·

·

A Mystical Joining

H., J. B. S. 1937. Messianic Radiation: Review of Star-Begotten: a Biological Fantasia by H. G. Wells. Nature 140: 171. DOI: 10.1038/140171a0 [nature.com]

It is always interesting to see what a scientific fact will look like after Mr. Wells's imagination has been let loose on it. The facts on which this book is based are that particles or photons of high energy provoke mutation, and that such particles and possibly photons are reaching our planet from outside. What if some intelligent extra-terrestial beings, perhaps on Mars, are treating us as we treat Drosophila? If these beings are as benevolent as they are powerful, may we not expect that our mutations will be of a desirable character, and that the mutants will reform the world? So Mr. Wells's characters argues. (H 1937: 171)

Radiation will give you superpowers!

"Star-begotten", like Stapledon's "Last and First Men" and "Odd John", but unlike his recent "Star-Maker", despairs of existing humanity, and demands beings of innate endowments superior to our own to deal with the present crisis of civilization, which it sketches in brilliant phrases. The author is obviously sceptical of the remedies which he and others have propounded. "Haven't all civilised men nowadays the feeling of being dilletantes on a sinking ship?" asks one of his characters. So with unconquered optimism he puts forward a panacea which he knows to be fantastic. (H 1937: 171)

What was the "present crisis"? Economic depression? The onslaught of authoritarianism?

Whether or not the Marxians have correctly diagnosed the cause of our present distresses, it is clear that evolutionary processes, either natural, or directed by terrestial or celestial eugenists, are most unlikely to end them. The time-scale of evolution is altogether longer than that of history: and we probably have not many years, let alone generations, to save our civilization from collapse. If this book encourages a single reader to think, even for one moment, that any natural or supernatural process will take the place of human effort and human thought, then it is a bad look. (H 1937: 171)

It could be said that Stapledon's Last and First Men is 'a future history of evolution'.

Anonymous 1939. Latent Virus Infections: Their Bearing on the Cancer Problem. The British Medical Journal 2(4114): 969-971. [JSTOR]

"Toothless" viruses need not be found only in cancers. Might not the viruses which, as some thought, must persist after infections and be responsible for keeping up a lifelong immunity be capable of being modified or made relatively "edentulous" instead of merely being masked by antibody? (Anonymous 1939: 970)

Define:edentulous - "lacking teeth".

Dr. G. W. M. Findlay recalled a book by Dr. W. O. Stapledon, Last and First Men, in which he pictured the human race some millions of years hence being attacked by the Martians with masses of various particles which had the property of receiving and transmitting short- and long-wave radiations. A large part of the human population was thus killed off, and it was only when man managed to incorporate the various particles into himself, thus converting himself into a receiving and transmitting station, that he overcame the forces arrayed against him. That seemed an analogy on the physical plane for Dr. Andrewes's argument on the biological. (Anonymous 1939: 971)

Leaving out the part where artificially constructed super-brains ("Fourth Men") construct a new species of humans ("Fifth Men"), incorporating the Martian subvital units in them artificially to give them "telepathy".

Lerner, A. P. 1948. An Economist Comments on "Freedom Demands Responsibility". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4(10): 306-309. DOI: 10.1080/00963402.1948.11460256 [tandfonline.com]

In Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men" the discoverers of atomic energy decide that the secret is too dangerous to be entrusted to the human race. They therefore destroy the formula and it is not rediscovered for hundreds of years. Some atomic scientists in America and in England seem to feel that they should do likewise. They recognize that the nature of modern science makes the burying of a secret possible only in a world controlled by the imagination of the novelist. Nevertheless, the guilt that they feel about their participation in the development of the atomic bomb, emphasized by vivid pictures of Hiroshima and by the spectre of the threatening atomic world war, makes them wonder whether, like Stapledon's heroes, who suffered torture rather than divulge the dread secret, they should not somehow arrange to avoid participation in the development of more powerful forces for a world seeking to destroy itself. (Lerner 1948: 306)

This was written before the USSR made theirs.

Price, George R. 1955. A scientist dreams of Economic Frontiers in 2000 A.D. Challenge 4(3): 52-55. DOI: 10.1080/05775132.1955.11468188 [tandfonline.com]

The economic picture I foresee for the end of the century is that construction will be our major industry, the sun will be our major power source, and the most important raw material will be water. (Price 1955: 52)

Not wrong.

As I mentioned, the sun will certainly become our major power source. Each day the sun supplies the earth with more energy than man has used since he appeared on earth. The technological problems involved in converting sunlight to electricity should be simple once the necessary fundamental knowledge has been gained. And distribution costs will often be extremely low, for most domestic users will be able to generate their power needs on the roofs of their homes. (Price 1955: 53)

Not most, yet, but yeah.

For example, the three major prophetic novels of the early 1930s - H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men - have already been outmoded in several respects. Thus the first two do not mention atomic power at all, and in the third it does not appear until about 2100 A.D. (Price 1955: 55)

Maybe it will be "atomic rifles" that appear in the 2100s.

Derleth, August 1952. Contemporary Science-Fiction. The English Journal 41(1): 1-8. DOI: 10.2307/807153 [JSTOR]

Even for many of its most vocal proponents, science-fiction seems difficult to define with precision. For some it consists of fiction dealing solely with speculation about the future; for others it is the fiction of prophecy; for yet others it is fiction concerned only with interplanetary adventure. Actually, however, the term "science-fiction" embraces all imaginative fiction which grows out of scientific concepts, whether in mathematics or geology, nuclear fission or biology, or any scientific concept whatsoever, whether already demonstrtaed or whether projected out of the writer's imagination into future space and time. (Derleth 1952: 1)

How would one delineate scientific concepts from non-scientific concepts?

An attempt to set forth a basic science-fiction library of twenty books in a poll conducted by the Arkham Sampler two years ago among authors, editors, and readers of science-fiction resulted in a wide disparity of selections. In first place stood H. G. Wells's Seven Famous Novels (The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, In the Days of the Comet, and The Food of the Gods). This omnibus was followed by nine other titles - Last and First Men, by W. Olaf Stapledon; Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; The Short Stories of H. G. Wells; Adventures in Time and Space, edited by R. J. Healy and J. F. McComas; Slan, by A. E. Van Vogt; The World Below, by S. Fowler Wright; Strange Ports of Call, edited by August Derleth; To Walk the Night, by William Sloane; and The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (Derleth 1952: 2)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

Modern science-fiction has little relation to its forebears save in theme. Out of the tales of fabulous travels, which were begun by Plato in the description of Atlantis embodied in his Timaeus and Critias and reached their height in Sir John Mandeville, grew the familiar lost-continent and last-man-on-earth themes so common to science-fiction in our time. Out of the fantastic chronicles of voyages to the moon begun by Lucian of Samosata with his Icaromenippus, ca. A.D. 165, burgeoned the tale of interplanetary exploration, and this in turn opened various secondary themes - invasion from space, the conquest of alien planets, asteroids, stars. (Derleth 1952: 52)

I may finally have to read Lucian's "True History".

Writers now show a concern for matters philosophic, sociologic, psychiatric, and ethnological; and several of them, notably Robert A. Heinlein, with his "Future History" series, Isaac Asimov with his "Foundation" series, and A. E. Van Vogt with his "Weapon Shops of Isher" stories, have set out ambitiously to portray the history of future galaxies. Above all, a sort of Fortean challenge to the imagination has resulted in fresh, new themes, as well as different approaches to the more standard themes of science-fiction. (Derleth 1952: 3)

And Stapledon is not included in this bunch?

In England, however, wellk-onwn writers like C. S. Lewis, S. Fowler Wright, H. F. Heard, and W. Olaf Stapledon had had regular publication of their science-fiction in book form, most of them, clearly, on a far more literate level than the work of their American contemporaries, and most of them, curiously, concerned with the fate of mankind in the distant future or on other planets. Many of the stories stemmed from the utopian theme, which persists in the best novels in the genre, in one form or another, either in the direct portrayal of an imaginary and much improved civilization of the future or in the form of earth's rebuilding after a holocaust leaving but few survivors. M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud and, more recently, George Stewart's Earth Abides are excellent examples of the latter theme. (Derleth 1952: 4)

English science fiction was, at least for a while, ahead of the Americans.

Editor-author John W. Campbell, Jr., a nuclear scientist himself, writing under the pen name of Don A. Stuart, as well as under his own name, is best represented by his collection Who Goes There? and Other Stories, from the title story of which (comparable to the earlier "At the Mountains of Madness," by H. P. Lovecraft) the movie The Thing was recently produced. (Derleth 1952: 6)

Noted. I've been curious about The Thing ever since its parody in Futurama but have yet to watch the movie, even.

Huxley, Julian S. 1951. Sui Generis. Science 114(2952): 109. DOI: 10.1126/science.114.2952.10 [science.org]

I read with interest J. R. Pierce's article on "Science and Literature" in your issue of April 20, but I would like to point out one omission in it. He spoke of a book by Heinlein, tracing the imaginary future of man through many periods but omitted to mention what, in my opinion, is by far the best book on this subject, namely, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. This pursued the subject in a most illuminating way, on the assumption that with the vast amount of time still ahead of the human species, it might well produce a succession of totally different types. Stapledon's picture of the society in which all the thinking was done by specialized individuals whose brains were cultured out to a gigantic size on some sort of trellis, is unforgettable! (Huxley 1951: 109)

Define:trellis - "a framework of light wooden or metal bars, chiefly used as a support for fruit trees or climbing plants."

Livingston, Dennis 1969. Science Fiction as a Source of Forecast Material. Focus 1(3): 232-238. DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(69)90026-3 [sciencedirect.com]

The most basic concept developed in the history of science fiction is that the future is not totally unknown. In fact, inherent in science fiction is the notion that there is not one future, but many possible futures, each arising from the infinite variations that could be applied to the extension of present-day trends. (Livingston 1969: 232)

Multiverse.

Voyages to outer space have traditionally been specialties of science fiction, but the first man to think of using some form of rockets as the means of propulsion was Cyrano de Bergerac in A Voyage to the Moon (1650). Edward Everett Hale was the first to think of an artificial earth satellite in The Brick Moon (1869), as an aid to navigation, and George O. Smith made use of a space station to facilitate interplanetary communication in QRM Interplanetary (1942). Finally, Hugo Gernbeck's Ralph 124C41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1911-1912), featured a startling array of successful predictions, such as radar, tape recorders, and microfilm. (Livingston 1969: 233)

I think I was only vaguely aware of only Bergerac.

Robert Heinlein in Double Star (1955) suggests a world federal government headed by a constitutional monarch descended from the Dutch House of Orange, while Paul Anderson's Satan's World (1968) features a galactic organisation of loosely cooperating governments, interlaced with a guild of large companies (the 'Polesotechnic league') composed of both human and alien intelligent beings. (Livingston 1969: 234)

For context, Frank Herbert's Dune was first published in 1965 and Star Trek: The Original Series first aired in 1966.

This type of prediction [The sociology of the future] is probably the most valuable contribution science fiction can make to futures research, since it is easier to describe the eventual appearance of a gadget whose technical prerequisites already exist, than it is to predict its social consequences. The informed individual of the late nineteenth century might have foreseen the automobile, but it would have taken a high degree of imagination to have predicted the traffic jam. (Livingston 1969: 234)

Good analogy. Sounds familiar, too.

Three masterpieces of science fiction that presents an overall picture are Wells' The Time Machine (1895), and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and The Star Maker (1937). Two more recent long-range projections include Clifford Simak's City (1953) and Heinlein's stories and novels known collectively as the 'future history' series (of particular importance since the author pioneered the use of trend curves in projecting an integral future setting within which his stories are placed). (Livingston 1969: 234)

Both, huh?

Both Wells, in The Island of Dr Moreau, and Stapledon, in Sirius, discuss man's efforts to increase the intelligence of animals. (Livingston 1969: 235)

Possibly the earliest notice of Sirius I've found.

The information explosion is extrapolated to its logical conclusion in Hal Draper's Ms Fnd in a Lbry (1961) where a galactic human civilisation collapses upon the inability of the 'bibliotechal engineers' to locate, somewhere in the galaxy, the single drawer that contains the sum total of human knowledge impressed on 'nudged quanta'. (Livingston 1969: 235)

Oh wow.

Robert Bloch has conveniently summarised the kind of future society presented by the average science fiction writer as consisting of some variety of totalitarian state in which psycho-chemical techniques are a favourite means of keeping the populace happy (or quiet), an underground which the larger-than-life hero can join, and scientists who gladly turn over their discoveries to those in power. Running throughout such tales are the pervasive assumptions that human nature as we know it will remain stable, that economic incentive will remain the highest motivation, and that twentieth century culture and moral values will continue to dominate the world. (Livingston 1969: 235)

The average future in science fiction is a mixture of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it seems.

E. M. Forster, in The Machine Stops (1909), suggests that a perfectly functioning global communications network, and automatic satisfaction of food and medical needs might prevent the necessity and even the desire for personal contact. (Livingston 1969: 236)

I recall mentions of this "prescient" piece of writing during the pandemic.

In Clarke's Childhood's End, the aliens come not to conquer, but to guide man toward his final destiny, a mystical joining with the cosmic mind. (Livingston 1969: 236)

Also a theme in Stapledon's work.

Psychic powers of teleportation and telepathy are imaginatively explored in The Demolished Man (1952) by Alfred Bester and Slan (1940) by A. E. van Vogt. The superman/mutant type appears evocatively in Stapledon's Odd John (1935) and Heinlein's Gulf (1949), both of which remind us that such an individual may also have super-problems about coping with a society of ordinary mortals. (Livingston 1969: 237)

A positive mention of Odd John?

Pietrkiewicz, Jerzy 1962. Krajewski's Warsaw on the Moon. The Slavonic and East European Review 40(95): 308-323. [JSTOR]

The first Polish contribution to science fiction was printed in 1785 and happens also to be one of the earliest novels in the language. The mood of the 18th century is reflected in its title: Woyciech Zdarzyński. Życie i przypadki swoie opisuiący (Adalbert Zdarzyński. Describing his life and adventures). According to the fashion, fiction is here presented as a true account, and the hero performs the function of a story teller, advertising his goods by his very name. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 308)

Like Lucian's "True History".

His books are still dismissed as mere imitations; his name, if mentioned at all, means almost nothing even to the students of Polish classicism; the little that was said of him a century ago is echoed to-day, sometimes with the same disparaging remarks cursorily repeated. The first edition of 1785 remains the only edition of Woychiech Zdarzyński, and it does not seem probable that it will be reprinted in the near future. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 308)

Very nearly the fate of Odd John but looking it up now, it did have an edition by Galaxy Publishing Corp, and Dover bundled it with Sirius.

Within the Polish ground of reference, Zdarzyński seems important as a highly conscious stylistic exercise, and there are, after all, not many of them in 18th-century prose. One might go even further and say that the prose of Zdarzyński is as succinct as that of its model, Krasicki's Doświadczyński. At times it has an experimental quality. Nomet et omen, Adalbert Adventure turns out to be more adventurous than Nicolas Experience, at least in language. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 310)

I really like this author's style.

Chesterton is right about the people who are always 'playing the game of Cheat the Prophet'. Prophetic fantasy should remain volatile, [|] even without the help of balloons and rockets, for nothing destroys the illusion more than the heavy-handed attempt to nail it down to a particular moment in time. The late Olaf Stapledon, novelist and philosopher, unfortunately chose to imagine an Anglo-French war and the destruction of Paris by the British Air Force in the first chapter of his Last and First Men. His prediction was confounded only nine years later by Hitler and Stalin. Many novels about the future have dated beyond redemption because they gambled on dates. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 316-317)

Not wrong. Putting in exact dates is silly.

Krajewski kept his science fiction well within the bounds of his own century. He would not venture out into a distant to-morrow. Even when he complains about the menace of coach-drivers to pedestrians in the streets of big cities, he does not predict the dangerous mechanised version of to-day, but simply remarks in the footnote on p. 148 that the danger is sufficiently real in the present to speculate about what might happen in the year 2044. This attitude saves him from other temptations which would destroy the verisimilitude of his incidents. He may be far too cautious, as his critics seem to imply, but he certainly does not commit the folly of describing the 21st century in terms of the 18th. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 317)

The exact example discussed above (cf. Livingston 1969: 234).

The satire against science in Zdarzyński has a formal validity, and it seems unfair to discuss it only in relation to Krajewski's sources. Besides, the source hunters cannot be altogether trusted. Wojciechowski exaggerates Krajewski's debt to Swift and makes a misleading statement that chapter XX in the Polish novel paraphrases chapter V in the third [|] book of Gulliver's Travels. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 317-318)

Allikajahtijad.

In his study on 'the technique and function of the Polish novel in the times of Stanislas Augustus', Z. Skawarczyński not only repeats the reference to Peter Wilkins but also perpetuates the name of Mercier as Merces, which is an obvious printing error in Gubrynowicz's study. Sometimes one has to use the petty weapon of pedantry in order to fight pedantry of a heavier kind, for it certainly did weigh down Zdarzyński's chances. (Pietrkiewicz 1962: 319)

I am seriously tempted to look into what else this Pietrkiewicz has written.

Clarke, I. F. 1976. From Prophecy to Prediction: 13. Science and Society: prophecies and predictions 1840-1940. Futures 8(4): 350-356. DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(76)90131-2 [sciencedirect.com]

From 1920 onwards the debate about the consequences of the First World War was summed up in phrases that have since become familiar signals in any discussion of the rational use of scientific discoveries - the impact of science on society, the pace of progress, the challenge of the future, technology and social change, the need for planning. At the same time, the tale of the future went through a rapid and total transformation. The once common prophecies of the technological paradise-to-come and the many confident visions of a triumphant technology changed to admonitory accounts of a future time when human folly has destroyed all life on earth. (Clarke 1976: 353)

Not the first to make a note of this in my recent readings (cf Scheick 1981: 19).

The intention of the new myth makers was to get outside the closed circle of progress and technology so that they could make radical statements about their society. Olaf Stapledon put this new imperative with uncompromising [|] clarity in the preface to his most original story of Last and First Men:
To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarise ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds.
That proposition of 1930 was characteristic of the reactions to the immense changes thta had followed on the First World War; for all those many changes put a requirement on the prophet and the predictors to describe what lay in waiting for the world. (Clarke 1976: 354-355)

A historical-causal explanation.

Myers, Alan 1978. Science fiction in the classroom. Children's Literature in Education 9: 182-187. DOI: 10.1007/BF01150170 [springer.com]

Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, with exciting military episodes of an unashamedly Earth-chauvinist nature, propounds the idea that political power in a society should be restricted to those willing to defend it in actual physical combat. (Myers 1978: 183)

Oh wow, didn't know that was Heinlein's.

Time travel is often used as a device to permit tinkering with the past, but this is usually on a personal level and is often treated light-heartedly. Altering history is normally frowned upon in the future and the Time Police are notoriously efficient. Poul Anderson, in his Corridors of Time takes the reader to Carthage and ancient North America to avert twists in the time-line. A popular theme with amateurs is the expedition to Calvary with a machine-gun to prevent the crucifixion. (Myers 1978: 184)

That is literally the plot of a movie titled Assassin 33 A.D. (2020).

Wells' The Time Machine deals with the future evolution of the human race and can be used as discussion material on the rise and fall of civilisations (or warnings on the dangers of extrapolation in general!). A student who develops great interest in this topic can be given Olaf Stapledon's Last and [|] First Men. I personally find this arid, but I seem to be in a minority and there is no doubt that Stapledon's staggering vision of the evolution of the race of man over the eons has been a major formative influence on several science fiction writers, including Arthur C. Clarke. (Myers 1978: 184-185)

Understandable. Stapledon is not for everyone.

Roberts, Thomas J. 1973. Science Fiction and the Adolescent. Children's Literature 2: 87-91. DOI: 10.1353/chl.0.0169 [Project MUSE]

But it is science fiction prose - by far the most sophisticated and demanding of all these genres - that is capturing that adolescent reader. We seriously underestimate him if we suppose we understand science fiction prose merely because we have watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon or read Flash Gordon when we were young. It would be like supposing we know Moby-Dick because we have seen Joh Huston's film. The science fiction film may be lovable but it is stupid. Science fiction prose is often clumsily written but it is intelligent. (Roberts 1973: 87)

Well put.

The truth is that a large part of science fiction is not about science at all; it is about the supernatural. And much of the rest of it is either covertly or quite openly doubtful about scientific values: we all think of Ray Bradbury as a writer of science fiction but he knows very little about modern science and is blatantly antagonistic to it. (Roberts 1973: 88)

Which may be why he is not the darling that he was in the 1950s (e.g. for Derleth).

There are some good novels which only the exceptional adolescent will find absorbing: Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, and Frank Herbert's Dune, and John Brunner's Stand on Sanzibar, and the oeuvre of H. G. Wells (when read as anything more than gadget-stories). (Roberts 1973: 88)

Stapledon is not for everyone.

Adult science fiction manifests moral and philosophical and theological concerns and gives greater emphasis to the people in that strange new world, but it is the adolescent variety that interests us. (Roberts 1973: 88)

All present in L&FM.

Michaelis, Anthony R. 1978. Energy 2000. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 3(2): 87-88. DOI: 10.1179/030801878789826357 [tandfonline.com]

Man's luck appears to hold again - at least for the next two decades. The present climatic cooling cycle of the Earth is just about compensated by the 'greenhouse effect' caused by the carbon dioxide liberated from the profligate burning of fossil fuels. No dramatic changes of climate are foreseeable until the year 2000 A.D. (Michaelis 1978: 87)

Oh, thank god. After the year 2000 let it come what may. Who would want to live after that date anyway.

What hope remains then for the Western World to maintain its present high level of energy consumption? Will Olaf Stapledon's prediction, made in his classic book of 1930 Last and First Men, come true? He foretold that The squandering of fossil fuels on useless and ritual transportation ended the first of the many human civilizations of the future described in his mythology. Only fusion and solar power appear to offer new technologies of sufficient magnitude. Geothermal energy, wind and tidal power as well as the burning of artificially produced biomass, are either too local or too small to have a world-wide impact. (Michaelis 1978: 87)

Cool, at least some dirty energy hounds took notice.

Just the opposite appears to be true to harness the power of the Sun. Only a gigantic satellite with about 100 km2 of solar cells or Brayton engines in geosynchronous robit, 35 700 km above the equator, looks like the most effective way to tap solar power continuously. Solar heaters for individual houses can make a useful but only a very limited contribution. (Michaelis 1978: 88)

Solar cells can only go on top of houses or in space. No point in placing a lot of them in an array on a field, for example.

Smith, Curtis C. 1985. Review of Slusser, George E.; Rabkin, Eric S.; Scholes, Robert eds., Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy; Rabkin, Eric S.; Greenberg, Martin H.; Olander, Joseph D. eds., The End of the World; and Dunn, Thomas P; Erlich, Richard D. eds. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 31(2): 462-464. DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0136 [Project MUSE]

But the more successful essays see science fiction as reflective of broader social trends. Bruce Franklin in "America as Science Fiction" discusses, among other things, the New York World's Fair of 1930 as a kind of science fiction. Susan Gubar, in "She in Herland: Feminism and Fantasy," not only makes extensive comments on Haggard and Gilman but considers feminism itself as a kind of fantasy; and by fantasy she means a broader, ennobling power of the sort mentioned by Eric Rabkin, who concludes in another fine essay that "it is by well made fantasy that homo sapiens shapes the world." In his essay on Jules Verne, Mark Rose characterizes science fiction broadly as containing the tension between materialism and spiritualism. (Smith 1985: 462)

Noted. Coordinates is available on lg.

Two essays should be singled out: Gary K. Wolfe's "Autoplastic and Alloplastic Adaptations in Science Fiction: 'Waldo' and "Desertion'" and Leslie Fiedler's "The Criticism of Science Fiction." The former is the best essay on science fiction fandom that I have seen. (Smith 1985: 462)

Again, noted. I've been somewhat interested in the terms auto- and alloplasticity for over a year now.

The slogan "let's get science fiction back in the gutter where it belongs" has made the rounds of the conventions. Now here is Fiedler to tell us that science fiction never left the gutter after all. Even the best science fiction differs from mainstream literature in its effects, he says, and must accordingly be judged by different standards: "If, therefore, Stapledon [for example] moves [...] us, it is not [...] as Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka [...] move us." Rather, Stapledon - like other science fiction - is "sub or para literature." Fresh from books on freaks ad on Olaf Stapledon, Fiedler would lump science fiction with the previous two. In Stapledon, though, Fiedler picks a poor example to make his point, as recognition of Stapledon's (conventional) literary quality is growing. (Smith 1985: 463)

Stapledon is indeed a poor example of the worst tendencies in science fiction. His books are still blowing minds in the early 21st century.

Typically, essayists in this book assume that evaluative standards from outside can and should be imposed on science fiction, and they also take science fiction seriously as a source of ideas. Fiedler says that "the reader is not made better in any sense of the word, not wiser, not more pious, nor more sensitive by the reading of sf." The contrary assumption of The End of the World is that science fiction does at least attempt to make the reader all of these things. Several essays in the book discuss apocalyptic literature as a modern attempt to find in the face of threatened annihilation new images of order and meaning. (Smith 1985: 463)

Too bad that this very same Fiedler is one of the first to publish a monograph about Stapledon. Such a poor outlook.

Gravest of all defects is the omission of Olaf Stapledon, who is not listed even in the bibliography. The conflict in Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) between a future species of humans, the Third Men, and their creations the "Great Brains" (or Fourth Men) may be the most profound struggle between human and human creation in science fiction. After the Great Brains win the struggle, they come to realize that - because they can experience no emotion - there is something they are missing. In effect they make a decision to relinquish control, creating their supplanters, the Fifth Men. Any extensive study of machines in science fiction should include discussion of this conflict. (Smith 1985: 464)

This Smith might be a fan. Evidently (sf-encyclopedia.com) he edited the first and second edition of Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers (1981; 1986), which primarily delved into Olaf Stapledon and Mack Reynolds.

Smith, Curtis C. 1989. Review of Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction by Darko Suvin and Crossley, Robert ed. Talking Across the World. Modern Fiction Studies 35(2): 400-401. DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0316 [Project MUSE]

Darko Suvin's book is a collection of essays he wrote for periodicals, particularly for Science-Fiction Studies. Therefore, there are some duplications, and because most of the essays were written in the 1970s, the book is somewhat dated as well. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction is incidental work by Suvin, necessarily of less importance than his massive and major Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. However, Suvin is easily the most important critic of science fiction, and Science-Fiction Studies by far the most important journal in the field. Incidental Suvin makes for worthwhile reading. (Smith 1989: 400)

Thus far I've only read one piece by Suvin but it wasn't bad.

The only link between Suvin's book and Robert Crossley's is that Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is one of the cognitive science fiction writers Suvin most respects. (Smith 1989: 400)

Makes sense. Stapledon represents the extreme of cognitive estrangement.

With Crossley's magnificent and important book, which is essential to understanding Stapledon, this important writer may finally be coming into his own. Author of such vast future histories as Last and First Men and Star Maker, [|] Stapledon is surely the most ambitious science fiction writer who has ever lived. His aim is no less than to synthesize all human knowledge, to summarize all human history past and future, and to justify the Star Maker's ways to man. His sweep and even his style are Miltonic. Yet Stapledon has lived in the shadow of H. G. Wells the storyteller, and, especially after his death in 1950 until about 1970, his reputation was in almost complete eclipse. With now five full-length studies of Stapledon, one from Oxford University Press, and with an entire issue of Science-Fiction Studies devoted to Stapledon, this situation may well be changing. (Smith 1989: 400-401)

Very usable quotes. The chronology is correct - Stapledon was as-if rediscovered in the late 1980s.

Their exchange by mail during the war years makes for an affecting love story with which we all may identify at the same time that it is a striking period piece - no one writes such letters or has such a seemingly endless engagement today. Yet the book also involves far more. Olaf and Agnes give us erudite and witty talk about everything from a rail strike in Sydney to feminism to H. G. Wells and Walt Whitman to a near-riot in Liverpool when the Abbey Players come to perform Synge's Playboy of the Western World. (Smith 1989: 401)

Casting some doubt on the claim that Stapledon had not read Wells's Time Machine before he wrote his own L&FM.

Huntington, John 1989. Review of McCarthy, Patrick; Elkins, Charles; Greenberg, Martin Henry eds. The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon. Modern Fiction Studies 35(4): 810-811. DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1452 [Project MUSE]

The admirers of Olaf Stapledon find his continued obscurity a puzzle. While the defenders of Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, or Woolf develop critical angles and languages to convey what they value in these artists, the defenders of Stapledon still can only say, "Read him." Such a failure to enunciate value may be a sign of the inadequacy of our criticism, or it may be a sign of something hidden in Stapledon that enthusiasm fails to see. (Huntington 1989: 810)

Just watched Media Death Cult's review of L&FM. "Read him" very well summarizes that review.

Robert Shelton explicates Stapledon's philosophical works. Patrick McCarthy discusses in general terms what Stapledon shares with modernism. Two essays, Charles Elkins' challenge of Stapledon's quest for totality and Cheryl Herr's posing the dichotomy of convention and spirit as the deep structure of Stapledon's thought, begin to raise questions about Stapledon's goals, although neither develops a thorough and convincing argument. (Huntington 1989: 810)

Convention and spirit?

Louis Tremaine's essay, "Ritual Experience in Odd John and Sirius," comes closest to identifying the unease that represents Stapledon's strength and prevents his recognition. Using ideas from Eliade, Van Gennep, and Turner, Tremaine reads both novels as rendering a transitional moment between a conventional social "structure" and an enlightened "communitas." He persuasively argues that the murders in the books are sacrifices in which the protagonists encounter death by substitute. The essay does justice to the transformational ideal without losing sight of the moral atrocities depicted in these works and the problems they pose for the reader. (Huntington 1989: 810)

Stapledon's works indeed do not lack moral atrocities. Whether or not this is the cause of the "unease" I'm not yet certain.

The last two selections in the volume put us in touch with aspects of Stapledon's failure. Curtis Smith describes unsympathetically Stapledon's struggle in the late 1930s to defend his pacifist position in letters to newspaper editors. The sense of intellectual impotence that Smith conveys is amplified by the final selection, Stapledon's "Letter to the Future." Like late James, late Stapledon can sound like self-parody. The advice is entirely abstract; all assertions are withdrawn as soon as made; and although repeatedly disclaiming preaching, the letters are sermons. There is one fine atheistic apothegm, which has an angry energy quite unlike anything else in these letters: "I shall not forget the joy with which my slow mind first discovered that the human race and the stars are not a poultry farm for the production of moral foie gras for a gluttonous God." In his fiction Stapledon could give life to such an experience of intellectual discovery. As philosophy, however, it remains, as he himself seems at times aware, adolescent. Stapledon's "legacy" is not all of equal value, and it should be part of his admirers' task to discriminate. This book suggests some beginning points. (Huntington 1989: 811)

A nice addition to the discussion about Stapledon's use of language (e.g. Branham 1980: 16).

Rovit, Earl 1983. Review of Olaf Stapledon: a man divided by Leslie A. Fiedler. Library Journal 108(3): 208.

Fiedler brings belated attention to the British pioneer (1886-1950) whose work (especially, Star Maker) has had enormous influence on the scope and apocalyptic proclivities of the genre in America as well as in England. Although Stapledon was somewhat neglected by American readers, Fiedler demonstrates the seminal importance of novels like Last and First Men, Odd John, and Sirius. At the same time, he places Stapledon in relation to the social and intellectual milieu between 1914 and 1945. Using the scanty biographical materials available in conjunction with the fiction, Fiedler makes a sympathetic effort to reveal a portrait of what was a decidedly bizarre, conflicted, and reclusive personality. Recommended. (Rovit 1983: 208)

Recommended.

Hoch, Paul 1988. Review of In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel J. Kevles. The British Journal for the History of Science 21(2): 252-254. DOI: 10.1017/S0007087400024808 [cambridge.org]

The book also gives what may be a partly misleading impression, that the sterilization programmes for mental incompetents, victims of hereditary diseases, and - disproportionately - for racial minorities in various American states, had been effectively ended by the rise of the new social sciences and the recoil from Nazi eugenics in the 1930s and '40s. However, a few chapters later, it turns out that such programmes were also uncovered in various parts of the United States in the late '60s and early '70s. (Hoch 1988: 253)

Fighting the Nazis taught the Americans very little.

It might also have been interesting to delve further into literary reflections of the eugenics debates - over and above the three works mentioned by J. B. S. Haldane, Hermann Muller and Aldous Huxley - to include some of the genetic utopias (and anti-utopias) of H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and possibly even Norman Spinrad's satirical heroic fantasy of Hitler's eugenics conquests, The Iron Dream. (Hoch 1988: 253)

Genetic utopia?

Alkon, Paul 1985. Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Science Fiction Studies 12(2): 184-201. [JSTOR]

The impossibility of writing stories about the future was so widely taken for granted until the 18th century that only two earlier anticipations are known: Frances Cheynell's six-page pamphlet of political propaganda set in a very near future, Aulicus his dream of Kings sudden comming to London (1644); and Jacques Guttin's heroic romance, Epigone, histoire du siécle futur (1659). Before their publication, the future was reserved in Western literature for prophets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. As a trope for madness, John Donne could use the proverbial castigation Chronica de futuro scribet: "He undertakes to write a Chronicle of things before they are done, which is an irregular, and a perverse way" (2:77). (Alkon 1985: 184)

"[...] we cannot speak literally of shaping the future. The future exists only potentially." (Lawler 1980: 2).

The first English book to discard this aversion to chronicling the future is Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps in deference to the taboo against tales of the future, it was published anonymously in 1733, and then immediately suppressed by its author, an Irish Anglican clergyman who destroyed almost all copies of his extraordinary work as soon as they came from the press. (Alkon 1985: 184)

Good to know.

It would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveller arriving from the future, although what the narrator's guardian angel does in appearing one evening in 1728 to hand over 20th-century documents makes me think of such tales as Robert Silverberg's The Masks of Time (1968). Madden is, however, to my knowledge the first to write a narrative that purports to be a document from the future. He deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present. This too is an original variation on a familiar literary tradition: the discovery and interpretation of some ancient document (an artifact from the remote past) containing political or other prophecy. This convention has been used both seriously and satirically. (Alkon 1985: 186)

Stapledon can quite easily be placed in this literary-historical context, what with his Eighteenth Man making contact with him (telepathically) from the future.

No matter how inept as a satire, Madden's book remains noteworthy as the first work of prose fiction to adopt the central technique of those S-F and related modes that are formally distinct from previous narrative traditions by virtue of inviting readers to imagine themselves looking backwards from a far future to their own present and immediate future, which are thus also to be regarded as the past. Here, for the first time in prose fiction, is the proleptic structure identified hy Hanzo as the narrative method most closely affiliated with SF. (Alkon 1985: 196)

This mode invites the reader to consider his present and future as a past, as having already occurred, somehow.

0 comments | Labels: , , , ,

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.

0 comments | Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)