#123 = Volume 41, Part 2 = July 2014
REVIEW-ESSAY
Jerome Winter
All Hail the Slide Rule?
Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders. The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 221 pp. $45 pbk.
Sarah Herbe. Characters in New British Hard Science Fiction: With a Focus on Genetic Engineering in Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, and Brian Stableford. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 249 pp. €39 hc.
George Slusser. Gregory Benford. MODERN MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION series. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014. xi + 198 pp. $85 hc; $23 pbk.
Despite the potentially lucrative designs for heavy-lift launch vehicles, sub- orbital tourism, and space elevators, it is impossible to deny that in the wake of seemingly permanent shrinkages in government spending, the lure of space exploration no longer retains the seductive cultural power it once had. Yet nostalgia for this technocultural fantasy of seeding the stars still looms large in popular culture and literature. When eminent authors such as Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguru stoop to writing sf, it is sometimes claimed that they merely treat science as metaphor and write as if working unplowed literary pastures. One genre niche that spurs complaints of this sort is hard sf, which in addition to glorifying space adventure also constitutes the very antithesis of mainstream literary forays into the diverse fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. From the midcentury inception of the subgenre by Robert A. Heinlein and Hal Clement to the late-twentieth- century work of Gregory Benford and on to the recent renaissance by Alastair Reynolds, Justina Robson, and Paul McAuley, hard sf has thrived on the fear of being outed by a scientifically literate, plausibility-minded audience that cries foul when a story cheats or slips up on verifiable scientific detail.
The historical importance of Heinlein’s work for twentieth-century science fiction, and especially the subgenre known as hard sf, is nothing short of monumental. In “On Writing Speculative Fiction” (1947), Heinlein set the ground rules for what would eventually become hard sf by arguing that “in the speculative science fiction story, accepted science and established fact are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action” (qtd. Clareson and Sanders 61). The publication of The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction by Thomas Clareson and Joe Sanders, then, is unsurprising, even overdue. This sense of belatedness may be attributed to the fact that Thomas Clareson, who died in 1993, composed three initial chapters, while Joe Sanders revised and completed the manuscript. The first four chapters are based on Clareson’s original draft and cover Heinlein’s early short stories through his juveniles. Sanders contributed the remaining four chapters, preface, and conclusion that include discussion of classic 1950s works, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and the final period of novels.
Another (now posthumous) contributor, Frederik Pohl, commends the book in a second Preface for fairly assessing this deeply polarizing writer’s oeuvre, even when that critical judgment entails condemning the leaden, didactic pontification of works such as Heinlein’s first novel, For Us, the Living, written in 1939 and “unfortunately” rediscovered and published for the first time in 2004 (3). To their credit, Sanders and Clareson also dispense a few pithy indictments, joining in the chorus of critics assailing the 1941 novel Sixth Column (1941) for the Yellow-Peril “racist vilification” in which “the only good PanAsian is a dead PanAsian” (48); commenting on the “force feeding of a message” in the pacifist-baiting civics lectures that make up Starship Troopers (1959), the authors conclude that this novel, originally written for the juvenile market, was “the one that most vehemently treats its readers like children” (131). In contrast, Clareson and Sanders’s dismissal of any trace of racism, or at least white privilege, in Farnham’s Freehold (1964) will likely strike many readers as overly charitable. Likewise, while refraining from hagiography, they still repeatedly attempt to rescue Heinlein from H. Bruce Franklin’s trenchant criticism of his political views in Robert Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980). To a skeptical reader, such attempts often seem unconvincing and may even preempt debate by dubiously suggesting that closer attention to the texts themselves will inevitably deflect most of Franklin’s misgivings. Sanders and Clareson are most compelling, however, when they echo one of the primary contentions of Franklin’s landmark study, as well as of William H. Patterson’s recent biographical volume, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century (2010)—namely, that the hard sf of Heinlein was not only immensely popular but also an extraordinarily representative cultural production of twentieth-century American literary history.
Hence, while avoiding thick historical contextualization in favor of close reading and a literary-critical approach, Clareson and Sanders rise above their tendency to lapse into rote plot summary when they thematically dissect the way Heinlein’s fiction renders the dense nexus of cultural politics symptomatic of twentieth-century scientific and technocultural institutions. From his early short stories “If This Goes On—” (1940) and “Universe” (1941) to a classic novel such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), Heinlein’s revolution- centered narratives, for instance, consistently both champion and challenge the scientific authority of an insurgent technocratic elite. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the supercomputer Mike, equally terrifying and benign, reconfigures the boundaries of human nature, gesturing toward a hyper-efficient techno- utopia, while Heinlein’s right-libertarian ethos also scrupulously keeps at bay a more egalitarian, class-based uprising. Despite Heinlein’s socialist- progressive involvement in Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in Civilization (EPIC) gubernatorial bid, the demonization of Depression-era union strikes in “The Roads Must Roll” (1940) made clear early on Heinlein’s stubborn insistence that individual upward mobility trumped class-based solidarity.
This deference to an elite cadre of trained, economically remunerated experts in increasingly specialized scientific disciplines can be glimpsed as early as the heroic engineers of “Blowups Happen” (1940), who must prevent nuclear disaster by speaking truth to power—in this case, the scientifically illiterate board of the company. An engineer jeers, “you are none of you atomic physicists; you are not entitled to hold opinions in this matter” (qtd. Clareson and Sanders 37). Heinlein’s defenders aver that his gung-ho advocacy for the tyranny of the slide rule had a democratizing and populist bent, as exemplified in the Lazarus Long sequence of his future history where a longevity coup is widely disseminated such that “the elite may constitute almost the entire population” (Clareson and Sanders 49). At any rate, Heinlein’s fiction, as Clareson and Sanders abundantly show, privileges what Damon Knight first labelled “the One Who Knows”—or the scientifically minded Competent Man—as humanity’s last bastion of unflappable order against certain chaos. The sheer breadth of developing disciplines that would dominate twentieth-century technocultural discourses and that Heinlein dutifully covers in his early fiction is comprehensive, from rocketry and space flight in “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1950) to counter-intuitive theoretical physics in “By His Bootstraps” (1941), from the ethical implications of experimental bioscience in Beyond This Horizon (1942) to the wonders of cyborgian body- modification and mechanical engineering in “Waldo” (1942).
The four stories with which Heinlein broke into the mainstream slick- magazine market of The Saturday Evening Post—“The Green Hills of Earth” (1947), “Space Jockey” (1947), “It’s Great to Be Back” (1947), and “The Black Pits of Luna” (1948)—epitomize what Clareson and Sanders call Heinlein’s “vision to reach a wide, general audience” in order to curb “a dangerous public ignorance” (53). Likewise, even though Heinlein chafed at Scribner’s editor Alice Dalgliesh’s meddling with a fierceness that shocked Isaac Asimov, Heinlein’s twelve juvenile novels update Verne’s young scientists and the boy inventors of the Edisonade tradition to inspire and instruct potentially wayward adolescents. Clareson and Sanders do an admirable job of arguing that these bildungsromans illustrate Heinlein’s career- spanning concerns, including his championing of a benevolent technocratic authority that can channel inexperienced defiance into maverick self-reliance in line with some benevolent universal government as evidenced, for instance, by the ancient group called simply The Organization in Between Planets (1951) or the interstellar police of the Hegemony Guard in Citizen of the Galaxy (1957). In their analysis of the classic novels, Clareson and Sanders therefore trace the way that the Heinlein hero—practical, adaptable, and self- responsible—must compensate for character shortcomings and defects instilled in him by his hyper-advanced technological environment, including docility and solipsism in The Puppet Masters (1951), artifice and indecision in Double Star (1956), or apathy and aggression in Starship Troopers (1959). This constant trial of the Competent Man culminates in Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), who must learn not to take his religion too seriously and accept that his countercultural mysticism is fundamentally compatible with a scientific, if not deterministic, worldview.
In Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958), an intergalactic tribunal holds court over the savagery of humanity. Heinlein’s hero, Kip Russell, resents being so railroaded and barks a threatening credo of radical individualism: “we have no limits. There’s no telling what our future will be” (qtd. Clareson and Sanders 106). In George Slusser’s Gregory Benford, the latest installment in the MODERN MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION series from the University of Illinois Press, this moment, seen as axiomatic of Heinlein’s fiction in general, signifies a crucial legacy of American hard sf that forms a key clue to understanding the important literary achievement of Gregory Benford. Filling a scandalous scholarly gap for both professional researchers and casual readers of contemporary science fiction, George Slusser’s superb single-author study examines Benford’s resuscitation of a distinctively American brand of hard sf and its approach to representing the thrill and terror of scientific discovery and technological innovation. In addition to introductory and concluding chapters, the book is divided into a chapter on Benford’s Eaton Conference papers-turned-essays; two chapters on the GALACTIC CENTER series (1987-96), with an emphasis on the first and last book in the eight-novel saga; a chapter on Benford’s so-called “novel of manners,” the masterly Timescape (1980); and a chapter on his short fiction. Both a distinguished theoretical physicist and a major sf writer for over thirty years, Benford, as elucidated by the author himself in “Style, Substance, and other Illusions” (1992) and “In the Wake of the Wave: The British Science Fiction Market” (1996), negotiates a fraught compromise between experimental New Wave stylistics and “recent explorations of self-organizing structures in physics and cellular biology” (qtd. Slusser 39).
With a view to rendering the dynamic inner space of scientific discovery, Benford has recourse to a savvy recasting of Modernist techniques best illustrated perhaps in Against Infinity (1983), with its tour-de-force rewrite of Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1942) as an alien-encounter story on the methane ice of Ganymede, narrated in a Mocknapawtaphan voice. Benford retools a New Wave aesthetic agenda that would “eff the ineffable” of human subjectivity and its connection to a post-Enlightenment, techno-scientific world-view. Likewise, perhaps no brasher literary experiment has graced the pages of commercial space opera since at least Gully Foyle’s transformation into the Burning Man in The Stars, My Destination (1956) than the Joycean stream of consciousness and multiperspectival fragmentation of In the Oceans of Night (1977). To this end, Slusser argues that Benford deploys an artful bricolage of recurring sf icons and memes to collapse the mind-body and mechanical-organic dualisms of the Cartesian cogito into the scientific materialism of what Slusser, invoking Spinoza, Emerson, and Leibniz, calls a “striving monad” (66).
Although the unenviable constraints of synthesizing a prolific writer’s vast body of work amply justifies the narrow focus on a particular philosophy of scientific exploration extracted from Benford’s oeuvre, a passing reference to the science-rich dialogue of one novel as “techno-babble” (106) makes me wonder how much this Olympian, quasi-mystical vaunting of scientific endeavor raises a key question—namely, its fidelity to the hard science that constitutes what Benford, echoing Robert Frost’s dismissal of free verse, called “playing with the net up” (qtd. Slusser 39). Another understandable though troubling blind spot in his necessarily restricted analysis of Benford’s overall science-fictional outlook occurs when Slusser dismisses “identity politics, race, and gender issues with little or no relevance to science” (180)—a stance that, in an interview included as the last item in the volume, Benford validates in his skepticism about reading science fiction as “mask over social comment” (qtd. Slusser 181). Such an ahistorical, depoliticizing move neglects the explicit neoliberal political allegory that Slusser already notes in Against Infinity, with its opposition of “Marxist socialism” (60) on a dystopian Earth and a right- libertarian, anarcho-capitalist spreading of spaceward settler colonists modeled on Heinlein’s Luna in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. This disavowal of political ideologies, intentionally or not, reaffirms the neoliberal status quo as sacrosanct and is characteristic of Heinlein-dominated American science fiction. It is therefore unsurprising that writers associated with the latest wave of the British hard-sf renaissance, including self-identified socialists Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod, reject such dated quietism.
In Characters in New British Hard Science Fiction, Sarah Herbe lucidly shows that playing this game of hard sf involves a stylistic effect or attitude of techno-scientific verisimilitude achieved not only through literalized extrapolation, logical problem-solving, expositional info-dumps, and an appeal to the scientific method, and realistic depictions of scientists at work, but also, especially since the resurgence of hard sf that took off in the mid-1980s, through psychologically complex characterization. As gene therapy, biochips, medical screening, and organ transplants become not just lurid headlines but integral parts of our everyday reality, an understanding of how new hard-sf fiction works assumes ever more pressing importance. This techno-scientific frontline of sf spearheads relevant cultural-political responses to paradigm- shifting advances in the biological and life sciences.
Providing detailed case studies of Paul McAuley’s The Secret of Life (2001), Alastair Reynold’s INHIBITOR or CONJOINER series (2000-2007), and Brian Stableford’s EMORTALITY series (1998-2002), Herbe could have easily expanded her book’s already unwieldy subtitle to include Justina Robson’s Natural History (2003), Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World (2005), Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005), and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004). In the long first chapter, Herbe provides impressively exhaustive surveys of criticism on hard science fiction and its recent renaissance that defies David Brin’s claim in the early 1980s that hard sf was “running out of speculative niches” (qtd. Herbe 9); she also emphasizes the crucial role of genetic engineering in contemporary sf as a whole. The second chapter consists of literature reviews on the function of deep characterization in science fiction, which, by the editorial fiat of Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, was traditionally slighted from the 1930s through the 1950s before becoming deeply integrated into the genre in part because of the New Wave experiments of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, and Norman Spinrad. The third and fourth chapters hinge on the narratological distinction between “verisimilar” characterization analyzed by the cognitive literary theory of Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, and the “synthetic” characterization popular since the poststructuralist interventions of Roland Barthes. The unresolvable dichotomy that emerges is whether characters in fiction are verbal constructs of words on the page or representational fictionalizations of real people. In hard sf, Herbe contends that the former emphasis on synthetic constructs should be seen less as literary constructs than as redefinitions of the human body transformed by plausible future trajectories of cutting-edge bioscience.
The fourth chapter uses close readings of the aforementioned novels of new British hard sf to provide evidence of the subgenre’s tendency to provide fast explicit characterizations from the outside, either through free indirect discourse, reported speech, or heterodiegetic, semi-omniscient narrative description. In new hard sf, characters are no longer assumed to be the pulp- era stock figures of the heroic engineer and fearless rocket pilot, but are quickly introduced through mimetic if estranged descriptions of bodily appearance, profession, upbringing, relationships to other characters, and social position. Influenced by sophisticated New Wave and cyberpunk techniques, new hard sf follows Benford in foregrounding the inner space of characters: intentions, memories, feelings, and unconscious impulses. Despite the estranged gene splicing and routine body modifications of these futuristic individuals and the often large number of characters in the novels themselves, Herbe convincingly illustrates that contemporary hard sf puts a high premium on character depth, development, and believability. She does this by emphasizing sf’s use of multiple perspectives, mundane depictions of bodily functions and daily rituals, literary allusions, and metafictional devices. The final chapter tantalizingly addresses “Characters in Society” and presents a cursory thematic analysis of our cultural ambivalence toward genetic engineering—from Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in 1953 to the Human Genome Project—through the deconstructed Frankenstein trope of mad science and its hideous progeny. Herbe makes the useful distinction that far- future hard sf such as Stross’s Accelerando tends to take genetic engineering as inevitable whereas near-future fictions such as McDonald’s River of Gods function in part as a cautionary tale about the ways genetic engineering may lead to discriminatory practices.
Despite the comprehensively researched, if sometimes only partially integrated, surveys of criticism this timely and valuable book conducts, at points Herbe, not unlike Sanders, Clareson, and Slusser, shoves structuralist distinctions out the airlock into an ahistorical vacuum. The discussion of Reynolds’s Redemption Ark (2002), and the fact that the Conjoiners and Demarchists fiercely squabble rather than band together against the Inhibitors, astutely notes that characters in Reynolds’s fiction do not “give in to utopian concepts of peaceful cooperation of all humans” (Herbe 125). Yet to fault this dynamic as also “psychologically implausible” (125) because it is irrational overlooks the socio-historical role of identity politics and group affiliations in the make-up of human psychology. Aside from this quibble, Herbe manages productively to analyze the exciting phenomenon of the recent hard-sf renaissance, wherein exaggeratedly non-mimetic character constructs—such as McAuley’s Mariella Anders, a heroic scientist who battles big science and saves humanity by smuggling a Martian virus back to Earth, or Robson’s Voyager Lonestar Isol, a lonely starship who makes first contact with the vast corpse of an alien in deep space—can be considered to have more than a little in common with living, breathing people.
 Back to Home
|