Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  8. See William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish), The Issue at Hand, Advent Press, Chicago, 1964, pp. 117–19. I ought to make it clear that I am talking here of science fiction as a literary/cultural phenomenon, e.g., nobody can accuse George Bernard Shaw of suffering from the he-man ethos. But Shaw’s ventures into science fiction have had little influence on the American tradition.

  9. The American pioneer was Hugo Gernsback, whose name adorns the “Hugo,” the yearly fan awards for best novel of the year, best short story, etc. In 1908 Gernsback founded a magazine called Modern Electrics, the world’s first radio magazine. In 1911 he published a serial of his own writing called “Ralph 124C41+.” Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in 1926 and by common consent, real science entered the field with John W. Campbell, Jr., in the late 1930s.

  10. Some of the better writers in this genre are Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson, and Poul Anderson. Most magazine fiction is at least tainted with space opera.

  11. In Age of the Pussyfoot the heroine makes her living by trying out consumer products. She is so ordinary (or statistically extraordinary) that if she likes the products, the majority of the world’s consumers will also like them. A prominent character in John Brunner’s recent novel, Stand on Zanzibar, is a clairvoyant.

  12. Also “soap opera”—the roles of the sexes are reversed.

  13. I would put the ratio of male to female readers at about five to one. It might very well be higher.

  14. I think March and I think it was Amazing; it is either Amazing or Worlds of If for 1968 or 1969. Sorry!

  15. Me.

  16. It is noteworthy, however, that the ladies of the crew spend their time as nurses, stewardesses and telephone operators.

  17. See Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension, Advent Press, Chicago, 1968, especially Chapter VI.

  18. Entertaining use can be made of this form. Keith Laumer’s delightfully tongue-in-cheek “The War With the Yukks” is a case in point. You will now complain that I don’t tell you where to find it, but trying to find uncollected stories or novellas is a dreadful task. I don’t know where it is. I read it in a magazine publication; magazines vanish.

  19. Again, vanished without a trace. It’s an oldie and I suspect it appeared in one of Groff Conklin’s fat anthologies of The Best S.F. for (fill in year). It was a lovely story.

  20. This one may be American. A Russian (or American) and a Red Chinese, both from our present, are somehow transported into the future. They kill each other at a party in a xenophobic rage which their hostesses find tragic and obsolete. I remember that the ladies in the story shave their heads (that is, the ladies’ own heads). Not exactly a matriarchy but a semi-reversal of gender roles occurs in Philip Wylie’s The Disappearance, a brilliant argument to the effect that gender roles are learned and can be unlearned.

  21. Again I find myself with distinct memories of the story and none of the author’s name. I would appreciate any information. Science fiction is in a dreadful state bibliographically.

  22. This is perhaps too sweeping a statement; Isaac Asimov certainly writes for everybody, to give one example only. But male readers do outnumber female readers, and there is a definite bias in the field toward what I have called the he-man ethos. I think the generalization can stand as a generalization.

  23. See William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish), The Issue at Hand, Advent Press, Chicago, 1964, p. 112.

  24. Carol Emshwiller is a good example, See the Orbit series of anthologies edited by Damon Knight (Putnam’s in hardcover, Berkley in paperback).

  25. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books, New York, N.Y. 1969 (paperback). As of this writing it has also received the Hugo, a comparable fan award.

  26. Ibid., p. 201.

  27. Ibid., p. 223.

  28. Ibid., p. 281.

  29. I am too hard on the book; the narrator isn’t quite that positive and one could make out a good case that the author is trying to criticize his viewpoint. There is also a technical problem: we are led to equate the human narrator’s world (which we never see) with our own, simply because handling two unknowns in one novel would present insuperable difficulties. Moreover, Le Guin wishes us to contrast Winter with our own world, not with some hypothetical, different society which would then have to be shown in detail. However, her earlier novel, City of Illusions, also published by Ace, is surprisingly close to the space opera, he-man ethos—either anti-feminism or resentment at being feminine, depending on how you look at it.

  30. There is an old legend (or a new one—I heard it read several years ago on WBAIFM) concerning Merlin and some sorceress who was his sworn enemy. Each had resolved to destroy the other utterly, but they met and—each not knowing who the other was—fell in love. The problem was solved by Merlin’s transforming her into him and she transforming him into herself. Thus both destroyed and reconstituted in the other sex, they lived happily ever after (one assumes). Or as Shaw was supposed to have said, he conceived of his female characters as being himself in different circumstances.

  18

  Progress versus Utopia; or, can we imagine the future?

  Fredric Jameson

  It will then turn out that the world has long dreamt of that of which it had only to have a clear idea to possess it really.

  —Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (1843)

  A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

  —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939)

  What if the “idea” of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else? This is the perspective suggested, not merely by the interrogation of cultural texts, such as SF, but by the contemporary discovery of the Symbolic in general. Indeed, following the emergence of psychoanalysis, of structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, of semiotics together with its new field of “narratology,” of communications theory, and even of such events as the emergence of a politics of “surplus consciousness” (Rudolf Bahro) in the 1960s, we have come to feel that abstract ideas and concepts are not necessarily intelligible entities in their own right. This was of course already the thrust of Marx’s discovery of the dynamics of ideology; but while the older terms in which that discovery was traditionally formulated—“false consciousness” versus “science”—remain generally true, the Marxian approach to ideology, itself fed by all the discoveries enumerated above, has also become a far more sophisticated and non-reductive form of analysis than the classical opposition tends to suggest.

  From the older standpoint of a traditional “history of ideas,” however, ideology was essentially grasped as so many opinions vehiculated by a narrative text such as an SF novel, from which, as Lionel Trilling once put it, like so many raisins and currants they are picked out and exhibited in isolation. Thus Verne is thought to have “believed” in progress,1 while the originality of Wells was to have entertained an ambivalent and agonizing love-hate relationship with this “value,” now affirmed and now denounced in the course of his complex artistic trajectory.2

  The discovery of the Symbolic, however, suggests that for the individual subject as well as for groups, collectivities, and social classes, abstract opinion is, but a symptom or an index of some vaster pensée sauvage about history itself, whether personal or collective. This thinking, in which a particular conceptual enunciation such as the “idea” of progress finds its structural intelligibility, may be said to be of a more properly narrative kind, analogous in that respect to the constitutive role played by master-fantasies in the Freudian model to the Unconscious. Nevertheless, the analogy is misleading to the degree to which it may awaken older attitudes about objective truth and subjective or psychological “projection,” which are explicitly overcome and transcended by the notion of the Symbolic itself. In other words, we m
ust resist the reflex which concludes that the narrative fantasies which a collectivity entertains about its past and its future are “merely” mythical, archetypal, and projective, as opposed to “concepts” like progress or cyclical return, which can somehow be tested for their objective or even scientific validity. This reflex is itself the last symptom of that dissociation of the private and the public, the subject and the object, the personal and the political, which has characterized the social life of capitalism. A theory of some narrative pensée sauvage—what I have elsewhere termed the political unconscious3—will, on the contrary, want to affirm the epistemological priority of such “fantasy” in theory and praxis alike.

  The task of such analysis would then be to detect and to reveal— behind such written traces of the political unconscious as the narrative texts of high or mass culture, but also behind those other symptoms or traces which are opinion, ideology, and even philosophical systems—the outlines of some deeper and vaster narrative movement in which the groups of a given collectivity at a certain historical conjuncture anxiously interrogate their fate, and explore it with hope or dread. Yet the nature of this vaster collective subtext, with its specific structural limits and permutations, will he registered above all in terms of properly narrative categories: closure, recontainment, the production of episodes, and the like. Once again, a crude analogy with the dynamics of the individual unconscious may be useful. Proust’s restriction to the windless cork-lined room, for instance, the emblematic eclipse of his own possible relationships to any concrete personal or historical future, determines the formal innovations and wondrous structural subterfuges of his now exclusively retrospective narrative production. Yet such narrative categories are themselves fraught with contradiction: in order for narrative to project some sense of a totality of experience in space and time, it must surely know some closure (a narrative must have an ending, even if it is ingeniously organized around the structural repression of endings as such). At the same time, however, closure or the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the vision of future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the same time that its novelistic expression demands some such ending. Thus Asimov has consistently refused to complete or terminate his Foundation series; while the most obvious ways in which an SF novel can wrap its story up—as in an atomic explosion that destroys the universe, or the static image of some future totalitarian world-state—are also clearly the places in which our own ideological limits are the most surely inscribed.

  It will, I trust, already have become clear that this ultimate “text” or object of study—the master-narratives of the political unconscious—is a construct: it exists nowhere in “empirical” form, and therefore must be re-constructed on the basis of empirical “texts” of all sorts, in much the same way that the master-fantasies of the individual unconscious are reconstructed through the fragmentary and symptomatic “texts” of dreams, values, behavior, verbal free-association, and the like. This is to say that we must necessarily make a place for the formal and textual mediations through which such deeper narratives find a partial articulation. No serious literary critic today would suggest that content—whether social or psychoanalytic—inscribes itself immediately and transparently on the works of “high” literature: instead, the latter find themselves inserted in a complex and semi-autonomous dynamic of their own—the history of forms—which has its own logic and whose relationship to content per se is necessarily mediated, complex, and indirect (and takes very different structural paths at different moments of formal as well as social development). It is perhaps less widely accepted that the forms and texts of mass culture are fully as mediated as this: and that here too, collective and political fantasies do not find some simple transparent expression in this or that film or TV show. It would in my opinion be a mistake to make the “apologia” for SF in terms of specifically “high” literary values—to try, in other words, to recuperate this or that major text as exceptional, in much the same way as some literary critics have tried to recuperate Hammett or Chandler for the lineage of Dostoyevsky, say, or Faulkner. SF is a sub-genre with a complex and interesting formal history of its own, and with its own dynamic, which is not that of high culture, But which stands in a complementary and dialectical relationship to high culture or modernism as such. We must therefore first make a detour through the dynamics of this specific form, with a view to grasping its emergence as a formal and historical event.

  1. Whatever its illustrious precursors, it is a commonplace of the history of SF that it emerged, virtually full-blown, with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, during the second half of the 19th century, a period also characterized by the production of a host of utopias of a more classical type. It would seem appropriate to register this generic emergence as the symptom of a mutation in our relationship to historical time itself: but this is a more complex proposition than it may seem, and demands to be argued in a more theoretical way.

  I will suggest that the model for this kind of analysis, which grasps an entire genre as a symptom and reflex of historical change, may be found in Georg Lukács’ classical study, The Historical Novel (1936). Lukács began with an observation that should not have been particularly surprising: it was no accident, he said, that the period which knew the emergence of historical thinking, of historicism in its peculiarly modern sense—the late 18th and early 19th century—should also have witnessed, in the work of Sir Walter Scott, the emergence of a narrative form peculiarly restructured to express that new consciousness. Just as modern historical consciousness was preceded by other, for us now archaic, forms of historiography—the chronicle or the annals—so the historical novel in its modern sense was certainly preceded by literary works which evoked the past and recreated historical settings of one kind or another: the history plays of Shakespeare or Corneille, La Princesse de Clèves, even Arthurian romance: yet all these works in their various ways affirm the past as being essentially the same as the present, and do not yet confront the great discovery of the modern historical sensibility, that the past, the various pasts, are culturally original, and radically distinct from our own experience of the object-world of the present. That discovery may now be seen as part of what may in the largest sense be called the bourgeois cultural revolution, the process whereby the definitive establishment of a properly capitalist mode of production as it were reprograms and utterly restructures the values, life rhythms, cultural habits, and temporal sense of its subjects. Capitalism demands in this sense a different experience of temporality from that which was appropriate to a feudal or tribal system, to the polls or to the forbidden city of the sacred despot: it demands a memory of qualitative social change, a concrete vision of the past which we may expect to find completed by that far more abstract and empty conception of some future terminus which we sometimes call “progress.” Sir Walter Scott can in retrospect be seen to have been uniquely positioned for the creative opening of literary and narrative form to this new experience: on the very meeting place between two modes of production, the commercial activity of the Lowlands and the archaic, virtually tribal system of the surviving Highlanders, he is able to take a distanced and marginal view of the emergent dynamics of capitalism in the neighboring nation-state from the vantage point of a national experience—that of Scotland—which was the last arrival to capitalism and the first semi-peripheral zone of a foreign capitalism all at once.4

  What is original about Lukács’ book is not merely this sense of the historical meaning of the emergence of this new genre, but also and above all a more difficult perception: namely, of the profound historicity of the genre itself, its increasing incapacity to register its content, the way in which, with Flaubert’s Salammbô in the mid-19th century, it becomes emptied of its vitality and survives as a dead form, a museum piece, as “archeological” as its own raw materials, yet resplendent with technical virtuos
ity. A contemporary example may dramatize this curious destiny: Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, with its remarkable reconstruction of a whole vanished 18th-century past. The paradox, the historical mystery of the Revitalization of form, will be felt by those forwhom this film, with its brilliant images and extraordinary acting, is somehow profoundly gratuitous, an object floating in the void which could just as easily not have existed, its technical intensities far too great for any merely formal exercise, yet somehow profoundly and disturbingly unmotivated. This is to say something rather different from impugning the content of the Kubrick film: it would be easy to imagine any number of discussions of the vivid picture of 18th-century war, for example, or of the grisly instrumentality of human relationships, which might establish the relevance and the claims of this narrative on us today. It is rather the relationship to the past which is at issue, and the feeling that any other moment of the past would have done just as well. The sense that this determinate moment of history is, of organic necessity, precursor to the present has vanished into the pluralism of the Imaginary Museum, the wealth and endless variety of culturally or temporally distinct forms, all of which are now rigorously equivalent. Flaubert’s Carthage and Kubrick’s 18th century, but also the industrial turn of the century or the nostalgic 1930s or ‘50s of the American experience, find themselves emptied of their necessity, and reduced to pretexts for so many glossy images. In its (post-) contemporary form, this replacement of the historical by the nostalgic, this volatilization of what was once a national past, in the moment of emergence of the nation-states and of nationalism itself, is of course at one with the disappearance of historicity from consumer society today, with its rapid media exhaustion of yesterday’s events and of the day-before-yesterday’s star players (who was Hitler anyway? who was Kennedy? who, finally, was Nixon?).