Science Fiction Studies

W.R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. University of Illinois Press, 1976, xii+215, $9.95.

This book is so full of unsubstantiated and misleading generalizations that at best it will prove suggestive, rather than convincing, to serious critics of fantasy literature. Not enough of the argument is based upon close acquaintance with actual fantasy narratives, and overall the book leaves an impression of artificiality, vagueness, and superficiality. Typically, the best things in it are derived from other critics, and although Irwin is an accurate enough reporter of these earlier views he never manages to create a new critical synthesis out of them. Distinct approaches to literary scholarship--biographical, Theory of Fiction (Booth), Structuralism (Todorov), and others--are interwoven piecemeal with accounts of all sorts of literature--including "classics" like Shakespeare, Milton, Blake--without the author achieving any critical unity at all.

Irwin address himself specifically to the "long prose fiction fantasy" which first establishes and then develops an "anti-fact" or "counter-norm." The new counter-reality, of course, constitutes reality itself within the world of the literary narrative (the most cogent formulation of the idea appears on p 166, based on an earlier essay by Douglass Parker). This promising intuition about one kind of fantasy appears on the first page of the book, is repeated often enough throughout the text, but is never elaborated in detail--it remains an intuition.

Instead, we are introduced to five essentially unrelated chapters of hazy generalizations. Thus chapter 2 elaborates the "game" metaphor of the title through lengthy discussions of the philosophy of play in the writings of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois. None of this seems necessary since neither "game" nor "play" contribute much to Irwin's readings of actual fantasies--except to give him the misconception that the literature of the impossible must somehow also be "playful." (The same is true of the word "rhetoric" which appears in the subtitle and then is scattered throughout the essay without adding anything.) Predictably, Freud is brought into the discussion, only for us ultimately to be told that his theory of wit and humor has no bearing on the author's problem of the prose fantasy narrative.

Chapter 5 illustrates the author's habit of presuming that random negating of others' generalizations should somehow be construed as a positive contribution to the theoretical literature. In this chapter, for instance, we are told that fantasy is not pornography, beast fable, fairy tale, gothic romance, nor science fiction. (The same negative tactic is evident in chapter 4, in the artificial contrast established between romance and fantasy.) Irwin simply has not sampled enough actual narratives to contrast these types of fiction so confidently: as he does, e.g., by relying on Bradbury's F451 as his sole example of SF (pp 97-99) with no more sophisticated an idea of what makes it SF, as opposed to fantasy, than that everything in it might come true. Besides, none of these "genres" of imaginative literature which Irwin sets before us to illuminate fantasy by contrast is adequately defined, so such criticism seems to be a case of obscurum per obscurius.

Chapter 3, "Help from the Critics," works analogously. Irwin reports the views of H.G. Wells, Herbert Read, E.M. Forster, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis without any sort of focus. The first three in this group are literary artists whose criticism is best regarded as a literary polemic which defends specific artistic practices and ideologies, while the latter two are deeply indebted to Christian perspectives in their criticism. But all of the essays involved here also seem archaic and simple in light of recent developments in literary theory and practice, and belaboring them seems gratuitous on Irwin's part.

The second set of five chapters focuses on subclasses of fantasy according to their respective modes of impossibility: metamorphosis, impossible societies, reification of impossible innocence, parody and adaptation of other fictional narratives, and supernatural fantasy. None of these categories is particularly well justified by the author, they are not of the same semantic order, and unfortunately all are far too broad to be of any critical value. Limiting criticism (mainly) to works in English published between 1880 and 1957 would have been a permissible tactic if Irwin did not believe this schema had objective validity. As it stands, however, even his selections of works is just another unlikely Procrustes bed.

Some of the books Irwin mentions are truly fascinating and forgotten minor classics, worthy of renewed scrutiny by contemporary critics of imaginative literature: David Garnett's Lady Into Fox, Norman Douglas' South Wind, and Herbert Read's The Green Child, for examples. Yet this is exactly where Irwin's limits also show up: no more than a passing mention of William Morris, E.R. Eddison, and James Branch Cabell (Irwin also has the wild misconception, p 9, that "intellectual play" is not to be found in Cabell; I do not see how this could be true of Jurgen and The Silver Stallion); one or two pages on Dunsany, MacDonald, and Golding; and really not even an awareness of fantasies produced by the so-called "SF ghetto" writers of the thirties and forties (hence, nothing on Weird Tales or Unknown either), yet many of these would come off well by comparison with the books Irwin has selected (perhaps this explains the list of Suggested Readings appended to the book as a sort of afterthought). Then, again, Irwin includes many works which are not really narratives of the impossible and which would be taken most naturally as exceptionally facetious satires: for example, if Ronald Firbank's Flower Beneath the Foot and John Collier's His Monkey Wife are fantasies, then so are the works of Peacock, Waugh, and Burgess, and we are far from a revealing distinction between fantasy and satire. The implication is that Irwin often abandons his narrower view of fantasy as a strategic reaction to prevalent norms for an all-inclusive definition of fantasy to mean only the imaginary.

However, even though the works described are so potentially compelling, Irwin's own readings are conventional and uninteresting (as, e.g., in the case of Tolkien's Rings and White's Once and Future King). When focusing on either scholarship on fantasy or on fantasy fiction, in fact, Irwin never seems to get beyond the level of mere reportage, nor are his pronouncements about individual works and authors founded in an organized sensibility. Nevertheless, the fantasy stories he describes are certainly worth knowing about, and that much alone justifies a reading.

--S.C. Fredericks

---

Pioneers and All: Moskowitz, H.L. Berger, Brian Ash, and Rose's Critics

• Sam Moskowitz. Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction
• Harold L. Berger. Science Fiction and the New Dark Age
• Brian Ash. Who's Who in Science Fiction
• Mark Rose, ed. Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays

Sam Moskowitz. Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction. Charles Scribner's Sons, v+298, $8.95.

One thing that can and must be said for Sam Moskowitz is that his game is often the only game in town. When the articles that make up this book were first published, they dealt with subjects, or aspects of subjects, that simply had not been dealt with before-- and most of them, like many of those in his other books, still provide information on SF of a kind not readily available elsewhere. These articles were written, not for scholars, but for fans, and all but one were originally published in the SF pulps. Their greatest weakness lies not simply in the absence of footnotes but in Moskowitz's frequent failure to cite his sources in any way, which not only makes it difficult or impossible to judge the way he has used his evidence, but also deprives the scholar of leads that he might use for further study. Even so, eight of the eleven articles may be said to have some or great value as introductions to their subject. I will take up the articles, not in the order in which they appear in the book, but in that of their present importance, interest, relevance to the student of SF.

§9. "War: Warriors of If" (from George Griffith, The Raid of "Le Vengeur" and Other Stories, UK 1974). The only survey known to me of the SF of George Griffith, this article also deals with future-war stories in popular UK magazines in the 1890s, and is a valuable-- indeed, necessary-- supplement to Clarke's Voices Prophesying War. For further comment, see SFS 2(1975):98.

§5. "Birth Control: Better the World Below than the World Above" (1965). This is the only survey known to me of the SF of S. Fowler Wright. The original title, "S. Fowler Wright: The Devil's Disciple?," is a more accurate indication of its subject, for neither the article nor Wright has anything much to say about birth control, even though Wright in his fiction again and again mentions the practice as one of the great evils of modern civilization. I have not yet been able to come to any satisfactory understanding of Wright's SF, and while I don't at the moment find this article very illuminating, it is still the only article I know on this important SF writer.

§7. "Crime: From Sherlock to Spaceships" (1966; rev). When Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, he responded not only with Science Wonder Stories but also with Air Wonder Stories and Scientific Detective Monthly. The former was evidently ahead of its time, for its failure after 11 issues was followed in a few years by a boom in air-war pulps featuring future-war stories (a phenomenon whose history is still to be written); the latter was too late, the scientific detective story having already passed its peak of popularity. Moskowitz's account of the rise and fall of the scientific detective and of the subsequent transformation of the earlier story-type into the future-world detective story, as practiced by Asimov and Bester, is again the only survey of the subject I know. But with respect to the scientific detective story proper, I remembers that there has been a certain amount of scholarship on the detective story, and so must note that Moskowitz's failure to "review the literature" in this area makes this article less valuable than it could have been.

§8. "Teen-Agers: Tom Swift and the Syndicate" (1966; rev). The only account known to me of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and its various mass-produced series of SF juveniles.

§11. "Art: Portraitist of Prescience" (1965; rev 1971). An account of the career of Virgil Finlay with some discussion of the world of pulp-magazine illustrators. Finlay enthusiasts may be interested in something I can add (if it is not already well known): Finlay's first appearance in a national magazine was probably the reproduction of his prize drawing, "My Mirror's Melody," in Scholastic Magazine, Apr 29, 1933, p 19.

§6. "Psychiatry: The Invasion of the Incredible Head-Shrinkers" (1966). A survey of the stories of David H. Keller, together with some by Kuttner, Heinlein, Sturgeon, and others who have used psychiatric themes in SF.

§10. "Unexplained Phenomena: Lo! the Poor Forteans" (1965; rev). This account of Charles Fort and the use made by SF writers of Fortean materials has been largely superseded by, but retains value as an anti-Fortean counterweight to, Damon Knight's pro-Fortean Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained (Doubleday 1976). Through the Fantasy Amateur Press Association and specialist book dealers, Mr Moskowitz has also issued a pamphlet, Charles Fort: A Radical Corpuscle, which contains the eponymous SF short story by Fort, a number of magazine illustrations for Fort stories, and an examination of each of the 22 stories that Fort published 1905-07 "for elements that might have provided the genesis of his later non-fiction works that were to create his reputation, [and] for a basic appraisal of his early writing skills."

§1. "Religion: Space, God, and Science Fiction" (1965; rev). The subject of this article has been much dealt with in recent years, so that it no longer has much value as an introduction to its subject.

§§2-3. "Anti-Semitism: The Day of the Messiah" (1966; rev); "Civil Rights: Rockets to Green Pastures" (1967; rev). Although there is more information in these two articles than in §1 that might be new to the SF scholar, much of it is erroneous or misleading, so that one may wish that they had been left in the obscurity of their original publication.

To read the romance and melodrama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is to find support in dreary abundance for the possibility that the writers were more prejudiced than their readers, though it is more reasonable to conclude that they were simply "more adept at articulating the prejudices shared by most white, native Americans" (to use words applied to utopian reformers by Kenneth L. Roemer in The Obsolete Necessity [US 1976 xiv+239], p 70)--and shared by most English Protestants. But there is something more to be said on the subject. In English-language literature we have traditions of both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, of both the brutal savage and the noble savage, and of American Negroes both as hopelessly stupid and vicious and as good-hearted simple folk who would be fully equal to whites if only educated. Before World War II, the writer of popular fiction, who was likely to be white, gentile, and middle-class, with little interest in and less knowledge of the special problems of Jews and Blacks in our pluralistic society, would with very little thought draw on either of the opposed traditions, or on both in alternate chapters, to lend his romance or melodrama a certain strangeness, mystery, glamor. The reader of our day, when enlightenment on racial matters is as fashionable as prejudice was fifty years ago, is likely to read more than was meant into any unsympathetic treatment of characters identified as black or Jewish, and even to find evidence of prejudice in sympathetic treatment.

Mr. Moskowitz finds the "prejudices" of Ignatius Donnelly "shockingly revealed" in what he sees as the unstated moral of a novel concerned with an interchange of souls: "a white man in a Negro's body ennobles the race, but a Negro in a white man's body defiles it" (p 60). This is an interpretation that allows Donnelly no way to win in his effort to show that the most admirable of humans (our white hero) would be treated with contempt if taken for a Black, no matter how intelligent, well-educated, or well-behaved he showed himself to be, whereas the most despicable of humans (our black villain) would be treated with respect, even deference, if taken for a wealthy white man, no matter how stupid and obnoxious his behavior. As a matter of fact, in this rather silly melodrama, Dr Huguet (US 1891 309p), all but two or three of the good guys are black, and all but two or three of the bad guys white. It is also true that it is a story squarely in the simple-folk tradition:

There are three things that point to the inherent civilizability of the negro race: First, their desire for learning; second, their strong religious instincts; and third, their wish to be respectable and to imitate the best examples given them by the whites. It does not seem to me that the red men manifest any of these traits; hence I argue that the negro race will rise upon the breast of the great tide of civilization, while the Indian is very apt to be buried under it. [pp 213-14]

If this passage is racist in its assumption that racial groups can be judged as fit or unfit in "civilizability," it is still not anti-Negro in any sense--and is, indeed, part of a book-long argument for granting full civil rights to Negroes.

In §1:16 of The War of the Worlds (1898) a certain character appears as a symbol of avarice. To blame H.G. Wells (as Mr Moskowitz does with some vehemence, pp 30-31) for following tradition in the magazine version and making this character Jewish, rather than to give him credit for abandoning tradition in the book version and eliminating the Jewish reference, is to miss an opportunity for examining the development of enlightened attitudes in the consciousness of a great writer. Although in his early career Wells flirted a bit with the "scientific racism" of the day, he soon came round to a belief in the essential equality of all branches of humanity and to the advocacy of "a free social and economic intercourse, even to the point of marriage, between all racial types" (The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind [1932; rev edn 1934 xv+867], p 692). He was not anti-Semitic in a racial sense, and was no more anti-Judaic than he was anti-Anglican, anti-Catholic, or anti-Dissenter. That is, he was no more against your cultural heritage than he was against his own, and in asking you to give yours up he asked no more of you than he asked of himself, for what he campaigned for was a world in which all religious, philosophic, cultural, and national differences would be dissolved into a universal scientific humanism.

A future America in which, under the pressures of resistance to a foreign ruling class, all religious and cultural differences have dissolved into a common Americanism is depicted by Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Moon Men (Argosy 1925; Ace Books 1962; abridged version as Part II of The Moon Maid, 1926): "Among us were descendants of Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Jew that I knew of and how many more I did not know, nor did we care"; it doesn't matter, for the emblem of the God they worship in their secret religious services is neither cross nor star but the American flag (Ace version, §7). Among the members of the hero's congregation is a man called Samuels the Jew, who is depicted as heroic and so finds great favor in the eyes of Mr. Moskowitz, who does not pause to inquire how under such circumstances it would still be possible to regard this Samuels as a Jew. Nor does he inquire into the philosophy that makes the Moon Men an inherently inferior race (able to conquer us only because we had been so foolish as to disarm) because descended from the lower classes of a nation that has undergone a socialist revolution in which the upper classes were wiped out.

The most thoroughly excoriated of Mr. Moskowitz's racist villains is M.P. Shiel, who is said to have been "vituperatively opposed to religion and blinded by his faith in science" (p 100), to have been "anti-Negro, anti-Oriental, anti-Christian, and prowar," to have "Applaud[ed] all the persecutions against the Jews by the Continental nations," and to have "outlined in his novels" a superman philosophy that not only "foreshadowed Nazi dogma but quite obviously deals with 'a final solution to the Jewish problem,'" the "most vicious of his novels" being The Lord of the Sea (pp 31-32). I find all this very distressing, for I had hoped that in the years since Explorers of the Infinite (1963), Mr. Moskowitz would have found occasion to revise his views of Shiel. I can only conclude that on a bad day Mr. Moskowitz read half-way through The Lord of the Sea, misunderstood what he read, and was so upset that he closed the book and swore to high heaven never to read another line by that wickedest of men. Having recently read 29 of Shiel's 31 books, I can say that Shiel was not opposed to religion but was instead one of the most God-ridden of men, that one of his "yellow peril" novels sees the hope of the world in the Japanese, and another in a mixture of the races, that although he was influenced by "scientific racism," he did not advocate the destruction or even segregation of any race, that his one novel dealing with Blacks (Children of the Wind, 1923) is in the noble-savage tradition, and that he was not anti-Semitic but philo-Semitic, The Lord of the Sea being a celebration of Zionism in an account of the marvels that attend on the coming of the Messiah, the foundation of Israel, and Israel's redemption of the world:

And not Israel alone reaped the fruits of his own grandeurs; but his dew fell upon all. For it says: "They shall be as dew from the Lord"; and again: "They shall fill the face of the Earth with fruit"; and again: "All nations shall call them blessed."

And so it was: the example of Israel--all his suasive charm--proved irresistible as  sunlight to plants; and the great heart of Spinoza [Richard Hogarth, the Messiah, now judge of Israel] lived to rejoice at the spectacle of a whole world abandoning the bloodstained paths of Rome, to follow into these uplands of mildness and pleasaunce of that lily Jew of Bethlehem.

The mission of unbelieving Israel was to convert Christendom to Christianity: and this he did.

We see the Judge descending the Mount of Olives in the midst of a jubilant throng, all noisy with timbrels and instruments of music: for his exalted life was simple, and one with the life of his people. [UK 1901 vii+496, pp 493-94]

They took him for the Sent-one of Heaven: and certainly the results of his most glorious reign did not stamp this belief as superstition.... all our greatest are but One, who continually runs the cycle of incarnation after incarnation from hoar old ages until now --the Ancient of Days, his hair white like wool--quietly turning up again when the time calls, and Man is near to yield to the enemy: Proteus his name, and ever the shape he takes is unfamiliar, unexpected: yet ever bearing the same three divine traits of Insight, Rage, and Tenderness--The Slayer of the Giant--Arthur come back--the Messenger of the Covenant--the good Genius of this Earth--Jesus, the Oft-Born.[p 496]

It is indeed ironic that Mr. Moskowitz called this article "The Day of the Messiah" with reference to Henry Byatt's 1907 novel of a false messiah, The Flight of Icarus, and then failed to see that The Lord of the Sea tells of a true messiah.

Mr. Moskowitz has been the most important pioneer of SF scholarship, not only in having been one of the first, but also in always working at the frontiers of our knowledge of the history of SF, albeit with rather crude tools. One can hope that in the future he will pay more attention to scholarly methods and thus make his work of greater value to scholars as well as of continuing interest to fans. Unlike most of his previous books, this one is published by an old and prestigious house, Charles Scribner's Sons. Can one also hope that for any future volume of SF scholarship Scribner's will apply the standards of editing that one expects of a great house? Each of us has strange lacunae in his store of information, and each of us is liable to strange aberrations (so that I must cry mea culpa elsewhere in this issue). An author cannot be greatly blamed for such things as confusing the Virgin Birth with the Immaculate Conception (p 4), as robbing the title of Del Rey's famous story of all its meaning by getting the last word wrong, "For I am a Jealous God" (p 17; it should be "People"), or as confusing the United State of one translation of We with our own United States (p 105), but a publisher may be justly censured for not making use of the editorial consultants that would have caught such errors.

Harold L. Berger. Science Fiction and the New Dark Age. Bowling Green University Popular Press, nd [1976], ix+231, $4.95 softbound, $11.95 hardbound.

This book's chief claim to value, in comparison with the books on dystopian fiction by Amis, Walsh, and Hillegas, is that "it discusses more anti-utopian works and discusses them in more detail, treating of many that have never received notice in scholarship" (p xi). This claim may be allowed, with the reservation that the works discussed here but not by Amis, Walsh, and Hillegas are almost entirely books published since those scholars did their work. The failure of the book derives from the author's lack of any appreciable knowledge of the history of utopian/dystopian fiction, so that he is capable of writing the following in his Conclusion:

Anti-utopian science fiction, in a span of some forty years, has established itself as a literary genre.

The suddenness of its establishment, the speed of its growth, and the attraction it holds for writers of note and talent has made dystopian science fiction one of the literary phenomena of the century. That such a genre should emerge so soon after Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and the dozens of stories it inspired, so soon after Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905), The World Set Free (1914), and Men Like Gods (1923) is solidly founded in the events of history. [p 199]

Which is to say that our grandparents wrote utopias because they were stupid and naive, while we have been made wise and sophisticated by the events of history and so write dystopias. And this is the book's one and only thesis.

The book's bibliography does not include the most important work yet published in its field, Richard Gerber's Utopian Fantasy (1955), nor a single article from Extrapolation (established 1959) or Riverside Quarterly (established 1964). Although the bibliography does include Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians, Dr Berger still treats Wells as the naive optimist of anti-Wellsian legend, and so does not even mention When the Sleeper Wakes and "A Story of the Days to Come," the twin fountainheads of much if not most 20th-century dystopianism. With such glaring omissions, it is not surprising that Dr Berger should be unaware of the dystopian character of many of "the dozens of stories it [Looking Backward] inspired" or of the numerous dystopias stretching from The Coming Race (1871) down to his beginning of the dystopian genre "some forty years" ago.

Despite that "some forty years" ago, Dr Berger discusses only eight dystopian or anti-science stories published before 1950--"The Machine Stops," We, Brave New World, Ape and Essence, the C.S. Lewis trilogy, and Nineteen Eighty-Four -- and to what has already been said on these much-discussed works he has nothing important to add. The only book he discusses as a utopia is Walden II, and here he does a little better, giving us first a summary of its reception by critics (pp 51-65) and then a rundown of SF stories that may be said to be reactions to Skinner's concept of conditioned virtue, including Burgess's A Clockwork Orange but not Damon Knight's "The Country of the Kind," which he treats in another place as similar to Waugh's "Love Among the Ruins" in being a satire on the "softer penology" of our "permissive" society, failing to grasp the similarity between its narrator and Burgess's Alex, the significance of its title, or the fact that it depicts a Skinnerian utopia that works (pp 65-85, 186-88).

This failure with "The Country of the Kind" is symptomatic. Since Dr Berger's one purpose was to demonstrate the wisdom and sophistication of contemporary writers in seeing that the world is in bad shape and rapidly getting worse, since his reading beyond the nine classics included only books readily available on the newsstands in the late 60s and early 70s, since he did not confine himself to SF writers but also included (without distinction) popular novels by other writers trying their hand at fashionable SF themes, since he was searching for similarities rather than contrasts and he was evidently content when he had found nine or ten stories for each of his themes, since he did not review previous scholarship for interpretations different from his own--for all these reasons, his research lacked controls of the kind that would have enabled him to make valid generalizations on the science-fictional response to the present-day world. All he has given us is superficial plot summaries or idea-content summaries for a hundred or so stories, and for that sort of thing the Barron bibliography is a handier reference.

A work of literary scholarship is of value to the extent that it adds to our knowledge or understanding of the literary works discussed. To ignore previous scholarship on your subject is to work in ignorance of what you can add as new information, as correction of old error, or as reinterpretation. It is also to work without the controls that can keep you from drifting into absurd interpretations and generalizations. It is distressing to see published in 1976 a work of university scholarship written as if its author were as much a pioneer in dystopian fiction as Sam Moskowitz was in popular SF twelve years ago.

Brian Ash. Who's Who in Science Fiction. Taplinger Publishing Co., 1976, 220p, $8.95.

This catch-as-catch-can exercise in tertiary scholarship contains some 400 articles on writers, editors, and artists, mostly of from 40 to 100 words, but reaching up to 800 for the best-known writers, with Wells getting about 1200. The material on writers new in the 70s appears to have been taken from blurbs and magazine headnotes, but most of the hard information for the established writers has been lifted from Robert Reginald's Stella Nova (US 1970; rpt 1974 as Contemporary Science Fiction Authors), Donald H. Tuck's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vol. 1: Who's Who, A-L (US 1974), and the various books of Sam Moskowitz. To this hard information Mr Ash has added some comments on subject matter or opinions on quality for such books as he happens to have read. The articles do not have a standardized form: in each you will find a title or two (or a dozen or so for the best-known writers), and in each you may find the date of the subject's birth, the name of a school or two he attended, a list of the jobs he has held, etc--or you may not, for it all depends (apparently) on what was in the source.

One of the articles to which Mr. Ash has apparently contributed something of his own is the one on Victor Rousseau Emanuel, about whom I published an essay in 1967. Although I had read The Messiah of the Cylinder (pbd 1917 as by Victor Rousseau) and The Selmans (pbd 1925 as by V.R. Emanuel), and had found some factual information that seemed to suggest that The Selmans was in some degree autobiographical, I did not know where Emanuel was born, where he lived, or when or where he had died, and so wrote the following: "I would like to know something about the details of Emanuel's biography, but to this point they have eluded me. It seems evident, however, that he was born into an Anglo-Jewish family, that as a boy and young man he hated being a Jew, that he went to South Africa at the time of the Boer War, that he became a Christian, perhaps while in Africa, and that he came to America some time before 1917" (Extrapolation 8:55).

In 1970, in Under the Moons of Mars (US xiii+433), Sam Moskowitz, presumably on the basis of "an autobiographical sketch published in 1931" (p 396) and as if in answer to my plea, wrote than Emanuel was born in London "of a Jewish father and French mother," that "the thought of being half Jewish tormented him most of his life, and he converted to Catholicism after having spent several years in South Africa, where he received his first training in journalism," and that he "came to the United States and secured an editorial position on a magazine" (p 395). In 1974 the Tuck Encyclopedia supplied the date and place of death: "5 Apr 1960...almost unnoticed in New York." And now in 1976 Mr. Ash supplies a different date of death (1951), an additional fact (Emanuel "applied for [US] citizenship"), and the statement that Emanuel "spent most of his life, and much of his writing, obsessed with his half-Jewish parentage...(his surname was more easily discarded than his heritage)" (p 171).

Now Emanuel did not discard his surname but instead honored it by reserving it for his "serious" fiction (three mainstream novels). But what interests me in all this is the way in which the 1967 supposition that "as a boy and young man he hated being a Jew" becomes first the 1970 fact that "the thought of being half Jewish tormented him most of his life," and then the 1976 fact that "he spent most of his life, and much of his writing, obsessed with his half Jewish parentage." I take Mr. Moskowitz's "fact" to be simply a somewhat exaggerated but not unacceptable interpretation of my reading of The Selmans (though of course it might come from some other source), but since Mr. Ash gives us facts not to be found in my article, in Moskowitz, or in Tuck, I must assume that he has some source unknown to me. Does that source actually state than Emanuel "spent most of his life, and much of writing, obsessed with his half-Jewish parentage"? And if so, on the basis of what evidence? Or is it that Mr Ash has himself read not only Messiah but also all the realistic novels, western novels, SF novels, and numerous magazine stories published under the names V.R. Emanuel, Victor Rousseau, and H.M. Egbert, and thus feels qualified to make pronouncements on the obsessive content of "much" of Emanuel's writing?

A book of this general kind would be of real service to the student or scholar who cannot have a reasonably complete set of SF reference works on his own desk, if the compiler would only cite his sources, for then it could serve as a guide to works he could consult in a library, works that give full accounts from which the "guide" has selected the few biographical and bibliographical details that it has room to print. But many of the people working in SF scholarship (academic and non-academic alike) seem not to have grasped the principle that literary scholarship is a cooperative, ongoing endeavor that provides not final answers but materials for and leads to further study. Indeed, many seem to think that SF scholarship is a competitive business enterprise in which the sources one finds are a kind of capital asset, to be kept secret and mined for new material whenever the market is ripe. It is high time that everyone concerned (including publishers) realize that a work that does not cite its sources, no matter how extensive and careful the research behind it, is not scholarship at all.

Mark Rose, ed. Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice-Hall, nd [1976], xi+174, $2.95 softbound, $7.95 hardbound.

In each of the essays in this new volume of the Twentieth Century Views series we have a sharp mind focused on science fiction as literature (or, in one case, as film): Kingsley Amis, "Starting Points" (1963); Robert Conquest, "Science Fiction and Literature" (1963); Robert Scholes, "The Roots of Science Fiction" (1975); Darko Suvin, "On The Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre" (1972); Stanislaw Lem, "The Time Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring" (1974); Eric S. Rabkin, "Genre Criticism: Science Fiction and the Fantastic" (1976); C.S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction" (written 1955); Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster" (1965); Michael Holquist, "How to Play Utopia: Some Brief Notes on the Distinctiveness of Utopian Fiction" (1968); David Ketterer, "The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature" (1974); John Huntington, "Science Fiction and the Future" (1975).

For anyone new or fairly new to the serious study of science fiction, this volume would be one of the best of all possible introductions. For anyone who has been in the field for some time, all but two or three of the essays will already be familiar, the two or three varying with the individual. The Conquest, the Holquist, and the Huntington are new to me.

C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Robert Conquest have in common the fact that each had made his mark in what anyone would regard as serious literature before turning his critical attention to science fiction, even though he had been a life-long addict. They were all pioneers (albeit with the sharpest of tools) in bringing SF to the attention of the literary world by distinguishing the ways in which it is like and unlike the fiction conventionally regarded as serious, and thus in fitting it into the overall literary scheme (something Robert Scholes was to do even more effectively, at least from a structuralist point of view, at a much later date). Like Amis (but unlike Lewis) Conquest seems to me to insist too much of the newness of SF as a genre, too much on the supposed absence of links between "modern SF" and such SF as was prior to or even contemporary with Verne and Wells. But since Conquest is primarily concerned with other things, this is a matter best discussed in another place.

Analogies such as the one Michael Holquist sets up in his essay--utopia is to society as chess is to war--have been made before for SF but never worked out in such exquisite detail, and I can't imagine any article that would serve better as a basis for discussion and argument, in the classroom or out. Although the argument overall is quite persuasive, I am worried by some of the details, and feel that there is a contradiction between, on the one hand, "This society is by definition perfect, so that any changes in it can result only in a falling away, a decline. Thus innovation is a crime in utopia, a sin against perfection" (p 139), and on the other hand, "the best examples of the genre are arranged in such a way that they may be played again as often as they are read. That is, most utopias have open endings," with More's Utopia cited as an example (pp 143-44). If the perfection of the society is so defined that innovation is a crime, then the game will be lost by the author whenever the reader decides that objectionable detail is either unnecessary to the structure of the society or so objectionable that if it is necessary the whole society must be rejected. But if the perfection of the society allows for such innovations as are made necessary by outside pressures like war, or such as simply become desirable because of growth in knowledge or wisdom, then the game in rereadings becomes one in which victory or defeat may alternate between author and reader. The citizens of More's republic recognize that their society has not been perfected beyond possible change for the better, especially in religious practices, and the "visitors" to Utopia (Hythloday, "More," and many readers) have found a number of the details questionable or even absurd, so that the perfection of the eponymic Utopia depends on there being an orderly process for change, which is allowed for in the governing bodies. Having said this, one hardly needs to mention Wells's A Modern Utopia, which is called "modern" because it expressly recognizes and makes provision for the inevitability of change.

John Huntington's essay provides the best answer I have yet seen to the contention that the function of SF is to prepare us for the future, arguing that SF holds its readers by "answer[ing] a craving...for a science which will mediate between a conviction of the necessity of events--that is, a strict determinism--and a belief in creative freedom" (p 159). Mr Huntington has published two essays in SFS; I wish he had sent this one to us instead of to College English.

I have singled out these three essays not as the best but only as the ones new to me. Many would say, and I would not disagree, that the most important essay in the book is the one by my co-editor, Darko Suvin, which was published in the December 1972 College English and has since set what is perhaps a record for frequency of citation by SF scholars.

--R.D. Mullen.

---

Bulwer-Lytton's Fiction of New Regions

Allan Conrad Christensen. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions. University of Georgia Press, nd [1977], xvii+268, $12.00.

As the author of The Coming Race, perhaps the most important SF novel in English between Frankenstein and The Time Machine, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton (but most of his life simply Edward Bulwer), should be of some interest to students of SF. This book, a model of its kind, should go far toward making Bulwer's fiction accessible to present-day readers. I call it a model of its kind, for even though it is primarily for scholars in 19th-century fiction, and even though in this field, except for a few SF novels, I know only the Great Novels of the Great Novelists, I was still able to follow its arguments with reasonable ease. Those arguments, without making any claims for Bulwer as a rival to the Great Novelists, pretty well demonstrate that he is worth our attention for having in his fiction "chart[ed] the territory of psychological myth" (p 215), the "new regions" of the subtitle, arid for having elaborated theories on the art of fiction in the critical essays which, together with the example of his highly innovative novels and stories, made him probably the strongest contemporary influence on 19th-century fiction, albeit an influence opposed to the dominant realism of the time.

The SF or what-if basis of The Coming Race may be said to be: if Darwin and Marx are right, the world depicted here is the kind of world our descendants will live in. Since this world is utopian in the more obvious ways, but still not a world that either author or reader would care to live in (if the reader has read at all well), The Coming Race is the first of the modern (i.e. Darwinist, Marxist) dystopias--or, at least, the first in English to make any important impact on the reading public. The part of the present book of most direct interest to students of SF is chapter 7, "Back to the Region of Pure Forms," which not only examines Bulwer's two SF novels, A Strange Story (1862) and The Coming Race (1871), but also reviews Bulwer's response to science and socialism in his earlier fiction, especially Zanoni (1842), which some people count as SF, and then deals with his last two novels, The Parisians and Kenelm Chillingly (both 1873, the year of his death), which are also concerned with science and socialism, though not in a science-fictional way. This chapter can be read by itself with profit, though I do not recommend doing so, for its full significance depends on concepts developed in the preceding chapters.

It must now be said that Professor Christensen gives no indication whatever of any interest in SF, or even knowledge of its existence, with one result being that on the influence of The Coming Race he can say only that it depicts "a social and political structure that prefigures those of many more recent utopian satires" (p 179) and that it "apparently did have a decided influence on George Bernard Shaw, and it is clearly relevant to the entire flurry of [utopian] satires at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries" (p 230). So that although this book is apparently a brilliant interpretation of Bulwer's fiction (the "apparently" coming from my unfamiliarity with most of that fiction), and although I would have been happy to have had its Chapter 7 in SFS, it remains true that a definitive or near-definitive article on Bulwer as an SF writer is still to be written.

--R.D. Mullen.

---

The Great Martian Controversy

William Graves Hoyt. Lowell and Mars. University of Arizona Press, nd [19761, xv+376, $13.95.

The Great Martian Controversy may be said to have begun in 1894-95 when Percival Lowell published a number of magazine articles and the book Mars; to have stirred no great interest in the general public until 1905, when Lowell announced that the canals had been photographed and the newspapers began to devote space to the subject; to have escalated with the publication in 1906 of Lowell's Mars and Its Canals; to have reached the proportions of a furor in 1907 as Mars neared, reached, and departed from opposition; to have begun to fade when the photographic evidence failed to win universal assent and no new evidence of a definitive kind resulted from observation during the 1907 opposition or found publication in Lowell's 1908 book, Mars as the Abode of Life; to have faded into the recesses of the public mind with Lowell's death in 1916 and with the continuing absence of new evidence (e.g. continued failure to receive radio signals from Mars), so that is was almost forgotten (albeit still alive) when in July 1965 the first Mars probe sent back the photographs that laid it finally to rest.

But it was still alive, with respect to the existence of the canali, in early 1965, despite such nonsense as C.S. Lewis's 1955 statement, "When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical illusion" (Of Other Worlds [US 1967 xi+148], p 69). For better telescopes had resolved nothing, and although the weight of scientific opinion had established the illusion theory as orthodox, there were still prominent authorities on the other side, e.g. the Britannica as late as its 1956 edition if not later, and E.C. Slipher's The Photographic Story of Mars, US 1962, perhaps the last major document in the controversy.

Mr. Hoyt's handsome and profusely illustrated book presents an entertaining and (so far as I can judge) generally accurate account of the whole affair, but is deficient in at least two ways important to students of the history of SF: first, in its sketchy account of our knowledge and pseudoknowledge of Mars before Lowell and hence in its assessment of what Lowell's contributions to that (pseudo)knowledge really were; second, in its sketchy and highly inaccurate account of the science-fictional response to descriptions of Mars by astronomers in general and Schiaparelli and Lowell in particular.

Before Schiaparelli the maps of Mars showed three major features: the polar caps, the dark areas or "seas," and the light areas or "continents," with some but far from all astronomers properly skeptical of taking the dark-light distinction as a sea-continent difference. Schiaparelli's 1877 reports had the effect of dividing the continents into islands. Although some astronomers were dubious about the canali because of their inability to see them (e.g. Richard A. Proctor, Old and New Astronomy [UK 1892 viii+816], pp 544-45), there seems to have been no great opposition to their existence and nothing more than amused skepticism on the theory that some of the canali might actually be canals built by the Martians for such purposes as the prevention of floods during the periodical inundations caused by the melting of the polar caps (see Wells' War of the Worlds §1:1). For if you accepted the idea that Mars was inhabited (and there was at that time no solid evidence to the contrary), there was no reason to believe the inhabitants incapable of great engineering works, especially since the Martian civilization would be older and hence more advanced than ours, the smaller planet having cooled more rapidly than Earth from a molten to a habitable state.

This then was the pre-Lowellian picture of Mars. But just before Lowell began to publish his own views, two of his associates made a "discovery" that drastically changed the traditional picture: there were lines running through the dark areas, and therefore no seas on Mars. In the following excerpt from a letter by Lowell I have italicized the words that express what is new in the Lowellian picture:

Roughly speaking the evidence seems to be that Mars has (1) some but not much atmosphere; (2) is an aged world but with no water to speak of other than in the polar caps; (3) is provided with an elaborate system of line markings which are best explained by artificial construction, cases of assisted nature...; (4) shows what seem to be artificially produced oases as the termini of the canals -- what we see and call canals being merely strips of vegetation watered by the canals, the canals themselves being too narrow to be seen. [p 70, ellipsis in Hoyt]

Thus the picture of a planet with many well-watered areas despite its shrunken seas and vast deserts, a planet with a great flood-control problem that had perhaps been solved by the building of a number of drainage canals, became in Lowell's hands the picture of a supremely and planet (three-fifths absolute desert, two-fifths steppe so dry that it would be regarded as desert on Earth), with many hundreds of thousand-mile-long irrigation canals to bring water from the polar caps to the oases in which was centered what remained of Martian life. There is a double irony here: what Lowell's associates saw in the dark areas was an illusion, but what it signified to them was true, and that truth (no seas on Mars), which should have been the death blow to the concept of Mars as habitable, was instead used as evidence that Mars was not only habitable but actually inhabited.

Schiaparelli's canali seem not to have been of any great importance to astronomers, science-fiction writers, or anyone before Lowell; that is, they were simply accepted as one more feature in the picture of Mars that had been developing gradually for a century or so. Richard A Proctor, taking them as real but as incorrectly interpreted in their discoverer's map (loc. cit.), worked them into his own map of Mars, one drawn on the basis of observations made by numerous observers. Writing not long after the famous twin events of 1877, Percy Greg devotes some space to Asaph Hall's moons (Across the Zodiac, 1880, §3), but does not even mention the canali. It seems to me evident that turn-of-the-century interest in Mars would have been much the same without Schiaparelli, though not without Lowell, whose public-relations work brought that interest to a fever pitch. But there is another irony here, for Lowell's drastic revision of the traditional picture seems to have had very little effect on the public's concept of Mars, perhaps because the newspapers played up the positive concept of Mars as inhabited by canal-builders and played down Lowell's depiction of a supremely arid planet. Although that is mere speculation (neither Mr. Hoyt nor I have investigated the ways in which the newspapers treated the details of Lowell's work), it can be said that the pre-Lowellian Mars continued to dominate in science fiction up to Burroughs. Burroughs changed our concept of Mars, not by any careful use of Lowellian detail but by constantly iterating that Mars is a dying world, and not immediately (for his books had little influence on adults) but gradually as his youthful enthusiasts grew up and themselves became writers of science fiction or popular science.

In 1964 a very sketchy article and bibliography by Thomas D. Clareson and William B. Johnson appeared in Extrapolation (5:37-48): "The Interplay of Science and Fiction: The Canals of Mars." For the past ten years I have been hoping that someone would follow up on this with a full treatment of the subject, but up to the present no one seems to have done so. If someone does take up the challenge now, Mr Hoyt's book will make the task immensely easier than it would otherwise have been.

--R.D. Mullen.

---

World SF for the Russian Common Reader

E.I. Parnov. Fantastika v viek NTR. Očerki sovriemiennoj naučnoj fantastiki. Moskva 1974, Izd. "Znaniue," s. 192.

The main aim of Parnov's collection of essays is to present the thematic profile of science fiction as it appears in various countries. The critical point of view is not that of an academic scholar; the author neither looks for definitions of genres, nor tries to achieve close analyses of texts, nor attempts broader historical perspectives of current tendencies or literary traditions. Parnov simply assumes the role of the common reader: grasping the main idea of a novel, understanding the course of action and the role of fantastic motifs in it are the ultimate aims in the discussion of particular titles. However, it is when Parnov attempts a synthesis that his journalistic methods are fully disclosed: he views fantastic literature against the broadest possible background of modem scientific, social, political and economic phenomena. Thus the study's title, "the fantastic literature in the century of scientific and technical revolution," becomes fully justified, at the same time suggesting the book's most evident feature, the discrepancy between its literary field of inquiry and its extraliterary viewpoint.

The results of the adopted critical method are to be expected. First, the subjects of the essays copy the examples of the critiques abundant both in Russia and abroad. Parnov discusses SF as a warning about contemporary tendencies in modern civilization (in essays entitled "The First Alarm" and "New Elements of the Brave New World"), presents texts concerned with the problem of intergalactic and interplanetary contact ("The Foreign Life"), comments upon the interest of scientists in SF ("The High Priests of Urania: Practice Range or Hobby"), and traces the evolution of the robot theme in fantastic literature ("The Stages of Roboevolution or the Lesson of Čapek").

Second, in pursuit of the most universal outlook, the author's theses and conclusions become almost platitudes. This happens, for instance, to the main thesis of the first essay (and the whole book!), the suggestion that science fiction grew on the border between science and art ("Urania and Euterpe"). Similarly, the conclusion of "The Wings of the Fairy-tale" seems neither to be the product of a creative critical insight nor to enrich much our knowledge about fantastic literature; we are already fairly well accustomed to the ideas that modern fantasy has some roots in the ancient myths and that it often fulfills the social functions of the fairy-tale.

But Parnov never boasts of any ambition to be a creative critic. He wants only to popularize the kind of literature he speaks of, to inform the general reader about its subjects and ideas--sometimes even risking an essay so full of information that it turns into a sort of annotated bibliography. Such is the case of the second essay of the volume ("The Children of the Two Revolutions"), devoted to the presentation of SF in France, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Cuba, Rumania... An attempt at evaluation that closes this essay is not the luckiest stroke of the critical pen either, since the evaluation is strongly influenced by political, social, and economic realities. In literary criteria it hardly ever matters how many revolutions created the country where the literature originated! The last essay, devoted to Russian fantastic literature, is also perhaps too much of a glorified and glorifying bibliographical guide.

Parnov's book may be of some interest, even to a literary theoretician, if treated as an example of certain tendencies in the critical awareness of our times. It is comforting to discover a journalist speaking of fantasy as a literary game (igra v elementy mira) instead of analyzing its "verisimilitude," "prophetic elements," and "scientific truth." It is a sort of consolation to have Parnov popularize the understanding of fantasy worlds as various types of literary convention, especially if one remembers how often literature is still envisaged as an immediate effect of an author's mental aberrations or as an inevitable result of economic and social conditions. And a literary historian might agree with Parnov when he sees the evolution of SF to be the history of the quest (p 7), notwithstanding some doubts whether such a history ranges only from the quest for technology to the quest for the humanistic picture of the world. What's more, though generally the reader is left unconvinced by the author's critical criteria (as in the case of "the lack of psychological depth in the protagonists" in the essay on F. Brown and W. Tenn entitled "The Demands of the Fantastic or Occam's Lesson"), sometimes he might even admire the author's understanding of the particular poetics (cf. remarks on Bradbury's fantastic motif of "the autumn people" in the essay "The First Alarm").

The reader's admiration is further strengthened by the respectable number of texts mentioned in the study, especially where less known literatures are concerned, as in the two essays "Free Commentaries on the Divine Comedy" and "The Year of the Sun Tower" which not only discuss the main issues of Italian and Japanese SF, but also compare their modern achievements to these chosen aspects in their literary traditions. It is a pity that the publishers have not done justice to the author's readings by providing a bibliographical list of the texts.

When reviewing a journalist's book on literature, one should perhaps attempt to see it with the eyes of its professed addressee, the reader who is little oriented in the field under discussion. It seems then, in spite of evident drawbacks, that Parnov's study may prove quite a valuable introduction to the vast vistas of the world's science fiction.

--Andrzej Zgorzelski (tr. Franz Rottensteiner)

---

Finding Le Guin's Right Hand

George Edgar Slusser. The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin (Milford Series, Popular Writers of Today, Volume 3). Borgo Press, 1976, 60p, pb $1.95.

Slusser's main premise is clear, sturdy, and big enough to support any number of pages: "From the start, Le Guin's writing is a fiction of ideas--or rather, of one idea: change in permanence, the dynamics of equilibrium" (p 5). Analyzing nearly all of Le Guin's novels and novellas from this premise, Slusser notes the growing complexity of its applications and the increasing role of "the individual ... as maker and breaker of equilibrium" (p 4). However, one novel, The Lathe of Heaven, is simply labeled Le Guin's "worst" and dismissed without discussion (p 3).

Aside from six pages devoted to Introduction, Conclusion, and list of Le Guin first editions, Slusser's essay has four sections: the early Hainish novels; The Left Hand of Darkness; the Earthsea trilogy; The Dispossessed. With its survey approach that places each novel in its niche in Le Guin's Future History, and its formalistic major premise that allows for close analysis of each novel individually, Slusser's pamphlet is an excellent introduction to Le Guin--indeed, the best available. On the other hand, the more serious scholar may be irritated by the lack of footnotes or any other indication of sources, particularly in the discussions of the early novels and LHD. If Slusser's intention is to present a solid, consensus viewpoint, even an indirect assessment of previous scholarship would support his argument as well as direct the uninitiated toward further study. So these sections, while unexceptionable, could easily have been made more useful.

The other two sections are far more valuable. Not only is The Dispossessed such a recent work that any observations would be welcome, Slusser has laid the groundwork for some extensive investigations. For example, he notes that "each pair of chapters, from one to twelve, mirror the other," and goes on to provide an example of what this mirroring involves, using chapters five and six:

The chapter on Anarres ends with Shevek in Takver's arms; on Urras it ends with him dreaming of her. In both he gazes at the moon, dreams of a moon that is cold, a vision of death. The two chapters interlock here--going away is coming home--but the overriding factor is Takver and her love. [p 55]

Here, future studies will have to take Slusser into account.

In a sense, the section on the Earthsea trilogy is even more valuable. Slusser demonstrates, I think quite convincingly, that it "creates a universe which is parallel to that of the Hainish novels, one in which major themes are not simply mirrored or reflected, but carried forward and developed in new ways" (p 31). To think of the trilogy as somehow inferior because it has been designated children's literature is, as Slusser says, "silly." Anyone reading these books will not only recognize the same intelligence at work that produced the Hainish novels, but will observe it functioning at the same level of language and creativity. While the Earthsea novels are indeed fantasy rather than SF, they can hardly continue to be ignored by SF commentators. Slusser suggests that the Earthsea novels were written to escape from the demands of polemic, back to a less restricted form of creativity, since the SF Le Guin wrote during this period was strongly motivated by an urge to comment on the war in Vietnam. Whether or not this particular speculation is sound, Slusser's integration of the Earthsea trilogy into the Le Guin canon can only be applauded.

--Charles Nicol

---

A Bibliography and 49 Reprints (see SFS 3:294-304): Addendum

The book noticed here was "not available for this review" in SFS #10.

#18. Victor Rousseau [i.e. V.R. Emanuel]. The Sea Demons. UK 1924 [as by H.M. Egbert]. Hyperion Press, 254p, $3.95 pb, $12.50 hb, plus 35¢; service charge. Set in England during the Great War, this story tells of how a threat to mankind rose from beneath the North Sea, of how our hero saved the world, and of how the warring nations realized at last that humanity is one and thereupon made peace and put an end to war for all time. When serialized in All-Story in 1916, this could be considered a story of the near future or an alternate present, but when published as a book in 1924 it could only be the story of an alternate past.

--R.D. Mullen.  

---

Back to Home