was familiar with them).
Intended to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, Structural Fabulation is not
so much a "defense of poetry" as it is an aggressive staking of claims, on
grounds much surer than those on which most SF missionaries stand. Even so, its claims
need close analysis. It may be "common knowledge" that the contemporary novel is
dead, but is it true? The historical schemata he invokes are interesting, but their very
symmetry arouses my suspicions. In Structuralism in Literature, Scholes provides
an arrowhead diagram with history at the point and the novel (fiction) proceeding
chronologically away from the point; realism is neatly bracketed by sentiment and comedy,
naturalism by the picaresque and tragedy, fabulation by satire and romance. The model is
aesthetically and logically pleasing but, as with those in the present volume, it leads
teleologically toward the a priori position that fabulation (structural or not) is today
the dominant form, and to the suggestion that this is the end of the line.
I am sympathetic to Scholes' arguments. I have used fabulation as one pole in
classes in contemporary literature. And I have argued for the need for a
"structural" view of man, for the future as a complementary dimension in our
culture's model of time, and for literature as "useful," at least in the sense
of enlarging us with vicarious experiences. But how much science fiction actually does
this? Scholes is very selective, and one could infer from his statements that science
fiction which does not fit within the parameters of his structuralist ideology (he calls
it that himself in Structuralism in Literature, comparing it with existentialism
and Marxism) is by definition trivial. Evaluation by ideology troubles me, especially on
such a conscious, programmatic basis.
But perhaps that's a minor nit to pick in a book with this one's virtues: wit, grace,
sensitivity, social concern and a challenging theoretical base. This essay may do more to
convert the Philistines than any ever written on science fiction.
--David Samuelson
Patrouch's Study of Asimov
In a famous dispute over the art of fiction, Henry James taxed H.G. Wells with
stressing situation at the expense of character. Wells replied that subtle analysis of
character is only possible if the writer assumes that the social frame remains fairly
stable. Living at a time when industrial development and scientific discovery were rapidly
warping the social frame, Wells felt that he could not afford the Jamesian luxury of
cataloguing the minutiae of personality. The world itself had become problematic.
Modernist writers have generally sided with James in this dispute, probing ever deeper
into the veins of consciousness while progressively ignoring the social realm. With few
exceptions, and those fairly recent, writers of science fiction have sided with Wells,
creating a genre in which, not character, but the framework within which character acts
out its destiny, is at issue.
In The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov
(Doubleday, xxvii+283p, $6.95), Joseph F. Patrouch, Jr.,
offers a working definition of the genre as "fiction which examines scientifically
plausible alternate settings for human consciousness." His chronicle of Asimov's
work, from the stories of 1939 to The Gods Themselves of 1972, shows that this
patriarch of science fiction has sustained for over three decades a fascination with
alternate settings alongside a rather rudimentary interest in consciousness. In other
words, the Asimov who emerges from Patrouch's study is the creator of psychologically
simple characters within conceptually intricate situations. The only complex mind present
in this fiction is Asimov's own, the ever-present artificer.
Patrouch himself is most interested in Asimov the artificer, the craftsman, rather than
Asimov the thinker, and much of the book is therefore devoted to the examination of
narrative technique in the fiction. The choice of focus is an odd one because, as Patrouch
demonstrates repeatedly, Asimov is a clumsy writer, often hasty and careless, more
interested in the well-turned idea than the well-made story. His best fiction moves us by
the force of his conception rather than by the power of his art, by ingenuity rather than
craftsmanship. Having chosen this focus, therefore, Patrouch is led to protest time after
time against Asimov's inconsistencies, his use of hackneyed or hyperbolic language, his
recourse to formulas, his partiality for trick endings, his cardboard characterization.
And yet Patrouch makes clear to us from the beginning that these protests should be
read as a lover's quarrel: he is pointing out flaws in a master whose lifework he
respects. In fact on several occasions he exhorts Asimov to dedicate himself once again
full-time to the writing of science fiction, and suggests that the master could most
fruitfully deal with those social and technological trends which have recently led Asimov
(together with the rest of us) to take a dim view of the human prospect.
Indeed the technological optimism and the unwavering faith in reason which were
characteristic of Asimov's fiction from the beginning have become increasingly suspect in
the past decade. Patrouch notes that Asimov has claimed he suffers from no
"Frankenstein complex," harbors no fears that our mechanical creations will
destroy us.
Even in the nineteen-forties, when new inventions were annihilating millions, this
technological faith might have seemed groundless. Surely in the nineteen-seventies, anyone
who still believes the First Law of Robotics--that our mechanical creations are incapable
of harming us--is indulging in nostalgia or fantasy.
Those interested in Asimov's work as a writer of science fiction will find Patrouch's
book a careful, thoughtful summary. There are bibliographies listing sequences of
composition and publication for the novels, stories and collections, and there are
discussions of all the major and many of the minor works. He notes the influence of
reigning pulp models, particularly as formulated by Campbell, on the earliest stories,
although he emphasizes the break Asimov made from the space-opera tradition in favor of a
more cerebral and eventually political fiction. After dealing in successive chapters with
the beginnings of Asimov's career, the Robot stories, the Foundation series, the novels
from the fifties and the various collections of short fiction, Patrouch concludes with a
discussion of recent work, and in the process summarizes the qualities which he takes to
be distinctively Asimovian.
He stresses that he has no intention of ranging outside the ample domain indicated by
his title; but this has the effect of isolating Asimov's science fiction from all his
other multifarious activities as writer, scholar and publicist. This man who has sought to
embody in his own life the catholicity of interest and the unity of understanding which he
advocates for all enlightened modern persons, deserves someday to be studied as a whole.
--Scott Sanders
Reginald's Contemporary SF Authors
This volume--R. Reginald, Contemporary Science Fiction Authors
(Arno Press, viii+368, $20.00)--first appeared in 1970 in a $5.00 limited edition.
Anything published in 1969 figures here as "Work in Progress."
This half-decade time lag is as unfortunate as it is unavoidable. Happily, CSFA does
not rely greatly on being up-to-date; its merit lies in an eclectic eccentricity which
includes much information of a kind that less catholic editorship might have rejected.
Let me give instances. Most of the authors--483 are claimed, though this bag includes
editors and critics and other breeds without the law--have been allowed to talk about
their own work. So we find D.C. Compton admitting that he regards the writing of SF as a
sign of weakness; Paul Corey claiming that he writes farm fiction, a genre hitherto
unknown to this reviewer; Tony Russell Wayman saying that he scripted a series of
Malaysian fantasy novels, including Aladin Burok and Wily Delilah; Ray
Nelson confessing to several previous reincarnations, including one as Yoni McKarikan in
Ireland in the Early Middle Ages; Lester del Rey revealing his full name. Etc.
To qualify, authors had to be active when the volume was being compiled; so it is a
surprise to come across the name of Col. S.P. Meek, noted author of the Gernsback era, who
still writes in the style of that period. "I am not especially familiar with the
modern version [of SF], and would prefer not to express an opinion on its merits, much
less pontificate about it. I was in at the early days, I feel I made some contribution to
it, and the mere fact that two of my old magazine serials were disinterred and reprinted
in 1961 seems to indicate that my work was not wholly without merit. More I will not
say."
The editor's comments are equally enjoyable. "A.J. Merak seems to be a real name,
but no proof has been encountered to date verifying his existence." And I appreciated
"Zeno Koomoter is a pen-name of Joseph Marnell," and similar information. In the
pirandellan SF field, authors are always in search of names--and vice versa. The fact that
E.H. Visiak was pen-name for Edward Harold Physick is omitted, perhaps wisely.
Mr. Reginald is particularly strong on English authors, perhaps because Ted Carnell
helped with the British scene. Britain has produced some of the best SF writers; that it
has also produced some of the worst--and the most prolific--this volume testifies. Badger
Books find their monument here. Although consistency is not a strong point, the volume
does not include the names of Nigel "Quatermass" Neale, Peter Tate, Christopher
Priest, or John Keir Cross; the mystery of who John Lymington is is not unravelled.
However, by way of compensation, it does include the information that Will F. Jenkins
(Murray Leinster) "was recently presented a plague by the Newark Science
Fiction Club"--presumably for Doctor to the Stars.
For a reference book, CSFA is extremely readable. More cuddley than definitive, it
provides another heroic memorial to the amateur endeavour on which so much of the activity
of the SF field is based--as well as a feast of aberrant facts.
--Brian W. Aldiss
S amuelson's Visions of Tomorrow
New Criticism has been slow to cast its cold analytic eye upon science fiction, partly
due to the classical bias of those who fathered close reading in this country, scholars
who preferred their literature to go upon stilts, and partly due to the speculative bent
of the genre itself. Science fiction has been so insistently concerned with ideas that it
has held out little appeal to critics who believe that works of literature should not mean
but be; it has employed pulp conventions so loyally, and has held so faithfully to the
values of clarity and accessibility, that it has discouraged critics who seek formal
complexity, whether their key terms be irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension or allusiveness.
The aesthetic values implicit in New Criticism, in short, are at odds with those implicit
in science fiction.
Nevertheless, works of science fiction are crafted objects, they are products of human
design, and accordingly they have begun to attract the sort of close formal attention
which we have long since bestowed upon writings of the Metaphysicals, Symbolists and
Moderns. An ambitious and largely successful example of this close reading is offered by
David Samuelson in Visions
of Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Outer to Inner Space (Arno Press,
v+429p, $25.00). The six journeys in question are Childhood's End by Arthur
Clarke, Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human,
Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Rogue Moon by Algis
Budrys, and The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard.
Originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation at U.S.C. in 1969, the study has been
reprinted as it stood six years ago, with a brief forward added in which Samuelson
sketches the main changes he would make were he to revise the book. Let me ask, before
going on to describe what Samuelson does, and does well, why he did not revise the study?
It is an uncommonly good dissertation, written with confidence and lucidity; but it
remains a dissertation, in need of pruning, too timid in places where a doctoral committee
might raise objections, too lumbered with notes and yet lacking an index. Furthermore
Samuelson himself states in his Foreword that his thoughts have shifted concerning the
central theme in the book, the role of science in science fiction. Why then not rewrite it
for book publication? Any study worth presenting to the public is worth presenting in its
most considered form.
Visions of Tomorrow opens with a historical chapter which reviews the
formative influence of the utopian and dystopian traditions, of Poe, Verne and Wells, and
then concentrates upon the development of the genre in this country since the 1920s.
Because this development has been recorded and largely promoted by the pulp magazines,
Samuelson stresses the role played by the most important editors, Hugo Gernsback, John W.
Campbell, Jr., and Anthony Boucher (pseudonym for William Anthony Parker White). The
chronology he offers is a useful summary of what has become fairly well accepted in
histories of the genre: the period up to WWII was dominated by "physical"
science fiction, exploiting technical discoveries, often for the further glory of some
death-defying hero; the succeeding period, from the war into the late 1950s, was dominated
by "social" science fiction, stressing the broadscale human response to
scientific discoveries; and the pre-eminent form since about 1960 has been
"psychological" science fiction, which explores the further reaches of
consciousness and dramatizes the life of the psyche.
In the second chapter Samuelson sketches a blueprint for the science fiction novel an
"ideal," in Max Weber's sense of a hypothetical model whose essential features:
never exactly duplicated in reality, define the genre. The model he offers, as he
acknowledges, is a familiar one: "imaginative literature based on extrapolation from
contemporary reality, consistent with contemporary scientific assumptions and
theory." Judging from his new Foreword, he would now qualify his claim, prominent in
the book, that a scientific conception of the world is basic to the genre, that the
science-fictional cosmology is "at bottom...founded on natural law and the goals and
assumptions of science." However true this may have been for earlier work, it ceases
to hold for much of what has been written under the name of science fiction during the
last two decades; in proportion as writers explore the psyche, religious experience, and
altered states of consciousness, the methods and outlook of the sciences lose their
efficacy.
With the historical and theoretical scaffolding erected, Samuelson then proceeds to his
primary concern--the close reading of the novels. In each analysis he discusses other
relevant works by the author in question, summarizes the reviews which greeted the book,
articulates the leading themes, and examines matters of style, characterization, narrative
structure, imagery and symbolism. He is strongest precisely where science fiction
criticism has been weakest, in formal analysis, in viewing the novels primarily as
artefacts and only secondarily as vehicles for speculation. Among the six critiques he is
most illuminating when dealing with the two authors who are the finest craftsmen, namely
Miller and Ballard, who repay formal analysis most handsomely. I believe Samuelson is
wrong in his implicit hope that science-fiction writers will be provoked into greater
concern for the art of the novel by such criticism, however. Good writers have always
derived their standards from other writers, not from critics. One science-fictional
Stendhal or Tolstoy or Lawrence would have more impact on the genre than a trainload of
well-intentioned commentators. But I believe Samuelson is justified in his hope that
studies of the sort he has written, intelligent and clear-eyed, will help us "to see
science fiction more in terms of individual works and writers, and less in terms of a
conglomerate or corporate image."
Having said that, I wish to consider briefly two features of the corporate image of
science fiction which emerge from the book. The first is the prominence of pulp literary
conventions--for example, stereotypical characters, action-oriented plots, resort to
sentimentality or melodrama, and the treatment of language as a tool for communication
rather than a medium bearing its own intrinsic interest. Samuelson provides a balanced
reading of the pulp elements present in the six novels under discussion, and suggests the
crucial role this repertory of conventions has played in establishing a community of
readers for the magazines. The pulp influences have helped create a paradoxical genre. For
we encounter in science fiction a combination of scientific speculation, which is oriented
toward innovation, and popular literary forms, which tend to be conservative, formulaic,
counter-innovative. This pouring of new wine into old wineskins was common during the
first two centuries of the novel's existence (if we date from Cervantes), when the novelty
which gave the genre its name was often a matter of content rather than form. Increasingly
during the past one hundred years, the "literary" novel has stressed formal
innovation; the aesthetic bequeathed us by the modernists has demanded that each new work
constitute an assault upon narrative and stylistic conventions. Therefore, during the past
century, the gulf between "popular" and "literary" fiction has
widened, the one adhering to formulas of plot, characterization and language which had
proved engaging for a broad audience, the other seeking to generate new forms as
relentlessly and often pointlessly as Detroit spinning automobiles.
In the case of science fiction, in addition to the aesthetic gulf which separates all
pulp fiction from the self-consciously literary novel, there is also an ideological gulf,
because, in our own time, the mainstream writer is usually ignorant of or hostile to the
aims and methods of science. This has not always been so. However amateurish their efforts
to comprehend the sciences, many nineteenth century novelists, from Balzac through Zola
and Howells, sought to explain their fiction by analogy to biology or physics. Literary
naturalists and positivists conceived the novel as a branch of natural philosophy, an
application of the scientific method to the affairs of society. Discoveries in biology,
anthropology, psychology, and even, to a lesser extent, in physics and chemistry, were
eagerly followed by writers who wished to incorporate the newest learning into their
fiction. As these discoveries became more esoteric, however, and their human significance
more obscure, writers who lacked technical training came to feel impotent in the face of
this proliferating realm of scientific theory. This technical illiteracy, coupled with the
misuse of scientific discoveries in our own century, the daily atrocities visited upon man
and nature by our own inventions, would be sufficient grounds for explaining the neglect
of science on the part of "literary" writers.
But there is an additional ground, more potent than the other two, for the mainstream
writer's ignorance of or hostility toward science, and this is the manifest failure of
scientific method to illuminate the novelist's traditional subject matter--human beings as
unique individuals, and as social creatures. This brings me to the second feature of the
corporate image of science fiction which emerges from Samuelson's book. For he holds out
as an ideal the vision, projected elsewhere by Reginald Bretnor and Judith Miller among
others, of an "integrated" literature, combining the speculative method,
awareness of technical change, and scientific outlook characteristic of science fiction,
with the respect for individual character, aesthetic values and human wholeness
characteristic of the mainstream novel. But is this integration possible, and if so on
what terms? Much has been made of the use of science fictional motifs by such mainstream
writers as Anthony Burgess and William Burroughs. Yet to proceed from borrowing motifs to
expressing a scientific worldview is an immense journey. J.G. Ballard, for example, as
Samuelson himself argues, ransacks science for metaphors and images, much as T.S. Elliot
ransacked literature; but the worldview implicit in Ballard's fiction, the view of man's
nature and prospects, is diametrically opposed to that upheld by science. Likewise, the
interest in the intricacies and idiosyncracies of character--the romance of
psychology--which animates the modernist novel, is diametrically opposed to the
abstracting, categorizing, generalizing interest which sustains the scientist. The
limitations of scientific understanding, particularly when applied to human affairs, are
in fact a central theme in the six novels which Samuelson discusses. In each book at least
one character reveals the distortions and dangers to which an exclusively rational,
scientific mentality falls prey.
If we are to achieve the integrated literature which Samuelson imagines, it must
involve more than a borrowing of metaphors from science for the mainstream novel, more
than aesthetic polishing for the science fiction novel. It will have to involve a blending
of the quite different modes of understanding characteristic of the two traditions: modes
of understanding character, event, history, and consciousness. The obstacles in the way of
such a blending are obvious. Whether some genius will succeed in overcoming them, succeed
where humanists and scientists have failed, only the future of fiction will tell.
--Scott Sanders
Menville's Thesis on SF Film
But why is Douglas Menville's A Historical and Critical Survey of the Science-Fiction
Film (New York: Arno Press, xvii+185, $11.00) published? The
survey, which attempts to trace the history of the film genre from its beginnings through
1957, was and still is merely a Master's thesis presented at USC in 1959. It is entirely
superseded by John Baxter's Science Fiction in the Cinema (New York: Paperback
Library, 1970), to which it adds little except an occasional error.
The volume does provide a fascinating glimpse into the horrors of American graduate
education. It contains all the idiocies we require in an MA thesis, the superabundant and
useless footnotes, the execrable prose style ("As has been stated
previously..."; "Ever since man first..."), the bloated commonplaces
presented as scholarly conclusions ("As we glance back over the history of the
science-fiction motion picture we will come to realize that the primary purpose of this
type of film is to entertain"). To be fair, one must say that this pendantic guff is
probably more to be attributed to Mr. Menville's thesis directors than to himself. If they
had enough confidence in the subject to allow him to pursue it, why had they not enough
confidence to allow him to treat it sensibly? Here is a prime example of the way in which
academic snobbishness and defensiveness can mortally hinder interesting research.
Even so, Mr. Menville has allowed it to be published. Rather, he has caused it to be
published, since he is one of the two advisory editors for the Arno Press Science Fiction
collection. And for this, he must be held guilty. At a time when money is scarce, and when
many libraries are trying desperately to gather workable holdings in both film and SF, the
issuance of this volume under the aegis of the New York Times is a heartless
imposition.
Menville is, I take it, working on a real, honest-to-God history of the SF film. We
could have waited; it costs nothing to wait.
--Fred Chappell
SF: A View from the USSR
In his Chto Takoe Fantastika (What
is SF?--Moskva: Khudozhestvennaya Literature, 1974 352p),
Juliy Kagarlitsky, who received the 1972 SFRA
Pilgrim Award, sets himself the task of defining SF in a literary and social context,
appealing first to the historical antecedents of the genre and then to its main
present-day concerns. He limits himself primarily to British and American authors, but the
problems upon which he touches are not theirs alone. The low quality of much of the SF
produced for the mass market has, in Kagarlitsky's estimation, caused the works of even
the best writers to be unjustly slighted. As a result, the positive social role of SF has
been minimized or ignored. Kagarlitsky intends that his book should help to remedy this
situation.
Selecting several scientific concepts and tracing them through various works important
in the history of SF, Kagarlitsky sets off to explore some of the conflicts inherent in
the genre. While SF is undoubtedly based in the scientific knowledge and social reality of
its time, and while it may use realistic literary devices, its effect is destroyed if the
illusion of reality thus created is too complete. On the contrary, as he points out, SF
demands a complex interaction of belief and disbelief in its explorations of the unknown
aspects of the known. Kagarlitsky suggests a possibly productive comparison of myth with
SF: both are only analogues of reality, but while myth is based on faith, SF is based on
the "dialectics of the investigative mind."
The fruits of some of the more notable "investigative minds" are examined in
the next two chapters. He devotes the second chapter to a brief history of the genre,
beginning with Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and the Renaissance utopian
fiction, continuing through Swift and Voltaire's Micromégas, and concluding with
works from the Romantic period, of which the most important is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
He selects Gulliver's Travels for a closer analysis of the interrelationship of
scientific ideas and SF; specifically, the experiments of the Projectors of Lagado
demonstrate that Swift was writing from a close knowledge of the scientific advances of
his period.
The second and more extensive section of the book (ch.4-9) deals with some of the major
elements which have been present in the SF of the last 100 years. Revealing a broad
knowledge of the works of many British and American authors, Kagarlitsky devotes
particular attention not only to their scientific, but also their social bases. In the
chapter "Chronoclasm," for example, Kagarlitsky--referring to works by Wells,
Asimov, Lem, Aldiss, Bradbury, Heinlein and others--mentions some of the philosophical and
social problems explored through time-travel. Moreover, he suggests that the preoccupation
of writers with this device is a measure of their interest in the problems of history and
the direction of the future. One result is the relatively new "historical novel about
the future," exemplified here by John Wyndham's The Chrysalids.
Chapter 5 is devoted to the discussion of American mass-market SF. Although he deplores
its low quality (earlier he had pointed out that in its unquestioning absorption of often
pseudo-scientific ideas it resembles myth more than it does true SF), he sees in it,
especially in the "space operas," a reflection of the epic element present in
all SF, and proposes that it derives its popularity and distinctively American flavor from
wholesale borrowing from Westerns. At the same time, he does acknowledge the high quality
of much American SF.
In the next three chapters, Kagarlitsky discusses in considerable detail the reaction
of SF to the social problems created or threatened by changing conceptions of the world,
of man and of the role of technology. He deals with the social uses, as seen by SF, of
such concepts as personal immortality, telepathy and robots. This analysis is extended in
his last chapter, "SF, Utopia, Anti-utopia," which examines the SF portrayal of
societies, ideal or otherwise. Although he has already passed the early utopias in review,
he discusses them here in more depth. In addition, he treats anti-utopias such as Wells' Time
Machine, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451, characterizing them as critical evaluations of progress and, incidentally,
refuting claims that anti-utopias such as 1984 were aimed against communist
states. Finally, he turns to visions of future societies in contemporary SF, enumerating
frequent targets such as the desirability of prosperity, over-dependency on machines, or
personality leveling. Particularly timely, in view of our present preoccupation with the
return to the simple life, is Kagarlitsky's discussion of what he terms the Rousseauist
utopia. Utopias such as B.F. Skinner's Walden Two are futile, in his opinion,
since they are moving in an anti-historical direction by rejecting progress, and he
interprets them as essentially, although not necessarily intentionally, reactionary. He
sees the pessimism of many Western SF writers as a function of their limiting themselves
to visions of progress only along the lines of bourgeois materialistic societies.
Whether or not one agrees with Kagarlitsky that the utopia for which British and
American writers are searching lies in communism, he offers a valuable interpretation of
the interaction of SF, and in particular of its basic themes, with society. This is both
the strength and the limitation of his approach to what is after all fiction rather than
futurology. Perhaps such an exclusive stress results from his popularizing intention,
which is here pleasingly fused with solid erudition. Thus, although Kagarlitsky may not,
as he confesses in his introduction, have provided a definitive answer to the question
"What is SF?", he has instead suggested some promising lines of research on a
number of basic problems with which modern SF deals, and on how it historically came to do
so.
--Marjorie Ferry
Orwell Surveyed
George Orwell: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams, has just been
published in the industrious Twentieth Century Views Series (Prentice-Hall, x+182p, $6.95
hardback, $2.95 paperback). This is an excellent choice of various views on various facets
of Orwell, which runs the gamut from liberal to anarchist and from journalistic to
scholarly criticism; only the two blind extremes of Tory and Stalinist reactions to Orwell
have been excluded as not helpful, but Professor Williams's Introduction gives a sense of
the whole evolution of views on Orwell. For the SF critic, the most helpful parts will be
a) the general views of Orwell by Raymond Williams himself, E.P. Thompson, and John Wain;
b) particularly on 1984, which increasingly looks as the fountainhead of the
"new maps of hell" SF after World War 2, there are useful contributions by Isaac
Deutscher and Conor Cruise O'Brien, while the concluding chapter by George Woodcock is
both a general approach to Orwell's prose and a critique of 1984. A number of
writers in this collection point to Orwell's indebtedness to earlier masters of SF. The by
now classic essay of Deutscher analyzes his huge debt to Zamiatin's We (though it
would have been useful had a footnote corrected Deutscher's wrong information about
Zamiatin's biography, which was in 1954, when he wrote, largely obscure but has by now
been cleared up, notably in the monograph by Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of
Evgenij Zamjatin, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968).
Further, an essay by Jenni Calder uses Orwell's reviews of Jack London's The Iron Heel
for a brief parallel. But much work remains to be done on 1984 as a twist on the
transmission between prewar and postwar approaches to the SF genre. For such further work,
Professor Williams's collection is an excellent first introduction, from which a student
can continue to deal with other views on Orwell--with Woodcock, Williams himself, etc. (a
basic bibliography, as it made clear in a useful appendix, would by now have about two
dozen titles).
--Darko Suvin
Locke's Bibliography
We have long needed what George Locke
gives us in Voyages in Space: A Bibliography of
Interplanetary Fiction 1801-1914 (London: Ferret Fantasy, 1975, 80
pages plus paper cover, $8.50 in U.S. bookstores). Beginning where Marjorie Nicolson left
off, Locke lists 215 books published in his period, and then adds 48 magazine stories,
"boys' novelettes," etc. Since he is not especially interested in identifying
the first issue of the first edition (and in some cases does not have the information to
do so), he does not give a full collation, but merely the number of the last printed page.
On the other hand, since the book is designed primarily for collectors, he does give some
information on bindings and variant editions. He is commendably careful with his dates,
bracketing any derived from copyrighting, bound-in advertisements, or external sources,
and clearing up a number of matters that had bothered me for some time. Most important, he
presents for each book a brief statement on the content: the planet to which the voyage is
made, the nature of the inhabitants of the planet, the technology involved, etc. He
includes a number of works in which the voyage into space occupies only a few pages, or
comparatively few, as in the anonymous 4-volume Life and Its Manifestations
(privately printed 1891-1910), for which the commentary ends with this wry note:
"However, 130 pages in nearly 2000 is not likely to attract many collectors, and
there is, of course, no story." Not many books are listed of this type, and only one
that I think should have been excluded, simply on the matter of dating, for his scheme
does not allow him to include in his main list the second or third edition of a book first
published before 1801: Volney's Ruins, for which he lists an 1801 edition. On the
other hand, it is interesting to discover that this famous book contains a passage in
which the "narrator's spirit is taken by a genius to a point in space above Earth
and, as the planet rotates, is able to witness the future development of
civilization," and if he had merely put this note in his "select bibliography of
interplanetary fiction up to 1800," I could not have made even this quibble. Finally,
although Mr. Locke limits himself to the modest claim that his listing includes
"between 80 and 90% of the relevant books," it seems to me highly doubtful that
anything of any importance has been overlooked--but of course, if you have knowledge to
the contrary, both Mr. Locke and I would be very happy to learn about it. In sum, Mr.
Locke has given us what we need, and probably all we need, as a guide to serious study in
this field.
Miscellanea
Orbites, a Quarterly edited by Daniel Riche and
Gérard Klein. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Oswald, 1982. 200 p. each issue. FF39.00.--This
is a new journal published in France by two major SF writers and editors. After a number
of failed attempts at launching a quality journal of SF, we do hope that the new formula
will be successful. In its second issue Orbites published a number of short stories
by Moorcock, Matheson, Robert F. Young, and Scott Baker. Half of the issue is devoted to
critical surveys (on heroic fantasy in this case), notes, and reviews.
Jacques Bisceglia (with the help of
Roland Buret for SF) Trésors du roman policier, de la
science-fiction et du fantastique: catalogue encyclopedique Paris: Les
Editions de l'amateur, 1981. 431p. FF135.00.--This bibliographical catalogue attempts to
provide a complete listing of all that has ever been published in French in detective
fiction' SF, and fantasy. The authors do recognize that this compilation of 25,000 titles
or so, with a grouping by series and publishers, still presents gaps and errors. As it
stands, however, their work is a mine of information that will be welcomed by collectors
and second-hand booksellers as well as by university scholars. An average price on the
second-hand bookmarket is provided where possible.
Koinos Kosmos, edited by Klaus
Johansen. Odense, no. 2:1982. US $1.00 per issue.--This fanzine, published
in English by a Danish fan, Mr. Klaus Johansen (Godthäbsgade 61/st.tv./DK 5000 Odense
C./Denmark) stands unique in its kind for exclusively publishing critical texts on Philip
K. Dick. In issue number two, an interesting polemic between Stanislaw Lem and O. Terlecki
pro and against Dick has been translated.
"Special Uchronie," Imagine...,
Montréal, no. 14:1982. 171p. Can. $5.00.--This is an excellent special issue of this
journal, dealing with alternative future romances, a subgenre of SF that is examined in a
dozen interesting essays. For information write to: J.M. Gouanvic/403 west, St.-Joseph,
#21/Montréal. Ouébec/Canada H2V 2P3.
R. Reginald. Science
Fiction & Fantasy Awards. First Edition. San Bernardino CA: Borgo Press
["The Borgo Reference Library," Vol. 21, 1981. 64p. $8.95 cloth, $2.95
paper.--This booklet contains a complete listing of all awards related to SF and SF film
through the end of 1981, not only the American awards but also the major foreign ones.
----Marc Angenot
Back to Home
|
|