Hard Reading: Learning From Science Fiction - OAPEN

A Personal Prefacexiiiat our interminable marks meetings much quicker in my head thanthe secretary could with a calculator, said, ‘Tom, you should have beenan engineer’. This was not meant as a compliment.)Turning further to the personal aspect of this ‘Personal Preface’, Ithink I was lucky enough to be inoculated against that whole area ofprejudice. I recall the day it happened. It was early in 1958, I was at homerecovering from some minor illness, I had read everything in the house(there wasn’t very much), and my mother went to the unimpressive localnewsagent and came back with the only form of narrative she could findthere. It was the British edition of Astounding Science Fiction for January1958 (September 1957 in the American edition). It contained the firstpart of a four-part serial, Robert Heinlein’s juvenile Citizen of the Galaxy,a comic novella by David Gordon, three short stories (one of them byEric Frank Russell), and the usual Astounding apparatus of a science factarticle, on fusion power, an editorial, readers’ letters, etc. I was hookedimmediately, and have remained on the hook ever since.Quite why that should be, I cannot say. The odd thing was that ittriggered a till-then dormant interest in the classic literary texts I hadbeen ignoring at school. Not very long afterward I wrote a 25,000-wordprize essay on Shakespeare’s history plays. The burden of it was that,far from being patriotic accounts of the national pageant – whichwas the way they were being presented at just that time in a BBCdrama series on television – they portrayed, if you read more closely,a sequence of Machiavellian politicians, ending up with the mostsuccessful ‘Machiavel’ of them all, Henry V. I was especially struckby the scene in Henry V Act 2 scene 2, where Henry talks the Earl ofCambridge into arguing against mercy for traitors and then has himexecuted for treason. Poetic justice? No, I argued, political murder. Forthe Earl was in one view (and a view which Shakespeare had clearlypresented in an earlier play) the rightful King of England, son of a manwhom Henry’s father Henry IV had similarly disposed of: ‘Was not heproclaimed / By Richard that dead is, the next of blood?’I was in fact presenting a view taken many years before by WilliamHazlitt. But I had never heard of Hazlitt. On the other hand, I had readand noted the scene in Poul Anderson’s The Man Who Counts (serialisedin Astounding, British edition May–July 1958, right after the Heinleinserial), in which the wily and cynical Nicolas van Rijn works up a hostof winged aliens to go to war, for his own purposes, with adaptationsof speeches from Shakespeare’s King John and Henry V. So, there was asubtext to van Rijn’s quotations, and maybe one in their originals too!At last, great literature became interesting. The result was that fromthen on I had at least a tendency to read the classics through science

xivHard Readingfiction, not the other way round. As I note elsewhere in these essays,I could not accept the consensus view of the end of Gulliver’s Travels(‘we must remember that in his misanthropy, Gulliver is mad’). I hadalready read the very similar ending of The Island of Dr Moreau, and Iknew that Wells’s Prendick was not mad: he had seen the animal inhumanity and his insight was ‘in a sense’ (see p. 32 for discussion ofthat phrase) correct, perceptive, scientifically based. In the same wayI did not accept the excuses normally made for the ending of Twain’sConnecticut Yankee (‘it is bitterly ironic’): I had already read de Camp’s LestDarkness Fall, and other works (see item 4, below), with their variableand nuanced approaches to ‘change-the-past’ stories. I appreciated BraveNew World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I saw at once that they were‘enclosed universe’ stories, like Wells’s ‘Country of the Blind’, Heinlein’sOrphans of the Sky and several later variants, and felt that Huxley andOrwell had quailed before the logic of the plot: which is that someonein an enclosed universe cannot break out of it just on the basis of someancestral memory (Winston Smith) or instinctive distaste (BernardMarx; see, further, n. 10 on p. 254).2 And so on.In a similar way, as I read works of sociology or anthropology, likeThomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), or MargaretMead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), or B.L. Whorf’s much more dubioustheories about the nature of language (Carroll 1956), I read them notwith surprise but with recognition, having picked up the ideas alreadyfrom science fiction. There is an obvious Margaret Mead figure in Citizenof the Galaxy, though I did not recognise her till years later, and JackVance had fictionalised Whorf in his The Languages of Pao (1957). As forKuhn, he was part of a whole science fictional debate about ‘steamengine time’. (See, for all these, items 6, 11, below.)In short, I had a science fictional education. People often wonderwhether there is a correlation between interest in sf and fantasy, on theone hand, and becoming a professional medievalist, as I did, and therecertainly seems to be one such. It happens too often to be coincidence.The critic Leonard Jackson, whom I quote several times with approvalin what follows, thought that it was the result of a kind of marginalisation, would-be critics shuffling to the edge of their profession becauseof what he saw as the stultifying effects of the kind of literary educationhe and I and others all underwent in the Cambridge University EnglishDepartment, and its many offshoots – for Cambridge was then dominantin the UK literary field. He could well be right in many cases, but not2Wells too succumbed to the lure of the ‘cop-out’ ending, rewriting his storywith a happy ending in 1939: see Parrinder 1990.

A Personal Prefacexvin mine. I was not marginalised into science fiction, I was there already,and the interest in medieval studies was probably set off by the manyquasi-medieval settings of science fiction stories, as well as the field’scontinuing fascination with the idea of different cultures. (I see I spentmy prize money for the Shakespeare essay on the expanded 1959 editionof R.W. Chambers’s Beowulf: An Introduction.)There are indeed similarities between the problems of criticisingscience fiction and medieval literature, notably a lack of fit betweenthem and our Classically derived critical vocabulary. Is Beowulf an ‘epic’?Tolkien did not think so. Are Anglo-Saxon poems like The Wanderer andThe Seafarer ‘elegies’, as they are usually termed? Not really. Anglo-Saxonpoets loved the device of playing on word-pairs like ‘life / leaf’, ‘blade /blood’, ‘knell / knolled’ (all taken from Macbeth, the one Shakespeare playset in Anglo-Saxon times), but we have no word for the device. Some say‘pararhyme’, which reminds one of ‘paratext’, the word used by MichaelSaler (2012: chap. 2) to refer to the common science fictional deviceof framing a narrative with (among other things) made-up quotations,like Asimov’s Encyclopaedia Galactica or Vance’s ‘Life, by Unspiek, BaronBoddissey’. Both fields have a buried rhetoric one has to exhume.In any case, and for whatever reason, I had no difficulty, many yearslater, and this time much more consciously, in integrating science fictionand fantasy with the then critically neglected field of ‘medievalism’, thestudy of modern fictional, artistic and political responses to the MiddleAges. Behind all such connections, I suspect that I had evolved somekind of meta-statement within science fiction, to the effect that culturesvary in every conceivable way: but they are all conditioned by the limitsof available technology, and the awareness and the social structurescreated by those limits. That was what led me on to exploring both themedieval and science fictional fields.Autodidacts, however, notoriously have blind spots and gaps in theirknowledge, of which I only slowly became aware. One was a profoundlack of interest in contemporary politics (see the introduction to item11, below). I took politics to be an epiphenomenon, as did many sciencefiction authors, probably with bad results, as the sad history of NASAhas shown.3 The space programme was stimulated by science fiction, ashas often been pointed out, but we thought that was enough. We shouldhave paid more attention to Heinlein’s ‘The Man who Sold the Moon’.3Ken MacLeod’s article ‘Politics and Science Fiction’ (2003) deals ably withthe way politics is presented in science fiction. On the whole, though, andwith exceptions, real-world politics seems to be of minor interest to mostwriters, and fans.

xviHard ReadingAnother gap was lack of interest in critical developments. I recallmy Oxford colleague, the anthropologist Edwin Ardener, saying tome, very gently, sometime in the 1970s when I was telling him about‘structuralism’, which I thought I understood, ‘But we are now surelyin a post-structuralist phase’. I did not understand him, and shouldhave followed up till I did. I was, however, largely insulated frompost-structuralism by being a medievalist. My basically reactionaryview of Tolkien, seen in the context of ‘the post-Grimm revolution’ ofthe nineteenth century, was correct as regards Tolkien and has foundmany responses outside the academic world, but remained critically andacademically on the margins, from which science fiction and fantasy areslowly making their way (see especially item 2, below).The introductions with which I have prefaced the chapters belowaccordingly deliberately disclose both the effects of a ‘double life’inside academia and inside science fiction, and a slow trajectory fromdetachment to rapprochement.Nevertheless, and for all its failings or disadvantages, I remain deeplygrateful to my science fictional education. No academic conference Iever attended (scores of them) ever had the same sense of community,or the same intellectual stimulus, as WorldCons in the USA and theUK, NovaCons in the UK, the conventions organised by the Journal forthe Fantastic in the Arts, or the ‘Boskones’ of the New England ScienceFiction Association. It was a rare privilege to talk to the likes of BrianAldiss, Kingsley Amis, Greg Benford, Robert Conquest, Steve Donaldsonand (most of all, and without running through the rest of the alphabet)my much-regretted former collaborator the late Harry Harrison, whosememoir, edited by his daughter Moira, has just appeared as HarryHarrison! Harry Harrison!, with a play on the title of one of his mostfamous books. I hope the essays below may be seen as an act of homage,and of gratitude, to a literary genre and to its practitioners. I would nothave had my life since January 1958 any other way.

What SF Is

1IntroductionComing Out of the Science Fiction ClosetIntroduction 1One of the sub-themes in this collection is the way I slowly ‘outed’ myselfas a science fiction reader within the academic profession. When I was anundergraduate at Cambridge, one thing I was quite sure about was thatthe merest whisper of an interest in science fiction was going to destroyany prospects I might have as an English professor: science fiction, itwas well known, was suitable only for adolescents, and indicated a lackof the serious moral qualities thought requisite (in Cambridge, in theearly 1960s) for literary criticism. My Moral Tutor indeed once noticeda copy of Astounding carelessly left lying around in my room, and notlong afterwards told me that he would not support any application ofmine for graduate study. This may have been a coincidence – I had otherblack marks on my record – but it certainly didn’t help.My first tiptoe into sf criticism came in 1969 (see item 5, below).This was only slightly brave. I was then a very junior lecturer at theUniversity of Birmingham, but I had just got what Americans call‘tenure’. I didn’t think it was going to do me any good in any applicationI made for promotion or a different job, but it came out in a journal withminimal circulation, so probably no one would notice. In 1972, I gota substantial promotion to an Official Fellowship, at St John’s College,Oxford, teaching Old and Middle English – not, of course, science fiction!– and felt secure enough to write for Foundation (see items 4 and 9,below), both write-ups of talks given at Novacons in Birmingham. Thiswas probably acceptable in Oxford as an amiable eccentricity, thoughstill a bit suspicious: but then no one from Oxford was going to showup at Novacon, apart from the odd naughty student, and they were onmy side. By 1982, I was Professor of English Language and MedievalLiterature at Leeds, and bold enough to write a book on Tolkien. Thiswas just about OK in that, however much his fiction was scorned anddespised by the critics (he still is Public Enemy Number One to many),he was a famous philologist, and, since I then held the Chair he had3

4Hard Readingheld at Leeds in the 1920s, writing about him could be seen as an actof respectful piety towards the ancestors.However, I think the real moment of ‘outing’ on my part, as alsoof growing sf acceptability from sections of the academic community,came in 1988, when I returned to Leeds from a year at the Universityof Texas, pretty well set on making a permanent shift to the USA, andwas asked by the English Association to edit their annual volume ofEssays and Studies for 1990 on the theme of science fiction. The piecethat follows was the ‘Preface’ to this. One of the jobs of the ‘Preface’was to introduce all the other essays and show how they fitted together:I have cut out a good deal of this in the version here. What remainsmakes one of several strongly contrarian points, which have becomemore and more obvious to me over the years. I should add that muchof it was reprised, along with parts of items 2 and 7, below, with theagreement of the editor, in my article in David Seed’s Companion toScience Fiction (2005).One of the things people continually said, and say, about Tolkienand fantasy, is that it is ‘escapist’. I have argued elsewhere (2000: vii–ix,306–18) that the great fantasies of the twentieth century are all aboutthe major problem of the early twentieth century, which was industrialised warfare controlled by a resurgent barbarism: the escapists werethe E.M. Forsters, Henry Jameses and Virginia Woolfs whom Cambridgerated so highly, slowly and luxuriously dissecting the emotional problemsof a small sheltered class of people who were much less important andinteresting than they thought they were. Similarly, the accusation aboutscience fiction was often that it was just simple-minded. I argue in thisessay – and again in the next one, and with detailed backup in thepiece on the many reviews of Kingsley Amis, item 8, below – that, onthe contrary, a lot of it is just too hard for many readers, even educatedreaders. Reading it takes extra work. It demands a layer of ‘informationprocessing’ above and beyond what is needed to read any work of fiction.And it is, using the word technically, both intrinsically and demonstrablya ‘high-information’ genre, which relies not on the mot juste, like Flaubert,but on the mot imprévisible, the word you cannot predict.Finally – and I take this up also in the next essay – it is incipientlythreatening to those critics who regard themselves as the arbiters anddictators of good taste, the people who decide what is and what isnot ‘literature’. My former St John’s colleague John Carey has chartedvery well the reactions of the Anglo-American haute bourgeoisie to thechallenge of a new lower-middle-class reading public and an authorshipwhich wrote for them – people like H.G. Wells – in his 1992 book TheIntellectuals and the Masses, which is much more aggressive than anything

Introduction 15I have ever managed to write. Something we both agree on is that manycritics are still refusing even to look at the evidence. Popular literature,genre fiction – these just are not ‘literature’, see above, and do not needto be considered unless they can be shoehorned into what is usually apolitical agenda. But, as Darko Suvin has very rightly said (1979: vii),people who ignore 90 per cent of the subject they are supposed to bestudying – literature, fiction, whatever you want to call it – will bewrong about even the 10 per cent they agree to study.Sf and fantasy have crept into the critical world during my workinglife, but still marginally and on sufferance. This is a pity, because I thinkit would have aerated the subject, improved both critical practice andcritical theory, and done something to prevent what has become in theUSA a major undergraduate withdrawal from the humanities. On theother hand, critical scorn hasn’t done sf any harm And that’s whatI really care about. The critic Leonard Jackson, who must have been atCambridge just before my time, has said that the need to disguise one’sreal feelings about books in order to get the critically OK answer waswhat drove many into marginal fields, like science fiction, just becausethey were unregulated; and that this was a cultural disaster (1994:16–17). If there was such a cultural impoverishment as Jackson says, itseems to me it was felt within the mainstream, and especially within– to borrow the title of a work by another former colleague, this timethe novelist David Lodge – the ‘small world’ of academe.

Learning to Read Science Fiction1Learning to Read Science FictionThere are many definitions of science fiction, but most of them arevariations on Kingsley Amis’s sensible, if laborious, ‘Science Fiction is thatclass of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in theworld we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovationin science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology’, fromNew Maps of Hell. Some of those which aren’t are clearly counterpunching,like Theodore Sturgeon’s claim (repeated by James Blish), that ‘A sciencefiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problemand a human solution, which would not have happened at all withoutits scientific content’. This is responding to the familiar accusation that sf‘lacks characters’, or ‘is about things not people’, but is ducking an obviousquestion: are human beings the only really interesting things in theuniverse, without which no story has a point? More thought-provokingare remarks which fall short of a definition, or go beyond it, like BrianAldiss’s ‘Science fiction is the search for a definitio

3 Getting Away from the Facilior Lectio 47 'Semiotic hosts and g hostlinesses in the Work of Bruce g Sterling' 50 SF and Change 4 Getting Serious with the Fans 67 'Science Fiction and the dea of History'i 70 5 Getting to Grips with the Issue of Cultures 85 'Cultural ngineering: e a Theme in Science Fiction'89 6