#12 = Volume 4, Part 2 = July 1977 |
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ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
Jerzy JarzebskiStanislaw Lem, Rationalist and VisionaryAbstract.-- This survey of Lem’s fiction and non-fiction between 1951 (The Astronauts) and 1973 (second edition of Tales of Pilot Pirx) considers at some length the successive volumes of Star Diaries and The Cyberiad; it also summarizes his early critical reception in Poland. Clearly, whatever Lem’s form of expression, he always returns to the same themes: chance and necessity in the development of mankind, determinism and indeterminism in the life of man, and finally the concept of the cosmos as a game. It would appear that nobody is fitter for pointing out man’s inner contradictions than Lem, who is on the one hand a sober brain seeing the world through categories and laws, a rationalist to the bone, and on the other hand a prisoner of his own emotions and fears, with a special inclination for phantasmagorical visions. The fate of his hero always logically serves his author’s thesis, yet the hero is also thrust into a world of baroque visions, of powerful sensual and emotional impressions. The same conflict may be detected in Lem’s language between an inclination towards exactitude and precision of expression and a contrary impulse towards stylistic exuberance. Even Lem’s scientific essays are full of overflowing metaphors. Bernt KlingPerry RhodanAbstract.-- The Rhodan SF series, with well over 700 volumes and over 100 paperbacks so far, is the most successful series of this sort in West Germany and since its publication in the United States, probably in the world. This essay offers a brief overview and publication history of the series. Stanislaw LemCosmology and Science FictionAbstract.-- Beginning by praising Cosmology Now (1973), with a caution about how soon its science will become obsolete, this essay considers the relationship between cosmology and SF. The facts are clear: both universes, that of the writers and that of the scientists, grow ever more apart. Science fiction started its escape from the real cosmos even before the question was formulated why the universe remains so silent, why other life-forms and other civilizations have not been discovered after decades of "sky listening." Yet SF itself has become so encapsulated against the space of cosmology that it is increasingly unwilling to receive any signals--any news from the field of science with the exception of what manages to make the front pages (such as the tale of the black holes). This encapsulation took place when SF authors got hold of two fantastic, very convenient inventions: unlimited travel in time, and unlimited travel in space. Thanks to time travel and FTL, the cosmos has acquired such qualities as domesticate it in an exemplary manner for story telling purposes; but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty. SF doesn’t know of the cosmos of colliding galaxies, the invisible stars sucked in by the curvature of space, the pulsating magnetic fields. Structurally, the civilizations in SF remain arrested in the 19th century, with their colonizing tactics of conquest and their strategies of war. SF has not the slightest idea what could be done with the power of a sun, if it isn’t used exclusively for the destruction of inhabited planets. SF criticism often talks of a "sense of wonder" that the field is supposed to generate, but upon close examination, the "wonder" divulges its close relationship to the tricks of a stage magician. Tom MoylanIdeological Contradiction in Clarke's The City and the StarsAbstract.-- From the works of Wells on, science fiction has been primarily a petit-bourgeois literature: written and read not by the elite who control technological capitalist society but by the merchants, farmers, teachers, technicians and their children who are not part of the ruling class but who seek reforms, usually characterized by populist ideology, that would bring them into positions of power and end their own alienation and oppression. In this vision, capitalist society and science is criticized for its dehumanization, alienation, and often physical destruction of people--and for its misuse of science and technology. But just as there is a critique and a wish for escape so there is all too often a desire simply to reform and control rather than to negate and transform. The typical SF protagonist is not a revolutionary but a rebel, one who rises in the world from a powerless position and changes society by means of newly gained personal power. Seldom is social change collective, class-based, and revolutionary. Arthur C. Clarke’s SF, reflecting his own ties with space technology, explores the possibilities for development of space flight and planetary colonization either by the US government or by an Americanized world government. A curious figure, Clarke is both propagandist for the US space programs and mystical prophet of the end of humankind and the ascendancy of superior life forms. Clarke’s support of US capitalist hegemony is both strengthened by his obsession with technocracy and mystified by his visions of a distant non-human future. With this background in mind, The City and the Stars can be recognized more readily as a mechanism of SF’s bourgeois ideology. Robert M. PhilmusH.G. Wells as Literary Critic for the Saturday ReviewAbstract.-- H. G. Wells’s association with The Saturday Review began when Frank Harris took over its management in 1894. The period from November 1894 to April 1897 during which Wells regularly submitted brief essays and book reviews to Harris were formative. In those years he was at work revising The Time Machine, seeing to the publication of The Wonderful Visit and The Wheels of Chance, drafting The Island of Dr. Moreau, and assembling two volumes of his short stories. As if those projects were not enough, he also wrote speculative essays and reviewed books on scientific subjects for SR, while concurrently acting first as drama critic for The Pall Mall Gazette and then as SR’s principal reviewer of fiction. This overview concludes with brief description of the ninety-two book reviews and other items written by Wells for The Saturday Review between 1894 and 1897. Michael D. WhiteEllison's Harlequin: Irrational Moral Action in Static TimeAbstract.-- Though Ellison has written this story to protest a rigid bureaucracy ruled by a social elite, his story fails to negate the power and the future of this totalitarian dictatorship. What is negated in protest itself: the Harlequin, a symbol of the enlightened yet anguished individual conscience rather than a symbol of history as process, is negated. Historical process itself is nullified. So Ellison’s protest of a social system corrupted with rational technocracy and with bloodied but rich overseers is as ineffective as the Harlequin’s conscientious rebellion against Ticktockman. In this story, both content (the theme of rebellion against oppressive authority) and form (the ahistorical embodiment of conscience and rebellion in one person, the Harlequin) nullify the purpose and the consequences of social protest. Ellison has fictionally embodied, in fact, the Kantian-Weberian ideological separation of "fact" from "value." Like Weber, he has provided a "factual" analysis of an ugly mechanical world about which one can do nothing. The Harlequin’s comical acts of disruption cannot succeed; thus, progressive social change cannot be the theme of Ellison’s Harlequin. The theme is the futility of protest in effecting social change. We are left with the existential Angst of the great tragi-comic clown-hero who valiantly throws himself under the wheels of the great machine, only to be "worked over" and mechanically recycled by the Timeless Technology.
Gary K. WolfeMythic Structures in Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon"Abstract.-- Discussions of the relationship between science fiction and myth usually begin to break down as soon as the question of basic definitions arises. There is little agreement as to the meaning of either term, and trying to establish some relationship between them begins very quickly to seem like an attempt to draw maps of clouds. But this should not be taken to mean that myth study has little to offer the study of science fiction or vice versa. In this paper, I apply a specific methodology drawn from the study of myths conducted by Claude Levi-Strauss to a work generally received as science fiction, Cordwainer Smith’s "The Game of Rat and Dragon." The confluence of Levi-Strauss’s particular method with this particular work should not be taken as an argument that all science fiction should be studied using this method, or treated as myth. Perhaps more than any other writer of future-history series, Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) manages to impart to his tales the aspect of "strong time" of which Mircea Eliade speaks in describing the power of myth--"the prodigious, ‘sacred’ time when something new, strong, and significant was manifested."
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