Sam j lundwall, p.7
Sam J Lundwall, page 7
In 1969, the well-known Russian science fiction writers Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky, who are considered the best authors of Soviet science fiction and the only ones comparable to the best U.S. authors, were silenced by the Soviet authorities on account of four satirical sf stories dealing with bureaucracy and the right of a state to interfere with social development on other planets (read: countries). At the other end of the political spectrum, similar things have recently taken place in Spain, when the Political Police seized all the copies of an issue of the Spanish sf magazine Nueva Dimension.
This is, of course, not something that has happened only to science fiction. On the whole, the sf field has been spared the most mindless acts of the political censors. But with more and more writers turning to the science fiction story as a means to convey social criticism, it might be safe to assert that we will see more of this in the future.
It should be pointed out that criticism does not necessarily mean negativism. With so many of the well-known works of science fiction being anti-Utopian, the whole genre has gotten a somewhat undeserved reputation as being largely negativistic and defeatist in attitude, longing, in effect, back to the "good old days" that never existed anyway, and deadly afraid of what the future might bring. Actually, most sf writers seem to believe in progress, even though few are so naive as to believe that the future will be all roses. Also, the anti-Utopian branch of science fiction occupies only a comparably small portion of the medium as a whole. Nevertheless, the anti-Utopian branch, with its roots in ancient satirical writings, has always proven to be the most popular outside of the circle of sf aficionados, and most easily recognized by the critics as "Literature."
"Straight" science fiction, being more optimistic in its outlook, and dealing more with the future as such, delineates future societies where conditions are vastly different from what they are here and now and constructs plot and human behavior as results of these assumptions—colonization of far worlds, new means of travel, new forms of (not necessarily evil) governments and so forth. Yet "straight" science fiction has never achieved the same impact on the literary scene. The reason for this might be that while the anti-Utopian novel is old as a literary phenomenon, the "straight" science fiction, depicting the future on its own terms, describing it as not necessarily better or worse but different, then taking this at its face value and trying to make the best of it, is new, and, therefore, somewhat suspicious.
Personally, I find the anti-Utopian science fiction extremely interesting—but it shows only one side of the matter. It is anti but never pro; it gives criticism, but never even attempts a solution. Just as the Utopian story is escapist, its antithesis is defeatist; it must always be so. There is an unfortunate tendency in all literature to view all changes with the deepest suspicion and to put the worst construction on everything new. It would be very strange indeed if this did not pervade science fiction to a degree as well. No doubt many people in the year 2025 will look back to the wonderful golden days of 1971 when everything was so much better, and regard the new star ships and what-have-you with grave misgivings, feeling the ground rock beneath their feet. This is as it should be, and the anti-Utopian novel has done a lot of good by pointing out faults in society's machinery—but one should not stare oneself blind on this side of the coin.
In 1660, the Italian Jesuit Francesco Lama was certain that God never would permit the construction of airships, because they could be used to throw things down at people. Airships are being used to throw things down at people, and in a much more horrible way than the good Lama ever envisaged, too, but they also are used to transport people in a perfectly peaceful way, and on the whole, it has been of much more good than evil, notwithstanding the old, often repeated cry that If-God-had-meant-us-to-fly /write /travel/live-he-would-have-given-us-wings/pens/wheels/hos-pitals. Well, he didn't; we did it ourselves.
Basically, the anti-Utopian novel is just a way of saying (as Cyril M. Kornbluth puts it in The Science Fiction Novel,) "I will show you what will happen if you don't listen to me and do as I say," as opposed to the Utopian message of "See here how beautiful and orderly everything will be if you make me dictator over the world." The difference is slight, and in the end they both come down to the same thing: an inability to face the present world. The anti-Utopian novel is interesting, and as a means of powerful social criticism, unsurpassed. It should be read with a pinch of salt, though. The future isn't all sour grapes.
5. THE MAGIC UNREALITY
When one comes to the type of science fiction that completely abandons the accepted idea of this universe for the benefit of another, more or less self-made one, so-called Fantasy, the question immediately arises as to which literature, properly speaking, does this branch of the genre belong, and why. Enthusiastic sf scholars have made remarkable plunges down into world literature and returned with the most astounding discoveries, from the Sumer epic of Gilgamesh to the old Norse Eddas, the Arabian Nights and so forth, not to mention the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. With this definition, The Sleeping Beauty would make science fiction of prime quality, and Mother Goose would be a must in every true sf fan's library. Even the definition by situation that usually is applied to "straight" science fiction, gives peculiar results here. So, for example, we find religious allegories like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia among the works of science fiction, something that undoubtedly would have surprised the authors.
Fairy tales and religious allegories have existed since time immemorial, but the particular literature or point of view that we call Fantasy is, despite all eager efforts to prove the opposite, a comparably new occurrence, that appeared during the nineteenth century with works like Lewis Carroll's (Charles L. Dodgson) Alice in Wonderland (1865), The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
The difference between the traditional fairy tales and these works may seem slight—but there is a definite difference. We don't believe in demons, werewolves, fire-breathing dragons and the rest (well—most of us don't), but once, and this wasn't too long ago, we certainly did. Everyone knew that these creatures existed; they were not imagination, they were fact. Sometimes they were seen. The fabled creatures of ancient and not too ancient times were a lot more familiar to those people than outer space is to the average man of today. Thor lived once, and the Earth was flat; and seven crystal spheres encircled the world of man. Of course we don't believe in this today, and any work of fiction assuming that these legends are true is purely fantasy. The difference lies in that the old sagas told about things that were considered facts, while modern fantasy—is fantasy.
Terry Carr says in his introduction to New Worlds Of Fantasy/2 (1970) that ". . . fantasy springs from and operates on a basis of emotional symbolism, just as dreams do. Fantasy is, in fact, the literary equivalent of dreams." This is a good point, and tells a lot about the mechanisms of fantasy. Just as in dreams, anything can happen, anything at all. What logic and natural laws there are, can be changed at the slightest whim. And there are nightmares as well, as attested by the veritable armies of monsters, ghouls and malignant magicians who live in blissful abandon in this sub-genre of science fiction.
Most fantasy stories are based on an existing tradition of sagas and popular conceptions. This is exceptionally obvious in works like Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) and James Branch Cabell's stories from Poictesme—not to mention the Irish writer Lord Dunsany, heavily influenced by ancient folklore, who in his turn has influenced most modern fantasy writers. But it is striking in how high degree the authors have created their own universes, with highly specific natural laws, and how this has been done as a sort of intellectual game: creating worlds as frameworks to the narrative and molding them into shape with complete disregard for commonly accepted logic, much in the same way as the absurdists, Ionesco and Alfred Jarry and others, later did. It is also interesting to note that while many of these works of fantasy are commonly considered to be juvenile stories, e.g. Alice in Wonderland, they are actually highly sophisticated works that require an adult mind to comprehend them to their fullest extent. Still, they can be read and appreciated by anyone. As opposed, I might add, to some of the modern absurdist works.
Among the works of fantasy one can also find a number of stories bordering on far-out science fiction of the usual type, very intelligent and satirical works built within a framework of pure, undiluted fantasy; for example the French artist J. J. Grandville's sick, mystifying Un Autre Monde (1844), a hallucinatory vision in which steam-powered robots give mechanical concerts, where marionettes have formed kingdoms of their own and the botanical garden boasts a section for real, living heraldic animals. Grandville, a well-known illustrator of his time, was probably the world's first surrealist painter of the Dali school. He died in 1847 in a mental institution, his last works, done just a week before his death, being two strange, frightening surrealistic dream visions.
It is, of course, in the nature of fantasy literature that one can't draw up straight orientation lines for its development. The Italian writer C. Collodi's (Carlo Lorenzini) strange children's book Pinoccio (1880) with its touches both of Gothic horror and time-typical moral story, undoubtedly belongs to this genre, as well as the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson's Moomin books and the English philologist J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring. The English priest and Shakespeare scholar Edwin Abbott's mathematic fantasy Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), which is a square's (a geometric square, not a human one) description of its two-dimensional world, is likewise fantasy in the literal sense of the word.
The greater part of the fantasy literature that has been written during the last fifty years belongs, however, to the more easily handled groups of science fantasy (fantasy on an alleged scientific or logical basis, where the Newtonian cosmic system has been exchanged for one with a mystical or purely homemade basis) and Sword & Sorcery (swords and monsters of various kinds, usually with a strong influence of ancient Nordic folklore, including elves, giants, fire-breathing dragons, magicians and so forth).
The heritage from ancient mythology is considerable in the latter type of fantasy, and primarily the Gothic novel seems to have furnished a lot of its time-honored ingredients, from chivalrous feats to artificial creatures of all kinds —homunculi, golems, living dead and such, besides the usual ghoul ballet and its malignant conjurers. The Gothic novel, which appeared for the first time with Horace Wal-pole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) had obvious connections with the chansons de geste of the Middle Ages, the Arthurian legends and the legends of Charlemagne, of which especially Ludovico Ariosto's poetical work Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532) seems to have made lasting impressions. Orlando Furioso was a tale of chivalry with a motif from the alleged heroic deeds of Charles the Great, written in the style of the time. The plot is utterly dramatic, alternating between the pathetic and the grotesque, with lots of heroic deeds, swords, blood and thunder. Moreover, it contains some really imaginative episodes in the story of Asdolf's journey to the Moon and his highly improbable adventures there. This whole genre was murdered by Cervantes with Don Quixote (1605), and when its pitiable remnants again crawled inside the book covers, more than one hundred and fifty years later, it was thus in the guise of the Gothic tale.
The Castle of Otranto, and the literary genre that it gave birth to, can make the hair stand on end on the most obdurate person. It is a genre that almost exclusively occupies itself with dilapidated castles under the light of the werewolf moon, sepulchers with disagreeable contents, evil magicians, compacts with the Devil, noble heroines whose primary mission is to be abducted by all and sundry; noble heroes with peculiar names, kindhearted old men with noble features, old ladies with horrible secrets, and assorted monsters of the most horrible sort. The intrigues are usually complex onto the borders of insanity, and to complicate it all further, half of the characters are usually related to the other half, which gives birth to interesting incestuous situations à la some of the current teenage magazines.
This ghastly literature was, of course, a product of its time, in the same way as the current science fiction literature is the product of our specific situation. It belongs, partly, to the Romanticism of the eighteenth century, the longing back to times when everything was better (the old days were always better), as well as the Romanticist's well-known faiblesse for ruins and forgotten passages and such. But there was probably also a much more substantial connection with the real world. The Marquis de Sade makes an interesting observation in his L'Idée sur les Romans (1800) regarding the Gothic tale:
This genre . . . was the inevitable product of the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded. For those who were acquainted with all the ills that are brought upon men by the wicked, the romantic was becoming somewhat difficult to write, and merely monotonous to read: there was nobody left who had not experienced more misfortunes in four or five years than could be depicted in a century by literature's most famous novelists: it was necessary to call upon hell for aid in order to arouse interest, and to find in the land of fantasies what was common knowledge from historical observation of man in this iron age.
The "iron age" was the world in which people lived—if live it can be called—in indescribable conditions, condemned to a life of appalling suffering for the crime of being born; the world in which scholars spent years and healthy salaries arguing with learned friends about the placing of a comma in a poem and deciphering ancient stone tablets. The lower classes were starving, and in France, Marie Antoinette suggested that if the peasants didn't have bread, "let them eat cake." The Marquis de Sade chronicled the horrors of the time in a much more naked and effective way than any of his contemporaries, frequently repeating his conviction that, in modern civilization, virtue is persecuted—while crime not
only pays fabulous dividends, but, in the skillful hands of the man who is master of himself, goes unpunished.
Basically, the early Gothic tale was only the romans de moeurs in a new overcoat, still convinced that virtue will be rewarded in the end and vice justly punished, finding pleasure in "the beautiful horror which delights while it saddens," a sort of horror pornography, if you like. However much due to the influence that the Marquis had on his contemporaries, with works like Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, La Philosophie dans le Boudoir and Les 120 Journées de Sodome, a change set in, in the Gothic tale. Vice did not always get punished. The Gothic tale became, not a picture of the contemporary world, but of its undercurrents of despair and hopelessness. The ghosts are within ourselves, as the tormentors of the Marquis' novels are projections of ourselves. In the imitation of the Marquis de Sade and, in a sense, of the Gothic tale as a whole, I can mention a modern work, Pauline Réage's painful and grandiose novel Histoire d'O (1954), which chronicles a woman's willful subjection to complete slavery of the most horrible kind. The Gothic tale had all this, although in a very inarticulate way, and this might be the chief reason why. outside of the sheer horror content, it is still readable. Its real terrors are real, but merely hinted at.
The Castle of Otranto, the first of the Gothic novels, had much in common with the romans de moeurs like Manon Lescaut and Fanny Hill—the pornographic interest was exchanged for the horror interest, but basically it was the same story, only much more crude. Instead of the bedroom we have the sepulchral chamber; instead of love, terror; instead of fornication, death (in womb-like subterranean passages). In later Gothic tales these two subjects, sexuality and death, were combined to form peculiar necrophilian situations. This is especially the case with Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, which will be discussed later on. But in The Castle of Otranto, sex was exchanged wholesale for horror, and after a lot of gruesome spine-tingling occurrences, virtue was rewarded just as it should be.
The action is laid in the castle of Otranto, where the terrible sovereign Manfred reigns in the place of the rightful owner, who went out to participate in the Holy War and never returned. A terrible ancient prophecy haunts the background, and one day a giant helmet flops down in the courtyard, bashing in the empty head of Manfred's son Conrad, who quickly passes away, leaving Manfred with Conrad's bride-to-be, the beautiful Isabella. Manfred starts making unpleasant advances, just in the line of what one could expect of such a man, and before you know it, the circus is going full blast with bleeding statues, hollowly groaning ghosts, new giant articles of clothing that appear from nowhere when you least expect it, and other merry occurrences calculated to raise the spirit of any thrill-seeking reader. The atmosphere is gloomy, but all ends well despite everything. Manfred enters a monastery and the hero, a young and noble-looking lad who spends his days in the subterranean vaults of the castle, occupying himself with saving the life of all and sundry and finally turning out to be (surprise! surprise!) the long-lost heir to the castle, gets Isabella. The novel was originally published under the nom de plume of Onuphrio Muralto, "Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto," and "translated from the original Italian by William Marshal, Gent." In the preface of the first edition, Mr. "William Marshal" speaks highly and without the slightest trace of unbecoming modesty of his own work:
