Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

LEARNING FROM OTHER WORLDS

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies General Editor DAVID SEED Series Advisers I. F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford Robert Crossley Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future David Seed (ed.) Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds) Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference Brian W. Aldiss The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy Carol Farley Kessler Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy I. F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (Foreword by George Hay, Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors Qingyun Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias John Clute Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard I. F. Clarke (ed.) The Great War with Germany, 1890–1914: Fictions and Fantasies of the War-to-come Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story: Studies in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction

LEARNING FROM OTHER WORLDS Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia Edited by Patrick Parrinder

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2000 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 0–85323–574–0 cased ISBN 0–85323–584–8 paperback Typeset in Meridien by Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd., Bolton Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Books Ltd, Trowbridge

Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: Learning from Other Worlds P ATRICK P ARRINDER Part I: Science Fiction and Utopia: Theory and Politics Before the Novum: The Prehistory of Science Fiction Criticism E DWARD J AMES Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction P ATRICK P ARRINDER ‘Look into the dark’: On Dystopia and the Novum T OM M OYLAN Science Fiction and Utopia: A Historico-Philosophical Overview C ARL F REEDMAN Society After the Revolution: The Blueprints for the Forthcoming Socialist Society published by the Leaders of the Second International M ARC A NGENOT Part II: Science Fiction in its Social, Cultural and Philosophical Contexts From the Images of Science to Science Fiction G ÉRARD K LEIN Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds P ETER F ITTING ‘A part of the … family [?]’: John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos as Estranged Autobiography D AVID K ETTERER Labyrinth, Double and Mask in the Science Fiction of Stanislaw Lem R AFAIL N UDELMAN ‘We’re at the start of a new ball game and that’s why we’re all real nervous’: Or, Cloning—Technological Cognition Reflects Estrangement from Women M ARLEEN S. B ARR ‘If I find one good city I will spare the man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy F REDRIC J AMESON Afterword: With Sober, Estranged Eyes D ARKO S UVIN Darko Suvin: Checklist of Printed Items that Concern Science Fiction Bibliography Index

vi vii 1

19 36 51 72

98

119 127 146 178

193 208 233 272 291 307

Acknowledgements I owe grateful thanks first of all to Darko Suvin, to whom this book is dedicated, and who has offered encouragement, patient support and wise counsel throughout its various metamorphoses. My thanks go to all the other contributors, and especially to Marleen Barr, Edward James, Fredric Jameson and David Ketterer. The universities of Luton and East Anglia hosted conferences that brought some of us together at two crucial points in the book’s gestation. Robin Bloxsidge, at Liverpool University Press, and Reynolds Smith, at Duke, nursed it towards publication. Joy Braun and the Department of English at Reading University provided invaluable secretarial support. Finally I want to express my gratitude to the journals Science Fiction Studies and Foundation, which have done so much to promote the serious study of SF and utopia in the last three decades. Darko Suvin was the founder of Science Fiction Studies, and virtually all our contributors have served it as editorial consultants – the exception being Edward James, the current editor of Foundation. Our lives as scholars and teachers would have been much poorer without these two journals. May they continue to support and enhance the SF community in the twenty-first century. Patrick Parrinder Reading, December 1999

To Darko Suvin ‘Darko is a true scholar, and he has left his mark on a generation of science-fiction critics.’ Frederik Pohl

Contributors Marc Angenot is Professor of French at McGill University and a former editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies. His books include Le roman populaire: Recherches en paralittérature, and a series of studies of late nineteenth-century political discourse including L’utopie collectiviste: Le grand récit socialiste sous la Deuxième Internationale. Marleen S. Barr teaches in the Humanities Department of Montclair State University. She is editor of Future Females: A Critical Anthology and author of Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction and of Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Her latest book is Genre fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. She was the 1997 winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award. Peter Fitting, an Associate Professor of French at the University of Toronto, is currently working on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction with subterranean settings. Carl Freedman teaches critical theory and modern literature at Louisiana State University. He is the author of a full-length study of George Orwell and of the recently published Critical Theory and Science Fiction. He is an editorial consultant for Science Fiction Studies and a frequent participant in the Eaton conferences on science fiction and fantasy. Edward James, Professor of History at the University of Reading, has written several books on the archaeology and history of the post-Roman period, and was a founding editor of the journal Early Medieval Europe. Since 1986 he has also edited Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Fredric Jameson is the Director of the Program in Literature at Duke Univesity. Among his latest books are The Seeds of Time and Brecht and Method. He has written widely on utopias and science fiction. David Ketterer was until recently Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature, of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, and of books on James Blish, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. In

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1996 he received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award. Gérard Klein is a leading French science-fiction novelist, anthologist, critic and editor. His first stories appeared in 1955, and a number of his novels, including Starmaster’s Gambit and The Day Before Tomorrow, have been translated into English. He lives in Paris. Tom Moylan is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. He is author of Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, and co-editor (with Jamie Owen Daniel) of Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. His latest book is Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Rafail Nudelman is a critic and theoretician of science fiction whose essays have been published in Science Fiction Studies and elsewhere. He is also co-author with the late A. Gromova of two Russian SF novels, published in the former USSR. Since 1975 he has lived in Israel. Patrick Parrinder, Professor of English at the University of Reading, is author of Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching and has written and edited a number of books on H. G. Wells, of which the most recent is Shadows of the Future. He is also the author of books on James Joyce and on literary criticism, and is currently writing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction. Darko Suvin took his PhD at Zagreb University, where he taught before moving to Canada in 1968. He is the author of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, and of numerous essays on the SF and utopian genres, some of which have been collected as Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. In 1973 he co-founded the journal Science Fiction Studies, and in 1979 he won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award. His other publications include essays on Brecht and modern drama, and two volumes of poems. He was for many years Professor of English and Comparative Literature at McGill University.

Introduction: Learning from Other Worlds PATRICK PARRINDER

I ‘Discover science fiction and fantasy . . . We hope you enjoy this taster of a new world of reading’, coaxes a sixteen-page pull-out supplement in a recent London newspaper. Inside the supplement is a ‘Timeline’ beginning with More’s Utopia, and a series of author profiles culminating in a full-page feature on ‘Mars specialist and writer Kim Stanley Robinson’. The three hundred words on Robinson focus on his ‘attempt to rehabilitate the term utopia’, his ‘egalitarian beliefs’ and his ‘idealistic life’ on a commune in rural California.1 Science fiction’s ability to transport us to other worlds, and to draw improving lessons from them, could not be more clearly stated. Looking more closely at this piece of advertising hype, we can detect many of the tensions and contradictions surrounding the contemporary SF phenomenon. Neither book clubs marketing the literary tradition nor record clubs marketing classical music find it necessary to strike quite this note of earnest edification in order to shift their products. There is the appeal to nerdishness—‘Get into science fiction and fantasy at W. H. Smith’, exhorts a major bookselling chain2—but also the presentation of science fiction as a source of collective enlightenment and an area of knowledge, as in the prospectus of a university course. SF is both something we can ‘get into’ and, by implication, something we can or should be able to build up credits in. But it is, too, a field manifestly insecure, chronically given to overselling itself, and at once proudly incorporated in and curiously peripheral to today’s culture industries. The institution of science-fiction studies has become an essential part of the genre’s brand image, since SF still craves recognition and wants, above all, to be taken seriously. Clearly, this was not always so. SF is much older than science-fiction studies. The latter’s institutional life goes back no more than thirty years, though now it can boast its full quota of learned societies, journals, refer-

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ence tools, annual conferences and awards for scholarly achievement. Science-fiction and utopian texts, including media texts, have become a familiar presence in the classroom. But with maturity have come diversification and a certain amount of self-questioning. There is what one commentator on current SF studies has called a ‘lack of consensus . . . which is frustrating, fascinating . . ., and, no doubt, inevitable’: is sf a narrative genre? a field of discourse? a mode of thinking? a body of literary texts? the compendium of mediatized entertainments which have grown up around the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises? Where exactly are its borders (does it have borders)? Is there something like a sf effect? When, if ever, should we call it science fiction, speculative fiction, sf? What do we do when we read sf? And what’s it got to do with anything outside itself? (Veronica Hollinger, ‘Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism’)3

The contributors to Learning from Other Worlds take different critical approaches—the book includes examples of intellectual and cultural history, genre theory, thematic and biographical criticism, feminist cultural studies and political textual analysis—but readers will also find a developing argument with a clear set of answers to most of Hollinger’s questions. A crucial aspect of this argument is that most of the contributors would insist upon a close association between modern utopian speculation and SF. In fact, the lack of consensus within SF studies (and also utopian studies) is not a sign of scholarly anarchy, still less of a malfunction within these disciplines. Rather, it reflects the presence of different critical communities with their own distinctive values, interests and priorities. I would claim that Learning from Other Worlds is a—necessarily dialogical—manifestation of one such community. There is ample dialogue among and between the contributors represented here, so that this is a manifestation and not a manifesto. But there is also a vigorous dialogue between the positions we take up and other (so we would argue) less forceful, less farsighted, and less critical ways of conceiving science fiction and utopia. As for ‘SF and utopia’: the coupling replaces the more conventional and (as we have seen) market-led alternative of ‘science fiction and fantasy’. It stresses science fiction’s commitment to visions of human transformation and credits it with an inherent—though frequently fragile, ambivalent and compromised—potential for political radicalism. To yoke science fiction and utopia together is also to direct scrutiny on to the word ‘science’ in SF: why science? What effect do scientific perspectives have on utopian speculations? Carl Freedman, Gérard Klein, Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin are among those who discuss one or both of these problems in the chapters that follow. But if ‘science’ is brought into question, so is SF’s wary embrace or marriage of convenience with its neighbouring genre of fantasy. Fan-

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tasy’s simultaneous (and necessary) exclusion from, and inclusion in, considerations of science fiction is debated in a number of essays. David Ketterer explores fantasy as a mode of autobiographical displacement in the writing of a ‘classic’ SF novel (Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos), while Peter Fitting looks at the invading alien, and Marleen S. Barr at cloning technology, as the repositories of contemporary ideological fantasies. At another level, Parrinder and Suvin debate the theoretical plausibility and consequences of laying down strict generic boundaries between SF and fantasy fiction. What all these chapters have in common is a view of science fiction and utopia as a body of imaginative literature with a canon (in the strong sense—a canon both includes and excludes) going back at least to Thomas More. But the literature exists in significant, sometimes antithetical, relationship to texts of many other kinds: autobiographical and personal writings, popular culture and journalism, political theory and propaganda, scientific popularization and Western philosophy from Plato to postmodernism. In other words, our approach to science fiction and utopia is generic. We would tend to resist the argument (however understandable in view of the current explosion of ‘sci-fi’ phenomena in the visual and electronic media) that science fiction is now too broad to merit the title of a cultural genre. The justification for taking such a stand can only be strategic or pragmatic: it is not that we claim access to permanent and transcendent truths about the position of SF and utopia in the literary and cultural ‘anatomy’, but rather that we see the generic approach as providing the best available critical hypotheses. Viewing science fiction and utopia as a canonical genre (and a generic canon) brings together description and prescription—two processes that can hardly be separated in the critical and interpretative disciplines–and, above all, it brings them together at the point where genre and canon are potentially transformed by what T. S. Eliot called the advent of the new—the really new—work. Such transformations have happened quite frequently in the past, as is indicated by the references to (for example) More and Wells in this book. But they are also a feature of the best of recent SF and utopian writing, as can be seen from Rafail Nudelman’s discussion of Stanislaw Lem’s epistemological romance and from the ‘worldconstructing’ fiction exemplified by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which is the subject of Frederic Jameson’s chapter. The coupling of SF and utopia, the separation of SF from the body of fantasy literature and the definition of SF as a canonical literary genre have all found their most forceful and influential expression in a single body of criticism and theory extending back for more than thirty years: the work of Darko Suvin. Learning from Other Worlds is both a tribute to Suvin’s intellectual and personal inspiration—for he is indeed, as the novelist Frederik Pohl has written, one who has ‘left his mark on a generation of science-fic-

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tion critics’4—and, for much of the time, an extended critical dialogue with him. Suvin’s position at the unofficial centre of the critical community to which this book gives expression is formally reflected in the Afterword, where he responds to the preceding essays, glances back at some of his scholarly contributions and comments on the political and cultural challenges facing SF and utopia in characteristically outspoken and penetrating fashion. Finally, an appendix offers a complete checklist of Suvin’s writings on science fiction. It was Suvin who, in a bold and much-quoted phrase from Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), described utopia as the ‘sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction’.5 His classic 1972 essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, together with the other pieces collected in Metamorphoses, brought the weight of modern critical theory to bear on the distinction between SF and fantasy—it will be noted that in his Afterwords below he at least provisionally revokes his earlier anathema against fantasy—in the course of defining science fiction (and, by extension, utopian writing) as the ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’. The title of the present book glancingly alludes to another highly distinctive product of Suvin’s intellectual biography, his 1970 anthology Other Worlds, Other Seas: Science-fiction Stories from Socialist Countries. At the same time, ‘learning from other worlds’ is an attempt to convey the essence of Suvin’s theory of cognitive estrangement: that by imagining strange worlds we come to see our own conditions of life in a new and potentially revolutionary perspective. Needless to say, there is much more to the concept than can be contained in such a blank statement. For example, if we refer back to the questions set out in the quotation from Veronica Hollinger above, the idea of cognitive estrangement will help us to open up most of the issues that Hollinger specifies and to see how they might be answered. In the second section of this Introduction I shall offer a personal account of how ‘learning from other worlds’ leads to a particular understanding of science fiction and utopia.

II The scientific revolution—and thus the history of modern Western civilization—begins with the acts of learning from other worlds symbolized by the names of Columbus and Galileo. Galileo’s astronomical observations were responsible, as Gérard Klein reminds us below, for the image of Jupiter encircled by its satellites which became virtually synonymous with the new physics; but Galileo should also be considered as a writer, whom the novelist Italo Calvino has praised as one of the founders of Italian literature. The history of the revolution in physics has often been written, but its textual character has rarely been recognized. Yet, in Calvino’s words, Galileo con-

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tributes to the great tradition (found also in Dante) of the literary work as a ‘map of the world and of the knowable’—that is, of writing as cognitive labour driven on by the thirst for knowledge—and, moreover, his knowledge is of the unknown on the point of becoming known: When I read Galileo I like to seek out the passages in which he speaks of the moon. It is the first time that the moon becomes a real object for mankind, and it is minutely described as a tangible thing, yet as soon as the moon appears one feels a kind of rarefaction, almost of levitation, in Galileo’s language. One rises with it into an enchanted state of suspension.6

I think we might call this effect of style, expressing what the older SF criticism called the sense of wonder, an estrangement effect. It comes about because the Moon, the nearest and most meaningful of the other worlds of space, has been rendered minutely describable by the invention of the telescope. Calvino’s word, however, is not describable but ‘tangible’. Galileo’s scientific achievement involved measuring the lengths of shadows cast by mountains and the sides of craters on the Moon so as to give a three-dimensional description of its topography.7 By virtue of the terrestrial analogy which enables him to project the moon’s topography in three dimensions, he is implying that there might well be living beings capable of seeing, touching and dwelling on the moon. For Galileo and his contemporaries this was not a forecast of NASA so much as a new piece of evidence in the long-running debate about the plurality of worlds and the existence of extraterrestrial life. It is no surprise, then, that Galileo directly influenced two of the principal early fantasists about life on other worlds, Tommaso Campanella (one of the first utopians) and Johannes Kepler (who may reasonably be claimed as the first science-fiction author). Campanella was to write the Apologia pro Galileo (1622) arguing that extraterrestrials would not be found guilty of original sin.8 Kepler was responsible, among other things, for the Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1610) in which he maintains that if Jupiter has moons then it must be inhabited. As far as our Moon was concerned, Kepler thought that the fact that its valleys and mountains are much bigger than on Earth must mean that its inhabitants are similarly colossal.9 For Kepler as for Campanella the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life had an estranging effect, revealing both human pretensions and human religion in a new light. There is a famous passage in Kepler’s Conversation which, mediated through Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century omnium gatherum the Anatomy of Melancholy, became the epigraph to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds nearly three hundred years later: ‘But who shall dwell in these Worlds if they be inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . . And how are all things made for man?’10 In the Wellsian context, as Peter Fit-

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ting’s chapter hints, these words allude not just to the ‘other worlds’ of Galileo and Kepler but to those opened up by terrestrial explorers such as Columbus. That is, they become (as they are not in Kepler’s Conversation) the pretext for an imperialist ‘first contact’ narrative in which each side eyes the other, bristling with hostility, fearing defeat and committed to battle. Learning from other worlds is always a potentially political act as well as an adventure of disinterested cognition, as Galileo’s own struggle with the Church testifies. So far we have seen ‘cognitive estrangement’ operating on a number of different levels, which need to be distinguished from one another. There is, first, the moment of ontological apperception of something posited (in the terms that Fredric Jameson uses below) as external, independent and strange. But, practically inseparable from this, there is the epistemological labour of bringing-to-knowledge, involving a dialectic of analogy and difference. Galileo has to assume that shadows on the Moon have similar causes to shadows on Earth in order to understand the Moon’s difference from Earth. But the labour of cognition is a painstaking, unpredictable process, involving the twists and turns, the obstacles and dead ends typical of all intellectual enquiry (on which see Nudelman’s chapter on Lem below). From a modern scientific viewpoint the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life in the solar system is one of these dead ends, yet so great an astronomer as Kepler evidently needed to believe in extraterrestrials in order to render Galileo’s discoveries thinkable. In its ontological and epistemological aspects cognitive estrangement denotes (to use Hollinger’s terms) a mode of thinking rather than a body of texts. But textuality and narrativity are also necessarily part of it. Galileo’s discoveries consist of what he is able to write down, not of what he literally sees through his telescope, and Kepler’s and Campanella’s ‘conversations’ with Galileo are entirely conducted through the medium of text. Moreover, the further we get from Galileo himself the more his work becomes mediated and reformulated in the collective imagination, until both his life and his science have become part of the modern myth of rationalism triumphant. (Thus the legendary words ‘Eppur si muove’ became a byword of intellectual heroism as well as of cognitive estrangement, and the legend had to be ‘estranged’ in its turn in a work such as Brecht’s Life of Galileo.) The fact that we now look at Galileo and Kepler as figures of the scientific revolution—a conception that was hardly available to the two men themselves—points to the reflexive element in cognitive estrangement, or what Nudelman refers to as the ‘mutual influence of the cognizing and the cognized’. To understand the Moon it was necessary not only to put one’s observations into words but for the words themselves to be transformed, at the local level by effects such as those that Calvino calls ‘levitation’ and ‘rarefaction’ and on a much broader scale by the gradual emergence of a new

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sort of prose, which would be codified by the Royal Society later in the seventeenth century and would come to be called ‘scientific’. Throwing words at the Moon has, as it were, a boomerang effect—the words come back to us changed—though it should be remembered that only a small proportion of traditional boomerangs were actually designed to return to the hand of the thrower at all. There is, similarly, something new and epoch-making about Galileo’s descriptions of the heavens, and this has made them canonical both in the history of science and, if Calvino’s recommendation is heeded, in literary history. It is, of course, axiomatic that the new world opened to description, which Suvin calls the novum, cannot be fully understood. What the telescope reveals is only a fractional prefiguration (to use Carl Freedman’s term) of what the lunar astronauts have subsequently found, or what we would see if, possessed of the fullest knowledge about the Moon, we were also able to touch it. But the more knowledge we have of the Moon, the less there would be to surprise and astonish us in the act of touching it, and the less likely would it be to have a transforming or levitating effect on our prose. So cognitive estrangement necessarily implies a state of partial and imperfect knowledge. It is the result of coming to understand what is just within, and was formerly beyond, our mental horizons. But surely, it will be objected, there is an irreducible gap between the new worlds discovered by science and exploration, and the imaginary new worlds of SF and utopia which have no existence outside a fictional narrative? What kind of leap is involved in the idea of a ‘literature’ of cognitive estrangement? Kepler’s example shows his inability to comprehend the Galilean novum without inventing stories about the inhabitants of the Moon and planets, but it is Kepler’s calculation of planetary motions and not his proto-science fiction which figures in orthodox histories of science. The literature of cognitive estrangement depends upon a fictional novum or idea of discovery, and typically one which uses scientific discovery itself as a literary trope—as when John Keats, thinking of his first reading of Homer, writes Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken (‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’)

—but the poetic analogy has a very different purpose from Galileo’s use of analogy in his mapping of lunar topography. Nevertheless, the very frequency and, I would say, the inevitability of the ‘new worlds’ metaphor tells its own story about the nature of modern Western experience. The trope of cognitive estrangement in Keats’s poem satisfies our desire to understand something more than the given data of our present state of experience; and it promises communicable, rational discovery, not the fruits of religious rev-

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elation or of some private, indescribable mystical state. It is critical and argumentative as well as creative. It is this that brings us to the fiction of utopia—of utopia considered as a thought-experiment which, in the words that Carl Freedman quotes from Ernst Bloch, is always elsewhere and which functions as a critique of what is present. (This is what enables Freedman to call the literature of cognitive estrangement the ‘critical genre par excellence’.) Kepler’s and Campanella’s inhabited moons are utopias by this definition. In literary contexts, including those which Kepler’s Conversation and his Somnium (1634) provide, the novum begins as a playful narrative invention of the kind that Wells was to suggest in his Preface to the Scientific Romances: ‘human beings inside out or worlds like dumb-bells or a gravitation that repels’. But, says Wells, anyone can dream up such things: what matters is their translation into ‘commonplace’, ‘human’ terms and their inscription in a convincing narrative.11 The invention or thought-experiment has to be mobilised in a story, and the story becomes the vehicle of a critique of the world we thought we already knew—that is, of a utopia or at least a conscious or unconscious parable. There then follow the literary questions that are debated or touched upon in most of the chapters that follow. Does a strange newness or ‘novum’ embodied in a story inevitably result in a parable? Is the parable a ‘code’ embedded in the fictional text or a way of reading that text, and at what point should it predominate over other codings and readings? Is our need to ‘learn from’ the texts of fantastic fiction something more than a reflection of our own pedagogic position as students and teachers?

III If what Hollinger calls the ‘SF effect’ is one of learning from other worlds or cognitive estrangement, what is involved in writing criticism about SF, and teaching it in the classroom? In science, the process of scientific discovery is paralleled (or, at worst, parodied) in scientific teaching. The experimental demonstration repeats the discovery, or supposedly repeats it. Some of its most striking cognitive rituals occur in elementary biology and medicine, since in the teaching of human biology the body itself must be estranged. Pupils in the biology lab look at human blood—very likely, their own blood—under the microscope. Medical students are initiated into what was traditionally known as the anatomical theatre, in which the professor of surgery demonstrates human dissection and the students learn to practise it. In each case novices are trained, under some emotional and intellectual stress, to observe only those phenomena which have already been ratified by biological and medical science. In literary and cultural studies, professional ratification is doubtless

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much looser but the metaphors of analysing, examining and dissecting (or ‘opening up’) texts are almost mandatory. The process of initiation into textual studies is thus conceived as being analogous, in however innocuous and bloodless a fashion, to the initiation of medical students. In the case of science fiction—which, as we have seen, is offered as a ‘new world of reading’ to those who have yet to ‘discover’ it—the experience of studying and criticism means taking up an attitude of cognitive estrangement to the cognitive estrangement found in the text. This ‘second-degree’ experience is not always welcome. ‘Science fiction has lost its innocence, a quality notoriously hard to recapture’, complained Kingsley Amis in 1981. Twenty years earlier, when Amis himself had written a critical study of science fiction, SF writer Ted Tubb accused him of trying to ruin the genre by bringing in ‘highbrow values’.12 Such comments take for granted a ‘mutual influence of the cognizing and the cognized’, so that writing criticism about SF has the effect of changing the genre itself—just as dissection changes our ideas about the human body. If thinking is inherently self-reflexive, cognitive estrangement can always be estranged. Moreover, where thinking can go it arguably must go. This means that our methods of estranging science fiction must themselves be subject to a methodological critique. Such a critique is partly explicit and partly implicit in the present book. Taking Darko Suvin’s contribution to SF criticism and theory as paradigmatic, Learning from Other Worlds begins with a series of discussions and contextualizations of his theory of cognitive estrangement (thus aspiring to a third degree of estrangement), and ends with Suvin’s own ‘post-theoretical’ self-reflections. Edward James’s perspective on the early history of science-fiction studies may be deduced from his title ‘Before the Novum’, where the ‘novum’ in question is Suvin’s critical advent in North America. Suvin thus becomes the Galileo or Columbus of SF studies, although as James reminds us he was by no means the first writer to develop critical self-awareness within the field. James’s starting-point is Blish’s 1965 survey of ‘SF: The Critical Literature’. (What constituted the ‘critical literature’ in 1965 has all been superseded now, although there have been attempts to rehabilitate the still more primitive level of self-awareness found in ‘Golden Age’ magazine editorials.) James’s chapter emphasizes a certain conservatism in Suvin’s impact—that he was, ‘in many ways, rephrasing the stance of the past’— but how decisively he (together with other contemporaries such as Samuel Delany, Robert Philmus, Eric Rabkin, Mark Rose and Robert Scholes) rephrased it! Just before Suvin’s arrival, the British magazine New Worlds Science Fiction set out with a mission to revolutionize the genre, but the standards of New Worlds were those of ‘legitimate’, ‘serious expression’ by mainstream modernist and postmodernist writers, and the tone in which they were put forward—to judge by the sample James gives us—was that of a

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junior-league football coach. That science fiction possessed its own kind of literary sophistication, and could generate (and, also, fail to live up to) its own literary standards, was in danger of being forgotten by the leaders of ‘New Wave’ SF. So, around 1970 Suvin began to propound a ‘poetics’ of science fiction’, borrowing the label from Aristotle and from formalist and structuralist theory. The term presents an immediate paradox, since structuralist poetics is synchronic and offers little purchase for literary-historical explanations. Yet Suvin’s definitive study Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) is a narrative of SF history, and he now regrets that more attention was not paid to its historical aspects. In the next chapter, ‘Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction’, I argue that, in a general sense, Suvin’s own later work anticipates the deconstruction of his earlier formalism. The concepts of estrangement, cognition and the novum are, in the end, richer and more important to him than the notion of a separate and coherent genre that they were initially used to define. So far from regarding SF and utopian fiction as theoretically unique, he has subsequently written on estrangement and cognition in relation to poetry, drama, metaphor, parody and other literary and cultural forms. And yet we still need a theory that will serve to describe and identify science fiction’s generic uniqueness. Suvin’s poetics was originally offered as a ‘heuristic model’, where heurism is defined as the ‘practice or principle of training pupils to discover things for themselves’ (OED). In other words, it is like a laboratory experiment. Like many experiments, it will probably continue to serve for teaching purposes long after the hypotheses it originally supported have been modified and redeveloped by others. There have been a number of surveys to discover which SF texts are most commonly taught on college courses in the English-speaking world; it would be interesting to discover whether Suvin’s theories are as commonly taught as, say, Neuromancer, The Left Hand of Darkness or The Time Machine. The contributors to the present book are in no doubt that Suvin’s poetics has successfully outlived its moment; but what was its moment? ‘Cognitive estrangement’ may be taken to be a fact about the 1970s, just as T. S. Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was a fact about the 1920s (and not the 1640s of which it offered a theory).13 In ‘ “Look into the dark”: On Dystopia and the Novum’, Tom Moylan views Suvin’s concern with the cognitive dimension of science-fiction as an intervention within a specific political context, that of the post-Vietnam American Left. Suvin’s ‘driving desire to differentiate between novum and pseudo-novum’ highlighted science fiction’s commitment to visions of human transformation and, therefore, its radical political potential. Suvin locates all SF within the utopian–dystopian horizon, but he has sometimes viewed the dystopian as being irrevocably tainted by its links with Cold War liberalism and ideological conformity. Moylan’s purpose is to show how dystopia as well as utopia can be brought within the

Introduction

11

framework of the ‘novum’ and cognitive estrangement. In a remarkable move, the text that Moylan uses to exemplify the potential for a ‘militant, epical’ utopian pessimism turns out to be a short poem by Suvin himself, his deeply personal meditation on ‘Growing Old without Yugoslavia’, first published in Science-Fiction Studies in 1993. As Moylan demonstrates, both the concept of the novum and the idea of ‘utopian pessimism’ derive from Ernst Bloch, who is perhaps Suvin’s most important theoretical precursor and source. (What Bloch has done for the theory of utopia, Suvin has arguably done for SF.) Bloch’s theories are summarized in the following chapter, ‘Science Fiction and Utopia: A Historicophilosophical Overview’, by Carl Freedman. In a tour de force of compression, Freedman outlines the Blochian conception of a utopian hermeneutic and traces its relationships both to the classical literary utopia and to modern science fiction. Although SF is not directly connected to political utopianism, Freedman argues that it is as close or closer to utopia understood as a critical hermeneutic ideal than are the largely monologic traditional narratives, from More to William Morris, that go under the name of utopias. If this is so, Freedman adds (pulling, as it were, a second rabbit out of his impressively logical conjuror’s hat), then Karl Marx, celebrated by Bloch as the greatest of utopian thinkers, must also be, implicitly at least, ‘one of the major theorists of science fiction’. Though Freedman rarely refers to Suvin directly, his revisiting of the The Time Machine versus Utopia as structural models for SF and utopian fiction would be unthinkable without Suvin as precursor. This is, in some ways, the most fundamental theoretical restatement of the coupling of SF and utopia since Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. If Marxist socialism is utopian—while claiming in some versions to be scientific—then the relationship between socialist thought on the one hand and science-fictional utopias on the other must be demonstrable empirically, and not merely as a matter of logic. This is Marc Angenot’s task in ‘Society After the Revolution’, an analysis of the blueprints produced by the leaders of the Second International (who subscribed to Engels’s notorious anathema against ‘utopian’ as opposed to ‘scientific’ socialism). In Angenot’s view the collectivist blueprints are ‘mythical-utopian constructs’ whose significance lies in their critical negativity: that is, they are ‘true’ not in the sense of offering a positive programme but in showing what is impossible under capitalism. Although the tactical and organizational function of such utopias always needs to be remembered, their status as ideological ‘counter-propositions’ aligns them far more closely than their authors would have admitted to the contemporary fictional utopias of Bellamy, Morris and Wells. At the same time, the later rehabilitation of utopian imaginings in the work of Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and (ultimately) Darko Suvin arose from critical Marxism’s rejection of literal belief in the future projections to which all militants were once expected to subscribe.

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In Part II, the problematic of SF-and-utopia is temporarily left behind, only to be taken up with renewed force by Jameson and Suvin at the end of the volume. Instead, Gérard Klein’s lucid brief chapter serves to reconstruct genre theory from first principles, starting from Galileo’s telescope and arguing that SF is structurally dependent on the images and representations through which scientific observations and theories are mediated and enter public discourse. This means that cognitive estrangement and what is often termed ‘conceptual breakthrough’ appear in SF in the mythologized form in which they have entered, or are in the process of entering, the collective imagination. Attempts to apply rigidly positivistic criteria of scientific accuracy or plausibility in the SF field are therefore beside the point; Klein’s argument has the effect of retrieving ‘science fantasy’ from its somewhat anomalous position on the fringes of the SF genre. At the same time, SF’s endorsement of scientific ideas and representations can be directly compared to that found in other kinds of writing which exploit the supposed authority of science for their own ends. Alluding to Sokal and Bricmont’s recent book Intellectual Impostures with its controversial exposures of (mis)applications of relativity, non-Euclidian geometry and chaos theory in recent Parisian thought, Klein wryly concludes that, among the various forms of contemporary discourse making use of scientific images, SF has the advantage of being openly and avowedly fictitious. As Klein observes, even a text describing a purely fantastic planetary settlement such as Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles would be inconceivable without the long tradition of literary and scientific writings portraying Mars as an astronomical object. The same is clearly true of Wells’s The War of the Worlds, but, as Peter Fitting reminds us in ‘Estranged Invaders’, Wells exemplifies the SF writer’s ability to bring different areas of scientific and political discourse together in a single fable. The moment of First Contact as exemplified by Wells’s gruesome description of the Martian invaders is both a classic ‘image of science’ and a prime instance of science fiction’s estrangement effects. But First Contact is also one of modern narrative’s primal scenes, carrying an emotional charge deriving both from the Western colonial experience and from Gothic fantasy. Frequently it provides an excuse for crude xenophobic scaremongering. Fitting therefore contrasts Wells’s comparatively complex and nuanced portrayal of the Martians with the mass of later SF popularizing and stereotyping invasion motifs. Wells’s aliens represent not only a bug-eyed displacement of contemporary racism but what Fitting describes as a return of the repressed, a fantasy in which the beneficiaries of European imperialism are able to acknowledge their guilt by identifying with the plight of its victims. The Europeans in The War of the Worlds are like subhuman ‘natives’ threatened with extermination by the invading force, but the Martians are also, in a sense, ‘Europeans’. In The War of the Worlds science-fictional estrangement is the vehicle of a horrify-

Introduction

13

ing, reflexive self-knowledge about imperialism which might be compared to that offered by another highly ambivalent turn-of-the-century text, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Fitting, a conscious latecomer to the discussion of First Contact, sets out to estrange the earlier readings (including Suvin’s)14 of The War of the Worlds and its progeny. The growing body of criticism and scholarship devoted to Wells’s science fiction is in sharp contrast to the critical neglect suffered by the most popular of his direct successors in the British school of SF—‘John Wyndham’ (John Beynon Harris). Harris’s use of a variety of pseudonyms and his repressed and reclusive personal life characterize a mode of authorship in stark opposition to Wells’s. Where the latter seems to have kept his science fiction and his personal experiences apart, Ketterer argues in his chapter that SF functioned for Wyndham/Harris as a kind of ‘estranged autobiography’. Ketterer’s analysis of The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) draws on unpublished letters and diaries in order to unravel the meanings of the alien Midwich children and their (missing) linkages to Harris’s own life. Beneath the ‘novel-of-manners style’ Ketterer reveals both an ‘anguished, animalistic, Darwinian truth’ and a glimpse of the personal secrets and traumas hidden in the fiction. In this pioneering chapter, biographical research—one of literary criticism’s most venerable tools—itself becomes estranged when the object of study is not the customary lyric poem or realistic novel but a science-fictional text. While Ketterer’s study depends on a patient reconstruction of Wyndham’s social circle and contacts with Bedales School in south-east England, Rafail Nudelman, in his chapter, offers a critical study of the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem distinguished by its familiarity with the author’s Polish texts, including items which have yet to be translated and are, therefore, virtually unknown to Western commentators. Lem more than any other science-fiction writer has been viewed as a creator of epistemological parables, and, as Nudelman shows, the process of cognition is the ‘meta-story or meta-plot’ of all of his SF. His fiction presents not only enigmatic first contacts with the alien but the recurring theme of the labyrinth, linked (so Nudelman suggests) to an initiation rite in which the hidden truth or strange world remains obscured by a form of mask. Lem’s heroes, such as Kelvin in Solaris, are lost inside the labyrinth, dazzled by its zigzags and dead ends, but still hoping for some sudden illumination. Lem is the poet of humanity’s ‘cosmic initiation’ (via the space programme), rather than of the mastery of the physical universe which preoccupies Western SF. Moreover, since he writes within the framework of modern science and refuses any religious or mystical consolations, one can move around in his labyrinths but there are, in the end, no exits. Nudelman’s chapter strikingly consolidates the Polish novelist’s standing as (in Suvin’s words) ‘one of the most significant SF writers of [the twentieth] century’.15

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As Nudelman explains, Lem’s fiction suggests the need for a continual renewal of the instruments of cognition if we are to understand new worlds. This is in stark contrast to the outpourings of journalistic banality lying in wait for each new scientific and technological discovery, and especially for those in which (as they say) yesterday’s ‘sci-fi’ becomes today’s ‘science fact’. In 1997 the technology of cloning, which had earlier been portrayed in science-fiction stories by writers such as Ursula Le Guin and John Varley, suddenly became the focus of intense media discussion after the public unveiling of Dolly the genetically engineered sheep. The results are surveyed in Marleen S. Barr’s splendidly acerbic chapter. Heralding a future in which women might be expected to lose control of reproduction to (stereotypically male) scientists, the media commentary on Dolly revealed an extent of patriarchal prejudice both hilarious and deeply disturbing. (This would be repeated when, in 1998, the now world-famous cloned sheep herself became pregnant, and the media heaved a collective sigh of relief. ‘Dolly’s had a little lamb—and in the way that nature intended’, as one television channel reported.) Barr mercilessly holds up cloning reportage as an example of non-cognitive estrangement, ‘estrangement from the present and future’ and, above all, from the female. Here Dolly the sheep, corralled in her pen and surrounded by paparazzi, becomes the text both for a feminist parable and for a lesson in the cultural containment of science’s potential for human transformation. The final chapters in Part II is Fredric Jameson’s pioneering textual reading, at once finely detailed and boldly speculative, of what has been acclaimed as the outstanding SF work of the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. In Jameson’s progression from a first-level ‘scientific’ reading to second-level allegorical and utopian readings of Robinson’s saga of the colonization, terraforming, and political history of the red planet, many of the themes of Learning from Other Worlds are brought together. One remarkable aspect of Robinson’s work—after the New Wave’s flirtations with surrealism and literary experiment, the erasure of the SF/fantasy borderline in writing of the 1970s, and the postmodernist arabesques of cyberpunk—has been his relatively traditional and sternly realistic narrative style. Jameson shows how Robinson’s history of social construction on Mars leads to a new understanding of the ‘constructedness’ of our own planet, including its very vegetation as well as the social, economic and ideological systems that surround us. Although Jameson refers only in passing to other recent ‘world-construction’ narratives such as those of Aldiss and Le Guin, his chapter implies that the motif of settlement on a planet of bare rock—with all its technological dilemmas, emotional conflicts and ecopolitical tensions and struggles—might be the contemporary SF trope, and also the utopian trope, par excellence. Learning from other worlds here is, supremely, the task of learning from an epic fictional text in which a new

Introduction

15

world is being built (mimetically, but also narratively and textually), in the face of human, natural and cognitive resistances. As Jameson shows, the Mars trilogy insistently raises the question of the relationship between SF and utopia. Jameson’s scrupulous alternation between the different levels of reading that Robinson’s trilogy demands leads directly to the central argument of Darko Suvin’s essay, an Afterword to this collection from which I shall extract one or two themes, without in any way wishing to pre-empt it. According to Suvin, ‘all estranged texts’ (including fantasy) are ‘centrally parables’, which ‘engage the audience in an act of argumentative world-creation’. Readers insecapably but tentatively find themselves sketching in the Blochian ‘City Beyond the Horizon’ towards which the parable might appear to be pointing. The potential of science fiction to renew the instruments of cognition all too often remains unfulfilled—and ‘perversions’ whether artistic or political ‘have to be chastised with scorpions’—but SF has the proven capacity to construct parables that are as far-reaching, as radical and as estranging as any that literature can show. Suvin quotes Suzy McKee Charnas as saying that she turned to science fiction because it gave her ‘the margin of fantasy to push the ideas of the story as far as I saw they could go’. Utopia here is the aim; the ‘margin’ of fantastic invention (but, it should be noted, only the margin) is the technique; and the science-fiction genre combines the two in its acts of argumentative world-creation. ‘Argumentative’, because these are other worlds which seek to engage us in dialogue, and from which we can and should learn.

Notes 1 ‘New Worlds: Discovering Science Fiction and Fantasy’, Guardian, 27 Nov. 1999: 3, 8. The supplement is sponsored by Voyager, a HarperCollins imprint. 2 Ibid.: 2. 3 Veronica Hollinger, ‘Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980–1999’, p. 238. 4 Frederik Pohl, letter to the present writer 1 Nov. 1997. 5 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 61. 6 Italo Calvino, ‘Two Interviews on Science and Literature’, pp. 31–32. 7 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, p. 221. 8 See Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant, p. 93. 9 Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, pp. 28, 39. Cf. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, p. 77. 10 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, title-page. In Edward Rosen’s translation this passage appears as follows: ‘Well then, someone may say, if there are globes in

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the heaven similar to our earth, do we vie with them over who occupies the better portion of the universe? For if their globes are nobler, we are not the noblest of rational creatures. Then how can all things be for man’s sake? How can we be the masters of God’s handiwork?’ Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation, p. 43. 11 H. G. Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, p. 241. 12 Kingsley Amis, ‘Introduction’ to The Golden Age of Science Fiction, pp. 8, 27. 13 The source of this insight into T. S. Eliot is of course Raymond Williams, who was one of Suvin’s (as he was one of my own) intellectual mentors. 14 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 214. 15 D[arko] S[uvin], ‘Stanislaw Lem’ in John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. 711. It seems likely that Lem’s critical essays on SF, which began appearing in Poland in the early 1960s, had a major influence on Suvin.

PART ONE

Science Fiction and Utopia: Theory and Politics

Before the Novum: The Prehistory of Science Fiction Criticism EDWARD JAMES

In 1967 Darko Suvin left Yugoslavia, first to go to the United States and then, a year later, to Canada. This chapter will look at the significance of Suvin’s early criticism—as summed up in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction— by first examining the state of science fiction criticism before Suvin, and by comparing this with what Suvin brought to the field. Just two years before Suvin’s arrival in North America, the science fiction writer and critic James Blish had conveniently published a discussion of the development of the criticism of modern science fiction: ‘SF: The Critical Literature’.1 He achieved this by a discussion of just five books: Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (1956); William Atheling, Jr’s The Issue at Hand (1964), Sam Moskowitz’s Explorers of the Infinite (1963); the collection of essays by science fiction writers edited by Basil Davenport, The Science Fiction Novel (1959), and Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell (1960). Only the last was written by somebody not intimately connected with the science fiction community; only the last was published by a major publisher on both sides of the Atlantic: the other four were all published by Advent Publishers Inc., an enterprise owned by SF fans in Chicago, with a small distribution almost entirely within the science fiction community. The contrast is skewed somewhat by Blish’s emphasis on modern science fiction: thus, he excludes two earlier books that did have wider circulation but which concentrated on the more ‘respectable’ antiquarian origins of science fiction: Professor J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947) and Dr Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Voyages to the Moon (1949).2 Blish’s five books—one of which, that by ‘William Atheling, Jr’, was in fact by Blish himself—were of very different styles and value as critical works. The Knight and Atheling volumes were collections of reviews and essays by practising science fiction writers: both of them rigorous in their

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exposure of poor writing and illogical thought, but very much viewing science fiction from within, and concentrating on individual works, rather than trying to place the whole genre historically or critically within literature as a whole. Moskowitz, one of the earliest and most enthusiastic of science fiction fans, was, according to Blish, ‘the nearest thing to a scholar that science fiction has yet produced’ (25); he was also, according to Blish and most of his other critics, a man with little critical sense, little knowledge of literature outside science fiction, and a startling ability to produce errors and misreadings. His book Explorers of the Infinite, moreover, was a study of some of the founders of science fiction, of whom the most recent was Stanley Weinbaum (d. 1936), thus hardly a study of modern science fiction. The fourth of Blish’s books, Davenport’s The Science Fiction Novel, was of mixed worth, though Blish still rated it ‘a landmark’ (30). Heinlein’s contribution made points already familiar to readers of SF magazines and their editorials: that science fiction prepares readers for the future, and, by offering inspiration to would-be inventors, spurs on technological progress. Of much more interest were the essays by the SF writers C. M. Kornbluth and Robert Bloch. The former argues that modern science fiction had had little social effect because it is ‘a wish-fulfilment device which does not require the reader to take action in society’ (29), the latter accuses modern science fiction of thoughtlessly perpetrating social clichés and neglecting its duty of social criticism. Blish’s fifth book, Amis’s New Maps of Hell, was the first study of modern science fiction to be published by a major publisher, and, since it was widely noticed at the time, and soon available in a cheap paperback editions,3 it was the first such study to be read by a large number of people outside the science fiction community. Amis was an academic, and not a writer of science fiction; the book originated as a series of lectures given at Princeton University. These facts allow one to imagine a strong contrast with the other four books. This is wholly misleading, however. Amis was an academic, but would shortly decide to leave academic life; Amis was a writer, and would shortly try his hand at writing science fiction. Amis had in fact been reading science fiction since the early 1930s, and in many ways the tone taken by New Maps of Hell was that of the fan: despite his sophistication and his strong awareness of the poor quality of much science fiction, he was clearly inspired by the idea of making science fiction appear ‘respectable’, by giving it a distinguished ancestry and by giving it a clear social purpose. In his first chapter he talked about the distinctions between science fiction and fantasy, and traced the origins of science fiction back to Lucian of Samosata, though with rather more enthusiasm back to Gulliver’s Travels, and thence to Verne and Wells, the ‘two creators of modern science fiction’.4 In the sec-

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ond chapter he began, as many fans would have done, with Hugo Gernsback; and he carried the story through to the present, arguing that by the late 1950s science fiction had largely outgrown its puerile origins in the earliest SF magazines. The third chapter returned to some extent to the puerile, or at least to the ways in which science fiction can unconsciously express fears and desires: again it concluded in favour of science fiction, arguing that SF betrays a healthy—even if sometimes excessive—respect for reason. Chapters 4 and 5, ‘Utopias 1’ and ‘Utopias 2’, formed the core of Amis’s study, and his own understanding of the genre. Neither chapter had a great deal to do with what is normally meant by ‘utopia’. The first deals with science fiction as warning: through science fiction one can extrapolate present trends into the future, to warn the present against the dangers that lie ahead; the second concentrates on Frederik Pohl, and in particular The Space Merchants by Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, a satire on the advertising industry (and much else), which Amis saw as one of the most considerable achievements of modern science fiction. (Blish justly criticized Amis for giving most of the credit in this partnership to Frederik Pohl, whom Amis regarded as ‘the most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced’,5 calling this a ‘now notorious deification . . . which I suspect is already an embarrassment to both men’ (33).5 Like Bloch, therefore, in the Davenport essays, Amis sees social criticism and social satire as the predominant utility of science fiction, and one that is successfully fulfilled by a number of writers of the 1950s. Blish comments that this subgenre of science fiction has become such a cliché and a bore that rather than calling for better examples, as Amis does, ‘what we should ask for is a moratorium on the damn thing’ (33). But, as we shall see, Suvin has followed Amis in privileging the satirical aspects of science fiction. In the final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Amis tries to see where science fiction might be heading, looking at a number of themes, noting (as critics have been noting ever since) that a number of mainstream novelists (he names Shute and Updike) have been taking science fiction themes, treating them ineptly, and publishing the result to great acclaim by those who affect to despise science fiction. He concludes by admitting (or pretending to admit, in an attempt to win over his audience) that the claims of science fiction propagandists are overinflated. Science fiction is not going to engulf the rest of literature; science fiction is not the only way to attract young people to science or break down resistance to interplanetary travel. It has two things to offer, he says: a means of criticizing our society and our assumptions, and a means of looking at the future, at historical change, and ‘those large, general, speculative questions that ordinary fiction so often avoids’. There are already ‘a dozen current practitioners who have attained the status of

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the sound minor writer whose example brings into existence the figure of real standing’. Rather than celebrating the achievements of science fiction, Amis concludes by saying that the genre is beginning to tread a path, ‘in its faltering way’, which will not only secure its own future but perhaps ‘make some contribution to the security of our own’.6 Blish was right to say that criticism of modern science fiction was, in 1965, confined to only a few books. But he recognized in the course of his discussion that criticism and commentary was carried on in three other places: in the editorial columns of science fiction magazines, in reviews and in critical journals. What was the state of discussion in these three areas by the time of Suvin’s arrival on the scene? For Gary Westfahl, it was in the editorial columns of science fiction magazines that a first critical theory of science fiction was hammered out, most notably by Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr.7 Gernsback proclaimed his view of science fiction in the first edition of his magazine Amazing Stories, itself the first specialist science fiction magazine: it is ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’;8 later he specified that ‘the ideal proportion of a scientifiction story should be seventy-five percent literature interwoven with twenty-five percent science’.9 Science fiction was thus intended to be a hybrid form, non-fiction welded to the imaginary romance: and it had a very clear purpose, which was to educate as well as to entertain. Not only is science fiction an idea of tremendous import, but it is to be an important factor in making the world a better place to live in, through educating the public to the possibilities of science on life which, even today, are not appreciated by the man on the street . . . If every man, woman, boy and girl, could be induced to read science fiction right along, there would certainly be a great resulting benefit to the community, in that the educational standards of its people would be raised tremendously. Science fiction would make people happier, give them a broader understanding of the world, make them more tolerant.10

The ‘man in the street’, and his family, would benefit; but so would the scientist, argued Gernsback: it would open up ‘his’ mind, suggest new inventions and ideas, and speed on the technological progress of the world. John W. Campbell, Jr, whose ideas are publicly expressed in the editorials which he wrote between 1937 and 1971 for his magazine Astounding Science Fiction (which became Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction in 1960 and later Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact), had a great impact on science fiction, above all in the first decade or so of his editorship of Astounding: in part this was because of the forcefulness of his personality, by which he would bend

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his authors to his own purposes, and in part because he paid more per word, and thus captured the greater part of the writing talent in this fruitful decade.11 Campbell’s ideas about science fiction, as reconstructed by Gary Westfahl, develop out of Gernsback’s ideas rather than countering them: he never mentions Gernsback, but the implications are clear. Thus, science fiction should be more humanistic, and more sociological: ‘In older science fiction the Machine and the Great Idea predominated. Modern readers—and hence editors!—don’t want that; they want stories of people living in a world where a Great Idea or . . . a Machine . . . form the background’.12 Science should be there, but in the background; prophecy should be there, but as careful extrapolation of the future. Science fiction should be a thoughtexperiment about the future, ‘a way of considering the past, present and future from a different viewpoint, and taking a look at how else we might do things . . . a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas—and for examining old ideas’.13 It should be educative, but not for the boys and girls whom Gernsback hoped for as readers: Campbell’s ideal reader was an engineer, who would bat around ideas in stories with other engineers, in a never-ending brainstorming session: stories which would be read by rocket-scientists in the USA, or in Russia, and be used by them in their search for real solutions. Campbell was not back-pedalling on Gernsback’s grandiose vision for science fiction: he was extending it. Science fiction was, or should be, integral to scientific thought and research; it had to be judged on those grounds, and not on merely literary ones: or, one might say, not on literary grounds at all. Gernsback’s ideas, as developed by Campbell, were by the 1950s firmly embedded in science fiction criticism within the field: they were never without their critics, but they fitted in so well with the two-culture mentality of many in the science fiction world, and gave science fiction writers and readers such a sense of their own importance that they were unwilling to move much beyond them. Science fiction was a Literature of Ideas, it was frequently said; criticism should be directed towards those ideas.14 H. L. Gold was probably the most vociferous imitator of Campbell in this respect in the 1950s, as editor of Galaxy, alongside The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the most influential new SF magazine of the 1950s. But his editorials reduce the importance of science in the formulation, as well as placing more emphasis on literary value, claiming that one should be able to apply ‘the standards of any legitimate branch of literature to science fiction’.15 Nevertheless, ideas should predominate: ‘What science fiction must present entertainingly is speculation. Not prophecy, but fictional surmises based on present factors, scientific, social, political, cultural, or whatever’.16

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Anthony Boucher, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction throughout the 1950s, did not believe in editorials, so although those who wrote for him knew the importance which he placed on literary quality, and although many credit him with raising the literary standards of magazine SF, he did not express or develop his ideas in public. The crusade for higher literary standards for science fiction began in the editorials of the British SF magazine New Worlds, in the early 1960s. In 1962 J. G. Ballard used the occasion of a Guest Editorial to bemoan space adventure, to deplore H. G. Wells’s ‘disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction’, to demand the jettisoning of present narrative forms and plots, and more ‘psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time-systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the remote, sombre, half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics’. The first true s-f story, and one I intend to write myself if no-one else will, is about a man with amnesia lying on a beach and looking at a rusty bicycle wheel, trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them. If this sounds off-beat and abstract, so much the better, for science fiction could use a big dose of the experimental; and if it sounds boring, well at least it will be a new kind of boredom.17

The following year Michael Moorcock used the same space to call for a new direction to SF. Let’s have a quick look at what a lot of science fiction lacks. Briefly these are some of the qualities I miss on the whole—passion, subtlety, irony, original characterisation, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer . . . And another point to authors—s-f is becoming a legitimate field for serious expression again . . ., and as it does so the mainstream writers are going to move it. Watch it, lads, we’re going to need to be good.18

The tendency of the New Wave begun in Britain by Ballard and Moorcock, and picked up in North America by Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany and others, was to elide the boundaries between science fiction and the mainstream, to remove science as a significant element, and to judge science fiction on the same criteria as used for the mainstream: in a sense, then, to try to remove science fiction as a separate category. One tactic was to change the name: thus, the writer and anthologist Judith Merril: Science fiction as a descriptive label has long since lost whatever validity in might once have had. By now it means so many things to so many people

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that . . . I prefer not to use it at all, when I am talking about stories. SF (or generically, s-f) allows you to think science fiction if you like, while I think science fable or scientific fantasy or speculative fiction, or (once in a rare while, because there’s little enough of it being written, by any rigorous definition) science fiction.19

The New Wave was at its height when Suvin came to North America; its impetus faded away soon after, and one might argue that it had little influence. The improved literary standards within science fiction by the 1970s were more to do with changing publishing practices; the decline in the importance of accurate science as a criterion may have as much to do with the rise of fantasy, and with science fiction attracting both readers and writers from well outside the scientific community. And the New Wave certainly did not win the day as far as critical criteria were concerned: there was, for instance, a full restatement of the view that SF was a ‘literature of ideas’ in Extrapolation, December 1971.20 After editorials, the next place where critical thought about science fiction could be developed was in reviews. One of the problems with reviews was that they were mostly produced by and for the science fiction community, and ‘the attitude once widely held within sf that any sf book was a good one, and was best not panned in public, produced a flock of reviewers and no critics’.21 The situation is perhaps best encapsulated by the reviewing policy of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which for many years (throughout the 1950s and beyond) called its review section ‘Recommended Books’. But reviewers did often lay down clear lines concerning the ideal science fiction book. The anthologist Groff Conklin, for instance, reviewed for the magazine Galaxy in its first five years. Science fiction should be written in a cool unadorned style, he thought: Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth was ‘an overwhelming argument for peace and a masterly example of sensitive and perceptive story-telling, unadorned by high pressure writing or hysterics’ (of the kind, presumably, that one would expect from a woman).22 Van Vogt’s The House that Stood Still, on the other hand, was ‘a potboiler that develops no head of steam’: ‘The book is readable, no question about it. But in science fiction more is needed, as van Vogt’s other works brilliantly show. Ideas, imagination, scope: these things, essential in good science fiction, this book has in minimal quantities’.23 Campbell’s The Moon is Hell was ‘full of ingenious solutions to known lunar problems’.24 Of Time and Again, he wrote ‘Like so much good modern science fiction, Simak’s new book is based on some real, honest, practical ethical thinking. It is an idea book’.25 In his review of William F. Temple’s The Foursided Triangle he quotes Galaxy’s editor with approval: ‘H. L. Gold has defined adult science fiction as: fiction that is based on credible characters with

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believable motivations, whose conflicts and problems are the result of a projected environment, with which their attempts to find a solution, and the solution itself, are logically consistent’.26 As for so many reviewers of the time it is the ideas that count: style and literary value are largely irrelevant. That Conklin was style-blind is suggested by his review of Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint’s The Blind Spot, which he found ‘astonishingly compelling and dramatic’: ‘only the most jaded and unimaginative of readers will be able to put this honored classic down unfinished. It’s good’.27 Most reviewers nowadays would concur with Damon Knight’s assessment, even if they might not be quite so acerbic. Knight considered that Hall (who wrote most of the book) was ‘style-deaf’, ‘totally innocent of grammar’, ‘so little at home with the English language that he could not lay hands on the commonest idiom without mangling it’, and ‘incapable of remembering what he had already written or looking forward to what he was about to write’. He was ‘credulous without limit’, had ‘no empathy, and, I might add, no sense of humor’, and ‘his knowledge of science, if he had any, is not discoverable in these pages’.28 The difference, of course, was that Knight was a practising writer of science fiction, more interested in the practicalities of writing in the genre than in the ideas that were expressed. His reviewing, which began in 1952, had considerable influence on the field, which gradually came to respect, though not necessarily to imitate, his credo:29 that a review is not the same as a publisher’s blurb, that science fiction is worth taking seriously and that ordinary critical standards (originality, sincerity, style, construction, logic, coherence, sanity, ‘garden-variety grammar’) can be applied to it, and that a bad book hurts SF more than ten bad notices. There was little attention paid by reviewers to science fiction outside the science fiction community itself. In the United States, science fiction books were rarely given individual reviews, but were lumped together in columns with titles like ‘Of Time and Space’ and ‘Spaceman’s Realm’. On the other hand, in the 142 reviews of SF books analysed by Lerner published between 1946 and 1950, Lerner claims that 87 per cent addressed their literary content, 10 per cent their scientific content, and only 3 per cent their ideological content.30 Reviewers in American newspapers seem to have been divided between those who were actually science fiction writers themselves, who tended to write as if their readers knew the field, and outsiders who were self-consciously slumming. Neither produced a serious attempt at criticism of the genre. But when that criticism emerged, the two camps emerged clearly. Such was the case, for instance, when Siegfried Mandel and Peter Fingesten published ‘The Myth of Science Fiction’ in the Saturday Review in 1955.31 Science fiction, they argued, had become a substitute for religion,

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replacing concern for earthly problems with ‘the dangers and incalculable vistas lurking in the vast stretches of an unknown universe’. As a result, they claimed, it had become escapist, but it had lost touch with reality; ‘it does not correspond to the normal aspirations of the human spirit. The science-fiction future is not one which strikes the average man as an age of promise; it is not . . . a world where most of us would care to abide’. But, of course, for many years science-fiction fans had been priding themselves on being something better than the ‘average man’, and having aspirations that did not correspond to ‘the normal aspirations of the human spirit’, and reaction was swift and furious. An entire letter column was devoted to almost unanimous attack on the article, and John W. Campbell was given space the following year to reply at some length to Mandel and Fingesten: he threw down the gauntlet to anyone from outside the science fiction field who dared criticise it. ‘It is the total difference in objective which renders irrelevant and fatuous the “literary criticism” of science-fiction by anyone not himself primarily a science-fictioneer’. Even more rashly, he suggested that science fiction should be judged on its merits as prophecy.32 It is in fact interesting how many of the outside commentators on science fiction in the 1950s whom Lerner has unearthed—including Mandel and Fingesten themselves—were actually accepting the criteria for science fiction criticism laid down by the science fiction community itself: that is, they privileged the ideas which were expressed in science fiction, and often commented, both in praise and in denigration, on the ideas rather than the literary ways in which they were expressed. An early two-part article in the New York Times Book Review, which began as a comment on Bretnor’s collection of essays about science fiction, noted with due surprise that Bretnor discussed science fiction as if Verne and Wells had not existed, and argued that it was a serious literature ‘deeply concerned with mankind’s present plight and its problematical future’.33 Stanley Frank, in Nation’s Business, described science fiction as ‘compounded mainly of philosophy with a sugar-coating of fiction’, and noted the secular idealism of SF writers.34 Clifton Fadiman, in Holiday, said that science fiction was the attempt to cope with the movement of the Western imagination away from the human heart towards technology,35 and that science fiction writers had become a new profession—‘Futurians’—whose occupation it was to think about the future, and to project ways of coping with it.36 Lerner interestingly points to the generally favourable attitude found towards science fiction in Catholic publications, which he reckons could be summed up by the closing words of Louis de Wohl’s article in America: Science fiction, in the widest sense, is a very serious matter, far transcending the purely imaginative and speculative, let alone the more or

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EDWARD JAMES less brilliant showing-off of technical pseudo-knowledge. In the wrong hands it can and will create new heresies and revive old ones. In the right hands it can be one more instrument to glorify God.37

And in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists came a shrewd comment about the function it fulfilled for scientists, who enjoy the genre not for its literary merit but because it glamorizes them, it expresses their protest about the misuse of science, and it ‘reaffirms the basic humanistic values of the scientist’s creed’.38 Even a British commentator who was clearly not in favour of traditional adventure science fiction saw its functional value in terms of an entry into ‘inner space’: J. B. Priestley praised future nightmares, as typified by Bradbury, because they ‘show what is happening to the human mind’, expressing the anxiety, fear and guilt which trouble man.39 Only one commentator from the 1950s that I have come across spoiled the general consensus by arguing that science fiction was taking itself far too seriously, and lamented the loss of its potential for high adventure.40 Many of these commentators were remarkably well-informed. It is interesting, in terms of the direction which science fiction criticism would take in the 1960s and 1970s, that one of the very first academic articles on science fiction, by Stephen O. Mitchell, should betray his serious ignorance of the field by suggesting that Abraham Merritt’s The Moon Pool and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror were typical examples of science fiction.41 Finally, the critical journals. Blish’s own article was published in Britain’s first attempt at a critical journal which was more than a fanzine: SF Horizons. It was edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and its first issue (spring 1964) featured a discussion about SF by Britain’s most prominent SF fans: Kingsley Amis and Professor C. S. Lewis. But the second issue of SF Horizons (winter 1965), in which Blish’s article appeared, was also its last. It was another seven years before Britain produced a successor, in the Science Fiction Foundation’s journal Foundation, although in those years Peter Weston’s fanzine Speculation published some excellent criticism. In the United States, the academic study of science fiction effectively began with Tom Clareson’s success in creating a seminar on science fiction at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York in 1958; his journal Extrapolation began publication in 1959 as The Newsletter of the Conference on Science Fiction of the MLA. It was initially published from the English Department of Wooster College, Ohio, but with a small circulation and a low academic profile. Although it had some important theoretical articles, such as those by V. Milo Kaufmann42 and H. Bruce Franklin,43 and the occasional overview,44 it did not venture very often into criticism of modern authors. The single- or dual-author studies (including bibliographies) which were published in its first ten years were devoted to Borges, Clarke (with Kubrick), George Eliot,

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Victor Rousseau Emanuel, Huxley (twice), Lovecraft (twice), Priestley, Tolkien, Verne (twice) and Wells (three times).45 Only Clarke might be described as a modern science-fiction author, and he was being studied only in the context of Kubrick’s film 2001. The contents of Extrapolation changed dramatically during the early part of the 1970s; but, then, the whole context changed dramatically in the first ten years of Darko Suvin’s sojourn in North America. The Science Fiction Research Association was founded in October 1970; the SFRA Newsletter began in 1971; the Science Fiction Foundation was created in the UK in 1971; Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction began publication in March 1972; and Science Fiction Studies started in spring 1973, co-edited by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. Of them all, Science Fiction Studies undoubtedly had the greatest initial impact, because of its more serious commitment to theory and to viewing science fiction as a global, rather than Anglo-American, phenomenon. For both these achievements, Suvin probably deserves the greatest share of the credit. But the impact of Suvin’s work as theorist and as editor will have to be left to someone else. It is time to turn to an examination of Suvin’s early writings, to see how they compare with the preSuvinian world. It might be possible to trace the development of Suvin’s ideas up to and including Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), but it would be a daunting task. Many of Suvin’s earlier writings are incorporated in that book—the Acknowledgements page lists eleven former publications, articles in journals ranging from Foundation to Strumenti Critici, which have been incorporated into the book, ‘as a rule significantly changed’ (xvii). I shall take the book as canonical, and make my comments on that text, which sums up the first dozen years of Suvin’s work in North America. At the very beginning of the book Suvin introduces the three words which are the key to understanding his position: he announces that he is going to argue for ‘an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement’ and that SF is concerned with ‘a strange newness, a novum’ (3). In some sense ‘science’ corresponds to ‘cognitive’, although the latter is a reminder that the ‘science’ ought to be understood in broad terms, as in the French science or the German Wissenschaft; in a sense ‘fiction’ stands for ‘estrangement’. Suvin admits that the Science Fiction (sensu lato) which he is trying to define is much larger than that defined by the term SF sensu stricto. The literary genre which I am trying to define embraces the subgenres [already] mentioned, from Greek and earlier times until today (the Isles of the Blessed, utopias, fabulous voyages, planetary novels, Staatsromane, anticipations, and dystopias—as well as the Verne-type romans scien-

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EDWARD JAMES tifiques, the Wellsian scientific romance variant, and the twentieth-century magazine-and anthology-based SF sensu stricto) (12).

In the pre-scientific era, cognitive estrangement was to be found in satire and social critique (in Utopia and in Gulliver’s Travels, for instance), and in the scientific era it was to be found in the possibilities inherent in the natural sciences, and, more recently, in sciences such as anthropology. There was an historical shift in the locus of estrangement from geography to chronology: typified by a shift in the locus of utopia from More’s Utopia, an island in the southern Atlantic to, say, Piercy’s Mattapoisett, in a future North America. SF sensu stricto has been ‘exiled since the beginning of the twentieth century into a reservation or ghetto which was protective and is now constrictive, cutting off new developments from healthy competition and the highest critical standards’ (14). But SF has grown, and has introduced new forms of cognition to the purely scientific. Within this genre, the consistency of extrapolation becomes an aesthetic factor; the cognitive element becomes a measure of the aesthetic quality and pleasure to be found in science fiction. There is much else in Metamorphoses, but this, it seems to me, is its core. Suvin has identified a genre, whose members he is able to separate from, say, those in the genre of fantasy.46 There may be problems on the borderlands (as Parrinder discusses in this volume), but it is a useful working hypothesis. He has also given the ghettoized genre of twentieth-century SF an ancestry going back to the Greek classics, and argues SF to be a significant part of the mainstream of literary history. And, as elaborated in later sections of Metamorphoses, Suvin explains SF history in both literary and historical terms. Wells’s Time Machine, not Shelley’s Frankenstein, is at the origin of ‘contemporary SF’, and is the text from which ‘all subsequent significant SF can be said to have sprung’, because, in response to Darwinism, he endowed it ‘with a basically materialist look back at human life and a rebelliousness against entropic closure’ (221). Wells, indeed, it was, as Suvin admits, who devised the novum, and, in a sense, the concept of cognitive estrangement. ‘As Wells observed, the “fantastic element” or novum is “the strange property or the strange world” ’; ‘an SF story by Wells is intended to be “the valid realization of some disregarded possibility in such a way as to comment on the false securities and fatuous self-satisfaction of everyday life” ’.47 The novum, or ‘fantastic element’, of SF is its defining characteristic, in that it sets the fiction apart from the perceived world; but the aim is ‘estrangement’, which allows the reader to learn about the perceived world by comparison with the fictional one. Wells is not the only originator of some of the ideas to be found in Metamorphoses. The idea that science fiction should seek its origins in the works

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of Homer, or Plato, or Lucian, goes back to the earliest academic critics of science fiction, such as J. O. Bailey, as well as to the earliest science fiction fans, such as Sam Moskowitz. Most fans, at least, probably never considered this very seriously, in theoretical terms, since they knew that science fiction as it exists in the twentieth century was, as Amis had recognized, very much a creation of the time of Verne and Wells. Suvin is in a sense allying himself with fans such as Moskowitz, who would have argued that science fiction existed as an entity before the genre was named, and before there was any consciousness of genre. Suvin does assert that there was a coherent tradition, which writers explicitly testified to (‘the axis LucianMore-Rabelais-Cyrano-Swift-M. Shelley-Verne-Wells is a main example’ (12)), but Suvin does not actually supply text and verse to support this assertion.48 And the effect of Suvin’s effort to supply respectability is to restrict comment to those writers who would actually already be regarded as respectable in departments of literature: he clearly rather regrets that one of the roots of SF is ‘in the compost heap of . . . juvenile or popular subliterature’, although he does wittily acknowledge that this type of SF could be ‘kept in its proper humbly useful place in the ontogenetic development of the reader as well as in the phylogenetic development of the genre’ (22). In this sense, he seems to be turning his back on what had been happening in the critical world. In other ways, too, Suvin seems to be turning the clock back. He is going back to Bailey and Moskowitz in his desire to look for ancient ancestors. He is also prepared to accept the idea which the New Wave had tried to scotch: that SF was a literature of ideas and thereby, by implication, needs to be treated differently from ‘realistic’ literature. He does go rather beyond the cruder critics of earlier times. The implication of his remark that the cognitive element itself is a measure of aesthetic quality and of the specific pleasures found in SF is that the critic needs to think not just about the cognitive element itself, but also about how it creates that pleasure (the pleasure, perhaps, that traditional SF critics had summed up in the phrase ‘the sense of wonder’).49 One of the great events in the history of academic science fiction criticism is the Modern Language Association meeting of 29 December 1968, which was printed verbatim by Thomas D. Clareson.50 The discussion was chaired by H. Bruce Franklin, and the three panellists were Darko Suvin, Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl. Suvin talked about Soviet SF, underlining that the main difference between Soviet and American SF was the former’s utopian element; Asimov talked about SF as a recruiting ground for scientists, and for science writers, and about the importance of ensuring that a Moon colony be established (‘Man may yet spread through the entire galaxy, and beyond’);51 while Pohl too talked about what the

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future was going to be like. The dissenting voice came from a third SF writer, Robert Silverberg, from the audience. ‘I really must deplore the unanimity of opinion that came from this platform, because it seems to me that you gentlemen were all expressing a utilitarian and not a literary view of science fiction that is rather dreary to a practising writer’.52 Pohl tried to justify their stance, by saying that the fourth panellist, Judith Merril, had been scheduled to speak on SF as literature, but she had been ‘unavoidably detained’. But he made the mistake of adding: ‘To some extent this imposition of literary values on science fiction interferes with its function as science fiction’.53 Silverberg leapt on that word ‘function’, and said that was the heart of his complaint: all three had spoken about the function of SF, including Suvin, when speaking of Soviet SF as political commentary, and none had talked about the literary specificity of the genre. This is the split between the old critics of SF and the critics of the New Wave; Silverberg (just coming into the period of his greatest innovation and creativity at this point) allies himself, in a sense, with the New Wave; he perceives Suvin as belonging to the Old. The function of SF as social commentary and critique certainly appears in Metamorphoses more than once, and allies him to Amis and other, earlier, critics of SF. But we can even find Suvin supporting Asimov in his views (derived from Gernsback and Campbell) about the educational function of science fiction, even if not so narrowly as that of inspiring young scientists. This is an educational literature, hopefully less deadening than most compulsory education in our split national and class societies, but irreversibly shaped by the pathos of preaching the good word of human curiosity, fear, and hope. Significant SF denies thus the ‘two-cultures gap’ more efficiently than any other literary genre I know of (36).

It is thus that the first significant academic theorist of SF should be seen to be, in many ways, rephrasing the stance of the past rather than establishing totally new grounds on which to base science-fiction criticism. That Suvin’s greatest achievement may have been to persuade a major academic publisher to print a book on the theory of science fiction is not to belittle that achievement. Metamorphoses, in retrospect, was a very significant watershed in the history of science-fiction criticism, not because of what it said but because it was there. The way it was said was also significant. Suvin did not make the study of modern science fiction respectable by dealing with modern science fiction: the only twentieth-century writers he deals with after Wells are Capek and Russian writers such as Zamyatin and Yefremov. But, by giving modern SF writers a respectable ancestry, based on theoretical grounds, he gave those writers greater credibility in the halls of

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academe. And by providing science fiction criticism with respectable language, he achieves the same feat. ‘Sf is a literature of ideas’ is one thing; Swin’s statement that a cognitive—in most cases strictly scientific—element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality, of the specific pleasure to be found in SF. In other words, the cognitive nucleus of the plot codetermines the fictional estrangement itself (15)

places the discussion in quite a different register. Just as African-American dialect can become a respectable field of study once it is called ebonics, so SF criticism needed a new and more scientific manner of discourse. As the outsider, of course, fresh from Europe with his knowledge of European critical theory and his familiarity with whole areas of science fiction which were largely unknown in the West, Suvin was ideally placed to make this contribution.

Notes 1 SF Horizons 2 (winter 1965), 38–48, here cited from its reprinting as ‘New Maps and Old Saws: The Critical Literature’ in William Atheling, Jr. (i.e. James Blish), More Issues at Hand, pp. 18–40. 2 But the reprinted version of the Atheling essay in More Issues adds two more books to the list: Moskowitz’s Seekers of Tomorrow (1966), which he savages, and Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension (1968), which he regards as ‘the best singleauthor study of a recent writer ever to be published in our field’ (p. 40). 3 New York: Ballantine 1962; London: Four Square 1963. 4 Amis, New Maps, p. 31 (citing from the Four Square edition). 5 Ibid., p. 104. 6 Ibid., pp. 134–35. 7 See ‘ “An idea of significant import”: Hugo Gernsback’s Theory of Science Fiction’; ‘ “A convenient analog system”: John W. Campbell, Jr’s Theory of Science Fiction’; The Mechanics of Wonder (Liverpool University Press, 1999). 8 ‘A New Kind of Magazine’. 9 ‘Fiction Versus Facts’. 10 ‘Science Fiction Week’. 11 Apart from Westfahl, see the writings of Albert I. Berger, notably sections I–III of ‘Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact’ in Marshall B. Tymn and Mike Ashley, eds, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines, pp. 64–88, and The Magic that Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology. 12 ‘The Science of Science Fiction Writing’, in L. E. Eshbach, ed., Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing, pp. 92, 94. 13 ‘Introduction’, Prologue to Analog, ed. J. W. Campbell, p. 13. 14 Westfahl argues that Campbell’s interest in ‘ideas’, at the expense of Gerns-

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back’s ‘charming romance’ or thrilling adventure, led to the excessive preoccupation with social satire, which ended the SF boom of the 1950s, and with ‘dangerous and pointless flirtations with avant-garde fiction’, which lost the New Wave its sciencefictional audience: see Westfahl, ‘ “A convenient analog system” ’, pp. 64–65. 15 H. L. Gold, ‘Yardstick for Science Fiction’. Quoted by Westfahl, in The Mechanics of Wonder, in the chapter entitled ‘ “A field of literature worth taking seriously”: Critical Voices after John W. Campbell, Jr’. 16 H. L. Gold, ‘Step Outside’. 17 J. G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, at p. 118. 18 Michael Moorcock, ‘Play with Feeling’, at pp. 126 and 127. 19 Judith Merril, ‘Introduction’ in Merril, ed., SF: The Best of the Best, p. ix: quoted by Westfahl in The Mechanics of Wonder. 20 Robert J. Barthell, ‘SF: A Literature of Ideas’. 21 Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison in ‘A Statement of Policy’. 22 Galaxy, Oct. 1950: 141–42. 23 Galaxy, Jan. 1951: 138–39. 24 Galaxy, Apr. 1951: 60. 25 Galaxy, Aug. 1951: 100. 26 Galaxy, May 1951: 83–84. 27 Galaxy, Jan. 1952: 119. 28 Review reprinted, without details of prior publication, in D. Knight, In Search of Wonder, pp. 22–25, in the chapter called ‘Chuckleheads’. 29 As expressed in his first review column for Lester Del Rey’s Science Fiction Adventures, Nov. 1952, and as reprinted in In Search of Wonder, p. 1. 30 Frederick Andrew Lerner, Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community, pp. 34–35. Lerner gives no indication how he separates ‘Literary’, ‘Scientific’ and ‘ideological’ from each other. 31 Siegfried Mandel and Peter Fingesten, ‘The Myth of Science Fiction’: I am following Lerner, Modern Science Fiction, pp. 49–50. 32 John W. Campbell, Jr., ‘Science Fiction and the Opinion of the Unwise’. 33 Donald J. Adams, ‘Speaking of Books’. Quotation from 13 Sept. 34 Stanley Frank, ‘Out of This World’. 35 Clifton Fadiman, ‘Party of One’, Holiday, June 1952: 14–16, 146. 36 Clifton Fadiman, ‘Party of One’, Holiday, May 1957: 6–11, 172. 37 Louis de Wohl, ‘Religion, Philosophy and Outer Space’, at p. 421; see Lerner, Modern Science Fiction, p. 54. 38 Arthur S. Barron, ‘Why Do Scientists Read Science Fiction?’. 39 J. B. Priestley, ‘They Came from Inner Space’. 40 Peter Fison, ‘That Thing from Another World’. 41 Stephen O. Mitchell, ‘Alien Vision: the Techniques of Science Fiction’. 42 V. Milo Kaufmann, ‘Brave New Improbable Worlds: Critical Notes on “Extrapolation” as a Mimetic Technique in Science Fiction’. 43 H. Bruce Franklin, ‘Science Fiction as an Index to Popular Attitudes Towards Science: a Danger, Some Problems, and Two Possible Paths’. 44 T. D. Clareson, ‘The Scientist as Hero in American Science Fiction, 1880–1920’; Judith Merril, ‘What Do You Mean—Science? Fiction?’. 45 The first ten years were reprinted as Thomas D. Clareson, ed., Extrapolation: A

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Science Fiction Newsletter. Volume I through X, December 1959 to May 1969. 46 He put these distinctions to practical use when defining the corpus to be studied in his Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power. 47 Suvin, Metamorphoses, pp. 208 and 209, quoting Wells in ‘Preface’ to Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells p. vii, and in ‘An Experiment in Illustration’, Strand Magazine, Feb. 1920. 48 As pointed out by Gary Westfahl in ‘On The True History of Science Fiction’, at pp. 15–16. 49 For some discussion see E. James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, pp. 103–07. 50 Thomas Clareson, ed., ‘Science Fiction: The New Mythology’. 51 Ibid., p. 85. 52 Ibid., p. 95. 53 Ibid., p. 97.

Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction PATRICK PARRINDER

SF in general—through its long history in different contexts—can be defined as a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment, and . . . it is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’ (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.1

Estrangement, cognition, the novum: these well-known terms of Darko Suvin’s have borne the main burden of his attempt, declared at the beginning of his 1972 essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, to lay down a ‘coherent poetics of SF’.2 A ‘poetics’ is a construction of formalist or structuralist theory—it speaks to us, these days, of the age of Roman Jakobson and Northrop Frye—and (as is clear from the above quotation) it addresses only the synchronic aspect of literary texts. Literary history and the politics of the text are never absent from Suvin’s writings, but in his poetics of science fiction they are apparently subordinated to the idea of an ‘imaginative framework’—elsewhere he calls it a ‘formal framework’— which is the historically continuous textual structure distinguishing one literary genre from another. In the case of SF, an imaginative framework specified by estrangement, cognition and the novum is said to be common to all true examples of the genre, which Suvin also provides with a ‘long history’ stretching back some centuries before the term itself was invented. The resulting theory is offered as a ‘heuristic model’ for SF criticism and research, and it has been very widely adopted. But is the model actually coherent? Should a poetics of science fiction still be seen as a desirable and necessary construction? And what sorts of blindness accompany its insights? Suvin himself seems to have been disturbed by these questions.

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In a number of essays since 1972 he has revisited his poetics of SF, and it is a moot point whether this process of theoretical revision has shored up or tacitly undermined the foundations that he originally laid down.3 To begin with estrangement, cognition and the novum: just as the poetics of SF may in part be seen as a way of asserting the genre’s literary respectability—a way, that is, of presenting it as a suitable object for criticism and theory—the three terms defining its ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ partake of a translation process, mediating between the existing body of ideas familiar to SF writers and readers, and the philosophical terminology of modern genre studies. Thus, estrangement, in the formal sense of an ‘imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’, alludes to existing ideas about speculative fiction, fantasy and scientific romance; but the term itself derives from the Russian formalists’ concept of ostranenie and Brecht’s Verfremdung.4 The interaction of estrangement and cognition suggests the Gernsbackian idea of fiction with a scientific explanation (scientifiction, science fiction), but Suvin opts for the term ‘cognition’ because of its wider reference, roughly equivalent to German Wissenschaft, French science and Russian nauka.5 Finally, the novum is what H. G. Wells in a much-cited essay called the ‘fantastic element’ or ‘the strange property or the strange world’.6 Suvin’s use of the Latin term, however, both invokes and reinterprets the utopian theorizing of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch.7 For anglophone readers these three faintly exotic terms could be said to offer a microcosm of the process of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that they exist to define. In terms of systematic poetics, the co-presence of estrangement and cognition represents one of four possible positions on a simple binary diagram set out in Suvin’s 1973 essay ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’.8 Science fiction belongs with myth, fantasy, fairy tale and pastoral in its possession of an estranged formal framework that sets it apart from ‘naturalistic or empiricist’ literary genres; but it differs from myth, fantasy and fairy tale in its cognitive approach and function.9 The category of estrangement here is supposedly uncontroversial, a matter of ‘formal frameworks’ merely; though we shall need to remember that the Russian formalists showed that the writing of a realistic novelist such as Tolstoy was full of estrangement effects. For the time being, however, we shall focus on the category of cognition, which is clearly highly controversial. Cognition, however defined, will be found hard to separate from instruction which is one of the traditional goals of all worthwhile art; yet Suvin’s theory has the effect of consigning whole genres (not only myth, fantasy and fairy tale but what he calls the ‘sub-literature of “realism” ’)10 to the non-cognitive position in his genological system. A huge portion of the total literary output is, so to

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speak, thus labelled as ‘Terra Noncognita’. Logically this is hard to justify, which may be why Suvin in his 1972 essay, as well as in later works, rapidly moves from quasi-neutral generic theorizing to the language of an ideological crusade. To be fair, his object is less the wholesale condemnation of other forms of writing than the decontamination of science fiction itself. SF in its pure form of cognitive estrangement is sharply distinguished from mixed, adulterated forms (‘science fantasy’), and good or significant SF is distinguished from the run-of-the-mill: the theory, as has often been observed, is both definitive and normative. The sloganizing rhetoric of parts of his 1972 essay betrays Suvin’s anxiety to defend a normative view of SF. Science fiction, he writes, sees the ideology of myth as ‘an illusion, usually [a] fraud’ (61); SF that retrogresses into fairy tale is ‘committing creative suicide’ (62); and critics who fail to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy are perpetrating a ‘grave disservice and rampantly socio-pathological phenomenon’ (63). In ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’ (1973) the ‘non-cognitive’ genres of myth, fantasy and fairy tale are grouped together as ‘metaphysical’: the contemptuous dismissal of metaphysics here is reminiscent of the extremes of logical positivism. Moreover, in this essay Suvin refers in a single paragraph to the ‘Great Pumpkin antics of fantasy’, ‘the black ectoplasms of fantasy’, and the ‘parasitism and vampirism of fantasy’ (24–25). ‘Science fantasy’ is a ‘misshapen subgenre’ (20) in which ‘under the guise of cognition the ancient obscurantist enemy infiltrates [science fiction’s] citadel’ (25). What is most telling here is the apparent indispensability, for Suvin’s purpose, of images and metaphors evoking the very genres he is trying to condemn. Another recent critic, compounding this process, has spoken of Suvin’s attempt to ‘vomit the fantastic out of the body of SF’.11 It may seem obvious to retort that all science fiction is necessarily fantastic and that fantastic images are frequently made to serve a cognitive purpose: we shall see in due course how these very insights are present and at least partially acknowledged in Suvin’s later essays. H. G. Wells, as has already been mentioned, spoke of what Suvin calls the novum as ‘the fantastic element’, and Wells’s 1933 Preface to the Scientific Romances (which anticipates some aspects of Suvin’s theory) speaks fairly indiscriminately of what we would now see as the distinct genres of science fiction and fantasy. But Wells is notably guarded about the use of fantasy within fantasy. ‘Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention’, he writes.12 If we take Wells’s ‘cardinal assumption’ as yet another synonym for the novum, then it seems that he, like Suvin, relegates the fantastic to the initial conditions or formal

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framework rather than to the pervading texture of the science-fictional narrative. The latter is characterized by a kind of displaced realism, portraying what Wells calls ‘human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired’.13 And this portrayal of human feeling and human ways is outlined in terms implying a rigorous assertion of the super-ego, of ‘responsibility’ and intellectual maturity; its task is to exert supervision and control over the fantastic elements which might otherwise give way to childish silliness. At certain times in the history of science fiction it has been suggested that the ‘scientific community’ might have some kind of duty to exert control and even censorship of the fantastic. SF’s evident educational potential and juvenile appeal suggested to some that texts judged to be scientifically sound should, at the very least, be specially recommended to readers.14 Suvin’s theory, which substitutes cognitive status and value for ‘scientific soundness’, has the effect of repatriating this task to the literary community while, if anything, further increasing its urgency and rigour. Control over the fantastic is crucial to his sense of SF as both literary genre and literary canon. For science fiction to be cognitive, however, it must first be estranged: its resemblance to myth, fantasy and fairy tale logically precedes its separation from them. Estrangement, for the Russian formalists, was the effect of a variety of stylistic devices designed to counter habitualization and to remove objects from the ‘automatism of perception’.15 Later in the Brechtian theatre it became a strategy for provoking audience-response and a means towards the reader’s political education. For Suvin, by contrast, estrangement in fiction is first and foremost a matter of choosing a plot that is non-realistic in the sense that it is determined by the novum. To appreciate what this change of focus entails for the category of estrangement, we should recall that, since the formalists, estrangement has usually been interpreted as a sign of experimental and Modernist art.16 Picasso’s painting of the head of a woman showing both eyes on the same side of the nose is an example of what would commonly be called an estrangement effect. What has popular fiction about spaceships to do with the dynamics of artistic innovation using experimental shock tactics to defamiliarize perception? Starting from Wells’s observation that in his kind of ‘responsible’ fantastic fiction (with a ‘rigorous adherence to the hypothesis’), the source of the interest is the ‘new angle that has been acquired’, we might indeed argue for a resemblance between the fantastic plot and the Picasso painting. But this line of argument has failed to convince those critics of Suvin’s theory who hold that most SF is distinguished not by its estrangement but by its ‘domestication’ of supposedly strange and unfamiliar worlds. John Huntington, for example, describes popular SF as a conservative literature which

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‘manages to domesticate the future, to render it habitable and, in spite of a somewhat strange surface, basically familiar’.17 Either this represents the failure of an aesthetic effect that true or ‘significant’ science fiction ought to produce, or it presents a major objection to Suvin’s theory. In fact, the objection is somewhat chimerical. All knowledge or cognition works to domesticate the strange and to make it seem familiar; assumptions which remain incredible or implausible are progressively excluded from the domain of knowledge. Science fiction emphasizing what is open to cognition, rather than the irreducibly fantastic, is no more a conservative genre than Copernicus and Galileo were conservative figures. There is, admittedly, a lack of freedom about such fiction, a determination to insist upon particular meanings; few if any science-fictional works can claim to be the ‘writerly’ texts celebrated in some post-structuralist theory. A fiction that is estranged in Suvin’s terms may, however, make us feel at home in a particular future provided that it offers a new angle of perception and so familiarizes us with a different view of the present. The problem with Huntington’s and similar formulations is that they confuse aesthetic failure (in which the supposed new angle of perception is in fact already familiar and conventional) with the kind of aesthetic triumph in which a genuinely innovative device or novum produces a world that comes to seem habitable to us. But estranged fiction needs to change our view of our own condition, and not simply to momentarily dazzle us with a superficially unfamiliar world. This does not mean, however, that the theory of cognitive estrangement emerges from this confrontation completely unscathed. If estrangement is or should be a reflexive process countering the habitualization of the familiar world, it is hard to see how this could be the automatic effect of a story’s ‘formal framework’, rather than involving (as the formalists believed) the more subtle and intricate aspects of narrative method and style. Moreover, to the extent that countering habitualization renews our understanding and sharpens perception, genuine estrangement would seem to be an inherently cognitive process. The potentially problematic aspect of Suvin’s theory is thus not the bringing together of estrangement and cognition (as many have thought), but rather the reverse of this. Since estrangement and cognition are logically separate, it is tempting to think that estrangement without cognition, or cognition without estrangement, are real categories to which some literary or scientific works might actually belong. In structuralism, we are accustomed to think of the sign as divisible into signifier and signified, so that there can be floating signifiers and unsignified signifieds: the same kind of perhaps dubious analytical logic dictates that cognition must exist in both estranged and non-estranged forms, so that there

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is necessarily a Terra Noncognita waiting to be filled by literary works which are formally estranged but incapable of promoting understanding. A weaker version of the theory may be more acceptable, in which the estrangement-cognition coupling is always preserved but there is a spectrum of ‘cognitive values’ (and presumably also of estrangement values) ranging from a hypothetical zero to the boiling point of the best science fiction. Suvin has occasionally suggested that his distinctions might be interpreted in this relative way, but he has not done so consistently, and the evangelical fervour of his early writings has the opposite effect.18 His more recent work, as we shall see, broadens out from the theory of science fiction in search of a more fundamental understanding of estrangement and cognition. I have mentioned above that in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’ (1973) Suvin describes myth, fantasy and fairy tale as ‘metaphysical’ genres. His implied distinction between the metaphysical and the cognitive may be better understood as a secondary distinction within cognition, between (let us say) the metaphysical and the rational, or between the metaphysical and the empirically verifiable or falsifiable. Suvin in his later work explicitly endorses the idea of non-rational cognition.19 But cognition in science fiction is not, or not primarily, of this kind, since (as he writes in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’) SF ‘shares with naturalistic literature, naturalistic science, and naturalistic or materialist philosophy a common sophisticated, dialectical, and cognitive epistemé’ (20). The question of how far Suvin’s theory is axiomatically dependent upon a philosophy of scientific materialism, which is revised or abandoned in his later writings, arises in relation to his essay on ‘SF and the Novum’ which rounds off the ‘Poetics’ section in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). The novum is the crucial element generating the estranged formal framework or world of the SF text: Now, no doubt, each and every poetic metaphor is a novum, while modern prose fiction has made new insights into man its rallying cry. However, though valid SF has deep affinities with poetry and innovative realistic fiction, its novelty is ‘totalizing’ in the sense that it entails a change of the whole universe of the tale, or at least of crucially important aspects thereof (and that it is therefore a means by which the whole tale can be analytically grasped). (64)

I will examine the proposed resemblance between science fiction and poetic metaphor later in this chapter. At present we should note that the novum in SF as opposed to fantasy is specifically ‘postulated on and validated by the

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post-Cartesian and post-Baconian scientific method’ (64–65). It cannot be a ‘metaphysical wish-dream such as omnipotence’, since it is ‘intrinsically or by definition impossible for SF to acknowledge any metaphysical agency, in the literal sense of an agency going beyond physis (nature). Whenever it does so, it is not SF, but a metaphysical or (to translate the Greek into Latin) a supernatural fantasy-tale’ (66). This shows how restrictive Suvin’s definition can be: the barricades round the genre seem to be drawn tighter, the Terra Noncognita beyond the barricades to be ever larger and more threatening. For the prohibition of ‘metaphysical agency’ rules out not only the blatantly supernatural fantasy-tale but more hybrid and playful forms of fiction, whimsies and allegories which might have some claim to sciencefictional status but cannot, Suvin implies, be allowed inside a properly defended citadel. The question of allegory is particularly awkward here. Science fiction is ‘not orthodox allegory’ (75), but it is nevertheless an analogical mode ‘somewhere between a vague symbol and a precisely aimed parable’ (76). The OED defines parable as ‘any saying or narration in which something is expressed in terms of something else; an allegory’, but ‘SF and the Novum’ has the following confusing footnote about allegory, satire and SF: Works avowedly written within a nonrealistic mode, principally allegory (but also whimsy, satire, and lying tall tale or Münchhauseniade), constitute a category for which the question of whether they possess a novum cannot even be posed, because they do not use the new worlds, agents, or relationships as coherent albeit provisional ends, but as immediately transitive and narratively nonautonomous means for direct and sustained reference to the author’s empirical world and some system of belief in it. The question whether an allegory is SF, and vice versa, is, strictly speaking, meaningless, but for classifying purposes has to be answered in the negative. This means that—except for exceptions and grey areas—most of the works of Kafka or Borges cannot be claimed for SF: though I would argue that In the Penal Colony and ‘The Library of Babel’ would be among the exceptions. But, admittedly, much more work remains to be done toward the theory of modern allegory in order to render more precise the terms underlined in this note. (65n)

Plainly Suvin means to indicate that SF should have ‘a narrative reality sufficiently autonomous and intransitive to be explored at length as to its own properties and the human relationships it implies’ (71)—it is a ‘specifically roundabout way of commenting on the author’s collective context’ (84)— but the terms used are approximations and are recognized to be so by Suvin himself.

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Some relevant examples will show what is being included in, and excluded from, science fiction at this point. (Admittedly, Suvin himself observes that ‘One of the troubles with distinctions in genre theory is . . . that literary history is full of “limit-cases” ’ (69). Wells’s The Time Machine, which is cited in ‘SF and the Novum’ as one of a group of works which are ‘primarily fairly clear analogies to processes incubating in their author’s epoch’ (78), is a non-controversial example of an SF text involving a novum. (But if the future degeneration of the human species in Wells’s text is both a novum and a reflexive analogy—that is, the Eloi and Morlocks confound Victorian expectations of progress—it is surely not the only novum in the story. Perhaps an extended SF narrative needs two or three novums?) The cognitive logic involved and the analogies to processes incubating in the author’s epoch are spelt out in the text and have withstood more than a century of critical scrutiny, although—like all of Wells’s science-fictional novums—they are open to various potential logical and scientific objections. Most readers would unhesitatingly confirm that the Time Traveller’s discoveries among the Eloi and Morlocks meet Suvin’s criterion of a sufficiently autonomous narrative reality. I will now consider a short story by Borges, ‘Funes, the Memorious’, which Suvin would presumably classify as a metaphysical fantasy. Funes, a countryman from the Argentine cattle town of Fray Bentos, receives his extraordinary gift of memory after being crippled in a horseriding acident. He is capable of recognizing and distinctly comprehending every object in the material universe, but this does not, so the narrator insists, make him capable of thought. ‘To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract’;20 all that Funes can acknowledge and give a name to are discrete, individual entities. The story’s cognitive logic is apparently a little muddled, since the narrator asserts that Funes has learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin without effort: we are not told how someone incapable of any kind of abstraction and generalization can be said to have learned a language. Since Funes has difficulty with a generic noun such as dog, how can he distinguish between the English and the French languages? If, within the narrative world of Borges’s parable, such questions can be dismissed as irrelevant nitpicking, that seems to make Suvin’s general point: ‘Funes, the Memorious’ is an allegory about cognition which does not try very hard for cognitive consistency. On the other hand, both Borges’s story and (as was suggested above) The Time Machine involve differing amounts of logical sleight-of-hand. We should perhaps see Funes’s remarkable memory not as a failed (Wellsian) novum but as a quasi-novum or pseudo-novum; the term pseudo-novum is suggested on the analogy of a pseudo-concept, a ‘notion treated as a concept though it cannot be properly conceptualised or

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grasped by the mind’ (OED), though Suvin in ‘SF and the Novum’ uses ‘pseudo-novum’ to mean, simply, a fake novum (81). The ‘novum’ in Borges’ story is not simply bogus, since the fact that Funes’s memory cannot be properly conceptualized by the reader has in itself an instructive or cognitive value. In other words, a story with a quasi-or pseudo-novum can serve a cognitive function. If this turns out to be one of Suvin’s anomalies or limit-cases, we may wonder whether the theory of cognitive estrangement is not rather too generously productive of limit-cases. Is a parody of a science-fiction story a science-fiction story? The question is pertinent since, as Suvin himself has shown, much of the genre’s historical origins lie in parody and forms of ‘Aesopian language’. Parody and satire thrive on analogy, and Suvin regards SF, too, as an inherently analogical mode. When he argues that ‘It is intrinsically or by definition impossible for SF to acknowledge any metaphysical agency’, Suvin implies that the purpose of SF is one of truth-telling. SF cannot acknowledge metaphysical agencies because within the terms of the scientific epistemé such agencies are considered to be empirically false. Historically, the truth-telling modes of modern SF emerged when writers of the positivist age decided to forgo satirical fantasy in favour of technological extrapolation and prophetic anticipation. Poe’s ‘Eureka’ and ‘Hans Pfaall’ and the Erewhon of Samuel Butler gave place to the ‘futuristic present’ of Jules Verne and the futurological warnings of Wells. Suvin sometimes plays down the satirical elements in the works he discusses—in ‘SF and the Novum’ he dismisses Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four, for example, as (untruthful) examples of ‘fashionable static dystopia’ without alluding to their status as avowed satires (83) —but he also rigorously rejects any attempt to limit science fiction to the functions of prophecy or extrapolation: extrapolative SF in any futurological sense was (and is) only a delusion of technocratic ideology—no doubt extremely important for the historical understanding of a given period of SF, but theoretically untenable . . . extrapolation is a one-dimensional, scientific limit-case of analogy. (76)

If extrapolation is a limit-case of analogy, then all cognition which is not strictly logical or arithmetical would seem to be based on analogy. Funes’s inability to generalize, and the difficulty he had in grasping the concept of dog, was a failure to draw an analogy between one dog and another. This means that Suvin’s attack on extrapolation and prophecy in ‘SF and the Novum’, as well as his treatment of SF’s relationships to allegory and satire, is open to charges of inconsistency. Consider the following assertion, for example:

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the cognitive value of all SF, including anticipation-tales, is to be found in its analogical reference to the author’s present rather than in predictions, discrete or global. Science-fictional cognition is based on an aesthetic hypothesis akin to the proceedings of satire or pastoral rather than those of futurology or political programs. (78)

To the extent that scientific extrapolation is a ‘one-dimensional limit-case of analogy’, we must regard ‘futurology or political programs’, and not merely satire and pastoral, as being validated by their analogical reference. Since common sense tells us that the actual future cannot be predicted with any certainty, we should have no difficulty in regarding futurological texts, for example, as ‘heuristic models’ according to the definition that Suvin gives in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’: ‘A heuristic model is a theoretical structure based on analogy, which does not claim to be transcendentally or illusionistically “real” in the sense of mystically representing a palpable, material entity, but whose use is scientifically and scholarly permissible, desirable, and necessary because of its practical results’ (17). In other words, the difference between futurology and science fiction lies not in the presence or absence of analogical reference to the author’s present but in that the former is intended to lead to practical results: futurological writings set out to counter ‘future shock’ and to warn against, or prepare their readers to negotiate, the projected future. We are left with a rather uncertain distinction between science fiction and futurology in terms of the ‘cognitive value’ of each: one of the causes of uncertainty being that the notion of cognitive value has also been used to distinguish SF from satire and fantasy. Suvin attempted to sort out these confusions and to patch up the poetics of science fiction in his 1984 essay ‘SF as Metaphor, Parable and Chronotope (with the Bad Conscience of Reaganism)’, reprinted as the conclusion to Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988). Here he takes up his earlier observation that poetic metaphor is a kind of novum, adding to it that every metaphor must by definition possess a cognitive value. (It will be evident at once that this undercuts his distinction between ‘estranged and cognitive’ and ‘estranged but non-cognitive’ fictions.) Quoting Paul Ricoeur’s aphorism that ‘Metaphor is to poetic language as model is to scientific language’,21 Suvin now vastly broadens the notion of a ‘heuristic model’ to include not only acknowledged speculative instruments (such as scientific hypotheses, literary theories and futurological scenarios), but metaphors and fictional texts (which he considers as extended metaphors). Every heuristic model must have a cognitive value. But to equate metaphors and heuristic models as Suvin proposes quickly leads to a reductio ad absurdum, since most modern linguistic theorists would maintain that metaphor

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is ubiquitous to and constitutive of language itself. In order to preserve Suvin’s argument at this point we would need to argue that, in the case of dead metaphors for instance, a cognitive value necessarily includes zero value. Suvin’s own strategy, a variant of this, is to suggest that the characteristics of a heuristic model apply to ‘true’ or ‘full-fledged’ metaphors and, by extension, to ‘significant’ SF, with the rest being left in a cognitive limbo (188). What follows from this is a highly original discussion of metaphor as a ‘cognitive organon’ (189); but the further we follow Suvin in this, the more inescapable seems his tacit abandonment of the idea of science fiction as a special kind of narrative exhibiting cognitive estrangement. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, for example, the fact that in SF ‘the cognitive nucleus of the plot codetermines the fictional estrangement itself’ is a consequence of the genre’s status as a branch of the literature of ideas: in SF ‘a cognitive . . . element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality’ (15). In the later writings in which Suvin considers metaphor as a fundamental aesthetic and cognitive gesture, all aesthetic manifestations in the medium of language seem to entail a cognitive element. Claiming that SF merely exemplifies far more widespread aspects of the process of thinking and making analogies, Suvin’s own analogical mode of thought expands his ‘poetics of SF’ well beyond breaking point. Recently, in ‘On Cognitive Emotions and Topological Imagination’ (1994), he has argued that all human creativity whether poetic or scientific, rational or emotional, conceptual or non-conceptual, has cognitive potential. The purpose of such creativity, as with the purpose of metaphor in ‘SF as Metaphor, Parable and Chronotope’, is to ‘redescribe the known world and open up new possibilities of intervening into it’.22 Revisiting Suvin’s poetics of science fiction, we thus find ourselves retracing the rejection of generic formalism in favour of a broad philosophical enquiry into human creativity and cognition that has guided his prolific output during the last two decades as a scholar and theorist of utopia, of semiotics, of theatre and drama, and of the lessons of Far Eastern cultures, not to mention his parallel movement from formal poetics to the theory and practice of poetry. The common assumption in all this writing is that of a necessary linkage between the cognitive and the aesthetic: the aesthetic is also a cognitive category, and vice versa. In its broadest terms, this common assumption puts Suvin on the side of Aristotle against Plato in the age-old quarrel between poetry and philosophy:23 there is no reason for poets and philosophers to differ, Aristotle and Suvin would claim, since poetry by its very nature has philosophical value. But all such arguments need to reckon with the fact that artists since the Romantic period have frequently ranged themselves on Plato’s side, not Aristotle’s. The very artists who made

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estrangement and the novum an article of faith eschewed or parodied conventional philosophical language. Theories—notably, in the twentieth century, Marxist theories—proclaiming the unity of the cognitive and the aesthetic are under suspicion of subsuming the aesthetic into the cognitive. Can this charge be maintained against Suvin’s poetics of SF? It seems to be axiomatic from Suvin’s point of view that the estranged world of the science-fiction story cannot possibly be an end in itself; his theory both affirms and denies aesthetic autonomy in the same gesture. For Suvin, the interpretation of any science-fictional novum would seem to involve the following necessary steps: relating the objects and figures in the text to the world of the text as a whole; relating the objects and figures to their corresponding or opposing elements in the author’s empirical world; and relating the world of the text as a whole to the author’s empirical world. This process of analogical interpretation serves to determine the text’s significance and to establish its science-fictional quality, taking it out of Terra Noncognita and revealing it as both estranged and cognitive. At the same time, it turns the text’s function of ‘commenting on the author’s collective context’ into the measure of aesthetic achievement. Significant SF which ‘suggests—sometimes strongly—a flight from that context’ is, Suvin writes at the conclusion of ‘SF and the Novum’, ‘an optical illusion and epistemological trick’ (84). The reverse of generic formalism, this kind of evaluation is prepared in the last resort to leave the text’s generic form behind and declare it to be, if not worthless, simply illusory. Looking back on an intellectual project begun in the 1970s, the editors of the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction referred some years ago to the growing complexity of their subject: GENRE SF continues to grow and flourish, and its description remains our central task; but genre sf more and more occupies a world which, because of new category and marketing distinctions, is difficult to comprehend at a glance. Game worlds, film and tv spin-offs, shared worlds, graphic novels, franchises, young-adult fiction, choose-your-own plot tales, technothrillers, surrealist fiction, sf horror novels, fantasy novels with sf centres, and so on—all contribute to a structure that hardly existed in the 1970s. The world of sf is also harder to describe now—not just because it has become more difficult, but because we have begun to discover that it always was.24

The task of an encyclopaedia may be to summarize our knowledge of the world as it is, but the task of theory is to simplify the world, to make it thinkable and to outline basic principles. The imposing but chequered his-

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tory of literary theory since the Russian formalists suggests that theoretical illusions are more or less inescapable; what is important is not so much to avoid them as to prevent them from taking root and persisting, weed-like, long after they have ceased to challenge the automatism of perception. Suvin’s candour, and the restless progression of his thought, represents the best kind of defence against illusions of this sort, but his search for a poetics of science fiction has always and deliberately been conducted against the grain of SF as a mode of popular entertainment. Does this make the poetics of SF as he envisaged it something of a mirage? In Reading by Starlight (1995) Damien Broderick describes Suvin as ‘In very large degree, . . . the implicit Newton or Lévi-Strauss of contemporary science fiction scholarship’, and adds that: ‘Having articulated the terms within which learned argument has tended to be elaborated, Suvin’s contribution has been absorbed so generally that it can seem transparently given—often a sign that a framework is due for drastic deconstruction, if not overthrow’.25 Broderick’s principal objection to Suvin’s framework, it would seem, is that SF is not, properly considered, a genre but a mode.26 The generic model is too limited. Others, going beyond the more or less exclusively literary domain that Broderick no less than Suvin endorses, have argued that SF is not a mode but a ‘field’. Each of these constructions and categorizations of science fiction is open to question. A ‘field’ may be a recognizable sociological or historical entity but it is too broad and vague to have much relevance for the theoretically minded. A ‘mode’ in its literary sense hovers uncertainly between pedantic archaism (in terms of which the ‘science-fictional’ would have to be distinguished from the comical, tragical, satirical, pastoral and so on) and indefinable looseness. A ‘genre’, being the tightest of the three terms—and thus the only one that can be experienced by writers and critics as challenging and prescriptive—throws up too many hybrids and limit-cases. Modes have the advantage of cutting transversely across generic boundaries. Suvin originally offered his theory as a ‘heuristic model’ for criticism and research, an emphasis underlined by the title of one of his most recent essays, ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’.27 Despite his (and others’) second thoughts, his poetics remains the most rigorous and illuminating attempt to understand science fiction as possessing a core of generic identity—a condition not easily separable, I suggest, from its possession of a core identity of any sort. From Suvin’s perspective SF offers itself for inspection as a form of cultural intervention definable in terms of its cognitive values and estrangement values—in other words, as something more than a shop window full of fictional commodities concerned with ‘science’, ‘wonder’ and ‘space’. To ‘fix’ SF as cultural intervention, Suvin has had to emphasize

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the extent and nature of its control over the fantastic. Those who maintain that literary fantasy is in fact uncontrollable will have to contend with H. G. Wells’s principle (which Suvin must certainly endorse) that ‘Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen’.28

Notes 1 D. Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, p. 66. 2 D. Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, in M. Rose, ed., Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 58. 3 In this chapter I have necessarily simplified the very complex chronology of Suvin’s writings on SF (for which see the Checklist at the end of this volume). 1972 is perhaps an arbitrary point of origin for the essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, which appeared in College English in that year but is here quoted in the form of the 1976 reprint which made it widely available to students of SF. With respect to the later essays up to 1988, I give their dates of first publication but quote the sometimes substantially revised versions that subsequently appeared in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction or Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. The page references in the text (apart from references to ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’) are to whichever of these two volumes the context indicates. Essay titles are given in the form in which they appear in Metamorphoses or Positions. 4 Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, pp. 60–61. 5 D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 13. 6 H. G. Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, p. 241; quoted by Suvin, Metamorphoses, p. 208. 7 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 6, 13, and 63–64 respectively. 8 Ibid., p. 20. 9 Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, pp. 57–58. 10 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 20. 11 D. Littlewood, ‘SF and the Fantastic: Siamese Twins?’. 12 Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, pp. 242, 241. 13 Ibid., p. 242. 14 In the 1950s the astronomer Patrick Moore called for scientists in each country to set up selection boards charged with conferring a seal of approval on SF novels chosen for their ‘scientific soundness’. P. Moore, Science and Fiction, pp. 10, 186–89. 15 V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, pp. 12–13. 16 Robert Scholes goes somewhat further and asserts that estrangement has been ‘the premise of all art since the romantic period’. R. Scholes, Structural Fabulation, p. 46. 17 J. Huntington, ‘Science Fiction and the Future’, p. 166. John Clute has put forward a very similar argument: see the joint article ‘Definitions of SF’ in J. Clute and P. Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. 313. 18 Suvin in his 1972 essay speaks of a ‘spectrum or spread’ of literary subject matter according to its degree of estrangement, and, in the context of a discussion

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of the ‘analogic model’, he says that ‘as in all distinctions of this essay, one should think of a continuum at whose extremes there is pure extrapolation and analogy, and of two fields grouped around the poles and shading into each other on a wide front in the middle’. The latter passage with its qualifying reference to ‘all distinctions of this essay’ has been cut from the version of the argument that appears in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, although later in the book he describes extrapolation as a ‘limit-case’ of analogy. (This is characteristic of the textual complexities of Suvin’s writings.) Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, pp. 58, 68; Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 29, 76. 19 D. Suvin, ‘On Cognitive Emotions and Topological Imagination’. 20 J. L. Borges, ‘Funes, the Memorious’, p. 104. 21 Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, p. 194. 22 Suvin, ‘On Cognitive Emotions and Topological Imagination’, p. 191; cf. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, p. 189. 23 This ‘age-old quarrel’ is mentioned by Plato in Book X of The Republic. 24 Clute and Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, pp. vii–viii. 25 D. Broderick, Reading by Starlight, p. 32. 26 Broderick is more interested in considering SF as constituted by a particular set of rhetorical strategies than by a generic framework, but (as his conclusions tend to confirm) this is largely a difference of emphasis. Coherent rhetorical strategies presuppose a generic framework; the choice of generic framework limits the rhetorical strategies available. Most of the items in Broderick’s summary of SF’s rhetorical components can easily be related to ‘cognitive estrangement’. See Broderick, Reading by Starlight, pp. 156–57. 27 D. Suvin, ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’. 28 Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, p. 241.

‘Look into the dark’: On Dystopia and the Novum TOM MOYLAN

‘I The ray of light that reveals the whole to be untrue in all its moments is none other than utopia, the utopia of the whole truth, which is still to be realized. T. W. Adorno

Looking backwards from the end of the century, the political and intellectual milieu of the 1970s stands almost as an alternative reality, a moment in sharp contrast to our times.1 I don’t evoke this difference to dwell in nostalgia—for there were problems and contradictions, arrogant shortcomings and enthusiastic errors, internal failure and external repression then as now. Nevertheless, at least from my own perspective within US culture, the spaces, and practices, of democratic opposition to the system of postwar capitalism and contending superpower bureaucracies were relatively more substantial, and occupied greater ‘liberated zones’ of praxis, before the ravages of counter-revolution in the 1980s. Within this larger ‘movement’, an array of intellectual and cultural activity took place across the social grid: from neighbourhood and organizational study groups, to local theatre companies, film societies, poster collectives, fan formations, festivals and rock bands, and on to new initiatives in the academy, critical and creative production flourished. In the universities the new work was broad, overlapping, and usually challenging to the academic structure and the social system. In an historic move, inter-, cross- and trans-disciplinary work in African-American, gay and lesbian, Third World, women’s and other ‘Studies’ programmes emerged as the intellectual and pedagogical dimension of the political struggles for self-determination. Also, the elaboration and expansion of ‘theoretical’ work in the Left’s ongoing critique of the status

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quo, and the struggle through and beyond it, took several directions. To name two specific examples in the USA: in Milwaukee, Madison and New York, attention was given to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in the editorial collectives of the new journal New German Critique; and spreading out from San Diego, what came to be called ‘literary theory’ led to the formation of the Marxist Literary Group, its annual Summer Institute in Culture and Society, and later the journal Social Text. In addition, work in specific areas of cultural production took more solidly critical shape: this can be seen, for example, in the studies of film and popular music, and in paraliterature, especially science fiction and utopias. In this richly layered space-time, therefore, intellectual and cultural work moved between the academy and other social formations without the barriers that have now become common. The result was the revitalization, after years of repression and marginalization, of the discourse of a broadly considered Left that included a refunctioned critical Marxism, a new wave of Marxist or socialist feminism and gay and lesbian studies, the maturation of critical ecological studies, and expanding anti-, non- and post-Western scholarship. This was a time when the personal, political and professional dimensions of life were more, though not always easily, interrelated as facets of the self-conscious practice of the ‘movement’. This was a time just before the rise of the Right, a time just before the alienation, reification and absorption of critical or theoretical practice into the market mechanisms of a newly rationalized knowledge industry. In this moment, thirty years ago, in the December 1972 issue of College English, Darko Suvin’s ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’ made a significant contribution to this ‘oppositional public sphere’. For many of us trying to develop critical methods needed to analyse and change the existing order of things, as well as with finding effective ways to come to terms with the social meaning of science fiction, ‘Poetics’ marked the beginning of a fresh approach to SF that dealt equally with its sociological and formal properties and led to the expansion of science fiction and utopian studies in ways that connected with the entire oppositional project. Suvin’s analysis of SF on its own terms, his identification of ‘the interaction of estrangement and cognition’ and ‘an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’, shifted SF scholarship beyond the limiting tendencies of the day: those which followed New Criticism and canonical literary studies in an elitist elevation of some SF to the status of ‘serious literature’, usually interpreted with criteria appropriate for the realist or modernist novel; and those which emphasized an unreflexive populist reading of all SF as paraliterature, but which did not make the distinctions required to comprehend SF’s social production and consumption.2 In ‘Poet-

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ics’, SF was considered as a didactic literary form with its own history (however debated that would come to be) and its own formal operations. The object at last shaped the critical response. The paradigmatic shift marked by ‘Poetics’ was followed by another key contribution in 1973 with Suvin’s ‘Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea’. Again, by way of historical analysis and careful definitions and distinctions, the essay sharpened the study of the literary utopia in a move that paralleled what ‘Poetics’ did for SF. It also added to Suvin’s examination of the ‘kinship’ of the two genres as he elaborated on his historically compelling argument that utopian fiction was both one of the roots of SF and one of its types: recall that he traced ‘science fiction’ from ancient and medieval marvellous voyages and earthly paradises and argued that utopian fiction and the modern instances of SF shared in this heritage as kindred forms of ‘estranged’ writing.3 These crucial contributions were joined by another with the paper Suvin delivered in 1977 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies (‘Science Fiction and the Novum’) which reappeared in 1979 as chapter 4 of his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. In ‘SF and the Novum’, (Metamorphoses, p. 63) Suvin brought to his categories of ‘cognitive estrangement’ and ‘alternative framework’ the more developed argument that ‘SF [and utopia] is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic’ (63). Here, however, this story of growing influence falters, for (as Suvin himself observed in his keynote address at a 1996 conference on ‘Envisioning Alternatives’ at the University of Luton), ‘SF and the Novum’ has not received the attention given to the earlier publications.4 In his address, Suvin surmised that the lack of response indicated an acceptance of his argument, indeed implied a ‘critical consensus’, by ‘socialists and liberals’ (‘Novum Is as Novum Does’, 37). My own interpretation of this critical silence is, I fear, less optimistic. I would argue that it is not consensus but in fact deep discomfort with Suvin’s argument that accounts for the subsequent neglect of the novum as a critical category. Indeed, in an exchange in Science-Fiction Studies as recent as 1995, a version of this discomfort emerges when Suvin and Carol McGuirk disagree over the function of the novum, with McGuirk, in postmodern fashion, distancing herself from Suvin’s claim that a textual novum needs to be validated by cognitive logic (this, even after checking Suvin’s clarification, in his 1988 volume Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction that cognition includes the imagination as well as analytical discourse, a point which he had already made in ‘Poetics’).5

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Lurking in this friendly disagreement, therefore, is a hint of what might have been more aggressively at stake in this decades-long silence. Recalling the onset of the hegemony of the Right around 1980, I suggest that this critical neglect is itself an early symptom of the organized reaction against the Left intellectual and cultural sphere. To be sure, needed, useful and proper critiques, by what has often been subsumed under the term ‘post-structuralism’, challenged the orthodox Marxist tradition that uncritically employed categories such as scientific analysis, totality or class struggle within the unyielding, authoritarian, stricture of a set teleological analysis which was itself closed to the specificities of history. Especially in critical Marxist, feminist and (post) colonial manifestations, these critiques have aided the democratic Left’s political and intellectual project, for they have stimulated the re-examination and refunctioning of such assumptions, premises, frameworks and methods. However, by the 1980s this healthy ‘post-structuralist’ correction was all too readily conflated with a response that was neither critical nor dialectical but outright condemnatory of all Left discourse, analysis, praxis. That is, the critical project was often appropriated for attacks based in old-fashioned anti-communism, albeit given new ‘professional’ shape by the post–1968 reaction and the emergent new Right discourse. In this repressive atmosphere, however carefully nuanced at the time, Suvin’s claims for the formal operation of a totalizing novum validated by critical cognition may well have been labelled as prescriptive and narrowly rational and consequently ignored and bypassed in the retreat to the safer zones of textuality, micro-politics, or yuppie postmodernity. This tendency to coat the bitter pill of dismissal with the gel cap of critique was countered as early as 1983 in the paper (published in 1988 as ‘Cognitive Mapping’) given by Fredric Jameson at the Summer Institute on Culture and Society, co-sponsored by the Marxist Literary Group and the Unit for Criticism at the University of Illinois. Jameson begins with a recognition of the ‘pedagogical function of a work of art’ (347) that leads him to affirm the ‘historical merit of the work of Darko Suvin to repeatedly insist on a more contemporary formulation of this aesthetic value [of the didactic], in the suggestive slogan of the cognitive’ (348). Later, as he concludes his argument for the use value of a (provisional, critical) ‘cognitive mapping’, he notes how he has ‘infringed so many of the taboos and shibboleths of a faddish post-Marxism’ which dismiss the categories of class, class consciousness, class struggle and the mode of production, and which stigmatize ‘the concept of totality and of the project of totalizing thought’ (353–354). Pointedly, he observes that the ‘French nouveaux philosophes said it most succinctly, without realizing that they were reproducing or rein-

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venting the hoariest American ideological slogans of the cold war: totalizing thought is totalitarian thought; a direct line runs from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit to Stalin’s Gulag’ (354). In 1994, Jameson updated this counterattack in The Seeds of Time as he again dismantled the postmodern equation of ‘totality’ as an aesthetic or analytic category (‘a combination or permutation scheme’) with totalitarian practice (xv). In what amounts to an autocritique of aspects of his postmodernism studies, he continues his review of the ‘paralysis of postmodern thinking’ and argues in favour of ‘the philosophically correct use of the concept of totality, as something that by definition we cannot know rather than as some privileged form of epistemological authority some people are trying to keep for themselves, with a view toward enslaving others’ (69). In other words, given the ‘totalizing force’ of capitalism, in any of its historic transformations, it is only by means of representations of the social totality (and not by the enforcement of hierarchical, undemocratic strategy and tactics) that the mode of production can be adequately grasped, critiqued, indeed challenged. Such a process is not authoritarian, closed, or absolute, but rather a matter of ‘a preliminary working hypothesis’ or ‘an indirect way of solving something that cannot be mastered head-on’ (68–69). As Jameson puts it: ‘Totalization’ is thereby ‘a project rather than the word for an already existent institution’ (65). A different version of this opposition to theoretical reaction is put forth by Paul Smith in his 1997 analysis of the current, apparently ‘global’, moment of capitalism. In Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North, Smith claims as part of his basic approach, the ‘logic of totality’, which quoting from Engels he describes as a method depending on ‘a historical process and its explanatory reflection in thought, the logical pursuance of its inner connections’ (2). Asserting that the ‘different descriptions of the world that [critical Marxism] can offer are still crucial’, despite (or perhaps because of) the historic events of 1989 and the ‘thrall of the millennial dream’ of a restructured capital, he argues that the ‘discovery and exposure of effective orders of determination in culture and society are still the tasks at hand and [are ones] in which a pragmatic politics might still claim a theoretical and analytical dimension directed at structural transformation’ (56). That is, in the face of capital’s totalizing practice, only an ‘alternative analysis of the totality’ (57) can mount an effective oppositional response. Thus, Smith, like Jameson, challenges anyone who ‘parrots the shibboleth of the “collapse of grand-narratives,” or who recites the standard chant against Marxism’s “totalizing” urge’ (59), or who ‘forgets’ how much Left critical praxis has rigorously challenged any and all authoritarian tendencies. As with Jameson and Suvin, by way of Raymond

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Williams, he reasserts the importance of ‘the explanatory power, and the power to change, that came from recognizing the existence of a completely structured totality’ (60) and of being able not only to critique the social order but also to change it.6 In light of this history of reaction and emergent counter-attack, I suggest that Suvin’s argument for the novum fell victim to the theoretical and political dark ages of the 1980s. As the political culture of the 1970s was beaten back, and as its critical wing slid into shadows of suspicion, the 1979 essay was seldom explored and less so developed, except by Jameson and others who were generally working within the ambit of the journal Science-Fiction Studies. Indeed, to return to the 1996 keynote address, I would note that even though Suvin expresses doubts about the ‘beneficence’ of the novum (‘Novum is as Novum Does’, 37), his concerns are not a rejection of its underlying logic but rather a caution about a too facile embrace of the capacity of a radical novum to survive the pressures of the current conjuncture. Thus, he asserts that ‘we live in an ever faster circulation of what Benjamin called das Immerwiedergleiche, the ever again recurring whirligig of fads that do not better human relationships’, and he quotes David Noble who warns of the ‘perpetual rush to novelty that characterises the modern marketplace, with its escalating promise of technological transcendence’ in a ‘remarkably dynamic society that goes nowhere’ (37). Suvin’s 1990s suspicions, in other words, are not those of the earlier period of reaction and rejection but rather a needed correction of the effective apprehension of the viability of the novum in these times. Because of its cautionary tone, I would argue that Suvin’s keynote commentary helps to revive his already nuanced argument in the light of the subsequent post-structuralist sensibility and in the shadow of the now more pervasive power of capital. Indeed, Suvin does not argue that the novum should be made redundant in an end-of-history implosion but rather that extreme care must be taken to distinguish between the novum of opposition and the pseudo-novum of commodification that has come to dominate the terrain of the ‘new’. He offers a sober reminder that utopian hope for what is ‘not yet’ is negated by the false utopia that the new market order offers as the prime site for individual experiences of hustle, success, and pleasure; and he further cautions that the novum of opposition itself must be interrogated (as in the critical utopias and heterotopias of the 1960s and 1970s) so that it is recognized as a novum when it generates a ‘formulation of a problem’ but not when it offers the consoling ‘explanations’ of a pseudo-novum (39). With this historical perspective in mind, I will go on to examine more carefully Suvin’s work on the novum. However, beyond explication, I will take the discussion into the present economic-cultural context and consider

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how the category of the novum—despite or indeed because of Suvin’s own caveats—can contribute to an understanding of that literary mode which seemed particularly suited to the nasty 1990s: namely, dystopian fiction. Whereas utopian—ambiguous or critical—writing was at the leading edge of cultural expression in the 1970s, it is, sadly but necessarily, the dystopia that now prevails (and I say this even while recognizing such a major exception to this tendency as the utopian novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, not only his Mars trilogy but also the concluding volume to his California trilogy, Pacific Edge).

II Human existence has nevertheless more fermenting Being, more dawning material on its upper edge and hem. Something has as it were remained hollow here, in fact a new hollow space has only just developed. Ernst Bloch

With his argument that the common denominator of the SF, and utopian, text was to be found in the ‘estranged techniques of presenting a cognitive novum’ Suvin sharpened the socio-political valence of his earlier definitions by clarifying how ‘history and society are not simply the contexts of fiction but its inly interfused factors’ (x–xi). Thus, while novelty might be present in the content of any literary genre, in SF the novum is the formal element that generates and validates all elements of the text, from alternative reality to plot, characters and style. Yet, the novum is meaningful only to the extent that it effectively intervenes in the author’s historical context. Suvin makes this point eloquently: Born in history and judged in history, the novum has an ineluctably historical character. So has the correlative fictional reality or possible world which, for all its displacements and disguises, always corresponds to the wish-dreams and nightmares of a specific sociocultural class of implied addressees. (Positions, 76)

As he reveals in Metamorphoses, Suvin’s immediate source for this category is Ernst Bloch’s work, but he does not simply borrow from Bloch. Rather, working in a different historical and political conjuncture, he dialectically critiques and supersedes Bloch’s more orthodox formulation of a societal novum. He consequently develops a radically democratic and diverse sense of the novum that enriches the deeper, political, implications of his argument. Bloch’s account in The Principle of Hope usefully begins with his identification of the realism and pessimism needed to expose the ‘horrifying possibilities

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which have been concealed and will continue to be concealed precisely in capitalist progress’ (199), for only from such a ‘critical coldness’ can a ‘militant optimism’ proceed clearly with concrete utopian struggle. Having taken this stand, however, Bloch then falls back into an orthodox framing of the Novum within the interrelated categories of Front and Ultimum, and here Suvin’s critical refunctioning takes hold. First of all, Bloch’s category of the Front, where the novum is to be found, is limited by its antiquated Leninist connotation of direct military engagement. Such a singular site of historical movement betrays what the actually existing Left has come to know: namely, that the social spaces and moments of contestation are multiple and shifting. In Suvin’s refunctioned sense—informed by the likes of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams—the ineffective metaphor of the Front gives way to a meaning closer to Williams’s notion of a structure of feeling, which allows for the naming of a variety of historically specific sites and instances (often contradictory but nevertheless oppositional) in which radical novums are to be found. To be sure, in his unorthodox moments Bloch himself catches this sense of a complex array of emergent possibilities, for he speaks of those spaces wherein the ‘world process’ is most in motion, wherein one can locate the ‘little thought-out, foremost segment of Being of animated, utopianly open matter’ (200). Thus, Suvin’s novum is not the reified ‘novelty’ produced by capitalism, or indeed the vanguard privileged by orthodox Marxism; instead, it is the dialectical force that mediates the material, historical possibilities and the subjective awareness and action engaged with those possibilities. On the other side of the frame from the Front, Bloch’s novum assumes full import only when grasped in terms of the Ultimum into which it will transmute, and for him the Ultimum represents ‘the highest newness, the repetition (the unremitting representedness of the tendency-goal in all progressively New) [that] intensifies to the last, highest, most fundamental repetition: of identity’ (203). The shift from novum to Ultimum registers the point of a ‘total leap out of everything that previously existed’ (203), and so it is the pull towards the unrepresentable Ultimum that keeps the novum resistant to enclosure by the forces (whether the hegemonic system or a hypostatized opposition) of the present moment. While the sense of a ‘total leap’ keeps the Ultimum radically open, the connotation of finality compromises it with the sort of ahistorical fixation that predominates in both theological and Stalinist discourse. For Suvin, therefore, the Ultimum, with its anti-historical, authoritarian, claim of fulfilment, must necessarily give way to the alternative of the always receding horizon of a radical break from, or leap beyond, the present, one that refuses the legitimating claim of teleological arrival. In Suvin’s formulation, the novum has revolutionary

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effect only if it functions in relationship to the changing, historically specific structures of feeling out of which it develops and the unnameable horizon of an ongoing history towards which it tends. Again, Bloch working from his unorthodox spirit, which always contends with his orthodox discipline, puts it this way: ‘the dialectic which has its motor in unrest and its goal-content, which in no way exists ante rem, in unappeared essence does away with the dogged cycle [of an Alpha to Omega movement around the new which endlessly repeats]’ (204). Instead, in keeping with the ‘realciphers in the world’, history itself can move in an open-ended, not determined or predictable, manner.7 Working from this dialectically enriched philosophico-political framework, Suvin frees up the political valence of the novum as the mediation of form and history. As he puts it in ‘SF and the Novum’: ‘An aesthetic novum is either a translation of historical cognition and ethics into form, or (in our age perhaps more often) a creation of historical cognition and ethics as form’ (Metamorphoses, 80). With the relationship established, he goes on to refine the treatment of readerly estrangement begun in ‘Poetics’, and describes it as a ‘feedback oscillation’ which moves now from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality to the narratively actualized novum in order to understand the plot-events, and now back from those novelties to the author’s reality, in order to see it afresh from the new perspective gained (71)

This process also provides him with the basis for the critical evaluation of SF texts, for he notes that SF is a symbolic system which can be ‘cognitively validated within the narrative reality of the tale and its interaction with readerly expectations’ (80). The criteria Suvin employs to judge the meaningfulness or significance of an SF text vary slightly from essay to essay, but they are summed up most succinctly in ‘Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction: Degrees of Kinship’ (published as ‘The River-side Trees’ in 1974, reprinted in Positions). He lists three criteria for the evaluation of the novum, and its correlate elements: ‘magnitude’, ‘cognitive validation’ and ‘relevance’ (Positions, 38). The measure of magnitude (gauged from a ‘single event or gadget to a cosmic-cumsocietal totality’) primarily concerns textual content (38), for this is largely a matter of assessing a text in terms of ‘how much new insight into imaginary but coherent and this-worldly, that is, historical, relationships it affords and can afford’ (Metamorphoses, 81). In his 1982 ‘Narrative Logic’ essay (also in Positions), Suvin elaborates on the criterion of magnitude in terms of the related criterion of ‘consistency’, which he explains is a measure of whether

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the novelties are ‘sufficiently numerous and sufficiently compatible to induce a coherent “absent paradigm” ’ (67).8 The question of cognitive validation shifts the readerly, critical process outside the text. Certainly, within the text, cognition requires ‘the necessity and possibility of explicit, coherent, and immanent or nonsupernatural explanation of realities’ (Metamorphoses, 67). However, in ‘Not Only But Also: On Cognition and Ideology in SF and SF Criticism’ (written with Marc Angenot in 1979, reprinted in Positions), the authors note that the validation of these realities must occur by way of a full ‘interaction between the text and the history in which it is being written and is being read, so that the contradictions and mediations of a history-as-process are [not] passed over in silence’ (48). That is, to avoid a response not caught in the present moment (therefore ‘ideological and mystifying’), cognitive validation must grasp the current conjuncture in its contradictions. To do so, however, it must draw not only on analytical discourse but ‘equally (and in all probability necessarily) . . . on imagination’ in order to resist the reductions and closure of an all too easily instrumentalized rationality (Positions, 189). Indeed, a ‘truly critical attitude’, Suvin and Angenot go on to say, works at the ‘horizon of a modern, epistemologically self-conscious and self-critical science or cognition’ (49). This cognitive horizon necessarily incorporates the viewer, reader or critic into ‘the structure of what is being beheld’ and therefore ‘permits the provisional method situated within it to be integrated into social practice and to become self-corrective on the basis of social practice, and which has a chance—if used intelligently—to show realistically the relationships of people in the material world’ (49–50). Thus, cognitive validation stays open to its own presuppositions, historical specificities, and changing positions in the context of an ongoing social practice. Finally, the criterion of relevance (‘fake vs. superficial vs. deep and/or lasting’) takes the evaluation to the ‘point where aesthetical and socio-political qualities meet’, where the ‘transposition and condensation of history into an analogical historicity’ make an epistemological impact on the reader’s own situation (Positions, 38). This is the most didactic moment in the production and reception of this didactic literary form. It is the moment when the cognitive quality of the novum which is manifest in reading protocols reorganizes the ‘logical space of our conceptual frameworks’ and increases ‘understanding of the “dynamic processes of reality” ’ (Eco, quoted in Positions, 190). Underlying these evaluative discussions is Suvin’s driving desire to differentiate between novum and pseudo-novum, between the open, political organ of the New and the economically or politically reified product. Indeed, by way of Walter Benjamin, Suvin develops an extensive analysis of

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the false novum in his 1980 essay, ‘For a “Social” Theory of Literature and Paraliterature: Some Programmatic Reflections’ (also in Positions), but he argues as well in ‘Narrative Logic’ that ‘the distinction between the consistent and inconsistent novum (as a special case of the distinction between true and fake novum) is . . . not only a key to aesthetic quality in SF but also to its ethico-political liberating potentiality’ (70). Thus, simple, ‘capricious’, market contingencies, passing fashions, do not a radical novum make, nor does the location of a universal meaning outside of history or the cycle of a static narrative masquerading as history. The novum, in short, must literally make a difference, and the determination of its quality is both an aesthetic and an ethico-political judgement that addresses the fundamental question of ‘power relationships’ as they play out in the author’s time-space (Metamorphoses, 82; Positions, 55).

III The lack of what we dream about hurts not less, but more. It thus prevents us from getting used to deprivation. What hurts, oppresses and weakens us all the time has to go. Ernst Bloch

Throughout his work, Suvin asserts this ethico-political potential of SF, and utopian, fiction. In Metamorphoses he argues that the ‘praxis’ and ‘epistemé’ of SF has the capability to lead into a ‘third dialectical term’ that supersedes both ‘fatalistic collectivism and humanistic individualism’ (74). He demonstrates this claim in theoretical arguments and textual analyses, and he persistently demonstrates how the fictional novum undergirds and informs the readerly or critical feedback loop which, at its best, comes to terms with the absent paradigm of the social-historical situation, cracks through its ideological formations and makes possible new ways of knowing the world. This powerful critical effort, however, has seldom dealt directly with the dystopian text. To be sure, early on in ‘Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia’, Suvin steps into the field of dystopian writing when he notes that utopia, as the ‘logical obverse’ of satire, ‘explicates what satire implicates, and vice versa’, and he further suggests that a utopian text could be ‘gauged by the degree of integration between its constructive-utopian and satiric aspects’, for the isolated extremes of ‘the deadly earnest blueprint and the totally closed horizons of “new maps of hell” both lack aesthetic wisdom’ (Metamorphoses, 54–55). Later, in ‘Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction’, he describes ‘antiutopias’ as utopian variants that emerge from a novum generated by a ‘less

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perfect principle’ of social organization, observing as well that a text which makes ‘a community claim to have reached perfection is in the industrial and post-industrial dynamics of society the surefire way to present us a radically less perfect state’ (Positions, 36). Further on, he mentions the ‘intimate connection of utopian fiction with other types of SF (extraordinary voyage, technological anticipation, anti-utopia, and dystopia, etc.)’ (38).9 However, rather than address the specificities of dystopia, he chooses to see it as satire one time, as anti-utopia another, and in yet another as a correlate form of SF. In the interests of clarifying the form and function of dystopian fiction— and doing so in light of Suvin’s concept of the novum—I want to turn to Jameson’s comments in The Seeds of Time. In his discussion of the antinomies of Utopia and Anti-utopia, Jameson makes the familiar point that even the most anti-utopian expressions are ‘in reality Utopian ones’, are manifestations of a political unconscious acting on its ‘longing for transfigured collective relationships’, despite the denial or suppression of the name Utopia in doing so (54–55). However, as he reasserts the ubiquity of Utopia, he cautions against ‘the facile deployment of the opposition between Utopia and dystopia’ (55). He suggests that the pair be disjoined, that the spectrum of Utopia and Anti-utopia be separated from the object of dystopian narrative. Indeed, it is the narrative quality of dystopia (its attention to what ‘happens to a specific subject or character’) that differentiates it from the non-narrative utopian text, which instead of plotting the trajectory of a subject ‘describes a mechanism or even a kind of machine’ (56).10 Thus, he opposes dystopian stories of social disaster (recently in near-future SF) to utopian accounts of the imaginary construction of better social systems in the name of freedom, even as such accounts are exercises which name that which cannot be named.11 While Jameson’s tendency not to recognize the role of narrative in utopian texts is a matter for later reconsideration, his point about dystopias is provocative and useful. To be sure, it is immediately necessary to detach ‘dystopia’ from ‘anti-utopia’ and thus to agree that the proper philosophical opposition is that of utopia and anti-utopia. Indeed, Lyman Tower Sargent made this distinction in 1975 when, in ‘Utopia—The Problem of Definition’, he reserved the term ‘anti-utopia’ for ‘works, both fictional and expository, which are against Utopia and utopian thought’ (138, my emphasis). Working from the original pun, he stipulates ‘ou-topia’ as the generic name for the ‘no place’ of alternative worlds of whatever valence, while ‘eutopia’ names the rendering of a ‘good place’ and ‘dys-topia’ becomes the term for accounts of a ‘bad place’ (137–138). Sargent’s distinctions accomplish what Jameson later suggests, for in the socio-philosophical spectrum

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of utopia and anti-utopia, the textual forms of ‘eutopia’ (now commonly ‘utopia’), ‘dystopia’, and ‘anti-utopia’ are related but different fictional subgenres. Indeed, in ‘Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction’ (1974), Suvin offered a less nuanced version of this distinction in his comment that ‘SF can finally be written only between the utopian and the anti-utopian horizons’ (Positions, 42). Jameson’s divorce of dystopia from utopia is, then, an important distinction, for it separates the textual category from the philosophical relationship (marked by capitalizing the historico-philosophical term). However, instead of removing dystopias from the discussion, this separation opens the way for an examination of the dystopian text, which is not to be read as an inversion of a utopia nor to be conflated with anti-utopia.12 Rather, it is an object to be analyzed on its own terms. Returning to Suvin’s framework, the dystopia emerges as another type of estranged writing, whose fictional novum also negotiates the socio-political spectrum of Utopia and Antiutopia.13 Considering dystopia in terms of its own properties, Raffaella Baccolini therefore argues that the dystopian text works from the dialogic interaction of a narrative of the hegemonic order and a counter-narrative of resistance (‘ “It’s not in the womb the damage is done” ’, 1). Given this structure, dystopian novels tend to ‘open directly on the nightmarish society, with no need for time and/or space dislocation for the dystopian citizen’ (‘Journeying’, 1). Yet, despite the absence of the ‘utopian’ process of dislocation, education, and return of a visitor, the ‘dystopia’ generates its own didactic project in the critical encounter that ensues as the citizen, a rebel or misfit of some sort, confronts, or is confronted by, the society that is present on the very first page. How that encounter develops, and especially how it ends, offers a starting point for investigating the meaningfulness of the textual novum. Here, Suvin’s criteria come back into play; but, before returning to his critical matrix, I want to recall Søren Baggesen’s analysis of dystopian tendencies. Working from Bloch’s categories of ‘militant’ and ‘resigned’ pessimism, Baggesen distinguishes between dystopias which exhibit a ‘utopian pessimism’ (in which the social conditions are explained in terms of the material processes of history) and those which hold to a ‘dystopian pessimism’ (in which the destructive elements are based in ontological conditions which lead to ‘resignation’ rather than ‘militance’). Although I prefer calling this second category ‘anti-utopian pessimism’ and will go on to identify its typical form as ‘pseudo-dystopia’, I agree, along with Hoda Zaki, that this analysis allows for a sharper understanding of how dystopian narrative plays out on the Utopia and Anti-utopia spectrum.

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Taken in the light of Baccolini’s and Baggesen’s analyses of the structure of dystopian narrative, Suvin’s criteria offer a useful entry to the critical assessment of dystopias. As outlined above, a text can be read in terms of the categories of magnitude, cognitive validation and relevance. However, in addition to this tripartite matrix, Suvin offers a related approach, based on the difference between epic and myth, that is well suited for the specific operations of dystopian texts. In ‘The SF Novel as Epic Narration’ (published in 1982 and in Positions), he identifies two complementary elements of the SF novel which serve as sites for formal and sociological evaluation: the novum as plot generator and the ending, as both are considered along the line from epic to myth. Suvin begins his analysis of the novum as plot generator by noting that SF is ‘in proportion to its meaningfulness—under the hegemony of the epic’ (Positions, 77), and he grounds his conclusion in the claim that SF texts share the common denominator, in one variant or another, of the ‘epic adventure or voyage-of-discovery plot’, even if a narration is concerned with the discovery of an idea or the process of changed consciousness. The validity of such narratives, again, rests on the force of the novum: for a significant SF text must be based on ‘new configurations of reality in both inner and outer space. . . . rather than an a priori dogma pretending to mythological status or a private impression’ (77). The chronicle in the alternative setting pivots on the novum, as the epically new, not on ‘the mythic reconfirmation of cyclic processuality’ (77); consequently, a meaningful text will ‘represent spatial and historical configurations as partly but irreconcilably different from the norm dominant in the author’s age’ and will ‘refuse the mythological homeomorphy where all cycles and all agents are, centrally, such transformations of each other which can bring forth neither truly new values nor a hesitation as to the empirical success of existing values’ (77–78). Moving from plot to ending, Suvin argues that ‘epic events can be presented as historically contingent and unforeseeable (and thus as a rule historically reversible)’; whereas in a compromised, commodified, ending, the ‘events are cyclical and predetermined, foreseeable descents from the timeless into the temporal realm’, hence mythological (80). In an epical text, ‘choice’ shapes the agential relations and ending in ‘new and better’ ways, ones not readily foreseen.14 This, he asserts, is ‘the precondition for a narrative rendering of freedom’ (80); whereas in a mythological text there is no clear sequence of narrative choices pulling forwards as a novum. He concludes: ‘In SF novels, again more explicitly and testably than in most other genres, the ending is the moment of truth for the novum’s cognitive validation and the narrative’s believability—for the coherence, richness, and

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relevance of the text as significant SF’ (81).15 In dystopian fiction, therefore, several critical moves can make possible an understanding of the operation of this textual form and its value. Considered as a separate subgenre of estranged fiction, the dystopia can be judged, on one hand, according to the manner in which its novum generates internal innovation and, on the other, according to its analytical and imaginative contestation with the author’s historical situation.16 However, given the above distinctions of ‘utopia’, ‘anti-utopia’, and ‘dystopia’, a further distinction can now be made between ‘dystopia’ and ‘pseudo-dystopia’ (see table): that is, between a text in the dystopian tradition and one which appears dystopian but fails (or chooses not) to challenge the ideological and epistemological limits of the actually existing society (see table). In this context, several questions arise: where does a given text fall on the continuum of ‘militant’, ‘utopian’ pessimism versus ‘resigned’, ‘anti-utopian’ pessimism; how does it play out in the difference between epical and mythic form and substance; how is it informed by a novum or pseudo-novum? And, how does it situate itself in the contest between history and the ‘end-of-history’, between Utopia and Anti-utopia?

Philosophical Horizons

Estranged (sub)genres

Utopia Historical Novum

Anti-Utopia Universal Pseudo-novum

u-topia/eu-topia (radical hope) dys-topia (militant pessimism) (epic, open)

anti-utopia (cynicism, despair) pseudo-dystopia (resigned pessimism) (myth, closed)

The potential of a dystopian text thereby rests in the capacity of its novum to ‘reconcile the principle of hope and the principle of reality’ by resisting mythological or ideological closure and opening towards a ‘more mature polyphony envisaging different possibilities for different agents and circumstances, and thus leaving formal closure cognitively open-ended, regardless of whether at the end of the novel the positive values be victorious or defeated’ (Positions, 83).

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TOM MOYLAN IV If you look into the dark long enough, there is always something there. W. B. Yeats

From London’s Iron Heel, Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ and Zamyatin’s We to Robinson’s Gold Coast, Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Piercy’s He, She, and It, the web of dystopian writing offers specific cultural artefacts that negotiate the processes of history, perception and social change.17 While some explore the terrors and contradictions of fascist or bureaucratically deformed socialist states, others delve into the cruel chaos of capitalist systems; while some adopt an anti-utopian persuasion with no allowance for opposition, others stubbornly locate utopian enclaves of resistance or pockets of misfits at their margins; while some take the ‘classic’ form of a conflict within an authoritarian society, others (often as SF set ‘twenty minutes into the future’) provide ‘new maps of hell’ that trace the complexities of a restructuring world system which, so far, offers few instances of appropriate resistance and utopian hope. Yet, each text leads to an aesthetic or epistemological encounter with its historical conjuncture: whether the encounter recasts the present in mythic traps of consolation or takes the reader radically beyond the order of things is a question whose answer begins with the textual novum as it works out in history. More specific studies must wait, however, for I want to close with another dystopian text, another by Suvin. This is not a critical essay, or fiction, but a poem, ‘Growing Old Without Yugoslavia’, published in 1994 in Science-Fiction Studies. To frame my comments, I begin with a utopian fragment published some years earlier, in 1988: namely, Suvin’s dedication in Positions: ‘To Ivan V. Lalic and the memory of Vojo Kuzmanovic—friends and SF swappers from the archaic torso of Zagreb in the 1950s, our socialist youth’. For here is a utopian riff that comes from memories in which the personal and political, everyday life and revolutionary society, braid together in a concrete utopian moment of youth in Yugoslavia in its youth. This remembrance, however, is not a ‘recollection’ or backward-looking exercise in nostalgia, but rather (and rightly, as the first words in a text devoted to history, cognition, imagination, and praxis) an act of ‘recognition’ of the continuing power of past victories in the present, perhaps in the future.18 It is a gesture against the cult of the new in a world-without-history, a terse challenge to the co-optations of commodified society. Since the book’s publication, this moment has passed more fundamentally than the dedication implied. The grinding motion of history, this time in capitalist triumph, has taken its awful toll. Nevertheless, the dedication is a figure of hope that stakes its claim on us, from out of history. As we read it, we are, momentarily, in history.

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The dedication puts the tragedy and pain of the poem in sharper perspective, as if it needed it. Written in 1993 and published during the barbarities in what once was Yugoslavia, the utopia of the dedication, the poem verges on despair as it describes a world in which even ‘those who cannot die / Also are dying’. Indeed, on first reading, it struck me as a step into the hell of anti-utopia. Knowing better than that as I reread, the dystopian quality of the lines echoed through their insistent refusal to go gently. For in this poetic journey from hope, into terror, and beyond, a radical novum holds out against the darkness of reaction.19 This is the poem: Growing Old Without Yugoslavia Dein leben wird dir entrissen Deine leistung wird dir gestrichen Du stirbst für dich. I would like to consent to my non-being Usually called death To make my peace i need a lot of good being In the nature of Buck’s anti-gravity belt Or maybe an airport runway: Well-kept, durable, solid Making possible a glad & safe ascent Into the giddy lightness of non-being Alas! The being around me is ill-kept The keepers are corrupt & absolutely shameless Their only integrity is the muddy massiness of hate Spewing out black lava, Burning up gnarled olive-trees small kakadu Yugoslavia disintegrates into dwarf malignancies Gun-sighting each other with simulacra mantic Slaughters romantic relics of saints Byzantine & Roman antics How can i consent to easeful non-being When being for all i hold beloved Becomes heavier & heavier? Who can unclutch let go, When assassins stick a bayonet into her entrails? Ascensions drop bombs rip up lung & eyes Even if we find anti-gravity it will be for blowing up babies Even if i die old in my bed, this system Makes it impossible to die gladly With no Tito, bombers & warring angels Recolonize the blissful anti-gravity skies,

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TOM MOYLAN Where nobody can consent to dying The economics of life are all wrong. Those who cannot die Also are dying: O Apollo, help us to change, to make a head On the torso of our bank-ridden life!

Because of the ‘corrupt’ and ‘shameless’ keepers who have wrought the destruction of individual lifetimes, of a society, of a social dream, ‘good being’ is banished. The actually existing locus of hope is disintegrating at the hands of a system which ‘Makes it impossible to die gladly’. And, lest we Western readers think it’s only the ‘Eastern’ bureaucracy to blame, we find by the closing lines that the ‘system’ has produced a world in which ‘The economics of life are all wrong’, in which we all face a ‘bank-ridden life’. Under the gravitational force of reaction, with its ‘dwarf malignancies’, the desire for fullness of being is crushed. The hope for a just and free world in which, as Bloch boldly argued, even death would lose its sting drowns in the lava flow of blood and hate. Yet, faced with this brutal loss of the historically achieved materiality of a socialist dream, the novum persists. It can be traced, as Suvin’s own criteria suggest, in the poem’s ending, but also in the creation of the poem itself. Contrary to the sense of the Brecht quotation which recounts the terror of being reduced to an isolated self, the narrator is a connected ‘i’ of a community, not a free-floating Individual. This stubborn self journeys internally from denunciation to annunciation, from the cold stream of critical apprehension of the shameful order to the warm current of hope, and moves toward an ending which culminates in an outrageous secular prayer to Apollo, god of light and truth, protector against darkness, ultimate mediator between humans and what lies beyond. The prayer, however, is not a cry for salvation, or deliverance. Rather, as one would send to a skilled organizer, it is an emergency message for help in mobilizing ‘change’. And change begins with work, with the re-creation of a head, that site of radical cognition, to enliven the alienated torso of flesh and desire, and so to stand upright against the life-denying system. The novum, however, flickers not only in the ending but also in the imagination that produces the poem. Even before the critical act of reading, or organizing, the structure of feeling of anger, fear and yearning moves the poet, who will not surrender at the margins of dystopia, to write.20 ‘Growing Old Without Yugoslavia’ thus resounds in militant, epical, utopian pessimism, and stands as the ‘ultimate’ moment in this meditation on the novum and dystopia.

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Notes 1 I want to thank George Mason University for supporting this project, and my graduate assistant Anna Bounds who helped me achieve greater clarity, with greater efficiency. I am indebted to Raffaella Baccolini, Jamie Owen Daniel, Áine O’Brien, Patrick Parrinder and Darko Suvin for comments on drafts of this essay, the ultimate shortcomings of which are mine. I’m especially grateful for the conversations, in person and in hard and electronic print, that I’ve had with Darko Suvin since first meeting him at the 1976 MLA convention and then at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in Milwaukee in 1977 when, as it happens, I was the respondent at the panel on ‘Science Fictions’ at which he presented his paper on ‘Science Fiction and the Novum’ along with papers by Teresa de Lauretis and Samuel R. Delany. A more extensive version of this essay appears in my book Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (New York: Westview, 2000). 2 In Positions Suvin contests ‘on one hand the academic elitism wrinkling its none too perfect nose at the sight of popular literature and art, and, on the other hand, the fannish shoreless ocean of indiscriminately happy passages to continents full of masterpieces miraculously emerging year upon year’ (xi). 3 Suvin’s initial presentation of these taxonomic definitions and distinctions, along with his discussion of extrapolative and analogic models of SF, appeared in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’ in Genre 63 (1972), which reappears as Chapter 2 in Metamorphoses. He made a different, but nevertheless key, contribution to SF and utopian studies when he joined Dale Mullen as co-editor of Science-Fiction Studies in 1973; SFS subsequently became one of the journals in the critical constellation of the 1970s. For a valuable source for fleshing out the nature of the ‘early’ forms of estranged writing in terms of the relations and tensions between emergent ‘scientific’ and ‘literary’ discourses in the Renaissance, see Denise Albanese, New Science, New Worlds. 4 A shorter version of Suvin’s address (which was entitled ‘Where Are We? Or How Did We Get Here? Is There Any Way Out?: Or, News from the Novum’) was published as ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’ in Foundation in 1997. 5 See Carol McGuirk’s essay and the exchange in ‘Notes and Correspondence’. Study of the related issue of the ‘science question’ in Suvin’s work might begin with his ‘ “Utopian’ and “Scientific” ’ essay and work through to his 1997 Foundation essay wherein he reaffirms his ‘quite conscious founding decision in Metamorphoses, dating from a silent debate with Brecht in the 1950s, to use the nomination of ‘cognition’ instead of ‘science’ (‘Novum Is as Novum Does’, 39). Such a study might then consider the connections and differences between his position and that of Donna Haraway (see ‘Situated Knowledges’). 6 For another critique in this vein see Terry Eagleton’s Illusions. 7 For more on Bloch’s dialogic struggle between his Leninist–Stalinist orthodoxy and his radical grasp of the motion of history and utopian desire see my ‘Bloch Against Bloch’. 8 The ground-breaking essay here is Marc Angenot’s ‘Absent Paradigm’, but see also Fitting, ‘Positioning and Closure’, and Kathleen Spencer, ‘The Red Sun’. 9 This is the place to recall Suvin’s account of the shift in utopian writing in the

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1960s. In ‘Not Only But Also’ (1979), he and Angenot note how new utopian work envisaged ‘the pros and cons of a dynamic, provisional . . . utopia’ (Positions, 58). And, in ‘the SF Novel as Epic Narration’ (1982) he notes that ‘utopia . . . turned from anatomy to novel, and its voyage-of-discovery plot was enriched by a doubly new consciousness’ (Positions, 83). In the interest of settling accounts, this is also the place to apologize to both authors for not citing, and benefiting from, these essays in my own work in Demand, even though both were in print before I completed the book. 10 Fredric Jameson’s point that dystopia is narrative and utopias are mostly ‘non-narrative’, however much I disagree with its extreme opposition, does clarify how ‘dystopias’ privilege the plot elements of the discrete register of the text (closer to the spirit, perhaps, of Marx’s political analysis in Eighteenth Brumaire) and how ‘utopias’ work from the iconic register (more in keeping with Marx’s ‘camera obscura’ metaphor of ideological analysis) wherein what is significant about the alternative utopian world is not so much what it describes but rather what it does not, what it has negated in the author’s social environment. See my ‘ “Dare to struggle” ’, and Demand, 29–59. 11 Although Jameson, Adorno, Benjamin and others have treated this utopian quality in terms of the Jewish Bildersverbot (though Protestant iconoclasm works almost as well), another metaphor emerges from the Roman Catholic definition of a sacrament, wherein the material form of the rite stands as the ‘outward sign of an inward grace’ (see Baltimore Catechism). Indeed, the metaphor of transubstantiation is also helpful, for it names a sign (the bread and wine) which means both its own materiality and the transcendent presence of the divinity. Utopia comes to us, perhaps, not by no name, but by a name: one not reducible to itself, yet with its own force of meaning in the provisional moment on the way to salvation or spiritual transcendence, revolution or material transcendence. Utopian content, indeed even narrative, is perhaps of more significance than Jameson and others usually recognize. See also Eagleton, ‘Pretty Much Like Ourselves’ 7. 12 Peter Fitting suggests that a distinguishing approach might be to regard ‘dystopias’ as fictions which privilege setting and ‘anti-utopias’ as those which work with plot (‘Impulse or Genre’, 281). Although I hold with Jameson that dystopias are overall more concerned with narrative (see note 11), Fitting’s point is apt if considered within the spectrum of ‘dystopian’ and what I term ‘pseudo-dystopian’ narratives. 13 Although I hope that my argument—drawing on Sargent, Suvin, and Jameson—helps to clarify terminological and analytical confusion in dystopian analysis, I do not mean to deny the value of earlier work, such as that of Frye, Hillegas, Hutchinson and Kumar. 14 For a related argument see Raymond Williams on ‘willed transformation’ in ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’. 15 Although I take Suvin’s point, I think that care must be taken to heed feminist critiques of the epic tradition’s privileging of the male hero. However, if indeed the SF novum is that which exceeds the social, and formal, limits of the present, then it has the potential to transcend the ideological limits of the epic tradition even as it makes use of the epical form. Of course, the best commentary on the power of SF to shatter existing gender structures and power relations can be found in critical

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essays by Joanna Russ. See especially ‘What Can a Heroine Do?’, which when originally published in 1971 was also a major contribution to the paradigm shift in SF studies. 16 I part with Suvin’s argument that utopia, anti-utopia, and dystopia are subgenres of ‘SF’, for I think SF is more accurately a product of modernity (where that begins is another matter). Since the roots of all these forms precede modernity, I prefer the term ‘estranged writing’ to name their overall category. Nevertheless, I agree that—in the twentieth century, or at least the second half—all three sub-genres were usually conceived, written, and certainly marketed, within the generic sphere of SF. See also Eagleton, ‘Pretty Much Like Ourselves’, 7. 17 I take Constance Penley’s point that ‘critical dystopia’ could name (filmic) texts which ‘suggest causes rather than merely reveal symptoms’ (‘Time/Travel’ 122) and look forward to pursuing her suggestion in my work on Robinson, Butler, Piercy and others. For a good analysis of an earlier dystopia negotiating utopia/antiutopia see Phillip Wegner, ‘On Zamyatin’s We’; and for a useful analysis of the ‘autocritical impulse’ in dystopia see George McKay, ‘Metapropaganda’. 18 The best elucidation of these opposing types of memory is Vincent Geoghegan, ‘Remembering the Future’. For studies of the place of memory and imagination in dystopia, see Raffaella Baccolini, ‘Journeying Through the Dystopian Genre’ and ‘ “It’s not in the womb the damage is done” ’. 19 In a recent e-mail exchange, Suvin reported that ‘Growing Old’ as published in SFS was the second half of a two-part poem, written during November and December 1993. He had sent it for publication to Mullen, who agreed to place it in the back-matter of a future issue. By the time he also submitted the first part for publication, Mullen had room only for part two. Since the SFS text is the published version (and the one which struck me when I read it), it is the text I choose to work with. 20 Another example of this dual stance in Suvin’s work (that is, critique/denunciation and hope/annunciation), though developed in a different context, is ‘Revelation vs Conflict’.

Science Fiction and Utopia: A Historico-Philosophical Overview CARL FREEDMAN

Thomas More’s neo-Greek coinage utopia is one of the most successful such inventions in linguistic history; merely to list and discriminate among the major uses of the term and the various senses that it has been made to bear would require a substantial book. For my current purposes, however, there are three distinct (though related) meanings of main importance: in chronological order, a generic meaning, a political-economic meaning and a philosophical and hermeneutic meaning. The chief burden of this overview will be to investigate the critical relationship between science fiction and utopia by co-ordinating each of these senses of the latter term with science fiction as understood in the canonical Suvinian sense: that is, as the literature of cognitive estrangement, as the critical genre par excellence. Generically, of course, utopia refers to the form invented in 1516 (almost exactly three centuries before Frankenstein, the founding text of SF) when More published Utopia; and the form has been at least intermittently popular ever since. There is no question here of even a very brief survey of the genre, but it is worth noting that there is probably no other comparably abundant literary kind that can be traced so unambiguously—and often explicitly—to a single text. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—probably the finest utopian work produced in the two centuries after More—Swift is careful to include overt mention of his precursor in the prefatory letter;1 and a number of later authors have recorded their direct debt in their very titles: for example Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905); William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), in which More’s neo-Greek is translated into English; Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), in which More’s term is translated and then scrambled; and, much more recently, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which is subtitled ‘An Ambiguous Utopia’. As the example of Le Guin suggests, utopias today are typically written within an explicitly science-fictional context.

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The second, political-economic sense of utopia is doubtless less familiar to most readers. It refers mainly to the polemical writings of Marx and Engels in which the founders of historical materialism deprecate certain alternative conceptions of socialism as ‘utopian’, in contrast to their own scientific version. Suffice it for the moment to note that, when Marx and Engels declare themselves to be against the idea of utopia, they object not (primarily) to the actual contents of any imagined better society, nor to the form that the imagining of such a society might take, and least of all to the idealism and good faith of at least some of those whom they characterize as utopian socialists. Instead, the main object of their attack is the putative means of transition from actuality to utopia. Utopia in this sense has no direct connection to science fiction, though its indirect relevance will become apparent. Finally, utopia has an important hermeneutic sense. The reference here is to a group of philosophers in, or on the margins of, the original Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, as well as later commentators directly influenced by the Frankfurt School. Key authors include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and, among later figures, Fredric Jameson. But far and away the most important philosopher of utopian interpretation is Ernst Bloch—most significantly as he is represented by his immense magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1959), an almost unclassifiable work that combines cultural and aesthetic commentary, philosophical and theological speculation, and political polemic, all the while remaining a kind of vast prose poem in its own right.2 For Bloch utopia is not so much a matter of description or planning as it is a way of thinking and of reading: a utopian hermeneutic construes fragmentary prefigurations of an unalienated (communist) future in the cultural artefacts of the past and present, including many that on the surface may not seem particularly progressive. Though it is possible to contrast critique and utopia, the latter, as we shall see, can be understood also as an aspect of critique. Furthermore, the hermeneutic of utopia provides an especially powerful and appropriate way of reading the texts of science fiction. But, before examining this particular conjuncture of science fiction and utopia, it is necessary to appreciate some of the critical richness of utopia in the Blochian sense.3

Ernst Bloch’s Utopian Hermeneutic For Bloch the central truth of utopia is paradoxical. On the one hand, utopia is never fully present in the here-and-now, and necessarily eludes all attempts to locate it with complete empirical precision. It depends upon

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what Bloch calls the novum, that is, the radically (though not purely) new, which by definition cannot be exhaustively or definitively mapped. Utopia is to be found in the Not-Yet, or the Not-Yet-Being, or the In-Front-of-Us, or simply the Front, as Bloch variously designates it. Utopia can never be fixed in the perspective of the present, because it exists, to a considerable degree, in the dimension of futurity: not, however, in the future as the latter is imagined by mere chronological forecasting, or in mechanistic and philistine notions of bourgeois ‘progress’, but rather as the future is the object of hope, of our deepest and most radical longings—longings that can never be satisfied by the fulfilment of any individual wish (for example for personal wealth) but that rather demand a revolutionary reconfiguration of the world as a totality. Utopian hope or longing, in other words, possesses an inherently collective character and at bottom has nothing in common with individualist impulses like greed. Indeed, it is only the dimension of collectivity that guarantees the future-orientedness of utopia: for the merely selfinterested wish always amounts to a desire that the status quo of the present should remain essentially unaltered while one’s own personal lot within it is improved. Yet, precisely because utopian longings are irreducible in human psychology as Bloch understand it—because the hope principle drives us no less ineluctably, if more subtly and less palpably, than the Freudian pleasure principle does—utopia, which in one sense is always elsewhere, always escaping our actual horizons, is in another and no less important sense inscribed in the innermost core of our being. As Bloch puts it in the sublime conclusion to Das Prinzip Hoffnung: Marx describes as his final concern ‘the development of the wealth of human nature’; this human wealth as well as that of nature as a whole lies solely in the tendency-latency in which the world finds itself – vis-à-vis de tout. This glance therefore confirms that man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland. (III, 1375–76)

Every valid theoretical description of utopia is thus paradoxical. Utopia is the homeland where no one has ever been but where alone we are authentically at home. It is the promised land which, in counter-Biblical fashion,

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can be attained only by means of exodus: ‘the thus designated realm of freedom develops not as return, but as exodus—though into the always intended promised land, promised by process’ (I, 205). Utopia is fundamental to our being, while being is itself a matter of Not-Yet-Being: ‘The being that conditions consciousness, and the consciousness that processes being, is understood ultimately only out of that and in that from which and towards which it tends. Essential being is not Been-ness; on the contrary: the essential being of the world lies itself on the Front’ (I, 18; emphasis deleted). Such paradoxes are by no means merely verbal. They correspond to the dialectic of immanence and transcendence that constitutes utopia and, ultimately, to the inescapably dialectical, contradictory nature of postKantian and post-Hegelian reality itself. It is important to understand that this concept of utopia is not only a theory of sociality—of the unalienated classless homeland of a post-revolutionary future—but, no less fundamentally, of psychology as well. The hope principle, incessantly driving us back to where we have never been, constitutes the human psyche as intrinsically divided, and there is some kinship between this idea and Lacan’s concept of the splitting of the subject. Indeed, a psychoanalytic reading of Bloch could readily rewrite utopian positivity as primary narcissism, or, in more strictly Lacanian terms, as preImaginary plenitude. But the differences between Bloch and Lacan are important. Lacan shares Freud’s harsh pessimism. For both, plenitude is primarily an illusion, and the Lacanian splitting of the subject is irreducibly structured on a lack or privation that can, at best, be somewhat palliated through psychoanalytic practice but can never be radically healed or even challenged. For Bloch, by contrast, plenitude is much more than an illusion, since it corresponds to the positive fulfilment of utopian longing. Lack is in one way no less crucial for Bloch than for Freud and Lacan—since Bloch certainly does not deny the bleakest prospects of psychic self-alienation and the reality principle—but Bloch, unlike the psychoanalysts, understands lack as not simply itself but also as always implying its own positivity. To understand lack or nullity in this paradoxical way is, indeed, the supreme hermeneutic achievement of utopian thought on both the psychic and social levels, and it is in this context that Marx can be seen as the greatest of utopian philosophers: ‘The zero point of extremest alienation which the proletariat represents now at last becomes the dialectical point of change; Marx teaches us to find out All precisely in the Nothing of this zero point’ (III, 1358). Utopian plenitude, one might say, is (pace psychoanalysis) a kind of truth, though—again the inevitable paradox—such plenitude can be truly apprehended only in fragmentary form. It follows, then, that utopia is a form of cognition and, indeed, a version

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of critical theory itself. Bloch’s dialectical synthesis of utopia as a category at once social and psychological works to foreground the post-Kantian and post-Hegelian primacy of interpretation and thus to transcend any mechanistic binary opposition between (abstractly positivistic) ‘objectivity’ and (abstractly psychologistic) ‘subjectivity’. Utopian thought cannot display the results of its investigations in the shape of quantified data, but none the less retains a cognitive integrity and validity that are grounded in the very nature of critique. Utopian hermeneutic is after all a kind of labour, a political practice, which makes no claim to empiricist ‘reflection’ but construes its objects in an avowedly interested—a collectively interested—way. The construction of utopia among the the terrible reifications of actuality is true, not in the sense of attaining unproblematic correspondence with pregiven reality but in the sense of construing that which is at some level(s) only coming into being.4 One of the most striking examples in the entirety of Das Prinzip Hoffnung is Bloch’s long analysis of ‘wishful images’ (I, 337–447), which extend from the happy endings of popular films and romances to the communal longings of Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux Klan. Bloch provides a devastating critique of such mendaciously pseudoutopian desires, and he exposes the concrete continuum that links something as apparently innocuous as beautification through lipstick with something as openly grotesque as the racist fulfilment achieved through the terrorism of the masked night-rider. Both involve a wishful image in the mirror, the desire, as Bloch says, to make ourselves appear more ‘beautiful’ than we really are. Yet the critique is not merely dismissive: the regressive pseudo-utopian wish contains some measure of utopia itself. At the same time that Bloch exposes and negates, he also emphasizes the authentic positivity buried within even the worst fascist distortions of the utopian ideal of collectivity. Accordingly, he maintains that the wish for a happy ending (however trivial or barbaric in form) must be respected and resituated as well as demystified: ‘For this reason there is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists’ (I, 446). The dialectical poise displayed here is exemplary, since, for the Jewish and Marxist Bloch, Nazism is of course the limit-case, the most extreme instance of degradation and nullity. Yet even here the utopian hermeneutic is capable of construing plenitude out of privation, of reading, in the hideous pseudo-Wagnerian celebrations of murderous Aryan brotherhood, a very partial prefiguration of true collectivity. Indeed, it is no accident that Bloch typically refers to the utopia of unalienated post-revolutionary classlessness as our homeland, or, in the original German, Heimat—a term that he quite deliberately attempts to rehabilitate out of the strongly Nazi sense that it bore between 1933 and 1945.

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As a version of critical theory, then, the utopian hermeneutic of Bloch not only ranks in importance with Bakhtinian stylistics and Lukácsian genre analysis but illustrates somewhat more emphatically than they do a crucial dialectical doubleness at the heart of the whole critical-theoretical project. On the one hand, utopia, the supreme positive value, none the less implies a ruthless negation and demystification of actuality: ‘the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers.’5 The perspective of utopia alone makes completely clear how banal and corrupt are the barriers of the status quo that utopia works to transcend. Indeed, the fact that utopian plenitude can be apprehended only in the most elusive and fragmentary anticipations—that utopia emerges only in the teeth, as it were, of the mundane—is the most devastating commentary upon the latter. On the other hand, the specifically negative dimension of the utopian dialectic— the dimension of critique in the familiar sense of astringent demystification—can never, as we have seen, remain wholly self-identical but, in every concrete instance, points to a corresponding positivity and plenitude, to authentic utopian fulfilment. Of course, a substantially similar dialectic does operate in the theories of Bakhtin and Lukács. For the former, the critical heteroglossia or multi-accentuality of novelistic style—as opposed to the closed monologism of the poetic—possesses a potentially revolutionary charge in its grasp of the diverse and contradictory interconnectedness of the social field; and one might further argue that the open, polyvalent style of the novel actually functions, in Blochian terms, as a utopian figure of a multicultural liberated humanity. For Lukács, authentic critical realism, through its concrete historical-materialist ontology and epistemology that negate (and sublate) the abstractions of naturalism and psychologism, directly serves the revolutionary project; and a purely realistic text could be composed only from the standpoint of utopia, of the transparency that only a post-revolutionary classless society could make possible. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that the telos of critical theory in general can only be the transformation (in thought, language and action) of reality into utopia. The elaborate demystifying apparatuses of Marxist (and, though to a lesser degree, Freudian and even some post-structuralist) thought exist, ultimately, in order to clear space upon which positive alternatives to the existent can be constructed. But, of all versions of critical theory, it is perhaps Bloch’s that provides the amplest and most explicit demonstration of the reciprocity and indispensability of the negative and positive moments of the critical dialectic; and, not accidentally, it may well be Bloch’s utopian hermeneutic that bears the deepest affinity with science fiction.

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CARL FREEDMAN The Utopian Dimension of Science Fiction

For Bloch all genuine art—virtually by definition—finds its true significance in utopian construing.6 But there are also discriminations to be made, not only among individual art works but, perhaps more pertinently, among whole genres, some of which participate more fully in the utopian dialectic than others. Though Bloch (like Bakhtin and Lukács) exhibits little or no personal acquaintance with science fiction as such, he indirectly provides a guide to the utopian dimension of science fiction in his two great companion essays in genre criticism, ‘A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel’ and ‘A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist’.7 Bloch sees the two genres as comparable, frequently ‘popular’ forms (but such a juxtaposition might more likely pair detective fiction with science fiction), which are, however, philosophically antithetical. Detective fiction is a deeply conservative form in which utopia is at a minimum. The essentially Oedipal structure of the detective novel is oriented toward the past, when the crime that constitutes the chief datum of the text was committed. The plot of the novel is thus devoted to the strictly reactionary project of solving the crime and identifying the culprit in order that the status quo ante—the as-if-unproblematic condition of the detective’s society prior to the (singular) crime— may be restored. Now, although Bloch himself does not here pursue this line of thought, there is no doubt that a comprehensively Blochian reading would be capable of constructing anticipatory pre-illuminations of utopian collectivity even from such regressive Tory loci as a rural English village in Agatha Christie or an Oxford college in Dorothy Sayers. But what Bloch actually stresses is the much greater utopian energy at work in the novel of the artist. For here the chief structuring datum is a real novum, namely the imaginary works of art that give the protagonist his generic identity as an artist, but which can be located only on the Front, as works that may be coming into being but possess no established empirical validation. ‘Whereas the detective novel’, as Bloch summarizes, ‘requires a process of collecting evidence, penetrating backward to a past crime, the novel of the artist requires recognition of an interest in the creative person who brings out something new instead of something past’ (267). For the Germanspeaking Bloch, Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) is the principal exemplar of the novel of the artist, but Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which probably occurs more readily to the English-speaking reader, provides an even more pertinent illustration of the Blochian point. Stephen Dedalus, after all, is not, precisely, an artist (for that title cannot be earned by a single haunting villanelle), but a future artist, an artist as a young man. The great art works that constitute Stephen as the hero of the Bildungsro-

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man of an artist are not only imaginary but, even within the world of the text, exist only on the level of the Not-Yet, as pure though concrete potentiality. In strictly utopian manner, it is the future—the fractional anticipations of that which is coming into existence—that structures Stephen: and not only him individually but, as he himself suggests in his determination to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’,8 our entire view of the society which his artistic achievements will retroactively redefine. Bloch’s fundamental generic point about the novel of the artist is, I think, even more relevant to SF. The estranging novelties that characterize SF correspond precisely to the Blochian novum—which, as we have seen, is never a single new element inserted into an essentially unchanged mundane environment, but is instead such a radical novelty as to reconstitute the entire surrounding world and thus, in a sense, to create (through not ex nihilo) a new world. Likewise, the science-fictional text is defined by its creation of a new world whose radical novelty estranges the empirical world of the status quo; and this is equally true whether the novum of science fiction is expressed by the wholesale production of new worlds (as in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1931) or its even more widely ranging sequel, Star Maker (1937)), or whether (as in Frankenstein) the novum manifests itself as one novelty of such radical and profound newness that the superficially mundane context is dynamically reconstituted as a potential future, new and strange. Furthermore, the utopian aspect of such SF futures is heightened by the cognitive and critical nature of science-fictional estrangement. Although (as Bloch himself makes clear) the longings expressed in fantasies and fairy tales may well possess authentic utopian value, utopia cannot finally be understood as simply cut off from the empirical world of actuality. For it is the transformation of actuality into utopia that constitutes the practical end of utopian critique and the ultimate object of utopian hope. In other words, such shards of utopia as may be found in fantastic representations of Cockaigne or Never-Never Land involve the recasting of utopia into irrationalist form. By contrast, the cognitive rationality (at least in literary effect) of science fiction allows utopia to emerge as more fully itself, genuinely critical and transformative. In this way, the dynamic of science fiction can on one level be identified with the hope principle itself. The reading of SF drives us into lands where we have never set foot and yet which—because they are cognitively linked to the world we do know and are invested with our actual longings—amount to a kind of homeland. Even more than in the novel of the artist, the defining features of SF are located on the In-Front-of-Us, at the level of the Not-Yet-Being and in the dimension of utopian futurity.

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It is strategically convenient to take a few examples from science fictional works that may not appear to be particularly progressive or utopian in content. For instance, one of the defining ideologies of Asimov’s most important work—the Foundation trilogy (1951–53) and the robot stories, most notably those collected in I, Robot (1950)—is a flat quasi-Skinnerian rationalism (not rationality). These texts invest enormously in the notion of both mass and individual behaviour as predictable in purely positivistic terms that admit of no dialectical complexity. Thus are generated the highly influential Three Laws of Robotics—in which the Kantian and post-Kantian ethical problems posed by the categorical imperative are largely waived by reducing the questions at issue to the level of engineering technique—and, yet more strikingly, the ‘psychohistory’ of Hari Seldon and his colleagues, which amounts to a deterministic pseudo-Marxism (or pseudo-FreudoMarxism) drained of critical and utopian content, and thus flattened out to as-if-actuarial calculation. Quite different from this mechanistic behaviourism, but equally unpromising, on the surface, for the hermeneutic of utopia, is the synthesis of romantic technologism with vulgar-Nietzschean evolutionism that characterizes such of Clarke’s major works as Childhood’s End (1953) or 2001 (1968). The ideological tendency here is to short-circuit the genuinely conceptual questions of political change and social totality by projecting a supermundane future dependent, on the one hand, on a march of technical progress understood as autonomous of politics and, on the other hand, on a sub-Stapledonian materialist ‘spirituality’ absolutely transcendent of political categories. Yet, even while these works do make major retreats from the potential radicalism intrinsic to science fiction, the apparent nullity of utopia also hides a considerable reserve of utopian energy; and it is the latter which supplies the power so many readers have found in Asimov’s and Clarke’s finest fiction. In historical situation, the anti-ethical and anti-political tendencies of these texts must be understood as, at least in large part, a refusal to join in the Manichaean Cold War anti-commmunism that had so impoverished intellectual culture in America and (to a smaller degree) in Britain, and had thus largely monopolized the discourses of ethics and politics. In this context, Asimov and Clarke achieve genuine utopian force by projecting potential futures of freedom and positive fulfilment—the benign world state at the end of I, Robot; the literally epochmaking triumph of the psychohistorians at work in the Second Foundation; the godlike powers of Clarke’s Overmind or of his Star Child—in ways that cannot be made to cohere with (even though they do not directly challenge) Cold War dogma. Nor is this merely a matter of historical contextualization in the narrow—or historicist, as Benjamin would say—sense. The Clarkian and Asimovian images of liberation from material necessity—and, at some

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points, of authentic if highly qualified human solidarity—achieve a power that outlives its original social matrix. The fragmentary construction of utopia in these images remains true, despite the largely shabby, precritical ideologies by means of which Clarke and Asimov think their various science-fictional novums. And these novums, it must be emphasized, owe much less to the conventional, if genial, liberalism of Asimov and Clarke as biographical individuals than to the defining characteristics of science fiction as a genre. Indeed, we might emulate Bloch’s brief examination of Ku-Klux rhetoric by glancing at a science-fiction text much further removed (in overt terms) from utopian hope than even the Clarkian and Asimovian masterpieces: namely, Farnham’s Freehold (1964), one of Heinlein’s most hatefully militaristic works (and one which is ferociously sexist and somewhat more mildly racist as well). First published in the context of Goldwaterite fanaticism, it was appropriately revived in the 1980s as a cult book of the neo-fascist survivalist movement. In sharp contrast to Asimov’s and Clarke’s strategic evasions of Cold War anti-communism, Heinlein explicitly and enthusiastically embraces the latter. Yet even this text contains, in the science-fictional novums that structure it, a significant measure of utopian potential. The postnuclear ‘freehold’ of the title supplies images of real human solidarity, however patriarchal and authoritarian the forms by which this solidarity is organized. Indeed, the main significance of Hubert Farnham’s original project of surviving thermonuclear war is that it is conceived in explicitly communal, collective terms. Furthermore, what finally transpires to be the novel’s ontological premise involves the possibility of time travel and the alteration of the past—frequent Heinlein themes, of course, which are also quintessentially science-fictional. There is thus an oblique suggestion of the potentially utopian mutability of history itself: a mutability also inferrable, in a different way, from the nostalgia implied by the text’s very title. It is such largely but not totally occluded moments of utopian positivity that account for the intense, if demented, love that Farnham’s Freehold (which I take as a somewhat extreme but not uncharacteristic instance of Heinleinian right-wing SF) has inspired in many readers. This short discussion of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein—the so-called Big Three, who largely dominated American (and, though to a lesser extent, Anglo-American) science fiction during the 1940s, the 1950s and well into the 1960s—should serve to suggest the particularly complex affinity between science fiction and critical theory in its Blochian version. Science fiction as an aesthetic form is, even more than the novel of the artist, a privileged object of utopian hermeneutic. For the structural constitution of the genre on the Front, on the ontological level of Not-Yet-Being, renders

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science fiction a perhaps uniquely fertile field for the location of fragments of an unalienated futurity, of our postrevolutionary Heimat: even despite the regressive ideologies that may also help to form (and deform) many science-fictional texts. Yet if science fiction is a privileged object for the critical theory of utopia, this is true largely because the genre functions as a subject of such theory as well; that is, the cognitive estrangements of the genre work in the manner of utopian critique to foreground and to demystify the actual, and thereby to point towards some authentic plenitude with which the deprivations of mundane reality are contrasted. Just as the logic of Lukácsian genre criticism suggests that a pure product of historical realism could be produced only in the context of pure and perfected utopia, so the same is true—but more complexly so—of science fiction. A purely science-fictional text would not only estrange our empirical environment absolutely but would do so in such a perfectly cognitive fashion that the utopian alternative to actuality would not merely be suggested but delineated in complete and precise detail. The project of composing such a text is thus impossible not only in the sense that no asymptote can ever be actually attained (as in the case of the purely realistic text), but also in the sense that the situation of such a project is inherently self-contradictory (again we encounter the paradoxical nature of utopia itself). For the perfected knowledge of utopia required to compose a purely science-fictional text could be obtained only by the kind of residence in utopia that would leave one without a non-utopian actuality to be estranged. We are bound to notice, however, that, whatever the problems of such a project, the detailed delineation of utopia does appear to be the aim of utopia in the generic sense established by More; and it is now time to coordinate utopia in this meaning with science fiction and with utopia in the sense of philosophical critique.

Literary Utopias Bloch himself is in fact somewhat (and, as I shall argue, rightly) sceptical of utopia as a literary kind, and for reasons directly suggested by our hypothetical case of the purely science-fictional text. Precisely because utopia in the Blochian sense—that is, the unalienated homeland where we have never lived—can be apprehended only obliquely and partially, there is some cause to be suspicious of those quasi-cartographic projects that offer to produce a full representation of utopia for direct view. Since utopia is necessarily in large part transcendent of the empirical here-and-now, there would seem to be a falsity in any project that aims to give utopia unprob-

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lematic textual immanence. Utopia, in the philosophical and hermeneutic sense, cannot be seen straight on, but only in fractional prefigurations; yet such a ‘straight’ rendering of utopia seems to be precisely what utopia as a literary genre attempts. This essentially Blochian point has been influentially rethought and restated, in a different vocabulary and with the aid of a quite distinct theoretical lineage, by Louis Marin, perhaps the most noteworthy student today of utopia in the generic sense. Strongly influenced by the sharp Althusserian distinction between ideology and (critical) theory, and by Pierre Macherey’s application of this distinction to the study of literature as ideology,9 Marin proposes that utopia as a literary kind is ‘an ideological critique of ideology’.10 Utopia remains ideological for Marin because it does not, in the manner of Althusserian theory, ‘produce the theory of its production’ (196). In other words, it is not a properly critical and self-reflexive meta-discourse, but (like literature in general for Macherey) remains a relatively immediate or first-order discursive practice, incapable of breaking decisively with the imaginary relations that ultimately define ideology as such. At the same time, however, Marin insists (what Bloch by no means wholly denies) that the literary utopia does none the less possess a certain kind of critical—or, perhaps more precisely, quasi-critical—force. Operating from within ideological boundaries, the utopia does not offer, in paradigmatically ideological manner, a totalizing justification of as-if-pre-given reality but instead a displacement of the latter into fictional discourse that works to foreground and to demystify its own ideological presuppositions (again, the influence of Macherey is clearly decisive). Utopic discourse, as Marin summarizes, is ‘ideological discourse that [alone among ideological discourses, evidently] can anticipate in a theoretical way’ (199). Adapting this position to the dominant vocabulary of the present chapter, we might say that the literary utopia lacks the radical affinity with critical theory that I claim for science fiction, but nevertheless enjoys a somewhat privileged, if subordinate, relationship with critical theory. We can articulate this point with regard to the definition of SF by suggesting that the literary utopia—the pre-science-fictional literary utopia, that is—is in large part defined by a certain disjunction between relatively strong estrangement and relatively weak cognition. The pre-eminent example here is of course More’s pioneering text: the most powerful tendency of which has less to do with the particular social content of the island of Utopia than with the unprecedentedly radical way that More’s England is estranged by being thrown into contrast with a country that is literally nowhere, in the sense of nowhere empirically locatable. The putative superiority of Utopia to England is, as many commentators have pointed out,

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problematic and highly qualified; and the implied meaning of ‘eutopia’, or good place, is secondary to the alternative meaning of ‘outopia’, or no place.11 What mainly gives the text its force and its almost matchless generic fertility is the innovative estrangement of actuality according to standards which do not depend upon the conservatism of precedent or tradition, and which, indeed, pronounce, on a literal level, a disclaimer of empirical validation. This is the radicalism which enables Utopia to function, in Marin’s vocabulary, as a critique of ideology; and to this degree the generic tendency of science fiction is strongly at work within More’s text. To name but one outstanding example, the use of gold and silver in Utopia for purposes of degradation makes no sense as a practical policy suggestion for how the precious metals should be used in More’s own society: ‘If gold in Utopia were plentiful enough to be so used, gold in Utopia would not be a precious metal’, as C. S. Lewis somewhat pedantically explained.12 But the real point, of course, is to estrange the nascent fetishism of the money relation in More’s England, and in this way the device succeeds brilliantly— right down to the astonishing proto-Freudian prescience with which More’s golden chamber pots suggest the connections among excrement, anal eroticism and the universal equivalent of commodity exchange. Yet the ultimate integrity and validity of literary estrangement depend upon its cognitive, critical character. And when we interrogate the cognitive dimension of Utopia—when, in other words, we ask just what, if not empirical precedent, constitutes the matrix of the values by which the estrangements of the text function—Bloch’s and Marin’s reservations about utopia as a genre become especially relevant. More’s Utopia is, to be sure, far from wholly fantastic. It is not a version of Cockaigne. To some extent (especially in Book I), it is connected with English and European reality; and, given the rather speculative, unfinished character of geography as a sixteenth-century science, one might even argue that a certain cognition effect is attained with regard to the island’s putative existence. But it is a weak cognition effect. Much in this (frequently playful and comic) text, not least the title itself, presents the rational viability of Utopia as, at most, a bare technical possibility, not a concrete potentiality. If Utopia and actuality are not wholly severed from one another in the manner of fantasy, neither do they participate in a truly plausible science-fictional continuum: and so the nature of the critical claim, if any, that Utopia may have upon actuality is left unclear. The problem here is historical. Science fiction, like the historical novel and like critical theory itself, is born out of the age of the democratic revolution, the age in which history itself may fairly be said to be invented—which is also to say, the age in which futurity in anything other than an abstract or metaphysical sense first comes into being, and, therefore, the age in which

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anticipatory pre-illuminations of post-revolutionary utopian collectivity in the Blochian sense become fully possible. To say that More’s age is a precritical one is also to say that the category of futurity is unavailable to him and thus cannot serve as the cognitive grounding of literary estrangement. But futurity, as Bloch would argue, is the only standpoint from which a radical estrangement of the status quo can be genuinely—that is, critically— attained. Unable to assume this standpoint, Utopia performs estrangements whose epistemological status wavers uneasily between the science-fictional and the fantastic, between cognition and the admittedly irrational. The imaginings of the text cannot be energized in the cognitive manner of science fiction; and fragmentary anticipations of utopia in the philosophical and hermeneutic meaning of the term are accordingly at a comparatively low level. Furthermore, the very fact that More’s text does not and cannot perform, to a degree comparable with science fiction, the critical labour of utopian hermeneutic leaves it unconstrained by the rigorous demands of the latter. The text therefore attains a certain kind of of freedom (or pseudofreedom) to delineate Utopia not in fractional obliquities but in the direct and full detail that itself, as we have seen, provides some ground for suspicion. And the delineation that thus emerges (especially in Book II) is necessarily two-dimensional, precritical and, as Bakhtin would say, relatively monologic and undialectical. It remains to ask exactly how then, if not in a fully critical or future-oriented way, the estrangements of More’s text do work. What, in other words, are the historical and ideological presuppositions of this precritical but still immensely vital and innovative book? The most adequate answer, I think, has been offered by Christopher Kendrick in perhaps the most useful commentary on Utopia since Marin’s own.13 Kendrick proposes that the estrangements of the text are made possible by a certain kind of new and radical individualism, which in turn depends upon a uniquely transitional moment in the history of European modes of production. The peculiar overdeterminations of the absolutist period, when classical feudalism is on the decline but fully fledged capitalism has not yet emerged into clear view, allow the class of small independent producers, for whom More speaks, to imagine their own class position as a universal one: that is, an (ideological) space of individual freedom is created by the fact that they are partly detached from the body of a dying feudalism—and are therefore in a position to adopt a somewhat critical stance toward the latter—while they have not yet come into their own historical destiny as subjects of a properly bourgeois hegemony. During this moment (which in historical retrospect is seen to be a transient window of opportunity, but which from the perspective of 1516 must have seemed a stable and even ‘natural’ situation) the class of

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independent petty producers, and especially their Humanist cultural representatives like More, can in relatively good faith understand their own counter-feudal and proto-bourgeois individualism as the universal interests of free and skilful production. Accordingly, the estrangement that More’s text effects of a still largely feudal England and Europe is based on just this atomized (but relatively progressive) sense of individuality—rather than on Blochian images of futurity and unalienated collectivity. And this is true even with regard to the feature of More’s island that has drawn the highest socialist praise, namely its apparent economic collectivism. As Kendrick demonstrates in considerable detail, Utopian communism is grounded in ‘an attempt to body forth a cohesive society based upon the primacy of petty production and the hedonistic work ethic which forms its organic accompaniment’ (251). Kendrick coins the term ‘petty communism’ to describe the Utopian mode of production, a formulation whose deliberately paradoxical quality corresponds to the contradictions inherent in the notion of free, non-class-bound individualism that More’s transitional moment makes possible. The foregoing analysis of the founding text of the utopian generic tradition is, I think, largely true of the genre as a whole, at any rate in its prescience-fictional phase. But the ideological critique of ideology tends to become more problematic and contradictory as bourgeois ideology becomes increasingly hegemonic and thus, so to speak, increasingly itself. In other words, the (proto-)bourgeois individualism that in More’s period can still function, despite its somewhat illusory character, in an essentially progressive way and in essentially good faith is riven by increasingly intolerable incoherence, and often assumes a more reactionary, irresponsible posture, as the dominance of capitalist social and ideological relations deepens. For one thing that capitalism as the dominant mode of production tends to make clear is the extent to which the notion of the free independent individual—a notion ultimately based, of course, on the ‘free’ wage contract between the producers and the expropriators of surplus value—is actually dependent on an oppressive system of property relations: a system that is, indeed, frequently repellent to the most articulate of individualists, notably to those within the Humanist and neo-Humanist traditions. Thus the prescience-fictional literary utopia after More continues to estrange mundane actuality, but, owing to this central insupportable contradiction, typically does so in a less critical and cognitive way, and thus with even fewer prefigurations of utopia in the philosophical sense, than in the case of More’s founding text. Accordingly, an effect of the grotesque often assumes increased literary importance. The chief instance here is Gulliver’s Travels. The two centuries that sepa-

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rate it from Utopia witness the establishment of capitalist dominance in the economic, the political and, less securely, the cultural and ideological spheres. Swift’s text is certainly no less individualist than More’s. But More’s individualism, in its relative coherence and at least moderate optimism, contrasts strikingly with the wild self-contradictions and bitter misanthropy that characterize Swift’s. Orwell’s diagnosis remains definitive: ‘He [Swift] is a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible.’14 The greatest joke of the text is that Gulliver, the prototypical bourgeois subject and hence the spokesman for common sense, is a naive fool (as his name implies) who proves hopelessly inadequate to the world that the bourgeoisie have created. But Gulliver’s position is to a considerable degree Swift’s own. Though certainly no fool, Swift is caught in the intolerable dilemma of being intellectually dependent, as a bourgeois individualist, on the very system that he violently and often intelligently despises. His authentic hatred combines with literary genius to produce the most powerful estrangements of English and European society achieved since More: and these range from topical, local satire, through such more general estrangements of capitalist society as the great attacks on colonialism and militarism, to metaphysical estrangement of homo sapiens as a disgusting species (an element of the text that reaches its culmination in Book IV but is present from the early pages of Book I). Yet in all these negative representations there is very little criticism in the strong sense. Cognitive pre-illuminations of any unalienated, collective alternative to actuality are, if not completely lacking, at a remarkably low level for literature of such stature. Irretrievably opposed to the status quo, Swift cannot concretize his opposition; and, for reasons of both historical moment and personal inclination, he possesses few resources on which to draw save his own sense of individuality. This is perhaps especially true of those points in the text at which Swift, in direct emulation of More (the only modern figure who is presented, in the voyage to Glubbdubdrib, as comparable to the noblest heroes of antiquity), does attempt to delineate positive alternatives. For such representations—the King of Brobdingnag, Lord Munodi of Balnibarbi, the Houyhnhnms themselves—are even more monologic and abstract than More’s own, more dependent upon the accumulated details of an individual preference (Munodi, for instance, may simply be Swift’s personal friend Bolingbroke), and so less open to the historical Blochian potentialities of a utopian future.

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If, then, utopia as a literary genre tends to be (in a merely verbal paradox) less utopian in the philosophical and hermeneutic sense than SF, it is to be expected that the invention of science fiction in the nineteenth century has major implications for the older but more limited genre. Such is the case. The new generic tradition, founded early in the century by Mary Shelley and consolidated in its final decade by H. G. Wells, partly grows out of the older one: for every science-fictional text is, after all, a representation of a place that is no place. But the advent of science fiction also, and in more fundamental ways, reinvents the older genre and energizes it with the kind of concrete utopian potentiality now available in the age when the future has, so to speak, finally come into existence. As one might expect, Wells himself is the first key figure in the synthesis of science fiction and the literary utopia. But, before we turn to him, it will be useful first to consider a slightly earlier text, News from Nowhere—which I take to be the last great pre-science-fictional utopia and the only one, at least in English, comparable in literary importance to More’s and Swift’s. But is it pre-science-fictional? Mere chronology is ambiguous on this matter, but the more important point is that such a designation would seem to imply a precritical status for Morris’s text—a curious characterization indeed for the most notable literary utopia of explicitly Marxist cast in the language. Morris is said to have been the first English reader of Marx’s Capital; and his own magnum opus, in its attempt at a plausible depiction of working-class socialist revolution and the resulting communist society, seems definitively oriented toward the future and the Blochian (or protoBlochian) utopia. Now, Morris’s Marxism is indeed of crucial importance to the text—mainly as a means of short-circuiting the pattern of precritical regression observable in the development of the literary utopia from More to Swift. By the late nineteenth century, the contradictions and oppressiveness of capitalism have become so overwhelmingly evident, and the oppositional resources of mere individualism so obviously inadequate, that some definite (and often overt) commitment to socialism becomes almost mandatory for significant utopian literature. The major examples include not only the Marxist Morris himself but also his antagonist, the Christian Socialist Edward Bellamy of Looking Backward (1888). Though there are many specific points in News from Nowhere that offer comparatively noncognitive estrangements directly reminiscent of Swift and More (for instance, the transformation of Parliament House into Dung Market), the text as a whole does, on one level, attempt to offer a militantly critical and collective alternative to a materially wasteful, morally repugnant, and aes-

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thetically disgusting Victorian capitalism. Morris carefully delineates a post-revolutionary society where alienation has been overcome. His communist Nowhere is rationally connected to its bourgeois prehistory through the terms of Marxist theory, while in some instances Morris goes beyond Marx, rendering explicit certain of Marxism’s utopian elements (in the Blochian meaning) that Marx himself leaves mainly (not totally) implicit. Examples include the stress on art, on the revival of pre-capitalist handicrafts, on the beauties of nature, and on human plenitude and fulfilment generally: ‘Revolution having brought its foredoomed change about, how can you prevent the counter-revolution from setting in except by making people happy?’15 As this acute and prophetic comment by one of the protagonist’s informants suggests, Morris’s Nowhere contrasts sharply with More’s island and Swift’s land of the Houyhnhnms not only in its critical Marxist vision of collectivity but also—what in the end, however, may come to much the same thing—in stressing the importance of concrete psychic desire and engaging the problem of boredom in utopia. Yet the question of boredom, if engaged, is not exactly solved by this text, whose own monologism of style and manner is similar to that in Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels. The relationship of Morris’s text towards the flatness and over-explicitness of the literary utopia—or toward the ideological character of the genre, as Marin would say—can be expressed by saying that the problems that are thoroughly solved on the purely intellectual level persist on the generic level. Or, to put it another way, the disjunction we noted in the pre-SF utopia between relatively strong estrangement and relatively weak cognition is here partly translated into a gulf between theoretical content and generic form. The false freedom of the literary utopia, which allows it to exhibit in great and often somewhat monotonous detail the utopian vision that Bloch insists can only be truly apprehended in fragments of pre-illumination, constitutes a structural problem that Morris’s Marxism can complicate and in some ways ameliorate but that it cannot remove or wholly solve. The boredom often associated with utopia is itself a strictly generic phenomenon, resulting as it does from the monologic delineations that owe far more to the private fancies of the individual author than to genuinely critical anticipations of a collective future. Though it might seem strange to say so of a work as militantly communist and antiindividualist in overt theoretical orientation as News from Nowhere, the individualism associated with the genre is on one level stronger than Morris’s (very strong) political intellect; and the result is that, in strictly formal terms, Marxism itself becomes something like a private fancy of the author. In other words, Morris accepts the generic format established by More— the basically homogeneous system of detailed delineations and explana-

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tions that largely occlude narrative and characterization—and gives it a brilliantly critical, Marxist content. But the generic format retains its own determinate force, giving the text’s Marxism a somewhat abstract character and limiting the degree to which News from Nowhere can concretize the utopian futurity that it schematizes so lucidly. Abundantly critical in Marxist content, Morris’s text remains predominantly precritical and pre-science-fictional in monologic form. Essentially the same point can be made by saying that News from Nowhere remains pre-novelistic. The critical resources of science fiction, while greater than those of the novel generally, are tied to the novelistic mode of fictionality—to the dialogic and dialectical multi-accentuality of novelistic style theorized by Bakhtin, and to the critical historical insight that Lukács describes as a potentiality within novelistic representation. These are the elements that, to a great degree, make possible the critical power of the novel and a fortiori of science fiction, which is almost invariably fiction in the novelistic sense (understanding this category to include the briefer sub-novelistic forms like the short story and the novella, as well as the post-Balzacian series of novels). Since utopia in the philosophical and hermeneutic meaning is a version of critical theory—and might, indeed, almost be defined as the version of critical theory concerned to stress the element of positivity always implicit in critique in the negative sense of demystification—it is hardly surprising that utopia tends to function more strongly in the more critical and novelistic genre of science fiction than in the older (and, in specifically Bakhtinian terms, quasi-poetic) genre of the literary utopia, which of necessity lacks novelistic resources. Indeed, the very characteristics of the literary utopia that limit its hermeneutic construction of utopia as collective unalienated futurity are precisely those that distinguish the genre from the novel. For the detailed schematization of an alternative society—the readymade representation of a no-place that is generated as if directly willed from the brain of the author as individual—amounts, on the one hand, to a generally monologic authorial style that tends to foreclose any properly novelistic clash and heterogeneity of different voices, and, on the other hand, to a largely static and spatial form of narrative construction inhospitable to historical temporality and characterological typicality. By contrast, the novel, and particularly the science-fiction novel, involves a much higher level of dialectical complexity. It is thus precluded from any comprehensive or absolute representation of utopia, and so is all the more capable of construing utopia truly—that is, in the kind of fractional pre-illuminations theorized (and practised) by Ernst Bloch.16 Accordingly, the great vitalization of the literary utopia made possible by the advent of science fiction—the synthesis, that is, of science fiction and

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utopia—amounts to the transformation of utopia into the utopian novel: which might also be designated (here I borrow and revise Tom Moylan’s useful term)17 the critical utopia. In a sense it seems absurd to deny that characterization to News from Nowhere; for, in self-conscious theoretical stance, no literary utopia before or since, at least in English, exhibits greater critical insight. But Morris, though not barred by mere chronology from the novel and the possibility of the science-fictional utopia, remained decisively committed, in the matter of literary form, to poetry and other less dialogic genres. It remained for his younger contemporary H. G. Wells (also, significantly, a socialist, though not a Marxist) to fuse the generic tendencies of utopia and science fiction and thereby to produce a literary utopia that is critical, and thus philosophically utopian, not only in its didactic content but also in its novelistic form. The first key text here is The Time Machine. Not only does this novel inaugurate the science-fictional utopia but—not coincidentally—it is also the first text in which the crucial temporal and historical dimension of science fiction becomes completely explicit. Indeed, one might argue that, if science fiction is invented by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, it is virtually reinvented with Wells’s pioneering text. For the synthesis of science fiction with literary utopia produces the most critical utopia, in formal terms, to date, and at the same time establishes new utopian potentialities for science fiction itself. In The Time Machine, of course, the alternatives to empirical actuality have a mainly negative utopian value. The novel opens with an image of smug middle-class British society—typified by such representatives of English positivism and conservative Liberalism as the Medical Man, the Psychologist and the Editor—and then estranges this mundane reality by means of the several scenarios formulated by the Time Traveller as he attempts to understand the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks. The world of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One AD first seems to him the decadence of a purely communistic society (there is perhaps some deliberate satire here of Morris’s pastoral vision), then a rigidly and stably hierarchical society in which class differences have been biologically naturalized, and finally an unstable hierarchical society in the midst of active class warfare. What most distinguishes this utopian novel from earlier utopias is the much higher level of critical concreteness attained. The alternative socialities are not presented as if ready-made by authorial fiat. Instead, they are novelistically produced through a properly temporal, historical narrative that, on the one hand, exhibits a protagonist who is more like a typical character than the heroes of earlier literary utopias and, on the other hand, a style that is more nearly dialogic. Accordingly, a more substantial apprehension of utopia in the Blochian sense is achieved. Such pre-

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illuminations are partly located in the negative utopian scenarios themselves. Every negativity conceals its own implicit positivity, and the various privations of Wells’s imagined future suggest corresponding (but antithetical) possibilities of collective fulfilment—just as, for Bloch, anxiety is as much a future-oriented and utopian emotion as hope itself (the two emotions are in fact inseparable from one another). But a rather more direct prefiguration of utopia is to be found precisely in the heroic middle-class individualism of the Time Traveller, which recalls bolder and more affectively rich phases of capitalist cultural history than Victorian Liberalism, and which differentiates him so sharply from his timid and incurious friends. In this way The Time Machine might be described as the exact opposite of News from Nowhere. Morris’s text explicitly celebrates communist collectivity, but does so in a monologic, pre-novelistic form that depends heavily on individualist ideology. Wells’s science-fictional utopia devotes some of its energy to celebrating a certain kind of bourgeois individualism that (as the Time Traveller’s isolated work habits suggest) had been largely occluded by capitalism’s corporate phase; but the celebration is done with sufficient novelistic concreteness that the attractive qualities of the protagonist’s courageous and intelligent curiosity attain a utopian and hence collective value. With Wells the theoretical description of science fiction and utopia (in both the philosophic and generic senses) is in many ways nearly complete. I do not, of course, mean that he exhausts the generic possibilities of the SF utopia, nor that his work provides a complete, definitive instance of the utopian pre-illuminations achieved by science fiction. But I do think that, as the inventor of the science-fictional utopia and as the consolidator or second founder of science fiction itself, Wells establishes the basic terms of the dialectic between science fiction and utopia as it will operate during the century following The Time Machine. He is the pre-eminent and direct inspiration (though by no means always an object of uncritical admiration) for most of the British authors who follow him in producing important sciencefictional utopias: Olaf Stapledon, C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke and others. It is noteworthy, of course, that much of this work emulates The Time Machine by recasting More’s genre not only in science-fictional but in emphatically negative terms. Indeed, the negative utopia—the no-place that estranges the status quo mainly by attempting to extrapolate from the worst tendencies of the latter—is probably the most significant version of utopian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. After the mid-century, and especially after the 1960s, major science-fictional utopias are produced more often in North America than in Britain, and the positive utopia largely regains its traditional priority over

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the negative variety. But the terms of the utopian novel or critical utopia established by Wells continue to be decisive. He remains an essential precursor, on a level with More and Mary Shelley, and it is owing to Wells more than to any other particular author that nearly all significant literary utopias are now science fiction as well. Outstanding examples include Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960), Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Word for World is Forest’ (1972) and The Dispossessed (1974), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Samuel Delany’s Triton (1976) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and, in a revival of the negative utopia, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). There is no question here of attempting even a cursory survey of the contemporary science-fictional utopia. But it is worth reiterating the main point in general terms: the genre invented by More in 1516 does not truly come into its own, does not become a privileged form for utopia as Bloch conceives it, until over three and a half centuries later, when it is able to avail itself of the critical resources of the novel and, above all, of science fiction.

Science Fiction and Scientific Socialism There is one major issue yet to be discussed: namely, the political-economic sense of utopia and its relationship to science fiction, as well as to utopia in the two other meanings we have considered. Just because utopia in this sense has the most indirect bearing on science fiction, it is only at this point in the argument that we are finally in a position to appreciate that somewhat oblique but none the less important relationship. In his treatise on the Marxian distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, Engels argues, with vintage Marxian sarcasm, that for Fourier, Owen and the utopian socialists generally ‘socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power’.18 Utopian socialism, that is, understands itself as ‘an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain’, and takes as its task ‘to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible’ (52). Engels allows—and Marx and Engels elsewhere give the same point greater stress19—that utopian socialism does contain genuine value in describing and exposing the horrors of the status quo. But, while the utopians are perfectly capable of criticizing (in a loose sense) capitalism and capitalist society, ‘they could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them’ (52; emphasis added). By contrast, the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels themselves is based on a precise rational analysis of the capitalist mode of production—

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most notably the discovery of surplus value and its extraction as the essential driving force within the system as a whole. This rational grounding, then, allows Marx and Engels to formulate a theory of socialist revolution that assigns a historically determinate and privileged role to the proletariat, as the only social collectivity with both an inescapable interest in overthrowing capitalism and the (potential) ability to do so. Though the utopians may trenchantly revile bourgeois society, their inability to understand the latter in a rigorously critical way leaves them without any means of theorizing the transformation of actuality into the utopias of which they dream. Accordingly, and despite the personal good faith of many of the utopians, especially among the original giants of the movement like Fourier and Owen, utopian socialism always risks conservatism. For, lacking a scientific concept of collective social transformation, utopian socialism must inevitably be tempted to imagine that utopia can be achieved through such essentially individualist means as tricks, reforms, personal fiats and self-contained enclaves of social virtue, without any need for the revolutionizing of society as a whole.20 For Marx and Engels, only such a radical revolutionizing could be sufficient to establish socialism; and such a total transformation of society is dependent upon the scientific understanding of capitalist society as a totality. It should not, however, be thought that the scientificity of Marx and Engels has anything philistine or pedestrian about it. They are indeed suspicious of those utopian socialists who claim to predict in great detail what the post-revolutionary society—that is, utopia in Bloch’s sense—will be like. But they none the less regard some vision of what may lie beyond alienation to be indispensable. Of the many passages in the Marx–Engels canon that might be selected for illustration, one of the best descriptions of achieved communism is from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific itself. It ends with this famous peroration: ‘Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom’ (73). In other words, for classical Marxism pure communism is precisely the same thing that utopia is for Bloch (whose own claim to be squarely within the Marxist tradition is far more justified than most of his Western readers have understood): namely, an ultimate horizon beyond the alienations of class society that, because it lies on the far side of a revolutionary social transformation, can only be glimpsed in anticipatory bits and pieces of preillumination, but that none the less must be kept in view as much as is authentically possible. The Marxist objection to utopian socialism is strictly

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parallel to the Blochian objection to the traditional literary utopia. Both utopian socialism and the pre-science-fictional literary utopia claim to know too much too soon; and both produce impossibly detailed abstract maps of a place (or rather a no-place) in which no one has ever stepped. Accordingly, both versions of utopia suffer from a metaphysical flatness or hollowness, from a failure of genuine concreteness: both tend to present themselves as, in Engels’s phrase, the ‘accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain’. Though both manifest expressly collective concerns, both covertly depend on the perspective of individualism. Above all, utopian socialism and the utopian genre as invented by More are both weak with regard to the crucial category of transition. Whatever the strong points of an Owenite commune or of More’s imagined island, it is impossible to understand how those strong points could be ever be translated into the general condition of social actuality as a whole. In other words, what is true of the too schematic cartographies of the literary utopians in contrast to the Blochian hermeneutic of utopia is equally true of utopian as contrasted to scientific socialism: both are finally precritical. In this perspective, then, it should be easy to see that the verbal resemblance between science fiction and scientific socialism, which might superficially appear to be an accident, a near pun, actually expresses a deep theoretical affinity. For science fiction, and, even more precisely, the science-fictional utopia, stands to the traditional literary utopia very much as scientific socialism stands to the utopian variety. The original Marxist claim, after all, is not simply to negate the social visions of the utopians, but rather to sublate the real value in their work—the passionate and often acute opposition to the oppressive empirical realities of the status quo—into a more concrete and fully critical theory of society and social transformation, a theory capable of negotiating and even practically guiding the transition from actuality to something better: something closer (in modern terms) to utopia in the strong Blochian sense. In a strictly similar way, science fiction vitalizes the pre-science-fictional literary utopia by making the genre of utopia more concrete and novelistic, and therefore more critical in theoretical stance. Whereas the estrangements of the older utopian fictions tend to be only weakly cognitive, and sometimes—like the wilder imaginings of the utopian socialists—almost approach the borders of fantasy itself, science fiction provides, in literary effect, estrangements of an authentically cognitive, critical nature that are therefore capable, at least in principle, of suggesting a rational means of transition from the mundane actuality of the author’s environment to something radically (and whether for better or worse) different. In sum, science fiction and scientific socialism both participate in the utopian hermeneutic theorized by Ernst Bloch to a much

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greater degree than do classic utopian fiction and pre-Marxian utopian socialism. Accordingly, Bloch’s vision of Karl Marx as the greatest of all utopian thinkers was not (what it has often been misunderstood to be) a mere tactical gesture toward the authorities of the old German Democratic Republic. On the contrary, we now can clearly see it to be at one with the fundamental logic of his hermeneutic philosophy. Furthermore, from the main perspective of the current chapter—which has stressed the critical and utopian energy of science fiction—Marx is something else as well. For if science fiction is indeed privileged with regard to critique and utopia, and if Marx remains pre-eminent among critical theorists and utopian visionaries, then—like Mikhail Bakhtin, like Georg Lukács, like Bloch himself— Marx must inescapably be counted as (if implicitly and unconsciously) one of the major theorists of science fiction.

Notes 1 ‘If the censure of yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain; and have gone so far as to drop hints that the Houyhnhnms and yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia’ (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. Louis Landa, p. 5). 2 My references to this work are to the three-volume translation by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (1986). The translators have called their version The Principle of Hope, but Bloch’s title is in fact untranslatable into idiomatic English. Some have suggested that ‘Hope the Principle’, while awkward, is closer to Bloch’s German. ‘The Hope Principle’ is at least as awkward but arguably closer yet, at least in so far as it suggests that, for Bloch, hope is a principle analogous (but also in contrast) to the pleasure principle and reality principle of Freud. Bloch insists that we are driven by hope just as inevitably as psychoanalysis holds us to be driven by the search for pleasure, the avoidance of pain and the recognized strictures of reality. 3 Although my own introduction to Blochian philosophy was achieved by way of Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, pp. 116–59, it should be mentioned here that Darko Suvin was another of the earliest commentators in English to make informed use of Bloch and especially of Das Prinzip Hoffnung: see his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, especially pp. 37–84. 4 Cf. Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cumming, p. 96: ‘Utopian consciousness remains wholly without deception inasmuch as the moment of its fulfillment is still outstanding—and certainly not for sceptical or agnostic reasons . . . The world-substance . . . is not yet finished and complete, but persists in a utopianopen state, i.e. a state in which its self-identity is not yet manifest’ (emphasis added). 5 Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, p. 12.

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6 Cf. Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, p. 94: ‘The permanence and greatness of major works of art consist precisely in their operation through a fulness of pre-semblance and of realms of utopian significance. These reside, so to speak, in the windows of such works; and always in windows which open in the direction of ultimate anticipation: driving forward, soaring, or achieving towards a goal—which is never a mere land in the clouds above.’ 7 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, pp. 245–78. Page references are given in the text. 8 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 253. 9 The most important references here are to Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, pp. 11–69; Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, pp. 87–128 and 161–247; Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology; and Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, pp. 3–101. 10 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert Vollrath, p. 195. For an influential presentation of and commentary on Marin’s theory see Fredric Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,’ in his The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, II, pp. 75–101. 11 The primacy of outopia over eutopia—the primacy, that is, of estrangement over a comparison of the merits of real and fictional societies—is valid not only for More’s text but for the entire generic tradition: the popular solecism ‘dystopia’, or bad place, ought therefore to be resisted, since it tends to foreground the good/bad comparison and thus to distract attention from the estranging dynamic of utopian fictions, whether positive or negative, in their relation to the actual environments in which they were produced. 12 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, p. 170. Strictly speaking, Lewis’s point here is not only pedantic but (at least according to Marxian economic theory) slightly inaccurate: for he seems to assume that the law of demand and supply is the primary, or even the sole, determinant of exchange-value. 13 Christopher Kendrick, ‘More’s Utopia and Uneven Development’. I should acknowledge that what I give here is a schematic and somewhat simplified version of Kendrick’s complex analysis. 14 George Orwell, ‘Politics vs Literature’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, IV, p. 253. 15 William Morris, News from Nowhere, in Three Works by William Morris, p. 275. 16 Cf. the most classic aphoristic defence of the novel: ‘The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all’ (D. H. Lawrence, ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ in Phoenix II, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, p. 416). 17 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible, passim. 18 Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling, p. 43. 19 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 57. 20 Though Proudhon is not to be counted as one of the original leaders of utopian socialism proper, perhaps the most elaborate and convincing deconstruction of the fundamental logic of utopian socialism remains Marx’s reply to the French socialist’s Philosophy of Poverty: see Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

Society After the Revolution: The Blueprints for the Forthcoming Socialist Society published by the Leaders of the Second International MARC ANGENOT The social system cannot be represented unless one can imagine a different order of things, as I cannot limit myself to only write about the present. I must also see the times ahead in terms of another way and another possibility. Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 1938

The Utopian Writings of the Leaders of the Socialist International Many of the most respected leaders of the Second International—such as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky in Germany, Jean Jaurès and Émile Vandervelde in the French-speaking labour movement—and several other prominent figures of European socialism at the end of the nineteenth century published, for the benefit of the labouring masses, detailed blueprints of the ‘collectivist’1 society that was to succeed the—supposedly imminent—proletarian revolution and the collapse of capitalism. They set out to describe in the minutest details the type of society that would ‘inevitably’ emerge out of the forthcoming revolution. It is true that the ‘modern’ socialist movement was supposed to have abandoned the blueprints for an ideal society that seemed so typical of its romantic ‘utopian’ predecessors. Making predictions about the future was not compatible with the general claim to strive for a positive ‘science of history’ that had nothing to do with conjectures, fictions and speculations. This remark seems right, yet the facts contradict it. The European socialist movement under the Second International (1889–1914) officially designed an abundance of detailed blueprints and precise visions of the post-revolutionary society. For the most part these tableaux were components of the day-to-day propaganda that accompanied social struggles, as articles in party newspapers and pamphlets. One cannot criticize the evils of capital-

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ism, one cannot show how this economic system is the ‘unique cause’ of poverty, alcoholism or prostitution without showing how and why the proletarian revolution will automatically eradicate these evils. One thus finds a multitude of sketchy glimpses of the ‘collectivist’ social order contrasted with the descriptions of capitalism and its evils. On the other hand, there is also a large number of full-scale books which dealt exclusively with the systematic description of the socialist vision of the future. The party leaders insisted that these tableaux of the post-revolution socialist mode of production, state organisation and mores were as ‘scientific’ as Marxist historical materialism, because they did not formulate a speculative ‘goal’, nor an ethical ‘ideal’ but were describing something which, at least in general terms, was inevitably coming according to the ‘laws of history’. In my book L’utopie collectiviste I have analysed some eighty of these paradoxical pieces of utopian literature (mainly those in French and German) that were marketed by publishers connected to the European labour parties and presented to the militants and the public of the Belle Époque as products of ‘scientific’ socialism worked out by responsible, positive and informed militant intellectuals. These works have sunk into oblivion. They had to be unearthed and reread in order to grasp the logic of their utopia, to analyse such a utopia’s themes and arguments and also to unravel the knots of dissension and polemics that characterised the evolution of this ‘genre’. Entire generations of ‘revolutionary’ militants before the October Revolution put their faith in the perfection of the socialist or ‘collectivist’ system under which they were convinced their children—if not themselves—would live. They pledged their whole lives on the imminent collapse of capitalism and the founding of a Brave New World based on entirely different economic relations. The question raised in my book is: What did they expect precisely? In this chapter I shall provide an overview of these books and pamphlets, and try to make sense of this resurfacing of the utopian conjecture that did in fact resurge in the modern ‘materialist’ labour movement. Some socialist intellectuals—including the eminent Eduard Bernstein with his famous and controversial Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (The Presuppositions of Socialism, 1899)—actually loathed speculating about the future. None the less, socialist parties felt that they could not continue promoting mere abstract formulae. They had to ‘codify the future socialist organisation’2 because socialism had always already said too much about it. All the official programmes had at least several paragraphs devoted to outlining the brilliant future of humankind. It was thus normal for the militant to demand that these formulations should be clarified. The propaganda rallied public support with its slogans: ‘End to the wage system’, ‘Everyone according to his needs’, ‘Workers’ emancipation’, ‘No income without labour’, and so on. Militants were

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not willing to accept these as empty mottoes. They were supposed to synthesize concrete plans and courses of action. ‘All the labour party programmes must contain a critique of the current society, the enumeration of the transitional reforms that will be implemented and a basic outline of the foundations of the new society, i.e. Collectivism’.3 The intellectual who wanted to contribute to the science of socialism had his task cut out for him: to transform these ‘basic outlines’ into elaborate, detailed blueprints.

‘Scientific’ versus ‘Utopian’ Socialism The critique of the Romantic ‘utopian socialists’ that Marx undertook in the Communist Manifesto involves less of a reproach to their concept of a just and harmonious society than to their naivety in calling upon the ruling class to realize their projects, and their ignorance of the laws of history—as well as to the idealism that led them to disregard solidarity in present social struggles in the name of the beauties of a pacified humankind. By the end of the century the ‘scientific’ socialism endorsed by the Second International—a science supposedly based on the ‘discoveries’ of Marx—absorbed the utopian conjectures that had appeared before Marx, those born in the 1830s and 1840s, contemporary to the younger Marx, and those which actually abound in the writings of Marx and Engels, and transmogrified them into scientific ‘laws’ and demonstrable predictions. In the words of the French essayist Charles Andler, it was ‘rigorous’ and ‘scientific’ to ‘predict the possible forms of the socialist regime’ on the condition of ‘not exceeding, with speculative reasoning, the narrow [?] limits of historical and psychological observation’.4 The many European doctrinaires and party leaders who—in the aftermath of the Paris Commune and up to the October Revolution of 1917—wrote the blueprints for what society would look like after the Revolution accepted this ‘rule’ and strove to work with it. Some positivist thinkers of the turn of the century claimed that the main function of scientific laws was to allow the prediction of natural and/or social phenomena. For them, the well-supported scientific hypothesis was the truth of tomorrow. The collectivist paradigm expounded upon in the official descriptions of Society the Day After the Social Revolution (Am Tage nach der sozialen Revolution: this is the title of the German leader Karl Kautsky’s major book on this question, published in 1902) was to be seen as a political agenda designed for the near future, and not an eschatology. It was a scientific prediction, and not a moral speculation. It was a global solution addressed to the empirical world and a systematic remedy formulated after a rigorous analysis of present evils and abuses. The International Workers’

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Movement acted as the guarantor of the successful and (according to the best-case scenario) near peaceful realization of the blueprint. A Productivist Utopia My research on this ideological production unearthed the progressively acquired preponderance of a certain model of society that can be characterized as planist, statist and productivist. Socialism will have its share of overproduction but in a different sense of the word than under capitalism. ‘There will be no more flour that goes unsold in front of men dying of hunger’, wrote Jaurès.5 In the free market, abundance creates poverty. In a rational and no longer absurd economy, it will ensure the well-being of all. ‘Abundance will be extreme for all products’.6 The moral consequences of this will be a reconciliation of individual and collective needs, an end to antagonisms and conflicts between human beings. Socialist abundance implies not only a surplus of goods but also an increase in their quality. Why would the state want to produce mere rubbish when it can produce highquality, highly durable goods? Thus consumers will experience a constant increase in their quality of life and this continuous progress will ‘warm the hearts of the people with a joyous love of labour’.7 This state-run productivist paradigm was imposed on the labour movement only through the suppression of other theses and counter-propositions—mutualist, federalist, reformist, libertarian and anarchist. It was imposed on the Second International as an orthodoxy to the point of making the often perspicacious criticism it encountered totally forgotten today. Notably it served to disqualify evolutionary and decentralizing projects, concepts of mixed or pluralistic systems. Since this state-productivist socialism revealed its totalitarian damaging potential throughout the twentieth century, one could think that it might be advisable to return to the other socialist projects, to put back into light that which this model succeeded in eliminating and disqualifying. One cannot presume however that these counter-propositions harboured more realistic and rational strategies. For our vision is hardly clearer today than in the time of Kautsky, Guesde, Jaurès and Vandervelde, as to how a society without a very strong centre of power equipped with a synoptic authority would be able not only to produce abundance and fully satisfy the diverse needs, but also to cause justice to reign and to emancipate human beings by providing them with everexpanding opportunities. One can therefore read these collectivist-productivist agendas as an attempt, albeit itself aporetic, to surmount the essential aporia inscribed in the idea of social justice.

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The tableau of society after the socialist revolution was a utopia from yet another point of view: it had pretences of formulating a global, all-encompassing system of society. It also supposed that it is coherence that must characterise the well-functioning of a society. This ‘will to coherence’ leads it to construct closed systems. This is enhanced in the European socialist theories at the turn of the century by the paradigm of an economic ‘Plan’ which will efface all discrepancies between production and needs while forever preventing crises. One of the axioms of collectivist thought was that societies could and should be organizable and governable in all their parts and that all social contradictions and conflicts were contingencies to be eliminated. The socialist utopia’s counterpart was the total dystopia of capitalism, with its ongoing and ever more brutal economic crises, its ‘iron law’ of wages, generalized proletarianization and reinforced repression. The alleged impossibility of reforming capitalism justified the endorsement of the collectivist doctrine which was presented as ‘the only alternative’. The ‘revolutionary’ blueprint results not only from a desire for coherence but from an active suppression of all perceived contradictions. The future utopian democracy presupposes a constant and perfect harmony between the best decisions and the will of the people, a harmony between the scientific decrees of the leaders and the wishes of the masses. The will to coherence applied to future social mores translates into a world where the state would guarantee the welfare of the citizenry from cradle to grave. This implies a system in which the risks of life, risks of failure, of suffering, will be eliminated, in which artists, for example, would never risk being misunderstood or falling into poverty, where they would be both ‘recognized and freed from confines of material worries’ by an enlightened, efficient and benevolent Arbeitstaat, labour state. Society was to become totally harmonious and devoid of conflicts because it was to be governed ‘scientifically’. Saint-Simon in the 1820s was the first to call for this rational change in the course of history : ‘The government of society must become scientific’,8 he insisted. The ultimate goal of socialism was ‘the assurance that every human being will have the possibility of an integral development through a just repartition of work and goods in a society that will be rationally organized’, wrote the French socialist academic Georges Renard.9 If collectivism was to be completely rational, it is because it was to appear in human history only to supersede the ‘irrationalities’ of capitalism. If it suppresses economic competition, it is because it is a source of inequity, no doubt, but also a source of waste, of inefficiency.

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Within the deep logic of the doctrines of the Second International is a passion for social order. This ideal of rationalist order is one of the legacies of Hegel by way of Marx, but that insistence indeed pertains to the general epistemological paradigm of the past century. Every system that wants to be ‘rational’ tends towards abstract intellectualism. All that is judged good in principle is also judged universally, and thus immediately, applicable. Socialization, concentration and planification form a scientifically correct paradigm: thus, it must be applied to everything at once, and it will work efficiently only if nothing escapes its hold. Collectivist ideologues were jubilant with basic reforms that they already had in their files and that were realizable ‘with a stroke of the pen’. The editor of Le Mouvement social and insightful author of Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel who was a critical compagnon de route of French socialism, systematically pinpointed the disconcerting abundance ‘of abstract formulae: . . . socialization of the means of production . . ., administration of things, etc.’ in the party’s writings.10 Karl Kautsky was familiar with enthusiastic and trenchant assertions that reveal a bookish logic: ‘It is in the very nature of a socialist regime to have no more urgent a task than the democratic organization of production, etc.’11 The ideologue is dazzled by the colossal plan of harmony he constructs. Here again only some dissidents allowed themselves a degree of irony with respect to the simplistic rationality that prevailed: ‘And only a few decrees will suffice to change all, the “Dictatorship of the proletariat” will suffice to give us new mores, and different thoughts! Behold the simplicity of simple solutions!’12 The rationalism of the orthodox collectivist brings with it an extraordinary blindness to social facts, which are always treated as inert and manipulable. Indeed, with a stroke of the pen Karl Kautsky in his Society the Day After the Social Revolution ‘suppresses’ two hundred thousand parasites, shop operators and shopkeepers. Next, he regroups so many thousands of shoemakers and barbers into ‘vast’ enterprises run by the state, and so on. Abstract intellectualism not only abhors contingencies, indeterminations and social contradictions, but equally refuses society itself as plurality, diversity, antagonism. It prefers to see neither the infinite ruses of capitalism, nor the chain of consequences of a given decision, the indeterminacy at work in any complex society. Rationalism, conjoined with the dynamics of desire, cannot imagine something termed an ‘advancement’ without globalizing and accelerating it. Rationalism is animated by the idea that history can move fast, disentangle itself from the present evils without risk of ever returning to inequity, that it can avoid any compromise between ‘progress’ and injustice or abuse.

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The socialist theoretician is civically virtuous—from this he deduces that he is realistic and credible: ‘To desire to transform the current society by destroying all the roots of evil, to desire a society where thuggery, theft, rape, and murder will only exist in legends’,13 was there anything more just and relevant? The militant is overjoyed to discover that his doctrine shows his desires to be achievable. He does not see that he takes the fact that something is desirable to imply that it can also be achieved.14 The blindness of speculative socialism is betrayed by the kind of evangelicalism, moralism and irrealism which I have touched on. This moralism pretends to render the community of humankind forever happy, bound in a grandiose solidarity. A ‘detergent’ moralism effaces the power of money, misery, waste, ostentatious opulence, religious superstition, luxury and sexual debauchery. The more subtle doctrinaires conceded that it would not be so simple, nor so stable, but that one could, nevertheless, construct socialism on paper, without conflict, without social agitation, without resistance (or very little—just a ‘few weeks’ after the Revolution). After having shown the interest that the exploiting ‘parasite’ classes have in maintaining capitalism, one is asked to believe that these classes will surrender and find immediate contentment in the labour state. And the revolutionary militants will become at once disciplined citizens, assuming their posts in the new state. The evolution of the socialist parties themselves only showed the development of oligarchic and autocratic tendencies, opportunistic trends and petty quarrels. The paradoxical nature of the ‘genre’ of collectivist blueprints is that, in pretending to put the Ideal to the test of the facts, of economic data and social reality, to anchor itself in ‘the solid ground of reality’, it unavoidably ends up in weak-kneed, evangelical and unsatisfactory ‘solutions’.

The End of History: Socialism as a Perfect Society Some militant writers proclaimed the perfection of post-revolutionary socialism with formidable candour: ‘This system carries with itself the character of perfection . . . It is eternal and definitive since a problem has only one just solution’.15 A certain degree of realism prompted others to admit that collectivism established after the revolution could only be ‘better’ than the present state of affairs, that it would be mostly beneficial to all, but that societies would still ‘progress’. The truly critical position obviously would have been to suggest that ‘a perfect social organization is not to be desired and will never be invented by anyone’.16 Socialist theorists proclaimed that they were not constructing a priori a perfect society. They were acknowledging its excellence a posteriori. The col-

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lectivist programmes deny seeking an immutable perfection and indignantly dismiss the ‘bourgeois’ objection that only angelic humans could live in their world of the future. If they were led, in spite of themselves, to images of stable perfection, it is because collectivism was conceived, and could be conceived, only as a panacea and ultimate solution. The naivety of the socialist doctrinaire is that, constrained to find a remedy for everything that was supposed to be wrong, and logically prevented from conceding that, at least for certain social ills, there was no immediate solution, he ends up by presenting the future regime as a universal panacea: ‘What is admirable in collectivism and what consecrates it as the regime of the future is that by the single fact of existing and without having to turn to violent or exceptional measures, it resolves all the political, social and economic questions’.17 The petitio principii was unavoidable. Socialist propaganda had, from the beginning, repeatedly demonstrated that there is not a misery, not a single social vice that does not flow from capitalism. It is led to conclude from this axiom that, once capitalism is overthrown, all the evils will soon vanish. The Marxist doctrinaire Adéodat Compère-Morel expresses the same type of reasoning: ‘Alcoholism, like clericalism, like militarism, is an effect of the capitalist regime—hence it will all fall with the disappearance of this regime’. This leads to an underlying conclusion which is identical in all cases: ‘Transform the social milieu and ensure well-being to all, and alcoholism will disappear’.18 The conception of socialism as a unique and sure remedy for all evils of society leads to a pure eudaemonistic vision. ‘Socialism . . . makes humanity happy to live, it renders humanity sensitive to beauty’.19 ‘There will be no more suffering except those who cannot heal human intervention’. These images of universal happiness which complete the tableaux of the future society allow the militant to work and sacrifice with the ‘calm and unfailing resolution of rendering the society in which our successors on earth will live more humane, fraternal, brighter’.20 Who would not subscribe to such a belief? Who would refuse to ‘arrive at the promised land, the good of humanity’?21 After striving to show collectivism as a practical and rational project, the propagandist recognizes that he is actually preparing a ‘paradise’, a ‘golden age’: ‘The Golden Age is not behind humanity but ahead of it’.22 The socialist doctrinaire leads humanity to the top of the mountain and shows it the light: that ‘Golden Age’ to which all humans aspire. In the last chapters of the socialist blueprint, the extrapolation of economic data and the technical arguments are abandoned in order to evoke the ‘radiant future’ that the proletariat prepares.23 The final paragraphs display an overt lyricism which had long been suppressed. Having glimpsed the future happiness, the militant intellectual already basks in its light:

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The Critique of Socialist Utopianism, from Bernstein to Mannheim It should be immediately noted that many ‘bourgeois’ scientists from the turn of the century reacted against the prophetic and utopian character of the ‘scientific’ concept of collectivism and espoused another epistemology. Socialism thereby had nothing to do with science: A system which pronounces dogmatically: ‘One must abolish, one can abolish, one will abolish de facto individual property’—such a system places itself outside of science. It places itself outside of science even more than traditional economists who declare that the present regime of property is the only desirable one, the only possible one, the only one that can be real in the future . . . The socialists who predict the demise of private property are not scientists but prophets: in their critique they employ the method of Jeremiah and in their construction that of Isaiah.25

Voices from the socialist ‘camp’ also conceded that—with all due respect to Friedrich Engels—it was necessary to refuse the qualification of ‘scientific’ with respect to the socialist doctrine. Eduard Bernstein substituted the term ‘critical socialism’. Marxist socialism is not a ‘pure science’,26 he contended, in Socialisme et science, it is an ‘ethics’ joined to some sort of ‘applied science’. In Marx’s works, as with the utopian socialists of Romanticism, ‘science isn’t everything’. A critical doctrine is not a science because, oriented towards determined ends, it implies ‘not a knowledge, but a will’, according to Bernstein (18). In the name of this ‘critical socialism’, Bernstein denied any validity and even any interest in the tableaux and programmes of the incoming collectivism that had become so abundant, even doubting that the ‘necessary collapse of the capitalist mode of production’ was in the works of Marx himself anything but a ‘more or less reasonable conjecture’ (18). Saverio Merlino in Italy and Georges Sorel in France followed in Bernstein’s steps and came to suggest that the official socialdemocratic pretension to science was no better founded ‘than that of the Phalansterians [the Fouriéristes]’.27 Some thirty years later, one of the critical Marxist thinkers in the 1920s, Karl Mannheim, came fully to recognize the utopian character of socialist

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thought, without however assimilating that characteristic to a lack of scientificity or dismissing socialism as a simple chimera. According to his famous essay, Ideologie und Utopie (1929), ‘utopias’ are ideological productions specific to a dominated group, oriented towards the transformation of existing reality and consecrating the progressive character of rising classes (170). For a collective ‘state of mind’ to be utopian it must enter into contradiction with the status quo, and it must also engender a collective historical agent capable of effectively changing the course of history. For Mannheim, utopia is not reducible only to a simple ‘utopomorphic’ construct, any more than it is the just prediction of a historically foreseeable evolution. It corresponds to the ‘consciousness’ (as one would have said in the 1920s) of a social class in a period that offers revolutionary possibilities to it (125). More generally, every collective movement, ‘every order of life that is really operating is, at the same time, mixed with conceptions that one would call transcendent or “unreal” because their content can never be realized in the societies in which they appear’ (127). With this angle of approach, all socialism, even Marxist socialism, is ‘utopian’. It is a revolutionary ideology which assumes a historical function (126). This chiliastic concept is far from the positivist concept of the Second International, yet the basic difficulty reappears if one were to work with it. For it is the current function fulfilled by the utopian blueprint that gives it historical value, not the fact that it is intrinsically true, possible, consistent or implementable. Revealing a complete discord with the society in which it appears, the emerging utopian ideology mobilizes and unites social forces, it makes people act, which is not to say that the ‘images’ it elaborates, even if they lead to revolution, might ever help realizing the projects they express, nor will they show them in retrospect as beneficial, non-contradictory or realistic. For Mannheim (and also Ernst Bloch at the same time), the utopia says to the unjust world and the oppressors that ‘it ain’t necessarily so’: in its critical negativity it is both ‘true’ and mobilizing. It speaks the truth by showing ‘something else’, in order to show ‘that which cannot endure’. Utopia is true in showing that which is impossible today. It is in no way true (nor even really desirable) as a positive programme to be implemented or to be presented as an arguable prediction.

The Socialist Project as Myth: Georges Sorel Georges Sorel applied his concept of ‘myth’ to the advocacy of the General Strike in the syndicaliste-révolutionnaire fraction of the French workers’ move-

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ment after 1900. But Sorel’s concept of ‘myth’ is indeed broader: it includes any aspiration for change throughout history and any representation of a new and better world. Ideologies that are opposed to the established order of society gain their ‘truth’, or their cognitive status, from the projection into the future (historical or eschatological) of the aspirations of social groups. This is in no way derived from their capacity to predict what will happen, nor their verisimilitude or their intrinsic coherence. It may even be the case, wrote Sorel in ‘Réflexions sur la violence’, that ‘none of what the myths predict will ever even happen (as was the case with the first Christians)’ (264). An analogous discrepancy can be remarked, he insisted, in the ideologies of the French Revolution: The actual consequences of the Revolution in no way resemble the enchanted tableau that dazzled the eyes of its first adepts. But without this tableau would the revolution ever have taken place? And in that tableau does one not find a mass of effectively acquired results but which have been realized differently and without concern for our forebears? (264)

It is thus not only the final goal, the ultimate General Strike extolled by the syndicalists of Action directe, to which Sorel applies his notion of myth, but also to the conception of the socialist revolution as Marx himself described it in Capital, that is to say, in a text that Althusserians would later present as resolutely ‘scientific’.28 Sorel repeated that the revolution described in the second to last chapter of the first volume of Capital as ‘that final catastrophe that must resound in the wake of a worker’s revolt’, can only be apprehended, even in Marx’s literal text, as a ‘social myth’.29 ‘Here we have a strongly coloured outline, that gives a very clear image of social change, but of which no detail can be discussed as a foreseeable historical fact’.30 Sorel ‘decomposed’ Marxism—one of his books is aptly entitled La décomposition du marxisme—beyond the Bernsteinian ‘revisionist’ theses which he recognized as well-founded, in approving of the revolutionary idea not as scientific or materialistic, but as a ‘myth’ that was extremely useful for collective action, social heroism and historical struggles. In his time he was hardly the only one to pose this fundamental question: what value, then, remains in the revolutionary and collectivist paradigm if nothing either in the doctrine or in the blueprint should be taken literally? From 1899 on, Sorel expressly conceived paradigms of a future socialism as a ‘representation’ which had value only in the present struggles as an indispensable reinforcement of militant consciousness: We cannot do without representations of an absolute socialist regime because representations are means (and the only ones that are truly prac-

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tical) to comprehend the identity of our states of consciousness with regard to the true socialist principles.31

Sorel scarcely wavered from his thesis. He pushed his reflection beyond the critique of Bernstein, accepting the fact that the future ‘socialization of the means of production’ was neither economically ‘inevitable’ nor advisable nor necessary. He nevertheless maintained it as a key element of the ‘myth’ that the labour movement needed to fight the bourgeois order. If one adopts Sorel’s point of view, the official doctrines of collectivism can be maintained only as imaginary constructs, stimulating fictions that had, at a given moment in history, some verisimilitude, a term applying to works of imagination that are convincing in some cultural circumstances. There is no need to find out whether these conjectures and tableau were free of fallacious ideas, erroneous data or immanent contradictions. It suffices to ask if the image of the collective goal was sufficiently efficient and ‘clear’ for a given group. Thus the representation of converging harmonious forces, through which everything against which one fights—economic exploitation, ignorance, religious ‘obscurantism’, sexual misery and so on—will disappear for ever, finds its validity as a collective motivation, a mobilizing instrument. (But in an esoteric place, at least one socialist thinker must keep repeating that these predictions and hopes will never be actualised or approximated.) From Sorel to Mannheim, to Ernst Bloch, and to Brecht, the collectivist paradigm was both rejected as not being even remotely ‘scientific’ and saved as a projection on to the unknowable future of the legitimate critique of capitalism, as a counter-proposition, a ‘utopia’ or a ‘myth’, a chiliastic ideology demanded by the oppressed masses. These diverse counter-theories of what ‘socialism’ was all about have the following conclusion in common: this collectivist tableau is not in the future. It is the proof by way of an illusory ‘determined future’ of the meaning of the historical conjuncture when it is written for a given group. It is militant action itself, militant hope projected and objectified. This concept of socialism and revolution as a ‘myth’, powerful in the basic questions it poses, nevertheless needs to be placed in the historical context of the socialist doctrine. One does not fabricate myths with figures, numbers, scientific references and footnotes. If the collectivist blueprints outlined by the leaders of the Second International draw upon a myth, they form a myth which was systematically occulted, denied and dissimulated. There is nothing incompatible with Sorel’s thought here: the ‘philosophers’ of the French Revolution believed in the Social Contract and in the Reign of Virtue. The propagandists of socialism believed their myth—and they had to. On the other hand, Sorel does not deny that revolutionary myths inform

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militant action, that they orient that action, that they thereby reveal its limits and its contradictions. Nor does he deny that revolutionaries will try to realize the doctrine they hold faith in, if they are not hindered. The political ‘myth’ is a guide for action, even if historical realities lead to results completely different from those anticipated. For the myth is effective only because it penetrates the masses with a faith in its ‘truth’. It plays its historical role only by not being recognized as such. Orienting action, the collectivist conceptions of the workers’ state, of directed economy, of ‘industrial democracy’, of the just remuneration of needs, along with the contradictions that this carries and the antagonisms that it revealed between the diverse sectors of the worker’s movement, are not simply suggestive visions. If they do not predict the future, they reveal the choices, the tactics, the exclusions that have been imposed on socialist militancy. From a ‘metacritical’ perspective, the Sorelian concept constitutes a springboard for reflection, but it is necessary also to carry out the critique of the Second International ideology without forgetting the status that the texts demanded: two ways of putting the future into discourse which are the opposite of a ‘myth’: a political programme and a social solution.

Sphere of Purport or Positive Programme? If then we envisage the tableaux of collectivism as myths-cum-utopias, indeed as doctrinal and systemic expressions of a ‘utopian thought’ in Mannheim’s sense, we find ourselves faced with the question of the cognitive and, in some sense, the ontological status of this ‘genre’ of discourse. The conviction that animated Kautsky or Jaurès was that their writings had nothing in common with the utopias of the ‘precursors’ of socialism— those of Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet or Colins de Ham—nor, and even less so, with the talented, interesting, but all too ‘fanciful’ novels of Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells or William Morris. The writings of the socialist leaders deny all relation with science fiction in the wide and historically relevant sense that Darko Suvin has given the term. But it is precisely this denial which renders the cognitive status of the texts in question equivocal and ambiguous. First, Fourier and Cabet, in their utopian ‘delusions’, thought that the Phalange or Icaria were not mere vehicles of a critique of the bourgeois and individualist society, but rather a perfectly attainable and desirable project, a rational prediction of things to come. For them, it was to be implemented, as it was not at all an emancipatory dream. On the other hand, the ‘fictional’ and ‘literary’ aspect of the narratives of Bellamy, Morris et al. is that which makes their oeuvres instru-

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ments of cognitive estrangement, in which ultimate meaning resides in the critique of the empirical world and not in a positive prediction to be tested in the near future. When Edward Bellamy presents the city of Boston in the year 2000 covered with a huge velum on rainy days, with a gigantic single ‘umbrella’, the only hermeneutic effect of this image is that of ironically showing the strangeness of the familiar—the American city of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world with its millions of ‘individualist’ umbrellas—and thousands of poor people without any at all. Obviously Bellamy is not submitting a practical project to build some day an immense collective umbrella over the city. In this regard, the collectivist blueprints published by the theoreticians of the Second International have a very ambiguous status and can be conceived within a number of logics. Within a mobilizing propaganda, they formulate a goal and show a solution, they offer a remedy to social evils. They present themselves as the ‘solution to the enigma’ of the abuses, injustices and miseries of the empirical society. They form a horizon of meaning or sphere of purport for the struggles under way, a counter-proposition whose function is to reveal the arbitrary character of the existing order. Confounding the emancipation of humanity and the organization of a new, perfectly functioning, economic and social system, they do not limit themselves to such a representation, such a projection of the ‘conscious and organised Proletariat’ in the imagined future. If the collectivist blueprints were only an instrument of a critique, a ‘looking backward’ on capitalism and its evils and damages, their deciphering would not give rise to difficulty. The foundation of collectivist utopias is the rejection of capitalism, the critique of exploitation, of stolen autonomy, of the moral and physical usury of the workers. The critique of capitalism is their pre-text, but it also forms a pretext, the alibi which invites one not to quibble too rigorously on the details of the counter-proposition itself. The positive functions that routinize this ‘revolutionary’ programme and create a remedy within the organization of the socialist movement are multiple. Without a doctrine that shows a single goal, the exploited class will not resist compromises, the endorsement of partial and demobilizing reforms and the internal antagonisms which come from immediately conflicting interests. In order to establish the unity of the exploited and to represent the rupture with the regime of the exploiters, the ideologues are led to present a totally positive solution. In the struggle against both opportunism and adventurism (or Blanquisme) it was not enough to speculate on possible worlds, one had to dogmatize the collectivist solution as the only valid one, and impose it as scientifically determined by the objective laws of history. Everyone wants justice, the righting of wrongs. In order for the

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socialist labour movement to preserve its identity, it had to be the only party that refused the ‘bourgeois’ regime en bloc. As a sphere of purport, as a horizon of meaning, the ‘truthfulness’ of the collectivist programme did not reside in the feasibility of its ‘solution’ but in the functions fulfilled by that doctrine for the militant collectivity that recognized itself therein. There is no collective struggle without a clear representation of what comes after ‘victory’, and, if the ultimate ‘goal’ is perceived as encumbered by blind-spots, contradictory conjectures and improbable speculations, it is not in the middle of a struggle that one is going to allow oneself to say so. The collectivist project was not a utopia— a simple intellectual construction—because it fulfilled an organizational function, it was supposed to prevent short-term opportunism from calling itself ‘revolutionary’ (at least it should have done so) and it integrated itself within a party orthodoxy because that was the price of maintaining a common disciplined movement, cementing diverse and partial interests and claims. The ‘orthodox’ ideologues in the German and French parties who battled against Bernstein clearly stated that his ‘revision’ of Marxism, whatever value his arguments may have had, had the fundamental flaw of rendering the present unity of the labour movement impossible. Collectivism formed a unified system only because it insisted that the socialist movement must form a disciplined whole. The unity of the solution responds to the unity of the propaganda. ‘The programme of the worker’s party . . . forms a whole . . . where the most elementary claims . . . logically serve the most general . . . and the most audacious demands. It opens up on to collectivism’.32 The collectivist goal is like Cato’s Delenda Carthago: it aims at forbidding the militant from ‘specializing’ in particular questions and specific fights, anti-alcoholism, anti-militarism, anti-clericalism or feminism. In 1907 the Marxist Charles Vérecque condemned those comrades who ‘immobilized their efforts by pursuing tasks that had nothing to do with the overthrow of capitalist society. This is why we [the guesdistes or French Marxists] have little enthusiasm for the campaigns certain people would pursue specifically against militarism, against tuberculosis and against alcoholism’. Every specialized, targeted form of militancy ‘only has the effect of scattering and weakening the forces of the proletariat and of retarding its emancipation’. ‘If the proletarians want to play this game and undertake a special campaign aimed at each of the evils that it suffers, we have set out on a course of thousands of years without any certainty of reaching an end and entering the collectivist society’. The blueprint of the collectivist system was the panacea for mobilizing into the single ‘Army of the Revolution’ those who demanded ‘the end of religions, of militarism, of tuberculosis and of alcoholism’. To all these problems,

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there was a single response. ‘Socialism alone will put an end to all the monstrosities of a social order which are destined to disappear’.33

Did the Socialists Believe Their Own Myth? We don’t have to choose between the different points of view through which we have approached the collectivist theories and blueprints from 1880 to 1917: a gloss on the foreseeable future drawn from the revolutionary dogma, a conjectural remedy for social ills, a supposedly well-deduced scientific prediction, a mobilizing myth—the collectivist programme is all these things at once. It is precisely because it was all these things that it could be believed it in a number of ways, offering a margin for both good and bad faith. The rank-and-file militant believed in it because the Party endorsed it: Fides implicita as medieval scholastics aptly called this phenomenon. The question whether Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Vandervelde, Jaurès and others believed in these projects is not to be posed. They believed it because they were not dreamers or litterateurs but people of action and organization, inclined to confound the true with the orthodox, the convincing and the efficacious. They also believed in the collectivist project because the collectivist project was not their own, it had always been already there, diffuse and omnipresent in the great debates of the labour movement. They simply allowed themselves to work out and interpolate some ‘clarifications’ along the way, opting for formulae that seemed to them the most practical, the most realistic, yielding as little as possible to ‘bourgeois’ attacks without ceding on the principles, and yet making surreptitious compromises between equality and liberty, centralization and democracy and so on, in accordance with the pressures of their age. The collectivist ideology, like every political ideology, forms an institutional discourse that developed and perpetuated itself by rousing the faith of the coal miner—la foi du charbonnier as they say in French—in some people, in others semi-conscious compromises between adhesion to principles and doubts on many ‘details’, in others a repressed scepticism which the urgencies of militancy did not allow them to deepen. All the ‘forces of the past’ were lined up against socialism: this in itself sufficed to convince a priori that the revolutionary programme was not that bad. However, many leftist militants were also suspecting that this revolutionary ideology was not at all a programme that the socialist ‘pontiffs’ vowed body and soul to realize. A constant suspicion has pressed against the doctrinaires and leaders of parties: the promises of a ‘radiant future’ and of ‘paradise on earth’ were perhaps pure verbiage, humbug designed to

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keep the active minorities quiet and to dissimulate compromises made with the bourgeois order. The extreme Left of social democracy in France and Germany has never stopped pointing out that above all to talk, always to talk of the incoming revolution allowed one to do nothing! The most violent militants commented ironically on the ‘Society more and more distanced into the future that they laboriously prepare with their discourses’.34 The mythical-utopian construct of revolutionary socialism had little credibility except for those who were entirely absorbed in this universe. The acceptability and legitimacy of these ideas was engendered by the institution which developed them while developing itself. The belief in the collectivist project and the imminent revolution permitted the sublimation of the exhausting tasks of organization and combat through the reinvigorating perspective of an imminent total mutation. To believe in the future good of humanity as the consequence of the socialization of the means of production, is to give sense to the often deceptive and deceiving struggles, and to allow one to read these as prefiguring a desirable collectivization which is necessary and fated. Utopia and myth are also ways of occulting that which, in everyday experience (be it only in the permanent and unpleasant intrasocialist conflicts between tendencies and fractions), might indicate that the future of this great productivist-democratic system may not be so easy. One had to believe in a ‘miracle’ in order to tackle the formidable and always renewed obstacles which stood in the way of socialism.

Notes Translated by Jonathan P. Bender and the author. All quotations in the text are translated from the French. 1 ‘Collectivism’ was the precise theoretical term for the mode of production that was to succeed capitalism. 2 Auguste Chirac, La prochaine révolution: code socialiste, p. 6. 3 Henri Brissac, Leurs arguments anticollectivistes, p. 3. 4 Charles Andler, ‘Préface’ to Anton Menger, L’État socialiste. 5 Jean Jaurès, ‘L’organisation sociale’. 6 Gustave Hervé, Le remède socialiste, p. 18. 7 Jaurès, ‘L’organisation sociale’, p. 134. 8 L’Organisateur, Oeuvres choisies de Saint-Simon, II, 308. 9 Georges Renard et al, Le socialisme à l’oeuvre, p. 1. 10 Georges Sorel, in Le Mouvement Social, (1904): 159. 11 Karl Kautsky, ‘Le lendemain de la révolution sociale’ (trans. from the German), Le Mouvement Social (1903): 311. 12 Eugène Fournière, Chez nos petits-fils, p. 9. 13 Le Combat Social, 15 Dec. 1907: 1.

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14 ‘It is pure utopianism to affirm that the future society will be because it must be . . . as the future must be made by men and will be dependent on the development of their abilities’, wrote Antonio Labriola in Socialisme et philosophie, p. 202. 15 Anatole Baju, Principes du socialisme, Preface by Jules Guesde, p. 23. 16 Saverio Merlino, Formes et essence du socialisme (trans. from the Italian), p. 15. 17 ‘L’application du système collectiviste’ (written by Lucien Deslinières), Revue Socialiste, (1898): 715. 18 Le Socialisme (Paris), 15 Aug. 1908: 3. 19 Kautsky, ‘Le lendemain’, p. 418. 20 Lucien Deslinières, L’application du système collectiviste, p. 305. 21 Georges Renard, Le régime socialiste, p. 186. 22 La Voix du Peuple du Var, 17 May 1890: 1. 23 H. Ghesquière, editorial in Le Travailleur (Lille), 20 June 1908: 1. 24 P. Constant, in Le Combat, 18 June 1906: 1. 25 Alfred Fouillée, Le socialisme et la sociologie réformiste, pp. 61, 56. 26 Eduard Bernstein, Socialisme et science, p. 8. Translation from Wie ist wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus möglich (Berlin: Sozialistische Monatshefte, 1901). 27 Georges Sorel, in a remarkable paper entitled ‘Y a-t-il de l’utopie dans le marxisme?’, 156. 28 Georges Sorel, ‘Réflexions sur la violence’ 227. 29 Georges Sorel, La décomposition du marxisme et autres essais, p. 55 (originally published in 1908). 30 Edouard Berth, Les nouveaux aspects du socialisme, p. 18. 31 George Sorel, in Le Mouvement Social (1899): 213. 32 Le Peuple (Brussels), 4 Apr. 1889: p. 1. 33 Charles Vérecque, editorial in La Défense (Troyes), 1 Jan. 1907: p. 1. 34 Flax, in Les Hommes du Jour, 2 (1908): 2. ‘Encore une fois, on fera la révolution . . . en paroles’ repeats L’Anarchie, 2 May 1907: 1.

PART TWO

Science fiction in its Social, Cultural and Philosophical Contexts

From the Images of Science to Science Fiction GÉRARD KLEIN

The question of the relationship between science and science fiction has stayed relatively obscure despite the numerous works of critics and theoreticians interested in the genre. Many of them consider SF as a more or less parasitic literary extension of science, in the mode of speculation and extrapolation, audacious, perhaps irresponsible, often inexact, sometimes ignorant. Thus science fiction would boldly express what science does not yet dare to affirm or suggest, and even what it would find absurd. It would develop the social, ethical, metaphysical or purely logical consequences of science, or set out to confirm its ideological assumptions. In such a perspective, the literature of science fiction would be a continuation, albeit purely verbal and conceptual, imaginary and anticipative, of the real scientific work that itself sometimes uses fictions in the form of so-called ‘thought experiments’. Such an approach proceeding directly from the difficulty of adequately defining science fiction seems to me to open up a number of problems that the theoreticians have neglected or have been unable to solve. Much of science fiction has—to say the least—a very tenuous relationship with science, but it is impossible to exclude it from the corpus, as perceived by the majority of its readers and by the historians of the field. It is even very easy to find deliberately anti-scientific works of science fiction. Should one reallocate these to another, highly problematic genre or field? I have given some thought to that difficult question for more than forty years as writer, editor and critic, and I feel I have reached a hypothesis which, though provisional, has the merit of suggesting solutions to some of these problems, and, moreover, of throwing some light on the genesis of ideological productions irrelevant to science fiction but having problematic relationships with science.

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(It must be understood that in what follows the word ‘science’ is a convenient shorthand for the full range of science and technology, and that this term does not in any way imply the unity or metaphysical identity of the fields concerned.)

The Images of Science My feeling is that science fiction does not proceed directly from science, nor from philosophy, but that the sciences (and, for that matter, philosophy) produce, often unknowingly, images (eikons) and representations (eidons). A good example of a scientific image (eikon) is that of Jupiter surrounded by some of its satellites in Galileo’s telescope. This eikon gives birth to a representation (eidon), that of a central body surrounded by the orbits of its satellites, which in turn inspires the representation of the Sun surrounded by the concentric orbits of the planets. That image and representation has informed scientific research in ways that are of no immediate interest to us here, but it also quickly became public knowledge, and it continues to enrich the common imagination. The products or consequences of such an imaginary conception can be very remote from the initial scientific observation, and they become contaminated by other images and representations, as well as by earlier ideological, religious and philosophical concepts; but it is always possible to go back to the original scientific image without which the ensuing fictions and beliefs would not have been possible. I must insist on the radical difference between these eidons and eikons and the actual measurements, observations, results and theories of science even if at their beginning they are all intermingled. Scientists, historians of science and epistemologists have in general little or no interest in these images of science, preferring the observations, results and theories directly involved in the work of science, in its progress and evaluation. They look upon such images and their destiny as parasitic, and of negligible significance except in two cases: when they can make use of them, as the astronomers did in their attempts to make an expensive science without any immediate practical use (once the problem of longitude was solved) interesting to a wide public; and when the images come back to roost and there is a demand for scientific explanations, as in the case of pseudo-sciences such as ufology, spiritualism or parapsychology. These are the ghosts or revenants of science. This lack of interest is harmful for many reasons, since the fate of scientific images has a large if often neglected role in the history of ideas, and

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since the scientific information possessed by the public at large is almost exclusively conveyed by such images.

Eidons and Eikons in Science Fiction What characterizes and perhaps defines science-fiction stories is that they contain, to some degree at least, traces of the eikons and eidons without which they could not function as fictions. It is not enough to find an image of scientific origin in a work to classify it as belonging to science fiction. If that image is accessory and could, at least in principle, be excised without the story breaking down, it is not science fiction. If, on the contrary, the pretext, the plot, the very action (call it what you will) hangs on such an image, it is science fiction. The following point should be emphasized: the image must have been elaborated in the imagination of the author, or in the collective imagination, or at least it must not coincide, or claim to coincide, with the original scientific image from which it has been derived. In other words, realistic novels describing scientific research and the lives of scientists are not science fiction. The distinction I have introduced between eikons and eidons is not trivial. The eikon, the image, is what appears in the eyepiece of a telescope (the planet, comet or galaxy, the former suggesting by its visible disk that the planet is a sphere, and therefore possibly an inhabited world) or of a microscope (animalcules, microbes, spermatozoa, animal or vegetable cells, all holding out the possibility of a displacement of scale, of going down into the microscopic world or seeing it erupt into our world). Even if the eikon is always connected to a theory, it speaks for itself and often has a strong emotional and aesthetic value. The eidon, the representation, can be very abstract. The model of atomic structure based on the solar system, briefly proposed by Niels Bohr, had a lasting impact on science fiction even though nobody had ever seen electrons or (at the time at least) atoms. Although the Darwinian model of natural selection and the idea of mutation put forward by Hugo de Vries have no precise equivalents in the world of images, they inspired popular representations that stirred the imagination. The black hole is a physico-mathematical abstraction that is not properly representable and whose physical reality can only be indirectly induced from evidence, but that has not prevented it from giving rise to popular representations and having its supposed or extrapolated logical properties exploited in numerous works of science fiction.

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Although certain critics doubt whether the time-travel theme truly belongs to science fiction because of its improbability or (worse) its implausibility, it follows necessarily from the representation of time as a dimension, and then from its spatialization, which can be traced back to the Cartesian description of movement. It owes nothing to Einsteinian relativity, even if some authors have tried to justify it in those terms. Once this genealogy becomes apparent, it is no longer possible to deny that the timetravel theme, even in its wildest manifestations, belongs to science fiction. This theme is simply unthinkable outside a scientific and technical environment.

Practical Applications It is interesting to test out this idea in relation to particular works of science fiction, and especially to those whose relationship to the field seems problematic for one reason or another. Take Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. They describe a purely fantastic Mars, evoking nothing remotely resembling the red planet either as scientists were describing it at the time or as it has since been revealed by space probes. So the Chronicles can seem ascientific (or even to some extent antiscientific). But they are nevertheless inseparable from a long tradition of literary and scientific texts portraying Mars as a planet, an astronomical object, perhaps containing life, and accessible by means of space rockets. Even if Bradbury’s description is totally inadequate to what scientists have said about Mars, it teems with eikons and eidons of scientific origin, elaborated by the collective imagination through a long series of works without which Bradbury’s stories would have been both impossible to write and unintelligible to the reader. The mere fact that the scientifically cultivated reader is a bit shocked by Bradbury’s aberrations (while appreciating his powers of poetic creation), and sees them precisely as a case of poetic indulgence, suffices to indicate that images of science actually underlie the text. Two much earlier examples will perhaps make clearer the advantages of this approach and its ability to refresh our readings of classic texts. Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) is generally considered (at least by the French educational establishment) as a philosophical tale with no relationship either to science fiction or to science itself. But such a misconception neglects or underestimates those aspects of the text deriving from scientific images which were innovative at the time of writing, which Voltaire uses to illustrate his relativist outlook, and without which his narration would be impossible. Such images include the notion of inhabited worlds in space,

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popularised by Fontenelle (whom Voltaire holds up to ridicule) but deriving from the Newtonian theory with its picture of a solar system containing planets of various sizes, with which Voltaire had been familiar since his youth. By the same token, the effect of change of scale from the astronomical to the microscopic was made possible by the invention and spread of the microscope and of images of micro-organisms. This relativism of scale was, if not of recent conception (compare Pascal and his cheese-mite’s cheese-mite), at least of recent dissemination. Our own familiarity with these themes and images today, resulting from their complete absorption into the so-called general culture, prevents us from seeing immediately that they must have been new, surprising and even scandalous for Voltaire’s first readers—readers who were often curious but badly informed in science, and whose conception of the world was being shaken by the introduction of what Darko Suvin calls a novum. By contrast, when Bernardin de SaintPierre, for example, later published philosophical tales (such as La chaumière indienne, 1791) in the same tradition, he made no reference to images drawn from science but simply attacked religion and ethics. As with Voltaire, much of Swift’s work—particularly the section of Gulliver’s Travels concerning Laputa, the island of the scientists—is intelligible only by reference to scientific images (and representations of scientists, a milieu which Swift knew well). I am aware that many historians and critics of science fiction have already written about the connections between these works and science fiction. But the reproach of illegitimate annexation has been often made by critics from outside the field. This reproach seems to me to lose all validity if one considers that those authors and many others have been inspired by images emanating from science, and not by scientific results. It is also interesting to consider works contravening science, either knowingly and deliberately, or because the state of scientific knowledge has changed in ways that could not have been predicted. For example, Cavorite, the substance that made it possible to manufacture the anti-gravity screens in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, clearly depends on scientific imagery, since Wells views gravity as a force transmitted across space (two scientific concepts, eidons actually) on the model of light and, more generally, of electromagnetic radiations that can certainly be screened out. It is only as a result of the theory of general relativity that we know that gravity is a property of space that no obstacle can intercept. Even if in Wells’s time there were no scientific data permitting an extrapolation such as Cavorite, his reader was made to give the nature of gravitation some serious thought. Similarly, The Time Machine introduces the pre-Einsteinian representation of time as a dimension of space-time. This

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representation is somewhat banal in relation to the much older inscription of movement in a system of Cartesian coordinates, but it is presented in a down-to-earth and familiar context which shakes readers’ mental habits and forces them to recognize that both they themselves and the history to which they belong are inscribed in such a system of co-ordinates. In French science fiction, when René Barjavel in Ravage (1943) introduces the wholesale disappearance of electricity without any justification, the scientific reader is likely to blame him for his irresponsibility and especially for his ignorance of the cosmic effects such a disappearance would have, with the result that the whole novel is relegated to the domain of fantasy. But perhaps this is to overlook the essential point that Barjavel conceives electricity as, precisely, a physical force which has abundantly fed the world of the imagination. Without the concept of electricity and its accompanying technology (whose social consequences Barjavel unashamedly detests, but that is another story), his novel would be unthinkable.

Science Fiction and Other Literary Genres This approach by way of the imaginative consequences of science, and no longer directly through science, allows us also to distinguish works of science fiction, however marginal, from neighbouring genres which frequently pose problems of delimitation. The search for neat distinctions has insidiously led some analysts to limit the field of science fiction to what is conventionally called ‘hard science’. Such puritanism is quite unnecessary. Effectively, fantasy, traditional and modern Gothic, detective stories, historical novels, thrillers and westerns do not ordinarily borrow from the images of science, not even from those emanating from the most relevant social sciences such as anthropology. They rely on other imaginary sources, perhaps coming from other bodies of knowledge: folklore and fairy-tales for fantasy; popular theology for the traditional Gothic, and its atheistic derivations for modern Gothic; criminology (very little) and newspaper reporting for the detective novel and the thriller; history, memoirs and eye-witness accounts for the historical novel; the tradition and mythology of the American West for the western. When a science-fictional element appears in stories of this kind, as sometimes happens, it refers to an aspect of the imaginative world of science whose genealogy (as Michel Meurger has often noted in his works) it is always possible to trace. Thus it is neither useful nor necessary to look for a comprehensive or exhaustive definition of SF, nor to declare by default that ‘science-fiction is what science fiction readers consider to be science fiction’, nor to indulge in

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subtle exegeses verging on metaphysics. A text either contains or does not contain images elaborated from science.

Anticipation, Retrospect and Science Fiction in the Present This approach also allows a better understanding of why almost all science fiction has been set in the future and has come to take the form of anticipation. It is not so much that extrapolation of existing science forces science fiction to place itself beyond current science and therefore in the future; it is that the imaginative elaboration of images of science is necessarily situated in a place beyond science. Some contrary examples are enlightening at this point. Prehistoric novels (such as those of Rosny Aîné) are based on the images proposed by contemporary palaeontological science. The long-established but now outmoded convention according to which works of science fiction could be set in a present contemporaneous with the author and readers also corresponded to the images of science and scientists (then known as savants in French) at a time when scientific innovation seemed astounding and unprecedented, and producible only in isolation and impenetrable secrecy. It is much more difficult in our days of collective and highly publicized science to get the reader to believe in a mad scientist who has built an interstellar spaceship in the back garden. One of the new representations of science is precisely that it has a history that is not reducible to lonely inspirations of genius. It is worth remembering that even the mistakes and dead ends of science produce a specific body of images. The Lamarckian theory of the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics, long held to be erroneous, has often found a following in SF, as in Greg Bear’s fine novel Legacy (1995). The same thing is true of parapsychology which, even if it has never produced scientifically convincing results, temporarily found formal scientific expression in the research and publications of Rhine, which themselves followed the work of the Institutes of Metapsychics (Charles Richet in France, and others). That expression gave birth, to some extent legitimately, to a body of images which has left its mark on a great deal of SF (for example Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids, 1947–49)—a body of images owing nothing to magical or supernatural powers even if its effects are very similar.

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GÉRARD KLEIN The Three Destinations of the Images of Science

SF is not the only destination of the images of science. It is one of the possible ways, one of the means through which these images are continuously evolving, propagating and being transformed. The pseudo-sciences which lay claim to objectivity and whose supporters often call on scientists to express an opinion about their subject—that is, to endorse their methods or their supposed results—are another derivation from the images of science. Ufology is intelligible only with reference to a universe containing other solar systems, other planets inhabited by alien life-forms, and other civilizations perhaps more advanced than ours—all themes borrowed from the stock of scientific images. Ufology in any case owes much to SF even though it ignores or claims to ignore it, as Michel Meurger has brilliantly shown in his essay ‘Alien Abduction’ (1995). The same is true of other areas such as speculations on Atlantis, supposed prehistoric astronauts, and so-called scientific astrology and parapsychology, all of which—through specific bodies of images—pay lip-service to science, a tribute that scientists could well do without. They are the revenants of science, attempting to return to it but refusing to acknowledge the truth about their imaginary and fictional origins. (However, we should not neglect their other sources, such as occultism.) There is a third possible destination for the images of science. It is found in the works of those philosophers and cultural theorists who try to find support for their ideas in what they wrongly take to be science itself, but is usually only images imperfectly conveyed by more or less sophisticated versions of popular science. Such theorists tend to draw without any restraint on the supposedly authoritative images and vocabulary of science, transposing them into domains so far removed that the legitimacy of their borrowings is at best dubious and at worst thoroughly fallacious. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have exposed these practices in their book Impostures intellectuelles (1997). Thus the images of science can have at least three destinations, of which only SF admits that it is fiction, while the other two claim to reveal something of the real world with objectivity and seriousness: the one reaching through mystifications and delusions towards a provisional unknown, while the other approaches the ontological roots of our being by way of erroneous interpretations and dubious analogies. The least foolish of the three is not what most people think.

Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds PETER FITTING

SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment. Suvin, Metamorphoses, pp. 7–8

In my own reading and teaching of science fiction I have always been fascinated by scenes of ‘First Contact’, the moment of encounter between humans and aliens, a moment familiar to us from anthropological investigation and historical accounts; one which, consciously or not, re-enacts the encounters of the European ‘discovery’ of the New World. SF accounts of meetings with alien others have usually been modelled on the European narratives of voyages of discovery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet in the earliest voyages to the Moon and the planets (from Cyrano to Voltaire) the alien appears primarily in a satirical role.1 Interest in the physical appearance and being of the alien comes later, with speculation about the possibility of life on other worlds.2 The first major literary text in which the alien becomes interesting for its own sake is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), which establishes the portrayal of aliens in SF for decades to come.3 Science fiction often tries to imagine such meetings ‘innocently’, without the greed and acquisitiveness which motivated the European voyages of discovery. SF has another hypothetical advantage. While there are, of course, historical accounts of the discovery of the New World from the perspective of those who were discovered as well as from that of the European discoverer, accounts of the converse of this event—the discovery of Europe—exist primarily in fiction. The discovery of Europe by representatives of other cultures has been used as a satirical literary device (as in Mon-

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tesquieu’s Lettres persanes, or Voltaire’s Micromégas), but there is no equivalent to the devastation and plundering of the New World by someone claiming to have discovered Europe. In SF, however, there are no such limitations: narratives of visits to Earth by aliens are as common as those which tell of voyages to other worlds. With Wells the representation of the alien marks a shift from more explicitly didactic works (utopia, social satire etc.) to more pleasurable forms of fiction.4 More importantly, the influence of The War of The Worlds on later SF will be such that, in this transition from satire to diversion and entertainment, the figure of the alien will become a monster. There has been a spate of critical attention in recent years directed at the metaphorical and ideological dimensions and underpinnings of literary discourse (from deconstruction to post-colonial criticism), much of which has filtered into SF criticism. At the same time the rhetorical and estranged dimensions of some of SF’s most familiar icons seem so obvious and selfevident to contemporary readers that further critical examination often seems unnecessary. In terms of the alien, for instance, we all know that ‘the aliens are us’, or that in some way or another they stand as emblems of the Other. Yet this very ability to read the alien Roller in Fredric Brown’s celebrated story ‘Arena’ (1944), for instance, in terms of xenophobia and the war in the Pacific (or the particular take on this story in the ‘Arena’ episode of Star Trek (19 January 1967)); or the ability to read, in more positive terms, the bar scene in Star Wars in terms of a kind of affable multiculturalism, (now brought to the small screen in the many friendly aliens of the various Star Trek sequels and spin-offs), through that very foregrounding of the allegorical or figural nature of the alien, sometimes prevents us from examining more closely the discursive composition of these figures. There have been, of course, studies of the role or function of the alien in SF, and the trajectory of this ‘icon’ or motif, from The War of the Worlds to Lem’s Solaris is sketched out, for instance, in Mark Rose’s Alien Encounters (67–95). Treatments of the alien in SF range from discussions of the possibility of contact (‘Science fiction allows us to gain a significant insight into what it is that would make [contact] a unique relationship, for nowhere else is this issue so directly confronted and so thoroughly examined’ (Robert Pielke, ‘Humans and Aliens’, pp. 29)) to Carl Malmgren’s ‘Self and Other’ which, following his earlier narratological study Worlds Apart, reviews the forms of ‘alien-encounter SF’ (with special attention to Orson Scott Card’s Ender trilogy). Yet, with the exception of some feminist criticism which calls attention to the theme of otherness in SF (as in Jenny Wolmark’s Aliens and Others:

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Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism (1994) or Marleen Barr’s Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (1987), there seems to be little critical acknowledgement that there may be other discursive layers in the construction of the figure of the SF alien, beginning with the very term alien which, when used in contemporary political discussion, refers more often than not to the ‘problem’ of ‘illegal’ immigrants, as in Peter Brimelow’s doubly punned title: Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (1996). Illegal aliens and contemporary immigration policy may seem far removed from contemporary SF, but one only has to think of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye (1974), for instance, to realize that here, too, there are connections.5 But let me begin at the beginning, as it were, by now turning to the first major portrayal of an alien—H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Not only is Wells’s novel the locus classicus of the invasion theme in SF but it constitutes a much more complex portrait of the alien than most of its imitators.

The War of The Worlds and The First Men in the Moon Wells’s whole first cycle is a reversal of the popular concept by which the lower social and biological classes were considered as ‘natural’ prey in the struggle for survival. In their turn they become predators: as labourers turn into Morlocks, so insects, arthropods, or colonial peoples turn into Martians, Selenites, and the like. This exalting of the humble into horrible masters supplies a subversive shock to the bourgeois believer in Social Darwinism; at the same time, Wells vividly testifies that a predatory state of affairs is the only even fantastically imaginable alternative. (Suvin, Metamorphoses, 213)

Most readers are familiar with at least one of the reincarnations of Wells’s narrative of the Martian invasion of Britain, of which the most famous was the Orson Welles/Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of 1938, which panicked a nation. There is also a relatively good Hollywood film version, where the invasion is transposed from the outskirts of London to Los Angeles (1953, directed by Byron Haskins). There are also some other less well-known adaptations of the novel, including, as David Hughes has reminded us, two unauthorized US newspaper serializations which appeared even before the novel had ever appeared in book form (in 1897 and 1898), in New York City and Boston.6 The War of the Worlds was adapted again in 1927 when it was reprinted in two early issues of the first SF magazine, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (August and September 1927, with a wonderful cover by Frank Paul showing the tentacled Martian war-machines).

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The impact and influence of The War of the Worlds stem in part from the fact that Wells borrowed the invasion narrative from one of the most successful and influential stories of the late nineteenth century, Sir George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), which recounts, in a dramatic first-person narrative, the successful German invasion and subjugation of Britain. In Voices Prophesying War, his authoritative study of the genre of future wars, I. F. Clarke points out that Chesney’s story was ‘far more than the major publishing event of 1871’, for the resulting clamour forced the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, to warn publicly of the dangers of alarmism: Chesney the soldier had understood the military consequence of technological progress as these had appeared during the War of 1870, and, like his countrymen, he had seen how the German victory in that war had altered the balance of power in Europe. So, without fully realizing the exceptional novelty of the means and methods, he chose to present his fears for the future of his country in a highly dramatic and totally realistic projection. And then, after the excitement had died down, Chesney’s admonitory tale of disaster and defeat went on to provide both form and technique for the many forecasts of coming wars and future battles that began to appear in ever-increasing numbers throughout the new industrial nations. British, French, German and Italian propagandists learnt from the English colonel how to deliver forceful lessons on naval policy or warnings about the dangers of military unpreparedness in a pattern of fiction that the middle classes and—later on in the 1890s—the new literate masses could readily comprehend. (1–2)7

The converse of the future war or invasion model is the conquest narrative of the European adventurers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most famously the accounts of Cortès in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. This type of story, because it is written from the point of view of the invaders, is usually not characterized as an invasion, but is more often called a narrative of exploration and conquest (for example, J. M. Cohen’s edition of the various Spanish accounts is titled The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, while William Prescott’s famous account is titled The Conquest of Peru). In SF there are many such narratives of exploration and the colonization of other worlds, often along the lines of the ‘opening’ of the American West and the ‘frontier’.8 Following Chesney’s model, Wells has reversed the situation, depicting the invasion of Britain from the perspective of the people being invaded. By means of this reversal—in which Britain, an imperialist power which has successfully invaded and subdued so many areas of the globe, is now itself invaded—Wells goes beyond the issue of the threats

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posed by the militarization of European rivals, to propose a humiliating onslaught, by superior creatures who share none the less some of the characteristics of Earth’s ‘lower’ species, a humiliation which is compounded by their apparent lack of interest in the humans as an intelligent species: Did they grasp that we in our millions were organised, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? (321)

To understand better the significance of this reversal technique, it is appropriate to remember that Wells also wrote an SF voyage of discovery, one that is perhaps not as frequently imitated as The War of The Worlds but which is equally distinct from its predecessors, namely The First Men in the Moon (1901). While earlier visitors to the Moon and planets had frequently encountered other intelligent beings, these beings were often humanoid, and usually served a satirical or utopian function, like the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun in Cyrano’s famous voyages—but they lacked the evocative and exotic physical presence given them by Wells.9 Wells’s Selenites are not simply satirical or dystopian images of an alternative society, for they constitute as well another rendition of Wells’s Darwinian speculations, and inaugurate the depiction of the wondrous and strange features of alien worlds which will characterize later SF (I am thinking both of the sunrise on the Moon with the vivid explosion of life, and of some of the scenes of the Selenites). In terms of evolutionary speculation, the Selenites demonstrate how humans might evolve—towards increasing specialization (a dystopian theme most familiar to us from Huxley’s Brave New World)—as well as showing the possibility that other intelligent species might also evolve from very different beginnings than our own—in this case from insects. (See also Wells’s story ‘The Empire of the Ants’ (1905).) The novel tells of the visit of two men (the narrator-entrepreneur and Cavor the scientist) to the Moon, where they encounter the insect society of the Selenites. Not surprisingly, the Selenites react with alarm as they are told of the ‘insatiable aggressions’ of humankind. Cavor has described with enthusiasm and in great detail Earthly love of war to the Grand Lunar, assuring ‘them [that] men of my race considered battle the most glorious experience of life, at which the whole assembly was stricken with amazement’ (526).10 After the narrator’s return to Earth he remains in radio contact with Cavor, and the book ends with one final, interrupted message from Cavor, ‘I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know—’, followed by an unsuccessful attempt to transmit the formula for Cavorite (the anti-gravity substance which allowed them to ascend to the Moon):

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Reading The War of the Worlds The War of The Worlds is one of the most commented-on works in the SF canon, and Wells’s critics have offered a variety of readings of the novel. On a first, formal level, the novel may be seen as an early variant of the ‘What if?’ narrative of later SF, as summed up in a remark Wells’s brother made to him as they were out strolling: ‘Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly, and begin laying about them here!’11 On another level, Wells has taken the invasion story and used it to dramatize his own concerns about the complacency of his contemporaries. Apart from the various textual references to this theme, or the parallel to the decline and stagnation of humanity in The Time Machine, this concern is expressed, for instance, in the Preface to the Scientific Romances, where Wells describes the novel as an ‘assault on human self-satisfaction’.12 This theme follows from the author’s interest in Darwinism and the theory of evolution, for in the figure of the Martian he will speculate about more positive aspects of what human evolution might bring. However, in his utilization of the invasion story he raises issues different from those that Chesney and his imitators did. For he is not as interested in the inadequacy of British military preparedness (although that is also a theme in the novel), but in the rationale for British imperialism and colonialism. In these terms, as Bernard Bergonzi wrote, the novel may also be understood as ‘expressing a certain guilty conscience about imperialism’.13 Adaptations of the novel have tended to reduce the Martians’ complexity, while in subsequent SF, at least until the 1980s, aliens are usually presented and understood as either good or more frequently bad. In Fredric Brown’s ‘Arena’, for instance, which I will take as my example of the classic depiction of the hostile alien, Earth has gone to war with the ‘Outsiders’, an alien race which, without warning or explanation, has begun to attack Earth’s colonies and outposts in the solar system. Now as the decisive battle looms, Bob Carson and an alien ‘Roller’ are plucked from their spacecraft

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by some superior being and placed on a desolate planet where they must decide the fate of their respective races in single unarmed combat. The resourceful Earthman is of course able to kill the Roller and save the human race. But at the outset, in an attempt at communication, Carson tries to project a mental suggestion of peace between the two races: Carson blanked out his mind to receive a reply. It came, and it staggered him back, physically. He actually recoiled several steps in sheer horror at the depth and intensity of the hatred and lustto-kill of the red images that had been projected at him. Not as articulate words—as had come to him the thoughts of the Entity—but as wave upon wave of fierce emotion. (289)

‘Arena’ represents the pole of absolute difference and xenophobia: the alien as evil, where the only possible result of such a meeting is conflict. The absoluteness of this alien otherness, and the justice of human triumph, are summed up Carson’s own reactions as he realizes that his earlier offer of peace was wrong: He felt sheer horror at the utter alienness, the differentness of those thoughts . . . He understood now that the Entity had been right: Man or Roller, and the universe was not a place that could hold them both. Farther apart than god and devil, there could never be even a balance between them. (307)14

At the other end of the spectrum, superior, benevolent aliens appear in two of the highest-grossing and most popular films of all time, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), both directed by Steven Spielberg. One of the first of these positive portrayals of the alien in film is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). There are few examples of such benevolent alien visitors in written SF, at least until recently. Some critics, most notably the writer Ursula Le Guin, have argued that the dominant portrayal of the alien was negative until at least the late 1930s. In this account, the turning point was Stanley Weinbaum’s ‘A Martian Odyssey’ (1934), although this is an example of the exotic alien rather than of a benevolent or more advanced one:15 What about the cultural and the racial Other? This is the Alien everybody recognizes as alien, supposed to be the special concern of SF. Well, in the old pulp SF, it’s very simple. The only good alien is a dead alien . . . Then there’s the other side of the same coin. If you hold a thing to be totally different from yourself, your fear of it may come out as hatred, or as awe—reverence. So we get all those wise and kindly beings who deign to rescue Earth from her sins and perils. The Alien ends up on a pedestal

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PETER FITTING in a white nightgown and a virtuous smirk—exactly as the ‘good woman’ did in the Victorian Age. In America, it seems to have been Stanley Weinbaum who invented the sympathetic alien . . . From then on . . . SF began to inch its way out of simple racism. (Le Guin, The Language of the Night, 98–99. See also Clute and Nicholls, Encyclopedia, p. 16)

Wells’s invention of the alien as a monster will have a long life in the twentieth century, becoming the BEM or ‘bug-eyed monster’ of the lurid covers of the pulp magazines in the 1930s. Here is our first glimpse of a Martian in The War of the Worlds: Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread. (276)

Note the words ‘horror’, ‘disgust’, ‘dread’, ‘inhuman’, ‘monstrous’, ‘nasty’. To make this horror complete the Martians not only invade Earth but feed vampire-like on humans, injecting ‘the fresh, living blood of other creatures’ directly into their veins; while completely ignoring or disregarding any sign or possibility of intelligence on the part of humans, as I’ve already mentioned. In the first meeting between the two races, a group of spectators approaches the pit where the Martian cylinder has landed, waving a white flag, ‘to show them, by approaching them with signals, that we too were intelligent’ (278). Instead of acknowledging the signal, the Martians use a ‘heat ray’ to destroy the delegation: Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men . . . It was as if each man were suddenly turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run. (278)16

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In addition to such scenes which establish the Martians’ monstrous characteristics, there are complications and complexities in Wells’s portrayal of the aliens following from the author’s interest in evolutionary theory. Martian superiority is not simply an illustration of the slogan ‘the survival of the fittest’; the Martians have evolved, and their development offers Wells a chance to reflect on human evolution. Wells’s speculation about what changes evolution might bring stresses first of all intellectual development along with a corresponding decline in the importance of the physical, and this based on the notion of increasing physiological efficiency: ‘They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins’ (349). Viewing evolution in terms of an increasing physiological efficiency is not unusual in SF, while the growth of the brain is a popular SF theme as well (and, like the lurid images of Martian monsters inspired by The War of The Worlds, the enlarged brain was also a popular image on the covers of the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s). Efficiency is also marked by the disappearance of the need for sleep: ‘They had little or no sense of fatigue . . . In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants’ (350). An equally significant part of Wells’s notion of evolutionary progress is the conjecture that the Martians have evolved beyond emotion or desire. In addition to no longer wasting time with sleep or with eating and digestion, they ‘were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men’ (350). Wells outlined some of his evolutionary theories in two magazine articles written around the time he was working on the novel: ‘The Man of the Year Million’ (1893) and ‘Intelligence on Mars’ (1896). In the first Wells outlines many of the physiological changes we have seen in the Martians: Just as the bird is the creature of the wing, and is all moulded and modified to flying, and just as the fish is the creature that swims, and has to meet the inflexible conditions of a problem in hydrodynamics, so man is the creature of the brain; he will live by intelligence, and not by physical strength, if he live at all. So much that is purely ‘animal’ about him is being, and must be, beyond all question, suppressed in his ultimate development . . . We notice this decay of the animal part around us now, in the loss of teeth and hair, in the dwindling hands and feet of men, in their smaller jaws, and slighter mouths and ears. Man now does by wit and machinery and verbal agreement what he once did by bodily toil . . . The coming man, then, will clearly have a larger brain, and a slighter body

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PETER FITTING [with one exception]: The human hand, since it is the teacher and interpreter of the brain, will become constantly more powerful and subtle as the rest of the musculature dwindles. (‘Of a Book Unwritten p. 291)

The growth of the brain and its mental faculties (and the withering away of the body) leads to an even more popular SF theme based on the mind/body dichotomy (particularly in the 1950s and 1960s) which is only hinted at here—the development of telepathy. As the novel’s narrator explains: It is commonly supposed that [the Martians] communicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations . . . [However] their peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding, and was, I believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of air preparatory to the suctional operation. [Rather] I am convinced . . . that the Martians interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation. (351–52)

Finally, Wells’s vision of human evolution as represented by the Martians includes what we would now call our almost symbiotic dependence on machines (the themes of prosthetics and cyborgs): Yet though [the Martians] wore no clothing, it was in the other artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaringmachines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. (352)

The positive features of evolution are counterbalanced by various reservations about what might be lost in a being in which ‘the irrational fellowship of man will give place to an intellectual co-operation, and emotion fall within the scheme of reason’ (‘Of a Book Unwritten’ 294). This uncertainty is expressed, for instance, in the narrator’s comments about the Martians’ lack of sexuality. These reservations are summed up in the comment that ‘Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.’ (351).17 Wells’s contradictory attitudes towards evolution are well summed up in the Martians: they are superior, but they have lost some human characteristics which we value, primarily in the emotional sphere. The theme of human evolution is a familiar one with various developments and directions, particularly the concept of telepathy which, as I mentioned, Wells

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introduces without really exploring. At the same time the idea of superior, more advanced humans—supermen—has been a popular SF theme, one (reflecting perhaps the ‘ghetto’ mentality of SF fans in the 1940s and 1950s) in which—out of fear of the new—the superior human mutants are persecuted and hunted (‘Slans are Fans’), or even are simply disdainful of the ‘Old People’.18 Wells establishes a superior/inferior dichotomy of race based on the Social Darwinist ideas of the time according to which the superior Martian race is simply exercising its evolutionary prerogative. Humans, as Wells’s narrator states, ‘are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out’ (211). Thus a second set of contradictions can be read in terms of his attitude towards the ‘Other’, as Wells assumes the superiority of the Europeans when juxtaposed to Earth’s ‘inferior races’, as is made clear in the celebrated opening pages of the novel. And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to [the Martians] at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals . . . And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (266)

Tasmania is an island roughly the size of Ireland, 100 miles south of Australia (of which it is now a state), which was separated from the mainland some twelve thousand years ago. The first recorded European contact with the island was made in 1642 by Abel Jans Tasman—an employee of the Dutch East India Company—who named it Van Diemen’s Land after a high official of the Company. The island was claimed by Britain in 1770 and occupied in 1778, and was increasingly used as a penal colony, the convicts providing an inexpensive labour force for the development of the island. According to Lloyd Robson, there were between four and six thousand aboriginals living on the island at the time of the European arrival. In the first decades of the nineteenth century there were increasingly hostile encounters between settlers and the nomadic aboriginals. Often hunted like

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animals, there were fewer than three hundred in 1831 when they were placed in a camp on a small desolate island. When they were moved to a camp on the outskirts of the capital fifteen years later there were forty-five left. The Tasmanian episode was an absorbing chapter in the history of British colonialism for several reasons, as can be seen from Wells’s own references to it in his Outline of History (1920): In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut-off population of people remained in the early Palaeolithic stage until the discovery of that island by the Dutch in 1642. They are now, unhappily, extinct. The last Tasmanian died in 1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of mankind for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years. (I, 138) At first the only people encountered by the Spaniards in America were savages of a Mongoloid type. Many of these savages were cannibals. It is a misfortune for science that the first Europeans to reach America were these rather incurious Spaniards, without any scientific passion, thirsty for gold, and full of the blind bigotry of a recent religious war. They made few intelligent observations of the native methods and ideas of these primordial people. They slaughtered them, they robbed them, they enslaved them, and baptized them; but they made small note of the customs and motives that changed and vanished under their assault. They were as destructive and reckless as the British in Tasmania, who shot the last Palaeolithic men at sight, and put out poisoned meat for them to find. (II, 189)

There are a number of relevant statements about evolution and race in these two passages (and the first is taken from the chapter entitled ‘The Races of Mankind’), including the repetition of the belief that the American ‘savages’ were cannibals, and his swipe at the ‘rather incurious Spaniards’. While Wells laments the passing of the Tasmanians, it is as much for the loss to science of these ‘primordial people’ as from any humanitarian concerns. The concept of Palaeolithic Man is a reflection of contemporary attempts to understand human evolution, and Wells’s notion of evolution clearly implies the idea of a progression, and more generally, of progress: the subjects of Queen Victoria are superior to Palaeolithic Man, but then, so are they inferior to the more evolved Martians. Rather than acting out of greed or acquisitiveness, the Martians were forced to look earthward because their own world was dying: ‘this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals’. Expansion and conquest—at least as practised by the Martians— are to be judged not in moral terms but according to the laws of nature: ‘The

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intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars’ (266).

Conclusion How long, I wonder shall the people of these lands remain thus ignorant of Him who created the gorgeous sunlit world they look upon each day from their lofty upland! How long shall their untamed ferocity be a barrier to the Gospel, and how long shall they remain unvisited by the Teacher! . . . [A]ll the land [might] be redeemed from wildness, the industry and energy of the native stimulated, the havoc of the slave-trade stopped, and all the countries round about permeated with the nobler ethics of a higher humanity. But at present the hands of the people are lifted—murder in their hearts—one against the other . . . each tribe, with rage and hate in its heart, remains aloof from the other. ‘ Verily, the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.’ Oh for the hour when a band of philanthropic capitalists shall vow to rescue these beautiful lands, and supply the means to enable the Gospel messengers to come and quench the murderous hate with which man beholds man in the beautiful lands around Lake Victoria! Stanley I, 174–75

Although there are many statements about how European explorers viewed indigenous peoples (summed up by the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley in his account Through the Dark Continent cited above), we do not know how the Martians perceive humans—as an intelligent competitor to be vanquished, or simply as pests, as typified by the aliens in Thomas Disch’s The Genocides (1965) who seed the Earth with food plants and are finally forced to fumigate the planet to rid it of the annoying humans, in an echo of the Martians’ use of poison gas in The War of the Worlds: ‘So setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasp’s nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the Londonward country’ (323). In these and similar images of our inferiority Wells does provide us with a means for imagining how the Martians view humans—like pests rather than as equals: ‘But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked’ (304). In Wells’s account of the Martian invasion, the familiar justification for con-

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quest—a rescue mission led by ‘philanthropic capitalists’ and ‘Gospel messengers’—is reduced to a simple question of survival for a superior race whose world is dying.19 As we have seen, Wells deploys a network of contradictory attitudes in the figure of the Martian. In the terms of the Social Darwinism of the day, guilt about the British treatment of aboriginal and indigenous peoples (like the Tasmanians) is balanced by arguments about human evolution and the necessary struggle for existence. This justification via the argument of survival of the fittest is contradicted by the story’s plot, since it is not the strongest or the most advanced who survive, but—thanks to ‘the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth’—the weaker humans; and the very figure of human inferiority (via the comparison with ‘lesser creatures’) is used again in its full Christian sense at the novel’s end: ‘The survivors of the people scattered over the country—leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd’ (381). Although Wells does not challenge the Social Darwinist model directly, he does question the implicit notion that evolution leads to progress and advancement. The features of evolutionary progression, in terms of the individual, particularly the development of the brain and of reason, and the move towards efficiency, are presented with some reservations—themes which in later SF will become identified with the work of Arthur C. Clarke. The Martians are a speculative figure of our own evolved humanity, but one in which much of what constitutes our humanity seems to have disappeared. In terms of the reasons for imagining the Martians as monstrous invaders, then, it is perhaps significant that evolution has also eliminated the need for sleep. If Wells’s monsters are seen not only as a displaced figure of contemporary attitudes towards the racial Other, but as a return of the repressed—in this case the ‘guilty conscience of imperialism’, the memory of centuries of subjugation, slavery and murder—then not sleeping has its advantages. These monsters may be seen not only as a projection of the fear of the other but as a transposition of the nightmares generated in the indigenous peoples of Africa and Australia as well as the Americas as their lives and culture were torn apart and destroyed by the European invaders.

Notes Quotations from The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon are from H. G. Wells, Seven Famous Novels (New York, 1934). Page references are given in the text.

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1 The list of predecessors of the encounter with extraterrestrial aliens begins with Lucian’s True Story (first translated into English in 1634; see Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence (London: Duckworth, 1979); as well as S. C. Fredericks, ‘Lucian’s True History as SF’, Science-Fiction Studies 3 (1976: 49–59). For a discussion of this aspect of the prehistory of SF see Roger Bozzetto’s L’obscur objet d’un savoir (Aix en Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1992), as well as Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s classic Voyages to the Moon (1948). The epigraph of The War of the Worlds is taken from Kepler, whose Somnium (1634) is another important SF forerunner. 2 Until the late nineteenth century, two French writers were the chief sources of European speculation on the question of life on other worlds: Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), and Camille Flammarion’s Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1865). See Karl S. Guthke’s The Last Frontier. 3 Speculation about the possibility of life on Mars flourished following Schiaparelli’s announcement of the discovery of canals on Mars (in 1877). US astronomer Percival Lowell published two popular books on the subject: Mars (1895); and Mars as an Abode of Life (1908). Schiaparelli is mentioned in the opening pages of The War of The Worlds (as failing to correctly ‘interpret the fluctuating appearances of the marking [he] mapped so well’); and Wells mentions his debt to ‘his friend Lowell’ in ‘The Things that Live on Mars’ (1908), which is reprinted in the Hughes/Geduld edition. There were a number of utopian novels set on Mars around the time of Wells’s novel, including Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880), Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space (1890), M. D. Leggett’s A Dream of a Modest Prophet (1890) and L. P. Gratacap’s The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars (1903). Kurd Lasswitz’s novel about the encounter with a superior Martian culture—Aus zwei Planeten (Two Planets)—was published in 1897, the year before Wells’s novel, although critics agree that Wells does not seem to have known of Lasswitz’s novel. Karl S. Guthke closes his study with a comparison of the Mars novels of Lasswitz and Wells, pp. 382–92. For a discussion of Mars in the nineteenth century see Mark Hillegas, ‘Victorian “Extraterrestrials.” ’ 4 As Percy Adams explains in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, citing an Anglican bishop on the evils of some eighteenth century travel narratives, ‘ “books of Voyages and Travels, filled with monsters and incredible Stories” were then popular because they satisfied a “morbid taste for extravagant fiction” ’ (109). 5 For a reading of the novel in these terms see Fredric Jameson, ‘Science Fiction as Politics: Larry Niven’. More recently Niven and Pournelle have written a classic alien invasion novel, Footfall (1985). The recent film Men in Black (1997) depicts a secret US agency which monitors the comings and goings of the many aliens who visit our planet. The films’s first scene explicitly refers to the double meaning of the term ‘illegal alien’ when an extraterrestrial attempts to enter the United States covertly, by crossing the border in a pickup truck filled with Latin Americans who are also attempting to enter the United States ‘illegally’, a truck which is then stopped by the Border Patrol. While Wells does not use the term ‘alien’ in The War of The Worlds (although he does use ‘extraterrestrial’), the term was common in the late nineteenth and early twentienth centuries in Britain in the debates about British immigration policy.

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Some titles from the period include William Wilkins, Alien Invasion (1892), Myer Jack Land, The Alien Problem and its Remedy (1911), and A. H. Lane, The Alien Menace: A Statement of the Case (1927). The debates are summed up in Bernard Gaine, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (1972). 6 The characteristics of these ‘lurid’ adaptations are summed up thus by David Y. Hughes: ‘aside from the mechanics of substituting American locales for the English one—the papers 1) ruthlessly cut passages that deviated from the straight chronicle of death and destruction, and 2) interpolated long passages enumerating fresh Martian marvels and atrocities’ (Hughes, ‘The War of the Worlds in the Yellow Press’, p. 283). 7 When he comes to the situation of Wells’s novel in the future war genre, I. F. Clarke writes: ‘At this point The War of the Worlds parts company with the mass of imaginary war fiction as it had developed since the time of The Battle of Dorking; for Wells’s story transcends all the limitations of national politics, international disputes and contemporary armaments that had engaged the attention of most practitioners in this field. A scientific education, a logical mind, an exceptionally rich and original imagination had acted on his intense realization of incessant change to create this prevision of the possible . . . For these reasons, and because of the high quality of the narrative, The War of the Worlds is still the most remarkable fantasy of imaginary warfare that has so far appeared in the history of the genre’ (Voices Prophesying War, p. 86) 8 For a development of this theme see David Mogen, Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature (2nd edn revised and expanded, San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 1993). Later in the 1960s this tradition is questioned, by more ‘anthropologically’ oriented SF, as well as by stories which explicitly challenge this model, as in Le Guin’s Vietnam novella ‘The Word for World is Forest’ (1972). It is perhaps ironical that both the Aztec and Incan civilizations were powerful and flourishing empires at the time of the European conquest. 9 For histories of the early development of this theme see Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon and Guthke, The Last Frontier. 10 This is an echo of the scene in which Gulliver proposes making gunpowder to the king of the Brobdingnagians. ‘The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I . . . could entertain such inhuman ideas’ Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert Greenberg, p. 108). 11 ‘The book was begotten by a remark of my brother Frank. We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. “Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,” said he, “and begin laying about them here!” Perhaps we had been talking of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans—a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians! I forget. But that was the point of departure. ‘In those days I was writing short stories, and the particular sort of short story that amused me most to do was the vivid realization of some disregarded possibility in such a way as to comment on the false securities and fatuous self-satisfaction of the every-day life—as we knew it then. Because in those days the conviction that history had settled down to a sort of jog-trot comedy was very widespread indeed’ (Wells writing in 1920, cited in Bernard Bergonzi, The Early, H. G. Wells, p. 124).

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12 H. G. Wells, ‘Preface to the Scientific Romances’, p. 243. For a discussion of Wells’s ‘attack on human complacency’ see Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare, pp. 20–26. 13 Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells, p. 134. Hughes and Geduld write that there are two major themes in the novel: ‘Wells’s critique of certain Victorian philosophical and political attitudes, and his visions of man’s potential evolution and of Earth’s inevitable fate’ (30). Among the many articles I have consulted see Kathryn Hume, ‘The Hidden Dynamics’ of The War of the Worlds’, in which she stresses the ambivalence of Wells’s attitudes. Mark Rose also calls attention to the abundance of meanings invested in the figure of the Martian: ‘At one level the Martians are signs that stand for the idea of alienness, the idea of the incomprehensible otherness of the universe in which man lives. At another level, however, they stand for ourselves. In the evolutionary fable, for example, the Martians with their hypertrophied brains and atrophied bodies suggest a possible human future . . . The narrator goes on to remark that “without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being,” and thus he makes explicit another dimension of metaphorical significance, this time a specifically moral one in which the Martians represent the eternal danger of cold reason divorced from humane feeling. ‘The Martians also have political significance . . . comparing the Martian colonization of Earth to the European extinction of the Tasmanians. We can perhaps read an even more fundamental, though less explicit, political meaning in the fiction if we consider the Martians as a metaphorical projection of the capitalistic industrial system of the late nineteenth century, here conceived as a social machine created by a ruthless economic reason that sucks the lifeblood out of human beings’ (Rose, Alien Encounters, p. 76). 14 The story was presented as a Star Trek episode (19 Jan. 1967). Another famous example of the frightful, more advanced alien invader is John Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There’ (1938), which has twice been filmed as The Thing (1951 and 1983). The Cold War would increasingly generate stories about alien invasion, from Heinlein’s 1951 Puppet Masters to the paranoia of the invisible fifth column in films such as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). 15 There is, of course, a third possibility—a very different view of SF and its aliens, namely the unknowable alien. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), for instance, is usually read as a presentation of this unknowability, and as a critique of SF’s presumption that humans can know everything. 16 This scene was included in Byron Haskins’s 1953 film version of the novel. These heat rays (like many of the conventions of the invasion film) are parodied in the heat guns of the Martians in the recent film, Mars Attacks! It is interesting to note that in Prescott’s account of the crucial meeting between the Incas and the Spaniards, Pizarro’s ‘appointed signal’ to attack is the waving of a white scarf. 17 This theme is epitomized by the Overlords in Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953). This intellectually more advanced alien race has lost all sensitivity to art or humour, or to the spiritual and transcendent more generally. This novel is relevant to the discussion of Wells’s aliens in another way, for although many critics describe

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it as a version of the theme of the benevolent alien, it is possible to make the opposite case, viewing it instead as example of the alien invasion narrative. The coming of the Overlords (acting on behalf of the Overmind) brings about the end of the human race and the destruction of Earth. These developments are usually seen (in the familiar SF imagery of human transformation e.g. John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) as the transcendence of the human, the passage to another, posthuman and more spiritual state (e.g. Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953)). Yet such an interpretation implies that we agree that ‘father knows best’, that the Overlords are acting in our best interests even if we cannot appreciate it. Many British colonizers felt that they were acting in the best interests of the many tribes and peoples of the Indian subcontinent, for instance, even if their beneficence was often not appreciated, and even resisted, often violently, as Wainwright and some of his followers fought against the dominion of the Overlords. 18 The expression is taken from John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), where atomic fallout has produced mutations and the emergence of children with telepathic powers who are hunted and killed by their parents. This irremediable conflict is explained to the children by a representative of the new society who rescues them: ‘In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction. ‘If the process shocks you, it is because you have not been able to stand off and, knowing what you are, see what a difference in kind must mean. Your minds are confused by your ties and your upbringing: you are still half-thinking of them as the same kind as yourselves. That is why you are shocked. And that is why they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are alert, corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite well that if it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deteriorations, but they must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant’ (John Wyndham, The Chrysalids, p. 196). 19 Despite this range of explanations of why the aliens may have come to the Earth, it will be some time before we are given the perspective of the alien. For an early exception see A. E. Van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950). The Coeurl and Ixtl sections of Voyage do not begin aboard the exploration ship The Space Beagle, but with the monster, alone and hungry. These aliens are truly ‘monstrous’: the Coeurl feeds on the ‘id’ of living creatures while the Ixtl, like the terrestrial wasp, needs a living host for its eggs; and the Anabis feeds on the electrical discharge living beings give off when they die violently. In ‘Arena,’ Carson’s brief experience of the monster’s emotion was meant to lead him—and the reader—to acknowledge the alienness of the Roller, and to make killing it permissible. Van Vogt’s aliens are even more dangerous and predatory, yet the brief shifts in the narrative to the monster’s perspective have an effect on the reader which contradicts, however briefly, the legitimizing of our rejection of the Other, for these shifts to the point of view of the cruel, inhuman monster give the reader a momentary experience of intense physical pleasure and strength. As we experience their powers, some part of us is moved to awe and envy. The Coeurl, a powerful cat-like creature with superhuman intelligence, has amazing physical agility, as well as the ability to control various forms of energy, and ‘virtual immortality’. These mighty talents are multiplied in the Ixtl’s powers and abilities, for it has been floating in space for hundreds of thousands of years and

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it remembers ‘a time when his race could control the movement of entire sun systems through space . . . before they dispensed with space travel as such and moved on to a quieter existence, building beauty from natural forces in an ecstasy of prolonged creative production.’ A. E. Van Vogt, The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), p. 100).

‘A part of the … family [?]’: John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos as Estranged Autobiography DAVID KETTERER

‘We ordered some asparagus and got triffids.’ This joke complaint from a 1997 British cinema and television ad (for—it turns out—telephone banking services) alludes to the novel The Day of the Triffids originally published in 1951 by John Wyndham, who died in 1969. There are not many science fiction writers who have imprinted any of their works on the consciousness of a nation to the extent that the recognition of an allusion could be so readily assumed. This has something to do with the fact that Wyndham’s paperback publishers, Penguin Books, have kept his best works continuously in print. Other SF titles come and go but that rectangle of orange, made up of those Penguin spines, remains a sober, respectable fixture of the SF shelves of English-language bookstores worldwide. (Outside the English-speaking world, too, Wyndham has been widely read in translations, the translators of The Day of the Triffids into Serbo-Croat being none other than Darko Suvin and his late mother.) And yet the amount of critical and biographical attention that Wyndham, or John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (as he was amply named in full), and his works have received is negligible. In what follows I shall refer to the authorial persona as ‘Wyndham’ (often within quotation marks) and, more frequently, to the man himself as Harris. While ‘Wyndham’s’ books are well known (if little studied), Harris is the invisible man of British SF. When, in the 1980s, Tom and Alice Clareson embarked on what was to be the first book-length study (a project aborted by Tom Clareson’s death), they quickly came up against a major stumbling block—the unavailability of Harris’s papers. At that time they were in the possession of Harris’s brother Vivian at Vivian’s home in Hythe, Kent. After Vivian’s death on 12 June 1987 and that of Harris’s widow on 2 June 1991, they were apparently sold to a private collector who, in 1992, engaged the London antiquarian

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bookseller, Bertram Rota Ltd, together with Harris’s (and Vivian’s) solicitor, Brian Bowcock, to sort them into the John Wyndham Archive.1 In 1997 Bertram Rota Ltd resold the Archive (now augmented by five hundred letters that, during the Second World War, Harris wrote to the schoolteacher Grace Wilson—his eventual wife) to the University of Liverpool’s Sydney Jones Library, where the Wyndham Archive may now be consulted by interested researchers. As it turns out, the Archive reveals much more about Harris’s work than about the rather compartmentalized life of the man himself. Harris was a shy man, and both he and Grace were very reserved and private people. Fortunately, Grace Harris, who died in 1991, kept a detailed diary throughout most of her life and her diaries for the period 26 August 1948 to 27 December 1988 have survived. These diaries (which I had the opportunity to purchase and which are now in my possession) serve to document the last twenty-one years of Harris’s life more thoroughly than anything else in the Archive.2 I bought the diaries because I realized that my work-in-progress— a critical biography of Harris—would be impossible without them. At the same time, I have corresponded with, or interviewed, most of the people still alive who knew Harris more or less well. Consequently I am now able to construct a chronology of Harris’s life which is much fuller than the familiar account included in Sam Moskowitz’s Seekers of Tomorrow (1965).3 With this knowledge it is possible to point to The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) as not just Harris’s most original and artistically accomplished novel but as the work which can most illuminatingly be approached from a biographical perspective.4 Thus read, it emerges as an example of ‘estranged autobiography.’ Pretty much all works of fiction are susceptible to biographical readings of some of their details. Only when the entire work opens up to such probings in ways that would not be immediately apparent to the average reader is it appropriate to categorize a work of fiction as ‘estranged autobiography’. Harris’s other ‘Wyndham’ novels certainly contain elements which can be traced to his own character or his biographical experiences but not to anything like the same extent as The Midwich Cuckoos. Is it coincidental, then, that what I believe to be his best novel is also his most autobiographical? There is, after all, no necessary correlation. But in Harris’s case I believe there is. He wrote SF, a form which aims at the effects of realism while taking as its main plot device—its generic marker—an invention which is known not to be real and iconically so signalled. However, no work of SF can be of lasting value and interest unless it is in fact ultimately about something that is real, something of genuine concern to human beings. In Harris’s work the autobiographical—which includes his Darwinist ideology (largely derived from H. G. Wells albeit foundational to

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SF and naturalism, and given new narrative ramifications by Harris) and a good deal that is rather less apparent—provides a significant aspect of that grounding in what is real. This is all the more true because, although many of the autobiographical traces which may be discerned in an estranged (that is, unacknowledged, reconfigured, distorted, distanced, made strange) form5 in The Midwich Cuckoos were consciously and deliberately put there, there are other autobiographical adumbrations which may have found their way into the text without Harris’s conscious intention.

Harris as Gayford and Zellaby The narrator of The Midwich Cuckoos, Richard Gayford, and his wife Janet are based directly on John Harris and Grace (although they would not marry until 1963, six years after the book’s publication). Gayford and his wife, who live in the sleepy English village of Midwich in ‘Winshire’ (163),6 are away on the day of what comes to be understood as some kind of alien visitation whereby, under an impregnable, invisible, dome, the comatose Midwich females of childbearing age all become pregnant. In effect they have all been unwittingly, even cosily, raped. The narrator’s opening sentence refers to the fortuity of his being ‘born on the 26th of September’, an anticipation of the more extraordinary births to come: Because it was my birthday . . . and also to some extent because I had the day before received and signed a contract with an American publisher, we set off on the morning of the 26th for London, and a mild celebration. Very pleasant, too. A few satisfactory calls, lobster and Chablis at Wheeler’s, Ustinov’s latest extravaganza, a little supper, and so back to the hotel where Janet enjoyed the bathroom with that fascination which other people’s plumbing always arouses in her. (9)

Harris was not born on 26 September (a date on which he might have been conceived) but the rest of the paragraph describes a common event in his life as a writer and what he and Grace would have regarded as a good night out. Harris and Grace lived in London at the Quaker-based Penn Club, 21 Bedford Square. ‘Harris’, as the Penn Club residents characteristically referred to him, had moved into the Penn Club in 1925 when he was 22 years old and when the Club, founded in 1918, was at its original location ‘at numbers 8, 9, and 10 [later numbered 9, 10, and 11] Tavistock Square’.7 Subsequently, Grace became a resident of the Penn Club and a couple of entries in her surviving diaries indicate that her relationship with Harris began in 1932. In 1938, when the Penn Club moved to 21 Bedford Square,

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Harris and Grace had the adjoining rooms 45 and 44.8 They remained in those rather spartan rooms (each had a corner washbasin), with the bathroom downstairs, until their 1963 marriage following Grace’s retirement from teaching at Roan School for Girls in Devonshire Drive in Greenwich, London.9 All told, then, a relationship of more than thirty years preceded that marriage. Harris and Grace dined out quite regularly and frequently ordered lobster. On 22 January 1956, they dined at the same well-known fish restaurant off Leicester Square that the Gayfords patronize: ‘dinner at Antoine’s—now [renamed] Wheeler’s—simple enough but 4.14.6 [£4 14s 6d]’. On 27 May 1956 they returned to the same restaurant but Grace has forgotten that it is now named Wheeler’s: ‘supper at Antoine’s—lobster’. Given the renamed restaurant and the September 1957 publication of The Midwich Cuckoos, the 26 September date on which the novel opens must be 26 September 1956.10 The extravaganza that the Gayfords see on that date by the Russian-born actor-writer Peter Ustinov, Harris and Grace saw on 20 June 1956: ‘Romanoff & Juliet, Ustinov—very delicious . . . This the best he has done’. What remains Ustinov’s most successful play, Romanoff and Juliet, had begun its run at the Piccadilly Theatre on 17 May 1956.11 Ustinov seems to have been a particular favourite of Grace’s since she makes subsequent references to him. While based in his country retreat, Richard Gayford spends regular periods in London. Harris, on the other hand, while based in London, regularly retreated to the homes of two families—the Barkers and the Sykeses—who lived in the Hampshire countryside. Clearly, the second paragraph of The Midwich Cuckoos—the one I have quoted—is especially meaningful to a reader who has access to Grace’s diaries. But a detail in the potted biography that Penguin Books supplies would resonate with the information that Gayford had ‘signed a contract with an American publisher’ (9), namely that after the Second World War, ‘Wyndham’ (under the names ‘John Beynon’, ‘John Beynon Harris’ and ‘Johnson Harris’) ‘went back to writing stories for publications in the USA’. However, little else in that potted biography would alert readers that aspects of Harris are also to be identified in a more important second character—an older man named Gordon Zellaby of Kyle Manor who, although a writer like the narrator, is also a man of action; he ultimately emerges as the hero of the novel. Much like Harris, Zellaby was too young for the First World War and too old for the Second. Zellaby describes himself as ‘Too young for one war, tethered to a desk in the Ministry of Information in the next. Something more active would have been preferable’ (21). Harris was called up at the

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beginning of The Second World War but in error; he was a month or two over call-up age. He protested and was given a position in the censorship department of the Civil Service but subsequently he was in the Army Signals Corps and participated in the Normandy Landings. Regarding the Second World War, he informed Moskowitz that ‘I had a constant feeling I was there by mistake . . . Possibly that was because I had spent much of my schooldays expecting in due course to be in the Kaiser’s war, though it ended when I was still too young’.12 However, Harris, aged 53 in 1956, was a younger man than the ‘elegantly white[-haired]’ Zellaby (17) who has a daughter named Ferrelyn by his first wife and a much younger second wife named Angela.13 Zellaby is a father figure, and, to some extent, Harris may be putting himself in the role of his own father. But subconsciously Harris seems to have related that father figure to another individual in his life. Grace’s diary entry for 29 March 1957 has this revelation: ‘J knocked quite sideways on finding from Hebden that Zellaby (Cuckoos) has birthday, wife’s name, no. marriages, child & granddau[ghter] born same time just as MJ!’ In the novel Angela gives birth to a ‘normal’ child that was conceived naturally around the time of the alien visitation, and Ferrelyn, whose engagement to Second-Lieutenant Alan Hughes is announced in Chapter 2 (a second family event following on the narrator’s birthday), gives birth to an ‘alien’ Child. From subsequent instances of the initials ‘MJ’ in Grace’s 1957 diary, it is clear that they stand for Michael Joseph, the man who was to publish The Midwich Cuckoos and who had published Harris’s three previous best-selling novels beginning with The Day of the Triffids. But Grace’s list of coincidences related to Michael Joseph is a bit confused. He shared his birthday—26 September—not with Zellaby but with Richard Gayford (unless Zellaby, whose birthday is not noted, was very coincidentally also born on a 26 September) and he had married his third wife in 1950. Born in 1897, Joseph was six years older than Harris and died the year after The Midwich Cuckoos was published. On a similarly sombre note, it should be observed that Zellaby’s heart trouble (which he uses to soften his violent suicide at the novel’s conclusion) would soon be Harris’s and that Harris would subsequently die of a heart attack. Whatever Harris may have revealed about his attitude towards his publisher in the character of Zellaby, Zellaby’s ultra-rational opinions are Harris’s. The announcement of his daughter’s engagement gives Zellaby the opportunity, in his congratulatory toast, to include Harris’s negative views on marriage: It is true that the institution of marriage as it is proclaimed by Church and state displays a depressingly mechanistic attitude of mind towards partnership—one not unlike, in fact, that of Noah. The human spirit, how-

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ever, is tough, and it quite often happens that love is able to survive this coarse, institutional thumbing. (20)

It may be supposed that Harris’s baleful attitude to marriage received its initial impetus from the break-up of his parents’ marriage. Zellaby is also a mouthpiece for the Darwinian views (filtered through H. G. Wells) that power much of Harris’s fiction. Of the two Zellaby titles that are mentioned (both non-fiction), the first one—‘While We Last’ (18)—provides a capsule summation of Harris’s central theme: the sudden or eventual replacement of humanity in the Darwinian course of things. The book that Zellaby finishes shortly before his heroic death conveys in its title— ‘The British Twilight’ (81)—the sense of Britain’s postwar diminished status in the world that, it is often claimed, is conveyed metaphorically by ‘Wyndham’s’ catastrophe novels. Among the Harris set-speeches that issue from Zellaby’s lips, one deserves quotation in full because it responds directly to what has become a clichéd misconception about ‘Wyndham’s’ work: ‘I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than “Mother Nature” was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul—unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.’ (112–13)

This paragraph provides a pre-emptive rebuttal of the influential catchphrase that Brian Aldiss coined years later in 1973 in Billion Year Spree when he dubbed Harris the ‘master of the cosy catastrophe’.14 Harris’s catastrophe theme is far from cosy, and The Midwich Cuckoos provides the extreme instance of just how brutal his vision could be. The novel ends with the deliberate blowing to bloody bits of fifty-eight Children (plus Zellaby). Harris is careful to mitigate the impact of this ultimate horror but that is what happens. What gives the impression of cosiness is the evocation of a conventional, comfortable, English world prior to its disruption—its being blown away, shown to be illusory—all told in the very English novel-ofmanners style—represented perhaps by an arch name like Ferrelyn

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Zellaby—that Harris uses to convey his message. The effectiveness of his best works has much to do with the extreme ironic disparity of style and content. The oh-so-civilized novel-of-manners style cloaks the anguished, animalistic, Darwinian truth.15

Core Biographical Inflections: (1) The Absent Father The evidence that Harris has divided himself between Richard Gayford and Gordon Zellaby is, I believe, beyond dispute. More contentious, perhaps, is the claim argued below that four areas of Harris’s personal experience directly inform what is thematically central in The Midwich Cuckoos. These areas relate to (1) the separation of his parents when he was eight years old, (2) his very positive, very influential experience at Bedales School, (3) his ‘adoption’ of the Barker and Sykes families, both connected with Bedales, and (4) the decision of one of the Barkers’ two daughters to become a cloistered Benedictine nun. But before detailing the relevance of the key experiences, it should be observed that they and the Gayford/Zellaby personae do not comprise all of the autobiographically inflected material in The Midwich Cuckoos. A brief survey of the more incidental or more general autobiographical details is in order. One of the Midwich mothers believes she has no legal responsibility for her Child. Zellaby’s account of the legal complexities as to whether she is not responsible because ‘she was placed in loco parentis without her knowledge or consent’ (110) and whether the Ministry responsible for research at The Grange which placed her in Midwich, or some other body, might be indictable surely draws on the knowledge of the law which Harris acquired while attempting to follow in his barrister father’s footsteps by studying law at Oxford. The pervasive emphasis in the novel on secrecy—something deemed desirable by both the government authorities and the villagers—owes a good deal to Harris’s work experience, his reserved character and his own closely guarded privacy. The involvement of the Civil Service in the secret research work at The Grange and of Colonel Westcott of the Department of ‘Military Intelligence’ (164) in the affairs of Midwich (about which he knows more than first appears), and the emphasis on the need for ‘benign censorship’ (65), all draw on Harris’s wartime work in the Civil Service censoring soldiers’ letters (August 1940 to November 1943) and then as a Lance-Corporal in a cipher office of the Royal Corps of Signals. The strong sense in the novel of the authorities operating in secret can be directly related to these experiences. And, of course, the ‘fatherly eye’ (51) which

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Colonel Westcott keeps on Midwich points to a metaphorical overlap of common concern between military operations and the alien visitation with its own secretive, paternal interest.16 But to return to the first of what I am calling ‘core biographical inflections’, the damaging affects of marital breakdown on children between the impressionably aware ages of five and 15 is well attested. In 1911, the year the Harris parents separated, the stable world which John had known in Edgbaston, Birmingham, collapsed. The collapse of this personal world influenced all the imagined, wider world catastrophes that he would later write about, including that described in The Midwich Cuckoos. Although he was born on 10 July 1903 in the village of Knowle, Warwickshire, the Harris family lived in nearby Edgbaston where they enjoyed a life of some luxury. The father, George Beynon Harris, who was born and bred in South Wales and became a barrister after his marriage, augmented his income by investing in property. He bought (perhaps with his wife’s money) an ‘estate’ of about fifty small properties in a poor area of Birmingham. George Harris’s wife, Gertrude (Parkes), was the well-off daughter of a Birmingham ironmaster. After the separation, Gertrude and her two boys (the younger one, Vivian, had been born on 16 November 1906) moved around the country staying in various hotels. As a result of this gypsy life, John would eventually attend seven schools. His father (who, not unusually in those days, was never divorced from his mother) essentially disappeared from his life. Indeed, when his father was dying, ‘Harris had to be contacted via a BBC SOS as touch had been lost’.17 The main connection of all this with The Midwich Cuckoos is obvious enough. Like the alien Children, John grew up without his biological father. His unknown father inevitably became a figure of mystery analogous to the mysterious whatever responsible for impregnating the women of Midwich. Also inevitably, as sons without a father, both John and Vivian felt themselves to be different from other children and it is not unreasonable to suppose that John might have related his sense of difference to the situation of the cuckoo egg deposited and hatched in the nest of another bird. However that may be, Harris’s (or John’s, Jack’s, ‘Beynon’s’, ‘Wyndham’s’, or ‘Lucas Parkes’s’) troubled sense of personal identity, associated with the syndrome of the Missing or Absent Father, is closely related to The Midwich Cuckoos. There the Missing Father is an ultimate mystery. As the elder son, John was required, to some extent, to fill the husband/father roles. It might be supposed that any Oedipal conflict between father and son was correspondingly internalized. A similar child/father dichotomy is apparent in the cuckoo Children. Although they are children,

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they are also superior beings. And given, in both The Midwich Cuckoos and in Harris’s life, that the real father is a mysterious outsider, the eternal triangle of wife, husband and lover coexists with the Oedipal triangle of mother, father and son. This variously triangular state of affairs in The Midwich Cuckoos may be hinted at in the first chapter reference to the ‘road triangle’ formed by the villages of Stouch, Oppley and Midwich, and its being immediately followed by the statement that ‘At the heart of Midwich is a triangular Green’ (11).18 In the following chapter, the Reverend Hubert Leebody is described as listening ‘to a Third Programme disquisition on the PreSophoclean Conception of the Oedipus Complex’ (22). And much later, Zellaby describes a variant of the Oedipal and eternal triangles that is central to so many American SF movies: ‘in the Catskills a hitherto ignored professor and his daughter, with their rugged young assistant strive like demented midwives to assist the birth of the dea ex laboritoria which will save the world at the last minute, minus one’ (187). What I am suggesting is that Harris’s conflicting roles as son and proxy husband complicated his relationship with his mother, and his roles as proxy husband (in relation to his mother) and lover complicated his relationship with Grace. And both of these complications contributed to his sense of difference and to the theme of the Different Child which is most effectively expressed in The Midwich Cuckoos and which I take to be of dominant interest in his fiction. In print, the Different Child theme first appears in his 1936 novel Planet Plane (serialized as Stowaway to Mars). The female stowaway, Joan, is essentially raped and impregnated by the Martian Vaygan. The reader is informed at the end of the novel back on Earth that, six months later, Joan died giving birth to the Martian’s son. And hence the teasing last line: ‘But the tale of Vaygan’s son belongs to a different story.’19 That story was never written. The incomplete holograph manuscript (which survives in the Wyndham Archives) of an unpublished tale probably written in the early 1930s and entitled ‘Fairy Story’ is important because it presages the Different Child theme in the related works ‘Child of Power’ and ‘Chocky’; it concerns a little girl named Priscilla who is able to see and communicate with fairies and whose murderous wish is fulfilled by a fairy named (for the Fury) Tisiphone. ‘Child of Power’ (Fantasy, June 1939; entitled in previous versions ‘Frustrate Glimpse’ and ‘Sixth Sense’) is about a child born with the ability to hear radio waves. Grace’s diary entry for 4 October 1949 mentions ‘A new story of J’s about “art. insem.” ’. This is a reference to the unpublished SF thriller (which survives in the Wyndham Archive) alternatively titled ‘Plan for Chaos’ and ‘Fury of Creation’ which might be viewed as a precursor of The Midwich Cuckoos to the extent that its cloning theme involves an unorthodox means of procreation (see Ketterer, ‘Plan for Chaos’). ‘Adapta-

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tion’ (Astounding, July 1949), originally a much longer manuscript entitled ‘Freak,’ is about a girl born on Mars whose mother dies. Although the ‘first Earth baby to be born on Mars’, she becomes truly different when she is medically adapted by Europans for life on Europa, the moon of Jupiter on which she is deposited following an aboard-spaceship mutiny—she is discovered to be ‘twenty-five inches tall’.20 The Chrysalids (1955) is about a group of mutant children in a postnuclear catastrophe world. Unlike the Different Children of the Midwich Cuckoos—the novel which followed—those of The Chrysalids have the reader’s sympathy. Harris continues the theme in ‘Chocky’ (Amazing, March 1963; extended as Chocky, 1968), which features an adopted boy who is in telepathic communication with a female/male alien (the found, true parent). Rather more obliquely relevant are the humorous story ‘It’s a Wise Child’ (Argosy, November 1962; republished in 1967 and 1969 as ‘Wise Child’), which posits a special agent that creates a superior baby because it inherits not just the characteristics of its parents but their knowledge and abilities, and the last story published in his lifetime—‘A Life Postponed’ (Galaxy, December 1968). This final story, entitled ‘Life-Force’ in the original manuscript, is about a couple who transport themselves (via suspended animation) to the somewhat better world of 2095 where having children is a more responsible act. Clearly, Harris was imagining another life for himself and Grace where everything would have been better and different. This entire lineage suggests that the Different Child—a corollary of the Replacing Humanity plot—is the key theme in Harris’s work and not the catastrophe theme with which it may be linked and with which ‘Wyndham’ is generally associated because of the success of The Day of the Triffids. After Harris’s death his brother Vivian went through the letters of condolence. At the back of a ledger-style notebook is his incomplete draft of a response to such a letter from a Mrs Allen who must have written about her child Zephanie’s enjoyment of Harris’s fiction. Vivian tells Mrs Allen that his (childless) brother ‘loved children and his warmest books and the books we love best are the ones with them in’ (‘My Brother, John Wyndham’, 39).21 This draft follows a 14-page untitled memoir of his brother’s life (with an alternative start first page) in which Vivian points out that The Kraken Wakes lacks the humanity of The Day of the Triffids because ‘it had no children in it’ and that, because of the presence of children, ‘ “The Chrysalids,” “The Midwich Cuckoos,” & “Chocky” were my favourite books, especially “The Chrysalids” ’ (‘My Brother, John Wyndham’, 25). The child in The Day of the Triffids is the nine-or-ten-year-old orphan named Susan whom the narrator ‘adopts’ as his companion-in-adventure and daughter. Given this interest in children, it is notable that in 1911, when Harris was eight years old, his

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father published a memoir entitled When I Was a Boy. The dedication reads as follows: ‘To Wyndham and Vivian This Volume is Fondly Inscribed’.22 George Beynon Harris writes well with an easy conversational style and it seems reasonable to conclude that John Harris inherited his writing talent from his father (as did Vivian to a lesser extent). He also shared with his father a love of childhood. But to some extent (unlike his father?) John Harris seems to have been arrested in his childhood. The experience of their parents’ marriage made both John and Vivian opponents of the married state. They did not ‘believe in’ marriage. Vivian (childless like his brother) lived with his companion, Lila Grettan (an actress and cabaret performer) in downstairs and upstairs flats (much as Harris and Grace lived in adjoining rooms) for many years. Harris married Grace after a relationship of over thirty years not so much because she wanted the marriage (and she did) but because it was conventionally expedient and expected at the time when, following Grace’s retirement from teaching, they moved out of the Penn Club to share a modest house (with separate bedrooms). I have already quoted Zellaby’s negative appraisal of the ‘mechanistic’ ‘institution of marriage’ (20) as expressing Harris’s view, and the fact that some of the Children are born to Midwich women who are not married allows for comments about the desirability of procreation outside the conventions of marriage. Addressing a ‘Special Emergency Meeting of Great Importance to every Woman in Midwich’ (67), Angela Zellaby (who it later turns out is pregnant with Zellaby’s child and not an alien Child) observes that ‘All of us have been placed outside the conventions, and if any married woman here is tempted to consider herself more virtuous than her unmarried neighbour, she might do well to consider how, if she were challenged, she could prove that the child she carries is her husband’s child’ (71). The remark has been prompted by the abrupt departure of Miss Latterly,23 an older woman who is possibly in a lesbian relationship with ‘her inseparable companion, Miss Lamb’ (69), who Miss Latterly has just realized (herself no longer being capable of conceiving a child) must be among the assembled pregnant women. Subsequently, Ferrelyn’s fiancée, Alan, points out that the husbands of Midwich have adapted to the situation and become ‘more reasonable, and less conventional’ (82). Approximately nine months after the so-called ‘Dayout’ (47), the Midwich Children are mostly born ‘about the end of June, or the first week in July [1957]’ (65) but by ‘the last week of July’ there are still ‘two or three more to come’ (91). That is to say, Harris has timed the birth period of the Children to include the 10 July date of his own birth. As I have noted, the date of Richard Gayford’s birthday—26 September—might well have been the date of Harris’s conception.

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Part Two of The Midwich Cuckoos deals with the disturbing events that occur after the passage of nine years. The first chapter of Part Two is entitled ‘Now We Are Nine’—a reference to the age of the Children adapted from A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six (1927). The Gayfords are back in Midwich for a six-week spell having moved to Canada; it is ‘the eighth summer after we had left’ (129). Is it just coincidence that the first signs of mayhem in Midwich caused by the Children occur after approximately the same amount of time has elapsed as preceded the separation of Harris’s parents? An eight-year period of security and tranquillity abruptly ends to be replaced by a period of danger and radical uncertainty.

Core Biographical Inflections: (2–4) Harris’s ‘Bedales World’ Of the four biographical experiences that I am here relating to The Midwich Cuckoos, only the second makes it into the Penguin potted biography: ‘John Wyndham . . . was at Bedales from [March] 1918 till [March] 1921.’ But this brief notation gives no sense of the lasting influence and importance of those Bedales years. During the seven unhappy years which followed his parents’ separation John and Vivian and their mother moved regularly and sampled different hotels and different schools. But when John entered Bedales (after a bad experience at the famous public school Blundell’s) in 1918 everything changed for the better: ‘I had discovered a school that expected civilized behaviour and had miraculously succeeded in making the wretched business of growing up a largely enjoyable process.’24 Bedales was a bold experiment. Founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley (who was headmaster until 1934 and died, aged 102, in 1967), it was the first coeducational boarding school in England. Originally situated in Sussex, the school moved to the village of Steep in the beautiful Hampshire countryside near Petersfield in 1900. Badley was a progressive educator; he believed in an anti-competitive, non-religious environment and was strongly influenced by the philosophy of William Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere and the Arts and Crafts movement associated with Morris. Physical labour was as important as book-learning, relationships between the pupils and teachers were friendly, and discipline was benign. Harris maintained connections with what might be called his ‘Bedales world’ throughout his life, and when he and Grace finally married in 1963 and moved out of the Penn Club they moved into a small, recently built house (with a magnificent countryside view) named ‘Oakridge’ close to the school grounds. Bedales corresponded pretty much to Harris’s idea of utopia—a pastoral community where the ties that bound people were those of friendship and the legal

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apparatus of marriage was not of prime importance. The Penn Club— which might be called ‘Bedales-in-London’25—constituted a similarly friendly communal environment of male and female equals (as required by its Quaker philosophy). Looked at less positively, it might be suspected that in important ways (as is the case with a good many British public school pupils) Harris’s development was arrested by his intense Bedales experience. Like the Midwich Children, the Bedales children and adolescents might be viewed as an improved humanity. The ‘special [mixed sex, boarding] school’ (170) that is set up for the Children at The Grange—’a kind of school-cum-welfare-centre-cum-social-observatory’ (131)—is clearly modelled on Bedales. As Zellaby points out, any ordinary school was obviously out of the question . . . They have a different sense of community . . . Their ties to one another are far more important to them than any feeling for ordinary homes . . . they can’t really become one of the family, they’re too different. (131–32)

As soon as ‘dormitories’ (132) are set up at The Grange, the Children all abandon their apparent ‘families’ and move in. The coeducational set-up at Bedales and what were regarded as lax standards met with a good deal of disapproval in the early days. Similar prejudices regarding the Grange school are expressed by the Chief Constable of Midwich: ‘I’ve heard of those fancy schools. Children mustn’t be what-do-you-callit?—frustrated. Self-expression, co-education, wholemeal bread, and all the rest of it. Damned nonsense! More frustrated by being different about things than they would be if they were normal.’ (170–71)

According to the actor George Sanders (whose 1917–19 stay at Bedales overlapped with John’s and who would play the role of Zellaby in the version of Harris’s novel filmed as The Village of the Damned (1960)), there was a certain degree of permissiveness at Bedales: One did not learn very much, but boys and girls sat together at desksbuilt-for-two and some of the girls were very pretty and it was rather fun . . . On Saturday nights there was dancing in the great hall, dark corners of which were decorated with mistletoe.26

George Sanders would have been too young to take much advantage of this licence. And the three-years-older John Harris certainly did not. But for Badley the true value of his coeducational school was that it encouraged a feminist philosophy of sexual equality. A commitment to sexual equality was also an important aspect of Quaker thought and hence, as

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noted above, of the Quaker-based Penn Club.27 And strong female characters and the expression of feminist views are very much a feature of Harris’s fiction. In an article derived from their aborted book, Thomas and Alice Clareson were the first critics to highlight the feminist credentials of some of the later stories but they fail to convey the career-long extent of this interest and its biographical source in Harris’s Bedales experience.28 The Midwich Cuckoos is not especially notable in feminist terms but the traces of those concerns are clear enough. Janet Gayford is a more assertive figure than her narrator-husband. When they set about exploring the Midwich phenomenon, Richard Gayford is stopped by a figure waving a stick: ‘ “Oh, come on, Richard. He’s miles away,” said Janet impatiently, and began to run ahead’ (14). Regarding the mysterious pregnancies, Zellaby explains to his daughter’s fiancé Alan that ‘ “one of the things you must not do . . . is to underestimate her. Ferrelyn, I assure you, was away ahead of you.” ’ (80). Zellaby’s young wife Angela seems every bit as decisive and clear-thinking as Janet Gayford. She sees the true danger that the Children represent and, at one point, speaks to her husband ‘in a severe voice, as if reprimanding a child’ (160). I have already noted that Harris maintained his Bedales connections, and that brings me to the third area of biographical experience that impinges on The Midwich Cuckoos—his cuckoo-like ‘adoption’ (allowing for the metonymy of egg and cuckoo) of two families associated with Bedales: the Barkers and the Sykeses. Harry (‘Biff’) Barker, first employed at Bedales between autumn 1921 and the summer of 1925 was, from 1930 to 1964 (after five years in Africa at Achimota College, Accra, the Gold Coast), in charge of the Workshop at Bedales. As the Crafts Master he taught woodwork, metalwork, mechanical drawing, silver-smithing and jewellery-making. He and his wife Eileen had two daughters, Jean Leslie, born in 1931, and Marion Tess, born in 1933.29 ‘Biff’ Barker, then, was not at Bedales when John was a pupil but, throughout his life, Harris attended the annual ‘Old Bedalian Weekend’ (or ‘O. B. Meeting’ as it was alternatively called) which usually took place in early July. Tess Barker (now Sister Bede) believes that Harris and her father first met during Biff’s 1921–25 period of employment at Bedales, perhaps at an Old Bedalian Weekend; they quickly became fast friends. From 1932 onwards Harris stayed with the Barkers at their home, Row Cottage, in Steep for every O. B. Weekend—and for other extended breaks from London—until the Harrises moved to Steep in 1963. He became ‘Uncle Jack’—one of the family—almost a surrogate father for Jean and Tess. And he did much of his creative work during these stays at Row Cottage where his portable typewriter was kept for him. Harris’s second surrogate family lived close by. His friendship with the

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farmer Arthur Thomas (‘Bill’) Sykes dated from their schooldays. ‘Bill’ Sykes was a pupil at Bedales from March 1915 until March 1921. ‘Bill’ Sykes and his wife Leslie (godmother to Tess Barker) had two children, the first adopted: David, who was born in 1935, and Matilda, who was born in 1941. The Sykeses lived at the Red House (which had originally been built—with a red-tiled roof—for the poet Edward Thomas, who lived there from 1909 until 1913) and, after spending the O. B. Weekend with the Barkers, Harris would usually stay with the Sykeses for the following three nights. According to Tess Barker, ‘Jack was as much at home at the Red House as at Row Cottage. Yet I noticed that his stays at Row Cottage were prolonged ones at which he regularly did a stint of writing.’30 But Harris’s holidays at the Red House were not confined to the O. B. Weekend. Grace’s diaries record his regular visits over the years. It seems clear that Harris led a compartmentalized life; there was his life in London with Grace and the Penn Club, and his other lives in the country with the Barkers or the Sykeses.31 In his ‘Bedales world’ he had a choice of welcoming families but, however welcoming, as an honorary Barker or an honorary Sykes, Harris must, to some degree, have felt himself to be a Barker cuckoo or a Sykes cuckoo. It should also be stressed that Harris’s experience and understanding of children—crucial to the Different Child theme in his fiction, especially in The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky—derived not just from his memories of being a schoolboy (and a Bedales schoolboy in particular) but from the uncle-like and father-like roles he played in the lives of the Barker and Sykes children—especially the Barker children, whom he seems to have virtually adopted as his own.32 We return here, perhaps, to the possibly problematic basis of Vivian’s statement that his brother ‘loved children’. Harris was an accomplished photographer, and Sister Bede showed me a number of photographs he took of her family including several shots, taken in the summer of 1935, of her sister Jean, aged four, romping in the garden of Row Cottage, nude. Enlarged and mounted, one of the series of nude Jean shots (with her father a shadowy figure in the right background) is included in what survives as a portfolio of eleven mounted photographs that Harris assembled in the 1930s when he was perhaps thinking about a career as a photographer.33 This portfolio is now in one of the thirteen boxes of ‘Bowcock Files’ (see note 2 below)—a box labelled ‘Scrapbooks & photos’. The short blonde-haired, four-year-old Jean in the photograph might be taken as a plausible prototype of a Midwich Child. We live in a suspicious age, and parallels with a keen photographer of young (sometimes undressed) girls— Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)—might spring to mind. In Harris’s case, it should be emphasized, there was never any hint of impropriety but, just

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as Dodgson was, in some ways, most truly at home in the idyllic years of his childhood at the rural Daresbury parsonage in Cheshire (where, with his seven sisters and two brothers, he was initially educated by his mother), so too, in some ways, as I have noted, Harris seems to have been arrested around the era of his utopian days at Bedales where, up until the age of 11, boys and girls swam naked together. Harris seems to have taken from that time, and apparently remained fixated by, an idealized, asexual (?), Wordsworthian and Victorian image of childhood. In this light, a psychosexual interpretation of The Midwich Cuckoos as estranged autobiography—no doubt totally unwitting estranged autobiography—should be considered. Although the Children are simply concerned with their own survival, from our human point of view, from the age of nine onwards they are branded as evil. Should one see in that evaluation a transference of how society regards men who, like Harris, ‘love’ children? As a result of the trust he has built up with the Children, Harris’s surrogate, Zellaby, arranges a narrative conclusion whereby he and the Children die explosively together. Should one here recall Zellaby’s earlier concern that the Children ‘reach maturity unmolested’ (208) and accord the word ‘die’ its Elizabethan and metaphysical sexual connotation? How cosy a catastrophe would that be? I raise this ‘perverse’ understanding of The Midwich Cuckoos simply as an interpretative possibility, not as any kind of biographical ‘truth’.34 The novel’s ideological centre remains Zellaby’s Darwinian message which overtly expresses Harris’s own views. Clearly, Harris’s key innovation in The Midwich Cuckoos and elsewhere is to combine his idealized view of children as superior beings with the Darwinian theme of human or trans-human evolution. Turning now to my next core biographical experience, one of the Barker children would herself prove to be a species of cuckoo, and Harris’s reaction to what he must have regarded as her betraying, ‘changeling’ alienness constitutes the fourth biographical area to influence The Midwich Cuckoos. Grace records the offence in her diary entry for 30 April 1956: ‘shocking news that Tess Barker means to go into a closed order—Benedictines. poor Biff.’ This is immediately preceded by ‘J a horrid sinus infection now’. His being unwell—‘with odd symptoms’ according to a 6 May entry—is, almost certainly, a reaction to Tess’s decision and he remains slightly unwell for at least the next six months. In her 14 October 1956 entry Grace writes, ‘J wretched with cold & eye boil again. Vitamins don’t seem to combat the infection he has had for six months now.’ Grace does not indicate when Harris began writing The Midwich Cuckoos, but since he appears to have completed a draft by 23 January (‘J just finishing Cuckoo’), it seems likely that the entire period of composition more or less coincided with the period of

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unwellness that followed Tess’s news.35 On 1 May 1956, the day after that news was received, Grace writes as follows: ‘much talk last night about Tess and Eileen’s wickedness & its results’. What Grace means by the intemperate word ‘wickedness’ here is the conversion of Tess’s mother to Roman Catholicism in February 1948 and Tess’s own conversion in May 1951 followed by her decision to become a cloistered nun. On 10 May 1956, ‘J had a letter from Eileen. I think at last she sees what she has done.’ As Grace saw it, Eileen had admitted the poisonous intruder faith into the Anglican Barker household, and that faith had infected Tess. Tess entered St Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde on the Isle of Wight in September 1956 (the very month and year when the Midwich catastrophe begins) and, as Sister Bede, made her monastic vows on 21 April 1959. She is a member of the same Benedictine community today. When I talked to Sister Bede at St Cecilia’s Abbey on 24 May 1997, she explained the extreme nature of Harris’s reaction to the two members of the Barker family becoming Catholics in terms of his thoroughly dogmatic belief in a Wellsian, rationalist, materialist atheism. In her written account of the ‘Peak or crisis-moments in Jack’s life’, she notes that, after her mother became a Roman Catholic, ‘Jack boycotted the Barkers for a few months . . . which occasioned great pain’. He stayed with the Sykes family instead. Thanks to Eileen Barker’s initiative, the breach was healed but he strongly objected to Tess’s entering St Cecilia’s Abbey and felt sure she would eventually change her mind. When it became clear that that was not likely, Harris changed his will.36

The Grange and St Accius’s Abbey (and St Cecilia’s Abbey) It may not be immediately apparent just how Tess’s becoming a nun could be said to have left its mark on The Midwich Cuckoos, but a moment’s reflection gives rise to a number of hypotheses about areas of overlap between a community of cloistered Benedictine nuns and the community of alien Children. Both groups might be viewed as threatening collectivities deliberately cut off from the normal world. (And, it bears repeating, in the very month and year that Tess Barker began her life sealed from the outside world, Midwich found itself quite literally sealed from the outside world.) In the case of both the nuns and the Children, an individual’s personal identity is subsumed by a group purpose. And both groups represent and serve some conjectured higher power. But most importantly, Midwich surely would not so prominently have included the ruins of St Accius’s Abbey were it not for the disturbing and

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bewildering intrusion of the real-world St Cecilia’s Abbey into Harris’s life while he was writing the novel. St Accius’s Abbey is one of two buildings which figure significantly in the plot of The Midwich Cuckoos and which are introduced as part of the Chapter 1 general description of the village. The first of these, The Grange, is a Victorian building to which have been added ‘utilitarian wings . . . when the Ministry took it over for Research’ (12). In the course of the novel the main building becomes, as I have noted, a Bedales-style school for the Children. Thus a site linked with progressive thinking and science (and suspicions about same) is paired with religion by the reference to ‘the sensational closure of the nearby St Accius’s Abbey, and the redistribution of the brethren for reasons which have been a subject of intermittent local speculation ever since it took place, in 1493’ (13). Science and religion are linked as areas of mystery and power but it is also relevant to note that the ruined Abbey prefigures the fate of The Grange. At the end of the novel The Grange is left in ruins as a consequence of Zellaby’s bomb which drastically effects the redistribution of the building and its contents including the Children and Zellaby. Finally, then, Midwich is distinguished by two ruined buildings. The elided offence (or offences) and the ‘sensational’ punishment visited on the Abbey and its ‘brethren’ might be understood as magnifying (out of all proportion?) Tess’s ‘offence’ and its destructive consequences. In the past, when William Wordsworth visited Midwich, he ‘was inspired by the Abbey ruins to the production of one of his more routine commendatory sonnets’ (13). A reader will be reminded here of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (and perhaps of ‘Tintern Abbey’) but he or she might also recall that Wordsworth is famous for writing about children ‘trailing clouds of glory’ in the fourth stanza of his ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode. For Wordsworth, children, like the alien Children, were superior to common humanity. Harris’s choice of the name ‘Accius’ (spelled the same way in every edition of the novel) is puzzling. There is no St Accius, but the Benedictine Book of Saints does list seven saints with the name Acacius. If Harris had a saint of that name in mind, might he have deliberately dropped the second ‘a’ in order to suggest an irreverent pun on ‘ass’ and thereby express his response to religion generally and to Tess Barker’s decision in particular? Of the seven saints named Acacius, the most appropriate would seen to be the St Acacius who was martyred with ‘ten thousand Roman soldiers under his command on Mt Ararat’. This story, ‘which had great vogue in the later Middle Ages, is now discarded as pure romance’.37 His day in the liturgical calendar was 22 June but in 1969 the cult was suppressed. This St Acacius seems the most likely candidate because of the drama of his story, because of the collectivity of ten thousand and one (paralleling perhaps the collec-

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tive ‘martyrdom’ of the persecuted Children), and because there is a famous fifteenth-century stained-glass window in Berne, Switzerland, which ‘provides the most complete pictorial record of the martyrdom’.38 Harris and Grace took regular walking holidays in Switzerland (where he had a bank account) and may well have seen this window in actuality or in reproductions. There is at least one discreet attack on religion in The Midwich Cuckoos. Mrs Leebody, wife of the minister, is made mild fun of for the jeremiad-style lesson she draws from the Midwich ‘visitation . . . of a plague of—er— babies’ (79) when she preaches ‘from an upturned box’ (78). In conversation Sister Bede made the interesting suggestion that the sixty-one inexplicable Midwich conceptions might be a blasphemous dig at the doctrine of the Virginal Conception of Jesus Christ.39 To a rationalist like Zellaby there is, of course, no distinction between religion and rank superstition, a view that Janet Gayford appears to share. In her report, she notes, ‘there is a tendency among the weaker-willed to become superstitious . . . and to credit the babies with magical powers. This sort of nonsense does no one any good, and invites exploitation by what Zellaby calls “the beldame [sic] underground” ’ (100). Certainly, the name ‘Midwich’ invites the homonym ‘mid witch’ and the fear that the good villagers have found themselves amid (mid-wife) witches. The ‘unidentified flying object’ (24) that is associated with the Midwich phenomenon is also specifically related to St Accius’s Abbey. It lands ‘by the Abbey’ (41) and the aerial photograph taken of it reveals ‘a pale oval outline . . . not unlike the inverted bowl of a spoon’ (36). With this simile (and the adjective ‘oval’) Harris has provided the creative reader with enough hints to construct a materialist scenario for the acts of artificial insemination which appear to have occurred. Did the alien power acquire the sperm that it spooned (after appropriate genetic manipulation?) into the eligible women of Midwich from a convenient group of men akin to the monks it tapped back in 1493? Those monks might well have interpreted this experience as their being visited by satanic succubi and hence the closure of the Abbey. Zellaby supplies further rational hypotheses, ‘hypotheses’ because they are as much opposed to scientific dogmatism as to religious dogmatism. Our ancestors, he had observed earlier, ‘had only to suffer religious dogmatism, which was not so dogmatic as scientific dogmatism’ (106). Is there an area where an undogmatic science and an undogmatic religion (as represented by The Grange and St Accius’s Abbey) might overlap? That is where Zellaby’s revised theory of evolution might point. After all, his theory of evolution does include a deus ex machina putting in an appearance from time

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to time. Zellaby begins by questioning the notion that the theory of evolution requires a single ‘missing link’ to bridge the gap between ape and prehistoric man. The diversity of the human race suggests numerous missing links. Our evolutionary history is full of gaps. We do not have anything approaching ‘a complete evolutionary tree’ for mankind. The ‘isolated specimens’ we have ‘are as unattached to us as we are to the Children’. Zellaby concludes, ‘I find the occurrence of the Children scarcely more startling, objectively, than that of the various other races of mankind that have apparently popped into existence fully formed, or at least with no clear line of ancestral development.’ Given this state of affairs, he can only speculate that there may be ‘some Outside Power arranging things here’. Our world appears to be ‘a rather disorderly testing ground’ (204) for the biological inventions of some cosmic ‘Inventor’ or ‘team’ of Inventors. Such a hypothesis ‘has the merit of being no less impossible, and a lot more comprehensible than many religious suggestions’ (205). What Zellaby does here is cast doubt on the notion of an original father of mankind. Such a progenitor is absent. According to Zellaby’s ‘cuckoo’ theory of evolution, different human beings have been periodically seeded at different locations. These discontinuous human lines lack natural fathers. They are different seeds planted by an experimental gardener, or gardeners, or simply by capricious winds. In a sense, then, we may all be illegitimate Midwich Children. Zellaby plans to take advantage of the trust he has built up with the Children as their teacher at The Grange to bring a bomb into his class secretly. The ruthless Darwinian imperative of survival demands that the Children—a superior strain of humanity capable of replacing us—should be destroyed. After all, the Children have already demonstrated their lethal powers of mind control when confronted with what they consider acts of aggression, whether intentional or not. What happened to the young Pawle brothers amounts to a sombre warning. After Jim Pawle knocks one of the Children down while carelessly driving his car, the Children cause him to have a fatal accident. Out for revenge, his brother David is made by the Children to turn his rifle on himself.40 When Zellaby’s bomb explodes, he and all the Children at The Grange will be destroyed. Zellaby downplays this heroic act of suicide with the belief that he has not long to live anyway because of his heart condition. Harris evades the full horror of his conclusion by having it occur offstage. Furthermore, Harris has simplified or, perhaps more accurately, fudged and sidestepped the moral issues involved by ensuring that no apparent member of Zellaby’s own family is among the destroyed Children. The child that his second wife Angela gives birth to, presumably during the same June/July period as the Children are born, is a

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‘natural’ child. We are to assume that Zellaby impregnated Angela around the time of the Dayout. And his daughter Ferrelyn’s cuckoo Child (a boy) was among the three ‘carried off’ earlier by ‘an epidemic of influenza’ (116). The offstage explosion at The Grange has its effect on Zellaby’s home, Kyle Manor. All the ‘west front’ windows are ‘without a pane of glass left’ and, in Zellaby’s study, ‘A part of the Zellaby family record has been swept from the mantel-shelf and now lay shattered in the hearth’ (219). Whoever the actual photographic subject, or subjects, the fallen photograph symbolically represents the death of Zellaby. He has become an absent husband and an absent father. Once ‘A part of the . . . family’, he is now separated from it, apart from it, in death. The phrase ‘a part of the family’ (simultaneously implying belonging and separateness) can also be applied to Harris’s own family entanglements. Chary about being a part of a legalistic family, he preferred to be a part of a family to which he was not legally—or (with the exception of his mother and Vivian) biologically—bound. He acquired families that he simultaneously belonged to and was separate from. The self-contained families of Midwich are similarly breached by the introduction of the alien Children. And thereby the question is raised, What is a family? Might it not be supposed that the Midwich Children are ‘part of the Zellaby family record’ that lies shattered? After all, they are just as dead as Zellaby—united in death, as the cliché has it—and Zellaby’s ‘cuckoo’ theory of evolution implies that he and everybody else on Earth owes his or her existence to a cuckoo prototype. In the most real sense, it follows from Zellaby’s hypothesis that the true families would be all the members of one ‘cuckoo’ line of descent. This communal ‘family’ would finally be more meaningful than any of the legal families it incorporated. Certainly, the Children constitute the true ‘family’ in The Midwich Cuckoos. Because of their telepathic talents, the Children appear to be a single unit. In spite of the apparent distinction between the mind shared by the boys and that shared by the girls, it is a case of what is dubbed ‘the contesserate mind’ (176)—a unified design composed of individual tiles—overpowering the divisive nuclear family.

Wyndham and the Winds of Change The novel concludes with Zellaby’s suicide note. The narrator’s attention is drawn to it as he enters Zellaby’s study: ‘The opening of the door brought a draught through the empty window-frames. It caught a piece of paper lying on the desk . . ., slid it to the edge, and sent it fluttering to the floor’ (219). This ‘draught’ is the last instance in this novel of the various winds that agi-

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tate this world and others in Harris’s fiction. As a natural force and in their total capriciousness and destructive potential, the wind provides an appropriate metaphor for Harris’s uncompromisingly Darwinian world view. And he could not have been unaware of the homonym with the first syllable of the name by which he became famous.41 All his references to hurricanes, gales, winds, breezes and draughts must be regarded with a suspicious eye for symbolism. They are estrangements of his very name and might be construed as a disguised signature motif.42 Wind symbolism is most overt in ‘Wyndham’s’ last novel, the posthumously published Web (1979). It is about a new and dangerous breed of spider that comes close to taking over one of those islands of which SF writers—especially British ones—are so fond. Influenced by Darwin’s description in The Voyage of the Beagle of the deck of a ship covered with spiders transported by a thermal, the reader is left with the disturbing thought that the winds that blew radioactive dust to the island (which accounts for the mutant telepathic spiders?) will waft those same spiders (a successor species gendered female) to the rest of the world. There are several references in the novel to the wind. For example, we are told that ‘Already a new wind was blowing . . . that would tatter the Age of Confidence to its last shreds’ and that ‘no one could control the winds’.43 In his own life Harris was repeatedly exposed to ‘the winds of war’ and ‘the winds of change’, to appropriate (in the second case) the image that the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan memorably used in a 1960 speech. (The first volume of Macmillan’s autobiography is entitled Winds of Change 1914–1939 (1966) and, as it happens, his faithful private secretary was named John Wyndham—on one occasion a newspaper report mistakenly used Harris’s photo in place of the secretary’s.) According to John Scarborough, ‘Wyndham’ was ‘the most eloquent middle-class British spokesman for the rampant fear of the 1950’s’.44 Those winds of change, both real and metaphorical, blow with varying intensity throughout Harris’s fiction. They are felt in the 1933 story which presages the 1951 Day of the Triffids—‘The Puff-ball Menace’. It begins with a reference to ‘dust in the wind’, and the concluding chapter is entitled ‘The Attack of the Winds’.45 The female survivor-turned-cannibal of ‘Survivor’ (1952) lulls her baby with the nursery song ‘Rock-a-bye baby / On the tree top / When the wind blows’.46 In ‘A Life Postponed’ (Galaxy, December 1968), the female protagonist is expected by the male protagonist to want babies because a woman ‘practically can’t help it—can’t stand against the biological wind, if you see what I mean’.47 As for those triffids, Harris claimed (suppressing the puff-balls) that he came by the idea ‘when he was startled one night by the manner in which the wind made a sapling in a hedge appear to be making jabs at him’.48

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As befits the pastoral setting, the winds in The Midwich Cuckoos are mild. During the Dayout there is ‘a light wind blowing’ (28). In the last chapter the narrator describes Zellaby ‘as he sat with the light wind stirring his silky white hair, and his gaze on things far, far away’ (213). Subsequently, Zellaby focuses on the foreground ‘watching the poplars sway with the wind’ (214). Earlier, an observer of Zellaby’s minor heart attack comments: ‘Fair put the wind up me, you did’ (140). The novel concludes with an image of momentary stillness. Realizing that her husband is dead, Angela sits at his desk slumped forward ‘with her head on her bare arms. She did not move’. The narrator picks up Zellaby’s previously ‘fluttering’ letter and places ‘it back on the desk beside the motionless Angela’ (219). But movement and change will return; the wind will pick up. A part of the Zellaby family is no more but the remaining part survives for now. Perhaps only a part of the extended family of alien Children has been killed. What of that remainder? Some of the Children we have been informed of, born in other parts of the world, may well survive. And in the future, other such Children will doubtless be born—perhaps one or more of them to a Zellaby descendant (a part of the Zellaby family). After all, in the normal course of things, our children will replace us. Are they, then, the enemy, the Darwinian rival species? There is no question that The Midwich Cuckoos expresses a Darwinian ideology and that that ideology corresponds to Harris’s own outlook. But any creative text (not necessarily of autobiographical inspiration) will convey some sense of its author’s world view. For the term ‘estranged autobiography’ to apply, the expression of an author’s world view must be combined with a much more than incidental amount of material that can be related, more or less directly, to aspects of that author’s most important life experiences. And that is why The Midwich Cuckoos qualifies as a work of estranged autobiography rather than as a text which might be adequately characterized as including biographical elements, more or less incidental, conveying to those in the know merely local areas of resonance. The estranged Darwinism of The Midwich Cuckoos gains a further estranged dimension and is illuminated (for the informed reader) by the overall relevance of key aspects of Harris’s life.49

Notes 1 I have not been able to secure a definitive answer to the suspicion that Bertram Rota Ltd was the ‘private collector’ who wished to remain anonymous. 2 The widowed Grace Harris was apparently not particularly co-operative where would-be biographers were concerned. Her diary entry for 25 February 1987 records

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her receipt of a ‘letter from Mr Clareson who wants to do a study of J, esp. the women in his stories. Viv gave him my name & address. I didn’t answer before & don’t think I shall now.’ Her diaries are all the more valuable because those of her husband no longer exist. According to solicitor Brian Bowcock, in a letter to the literary agent Gerald Pollinger dated 2 November 1990: ‘Anthony Goff says that Viv always told him that it was Jack’s expressed wish that there should not be a biography . . . My impression [is] that Jack’s reticence was limited to the destruction of diaries and other personal papers after his death. That wish was implemented.’ See file H4(a37) in the ‘Bowcock Files’, the thirteen boxes of Harris-related material that Brian Bowcock has loaned to the University of Liverpool’s Sydney Jones Library. A letter in the Wyndham Archive from Vivian Beynon Harris to Bowcock dated 9 May 1882 (sic) contradicts the impression that Bowcock gives above that Harris kept a diary: ‘he never kept a diary, he never kept anything but business letters.’ 3 Sam Moskowitz, ‘John Wyndham’ in Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, pp. 118–32. For the fullest current biographical account, see Vivian Beynon Harris, ‘My Brother, John Wyndham’ Wyndham Archive, University of Liverpool). 4 To praise the originality of The Midwich Cuckoos is not to deny the existence of precursors, the most obvious being Wells’s Star Begotten (1937). In Star Begotten mysterious cosmic rays create superior mutant children (a ‘Martianized’ humanity) who will inherit the Earth. This novel was reviewed in the June 1937 number of the fanzine Scientifiction immediately following Harris’s review of Stapledon’s Star Maker. In turn, both Wells and Harris owe something to J. D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), the first important story about a more highly evolved individual; like Harris’s Children, the Wonder is finally murdered. Harris’s own fondness for The Midwich Cuckoos may explain why it is the only ‘Wyndham’ novel for which he contemplated writing a sequel. The John Wyndham Archive includes 122 holograph pages (six chapters) of an uncompleted sequel (originally commissioned by MGM who made the 1960 film Village of the Damned based on The Midwich Cuckoos) entitled (inexplicably, perhaps by Vivian) Midwich Main. It is almost sixteen years later and the now widowed Gayford, relocated back in England, accepts a government assignment to check out reports of Midwich-style children (or possible ‘hybrids’) in different parts of the world. But is one of the children whom Gayford meets, the adopted Thomas Evans with his hypnotic revolving sphere, actually controlling him? 5 Although Darko Suvin’s Brechtian and Russian formalist conception of ‘cognitive estrangement’ might well be applied to the standard dictionary definition of ‘estranged’ and ‘estrangement’ which I am employing, I do not accept Suvin’s apparent implication that there exists a non-cognitive form of estrangement (supposedly characteristic of fantasy). After all, the term ‘estrangement’ is meaningless unless some concept of what is assumed to be known as real is involved. What else is there to be estranged from? Is not ‘cognitive estrangement’ a tautology? 6 All parenthetical page references are to John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). At the first mention of ‘Winshire’ in the corrected 365-page ribbon typescript of The Midwich Cuckoos which survives in the Wyndham Archives, it is corrected from ‘Wintonshire’ (typescript, p. 45; cf. The Midwich

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Cuckoos, p. 34). Harris’s mythical county of Winshire (i.e., Wyn[dam]shire; cf. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex), apparently originates in his second published novel, Foul Play Suspected (London: George Newnes, 1935), where it is noted that ‘a narrow tongue of Winshire runs up to separate the two larger counties [of Sussex and Hampshire]’ (41). The Detective Inspector Jordon of New Scotland Yard who is the protagonist of Foul Play Suspected also features in the unpublished detective novels which Harris wrote subsequently, as does Winshire: Murder Means Murder (1935; retitled Murder Breeds Murder and Bury that Body) and Death upon Death (1936). It should be noted that the carbon typescript of Murder Means Murder and the ribbon typescript of Death upon Death are both authored ‘by John Wyndham’, a name Harris is generally thought to have first used in 1950 as the byline for ‘The Eternal Eve’ (Amazing). 7 The three leased Georgian houses no longer exist; they stood on ground now occupied by Lynton House (7–12 Tavistock Square). The Penn Club was named after the inspiring Quaker William Penn of Pennsylvania. See David C. Maxwell, The Penn Club Story pp. 6–7. 8 Ibid., p. 20. 9. A good many of Harris’s friends outside the Penn Club seem not to have been aware of his relationship with Grace. Arthur C. Clarke, who knew Harris from 1936 onwards as a fellow member of the British Interplanetary Society and from convivial gatherings of SF fans at the Red Bull pub (and, after the War, at the White Horse pub) writes, ‘Incredibly, after years of friendship, I knew very little of John – I had no idea he had a girl friend!’ (letter to Ketterer, 13 May 1997). (Grace joined the staff at Roan School for Girls in 1930 and was head of the English Department from 1947 until her retirement; she had also acted as Second Mistress. Dating from 1877, the school, closed since 1982, has recently been converted into flats.) 10. For the month of publication see Phil Stephensen-Payne, John Wyndham, Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe: A Working Bibliography, 19. 11. Christopher Warrick, The Universal Ustinov, p. 121. 12. Quoted in Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow, p. 126. 13. The choice of the name ‘Ferrelyn’ might have owed something to the first name of Mrs Ferelyth Wills who, from the mid 1930s until the late 1980s, lived down the road from Harris’s friends, the Barkers, in Steep, Hampshire. Throughout the ribbon typescript of The Midwich Cuckoos, the ‘the’ in ‘Anthea’ is changed to the ‘gel’ of ‘Angela’. 14. Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, p. 293; revised (with David Wingrove) as Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, p. 315. See also the concordant title of Phil Stephensen-Payne’s bibliography (note 10 above). The appropriateness of the too catchy ‘cosy catastrophe’ tag to Harris’s work was first questioned by L.J. Hurst, ‘We Are the Dead: Day of the Triffids and Nineteen Eighty-four’. See also C. N. Manlove, ‘Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’; and Rowland Wymer, ‘How “Safe” is John Wyndham? A Closer Look at His Work with Particular Reference to The Chrysalids’. 15. The four not-very-successful novels that Harris’s RADA-trained actor brother Vivian published also employ a light, comedy-of-manners style but in Vivian’s case the style is consistent with both form and content: Trouble at Hanard (the British Library copy bears the inside-front-cover inscription ‘To Jack with Love from Viv/April 1948 “Your godchild” ’); Confusion at Campden Trig (which also features the

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protagonist Richard Hanard); One Thing Constant; and Song for a Siren. 16. In this military connection, note that the beginning of the Midwich births is anticipated as ‘D-day’ (84). The code term refers to the initiation of the turn-around phase of the Second World War, the first day of the Normandy Landings (6 June 1944) in which Harris participated. Nine years pass before the quasi-Aryan Children are identified as a possible enemy, so the application of the ‘D-day’ term signals the unrecognized state of war which exists between humanity and the Children. 17. Letter to Ketterer from Miss M. M. Raymer, 4 Jan. 1997. I am grateful to Mollie Raymer, a friend of Harris’s and contemporary resident at the Penn Club, for a good deal of helpful information. Significantly, George Beynon Harris, the father’s name, is pointedly missing from the ‘family’ memorial, the 1990 National Trust interpretation panel at Cwrt farm to the west of Aberdaron in North Wales: ‘The National Trust is grateful for the financial assistance received towards the acquisition of Cwrt from the Countryside Commission, the World Wide Fund for Nature Conservation (with sponsorship from Office Supplies Ltd.), the Nature Conservancy Council, individual donors and a substantial legacy from Vivian Beynon Harris in memory of his brother (who wrote under the name of “John Wyndham”), Gertrude Harris, Grace Beynon Harris and Lila Mary Grettan.’ This, the only ‘John Wyndham’ memorial that currently exists, came about because of a provision in Vivian’s will; he specified the names to be mentioned, including his long-time partner, Lila Grettan (she had changed her name from Gann) and excluding his and John’s father. The National Trust received £9,924.29 when the will was probated. I am grateful to Brian Bowcock for providing me with a copy of Vivian’s will, and for reproducing the National Trust wording (letter to Ketterer, 4 July 1997). 18. Harris probably had a particular, real ‘triangular green’ in mind. A ‘small village which was disposed neatly about a triangular green’ figures in The Day of the Triffids (210) Corresponding to ‘Mrs Welt’s shop’ in Midwich (11) is ‘Mrs Walton at the shop’ in the Triffids’ village (211). 19. ‘John Beynon’, Planet Plane, p. 247. Harris did publish what he described as a sequel to Planet Plane but it does not feature Vaygan’s son and is more accurately described as a parallel story. ‘Sleepers of Mars’, Tales of Wonder 2 (spring 1938), reprinted in the ‘John Beynon’ collection Sleepers of Mars, deals with the Russian mission to Mars with which the British and American missions—in competition with each other—were also in competition. 20. ‘John Beynon’, ‘Adaptation’, Astounding Science Fiction (July 1949); reprinted in The Best of John Wyndham, pp. 151, 168. 21. Brian Bowcock has loaned what amounts to five boxes of Vivian Harris’s manuscript material to the Sydney Jones Library of the University of Liverpool. The ledger from which I am quoting is in one of those boxes. Vivian’s manuscripts include five unpublished novels, one of them SF (Son of the Morning). 22. See Lucas Beynon, When I Was a Boy, illustrated by Charles Robinson (1911). The memoir opens with the following paragraph: ‘My real name is George. They gave me that name, I am told, because my grandfather’s name was George. And because there were several Georges in the family before him even—a name, I might say, that I never cared for in the least’ (p. 1). He continues, ‘I often wondered if they were short of names in those days’ (p. 1), which may explain the plethora of names he gave his first son. Under the name George Lucas Beynon, he earlier published one

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other rather different book, a weighty tome (dedicated to the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain) related to his professional life: The Law of Tender (1908). 23. In the ribbon typescript of The Midwich Cuckoos the name ‘Latterby’ is changed to ‘Latterly’. Presumably Latterby was too close to Zellaby. 24. See Harris’s reminiscences of ‘The Twenties’ (one of four reminiscences by pupils of that era in Gyles Brandreth and Sally Henry, eds, John Haden Badley, 1865–1967: Bedales School and its Founder, p. 31. For further information about the Bedales of Harris’s time, see James L. Henderson, Irregularly Bold: A Study of Bedales School, and Roy Wake and Pennie Denton eds, Bedales School, 1893–1993. 25. I am indebted to Harris researcher, Dr Kenneth Smith of Regents College, London, for this phrase. 26 George Sanders, Memoirs of a Cad, pp. 21, 22. 27. The Quaker belief in the equality of the sexes, in terms of worship and value if not always, in practice, in terms of power, stems from a point fundamental to Quaker theology: ‘The orthodox Christian belief about women was simply that since Eve was first in transgression her kind must ever bear the reproach. [George] Fox did not deny the historicity of the Genesis story; he argued that the reproach was taken away by Mary the mother of Jesus. To him the equal worth of women and men in the church was a logical deduction from the major premise which was the theme of all his preaching: “Christ renews man and woman up into the image of God as they were in before they fell”.’ See Arnold Lloyd, Quaker Social History, 1667–1738, p. 108. 28. See Thomas D, and Alice Clareson, ‘The Neglected Fiction of John Wyndham: “Consider Her Ways”, Trouble with Lichen, and Web’. But it should be stressed that Harris’s feminism partakes strongly of the archetypal equation between Woman and Nature. His belief in an all-powerful, chthonian, female nature is close to that elaborated by Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae. Thus the deadly plants in The Day of the Triffids and the inchoate aliens from the sea in The Kraken Wakes are both best understood as manifestations of nature’s feminine fury. 29. For my account of Harris’s relationship with the Barker and Sykes families I am indebted to Marion Tess Barker, or Sister Bede as she now is. My taped interviews with Sister Bede took place on 24 May 1997 at St Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight. In addition, Sister Bede kindly provided me with seven carefully prepared packages of documentation and recollection (one corrected in November 1998) including a ‘Chronology of Jack’s major works’ with biographical influences. Regarding The Midwich Cuckoos, Sister Bede notes that ‘the countryside would seem to be typically Surrey—Hampshire’, and ticks off ‘the anti-Mother Nature theme’, the anti-Bedales ‘prejudices’, Zellaby’s Darwinian ‘philosophy of life’, and ‘the very negative evaluation of the British political set-up which comes from the lips of a Child [see pp. 198–200]’. Sister Bede read an earlier version of this article and I have made all the corrections she sent me in a letter dated 11–16 February 1998. This letter includes the observation that she and her sister Jean (now Jean Case) were different or ‘alien’ children ‘in a double fashion. We were Bedalians with regard to the outside world; but we were also “aliens” to a certain degree within Bedales itself, because we were the children of a member of the teaching staff.’ I am also grateful to Jean Case for answering many of my queries in her letter

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postmarked 24 April 1997, and for providing me with photocopies of the pages of the Bedales Roll relating to the Barkers, the Sykeses, and John and Vivian Harris. 30. Quoted from Sister Bede’s inventory of ‘Peak or crisis-moments in Jack’s life’. David Sykes recalls most definitely that Harris also wrote a good deal at the Red House (interview with Ketterer, 23 May 1998). 31. Sister Bede, in her letter to me of 11–16 February 1998, points out that Grace also led a compartmentalized life: ‘She kept her relationship with Jack a secret from her family (so I was told by my mother) because they would have been shocked, and have severely disapproved . . . Since Grace had her duty towards her family, she spent Christmas week and Easter week with her relatives; and Jack would stay with the Barkers at Row Cottage.’ 32. Jean Case writes: ‘I have always believed that we [Tess and Jean] and the two Sykes kids, were the children he never had.’ 33. I sent Sister Bede photocopies of the eleven mounted photographs for identification purposes. She identified the nude child as her sister and a photograph of a picnicking couple as the young Bill and Leslie Sykes. See her letters to Ketterer dated 11 February and 19 April 1998. 34. One aspect of The Day of the Triffids allows for a correspondingly ‘perverse’ reading. Josella Playton (the Grace Wilson character in Triffids), whom the narrator, William Masen (the WyndhaM character), takes up with, implicitly lays down a condition: ‘every man who marries a sighted girl must take on two blind girls as well’ (124). At a house named ‘Shirning’ (based on the Red House where the Sykes family lived) Josella, now, in all but law, ‘married’ to Bill, recalls that ‘condition’ (228) and allows the reader to draw the conclusion that the ‘nine or ten years old’ Susan (210) from ‘a small village’ like Midwich (see note 18 above), whom Bill has befriended, and Mary Brent’s newborn daughter (based presumably on Leslie Sykes and her daughter Mathilda) now, according to a numerical logic at least, satisfactorily stand in for the ‘two blind girls’. Quite what the psychosexual ‘truth’ about Harris might have been is a matter for speculation. Why, it might reasonably be asked, did someone who liked children so much not have children of his own? (Mike and Josella do have babies. The first is named David perhaps after David Sykes.) Harris does not seem to have had much interest in sex. Grace Harris’s friend Karen Antonini, who found ‘Jack’ an attractive man, suggested that he may have been impotent (interview with Ketterer, 23 May 1998). The SF writer Christopher Samuel Youd (‘John Christopher’), who knew and corresponded with Harris, concluded that he ‘was almost pathologically shy with women, which I found particularly surprising in an Old Bedalian’. Youd continues, ‘I’ve wondered if the theme of the devouring mother [which Youd sees in Harris’s short story “Survival”] had any connection with the gynophobia I had read (prior to [Youd’s meeting] Grace) into his shyness with women’ (letter to Ketterer, 14 July 1997). The co-educational set-up at Badley’s Bedales, which stressed the value of non-sexual friendships between the sexes, could have had damaging consequences and may have influenced Harris’s relationships with members of the opposite sex both younger and older. In this regard the jaundiced recollections of E. L. Grant Watson, who was a pupil at Bedales in its very early years (approximately 1896–1903), may be apposite. In But to What Purpose: The Autobiography of a Contemporary, his discussion of co-education at Bedales (45–51, 61) occurs in the context of an account

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of his time there (25–63). The school and its forceful, idealistic headmaster are pointedly not named. To Watson, who had lost his father to typhoid, the headmaster was ‘the father-substitute’ who ‘possessed the girls that were forbidden to us’ (47). ‘The emotional side was developed, over-developed to a high, unnatural tension. The sensuous side was forbidden, utterly taboo’ (51). ‘The greatest evil about the school was its purity cult’ (42). Apparently, Watson spent years in analysis dealing with the psychosexual problems that resulted from Badley’s regime. One way or another, Harris was also affected by Bedales. Is what might be regarded as the unnaturally chaste nature of his fiction evidential? 35. The composition process of The Midwich Cuckoos (which overlapped with accelerated negotiations for the film rights) can be reconstructed from Grace’s diary entries: 10 Oct. 1956: ‘J baby [a metaphoric reference?] in 7 weeks’; 27 Nov. 1956: ‘[read] some of J’s Cuckoo’; 23 Jan. 1957: ‘J just finishing Cuckoo’; 4 Feb. 1957: ‘teasing at J’s Cuckoo, disliking it considerably yet finding it very absorbing, and detail very good indeed. argument—I think it would be more u with social satire like Consider her ways—J very willing to listen’; 21 Feb. 1957: ‘J’s Ms too long’; 8 Mar. 1957: ‘J a very good criticism from Clemance Dane’; 24 Mar. 1957: ‘he has horrible grind cutting Cuckoos’; 31 Mar. 1957: ‘J despairing now over Cuckoos’; 22 May 1957: ‘MGM have offered £3,000 for Cuckoos: as both of us think this unfilmable it would be as well to close at once’; 17 June 1957: ‘J thinks now that MGM must have backed out of contract: He never pays much attention to the potty film people, but this offer came unsought and seemed fine, and I can see he is disappointed’; 12 July 1957: ‘MGM wants title of M Cuckoos changed—so it goes on’; 23 Aug. 1957: ‘J got the contract from MGM to sign’; 5 Sept. 1957: ‘Cuckoos Bk Soc. recomendn.’; 19 Sept. 1957: ‘J had English Cuckoos delivered’; 23 Sept. 1957: ‘good dinner at Elysée to celebrate publication of Midwich Cuckoos’; 28 Sept. 1957: ‘good reviews for Cuckoos’; 2 Oct. 1957: ‘J has got the £3,000 cheque for Cuckoos film!!’; 4 Oct. 1957: ‘good review (TLS) continue’; 2 Jan. 1958: ‘J has US Cuckoos.’ Harris typically composed in longhand. Apparently, no holograph manuscripts of The Midwich Cuckoos have survived, but the extent of Harris’s cuts to his narrative (as required by the publisher Michael Joseph) is apparent from the blue-ribbon typescript produced by a ‘Mrs Jolly’ (with revised pages in Harris’s black type). As conceived in Mrs Jolly’s typescript, The Midwich Cuckoos was the longest of Harris’s novels, published and unpublished. Next in length, four pages shorter at 421 pages, is the unpublished SF thriller Plan for Chaos (written 1947–48). The original 425 pages of the blue-ribbon Midwich Cuckoos typescript became 365 pages after cutting and what was 23 chapters became 21. A chapter 3 was eliminated (missing pages 26–32 of the blue-ribbon typescript; page 33 became 27), twelve pages of what was chapter 4 were eliminated, and a second chapter was lost between chapters 8 and 9. The approximately sixty deleted typescript pages appear not to be extant. Harris first decided to capitalize the ‘C’s of ‘Children’ and ‘Child’ on page 220 in the typescript and then corrected previous references. In chapters 20 and 21 of The Midwich Cuckoos the narrator draws attention to the Children’s love of the sweet known as a ‘bullseye’ (202–03) and, clearly, Zellaby uses ‘bullseyes’ (213, 215) to gain the Children’s trust and friendship. (The Children do, of course, become the bullseye of the explosion that kills them.) In the typescript a different sweet was originally involved; humbugs are changed to bullseyes. Presumably Harris wanted to avoid

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the too overt other meanings (albeit most are appropriate) of the word ‘humbug’ (imposture, deception, ‘stuff and nonsense!’) but, given the familiar prohibition against children accepting sweets from a stranger, it might be relevant to note that Nabokov’s Lolita, with its humbug paedophile Humbert Humbert, was published, to great notoriety, in Paris in 1955, two years before The Midwich Cuckoos. As a result of a codicil (dated 4 December 1985) to Grace Harris’s will, a ‘Ring bound proof copy’ (with no corrections) of The Midwich Cuckoos and a ‘Proof copy’ of Chocky were to go to the Bedales School Library. Instead, at some point after the compilation of Bertram Rota’s listing, they were added to the Wyndham Archive (and are now officially on loan from Bedales). (Grace’s ‘Russian linen and my diary of my Russia trip of 1931 and the photographs of the same trip’ willed in the same codicil to Grace’s friend Karen Antonini are currently unlocated.) As it happens, Chocky is the one other ‘Wyndham’ novel which can be read as estranged autobiography; Chocky translates as a boy’s attempt to open a line of communication with an idealized absent father. Harris sold the film rights of The Midwich Cuckoos much too cheaply. Samuel Youd relates that sale to the London office of MGM to the earlier sale of his Death of Grass to MGM in the USA: ‘Apparently MGM’s London office got a rocket for not picking it up in London, at a London price, and John attributed their purchase of Midwich Cuckoos to a determination not to miss out again on SF. They were throwing money away he said: there wasn’t the remotest possibility of making a film featuring a number of identical children. We didn’t consider that wigs might do the trick, and result in the best film made from his writing—altogether one of the best films in the SF category’ (letter to Ketterer, 14 July 1997). Sister Bede also recalls Harris’s ironic ‘doubts as to whether it could be filmed. He hoped it wouldn’t appear too quickly how difficult it would be to make an acceptable film of the Midwich cuckoos!’ See her ‘Chronology of Jack’s major works’ (note 29 above). 36 He had intended that, after the death of his brother Vivian and of Grace, the two Barker girls would inherit his literary estate. But, given Sister Bede’s vow of poverty, that would mean that half of his royalties would finally go to the Catholic Church—the alien enemy. His solution was to pass over both Tess and Jean and leave his royalties to Jean’s children; Jean had married the Australian engineer Lionel Case on 25 April 1953 and, between 1958 and 1963, had three children: Virginia, Jonathan and Catherine. The Case family emigrated to Tasmania in November 1964. The son, Jonathan Beynon (who now manages Harris’s literary estate), was so named for Harris; Catherine’s first son (born in 1988) was named Patrick Wyndham; and Jonathan’s second son (born in 1997) was named Ashley David Wyndham. In her letter to me of 11–16 March 1988 Sister Bede writes, ‘After I took religious vows Jack considered me as one dead—literally, as witness his change to his will . . . some of his anger and frustration, and sense of being threatened by a potential danger he could not grasp, may have found expression and outlet in the killing of the Midwich children.’ 37 The Book of Saints, p. 4. 38 David Hugh Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, p. 2. This St Acacius cult thrived in Switzerland and Germany. 39 In her letter to me dated 11–16 February 1988, Sister Bede elaborates: ‘the

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celebration of Christmas with the Barkers, when Mummy was daring enough to place a statue of the Virgin and Child with some holly or decoration in a visual place, may have made Jack wonder how this “myth” came about . . . The notion of a “visit from outer space” of some kind being the real cause could then have presented it to his mind as a rational hypothesis—and the story would have developed from that. For the two years I was a Catholic, before I came to the Abbey, I arranged a Bethlehem “Crib” scene with little figures in a corner of the Front Room. For two (or more) Christmases, then, Jack would have seen that reminder too, of the event of Christ’s coming. It was intended to make people think!—and perhaps it did, in an unforeseeable way.’ The secularization of the Virginal Conception doctrine leads directly to the SF theme of alien impregnation or, more broadly, human/alien procreation. Can it be claimed that Harris daringly originated this interesting SF theme with the human/Martian son mentioned at the conclusion of Planet Plane (1936)? After all, the blander influence of cosmic rays and not literal alien impregnation is what is involved in Wells’s somewhat related novel of the following year, Star Begotten (see note 4 above). In our time, the theme of human/alien procreation has reached explicit heights with Octavia Butler’s impressive Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–89). The Midwich Cuckoos and Butler’s trilogy are clearly the most significant explorations to date of that theme’s fertile possibilities and problems. What can be secularized can readily be re-sacralized, and that was what Jung famously did for The Midwich Cuckoos in his ‘Supplement’ to ‘Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies’ (1958): ‘The peculiar parthenogenesis and the golden eyes denote kinship with the sun and characterize the children as divine progeny. Their fathers seem to have been angels of the annunciation who had come down from a “supracelestial place” to take care of the stupidity and backwardness of Homo sapiens. It is a divine intervention that gives evolution a definite push forward.’ Jung goes on, however, to provide a thoroughly material switch: ‘there is something definitely suspect about these children . . . they would have founded an entirely uniform society . . . the very ideal of a Marxist state. Thus the negative end of the story remains a matter for doubt’ (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung 10: 432–33). 40 There is no doubt a biographical reason why two other characters in Harris’s works share variants of the name ‘Pawle’: the teacher ‘Pauley’ in ‘Child of Power’ (1939) and ‘Pawley’ of ‘Pawley’s Peepholes’ (1951). The Midwich Pawle brothers are described as ‘very much attached’ (151) like John and Vivian Harris. 41 The name ‘Wyndham’ by which Harris became famous, is the most mysterious of his many names. The name ‘Parkes’ came from his mother; the names ‘Lucas Beynon Harris’ from his father’s side of the family. Before writing his biographical article on Harris, Sam Moskowitz sent him a list of thirty questions in a letter dated 12 January 1963 (a mistake for 1964?). Question 22 reads: ‘The name Wyndham, where was it derived from? Does someone in your family have that name?’ Harris’s reply to that question in the six pages of responses accompanying his letter to Moskowitz dated 22 January 1964 reads as follows: ‘My father was a one for genealogy. I am not, but I think he discovered some connection with a branch of the Wyndham family that settled in South Wales.’ I am grateful to the late Sam Moskowitz for generously sending me (on 29 May 1996) this photocopied correspondence. 42 In response to this portion of my article in her letter of 11–16 February 1998,

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Sister Bede ‘recalled Jack’s work on cyphers during the war; and how he enjoyed double and hidden meanings, innuendo and plays on words . . . I do clearly remember how he chuckled once as he said to Biff, that he (Biff) would be surprised at how many academics read science-fiction and thrillers as an intellectual diversion; and that although he (Jack) was not a “university man” himself, he was giving the university men some teasers to exercise their ingenuity if they cared to look more closely at what he wrote.’ 43 ‘John Wyndham’, Web, pp. 38, 45. 44 John Scarborough, ‘John Wyndham, 1903–1969,’ p. 223. 45 ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’ (originally published as ‘Spheres of Hell’ by ‘John Beynon Harris’, Wonder Stories (Oct. 1933)), in ‘John Wyndham writing as John Beynon’, Wanderers of Time, pp. 135, 153. 46 ‘Survival’ (originally published in Thrilling Wonder (Feb. 1952)), in ‘John Wyndham’, The Seeds of Time, p. 95. 47 Wyndham, ‘A Life Postponed’, Galaxy 27 (Dec. 1968): 118. 48 Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow, p. 128. 49 I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a 1997–2000 Research Grant in support of my work on John Beynon Harris.

Labyrinth, Double and Mask in the Science Fiction of Stanislaw Lem RAFAIL NUDELMAN

You don’t really think that I would have wasted so much effort and been so stubborn in pursuing my task, had I not with my own unsure, shaking hand prepared the labyrinth along which to travel, arranging my departures, revealing secrets, going deeper and deeper in search of landmarks which would shorten or change my route—a labyrinth in which I could have gotten lost and appeared before the eyes of those I will never meet again. Certainly I am not the only one writing in order not to reveal my face. Don’t ask me who I am, and don’t ask me to stay the same. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Stanislaw Lem is, above all, a writer of epistemological themes. The process of human cognition is the meta-story or meta-plot of all of his science fiction. This plot, as a rule, manifests itself in Lem’s works in the form of ‘wandering in a labyrinth’: the travels of human reason in the labyrinth of a ‘cosmic situation’ in the wider sense. There is always some kind of enigma hidden in the depths of such a labyrinth. It is, in the words of Paolo Santarcangeli in The Book of the Labyrinth, ‘maybe a Beast, maybe a Hidden Treasure’ (9)—this remains unknown, for the inhabitant of the labyrinth invariably appears before humanity in a terrible mask which hides his face. More often than not this is the mask of the Double. In other words, Stanislaw Lem is a poet of the labyrinth, doubleness and the mask.

I Let us begin with the labyrinth. The persistence with which this theme appears in Lem’s works is astonishing: for example, in the endless interweaving of passages and dead ends in the mysterious bowels of the gigan-

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tic cosmic creature in the early story ‘The Mouse in the Labyrinth’; or in the cyclopean labyrinth of the Earth’s cosmodrome in the novel Return from the Stars which prefigures the protagonist’s wanderings in the mysterious society of the new Earth; or in the monstrous products of the Solaris Ocean (the symmetriads, asymmetriads, and so on) which reproduce the riddles of cosmic existence; or in the jumble of narrow little streets in the strange city on the planet Eden (in the novel of the same name) and also in its labyrinth of halls, where the automatic creation and destruction of strange objects takes place; or in the branchings of the network of canyons where the last battle with the mysterious metallic Cloud takes place in The Invincible; or in the gloomy labyrinth of underground canalization into which Ion Tichy falls in The Futurological Congress, before he finds himself in the incomprehensible and many-layered world of the future; or in the intricate corridors of the Underground Pentagon in the Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, along which the protagonist wanders in a polysemous search for the meaning of his ‘mission’; or, finally, in the Forest of Fiasco where Pirx dies, only to be resurrected to solve the secrets of a distant planet. This list could be continued, but it is sufficient for suggesting the omnipresence and importance of the labyrinth motif in Lem’s SF. In order to understand its symbolism and role it is useful to examine the common features of the ‘labyrinthine’ situation in Lem’s works. The first such situation appears in the early and in many respects immature (but therefore also highly revealing) story ‘The Mouse in the Labyrinth’. The two young protagonists are vacationing alongside a lake, and in their spare time discuss Shannon’s recent experience with an electronic ‘mouse’ in the labyrinth. They witness the fall of an enormous meteorite into the lake, and while searching for it they are pulled into the innermost depths of the ‘meteorite’, which is actually a gigantic living creature from outer space. Gradually it becomes clear that this creature is capable of changing its internal gravitational field and with it the time-space properties inside itself. Therefore the protagonists’ wanderings in the depths of the creature become a peculiar repetition of the wanderings of ‘Shannon’s mouse’, only in a space-time and not in a ‘table-top’ labyrinth. (To avoid any doubt the author mentions ‘a glass labyrinth’, ‘a snaking thread’, and so on.) Tortured by the enigma, fatigue, and thirst, the protagonists finally encounter what appear to be two human beings in the deserted corridors, but on closer examination it is revealed that these Doubles of theirs are empty casts (‘an empty, dead doll’). Supposing that some cruel experiment is being conducted on them, one of the protagonists appeals to the enigmatic creature: ‘take the mask off . . . I beg you, take the mask off . . . Karl had a mask on in the laboratory, too, so that the mouse

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wouldn’t guess whether it was going the right way or not, but me . . . I don’t need it . . . take it off, I beg you!’ The creature, however, does not answer; we learn later that it is unviable under earthly conditions. In its agony it so monstrously changes its gravitational field that one of the protagonists dies and the other ends up thrown several days into the future. In the epilogue the remaining protagonist contemplates the recent events and guesses that the ‘Double’ they met was a kind of ‘first letter, first word with which HE [i.e., the visitor from outer space] wanted to communicate’. It can be seen that ‘The Mouse in the Labyrinth’ anticipates, in outline form, basic motifs of the novel Solaris. The latter’s protagonists, workers at a cosmic research station orbiting around the planet Solaris, also become the objects of a mysterious experiment: ‘visitors’ somehow appear in their cabins. These ‘visitors’ are materialized ‘casts’ of their suppressed tragic memories, which are somehow embodied in the form of separate biological structures who possess consciousness (but not memory!) and individual initiative. Most often this biological structure is a living being. Of course, this meeting of mankind with the embodiment or incarnation of his memory’s content is the same kind of meeting with himself (with an ‘externalized’ self; effectively, with his Double) that is found in the ‘Mouse’ story, for our self-perceived Self is also only the content of our memory. However, detailed research on these biological structures reveals that at a given level ‘emptiness’ hides under their external shell, just as in the Doubles of ‘Mouse.’ In the words of the main Solaris character, Kelvin: ‘It’s only camouflage. A mask. A replication, or more precisely even a superb original. All the proteins, cells, cellular nuclei are in reality only a mask.’ The protagonists’ attempts to destroy these ‘visitors’ are futile, which only strengthens the suspicion that they are purposeful products of the Ocean of the planet. It follows that the Ocean is a living and thinking cosmic being, as was the ‘meteorite’ in ‘Mouse’; and that the Ocean-made ‘visitors’ are similarly a means of contact with the cosmonauts. Kelvin comes to almost the same conclusion: ‘Where in people we come up against the limits of a structure’s divisibility, here a further path has been found, since subatomic building materials have been used’; the further path is a path of further cognition, of dialogue. Such suppositions are confirmed by the fact that, after the ‘sending’ of Kelvin’s memory-contents to the Ocean, the torturous materialized recollections cease to appear. The resemblance of the two cosmic creatures—in the story and in the novel—is emphasized further by the fact that the Ocean’s activities manifest themselves in the continual generation of incredibly complex, cyclopean surface structures: ‘their mind-boggling architectonics, criss-crossed by countless chambers and corridors, reminded one of the description of an extensive labyrinth’. The

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Ocean’s structures too are able to change their cosmic gravitational fields and the space-time laws of the cosmos. At the end of the novel Kelvin disembarks on one of the Ocean’s creations and, sitting near the entrance to the mysterious labyrinth, considers the resumption of dialogue with the living planet: ‘I firmly believed that the time of terrible miracles had not yet passed—’ However, this open-ended finale, with its hint of an ambiguous, agnostic hope, strikingly differentiates Solaris and Lem’s subsequent novels from the naively ecstatic illusions of technologically progress in ‘The Mouse in the Labyrinth’ and other early works. In both of these works the appearance of the ‘labyrinth’ is always connected to the cognition of something new and unknown. This corresponds to the labyrinth’s traditional mythological symbolism. According to Mircea Eliade, the labyrinth serves to ‘shield the centre’ where ‘absolute reality’ (absolute knowledge) is hidden: the labyrinth is always connected with the underground, the gloom, the cave. The Russian writer Yampolskii in his book The Demon and the Labyrinth calls it a ‘dark space’—‘dark’ and ‘gloomy’ being also synonyms for the unknown. The labyrinth, according to Yampolskii, is a trace of the body’s route in space, it is a kind of embodiment in space of the ‘memory’ of the body’s route; therefore ‘wandering in a labyrinth is a wandering inside someone else’s memory’, which is why ‘the labyrinth can be examined as a space in which an exchange of information, experience and recollection takes place’ (84). This interpretation is strikingly similar to the situation in Solaris, where there is also an ‘exchange’ of memory-contents between people and the Ocean. Indeed, the comparison of memory to a cave became a commonplace already in early antiquity. In such a cave vague Ur-images are hidden, waiting to be named; for mythological understanding, their naming is their cognition. But Eliade observes that penetration into such a cave, reaching the centre of a mythological labyrinth, is equivalent to an initiation, an accession to the secrets of the world, a discovery of knowledge about the ‘true Names’ of all things. The initiation ritual (a descent into the ‘labyrinth of the world’) is intended only for males (isn’t that why the world of Lem’s SF is primarily a male world?) and, moreover, only for special men, for heroes. Mythically, the descent into the labyrinth is in antiquity a lowering into the world of the dead. However, the labyrinth is also connected to rebirth, for the protagonist who descends into it (whether Theseus or a young man undergoing an initiation) comes out from the underground kingdom a ‘new’ or ‘reborn’ man. The labyrinth has also been associated since ancient times with the female womb which provides a beginning for new life (as in the doll-Doubles of the ‘Mouse’ story and the ‘visitor’ recollections in Solaris), and it is also associated with the shell, in the tangled creases of

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which a pearl is generated (in one of the Greek myths, King Minos, sending out spies to find Daedalus, the runaway builder of the labyrinth, ordered them to find the man capable of ‘passing a thread through a snail’s shell’). In other words, exiting from the labyrinth is equivalent to victory over death and the discovery of a new self. This is precisely the situation with Lem’s labyrinths: one of the protagonists of ‘The Mouse in the Labyrinth’ dies, while the other ‘conquers time’; the Ocean’s labyrinth begets ‘immortal’ living models of the ‘visitors’; Ion Tichy in The Futurological Congress dies in the underground canal and is resurrected in the future; Pirx the pilot in Fiasco dies in a labyrinthine forest and is reborn on a spaceship; the protagonist of Return from the Stars finds a new self, passing through the initiation ‘labyrinth’ of the new terrestrial society; and so on. In Lem’s SF the heroic myth-drama of cognition is connected to the descent into the labyrinth’s epistemological centre. Lem’s mask is always a sign of the unknown, the shape in which the unknown appears to cognizing reason, a symbol of the enigma whose comprehension demands unmasking, penetration into the centre of the labyrinth. The labyrinthine character of the path to the mystery emphasizes its complex, and at times superhuman, nature. The grasp of this nature demands the greatest exertion of intellectual, spiritual and physical force and is accompanied by the most difficult, torturous tests of body and soul (Kelvin’s ‘time of terrible miracles’). To reiterate Santarcangeli: ‘In the depths Something sleeps— maybe a Beast, maybe a Hidden Treasure; but the path to it fills one with fear and gives rise to an intellectual despair that is close to madness’ (9). This is the typical state of Lem’s protagonists in their epistemological labyrinths.

II What has been argued thus far suggests that the symbolism of the labyrinth is closely connected to the symbolism of the Double and the mask. The meta-situation of the labyrinth is the meeting of Theseus with the Minotaur, with the enigma of the unknown masked as Santarcangeli’s Beast. Descent into the labyrinth unavoidably portends an appearance of the mask—both in ancient myths and in Lem’s SF. Therefore the symbolism of such a mask has much in common with the symbolism of the labyrinth. The mask is always a symbol of duality; as Roger Gallois states in ‘The Mask of Medusa’, ‘the mask signifies a dual existence, for the man in it is both himself and not himself at the same time’. According to Jean-Louis Barrault, ‘the mask expresses simultaneously the height of life and the height of

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death’, and Max Frisch remarks that ‘the ancient mask always had the function of signalling the entrance into “another dimension”: it showed the coming of a “majestic moment”, a ritual, something superhuman, a dramatization of the heroic myth’ (all three cited in Kowalski and Krzak, p. 20). On the individual plot level each such labyrinth symbolizes, and even directly embodies (that is, materializes in physical or biological forms), a certain mysterious, incomprehensible structure (the cosmos, the extraterrestrial or future terrestrial society and so on). On the level of meta-plot they all appear as varieties of the same epistemological structure: the labyrinth of cognitive space. In other words, its traversing is that voyage of which in ancient times it was said: ‘There are two ways of learning new things—reading and travelling.’ On the plot level the Contact takes place between humanity and a cosmic creature. This has been argued for the Alien of the ‘Mouse’ and the Ocean of Solaris; in The Invincible it is a living metallic Cloud, to guess the secret of which one must pass through the labyrinth of the planet’s caverns; in Eden and Return from the Stars it is the inhabitants of other planets or of the future Earth, whose mysterious peculiarities become known only through wanderings in a labyrinth of sociopsychological relationships; and so on. However, on the meta-plot level the situation of Contact acquires the character of a cosmic (or social) initiation. In other words it is a cognitive penetration into the most unattainable secrets of the world, inaccessible for the uninitiated. The ritual of this epistemological initiation seems taken from ancient patterns: the real initiation of a tribe’s youth includes physical and spiritual tortures; the initiation must, in the end, let the initiate in on the ‘last secret of existence’; and even the meeting with a mysterious Double echoes the ancient meeting with the totem, that is, with the initiate’s tribal ancestors or, in essence, with himself. As The Encyclopedia Britannica states, ‘for the viewer, the mask is a reminder of past times. It is a link between the present moment and the beginning of time, something very important for a culture without a written history’. As was mentioned earlier, such a ‘meeting with the Double’ is also characteristic of Lem’s SF: almost his whole opus could have been united under the general title of ‘Two in the Labyrinth’. What was said above about selfcognition as the flip side of cognition in part explains this peculiarity: man meets with his ‘cosmic Double’ as with a mirror in which he is reflected. But it is equally important that this protagonist, learning about himself, simultaneously becomes a mirror for his partner in dialogue (for the ‘meteorite’ or the Ocean; or, in general, for the thinking cosmos). In other words, man is a tool of the self-cognizing cosmos to the same extent that wandering in the cosmos’s labyrinth is a means of finding out about himself. With this

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interpretation, Snow’s phrase from Solaris: ‘We are looking in space for a mirror . . . Man is looking in space only for himself’—takes on a new meaning. Lem could have been repeating after Antonin Artaud: ‘Nature wanted to think through man’, and after Goethe: ‘In man nature carries on a dialogue with God’ (both cited in Kampolskii 99). This motif of duality deserves a detailed examination. It resembles ancient initiation rituals since both deploy the metaphor of ‘the pains (or tortures) of cognition’. More interesting is the fact that, as with the two other basic motifs of Lem’s SF—the labyrinth and the mask—this duality can be found in Theseus’s trip into the Labyrinth, into King Minos’s underground territories. This is a variation on the voyage to the land of the dead similar to Orpheus’s journey for Eurydice or the much later descent of Christ into the underworld. However, in The Book of the Labyrinth, Paolo Santarcangeli writes: ‘The sign of the bull looms over the entrance to the Knossos Palace on Crete. From here the path to the kingdom of secrets, despair, and cleansing begins, as well as the meeting with one’s self and with freedom’ (8). What does this mean? For in the Knossos labyrinth Theseus encountered the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. Yet the Greek myths say—and The Encyclopedia of World Myths repeats after them (502)—that Theseus was begot not by the Athenian King Aegeus but by the god of the sea, Poseidon, who secretly slept with Aegeus’s wife Aethra. Further, the Minotaur was born of Minos’s wife Pasiphae and Poseidon’s bull, in whose appearance was hidden, most probably, the god of the seas himself, who favoured the Cretan command of the seas. Theseus, consequently, meets in the labyrinth his blood brother, a mocking and gloating creation of the gods in which the sin of his mother’s licentiousness and the sin of the whole world, the symbol of the animal in man—in short, our Double, our second Self—is embodied. Of course a modern writer, especially a rationalist like Lem, is in no way obliged to follow the hidden springs of the ancient myths. Lem, however, follows them with such persistence that those who believe in the questionable schema of Carl Gustav Jung cannot rid themselves of the feeling that before them stands a typical example of the unrecognized surfacing of a collective archetype, which is reinterpreted by the author’s individual consciousness in a completely modern, scientific way. Such a reinterpreted ‘Minotaur double’ first appears in Lem’s SF in the early and awkward story (or more precisely, short play) ‘Do You Exist, Mr Jones?’. In this work a man repeatedly suffers various accidents and crashes, after each of which he has some part of his biological body amputated, always exchanging these body parts for self-governing electronic prostheses. The result of these manipulations is, as we would say today, a

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‘cyborg’, or a half-man, half-robot, akin to the Minotaur in relation to the initial Theseus–Jones, or an indivisible ‘two-in-one’. The judge who is questioning whether Jones is still a man or already a machine poses, in effect, ‘Turing’s question’, obligatory in any Contact story. (According to Turing, this should be carried out by an investigator who asks his respondent sitting in the next room a series of questions which should clarify whether the respondent is a man or an artificially programmed computer.) Thus, Mr Jones gradually turns into a mask in a man’s likeness. In its first appearance in Lem’s works, this mask of the Minotaur fulfills its role from ancient myth, yet at the same time the myth is turned upside down. In the myth the mask returns the viewer to past times, but here it directs him to future times: that which in the distant (mythological) past concealed and revealed the animal (or Beast) in man, in the distant (technological) future conceals and reveals the mechanical in the biological or, taken more widely, ‘the artificial in the natural’. The story of Mr Jones is thus the first of a whole series in Lem’s works in which the ancient problem of the ‘truth’ of human nature is enlarged by pointedly contemporary questions, addressed to human consciousness and to the nature of the human self. How can one identify the moment when Mr Jones turns from man into machine; and, vice versa, when does a machine (computer), possessing artificial intelligence, become a man? How can we determine whether or not the Ocean’s creation of a ‘thinking copy’ of Kelvin’s beloved is less natural than the dead woman (Solaris)? Which of the two arguing the question in Peace on Earth, is the ‘real’ Ion Tichy? Of the two cosmonauts who perish in Fiasco, whose consciousness thinks itself in the resulting ‘sewn together’ body, Pirx’s or his young colleague’s? Each of these Doubles is another mask which hides not so much another technological possibility as another epistemological paradox. Therefore to each of them Lem directs the ‘Turing question’ about reason: ‘Who are you?’ This persistence is akin to obsession: Lem again and again returns to his old protagonists (and old plots), making almost all of them travel through a labyrinth of such paradoxes, where they are fated to meet with ‘themselves/not themselves’, with their Doubles, with an enigmatic, epistemic double consciousness. The story of Mr Jones is repeated in the story ‘The Investigation’ (from the Pirx the Pilot series); the story of the cosmonauts doubling in a ‘time warp’ from the travels of Ion Tichy returns in Peace on Earth; the story of Pirx looking at his own and simultaneously at a totally foreign face from the story ‘On Patrol’ recurs in the novel Fiasco. Yet Lem is trying with equal persistence to find out, ‘What are you?’— what is the world, what is existence? The world too may be artificial as are, for example, the future world created by psychotropic effects in The Futuro-

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logical Congress, or the ‘good worlds’ resulting from the impossibility of violence by means of ‘betrization’ in Return from the Stars or of invisible nanorobots in The Investigation. Are these world-doubles true? This question represents one of the branchings of the problem of cognition: ‘the removing of masks’. In The Futurological Congress, when Lem plays with different variations of ‘artificiality’, the boundaries between reality and one’s perception of reality totally disappear, and they change places with each other so easily that the question of primariness or secondariness, so it seems, loses meaning. Can one pose ‘Turing’s question’ to disclose whether something is real or merely a ‘mask and representation’? (Here Lem allows himself a dig at Schopenhauer’s ‘world as will and representation’, which he dislikes.) In the final analysis, any reality in these novels remains—to use the expression of one of the characters in The Futurological Congress—‘suspect’, and Lem’s characters are always haunted by the suspicion that they are encountering the materialization of Professor Symington’s threats (from the same story): ‘If we cannot alter reality, than we must at least conceal it.’ This suspicion of experienced reality arises because either the world appears to be little more than a pure product of our consciousness; or the world is created by a cruel and mocking experimenter; or in the depths of the tortuous labyrinth, behind all of its masks, there is still something objective hidden—forming a cognitive core for all of Lem’s SF and the impetus for his plots. Lem’s protagonists are always faced with this fundamental epistemological choice in their travels through the labyrinths. As a rule, Lem leaves the choice up to the reader, distributing all possible variations of answers between his characters, who are left in a state of extreme ambiguity. It would appear that he himself is more inclined to Einstein’s position that ‘The Good Lord is sly but not malicious’; this can be indirectly judged from the sincere enthusiasm which he shows for all situations of scientific quest in his novels and also, in part, by his extraliterary pronouncements about scientific cognition (in his treatise ‘Golem’, for example). Thus, the masks in Lem’s SF as a rule (but far from always) not only conceal but also give a glimpse into the enigma, or in any case hint at the fundamental possibility of its comprehension. They are emphatically addressed to a human being, they are his ‘user-friendly’ human-like Doubles, as if they were ‘intended’ for the establishment of contact. Thus, the mask becomes the place of contact of human reason with mankind’s cosmic partner, a surface between two sides of dialogue—the subject who is experiencing the events, and the mysterious Double who is being experienced, an interface. The dialogue situation itself inevitably turns into a ‘Turing ques-

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tion’—a sequence of guesses, suppositions, mental experiments, real experiments, turns of the dialogical plot, which attempt to remove the mask and to solve the enigma it hides—the essence of its existence. (The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the mask as that which ‘not only separates from reality, but also is a means of contact with it’.) However, such a ‘removal of the mask’ is never a one-shot affair in Lem’s works. As a rule, the chief enigmas in his SF—existence and consciousness—have a hierarchical system of masks in store for the cognitive intellect. The ‘truth’ hidden behind each of them denies the preceding one (as has already been noted, this is clearly seen in Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and especially in The Futurological Congress). The movement of the cognitive intellect through this hierarchy has to be accompanied by twists, zigzags, and dead ends; in other words, it becomes necessarily labyrinthine itself. The choice between absolute gnostic pessimism (the labyrinth is devoid of a centre and a meaning) and cautious gnostic hope (the labyrinth leads to something) turns out to be necessary at literally every turn of such a labyrinth. This is why in all of Lem’s works the choice remains open; they all conclude with an unambiguous question mark, although, as at the end of Solaris, it is partially a question mark of hope. And probably not so much hope for the existence of an ‘absolute reality’ and ‘final truth’ as for the stubborn choice of reason to continue its search, in defiance of defeats.

III A wonderful example of Lem’s problem area of cognition and the poetics of mask and labyrinth is the long story The Mask—a play on mythological symbolism and poetics continuously and mockingly cancelled out by modern details. On the first or plot level it looks like a paraphrase of some kind of ancient folktale: the king sends a trusted man (in the traditional hangman’s mask) to punish a disobedient subject. All of the events have a purely mythological (or fairy-tale) aura—the palace; the beautiful ladies and knights; the lengthy chase after the traitor ‘across land and sea’ which goes to the very ‘edge of the earth’, to a deserted house in the mountains; the traitor himself, who takes on the proportions of a Prometheus; the wise monks and the metalworking sorcerers, as well as the traditional mythology of the mask. The irony of the situation, however, is that this mythological reality is ‘suspect’ from the very beginning, since the story begins with the significant ‘creation episode’: its heroine (the ‘Mask’) vaguely remembers how she was manufactured and programmed in some kind of gloomy underground cave, where the conveyor belt transported her from one

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machine to another and human designers spoke in phrases she did not understand. As a ‘finished’, human-like creature the Mask first appears as a beautiful young woman who attends the royal ball and makes the acquaintance of her next victim. The fleeting, indifferent glance of the king suddenly suggests to her that the king knows some secret of hers which, despite her beauty, arouses his coldness and alienation. This shock fuels her suspicions, which gradually grow into certainty, about her artificial nature. At that point the murder programme inside of her is activated; it was placed there by the designers (as we can guess, on the king’s orders). The Mask, throwing off the no longer needed human flesh, dashes after the traitor, who has fled from the castle (and with whom she had fallen in love at the ball). The chase gradually loses all realism (the steel machine’s enormous body squirms along the streets and canyons as in a gigantic natural labyrinth) and leads her to a meeting with the traitor-hermit; since she has also thrown off human flesh, this embodiment of spiritual wisdom calls her ‘sister’. His words echo her new doubts about her nature, which have arisen thanks to an awakening of human feelings in her. The appearance of these doubts represents the story’s transition to a higher level of meaning. The new aspect that had appeared within the chase story can be called a cybernetic one: man as machine and machine as man. The basic feature of a machine is its total subordination to the ‘creator’s’ plan, as opposed to human freedom of will. To create a machine which is similar to man means to create a semblance of free will. Does the steel caterpillar have such freedom? If so, then even her machine-like appearance is a mask. First, the doubt about her naturalness compelled the protagonist to tear off her human-like mask; second, the doubt about her artificiality is prompting her to forsake her mask of machine-likeness. But the freedom of will could, after all, have been programmed by the designers. And indeed when the the body of the steel caterpillar is opened up, a superfluous centre or programme is found in its mechanism—this is the seat of emotion, suffering, pain and love. It is possible that this is even the seat of ‘freedom of will’. The intensity of this programme’s work (superfluous for the fulfilment of the Mask’s basic function) depends, it would appear, only on a chance balance of steel dust which has accumulated on the poles of her ‘humanity centre’. Thus, the Mask does not know what she may do once she finds the traitor, for this depends upon the random settling of dust on the poles of the given centre. There is a paradox here. But it signifies the story’s transition to a third and even higher level of meaning. Indeed, aren’t free will and mankind’s feeling of naturalness incorporated into us by evolution? And aren’t they

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superfluous for the fulfilment of the basic evolutionary function: to pass on the genetic code to our progeny? The creation process in the underground labyrinth (which, as always in Lem, portends the appearance of the mask) was a partly ironic and partly serious reproduction of the evolutionary process which created man. Man is to evolution as the mask to the king— a shell of ‘superfluous flesh’, inside of which is concealed a steel caterpillar of immortal DNA, carrying (as the Mask bears the unpredictable enigma of her decision) the secret of life and death simultaneously. We now find ourselves on the highest level of meaning: that which appeared to be the tale of a ‘mask’ turned out to be a parable about freedom of will and predetermination; that which appeared to be a parable about freedom of will and predetermination turned out to be a masked reflection (the text of The Mask functions as a mask) on evolution as a playground of predetermination and freedom, of necessity and chance, of cruel programming and ‘superfluity’, of closed determinism and open choice. What does Lem think about evolution? That it is just as cruel, capricious, and unpredictable as the fairy-tale king. Maybe those whom it kills are Promethean protagonists and humanity’s benefactors; that is not important. Evolution creates people with malicious, superfluous imprecision—with the ‘superfluous centre’ of humanity. For the transmission of genetic code this is blatant excess. It is cruel because it brings about pain. Wouldn’t it be easier to create an unfeeling steel caterpillar? Is evolution then the cruel demiurge of the ancient Gnostics? But couldn’t it all be equally explained by the game of indifferent chance?

IV Like all serious writers of SF, Lem aims at the cognition of the ‘new’, but his specific, personal aim is the process of such cognition, the peculiarities and paradoxes of this process. Lem’s chosen literary antecedents are Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann and so on. In this respect, he is a product of the nineteenth century. Almost none of his SF deals with the problem of time, so characteristic of early twentieth-century culture, beginning—say—with Proust. Lem is interested in mankind as a cognitive, epistemologico-psychological subject, which, however, belongs not so much to history as to the cosmos. In that respect, of course, he is a writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, very significantly, the cosmos is for Lem first and foremost a spatial category. In modern SF time is, if not a dominant feature, then often (either alone or in combination with a spatial theme) a leading one. The enormous ‘cycles’ of Asimov, Heinlein, Kim Stanley Robinson and many

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other Western SF writers are attempts to create a ‘history’ (that is, time-line) of humanity’s mastery of outer space. This ‘party line’ of Western SF dates back to Wells, who focused almost exclusively on time in its sociological aspect; that is, on the attempt to look into the future history of humanity, to comprehend the influence exerted by (scientific and technological) time on social relations, and to grasp their interaction. As for Lem, one could say that, on the contrary, he is more interested in the interaction of space (the cosmos) with the individual cognitive intellect; and if Wells’s worlds are ‘collective’ ones, then Lem’s worlds are per se ‘individual’ ones. It is possible that Lem’s enthusiasm for space can be explained by the timing of his entrance into literature—an era of scientific and technological breakthroughs and mastering of the cosmos. Where other SF writers saw a new space for scientific and technological possibilities, Lem saw the immeasurable expansion of space above all as the dwelling place of human intellect. Humanity as a whole entered the era of ‘cosmic initiation’ and this demanded painful efforts on the part of the intellect to settle into these new surroundings, to comprehend this new existential situation with its cognitive paradoxes and dead ends. Thanks to his own personal reading and writing experience and to his broad interests, Lem was better prepared than many others for such reflections. In his autobiography, High Castle, he recounts how even in childhood he was fascinated with games of classification and organization or structuring of fictitious worlds. His two-volume work The Philosophy of Chance applies this fascination to the problems of modern structuralism and the search for the meaning of meaning (or the definition of the category of ‘sense’). His early volume Dialogues is, in essence, a collection of preliminary remarks on the new paradoxes of consciousness which occur because of the possibilities of computers, cybernetics, the construction of artificial intelligences and so on. Finally, Lem’s The Sum of Technology is one of the first attempts in the West at a culturological comprehension of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ evolution against the broad background of the future possibilities of science. Most important among his various interests is Lem’s perpetual concern with the enigma of the world’s structure and its reflection in the structure of cognitive consciousness. Cognition is an organizing, classifying and hierarchy-making intention. An organizing intellect seeks for (or imputes) a fundamental structure to nature. At the same time, this search for ‘absolute structures’ unavoidably leads to the creation of consecutive ‘intervening explanations’, to a hierarchy of masks (consecutive approaches to ‘truth’). Thus, Lem’s masks are a fundamental category of his epistemology, directed to the widest space of our existence and our fate. In his Conversations with Stanislaw Lem Beres quotes the author: ‘Undoubtedly, the Cosmos is a

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phenomenon of a completely different order than any concrete object; according to modern science, it contains our fate’ (298). The wanderings of the cognitive intellect in the cognized space of existence are inevitably complex and involved; they abound in dead ends, sharp turns and digressions. Therefore the ‘memory’ of this route (using Yampolskii’s terms), its ‘spatial trail’ or, even more precisely, the ‘world’s epistemological structure’ is the labyrinth. The appearance of the ancient categories of mask and labyrinth conveys the richness of their historical and cultural symbolism into Lem’s SF; but both of them acquire a new depth of meaning, possible only in our time. As has already been mentioned, the mask is the ‘contact point’ of cognizing subject and cognized object; it is, therefore, a reflection of the cosmic complexity as well as of the peculiarities, illusions and limitations of human consciousness. This also applies to the labyrinth: it is a structure which occurs as the result of superimposing two ‘spaces’—the mega/cosmic and the micro/human—or of cognition and self-cognition. This doubling is the most profound reason for the persistent repetition of the duality motif in Lem’s SF. At the same time, and for the same reason, another motif necessarily arises: the mutual influence of the cognizing and the cognized. While the cognized, unfamiliar world forms a new human psychology of the cosmic era, the cognizing intellect introduces into this world its illusions, fears and hopes (as the measuring device in quantum mechanics distorts the phenomena measured). The awareness of this permanent distorting factor (which gives rise to ‘masks’) leads Lem to the following principle, which is not spelled out in so many words in his works but can be strongly felt there: the broadening of the spheres of cognition must be accompanied by a continual renewal of the instruments of cognition; otherwise the cognized object turns into that ‘mirror’ which Snow talks about in Solaris. In other words, the cognitive intellect must check its former understandings and categories if and when it intends to use them for the cognizing of a fundamental novum. Traditionally one of the most important categories for orientation in the surrounding world was ethics. With great boldness Lem has announced that this category no longer applies in the new conditions of human existence. In the above-mentioned Conversations with Beres, immediately after his remark about the cosmos as containing human fate, he adds: ‘But the peculiarity of this “scientific Cosmos” is that it is neutral in relation to man’ (298). The cosmos of all religions is not neutral—it is good, or angry, or merciful, or malicious, or, at least, if the worst comes to the worst, teleological. But the real cosmos is completely indifferent to our fates, for they exist (at least for the time being) on an extraordinarily different scale of space and time.

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This neutrality of the cosmos does not allow one to attach to it the concepts of good and evil (nor many other representations of human intellect), and forces one to use only the unsentimental categories of necessity and chance, ‘blind evolution’ and ‘terrible miracle’ in relation to it. This is what gives rise to the cognitive and psychological tragicalness of all the plot situations in Lem’s SF, from Solaris to The Mask, for Lem’s cosmos remains incomprehensible, ‘unnamed’ by human labels. There is no triumphant exit from Lem’s labyrinths; the only hope lies in that freedom which the French biologist Jacques Monod talks about in his book Necessity and Chance—the freedom to continue the painful path of cognition. The only finale is a respite at the top of the latest hill, as in the endings of Return From the Stars, The Invincible, The Mask or Solaris; after the respite follows the voluntary return of Theseus into the labyrinth. In other words, the amorality and indifferent silence of the cosmos is the most important reason why Lem’s SF remains, to use Darko Suvin’s term, fundamentally ‘open’. Translated by Sarah Kaderabek

Note The citations from Lem’s texts are translated from the Polish originals, to which no page references are given in this chapter.

‘We’re at the start of a new ball game and that’s why we’re all real nervous’: Or, Cloning—Technological Cognition Reflects Estrangement from Women MARLEEN S. BARR In Procedure on Sheep, Fiction Becomes True and Dreaded Possibilities Are Raised. New York Times, 23 Feb. 1997

In ‘Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies’, C. G. Jung explains that UFO sightings are a psychological phenomenon: The worldwide rumours about Flying Saucers present a problem that challenges the psychologist for a number of reasons. The primary question . . . is this: are they real or are they mere fantasy products? This question is by no means settled yet. If they are real, exactly what are they? If they are fantasy, why should such a rumour exist? (3)

UFO sightings may, as Jung asserts, emanate from psychological problems resulting from responses to science and technology. Although science and technology have not yet settled the question of whether or not UFOs are real, the same does not hold true for cloning. While no UFO has yet landed on the White House lawn, the cloned sheep named Dolly now exists. Ian Wilmut has made cloning, a former mere science fiction fantasy product, real. Princeton biology professor Lee Silver responded to Wilmut’s transformation of science fiction into fact: ‘It [viable cloning] basically means there are no limits . . . It means all of science fiction is true. They said it could never be done and now there it is, done before the year 2000’.1 Like Jung’s unreal UFOs, cloning, recently made a very real human cognition, psychologically manifests itself as the desire to establish distance from an onslaught of newness. We are, in other words, estranged from the unreal becoming real—the rapidity with which the science-fictional element emerges from science fiction’s pages and becomes human cognition. According to the comments William Gibson made at a public reading (26

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Aug. 1997), we try to deny that we live within science fiction. To assuage anxiety, Gibson believes that, like Jack Benny wishing to remain forever 39, we want to remain in 1993: It seems to me that if you want to write something approaching naturalistic fiction in 1997 you’re going to have to be thoroughly acquainted with the tool kit of science fiction because you’re living in an overlapping batch of science-fiction scenarios. AIDS is a science-fiction scenario. The decay of the ozone layer is a science-fiction scenario. Both these scenarios are, I think, the result of technology. I think we would all be willing to live in 1993. I think that’s where we live. We’re in a sort of temporal denial and we need as mammals to be able to go out into the streets and look around and say, ‘Manhattan business as usual you know I’m going home and making some hot milk.’ We don’t want to go out there and own to our full share of ambient dread and skittish postmodern ecstasy. Most people, once in a while, turn on CNN and they see something which they just can’t process and they turn it off and they want to read a memoir—a memoir from a saner age, like ten years ago.

Gibson goes on to describe the anxiety newness now causes: I think our position today is that we live very deep in a strange faultline of history and that big big things are going down. In fact, they are so big that we can’t comprehend them. And that’s what we feel. It’s not premillenial anxiety . . . I think the dread and ecstasy we feel is the result of something like the end of modernity, the end of this thing that we’ve been doing for the past hundred years. Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents had a simple model for culture and that was in order to have civilization the individual surrenders a certain part of his or her potential happiness and agrees not to rape indeterminately and be red of tooth and claw and what not—and to, you know, wear a tie. I think Freud was on to something with that. I think the deal has come back on us. That’s what modern civilization was about. We’re past that. Or, at the very end of that and we’re being asked to exchange a part of that security that we traded our animal happiness for a long time ago for unthinkable happiness. We’re being asked to exchange that for options that no one ever had before. Those options are technological options. We’re at the start of a new ball game and that’s why we’re all real nervous. (Gibson reading; transcript made from my taperecording)

In a world where yesterday’s science fiction becomes the next day’s science fact, we wish to inhabit yesterday. Cognition which transforms science fiction into reality causes estrangement from the present and future.

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Like Gibson’s references to AIDS and ozone layer decay, cloning is a science fiction scenario which is no longer science fiction.2 Science fiction is busting out all over to cause psychological problems regarding the rapidity with which it influences as well as becomes reality. Cloning’s viability is the latest anxiety to result from science fiction made real. In this chapter I consider, by pointing to the conflation between science fiction and a new reality once solely relegated to this literature, how technological cognition mirrors social estrangement. I emphasize how this estrangement particularly applies to women, how cloning’s advent reflects the desire to replicate men and eradicate women3. I discuss three stories about cloning: Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Nine Lives’4 (written before cloning became real), Douglas Coupland’s ‘Clone, Clone on the Range’ (written immediately after cloning became real), and John Varley’s ‘Lollipop and Tar Baby’ (a tale of two female clones). Anxiety following cloning’s leap from science fiction to reality manifests itself as the media’s explanations, rumours and jokes. I establish close encounters between the three cloning stories, the media’s response to Dolly and my feminist viewpoint. I conclude that new cloning cognition yields old misogyny. Le Guin’s headnote to ‘Nine Lives’ in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) addresses the wish to erase the female. She says, ‘Nine Lives’ appeared in Playboy in 1968, under the only pen name I have ever used: U. K. Le Guin. The editors politely asked if they could use the first initial only, and I agreed. It’s not surprising that Playboy hadn’t had its consciousness raised back then, but it is surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them. It was the first (and it is the only) time I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer, from any editor or publisher; and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was so important. (105)

Playboy tried to clone Le Guin! The editors used ‘U. K. Le Guin’ to represent a different version of an identical individual, Ursula K. Le Guin. I am reminded of an essay Norman N. Holland contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology called ‘You, U. K. Le Guin’. Dolly’s presence combined with Playboy’s attitude generates this version of Holland’s title: ‘Ewe, U. K. Le Guin’. ‘Nine Lives’ concerns, in terms of a New York Times reporter’s current thoughts about cloning, ‘deep brooding about immortality and identity, the nature of the human soul and the difference between love and narcissism’ (Gross, ‘Thinking Twice about Cloning’). The story addresses fear of women and patriarchy’s efforts to control women’s natural reproductive role. The

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nine lives to which Le Guin’s title refers, nine members of a ‘ten clone’ made from John Chow’s cells, die. As surely as Playboy tries to separate Le Guin from femaleness, the ten clone emanates from a process that separates birth from men. After Chow dies ‘they took some [of his] intestinal cells and cultured them for cloning. Reproductive cells aren’t used for cloning’ (110). Substituting a man’s intestinal cells for a woman’s reproductive cells indicates that omitting women’s reproductive role is a crock of defecation. ‘Nine Lives’ announces that it is wrong to make new individuals from ‘bits and pieces instead of whole people’ (124)—instead of from whole people who happen to be women. Singularity is the stasis the story achieves.5 Kaph, the sole surviving clone—someone who does not become one of the dead nine lives—‘never was alone before’ and, hence, ‘must learn’ how to be a single individual (123). If ‘Nine Lives’ addresses the eradication of women issue and articulates female empowerment—if the story concerns powerful woman-asnature/planet exacting revenge against patriarchal science—then why is the surviving clone male? The situation in China (where families limited to one child kill or expel female infants) provides an explanation. Like Chinese men who may not find mates owing to the shortage of women, Kaph is left without female companionship. Kaph, accustomed to engaging nine identical versions of himself, confronts our reality in which people are ‘each of us alone, to be sure’ (130). Kaph, the survivor, is punished. Nine lives are snuffed out by a murderer named Libra, the female described at the story’s inception. ‘She was alive inside but dead outside, her face a black and dun net of wrinkles, tumors, cracks. She was bald and blind. The tremors that crossed Libra’s face were mere quiverings of corruption’ (105). Libra is a planet depicted as an elderly black woman, as a marginalized woman. No nurturing voluptuous Mother Earth, Libra is a killer, an eradicator of clones by dint of earthquake. This personifier of the phrase ‘don’t mess with mother nature’ is an avenger who strikes back against encroachment upon women’s reproductive biology. She terminates nine lives, nine people who result from ‘messing’ with women’s reproductive capacity. ‘Nine Lives’ is a feminist revenge tragedy: the elderly female living planet acts against people who are not of woman born. Cats’ nine lives are a fiction; one living cloned sheep is a fact. Another fact: women’s normal reproductive role can now be erased as effectively as Le Guin’s female given name. Le Guin, whose work is collected in The Language of the Night, takes back her name as certainly as female activists, while protesting violence against women, take back the night. She will not be a cloned version of herself, an obliterator of her female identity. Her reclamation of her female name is analogous to a

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female ten clone member’s description of using male cells to create female clones: ‘It’s easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female’ (110). Deleting initials allows Le Guin to revert back to her basic female self. ‘Nine Lives’, a story whose author’s female name was deleted so that she could reappear as the male norm, discusses deleting the male gene to go back to the female norm. Le Guin’s view of cloning in ‘Nine Lives’ asserts that women are basic, powerful and dominant—that women are not ‘the other’ (131) subject to non-existence. Libra, the elderly black single female entity, quakes—and kills the unnatural. The insistence upon female power in ‘Nine Lives’—Libra’s ability to eradicate patriarchal cognition’s assault upon and estrangement from natural female reproduction—forms a positive response appropriate to the media’s non-feminist view of cloning. The dead female clones in ‘Nine Lives’ signal Le Guin’s realization that cloning is not in women’s best interest—that, for women (like erasing Le Guin’s first name), cloning yields eradication, not reproduction. Cloning’s relation to female nullification is apparent in John Varley’s ‘Lollipop and Tar Baby’. This story is a less exaggerated version of Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries in which protagonist Ijon Tichy encounters innumerable multiple versions of himself. Varley’s protagonists, Zoe and her clone Xanthia, are the sole inhabitants of spaceships named Lollipop and Shirley Temple. A sentient black hole tells Xanthia about ‘Clone Control Regulations’ (370) which stipulate that either she or Zoe must die. Shirley Temple was ‘cloned’ when she inspired the popular Shirley Temple doll. Varley asserts that Xanthia is no innocent Shirley Temple proclaiming her relationship to the good ship Lollipop. Xanthia gives self-preservation first priority after she hears the black hole describe cloning regulations: ‘clones had been a loophole. No more. Now, only one person had the right to any one set of genes. If two possessed them, one was excess, and excess was summarily executed’ (370). Varley’s Lollipop and Shirley are ships of fools. The female clones, instead of finding a viable alternative, adhere to the rubric that one of them must die.6 Real women also approach cloning by co-operating with their eradication—and potential death. Many wish to clone themselves as mirror images of impossibly thin models. The picture of a fat Barbie doll that appeared in Body Shop windows during late 1997, by alluding to cloning, speaks to these women. The text accompanying the picture asserts that ‘There are three billion women who do not look like supermodels and only eight who do’. Three billion women try to re-create themselves as eight almost impossibly thin women. Enacting cognitive estrangement from

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their bodies’ natural weight, women starve themselves to resemble stick figure models—or lollipops. They take extreme measures to obliterate fat cells—in order better to sell themselves on the marriage market. For women who starve to reconfigure themselves as supermodels, a candy shop where bonbons play on the sunny side of Peppermint Bay is to be avoided at all costs. So too Xanthia must eradicate the Other who is herself. ‘Lollipop’, then, describes the demise of the female clone. Although Xanthia and Zoe live together and are biologically identical, they are antagonists who do not feel ‘clonal empathy’, the term Time writer Robert Wright uses to describe the situation in which ‘you and your clone were essentially the same, driven by the same hopes and fears. You might even feel you shared the same soul’ (73). Xanthia, who never had a spaceship/room of her own, asserts that she has a soul of her own. Because her main fear involves losing the ability to live her own life, she eradicates her female clone. Like ‘Nine Lives’, ‘Lollipop’ achieves the stasis of singularity via the death of clones. Coupland’s ‘Clone, Clone on the Range’ achieves the stasis of multiplicity through duplicated life. This story, which takes place after ‘the first news of successful human cloning was announced’ (74), concerns two ageing film stars, Corey and Lori, who check into ‘an exclusive (naturally) cowbased Saskatchewan cloning spa . . . to create a flock of worshipful children’ (74). As they regard their clones gestating within cow uteruses, the protagonists view this bucolic scene: ‘hundreds of beautiful Hereford mommies, glorious and dumb as posts under the great Canadian sky, chewing vitamized, antibioticized alfalfa while inside each of them our own future little fan clubs incubated’ (74). Like ‘Nine Lives’, ‘Clone, Clone’ equates cloning with the need for love. Coupland’s story also adheres to George Stephanopoulos’s comment about cloning and immortality: ‘But who among us is not afraid of the flesh withering? . . . What this [cloning] creates is the possibility of immortality, which helps us conquer the fear of death . . . But what is the cost? The cost is terrifying’ (Gross, ‘Thinking Twice about Cloning’). Coupland’s humorous story communicates the terrifying cost of cloning: hatred of women, the desire to separate reproduction from women’s control. The cow-based cloning spa has much in common with the docile women contained as reproductive vessels whom Kate Wilhelm portrays in Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. The cows, so many bovine versions of Margaret Atwood’s handmaids, are put out to pasture to serve a reproductive agenda they do not control. The bucolic scene Corey and Lori witness is short-lived. There is trouble on the range: ‘cattle rustlers’ (75). The beautiful Hereford mommies are stolen as surely as cloning technology steals reproduction from women. The

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protagonists realize that, like the present and unaccounted-for extraterrestrial aliens in The Invaders, ‘our own mommy cows could be practically anywhere’ (75). The illustration accompanying ‘Clone, Clone’ indicates that the mommy cows are nowhere, that the mommy cows are not female. It shows an udderless horned bovine standing upright appearing to wear a business suit. The bovine’s hooves/hands open his chest cavity from which male-appearing human figures, who walk on a conveyor belt, emerge. This pregnant male bovine has more in common with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of a pregnant man than with a pregnant sheep. Corey and Lori ponder the fate of the rustled cow surrogate mothers. ‘Were they rustled for their meat? Were they taken by terrorists? Kidnappers?’ (75). Female reproductive capacity is what is rustled, taken. I read the ‘range’ in Coupland’s title as a stove akin to the one Pamela Zoline imagines in ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. In ‘Clone, Clone’, female reproductive biology is a cooked goose—taken for its meat, cannibalized. Corey and Lori—together with their ‘10 beautiful children: Cori, Korrie, Corry, Korey, Korrey, Laurie, Lorrie, Laurey, Lorrey, and Lorri’ (75)—dedicate themselves to fighting against embryo poaching. Normal human reproduction and gender, not embryos, is what is poached on the range/heat death of the universe stove. In regard to gender, the Lori/Cori clones’ names are almost as ambiguous as Le Guin’s initials. The clones gestated inside cows are herded into a dysfunctional economic enclosure (a non-OK Corral) within which they copy their parents’ consumer values. Corey and Lori parent psychological clones who, like their parents, are obsessed with ‘memos, real estate, facials, and colonics’ (75). They create genderless members of a consumer culture in which, as the aforementioned conveyor belt emanating from the pictured male bovine’s midsection suggests, reproduction is removed from women and attached to the market. A letter to the New York Times by Walter Glickman articulates the point that ‘Clone, Clone’ raises about vacuous consumerism: ‘We seem to be operating under the assumption that the world is nothing but material— be it nucleus, gene, sheep, person, Earth or star . . . there for probing for profit, with any sense of reverence completely abandoned. This assumption needs to be questioned’. Le Guin’s sentient planet and Varley’s sentient black hole are treated as for-profit material and act as questioners. Coupland, in contrast, portrays materialists who might disagree with George Johnson’s assertion that we ‘each carry in our heads complexity beyond imagining and beyond duplication. Even a hard-core materialist might agree that, in that sense, everyone has a soul’ (New York Times, 2, March, 1997). ‘Clone, Clone’ assumes ‘that psyches get copied along with genes’

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(Wright, ‘Can Be Xeroxed?’). Time magazine’s Dolly coverage showed that, in relation to cloning, the xeroxed psyche reflects the patriarchal psyche’s wish to copy itself and eradicate women. Although human cloning is still impossible, the media’s response to Dolly reveals that patriarchy replicates itself. The New York Times’s initial front-page Dolly report, for example, stated: ‘If there is a market for a sperm bank selling semen from Nobel laureates, how much better would it be to bear a child that would actually be a clone of a great thinker or, perhaps a great beauty or a great athlete’ (23, February 1997). When readers respond to this statement, guess which sex is related to great athlete and thinker and which to great beauty? Like sheep, great beauties have already been cloned. For seventy-seven years, fifty state representatives have participated in the Miss America Pageant. Seventy-seven rather undifferentiated versions of Miss South Dakota, Miss Wyoming etc. exist. The title-holders are virtually look-alike women who, in the manner of Le Guin’s experience with Playboy, are deprived of their name, their identity. The New York Times seemed to imply that a male human clone existed too: Donald J. Trump ‘who has already replicated himself around town by erecting tall buildings’ (Gross, ‘Thinking Twice about Cloning’). The humour indicates seriousness: in regard to men, replication evokes commercial success, phallic power—that is, Trump Tower. When asked who he would deem an appropriate candidate for cloning, Trump answered, ‘We could certainly use another George Washington, or another Jonas Salk’ (ibid.). A higher intellectual authority than Trump, Rabbi Moses Fendler (professor of medical ethics and biology at Yeshiva University), answered the same question: ‘Cloning Albert Einstein might be the rare case worth trying’ (ibid.). The Times cited men who talk about cloning men. Time magazine’s special report on cloning, when speculating about appropriate future human clones, also suggested men’s names. Time, like the New York Times, mentioned Einstein and Salk (Kluger, ‘Will We Follow the Sheep?’, 71)— who are repeatedly named (seem to become textual clones) in discussions about appropriate human cloning. Time revealed that well-known science science fiction cloning stories— such as Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil and Woody Allen’s Sleeper 7 —are written by men and are about men. Allen and Levin describe cloning male tyrants; I observe that current discourse about cloning duplicates tyrannical patriarchal premises. Time commented upon Levin’s and Allen’s scenario about despots appropriating cloning: ‘Even as the fiction of one decade becomes the technology of another, it’s inevitable that this technology will be used—often by the wrong people’ (72). Since feminist analysis of cloning is absent from the dominant media, cloning reportage is, to use

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Teresa de Lauretis’s term, a ‘technology of gender’8 which yields estrangement from the female. Time questioned this technology: ‘What does the sudden ability to make genetic stencils of ourselves say about the concepts of individuality?’ (69). I answer by considering the picture accompanying the Time article whose text posed this question. Wilmut appeared with Dolly in the picture captioned thus: ‘CREATOR AND CLONE: Wilmut and the unsuspecting Dolly have made news—and sparked debate—around the world’ (69). Wilmut unknowingly makes a statement about women’s relation to this debate: his hand is placed over Dolly’s muzzle. He literally silences Dolly, prevents her from articulating her opinion about cloning: baah. The Time cloning special report included four fictitious scenarios—stories—about people who could potentially use a cloning lab such as the facility Coupland depicts: (1) an aging male despot; (2) a terminally ill physics laureate; (3) a male industrialist who wants his clone to serve as his son; (4) parents who want to clone their six-year-old daughter. The reason for cloning the daughter: she suffers from leukemia so aggressive that only a bone marrow transplant can save her. The problem is finding a compatible donor . . . But nature didn’t provide her with a twin, and now the cloning lab will try. In nine months, the parents, who face the very likely prospect of losing the one daughter they have, could find themselves raising two of her—the second created expressly to help keep the first alive. (69)

The first three scenarios involve the male ego’s relation to political and economic power. Men are in control; men decide to create clones. The fourth scenario concerns a vulnerable female child who has no say about the decision to clone her. Wilmut’s hand covers her mouth almost as definitely as it covers Dolly’s muzzle. The girl’s clone will not have a raison d’être of her own. Scenarios one, two and three are about perpetuating male life; son clones duplicate fathers. Scenario four describes perpetuating female life as creating a lesser female life. The new version of the daughter will be a pale xerox of the original. These scenarios address my view of women’s relationship to cloning in the fiction and media I include. Woman is silenced; she lacks control; her individuality is eradicated. She is the construction site, the bulldozed sentient hole, the earth opened and raped to become the foundation of man’s monument to himself—phallic Trump Tower, for example. ‘The Pharaohs built their pyramids, the Emperors built Rome . . . to make the permanence of stone compensate for the impermanence of the flesh. But big buildings and big tombs would be a poor second choice if the flesh could be made to

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go on forever. Now it appears it can’ (71). Patriarchy views natural reproduction as a poor second choice to reproductive technology, to cloning. The New York Times, attempting to assuage the anxiety Dolly causes, included an article called ‘Don’t Worry, A Brain Cell Still Can’t Be Cloned’. When the author, George Johnson, describes the ‘queasiness’ people feel upon learning about Dolly, he seems to equate social estrangement with the need for Alka Seltzer. He describes this ‘queasiness’: ‘if a cell can be taken from a human being and used to create a genetically identical double, then any of us could lose our uniqueness. One would no longer be a self’ (1). And he provides reassurance: ‘We each carry in our heads complexity beyond imagining and beyond duplication. Even a hard-core materialist might agree that, in a sense, everyone has a soul’ (16). Although Johnson seems to echo the old Alka Seltzer jingle (by implying plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief cloning is), the press provides no relief vis-à-vis cloning as yet another way to deny woman’s brain, her uniqueness, her soul. The illustration accompanying Johnson’s article (its caption reads ‘Dolly, the ewe cloned in Scotland, meets the press at the Roslin Institute’) shows Dolly, foregrounded by paparazzi, peering out from between her pen’s slots. She meets the press appearing as a pilloried female celebrity, her head held between a vice (the pen slots) and separated from her imprisoned body. Dolly is corralled within a prison-house of language, an enclosure in which patriarchal cognition estranges the female body from its soul. A lengthy New York Times special report on cloning seems to address my discussion of the photograph. This information about the inspiration for Dolly’s name is mentioned as an aside to detailed cloning process information: ‘When the scientists moved on to cloning a fully grown sheep, they decided to use udder, or mammary cells, and that is how Dolly got her name. She was named after the country singer Dolly Parton, whose mammary cells, Dr. Wilmut said, are equally famous’ (Specter and Kolata, ‘After Decades of Missteps’). Concerning the aforementioned Trump Tower: although big buildings and big tombs still stand in for human cloning, sexists can bring human flesh to bare [sic] upon naming a cloned female sheep. They can name the cloned sheep after big boobs. Le Guin wrote ‘She Unnames Them’. Namers who unname women are, unbeknownst to themselves, replicants. They are so many big boobs. Dolly, the cloned sheep named after Ms Parton, evokes a particular SF text not marketed as SF: Philip Roth’s The Breast. In Roth’s fiction (and, now, in reality) a mammary gland represents an entire individual. Mammary cells absolutely do make women—and sheep—famous. This circumstance, to my mind, calls for Alka Seltzer. Dr Keith Campbell, a biologist at the Roslin Institute, used humour to

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assuage the ‘queasiness’ Johnson describes. Campbell said that ‘the old fashioned way . . . will always be the preferred way of having children . . . Why would anyone want to clone, anyway? It’s far too expensive and a lot less fun then the original method’ (ibid). Did it not occur to Campbell that a woman, to avoid queasiness, might want to use an artificial womb to clone—that childbirth is not fun? Childbirth, whether natural or artificial, is something patriarchy seeks to control. Hence Pope John Paul II spoke out against those ‘who compromise human dignity’ with ‘dangerous [cloning] experiments’ (‘Pope Attacks Experiments’). And the Village Voice columnist Linda Stasi worried that, in New York state, the cloning issue will be decided by conservative legislators such as the Assembly member Anthony Seminerio, who once said, ‘If the Indians are unhappy they should go back where they came from’ (‘Clone This’). The ‘dangerous’ issue is who will be duplicated, not the duplication itself. A front page International Herald Tribune picture (12 Mar. 1997) addressed this issue. The picture shows European Parliament Green Party members responding to the Commissioner of Research Edith Cresson’s call for ethics panels to monitor cloning. The legislators, called ‘sheep-like’, all wear identical white masks. The masks’ whiteness speaks to exactly which group is routinely mentioned in cloning discourse. The media are almost silent in regard to cloning people of colour.9 The AIDS activist Larry Kramer represents another group whose members are ignored as candidates for cloning. He responded to Wilmut’s research by mentioning selective reproduction: ‘Gay people are always terrified we’ll be genetically altered out of existence’ (Gross, ‘Thinking Twice about Cloning’). Ruth Westheimer evoked her experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany to state that, in the face of cloning, people like her face nonexistence: ‘I came out of Nazi Germany . . . If you could make people who were only Aryan, blonde and blue-eyed, someone like me—Jewish and 4 foot 7—would not be here’ (ibid.). An International Herald Tribune editorial is applicable to Westheimer’s vision of mass Aryan human production; the editorial mentioned separating ‘Dolly’s cloning from the feared science-fiction scenarios of human mass production, slave factories, and carboncopied armies’ (27 Feb. 1997). Again, the most dangerous issue is not duplication but, rather, the lack of mass production of certain humans: gays, Jews, people of colour, women. Women, however, can produce copies of themselves. ‘Theoretically yes’ (Kolata, ‘Scientist Reports First Cloning’) is the answer to the question of whether or not women can clone themselves. This affirmative response is played out in feminist SF (Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines, for example). Media discourse portends that such feminist SF will not become reality.

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Duplications of women are not wanted. Someone like Westheimer might not exist because, as well as being Jewish and short, she is female. In addition to the aforementioned murder of Chinese female infants, parents—to ensure that their first born will be male—use sonogram technology to decide to abort female foetuses. Although cloning discourse reflects the wish not to duplicate women, the technology itself has been positioned as Woman. Dolly—like rumours of the Roswell, New Mexico, UFO cover-up and the opinion that the Moon landings are televised dioramas—has been linked to conspiracy. The sheep cloning conspiracy accusation is a psychological phenomenon analogous to paternity questions, to distrusting women in regard to reproduction. The father asks if a child is his; the scientist asks if the cloned sheep is a hoax— if she really is Wilmut’s creation: In the five months since the clone named Dolly was announced, some scientists have begun to grumble. How do we know the whole thing wasn’t a hoax? Why didn’t the scientists who created Dolly go to greater lengths to prove that she really is what they say she is, a lamb produced by cloning the udder cells of an adult sheep? Why, some ask, is the rest of the world so willing to accept the world-shattering claim that an adult mammal was cloned? (Kolata, ‘Some Scientists Ask’)

Such distrust leads, for example, to insisting upon monogamy—to chastity belts. Wilmut answered his accusers with the voice of accused wayward woman: Wilmut said there was another way to know that Dolly had been cloned from udder cells: just look at her, he said. The udder cells were from a Finn dorset sheep, dirty white with a pure white face; of all the hundreds of sheep living at the Roslin Institute, only Dolly was of that species. ‘No other sheep at the Roslin Institute looks like Dolly,’ Dr Wilmut said. Neither her surrogate mother, who is a Scottish blackface sheep, nor her egg donor . . . physically resembles her. (ibid.)

Wilmut echoed the accused adulterous wife calling attention to her child’s resemblance to her husband. Wilmut, male scientist, speaks as distrusted Woman. Cloning jokes reflect women’s denigration and men’s power. In regard to A1 Gore, as the International Herald Tribune title ‘A1 Gore, Replicant (and Other Cloning Issues)’ implies, cloning has already occurred. So too for a KAL political cartoon (KAL is the cartoonist’s designation) which portrays four versions of Bill Clinton: one Clinton takes care of foreign affairs, another domestic affairs, another financial affairs and another (last but not

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least in regard to Clinton) ‘affairs’ (New York Times, 2 March, 1997). While, according to this cartoon, only one Clinton clone is in charge of sex, jokes about women and cloning relegate them exclusively to sexuality and appearance. Two examples follow: If only they could find a way to combine cloning with gene therapy—you could make a new version of yourself, only with thinner thighs. Why should a successful man with a midlife crisis leave his wife for a younger woman when he could leave her for a younger clone? Isn’t that a little less mean? (‘Al Gore, Replicant’)

Leaving a woman for her younger clone is definitely not less mean. Successful men can leave their wives for a younger sheep. Esquire’s ‘women we love’ special issue literally placed women and the cloned sheep in the same category. Ensconced within Esquire, appearing with pictured female celebrities, is none other than a picture of Dolly. Roy Blount Jr, in ‘Dolly the Woman We Love Over and Over and Over and Over’, described why a sheep appears in an Esquire issue about women: I feel that I can tell her [Dolly] anything. She doesn’t judge; she takes it in . . . A ruminant grin. She’s turning my words over and over—not at all captiously. She’s just savoring, digesting. I like that in a confidante . . . As for the clone thing, hey, she knows she has doubles. Researchers who say, ‘Couldn’t anybody make a sheep’ . . . Clone jokes leave her cold. But she loves a good sheep joke . . . there’s a man in your field whose behaving very badly toward one of your sheep . . . ‘Oh,’ said the farm girl, ‘that’s just Daaaaaddy’.

So what if the Esquire issue about women pictures a sheep? According to patriarchy, women and cloned ewe are xerox copies. ‘I felt like an imposter . . . I was one of the animals’ said the feminist reproductive technology theorist Genoveffa Corea while inside a lab containing experimental animals (Corea, ‘Egg Snatchers’). Esquire’s decision to include Dolly indicates the extent to which cloning cognition reveals estrangement from women. Fortunately, however, like Jung’s UFO observers, sheep or women can look up. Kurt Vonnegut has indicated why this assertive gaze is necessary: ‘I advocate a constitutional amendment in which all people who want to work can work—and can earn a living wage. I am concerned that people are being made obsolete. They are concerned about cloning. The microchip is already cloning what people can do. To hell with identical sheep.’ According to Vonnegut, the microchip as cloning technology has already begun to eradicate women—and men.10

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1 Dr Ian Wilmut, an embryologist affiliated to the Roslin Institute located seven miles from Edinburgh, announced on 22 February 1997 that he had created the first animal cloned from an adult. Dr Wilmut ‘took a mammary cell from an adult sheep and prepared its DNA so it would be accepted by an egg from another sheep. He then removed the egg’s own DNA, replacing it with the DNA from the adult sheep by fusing the egg with the adult cell. The fused cells, carrying the adult DNA, began to grow and divide, just like a perfectly normal fertilized egg, to form an embryo. Dr Wilmut implanted the embryo into another ewe; in July, the ewe gave birth to a lamb, named Dolly. Though Dolly seems perfectly normal, DNA tests show that she is the clone of the adult ewe who supplied her DNA’ (Gena Kolata, ‘Scientist Reports First Cloning Ever of Adult Mammal,’ New York Times, 23 Feb. 1997: 1). 2 While Gibson explains that science fiction literature is now an indicator of contemporary life, Lucie Armitt states that science fiction is central to contemporary criticism. ‘After a period in which science-fiction criticism has lagged behind more explicitly theoretical fields, it is now enjoying a central status as the impetus behind and stimulus for one of the most influential of all critical discourses. Thus even “high” postmodernist texts . . . draw heavily upon the language and tropes of popular science fiction’ (Theorising the Fantastic, pp. 74–75). 3 Cloned, a television movie (NBC, 28 Sept. 1997), addresses cloning’s relationship to the eradication of women issue. The film is about a male doctor who clones the child of a woman employed in his reproductive technology lab. When she fights to expose him, his defenders play the ‘doubting the hysterical woman’s word’ card. Her husband, however, echoes her charges. When the doctor’s crony shoots him, evoking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (the quintessential male buddy film), the couple jumps from a cliff and land in water. The woman, who saves her husband from drowning, is the hero. The couple ultimately decide not to clone their dead son, the boy who, throughout the film, is shown as a duplicated entity. In contrast to the focus upon the duplicated boy, when the couple go to an orphanage to investigate adoption, they see many girls in a playground. The implication: instead of adopting a boy to replace their son, they will adopt a girl. 4 According to Elizabeth Cummins Cogell (Ursula K. Le Guin: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, pp. 4–5), the Nebula-Award-winning ‘Nine Lives’ appeared in at last eight major collections between 1970 and 1978. 5 According to Thomas Richards, Star Trek also emphasizes singularity: ‘The emphasis of the series is always on the individual. In Star Trek all acts are individual acts . . . The individual is paramount, the group secondary . . . Group consciousness is more likely to be represented as the worst possible thing in the universe . . . The strength of the individual remains unbroken; to the end the series maintains the inner inviolability of the individual’ (The Meaning of Star Trek, pp. 32, 74, 77, 97). 6 Jeen Han, who has been accused of trying to murder her twin, Sunny, provides a real-life analogue to Xanthia’s decision to murder her clone. According to the New York Times: ‘Proceedings began last month in the criminal trial of 22-year-old Jeen Han . . . [who is charged with] conspiring to murder her twin, Sunny Han last year. It sounds like a bad television movie . . . But for now it is real life. The identical twins

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were co-valedictorians at a suburban high school near San Diego. Their paths diverged when Jeen Han took up gambling . . . and was arrested for credit card fraud. Then last November Sunny Han was held at gunpoint and bound with duct tape by two teenagers. Prosecutors say Jeen Han orchestrated the crime and intended to assume her sister’s identity . . . Sunny Han has made the rounds of talk shows lamenting how the news media have focused on the theme of the good versus evil twin . . . Why are such cases so fascinating? Maybe it’s because they fit squarely in the mythic tradition of twins as symbols of darkness and light, good and evil’ (Jeff Stryker, ‘Twin Pique: Yin, Yang, and You’). 7 These works are better-known than women’s imaginative visions of cloning such as Pamela Sargent’s Cloned Lives (1976) and Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May (1989). 8 De Lauretis defines a technology of gender as ‘a social technology’ which signifies how the ‘representation of gender is constructed by the given technology’ (‘The Technology of Gender’, p. 3). 9 In addition to describing Clinton clones, the KAL political cartoon I discuss below depicts cloning Michael Jordan. 10 Vonnegut Reading, New York, 22 Sept. 1997; transcript made from my taperecording.

‘If I find one good city I will spare the man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy FREDRIC JAMESON

Strictly speaking, Utopia is not a genre in its own right, but rather the socio-political sub-genre of Science Fiction. Darko Suvin1

For those who still think that science fiction is about science, the Mars trilogy will certainly qualify. Not only are scientists and engineers among its principal characters; pages upon pages offer pocket disquisitions on a host of topics that surely qualify as hard science, most of it relating to terraforming: such as the biochemistry of rocks and solids; the dynamics of gases and the composition of atmosphere; aquifers and the release of water and other liquids; genetically engineered micro-organisms and genetically reconstructed DNA; radiation, light and heat; the food chain; the structure of topsoil; meteorology and the dynamics of wind and climate; botanical systems and classification; ‘string theory’ and the unified field theory in physics; the mechanics of velocity in astronomical and military situations. Robinson manages to hold the non-scientific reader’s interest and attention during these brief but ludic discussions, about which one would also like to hear the scientists’ opinions or to browse through a collection of essays by the experts on his treatment of these specialized matters, which I take to be a mixture of state-of-the-art conceptualization and ‘speculation’, mainstream or otherwise. It is true that the literary critic would here interpose the reminder that the novel offers a mimesis of science and scientific activity and not the thing itself. It is an aestheticist answer, which has always aimed at separating out the literary and ‘imaginative’ from the referential (‘real’ science, ‘real’ scientific texts and so on), but which in the present context has the disadvantage of bracketing the ‘cognitive’ as such. Still even the ‘verisimilitude’ of imitation necessarily has something to do with outside factors, and in particular the rapidly changing configurations of these various scientific fields in the real world.

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More pertinent is, I think, the way in which these scientific facts and findings, presuppositions and activities are themselves staged: namely, as data and raw materials for the solving of problems, rather than as abstract and contemplative features of an epistemology or scientific world picture. Not only are ‘problems’—crises, dilemmas, catastrophes (has Sax thought about what to do if Burroughs was flooded?)—more dramatic than classic unresolved issues in theoretical science; but they also potentially give free rein to a different kind of imagination and a wilder set of propositions and puzzle-solutions: my favourite is Art Randolph’s proposal for solving the population explosion: ‘“I would give everyone alive a birthright which entitled them to parent three-quarters of a child.” He explained that every pair of parents would thus have the right to bear a child and a half; after having one, they could either sell the right to the other half, or arrange to buy a half from some other couple’ etc.2 There is thus a supplementary energy and invention to be admired in these solutions, above and beyond the ‘merely’ scientific ones (unless indeed, the scientific ones are themselves aesthetically the result of just such ingenuity in the first place, something that nonscientists, with their reified respect for science as an absolute, are less often prepared to allow). At any rate, this kind of speculative problem-solving is obviously rather different from what one finds in science fiction that offers a description of this or that kind of alien anatomy, a premise about the mechanism of this or that faster-than-light space travel, or a preview of developments in the universe several billion years from now. Indeed, the specifically SF motifs are here few and far between, and largely in the area of perception: To the east stood a number of rocket landing vehicles, each one a different shape and size, with the top of more sticking over the eastern horizon. All of them were crusted the same red-orange as the ground: it was an odd, thrilling sight, as if they had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaceport. (R, 89)

But even here the next sentence puts us on the track of an idiosyncrasy (particularly when we remember that it is a Russian member of the First Hundred who is making the observation): ‘Parts of Baikonur would look like this, in a million years.’ Leaving aside a few wonderful Stapledonian excesses (the terraforming of Venus and the train-city Terminator on Mercury in the last volume), what look like science-fictional elements here are mostly temporal inversions, parts of early Mars looking old and museumlike, the great metropolis of Burroughs drowned under water in the last volume, inverted allusions to Terran ancient history—in particular to Crete—as those rise back up in Mars like a ‘return of the repressed’. Is

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this then to say that the Mars trilogy is a more realistic kind of science fiction than what we ordinarily associate with space travel and emigration? Perhaps: but that is not quite the notion of realism I want to propose here. Yet one more thing needs to be said about the kind of science we find in this novel: it is related to the overall problem of terraforming Mars, no doubt, but also has more general implications. Secondary themes hint at the secret of ‘problem-solving’ here: the mockery of Sax’s ‘monocausotaxophilia’ for example (G, 344)—‘the love of single causes that explain everything’. But Sax himself is perplexed about prediction: ‘the interventions that worked, the interventions that backfired—the effects unintended, unforeseen, unnoticed’ (B, 334), particularly as far as Martian weather is concerned: ‘impossible to predict, even if one froze the variables and pretended terraforming had stabilized, which it certainly had not. Over and over Sax watched a thousand years of weather, altering variables in the models, and every time a completely different millennium flitted past’ (B, 336). These structural unpredictabilities, based on chaos theory, have often been taken to be so many arguments against historical determinism, and assimilated to the anti-Marxian arsenal (in the name of some ‘freedom’ and creativity at work at the very heart of Nature itself). I think that ‘predictability’ as such was never at stake here, however, and that we have here rather to do with that more fundamental structure of problem-solving in the Mars trilogy, which is not so much to be characterized in terms of indeterminacy as rather in those of overdetermination. The Althusserian concept3 was indeed specifically designed to name what is finally not ultimately thinkable about historical conjunctures of this kind: in other words, if all of Mars is some gigantic laboratory (and in another way it is, and we will also have to think about the novels from that perspective), then it is a unique laboratory in which the variables can never be isolated in the ordinary ways, but always coexist in a multiplicity which can scarcely be mastered by equations let alone by the computer itself. This means that whatever the scientific theme confronted—botany, biology, geology, physics, chemistry, astronomy—the projected solution to the imaginary problem will always involve the rehearsal of a specific kind of thinking to which we are not often accustomed, namely the grappling with what Althusser calls ‘complex overdetermined concrete situations’4 which he also very specifically associates with history and above all with politics. It is therefore not only about the construction of a ‘biotic community’ in topsoils that one might be tempted to exclaim (as Nadia does): ‘My God, it’s like trying to get this government to work’ (B, 269): all of the scientific problems described in the novel, without exception, offer an allegory, by

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way of the form of overdetermination, of social, political and historical problems also faced by the inhabitants of Mars. This is then the sense in which science and politics are not (or not only) two separate themes in the Mars trilogy, which appear to alternate from chapter to chapter of the story of the planet’s development; nor is it only a question of the inevitably scientific dimensions of any politics on Mars, nor even the increasingly obvious fact that scientific research today is itself a specialized form of institutional politics, over and above its implications for the more generally social and political. Besides all this, we need to insist on the way in which any first scientific reading of the Mars trilogy must eventually develop into a second allegorical one, in which the hard SF content stands revealed as socio-political—that is to say, as utopian. We have to do, in other words, with the registers of reading and interpretation, and the way in which a shift between these two fundamental levels of nature and human collectivities tends to problematize each one in turn, and to send us back to the other. And this interpretative alternation also explains the more horizontal alternations in the text itself, its heterogeneities and the uneven sequence of great sheets of material—now the exploration of the landscape, now the grappling with political problems from Earth (the UN, the nation-states, the multinationals), now the brilliant set-pieces (the assassination of John Boone—‘the first man on Mars’—, the two revolutions, the falling of the space elevator as it wraps itself twice around the planet, great floods and fires in the tented cities, Sax’s life disguised, then his rescue from the security new town, the search for Hiroko, the dramatic cures and dramatic deaths) . . . so many distinct reading temporalities that are carefully juxtaposed, in a kind of distant echo of the narrative heterogeneities of the classical utopias themselves, the ‘discovery’ in space or time, the encounters, then the guided tours and explanations, to which here correspond the innumerable visits to different kinds of communities and settlements all over the new planet. Sheer length, sheer reading time, is crucial here in order to develop an analogon of historical time itself, as its overdeterminations slowly evolve across the longer Martian years, which the device of the longevity treatment prevents from forming into generations (or perhaps at best only three generations, whose time is unsettled in a politically problematic way—a Bénard instability?— by the irregular immigration of Earth-dwellers). It is something of a scientific laboratory experiment in its own right, for human collective history knows a rhythm and a logic radically distinct from the normal biological life-span, and its paradoxes and unknowabilities stem as much from that incommensurability as they do from the other one that opposes biological individuals to larger multiplicities. The Mars trilogy then experimentally

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extends the lives of its viewers and participants in order to make them coeval with their own history, at the same time that it projects an original collectivity—the first settlers, the so-called ‘First Hundred’—as a collective protagonist or multiple subject for that history itself; and this is also the moment to observe that the three books form a single narrative and constitute a single novel, rather than a genuine trilogy (like Robinson’s Orange County books), let alone a series on the fantasy model. The shifting adjectives of the titles then correspond to stages in the development of the planet itself—first reddish rock, then covered by green plant life, and finally bathed in water and wrapped definitively in the great Martian oceans. (What the colours stand for here, and their political implications, we will see later on.) Meanwhile, the later theme of the memory problems of the survivors, and the relationship of memory to the structure of the brain, is a kind of decorative projection of the structural or narrative device, what we will in a moment call its autoreferential inscription, and belongs to something like the modernist structural traits or features of the Mars trilogy. Yet categories like ‘modernism’ or ‘realism’ have never seemed particularly compatible with so peculiarly generic a classification as that of Utopia (or Utopian discourse, the Utopian text), and we need to clarify them before we can work our way back to the more central issue of the relationship between science fiction and utopia that the Mars trilogy so insistently raises. One is tempted to think indeed that the hidden agenda behind predictably aimless and academic distinctions between realist and modernist utopias has more to do with the question about the possibility of a ‘postmodern’ utopia, that is, about the possibility of utopias today as such, than it does with genre theory. In any case the classificatory categories in question themselves seem uniquely ‘modern’, and not very relevant to More or Cyrano, let alone to the fantastic as such in general. Rather than marshalling various traditional or a priori conceptions of realism, it seems best to begin with the Mars trilogy’s own answer to this question, which can surely be glimpsed in Sax’s musings about the way he thinks of science: ‘I try to understand. I pay attention to things, you see, very closely. As closely as I can. Concentrating on the specificity of every moment. And I want to understand why it happens the way it does. I’m curious. And I think that everything happens for a reason. Everything. So, we ought to be able to tease those reasons out. When we can’t . . . well, I don’t like it. It vexes me. Sometimes I call it . . . the great unexplainable.’ (G, 12)

What is important in this rambling statement is less the issue of causality (about which the question of single versus multiple causes will be crucial

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enough in a different context, as we have already seen above) than it is the evocation of resistance: external reality organizes itself into a problem, or even, at some lower limit, into an event as such, whose nature poses a problem only in so far as it raises a question about its own coming into existence in the first place, about the very why of its happening. This problem then, in the name of external reality or the world itself, refuses an answer and eludes a solution: and I will want to suggest that it is very precisely this kind of ‘resistance’ of a phenomenon posited as external and independent which defines the situation of literary realisms as well, and needs to be their effect when they succeed in becoming realism in the first place. It is a ‘definition’ which has the advantage of adapting to a variety of contents and historical situations, including the traditional ones: namely that realism has something to do with observation, with social documentation, with the rise of journalism and the ‘construction’ of the ephemeral or of actuality, and so forth. It also moves us away from the standard history-ofideas notion of the central role of the emergence of modern science; and this is perhaps less paradoxical than it may at first seem, since the very observation about science with which we began represented an attempt to describe science in terms of a whole range of other activities, or, in other words, to assimilate science to non-scientific activity and daily life as such. Science thereby becomes only one of the by-products of this increasingly specified ‘resistance’ of reality, and not particularly the primary agent, in a process we would do better to describe in terms of secularization. For it is secularization as such which forestalls the easier answers of the theological or the traditional, the symbolic or the mythic; the latter’s absence both confirms the autonomy of the problematic object and accounts for the creative frustration of the questions asked of it. At the same time, this initial moment of secularization also precludes the development and deployment of subjectivity as such, and of the intricate dilemmas of projection and anthropomorphism, the confusions that result when we are able to begin wondering about the very source of the answers themselves: the mark of a humanization and socialization so extensive that, as Ann puts it, ‘we’ll wonder . . . why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces’ (R, 142). Is this to say that the realistic moment must always betray a certain naivety, a certain absence of reflexivity, an attention to the object too intent to register the operation of our own mental categories in the process? In that case, or so the canonical account runs, realism’s sequel modernism will date precisely the emergence of that new reflexivity and categorial consciousness. It is a reproach (or at least a historical diagnosis) which ought presumably also to be extended to language itself, in order to gauge the full

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extent of this precarious situation and the fragility of the realist moment in general. For the very unexplainable, in Sax’s sense, the evocation of those problematic entities outside ourselves whose density refuses to answer our questions, the crucial event or occasion of the unsolvable mystery as such— these are all constructions of the realist’s language, and presumably, particularly when we have to do with a novel, a human artefact constructed in advance, after the fashion of the classic mystery novelist who initially devises a sequence of events designed to be as provisionally unintelligible as possible. In that case, literary realism is a trick and a deceit, which has to collapse as soon as the idea of fiction dawns on its reader. The unexplained presumably has to lie outside of language; even if the very illusion of the unexplained and the unexplainable is itself produced by language in the first place. And this is even more visible when we come to the most philosophically ambitious fictions: the tree-root, for example, in Sartre’s Nausea5 which is supposed to stand for the absolute Not-I, and to resist and unveil the feebleness of the adjectives with which we try to seize and evoke it. Is the existential narrative still a realism, then? I think so, but it comes at the moment in which the various initial realisms have passed over into ontology; it is an ontological realism, as we shall see in a moment. What threatens our belief in realism today, and yet perhaps stimulates newer and even more desperate forms of realism, is our widespread conviction (which owes as much to Sartre as to anybody else) about the ‘constructedness’ of reality as such—the constructedness of scientific fact fully as much as of social institutions, the construction of gender and of the subjective fully as much as that of the objective categories through which we intuit the allegedly still real world. In that case everything is human, and the formerly unexplainable, the formerly contingent and resistant, will recede uniformly against the horizon of a complete humanization and a complete socialization, of the awareness of the omnipresence of praxis and production in the seeming autonomy of what lies outside us. Thus, even the tree-root must wane and fade away in its Being when we incorporate the longer historical view into our dealings with nature: in particular, a knowledge of the historical invention and production of plant life by emergent human society. At that point, then, presumably, everything we have hitherto considered to be natural and organic becomes as manufactured as the cityscape itself: and this is certainly a radical defamiliarization that much of science fiction has attempted to convey. If the tree and its roots are not the result of such ancient domestication, as it were the dogs among plant life, then this form tends to separate itself out, not as a messenger of some unknowable Being, but rather merely as a kind of archaic symbol:

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The Mediterranean tree, the tree of the Greeks . . . Each tree was like an animal holding its plumage up into the wind, its knobby legs thrust into the ground. A hillside of plumage flashing under the wind’s onslaught, under its fluctuating gusts and knocks and unexpected stillnesses, all perfectly revealed by the feathering leaves. (B, 187)

On the other hand, one can also evoke a more dialectical construction, a production by the negative, as when even wilderness itself—‘desert’ in its archaic sense of the emptiness of people—waste, the radically non-human in earthly nature, is itself brought into being and generated by the emergence of the fact of the human—the jar on the Hill—in its midst: It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.6

This was Marx’s great reminder to Feuerbach, when he invited him to look out on to the Roman Campagna: So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production, the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists that, were it interrupted for only a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing.7

Behind the theory of social construction, therefore, lies praxis and human production itself, which makes a mockery of realism’s staged mystery stories, its fictive astonishment at encountering the ‘resistance’ of a reality it has itself cooked up in another avatar. The thought then drifts across the mind, like the proverbial cloud no bigger on the horizon than a hand, and in the form of what is as yet a merely speculative perplexity, whether precisely that production and its story, the very construction of otherness itself, the history of praxis and the resistances it must transform in its turn— whether those narratives at the second degree, or better still at the level of preconditions—might not yield a realism in its own right, comparable to yet different from the more familiar realisms whose secrets we have been trying to surprise. Production, praxis, even construction as such, in fact require the resistance of some initial raw material, diffused through the situation which itself takes shape only under the pickaxe of the original project: it is a formula that combines both requirements, that of the confrontation of an unyielding set of elements, to be inventoried and described, that of the human pressure that will gradually give them names and the appearance, if not yet of a city, at least of its quarry and foundation pit, an immense building site whose future skyline is still unknown.

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This is, at any rate, the ambiguous space in which the Mars trilogy is uniquely positioned, wedged in between the moments of otherness and production, between geology and biology, rock and plant, impact crater and tented village. Time is inscribed, in this spatial novel, as the marker of ‘emergent properties’ (B, 343), of the radically unexpected and unpredictable, which is to say of contingency and ontological resistance in the realm of temporality and of change itself; hitherto static descriptions of the outside world are thus already secretly historical: The flowers were mounted on little mossy cushions or florettes, or tucked among hairy leaves. All the plants hugged the dark ground, which would be markedly warmer than the air above it; nothing but grass blades stuck higher than a few centimeters off the soil. He tiptoed carefully from rock to rock, unwilling to step on even a single plant. He knelt on the gravel to inspect some of the little growths, the magnifying lenses on his face-plate at their highest power. Glowing vividly in the morning light were the classic fellfield organisms: moss campion, with its rings of tiny pink flowers on dark green pads; a phlox cushion; five-centimeter sprigs of bluegrass, like glass in the night, using the phlox taproot to anchor its own delicate roots . . . there was a magenta primrose, with its yellow eye and its deep green leaves, which formed narrow troughs to channel water down into the rosette. Many of the leaves of these plants were hairy. There was an intensely blue forget-me-not, the petals so suffused with warming anthocyanins that they were nearly purple—the color that the Martian sky would achieve at around 230 millibars, according to Sax’s calculations on the drive to Arena. It was surprising there was no name for that color, it was so distinctive. Perhaps that was cyanic blue. (G, 150)

Here the very colours are events in their own right, the yellow eye of the primrose ‘looks back at you’ (Rimbaud), the unnamed blue almost speaks to you, like a word on the tip of the tongue. Colour is here on Mars already defamiliarized and made strange, pre-prepared for further dramas of meaning, as we shall see. Meanwhile, the various traits themselves hover on the strategic faultline between the symbolic and the contingent, between meaning and being: blocking off a space of undecidability which is unexpectedly narrative: So he dove back into studying plants. Many of the fellfield organisms he was finding had hairy leaves, and very thick leaf surfaces, which helped protect the plants from the harsh UV blast of Martian sunlight. These adaptations could very well be examples of homologies . . . or they could be examples of convergence . . . And these days they could also be simply the result of bioengineering . . . There was a Biotique lab in Elysium, led

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by a Harry Whitebrook, designing many of the most successful surface plants, especially the sedges and grasses, and a check in the Whitebrook catalogue often showed that his hand had been at work, in which case the similarities were often a matter of artificial convergence, Whitebrook inserting traits like hairy leaves into almost every plant he bred. (G, 160)

Art then, rather than nature: the hairy leaves are like the traits of style of a distinctive painter, which help to authenticate this or that doubtful canvas. Now suddenly otherness falls away, and we have to do with the mediation of human artefacts, to be scrutinized not for natural laws and evolutionary processes but rather for intentions and forensic responsibility. Indeed, all this later on unexpectedly comes to life in a different way, when Harry Whitebrook appears on the scene in person, in flesh and blood so to speak (B, 214); he has moved on to experimentation with animal life, and rather large animal life at that, and Ann thinks of assassinating him, as one of the great criminals of terraforming. Yet the apparition has a rather different effect from this mystery-story one: rather like those rare moments in the novel when God, or the Author, make their appearance in person—the visit to the corporate office at the end of Frank Norris’s The Octopus, or the desperate appearance in the writer’s study of one of the doomed characters of Miguel de Unamuno’s Mist—more than a mere figure in the carpet this, a kind of ultimate chance to ask the ultimate questions, to unravel the fabric of the universe by tugging on this tantalizing loose thread. It is what the Romantics called irony, in the heightened or sublime sense of the I behind the not-I—the lantern bobbing through the woods towards the cabin in which the terrified characters of C. D. Grabbe (in Scherz, Satire, Ironie, und tiefere Bedeutung) attempt to hide, warning the audience, as the curtain is about to fall, that the newcomer is in fact Grabbe himself, ‘the author of this damned play!’ Yet such Romantic irony is rarely understood to be the logical outcome of any really consequent realism: here, I believe that its ghostly presence rather marks the faultline between realism and something else, which I will call ontology, and into which the inventory of otherness and resistance can logically develop, when realism is conceived in a religious or metaphysical mode. It is an outcome which will not surprise students of film theory, where the ontological strains both in Bazin and in Kracauer have a religious solemnity and promise a ‘redemption of physical reality’.8 This ontological alternative is more difficult to project and to achieve in narrative literature as such, where an approach to the visible and the tactile is mediated by language and must generally be keyed by interpretive signals (thus Heidegger’s examples are mainly those of lyric poetry).9 In the Mars trilogy, however, and in science fiction generally, it is the possibility of separating off the elements of human labour from the underlying conditions

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of Being itself which makes both dimensions available for celebration. Thus it has been observed about Robinson Crusoe that its mythical status of origins, of an absolute new beginning and the philosophical blank state of human culture and civilization, depended on some initial prestidigitation: not only is the island occasionally visited by other people and cultures, but above all Crusoe himself is able to salvage a good deal of Europe from the shipwreck, and to stock his island refuge in advance with a variety of tools and materials, in other words with stored human labour. But this inventory is not only obvious, it is foregrounded in the Mars trilogy, where to the Whitmanesque list—‘an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, etc., etc.’, (R, 96)—a wholly different preview, a synthesizing perspective, is added: ‘ “You know what this is,” Nadia said to Sax Russell one evening looking around her warehouse, “it is an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces” ’ (R, 96). Crusoe’s atomized individualism makes it hard for him to feel about his laden yet doomed ship what disassembling the Ares suggests to its settler-passengers: ‘like dismantling a town and flinging the houses in different directions’ (R, 78). Crusoe must meanwhile produce his own internal division of labour: the Ares brings a collective one with it, and Mars itself generates whole new kinds of tasks, competencies, métiers and vocations (my favourite one is the new art of ‘cliffside trailmaking’ which Nirgal encounters in the course of his joggings and ramblings around the planet (B, 368)). ‘Terraforming’ then retroactively includes all those implements, all those receptacles of human value, and it becomes the fundamental dividing line between realism as the narrative of human praxis and ontology as the traces of Being itself: two formal or generic possibilities which thereby reinforce each other, in so far as production requires some preexistent being on which to do its work, while Being itself can be detected only in the spaces that human praxis spares, in the evanescent chance at origins that time and history inexorably efface. It is therefore scarcely surprising that the trilogy should inscribe this its structural condition of possibility within the narrative itself: it is something like the modernist feature of this ‘realistic’ text, its mode of autoreferentiality, in other words, of designating its own unique process of production, and reproducing the form of the text within its themes. In something of the same fashion we have already observed the way in which the theme of the longevity treatment as it were authorizes the length of the trilogy itself and replaces the latter’s temporality within its narrative, in the form of memory and forgetfulness and the structure of the brain. Terraforming now finds its internal marker and as it were its interpretant and its organ of resonance in

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the allegorization of two specific characters, Ann and Hiroko, who become the symbols and monuments, larger than life, of the pro and the con of this new productive process. It is true that all of the central characters gradually become allegorized in similar ways; ‘in the arguments on Earth, many people began to use the colonists’ names as a kind of shorthand for the various positions’ (R, 151): so that their collective relations project the intricate political constellations and multiple oppositions of the work, while individually they survive and redouble themselves over the course of the narrative, becoming their own legends or—what is probably more significant in a work in which longrange communication is also a significant issue—their own media images. Yet perhaps some supplementary word should be offered here about the talents and ‘specialties’ of this particular writer, whose affinity for individual sports like skiing is also evident in other works and has its bearing on the veritable anthology of physical modes of appropriating the planet here. What must also be mentioned in that respect is the unique narrative sociability he shares with Pynchon and Delany, the preference, over states of individual introspection (although not, as we have seen, of perception), for collective zaniness and the manic interaction of a host of different characters, in a gamut that ranges from the late-night party all the way to revolution itself. At any rate, it is clear that tension between the characters is a precondition for such moments of collective euphoria and the gift of tongues.10 Multicultural liberals (like John Boone) are opposed to Machiavellian operators (like Frank Chalmers, for whom politics ‘was all damage control’ (G, 442)), themselves both opposed to professional mediators (like Art Randolph, responsible for the original Dorsa Brevia declaration and then the first constitution itself), all of their forces and positions then recirculated through the women characters, Mars’s first president and first engineer, Nadia Cherneshevsky (along with that of her eventual partner the anarchist Arkady Bogdanov, her name offers a properly utopian autoreferentiality), and the first real leader of the expedition, Maya Toitovna, whose public interventions throughout the first two hundred years offer a political feverchart of Martian history. The ‘semiotic rectangles’11 with which Michel occasionally tries to sort out the ‘temperaments’ of his patients among this First Hundred are perhaps not complicated enough to do justice to the multiple interactions between them and the constant evolution and reorganization of those interrelationships themselves at higher levels; a process which not only reconfirms the doctrine of ‘emergent properties’ but perhaps in its own way also offers abstract cross-sections of ‘overdetermination’ at fixed stages in its own trajectory.

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The characters can also be typologized and allegorized, because their specializations are required for the novel’s heterogeneity, passing from the various sciences (Sax Russell) now to architectural and urban construction (Nadia) and now on to politics (Maya or Frank). But the structural allegory develops around two central figures who are both marginal to the central historical movement of things and indispensable to the struggle over meanings which is also a part of that movement. Both are in that sense forces of negativity, Ann Clayborne because she herself implacably personifies refusal and opposition, Hiroko because her ultimate incarnation and avatar seems to have become absence itself: she negates empirical reality in the spirit of an ideal, while Ann seeks to undermine it in the political activism of an opposition to activism and an attempt to end history itself in a different way, by bringing change and ‘progress’ to a halt. For terraforming ought to constitute the utopian moment par excellence of this grand historical adventure, a global equivalent of that ‘flowering tree’ which signalled the passage from winter to spring in Morris’s News from Nowhere,12 as its protagonist woke out of the sleep of his miserable ‘historical’ London. But even if the inspection of plant life is one of the keenest events in this trilogy, the celebration of the coming of life is scarcely unanimous. Ann is the place of this particular great refusal, which it is essential to grasp as an affirmation as well and the very space of the alternative, if not indeed the original ontology. ‘A mask of anger’, she is also a figure of desperate mourning and silence; her misery and unhappiness persists throughout her surface activities, as geologist and also de facto party chief—it is the most tangible expression of the irreversible loss which is also the colonization of Mars. And it is no doubt this persistence of a grief that cannot be resolved that makes her into more than an allegory of melancholy in its most morbid Freudian sense; her gaunt and unappeasable face suggests that she is ridden and inhabited by the incubus of a characterological defect which the others want to explain psychologically: ‘I think it is a denial of life. A turning to rock as something she could trust. She was mistreated as a girl, did you know that?’ (B, 44). Indeed, she comes to stand for death, from which she herself escapes by merest accident (‘the long runout’—G, 100; the enforced longevity treatment—B, 83; the emergence unscathed from the hopeless civil war—B, 27). Yet perhaps this is to mistake the irrevocability of death for a rather different kind of historical irreversibility—the fact that Mars is henceforth tainted and can never be returned to any pristine state, no matter what conservationist movements spring up as a second best in Ann’s wake. Indeed, one’s impression is that the ‘original’ planet speaks less often directly to its settlers than their own future projects for it: it must come as a pause and a shock in order to be seen:

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truly giant walls flanked him on both sides, dark brown slabs riven by a fractal infinity of gullies and ridges. At the foot of the walls lay huge spills of ancient rockfall, or the broken terracing of fossil beaches. In this gap, the Swiss road was a line of green transponders, snaking past mesas and arroyos, so that it looked as if Monument Valley had been relocated at the bottom of a canyon twice as deep and five times as wide as the Grand Canyon. The sight was too astonishing for John to be able to concentrate on anything else, and for the first time in his journey he drove all day with Pauline [the computer] off. (R, 236)

Does this very astonishment not confirm Ann’s suspicion that the First Settlers ‘have never even seen Mars’ (R, 160), but only their own faces, their own projections, even in the guise of life forms engineered and implanted by human beings? Ann’s ‘mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy’ (R, 490). It would be wrong to think of her relationship to this planet as some purely aesthetic or contemplative one, however: for she is in a way its historian and the student of its archaic palimpsest: ‘To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own long past: that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s close observation and study, and by her own native gift, her love for it’ (B, 79). Here too the romance of causation and the story of production transform so many visual and natural curiosities into deep time: the fantastic pressures engendered by the impact had resulted in all manner of bizarre metamorphoses, the most common being giant shattercones, which were conical boulders fractured on every scale by the impact, so that some had faults you could drive into, while others were simply conical rocks on the ground, with microscopic flaws that covered every centimeter of their surfaces, like old china . . . shattercones that had landed on their points and stood balanced; others that had had the softer material underneath them eroded away, until they became immense dolmens; giant rows of fangs; tall capped lingam columns, such as the one known as Big Man’s Hardon; crazily stacked strata piles, the most prominent of them called Dishes in the Sink; great walls of columnar basalt, patterned in hexagons; other walls as smooth and gleaming as immense chunks of jasper. (G, 421)

I think that the philosophical debate is thus poorly posed if we stage it in terms of the death wish, or of ‘a desperate attempt to stave off the present moment; to stave off history’ (B, 79), since the reading of the historical record is inscribed in such ontological meditation, and even the contemplation of Mars’s pristine surface in that sense offers materials for ‘a poem

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that includes history’, as Pound liked to put it. Heidegger is there, meanwhile, to show that the ‘opening onto Being’ need not be exclusively restricted to the inorganic or to rock surfaces; although we need to juxtapose his accounts with the august later poetry of McDiarmid: All is lithogenesis—or lochia, Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree, Stones blacker than any in the Caaba, Cream-colored caen-stone, chatoyant pieces, Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige, Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform . . . I must begin with these stones as the world began.13

It seems to me that the only way to do justice to this significant philosophical component of the trilogy is to grasp the anti-humanism inherent in all ontology, from the religious varieties all the way to secular ontologies like that of Heidegger. We have not done with the great debates around humanism that were conducted in the 1960s, even though such official themes seem to have receded into the archives of fashion. But we cannot yet assess this antihumanist ontology until we take account of its great alternative, the ‘areophany’ of Hiroko, who stands for greenness—viriditas—and life, and whose vitalism thus seems to oppose Ann’s death urge in all respects: ‘Life is so much spirit, Hiroko used to say. It was a very strange business, the vigor of growing things, their tendency to proliferate, what Hiroko called their green surge, their viriditas, (G, 153). Yet even this identification with the organic and the biological is somewhat discredited in advance by the presence of genetic engineering (just as the claim to Being of rocks was by their history). Yet just as life does not simply run parallel to the organic and to dead matter, so also Hiroko’s story is scarcely symmetrical to that of Ann; and if the latter becomes a political symbol (and a virtual allegory), Hiroko’s transmutation into a virtual (Mars) goddess is both comparable and yet very different indeed. Nor does her modest first appearance as a rather withdrawn Japanese botany expert, nor even the lush arrangements of her spaceship farm (or the rumours about her ‘male harem’, a collection of alleged sperm donations from members of the crew), presage the surprise of her disappearance, along with a whole breakaway group of followers, including a stowaway from Earth (the legendary Coyote-to-be). But the significance of this secession is enhanced by evidence of long and careful planning: caches stored around Mars’s surface and undetectable from the air, and the wondrous sanctuaries under domes of ice, in which bamboo structures nestle among greenhouses (‘the green world inside the white’, as Nirgal thinks (G, 7)), slowly project the image of a genuine alternative world

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(‘they probably wanted to get free of us. Make something new. What you and Arkady say you want, they really wanted’ (R, 226)), and generate a utopia within the utopia of the Mars colony. They also invest her person with an authority not far from superstition; so that the staged reappearances at crisis moments in the planet’s history are politically influential as well as dramatic: A string of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcano. They were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries . . . When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a silence fell. ‘That’s Hiroko’, Nadia said suddenly over the common band. (R, 332).

Hiroko is thus the leader of a social and political sect, but also an authority figure for the larger Green movement; her well-nigh legendary status is meanwhile to be understood as the component of a cultural politics as well, as when she systematically develops and encourages a kind of Mars ritual during the great organizing congresses: ‘Hiroko . . . seems an alien consciousness, with entirely different meaning for all the words in the language, and, despite her brilliance at ecosystem design, not really a scientist at all, but rather some kind of prophet’ (G, 115). Yet it is not particularly any personal ambition that is involved (we are told again and again of her impersonal relationship to her followers and her children, her relative indifference to individuals) but rather the sense, conscious or unconscious, that social cohesion is cemented, as the term suggests, by re-ligio, and therefore that the unique relationship the settlers need to develop to Mars must be sealed and strengthened by a ritual attachment to the planet of the type that some Terran ecological and feminist groups have tried to develop around the mythic entity of Gaea. (The appearance of a ‘feral’ community of intentionally primitive hunters on Mars also suggests Ernest Callenbach’s inclusion, in Ecotopia, of an archaic ritual of rivalry and physical violence as a collective steam-valve: in the Mars trilogy, however, the ferals merely designate one alternative possibility among others, as, indeed, does Hiroko’s ‘new religion’.) All this is of course heightened by the mystery of her disappearance and presumed death in the firestorm at Sabishii; after which her reappearance, to rescue Sax in the snowstorm (B, 57), is only the first in many rumoured sightings, on Earth itself, back on Mars and even in the outer planets and satellites. But it is obviously as the spiritual leader of the Greens that the figure of Hiroko takes on an ideological meaning comparable to Ann’s. No doubt we need to gloss these political terms, about whose traditional Terran meanings the Mars trilogy has some tricks to play on us. For if Earth’s ecological

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movements have come to be designated as Green, it takes but a little reflection to understand that the comparable movement of conservation on Mars will be called Red; and that it is Ann’s extreme or radical position, that the original Mars should be maintained in its pristine shape, without breathable atmosphere or plant life, that is the truly ‘ecological’ political ideology. On Mars, then, the ‘Greens’ are the party of progress and as it were development in its bad, industrial sense: they stand for the ‘terraforming’ of the planet and the loss, as it were and as we have seen above, of its ancient Being and meaning; never mind for the moment that there are clearly a whole range of technologies available to do this, and thus a whole range of Green ideologies and Green versions of ‘respect for the planet’ (the most frequently mentioned compromise, unacceptable to Ann herself—until the very end?—is the proposal to limit breathable atmosphere up to a certain distance alone, so that above that mark the Martian landscape will retain its original desolation and impact formations). Hiroko’s notion of ‘viriditas’ can thus be seen as a kind of ideological compensation: the construction of an image of Martian life that might win the same kind of ecological adherence and loyalty as Ann’s more obvious and literal appeal to what really once was. (But it should be noted that, latterly, Ann herself feels the ideological and political need to invent a Red version of ‘viriditas’, a viriditas of rock (B, 558), a paradoxical concept that seemed physically realized in advance by the green glow of Uranus (B, 434).) Still, Ann’s ‘Reds’ are a violent bunch, whose advocacy of ‘armed struggle’ will certainly suggest Terran analogies; while Hiroko’s ‘Greens’ remain as vitalist as any of those so designated on Earth. I think we should not exaggerate the narrative temptation to reconcile these positions in some final, ideological ‘happy ending’: it is true that something analogous is acted out on that symbolic level of colour on which we have commented, in one of the novel’s most striking descriptions: Right next to the pond were patches of dark green succulent leaves, dark red at their edges. Where the green shaded into red was a color he couldn’t name, a dark lustrous brown stuffed somehow with both its constituent colors. He would have to call up a color chart soon, it seemed; lately when looking around outdoors he found that a color chart came in handy about once a minute. Waxy almost-white flowers were tucked under some of these bicolored leaves. Farther on lay some tangles, redstalked, green-needled, like beached seaweed in miniature. Again that intermixture of red and green, right there in nature staring at him. (B, 54)

But the name for this unnameable colour is Utopia, which stares insistently back at us from the Mars trilogy just as it does at Sax.14 The utopian text is

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not supposed to produce this synthesis all by itself, or to represent it: that is a matter for human history and for collective praxis. It is supposed only to produce the requirement of the synthesis, to open the space into which it is to be imagined. And this is the spirit in which the various political ‘solutions’ of the Mars trilogy are also to be evaluated: that they are numerous, and contradictory or even irreconcilable, is I believe an advantage and an achievement in a contemporary utopia, which must also, as Darko Suvin has pointed out, stage an implicit debate with the objections and ideological and political prejudices of its readers. Indeed, Suvin’s originality, as a theorist of both SF and utopias all at once, is (among other things) not merely to have linked the two generically; but also to have conjoined the SF and utopian critical tradition with the Brechtian one, centring on estrangement (the so-called V-effect), and to have insisted not merely on the function of SF and Utopia to ‘estrange’, to produce a V-effect for the reader from a normal ‘everyday’ common-sense reality, but also to do so ‘cognitively’ (a no less Brechtian component of the definition). The reassertion of the cognitive means, as we said at the outset, a refusal to allow the (obvious) aesthetic and artistic status of the SF or utopian work to neutralize its realistic and referential implications: so we do want to think about ‘real’ science when we read these pages (and not only about the ‘mimesis’ of science in the bad dismissive sense Plato gave that term), and by the same token we want to be able to think about ‘real’ politics here and not merely about its convincing or unconvincing ‘representation’ in these episodes, which dramatize our ideological objections and resistances to Utopia fully as much as they satisfy our impulses towards it. Unlike the ‘monological’ utopias of the tradition, which needed to dramatize a single utopian possibility strongly because of its repression from Terran history and political possibility, this more ‘dialogical’ one includes the struggle between a whole range of utopian alternatives, about which it deliberately fails to conclude. If the Mars trilogy is ‘realistic’, then, on the strength of its inner reinvention of production as such, and ‘modernist’ in so far as it then systematically designates that process of production as such, we must also insist on its properly utopian structure as a kind of ‘world reduction’ in which not merely breathable atmosphere but custom, human relationships and finally political choices are pared down to the essentials and represented in a kind of zero degree. It is an argument that can be staged negatively, by an analysis of one of the great generic set-pieces of this narrative of coexisting worlds, and one which in genuine modernist fashion designates the utopian genre by its very exercise, namely the obligatory return tourist trip to Earth itself (which can be compared to the more central journey in Le

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Guin’s The Dispossessed, and also to the equivalent in Brian Aldiss’s quite different and non-utopian Helliconia trilogy). Here indeed, we find estrangement effects within the estrangement effects, and as it were in a mise en abyme that according to Gide’s formula inverts the thematics of the surrounding work with a kind of telescopic precision. Here ‘terraforming’ is still central—that is to say the existence of a layer of breathable atmosphere—yet its Terran equivalent suddenly becomes more vivid than the not insignificant accompanying problem of gravity (into which the Mars settlers slowly seem to grow): The air was salty, hot, clangorous, heavy . . . There was a doorway glowing with light. Slightly dizzy with the effort, [Nirgal] walked out into a blinding glare. Pure whiteness. It reeked of salt, fish, leaves, tar, shit, spices: like a greenhouse gone mad. (B, 139)

A landing in the Caribbean is evidently calculated to enhance the senses in general, assaulting them with the masks and costumes of Carnival and the sound of steel bands, and also with the lushness of green vegetation; yet the most ‘bodily’ of all the senses seems the most strategically symbolic in its dominance: the rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind . . . The sweet scent [of a flower necklace] clashed with the stinging salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable wind, tarred and spiced . . . The stench was of a greenhouse gone bad, things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything blazing in a talcum of light. (B, 140)

This sensorium acts out the coexistence of multiplicities, and heightens the existential shock and conjunction of simultaneities that in the thinner, poorer air of Mars are carefully separated out from one another: as a figure for earth’s population crisis, it also emits a utopian afterimage of some Martian solution. At any rate, it is aesthetically as well as politically unsurprising that it is precisely this structural parallelism that Nirgal should point out in his first address to the Terran welcomers: ‘Mars is a mirror’, he said in the microphone, ‘in which Terra sees its own essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away all but the most important things. What happened in the end was Terran through and through . . . we can most help the home planet by serving as a way for you to see yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity.’ (B, 141)

It should be added that this position is by no means shared by all the parties on Mars itself; and also that the theme of ‘immensity’ is itself some-

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thing of a defamiliarization, since so much about Mars—‘Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system’ (R, 86) or the canyons we have already seen which dwarf our own Grand Canyon—has been evoked in gigantistic terms (along with the accompanying mythologies of Big Man and Paul Bunyan, and, by inversion, the ‘little red people’). Now, however, unexpectedly, Nirgal in the Alps comes to ‘the sudden knowledge that Earth was so vast that in its variety it had regions that even out-Marsed Mars itself—that among all the ways that it was greater, it was greater even at being Martian’ (B, 159). These spatial and dimensional paradoxes are also, I think, hints about the peculiar reading methods we need to develop in order to navigate the structural peculiarities of utopian estrangement, which must separate us decisively from Earth before returning us to it. Indeed, if it were not too clever by half, it could be suggested that the other fundamental political preoccupation of the work is in this respect itself rather autoreferential. For it is important to understand that the debate over terraforming, and the symbolic opposition between Ann and Hiroko, is only one of the political axes around which the social and revolutionary drama of the book is fought: the other having to do with the independence of Mars from Earth, a classical Heinlein or SF theme15 which is deepened here by the more utopian consideration of a whole ‘change of self’ and the emergence of a New Martian on the order of Soviet New Man—the issue, in other words, of a cultural as well as a political revolution. We must indeed here recall the structural precondition of that social ‘blank slate’ upon which traditional utopias wrote their text: the radical separation of Utopia from historical reality, whether in the ‘great trench’ dug by More’s Utopus, or the ancient, now forgotten bloody revolution which ended capitalism long before the beginning of Morris’s News from Nowhere, or even the planetary flight that, in a few dilapidated spaceships, ferries Odo’s followers across to the unpromising twin planet Urras. But in the Mars trilogy this gesture remains suspended and incomplete: and the space elevator—brought down in one of the most spectacular revolutionary episodes (it wraps itself twice around the planet like a broken necklace) and then perpetually rebuilt, in Robinson’s answer to Ringworld and so many other ‘floating islands’—is the persistent emblem of the threat of Terran politics and intervention, and the dilemmas of autonomy and ‘delinking’ on Mars as well. In the traditional utopia it was the emblematic trench which ‘ended History’; here it is the attempt repeatedly to begin history over again which is the very subject of the work, and the other issue on which the various political parties and movements (some twenty are listed at B, 100) must necessarily take a stand.

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There is thus material here for any number of combinations, so that in the long run Greimas’s rectangle would seem to be more appropriate, after all, than dualisms of the Red/Green type (or even of Nirgal’s Green/White distinction: ‘in archetypal terminologies we might call green and white the Mystic and the Scientist . . . but what we need, if you ask me, is a combination of the two, which we call the Alchemist’ (G, 13). What complicates all these logically possible combination and permutation schemes is the movement of History itself, which slowly modifies the fundamental situations and crises themselves. On the one hand, the issues surrounding terraforming are themselves transformed when a minimal atmosphere is acquired and a botanical biosphere set in place (and also when the first big cities have been established): not only does the idea of returning to the ‘original’ planetary conditions come to seem conservative as well as unrealizable, the thawing of the aquifers and the dramatic unleashing of the great floods foretell the definitive emergence of some irreversibly blue Mars. As for the other axis, which relates the settlers to Earth itself and its power structures, here two changes on both sides modify it ceaselessly. Mars becomes populated and urban, and its younger generations take the premise of Martian independence for granted, so that, after the second—more officially successful—revolution to that effect, political debate turns around the degree to which even a token emigration should be allowed and Earth’s many dilemmas publicly acknowledged. But the very nature of Terran power has also evolved and been restructured over this period: an initial United Nations surveillance is undermined by the evolution of multinational corporations into trans- and then finally meta-nationals, with only a few enormous groups left, themselves divided into the traditional capitalistrapacious ones and a new more experimental type of corporate power more dependent on the World Court (the Praxis group), at the same time that the status of the nation-state begins to oscillate perilously between the nominal flag-renting countries and the few economic giants, later on displaced by the immensely populated states, particularly China and India, which support Martian independence at the same time that their overpopulation threatens it. The intricacies of these developments are then intensified by the threefold crisis of famine, the longevity treatment and its social consequences, and finally the break-up of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the disastrous rise in Terran sea-level. Yet the Mars trilogy does not narrate this grim series of unresolvable crises in any direct or chronicle-like fashion; rather, we learn to read it indirectly off Martian developments themselves and deduce the shifts in the Terran power-structure from the modification of political constellations which are the response and the result on Mars itself. It is a system which allows a novel disposition of the utopian and the

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dystopian, if you like: the latter reserved for the seemingly inevitable degradation of Terran conditions, the former the invention of a range of political positions in that ‘realm of freedom’ which is the Martian public sphere. It would not be possible to sort the immense proliferation of groups and movements out without distinguishing between the political, the social and the economic levels as such; and indeed on some first general assessment it becomes clear that groups can emerge around concerns centred in any one of these three areas. The political ones are most likely to have come into being in response to the crises of Terran geopolitics outlined above; while the social groups are more likely to organize around what have come in postmodernity to be called ‘lifestyle’ issues. And surely one of the vocations of the Mars trilogy is to have projected a ‘blank slate’ so immense that an unimaginable variety of such social micro-systems can be housed: the descriptive or botanical level of the allegory indeed gives us the clue here: The closer he looked, the more he saw; and then, in one high basin, it seemed there were plants tucked everywhere . . . The diversicolored palette of the lichen array; the dark green of pine needles. Bunched sprays of Hokkaido pines, foxtail pines, Sierra junipers. Life’s colors. It was somewhat like walking from one great roofless room to another, over walls of stone. A small plaza; a kind of winding gallery; a vast ballroom; a number of tiny interlocking chambers; a sitting room. Some rooms held krummholz bonsai against their low walls, the trees no higher than their nooks, gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level. Each branch, each plant, each open room, as shaped as any bonsai – and yet effortless. (G, 71)

The niches correspond to the varieties of social life, and ask us to fill them and to strain the utopian imagination itself for their tangible specification. One is reminded of Deleuze’s celebration of the niches of life forms in Fellini: ‘The honeycomb-presentation [“alvéoles”], the cubicled images, the huts, niches, cabins and windows’.16 On the other hand, from any postmodern perspective centred on the ‘new social movements’ or on micropolitics, the social experimentation here scarcely knows the frenzied baroque formations one finds, extensively, in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, or, intensively, in Delany’s Trouble on Triton (Olaf Stapledon, the great precursor in this respect, was perhaps reacting against racist ideologies, rather than anticipating this more properly 1960s spirit). Alongside these utopian projections, then, the Mars trilogy also draws on a variety of cultural ones, and, after the initial Cold-War ‘superstate’ division of power of the Ares, it is a variety of Terran ‘cultures’ in the national and anthropological sense that we are given to observe, from Arabs to Swiss to Japanese and South African

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(with Sufi interludes and Cretan overtones): indeed, few novels can have projected a global post-coloniality of such range and dimensions, in a spirit so alien to US parochialism and commodity universalism. As for the economic, to turn our attention to it is at first to recall a certain initial bemusement at Darko Suvin’s language (in the generic definition that we have taken as a motto): a ‘socio-political sub-genre’ . . . but why not a socio-economic one? Or does he mean to imply, on the one hand, that the ‘economic’ is a rather late mode of thinking and interpretation in human social and political thought and thereby in utopian thought as well? Yet utopias from Plato to More have specified an absence of private property as one of their defining characteristics. Or, on the other hand, does Suvin imply that some structural blindness of the utopia to economics as such betrays the fundamental limitation of the form? Or betrays the fundamental limitation of narrative itself? Yet there is no lack, in the Mars trilogy, of socialist and co-operativist alternatives and ideologies, among which anarchism and Bogdanov hold the pride of place, but also the Mondragon co-operatives in Spain. New economic systems are pioneered, the so-called ‘eco economics’, an elaborate calculation of value in terms of calories (R, 268–70, G, 316–17, B, 117–18, B, 240); or more rudimentary gift or barter economies (‘it’s a sort of twotrack thing, where they can still give all they want, but the necessities are given values and distributed properly’ (G, 34)). In the old days, the revival of these various schemes and their ideological authorities could often be shown to be an anti-Marxist strategy and a deployment of ‘utopian socialism’ in exactly the spirit of Marx’s critique of it. Today, it seems more likely to serve as a kind of collective left anamnesis and a reflowering of elaborate and varied left traditions and alternatives that were historically undeveloped, not least owing to the hegemony of Marxism itself. Leninism does not in fact loom large here, although we are told about the existence of palaeo-Marxist communes and splinter groups; but I think that has as much to do with revolutionary strategies as it does with Marxian economics; and indeed the debate about the nature of revolution itself is unsurprisingly one of the central themes of this trilogy, which tells the story of several of them. In that respect, the word does seem to be confined to a very narrow sense indeed when we are told repeatedly by significant characters that revolution as such is outmoded, and is indeed itself a Terran concept (‘it never even worked on Earth, not really’ (R, 315)) and are offered various substitutes, such as the notion of ‘phase change’ from physics (G, 497). The Leninist revolutionary party seems, however, to be the main target here, as political movements on Mars are grasped in terms of the dynamics of mass demonstrations, as in the Iranian revolution, where

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so great a percentage of the population is in the streets (B, 598) that the only alternative for the power structure would be, as Brecht put it, ‘to dissolve the people and elect another one’. Yet this politics of the mass movement yields splendid Eisensteinian images, such as the immense line of people against the sky, leaving the drowned city and thus also symbolically ‘walking away’ (G, 523) from the old system, the old way of life. What identifies the Mars trilogy as a utopia, none the less, rather than a political novel about recurrent revolution as such, is the place of its unexamined premise, which in the traditional utopian text is to be found in the great trench itself, the separation, as has been said above, from everyday Terran reality.17 The politico-economics of Mars is here and throughout mainly anti-capitalist, although it should be noted that the liberal corporatist ideology of the Praxis metanational is given a very sympathetic hearing indeed. Yet private property has already disappeared from the Martian environment, or, rather, was never implanted there in the first place. This is then the sense of the so-called Werteswandel: ‘right here on Mars we have seen both patriarchy and property brought to an end. It’s one of the greatest achievements in human history’ (B, 346). Yet it is an achievement that must constantly be renewed, since one of the latest political problems is the wave of Terran immigrants who cannot be assimilated because they have not absorbed such changes (the issue of some properly cultural revolution). And it is also a structural presupposition of this utopia, since we do not ever witness its evolution as a narrative event; perhaps indeed we could not do so. Yet utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them.

Afterword Of the many other things that could be said about the Mars trilogy, I want only to add this one which responds, as one always must, to Robert C. Elliott’s test of the imaginative qualities of a given utopian text, namely their capacity to imagine properly utopian art works.18 I do like the mysterious town of Medusa, in which solid blocks of whitish rock are surrounded by statues: ‘small white figures stood motionlessly between these buildings, on white plazas ringed by white trees’ (G, 265). But that is a relatively uncharacteristic note in this mainly ‘realist’ utopia. So I prefer to submit this one: Mangalavid was showing the premiere performance of an aeolia built by a group in Noctis Labyrinthus. The aeolia turned out to be a small building, cut with apertures which whistled or hooted or squeaked, depending

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Notes 1 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 61. 2 Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (1994). Henceforth, all references to the trilogy—Red Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996)—are given within the text with the abbreviations, R, G and B. 3 See Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, especially chapters 3 (‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ and 6 (‘On the Materialist Dialectic’). 4 Ibid., p. 217: an ‘unevenness (in dominance) of the ever-pre-given complex whole’. 5 Jean-Paul Sarte, La nausée in Oeuvres romanesques pp. 150–60 (journal notation begining ‘Six heures du soir’). 6 Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ in The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens, p. 46. 7 Karl Marx ad Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 46. 8 André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. H Gray, pp. 9–16; and Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality. 9 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. 10 But I must also note its opposite, in the frozen and chaotic results of the first floods: ‘The landscape itself was now speaking a kind of glossolalia’ (R, 495). 11 See A.J Greimas, On Meaning. 12 ‘It was winter when I went to bed last night, and now, by witness of the riverside trees, it was summer, a beautiful bright morning seemingly of early June’ (William Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 3. 13 Hugh McDiarmid, ‘On a Raised Beach’ in Douglas Dunn, ed., The Faber Book of Twentieth-century Scottish Poetry, pp. 56–57. 14 ‘“But where is socialism?” Dvanov remembered, and peered into the murk of the room, searching for his thing’ (Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, p. 79); and see the discussion in my The Seeds of Time, pp. 73–128. 15 As, classically, in Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). 16 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, II p. 89. 17 See my ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, pp. 75–101. 18 Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia.

Afterword: With Sober, Estranged Eyes DARKO SUVIN

And then all of a sudden this evidence appears, on the one hand, that I no longer have time to try several lives. I have to choose my last life, my vita nuova; and on the other hand, I have to leave this tenebrous state where the wear and tear of repeated work and mourning have conducted me. Barthes, 1978 A passing emperor once saw a peasant planting dates and oculating a date tree, though this bears fruit only after a hundred years. The emperor was amazed and asked the peasant, Little man, in whose interest are you planting? The poor peasant answered, Your Grace, for god and those born after. Anonymous sixteenth-century German anecdote

Through the Deepening Shadows Whatever is stable and established evaporates, whatever is sacred is desecrated, and people are finally forced to consider with sober eyes their position in life and their mutual relationships. The Communist Manifesto, 1848

If You Read This Book for Three Hours, Forty Jumbo Jets Will Have Crashed in That Time One night recently I couldn’t sleep and on the well-supplied television set of my rented Berlin apartment I found a strange channel where usually there was blackout. Its news reported that three hundred jumbo jets,

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mainly carrying women and children, had crashed that day with total loss of life. And to horrify me further, it commented that its researchers had found out this has happened every day for the last twenty years or so, and yet has never been reported on the other sixty-plus channels on the wonderful satellite web. Of course I assumed that this was a hoax akin to Poe’s newspaper ones or Orson Welles’s radio hoax where The War of the Worlds Martians came a-landing in the USA. But one look into the most trustworthy international sources showed me that my phantom channel was in all that matters (number of deaths) right, though the deaths were not by most advanced technology but only by its most ancient effect when used for class and other domination: hunger. These sources estimated in the mid-1980s that some forty million people die from hunger each year (make your own division to get to my jumbo crashes); and—I don’t know which is worse— that in 1996 ‘Nearly 800 million people do not get enough food, and about 500 million are chronically malnourished’.1 The notoriously too optimistic World Bank has similar estimates, which conclude that more than a thousand million people (yes, one billion!) were in the 1980s living below the poverty line of US$370 a year.2 This agonizing mass torture and murder spree, in comparison to which a swift death by aeroplane crash seems merciful, has been getting worse ever since the mid-1970s, but I have been unable to get full up-to-date numbers. If you will, as I beg you, meditate on this overwhelming fact, whose brute pressure and brutal thrust clearly overshadow anything else happening in our wondrous new postmodernist or better post-Fordist times, you may forgive me if I think it is not merely or even, I trust, primarily the approaching biological cessation of one’s ridiculously brief life—I have griefs not only with society but also with the universe, or at least our little sector of it— which roots my stance in a sense of profound urgency. Some of you may even grow inclined to attribute my sticking to Marx’s horizon of intelligent indignation at this unnecessary massified cruelty less to a personal aberration of an old (but not Old) Leftist than—as in the belatedly awakened Derrida—to a reasonable conclusion that central elements of the classical Marxian diagnosis are cognitive (rational and emotional) instruments that our age cannot do without: that is, until their ends are fulfilled in some way undreamt of by Marx himself.

Orwell, Thou Shouldst Be with Us at This Hour But might not the hungry after all revolt? I would if I were. You might think that revolt has died out with Leninism. But the ruthless rulers above us do not.

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A compassionate friend helped me this spring to take off the Web an illuminating and frightening text, ‘An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control’, written by Steve Wright of the Omega Foundation (UK), presumably from the work of a group. It is a realistic—indeed, given its semi-official status as a working document of a European Parliament organ, rather underplayed—glimpse into the future literally in store for us by all the armed powers of political control, and I could and probably ought to devote this whole Afterword to discussing it and a few other such glimpses, which are after all largely consubstantial with the efforts of best ‘awful warning’ SF (from Zamyatin, Orwell and the ‘new maps of hell’ through Bester, Le Guin, Russ, the Strugatskys, to Gibson, Cadigan and so forth), and leave the reader of this volume to place all contributions into the perspective opened by such texts. But this would not only trespass against our by now obsolete professional standards of isolating culture from politics (as the ScienceFiction Studies editors Csicsery-Ronay, Evans and Hollinger complained to me at the end of 1996 when refusing my article ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’, it would deal more with politics than with SF—as if the two can deep down be sundered). More to the point for me, it would sell short this volume’s contributions and what I have learned from them; and so I shall focus only briefly on (and take all quotes from) Wright’s ‘electronic pages’ 34–7, dealing with some ‘incapacitation weapons’ already waiting for us.3 Wright first reveals that even the ‘first generation incapacitation weapon’ of pepper gas was widely adopted by the FBI—and subsequently by a host of other countries, from Australia to India, and companies from Spain to the United Kingdom—on the basis of the OK given by the head of the FBI’s ‘Less-than-Lethal Weapons Programme’ (how’s that for Orwellian doublethink?); and Wright comments, ‘It has subsequently been revealed that [he] took a $57,000 bribe from a peppergas manufacturer to give the product Capstun the all clear’ (35), so that the matter is now being pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union. Pepper gas has, however, been reported as the source of death, subsequent to police or prison authorities’ spraying, of probably hundreds of people in the USA. It is lethal especially for people taking other drugs or subject to medicinal or physical obstruction of breathing passages; since I gather ‘other drugs’ means here anything from Aspirin on, while most police strangleholds entail obstruction of breathing, these two categories seem to cover most of us before and after contact with the policing forces. The US army concluded in a 1993 study that pepper gas has ‘mutagenic effects, carcinogenic effects, sensitization, cardiovascular and pulmonary toxicity, neurotoxicity . . .’, so that, recently, companies have noted with dismay its ‘potential for litigation’ (34–5). The second-generation weapons are, as we might expect from technology

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run wild in the service of repression and without any democratic control at all from below, not only more diverse but also much more frightening. They are driven by the US programmes in the 1990s—begun after a series of widely publicized glitches with outright killings, including the Waco mass deaths and the Somalia debacle—for fighting internal conflicts ‘nonlethally’. The new policy of ‘civil’—and of overall—militarization is avidly pushed by Right-wing radicals in the US army as well as by SF or SF-connected propagandists in outright or masked fiction such as Jerry Pournelle, Ben Bova, Harry Stine, Alvin Toffler or Janet and Chris Morris,4 and officially solicited by the US ‘Defense’ and ‘Justice’ Departments to the tune of millions of dollars per year. These weapons, classified as kinetic, chemical, optico-acoustic, microwave, disabling and paralysing technologies, are pursued with full speed in labs such as Oak Ridge, Livermore and Los Alamos. These have come up with pilot systems, which are being lobbied for hard and where possible patented by powerful companies of the military-technoscientific-media complex. A short list takes a page and a half in the WrightSTOA document: it registers the emphasis on pinpointing individuals in a crowd, and includes (I give only some samples): ●

●

●

● ●

●

●

●

ultra-sound or microwave systems that cause disorientation, vomiting and beshitting oneself high-intensity strobes and other visual techniques that induce epileptic fits an extensive range of pain-causing, disabling and paralysing chemicals with quick skin penetration, so that they work with one touch only human capture nets, electrified or laced with chemical irritant ‘lick ’em and stick ’em’ technology (for example, a foam gun) gluing the target’s hands and feet to the pavement laser weapons and radiator shells using gaseous plasma to cause blinding thermal guns working through a wall and raising body temperature to 107 ° F magnetosphere guns delivering magnetic field blows to the head (brain).

Corporate USA is enthusiastically responding to such projects with conferences of experts and accelerated Research-and-Development (does anybody remember Professor Leon Stover’s Right-wing definition of SF as the literature of R&D?). Nobody is much concerned with the fact that permanent disablement is no better than killing, or indeed that predicting when such a weapon will kill is in many cases scarcely possible. Pulling back its punches in a report that has to use diplomatic language, the STOA conclu-

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sion is, ‘The work done so far has led to dubious weapons based on dubious research, strongly influenced by commercial . . . considerations’ (37). In short, our main choice lies between total repression or (more realistically) a series of technologically fortified enclaves in Festung Western-andCentral Europe and Festung North America with ports and airlift bridgeheads on the poorer continents (especially where indispensable raw materials obtain). As can be seen in Piercy, Spinrad or Butler: a prime icebreaker of such newly cognitive SF, William Gibson, rightly remarked (after Oscar Wilde) that we are ‘living in an overlapping batch of SF scenarios . . . we live very deep in a strange fault-line of history and . . . big big things are going down’.5 I shall attempt at the end to sketch in why the potentialities of SF, as a part of an oppositional public opinion and domain, could be used to arrive at less gloomy scenarios.

With Sober Eyes I have devoted much time to schooling myself in the dry language of statistics and political economy these last years. Is this relevant for SF, which after all is playful fiction written by and for some middle social classes of the affluent North of Terra, which partly don’t feel and partly are conditioned not to feel the swelling tide of immiseration already above the waist? Yes, on the whole it clearly is relevant, I firmly believe: for isn’t the best SF about clairvoyance—literally, clear seeing—of what’s hidden yet advancing upon us? Like the second-generation paralysing weapons above, or like media-cum-computer-constructed personalities in Gibson’s Idoru? All of these are ‘the baby figure of the giant mass to come’ (Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, a meditation on stupid wars led by blind elites, with truth as the first casualty—on which I wrote my final BA paper, adopting Thersites’s stance). So if, as a basic example, one-seventh of people in the USA are officially under the poverty line—which, given the way official statistics go, means probably one-fifth, or about fifty million people—and if a disproportionate part of them are women, the young, the elderly, and some ‘ethnic’ groups, the good old ruling-class strategy of ‘divide and rule’ entails the feminization, greying and ‘racial rainbowing’ of poverty; can then this return of post-Fordism in some important ways to the nineteenth-century pre-Fordism, so that Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ are knocking on all our doors, not be noted in SF too? The two nations have fully returned to ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe and never gone from the rest of the South: now we can understand why there’s no SF there (why it abruptly collapsed in what was the USSR and the GDR), where the present swallows all future except more

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of the same. The clearest way to understand this is to look at the condition of women, the young and the other oppressed groups today as opposed to twenty-five years ago in Russia, or the Muslim world, or China. Or in most places of North America, where (as Lynne Segal argues for women) the huge gains made by a tiny percentage of people who have managed to enter the upper class dwindle in comparison to ‘a life of increasing frustration, impoverishment, and powerlessness for the rest’.6 Can this fail to affect deeply all significant fiction? It is true that, like most of us, SF isn’t exempt from frequent blindness to what’s already here, if obfuscated by our illusions, the blinkers we all wear (which have been foisted on us). Philip Dick, say, had an extra share of both clairvoyance and blindness, and I believe people like me rightly praised him loudly but also deplored his large blind spots. (He reciprocated by denouncing us to the FBI as Moscow agents.) And no doubt all of us have our own clairvoyances and blindnesses. But at any rate I am now faced with writing the afterword to what I am told should for overriding commercial reasons by no means be called a Festschrift but something functionally analogous to it (as gills are to lungs). Thus, I can only respectfully refer you to my recent or forthcoming works, and in the rest simply apply my strong feeling that it is high time for a sober look—as in Marx’s epigraph to this section. The bourgeois surgical cruelty quite non-ironically praised there is the midwife of a new condition Marx too confidently expects, where the illusion of holiness and the false, drugged euphoria to which it gives rise, as well as the concomitant illusion of permanence and fixity, are ‘profaned’, exposed to the eyes of people who rediscover the clear outlook of sobriety. It should be emphasized that Marx is here speaking of the heroic phase of the bourgeoisie as a class that is productively revolutionary; I’ve elsewhere argued how its (say) post-1848 ideological history is the history of that same occulting which Marx here also splendidly identifies, but now grown more complex by several historical turns of the mystifying screw.7 Thus ‘sober’ does not in Marx at all imply—nor would I wish to use it in the sense of—non-impassioned, it implies non-drugged, de-intoxicated, or in Brechtian terms de-alienated, ‘estranged’. It is particularly mandatory today, in the rampant ‘man is wolf to man’ post-Fordism, whose necessary pillar is illusionist brainwashing induced by the relentless barrage of all the media.8

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On This Work and on my Preceding Work What is the meaning of a book? Not what it argues, but what it argues with. Barthes, 1975 You may back off from the world’s woes, you’re free to do so and it lies in your nature, but perhaps this backing away is precisely the only woe that you might avoid. Kafka, ‘Reflections on Sin, Woe, Hope, and the Way’

On and around Philosophical History and Philology I’m grateful that the chapters in this book stimulated me to think of what I ‘really’ intended to do in my dealing with SF. I’m not sure I have the proper name for it, and anyway there may be many names depending on the stance of the beholder, but today it seems to me I’ve been trying to lay some fundaments for a philosophical history of SF. This is—I realized later— most akin to Walter Benjamin’s reconstruction or montage of historical material as philosophy,9 which also, and supremely, means the philosophy of bodies living together usually called politics. Immediately, many misunderstandings of this stance come to mind. Let me deny four of the most important and frequent ones. First, this is not pure theory: though I recall being dubbed a theory virtuoso by an Extrapolation commentator, and I confess there is a certain delight in the as it were zero-gravity acrobatics of theory, I’ve simply been forced to invent a theoretical toolkit in order to deal with SF history. I agree with Vico and Marx that the only science we may have (in Vico’s sense of scienza, knowledge or cognition) is the science of history. Second, I have spent much of my younger days arguing—within first the Titoist movement I belonged to and then the New Left I solidarized with— that the wild profusion of longer-range cognition, such as art, is necessarily in tension with the garden-variety or spear-point politics of getting things done right today or at the latest tomorrow.10 One can find this tension in Piercy’s undeservedly forgotten Dance the Eagle to Sleep, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or some Strugatsky works; and today at greatest length and with new insights in Kim Stanley Robinson’s great Mars trilogy, analysed with such acute sympathy in Fredric Jameson’s contribution to this volume. The tension is potentially very fruitful, and the medieval Catholic theology was forced to theorize it in its distinction between the ‘triumphant’ and ‘militant’ Churches. Art—movies, literature, even comics—always

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tends to use long-range or ‘triumphant’ horizons (which are not at all necessarily positive but only extreme, since the triumph of death is also possible, for example the fact that the horizons of liberation are for the present generation mainly closed). Thus it’s essential to keep constantly in mind the criteria constituted by a look backward from one’s furthest horizons, while at the same time not forgetting the imperfect but imperious needs of militancy to use all the possible chinks in the system right now—chinks never wholly absent, Benjamin’s omnipresent ‘weak messianic power’ (for example, the Zapatistas today). But if perverted into a dictatorship of Plato’s wise philosopher-king or the dictatorship—in practice much more frequent—of the security police, the tension is brutally flattened out. I note with some horror Parrinder’s recall of Patrick Moore’s advocacy of a scientific ‘thought police’ to vet the orthodoxy of SF, which of course proceeded from the impulse that animated many other similar restrictions, from the positivistic family-fare publishers of Verne and Heinlein to the zealous communist bureaucracies that Soviet and ‘Warsaw Pact’ SF had to fight. But I must also say that attempts by hostile critics to equate Marxism or socialism (for example my critical writings within those horizons) with a call for police repression have always elicited a wry smile from somebody who in the mid-1950s wrote leading articles, as an editor of the student weekly in an officially communist state, pleading (say) for a publication of Nineteen Eighty-four so that a proper discussion and critique of it might be publicly done in Yugoslavia (the publication happened later, the discussion did not). My dealings with the state security forces have, surprisingly, resulted only in two years’ internment (as a boy with my parents) by the lax and corruptible Italian army on an Adriatic island: I have been lucky. For I have, as a somewhat prominent anti-Stalinist and anti-Zhdanovian, been on the KGB’s blacklist from my tender days in 1948, and in the CIA–FBI files from about 1951 as a student activist engaged in international contacts.11 Third, if my stance is one of a philosophical history, it certainly is not a philosophy of anything (even of history). I’m not a philosopher but on the contrary very suspicious of what I might call ‘the silkworm theory of reasoning’, that is, drawing ideas or concepts from out of ideas or concepts in order to form a self-validating system—obviously irrefutable if the founding concepts are accepted but also obviously inapplicable to any brute, recalcitrant relationships those concepts cannot encompass. I began doubting the closed system as cocoon, including scientific cognition proceeding asymptotically toward absolute truth and knowledge, soon after getting a six-year science degree, and left it for the humanities. Last but not at all least: like Nietzsche, I have sometimes thought that the inscription on my grave (if anybody needed one) should be ‘DS, Philologist’.

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I chose to study literature—for there were no theatre or media studies in my antediluvian time—because I was and permanently am fascinated by and at ease with the ‘thick worlds’ of fiction. I’m a sucker for a good story: stories are a great invention of humankind, on a par with images, fire and the wheel. This is why I cannot stand postmodernists, who are telling one initially startling but by now rather boring story while denying they tell any. Or why, despite some impressive facets in his major series, I cannot follow the semantic and diegetic contortions of Gene Wolfe, fleeing the Master Narrative. One of the most important items of SF criticism, I’ve always thought, is Heinlein’s early essay on the Little Tailor and other patterns underlying SF, and I shamelessly confess I prefer a good story by Heinlein, Cherryh or Gwyneth Jones to most philosophies, since they show me worlds with actions, resistances and psychozoa for whom both mean something. This does not mean that a story cast from second-rate moulds of westerns and thrillers, or the pile-’em-up-high actions without resistances of Doc Smith, are better than one paragraph of Barthes or Wittgenstein or Dewey or Merleau-Ponty (to name some I’ve been trying to graft on Marxian growths): indeed the corruption of the potentially best is the worst (Lucifer). And so one of my greatest career regrets is that my historical analyses, say the whole second part of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction or the detailed correlation of the UK textual production and consumption from 1848 to 1885 in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (a book which I believe to be my methodologically highest achievement), have with rare exceptions— such as Brian Stableford—right up to today failed to excite the imagination of critics dealing with anybody from Lucian through Chesney to Capek: for the proof of the pudding is here. A thorough investigation of the theme of aliens, as perspicaciously approached in this volume by Peter Fitting, seems to me more valuable than all but the best generalities: as Marx and all East Asian thinkers said, the concrete—the theoretically understood particular—is always wiser and slyer than the abstract. At any rate, ever since I discovered the Russian formalists, translated and published (as also Zamyatin) by my friend Aleksandar Flaker in the heady early 1950 days of anti-Stalinist Titoism, I have held that art consists of shapes (what a ‘content’ is I do not to this day understand, and I mortally offended influential Zagreb University professors by saying so loudly). Any critique, philosophy, politics or revelation to come out of art must come out of the shapes (forms), or it won’t come. I was therefore amazed that one of the early, benevolent reactions to my work in Science-Fiction Studies was a little dialogic parable by R. M. Philmus, opposing Philologos (himself) to Ideaphilos (guess who). Had he listened to the original Greek, he might have discovered that Philologos means not only lover of speech or word but

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also of the logos, the transcendental Word, a philosophical idea I would never entertain. Meanwhile the ‘lover of ideas’ can be opposed to the ‘lover of word’ only if one believes that words are polluted by the concepts that inevitably organize them; or that ideas exist outside of words, a Platonically worded idea I’ve spent my life in combating. Anyway, ‘ideas’ are in such taboo debates always a codeword for ‘political ideas’, and more precisely for ‘explicit political ideas this critic disagrees with’ (for if politics is the way people can live together, say without mass hunger or mass repressive weapons against the hungry, surely this is what SF, as all art, is about, and even more surely SF criticism cannot but be imbued with value notions about what its object does). As Nietzsche put it, ‘I would not know what sense could classical philology have in our time, if not the sense of acting in this time in an untimely way, that is, against the time, and thus on the time and, I hope, in favour of a coming time.’12 Thus I’m led to amplify the little quotation from p. 84 of my ‘Novum’ essay whose compression may have led Patrick Parrinder to misunderstand (and therefore object to) it: when I said that SF suggesting a flight from the author’s social space-time is ‘an optical illusion and epistemological trick’, I never for a moment doubted that in any concrete textual analysis such an illusion is not only highly significant but also constitutive. But when theorizing about a whole corpus of say a couple of thousand books, it seems reasonable to generalize the supposition that The First Men in the Moon or The Dispossessed or Delany’s overcoded strange cities are, for all their welcome playfulness, finally about tendencies in contemporary England or the USA. To coin a phrase: aesthetic autonomy, yes; aesthetic apartheid, no. In sum, to play off concern for form against concern for ideas or function (as Robert Silverberg—whose central-phase writings I read with much interest precisely because they had a new form-as-function—seems to have done at the famous Modern Language Association SF meeting of 1968 described by Edward James) is a charge I cannot make sense of. Let me turn it around: assuming (but not conceding) I were dealing with ideas primarily, whence this allergy to them? I think it can arise only if any dragging out of implicit value constellations in the stories is considered by itself as obnoxious, as destroying the mindless absorption into them. But surely there are other, I’d say higher, forms of enjoyment when a story can be read without the reader’s having to repress her critical bump when picking up the text? But of course, the witty essay by Edward James in this volume (yes, I have read all those precursors) is in a way right: Marxians are conservative, we want to conserve some good old bourgeois—or indeed medieval and Hellenic and Buddhist—values destroyed by the rotting bourgeoisie. Only

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the market admen need to tout a ‘revolution’ for each new year’s brand of otherwise unnecessary consumption articles. Socialism is the only hope of tradition.

On Mythical Pseudo-history Once the umbrella-concept of History, whose agents are exclusively human forces, arises to supplant Fate, whose agents are superhuman forces inflicting their will on humans, the most pertinent antonym to philosophical history becomes the hybrid of mythical history (which denies any value to history). Since myth is one of the most confusing bricks in the present Tower of Babel confusion, I have tried already in Metamorphoses to explain that by this I do not mean long-duration shapes of figuration and narration (for example, Aristotle’s mythos). Like anybody fascinated by history, I’m very interested in these shapes, though in desperate straits (as in the present) I believe we should be even more interested in how synchronous needs modify these stories, adapting them to what given social groups need today. The sense of ‘myth’ I reject is the airtight explanation of ahistorical sense by fixed, static, fate-driven patterns (which deny any human agency toward or possibility of radically significant change; for example, Jung or Joseph Campbell), and thus everybody’s responsibility in determining our common destiny: Myths give answers to why the world is as it is when an empirical cause and effect cannot be seen, or when it cannot be remembered [or especially when it is hidden by organized obfuscation—DS]. Although they satisfy the desire felt by human beings for a meaning-filled world, it is at the high price of turning that world back upon them as inescapable fate . . . Science as well as theology, rationalism as well as superstition can claim that events are inexorably determined. (Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing p. 78)

An example: I find much to interest me in the first parts of Rafail Nudelman’s chapter, which focus on Lem’s underlying pattern of the cognitive hero descending ‘into the labyrinth’s epistemological centre.’ This bold generalization, steered away from talk about history by the terrible experience of Nudelman’s generation with history, splendidly explains much about Lem, including why I have always been so partial to his horizons (so that I regret he largely stopped writing stories in favour of pastiches, however splendid). Indeed my friend John Clute once taxed me, in his engagingly extremist way (which I wish he would extend from stylistics to politics),

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with defining SF as a ‘menu for writing like Lem . . . challengingly useful (though bats)’.13 This is not the place to discuss the reason he gives for his friendly vituperation, and which I think I could dispute, though Niels Bohr used to ask about a hypothesis, ‘Is it crazy enough?’ Rather, to return to Nudelman, I find his equally splendid climax is to discuss Lem’s best late story, The Mask, by rightly allotting the central explanatory place to a mythopoetic symbolism ‘continuously and mockingly cancelled out by modern details’. Nudelman’s philologically proper and indeed mandatory reading of a story as it actually unfolds (as epic syntagmatics) and not as a handed-down paradigm of eternal repetition is what I was driving at in my Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction essay on epic versus mythic storytelling (compare Moylan’s chapter in this volume), but it does not present what Jungians would recognize as a myth.

Off the Track: Descriptive versus Prescriptive One discussion that keeps, to my wonder, coming up time after time in connection with my work is that it is not only descriptive but also prescriptive. Guilty, m’lud—but not really: the accusation makes no sense. Let me call to my help Carl Freedman’s bold and sweeping attempt to strike a balance between history and philosophy, with which I have much sympathy as I struggled with the same problem in Part Two of Metamorphoses; he is attempting to do it in even less space than I had. For he rightly sets up the great trinity of the English SF tradition—More, Swift and Wells (with the beautiful but, as I’d agree, somewhat narcissistic News from Nowhere in between the latter two)—not only as genetic fountainheads for SF-cumutopia but above all as yardsticks for them (it). One of my regrets is that most writers of SF histories apparently don’t find compelling the hundred-plus pages or whatever of detailed analysis in the just-mentioned section of Metamorphoses on how More subsumes the medieval and antique tradition of other worlds, how Swift centrally derives from More and from Cyrano, and how Wells centrally derives from both of them and—as they too did— from the lower plebeian genres of storytelling. Thus, the SF which doesn’t know it derives from More and Swift—however many other confluents the industrial age has added—is like a severely shortsighted person both of whose eyeglass lenses are thickly pasted over by historical pollution, blinding it to utopia and satire, the better half of the SF mix. Wells thought he was a One-eyed Man in the Country of the Blind (the best that any of us poor worms writhing in our clod can manage to be). What is left for him— it’s usually a male writer, unless it’s Janet Morris—who doesn’t even know

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that he’s one-eyed? Well, only the Frankenstein and the Doc Smith components of the mix. We have SF theories to match this type of vision: Aldiss’s and Westfahl’s. Perhaps I should add that it seems to me that the status of Mary Shelley is in some ways incomparable to—that is, much higher than—Doc Smith or Van Vogt: for the Gothic or Romantic mode is in SF almost always (from E.T.A. Hoffmann to any good Aldiss story, say the one about the continent-sized creature fallen on to Earth) accompanied by the grotesque, which relates to it as satire does to utopia in the Enlightenment couple. Brian Aldiss thus has the ineluctable focus of a writer-theoretician, establishing the noble pedigree of his own SF and fending off competing pedigrees (Delany does this much less graciously in his attack on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which finally boils down to saying that she does not write as he does). Obversely to the grotesque, the adventure is simply the necessary narrative stratum undergirding all four above modes, and I have argued in Metamorphoses that its unalloyed, boy-scout use is cognitively exhausted midway through Jules Verne, whose unwittingly parodic pastiche we then encounter in the slam-bang Gernsback tradition of SF for white male teenagers. Back to uses of Freedman: a yardstick is a normative beast par excellence; if your yard is not the same as the platinum one in Paris, you’re simply wrong and misleading others. When Parrinder, for example, talks about aesthetic failure versus triumph, he’s rightly and unabashedly normative. He notes that the failure resides, within SF aesthetics, in not knowing how to assess the difference between new and conventional perception: and pray, how does one bisect this into prescription and description? Nohow; for the Humean agnosticism sundering ‘fact’ from value is simply bad epistemology, bad psychology and obfuscatory politics mumbling something about freedom. Facts are co-constituted by frames of recognition, any taxonomic naming of them is a hermeneutic, and—as I first learned from Lukács’s super-heretical History and Class Consciousness, rejected by both sides of the Cold War, though today it can be found in respectable theoreticians of science such as René Thom—the dynamic reality is always redefined by the imagination. This clearly does not plead for equally boring cookie-cutter clones, but only for some elementary dialectics: ‘The norm is . . . based on a fundamental dialectical antinomy [and tension—DS] between universal validity and mere regulative or even orientational potential which implies the conceivability of its violation. Every norm has this two-fold, contradictory impetus.’14 Such normativity is what founds any and every reading contract and thus makes reading or art possible in the first place; neither my novum nor the fans’ ‘sensawunda’ would be a surprising extension unless extend-

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ing away from the familiar (experimental science from Bacon through Bernard to Schrödinger proceeds by exactly the same method).15 So at the end I must again reverse the spear: if the critics do not read such normative orientations as the above Mukarovsky one, isn’t that because they themselves embody an unholy blend of US ‘me only’ narcissism and super-normative conformism? Politically speaking, doesn’t falling into the PoMo nihilism prepare the ground for US fascist ‘militias’? If so, that is their intellectual but also our collective funeral.

What Is To Be Done Have you stopped beating your spouse? Example of hidden presupposition in Ducrot, 1972 Couldn’t we, in the interests of propaganda, compile a list of problems which seem to us quite unsolved? Brecht, 1931

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men A caveat: I’m discussing here what I intended to write: what I ‘really’ wrote, how it was read by whom and why, is another story, partly analysed here by Tom Moylan in terms that I find most appreciative (or, in his vocabulary, annunciative) and therefore believe to be right on. Perhaps my highly compressed and some say idiosyncratic English is also at stake here: though I began to learn English in kindergarten at the age of four (yes, I come from the enlightened bourgeois intelligentsia grown ashamed of its class’s treason to its own ideals) and though I’ve written half a dozen collections of poetry in English, one of which was published in Toronto—even so, our language judges us in the same breath that we judge others. Judge and ye shall be judged: fair enough—especially when the judge is so sympathetic as Moylan, earning my undying gratitude for hitting what I fondly believe is the central wellspring of my work, the line of ‘communicating vessels’ that connects poetry to utopianism (my first book in North America, Other Worlds, Other Seas, took its title from Marvell) and our century’s bloody politics to resistance by Brechtian narrative images and Kung Fu’s rectification of names. Of course I won’t compile a Brechtian list here either for SF criticism in general (Marc Angenot and I gave it a shot in an essay foregrounding one of my favourite methodological principles, ‘Not Only But also’, now in my

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Positions, but this was in another country and the wench is dead) or for mine own. For one thing, I deeply disbelieve in copyrights and geniuses, so that whatever strengths my criticism may have derives from my having—in a doubtless truncated way—functioned as a focuser and formulator of group debate, incorporating selected hints, insights, scoldings, proposals . . . by, say, the co-editors and the consultants of Science-Fiction Studies during my 1973–81 tenure. I simply wish to indicate the most glaring gaps demanding more work by me and others, which prey most on my mind.

Remaining To Be Done: Parable as the Strategic Tool The central neon sign blinking ‘To Be Done’ is the matter of Parable, which then logically entails a reconsideration of fantasy—anyway much overdue for pragmatic reasons. Another is work on Utopia not confined to utopian fiction or its delimitation, which I favoured in my formalist and Fordist phase, but going on to horizons such as the anti-utopian brainwashing dominating us more fiercely every day, by means of identifiable figures and loci of ‘degenerate utopias’ (Marin; see my essay on Disneyfication cited in note 8). There are obvious traps in ‘pan-utopianism’ à la Bloch (though Freedman is quite right in recurring to his rich suggestiveness and not lesser lights such as Mannheim or the frankly unacceptable Manuels), and I wouldn’t like to jettison my earlier caveats against such shoreless discussions, which threaten to become pure tautologies: everything is utopia or has a utopian facet, including Hitler and a global ‘free market’, in which case utopia/nism as a heuristic tool is superfluous. But this could go some way towards explaining why (as Jameson queries) in Metamorphoses I called utopia the ‘socio-political’ and not ‘socio-economic’ sub-genre of SF. I can’t remember why—my reasons were pre-reflexive. He generously rehearses most of the probable reasons, of which I’d retrospectively emphasize two. First, politics may suggest the sphere of people living together that is wider than—if hugely codetermined by—economics. Second, utopia is—in More whom Marx found so congenial, and as a rule—not so much an alternative political economy but a critique of that very practice and new-fangled category, often by suppressing it totally, as in Bacon, Campanella or Morris, texts which therefore today look quaint. And to call it socio-politico-economical—plus maybe a few more adjectives—would have brought me uncomfortably close to Polonius’s categorization of plays. In fact, I even read a part of Freedman’s argument to imply that SF is in itself a (potentially privileged) utopian method, which strikes me as an important and perhaps fertile hypothesis. But in that case, how does this

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method operate? Thus we arrive back to parables. When Patrick Parrinder and I were discussing a possible title for this volume, which was provisionally Cognition and Estrangement, I suggested that instead it really ought to be Cognition, Estrangement, the Novum, and the Parable. This was an only semijoking proposal, for my (teleologically) final essay in the Positions book advances a view of SF that takes a new tack in comparison to the first three terms from Metamorphoses, though I trust it is not incompatible with them, in the way that (if small matters may be compared to huge ones) Einstein is not incompatible with Newton: the latter is still mandatory for all physical affairs that don’t approach the speed of light. None the less new insights and in some cases drastic modifications obtain in Einstein. And this may be taken not simply as immodest name-dropping if we remember the argument from Metamorphoses that the best post-Wellsian SF deals with spacetimes (as different from Verne’s spaces and utopian or dystopian futures), so that real mileage may be got out of such analogies and variants of allegory. In art rather than science, the nearest analogy may be the ‘moment of Cubism’ (thus Picasso rather than Einstein); John Berger dates it around 1910–14, but in this great critic’s sense of a ‘horizon where all was possible’.16 I’d extend it to the rebirth of post-World-War hope in the twenty years after 1917 (to the Left modernism of Joyce, Chaplin, Eisenstein and Brecht). It would not be too difficult to correlate this with the debates between the open and closed (Bloch’s ‘warm stream versus cold stream’, say Luxemburg or Gramsci versus Kautsky or Stalin) interpretations of Marx, in which the ‘cold’ pole eschewed the scandal of dialectics in favour of the comforting Newtonian predictive element (‘iron laws’) inherited but also transcended by Marx.17 I take it that this may authorize Angenot’s sad tale, a kind of Erasmian Praise of Folly, of how the Second International (and in a not too carefully hidden telos of his, the Third International) engaged in dogmatic, static or closed utopianism. It may also authorize Freedman’s short circuit between Marx and SF, which might be grounded in old Karl’s two favourite tropes or image-systems: the fantastic creatures—vampires, zombies, spectres, idolatrous fetishes, sorcerer’s apprentices, et j’en passe—that pullulate in his writings; and the gesture of subjecting the enemies’ occulting veilings to disclosing unveilings that his critique performs.18 I myself am not sure that Marx is a theoretician of SF, though the conceit is witty (and he does refer to Frankenstein in a letter); but surely, whatever the yoyos of ephemeral generations of fashion that come and go, his spectre will continue to haunt SF, among other fields, and Freedman’s chapter here is a clear example. As to its invoking of Engels’s ‘scientific socialism’, we may have differing opinions: this was excogitated after Marx’s death and with little basis in Marx’s

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work. I once buckled down to the agonizing task of reviewing this term,19 a demolition rendered indispensable by the rise of fascism, which was guessed at by storytellers (such as Jack London) rather than predicted or predictable by any system—though Engels’s mistakes are usually more instructive than other people’s successes. Yet if SF were in an Aristotelian analogy with ‘scientific socialism’, first, this is surely not its whole story, and it would be wishful thinking similar to that I indulged in up to the 1970s not to see that SF has many other analogies too, say to the utopian topos of the Third Reich (deriving from Joachim di Fiore) to which Bloch devoted a brilliant article, or to Verne’s utopian liberalism of circulation, or to Asimov’s utopian technocracy; and, second, my main conclusion from the socialist analogy would be that perversions of either have to be chastised with scorpions: ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’ I cannot here retraverse the theory of parable, as I did at length in the Positions essay, but may only in the most abbreviated way (to be filled in by the kind reader reaching for the old essay) repeat that the parable has perennially been the privileged genre—and even more: the privileged method, which can therefore extend to stories of any length—of fruitfully marrying textual seduction (in the ‘vehicle’) and cognitive consummation (in the ‘tenor’). You’ll note that it is a highly affective, nay erotic, way of bringing about what Brecht called ‘the gentle might/authority/violence of reason’ (die sanfte Gewalt der Vernunft), the necessary feedback between the universal and the singular. This way may be sneered at by people who cannot imagine that reason may be seductive—poor they! For they are weighed in the balance against Aristophanes, countless mashal-writing rabbis, Jehoshua of Nazareth, Gautama the Enlightened, Swift, Lessing and so many others, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’ (T. S. Eliot). All very well, I hear the dogmatic postmodernists reply, we know that Bellamy wrote impressive parables and Wells wrote stories which are narrativized parables (as ‘The Country of the Blind’), but what has this to do with us in the new dispensation? Well, maybe little with you (though I read much Derrida and Guattari and Deleuze as parables, and in fact the whole PoMo vulgate-text is one mega-allegory of the love–hate at the loss of master-narrative and of the clever hysteria of Hegel’s Serf without a Master) but a lot with the state of affairs we’re trying to understand today. The parable is the most complex, refined and populist form of allegory, opposed to the elitist theological combats of virtues and vices or psychomachia, those black-and-white exorcisms. The overall horizons of allegory to my mind deal with the relationships of art to truth, or of narrative and metaphoric imagination to conceptualized, normative doctrine; in other words, allegory has to do with the interplay between what is in social hegemony held to be

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true (and thus in a way privileged and indeed sacred) and what is held to be feigned (and what has therefore, historically, oscillated uncomfortably between being unholy, just entertaining or a second mode of privileged cognition). This has become more complex and exacerbated after the capitalist Industrial Revolution, which both installed inescapable social dynamics and yet held fast to the ruling-class traditional belief that history is at a qualitative end, and—in the new bourgeois variant—only quantitative growth remains (as in sports records or computer software: faster, higher, more). What then is the role of new creativity, which is as it were generically discontinuous from the privileged body of normatively ‘true’ texts, which is fiction or heresy rather than fact or orthodoxy? I have argued in a brief old text that all allegory, verbal or otherwise, is a (more or less admitted) relationship between a new proposition and an existing privileged set of normative and ruling propositions which the allegory re-produces (egoria) in a variant and other (allos, dare I say estranged?) way; and it might be apparent how discussions of the novum necessarily intertwine with allegorical horizons.20 I noted there an inherent tension in a dynamic bourgeois society between piety and creativity, the static tradition of doctrine and the deviating pressure of experience, so that a modern parable can be faithful only after its own fashion: ‘even the most believing creators are uncomfortable allies for priests’, I concluded on the basis of my own heretical Titoist experience. Within such horizons, the small forms of proverb, riddle, animal (or alien) fable and parable will be more open to a conflict of authority than the ‘large forms’ of mythical and religious systems, which are inexorably drawn into a confirmation of (sometimes new) authority. Let me then use Jameson’s exegesis (even for him quite unusually brilliant—it tosses off in passing small things such as a new hypothesis on realism) of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent Mars trilogy to make my point by—again—learning from Jameson.

Parable and Kim Stanley Robinson on Mars: Utopianism as Ongoing ‘Thick’ History For what availed it, all the noise And outcry of the former men?— Say, have their sons achieved more joys, Say, is life lighter now than then? Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, 1855

The parable is, then, traditionally a way of intimately relating doctrine to fiction—and vice versa. The traditional politico-religious point of the para-

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ble is to open the listener’s ears to the irruption of (often new) understanding, Bloch’s ‘aha-effect’: ‘O now I see that the tiny grain of mustard seed growing into the biggest bush of them all is Christ’s Word about the Kingdom of Heaven growing into my heaven-reaching faith in it!’ Theoretically, one might expect the parable not to survive the death of God in the twentieth century, since the rise of competing macro-godheads and tribal godlets entailed the slaughters of tens of millions as well as the starving of and psychic terror over—and thus evacuation of imaginative reason from—hundreds of millions, that have between them irretrievably sullied the alternatives of ideology and the Id. But practice is always slyer than theory, and, while Old Nobodaddy might be dead, the parable has managed to survive in two ways, identified with Kafka and Brecht (not counting nostalgic reactions back to reach-me-down Romanticism). Kafka managed to write parables—as Beckett managed to write Mystery plays—against a backdrop of ‘zero doctrine’, that is, the painful absence of community values and interhuman sense that was traditionally codified into a more or less religious doctrine, so that his isolated protagonist became a grotesque lone creature (my favourites are the animal fables of ‘The Burrow’ or ‘Josephine the Songstress’ rather than the clearer almost-SF of ‘The Penal Colony’, but the overt thumbnail sketch is in ‘The Door of the Law’). Brecht on the whole successfully navigated the whirlpools between the Scylla of nihilism (Kafka) and Charybdis of pseudo-religious Marxism as belief-into-scientific-destiny (not confined to Stalin) to approach a paradoxically experimental doctrine in which it is the method of fitting the sight to the situation seen that matters and not any system. The allegorical Little Man Schweik meets finally the allegorical Ruler Hitler at the end of one of Brecht’s most engaging parables of how to survive despotism, and Hitler fails: he is not prepared for winter. Neither is Joan Dark in the slaughterhouses of lockedout Chicago, an awful warning—the first ‘new map of hell,’ in fact—how the unemployed and dispossessed have to stick to each other or miserably die (Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses). It’s a cold world, my masters, and you better be prepared—by slyness, wit and method.21 After Marx and Nietzsche it’s no go for parables (or any other allegories) which trust in the transcendental signifier, the doctrinal tenor as soul or static essence, to which is then adjusted the imaged story, the vehicle as sensual body: they cannot satisfy (Silverberg’s objection at the MLA SF session to academic abstractions may derive from such functional subordination). If there is to be any soul or essence—I argue in ‘Two Cheers’ that a dynamic, changeable essence is necessarily to be posited in order to speak about anything, so that I was emboldened by reading in Robinson that ‘Terra sees [in Mars] its own essence’—it can be decisively co-constituted

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only by the body, here the story with its figures and metaphors. Surely all flesh is grass and in a way perhaps the vanity of vanities, but it’s the last line of defence and offence, delight and memory, left to us. In fact, if the Platonic-Idealist doctrine of two realities is thereby refused—the soul being either a changeable disposition of flesh or nothing at all—it is no longer quite true that the vehicle is concrete (plant) and the tenor abstract (belief in the Kingdom), and we might even pose the question whether this understanding of allegory is not characteristic of German Idealism and Romanticism, a late and degenerate form. Was King Pluto concrete but riches an abstract concept for Aristophanes, was Christ’s Kingdom To Come really abstract for medieval believers? In this intimate interaction, the fact that the tenor is being elicited by such-and-such a possible world (in Robinson, by all the features consubstantial to the three changing colours of Mars) cannot be simply subsumed by the tenor’s concept or even image and then forgotten, otherwise we’d have to equate any such fictional text to a leading article written against the same horizon. (This is my problem with the useful ‘discourse theory’, debated for years now with Marc Angenot.) An irreducible surplus is engendered by the humanizing features of world, figuration and narration of their interactions; Jameson names it after Althusser’s ‘overdetermination’, but I suspect pluricausality is only an important synecdoche for what is happening and at stake here. To exemplify it by contraries: the contingent grain of mustard seed gives rise to a stout suspicion that whatever tenor is built by means of it may get into trouble once the world of the listener is sufficiently removed from Mediterranean agriculture. A post-industrial Kingdom of Heaven may have to cease being a Kingdom and in Heaven, acquire a dynamic vector, and so on. In fact, it may have to become a utopian something to which the Mars trilogy relates as Dante’s equally outrageous Mount of Purgatory does to his planetary Paradises. Post-industrial cognition can proceed only by experimental construction out of ‘nature’s’ (the production mode’s) constriction, the main constriction or resistance as well as source of strength in capitalism being the money economy (on which Balzac’s realism is founded). Thus, science is no doubt Jameson’s allegory for human relationships (from which it anyway stems and which it then strongly inflects), but also the philosophical—or better, methodological—model for steering their dynamics (for better or worse: I shall return to this crucial point). I don’t know whether Robinson would demur from any such residual triumphalism, based not only on the sense that the nature of parable entails re-examination of empirical norms in the light of alternative possibilities but also on the sense that even the open-ended parables (I have discussed this for the case of Lem) still do not prevent an unmistakable orientation

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which can at least identify those directions which are wrong and those which may not be wrong. Parables engage the audience in an act of argumentative world-creation, so that partial and tentative sketchings-in of the City Beyond the Horizon to which that orientation is pointing are not only allowed but inescapable. Utopia is for Kim Stanley Robinson indeed the unnameable colour on which Jameson zeroes in, approachable only by symbolic detail—and, I’d add, by an argument about its modalities (not about its doctrine). His exemplum therefore demands that, and clearly shows how, our bourgeois categories of institutionalizing, fragmenting and alienating cognition into politics, religion, economics, psychology—the entire organigram of our social science faculties, against which Marxists and Nietzscheans of all stripes have always struggled—begin to break down. The ideal equivalent of the rainbow coalition is cognitively debated in the story’s interplay of what we poorly classify as ecological, political, economical (Martian and Corporate Terran), ethnic and even psychological matters (only religion seems to have been displaced into ecological politics on Mars). This is of a piece with the cognitive recovery of History argued earlier in this chapter. Let me call it, as Jameson almost did, ‘the filling in of King Utopus’s trench’; in Robinson, the most astounding image and pars pro toto standing for it is the space-elevator cable which ‘wraps itself twice around the planet like a broken necklace’ (Jameson): an anti-trench which has always to be reckoned with as an unclean but for this age’s horizons unbreakable birth-cord from mega-capitalism, which may yet strangle any attempt at new birth. Thus, to conclude reading Robinson (largely through Jameson), it becomes clear that he has managed a Herculean feat which we might at first, within SF, call the reconciling of an almost Stapledonian grand sweep with a micropolitics out-Delanying Delany’s individualist details, and at that in a style which eschews that master’s Baroque preciosities. But then, I’d go further, to the highest level: Robinson is giving a new twist to the Kafka–Brecht dilemma. His mega-parable is certainly not nihilist, though it shares with Kafka (or Nietzsche) the refusal of the Law as transcendental signifier. Updating the Brechtian (or Marxian) tension between the need for orderly learning and for productive anarchy, it plumps for nearness to the latter but on the same globe: we could call it the Tropic of Anarchy on the globe of cognition. In those terms, Lem’s epistemological labyrinth was on a kind of anti-Tropic of Order: can we understand our position on the globe at all? His masks figure forth a Socratic scepticism: the only thing I may know is that I do not know (better than mythological, Newtonian certainty anyway). Brecht’s equidistant Equator seems out of reach today. In storytelling terms, this means that no explicit ‘moral’ of the fable or tenor

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of the parable is imaginable and thus tellable today, unless it be the moral of open-endedness: History does not end, and this is no small matter when the monolithic media chorus tells us it’s ended definitely (and as we can see badly for 98 per cent of us). And conversely, the ‘show’ of vehicle is to be much ‘thicker,’ much more validated by material(ist) details or ‘realistic’, much more livable-in and seductively ostended, than the usually laconic and somehow reticent, wry European brevity of Brecht or indeed Kafka. Both of these Europeans knew between 1910 and 1950 roughly or precisely what to expect; we today—and Robinson as our story’s teller—do not know: we must not believe Kafka, we cannot believe Brecht (who is politically equivalent to a warm halfway house between Lenin and Luxemburg). Indeed, from where I stand the fact that Lenin is, as Jameson notes, conspicuously absent in Robinson even as a false alternative (which was still there in Piercy’s Dance the Eagle) seems a serious—dare I say American— gap not well compensated by the utopian optimism of eppur si muove. One hopes he will return to this gap, for no serious utopianism can fail to work through the problem of vanguard organization versus bloody defeat. Yet the most important matter remains that in any such ongoing history Kafka’s and Brecht’s judgments are inescapable, and the trial may be upon us sooner than we think. I have no time to discuss the real problem of fantasy here except in the most initial way. But let me use this occasion to declare solemnly that the anathema against fantasy pronounced, not without good reasons, in Metamorphoses cannot in this age be sustained as given there. First, the brute fact of its vertiginous spread cannot be reduced simply to market perversities: deeper allegories are at work here, alas. Second, if all estranged genres are centrally parables, then each fantasy text also has a tenor and cannot be simply dismissed because of its vehicle (‘End of the wonderful one-hoss shay/Logic is logic, that’s all I say’—Oliver Wendell Holmes). As I’ve just argued for Robinson, modern parables do not function on a teleological model, where the tenor subsumes the vehicle, but on a both-and (or not only but also) model, where both are to be evaluated and correlated. So I do not at all mean that the often (but not always) unappealing vehicle of fantasy could or should be disregarded: I still think something is pathologically wrong with an epoch where we are invited to delight in vampires or zombies, but perhaps we should not shoot the messenger. The beginning of wisdom here, so runs my initial hypothesis, is to de(con)struct this genre which to me looks rather like a congeries of genres united simply by negation of both realism and SF. Tolkien’s racist heroic fantasy not only perverts Morris but it surely has very little to do with the truly indispensable Kafka; if ghost and Gothic stories may be used tellingly by Marx, why not by oth-

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ers; while the horror à la Stephen King seems to me a short-circuit from US ressentiments much more banal than the class paranoias of Lovecraft (whom a pioneering essay by Gérard Klein has shown to be quite amenable to a Goldmannian materialist analysis).

The Two Souls of SF: A Colon: With a Happy Ending Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust [Alas, I bear two souls in my breast!] Goethe, Faust, 1806 colon, n. Punctuation-mark used esp. to mark antithesis or illustration. Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1946

Potentials and Inflections To tell the truth is already a revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, during the first World War

I shall attempt to develop my (at the moment) final group of arguments in the form of a heuristic binary which is, for all good methodological objections against such simplifying procedures, necessary to say anything simply—especially in a kind of balance sheet, based on double-entry bookkeeping. What are the potentialities of SF, how did they get inflected for better or worse? How does it fare between what Jameson calls ideology versus utopia, and sometimes more precisely manipulation versus gratification?22 Our whole epoch—and its interesting and promising child, SF, in particular—seems to me poised, as an eminent Victorian well foresaw, ‘between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born’ (‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’). One should add what Arnold could not foresee: that what is dead lives on and rules as a powerful, sly, brainwashing zombie. The ‘dead’ should be taken as a normative, utopian value-judgement rather than as an empirical, dystopian fact: this constellation encapsulates our unhappy consciousness, dissidence and oppositionality. Gramsci’s formulation adds an important entailment: ‘The old order is not yet dead, the new order cannot be born. In the half-light monsters rise up.’23 Within these horizons, the delightful critique and unmasking of the ideological steamrolling we’re all flattened by has always seemed to me the central point of culture. What I mean by culture is not the sense in which

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one has (as the Victorians put it) a bit of ‘parlez vous français and tinkling on the grand piano’, though every little bit of acquaintance with ways of understanding the world different from our hegemonic socialization helps: and, in that sense, entering upon an understanding of music or other languages may well go beyond fashionable affectation and become both a part and an emblem of an estranged, heretic stance (which is why humanistic studies are being dismantled today). I mean by culture rather a much less superstructural element, not added on to work and economics but—as Raymond Williams taught us—entering (together with feedbacks from practical experience) into the very constitution of our categories such as economics, superstructure and all others: being what we live for and by. In that sense, culture is what not only poses the question ‘What for?’ but also—simultaneously and consubstantially—does so in uniquely pleasurable ways which in their very sensual reception by our mind’s eye or ear gives a foretaste of the disalienated state its estranging and cognizing questions imply and call up. Looking at the economy a century ago, Nietzsche concluded: ‘The expenses of each add up to an all-around loss: people shrink—so that we do not know any longer what was the reason for this gigantic process. A “What for?”, a new “What for?” is what mankind needs’ (III, 629). The only proper timeliness is to be ‘untimely’ in the already cited sense of Nietzsche’s, which poses supremely uncomfortable questions unsettling the supposed ‘moral majority’ consensus. True, Nietzsche somewhat sarcastically added in his Untimely Reflections that his critique was only subjective and proved nothing to his enemies, ‘so long, namely, that is still considered untimely which was always in good time, and is today more than ever in good time and needful: to tell the truth’ (I, 207). And furthermore, within these horizons SF seems to me to have (as have most other ‘popular’ genres, most clearly the detective story) the inestimable advantage of a collective schema or generic form-skeleton. A schema is defined by my Concise Oxford Dictionary as ‘conception of what is common to all members of a class’. However contained by commercialization which touts ‘originality’ and brand-names, SF is technically or productively as collectivist—I almost said communist—as a modern factory (while the ‘mainstream’, which I selectively also much admire, is productively artisanal, pre-industrial). Now, obviously, the artisanal class of psychological novel or avant-garde novel also possesses a schema, but the fetish of originality usually forces it to occult that unoriginal commonality.24 (A complex, because multiple, exception is Ulysses; another, clearer one is Brecht, a workshop leader and not isolated genius, comparable to Marion Zimmer Bradley and ‘The Friends of Darkover’.) SF foregrounds the generic schema: as any reader knows, a new text is understandable only as a variation on (one of) the

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canonic schemas of the genre. In bad cases this may mean banality, a loss of cognitive import. In good cases—which constitute also the horizon of SF potentialities within which all cases are collocated, and against which they are willy-nilly judged—the foregrounding allows the schema and its import in any particular story (the relation of its vehicle and its tenor, I’d say today) to be scrutinized by the reader. Does it work? How and why? What does it mean (‘what for’ richly contains both why—cause—and to what purpose and in whose interest—effect)? ‘The schema is healthy’, concluded Brecht in an enthusiastic appreciation of the detective story. ‘On the day that, for example, our plays will again have some value, they will be as similar as one egg to another. They will have a schema. The schema is the best resistance for a writer’.25 This semi-cynical and, as usual, polemical exaggeration did not prevent Brecht from inventing several new schemas, nor does it prevent the rare epoch-markers in SF from doing that. Most recently, what immediately comes to mind is the schema of the feminist utopia, of cyberpunk (Gibson), of the new open-ended utopian parable (Robinson) and of the combination of feminism, post-colonialism and (maybe?) English post-Catholic stances by Gwyneth Jones, so new that I don’t even know how to describe it properly. Looking upon what I have just written, a possibly not uninteresting postscriptum to the normativity debate broached above comes to mind. A tactical failing in my books on SF so far seems to me now not their ‘normativity’, for the opposition of description and prescription makes no sense, but that I held it as self-evident that I was applying Weberian ‘ideal types’ to SF reality in order to say anything within a couple of hundred pages. An ideal type is a heuristic construct exemplifying and fully embodying the potentialities of a class of existents. I still see no way to talk about SF (or anything else) except to start from the ideal potentialities (themselves mainly induced from readings of SF texts) of any among its sub-forms and to see how any particular instance compares to it—with the important proviso that in modern life, and SF, we often have to do with the contamination of several ideal types or sub-forms, as was explained in an early pioneering essay on SF by Jameson. True, I tried to foreground this in the chapter on ‘Narrative Logic’ of my Victorian Science Fiction, which I thought of sufficient importance to reprint in Positions. But I underestimated the Anglo-American empiricist resistance to my Continental European tradition, from Kant to Marx, Simmel, and today, which operates in a feedback between the particular appearance and the general norm.26 This approach seems to me especially unavoidable when looking at new, strange domains—such as SF. How is one to map or indeed negotiate settling in a new land unless one quickly induces from what one has glimpsed some commonalities about its

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rivers, inhabitants, fauna and flora, climate and so on? Neither full philosophical abstraction nor empiricist description of singularities tacitly importing norms from the old countries that socialized the exploring eye, this method may mediate between single appearances and generalizing types, without slighting either pole. It thus gives at least some chances of not taking (as Columbus did) Cuba for Cathay or the Orinoco plateau for the Earthly Paradise. I shall discuss below the negative sense in which science (and technology) are organizing models for SF. But I’m not yet ready to concede science to the life-destroyers. As Robinson has clearly seen, we need (and there is no intrinsic cognitive reason why we couldn’t have) a science in the interest of utopia. A methodology and model of science cleansed of subservience to the all-warping profit-motive may grow again into the utopian tool it was at the outset. This seems to me simultaneously one of the very few tenable senses but also one of the very important senses in which the productive potentialities of SF are after all deep down connected with life-affirming science. Gérard Klein refurbishes the argument of Wordsworth and Coleridge (and of a number of SF critics, for example Russ)27 about the ineluctable vocabulary and tropes imposed by a new epoch by pointing out not only that SF uses images of science but that it is the only mode to do so as an avowed fiction. This means (and it seems to me crucial), that SF uses the metaphors mandated by our new times as a playful experiment shaping a possible world, to be judged by its fruits, a relational and situational epistemology and not an ontology doctrinally believed in. Utopian playfulness seems to me at the opposite pole from the ‘time is money’ rationalism of profit-making. This is, for example, why I have always been partial to the playful cognitive surrealism of Marleen Barr’s cross-connections between the apparently most disparate texts, yoked together by her generously indignant womanist gaze. This is also why I share Moylan’s conviction that the lessons of Ernst Bloch still lie in the foundations of not only utopian but also SF criticism, however we might want to modify our upper floors: in other words that utopianism is too important to be left to texts calling themselves utopias, some of which do not intersect with utopianism too much or too well (as testified to by Angenot). This kind of ‘communicating vessels’ relation between utopia and science, rather than Engels’s unhappy subsumption of the former under the latter, can give us at least some indications how to deal with the seeming theoretical scandals of time-travel and superluminary speed as narrative devices, which however we cannot just kick out of SF to satisfy scientism. I’d then wish to argue that these images and devices are energized within the magnetic field of a more-or-less utopian parable; but much remains to

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be done in finding out just how this happens. As a first orientation, expanding on what I may call such an epistemological metaphoricity, I would generalize Klein’s point by recalling that I have in the Positions essay on ‘SF as Metaphor, Parable and Chronotope’ outrageously considered a Kuhnian paradigm to be nothing more or less than a long-duration macro-metaphor or encompassing civilizational image. What seems to me the relevant focus here is the fact that, and the ways in which, SF also may use science as one or more Kuhnian paradigms, in a confused but also rich situation where (say in psychology, but just as well in physics) you can choose not only between various paradigms in various disciplines or indeed competing streams within the same discipline but also between the roughly Newtonian paradigm of closure and the roughly Einsteinian paradigm of openendedness.

The Destructive Soul of SF: Adolescent Fears, Technological Fix, Violence and War Are you expecting a recipe? There is no recipe . . . Enough, if the situation is presented openly. Kracauer, 1928

How are these potentialities used, within the two souls of SF (and of practically anything else in our alienated lives)? I shall first focus on a very partial delineation of the ‘bad soul’, and in particular on its overt and covert links with the corruption of science. From Edgar Allan Poe on (the argument may be found in my Metamorphoses), a characteristic of American SF has been its infantile gosh-wow, slam-bang aspect (sensationalism and sentimentality). Now ‘infantile’ is not necessarily a cuss-word, it may have connotations of freshness, naivety, innocence and similar qualities, and it is at any rate more promising than senile—a symmetrical cuss-word often flung at Europe by Twainian ‘Innocents Abroad’, horrified by its feudal up-front hierarchies (as Whitman was by Shakespeare). One could argue that much of the most mature SF in the USA was shaped by the awful suspicion, first adumbrated in the Gothic strain and then more precisely in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, that US innocence is withering into a premature senility. The most powerful ‘new maps of hell’, culminating beyond the 1950s in the horror transmutations of Philip K. Dick (Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-slip) and then in Gibson’s cyberpunk, belong to this hermeneutics of suspicion. None the less, up to the mid-1960s SF remained almost exclusively ‘white boy’s fiction’ (as Susan Koppelman and Joanna

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Russ name it), and, even after the notable influx of first-rate (and then of some not-so-first-rate) women writers and therefore of women readers in the last thirty years, this aspect of SF is sociologically or statistically probably dominant to this day. If we pithily (and therefore somewhat unfairly) associate it with names such as Heinlein and Asimov, and then their degenerate Right-wing descendants of the militaristic kind such as Pournelle, we shall realize that the main activities of white boys have in the USA traditionally been sports (including gun sports) and science. Sports fans do not read much, so that not much is written for them, and the debate about SF has since its inception (which began with Gernsbackian science popularization) been enmeshed with the somewhat infra-red herring of ‘SF and science’, or what Joanna Russ has with angry perceptivity seen as ‘SF and Technology as Mystification’ and indeed as the US capitalism’s—Russ would say the patriarchy’s, and I’d say both are correct—addiction to the technological fix. (I’d myself add to Koppelman’s designation of race, age and gender also class. It is a nice and unresolved point just which class/es is SF written for, in the commercial and ideological sense. At any rate, it circulates almost entirely within some middle classes of the white North: affluence is not enough—there’s little SF in Taiwan—nor is a scientificotechnological tradition—there’s somewhat more SF in Germany than in Taiwan but no real hard core of readers, unless it is lower-middle-class adolescents in Perry Rhodan fan clubs.) When I spoke about science as a potential methodological model for steering dynamic human relationships, I had not yet got to the pragmatic history of science in the last two centuries: for in them the steering happens in the interest of capitalism (see my ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’). Indeed, in so far as this science is centrally constituted by turning nature only into concepts, and furthermore into quantifiable or mathematizable concepts, and finally by making a more or less closed system out of concepts; and in so far as it is based (in capitalist as well as in orthodox Marxist versions) on mastery, a wrong end requiring consubstantially wrong means—the scientific is the political. Perhaps Wallerstein’s argument which I’ll now summarize, is (I hope it is) one-sided, but it is no less powerful for all that. His long and complex investigation reads global rationality of the ‘Westernizing’ type—claiming to be the search for Truth—as being deeply complicit with imperial conquest, economic exploitation and a world cultural framework creating and ideologically disciplining the indispensable cadres for capitalist production (technicians, scientists and the attendant administrators and educators). The funds used to support this ‘professional-managerial’ class (or classes) came from the global surplus as extracted through companies and states, and in this fundamental sense the interests of this

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class (most of us) were tied to that of capitalism, at the same time that parts of it were bitterly protesting against some historical irrationalities and injustices. Scientific culture supplied also a language and horizon specific to such cadres, setting it apart both from the upper bourgeoisie and from the working classes. This limits the prospect and extent of rebellious cadres allying themselves to the latter, since they’d have to lose not only their relative affluence but also their whole lifestyle and habitus. ‘Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operation of historic capitalism. The great emphasis on the rationality of scientific activity was the mask of irrationality of endless accumulation.’28 After a lifetime of work as teacher, I must ruefully confess that I take seriously Nietzsche’s diagnosis of 125 years ago: Symptoms of a decay in education are everywhere: . . . the contemptible cash and pleasure economy of the educated classes, their lack of love and grandeur . . . [The learned classes] become more thoughtless and loveless with every day . . . If a Luther were to appear now, he would rebel against the disgusting mentality of the propertied classes, against their stupidity and thoughtlessness: for they have not the least suspicion of the danger.29

I still remain more optimistic than Nietzsche, for I think that the split being enforced nowadays in the professional classes between well-paid because indispensable administrators, most lawyers, top academic researchers funded by the military, and so on, and the great majority subject to rapid proletarianization may perhaps open the eyes to a number of us—in my very optimistic days, I think to three per cent—about Marx’s great example of dialectics, where poverty is not only poverty but also revolt. The Iron Heel may, alas, not be wholly out of date yet. To treat the orthodox scientific ethos in terms of its semantics, if you wanted to be master of your company, you got to treat profit-making concepts as raw material on the same footing as profit-making labourers and iron ore. These means have proved to be quite adequate to these ends (so much the worse for all of us). In Benjamin’s words. ‘If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war.’30 This is the wholly negative sense in which science and the technological fix are organizing models for SF. This can be openly seen in ‘mercenary SF,’ in US ‘militia utopias’,31 in Norman’s Gor cycle whose anti-feminism is, logically, also warmongering, and in many (not all) ‘techno-thriller’ novels,

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comics and games shaped as perverse educations ‘transforming boys into men through warfare’ (Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam’, p. 200); and to my mind it also sterilizes most quasi-liberal ‘hard SF’ of the Benford type. However, I think that indirect influences of the fix on ‘getting there fastest with the mostest’ (burlesqued already by Verne in the Baltimore Gun Club) on matters of tone, such as the increasing brutalization pioneered by the media and comics, and of underlying form, such as sensationalist violence, are even more important. I wish I had space-time here for a running comment on Russ’s great essay and its most significant central trope of toxic addiction (which would lead me to empathy as the key psychological process for suppressing critical evaluation and in favour of cathartic sentimentality), but I haven’t. The addiction and the fix result in stories which present some variant on John Jakes’s candid self-characteristic as ‘I Claudius meets Dallas, 600 years in the future’, that is movie, television and comics pap using spaceships instead of horses, Mississippi steamboats or executive suites, and Aliens instead of Injuns, robbers or hostile takeovers. And it is these movies, television shows and comics (branching out into games and other commercial tie-ins) that today constitute the bulk of SF, and the bulk of really bad SF (even of new SF books, one-sixth were by 1995 ‘media novelizations’ done mainly for financial reasons by some prominent SF names); while masterpieces of SF like Disch’s 334 are remaindered (and mostly disregarded by critics), up to $1.5 million was being paid in the 1980s for novels by Heinlein, Asimov and others reputed to have Hollywood potential.32 We know today that Reagan’s Star Wars programme was a scientific hoax designed to bankrupt the USSR and enrich the West Coast megacompanies (both of which it very successfully accomplished); but it is extremely characteristic that the only way that the US taxpayers could be hoodwinked into forking billions over to big technological corporations was by using the associations of the black-and-white SF movies and of the whizzkid, infantile (sorry— adolescent) fix on technology as salvational ploys. (It is, of course a fake salvation; I shall return to this needful term.) The pedigree goes: Gernsback, Campbell and Heinlein to NASA and the SF ‘Bova’ wing, both of these converging into George Lucas, and thence to Reagan’s advisers. Now Heinlein cannot necessarily be held responsible for all the Heinleinists, to whom he is sometimes as superior as Marx usually is to the Marxists and Christ to the Christians. None the less, Stalin is (however minimally) present in Marx, the televangelists in Christ and the out-and-out-mystifiers—say, the Star Wars people—in Heinlein, notably in Starship Troopers, his shoddiest book (bar the senilia). The argument that the ideological hegemony of scientism is the central conflict in SF criticism has much to recommend it, and

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I find it significant that Jordin has suggested it on the basis of an analysis of Wolfbane by Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl.33 Adolescents have normal age-bound fears about affirmation, sex, identity and so on. But in capitalism without a human face, the anxieties grow deeper than ever. The ‘bad soul’ of SF battens on and exploits those fears. Let me attempt here only a small addition to Russ, about a characteristic feature often supplementing sensationalism and sentimentality in American SF, which I shall call (stealing a term from performance studies) surrogacy. It is in fact most easily identified in Hollywood SF movies: Lucas’s Star Wars, for example, clearly speaks ‘to the American boy’s love for shiny gadgets, spiffy uniforms, authoritative-sounding technotalk and a hot rod that shoots really cool laser blasts’, so that it ‘certified a new wisdom: megamovies were now the province of the young male’.34 But my example is the earlier and more substantial ‘paranoid’ cluster about malevolent aliens, centring on the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers (directed by Don Siegel, 1956). These movies feed on and in turn feed further the real fears during the 1950s of people from their characteristic middle-middle-class suburban locale. The civilian or military authorities to which the citizen should normally look for protection turn out to be malevolent, ‘alien’. In a climate characterized by massive Cold-War paranoia, stemming from the militarytechnoscientific complex and orchestrated through the subservient media, all democratic control from below was paralysed after about 1947. Scientists on the military payroll experimented recklessly on humans (one of many such episodes was later revealed as CIA-funded research on brainwashing drugs at my own McGill University, which wrecked the lives of many unsuspecting human guinea pigs); only a few maligned commentators, like the utopologist Lewis Mumford (and the SF from Pohl to Dick and Disch), had the courage and intelligence to suspect the possibility of such Nazi-like experimentation.35 The fears of the ‘middle’ class, invaded and finally squeezed out of existence by huge, from-the-top-down forces, can now be clearly seen as deeply justifiable, and are being consummated under today’s post-Fordism in the rapid elimination under way for independent economic or ideological existence of this whole congeries of classes. The basic ploy or trick of such very Freudian nightmare movies is then to take these deep fears on the part of the ‘outer-directed’, conformist employee of big firms— diagnosed at the time by the new sociological muck-rakers like David Riesman and later by critics of the militaristic aspect of SF such as Bruce Franklin—and to project them in the best case on some unidentifiable, scary aliens and in the worst case (as in a number of Heinlein’s novels, from The Puppet Masters through Starship Troopers to Farnham’s Freehold, which should have claimed copyright payments from Hollywood) on transparently

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Earthly antagonists, Chinese communists or blacks. The commodity fetishists get a taste of their malevolent fetish disguised as Baal and not Jehovah. Their fears are acknowledged, energized and directed at the wrong enemy—the surrogate or scapegoat (a very Christian figure). I’d expand Cyndy Hendershot’s conclusion for my own ends beyond her focus on radiation and the military, and allot a central role also to the incipient fears at the first stirrings against the New Deal. Her conclusions then apply with redoubled force: the very power that threatens the small-town citizenry through weird new restructuring experiments is in this topsy-turvy mirror saving humanity: the films ‘[suggest] that the enemy is really the savior’ (‘The Invaded Body’ p. 36); or, even more clearly, ‘following commentators like Mumford leads me to conclude that many people understood fear of communism as a displaced fear of the American (in)security state’ (37).

What For?: Salvation of the Commonwealth At quite a few places in this Afterword I have been slipping into the vocabulary of salvation. And indeed my overriding political rule would be the Latin one Salus reipublicae suprema lex. The ancient Romans, not having read Machiavelli or Shakespeare, did not distinguish politics and religion, so that salus means equally health and salvation; thus ‘The health/salvation of the commonwealth is the supreme rule’. Why use semi-religious or seemingly theological language to talk about politics today, as in this subtitle? Well, for one thing the liberation theologians have not done too badly in this endeavour. For a second thing, human life differs from the animal by pivoting on belief, the deferral of time between bestowing (one’s trust—a credo always on credit) and receiving back.36 For a third, religion has the great advantage over science of providing digital views—yes or no, 0 or 1—which one cannot do without at all moments of crucial decision, though science is much better at giving us the complex underlying, analogue picture. Add to this serious doubts about science because of its enthusiastic subservience to capitalist destruction of life, and a new look at religion seems indicated. Not, I hasten to add with as much stress as I can muster, that I find any use for monotheism, or for projecting upon the unknown anthropomorphic forces which may be propitiated, or—of course—for the usually quite pernicious clerical apparatuses (churches as institutions). Yet the scientific no less than the religious fixed truth is a dangerous illusion or fakery; understanding or wisdom is (at least since the Industrial Revolution) ineluctably a dynamic permeation and interfusion of the known with the unknown; and the unknown will never be finally known since history won’t freeze. I’d con-

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clude, then, that no impulse toward salvation of communities and individuals (traditionally monopolized by religions and theologies, which both preserved and deflected this impulse) can be heedlessly tossed aside while we are lurching into a most dangerous unknown. The relevance of the salvational impulse cannot be gainsaid in an age of multiple catastrophes at all levels. Profit as the transcendental signifier (Great Satan) means unprecedented and system-immanent quantitative and qualitative destruction of human bodies through wars, drugs and other poisonings of air, water, food—all of them being normalized and naturalized through objectivism and empathy. Looking at this from the scientific side, we need a salvational science, wresting the impulse away from religion. Looking at it from the side of belief, science needs to be refashioned to cope with qualities (overridingly, the quality of people’s lives) and not only quantities. We should use and invert Walter Benjamin’s famous image (out of our own Poe) of the automaton chess-player who always wins because a dwarf is hidden in it: Benjamin in 1940 identified the chess-playing Turk with Marxism and the wizened dwarf hiding his ugly countenance with theology. Today international Marxism is the dwarf banished for his ugliness, and a perverted Theology of ‘give us this day our daily profit’ always wins. I myself, however, prefer to follow Brecht and Benjamin and look at our historical constellation as a new animal at the crossroads of millennial catastrophe and a psychophysically viable community or polis: as politics in the classical sense. But refurbishing Benjamin’s image would also enlist a saner belief in the salvation of our common thing. The indispensable return of socialism (under whatever new name) must be prepared—and can only come about—by grafting new shoots upon the old cognitive tree; for, without the horizon of salvation, Marxism or socialism is scientistic dogma; without politico-economic practice, ‘theology falls into magic’ (Buck-Morss The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 249): both then fail. However, this has to be a politics that can recuperate (make sense of) paradise and—alas especially— hell. An earmark of hell: its ‘time doesn’t want to know death’; Disneyland, the emblem for where we live today, also denies death. An earmark of paradise: it can give meaning to death.37

The Cognitive Art: In Praise of Memory and SF Only that which doesn’t stop hurting stays in the memory. Nietzsche

One of the worst sins of the PoMo vulgate, accepted as the mainstream of at least the ‘soft’ intellectuals’ public sphere but increasingly adopted by the

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mercenary media as serving their obfuscating aims too, is its rejection of memory and thus of history. Violating often the great US motto (which should be on the one-dollar bill as the obverse of ‘In God We Trust’), Henry Ford’s ‘History Is Bunk’, SF is much better here. The cyberpunk, for example of Gibson and Cadigan, accepted into the mainstream of SF, desperately fights for memory and thus for history, so that even the realities of economic power emerge under the illusion of limitless ‘virtual realities’. But the examples could be extended to most, or perhaps all, of significant SF: it was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (which is, for all of its evident weaknesses, the great ancestor of the ‘new maps of hell’) and his (better) Animal Farm that gave us some of the sharpest tools to dissect Nazism and Stalinism, and it was in Nineteen Eighty-four that he noted how the falsification of reality is seamlessly welded into the obliteration of memory. It was the great satiricodystopian strain of American SF which noted how the invasive dictatorship of technologized PR first under commercial and then under financial capitalism threatened the ‘common man’. It was Lem and the Strugatskys who noted how scientistic absolutism, in orthodox Bolshevism or in technocratic consumerism, led to the same ends. And, not least, it was Russ, Le Guin and the ensuing waves of women writers who reactualized the old socialist adage that the position of women (which in literature means, of the agents coded as female) is as it were emblem and tide-gauge of civil society as a whole. The epigraph from Nietzsche ought to tell us why memory is one of the strategically central ideological battlegrounds today: a halfway good (never mind radically better) near future is today just not believable. The collapse of the welfare-state—Leninist and Keynesian—visions and practices left the future to be colonized by the think-tanks of the military-technoscientific complex, promoted from designing weapons systems to whole social systems. Futures became ‘knowledge commodities’—as in that fascinating stock-exchange category on which our economics nowadays hinge, ‘futures trading’—and ‘futurologists’, from Kahn to Toffler, became scouts for the military and financial hit-men. What Archimedean point can we, then, find to move the seemingly deeply frozen or even rock-solid (but, in fact, oceanfluid) present? The far-off future, possibly. But since it is difficult to make images, or other topological figurations, of states that anybody today over forty to fifty won’t see, the only way that the possibility of a way out in the future can be imaginatively entertained is by mobilizing the past: the personal and collective memories. True, nostalgia can be simply useless wallowing, but it can also be, as Alexander Kluge put it, a defence against the onslaught of the present on the rest of the time.38 There is no revolution without the Great Ancestors. Against the PoMo war on memory, that ‘car-

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nival on the volcano’ (Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 173), a cognitive memory—that is, drawing lessons about the open future as against the intolerable present out of a critically reworked past—remains an important part and parcel of that unexhausted, continuing legacy of Enlightenment which was formulated by Kant in that great bourgeois cultural revolution as Sapere aude: Dare to know! This is incompatible with the yearly whirligig of commercial fashion, which has for example obliterated from the social memory of my students the Vietnam War, never mind Nazism (Stalinism has never been properly understood in the ‘West’, which also means that Zamyatin and Orwell have never been properly read). With the exception of the very top, even the US upper classes, notes Blonsky echoing unwittingly the Nietzsche epigraph above, ‘live “mouse lives,” unable ever to see systems, general social plans or the ideological and social laws revealed by the scattered fragments [of the US image factories]’.39 The US senators today compare very unfavourably with the Catholic Church’s seventeenth-century cardinals, as Brecht noted apropos his Life of Galileo. But then, I have discussed earlier how this mousy blindness applies also to the great majority of the only alternative public voice and stance, that of our professional class(es). Loud ‘silicon positivists’ propound now that virtual reality is the new messiah, leading to ‘Athens without slaves’; but Andrew Ross reminds us that we may be instead getting a society of ‘slaves without Athens’ (Strange Weather, p. 94). It is good to find that the large anti-cognitive majority making for such a threat doesn’t include most of high-quality SF. I don’t at all mean by this that we should return to singing the praises of the good old times before electricity or television: this is what the past-oriented SF used to be with Bradbury and Simak, and the nostalgia is irrelevant for all of us Harawayan cyborgs. What I mean is rather to be found in the fiction and critical testimonies of some writers. Out of many possibilities, I take one which happens to have landed lately on my table, by Suzy McKee Charnas.40 She speaks of her three shared-world SF novels, the wellknown and splendid ‘Holdfast’ trilogy, as each being a ‘reflector’ (I’d say a parable) of ‘a certain moment and level and tone of feminism among middle-class, white . . . feminists . . . during the two or three years prior to publication date . . . each giving a view of a limited but complex segment of what I saw of the war of the sexes during those years’ (7)—that is, of a story ‘still alive as potentiality in our own culture and time’ (11). She also mentions how she tried to write the first novel, Walk to the End of the World (1974), as an adventure story, as a political thriller set in a post-colonial Third World country, etc.: ‘But only an SF brand of fantasy offered me both the foothold in reality that meant the story couldn’t just be dismissed as a silly nightmare and the margin of fantasy to push the ideas of the story as

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far as I saw they could go’ (15). These reflections of Charnas’s seem to me an excellent example for the parable nature of SF, and her trilogy for the narrative cognition such parables can achieve. I attempted to differentiate my Sorelian and Gramscian pessimism of the soberly looking eyes from apocalypticism in a previous essay, but I shall here, in order to close on a quite non-apocalyptically positive note, rather emphasize a startling metaphor of Plato’s. In an otherwise not very distinguished dialogue, ‘The Sophist’, he argues that there exists merchandizing that not only sells what serves the body but that sells what serves the psyché (not quite our ‘soul’). To this heavenly food, as the Christian tradition will call it, belong the arts (mousiké, what the Muses preside over) of show or display (epideiktiké) such as painting or prestidigitation, and in general cognitions (mathemata) trafficked in and sold for the psyché’s entertainment and also for its serious needs.41 I rather like the down-to-earth definition of arts as shows sold for the pleasures and needs of the (let us call it) personality, which is alas then immediately forgotten as Plato proceeds to lambaste the sophists who traffick in virtue. But what really cheers me is that the ancient Hellenes saw no contradiction or inded significant difference between the Muses’ work and cognitions, music and mathematics if you wish. And the mother of all the Muses was Mnemosyne, Memory. As was to be demonstrated. A generalizing conclusion at leaving: art, the rendering of ‘thick’ possible worlds, has traditionally been the main competitor of religion for wresting the unknown into the known by means of figure and narration; and for doing this in order to make living easier not only by means of a distance wrested from a world too much with us (escape) but also in guise of a boomerang returning us into that world with possibly new powers—like the bison hunters at Lascaux who could now precisely place the beast’s vulnerable heart. This parable-like function remains for art in the foreseeable future. But it remains pertinent (it will be cognitive) on condition that the parable does not simply illustrate but induces the doctrine that informs it: as I attempted to argue on the traces of Benjamin apropos of Kim Stanley Robinson. Such an inducing, with the prominent role given to bodily stance and experience, means that ‘The highest art is the art of living’ (Brecht): today perhaps by means of the art of training critical citizen-dissenters (see some first reflections in chapter 7 of my Positions, written with Charles Elkins). This art would today also have to show its ideal dissenter-learners, banding together to help themselves collectively—which is what politics to my mind should be and only too rarely is—that caring for how is the indispensable obverse of caring for why (what for).

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Notes 1 Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, p. 35; and Human Development Report 1996, ed. UN Development Programme, p. 20. I’d like here to thank all contributors to this volume, and in particular its indefatigable editor Patrick Parrinder and Tom Moylan; I’m also indebted to discussions with my PhD student Salvatore Proietti, and to Christoph Jander and the Humboldt University Library in Berlin. 2 Poverty and Hunger (World Bank, 1986); World Development Report (World Bank, 1990); and cf. Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market, p. 19 and passim. 3 Steve Wright, ‘An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control’, ed. Dick Holdsworth, pp. 34–35. 4 Chronologically: Stefan T. Possony and Jerry E. Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Dunellen, 1970); Ben Bova, Assured Survival (Boston: Houghton, 1984); G. Harry Stine, Warbots series (New York: Pinnacle, late 1980s); Chris Morris and Janet Morris, Threshold (New York: New American Library, 1990); Alvin Toffler, War and Anti-war (London: Little Brown, 1994); Chris Morris, Janet Morris, and Thomas Baines, ‘Weapons of Mass Protection’, Airpower Journal (spring 1995): 15–29. Cf. also the critical comments in Chris H. Gray, ‘ “There Will Be War!” ’, Science-fiction Studies 7 (1980): 315–36; Thomas M. Disch, ‘The Road to Heaven’, Nation 10 May 1986: 650–56; J. William Gibson, The Perfect War (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1986), and ‘Redeeming Vietnam’, Cultural Critique 19 (1991): 179–202; H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 5 William Gibson, talk in New York City on 26 Aug. 1997, cited in Marleen Barr’s chapter. 6 Lynne Segal, ‘Whose Left: Socialism, Feminism and the Future’ New Left Review 185 (1991). 81–91. 7 Darko Suvin, with Marc Angenot, ‘Demystification, or the Implicit of the Manifested: Laudation, Limit-finding, and Uses of Marx Arising out of the Communist Manifesto’. 8 See much more on this in my ‘Utopianism from Orientation to Agency: What Are We Intellectuals under Post-Fordism To Do?’ 9 Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 55. 10 Beside Brecht, Bloch and Benjamin, there are interesting reflections on this in Marcuse. Cf. Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. 11 Readers of Philip K. Dick’s letters and a debate which erupted apropos of them in Science-fiction Studies may remember that he denounced Fitting, Jameson and myself as Soviet agents run by a committee called Lem from Poland! This potentially very damaging denunciation can be forgiven since the FBI laughed at it, but I still look much more askance at the somewhat more hypocritical—but at least open—use of the same running-to-Big-Brother trope (‘He’s a Yugoslav Marxist’) by Jack Williamson in the debate we had in College English when I criticized a book by his friend Clareson. I think I’ve very few lessons to learn in this field (let us call it international ideologized politics), and none from people who don’t know anything about it. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta, I, p. 210.

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13 John Clute, ‘Universe Two’ (review): 12. 14 Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. M. Suino, p. 26. 15 Cf. René Thom, Apologie du logos, pp. 609–16 and 631–2. 16 John Berger, The Moment of Cubism, and Other Essays. 17 I discuss this at some length in Suvin with Angenot, ‘Demystification’, and especially in ‘Two Cheers for Essentialism and Totality: Marx’s Oscillation and its Limit’. 18 See for much more my ‘Transubstantiation of Production and Creation’, and Suvin with Angenot, ‘Demystification’. 19 See my ‘ “Utopian” and “Scientific”: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels’, and a detailed argument on Marx’s ‘limited oscillation’ about scientificity in ‘Two Cheers’. This matter has of course occasioned a whole mini-library of comments which can be glimpsed in the notes to my essays; a good survey is Theodore Shanin, ‘Marxism and the Vernacular Revolutionary Traditions’ in Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp. 243–79. 20 The brief text referred to is Darko Suvin, ‘Preliminary Theses on Allegory’; on the novum see now my reconsideration and updating of the Metamorphoses essay’s approach in ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’. 21 I have been worrying at such aspects of Brecht’s since my student days, and a record of my thinking from the 1960s and 1970s may be found in To Brecht and Beyond; but see now the Copernican revolution in Brechtian studies in Fredric Jameson’s Brecht and Method, and my take on it in ‘Centennial Politics: On Jameson on Brecht on Method’, New Left Review 234 (Mar.–Apr. 1999): 127–40. 22 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 287. 23 Antonio Gramsci, cited in Alain Lipietz, Towards a New Economic Order, trans. M. Slater, p. 59. 24 I discuss the historical semantics of ‘original/ity’ and its being confined to the individualist capitalist tradition (as opposed, for example, to the East Asian one) in Suvin, Lessons of Japan, ch. 3, and see also Brecht’s use of Japanese matter in ch. 5. 25 Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Grosse Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, XXI, p. 131. 26 See for a first discussion of the sociopsychological reasons for intellectuals like me using this approach Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse, pp. 106–18, and cf. also pp. 209–48 on Simmel. 27 Joanna Russ, To Write like a Woman, p. 10. 28 Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, pp. 80–85 and passim. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. D. Breazeale, pp. 102, 104. 30 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I, p. 507. 31 See Michael Orth, ‘Reefs on the Right’. 32 Quote from John Jakes in Kate Seago, ‘Celebrities Create Comic-book Characters, Concepts’, byline from Dallas Morning News; as the title indicates, he was speaking about his Mullkon Empire comics series begun in 1995, but I’ve extrapolated it quite fairly to his (and not only his) whole opus. Data on SF and media from Neal Baker, ‘The X-Files: Ruins’: 122–23. Data on Disch and 1980s payments from

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Colin Greenland, ‘Redesigning the World’. 33 Martin Jordin, ‘Contemporary Futures’. Pohl was my earliest correspondent and contact in the US SF community, with whom and other writers such as Aldiss and Blish I spent memorable summers at the Trieste SF Film Festivals in the 1960s and 1970s, which included watching the first Moon landing. 34 Richard Corliss, ‘Our Critic Rides a Time Machine’. 35 I take much of my information, including the reference to Mumford’s In the Name of Sanity (1954) from Cyndy Hendershot, ‘The Invaded Body’, and the background from Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space. 36 Michel de Certeau, ‘What We Do when We Believe’ in Marshall Blonsky, ed., In Signs, pp. 192–96. 37 I refer throughout mainly to Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ from 1940 (originally untitled, also called ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’) I, Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 691–704, but the quotation about death is from V, p. 115; I expatiated on proper dying in Lessons of Japan, ch. 5, and on Disneyland in ‘Utopianism from Orientation to Agency’. 38 Kluge is quoted in Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 88, as part of an interesting diagnosis of German discussions about utopian discourse under the onslaught of PoMo ideologies. On bourgeois futurology see Andrew Ross, Strange Weather, pp. 172ff.; I’m not sure why he put quotation marks around the adjective. 39 Marshall Blonsky, ‘Introduction’ to In Signs, p. xxxiv. 40 Suzy McKee Charnas with Ildney Cavalcanti, ‘A Literature of Unusual Ideas’. See also Russ’s laudation of SF as a noble didactic genre, similar to medieval literature or the plays of Brecht and Shaw (as befits a fellow-alumna of the Yale School of Drama). 41 Plato with an English Translation, ed. H. N. Fowler, II, pp. 290–93.

Darko Suvin: Checklist of Printed Items that Concern Science Fiction (with Utopian Fiction or Utopianism, and a few Bordering Items)

I caught a captive & he won’t let me go. Johann Nestroy

Compiled from records kept by DS; they might not be full as concerns the early years. Notes by DS. Translations from English into Croatian and/or Serbian (and other Yugoslav languages) after 1970 are marked as Y in square brackets. Rare publications in fanzines (except for Rottensteiner’s influential Quarber Merkur), some very brief notes (e.g., in Science-Fiction Studies) and translations (e.g. from Russian, from Lem) are as a rule not listed. The list is chronological, except in case of re-editions or translations marked by lowercase letters after the original entry; however, for better accessibility the publication in English (where extant) is always the first entry, even when translated publication in other languages came earlier. Within each year first come books by DS, then in books by various hands, then articles. For easier orientation, here is a list of volumes (books, excluding those superseded by later editions; and special issues of periodicals, excluding Science-Fiction Studies) written or (co)edited by DS: nos 19, 38, 77, 78, 83, 88, 94, 141, 146, 149, 156, 170. All references to Science-Fiction Studies below are to the issue number, not volume number. Template: Original title [if pertinent, translation for this occasion]. Place of publication: publisher, date, page numbers where known. [Annotation] Comment on some Yugoslav sources: Studentski list [Student Paper], weekly of the Union of Students of Zagreb University (then the only university in the Federal Republic of Croatia), printed in three to four thousand copies; DS was a collaborator from 1951 as theatre critic, then member of editorial board and deputy editor-in-chief.

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Nase teme [Our Themes], monthly published by a younger group around the Zagreb student union president, Ivo Bojanic, mainly Marxist ‘reformist’. DS was a permanent collaborator in most issues, both with overviews of discussions in the French and English cultural publications and with articles and essays. Izraz [Expression] was a ‘warm stream’ cultural periodical in Sarajevo. Republika (founded 1946) was the ‘flagship’ cultural periodical in Croatia. Telegram was a cultural weekly; the editorial office was in the Union of Writers of Croatia (of which DS was a member). Umjetnost rijeci [Art of the Word] was the ‘academic’ periodical of the Croatian Philological Society—in fact of the Faculty of Philosophy (that is, Arts) at Zagreb, where DS was an asistent (assistant lecturer) from 1960 to 1967.

1955 1 ‘Najprije analiza’ [To Begin with, an Analysis]. Studentski list 1 Nov. 1955: 5. [Editorial, argues for translating Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and then assesses it]

1958 2 ‘Mornar na katarci’ [Sailor on the Mast]. Nase teme no. 2 (1958). [First brief overview of SF and utopianism; title is taken from Zamyatin] 3 ‘O nauci, umjetnosti, nauci o umjetnosti i naucnoj umjetnosti’ [On Science, Art, the Science [i.e. scholarship] of Art, and Scientific Art]. Izraz 7–8 (1958): 140–43. [Theoretical problems not too far from ‘scientific fiction’]

1961 4 John Wyndham Dan obracuna [The Day of Reckoning]. Transl. Darko Suvin. Zagreb: Epoha, 1961, 287pp. [Translation of The Day of the Triffids, 1958] 5 ‘Lukijan, prvi pisac prednaucne fantastike’ [Lucian, the first writer of proto-SF [or pre-scientific fiction]]. Republika 11 (1961): 22–23. [Folio format; translation by DS of a section from Lucian’s True Histories follows]

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6 ‘Anticipacija i Edward Bellamy’ [The Anticipation and Edward Bellamy]. Republika 2–3 (1962): 93–96. [Folio format; translation of a section from Bellamy by Truda Suvin (mother) follows] 7 ‘Savinien Cyrano i planetarni roman’ [Savinien Cyrano and the ‘planetary novel’]. Republika 4 (1962): 163–65. [Folio format; translation by DS of sections from Cyrano’s The States and Empires of the Moon follows] 8 ‘Utopija, tehnika i mit: Baconova Nova Atlantida’ [Utopia, Technology, and Myth: Bacon’s New Atlantis]. Republika 8 (1962): 341–43. [Folio format; translation by DS of sections from New Atlantis follows] 9 ‘John Christopher’. Telegram 19 Oct. 1962: 10. [A note introducing translation of a JC story]

1963 10 ‘Naucna fantastika i utopizam: Pristup jednoj knjizevnoj grani’ [SF and Utopianism: Approach to a Branch of Literature]. Umjetnost rijeci 2 (1963): 113–35.

1964 11 ‘Ogledalo i dinamo: utopizam W. Morrisa’ [The Mirror and the Dynamo: William Morris’s Utopianism]. Kolo 2 (1964): 244–55. 12 ‘S. Cyrano’. Telegram 13 Mar. 1964. 13 ‘W. Morris’. Rijecka revija no. 4 (1964).

1965 14–18 ‘O tradiciji naucne fantastike’ [On the Tradition of SF]. razlog nos 2, 3 and 5 (1964), 6 and 7 (1965). [A historical and theoretical overview of SF, incorporating views from the studies nos 5–11, collected in no. 19] 19 Od Lukijana do Lunjika: Historijski pregled i antologija naucne fantastike [From Lucian to the Lunik: A Historical Survey and Anthology of Science Fiction]. Zagreb: Epoha, 1965, 566 pp. [Besides the essayistic historical overview previously published in nos 14–18, the bulk of the volume was an appended anthology of translated SF texts with brief introductory notes, from Lucian, Bacon, Cyrano and Swift through O’Brien, Bellamy, and Mor-

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ris—incorporating nos 5–8 and 11–to twentieth-century US, Soviet, UK and French examples]

1966 20–23 Encyclopedia entries ‘Asimov’, ‘Bellamy’, ‘Blish’, ‘Bradbury’. Enciklopedija Leksikografskog zavoda, vol. 1. 2nd edn. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod [Encyclopedia Institute], 1966: 202, 350, 418 and 474. [Between 5 and 12 column lines]

1967 24–26 Encyclopedia entries ‘Gernsback’, ‘Godwin’, ‘Heinlein’, Enciklopedija Leksikografskog zavoda, vol. 2. 2nd edn. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod [Encyclopedia Institute], 1967: 524, 562 and 700. [6–10 column lines] 26b ‘Heinlein’ rpt ibidem, vol. 3. 3rd edn. 1977: 375. 27 Dzejms Blis [James Blish]. Zvezdane spore. Transl. Darko Suvin and Truda Suvin. Biblioteka [Series] Kentaur. Beograd: Jugoslavija, 1967, 177pp. [Translation by DS and his mother of Blish’s Seedling Stars, 1957] 28–29 Encyclopedia entries ‘Jambul’ [Yambulus] and ‘Jefremov’. Enciklopedija Leksikografskog zavoda, vol. 3. 2nd edn. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod [Encyclopedia Institute], 1967: 249 and 274. [6–12 column lines] 28b ‘Jambul’ rptd ibidem, vol. 4. 3rd edn. 1978: 36.

1968 30–34 Encyclopedia entries ‘Lem’, ‘Mercier’, ‘Naucna fantastika’ [SF], ‘Nesvadb’, ‘O’Brien, Fitzjames’. Enciklopedija Leksikografskog zavoda, vol. 4. 2nd edn. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod [Encyclopedia Institute], 1968: 50–51, 315, 487, 508 and 617. [Entry ‘SF’ has 60 column lines, the rest 6–10 lines] 30–31b and 33b, rptd ibidem, vol. 5. 3rd edn. 1979: 76, 431–32, 725. 34b. rptd ibidem, vol. 6. 3rd edn. 1980: 132. [Note: The entries ‘Morus’ and ‘Morris’ were accepted by the Encyclopedia Institute but apparently never printed.] 35 Encyclopedia entry ‘Pohl’. Enciklopedija Leksikografskog zavoda, vol. 5. 2nd edn. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod [Encyclopedia Institute], 1968: 182. [5 column lines] 35b rptd ibidem, vol. 6. 3rd edn. 1980: 486.

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36 Panel intervention in the MLA Forum on SF [DS’s title was ‘An Approach to Russian Science Fiction’]. Extrapolation 10 (1969): 71–81. [It was followed by a discussion between the panelists and audience, ibidem, 91–113] 37 ‘Mjesecevo zrcalo covjeku, ili pouke selenografije’ [The Moon as a Mirror to Man, or Lessons of Selenography]. Telegram 25 July 1969: 12–13. [Self-translation of a lecture at the Trieste SF Film Festival seminar ‘What after the Moon Landing?’, July 1969; the argument is that while colonels land on the Moon, this mirror shows the mass killings and hunger on Earth]

1970 38 Other Worlds, Other Seas: Science Fiction Stories From Socialist Countries. New York: Random House, 1970, xxxiii + 217 pp. [Selected and edited with Preface and notes by DS; the ‘Socialist’ was inserted by the house editor Chris Cerf, the original term was ‘Warsaw-Pact’] 38b New York: Berkley, 1972. [Paperback] 38c München: Goldmann, 1972 and 1975. 38d Paris: Denoël, 1973. 38e Laren (The Netherlands): Luitingh, [1976]. 38f Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobo, 1979. 39 ‘The Science Fiction Novel in 1969’, in J. Blish, ed., Nebula Award Stories Five. New York: Doubleday, and London: Gollancz, 1970: 193–205. 39b New York: Pocket Books, and London: Panther, 1972. [Paperback] 39c Knjizevna smotra 5–6 (1970). [Y; folio size] 40 ‘The Open-ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and Solaris’, Afterword to S. Lem, Solaris. New York: Walker, and London: Faber & Faber, 1970: 212–23. 40b New York: Berkley, 1972. [Paperback] 40c Quarber Merkur 25 (1971). [Partial German translation] 40d Delo (Beograd) 12 (1971). [Y] 40e See no. 96. 41 ‘Significant Themes in Soviet Criticism of Science Fiction’. Extrapolation no. 11 (1970): 44–52. [Title wrongly modified by editor] 42 ‘Dramaturgija, kritika i naucna fantastika’ [Dramaturgy, Criticism, and SF]. Rijecka revija 1–2 (1970): 23–24. [Interview with G. Scotti; Y]

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1971 43 Russian Science Fiction Literature and Criticism 1956–1970: A Bibliography. Working Paper of the ‘Secondary Universe 4’ Conference, Toronto, Oct. 1971. Toronto: Toronto Public Library, 1971, 35 pp. [Two loose-leaf pages of ‘Errata’ enclosed. Parts previously published in Canadian Slavic Studies no. 2 and no. 4 (1971).] 43b Quarber Merkur no. 29 (1972). [Partial German translation] 44 ‘The Utopian Tradition of Russian Science Fiction’. The Modern Language Review 1 (1971): 139–60. 44b Umjetnost rijeci no. 3 (1969): 215–38. [Y] 44c Archives Internationales de Sociologie de la Coopération 27 (1970) and no. 29 (1971). [French] 44d See no. 60c. 44e In F. Rottensteiner, ed. Polaris 2. Frankfurt: Insel, 1974: 209–47. [German]

1972 45 ‘Cognition and Estrangement: An Approach to SF Poetics’. Foundation 2 (1972): 6–16. 45b ‘Naucne fantastika’ [SF], in Z. Koscevic, ed., Prvi sajam nauene fantastike. Zagreb: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1972, n.p. [9 catalogue pages; Y] 45c–d Knjizevnost no. 10 (1972); Umjetnost rijeci 2 (1973). [Y] 46 ‘Criticism of the Strugatskii Brothers’ Work’. Canadian–American Slavic Studies 6 (1972): 286–307. 46b Quarber Merkur 40 (1975). [German] 47 ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’. College English 34.3 (1972): 372–82. 47b in E. Barmeyer, ed. Science Fiction. München: Fink-UTB, 1972: 86–105. [German] 47c Umjetnost rijeci 1–2 (1970). [Y] 47d Helikon 1 (1972). [Hungarian] 47e In M. Rose, ed., Science Fiction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976: 57–71. 47f Eureka (Tokyo) 12.4 (1980). [Japanese] 47g Proxima (Københaven) 28 (1981). [Danish] 47h In Ryszard Handke et al. eds Spor o SF. Poznan: Wyd. Poznanskie, 1989: 303–12.

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48 ‘Against Common Sense: Levels of Science Fiction Criticism’. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1972): 124–32. [Review]

1973 49 ‘SF–The Other Side of Realism’. College English 34 (1973): 1148–50. [Review] 50 ‘A, B, and C. The Significant Context of SF: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Transcribed and edited by Darko Suvin’. Science-fiction Studies 1 (1973): 44–50. 50b Leesblad 5 (1993). [Flemish] 51 ‘Science Fiction and the Genological Jungle’. Genre 6.3 (1973): 251–73. 51b Delo (Beograd) 7 (1973). [Y] 51c Littérature 10 (1973). [French; incorporating no. 47] 51d Quarber Merkur 36 (1973). [German] 52 ‘Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal and a Plea’. Studies in the Literary Imagination 6.2 (1973): 121–45. 53 ‘The Time Machine versus Utopia as a Structural Model for Science Fiction’. Comparative Literature Studies 10 (1973): 334–52. 53b Strumenti critici 18 (1972). [Italian] 53c Savremenik 3 (1973). [Y] 53d Quarber Merkur 34 (1973). [German] 53e The Wellsian n.s. 1 (1976). 53f See no. 83. 54 ‘SF Writers, the Great Consensus, and Non-alignment’. Science-Fiction Studies 2 (1973): 135–36.

1974 55 ‘Raymond Williams and SF’. Science-Fiction Studies 3 (1974): 216–17. 56 ‘H. G. Wells and Earlier SF’. Science-Fiction Studies 3 (1974): 221–22. 57 ‘Response to Jack Williamson’. College English no. 35.4 (1974): 495. [JW’s letter impugning DS’s ‘Yugoslav Marxist’ critique no. 49 is on the preceding page] 58 ‘Is the Publisher Always Right?’ SFWA Bulletin 51–52 (1974): 15–22. 59 ‘The River-side Trees, or SF & Utopia’. Minnesota Review n.s. 2–3 (1974): 108–15. 59b Europe 580–81 (1977). [French]

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60 ‘The Literary Opus of the Strugatskii Brothers’. Canadian–American Slavic Studies 8 (1974): 454–63. 60b Delo (Beograd) 11 (1972). [Y] 60c In E. Barmeyer, ed., Science Fiction. München: Fink-UTB, 1972: 318–39. [Incorporating no. 44; German] 61 ‘Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Recoil in the Age of Anticipation’. Science-Fiction Studies 4 (1974): 255–69. 62 ‘In Response to Mr. Eisenstein’. Science-Fiction Studies 4 (1974): 306–07. 63 ‘Communication in Quantified Space: The Utopian Liberalism of Jules Verne’s Science Fiction’. Clio 4.1 (1974): 51–71.

1975 64 ‘Introduction’ to K. Capek, War with the Newts. Boston: G. K. Hall, Gregg Press, 1975: v–xviii. 64b Quarber Merkur 41 (1975). [German] 65 ‘Introductory Note [to the P. K. Dick Issue]’. Science-Fiction Studies 5 (1975): 3–4. 65b See no. 66c. 66 ‘P. K. Dick’s Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View (Introductory Reflections)’. Science-Fiction Studies 5 (1975): 8–22. 66b In T. Nishimura, ed., P. K. Dick kenkyu dokuhon. Tokyo: Sanrio, 1986: 124–53. 66c In R. D. Mullen et al. eds, On Philip K. Dick. Terre Haute: SF-TH, 1992: 1–15. [Reprints also no. 65] 67 ‘A Facsimile of the Wilkins Treatise’. Science-Fiction Studies 5 (1975): 94. 68 ‘German Utopian Thought in the 20th Century’. Science-Fiction Studies 5 (1975): 95. 69 ‘SF and The Left Hand of Darkness’. Seldon’s Plan (Wayne State University) 37 (1975): 6–17. [Public interview of DS by Cathleen Toiny and Madlyn Ferrier; fanzine ed. by Cy Chauvin and ‘Wayne Third Foundation’] 70 ‘Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition’. Minnesota Review n.s. 4 (1975): 106–15. 70b Excerpts in T. Votteler, ed., Short Story Criticism, vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990: 393–94. 70c In J. Huntington, ed., Critical Essays on H. G. Wells. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991: 23–33. 71 ‘Orwell Surveyed’. Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1975): 178: 72 ‘Angenot on Paraliterature’. Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1975): 199.

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73 ‘SF and Pulp-paper Publishing Practices’. Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1975): 197. 74 ‘Introductory Note [to the U. K. Le Guin Issue]’. Science-Fiction Studies 7 (1975): 203–04. 75 ‘Parables of De-alienation: Le Guin’s Widdershins Dance’. Science-Fiction Studies 7 (1975): 265–74. 75b In W. Jeschke, ed., Heyne Science Fiction Magazin 6. München: Heyne, 1983: 82–106. [German; a book, despite the title] 76 ‘James Blish, 1921–1975’. Science-Fiction Studies 7 (1975): 294–95. [Obituary]

1976 77 Russian Science Fiction 1956–1974: A Bibliography. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1976, viii + 73 pp. [Sections: Original Books; Translated Books; Annotated Checklist of Criticism; Appendix on Criticism before 1956. Supersedes no. 43. See nos 111 and 140] 78 Co-editor (with R. D. Mullen) of Science-Fiction Studies: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1973–1975. Boston: G. K. Hall, Gregg Press, 1976, 304 pp. [Includes four essays (nos 50, 61, 66, 75) and three notes (nos 54, 65, 74) by DS] 79 (With David Douglas), ‘Jack London and His Science Fiction: A Select Bibliography’. Science-Fiction Studies 9 (1976): 181–87. [Douglas was a graduate student of DS’s] 80 ‘On Wolk, Eisenstein, and Christianson in SFS #8’. Science-Fiction Studies 9 (1976): 211–13. 81 ‘ “Utopian” and “Scientific”: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels’. Minnesota Review 6 (1976): 60–70. 81b Pitanja 9.8 (1977). [Y] 82 ‘The Alternate Islands: A Chapter in the History of SF, with a Select Bibliography on the SF of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance’. Science-Fiction Studies 10 (1976): 239–48.

1977 83 (Principal editor of) H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction. Lewisburg, PA, and London: Associated University Presses, 1977, 279 pp. [Introduction (no. 70 adapted) and one essay (no. 53) by DS] 83b Quarber Merkur 46 (1977). [German translation of a variant of the Introduction]

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83c In B. Waites et al. eds, Popular Culture: Past and Present. London: Croom Helm, 1982: 22–32. [Rpt of the Introduction] 84 ‘Preliminary Theses on Allegory’. Umjetnost rijeci 1–3 (1977): 197–99. [Cognate to parable and SF] 85 ‘A First Comment on Ms. Le Guin’s Note on the “Lem Affair”’. ScienceFiction Studies 11 (1977): 101–02. [U. K. Le Guin’s note was on the preceding page] 86 ‘SF Theory: Internal and External Delimitation, and Utopia (Summary)’. Extrapolation 19.1 (1977): 13–15. 87 ‘Introduction [to the Sociology of SF Issue]’ Science-Fiction Studies 13 (1977): 223–27 and 318–19.

1978 88 Co-editor (with R. D. Mullen) of Science-Fiction Studies, Second Series: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1976–1977. Boston: G. K. Hall, Gregg Press, 1978, 335 pp. [Includes two essays by DS, nos 82 and 87] 89 ‘The State of the Art in Determining and Delimiting SF’, in C. Lester, ed., The International Science Fiction Yearbook 1979. London: Pierrot, 1978: 22–29. 89b ‘The State of the Art in Science Fiction Theory’. Science-Fiction Studies 7 (1979): 32–45. [Enlarged] 89c Quarber Merkur 53 (1980). [German] 90 ‘On What Is and What Is Not an SF Narration: With a List of 101 Victorian Books that Should Be Excluded from SF Bibliographies’. Science-Fiction Studies 14 (1978): 45–57. 91 ‘What Lem Actually Wrote: A Philologico-ideological Note’. Science-Fiction Studies 14 (1978): 85–87. 92 (with Irena Zantovská-Murray) ‘A Bibliography of General Bibliographies of SF Literature’. Science-Fiction Studies 16 (1978): 271–86. 93 ‘Science and Marxism, Scientism and Marquit’. Minnesota Review 10 (1978): 143–51. [Answer to attack by orthodox Marxist I. Marquit on no. 81] 93b Pitanja 11. 6–7 (1979). [Y]

1979 94 Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979, xviii + 317 pp. [Includes or subsumes nos 47, 51, 52, 109, 61, 82, 63, 70, 53, 44, 64]

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94b Pour une poétique de la science-Fiction, Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1977. [Shortened version, lacks chs 4, 6 and 8] 94c Poetik der Science-Fiction. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. [Lacks ch. 11] 94d Metamorfosis de la ciencia ficción. México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1984 and 1987. 94e Le metamorfosi della fantascienza. Bologna: II Mulino, 1985. [Ch. 11 updated] 94f SF no hen’yo. Tokyo: Kokubun-Sha, 1991. 94g–h Excerpts in Twentieth-century Literary Criticism. Detroit: Gale, 1982, 6: 93–95 [on Capek] and 8: 554–55 [on Zamyatin]. 95 ‘Andromeda (Tumannost Andromedy)’, in F. N. Magill, ed., Survey of Science Fiction Literature. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979, 1: 58–62. 96 ‘Three World Paradigms for SF: Asimov, Yefremov, Lem,’ in T. J. Remington ed., Selected Proceedings of the SFRA 1978 Conference. Cedar Falls, IA: University of Northern Iowa, 1979: 1–8. 96b Quarber Merkur 39 (1975). [German] 96c In Insel Almanach auf das Jahr 1976. Frankfurt: Insel, 1976: 157–71. [Lem part only, combined with no. 40] 96d In M. V. Dimic and E. Kushner, eds, Proceedings of the 7th Congress of the ICLA. Stuttgart: Kunst u. Wissen–Bieber, 1979, 1: 537–41. [Brief form] 96e Pacific Quarterly Moana 4.3 (1979). 96f In Jerzy Jarzebski, ed. Lem w oczach krytyki swiatowej. Krakow: Wyd literackie, 1989: 70–86. 96g ‘I, Robot: Isaac Asimov’, B. Narins and D. Stanley, eds, Contemporary Literary Criticism. Detroit: Gale, 1996: 3–4. [Extract from Asimov part] 97–99 Encyclopedia entries ‘Lem’, ‘Strugatsky, A. and B.’, ‘Zamiatin’, in P. Nicholls ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Roxby, and Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979: 350–52, 578–79, 670. 100 (Coauthored with M. Angenot, C. Elkins and R. M. Philmus), ‘Editorial’. Science-Fiction Studies no. 17 (1979): 3–8. [On the occasion of changing the SFS editorial board and transferring publication to Montréal] 101 ‘Locus’. Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1979): 107. [Review] 102 ‘An Unnecessary Reprint’. Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1979): 107–09. [Review] 103 ‘Gespräch zwischen Darko Suvin und Dieter Hasselblat’. Quarber Merkur 51 (1979). [Long radio discussion on SF] 104 (With M. Angenot), ‘Not Only But Also: Reflections on Cognition and Ideology in SF and SF Criticism’. Science-Fiction Studies 18 (1979): 168–79. 104b imagine . . . (Montréal) 38 (1987). [French] 105 (With C. Elkins), ‘Preliminary Reflections on Teaching Science Fiction Critically’. Science-Fiction Studies 19 (1979): 263–70.

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106 ‘The Strugatskys and their Snail on the Slope’. Foundation 17 (1979): 64–75. [Much enlarged from no. 60] 106b ‘Nachwort’ in A. and B. Strugazki, Die Schnecke am Hang. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978: 255–77. 106c ‘Introduction’ to A. and B. Strugatsky, The Snail on the Slope. New York: Bantam, and London: Gollancz, 1980: 1–20. 107 ‘Pilgrim Award Acceptance Speech’. Supplement to SFRA Newsletter 73 (1979): [ii–iii].

1980 108 ‘On Two Notions of “Science” in Marxism’, in Tom Henighan, ed., Brave New Universe. Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 1980: 27–43. 109 ‘Science Fiction and the Novum’, in T. de Lauretis, ed., The Technological Imagination. Madison, WI: Coda, 1980: 141–58. 109b Kokubungaku 8 (1982). [Japanese] 109c Knjizevna smotra no. 46 (1982). [Y] 109d Chung-Wai Literary Monthly 22.12 (1994). [Chinese] 110 (Co-authored) ‘Editorial Note’. Science-Fiction Studies 20 (1980): 1. [Mainly by M. Angenot and DS] 111 ‘Supplement to Russian Science Fiction 1956–1974: A Bibliography’. Canadian–American Slavic Studies 14 (1980): 88–90. [Additions and corrections to list of SF books in no. 77] 112 ‘Some Introductory Reflections on Sociological Approaches to Literature and Paraliterature’. Culture & Context (Montréal) 1 (1980): 33–55. [Not on SF specifically] 113 ‘74 More Victorian Books To Be Excluded from SF’. Science-Fiction Studies 21 (1980): 207–12. 114 ‘SF in Scandinavia’. Science-Fiction Studies 22 (1980): 346–47. [Review]

1981 115–36 Twenty-two encyclopaedia entries (on G. Allen, E. Bellamy, A. Belayev, J. and G. Braun, V. Bryusov, S. Butler, K. Capek, R. Cromie, E. D. Fawcett, C. Flammarion, G. Griffith, C. J. C. Hyne, S. Lem, W. Le Queux, V. Mayakovsky, S. Newcomb, B. and A. Strugatsky, A. Tertz, A. Tolstoy, K. Tsiolkovsky, I. Yefremov, E. Zamyatin) in C. C. Smith, ed., Twentieth-century Science Fiction Writers. London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981.

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115–36b See no. 154. 137 ‘Anticipating the Sunburst’, in K. Roemer ed., America as Utopia. New York: Franklin, 1981: 57–77. [Bellamy, Morris, utopias] 138 ‘Playful Cognizing, or Technical Errors in Harmonyville: The SF of Johanna and Günter Braun’. Science-Fiction Studies 23 (1981): 72–79. 138b in F. Rottensteiner, ed., Polaris 5. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981, 119–31. 139 ‘A Brief Valedictory’. Science-Fiction Studies 23 (1981): 114–15. 140 ‘Second Supplement to Russian Science Fiction 1956–1974: A Bibliography’. Canadian–American Slavic Studies 4 (1981): 533–44. [Additions to list of criticism]

1982 141 (Guest editor) Knjizevna smotra 46 (1982), special issue on science fiction, 93 pp. folio size. [Twelve essays—including one essay (no. 109), the introduction and a bibliography by DS; Y] 142 ‘ “Formal” and “Sociological” Analysis in the Aesthetics of the Science-Fiction Novel’, in Z. Konstantinovic et al. eds, Proceedings of the 9th Congress of the ICLA. Innsbruck: AMOE, 1982: 453–58. 142b Umjetnost rijeci 1–2 (1980). [Y] 142c (With M. Angenot) ‘Thèses sur la “sociologie” de la littérature’. Littérature 44 (1981): 117–27. [Reworks part of the material, foregrounding the theoretical problem] 142d In G. Hottois, ed., Science-Fiction et fiction spéculative. Bruxelles: Université de Bruxelles, 1985: 141–48. 143 Gespräch über die SF-Hörspiele von S. Lem und R. Voges zwischen Darko Suvin, Eike Barmeyer und Dieter Hasselblatt. München: Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1982, 19 pp. [Discussion starting from two SF radio plays; internal BR document] 144 ‘Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of SF: A Hypothesis with a Historical Test’. Science-Fiction Studies 26 (1982): 1–25. 144b Protée (Chicoutimi) 10.1 (1982). [French] 144c Republika 9 (1982). [Y] 145 (With M. Angenot and J.-M. Gouanvic) ‘L’uchronie, histoire alternative et science-Fiction’. imagine 14 (1982): 28–34. [Discussion on uchronia]

1983 146 Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power.

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Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983, xvii + 461 pp. [Includes nos 90, 113, 144, 147, 151] 147 ‘Victorian Science Fiction, 1871–85: The Rise of the Alternative History Sub-genre’. Science-Fiction Studies 30 (1983): 148–69. 148 (With J.-M. Gouanvic, P. Couillard, A. Davis and P. Sormany) ‘La science et la fiction’. imagine 19 (1983): 15–26. [Discussion]

1984 149 (Guest editor), Canadian–American Slavic Studies 18 1–2 (1984), special issue on Twentieth-century Science Fiction in Warsaw-pact Countries, 152pp. [Eleven essays, a bibliography and an obituary, about Russian, Polish, Armenian and GDR SF; with brief introduction by DS] 150 ‘Science Fiction: Metaphor, Parable and Chronotope’, in J. Emmelina and D. Terrel, eds, Actes du ler Colloque International de Science-Fiction de Nice. Nice: Centre d’Étude de la Métaphore, 1984: 161–81. 150b In L. de Vos, ed., Just the Other Day. Antwerpen: Restant-Exa, 1985: 81–99. 151 ‘The Extraordinary Voyage, the Future War, and Bulwer’s The Coming Race: Three Sub-genres in British Science Fiction, 1871–1885’. Literature and History 10 (1984): 231–48.

1985 152 ‘An Interview with Darko Suvin [by Takayuki Tatsumi]’. Science-Fiction Studies 36 (1985): 202–08. 152b The Book of Science Fiction (Tokyo) 8 (1985). [Japanese] 153 ‘R. Jefferies: Der Wald kehrt zurück’. Solaris-Almanach 6 (1985): 100–03. [Review, German, adapts a passage of no. 146]

1986 154 (With Gina Macdonald), ‘Strugatsky, Boris and Arkady’, in C. C. Smith, ed., Twentieth-century Science Fiction Writers. London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986: 850–52. [Updated entry; twenty-one other entries rptd from nos 115–36] 155 ‘Samuel Butler: Erewhon’. Solaris-Almanach 7 (1986): 166–69. [Review, German, adapts a passage of no. 146]

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156 Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. London: Macmillan, and Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988, xviii + 227 pp. [Includes nos 112, 50, 59, 104, 144, 142, 105, 96, 66, 75, 106, 138, 150] 157 ‘Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies’. Discours Social/Social Discourse 1.1 (1988): 87–108. 157b In G. Saccaro del Buffa and A. O. Lewis, eds, Utopia e modernità. Roma: Gangemi, 1989: 47–65. 157c Utopian Studies 1.2 (1990): 69–83. 157d In J. O. Daniel and T. Moylan, eds, Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London: Verso, 1997: 122–37. [With some change] 158 (With M. Angenot) ‘A Response to Professor Fekete’s “Five Theses” ’. Science-Fiction Studies 46 (1988): 324–33. 159 (With K. Yamada), ‘SF and Theatre: An Interview With Darko Suvin’. Foundation 44 (1988/89): 33–41. 159b ‘Betsu no sekai = arikata no kanosei no tansaku’ [Other Worlds = A Search for Other Possibilities of Existence]. Dokushojin (Tokyo) 1721 (22 Feb. 1988), 3. [Original interview in Japanese, some differences]

1990 160 ‘Teze o poetici naucne fantastike’ [Theses on the Poetics of SF], in P. Palavestra, ed., Srpska fantastika. Symposia of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts 44. Beograd: SANU, 1989: 49–55. [Y] 161 ‘On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF’. Foundation 46 (1989): 40–51. 161b Hayakawa SF Magazine (Tokyo) no. 10 (1988). [Japanese] 161c Quarber Merkur 72 (1989). [German] 161d In Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, 349–65. [Slightly changed] 161e Alphaville 1.1 (1992): 89–106. [Italian]

1990 162 ‘Counter-projects: William Morris and the Science Fiction of the 1880’s’, in F. S. Boos and C. G. Silver, eds, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990: 88–97. 162b In R. Garnett and J. R. Ellis, eds, Science Fiction Roots and Branches. London: Macmillan, 1990: 7–17.

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163 (With Carlo Pagetti) ‘Teatro e altri misteri’. L’Unità 3 Jan 1990: 14. [Interview] 164 (With Horst Pukallus), ‘An Interview With Darko Suvin’. Science-Fiction Studies 18.2 (1991): 253–61. 164b Das Science Fiction Jahr 5 (1990). [German]

1991 165 Fourteen encyclopaedia entries (on Bellamy, Belyaev, Bryusov, Butler Capek, Cromie, Griffiths, Hyne, Mayakovsky, the Strugatskys [with G. Macdonald], A. Tolstoy, Tsiolkovsky, Yefremov, Zamyatin) in N. Watson and P. E. Schellinger, eds, Twentieth-century Science-Fiction Writers. Chicago: St James, 1991: 43–44, 110–12, 176–77, 342–43, 405–06, 914–15, 917, 919–20, 929, 931–34, 934–35, 938–40. [Number of entries reduced from no 154]

1993 166–68 Encyclopaedia entries ‘Lem’, ‘Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris’, ‘Zamiatin’, in John Clute, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Little, Brown, and New York: St Martin’s, 1993: 710–12, 1173–75, 1364–65. 166–168b In Grolier Science Fiction. Danbury, CT: Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1995. [CD-ROM] 169 ‘Fantascienza’, in Enciclopedia delle scienze sociali. Roma: lstituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1993: 3: 788–92. [Folio size] 169b Chung-Wai Literary Monthly 22. 12 (1994). [Chinese]

1994 170 (Guest editor) Chung-Wai Literary Monthly (Taipei), special issue on Science Fiction 22. 12 (1994): 6–217. [Foreword by DS and fourteen essays, of which two (nos 169b, 109) by DS; in Chinese] 171–72 ‘Thinking Worlds: Two Interviews with Darko Suvin. Part I. On Utopia [by Hui-chuan Chang]; Part II. Science Fiction, Theatre, and Polytheism [by Chao-yang Liao]’ Studies in Language and Literature (Taipei) 6 (1994): 171–89. See no. 177. 173 ‘Preliminary Note’ to Koichi Yamano, ‘Japanese SF, Its Originality and Orientation’. Science-Fiction Studies 21 (1994): 67–69. 174 ‘ “A Quine–Schrödingerian Desemanticization of Domesticated Mam-

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mals as Wave-package: Cross-disciplinary Propagations” by R. D. Nivus et al.’ Oz: Rivista internazionale di utopie (Roma) 2 (1994): 74–79. [Large size] 174b ibidem, 69–73. [Italian]

1995 175 ‘A Note for the “Quirks & Quarks” (Moods and Facts?) Dept’. ScienceFiction Studies 65 (1995): 137–38. 176 ‘Goodbye to Extrapolation’. Science-Fiction Studies 66 (1995): 301. [Note]

1996 177 ‘Travels of a Shintoist Cybermarxist’. Foundation 67 (1996): 5–28. [Two interviews, with Chao-yang Liao (no. 171) and Tami Hager]

1997 178 ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’. Foundation 69 (1997): 26–43. 178b ‘Gdje smo? Kako smo ovamo dospjeli? Ima li odavde ikakva izlaza?: ili, vijesti iz “novuma”.’ Knjizevna smotra (Zagreb) 29.1 (1997): 23–37. [Translation of original, much longer variant, not yet printed in English; Y]

1998 179 ‘Utopianism from Orientation to Agency: What Are We Intellectuals under Post-Fordism To Do?’ Utopian Studies 9.2 (1998): 162–90.

Appendix: Some Selected Secondary Literature on the above [DS’s list implies cognitive usefulness of but not necessarily agreement with the items retained] [Zoran Zivkovic. ‘Izucavanje naucne fantastike u Jugoslaviji’ [SF Scholarship in Yugoslavia]], in Andromeda SF 2. Beograd: BIGZ, 1977: 385–401. Shelley Cox. [Review of the Science-Fiction Studies journal]. Serials Review (Oct–Dec. 1978): 17–18.

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Elizabeth Cummins Cogell. SFRA Newsletter 73 (1979): Supplement. [Roald Tweet.] ‘Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. SFRA Newsletter 77 (1979): 3–4. Tom J. Lewis. ‘Darko Suvin. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. World Literature Today 54.4 (1980): 703–04. Elizabeth Cummins Cogell. ‘A Hopeful Art or an Artful Hope?’ Essays in Arts and Sciences 9 (Aug. 1980): 235–46. Tom Shippey. ‘The Hegemonic Novum’. Times Literary Supplement 9 May 1980: 519. Masashi Orishima. ‘Darko Suvin: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. Eibungaku Kenkyu [Tokyo] 58.1 (1981): 123–28. Kenneth M. Roemer. ‘Utopia: Alphabetized, Analyzed, Edited, and Listed.’ American Literary Realism 1870–1910 14.1 (1981): 126–28. Stephen Gresham. ‘Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. Southern Humanities Review 15.2 (1981): 189–90. J.-P. Vernier. ‘Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. Études Anglaises 34.3 (1981): 331. V. L. Gopman. ‘Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. RZh ‘Literaturovedenie’ 4 (1981): 67–71. David Hartwell. Age of Wonders. New York: Walker, 1984: 122 and 179–81. Uwe Böker. ‘Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction’. Anglia 101 (1983): 545–48. Brian Stableford. ‘A Monumental Work’. Science Fiction & Fantasy Review 66 (1984): 33–34. Herbert Sussman. ‘Victorian Science Fiction’. Science-Fiction Studies 11 (1984): 324–28. Federico Patán. ‘Metamorfosis de la ciencia ficción, de Darko Suvin’. Unomásuno [México] 20 July 1985: 12. Anna Mandich. [Review of Le metamorfosi della fantascienza], in Carmelina Imbroscio, ed., Requiem pour l’utopie? Pisa: Libreria goliardica, 1986, 211–14. Peter Ruppert. Reader in a Strange Land. Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986: 35–40 and passim. Hans-Joachim Schulz. Science Fiction. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986: 70–77 and passim. ‘Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction’. American Literature (March 1989): 161. Curtis C. Smith. ‘Darko Suvin. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction’. Modern Fiction Studies 35.2 (1989): 400–01. Judith Catton. ‘Suvin’s Best Work’. SFRA Newsletter 173 (1989): 23–24. Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard. Libertinage et utopies sous le règne de Louis XIV. Geneve: Droz, 1989: 10–12.

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‘Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, by Darko Suvin’. Communication Research (Apr. 1990): 259–60. Raimund Borgmeier. ‘Objectives and Methods in the Analysis of SF’, Science-Fiction Studies 17.3 (1990): 383–91. [Review of the Science-Fiction Studies journal] John Huntington. ‘Newness, Neuromancer, and the End of Narrative’, in T. Shippey, ed., Fictional Space. English Association Essays and Studies 1990. Oxford: Blackwell, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991: 59–75. Elizabeth Cummins. ‘Suvin, Darko. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction’. Extrapolation (spring 1991): 87–91. Richard Daniels. ‘Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, by Darko Suvin’. The Minnesota Review n.s. 36 (1991): 117–18. D. D. Kilgore. ‘The Blue-and-Not-Yellow Sun’. Science-Fiction Studies 18.1 (1991): 116–21. [Review of Positions] Takayuki Tatsumi. ‘Ninshikiteki ni ika suru hihyo no kokoromi’ [An Attempt at a Criticism of Cognitive Estrangement]. Tosho Shimbun 27 (Apr. 1991): 4. Joji Ohkanda. ‘Ohkina hen’ka to ikizumari’ [Revolution and Stagnation in SF]. Shukan Dokushojin 27 (May 1991): 3. [Peter Nicholls.] ‘Suvin, Darko’, in John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Little, Brown, and New York: St Martin’s, 1993, 1190; also in Grolier Science Fiction. Danbury, CT: Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1995 (CD-ROM). Damien Broderick. Reading by Starlight. London: Routledge, 1995: 31–36, 51–52 and passim. Vittorio Roda. I fantasmi della ragione. Napoli: Liguori, 1996: 93–95, 125–26, 156–57 and passim. Charles Elkins. ‘Reassessing the Work of a Major Utopian Theorist’. Science-Fiction Studies 25.1 (1998): 110–11.

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Index

Note: Names in the Checklist are not indexed unless they also appear in the main text. Adams, P. 141n.4 Adorno, T. W. 51, 73 Aldiss, B. W. 14, 28, 245, 271n.33 Billion Year Spree 151 Helliconia trilogy 226 allegory 42, 44, 210–11, 219–20, 249–50, 281 Allen, W., Sleeper 200 Althusser, L. 83, 108, 210, 232n.3, 252 Amazing Stories 22, 129 Amis, K. 9, 28, 31, 32 New Maps of Hell 19, 20–22 Angenot, M. 11, 60, 70n.9, 246, 248, 252, 258, 279, 282, 283, 284, 286 anti-utopia 62, 65, 67, 70n.12, 71n.16, 247 Aristophanes 249, 252 Aristotle 10, 46, 243, 249 Armitt, L. 206n.2 Arnold, M. 250, 255 Artaud, A. 184 Asimov, I. 31, 32, 80–1, 189, 249, 260, 262, 275, 282 Foundation trilogy 80 I, Robot 80, 282 Astounding Science Fiction 22, 155 Atheling, W., Jr. see Blish, J. Atwood, M., Handmaid’s Tale, The 93, 198 Baccolini, R. 63–64, 71n.18 Bacon, F. 246, 247, 274 Baggesen, S. 63–64 Bailey, J. O. 31 Pilgrims through Space and Time 19 Bakhtin, M. 77, 78, 90, 96 Ballard, J. G. 24 Balzac, H. de 90, 252 Barjavel, R. 124 Barr, M. S. 3, 14, 258, 269n.5 Alien to Femininity 129 Barrault, J.-L. 182–83 Barthes, R. 233, 239, 241 Bazin, A. 217

Bear, G., Legacy 124 Bebel, A. 98, 113 Beckett, S. 251 Bellamy, E. 11, 88, 110–11, 249, 274, 275, 283, 284, 287 Looking Backward 88, 111 Benford, G. 262 Benjamin, W. 56, 60, 73, 80, 239, 240, 261, 265, 268, 271n.37 Beres, S., Conversations with Stanislaw Lem 190–91 Beresford, J. D., Hampdenshire Wonder, The 169 Berger, A. I. 33n.11 Berger, J. 248 Bergonzi, B. 132, 142n.11 Bernard, C. 246 Bernstein, E. 99, 106, 108, 109, 112 Presuppositions of Socialism, The 99 Socialisme et science 106 Bester, A. 235 Beynon, J. see Wyndham, J. Blish, J. 9, 19–22, 28, 33n.2, 271n.33, 275, 276, 280 Issue at Hand, The 19–20 Bloch, E. 8, 11, 15, 37, 57–59, 61, 63, 68, 69n.7, 73–96, 96n.2–5, 97n.6–7, 107, 109, 247, 248, 249, 251, 258 Principle of Hope, The (Das Prinzip Hoffnung) 57–58, 73–82, 96n.2 Bloch, R. 20, 21 Blonsky, M. 267 Blount, R., Jr. 205 Bohr, N. 121, 244 Borges, J. L. 28, 42, 43–44 Boucher, A. 24 Bova, B. 236, 262 Bozzetto, R. 141n.1 Bradbury, R. 28, 267, 275 Martian Chronicles, The 12, 122 Bradley, M. Z. 256 Brecht, B. 11, 37, 39, 68, 109, 169n.5, 238, 246,

308

Index

248, 249, 251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 265, 267, 268, 270n.21, 271n.40 Life of Galileo 6, 267 Bretnor, R. 27 Bricmont, J. see Sokal, A., and Bricmont, J. Broderick, D., Reading by Starlight 48, 50n.26, 290 Brimelow, P., Alien Nation 129 Brown, F. 128, 132–33, 144n.19 Buck-Morss, S. 243, 265 Burton, R., Anatomy of Melancholy 5 Butler, O. 237 Parable of the Sower 66 Xenogenesis trilogy 176n.39 Butler, S. 283, 287 Erewhon 44, 72, 285 Cabet, E. 110 Cadigan, P. 235, 266 Callenbach, E. Ecotopia 223 Calvino, I. 4–5, 6, 7 Campanella, T. 5, 6, 8, 247 Apologia pro Galileo 5 Campbell, J. 243 Campbell, J. W., Jr. 22–23, 27, 32, 143n.14, 262 Moon is Hell, The 25 Campbell, K. 202–3 Capek, K. 32, 241, 279, 282, 283, 287 War with the Newts 279 Card, O. S. 128 Charnas, S. M. 15, 267–68 Motherlines 203 Walk to the End of the World 267 Cherryh, C. J. 241 Chesney, Sir G. 130, 132, 241 Battle of Dorking, The 130, 142n.7 Christopher, J. 173n.34, 175n.35, 274 Death of Grass, The 175n.35 Clareson, T. D. 28, 31, 146, 269n.11 Clareson, T. D., and Clareson, A. 146, 159, 172n.28 Clarke, A. C. 28, 29, 80–81, 92, 140, 170n.9 Childhood’s End 80, 143n.17 2001 29, 80 Clarke, I. F., Voices Prophesying War 130, 142n.7 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 133 Clute, J. 49n.17, 243 see also Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Cogell, E. C. 206n.3, 288, 289 cognitive estrangement see estrangement, cognitive Cohen, J. M. 130 Coleridge, S. T. 258 College English 52, 269n.11, 277, 278 Columbus, C. 4, 6, 9 Compère-Morel, A. 105 Conklin, G. 25–26 Copernicus, N. 40 Corea, G. 205 Coupland, D. 195, 198–200, 201 cyberpunk 14, 257, 259, 266, 286 Cyrano de Bergerac, S. 31, 127, 131, 212, 244, 274 Dante Alighieri 5, 252 Darwin, Charles 121, 131, 151, 152, 161, 165, 167 Voyage of the Beagle, The 167 Darwinism 129, 132, 137, 140, 147–48, 168

Davenport, B., Science Fiction Novel, The 19, 20, 21 Day the Earth Stood Still, The 133 Defoe, D., Robinson Crusoe 218 Delany, S. R. 9, 24, 219, 242, 245, 253 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand 93 Triton 93 Trouble on Triton 229 De Lauretis, T. 201, 207n.8 Deleuze, G. 229, 249 Derrida, J. 234, 249 Descartes, R. 122, 124 detective fiction 78, 124, 256, 257 De Vries, H. 121 Dewey, J. 241 Dick, P. K. 238, 259, 263, 269n.11, 279 Martian Time-slip 259 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The 259 Ubik 259 Di Fiore, J. 249 Disch, T. M. 263 Genocides, The 139 334 262 Disraeli, B. 237 Dodgson, C. (Lewis Carroll) 160–61 Dostoyevsky, F. 189 dystopia 10–11, 44, 57–68, 70n.10, 70n.12, 71n.16–17, 92–93, 97n.11, 102, 131, 229, 248, 255, 266 Eco, U. 60 Einstein, A. 122, 123, 186, 200, 248, 259 Eisenstein, S. 231, 248 Eliade, M. 181 Eliot, G. 28 Eliot, T. S. 3, 10, 249 Elkins, C. 268, 282, 290 Elliott, R. C. 231 Ellison, H. 24 Emanuel, V. R. 29 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The 47, 282, 287, 290 Encyclopedia of World Myths 184 Engels, F. 11, 55, 73, 93–94, 95, 100, 106, 248–49, 258, 280 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 93–94 Esquire 205 estrangement, cognitive 4, 5–10, 11, 12, 14, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36–49, 50n.26, 52, 53, 57, 72, 79, 83–89, 111, 169n.5, 197–98, 225, 268, 277, 290 E. T.: The Extraterrestrial 133 Extrapolation 25, 28–29, 239, 276, 281 Fadiman, C. 27 fantasy 2–3, 4, 12, 14, 15, 25, 30, 37, 38–39, 41–42, 43–44, 45, 48, 84, 124, 169n.5, 247, 248, 254–55, 267–68 Fellini, F. 229 feminism 14, 52, 54, 70n.15, 128–29, 158–59, 172n.28, 195, 196, 200, 203, 205, 257, 267 Fendler, M. 200 Feuerbach, L. 215 Fingesten, P. see Mendel, S., and Fingesten, P. Fitting, P. 3, 5–6, 12–13, 241, 269n.11 Flammarion, C. 141n.2, 283

Index Fontenelle, B. 123, 141n.2 formalism, Russian 37, 39, 40, 48, 169n.5, 241 Forster, E. M. 66 Foundation 28, 29, 69n.4–5, 277, 286, 288 Foucault, M., Archeology of Knowledge, The 178 Fourier, C. 93, 94, 106, 110 Frank, S. 27 Franklin, H. B. 28, 31, 263 Freedman, C. 2, 7, 8, 11, 244–45, 247, 248 Freud, S. 75, 77, 84, 96n.2, 220, 263 Civilization and Its Discontents 194 Frisch, M. 183 Frye, N. 36 Galaxy 23, 25, 155, 167 Galileo 4–7, 9, 12, 40, 97n.16, 120 Gallois, R. 182 Geduld, H. M. see Hughes, D. Y., and Geguld, H. M. Geoghegan, V. 71n.18 Gernsback, H. 21, 22–23, 32, 37, 129, 245, 260, 262, 275 Gide, A. 226 Glickman, W. 199 Goethe, J. W. von 184, 255 Gold, H. L. 23, 25–26 Goldmann, L. 255 Gothic fiction 12, 124, 245, 254 Grabbe, C. D., Scheuz, Satire, Ironie, und tiefere Bedeutung 217 Gramsci, A. 58, 248, 255, 268 Greimas, A. J. 228 Guattari, F. 249 Guesde, J. 101 Guthke, K. S. 141n.3, 142n.9 Hall, A., and Flint, H. E., Blind Spot, The 26 Haraway, D. 69n.5, 267 Harris, J. B. see Wyndham, J. Harris, V. 146, 153, 155, 156, 157, 160, 166, 169n.2, 170n.15, 175n.36, 176n.40 Harrison, H. 28 Haskins, B. 129, 143n.16 Hegel, G. W. F. von 55, 75, 76, 103, 249 Heinlein, R. A. 20, 189, 227, 232n.15, 240, 241, 260, 262, 263, 275 Farnham’s Freehold 81, 263 Puppet Masters, The 143n.14, 263 Starship Troopers 262, 263 Heidegger, M. 217, 222 Hendershot, C. 264, 271n.35 Hillegas, M. R. 141n.3, 143n.12 Hoffman, E. T. A. 245 Holland, N. N. 195 Hollinger, V. 2, 4, 6, 8 Homer 7, 31 Howard, R. E., Conan the Conqueror 28 Hughes, D. Y. 129, 142n.6 Hughes, D. Y., and Geduld, H. M. 143n.13 Hume, D. 245 Hume, K. 143n.13 Huntington, J. 39–40 Hurst, L. J. 170n.14 Huxley, A. 29, 92 Brave New World 44, 131

309

Huyssen, A. 266–67, 271n.38 International Herald Tribune 203, 204 Invaders, The 199 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 143n.14, 263 Jakes, J. 262, 270n.32 Jakobson, R. 36 James, E. 9, 242 Jameson, F. 2, 3, 6, 12, 14–15, 54–55, 56, 70n.10–11, 73, 97n.10, 239, 247, 250, 252, 253, 255, 257, 269n.11 Brecht and Method 270n.21 Marxism and Form 96n.3 Seeds of Time, The 55, 62–63 Jaurès, J. 98, 101, 110, 113 Johnson, G. 199, 202, 203 Jones, G. 241, 257 Jordin, M. 263 Joyce, J. 248 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 78–79 Ulysses 256 Jung, C. G. 176n.39, 184, 193, 205, 243, 244 Kafka, F. 42, 239, 251, 253, 254 In the Penal Colony 42 Kahn, H. 266 Kant, I. 75, 76, 80, 257, 267 Kaufmann, V. M. 28 Kautsky, K. 98, 101, 103, 110, 113, 248 Society the Day After the Social Revolution 100, 103 Keats, J. 7–8 Kendrick, C. 85–86, 97n.13 Kepler, J. 5–6, 7, 8, 141n.1 Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger 5, 6, 8, 15–16n.10 Somnium 8, 141n.1 Ketterer, D. 3, 13 King, S. 255 Klein, G. 2, 4, 12, 255, 258, 259 Kluge, A. 266, 271n.38 Knight, D. 26 In Search of Wonder 19–20 Kolata, G. 204, 206n.1 Koppelman, S. 259–60 Kornbluth, C. M. 20 see also Pohl, F., and Kornbluth, C. M. Kracauer, S. 217, 259 Kramer, L. 203 Kubrick, S. 28, 29 Kuhn, T. 259 Labriola, A. 115n.14 Lacan, J. 75 Lamarck, J. 125 Lasswitz, K. 141n.3 Lawrence, D. H. 97n.16 Le Guin, U. K. 14, 93, 133–34, 142n.8, 195–97, 199, 200, 202, 235, 266, 280, 281 Dispossessed, The 72, 93, 225–26, 227, 239, 242, 245 Language of the Night, The 196 Left Hand of Darkness, The 10, 279 Wind’s Twelve Quarters, The 195

310

Index

Lem, S. 3, 6, 13, 14, 16n.15, 178–92, 243–44, 252, 253, 266, 275, 276, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287 Dialogues 190 Eden 179, 183 Fiasco 179, 182, 185 Futurological Congress, The 179, 182, 183, 186, 192 High Castle 190 Investigation, The 186 Invincible, The 179, 183, 192 Mask, The 187–89, 192, 244 Memoirs Found in a Bathtub 179, 187 Peace on Earth 185 Philosophy of Chance, The 190 Return from the Stars 179, 182, 183, 186, 192 Solaris 13, 128, 143n.15, 179, 180–81, 183, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 276 Star Diaries, The 197 Sum of Technology, The 190 Lenin, V. I. 254 Lerner, F. A. 26, 27–28, 34n.30 Levin, I., Boys from Brazil, The 200 Lévi-Strauss, C. 48 Lewis, C. S. 28, 84, 92, 97n.12 Liebknecht, K. 113 London, J. 249, 280 Iron Heel, The 66, 261 Lovecraft, H. P. 29, 255 Lucas, G. 262 Lucian of Samosata 20, 31, 141n.1, 241, 273 Lukács, G. 77, 78, 90, 96 History and Class Consciousness 245 Luxemburg, R. 248, 254, 255 McDiarmid, H. 222 McGuirk, C. 53 Macherey, P. 83 McKay, G. 71n.17 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 23, 24, 25, 278 Malmgren, C. 128 Manlove, C. N. 170n.14 Mann, T. 189 Dr Faustus 78 Mannheim, K. 106–7, 109, 110, 247 Ideology and Utopia 107 Manuel, F. E., and Manuel, F. 247 Marcuse, H. 73 Marin, L. 83–85, 89, 97n.10, 247 Marx, K. 11, 70n.10, 73, 74, 89, 93–94, 96, 97n.20, 100, 103, 106, 215, 230, 234, 238, 239, 241, 247, 248, 251, 253, 254, 257, 261, 262 Capital 88, 108 Communist Manifesto, The 100, 233 Marxism 11, 37, 47, 52, 54, 55, 58, 76, 77, 80, 88, 89–91, 93–96, 98–114, 176n.39, 230, 240, 242–43, 248, 251, 253, 265, 269n.7, 283 Men in Black 141n.5 Mendel, S., and Fingesten, P. 26–27 Merleau-Ponty, M. 241 Merlino, S. 106 Merril, J. 24–25, 32 Shadow on the Hearth 25

Merritt, A., Moon Pool, The 28 Meurger, M. 124, 126 Mitchell, S. O. 28 modernism 39, 52, 212, 213, 218, 225, 248 Mogen, D. Wilderness Visions 142n.8 Monod, J., Necessity and Chance 192 Montesquieu, C. de, Lettres persanes 128 Moorcock, M. 24 Moore, P. 49n.14, 240 More, T. 3, 11, 31, 72, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89–90, 92, 93, 95, 212, 244, 275 Utopia 1, 11, 30, 72, 83–86, 87, 89, 227, 230, 247, 278 Morris, J. 244 Morris, J., and Morris, C. 236 Morris, W. 11, 88–91, 110, 157, 254, 274–75, 284, 286 News from Nowhere 72, 88–91, 92, 157, 220, 227, 232n.12, 244, 247 Moskowitz, S. 20, 31, 150, 176n.41 Explorers of the Infinite 19, 20 Moylan, T. 10–11, 91, 244, 246, 258 Mukarovsky, J. 245–46 Mullen, R. D. 29, 71n.19, 279, 280 Mumford, L. 263, 264, 271n.35 Newton, I. 48, 123, 248, 253, 259 New Worlds Science Fiction 9–10, 24 New York Times 193, 195, 199, 200, 202, 205, 206n.1, 206n.6 Nicholls, P. see Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Nicolson, M. H., Voyages to the Moon 19, 141n.1, 142n.9 Niven, L., Ringworld 227 Niven, L., and Pournelle, J., Footfall 141n.5 Mote in God’s Eye, The 129 Noble, D. 56 Norman, J. 261 Norris, F., Octopus, The 217 novum 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 29, 30, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41–42, 43–44, 45, 47, 48, 51–68, 70n.15, 74, 79, 81, 123, 191, 245–46, 248, 250, 270n.20, 283, 288 Nudelman, R. 3, 6, 13–14, 243–44 Orwell, G. 87, 92, 234, 235, 267, 279 Animal Farm 266 Nineteen Eighty-four 44, 240, 266, 273 Owen, R. 93, 94, 95, 110 Paglia, C. 172n.28 Panshin, A. 33 parable 42, 247, 249–54, 257, 258–59, 267–68, 281, 285 Parrinder, P. 3, 10, 30, 240, 242, 245, 248 Pascal, B. 123 Paul, F. 129 Penley, C. 71n.17 Perry Rhodan 260 Philmus, R. M. 9, 241–42, 282 Picasso, P. 39, 248 Pielke, R. 128 Piercy, M. 30, 237 Dance the Eagle to Sleep 239, 254

Index He, She, and It 66 Woman on the Edge of Time 93 Plato 3, 31, 46, 225, 230, 240, 242, 252, 268 Platonov, A. 232n.14 Playboy 195, 196, 200 Poe, E. A. 44, 234, 259, 265 Pohl, F. 3, 21, 31–32, 263, 271n.33, 275 Pohl, F., and Kornbluth, C. M., Space Merchants, The 21 Wolfbane 263 postmodernism 3, 9, 14, 53, 54–55, 206n.2, 212, 229, 234, 241, 246, 249, 265–67 post-structuralism 40, 54, 56, 77 Pound, E. 222 Pournelle, J. 236, 260 see also Niven, L., and Pournelle, J. Prescott, W., Conquest of Peru, The 130, 143n.16 Priestley, J. B. 28, 29 Proudhon, P. 97n.20 Pynchon, T. 219 Rabkin, E. S. 9 realism 14, 37, 39, 52, 121, 210, 212–19, 225, 231, 250, 252, 254 Renard, G. 102 Richards, T. 206n.5 Richet, C. 125 Ricoeur, P. 45 Riesman, D. 263 Rimbaud, A. 216 Robinson, K. S. 1, 57, 189, 208–32, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 258, 268 Gold Coast 66 Mars trilogy 3, 14–15, 57, 208–32, 239, 250, 252, 253 Pacific Edge 57 Robson, L. 137 Rose, M. 9, 128, 143n.13, 277 Rosny Aîné, J.-H. 125 Ross, A. 267, 271n.38 Roth, P., Breast, The 202 Russ, J. 70–71n.15, 235, 258, 260, 262, 263, 266, 271n.40 Female Man, The 93 Russian formalism see formalism, Russian Saint-Pierre, B. de 123 Saint-Simon, C. H. de 102, 110 Sanders, G. 158 Santarcangeli, P. 178, 182, 184 Sargent, L. T. 62 Sargent, P., Cloned Lives 207n.7 Sartre, J.-P. 214 satire 21, 34n.14, 44, 45, 48, 61–62, 127, 128, 131, 245 Scarborough, J. 167 Scholes, R. 9, 49n.16 Schopenhauer, A. 186 Schrödinger, E. 246 Science-Fiction Studies 11, 29, 53, 56, 66, 69n.3, 71n.19, 235, 241, 247, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290 Segal, L. 238

311

SF Horizons 28 SFRA Newsletter 29 Shakespeare, W. 237, 259, 264 Shaw, B. 271n.40 Shelley, M. 31, 88, 91, 93, 245 Frankenstein 30, 72, 79, 91, 245, 248 Shute, N. 21 Siegel, D. 143n.14, 263 Silver, L. 193 Silverberg, R. 32, 242, 251 Simak, C. D. 267 Time and Again 25 Simmel, G. 257 Skinner, B. F. 80 Smith, E. E. ‘Doc’ 241, 245 Smith, P. 55–56 Sokal, A., and Bricmont, J. 12, 126 Sorel, G. 103, 106–10, 268 La décomposition du marxisme 108 Reflections on Violence 103, 108 Speculation 28 Spielberg, S. 133 Spinrad, N. 237 Stableford, B. 241, 289 Stalin, J. 248, 251, 262 Stanley, H. M. 139 Stasi, L. 203 Stapledon, O. 80, 92, 209, 229, 253 Last and First Men 79 Star Maker 79, 169n.4 Star Trek 2, 128, 143n.14, 206n.5 Star Wars 2, 128, 263 Stephanopoulos, G. 198 Stephensen-Payne, P. 170n.14 Sterling, B., Schismatrix 229 Stevens, W. 215, 232n.6 Stine, G. H. 236 Stover, L. 236 structuralism 10, 36, 40, 190 Strugatsky, A. and B. 235, 239, 266, 277, 279, 282, 283, 285, 287 Stryker, J. 207n.6 Sturgeon, T., More than Human 144n.17 Venus Plus X 93 Suvin, D. 2, 3–4, 7, 9–11, 12, 13, 15, 16n.12, 16n.15, 19, 21, 22, 25, 29–33, 36–49, 52–54, 56–68, 69n.2–5, 70n.9, 70n.15, 71n.16, 71n.19–20, 72, 110, 123, 146, 169n.5, 192, 208, 225, 230, 272–90 Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 4, 10, 11, 19, 29–31, 32–33, 36–47, 49n.3–50n.18, 53, 57, 59, 61, 69n.5, 96n.3, 127, 129, 241, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 254, 259, 270n.20, 281–82, 288–89 Other Worlds, Other Seas 4, 246, 276 Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction 45–46, 49n.3, 53, 57, 59–67, 244, 247, 248, 249, 257, 259, 268, 286, 289–90 To Brecht and Beyond 270n.21 Victorian Science Fiction in the UK 35n.46, 241, 257, 284 Swift, J. 31, 87, 88, 123, 244, 249, 274 Gulliver’s Travels 20, 30, 72, 86–87, 89, 123, 142n.10

312

Index

Temple, W. F., Four–sided Triangle, The 25 Thom, R. 245 Thomas, E. 160 Time 198, 200, 201 Toffler, A. 236, 266 Tolkien, J. R. R. 29, 254 Tubb, E. C. 9 Turing, A. 185, 186 Twain, M. 259 Unamuno, M. de 217 Updike, J. 21 utopia 2–3, 4, 8, 10–11, 12, 14–15, 21, 30, 46, 53, 57–58, 61–68, 70n.9–11, 71n.16, 72–96, 98–114, 131, 157–58, 208, 211, 212, 219, 220, 222–23, 224–32, 245, 246, 247–49, 252–53, 255, 257, 258–59, 274, 278, 280, 281, 284, 286, 287, 288 Vandervelde, E. 98, 101, 113 Van Vogt, A. E. 245 House that Stood Still, The 25 Voyage of the Space Beagle, The 144–45n.19 Varley, J. 14, 185, 197–98, 199 Vérecque, C. 112 Verne, J. 20, 27, 29, 31, 44, 240, 245, 248, 249, 262, 279 Vico, G. 239 Village of the Damned 158, 169n.4 Village Voice 203 Voltaire, F. M. A. de 127 Micromégas 122–23, 128 Vonnegut, K., Jr. 205, 207n.10 Wallerstein, I. 260–61 Weber, M. 257 Wegner, P. 71n.17 Weinbaum, S. 20, 133, 134 Weldon, F. 207n.7 Welles, O. 129, 234 Wells, H. G. 3, 8, 11, 20, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38–39, 44, 48, 88, 91–93, 110, 123, 129–40, 147, 151, 162, 190, 244, 248, 249, 278, 279, 280–81 First Men in the Moon, The 123, 131–32, 242 Modern Utopia, A 72 Outline of History, The 138 Scientific Romances, The 8, 132, 143n.12

Star Begotten 169n.4, 176n.39 Time Machine, The 10, 11, 30, 43, 91–92, 123–24, 132, 278 War of the Worlds, The 5–6, 12–13, 127–40, 141n.1–143n.13, 234 Westfahl, G. 22, 23, 33–34n.14, 245 Westheimer, R. 203, 204 Weston, P. 28 Whitman, W. 218, 259 Wilde, O. 237 Wilhelm, K., Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang 198 Williams, R. 16n.13, 55–56, 58, 70n.14, 256, 278 Williamson, J. 269n.11, 278 Humanoids, The 125 Wilmut, I. 193, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206n.1 Wittgenstein, L. 241 Wohl, L. de 27–28 Wolfe, G. 241 Wolmark, J., Aliens and Others 128–29 Wordsworth, W. 161, 163, 258 Wright, R. 198 Wright, S. 235 Wymer, R. 170n.14 Wyndham, J. 13, 146–68, 169n.2–177n.42 Chocky 155, 160, 175n.35 Chrysalids, The 144n.17, 155 Day of the Triffids, The 146, 150, 155, 167, 172n.28, 173n.34, 273 Foul Play Suspected 170n.6 Kraken Wakes, The 155, 172n.28 Midwich Cuckoos, The 3, 13, 146–68, 169n.2–177n.42 Planet Plane 154, 171, 176n.39 Sleepers of Mars 171n.19 Web 167 Yampolskii, M. 181, 191 Yeats, W. B. 66 Yefremov, I. 32, 275, 282, 283, 287 Youd, C. S. see Christopher, J. Zaki, H. 63 Zamyatin, Y. 32, 235, 241, 267, 273, 282, 283, 287 We 66 Zoline, P. 199