#144 = Volume 48, Part 2 = July 2021
Aren Roukema
The Esoteric Roots of Science Fiction: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H.G. Wells, and the Occlusion of Magic
Abstract. -- H.G. Wells is sometimes credited with a stylistic rupture that separated science fiction from other fantastic genres, eschewing magical elements in favor of empiricist and rationalist knowledge. While there is merit to this narrative, this article argues for a more complex genre heritage by evaluating the fiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton as an indicative example of a competing nineteenth-century strand of occult science fiction. This form, quite popular in the period, drew on methods of scientific legitimation used by esoteric traditions such as Theosophy and Spiritualism, as well as theories of the mind such as clairvoyance and telepathy, producing fiction that was in dialogue with scientific currents of the day but that did not reject magic. Indeed, noting that Wells consciously exploited the narrative value of esoteric science in a number of his early short stories, the article argues that the fiction of authors such as Bulwer-Lytton is distinguished from the form championed by Wells not by an exorcism of magic but by a productive occlusion of it. The article concludes by outlining the methods and continuing influence of this occlusion, arguing that esoteric sciences have continued to influence and generate the tropes, novums, and stylistics of science fiction.
Tiziano De Marino
The Ethics of Empire: H.G. Wells Re-Writing R.L. Stevenson
Abstract. --This essay explores the connection between R.L. Stevenson and H.G. Wells, with a particular focus on their shared interest in the ethical implications of expansionism at the close of the nineteenth century. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells surprisingly appears to have extensively borrowed from and reworked Stevenson’s Pacific tale The Ebb-Tide. On these grounds, it is possible to trace an implied conversation between Wells and Stevenson, which takes its cue from Robert M. Philmus’s pioneering works on the “Strange Case of Moreau.” Moreau, as Philmus and other critics have noted, is in fact rich with intertextual connections, which complicate its meaning and make it highly ambivalent. The Ebb-Tide, a major and leading source text seemingly as relevant as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, has been largely neglected by contemporary criticism. Bringing more evidence to the case, this essay also connects Wells and Stevenson to a shared ideological awareness, while shedding more light on the sociopolitical horizons of Wells’s early sf.
Alexander Kingsbury Smith
Prognostication and Precognition as Novums in Postwar SF
Abstract. -- Very broadly speaking, beginning with the development of a social science-fictional mode, a number of postwar authors began exploring how forms of exceptionally accurate foresight might effect the development of a society. The social effects of the mobilization of extraordinary forms of prognostication were explored by numerous authors in the 1940s and 1950s, including Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, A.E. van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. This became a significant, but theoretically and critically understudied, motif in sf during the 1960s and 1970s. Relative to the study of prognostication in history, this body of sf literature provides a unique perspective on the relationship between predictive methods and governance, offering a corpus of theoretical reflections on how the implementation of hypothetical, infallible (or nearly infallible) prognostic systems could affect different types of social order. In this essay, I will briefly explore the development of prognostication and precognition as socially-embedded novums and investigate what these sources tell us about prognostication in history when viewed through the lens of Western metaphysics and the Western literary imagination. In doing so, I propose a binary taxonomy as a heuristic, organizing texts with prognostication or precognition as their central novum into two general modes: (1) positivist/techno-optimist and (2) romantic/techno-pessimist. The intellectual history of these tendencies in the literature is explored and compared through several exemplary texts.
Joshua DiCaglio
Simulations of Moksha: Liberation, Mysticism, and Trans-humanism in Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis
Abstract. -- This article reexamines and reframes Philip K. Dick’s sprawling philosophical text, known as the Exegesis, in relation to his widely celebrated fiction, philosophies of mysticism, posthumanism, and transhumanism, and more generally, the difficult task of discovering means of transforming our personal and cultural values to be more adequately attuned to our changing environment. I consider how the ontological uncertainty produced in sf relates to an inevitable ontological disorientation produced by science and technology, and show how this leads to a particular (and particularly mystical, for reasons explained) task: the need to estrange ourselves from our traditional human concepts, values, beliefs, and cultures. Using passages from the Exegesis, I lay out how Dick sets up the task of the Exegesis as a kind of simulation of moksha (liberation, in a profound sense), reading the Exegesis as the venue for Dick to run philosophical and personal counterparts to the simulations of his fiction. Dick’s remixing of mystical and transhuman rhetoric also clarifies mysticism’s relationship to science fiction. Along the way, I reread Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, Valis, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch through the frame and task set up in the Exegesis, resulting in a new reading of Dick’s work that integrates with his post-1974 experiences and writing.
Stephen Dougherty
Messages from the Stars: 2001: A Space Odyssey and His Master’s Voice
Abstract. -- In many respects, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and His Master’s Voice (1968) could not be more different. Kubrick/Clarke’s mystical and affirmational visions of space exploration and humankind’s technological evolution are decisively countered by Lem’s downbeat tale about failed communication with the aliens. Rather than conventional first-contact stories, these texts are more specifically about the impact of messages received from outer space, which sf fans either reading or going to the movie theatres were surely encouraged to evaluate within the context of “space-age” technology and lifestyle. What did it mean to be space-faring humans, leaving the Earth behind? What were the political and social consequences of technocracy and the space race? How was “big science” changing politics and society, both in the East and West? How was it changing the ways that humans might take the measure of themselves? These are big questions, and I have chosen the Kubrick/Clarke and Lem works, created on either side of the Iron Curtain, because I believe that their juxtaposition helps us to appreciate the central role of the Cold War struggle in shaping the sf genre’s responsiveness to the times.
Miguel Sebastián-Martín
Refabricating Individualism and Commodifying Anti-Capitalism: Melodramatic SF and VOD Spectatorship
Abstract. -- This essay analyzes certain audio-visual sf narratives that are primarily distributed via VOD (video-on-demand) platforms, specifically focusing on episodes of Netflix’s Black Mirror and Amazon’s Electric Dreams, considering both in the context of post-cinematic spectatorship. It shows how the ostensibly subversive, anti-capitalist narratives of these shows may lead towards conformity with hegemonic individualism, especially when viewed through VOD platforms. The underlying assumption is that the possibility of subversion is dialectically entwined with—yet not necessarily annulled by—its recuperation by dominant neoliberal individualism, which makes each of these series ambiguously open-ended in their ideological effects. Although this essay centers upon two examples within their specific context of reception, it also suggests a larger theoretical framework for the understanding of similar forms of contemporary sf, proposing “melodramatic science fiction” as an analytic lens that incorporates and reframes ideas originally developed for the criticism of melodrama.
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