BOOKS IN REVIEW
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Diana Waggoner. The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy. Atheneum,
1978, x+326, $16.95.
This book began as a Specialization Paper for a degree in library science (page v). The
specialization was evidently children's literature, for although Ms Waggoner assures us
that it lists only works "expected to be of interest to adult readers" (p 125),
about two-thirds of the primary works listed seem to be children's books (530 out of 846
by my count). In "adult fantasy" 239 of the titles come from the books discussed
in Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds (Ballantine pb 1973) or currently available on
the newsstands in such SF lines as Ballantine and Ace. The remaining 77 titles obviously
derive from a catch-as-catch-can operation rather than from any thorough study of literary
history, for although she complains of the paucity of secondary works devoted to fantasy,
her list of sources fails to include such obvious works as Dorothy Scarborough's The
Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) or the Baker-Stevenson History of
the English Novel (1924-67). Finally, though the bibliography purports to cover the
years 1858-1975 (pp 65-67), 41% of its titles come from the last decade of that period,
1966-75.
As for publication data, Ms Waggoner gives (or promises to give) for each book the name
of the illustrator, if any, the city of publication, the publisher, the date, and the
pagination, which in most cases presents no problem, the books being so new that there has
been only one edition. For older books she has "preferred to list editions which are
readily available in American bookstores or libraries" with the "date of
original composition or publication ... given in parentheses after the date of the
particular edition cited" (p 125). This use of the edition one happens to have, with
the copyright date taken as that of "original composition or publication"
(whether it is the one or the other is never specified) leads to many problems. For Tarzan
of the Apes we find "New York, Grosset, 1914 (1912)," whereas the novel was
serialized in 1912, published by A.C. McClurg in 1914, carried in the A.L. Burt reprint
line 1915-28, and added to the Grosset & Dunlap line only in 1927. For A. Merritt's
The Ship of Ishtar: "Illus. by Virgil Finlay. Los Angeles, Borden, 1924,"
whereas Finlay was still in knee pants in 1924 and the Borden Co. probably not established
until much later. For A.T. Wright's Islandia: "Holt, 1942," presumably
taken from a recent edition in which the copyright is claimed by Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, for the 1942 first edition was published by Farrar and Rinehart, and the 1958
edition by Rinehart and Co. There is much confusion of this and other kinds in the listing
of 37 titles by Burroughs, which this student of library science was rash enough to do
without consulting the major Burroughs bibliography (missing from the list of seven
secondary works on Burroughs) and probably without even consulting the Bradford M. Day
bibliography which she does list and which presumably would have served well enough. And
25 of the 40 Oz books are not dated at all!
Although untrustworthy in all such matters, this is still at this moment an important
book. For although we have had a number of recent works on the theory of fantasy, they
have tended to propound highly abstract theories based on the reading of a comparatively
small number of works prominent in mainstream literature, while Ms. Waggoner not only
discusses the theory in some detail but also lists and annotates a large number of popular
books of the kind we think of as belonging to "Fantasy and Science Fiction," and
even offers a classification for these books that provides a thorough test for her theory.
It was a brave thing to do, even if she did not realize how rash it was.
Ms. Waggoner writes as one completely satisfied with her authorities. Citing Tolkien,
she discusses "Subcreation and Literary Belief." Citing Anatomy of Criticism
and The Fabulators, she discusses the history of "Literary Realism and Its
Effects." There was a time when people believed in the unity of God's world, but with
"the rise of scientific, empirical rationalism and materialism," readers found
that they could no longer "give credence to the supernatural in the Primary
World," and so not "in a Secondary world, either." This led to the rise of
realism, in which "Supernatural-seeming events were credited to psychological sources
or coincidence or (worse) the scheming of evil men trying to hold mankind in bondage to
superstition" (p 7). Realism flourished until interest in the subconscious brought
forth first Joyce and then the fabulators, in whose fiction "Literary belief can ...
be given to the supernatural as an expression of the unconscious" (p 8).
But what, asks Ms Waggoner, but "what if the supernatural were, after all, real...?"
This possibility resulted in the birth of "speculative fiction," which provided
"a means by which realism could speculate on unprovable realities and readers could
give them literary belief" (pp 8-9).
With pre-realist romance, realism proper, and post-realist fabulation disposed of, Ms
Waggoner defines speculative fiction as "a class of modern, 'sentimental' [Frye's
term] literature that treats supernatural and/or nonexistent phenomena (such as the
future) as a special class of objectively real things or events," which includes
fourteen genres: "allegory, satire, utopia, imaginary voyage, traveler's tale, ghost
story, the Perrault fairy tale, the 'art fairy tale,' Or Kunstmaerchen, the
Oriental tale (imitating the Thousand and One Nights), the dream-story, the
Gothic novel, the horror story, science fiction, and fantasy" (p 9).
Ms Waggoner must now supply the differentia that distinguish Fantasy from its thirteen
sister genres -- a number that should have been eight, since the dream-story obviously
does not treat its phenomena as objectively real, since the imaginary voyage and
traveler's tale are soon to be dismissed as mere relics, as indeed they might well be in
view of the "modern, 'sentimental"' of the definition, and since the Perrault
fairy tale and Oriental tale are treated in the remainder of the book as belonging to
Fantasy.
Satire, allegory, utopia, and the Kunstmaerchen are said not to create genuine
Secondary Worlds, being tied too closely to the author's Primary World, a distinction
equivalent to the autonomous contingent distinction made in the first paragraph of this
essay, though I would of course deny the necessary contingency of utopian fiction. The
ghost story (as opposed to "ghost fantasy"), the horror story (as opposed to
"horror fantasy"), and presumably the Gothic novel are eliminated as not
supplying the necessary "realistic credentials," for "Fantasy is distinct
among the genres of speculative fiction in that it goes to the farthest extreme to
establish realistic credentials -- a history and background -- for the supernatural"
(p 9).
The essence of Fantasy is the supernatural: "A numinous power -- an ultimate
power, for good or evil -- orders the world and impels the story, acting directly on its
characters and events. In the Primary World, the existence and activity of such powers are
a matter of religious faith; in the fantasy's Secondary World, their existence and
activity are subject ot material proof." But, "This is not to say that the
author must state, in so many words, that some supernatural power is behind the story. Its
existence is implicit in those fantasies based on 'magical' impossibilities: Talking
animals, alternate universes, new worlds, Perrault fairy tales, and so forth" (p 10).
On this basis, as may be seen in the table on this page, Ms Waggoner divides Fantasy
into two major classes: First, those stories taking place (or at least beginning) in a
Secondary World, the Natural Present, which differs from the Primary World only in that
"magic, or magical beings, actively operate on the lives of people living" in
that world; second, stories set in Worlds of Enchantment "based on the existence of a
numinous, but passive, power" (p 94). Now it should be obvious that if the
supernatural is inactive in a Secondary World, that world can be regarded as enchanted
only if there is some evidence, some "material proof," of the supernatural's
having once been active, such as the presence of talking animals or other creatures of
Faerie, as in the worlds of Class V. The so-called Worlds of Enchantment in Class VI range
from those like Le Guin's Earthsea, in which the supernatural is omnipresent, through
those of adventure stories like the Tarzan series, in which the supernatural, if present
at all, is of little or no importance, to those like Wright's Islandia, which not only
suggest nothing at all about any present or past activity of the supernatural, but also
clearly imply an agnosticism bordering on atheism.
AN ABSTRACT OF THE WAGGONER SYSTEM. The bracketed figures indicate the number of
books in each class or subclass.
MAGIC IN OPERATION [447]
MAGIC OF SITUATION [375]
I. In Natural Present [268]
V.
Fairy-story Fantasy [201]
A. Magic [56]
A. Fairy Tales [106]
B. Mythic Fantasy [43]
B. Toy Tales [15]
Out of the Silent Planet
C. Animal Fantasy [80]
C. Faerie [1071
VI. Worlds of Enchantment [174]
D. Ghost Fantasy [26]
A. New Geographies [97]
E. Horror Fantasy [19]
Thongor of Lemuria
Titus Groan
Stormbringer
F. Sentimental Fantasy [17]
Conan the Conqueror
The Fifteenth Pelican
Tarzan of the Apes
II. Magic Time Travel [49]
She
A Connecticut Yankee
The People of the Mist
Orlando
Lost Horizon
III. Travel from Our
Islandia
Universe to Another [100]
B. New Histories [32]
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Mouse That Roared
A Princess of Mars
C. New Universes [45]
Phantastes and Lilith
A Wizard of Earthsea
IV. Science Fantasy [30]
A Case of Conscience
Black Easter
\Ms Waggoner seems to have resorted to the concept of Enchanted Worlds primarily to
cover talking animals, talking toys, and such other creatures of Faerie as have no
supernatural powers -- i.e., the things I have called pseudonatural. Since our folktales,
legends, and myths have always mingled the pseudonatural with the supernatural, there is
no reason why the essence of Fantasy should not be specified as the "supernatural
and/or pseudonatural." In sum, if the concept of the pseudonatural can be accepted,
there is no need for the highly dubious Enchanted-World concept.
In distinguishing between Fantasy and the dream-story, "the story reproducing
dream experience," such as Alice in Wonderland, Ms Waggoner admits into
Fantasy those stories in which the "dream-frame is merely a clumsy device to set the
plot in motion," such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (p 11).
Now if a framing device is irrelevant to whether or not a story is Fantasy, it is also
irrelevant to a classification in which the basic criterion is the kind of Secondary World
in which the events occur. If the dream frame is irrelevant for A Connecticut Yankee,
so is the time-travel aspect of that dream, and so is the instantaneous supernatural space
travel of A Princess of Mars.
The Other Universes of Class III are supposed to have "different natural
laws" from those of the Natural Present (p 106). This may be true of Oz, but it is
not true of the Barsoom of A Princess of Mars, for in the Secondary World of
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Barsoom is merely one of a number of locales all subject to the
same natural laws: the Burroughs fantasies are all presented as true, and all but a few
are explicitly tied together, ERB purportedly being an editor of manuscripts or a reteller
of other men's tales, rather than an author who makes up stories. The New Universes of
Class VI:C differ from the Other Universes of Class III and the other times of Class II in
that they are supposed to be "worlds which are not at all related to ours" (p
115) -- a distinction that could be rendered invalid in any particular case simply by the
author's writing a sequel in which a visitor from the Natural Present arrived by
spaceship, time machine, or metempsychosis. The journeys through time or space in Classes
II and III are almost always instantaneous and thus mere framing devices; if there are any
in which the traveling itself is predominant in the story, that traveling must take place within
a universe of some kind. There is thus no need for special classes (or even a special
class) covering journeys through space or time; all the stories can be classified on the
basis of the nature of the Secondary World. (Are not the journeys to Oz mere framing
devices? Is not Oz a fairy-story world? On the other hand, since there is no suggestion of
the supernatural in the 5th-century Britain of A Conneticut Yankee, how can we
possibly count that story as Fantasy?)
Ms. Waggoner defines the New Histories of Class VI:B as "alternate versions of
Primary history" (p 115), which would cover many historical romances not usually
regarded as Fantasy, as well as the three story-types I find in the list: those set in
alternate time tracks, those set in legendary or mythological worlds, and those depicting
great events in the present or recent past that never actually occurred. This mixture
suggests that Ms. Waggoner does not understand that whereas an alternate time track
involves differences in history so great that the present is changed, it is
perfectly possible to imagine differences in history, legend, or myth that would leave the
present as it is. So far as our present is concerned, it does not matter whether we
envision Camelot as Malory did, or Tennyson, or T.H. White, or Mary Stewart.
Just as "inventing an 'imaginary country' like Ruritania for a story does not make
it a fantasy" (p 30), neither does inventing great public events that somehow never
got into the newspapers of the Primary World. Such events have been the stuff of thrillers
ever since the days of E. Phillips Oppenheim. Leonard Wibberly's The Mouse That Roared
and its sequels, which I know only from a Peter Ustinoff movie and Ms Waggoner's
annotations, count as Fantasy not because they present so-called alternate history but
because of the pseudotechnology of the tiny duchy of Grand Fenwick's "beat[ing] all
other countries to the Moon in a rocket ship fueled by its famous wine," the
pseudosociopolitics involved in its invading and conquering the United States, and the
pseudosocioeconomics of "Duchess Gloriana's desire for a fur coat nearly destroy[ing]
the economy of the Free World" (pp 292-93).
More than two-thirds of the books listed in Class VI:A, New Geographies, belong to four
superhero series: Thongor, Stormbringer, Conan, and Tarzan. Although the first three of
these may be sufficiently concerned with magic to count as Supernatural Fantasy, the
Tarzan series is not. The point to be made here is that in all such stories the hegemonic
marvel is the superhuman and hence pseudonatural hero himself, so that these stories are
quite properly called Heroic Fantasy, and thus may be counted as Fantasy without resort to
the New-Geographies concept. Most of the other 31 books listed here also count as
Supernatural or Pseudonatural Fantasy. The few that do not will be dealt with later.
A gross illogicality in Ms Waggoner's system is Class I:F, Sentimental Fantasy, for
"Books in this category might be placed in others ... were it not for the sickly,
vapid air which permeates them" (p 103). But although Ms Waggoner in the generally
reasonable and perceptive Chapter 2, "Some Trends in Fantasy," follows a system
of classification based on the reader's emotional response, she is not doing so in this
place. That "sickly, vapid air" is therefore irrelevant. (The Fifteenth
Pelican, evidently the basis for the TV series The Flying Nun, offers a good
example of pseudotechnology in its principle that a nun's habit would enable a very small
nun to fly whenever there was a good wind; judging from the TV series and Ms Waggoner's
annotation (p 265), there is in this novel nothing of the supernatural, nor any creatures
from Faerie, nor anything else that would qualify it as Fantasy under Ms Waggoner's
criteria.)
Given the elimination of Subclass F, Sentimental Fantasy, I have no quarrel with the
logic of the subdivisions of Class I, except for the fact that the headings are highly
misleading in being neither grammatically nor semantically parallel. I would probably
still be trying to ascertain the basis for subdivision if Ms Waggoner had not hinted at it
in the discussion that precedes the table (the bracketed subclass designations are my
addition): "Humans living in what E.R. Eddison called 'natural present' are affected
by magic -- by experience of the powers of [A] human magicians, magical objects, [B] gods,
devils, or supernatural spirits, [C] creatures of Faerie, [D] ghosts, and [E-F] so
forth" (p 94).
Subclass E, Horror Fantasy, calls for some discussion. The word most conspicuously
absent from Ms Waggoner's Index of Terms is "vampire," and the title most
conspicuously absent from her list is Dracula. Since neither the word nor the
title is so much as mentioned in the book, there is of course no explanation offered for
their omission. And strange as it may seem in this determinedly modern Guide to Fantasy,
with 41% of its titles from the last ten years, there is also no recognition whatever of
the great recent boom, with its numerous bestsellers and blockbuster movies, in stories of
supernatural horror, Satanism, possession, etc., etc. The reasons, I would imagine, come
partly from Ms Waggoner's personal tastes and partly from a librarian's belief that even
in our permissive times children must be protected from some things. Be that as
it may, her discussion of "Horrific fantasy" includes an emphatic expression of
disgust, "all the most obvious notions of the Aesthetic Nineties: the studied
decadence, the ornamentation of style, the interest in exotica, especially oriental
exotica out of the Arabian Nights, the wallowing in bizarre sins and deliberately
shocking behavior, and the elitist, gnostic view of both life and art," which is soon
followed by what strikes me as the finest example of ad hominem criticism I have
ever seen: "Lovecraft was an extreme neurotic, a recluse who hated the modern world,
lived in an unhealthy and morbid atmosphere at home, and thought that literature had
reached its zenith in the Nineties. As a result his fantasies are nearly unreadable"
(p 60).
In the bibliography proper we find Lovecraft's life represented by De Camp's biography,
Derleth's memoir, and the 3-volume edition of his letters -- but Lovecraft's fiction, even
though there is a standard 3-volume edition, only by a Lin Carter paperback!
Now it cannot be said that Ms Waggoner's distinction between "horror story"
and "horror fantasy" justifies such omissions. Bram Stoker's Dracula
meets every criterion in Ms Waggoner's description of horror fantasy, and indeed is so
elaborately detailed that it would count as science fiction if vampires could be imagined
as belonging to nature rather than supernature. And the same thing must be said for the
bulk of Lovecraft's fiction: no author of horror fantasy ever went further than he to
establish "realistic credentials -- a history and background -- for the
supernatural."
Finally, Titus Groan should not have been listed in Class I:E, for it is a
horror story only in the sense that some of the wickedness depicted might horrify some
sensitive readers. Indeed, since there is nothing of the supernatural in its Secondary
World, how can it be regarded as Fantasy at all?
Ms Waggoner treats She as a lost-race story (as did my distinguished co-editor
in SFS #14 [p 51] despite my vehement protests), but this famous novel, in Haggard's
words, is the story of "an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love" (The
Days of My Life [UK 1926], 1:245). Its hegemonic marvel is the marvel that entranced
Carl Jung, Henry Miller, and many a less famous critic, the divine Ayesha herself,
She-who-must-be-obeyed because she can and sometimes does kill with a look, she whose love
for the hero eventually has the same result as Jove's for the foolish Semele. In sum She
should have been listed in Class 1:13, Mythic Fantasy.
Haggard's The People of the Mist, on the other hand, is a lost-race story, and
on this matter I must say a word or two. If the term "lost race" means anything,
it designates a community which was once part of the civilized Ekumene but which has been
isolated for such a long time that it knows of the Ekumene, and the Ekumene of it, only
through legend, if at all. The Amahaggar of She, the "people who put pots on
the heads of strangers," are a savage tribe with some admixture of the blood of a now
long dead civilized race; although off the beaten trails, they are not isolated from the
world, as is indicated by the fact that they have standing orders from Ayesha not to eat
any white men who happen through but instead to bring them to her (just in case one of
them is the reincarnation of the Kallikrates she killed with a look 2000 years ago). The
people of the mist, in contrast, are a Semitic community of Manichean faith who have been
isolated for many centuries by African jungle and savagery.
The lost-race community is different from "the forbidden world," a community
that has cut itself off from the Ekumene, as in Lost Horizon, to preserve its
culture from infection. Such a community is not lost, for it knows exactly where it is and
may indeed have one-way contacts with the Ekumene, as in its ruling families sending their
sons to Oxford -- or to Harvard, as in Islandia. And both the lost race and the
forbidden world are of course different from the "noble-savage" community, as in
Haggard's King Solomon's Mines or Nada the Lily (books not listed by Ms
Waggoner).
Now as I have already said, there is nothing whatever of the supernatural or
pseudonatural in the Islandia dilogy, and very little of either in The People
of the Mist, or in the vast majority of lost-race, forbidden-world, and noble-savage
novels. Such novels are adventure stories in which supernatural events and pseudonatural
creatures, if they occur at all, are taken in stride, so that the reader is surprised
neither if they appear nor if, at the end of the story, he realizes that all its events
and creatures have been entirely natural. What is it, then, that causes scholars and fans
to regard such books as fantasy, if not indeed science fiction? It is, I think, the
contrast of cultures: the lost race, the forbidden world, the noble-savage community is a
sociocultural marvel.
As for Islandia, which is much the most important book of the type treated
here, it may be sufficiently concerned with the sociopolitical and socioeconomic to
justify scholars in calling it a utopia, but those things are in the background. The
foreground is occupied by the sex life of the hero, a virgin too fastidious to resort to
prostitutes, too honorable to attempt a nice girl, and in a situation that precludes
marriage. For him the chief marvel of Islandia is the culture that allows him to come to
terms with his sexuality.
Although we would not think of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as
a lost-race, forbidden-world, or noble-savage story (though an argument could be made for
the last), its theme is still one common in such stories (a hero from the technologically
advanced world attempting to transform a backward society), and it can certainly be seen
as Sociocultural Fantasy.
In Titus Groan and Gormenghast we also have two novels universally
regarded as Fantasy even though there is nothing of the supernatural or pseudonatural in
the Secondary World (Titus Alone, the third volume of the trilogy, is science
fiction). Here again I think we may say simply that we have Sociocultural Fantasy.
There is no logical place in Ms Waggoner's scheme for Class IV, Science Fantasy. The
stories listed here in which the science-fictional predominates over the supernatural and
pseudonatural should be removed from the list altogether and described elsewhere as
"science fiction contaminated by fantasy" (Dr Suvin's term for something all too
common in SF). Those in which the supernatural and/or pseudonatural predominate should be
distributed among the other classes. (Blish's A Case of Conscience is pure
science fiction, for in its Secondary World, Ms Waggoner to the contrary [see pp 20 and
143], the existence of the supernatural is a "matter of religious faith" not
"subject to material proof." Black Easter, on the other hand, since it
depicts no science-fictional marvels but only the magic of magicians and devils, is pure
fantasy and should be listed in Class I:B, Mythic Fantasy.)
The marvels of Barsoom in A Princess of Mars and its "nine sequels"
(Ms Waggoner fails to list Llana of Gathol, the only one of the sequels that does
not have "Mars" in its title) are predominantly science-fictional; it is absurd
to call these stories Fantasy simply because of the supernatural framing device. Virginia
Woolf's Orlando is a dream-story, and George MacDonald's Phantastes and Lilith
combine dream-narration with Spenserian allegory. There are doubtless a number of
other books listed as Fantasy in the bibliography even though defined out of Fantasy in
the introduction.
--R.D. Mullen
A New Wells Bibliography
J.R. Hammond. Herbert
George Wells: An Annotated Bibliography of His Works. New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1977, xvi+257, $24.00.
Hammond, in the preface to his descriptive primary bibliography of Wells's first
editions, acknowledges his "indebtedness" to The Works of H.G.
Wells 1887-1925: A Bibliography, Dictionary, and Subject-Index by Geoffrey H. Wells. But
Hammond fails to make clear the magnitude of his debt. In actuality, Hammond's volume is
an updated, slightly amended version of the bibliographical section in Geoffrey Wells's
standard work, the form of which -- with a few insignificant exceptions -- Hammond has
adopted. It is worthy of note, in this regard, that Hammond, in following Wells's form,
deviates from currently accepted bibliographical procedure by not distinguishing between
upper- and lower-case letters when describing a title page. And no less noteworthy is the
fact that, in at least one instance, Hammond has copied one of Wells's descriptions
mistake for mistake (the number 312 in line six of the description of item A1 in Hammond's
bibliography should read 314; the same error is made by Wells in his item 9).
Another, far more significant legacy of Hammond's borrowing is his citing as first
editions the first English editions of four works that enjoyed prior American publication.
By some perversity of logic, both bibliographers have seen fit to exclude from
consideration all American editions, save for those of H.G. Wells's works published solely
in this country. The four improperly labeled "first editions" are A4, Tono-Bungay,
which was first published in New York by Duffield & Company in 1908; A7, The New
Machiavelli, released by the same firm in 1910; B1, The Time Machine,
published in New York by Henry Holt & Company in 1895 (in this case, though, it is the
first English edition which is definitive); and E30, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of
Mankind, published in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran, & Company, in
1931.
There are two prominent ways in which Hammond, in adapting Geoffrey Wells's entries,
has departed from his source. He has deviated from Wells's findings in those cases in
which he felt that author's data to be incomplete or found them to be inaccurate; and,
instead of structuring his descriptions of H.G. Wells's books in a simple chronological
configuration, as does Geoffrey Wells, Hammond has separated the works by genre-novels,
romances, short story collections, essay collections, non-fictional books, and
non-fictional pamphlets -- and arranged the descriptions chronologically within each
genre. Those of H.G. Wells's works published after the appearance of Geoffrey Wells's
bibliography, of course, follow the same arrangement. Although one may question some of
Hammond's classifications (E5, A Modern Utopia, for example, rests uneasily in
the category nonfictional book), his division-by-genre of H.G. Wells's works represents an
advancement over the arrangement found in Geoffrey Wells's volume, since most users of the
bibliography, I assume, will be interested in one facet of Wells's varied literary career
more than, or perhaps to the exclusion of, any other.
Hammond's volume develops through a series of additional listings. Wells's posthumously
published works and letter collections are fully described. The collected editions of
Wells's writings are cited, but only the first volume of Wells's well-known Atlantic
Edition is described. Simply noted are books by other writers containing prefaces by
Wells, books by other writers containing contributions by Wells, and Wells's
illustrations. Among the appendices that follow are a chronological catalogue of Wells's
works, a note on his "more important unreprinted writings," a chronological list
of book-length Wells criticism, and a skeletal description of the Wells material at the
University of Illinois-Urbana Library and the Bromley Central Library in England. An
alphabetical index of Wells titles concludes the book. As Hammond makes clear in his
preface, he has attempted to catalogue neither Wells's unreprinted journalism nor the
article-length criticism of his works.
The fact that Hammond's book, for all its bibliographical shortcomings, provides much
new information about H.G. Wells's works, coupled with Wells's stature as a writer of
science fiction, will, no doubt, make this volume a must for many specialists in the
field. And, in the last analysis, some of the responsibility for the book's deficiencies
must rest with its publisher, who did not provide the author with the editorial assistance
which might have led to Hammond's remedying those things which make it less than
satisfactory. If the Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, of which the Wells
bibliography is Volume 84, is to achieve the sort of reputation for uniform scholarly
excellence currently shared by the Pittsburgh Studies in Bibliography and the Soho
Bibliography Series, the firm must make sure that it, not its authors,
establishes solid guidelines that can earn Garland that esteem.
-Joe Weixlmann
[A response by J.R. Hammond, and Joe Weixlmann's
reply, appear in SFS 18 (July 1979).]
Two Specimens of the Cliff Notes Series
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