Contact:
pierce07446@hotmail.com
Dwight Decker is what some call an “independent scholar.” In science fiction fan circles, he might be called a “sercon” (serious constructive) fan.
Whatever one calls him, he’s the kind of researcher we need
more of, in a time when a lot of academic sf criticism has bogged down in
pretentious jargon and ideological cant and slant. I’m reminded of David
Barton, who relies on selective quotations, specious logic and confirmation
bias to “prove” that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were
fundamentalists who believed in a Christian state. Academics also tend to
privilege secondary sources over primary texts, resulting in tiresomely
Talmudic commentaries on commentaries on commentaries that lose sight of the
original subjects.
I’m an independent scholar myself, presently working on an
update of my history of science fiction, Imagination and Evolution. I&E, as another independent scholar Harvey
Satty (an authority on Olaf Stapledon) dubbed it, originally appeared in four
volumes from Greenwood Press between 1987 and 1994. A lot has happened in sf
since then, but a lot has likewise happened in sf research – thanks to Project
Gutenberg and other online e-book sources, print-on-demand editions of proto-sf
works of all sorts, and translations of a good deal of classic sf never before
available in English, I can get a better impression of how the genre has
evolved from its earliest years into today’s global phenomenon.
But I couldn’t manage without the help of other independent
scholars, and Dwight is truly a prime example. He’s my expert on early science fiction in German,
Danish and other languages that has not
been translated, let alone studied. He has previously translated comic books
and Perry Rhodan space operas, and has done a lot of business translation. He
is presently working on a CreateSpace book centering on a translation of Eberhard Christian
Kindermann’s Speedy Voyage of an Air Ship to the Upper World (1744), an obscure but historically important German
story about a trip to Mars – well, actually a supposed moon of Mars that
Kindermann thought he had just discovered (With help from a friend, Dwight
himself discovered that on the date the German astronomer claimed to have
observed the moon, which he described as rather fuzzy, Mars was right next to
the Crab Nebula! There'll be more about the self-absorbed Kindermann in the new book.).
Five years ago, he broke entirely new ground in translating Vilhelm
Bergsøe’s “Flying Fish ‘Prometheus’” (1870), a Danish work so much like today’s
steampunk that he was able to sell it the next year to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s
anthology Steampunk II (2010). In 2009,
for The New York Review of Science Fiction, he wrote the first account of Julius von Voss’ Ini (1810), a major German sf novel that had fallen into
obscurity but has since been republished. More recently, although few realize
it yet, he has revolutionized the history of sf by discovering connections between
two other German works, A.K. Ruh’s Garlands Around the Urns of the
Future (1800) and Volume III of Heinrich
Zschokke’s The Black Brothers
(1795). Garlands appears to be
the very first true sf novel set
in the future, but it was clearly influenced by Zschokke’s work, which in turn
was a variation of the futuristic utopia invented by Louis Sebastien Mercier
with L’An 2440 (1771) – The
Black Brothers III is still mostly lecture
and philosophizing, but has elements of storytelling.
One language Dwight doesn’t know is Polish, but he has
helped me a great deal with the Lunar trilogy of Jerzy Zulawski – On the
Silver Globe (1903), The
Conqueror (1910) and Old Earth (1911). That’s because the trilogy has been
translated into German, and while it may not seem legitimate to translate from
a translation, Ursula K. Le Guin has done that with the Spanish translation of Squaring
the Circle, a collection of fantastic
stories by Romanian author Gheorghe Sasarma. Zulawski may have been influenced
by German writer Kurd Lasswitz, author of Two Planets (1897). Like Two Planets, the lunar trilogy is very philosophical – the
humans who survive a trip to the Moon in the first volume migrate to the far
side, where they find a hostile native civilization but also carry the evils of
their own past with them, as the eldest among them realizes:
I left the room and
contemplated for a long time the terrible irony of human existence that had
followed us from the Earth to the Moon. I thought of O’Tamor, that poor old
dreamer! As he had pictured it in his imagination, the children of Thomas and
Martha, protected from the bad influences of earthly civilization, would grow
up here on the Moon as an ideal kind of humanity, without the afflictions and
without the differences that had been the source of all the eternal misery of
mankind on Earth! I look at these children and it seems to me that the noble
old dreamer O’Tamor left out of consideration the fact that the descendants of
mankind would inevitably be the offspring of human beings and carry deep within
them the seeds from which spring all the abominations of the earthly races. And
isn’t the most terrible irony that Man takes his worst enemy deep inside
himself along with him even to the stars? It’s a good thing that Tom doesn’t
have a brother. So the age of war between brothers and slavery won’t dawn right
away, and we will perhaps be dead by then and won’t have to witness it
In the second volume, another Earthman arrives hundreds of
years later to find himself hailed as their liberator and redeemer according to
a religion created by the daughter of one of the original settlers. But he
meets an ironic fate, and becomes the center of a new cycle of legends. In the
third volume, two lunar human make it to Earth and get involved in political
intrigue. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the details here, but before I
read Dwight’s summaries and excerpts, I had nothing to rely on but secondary
sources – which offered a confusing and even misleading account of the events
of the trology and their true meaning.
Dwight had already helped me with translations of some of
Lasswitz’ essays, and he has done the same with some commentaries on sf by the
French writer J.H. Rosny ainé. He knows his languages. But even more crucially,
he knows enough about science fiction to tell what’s really important and what
isn’t in an unfamiliar work, and to focus on the truly significant aspects.
When Dwight Decker writes about science fiction, he tells it
straight.
.
