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Science-Fiction Stu d ies

Volu me 1
Part 2
Fall 1973
Fred ric James on.
Generic Dis continu ities
in SF: Brian Ald is s ' Stars hip. . . 57
Robert Plank.
Qu ixote's Mills :
The Man-Machine Encou nter in SF . . . 68
Stanis law Lem.
Remarks Occas ioned by
Dr. Plank's Es s ay "Qu ixote's Mills " . . . 78
Franz Rottens teiner,
James Blis h,
Urs u la K. Le Gu in,
H. Bru ce Franklin,
and Chand ler Davis .
Change, SF, and Marxis m:
Open or Clos ed Univers es ? . . . 84
Franz Rottens teiner.
Playing Arou nd with
Creation: Philip Jos e Farmer . . . 94
David Y. Hu ghes
and Robert M. Philmu s .
The Early Science Jou rnalis m
of H.G. Wells : A Chronological Su rvey . . . 98
R.D. Mu llen.
The Books and Principal Pamphlets
of H.G. Wells : A Chronological Su rvey . . . 114
Notes by Several Hand s . . . 135
54 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
Science-Fiction Stu d ies , Volu me 1, Part 2, Fall 1973, Copyright ? 1973 by
R. D. Mu llen and Darko Su vin.
SUBSCRIPTION to the fou r parts of Volu me 1 (Spring 1973, Fall
1973,
Spring 1974, Fall 1974) is $5.00. The parts ord ered s eparately are $2.00
each.
ADDRESS all commu nications to Science-Fiction Stu d ies , Department
of Englis h, Ind iana State Univers ity, Terre Hau te, Ind iana 47809.
EDITORS: R. D. Mu llen, Ind iana State
Univers ity;
Darko
Su vin,
McGill Univers ity (on leave October--Ju ly 1973-74). MANAGING EDITOR:
Elaine L. Kleiner, ISU. ASSISTANT EDITOR: Mary Lu McFall, ISU.
EDITORIAL BOARD: James Blis h, Harps d en; Gale E. Chris tians on,
ISU;
Robert G. Clou s e, ISU;
Peter Fitting, Univers ity of
Toronto;
H. Bru ce
Franklin, Menlo Park; Northrop Frye, Univers ity of Toronto; Mark R.
Hillegas , Sou thern Illinois Univers ity; David Ketterer, Sir George
Williams Univers ity; James B. Mis enheimer, ISU; Patrick Parrind er,
Cambrid ge Univers ity; Robert M. Philmu s , Loyola College of Montreal;
Franz Rottens teiner, Vienna; Donald F. Theall, McGill Univers ity.
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES pu blis hes articles res u lting from the s tu d y
of s cience fiction--inclu d ing u topian fiction, bu t not, except for pu rpos es of
comparis on and contras t, s u pernatu ral or mythological fantas y. Articles
intend ed for Science-Fiction Stu d ies s hou ld be written in Englis h, ac-
companied by an abs tract of fewer than 200 word s , and s u bmitted in two
copies conforming generally to the d ictates of the MLA s tyle s heet, except
that for cheap paperbacks or other ed itions not likely to be fou nd in
libraries , references s hou ld be to chapter rather than page (cf the next
paragraph).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA. Unles s there is ind ication to the contrary,
each book cited in thes e pages was pu blis hed in hard back in the United
States and /or the United Kingd om in the year s pecified . Information of
greater particu larity is given only when d eemed neces s ary to the valid ity
of a page reference. When the work in qu es tion has been pu blis hed
in
variou s formats and hence in variou s paginations , references are mad e
not to pages bu t to chapters of s u ch other d ivis ions as the au thor has
provid ed .
5:4 Volu me 5, Page 4.
? 5 Chapter 5--or the fifth of the s malles t d ivis ions nu mbered
continu ou s ly throu ghou t the work.
? 5:4 Book 5, Chapter 4--or s ome s imilar combination.
15
-Note 5--or
Second ary
Work Nu mber 5.
X
5=
Primary
Work Nu mber 5.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. The es s ay "Qu ixote's Mills " by Robert Plank is
a revis ed vers ion of a paper read October 10, 1971, at the Second ary
Univers e Conference, Toronto. The es s ay "On the Stru ctu ral Analys is of
Science Fiction" by Stanis law Lem, which appeared in ou r firs t is s u e, was
written in German for Qu arber Merku r No. 21, Nov. 1969, ed ited by Franz
Rottens teiner; its firs t appearance in Englis h, a s omewhat d ifferent ver-
s ion, was in SF Commentary No. 9, Feb 1970, an Au s tralian magazine
ed ited by Bru ce R. Gilles pie.
CONTRIBUTORS. The mos t recent book by FREDRIC JAMESON, Univer-
s ity of California,
San Diego, is The Pris on Hou s e of Langu age: A Critical
NOTES IN RETROSPECT 55
Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, published in this coun-
try by Princeton and in England by Oxford. ROBERT PLANK, Department
of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, has written extensively
about SF, as well as in his professional field. The second and third of
STANISLAW LEM'S novels to appear in English, The Invincible and
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, were published during the summer by
Seabury Press, along with an anthology by FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER, View
From Another Shore: Eurzopean Science Fiction. A bibliography of the
writings of JAMES BLISH appeared in the April 1972 issue of Fantasy and
Science Fiction, together with appreciations by Robert A. W. Lowndes
and Lester del Rey. URSULA K. LE GUIN is the subject of a note in our
first issue. H. BRUCE FRANKLIN has published numerous articles and
several books, including The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology
(1963), Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury (1966), the The Essential Stalin (1973). As an SF writer, CHANDLER
DAVIS, Professor of Mathematics, University of Toronto, is perhaps best
known for "Adrift on the Policy Level," which appears in Frederik Pohl's
anthology of science fiction by scientists, The Expert Dreamer.s (1962).
DAVID Y. HUGHES, author of a number of articles on Wells, is preparing a
survey of recent Wells scholarship for our next issue. ROBERT M. PHILMUS
has published several articles on SF, as well as Into the Unknown: The
Evolution of Science Fiction fr-om Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells (1970).
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES welcomes contribut ons written from the
point of view of any liberal, sceptical, or open-ended philosophy. The
opinions expressed in a signed article are those of the author and not
necessarily those of the editors, and those expressed by one of the editors.
are not necessarily those of the other.
NOTES IN RETROSPECT. MARXIST CRITICISM. As one who cut his
wisdom teeth on the radicalism of the American thirtes, I have been in-
trigued with and impressed by the recent reemergence of Marxism in
American academic criticism. I would agree with Joel Roache that in the
last few years Marxists have produced a body of work that should
"dissolve the complex of myths that add up to a portrayal of Marxist
criticism as a repetitive monolith of simplistic, reductionist assertions" (a
review in College English
34[1973]:1142).
But the role peculiar to
Marxist critics is that of making liberals and sceptics aware of the extent
to which they are intellectually the prisoners of their socioeconomic en-
vironment, and this task, like all intellectual endeavors, has its own
special tendencies to the reductionist or the a priori. So while I squirm at
the exposure of some of my own prejudices and predispositions, let me
note that I remain unconvinced of the sufficiency of Marxist theory, and
that tendencies to the reductionist and simplistic seem to me to appear
here and there in the Marxist essays in this issue. But since debating with
contributors is hardly the proper role for an editor, arguments to this ef-
fect will have to be made, if they are made at all in SFS, by other con-
tributors.
THE TEN PERCENT. With respect to popular SF we have to grant not
only the application of Sturgeon's Law but also that much of the
remaining ten percent is'pretty routine stuff, including many of the novels
and stories that have won the Hugo or Nebula award. But there is still the
56 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
saving remnant, not only those individual novels or stories that are
altogether worthwhile, but also elements of those that are otherwise
routine. So I think that students of SF have perhaps had enough" of ar-
ticles like my own attacks on A. E. van Vogt and Edgar Rice Burroughs or
like Dr. Rottensteiner's attack in this issue on Philip Jose' Farmer. This is
not to say that SFS would not welcome a new article of this nature if it
were as vigorous and persuasive as Dr. Rottensteiner's, but it is to say that
what we need most are articles that define those elements of SF that at-
tract and hold our interest despite the banalities and sentimentalities
that mar popular SF no less than other kinds of popular fiction.
SF BIBLIOGRAPHY. It seems to me that the kind of information of-
fered by most so-called histories of literature would be most readily ac-
cessible if presented directly in the form of an annotated bibliography (cf
Robert M. Philmus on Bailey's Pilgrims [SFS 1:40]), with the books
treated as abstract units rather than physical objects, and the annotations
concerned with factual matters of content, structure, and reputation
rather than with judgments on literary quality. For the last two years I
have been at work, albeit somewhat desultorily, on a book to be called
Science Fiction in English 1551-1945, or SFE for short. Since one cannot
make an adequate study of any author without considering all his work, I
have planned to include complete listings for anyone that can be thought
of as an SF author. My essay in this issue, "The Books and Principal
Pamphlets of H. G. Wells," is presented as a pattern for the kind of thing I
would like to see done for a number of writers. At the present time the
most valuable bibliographical work in SF is obviously I. F. Clarke's Tale
of the Futur)e (2nd edn 1972; ?.3.75 from the Library Association, 7
Ridgmount Street, London WCIE 7AE), which demonstrates, for all its
indispensability, that no one person can do a wholly satisfactory job of
this nature. So I would like to receive, for publication in SFS and/or even-
tual publication in SFE, bibliographical essays on SF authors, and
bibliographical notes on books by authors for whom SF was only an oc-
casional diversion.
NOTE IN CORRECTION. The original plans for SFS called for
something we have not yet got around to: aseries of notes correcting
errors that appear in more or less standard works on the history of SF.
Although it hardly qualifies as a standard work, we might as well begin
with an essay of my own; that is, with a footnote to that essay, one con-
cerned with the "three" texts of a certain novel by Victor Rousseau. In a
passage here somewhat abridged I wrote as follows in Extrapolation
8(1967):58-59. "It is evident, from a series of anachronisms, that part of
The Messiah of the Cylinder (Chicago 1917) was written before, and, from
other evidence, that part of it was written after, the outbreak of the Great
War. The version serialized in
Everybody's,
June-September 1917, is not
only an abridgment of the Chicago text, it is also a thoroughgoing stylistic
revision with such substantive changes as were necessary to eliminate the
anachronisms. The London edition, published in 1918 as The Apostle of
the Cylinder, surely represents the author's final intention, and would be
used here if I had been able to secure a copy. So far as I can tell from the
review in TLS (Nov. 15, 1918; p558), it differs from the Everybody's ver-
sion only in the name of the hero, given as Blenerhasset, and in containing
the (presumably revised) portions omitted in the abridgment." Having
GENERIC DISCONTINUITIES: ALDISS' STARSHIP 57
since been able to secure a
copy,
I can now testify that the text of
Apostle
is identical with that of the Chicago Messiah. Since the author allowed
the London edition to appear with all its anachronisms intact, I am temp-
ted to suggest that the serial version resulted from the revisions of an
editor, but one must eventually come to appreciate the foolishness of such
speculations. Finally, since the files of TLS certainly constitute a stan-
dard reference work, this note can serve the original purpose: the hero's
name is not Blenerhasset; it is Arnold Pennell. --RDM
Fredric Jameson
Generic Discontinuities
in SF: Brian Aldiss' Starship
The theme or narrative convention of the lost-spaceship-as-universe offers
a particularly striking occasion to observe the differences between the
socalled old and new waves in SF, since Aldiss'
Sta.ship (1958) was
preceded by a fine treatment of the same material by Robert A. Heinlein
in Orphans of the Skv (serialized 1941 as "Universe" and "Common
Sense").' Taken together, the versions of the two writers give us a synoptic
view of the basic narrative line that describes the experiences of the hero
as he ventures beyond the claustrophobic limits of his home territory into
other compartments of a world peopled
bv strangers and mutants. He
comes at length to understand that the space through which he moves is
not the universe but simply a gigantic ship in transit through the galaxy;
and this discoverv--which may be said to have in such a context all the
momentous scientific consequences that the discoveries of Copernicus and
Einstein had in our own--takes the twin form of text and secret chamber.
On the one hand, the hero learns to read the enigmatic "Manual of Elec-
tric Circuits of Starship," a manual of his own cosmos, supplemented by
the ship's log with its record of the ancient catastrophe--mutiny and
natural disaster as Genesis and Fall--which broke the link between future
generations of the ship's inhabitants and all knowledge of their origins.
And on the other, he makes his way to the ship's long vacant control room
and there comes to know, for the first time, the shattering experience of
deep space and the terror of the stars. The narrative then terminates with
the arrival of the ship--against
all
expectation--at
its immemorial and
long forgotten destination and with the end of what some indigenous star-
ship-philosopher would no doubt have called the "prehistorv" of the
inhabitants.
But this series of events constitutes only what
might be called the
horizontal dimension of the thematic material in
question. On its basis a
kind of vertical structure is erected which amounts to an account of the
customs and culture that have evolved within the sealed realm of the lost
ship. Both Heinlein and Aldiss, indeed, take anthropological pains to note
58 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
the peculiar native religion of the ship, oriented around its mythical foun-
ders, its codified survival-ethic, whose concepts of good and evil are
derived from the tradition of the great mutiny as from some primal dis-
obedience of man, its characteristic figures of speech and ritualistic for-
mulae similarly originating in long-forgotten and incomprehensible
events and situations ("Take a journey!"= "Drop dead!"; "By Huff!"=
"What the devil!" in allusion to the ringleader of the mutiny; and so on).
With this anthropological dimension of the narrative, the two books may
be said to fulfill one of the supreme functions of SF as a genre, namely the
"estrangement," in the Brechtian sense,2 of our culture and institutions--a
shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the
first time, we are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness,
their profound dependency on the accidents of man's historical adventure.
Indeed, I propose to reverse the traditional order of aesthetic
priorities and to suggest that this whole theme is nothing but a pretext for
the spectacle of the artificial formation of a culture within the closed
situation of the lost ship. Such a hypothesis demands a closer look at the
role of the artificial in these narratives, which takes at least two distinct
forms. First, there is the artificiality of the mile-long spaceship as a
human construct used as an instrument in a human project. Here the
reader is oppressed by the substitution of culture for nature (a sub-
stitution dramatically and unexpectedly extended by Aldiss in the twist
ending that we shall speak of later). Accustomed to the idea that that
human history and culture obey a kind of organic and natural rhythm in
their evolution, emerging slowly within a determinate geographical and
climatic situation under the shaping forces of events (invasions, in-
ventions, economic developments) that are themselves felt to have some
inner or "natural" logic, he feels the supreme influence of the ship's en-
vironment as a cruel and unnatural joke. The replacement of the forests
and plains in which men have evolved by the artificial compartments of
the spaceship is in itself only the external and stifling symbol of the
original man-made decision (a grim caricature of God's gesture of
creation) which sent man on such a fatal mission and which was at the
source of this new and artificial culture. Somehow the decisive moments
of real human history (Caesar at the Rubicon, Lenin on the eve of the Oc-
tober revolution) do not come before us with this irrevocable force, for
they are reabsorbed into the web of subsequent events and "alienated" by
the collective existence of society as a whole. But the inauguratory act of
the launchers of the spaceship implies a terrible and godlike respon-
sibility which is not without serious political overtones and to which we
will return. For the present let us suggest that the estrangement-effect
inherent in such a substitution of culture for nature would seem to involve
two apparently contradictory impulses: on the one hand, it causes us ob-
scurely to doubt whether our own institutions are quite as natural as we
supposed, and whether our "real" open-air environment may not itself be
as confining and constricting as the closed world of the ship; on the other
hand, it casts uncertainty on the principle of the "natural" itself, which as
a conceptual category no longer seems quite so self-justifying and com-
mon-sensical.
The other sense in which the artificial plays a crucial role in the
spaceship-as-universe narrative has to do with the author himself, who is
GENERIC DISCONTINUITIES: ALDISS' STARSHIP 59
called on, as it were, to reinvent history out of whole
cloth, and to
devise,
out of his own individual
imagination, institutions and cultural
phenomena which in real life come into being only over
great stretches
of
time and only as a result of collective
processes. Historical truth is
always
stranger and more unpredictable, more
unimaginable, than
any fiction:
whatever the talent of the novelist, his inventions must
always of
necessity
spring from extrapolation of or analogy with the real, and this law
emerges with particular force and
visibility in SF with its
generic at-
tachment to "future history." This is to say that the cultural traits
in-
vented by Aldiss and Heinlein always come before us as
signs: they
ask
us
to take them as equivalents for the cultural habits of our own
daily lives,
they beg to be judged on their intention rather than
by
what
they ac-
tually realize, to be read with
complicity
rather than for the
impoverished
literal content. But this apparently inevitable failure of the
imagination is
not so disastrous aesthetically as one might expect: on the
contrary, it
projects an estrangement-effect of its own, and our reaction is not so much
disappointment at the imaginative lapses of Aldiss and Heinlein as rather
bemusement with the limits of man's vision. Such details cause us to
measure the distance between the creative power of the individual mind
and the unforeseeable, inexhaustible fullness of history as the collective
human adventure. So the ultimate inability of the writer to create a
genuinely alternate universe only returns us the more surely to this one.
So much for the similarities between these two books, and for the
narrative structure which they share. Their differences begin to emerge
when we observe the way in which each deals with the principal strategic
problem of such a narrative, namely the degree to which the reader is to
be held, along with the hero, in ignorance of the basic facts about the lost
ship. Now it will be said that both books give their secret away at the very
outset--Aldiss with his title, and Heinlein with the initial but retrospective
"historical" motto which recounts the disappearance of the ship in outer
space. Apparently, therefore, we have to do in both cases with an ad-
venture-story in which the hero discovers something we know
already,
rather than with a cognitive or puzzle-solving form in which we ourselves
come to learn something new. Yet the closing episodes of the two books
are different enough to suggest some significant structural distinctions
between them. In Heinlein's story, indeed, the lost ship ultimately lands,
and the identity of the destination is not so important as the finality of
the landing itself, which has the effect of satisfying our aesthetic ex-
pectations with a full stop. Of course, the book could have ended in any
one of a number of other ways: the ship might have crashed, the hero
might have been killed by his enemies, the inhabitants might all have died
and sailed on, embalmed, into intergalactic space like the characters in
Martinson's poem and Blomdahl's operaAniara. The point is that such
alternate endings do not in themselves call into question the basic
category of an ending or plot-resolution; rather, they reconfirm the con-
vention of the linear narrative with its beginning (in medias res or
ncatigationis), middle, and end.
The twist ending of Aldiss' novel, on the other hand, turns the whole
concept of such a plot inside out like a glove. It shows us that there was a
mystery or puzzle to be solved after all, but not where we thought it was;
as it were a second-degree puzzle, a mystery to the second power, tran-
60
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
scending the question of the world as ship which we as readers had taken
for granted from the outset. The twist
ending, therefore,
returns
upon the
opening pages to transform the
very generic expectations
aroused there.
It
suddenly reidentifies the category of the narrative in a
wholly unexpected
way, and shows us that we have been
reading a
very
different
type
of
book
than the one we started out with. In comparison with
anything
to
be
found in the Heinlein
story, where all the discoveries take
place within,
and are predicated on the existence and
stability of,
the narrative
frame,
the new information furnished us by Aldiss in his
closing pages
has
struc-
tural consequences of a far more
thorough-going kind.
The notion of generic expectation.s: may now serve as our
primary
tool for the analysis of Starship--at the same time that such a
reading
will define and illustrate this notion more concretely. I suppose that the
reader who comes to Aldiss from Heinlein is impressed first of all by the
incomparably more vivid "physiological" density of Aldiss' style. In spite
of everything the title tells us of the world we are about to enter, the
reader of Starship, in its opening pages, finds himself exploring a mystery
into which he is plunged up to the very limits of his senses. In
particular,
he must find some way of reconciling, in his own mind, the two con-
tradictory terminological and conceptual fields which we have already
discussed under the headings of nature and culture: on the one hand, in-
dications of the presence of a "deck," with its "compartments,"
"barricades," and "wooden partitions," and on the other hand, the
organic growth of "ponic tangle" through which the tribe slowly hacks its
way as through a jungle, "thrusting forward the leading barricade, and
moving up the rear ones, at the other end of Quarters, a corresponding
distance" (?1:1). Such an apparently unimaginable interpenetration of
the natural and the artificial is underscored by a sentence like the
following: "The hardest job in the task of clearing ponics was breaking up
the interlacing root structure, which lay like a steel mesh under the grit,
its lower tendrils biting deep into the deck" (? 1:1 }. Such a sentence is an
invitation to "reverie" in Gaston Bachelard's sense of the imaginative ex-
ploration of the properties and elements of space through language; it
exercises the function of poetry as Heidegger conceives it, as a non-
conceptualized meditation on the very mysteries of our being-in-the-
world. Its force springs, however, from its internal contradictions, from
the incomprehensible conflict between natural and artificial
imagery,
which arouses and stimulates our perceptual faculties at the same time
that it seems to block their full unfolding. We can appreciate this
mechanism more accurately in juxtaposition with a later book by Aldiss
himself, Hothoiuse (1962),' in which a post-civilized Earth offers only the
most abundant and riotous purely organic imagery, the cultural and ar-
tificial with few exceptions having long since vanished.
This is not to say that Heinlein's book does not have analogous
moments of mystery, but they are of a narrative rather than descriptive
kind. I think, for example, of the episode near the beginning of "Universe"
in which Hugh and his companion, lost in a strange part of the ship, sight
a "farmer":
"Hey! Shipmate! Where are we?"
The peasant looked them over slowly, then directed them in
GENERIC DISCONTINUITIES: ALDISS' STARSHIP 61
reluctant monosyllables to the main
passageway which would
lead
them back to their own village.
A brisk walk of a mile and a half down a wide
tunnel
moderately crowded with
traffic--travelers, porters,
an
occasional
pushcart, a dignified scientist
swinging in a litter borne
by four
husky orderlies and preceded by his master-at-arms to clear
the
common crew out of the way--a mile and a half of this
brought them
to the common of their own
village, a
spacious compartment three
decks high and perhaps ten times as wide.
One thinks of Rabelais' narrator climbing down into
Pantagruel's throat
and chatting with the peasant he finds there
planting cabbage;
and it
ought to be said, in Heinlein's
defense, that the
purely descriptive in-
tensity of Aldiss' pages should be considered a late
phenomenon
stylistically, one which reflects the breakdown of plot and the failure of
some genuinely narrative gesture, subverting the classical
story-telling
function of novels into an illicit poetic one which substitutes objects and
atmosphere for events and actions. On the other hand, it is true that what
characterizes a writer like Aldiss--and in the largest sense the writer of
the "new novel" generally--is precisely that he writes after the "old novel"
and presupposes the latter's existence. In an Hegelian sense one can say
that such "poetic" writing includes the older narrative within itself as it
were canceled and raised up into a new type of structure.
Yet the point I want to make is that the Aldiss material determines
generic expectations in a way in which the Heinlein
episode does
not. The latter is
merely one more event
among others, whereas
Aldiss' pages programme the reader for a particular type of reading, for
the physiological or Bachelardian
exploration, through style, of the
properties of a peculiar and fascinating world. That such
phenomenological attention is for the moment primary may be judged by
our distance from Complain, the main character, who in this first section
of the book may be said to serve as a mere pretext for our perceptions of
this strange new space, and in fact to amount, with his unaccountable
longings and rages, to little other than one more curious object within it,
which we observe in ethnological dispassion from the outside. Indeed, the
shifting in our distance from the characters, the transformations of the
very categories through which we perceive characters, are among the most
important indices of what we have called generic expectation. This con-
cept may now perhaps be more clearly illustrated if we note that the
opening pages of Starship (roughly to the point in ? 1:4 where Complain is
drawn into Marapper's plot to explore the ship) project a type of narrative
or genre which is not subsequently executed.
Hothouise, indeed, provides a
very useful comparison in this context, for it may be seen as a book-length
fulfillment of the kind of generic expectation aroused in this first section
of Starship. Hothouse is precisely, from start to finish, a Bachelardian
narrative of the type which Starship ceases to be after Complain leaves
his tribe, and is for this reason a more homogenous product than Sta ship,
more prodigious in its stylistic invention, but by the same token more
monotonous and less interesting formally.
For the predominant formal characteristic of Staship) is the way in
which each new section projects a different kind of novel or narrative, a
62 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
fresh generic expectation broken off unfulfilled and replaced in its turn by
a new and seemingly unrelated one. Such divisions are of course ap-
proximative
and must be mapped out by each reader according to his own
responses. My own feeling is that with the onset of Marapper's plot, the
novel is transformed into a kind of adtventure story of the hostile-territory
or jungle-exploration type, in which the hero and his companions, in their
search for the ship's control room, begin to grapple with geographical ob-
stacles, hostile tribes, alien beings, and internal dissension. In this
section,
lasting for some twenty pages, the reader's attention is focussed on the
success or failure of the expedition, and on the problems of its
organization and leadership.
With the discovery, in the middle of the night, of the immense Swim-
ming Pool (? 2:2)--a sight as astounding, for the travellers, as the
Europeans' first glimpse of Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile--our
interest again shifts subtly, returning to the structure of the ship itself,
with its numbered decks through which the men slowly make their way.
The questions and expectations now aroused seem once more to be of a
cognititve type, and suggest that the mere certainty of being in a spaceship
does not begin to solve all the problems we may have about it, and in par-
ticular does not explain why it is that the ship, thus mysteriously aban-
doned to its destiny, continues to tun (e.g., its generators still produce
electricity for the lighting system).
But the result of this new kind of attention to the physical en-
vironment is yet another shift in tone or narrative convention. For the
unexpected appearance of hitherto unknown beings--the Giants and the
army of intelligent mind-probing rats--seems to plunge us for the moment
into a story line of almost supernatural cast. With the rats in particular
we feel ourselves dangerously close to the transition from SF to fairy tale
or fantasy literature in general, and visions of the Nutcracker or even the
comic-book variety. (This new shift, incidentally, is proof of the immense
gulf which separates SF from fantasy and which might therefore be
described in terms of generic expectations.)
With the entry, in?3, of the explorers into the higher civilization of
the Forwards area, Marapper's plot proves a failure, and once again a new
generic expectation replaces the earlier one: with the enlargement of the
focus, we find ourselves in the midst of a collective-catastrophe novel, for
now we have a beleaguered society struggling for its life against real and
imagined enemies--the Outsiders, the Giants, the rats, and the lower bar-
barians of the Deadways. Once again the generic shift is signalled by a
change in our distance from Complain, who from a mere team member is
promoted to romantic hero through his love affair with Vyann, one of the
political leaders of the Forwards state. Our new proximity to and iden-
tification with Complain is reinforced by his discovery that the chieftain
of the barbarian guerilla force is none other than his long-missing brother
(a discovery which perhaps sets in motion minor generic expectations of
its own, recalling last-minute denouements of the Hellenistic story a la
Heliodorus, or family reunions in orphan or foundling plots, as in Tom
Jones or Cymbeline).
At length, in the apocalyptic chaos with which the novel ends, the
fires and melees, the invasion of the rats, the breakdown of the electrical
system and impending destruction of the ship itself, we reach the twist en-
GENERIC DISCONTINUITIES: ALDISS' STARSHIP 63
ding already mentioned. Here the supernatural elements
are, as it
were reabsorbed into the SF (one is tempted to say, the
realistic)
plot structure, for we discover that the Giants and Outsiders
actually
exist and can be rationally explained. The mechanism of this final generic
transformation is a physical enlargement of the context in which the ac-
tion is taking place: for the first time the inner environment of the ship
ceases to be the outer limit of our experience. The ship acquires an outer
surface, and a position in outer space; what has hitherto been a complete
world in its own right is now retransformed into an immense vessel
floating within an even larger system of stable and external coordinates.
At the same time, the very function of the ship is altered, for with the
momentous final discovery, the endless, aimless journey through space
proves to have been an illusion, and the inhabitants discover themselves
to be in orbit around the Earth. It is an orbit that has been maintained
for generations, so that the discovery returns upon the past to transform it
as well and to turn the "tragic" history of the ship into a sort of grisly
masquerade. So at length we learn that the main characters in the
story,
the characters with whom we have identified, are mutants administered
"for their own good" by a scientific commission from Earth, a commission
whose representatives the ship-dwellers have instinctively identified as
Giants or Outsiders.
Thus in its final avatar, Starship is transformed, from a pseudo-
cosmological adventure story of explorations within the
strange world of
the ship, to a political fable of man's manipulation of his fellow man. This
ultimate genre to which the book is shown to belong leads our attention
not into the immensities of interstellar space, but rather back to the
human inte tions underlying the ghastly paternalism which was respon-
sible for the incarceration within the ship, over so many generations, of
the descendants of the original crew. If my reading is correct, the twist en-
ding involved here is not simply the solution to a puzzle confronted un-
successfully since the opening pages of the book; rather, the puzzle at the
heart of the work is only now for the first time revealed, by being un-
wittingly solved.
This revelation has the effect of discrediting all our previous modes of
reading, or generic expectations. Over and above the story of the charac-
ters and of the fate of the ship, one is tempted to posit the existence of a
second plot or narrative line in that very different set of purely formal
events which govern our reading: our groping and tentative efforts to iden-
tify, during the course of the reading, the type of book being read, and our
ultimate solution to the puzzle with the discovery of its social or political
character.
Such a description will not surprise anyone familiar with the aesthetics of
modernism and aware of the degree to which modern writers in general
have taken the artistic process itself as their "subject matter," assigning
themselves the task of foregrounding, not the objects perceived, not the
content of of the work, but rather the very act of aesthetic reception and
perception. This is achieved on the whole by tampering with the per-
ceptual apparatus or the frame, and the notion of generic discontinuity
suggests that in Starship the basic story-line may be varied as much by
shifts in our receptive stance as by internal modifications of the content.
One recalls the well-known experiment, in the early days of Soviet film, in
64 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
which a single shot of an actor's face seemed to express now joy, now
irony, now hunger, now sadness, depending on the context developed by
the shots with which it was juxtaposed. Indeed the very notion of generic
expectation requires us to distinguish between the sense of the individual
sentences and our assessment of the whole to which we assign them as
parts and which dictates our interpretation of them (a process often
described as the "hermeneutic circle"). Aldiss' Starship confirms such a
notion by showing the results of a systematic variation and subversion of
narrative context; and that such a structure is not merely an aesthetic
freak, but stands rather in the mainstream of literary
experimentation,
may be demonstrated by a comparison with the structure of the French
nouveaui roman, and particularly with the stylistic and compositional
devices of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose work Aldiss has himself ranged in
the SF category, speaking of "L'Annee derniure 'a Marienbad, where the
gilded hotel with its endless corridors--e'normes, sompteux, baroqlues,
luglubres--stands more vividly as a symbol of isolation from the currents of
life than any spaceship, simply by virtue of being more dreadfully ac-
cessible to our imaginations."5
What Aldiss does not say is that such symbols are the end-product of
a whole artistic method or procedure: in the narrative of Robbe-Grillet,
for instance, our reading of the words is sapped at the very base: as the
narrative eye crawls slowly along the contours of the objects so minutely
described, we begin to feel a profound uncertainty as to the very
possibilities of physical description through language.'" Indeed, what hap-
pens is that the words remain the same while their referents shift with-
out warning: the bare names of the objects are insufficient to convey the
unique identity of a single time and place, and the reader is constantly
forced to reevaluate the coordinates of the table, the rocking chair, the
eraser in question, just as in Resnais' film the same events appear to take
place over and over again, but at different times and in different settings.
Such effects are quite different from what happens in dream or surrealist
literature, where it is the object itself that is transformed before our eyes,
and where the power of language to register the most grotesque
metamor-
phoses is reaffirmed: thus in Ovid, language is called upon to express the
well-nigh inexpressible and to articulate in all their fullness things
that
we doubt our real eyes could ever see. In the nouveau roman, on the con-
trary, and in those SF works related to it (e.g., the hallucinatory scenes in
such Philip K. Dick novels as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), it
is the expressive capacity of words and names that is called into question
and subverted, and this is not from within but from without, by im-
perceptible but momentous shifts in the context of the description.
Yet there is a way in which the characteristic material of SF enjoys a
privileged relationship with such effects, which seem to be common to
modernist literature in general. One would like to avoid, in this con-
nection, a replay of the well-worn and tiresome controversies over literary
realism. Perhaps it would be enough to suggest that, in so-called realistic
works, the reference to some shared or "real" objective outside world ser-
ves the basic structural function of unifying the work from without.
Whatever the heterogeneity of its materials, the unity of the "realistic"
work is thus assured a piiori by the unity of its referent. It follows then
that when, as in SF, such a referent is abandoned, the fundamental for-
I
GENERIC DISCONTINUITIES: ALDISS' STARSHIP 65
mal problem posed by plot construction will be that of finding some new
principle of unity. Of course, one way in which this can be achieved is by
taking over some ready-made formal unity existing in the tradition itself,
and this seems to be the path taken by so-called mythical SF, which finds
a spurious comfort in the predetermined unity of the myth or legend which
serves it as an organizational device. (This procedure goes back, of course,
to Joyce's Ulysses, but I am tempted to claim that the incomparable
greatness of this literary predecessor comes from its incom)lete use of
myth: Joyce lets us see that the "myth" is nothing but an organizational
device, and his subject is not some fictive unity of experience which the
myth is supposed to guarantee, but rather that fragmentation of life in the
modern world which called for reunification in the first place.)
Where the mythological solution is eschewed, there remains available
to SF another organizational procedure which I will call
collage: the
bringing into precarious coexistence of elements drawn from very different
sources and contexts, elements which derive for the most part from older
literary models and which amount to broken fragments of the outworn
older genres or of the newer productions of the media (e.g., comic strips).
At its worst, collage results in a kind of desperate pasting together of
whatever lies to hand; at its best, however, it operates a kind of
foregrounding of the older generic models themselves, a kind of
estrangement-effect practiced on our own generic receptivity. Something
like this is what we have sought to describe in our reading of
Starshil).
But the arbitrariness of collage as a form has the further result of in-
tensifying, and indeed transforming, the structural function of the author
himself, who is now felt to be the supreme source and origin of whatever
unity can be maintained in the work. The reader then submits to the
authority of the author in a rather different way than in the conventions
of realistic narrative: it is, if you will, the difference between asking to be
manipulated, and agreeing to pretend that no human agency is present in
the first place.
It would be possible to show, I think (and here the works of Philip K.
Dick would serve as the principal exhibits), that the thematic obsession, in
SF, with manipulation as social phenomenon and nightmare all in one
may be understood as a projection of the form of SF into its content. This
is not to say that the theme of manipulation is not, given the kind of world
we live in, eminently self-explanatory in terms of its own urgency, but only
that there is a kind of privileged relationship, a pre-established harmony,
between this theme and the literary structures which characterize SF. To
restrict our generalization for the moment to Starship itself, it seems to
me no accident that the fundamental social issue in a book in which the
author toys with the reader, constantly shifting direction, baffling the lat-
ter's expectations, issuing false generic clues, and in general using his of-
ficial plot as a pretext for the manipulation of the reader's reactions,
should be the problem of the manipulation of man by other men. And
with this we touch upon the point at which form and content, in Starship,
become one, and at which the fundamental identity between the narrative
structure previously analyzed, and the political problem raised by the
book's ending, stands revealed.
That Mr. Aldiss is well aware of the ultimate political character of his
novel is evident, not only from his Preface, but also from occasional reflec-
66 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
tions throughout the book. But it seems clear from his remarks that he un-
derstands his fable--which illustrates the disastrous effects of large-scale
social decisions upon individual life--to have an anti-bureaucratic and
anti-socialist thrust (bureaucracy being the way socialism is conceived by
those it threatens). "Nothing," he tells us, "but the full flowering of a
technological age, such as the Twenty-fourth Century knew, could have
launched this miraculous ship; yet the miracle was sterile, cruel. Only a
technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in it, as if
man were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration." (? 3:4). And
his Preface underscores the point even further: "An idea, which is man-
conceived, unlike most of the myriad effects which comprise our
universe,
is seldom balanced.... The idea, as ideas will, had gone wrong and gob-
bled up their real lives." We glimpse here the familiar outlines of that
most influential of all counter-revolutionary positions, first and most fully
worked out by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French
Revolution, for which human reason, in its fundamental imperfection, is
incapable of substituting itself and its own powers for the organic, natural
growth of community and tradition. Such an ideology finds confirmation
in the revolutionary Terror (itself generally, it should be added, a
response of the revolution to external and internal threats), which thus
appears as the humiliation of man's revolutionary hubris, of his presump-
tion at usurping the place of nature and traditional authority.
But this reading by Mr. Aldiss of his own fable is not necessarily the
only interpretation open to us. I would myself associate it rather with a
whole group of SF narratives which explicitly or implicitly raise a
political and social issue of a quite different kind, which may be charac-
terized as belonging to the ethical problems
of utopia, or to the political
dilemmas of a future in which politics has once again become ethics. This
issue turns essentially on the right of advanced civilizations or cultures to
intervene into the lower forms of social life with which they come into
contact. (The qualifications of higher and lower, or advanced and un-
derdeveloped, are here clearly to be understood in a historical rather than
a purely qualitative sense.) This problem has of course been a thematic
concern of SF since its inception: witness H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds,
patently a guilt fantasy on the part of Victorian man who wonders
whether the brutality
with which he has used the colonial
peoples may not
be visited on him by some more advanced race intent, in its turn, on his
destruction. In our time, however,
such a theme tends to be reformulated
in positive terms that lend it a new originality. That the destruction of
less advanced societies is wrong and inhuman is no longer, surely, a mat-
ter for intelligent debate. What is at issue is the degree to which even
benign and well-intentioned intervention of higher into lower cultures
may not be ultimately destructive in its results. Although the conventions
of SF may dramatize this issue in terms of galactic encounters, the con-
cern clearly has a very terrestrial source in the relations between in-
dustrialized and so-called underdeveloped societies of our own planet.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, a safe liberal anti-colonialism,
analogous to the U.S. condemnation of the decaying British and French
colonial empires, seems to have been quite fashionable in American SF.
In one whole wing of it, interstellar law prohibiting the establishment of
colonies on planets already inhabited by an intelligent species became an
GENERIC DISCONTINUITIES: ALDISS' STARSHIP 67
accepted convention. However, the full implications of this
theme, with a
few exceptions such as Ursula Le Guin's The
Left Hand
of Darkness
(1969), were explored only in the SF written within socialist
horizons, in
particular in the works of Stanislaw Lem and in the Strugatsky Brothers'
It's Hard to be a God(1964)7 In Western SF, this theme is present mainly
as a cliche or as an unconscious
preoccupation, and manifests itself in
peculiarly formalized ways. So I would
suggest that visions of ex-
tragalactic intervention, such as Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's
End,
belong in this category, as well as many of the intricate
paradoxes of time
travel, where the hero's unexpected appearance in the distant
past
arouses the fear that he may alter the course of
history
in such a
way
as to
prevent himself from being born in the first place. In all these traits of
Western SF one detects the presence, it seems to me, of a virtual
repression of the ethico-political motif in question, although it should be
made clear that it is a repression which SF shares with most cultural and
artistic activities pursued in the West. Indeed, such unconscious con-
cealment of the underlying socio-economic or material bases of life with a
concomitant concentration on purely spiritual activities, is responsible for
the ways of thinking which classical Marxist theory designates as
idealism. It amounts to a refusal to connect existential or personal ex-
perience, the experience of our individual private life, with the system and
suprapersonal organization of monopoly cpaitalism as an all-pervasive
whole.
In the present instance--to restrict ourselves to that alone--it is our
wilful ignorance of the inherent structural relationship between that
economic system and the neo-colonialistic exploitation of the Third World
which prevents any realistic view or concept of the correct relationship
between two distinct national or social groupings. Thus we tend to think
of the relations between countries in ethical terms, in terms of
cruelty or
philanthrophy, with the result that Western business investments come to
appear to us as the bearers of progress and "development" in backward
areas. The real questions--whether "progress" is desirable and if so which
kind of progress, whether a country has the right to opt out of the in-
ternational circuit, whether a more advanced
country
has the
right
to in-
tervene, even benignly, in the historical evolution of a less advanced coun-
try; in sum, the general relationship between indigenous culture and in-
dustrialization--are historical and political in character. For our
literature to be able to raise them, it would be necessary to ask ourselves
a good many more probing and difficult questions about our own-system
than we are presently willing to do. I should add that this comparison bet-
ween the formal capacities of Western and Soviet SF is not intended to
imply that the Soviet Union has in any sense solved the above problems,
but merely that for the Soviet Union such problems have arisen in an ex-
picit and fully conscious, indeed agonizing fashion, and that it is from the
experience of such dilemmas and contradictions that its best literature is
being fashioned.
The thematic interest of Starship lies precisely in the approach of
such a dilemma to the threshold of consciousness, in the way in which the
theme of intercultural influence or manipulation is raised almost to ex-
plicit thematization. In this sense, it makes little difference whether the
reader chooses to take Mr. Aldiss' own rather reactionary political in-
68 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
terjections at face value, or to substitute for them the historical in-
terpretation suggested above; the crucial fact remains that the political
reemerges in the closing pages of the book. The structural inability of such
material to stay buried, its irrespressible tendency to reveal itself in its
most fundamental historical being, generically transforms the novel into
that political fable which was latent in it all along, without our knowing
it. So it is that en route to space and to galactic escapism, we find our-
selves locked in the force field of very earthly political realities.
NOTES
'The British (and original) title of Starship is
Non-Stol);
the book Or-
phcans of the Sky was published in book form in 1963.
2See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and tr. by John Willett
(US 1964), especially ppI91-93.
:'Any reflection on genre today owes a debt--sometimes an unwilling
one--to Northrop Frye's Aniatomy of Criticism (1957); we should also men-
tion, in the renewal of this field of study, the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians
represented in R.S. Crane's anthology Critics andl Critici.sm (1952). For a
recent survey of recent theories, see Paul Hernadi, Bevondl Genre (1972),
and for the latest discussion of "generic expectations," E.D. Hirsch, Jr.,
V(aliditv in
IntCIPretation
(1967). On SF as a genre, the essential
statement is of course Darko Suvin's "On the Poetics of the Science Fic-
tion Genre,"
College
En1glish, December 1972; while the seminal in-
vestigation of the relationship between genre and social experience
remains that of Georg Lukacs (see for example his Writer and Critic
[1970], and The Historical Novel [new edn 1969], or for a more general
discussion, my "Case for Georg Lukacs," in Marxism and Form [1972].
4Published in US as The Long Afternoon of Earth.
5Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, eds., Best SF: 1969 (US 1970),
p217.
6I have discussed this phenomenon from a different point of view in
"Seriality in Modern Literature," Blucknell Review, Spring 1970.
7This is a working hypothesis only, since the basic thematic
spadework--as in so many other aspects of SF--has not yet been done. A
bibliography of such writings should be compiled as a first step toward
further investigation.
Robert Plank
Quixote's Mills:
The Man-Machine Encounter in SF
The hazy border area between living and non-living beings or structures,
especially if these are artifacts, is one of the great themes of fantasy and
more particularly of SF. We can view it more clearly by approaching it
QUIXOTE'S MILLS 69
from the outside, though a work that cannot be considered as either --
Don Quixote.'
Though in writing his "marvellous history" Cervantes created a
model for the modern realistic novel, the work does not owe its wide fame
to its realism; on the contrary, to the element of fantasy in it. But we must
see clearly that fantasy here resides in the mind of the hero, while the
world that Cervantes presents directly is strictly the real world. The con-
trast is most glaring in one famous episode, Quixote's fight with the wind-
mills:
At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills . .. and
as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is
arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our
desires ourselves, for look here, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or
more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to
engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to
make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good
service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."
"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.
"Those thou seest there," answered his master, "with the long
arms. . . ."
"Look, your worship," said Sancho: "what we see there are not
giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails
that turned by the wind make the millstone go."
"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that thou art not used
to this business of adventure; those are giants; and if thou art afraid,
away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I
engage them in fierce and unequal combat."
So, invoking his lady Dulcinea, Quixote charges the "giants," shouting
chivalrous insults. A breeze springs up, the mills begin to turn:
as he drove his lance point into the sail the wind whirled it around
with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it
horse and rider, who went rolling over the plain, in a sorry plight.
Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass would go. . .
and is so upset that he forgets his manners:
"Didn't I tell your worship ... they were only windmills? And no one
could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of
the same kind in his head."
Don Quixote has his answer ready: "That same Friston who carried off
my study and my books has turned these giants into mills to rob me of the
glory of vanquishing them." (?1:8).
'r1his is probably by far the most popular passage in Don Quixote.
Why should this be so? I cannot think of any explanation but the obvious
one: we have here a confrontation of man and machine, one of the earliest
in literature, and one of the most perfect. Let us look at some aspects of it.
First, a popular misconception: people often seem to think that
Quixote's folly is shown in his misinterpreting such a simple, old-
70 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
fashioned, and evidently familiar device. But even the old-fashioned was
new at one time, and in the case of the windmills, this was just about Cer-
vantes' time. Commentators have noted that windmills were first erected
in La Mancha thirty years or less before Don Quixote was written.2 That
means, we have the motif here already in its modern form: the con-
frontation with a new technology.
Furthermore, windmills clearly are in rotary motion, as indeed
machines so far usually are. How much significance should we attach to
this point? Mumford makes much of the contrast between rotary and
reciprocating motion; Santillana has also considered the subject. s
Reciprocating motion is the natural action of man's muscles,4 while rotary
motion is virtually unknown in nature -- on Earth, that is: the
movements of the heavenly bodies are rotary. This is so uniformly true
that the appearance of comets, which seem not to be in rotary motion,
used to be seen as a sign of grave disturbance. It is conceivable that in-
terest in the study of movements in the sky -- i.e., what was first astrology
and later became astronomy -- developed as early as it did because men
were somehow impressed with rotary motion. In fact, progress in
astronomy was for centuries impeded by the firm belief, obstinately held
until Kepler shattered it, that planets must move in circles.
It is equally conceivable that the awe in which mankind has held
some of its own artifacts may spring from the observation that much of
human technology--namely, that part of it that involves the wheel -- is
based on rotary motion. It would seem, then, that in
inventing the wheel
man imitated not the nature he shares but the heavens. This is perhaps
why the wheel has been linked with cosmic power in religious imagery.
Though this is not as prevalent in Western as in Eastern thinking, we may
recall that Dante concludes his work by evoking a wheel as symbol of fin-
ding peace and fulfillment in God.'
A test of this hypothesis is provided by modern technological develop-
ments. Rocketry and electronics are not based on the wheel the way
mechanisms are. The feeling of alienation which has been one factor
shaping man's relation to his machines since the industrial revolution
should therefore yield to a more comfortable symbiosis as the new
technology evolves. This is indeed the case. Modern SF has by preference
featured post-mechanical technology and has come to prominence with its
ascendance.
Constructs of modern SF (e.g., HAL, the computer in 2001) may be
equated with human beings because of their mental capabilities. They are
not usually capable of man-like or animal-like physical movements. The
core of Quixote's adventure, however, is clearly that he mistakes a
mechanical device for a living being, and that he does so because he is
mad. Yet his attack has also inspired outbursts like this:
The knight was right; fear, and fear alone, made Sancho and makes
all of us poor mortals see windmills in the monstrous giants that sow
evil through the world.... Fear ... alone inspires the cult and wor-
ship of steam and electricity, makes us fall on our knees and cry
mercy before the monstrous
giants
of mechanics and
chemistry.
And
at last, at the base of some colossal factory
of elixir of
long life,
the
human race, exhausted by weariness and surfeit, will give up the
___ QUIXOTE'S MILLS 71
ghost. But the battered Don Quixote will live, because he
sought
health within himself, and dared to charge at windmills."
Unamuno is speaking here of the significance of Quixote's attack. But
the
episode makes good sense on the literal level also. That it has
caught the
fancy of generation after generation can be best explained by assuming
that its manifest content--the
misperception of a technical artifact as
a
living being--has powerfully appealed to readers who
increasingly, as
technical development progressed, have faced the same dilemma.
Far
from viewing Quixote as a madman and hence
incomprehensible, they
must have felt that he acted on an impulse they shared but did not act
upon. The chord that Cervantes struck has therefore never been silent
since.
Some time elapsed, though, before the science of psychology got
around to the subject. The first notable contribution was a short study by
Jentsch, published in 1906, on the "uncanny feeling."7 The word "un-
canny" has become the standard translation of the German "unheimlich,"
although such words as "weird," ".sinister," "eerie" would also express
certain shades of the meaning, for it is a complex feeling, not easily
described.
It usually arises from an unexpected perception: an encounter felt at
the same time as vaguely threatening, mysteriously alluring, and--
paradoxically--both familiar and
unfamiliar, in the sense, that it seems to
pose a riddle: we feel faced with something unfamiliar which
will,
however, soon reveal itself as something familiar. It is an unpleasant
feeling, but in a low key. Though akin to anxiety, fear, and even terror, it
should not be identified with these.
How does the uncanny feeling arise? Jentsch put forth the hypothesis
that it is evoked by "mental uncertainty," and particularly by "doubt of
the animation of an apparently living being, and vice versa doubt whether
a lifeless object is not perhaps animated; and this even if that doubt has
become only dimly conscious." It is clear that SF is deeply engaged here.
Jentsch's specifications would apply with special force to automata and
robots. In more sensitive minds, almost any machinery would stimulate
similar feelings, as witnessed by the German poet Heine, describing a trip
to England in 1837:
The perfection of the machines which are used here everywhere and
have taken over so many human activities, had for me also
something uncanny. This artificial motion of wheels, rods,
cylinders,
and a thousand little hooks, pins, and teeth, all moving almost
passionately, filled me with shudder. That the life of the English is
so defined, precise, measured, and punctual, caused me as much
anxiety. As the machines in England appear to us human, so the
people there seem like machines. Indeed, wood, steel, and brass seem
to have usurped the spirit of man and from fullness of spirit to have
gone almost mad, while the dispirited man, like a hollow
spectre,
goes mechanically about his business and has certain hours set aside
to wolf his steaks, to make speeches in Parliament, to brush his
iiails, to board a stage coach, and to hang himself."
72 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
This passage is evidently spiced with sexual imagery, as though Heine
were saying that those "passionate" movements struck him as uncanny
because of their similarity to the sex act--a testimony of some value since
it
evidently
arose independent of psychoanalysis: he died the year Freud
was born.
Jentsch himself used such examples as the reaction of savages who
see a locomotive for the first time and mistake it for a monstrous mam-
mal, but also an episode from a classic tale of SF and fantasy,9 namely
the figure of Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffmann's novella The Sandman. Olym-
pia is an automaton whose maker passes it off as his daughter. The motif
has caught on sufficiently to be used in popular later works, notably in the
opera Tales of Hoffmann and the ballet Coppelia.
Freud disagreed with Jentsch, thought his treatment of the subject
was superficial, and offered a psychoanalytic explanation of the uncanny
feeling. He noted, though, that "an uncanny effect is often and
easily
produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality,
such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary ap-
pears before us in reality.""' As to The Sandman, Freud points out that
the Olympia episode is about the least gruesome part of the story and that
Hoffmann treats it in an ironical, one might say facetious manner. This,
with other examples that Freud gives, shows how easily the uncanny
feeling can slip over into the comical. Humor, as long as it can be used, is
the best defense against anxiety, as demonstrated by the style of Heine's
travelogue.
Cervantes was, of course, a master of the art of twisting the tragic and
lofty, without degrading it, into the comical. Two questions arise. First,
how mad does a person have to be to mistake windmills for giants--or,
more generally, how normal is it to be uncertain whether a perceived ob-
ject is living or not? Freud, in discussing the uncanny feeling, remarks
that "in their early games children do not distinguish at all
sharply be-
tween living and lifeless objects, and . . . they are especially
fond of
treating their dolls like live people."'" One of his eminent disciples,
however, the child development specialist Rene Spitz, seems to think that
there is an almost instinctual ability to distinguish the living from the
inanimate:
There is a strange fascination about the idea of the inanimate
creating the illusion of life; and also about the living posing as
inanimate.... Recently, in a magazine illustration, a little girl was
shown kissing a very lifelike doll nearly her own size--with the cap-
tion "Which one is the toy dolly?" The caption obviously is intended
to be "cute." But the photograph fools nobody: even though absence
of color, lack of motion, and two-dimensionality, handicap
photography in conveying meaning, we "know" the child from the
doll immediately.
1 2
The question is whether this can be experimentally verified. Both child
psychology and ethology (e.g., Harlow's experiments with contraptions of
wire mesh and terry cloth, accepted by baby monkeys as "surrogate
mothers") would be relevant here. It seems that reports so far tend to sup-
port Freud's viewpoint versus Spitz's.'
QUIXOTE'S MILLS 73
Our second question is, why does Quixote himself not feel that the
windmills are uncanny? Jentsch postulated mental uncertainty as a basic
ingredient of that feeling. Such uncertainty is hard to tolerate,,and the
mind will therefore tend to decide the question quickly, if wrongly. The
uncanny feeling is an evanescent feeling, its half-life is very brief. We
might say, Quixote makes the decision that there are giants so fast that no
uncanny feeling has time to rise over the threshold of his consciousness.
It may be that his madness does not consist in mistaking windmills
for giants--an error that within limits can happen to anybody--but in his
imperviousness to the uncanny feeling; that to him it does not make as
much difference whether those objects are animate or inanimate as it does
to other people, and that this constitutes his madness. Such an in-
terpretation is in accordance with modern views of schizophrenia, par-
ticularly as they were first developed by Tausk in 1912.'4 He considered
the tendency of schizophrenics to disanimate the world, and to project
their internal emotional struggles into external struggles between them-
selves and powerful, usually hostile, outside forces. He explained the in-
terest in the creation of mechanisms out of the conflicts involved in these
processes. It is important for our purposes to note that this type of projec-
tion is quite prevalent in much of what goes by the name of SF, especially
where so-called psi powers are postulated.
Where such ideas occur as beliefs rather than as fictions, they are
prima facie evidence of pathology. These schizophrenic attitudes toward
machines are usually integrated into a well-developed system of
delusions. This is exactly the case with Don Quixote. As soon as he is un-
deceived about the windmills, he explains his error away: it was no
mistake, it was a real change, brought about by a vicious sorcerer. Cer-
vantes, of course, is quite positive that the "sage" Friston does not exist:
he is purely a figment of Quixote's imagination. This is what distinguishes
the novel from fantasy, what makes Don Quixote a realistic work. The
windmills have never been anything but windmills; the author knows it,
and so the reader knows it, too. But Quixote doesn't. As a subjective ex-
perience, his encounter can therefore stand as the paradigm of the in-
numerable such encounters in later SF and fantasy.
There are basically two ways of introducing structures or beings that
may or may not be alive into fiction: the author can focus on the feelings
of an outsider who stumbles on such an object, as Quixote did and as
Nathanael, the suffering hero of The Sandman, did; or he can focus on the
relationship between the creator and the created. This latter approach
has found its classical form in a work contemporaneous with Hoffmann's,
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
We must also consider who the carrier of the emotion is: Not only the
readers of a story, but also the characters in it may react to the same per-
ception with a more or less uncanny feeling, or none at all. This in turn
may depend on the character or on the author. The character who en-
counters the stimulus of the uncanny feeling is usually either the narrator,
or the hero on his quest, or both. He may be more or less susceptible to the
uncanny feeling, and the author wants to show the degree of his charac-
ter's sensibility. It may be, on the other hand, that it is the author himself
whose sensibility is either weak or strong.
Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race offers a good example of this am-
74 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
biguity. The narrator finds himself in a subterranean world where
technology is based on a mysterious power called "vril":
In all service, whether in or out of doors, they make great use of
automaton figures, which are so ingenious, and so pliant to the
operations of vril, that they actually seem gifted with reason. It was
scarcely possible to distinguish the figures I beheld, apparently
guiding or superintending the rapid movements of vast engines, from
human forms endowed with thought. (?18).
How is that for keeping a stiff upper lip? The Coming Race was written in
1871, the height of the Victorian Age. It is fitting that no further comment
is made on these automaton figures. Whether Bulwer-Lytton wanted to
show his character capable of not registering feeling, or whether that was
a trait in the author himself, would be hard to decide; but there is no
doubt that the ability to conceal, repress, or simply not feel any of the sub-
tler and less tractable emotions helped the ruling classes of Britain to
conquer a large part of the world--not, however, to hold it, and today the
Victorian frame of mind seems awfully dated. Though Bulwer-Lytton
could claim some distinction for having anticipated atomic energy in his
concept of "vril," The Coming Race is virtually a forgotten book.
I think we can now generalize these observations and bring them
closer to our special interest. It has been difficult for SF to gain a hearing
beyond the circumscribed circle of "fans". SF has been reproached with
being of low literary quality, lacking in genuine human interest. Its
characters are said to be one-dimensional cliches, they do not come to life.
What do these rather general criticisms mean specifically? Perhaps they
mean that in SF overwhelming events are depicted, but that the charac-
ters who experience them are not shown as being overwhelmed--just as in
The Coming Race the narrator's reaction is simply passed over. It is only
natural that the reader, who would
respond
with enormous emotion if he
himself were exposed to such formidable adventures fails to develop that
identification with the hero which alone would make him feel that he
reads about fully realized characters, as he does in "mainstream" fiction.
This is less true of fantasy than of SF. Compare the cold evasion of
the uncanny feeling in The Coming Race with its treatment in such fan-
tasy novels as Descent into Hell by Charles Williams; or with The Turn of
the Screuw by James, where uncanniness holds you in its grip to the very
end; or for that matter, with almost any "Gothic" novel.
We should on the other hand expect little if any uncanniness where
the twilight zone between the living and the non-living is evoked for pur-
poses of allegory. Carl Spitteler's Olympian Spring culminates in his
presentation of the order of the world as a giant metallic automaton
forever rolling on its prescribed course and in its run squashing billions of
sentient beings. The reader may share the existential horror that Spit-
teler's character Hera feels as she gazes at the spectacle, but he will
hardly perceive it as uncanny.
I believe that likewise no uncanny feeling is attached to the bird
automaton in Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium."'} Where an object clearly
stands for something other than itself, the question whether it is alive or
lifeless will not engage our attention, and there is no stimulus for an un-
QUIXOTE'S MILLS 75
canny feeling to arise.
Let me now come back to the dichotomy I suggested earlier--the two
approaches, from the angle of the outsider, and from the relationship
creator/created.
In the stories of the creation of artificial beings we find little of the
uncanny feeling. We encounter something else instead: open conflict,
usually in the form that the creature turns against the creator, be it
merely by persisting in automatic functioning damaging to him. We can
call it rebellion, for short.
Here again I would suggest that the reason the uncanny feeling does
not develop is that it would be so transitional: as soon as the
rebelliousness of the creature becomes clear and the mental uncertainty is
thus removed, the uncanny feeling would yield to other emotions, and
neither writer nor reader has reason to pause to consider an intermediate
stage.
There is, of course, a practically unlimited supply of examples.
Franken-stein is the paradigm, but the motive has occurred many times
before and after, e.g., in the Jewish legends about the golem and in their
modern adaptations. Or in innumerable robot stories. Asimov's three laws
of robotics appear as an instance of the opposite, since they seem to ex-
clude the rebellion of the creature; but I would point out that on the con-
trary, these arbitrary laws were deemed necessary as a defense. Without
these laws, Asimov says, robots would indeed turn furiously against
human beings (see I, Robot ?6).
Some of the more complex and ambitious works of SF present both,
the astonishment of the onlooker who has stumbled on robots, and the
rebellion of robots against their makers and masters. This combined pat-
tern formed the message of the very first work that introduced the term
and concept of robot to the Western world, Capek's R. lJ.R. Almost half a
century later, this same double approach was used in 2001.
As rebellion is an ubiquitous motive in fiction where artificial beings
are made, it must correspond to a universally felt emotional need.
Whether that need springs from human nature in a biological or in a
historical sense may at the present state of science be impossible to
decide. I can therefore not go as far as to agree with Stanislaw Lem when
in a recently translated essay he attempts to reduce the motif to a more
limited phenomenon by tracing it to special ideological taboos:
The concept of an artificially created man is
blasphemy in our
cultural sphere. Such a creation must be
performed by man and is
therefore a caricature, an
attempt by humans to become
equal to
God. According to Christian dogma, such audacity cannot succeed;
should it happen, it necessarily means that satanic forces were
engaged in the work ... only the Mediterranean culture, modified by
Christianity, considers the homunculus to be the result of
blasphemy. It is for this reason that those "archetypical robots,"
those literary prototypes from earlier centuries such as the golem,
are as a rule evil or at least sinister ... the relationship of belief to a
special technique is determined by whether or not the belief has
dealt dogmatically with the technique. Christian belief has dealt
neither positively nor negatively with the automation of sewing;
76 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
therefore, the sewing machine is an absolutely neutral object--for
religious belief. On the other hand, religous thought has dealt with
flying insofar as it has spoken of angels; there was a time,
therefore,
when theologians regarded all attempts to master flight as close to
blasphemy. And belief has dealt intensively with the human mind so
that the homunculus has become in our civilization a technical
product at least partly "determined by the devil."'"
The argument is captivating, but it has its weak points. The sewing
machine is not only religiously neutral, it also has the qualities of being
familiar and often operated by muscle power; the machines that Heine
saw (probably mostly spinning machines) were just as religiously neutral,
yet they did evoke the uncanny feeling. The creation of artificial beings
has retained its flavor of "blasphemy" (hubris would be the better word)
though the formerly equally tabooed flying has not. "Prototypes from
earlier centuries" are by no means the only ones to appear "evil or at least
sinister"; more recent types appear so too, and Lem cannot account for
the persistence of the feeling that artificial creatures will rebel.
To sum up: the relationship man/machine comes to its most in-
teresting point when the question of the machine's possibly being alive is
raised. This can be considered in two relations: a) creator/creature; b) ob-
server/ambiguous entity. With a), rebelliousness is the outstanding
psychological phenomenon; with b), the uncanny feeling. SF neglects
these relationships at its own peril, and if any work of fiction dealing with
such relations is to be of any value, these emotional forces will come out
whether the author intends it or not.
These are the thoughts that the material insinuates. To validate
them, and to anchor them securely by finding out why these psychological
patterns are as they are would require much research. I think it should be
undertaken, for SF is too important to be ignored by science. SF has the
noteworthy mission to prepare us, with empathy and imagination, for the
innovations that science has in store for us. They will involve more urgent
and more tractable problems than the complex one of man's relation to
machine, artificial intelligence, and all the other windmills; but if we take
a longer view, the windmills loom larger. There has never been a shortage
of Sancho Panzas; but somebody has to wield the lance of Don Quixote.'7
NOTES
'I have used the translation by John Ormsby (UK 1885); since it is
both faithful and vivid, I have preferred it to many later translations.
2Ibid., p58, n.2; Don Diego Clemencin in an earlier edition of Don
Quixote (Madrid 1835), pp170-71; Wyndham D.B. Lewis, The Shadow of
Cervantes (US 1962), p12.
:Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mills
(1969), passim. As to Mumford's writings, see especially Technics and
Ciilization (US 1934), p32.
4The same is true, incidentally, of sexual action. The mechanical
problem concealed here has attracted at least one SF writer: Pierre
Boulle, who describes the troubles of a young couple celebrating their
wedding night in the condition of weightlessness that obtains in a
space
QUIXOTE'S MILLS 77
craft; see "L'Amour et la Pesanteur" ("Love and Gravity") in his Con.tes
de l'Absurde (Paris 1963).
5Ma gia volgeva il mio disio e '1 velle, / Si come rota ch'igualmente e
mossa, / L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. (But now, what drove my
will and my desire/ Was, like a wheel in equal motion, / The love that
moves the sun and the other stars.)
"IMiguel de Unamuno. The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
(UK 1927), p40.
7Ernst Jentsch, "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen," Psychiatrisch-
Neurologische Wochenschrift No's. 22 & 23 (8/25 & 9/1/1906).
8Heinrich Heine, "Florentinische Nachte," Samtliche Werke, 4:353-
54.
'Lest any reader be shocked by my so classifying The Sandman, let it
be noted that I am operating in the frame of a terminology where the
distinction is that SF deals with the possible, fantasy with the impossible.
It is true, though, that what is and what isn't possible would have to be
decided according to the author's expectations, determined by his
historical locus. The question how many of the impossible events in The
Sandman are meant to occur exclusively in Nathanael's imagination is
moot in our context.
I'Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 17 (UK 1955):217-
56.
" Ibid.
'2Rene A. Spitz, "Life and the Dialogue," in Herbert S. Gaskill, ed.,
Counterpoint: Libidinal
Object
and Subject: A Tribute to R.A. Spitz on
his 75th Birthday (US 1963), p155.
i3(Cf, among others: Harry F. and Margaret Harlow, "Learning to
Love," American Scientist 54 (1966):244-72; F. Heider and M. Simmel,
"An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior," American Journal of
Psychology 57 (1944):243-59; Nicholaas Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct
(1951).
' 4Victor Tausk, "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in
Schizophrenia" (1919) in Robert Fliess, ed., The Psychoanalytic Reader
(1948). This essay is of importance in the study of man-machine relations
chiefly because it contains the clinical material upon which Sachs based
his study (see 17).
'-In his short story "A Man"--New Yorker 12/30/72--Donald Bar-
thelme refers to such a bird as "a
piece
of
expensive junk."
'"Stanislaw Lem, "Robots in Science Fiction," in Thomas D.
Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (1971), p309. Robots being
the favorite machine in SF, this brilliant study is important for our sub-
ject.
'7In addition to those named above, the following works are of im-
portance for our subject. Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Die technischen Fort-
schritte nach ihrer asthetischen und kulturellen Bedeutung (1888);
important, in spite of its age, as an unusually clear and forceful af-
firmation of the role of the machine. Roger Burlingame, Engines of
Democracy (1940); Part VI, "The Social Lag," is thought-provoking,
though dated. Hanns Sachs, "The Delay of the Machine Age," in his The
Creative Unconscious (1942; enlarged edn 1951); this essay is in-
78 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
dispensable as the classic psychoanalytic orientation to the man-machine
problem. Arthur 0. Lewis, Jr., ed., Of Man and Machines (1963); this rich
and up-to-date collection of fiction and non-fiction pertinent to the
problem area of man-machine relations deserves first priority; it is of
special interest in that it leads to further reading.
Stanislaw Lem
Remarks Occasioned by
Dr. Plank's Essay "Quixote's Mills"
According to our cultural tradition a literary work is significant in the
degree to which it differs in a nontrivial way from all previously published
works. This individualistic approach, strongly correlated with the concept
of the uniqueness of each literary work, is perhaps dying out in our time,
for it is opposed to the trend of mass culture.
A literary work is at the same time something strange and something
familiar. Thanks to its familiarity we can understand it well; thanks to its
strangeness we can experience through its content a new revelation of
what we had thought to be banalized, doomed to silence. Neither the
strangeness alone nor the familiarity alone can make a work of art
relevant: the fusion of the two is the necessary precondition of creation.
From a bird's-eye view, the whole domain of modern literature is
somewhat depressing. Mainstream writing tells us all about practically
nothing, and SF tells us practically nothing about all. The mainstream
bores us with everyday trivia as seen through a magnificent microscope--
the magnificent system of well-focused lenses created by the self-
devouring sophistication of hyperspecialized narrative modes. In SF we
look through a badly built apparatus at "all"--but this "all" is dubious if
not falsified. We have in SF a counterfeited Cosmos, a nauseating mixture
of anachronisms, counter-empirical as a whole, and an oversimplified
future of the race, perceived only at its black extremes,.only in the spec-
trum of all imaginable holocausts and global suicides; and what stands in
SF for human reason is really only a moronized superman version. In SF
we do not even see the big problems central to future research (future
social structures, the relationship of man to artificial man, mankind en-
dangering itself with the not yet evident consequences of so-called
progress) other than through a dimmed glass, darkly: the whole ap-
paratus is out of focus--and intentionally so.
This intentionality must be explained before we can proceed. Our
neighbor planets, Mars and Venus, were thought by the oldtime
atronomers to be images of Earth's future (Mars) or of its past (Venus).
We know now that neither of these assumptions is true. Venus is not
similar to Earth as Earth was some hundreds of millions of years ago,
REMARKS OCCASIONED BY "QUIXOTE'S MILLS" 79
and Mars has nothing in common with the planet imagined by
astronomers--a planet on which the once vigorous life forms were dying
out, being involved in an heroic but already lost struggle with worsening
environmental conditions (the "canals" were thought to be signs of this
struggle, with respect to the supply of water). So we see that for the old-
time astonomers these planets were a kind of Rorschach test: they did not
see the planets as they really were; they did not stop at the limit of their
knowledge based on observational facts; they instead projected their un-
conscious, anthropocentic expectations into outer space, building a
coherent, intelligible system of relations, a spectrum of celestial bodies in
which Earth's position was still central, thus repeating the error of
precopernican cosmology. The parallel looks like this: Venus has not
YET achieved, and Mars has ALREADY lost, what Earth NOW
possesses. This invariant of our perception manifests itself in science only
unintentionally, for the sole task of science is to build a model of reality
as true as possible. Since the task of science is unambiguous, the attitude
of the scientist has little in common with that of the writer, for whereas
there is a licentia poetica, there is no such thing as licentia scientifica.
Although the distortion of the world's image is possible in science
only as an error, such distortion in literature is often the proper mode of
individual expression. But not every kind of intentional distortion and
transformation of true facts is of the same value in literature. Highly
specialized distortions, or rather their modi in a paradigmatical sense, are
selected out of the set of "all possible distortions" by the process of
evolution in the various literary genres. This selection is by no means a
rational progress, for the writers themselves do not know why this rather
than that transformational pattern of the narrative becomes a leading
paradigm of creation. Nevertheless Occam's razor is in a way valid in
belles lettres. It can be called the minimax tactics of creation: the greatest
impact results from a minimum of invested means--a very old maxim, put
by J.W. Goethe in the words "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der
Meister." The neglect of this rule results in an inflationary escalation of
means and meanings.
While the real universe is a thing too big for our science (and will
remain so forever, I think), it is too small and too crowded a place for the
expansion of escapist dreams, so SF has invented a lot of other universes.
But this remark is only preliminary; the heart of the matter is inflation in
art, and specifically in SF. The generally low standard of SF is often
defended with an expression now proverbial in SF circles, that "90% of
everything is trash." But this defense is not only inappropriate; it misses
the point central to any discussion of the genre.
In the realm of art we are accustomed to the state of things in which
a hierarchical order builds up with the passing of time. The best works
find their place at the top of the pyramid, and the hopeless miscon-
structions find theirs at the bottom. This process of ordering goes on very
slowly; as the device filtering out the worst and selecting the best, time is
the constantly moving factor in this catalytic cracking. But alas! so much
broken glass is given for diamonds in SF that every true diamond must be
dimmed, if any at all are to be found in these mountains of waste. The
worst eclipses the best; true, but this is only the prima facie notion. In
80 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
reality the perfection of a work of art is only in its potentiality, its chance
of maturing, of expanding in meanings; and there are some necessary
preconditions for this kind of growth: the duration of contacts (between a
work and its readers), the attention given to each work, and so on. All this
can be translated into the technical language of information theory, with
its "channel capacity," "noise-signal ratio," etc. The most relevant piece
of truth in information theory is the rule that when we have too many
signals, their common resultant can only be noise. The principal factor in
the killing of creation in our time is the law of large numbers. The hyper-
saturation of the market is a suicidal process in our culture: the forces of
selection are paralyzed. So what determines the success of a literary
work? To an ever greater degree, the determinants are accidental; where
there was once self-organization through maturation and discriminative
feedback, now there is only chance. If we have not yet reached the
breaking point, the point at which the randomization of "natural selec-
tion" in culture wipes out all other kinds of selection, we are surely
moving, and with acceleration, to this point of no return.
Let me point out some symptoms of this malaise in the artistic genre
of SF. Firstly, there is the staggering discrepancy between the literally
cosmical aspirations of SF and its realizations. The cosmos is
already
miniaturized to pocketsize in a vast bulk of SF books. This
miniaturization is counteracted only by means of words: by adjectives,
say, in statements that the distances between the stars are "immensely
great," by the notion of cosmonautics with speeds measured in
"kilolights," etc. But a pocketsize universe simply cannot be taken
seriously, so we have already a grotesque unintentionally attained in this
writing--a dangerous and bad omen.
Secondly, a growing number of books show signs of very strong
referential bonds with the whole background of science fiction. These
books, when put in the hands of a reader with no experience in SF, remain
simply incomprehensible. They look as if they had been mutilated, and
truly they have been mutilated: such a book is no closed system, no
sovereign independent entity, no self-sustaining organization of meanings
but is instead a fragment, a particular and incidental embodiment of the
trend now fashionable in SF. In a word, these books have already lost the
central attribute of a work of art: individual, nonrepetitive, unique
characteristics. They are very similar each to other, and even if they dif-
fer, their differences are dominated by their general resemblance. This is
pulp in the primary, material sense of the word.
The disindividualizing trend can eventually become the dominant
one in all branches of art; then our present views will perish, as a tran-
sitory phase in the evolution of culture. I do not forecast this state of af-
fairs; I consider it only a serious possibility. To claim today that one will
spend years in the writing of a novel--as Thomas Mann did, working ten
or twelve years on a single book--would be not a sign of spectacular
courage but rather of madness. Who can know what the fate of a book
planned now would be twelve years from today? There is building up a
pressure that necessitates the synchronization of creative plans and prac-
tical considerations (marketing) in a writer's production: he is forced to
write under conditions more and more resembling those in the typical
production of mass goods.
REMARKS OCCASIONED BY "QUIXOTE'S MILLS" 81
Perhaps all this is so, but what has it to do with Dr. Plank's essay,
which introduces into the relation of men and machines such notions as
this of the "Don Quixote effect"?
Firstly, one can put the notion "escapist" or "estranged mind" for Dr.
Plank's notion "Don Quixote," and "empiricist" for "Sancho Panza." This
would already be a somewhat polemical substitution, since I have stated
above that I understand a literary work to be a union of these opposites.
When you have estrangement only for estrangement's sake, you are
escaping the real world. The presence of both Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza in Cervantes' novel is no chance accident, neither is the epilogue of
this great book.
Secondly, we have in literary criticism the choice between the nor-
mative and the descriptive approach. A normative approach must
necessarily end with the construction of a normative aesthetics. A nor-
mativistic critic is forced to throw 98 or 99% of SF to the wolves, and to
plead for a "better, future SF"--and so he himself becomes a utopian,
since no man can by himself change a big complex trend in the social or in
the cultural life of his society. There is simply no substitute for natural
selection as a means of preserving prominent works of art and drowning
bad ones in oblivion. So even if I am biased here in that I feel a strong at-
traction toward the normative attitude, I must also sympathize with the
descriptive study of literature, for I am a science addict, and the
egalitarian mode of research is typical of science.
Now descriptit)e research is not a univocal term, for we have both syn-
chronical and diachronical modes of description and generalization. The
synchronical mode was first worked out by the structuralist school: here
the central problem is how a given work has been put together and what
its relations are with the proper genological paradigm. The second school,
more traditional, treats a work as a link in the chain of sociocultural and
philosophical events distributed along the time axis of human history.
The structuralist mode of research is, alas, insufficient, since its
theoretical apparatus has no necessary resolving power: it cannot
distinguish between certain subsets of complex literary texts; e.g., between
a dull (and boring) complexity and a brilliant (and fascinating) one. (This
is a matter of fact, not openly stated by the structuralists themselves.)
The second school tends to explain away the immanent quality of
every literary work, since in this historical perspective a given work is only
a point of hybridization of some antecedent currents of thought: at the
end of the analysis the work in question is reduced to a handful of other
works, philosophical viewpoints, and sociological concepts.
Dr. Plank has taken another road, a third road: he has inverted the
canonical attitude of considering an artistic work as the ultimate object of
study. The SF landscape is for him a
projection
of the deep currents
building up tensions in the base of human minds. He treats SF as an ex-
pression of those forces. In The Emotional Significance of Imaginary
Beings (1968) he has stated that a bad, primitive SF story is more in-
structive than an SF masterpiece, since in a primitive story the primary
forces working at the base of creation are not camouflaged by the author's
skills, by all the evasive techniques of narration that are typical of the
sophisticated and talented writer (pp88-89). In this way Dr. Plank has
shown most clearly his own critical attitude, which is by no means a
82 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
proper one for the "pure" critic of literature.
His is rather the attitude of the scientist and physician, as will appear
in the following consideration. For the physician there are of course easy
and difficult cases, but there are no "good" or "bad" symptoms of an
illness. All symptoms have the same value as signs, and this also applies
for the psychologist or psychiatrist, since such a man does not evaluate the
enunciations of his patients in the way we would evaluate those same
enunciations in everyday life; for him the enunciations are not statements
about fact but rather symptoms of the patient's mental state. It is also
true that a taxonomist does not distinguish between "good" and "bad"
species: cockroaches and gazelles are equals to him, for his function does
not include the aesthetic (or moral) evaluation of what he is studying.
This scientistic attitude is alien to literary criticism, and if applied
systematically, it nullifies the axiological viewpoint. The analyzed work of
art ceases to be a work of art in the proper sense, for it is no longer the
ultimate object of study, being used as an apparatus pointing out and
magnifying the basic pattern of the emotions active as factors of selection
and creation in the author-reader complex.
What survives as organism or species is neither "bad" nor "good" in
the eyes of the biologist. There are criteria of "badness" and "goodness"
at work in natural evolution, but they are of a "technological" (i.e.,
pragmatical) character: what survives is evidently "good" and what dies
out evidently "bad"--in the sense of "badly built"--and so unfit to survive.
Now when we substitute the salability of books for the survival fitness of
species, we have before us the proper model of the critical attitude
proposed by Dr. Plank. (The set of all readers stands here for the en-
vironment of organisms.) Practically all SF is trash; nevertheless not all
SF books are selling equally well. Fandom prefers some books and rejects
others. Why? Because those others were badly written? No, rather because
the privileged and selected out are in tune with certain expectations of the
readers. There is apparently a unisonance involved in this process of
filtering, a unisonance of all the unconsciousnesses involved, those of the
authors and of the readers.
But this is still an interesting mode of approach. It is worth pointing
out that Michel Butor has proposed that SF authors work together, in big
collectives, to build up a single fictitious world; this proposal caused some
indignation on the olympian heights of SFWA.' But no one has remarked
that Butor's idea is already accomplished to 80 or 90% , and this ac-
complishment manifests itself in the syncytial character of all produced
works that have in common practically the same fictitious universe; that
is, falsified in the same way, with "hyperlight travel," with time loops,
with parallel worlds, with man-reduplicating machines, etc.
The sole weakness of Dr. Plank's approach is this: if for the sake of
the argument I accept his general assumptions and approve his attitude, I
must still disagree with many of his particular statements. But there is no
point in opening a polemic, in writing diatribes. What I could say would
not in the least change the principal object of disagreement. My
arguments, on this level of discourse, would have the same inbuilt
weaknesses as those of Dr. Plank. On this level there are simply no
methods of proving who is right and who is wrong. Here, in this
psychoanalytical approach, we have no simple basal facts--no facts
REMARKS OCCASIONED BY "QUIXOTE'S MILLS" 83
already established beyond any reasonable doubt. Sam Lundwall has
written that we have in SF two kinds of artificial beings in accordance
with an ambivalence typical and well known in the domain of the un-
conscious. Androids are sexed but robots are sexually disarmed, because
we, the readers, are at one and the same time attracted and repelled by
the idea of sexual intimacy with an artificial man or woman.2
Perhaps Lundwall is right, but how could we prove that he is?
Breadth of imagination cannot represent the highest instance of appeal in
the theory of literature (or of its genres). Of how to evaluate Dr. Plank's
hypothesis on the "Don Quixote effect" or "complex," I have no idea. Af-
ter reading "Quixote's Mills" I have the same feeling as after finishing
The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings, the feeling that both
these texts should start at the point where they come to an abrupt end. I
can only hope that this is not a dead end. Perhaps statistical analysis of a
truly big set of SF works could be of some help here. Their central leit-
motives could be analyzed in search of statistical significance. So we need
now some computers, some programs, some men with proper capabilities,
and of course a lot of money. This is how literary considerations are en-
ding today.
Perhaps I should add some words explaining that I do not see any
serious disagreement between Dr. Plank's position and my own with
respect to the "blasphemous nature" of robots in our culture. In my essay
on robots, I did not claim that I was enumerating all the factors involved
in "antirobotical" feelings and/or anxiety, but I thought that my
argument was reasonable in the form of a selective approximation of the
problem. The problem is of course a very complex one, and my essay was
a minor thing, written for a limited audience.3
NOTES
'See Michel Butor, "Science Fiction: The Crisis of Its Growth," and
James Blish, "On Science Fiction Criticism," in Thomas D. Clareson, ed.,
SF: The Other Side of Realism (1971), pp157-70.
2Sam J. Lundwall, Science Fiction: What It's All About (Ace Books
1971), ?7.
<"Robots in Science Fiction," written in German for Quarber Merkur,
No. 21 (Nov. 1969); an English translation appears in Clareson (?11),
pp3O7-25.
RESPONSE BY DR. PLANK
Responding in a spirit of magnanimity, Stanislaw Lem has widened the
area of conceptualization rather than that of argument. Any extended an-
swer by me would merely impair this desirable effect, so I'll be brief.
He is right, of couse, that my basic approach is neither normative nor
descriptive--in fact, primarily one of psychological study rather than
either type of literary criticism. I may well be guilty of not having kept the
three approaches as separate as they ought to be.
I can't agree more than with Lem's judgment that my book would be
better if it went on (and it will hardly surprise anybody who knows
publishing problems to learn that the manuscript was thrice as long
84 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
originally). I doubt that this would necessarily take us as far as to com-
puters. The science and art of sampling has developed sufficiently, I
hope,
to spare us such a step that I, for one, still feel, without blushing, to be a
bit "unheimlich."
Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes?
NOTE. This exchange of opinions came about when we asked Mr. Blish to replv to Dr. Rot-
tensteiner's critique, and having received the reply, saw that the two contributions taken
together r aised (Luestions of interest for a further debate. We then asked several other
people.
includiing the three other contributors, to comment on them. All these
people
were sent
copies
of the Rottensteiner-Blish exchange; it was technicallv impossible to let anv of them read the
other two contributions in time to reflect on and replv to them too. The reader is asked to
keel)
that in mind for a just evaluation. The
pages
of SFS will be open to further significant
contributions in this debate on "Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes?" with
a maximum of one thousand words. --DS.
FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER. ON AN ESSAY BY JAMES BLISH
In the essay "Future Recall"' James Blish is playing the old game of fin-
ding
a function for SF. He
quite rightly
demolishes some of its claims:
Thus far then, I have said that science fiction is not notably
prophetic; that it is not educational in the usual sense; that it is
steadily writing itself out of the business of suggesting inventions, or
careers in science; and that even the free-wheeling speculation which
used to be its exclusive province can now be found in many other
places, including the pages of Nature. I have only to add that even as
fiction most of it is poor--and it will appear that I have pulled the
rug out from under the genre entirely.
But not so, continues Mr. Blish, for SF is the literature of change. It "at-
tempts to help us prepare for the changes" that the real world is un-
dergoing. Now as we know, "change" is the om mani
padime
hum in the
prayer mills of SF authors, repeated there ad naulseam. Perhaps we need
to look at some principal considerations.
How can change be shown in literature? In two ways: by static con-
trast, or as a dynamic process. The second way, of course, is the more dif-
ficult and intellectually the more sophisticated. Therefore most SF is con-
spicuously silent concerning the rules that govern and motivate change,
and offers only the cliche' of the "progress of science and technology" in-
stead of useful analyses. When SF attempts to show motivations, it falls
hopelessly behind the theoretical level achieved by contemporary
philosophical and sociological thought on the subject. When sociologists
have written about SF, they have mostly diagnosed its static, conservative
nature.
Therefore most SF shows change by way of contrast; another strange
and alien world is presented; some other time, space and society, with
nothing to explain how these worlds came about. The reader can only ac-
cept the premises of such stories. But then SF does only what any
historical novel or any "mainstream" book from another era does. And
CHANGE,
SF, AND MARXISM 85
while it is true that "mainstream" fiction does not emphasize change, a
sampling of world literature makes it quite obvious that
thQ
world is
changing and has always been changing, at least in the field of social at-
titudes, cultural norms and mores, and so on. One of the major themes of
literature is the struggle between generations, between the old and the
young, because the old can no longer understand the quite different views
of the young. But you don't find this conflict in SF (e.g. Heinlein depicts
different, but quite static societies, where children believe exactly what
their daddies tell them, with no back-chat), nor character development. In
SF there can be no development of character, because there are no
characters. If a "character's" ideas change, then we are forced to believe
in miracles, since we are shown no other psychological motivation.
But I have still not looked at the main question about the
"therapeutic" value of SF as postulated by Blish. Are readers of SF really
better equipped to face change than the people who refuse to read the
stuff? What really can ESP powers, feudal societies, time travel, worlds in
the atom, intelligent robots, invaders or monsters from space, and all the
other paraphernalia and worn-out gambits of SF, contribute to our
preparation for the future? Anyone who reads contemporary SF to help
him survive in the future would, to put it mildly, be wasting his time. Af-
ter reading widely in SF, the disinterested observer will find a total in-
nocence of SF writers as far as real problems and likely developments of
the future are concerned. He will find that the "changes" SF envisions
bear no relationship whatever to the real course of the world, as they are
only resurrections of old cliches, dead modes of life, dim myths and
popular superstitions firmly rooted in the subconscious of mass-man. SF
is not a branch of epistemological fiction, but a new kind of opium for the
people, offering wish-fulfillment instead of cognition.
lThe best indicator of the intellectual degradation of English-
language SF and its resistance to radical and real change can perhaps be
found in its attitude or rather silence towards Marxism. It must make you
think when you realize that no American or English author has written a
story that would endorse a Marxist view of change, or at least contain an
intelligent discussion of it. Now those authors would probably all claim
that they consider Marxism to be wrong. However, rightness and
wrongness is irrelevant in this context, for SF authors endorse views or in-
corporate views into their stories that most certainly are wrong: the Bates
method of eye-training, for instance, dianetics, the tarot, or astrology.
Even on statistical expectations, one would expect at least a few authors
to be familiar with socialism. For Americans, Marxism is probably a most
alien system of thought, therefore those authors who say they describe
change and other possible societies should leap upon Marxism as an
example of radical change. That they don't recognize this direction of
thought is a clear indication of their conservatism. Also, wrong or not,
Marxism is one of the most important philosophical and economic
systems of our time, the official doctrine of millions of this planet's
inhabitants, the hope of several hundred million more in the undeveloped
countries, and it is heatedly discussed by intellectuals all over the world.
It just isn't possible to dismiss such a system out of hand, even if you con-
sider it wrong, for it will certainly help to shape the future. The main dif-
ference between the ready acceptance of crank theories by SF and its
neglect of socialism seems to be this: the more banal a system is, the more
86 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
easily it can be assimilated and digested by trivial fiction. An
example:
note the crusade-like manner in which even the most trifling stylistic in-
novations are quarreled about by the fans. This seems to show that SF
readers are ill-equipped to realize the various claims for their
acceptance
of "change." For when they react so violently to such unimportant mat-
ters, how will they react to changes involving their personal lives?
To sum up: to stress change is but a fairly useless cliche'. It is far
more important to look at the specific qualities of change, and this SF
does not do. For in the future we will find no galactic races
offering gifts
to us; no talking human-like
robots; no
"spindizzies" with the
physical
properties of flying carpets, but lacking their charm; there will be neither
time-travel nor extrasensory perception; and Poul Anderson's naive belief
in the fine art of fencing won't help anyone.
There is another point which Mr. Blish should have considered, but
did not touch upon: why must SF be a fiction of change? With so many
popular journals, newspapers, books of futurology, and so
on, to tell
you
about change, how does SF justify itself, especially as the other media
reach a much wider audience than SF, and are much more precise in their
descriptions of change?
JAMES BLISH. A REPLY TO MR. ROTTENSTEINER
Having first read Mr. Rottensteiner's review in Quarber Merkur filtered
through my bare acquaintance with his beautiful native language, and
now having read it again in his better command of mine, I must admit at
the outset that I can still only guess at his objections to my essay. There
seems to me to be two: (1) he does not agree that SF is "the literature of
change"; and (2) he thinks that SF in the West ought to pay more at-
tention to Marxism.
(1) The fact, which he points out, that I did not invent the notion that
SF uniquely prepares the reader for our present situation of almost ex-
ponential change is an ad hominem argument which may be dismissed
forthwith as such. I never claimed I did; moreover, many people have
stated it better than I have, and I have made some attempts since 1969,
when I wrote the essay he attacks, at qualifying it and setting limits upon
it which apparently have not come to his attention. All that matters here
is that I still subscribe to it and that I think his case against it is flabby.
I so think because he uses "literature" in two senses without allowing
that there is any difference between them. One of these senses allows the
term to cover any published work of substance, including works in
philosophy, sociology, popular journals, newspapers and now futurology
(not a collection I would lump under "works of substance," but since he
implies that he does, I take it as read). In this sense, it's not difficult to
recognize that there are only a few great minds, and that the followers of
each derive, dilute, break up into small schools, and eventually disappear
into niggling, feuding little brackish backwaters of no importance what-
soever to the history of thought or the life of the mind. I adduce Freud; he
wrote not one word that I admire except aesthetically, yet it should be
easy to see that, whether one agrees with him or not, his whole scholium
goes downhill from him and follows the natural history of the
degeneration of an original idea to the inevitable useless quibbling within
a pack of doctrinaire idiots. I further adduce such other marvels as Plato,
CHANGE, SF,
AND MARXISM 87
Christ, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, Hume, Berkeley, Nietzsche, Marx,
Spengler, Pareto, and
Wittgenstein;
Mr. Rottensteiner will have his own
pick of pernicious thinkers among these, as I have mine, but neither of us'
will find it difficult to see that every one has had no followers who haven't
been lesser men than they were.
In the second sense, "literature" is limited to the world of poetry,
drama, fiction and various secondary arts such as criticism. Those who
enjoy and value this do so because it supplies them with a number of
things not obtainable from works of philosophy or sociology. It is to this
world that SF belongs. One of the things good SF does is to show how
given individual human beings might react to a postulated environmental
(including social and technological) change. I will grant that not many SF
stories actually do this, and still fewer do it well, but this is simply to
grant that most SF also is bad, which has no bearing on the main
argument. Contrary to Mr. Rottensteiner's sweeping dismissal, there are
some good examples, and their existence shows that the possibility of
doing it is inherent in the medium. The improbability of most of the
postulated changes is another side-issue, first because it's impossible to
weigh them -- the world I live in now would have seemed an almost solid
mass of improbabilities to the one I was born in half a century ago
-- and
second because we are not talking about any specified proposed changes,
but the process of change itself.
(2) It has always been my impression that Marxism had a deep and
visible influence upon the work of Olaf Stapledon, to cite one English-
language SF author Mr. Rottensteiner's other blanket dismissal cannot
sweep away. In America in the 1930's quite a number of SF authors were
sympathetic toward socialism, and one group in New York City, the
Futurian Society, was formed exclusively for those who were either actual
members of the Communist Party or espoused the Party's policies. Later,
the barriers were lowered a little to admit Trotskyites as well as
Stalinists. The aim of this group, proclaimed publicly at a World-Con by
John B. Michel with a pamphlet to back him up, was to use SF to help
bring about what they believed to be the future. They wrote and published
SF stories with this intent. The stories were bad, which is doubtless why
Mr. Rottensteiner has never encountered them
--
even I, who knew all the
authors at the time and read the stories, can't cite any of the titles from
memory--but they did endorse the Marxist view of change, or whatever
version of it the American CP was wedded to at the time, so Mr. Rot-
tensteiner's "statistical expectations" are in fact satisfied. And of course
the badness of the stories was the fault of the authors, not of the subject,
for good SF stories with socialist assumptions also exist; that these
assumptions found their way only into bad stories in the U.S.A. is un-
fortunate, but again, irrelevant. Contrary to Mr. Rottensteiner's
statement, they exist, which should be quite enough to "make you think"
twice.2
In my opinion, the minor (not non-existent) role Marxism has played
in English-language SF may be due to the very fact he cites, that it is "the
official doctrine of millions of this planet's inhabitants." Nazism was the
official doctrine of (fewer) millions for a while, and while some tags and
attitudes of Fascism have popped up, sometimes fairly consistently, in the
works of some English-language authors, only one, M. P. Shiel, can in
fairness be described as espousing the Nazi version of it (before the
88 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
Nazis were in power), and it's equally unfortunate from a non-literary
point of view that as a novelist he is quite as good as Stapledon; and I can
think of only two American stories, both good,3 that adopted Fascist
economic theory. We may be tempted to attribute this dearth to human
decency, but then we might well use the same point against Stalinism. It
seems to me far more likely that most SF writers in the West are fun-
damentally antipathetic toward "official doctrine" no matter what form it
takes, and when they have made any use of it at all, it has been as
material for satire. We do not, in fact, like closed systems of any sort, and
if we use them, do so only for the sake of the story in hand. Let us take one
of the most conspicuous examples, A. E. van Vogt. He has adopted
Spengler, Nietzsche, Bates, Korzybski, Graves and both halves of Hub-
bard (and I may have missed a few others), and unless I completely
mistake Mr. Rottensteiner, the latter cannot believe that there is anything
good to be said for any of these theorists; and with various reservations, a
few of which are serious, I would agree with him. But what is much more
important is that all of these untenable, antithetical or just plain ill-
understood assumptions have been advocated by a single author
(restlessness within closed systems), and that every one of these source-
authors, though one of them is not banal and has influenced millions and
another is the simplest kind of crank, is a would-be revolutionary (an-
tipathy to "official doctrine"). Though we may be detected carrying
placards now and then, most of us find the posture acutely uncomfortable,
as most writers of any sort of fiction do, and should; and as writers whose
fundamental sympathy lies with continuous and unexpected change, we
would find ourselves drowned out if we got trapped into beating the same
drum over and over again. In SF, no notion, not even Bates eye-exercises,
is so monstrously trivial as having a mind closed to all ideas but one, no
matter how important and complex that one may be. A failure to un-
derstand this implies incomprehension of any sort of creative enterprise.
I may not believe a word of this tomorrow. This would surprise me.
but it would also please me.
URSULA K. LE GUIN. SURVEYING THE BATTLEFIELD
In attacking the achievements and
potentialities of SF as he does, Mr
Rottensteiner is in a
very strong position.
The massed armies of Lit. Crit..
are behind him; he has enlisted the storm-troops of Futurology; he holds
all the advantage
of the
ground,
of
strategy,
and of
recognized legitimacy.
Mr. Blish, speaking for a ragged crew of
dissidents, very
few of whom are
even willing to be represented by him, their main concern being
quarrelling with one another, stands on the shakiest ground, and with
resolute gallantry defends the all but indefensible.
It is only too easy for a bystander (like Pierre at Borodino) to point
out the weaknesses in Mr. Blish's arguments. If, for all Marxist influence
in any lasting or meaningful sense in English-language SF, one can point
onlv to Stapledon--scarcely
an orthodox Marxist!--perhaps that point
were better conceded altogether. If one reduces all philosophy, theology,
social thought, etc. to the works of "a few great minds" and a mess of
squabbles among their "doctrinaire idiot" followers, perhaps it were bet-
ter not to mention these topics at all. On these issues, it almost seems that
Mr. Blish seeks deliberately to make his position more untenable than it
CHANGE, SF, AND MARXISM 89
already is.
But what does our Napoleon, Mr. Rottensteiner, do? How does he
deploy his magnificent artillery? With wonderful consistencyi He spikes
every gun he's got.
The technique is familiar. With, ummistakably,
the
purest motives,
the most earnest, honest admiration, Mr. Rottensteiner has done more to
build up antipathy towards his friend Stanislaw Lem
among English-
speaking readers, these past couple of years, than Lem's worst enemy
could have done. He has overpraised Lem, oversold him, used him to make
invidious and otiose comparisons, translated his difficult, vigorous, genial
style into pedantic, ham-handed English, and in short done everything
possible to make his books disliked before they are read. Fortunately,
Lem is so very good a writer that his works, as they appear in English,.
will survive this introduction. Nothing can hold a talent like that down;
but Mr. Rottensteiner, with the best intentions in the world, has
certainly
tried. And in this essay, he's at it again.
Personally, I agree with most of his main points: and, having read
them as he states them, am ready to deny them all categorically. I think
that if I was told in this tone of voice that energy equals mass times the
square of the velocity of light, I would deny it. This is not, however, a
mere matter of tone of voice, of manners or "taste." The solidest idea, if
presented by a bigot, loses its solidity; it becomes, not an idea any more,
but a dogma--a much more tenuous, and less interesting, thing. Mr. Rot-
tensteiner is not a bigot. Rather, he is passionately, and admirably, con-
cerned. But an unbalanced concern, or an overly polemical one, becomes
fanaticism; and so we see this intelligent man suddenly ascending the
pulpit and speaking ex cathedra. Those of us (possibly including Mr.
Blish) whose conscience insists that we mistrust any statement that sets
itself above debate, must wince to see sound arguments thus
rendered, if
not untenable, certainly intolerable.
I do not wholly subscribe to Mr. Blish's ideas of the usefulness of SF,
if
indeed
I understand it. I am extremely suspicious of any usefulness at
all being ascribed to literature: in fact, of the whole criterion of usefulness
as applied to literature, music, oak trees, oceans, persons, etc.
--
unless a
great many other criteria, of equal or superior value, are applied at the
same time. But this idea of a "literature of change" is not the main drift
of his reply to his critic. He states his main idea plainly and cogently: the
idea of the open system. (It is an idea, by the way, with which I believe
Stanislaw Lem agrees; in a very closely equivalent context
--
talking
about the faults and potentialities of SF
--
he calls the same thing the
open univer-se.)
I only wish that Mr. Blish had remarked (thus undercutting his op-
ponent on his own ground--sawing through his pulpit, as it were) that the
dislike of and restlessness within the closed system also characterizes the
best Soviet/Communist-nation SF. The supreme example is probably
Zamyatin's We. (We, of course, has never been printed in Russia. Ardent
anti-Communists may take comfort in that fact, though I do not see how
they can take comfort in the fact that it was, after all, written in Russia,
and by an old Bolshevik at that.) Zamyatin's novel perfectly exemplifies
Blish's central point, that SF operates effectively only in an open system.
The open system is not, cannot be, merely the writer's society; essen-
tially, it exists in his mind.
90 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
"Marxism" can be accepted as an open system (Marx) or a closed one
(Stalin). "American democracy" can be taken as an open system (Jef-
ferson) or a closed one (Nixon). What must be remembered is that, if the
individual has decided to opt for the open system, he is free to go beyond
it. If his society or his government forbid him to do so, and if he accepts
that decree, then he is living in a larger, but not an open, system. He has
let the door be shut again.
The intellectual crime for which Zamyatin was reviled and silenced
was that of being an "internal emigre." (The American equivalent would
be "un-Americanism.") This smear-word is a precise and noble descrip-
tion of the finest writers of SF, in all countries.
Mr. Rottensteiner is altogether justified in criticising SF writers who,
living in nations without overt censorship, yet choose to shut the door, to
close their minds into hermetic ideological systems such as free-enterprise
capitalism, Social Darwinism, Catholicism, or pseudo-ideologies like
dianetics, and thus to cripple their imagination and their intellect. But
what is lacking in his criticism is humanity. He says, "Stop! You are
wrong!"--but he does not say, "Look around--you are free." His critique is
authoritarian, not libertarian. The idea of simply opening the door and
leaving it open seems not to occur to him. And this is why Mr. Blish, with
his shaky arguments, making his hopeless defense of a lot of shoddy
writers, finally appears as the only man left standing upright in a sham-
bles of verbiage. For he is speaking, across all national and ideological
boundaries, for the liberty of the mind. Mr. Rottensteiner has all the ar-
tillery; but if there are any angels around, they
are on Mr. Blish's side.
H. BRUCE FRANKLIN. A RESPONSE FROM A MARXIST
Franz Rottensteiner criticizes Anglo-American SF for its failure to give
any expression to a Marxist outlook. This is extremely
mild
criticism,
for
in fact Anglo-American SF does not merely ignore Marxism, but is pro-
foundly hostile to it. The main body of English-language
SF writers
range
from conscious anti-Communist propagandists such as
Ayn Rand, Aldous
Huxley, George Orwell, and Robert A. Heinlein, to writers who are
politically ignorant and so thoroughly conditioned by anti-Communist
assumptions that they echo their rulers and masters without even
knowing what they are doing.
As a Marxist myself, I would go considerably further, to a more fun-
damental criticism. To me--as to the vast majority of intellectuals in Asia,,
Continental Europe, and Latin America--Marxism is the only science one
can intelligently bring to bear on any overall discussion of humanity's
future, near or far. Only in Great Britain, the United States, and the
English-language regions of Canada is Marxism not generally regarded as
the science of human history--past, present, and future. To most of the
world's intellectuals, the philosophical bases of Anglo-American SF seem
like bizarre anachronisms. It is as though a section of the world insisted
on trying to build a science of matter by relying on medieval metaphysics
while pretending that experimental physics had not been invented (or that
Isaac Newton was the mastermind of a sinister global conspiracy aimed
at reducing humanity from glorious beings to mere machines). Most of the
SF of Great Britain and the U.S. seems as irrational as the societies that
produced it. This should be no surprise. Anglo-American SF does not
CHANGE, SF, AND MARXISM 91
project the future of the world; it merely reflects the realities of these two
dying empires. Imaginary inter-galactic wars of conquest against alien
beings are natural products of societies whose entire histolry has flowed
from genocidal wars against people of color throughout the world. And
the grotesque worlds of Anglo-American SF in general are not too far
removed from the social worlds of Great Britain and the U.S., whose vast
productivity, instead of being used to satisfy human needs and desires,
debauches human existence and poisons the environment, creating anar-
chic urban jungles built on exploitation, drugs, sex for sale, and every con-
ceivable form of predatory relationship. And what could be more im-
probable than the fact that these vast empires are ruled by gangs of
master criminals, who command armed forces capable of annihilating all
life and who deploy involuted networks of uniformed and secret police
utilizing the most advance electronic surveillance systems?
James Blish's responses to Rottensteiner's criticism are mere reflex
actions. The key sentence in the debate is Rottensteiner's timid un-
derstatement: "Also, wrong or not, Marxism is one of the most important
philosophical and economic systems of our time, the official doctrine of
millions of this planet's inhabitants, the hope of several hundred million
more in the undeveloped countries, and it is heatedly discussed by in-
tellectuals all over the world." Blish ignores all the main points of this
conservative declaration of fact. Instead he obediently leaps at the words
"official doctrine." Like all loyal citizens of the Anglo-American Free
World, he loudly proclaims his scorn for the slavish Communist "official
doctrine" (and all other foreign ideologies). Of course we have no
ideology, and nothing controls or determines olur- thinking, particularly if
we happen to be such free, creative, individualistic beings as SF writers
and critics.
Of course, being a liberal, Blish has to show that he's just as tolerant
of Marx as he is of other "great minds." So he puts Marx in a hodge-podge
list in the free academic marketplace of solitary geniuses.
Pick
your
favorite "pernicious thinker," he offers, and do with him what you will.
But among these, Marx alone provides the basis for a serious, intelligent,
scientific science fiction. And of far more fundamental importance, the
hundreds of millions of people who are determining humanity's future are
not and will not be guided by a metaphysical maniac like Bishop
Berkeley, a theorist for an ideal conformistic police state like Plato, or
any embodiment of ancient superstition, even Christ.
"We do not," declares James Blish,
"like closed
systems
of
any
sort."
Well, Marxism is the opposite
of closed. It is not the reflections of some
solitary genius, but rather a developing science which puts into the hands
of the people the control over their own destiny. Blish fails to see that it is
we in the U.S. who function within a system as closed as that of the Greek
slave empire that also called itself a "democracy."
In fact the interlocking Anglo-American empires have decayed so far
that they have produced some SF that does indeed border on a Marxist
analysis. Advanced state capitalism has now given birth to a whole body
of SF works that project the next stages of its monstrous cancer. Kurt
Vonnegut's Player Piano, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space
Merchants, Pohl's "The Midas Plague," Robert Silverberg's "The Pain
Peddlers" and "Company Store," Robert Sheckley's "Something for
Nothing," J. G. Ballard's "Subliminal Man," John D. MacDonald's
92 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
"Trojan Horse Laugh" and "Spectator Sport"--all these are good projec-
tions of what capitalism might become if it were not destroyed. But
capitalism is in the process of extinction, and those who are wiping it out
and replacing it with a decent human society are guided by the science of
Marxism.
My criticism of James Blish is not intended to be an attack against
him personally, but rather against the all-too-common ideas he expresses.
We Marxists believe in vigorous and forthright debate of these issues of
life and death. On the other hand, the apologists for the "Free World"
usually conduct their side of the debate by exclusion, repression, open
terror, and mass violence. The methods used to silence us, including my
firing from Stanford University for giving political speeches, are
typical
of
those employed against all who express revolutionary Marxism. Like
many other comrades who try to base their lives on this philosophy, I have
been deprived of my livelihood, arrested several times, beaten by the
police, and most recently, had my door kicked in by two dozen agents of
the federal secret police (F.B.I.) who held my wife and three children at
gunpoint while they kidnapped me on charges they later had to drop. But
this terroristic repression only increases our determination to expose and
change the exclusion of Marxism from our lives. To me, the exclusion of
Marxism from SF is intimately connected to the world-wide campaign of
terror and suppression being waged by this frenzied dinosaur
empire.
CHANDLER DAVIS. THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS
Thesis (Blish): SF is the literature of change. Antithesis (Rottensteiner):
No, it's not.
And yet Mr. Rottensteiner agrees that it ought to be, and at its best,
is. He complains that it mostly doesn't do the job Mr. Blish assigns it; but
that, Mr. Blish concedes. There is still a real issue here. But in defining it,
let me treat not the mass of mostly undistinguished SF, but rather an
ideal type abstracted from the best of it--or even a desired new literature
for which something in SF raises hopes.
A whole generation of young English-speaking fans--Mr. Blish's
generation and mine--surely came to SF seeking a literature of change.
Whimsy, intellectual playfulness, we had. It merged into a Faustian in-
tellectual arrogance: we were god-like, since we could contemplate so
many worlds. For many fans that was as far as it went. But our
generation too had those--Mr. Blish and me among them--who opposed as
Mr. Rottensteiner does the merely playful in SF. For "our" literature,
even when it was light or satirical, we had serious aspirations.
We believed in the mutability of the assumptions integral to the
inherited social order. We welcomed the writer who exposed their
evitability--whether it was Karl Marx or Jonathan Swift or Ruth
Benedict or Olaf Stapledon.
We believed the future just as real as the present. We welcomed the
writer who attacked the illusion that nothing will happen--whether it was
Karl Marx or H. G. Wells. We welcomed (to the extent that we could find
it) the kind of future fiction that fit Heinlein's epithet: "more realistic
than most historical and contemporary-scene fiction."
We believed in a human responsibility to act, to make history. We
welcomed the rare writer who pictured different roads, both possible, and
CHANGE,
SF, AND MARXISM 93
called us to take part in choosing--whether it was the Marxist Jack Lon-
don or the anti-Marxist Aldous Huxley. Granted that the hours we
devoted to SF were not our most activist hours, were perhaps even escape,
still we saw in SF more than horrid or radiant futures, or worlds of
what if: we sought real problems truly posed.
Marxism seemed neither absent from SF (Rottensteiner) nor
peripheral to it (Blish). Marxism seemed to treat questions which were of
SF's essence. And our then view of SF's essence underlies Mr. Blish's
present view: "It is in stretching the mind to accommodate this
multiplicity of possible futures that science fiction has its reason for
being."
We must admit to Mr. Rottensteiner and to ourselves that we failed
to create an SF which lived up to our vision, and that even the vision
faded. What happened?
We starry-eyed youth came to accept more and more the flip whimsy
of the other fans among whom we found ourselves. First because we did
find ourselves among them, reason enough; too, some of us may have
soured because our millennium failed to arrive on schedule; but other
things were eroding our seriousness.
There was this technical limitation: Whereas the real future in-
corporates a profusion of simultaneous novelties, whose effects can
scarcely be disentangled, the fictional future must bring out a few, to
avoid swamping the finite readers, and to allow tracing effects. I am not
resisting this necessity; but it did militate against our fidelity to real
future and for a rapprochement with the fantasy-writer's arbitrary con-
trary-to-fact hypothesis.
Another reason was our genuine eclecticism. Though mostly
socialists, we found that Zamiatin, Huxley, and Heinlein, who were not,
had something to teach us--even something to teach us about socialism.
We ought to have been prepared by John Stuart Mill
(and Marx!)
to un-
derstand that the truth is many-sided and imperfectly known, so our doc-
trine must be dialectical and evolving. To our discredit, we tended rather
to the non-dialectical eclecticism which accepts contradictory ideas
without confronting them. Marx, Spenser, Freud, Jung, Bates--who cares,
as long as there's a story in it? We ought not to have decided, just because
we saw that true ideas may come from unexpected sources, that there are
no false ideas.
A final reason was the pose of innocuousness. When the inquisitor
looked in on the Rena;issance: humanist, he was assured, "Ah, but though
my book sets forth the heresies reason has taught me, I retract them all on
its last page, for when reason and the Church conflict then reason must be
in error." When the inquisitor looks in on the SF writer, on the other
hand, he is assured, "Ah, but the revolutions and utopias in my stories are
mere escape fantasies, and even my social satires are mere jokes.
Everything is grist for the SF mill. You'll see--my next story will be about
a witch who's allergic to broomsticks, ha-ha." This disguise had done
good service to our precursors, and was easily available to us in the 50's
when we needed it. How natural that the mask should now seem part of
our face. -Natural, and pitiful. Let's express contentious ideas obliquely
when we must, but let's dare to have them, and express them.
The future is still real, still coming at us, and at least as unknown as
we thought it. Let's face it with the respect it deserves.
94 SCIENCE-FICTION STIJDIES
Marxism as an official philosophy is also important for SF, just as
Catholicism is (witness Blish's excellent A Case of Conscience) but more
so: it is a weightier social fact in the world of the real near future. So yes,
let's admit it to our fictional futures. But caution! For SF, however
Marxist, official Marxism can't be the right stance. No official philosophy
can. Governmental apologetics are not always false, but they are always
one-sided; usually their time-scale is in months not centuries, though they
claim otherwise.
By all means let SF stretch the people's minds to accommodate a
multiplicity of possible futures. Not just futures into which they may be
herded. Futures they urgently have to see coming, and struggle to avert or
to realize.
NOTES (BY RDM)
'Mr. Blish's essay appeared in George Hay, ed., The Disappearing
Future (London: Panther, 1970). Mr. Rottensteiner's present article is
from his review of that book, which appeared, in German, in his fan
magazine, Quarber Merkur No. 26.
-For some reminiscences of this group, see Robert A.W. Lowndes, "A
Eulogy for the Dying Science-Fiction Magazines," Riverside Quarterly, 6
(1973):34-35.
:Mr. Blish has written us that the books he had in mind were Robert
A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1942) and L. Sprague de Camp, The
Stolen Dormouse (1941). He might well have added James Blish and Nor-
man L. Knight, A Torrent of Faces (1967).
Franz Rottensteiner
Playing Around with
Creation: Philip Jose Farmer
Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for March, 1961,
Alfred Bester singled out Philip Jose Farmer as one of seven SF authors
meriting special praise: "Mr. Farmer's is the true courage, for he has the
strength to project into the dark where no pre-formed attitudes wait to
support him .... Mr. Farmer often shocks because he has had the courage
to extrapolate a harmless idea to its terrible conclusion" (p80). Let's take
a look at such extrapolating; and To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first
of a series of stories, might be an appropriate subject, having won a
"Hugo" as the most popular SF novel of 1971 among American fans.
The basic idea of that novel is imaginative enough, and does justice
to Mr. Farmer's reputation of daring to handle controversial topics. All
human beings that ever lived up to the year 2002, when all but a few were
destroyed by extra-terrestrial visitors, have been resurrected along the
banks of a river 25 million miles or so long, which zigzags its way in a
PLAYING WITH CREATION: PHILIP JOSE FARMER 95
narrow valley on some artificial alien planet. All these humans, from the
Neanderthals to the moderns, thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand
and thirty-seven in number (Mr. Farmer has industriously counted them),
find themselves exactly twenty-five years of age, stark naked, totally
hairless, the females all virgins, the men circumcised. Why this should be
so is anybody's guess, but one assumes that Mr. Farmer threw in the cir-
cumcision as a joke on Jew-haters. The virgins seem to be a special bonus
for characters that like to deflorate, so that the state of virginity is soon.
remedied--but without much explicit description.
Population is distributed in different areas of the river valley ac-
cording to a fixed ratio: 60% of a particular nationality and century, 30%
of some other people, usually of a different time, and 10% from any time
and place. Food is no problem, since every individual is equipped with a
"grail" that delivers to him sustenance, such as beefsteaks, and other com-
modities, including cigarettes: as far as food is concerned, this afterlife is
a Land of Cockayne if you are careful not to lose your "grail". But in most
other respects it is a jungle, with men preying on each other, with warfare
among the various groups and small states, and "grail slavery." In fact,
this episodic novel is a chain of various battles, adventures (mostly of a
bloody kind) and fights that the heroes experience while travelling in this
world--and what better excuse for a quest than a gigantic meandering
river?
With all beings awakening naked, there are initially some problem of
decorum (among Victorians, say), and the author manfully pleads for a
breaking of taboos; and since the function of the grails isn't obvious at
once, and there are no animals, a few good words are put in for can-
nibalism, a favorite pastime among more "iconoclastic" SF authors. But
while there is no food, and no clothes, luckily there are stones to batter
heads in with, and bamboo to make spears for impaling bodies.
Aside from these familiar concerns and dutiful motions of any ad-
venture story, in or out of SF, there is a Big Philosophical Question. Why
have all humans been resurrected? Are they in heaven, hell, purgatory or
whatever? It soon transpires that it wasn't God who lent a helping hand
but rather a race of superior beings, called the "Ethicals" though they ap-
pear to be villains. The purpose of their actions is unclear, but there are
conflicting theories. One of them is advanced by the "Church of the
Second Chance", among whose more illustrious members is a sym-
pathetically portrayed Hermann Goering (who seems to hold a special ap-
peal for American SF writers, to judge from the number of SF stories in
which he has figured). It holds that the riverworld is a sort of purgatory
to cleanse humans of all impurities, and prepare them for an eternal bliss,
which some saints are supposed to have already achieved. This happens
also to be the official doctrine of the "Ethicals," as we discover when the
book's protagonist, Richard Francis Burton, the 19th Century adventurer
and translator of the Thousand and One Nights, is brought before a
tribunal in celebration of his 777th death. For death in the riverworld is
not final, but an act repeatable at will, although turning dying into a
hobby isn't advisable, since, the reader is told, the soul or "psychomorph"
might get lost. Its ties with the body are weakened by too many deaths,
and one might truly die.
The other theory is advanced by a renegade Ethical called The
Mysterious Stranger--an allusion to a story by Mark Twain, whose name
96
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
is taken in vain for the hero of the second novel in the series, The
Fabbulous Riverboat (1971). He contends that the riverworld is a
gigantic
experiment, a scientific test for finding out the reaction of human
beings
in various situations, and for
increasing the
knowledge
of
history by in-
terviewing the resurrected humans. This Mysterious Stranger pretends to
want to help people, but he might lie, as might the other Ethicals. Aside
from the fact that there is no interviewing in the novel, this theory is non-
sense, since any race able to restore every person that ever
lived, atom by
atom, with all memories intact, already knows so much about them as to
be in no need of interviewing them. What can you tell a
being that knows
every atom of your structure, which is
infinitely more than any man can
know about himself?
In any case, Richard Burton determines to find out the Truth, to
arrive at the dark Grail Tower where the mysterious grail masters dwell.
To do so, he travels around, until he discovers a more original method of
transportation: teleportation by suicide. Since
the resurrections occur at
different "grailstones" along the river, obeying a random principle, dying
is a method of statistical travel. Now I have no idea what Burton or the
heroes of the other books in the series, existing or forthcoming, will finally
find out about the Ethicals, but on the evidence we have so far I am
prepared to bet that it is something not worth knowing, and just as banal
as what has passed before. For I contend that To Your Scattered Bodies
Go doesn't tell us anything meaningful about life, death, or the hereafter.
Rather, it presents little children playing with the marbles of space, time
and resurrection; its "afterlife" is merely one more stage for the same old
set of events which have been recounted in any number of novels of ad-
venture.
What little value the novel has lies wholly in the fact that it presents
in an almost pure form the particular method of mass-market SF--that is,
playing around with a limited set of elements that are combined and re-
combined to infinity. A kaleidoscope of oddities that is simultaneously
derivative, self-perpetuating and incestuous; a mirtum compositum of
almost unlimited assimilative powers, ahistorical and devaluating;
readily accepting what is intellectually bankrupt, and bankrupting what
initially had some value, before it was drawn into the gigantic junk-yard
of SF, where everything is but a pretext for another cops-and-robbers
story--regardless how the figures are called, and whether the background
is the earth, some other planet, the galaxy, past, present or future, some
other dimension, or indeed the afterlife. Without paying notice to
historical context, environment or character, such SF throws together the
customs and institutions of different pasts, usually jazzed up with some
hyperbolic technology of the future (a never described technique of
resurrection in Mr. Farmer's case). What SF in general does
metaphorically, Mr. Farmer presents literally as his subject: the river-
world is quite factually a world where past, present and future meet,
where historical context no longer exists, and knowledge of milieu is no
longer necessary, since all figures in the story share the same uniform and
artificial background. Even the psychology of individuals and character
development has given way to mere name-dropping: Mark Twain, Her-
mann Goering, Richard Francis Burton, the "original" Alice. None of
these humans has, as lively as some of them are, any real relation to their
historical "prototypes": what Mr. Farmer has to offer is at best some com-
PLAYING WITH CREATION: PHILIP JOSE FARMER 97
monly known lexicographical information. A revival on such a gigantic
scale would have offered a chance of a unique meeting of minds; but all
Mr. Farmer presents is the old trite quarrel of survival and petty warfare.
People who were noted for their sharp minds are here reduced to pages
and pages of inane mutterings, and to playing at the old game of im-
prisonment and escape.
This series is also further proof, if such proof were needed, that
present-day SF, far from being the literature of change, is as a rule, very
conservative in methods as well as content. While paying lipservice to
change, and offering some background slightly changed in relation to the
author's environment, it actually comforts the reader with the palliative
that nothing will ever really change, that we'll always be again what we
have been before, in this world or the next; as below, so above; as on
Earth, so in the afterlife, Amen.
Ever since The Lovers (1961)--his first and, for all its faults, still most
interesting SF novel, along with Night of Light (1966)--three components,
intermixed in different ways and degrees, occur again and again in Mr.
Farmer's work: religion, sex, and violence. Religion most often takes the
form of a fascinated,secularized preoccupation with creation. His creators,
however, lack any dignity or higher purpose; they appear childlike in their
creative omnipotence, playful, scheming, lying, deceitful--and not very
bright. In Outside Inside (1964), for instance, the hero, a social climber,
finds himself in a nightmare miniature world that presents the reverse
side of the riverworld coin. It delineates not a world after death, but a
prenatal world, where artificial souls, created again by a race of
"Ethicals" (perhaps the same as in To Yolur Scattered Bodies Go), are
conditioned for life in our world. Or so at least the hero is told in the end,
which may or may not be a lie (it seems likely that it is only a cruel joke
of the "gods" to further torment the characters of the story). For, again,
the "explanation" makes very little sense: if the Ethicals create immortal
souls out of benevolence, why "condition" those souls in a purgatory? This
seems to indicate a very poor engineering job, for why not create souls
that have the desired qualities in the first place? And the straightening
out job seems as poor. Sexual perverts, for instance, are treated in the
following way: "So, the Exchange castrated them, cut out their tongues,
amputated all four limbs, and thus made them unable to offend or harm
anybody, even themselves." The Ethicals really must have very curious
educational theories, and Mr. Farmer is aware of the irony of the
situation: he has a "demon" comment in the story thxat the perverts, to
spite their creators, get more vicious all the time.
Equally cruel is the afterlife pocket-universe in "A Bowl Bigger than
Earth," a short story in Mr. Farmer's collection Douwn in the Black Gang
(1971). There, human beings find themselves thrown into an intestine-
shaped world, imprisoned in identical sexless bodies, and subjected to
mindless drudgery. This world is truly hell, and they are punished if they
so much as utter the word; insult is added to injury in that they are
required to exclaim that they positively like their toiling and that things
couldn't be better.
What does this all suggest? Farmer presents hellish worlds, before
birth and after it, into which a vague hope is introduced only as an ad-
ditional torture. They depict various degrees of degradation of man, and
reject the autonomy of human values and human beings. These stories
98 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
proclaim the Fortean doctrine that man is only property, utterly at the
mercy of beings with remarkable powers, "gods" or "ethicals," who appear
to be childlike, prankish, sadistic dimwits, taking delight only in causing
pain and suffering. Even death offers no escape from the torturers, since it
has lost its uniqueness and become a playful act that can be reversed or
repeated at will. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, / They kill
us for their sport."
The author of such "gods" does in fiction what they are supposed to
do in reality: he plays around with shocking situations and possibilities,
without justifying them or giving them a larger meaning. Sometimes these
creations are, in their vividness of description, remarkable as fruits of a
grotesque imagination; but I think they are never of any importance as
speculative thought, as intellectual effort. Of the three components,
religion, sex and violence, the last seems by far the strongest, and to be
gaining in strength with time. Sex if often restricted to a few puns, some
"bad" language (which hardly seems anything but cursory), and a few acts
deviating from what is considered "proper"; more essential in these
stories are the many acts of maiming, mutilating, torturing and killing.
The most significant argument for this is perhaps the fact that Mr. Far-
mer unabashedly continued one of his most far-out sex-books, the hard-
core pornography A Feast Unknown (1969), in two "clean" novels: Lord of
the Trees /The Mad Goblin (Ace Double, 1970). Does it not seem strange
that a writer in whose work sex is said to be so central, should find it so
easy to delete all sex in a sequel? Such an act, one would assume, would
change the whole nature of a story, turn it into'something else altogether.
That Mr. Farmer did it so effortlessly, seems typical of him and SF in par-
ticular, and the civilization it mirrors in general. Sex can come and go, as
commercial considerations make it necessary; the atrocities and violence
are constant, for nobody objects to that. At least not the editors, the
publishers, or the Hugo Award voters.
David Y. Hughes
and Robert M. Philmus
The Early Science Journslism
of H.G. Wells: A Chronological Survey
This survey offers abstracts of H. G. Wells's science journalism, from his
earliest surviving efforts up to 1901 (with exception made for "The Scep-
ticism of the Instrument," included as an appendix to A Modern Utopia
[1905] but also essentially related to these early writings, especially "The
Rediscovery of the Unique," and thus an important nexus between Wells's
interest in science and his later sociological concerns).' Without claiming
to be exhaustive, the listing comprises 60 articles derived from a com-
prehensive sifting of periodical contributions (some of them reprinted in
Certain Personal Matters) attributed to Wells by Geoffrey H. Wells or by
Gordon N. Ray, augmented by 30 previously unnoticed articles that we
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 99
assign to Wells on the basis of evidence found in the Wells Archive at the
University of Illinois (see below: CPM, GHW, GNR, and H&P). We have
included all the essays and reviews that we deem relevant to Wells's
science fiction, as well as two uncollected short stories of a somewhat
essayistic nature (-2-3).
The 90 items listed here--most of them unsigned and unreprinted--
make up an otherwise unavailable record of Wells's overt scientific beliefs
and shifts in belief in the period before Anticipations--before, that is, he
turned his attention decisively toward sociological issues. While his
science journalism prepares for that development, it does not reveal Wells
as committed to any particular blueprint for society. It does, however,
reveal him as committed to science in its literary use as a basis for science
fiction.
The reviews and essays fall into three groups, partly overlapping. One
group involves science education or science popularization; one expresses
a more or less passive delight in the wonders and mysteries of science; and
the third deliberately challenges received opinion by proposing novel or
paradoxical ideas and backing them up with an appeal to science. Of
course, all three types reveal Wells as attempting to widen the reader's
range of perceived possibilities and to encourage his power and desire to
extend it for himself.
EDUCATION AND POPULARIZATION. Having dropped science
teaching in 1893, Wells as a journalist urged reform. The core of his
position is the need for a sequence of studies. Mind and hand should be
trained in integrated class and laboratory work leading step by step
through the intellectual hierarchy of the sciences. Common sense dictates
that studies like metallurgy or physiology should rest on prior study of
physics and chemistry. Science consists neither in technical proficiency
nor in pure knowledge of fact but in a method of discovery, and science
teaching must impart that method. Wells is Baconian, largely--he stresses
inferential reasoning and slights mathematics--but he prizes the inductive
method itself, not its material fruits. (See # # 36, 47, 51.)
He is consistently Baconian concerning fields of learning as well as
ways of teaching. He mistrusts both the a priori state of academic
psychology and the non-repeatable data of psychic research. In a lighter
vein, he intimates that "pure" reason may be unhygienic; he shows up the
usual "proofs" that the earth is round as false inductions; and he deplores
the taxonomic pedantry of the South Kensington Science Library, which
catalogues the lives of entomologists under "Insects" and the subject
"Meteorology" before 1891 under "Physics" and after 1891 under
"Astronomy." Lastly, recalling his education as having been in many
ways a typical one, he finds all his teachers deficient in the faculty of
significant inductive generalization, even at the Royal College of Science,
except of course T. H. Huxley. (See## 8, 10, 23, 26, 44, 53, 89, 90.)
In "Scientific Research as a Parlour Game" (#72) and especially in
"Popularizing Science" (#32), Wells states the requirements of works of
popularized science. Primarily, he urges the imparting of a sense of in-
tellectual discovery to the reader. The popularizer must shuck off
specialized language as a mark of "intellectual parochialism" and employ
general literary (or at least literate) English; his delight in technical
problems must be subsumed by the larger scheme that gives them
100 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
significance; and he must build up this scheme in an orderly causal and
logical sequence in support of an opening generalization, so as to give the
reader an idea of scientific method. The result, says Wells, is the pleasure
of "inductive reading." Since his model of what the popular exposition of
scientific ideas should be like closely parallels the plan of a number of his
science fantasies, it is significant that he also remarks that "the fun-
damental principles of construction that--underlie such stories as Poe's
'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' or Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes' series,
are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer" (#32).
At this time, in mid-1894, he had done little science popularization
himself; he alludes instead to his experience "as a reviewer for one or two
publications" (#32), evidently referring to his Pall Mall Gazette science
reviews (listed for the first time in this survey). In these reviews, he
develops the critical principles that later work well for him in his Satur-
day Reviieu' popularizations. The PMG reviews employ the technique of
evaluation through direct quotation (an analogue of the inductive policy).
Among them are slashing attacks on jargon, bad construction, false sen-
timentality, sham induction, and amateurish theorizing: faint com-
mendations of technical guides and
supernumerary surveys of already
familiar fields; and unreserved recommendations of original research
presented lucidly as an imaginative and encompassing vision (e.g., # 22).
Wells's own popularizations, despite their brevity, succeed through
causal connection of illustration and generalization. Sometimes these
essays begin by asking the question, what general principle does a given
set of phenomena illustrate, the answer being unknown. This provides
"inductive reading": the quality or significance of a phenomenon is
revealed or problematically raised as a function of its illustrating a prin-
ciple of things. For example: no conspicuously colored or scented flower
exists without relation to insects (#70); or, a recent transit of Mercury,
though a minor event, might, under proper conditions of weather and
geographical accessibility, have helped determine the presence or absence
of an atmosphere on that planet as well as the extent ot its curious orbital
aberrancies (#41). In general, the expository essays on science manifest a
reasonable care for accuracy, a strong emphasis on factual up-to-dateness,
and a sure eye for salient, problem-focusing detail (the erratic behavior of
Mercury that Wells singles out for attention, for instance, not long af-
terwards gave Einstein evidence for his Theory of Relativity). (Other
examples of basically neutral expository essays: # # 45, 52, 62, 66, 80, 82.)
THE WONDERS AND MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE; that is, the secrets
of nature that science discloses. Essays with such titles as "A Vision of the
Past" (#3), "An Excursion to the Sun" (#15), "From an Observatory"
(#43), and "Through a Microscope" (#54) are exercises in dissolving the
limitations of human perception. Through science we can imagine having
telescopic or microscopic eyesight or conceive of a life span enduring
through eons. Science thus can aid imagination and enlarge human un-
derstanding. True, some deficiencies may not be remediable. If the moon
were brighter, we might never suspect the existence of the stars (#43); the
human brain, not merely the eye, is doubtless a provisional and unreliable
instrument (# 90), a mere "bye-product" of the evolutionary process
60); and science itself is merely a matchflare that "man has just got
alight," beyond which is "darkness still" ( # 4). Yet these arguments of
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 101
human limitation bespeak wonders and mysteries in nature discoverable,
if at all, only through the scientific method. Case in point: precise
measurement of the weight and density of gases reveals the'existence of
argon, the otherwise unsuspected element in the air we breathe (# # 61,
68, 74).
At times Wells appears almost ready to abandon Baconian principles
outright and commit himself to a belief in a universe of unpredictables. At
other times he faces what he calls the "Calvinism of Science" (# # 76, 84).
That is, when science enables man to take his bearings against the im-
mensities of nature, his sense of wonder and mystery and his fine free,
sense of enlarged vision may be overshadowed by a feeling of impotence
amid inexorable forces (# # 2, 43). The ability to envision the man of the
year million confers no power to alter the cosmic forces that will have
shaped him ( # 12). This awareness on Wells's part permits him to see that
the scientific enterprise is apt to be regarded as a "systematized
Fetishism," a substitute for religious magic in offering cosmic correspon-
dences among phenomena well beyond the pale of cause and effect ( 88).
On the other hand, always alive to the dialectical possibilities of the
"opposite idea" ( # 5), Wells attributes to science "The
Rediscovery of the
Unique" (# 4). Man is finally liberating himself from "the trim clockwork
thought" of the 18th century as
evolutionary biology
now teaches that
"All being is unique.
" There are no principles, no ontological
generalizations, but only individualities--"unique threads flying," in
Goethe's figure of the loom of time. Perhaps nothing is impossible in
nature and perhaps nothing is repeated. Perhaps, Wells suggests in "The
'Cyclic' Delusion," the only universal principle is change, that is, novelty
and death in a cosmos moving "from the things that are past and done
with for ever to things that are altogether new" ( # 39). Yet such a view
renders science powerless to reveal nature's secrets because it amounts to
dissolving the system of uniformities upon which all science rests. For that
reason, Wells is only sporadically tempted by unpredictability.
UNORTHODOX SPECULATION was congenial fare to Wells. In part it
was a matter of intellectual play. Civilization was engendered by the flint
and could have been engendered by nothing else
( # 29); "mimetic"
coloration is not protective but irrelevant since most predators hunt at
night and by smell (
#
59); not only are rigid skeletons not needed for sup-
port of musculature, as witness the octopus, but silica skeletons--if rigidity
be desired--would far surpass the lime-salt structures actually possessed
by vertebrates ( # 81); on the moon there may be considerable and con-
tinuous change, the possibility of which is discounted without reckoning
that such change might be invisible to us ( #77). These are fair samples of
sheer speculative play.
The most paradoxical of Wells's notions have to do with man's place
in nature, a theme so pervasive in these early essays (as in his science fic-
tion) that it is possible here to suggest only the briefest outline of his
thought. His starting point is unorthodox from any standpoint but that
of mainstream British
biology, especially as exemplified by Thomas
Huxley. Wells did not really regard evolution as a "theory" at all.
Whatever its consequences might be, it was the central fact of biology,
geology, and solar physics. 'T'he corollary was that homo sap)iens is an ac-
cident and an episode. Essay after essay--at least until about 1896--
102 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
hammers away at the anthropocentric fallacy. Life could be built out of
compounds other than carbon ( #48) and might somewhere have reached
or surpassed man's present mental level (# # 30, 79). Animals (# # 3, 50)
and plants ( # 82) possess nervous organizations higher than is commonly
recognized, while the human brain is an instrument of dubious precision
(
#
90). Man, moreover, remains subject both to instinctual drives
inherited from ape-like ancestors and to the accidents and necessities im-
posed on him by nature ( # 84); so that from both within himself and
without he faces powerful adversaries to his humanity. Natural law is as
amoral and un-"human" as it is universal and absolute ( # # 19, 28, 76).
After Wells came around to accepting--by early March 1895--
Weismann's Theory of Germ Plasm2 (which directly opposed the older
Lamarckian theory that acquired characteristics are inheritable), he
gradually but decisively turned his attention away from the long-range
prospects of evolutionary change through natural selection (as in The
Time Mcachine) and towards the immediate possibilities of what he ter-
med "artificial evolution" (# 84)--meaning education and behavioral
engineering. Having discovered in The Island of Doctor Moreau that
mind presents more of an obstacle to "individual plasticity" than does
man's physical form, he concluded that man may be redeemed from the
bondage of cosmic biological laws only through education ( # 85), which
confirms him in his capacity of "artificial man," "the highly plastic
creature of tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought" ( # 84). Here
Wells speaks as he would for years to come; and by 1897 he already
imagines the vanguard of the New Republicans, Samurai, and Open Con-
spirators. "We may dream," he writes, "of an informal, unselfish
unauthorized body of workers, a real and conscious apparatus of
education and moral suggestion . . . shaping the minds and acts and
destinies of men" ( #86).
NOTES
'We intend to explore this aspect of Wells's thought in some detail in
introductory material for an anthology of Wells's hitherto unreprinted
writings, H. G. Wells and the Poetry of Science.
2For the dating of Wells's conversion to Weismannism, cf #
52; see
also "Incidental Thoughts on a Bald Head," CPM, p158, first printed
PMG 60 (Mar. 1, 1895):10.
SOURCES
CPM. Wells's Certain Personal Matters (1897), which collects # # 12,
35, 43, 54--the only articles, of those listed in this survey, except for # 90,
that have been reprinted.
EIA. Wells's Experiment in Autobiography (1934).
FR. Fortnightly Review
GHW. Geoffrey H. Wells, The Works of H. G. Wells 1887-1925: A
Bibliography, Dictionary and
Subject-Index
(1926).
GM. Gentleman's Magazine.
GNR. Gordon N. Ray, "H. G. Wells's Contributions to the Saturday
Review," The Library 16(1961):29-36.
GW. Geoffrey West [i.e., Geoffrey H. Wells], H. G. Wells: A Sketch
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 103
forc a Portrait (1930). This writer was not related to H. G. Wells.
H&P. Hughes and Philmus. Of the 30 previously unattributed ar-
ticles, one is signed (# 85), 13 are identifiable from Amy Catherine Wells's
cue-titles (quoted in the attribution bracket that appears below in each
entry), and 16 (of which six allude to, or are alluded to in, articles known
to be by Wells) are included on grounds of style and content. We decided
to record these items after studying all the issues of the Pall Mall Gazette
from August 1893 through May 1895, the inclusive dates for Wells's con-
tributions to that paper. For comparison we had twelve reviews in PMG
that we knew to be Wells's, plus his work for the Saturday Revlieu and,
more generally, the body of his other essays and science fiction. Here we
would like to acknowledge, in addition to the aid of published
bibliographical sources, the kind assistance of Professor Harris Wilson,
University of Illinois Wells Archive, and Professor J. P. Vernier, Univer-
site' de Rouen.
PMG. Pall Mall Gazette.
SR. Saturclay Retiew.
SSJ. Science Schools Journal. Wells was one of the founders of this
student magazine, and its first editor.
THE CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY
#
1. Mammon. SSJ I(Jan 1887):53-54. [GHW; signed "Walter
Glockenhammer"]. Wells's thoughts on two paintings by G. F. Watts,
Mcammon and Visit to Aesculapius: together these canvases "signify . . .
that this nation is, as it were, two dissevered parts . . .
ease, elegance, and
pleasure are floated to-day on an ocean of toil and ignorance and want."
#
2. A Talk with Gryllotalpa. SSJ
1
(Feb 1887):87 -88. [ GHW; signed
"Septimus Browne"]. A dialogue wherein the anthropocentric view of the
world confronts the cosmic perspective of the "infinitesimal littleness of
man."
#3. A Vision of the Past. SSJ
1
(June 1887):206-09. [GHW; signed
"Sosthenes Smith"]. A vision of reptilians in the distant past: they have
three eyes and believe the world was made for them, "the noblest of all
beings who have ever existed or ever will exist." When the time traveller
points out to them that this cannot be so for they will soon become extinct,
they attempt to refute him with an argumenturm ad
stomachulm. But he
saves himself from being eaten by waking up.
#4. The Rediscovery of the Unique. FR 50(July 1891):106-11.
[Signed]. Science, by making available the technological means for
measuring minute differences among apparently similar phenomena, sub-
stantiates the contention that "All being is uinique, or, nothing is strictly
like anything else."
#5. Zoological Retrogression. GM 271(Sept 1891):246-53. [Signed].
Contrary to popular belief, evolution is a process of twists and
backslidings. Degeneration is common and not always a dead end but
sometimes "a plastic process in nature." The degenerate upper Silurian
mud-fish is the ancestor of the land animals; and who knows the future of
the "last of the mud-fish family, man"? His varied existence and variable
structure probably assure him "a long future of profound modification."
Yet nature may even now be equipping some "humble" successor. "The
Coming Beast must certainly be reckoned in any anticipatory calculations
104 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
regarding the Coming Man."
#6. Ancient Experiments in
Co-operation.
GM
273(Oct 1892):418-422.
[Signed]. The "element of individual competition [in the struggle for
existence] is over-accentuated in current thought" while biological co-
operation has been ignored. Wells gives a few examples of the kind of co-
operation he is referring to, pointing out that man himself "is an
aggregate of [co-operating] amoeboid individuals in a higher unity." The
essay closes with speculation on the social significance of this fact.
#7. Concerning our Pedigree. GM 274(June 1893):575-80. [Signed].
Muses, with satirical overtones, on the evolutionary ancestry of man,
which Wells follows from the anthropoid apes backwards in time.
#8. At the Royal College of Science. Edlucational Times 46(Sept 1
1893):393-95. [H&P. About 1893-94, this paper "paid Low.?50 a year as
editor and another ?50 a year for contributors. He and I found it con-
venient that I should be the contributors--all of them" (EIA ?6:6)].
Things have changed little, Wells writes, since his student days at South
Kensington; and he hopes that through brief "glimpses of the hall, the lift
and staircase, a laboratory full of students, methodical teaching, and
errant rebels sitting over rare books in the 'Dyce and Forster,' or
cultivating art in the picture galleries" he can give the reader a student's
view of that institution.
#9. On Extinction. Chambers's Journal 10(Sept 3 1893):623-24.
[GHW]. Extinction--the "saddest chapter of biological science"--is
a tragedy as true as any by a Shakespeare, a
Sophocles,
an Ib-
sen. Perhaps, moreover, the victims feel: perhaps the bison senses that
those "seas of grass were once the home of myriads of his
race, and are
now his no longer." The loneliest of pinnacles is man's present triumph.
Visions of the future must include the doom hit upon in "The Last Man"
of Thomas Hood: "the earth desert through a pestilence, and two men,
and then one man, looking extinction in the face."
#10. The Pure and Natural Man. PMG 57(Oct 16 1893):3. [GHW].
Wells's hero, a rigid logician, recognizing that "the essence of all civilized
ills" is man's "entirely artificial life," has retired from society, gone
nudist, and abstains altogether from the use of soap, an alkali.
#111. The Dream Bureau. PMG 57(Oct 25 1893):3. [H&P]. With in-
creasing knowledge of dream-physiology, the time approaches for in-
vestigators "to bring the control of dreaming as a fine art into the realm
of possibilities." We may imagine the dream-addict someday ordering up
a night's supply, of any sort he pleases.
#12. lThe Man of the Year Million. PMG 57(Nov 6 1893):3. [Reprin-
ted in CPM as "Of a Book Unwritten"; an apparently lost version, "The
Past and Future of the Human Race," went back to 1885--see GW ? 5:1 --or
perhaps 1887--see EIA ?9:1]. As man evolves, says Professor Holzkopf of
Weissnichtwo, "the purely 'animal' about him is being, and must be,
beyond all question, suppressed in his ultimate development." He
forecasts the hypertrophy of the organs of intellect--hands, head, eyes--
and the atrophy of the "animal" organs--nose, external ears, digestive
tract. Our descendants, immersed in nutritive baths deep underground,
will survive until the sun itself burns out.
#13. Angels, Plain and Coloured. PMG 57(Dec 6 1893):3. [GHW].
Catalogues angels: the common white angel of "the oleograph, the Christ-
mas card, the illustrated good book, and the plaster cast"; the art angel of
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 105
"fiery red and celestial blue," "of brightness rather than sentiruent"; and
the biblical angel of the Hebrew and of Milton, "a vast winged strength,
sombre and virile."
#14. The Advent of the Flying Man. PMG 57(Dec 8, 1893):1-2.
[GHW;
but GHW
inadvertently
masks the
identity
of this
unreprinted
essay by confusing it with "The Flying Man," a short story reprinted in
The Stolen Bacillus, which appeared in PMG 60(Jan 4 1895):1-2]. Por-
trays the flying man, present and future. The 19th and 20th centuries wit-
ness his fiascos and hardier triumphs. By A.D. 21,000 (Wells adopts the
quasi-visionary tones of #12) batlike swarms darken the evening air,
homing to suburban "rookeries" from the dome of St. Paul's. The flying
man holds the future: "Even now the imaginative person may hear the
beating of his wings."
#15. An Excursion to the Sun. PMG 58(Jan 6 1894):4. [H&P]. Praises
the plain style and the "inhumanity and serene vastness" of subject of Sir
Robert Ball's The Story of the Suin. The idea of electro-magnetic tides
brushing by "our little eddy of planets," unsettling our compasses, making
solar storms, then passing on to "the illimitable beyond" is "so powerful
and beautiful as to well-nigh justify that hackneyed phrase, 'the poetry of
science.'
"
# 16. Reminiscences of a Planet. PMG 58(Jan 15
1894):4. [H&P;
allusion in #32]. Commends an "able and popular exposition of modern
geology," Thomas Bonney's The Stovy of Our Planet. The earth's age and
life-span are the main topics of this review.
#17. The Very Fine Art of Microtomy. PMG 58(Jan 24 1894):3.
[GHW].
Describes the preparation of a variety of substances for ob-
servation under the microscope and
whimsically envisions a time when
the slides prepared in that day will become collector's items.
#18. The Province of Pain. Science andl Ar-t 8(Feb 1894):58-59.
[Signed]. After tracing gradations of animal and human pain, Wells con-
cludes that "the province of pain" may be no more than "a phase through
which life must pass on its evolution from the automatic to the spiritual."
#19. The Good Intentions of Nature Explained. PMG 58(Feb 9
1894):4. [H&P]. Wells regrets Edith Carrington's Workers Withouit Walge,
a children's nature book which holds up to "vile" man the "lowly good-
ness" of the "affectionate" spider and the "patient" snail. Hiding nature's
cruelty from children is bad practice.
#20. Life in the Abyss. PMG 58(Feb 9 1894):4. [H&P]. In this review
of Sidney J. Hickson's The Fauina of the
Deel)
Sea, Wells recounts some
oddities in a field just opening up. He concludes: "our knowledge is in a
very pleasant phase; enough to stimulate the imagination, and not enough
to cramp its play."
#21. The Modest Science. PMG 58(Feb 19 1894):4. [H&P; allusion in
#51]. To the general reader, says Wells, H. N. Dickson's Meteorology is
"exceptionally entertaining," combining "the most modern conclusions"
with accurate folk-knowledge of the still unpredictable ways of the
weather.
# 22. The Sun God and the Holy Stars. PMG 58 (Feb 24 1894):3.
[H&P]. In this review of Norman Lockyer's The Dawn of Astronomy,
Wells focuses upon man's early closeness to the cycles of the sun and the
stars. Now, Wells adds, churches look onto gas-lit streets where "the
Great Democracy circulates for ever" and "the silent and eternal stars are
106 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
forgotten."
#23. The Flat Earth Again. PMG 58(Apr 2 1894):3. [H&P; ACW:
"The Flat Earth Again"]. A dialogue in which a "perverse person"
challenges a schoolmaster to prove the earth round. "The point is that you
teach things at school as proofs the world is round that are no more proofs
than they are poetry."
#
24. Flint Implements, Old and New. PMG 58(Apr 3 1894):4. [H&P].
Recommends Worthington G. Smith's Mcan, the Primevial Sav)age to the
general reader for its accounts both of ancient bones and implements and
of modern forgeries of same.
#
25. Decadent Science. PMG 58(Apr 5 1894):4. [H&P; allusions in
# # 32, 72]. Demolishes Henry Pratt's
Principlia
Nova Astr-onomica and
its "brand-new" solar system, "a very nice affair, with a Central
Sun, and
a Polar Sun, and an Equatorial Sun, over and above the visible sun of
your vulgar astronomers."
#
26. The Science Library, South Kensington.
PMG
58(May
3
1894):2.
[GHW]. Slashes the cataloguing system of the Science
Library
of the
Royal College of Science.
*27. The "Polyphloisballsanskittlograph." PMG 58(May 8 1894):3.
[H&P; cf #25]. Spoofs apparatuses of unknown function exhibited by
unintelligible foreigners at Royal Society soirees.
#28. The New Optimism. PMG 58(May 21 1894):4. [H&P]. In
reviewing Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution, not only does Wells doubt
Kidd's belief that nations survive in the struggle for existence by subor-
dinating intellectual development to "virtue, altruism, and the habit of
self-sacrifice," but he questions the name "optimism" for a creed which
gives the future to Anglo-Saxons because they are "so stupid, so pious, so
sentimental."
#
29. The Foundation Stone of Civilization. PMG 58(May 22 1894):3.
[GHW]. A cyclist with a tire ripped up by flints listens perforce to an old
man's dissertation showing that flints attended the demise of savagery
and were, in fact, "the only thing that could engender civilization."
# 30. The Living Things That May Be. PMG 58(June 12 1894):4.
[H&P; allusion to # 23]. Finding J. E. Gore's The Worldsi of S)ace
unimaginative with respect to extraterrestrial life, Wells suggests such
possibilities as a silicon base for life outside the earth.
#31. More Bacon. PMG 58(June 22 1894):4. [H&P; allusion in #32].
Expounds the "scientific method" of Orville W. Owen's Sir F'i.ancis
Bacon'S Ci/)hei S/ory. Owen pasted up the pages of all of "Bacon's"
works--The Faeiie ('iuecn', TIhe A tnatomiv of Melan c/holy, Shakespeare's
plays, and the rest--and rolled them back and forth on a thousand feet of
canvas until every line mated with a physically distant one to produce a
secret history of Elizabethan profligacy. Two earlier Bacon articles--
"Mysteries of the Modern Press," PMG 58(Apr 23 1894):3, and "A
Remarkable Literary Discovery," PMG 58(May 3 1894):3--may also be by
Wells.
#32. Popularising Science. Nature 50(July 26 1894):300-01. [Signed].
Begins by pointing out the need for popularizing science, then criticizes
how scientists usually go about it (in language that is too technical and
jargonized or absurdly and condescendingly simplistic). "Intelligent com-
mon people come to scientific books . . . for problems to exercise their
minds upon . .. there is a keen pleasure in seeing a previously unexpected
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 107
generalisation skilfully developed."
#33. Luminous Plants. PMG 59(Aug 25 1894):4. [H&P; ACW: "Pr. v.
Kerner"]. In the interests of the "general reader," Wells approves Anton
Kerner von Marilaun's The Natrlal Histo-y of Plants (tr F. W. Oliver). In
particular the section on luminous lichens and seaweeds inspires him to
regard the deepest growths (which overhang "the perpetual night of the
plant world" and glow red in utilizing their chlorophyll) as emblems of
apocalypse--"so to speak, the sunset of marine vegetation."
#434. The Pains of an Imagination. PMG 59(Sept 20 1894):3. [GHW].
The author used to be cursed with a restless florid imagination that led
him about as if tied by a string. But he cured himself of it: he proposed
that it earn him a living by writing a book, and it has never troubled him
since.
#35. The Extinction of Man. PMG 59(Sept 25 1894):3. [Reprinted
with a slight addition in CPM]. Man is dominant today, but the fossil
record never shows "a really dominant species succeeded by its own
descendants." Man may be displaced by crustaceans, cephalopods, ants,
or even plague bacilli--to name but four possibilities "out of a host of
others."
#36. Science, in School and after School. Naturi e 50(Sept 27
1894):525-26. Mainly in school: a critique of the predominant pedagogical
approach to science, which inculcates fact but not the method of
discovery.
#37. Angels and Animalculae. PMG 59(Oct 9 1894):4. [H&P; ACW:
"Angels & Animalculae"]. Wells cheerfully labels J. W. Thomas's
Sp iritual Laiw in the Natural World "what one may perhaps call the New
Theology, theology 'up-to-date,'" scientifically smartened up.
#
38. A.D. 1900. PMG 59(Oct 12 1894):3. [ GHW ]. In 1900 the giving of
a dinner party or the hanging of a picture may be forbidden by court order
if either is deemed unwholesome by Mrs. Hallelujah, Mr. Peahen, or other
guardians of public morality.
#39. The "Cyclic" Delusion. SR 78(Nov 10 1894):505-06. [GHW,
GNR]. While the tendency to perceive every process as cyclical is "woven
into the texture of our being," many times this perception is delusive--e.g.,
"one day the sun will rise for the last time." On the cosmic level, "the
main course is forward, from the things that are past and done with for
ever to things that are altogether new."
#40. A Belated Botanist. PMG 59(Nov 13 1894):4. [H&P; ACW:
"Belated Botanist"]. E. Sandford, author of A Manual of the Exotic
Fei-ns and(I Selaginella, is "an extreme expression of the specialist type."
Knowing all about the cultivation of ferns, he has not a suspicion of the
findings of botany in the last forty years--facts of fertilization, reproduc-
tion, and classification--known to "almost any high-school girl."
#41. The Transit of Mercury. SR 78(Nov 24 1894):555. [GHW,
GNR]. Discusses what is important about observing the planet Mercury
as it crosses the sun's disc. (See our introduction.)
#42. Mountains out of Molecules. PMG 59(Nov 29 1894):4. [H&P;
allusion in # 72]. Debunks both the thesis that "heat is a current of ether
running in and out of molecules" and the overblown style of its presen-
tation in Frederick Hovenden's What is Heat? A Peep into Nature's Most
Hidden Secrets.
#43. From an Observatory. SR 78(Dec 1 1894):594-95. [Reprinted in
108 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
CPM]. If our moon were brighter, the stars would be unsuspected: "We
can imagine men just like ourselves without such an outlook." What an
enlargement of vision it would be if that bright moon faltered in its
luminosity, perhaps perturbed by the passing of a dark star, and the skies
were unveiled. There is a fear of the night "that comes with knowledge,
when we see in its true proportion this little life of ours."
#44. Peculiarities of Psychical Research. Nature. 51(Dec 6
1894):121-
22. [Signed]. A review of Frank Podmore's
Apparitions
and Tholught
Transference, and an attack on "research" into occult phenomena as un-
scientific because unverifiable by repeated experiment.
#45. Fallacies of Heredity. SR 78(Dec 8 1894):617-18. [GHW, GNR].
Raises, but leaves unanswered, the problem of what causes genetic
"idiosyncrasy"--i.e., differences among offspring of the same parents, even
between twins--which Wells finds one of the fascinating enigmas of
heredity.
#46. The Rate of Change in Species. SR 78(Dec 15 1894):655-56.
[GHW, GNR]. One thing biologists have not emphasized about evolution
is that the rate of change in species, and hence their "plasticity," varies in
direct proportion to their fecundity and the span between
generations.
Thus "'1'he true heirs ot the tuture are the small, tecund, and precocious
creatures . . . No doubt man is the lord of the whole earth to-day, but the
lordship of the future is another matter."
#
47. The Sins of the Secondary Schoolmaster. PMG 59(Dec 15
1894):1-2. [H&P; ACW: "Sins of the Schoolmaster"; this, the last of three
parts, deals with science teaching; the two earlier parts appeared Nov 28
ppl-2 and Dec 8 ppl-2]. Generally ignorant of the present state of science,
schoolmasters must needs teach it anyway. They do so mechanically,
without sequential progression and without realizing that "not
knowledge, but a critical and inquiring mental habit, is the aim of science
teaching."
#48. Another Basis for Life. SR 78(Dec 22 1894):676-77. [GHW,
GNR]. There may be non-organic elements which "would afford the
necessary material basis for a
quasi-conscious and even mental super-
structure," such as the silicon-aluminum
cycle, which inspires Wells with
"visions of silicon-aluminium organisms."
#49. Electricity. PMG 59(Dec 22 1894):4. [H&P]. A review of J. A.
Fleming's Electric Lamps and Electr-ic Lighting and R. Mullineux Walm-
sley's The Electric Cu-rrent. The one is a "readable volume" for non-
technical people, the other a second-hand handbook of batteries, circuitry
and "professorial disregard" of "the real substance of electrical
engineering" today, the dynamo.
#50. The Mind in Animals. SR 78(Dec 22 1894):683-84. [GHW,
GNR]. In this review of C. Lloyd Morgan's An Introduction to Com-
parative Psychology, Wells intimates that he has a higher opinion of
animal intelligence than Morgan: "It may be that Professor Lloyd
Morgan's dog, experimenting on Professor Lloyd Morgan with a dead rat
or a bone, would arrive at a very low estimate indeed of the powers of the
human mind."
#51. The Sequence of Studies. Nature 51(Dec 27 1894):195-96.
[Signed]. Reviews three scientific textbooks and criticizes them all for the
absence "of that progressive reasoning process which is the very essence of
genuine scientific study"--that is, the process of establishing evidence for
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 109
why something is a scientific fact.
#
52. The Biological Problem of To-day. SR 78(Dec 29 1894):703-04.
[GHW, GNR]. A brief expository critique of August Weismann's Theory
of Germ Plasm, against which the main objection is that the immortality
of germ cells seems to be another version of mystical theories of the pre-
formation of all individuals at the beginning of time. Cf #.85.
#53. The Position of Psychology. SR 78(Dec 29, 1894):715. [GHW,
GNR]. Uses George Trumbull Ladd's Psychology, Descriptive (i/d(l EY-
plCan(atolv
to launch an attack on the state of contemporary psychology,
which Wells regards as being weighed down by unscientific assumptions.
#54. Through a Microscope. PMG 59(Dec 31 1894):3. [Reprinted,
slightly modified, in CPM]. "All the time these creatures are living their
vigorous fussy little lives in this drop of water they are being watched by a
creature of whose presence they do not dream." "Even so, it may be, the
[observer] himself is being curiously observed."
#
55. The Darwinian Theory. PMG 60(Jan 1 1895):4. [H&P; ACW:
"Darwinian Lectures"]. For the general reader, A. Milnes Marshall's Lec-
tures oni the Darwinian Theor-y is "the clearest modern exposition"; and,
says Wells, "when such dark speculations as those of Weismannism" are
used by the "small fry of science" to belittle Darwin, Marshall's is "a
needful tribute to the memory of the greatest biologist" of all time.
#
56. About Telegraphs. PMG 60(Jan 5 1895):4. [H&P; ACW:
"Telegraphs"]. Praises A. L. Ternant's The Telegraph (tr R. Routledge)
for its wide-ranging historical exposition of the development of various
telegraph systems, ancient and modern.
#57. The Diseases of Trees. SR 79(Jan 19 1895):102-03. [GHW,
GNR]. A review of R. Hartig's The Diseases of Trees, together with a brief
discussion of plant pathology.
#58. The Limits of Individual Plasticity. SR 79(Jan 19 1895):89-90.
[GHW, GNR]. "It often seems to be tacitly assumed that a living thing is
at the utmost nothing more than the complete realization of its birth
possibilities.... We overlook only too often the fact that a living being
may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something
that may be shaped and altered . . . and . . . developed far beyond its ap-
parent possibilities." "There is in science . . . some sanction for the belief
that a living thing might be taken in hand and so moulded and modified
that at best it would retain scarcely anything of its inherent form and
disposition; that the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while
shape and mental superstructure were so extensively recast as even to
justify our regarding the result as a new variety of being." Wells argues in
favor of this idea by using familiar examples, such as those drawn from
surgery: "If we concede the justification of vivisection, we may imagine as
possible in the future, operators, armed with antiseptic surgery and a
growing perfection in the knowledge of the laws of growth, taking living
creatures and moulding them into the most amazing forms." Cf The
Island of Doctor Moreau, ?14.
#59. The Colours of Animals. PMG 60(Jan 25 1895):3. [H&P; ACW:
"Mimicry of Animals"]. Whereas the man in the street supposes that
"everything is trying its very best to resemble something else," the truth is
that "many of such resemblances are still unaccountable and apparently
quite accidental." Wells cites as his main source F. E. Beddard's Animal
Coloiuration.
110 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
#60. Bye-Products in Evolution. SR 79(Feb 2 1895):155-56. [GHW,
GNR]. "Modification . . . involved in the change [designated] A,"
required for successful adaptation, brings with it "other consequent
changes . . . the directly unserviceable and yet absolutely necessary
modifications B, C, and D"; hence, "a perfectly useless organ" may be just
this kind of "bye-product" and does not necessarily pose an objection to
the theory of natural selection. Wells then goes on to speculate on whether
the higher attributes of mind might be. such "bye-products" of
evolutionary adaptation.
#61. The Newly Discovered Element. SR 79(Feb 9 1895):183-84.
[GHW, GNR]. A popularized account of Lord Rayleigh's discovery of
argon. "All their lives [people]
had,
without knowing it, been breathing
argon.99
#62. The Centre of Terrestrial Life. SR 79(Feb 16 1895):215. [GHW,
GNR]. On the basis of the geological theory that continental land masses
have persisted fundamentally unchanged in scope in geological time,
Wells reasons that terrestrial life must have begun in the higher northern
latitudes and "In the struggle for existence between the older and newer
type [i.e., species], generally the newer prevailed and drove the older
southwards."
#63. The Duration of Life. SR 79(Feb 23 1895):248. [GHW, GNR].
"The business of the animal seems to be, not to live its own life, but to
reproduce its own kind, and the term of life at its disposal is adjusted ac-
curately to the special difficulties of this purpose." The generalization
also applies to man under natural conditions.
#
64. Yards Sacred and Profane. PMG 60(Mar 4 1895):4. [H&P;
ACW: "Measures"]. With a perfunctory nod to reform, Wells turns with
relish from the rationalized standards urged in Wordsworth Donisthorpe's
A System of Measures to Donisthorpe's account of such "natural" stan-
dards as the hand's-length or the ox's "furrow-long"--"growing," says
Wells, "visibly out of the soil." In spirit, this review recalls # 22.
#
65. The Visibility of Colour. PMG 60(Mar 7 1895):4. [H&P; ACW:
"Colour Vision"; GNR links this cue-title to SR (Sept 14 1895), but ACW
enters it under PMG only and in a group all published by mid-April;
and the SR (but not the PMG)
review is
uncommonly
bland for
Wells].
Wells welcomes W. de W. Abney's Colour Vision,
"a
fairly exhaustive ac-
count of the sensations of colour from the scientific side" and a work par-
ticularly stimulating to "the artist and art critic among those who find
pleasure in untechnical scientific books addressed to the general reader."
#
66. Discoveries in Variation. SR 79(Mar 9 1895):312. [GHW, GNR].
A discussion of new biometric studies of variation in species, wherein
Wells observes: "Variation occurs in every direction [i.e., all possibilities
are tried], with complete symmetry; it does not occur in a definite direc-
tion as if it were following some inherent tendency of the animal to
develop in a particular fashion. These minute variations offer a fair field
for natural selection to reject or select."
#
67. Rudis Indigestaque Moles. PMG 60(Mar 13 1895):4. [H&P;
ACW: "Rudis Indigestaque Moles"]. A review of Sir Archibald Geikie's
Memoir of Sir A.C. Ramsay, in which one eminent geologist shuffles the
life of another into a detritus "shaken up together and thrown down
before the reader."
#68. The Strangeness of Argon. PMG 60(Mar 15 1895):3. [H&P;
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 111
ACW: "Argonn"]. Many are the curious properties of argon, not least the
lateness of its recognition. "Surely there are still wonders left in the
world, and the healthy discoverer may keep a good heart yet, though
Africa be explored." (See also # # 61 and 74). In PMG 60(Mar 18
1895):4, replying to factual criticisms, Wells, "without any indecent
shame," admits to errors of detail and proposes that "occasional inac-
curacies" are less injurious to the general reader than the "permanent
boredom" visited upon same by technical writers.
#69. Death. SR 79(Mar 23 1895):376-77. [GHW, GNR]. Complex
organisms are mortal but "death is not inherent in living matter.
Protoplasm may live forever." Nevertheless, "mortal man and the im-
mortal protozoa have the same barren immortality; the individuals
perish, living on only in their descendants . . . the type alone persists."
#70. Insects and Flowers. SR 79(Apr 6 1895):440-41. [GHW, GNR].
Discusses examples of pollination by various insects.
#71. Pygmy Philosophy. PMG 60(Apr 11 1895):4. [H&P; ACW:
"Pigmies"; GNR links this cue-title to SR (July 13, 1895), but ACW enters
it under "Sat Review" and "PMG" in title-groups published no later than
April, and only the PMG entry is crossed off (indicating publication);
also, the SR review, but not the PMG review, is uncommonly colorless for
Wells]. Rejects the efforts of J.L.A. de Quatrefages, in The Pygmies (tr
Frederick Starr), "to establish the high moral standards of these primitive
people, and to imply the primordial elevation of humanity."
#72. Scientific Research as a Parlour Game. SR 79(Apr 20 1895):516.
[GHW, GNR]. A review of I. W. Heysinger's The Source and Mode of
Solar Energy, pointing out Heysinger's ignorance in equating solar energy
with electricity and making a general attack on this kind of dilettantism.
#73. In the New Forest. SR 79(Apr 27 1895):544-45. [GHW, GNR].
Mentions some animals to be met with in the forest and raises some
questions about their behavior.
#74. The Protean Gas. SR 79(May 4 1895):576-77. [GHW, GNR]. A
quizzical discussion of the controversy surrounding the discovery of argon.
#
75. The Influence of Islands on Variation. SR 80(Aug 17 1895):204-
05. [GHW, GNR]. "Isolation on islands has played a larger part in the
evolution of the animals and plants than is usually attributed to it" since
this isolation, which according to modern geological findings is in-
termittent, gives rise in its periodicity to "an immense number of new
species" among which natural selection takes place whenever the island
resumes its connection with the mainland.
#76. Bio-optimism. Nature 52(Aug 29 1895):410-11. [Signed]. A
review of The Evergreen by Patrick Geddes et al., in which Wells rejects
Geddes' arguments against the idea that the struggle for existence is the
prime mechanism in evolution: "As a matter of fact Natural Selection
grips us more firmly than it ever did, because the doubts thrown upon the
inheritance of acquired characteristics have deprived us of our trust in
education as a means of redemption for decadent families."
Moreover, "a
static species is mechanical, an evolving species suffering." "The
phenomena of degeneration rob one of any confidence that the new forms
[of life] will be . . . 'higher' . . . than the old."
#77. The Visibility of Change in the Moon. Knowledge 18(Oct
1895):230-31. [Signed]. While it is popularly believed that the lunar sur-
face has not changed, there is every reason to suppose that it has, and that
112 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
this change has escaped observation not only because the
process of lunar
transformation would be less noticeable than its terrestrial
counterpart,
but also because "the eye that watched [the moon] was set
against the ex-
pectation of change."
# 78. Concerning the Nose. The Ludgate 1 (Apr 1896):678-81. [Signed].
Light-hearted speculation, with satiric
undertones,
on the future evolution
of the inexplicable human nose. "The nose of to-day . . . is in . . . a tran-
sitory and developing stage. One may conceive 'advanced'
noses, inspired
with an evolutionary striving towards
something higher, remoter, better--
we know not what. We seem to need ideals here."
#
79. Intelligence on Mars. SR 81(Apr 4 1896):345-46. [GHW, GNR].
Argues that if "there has been an evolution of protoplasm upon Mars,
there is every reason to think that the creatures on Mars would be dif-
ferent from the creatures of earth, in form and function, in structure and
in habit, different beyond the most bizarre imaginings of nightmare." "No
phase of anthropomorphism is more naive than the supposition of men on
Mars." A report in SSJ 2(Nov 1888):57-58, "Mr. Wells on the Habitability
of the Planets," indicates that at least part of the substance of what Wells
advances in his SR essay had already been formulated as early as October
1888.
#
80. The Origin of the Senses. SR 81(May 9 1896):471-72. [GHW,
GNR]. A discussion of the evolution of the nose, from primitive
chemotropic, and the eye, from primitive phototropic, mechanisms, and of
the ear, as "an organ for translating vibrations into touches."
#81. Concerning Skeletons. SR 81(June 27 1896):646-47. [GHW,
GNR]. Begins by raising the questions, why a skeleton of phosphate and
carbonate of lime rather than of silica, which would be sturdier and more
durable; and why a skeletal structure at all, which is "not simply ex-
plicable as a response to the need for support and armature"; then grants
that these are as yet unanswerable questions, but suggests "that the line
of advance in biology lies now along the path of physiological chemistry
[i.e., biochemistry]."
#82. The Life of Plants. SR 82(Aug 8 1896):131-32. [GHW, GNR].
Points out that the differences between animals and plants are not so
great as most people imagine. All plants have at least local motion, with
the "lower forms of plant life" moving "as actively as animal
protoplasm"; moreover, the process whereby plants absorb and assimilate
nourishment is not so mechanical as it is usually supposed to be.
#83. The Possible Individuality of Atoms. SR 82(Sept 5 1896):256-57.
[GHW, GNR]. The fact that oxygen, for example, responds in more than
one way to spectroscopic analysis means "that there are two kinds of
oxygen, one with an atom a little heavier than the other. And this opens
one's eyes to an amazing possibility . . . that, after all, atoms might not be
all
exactlv alike, that they might have individuality, just as animals
have."
#84. Human Evolution, an Artificial Process. FR
60(Oct 1896):590-
95. [Signed]. Because for various reasons man is not as much
subject
to
the rigors of natural selection as, say, rabbits, "man7
has
undeigone. ... bit
an1 in1finitesinal alter)ation7 in his intrinisic nature since the
age of
unti-
I)o1is.h(e(l stone," especially since civilization
impedes the workings of
natural selection. Civilized man is a
composite
of the "natural man ...
the culminating ape" and the "artificial man . . . the
highly plastic
H.G. WELLS: EARLY SCIENCE JOURNALISM 113
creature of tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought"; and
pave
for the
"padding of suggested emotional habits" (Wells's definition of morality),
he is no different from the Paleolithic savage. Wells concludes by saying
that "in Education lies the possible salvation of mankind from misery and
sin"--i.e., the "suffering and 'elimination' "
entailed by the evolutionary
process.
#85. The Acquired Factor. Academy 51 (Jan 9 1897):37. [Signed].
Wells approves the constructive Weismannism of C. Lloyd Morgan's
Hcabit andl Instinct (so like his own position in
#
84). Morgan infers from
analysis of the proportionate shares of instinct and habit (i.e., education)
in higher animals, including man, that the human body and instincts are
no longer evolving. The mental environment alone evolves. Despite his
brute ancestry, man can shape his world through science, art, and
education, and so "cease to be driven, a dry leaf before the wind."
#86. Morals and Civilisation. FR 61(Feb 1897):263-68. [Signed]. "We
must needs regard social organization and individual morality as deter-
mining one another." Wells takes sexual morality as an example of man's
ethical progress and then asks whether "a rational code of morality" can-
not be formulated at this point in man's history. "We may dream of an in-
formed, unselfish, unauthorised body of workers, a real and conscious ap-
paratus of education and moral suggestion . .. shaping the minds and acts
and destinies of men."
#87. Human Evolution: Mr. Wells Replies. Ncatluracl Science 10(Apr
1897):242-44. Defends the position taken in # 84 against objections raised
by F. H. Perry Coste in NcatlZcl Science 10(Mar 1897):184-87. "My in-
terest in these theories [about the nature of man] lies chiefly in their ap-
plication. . . . After Darwin it has become inevitable that moral con-
ceptions should be systematically restated in terms of our new conception
of the material destiny of man."
#88. On Comparative Theology. SR 85 (Feb 12 1898):212-13.
[Signed]. A review of Grant Allen's The Et'ollution of the Iclea of God
(and of an anonymous work called The [Cabalistic] Canoni), which
recommends Allen's book as one "certainly . . . to be read," but disagrees
with Allen's notion that man could have come in only one way to the wor-
ship of God: "it is certain there are at least a dozen different ways .
by which a man may arrive at worshipping a stone."
"The modern method of inquiry, as Bacon described it, was of course
a systematised Fetishism," says Wells: science, that is, depends on a
fetishistic relation of cause and effect. Indeed, some scientists propound
an "intensely superstitious science" based on cosmic correlations having
nothing to do with cause and effect: witness the comparative anatomist's
penchant for finding structural correspondences among, say, all in-
vertebrates.
Another, much less interesting, review of Allen's book by Wells is
"Grant Allen's 'Idea of God'," Dailv Maiil (Nov 27 1897):4. [Signed].
#89. Huxley. Rovyal College of Science Magazine (formerly SSJ)
13(April 1901):209-11. [Signed]. A reminiscence of his student days under
T. H. Huxley: "I believed then he was the greatest man I was ever likely
to meet, and I believe that all the more firmly today."
# 90. The Scepticism of the Instrument. Mind 13(July 1904):379-93.
[Signed; given first as a paper to the Oxford Philosophical Society, Nov 8
1903; reprinted, altered and abridged about 15%, as an appendix to A
114 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
Modern UJtopia (1905), and in the Atlantic Edition 9:335-54]. Develops
ideas first bruited in # # 4 and 83. Wells mistrusts the uniformity of for-
mal logic because: (1) it classifies "uniques as identically similar objects"
under some term that automatically accumulates a specious significance
thereby; (2) "it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them
as though they were positive", and (3) it projects onto the same plane
ideas which in fact are stratified at various levels of meaning and thus
renders contradictory notions whose real relation to one another is com-
plementary. In Wells's universe of uniques, "ethical, social and religious
teaching [come] into the province of poetry." Since philosophy, too, is
self-expression, this essay contains much autobiographical material.
R.D. Mullen
The Books and Principal Pamphlets
of H.G. Wells: A Chronological Survey
This essay deals with books and pamphlets as abstract units rather than
physical objects. The place of publication is noted only where necessary to
other purposes and then only as UK or US. The dates given are for first
book or pamphlet publication, except that in # 71 the dates for first serial
publication are also given. For each book or pamphlet the length is given
in the pages of the Atlantic Edition (?4) or in abstract pages ("ap") of the
same size. For detailed information on the various first editions, the
reader is respectfully referred to the two major bibliographies (?
?
1-2).
Wells began his book-publishing career in 1893 with Text-Book of
Biology and Honours Physiography. Although I have glanced at copies of
these books, I have not read them and so do not presume to include them
in this survey. Besides, it seems eminently fitting to begin the survey with
The Time Machine, which is now known to have been published before
Select Conversations (see ?13). With exception allowed for any work ap-
pearing in the Atlantic Edition, I have also excluded publications of cer-
tain types listed in the major bibliographies (see ?2).
The annotations are intended to be, not evaluative as to literary
quality, but factually descriptive as to content and reputation; that is,
terms like classic and notable are used to indicate, not just opinions that I
happen to share, but opinions that seem to be widespread. The length of
each annotation is determined not by the supposed importance of the
work but by the amount of detail necessary to indicate the interrelations
between Wells's various books and to suggest both the continuities and
the changes in his thought.
In classifying the various works of fiction, I have counted as fantasy
those that deal with the phehistoric past as traditionally envisioned in
theology or mythology; with future time as leading to judgment day; with
outer space as envisioned in theological astrology; or with the traditional
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 115
personae of demonology and mythology: angels, devils, and the demons of
the air, ghosts and human souls waiting to be born, magicians and wit-
ches, mermaids and fairies, etc. Counted as delulsional fantasy are stories
that center on a dream or daydream, or a sleeping or waking nightmare,
of the protagonist.
On the other hand I have counted as science fiction stories that deal
with imagined developments in applied science, including social science
and the psychic; with imagined biological species, imagined survivals in
presumably extinct species, or imagined mutations in existing species;
with natural catastrophes of a nature or scope unparalleled in history,
though perhaps not in myth; with the prehistoric past as reconstructed in
paleontology; with the fourth dimension as a short-cut through time or
space or as a link between parallel worlds; or with outer space as an ex-
tension of the material world perhaps inhabited by beings with humanlike
or even godlike powers but not exclusively or primarily by traditional
beings behaving in the traditional ways. Also counted as SF are those
stories in which apparently supernatural phenomena are made subject to
natural law, as in # 7?6.
In both fantasy and SF we have stories of the unresolved type: those
in which narrator and reader are left in doubt as to whether the ghost was
real or merely a delusion, or the claimed invention or discovery merely a
fraud.
For stories counted neither as fantasy nor as SF, I have used four
terms: the noun notel or the adjective mundane for those predominantly
concerned with the world of the here and now as empirically verified in
our daily lives; colonial romance for the adventures of Europeans or
Americans ("white men") among the natives of the far places of the
world; and ruritanian romance for stories laid in imaginary small
kingdoms of the white man's world.
Finally, I have used the term mucndlane in two paradoxical ways: in
mundane fantasy for stories that contain nothing of the supernatural or
science-fictional but are too dreamlike to be called realistic and too
reasonable to be called surrealistic; and in such phrases as mundane farce
on the wonders of science for stories centering on astonished, marveling,
or worshipful reactions to the actual achievements of modern science.
? 1.
Geoffrey
H. Wells. The Wor ks
of
H. G. Wells 1887-1925: A
Bibliogralphy,
Dictionary,
and Subject-Index. 1926.
? 2. The H. G. Wells
Society.
H. G. Wells: A
Comprehensive
Bibliography. 1966, 1968 (rev), 1972 (with index). To avoid duplication,
certain CB items have been merged with certain Survey items (e.g., The
Red Room, CB 7, is listed here only as a story in # 7): 7/# 7, 13/ #71,
321#38, 34/#27, 42/#71, 44/ #71, 46/#38, 48/#38, 66/#52, 89/#27,
92/
#
67, 98/ #74, 99/
#
74, 106/
#
82, 108/
#
82, 1 1 1/
#
82, 114/
#
75,
118/
# 82, 126/
# 95, 146/ # 100, 149/
# 111. With exception allowed for any
work that appears in the Atlantic Edition, CB items of the following kinds
have been excluded altogether: early textbooks (1, 2), books or pamphlets
to which Wells was merely a contributor, and pamphlets printed for
private circulation, issued as advertising brochures, or of less than 32ap
(29, 31, 45, 49, 70, 72, 73, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 95, 112, 113, 153), and two
items which I have been unable to locate (143, 151) and which are listed
116 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
in CB without sufficient detail to tell me whether they would qualify or
even to persuade me that they have actually been examined by the editors
of CB.
?13. Bernard Bergonzi, "The Publication of The Time Mcachine, 1894-
1895," in Thomas D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (1971),
pp2O4-15; reprinted from Reuieuw of Engli.sh Stiudlies 11(1960):42-51.
114.
The Wor-ks
of
H. G. Wells. Atlantic Edlition. 28 vols. Vols.
1-3,
1924; 4-14, 1925; 15-22, 1926, 23-28, 1927. Referred to below as Al, A2,
etc., with the prefaces designated as ?0. The promise made in the prospec-
tus for AE, that its contents would be newly revised, was kept only in a
very desultory fashion with respect to the fictions and familiar essays,
where the revisions (except for # 43) are not substantive but merely
stylistic in quite trivial ways.
#1. The Time Machine: An Invention. US 1895; UK 1895 (rev). Al
(1 16p; rechaptered). SF. Evolution to the end of time: social, biologic,
geologic, solar. Forms with # # 5, 8, 10, 14 the group of five scientific
romances that have won virtually unanimous acclaim.
#2. Select Conversations with an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other
Reminiscences. 1895 (74ap). 14 familiar essays in which provincial com-
mon sense is pitted against the artistic and social fashions of the
metropolis.
# 3. The Wonderful Visit. 1895. Al (155p). The first book-length story
in which Wells uses the method that predominates in his short
stories,
"the method of bringing some fantastically possible or impossible thing
into a commonplace group of people, and working out their reactions with
the completest gravity and reasonableness" (A1?0). An angel falls from
his world (our land of dreams) through the fourth dimension to our world
(his land of dreams), where he is immediately shot down by a bird-
hunting vicar, who then takes him home to nurse, for until his wounds
heal he will not be able to fly again. The townspeople refuse to believe
that he is anything other than some queer kind of hunchback. Although a
pure creature when he arrives, he gradually deteriorates as he breathes
our "poisonous air" (?48), so that when his wounds heal, he finds himself
not only unable to fly but also suffering from all the human passions; cf
#
23. SF, if barely so: although the protagonist is called an angel, he is
not from the traditional heaven; moreover, the concept of parallel worlds
with each being the other's land of dreams would seem to belong to
psychic SF rather than traditional fantasy.
#4. The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. 1895 (168ap).
? 1. The Stolen Bacillus. Mundane farce on the wonders of science. A
jesting bacteriologist tells a visitor that the bottle in his hand contains
enough bacteria to poison London's entire water supply. Since modern
science can do anything, the credulous visitor, who happens to be an anar-
chist, runs awav with the bottle to do just what the bacteriologist has
suggested.
?2. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid. Al. Biological SF.
? 3. In The Avu Observatory. Biological SF.
?4. The Triumphs of a Taxidermist. Mundane satire on the passion
to make a name for oneself by the discovery of new species.
?5. A Deal in Ostriches. Mundane farce.
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 117
?6. Through a Window. Ironic mundane melodrama.
?7. The Temptation of Harringay. Fantasy: the infernal pact and ar-
tistic integrity.
?8. The Flying Man. Colonial romance with the wonders of
technology: the natives astounded by the use of a parachute.
?9. The Diamond Maker. SF of the unresolved
type;
cf # 7?5.
?10. Aepyornis Island. Al. Biological SF.
?11. The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes. Al. SF: the fourth
dimension.
?12. The Lord of the Dynamos. Al. Mundane tragedy involving the
wonders of science: a white man's brutal jest and a black man's religious
response; cf ?1.
?13. The Hammerpond Park Burglary. Mundane farce.
?14. The Moth. Al. Delusional fantasy satirizing the rivalry of
biologists in the discovery of new species.
?15. The Treasure in the Forest. Colonial romance.
#5. The Island of Dr. Moreau. 1896. A2(170p). Described by Wells as
a "theological grotesque" (A2?0), this story of animals turned into men by
surgery has been given various parabolic interpretations.
#6. The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure. 1896. A7 (231p).
Novel. This story of the misadventures of a draper's assistant on a
bicycling holiday is the first of the five comedies of lower middle-class life:
"close studies" of "personalities thwarted and crippled by the defects of
our contemporary civilization" (A7? 0). Cf # # 13, 22, 32, 44.
#7. The Plattner Story and Others. 1897 (296ap).
?1. The Plattner Story. Al. SF: the fourth dimension.
?2. The Argonauts of the Air. SF: the building and launching of the
first successful aeroplane; cf
#
19?1.
?3. The story of the Late Mr. Elvesham. Al. Somatopsychic SF: a
drug-induced exchange of bodies.
?4. In the Abyss. Biological SF: a manlike species on the ocean floor.
?5. The Apple. Unresolved fantasy. A schoolboy dreading
examinations is by a mysterious stranger given an apple said to be from
the Tree of Knowledge, but loses it before he can nerve himself up to
trying it out.
?6. Under the Knife. Al. SF in a delusional-fantasy frame. When soul
and body separate at the moment of death, the soul, being immaterial and
hence unaffected by either inertia or external force, remains fixed in space
while body, earth, and solar system speed away.
? 7. The Sea Raiders. SF: man's predominance challenged by a
hitherto unknown species from the depths of the sea.
?8. Pollock and the Porroh Man. Colonial romance: the white man's
arrogance and the black man's magic.
?9. The Red Room. AIO. Psychic SF: fear as an externalized force; cf
the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.
? 10. The Cone. Al. Mundane melodrama
involving
the wonders of
technology.
?11. The Purple Pileus. Al. A mixture of mundane
comedy and
delusional fantasy resulting from the eating of a mushroom.
?12. The Jilting of Jane. Al. Mundane
comedy.
?13. In the Modern Vein: An
Unsympathetic Love
Story.
Mundane
118
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
comedy.
?14. A Catastrophe. A10. Mundane comedy.
?15. The Lost Inheritance. Mundane comedy.
?16. The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic. Mundane comedy.
? 17. A Slip Under the Microscope. A6. Mundane
comedy of student
life at the Normal School of Science; cf # 13.
#8. The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance. 1897 A3 (203p). SF.
Remains the model of stories using the method specified for #3 and one
of the chief models of the superman story.
# 9. Certain Personal Matters: A Collection of Material, Mainly
Autobiographical, 1897 (240ap). 39 familiar essays, "the stuff of which
novels are made" (A6? 0), of which 22 appear as The Euphemia Papers in
A6 (115p). Among those not in A6 are the two of most direct SF interest:
"The Extinction of Man" (the stuff of # 7?7 and #71:?1:2) and "From an
Observatory" (the stuff of # 12? 2).
#10. The War of the Worlds. 1898. A3 (241p). SF. Martians invade
England with a technological superiority as overwhelming and a
ruthlessness as complete as that with which Europeans have invaded
Africa and Australasia. Remains the standard of comparison for all
stories on the world-catastrophe theme.
#
11. When the Sleeper Wakes. 1899
(326ap).
1910
(rev
as The
Sleeper
Awakes). A2 (text of 1910; 304p).
SF. The revolt of the
proletariat
in
the
megalopolis of 2100--a future extrapolated on the basis of Marxist theory
and the assumption of continued technological advance under laissez-
faire government; thus a laissez-faire utopia in that it realizes the dreams
of Free Enterprise, but also a laissez-faire dystopia in that the effects are
shown to be disastrous for the human spirit. Although Wells regarded this
work as artistically and intellectually unsatisfactory (A2?0; # 24?1), it
has probably been the most influential of his scientific romances. The
revisions of 1910 consist in the elimination from ?14 of an 11-page ac-
count of the history of the period 1899-2100, from ? 16 of a 4-page account
of flying inconsistent with the actual flying of 1910, and from ?23 and
elsewhere of about 7 pages that suggest a love affair between the Sleeper
and the heroine. See # 30.
#12. Tales of
Space
and Time. 1899
(269ap).
? 1. The Crystal Egg. Al0. SF. Interplanetary television.
?2. The Star. AIO. SF. A 16-page epitome of the colliding-worlds
theme.
? 3. A Story of the Stone Age. 79ap. SF. The invention of the axe, the
taming of the horse, etc.
?4. A Story of the Days to Come. 124ap. SF. Pastoral dream and
megalopolitan reality in the laissez-faire dystopia of 2100; cf
#
11.
?5. "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." A10. SF: like #7?6 in
bringing supernatural phenonena into conflict with the Newtonian laws of
motion. For the film, see
*#
90.
#13. Love and Mr. Lewisham, 1900. A7 (278p). Novel. The ambitions
of youth abandoned under the pressures of sexuality for the comforts of
marriage. This second of the five comic novels (see # 6) was Wells's first
laborious attempt at realistic fiction and his bid for reputation as a
serious novelist. Although it failed in its immediate purpose, its depiction
of student life at the Normal School of Science and its portrait of Chaffery
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 119
the Medium have since made it one of his most popular novels.
# 14. The First Men in the Moon, 1901. A6 (265p). SF. Regarded by
Wells as the best of his scientific romances and by many
readers as the
unrivaled masterpiece of the cosmic voyage.
# 15. Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific
Progress upon Human Life and Thought. 1901. A4 (273p). In this book,
which was more responsible than any other for the
development of
futurology, Wells turned from the Marxist thinking of # 11 to the
develop-
ment of his own vision of the future. The improvements in locomotion
already well under way will cause cities to grow, not in the immense ver-
tical concentrations described in # 11, but
horizontally along great road-
ways (? ? 1-2). The old social classes will dissolve into a new mixture of
four main elements: first, the Efficients, "more or less capable people
engaged more or less consciously in applying the growing body of scientific
knowledge to the general needs"; second, and perhaps as numerous as the
Efficients, the Speculators, "nonproductive persons living in and by the
social confusion"; third, the unemployables, or People of the Abyss, those
unable for one reason or another to develop the skills required by
mechanized industry; fourth, the Irresponsible Rich--rich because of their
ownership of shares in corporations, irresponsible because the control of
those corporations will be in other hands (?3). In the earlier years of the
century there will be not one but many moralities, not one but many
reading publics, etc., but as the years pass the Efficients will develop a
common body of ideas and gradually segregate themselves from the func-
tionless elements (?4). Since popularly elected governments inevitably
drift into war, but cannot fight a war effectively, they will give way to
governments that can (?5). The nations that survive the pressures of war
and preparation for war will be those that achieve the largest propor-
tional development of Efficients; that is, those that are most successful in
eliminating, in one way or another, the Speculators, the People of the
Abyss, and the Irresponsible Rich (?6). The growing unity of the world
will result in the spread of those languages that offer the largest bodies of
imaginative and scientific literature, and also in the aggregation of
smaller states into larger ones; by the end of the century the world will
probably be dominated by three great powers: an English-speaking union,
a federated Western Europe, and an East Asian union, with Russia ab-
sorbed into the second or third or divided between them (??7-8). In the
English-speaking union, at least, the Efficients will become a New
Republic, with a religion stripped of superstition and with a morality and
public policy shaped to favor the procreation of the "fine and efficient and
beautiful" and to prevent that of "the mean and ugly and bestial in the
souls. Bodies, or habits of men" (??8-9).
#16. The Discovery of the Future: A Discourse Delivered to the Royal
Institution. 1902. A4 (33p). The classic statement of the difference be-
tween the kind of mind that looks to the past and the kind that looks to
the future.
#17. The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine. 1902. A5 (167p), Fantasy.
The Method of
# #
3 and 8 with the subject matter of
#
13, except that
here the youthful ambitions include an advantageous marriage already
arranged and are abandoned for the "better dreams" advocated by the
mermaid heroine.
120 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
* 18. Mankind in the Making. 1903 (371ap). A4 (74p; selections as in-
dicated below). Concerned with education, health care, and social
legislation as means of making ordinary people Efficients rather than
unemployables and thus of saving them from the Abyss of #15.
? 1. The New Republic. This first of the Wellsian manifestos (see
# # 59, 69, 75) calls upon the reader to dedicate himself to "the service of
the future of the race."
?2. The Problem of the Birth Supply. A4. Argues against positive
eugenics and ridicules the fear of the rapid multiplication of the unfit.
?7. Political and Social Influences. A4 (first half only, as "The Case
for Republicanism"). The first of Wells's many attacks on the English
monarchy and aristocracy.
?8. "Thought in the Modern State." A4 (last paragraph only). On the
publishing and distributing of books.
? 12. "Appendix: A Paper on Administrative Area Read Before the
Fabian Society." A4 (as "Locomotion and Administration"). This
argument that the administrative areas planned by the Fabians are far
too small for the demands of the modern world is mentioned frequently by
Wells in his later work. See 20.
#19. Twelve Stories and a Dream. 1903
(274ap).
?1. Filmer. SF. The building of the first aeroplane. Cf
#
7?2.
?2. The Magic Shop. AIO. Unresolved fantasy. Magic is in the eye of
the beholder. A classic story of the conflict between the child's vision and
the adult's mundaneness.
? 3. The Valley of Spiders. AIO. Biological SF within a parable of the
ruler and the ruled.
?4. The Truth About Pyecraft. A10. SF. The difference between fat
and weight in a story that brings supernatural phenomena into conflict
with natural law; cf 7?6.
?5. Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland. Fantasy. An epitome of one side
of the theme most pervasive in Wells's mundane fiction: Mr. Skelmersdale
declines the invitation of the fairy queen and then regrets having done so
for the rest of his life in this dreary world. Cf # # 17 and 33.
?6. The Inexperienced Ghost. A ghost story.
? 7. tJimmy Goggles the God. Al0. Colonial romance. The effect of the
wonders of technology on the superstitious natives.
?8. The New Accelerator. AIO. SF. A drug that accelerates human
reactions a thousandfold.
?9. Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation. Mundane farce.
? 10. The Stolen Body. SF. Psychic research.
? 11. Mr. Brisher's Treasure. Mundane farce.
? 12. Miss Winchelsea's Heart. A6. Mundane comedy.
? 13. A Dream of Armageddon. A3. SF. Love and honor in the world
of 210(0; that is, the world of
#
11 and # 12?4.
#20. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth. 1904. A5
(299p). SF. Said by Wells to be "the idea of the first chapter of 'An-
ticipations' and of the essay on 'Locomotion and Administrative Areas'
transmuted into fantasy" (A5?0; see #
12), this story of children grown so
gigantic that they cannot "get inside a church, or a meeting-house, or any
social or human institution" (?1:4:2; emphasis added), is his most
elaborate application of the method of
#
3 and
#
8 and his most extensive
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 121
venture into allegory. (On a number of occasions in his later writings,
Wells uses the expressions "Food of the Gods" and "Sea Lady" for op-
posing forces in the human heart; for one example, see #35.)
#21. A Modern
Utopia.
1905. A9
(350p; including
the
Appendix,
"Scepticism of the Instrument," which is of some importance
in the
history of semantics). SF. The world as it might have been in 1905 if
history had been somewhat different, as shown by a parallel world out
beyond Sirius; that is, a world more technologically advanced than Ed-
wardian England only in the ways and to the degrees that would have
been possible through the wider application of techniques already
available. The Irresponsible Rich of # 15 have no existence in
Utopia, but
the Efficients are present as the Poietic and Kinetic; the Speculators as
the Base, mostly banished to islands where they may cheat each other to
their heart's content (?5:2); the People of the Abyss as the Dull, those
failing in the educational program, now about 13% but a
constantly
decreasing proportion of the population (?9:4); and the New Republicans
of #15 and #18 as the Order of Samurai, in which Wells anticipates such
organizations as Lenin's Communist Party. Since the Order is open to
87% of the population, subject only to one's willingness to abide by the
Discipline, it cannot be said, critics to the contrary, to be anything like a
managerial elite.
#22. Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul. 1905. A8 (442p). Novel. With
this story of a draper's assistant who inherits a fortune, Wells achieved
the success that had eluded him with # 13. Henceforth for many readers
he was to be the supreme interpreter of the life of the lower middle class--
the "new Dickens." Kipps was originally planned as part of a larger work;
Harris Wilson has compiled a continous narrative from the surviving
pages of the discarded
manuscript and published it as The Wealth of Mr.
Waddy (1969).
#
23. In the Days of the Comet. 1906. A10 (313p). SF. The world
before and after the passage of a comet that purifies the air men breathe
and thus awakens "the Spirit of Man that had drowsed and slumbered
and dreamt dull and evil things" (?2:1:3; cf #3). The first half of this
book presents a considerably darker picture of lower-class life than that
presented in #
22 or any of the other early comedies. There seems to be no
term in current usage, though worId-elucatastrophe might serve, for a non-
millenial world-shaking natural event of beneficial effect, the theme not
being common in literature. So far as I know, the only story comparable
to #23 in this respect is Poul Anderson's Brain Wate (1954).
#24. The Future in America: A Search After Realities. 1906. A26
(238p). An examination of various aspects of American life in an effort to
determine whether the United States is on the way to become the kind of
Great State that Wells envisions in such works as # # 15, 21, 27, 38:7.
#25. Socialism and the Family. 1906. A16 (36p). A pamphlet on mat-
ters covered more fully but less radically in
#
27.
#26. This Misery of Boots. 1907. A4 (25p). A frequently reprinted
essay in which shoddy footware is made to stand for all the inefficiencies
of the capitalist system.
#27. New Worlds for Old. 1908 (272ap). An exposition of "modern
Socialism," directed primarily at the middle classes, and said to have
been the most widely influential socialist propaganda of its day. Includes
122 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
the matter of two pamphlets: Will Socialism Destroy the Home? (1907)
and A Walk Along the Thames Embankment (1923).
#28. The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways
Fared While It Lasted. 1908. A20 (377p). SF. Notable for its blending of
the science fiction of great events with the comedy of lower middle-class
life. After a series of misadventures, Mr. Smallways finds himself on the
flagship of the German Aerial Navy and thus with a grandstand seat for
the beginning of the war that destroys civilization. Unlike # # 39 and 84
in that the destruction of civilization has no utopian aftermath.
#29. First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life.
1908 (212ap); 1917 (with addition of ? 1:12-15); see note on # 109. All
(182p; 1917 text with deletion of ? 3:10-19). An introduction to philosophy.
Begins with an exposition of the "neo-nominalism" which Wells began to
develop as early as 1891 in "The Rediscovery of the Unique" (Fortnightly
Revieu', July), which he developed further in "Scepticism of the In-
strument" ( # 21, Appendix), which he continued to work at for the rest of
his life (see # 111?4), and which forms the metaphysical foundation for
his view of what life is in the modern world and what one should do about
it. Of the sections omitted in All, the first seven deal with the possibility of
organized brotherhoods along the lines of the Samurai ( # 21), and the last
three with an attitude toward war rendered difficult to defend if not un-
tenable by 1914-1918.
#30. Tono-Bungay. 1909. A12 (520p). Novel. Widely regarded as
Wells's masterpiece, this is the autobiography of a scientist involved in the
rise and fall of a financial empire that originates in the success of the
eponymous patent medicine. In its concluding chapters, with the world
collapsing around the protagonists, it becomes somewhat farcical and
science-fictional in the search for an SF metal and the use of an SF air-
craft. As has been noted by several critics, this book does for turn-of-the-
century England, especially with respect to advertising, corporate finance,
and class relationships, what
#
11 attempted to do for the future. The
most cogent account of the relationship between the two books is given by
Wells in a 1921 preface that appears in the Collins edition of The Sleeper
Awakes.
#31. Ann-Veronica: A Modern Love Story. 1909. A13 (390p). Novel.
The first of Wells's novels to deal primarily with the upper classes,
and
the first to include extensive discussions of
morality
and
politics,
this
story of a young woman from a respectable home who defies her
parents,
first in going to London to study biology
and live on her
own,
then in
demonstrating with the suffragettes
and
going
to
jail
for the cause, and
finally in setting up housekeeping with the man she loves even
though
he
already has a wife, scandalized a vocal segment of the older
generation
and became an international success among young people.
#32. The History of Mr. Polly. 1910. A17 (280p). Novel. A return to
the comedy of lower middle-class life, this book had a success comparable
to that of # 22 and continues to be one of Wells's most popular books.
#33. The New Machiavelli. 1911. A14 (553p). Novel. The
autobiography of a politician who chooses, at the height of his career, to
abandon politics for an illicit love (cf # 17). For the scandal that arose
from the similarity of two of the characters to Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
and from the similarity of the crucial love affair to an affair of Wells'
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
123
own, see Lovat Dickson, H. G. Wells: His Turbulent
Life'and Times
(1969), ? 12. This is the first of the five Prig Novels--stories that "turn on a
man asking himself what he shall do with his life"
(A19?0),
in each
of
which the protagonist is frustrated in the attempt to live a
nobly con-
structive life by the pressures of sexuality or by the demands of a wife or
husband interested only in mundane success (see # # 35, 37, 40, 45).
Together with # # 13, 17, 62, they thus represent Wellsian variations on
the ancient theme of love and honor.
#34. Floor Games. With marginal drawings by J. R. Sinclair. 1911
(63ap). An introduction to the art. See # 36.
#35. Marriage. 1912. A15 (577p). The second of the prig novels (see
# 33): "Trafford has eaten the Food of the Gods, and Marjorie is immune
to that stimulant and plays, in holy wedlock, the role of the Sea Lady"
(Al 5? 0).
#36. Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One
Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes
Boys' Games and Books. With an Appendix on Kriegspiel. By . . . the
Author of "Floor Games" and Several Minor and Inferior Works. With
marginal drawings by J.R. Sinclair. 1913 (103ap). 1970 (facsimile edition
with Foreword by Isaac Asimov and Introduction by Christopher Ellis).
Ellis indicates that a considerable literature has grown up in this field, all
deriving from this book. If so, it has in its field the same kind of im-
portance that ## 15, 56, and 80 have in theirs.
# 37. The Passionate Friends. 1913. A18 (376p). Novel. The most
romantic of the prig novels (see
#
33)--and the book in which the phrase
"open conspiracy" first appears (see
#
75).
#38. An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a series of
Unrestrained Remarks on Contemporary Matters. 1914 (443ap; in US as
Social Forces in England and America). A9, 18, 20, 27 (217p).
? ? 1-3. The Coming of Bleriot; My First Flight; Off the Chain. A20. Of
the 1909 channel crossing that demonstrated the practicability of heavier-
than-air flight; of Wells's own venture three years later; and of the
inevitable effects of the abolition of distance on commerce, politics, and
social life.
? ?4-5. Of the New Reign; Will the Empire Live? A20. Argues against
imperial tariffs, imperial military establishments, etc.; argues for a great
effort to make the Empire worthy of the loyalty of its various peoples.
?6. The Labour Unrest; Social Panaceas; Syndicalism or Citizenship.
1912 pamphlet. Argues that modern conditions demand, not mere
tinkering with wages and hours, which seems to be the sole concern of the
labor unions, but fundamental changes in the social structure.
?7. The Great State. A18 (40p). Appeared in a book of the same title
by Wells and 13 others (1912) as "The Past and the Great State." An
epitome of Wells's social thought, with a remarkable diagram that makes
Wells's view of past and future immediately clear.
?8. The Common Sense of Warfare. A20. 1913 pamphlet. Argues
against conscription, for education.
?9. The Contemporary Novel. A9. The major statement of Wells's
literary theory. Cf #85?7:5; also #74?25-26, #102?0.
? 10. The Philosopher's Public Library. A description of what a public
library should and very economically could be.
124 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
? 11. About Chesterton and Belloc. A9. On the most persistent of his
friendly enemies, who fought at his side against the capitalist order, but
parted from him in advocating distributism rather than socialism and
who are the objects of friendly comment or gentle satire in many of his
books (not always gentle in the case of Belloc; see especially # 70).
?12. About Sir Thomas More. Originally the introduction to an
edition of Utopia published in 1905, the year -# 21 appeared.
?13. Traffic and Rebuilding. Suggests that it might be more
economical to rebuild London on a new site.
?14. This So-Called Science of Sociology. 1907 pamphlet. Against
Comte, Spencer; for Plato and the utopian approach.
?15. Divorce. A18. Changing mores.
?16. The Schoolmaster and the Empire. Against regarding Polonius
as the ideal schoolmaster.
?17. The Endowment of Motherhood. A18. The most convenient
statement of an idea also treated in # #
21, 27, 33.
? 18. Doctors. For medicine as a "sanely organized public machine."
? 19. An Age of Specialization? Argues that this is instead an age of
the decline of specialization.
? 20. Is There a People? Argues that there is not.
?21. The Disease of Parliaments. Argues for proportional represen-
tation. Cf # 52?9-11.
?22. The American Population. A9 (as "The American Outlook"). A
more pessimistic forecast than that of # 24.
?23. The Possible Collapse of Civilization. A20. The great dangers
are financial panic and modern warfare.
? 24. The Ideal Citizen. A9. He is, in sum, a student and philosopher,
understanding the society in which he lives.
?25. Some Possible Discoveries. The most sensational discoveries of
the century are likely to be in biology.
? 26. The Human Adventure. A27. Surely the most eloquent statement
of Wells's vision of the future, this essay is an elaboration of the last pages
of # 20.
#39. The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind. 1914. A21 (247p). SF.
An experiment in narrative structure, this romance tells of the develop-
ment of atomic energy, of the use of atomic bombs in the most destructive
of all wars, and with the world thus freed of its past, of the establishment
of the world state and building of utopia. From this time on, despite the
apparent optimism of many of his books, Wells seems always to have
believed that only after some great cleansing, some catastrophe of world-
wide scope, would the leaders of mankind leave the road to destruction
and set out upon the road to utopia.
#40. The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman. 1914. A16 (500p). Novel. The
fourth of the prig novels (see # 33): large-minded wife, small-minded
husband; thus in direct contrast with # 35.
#41. The War That Will End War. 1914 (88ap). A pamphlet reprin-
ting eleven newspaper articles in which Wells views the war less as a great
disaster than as a great opportunity. With one exception ("The Liberal
Fear of Russia"), they deal with matters more fully covered in # 46.
#
42. The Peace of the World. 1915. A21 (33p). Discusses the forces
that make for war and calls for a world congress to replace the am-
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 125
bassadorial system.
# 43. Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and
The Last Trump: Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of
George Boon, Appropriate to the Times: Prepared for Publication by
Reginald Bliss, with an Ambiguous Introduction by H.G. Wells. 1915
(198ap). A13 (166p; omits ? ? 0 and 6-7). Novel: despite the title, this book
is not a collection of papers by George Boon, the "remains" having turned
out to be merely a few scraps of paper, but instead a narrative by
Reginald Bliss in which he talks about Boon and his friends, reports their
conversations, and reconstructs from memory never-written papers that
Boon has told him about, including the (in) famous "Of
Art, of Literature,
of Mr. Henry James." Of the "selections" only one is a
complete literary
work: "The Story of the Last Trump," a fantasy in which the world con-
tinues on its merry way, the last trump having been heard but not
believed. ? ? 6-7, a lively but rather frivolous debate on metaphysics and
religion, were perhaps omitted from A13 as being inconsistent with the
views set forth on these matters in All; for which see
#
50.
#
44. Bealby: A Holiday. 1915. A17 (278p). Novel: the last and most
farcical of the five comedies of lower middle-class life; see #
6.
#45. The Research Magnificent. 1915. A19 (436p). The quintessential
prig novel (see #33) in that it explores most fully the motivations and dif-
ficulties of a man attempting to lead a completely noble life. Although
gestures were made in this direction in # # 33 and 35, Benham is the first
of Wells's heroes to develop religious ideas along the lines of those more
fully propounded by Mr. Britling in
#
47 and Wells himself in
#
50.
#
46. What is Coming? A Forecast of Things After the War. 1916
(248ap). Looks forward first to a long war (being here different from #41
and # 47) and then to the bankruptcy of the exhausted nations, which will
force upon them a considerable degree of socialism; to the liberation of
women made inevitable by their participation in the war effort; to a refor-
mation of the universities, made possible by their now being virtually
deserted; to a Europe made less quarrelsome by the rationalization of
national boundaries; to the beginnings of a world state in the Permanent
Alliance made necessary by the fear of a resurgent Germany; to the end of
the various colonial empires, backward countries beint prepared for
statehood by the members of the Permanent Alliance; and to the eventual
absorption of a chastened Germany into the new world order. For the way
in which this "very loose-lipped" book was viewed by Wells 18 years later,
see # 84?9:5.
#47. Mr. Britling Sees It Through. 1916. A22 (as Mr. Britling; 538p).
Novel. This story of life during wartime at the home of a famous author
was Wells's greatest popular success in fiction, ranking second among
American best sellers in 1916 and first in 1917. Many reviewers, and
presumably large sections of the general public, found reassurance in Mr.
Britling's religious conversion; on the other hand, many of Wells's most
loyal followers felt themselves betrayed.
#48. The Elements of Reconstruction: A Series of Articles Con-
tributed in July and August 1916 to The Times: With an Introduction by
Viscount Milner. [Articles signed "D.P."]. 1916; 1917 (as by Wells). This
pamphlet calls for increasing the size of British industrial units so that
they can compete with those of Germany and the United States; for an im-
126 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
perial constitution and parliament (not wholly consistent with #
38?4-5);
in general for adapting British institutions to the demands of the new age.
#49. War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain at War. 1917
(240ap; in US as Italy, France and Britain at War). A26 (106p).
? 0. The Passing of the Effigy. A26 as ? 1. Discusses the absence of
"great and imposing leaders, Napoleons, Caesars."
?1. The War in Italy: August 1916. A26, abridged, as ? ? 2-3.
?2. The Western War: September 1916. A26, abridged, as ? ?4-7. One
chapter tells of Wells as the grandparent of the tank, because of his 1903
story "The Land Ironclads" ( # 70? 1:4), of the old-line opposition to the
development of tanks, and of their potential as "the decisive weapon of
the war."
? 3. How People Think of the War. In
comparison to #
46,
a more
restrained but still hopeful forecast of the world after the war.
#50. God the Invisible King. 1917. All (147p). An introduction to
theology. From first to last (or at least, from #15?9 to #
113) Wells saw
Man as struggling to survive in a hostile universe, and saw religion as the
dedication of the individual to this larger purpose. The present book
forms with # # 51 and 54 what may be called a Manichaean
trilogy,
for in
them, as less centrally in #'# 45 and 47, the
Spirit of Man is seen as em-
bodied in a finite personal god. Although Wells repudiated this book from
1926 on ( # 69? 1:3, # 85? 9:4,
A
109? 10), he was defending it as late as
1925 against both orthodox Christians on the right and the Rationalist
Press Association on the left (A11?0), and it remains an accurate
statement, except in the concept of a personal god, of his religious views.
# 51. The Soul of a Bishop: A Novel (with Just a Little Love in It)
about Conscience and Religion and the Real Troubles of Life. 1917. A25
(309p). Novel: the second part of the Manichaean trilogy. Having un-
wittingly taken a mind-expanding drug, the Bishop experiences the reality
of the living God and eventually comes to find that he can serve Him best
by leaving the established church.
# 52. In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace. 1918. A21
(125p; omits ?0, 5ap).
?0. Preface. Of the various proposals made since 1914 for a league of
nations.
?
?
1-8. The League of Free Nations. Argues that the League can be
successful only if all the civilized peoples of the world are pledged to a
common law and a common world policy. Includes the 1917 pamphlet A
Reasonable Man's Peace.
?9-11. "Democracy." Argues for proportional representation.
#53. Joan and Peter: the Story of an Education. 1918. A23-24 (819p).
Novel. The story of how Oswald Syndenham, bruised in body and spirit
after serving the Empire in Africa for 17 years, returns to England to
become the guardian of Joan and Peter, of how he undertook their
education, and of what he and they learned in the years before and during
the Great War.
#54. The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel. 1919. All (170p).
Fantasy. This last part of the Manichaean trilogy (see
#
50) tells of a new
wager in Heaven; of how Job Huss, headmaster of a school similar to
Oundle (see
#
65), suffered through a series of blows to himself, his
family, and his school; of how he kept the faith; and of how all things
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 127
were restored. Although repudiating its theology, Wells continued to
regard this dialogue on religion and education as one of his finest artistic
achievements ( #84?7:5). Listed among Wells's works sometimes as a
novel, sometimes as a
romance;
cf # 66.
#55. History is One. 1919. A27 (14p). Prolegomena to #56.
#56. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and
Mankind. 1920 (1950ap). Numerous editions in various formats; one of
the best-selling books of all time. As the first full-scale history of mankind,
and as by far the most widely read, this book was more important than
any other in popularizing world history as a field of study. The note that
dominates Wells's work from this time on is struck in the final chapter,
"The Possible Unification of the World into One Community of
Knowledge and Will." Although Wells the erstwhile school-teacher had
labored extensively along conventional lines for the improvement of
schools, teaching methods, etc. (in numerous never-reprinted articles in
the educationist press and in # 18), he had come to believe that such ef-
forts would be largely futile until there had been broad changes in the
attitudes of the members of the educated classes, especially with respect
to religion and patriotism. In devoting its first 14 chapters to scientific
concepts of the origin and prehistorical development of earth, life, man,
language, and in devoting many of its other chapters to religions, cultures,
and empires outside the Ancient-Medieval-Modern scheme that con-
ventionally culminated first in Christian Europe and then in modern
England (or modern Anycountry) as the crown of civilization, the Outline
was consciously intended to reshape the outlook of its readers in very sen-
sitive areas of belief and opinion. That it would arouse instense op-
position in many quarters was only to be expected; see # # 60 and 70.
#57. Russia in the Shadows. 1920. A26 (75p; omits 6p Envoy). Tells of
a visit made in October 1920 to Petersburg and Moscow, including an in-
terview with Lenin, and argues that the Allies should seek not to over-
throw but instead to aid the Bolshevik government, it being the only con-
ceivable government that can save the country from complete collapse.
#58. A Memorandum on Peace Propaganda. In Campbell Stuart,
Secrets of Crewe House (1920). A21 (13p). Written in 1918 while Wells
was officially engaged in the propaganda campaign directed at the Ger-
man people; published as evidence of the failure of the government
to
keep its wartime promises; cf # 73? 3.
#59. The Salvaging of Civilization. 1921 (186ap). ? 1, the second of the
Wellsian manifestoes (see
#
18), anticipates the Threefold Imperative of
#108 by declaring that "unless the ever more violent and disastrous in-
cidence of war can be averted, unless some common controls can be im-
posed on the headlong waste of man's limited inheritance of coal, oil, and
moral energy that is now going on, the history of humanity must
presently culminate in some sort of disaster, repeating and exaggerating
the disaster of the great war, producing chaotic social conditions, and
going on thereafter in a degenerative process towards extinction" (? 1:2)
and then calls for "propagandist cults to which men and women must give
themselves and their energies regardless of the consequences to them-
selves" (? 1:4). ? ? 2-3 distinguish between a true world state and such
organizations as the League of Nations. ? ? 4-7 discuss a possible Bible of
Civilization and the schooling of the world. In sum, the salvaging of
128 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
civilization, to use the famous phrase from # 56?41:4, is a race between
education and catastrophe.
#60. The New Teaching of History: With a Reply to Some Recent
Criticisms of "The Outline of History." 1921 (42ap). Defends the concept
of world history; expresses a willingness to accept corrections in matters
of detail; complains that many critics attack the work for errors that ap-
peared only in the serial version; etc.
#61. Washington and the Hope for Peace. 1922 (189ap; in US and in
A26 as Washington and the Riddle of Peace). A26 (155p; omits 7 chap-
ters). 29 newspaper articles on the Washington Disarmament Conference.
The victorious Allies having imposed a punitive peace, the League having
emerged as a mere paper organization, and this conference having ac-
tually achieved some success, Wells turns from the idea of an immediate
world parliament to the hope that from this and similar conferences may
come the establishment of world-wide limited-purpose organizations that
can gradually become numerous enough and strong enough to create the
conditions necessary for world peace, order, and development. Cf # 77.
#62. The Secret Places of the Heart. 1922. A25 (250p). Novel. Like
## 13, 17, 33, this is a love-and-honor story, but in this case the lovers
choose honor rather than love, separating so that they can devote them-
selves more effectively to the creation of the new world order.
#63. A Short History of the World. 1922. A27 (457p). Numerous
editions, including paperback editions and updated revisions.
#64. Men Like Gods. 1923. A28 (321p). SF. A group of Englishmen
pass through the F dimension to a utopian world such as Earth might
become in a thousand years if it manages to survive the present Age of
Confusion.
#65. The Story of a Great Schoolmaster: Being a Plain Account of the
Life and Ideas of Sanderson of Oundle. 1924. A24 (130p). Wells's theory
of what a school should be was closely approximated by Oundle School, to
which he sent his own sons, and on which he modeled the school attended
by Peter in # 53 and the one presided over by Job Huss in # 54.
f66. The Dream: A Novel. 1924. A28 (318p). An inhabitant of the
utopian world of the 40th century dreams of life in the 20th century. The
result is essentially a realistic story of working-class life. Although it can
hardly be called science fiction, the story is given a distancing and
coloring by the narrative device that might justify calling it a romance.
Students of SF as popular literature might well be interested in the ac-
count of Thunderstone House, an English equivalent of the American
publisher of pulp magazines.
#67. A Year of Prophesying. 1924 (302ap). A26 (76p; 14 selections as
Articles written in 1923-1924). 55 newspaper articles on a wide variety of
subjects. A 1924 pamphlet, The P. R. Parliament, appears here and in
A26 as "The Extinction of Party Government."
#68. Christina Alberta's Father. 1925 (466ap). Novel. Partly the story
of the growth to maturity of the heroine, and partly that of the belief of
her putative father that he is a reincarnation of Sargon, King of Kings,
and has only to proclaim his kingdom in order to bring it into being. This
is the first of five stories making extensive use of formal psychology and
centering on a protagonist who suffers from some form of psychosis. See
##
75, 82, 97, 102.
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 129
#69. The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle. 1926
(860ap; 3v in UK; 2v in US). A survey of the world of 1926, and of its
history, purportedly written by a scientist of such vision and directive
capability as to have been important in the development of a world-wide
industrial organization similar to Brunner Mond and Co. Not more than
a third of the book can be described as narrative, and even this tends to be
synoptic rather than detailed. ? 5 presents the first extensive
exposition of
the Open Conspiracy for a world state, an idea that Wells
thought should
be especially attractive to men engaged in commerce or
industry on a
world-wide scale, hampered and restricted as they presumably are by the
division of the world into numerous small states. See # 75.
#70. Mr. Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History." 1926 (76ap).
Wells's part in the no-holds-barred contest that Belloc began with a series
of articles in the Catholic press.
#71. The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. 1927 (later editions as The
Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells). Contains 11 stories (19lap) not
yet accounted for in this survey.
?1. The Time Machine and Other Stories. ??
1:2, 1:3, 1:5, 1:6, 1:8,
were first collected in a 1911 omnibus, The Country of the Blind and
Other Stoties.
? 1:1. The Time Machine. See # 1.
?1:2. The Empire of the Ants. (1905). A10. Biological SF. A new
threat to man's predominance; cf # 7?7.
? 1:3. A Vision of Judgment. (1899). AIO. Fantasy. Sinner and saint at
what is not actually the last judgment.
? 1:4. The Land Ironclads. (1903). A20. SF. Wells's chief claim to ac-
curacy in technological prediction; see # 49?2.
? 1:5. The Beautiful Suit. (1909). A10. Mundane fantasy. A parable of
innocence and experience.
? 1:6. The Door in the Wall. (1906). AIO. Unresolved fantasy. The
classic story of the secret garden.
? 1:7. The Pearl of Love. Written 1925 for AIO. Mundane fantasy. A
parable of the artistic process.
? 1:8. The Country of the Blind. (1904). AIO. Biological SF combining
the lost-race and superman themes.
? 2. The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. See #4.
? 3. The Plattner Story and Others. See # 7.
?4. The Reconciliation. (1895). First collected in an 1897 omnibus,
Thirty Strange Stories. Mundane melodrama.
?5. My First Aeroplane. (1910). A farcical SF parable: childish Man
playing with a new and dangerous toy.
?6. Little Mother up the Morderberg. (1910). Mundane farce: a
sequel to the preceding story.
?7. The Story of the Last Trump. A1 3. From # 43, q.v.
?8. The Grisly Folk. (1921). SF. The clash of true man and Nean-
derthaler; a fictionalization of # 56? 10:1.
?9. Tales of Space and Time. See # 12.
? 10. Twelve Stories and a Dream. See # 19.
#72. Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady. 1927 (325ap). Novel. Even-
tually the constructive revolution; meanwhile, fascism in Italy and the
general strike in England.
130 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
#73. The Works of H. G. Wells. Atlantic Edition. Vol. 27. 1927. Con-
tains three essays not previously collected (54p).
? 3. What is Success? A Note on Lord Northcliffe. Of Wells's long
acquaintanceship with the great press lord, of their working together at
Crewe House (see #58), and of the difference between the official
propaganda issuing from Crewe House and the hate campaign waged
against Germany in Northcliffe's newspapers.
? 4. The Gifts of the New Sciences. Like
#
38? 25 in predicting that the
great advances will be in biology, psychology, education rather than in
technology; less than prescient on atomic energy and the speed of travel.
? 5. The Ten Great Discoveries. First, the use of implements; second,
the beginning of moral law and social restraint in the form of tabu; tenth,
the realization that the world is one.
# 74. The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years
Ahead. 1928 (338ap). One address and 26 newspaper articles, of which the
following are perhaps of greatest interest.
? 1. Man Becomes a Different Animal. Delusions about Human
Fixity. Of the "biological revolution now in progress."
? 5. Democracy Under Revision: A Lecture Delivered at the Sorbonne.
1927 pamphlet. Of the contrast between the indifference of the ordinary
citizen-with-a-vote and the dedication of the members of such
organizations as the Communist Party, the Fascist Party, and the
Kuomintang, and of the similarities of these organizations to the New
Republicans of
# 15 and # 18 and the Samurai of # 21. (?? 2-4 cover
much the same ground.)
? 11. The Present Uselessness and Danger of Aeroplanes. A problem
in Organization. An instance of the failure of administrative units to
adapt to the change in scale; cf # 18? 12.
? 13. Delusions about World Peace. The Price of Peace, 1927 pam-
phlet (as Playing at Peace). The price is the world state.
? 16. The Silliest Film: Will Mchinery Make Robots of Men? A
review of Metropolis, the Fritz Lang film, noting its similarity to # 11 and
the failure of its creators to learn anything from the developments of the
last 30 years.
?25. The Man of Science and the Expressive Man. To Whom Does
the Future Belong? Some Thoughts about Ivan Pavlov and George Ber-
nard Shaw. This discussion of style and content is one of the major
statements of Wells's artistic theory.
?26. The Future of the Novel. Difficulties of the Modern Novelist.
Argues that the novel adapts its form to changes in its environment.
#75. The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution. 1928
(145ap). 1931 (rev as What Are We to Do with Our Lives?). the 1931 text,
in which the revisions are more rhetorical than substantive, presents the
final form of the third Wellsian manifesto (see #
#
18, 59, 69). Abjuring
anything so romantic as conspiratorial conspiracy; calling not for heroic
action but only for the formation of study and propagandist groups, who
would find their basic concepts in such books as
# #
56, 80, 81, the
manifesto must have struck many readers as less a call to world
revolution than a device to sell books.
#76. Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island. Being the Story of a Gen-
tleman of Culture and Refinement who suffered Shipwreck and saw no
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 131
Human Beings other than Cruel and Savage Cannibals for several years.
How he became a Sacred Lunatic. How he did at last escape in a Strange
Manner from the Horror and Barbarities of Rampole Island in time to
fight in the Great War, and how afterwards he came near to returning to
that Island for ever. With much Amusing and Edifying Matter concerning
Manners, Customs, Beliefs, Warfare, Crime, and a Storm at Sea. Con-
cluding with some Reflections upon Life in General and upon these
Present Times in Particular. 1928 (328ap). Novel: the second of the
psychosis stories (see # 68). Mundane comedy and satire in ? ? 1, 2, 4, but
delusional fantasy in ? 3, which presents a reversal of the situation in
# 20, the megatheria representing those swollen human institutions which
have outlived their time but which refuse to die and thus clear the way for
man's progress.
#77. The King Who Was a King: The Book of a Film. 1929 (175ap).
Ruritanian romance; borderline SF. How a king outmaneuvers the foreign
offices of the great powers and brings about a World Control for
Calcomite (an SF metal); cf # 61. (The film was never produced.)
#
78. The Adventures of Tommy. 1929 (28ap). Cartoons with captions;
a minor classic in children's books.
-# 79. The Autocracy of Mr. Parham: His Remarkable Adventures in
this Changing World. 1930 (321ap). SF in a delusional-fantasy frame.
How Mr. Parham, philosopher of history and expert in geopolitics, is at a
seance possessed by a Visitant from Mars, the Master Spirit of Manhood
and Dominion and Order, and thereafter proceeds to do for England what
Mussolini has done, or talked about doing, for Italy.
#80. The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge
about Life and Its Possibilities. With Julian S. Huxley and G. P. Wells.
1930 (2700ap). Has been issued in lv, 3v, 4v, and 9v editions. Planned and
organized by Wells, with about 70% of the writing by Huxley and about
25% by G. P. Wells. Like #
56, the first comprehensive treatment of its
subject. "Its effects are still manifest in the increased space allotted to
biology in the educational curriculum, and the greater interest of the
general public in biological facts and their consequences"--Julian Huxley,
Memories (1970), ? 12,
which
gives
an account of the collaboration.
#81. The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. 1931 (2v).
1932. Rev ed: UK 1934 (1390ap); US 1336 (as The Outline of Man's Work
and Wealth). In Wells's social, political, and philosophical thought, the
culmination of all that precedes and the basic source of all that follows:
most of his other non-fictional works might well be regarded as mere ad-
denda to this one book. With # # 56 and 80 forms what is often called the
educational trilogy.
#82. After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World
Situation. 1932 (230ap). 16 essays on politics, economics, morality, and
the future, of which four had separate publication.
? 3. The Common-Sense of World Peace. 1929 pamphlet. The common
sense of world peace demands a world state.
?5. Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy. 1929 pamphlet. Laments
that the concept of a self-sufficient Empire with protective tariffs should
be advocated by a director of Brunner Mond and Co. See
#
69.
?6. The World Change. One section of a 1930 pamphlet, The Way to
World Peace, the remainder omitted as repeating ?3, as indeed it does,
132 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
almost word for word.
?16. What Should Be Done--Now. 1932 pamphlet. The economic
crisis demands a controlled inflation, the expansion of public em-
ployment, the lowering of tariffs, and disarmament.
#
83. The Bulpington of Blup: Adventures, Poses, Stresses, Conflicts,
and Disaster in a Contemporary Brain. 1932 (501ap). Novel. This third of
the psychosis stories (see # 68) recounts the fantasy life and the real life of
a literary intellectual.
4
84. The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution. 1933
(640ap). SF. Purportedly a schoolbook written in 2106, this history begins
with the financial disasters of 1929 and moves through the depression
years into a future extrapolated on the assumption that the nations will
not be able to halt the steadily worsening economic and political disin-
tegration. A decade of desultory warfare (the devitalized nations being
unable to mount a war on the scale of 1914-18) is followed by a decade of
plagues that halve the population of the world. With the world thus set
free of its past, scientific and technical workers find it possible first to
establish an Air Dictatorship and then to proceed to the building of
utopia. For the film, see #87.
#85. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a
Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). 1934 (1033ap). Covers the personal life
through about 1900 and the professional life through the first half of 1934
(during which he interviewed both Roosevelt and Stalin). Notable for the
frankness of its strictly autobiographical parts and for the vividness of the
numerous portraits of men prominent in literature or public life.
#86. The New America, the New World. 1935 (60ap).
On the
ways
in
which the friends and enemies of the New Deal are reacting to the world
crisis.
#87. Things to Come: A Film Story Based on Material Contained in
his History of the Future "The Shape of Things to Come." 1935 (170ap).
In its first half, a drastically simplified version of # 84?2:9-12; in the
second half, a story of conflict in the utopian world of 2054 in which the
advocates of luxurious idleness trv to prevent the advocates of heroic en-
deavor from attempting a voyage to the moon.
#88. The Croquet Player. 1936 (60ap). SF in the form of a
rationalized ghost story: the changed environment is releasing and in-
tensifying man's inherent aggression and cruelty.
#89. The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis. 1936 (166ap).
Purportedly a review of a multi-volume work of the same name by a
recently deceased author--a work modeled on Burton and dealing with
the forces in human nature and modern life that frustrate Man in his
collective effort to create a rational world order, and the individual in his
effort to lead a worthwhile life. Cf the prig novels of 1911-1915.
#90. Man Who Could Work Miracles: A Film Story Based on
Materials in His Short Story.... 1936 (106ap). SF. An expanded version
of
#
12?5, together with a prologue and epilogue in heaven that make the
misadventures of Mr. Fotheringay a test case for the question whether
Man can safely be trusted with such power as science is even now putting
into his hands.
#91. Star-Begotten: A Biological Fantasia. 1937 (151ap). SF. The
discovery among us of a new human species and the search for the cause
H.G. WELLS: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 133
of its origin. CF # 96.
#92. Brynhild; or The Show of Things. 1937
(264ap).
Novel. Satire on
the building of a literary reputation.
#93. The Camford Visitation. 1937 (52ap). Borderline SF. The reac-
tions of dons and students to an invisible but highly vocal visitor from
outer space who lectures them on the short-comings of mankind,
especially as represented at Camford and
Oxbridge.
#94. The Brothers. 1938 (96ap). Ruritanian romance. In a civil war
the royalist and communist leaders discover not
only that
they
are twin
brothers but also that they have, despite the contrast in their
rhetoric, the
same constructive principles.
#95. World Brain. 1938 (154ap). Ten addresses and articles on the
establishment of a world encyclopaedia center and on education in
general. Includes Wells's presidential address to the Education section of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1937, "The In-
formative Content of Education," and a 1936 pamphlet,
The Idea
of a
Wor ld Encyclopaedia.
#96. Apropos of Dolores. 1938 (344ap). Novel. The
story of a battle
royal between man and wife; related to # 91 by the presence of the
biologist Foxfield and the concept of two human species.
#97. The Holy Terror. 1939 (575ap). SF. The life story of Rud
Whitlow, who is paranoic as a child, heroic as the leader of the world
revolution, and again paranoic as the Master Director of the World State.
With respect to depression and war, the extrapolative assumptions here
are the same as in # 84, but in this case there is a well-organized Open
Conspiracy ready to take advantage of the coming of war. This is the
fourth of the psychosis stories (see
#
68); from # 102?4:1:4 it is clear that
the protagonist, though he may at times suggest Hitler or Wells himself, is
modeled primarily on Stalin.
#98. The Fate of Homo Sapiens: An unemotional statement of the
Things that are happening to him now, and of the immediate Possibilities
confronting him. 1939 (280ap; in US as The Fate of Man). 1942 (see note
on
#
100). Begins with a statement of the ecological crisis and then sur-
veys the "existing forces" that hold man on the road to destruction and
prevent him from taking the road to utopia: Judaism, Catholicism,
Protestantism, Nazism, Totalitarianism, the British oligarchy, Shintoism,
the New Life movement, Imperialism, Communism, the American men-
tality. The conclusion is that Man will almost certainly fail to adapt to
his new environment and hence pass out of existence.
#99. Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. 1939
(125ap). Wells at his most cantankerous in eight articles and one address,
and at his noblest in a second address, "The Honour and Dignity of the
Free Mind," which was prepared for delivery to the 1939 meeting of the
P.E.N. Club, scheduled for Stockholm in September, but canceled.
#100. The New World Order: Whether It Is Attainable, How It Can
Be Attained, and What Sort of World a World at Peace Will Have to Be.
1940 (142ap). 1942 (see NOTE). This handbook for the constructive world
revolution was Wells's first response to the coming of the second war; the
same general ideas are developed more fully and coherently in # 108.
NOTE. In The Outlook for Homo Sapiens: An Amalgamation and Moder-
nization of [ # 98 and # 100] (1942), the Introduction and 26 chapters of
134 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
#98, with ??4-5 combined, appear as ??1-26, and the 12 chapters of
# 100 as ? ? 27-38. The only modernizations are a transitional paragraph
in ? 27, the use in ? 36 of a later version of the Sankey Declaration (see
#
101), and the addition of ?39, "Russia, the West, and World
Revolution."
# 101. The Rights of Man; or What Are We Fighting For? 1940 (93ap).
An account of the origin of the Sankey Declaration, an exposition of its
provisions, and an argument for its immediate world-wide adoption. The
version of the Declaration given here also appears in # 103; an earlier
version appears in # 100, a later version in # 105 and # 107, and the final
version in #108 and #111.
#102. Babes in the Darkling Wood. 1940 (520ap). Novel. This fifth of
the psychosis stories (see # 68) is in large part an exposition of "the new
and entirely revolutionary philosophy of behaviourism" (?0). The story
tells of how the young hero and heroine clash with their old-fashioned
parents, of what the hero experiences in Poland during the first days of
the war, of his mental breakdown and the failure of psychoanalysis to ef-
fect a cure, and of the success of psychosynthesis. The Introduction is a
defense of the novel of ideas as a literary form.
#103. The Common Sense of War and Peace: World Revolution or
War Unending? 1940 (124ap). Material generally similar to that in # 100.
#104. All Aboard for Ararat. 1940 (9Oap). Fantasy. Having been so in-
structed by God, Noah Lammock, the well-known author, builds an ark in
order to survive the flood of the ecological crisis.
# 105. Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World
Revolution. 1941 (180ap). Despite the title, this is simply a collection of 52
newspaper articles.
#106. You Can't Be Too Careful: A Sample of Life. 1941 (386ap).
Novel. Wells's last book-length fiction is both a comedy of lower middle-
class life that caused some reviewers to applaud the old man for returning
to his true forte, and a drama of the world crisis. It is the life story of Ed-
ward Albert Tewler, a representative specimen (even as you and I) of
Homo tewler, which may survive long enough to become Homo sapiens,
but probably will not.
# 107. Science and the World-Mind. 1942 (45ap). Poses the problem of
the education of two billion people for world unity.
#108. Phoenix: A Summary of the Inescapable Conditions of World
Organization. 1942 (265ap). A comprehensive summation of Wells's
thinking on the ecological crisis and the constructive revolution. ? 1:2,
"The Threefold Imperative," expresses more cogently than ever before a
set of concepts that had occupied him since
#
59 in 1921. First, the
abolition of distance, which subjects every country to the danger of a sud-
den blitzkrieg, makes imperative a world control of transport and com-
munication, especially in the air. Second, the "stupendous enhancement of
the power of waste" makes imperative the establishment of a world con-
servation authority. Third, the virtual disappearance of illiteracy and the
danger posed by masses of discontented young men makes imperative the
subordination of all states to a common fundamental law--a Rights of
Man that includes the right of every man to satisfactory employment.
#109. The Conquest of Time: Written to Replace His "First and Last
Things." 1942 (88ap). A compact exposition of "the religion of the new
NOTES BY SEVERAL HANDS 135
man,"
with an appendix on some theories of time. (Despite the intention
indicated in the sub-title and the Preface, the Rationalist Press
Association continued # 29 as No. 1 in the Thinker's Library and made
this book No. 92.)
#110. Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church.
1943 (142ap). Among other things, condemns the Church for its failure to
condemn Nazism.
#111. '42 to '44: A Contemporary Memoir upon Human Behaviour
During the Crisis of the World Revolution. 1944 (360ap).
? 0. Preface. States that since this book is "strong meat for babes" and
may thus prove repellent to many who follow his propaganda for the new
world order, it will be published only as an expensive library volume. (It
was published at 42s, about four times the ordinary price.)
? 1. The Heritage of the Past. The Psychology of Cruelty. Considers, in
14 sections, the possibility that Man's addiction to cruelty may prove an
insuperable barrier to the realization of a just world order and hence to
his survival.
?2. How We Face the Future. 17 articles, mostly reprinted from
periodicals, on stupidity and scoundrelism in high places.
? 3. A Thesis on the Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of the In-
dividual Life in the Higher Metazoa with Particular Reference to the
Species Homo sapiens. 1942 pamphlet. The thesis with which Wells, at 85,
won a doctorate from London University.
?4. A Memorandum on the Relation of Mathematics, Music, Moral
and Aesthetic Values, Chess and Similar Intellectual Elaborations to the
Reality underlying Phenomena. In Wells's neo-nominalism, mathematics
cannot accurately reflect the ultimate reality.
? 5. A Memorandum on Survival. On the survival or failure to survive
of species in general and Man in
particular. Incorporates
material also
used in the 1945 edition of # 63 and in # 113.
#112. The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life. 1945 (47ap); see #113.
Autobiographical fantasy: conversations with Jesus on disciples, a hymn
of hate against sycamores (cf the megatheria of
#
76), and a visit to
Elysium.
#113. Mind at the End of Its Tether. 1945 (35ap); US 1946 (with
#
112); UK 1968 (with # 112, edited with an introduction by G. P. Wells,
as The Last Books of H. G. Wells). ? ? 1-3 announce that "the end of
everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded"; ? ? 5-8, not
wholly consistent with this announcement, are from the 1945 edition of
# 63 and also, in part, from 111?5.
Notes by Several Hands
SF WRITERS, THE GREAT CONSENSUS, AND Non-ALIGNMENT. It is only
fair to assume that any article printed in SFS has in the editors'
opinion--
even where they disagree with it--some significant redeeming aspects.
Thus I personally think that Dr. Rottensteiner's robust polemics on Mr.
Farmer's "riverworld" cycle make a salutary point. But as was said in my
136 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
little dialogue in our first issue, the critic should be for the creative
writer,
not against him. Since in this imperfect world very few writers are either
totally creative or totally non-creative, but various shades of in-between,
it seems to me that the most fruitful strategy is to condemn trashy and
unhealthy writings, and very rarely the author. Mr. Farmer is after all the
writer who extended the closed world of American SF thematics with such
stories as "Father," "My Sister's Brother," and above all "Riders of the
Purple Wage," which even his sternest critic, Stanislaw Lem, has called
"no mean piece of prose" (see Lem's very significant essay, "SF: A
Hopeless Case--With Exceptions," SF Commentary No. 35-37, 1973).
Where Dr. Rottensteiner talks of "Farmer," therefore, I take the name to
mean not the actual citizen of Peoria, but the authorial persona that has
allowed economic and psychological pressures to turn him from "Riders"
to the works that Dr. Rottensteiner
criticizes, the persona that has
allowed the ruling system--represented in SF by the publishing circuit, the
fan-voters, and the whole mutual-admiration club--to become in-
ternalized as the norm for such "aligned" or
gleichgeschaltet writing. Very
little has actually been changed by the supposedly "dangerous" themes of
sex and blasphemy that Mr. Farmer has pioneered in American
SF,
for in
their actual use within conformist structures these "new" themes
appear
only as the obverse of the puritanism and agnosticism of the old SF. In
other words, whatever the wishes of an SF writer may be,
whatever his
opinions as a private citizen may be, if his
writings portray intelligent
beings facing a new world as isolated individuals without
significant new
relationships to other intelligent beings and to the totality of their in-
stitutions, he is aligned with the powers-that-be.
In present power circumstances, a writer, as Ms. Le Guin says in this
issue, can save his soul, whether in the USSR or the USA, only by refusing
to become so aligned. The fact that US writers, such as Blish, Clement,
Delaney, Dick, Disch, Knight, Le
Guin,
Leiber, Miller, Oliver, Pohl,
Sheckley, Simak, etc., have to an important extent managed to escape
such aligning proves that despite the pressures it is a matter of choice. But
this choice determines the writer's aesthetics as well as his ethics. Most
SF writers have fooled themselves for far too long that they are a
vanguard educating the American people (and then all other peoples) for
the space age, for inner space, or what not. Sadly, the basic ideological
pull seems to have drawn the other way: the price of success--such as it
is--has been the educators' becoming educated into a subdivision of the
great American consensus (see also Dr. Davis's contribution to this issue).
So to my mind, writers like Mr. Farmer, capable of better work if given
better financial support and better normative systems, should be regarded
with sorrow at least as much as with anger: so many wasted op-
portunities, so much wasted talent! If villains need be, the anger should
be directed at the writers' submitting to such publicity systems of rein-
forcement as the Hugo award, rapidly becoming the measure of what is
immature in SF.--DS.
THE A LDISS H ISTORY. For the present, and probably for some time to
come, the best introduction to the history of SF is Brian W. Aldiss, Billion
Year Spree: The Trule Hi.stoty of Science Fiction (Doubleday, $7.95; in
UK, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, "about four pounds," according to my
source). Mr. Aldiss has been widely recognized for more than a decade as
NOTES BY SEVERAL HANDS 137
one of the best writers and editors in SF; in this book he demonstrates
that his familiarity with general literature is wide enough and deep
enough for him to see SF in its literary context. For those already well
read in the history of the genre, the most provocative and valuable
parts
of the book will be those concerned with the relationships between SF
narrowly defined and such writers as Milton, Erasmus Darwin, Hardy,
Kafka. The fact that we can call the book an introduction--Aldiss takes
the SF canon as having been pretty well
established, and finds SF
scholarship of sufficient bulk and extent for summary, interpretation, and
synthesis--makes it a kind of milestone in our field. --RDM.
A NEW BOOK BY MOSKOWITZ. For his new book--Edward Page Mit-
chell, The Crystal Man: Landmark Science Fiction (Doubleday, $7.95)--
Sam Moskowitz has collected thirty stories (published anonymously 1874-
1886, all but one in the New York Sun) and written a 64-page in-
troduction on Mitchell, his stories, and the history of American SF from
the publication of Locke's "Moon Hoax" in 1835 to that of Looking Back-
ward in 1888. Whereas Aldiss finds the context for SF in mainstream fic-
tion, Moskowitz finds it in the world of commercial publishing (in
magazines, newspapers, and dime novels more often than in books),
especially in the rivalries of authors, of editors,
and of publishers. He tells
us that the Suin was unusual among newspapers in that it "fictionalized
the news, literally wrote it like fiction with characters, dialogue, plot" (p.
xxxi). The same might be said of his own approach to literary history: he
plunges us into the middle of things, creates his heroes and villains, harks
back to the beginning, and then proceeds to the end, with his scenes
arranged for dramatic effect more than for chronological order. His own
role is almost always that of the omniscient narrator: here, as in his
previous essays, we are given a vast amount of presumably factual detail
with no citation of sources; indeed, with two exceptions, we are not even
allowed to know the basis on which these anonymous stories have been
assigned to their supposed author.
"Landmark" status is claimed for these stories on the basis of their
including a number of firsts: the first time machine, the first electronic
computer functioning within a human head, the first use of scientific
means to make a man invisible, the first use of mechanical refrigeration
to effect suspended animation, the first theory suitable for faster-than-
light travel (pp. ix-x). Whether or not these claims are valid, the stories
are still interesting enough for us to grant that Moskowitz has performed
a real service in bringing them to light. And the introduction is sufficiently
provocative and informative to have its own value.
But I would differ with Moskowitz in suspecting that the value of the
stories lies not in their being so unusual as to qualify as landmarks but
rather in their being so typical of the time that they qualify as represen-
tative. The two exceptions to anonymity are "The Tachypomp" and "The
Ablest Man in the World," which were reprinted under Mitchell's name in
an 1884-85 anthology, the 10-volume Stories by American AutLors. I
would like to know more about this collection of 56 stories (they are listed
in Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction 1876-1890 [1966]): how many of
them can be counted as SF?, is there editorial comment in which Mit-
chell's stories are cited as strange or unusual?, etc. In sum, I would like to
know the degree to which the editors and readers of the 1880s regarded
138 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
the appearance of an SF story as simply a matter of course. --RDM.
RYNIN IN ENGLISH. Long before most Americans took either space
travel or science fiction seriously, there was a tremendous interest in both
in the Soviet Union. The nine-volume work by Nikolai A. Rynin, In-
terplanetary Flight & Communication, originally published in Leningrad
1927-1932, is ample proof. During this period, before Stalin isolated the
Soviet Union from the rest of the world, there was considerable com-
munication among space-travel enthusiasts around the world. Rynin's
volumes cover, not only the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but also that
of Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard, Robert Esnault-Pelleterie, and
others in great detail. Parallel to the interest in space flight is the interest
in science fiction, especially in the first three volumes: Dreams, Legends,
and Early Fantasies; Spacecraft in Science Fiction; and Radiant Energy:
Science Fiction and Scientific Projects. Rynin is familiar with much of the
German (Otto Willi Gail, Bruno H. Burgel, etc.) and American (Hugo
Gernsback's Wonder Stories) science fiction of the period, and indicates
that there was considerable international influence and interchange of
ideas in the genre; indeed, "Gernsbackian" SF seems to have been an in-
ternational movement. The nine volumes are now available in English,
$30.00 for the complete set, from the US Department of Commerce,
National Technical Information Service, Springfield, Va. 22151. The
serial numbers for the nine volumes are NASA TT F-640 through 648.
Each is $3.00, except the last, which is $6.00. --John J. Pierce.
MARXISM, MODERNISM, AND SF. I have recently come across David
Caute's The Illusion (1971), an essay on Marxism and modernism in con-
temporary writing, which discusses SF and anti-utopian fiction in the con-
text of the "dialectical novel," and which says about Zamyatin the same
kind of thing as I said in my essay in the first issue of SFS. --Patrick
Parrinder.
PANSPERMIA. Critics of SF have maintained for some time now that
the genre has little actual value as a predictor of the direction scientific
endeavor and discovery may take in the future. Nevertheless, it is
probably the belief that SF can perform such a function which creates
much of the popular interest in the genre and which has attracted its most
inspired authorial practitioners. Thus when the true believer finds a point
of intersection between SF and modern science, it is a happy day indeed.
Finding a scientist of Francis Crick's stature supporting the fascinating
contemporary SF theme of interplanetary visitation--the spaceship sent
centuries ago from a distant, advanced civilization to seed the earth with
life forms as we know them or to otherwise influence the course of human
evolution--constitutes such a day. Crick, discoverer of the structure of the
DNA molecule, together with his co-worker Leslie Orgel of California's
Salk Institute, writes in Icarus 19(1973):341-46, of his new theory of the
origin of life on earth: "directed panspermia," modeled on the panspermia
hypothesis of the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who in 1908 first
proposed that cells traveling from outer space had brought life to distant
planets. --Elaine L. Kleiner.
THOMAS M. DISCH AS POET. Thomas M. Disch is certainly one of the
most promising of the younger SF writers and editors: in his 1973 an-
thology, Bad Moon Rising, the best story is his own "Everyday Life in the
Later Roman Empire." Those who wish to investigate him as a poet can
NOTES BY SEVERAL HANDS 139
obtain a copy of The Right Way to Figure Plumbing for $1.95 from -the
Basilisk Press, P.O. Box 71, Fredonia, N.Y. 14063. --RDM.
A B ILINGUAL WELLS. Jean-Pierre Vernier, Universite de Rouen,
author of H.G. Wells et son temps (Rouen 1971), has edited a facing-page
edition of "A Story of the Days to Come" and "A Dream of Armageddon"
as H. G. Wells, Deux nouWelles d'anticipation/Tu'o scientific romances
(Aubier-Flammarion 1973). --RDM.
SOME NEW CHECKLISTS. Copies of The NESFA Index: Science Fic-
tion Magazines and Original Anthologies 1971-1972 may be obtained
from NESFA, Box G, MIT Branch P.O., Cambridge, Mass. 02139, for
$3.00. The earlier volumes in this series are also available: for 1951-1965,
$8.00; for 1966-1970, $5.00. Leslie Kay Swigart has produced an
elaborately illustrated Harlan Ellison: A Bibliographical Checklist, $3.50
from the author, P.O. Box 8570, Long Beach, CA 90808. H. W. Hall is
editing a series of SF book-review indexes: the volumes for 1971 and 1972
may be obtained from him, for $1.50 each, at 3608 Meadows Oak Lane,
Bryan, Texas 77801; in addition, he offers to xerox a copy of the out-of-
print 1970 volume for $3.50. A volume supplementary to the Hall series,
indexing reviews in the SF magazines 1949-1969, has been issued by
SFRA and may be obtained from Ivor Rogers, P.O. Box 1968, Des Moines,
Iowa
50311,
for $2.95. --RDM.
BELLAMY R EDIVIVUS. During the earlier sixties Mack Reynolds con-
tributed to the SF magazines, especially Analog, a large number of stories
based on socioeconomic extrapolation, stories that were almost entirely
ignored by book-publishers (so far as I know, none of his serials or series
has appeared in hardcover, and only a few in paperback). Now he has
come forward with the most optimistic utopia that American SF has
produced in many years: Looking Backward, From the Year 2000 (Ace
paperback). Just as John Brunner produced his horrendous The Sheep
Look Up (1972) by extrapolating all the negative features of American
life, so Reynolds has retold the story of Julian West by extrapolating all
the positive features. But whereas Brunner's book has had hardcover and
book-club as well as paperback editions, Reynolds is still confined to the
paperbacks. -- RDM.
AN AWARD FOR LEM. In July Stanislaw Lem received the Literary
Award of the Polish Ministry of Culture, for his whole opus, but especially
for two books whose titles would translate into English as Hard Vacuum
(an SF novel) and His Master's Voice (a collection of reviews of non-
existent SF books). --DS.

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