Science Fiction Studies

#11 = Volume 4, Part 1 = March 1977

ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

• Peter S. Alterman. The Surreal Translations of Samuel R. Delany

• Martin Bickman. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness: Form and Content

• Gérard Klein. Discontent in American Science Fiction

• Russell Letson. The Faces of a Thousand Heroes: Philip José Farmer

• Thomas J. Remington. Three Reservations on the Structural Road

• Scott Sanders. Invisible Men and Women: The Disappearance of Character in Science Fiction

Peter S. Alterman

The Surreal Translations of Samuel R. Delany

Abstract.-- Delany’s novels Dhalgren, Empire Star, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, and Babel-17 all address the relationship between experience and art. In every case, art is able to order experience, bringing pattern and order to chaos. As Delany uses language, the order of realism uneasily depends on the chaotic subjectivism of a perceiving narrator. His prose seeks to render the texture of the chaotic universe by actualizing the literary metaphors with scientific theory, organizing chaos into intelligible, translatable forms. For Delany, artistic creation attempts to derive order from the chaos of experience—to reconcile the demands of the artist’s subjective perspective with the requirements of form. In Delany’s prose, neither the subjective nor the objective is given primacy. Just as metaphor is solidified by fact, experience is ordered by the effect of art upon the raw material of the mind. These novels are arenas in which life and language confront one another and come together to form a dialectic of literature. Delany’s SF capitalizes on the tension between scientific theory and linguistic potential.

Martin Bickman

Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness: Form and Content

Abstract.-- The inter-relationship of form and content should be evident in any fine work of literature, but science fiction writers have traditionally had difficulty in this area. Masters like Clarke, Asimov, and Herbert can tell a story skillfully, but seldom see the possibilities of literary form beyond those of direct narrative. On the other hand, experimentalists such as (at various times) Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, and John Brunner have been so concerned with technique that the results have been sometimes more audacious than successful. This article conducts a close reading of The Left Hand of Darkness to suggest some of the ways form and content can be wedded in SF in a functional, organic and aesthetically meaningful way.

Gérard Klein

Discontent in American Science Fiction

Abstract.-- Around the middle of the 1960s, there was a sudden veering in English-language SF: turning from a general (if not invariable) optimism, it became as a rule quite pessimistic and sober. Science fiction during the 1940s and 1950s zoomed through vast galactic prospects in very far futures, but during the 1960s, it increasing dealt with the near—even the very near—future, and confined itself to Earth. The authors became preoccupied with delivering a serious and responsible message. For about ten years, with the notable exception of Ursula K. LeGuin, writers sought to achieve credibility by describing the near future in very dark colors. According to a frequently expressed but somewhat naive view, SF had passed from the stage of tumultuous teenage dreams to an adult stage, manifest in a focus on human sufferings.

Discussing Roger Zelazny, Norman Spinrad, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, and T. J. Bass (among others), this essay explains the failure of SF’s early optimism as an illustration of this hypothesis: the real subject of a literary work is the situation of the social group to which the author belongs. SF writers in the 1960s as a social group were in danger, and aware of it. They had become aware that technology could not be controlled through their will or activities as a group. Like an individual who has an illogical tendency to make of his own death a universal event, this threatened group of SF writers, too, had a tendency to confuse the dissolution of their authority over technology with the disappearance of civilization, and even—in a genre as haunted as SF by megalomania—with the end of history and all humanity.

Russell Letson

The Faces of a Thousand Heroes: Philip José Farmer

Abstract.-- Farmer’s work exhibits a fascination with the great hero, both the fictional figure and the historical man. The Riverworld series features the explorer-adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton as well as other fictional and historical characters who qualify as heroic despite their secondary roles. The historico-fictional world of the Rivervalley, however, is less epic in its proportions than Farmer’s wholly fictional creations and continuations: the universes of the World of Tiers, Wold Newton, and various non-cycle stories give us the neo-Amerindian figures of Roger Two-Hawks and Kickaha, the neo-Tarzans Ras Tyger, Grandrith, and John Gribardsun, and the borrowed figures of Doc Savage/Doc Caliban, Sherlock Holmes, and Phileas Fogg, to name a few. These heroes coexist in Farmer’s fiction with two other classes of central character: the ordinary man who must act the hero and the ordinary man who is transformed into a superhero. Farmer’s supermen go beyond the stylized heroes of space opera and adventure formula. Having shown the heroic or even divine capacities of ordinary men, Farmer turns back to look at the dark side of the hero, rejecting the simple, clean, romantic optimism inherent in much of the adventure formula. Nonetheless, throughout his fiction, especially the Riverworld and Tarzan recreations, runs the certainty that heroism is possible in spite of human flaws.

Thomas J. Remington

Three Reservations on the Structural Road

Abstract.-- All those who take science fiction seriously are indebted to Robert Scholes for lending his stature to the cause of SF, placing his considerable prestige on that side of the literary lists. Nonetheless, there are three major problems with Structural Fabulations (1975), Scholes’s "prolegomena to the serious reading of what we loosely call ‘science fiction’" —problems readers should consider before accepting the book’s views, however exciting. Despite its virtues, Structural Fabulation condescends to science fiction, oversells it, and badly misrepresents it.

Scott Sanders

Invisible Men and Women: The Disappearance of Character in Science Fiction

Abstract.-- Kingsley Amis argues that SF must deal in stock figures because it ponders our general condition rather than the intricacies of personality. Theme replaces character as the organizing principle of the genre, a view summarized in his terse formula: "Idea as hero." But why should such a genre arise and flourish in our century—a genre stressing theme rather than character, abstraction rather than personality? The answer is sociological. Science fiction reproduces the experience of living in a regimented, rationalized society, within which the individual has become anonymous: persons are interchangeable and actions are governed by procedure (and so do not characterize the actor). Emotion is repressed in favor of reason; the individual is subordinated to the system. A literary form that ignores personality in its representation of vast impersonal forces mirrors our modern sense of the anonymity of individuals within mass society. In the twentieth century, science fiction as a genre is centrally about this disappearance of character, in the same sense that the eighteenth and nineteenth century bourgeois novel was about the emergence of character. Discussing a broad range of texts, canonical and popular (including, among the latter, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Philip K. Dick’s "Faith of Our Fathers," LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Aldiss’s Earthworks, and Clarke’s The City and the Stars), this essay argues that identity is problematic in science fiction because it has become problematic in modern society.

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