Science Fiction Studies

#4= Volume 1, No. 4 = Fall 1974


Sunken Atlantis and the Utopia Question: Sunken Atlantis and the Utopia Question: Parry's The Scarlet Empire and Coblentz's The Sunken World

The Scarlet Empire: Two Visions in One

Oscar Wilde's well-known pronouncement--"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better world, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias."--with its glaring non sequitur and petitio principii, provides many students of 20th-century utopian (i.e., in the main, dystopian) literature with final-chapter hope. Dystopias, it would appear, leave too little hope. D-503's return to equations and obedience in We, Winston's abdication to terror in 1984, the Savage's suicide in Brave New World, the inanity of the Pelphase and the cannibalism of the Gusphase in The Wanting Seed, and the apparent inevitability of fiat voluntas tua in A Canticle for Leibowitz, do not satisfy the evidently continuing need for a vision of earthly perfection. It is indeed difficult to have one's cake and eat it too. As Dostoevski reminds us, bread and freedom are incompatible. An analogous and immediately related problem exists in utopian literary criticism. No one, I think, would deny that Huckleberry Finn, The Time Machine, and Major Barbara are, as works of the literary imagination, clearly superior to The Strange Republic of Bangour, A Modern Utopia, and Back to Methuselah, respectively. The reason is quite simple: forms in blueprints of ideal states lack any appreciable individuation. Utopias tend to argue discursively: dystopias, to argue movingly. News from Nowhere appears to be the sole significant exception in the past hundred years, largely because its vision incorporates the mythical-romantic view of man, with its emphasis on the life of the imagination. Infrequently do we recognize in visions of earthly perfection any "real" individuals; characters tend to be either diaphanous or merely argumentative, forms who little resemble men and women as we know them. And yet, J.C. Garrett, having underlined the dangers inherent in utopianism, and having mentioned the dubious literary merit of Looking Backward and Walden II, the two most influential literary utopias ever written in the United States, concludes his Utopias in Literature Since the Romantic Period (Christchurch 1968) on this note: "The Utopian dream is as old as mankind; it is unlikely to die as long as men yearn for a better world." Mustapha Mond proves a more perceptive and persistent critic when he argues that Shakespeare has no place in man's earthly paradise.

An explicitly optimistic dystopia, it would seem, would satisfy all needs. In such a work the author would avail himself of the resources of the satirist, but would at the same time present a vision of perfection: Bellamy inverted and turned novelist. Such a work would score attempts to reduce men to robots, but would at the same time present a permanently stable world of free and creative individuals dedicated to self-fulfillment and progress. David McLean Parry's The Scarlet Empire (1906) is a rare attempt to fuse the two visions; his areas of success and his areas of failure in this work are symptomatic.

The story begins with an unsuccessful suicide attempt by an avid young socialist. Man's inhumanity to man crushes him; "possessed with bitterness," he leaps from a pier. Through the intervention of 713, the young man suddenly finds himself in the Social Democracy of Atlantis, the Scarlet Empire. He is elated: "A social democracy--exactly what I have been dreaming of for years!" Here all men, he is told, are treated equally. No more than a few minutes pass, however, before the hero begins to suspect that this state may not be exactly what he had hoped for: 713 informs him that all citizens of Atlantis must carry a "verbometer," a device ensuring that no citizen exceeds his daily word-quota. Physicians, he learns soon after, much to his chagrin, are incompetent; diagnosis and medication are by numbers. Gradually he discovers that the people of Atlantis have also been reduced to numbers. The government is dedicated to concretizing the metaphor "all men are created equal": the tall must marry the short, the beautiful the ugly, the young the old, the intelligent the stupid. Everyone wears the prescribed garb, and eats the same portions of the same food at the same time. Any deviation incurs swift and severe punishment. Selected by lot for the legislature, the hero maliciously pursues this logic by proposing that all citizens chew their food the same number of times, and that all walk at the same pace. Abundant supplies of "lethe-weed" keep the people content with their drab existence. The state persecutes all "atavars," throwbacks to primitive individualism; and yet, as the hero eventually learns, the state itself is controlled by a clique of atavars--a deformed dwarf, a disgusting hag, and two equally repulsive colleagues. Periodic public executions satisfy the citizens' occasional lust for excitement, and serve to keep them in a state of fear-induced conformity.

Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley have presented us with similar nightmares, reductions to absurdity of utopian dreams. Prescience alone, however, does not make for literary excellence. The atavars in control of the Scarlet Empire are relatively powerful characters, as grotesque, as insidious, as cunning as Quilp, Fagin, and Madame Defarge (a citizen who has the temerity to ask for a second portion of food is likened by the narrator to Oliver Twist). The hag, proud of her ugliness, allows the ingenuous hero, whom she suspects of political subversion, to ensnare himself in his own passions. She carefully notes his reactions at the trial of a beautiful atavar, places temptation in his path, and waits patiently. The dwarf, equally suspicious, offers a share of political power, hoping to damn him through either acceptance or refusal. The hero and his beloved Astraea, the atavar he had seen at the trial, fade in comparison: they are mere collages of ideal qualities, recipes for perfection. He is the archetypal Yankee individualist, honest, strong, resourceful, kind to his friends, ruthless to his enemies, courageous, and appreciative of the merits of gunpowder and six-gun. She is the ravishingly beautiful maid, obedient to her man, tender, and helpless. Without knowing it, Parry was of the party of the dwarf and hag (Bonario and Cecilia seem transparent next to Volpone and Mosca). In the end the hero shoots his way out; and, accompanied by Astraea, 713, and a doctor befriended early in the story, returns to the surface via a submarine filled with treasure stolen from a museum. A stray torpedo smashes through the barrier that holds back the sea, and thus ends the nightmare.

Whatever merit as literature this novel possesses lies in its satire; its affirmation is downright naive. The urge to project patterns of earthly perfection seems to mitigate against wit, complexity, and individuation. In the conclusion of The Scarlet Empire, the utopian theme emerges clearly: perfection exists here and now in the 1906 USA. The hero, who has recounted his adventures and conversion for our edification, informs us that after his escape he, Astraea, and their companions fulfilled themselves completely: he as a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist (the loot from Atlantis proved useful); Astraea as his mate, a perfect wife, hostess, and mother; 713 as an "ultra individualist" and eminent doctor of medicine; and the other doctor as a brilliant researcher-entrepreneur dedicated to the progress of mankind. All enjoyed peace, happiness, wealth, and civil liberties in the land of capitalism and progress-a satisfying conclusion for a writer who had parlayed a small hardware business into a factory employing 2800 men in 1904, and who had been elected president of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1902.

The greatest good for the greatest number may appear a reasonable and attractive doctrine, but, one suspects, only to those who belong to the greatest number. Meritorious writers and their creations have always been unfortunately few. Parry, insofar as he is a utopian, would have us believe he is of the majority; he and critics who would have worthwhile books of the literary imagination and utopia prove less consistent philosophers and less perceptive critics than the Grand Inquisitor and Mustapha Mond. The following lines from Cousin-Jacques' Nicodème dans la lune, a play performed in Paris in 1790-91, might be adapted to serve as an epilogue to The Scarlet Empire: "Tous ceux qui n's'ront pas contens/ En France d'leux fortune:/ Afin d'mieux leur temps,/ Pourront v'nir avec moi dans la lune."

-- C.L. Bossière


The Sunken World : Also Two Visions in One

Stanton A. Coblentz's The Sunken World (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1928; book form 1949) resembles, contrasts with, and presumably derives from The Scarlet Empire. Coblentz's sunken Atlantis fascinated me so greatly when I first read the story at 13 that I have never forgotten it. Having reread it, I still find it interesting and only wish that the author's command of language and understanding of thought, character, nature, and plot had been sufficient for him to have realized his purposes more fully. My intention here is to argue briefly against the widespread notion presented so vigorously above by Professor La Bossière, the notion that it is simply not possible to write utopias that are comparable to dystopias in literary distinction or even in ordinary SF interest. My method will be the comparison of the two books in their treatment of diction, thought, character (differences between things of the same species), nature (differences between species), and plot, in an effort to show that Coblentz's novel is superior to Parry's and that its superiority has nothing to do with the fact that it is a utopia and Parry's novel a dystopia.

The two are like each other, like most SF novels, and indeed like most fiction of any kind in being quite undistinguished in diction. Except for a few stabs at lower-class dialect by Coblentz, no appreciable effort is made in either book to distinguish the language of one person from that of another or even to differentiate conversational dialogue from the running narrative of the protagonist-narrator. Since neither author is a master of language, neither is able to render either thought or character with any precision or vividness.

What we get in the way of thought consists simply of conventional arguments--for or against socialism, for or against capitalism, for or against the concept of man as inherently indolent, etc. The rendering of character is equally crude: in Parry's story the hero and heroine and their two allies are good by definition since they seek to escape the oppression of the bad people, of whom some are bad in that they manipulate the law in their efforts to victimize heroine and hero while others are bad merely in that they abide by and seek to enforce the foolish laws of a foolish society; in Coblentz' story there are no good-bad distinctions, the conflicts being intellectual and comic rather than moral and melodramatic.

We are thus left, as we are in nearly all SF novels, with matters of nature and plot. In both novels the physical environment differs so greatly from our own--or from that of the authors--that it must be said to be a difference in nature rather than in character. We have in each story a world that sank beneath the sea 3000 years ago but that somehow survived with roofs and walls that hold back the water and with sources of light, heat, and air that replace the sun and the atmosphere. In The Scarlet Empire the survival was accidental in a way that is never adequately explained: "these gigantic columns which you admire so much are the petrified forests of the Garden of Eden. You cannot see their branches here below, but if you could ascend ... you would find that great limbs spread out in all directions, supporting a dome which seems a mass of foliage and mineral matter impervious to water" (§7). In The Sunken World the submergence was planned: a dome of glass was constructed over a large area and "intra-atomic heat" was used "to sink the whole island to the bottom of the sea" (§12). Each of the narrators is taken on a tour of the enclosed world, but whereas the Coblentz world is described in considerable detail, the Parry world is hardly described at all: The Sunken World is thus a more rewarding novel than The Scarlet Empire on the basis of the interest that science-fiction readers take in the attributes of any imaginary world.

In each book the political and socioeconomic environment also differs in nature from our own (i.e., the United States of 1903, 1928, or 1974) in that it is socialist and equalitarian rather than capitalist and graded, and in character if not in nature from modern socialist states in that the equality has a completeness far beyond anything known in our world: in Coblentz the Atlanteans live in comfort and plenty supplied by two hours of work a day, and devote their leisure to artistic and intellectual endeavors; in Parry they live in abject poverty, with four-fifths of the people working fifteen hours a day under whips wielded by the other fifth, who are not much better off since they must wield the whips for the same fifteen hours, must eat the same food, etc., and even the members of what Professor La Bossière calls the ruling clique gain only venial rewards by their rule. The government of Coblentz's utopia is a direct democracy (the population being held at 500,000 to make this possible), with the few administrators being chosen by examination; the government of Parry's dystopia is representative democracy, with legislators and administrators being chosen and all work-assignments (including the wielding or the working under the whips) being made by lot. Although neither novel gives us anything more than the banalities of routine utopian/dystopian exposition, Coblentz's world is again detailed with greater fullness and coherence and therefore is superior in ordinary SF interest--or, to say it in a different way, would surely be of much greater interest to any bright 12-year-old just becoming aware of utopian/dystopian possibilities.

Finally, there should be in each novel a spiritual environment resulting from the isolation of the society from the rest of humanity, but only Coblentz makes anything of this, Parry being content to attribute all the evils of his Atlantis simply to socialism. The utopian Atlantis came into being as a result of the decision of the Atlanteans that they could create and maintain a just society only if they isolated themselves from the wicked world, but now after 3000 years the political parties of utopian Atlantis include an Industrial Reform Party, a Party of Artistic Emancipation, a Party of Birth Extension, and even a Party of Emergence whose members argue that although the plans of the founders were almost perfect, they were deficient in that they "did not leave room enough in Atlantis for adventure" (§§22-23). In sum, Coblentz' story is superior to Parry's in that whereas the latter is simplistic enough for its dystopia to be perfectly bad, the former is sufficiently complex for its utopia not to be perfectly good.

Both novels are somewhat incoherent in plot. (In the analysis used here, plot is defined as the interaction of protagonist and environment, with the environment of the protagonist including the personal [his friends and enemies], the sociocultural, the sociophysical, the geophysical, or whatever, and with the organizing principle of the plot being a change in the thought, character, or nature of the protagonist or environment, or in their relationship.) The Scarlet Empire begins with a change-in-thought plot, but our hero has already learned his lesson by the end of §6, whereupon the plot of §§7-41 becomes one of melodramatic adventure in which our hero rescues a maiden in distress, wins her love, plunders a museum of great wealth (pagan temples in unenlightened lands being fair game for enlightened adventurers from the civilized world), shoots his way free, destroys his enemy (some five million people), and escapes to happiness ever after as a rich man with a beautiful and adoring wife in the best of worlds, the USA. Having said all this in full agreement with Professor La Bossière's statement that Parry's "affirmation is downright naive," we must add that there is an ugly development in the character of the protagonist--who goes from simple greed at the sight of the jewels stored in the museum (§11) to the self-righteousness of declaring that the five million people killed by a torpedo from his submarine were "overwhelmed by the wrath of God," were a "nation that through its worship of Social Equality went down to destruction" (§41)--a development which is probably merely a reflection of the naive self-righteousness of the author but which might possibly be read as the overall plot of a novel that has self-righteous robber-baron greed as its ultimate object of satire.

In §§1-14 of The Sunken World the plot seems to center on a conflict between the narrator and his commanding officer for the leadership of the crew of submariners who have accidentally arrived in a country which they are told they will never be permitted to leave, but from §15 on the commander and crew simply cease to figure in any important way in the story. Forced to back up and start over, we find that in §§11-32 the story is concerned chiefly with the inability of the obtuse narrator to grasp the realities of his sociocultural environment, and with the resulting foolishness of his behavior. From the beautiful Aelios, who serves as his cicerone and as the expounder of Atlantean orthodoxy, he learns that in the centuries before the submergence, the Atlanteans applied themselves less and less to "the pursuit of the beautiful" and more and more to "construction of huge and intricate machines, of towering but unsightly piles of masonry, of swift means of locomotion, and of unique and elaborate systems of amusement," and that with their "lightning means of travel and lightning weapons of aggression" they "began to swoop down occasionally upon a foreign coast, picking a quarrel with the people and finding some excuse for smiting thousands dead." But of the Atlanteans, "not all...were savages, and not all approved of [the] policy of international murder," and so an "Anti-Mechanism" party of beauty lovers arose to argue that Atlantis's "best human material was being used up and cast aside like so much straw," that "its best social energies were being diverted into wasteful and even poisonous channels," that "its too rapid scientific progress was imposing a wrenching strain upon the civilized mind and institutions," and that there was "only one remedy, other than the natural one of oblivion and death, and that remedy was in a complete metamorphosis, a change such as the caterpillar undergoes when it enters the chrysalis, a transformation into an environment of such repose that society might have time to recover from its overgrowth and to evolve along quiet and peaceful lines" (§13).

But the fact that he is in a society that has achieved and abjured a triumph over nature, that has renounced the pursuit of power and glory, and that has isolated itself from the rest of the world so that it might follow the ways of peace and art, does not prevent our hero from continuing to assume the universal validity of the values of his own world. And so at the first opportunity he rises in a public assembly to deny that he and his companions are the "barbarians" the Atlanteans take them to be, and to claim that they are instead "representatives of the highest of modem civilizations":

My description of the growth and attainments of the modern world was listened to with interest, but with a lack of comprehension that I thought almost idiotic. Thus when I declared that the United States was a leading nation because of its population of a hundred million, its rare inventions and its prolific manufactures, my hearers merely looked blank and asked how the country ranked in art; and when I stated (what is surely self-evident to all patriotic Americans) that New York is the greatest city on earth because of its tall buildings and its capacity for housing a million human beings in one square mile, my audience regarded me with something akin to horror, and one of the men--evidently a dolt, for he seemed quite serious--asked whether no steps had been taken to abolish the evil.

But it was when describing my own career that I was most grievously misunderstood. Had I confessed to murder, the people could not have been more shocked when I mentioned that I was one of the crew commissioned to ram and destroy other ships; and I felt that my prestige was ruined beyond repair when I stated that I had entered the war voluntarily. (§13)

There are a number of incidents that illustrate the obtuseness of our hero, but since we have heard it all before, in Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmsland, we can content ourselves with three examples. At the annual Pageant of the Good Destruction, where films are shown of pre-Submergence Atlantis (films that cause one of his companions to exclaim, "By the holy father, if we're not back in the old U.S.A!"), he muses to himself that he "had never known anything quite so ugly as the scenes we now witnessed" (§15). When he has completed the course of study that qualifies him for citizenship, and has been made the Official Historian of the Upper World, he sets himself to write "a grand resume of modern achievement ... to show the steps by which that achievement had been consummated, and to picture in general the course of those social fluctuations, those invasions, battles, slave-raids, civil conflicts, religious persecutions, crusades, economic revolutions, industrial tumults and international blood-feuds that had brought civilization to its present high estate" (§25). And when he sees in a museum a display of weapons used by the Atlanteans in their war-making days, he exults "at the proof of or superiority: ...the bayonets were fully half a foot shorter than our own; the machine guns ... had obviously not half the killing capacity of ours," etc. (§26).

But although this conflict between protagonist and environment gives us the utopian dual vision by opposing Atlantis to the United States (with our twin, ancient Atlantis), it does not develop as a plot but instead merely runs on an even course until it peters out in what can hardly be called a climax but must still serve as the only evidence of any change of thought in the protagonist: when attempting to write on "Social Traditions and Institutions in the Upper World" he finds that the "the further I proceeded the harder the work became, for the more I learned of Atlantis the more difficult it appeared to represent the earth in a light that was not merely pitiable" (§33).

Our second plot having faded away, we must once again back up and start over. That our hero is an unreliable narrator is obvious from the beginning, and near the end of §22 we learn with disconcerting suddenness what should have been made evident by diction but was not: that the beautiful Aelios is also unreliable, for if happiness and freedom were as complete in Atlantis as she claims, there would surely be no need for such political organizations as the Industrial Reform Party, the Party of Artistic Emancipation, the Party of Birth Extension, and the Party of Emergence. It soon becomes obvious that this incident, together with the following chapter (in which our hero is instructed in the principles of the Party of Emergence by its leader, a "fiery spirit, audacious thinker, and trustworthy friend"), is a prelude to the concluding action of the novel (§§27-35), in which the people of Atlantis assume the role of protagonist.

The appearance of a crack in the great dome shatters the calm of the people of Atlantis: "most of them [were] so transformed that I could hardly recognize them as citizens of the Sunken World; for they were chattering wildly, or pacing distractedly back and forth, or uttering half-hysterical exclamations; and one or two of them were muttering or mumbling to themselves, or moving their lips silently in what might have been prayer" (§27). The crack is soon repaired to the complete satisfaction of the majority of the committee of scientists and engineers assigned to the problem, and calm returns. One member of the committee submits a minority report holding that the repairs will prove adequate for only five or six years, and urging "the immediate erection of a new glass bulwark against the affected portion of the wall," which can probably be completed in time, "prodigious though the effort will necessarily be," but the other members of the committee testify at length on "the scientific unsoundness of Peliades' theories," and disprove "his views to their own satisfaction and that of the people" (§28). Even so, the Party of Emergence wins many new supporters for its policy of allowing a portion of the population to emigrate to the surface, and seems to be headed for victory in a referendum on the matter until the publication of our hero's History of the Upper World turns the entire country against making any contact with the barbarians of the upper world (§§29-31). And so for six years the unadventurous descendants of the builders of the great dome do nothing whatever to ensure that it will continue to make life possible in their enclosed and isolated world, and make no plans for escape if the dome should fail--as fail it does (§§32-35).

To the best of my no doubt limited knowledge in this field, no utopographer has ever defined utopias as either "perfect" worlds or "permanently stable" worlds; this strawman is the creation of those who deride any belief in the possibility of improving the human condition. Since the utopian world, even though much more nearly perfect than our own, is still imperfect, there is room in it for conflict of various kinds and hence for the kinds of action portrayed in plotted as opposed to simply expository fiction. Just as we find in dystopian fiction a conflict between protagonist and environment in which the protagonist is in the right, so we would expect to find in utopian fiction a conflict in which the protagonist is in the wrong or a conflict which tests the strength of the society-and such conflicts we do find in The Sunken World, even though they are poorly handled. My proposition in this essay has been that it is quite possible to write utopian novels of literary distinction or, at least, of considerable SF interest. When I began writing it seemed necessary to argue the proposition in the abstract, but that is no longer necessary (and this essay may have lost its purpose), for the proposition has been triumphantly demonstrated by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

-- R.D. Mullen


The Steam Man of the Prairies and Seven Other Dime Novels. E.F. Bleiler has edited Eight Dime Novels (Dover, $3.50), a 9 by 12 book containing photolithic reprints of five cent periodicals published between 1881 and 1905 in the dime-novel format of that period apparently a 4-page or 8-page newspaper folded twice to produce a booklet of 16 or 32 pages. Along with Old and Young King Brady, Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Frank James, Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell, and the Horatio Alger hero of the month, we have a youthful genius named Johnny Brainerd who builds a steam engine in  the shape of a man and uses it with amazing results in hunting for gold and fighting bad guys, in The Steam Man of the Prairies, by Edward S. Ellis, originally published in 1865and said to be the first SF dime novel. —RDM


23 "Classics" of SF: the Hyperion Reprints.

In her Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (L 1957) Margaret Dalziel remarks that the study of such fiction is "full of interest for the reader who is prepared to undertake it in cheerful resignation to the fact that he is unlikely to discover any lost treasures" (p4). I must confess that there was a time when what drove me on in the reading of the SF of 50, 100, or 200 years ago was my adherence to the theory that since literary critics had always been prejudiced against SF there were probably some lost masterpieces to be rediscovered; that is, it took me many a year to learn that this prejudice is largely an American phenomenon of the last 50 years or so, and that such SF masterpieces as have been written have all been pretty well accepted as part of mainstream literature, in Britain if not in the US. Although these 23 books have all been advertised as if they were lost masterpieces, not more than five of them (## 1, 3, 9, 19, 23), and perhaps only three (I have not read ## 3 and 9), can be counted as masterpieces in any sense.

Having thus done my duty by literary standards, I must now express my enthusiasm for the series and my gratitude to Hyperion Press and Sam Moskowitz, the series editor, for making them available in these substantial and reasonably priced editions, for as badly written and as badly thought as most of these novel are, we still need them all if we are to come to understand what SF has been and what it is. Not that the readers of SFS are going to learn all that from this brief report: I will merely list the books and make a few comments on them—nostalgic comment in some part, for most of these are books that I read in my childhood or adolescence, mostly in a 5-year period (1928-1932) during which I not only read all the pulp magazines publishing SF, but also sought, out and obtained all the back numbers of Amazing Stories and many of Weird Tales, Blue Book, and Argosy All Story Weekly.

Each of the books is a photolithic reprint of some earlier edition, 5½ by 8½, printed on good paper, and sewn in signatures; the publisher is Hyperion Press, 45 Riverside Ave., Westport, Conn. 06880. The reasonableness of  the prices (given below for hardback/paperback) can be seen in connection with #9, announced in 1971 by McGrath at $42.00 (but  never published) and offered here at $13.50  5.50. ## 1, 3, 9, and 22 are not available for this report, but I have been assured that they are even now being printed.

#1. Robert Paltock. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins. 1751 (but here an edition with introduction by A.H. Bullen, d. 1920).$10.95/4.50. Not available for this report. This minor classic of English literature, the third most popular of the 18th-century imaginary voyages (albeit a poor third to Crusoe and Gulliver) and never long out of print, is an example of the SF of the white man's burden: Peter teaches the arts of war and other advantages of advanced  civilization to a race of winged people. Sam  Moskowitz, Brian Aldiss, the NCBEL, and others to the contrary, it is not set in a world inside the earth: the action takes place, first, on a small island similar to Burroughs's Caspak in that it is completely encircled by high cliffs but open to the sky; second, in a larger country  surrounded by towering mountains and lying in the supposedly temperate regions of the south pole.

#2. W.H. Rhodes. Caxton's Book: A Collection of Essays, Poems, Tales and Sketches. Ed. Daniel O'Connell. With an "In Memorium" - signed W.H.L.B. 1876. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $8.95/3.75. This memorial volume, assembled by friends of the author, a San Francisco lawyer who had written some newspaper and magazine pieces under the name Caxton, contains one well-known SF story of the hoax type, "The Case of Summerfield," a sequel to that story, and four other stories of considerable SF interest, together with a number of poems and essays. The "In Memorium" is of interest, in indicating that SF was a recognized genre in 1876 but was believed to be something rather new: "His fondness for weaving the problems of science with fiction, which became afterwards so marked a characteristic of his literary efforts, attracted the especial attention of his professors [at Harvard in the 1840s], and had Mr. Rhodes devoted himself to this then novel department of letters, he would have become, no doubt, greatly distinguished as a writer, and the great master of scientific fiction, Jules Verne would have found the field of his efforts already sown and reaped by the young southern student" (pp 6-7).

#3. Percy Greg. Across the Zodiac. 1880.With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $13.50 5.50. J.O. Bailey treats this book as a landmark in the history of SF (Pilgrims, pp67-69), it is the one "classic" of SF that I want most to  to read, but it has not yet come my way

##4-5. George Griffith. The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror.With [17 magnificent] illustrations by Fred. T. Jane1893 (but here an 1894 edition issued before the death of Tsar Alexander, November 1st). With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $11.50/4.75 Olga Romanoff: or The Syren of the Skies. 1894 (with an errata slip: "In view of recent events in Russia.... For the obviously necessary alterations in the text the reader is referred to the Ninth Edition of [#3]."). With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $10.50/4.25. In Voices Prophesying War (1966) I.F. Clarke dismisses Griffith with the following: "a new race of journalists like Louis Tracy, George Griffith, and William Lee Quex.... had a standard formula for dealing with every situation: a major anxiety of the moment plus a racy and exciting narrative plus the introduction of eminent contemporary figures who would talk to the reader in the intimate manner favored by the Daily Mail" (p65). Whether Griffith's contributions to the future-war story deserve more than this I cannot say, having read few of the books that Professor Clarke regards as important in that sub-genre and thus being unable to make comparisons. What can be said is that these highly sensational and melodramatic stories are more in line with—would appear in matters of story-telling to be more directly ancestral to—modern popular SF than Wells's stories, though their influence is of course indirect, Griffith not having been published in the US and having been long out of print in Britain. Set ten years in the future, Angel is concerned with the building of the first successful aircraft, which combine the principles of "Jules Verne's imaginary 'Clipper of the Clouds' and  Hiram Maxim's Aëroplane" (p42); the use of a fleet of these aircraft by the international nihilist-socialist-anarchist Brotherhood under the leadership of Natas and his daughter (the eponymous Natasha) to save England from conquest by Russia and France (eventually with help from America, the US branch of the Brotherhood having overthrown the Plutocracy, torn up the wicked Constitution, and joined the US with Britain in an Anglo-Saxon Federation); and the establishment of a world-wide reign of peace and justice on the basis of socialist-democratic government and monarchical pageantry (Edward VII and the German and Austrian emperors being allowed to keep their thrones), a reign guaranteed by the monopoly of air-power that the Brotherhood wields from its base in an idyllic region of Africa. The chief villain of the story is Tsar Alexander/Nicholas (Alexander having died between the 8th and 9th editions), and the final scene in which the Tsar appears is typical of much in the book:

From here they [the Tsar and his high ministers, in chains] were marched on to the first Siberian etapè, one of a long series and of  foul and pestilential prisons which were the only halting-places on their long. and awful journey. The next morning, as soon as the chill grey light of the winter's  dawn broke over the snow-covered plains,. the men were formed up in line, with the sleighs carrying the women and children in the rear.... "Forward!" the whips of the Cossacks cracked, and the mournful procession moved slowly onward into the vast, white, silent wilderness, out of which none save the guards were destined ever to emerge again. (p385)

Set in 2030, Olga Romanoff is concerned with the efforts of the eponymous villainess (who seduces our hero and thus obtains the secret of aerial navigation) to reestablish the throne of her ancestors, with the great aerial battles waged between her forces and those of the Brotherhood, with the warning of impending doom received from the Martians, and with the coming of the comet that wipes out humanity save for those members of the Brotherhood who found shelter deep underground. Both novels abound in pageantry and formal situations (regiments on parade, sessions of Parliament, assemblies of heads of state, etc.) and in set scenes that cry out for the stage of melodrama; e.g., from Angel, with Natasha holding the floor at a meeting of the Executive Council of the Brotherhood:

"You have asked for a bride, Michael Roburoff, and she has come to you, and I can promise you that you shall sleep soundly in her embrace. Your bride is Death, and I have chosen to bring her to you with my own hand, that all here may see how the daughter of Natas can avenge an insult to her womanhood.

"You have been guilty of treachery to the Brotherhood, and for that you might have been punished by any hand; but you would also have condemned me to the infamy of a loveless marriage, and that is an insult that no one shall punish but my self. Look up, and, if you can, die like a man." Roburoff took his hands from his face, and with an inarticulate cry started to his feet. The same instant Natasha's hand went up, her pistol flashed, and he dropped back again with a bullet in his brain. (p275).

The introductions are valuable in that they give us some information on Griffith not available elsewhere; less so in their effort to make Griffith one of the most influential writers of his day.

#6. Gustavus W. Pope, M.D. Journey to Mars. The Wonderful World: Its Beauty and Splendor: Its Mighty Races and Kingdoms: Its Final Doom.1894. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $12.95/5.25. This verbose and slow-moving story, quite the silliest of these 23, is Mr. Moskowitz's candidate for an honor much disputed among Burroughsians, that of being the chief source for Barsoom. I can't see that he has much of a case: the Mars depicted here is pre-Lowellian, with the continents and seas named as on the maps in Richard A. Procter's Old and New Astronomy (1892), with canals cut to prevent floods and to "equaliz[e] our climate from equator to poles" (p150), with a population "nearly seven times that of Earth" and all living in utopian comfort (p196), with people who live only for about a hundred years (p337) and are all of human size except for a very few  members of an immigrant race, who may attain ten feet (p175), and with virtually all monstrous animals having been cleared off the planet ages ago (p178)

Pope outdoes Griffith in his devotion to pageantry and is unrivalled in the observance of all the formalities on every occasion: our hero is introduced around on Mars as "Lieutenant Hamilton of the Navy of the United States of America, the greatest Republic on the Terrestrial Globe," and one of the high points of his tour of Mars occurs during a "magnificent naval spectacle" when his hosts honor him by raising "the STAR SPANGLED BANNER" (pp195-209). But as fascinated as we may be with the extensive depiction of Martian high society in all the splendor of its parades, fetes, balls, assemblies, the book is perhaps most interesting in its treatment of race. In this world in which wickedness of any kind is almost entirely unknown, there are five pure races living together n complete harmony, and one race of wicked mongrels: "We pure Martians regard intermarriages of our different races with abhorrence. Such alliances are contrary to the laws of God and Nature and produce great deterioration of the original stock and dreadful degeneracy of offspring" (p279). This belief is supported "as a great physiological truth" by an auctorial foot-note on the same page: "The moral, mental and physical degeneracy of the greater part of [Terrestrial] semi-civilized and barbarous races is due to these admixtures." But these sentiments are expressed as it were in odd-numbered chapters while in those with even numbers a great though unspoken love is developing between our hero and a Martian princess. The book ends with the Martians making desperate plans to survive an apparently inevitable doom resulting from the dislodgement of the Martian moons by a meteor shower (and with the wicked King of the wicked mongrels threatening to frustrate those plans unless our heroine becomes his bride). I can't wait to read the sequel (A Journey to Venus, 1895): the Martians will of course survive, but will hero and heroine allow their great love to lead them into the loathsome crime of miscegenation?

#7. L. Frank Baum. The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale founded on the Mysteries of Electricity and the optimism of its devotees. It was written for boys, but others may read it. Illustrations by F.Y. Cory. 1901. With introduction by David L. Greene and Douglas G. Greene. $8.95/3.75. Ozians or Baumians (however called) will of course be interested in this book; others will find it a pleasant enough tale. With an electrical gun that will render any foe unconscious for an hour, and with an anti-gravity device worn like a wrist-watch, our youthful hero flies over the world having adventures of many kinds until he finally decides that it's "no fun being a century ahead of your time" (p245). The authors of the modest and informative introduction (professors respectively of English and history) are members of the International Wizard of Oz Club.

#8. Robert W. Chambers. In Search of the Un-known 1901. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $8.95/3.75. The farcical adventures of a young zoologist searching in various parts of the world for specimens of prehistoric or mythical animals and for love; in each case he loses the specimen and the girl. The introduction attempts to make a case for Chambers, one of the best-selling novelists of his time, as an important writer of SF, but these slick-magazine stories are quite routine both as SF and as romantic comedy.

#9. Gabriel de Tarde. Underground Man. With introduction by H.G. Wells. 1905 (1896 as Fragment d'une histoire future). $7.50/2.95.- One of the four books unavailable for review, and one I have not read. Tarde's reputation as sociologist and criminologist makes one hope that this may be an important novel.

#10. William Wallace Cook. A Round Trip to the Year 2000 Serialized 1904; here a 1925 dime novel. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $9.50/$3.85. A farcical story with some ingenious ideas not very well worked out; e.g., since books about the year 2000 are very popular in 1901, a number of 1901 writers have gone to 2000 via suspended animation and there have made a solemn pact not to tell the truth in the books they will publish in 1901 if they can find a way to go back. The last avatar of the dime novel was a thick little book of about 300 pages, 4½ by 7, side-stapled, and selling for 15¢. The introduction to the present edition states that this novel has been "unjustly neglected by academics interested in science fiction because of the absurd prejudice, baldly stated in several learned journals, that a work published only as 'a cheap paperback' is not worthy of critical evaluation." But I have never said any such thing, and I doubt that any other scholar ever has. What I did say, poorly expressed, on one occasion (SFS 1:2) is that "references should not be made to the pages of cheap paperbacks or other editions not likely to be found in libraries" (i.e., should instead be made to chapters); and on an earlier occasion, in connection with a projected bibliography of SF books published before 1946, that in our search for titles we could ignore books of certain kinds, including any "published only as a cheap paperback," which would not rule out the inclusion of any such book that we happened to run across, or already knew of, and considered worthwhile. We already knew of the present book (it is listed in a bibliography by Thomas D. Clareson, Extrapolation 1 (1959):8 and is one that I read as a child), and since it is one that I consider worthwhile (in a minor way), it would have been included. On the other hand, if we had missed it, it would have been no great loss

#11-12. Garrett P. Serviss. A Columbus of Space Illustrated. 1911. With introduction by A. Langley Sears. $9.50/3.95. The Second Deluge. Illustrated. 1912. With introduction by Joseph Wrzos. $10.95/4.50. The first of these is a boys' story about a journey to Venus and wild adventures thereon. The second is a much more interesting and substantial work though marred by bad style (Serviss could write only at the top of his voice): an astronomer's warning that Earth is about to pass through a watery nebula; the vain efforts of the hero to get the world to prepare for the coming disaster; his own building of an enormous ark that makes possible the saving of a few hundred people. The introductions are sober and informative

#13. George Allan England. Darkness and Dawn 1914. With an introductory essay by the author, "The Fantastic in Fiction." 13.95/5.95 An engineer and his secretary wake up in their skyscraper office to find that perhaps a thousand years have passed since they mysteriously lost consciousness, and that they are apparently the only people alive in a New York City that lies in ruins. Later they find a tribe of small ape-like creatures that they take to be descended from Negroes, who might have been immune to whatever it was that killed off everyone else, and would surely have degenerated to an animal like condition in the absence of Whites to guide them (§1:19). At long last they find some Merucaans (§2:24), not very prepossessing but at least White(!) and so capable of being uplifted and brought back to a technological civilization, which our hero and heroine set out to do. A few years later they have trains running, planes flying, and the beginnings of a socialist utopia. All in all, pretty routine stuff both as adventure story and as racist-socialist vision. The introductory essay, written for a writer's magazine, is interesting in showing that England was both half-proud and half-defensive about being writer of such wild stuff as SF

#14. Victor Rousseau. The Messiah of the Cylinder [also pbd as The Apostle of the Cyl-inder]. Illustrated by Joseph Clement Coll. 1917 With introduction by Lester Del Rey. $9.50/3.85. Though sentimental and melodramatic, this novel is interesting as a direct imitation of Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and as an extensive Catholic-conservative critique of Wellsianism. The introduction by Lester Del Rey surprisingly ill-informed about the history of the anti-utopian novel and about the content of this book, which is not especially concerned with socialism (and is indeed more anti-capitalist than anti-socialist), but is instead an attack on Soulless Science in general and eugenics in particular. The illustrations are excellent, surpassed in this group of books only by those in #4.

#15. Milo Hastings. City of Endless Night 1920. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $9.95/3.95. One of the many post-war books inspired by fear of a resurgent Germany, this story was serialized as "Children of 'Kultur'," the word Kultur having been made infamous by Allied propaganda in World War I, and like #14 is primarily an attack on Soulless Science (and especially eugenics), here seen as peculiarly German. In this imagined future all the world is peacefully united except for Germany, which continues under the Kaisers to nourish dreams of world dominion, and which survives in a vast underground Berlin so strongly fortified that it can withstand any force of arms brought against it. Even more sentimental and melodramatic than #14, and much less interesting.

Sam Moskowitz can always be relied upon to present some intriguing new information on the history of popular SF: who would have believed that any SF was ever published in True Story Magazine (as this story was) or that SF was once a regular feature of Physical Culture.

#16. Harold Lamb. Marching Sands. 1920.. With introduction by L. Sprague de Camp. $9.50/3.75. Harold Lamb graduated from the pulps to considerable success as a writer of popular history and biography. Mr. de Camp tells us that Lamb "became prodigiously learned in Asian history and languages" which I do not doubt; but such learning does not show up in this book, which is merely a routine lost-race romance that can be counted as SF only if all such stories are so counted.

#17. Ray Cummings. The Girl in the Golden Atom. 1923. With introduction by Thyrill L. Ladd. $9.95/3.95. In the late 20s and early 30s Argosy All-Story Weekly ran four serials in each issue, of which one was always SF or fantasy, and for a year or two in that period half the latter were written by Ray Cummings. It went something like this: "The Sea Girl" by Cummings, then a serial by Ralph Milne Farley, then "The Snow Girl," then a serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, then "The Shadow Girl," then one by Austin Hall, then "Princess of the Atom," then one by Burroughs, then, having run out of girls, "Beyond the Stars," and so on and on.. Cummings was advertised as a former secretary to Thomas A. Edison, as the American H.G. Wells, and as the author of a "trilogy of matter, time, and space," all of which I found very impressive until it grew on me that he had very little to say and had long since said it all. The original novelette of this title, which was combined with a six-installment sequel to form the book, is famous among fans as having initiated the SF story set in the world of the atom (reached by taking a size-diminishing drug) or the world "Beyond the Stars," in which our cosmos is a mere atom (reached by taking the drug that enables you to return from the infinitesimal world), which would be all very well if there were any worthwhile stories of this kind. All in all, this poorly written and poorly imagined story is second in silliness only to #6.The introduction is adulatory rather than informative, except that it does tell us that Cummings was never Edison's secretary.

#18. A. Merritt. The Metal Monster. Serialized 1920; here as #41 of the Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1946. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz (§12 of Explorers of the Infinite1963). $7.95/2.95. This story belongs to a rather odd but once very common category: the story in which the hero, adventuring in some remote part of the world, finds, not a lost race (or, as here, not only a lost-race) but an invader from outer space (or the fourth dimension, or the geological past, etc.). Here the invader is a collective being composed of millions of metal beings, evidently engaged in nothing more than amusing itself in and of itself, and apparently completely indifferent to man (though willing to destroy the enemies of the one human being it has deigned to recognize).

Correctly characterized by Mr. Moskowitz as the Lord of Fantasy, A. Merritt, who wrote the purplest prose of any SF writer between the early Shiel and the young Bradbury, differed from Cummings in that he did not wear out his welcome, publishing only two novelettes, eight serials, and a few short stories over a period of 16 years, and amassing the largest and most enthusiastic audience of any fantasist—an audience that endured through reprintings in Amazing Stories (where I first read The Moon Pool and "The Face in the Abyss"), in various other pulp magazines, in hardback editions (with The Metal Monster as the one exception), and finally in paperback editions down to just a few years ago (though some of the books are still in print). I remember being astonished a few years ago when Brian Aldiss wrote that Merritt could not write—could not plot, could not draw character, had a beastly style—could only confect (SF Horizons #1, 1964p34), and then, upon rereading some of the books, finding that he was quite right. Even so, Merritt was certainly the most imaginative of all the imitators of Haggard, and any SF writer who aroused so much enthusiasm over so long a period deserves at least some attention from students of SF. And while I think Mr. Moskowitz's claim of philosophical profundity for The Metal Monster quite absurd, I agree with him that this is probably Merritt's best book.

#19. Karel Capek. The Absolute at Large. 1927 (1922 as Tovarna na absolutno). With introduction by William E. Harkins. $8.50/3.50.This masterpiece of satiric comedy by the author of R.U.R. is concerned with the world-catastrophe that follows the invention and widespread use of the Karburator, which effects complete disintegration of matter and so not only produces limitless power but also frees as immaterial residue what has hitherto been confined: the pantheistic God. The introduction is by the author of Karel Capek (Columbia University Press 1962).

#20. Philip Wylie. Gladiator. 1930. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz (§17 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963). $9.95/3.95. The late Philip Wylie was the author of a number of iconoclastic best-sellers, and a great favorite among college students in the 1940s. I remember reading this book in 1930 or 31 in a book-club edition issued in wraps, and have never forgotten the sentence that expresses its what-if basis: "Make a man as strong as a grasshopper— and he'll be able to leap over a church" (p6). This then is the story of a young man as strong as a grasshopper who seeks something better to do than leaping over churches but can find no tasks worthy of his strength. According to Mr. Moskowitz the creators of the Superman comics found their inspiration in this book, perhaps most directly in this passage: "What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in the world, mightier than the machine? He made himself guess answers for that rhetorical query. '...I would be a criminal, I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and destroy. I would be a secret invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the earth; I would be a secret detective, following and summarily punishing every criminal until no one dared commit a felony"' (p232). Though several cuts below Odd John or The Invisible Man in vividness and power, this is one of the best of the superman stories.

#21. David H. Keller, M.D. Life Everlasting and other Tales of Science, Fantasy, and Horror. Edited and with a critical and biographical introduction by Sam Moskowitz. 1947. $10.50/ 4.25. Keller, a psychiatrist, was the most popular of the new writers recruited by Hugo Gernsback for his magazines, and much as I hate to admit it, these unbelievably crude stories (serialized in the 20s and 30s) were among the special favorites of my adolescence, perhaps because of their strange combination of sentimentality and callousness.

#22. Stanley G. Weinbaum. A Martian Odyssey and Other Science Fiction Tales: The Collected Short Stories of Stanley G. Weinbaum. A composite volume containing A Martian Odyssey and Others (1949), The Red Peril (1952), some uncollected material, an autobiographical. sketch, and an introduction by Sam Moskowitz (perhaps §18 of Explorers of the Infinite) $13.50/ 5.75. Not available for this report. Weinbaum published his first SF story, "A Martian Odyssey," in 1934 and another ten before his death in 1935; twelve more appeared in the magazines, some completed by other hands, in the years 1936-1943. He has become a heroic figure to, and a special favorite of, SF writers. The title story ranked second in the SFWA balloting for the best short stories of all time; Isaac the Asimov regards the appearance of that story as an epoch in the history of SF, and believes that Weinbaum would have been the greatest of all SF writers if he had lived (see his introduction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum [Ballantine 1974]), and Sam Moskowitz views him in much the same terms. While I cannot share in this enthusiasm, it is certainly worth pondering

#23. Olaf Stapledon. Darkness and the Light. 1942. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz (§16 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963).$7.50/2.95. A masterpiece; for further comment see Dr. Smith's essay in this issue. —R.D. Mullen.


The Tuck Encyclopedia. Volume I (Who's Who: A-L) of a much heralded and certainly indispensable work, Donald H. Tuck's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (8‡ ix 11, 230 2-column pages) has been published by Advent Publishers, P.O. Box A3228, Chicago Ill. 60690, $20.00. Volume 2 (1976?) will complete the "Who's Who" and include a title-index; Volume 3 (1977?) will be devoted to magazines and paperbacks (covered to some extent in the "Who's Who") and to pseudonyms and miscellaneous matters.

The "Who's Who" attempts a complete listing of everyone connected with the field: authors, illustrators, editors, critics, prominent fans, etc. A special feature of the work is that it lists the contents of all collections and anthologies. In each author-article we find first, a brief biographical sketch; second, "Series," each item listing each of the stories in a given series with specification of the magazine or book in which it appears; third, "fiction," i.e. books, with items like the following for the Poul Anderson novel:

High Crusade, The. (ASF, sr3, July 1960) ( Kreuzzug nach fremden Sternen [German], UZ: 298, 1961) (Croaziata spaziale el, [Italian], Cosmo: 105, 1962) (Les croises du cosmos [French], Denoël: PF 57, 1962, pa) (Macfadden: 50-211, 1964, 160 pp., pa 50¢; 60-399, 1968, pa 60¢) An English Knight in the Middle Ages captures an alien space ship and sets out to conquer the stars. Entertaining.

Finally, where appropriate, "Nonfiction," with items of the same kind. Although the general rule is to exclude authors whose books have not been reprinted since 1945, this rule is waived for anthologies or for other books that the editor deems important. The result is that while we find no article for Robert Cromie or Percy Gregg, we do find articles, complete with biographical sketches, for Mary Griffith ("Three Hundred Years Hence" having been reprinted in 1950) and Elizabeth Gaskell (so that the eleven stories in Cousin Phyllis may be listed). There are also attempts at complete SF-and-fantasy listings for such prominent authors as H. Rider Haggard, but with the modest disclaimer that no attempt has been made to list all the early editions. Any work of this kind is bound to contain many errors, both typographical (as in the Cummings article, where the date for The Shadow Girl in Argosy is wrong under "Series" but right under "Fiction") and factual (as in the Haggard article, which in effect states that only one copy is in existence of The Lady of the Heavens, an error obviously deriving from a misreading of the Scott bibliography). It is my impressioin that this work is much more reliable for the recent authors (to which it is primarily devoted than for the earlier authors); in sum, if you use it for an author listed in NCBEL or some similar work, you'd better cross-check. (Not that NCBEL doesn't contain errors; indeed, there may be as many in its Haggard article as in Mr. Tuck's.)

Finally, Mr. Tuck is a bit severe on academics, especially I.F. Clarke, whose Tale of the Future is said to be "not complete even within the limits of its selection" (as if this weren't true of all bibliographies) and to be "of value for books not within the scope of this Encyclopedia" (as if the chronological arrangement were not in itself of value, and as if a reader might not wish to check Mr. Tuck's annotations for content against those of another bibliographer). —RDM.


A C.S. Lewis Secondary Bibliography. Joe R. Christopher and Joan K. Ostling have com piled an extraordinarily inclusive work in C.S. Lewis: An Annotated Checklist of Writings about him and his Works (Kent State University Press, $15.00): not only books, pamphlets, articles, theses, and dissertations on Lewis and his work, but also book reviews, news items, and books and articles that just happen to mention Lewis in passing; e.g., Heinlein's chapter (Doubleday, 1960, 192 pp., $2.95; 'Dolphin' C351, 1962, pa 95¢) (Doubleday, Toronto) in Basil's Davenport's The Science Fiction Novel where Lewis is mentioned three times. While I am not expert enough in Lewis scholarship to assess the completeness of this work, I can't imagine these 389 pages as anything less than exhaustive. —RDM.


More Special Issues on Utopias. After the revolts which culminated in 1968 and re-activated the supposedly dead and buried utopian yearnings, study and discussions of as well as symposia on utopias—literary and otherwise— have again become highly fashionable. In addition to the special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination reported in SFS #3, two more special issues have come to my attention. The first is #434 (April 1974) of the prestigious Paris monthly Esprit, representing the Left-Christian or "personalist" current among French intellectuals (which also had one of the first special issues, if not the first, that any "mainstream" journal devoted to SF, back in the 1950s). The issue is entitled "L'Utopie ou la raison dans l'imaginaire" (Utopia, or Reason in the Realm of the Imaginary), it devotes 125 pages to that subject, and comprises nine essays by Ray Jean-Marie Domenach (the director of the review and one of the leading French intellecuals), Francois Chirpaz, Lucie Giard, Henri Desroche (who besides an essay on Fourier contributes an excellent discussion of utopian secondary literature), Richard Gombin, Paul Virilio, and Paul Goodman.

The second periodical is Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 1973) of Comparative Literature Studies, which devotes 100 pages, titled "Utopian Social Thought in Literature and the Social Sciences," compiled by guest-editor Professor Herbert Knust, to the proceedings of the eponymous symposium at the University of Illinois-Champaign. After an introduction by Harry G. Haile, the social-sciences part of the Symposium is represented by Irving Louis Horowitz and Helmut Klages, and the literature part by Darko Suvin, Walter Höllerer, Richard Figge, and Peter Demetz, with the summary of a panel discussion among the participants. To the Symposium are added two essays on utopian literature by Gorman Beauchamp and Lyman Tower Sargent. —DS.


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