SF was born in Europe, created and developed by Europeans, raised from the beginning to
heights it took a long time for writers across the Atlantic to attain. Its destiny
resembles that of the cinema which was invented, created and perfected in Europe. But
because of the 1914 war, Hollywood became pre-eminent and, for thirty years, had people
convinced that it was THE cinema. In similar fashion, American SF was anticipated by
European SF which came to maturity long before the former and was at times as audacious
and as frantic. But because of economic factors it remained embryonic. Then in 1950 came
the shock of works from the USA. If European SF deserves to be called
"infantile" it is that SF which has been written since 1950, following the bad
example of American SF. (pp 19-20)
The first half of this study is a 200-page survey of "les grands thèmes,"
which the author divides into twelve chapters, including looks at "thinking
machines," "the race which will replace us," "modified man,"
"the immortals and the resurrected," "artificial and doctored lives,"
and "the twilight zone"--this last being six pages on "texts inspired by
neurology, psychopathology, experimental psychology [and] metaphysics" (p221). The
first of his longer chapters, "A la conquête de l'espace et du temps," deals
with space travel, from Lucian, through Kepler, Cyrano de Bergerac, and the 19th century,
to Gernsback and the USA:
It's a fact: the generation of 1930 in America overdid it. A thousand light-years in
two bounds, the inhabitants of Eldorado planets who surpass men in every domain, the
conquest of a galaxy in six months--and, nevertheless, one pitiful Earthman, alone, is
able to overthrow an Empire. (As an American he brings with him democracy, chewing-gum,
gadgets and strip-tease. Bradbury's work can only be understood as a reaction against this
attitude.) No more science, but the classic love story and lots of adventure. The American
public, saturated with scientific dissertations and badly disguised engineers' reports,
wanted action. And it wanted the stars. (p 47)
In his second chapter, "Dans les corridors de l'espace-temps," Van Herp
points out that although the time machine is a recent invention, time travel is an eternal
theme, a meditation on man's ability to change his destiny. He distinguishes four
categories: voyages to the past and to the future; political fictions and
"uchronies," the fourth dimension, and parallel worlds. For each category titles
are listed and various works are described, but there is rarely any effort at a
comprehensive survey and there is always an emphasis on "who did it first":
"the Americans think they invented this genre... But the parallel universe is not a
recent invention...It comes directly from the philosophy of the Middle Ages and from Averroes " (p 77).
In "Les mondes défunts et les mondes cachés," the author studies at length
the myth of Atlantis, both in fiction and non-fiction, before turning to lost continents,
lost civilisations, and the hollow earth. And in a shorter chapter, "Les cités
futures," he discusses anticipations, utopias and anti-utopias.
The two other major thematic groupings are "L'anticipation militaire" (future
wars and invasions) and "Les fins du monde" (various accounts of the end of the
world). In this thematic survey, the author's efforts at finding historical antecedents
for SF themes (and the full development of those themes in French SF of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries), result in a rambling, baroque catalogue of titles and plot
résumés. There are few attempts at synthesis or an investigation of the larger
significance of the thematic groupings, nor any systematic attempt at organizing the
seemingly haphazard thematic categories. And there are some glaring lacunae: there is, for
example, no discussion of other worlds, whether anthropologically or geographically, no
reference to telepathy or to the theme of first contact.
The second section of this Panorama--"Les genres"--seems even more
arbitrary than the first. "Works may be classified," the author writes,
"from the perspective of the particular approach of the author to the subject as well
as from a thematic perspective" (p223); and under the former he mentions
"engineering SF," "humorous SF," "La S.F. du délire"
("frenzied SF which dares anything," as for example, The Worm Ouroboros!)
and "La S.F. d'endoctrinement" (Poul Anderson and Murray Leinster, "where
every deception is allowed which magnifies American civilisation," p234). There are
only three chapters in this section: "Le Space Opera et l'Heroic Fantasy," a
very substantial chapter on "La science fiction mythologique: Merritt et
Lovecraft" and a quick look at "Les juvéniles." Space Opera, according to
Van Herp, has two poles, Burroughs and Hamilton. In the latter, "the combat spreads
over at least a galaxy, mankind confronts a hostile, alien race and the destiny of the
universe is in the balance" (p237). The Burroughs type is more pictorial, "the
anachronistic, baroque world of the first adventures of Flash Gordon" (p238). Turning
to Merritt and Lovecraft, the author describes "poetic fiction" as that genre
where "beings, things, machines are touched by an aura which transfigures them,
giving them a mysterious life of their own"; a quality which is lacking in most SF
and which is combined with mythology in the fictions of Merritt, Lovecraft and the Belgian
Jean Ray.
In a very brief third section, "Les écoles," Van Herp looks at U.S., French
and Soviet SF. American SF began with Hugo Gernsback, the disgruntled inventor of a rather
silly anti-torpedo device who turned to publishing as an outlet and who openly borrowed
everything important from Jules Verne: "as in many areas, the Americans invented
nothing, but utilizing to the maximum the home market, were able to industrialize and
perfect their production" (p276). Van Herp's anti-American bias seems to reveal a
frustrated sense of outrage that a culturally backward country should go on receiving all
the credit, even in France, when so many superior works in French are overlooked. He
admits, however, that the best French SF seems to have been written in the 17th and 18th
centuries.
Finally, in the section "Problèmes," the author begins with the question of
attitudes towards science in SF, but his answers seem tentative and superficial. In the
next chapter, "Science fiction et occultisme," he sets out to reveal the
"unconscious influence of occultism in SF," but he spends four pages defining
"occultism" and only one reviewing its influence, in the themes of living matter
and the mad scientist. Again, in the chapter "Science fiction et religion" the
author approaches the question from a rather superficial point of view, informing us for
instance that SF is written by believers and non-believers alike whose ideas may or may
not influence their work. And the chapter, "Science fiction et morale" provides
him still another opportunity to display his own limitations and prejudices. American SF,
he writes, tends to reflect a conventional morality in which an American's civic duties
consist in "consuming" and in being "stool-pigeons" (p346). This
chapter also includes a discussion of eroticism: Americans like Farmer think they have
pioneered eroticism in SF, but the French were writing erotic SF novels more than fifty
years ago. And he goes on to explain why American SF is only now dealing with sexuality.
There is regrettably no index and therefore no way of finding particular authors or
works, but there is a long bibliography which includes references to articles and to
numerous reviews in the French SF magazine Fiction. Once the reader accepts this
work's blatant pro-French and pre-20th century stance, it is, like the Versins'
encyclopedia, an interesting and entertaining look at the European pre-history of SF.
Van Herf's biases are in sharp contrast to Jacques Sadoul's Histoire de la science
fiction moderne whose major drawback, for this reader, lies in its dull and confining
objectivity. The work is divided into two parts, "le domaine anglo-saxon" and
"le domaine francais," and the proportions--300 pages for the USA as opposed to
100 pages for France--reflect a very different attitude from that of Van Herp. "SF is
a branch of the literature of the imaginary," writes Sadoul, "which also
includes fantastic and supernatural literature" (p16). Without assigning strict
limits, he states that the distinguishing feature of SF lies in the treatment of
the material, but that he will include both Lovecraft (whose "demons are manifestly
extra-terrestrials") and Tolkien (a "parallel universe") in his history. He
very briefly surveys the genre prior to the 20th century before turning to his subject,
modern SF: "a genre of European descent which took root in the USA where it has
flourished more than anywhere else" (p21).
This study is, as the author states, only a first step: a rather dull listing of dates,
authors, and stories; the bare bones of a history. He proceeds chronologically, dividing
American SF into seven periods: 1) "Foundation," 1911-1925; 2)
"Crystallization," 1926-1933; 3) "Mutation," 1934-1938; 4)
"Harvest," 1939-1949; 5) "Proliferation," 1950-1957; 6)
"Recession," 1958-1965; and 7) "Resurrection," 1966-1971. Each chapter
corresponds to a period: he surveys, magazine by magazine, the important stories, stopping
to present a biographical sketch or the synopsis of a story. There are few judgements or
opinions, apart from statements that a story is "important" or
"classic" and with only a few exceptions, as, for instance, when he writes that Ubik
was Dick's last important novel: "[afterwards] the drugs had begun their
destructive effects" (p248). In writing about the different magazines, Sadoul
mentions that Campbell and Astounding were seminal forces in the shaping of SF,
but makes only the barest indication of what this direction consisted: "for him
Science was the essential, to which must be added another pole of interest: forecasting
the future. Campbell thought that the role of SF was to predict the civilisation of
tomorrow in a realistic, plausible and of course scientific manner" (p135). Gold's
editorship of Galaxy is described only as a "particular style he imposed on
his authors" (p188), while Boucher's influence is mentioned only once, as responsible
for "the more literary development of recent SF" (p277). Although this work is a
history, there is almost no discussion of what produced the various developments and
changes in SF. In sum, it might be argued that as questionable as the thematic approach to
SF may be, it at least provides some cohesive focal point, some way of juxtaposing various
works, their development and mutual influence, their relation to reality and their
relative merits. Brian Aldiss' history of SF suffers from some of the same failings--it is
at times a simple catalogue of authors and titles--but Aldiss at least gave his work some
direction by attempting to show the genre's evolution from its 19th century origins.
Sadoul's section on French SF is marred by the same flaws, for although he cannot rely
on the magazines to lead him through the two major periods, "Yesterday"
(1905-1950), "...and Tomorrow" (1950-1972), he presents us with the same weary
listing of authors, titles, and synopses--less boring, perhaps, in that the
English-language reader may be less familiar with those names and titles. This book is
accurate, well-indexed and attractively illustrated--Sadoul is a well-known fan and
magazine collector and he has published an album of illustrations from American SF
magazines, Hier, l'an 2000 (Paris 1973). But it is useful only as a reference
book and most of its usefulness will disappear if and when the promised index to Versins'
encyclopedia is published. (If there were an index in the present edition of Versin, I
would not have made the error that I did in the last issue of SFS, in saying on p181 that
"there is no listing for England.")
-- Peter Fitting
Two New Books from Germany
In these two volumes--Eike Barmeyer, ed.,
Science Fiction: Theorie und Geschichte
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972);
Franz Rottensteiner,
ed., Polaris 1: Ein Science Fiction Almanach
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1973)--critics from North America and Western and
Eastern Europe analyze the weaknesses, strengths, themes, and potentialities of SF. Having
already appeared in English, seven of the twenty-one essays in Barmeyer and three of the
four in Rottensteiner will not be discussed here: James Blish, "Future Recall,"
in The Disappearing Future, ed. George Hay (L: Panther 1970), pp 97-105; Evgeni
Brandis and Vladimir Dmitrevsky, "In the Land of Science Fiction," Soviet
Literature No. 5 (1968), pp 145-50; Michel Butor, "Science Fiction: The Crisis
of its Growth," Partisan Review 34(1967):595-602, reprinted in SF: The
Other Side of Realism, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green: Bowling Green
University Popular Press 1971), pp 157-65; Michael Kandel, "Stanislaw Lem on Men and
Robots," Extrapolation 14(1972-73): 14-24; Stanislaw Lem, "Robots in
Science Fiction," in SF: The Other Side (see Butor), pp 307-25; Darko Suvin,
"On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," College English
34(1972-73):372-82; Malgorzata Szpakowska, "A Writer in No-Man's Land," Polish
Perspectives 14,x(1971):29-37--all the preceding in Barmeyer, the following in
Rottensteiner--Stanislaw Lem, "SF: A Hopeless Case--With Exceptions," SF
Commentary No. 35-37, 1973; Robert Plank, "The Place of Evil in Science
Fiction," Extrapolation 14(1972-73):100-11; Franz Rottensteiner, "Kurd
Lasswitz: A German Pioneer of SF," in SF: The Other Side (see Butor), pp
289-306.
Three of the critics in Barmeyer discuss the nature and potentialities of the utopian
novel. After reviewing its background and basic meaning, Werner Krauss concludes that it
retains nothing more than the charm of childhood memories. In contrast, Hans-Jürgen
Krysmanski foresees a continuation of the tradition through avant-garde forms which refine
the older method by portraying futuristic possibilities. To Martin Schwonke, the utopian
novel has moved from the paradigm stage to that of critical speculations upon the
sufficiency of the individual. One should next read Frank Rainer Scheck's essay on the
anti-utopian reaction, which he sees as a product of the conservative, petty-bourgeois
fear of technology and its potentialities for power and change.
Darko Suvin has two articles in the Barmeyer volume. The first, having appeared in
English, is listed above; the second is an essay on Soviet SF and traces its development
from the rationalist political novel of the 18th and 19th centuries through the modern
period. The most important works of the 20s were by Mayakovsky and Zamyatin. Sputnik and
destalinization began the new period which included Yefremov's classical utopia and works
of Dneprov, who introduced cybernetic SF into Russia. Suvin pays special attention to the
Strugatsky brothers, today the most significant authors. Centered on heroes with utopian
ethics, their works combine SF with politics and philosophy, thus bridging the gulf
between the scientific and humanistic modes.
As a scientist and writer, Herbert W. Franke defends SF's generic relationship to
science and technology. He asks both that the writers improve their literary techniques
and that the humanists reorient their thinking toward more realistic approaches to the
world's problems. In contrast, Jürgen von Scheidt in his Jungian-Freudian analysis
reduces the technological SF novel to an adult fairy tale which has its source in
regression and compensation. But he does grant the importance of speculative fiction as a
form of visionary literature which illuminates to some extent the universal mystery.
Robert Plank's stimulating essay discusses the development from aliens type A (mirror of
human foibles) to aliens type B (popularized by Wells and now an important part of our
general intellectual orientation), who possess greater psychic powers than men and are
often crucial to a change in human destiny. Identifying them as variations on the father
figure, Plank asks, "Will there be a Type C--a brother figure?" This seems to me
to be an especially valuable result of the critical study of SF. Eike Barmeyer points out
that the fear of strange beings reveals the basic human desire for direct communication, a
motif whose extreme case is total communion. He refers to the near impossibility of
communication between dissimilar beings (as in Lem's Solaris --though I think
there is evidence of the beginnings of communication at the end of that novel), and ends
with the ultimate development of communication from group-mind to cosmic-mind (as in
Stapledon's The Star Maker). Similarly, Curtis C. Smith identifies as Stapledon's
hero a humanity which is the instrument of an unnamed and unknowable mentality.
In an essay on the history and ideology of the pulp magazines Ronald M. Hahn demolishes
vigorously the claim that SF has no truck with political ideology. Appropriate quotations
from Perry Rhodan's adventures, Heinlein's novels, the Lensmen series, etc., display
obvious traces of fascism, racism, feudalism, militarism, and imperialistic chauvinism. In
his valid description of the less reflective works Hahn finds that they prize the status
quo, superficial amusement, and the expansion of a reactionary ideology (in contrast with
the great utopian writings of the past). After comparing the novels of Wells and Verne,
Hans Joachim Alpers notes that the essential importance of both lies in their use of the
possible extensions of reality rather than of subjective prophecies or presentations of an
ideal world.
The last two pieces in the book are by Franz Rottensteiner: a bibliography essential to
those who want to do research in the field, and a hard-hitting critical essay--itself an
example of the forthright criticism he calls for. He is unimpressed with the New Wave and
with the reworkings of old myths, a process he considers crude, inelegant, and boring. But
along with his criticism of Ellison, Spinrad, Zelazny, and Delany he praises Thomas M.
Disch and J.B. Ballard for penetrating style and interesting atmosphere. Rottensteiner
suggests finally that the answer to the question on the potentialities of SF depends on
the ability of gifted writers to handle futurological problems without simplifying the
theoretical niveau of modern science.
Rottensteiner states the purpose of his "Almanac" Polaris clearly.
It should present a selection of early and modern SF, especially by European writers, and
critical essays, and this the first volume contains stories by Lem, Lasswitz, Gérard
Klein, Fitz-James O'Brien, and Vladimir Colin, as well as essays by himself, Lem, Plank,
and Szpakowska, all calling for a sense of ethical responsibility and maturity on the part
of those who produce SF in any medium. The only one of these that has not appeared in
English is Malgorzata Szpakowska's analysis of Lem, which suggests that Lem is concerned
with the structure of the given world at least as much as with "literature." In
his view, science and technology have brought us to the point where we can choose the
biological make-up of humanity. This fact reforms the existential condition of man: there
are now no constants, only variables. SF should fill the present void with the creation of
values. Therefore, its flight into the sphere of empty game or of trickery is extremely
irresponsible and an offense against aesthetics and morality. SF has before it a task
which science cannot assume--of giving answers as to the purposes of technological
development. Szpakowska concludes that Lem has displayed a tendency to move into the realm
of philosophy, possibly out of despair over today's SF.
-- Alice Carol Garr
The Dilemma of SF film criticism
Writers on SF films--such as John Baxter,
Science Fiction in the Cinema (International Film
Series 1979), Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster," in her Against
Interpretation (1965), J.P. Bouyxou, La science fiction au cinéma
(Paris: Union
Generale d'editions 1971), and the various contributors to Focus
on the Science Fiction Film, ed. William Johnson(Prentice-Hall 1972)--confront a basic problem: not only is the genre as difficult to
define as that of written SF, but there seems to be a consensus that it is drastically
different in its use or abuse of elements that have come to be recognized as standard in
SF. Instead of a more or less scientific exploration of a hypothetical problem in some
kind of future space (social, technological, historical, or cultural), the films have
decidedly apocalyptic tone. They seem to deal with the themes of loss of individuality and
the threat of knowledge, most neatly combined in a scientific experiment gone wrong and
thereby unleashing a monstrous force upon the world (cf Baxter, p. 11); as Susan Sontag's
famous essay suggests, the SF film is characterized by the imagination of disaster.
There may be various reasons for this difference. For one, there is a literary
tradition for SF going back to the Renaissance and beyond, whereas the cinema in its two
modes, the documentary and the fictional, has a very short tradition consistently
stressing the effects of the marvelous and strange, not only explicitly as in Méliès's A
Trip to the Moon (1902) but also implicitly as in the documentary shock effect of
Lumière's train charging into the station. Secondly, the socioeconomic conditions of the
marketplace for the two products are different. Nearly all writers venturing into
Hollywood are struck by the budgetary pressures on the "aesthetic" object (cf
Robert A. Heinlein's "Shooting Destination Moon" in Focus) and, like
Pierre Kast, find that "the childish socioeconomic structure of film production gives
rise to childish films" (Focus, p. 69). The marketplace conditions for SF
writing, within the history of pulp magazines and paperback publishing, might have been
somewhat similar, but the difference in financial scope means a qualitative increase in
the pressures toward "childishness."
Perhaps the most important reason suggested is that the difference between SF writing
and SF cinema might be inherent in the two media. Sontag, for example, suggests that the
film medium is necessarily strong on the immediate representation of the extraordinary and
its sensuous elaboration but weak on science, whereas language is eminently suited for the
abstract play of ideas but cumbersome when it comes to direct description. John Baxter,
similarly, argues that an SF film is an intellectual impossibility, usually succeeding as
cinema in proportion to the degree in which it fails as SF; the resulting compromise
leaves us with a sensuous medium which can provide us with the poetry of the atomic age,
but is separated from the traditions of either cinema or SF. Many film makers and
novelists echo these assumptions about the nature of the two media: Alain Renais, among
others, contrasts the concrete descriptive immediacy through which an image reveals
anything and everything, with the subtle exploratory power of words through which an SF
writer is perfectly free not to describe the monster, or whatever, in detail (Focus,
p. 166).
But his argument is only superficially cogent. A film maker like Eisenstein based his
whole aesthetics on the assumption that he could indeed express anything on film. His
proposal, at one time, to film Marx's Das Kapital indicates that he found the
more subtle levels of abstraction and emotion simply a challenge to bring out the
neglected power of cinema as a narrative medium. The complex relationship between sound
and image, description and narration, in, say, a Bresson film, suggests that the
distinctions between the two media are by no means easy to define. And Kubrick himself,
according to Arthur C. Clarke -- The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Signet 1972), p.
189--has declared that if something can be written, he can film it, a point that Clarke
seems willing to concede him, at least if constraints of time and money are removed.
These questions raise the important issue of the relationship between SF and words. For
it makes a difference if one assumes that the genre of SF is a purely literary one, and
thus can be translated into another medium only under great stress, or if one argues that
the genre is not confined to literature but can--like, say, the pastoral--be used in
different modes and media. In fact, most definitions of SF are designed to accommodate
primarily prose narratives: there is comparatively little SF in poetry or drama, and what
little there is frequently takes its place among other works not in SF but in
"mainstream" literature.
Given the generic confusion in the area, it is hardly surprising that most writing
about SF films is vague or arbitrary on definitions and weak or inconsistent in aesthetic
judgments. A writer like J.P. Bouyxou, for example, because he rejects the reactionary
politics that he sees as a necessary consequence of the socioeconomic basis of the movie
industry, ends up with such a tight definition of the SF film--as an exploration of a
parallel world--that he can find only a limited number of films to fit the genre (pp.
23-24,147,416), and those films seem much less SF than simply examples of an avant-garde
aesthetic (an aesthetic, by the way, which in this case seems based on the logical, if
absurd, notion that all film by definition is a narrative generated by technological
means, and thus a kind of science fiction). Baxter's opinion on the intellectual
impossibility of the genre and on its specific sensuousness makes him particularly
disposed to appreciate the pale grey flatness of, say, Jack Arnold's films (It Came
from Outer Space, 1953, The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), their skillful
use of the medium and its devices, such as the exploitation of the frame as stage, and the
creation of tension by character rather than style. Truffaut has argued that it is this
stress on the texture of everyday life that is important in grade Z films (Focus,
p. 48), but Baxter's approach prevents him from going beyond this perception to a more
clearly defined aesthetic criterion for why a given SF film is better than any other.
The problem with much of this kind of writing is that a formal analysis rapidly finds
itself in a dilemma. In order to judge the significance of formal phenomena that otherwise
would not have much aesthetic validity, the critic begins to assess their typicalness as
evidence of a sociocultural pop mythology, and what started out as a formal analysis
quickly turns into a kind of pseudo-allegorical interpretation of prevailing patterns of
audience behavior. This is certainly true of Sontag's essay, which moves from the
aesthetics of destruction in formal terms towards a thematic allegory in which the imagery
of disaster is seen as the sign of an inadequate response to the human condition in the
20th century and indicates a morally neutralizing complicity with the abhorrent. In many
ways this movement is contrary to the whole character of Sontag's critical stance; that
she should follow it when writing about SF films seems indicative.
In many ways, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a touchstone for the
dilemma of SF film criticism. Thematically, it clearly belongs to the genre; yet all those
more or less formalistic categories devised to validate the genre to date--to make, say, a
film like Godzilla (1955) an object of interest--seem ludicrously out of place
with 2001. Consequently, SF fans find it impure, while film fans with aesthetic
predilections find it naive and pretentious. Baxter sees it as a space-age documentary
which--since film as a medium is less precise than words--is beautiful but whose point is
soon forgotten or lost. Bouyxou finds in it a "documentary frigidity" except for
the "decorative extravagance" of the Jupiter trip. Harry Geduld, on the other
hand, viewing the film in a tradition that goes back to Méliès, finds that it is
curiously anti-humanist and that it takes its own pretentiousness with deadly seriousness
(Focus, p. 146). Michel Ciment finds that "Kubrick has conceived a film
which in one stroke has made the whole science-fiction cinema obsolete," and
recognizes that "what makes any critical approach to 2001 unusually
difficult is the film's specifically visual quality, which sets it outside all the
familiar categories of the cinema" (Focus, pp. 135, 140).
Ultimately, of course, the polarization of opinion into those who want to keep their
pleasures simple, their genres pure, and popular tastes clearly removed from the
celebration of kulchur, and those who grudgingly admit that the popular taste occasionally
achieves something of lasting significance, seems futile. The importance of Kubrick's
achievement is surely not that he brought a kind of metaphysical pretension to a
"trivial" genre, or that he developed a popular genre with a visual virtuosity
that takes it beyond its generic value (although he may have done both things). Rather,
his film is important because it brings to bear on this genre all the economic,
technological, and aesthetic resources of a major undertaking--and at the same time
presents an analysis of the aesthetic-social conditions of design underlying such an
undertaking, in terms of perceptual strategies, cultural habits, or expressive
conventions. In other words, it is simultaneously an SF film and a cinematic commentary on
the rules or constraints that govern our present conception of such films (and of SF
itself). As Michel Ciment hints, the projection into the future of the moment when
scientific exploration reaches its boundaries and encounters a science beyond space and
time (i.e. magic) becomes an analysis of the scientific and cultural conditions that
govern our present description of the world. That description, the shapes, colors, forms,
textures, rhythms of everything from weightless toilets to interplanetary communication
problems, is explored with almost limitless virtuosity by Kubrick. In this way he has
turned to his advantage what Guy Gauthier describes as one of the most puzzling paradoxes
of SF, namely, the fact that the artist's imagination can reach out ahead of science
within certain limits, "but not ahead of art, that is ahead of itself" (Focus,
p. 98). It is Kubrick's self-conscious awareness of all these conditions that takes his
film beyond the traditional genre distinctions, and indicates the directions of the
criticism we now need. It is not enough simply to group together certain works on the
basis of more or less vague thematic similarities. Surely any attempt to come to terms
with SF as a genre will at least either have to place it within the larger tradition of
literary history, or contemplate it, ahistorically, as one of many cultural forms (such as
pastoral, utopian literature, myths) available at any given moment to the artist.
Similarly, SF films can only be understood and analyzed either in the context of the
history of cinema itself, or, alternatively, as one of many narrative modes imaginatively
and socially available in the medium. The analysis of the complex interactions of such
points of view has barely begun.
-- Peter Ohlin
Some German Writings on SF
German SF criticism can be said to have begun with the valiant, though
notably unsuccessful attempt of the Karl Rauch publishing house in 1952 to start an SF
series in hardcover. The four volumes published--Jack Williamson's The Humanoids, Campbell's
The Incredible Planet, Asimov's I, Robot, and the anthology
Überwindung von Raum und Zeit compiled by
Dr.
Gotthard Günther--were all accompanied
by lengthy comments written by editor Günther. Employing a highly sophisticated
philosophical vocabulary, they were much better than the books themselves. Günther is the
author of an attempt to formulate a new metaphysics and of a book on the possible
consciousness of machines, and has some reputation as a philosopher. Thus, German SF
criticism characteristically began at the highest level of philosophical abstraction. For
Dr. Günther, SF stories were mythic fairy tales, suggesting a new type of metaphysics
appropriate for mankind's conquest of space. He didn't think that existing SF achieved
that mythos, but was only a forerunner looking into the promised land, without being able
to enter it, just reserving the space for a new "American fairy tale"--a fiction
denying the philosophical axiom of the uniqueness of reality, and dealing with
metaphysically extreme conditions of possible future experiences. He believed that SF
ideas foreshadowed a new metaphysics by implicitly criticizing the Western philosophical
tradition: the inviolability of the soul (Campbell's "Who Goes There?"), the
belief that man is the peak of evolution (Simak's "Desertion"), the priority of
theoretical reason or pure will (Weinbaum's "The Lotus Eaters"), the accuracy of
notions of time (H. Beam Piper's "Time and Time Again") or of the relationship
between thinking and reality (Van Vogt's "The Monster" or Lewis Padgett's
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves").
Dr. Günther
also
summarized his theoretical basis for SF in Die
Entdeckung Amerikas und die Sache der amerikanischen Weltraumliteratur (Düsseldorf
& Bad Salzig: Karl Rauch Verlag 1952), a companion volume to his premature series.
When the SF wave later reached Germany, it was in the form of first dime novels and still
later pocket books. Criticism, however, came before the thing itself became generally
known, the pioneering study being
Dr. Martin Schwonke's
dissertation, Vom Staatsroman zur Science Fiction: Eine
Untersuchung über Geschichte und Funktion der naturwissenschaftlich-technischen Utopie
(Stuttgart:Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1957, Göttinger Abhandlungen zur Soziologie, vol. 2). Dr.
Schwonke continued Günther's theorizing in thin air, "far above the valleys where
the books are" (as Peter Nicholls put it in a review of another critic in Foundation
4). Dr. Schwonke is a sociologist, and this also set a pattern. Not one of the many
existing German studies is interested in SF as literature or narration. Also conspicuous
by their absence are biographies, bibliographies, and histories. Most writers on SF in
Germany start from some abstract method and principle, where the literary artifacts
considered are but a means to an end. They are summarized in capsule reviews and their
ideas classified insofar as they support the thesis that the author set out to prove. In a
recent article in the reputable German weekly Die Zeit ("Wissenschaftsmärchen.
Der Science-Fiction-Boom in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland," No. 39, 29 September
1972), Krysmanski stressed again that the differences between good and bad SF don't matter
much; only as an indicator of social trends and ideas is it worthwhile.
Schwonke sees a direct and linear development from the Staatsromane (17th-18th
century "state novels") and utopias to modem science fiction, listing much the
same authors and books that appear in many a history of SF: More, Campanella, Andreae,
Bacon, Wilkins, Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac. For him SF is a manifestation of
"Ver”nderungsdenken" (dynamic thinking). Schwonke opposes the idea that utopian
thinking is a secularization of the eschatological idea of Eden, for man does not master
nature according to the role ordained by God. Rather, he is a rebellious, autonomous
creature for whom nature is but a resource to create something transcending nature. What
utopian thinking shares with fairy tales is a tendency for wish-fulfillment, the desire
for another and better world. Under the influence of the progress of science and
technology, however, utopian goals have lost their previous importance: the act of
creation itself, the ability to make something, has become essential in SF. The emphasis
has shifted from the realization of the best world to change as such, to a mental
experimenting with all possible alternatives, not only with desired or abhorred ones.
Utopia develops into a much wider field of conjectural fiction: "The utopist, who was
the constructor shaping the blueprint of the world in order to present it to mankind as a
desirable goal, turns into the staff-strategist who prepares campaign plans for all
contingencies that the future may hold in store."
This line of generalizing criticism was continued in
Hans-Jürgen Krysmanski's Die
utopische Methode: Eine literatur- und wissenssoziologische Untersuchung deutscher
utopischer Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts (Köln und Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag 1963). Starting with a detailed discussion of eight important German
utopian novels by Conrad, Kellerman, Hauptmann, Döblin, Hesse, Werfel, and Jünger,
Krysmanski tries to arrive at a formulation of "utopian method." He perceives
this to be vital nowadays in SF, which is discussed only marginally in his book. Heavily
influenced by Raymond Ruyer's L'utopie et les utopies (Paris: P.V.F., 1950),
Krysmanski like Schwonke defines utopia as a proving ground for new possibilities. He
differs with Schwonke mainly in that he denies a direct line of development from the
"state novels" to modern "progress-oriented thought," since SF often
isn't directly concerned with the future, e.g. in the experiments with time and dimension.
It is rather that the "doors of perception" (Huxley) have been opened in all
directions; characteristic for SF is its non-directional, free-wheeling speculation, which
also offers a chance for the utopian novel sensu stricto to fulfill its cognitive
function. "Therefore SF must be interpreted as an impulse toward the utopian novel,
as a vigorous application of utopian method which, when it includes in its experiments
social themes, becomes indistinguishable from utopia." That is, utopia becomes a
special case of SF.
Krysmanski, and to some degree Schwonke, have been sharply criticised
in the introduction to Amhelm Neusüss's
anthology Utopie: Begriff und Phänomen des Utopischen
(Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1968, Soziologische Texte No. 44). Neusüss points
out that the purpose of utopia wasn't and isn't just the construction of a different, but
of a more humane world. He also maintains that realization is essential to
utopia, whereas Krysmanski had treated it rather as an autonomous method of gaining
knowledge in a speculative way. Neusüss also disbelieves SF could (as was claimed by
Schwonke) serve as "prognostic orientation," that task having been taken over by
futurology. Neither "prognostic orientation" not a mature expression of utopian
hope, SF is restricted to dim myths and fairy tales of wish-fulfillment.
Jörg Hienger's
dissertation Literarische Zukunftsphantastik
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1972) is in many respects the best German
study of SF. Hienger offers much more detailed studies of individual stories than either
Schwonke or Krysmanski, and he extracts from them an SF philosophy of change in convincing
detail. The key quotation is from an Asimov essay ("Social Science Fiction" in
Bretnor's Modern Science Fiction): "Either to resist change, any change, and
hold savagely to the status quo, or to advocate change, a certain change, and no other
change. Neither of these views is flexible. Both are static." SF offers a
phantasmogoria of aimless changes, without distinguishing between desired and undesired
changes. In SF, change itself is more important than its results. "Because the
results of change are themselves subjected to change, it is, according to SF, an
anthropocentric naivete to judge changes only from the viewpoint of aimed at or dreamed of
changes. Of course, the march of events can temporarily further human aims and hopes, or
thwart them. But on the whole the unceasing change of things existing, going beyond any
goal reached, and making those given up as attainable suddenly appear in our grasp, has no
intrinsic goal, and even less any transcendental goal" (pp. 178-179). This analysis,
which is substantiated in chapter after chapter, examining some of the most important SF
topics (such as "Future Without Goal," the cataclysmic story, "Experiments
with Consecutio Temporum," "Individuals Divided and Multiplied"), seems to
touch upon the essence of the Anglo-American SF. It should perhaps be added that this has
very little to do with "open" or "closed" systems, and much more with
philosophical depth or shallowness. The more modest, relativistic "social
engineering" advocated by Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies is
as absent from science fiction as are the holistic Marxist notions of change. (What
Popper's attitude to SF concepts of change would be may be gauged from his caustic remarks
in The Poverty of Historicism about people who think that they have discovered
for the first time the problem of change, which is "one of the oldest problems in
speculative metaphysics.") Hienger recognizes change as the essence of SF, but
without seeing any special virtue in it, since "the simple concept that our world is
changing, that the old is succeeded by the new, has of course never remained hidden from
mankind" (P. 12). SF affirms a change without meaning, and thus may appear
reactionary to progressive minds and radical to conservative ones. Hienger's reasoning
yields some interesting insights, the most important of which is perhaps a distinction
between dystopias by non-SF writers like Orwell, with their hopeless timelessness, and
some dystopias by SF writers such as Vonnegut's Player Piano or Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451, which are true to the SF credo, offering perspectives of endless turns of
history.
Rather less valuable than Hienger's book is Vera Graaf's Homo
Futurus (Hamburg and Düsseldorf. Claasen, 1971), a Ph.D. thesis
which can serve as a popular introduction to SF without offering new insights or deep
interpretations. Graaf begins by neatly arranging the various definitions of the genre,
says something about forerunners and the history of the field, magazines, editors and
anthologies, fandom and publishing, and then concentrates on several main topics: cosmic
visions and atomic dooms, future societies (stressing especially the "giant
city" and the "frontier of space," quoting the theories of historian
Frederick Jackson Turner), overpopulation, manipulation, evolution and mutation, robots,
and the expansion of consciousness. A chapter on utopia and dystopia, which also covers
the relationship between SF and myth, concludes the book.
In chapters arranged like a space-flight, two young scholars,
Michael Pehlke and Norbert
Lingfeld, stride over the ideological ground of science fiction in their
book Roboter und Gartenlaube: Ideologie und Unterhaltung
in der Science-Fiction-Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1970). The subtitle
about "ideology and entertainment" indicates the aim of the authors'
spear-thrust. From the viewpoint of German leftist thinking, they evaluate SF as the
defender of the eternal status quo and as a means of conscious and unconscious political
indoctrination. False consciousness in the Marxist sense (i.e., a false understanding of
the relations conditioned by economic production) is, according to them, the inherent
cause for the inferior quality of SF. They put up Soviet SF as an alternative, but they do
not analyze it, it just serves as the invisible background for their judgements. What to
SF authors is "openness," a trying out of conflicting possibilities, is to them
"that chaotic mess of various ideologies," diagnosed by the socialist
philosopher Ernst Bloch as typical for the world view of fascism (p. 59). They deal mostly
with writers like Asimov, Heinlein or Anderson, but also discuss the notoriously fascist
German dime novel series Perry Rhodan. The book is well-written, and valuable as
an exposition of a clearly stated ideological position. One cannot help noticing, however,
that many of the authors criticized for their open or hidden ideological content are just
as popular in the socialist countries as in the U.S.A., e.g., Isaac Asimov, or even some
stories by Poul Anderson. Also, they do not seem to have read the English originals but
only their defaced German translations.
Written on a similarly critical basis, but much more valuable, is
Manfred Nagl's Ph.D. thesis Science
Fiction in Deutschland: Untersuchungen zur Genese, Soziographie und Ideologie der
phantastischen Massenliteratur (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für
Volkskunde 1972, Untersuchungen des Ludwig-Uhland-Instituts der Universitat Tübingen,
vol. 30), not the least for its wealth of material. Nagl discusses not just those books
that can be found in any historical study of SF, but unearths a lot of forgotten German SF
stories from 1780 to the present day and other European SF current in Germany, e.g., A
jövö század regénye [The Novel of the Coming Century], 1872, by the
popular Hungarian writer Mór Jokai. The author provides detailed and persuasive
expositions of the psychological mechanisms at work in these works.
Nagl is sharply critical of Krysmanski and in particular Schwonke, whose
philological-eclectic methods he attacks as sociologically indefensible. They concentrated
only on a few works of higher quality, overrated them, and declared everything else, i.e.
about 90% of SF, not to be SF proper. Being a folklorist, Nagl examines the representative
mass of SF, and his interpretations follow the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershon
Legman. Convinced that SF should be socially aware and progressive, he denies its descent
from utopia, understanding it rather as a genre arising apart from utopia and in direct
opposition to it, as a substitution for revolution and a literature of conformism,
supporting and cementing existing social structures. Like Aldiss in his Billion Year
Spree, Nagl puts SF into a larger context, but his context is not the wider world of
literature, but rather the dim field of pseudo-science, crankhood, mysticism and popular
superstition: all the books about hollow earths, Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, the occult, secret
knowledge and hidden powers, and the many pamphlets simplifying and distorting
evolutionary ideas. There he perceives the true springs of SF, and lovingly traces the
incorporation of those dubious ideas into SF. Small wonder then that he sees Nazi Germany
as SF come true, the realization of all science-fictional dreams of fictional sciences,
the crowning gothic horror of them all. He points out how this tradition was continued
after World War II without a break, in particular in the fascist Perry Rhodan dime
novels (about which Nagl has written an excellent analysis in the journal Zietnahe
Schularbeit 22 [1969], No. 4/5, April/May 1969: "Unser Mann im All").
Perhaps Nagl has a somewhat simplified idea of the interaction between fiction and
reality, but the examples he quotes are certainly horrible enough. The weakness of Nagl's
method becomes most obvious when he discusses a writer like H.G. Wells, who appears in his
book only as a highly skilled horror writer managing to use even the silence for shock
effects ("the silence fell like a thunderclap," in The War of the Worlds).
He is also unable to appreciate the genuine merit of limited scientific ideas, where they
don't appear together with social sophistication. Science Fiction in Deutschland
is a controversial, overloaded and jargon-prone book, but highly interesting, always
stimulating and sometimes brilliant.
Less than brilliant is Hermann Buchner's
Programmiertes Glück: Sozialkritik in der utopischen
Sowjetliteratur (Wien, Frankfurt, Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1970).
Philosophically naive in its generalizations, it nevertheless deserves some interest as a
study of that neglected part of SF, the Soviet variety. Buchner knows only an insufficient
sample of Soviet SF (principally Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Tertz [Siniavsky], Dneprov's Island
of the Crabs and two novels by the Strugatskis, Hard to be a God and Monday
Begins on Saturday), but despite this and a tendency to seek out anti-Soviet trends,
he is stimulating when discussing particular works, especially the Strugatskis, whom he
has translated quite well into German. In the opposite camp is Hartmut
Lück, a student currently working on a thesis about Soviet SF. He is a
believer in German leftism of the Chinese branch, and he judges all works of fiction
according to how they conform to his dogmatic notions of the true path. Representative for
his work is the article "Echo aus der Zukunft" (on Efremov's Hour of the
Bull) in Sozialistische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Gesellschaft No. 8/9
(October 1971) or his article "Die sowjetische wissenschaftlich-fantastische
Literatur" in the SF issue of the same periodical (No. 18/19, July 1973).
Among bibliographic items one must mention
Heinz Bingenheimer's Transgalaxis: Katalog der deutschsprachigen utopisch-phantastischen Literatur 1460-1960 (Friedrichsdorf/Taunus: Transgalaxis, 1959-60). Although far from complete, not always reliable--it contains items
that are neither SF nor fantasy--and ignorant of proper rules of bibliography, it is the
only listing of its kind generally available.
SF has also entered the classroom. The textbook publisher Diesterweg
has put out two volumes entitled Science Fiction,
both edited by Friedrich Leiner and
Jürgen Gutsch (Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, 1972), the one
offering SF stories, the other being a handbook for teachers with a capsule history of SF,
notes on the authors and on SF publishing, quotations about SF (including a good listing
of existing definitions), a list of recommended stories and a bibliography of secondary
literature.
The current SF boom has resulted in a number of articles in the general press and in
trade journals, mostly dealing with commercial aspects of the field, but occasionally also
containing some criticism. For instance: "Welle mit Zukunft" in the magazine
Der
Spiegel (No. 11, March 6, 1972), "Die Lust am Spekulativen" by Ronald Hahn
and Werner Fuchs in Buchmarkt No. 11 and 12, 1972, or a series of articles by
Gert Heidenreich, Jürgen vom Scheidt, Anton Kenntemich, Hans Joachim Alpers and Manfred
Bosch in Publikation No. 3 and 4 (March, April, 1972).
Although SF generally isn't taken seriously as literature in Germany, there are some
reputable German critics with a great interest in it, most notably the brilliant writer
Helmut Heissenbüttel and the critic Heinrich Vormweg (see, e.g., his "Gedankenspiel
mit unbegrenzter Möglichkeit," Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 14/15, 1970, or
"Wo die Zukunft schon begonnen hat," same paper, March 22, 1972). The great
German newspapers will nowadays review SF books; but the only writers who get detailed
attention are Vonnegut, sometimes Bradbury, and always Stanislaw Lem.
Mention should also be made of Science Fiction Times (ed. Hans Joachim Alpers,
D-285 Bremerhaven, Weissenburgerstr. 6, Germany; DM 18 per year), a semi-professional
magazine devoted to SF. It contains reviews, longer essays, notes on recent writings on
SF, bibliographies of new books, and really covers all aspects of the SF field. It is the
most valuable of several dozen magazines produced by the very active and numerous German
SF fandom.
-- Franz Rottensteiner
Back to Home