Albert I. Berger
Towards a Science of the Nuclear Mind: Science-Fiction
Origins of Dianetics
Abstract.--L. Ron Hubbard's widely advertised book, Dianetics: The Modern
Science of Mental Health (1950), describes a popular form of unorthodox psychological
"therapy" that purports to offer solutions to personal problems and to point the
way to a secure and socially successful life. The Church of Scientology that he founded
became one of the more prominent "cults" characterizing American popular culture
during the 1970s, and he himself became a famous, if notorious and mysterious, figure as
its leader. Yet Hubbard started out as a pulp SF writer in John Campbell's Astounding
Science Fiction, and Dianetics has substantial roots in SF's traditional
interest in the use of psychological science as the basis for a powerful technology
mimicking the genre's ideas on the role of the physical sciences. The extent of these
roots was seen in the 1950s when many SF writers--Campbell among them--were initially
attracted to Hubbard's ideas.
A "science of the mind" had been a staple in SF at least since the 1920s,
when E.E. ("Doc") Smith had written of thought-powered spaceships and weapons,
and Campbell himself had included his ideas on the subject in some of his fictions and
many of his editorials even before the achievement of nuclear power. From Campbell's
perspective, "mental sciences" might mean anything from psychosomatic medicine
to telepathy, partially as an antidote for the problems created by the use of physical
technology, but more significantly as advanced systems of knowledge not yet fully
understood, except as various forms of magic. Equally significantly, Campbell wrote of his
respect for ancient priests and soothsayers as practitioners of "the Science of
Magic," and he would later describe modern science as "The Magic that
Works."
During the early 1940s, writers publishing in Campbell's magazine (e.g., Robert
Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt) made a variety of psychological technologies
integral parts of the theories of history incorporated in their stories. In general, all
of them imagined that these technologies would eventually displace economics, politics,
and other forces as the principal determinants of social relationships in human
civilizations. Such concepts seemed more important to them after the achievement of
nuclear power. The fiction Hubbard wrote before he created Dianetics can be read
as a severely alienated critique of modern industrial society and the failure of the
political life associated with it, as well as a brief for the abandonment of both by an
elite.
Such concepts appeared outside the orbit of SF in American culture at the same
time--viz., during the years in which psychosurgery and the use of drugs were becoming
increasingly characteristic of orthodox psychotherapy and in which bureaucratic,
technical, and managerial objectives were increasingly being substituted for social and
political ideals. Dianetics' emphasis on individual, personal empowerment through therapy
and on the elimination of irrationality and evil thus fit very nicely into that historical
context. Moreover, Hubbard explicitly stated that Dianetics would permit the extension of
the frontier of American mythology into outer space, at least for those who completed the
course of therapy and were "cleared" of all their neuroses.
Meanwhile, however, SF writers such as Cyril Kornbluth and Robert Bloch were able to
see the limitations that such a world-view placed both upon political and social criticism
in SF and upon political and social thought and action in civic life. They were able to
recognize how ideas such as Hubbard's could in fact become justifications for an apathetic
resignation to the continuation of tyranny.
Francis Cromphout
From Estrangement to Commitment: Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics
and T Zero
Abstract.--Italo Calvino did not think of himself as an SF
writer. This fact, however, has to do with the situation of SF in Italy at the time Cosmicomics
and T Zero were published more than with certain prejudices about how SF is to be
defined--such as the notion that the genre should be wholly identified with the novel of
scientific anticipation. Given a generic typology like that which Darko Suvin establishes,
the two works of Calvino's just mentioned can properly be claimed as belonging among the
best SF by reason of their mode of proceeding, which is at once cognitive, pluritemporal,
and estranged.
This proceeding leads Calvino to construct cognitive utopian fictions, the product of
the demands for order, identity, and applicability to the extra-fictional world, all of
which are thematized in his "cosmicomical" stories. The result is an oeuvre
which implies, especially on the stylistic level (in both the narrow and the broadest
sense), an engagement on the part of the writer. Calvino, in other words, calls into
question established norms of thinking in a way that also imparts the idea of the world's
transformability.
John Fekete
Science Fiction in Hungary
Abstract.--In the past 15 years, there has developed in Hungary the
basic skeleton of a serious infrastructure for SF production in terms of an organized
subculture of writers, readers, publishers, journals, other accessible media of
communication, and international relations. This subculture can draw strength from a
strong indigenous minority literary tradition of fantastic writing whose contributors
include some of the most important Hungarian prose writers of the 20th century--among
them, Mihály Babits, Frigyes Karinthy, and Tibor Déri. Writing at an international level
of literary merit continues to be produced within the genre by the likes of Gyula
Hernádi, Péter Lengyel, Péter Zsoldos, and Dezsö Tandori, and potentially also by a
generation of young writers working near and around them. At the same time--and
problematically--this creativity in SF remains generally unacknowledged, and certainly
unlegitimated, by the main institutions of literary history, literary criticism,
education, and official cultural transmission. This also applies, even within the SF
subculture, to the more sophisticated formal experiments in Hungarian SF.
Veronica Hollinger
The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider
Abstract.--While SF often evokes in its readers a proverbial
"sense of wonder," it also works to "domesticate" narrative elements
which, in different generic contexts, would be considered fantastic. In this essay, I
examine the domestication of the figure of the vampire through its introduction into SF
narratives. I analyze two texts in particular: Colin Wilson's The Space Vampires
(1976) and Jody Scott's I, Vampire (1984). Each, in its own way, is a rewriting,
and thus, to some extent, a parody, of Bram Stoker's Dracula. However, it is
interesting to note the degree to which the compliance of The Space Vampires with
the genre conventions of SF serves to consolidate a conservative textual ideology, while
the more playful rejection of the boundaries between SF and fantasy in I, Vampire
both derives from and results in a more radical ideological coloration. It seems to me
that Wilson's treatment of the vampire as alien-Other closely parallels Stoker's original
treatment in Dracula, while Scott's feminist revision not only undertakes a
generic subversion, but also undermines the conventional human/alien opposition. The
recent resurgence of vampire fiction, much of it by women writers, has produced some
intriguing re-presentations of the vampire as Outsider which function as critiques of the
marginalizations effected by patriarchal representations.
Thomas J. Morrissey
Pamela Sargent's Science Fiction for Young Adults:
Celebrations of Change
Abstract.--Pamela Sargent's five SF novels for young adults display the same
insight and concerns that characterize her novels for adult readers. The latter
extrapolate from a broad range of contemporary technologies, including cybernetics,
biological engineering, space travel, and atomic science. Regardless of the setting,
however, her principal focus is always the carefully drawn characters who must live with
the consequences of the technological revolution--or, in some cases, Revolution. Her five
SF novels for younger readers--Watchstar (1980), The Eye of the Comet
(1984), Homesmind (1984), Earthseed (1983), and Alien Child
(1988) are simpler stylistically than her other books; but unlike many novels of the
genre, they assume an audience with a speculative intelligence and an eagerness to be
confronted with unconventional ideas and situations. In them, technological change and
human evolution are inextricably entwined; humanity must come to terms with, rather than
escape, the consequences of modern science. Sargent celebrates youth and the positive
potential for change made possible by technology. Her novels for young adults are,
therefore, as freewheeling and imaginative as the best SF for adults is.
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