#33 = Volume 11, Part 2 = July 1984 |
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ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
John L. GrigsbyHerbert's Reversal of Asimov's Vision Reassessed: Foundation's Edge and God Emperor of DuneAbstract .--The disparity which I previously identified (in SFS. No. 24) between the personal vision that informs Asimov's FOUNDATION books and that underlying Frank Herbert's DUNE books carries over into those series as tetralogies. In Foundation's Edge, Asimov has not repudiated his faith in mental science and technology; he has simply shifted it from the psychohistorians of the Second Foundation and the physical scientists of the First to the ideal world of Gaia, a utopia of ultimate harmony guided either by robots (i.e., technology) or by a Skinnerian universal determinism à la Walden II (which in effect updates mental science, or psychological control theory, to replace psychohistoricism). By contrast, in the latest addition to his DUNE series, God Emperor of Dune, Herbert's Leto II deliberately resorts to psychological and technological means of oppression to provoke revolt against his psychological manipulation and machine control. His aim is to teach his people the why and how of freeing themselves from such control: that they might live as humankind should, without the set limits of Skinnerian determinism and/or machine domination.Clayton KoelbThe Language of Presence in Varley's "The Persistence of Vision"Abstract .--John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision " proposes a linguistic utopia in which ordinary speech, which is composed of signs inevitably possessing an element of distance and "absence," is replaced by a language (or set of languages) in which the process of signification is set aside in favor of the direct "reading" of the world. Since Varley is fully aware that such a language of presence is incompatible with the structure of the world we live in, he separates his utopia from this world. The separation is at first relatively slight, and the story stays close to the margins of credibility; but at the end Varley leaves no doubt that his tale is a magical fantasy treating a world very different from the one we inhabit. What happens in Varley's story is impossible and not to be believed. This impossibility and this incredibility are precisely the point, for if we were to suppose that Varley meant to solicit the reader's belief, either directly or allegorically, his story would appear either curiously self-destructive on the one hand or emptily pretentious on the other. Neither is the case. This story that at first gives every appearance of expressing absolute faith in the possibility of a perfect form of communication unmasks itself at the end by showing decisively that this dream-language can exist only in the realm of outright, incredible fantasy. The language of this fantasy world is shown to be most powerful precisely when it is most incredible.Marie MacleanMetamorphoses of the Signifier in "Unnatural" LanguagesAbstract. --The extent and force of metafiction, and especially of modern SF--of that intellectual adventure which could be called "cognitive subversion"--owes much to an increasing understanding of language. The construction of artificial languages, the exploration of knowledge systems and of cybernetics, and information theory generally all lead to a literature which exploits the connections between human, or "natural," semiotic systems and others which are artificial, or "unnatural." To facilitate our comprehension of the latter, I would propose a preliminary scheme of classification based in two large groupings: leximatic and non-leximatic. The leximatic group composes the following categories: (1) the signifier whose signified is absent (missing, empty); (2) the signifier having a single signified (as in computer language, at least ideally); (3) the signifier whose signified obeys logical rules (as in cybernetics); and (4) the signifier whose signified is re-evaluated by its context (future, parallel, or whatnot). The non-leximatic group includes these categories: (5) the compact signifier (as in portmanteau words, techno-neologisms, etc.); (6) the modified signifier (derived through extrapolation from future languages); and (7) the "arbitrary," or exolinguistic, signifier, for the most part a sign or icon whose motivation is, say, phonetic, visual, or anagrammatic. (The use of the arbitrary signifier usually depends on the insertion of a "motivated" sign into a semiotic system peculiar to the world of the text--depends, that is, on what Marc Angenot calls the "absent paradigm.") How these diverse signifers function and what they can tell us about the relationships between "natural" and "unnatural" languages as they figure in SF texts are questions best approached through Roland Barthes' concepts of connotation and metalanguage, from the standpoint of which the capacity of fiction to transform and reinterpret chains of signification is most apparent.Patrick A. McCarthyZamyatin and the Nightmare of TechnologyAbstract .--Yevgeny Zamyatin's anti-utopian novel We relies on a Romantic conception of politics and technology that is consistent with attitudes developed in essays Zamyatin wrote during the early years of the Bolshevik state. In the novel, both the machine images and the adaptation of the Prometheus myth demonstrate the capacity of the products of the imagination to become inhibitors of imaginative activity: thus the machine and the state are at once man's potential liberators and his actual masters. The drama is played out in the mind of D-503, whose instinctive desire for freedom and individuality is eventually destroyed, leaving him in the perfectly mechanical state towards which he has always consciously aspired. In this sense, D-503 comes to represent the failure of the imagination to retain its ascendancy over its creations.Remi-MaureScience Fiction in ChileAbstract .--Chile could not lay claim to any indigenous SF until 1959. That year, however, marked the appearance in print of Hugo Correa, who remains the most prolific as well as the best writer of SF that Chile has so far produced. Los Altissimos (The Superiors, 1959), his first book (of five, to date) is something of a classic, certainly an auspicious beginning to a "Golden Age" of Chilean SF.Second to Correa is Antonio Montero Abt, with three SF titles to his credit--most notably, Acá del tiempo (This Side of Time, 1969). But Montero apparently ceased writing after 1970, and no one else of talent among his compatriots has since devoted her or himself to writing SF exclusively and in quantity. There is, perhaps predictably, one renowned "mainstream" author, Miguel Arteche, who momentarily condescended to an S-F future history, El Cristo hueco (The Empty Christ, 1969). And among the SF books of the '60s, those of Armando Menedin, Elena Aldunate Bezanilla, and Ilda Cádiz Avila deserve mention, even though they have written little and that little entirely in the form of short fictions. So, too, among '70s' writers, Carlos Ruiz-Tagle and José Bohr can be singled out, especially the latter for his Mañana hacia el ayer (Tomorrow Towards Yesterday, 1975). And finally, just for the record, there also exist some execrable SF stories by Roberto van Bennewitz and Renè Peri Fagerstrom. Chile's "Golden Age" has proved to be short-lived: it lasted until about the time of Allende's overthrow--until 1975, to be precise--since which time SF activity in the country has virtually come to a complete halt. Franz RottensteinerPaul Scheerbart, Fantast of "Otherness"Abstract .--Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) is a most singular phenomenon among fantasts: a Prussian gifted with a sense of humor, he created a cosmos of the most colorful continuous transformations and alterations--a cosmos that is without parallel in literary history.Despite being evidently preoccupied with new contents--with curious alien beings, including sentient stars, with landscapes in the far universe, with other architectures (especially of glass), and with new art forms--Scheerbart was most interested in aesthetic problems. Accepted literary forms and genres in his hands undergo a condensation, an uttermost simplification, which has the effect of ironizing them. Nor do the conventional laws of physics rule his monstrously bizarre cosmos. Indeed, he held such laws in ridicule, claiming that they were nothing more than what the poor imagination of "earthworms" imposed upon higher, astral beings inaccessible to human reason--beings whose sympathies and ultimately aimless metamorphoses serve no goal other than to produce ever "new" and "other" vistas of the incredibly wide cosmic spaces. Scheerbart proclaimed that he was in love with the "world spirit." That is no doubt true enough, but his attachment to it gives his aesthetic universe of surface form a curiously soulless and static quality. His cosmos is in fact a purely literary construct. Pacifist and free from the drudgery of work, the necessity for food, and the pains of sexual conflicts and disappointments, it stands as a counter-world, implicitly invoking the real world, Earth bound in the fetters of terrestrial gravity, only as its absolute antithesis. Nancy Steffen-FluhrWomen and the Inner Game of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body SnatchersAbstract .--Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is not primarily a political allegory but a complex psychomachia written by and for beleaguered males of the 1950s. The inner game of Invasion is a very traditional version of the War Between the Sexes in which overt antagonism has been suppressed and re-projected as a War of the Worlds. Miles's fear of surrendering to the alien pods--and all they represent-- is precisely parallel to, and comments upon, his unarticulated fear of other surrenders: to Becky, his androgynous "other half"; to his own uncontrollable passion; and, most importantly, to his (and Siegel's) hidden desire for forbidden surcease. Surrender, passivity, receptivity, deemed by the patriarchic culture of the '50s to be mere womanish weakness, are projected onto the alien pods and ultimately rejected as inconsistent with manly emotion--indeed, inconsistent with survival itself.The ambivalent meaning of the pods follows a general rule for SF plots: "anything alien is inhuman to me." That is, in Invasion, as in male SF in general, the threatening aliens represent distorted projections of anima--not women qua women but women as estranged components of the psyches of the male authors, auteurs (Jack Finney, on whose novel Invasion is based; the late Daniel Mainwaring, the scriptwriter; and Don Siegel, the director). Siegel, a chronic insomniac, apparently driven by a strong need for conscious control, has intended the pods to represent depression, conformity, "other-directedness"--all that is inimical to a thrusting, flight-or-flight definition of the intensely lived life. And so they do--in his text. But in his subtext, in his imagery, the pods also simultaneously convey deep yearnings for surrender, for release, for genderless intimacy and androgynous psychic wholeness. The film flirts with this vision of surcease, of a life beyond macho role-playing. But in the end, it reasserts the simplistic, bi-polar values of the American patriarchy. Miles's beloved Becky, his passionate "other half, " is revealed as a Judas who betrays her lord with a kiss, leaving him to be rescued by J. Edgar Hoover and his cohorts. Back to the raft again, Huck honey. [A response by Ellen M. Pedersen, and Nancy Steffen-Fluhr's reply, appear in SFS 35 (March 1985).] Louis TremaineHistorical Consciousness in Stapledon and MalrauxAbstract .--A comparison of Olaf Stapledon's fictions (especially Last and First Men and Star Maker) with Andre Malraux's Man's Fate discloses an essentially narrative consciousness at work in both writers. Central to this historical consciousness is a dialectical awareness of the relationship between human actuality and human potentiality--an awareness that present events are meaningful only as they are measured against a larger vision of what human beings have been and what they can become. Malraux accordingly steeps his novel in a particular historical moment to suggest that the appropriate response to the eternal condition humaine of inevitable suffering and death lies not in the mythic innocence of ideology or in a passive resignation to human tragedy, but in an ever greater lucidity on the part of humanity about what it is capable of within the natural limits that constrain it. So, too--but using an incomparably larger canvas than Malraux--Stapledon tests this same human capability for giving significance to human history. Indeed, it is Stapledon's historical consciousness that accounts, in part, for such characteristic elements of his fiction as the distancing narrator, the extreme-situation plot device, and the personality-in-community theme.
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