The New York Review of Science Fiction
ISSUE #292 December 2012 Volume 25, No. 4 ISSN #1052-9438
ESSAYS
Victor Grech: Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers
Michael Andre-Driussi: The Politics of Roadside Picnic
Grady Hendrix: God and Tesseracts: Christian Love in L’Engle’s Time Quartet
Douglas A. Anderson: Joanna Russ’s Version of The Hobbit
REVIEWS
Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, reviewed by Jenny Blackford
Robin D. Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign, reviewed by Lisa Padol
Hope Larson’s Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the Graphic Novel, reviewed by Avram Grumer
Spaceman, written and directed by Leegrid Stevens, reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld
PLUS
Plus: Philip Wylie and nuclear destruction, photos from Philcon, and an editorial
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Victor Grech
Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers
Introduction
Science fiction was born in the pulps, an ingenious medium credited to Frank Munsey that utilized the then-new high-speed printing presses to print on cheap, untrimmed, pulp paper, resulting in low-priced magazines. It was by way of these cheap pulps that sf began to emerge as a self-conscious genre, despite the repeatedly recycled clichéd stories.
Superhero comics evolved alongside the sf pulps. They depict latter-day surrogate gods and goddesses, whether human, alien, or mutant.
As a seasonal treat, I would like to survey the changing depictions of Santa Claus on these covers.
Covers
Covers spanning 1941 to 1948 (figures 1-5) depict Santa assisted in his task of delivering gifts by a wide variety of superheroes. In figure 5, his role is appropriated (albeit temporarily) by superheroes who pitch in with toy construction as Santa is ill and abed in the background. These are all conventional depictions of Santa, and the 1945 cover incongrously also exhorts readers to “back the 6th war loan.”
Figure 1: Captain Marvel Adventures #19, January 1941
Figure 2: Comics Cavalcade #5, Winter 1941
Figure 3: Batman #27, Feb-Mar 1945
Figure 4: Action Comics #105, February 1947
Figure 5: Comics Cavalcade #25, Feb-Mar 1947
The decade 1951–1960 featured several covers from Galaxy Science Fiction magazine by Edmund Alexander Emshwiller (1925–1990), also known as Emsh. All of his Santas superficially resemble the orthodox Santa, a jovial, fat, pipe-toting, balding, white-haired and white-bearded fellow in the customary red suit (figures 6-13). Notably, Santa has four arms. However, even over this relatively small period of time, Emshwiller depicts important changes in Santa.
The 1951 cover (figure 6) conventionally depicts Santa having a drink, albeit with a mixed bag of humans and aliens, being served (and having his pipe lit) by a very alien waiter in a tuxedo next to an alien Christmas tree, in a futuristic building or vehicle and with an equally futuristic and possibly alien window view.
Figure 6: Galaxy Magazine, December 1951
The following year’s cover (figure 7) is also innovative, with Santa standing just inside a spaceship airlock (which is signposted with warnings to check the external environment before opening the door) and listening to four carolers of whom only one is human. Overhead, a wreath contains a candle in the shape of a spaceship.
Figure 7: Galaxy Magazine, December 1953
The 1954 cover (figure 8) illustrates Santa taking off from a futuristic base that is off the Earth, possibly the moon, with Earth visible in the background. His vehicle is rocket propelled and is assisted by reindeer who, like Santa, have donned space suits.
Figure 8: Galaxy Magazine, December 1954
Two years later, the cover (figure 9) shows a worried Santa attempting to plot courses across space, presumably in order to hand out gifts. He is aided by coffee from a spaceship-shaped dispenser, a fob watch, navigation textbooks, a calendar, and a huge computer that is labeled not only with names of planets, but with names of stars, subdivided further by the labels “good” and “bad.” Transport technology has advanced in that one of the books on his desk is Principles of Space Warp.
Figure 9: Galaxy Magazine, January 1956
The 1957 cover (figure 10) portrays Santa playing with an alien baby and dispensing gifts not only to humans but also to aliens who are so different that they cannot even breathe the same air as Santa, and therefore wear space suits.
Figure 10: Galaxy Magazine, January 1957
In the following year, Santa shares his task with an alien and octopoid Santa who crosses his path in space while being pulled by equally alien equivalents of reindeers, which appear to be vaguely saurischian with kangaroo-like hindquarters (figure 11).
Figure 11: Galaxy Magazine, January 1958
The 1959 cover (figure 12) is similar in theme to the 1957 cover, with Santa arranging toys on a Christmas tree while being watched by two alien toddlers. Christmas’s characteristic green is the predominant color used in the depiction of aliens in this series of illustrations.
Figure 12: Galaxy Magazine, December 1959
The December 1960 Galaxy cover (figure 13) shows a puzzled Santa in the background gazing at a robot Santa who has seemingly supplanted the organic Santa and who adorns an angular, inorganic Christmas tree with bits of machinery, such as nuts, bolts, and springs. Emshwiller’s cover for that same year for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction features a young girl and a small robot watching a cyborg decorating a Christmas tree (figure 14). The cyborg has prosthetic arms, legs, nose and a metal patch replacing part of his skull. The same theme is also reflected in the cover of the 1958 Popular Electronics magazine with male and
female robots decorating a Christmas tree, accompanied by a robotic pet dog (not pictured).
Figure 13: Galaxy Magazine, December 1960
Figure 14: F&SF, December 1961
Skipping forward, the next cover from 1972 constitutes a watershed with Santa’s role appropriated by Batman (figure 15). Similarly, a 1976 cover shows the monstrous Thing (one of the Fantastic Four) dressed as Santa (figure 16). These two covers seemingly prefigure Lyotard’s postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” in that Santa is rejected and traded for a superhero. These covers indirectly intimate incredulity toward Santa himself, an attitude that persists in the remaining illustrations.
Figure 15: Batman #239, February 1972
Figure 16: Marvel Treasury Edition #13, 1976
Thus, a 1986 cover portrays a sleazy Santa replete with shades, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and a handgun in a fingerless glove (figure 17). Similarly, a 1991 cover depicts Santa fighting the incredible Hulk with a crowbar (figure 18); it must be remembered that the Hulk, while constituting an antihero, is ultimately one of the good guys.
Figure 17: Peter Parker #112, 1986
Figure 18: Incredible Hulk #338, 1991
The next cover from 2008 is a single acknowledgment to the past with Santa being helped by a group of superheroes (figure 19). But our final cover from 2009 is the ultimate postmodern rejection of the Santa metanarrative: a haggard Santa stares at the reader in consternation while being arrested by Judge Dredd, who sneeringly admonishes him: “Housebreaking—twenty years, creep!” (figure 20).
Figure 19: DC Universe Holiday Special #1, 2008
Figure 20: Judge Dredd Megazine #279, 6 January 2009
Discussion
Asimov noted that “[t]he history of science fiction can be divided into four eras: 1. 1815–1926; 2. 1926–1938; 3. 1938–1945; and 4. 1945 to present,” and these eras were respectively the relatively primitive, adventure-dominant (e.g. Wells and Burroughs); 1938-50 science-physicist-engineer dominant (e.g. Campbell and Astounding); 1950-65 sociology-dominant (e.g. Wyndham and Bradbury) and 1966 to the present being style-dominant, with narratives of deliberately enhanced literariness along with the development of sub-genres within sf itself (168).
This relatively small sample of magazine covers within the genre has exposed similar tropes and aspirations, which have mutated over the decades. The early covers were unassuming and fêted a conventional Santa who consorts with other and equally mythic characters such as superheroes. Santa is arguably a superhero, doing good by using powers that are beyond human comprehension, such as the near-instantaneous delivery of uncountable presents.
This era was followed by the inveiglement of science and technology, exposing the genre’s emphasis during this era which “valorizes a particular sort of writing: ‘Hard sf,’ linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom” (Roberts 195).
The next era of covers just predated the rise and popularization of postmodernism, leading to a refutation of the Santa metanarrative, in the same way that postmodernism resulted in skepticism toward all metanarratives.
SF magazines and comic books can be said to reflect scientific progress, which portrays aliens, computers, androids, robots and cyborgs as the new, frightful and mysterious adversaries and “we have populated these new unknowns with monsters and ogres that could well be the close relatives of the trolls and ogres of folklore fame. In that sense . . . sf is modern folklore” (Schelde 4).
In conclusion, the mythical Santa metanarrative has been rejected outright by magazine covers or replaced by superheroes who temporarily don the Santa mantle in order to keep the myth alive, a loss of innocence that is as inevitable as it is sad.
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Victor Grech lives in Tal-Qroqq, Malta.
Bibliography
Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Asimov, Isaac. “Social Science Fiction.” Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. Edited by Reginald Bretnor. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1953.
Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” Astronautics September (1960): 26-27, 74-75.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Schelde, Per. Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters: Science and Soul in Science Fiction Films. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Michael Andre-Driussi
The Politics of Roadside Picnic
The Russian novel Roadside Picnic was first published in 1972 and translated into English in 1977. Its Swedish edition won a Jules Verne award, and in 1981, it received an award for best foreign novel of the year at the Festival du Science Fiction in Metz. Over multiple re-readings of the 1977 translation in 2011, my sense of the politics of Roadside Picnic altered considerably. A breakthrough came this year when a new translation was published and I read the new edition’s foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and the afterword by Boris Strugatsky.
Le Guin revisits the context of the novel, telling what a refreshing text it was in the 1970s, written as if the authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were “indifferent to ideology” (vi). In contrast, Boris Strugatsky’s piece is about the complicated publication history of Roadside Picnic as a book in the USSR and the long-running arguments with the Soviet censors. If I understand it correctly, the censors were not concerned with the ideology, since the novel’s ideology followed Soviet orthodoxy. As Strugastsky repeatedly told them,
the novel contained nothing criminal; it was quite ideologically appropriate and certainly not dangerous in that sense. And the fact that the world depicted in it was coarse, cruel, and hopeless, well, that was how it had to be—it was the world of “decaying capitalism and triumphant bourgeois ideology.” (207)
It was precisely the graphic coarseness, vulgarity, and immoral behavior in the novel that was the problem for the censors. This material may have been acceptable for a literary journal like Avrora (where Roadside Picnic was serialized in 1972), but publication as a young adult title was a different matter.
Roadside Picnic is about humans dealing with weird artifacts left on Earth after a mysterious alien visit. The aliens are never seen nor are their vehicles; there are just the six Zones scattered across the globe where they visited, and the strange objects left behind. (The novel’s title comes from one theory about the Visit—that it was merely a roadside picnic, and the artifacts are only alien trash.) The Zones are dangerous, filled with weird monsters and deadly traps, but adventurers called “stalkers” sneak in to bring out artifacts they can sell. The novel is a series of episodes over a span of years following a stalker named Red.
Initially I took Roadside Picnic to be an action story that was, for a Soviet work, remarkably free of politics. It was a page-turning thriller with a heady mixture of elements from film noir, the fey logic of Wonderland, and even scenes from the Bible. The novel does an incredible job of shifting around: At the beginning, stalkers seem to be like prospectors who undertake personal risk in order to win their gold; then they more closely resemble gangsters trafficking in contraband; finally they are revealed to be still worse. Humor is used as a setup for a dark surprise time and time again in the tale. The opening radio interview suggests that mass hysteria and wild rumors exaggerated the alien arrival, but as Red enters the Zone in the next section, he offhandedly reveals that the reality of the Visit was far worse than what was ridiculed in the radio show. Nearly every section also has a dark surprise about its hero, too, whether it be that good guy Red has just smuggled a weapon of mass destruction out of the Zone or that bumbling bureaucrat Dick Noonan is also a brutal whoremaster working for the secret police.
By the third reading, though, I began to perceive Soviet details. For example, a wall is put up to protect the humans from the Zone, and it seems inconceivable that this was not related to
the Berlin Wall. I resisted that interpretation, because such a reading reduces the Zone to mere “capitalism,” the stalkers to simple smugglers, and the wondrous alien artifacts to being only lipstick, blue jeans, and rock music—items of everyday Western “decadence” that worked their way into the USSR and “polluted” it. This transmutes the wonder into a typical anti-bourgeoisie rant. And yet I was forced to conclude that ultimately the work really is a devastating jeremiad by a pair of communist utopians earnestly warning about the horrors of capitalism.
This interpretation seemed to be a “magic key,” possibly capable of unlocking the texts intractable mysteries, so I researched whether it was already in common use.
Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) says of Roadside Picnic:
This text moves in a space beyond the facile and obligatory references to the two rival social systems [capitalism and communism]; and it cannot be coherently decoded as yet another samizdat message or expression of liberal political protest by Soviet dissidents. (294)
Jameson states it is not a simple and obvious case, which seems rather cagey to me, but he points out that the text is not anti-Soviet. On this last item, Landon’s Science Fiction After 1900 (1995) agrees: “nor were the Strugatskys ever dissidents or anti-Soviet” (96).
Roland Boer, in Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1999), goes further: after describing how the brothers had been blacklisted for the unauthorized 1972 publication of their novel The Ugly Swans in West Germany, he writes, “Yet, it would be a mistake to see the Strugatskys as dissidents in the Soviet era, a view that led in part to the flood of translations and publications of their works in the 1970s” (111). In this way Boer claims that a misperception of the brothers as dissidents is what led to their being embraced by the West in the first place.
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