Some historical/critical contexts and questions for class

"Extravagant Fiction Today... Cold Fact Tomorrow."
--slogan of Gernsback's Amazing Stories magazine, premiering April 1926.

"By 'scientifiction'... I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story-- a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision." --Hugo Gernsback, quoted in Fiedler's introduction to In Dreams Awake, 11.

Question: how can we talk about Hugo Gernsback as an originator of "science fiction" when his definition of the genre referred back to predecessors like Verne, Wells, and Poe? Where did Verne, Wells, and Poe get their ideas about fiction from? Do questions like this lead us into a kind of infinite regress? Is the pursuit of literary "origins" for the genre a dead-end, as Fiedler suggests? He quotes H.G. Wells, who "objected on principle to all such ancestor-hunting": "Literary criticism... was dominated by the medieval assumption that... whatever is worth doing has already been done... anybody who turned up was treated as an aspirant Dalai Lama is treated, and scrutinized for evidence of his predecessor's soul." But, as Fiedler notes, "his warning has gone unheeded, as later academic critics have established even longer pedigrees [for SF], beginning with Plato and including Lucian, Kepler, Campanella, Edmond Rostand, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley..."

The first writers for Amazing Stories were not litterateurs, but people like "Philip Nowlan, a financial writer for the Philadelphia Retail Ledger", and "Chicago businessman John F. Dille". [Science Fiction Comics, 8.]

Related Question: Is there, as Fiedler argues, "little point... in relating an essentially popular form to a 'Great Books' past"? Is SF an "essentially popular form"? For this judgement has consequences for Fiedler's other judgements about SF and its possibilities, as his essay concludes (pp. 22-23):

To some older writers, therefore, the end of all this [the classic paradigm of SF] seems an unmitigated disaster: the breakup of the last organic literary community in the Western world, inside of which the confrontation of reader and writer was not mediated by critics, but happened face to face... [Whereas younger writers would argue that] such writers to some degree merited the contempt they received [from the mainstream literary establishment], since their works were marred by "slapdash writing, sloppiness, and vulgarity"... [I claim that] it is precisely out of "slapdash writing," "sloppiness", and especially "vulgarity", as exemplified in, say, Shakespeare, Cooper, Dickens, and Twain, that myth is endlessly reborn, the dreams we dream awake.

In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delany fiercely objected to Fiedler's conclusions, and argued that "slapdash writing, sloppiness, and vulgarity" have never and would never make great literature-- and accused Fiedler and like-minded critics bent on reading SF as an "essentially popular genre" of sabotaging the newborn literary revolution of the new SF of the sixties and seventies. So who is right? Should we import "literary" values into the reading and writing of SF? Or does SF have its own native set of values by which it must be evaluated? Should SF writers be taken to task for their ignorance of what's happening in the rest of the literary world-- the innovations, the possibilities opening up and already opened? Or is there something that stands to be lost with that innocence? (For more arguments on this question, see lots of essays by Bruce Sterling, Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. LeGuin, Thomas M. Disch, and Samuel R. Delany.)

from Science Fiction Comics, 7:

In 1924, astronomer Carl Hubble announced the existence of galaxies outside our own. In 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. Stainless steel, electric toasters, and radar were the new marvels...
In 1904, at the age of twenty, Hugo Gernsback invented a new kind of battery and emigrated from Luxembourg to the United States in hope of patenting it. A year later, he was publishing a radio catalog and selling home radio kits by mail... In 1908, he published the first magazine about electricity and radio-- Modern Electrics. In a 1911 issue, between articles on "Wireless Telegraphy" and a "Photographic Phonograph", Gernsback began serializing a novel he had written called Ralph 124C 41+. Set in the year 2660, Gernsback's story was a tour of the technological wonderland awaiting us: vending machines, aluminum foil, and night baseball...

from Leslie Fiedler's introduction to the collection In Dreams Awake, 19:

[SF writers in the age of pulp science fiction were not] aware that all taboos concerning erotic scenes and explicit erotic language had been long since abandoned. In the realm of pulp
s-f, obscenity and profanity beyond an occasional "Great Space!" was strictly forbidden-- as was the sex act itself and any reference to human genitals, except as projected onto the Machines of the Future. But... the religio-genital power of those devices for Super Drive and Hyper-penetration of Space and Time! No wonder the abandoned or jettisoned women in standard s-f (Tom Godwin's much-reprinted "The Cold Equations" is an instance) had to struggle so hard, and most often in vain, against the eroticized technology of their men. Casual readers of the genre may end up believing that the essential function of the stereotyped men in pulp science fiction is to deliver stereotyped women from extraterrestrial Bug-Eyed Monsters. But in the best-loved stories of the classic period, it is rather to sacrifice them to machines.

Science Fiction Comics, 26:

[Basil] Wolverton's first comic book work came later in 1938 when he drew a short science fiction series... [his] aliens and alien landscapes made his mind-perverting stories unforgettable. An incredible master of the grotesque (he won a 1946 Life magazine contest for drawing the ugliest woman, "Lena the Hyena"), Wolverton peppered his stories with warty, wrinkled people, plants, and rocks.
His aliens often looked like a cross between a gherkin pickle and the male sex organ. His characters clambered in womblike caves and over mammary mountains. Nearly every figure, shape, and shadow in a Wolverton story could be broken down into penile or vulval counterparts.
"Sig Freud would probably go raving over my stuff," Wolverton said. "I know I draw things that look like all kinds of organs and glands."

Question: is SF fundamentally or primarily about wish fulfillment? If it is, what kinds of wishes does it appeal to? New Wave radicals like Norman Spinrad seemed to argue that it appealed in rather sneaky, unconscious, and covert ways to wishes for power and domination. On the other hand, what's so bad about wish fulfillment (as long as the wishes are relatively innocent, perhaps)? Isn't all literature about that, as Sig Freud indeed argued? (Freud claimed that writers and artists were doing a sort of daydreaming: whereas most people act out their unrealistic, illicit, impossible, or forbidden wishes in their dreams, creative people can act these out in works of fiction, paintings, and poems.)

Related Question: when and where can we/should we bring moral judgements into our reading of SF? (Of literature in general?) Is literature somehow "beyond" ethical scrutiny? Or do writers have certain responsibilities? (Responsibilities to whom or what? To their audiences? To ethical/political standards? To "the truth"?) Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his critique of the horror genre ("Amoral Responsibility", in SF Eye #8, Winter '91, pp. 54-7), argues that authors of fiction can be considered as the creators of a fictional "world" in which "the characters, and the relations of the characters... reveal something of the author's view of what life 'really' is-- or should be... Every fiction prescribes as well as (or more than) it describes". Hence, "Every fiction is political". Is this point of view puritanical? Wilson insists that it is not-- and that, on the contrary, he is an anti-puritan. His criticism of horror fiction is that horror portrays a world where sexuality is always a kind of violent assault on the body, where "Life, love, pleasure-- all is death, all is shit and disease". Do science-fictional worlds have a prescriptive "worldview"? (Stanislaw Lem, remember, claims that the distinguishing mark of the SF universe is that it is amoral!) One last possibility: could one criticize the sort of SF that Fiedler is talking about when he speaks of "women sacrificed to machines" simply on an aesthetic basis-- that is, could one criticize it not on moral grounds, but simply because (as Fiedler notes) it relies so heavily on "stereotypes" of human beings, on clunky clichés? (See Joanna Russ' hilarious "The Clichés From Outer Space", in Dark Side of the Moon...)

from Samuel R. Delany, Silent Interviews (Wesleyan University Press: USA, 1994), pp. 67-69:

Johan Heye: In your early years as a writer you were often mentioned as a representative of the New Wave in SF. Is this label at all meaningful today?
Samuel R. Delany: The real question is, of course, was it ever meaningful-- and if so, in what way?
At the time when I was first being called 'a representative of the New Wave'... practically every writer who had emerged in the sixties was being lumbered with the term.
This is a little sad, because there was a real, vigorous, and talented group of writers who were known as the New Wave at the end of the sixties-- a group of interesting and energetic writers, whose output was very important for the development of science fiction. But they were a group with which, though I was friends with a number of them, I had almost nothing at all to do, at least in writerly terms.
These writers-- Aldiss, Ballard, Brunner, Disch, Sladek, Zoline and a number of others-- centered around Michael Moorcock's British SF magazine New Worlds [circa 1966-1970]...
Johan Heye: Do you feel that you as a writer belong to any group, trend, or movement?
Samuel R. Delany: Right now? No. During the mid-sixties, you could responsibly associate me with the Dangerous Visions writers-- the writers who were, however briefly, organized around Harlan Ellison's multivolume Dangerous Visions anthology project.
One thing that accounts for the 'New Wave' mystification and obfuscation I've been discussing is a situation occasionally written about in my critical books on science fiction.
By the mid-sixties, the sea of science fiction had grown large enough to support several productive islands. The most important of these islands was the historical New Wave, in England. Two other islands were both in the United States. One was organized around Damon Knight's continuing hardcover anthology series, Orbit, which went through some twenty-one volumes. The other was the much broader if somewhat ill-formed island around Dangerous Visions-- two immense volumes, which have several times been reprinted, broken up into smaller blocks. All three islands-- New Worlds (focus of the historical New Wave), Orbit, and Dangerous Visions-- had a different density, a different coherence, and a different organization; and all three represented different aesthetic and ideological priorities. As I said, my particular island was Dangerous Visions.
But even so, half a dozen groupings of SF writers including me that one might make would strike me as reasonable. Despite their homes on (or off) their various islands, during the sixties I always felt that Joanna Russ... Thomas Disch... Roger Zelazny... and myself formed a kind of quartet. All four of us (Russ, Disch, Zelazny, and myself) are contemporaries among whom, in one way or another, some kind of dialogue has constantly gone on since at least 1966...
So, you see, it's not the notion of 'a group' or 'a school' of writers that I'm opposed to. It's only the historically demonstrable inaccuracy of locating me with the New Wave that I balk at. I would have very much liked to have been a part of the New Wave. But I wasn't.

Question: what is a "genre" (or a "group", or a "school")? How do you define a genre? Can you set up a kind of "structural" definition, as Stanislaw Lem tries to do? He defines "pure" science fiction as the depiction of a world which a.) is amoral, ruled only by physical laws; b.) is unlike ours in some important respect; but which c.) is nonetheless rigorously confined to the realm of the empirically possible, as far as current scientific knowledge lets us know what is indeed possible. (You can also create a variety of other structural definitions for the SF genre-- Paul Di Filippo, for instance, suggests that the fantasy genre is oriented towards the present (the eternal "now", changeless and ageless), horror fiction oriented towards the past (buried secrets, ancient curses, the guilt of deeds done long ago), and science fiction oriented towards the future. Try coming up with your own!) The problem with structural definitions is that they often feel like Procrustean beds that you have to stretch things to fit into: you will always find something that you're sure is "science fiction" which doesn't fit into your neat set of rules for what "science fiction" must be-- which then means you have to call it an "exception to the rule", or an "impure" specimen, or an "anomaly". A structural approach also tends to imply that the boundaries of the categories it defines are somehow sacred: Lem even speaks of a kind of "incest prohibition" which does (and ought to!) prevent the intermingling of SF with other genres! A different approach would come from something like the theories of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.
Bakhtin would say that "science fiction" is a discourse produced by a discourse community of writers, readers, and critics. A discourse, for Bakhtin, is not a thing-- some solid object that exists independently of observers; it is, rather, created anew every time someone uses the word "science fiction" to describe something. (For Bakhtin, language is a living creature: when a substantial group of people (a discourse community) starts to use a word in a different way, that word changes its meaning, even if the dictionary stubbornly insists that it means what the old definition says it means.) What science fiction is, then, may fluctuate from one year to the next-- or even from one occasion to the next. A Bakhtinian critic of SF would pay great attention to figuring out what sorts of expectations the readers and writers of SF seem to share (at any given point), and to how these expectations are fulfilled or violated. He might also talk about multiple "groupings", like Delany does in the above interview-- almost nobody belongs to only one discourse community, and most of us live in several overlapping communities.
There is no concern for "purity" here-- Bakhtin liked to talk about the great times of literary innovation (as when the "novel" form was in its birth stages) as periods of a vigorous "intermingling of voices".
What sort of approach works best for you? And what sorts of considerations are affecting your choice of approaches? (If you are attracted to Lem's definition, is it because of the "rigor" of the framework he sets up? Are certain sorts of science fiction favored by that framework, and others devalued? What about in Bakhtin's theoretical understanding? Are there any pitfalls to that approach?)

from Elizabeth Hand's "Distant Fingers: Women Visionaries for the Fin-de-Millenaire" (Science Fiction Eye #8, Winter '91, 30-36):

This reliance on "rationalization" [commenting on a passage from Le Guin criticizing the reliance of writers on rational explanation of events as the product of cause-and-effect] not only results in work of surpassing dullness and juvenile execution-- gee that faster-than-light drive sure works swell! Sure glad the author went to MIT!-- it also prevents readers-- and writers, and critics-- from recognizing the new and marvelous when it really does appear... This worship of the rational... is not only somewhat philistine, it is limiting as well. Among other things, it limits writers to imagine only what falls within the narrow boundaries of their own world, of what can be extrapolated without much effort from the tidy and mundane world bounded by what is known today about stars and quarks and disease and relationships. It fails to see that there are miraculous cures within the poisons secreted by tiny tree-frogs; that the motion of a butterfly's wings can contribute to a tsunami; that there are forms of love and family besides those prescribed by the Church and State: mother, father, and biological child. And it is this that has led to the paucity of truly brilliant writing in much of the field today: a failure of vision, of imagination, of nerve.

Question: how important is science to science fiction? Is SF to be primarily defined by the way it sticks to the realm of the scientifically-possible? Should writers prioritize scientific "rationality" or imaginative "vision"? Is the science in science fiction really science, after all? Or is it pseudo-science, scientific only in tone, using technical-sounding jargon to give the appearance of substance to airy speculation? (That's a question worth asking about much of the field-- after all, faster-than-light drives, time travel, and alternate-reality travel are at the very least not as simply possible, according to current scientific knowledge, as they are portrayed in many an SF story. Does that make those stories less compelling?) Would prioritizing "dreams", "madness", "darkness", "desire", and the "irrational" (Hand) lead to a weakening of the field, in some sense-- to a loss of rigor or objectivity? Is there any such thing as objectivity? Do we live in a universe that is essentially indifferent to human interests and purposes, or are we always too caught up in those conscious and unconscious interests and purposes to even perceive any objective reality (as Dick's "Frozen Journey" might suggest)? Is psychology the ultimate science, in some sense? Does the division of the SF field into "hard SF" and "soft SF" make sense? (Hard SF is considered by some to be involved with "outer space", while its counterpart is concerned with "inner space" (Ballard); some have even spoken of a division of the field by scientific discipline-- hard SF is based around physics and chemistry, soft SF is based around biology, sociology, ecology, psychology, and anthropology...) Is non- or anti-scientific SF an escape from fiction that is forced to deal with real crises that face us-- overpopulation, pollution, drugs, diseases, ecological disaster-- all of which involve scientific understanding? (Cyberpunk authors like Sterling and Gibson, notably, insisted that SF was bound by its commitment to scientific realism to represent a plausible near-future world-- that is, a world of crumbling cities, corporate domination, and the breakdown of the boundary between human and inhuman!) When you argue these questions, what sorts of committments are you responding to?

Related question: is it possible that one of the directions we can see in the evolution of SF from New Wave to cyberpunk to slipstream is a progressive loss of interest in science? New Wave fictions usually hold on to the valuation of science while trying to steer SF discourse towards "human" interests and artistic excellence; cyberpunk is less interested in "science" (theory, discovery, rational explanation) than in "technology" (and particularly in the way, as Gibson puts it, that "the street finds its own use for things"); and slipstream novels like White Noise seem to be interested in science as much for the sake of discrediting it as the sole/final arbiter of "reality" as anything else. Do we then say that SF is changing its structure of concerns? Or that SF is losing its identity and merging with a more generalized current of "the fantastic" (to use a critical term that seems to be very hot at the moment, although vague and nebulous)?

Another related question: if SF is changing its relationship to science, what is driving that change? The wish for a "higher" level of literary appreciation? The eclipse of SF as a "predictor" of technological development? (W. S. Burroughs: "I stopped reading SF when the newspapers got more creative.")

Created 1997 br00282@binghamton.edu

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page