A Passion for Science Fiction

Some thoughts about a novel that may not be well known but has a lot to tell us about the art of writing and the art of reading….

There is a wonderful point in many stories which comes after the characters and general lines of action are set, when things begin to move by themselves. This is where the unconscious takes over. All the writer's submerged beliefs and fears and hopes come surging joyfully to the surface to take full charge, and the writer's only function is to type fast enough to keep up. This happy state unfortunately isn't common. But when it does come, there are few greater pleasures in life.

The reason, of course, is that (besides the necessary money) such stories bring their writers that glorious free-fall sensation which is a kind of catharsis of the unconscious. Characters personifying one's deeply felt beliefs and values test them out in a fictional world. You don't know at the time what's happened. You just know you feel wonderful. Long afterward, rereading the work, you can see what lies just under the surface.

There’s an obvious passion for writing in those words, and yet you won’t find them in a manual about writing, or in the autobiography of some world-famous writer. They’re in the introduction to a 1972 Lancer Books paperback edition of Fury, a classic sf novel that was first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947 under the pseudonym Lawrence O’Donnell, came out as a hardcover book three years later as by Henry Kuttner, and had been retitled Destination: Infinity for a previous 1958 paperback.

Fury’s publishing history makes the novel seem purely a matter of commerce rather than art. And yet it is a work of art, as we can tell from the work itself as well as that introduction by Kuttner’s widow C. L. Moore – who therein reveals that she wrote some of the scenes, and could still recognize her part in their collaboration 25 years later. Henry and Catherine Kuttner, who frequently wrote together in relays as “Lawrence O’Donnell” and under other pen names, shared a love for sf that transcended the seemingly cynical imperatives of what was often regarded by outsiders as nothing but pulp fiction.

Moore related that she and Kuttner were driven by thematic imperatives that went beyond sf itself. “Hank’s basic statement was something like, ‘Authority is dangerous, and I will never submit to it.’ Mine was, ‘The most treacherous thing in life is love.’” These worked their way into Fury, set on a Venus to which the human race has fled after destroying Earth in a nuclear holocaust. But mankind on Venus has abandoned any effort to tame a savage planet, instead retiring into a “luxurious Eden” of undersea Keeps – and, “with no challenges left, would slowly strangle in its own inertia if, out of nowhere, a deliverer did not come with a flaming sword to drive them back to life.”

That deliverer is Sam Harker/Reed, a monstrous freak unknowingly robbed of his heritage as one of the elite of Immortals who rule Venus. Reed is driven only by hatred and a lust for vengeance. He was Kuttner’s creation, and Moore couldn’t identify with him at the time. But on re-reading the novel, she came to understand that to make the premise work – to make the story work – “he had to be what he was—utterly ruthless, terribly intelligent, terribly vulnerable, fighting every hour of his life by every savage form of trickery, betrayal and murder, to reach a goal he was never truly aware of.”

The story of Sam Reed is headed with a quotation from Shakespeare’s MacBeth, the scene where MacBeth learns that Macduff, his nemesis, “was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripp’d.” Reed himself is “untimely ripp’d,” cruelly mutilated and abandoned at the behest of his enraged father after his mother dies in the Caesarian, thus setting the stage for a life out of a Shakespearian tragedy. But the reference to a classic of English literature tells us something else.

“You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't read anything else,” Ursula K. Le Guin remarked on the occasion of a British Library sf exhibition, regarding what she had learned from reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) at age 17. “Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre.”

It is often assumed, perhaps even by Le Guin, that genre sf writers generally don’t read anything but sf, let alone find any “useful models” outside the field. But that isn’t true of leading writers today, and it wasn’t true of Kuttner and Moore back in the 1940’s. Ray Bradbury, in his introduction to The Best of Henry Kuttner (1975), sets things straight, recalling his elder’s role as a mentor – and not just by helping him put out a fanzine:

Along the way, he also sneaked me the names of people who might influence my life. Try Katherine Ann Porter, he said; she’s great. Have you read Eudora Welty? he suggested, and if not, why not? Have you re-read Thorne Smith? Get to it. How about the short stories of Faulkner, or—here’s one you never heard of—John Collier.

In Fury, then, allusions to the classics are intertwined with science fictional concerns about the fate of humanity:

Blaze and Bessi – it was a Romeo and Juliet story with a happy ending, up to the time Sam was conceived. They were casual, purposeless hedonists. In the Keeps you had to choose. You could either find a drive, an incentive – be one of the technicians or artists – or you could drift.

For lesser drifters, there are escapes like dream dust and happy cloaks – the latter, derived from a native life form, slowly consume their addicts. But Sam Reed, born Harker, isn’t a drifter; he is a driven man, as driven as any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, hating himself and hating the Immortals – never knowing until the end that he is one. Only, there’s no coven of witches or a Greek chorus to set the plot in motion or comment on its import. Instead we have the Logician, an Immortal unknown to the other Immortals – a man born on Earth who understands what happened there (“It wasn’t atomic power that destroyed Earth. It was a pattern of thought.”). He can foresee the future on Venus, but he is powerless to intervene – except in the subtlest ways.

Fury is actually a sequel to “Clash by Night” (1943; the title is an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”), set centuries earlier, when rival Keeps fight proxy wars on the surface through the Free Companies: bands of mercenaries bound by a strict code of honor. The Keeps themselves are never attacked, and should any ship of any warrior band break the taboo on atomic weapons, the others will turn on it and destroy it without mercy.

Scott commands one unit in a war for economic advantage between the Montana and Virginia Keeps. But his loyalty to the Doones comes to seem a foolish one; the romantic ideals of the Free Companies are delusions: “Blind, stupid folly!” He longs for the hedonistic comforts of the Keeps. In the end, however, he cannot abandon his company, for it helps serve an objectively necessary end: preserving the Keeps from the danger of war, until the Keeps themselves tire of war and make the mercenaries objectively unnecessary:

The Doones meant nothing. Their ideal was a false one. Yet, because men were faithful to that ideal, civilization would rise again from the guarded Keeps. A civilization that would forget its doomed guardians, the waters of the seas of Venus, the Free Companions yelling their mad, futile battle cry as they drove on – as this ship was driving – into a night that would have no dawn.

In Fury, the season has changed: rot rather than fire is the greatest threat to mankind. The Keeps have turned inward, refusing the challenge of conquering the land; in their decadent hedonism, they have surrendered to a cultural entropy that can lead only to extinction – ”it wasn’t the individual who paid. It was the race that was paying.” And so Sam Reed is just what the race needs.

Motivated only by envy and rage, he turns to crime, at which he succeeds so well that the Immortals themselves seek him out for a murder contract against Robin Hale, a veteran of the Doones whose crusade for colonization of the land is upsetting the social equilibrium. Their mistake: Reed almost instinctively sides with Hale and therefore with Hale’s cause. A ruthless cunning that once served him in the underworld now serves him in the struggle to defeat a savage environment and thus win the survival of mankind.

Only, that is never his motivation; he never thinks of anything but his own survival and vengeance against the Immortals. His crimes range from blackmail to murder; when his false promise of Immortality for colonists is exposed, he sabotages the Keeps, forcing millions to abandon them or die. He has saved mankind, but now the Logician, following an allusion to Moses – who was suffered to see the Promised Land but never to go over thither – delivers his judgment:

Men like you are mighty rare, Sam. When they get to the right position, at the right time, they’re the salvation of the race of man. But it’s got to be the right time – a time of disaster. The drive never stops, in a man like you... If you can’t conquer an enemy, you’ll conquer your friends. Up to now, the enemy was Venus, and you licked it. But what have you got to fight now? ….

If you hadn’t been born, if Blaze hadn’t done what he did, mankind would be in the Keeps yet. And in a few years, or a thousand, say, the race would have died out. I could see that ahead, clear as could be. But now we’ve come landside. We’ll finish colonizing Venus. And then we’ll go out and colonize the whole universe, I expect.

You’re the one who did it, Sam. We owe you a lot. In your day you were a great man. But your day’s over. You got your power by force, and, you’re like most dictators, son, who reach the top that way. All you could think of was repeating the things that made you a success – more fighting, more force. There wasn’t any way but down for you, once you’d reached the top, because of the man you are. You had the same drive that made the first life-form leave water for land, but we can’t use your kind any more for a while, Sam.

And so, Sam must be put to sleep, at the very moment of his triumph, lest he endanger mankind. Yet Kuttner thought he might be needed again, although he never told Catherine what he might have had in mind when he wrote the two-word epilogue: “Sam woke—”

We feel for Sam because Kuttner felt for him when he created the character. We are caught up in the story of Fury because Kuttner and Moore themselves were caught up in it. In telling that story, they put everything of themselves, of their reading of the classics and science fiction alike, of their experience of life and knowledge of history and evolution and much else, into their work. And somehow, everything they put into their novel, the reader can get out of it. That’s what true reading is all about.

In An Experiment in Criticism (1961), C.S. Lewis argued that books should be judged by how they are read, rather than readers being judged by what they read. “Literary” readers, he proposed, simply don’t approach reading in the same manner as the “unliterary.” First, Lewis wrote, the unliterary never read a book more than once, whereas the literary return to great works repeatedly. Secondly, even if they read a lot, the unliterary don’t set much store by reading, whereas the literary feel impoverished if they don’t have a chance to read for even a few days.

Thirdly, the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before. But there is no sign of anything like this among the other sort of readers. When they have finished the story or the novel, nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them.

Finally, and as a natural result of their different behaviour in reading, what they have read is constantly and prominently present to the mind of the few, but not to that of the many. The former mouth over their favorite lines and stanzas in solitude. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience. They talk to one another about books, often and at length. The latter seldom think or talk of their reading.

Victor Nell, in Lost in a Book (1988) makes a similar distinction between what he calls Type A and Type B reading, Type B readers seek “entrancement” in great works whereas Type A readers are after only momentary distraction. Nell cites a number of theories in trying to explain the nature of what he also calls the “ludic reading” experience of Type B readers, and his own studies in which readers evaluated how they responded to various kinds of fiction and non-fiction. He even conducted experiments to monitor the physiological effects of ludic as opposed to non-ludic reading, and out of all this concludes:

The consequences of the interplay of reader needs and book selection criteria is that Type B readers will read fewer books but will experience some deep involvement in all or nearly all of them while Type A’s will read many books and find involvement in only a few of them. We have, however, repeatedly emphasized that although the distinctions between Type A and Type B readers are real, the boundary between the two types is permeable.

Nell cites W. Somerset Maugham’s confessed addiction on reading indiscriminately, flying to books “as the opium-smoker to his pipe.” Just as paradoxically, Nell reveals, responses to his Reading Mood Questionnaire revealed that nearly half the reading matter of his ludic readers consisted of what they themselves believed would be dismissed as “trash” by English teachers. How are we to account for this?

At the outset of Lost in a Book, Nell comments at length on the long-standing prejudice against reading for pleasure that goes with the Puritan ethic. Perhaps the ludic readers who find guilty pleasures in “trash” have simply internalized the judgments of authorities motivated by that Puritan ethic. It’s hard to be certain, for, among other things, Nell’s subjects were white readers and librarians in apartheid South Africa, where the culture was not necessarily representative of Western culture generally.

What may actually be the case is that while Nell’s ludic readers, like Lewis’ literary readers, do indeed find entrancement in great literature that can be found nowhere else, they can also find pleasure in popular fiction for what it is – they can enjoy both Shakespeare and, say, Agatha Christie on their own terms. And they don’t read popular fiction indiscriminately without any sense of taste or judgment. They can tell good mysteries from bad mysteries, good romances from bad romances and… good science fiction from bad science fiction. They can point to works that are classics of their genres, even if they don’t appeal to the kind of critics who set themselves up as gatekeepers to the Heavenly Kingdom of literature. They are the kind of readers we need most.

North to Alaska!

Been more than two months since I’ve posted here. First, it was a heavy load of work at the office that took up my time. But that was to give me a window of vacation time for….

I’d never been to Alaska before, and I’d never been on a cruise ship, either. Maybe I never would have, except that the cruise through the Inside Passage in mid-August included a program organized by Reason magazine, a libertarian publication Marcia and I have subscribed to for several years now. I knew about Reason a long time before that, having written an sf column for the magazine in the early 1970’s, and I’ve long been sympathetic to libertarian ideas although I’ve never been an activist.

Here’s the thing: I’d never had the slightest interest in cruise ships like the Holland America Westerdam, the one we took from Seattle. I imagined that being aboard one would be about as much fun as sitting in a football stadium, surrounded by 50,000 people you don’t know, watching a game between two teams you don’t give a shit about. But Marcia had been on two cruises, one to Alaska – it helped that the latter included a contingent of alumni of Carnegie Mellon University, her alma mater. In the present instance, I figured it would help to travel among people I knew about even if I didn’t know them personally.

That indeed turned out to be the case, and I met some wonderful people. One, John Tooby, an evolutionary psychology theorist who teaches at UC Santa Barbara, turned out to share a love for one of my own favorite sf stories, Cordwainer Smith’s “No, No, Not Rogov.” But I’m interested in evolutionary psychology anyway as a layman, because it touches on the origins of art, music and literature (oral at first, only later written). Several others seemed to be intrigued about sf, once they knew I was on board, among them Reason editor Nick Gillespie, Columbia economics professor Eli Noam and his wife Nadine Strossen – past president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Among the most intriguing speakers (to me, at least) were Richard and Jane Stroup on free market approaches to environmental issues and Thaddeus Russell (author of A Renegade History of the United States) on the positive influence of “slackers, rebels and outlaws” as opposed to respectable people (including supposed progressives) on American culture. I’m not going to list all participants here, but I want to make it clear that these libertarians are not Tea Party conservatives – they’re opposed to endless wars, condemn crony capitalism as well as socialism, and support women’s rights (including abortion). Strossen was really tough on the abuses of government surveillance of anyone and everyone in the name of national security, and the arbitrary powers granted to the president (supported by both parties) to declare anyone a terrorist and imprison them without trial.

On a more pleasant note than the growing threat of Caesarism to our liberties was the Inside Passage voyage itself. To begin with, of course, it was all new to me. But there was also our luck with the weather: usually, it’s dank and even rainy in the Alaska panhandle, but for us it was bright and sunny most days, and if it was overcast in the morning the clouds would usually part later in the day. That meant we could get a much better view of the mountains, islands and glaciers. Closer up, we could watch the dolphins “escorting” the cruise ship and, later, a small boat we took to the site of an old salmon cannery in Ketchikan.

Our first stop in Alaska itself was Juneau, the state capital, and our tour guide on shore was eager to tell us where the red light district had once been, and that the state capitol building had been voted the ugliest in the country. But we also had a boat ride to go whale watching. Marcia hadn’t seen a single whale on her previous visit, but this time there were about 20 – 14 of them hunting together in one group, which is really unusual. Another stop by bus on the way back to the ship was the Mendenhall Glacier. We got to see a lot more glaciers the next day; the weather was so good that the Westerdam decided to add an extra stop to its cruise up Glacier Bay. I can’t say for sure, but since a previous announcement had mentioned the Johns Hopkins glacier at the end of one inlet, the extra stop might have been the Margerie glacier up another inlet, and that was the best of them – a ship photographer took a shot of us against that, and it was the only ship-taken picture we decided to buy.

At Sitka, we got to see a Russian Orthodox church built back in 1844. It burned down in 1969, in a fire that had started across the street, but the architectural design had been preserved by the Library of Congress, so it was rebuilt almost exactly like before. Not only that, but the faithful had managed to rescue all the icons, so those you see today all go back to the original church. Other stops included the Visitor Center, where a group of amateur dancers (all women; the men just weren’t interested when the troupe was formed decades ago) performed traditional Russian dances.

There was also a salmon stream 600 feet into the rain forest (In the shade of the trees, it really gave me the sense of a rain forest), and the salmon were running. Well, trying to run: none I saw seemed to be making any headway, and the spawning area was seven miles upstream. Somebody told me the next day at a historic salmon cannery that it was late in the season, and that the salmon strong enough to make it already had – those left behind were out of luck. Survival of the fittest…

Lots of totem poles, of course, including some indoors at the local museum. Totem poles often honored prominent Tlingit Indians, and a number of them are shown wearing what appear to be stovepipe hats. But a guide at the museum said the resemblance is purely coincidental; those hats (and others with sloping as opposed to flat brims) are potlatch hats (potlatches are gift-giving ceremonies) and the stovepipes are actually series of rings indicating how many potlatches the person honored had given. On the other hand, the next day at Ketchikan, we saw a totem pole with Abraham Lincoln and his stovepipe hat – this had been erected in 1867 after an American gunship called the Lincoln had come to the aid of local Tlingits who had been attacked by a rival tribe.

That cannery in Ketchikan had closed in 1957, after the salmon had been trapped out. One of the first things Alaska did after it became a state was to ban salmon traps, and the salmon industry has since been revived with hatcheries and sustainable catch policies. But that was too late for the George Inlet cannery, which had been operated by a subsidiary of Libby – others based in the town itself, rather than at the remote inlet, were more efficient, and could handle all the catch. But the abandoned plant has been fitted out with duplicates of the original equipment – including a machine unfortunately called the Iron Chink because it handled a part of the processing previously done by Chinese laborers. By the way, if you’re wondering why canned salmon has bones and canned tuna doesn’t, it’s because tuna is canned only after being cooked and deboned. But why tuna is treated that way and salmon isn’t, even the tour guide didn’t know.

As is often the case, there were little things that fascinated me. In Glacier Bay, it was the frozen brooks you could see snaking down the mountainsides, something not mentioned in tour books. In Sitka, it was the slanted bars on Russian orthodox crosses (I learned that had to do with the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus; one of them had reproved the other and been promised a place in Paradise; the upslanting end of the bar represents him; he was canonized as St. Dismas.). In George Inlet, there was orange seaweed on one side where sheer rock rises from the water, and on which starfish feed – popweed is what they call it, our guide told me, because it has little air sacs like bubble wrap. There’s something like Spanish moss that hangs from some of the tree branches it has various names, including Methuselah’s Beard and Witch’s Hair.

We had a fine stateroom aboard ship, with a picture window, and all the amenities. The food was great, except that the scrambled eggs were sometimes mushy. I was able to get in some laps on the Promenade deck – really needed the exercise. One terrific extra was the option to have our luggage taken right from outside our stateroom to the plane after we docked in Seattle. The only really annoying thing on the ship was the cruise director being required to interrupt the Reason seminars with announcements over the PA system, mostly to promote onboard lotteries, bingo and casino gambling. Ashore, it often seemed as if there were nothing downtown except jewelry stores, most not even selling locally-made jewelry. The ship urged the passengers to shop at these stores and didn’t bother to tell us where we could buy genuine Alaskan made souvenirs, but Marcia found one where they had a native-carved whale fluke, made from whale bone, a great reminder of our excellent whale sightings.

At the outset, there had been the hotel the cruise people had recommended for our stay in Seattle for a couple of nights before the voyage itself. Our room turned out to be cramped, and the place had falsely advertised on its website that it had a dining room – it didn’t even offer a Continental breakfast. (The website described it as a “boutique hotel” and we wondered what that meant – we found out that it meant small and overpriced.) Well, we found other places to eat, and having an extra day in Seattle with a rental car gave me a chance to take Marcia in a scenic drive through Snoqualmie Pass (one of my favorite places in the world) and on to Roslyn – the picturesque town once used as the setting for Northern Exposure.

There was always something wonderful to see, or do, or hear, from first day to last.

In The New Yorker? Oh no, The New Yorker!

In case you haven't noticed it, the June 4-11 edition of The New Yorker was a special science fiction issue. Science fiction used to be virtually taboo at that magazine, which now seems to be trying to make up for lost time.

What with the press of other business, I haven’t gotten around to more than glancing at most of the contents, but there isn't actually much fiction in it. The contributors to a "Sci Fi" section include well-known genre sf writers Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville and William Gibson, and Margaret Atwood also rings in there; but this section is devoted entirely to memoirs and commentaries. Jonathan Lethem, prophet of the slipstream movement, is the only recognizable name among the fiction contributors. But Jennifer Egan, whose story is a series of tweets, is the one that the magazine gave a pre-publication build-up.

Would Atwood like the cover, which shows  a cocktail party interrupted by a spaceman with a ray gun, a robot and an octopus apparently erupting from another dimension? The author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake had elsewhere dismissed genre sf as all about "talking squids in outer space," and the only genre story she discusses here is about a world of sexy spider women that lay their eggs in the bodies of beguiled male visitors who learn the Awful Truth about them too late. But Laura Miller, who contributes a think piece about aliens in sf called “The Cosmic Menagerie,” ends up sounding a similarly sour note. Like a number of outsiders who write about the genre, she seems to fancy herself an instant expert. Here are her credentials from her own website (http://lauramiller.typepad.com/lauramiller/about.html):

Laura Miller helped to co-found Salon.com in 1995 and is currently a staff writer at that publication. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She is the editor of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000). She lives in New York.

The thing is, she really tries to be fair at the start. She writes about the portrayal of aliens by French astronomer-mystic Camille Flammarion and his fellow countryman J.H. Rosny ainé, having come across a recent collection of three of his stories (“Les Xipéhuz,” “Another World” and “The Death of the Earth”) in translation, and devotes nearly a page to him – relying on editor-translators Danièle Chatelain and George Slosser, it would appear, for details about another of Rosny’s works, “Navigators of Infinity” (She is evidently unaware that it too has been translated by Brian Stableford as part of a series for Black Coat Press.).

But when it comes to English language sf, she thinks its history begins with H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as far as the treatment of aliens is concerned – and virtually ends with it. Except for a few works like Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which treat issues of religion and gender, we are given to believe that genre sf is a vast wasteland of xenophobia – “For every kindly E.T., there must be a dozen fiendish Body Snatchers.”

Like many mainstream critics, she evidently considers movies the only important expression of science fiction. But even in the movies there are counter-examples like Avatar. And in the most successful movie franchise, Star Wars, the bad guys are all human – the aliens are usually good guys. They may be insufferable, like Jar Jar Binks, but that’s a different issue. Only, if Miller assumes that literary sf treats aliens primarily as monsters and body snatchers, it is out of near total ignorance of the genre.

Chances are that she’s never even heard of Stanley G. Weinbaum, who created a sympathetic alien way back in 1934 with “A Martian Odyssey,” which was a seminal influence on the treatment of aliens, including in space opera. Neither is she likely to have heard of Raymond Z. Gallun, who took a different approach to aliens in “Old Faithful” (also 1934) but an equally sympathetic one and one that has also been a seminal influence. Nor can she be familiar with British philosopher Olaf Stapledon, whose Star Maker (1937) imagined aliens (including even symbiotic species) that were nothing like humans, but had their own believable evolutionary histories.

As any genre sf reader knows, these works were far more influential on portrayals of aliens in modern science fiction than The War of the Worlds. One need only cite only a few classics such as Eric Frank Russell’s “Dear Devil,” Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, James White’s Hospital Station series, Larry Niven’s Known Space tales, Clifford D. Simak’s Way Station, Poul Anderson’s The People of the Wind and Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg. There are oft-cited counter-examples like Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but that was controversial even within the genre, and has drawn fictional rejoinders from the likes of Joe Haldeman and John Scalzi -- moreover, Heinlein himself didn't write only about war with aliens.

In recent decades there have also been a number of works about aliens that are so alien as to make contact with them, or at least understanding, impossible – best known is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, but other examples include Michael Bishop’s “Death and Designation among the Asadi.” And in C.J. Cherryh’s long-running Foreigner series, humans who have founded a colony on an alien world have to learn how to get along with the natives – who don’t look that alien, but have an entirely alien social mind-set based on a hierarchy of loyalties. “Friendship” and “love” as we understand them are alien to the Atevi. Miéville's Embassytown deals with a similarly difficult exercise in communication.

Only, you won’t learn about any of this in The New Yorker. You won't even get a hint of it. That’s a shame.

Cosmic Voyages

It was about a year ago that I came across a Russian movie called Kosmichesky Reis (Cosmic Voyage) on YouTube. Somebody had posted the whole thing, reportedly with the blessings of Mosfilm. I had read about this 1936 space travel movie, but had never expected to see it. Good thing I did when I had the chance, because when I checked the link again last week, it had been taken down for copyright infringement. If I hadn’t seen it last year, I wouldn’t have been able to give an accurate or insightful account of it in a chapter of Foundations of Science Fiction, which follows the link below to a video with just  a few excerpts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoAiYmeDvxc

“I remember well how the thought struck me of making calculations for rockets,” wrote Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose theoretical work on multistage liquid-fuel rockets laid the foundation for space travel. “I think the first seeds were sown by the imaginative tales of Jules Verne, which assailed my mind. I was assailed by a sense of longing, and this set me to thinking in a specific way.”

Tsiolkovsky was not the only pioneer of astronautics to credit Verne as his inspiration; Hermann Oberth was one of the others. Long before Neil Armstrong finally set foot on the moon in 1969, it had been conquered countless times in imagination – and the influence of Verne can be seen in an entire school of astronautical science fiction which helped prepare the way for that “giant leap for mankind.”

Verne himself brought the Baltimore Gun Club astronauts back home in Around the Moon (1869) with a splashdown, appropriately, in the same part of the Pacific used for Apollo missions a century later. Yet only in Hector Servadec (1877), also known as Off on a Comet, did he return to the subject of interplanetary travel – and that was one of his worst books. Servadec is fighting a duel in Algeria when a passing comet sweeps up the part of the Earth he and his companions are standing on, without harming them in the least. A Cook’s tour of the solar system follow, from near the Sun to the frigid regions of Saturn and back – after which the travelers are returned unharmed to Earth in a manner as violent as their departure,

Other dreamers, however, soon took up where Verne left off. Numerous interplanetary adventures appeared in the decades before and after World War I, in France and elsewhere. Most are long forgotten, but a number are described in Nikolai A. Rynin’s Interplanetary Flight and Communication (1927-32), a Russian encyclopedia of astronautics, or in other sources like Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972) and Jean-Marc Officier and Randy Lofficier’s French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction (2000).

Among these now obscure works are Boris Krasnogorsky’s On the Waves of the Ether (1913), which involves a trip to Venus in a ship using light pressure ship lofted into the upper atmosphere of Earth by balloons in order to catch solar radiation. Rynin devotes considerable attention to the technical details of this novel, which like most of those he surveys has since been forgotten.

One that hasn’t been forgotten, and has recently been translated by British sf writer and historian Brian Stableford, is The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System. A collaboration between adventure writer Georges LeFaure (1858-1953) and physicist Henri de Graffigny (1863-1942), it ran to some 1,800 pages over four volumes: The Moon (1889), The Sun and the Minor Planets (1889), The Major Planets and the Comets (1891), and The Stellar Desert (1896). For translation, the first two and last two volumes are combined.

Mikhail Ossipoff, the Russian scientist, jealously guards two great treasures: his daughter Selena and a super-explosive he has invented – selenite, powerful enough to blow up the world or to send men to the moon. When his arch-rival Fedor Sharp has him exiled to Siberia on trumped-up charges of anarchism in order to steal his invention, Selena’s suitor Gontran de Flammermont comes to the rescue, with a steam-powered airplane invented by Alcide Fricoulet, a French engineer.

By that time, Sharp is already off to the moon, having fraudulently obtained American backing for a space gun. But Ossipoff is soon in literally hot pursuit, with a spacecraft launched from an active volcano to carry himself, his daughter and her fiancé, Fricoulet and Jonathan Farenheit, a former confederate of Sharp’s. They land on the far side, where there is enough air and water to support native life (De Graffigny exploits the idea, dubious even then, that the Moon is egg-shaped, with the narrow end facing Earth.).

There they are discovered by the Selenites, 12-foot tall beings with huge heads and frail bodies. Through their technological assistance, the Earthmen soon master the local language, and the Selenites are eager to help them journey by rocket-propelled aircraft to the near side in search of fuel to continue their interplanetary journey. What they also find is Sharp’s spacecraft, in which Sharp himself has barely clung to life by killing and feeding on another confederate.

Hardly have they revived Sharp than he kidnaps Selena and heads for the inner planets. Thus begins a long pursuit carrying the rivals to Venus and Mercury, where the heroes get shut of Sharp. But Ossipoff is eager to push on to Mars, and even the outer planets. A Cook’s Tour of the solar system employs every means then imaginable – light-pressure craft, a passing comet, even an interplanetary ramjet fueled by comet dust. Plot complications – other than the hazards encountered in space – center on Farenheit’s homesickness and the Flammermont’s impatience over the years-long delay of his marriage.

LeFaure and Graffigny were perhaps the first to think of a now obvious necessity for space travel: space suits. They also anticipated something akin to lasers for interplanetary communication: light beams picked up and modulated by selenium photocells. But, beyond technology, their imaginations often fail them: the Venusians they encounter speak Greek, and the bird-like Martians fight wars on a regular schedule – a borrowing from the satirical travel tale, but justified here as a population control measure.

In keeping with astronomer Camille Flammarion’s mystical theory of the plurality of worlds, even Mercury and the moons of Mars harbor life, but none of the life forms are terribly interesting. It actually comes as a relief when Jupiter turns out to be a hellish world of violent storms and volcanic eruptions. But by this time, most of the narrative is a huge information dump – including a collective hallucination in which the ramjet Éclair explores the Galaxy at many times the speed of light. Occasionally, there are passages that evoke a sense of wonder:

The profound blackness of space was packed with multicolored stars. Here were entirely white globes that radiated milky tints of extraordinary delicacy into space; there were mysterious worlds brightening the depths of space with a glow that passed through all the shades of red, from scarlet to the finest orange-yellow; a little further on there was an assemblage of stars of different hues, resembling the colors of an extraordinary palette. Some of these worlds seemed blurred by a luminous mist, like Venetian lanterns whose flames flicker as the festivals they illuminate come to an end, ready to go out.

But nearly all the narrative is a dull catalogue of dull facts. Another chronic problem with the whole series is that the story chronology, and even the “scientific” explanations, are incredibly sloppy. Perhaps the finest moment is the unexpectedly ironic conclusion, when the heroes finally reach home back on Earth after their ship crashes, but find their dreams of glory dashed in a last ploy by Sharp.

Garrett P. Serviss (1851-1929), a leading Vernean sf writer in the United States, shows similar limitations in A Columbus of Space (1909). His hero harnesses atomic energy and, with hardly any preliminaries, builds a spaceship and invites his friends aboard for its maiden flight. After a journey fraught with such perils as meteors, they reach Venus. But, once Serviss gets them there, he doesn’t know what to do with them. There is a brief encounter with Stone Age telepaths, then a longer one in a Ruritanian kingdom, complete with a princess. Only in a religious mythology based on the rare appearances of the sun, through breaks in the cloud cover, is there any real cultural invention.

More imaginative is Andre Mas’ “The Germans on Venus” (1913), published as a booklet in France on the eve of World War I. From secondary sources, it might seem to be an exercise in jingoism – especially since in an epilogue the Great Powers divide the planets among them, just as they had recently divided Africa. But in fact the story is a Vernean adventure, with a bit of H.G. Wells. The German ship Sirius is launched by a flywheel catapult, but powered by rockets thereafter. Two of the crewmen are German, but one is French, and Mas’ Venus is far more believable than previous versions of our sister planet, with its freakish climate and pseudo-saurian life forms. Mas’ heroes have to fight to survive, and they can’t return to Earth – so they can send radio messages that attract a wave of colony ships, an expression of humanity’s manifest destiny to spread beyond its homeworld.

But it was Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) who first used science fiction to fully explore concepts that have since become reality in the conquest of space. “Earth is the cradle of mankind,” he is said to have remarked. “But you cannot live in a cradle forever.” Beyond the Planet Earth (1918) is a testament to his belief in not just the conquest, but also the actual colonization of space.

An international colony of reclusive scientists in the Himalayas, looking tor new worlds to conquer, is startled when one of their number. Ivanov, announces he has solved the problem of space travel. The others are skeptical: “The Russian’s probably thought up a gigantic gun,” huffs Franklin, in an obvious allusion to Verne. But the solution, of course, is actually the liquid-fuel rocket. Beyond the Planet Earth goes on to offer equally ingenious solutions to other problems of space flight: Tanks of water cushion the astronauts against acceleration, greenhouses replenish air and (using human wastes as fertilizer) food, and rocket pistols are used for space walks.

Tsiolkovsky pays attention to such mundane details as how to take a bath in a weightless environment, and he provides his crewmen with food in squeeze tubes. The antics of his heroes foreshadow those of actual Skylab and Salyut crews:

One after another our travellers flew into the large cabin, some sideways, some upside down; it seemed to each man that he was the right way up, while the others were not... it [was] difficult to prevent themselves from moving about. It was an odd state to be in, and provoked endless witticisms, jokes and laughter.

Although there is a visit to the moon in a rocket-powered rover, even a flyby of Mars, the real stress is on creating new habitats for mankind in space itself, as Gerard O’Neill later proposed – even to the use of lunar material for construction. By the end of the novel, thousands of ships are being launched to found space colonies, which are envisioned as the scene of Utopian social experiments.

True, as Newton remarks, space lacks the familiar mountains, oceans, and storms that have inspired earthly poets. “But is there really no poetry here?” he asks. “Surely we still have science, matter, worlds – and mankind, which will come and surround us and occupy this boundless expanse! Is not Man himself the highest poetry of all?’”

 When Hermann Oberth independently developed modern rocketry theory in Germany, Otto Willi Gail (1896-1956) was quick to push the cause of space exploration with The Shot into Infinity (1925).

August Korf, a German scientist who has dedicated his life to the conquest of space, is too proud to appeal to the world for funds. Less scrupulous is his Russian rival Suchinoff, who uses stolen plans for a solid-fuel rocket to launch his own mission to the moon (The same year Gail’s novel appeared, Karl August Laffert’s Beacon in the Sky had its World Peace League using solid-fuel rockets.).

Korf himself had abandoned the solid-fuel design as insufficient, and he is proven right when Suchinov’s astronaut is stranded in lunar orbit – doomed to slow death. Putting aside all else, Korf works against time to complete his multistage liquid-hydrogen rocket, which is launched from a ramp, to attempt a rescue. Only after a rendezvous with the Suchinoff craft does he learn that the dying pilot is Natalka – Suchinoff’s daughter, and his own former lover.

   As dedicated to the cause of space flight as Korf himself, she had become impatient with his caution and had stolen the solid-fuel design for her father in order to carry out the “great liberating deed” herself. “It was a crime against mankind that national honor and trifling pride as a citizen meant more to you than this noble work,” she tells him. After more than eighty years the novel, for all its Wagnerianism, remains prophetically realistic. Illustrations of stage separation and a space walk for the cover of the 1929 English translation in Science Wonder Quarterly look almost like NASA publicity stills.

 Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929), which enlisted Oberth as its technical advisor, owes as much to Gail as to the Thea von Harbou script. The early scenes, in which excited crowds watch as a two-stage rocket is moved on tracks from a huge assembly building to the launch site, the countdown and the launch itself seem like a preview of those at Cape Canaveral forty years later – there’s even a Walter Cronkite-type excitedly broadcasting the news to the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5iqJUrgwbM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EXFQg0SqQU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJvkUHgIjs0

But the film was not a success – in those days, the conquest of space was the obsession of a few, the kind of men who founded the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt and the American Rocket Society and the British Interplanetary Society, working in scorn or, at best, in obscurity.

Dedication meant something in those days. When Soviet enthusiasts founded GIRD (Grupa po Izuceniyu Reaktivno Dvizheniya, or Group for the Study of Reactive Motion), cynics dubbed the enterprise Grupa Inzhenerov, Rabotayushchikh Darom – Group of Engineers, Working for Nothing. But those engineers found a champion in Aleksandr Belyayev (1884-1942), who evidently sought to outdo Gail with A Leap into Nothingness (1933).

More than Gail, Belyayev understood the logistics of organizing a space program; an entire industrial center and launch complex has to be built in the Andes. And A Leap into Nothingness was the first sf novel to deal seriously with space medicine and astronaut training. Belyayev’s future spacemen work out in centrifuges and use a free-fall elevator to simulate weightlessness – an idea Robert A. Heinlein reinvented in Space Cadet (1948).

Of course, by 1933, Belyayev had to make his novel politically acceptable: instead of pure Vernean adventure, there is propaganda. The New Ark is financed by frightened billionaires seeking to escape from world Communist revolution. Having arrived on a Carboniferous Age Venus, the refugees revert to savagery for lack of anyone to exploit, and Leo Tsander (named for GIRD pioneer Fridrikh Tsander) and his crew return to a Communist Earth in triumph.

Gail and Belyayev both followed up with pioneering works involving manned space stations. But Gail’s The Stone from the Moon (1926),  offers only a brief visit to Astropol before descending into occultist rubbish about lost Atlantis and the world ice theory. Belyayev’s KETStar (1936), by contrast, further develops Tsiolkovsky’s theme of colonizing space – its very title (in Russian. Zvyezda KETS) honors his initials.

Leonid Artemiev, the hero, is a young biologist specializing in fruit who happens to make friends with Tonya Gerasimova, an assistant at an institute of mechanical physics. Together with Paley, an engineer, Tonya has worked out secret designs and made a series of calculations for a flight to the moon. Suddenly Paley disappears, Tonya asks Artemiev to fly with her to the Pamirs, where she hopes to find Paley. Only it turns out that there is already a secret (!) space program based there – and Artemiev is soon drafted into it.

KETStar, still under construction when he arrives, is both a space laboratory and a launching platform for missions to the moon and planets – the station itself and the interplanetary craft are built from meteoric material. Earth receives such practical benefits as the warming of the Arctic by giant mirrors, but space is seen as a new home for mankind. In the end, Artemiev, after an exciting trip to the Moon (in a ship guided by radio from the station) and his work at the space laboratory, decides to stay on and raise his family there.

Soviet film offered Vasili Zhuravlyov’s Cosmic Voyage (1936), with Tsiolkovsky himself as technical advisor. Pavel Ivanovich Sedikh, academician at the All-Union Institute for Interplanetary Communication, is his obvious avatar: a white-bearded physicist who wants to go to the Moon in the worst way. Professor Karin, head of the space program in 1946, doesn’t think an “old man” has any business in space, but Sedikh contrives to make the journey – accompanied only by a young woman, Marina, and a boy, Andryusha – kid brother of Victor Orlov, who had been slated to make trip himself.

For a film shot during Stalin’s reign, Cosmic Voyage seems remarkably apolitical aside from the “USSR” on the rocket ships. It’s all about the excitement of space travel. “Where are you going?” Andryusha’s friends ask him. “To the Moon!” Like Gail’s A Shot into Infinity, the movie features a launching ramp and scenes of stage separation and weightlessness. But one novelty is immersing the astronauts (not cosmonauts) in tanks of water to cushion them against acceleration during liftoff. On the Moon itself, they leap and frolic about in the low gravity. Sedikh is trapped under a rockslide at one point, but the others rescue him – and even a cat from an unmanned craft that had coincidentally landed at the same location. Naturally, they are all mobbed on their triumphal return.  

Ironically, there had at that time been little realistic astronautical science fiction in the United States, where Robert Goddard shunned publicity and pulp sf was dominated by fanciful neo-Victorian concepts of space travel. One exception, little remembered today, was The Moon Maker (1916) by novelist Arthur Train (1875-1945) and physicist Robert Wood (1868-1955). Four years before Goddard published his calculations, they had envisioned an atomic-powered rocket in The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915). There, it was used by a mad scientist trying to force an end to the world war.

In The Moon Maker, the Flying Ring is sent on a desperate mission to try to divert an asteroid on a collision course with earth. The short novel is notable for its realistic treatment of acceleration and weightlessness and for a prophetic scene in which the astronauts are jockeying to a landing on the moon, kicking up dust with their exhaust as the Apollo LEMs did decades later. Later, they use a death ray to divert the asteroid.

The Moon Maker wasn’t entirely ignored; Stanley G. Weinbaum clearly modeled his peculiar flying triangle in “The Red Peri” (1935) after the Flying Ring. But it was the German influence that was decisive, both in fiction and in technical works like Hermann Noordung’s “The Problems of Space Flying” (translated 1929). Willy Ley, a colleague of Oberth’s who fled Nazi Germany, spread the gospel in stories like “At the Perihelion” (1937), in which the escape of the hero and heroine from a Soviet colony on Mars depends on a precise understanding of celestial mechanics.

With Murray Leinster’s “The Power Planet” (1931), a melodrama about the struggle for control of a solar power station, serious speculation about potential uses of space had already entered American sf. Within a few years, realistic concepts of space exploration were taken almost for granted as a background for science fiction centered on broader themes.

Following World War II, a wider public began to awaken to the idea of space travel. Heinlein did his missionary work with Destination Moon (1950), a soberly realistic film for its time, and tried to communicate the spirit of space visionaries in “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1950). Delos David Harriman doesn’t want to go down in history; he just wants to go. His struggle with indifferent business partners and an apathetic public to realize his dream is personal and tragic. Like Ley, who died a month before Apollo 11, he wins his battle – but not for himself. As a friend observes, “He looks as Moses must have looked, when he gazed out over the promised land.”

After that, it was time for the pseudo-documentaries; Arthur C. Clarke’s Prelude to Space (1951) and Islands in the Sky (1952). Lester del Rey’s Step to the Stars (1954), Leinster’s Space Tug (1953) – realistic but soon dated accounts of the first manned flights and the first space stations. Following Sputnik, “tomorrow” faded into “today” with novels like Martin Caidin’s Marooned (1964), and. finally, it was history with James Michener’s Space (1982).

Looking in the Wrong Place for New Classical Music

A friend of mine once came up with the word “outeresting” to describe things that were not only uninteresting in themselves but drained you of interest in anything when you encountered them.

I was thinking of that the weekend before last at the New York Philharmonic, where, besides classics by Berlioz, Mozart and Debussy there was the world premiere of a concerto by Mark Neikrug, whom neither I nor Marcia had ever heard of. This was a really big deal; the performance was preceded by an interview by the conductor, Alan Gilbert, about how emotional the piece was and what it was supposed to be about. My take is that it was about 30 minutes.

The concerto isn’t available at YouTube, but here’s a music video based on a early piece by the same composer, “Through Roses,” that premiered in London back in 1980. Very outeresting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhUbZ_hmJVsA

The New York Philharmonic has featured a number of “modern” works over the past few years that we’ve been attending concerts there. What they all seem to lack is any sense of direction. They may be pleasant to listen to, unlike serial music and other “experimental” forms, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere. They remind me of Silverado, a movie from 1985 that was supposed to revive the classic western. It started with what seemed to be a warmup for the main story, but it never got to the kind of story that made the classic western classic; the warmup was all we got.

Now there is contemporary classical music that you won’t find being played at the New York Philharmonic, but it comes from composers who are known mostly or only for film and TV music. Angelo Badalamenti, for example. He’s still known best for scoring Twin Peaks, but he’s composed music for dozens of movies, in a number of different styles. In “Opium Prince,” one of the tracks for The City of Lost Children (1995), he masters the classic Russian style so well that we can imagine the piece being a lost and rediscovered movement from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rdQ3v4bL_A

Nino Rota (1911-79) is best known for the Godfather theme and for having been Federico Fellini’s composer for most of his films. An extra on the Criterion DVD of 8½ is a fascinating featurette about Rota, who also composed concert music – a number of his concertos and other works (among them a ballet version of Fellini’s La Strada) have made it to CD in recent years. Yet his most innovative work may have been his score for Fellini’s Casanova (1976), which draws on influences as diverse as Mozart and Stravinsky and juxtaposes them in strange ways. But I’ve never heard anything else like the first track, “Venezia Venaga Venusia.” Really ethereal, even in a self-referential nod (1:14) to one of Rota’s familiar melodies from La Dolce Vita:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzQzxAY-wLo

Ennio Morricone has more movie scores to his credit than you can count, and he’s even conducted his music in concert (those performances, like the movies he has scored, are available on DVD). The piece below, “Penance,” is from The Mission (1986), a historical drama about the Jesuits who converted the Guarani Indians of Paraguay in the 18^th Century, but treated them fairly – unlike would-be colonists from Spain. At 1:25 here, Morricone fleetingly samples “Dies Irae,” a Gregorian chant from the 13^th Century that had been used before by composers as varied as Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoyQkQD1-I

Although he has a number of film scores to his credit, Jon Brion has composed only one classical orchestral score. But what a score! I read somewhere that he took on the assignment for Magnolia (1999) because he figured it was the only chance he’d get to compose music for a full orchestra. I honestly don’t know why he wanted to do that; his musical roots are in rock and pop, and he’s famed for his Friday night gigs at Largo in Los Angeles. But I’m sure glad he did. This edit of a piece with the unwieldy title “Stanley/Frank/Linda's Breakdown” is an example of something an admirer of my father calls “organic syncopation,” the layering of a rhythm and melody analogous to the heartbeat and breathing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZueG5NRyRDY&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL783D209F8CC2972C

Now if the New York Philharmonic wants to commission a work that will really rock the classical audience, it could count on Brion to come through. Likewise Badalamenti and Morricone and others I myself may not be aware of. There have been crossover composers before – just think of George Gershwin and Kurt Weill. Maybe it’s time to look to a new generation of crossover composers to bring some vitality to the concert halls.  

Misreading "Colonialism" in Science Fiction

John Rieder, who teaches at the University of Hawaii, came out four years ago with a book called Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, which picks up where Edward W. Said left off in Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said's argument was that every aspect of Western culture is part of an Orientalist discourse aimed at justifying colonial exploitation of non-Western peoples. 

Even Jane Austen, according to Said, was an apologist for slavery. But Said doesn't mention science fiction, so Rieder rang in with a book-length case that the genre originated as vehicle for propagating demeaning colonialist images of non-Western peoples. He can find plenty of examples, because there really were incredibly racist and imperialist ideas in some sf in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But that's not enough; whatever wasn't overt,  in past or more recent times, must have been covert or unconscious propaganda of the same kind. Thus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) becomes an exercise in the "construction of race" rather than a gothic tale of hubris in the attempt to create life; and Catherine Moore's "Vintage Season" (1946), in which tourists from some inhuman future visit the scene of what they know will be a disaster in our time, is somehow really about Cold War fears of Communism. 

Rieder isn't aware of, or simply ignores, any examples to the contrary, such as anti-racist, anti-colonial sf like that of Leigh Brackett, which appeared in Planet Stories. In “Citadel of Lost Ships” (1943), she tells a story of a fugitive Earthman among the Kraylen, natives of the swamps of Venus who look vaguely reptilian – blue-white of skin and with crests that resemble feathers but aren’t – whose homes and lives are threatened by imperialists from Earth:

"There have been men in the swamps. Now word has been sent us. It seems there is coal here, and oil, and certain minerals that men prize. They will drain the swamps for many miles, and work them."

Campbell let smoke out of his lungs, very slowly. "Yeah? And what becomes of you?"

The Kraylen turned away and stood framed in the indigo square of the doorway. The distant drum sobbed and shouted. It was hot, and yet the sweat turned cold on Campbell's body.

The old man's voice was distant and throbbing and full of anger, like the drum. Campbell had to strain to hear it.

"They will take us and place us in camps in the great cities. Small groups of us, so that we are divided and split. Many people will pay to see us, the strange remnants of old Venus. They will pay for our skills in the curing of leshen-skins and the writing of quaint music, and tattooing. We will grow rich."

Campbell dropped the cigarette and ground it on the dirt floor. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead, and his face was cruel. The old man whispered:

"We will die first."

Brackett is obviously drawing a parallel with American Indians and other non-Europeans robbed of their lands, resources and dignity; the reference to “camps” might even be a veiled allusion to the then-recent internment of Japanese Americans. But when racist readers wrote to Planet Stories that the Kraylen ought to be liquidated, Brackett denounced them in no uncertain terms:

If that isn’t totalitarian reasoning, I never saw it. Under democratic law, any and every minority, so long as it functions within legal limits, is guaranteed the right to live, think, and worship as it sees fit. You might as well say we ought to LIQUIDATE the Mennonites, the Amish, or any other decent, peaceable group simply because they’re different… It’s well to remember one thing, when you are planning the liquidation of minorities. Human society is a fluid and unstable thing. And it’s frightfully embarrassing to wake up one morning and find that all of a sudden you have become—a minority.

But I recently found a much earlier example, and more startling for that, in Timeslip Troopers, Brian Stableford’s rendering for Black Coat Press of La Belle Valence (1923), a time travel novel originally written by André Blandin and then rewritten by Théo Varlet, an established sf writer, to secure publication.

The original title refers to both the Spanish city of Valencia and the oranges it was famed for, which would be hard to convey in a literal translation; hence the anachronistic play on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) in the translation. Nobody knows anything about Blandin, although Stableford surmises that he must have been a French officer during World War I. It was he, in any case, who came up with the plot: French soldiers in the trenches near Metz in 1917 find a time machine in the basement of an old house, and learn to use it.

What follows seems at first only a variation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), but that’s an oversimplification. By mischance, the time machine takes not only its operators but the whole surrounding area – with a company of soldiers, their advanced weapons, even a British plane that has landed nearby – to the Valencia of 1341. 

That puts them in the same position, technologically, as the Spanish conquistadores in America – only the primitives are the Catholics and their Inquisition, and it is the Moors they side with. This was the age of Averroes, after all, not that of the ayatollahs. Tortorado, Dominican inquisitor of Valencia, loves to torture Moors and Jews; he has even forced the daughter of a Jewish merchant to convert and become his sex slave. And as the French arrive, he is pursuing a case against a Franciscan monk, Geronimo: 

His love of progress and Enlightenment, and his acquaintance with Moorish and Jewish scholars, had caused him to be accused of heresy by his rivals, the Dominicans. Arrested in the middle of the night the previous day, he had been subjected a few hours later to questioning by water…[i] 

Captain Marcel Renard and his company, outraged by the state of affairs, make short work of the Spaniards and, after a brief counterattack by the Catholics, call in Moorish allies and restore the Emir to power. But that is only the beginning; the men from the future set out to bring the future to the benighted city, spreading the teachings of the European Enlightenment, launching a mini industrial revolution and even introducing paper money. Renard fantasizes going beyond Valencia itself (“In six months, Spain will be ours.”[ii]) and even bringing about the French Revolution 400 years ahead of time.

But the French are running low on ammunition even as they are running high on hubris. Renard’s troops spend much of their time boozing and wenching; even the local nuns are hot for them, but they also bring the clap. They act in reckless disregard of local sensibilities, punishing those who disrespect them with menial labor; some even bust heads and loot homes on the slightest pretext. Geronimo, meanwhile, has gotten high on the thoughts of Rousseau and Marx, and is so full of himself that he welcomes a crown offered by the French as a new “pope.” It is all too much, too soon for what is essentially a conservative society. Resentment against the French and the ways they bring erupts into violence after the factories fail for want of raw materials, throwing people out of work; and Tortorado makes good on the opportunity to stage a counter-revolution.

“Progress is an admirable thing, but it can only be realized in a propitious atmosphere, in its own time,”[iii] Renard realizes too late – only a few of his men make it back to their own time, where they take a vow of secrecy about their ill-fated venture in liberation. And make no mistake about it; they saw themselves as liberators; critics of the Said-Rieder school who imagine that Western rationalism devalues only non-Western culture overlook the fact that the Enlightenment began as a challenge to the European social and religious order of its time.

Yet Renard and his men end up behaving just like the colonialists Said and Rieder condemn, and Timeslip Troopers can thus be seen as a critique of colonialism in the classic sense. But it can also be seen as a critique of the kind of supposedly benevolent efforts to bring peace and progress to non-Western cultures that are currently called “nation building.” In the same context, it can be seen as a critique of past and present revolutionary movements, whether social or religious, that reduce people to Believers and Unbelievers and treat them accordingly. And that includes ideological movements like that of Said and Rieder,

---

[i] Varlet, Théo, and André Blandin, Timeslip Troopers, trans. Brian Stableford, Black Coast Press, 2012, p. 92.

[ii] Ibid., p. 155.

[iii] Ibid., p. 208