Stanton A. Coblentz's The Sunken World (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer
1928; book form 1949) resembles, contrasts with, and presumably derives from The
Scarlet Empire. Coblentz's sunken Atlantis fascinated me so greatly when I first read
the story at 13 that I have never forgotten it. Having reread it, I still find it
interesting and only wish that the author's command of language and understanding of
thought, character, nature, and plot had been sufficient for him to have realized his
purposes more fully. My intention here is to argue briefly against the widespread notion
presented so vigorously above by Professor La Bossière, the notion that it is simply not
possible to write utopias that are comparable to dystopias in literary distinction or even
in ordinary SF interest. My method will be the comparison of the two books in their
treatment of diction, thought, character (differences between things of the same species),
nature (differences between species), and plot, in an effort to show that Coblentz's novel
is superior to Parry's and that its superiority has nothing to do with the fact that it is
a utopia and Parry's novel a dystopia.
The two are like each other, like most SF novels, and indeed like most fiction of any
kind in being quite undistinguished in diction. Except for a few stabs at lower-class
dialect by Coblentz, no appreciable effort is made in either book to distinguish the
language of one person from that of another or even to differentiate conversational
dialogue from the running narrative of the protagonist-narrator. Since neither author is a
master of language, neither is able to render either thought or character with any
precision or vividness.
What we get in the way of thought consists simply of conventional arguments--for or
against socialism, for or against capitalism, for or against the concept of man as
inherently indolent, etc. The rendering of character is equally crude: in Parry's story
the hero and heroine and their two allies are good by definition since they seek to escape
the oppression of the bad people, of whom some are bad in that they manipulate the law in
their efforts to victimize heroine and hero while others are bad merely in that they abide
by and seek to enforce the foolish laws of a foolish society; in Coblentz' story there are
no good-bad distinctions, the conflicts being intellectual and comic rather than moral and
melodramatic.
We are thus left, as we are in nearly all SF novels, with matters of nature and plot.
In both novels the physical environment differs so greatly from our own--or from that of
the authors--that it must be said to be a difference in nature rather than in character.
We have in each story a world that sank beneath the sea 3000 years ago but that somehow
survived with roofs and walls that hold back the water and with sources of light, heat,
and air that replace the sun and the atmosphere. In The Scarlet Empire the
survival was accidental in a way that is never adequately explained: "these gigantic
columns which you admire so much are the petrified forests of the Garden of Eden. You
cannot see their branches here below, but if you could ascend ... you would find that
great limbs spread out in all directions, supporting a dome which seems a mass of foliage
and mineral matter impervious to water" (§7). In The Sunken World the
submergence was planned: a dome of glass was constructed over a large area and
"intra-atomic heat" was used "to sink the whole island to the bottom of the
sea" (§12). Each of the narrators is taken on a tour of the enclosed world, but
whereas the Coblentz world is described in considerable detail, the Parry world is hardly
described at all: The Sunken World is thus a more rewarding novel than The
Scarlet Empire on the basis of the interest that science-fiction readers take in the
attributes of any imaginary world.
In each book the political and socioeconomic environment also differs in nature from
our own (i.e., the United States of 1903, 1928, or 1974) in that it is socialist and
equalitarian rather than capitalist and graded, and in character if not in nature from
modern socialist states in that the equality has a completeness far beyond anything known
in our world: in Coblentz the Atlanteans live in comfort and plenty supplied by two hours
of work a day, and devote their leisure to artistic and intellectual endeavors; in Parry
they live in abject poverty, with four-fifths of the people working fifteen hours a day
under whips wielded by the other fifth, who are not much better off since they must wield
the whips for the same fifteen hours, must eat the same food, etc., and even the members
of what Professor La Bossière calls the ruling clique gain only venial rewards by their
rule. The government of Coblentz's utopia is a direct democracy (the population being held
at 500,000 to make this possible), with the few administrators being chosen by
examination; the government of Parry's dystopia is representative democracy, with
legislators and administrators being chosen and all work-assignments (including the
wielding or the working under the whips) being made by lot. Although neither novel gives
us anything more than the banalities of routine utopian/dystopian exposition, Coblentz's
world is again detailed with greater fullness and coherence and therefore is superior in
ordinary SF interest--or, to say it in a different way, would surely be of much greater
interest to any bright 12-year-old just becoming aware of utopian/dystopian possibilities.
Finally, there should be in each novel a spiritual environment resulting from
the isolation of the society from the rest of humanity, but only Coblentz makes anything
of this, Parry being content to attribute all the evils of his Atlantis simply to
socialism. The utopian Atlantis came into being as a result of the decision of the
Atlanteans that they could create and maintain a just society only if they isolated
themselves from the wicked world, but now after 3000 years the political parties of
utopian Atlantis include an Industrial Reform Party, a Party of Artistic Emancipation, a
Party of Birth Extension, and even a Party of Emergence whose members argue that although
the plans of the founders were almost perfect, they were deficient in that they "did
not leave room enough in Atlantis for adventure" (§§22-23). In sum, Coblentz' story
is superior to Parry's in that whereas the latter is simplistic enough for its dystopia to
be perfectly bad, the former is sufficiently complex for its utopia not to be perfectly
good.
Both novels are somewhat incoherent in plot. (In the analysis used here, plot is
defined as the interaction of protagonist and environment, with the environment of the
protagonist including the personal [his friends and enemies], the sociocultural, the
sociophysical, the geophysical, or whatever, and with the organizing principle of the plot
being a change in the thought, character, or nature of the protagonist or environment, or
in their relationship.) The Scarlet Empire begins with a change-in-thought plot,
but our hero has already learned his lesson by the end of §6, whereupon the plot of
§§7-41 becomes one of melodramatic adventure in which our hero rescues a maiden in
distress, wins her love, plunders a museum of great wealth (pagan temples in unenlightened
lands being fair game for enlightened adventurers from the civilized world), shoots his
way free, destroys his enemy (some five million people), and escapes to happiness ever
after as a rich man with a beautiful and adoring wife in the best of worlds, the USA.
Having said all this in full agreement with Professor La Bossière's statement that
Parry's "affirmation is downright naive," we must add that there is an ugly
development in the character of the protagonist--who goes from simple greed at the sight
of the jewels stored in the museum (§11) to the self-righteousness of declaring that the
five million people killed by a torpedo from his submarine were "overwhelmed by the
wrath of God," were a "nation that through its worship of Social Equality went
down to destruction" (§41)--a development which is probably merely a reflection of
the naive self-righteousness of the author but which might possibly be read as the overall
plot of a novel that has self-righteous robber-baron greed as its ultimate object of
satire.
In §§1-14 of The Sunken World the plot seems to center on a conflict between
the narrator and his commanding officer for the leadership of the crew of submariners who
have accidentally arrived in a country which they are told they will never be permitted to
leave, but from §15 on the commander and crew simply cease to figure in any important way
in the story. Forced to back up and start over, we find that in §§11-32 the story is
concerned chiefly with the inability of the obtuse narrator to grasp the realities of his sociocultural environment, and with the resulting foolishness of his behavior. From the
beautiful Aelios, who serves as his cicerone and as the expounder of Atlantean orthodoxy,
he learns that in the centuries before the submergence, the Atlanteans applied themselves
less and less to "the pursuit of the beautiful" and more and more to
"construction of huge and intricate machines, of towering but unsightly piles of
masonry, of swift means of locomotion, and of unique and elaborate systems of
amusement," and that with their "lightning means of travel and lightning weapons
of aggression" they "began to swoop down occasionally upon a foreign coast,
picking a quarrel with the people and finding some excuse for smiting thousands
dead." But of the Atlanteans, "not all...were savages, and not all approved of
[the] policy of international murder," and so an "Anti-Mechanism" party of
beauty lovers arose to argue that Atlantis's "best human material was being used up
and cast aside like so much straw," that "its best social energies were being
diverted into wasteful and even poisonous channels," that "its too rapid
scientific progress was imposing a wrenching strain upon the civilized mind and
institutions," and that there was "only one remedy, other than the natural one
of oblivion and death, and that remedy was in a complete metamorphosis, a change such as
the caterpillar undergoes when it enters the chrysalis, a transformation into an
environment of such repose that society might have time to recover from its overgrowth and
to evolve along quiet and peaceful lines" (§13).
But the fact that he is in a society that has achieved and abjured a triumph over
nature, that has renounced the pursuit of power and glory, and that has isolated itself
from the rest of the world so that it might follow the ways of peace and art, does not
prevent our hero from continuing to assume the universal validity of the values of his own
world. And so at the first opportunity he rises in a public assembly to deny that he and
his companions are the "barbarians" the Atlanteans take them to be, and to claim
that they are instead "representatives of the highest of modem civilizations":
My description of the growth and attainments of the modern world was listened to with
interest, but with a lack of comprehension that I thought almost idiotic. Thus when I
declared that the United States was a leading nation because of its population of a
hundred million, its rare inventions and its prolific manufactures, my hearers merely
looked blank and asked how the country ranked in art; and when I stated (what is surely
self-evident to all patriotic Americans) that New York is the greatest city on earth
because of its tall buildings and its capacity for housing a million human beings in one
square mile, my audience regarded me with something akin to horror, and one of the
men--evidently a dolt, for he seemed quite serious--asked whether no steps had been taken
to abolish the evil.
But it was when describing my own career that I was most grievously misunderstood. Had
I confessed to murder, the people could not have been more shocked when I mentioned that
I was one of the crew commissioned to ram and destroy other ships; and I felt that my
prestige was ruined beyond repair when I stated that I had entered the war voluntarily.
(§13)
There are a number of incidents that illustrate the obtuseness of our hero, but since
we have heard it all before, in Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmsland, we can content ourselves
with three examples. At the annual Pageant of the Good Destruction, where films are shown
of pre-Submergence Atlantis (films that cause one of his companions to exclaim, "By
the holy father, if we're not back in the old U.S.A!"), he muses to himself that he
"had never known anything quite so ugly as the scenes we now witnessed" (§15).
When he has completed the course of study that qualifies him for citizenship, and has been
made the Official Historian of the Upper World, he sets himself to write "a grand
resume of modern achievement ... to show the steps by which that achievement had been
consummated, and to picture in general the course of those social fluctuations, those
invasions, battles, slave-raids, civil conflicts, religious persecutions, crusades,
economic revolutions, industrial tumults and international blood-feuds that had brought
civilization to its present high estate" (§25). And when he sees in a museum a
display of weapons used by the Atlanteans in their war-making days, he exults "at the
proof of or superiority: ...the bayonets were fully half a foot shorter than our own; the
machine guns ... had obviously not half the killing capacity of ours," etc. (§26).
But although this conflict between protagonist and environment gives us the utopian
dual vision by opposing Atlantis to the United States (with our twin, ancient Atlantis),
it does not develop as a plot but instead merely runs on an even course until it peters
out in what can hardly be called a climax but must still serve as the only evidence of any
change of thought in the protagonist: when attempting to write on "Social Traditions
and Institutions in the Upper World" he finds that the "the further I proceeded
the harder the work became, for the more I learned of Atlantis the more difficult it
appeared to represent the earth in a light that was not merely pitiable" (§33).
Our second plot having faded away, we must once again back up and start over. That our
hero is an unreliable narrator is obvious from the beginning, and near the end of
§22 we
learn with disconcerting suddenness what should have been made evident by diction but was
not: that the beautiful Aelios is also unreliable, for if happiness and freedom were as
complete in Atlantis as she claims, there would surely be no need for such political
organizations as the Industrial Reform Party, the Party of Artistic Emancipation, the
Party of Birth Extension, and the Party of Emergence. It soon becomes obvious that this
incident, together with the following chapter (in which our hero is instructed in the
principles of the Party of Emergence by its leader, a "fiery spirit, audacious
thinker, and trustworthy friend"), is a prelude to the concluding action of the novel
(§§27-35), in which the people of Atlantis assume the role of protagonist.
The appearance of a crack in the great dome shatters the calm of the people of
Atlantis: "most of them [were] so transformed that I could hardly recognize them as
citizens of the Sunken World; for they were chattering wildly, or pacing distractedly back
and forth, or uttering half-hysterical exclamations; and one or two of them were muttering
or mumbling to themselves, or moving their lips silently in what might have been
prayer" (§27). The crack is soon repaired to the complete satisfaction of the
majority of the committee of scientists and engineers assigned to the problem, and calm
returns. One member of the committee submits a minority report holding that the repairs
will prove adequate for only five or six years, and urging "the immediate erection of
a new glass bulwark against the affected portion of the wall," which can probably be
completed in time, "prodigious though the effort will necessarily be," but the
other members of the committee testify at length on "the scientific unsoundness of Peliades' theories," and disprove "his views to their own satisfaction and that
of the people" (§28). Even so, the Party of Emergence wins many new supporters for
its policy of allowing a portion of the population to emigrate to the surface, and seems
to be headed for victory in a referendum on the matter until the publication of our hero's
History of the Upper World turns the entire country against making any contact
with the barbarians of the upper world (§§29-31). And so for six years the unadventurous
descendants of the builders of the great dome do nothing whatever to ensure that it will
continue to make life possible in their enclosed and isolated world, and make no plans for
escape if the dome should fail--as fail it does (§§32-35).
To the best of my no doubt limited knowledge in this field, no utopographer has ever
defined utopias as either "perfect" worlds or "permanently stable"
worlds; this strawman is the creation of those who deride any belief in the possibility of
improving the human condition. Since the utopian world, even though much more nearly
perfect than our own, is still imperfect, there is room in it for conflict of various
kinds and hence for the kinds of action portrayed in plotted as opposed to simply
expository fiction. Just as we find in dystopian fiction a conflict between protagonist
and environment in which the protagonist is in the right, so we would expect to find in
utopian fiction a conflict in which the protagonist is in the wrong or a conflict which
tests the strength of the society-and such conflicts we do find in The Sunken World, even
though they are poorly handled. My proposition in this essay has been that it is quite
possible to write utopian novels of literary distinction or, at least, of considerable SF
interest. When I began writing it seemed necessary to argue the proposition in the
abstract, but that is no longer necessary (and this essay may have lost its purpose), for
the proposition has been triumphantly demonstrated by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1974 novel,
The Dispossessed.
-- R.D. Mullen
The Steam Man of the Prairies and Seven Other
Dime Novels. E.F. Bleiler has
edited Eight Dime Novels (Dover,
$3.50), a 9 by 12 book containing photolithic reprints of five cent periodicals published
between 1881 and 1905 in the dime-novel format of that period apparently a 4-page or
8-page newspaper folded twice to produce a booklet of 16 or 32 pages. Along with Old and
Young King Brady, Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Frank James, Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell,
and the Horatio Alger hero of the month, we have a youthful genius named Johnny
Brainerd who builds a steam engine in the shape of a man and uses it with amazing
results in hunting for gold and fighting bad guys, in The Steam Man of the Prairies,
by Edward S. Ellis, originally published in 1865and said to be the first SF dime novel. —RDM
23 "Classics" of SF: the Hyperion
Reprints.
In her Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (L 1957) Margaret Dalziel remarks that the
study of such fiction is "full of interest for the reader who is prepared to
undertake it in cheerful resignation to the fact that he is unlikely to discover any lost
treasures" (p4). I must confess that there was a time when what drove me on in the
reading of the SF of 50, 100, or 200 years ago was my adherence to the theory that since
literary critics had always been prejudiced against SF there were probably some lost
masterpieces to be rediscovered; that is, it took me many a year to learn that this
prejudice is largely an American phenomenon of the last 50 years or so, and that such SF
masterpieces as have been written have all been pretty well accepted as part of mainstream
literature, in Britain if not in the US. Although these 23 books have all been advertised
as if they were lost masterpieces, not more than five of them (## 1, 3, 9, 19, 23), and
perhaps only three (I have not read ## 3 and 9), can be counted as masterpieces in any
sense.
Having thus done my duty by literary standards, I must now express my enthusiasm
for the series and my gratitude to Hyperion Press and Sam Moskowitz, the series editor,
for making them available in these substantial and reasonably priced editions, for as
badly written and as badly thought as most of these novel are, we still need them all if
we are to come to understand what SF has been and what it is. Not that the readers of SFS
are going to learn all that from this brief report: I will merely list the books and make
a few comments on them—nostalgic comment in some part, for most of these are books
that I read in my childhood or adolescence, mostly in a 5-year period (1928-1932) during
which I not only read all the pulp magazines publishing SF, but also sought, out and
obtained all the back numbers of Amazing Stories and many of Weird Tales, Blue
Book, and Argosy All Story Weekly.
Each of the books is a photolithic reprint of some earlier edition, 5½ by 8½,
printed on good paper, and sewn in signatures; the publisher is Hyperion Press, 45
Riverside Ave., Westport, Conn. 06880. The reasonableness of the prices (given below
for hardback/paperback) can be seen in connection with #9, announced in 1971 by McGrath at
$42.00 (but never published) and offered here at $13.50 5.50. ## 1, 3, 9, and
22 are not available for this report, but I have been assured that they are even now being
printed.
#1. Robert Paltock. The Life and Adventures of Peter
Wilkins. 1751 (but here an edition with
introduction by A.H. Bullen, d. 1920).$10.95/4.50. Not available for this report. This
minor classic of English literature, the third most popular of the 18th-century imaginary
voyages (albeit a poor third to Crusoe and Gulliver) and never long out of
print, is an example of the SF of the white man's burden: Peter teaches the arts of war
and other advantages of advanced civilization to a race of winged people. Sam
Moskowitz, Brian Aldiss, the NCBEL, and others to the contrary, it is not set in a world
inside the earth: the action takes place, first, on a small island similar to Burroughs's
Caspak in that it is completely encircled by high cliffs but open to the sky;
second, in a larger country surrounded by towering mountains and lying in the
supposedly temperate regions of the south pole.
#2. W.H. Rhodes. Caxton's Book: A Collection of Essays, Poems, Tales and Sketches. Ed. Daniel O'Connell. With an "In Memorium" -
signed W.H.L.B. 1876. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $8.95/3.75. This memorial
volume, assembled by friends of the author, a San Francisco lawyer who had written some
newspaper and magazine pieces under the name Caxton, contains one well-known SF story of
the hoax type, "The Case of Summerfield," a sequel to that story, and four other
stories of considerable SF interest, together with a number of poems and essays. The
"In Memorium" is of interest, in indicating that SF was a recognized genre in
1876 but was believed to be something rather new: "His fondness for weaving the
problems of science with fiction, which became afterwards so marked a characteristic of
his literary efforts, attracted the especial attention of his professors [at Harvard in
the 1840s], and had Mr. Rhodes devoted himself to this then novel department of letters,
he would have become, no doubt, greatly distinguished as a writer, and the great master of
scientific fiction, Jules Verne would have found the field of his efforts already sown and
reaped by the young southern student" (pp 6-7).
#3. Percy Greg.
Across the Zodiac. 1880.With introduction by Sam
Moskowitz. $13.50 5.50. J.O. Bailey treats this book as a landmark in the history of SF (Pilgrims,
pp67-69), it is the one "classic" of SF that I want most to to read, but
it has not yet come my way
##4-5. George Griffith.
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror.With
[17 magnificent] illustrations by Fred. T. Jane1893 (but here an 1894 edition issued
before the death of Tsar Alexander, November 1st). With introduction by Sam Moskowitz.
$11.50/4.75 Olga Romanoff: or The Syren of the Skies.
1894 (with an errata slip: "In view of recent events in Russia.... For the obviously
necessary alterations in the text the reader is referred to the Ninth Edition of
[#3]."). With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $10.50/4.25. In Voices Prophesying
War (1966) I.F. Clarke dismisses Griffith with the following: "a new race of
journalists like Louis Tracy, George Griffith, and William Lee Quex.... had a standard
formula for dealing with every situation: a major anxiety of the moment plus a racy and
exciting narrative plus the introduction of eminent contemporary figures who would talk to
the reader in the intimate manner favored by the Daily Mail" (p65). Whether
Griffith's contributions to the future-war story deserve more than this I cannot say,
having read few of the books that Professor Clarke regards as important in that sub-genre
and thus being unable to make comparisons. What can be said is that these highly
sensational and melodramatic stories are more in line with—would appear in matters of
story-telling to be more directly ancestral to—modern popular SF than Wells's
stories, though their influence is of course indirect, Griffith not having been published
in the US and having been long out of print in Britain. Set ten years in the future, Angel
is concerned with the building of the first successful aircraft, which combine the
principles of "Jules Verne's imaginary 'Clipper of the Clouds' and Hiram
Maxim's Aëroplane" (p42); the use of a fleet of these aircraft by the international
nihilist-socialist-anarchist Brotherhood under the leadership of Natas and his daughter
(the eponymous Natasha) to save England from conquest by Russia and France (eventually
with help from America, the US branch of the Brotherhood having overthrown the Plutocracy,
torn up the wicked Constitution, and joined the US with Britain in an Anglo-Saxon
Federation); and the establishment of a world-wide reign of peace and justice on the basis
of socialist-democratic government and monarchical pageantry (Edward VII and the German
and Austrian emperors being allowed to keep their thrones), a reign guaranteed by the
monopoly of air-power that the Brotherhood wields from its base in an idyllic region of
Africa. The chief villain of the story is Tsar Alexander/Nicholas (Alexander having died
between the 8th and 9th editions), and the final scene in which the Tsar appears is
typical of much in the book:
From here they [the Tsar and his high ministers, in chains] were marched on to the
first Siberian etapè, one of a long series and of foul and pestilential
prisons which were the only halting-places on their long. and awful journey. The next
morning, as soon as the chill grey light of the winter's dawn broke over the
snow-covered plains,. the men were formed up in line, with the sleighs carrying the women
and children in the rear.... "Forward!" the whips of the Cossacks cracked, and
the mournful procession moved slowly onward into the vast, white, silent wilderness, out of
which none save the guards were destined ever to emerge again. (p385)
Set in 2030, Olga Romanoff is concerned with the efforts of the eponymous
villainess (who seduces our hero and thus obtains the secret of aerial navigation) to
reestablish the throne of her ancestors, with the great aerial battles waged between her
forces and those of the Brotherhood, with the warning of impending doom received from the
Martians, and with the coming of the comet that wipes out humanity save for those members
of the Brotherhood who found shelter deep underground. Both novels abound in pageantry and
formal situations (regiments on parade, sessions of Parliament, assemblies of heads of
state, etc.) and in set scenes that cry out for the stage of melodrama; e.g., from Angel,
with Natasha holding the floor at a meeting of the Executive Council of the Brotherhood:
"You have asked for a bride, Michael Roburoff, and she has come to you, and I can
promise you that you shall sleep soundly in her embrace. Your bride is Death, and I have
chosen to bring her to you with my own hand, that all here may see how the daughter of
Natas can avenge an insult to her womanhood.
"You have been guilty of treachery to the Brotherhood, and for that you might have
been punished by any hand; but you would also have condemned me to the infamy of a
loveless marriage, and that is an insult that no one shall punish but my self. Look up,
and, if you can, die like a man." Roburoff took his hands from his face, and with an
inarticulate cry started to his feet. The same instant Natasha's hand went up, her pistol
flashed, and he dropped back again with a bullet in his brain. (p275).
The introductions are valuable in that they give us some information on Griffith not
available elsewhere; less so in their effort to make Griffith one of the most influential
writers of his day.
#6. Gustavus W. Pope, M.D.
Journey to Mars. The Wonderful World: Its Beauty and Splendor:
Its Mighty Races and Kingdoms: Its Final Doom.1894. With introduction
by Sam Moskowitz. $12.95/5.25. This verbose and slow-moving story, quite the silliest of
these 23, is Mr. Moskowitz's candidate for an honor much disputed among Burroughsians,
that of being the chief source for Barsoom. I can't see that he has much of a case: the
Mars depicted here is pre-Lowellian, with the continents and seas named as on the maps in
Richard A. Procter's Old and New Astronomy (1892), with canals cut to prevent
floods and to "equaliz[e] our climate from equator to poles" (p150), with a
population "nearly seven times that of Earth" and all living in utopian comfort
(p196), with people who live only for about a hundred years (p337) and are all of human
size except for a very few members of an immigrant race, who may attain ten feet
(p175), and with virtually all monstrous animals having been cleared off the planet ages
ago (p178)
Pope outdoes Griffith in his devotion to pageantry and is unrivalled in the observance
of all the formalities on every occasion: our hero is introduced around on Mars as
"Lieutenant Hamilton of the Navy of the United States of America, the greatest
Republic on the Terrestrial Globe," and one of the high points of his tour of Mars
occurs during a "magnificent naval spectacle" when his hosts honor him by
raising "the STAR SPANGLED BANNER" (pp195-209). But as fascinated as we may be
with the extensive depiction of Martian high society in all the splendor of its parades,
fetes, balls, assemblies, the book is perhaps most interesting in its treatment of race.
In this world in which wickedness of any kind is almost entirely unknown, there are five
pure races living together n complete harmony, and one race of wicked mongrels: "We
pure Martians regard intermarriages of our different races with abhorrence. Such alliances
are contrary to the laws of God and Nature and produce great deterioration of the original
stock and dreadful degeneracy of offspring" (p279). This belief is supported "as
a great physiological truth" by an auctorial foot-note on the same page: "The
moral, mental and physical degeneracy of the greater part of [Terrestrial] semi-civilized
and barbarous races is due to these admixtures." But these sentiments are expressed
as it were in odd-numbered chapters while in those with even numbers a great though
unspoken love is developing between our hero and a Martian princess. The book ends with
the Martians making desperate plans to survive an apparently inevitable doom resulting
from the dislodgement of the Martian moons by a meteor shower (and with the wicked King of
the wicked mongrels threatening to frustrate those plans unless our heroine becomes his
bride). I can't wait to read the sequel (A Journey to Venus, 1895): the Martians
will of course survive, but will hero and heroine allow their great love to lead them into
the loathsome crime of miscegenation?
#7. L. Frank Baum. The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale founded on the Mysteries of
Electricity and the optimism of its devotees. It was written for boys, but others
may read it. Illustrations by F.Y. Cory. 1901. With
introduction by David L. Greene and Douglas G. Greene. $8.95/3.75. Ozians or Baumians
(however called) will of course be interested in this book; others will find it a pleasant
enough tale. With an electrical gun that will render any foe unconscious for an hour, and
with an anti-gravity device worn like a wrist-watch, our youthful hero flies over the
world having adventures of many kinds until he finally decides that it's "no fun
being a century ahead of your time" (p245). The authors of the modest and informative
introduction (professors respectively of English and history) are members of the
International Wizard of Oz Club.
#8. Robert W. Chambers.
In Search of the Un-known 1901. With
introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $8.95/3.75. The farcical adventures of a young zoologist
searching in various parts of the world for specimens of prehistoric or mythical animals
and for love; in each case he loses the specimen and the girl. The introduction
attempts to make a case for Chambers, one of the best-selling novelists of his time, as an
important writer of SF, but these slick-magazine stories are quite routine both as SF and
as romantic comedy.
#9. Gabriel de Tarde.
Underground Man. With introduction by H.G. Wells.
1905 (1896 as Fragment d'une histoire future). $7.50/2.95.- One of the four books
unavailable for review, and one I have not read. Tarde's reputation as sociologist and
criminologist makes one hope that this may be an important novel.
#10. William Wallace Cook.
A Round Trip to the Year 2000 Serialized
1904; here a 1925 dime novel. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz. $9.50/$3.85. A farcical
story with some ingenious ideas not very well worked out; e.g., since books about the year
2000 are very popular in 1901, a number of 1901 writers have gone to 2000 via suspended
animation and there have made a solemn pact not to tell the truth in the books they will
publish in 1901 if they can find a way to go back. The last avatar of the dime novel was a
thick little book of about 300 pages, 4½ by 7, side-stapled, and selling for 15¢. The
introduction to the present edition states that this novel has been "unjustly
neglected by academics interested in science fiction because of the absurd prejudice,
baldly stated in several learned journals, that a work published only as 'a cheap
paperback' is not worthy of critical evaluation." But I have never said any such
thing, and I doubt that any other scholar ever has. What I did say, poorly expressed, on
one occasion (SFS 1:2) is that "references should not be made to the pages of cheap
paperbacks or other editions not likely to be found in libraries" (i.e., should
instead be made to chapters); and on an earlier occasion, in connection with a projected
bibliography of SF books published before 1946, that in our search for titles we could
ignore books of certain kinds, including any "published only as a cheap
paperback," which would not rule out the inclusion of any such book that we happened
to run across, or already knew of, and considered worthwhile. We already knew of the
present book (it is listed in a bibliography by Thomas D. Clareson, Extrapolation 1
(1959):8 and is one that I read as a child), and since it is one that I consider
worthwhile (in a minor way), it would have been included. On the other hand, if we had
missed it, it would have been no great loss
#11-12. Garrett P. Serviss.
A Columbus of Space Illustrated. 1911. With
introduction by A. Langley Sears. $9.50/3.95. The Second
Deluge. Illustrated. 1912. With introduction by Joseph Wrzos.
$10.95/4.50. The first of these is a boys' story about a journey to Venus and wild
adventures thereon. The second is a much more interesting and substantial work though
marred by bad style (Serviss could write only at the top of his voice): an astronomer's
warning that Earth is about to pass through a watery nebula; the vain efforts of the hero
to get the world to prepare for the coming disaster; his own building of an enormous ark
that makes possible the saving of a few hundred people. The introductions are sober and
informative
#13. George Allan England. Darkness and Dawn 1914. With an
introductory essay by the author, "The Fantastic in Fiction." 13.95/5.95 An
engineer and his secretary wake up in their skyscraper office to find that perhaps a
thousand years have passed since they mysteriously lost consciousness, and that they are
apparently the only people alive in a New York City that lies in ruins. Later they find a
tribe of small ape-like creatures that they take to be descended from Negroes, who might
have been immune to whatever it was that killed off everyone else, and would surely have
degenerated to an animal like condition in the absence of Whites to guide them (§1:19).
At long last they find some Merucaans (§2:24), not very prepossessing but at least White(!)
and so capable of being uplifted and brought back to a technological civilization, which
our hero and heroine set out to do. A few years later they have trains running, planes
flying, and the beginnings of a socialist utopia. All in all, pretty routine stuff both as
adventure story and as racist-socialist vision. The introductory essay, written for a
writer's magazine, is interesting in showing that England was both half-proud and
half-defensive about being writer of such wild stuff as SF
#14. Victor Rousseau. The Messiah of the Cylinder [also pbd as
The
Apostle of the Cyl-inder]. Illustrated by Joseph Clement Coll. 1917 With
introduction by Lester Del Rey. $9.50/3.85. Though sentimental and melodramatic, this
novel is interesting as a direct imitation of Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and as
an extensive Catholic-conservative critique of Wellsianism. The introduction by Lester Del
Rey surprisingly ill-informed about the history of the anti-utopian novel and about the
content of this book, which is not especially concerned with socialism (and is indeed more
anti-capitalist than anti-socialist), but is instead an attack on Soulless Science in
general and eugenics in particular. The illustrations are excellent, surpassed in this
group of books only by those in #4.
#15. Milo Hastings.
City of Endless Night 1920. With introduction by Sam
Moskowitz. $9.95/3.95. One of the many post-war books inspired by fear of a resurgent
Germany, this story was serialized as "Children of 'Kultur'," the word Kultur
having been made infamous by Allied propaganda in World War I, and like #14 is primarily
an attack on Soulless Science (and especially eugenics), here seen as peculiarly German.
In this imagined future all the world is peacefully united except for Germany, which
continues under the Kaisers to nourish dreams of world dominion, and which survives in a
vast underground Berlin so strongly fortified that it can withstand any force of arms
brought against it. Even more sentimental and melodramatic than #14, and much less
interesting.
Sam Moskowitz can always be relied upon to present some intriguing new
information on the history of popular SF: who would have believed that any SF was ever
published in True Story Magazine (as this story was) or that SF was once a
regular feature of Physical Culture.
#16. Harold Lamb.
Marching Sands.
1920.. With introduction by L. Sprague de Camp. $9.50/3.75. Harold Lamb graduated from the
pulps to considerable success as a writer of popular history and biography. Mr. de Camp
tells us that Lamb "became prodigiously learned in Asian history and languages"
which I do not doubt; but such learning does not show up in this book, which is merely a
routine lost-race romance that can be counted as SF only if all such stories are so
counted.
#17. Ray Cummings. The Girl in the Golden Atom. 1923. With
introduction by Thyrill L. Ladd. $9.95/3.95. In the late 20s and early 30s
Argosy
All-Story Weekly ran four serials in each issue, of which one was always SF or
fantasy, and for a year or two in that period half the latter were written by Ray
Cummings. It went something like this: "The Sea Girl" by Cummings, then a serial
by Ralph Milne Farley, then "The Snow Girl," then a serial by Otis Adelbert
Kline, then "The Shadow Girl," then one by Austin Hall, then "Princess of
the Atom," then one by Burroughs, then, having run out of girls, "Beyond the
Stars," and so on and on.. Cummings was advertised as a former secretary to Thomas A.
Edison, as the American H.G. Wells, and as the author of a "trilogy of matter, time,
and space," all of which I found very impressive until it grew on me that he had very
little to say and had long since said it all. The original novelette of this title, which
was combined with a six-installment sequel to form the book, is famous among fans as
having initiated the SF story set in the world of the atom (reached by taking a size-diminishing drug) or the world "Beyond the Stars," in which our cosmos is a mere
atom (reached by taking the drug that enables you to return from the infinitesimal world),
which would be all very well if there were any worthwhile stories of this kind. All in
all, this poorly written and poorly imagined story is second in silliness only to #6.The
introduction is adulatory rather than informative, except that it does tell us that
Cummings was never Edison's secretary.
#18. A. Merritt. The Metal Monster. Serialized 1920; here as #41 of
the Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1946. With introduction by Sam Moskowitz (§12 of
Explorers
of the Infinite1963). $7.95/2.95. This story belongs to a rather odd but once very
common category: the story in which the hero, adventuring in some remote part of the
world, finds, not a lost race (or, as here, not only a lost-race) but an invader from
outer space (or the fourth dimension, or the geological past, etc.). Here the invader is a
collective being composed of millions of metal beings, evidently engaged in nothing more
than amusing itself in and of itself, and apparently completely indifferent to man (though
willing to destroy the enemies of the one human being it has deigned to recognize).
Correctly characterized by Mr. Moskowitz as the Lord of Fantasy, A. Merritt, who wrote
the purplest prose of any SF writer between the early Shiel and the young Bradbury,
differed from Cummings in that he did not wear out his welcome, publishing only two
novelettes, eight serials, and a few short stories over a period of 16 years, and amassing
the largest and most enthusiastic audience of any fantasist—an audience that endured
through reprintings in Amazing Stories (where I first read The Moon Pool and
"The Face in the Abyss"), in various other pulp magazines, in hardback editions
(with The Metal Monster as the one exception), and finally in paperback editions
down to just a few years ago (though some of the books are still in print). I remember
being astonished a few years ago when Brian Aldiss wrote that Merritt could not
write—could not plot, could not draw character, had a beastly style—could only
confect (SF Horizons #1, 1964p34), and then, upon rereading some of the books,
finding that he was quite right. Even so, Merritt was certainly the most imaginative of
all the imitators of Haggard, and any SF writer who aroused so much enthusiasm over so
long a period deserves at least some attention from students of SF. And while I think Mr.
Moskowitz's claim of philosophical profundity for
The Metal Monster quite absurd, I
agree with him that this is probably Merritt's best book.
#19. Karel Capek.
The
Absolute at Large. 1927 (1922 as
Tovarna
na absolutno). With introduction by William E. Harkins. $8.50/3.50.This masterpiece of
satiric comedy by the author of R.U.R. is concerned with the world-catastrophe that
follows the invention and widespread use of the Karburator, which effects complete
disintegration of matter and so not only produces limitless power but also frees as
immaterial residue what has hitherto been confined: the pantheistic God. The introduction
is by the author of Karel Capek (Columbia University Press 1962).
#20. Philip Wylie. Gladiator. 1930. With introduction by Sam
Moskowitz (§17 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963). $9.95/3.95. The late
Philip Wylie was the author of a number of iconoclastic best-sellers, and a great favorite
among college students in the 1940s. I remember reading this book in 1930 or 31 in a
book-club edition issued in wraps, and have never forgotten the sentence that expresses
its what-if basis: "Make a man as strong as a grasshopper— and he'll be able to
leap over a church" (p6). This then is the story of a young man as strong as a
grasshopper who seeks something better to do than leaping over churches but can find no
tasks worthy of his strength. According to Mr. Moskowitz the creators of the Superman
comics found their inspiration in this book, perhaps most directly in this passage:
"What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in
the world, mightier than the machine? He made himself guess answers for that rhetorical
query. '...I would be a criminal, I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and
destroy. I would be a secret invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the
earth; I would be a secret detective, following and summarily punishing every criminal
until no one dared commit a felony"' (p232). Though several cuts below Odd John
or The Invisible Man in vividness and power, this is one of the best of the superman
stories.
#21. David H. Keller, M.D.
Life Everlasting and other Tales of Science, Fantasy, and Horror.
Edited and with a critical and
biographical introduction by Sam Moskowitz. 1947. $10.50/ 4.25. Keller, a psychiatrist,
was the most popular of the new writers recruited by Hugo Gernsback for his magazines, and
much as I hate to admit it, these unbelievably crude stories (serialized in the 20s and
30s) were among the special favorites of my adolescence, perhaps because of their strange
combination of sentimentality and callousness.
#22. Stanley G. Weinbaum. A Martian Odyssey and Other Science Fiction Tales: The Collected Short
Stories of Stanley G. Weinbaum. A
composite volume containing A Martian Odyssey and Others (1949), The Red
Peril (1952), some uncollected material, an autobiographical. sketch, and an
introduction by Sam Moskowitz (perhaps §18 of
Explorers of the Infinite) $13.50/
5.75. Not available for this report. Weinbaum published his first SF story, "A
Martian Odyssey," in 1934 and another ten before his death in 1935; twelve more
appeared in the magazines, some completed by other hands, in the years 1936-1943. He has
become a heroic figure to, and a special favorite of, SF writers. The title story ranked
second in the SFWA balloting for the best short stories of all time; Isaac the Asimov
regards the appearance of that story as an epoch in the history of SF, and believes that
Weinbaum would have been the greatest of all SF writers if he had lived (see his
introduction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum [Ballantine 1974]), and Sam
Moskowitz views him in much the same terms. While I cannot share in this enthusiasm, it is
certainly worth pondering
#23. Olaf Stapledon. Darkness and the
Light.
1942. With introduction by Sam
Moskowitz (§16 of Explorers of the Infinite, 1963).$7.50/2.95. A masterpiece; for
further comment see Dr. Smith's essay in this issue. —R.D.
Mullen.
The Tuck Encyclopedia. Volume I
(Who's Who: A-L) of a much heralded and certainly indispensable work, Donald H. Tuck's
The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction and Fantasy (8‡ ix 11, 230 2-column pages) has been
published by Advent Publishers, P.O. Box A3228, Chicago Ill. 60690, $20.00. Volume 2
(1976?) will complete the "Who's Who" and include a title-index; Volume 3 (1977?)
will be devoted to magazines and paperbacks (covered to some extent in the "Who's
Who") and to pseudonyms and miscellaneous matters.
The "Who's Who" attempts a complete listing of everyone connected with the
field: authors, illustrators, editors, critics, prominent fans, etc. A special feature of
the work is that it lists the contents of all collections and anthologies. In each
author-article we find first, a brief biographical sketch; second, "Series,"
each item listing each of the stories in a given series with specification of the magazine
or book in which it appears; third, "fiction," i.e. books, with items like the
following for the Poul Anderson novel:
High Crusade, The. (ASF, sr3, July 1960) ( Kreuzzug nach fremden
Sternen [German], UZ: 298, 1961) (Croaziata spaziale el,
[Italian], Cosmo: 105, 1962) (Les croises du cosmos [French], Denoël: PF 57, 1962, pa) (Macfadden: 50-211, 1964, 160 pp., pa 50¢; 60-399, 1968, pa
60¢) An English Knight in the Middle Ages captures an alien space ship and sets out to
conquer the stars. Entertaining.
Finally, where appropriate, "Nonfiction," with items of the same kind.
Although the general rule is to exclude authors whose books have not been reprinted
since 1945, this rule is waived for anthologies or for other books that the editor deems
important. The result is that while we find no article for Robert Cromie or Percy Gregg,
we do find articles, complete with biographical sketches, for Mary Griffith ("Three
Hundred Years Hence" having been reprinted in 1950) and Elizabeth Gaskell (so that
the eleven stories in Cousin Phyllis may be listed). There are also attempts at
complete SF-and-fantasy listings for such prominent authors as H. Rider Haggard, but with
the modest disclaimer that no attempt has been made to list all the early editions. Any
work of this kind is bound to contain many errors, both typographical (as in the Cummings
article, where the date for The Shadow Girl in Argosy is wrong
under "Series" but right under "Fiction") and factual (as in the
Haggard article, which in effect states that only one copy is in existence of The Lady
of the Heavens, an error obviously deriving from a misreading of the Scott
bibliography). It is my impressioin that this work is much more reliable for the recent
authors (to which it is primarily devoted than for the earlier authors); in sum, if you
use it for an author listed in NCBEL or some similar work, you'd better cross-check. (Not
that NCBEL doesn't contain errors; indeed, there may be as many in its Haggard article as
in Mr. Tuck's.)
Finally, Mr. Tuck is a bit severe on academics, especially I.F. Clarke, whose
Tale
of the Future is said to be "not complete even within the limits of its
selection" (as if this weren't true of all bibliographies) and to be "of value
for books not within the scope of this Encyclopedia" (as if the chronological
arrangement were not in itself of value, and as if a reader might not wish to check Mr.
Tuck's annotations for content against those of another bibliographer). —RDM.
A C.S. Lewis Secondary Bibliography. Joe R. Christopher and Joan K. Ostling have com
piled an extraordinarily inclusive work in C.S. Lewis:
An Annotated Checklist of Writings about him and his Works
(Kent State University Press, $15.00): not only books, pamphlets, articles, theses, and
dissertations on Lewis and his work, but also book reviews, news items, and books and
articles that just happen to mention Lewis in passing; e.g., Heinlein's chapter
(Doubleday, 1960, 192 pp., $2.95; 'Dolphin' C351, 1962, pa 95¢) (Doubleday, Toronto) in
Basil's Davenport's The Science Fiction Novel where Lewis is mentioned
three times. While I am not expert enough in Lewis scholarship to assess the completeness
of this work, I can't imagine these 389 pages as anything less than exhaustive. —RDM.
More Special Issues on Utopias. After
the revolts which culminated in 1968 and re-activated the supposedly dead and buried
utopian yearnings, study and discussions of as well as symposia on utopias—literary
and otherwise— have again become highly fashionable. In addition to the special issue
of Studies in the Literary Imagination reported in SFS #3, two more special
issues have come to my attention. The first is #434 (April 1974) of the prestigious Paris
monthly Esprit, representing the Left-Christian or "personalist" current
among French intellectuals (which also had one of the first special issues, if not the
first, that any "mainstream" journal devoted to SF, back in the 1950s). The
issue is entitled "L'Utopie ou la raison dans l'imaginaire" (Utopia, or Reason
in the Realm of the Imaginary), it devotes 125 pages to that subject, and comprises nine
essays by Ray Jean-Marie Domenach (the director of the review and one of the leading
French intellecuals), Francois Chirpaz, Lucie Giard, Henri Desroche (who besides an essay
on Fourier contributes an excellent discussion of utopian secondary literature), Richard
Gombin, Paul Virilio, and Paul Goodman.
The second periodical is Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 1973) of Comparative Literature
Studies, which devotes 100 pages, titled "Utopian Social Thought in Literature
and the Social Sciences," compiled by guest-editor Professor Herbert Knust, to the
proceedings of the eponymous symposium at the University of Illinois-Champaign. After an
introduction by Harry G. Haile, the social-sciences part of the Symposium is represented
by Irving Louis Horowitz and Helmut Klages, and the literature part by Darko Suvin, Walter
Höllerer, Richard Figge, and Peter Demetz, with the summary of a panel discussion among
the participants. To the Symposium are added two essays on utopian literature by Gorman
Beauchamp and Lyman Tower Sargent. —DS.
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