ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
NOTE
Martha A. Bartter
The (SF) Reader and the Quantum Paradigm: Problems in Delany's Stars
in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Abstract.--In every age, the prevailing "world-view'' organizes
cultural assumptions so thoroughly that they become invisible. Only when they change are
they widely noticed. Readers of SF are experiencing such a change in world-view today--the
third in recent history. From the Newtonian universe of absolute space and time, we moved
to the relativistic universe in which space and time are functions of each other, energy
and mass are interchangeable, and the relative position of the observer makes a
difference. This Einsteinian universe has had considerable influence on literature. But we
now find ourselves assimilating a third world-view, the most difficult literary world-view
yet proposed: the radical uncertainty of the quantum universe.
That quantum mechanics makes a difference to science is obvious. That it makes a
difference to literature is less so. Yet the principles of uncertainty, simultaneity, and
universal attraction do show up in post-modern fiction. Despite Einstein's protest that
"God does not play dice with the universe,'' writers like Samuel Delany seem to
produce literature, based on quantum mechanics, which does just that. The resulting works
provoke admiration, protest, and bafflement from readers. An exploration of the quantum
structure of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand constitutes a way of reading
it that may unpack some of Delany's enigmas.
Raimund Borgmeier
Objectives and Methods in the Analysis of SF: The Case of Science Fiction
Studies
Abstract.--The articles in the first 15 volumes of SFS are worth
examining as examples of the kind of work that is being done and can be done in the field
of SF. There is a decided emphasis on theoretical questions, which are dealt with through
a wide variety of approaches. The history of the genre is less prominent as a research
topic, though some attention is paid to SF's prehistory and early history. A broadening of
perspective becomes most noticeable in the interest in Utopia and the awareness of other
media.
All in all, the articles in SFS realize the "critical opening'' that the editors
in 1979 identified as the journal's principal aim. But in spite of editorial intentions, a
great many of the essays in SFS are still concerned with single SF authors (Ursula Le Guin
foremost among them). Even so, SFS is striking for its internationalism, and at the same
time demonstrates that the study of SF texts can stand comparison with work in other areas
in point of its literary-critical and scholarly value.
Carlo Pagetti
In the Year of Our Lord Hitler 720: Katharine Burdekin's Swastika
Night
Abstract.--Swastika Night is in many ways the 1930s'
equivalent of The Man in the High Castle. It is not simply Burdekin's focus on
the problematics of history, of reconstructing the past, that brings her closer to Dick
than to Huxley or Orwell, but also her promotion of values which still do not have the
ideological currency of 1984's or Brave New World's. This estranged
fiction of hers anticipates Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in its depiction of a
future wherein the triumph of Nazism has meant the brutalization of women (as well as
Jews) for being an "inferior race.'' It is in that context that von Hess, Herman, and
Alfred attempt to piece together the fragments of history and thereby recover the
historical "truth'' that the Night of the Swastika would deform. Yet even Alfred, the
most sympathetic of these (would-be) "heroes,'' sadly fails to make the values that
women represent integral to himself--the values of pacifism and non-domination that alone
promise a possible end to the Night of the brutal violence of male aggression.
Roger Bozzetto
Kepler's Somnium; or, Science Fiction's Missing Link
Abstract.--The search for the origins of a literary genre is an
endless exploration. The sources of SF can be traced, in relation to the imaginary voyage,
to Homer and Lucian and, for utopian fiction, to Plato and Thomas More. But both imaginary
voyages and utopias remain either pure fantasy or non-narrative conceptual games. With
Kepler's Somnium, a new speculative format was inaugurated: he demonstrated the
consequences of an astronomical theory, complete with analogical reasoning and verifiable
mathematics, within the framework of a fiction which served as a kind of polemical
platform for his philosophical and scientific arguments. Taking into account the
historical conditions prevailing at the time of this work, Kepler was obliged to invent a
complex narrative form which was simultaneously open-ended (with its addition of
appendicized notes) and multi-framed (with the intervention of a supernatural narrator to
render its message credible)--a narrative form that was clumsy, difficult to read, and
with no direct posterity. Nevertheless, utilizing this new speculative format invented by
Kepler, both Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac --who more skillfully integrated the
"new'' knowledge into their linear narrative models--began to develop its
potentialities into the first "classical'' SF. In Kepler's Somnium,
therefore, we have the first example of "hard'' SF and what might be called a generic
"missing link'' between Lucian and More on the one hand and the SF tradition on the
other.
[A response by David Lake, and Robert M. Philmus's
response to Lake, appear in SFS 53 (March 1991).]
H. Bruce Franklin
The Vietnam War as American SF and Fantasy
Abstract.--American SF helped engineer and shape America's war in
Indochina, which then profoundly reshaped American SF. Indeed, the Vietnam War cannot be
fully comprehended unless it is seen in part as a form of American SF and fantasy.
Straight out of American pulp, comic book, and movie SF came fantasies of techno-wonders
and super-heroes that guided the decisions of political and military leaders. A paradigm
of the American self-images that helped shape the war might be Buck Rogers--as he uses his
manly skills and 25th-century technology to lead the good fight against the Mongol hordes
--sporting a Green Beret.
Although the decision-makers' customary discourse expressed these fantasies in a
language of ostensible realism and practicality, comparison with SF about the war unmasks
their content. One key policy-maker even published a story in Astounding which
exposes the roots of the dominant ideology. But shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968,
there appeared--in the form of rival advertisements opposing and supporting the war--a
roster of SF writers who, incarnating fundamental contradictions between Campbellian and
New Wave SF, would participate in the transformation of American SF by and through the
war.
Some of the greatest achievements of New Wave SF--such as Kate Wilhelm's "The
Village,'' Norman Spinrad's "The Big Flash,'' and Ursula Le Guin's The Word for
World is Forest--use fantasy to expose the menace of being possessed by unexamined
fantasizing; and more specifically, they employ the conventions of SF to dramatize the
treacherous infantile SF being enacted in Vietnam. The extreme forms of alienation
engendered by the war were transmuted into SF by a number of Vietnam veterans, including
Joe Haldeman, whose The Forever War caricatures the technophilia in the heart of
"Golden Age'' galactic combat fiction.
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