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A Philosophical Echo

Branham, Robert James 1980. Ineffability, creativity, and communication competence. Communication Quarterly 28(3): 11-21. DOI: 10.1080/01463378009369371> [tandfonline]

Throughout history, persons of all cultures have claimed to have experiences that are unique and significant, but which they cannot accurately convey to others. Occasionally such frustration has produced organized opposition to language or expression: The mystic academies of Plato and Ficino sought to avoid the "learned ignorance" imposed by language in their search for a reality beyond appearances; the spiritual disciplines of the Chinese Quietists operated from the shared assumption that "the Tao which can be told is not the eternal Tao." (Branham 1980: 11)

Like mystical experience, one presumes. Plato's idealist disregard for language or expression reminds me of the asyntactic type in L.'s cultural typology.

The claim of ineffability is a communicative commonplace, a persistent theme manifested across cultures, ages, epistemological and religious beliefs, and expressive talents. At its most interesting, human communicative history may be viewed as the record of confrontation between vision and expression, and between visionaries and those with whom they have attempted communication. (Branham 1980: 12)

The history of communication is one of overcoming the barrier of incommunicability.

The person struck by the ineffability of his experiences may nonetheless be moved to attempt expression or communication by a number of motivations. If sufficiently impressed by the magnificence and uniqueness of his vision, he may seek to translate or evoke its effects for others through artistry. He may seek to reach others who have shared similar experiences, or to proselytize for others to join in recreation. Less exotically and more commonly, he may simply seek to exalt and demonstrate the effects of on unusually moving and highly personal experience. (Branham 1980: 14)

Turn your vision into a novel, for example.

Insecure conversationalists often frame their statements with proclamations of practical ineffability, such as "I just can't tell you" (e.g., how excited I am), or "words are inadequate to convey" (e.g., my heartfelt sympathy). In private conversation, such qualifiers are commonly interpreted as demonstrations of sincerity and depth of feeling rather than proof of communicator incompetence. (Branham 1980: 15)

Nearly a phatic issue.

Qualified expression has occasionally produced significant aesthetic achievements. The works of philosopher and novelist Olaf Stapledon, for example, offer a powerful chronicle of personal struggle with vision and expression. Stapledon's nonfictional works explore the qualities and limitations of language in the construction of ethical insights and principles. Calling himself an "agnostic mystic," Stapledon sought expressive forms that would preserve the delicate balance of visionary insight and recognition of cognitive and linguistic inaccuracy. It is this cultivated tension between vision and expression that pervades Stapledon's fictional works, particularly Last and First Men (an intellectual history of the universal search for God in which Last and First Men is summarized in a paragraph). His myths, though grand in scale and conception, are invariably tentative and heavily qualified. (Branham 1980: 16)

Even Stapledon's nonfiction works may turn out to be of interest for the semiotician.

Stapledon reinforced this qualifier in virtually every descriptive passage. The reader's interest is sustained through the grandeur of the image fragments nevertheless attained and through a developed intrigue with the expressive situation of the narrator. The reader may forgive the narrator's cosmic stammering because he gains a sense of the immensity of Stapledon's vision and the hopelessness of more satisfactory articulation. Stapledon used language but distrusted it; he sought to trancend the ordinary limits of expression by raising our awareness of them. (Branham 1980: 16)

This factor is also noticeable in L&FM.

Paul Goodman characterized poets [|] as those who "understand, more than most people, what cannot be said, what is not being said though it ought to be, what is verbalized experience and what is mere words." (Branham 1980: 16-17)

Sõnastatud kogemus vs paljad sõnad.

Filmer, Kath 1985. That Hideous 1984: The Influence of C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Extrapolation. Extrapolation 26(2): 160-169. DOI: 10.3828/extr.1985.26.2.160 [Liverpool University Press]

Clive Staples Lewis, a contemporary of Orwell, wrote his "science fiction trilogy" between 1938 and 1945. The last novel in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, anticipates Orwell on many aspects of the evils of totalitarianism. Like Orwell, Lewis sees totalitarian rule as an attack not merely on society but on the very humanness of humanity itself. This issue is relevant in today's world, since it draws attention to the fact that governments are themselves controlled by forces antipathetic to human individuality. Indeed, it might be said that both Lewis' and Orwell's books are fictional exptrapolations of Lord Acton's time-honored aphorism, "All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." (Filmer 1985: 160)

More commonly known as C. S. Lewis.

Although there is some disparity between Lewis' and Orwell's choice of genre, it is nevertheless clear that their novels owe a common debt to the dystopian tradition which includes H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Both Lewis and Orwell explore the effects of a malevolent regime upon society, and in particular the corruption by that regime of two aspects of science - psychology and biology. (Filmer 1985: 161)

On what basis can L&FM be said to be dystopian literature? For its prefatory dismissal of utopianism, only?

With Orwell's dislike of intrusive supernatural elements, it is only to be expected that he would make his villain human. Lewis, on the other hand, was firmly convinced of the existence of an evil supernatural force, the fallen angels of Christian theology. He makes them and their leader, Satan, responsible for the complete and utter dehumanization of those who have chosen to serve themselves instead of God, but he terms them "Macrobes," not "devils." (Filmer 1985: 162)

Of course. Anglican demonology.

But sex is seen by Lewis not as one more human attribute to be abrogated by totalitarian power, but as part of a divine order. Mark and Jane Studdock sin by practicing birth control, while the cursed side of the moon which looks to each is inhabited by evil beings who will appease their lust not with flesh but with phantasms, and who are consequently barren (p. 337). For Lewis, sex is not the sole focus of the attack upon humanity, and the attack upon humanity is itself seen as part of a larger, cosmic struggle. (Filmer 1985: 164)

Casting sexual aspersions on the alien space station on the dark side of the moon.

The aim is to make "a new type of man" - a pure intelligence, a disembodied brain - for which the loathsome Head is prototype. Lewis' idea is not original, since it has been raised conjecturally by many writers, of whom the most recent is F. Estfandiary in his book Up Wingers. Esfandiary writes a philosophical echo of Olaf Stapledon: "We must redo the human [...] we must begin by redoing the human body. The body has been our greatest hangup. Our most serious obstacle to a higher evolution." Lewis' "Head" at Belbury represent with loathing and disgust the ultimate result of scientific manipulation of human development, and it communicates graphically the point he makes in his Abolition of Man: that "science" is closely related to the occult magic of the Middle Ages. (Filmer 1985: 164)

The "giant brain" is a pretty common trope in sci-fi, it turns out.

Lewis and Orwell are closest in their use of the motif of the corruption or perversion of logos. In this respect, their works are most applicable to the current political and sociological Zietgeist. In Orwell's novel, the motif is identified as "Newspeak"; In Lewis' it is presented through the continuing contrast between the meaningless jargon spoken at Belbury, especially in the final banquet scene when guests become acutely dysphasic, and the descent upon St. Anne's of Mercury, the "eldilic" Lord of Meaning. (Filmer 1985: 165)

Phaticity?

Hoyle, Fred 1986. Fred Hoyle on the Argument of Malthus. Population and Development Review 12(3): 547-562. DOI: 10.2307/1973224 [JSTOR]

Sir Fred Hoyle (b. 1915), the noted British astronomer and cosmologist (former Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University), and occasional science fiction novelist, is not one readily to accept consensus positions, in his own field or those of others. In this excursion into demographic speculation written in the early 1960s, Hoyle displays characteristic originality, insight, and provocativeness to suggest a different and, many might be persuaded, no less plausible long-term global future: one with recurrent population expansions and collapses. (Hoyle 1986: 547)

Not out of the question.

The millenial time scale, it might be noted, is modest beside Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years (London, 1952), the work Hoyle takes as his point of departure, let alone beside Olaf Stapledon's 1931 science-fiction classic, Last and First Men (also an oscillatory future, though lacking the evolutionary continuity of Hoyle's). (Hoyle 1986: 548)

These are still the papers that mention Stapledon very briefly. (The next batch will be explicitly about him.)

The prediction of the future is the main concern of science. This is a matter for scientific theories. Experiment exists in science as an aid to arriving at theories, although a casual observation of the facilities provided for experiment on the one hand and theoretical studies on the other, both in Universities and in the country at large, might sometimes suggest otherwise. (Hoyle 1986: 548)

A strong opening statement.

This argument has had a profound effect on all biological thinking since the days of Malthus. (The original publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, appeared in 1798.) It is well known that Darwin's work on natural selection was in part influenced by Malthus. And his grandson makes a similar use of these ideas in The Next Million Years, forecasting that the human society of the future will be limited by starvation, that the men of the future will look back on the present day as the golden age of the species. (Hoyle 1986: 552)

Back in them days we could adequately feed most of the population.

We are already beyond the normal form of biological control, the control that has directed evolution over the past thousand million years. However, I must emphasize that this is not to say we are beyond all control, rather that a new control is going to come into operation. My view is that the control will be so strong, so overwhelming, that within five thousand years a new species will have taken the place of the human species. It will still be human in shape, but its genetic make-up, its mental processes, its behaviouristic patterns will be so different from present-day norms as to justify the title of a new species. (Hoyle 1986: 554)

Sounds a bit too optimistic.

While only a fool, and apparently there are plenty of these, can contemplate nuclear warfare with equanimity, I do not think the effect would approach the picture painted by Nevil Shute in his novel On the Beach, for instance. (Hoyle 1986: 555)

Added to the list.

Rather obviously, the new creature - or new species as I prefer to call him - will be much more socially minded than we are. Selection of course is essentially synonymous with rejection. It will be the unco-operative elements that will be rejected. Such individuals prefer to exist in chaos and will finally be submerged. A species much better adapted to the whole phenomenon of social organization will have emerged. (Hoyle 1986: 556)

Again, very optimistic.

Reading in a library is to-day merely the innocent pursuit of the scholar. In the future the ability to puzzle out the knowledge of the past will be decisive. Knowledge, organization, the library, these are the environmental factors that will determine the future. It mae seem strange to the biologist to think of the library as a major environmental factor, but I think the strangeness comes from the newness of the concept rather than from any new principle. (Hoyle 1986: 557)

Cool idea, though we're already seeing that machine-learning might be the key to make sense of the large mass of knowledge recorded in our libraries.

Huntington, John 1982. Utopian and Anti-Utopian Logic: H.G. Wells and his Successors. Science Fiction Studies 9(2): 122-146. [JSTOR]

The major alteration in the structuce of Wells's logic that has occurred in IDC [In the Days of the Comet] is camouflaged by his use of what looks like the "two-world system" of The Time Machine or The Wonderful Visit (from which the phrase comes). The novel juxtaposes two worlds that share personalities and geographies but which are radically different. The old world is ours, an "insane" world of war, class hatred, and murderous jealousy; the new world is that which a rational treatment of society and of human relations might supposedly create, an organized utopia in which all humans are free to realize their whole potential. (Huntington 1982: 123)

Dreams.

In ridding the novel of its disturbing anti-utopianism by melodramatic gestures, Wells is being true to one important dynamic of WSW: the technological exuberance. The machine-dominated future, so the novel implies, Does not have to be a nightmare. (Huntington 1982: 127)

It doesn't?

Either, as in the case of Zamyatin's We (1924), we commit ourselves to an infinitely dialectical anti-utopianism, or, as in the case of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or, in a different spirit, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) or Huxley's Brave New World (1932), we quash ironic conflict and replace the puzzle with a single-valued structure, either dystopian or utopian. (Huntington 1982: 128)

Always this same bunch.

But let us also observe that Zamyatin is not the only anti-utopian developing out of the Wells tradition. Though it would lead us astray from our present purposes to explore their work in any detail, writers such as Karel Čapek, Olaf Stapledon, and Ursula Le Guin deserve mention here. (Huntington 1982: 128)

A more interesting bunch.

In Last and First Men (1930), Stapledon transforms the more or less static oppositions of Wells into a serial process of discovery, and his relentlessly dialectical history of the future picks up that mixture of yearning and skepticism that characterizes anti-utopia. (Huntington 1982: 128)

"Dialectical" in what sense?

The narrator of A Modern Utopia, what Wells calls "the owner of the Voice," is an ironic device that Wells uses as a way not of withholding full assent to the ideas he sets forth, but of suggesting the contradictory fullness of human hopes and, therefore, of expressing his anti-utopian awareness of the narrowness of his fervently held utopian ideas even as he declares them. (Huntington 1982: 141)

Hmm.

Michaelis, Anthony R. 1989. Anticipating the Future: TA + SF. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 14(2): 97-102. DOI: 10.1179/isr.1989.14.2.97 [tandfonline.com]

It is an attempt to compare technology assessment with a few examples from classical science fiction where the authors have described the social consequences of scientific discoveries and the resulting technologies. I do not know if this has been done before; even if it has, it may still be worthwhile to repeat it here as it may contribute to the renown of technology assessment. (Michaelis 1989: 97)

Not uninteresting.

The Minisec was the hand-held personal part of the system, the Comsole the unversal [sic] counterpart, looking like today's television screen and just as widespread. These two related to each other across an optical beam of ultraviolet light, exchanging personal with universal information and knowledge. 'Through the Comsole could flow everything that Man had ever learned about the universe [...] All the libraries and museums that had ever existed could be funnelled through this screen and the millions like it, scattered over the face of the Earth.' And what did Clarke suggest were the social consequences for an Earth that possessed such a utopian communication system? 'There is an unhealthy preoccupation with the past, an attempt to reconstruct and to relieve it.' The only pioneering spirit left in the solar system was on far-flung Titan, represented in the book by Duncan Mackenzie on a VIP visit to Imperial Earth. (Michaelis 1989: 98)

Computers and smartphones, and endless nostalgia.

Again it was the brilliant imagination of H. G. Wells, together with his not inconsiderable knowledge of science, that foresaw in uncanny detail the destructive powers of atomic bombs, in The World Set Free of 1914. He invented the term 'atomic bomb' and called them 'the crowning revolution of human potentialities' and considered that 1956 'or for that [|] matter 2056 may be none too late' for them. Atomic weapons were also prophesied by other writers, particularly Olaf Stapledon in his Last and First Men published in 1930. A young Chinese scientist demonstrates the power of his atomic rifle by removing a large island from the Bristol Channel, and he destroys a fleet of American bombers about to annihilate Europe. Yet the Council of world Scientists to whom the weapon is demonstrated decide unanimously that it is premature and must be destroyed. 'No, Sir! Your very wonderful toy would be a gift fit for developed minds; but for us, who are still barbarians, no, it must not be,' are the words of the French President of the Council. (Michaelis 1989: 100-101)

Did not know about Wells coining the term.

Wilt, Judith 1981. The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction. Popular Culture 14(4): 618-628. DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1981.00618.x [wiley.com]

In or around December, 1897, to paraphrase Virgina Woolf, Victorian gothic changed - into Victorian science fiction. The occasion was the publication of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which followed by only a few months the publication of Bram Stoker's gothic classic Dracula. Playing fairy godfather to the transformation was Victorian imperialism, that march of mind and militia whose confident momentum concealed anxieties which the literature of the time faithfully, if often obscurely, recorded. (Wilt 1981: 618)

A literary hinge point.

The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
The tone here is science fiction: the image is of carnal appropriation, not metaphysics but physics, and biology; the morality is scientific tolerance. (Wilt 1981: 619)

Quote from Wells' The War of the Worlds. Could Stapledon have taken this figure of "intelligent rabbits" as the basis of "man's more rabbit-like [...] descendants"?

Stoker wrote another novel in 1904 called The Jewel of Seven Stars which contains in a less oblique way, I think, a popular nightmare arising out of "The African Question" of the last Victorian decades.
In this novel the western penetration into Egyptian Tombs has both revealed and triggered the resurrection of a powerful Queen whose seven-fingered hand contains the jewel whose stars match a constellation current in the skies at the time the novel opens. (Wilt 1981: 623)

One of my favorite rappers is named Seven Star. The premise reminds me of the beginning of Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) for some reason.

The alien, like Conrad's trading company, eats men, and moves by machine, and shoots heat guns. Nevertheless, to the end Wells tries to make the Martian the other, absolutely uncommunicated with, barely communicable about. (Wilt 1981: 627)

Not that dissimilar from Stapledon's Martians.

The crowning horror is reserved for the Martians, however; victory, alarmingly for the English consciousness, satisfyingly for the unconscious, belongs to the invaded, not the invader. Destruction from the Martians runs its allotted course; then destruction fastens upon them and they appear to the narrator the second time, when he comes out of hiding, as solitary decaying corpses, killed by the bacteria of the earth who are "our microscopic allies," part of man's very self striking back at the invader. The Martians came on the wings of progress but what they learned on the planet Earth was regression. Specifically, the narrator remarks, "all the evidence suggests the Martians knew nothing of the putrefactive process." Now they know. The earth is the very locus of regression, reduction. "By the toll of a billion deaths man has gained his immunity and bought his birthright of the earth," Wells concludes, "and it is his against all comers" (p. 444). (Wilt 1981: 627)

That's a pretty neat idea: countless humans have had to die from infections so that we can live with our bacteria. We have become symbiotic with our microscoping partners, who would easily kill anyone else who hasn't paid the selective toll of living with these tiny living organisms.

But I like best of all the long dramatization of the non-imperial "progress" of the species in the Englishman Olaf Stapledon's novel of 1931, Last and First Men. There, after a history of mutations which alter and alter humanity until it can no longer be called such, the "last man" gives up the future to chance, letting the "seeds" of the race float out into the unknown space beyond the last inhabited corner of the universe, and pronounces, in case no seed takes root, with great simplicity, the end of empire: "It was good to have been man." (Wilt 1981: 628)

Too bad this paper wasn't about that, then.

Engelhardt, H. Tristram 1984. Persons and humans: Refashioning ourselves in a better image and likeness. Zigon 19(3): 281-295. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.1984.tb00931.x [wiley.com]

Reflections on the genetic engineering of humans tend to be encumbered by a number of difficulties, the main one being that this engineering is not currently possible in any significant degree. Hence, reflections take on a somewhat futuristic, if not science fictional, character. (Engelhardt 1984: 281)

Definitely premature in the 1980s.

Genetic engineering of the germ line attracts our attention because it brings into question our very character as a particular species. (Engelhardt 1984: 282)

Is it fluid?

To take the general issues of genetic engineering seriously in a science fictional context is also useful in conjuring certain contrasts between being a human and being a person, for the fantasy presents human nature as a changing and changeable designation for a certain range of mammalian capacities. (Engelhardt 1984: 285)

Science fiction tends to portray it as fluid.

For the former arguments to succeed, a set of religious or metaphysical assumptions regarding some designer and His or Her (or Their) design would be required. Such assumptions place the debate within restricted communities accepting such special religious or metaphysical assumptions. It would appear very difficult to show why in general terms the current results of evolution are in any sense sacrosanct. (Engelhardt 1984: 285)

Perhaps God created Sahelanthropus tchadensis in his own image, and Homo erectus et al. are just the leftovers - the good Toumaï were raptured to heaven long ago, and the only tchadensis skull we have was the one sinner left behind, who accidentally promulgated all of us.

One might cite as an example the classic science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon (1968), Last and First Men, which portrays the history of the human race over approximately two billion years and recounts various radical refashionings of human nature. Stapledon's 1931 portrayals of man remaking himself envisage many of the difficulties that are likely to be encountered in genetic engineering. Even where they fail to be complete, such accounts offer a heuristic portrayal of the distance between persons as fashioners, makers, and manipulators, and human nature as an object of such manipulation. (Engelhardt 1984: 286)

Ah, persons as genetic engineers, humans as genetic enginees.

Mistakes: Could genetic engineering provide the ground for tort for wrongful life suits? It is becoming more accepted legally that offspring may seek a recovery for damages when they are born with a genetic defect that could have been avoided by abortion or by contraception (Holder 1981). To conceive a child or to allow a pregnancy with known genetic defects to go to term harms the future person who will be born. However one might be able to construe such a harm, it is generally to the advantage of society to have as few disabled individuals as possible. (Engelhardt 1984: 628)

Sue your parents for being born. The antinatalists would love this.

The polytheistic metaphor can remind us that one should attempt to articulate alternative views of human excellence. Just as a devout polytheist attempts to choose a proper constellation of special gods and goddesses for his or her worship - one might think here of Septimius Alexander, worshipping in his private chapel with particular devotion Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana (Lampridius [|] [1924] 1967, 29.2) - so too a society might especially support the development of certain human types, while recognizing in the end that these constitute only a small selection from a wider possible range. (Engelhardt 1984: 288-289)

Wait, how did we get here?

This point is understood by children who have seen the movies in the "Star Wars" series and have come to the judgment that Yoda is a marvelous person and Jabba the Hut is an evil person. none of those entities is human, although they are all portrayed as persons. Stories of angels and gods give classic illustrations of the same point. Not all persons need be humans.
Genetic engineering makes this point in a somewhat transformed fashion. Humans, since they are persons, need not remain human. One [|] can imagine humans over time so transforming their characteristics that one would wish to advance new classificatory taxa to replace Homo sapiens - perhaps Homo Fabricatus I, Homo fabricatus II, and so on. This is the point raised by the novel by Stapledon. If one is willing to entertain a sufficiently long-range fantasy regarding the human future, it is difficult to imagine that humans will not in fact refashion themselves in major ways. (Engelhardt 1984: 291-292)

Not a bad argument.

The difference and distance between us as persons, as manipulators of our nature, and us as humans, as objects to be manipulated gives us our destiny as self-refashioners, self-manipulators. Being self-conscious and rational, we can always objectify our bodies and in so objectifying them bring their shortcomings into question. In seeing ourselves as objects, we then raise for ourselves the moral problem of all creators, namely, to create prudently and responsibly. Here the issue is especially earnest, for the problem is that of our own self-creation, self-manipulation. The possibility of genetic engineering recalls to our attention the inescapable fact that in being self-reflective individuals, we are always potentially recreators of ourselves. Genetic engineering opens up in physical reality possibilities that were always available in reflection. (Engelhardt 1984: 293)

Enese-ümberkujundajad. Good paper.

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan 1986. Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanislaw Lem. Translated by Marek Lugowski. Science Fiction Studies 13(3): 242-260. [JSTOR]

Lem: Literary realism, for me, is literature's way of dealing with the real problems of a dual (at least) type. The first kind is the sort of problem that already exists or is coming into existence. The second kind is the sort that appears to be lying on the path of humanity's future. Any attempt to differentiate "possible problems" from "fictional," or "probable situations (albeit seeming outrageous today)" from "unlikely," is probably too polarizing to be successful. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 244)

Problems like genetically engineering humans.

Similarly - mutatis mutandis - my writings over the last 30 years has been subjected to tests imposed by the changing world. I dare claim that the thrust of the main changes (such as genetic engineering or computer science) would become apparent to me, roughly at the time when some very intelligent people simply laughed at my notions as fairy stories. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 244)

Yup.

Of course, the mental life of the protagonist was all me - where else could I have acquired the information to render it? I do know, however, that books can be smarter than their authors, and that my geniouses such as Hogarth were half-illusions. After all, I do not quote the mathematical works which made Hogarth famous. All such things are decorations, theatrical props conjuring reality. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 246)

Something something the fifth function of texts in society.

I haven't read Kafka for a long time, because there is something in his works that I find repugnant. It's as if they contain more misfortune than is "proper" for a "decent" author. It's as if Kafka struggled with both some real forces and some that were but his own, personal, desperate neuroses; and I despise writer-psychopaths. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 246)

Oof.

ICR: In Science Fiction and Futurology, you wrote that no one has developed Stapledon's method of creating cultures. Many of my students, who read your novels immediately after reading Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, saw your work as a dialogue with Stapledon. They read your alien encounters as intense dramatic depictions of the same subject matter that Stapledon describes with epic expansiveness. Did Stapledon's imaginary cosmogony have an effect on your "dramas of cognizance"? (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 249)

Stapledon created "cultures"?

Lem: Most likely, my reading of Stapledon provided plenty of inspiration for my imagination, especially from the sociological point of view (the variety of cultures and the magnitude of their separateness). I think I can say that to me he is in that select group of authors known as true eye-openers. Still, purely belletristically, I can point to many flaws in his writing, as I have done in my Science Fiction and Futurology, especially in his Odd John. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 249)

As of yet my understanding is that absolutely no-one likes "Odd John".

ICR: You once wrote to me that you believe a lot of what Golem says. His speculations on the "toposophy" of Superior Artificial Intelligences can be read as a materialistic version of theosophy - a theosophy without a teleology. The development of intelligence described by Golem seems to parallel the development of "spiritual consciousness" projected by Teilhard, the Austrian mystic Rudolph Steiner, and others in the modern Western mystical tradition. Despite your stated dislike of mysticism and of Hegel, aren't you describing a dialectical progress of the Spirit of Intelligence in Golem's vision? (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 250)

Interesting. Haven't yet gotten around to Steiner but hopefully will.

Lem: Love is a matter of individuals. It is the fulfillment of the human psyche's expectations. An individual is able to feel love towards only a small number of the closest persons, be it erotic love, parental, or other - for example, religiously inspired. In my private life, this emotion plays perhaps the main role. But one cannot really love humanity. It is impossible even to get to know all coexisting persons. So put, "love of humanity" is a pure abstraction, entirely impotent in the face of the world's dramatic problems. This is why making love the subject of a book is tantamount to closing one's eyes to the problems of the world, and because of this alone, it would hinge on being escapist. Of course, these are strictly my private convictions. I do not believe that love can save nations or entire societies. This may be why love has taken the backseat in my writing. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 253)

What a marvellous statement (that can be set in contrast with Stapledon's 18th men who do get to know all coexisting persons, all the billions of them).

What may be even more surprising (if not downright paradoxical-sounding), this was the way in which I wrote my discursive prose as well: no projects, no blueprints. If a priori plans were needed, it often turned out they weren't kept. It was as though I was carried away by the current of my thought as I was writing the text - the sort of thing that happens to white water rafters: keeping the course and not really managing to do so. Basically, I wrote by trial and error, and since I never cross out anything, instead throwing away in its entirety what does not please me, I see myself as a high-jumper, making attempts at a height, one after another, each a contained procedure, including the initial run. It is impossible to pause in the air over the crossbar in order to make an adjustment. (Csicsery-Ronay 1986: 255)

Very similar to my own views on writing. Never been able to do anything systematically, piecemeal. It's either all in one go or a bust.

Ketterer, David 1983. Pantropy, Polyploidy, and Tectogenesis in the Fiction of James Blish and Norman L. Knight. Science Fiction Studies 10(2): 199-218. [JSTOR]

After remarking the comparative rareness of stories deriving their major ideas from biological areas (with the exception of stories concerned with teratology, the study of monsters), Blish points in a note to Norman L. Knight's "Crisis in Utopia" as "a real genetic story." (Ketterer 1983: 199)

In medicine and biology, "the scientific study of congenital abnormalities and abnormal formations." In mythology, "relating to fantastic creatures and monsters."

Although the relationship between the Altered Men and other human beings is problematical in "Seeding Program," there is no real doubt that the Altered Men are human beings - and this in spite of the synthetic denial implicit in such references as Sweeney's to the possibility of converting "an Adapted Man back into a human being" (I:2:24) and in spite of the meaning of the word "pantropy" itself: "changing everything" (I:1:8). If everything is changed or can be changed, then in what real sense is an Altered Man a human being? That question in effect occupies the concluding Book, "Watershed," where the notion of pantropy as total, ceaseless change comes up against the notion that there is an essential human nature which remains the same, an essential truth. (Ketterer 1983: 202)

Some question arises with Stapledon's future humans, who are affirmed as "fully human", and us first humans not yet so.

However, Dr Chatvieux points out that they themselves can contribute germ cells; and from these, with the aid of "pantropes," microscopic beings might be created that could survive in the puddles about the broken ship. Echoing the reasoning which applies in "The Thing in the Attic," fresh water is chosen rather than the sea because it is safer. The Adapted colonists that result will have no memory of their previous incarnation, although to some degree "the donor's personality patterns" (II:0:107) will be transmitted. But the original seeding team, including the two lovers, the pilot la Ventura, and midshipman Joan Heath, will die before they can be reborn as something new. A record engraved on metal plates of an appropriately microscopic size is left in the hope that the aquatic colonists, after generations of evolution, will decipher and learn the facts. In spite of the objection that telling them they are microscopic "may saddle their entire early history with a gods-and-demons mythology" (an echo of "The Thing in the Attic" again), this information is included. Chatvieux points out that "These people will be of the race of men. [...] They are not toys to be protected from the truth forever in a fresh water womb" (II:0:109). (Ketterer 1983: 205)

Microscopic metal plates? May they not corrode or be destroyed in volcanic activity? Or be buried under so much sediment as to be practically lost for ever?

If sex, as it seems to be, is that essential human truth, a material counterpart to the soul, then pantropy has a long way to go before it can be said to "change everything." (Ketterer 1983: 208)

What?

On the face of it, A Torrent of Faces seems to have more to do with the theme of overpopulation than with that of tectogenesis. The future, well-nigh utopian world described supports a population of about one trillion "normal" human beings (nine-tenths of whom are unemployed) in one hundred thousand enclosed, pyramidical, hive-type cities. Most of the book deals with the increasing threat of this stable world's collapse posed by three major disasters, one for each of the novel's three books: the shipwreck of a sea hotel; a break in the main supply pipe of a normally empty Disaster City named Gitler in Missouri, Unistan (i.e., the US plus Canada), to which people might be evacuated; and the impact in the Hudson's Bay area of an asteroid, one mile in diameter, named Flavia, one of a cast of 24 "characters" listed after the contents page. (Ketterer 1983: 210)

Another World Inside type visions of the future, it looks like.

In addition there is Dep. Blish 399/6 which consists of maps and six very detailed diagrams by Knight of a futuristic form of television, the floating-globe hotel, and aspects of a Biological Preserve where, in the interests of a controlled ecology, all the wildlife is kept apart from all that vegetation known as the World Forest, which covers most of the world's land masses including the exteriors of the cities. (Ketterer 1983: 210)

The "agricultural area" between the urbmons.

Like much SF, A Torrent of Faces hinges on the opposition between the artificial and the natural. The land world of the novel has been artificially segregated into three separate areas: a massive vegetable area, the World Forest; the various Biological Preserves where the animals are kept; and the enclosed cities where the people are kept. This apparently stable situation is then steadily undermined by a series of more or less natural disasters, culminating in the meteor. (Ketterer 1983: 213)

Vegetative, animal, and rational souls kept apart.

It should be recognized that the notion of biological or genetic engineering predates Blish's three treatments of the theme. It crops up incidentally in Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901), in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First men (1930) (an [|] ancestor Blish alludes to in The Seedling Stars [I:3:44]), and most significantly in Aldoux Huxley's Brave New World (1932). (Ketterer 1983: 214-215)

Alludes how?

Lawler, Donald L. 1980. Certain Assistances: The Utilities of Speculative Fiction in Shaping the Future. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 13(3/4): 1-13. [JSTOR]

We all know, although sometimes we must remind ourselves, that we cannot speak literally of shaping the future. The future exists only potentially. It is true that present choices help give shape, substance and dimension to the future as it actually unfolds; but our choices, much less our hopes and fears, are themselves insufficient causes of actual futures. Chance, irrational actions and events, destiny, and what we may broadly term froces of history, all converge in helping to shape our tomorrows. (Lawler 1980: 2)

The underlying premise of Stapledon's work might call this into question.

Hugo Gernsback thought so much of the utility of science fiction as an inspiration of new science and technology that he proposed patent searches include science-fiction literature and that science-fiction writers should be allowed legal claim to ideas that were later commercially developed. Such an arrangement would have made more than one science-fiction writer a fabulously wealthy citizen of the world. (Lawler 1980: 3)

Make a not-so-quick buck by writing science fiction with every possible invention you can think of.

Science fiction as cautionary tale has, it seems, a necessary and important role to play in our culture. The idea is now a familiar one that in exploring imagined futures, speculative science fiction sensitizes its readers to the likely consequences of the often fast-moving developments of the present. Olaf Stapledon expressed such a view in his Foreword to the American Edition of Last and First Men:
Man seems to be entering one of the major crises of his career. His whole future, nay the possibility of wishing any future at all, depends on the turn events may take in the next half-century. It is a commonplace that he is coming into possession of new and dangerous instruments for controlling his environment and his own nature. Perhaps it is less obvious that he is also groping toward a new and racial purpose. Unfortunately, he may possibly take too long to learn what it is he really wants to do with himself. Before he can gain clear insight, he may lose himself in a vast desert of spiritual aridity, or even blunder into physical self-destruction. Nothing can save him but a new vision and a consequent new order of sanity or common sense.
Science fiction serves our culture, therefore, as a sort of early warning system. An important effect of the cautionary tale is also to offer a reinterpretation or restatement of moral values in imagined future cultures different from our own. To this degree, science fiction advises us how to adjust our moral radar. (Lawler 1980: 3)

Damn, this quote is indeed missing from the Penguin edition I read.

The idea of science fiction as a new mythology, however it is conceived is a profoundly suggestive one, even portentous. To my knowledge, the first persuasive, systematic account of the genre as a new mythology occurs in Eugene Zamiatin's seminal study, Herbert Wells, (1922). Zamiatin calls Wells's scientific romances "urban fairy tales," arguing that the myth-making faculty of the poet has begun to take its materials from the modern city. Out of factories, automobiles, airplanes, apartment high-rises and the like, the poet now fashions a new mythology for industrial humans. (Lawler 1980: 7)
  • Zamyatin, Evgenii 1927[1922]. Well's revolutionary fairy-tales. (Excerpt from Herbert Wells). Translated by Lesley Milne. In: Parrinder, Patrick (ed.), H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage. Delhi, etc.: Vikas Publishing House PVT LTD, 258-274. [Internet Archive]

Scheick, William J. 1981. Towards the Ultra-Science-Fiction Novel: H.G. Wells's Star Begotten. Science Fiction Studies 8(1): 19-25. [JSTOR]

Despite a respectable reception at the time of its publication, H.G. Wells's Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937), has been no favorite among literary critics of SF aficionados. In fact, today it is hardly known at all, even by experts on Wells. But Wells wrote it during the period of his late career when he was celebrating the maturation of his thought and artistry; and he apparently viewed the work as an advance in the direction of the ultra-SF novel, an elusive ideal toward which his previous SF novels, by a kind of asymtotic evolution, had been pointing. (Scheick 1981: 19)

Seems likely. None of the papers on Wells I've read recently have even mentioned it.

The early 1920s, in Wells's opinion, exhibited momentarily a keener perception of reality as a consequence of the shock of World War I. The war, Wells maintained, had shattered illusions which had been supported by the deceiving framework or façade of ideas characteristic of pre-war generations. (Scheick 1981: 19)

It was, in a cultural sense, an "explosive" era.

Ideally the reader should ascertain that just as Mary and Joseph Davis, like their biblical prototypes, are the people within or behind the event of the remarkable birth and just as the birth itself is the product of a genetic change within human cells amounting to the incarnation of Martian mind within human flesh, so too the dimension of human reality that is Homo sideralis lies but veiled (6:103) within each reader. By demystifying the biblical account of Joseph and Mary, Wells lifts the veil of Christian mythology and reveals a greater dimension of contemporary reality in their story; and this demystification includes as well an "opening out," unveiling or broadening of audience expectations concerning a Wellsian work of SF and of prognostication. (Scheick 1981: 23)

Not that far removed from what occurs in Stapledon's L&FM over the span of several human species.

I have emphasized only these two features. In fact Wells's reach ranges farther and includes a revision of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (p. 81) and Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch (p. 87), among other works. Stapledon replied in "Mr. Wells Calls in the Martians," London Mercury, 36 (July 1937): 295-296. (Scheick 1981: 25, note 14)

So they were in a dialogue of some sort.

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