ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
Marc Angenot
Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism (II)
Abstract. -- This
review-essay surveys six works written between 1973-1976 that place Jules Verne
in the center of methodological debate, for each is representative of a
particular approach that leads to differing and even contradictory conclusions. Jules
Verne, a voluminous biography by the author’s grandson Jean-Jules Verne,
touches on the author’s favorite books, sources for his writing, his family
joys and sorrows, and his professional and personal relationships. Marie-Thérèse
Huet’s dissertation, L’Histoire des "Voyages extraordinaires," addresses the explicit historical and political references in the stories. Far
from being a flight of pure imagination or the result of mere ideological
speculation, Verne’s work is a transposition of all the major historical
conflicts in the world—except in France—that foretells the acute struggles
of the 20th century (revolt of the Sepoys in India, Greek independence
struggles, etc.). Science is his vehicle to recreate history by projecting not
that which will be but that which might have been: Verne’s works are not
anticipations but "uchronias." Simone Vierne’s voluminous (800+
pages) Jules Verne et le roman initiatique is the most impressive of all these
works. She confers an archetypal significance to the idea of initiation, linking
Verne to various esoteric traditions. In her view, Verne’s narratives lead the
hero, after trial, to a superior state of consciousness: each Verne story is a
psychodrama that addresses a deep human need. Initiation, in Vierne’s view,
requires three steps: the preparation of the hero, his trip into the hereafter,
and his final rebirth. Mme Vierne’s study of a single novel, L’Île
mysterieuse de Jules Verne, a work designed for undergraduates, is a brief
forerunner to the larger work on initiation in Verne. Michel Serres’s Jouvences
sur Jules Verne reveals in Verne’s imaginary voyages a "mathematical
oneiricism": i.e., transposition of the circle, the ellipse, the hyperbole,
the eccentric circle, and the loxodromic curve. Using little-known tales such as Captain Antifer and The Will of an Eccentric as a starting point,
Serres discerns certain laws of mechanics and gravitation in the structure of
Verne’s works. Finally, the Cahiers de L’Herne have devoted their
issue #25 (1974) to Jules Verne, printing a hitherto unpublished play and some
letters by Verne along with bibliographies and some 30 articles of very unequal
length, orientation, and value. All in all, the rapid succession and diversity
of recent work on Verne is proof that—at least in France—a long period of
misunderstanding and neglect of SF is now at an end.
Gale E. Christianson
Kepler's Somnium: Science Fiction and the
Renaissance Scientist
Abstract.-- Following an account of the painful
family circumstances
and risks attending the posthumous publication of Somnium in 1634, this essay
contends that the work marks the beginning of a new era. After an initial tribute to the
classicists, the modern scientist takes over. The Daemon of Lavania is nothing less than
Kepler’s own subtly masked voice, speaking with authority about the unlimited
possibilities of science. Gone is the fantasy-utopian world of Lucian and Campanella; in
its place is an imaginative modern work anchored in fact and rich in rational scientific
theory. And if Kepler’s small-scaled fictional work was overlooked by historians of
science for over 350 years, writers of cosmic voyages during the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries did not make the same mistake. The Somnium was known to
Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and, I believe, to such contemporary writers as Arthur C.
Clarke. Kepler opened the way for a new vision of the universe as a home to a plurality of
worlds; indeed, Kepler’s Dream may be seen as the fons et origo of
modern science fiction. Only in the last few years have Kepler’s writings finally
been given the attention merited by their historical importance and their contribution to
later scientific and technological developments, including twentieth-century man’s
lunar voyages.
Charles Elkins
Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION Novels:
Historical Materialism Distorted into Cyclical Psycho-History
Abstract.-- This essay speculates on what elements in the Foundation
stories of Asimov have so fascinated readers. The characters are undifferentiated and
one-dimensional. Stylistically, the novels are disasters: Asimov’s ear for dialogue
is atrocious. To describe characters’ annoyance, arrogance or bitterness, Asimov uses
again and again one favorite adjective and adverb, "sardonic[ally]." Evidently,
all people in all time periods will be sardonic. Asimov imports a watered-down idiom of
his own time into a world twelve-thousand years into the future, with no change at all.
This essay argues that what Asimov accepted as the "underlying concept" of the Foundation
trilogy is the vulgar, mechanical, debased version of Marxism promulgated during the
1930s—and still accepted by many today. Indeed he takes this brand of Marxism to its
logical end: human actions and the history they create become as predictable as physical
events in nature. Everything in the universe is preordained. Reading these novels, readers
experience a fatalism that (in a Marxist analysis) actually flows from their own sense of
alienation and impotence in the face of problems they no longer even understand.
Asimov’s answer to this modern problem of alienation is also the source of his
popular appeal: he envisions humanity in the capable hands of a
techno-bureaucratic elite.
S.C. Fredericks
Lucian's True History as SF
Abstract.-- This analysis proposes that a science-fictional
interpretation of True History can reveal more than the limited satirical criticism
that views the work merely as a humorous critique of speculations that have become
divorced from the facts of the real world. The many estranged worlds of True History
reveal a dynamic and disequilibrious relationship between the mind and its imaginative
products on the one hand and the real world on the other. If the disparities between ideal
and real realms are obvious, Lucian nonetheless implicitly represents the most ancient
example of what we have come to know as science-fictional intellectual non-conformism.
There are no absolutes for Lucian, only a continuing process of the mind’s creating
new conceptions that in turn make the mind more fully conscious of its own workings.
David Ketterer
Science Fiction and Allied Literature
Abstract.-- The issue at hand is the sloppy critical approach that
classifies works related to SF—Gravity’s Rainbow, The Education of Henry
Adams—as, in fact, examples of SF. Pynchon’s Pulitzer Prize and National
Book Award-winning novel is not an isolated instance. Mark Adlard comes close to calling
Dante’s Divine Comedy SF. Kingsley Amis encourages us to read The Tempest
as SF. Darko Suvin believes much of Blake’s work to be SF. Peter Nicholls is at work
on a history of science fiction that begins with the epic of Gilgamesh. Surely,
while all these works may contain science-fictional elements, they are not themselves
examples of SF. And although what is and what isn’t SF may be a matter of definition,
there is nothing to be gained by expanding the definition to include such cases. What is
needed is a new and larger category that would include both works of SF and works that
seem related to it. What is required is not so much an all-encompassing definition of SF
as various defining distinctions between the different gradations of SF. Such a
pluralistic approach is necessary because we may be approaching a stage in the development
of SF where an author’s work may best be understood in its own terms rather than as
an example of a particular genre.
Robert Plank
Ursula K. Le Guin and the Decline of Romantic Love
Abstract.-- This essay takes a psychoanalytic approach, discussing the
probable functions of such motifs in early LeGuin novels as identity (the hero of City
of Illusions never becomes quite certain whether he is really Falk or the Lord Agad
Ramarren) and telepathy ("listeners," "paraverbalists,"
"mindbearers," "empaths"). The psychologically interesting question is
not whether such processes can possibly take place, but why an author is attracted to
imagining them. The probable answer is that people will resort to extrasensory bridges
from mind to mind when they feel frustrated by observing that the more conventional route
of language and of empirically given non-verbal communication will no longer bear the
traffic. In the same way, they resort to Psi-powers or to magic or miracles when they are
agitated by finding that habitual means of problem-solving no longer suffice. A third
strand in LeGuin’s skein is less modernist: the "quest." A hero sets
out—often with companions who are swiftly eliminated—on a mission of crucial
importance. Rocannon, in Rocannon’s World, is such a quest hero and is finally
thought of as a god. While these motifs preoccupy LeGuin in her early fiction, the
pessimistic consideration of the collapse of ideal romantic love preoccupies her in The
Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. LeGuin does not proclaim
ambisexuality as a solution in LHD, but she depicts a world where ambisexuality is
institutionalized, universal, inescapable, not the result of individual choice or even
individual nature; hence, it is free of guilt and conflict.
David N. Samuelson
The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Abstract.-- Walter M. Miller is an enigmatic figure. An engineer with
World War II flying experience, he wrote science fiction of a technophilic variety, yet
studded his stories with allusions, clear and cloudy, to the Judeo-Christian tradition,
generally bathed in a generous light. A commercial writer who had produced a million words
by 1955, including scripts for the early television serial Captain Video, he came
to write progressively more complex stories until, having more or less perfected his art,
he stopped writing at the pinnacle of his success, at the age of 36. A Southern Catholic
born in Florida in 1923, he wrote his best-known work about a future order of monks
founded in Arizona in the name of a Jewish engineer. The medium lengths—novelette,
novella, short novel—were where Miller’s strengths lay. Of the forty-one
magazine publications surveyed here, twenty-four were of middle length, including the
three more or less independent tales later published as A Canticle for Leibowitz
and some other strong efforts: "Blood Bank," "The Ties that Bind,"
"The Lineman," "The Darfsteller," "Dark Benediction,"
"Conditionally Human," and "Command Performance." Among Miller’s
short stories, on the other hand, only "Crucifixus Etiam" really stands out,
followed by "The Big Hunger," "It Takes a Thief," "Death of a
Spaceman," "The Hoofer," and "Vengeance for Nikolai," most of
which come dangerously close to sentimentality. Five outstanding short stories out of
thirty-eight published is not disastrous, but they would hardly have caused Miller to be
remembered if he had not written A Canticle for Leibowitz. Against that standard,
not many science fiction stories or novels can measure up. Leading up to it, however, and
to the enigma of Miller’s abandoning writing afterwards, the whole canon has
extrinsic interest, chronicling his development from a commercial writer to an artist, one
who may have quit while he was ahead rather than have everything thereafter compared to
one book and found wanting.
Ralph Willett
Moorcock's Achievement and Promise in the Jerry
Cornelius Books
Abstract.-- Michael Moorcock entered Britains’s world of popular
culture at 17 as editor of a boys’ magazine, Tarzan Adventures; he then wrote
comic strips for Fleetway’s popular fiction publications. He has been compared not
only to Edgar Rice Burroughs but to William Burroughs, especially with respect to the
Jerry Cornelius books: The Final Programme (1968), The Chinese Agent (1970),
The Nature of the Catastrophe (1971), A Cure for Cancer (1971), The
English Assassin (1972), An Alien Heat (1972), and The Hollow Lands
(1974). Moorcock lacks William Burroughs’s accurate and devastating satire and his
verbal experiments have been less radical, but in both artists can be observed a basic
dissatisfaction with linear methods of representing space and time, a surreal sense of
co-existing multiple worlds, and an emphasis on apocalyptic disaster. The perspective of
Jerry Cornelius as a fluid, metaphoric being erodes the old convention of the
"retrospective" novel (as J. G. Ballard calls it), in which characters were the
property of their creator: tales about Jerry Cornelius by writers other than Moorcock
appeared in New Worlds, the magazine edited by Moorcock and Ballard, and were
collected, along with some by Moorcock, in The Nature of the Catastrophe, which is
dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges. The world of Jerry Cornelius is basically that of the
1960s—buoyant, elitist, androgynous, narcissistic, over-populated, and permeated with
images of violence.
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