- Pohl 1976. The Innovators
- Rabkin 1977. Conflation of Genres and Myths in David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus"
- Suvin 1972. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre
Pohl, Frederik 1976. The Innovators. The Journal of General Education 28(1): 43-49. [JSTOR]
Now, this could have been a pleasant half hour for me. I like science fiction. I've spent my life reading it, editing it and writing it, and it pleases me to find people who find merit in it. But the pleasure was spoiled, because I didn't know quite what to say to my Texan friend; every one of those exciting ideas he mentioned were, to be sure, exciting and challenging enough, but not one of them was new. I could remember this from the works of W. Olaf Stapledon and that from Arthur C. Clarke, this bit was Lester del Rey's, and that one came from William Tenn. (Pohl 1976: 43)
It feels like acquaintance with early science fiction acquaints one with spoilers.
Of all the writers who have contributed original thought to science fiction - and there are scores, perhaps even hundreds, whose contributions have been substantial - Wells is clearly the one to whom we all owe the largest debt. He did not invent the story of space travel, but he gave it its modern form. He did not invent the utopia, but he may have invented the dystopia - in When the Sleeper Wakes - and he certainly contributed largely to utopian literature. (Pohl 1976: 44)
That's the book that sounds, at least in summary, like the main inspiration for the Matrix.
But we must writers remember that Burroughs wrote long before Mariner was launched. The planet he described was the planet the best prevailing astronomical opinion spelled out for him. These were the years of Percival Lowell, when astronomers still saw canals in their telescopes, when the Martian ice caps were taken to be glaciers, when the color changes were deemed to represent the growth of vegetation - perhaps even of crops; when some of the best minds in science were preoccupied not with the question of whether intelligence existed on Mars - they took that as given - but with the question of how best to light huge fires in geometrical designs on the Sahara desert so that they might inform that Martian intelligent life that Earth had similar life of its own. (Pohl 1976: 45)
Can this be said of Stapledon's Mars?
I am not unaware, by the way, that other writers were thinking cosmologically large thoughts independent of Doc [|] Smith at about that same time - Stapledon comes quickly to mind, with Last and First Men and The Star Maker. But I think Smith is entitled to pride of place, partly because of the calendar - he wrote Skylark, after all, around 1919 - and partly because his influence was direct, immediate and large-scale, taking place in what was then the mainstream of science fiction, the American pulps. (Pohl 1976: 47-48)
Last and First Men has a literal chapter on cosmology.
A Martian Odyssey is written in Liberty magazine prose; it contains four or five human characters, an American, a Frenchman, a German and I have forgotten who all else; every one of them is a total bore, and I owe them no apologies for forgetting them because they deserve no better. (Pohl 1976: 48)
Jesus Christ, Pohl, put the gasoline can and matches down.
To see what a feat of invention this is we need only remind ourselves that even Wells did not succeed in accomplishing it; his Martians in The War of the Worlds are as impersonal as tiger sharks; his Selenites are ants ruled by witch doctors. Tweel is something else. Nothing like Tweel has ever existed. His language is less cognate with human tongues than English is with crow calls. And yet we know him well enough to like him; we may not understand him, but we can value him as a friend. Other writers put into their stories beings which they called Martians or Sirians or Plutonians, but it was always clear that they were either plain people in funny suits, or impersonal menaces, or symbolic figures like Voltaire's Micromegas and his associates, no more real than plaster saints. Tweel had the dimension of personality, and it was not near-human or insane-human, it was alien. (Pohl 1976: 48)
I said put them down! / Similar (lack of) personality issue with Stapledon's Martians and Venusians, but then again they are given as much detail as the various humans (that is, very little, if any at all).
Weinbaum went on to invent other kinds of creatures in a dozen other stories in his tragically short writing life - it was only a matter of a year or two after A Martian Odyssey appeared that he died; but he didn't have to invent more, he had shown how the trick was done and all of us began doing it instantly and in great volume. Tweel's descendants appear in every science-fiction story written in the past forty years that has to do with aliens. (Pohl 1976: 48)
I wonder if he's anything like Alf, Roger, or Paul.
Science fiction is a literature of ideas. (Not always, to be sure. Nothing is always anything.) Some of the ideas are funneled into science fiction from external sources - from other kinds of literature, from science itself, from the world around us. No writer deserves any special credit for being the first to happen to use that sort of idea. (Pohl 1976: 49)
Ending on a profound note.
Rabkin, Eric S. 1977. Conflation of Genres and Myths in David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus". The Journal of Narrative Technique 7(2): 149-155. [JSTOR]
David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), a powerful and confusing work set largely on a distant planet, obviously springs from the world of science fiction. One purist's definition of that genre calls for the exercise of utterly logical - scientific, if you will - extrapolation. Yet even in a paradigmatic science fiction novel like Well's The Time Machine (1895), the future setting is justified, made science fiction, by the fantastic device of the time machine itself. All science fiction is to some extent fantastic. (Rabkin 1977: 149)
Not sure if it's the correct use of the word "paradigmatic" but it seems to work. (Read somethig recently about Thomas Kuhn himself was not sure how to define "paradigmatic".)
Yet the extent to which science fiction can use the startling and assumption-reversing devices of the fantastic is much greater than Wells made clear. In Last and First Men (1930), for example, Stapledon gives us plenty of logical extrapolation, especially in the early chapters predicting developments in world politics, but he also has the thing called Man undergo seventeen discontinuous and fantastic metamorphoses so that he discusses fully eighteen so-called "Men." (Rabkin 1977: 149)
Does he?
There Maskull finds a tower which he hasn't the strength to climb, for as he goes up, its gravity increases geometrically: gravity as inverse electromagnetic phenomenon. Of course, there is no extraliterary justification for this kind of gravity, but once introduced, it functions "scientifically," extrapolatively, with mathematical precision - until Krag arrives. He administers a ritual arm wound to Maskull and this magic suddenly allows Maskull to walk up the stairs with ease. The narrative attitude toward science here is ambiguous. What after all should we make of our science if it functions in the same realm as magic? By writing science fiction as fantasy, Lindsay makes science fiction a tool for questioning the ostensible precision of science itself. (Rabkin 1977: 150)
A familiar problematic: is it science fiction if there's zero science involved in it?
The echoes of Christian mysticism are amplified by descriptions of a god like Pascal's infinite sphere with its center everywhere and by overly trinitarian concepts:[...] Length is existence, breath is relation, depth is feeling. (213) [...]However, one is not allowed to follow a simply Christian interpretation far. One problem is that the composite god goes not by three names but by at least six, again depending on locale. (Rabkin 1977: 153)
Yo what is this?
A second problem is that the central figure in Christianity, the dying god, is most closely approximated in this book by none of the gods but by Maskull. Sir James Frazer has shown us the relationship among Jesus, Osiris and Prometheus. (Rabkin 1977: 153)
It's weird being this familiar with a name and not knowing what the person was really about.
Suvin, Darko 1972. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre. College English 34(3): 372-382. [JSTOR]
Second, if one takes as differentiae of SF either radically different figures (dramatis personae) or a radically different context of the story, it will be found to have an interesting and close kinship with other literary sub-genres, which flourished at different times and places of literary history: the Greek and Hellenistic "blessed island" stories, the "fabulous voyage" from Antiquity on, the Renaissance and Baroque "utopia" and "planetary novel," the Enlightenment "state (political) novel," the modern "anticipation," "anti-utopia," etc. (Suvin 1972: 372)
This question of radical difference appears to be open ended in Stapledon.
In the following paper I shall argue for a definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement. This definition seems [|] to possess the unique advantage of rendering justice to a literary tradition which is coherent through the ages and within itself, and yet distinct from non-fictional utopianism, from naturalistic literature, and from other non-naturalistic fiction. It thus permits us to lay the basis of a coherent poetics of SF. (Suvin 1972: 372-373)
"Cognitive" seems redundant here - estrangement is cognitive by default.
Thus, it is not only the basic human and humanizing curiosity that gives birth to SF. Beside an undirected inquisitiveness, a semantic game without clear referent, this genre has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary). At all events, the possibility of other strange, co-variant coordinate systems and semantic fields is assumed. (Suvin 1972: 374)
Abstract reference?
Thus SF takes off from a fictional ("literary") hypothesis and develops it with extrapolating and totalizing ("scientific") rigor - in genre, Columbus and Swift are more alike than different. The effect of such factual reporting of fictions is one of confroting a set normative system - a Ptolemaic-type closed world picture - with a point of view or glace implying a new set of norms; in literary theory, this is known as the attitude of estrangement. This concept was first developed on non-natural (ostranenie, Viktor Shklovsky, 1917), and most successfully underpinned by an anthropological and historical approach in the opus of Bertolt Brecht, who wanted to write "plays for a scientific age." While working on a play about the prototype scientist Galileo, he defined this attitude (Verfremdungseffekt) in his Short Organon for the Theatre (1948): "A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar." (Suvin 1972: 374)
Isn't this the opposite of estrangement? Beginning with an unfamiliar (a fictional hypothesis) an turning it into the familiar?
The pastoral is essentially closer to SF. Its imaginary framework of a world without money economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization allows it to isolate, as in the laboratory, two human motivations - erotics and power-hunger. (Suvin 1972: 376)
The two dominant leitmotifs of poetry, again.
The natural sciences caught up and surpassed the literary imagination in the 19th century, the sciences dealing with human relationships might be argued to have caught up with it in their highest theoretical achievements but have certainly not done so in their alienated social practice. In the 20th century, SF has moved into the sphere of anthropological and cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a warming, a call to understanding and action, and - most important - a mapping of possible alternatives. (Suvin 1972: 378)
I'm somewhat suspicious about science fiction reaching anthropological and cosmological thought in the 20th century but then again I haven't read any of it.
This extrapolative model - e.g., of London's Iron Heel, Wells' The Sleeper Wakes and Men Like Gods, Zamiatin's We, Stapledon's Last and First Men, Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants, or Yefremov's Andromeda - is based on direct, temporal extrapolation and centered on sociological (i.e., utopian and anti-utopian) modelling. (Suvin 1972: 378)
Good company.
Yet already in Wells' Time Machine and in Stapledon' this extrapolation transcended the sociological spectrum (from everyday practice through economics to erotics) and spilled into biology and cosmology. Nonetheless, whatever its ostensible location (future, "fourth dimension", other planets, alternate universes), "extrapolative modelling" is oriented futurologically. Its values and standards are to be found in the cognitive import of the fable's premises and the consistency with which such premises (usually one or very few in number) are narratively developed to its logical end, to a cognitively significant conclusion. (Suvin 1972: 379)
I think with this claim that only in the 20th century did SF spill over into biology Suvin is completely ignoring Frankenstein.
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