#88 = Volume 29, Part 3 = November 2002
BOOKS IN REVIEW
The Triumph of Captain Future
Ignatius Frederick Clarke, ed.
British Future Fiction: 1700-1914. Pickering and Chatto, 2001.
8 vols. xlii + 4,413 pp. $795.00 hc.
This imposing anthology is designed as a companion to Modern British
Utopias 1700-1850, 8 vols., ed. Gregory Claeys (Pickering and Chatto, 1997):
“The texts presented in British Future Fiction, 1700-1914 show how time replaced
space and how, in consequence, the geographies of utopian fiction evolved into
the historiographies of a new literature” (ix). For this purpose Clarke selects
from “those stories that best present the varieties of future fiction” works
“that best reveal the evolutionary interconnections between contemporary ideas
and future projections” (ix). He rightly omits what is still easily obtained in
bookstores or libraries. Anyone likely to consult this anthology will probably
know beforehand many of the more famous works by H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley,
William Morris, Edward Bellamy, and others of like standing. The stories
included are indeed a sufficiently representative sample of their genre’s
various modes and topics as it evolved to become available for use by more
artful writers. Even die-hard formalists like myself agree that it is edifying
to read tales that most conspicuously—though perhaps not most adroitly— manifest
the Zeitgeist of their day. Although this collection provides supererogatory
confirmation of Sturgeon’s Law, no one has shown better than Clarke that future
fiction even at its worst usually reflects significant strands of intellectual
and social history. The erudite, articulate, and intrepid author of Voices
Prophesying War (rev. ed., 1992) and The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001
(1979) is a reliable guide through the badlands of forgotten futuristic fiction.
I.F. Clarke is our real-life Captain Future.
I only wish he had come to the rescue of early future-fiction’s damsel in
distress, Jane Webb. Clarke omits from his anthology her 1827 masterwork The
Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, probably because it was
reprinted in 1994. But that edition is worthless for any scholarly purpose and
altogether misleading in the impression it creates of Webb’s power as a novelist
because it is extensively abridged in crippling ways without any indication of
where the cuts have been made. (For details of this fiasco, see Paul Alkon’s
review-essay “Bowdler Lives: Michigan’s Mummy” [SFS #68, 23:1 (March 1996):
123-30]). Webb deserves better treatment and proper attention. As a fable
inviting skepticism about the idea of progress at a time when so many regarded
science as the high road to creating utopia in the real world, The Mummy
is a noteworthy text in the history of British thinking about the social
consequences of science and technology. As one of the most skillful early works
integrating novelistic action and analysis of utopian ideas, it stands out as a
remarkable development in the aesthetics of utopian narrative. Not least, it is
second only to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in the annals of
innovative sf by female authors.
More’s the pity then that all this good grist for Clarke’s mill is absent
from British Future Fiction and that in Pickering’s companion anthology
Modern British Utopias 1700-1850, Claeys merely devotes two dismissive
sentences to The Mummy without crediting Jane Webb—or anyone else—as its
author (see my review of Modern British Utopias in Eighteenth-Century
Fiction 12 [July 2000]: 578-83). Clarke acknowledges her authorship but is
almost equally dismissive by failing to mention The Mummy’s bumbling
robots, mad scientists, lunatic generals, and other wonderfully dystopian
satiric touches while nevertheless remarking rather misleadingly that, in
utopian anticipations from the 1770s to 1828, “War could have no place in any
ideal state of the future; and there could never be any mention of war in
romantic tales such as The Mummy by Jane Webb” (xxix). In fact, Chapter
two of The Mummy is enlivened by the Irish King Roderick’s landing with
his army in Wales, from whence he marches to attack the Queen’s palace in
London. British troops save the palace just in the nick of time. Roderick’s
forces are then pushed back in a succession of battles that end only when news
of a rebellion in Dublin persuades Roderick to hasten home. No sooner does his
army depart than (still in Chapter two) Greece and Germany declare war on
England and are defeated (offstage) by a British expeditionary force commanded
by General Montague. But two wars in the second chapter are not all. In
subsequent chapters Webb regales readers with detailed accounts of King
Roderick’s Spanish wars and (finally) his invasion of England again via a tunnel
from Ireland. War thus remains a conspicuous feature of life in Webb’s far from
utopian future, although her battles are presented in a romantic mode that
deflects them from being taken as warnings about the horrors of war or the
dangers of neglecting defense measures. Webb’s wars instead become mainly a
setting for romantic adventures and another aspect of her satire, directed at
the military component of social institutions. Those who wish to read the
complete text of The Mummy in order to judge for themselves its
intellectual and aesthetic virtues can find copies, as far as I know, only by
traveling to the British Library, the Boston Public Library, the Library of
Congress, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or Yale. Bon voyage.
Except for leaving would-be readers of The Mummy to hazard the
unfriendly and expensive skies if they live far from London, Boston, Washington,
Chapel Hill, or New Haven, however, British Future Fiction is a bargain
at $795.00 when compared to what it would cost for travel to all the (alas,
unspecified) locations where original editions of its rare texts are to be
found. What it includes, moreover, is considerable compensation for what is
omitted. It has such an abundance of stories, many quite surprising, that few of
its readers will wonder whatever happened to Jane Webb.
Clarke’s general rubrics for the eight volumes are: The Beginnings; New
Worlds; The Marvels of Mechanism; Women’s Rights: Yea and Nay; Woman Triumphant;
The Next Great War; Disasters-to-Come; and The End of the World. The works
included, which I’ll list in the order of their presentation but without
specifying their authors (where known) or dates of first publication, are:
The Reign of George VI; The Coming Race; Three Hundred Years Hence; A
Crystal Age; The Wreck of a World; An American Emperor; The Revolt of Man;
Lesbia Newman; Star of the Morning; The Sex Triumphant; The Battle of Dorking;
The Second Armada; The Invasion of England; The Siege of London; The New
Centurion; The Next Naval War; The Death Trap; The Great Raid; Under the Red
Ensign; The Doom of the Great City; The Salvation of Nature; and The Lord
of the World. If you have read most of these you don’t need British
Future Fiction. If not, you do. Clarke provides facsimile texts, sometimes
of later editions with prefaces that themselves illustrate interesting stages in
the understanding of future fiction’s purposes. He thus avoids the errors that
usually accompany setting works in type anew. As many of these tales exist only
in one edition, the advantages of facsimile reproduction far outweigh anything
to be gained by textual editing for a new printing. Even though—as Clarke
explains—many illustrations have been omitted because they couldn’t be
reproduced with sufficient clarity and a few pages have been spaced a little
differently in the anthology, facsimile versions give us uncut texts while also
allowing some appreciation of the material conditions that shaped responses to
these tales. If only The Mummy had been treated with equal respect by its
twentieth-century “editor” and not mangled beyond recognition in a misguided
attempt to disinter it!
Clarke’s general introduction, introductions to each story, notes, and epilogue
at the end of the last volume provide an excellent survey of future fiction from
its beginnings through post-Hiroshima developments. He also includes a useful
bibliography of secondary material. Those new to the topic will find ample and
accurate orientation to it in British Future Fiction. It’s hard to
imagine any advanced student or scholar working in this area who wouldn’t also
learn many new things by perusing British Future Fiction. I did.
I won’t try to list every possible use of this anthology or all its
unexpected treats. My greatest surprise was William Grove’s 1889 opus The
Wreck of a World, which Clarke sums up as “an ominous tale about
self-replicating machines and their almost successful attempt to control the
world” (3:1). Ooooh: terminators in 1889! Awesome. Scary. Well, not very.
Grove’s diabolical machines won’t strike readers now as anything like so
deliciously plausible and alarming as we find Arnold and his mechanical
colleagues at war with the human race in The Terminator (1984),
Terminator 2 (1991), and—hopefully soon—Terminator III. Nor will
anyone now find at all gripping The Wreck of a World’s banal love
story—which I’ll spare you. In an imagined 1948 Grove’s self-replicating
locomotives somehow produce little locomotives which grow to become big and
malicious ones able to move without railroad tracks while scouring the
countryside in packs to destroy humans. Steam warships somehow proliferate and
attack ships manned by humans. The US Navy is defeated. People flee from cities
and farms. They vanish. Although presumably killed or starved to death while
fleeing, there is no mention of corpses littering the landscape or polluting
empty towns in North America and Europe. Grove’s narrative falls into the Cozy
Catastrophe mode, as we follow the fortunes of one small band of survivors whose
lot it is to start American and world history again from scratch. They make
their way to a deserted New Orleans, narrowly escape hostile machines ashore and
afloat, link up with an unscathed United States warship just returned from a
remote ocean, appropriate some abandoned ships still in seaworthy condition, and
sail off to found a colony of refuge in Hawaii. Conveniently for the newcomers,
Honolulu also turns out to be devoid of people. Whee! Waterfront property for
the asking. Despite its air of a real-estate agent’s fantasy, its creaky plot,
its myriad absurdities and implausibilities, The Wreck of a World does
warrant the attention that its inclusion in British Future Fiction invites.
Clarke is right to identify The Wreck of a World as “the prototype of
the robot tale of terror” while remarking too that “The myth of the last great
war between us and our hostile, intelligent machines has now become a familiar
element in the twentieth-century dialogue between science and society” (3:3). It
is revealing to find the prototype of this myth appearing so long before the
development of computers raised the issue of whether they might ever equal or
even surpass human intelligence and what the consequences might be if that were
to happen. It is equally revealing to find the prototype of this myth in a tale
of such feeble artistry as The Wreck of a World. Its narrative crudities
and utter lack of any attempt at scientific verisimilitude concerning the
ability of machines to replicate themselves throw into sharp relief the strength
at that early date of anxieties about proliferating machinery. Grove’s
cannon-firing robot locomotives and warships rampant seem to bubble up out of
the unconscious with the vividness and illogic of disconnected images in a
nightmare, although presented without anything like the narrative power of the
equally dreamlike elements and equally imaginary though more plausibly explained
science so often remarked as features of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) and also of her future plague that wrecks the world in The Last Man
(1826).
It is a great intuitive leap from actual possibilities of 1889 to Grove’s
terrified—though not terrifying—images of machines multiplying on their own and
turning against us. That same year, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, Mark Twain imagined with far greater artistry the more immediate
and—in the wake of our Civil War—more realistic possibility that people could be
killed more horribly and efficiently than ever before by machines acting not on
their own but directed by other people impelled to warfare by a malign political
situation not amenable to rational control. Though set in a bizarre alternative
sixth-century past derived from Arthurian romance, Twain’s Battle of the Sand
Belt is a look forward to warfare of the future that could obliterate
unprecedented numbers of combatants in hideously efficient new ways, thanks to
what Twain’s protagonist describes—in a partial catalogue—as “guns, revolvers,
cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery.” History from
1914 onward has, alas, given Twain ever-increasing credit as a prophet. Perhaps
if worse comes to worst—and anybody survives—The Wreck of a World will
someday get a scrap or two of praise for prophecy. More certain is that readers
may come away from its pages with enhanced appreciation of the artistry of more
memorable tales in the same vein by Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and
many others—including the forlorn Jane Webb, whose Mummy is still entombed in
obscure library vaults in London, Boston, Washington, Chapel Hill, and New Haven
while awaiting proper excavation.
As Clarke intends, Grove’s story and all the rest included in British
Future Fiction nicely allow identification of past anxieties and also
assessment of how realistic those worries were in the light of subsequent
events. Much else can be learned from these tales. British Future Fiction
makes widely available a group of too often neglected documents that deserve
attention from those now so diligently applying to other material new methods of
cultural and intellectual history. Here is a fresh body of evidence. Those more
concerned with the aesthetics than with the sociology of future fiction may also
study to good effect the stories in Clarke’s anthology. Every university library
ought to acquire British Future Fiction 1700-1914. Everyone seriously
concerned with the history of sf and utopian literature ought to consult it and
if possible buy a set. British Future Fiction 1700-1914 is a major
resource for scholars. For I.F. Clarke it is yet another triumph.
—Paul Alkon,
University of Southern California
At Career’s End?
Kevin Alexander Boon, ed.
At Millenium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt
Vonnegut. Forward by Kurt Vonnegut. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.
vii-xii + 204 pp. $18.95 pbk.
If the test of a collection of essays on the work of a single author is
whether or not the reader of those essays soon finds herself or himself poring
over the works of that author to determine which to buy, then Kevin Alexander
Boon’s At Millennium’s End passes with flying colors. This collection
takes advantage of the fact that Vonnegut announced his intention to stop
writing novels when he published Timequake (1997). Boon and his
contributors thus have the opportunity, until Vonnegut decides that he has
another novel to write, to see his work in sum. The result is a series of essays
that refute Vonnegut’s claim in his Foreword to At Millennium’s End that
his personal and professional survival and success have been the consequences of
“dumb luck” (vii). Instead, the eleven chapters in this relatively slim volume
argue compellingly that Vonnegut’s enduring contribution has been his attempt,
as Boon puts it, “to talk sense into people who are willing to balance the world
on the precipice of utter annihilation” (ix).
Make no mistake: this collection, like many of Vonnegut’s novels, is not for
novices. Each chapter applies it argument to a significant cross section of his
work, if not the entirety of it. Fortunately, all the writers Boon has gathered
here are up to the task. Notably, the collection’s first chapter is contributed
by Jerome Klinkowitz, whose name dominates any library’s shelf of scholarship on
Vonnegut. In addition, all the material in At Millennium’s End is clearly
written and well documented with endnotes and bibliographic citations. Though
they often overlap in productive ways, the essays do not fall victim to
redundancy.
Klinkowitz’s essay, which starts the collection, focuses exclusively on
Vonnegut’s work as essayist, early and late in his career, and is balanced
nicely by Jeff Karon’s article on Vonnegut’s short fiction, often overlooked not
only because of its place in his career and its alleged immaturity, but also for
its focus on science. Donald Morse contributes an examination of Vonnegut’s
attitude to the notion of progress that pairs well with Hartley Spatt’s argument
about the real quality of Vonnegut’s disdain for technology. These two essays,
along with Loree Hackstraw’s chapter on Vonnegut’s use of quantum leaps and the
piece by Karon mentioned previously, would most interest readers specifically
wanting to situate Vonnegut within an sf framework. David Andrews explores the
role of aesthetic humanism in Vonnegut’s work in a way that juxtaposes well with
Todd Davis’s investigation of Vonnegut’s postmodern humanism. Lawrence Broer’s
essay “Vonnegut’s Goodbye: Kurt Senior, Hemingway and Kilgore Trout” discusses
questions of identity and masculinity, preparing the reader for Bill Gholson’s
look at the relationship between morality and Vonnegut’s narrative self.
Finally, the volume finishes with Boon and David Pringle’s critique of the film
adaptations of Vonnegut’s work.
Rather than rehearse and assess each of the intriguing and complex chapters
by the authors mentioned above, it seems more appropriate to comment on what
seems the overall mission of the collection. The central idea or agenda of At
Millennium’s End is its attempt to reconcile Vonnegut’s postmodern writing
style with his humanistic, idealistic, and ethical aspirations. To generalize,
his postmodernist use of time and narrator/author dynamics, or autobiographical
collage, position him as a writer who might be expected to reject the relevance
of ethical or moral behavior/thinking. But these essays, particularly Todd
Davis’s “Apocalyptic Grumbling: Postmodern Humanism in the Work of Kurt
Vonnegut,” do not accept such a facile stereotype.
In particular, Davis argues that Vonnegut’s work marries his postmodern and
ethical postures by rejecting grand narratives in favor of local stories or
“petites histoires” (151). While rejecting absolutist thinking and the kinds of
stories that promote that kind of thinking, Vonnegut does not suggest that
fictions we live by, that we create in order to live, are incapable of doing
harm or good. As Davis suggests, “the fact we can only know our world through
language, through the fictions we create—as with the Constitution or Vonnegut’s
own amendments—does not make the plight of humanity, the emotions and physical
needs of men and women, any less real” (160). That is, since real people must
live in a world composed of fiction, people will be affected, for good or ill,
by these fictions. They must be created and chosen with care. This notion echoes
part of the argument Klinkowitz makes in “Vonnegut the Essayist” when he points
out the impact of the narrative spun for Vonnegut by his architect father and
scientist brother: namely, that his education, his mental framework, and
ultimately his art/work should be defined by usefulness and not ornamentality
(1).
Thus, none of his postmodern play could be solely play for its own sake. I
well remember the frustrating experience of trying to process the drawings in
Breakfast of Champions (1973), not knowing, as a young reader, what their
purpose could be. Similarly, the “dark” visions of some of Vonnegut’s early work
such as Player Piano (1957) should not be seen merely as
pessimistic/apocalyptic visions of a world beyond saving. No doubt, he continues
to be dissatisfied with the political engagement of his fellow citizens. In a
1998 interview with Lee Roloff prior to the production of a 1996 Steppenwolf
Theatre adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Vonnegut expressed his
distaste: “I look at anti-nuke rallies, anti-war rallies, save-the-rain-forest
rallies, and all that, and it’s the same old bunch of moldy figs. It’s the same
seventeen moldy figs who show up every time. Why aren’t there more people?”(17).
Despite this, the writers in Boon’s collection remind us that there is a glimmer
of optimism, of choice, of chance in Vonnegut’s work. Hartley Spatt talks about
the recuperating use of humor in a novel like Slapstick (1976), and
Vonnegut himself has suggested that writers such as George Bernard Shaw taught
him that it was possible to be funny and serious at the same time.
But many of the writers Boon has assembled differ as to which novel provides
the best perspective from which to find Vonnegut’s vision of what might be
useful or what might create an opportunity for optimism. In contrast to Spatt’s
focus on Slapstick’s humor, Rackstraw pays attention to Slaughterhouse
Five’s liberating use of time. Morse points to novels like Hocus Pocus
(1990) and Galapagos (1985) for the ways in which they demystify
humanity’s sense of itself and its role on the planet. Gholson suggests that it
is Breakfast of Champions that challenges and empowers the individual to
ask questions about morality and identity and then to pursue their answers. By
positioning so many of Vonnegut’s novels as fulcrumatic in significant ways,
this collection makes an additional and indirect argument. That is, Vonnegut’s
career should not be organized around one canonical novel. Themes may resonate
and return, but what we are always experiencing when we read a Vonnegut novel,
as Boon and Pringle posit, is the state of Vonnegut’s consciousness (170). As a
living writer, he changes over time and as a result of time. No one novel can
dominate the others, since all the novels were written in time and, more
specifically, in their own times shaped by the “petites histoires” Vonnegut was
telling himself and being told at the time.
That At Millennium’s End adds to Vonnegut scholarship cannot be
disputed. Recent collections such as Forever Pursuing Genesis (1990) and
Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut (1990), edited respectively by Leonard
Mustazza and Robert Merrill, cannot do what Boon’s collection does. Since they
predate Vonnegut’s “let’s call it a career” declaration, they offer more
traditional single-text readings as compared to the sweeping, career-gazing
readings of Boon’s contributors. Klinkowitz and John Somer’s The Vonnegut
Statement (1973) offered essays with broader analytic approaches and
positions than the kind found in Boon’s volume. But that book is now nearly
thirty years old and cannot address the large part of Vonnegut’s career that
occurred after its publication.
The one thing that this volu>me misses, on occasion, is a dissenting voice: that
is, someone who would say, as Vonnegut himself might, that all that is being
said about him and for him is just so much horseshit. As if to anticipate such a
critique, Boon admits, in his introductory essay, that some of the authors
collected in At Millennium’s End are “among Vonnegut’s circle of friends”
or are “Vonnegut scholars compelled to assemble here by a deep appreciation for
the man and his writing” (ix). Indeed, these writers have come to praise
Vonnegut and not to bury him, even if his career may be dead.
—Scott Ash,
Nassau Community College
Processing Utopia
Erin McKenna.
The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist
Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. x + 178
pp. $65 hc; $22.95 pbk.
The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective promises
much in its title—to combine the rigors of John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy
with those of the wide range of feminist thought in the examination of utopian
literature is a valuable and original task. Erin McKenna’s introduction calls
for a “process model of utopia” (2) through pragmatism. “Pragmatism,” she
claims, “embraces a pluralism and dynamism, but does not reject the making of
judgements” and “can keep utopia alive without falling back on the end-state
model of utopia,” with its “dangers of stasis and totalitarianism” (3). As
promising as McKenna’s introduction is, her book nevertheless falls short.
McKenna’s method is to examine first the end-state utopia, represented for
her by Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), and then the
anarchist utopia, represented by Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time
(1976), deploying logical arguments—and sometime less logical ones, such as the
straw-woman argument—to dismantle each vision of utopia. She then turns to her
favored model, Dewey’s pragmatic process model, links its “Call for Community”
(131) with feminism, and exemplifies it in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming
Home (1987). She concludes with a call to action: “We need to continue to
try; we must hope and remain active agents in forming the future. We must take
on the task of utopia” (167).
While I found myself admiring McKenna’s commitment and call to action, I was
disappointed by her book. It read very much like a series of hour-long classroom
lectures, so I would like to critique it on those terms. My first problem is
with the poverty of the book’s language. Yes, a straightforward, plain style
would be appropriate for an oral presentation, especially in an introductory
class, but such a style need not lack wit or felicity, nor should it shun the
richness of a wider critical vocabulary than was used here. Second, the book
lacks clear descriptive definitions of its central terms—utopia, pragmatism, and
most complexly, feminism. Such definitions are, of course, foundational to an
introductory class, but they are also absolutely crucial to the laying out of
McKenna’s argument, and their absence weakens her case.
Third, McKenna doesn’t enlist the aid of the considerable resources of
utopian scholarship. For example, although she makes brief indirect reference to
the work of Tom Moylan, by citing Ruth Levitas’s use of his notion of critical
utopias (9), she never consults his Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction
and the Utopian Imagination (1986) and Scraps of the Untainted Sky:
Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (2000), both of which discuss Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time, so important to McKenna’s chapter on anarchist
utopias. Further, she would have found Moylan’s terms “critical utopia” (in
Demand the Impossible) and “critical dystopia” (in Scraps of the
Untainted Sky) invaluable to her argument. Without Moylan, she is forced to
reinvent the wheel to a significant extent.
Fourth, McKenna’s handling of quotations is problematic: of course,
punctuation always makes clear when she is quoting, but she doesn’t always take
the time to contextualize those quotes in the body of her text. Often one must
resort to the endnotes to identify the sources, and even then, one is often left
to wonder about the circumstances of the quoted material: what character in a
particular novel, under what conditions, said those words? This problem would be
exaggerated, it seems to me, if the chapters were indeed oral presentations. In
many places there would be no indications, beyond mute punctuation marks, to
distinguish between the lecturer and the sources she quotes.
Each of these four problems could have been prevented by careful editing and
the result would have been a very useful, perhaps inspiring book. Certainly,
McKenna’s stress throughout the book is on philosophical and practical rather
than on literary critique of her utopian models, which suggests an implied aim
of inspiration and action. Perhaps if it were spoken in ringing tones, the book
might prove more inspiring, but read, The Task of Utopia remains
unfulfilled.—JG
Prognosticating the Present
Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, eds.
Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural
Transformation. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. viii +
278 pp. $59.95 hc; $22.50 pbk
Faced with accelerating technological and cultural changes, sf has
increasingly turned from predicting the far future to exploring the
ramifications of the present. In this important collection, Veronica Hollinger
and Joan Gordon have assembled essays from some of the field’s finest critics,
along with pieces by Brian Stableford and Gwyneth Jones reflecting on their own
fictions, to explore the cultural preoccupations and social commentaries of sf
literature and film in the late twentieth century. Judged by the standards of
the early and middle periods of the century, the essays delineate a field that
would be almost unrecognizable as science fiction were it not labeled as such,
for technology and science form distinctly minor themes. Foregrounded are sf
works read as explorations of metaphor and language, narratives of gender and
sexuality, and stories of vampiric youth who consume popular culture at the same
time as they are consumed by it. Sf as it emerges in these essays is broader and
more diverse than it has often been depicted, a refreshing change of perspective
that may have something to do with the fact that the editors are prominent
female practitioners in a field that remains largely male-dominated, the growing
numbers of female writers and critics notwithstanding.
The change is apparent in Brian Attebery’s fine essay, “‘But Aren’t Those
Just ... You Know, Metaphors?’: Postmodern Figuration in the Science Fiction of
James Morrow and Gwyneth Jones.” Interpreting the fallen and dying body of God
in Morrow’s Towing Jehovah (1994) as a literalization of the “paternal
body that lurks in language” (94), Attebery shows that the novel ties together
the metaphoric and the physical to confront the characters, and implicitly the
readers, with the substrata of paternalistic assumptions haunting scientific as
well as ordinary rhetoric. Equally illuminating is his reading of Gwyneth
Jones’s White Queen (1991) and its sequels, read as clashes of
life-grounding metaphors of self-versus-world for the earthlings and
self-as-world for the alien Aleutians. Sparkling with intelligence and insight,
Attebery’s essay demonstrates that sf can be as interesting for its language as
for its action and scientific concepts. Wendy Pearson in “Sex/uality and the
Figure of the Hermaphrodite in Science Fiction” attends to discourses of
sexuality in Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man (1995), exploring the
confrontation of a society that recognizes only two sexes with one that
recognizes five. She concludes, “sex is very much a discursive construct” (111).
Even when sexuality is grounded in physical differences, as in Stephen Leigh’s
Dark Water’s Embrace (1998) and Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of
Darkness (1969), language—or more properly, discourse—remains central to the
construction of sexuality in general and hermaphroditism in particular.
Unsettling existing categories and challenging conventional notions of
sexuality, the hermaphrodite offers leverage that encourages us to recognize
that “truth is perhaps a matter of the imagination, not of sex” (123). A
like-minded essay by Jenny Wolmark, “Staying with the Body: Narratives of the
Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction,” offers “queered feminist” readings
(83) of GATTACA (1997) and The Matrix (1999), along with Kathleen
Ann Goonan’s novel Queen City Jazz (1994), to show that the posthuman
bodies depicted in these narratives deconstruct the presumption of a holistic,
self-identical body and, along with it, the single unitary self it supposedly
houses.
Another cluster of essays explores the perennial question of where the
boundaries of the field lie. In the terse and cogent “Evaporating Genre:
Strategies of Dissolution in the Postmodern Fantastic,” Gary Wolfe anatomizes
the strategies by which important contemporary works blur the boundaries of sf
as a genre, including such texts as Gregory Benford’s Eater (2000), Sheri
Tepper’s A Plague of Angels (1993), and Geoff Ryman’s Was (1992).
Neatly categorizing sf as concerned with the geography of reason, horror with
the geography of anxiety, and fantasy with the geography of desire, Wolfe
convincingly shows how sf is colonizing these and other genres and also being
colonized by them. The alternatives to boundary-breaking, he argues, are
narratives that remain bound by formulaic rules and conventions that quickly
become all too predictable. He finds far more interesting “narrative modes that
have already leaked into the atmosphere, that have escaped their own worst
debilitations, that have survived” (29). Similarly concerned with hybridization
is Brooks Landon’s “Synthespians, Virtual Humans, and Hypermedia.” Landon argues
that the effect of CGI (computer-generated imagery) in sf films is to make them
even more non-narrative, privileging spectacle over plot and using special
effects to interrogate technological issues in ways distinctively different from
the diegetic engagements of the films. His preferred mode of interrogation
focuses not on what the film “says” in its narration but what it does to and for
the audience, and his interpretive strategies explore the extension of
spectatorial spaces through Web and DVD technologies. By attending to the
specificities of the media and the phenomenological implications of these modes
of construction, distribution, and consumption, he offers a compelling account
of “post-sf film” (60) that does not rely on narrative analysis for its force,
thereby making a seminal contribution to the critical framework and theorizing
of contemporary (post-) sf films. Also in the boundary-blurring mode is Lance
Olsen’s experimental “Omniphage: Rock ‘n’ Roll and Avant-Pop Science Fiction,” a
riff on the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) that
spins through thirteen tracks to show how such musical techniques as sampling,
driving rhythms, and data compression infect contemporary literature, sf as well
as mainstream (or slipstream, including works by writers such as Jack Kerouac
and William Burroughs).
A particularly powerful group of chapters clusters around social and cultural
issues. Rob Latham in “Mutant Youth: Posthuman Fantasies and High-Tech
Consumption in 1990s Science Fiction” explores the contemporary vampire as an
image of consumer culture, with an emphasis not so much on critique—a focus he
uses to good effect in his recent book Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs,
and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago, 2002)—but rather on an
interrogation of the “ludic cyborg powers that VR seems to bestow on its users”
(129). His readings of Pat Cadigan’s Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and
Marc Laidlaw’s Kalifornia (1993) are particularly compelling. In a
brilliant chapter, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., takes up the curious question of
why nation-states play such a marginal role in contemporary sf, arguing that
national consciousness is broadly seen as a way-station on the route to
transnational or even intergalactic cultural formations. In his conclusion he
cogently points out that almost all of the novels discussed in his encyclopedic
survey come from first-world authors. “So far we have seen only the science
fiction futures of the nations that think they are empires,” he writes. “We must
wait to see whether the nations who think they are nations will imagine
different futures” (237). The implication is that the smaller and less powerful
nations may feel somewhat like the feminist who hears that the self is being
deconstructed just about the time she discovers that she is one. Roger
Luckhurst’s “Going Postal: Rage, Science Fiction, and the Ends of the American
Subject” is eloquent on the importance of rage to contemporary American culture
but somewhat less illuminating about the centrality of the subject to sf.
Veronica Hollinger’s “Apocalypse Coma” is an adroit reading of Douglas
Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), cannily juxtaposed with William
Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) to explore the tendency in sf to assume
apocalypse rather than depict it, as if the characters were too comatose or
otherwise occupied to notice it. The novels, she concludes, “suggest that
time-present—postmodern time—is a kind of supplemental time, a
time-after-the-end-of-time” (173). The phenomenon reflects the contemporary
ambivalence toward “irrevocable change,” when we sense that we are on the other
side but are loath to recognize the side we are on. Joan Gordon’s “Utopia,
Genocide, and the Other” adopts Michael Ignatieff’s capacious definition of
genocide, “any systematic attempt to exterminate a people or its culture and way
of life” (qtd. 205), to discuss the difficulties of writing a utopian novel in a
postcolonial age. Genocide is the other side of the utopian coin, she suggests,
and she shows how the utopian and genocidal ironically blend together in Paul
Park’s Celestis (1995) and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996)
and its sequel, Children of God (1998).
A final pair of essays, rather different than the rest of the collection, are
by Gwyneth Jones and Brian Stableford on their own futuristic fiction.
Stableford, writing in the third person, offers valuable information about his
state of mind during the composition of his “ecospasmic” novels and elucidates
the connections he sees among them. While I found the essay informative, I admit
to being put off by the style, no doubt because of a personal prejudice against
folks who speak about themselves in the third person, a practice forever
identified for me with President Richard Nixon. Gwyneth Jones, self-identifying
as a feminist sf author, writes about her Kairos novels in terms of a growing
realization that the novels hit closer to home than she had at first imagined,
as they begin consciously to contest and subvert the reigning male paradigms of
how to write sf.
A perennial problem with essay collections is quality control. They are
rather like the plastic bags of apples one buys in the supermarket, packaged so
it is impossible to see all the apples. While there are usually many good ones,
there are almost always some bad ones hidden in the middle. This collection is
noteworthy for the uniformly high quality of the contributions and the fine
insights that emerge from them. Perhaps the most important of these is implicit
rather than explicit: the range of contemporary literature that can be
considered sf, the diversity of its concerns, and the extension of the
boundaries—linguistic, stylistic, and conceptual as well as generic—that define
its limits. One of the services that a collection like this can perform is to
define a canon, however provisional and tentative, for contemporary sf. Judging
by the works discussed here, the field has never been as robust, experimental,
and exciting as it now is.
—N. Katherine Hayles, University of California,
Los Angeles
Women Take Back the Genres.
Merja Makinen.
Feminist Popular Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 192 pp. $58
hc.
In this book, Merja Makinen challenges what she sees as the feminist
assumption that genre fictions—i.e., romance, fairy tale, detective, and science
fiction—are inherently conservative and that, consequently, “feminist attempts
to appropriate them must fail” (4). Though she concedes that there is in each
genre a canon and that this canon “privileges conservative and phallologocentric
values”(1), she maintains that the inherently fluid nature of genre fiction
allows for feminist appropriations within romance, fairy tale, detective, and
science fiction and that these appropriations, subversive in nature and often
self-critical, work to transform each genre. Her conclusion that “no popular
genre can be called inherently ‘conservative’ because they are all such loose,
baggy chameleons”(1) is neither startling nor original. Nevertheless, the reader
new to genre studies or interested in an overview of the critical debates each
genre has produced among feminist scholars will find much in her book that is
helpful.
Makinen’s broadest goal for each of these types of fiction is to provide “a
history of the genre, reinstating women’s contributions, the main feminist
critiques of each genre and the feminist appropriations.… to explore in more
detail the narrative strategies at play in the appropriations” (7). She does
this in five chapters. The first is an overview of the relationship between
feminism and popular fiction. The four chapters that follow are close
examinations of both the history and context for feminist involvement in each
genre and the debates that have arisen over feminist attempts to appropriate the
genre in question. In Chapter One, Makinen distinguishes between feminist
fictions such as Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and Marilyn French’s
The Women’s Room (1977) that emerged during the second wave of feminism
in the 1960s and 1970s and that she describes as the “coming to consciousness
novel” (8) and feminist incursions into “popular genre format(s)” (8) that began
in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s. She argues convincingly that
this movement was neither accidental nor arbitrary but was rather the logical
outcome of the left wing’s embracing of popular cultures as a response to
conservatives’ dismissal of them. She notes that “Feminists, during the 1980s,
identified a need to address the popular viewpoint, to change cultural opinion,
and the attempt to appropriate popular culture and popular genres was part of
that procedure” (9).
How successful were these efforts? The answer seems to vary for each genre.
Though Makinen does a good job of supporting her contention that each genre is
fluid by charting the various shifts and transformations each has undergone from
the nineteenth century to the 1980s, some genres are, nevertheless, more
resistant to change than others. Romance, for example, though it is “the only
genre dominated by women, both as writers and readers” (24), and though it sells
more books than all the other genres combined, has neither a series nor an
author that consistently produces texts that can be labeled feminist. Makinen
chalks this up to the difficulty of synthesizing the conventions of the romance
genre, which demand a heroine who experiences “anticipation, bewilderment, and
desire … as she is pursued/played with by the hero” (23), with a feminist
ideology that would posit a heroine both capable and desirous of taking on the
active roles of pursuit and play.
In contrast, feminist appropriations of other genres, specifically detective
and science fiction, have been more successful, because there is less tension
between feminist ideology and those characteristics seen as definitive of the
genre. Detective fiction, for example, though long seen as a genre intent on
reinforcing the status quo, always has at its center, no matter what form it
takes, a character actively engaged in pursuit of the solution to a mystery. The
passive, pursued heroine of romance fiction serves only as the victim in
detective fiction, not as the active solver of problems. With this in mind, it’s
not surprising that writers and characters such as Sara Paretsky and her P.I.,
V.I. Warshawski, both of whom are clearly and consistently feminist, populate
contemporary detective fiction.
Makinen distinguishes science fiction from the other popular genres by noting
approvingly that no other genre “has been more comprehensively appropriated by
feminist theory than science fiction.… Few aspects of feminist thinking have not
been echoed, and often predated, by feminist science fiction writers” (129).
This is the case, she maintains, because of an innate sympathy between science
fiction, which is by definition speculative and which has historically been a
tool of social critique, and feminism, which both needs and demands those tools
when imagining a more (or less) equitable world. It is not surprising then that
there has been little debate among feminists over the viability of appropriating
science fiction as an arena for feminist practice. As a consequence of this,
feminist science fiction from the 1970s to the 1990s has “elaborated on all the
major feminist debates” (129). She supports this assertion by focusing on the
career of Joanna Russ as someone who both writes and theorizes sf and who
broadened its subject matter in her 1971 essay, “The Image of Women in Science
Fiction,” by arguing that “science fiction had failed to place gender roles in
the field of its speculations” (137).
Each of the last four chapters of Makinen’s study ends with three case
studies of novels that, to varying degrees, demonstrate feminist appropriations
of a particular genre. Unfortunately, most of the texts she discusses were
written before 1990, leaving her readers wondering whether what has been written
since then supports or undermines her argument. For example, her discussion of
Russ as a theorist of feminist science fiction is followed by a close reading of
Russ’s The Female Man (1975), and then by equally detailed discussions of
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Octavia Butler’s
Imago (1989). But while all three of these texts are of continuing
importance and Makinen’s discussions of them are insightful, I found myself
wishing that she had shortened her analyses of these works—all of which have
received abundant critical attention in a number of forums, and one of which,
Imago, is the third volume in a series—and included discussion of more
recent ones. Butler’s Imago was published in 1989 and much has been
published since then that would extend and add depth to Makinen’s argument. But
what I see as a weakness in the text, Makinen might well see as a reflection of
the declining popularity of feminist science fiction. She maintains that
feminist science fiction has been “hit badly by the folding of a number of
feminist publishing houses” (151) in England. This may well be the case in Great
Britain, but I have no sense that a similar phenomenon has occurred in the
United States. While it is true that many feminist publishing houses in the
United States, facing economic hard times, have reduced their output, I’d argue
that feminist sf has a strong presence in the output of more commercial
publishers of science fiction.
The strength of Makinen’s study is located in her first chapter, which
provides a helpful overview of feminists’ relationship with popular fiction from
the 1970s through the 1980s. Equally helpful is her discussion in each chapter
of critical debates among feminists over appropriation of the different
genres—though readers should be warned that most of her cultural analysis
focuses on Great Britain under Thatcher. The limitations of her study lie in her
choices of the texts that provide her “case studies” and the surprising lack of
a concluding chapter. Such a chapter would allow her to develop some of her most
interesting assertions: for example, that in “all genre formats, female
sexuality is posited as a site of social disruption and crime” (2), and that it
is the lesbian texts that, paradoxically, seem not only to appropriate but also
to contest the conventions of the genres best. In sum, this book is a good
introduction to feminist popular fiction, though limited by its narrow
chronological scope and lack of a conclusion.
—Nancy St. Clair, Simpson College
An Index to Vancean Linguistics.
David G. Mead. An
Encyclopedia of Jack Vance, 20th-Century Science Fiction Writer.
3 vols. Studies in American Literature 50. Lewiston: Mellen, 2002. $99.95 hc.
Jack Vance is arguably the greatest onomastician ever in the fantasy and sf
fields. He faces severe competition for such a title, of course, from Tolkien,
whose indices to The Lord of the Rings list many hundreds of names of
places, people, and things in at least seven languages, while Tolkien also
scores heavily in that his names and languages have clear and consistent
historical relationships to each other. It is possible to write about Tolkienian
linguistics in a way that one cannot about Vancean linguistics.
Nevertheless, Tolkien created only one world, that of Middle-Earth. With few
exceptions, Vance’s fifty published novels and hundred published stories take
place on different worlds. Where this is not the case, as in the three novels of
the Durdane (“Faceless Man”) sequence (1973-78), the four of Planet of
Adventure (1968-70), or the three of Lyonesse (1983-89), Vance makes
up for it by the invention of wildly divergent cultures and subcultures. A major
part of the success of his works comes from his unparalleled ability to think of
names that do not exist in our world but sound as if they could have—not names
like B’kwlth or Ffedwyll, which anyone with a keyboard can generate, but names
like Twitten’s Corner and Tantrevalles Wood from Lyonesse (1983), or
Liane the Wayfarer and Pandelume from The Dying Earth (1950). Who could
forget the bravura performance in The Star King (1964), where Vance
describes the discovery of the twenty-six planets of the Rigel Concourse and
their naming by their discoverer Sir Julian Hove for his childhood heroes (Lord
Kitchener, Rudyard Kipling, etc.), only for Sir Julian to have his and their
glory filched from him by an impudent clerk who renames them all in alphabetical
order, from Alphanor and Barleycorn to Ys and Zaracandra? Not many authors would
bother to write a complete list—with a joke buried in the middle of it—just as
background. Was it labor wasted?
Apparently not, for if one has the name, and it convinces, then one is half
way to the thing, or the idea of the thing. The Killing Machine (1964)
introduces Billy Windle, the hormagaunt, but it is not until nearly the end of
the novel that we find out what a hormagaunt is: according to the volumes
reviewed here, it refers to a person who extends his own life by using the
extracted life essences of live children. Characteristically, Vance classes
hormagaunts with dragons and fairies and ogres and linderlings, but not even
David Mead’s assiduity can tell us what linderlings are: imaginary creatures,
says the entry. That is what Kirth Gersen thought about hormagaunts, of course,
but it turned out he was mistaken about them—possibly about linderlings, too.
Their story remains to be written.
Clearly fascinated by the kind of invention hinted at above, Dr. Mead has
produced a list here of more than 15,600 terms from Vance’s science fiction,
fantasy, and detective-adventure fiction, excluding only the works written by
Vance as Ellery Queen. The entries are short, averaging no more than twenty
words and rarely reaching as many as a hundred. They add nothing to what one
finds in Vance, and were not intended to do so. They seem rather an index than
an encyclopedia, and an index to essentially unrelated material. There is no
doubt that this has been a labor of love, but there is more effort in it than
thought. One has to ask: is this, too, labor wasted?
There are two arguments to suggest that it is not. Even as an index, these
volumes are certainly useful as an aide mémoire, and in the case of Vance
almost anyone’s memory needs aid. It has been very easy, for instance, for this
reviewer to check his fallible memory of items mentioned. Furthermore, the whole
encyclopedia exists also in electronic form, as a data-base file searchable
using askSam, a well-known database management program. With this, as Walter E.
Meyers points out in his Commendatory Preface, one could search the database for
such items as “language” or “mask,” thus preparing the ground for entire
thematic studies that would otherwise, once again, depend on fallible memory.
A final point is that Edwin Mellen Press still presents a rather wasteful
page, showing a good deal of white paper. These three volumes and 1000-plus
pages could have been two and 750 with no more than normal type-setting, with,
one imagines, a considerable saving for the potential buyer.
—Tom Shippey, Saint Louis University
Does Not Grok in Fullness.
William H. Patterson, Jr. and Andrew Thornton.
The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives
on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.Citrus Heights, CA: Nitrosyncretic Press, 2001.<www.nitrosyncretic.com>
224 pp. $18.00 pbk.
In a late chapter pointedly titled “Martyrdom,” Patterson and Thornton argue
that, with the exception of Leon Stover in Robert Heinlein (1987), prior
critics of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) have articulated “nothing
but their own preoccupations,” standing “so firmly in their own light that they
cannot see Heinlein” (153). Their point—that thesis-driven scholarship has
shortchanged one of sf’s most important writers—is well taken. Yet the pitfall
of tendentious argument is nothing to the abyss that opens up when consistency
is refused altogether. If there is no method, no defined approach, then critics,
to be sure, will never cast a false light on their subject. But that is only
because they have chosen to work in the dark.
This book is benighted in that way. The authors begin by noting that
“Heinlein did not confine himself to well-traveled pathways of knowledge or
discourse. Tracing his ideas is a complex ... process which often leaves us
stranded in unfamiliar territory” (vii). Unfortunately, this is a fair
description of the book that ensues. There is no sustained analysis of the
style, plot, or characterization of Stranger in a Strange Land. Instead,
moving between the generic poles of “satire” and “myth,” the authors attempt to
elevate Stranger by puffing-up the philosophical, theological, literary, and
“esthetic” ideas on which the novel is said to draw. Much of the book is
preempted by exposition of these philosophical and religious ideas, though the
writing is so eccentric that even a reader seeking this kind of distant
background information will close the book more puzzled than enlightened. The
authors, for instance, explain that the ironic premise of Swift’s “A Modest
Proposal” is “that Irish babies should be ranched as meat animals by the
English” (34). “Pity and terror” are defined not as the emotions produced by
catharsis in tragedy, but as “the classical Aristotelian virtues” (162).
The discussion of genres is similarly sketchy and willful. Stranger is
at different points called a “satire” (3), an anatomy (26), a “gospel” (27),
“Platonic” (45), a “myth” (49), a “Hero tale” (49), a “fable” (50), “both comic
and tragic and therefore ‘absurd’” (58; emphasis in original), “formally a
‘divine comedy’” (105), “more explicitly NeoPlatonist than any other of
Heinlein’s books” (121), and a series of “parables” (171). The evident aim is,
as the authors say in their discussion of Neoplatonism, to place Heinlein’s
novel “within a prestigious tradition” (121). However strained the comparisons,
the effort will presumably be worthwhile if in the process some of Plato’s—or
Nietzsche’s, or Jung’s—prestige rubs off on Heinlein.
Genres and contexts of lower (perceived) status are given short shrift.
Patterson and Thornton follow Stover, for instance, in declaring that
Stranger is “not science fiction in any strict sense of the term” (50), but
is rather “a work of American culture criticism” (156). Heinlein is likewise
separated from the traditions of “the simple adventure story” (5) in a sentence
that contains the book’s single reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs. The authors
argue that “Heinlein ... learned more from ‘art’ writers like H.G. Wells, Mark
Twain, Anatole France, and James Branch Cabell” (7). Heinlein does practice a
sly art (and he suspects that he does it rather well, as may be seen in his
sympathetic portrayal of tricksters who create illusions that astonish even
themselves). But calling Heinlein an artist does not do the work of establishing
his artistry through coherent analysis of how his fiction is constructed. It is
not the jumble of ideas touched upon in Tristram Shandy (1759-67) that
makes it a wonderful satire and novel; it is how Sterne’s style and his
characters play with these ideas.
The authors, rejecting popular traditions and the play of meaning in satire
to focus instead on potted cultural history and highbrow precedents, do not
consider the possibility that Valentine Michael Smith’s Mars might have some
link to John Carter’s. Yet Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martians practice nudism as
ardently as any Heinlein Nestling. And at least among the communistic Green
Martians, monogamy is a capital offense: in A Princess of Mars (1912),
Sola’s mother is executed for maintaining an exclusive relationship with Tars
Tarkis. Furthermore, on Burroughs’s Mars, as on Heinlein’s, all
children—including John Carter’s own son—are hatched from eggs. Burroughs is
only one of several possible “Old Ones” from the popular tradition who might
have inspired elements in Heinlein’s imagination of Martian culture in
Stranger. Patterson and Thornton mention in passing that, in 1948, Virginia
Heinlein proposed the “Mowgli” story-idea that may have shaped the novel’s
conception (16). But the relationship of Kipling to Heinlein invites extensive,
not cursory, consideration: The Jungle Book (1894) is strongly echoed in
Stranger in a Strange Land’s account of a human child raised by at once
innocent and predatory non-human beings.
The authors’ assertions are often somewhat askew. Of the confused and
contradictory discussion of Apollonian and Dionysian elements in Stranger,
I’ll just say that Jubal Harshaw’s own exposition of these Nietzschean
contraries in the novel itself is by comparison a marvel of clarity. Northrop
Frye is “Northrup” throughout. “Trouble, trouble, boil and bubble” is the
dyslexic rendition of a line in Shakespeare (54). An epigraph is called a
“frontispiece” (119). Jubal Harshaw’s first name is associated with music (St.
Jubal is patron saint of makers of musical instruments), producing this
associative flight:
The ethos of music has been taken over in our time by fiction, and a maker
of musical instruments would translate to a maker of printing equipment. It is
quite possible that Jubal is an indirect evocation of one of Heinlein’s
particular literary heroes, Mark Twain. Twain was a printer in his earliest
job.... (176)
Patterson and Thornton defend the Nestlings’ sexual practices: Ben Caxton
comes in for severe treatment as a “hypocrite” for fleeing the Nest when his
jealous feelings for Jill Boardman get the better of him (75-77). Yet the
topic of sex is approached quite vaguely. Heinlein is in part depicting group
sex, for instance, but the authors say only that he is promoting “endogamous
sexual liberalism” (168). Heinlein’s limits as a libertine—his inability, for
instance, to imagine a place for same-sex desire in a sexually liberated
“Church of All Worlds”—are never discussed. Martian sacramental cannibalism is
mentioned only in a lecture on transubstantiation (38), an attack on Robert
Plank’s Freudian reading of Stranger (159), and a footnote (39) on Frazer’s
The Golden Bough (1890). But this motif in Heinlein—notably, the ritual
consumption of a broth made from Mike’s finger at the end of Stranger—may
again nod in the direction of Edgar Rice Burroughs: in The Gods of Mars
(1913), corrupt priests live on the flesh of the faithful.
In Heinlein’s novel, new members of the Church of All Worlds have to learn
Martian before progressing to higher circles. The authors here have only
half-mastered the languages of literary and cultural analysis, limiting the
usefulness of what has evidently been a great deal of work and study.
Patterson and Thornton are, I think, mistaken in approaching Heinlein as a
“public moralist” (vii), rather than as a notable writer of popular fiction.
But they do make some good points in passing, and I’ll conclude by mentioning
three. The sporadic but intriguing discussion of James Branch Cabell—Jurgen: A
Comedy of Justice was published in 1919—invites a more sustained future
analysis. It is amusing to learn that Jubal Harshaw’s harem of secretaries was
inspired by the sybaritic work arrangements of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator
of Perry Mason (176). Finally, the authors are honest enough to document an
important point even though it undermines their emphasis on Heinlein’s learned
grasp of various religions and philosophies. They note that the religious
background for Stranger—the discussion of the different traits of
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism—appears to have been lifted from 25
pages of summary in a single book published in 1912—the occultist Peter Ouspensky’s
Tertium Organum (93-94, 121).—CM
An Array of Austrian SF.
Franz Rottensteiner, ed.
The Best of Austrian Science
Fiction. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2001. 318 pp. $32.00 pbk.
Science-fiction literature is almost exclusively associated with authors from
the English-speaking world—a judgment that is confirmed by a quick look at the
list of Hugo Award winners. Apart from a handful of such well-known writers as
Stanislaw Lem and Jules Verne, little sf has been translated into English, and
knowledge of other countries’ sf traditions and writers is scarce.
Occasionally, the odd book by a foreign writer is translated but that is about
all.
With The Best of Austrian Science Fiction, Franz Rottensteiner attempts to
remedy this deplorable situation. This collection of thirteen stories by
twelve writers, prefaced by Rottensteiner’s “A Short History of Austrian
Science Fiction,” has been published with the assistance of the
Bundeskanzleramt-Sektion Kunst in Vienna as part of its Studies in Austrian
Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation series. The stories are
excellently translated by Todd C. Hanlin, with only an occasional echo of the
original German noticeable.
Among the first things we are told in the preface, somewhat abruptly, is that
there is definitely no “Austrian-ness” to Austrian science fiction. “For the
purpose of this anthology, Austrian sf is defined as sf written by authors
born (and usually living in) Austria” (i). Since Austrian writers are obliged
to publish through German publishing companies and turn to the much broader
German market in general, there is a tendency among them to move to Germany.
Their writing thus becomes part of sf in German, influenced by it and, one
hopes, influencing it, though perhaps sacrificing specific national
characteristics in the process.
Rottensteiner writes an informative and fairly comprehensive history that
describes early and proto-sf from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, with the
focus strongly on the first half of the twentieth century, on authors such as
Ludwig Anton, whose 1922 novel Die japanische Pest (The Japanese Plague) deals
with the threat of bacteriological warfare; Karl Hans Strobl, whose short
fiction can be found in, for example, Die Eingebungen des Arphaxat (1904, The
Inspirations of Arphaxat), Lemuria (1917), and Die Eier des Basilisken
(1926,
The Eggs of the Basilisk); and Oswald Levett, whose time machine in Verirrt in
den Zeiten (1933, Lost in Time) sends the protagonist back to 1632 and the
chaos of the Thirty Years’ War, where he attempts to set himself up as Emperor
of Europe. Some authors and works of central importance are presented in
detail, for instance, Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1962, translated in 1990 as
The Wall), which Rottensteiner designates the most important Austrian sf novel
(xix). His claim that the novel is written in “crystal-clear prose without
resort to symbolism of any kind” (xix) seems unconvincing, however,
considering the impenetrable, inexplicable glass wall that isolates and
protects the female protagonist from the rest of the world. Other central
writers described in some detail are Herbert W. Franke, the “leading Austrian
SF writer” (xvi), whose prolific sf career began in 1960, and Franz Werfel,
whose anti-utopian Stern der Ungeborenen (1946, translated as Star of the
Unborn) is the great utopian novel of Austrian literature (xiii).
The intention of this anthology is to “present a spectrum of contemporary
Austrian science fiction, mostly by young writers” (xx). This made me wonder
who is considered a young writer in Austria; the majority of the writers
included in the anthology are between 50 and 70 years of age, and none is
younger than 40. Also, the “contemporary” science fiction included here is
primarily by male writers—only two stories in the collection are written by
women—and was produced during the 1980s, with only one of the thirteen stories
younger than a decade old. This rather biased selection probably results from
the absence of more stringent selection criteria than the editor’s personal
preferences. A short note on each of the stories to explain why it merits
inclusion would not have been amiss.
The stories—by Martin Auer, Alfred Bittner, Kurt Bracharz, Andreas Findig, H.W.
Franke, Marianne Gruber, Peter Marginter, Barbara Neuwirth, Heinz Riedler,
Peter Schattschneider (who two stories), Michael Springer and Oswald
Wiener—span a wide range of themes and narrative techniques, from Neuwirth’s
“The Character of the Huntress,” with its Blade Runner-esque hunt for
artificial human beings (and the similarity does not end there), to Gruber’s
“The Invasion,” an introspective story set within the stifling hierarchy of a
hospital. There are light-hearted, short pieces, such as Schattschneider’s
zany “Banana Streams”—Banana streams are “[p]eculiarly distributed fragments
of space ships in interstellar space” (215) and the first ship found in this
way was carrying “exobananas”—and there are stories such as the fascinating,
if somewhat long, story “Gödel’s Exit” by Findig, where the reader is
introduced to a mysterious Vienna of 1929. While there are some really good
stories in this anthology, many seem derivative and a few are downright
unexciting.
At the end of the book, brief “Notes on the Authors” include what little
publication information is provided about the original stories, as well as the
authors’ other occupations. Rottensteiner points out in the preface that sf
writers in Austria generally cannot make a living from their writing (the
exception to this, Ernst Vlcek, is not included in this anthology).
Regrettably, the publishing information is incomplete, which makes it
difficult to say exactly how old some of these stories are. Original titles
are not given, nor is the date of first publication given for some of the
stories.
I am not sure if this is the best of Austrian science fiction—the selection
seems too narrow in more ways than one—but it gives a good introduction to the
historical background and to the field in general, and provides some quite
interesting stories. On the whole, however, and unfortunately, I suspect that
The Best of Austrian Science Fiction is going to be just another one of those
occasional and odd foreign books.
—Stefan Ekman, Göteborg University
The Other in SF Film.
Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt, eds.
Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema. London: Pluto Press, 2002. 186 pp. £45.00 hc.
£14.99 pbk.
Aliens R Us is a collection of ten essays addressing the images of otherness
in recent sf films (and two TV series) by twelve authors, most of whom do not
seem to have backgrounds in either sf or film studies. This results in a small
number of errors of fact, an innocence of sf theory (and, occasionally, of
film theory), a recurring tendency to lose sight of the films under
discussion, and some unusual and often rewarding perspectives. The tone is set
by Ziauddin Sardar’s “Introduction,” in which he argues that sf is to be
understood as a recycling of ancient narrative structures and tropes in
combination with contemporary issues, adding that its “devices of space and
time are window dressing, landscape and backdrop.... Science fiction is a time
machine that goes nowhere, for wherever it goes it materializes the same
conjunctions of the space-time continuum: the conundrums of Western
civilization” (1).
So far, so conventional; but then the assault commences: “Science fiction
shows us not the plasticity but the paucity of the human imagination that has
become quagmired in the scientist industrial technological,
cultural-socio-psycho babble of a single civilizational paradigm. Science
fiction is the fiction of mortgaged futures. As a genre it makes it harder to
imagine other futures, futures not beholden to the complexes, neuroses and
reflexes of Western civilization as we know it” (1).The basic components of
sf, Sardar argues, exist in all cultures, yet sf does not. Although there is
Islamic science, Indian science, and Chinese science, only Western
science—“the Western science that has been used to define and distinguish the
West from all other civilizations” (2)—is used in sf. This instrumentalist
rationality has played, and continues to play, an important role in justifying
and enabling Western imperialism, but since Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), sf
has sought to inject humanistic ethical principles into a rational framework
that disavows them: “what science fiction is really telling us is that there
is a deep tension within the formation of scientific, industrialized
technological society, an unresolved disquiet about ends and means, an
unending tussle over the formation of the project of science itself” (4-5).
In answering the question “Where Do Aliens Come From?” Sardar again offers
both the familiar—“Aliens demonstrate what is not human the better to
exemplify that which is human” (6)—and the unfamiliar, arguing that Wells’s
The War of the Worlds (1898)
directly connects with the most familiar trope of the Western past. It is the
Battle of Tours (Poitiers) all over again. It is the armies of Charles Martel
turning the tide, its [sic] is Charlemagne and his paladins at Roncesvalles
mustering for the first time a common sense of European identity, gathering
the armies of Western Christendom to confront the Muslim hordes.... In this
literary trope the Muslims are aliens, ideologically, metaphysically other
than their Christian adversaries. As adversaries these Muslim aliens are
fanatic, devoted to false consciousness, treacherous, untrustworthy, brutal
and cruel.... The monstrous races define the outer limits of the known,
existing beyond the territory of the Other on the borders of the Western
homeland, the Muslim adversaries. The crusading motif makes the sense of
superiority and legitimating right innate to Western self-description. It is
an impulse for exploration, seeking out, knowing and describing. It is a
precursor of the scientific spirit. It is a warrant to lay claim to outer
space, to colonise, re-inscribe and re-formulate this outer space. (6, 8-9)
Although this does not quite work as a description of Wells’s novel—which is
misdescribed as the “very first alien encounter” and “an imagined future” (6)—Sardar’s
location of the roots of the quintessentially science-fictional encounter with
the alien deep in Europe’s past is compelling.
Sean Cubitt’s essay on eco-apocalypse—which contrasts Jean-Pierre Jeunet and
Marc Caro’s Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995,
The City
of Lost Children) with Luc Besson’s Le Dernier combat (1983, The Final
Combat), Subway (1985), and Le Cinquième élément (1997, The Fifth
Element)—considers the new French sf cinema in relation to the Euro-liberal scepticism of nationalism alongside a concomitant belief in the “geographical
claim of identity” (18), and points to the ways in which the “theme of home
and nature lost under the burden of transnational capital has become a sort of
allegory of the struggles for land, now reinvented as nature, as a source of
identity” (18). Whereas Besson repeatedly imagines redemptive virtue, Jeunet
and Caro reject this totalitarian mysticism, envisioning instead
“capital-technology ... as a false nature, an anti-nature usurping both
ecological and human nature as they should exist—un-alienated” (21), in which
mere survival is the only reasonable goal. The fatalism of their vision is
overcome first by mischieviousness and then by “a humanistic view of the world
carried out in the form of relations thoroughly mediated by technologies,
instead of a world premised on bourgeois individualism and the psychological
nonsense of deeply rounded character motivation” (32).
Jan Mair’s “Rewriting the ‘American Dream’: Postmodernism and Otherness in
Independence Day” argues that, while the movie’s “reification of American
hegemony as the ‘end of history’ is arguably just about tolerable as a piece
of Hollywood fiction,” its metaphorical valorization of US foreign policy and
presence in the Middle East renders it “a libratory tract emphasizing the
‘moral’ right to obliterate ‘difference’—to annihilate all that is not
Western” (35). More than any other, this essay builds on Sardar’s
introduction, noting the continuation of Manichean dualism in the crusader
narrative of the Second Gulf War, reworked in Roland Emmerich’s movie. Mair
also dismisses the movie’s pretence at egalitarianism, exposing its relentless
and egregious stereotyping. Her reading, however, is weakened by the assertion
that the movie possesses “no attempt at irony” (35), when surely it is
exemplary of the successful double-coding found in many contemporary
blockbusters which enables them to be enjoyed ironically—or at least
cynically—as well as, apparently, with a straight face—Starship Troopers
(1997), or Armageddon (1998), for example, but not Star Wars: Episode I,
The
Phantom Menace (1999) or Pearl Harbor (2001). Mair also returns to
The War of
the Worlds. Noting that the novel is a critique of the Western imperialism
that annihilated the Tasmanians, she adds, bizarrely, that “Wells wanted to
demonstrate to the West how it might feel to be invaded by a strength far
superior to their own whilst at the same time suggesting that earthlings
should not feel too harshly towards the Martian invaders as they themselves
are guilty of insinuating the same colonial forces on others” (47).
Nickianne Moody’s “Displacements of Gender and Race in Space: Above and
Beyond” offers a typically nuanced and subtle analysis of a short-lived TV
series whose astonishing blend of intelligence and stupidity failed to find a
sufficiently large audience. “Saying ‘Yours’ and ‘Mine’ in Deep Space Nine,”
by Kirk W. Junker and Robert Duffy, is rather less impressive, and often seems
to have selected its primary text on the grounds that it would make the title
rhyme. The Star Trek franchise fares better in Christine Wertheim’s “Star
Trek: First Contact: The Hybrid, the Whore and the Machine,” which considers
the threat of absorption by the Borg as evidence of a particular failing of
“the ‘Western’ mind, which may now be found in many non-Western geographical
locations...: in Western-style societies the ‘social contract’ has been
reduced to a competition in which whoever doesn’t definitively come out on top
must be seen as having ‘lost,’ there being no principle of co-operation by
which the whole collective could be seen as gaining simultaneously” (76).
Suggesting that the Borg represent not only Western fantasies of communism and
of Asian, especially Islamic, cultures, Wertheim points out that the
opposition of “‘individual’ to ‘society’ as if it were a simple matter of the
one or the other ”is absurd, and that “this fantasy of exclusive disjunction
in which there is an absolute choice between individuality and sociality, with
no possibility of having both simultaneously, is the ultimate ideological
weapon of capitalism, triumphant over democracy as much as it is over
socialism” (77). Wertheim, not unproblematically, relates the Borg collective
to de Sadeian “radical heterogeneity in which every being gets to share in the
real differences of all the others” (77), and argues that it is only “through
the repression of this relational and equivocal otherness [that] we can be
maintained as passive, discrete and possessive individuals; that is, as
subjects of enlightened consumption” (91).
If Wertheim’s post-Marxism ultimately seems naïve, keeping its fingers crossed
that the repressed will return or that “With any luck the Borg might just turn
up one day and assimilate us for real” (92), then Toshiya Ueno’s otherwise
informative “Japanimation: Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes and Rave Culture”
is at least equally guilty of wishful thinking. Tactical syncretism—which he
relates to Laclau and Mouffe’s “moments”—may well differ from postmodern
eclecticism—which he relates to their “elements.” The former, which may be
exemplified by anime and Goa-trance, may well also provide a platform “for
critical views on globalisation” (109), but any political strategy that pins
its hopes on the far from accurate claim that “tactical consumption is already
an option for everyone” (109) not only ignores the many billions for whom this
is not true, but is also at best merely reformist.
Hong Kong cinema, one of the few Eastern cinemas in which sf flourishes, forms
the backdrop for “Wicked Cities: The Other in Hong Kong Science Fiction
Cinema” by Gregory B. Lee and Sunny S.K. Lam and for Peter X. Feng’s “False
and Double Consciousness: Race, Virtual Reality and the Assimilation of Hong
Kong Action Cinema in The Matrix.” Lee and Lam focus on Yaoshou dushi/The
Wicked City (Mak Tai Kit, 1992), a near-future supernatural action thriller
set in the days immediately before the handover to China. This film is adapted
from a Japanese manga, itself based on a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi, and
previouly filmed as an anime in 1989. Lee and Lam argue that, along with Mo Yan ga Sai/Spacked Out
(Lawrence Lau Kwok Cheong, 2000) and Sam Tiao Yan/Away
With Words (Chris Doyle, 1999), Yaoshou dushi is unique in Hong Kong cinema in
depicting diverse, hybrid, and non-conformist identities. One would have more
faith in their analysis if they knew the publication dates of Lao She’s 1933
novel Maochengji/Cat City—which they discuss in some detail—and had not
attributed Ringo Lam’s Xia dao Gao Fei/Full Contact (1992) to John Woo (whose
surname they spell “Wu”).
Feng sees The Matrix as “a parable of the cinematic apparatus,” drawing on
Jean-Louis Baudry’s notion of “le ciné -sujet” and Christian Metz’s discussion
of spectatorial involvement, as well as the “double consciousness” W.E.B. Du
Bois ascribed to the racialized subject aware of how both he and others see
him. After a badly sprained metaphor based on color-correction technology,
Feng offers a reasonably effective discussion of the movie’s “elision of
racial difference” (152)—not least of all with regard to the Asian-Pacific
Keanu Reeves’s passing as white. He goes on to argue that the movie’s nested
diegeses metaphorize “the assimiiation of Hong Kong action cinema” (156), and
to suggest that the “successful postmodern subject is an Asian passing for
white, a resistance fighter passing as a drone, a martial artist hiding not
behind Jet Li’s black mask but behind Keanu Reeves’ blank mask” (157).1 (As Feng explains, Reeves’s fighting style in the dojo sequence is based on that
of Jet Li, whose Black Mask (Lee, 1997) was fight-choreographed by Yuen Wo
Ping, The Matrix’s fight-choreographer. For a fine discussion of Reeves’s
blankness, see R.L. Rutsky, ‘Being Keanu’ in Jon Lewis, ed., The End of Cinema
as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties (London: Pluto Press, 2002),
185-94.)
The final essay, Dimitris Eleftheriotis’s “Global Visions and European
Perspectives,” considers Bis ans Ende der Welt (Wim Wenders 1991, Until the
End of the World) in the context of E.U. cultural policies and Wenders’s own
influential role as chairman of the European Film Academy. Eleftheriotis
suggests that the film can be read as both “an allegorical manifesto on the
future of cinema” and “a fiction about the future of technologies of vision
and vision itself” (170). Ultimately, it envisions the end of cinema as a
distinct medium, a position “identical to the view of the (not so distant)
future expressed by European policy-making bodies” (178). Moreover, despite
the movie’s attempt to be a truly global film, it is guilty of depicting the
non-European world merely as a series of attractive surfaces, a resource to be
commodified by the emergent information society. Twelve hundred and seventy
years after the Battle of Tours, 1224 years after the Battle of Roncesval, the
Other is still out there, dehumanized by representations that validate the
West’s “superiority” and justify its aggression and exploitation.
Aliens R Us is a valuable collection of stimulating, politically-committed,
and frequently idiosyncratic criticism. Although I am uncertain how useful it
will be as a classroom resource, it is to be both commended and
recommended.
—Mark Bould, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College
Apocalypse Often.
Jerome F. Shapiro.
Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. New York: Routledge, 2002. x + 386 pp. $24.95 pbk.
In his extraordinary essay “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing” (1964), Maurice
Blanchot begins by referring to Karl Jaspers’s influential claim that the
advent of the atomic bomb has utterly changed reality and that we must utterly
change our ways of thinking if we are to survive as a species. But, suggests
Blanchot, Jaspers’s claim amounts to a hypocritical platitude, not a serious
philosophical proposition: for, despite Jaspers’s melodramatic call for
changed thinking, he has not changed his own thinking one bit. On the
contrary, contemplation of nuclear catastrophe has—according to Blanchot—only
led Jaspers to cling ever more tightly to the banal and deeply conservative
liberalism to which he had been committed since long before the “Enola Gay”
appeared in the skies above Hiroshima. The basic contrast here is between
Jaspers’s tired individualism, with its basis in the liberal middle-class ego
of the nineteenth century, and Blanchot’s genuinely innovative attempts to
pioneer collective and communist ways of thinking adequate to the modern
world. Blanchot maintains that the total destruction of humanity that nuclear
weapons make technically possible can be a meaningful philosophical concept
only if humanity is concretely a totality in the first place; and since, as
Blanchot points out, such a totality must be, in the strongest sense,
communist, it is something to which Jaspers’s insipid but inevitable
anticommunism is incurably allergic. Blanchot even wonders if those, like
Jaspers (and, we might add, America’s own Jonathan Schell), who engage in the
loudest and most anguished breast-beating about nuclear war, are even really
interested in the subject they affect to be obsessed by: it may be that
“reflection on the atomic terror is but a pretense; what one [like Jaspers] is
looking for is not a new way of thinking but a way to consolidate old
predicaments”—a way, that is, to shore up the crumbling ruins of classical
liberalism one more time (Blanchot, Friendship, tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg
[Stanford, 1997], 104).
A good question to ask of any meditation on the atomic bomb is whether it is
vulnerable to the same charge of bad faith that Blanchot brilliantly, and to
my mind irrefutably, lays against Jaspers. Relatively few works completely
pass the test. But Jerome Shapiro’s Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic
Imagination on Film does pass, at least to a considerable degree. Shapiro
writes out of an unusual personal situation, to which he frequently refers. He
is a Jewish American expatriated in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese
wife and their two children and where he teaches at Hiroshima University—and
his overall viewpoint is somewhat quirky; indeed, his book does not, I think,
finally possess a completely coherent conceptual framework. But certain
elements in his world-view are clear and refreshing. Like Blanchot, he exposes
and condemns the individualistic, antipolitical reductionism that liberal
ideology tends to entail, and he also resembles the French critic (whom,
however, he never mentions) in expressing a strong distaste for
weeping-and-wailing anti-nuclearism of the Jaspers-Schell sort. Though he does
not deny that nuclear technology is a tremendously significant presence in our
world, he intelligently deflates many conventional exaggerations of the
matter. For instance, he shrewdly reminds us that Agent Orange very likely
caused more environmental and genetic damage in Vietnam than atomic bombs did
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also that sheer hunger is an overwhelmingly
more important fact in the lives of the world’s people than all the nuclear
devices ever thought of; nonetheless, it is a platitude to style ours as the
“Atomic Age,” whereas the “Age of Famine” would sound oddly archaic, and the
“Age of Agent Orange” would sound totally bizarre. I think that Shapiro and
Blanchot would agree that those who constantly wail about nuclear danger while
never mentioning the devastated Vietnamese ecosystem and seldom giving more
than a perfunctory squirt of pity to the victims of world hunger are,
precisely, hypocrites who seek to consolidate comfortable clichés rather than
to pioneer new modes of thought.
Shapiro also points out that the sense of everything having changed in the
so-called “Atomic Age” is itself an instance of an ancient and recurring
structure of feeling; indeed, we might say that one thing that never changes
is the fact that people periodically decide that everything has changed. The
idea of apocalypse is deeply woven into the Jewish and Christian roots of
Western culture, and Shapiro stresses that it does not traditionally mean a
final disaster but rather a crisis followed by rebirth and renewal. This is
the idea that guides Shapiro’s study of numerous Hollywood and some Japanese
films about the atomic bomb; the overwhelming majority of the films are
science fictional in one way or another—though Shapiro himself insists, not
without some justification, that “atomic bomb cinema” is a category that cuts
across more familiar generic divisions. Although, as he points out, these
films have often been adversely criticized by commentators from Susan Sontag
onward for their supposed failure to do justice to the unique realities of the
“Atomic Age,” Shapiro reads them more positively, and as perhaps the chief
modern expression of the perennial imagination of apocalypse. For Shapiro,
atomic bomb cinema is noteworthy for giving memorable and popular voice to
what he defines as the essential optimism in all apocalyptic thought: that is,
to the faith that, on the far side of whatever calamities lie ahead, humanity
will somehow endure.
One thing that Shapiro achieves is simply to make clear how large atomic bomb
cinema looms in cinema as a whole. By Shapiro’s count, Hollywood has made an
average of 17.57 bomb films every year between 1945 and 1999, for a grand
total of close to a thousand—a figure that accounts for about four percent of
Hollywood’s overall output; and Shapiro seems to be personally familiar with
most, or maybe even all, of these movies. If the total number of bomb films
looks surprisingly high to most of us, that is largely because, as Atomic Bomb
Cinema makes clear again and again, nuclear weapons and nuclear war are
important to many movies that we don’t necessarily remember in that way. It is
no surprise, for example, to find Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) and
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) discussed at length in a book about
the bomb. But would “atomic bomb cinema” invariably suggest such diverse
movies as Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth
Stood Still (1951), Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), George
Pal’s The Time Machine (1960), George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
(1968), James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), or Kevin Reynolds’s Waterworld
(1995)—to pick just a handful of examples? Yet all are indeed about the bomb,
in various ways, and Shapiro provides detailed readings of these and a great
many other cinematic texts. The quality of his commentary varies a good deal,
but it is usually at least interesting. Apocalypse in its core religious sense
is his chief critical tool for understanding the narratives of atomic bomb
cinema, but he also pays attention to the formal techniques of filmmaking, to
the complex intertextuality in which bomb films refer to one another, and to
the social, political, and cultural contexts that helped to shape the films
and on which, in certain instances, the films in their turn exercised a
considerable impact.
So Atomic Bomb Cinema is a book of genuine value; but it is also a very
unfinished book, one that often reads more like a promising rough draft than
like a completed work. I noted above its lack of a consistent theoretical
problematic; and the intellectual self-contradictions are often wild indeed.
Shapiro is by turns Marxist and anti-Marxist, pro-feminist and anti-feminist,
at times eager to sneer at critical thinking and at other times eager to be
taken seriously as a thinker himself—and all without the slightest explanation
of these antinomies or even any evident awareness of them. He seems similarly
innocent of the differences in aesthetic significance among the films he
discusses. It is perfectly legitimate, of course, to treat the work of genuine
masters like Hitchcock, Kurosawa, and Kubrick—and, arguably, Romero—alongside
the fairly routine B-movies that provide much of Shapiro’s subject-matter.
What jars is Shapiro’s general indifference—apart from some interesting
paragraphs about the relation of the Gojira, or “Godzilla,” films to
traditional Japanese aesthetics—to the fact that film is, after all, art. For
example, when one compares Dr. Strangelove to David Zuker’s Naked Gun 2
1/2
(1991), as Shapiro seriously does, the issue of aesthetic judgment might at
least be acknowledged, and perhaps even engaged.
The general disorganization of Atomic Bomb Cinema makes itself felt in more
local ways too. The logic of the exposition is not always clear, and there are
confusions of terminology, as when “ideological issues” are contrasted with
“more sociological and personal issues” (74). There are also confusions of
fact. Though Shapiro often compares other scholars’ knowledge of Western
religious tradition very unfavorably with his own, he manages to confuse the
Immaculate Conception of Mary by St. Anne with the Virgin Birth of Christ
(206); then, too, one would expect a scholar of the atomic bomb to know enough
about the old USSR to know that there is no such thing as the “Balkan region
of the former Soviet Union” (218). Finally, Shapiro’s style is often rather
uncertain, and there are even a few basic grammatical errors.
But the most important lacuna in Atomic Bomb Cinema is the largest and most
obvious. Though Blanchot considers the insipid anti-communist liberalism of
Jaspers to be woefully inadequate for theorizing the potential extinction of
the human race, such extinction is for Blanchot himself an issue of the most
urgent philosophical and political importance. For Shapiro, by contrast, the
“exterminism” (E.P. Thompson’s term) of the nuclear arms race simply does not
exist; one reads his book from cover to cover without hearing that, as a
matter of fact, nuclear technology, unlike any other, is indeed capable of
wiping human life, and probably all other life forms above the level of
cockroaches, from the face of the earth. So committed is Shapiro to the
optimism of apocalyptic continuity and renewal, and so unwilling is he to
learn anything from the anti-nuclearists for whom he has a partly justified
scorn, that he seems unwilling to face this fact. But the most powerful bomb
films do face it, and Shapiro’s understanding of them suffers accordingly.
In treating Dr. Strangelove, for example, he predictably lays considerable
stress on the possibility that some human life may survive the lethal effects
of the Soviet “Doomsday Machine.” True enough, the title character does
suggest near the film’s end that a remnant of humanity could be preserved at
the bottom of America’s deeper mineshafts; and the powerful white men to whom
Strangelove speaks find his scheme appealing, since it specifies that the
remnant must include top political and military leaders, each of whom, once
underground, would be required to engage in frequent sexual intercourse with
ten “stimulating” women in order to guarantee the propagation of the species.
What Shapiro fails to fully credit is that the film clearly represents
Strangelove’s scheme to be, like the man himself, thoroughly insane, and no
more likely to work than his earlier nuclear schemes, which have helped to set
humanity on the path to insane self-annihilation. Kubrick’s movie recognizes
the reality of nuclear exterminism, and appropriately leaves the viewer with
images not of merry subterranean sex, but of multiple atomic bombs exploding
one after another: “orgasms” not of Eros, but of universal Thanatos.
Shapiro’s reading of On the Beach is even less adequate to the film’s power
and pessimism. Here the self-extermination of our species is fully explicit.
Indeed, it determines the film’s structure more radically than most viewers
have noticed. For instance, the chief positive element in the movie is the
vibrant attraction between its central characters, Dwight and Moira; and the
official narrative reason given for their parting—Dwight’s commitment to
remain with his submarine crew on their final voyage—seems flimsy compared to
the erotic passion evoked by Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. But the real reason
that the film separates the lovers is, I think, more subtle. If there were any
hope at all of some human survival, Dwight and Moira would seem well qualified
to reprise the roles of Adam and Eve; but there is no hope, and Kramer is
determined that no new Eden is to be even temporarily envisaged. At the end,
the film leaves us with apparently mundane but unforgettably eerie images of a
depopulated earth. Shapiro recognizes the difficulty of finding in On the
Beach any trace of apocalyptic optimism, and rather desperately argues that
the continuity of the director’s camera itself is a kind of survival. This is
silly as a reading, but it does inadvertently point to a profound formal and
philosophical problem that the film faces more unflinchingly than perhaps any
other ever made. Strictly speaking, annihilation is unthinkable and hence unrepresentable. Try to imagine the world even after just your own individual
death, and you invariably find that you have smuggled your observing
consciousness somewhere into a corner of the picture. If, accordingly, there
can be such a thing as degrees of impossibility, then representing the death
of humanity in toto is even further beyond the resources of film or any other
medium. Of course Kramer’s camera does, in a sense, imply the continuation of
human consciousness—how could it do otherwise? But the movie’s final scenes,
as annihilation is quickly approached and then consummated, may come just
about as close to showing that which cannot be shown as the nature of thought
itself allows; and I believe it is this awesome formal achievement, rather
than the film’s feeble ideological liberalism that Shapiro rightly derides—its
overt reduction, that is, of political responsibility to accidents of
character and attitude—that accounts for the power On the Beach had for so
many viewers. It is a power that far transcends the religious notions of
apocalypse to which Shapiro is so attached.
In conclusion, I wish that Atomic Bomb Cinema were a better book. But that is
largely because I find it—and not least for the inevitable fascination of the
subject-matter—a pretty interesting book as is.
—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State
University
Of Stories and the Man.
Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe.
Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Ohio State UP, 2002. 276 pp. $60 hc; $21.95 pbk.
As Ellen Weil and Gary Wolfe make clear early on in this first full-length
study of his fiction, everyone who has ever met Harlan Ellison seems to have a
story about him. I myself have two. The first takes place in 1973 or 1974. I
was a graduate student at Ohio State University and Ellison, riding an
unprecedented wave of Hugo and Nebula Award victories, was performing to a
packed house on the OSU campus. Although scheduled to talk and read for two
hours, he went on for nearly twice that. The high points of the evening were
two, Ellison’s reading of his hilarious tale of alien Jews in space, “I’m
Looking for Kadak,” in a thick Yiddish accent, and his recounting of how he
had been expelled from Ohio State some years earlier for, he claimed, hitting
a professor who had denigrated his writing ability. A master of revenge,
Ellison further insisted that ever since his expulsion, he’d sent that
professor a copy of every story he’d published. He was obviously tickled at
having been invited back to Ohio State as a distinguished author and I’m sure
that he will be further pleased to see this book in print from OSU Press.
Weil and Wolfe’s study is itself full of such anecdotes, not merely because
they’re fascinating, not merely because Ellison, with his talk-show
appearances and his writing of stories in bookstore windows, is probably the
closest thing science fiction has ever had to a true media celebrity. It is
also because his intensely personal fiction pretty much demands that critics
adopt a biographical approach. In fact, as Weil and Wolfe demonstrate
repeatedly, many of Ellison’s stories, including most of the award winners,
such as “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman” (1965), “I Have No Mouth,
and I Must Scream” (1967), and “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans,
Latitude 38˚54'N, Longitude 77˚00'13W” (1974) are firmly grounded in the
author’s own life story. Indeed, Ellison seems to return again and again to
certain specific, traumatic events in his early life—a childhood fight, his
father’s early death, a confrontation with another fan at his first WorldCon,
the year he spent running with a gang, his first wife’s mental
illness—rehashing them, looking at them from every conceivable angle,
transforming them into art.
The authors subtitle their Introduction “The Golden Cage,” a reference to the
fate of Joe Bob Hickey, the protagonist of Ellison’s 1971 story “Silent in
Gehenna.” Hickey is a 1960s-era social and political activist who, as Weil and
Wolfe summarize the story, “finds himself transported to an alien world, where
he is imprisoned in a golden cage above a public thoroughfare” (3). There he
witnesses the awful social injustices of the alien society going on in the
street below and protests loudly against them. Every time he cries out, the
aliens make a brief show of punishing themselves for those injustices before
going back to their normal routine, having changed nothing. This, Ellison has
stated publicly, is how he sees his own life on a bad day. On slightly less
depressing days, however, he is also Harlequin, the maniacal trickster who
attempts to bring about societal change by tossing the jellybeans of his art
into the gears of the system. Of course Harlequin is caught and, Winston
Smith-like, is reeducated, but not before he has so disturbed the
Ticktockman’s own schedule as to have introduced a small, but possibly
permanent, change for the better into the world. Ellison has also stated that
“Repent Harlequin!” had its genesis not only in his abiding desire to satirize
a world increasingly predicated upon schedules and machinery, but also as a
sort of explanation for his own problems with getting to places on time.
In the ten chapters that follow, which move through Ellison’s life and his
published work in a roughly, but not obsessively, chronological fashion, Weil
and Wolfe cover an enormous amount of ground. Although Ellison has written few
novels, he has been astonishingly productive, particularly in the first few
decades of his career, and, although he’s largely thought of as an sf and
fantasy writer, he has been active in a wide range of genres. Growing up
short, smart, and the only Jewish kid in Paineville, Ohio (population
approximately 15,000) was hard on Ellison—the authors describe it as
“singularly unrewarding”—as was losing his father in 1949, when he was only
fifteen. After his family moved to Cleveland, however, and he discovered
fandom, things did improve somewhat. While in high school Ellison helped found
the Cleveland Science Fiction Society and soon became editor of that
organization’s fanzine. He made many friends in fandom—and some
enemies—including Robert Silverberg and the slightly older and already
publishing Algis Budrys, and was invited by Budrys to New York where he sat in
on a meeting of the now-legendary Hydra Club. In 1953, he attended his first
WorldCon in Philadelphia where he narrowly avoided getting into a fight in the
lobby of the convention hotel and also managed to insult Isaac Asimov. That
same year he entered Ohio State University, but was expelled a year and a half
later with, Weil and Wolfe tell us, “a reported grade point average of .086.”
The details of Ellison’s expulsion as recounted here differ slightly from the
description he gave from the podium during his later performance at OSU, but
it hardly matters. What we’re talking about here is as much personal mythology
as biography.
Ellison had evidently been producing reams of unpublished fiction for several
years at this point, but in 1955 he moved to New York City, determined to make
it as a writer. He’d had a story script accepted for EC’s Weird
Science-Fantasy comic book the year before and had been paid $25 for a piece
titled “I Ran with a Kid Gang!” by a sleazy magazine called Lowdown, only to
discover that, before publication, the magazine’s editor rewrote the piece
from scratch. All that was left of his original submission was a photograph of
Ellison in gang costume onto which the editor had airbrushed a facial scar.
His first sf story to see print was “Glowworm,” which appeared in the February
1956 issue of Infinity. The dam had definitely broken at this point and soon
Ellison was selling on average a story a week. He also married Charlotte
Stein—the first of five wives—a woman about whom he has said almost nothing in
public, but whose presence continues to haunt his fiction to this day.
Weil and Wolfe tell us that most of Ellison’s early sf, published primarily in
the less prestigious sf magazines, was pretty formulaic, showing only the
occasional glimpse of the brilliant writer he was later to become. He also put
a fair amount of time into non-sf, however, especially the various
gang-related stories that went into his short-story collection, The Deadly
Streets (1958), and his first novel, Web of the City (1958). There was also
his rock’n’roll novel, Spider Kiss (1961), which, believe it or not, received
a positive review from Dorothy Parker. The best stories Ellison published in
these early years tended to appear in the men’s magazines, which were more
open to experimentation and serious literary values than were the straight sf
magazines of the 1950s. By the mid to late-1960s, however, genre standards had
gone up and Ellison hit his stride, publishing such classics as “Repent,
Harlequin!” (1965), “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967), “The Beast
That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1968), and “A Boy and His Dog”
(1969), not to mention the classic anthology Dangerous Visions (1967).
Weil and Wolfe devote considerable space to Ellison’s highly uneasy
relationship with television and film, discussing his early work on Burke’s
Law (1963-1965), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1966-1967), Cimarron Strip (1967),
the film The Oscar (1966), and, would you believe, The Flying Nun (1965). They
also recount the stories behind such classic Ellison television scripts as
“Soldier” (1964) and “Demon with a Glass Hand” (1964) from Outer Limits, “The
City on the Edge of Forever” (1968) from Star Trek, and “Paladin of the Lost
Hour” (1985) from Twilight Zone, going into detail about the author’s not
entirely successful attempts to force the powers that be to actually film what
he wrote, and his use of the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird on any final television
or film project that wasn’t up to his standards. Each of Ellison’s major
scripts and short stories receives several pages of highly astute analysis,
with particular attention being paid to such stories as those mentioned above,
as well as “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” (1967), “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin”
(1968), “Basilisk” (1972), “The Deathbird” (1972), “The Whimper of Whipped
Dogs” (1973), “Jeffty is Five” (1977), and “All the Lies That Are My Life”
(1980). The authors trace Ellison’s growing sophistication and his increasing
use of both mythical and postmodern elements in his work. His 1975 collection
Deathbird Stories, which Weil and Wolfe describe as “a kind of spiritual
autobiography, a survey of themes that had been developing in Ellison’s work
over a period of several years,” is singled out for special praise.
The authors point out a number of recurrent themes in Ellison’s fiction. Among
these are his abiding belief that technology cannot fix loneliness and
alienation; the value of strong emotions of all sorts; the danger of being
driven into passive acceptance of what the world dishes out; the power to
influence that the past holds, even many years after it has seemingly been
laid to rest; the difficulty of establishing and maintaining long-term
personal relationships; the importance of myth, both personal and universal;
and, most important of all, the absolute necessity of getting revenge against
those who have done you wrong.
Troubled by health problems, Ellison has written much less fiction in recent
years, although Weil and Wolfe praise some of the later pieces, particularly
“The Function of Dream Sleep” (1988), Ellison’s decidedly post-modern “The Man
Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” (1991), which appeared in The Best
American Short Stories for 1993, “Mefisto in Onyx” (1993), and “Objects of
Desire in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear” (2000). They also discuss
his problems with failed projects such as the never-published anthology Last
Dangerous Visions and the unfinished, novel-length version of “A Boy and His
Dog.” Emphasis is placed on Ellison’s obvious concern with his literary
reputation, including his careful compilation of hardcover reprints of his
earlier collections and the publication of several retrospective volumes, most
notably Edgeworks (vol.3, 1997) and The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year
Retrospective (2001).
Weil and Wolfe have produced a lucid, well-written introduction to Ellison’s
life and fiction. They take on the author and his work, warts and all,
pointing out the more eccentric elements of his personality, but also praising
his strong social conscience, making clear which stories have weaknesses, but
giving deserved praise to Ellison’s many masterpieces. Although a significant
number of essays and monographs have previously appeared on Ellison’s work,
most notably George Slusser’s early Harlan Ellison: Unrepentant Harlequin
(1977), Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe’s Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever
is
likely to remain the standard work for years to come.
I mentioned that I had two Harlan Ellison stories. Here’s the other one. More
than twenty years after his Ohio State University reading, he gave another
performance at the 1997 Science Fiction Research Association Conference aboard
the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Older, in less than perfect health,
he was still his usual hyper-kinetic, brilliant, and occasionally nasty self.
At the end of the talk he asked for questions and my wife, Sandra Lindow,
raised her hand. Half way through her question, however, Ellison interrupted
her and asked her if she was chewing gum. When she admitted that she was, he
insisted in his usual peremptory fashion that she spit it out in his hand. My
guess is that most people would have been cowed by this and done as he said,
but my wife, who makes her living working with emotionally disturbed children,
is made of sterner stuff. Smiling, she agreed that it was impolite, carefully
wrapped the gum in a tissue, and calmly repeated her question. Ellison, for
once, seemed somewhat nonplussed. Five years have passed since that day and,
so far as we know, he has not yet taken revenge.
—Michael Levy, University of
Wisconsin-Stout
The Fantastic Price of Fantastic Art.
Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and
Kathleen Church Plummer, eds. Unearthly Visions: Approaches to Science and
Fantasy Art. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. viii + 166 pp. $63.95 hc.
Let’s get most of the unpleasantness out of the way first.
To begin with, Unearthly Visions is obscenely expensive: almost 37 cents a
page. Greenwood’s books always have been pricey, but the company has never
done a better job of living up to the motto it unofficially borrowed from
Frank Norris’s The Octopus: All The Traffic Will Bear!
Second, the book is sometimes unsteadily proofread and/or copyedited. At the
bottom of the first page of text—after almost three dollars’ worth of title
page, table of contents, etc.—George Slusser writes that “To answer these
questions, however, one must define in what way sf and fantasy images are
icons. To do this, one needs first to examine its relationship to modern
canonical art.” Working backward through several sentences, one may conclude
that the “it” refers to “sf/fantasy art,” one topic. Immediately following,
however, at the top of the second page, Slusser continues: “Sf and fantasy art
do [emphasis added] not just ‘borrow’ images and techniques from canonical art
.... What it [again] rather does ....” After that, I tried not to pay
attention to the writing but to concentrate on ideas as much as possible.
Finally, most seriously of all, this is a book that tries to talk about visual
art without showing examples. The writers must have used slides when they read
these papers at an Eaton Conference, for the texts of the essays frequently
refer to examples of book or magazine covers, complete with dutiful scholarly
citations to the original publications, although the examples are absent from
the volume. This is more frustrating than useful, however. When, for example,
Slusser spends almost a page discussing Howard V. Brown’s cover for the
January 1935 Astounding Stories, a reader must either flip desperately through
collections of fantastic art or dig out the crumbling magazine itself. Without
seeing the art, how is a reader to understand Slusser’s analysis of the piece
he’s looking at, let alone fit those points into a larger argument? That’s a
problem throughout this book; Samuel H. Vasbinder, for instance, mentions in
passing that “A painting by Frank Kelly Freas from Planet Stories shows the
artist using the old impressionist technique of The View Through the Keyhole
to show an exciting moment taking place somewhere in space” (69). Really? How
so? Even if Greenwood wouldn’t print any black and white reproductions, let
alone color, it would have been relatively easy for Westfahl and Co., once
they’d given information about original publication of the works under
discussion, to add references to the recent collections that reprint those works.
Despite these caveats, this book deserves attention as an important early step
toward thinking about fantastic art.
“Fantastic art” is, first of all, the eye-catching part of book and magazine
covers, sometimes also decorating interior pages. Its announced function is to
illustrate the written contents, but its real purpose is to sell the
publication by attracting potential buyers first casually—by bright colors and
dynamic design—then to the point of active commitment—by the atmosphere and
subject matter presented. This makes the discussion of fantastic art in
relation to commercial publishing very difficult. It wasn’t uncommon for sf
magazines to give an artist only a brief, inaccurate summary of the story to
be illustrated or even to buy a painting first, then tell an author to write a
story for the cover to “illustrate.” Nor has it been uncommon for publishers
to commission deliberately inappropriate art for the sake of marketing. At one
International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, for example, Robert
Silverberg talked about how paperback editions of his literary sf novels had
appeared with misleading covers, wryly adding that publishing Dying Inside
(1972) with a cover featuring a big, ooky, scary Thing was unfair not only to
readers of serious sf but also to people who wanted to read about big, ooky,
scary Things.
Several of the essays in Unearthly Visions have valuable things to say about
fantastic art as illustration. The best is Lynne Lundquist and Gary Westfahl’s
discussion of how Margaret Wise Brown’s text and Clement Hurd’s art interact
in The Runaway Bunny (1942) and other books for young children; marginal
though this may sound, the essay neatly shows how each creator complemented
the other’s talents. Less successfully, David Hinkley gives Frank Frazetta’s
cover paintings a bit too much credit for the popular success of Robert E.
Howard’s paperbacks, though the essay does effectively describe how Frazetta
visually blends elements of “savagery and civilization.”
Several more interesting essays concentrate on fantastic art that does more
than illustrate. The recent wave of single-artist collections is just the
latest demonstration that such work deserves separate attention. When Famous
Fantastic Mysteries published portfolios of Virgil Finlay’s illustrations in
the early 1940s, readers could connect the drawings easily to stories recently
published in the magazine; when Walter Dunkelberger reprinted the art a decade
later, the connection was tenuous at best. And when Advent published Frank
Kelly Freas: A Portfolio in 1957, the year after it did Damon Knight’s In
Search of Wonder, it didn’t even identify the stories supposedly illustrated.
For larger groupings, Vincent di Fate’s mammoth, encyclopedic Infinite Worlds:
The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art (1997) gives samples of many
major artists of the fantastic, and the bibliography of Unearthly Visions
lists several other multi-artist anthologies, some arranged historically, some
thematically.
All this makes it possible to start thinking about fantastic art, to consider
what it is, what it does separately from its illustrative purpose. Finding
general perspectives won’t be easy. Early in Unearthly Visions, Gary Westfahl
attempts a magisterial thematic history of sf art, even going so far as to say
that book covers can be used to classify content as hard sf or new wave,
before he sees how silly this is and calls instead for a more limited,
topic-based study. In fact, some of the essays here deal with fascinating
topics relating sf art to cultural history, such as Howard V. Hendrix’s
explanation of why the Northrop Flying Wing survived so long as a real,
experimental aircraft: drawings of the thing looked too cool for engineers to
abandon the project. Kathleen Church Plummer talks about the design of empty
space, how early sf stories describing suites of furniture that folded back
into the walls reinforced tendencies in early twentieth-century architecture.
Such essays at least give fantastic art serious weight, crediting it with real
influence on viewers.
Other essays try to isolate the essential nature of different types of
fantastic art. Considering another, larger kind of artistic importance, both
Slusser’s “Introduction: The Iconography of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art”
and Vasbinder’s “The Vision of Space: The Artist’s View” agree that sf art
deals with humanity’s perception of its place in what might feel like a
numbingly strange universe, as when Slusser sums up a Richard Powers paperback
cover as “the reinsertion of the human icon at the center of the new or alien
landscape” (9). An eye like the viewer’s is seeing; beings like the viewer are
present, even active. Speaking of fantasy art, John Clute would differ
slightly. In his essay, “Notes on the Geography of Bad—and Good—Fantasy Art,”
Clute finds that bad fantasy art merely illustrates bits of the world we
know—landscapes, weapons, muscular torsos, etc.—while “the central movement of
Fantasy ... might be: Bondage loosens. The verb of Fantasy is to loosen. It is
at this point that Story melts the ice, unlocks the wanweird that binds the
world from metamorphosis” (90). Art is not, in other words so much about
locating a place for ourselves as we are now as it is for suddenly glimpsing
ourselves transformed. Clute’s is a fine, too-short essay, one of the best in
the book.
Another fine essay is Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay’s “Shapes from the Edge of
Time: The Science Fiction Artwork of Richard M. Powers,” which persuades me,
despite my previous remarks on art being more than illustration, that Powers’s
surrealist cover paintings are the perfect illustrations (Clute would say
“illuminations”) for H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. As Hampton and MacKay say
of another painting, this one a cover for Arthur C. Clarke’s Reach for
Tomorrow (1956):
Working in a pop-culture milieu, with all the anonymity of a medieval artisan,
Powers virtually created a new form within the domain of painting—one in which
the artist’s ability to maintain illusory space is stretched past its limit,
as it fills with increasingly incomprehensible shapes. The viewer has the
illusion of perfect impersonality, the visual imagination of the end of time.
(78)
Still another outstanding essay is Gregory Benford’s, which talks first of
Chesley Bonestell, an artist who painted space scenes by using his imagination
and the best available scientific speculation, and then discusses the work of
painters who can refer to observations from real space flights. Benford values
hard-science accuracy, “getting it right,” in art, so it might seem that he
would be satisfied with correct detail. Actually, he admires Bonestell’s
sensitive creativity, and he also responds to and quotes approvingly Soviet
space painter Andrei Sokolov’s description of what nightfall on Earth looks
like from space:
at the terminator, ... valleys sink into darkness and a chain of snowy
mountains is shining in the background. Late in the evening, just beyond the
terminator, the very high mountains glow red-orange, like live coals....
Mountaintops cleave the clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Tropical
thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes at night, recall the blooming buds of
white roses. (65)
I hadn’t seen that description before. I won’t forget it.
If the picture these words create in my mind is art, John Grant’s
light-hearted short history of fantasy art is right to declare that “Whatever
form it [fantasy art] takes, it tells the only story that is important to you,
the viewer, the story in which both the artist and yourself are protagonists.
If it does not tell this story, it is almost certainly not fantasy art except
by commercial definition” (103). The same could be said of non-fantasy art, of
course, and Grant’s use of the word “story” reinforces the suspicion that
we’re simply observing that “art” has an effect on its audience, not saying a
great deal specifically about fantastic art. That’s part of what we need to
consider: in what way is “fantastic art” a meaningful category? And if we can
categorize thus far, do we want to consider “sf and fantasy art” as a singular
or plural subject?
Overall, then, Unearthly Visions gives readers some nudges toward ways of
thinking about fantastic art; it also illustrates some frustrating dead ends.
Still, the several excellent essays in this slim but overpriced volume deserve
attention. They remind us how many types of fantastic art exist, and they also
suggest how personally important our response to fantastic art can be. For
art, like literature, is about finding forms for human experience, helping us
notice the significant strangeness in our lives. Great art—significant
art—awakens us to new possibilities. It won’t let us go. It makes us see more,
and by doing so it transforms us. This is asking the impossible, of course—but
that’s what all art is about. If art isn’t doing the impossible, what good is
it?
—Joe Sanders
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