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A Catapathic Grouping

Sawyer, Andy 1996. Adult Services. RQ 36(1): 41-45. [JSTOR]

Science fiction (sf) is by no means just hard science written by scientists for other boffins. True, much sf is only one step beyond the "legitimate" speculation of the scientific paper and the extrapolative article, and a considerable number of scientists - and non-scientists - have been seduced into a fascination with the way the universe works by reading authors like Athur C. Clarke. But other branches of sf explore utopias and dystopias, or take current philosophical or political ideas and explore where they may lead. Far from being a minority interest, sf has something for everyone. (Sawyer 1996: 41)

Sometimes the science fiction writer pesters his scientist friends for ideas about possible futures.

The University of Liverpool was attracted to the Science Fiction Foundation Collection because of its potential for international research, and because the Department of English was planning an M.A. in Science Fiction Studies - the first taught postgraduate course in the field in the United Kingdom - for which a world-class collection of books, magazines, critical monographs, and journals would be a clear asset. There had already been something of an sf tradition in Liverpool: the University Library held the archive of Olaf Stapledon, whose gigantic philosophical epic, Last and First Men, is one of the most influential books in the entire field. The arrival of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection was almost immediately followed by significant archive and manuscript deposits from the Liverpool horror writer, Ramsey Campbell, and the family of the late Eric Frank Russell (another Liverpool sf writer). (Sawyer 1996: 42)

"Stapledon was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925".

Where the major literary bibliographies are of little use, it is vitally important to know where to find information, and full use of networks of friends, fans, and fanzines is necessary. In fact, the bibliography of sf is well-covered compared to other forms of writing, and there are a number of essential reference works. (Sawyer 1996: 42)

True. There's a website - isfdb.org - that meticulously documents the releases of science fiction books. Even in Estonian there is Baas, a website dedicated to user reviews of science fiction works specifically.

Media inquiries form a third market. Part of the function of the Science Fiction Foundation has always been to inform the media, and newspapers, TV, and radio are always there in the background with requests for information. Sometimes these are serious: a journalist writing about current research into telepathy wants to know about attempts to describe the phenomenon in fiction; a TV praduction crew preparing a major series on how we have imagined the future wants suggestions about writers to feature; a publisher producing a glossy encyclopedia of sf wants shots of book and magazine covers. (Sawyer 1996: 43)

Just this perfectly normal and serious subject - telepathy.

Leslie, John 1993. A Spinozistic Vision of God. Religious Studies 29(3): 277-285. [JSTOR]

Now, I find nothing too stupefying here. In fact, I go so far as to say that if there were absolutely no things - no people or other existents - then there would still be ethical truths: the truth, for example, that it was a pity that nobody was having fun with a chess problem, and the truth that it was fortunate that nobody was being burned alive. Even in an absence of all existents, ethical truths would be real and important. They would carry weight despite how there would ex hypothesi exist nobody who judged them weighty. (Leslie 1993: 277)

Fun With Chess Problems sounds like a book title.

Is belief in God's reality sensible? It very definitely could be, if it helped to solve three puzzles. The first is the puzzle of why the world's events fall into the orderly patterns which we call patterns of Causation. The second is that of why those patterns are of a sort leading to the existence of life and of [|] intelligence. And the third - the biggest of the three, the puzzle whose solution could answer the other two puzzles as well - is why there is any world at all: why Reality includes actual existents and not just such platonic truths as that two sets of two chess-problem-solvers would necessarily make four, or that the absence of a world of people being burned alive was fortunate. (Leslie 1993: 277-278)

Is the universe biased to create intelligent life?

Just what would God be? At least a very knowledgeable and powerful person, obviously? No, it is not at all obvious that God would be that. The neoplatonic theory that God, although real, is not a being, has greatly influenced many theologians: Greek Orthodox ones above all, but also such Catholics as Hans Küng and such Protestants as Paul Tillich. God, on this theory, is not a person but the world's 'power of being', a power with an ethical aspect. (Leslie 1993: 278)

God is love (cf. Searby 1989: 4).

The suggested solution is as follows. Nothing exists beyond a divided mind, or perhaps an infinite collection of divine minds. This, though, does not deny real existence to you and to me. Instead you and I are inevitable aspects of the fact that a divine mind knows everything, or at least (if that is different) everything worth knowing. You and I are parts of an immensely knowledgeable mind, it being good that it have parts of this kind. We of course are not directly aware of this. What we are directly aware of, is our considerable ignorance and confusion. But a divine mind, if knowing everything, would have to know just how it felt to be you or me, and hence how it felt to be ignorant and confused about a great many matters. We are people who can be conceived without contradiction, and a mind which did not know exactly what it felt like to be such people would ipso facto not know everything. What is more it would, one hopes, be missing something well worth knowing. Yet knowing it would have to involve actually feeling it (or, at the very least, having once felt it or something very much like it, although this could seem far from sufficient for divinely complete knowledge). Compare know you cannot know just how it feels to experience the colour red, without ever actually experiencing it. (Leslie 1993: 281)

The, uh, God is feeling himself line of thought.

While these last ideas can seem very bizarre, they are not particularly original. You will find very much the same ones in the philosophically vigorous science fiction of Olaf Stapledon (1930: section 4 of chapter 15) and in papers by Frank Tipler (1989, for instance), and they have turned up again and again over the long history of religious thought. (Leslie 1993: 285)

Indeed the cosmology of the Last Men sounds somewhat similar.

Lowenthal, David 1995. The Forfeit of the Future. Futures 27(4): 385-395. DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(95)00017-Q [sciencedirect.com]

Disaffection with the future stems in part from its growing uncertainty. The more complex we see our world to be, the harder it becomes to predict outcomes of our actions. Unease stems from too much as well as too little knowledge. Enhanced powers of forecasting exacerbate doubts about our ability to cope with changes foreseen or unforeseen. Whether concerns are cosmic (comet collisions such as bombarding Jupiter in July 1994), genetic (mutant life-forms), or ecological (loss of species diversity), the future we glimpse seems more a fearsome than a Brave New World. (Lowenthal 1995: 185)

Cf. Gibsonian inability to imagine the future. The categories of concerns is pretty neat (L&FM has them all).

Futurism was 'suspiciously like a period styl, a neo-gothic of the Machine Age, as revealed in the Art-Deco skyscrapers of New York in the twenties'. The archetypal future was 'a city of gleaming, tightly clustered towers, with helicopters fluttering about their heads and monorails snaking around their feet; all enclosed [...] under a vast transparent dome'. Life there, mocked the visionary Olaf Stapledon, would be 'unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human nature'. (Lowenthal 1995: 386)

Reference to Stapledon's critique of utopianism in the preface to L&FM.

In the mid-1970s Banham got posters 'from some Futures operation and they were all hand-lettered!'; he knew then that the future had had it. 'Pictures of windmills and families holding hands; [...] what kind of future is that? Where's your white heat of technology? Where's your computer typefaces and those backward-sloping numerals that glow at you out of pocket calculators? Where's that homely old future we all grew up with?' It had vanished with the wind of hope. Technological paradise, succumbed to World War II, Hiroshima, and postwar planning. Of the modernist future only nostalgic memories now remain. (Lowenthal 1995: 386)

Wishing for a pastoral future.

The assumption of eternal sameness bolstered conclusions about the future drawn from the past. Secular prognoses were based on exemplary historical evidence framed within a constant human nature; sub specie aeternitatis, nothing really rovel could arise. Whether the future was deduced from faith or from sober calculation, it was foreseeable because processes would continue to be what they always had been. 'He who wishes to foretell the future must look into the past', as Machiavelli put it, 'for all the things on each have at all times a similarity with those of the past'. (Lowenthal 1995: 387)

Huh? What is this interpretation of sub specie aeternitatis?

H G Wells is customarily remembered as a great champion of the future. But, when he tried to trace its lineaments, the future's thinness and sameness appalled him. Its handsome but characterless buildings, its healthy and happy people devoid of personal distinction, left Wells with 'an incurable effect of unreality'. By contrast, any past institution, however irrational or preposterous, had for Wells 'an effect of realness and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it has been [|] christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contours that we associate with life'. By contrast the anticipated future, however rational, 'seems strange and inhuman'. No wonder then that Banham's Futurist future died so little mourned. (Lowenthal 1995: 391-392)

From A Modern Utopia.

Drake, H. L. 1998. Introduction. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 9(4): 257-267. [JSTOR]

Plato's allegory of the cave illustrates that we, as a species, are yet prisoners of oru own mental poverties. As Samuel Stumpf describes Plato's allegory we "recognize as reality only the shadows formed on the wall...." (53). The theme for this Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts special issue on "mental abilities" in science fiction and science fantasy stories is derived from Plato's ideas as well as those of two contemporary academics: Hans Moravec's "postbiological" plans and Richard Dawkins' "memetics" (information replicators). The model that Moravec provides dares to suggest a brain macromutation in contrast to the slow and unpredictable "natural selection" process of Charles Darwin, who maintained that "the variability, which we almost universally meet with in our domestic productions, is not directly produced [...] by man; he can neither originate varieties, nor prevent their occurrence; he can preserve and accumulate such as do occur" (Bates & Humphrey, 143). (Drake 1998: 257)

In contrast with Stapledon's future, wherein man does create varieties, both intentionally and accidentally.

In his nonfiction book, Mind Children, Moravec theorizes about transferring recordings of human intelligence to robots. Those machines would subsequently add to the human mind transfers which they have received, in subsequently reproducing their mechanical selves: "Our culture will then be able to evolve independently of human biology and its limitations, passing instead directly from generation to generation of ever [|] more capable intelligent machinery" (4). Moravec suggests that only by way of such a noncorporeal development can homo sapens exist in and move through interstellar space. For, after all, as Brian Attebery has proffered, "the only thing that is colonizable is the self." (Drake 1998: 257-258)

Become machines, conquer the galaxy. What ever could go wrong.

Fiction authors whose stories are featured in this [|] JFA collection of articles struggle with these Moravecian and Atteberian and Dawkins extrapolations: the perpetuity and development of human "intelligence"; non-terra firma environments for our "minds"; the liberation of humanity from the excruciating slowness of Darwinian gradualism; and, the construction of more appropriate "memes" (Dawkins, Watchmaker, 158) regarding nonmythopoeic human immortality. (Drake 1998: 258-259)

Good phrase. Some changes take tens of millions of years to effect.

James Gunn believes that perhaps the first science fiction novel having to do with mental abilities is John Davys Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder, 1911 (letter, 1996). Although the story of The Hampdenshire Wonder is set in early twentieth century rural England, the tale fits most, if not all, of Gunn's definition(s) of science fiction: (1) considerations of a future that holds differences from the past or present; (2) homo sapiens thinking in terms of themselves as a species; (3) homo sapiens maintaining open minds about themselves and the nature of the universe (Road 3, xi); (4) a Darwinian approach, in that environment affects homo sapiens psychologically as well as physically; and, (5) the cognitive ability to behave in spite of environment ("Worldview," 95). (Drake 1998: 259)

Never heard of it. Humanity thinking about itself as a totality, though, is a salient feature. E.g. aliens can't come and say "take us to your leader" because humanity doesn't have a single representative; we are still making war with each other.

  • Beresford, John Davys 1911. The Hampdenshire Wonder. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd. [Internet Archive]
Susan Stratton establishes a rationale for "psience," the partnership between psi and technology. Stratton's paper features four authors - Muriel Jaeger, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Heinlein and Sally Miller Gearhart - whose works not only exemplify psience but also offer ideas regarding how psi is necessary for interpersonal communication [|] in order to keep the humaneness in humanity. By discussing her featured authors, she establishes a case for psience saving homo sapiens from alienation with universe(s). (Drake 1998: 263-264)
  • Stratton, Susan 1998. Psi and Technology in Science Fiction. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 9(4): 324-335. [JSTOR]
More transcendental issues arise in other essays. George Nicholas takes a spiritual look at another Stapledon work - Last And First Men - for the sense of how psi and other mental abilities can span the centuries between early homo sapiens and the last of our race. Nicholas's article points up the poignant - quasi-Christian and certainly quasi-Kantian - realization by the last of our race that there is something noncorporeal and nontechnological that in the final analysis has made humans humane, as perhaps no other sentients in universe(s) are or ever can be. Nicholas establishes a case for Stapledon's Last And First Men showing that our race is a unique work of art leading to an "epiphany of consciousness." (Drake 1998: 264)

Where is this?

Linsley, Robert 1994. Utopia Will Not Be Televised: Rivera at Rockefeller Center. Oxford Art Journal 17(2): 48-62. [JSTOR]

These historical 'facts' are enough to account for why the mural was destroyed, but they don't begin to suggest the full historical resonance of the piece, a resonance set into vibration by its destruction. The memory of Rivera's mural today crystallizes for us a complex network of relationships in the history of science, the history of utopian thought, economic and social history, and the history of popular culture. (Linsley 1994: 48)

History of science in a mural?

The central section of the mural is a vision of the entirety of nature, from the astronomical universe down to the atom and the cell, thoroughly penetrated and transformed by technology. In the middle of the image a large hand holding a glowing sphere emerges from some ambiguous machine. Inside this sphere are schematic renderings of atomic nuclei and of cell division. This sets out one of the major themes of the piece: the interrelationship of the organic and inorganic, of the biological world and the physical universe, and ultimately of mankind and the machine. The sphere is placed against a sectional backdrop illustrating the political and social struggles of the thirties. A benign scientific domination of nature is clearly situated in the mural as a product of the dialectic of history, as a component of a world also transformed socially. (Linsley 1994: 50)

I have to admit, the mural itself (at least the extant copy) looks awesome.

Having already perfected the technology of radio long before Marconi, Tesla had left his invention on the shelf, so to speak, and failed to develop its commercial potential. Instead, he tried to continue his researches into the broader area of energy transmission, and these led to the construction of the Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island (Fig. 5), intended as both a transatlantic radio station and a centre for the wireless broadcast of energy. The notion of broadcast energy is thoroughly utopian. Unlimited energy free to be drawn out of the air anywhere would transform the world, eliminating at a stroke all developmental and economic differences. Such an invention would permit decentralization of the economy and hence a break up of existing power structures. It was also totally impractical under the current social order, for the cost of generating the power to be broadcast could never be recoupled from the users. The energy could not be sold. (Linsley 1994: 50)

How different the 20th century could have become.

The average pulp science fiction story featured an inane adventure plot with a few grandiose ideas about the cosmos tacked on to answer the conventions of the genre, or, alternatively, grandiose ideas about time, space and human destiny (some of which were also rather interesting) with an inane adventure plot tacked on to meet the demands of the market. (Linsley 1994: 52)

Another pretty decent definition of science fiction. Particularly salient for me - grandiose ideas about human destiny.

As an associate of Trotsky, Rivera would naturally lay claim to an authentic Leninism, in opposition to Stalin's encouragement of the cult of Lenin as legitimation for his own power. It is significant that Stalin used the cult of Lenin in his propaganda for the build up of industrial power during the five-year plans. Rivera's Leninism remains utopian - he tries to capture the themes of centralized planning and industrialization at an earlier moment when the hope for a total transformation of the world had not yet been reduced to calls for increased output of tractors. (Linsley 1994: 53)

Not the best but also not the worst.

While doing invaluable work for G.E., Steinmetz was convinced that he was really working for the greater good of humanity. He thought that the vast American industrial concerns were accumulations of social capital, and of course of socialized labour, on such a scale that they represented transitional stages toward an inevitable socialism. These ideas were similar to those held by Rivera. They were also the kind of thoughts that would be pondered by the owners of American business, at least the more open minded, and those more experienced in profiting from new technologies, such as the Rockefellers and David Sarnoff, as they wondered how to protect their own position in a world that seemed to be rapidly changing. (Linsley 1994: 53)

Ah, the era of Eugene V. Debs and Upton Sinclair.

For the inventors, radio was primarily a form of two-way communication: wireless telegraphy. It was Sarnoff who arrived independently at the idea of mass produced home radio sets receiving broadcasts of music and advertising, and he more than anyone is responsible for the institution of broadcasting as we know it today. For a utopian like Tesla, radio was a spin-off from the more important project of wireless power transmission. For a capitalist such as Sarnoff, wireless energy transmission was an impractical pipe dream, whereas radio was eminently exploitable. The difference between these two points of view is dramatized by a newspaper debate between Sarnoff and the professional utopian visionary, H. G. Wells. In 1927, commenting on the puerility of radio programming, Wells had said:
My opinion (is) that the future of broadcasting is like the future of crossword puzzles and Oxford trousers, a very trivial future indeed.
Sarnoff saw things somewhat differently: 'In broadcasting we have a force, an instrumentality greater than any that has yet come to mankind.' Some of Sarnoff's recorded statements give us a clearer indication of what he was thinking of:
[T]hrough the institution of broadcasting, radio is the first universal system of one-way communication developed by man. No other agency can speak with a single voice at the same instant to millions of people. ... The greatest problem of mass communication that is likely to face us in the next national emergency is the problem of counteracting the deluge of enemy propaganda that might pour in on us through the air. (emphasis mine)
Sarnoff shows an early awareness of the propagandistic possibilities of broadcasting, framed within an internationalism that would resonate with Rockefeller's own. (Linsley 1994: 54)

Something similar is occurring in our own time. Computers are primarily two-way means of communication. You send and receive emails, peruse and put out your own webpages, etc. Whereas the smartphone is primarily a one-way means of communication: you scroll and scroll, and rarely if ever make something of your own.

Bourke-White's photo mystifies social domination through technology by elevating the instrument of control while revealing nothing of the social interests that use it. At least Rivera imagines an abstract, generalized humanity in control of its own destiny, in the form of the worker at the centre of the picture. This is not to deny that Rivera's work may also have a blind spot regarding power, but this is a reflection of a broader problem. However excellent its proposals for the reorganization of the economy might have been, the socialist movement could not solve the problem of power. (Linsley 1994: 55)

Imagine that: whole humanity in control of whole humanity; instead of those select few who control the means of production and circulation of capital.

With the affair of the Rivera mural, the Rockefellers and their associates in the Center, including above all David Sarnoff, realized that the theme 'Man at the Crossroads' was an open invitation to contest the future of technology. Rivera's socialist vision of the future in which technical progress is inextricably bonded to social change was incompatible with the ambitions of businessmen who wanted to exploit technology within capitalism. (Linsley 1994: 58)

The good of humanity? No, the main thing is that I make more money!

But the overriding goal of the businessmen brought together in Rockefeller Centre was to maintain their social power through a period of what seemed to be epochal social change. Since 1917 the culture had been saturated with utopianism in a variety of forms; the best thinkers of the time were predicting the immanent collapse of the old order. Marx had predicted that capitalism would pass away through its own internal contradictions, and the crash of 1929 seemed to be the most dramatic proof of the inherent instability of the system. (Linsley 1994: 58)

A general characterization of the interwar era.

The company was founded virtually by government edict in 1919 as a co-operative venture between the corporations that owned the various radio patents. The patents necessary to assemble a radio set were so widely dispersed, among GE, Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit, that no one company could easily or profitably do it. The immediate stimulus was the experience of the Great War, which had demonstrated the military value of radio technology. It was clearly in the interests of the parties to disregard Tesla's original patents entirely, and therefore by extension any other agenda regarding the uses of the technology; but really it was not the technology itself that mattered so much, but the need for closer co-operation between industry, government and the military, and it was the first media conglomerate, the Radio Corporation of America, that was the nexus of this co-operation. (Linsley 1994: 58)

At the inception of the American military-industrial complex: the radio.

As he clarified and condensed the design, the television moved into the centre. In both wings of the mural groups of people are watching images projected inside the circular casing spanning the central section. On the right workers on their lunch break, instructed by a pantheon of Marxist heroes, watch Lenin join the hands of soldier, peasant and worker (this was the ostensibly offensive scene). On the left, students and young people watch the life styles of the dissolute rich against the backdrop of a demonstration of the unemployed taking place on Wall Street. Rivera sees television as revelatory and educational; he seems to have a perception of its propagandistic potential that is as vivid as Sarnoff's, but very different in content. (Linsley 1994: 59)

Ah, television! That's what those large lenses were meant to represent. And of course there could be nothing worse than the soldier, peasant and worker becoming like-minded.

The mural is divided in two. The viewers left side - the right side for the worker in the centre - is the 'bad' side, with images of war and violence in the streets, but also with important references to science and education. In general terms the left side is the present. The right half - left for the worker - is the 'good' side, a fantasy of realized socialism; this represents the future. The right/left, negative/positive split also carries over into the two ellipses, representing the microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds delivered up by the telescope and microscope centred in the composition just behind the worker. The negative side of the macrocosmic ellipse contains the moon, a dead planet, and an eclipse of the sun. The biological ellipse on the same side contains samples of various diseases. More significantly, on the positive side of the biological ellipse of mass of dark cancer cells in visible near the centre of the crossroads. (Linsley 1994: 60)

I can't help noticing that on the left side there is Zeus in all his might wielding a thunder strike with a background of gas-masked soldiers and on the right there is a decapitated statue (the statue is just a statue) with a background of common people. Clearly there's a juxtaposition of "keeping our God(s)" and only looking inward vs. overcoming our fantasy overlords and exploring the space, in peace and unity.

The symbols of present defeat on the left side of the picture are balanced by the appearance at the upper end of the cosmic ellipse of a hammer and sickle floating in the stellar reaches. This grandiose prophecy of fulfilled history at a moment of defeat is paralleled in socialist utopian literature of the 20s and 30s, such as the novels of H. G. Wells, and particularly those of Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men, published in 1930, was very widely read in the United States and discussed in the mass circulation press. (Linsley 1994: 60)

What? It is argued if it is even "utopian" literature, much less "socialist".

This book is perhaps the most hyperbolic and even delirious of all Hegelian fantasies. It projects the struggle of humanity to take control of its own evolution over a period of 2 billion years, through 18 distinct species on three planets, moving upward toward the ultimate union of consciousness and the universe. Like Rivera's mural, Stapledon's novel is at once the testament and gravestone of the now forgotten utopianism of the pre-war period, and like Rivera's mural, its message is that in the fullness of time all present defeats will be understood as necessary moments of an eventual victory. But this hope is so abstract that it signifies more than anything else that the battle is already lost, that the invocation of Lenin is in the face of the failure of the Leninist party to fulfill its promise. (Linsley 1994: 60)

Quotable. But what even?

Sawyer, Andy 1998. "Dreaming Real": The Conquest Of Psiberspace? Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 9(4): 268-283. [JSTOR]

The term "telepathy" itself was first used by the early members of the society for Psychical Research, who were (by their own lights at least) hard-headed scientific investigators exploring paranormal phenomena which may well be reduced to aspects of the scientific fields we know. (Sawyer 1998: 268)

"The term was coined by F.W. Myers in 1882 [in] Vol 1 [...] of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (London, Trubner & Co 1883)" (Sawyer 1998: 279, note 1)

As early as 1872 Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking Glass was making a curious reference to people "thinking in chorus" (Complete Works 147: noted in Haynes 13) and the notes collected by Charles Fort in Wild Talents (1932) and the experiments carried out by Joseph Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s were incorporated into much science fiction of the succeeding decades. (Sawyer 1998: 268)

Kooris mõtlemine. Not bad.

Evidence for thought-transference is almost entirely on the anecdotal level, or a matter of how many marked cards an experimental subject can guess. You or I may claim to have telepathic powers but unless we can insert thoughts into each other's minds to the satisfaction of an impartial and expert witness, our claims are, in scientific terms, worthless. (Sawyer 1998: 269)

Calls to mind The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023).

The novels of both Robert Silverberg and Olaf Stapledon mentioned below may be read as dramatizations of the dislocated individual in culturally disorienting times (although it is the richness of sf that such a reading is merely reductive: to read science fiction purely as simple allegory is to misread its astonishing capacity for multi-levelled metaphors). (Sawyer 1998: 269)

Can Stapledon actually be read this way?

In this essay I am almost entirely ignoring the "plot device" function of telepathy: its role, for example as a "universal translator." Just as faster-than-light travel exists as a science fiction "given" to enable spaceships to travel around the galaxy in defiance of what we understand as the laws of relativity, so telepathy, as Walter E. Meyers describes it in Aliens and Linguistics (131-145), becomes the easy shorthand for communication between different [|] races. Conveniently, the alien can communicate with us through thought transference. (Sawyer 1998: 269-270)

Aliens are telepathic because science fiction writers are lazy.

"Future Fantastic," a popular-science series recently broadcast on BBC television in the UK, looked at a number of themes explored by science and science fiction. By the very nature of being fronted by Gillian Anderson of The X-Files, it suggested links between science and the paranormal, but more overtly it dramatized some of the wilder speculations of scientists and social dreamers. (Sawyer 1998: 270)

Available on Youtube.

Traditionally, sf has treated telepathy as a power which arises through mutation or evolutionary development, although some have followed Sigmund Freud in portraying it as an atavism, a reversion to abilities which may have been present in early hominids but which have been lost as language and individual reasoning developed. Freud suggested that telepathy may be "the original archaic method by which individuals understood one another" which has been superseded by better methods of communication by means of ordinary sensory perceptions but which may still be manifest in dreams, in excited crowds, or in children. (Sawyer 1998: 271)

Haha, what? There's even a Wikipedia entry on Dream telepathy. The reference to crowds sounds like he took Durkheim's "collective effervescence" a step further. The notes specify Freud's writings: "Dreams and the Occult", "Psycho-analysis and Telepathy" and "Dreams and Telepathy".

Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) describes the ability arising several times during the evolution of humanity, first within the Fourth Men as elements of the hive-minded Martians are incorporated into their brains (214) and eventually as a part-natural, part-engineered function of the minds of the Last Men, the eighteenth distinct species of humanity (289). Stapledon also saw it arising among the mutants within our own species, foreshadowing later evolution, as in his story Odd John (1935). (Sawyer 1998: 271)

So that's what Odd John is about.

Although Brunner's telepaths are (sometimes too easily) tempted to retreat into imaginary mentally-devised worlds, either solo or as part of a shared "catapathic" grouping, their basic need is to repair the mental damage all around them: "Nobody is nothing to one of us" (171). A telepath surrendering to the lust for money would feel the agony of his victims and go mad. (Sawyer 1998: 272)

Katapaatiline. Search results only give "cataphatic". The case of the power-hungry telepath reminds me of this gem: "Why, you couldn't even tell a polite fib about how you enjoyed a party." (Bailey 1976: 82)

John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) offers a form of telepathy as an alien invasion: a power of the golden-eyed hybrids who are the result of a "visitation" to an English village which results in the simultaneous impregnation of most of its female population. While still babies, the children can exert their wills over their mothers. At a later age, it is noticed that as one child becomes aware of an item of information so do the others. But is this true telepathy, or are the children in fact separate parts of a single gestalt organism? "What we have seemed to have here is fifty-eight little individual entities. But appearances have been deceptive, and we find that what we actually have are two entities only - a boy, and a girl, though the boy has thirty component parts each with the physical structure and appearance of individual boys; and the girl has twenty-eight component parts" (122-23). (Sawyer 1998: 272)

Oh damn. This must be what The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002) was parodying. They made a direct television adaptation just last year!

  • Wyndham, John 2009[1957]. The Midwich Cuckoos. London: Penguin Books. [Internet Archive]
The People are likened to angels often enough: the analogy is implicit in many stories and is made explicit in "Angels Unawares," while in "That Boy" one of them actually appears to members of a religious community in Angelic guise, feathered wings and all. "Presence, Name and Power" are clearly enough equated to "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" to convey the impression that their powers stem from deeper spirituality rather than biological difference. As with Stapledon and Silverberg in the works cited above, the mental powers granted to the People are signs of their difference from humanity, but also signs of what Humanity might grow or aspire to. (Sawyer 1998: 275)

Hmm. The way I read Stapledon, it's not exactly a "might" but a will (inevitably?).

Fitting, Peter 1992. Reconsiderations of the Separatist Paradigm in Recent Feminist Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies 19(1): 32-48. [JSTOR]

The general reaction to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) led me to the realization that the backlash of late against feminism has been paralleled by a slowing in the pace of feminist utopian writing. (Fitting 1992: 32)

I've never considered that writing a book could stop other books from being written.

The utopias of the 1970s presented a range of explorations for male violence, grouped roughly around an "essentialist" pole (men are by nature violent - here the best example would be Gearhart's Wanderground) - and a more materialist one, according to which male violence is socially produced (whether by capitalism, as in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time [1976], or by patriarchy itself, as in Russ's Female Man). In any event, the novels of the 1970s often had answers to questions about the differences between men and women and the roots of violence, whereas the novels of the late 1980s are not so certain. (Fitting 1992: 33)

The 1980s got more social constructionist. I recall very tedious discourse on whether even emotions are socially constructed (this discussion came and went).

In using the term "anti-utopian," I mean a work which explicitly critiques and rejects the utopian project, as in Huxley's Brave New World (1932), in distinction to the dystopian, which offers a bleak view of the future without critiquing utopianism per se (e.g., The Handmaid's Tale). The Shore of Women verges on the anti-utopian insofar as it portrays what might be called a "failed utopia." (Fitting 1992: 33)

I just recently had to explain this different to someone in my own words. This was pretty much it.

After she is rescued, she learns the full extent of her error and the real situation of Women's Country. The warriors are not the fathers of the children; that is the role of the servitors. More importantly, the warrior cult itself was deliberately created by the women as an elaborate program to select for non-violence! (Fitting 1992: 37)

What a twist. This is Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country

While some of the women talk about turning their "lifeshaping" skills to driving the Valans from the moon, there is a general rejection of such a strategy. When the soldiers are ordered to kill Sharers who approach their bases, the women only increase their visits. Their passive resistance in the face of intensifying violence further undermines the morale of the army. Desperate plans are made to destroy the entire population of the moon, but these are aborted - not because of any moral reservations about genocide, but because the army commander is afraid that the women may have "spread an infection which would lie dormant within us for years, only to mushroom into disease and wipe us out - unless Sharers are still around to halt it" (352). It is the Valans' own fear which prevents them from exterminating the women, a fear based not on anything the women have said or done, but on what a Valan would do if he or she had the Sharers' lifeshaping skills. The novel ends with the departure of the troops and the beginning of a return to normal. (Fitting 1992: 40)

A weird tale. It certainly sounds like Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986) could have inspired Waterworld (1995), but mostly got lost in translation. Uh... Waterworld "was based on [Peter] Rader's original 1986 screenplay" (Wikipedia). Coincidence?

I find the argument that to begin to kill is to lose one's soul moving, but I think that the ending makes it seem as if this will bring a victory in practice as well as in principle. If we turn to one of my favorite utopian works, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), we can find a similar depiction of a utopian world's decision to allow itself to be destroyed rather than to fight back. Let me quote a sentence which sounds very much like the Sharer philosophy:
But they knew also that in reorganizing themselves for desperate warfare, in neglecting, for a whole age of struggle, all those activities which were proper to them, they would destroy the best in themselves more surely than the enemy would destroy it by oppression; and that in destroying this they would be murdering what they believed to be the most vital germ in the galaxy. (Star Maker §9:361)
The difference is that Stapledon's "utopian worlds" are destroyed. Slonczewski's commitment to non-violence is a shining example of the rejection of a world of violence, but the novel's happy ending implies that it is a viable political strategy. (Fitting 1992: 44)

Another writer whose favorite writer happens to be Olaf Star Maker Stapledon.

Enders, Clifford 1991. Lars Gustafsson: Life, Landscape, and Labyrinths. Southwest Review 76(1): 120-137. [JSTOR]

Lars Gustafsson has been living quietly in Austin, Texas since 1983. The Swedish author, who was born in 1936 in Västerås, close to Mälar Lake, has written poetry, fiction, and philosophy since his student days at Uppsala. (Enders 1991: 120)

Ma sündisin Mällari Järve ääres. Ma ei mäleta sellest midagi.

Although he occasionally has set his fiction in America and Africa - indeed, one novel unfolds in Texas (The Tennis Players) - Gustaffson remains an essentially European author. The characters in his novels (like their author) carry Europe with them. The poems are salted with European place-names, history, psychology; they emanate a European light. (Enders 1991: 120)

What is a European psyche like?

ENDRES: I wonder whether you concern yourself consciously with Nature, with a capital N? Your work seems to have recurrent landscapes, and a special light, and so many dogs -
GUSTAFSSON: It is full of dogs! I never intended so many! (Enders 1991: 124)

What am I even reading here?

GUSTAFSSON: I couldn't tell you what the poem as a whole is about, though. That's often the case with my better poems. You know, the typical high-school-literature-class question, "What does the poet intend?" is really a good test - because if the poet intends something, it's often a lousy poem. (Enders 1991: 127)

Hmm.

ENDRES: In "Bombus Terrestris" I was struck by the image of the flying man:
A flying man who lives far within the wood
has folded up his wings and sleeps in the rain.
I wonder if that is from Olaf Stapledon and -
GUSTAFSSON: That is exactly where I got the idea! It's a little remainder from my reading of Last and First Men. I read that fantastic and extremely good science-fiction novel at the same time as I wrote this poem. So there is a flying man left in this deep forest. That's the finest episode in the novel. (Enders 1991: 127)

A poem for the Sixth Men?

ENDRES: Do you relate yourself as a poet to anything that Stapledon was doing in 1930?
GUSTAFSSON: Well, what Stapledon is discussing in that book is mankind - not exactly what kind of future mankind has, but rather history as it relates to the unborn. And that is precisely what is discussed in "A Landscape," which is about the unborn and the rest of history, and not the realized part of history. (Enders 1991: 127)

Not exactly following.

GUSTAFSSON: If you take individual history, it is clear that every moment in our lives forms concentric rings and compasses the earlier moments, and what happens to me in every moment changes my view of everything that has happened before. So that's a form in which our biography is present - really, is in our present - and of course history, which indirectly is a part of my biography, history is changing considerably over time. So in a sense history can exist only in the moment. (Enders 1991: 128)

The poet's philosophy of history.

GUSTAFSSON: Rainer Maria Rilke's Worpswode exists. Ovre Richter Frich (The Black Buzzards) is an obscure Norwegian, pre-Fascist I should say, writer of "agents' stories," which are very much about international anarchists and such things. They came in the late twenties and early thirties. (Enders 1991: 132)

Gjert Øvre Richter Frich wrote De knyttede næver (1913) and over 21 more books. None appear to have been translated into English (though several have been translated into Finnish). Correction: there's Lucifer's Oga (1958).

Vorda, Allan 1990. The Forging of Science Fiction: An Interview with Greg Bear. Extrapolation 31(3): 197-215. DOI: 10.3828/extr.1990.31.3.197 [Liverpool University Press]

Bear married Astrid Anderson (daughter of Poul Anderson) in 1983 and has a son named Erik who was born in 1986. They live outside Seattle, Washington, in a home that has a library of over 12,000 books. (Vorda 1990: 197)

Incestuous science fiction writers and way too many books.

BEAR: Outside of the field of American pulp science fiction, Olaf Stapledon is probably one of the more influential writers. His works inspired Arthur C. Clarke. After seeing 2001, I traced Clarke's roots back to Stapledon. The originals, such as Last and First Men and Starmaker, were very formative. Then, of course, the old timers, like H. G. Wells, were influential. (Vorda 1990: 198)

Would like to read something more specific about this connection.

BEAR: Outside of science fiction completely I enjoy reading James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and, in my college years, Nikos Kazantzakis. I found a great deal of resemblance between the philosophy of Kazantzakis and what I had found in Stapledon. Later on I found a similar vein in Bradbury's work because Bradbury was very fond of Kazantzakis's "Spiritual Exercises." (Vorda 1990: 198)

Noted.

VORDA: To quote from the Preface of The Wind from a Burning Woman: "The future will come, and it will be different, unimaginably so." And to quote a line by Kawashita from Beyond Heaven's River: "The future is not appetizing." Would you concur that this is an ongoing theme in your books - that the future for mankind is everchanging and not necessarily pleasant and predictable? Or, to be more precise, that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is a scientific metaphor in your books? (Vorda 1990: 201)

"The [future] is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

BEAR: Hitler or Stalin probably would not have been very good at a party. Hitler got into power because Germany was twisted by World War I and its aftermath. Germany was just basically ground under and stomped on by all the European nations, whereupon it went crazy. Germany expressed its craziness in an urge to suicide which is particularly Germanic. They picked Hitler to lead them to the funeral parlor. (Vorda 1990: 201)

Germany: a Werther nation.

VORDA: What about The Forge of God being an apocalyptic novel? Many people have the idea that if there are beings out there of higher intelligence, then they must therefore be good, but you seem to be saying that isn't necessarily the case.
BEAR: When I wrote the book, I convinced myself that this isn't really a bad theory about why things are so quiet out there. A long time ago David Brin and I were talking about a galactic ecology. He was trying to find some reason to explain why Von Neumann probel hadn't covered up the entire galaxy. If you had one civilization develop efficient Von Neumann probes, then in 100,000 years they would have sucked up virtually the entire galaxy. (Vorda 1990: 208)

"Greg Bear's novel The Forge of God deals directly with the concept of "Berserker" von Neumann probes and their consequences. The idea is further explored in the novel's sequel, Anvil of Stars, which explores the reaction other civilizations have to the creation and release of Berserkers." (Wikipedia: Self-replicating spacecraft)

Fischer, Roland 1993. A Story of the Utopian Vision of the World. Diogenes 163: 5-25. DOI: 10.1177/039219219304116302 [sagepub.com]

Being condemned (or chosen?) to be "the missing link" on its way to perfectibility (or redemption?) - half animal/half human - we always need in some way or another the transcendence of a Utopian Vision. (Fischer 1993: 5)

Humans only half-human.

George Orwell (1970) described the Utopian Vision as "the dream of a just society which seems to haunt the human imagination ineradicably and in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age, which once existed in the past and from which we have degenerated." As a structure of the imagination it has barely changed in the last twenty-four and a half centuries. Are not all utopias of the past two and a half thousand years merely footnotes to Plato's Republic? (Fischer 1993: 5)

Plato's Republic may be "just" in a philosophical (or geometrical?) sense, but definitely not classless.

It was of course through Plato's Republic, rediscovered along with other Greek writings in the European Renaissance, that the Hellenic ideal city most influenced western utopias. More saw his own Utopia as partly a continuation of the Republic, fulfilling Socrates' desire in the Timaeus to see the abstract Republic actualized. And four hundred years later H.G. Wells was still constructing his "modern utopia" according to Platonic example, and largely along Platonic lines. (Fischer 1993: 6)

Still haven't read Timaeus.

The Utopian concept of historic continuity remained a powerful undercurrent, culminating in social utopias of lasting anticipatory illumination. The most influential among them was that of the Calabrian monk Joachim di Fiore (around 1200). Joachim, a former Cistercian who had fled to the mountains of San Giovanni in Fiore, proclaimed that the progressive self-revelation of God occurs in three great stages: the first status is that of the Father, the second that of the Son, and the third and final that of the Spirit, i.e., the enlightenment of all in mystical democracy (a classless society [|] without masters or Church). Joachim was not formally a millenarian, and he was never denounced as a heretic by the Church; the doctrine he preached, however, was interpreted in a millenarian manner - that of the Eternal Evangel - and was developed by a long succession of followers, such as Thomas Müntzer and Tommaso Campanella. (Fischer 1993: 7-8)

"According to Joachim, only in this third age will it be possible to truly understand the words of God in their deepest meanings, and not merely literally." (Wikipedia) - Sounds like I know this shi- doesn't make any sense now but trust me bro it will definitely make sense in a few hundred or thousand years or so. We just have to keep at it.

Utopias are not universal. They appear only in societies with the classical and Christian heritage, that is, only in the West. Other societies have their paradises, primitivist myths of a Golden Age of justice and equality, Land of Milk-and-Honey fantasies, even messianic beliefs, but they do not have utopias. The modern utopia was invented by a Christian martyr, Sir Thomas More, later canonized by the Catholic Church. More's Christian piety was in many respects matched by that of the two other great early utopian thinkers, Campanella and Andreae, both of whom passed their entire lives as priests and preachers. Even the "pansonic" utopias of Bacon, Comenius, and Leibniz, with their stress on science, were conceived within the framework of Christian philosophy: science was the means to both a better knowledge of God and the creation of a truly Christian society. The title of Andreae's utopia, Christianopolis, sums up well the evident goal of all the principal utopian thinkers to the end of the seventeenth century: the ideal Christian commonwealth, a Christian utopia. Without the hope that religion ultimately offers, without the paradisiac and millenial expectations that Christianity inspires, it may be that utopia becomes a lifeless shell. Religion is, in this sense, the "unconscious of utopia," the subterranean source of much of its emotional force and dynamism. (Fischer 1993: 14)

Lucian's "True History", Ferdawsi's "City of Brass", al-Kinani's "Book of Misers", Kautilya's "Arthashastra". None of these exist. The author's thesis that utopianism is religious, and specifically Christian, is unconvincing.

Anti-utopias such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four not only dominated their own times but have continued to attract a considerable following in our time. Huxley's and Orwell's outlook on the modern world can readily accommodate many of the social developments of the postwar decades. Nevertheless, the anti-utopia too has faltered, as our continuing reliance on Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell itself suggests. Vonnegut's Player Piano, David Karp's One, a totalitarian nightmare, and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange have continued the tradition. But no anti-utopia since Nineteen Eighty-Four has truly captured the popular imagination or become the center of public debate. (Fischer 1993: 15)

The author does not hold to the distinction between "anti-utopia" and "dystopia".

Utopia survived among small pockets of utopian missionaries, but they preached to largely unhearing ears. No work of the utopian imagination appeared that caught the public fancy as had the utopias of Bellamy, Morris, and Wells at the turn of the century. Neither Olaf Stapledon's original utopia, Last and First Men (1930), or its successor Star Maker (1937), found a large and receptive audience. C.S. Lewis paid them the compliment of attacking their rationalist outlook in some of his best science fiction, and science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and James Blish acknowledged their debt to Stapledon's ideas. But his books were largely ignored and quickly forgotten. (Fischer 1993: 15)

Firstly, not a utopia. Secondly, you're talking about it.

Pre-industrial society was also a living source of ideas and institutions in the vision of Ivan Illich, the nonconformist Catholic priest who in a series of short, vivid and wide-ranging tracts - Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973), Medical Nemesis (1975) - sketched the broad outlines of a community that restores meaning and satisfaction in work to its members. (Fischer 1993: 16)

The Wikipedia entry for Tools for Conviviality makes it out as r/fuckcars, the book.

  • Illich, Ivan 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row. [Internet Archive]
Fictitious and utopian storytelling creates mental images in our listeners that should be as real, in a fundamental sense, as the immediately experienced world "out there." Both are constructions of the brain and mind. In hearing or reading the words of another, we literally share the reality of another consciousness (just as hypnotist and hypnotized do). (Fischer 1993: 19)

What the thell is this article about? So incoherent.

Martin, Paul A. 1999. Genes as drugs: the social shaping of gene therapy and the reconstruction of genetic disease. Sociology of Health & Illness 21(5): 517-538. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.00171 [wiley.com]

A number of different theoretical perspectives have been used to examine the creation of new technologies, including actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon 1987), the social construction of technology (SCOT) (Bijker 1995) and the analysis of large technical systems (Hughes 1987). Although each takes a distinct approach they share several common features, notably the idea that the development of a new technology involves a range of heterogeneous social, technical, economic and political processes. In addition, it is argued that new knowledge is co-produced at the same time as new technologies and new socio-technical relations, through a process of mutual shaping. (Martin 1999: 519)

The development of new technologies requires synergy.

The idea of genetic therapy has its roots in pre-World War II futurism and eugenics. The first suggestions for the genetic alterations of people for both social and medical reasons can be found in the writings of scientists such as Haldane and Muller, and the science fiction of Stapledon (Haldane 1923, Muller 1935, Stapledon 1930). Early advocates of the technology drew on Jacques Loeb's concept of 'biological engineering' as a means of modifying man and combating the degeneration of the race (Pauly 1987). These ideas were also articulated in the policies and programmes of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose funding was fundamental in shaping the development of the new science of molecular biology during the 1930s and 40s (Kay 1993). (Martin 1999: 521)

"Jacques Loeb became one of the most famous scientists in America, widely covered in newspapers and magazines, influencing other important individuals in the scientific world such as B.F. Skinner."

  • Haldane, J. B. S. 1995[1923]. Daedalus or science and the future. In: Dronamraju, Krishna R. (ed.), Haldane's Daedalus Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ["J. B. S. Haldane was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism."]
  • Muller, H. J. 1935. Out of the Night; a Biologist's View of the Future. New York: Vanguard Press. [Internet Archive]
  • Pauly, P. J. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. [lg]
  • Kay, L. E. 1993. The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [lg]
However, two competing 'visions' of how genetic therapy might be developed emerged during these first discussions of the subject during the 1960s. The first took its inspiration from eugenics and was centered on the idea of modifying future generations to make social and intellectual 'improvements' and cure genetic diseases. This vision was advocated by Hermann Muller and other supporters of what Kevles has called reform eugenics (Muller 1965). The second vision was purely medical and was only concerned with genetically altering affected patients and not their offspring (Tatum 1966). It was mainly proposed by a younger generation of clinically trained investigators who largely rejected the eugenics of the 1930s. (Martin 1999: 521)

Fix the patient or "fix" the patient's whole bloodline with new technologies not yet fully understood.

The Commission findings were published in 1982 in the landmark report Splicing Life, coinciding with increasing political pressures for an outright ban on research into gene therapy from religious groups, environmental activists and a number of prominent scientists. (Martin 1999: 522)

Religious groups I get, but environmental activists?

As a consequence, during 1986 Anderson worked with venture capitalists to found the world's first gene therapy firm, Genetic Therapy Inc, with the explicit aim of manufacturing vectors to support a clinical trial of ADA deficiency (Lyon and Gorner 1995). (Martin 1999: 525)

The heroes of the world, the venture capitalists. Nothing better than some public-private partnership. Isn't currently enshittifying everything in existence.

In each of these cases the development of novel therapeutic strategies was only possible as a result of the researchers being able to describe the pathology terms of molecular genetics. In some cases, such as haemophilia, the primary cause of the disease was clearly inherited, but as with cancer, it was also possible to construct a model of these other acquired conditions in terms of problems in the way the gene was regulated in the body. For example, Alzheimer's might be caused by the production of too little nerve growth factor (NGF) in the brain as a result of damage to the NGF gene. The role of gene therapy in these cases was therefore to resture the level of the missing protein coded by the damaged gene. This shift to a 'molecular pathology' was enabled by progress in many areas of biology, in particular, the information coming from gene sequencing and the recentyl formed Human Genome Project. By the early 1990s it was becoming possible to describe many diseases in purely molecular terms, with the prospect of all pathologies eventually being categorised in this way. (Martin 1999: 529)

In other words, we might be thinking of cancer in terms of gene mutations because there's billions in them thar gene therapy companies.

For pioneering investigators to apply gene therapy to research problems in specific clinical niches, they had to engage in a process of heterogeneous socio-technical engineering (Callon 1987). This included, the reconceptualisation of particular diseases as being genetic in some way; the reshaping of the technology itself; the construction of local socio-technical networks of regulators, genes, firms, clinicians and patients; and the creation of a new industry. (Martin 1999: 532)

Mighty sus.

McCaffery, Larry 1991. An Interview with Jack Williamson. Science Fiction Studies 18(2): 230-252. [JSTOR]

Whereas European SF was already in the process of producing a number of works of formal originality and thematic significance (Zamiatin's We [1920], Karel Čapek's The Absolute at Large [1922], Aldous Huxley's Brave New World [1932], and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men [1930], for instances), the maturing of SF in the US was being delayed by its self-imposed "ghettoization" within the hardware/adventure-oriented pulp magazines that flourished in American markets until the 1950s. Although a number of thoughtful and speculative SF authors emerged from this pulp scene (Asimov, Heinlein, van Vogt, Sturgeon, and Williamson himself, for example), even the best of these works were typically being created by men (and a few women) possessing rich imaginations and backgrounds in science but lacking the literary skills to fully express their visions. (McCaffery 1991: 230)

Europeans got an earlier start (cf. Derleth 1952: 4).

But while following that rule to some extent, Williamson's output of the '40s is markedly different from the elegantly reasoned (but passionless) SF of someone like Isaac Asimov. Rather, as Brian Aldiss puts it in his survey of SF's history (Billion Year Spree), Williamson "operates powerfully at the dreaming pole" of SF. In other words, though Williamson greatly admires scientific and rational thought, he himself is very much an intuitive writer whose work also expresses powerful psychological states - and a deep ambivalence about the suitability of using reason as th ebasis of defining ourselves and our values.
This clash of allegiances creates a powerful tension in The Humanoids (1948), Williamson's best-known work, which was to have a major impact on the presentation of robots for the next two decades. Depicting the takeover of the world by benevolent robots, The Humanoids memorably expresses Williamson's deep ambivalence towards the value of rationality in general. (McCaffery 1991: 231)
  • Williamson, Jack 1950. The Humanoids. New York: Grossett & Dunlap. [Internet Archive | lg]
By the 1950s, Williamson began to sense that a new generation of SF authors were leaving him behind. He accordingly decided to update his scientific background and explore literature more deeply by going back to [|] college. At the age of 50, he enroled as a student of English in graduate school, where he served as a teaching assistant and was awarded his doctorate (from the University of Colorade) in 1964. Although he wrote virtually no SF during this period, Williamson would eventually make good use of his readings in Beowulf, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to broaden his literary range when he resumed writing SF during the 1970s. More importantly, he was preparing himself to make what was to be his most significant contribution to the field during the 1960s and '70s: the establishment of SF as a suitable subject for college courses and scholarly research.
In part this involved making criticism of SF "respectable," a project which he contributed to by publishing one of the first scholarly treatments of the genre: his dissertation, H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress. (McCaffery 1991: 231-232)

Somehow the discussion always returns to Wells.

JW: We're stuck with technology and we'll just have to figure out how to use it. Stuart Chase's article "Two Cheers for Technology" makes interesting points about this problem. Before World War II and Hiroshima, we had been proud of technology, optimistic about our future and our stature; there was a sense we had control over our own destiny. Right now, though, there seems to be a contagious fear of the future - a fear that has brought our faith in science to a crisis. (McCaffery 1991: 233)

Alternatively: we were in control but then these other guys crashed near Roswell and started showing up all over the place, demonstrating with their mere visitations that we are in control of nothing.

LM: Didn't you invent the term "genetic engineering" in one of of [sic] your stories?
JW: I hesitate to claim that, but I did write a novel that was published in 1951, in which I referred to the new science of "genetic engineering" as a way to recreate the human race. I don't recall having seen the phrase before that point (the idea, of course, had been around for sometime). (McCaffery 1991: 234)

According to Google Ngram Viewer "genetic engineering" was first used in 1931 (probably the Rockefeller Foundation researchers). It lingered in the 1930s, dropped to half during WWII but immediately after the war started steadily climbing, reaching 0.0000000350% by 1951 when Williamson "invented" the term.

JW: I do remember that when I came across Gernsback's Amazing Stories, I was completely fascinated by the covers by the artist Frank R. Paul. They look pretty crude now, but back then they seemed wonderful and exotic. They conjured up these startling images of strange machines and strange creatures, spaceships taking off for other planets. That was what SF fiction was about! Wonderful inventions, travel in space, travel in time, future ages, other worlds. (McCaffery 1991: 236)

Paul's cover art is admittedly pretty cool.

LM: I said earlier that I distinguished SF from other fantasy approaches by the fact that SF should always make an effort to depict something that could possibly happen, while fantasy doesn't create this kind of direct link with reality. This definition is pretty subjective because fantasy forms can also be connected to the world around us symbiotically. (McCaffery 1991: 240)

Science fiction as predictive, extrapolative literature.

JW: So I based "Breakdown" [|] on Spengler and Toynbee, and I wrote a drama of the decline and fall of a future civilization. It seemed obvious that since people seem so endlessly fascinated with the eclipse of Greece and the fall of Rome, the notion of our own civilization falling into ruin would naturally have a similarly strong emotional appeal. (McCaffery 1991: 240-241)

This is about one quarter of Stapledon's whole shtick in L&FM.

LM: Did you get from Campbell the inspiration for having the robot guardians in The Humanoids be defeated by psi powers? It's pretty well known that he was very personally interested in these sorts of things.
JW: Yes, Campbell came up with the idea of that conclusion. He had gotten interested in the work that Joseph Rhine was conducting in psi-phenomena at Duke University. I had written "With Folded Hands" without consultation with Campbell at all. He likes it and accepted it for publication, but he suggested that I look into Rhine. He was intrigued with the possibility that people might develop the parapsychological powers that Rhine was interested in. I read a couple of Rhine's books, and for a few days I was halfway persuaded that parapsychological phenomena might be real and have practical applications. (McCaffery 1991: 245)

Joseph Banks Rhine "was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the Journal of Parapsychology [in 1937]"

LM: In Bright New Universe and especially in The Starchild Trilogy, you investigate the idea that our conception of life and intelligence in the universe is far too limited - a view expressed even in your earlier stories. was Stapledon a major influence in these later works? Your presentation of the sentient sun in Starchild, for example, seems like something right out of Star Maker.
JW: I rate Stapledon very highly, but I can't document his specific influence. I know I was interested in putting intelligence into all things in very [|] early works, long before I became acquainted with Stapledon's works. In a planned, early collaboration with Merritt, for example, I was working with the notion of a sentient mountains - it was a kind of primitive "animism" (as anthropologists would call it), attributing sentience to trees, rocks, and so on. I'm not sure I embrace this sort of mystic animism myself in a serious, conscious way, although I've been exploring variations of this idea throughout my work. That vision of the universe in The Starchild Trilogy, where the entire mass of the steady-state universe is gradually revealed to be, in a sense, a sentient being, is an outgrowth of this infantile animism by which the child or the primitive can impute life to sticks and stones. (McCaffery 1991: 247-248)

The whole universe sentient? Like... a Universal Mind?

Willis, Kirk 1995. The Origins of British Nuclear Culture, 1895-1939. The Journal of British Studies 34(1): 59-89. DOI: 10.1086/386067 [cambridge.org | JSTOR]

Nuclear culture is, of course, a product of nuclear physics, and modern nuclear physics - or, more accurately, modern atomic physics - began at the very end of the nineteenth century with the discoveries, in 1895 and 1896, by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and Antoine Henri Becquerel of X-rays and radioactivity, and, at the turn of the century, with the pioneering work of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie on radium and Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy on radioactive transmutation. Such discoveries revolutionized the study - and imagery - of physics and chemistry and sparked off their own chain reaction of research and further discovery which continues uninterruptedly. In the years from 1895 to 1939, the pace of change was positively dizzying - for participants as well as observers - as physicists and lay audiences learned a new language of X-rays, alpha particles, electrons, neutrons, half-lives, relativity, quantum mechanics, ciclotrons, positrons, plutonium, fission, fusion, and on and on and on. (Willis 1995: 61)

The names are familiar from popular culture but I don't think I've ever read something explicitly about this "nuclear culture".

These same writers, furthermore, also published avowedly popular introductions to the new physics, books such as Bertrand Russell's immensely successful The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925), E. N. da C. Andrade's The Atom (1927), J. W. N. Sullivan's Atoms and Electrons (1923), Oliver Lodge's Atoms and Rays (1924), and G. K. T. Conn's The Nature of the Atom (1939), books which ran through many editions and reprintings and which continued to appear in growing numbers right up to the outbreak of war in September 1939. (Willis 1995: 62)

Bertrand Russell did everything, didn't he?

  • Russell, Bertrand 1923. The ABC of Atoms. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. [Internet Archive]
For years later Soddy surpassed himself, and in the peroration to his most widely read book, The Interpretation of Radium (1908), prophesied, "A race which could transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. [...] Such a race could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden."
However compelling or hyperbolic such visions of prelapsarian bliss may have seemed to contemporaries, they also perplexed Soddy's audiences (as well as enraged nearly all of his more cautious scientific colleagues who well knew how far Soddy was racing before his or anyone else's evidence). Bewilderment stemmed in part from Soddy's repeated - and equally vivid - references to "storehouses stuffed with explosives" and "weapons by which to destroy the earth." (Willis 1995: 66)

It might be that Stapledon took this literally. As in, atomic weapons could make dirt disappear.

And to perplex lay readers still further, the respected Cambridge scientist and popular science writer W. C. Dampier Whetham paused at the end of a long and lucid essay on "Matter [|] and Electricity" in the April 1904 Quarterly Review to repeat one of Rutherford's rare and characteristically private conjectures: "Professor Rutherford has playfully suggested to the writer the disquieting idea that, could a proper detonator be discovered, an explosive wave of atomic disintegration might be started through all matter which would transmute the whole mass of the globe into helium of similar mass, and, in very truth, leave not one stone upon another." (Willis 1995: 67-68)

That's the stuff. Stapledon's "atomic rifles" have to be shot twice in succession, the second shot inhibiting the reaction from swallowing the whole globe.

As early as 1895 - the very year of Röntgen's earliest discoveries - the Irish journalist and adventure novelist Robert Cromie seized on the notion of atomic decomposition implied in Röntgen's work and placed it at the heart of a new novel, The Crack of Doom. I dismally written and absurdly contrived tale which nonetheless attracted a wide readership, the novel features a group of stereotypically fiendish scientists and "rational thinkers" whose leader invents a device capable of initiating atomic disintegration and thus (through the "wreckage of its contituent atoms") earthly oblivion. The device, "encased in a hollow glass ball the size of a pea," holds within it a single drop of water. When touched by an unspecified "chemical agent," "the atoms of the water [are] resolved into the ultimate ether of which they were composed" and set off a fierce reaction culminating in the destruction of the earth. The dastardly plans of the chief villain thus to "etherise" the planet are thwarted in the end by the protagonist, who alters the formula of the agent and causes not the atomic decomposition of the globe but rather a massive earthquake which destroys the Malaysian island from which the ultimate destruction was to proceed. (Willis 1995: 70)

Another candidate.

This pessimism received dramatic, if in some ways unintended, new expression in the winter of 1913 when H. G. Wells began to serialize what he described as a "good old scientific romance," The World Set Free, in the English Review. Published in book form just weeks before the outbreak of the Great War, The World Set Free was dedicated to "Frederick Soddy's Interpretation of Radium" and was avowedly inspired by Soddy's popular writings as well as by his direct conversation with Wells concerning the potential implications of radioactive disintegration. Not one of Wells's finest efforts, the novel is disjointed, ill-organized, and populated with caricatures rather than characters. (Willis 1995: 71)

Of course Wells shows up.

British novelists and playwrights, by contrast, were neither as inhibited nor as scrupulous as their scientific contemporaries, and the 1920s saw the publication of several works in which atomic energy was indeed put to the lethal purposes Lodge deplored. J. J. Connington's Nordenholt's Million (1923), for example, featured an atomic catastrophe sparked off by a physicist attempting to harness atomic energy through "induced radioactivity" but producing instead only a "high detonation" and the obliteration of his own laboratory. His successors, by contrast, were able - using his notes and after a series of "fearful explosions" - to "tap the stores" of atomic energy and create "atomic engines" which ran tirelessly, cheaply, and, reminiscent of Wells, "made the employment of human labour supererogatory." Since, however, a bacteriological infestation had wiped out nearly all the world's population, mass unemployment proved not to be a problem. Instead, the survivors - concentrated improbably in the Glaswegian hinterlands - enjoyed lives of prosperity, idleness, and boredom. (Willis 1995: 78)

Perhaps the inspiration for Stapledon's focus on the scientific information not getting into the wrong hands.

  • Connington, J. J. 1923. Nordenholt's Million. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. [Internet Archive]
A similar use of the "inexhaustible source of power" within the atom appeared briefly in Olaf Stapledon's remarkable science fiction novel, Last and First Men (1930), a sprawling and often incoherent account of "two thousand million years" of human history. First mastered by an obscure Chinese physicist in the early 1930s, atomic energy proved to be so "easily manipulated and controlled" that it soon found its way into ordnance production. At a meeting of international scientists at Plymouth, a demonstration of a small atomic device intended to set off a carefully delimited process of atomic disintegration proved at once unexpectedly destructive and eerily prescient:
For a dazzling point of light appeared on the remote cliff. It increased in size and brilliant, till all eyes were blinded in the effort to continue watching. It lit up the under parts of the clouds and blotted out the [|] sun-cast shadows of gorse bushes besides the spectators. The whole end of the island facing the mainland was now an intolerable scorching sun. Presently, however, its fury was veiled in clouds of stream from the boiling sea. Then suddenly the whole island, three miles of solid granite, leapt asunder; so that a covey of great rocks soared heavenward, and beneath them swelled more slowly a gigantic mushroom of steam and debris. Then the sound arrived. All hands were clapped to ears, while eyes still strained to watch the bay, pocked white with the hail of rocks.
The mushroom cloud was born. (Willis 1995: 78-79)

If nothing else, Stapledon "invented" the mushroom cloud?

On the morning of September 1, 1939, the preeminent British popular science magazine, Discovery, published as its leading article a [|] provocative essay by its editor, C. P. Snow. Entitled ominously "A New Means of Destruction?" it informed its nervous readers that the "atomic age" was about to open: "Some physicists think that, within a few months, science will have produced for military use an explosive a million times more violent than dynamite." (Willis 1995: 86-87)

Another surprisingly familiar name.

Tellingly, both Mark Oliphant and Jock Cockcroft, two of Rutherford's most [|] admired and trusted acolytes, had to leave the Cavendish in order to build the accelerators necessary to their researches. In America, by contrast, the funding for much contemporary physics came from industry, philanthropists, and foundations; it was not the University of California but utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and the Rockefeller Foundation, to offer but one prominent example, which largely financed successive versions of Lawrence's cyclotrons - to say nothing of Millikan's efforts to endow the California Institute of Technology. (Willis 1995: 88-89)

So, this is it, huh? The Rockefeller Foundation is going to make an appearance in every other article?

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