NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Oedipus as Time Traveller
By relating two passages which each contain the words "for a moment" in the final chapter of The Time Machine, the attentive reader can with some ingenuity deduce that the name of the apparently anonymous narrator is Hillyer.* But the name of the Time Traveller remains an enigma. It is tempting to identify him, by analogy at least, with H.G. Wells. However that may be, the analogue that Wells himself supplies is Oedipus. The presence of the Sphinx suggests that, like Oedipus, the Time Traveller must solve a riddle. The apparent answer—that the Eloi and the Morlocks have devolved from man (specifically his class structure)—corresponds nicely to the answer to the Sphinx's riddle (as well as being an answer already embodied in the half human/half animal nature of the Sphinx): the "animal" that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at midday, and on three in the evening is man. A notion of the cycle of man as a species replaces the individual cycle. (The monstrous Sphinx might specifically be linked with the Morlocks: as she devours the young men who fail to answer her riddle, so they devour the Eloi.) Mention of legs points to the crucial detail identifying Oedipus with the Time Traveller. Oedipus, whose name means swollen foot, has a limp which dates from the time he was abandoned on Mt Cithaeron with a spike through his foot. The Time Traveller suffers from a similar ailment: "I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel" (7:74). Towards the end of the narrative, we are reminded of this injury: "Presently I got up and came through the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful" (12:99).
There are two general senses in which the Oedipus story suggests itself as an appropriate analogy for The Time Machine. First, the Oedipus story provides a myth of origin while The Time Machine provides a myth of ending. At the same time, in the case of Oedipus, the end is implicit in what Oedipus discovers about his origins, and correspondingly, in The Time Machine, the end of life is imaged as taking place on that same deserted beach where the evolution of human life may be said to have begun. Second, in both the Oedipus story and The Time Machine, events transpire unwittingly; both stories lead to moments of appalled recognition. Oedipus has to face the fact that he has married his mother and killed his father (although the latter misdeed is never explicitly proven). The Time Traveller comes to recognize that the progress of civilization and a life of comfort and security (for a segment of the population) has led to the very uncomfortable and insecure, indeed horrifying, world of A.D. 802,701.
The story of Oedipus has been retold many times directly or indirectly: by Sopocles; by Seneca; in Virgil's Iliad; in Jean Cocteau's play, The Infernal Machine, and in his libretto for Stravinski's opera, Oedipus Rex; in various medieval works including Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend (where the Laius-Jocasta-Oedipus myth is attached to the legend of Judas Iscariot); and, by way of the Oresteia, in Shakespeare's Hamlet. To this list should be added H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Undoubtedly, the power of the book (after all it provides the kind of exemplary model for SF that Hamlet provides for tragic drama) owes not a little to the compulsion of the complex archetype on which it draws or to which it succumbs. The Time Machine is, of course, readily susceptible to a psychological interpretation (in this respect it is very similar to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, a work which, "ghosts" and all, may well have been influenced by The Time Machine) or to a variety of such interpretations (the Time Traveller's own experience clearly indicates that no interpretation is to be considered final). It seems, therefore, more than fortuitous, that amongst the group who witness the Time Traveller's demonstration, "it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage" (1:20). The "Platonic forms" which provide models for both The Time Machine and the Oedipus story incarnate the deterministic drives of both mythology and psychology.——David Ketterer
————————————————
* See Frank D. McConnell's "Critical Edition" of H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 98, n. 2. All parenthetical chapter and page references are to this text of The Time Machine. (The text, it should be noted, is generally reliable, unlike McConnell's War of the Worlds text, which unfortunately was reproduced from a bowdlerized version.)
Death and the Textual Shadow of the SF Author, Again
David Ketterer's "Death and the Denial of History" has the kernel of an idea (shared with Slusser) that I think clarifies some SF texts. But I have two caveats.
First of all, there are good reasons for wanting to "circumvent the reality of historical time." For one, reality may not be so simple. I am reminded of the critical reception to Yeats's Byzantium poems: "Tsk, tsk; here's the old fellow being escapist and unscientific." Yet "Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unaging intellect." Transcendence, as Ketterer uses the term, may represent philosophical difference, not mere lapses into easy mysticism. Our notions about time are not firm, and chastising authors with a supposed hard-nosed reality may be merely naive.
Furthermore, since one of the texts he mentions as subverting the linear view of time is my own Timescape, I should remark on some relevant details. Far from denying my death, it seemed to me—even while writing the book—to embrace it.
I appear twice in the novel. The unnamed twins in 1963 are in fact myself and my brother, who were indeed at that place and time, even in the correct classes. Second, the character Gregory Markham has exactly my biography (except that he didn't write Timescape!). I felt a clear identification with Markham while writing the book. Admittedly, the novel took over a decade to finish, but for the last several years I can remember thinking of Markham as myself. Thus, disobeying a standard "rule" of fiction and killing Markham onstage took a purposeful act. (I do think of it as "killing him off," too. Those are the words that spring to mind—not merely "showing his death.") It affected me greatly, but I felt it had to be done.
The question, then, is whether Markham's reappearance later in the novel— in the last long chapter, in 1974—constitues a wish of mine that I not die. To this question I have no answer. The 1970s' Markham is not the dead Markham of 1998. Does this constitute narrative resurrection anyway? The reappearance did occur for me after the death—that's the order of the actual writing—but I can't speak for my subconscious. When I read Ketterer's letter I thought my 1963 appearance undercut his argument, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps placing myself also in the 1963 world prefigures that 1970s' Markham? I suppose the "shadow of the author" can have many shapes.- Gregory Benford
I am grateful for Gregory Benford's elaboration concerning my citation of his Timescape as an instance of an SF author's attempt to circumvent the reality of his own death. I am grateful too for his specification of my use of the term transcendence" as representing philosophical difference. not mere lapses into easy mysticism." This is a distinction which is often not easily identifiable in practical terms and one that seems to have escaped numerous reviewers of my New Worlds for Old. Benford also points out, correctly I believe. that the textual shadow of the author' can have many shapes": and in this regard I should point out that Timescape sprang to my mind as an example not because of the reappearance of Markham/Benford but because of the concluding "apocalyptic" vision of the "timescape," a vision prepared for by several references to the waves of Asia (a new old world?) breaking on the shores of California (an old new world?).
The experience is Gordon Bernstein's. It was as if [a] piercing light shone through" the group of "shadowy figures" before him:
They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed. Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Time and space were themselves players. vast lands engulfing the figures. a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed. a great beast in the dark sea. (Timescape [1980; NY: Pocket Books, 1981], 46:366)
Here the competing players appear to be James Joyce (the riverrun" of Finnegans Wake) and Henry James ("The Beast in the Jungle"). The transcendent timescape is presumably in some sense to be equated with the transcendent possibilities of art. In such a fashion, of course, all authors—SF ones included—hope to surmount their personal deaths. But it is precisely the equation with the reality of the timescape (and the suggestion of suspended animation or cryonics) which signifies, in admittedly protean form, one of the textual shapes assumed by the shadow of the SF author.
One more remark on the same general subject....Amongst the 25 boxes of correspondence which constitute part of the Bodleian Library Blish Papers is a file of letters from and to Philip K. Dick (Dep. Blish 415/10). Most of the Dick letters have to do with a marital crisis that he was experiencing in 1964. He had opened the correspondence by literally appealing to Blish for help. These letters communicate a considerable degree of personal agony and make painful reading indeed. But in view of Dick's recent death and my recent speculation about the "textual shadow" of the SF writer who more often than not writes about a time when he or she will be dead (SFS No. 27. pp. 228-30), I was struck by the following statement in a letter from Dick to Blish dated 22 May 1964: you and I write about the future, and the future for me, and I think I am somewhat precog, has death written on its face, and I can't run fast enough to get away...."——David Ketterer
The Angenot-Khouri Bibliography of Prehistoric Fiction: Additions, Corrections, and Comment
The impressive international Bibliography of Prehistoric Fiction" by Marc Angenot and Nadia Khouri (in SFS No. 23) is almost equally impressive for what it omits. How fragmented SF scholarship is still! Perhaps no one in the US could have compiled their list of Continental sources, and few their Victoriana. On the other hand, no US researcher would have failed to check for reprints in Contento's Index. no properly raised Anglo-Saxon would have omitted Kipling's juveniles or the horrid fate of Huxley's Fifth Earl of Gonister, and not the most amateurish filler-writer for fanzines could have forgotten Cleve Cartmill's archetypally Nietzschean "The Link" (reprinted from ASF in Adventures in Time and Space)!
Given the number of addenda and corrigenda that follow, the authors may need to tighten their topic further. Can "prehistoric fiction" feature primitive humanoids beyond Tellus—Le Guin's green Athsheans, De Camp's tailed Krishnans, the Yahoos of Davidson's "And Now Let Us Sleep"? If the cut-off line runs between Stone and Bronze Ages, what about Paleo-Indians or even non-metal-using foraging societies today? Nay, what of that first citizen of the Pacific Northwest, beloved Bigfoot? All four yeti/sasquatch stories listed below (by Aandahl, Brown, Cotter, and Pangborn) raise the significant issue of miscegenation, and no doubt they are only the top of the iceberg.
In the list of addenda and corrigenda below, I have, for economy, augmented the abbreviations PR (prehistoric romance) and LW (lost world) with SS (simian society), LF (living fossil), J (juvenile), and some obvious acronyms for magazine titles (also: s.p.=same place. same publisher).
1. Corrigenda
Aldiss. Neanderthal Planet: first pub. Science Fiction Adventures, Sept. 1960; only pp. 9-58 in book by same title.
Chester. Kioga stories: cf. DAW paperback reprints.
De Camp. Genus Homo: not devolution, but human LFs revived à la Rip Van Winkle in SS of distant future.
—————————. "Living Fossil": here too, LFs are humans (devolved) and monkeys dominant; rpt. in Gates to Tomorrow, ed. André Norton and Ernestine Donaldy, NY: Atheneum, 1973.
—————————. "Throwback": devolution by selective breeding; also rpt. in his A Gun for Dinosaur. Garden City: Doubleday; NY: Modern Literary Editions, 1963.
Del Rey, "Day is Done": also rpt. in his And Some Were Human. Prime Press, 1948; Ballantine, 1961; and in The Best of Lester Del Rey, Ballantine, 1978; in Operation Future, ed. Groff Conklin. Perma Books, 1955; and in Where Do We Go from Here?, ed. Isaac Asimov. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.
—————————. "The Renegade": also rpt. in his And Some Were Human.
Hamlin. Alley Oop: not only LF but PR (when Oop is home with the dinosaurs in Moo).
Marshall. Ogden's Strange Story: not PR but psychological reversion to primitive after head injury.
2. Addenda
Aandahl, Vance. "An Adventure in the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness," F&SF, Aug. 1969; rpt. in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, l9th ser., ed. Edward L. Ferman. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971. Bigfoot.
Aldiss, Brian W. "Matrix," Science Fantasy, Oct. 1962; rpt. as "Danger: Religion!" in his Neanderthal Planet. NY: Avon, 1969; and in The Inner Landscape, ed. Michael Moorcock. NY: Paperback Library, 1971. Crosstime adventure terminates in SS.
Anderson, Poul. "The Long Remembering," F&SF, Nov. 1957; rpt. in his Homeward and Beyond Garden City: Doubleday, 1975; in Science Fiction Showcase, ed. Mary Kornbluth. Doubleday, 1959; and in Trips in Time, ed. Robert Silverberg. Nashville & NY: Thomas Nelson, 1977. Psychic time travel into PR, à la Allan Quatermain.
Asimov. Isaac. "The Ugly Little Boy" (alias: "Lastborn"), Galaxy, Sept. 1958; rpt. in his Nine Tomorrows. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959, and Tomorrow's Children. Doubleday, 1966; also in The Worlds of Science Fiction, ed. Robert Mills. NY: Paperback Library, 1963; and in Dimension X, ed. Damon Knight, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1970. LF brought forward forcibly by time machine.
Auel, Jean M. The Clan of the Cave Bear. NY: Crown, 1980; Bantam, 1981. PR. Bennet, Robert Ames. The Bowl of Baal. Serial in All Around, Nov. 1916-Feb. 1917; book pub., West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1975. LW.
Boucher, Anthony. "The First," F&SF, Oct. 1952; rpt. in his Far and Away. NY: Ballantine, 1954. Whimsical PR.
Brown, Fredric. "Abominable," Dude, March, 1960; rpt. in his Nightmares and Geezenstacks. NY: Bantam, 1961, and in The Best of Fredric Brown. NY: Ballantine, 1977. Yeti.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. "The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw," Argosy, Feb. 1937; rpt. in his Tales of Three Planets. Canaveral, 1964; in Masterpieces of Science Fiction, ed. Sam Moskowitz, NY: World, 1966, and in The Fantastic Pulps, ed. Peter Haining. NY: St Martin's, 1975. LF (Rip Van Winkle type).
Cartmill, Cleve. "The Link," ASF, Aug. 1942; rpt. in Adventures in Time and Space, ed. Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. NY: Random House, 1946; and in Political Science Fiction, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Patricia S. Warrick, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. PR (Angenot and Khouri's classic "gifted individual" type).
Cotter, John, and Judith Frankle (pseuds. of Jack Couffer?). Nights with Sasquatch. NY: Berkley, 1977. Just what the title suggests.
Crichton, Michael. Eaters of the Dead. NY: Knopf, 1976. LFs in 10th-century Scandinavia.
De Camp, L. Sprague. "The Gnarly Man," Unknown, June, 1939, rpt. in his The Wheels of If. Chicago: Shasta, 1948; NY: Berkley, 1970; and in The Best of L. Sprague De Camp. NY: Ballantine, 1978. LF (Wandering Gentile type).
—————————. [Title unknown, "amateurish little caveman tale" in pre-WWII Golden Fleece, apud De Camp, Best, p. 356.]
De Ford, Miriam Allen. "The Apotheosis of Ki," F&SF, Mar. 1956; rpt. in her Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow. NY: Walker, 1971, and in Special Wonder, ed. J. Francis McComas. NY: Random House, 1970. PR with extraterrestrials.
—————————. "The Colony," F&SF, May 1966; rpt. in her Elsewhere....
Ditto.
Del Rey, Lester. The Cave of Spears. NY: Knopf, 1957. PR, J.
—————————. The Infinite Worlds of Maybe. NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966. Crosstimers visit SS and ice-age cavefolk; J.
—————————. Tunnel Through Time. NY: Scholastic Book Services, 1966. Time-travel to mammoths and paleo-Indians; J.
Farmer, Philip José. "The Alley Man," F&SF, June, 1959; rpt. in his The Alley God. NY: Ballantine, 1962; and in The Book of Philip José Farmer. NY: DAW, 1973 Berkley, 1982. LF.
Garrett, Randall. "Frost and Thunder," Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine, Summer 1979; rpt. in The Best of Randall Garrett, ed. Robert Silverberg. NY: Pocket Books, 1982. PR (Stone Age Scandinavia).
Hart, Johnny. B.C. Comic Strip and paperback series since 1960s.
Hawkes, Jacquetta. Providence Island. London: Chatto & Windus, 1959. Magdalenean survivors in South Pacific, apud Nicholls' Encyclopedia, s.v."Anthropology" and "Hawkes."
Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer. 1937. Devolution.
Kipling, Rudyard. Just So Stories. 1902. PR: "How the First Letter was Written," "How the Alphabet was Made," "The Cat that Walked by Himself," "The Tabu Tale." J.
Krahn, Fernando. The Great Ape. NY: Viking Press; London: Kestrel Books, 1978. Cartoon send-up of King Kong.
—————————. "The Knife and the Naked Chalk," in his Rewards and Fairies, 1909. PR.
—————————. "The Story of Ung" (1894), "The First Chantey" (1895), "In the Neolithic Age" (1895). Satiric verse PR.
Kurten, Björn. Den svarta tigern. Stockholm: Alba, 1978; trans. as Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age. NY: Pantheon, 1980; Berkley, 1981. PR.
Lamprey, L. Children of Ancient Britain. Boston: Little, Brown, 1921. J/PR. Laumer, Keith. The Other Side of Time. Serial in Amazing, Apr.-June 1965; fix-up NY: Signet, 1972. Crosstime shoot-'em-up includes scenes and characters from SS.
Machen, Arthur. "The Shining Pyramid," in The Unknown World, May, 1895; perennial reprints. "Little Folk" euhemerized as pre-Celtic Turanian troglodytes.
MacFarlane, W. "To Make a New Neanderthal," Analog, Sept. 1971; rpt. in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, ed. Lester Del Rey, NY: Dutton, 1972. Devolution.
Miller, J.J. "Wonders of the Gods?" Fantastic Science Fiction, Oct. 1980. PR with visiting extraterrestrial.
Miller, P. Schuyler. "Old Man Mulligan," ASF, Dec. 1940; rpt. in his The Titan Fantasy Press, 1952. LF, apud De Camp, Best..., p. 358.
Nesbit [Bland], E. The Story of the Amulet. NY: Dutton, 1907. Time-travelling youth stops off in neolithic Egypt as conceived by E.A. Wallis Budge. J.
Neville, Kris. "Run, the Spearmaker," Riverside Quarterly, Aug. 1967. PR.
Norton, André. The Time Traders. Cleveland & NY: World, 1958; Ace pb. Time-travel PR (Beaker culture).
—————————. Galactic Derelict. s.p., 1959. Sequel to above; Folsom culture.
Niven, Larry. "There's a Wolf in my Time Machine," F&SF, June 1971, rpt. in his The Flight of the Horse. NY: Ballantine, 1970; in Zoo 2000, ed. Jane Yolen, NY: Seabury, 1973. Alternate timeline domesticates Homo habilis.
Pangborn, Edgar. "Longtooth." F&SF, Jan. 1960; rpt. in his Good Neighbors, NY: Macmillan, 1975; in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 19th ser., ed. Edward L. Ferman. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971; and in New Worlds of Fantasy No. 3, ed. Terry Carr. NY: Ace, 1971. Bigfoot in Maine.
Porter, Eugene. "The Children of Cain," Galileo, Sept. 1978. PR with extraterrestrials and time traveller.
Price, Roger. J. G. the Upright Ape. NY: Lyle Stuart, 1960. Humanized ape looks at humanity.
Sheffield, Charles. "Forefather Figure," in A Spadeful of Spacetime, ed. Fred Saberhagen. NY: Ace, 1981. LF (Endor type).
Smith, L. Neil. The Probability Broach. NY: Ballantine, 1980; The Venus Belt, s.p., 1981. Alternate universe where apes (and whales) have equal rights.
Thomas, Ted. "The Doctor," in Orbit 2, ed. Damon Knight. NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967; and in Best Stories from Orbit, Volumes l-l0 NY: Berkley, 1975; and in Alpha One, ed. Robert Silverberg. NY: Ballantine. 1970. PR among Neanderthalers in Pennsylvania.
Vance, Jack. "DP!" Avon SF & Fantasy Reader, Apr. 1953; rpt. in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1954, ed. Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty. NY: Frederick Fell, 1954; and in Political Science Fiction, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Patricia S. Warrick, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974. LF holocaust.
Vimereu, Paul. César dans l'île de Pan. Paris: Editions du Siècle, 2nd ed. 1923. SS ruled by escaped Napoleon, apud Versins, pp. 237, 623.
—Gordon B. Chamberlain
Science Fiction at the MLA Convention
Readers of SFS who are planning to attend the MLA Convention in Los Angeles at the end of December may be interested to know that there will be two sessions devoted to SF. Meeting no. 161, beginning at noon on the 28th, will feature papers on "Negative Attitudes toward Science and Society" in SF (Judith A. Spector), on "Science in the Writings of...Poe" (Benjamin Franklin Fisher), on the Strugatskys (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay), and on "The Scientist as Suffering Hero" (Charles Nicol) —all under the aegis of the Division on Literature and Science. The other session, no. 17, from 7 to 8:15 P.M. on the 27th, is entitled "Dialectics and Resolutions in Olaf Stapledon's Later Fiction," and is scheduled as a panel chaired by Charles Elkins and including Cheryl Herr, Robert Crossley, Robert Philmus, Amelia Rutledge, Robert Shelton, and Louis Tremaine, with Patrick McCarthy as respondent.
"Images of Inner and Outer Space": A Conference at Nice
"Far away is close to us in images of elsewhere." An unknown hand wrote this graffito on the walls of the London Underground a few years ago. Even the newspapers mentioned the fact at the time, perhaps because these words had a certain meaning for the thousands of users of the subway.... Is the outer world really so far from us? Today the real and the rational have taken over every field of human activity: love, work, education, health, politics, history.... Everything is described, analyzed, taken in charge by various sciences. It seems more and more difficult to enable our imagination to break out, invent, rave sometimes. And yet: never has the imagination of the strange and the unusual been so prolific. Literature, the cinema, comic strips, painting, advertising, architecture, and music bear witness that we are refusing to be pent up within the walls of reason. The old ghosts have lost none of their power; and SF, the field of hyper-rationalism, could not find its own language without borrowing from the realm of the most ancient fantasmagoria. Man has probably never stopped expressing the same anguish and the same hope. If the forms have changed, it is because contemporary man has at his disposal the images of the 20th century to dress his fantasms. To a SF writer like J.G. Ballard, the writing of this modern genre aims above all at representing the inner space of man confronted by his new condition. This explains the impact of this kind of imaginary form at the popular level and above all among young people. The importance of the cultural phenomenon is such today that it may reflect a change in our cast of mind.
It is time for the French Universities to inquire into these matters. Around the theme "Images of Inner Space—Images of Outer Space" a conference will take place in May 1983 sponsored by the Metaphor Research Center of the Université de Nice in conjunction with the Departments of English and French, the Cinemabook New Festival, and the Local Education Center (CRDP). Numerous famous persons from the French and English-speaking worlds are being approached: Roger Zelaznv, Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Jean-Pierre Andrevon, Pierre Pelot, Pierre Versins, Numa Sadoul; and others have already agreed to participate: J.G. Ballard, Michel Butor, Michel Jeury, Leon Stover, Patrick Parrinder, Jacques Goimard.
SF and the fantastic are objects of scholarly research but at the same time they exist only through an imaginary field which affects readers at all levels. We want to bring together scholars, artists, and a general public: "Research," "Escape," and "Invention" are the three lines of the conference program.
Please direct all suggestions and inquiries to: Dr Denise Fauconnier/Director of the Metaphor Research Center/UER de Lettres et Sciences Humaines/98 boulevard Edouard Herriot/06036 Nice/France.—Denise Fauconnier
Science Fiction and the Construction of Reality: A Call for Papers
Restant (Review for Semiotic Theories and the Analysis of Texts), a magazine publishing mainly in the field of text-theory, plans the publication of a collection of essays on the social and philosophical speculations generated by and in SF. Luk de Vos (University of Antwerp) will be the editor. The anthology, to be entitled Just the Other Day, will be published by EXA, Antwerp, Belgium/Eugene, OR in the Autumn of 1983. The deadline for manuscripts is April 30, 1983.
Contributions should address themselves to at least one of the following questions: (1) Nature and artifice. How is the rise of SF to be related to the heritage of rationalist thought that developed in the direction of technology after the Age of Enlightenment? How did metaphysical thinking manage to maintain itself within this changed epistemological direction? Which founders of SF contributed to this, and how did they react to the changing world view? (2) The philosophy of the inhuman. How is negative thinking (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Nihilism, the Absurd) integrated into technological extrapolation? Did SF contribute to an increase in apocalyptic thinking, and how can this be related to faith in progress? Man's final position in the post-materialist age? (3) Reds under the Beds. Which social utopias does SF develop as a defense against dehumanization? In the Dutch language area a number of far-reaching concepts have been worked out which draw on Anarchism and Social Democracy for their inspiration. Analyses of the relationship with foreign movements and currents of ideas occupy a central position here.
Manuscripts (two copies) should be sent to Restant, The Editor/Hof ter Bollen 51/B 2672 Liezele Puurs/Belgium. 30 contributions will be selected. Languages of publication are Dutch, French, English, and German. Texts should conform to the MLA Style Sheet. Notes should follow the text. Necessary photographic material (in black and white) will be printed alongside. Contributors will receive a copy of the book and 15 offprints. They are requested to send a short biographical note.—L. De Vos.
Fantasy and Horror, Aesthetics and Theory: A Call for Papers
We invite essays that focus on the essential nature of horror and/or fantasy fictions for a future special issue of Extrapolation. They should deal with a wide spectrum of works, may be interdisciplinary or comparative (in fact, such approaches are encouraged), and should reflect the essayist's strong understanding of the existing scholarship. We are looking particularly for new and varied approaches, and successful essays will reflect amplification, not repetition, of earlier scholarship. (A concise bibliography of books and articles you should be familiar with is available from me on request.)
Those who wish should feel free to submit 500 word proposals at their earliest convenience. However, it is not necessary to submit an advance proposal for a complete essay to be considered. Length should be a maximum of 3500 words, and note form should follow the MLA Handbook. Essays, inquiries, and proposals should be sent to me, c/o Department of English/Purdue University-North Central/ Westville, IN 46391.
The final due date for submission of completed essays is March 31, 1983. —Roger C. Schlobin
Back to Home