Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973

8/13/2019 Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973

1/50

Science Fiction t u d i e s

Volume 1Part 1Spring 1973

David N. Samuelson.Clarke's Childhood's End:A Median Stage of Adolescence? . . . 4Patrick Parrinder.Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells . . . 17Stanislaw Lem.On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction . . . 26Marc Angenot.Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism . . . 33Robert M. Philmus.The Shape of Science Fiction:Through the Historical Looking Glass . . . 37Ursula K. Le Guin.On Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream . . . 41A, B, and C.The Significant Context of SF:A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation.Transcribed and edited by Darko Suvin ..... 44


2/50


3/50

SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES 3Science-FictionStudies, Volume 1, Part 1, Spring 1973,Copyright1973 by R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin.SUBSCRIPTION to the four parts of Volume 1--Spring 1973, Fall 1973, Spring 1974, Fall 1974--is 5.00. The parts ordered separately are 2.00 each.ADDRESS all communications toScierice-FictionStudies, Departmentof English,Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana 47809.EDITORSR.D. Mullen, Indiana State UniversityDarko Suvin, McGill UniversityASSISTANT EDITORSElaine Kleiner, Indiana State UniversityMary Lu McFall, Indiana State UniversityEDITORIAL BOARDJames Blish, HarpsdenGale E. Christianson, Indiana State UniversityRobert G. Clouse, Indiana State UniversityPeter Fitting, University of TorontoH. Bruce Franklin, Menlo ParkNorthrop Frye, University of TorontoMark R. Hillegas, Southern Illinois UniversityDavid Ketterer, Sir George Williams tJniversityJames B. Misenheimer, Indiana State UniversityPatrick Parrinder, Cambridge UniversityRobert M. Philmus, Loyola College, MontrealFranz Rottensteiner, ViennaDonald F. Theall, McGill UniversitySCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES publishes articles resulting from thestudy of science fiction--includingutopian fiction, but not, except for pur-poses of comparison and contrast, supernatural or mythological fantasy.Articles intended forScience-Fiction Studlies should be written in English,accompanied by an abstract of fewer than 200 words, and submitted intwo copies conforminggenerally to the dictates of the MLAstyle sheet, ex-cept that referencesshould not be made to the pages of cheap paperbacksor of other editions not likely to be found in libraries (cf the nextparagraph).BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA. Unless there is indication to the contrary,each book cited in these pages was published in hardback in the UnitedStates and/or the United Kingdom in the year specified. Information ofgreater particularity is given only when deemed necessaryto the validityof a page-reference.When the work in question has been published invarious formats and hence in various paginations, references are made


4/50

4 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESnot to pages but to chapters or to such other divisions as the author hasmade.

5:4 Volume 5, Page 4.?5= Chapter 5--or the 5th of the smallest divisionsnumberedcontinuously throughout the work.?5:4==Book 5, Chapter 4--or some similar combination.?5/?4 =-Chapter 5 in one version, Chapter 4 in another.15 Note 5 in this series of notes.

David N. SamuelsonChildhood's End: A Median Stage of Adolescence?

Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End is one of the "classics" of modernSF, and perhaps justifiably so. It incorporates into some 75,000 words alarge measure of the virtues and vices distinctive to SF as a literary artform. Technological extrapolation, the enthronement of reason, the"cosmic viewpoint", alien contact, and a "sense of wonder" achievedlargely through the manipulation of mythic symbolism are all importantelements in this visionary novel. Unfortunately, and this is symptomaticof Clarke's work and of much SF, its vision is far from perfectlyrealized.The literate reader, especially, may be put off by an imbalance betweenabstract theme and concrete illustration, by a persistent banality of style,in short, by what may seem a curious inattention to the means by whichthe author communicates his vision. The experience of the whole may besaved by its general unity of tone, of imagery, and of theme, but notwithout some strain being put on the contract implicit between authorand reader to collaborate in the "willing suspension of disbelief'.Although much of Clarke's SF is concerned with sober images ofman's probable future expansion of technological progressand territorialdomain, often despite his own worst nature, in a numberof stories and atleast three novels he conjuresup eschatological visions of what man maybecome,with or without his knowing complicity.Against the Fall of Night(1948) is a fairy tale of a boy'squest for identity in a sterile technologicalsociety far in our future; confined in setting and narrative focus, itprovidesadolescent adventure,a veritable catalogue of futuretechnology,and a cautionary parable in a pleasant blend. 2001: A Space Oclyssey(1968, "basedon a screenplayby Stanley Kubrickand ArthurC. Clarke")This article appeared in different form in Mr. Samuelson's University of Southern Californiadissertation "Studies in the Contemporary American and British Science Fiction Novel,"which is Copyright 1969 by David N. Samuelson.


5/50


6/50

6 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESmnachinery,and Clarke is extremely sketchy about how this society is run,peace and prosperity are inadequate; the people of New Athens needsomething more to strive for. This particular "utopia" is only a temporaryst+-ge in man's development. Theoretically, he could go in the direction ofenlarging his storehouse of empirical knowledge; this is the way of theOverlords, without whom man could not have defused his own self-destrective tendencies. Yet, paradoxically, the Overlords are present in or-der to cut man off from entering their "evolutionary cul de sac" to insurethat he takes the other road, parallelling the mystical return of the soul toGod.On the surface, Clarke seems to commit himself to neutral ex-trapolation. Science and technology may have their limitations, but theycan increase our knowledge and improve our living conditions. Thetechnological power of the Overlords may be totalitarian, but their dic-tatorship is benevolent and discreet. From the "scientific" viewpoint ofspeculative biology, even the predestined metamorphosis of mankindcould be seen simply as an evolutionary step, proceeding according tonatural law, with no necessary emotional commitment, positive ornegative. There is a value system implicit in this reading, of course, whichthe narrator seems to share with the characters. The supreme represen-tatives of reason and science, the Overlords, are thinkers and observers ingeneral, and manipulators and experimenters in their role as mankind'sguardians. The few human characters with whom we have any chance toidentify also exhibit a scientistic attitude, i.e. the belief that science candiscover everything. Stormgren resists the fear that the as-yet invisiblJeOverlords may be Bug-Eyed-Monsters, and muses on man's absurd super-stitions: "The mind, not the body, was all that mattered" (?3). JeanGreggson's clairvoyance is supported by Jan Rodricks' researches, andcounterpointed by the study of parapsychological literature by theOverlord Rashaverak. George Greggson, when his son begins to dream ofalien planets, is reassured by Rashaverak when he confides "I thinkthere's a rational explanation for everything" (?18). Even Jan Rodricksretains his faith in reason in the face of the inexplicable glimpsed on theOverlord's home planet. Only hysterical preachers and befuddled womenapparently have any doubts.Yet there is some doubt about reason's power, engendered by thebasic science fictions of the book, the aliens, both those who guard andguide mankind, and that toward which man is evolving. The Overlords'espousal of scientific knowledge is open to suspicion. They admit they cannot comprehend the Overmind and that certain mental faculties (intui-tion, e.s.p.) are closed to them. They are repeatedly deceptive about theirappearance and their mission. First they say they have come to preventman's self-destruction, and that man is doomed never to reach the stars.They later proclaim being sent by the Overmind to oversee man'smetamorphosis, and then admit engaging in scientitic observation of thattransformation for their own purposes. Meanwhile one man does reachthe stars, returning to find that the children of man will indeed reach, andperhaps inherit, the stars, but only by means of a kind of self-destruction.Only toward the end do the Overlords confess that their name, made upby their human subjects, is an ironic one, given their own subject circum-stances.


7/50

ON CHILDHOOD'S END 7It may be that their duplicity is necessary, that man must be readiedfor closer approximations of the truth; science and reason both deal withthe world by means of approximations. But even their closestapproximations may be far from tht truth. becaust of their inability to

comprehend, because of further duplicity, or both. They resemblephysically that figure of European folklore known as the "Father of Lies"their names are suitably devilish, and even their home planet isreminiscent of Hell: the light from its sun is red, the inhabitants flythrough the dense atmosphere, Jan sees their architecture as dystopianlyfunctional and unornamented. If he were better versed in literature, hemight also recognize the Miltonic parallel of the Overlords' havingconquered this world after being forced to leave another. The Overlordsare certainly well-versed in human mythic thinking: they require theirfirst contacts to "ascend" to their ship, they assume a guise of om-nipotence and omniscience, and Karellen makes his first physical ap-pearance in the Christ-like pose of having "a human child resting trust-fully on either arm" (?5).Starkly contrasting with the Overlords' anthropomorphic shape andthinking processes is the totally alien Overmind, evoking images ofunlimited power used for unknowable purposes. To the human observer itappears as a living volcano on the Overlords' planet; its power is alsomade visible in the actions of the children of Earth, who convert theirplanet to energy in order to propel themselves to an unknown destination.Yet these visible manifestations seem to be mere side-effects, insignificantto the purposes of the being. The Overlords claim to know something of itsbehavior and composition, from having observed other metamorphoses, asKarellen indicates: "We believe--and it is only a theory--that the Over-mind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of theuniverse. By ncw it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left thetyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere.When it knew that you were ready, it sent us here to do its bidding, toprepare you for the transformation that is now at hand." The changealways begins with a child, spreading like "crystals round the first nucleusin a saturated solution" (?20). Eventually, the children will becomeunited in a single entity, unreachable and unfathomable by any in-dividual, rational mind. This is the extent of the Overlords' knowledge,and it may not be reliable; but the metaphor of crystallization can hardlybe adequate to describe the transformed state. All they can really know,when the Overmind summons them, is that they are to serve as "mid-wives" at another "birth", and they go like angels at God's bidding, but"fallen angels" unable to share in the deity's glory.On the surface, this inability to understand the Overmind is merely asign of its strangeness and vastness, which may some day become com-prehensible to reason and science--after all, how would a human writerdescribe something totally alien?--but underneath we feel the tug of theirrational, in familiar terms. The Overmind clearly parallels the Oversoul,the Great Spirit, and various formulations of God, while the children'smetamorphosis neatly ties in with mystical beliefs in Nirvana, "cosmicconsciousness", and "becoming as little children to enter the Kingdom ofGod". It is therefore fitting that the Overmind be known only vaguely andindirectly, and the confidence of any individual in isolation that he will


8/50

8 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIEScome to understand this being rings as hollow as the boasts of Milton'sSatan. Thus the interplay between the Overlords and the Overmindmaybe seen as a reworking of the old morality-play situation of the Deviltrying to steal away fromGodthe souls of men. These Devils appearto bedevoted servaintscarryingout God's orders,but the Overlords also neverstop tryingto bringHim down to their level, and they manage to convincethe reason-lovingmen of the story that, just as our faith in science tells us,everything has a natural explanation. Those men are doomed, however,and only the "childrenof man" may be saved in this Last JudgmentandResurrection, leaving the continuing struggle between two faiths to rever-berate in the mind of the reader.If the reader is thoroughlyindoctrinated in the simple paradigms ofostensibly neutral but implicitly scientistic popular SF of the Verne-Gernsback-Campbell radition (and Clarke can hardly have anticipated amuch larger audience in 1949-53), he can be expected to take the side ofreason, science, and Westernman, with perhaps a slight anxiety overtheiralliance with Devilish aliens. But the reception Childhood'sEnd receivedfrom mainstream reviewers suggests quite a different reading; for themthe eschatological theme was what made the book worthwhile, not theOverlords'continuation of man's tradition of systematic inquiry, or thesuccessive approaches to technological utopia.2They, and many readerssince, have sensed in Clarke a streak of sentimental mysticism, whichmakes some of his SF quite congenial to their own views, unconstrainedby the scientist's straitjackets of skepticism, proof, and unbendingrules.:3For all of Clarke's reputation for conservative extrapolation, quitejustified by much of his fiction as well as his non-fiction, he apparentlypushes more buttons when he strays from 'confident expectation oftechnological change into what may be termed watered-downtheologicalspeculation.4Even if a work of SF could be totally neutral in its extrapolationsfrom the findings and theories of the physical and/or social sciences,thoseextrapolations would have to reach the reader by means of characters,events, situations described in words which offer at least analogies to hisown experience.Everyword,and everyword-construct,picks up meaningsfrom other contexts in which we have seen it, and the more perceptivethereader is to his own psychology, and to a wide range of literature, themore meanings and patterns will accrue to his interpretation.The less awork of SF is anchored in incremental extrapolation from actual ex-perience, the freer we can expect the reign given to a mythologizing ten-dency.5Positive reactions to imaginary situations will be associated notonly with utopia, and its heretical premiseof man's perfectibility, but alsowith the mythological parallel between utopia and Heaven, whereasnegative reactions will summon up dystopian and Hellish coptexts. Thesituation is complicated further by the alliance in medieval Christiantradition between the Devil and forbidden knowledge, including science,and by the post-Romantic reversal of values which opposes an oppressiveJudeo-ChristianGod to ideals of progress,growth, and process.For Blakeperhaps the ringleader of this revolt, the oppressive God was allied withNewtonian science, an "absentee landlord" of an unjust social order,andthe Devil's strength was passion, disorder, wilfulness, refusal to acceptthe rules as absolute limitations. Accordingly,Blake depicted Milton as


9/50


10/50

10 SCIENCE-FICTIONTUDIESare obviously present to the senses, and psychologically human, andthrough them we receive the theory that almost explains the Overmind.This science-fictional domestication. however. is undercut bv failings inliterary domestication. For example, it is not reasonable that aliensshould be so similar to long-established European (and European only)folklore. And this is tied to another affront to credibilityin Clarkie'suse ore.s.p. Contradictinghimself in successive paragraphs, Karellen declaresthat man's science could not encompasse.s.p., and that he was sent to puta stop to apparentlysuccessful studiesof e.s.p. (?20). Such researchhavingbeen kept from fruition, Karellen is apparently forced to use traditionalspiritualist terms to explain e.s.p., i.e. these powers are real, have longbeen labelled but not verified, and have some connections with the Over-mind. Clarke'sown demonstrations are similarly vague, and decidedlyun-scientific: the children's dreams, powers, and cosmic dance are responsesto the Overmind,while Jean's clairvoyance,accomplishedby means of aouija board ( ), is "explained"by her being a "sensitive".Perhaps if wecan accept at face value the Overmind.we should not cavil at a littlespiritualism, but it does seem a bit unfair to explain one "impossibility"(e.s.p.) by means of another (Overmind), n turn comprehendedonly par-tially by yet another (Overlords). This use of the deus ex machina mayhave a noble history, and it may be convenient in daydreams and fresh-man themes on God, but it is at least suspicious in an art form dedicatedto projecting"possibilities". Even if we accept all of these improbabilitiesin the context of the story, giving in to the fable, Clarke has another sur-prise for us. A reader who is aware, as Damon Knight is for example, ofthe evidence for Satan's medieval European origin out of bits and piecesof pagan myth, may well object to the rewriting of historyneeded to makethe Devil part of the mythology of all peoples, caused by a racial memory(or premonition) of the future.'3Gaffes of this magnitude not only upset all but the most hypnoticsuspension of disbelief at the moment, but they also raise doubt as to thereliability of the narrator, and the credibility of the whole narrative.Clarke may want us to question the omniscience of science and theadequacy of the Overlords;Karellen's speech denigrating the ability ofhuman science to deal with e.s.p. can be fitted into either pattern, or both.But underminingthe veracityof the narrator is a dangerous game to playwith a reader already aware that the subjectmatter is tenuously anchoredfantasy.Why does Clarke even attempt this explanation of mythology?Why,in an SF novel, does he fill several pages with a spiritualistic seance?Neither was necessary to the theme it would appear, or to the book as awhole. The Overlords'parallel with the Christian Devil could have beenleft unexplained, without impairing them as alien beings or as literarysymbols;the explanation given is worsethan none at all. The seance func-tions peripherally to show the similarity between human and Overlordminds, and to foreshadow the role of Jean Greggson'schildren as firstcontacts with the Overmind. It also serves to point up man's boredomwith the Golden Age and the ridiculous ends which his technologycan bemade to serve, namely the production of mechanized ouija boards, butRupert Boyce, whom the party characterizes, is an unimportant figure,and the success of the seance undercuts the satire. The least important


11/50

ON CHILDHOOD'SEND 11purpose the seance serves is to provide Jan Rodricks with the cataloguenumberof the Overlords'home star; his visit to the museumto consult thecatalogue is equally irrelevant to his stowing away on the starship,whichwill go where it will, with or without his knowledgeof its destination. Theproblem which seems to exist on an SF level is essentially a literary one:not fully in control of his materials, Clarke has attempted more than hecan fulfill.The "cosmicviewpoint"which Clarke praised in 1962 in a speech ac-cepting UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science'4 iscommon in SF, as is its negative corollary, inattention to details. Besidesleading writers into multi-volumed "future histories", the cosmicviewpoint encourages close attention in smaller works only to the majoroutlines and the background.The characters are frequently left to fendfor themselves, as it were, in a jungle of disorderlyplots, melodramatic in-cidents, and haphazard image-patterns,which are symptomaticof an un-balanced narrative technique. Unity, if there is any in such a composition,frequently is maintained only by an uninspired consistency of style andtone, and by the momentum built up in the unwary reader by thebreakneckpace of events. Childhood'sEnd, like many books inferior to it,suffers from just such a disproportionate emphasis on the large,"significant"effects, at the expense of the parts of which they are com-posed.Structurally, disproportionis evident in Childhood's End in severalways. The three titled sections are balanced in length, but not in space,time, or relationships between characters and events. Each succession ofactions breaks down into almost random fragments of panoramicchronicle, desultory conversation,and tentative internal monologue. Partof the problem may be that the novel "just growed" rom a novelette,'5,butthat is symptomatic of Clarke's failure to bring his theme down tomanageable human dimensions. The effect might be similar if he hadwritten several stories of varying length and intensity, then tried to con-nect them up to an outline-summaryof future history.The point-of-view suniformlythird-person-omniscient,yet the narrative duties seem dividedbetween an awe-struckspectator at a cosmic morality play, and a disin-terested observerof ordinaryhuman events. The historian-spectatoris atleast involved in his theme, which he attempts to match in grandeur bypanoramic wide-angle photographs and impressive-soundinggeneralizationsorsententiae. But the detached observer gives us "slices oflife"--political negotiating sessions, a party, a visit to a library, a pressconference, a group meeting, a counseling session, a sightseeing trip--which haven't much life, and fails to reveal the principles behind hisslicing. Individual episodes stubbornlyresist integration with the whole,but they can not stand up independently, because they are "illustrations"insignificant in themselves. Clarke'sintent seems to be to counterpointthegreat, slow movement toward metamorphosis with the everydayactivitiesthat people, ignorant of their contribution to the whole, carry on indepen-dently, activities such as he often treats in his fiction of the predictablefuture, where plot is a peg on which to hang the background, andmelodrama adds a little spice. But where the background is a large ex-panse of space and time, and the context involves the larger mysteries oflife, such stagey effects as Stormgren'skidnapping,the Overlords' ntellec-


12/50

12 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIEStual striptease, and the explanation of one mystery by another, are un-necessary, irrelevant, annoying, and finally self-defeating.Either a unified plot or a more carefully developed poetic structuremight have been preferable to the awkward misfit of this particular essayin counterpoint. But Clarke is apparently unable to imagine a plotadequate to the scope of his framework; his "predictive" novels areequally plotless and even his tale of the far future is made up of a series ofaccidental occurrences, set into motion almost haphazardly by theadolescent hero's desire for change and adventure. So the counterpointstructure was attempted for Childhoods End, and the result is ahodgepodge of pretentious chronicle, apologetic melodrama, and super-ficial sketches of static unrelated, individual scenes. Even if we regard thebook as an elegy for mankind, for the end of personal and racial"childhood",the elegiac tone is inconsistent, and insufficient to maintainunity over 75,000 words without a more carefully wrought "poetic struc-ture", and the lame, pedestrian style of the novel seems particularly in-congruous for a poem.As it is practically plotless, the novel is also almost characterless.Against the ambitious theme and tremendous scope, individuals and theirmerely personal problems are bound to look somewhat insignificant.Theunknown bulks extremely large, and the attitude of the characters isstereotyped, not in the heroic mold, whose calculated respect for size andpower allows for action, but in the passive mold, whose awe and reverencewe normally term "religious".Man the Creator, acting, progressing,con-tinually making changes in his environment, whom I would consider theideal (if not the most common) protagonist of SF, gives way to man theCreature,full of fear and wonder and more than willing to follow orderswhen an encounter with an incalculable unknown power forceshim to ad-mit how small he is and how little he knows. " Althoughthe fear of racialannihilation is counterbalanced by pride in man's being "chosen",thisrevaluation of the inevitable as somehow "good" has an orthodoxreligious ring to it, contrasting sharply with the heresy and hubri.swhichhave characterizedscience in modern civilization.'7 Puny on an absolutescale, man's achievements are respectable measured against the present;his potential, symbolized by the Overlords, is by no means slighted. Topreserve this respectability, despite the awesome realities beyond,Clarkedoes show us representative moments of the better, i.e. rational selves ofcertain men.Stormgren, George, Jan, and Karellen are the only major characters;one of them is involved in every episode we are shown, not merely toldabout. All males, actively questing for knowledge, they all appear con-fident and rational, unless belief in rationality in the face of the incom-prehensible is itself irrational. Even their mental processes are shown tous in formal, grammatical sentences, with no trace of irrational stream-of-consciousness. Given little to do, however, they seem no more thanmarionettes in this cosmic puppet-show. Only Karellen, long-lived,revisitinga familiar pattern of events, scientifically detached and curious,has any real stature. Behind his posturing, lecturing, and deceit, his senseof tragedy makes him the most human of all; his intellectual stubbornnessis like that which doomed his prototype, Milton's Satan, to a similarlytragic and isolated immortality.


13/50

ON CHILDHOOD'S END 13A resigned acceptance, common to all four characters, is largelyresponsible for the elegiac tone pervading the book. Stormgren knows hewill never see the Overlords, George knows man has lost his future asman, Jan knows he can not survive cut off from humankind, and Karellen

knows he will never find the kind of answers that he seeks. It is thereader's knowledge of impending doom that makes the characters' incon-sequential behavior and sunny dispositions seem ironic; juxtaposition, a"cinematic" technique, accomplishes what style does not. Although Clarkesometimes stumbles over awkward circumlocutions, trite sententiae,pedantic speech-making, and labored humor, the pedestrian lucidity anduncomplicated vocabulary of his style seldom draw the reader's attentionaway from the events being described. I feel the author's presence onlytoward the end, where his style does manage to impart a sense of melan-cholic majesty to the spectacle. His attempt at generating a "sense of won-der", which ranges from "gee-whiz" impressions of the Overlords to awedcontemplation of man's fate, is most successful as the children grow moreconfident in the testing of their powers, and it culminates in thecataclysmic shock witnessed by Jan up close, then by Karellen far in thedistance. The note of regret, though cloying and sentimental at times (JeffGreggson's dog mourning his master lost in dreams, his parents' finalfarewell just before their island community blows itself up), also gains indepth with this echoing crescendo.The major source of unity, besides the figure of Karellen and thebasic consistency of style and tone, seems to lie in certain image-patternsand the repetition of significant motifs. The dozen or so allusions tofigures from folklore and history, while they may be intended to adddepth to the narrative, are so haphazardly chosen and introduced as toseem unrelated to the whole. On the other hand, the apocalyptic anddemonic imagery of the Overlords and the Overmind is so persistent as tolay down at the symbolic level a morality play contradicting the rationalmessage on the surface. The majority of patterns function somewhere inbetween these two extremes, mainly as unifying factors. The power ofStormgren, and his superiority over the human masses, are echoed by theOverlords' power and superiority over him, and by the Overmind's powerand superiority over them. Karellen's reference to humans as beloved petsreminds us of his attitude toward Stormgren, and is reinforced by thedog's loneliness. A widening perspective is seen in the Overlords' intellec-tual striptease, in the emphasis given e.s.p., in Jan's discovery of what liesbeyond the solar system, in frequent panoramic views of space and time,of Earth and human society. The frustrated takeoff of the Prologue'smoon-rockets is echoed by Karellen's edict that "the Stars are not forMan", and by Jan's discovery of the edict's essential if not literal truth(are the children still "man"?). This frustration is counterbalanced byStormgren's "ascent" to Karellen's ship, by flights of Overlord ships awayfrom Earth (including the one Jan stows away on), and by the final depar-tures of both children and Overlords. And the final transformation of thechildren into a fully symbiotic, super-organic life form is foreshadowed byimages of other kinds of togetherness, progressively becoming more com-pressed: the fifty starships hovering over world capitals that turn out to beprojections of just one, the mob demonstration broken up by Stormgren,the gangsters' "conference" broken up by Karellen, the entrance of


14/50

14 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESKarellen with the children, the party where the seance is held, the artists'colony whose sense of community rests on its individual members, and asingle family dissolving as its children become something else.If Childhood's End is not a fully satisfying literary experience, it doesillustrate certain characteristics of SF at its best, and it does exhibitliterary virtues. Respect for rational thought, construction of a cosmic per-spective, relentless pursuit of extrapolative hypotheses, and a genuineevocation of the sense of wonder are each positive achievements, on theirown terms. The whole, however, is flawed, not only by deficiencies in style,characterization, and narrative structure, which could presumably becorrected by revision, but also by a fundamental dichotomy between op-posing goals.'8Algis Budrys sees Clarke's problem as commercial wilfulness; afteridentifying him as the author of "a clutch of mystical novels", Budryschides Clarke for his "fixed and pernicious idea of how to produce asaleable short story [and presumably a novel]. That idea is to introducean intriguing technological notion or scientific premise, and then use it toevoke frights or menaces. [Thus he can] raise a formidable reputation forprofundity by repeating, over and over again, that the universe is wideand man is very small."'9 Budrys' criticism is pertinent as far as it goes,but it is limited; Clarke has shown more variety, and capacity for growththan Budrys would allow, and the flaws in Childhood's End are onlypartly, I think, due to the author's eye for a dollar.Certainly, Clarke is a commercial writer, a member of the secondgeneration of pulp magazine writers consciously turning out SF. Thus hehas one foot firmly planted in the SF magazines of the 1920's and 1930's,with their infantile dependency on Bug-Eyed Monsters,-slam-bang action,and technological artifacts treated as objects worthy of awe and wonder.But he is also rooted in a "respectable" British literary tradition. Blake,Shelley, Mary Shelley, Hardy, Butler, Morris, Wells, Doyle, Stapledon,Huxley, C. S. Lewis, and Orwell all wrote works in which they showedscience and technology as demonic, at least potentially. This tradition is, Ibelieve, still entrenched in Anglo-American humanistic circles, affectinglike blinders many academics and reviewers, and that part of the literatepublic for whom they remain arbiters of literary taste.2"1 Rather than acritical appreciation for science, they tend to inculcate fear and hostilitytoward it; by abdicating their function as a knowledgeable, foreseeingcounterbalance, they make more likely the technocratic state they professto anticipate with abhorrence.2'Given these traditions, neither of which I would call mature, Clarkeand other second generation writers for the SF magazines had little thatwas adequate out of which to construct a coherent critique of science andscientism. If Childhood's End is a "classic", it is partly because it is ahybrid, a respectable representative of that period during which SFmagazine writers were first trying to reach out to a literary audience, aswell as to their more habitual readers. An ambitious effort, better thanpeople outside the pulp field thought it capable of achieving, it is also anabortive effort, an impressive failure, the flaws of which are indicative ofthe problems frequently attendant upon the literary domestication of SF.It has a high seriousness that sets it apart from the ordinary pulp sciencefiction novel of any generation, but it barely lives up to its name. An at-


15/50

ON CHILDHOOD'S END 15tempt at maturity, Childhood'sEnd is no more than a median stage ofadolescence.California State University, Long BeachNOTES

'Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and theAnti-Utopians (1967), ppl53-54.2For reviews of Childhood's End after publication, see James J.Rollo, Atlantic Monthly Nov 1953, p112; William Du Bois, NY TimesAug. 27, 1953, p23; Basil Davenport, NYTBR Aug. 23, 1953, p19; GroffConklin, Galaxy Mar. 1954, ppl18-19; H.H. Holmes (Anthony Boucher[W. Anthony White]), NY Herald-Tribune Book Review Aug. 23, 1953,p9; P. Schuyler Miller, Astounding Feb. 1954, pp51-52.3A compendium of reviews, among other things, of a later work maybe found in Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (NewAmerican Library 1970). The propensity of humanistic, and scientific,critics of SF to see it through different-colored glasses I have explored insome detail in "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: A Study in theTheory and Criticism of Contemporary Science Fiction with Reference tothe Cultural Division Between the Sciences and the Humanities," B.A.Thesis, Drew University, 1962.4Not only has Clarke been publicly lionized for his quasimysticalnovels, but of his short stories that have been anthologized by bothacademic and commercial editors, theological speculation seems morerewarded than technological extrapolation. Cf W.R. Cole, A Checklist ofScience Fiction Anthologies (1964, privately printed). A survey of morerecent anthologies, especially those intended as textbooks, bears out thispredominance.-This argument is derived from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism(US 1957), esp ppl41-150.6Blake's Milton, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Goethe's Faust, andZamyatin's We are just a few of the works that reflect this Romantictradition. For a further discussion of the Romantic hero as, among otherthings, a "fallen angel", see W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood: or theRomantic Iconogral)hy of the Sea (1950).7This subject has been explored in some depth by Robert Plank inThe Emotional Significance of Imcginar-v Beings: A Stuidv of the Intet-ac-tion Between Psychopathology, Literature, and Realitv in the ModernWorld (1968).8Northrop Frye sees these structures as underlying even the mostrealistic fiction; see Anatomy of Criticism (US 1957), ppl31-40 andpcassini.9Samuel R. Delany, "About Five Thousand One Hundred andSeventy-Five Words," in Thomas D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side ofRealism (1971), p144. Cf Alexei Panshin, "Science Fiction in Dimension,"in Clareson. For opposing views see Stanislaw Lem, "Robots in ScienceFiction," in Clareson, and Darko Suvin, "On the Poetics of the ScienceFiction Genre," College English 34(1972 ):372-82."'Cf Joseph Campbell's discussion of the functions of myth in The


16/50

16 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESHero With a Thousand Faces (1949), esp "Prologue: The Monomyth";Northrop Frye, The Modern Century (Canada 1967), esp pplO5-20;Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (4v 1959-68), passim."Clarke's sober speculations may be found, for example, in ThePromise of Space (1968), ?29 "Where's Everybody?", and in Voices fromthe Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (1965), ?[17] "Science andSpirituality", where in both instances he draws comparisons to whatmight be "godlike" qualities in the aliens. Cf Plank (?7).'2Again,Clarkehas paid more serious attention to e.s.p. and the ideaof the groupmind in his non-fiction;see Profiles of the Future (1962; 1973with addenda), ?17 "Brain and Body";Voicesfrom the Sky (1965), ?[18]"Class of '00". He has also attacked "The Lunatic Fringe" for theirgullibility, as in a chapter of that name (?[20]) in Voices. The relation-ship of e.s.p. to wish-fulfilment is also explored by C.E.M.Hansel, E.S.P.:A Scientific Evaluation (1966), which debunks the notion made popularby Rhine that e.s.p. has been empirically verified, and by Robert Plank,"Communicationin Science Fiction," in Samuel I. Hayakawa, ed., OurLanguage and Our World (1958).'3Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern ScienceFiction, rev ed (US 1967), p188. Knight wronglyaccuses Clarke of havingthe Overlords encounter man in prehistory; Clarke writes that peopleassumed this (?6), but later corrects this impression with the future-memory explanation (?23). On the amalgamation of the Devil image, inthe particular shape Clarke chose for his Overlords, n the late EuropeanMiddle Ages, see BernardJ. Bamberger,Fallen Angels (US 1952), pp208-32; Maurice Gargon and Jean Vinchon, The Devil: An Historical, Criticaland Medical Study, tr Stephen Haden Guest (1930); PennethorneHughes,Witchcraft (1952), ?8; Ernest Jones, Nightmare, Witches, and Devils (US1931), ppl54-59. The theory of prehistoricencounters with aliens has, ofcourse, been given wide dissemination quite recently by Erich vonDiiniken in Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1969)and Gods from Outer Space (1971), both tr by Michael Heron. By a quirkof fate, the original title of von Dainiken's irst book translates literally as"Memories of the Future".'4Reprintedfrom UNESCO Courier as "Kalinga Award Speech" inArthur C. Clarke, Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age(1965).'5"GuardianAngel," New Worlds, Winter 1950, is basically the samestory as Part One of Childhood's End; revisionremovedsome poor repar-tee, added more background,and diminished slightly the dependence onmelodramatic effect.'6Cf Algis Budrys' comments on the "inertial school" of SF, withspecific reference to Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, and Knight, in Galaxy Dec1966, ppI28-33.'7This is not to say that Clarke is an orthodox adherent to anyreligion; his caricatures of the true believer, Wainwright, in the earlypages of Childhood's End, and of the lunatic fringe in Voices from the Sky(? 12), seem sincere enough, and his non-fiction writing is steadfastly onthe side of man's continued exploration and expansion of knowledge.Buthis flirtation with the mythic imagination is also continuous, even in hisnon-fiction, suggesting at least a humble regard for the limitations of


17/50


18/50

18 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESwriters to Wells' visions and methods. In Zamyatin'scase, Hillegas showsthat We reproducesthe broad topography of the Wellsian futureromance:the dehumanized city-state with its huge apartment blocks, its dictator-ship, its walls excluding the natural world, and its weird House of An-tiquity, is built of elements from When the Sleeper Wakes, A Story of theDays to Come , and The Time Machine.4 Yet this tells us little about thespirit in which We was written. The present essay will emphasize twofacts which have been noted but hardly taken into account by previouscritics. The first is that, so far from being a deliberate anti-Wellsian,Zamyatin was the author of Herbert Wells (1922), a sparkling but littleknown essay that puts forth its subject as, in some sense, the prototype ofthe revolutionary modern artist. The second is that Zamyatin was himselfa notably original modernist writer, and not merely the precursor ofHuxley and Orwell. To pass from The Time Machine to We is to enter aworld where the topography may be similar, but the nature of experienceis utterly changed, so that we are faced with two quite different kinds ofimagination. In this crucial respect, the modernist status that Zamyatinconferred on Wells in theory was in practice reserved for himself alone.A marine architect by profession, and an ex-Bolshevik who had beenimprisoned after the 1905 revolution, Zamyatin was building icebreakersin North-East England when the Tsarist regime was overthrown. Hereturned to Russia in September 1917, and became a leading figureamong the left-wing writers of Petersburg until his outspoken andheretical views came in conflict with the rigid cultural controls of the1920s. We, his major imaginative work, was written in 1920-21, banned inthe Soviet Union, and published in English translation in 1924. Inideological terms, it is an expression of his qualms about the technocraticdevelopments of Western civilization, with a sardonic relevance to theBolshevik ideal, notably in the portrayal of the entropic stabilization ofthe once-revolutionary state, and in the restatement of Dostoyevsky's eter-nal opposition of freedom and happiness. At the same time as writing We,Zamyatin, like most of his fellow writers, found himself engaged ineducational work and in the organization of new revolutionary publishinghouses. One of the first foreign authors to be republished was H. G. Wells.(His works had been abundantly available under the Tsar.) Zamyatinsupervised a series of Wells translations between 1918 and 1926, and Her-bert Wells, a survey of the whole of his work up to the 1920s, was a by-product of this,5Two factors dominated Zamyatin's enthusiasm for the English writer.There was Wells' standing as a creator of modern myths: Zamyatin sawthe scientific romances, which were his chief interest, as a species of fairytale reflecting the endless prospect of technological change and therigorously logical demands of scientific culture. They were the fairy talesof an asphalt, mechanized metropolis in which the only forests were madeul) of factory chimneys, and the only scents were those of test tubes andmotor exhausts. Thus they expressed a specifically Western experience:for the reader in backward Russia, the urban landscapes which hadproduced Wells, and not only those he described, belonged to the future.Zamyatin was enough of a determinist to feel that Wells's expression ofthe twentieth-century environment alone constituted an essential moder-nity. He denotes this side of Wells by the symbol of the aeroplane soaring


19/50

IMAGINING THE FUTURE: ZAMYATIN AND WELLS 19above the given world into a new and unexplored element. Just as theterrestial landscape was transformed by the possibility of aerialphotography, war and revolution are now transforming human prospects.Zamyatin calls Wells the most contemporary of writers because he hasforeseen this, and taught men to see with airman's eyes .He was forced to admit that Wells himself had come back to earth ,however, in the sense of abandoning science fiction for the realistic socialnovel. While suggesting that his social novels were old-fashioned andderivative beside the scientific romances, Zamyatin used the whole rangeof Wells's writings to support this second theme, that of Wells as asocialist artist. He quotes passages from Wells's introduction to a Russianedition of his works (1911) in which he declares himself a non-Marxist,non-violent revolutionary--in other words, a heretical socialist likeZamyatin himself. The most surprising twist in the argument is thediscussion of Wells's most recent phase, his conversion to belief in afinite God which was announced in Mr. BRitling in 1916. Wells'swayward and short-lived attempt to combine rationalism and religionlater appeared as an absurdity even to himself, but for Zamyatin it wasproof of his independence and of his imaginative daring. In the aftermathof the war, Wells's earlier visions had already come true. The whole oflife has been torn away from the anchor of reality and has become fan-tastic, Zamyatin wrote. Wells's response had been to pursue his methodfurther, until it touched the ultimate meaning of life. The resulting fusionof socialism and religion was a boldly paradoxical feat recalling thejoining of science and myth in the early romances:The dry, compass-like circle of socialism, limited by the earth,and the hyperbole of religion, stretching into infinity--the two are sodifferent, so incompatible. But Wells managed to breach the circle,bend it into a hyperbole, one end of which rests on the earth, inscience and positivism, while the other loses itself in the sky.Although it made a stir at the time, Wells's spurious religion hardlymerits this engaging metaphor. The figure of the circle bent into a hyper-bole is associated with the spiraling flight of the aeroplane. Both arefound elsewhere in Zamyatin's writings, serving as cryptic images of histheory of art.In the essay On Synthetism (1922), he divides all art into threeschools represented by the symbols +, -, -- (affirmation, negation, syn-thesis). ; Art develops into a continual dialectical sequence as one schoolgives way to the next. The three schools of art in the present phase arenaturalism (+), symbolism and futurism (-), and neorealism or syn-thetism (--), a post-Cubist and post-Einsteinian art which embraces theparadox of modern experience in being both realistic and fantastic .Characterized by incongruous juxtaposition and the splintering of planes,Synthetism is identified in the work of Picasso, Annenkov, Bely, Blok, andof course Zamyatin himself. But this is only a temporary phase, for eachdialectical triad is subject to an ongoing process of replacement and suc-cession which observes an eternal oscillation between the extremes ofrevolution and entropy. Development is a succession of explosions andconsolidations, and the equation of art is the equation of an infinite


20/50

20 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESspiral.These ideas are the formula of Zamyatin's commitment to permanentrevolution and to the heretical nature of the artist. They are related to hisview of Wells in various ways. In the section of Herbert Wells entitled

Wells's Genealogy , we read that the traditional utopian romance fromMore to Morris bears a positive sign--the affirmation of a vision of earthlyparadise. Wells invents a new form of socio-fantastic novel with anegative sign; its purpose is not the portrayal of a future paradise, butsocial criticism by extrapolation. There is some ambiguity abouit thesecategories, and Zamyatin does not elaborate on them, but it seems evidentthat there must also be an anti-utopian form marked (--). When we followthe struggle of D-503 to achieve social orthodoxy in We, and morefleetingly as we contemplate the brainwashed Winston at the end ofNineteen Eighty-Four, the impossibility of our imagining such a future atall--in any full sense--is what the author confronts us with. Is this perhapsthe negation of the negation?Such reasoning would limit Wells to an intermediate place in thedialectic of anti-utopia. Zamyatin usually sees him in a more general wayas epitomizing the dynamic quality of the contemporary imagination. Theaeroplane spiraling upward from the earth is not just Wells but a symbolof contemporary writing as a whole.7 Moreover, Wells's success in terms ofactual prophecy confirmed his position as a vanguard artist, and indeedas a neorealist. Destroying the stable picture of Victorian society withhis strange forward-looking logic, he had foreseen the revolutionary agewhen reality would itself become fantastic. Zamyatin credited him withthe invention of a type of fable reflecting the demands of modern ex-perience--speed, logic, unpredictability. Yet for all this there was one areain which he lagged behind: language, style, the word--all those thingsthat we have come to appreciate in the most recent Russian writers. Oneof Zamyatin's metaphors for art is a winding staircase in the Tower ofBabel. He heralded the verbal and syntactical revolution generatinglanguage that was supercharged, high-voltage, and he tried to createsuch a language in the writing of We.We is written in the form of a diary. It is true that D-503, the diarist,makes some conscientious attempts to explain his society to alien readers,but the social picture which emerges (the sole concern of ideologicallyminded critics from Orwell onwards) is essentially revealed through themedium of the future consciousness, and even the future language, whichare Zamyatin's most radical conceptions. The reflection that a new societyentails new consciousness and language, and that these can only beadequately suggested by a futuristic fictional technique, seems obviousonce stated. Yet it is Zamyatin's imagination of these conditions--hisrevelation of the future through its writings--that establishes We as auniquely modernist work of science fiction.

Hillis Miller has written that the transformation which makes aman a novelist is his decision to adopt the role of the narrator who tellsthe story. 8 It is from this point of view that the contrast between the in-fluential Wellsian model of the science-fiction fable, and the form thatZamyatin created, is more clearly seen.Wells's concern is with facing the unknown; Zamyatin's, with being


21/50

IMAGINING THE FUTURE: ZAMYATIN AND WELLS 21the unknown. Wells's narratives always have a fixed and familiar point ofreference. Like Swift and Voltaire, he exploits the Enlightenment forms ofthe travelogue and the scientific report. In his early romances there isalways a narrator who brings weird and disturbing news and yet wins ourconfidence at once by his observance of anecdotal conventions. Hisaudience is either today's audience or that of the very near future, and hisassumptions are those of contemporary scientific culture. In The TimeMachine, the Time Traveller sets out armed with expectant curiosity,quick wits, and a cheerful acceptance of danger--the very type of the disin-terested explorer. He is also equipped to formulate Social Darwinisthypotheses, and he arrives by trial and error at unanticipated butpresumably correct conclusions. At the end, however, we are casually toldthat the Traveller thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement ofMankind (?17/?13) even before he set out. The information is held backso that nothing shall interfere with his confidence in the value of ex-ploration-- the risks a man has got to take (?4/?3). Similarly, in TheIsland of Doctor Moreau, Prendick is a rational, eye-witness observer whoonly emerges as insanely misanthropic in the final pages. By such con-cealments the displacement of the whole narrative is avoided.The reversal in each of these stories shatters the confidence withwhich Wells's observers set out, but there is no substitute for rationalismas a method. In The War of the Worlds, we are told at the outset that thehumanist conception of the universe has been destroyed, but the narratoraddresses us in the established terms of rational discourse, and thenreassures us of his own essential normality: For my own part, I wasmuch occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series ofpapers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas ascivilization progressed (?1:1). In each case, what is portrayed is abiological or anthropological endeavor; the book is an exposition both ofan alien society and of the attempts of a representative bourgeois observerto know it empirically (hence the importance of the observation of theMartians from the ruined house, a literal camera obscura ). Thenarrator in The War of the Worlds is drawn to the Martians, although hedoes not reject human norms as completely as Gulliver does. Both Swiftand Wells recognized the inherent destructiveness of rationalism. Wells'sattempt to play down the perception appears more deliberate than Swift'sinsofar as he was obliged to make a more conscious choice of eighteenth-century narrative forms.In later romances Wells dropped the rational observer in favor ofcharacters who directly participate in the alien world. Since hisimaginative interests were more genuinely anthropological than political,however, the result is the cruder and less exacting form of adventurenarrative typified by When the Sleeper Wakes. There are some interestinghalf-experiments which reveal something different: The First Men in theMoon, with its split between the earthbound Bedford and the disin-terested rationalist Cavor; and In the Days of the Comet, a regrettablyslipshod attempt to view the present from the perspective of the future.But Tono-Biungay represents Wells's only major advance in technique,with its use of the autobiographical form to combine social analysis andthe pragmatic impressions of an uncertain and somewhat manic narrator.Not only is science eventually symbolized as a destroyer, but the whole


22/50

22 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESnovel embodies a displacement of sociological discourse to express thedrama of radical individualism in the hero'sconsciousness. This marksaninteresting development in the social novel, but in science fiction theWellsian model remained that of the adaptation of Enlightenmentnarrative forms based on the rational, objective observer.9'l'he effect of moving from Wells's romances to We'0 might be com-pared to the experience of Zamyatin's narrator as he passes beyond theGreen Wall of the city:

It was then I opened my eyes--and was face to face, in reality, withthat very sort of thing which up to then none of those living had seenother than diminished a thousand times, weakened,smudged over bythe turbid glass of the Wall.The sun--it was no longer that sun of ours, proportionatelydistributed over the mirror-likesurface of the pavements; this sunconsisted of some sort of living splinters of incessantly bobbingspotswhich blinded one's eyes, made one's head go round. And the trees--like candles thrusting into the very sky, like spiders squatting flatagainst the earth on their gnarled paws, like mute fountains jettinggreen. . . . (?27).

This is a new reality, neither seen through a glass (a recurrent mode ofvision in Wells), nor even in the light of scientific reason. Experience issplintered and blinding; the head whirls and the self loses its centre ofgravity. The writer is at the mercy of disparate impressions, and merelyrecords his conflicting impulses as they mount to a nauseous intensitv.Although he tries to control his unruly consciousness by a rationalmethod, it is the method of a society not our own.We begins with a directive inviting all numbers to composepoems ortreatises celebrating the One State, to be carried on the first flight of thespace-rocketIntegral as an aid to subjugatingthe people of other planets.To the narrator, D-503 (the builder of the Integral) this is a divine com-mand, but to us the forcing of a mathematically infallible happiness(?1) is brutally imperialistic.The value of space travel itself is thus calledinto question (a very un-Wellsian touch), by means of the ironical deviceof a narrator who worships mathematical exactitude and straight lines.Yet as soon as the alienness of D-503's values has been established, itbecomes clear that he himself is internally torn. He undertakes literarycompositionas a duty to the state, but chooses to write, not a poem in ac-cordance with the approvedpublic literary genres (the poetry of the OneState is about as rich and varied as that of the Houyhnhnms),but a sim-ple recordof his day-to-day impressions.The conflict of groupand privateconsciousness signified by the novel's title is thus outlined by his initialchoice of mode of writing;he thinks to expresswhat We experience, buthis recordbecomes irretrievablysubjective.Already as he begins the diaryhis cheeks are flaming and he feels as though a child stirred inside him--dangerous signs, for the irrationality of sensation and of thephiloprogenitiveemotion are motifs of rebellion throughout the novel (0-90's longing for a child parallels D-503's creative instinct, and duringthebrief revolutionary outbreak in the One State couples are seenshamelessly copulating in the public view). As he writes his diary, D-503


23/50

IMAGINING THE FUTURE: ZAMYATIN AND WELLS 23becomes increasingly conscious of the lack of continuity in his thoughtsand the disruption of logical processes; finally he goes to the doctors, whodiagnose the diseased growth known as a soul. A healthy consciousness,he is told, is simply a reflecting medium like a mirror; but he hasdeveloped an absorptive capacity, an inner dimension which retains andmemorizes. The disease is epidemic in the State, and universal fantasiec-tomy is ordained to wipe it out. Superficially D-503 develops a soul as aresult of falling in love with the fascinating I-330, but really it is con-stituted by the act of writing. It is his identity as a man who wishes towrite down his sensations that throws D-503 into mental crisis.Fittingly, it is the diary which betrays him, together with hisrebellious accomplices, to the secret police. It may seem that the one errorof the mathematically perfect state was to encourage its members toengage in literary expression at all--as in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451,things might run more smoothly if all the books were burnt. But can we besure of this? At the end, as the rebellion is crushed, D-503 undergoes fan-tasiectomy and watches the torturing of I-330, sensible only of theaesthetic beauty of the spectacle. Notwithstanding our reaction, this ap-pears to be an exemplary tale from the viewpoint of the One State--andmight even have been what its propaganda chiefs wanted. Certainly anundue concentration on the political message of We should not obscureZamyatin's attempts to suggest the ultimate inexpressibility of his futuresociety; its experience and its culture are structured in ways we can neverfully understand. The narrator tries to explain things for the benefits ofalien peoples stuck at a twentieth-century level of development, but healso feels himself to be in the position of a geometrical square charged toexplain its existence to human beings: The last thing that would enterthis quadrangle's mind, you understand, would be to say that all its fourangles are equal (?5). A similar argument may apply to the status of thebook itself.The classic satirical utopia establishes a social picture through in-congruous comparisons, and We does this too; the work of ancientliterature most treasured in its future society is the book of railwaytimetables. But Zamyatin suggests a more disturbing and bewilderingalienness than this method can convev. A new experience is rendered inan unprecedented language, or perhaps languages, for D-503's diary is atheatre of linguistic conflict. His orthodox selfhood is expressed througha logical discourse, syllogistic in form and drawing repeatedly onmathematics, geometry, and engineering for its stock of metaphors. (Thereare obvious resemblances to the aggressively technocratic style ofZamyatin's essays.) This is the language in which citizens of the One Stateare trained to reconstruct the infallible reasoning behind the State's balddirectives. Even women's faces can be analyzed in terms of geometricalfigures, circles and triangles--providing some striking instances of literaryCubism. However, this orthodox, mathematic language is unable to sub-due the whole of D-503's experience. He may see his brain as a machine,but it is an overheated machine which vaporizes the coolant of logic. Hebecomes uncomfortably self-conscious, and his mental operations are nolonger smooth and automatic. His analysis of I-330's face reveals twoacute triangles forming an X--the algebraic symbol of the unknown. Moreunknowns supervene, and his memory is forced back to the symbol of


24/50

24 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESunreason in the very foundation of the mathematics he was taught asschool-- VT the square root of minus one. Soon he confronts the existenceof a whole universe of irrationals, of 'IT solids lurking in the non-Euclidian space of subjective experience. To his diseased mind,m,athematics,the basis of society, seems divided against itself.The X or unknown element in We always arises within personal ex-perience. It is identified first in the meeting with 1-330,and we sense it inthe quality of dialogue--probing,spontaneous, and electric--whichclashessharplywith the formulaic responsesof the narrator's orthodox discourse.He has been taught to reduce everythingto a mathematical environment,but as soon as he describes impressionsand people, his account takes onan acutely nervous vitality. As the diary proceeds, the hegemony of or-thodox discourse diminishes, and the splintered style of We isestablished--the shifting, expressionistic style which is the basic ex-perience of Zamyatin's reader. The narrator's mood and attention areconstantly changing; sensations are momentary and thoughts, whethercorrect or heretical, are only provisional; utterances are charac-teristically left unfinished. D-503 is encouragedto bear with the confusionof his kaleidoscopic language by the vaguely pragmatic expectation thatself-expression must somehow lead to eventual order and clarification.Yet in fact it leads to the consciousnessof a schizoid identity from whichonly fantasiectomy can rescue him-We does describe a revolution in the streets, but the narrator's in-volvement is only accidental, for the real battleground is within hishead. The languages involved are futuristic languages, and (with somelapses) the fixed points to which D-503 can refer are different from ours;thus once his experiencehas transcendedthe limitations for which he hasbeen programmed,he is unable to make elementary distinctions betweendream and reality. It is Zamyatin's resolute attempt to enter theunknowns of consciousness as well as of politics and technology thatmakes We one of the most remarkable works of science fiction inexistence.Not its artistic techniques, but its topography and socialarrangements (down to Sexual Days and pink tickets) have passed intothe subsequent tradition. Verbal innovation and weird experience arepart of the stock-in-trade of science-fiction writers, but where the basicassumptions of story and characterization remain unchanged, this is nomore than a kind of mannerism. Ivan Yefremov, author of the popularSoviet space-tale Andr-omeda, outlines a typical attitude:

The mass of scientific information and intricate terminologyused inthe story are the result of a deliberate plan. It seemed to me that thisis the only way to show our distant descendants and give thenecessary local (or temporal) colour to their dialogue since they areliving in a period when science will have penetrated into all humanconceptions and into language itself.'2What is conferred is local colour, and this is done by the insertion ofscientific jargon into the emotive narrative of sentimental fiction. My im-pression is that, despite the variety of available styles and the consciouslymanneristic way in which a more sophisticated writer like Ray Bradbury


25/50


26/50

26 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESOn Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters (1923).2Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (1968),p140.3George Orwell, Review of We (Tribune Jan. 4, 1946) in The Collec-

ted Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwelland Ian Angus (1968), 4:72-75.4Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and theAnti-Utopians (1967), pp99-109.'The text of Herbert Wells followed here is that of the first edition(published in pamphlet form by Epoka, Petersburg, 1922)as translated byLesley Milne in Patrick Parrinder, ed., H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage(1972). The essay also appears in Zamyatin (?11)On Synthetism appears in Zamyatin (911).7See, e.g., On Literature. . . in Zamyatin (?1), plll.J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968), p62.9Thereading of Wells's romances presented here is a development ofthat outlined in my H.G. Wells (1970), p16 ff.'?The text of We followed here is that of the translation by BernardGuilbert Guerney (1970) except that the heroine is referred to not as E-330 but as I-330 , as Zamyatin intended.'Tony Tanner--in City of Words (1970), p82(UK)/p70(US)--pointsout that the heroes of many recent American novels are trying to get awayfrom all political commitment, whether pro or anti. Similarly, D-503 isunwillingly led into conspiracy, and tricked by both sides.'2Quoted on the dust-jacket of Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale(Moscow 1960).

Stanislaw LemOn the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction

In the early stages of literary development the different branches ofliterature, the genological types, are distinguished clearly and un-mistakably. Only in the more advanced stages do we find hybridization.But since some crossbreedings are always forbidden, there exists a mainlaw of literature that could be called incest prohibition; that is, the tabooof genological incest.A literary work considered as a game has to be played out to thefinish under the same rules with which it was begun. A game can be emp-ty or meaningful. An empty game has only inner semantics, for it derivesentirely from the relationships that obtain between the objects with whichit is played. On a chessboard, for example, the king has its specificmeanings within the rules of the play, but has no reference outside therules; i.e., it is nothing at all in relation to the world outside the confinesof the chessboard. Literary games can never have so great a degree of


27/50

ON THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE FICTION 27semantic vacuum, for they are played with "natural language", whichalways has meanings oriented toward the world of real objects. Only witha language especially constructed to have no outward semantics, such asmathematics, is it possible to play empty games.

In any literary game there are rules of two kinds: those that realizeouter semantic functions as the game unfolds and those that make the un-folding possible. "Fantastic"rules of the second kind--those that make theunfolding possible--are not necessarily felt as such even when they implyevents that could not possibly occur in the real world. For example, thethoughts of a dying man are often detailed in quite realistic fiction eventhough it is impossible, therefore fantastic, to read the thoughts of a dyingman out of his head and reproduce them in language. In such cases wesimply have a convention, a tacit agreement between writer and reader--in a word, the specific rule of literary games that a lows the use of non-realistic means (e.g., thought-reading) for the presentation of realistichappenings.Literarygames are complicated by the fact that the rules that realizeouter semantic functions can be oriented in several directions. The maintypes of literary creation imply different ontologies. But you would bequite mistaken if you believed, for example, that the classical fairy talehas only its autonomous inner meanings and no relationship with the realworld. If the real world did not exist, fairy tales would have no meaning.The events that occur in a myth or fairy tale are always semantically con-nected with what fate has decreed for the inhabitants of the depictedworld, which means that the world of a myth or fairy tale is ontologicallyeither inimical orfriendly toward its inhabitants, never neutral; it is thusontologically different from the real world, which may be here defined asconsisting of a variety of objects and processes that lack intention, thathave no meaning, no message, that wish us neither well nor ill, that arejust there. The worlds of myth or fairy tale have been built either as trapsor as happiness-giving universes. If a world without intention did notexist; that is, if the real world did not exist, it would be impossible for usto perceive the differentia specifica, the uniqueness, of the myth and fairy-tale worlds.Literary works can have several semantic relationships at the sametime. For fairy tales the inner meaning is derived from the contrast withthe ontological 'properties of the real world, but for anti-fairy tales, suchas those by Mark Twain in which the worst children live happily and onlythe good and well-bred end fatally, the meaning is arrived at by turningthe paradigm of the classical fairy tale upside down. In other words, thefirst referent of a semantic relationship need not be the real world butmay instead be the typology of a well-known class of literary games. Therules of the basic game can be inverted, as they are in Mark Twain, andthus is created a new generation, a new set of rules--and a new kind ofliterary work.

In the 20th century the evolution of mainstream literary rules hasboth allowed the author new liberties and simultaneouisly subjected himto new restrictions. This evolution is antinomical, as it were. In earliertimes the author was permitted to claim all the attributes of God: nothingthat concerned his hero could be hidden from him. But such rules hadalready lost their validity with Dostoevsky, and god-like omniscience with


28/50

28 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESrespect to the world he has created is now forbiddenthe author. The newrestrictions are realistic in that as human beings we act only on the basisof incomplete information. The author is now one of us; he is not allowedto play God. At the same time, however, he is allowed to create innerworlds that need not necessarily be similar to the real world, but can in-stead show different kinds of deviation from it.These new deviations are very important to the contemporaryauthor.The worlds of myth and fairytale also deviate fromthe real world,but in-dividual authors do not invent the ways in which they do so: in writing afairy tale you must accept certain axioms you haven't invented, or youwon't write a fairy tale. In mainstream literature, however,you are nowallowed to attribute pseudo-ontologicalqualities of your personal, privateinvention to the world you describe. Since all deviations of the describedworld fromthe real world necessarily have a meaning, the sum of all suchdeviations is (or should be) a coherent strategy ;r semantic intention.Therefore we have two kinds of literary fantasy: "final"fantasy as infairy tales and SF, and "passing"fantasy as in Kafka. In an SF storythepresence of intelligent dinosaurs does not usually signal the presence ofhidden meaning. The dinosaurs are instead meant to be admired as wewould admire a giraffe in a zoological garden; that is, they are intendednot as parts of an expressivesemantic system but only as parts of the em-pirical world. In "The Metamorphosis",on the other hand, it is not inten-ded that we should accept the transformation of human being into bugsimply as a fantastic marvel but rather that we should pass on to therecognition that Kafka has with objects and their deformationsdepictedasocio-psychologicalsituation. Only the outer shell of this world is formedby the strange phenomena; the inner core has a solid non-fantasticmeaning. Thus a story can depict the world as it is, or interpret the world(attribute values to it, judge it, call it names, laugh at it, etc.), or, in mostcases, do both things at the same time.If the depicted world is oriented positively toward man, it is theworld of the classical fairy tale, in which physicsis controlledby morality,for in a fairy tale there can be no physical accidents that result inanyone's death, no irreparabledamage to the positive hero. If it is orien-ted negatively, it is the world of myth ("Do what you will, you'll stillbecome guilty of killing your father and committing incest."). If it isneutral, it is the real world--theworld which realism describesin its con-temporary shape and which SF tries to describe at other points on thespace-time continuum.For it is the premise of SF that anything shown shall in principle beinterpretable empirically and rationally. In SF there can be no inex-plicable marvels,no transcendences,no devils or demons--andthe patternof occurrences must be verisimilar.And now we come near the rub, for what is meant by a verisimilarpattern of occurrences?SF authorstry to blackmail us by calling upon theomnipotence of science and the infinity of the cosmos as a continuum."Anythingcan happen"and therefore "anythingthat happens to occur tous" can be presented in SF.But it is not true, even in a purelymathematical sense, that anythingcan happen, for there are infinities of quite different powers. But let usleave mathematics alone. SF can be either "real SF" or "pseudo-SF".


29/50

ON THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE FICTION 29When it produces fantasy of the Kafka kind it is only pseudo-SF, for thenit concentrates on the content to be signaled. What meaningful and totalrelationships obtain between the telegram "mother died, funeral mon-day" and the structure and function of the telegraphic apparatus? None.The apparatus merely enables us to transmit the message, which is alsothe case with semantically dense objects of a fantastic nature, such as themetamorphosis of man into bug, that nevertheless transmit a realisticcommunication.If we were to change railway signals so that they ordered the stoppingof trains in moments of danger not by blinking red lights but by pointingwith stuffed dragons, we would be using fantastic objects as signals, but'those objects would still have a real, non-fantastic function. The fact thatthere are no dragons has no relationship to the real purpose or method ofsignaling.

As in life we can solve real problemswith the help of images of non-existent beings, so in literature can we signal the existence of realproblems with the help of prima-facie impossible occurrences or objects.Even when the happeningsit describes are totally impossible, an SF workmay still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems. For example,the social, psychological, political, and economic problemsof space travelmay be depicted quite realistically in SF even though the technologicalparameters of the spaceships described are quite fantastic in the sensethat it will for all eternity be impossible to build a spaceship with suchparameters.But what if everything in an SF work is fantastic? What if not onlythe objects but also the problemshave no chance of everbeing realized, aswhen impossible time-travel machines are used to point out impossibletime-travel paradoxes? In such cases SF is playing an empty game.Since empty games have no hidden meaning, since they representnothing and predict nothing, they have no relationship at all to the realworld and can therefore please us only as logical puzzles,as paradoxes,asintellectual acrobatics. Their value is autonomous, for they lack allsemantic reference; therefore they are worthwhile or worthless only asgames. But how do we evaluate empty games? Simply by their formalqualities. They must contain a multitude of rules; they must be elegant,strict, witty, precise, and original. They must therefore show at least aminimum of complexityand an inner coherence;that is, it must be forbid-den to make duringthe play any change in the rules that would make theplay easier.Nevertheless, 90 to 98 percent of the empty games in SF are veryprimitive, very naive one-parameter processes. They are almost alwaysbased on only one or two rules,-and in most cases it is the rule of inversionthat becomes their method of creation. To write such a story you invertthe members of a pair of linked concepts. For example, we think thehuman body quite beautiful, but in the eyes of an extraterrestrialwe areall monsters: in Sheckley's "All the Things You Are" the odor of humanbeings is poisonous for extraterrestrials, and when they touch the skin ofhumans they get blisters, etc. What appears normal to us is abnormal toothers--about half of Sheckley's stories are built on this principle. Thesimplest kind of inversion is a chance mistake. Such mistakes are greatfavorites in SF: something that doesn't belong in our time arrives here ac-


30/50

30 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIEScidentally (a wrong time-mailing), etc.Inversionsare interestingonly when the change is in a basic propertyof the world. Time-travel stories originated in that way: time, which isirreversible, acquired a reversible character. On the otherhand, any inver-sion of a local kind is primitive (on Earth humans are the highestbiological species, on another planet humans are the cattle of intelligentdinosaurs; we consist of albumen, the aliens of silicon; etc.). Only a non-local inversion can have interestingconsequences:we use language as aninstrumentof communication;any instrumentcan in principlebe used forthe good or bad of its inventor.Therefore the idea that language can beused as an instrument of enslavement, as in Delany's Babel-I7, is in-teresting as an extension of the hypothesisthat world view and conceptualapparatus are interdependent;i.e., because of the ontological characterofthe inversion.The pregnancy of a virgo immaculata; the running of 100 meters in 0.1seconds;the equation 2 x 2=7; the pan-psychismof all cosmic phenomenapostulated by Stapledon: these are four kinds of fantastic condition.1. It is in principle possible, even empirically possible, to start em-bryogenesis in a virgin'segg; although empirically improbable today, thiscondition may acquire an empirical character in the future.2. It will always be impossible for a man to run 100 meters in 0.1seconds. For such a feat a man's body would have to be so totally recon-structed that he would no longerbe a man of flesh and blood.Thereforeastory based on the premise that a human being as a human being couldrun so fast would be a work of fantasy, not SF.3. The product of 2 x 2 can never become 7. To generalize, it is im-possible to realize any kind of logical impossibility. For example, it islogically impossible to give a logical proof for the existence or non-existence of a god. It follows that any imaginative literature based onsuch a postulate is fantasy, not SF.4. The pan-psychism of Stapledon is an ontological hypothesis. It cannever be proved in the scientific sense: any transcendence that can beprovedexperimentally ceases to be a transcendence,for transcendenceisby definition empirically unprovable. God reduced to empirism is nolonger God; the frontier between faith and knowledgecan thereforeneverbe annulled.But when any of these conditions,or any condition of the same order,is described not in order to postulate its real existence, but only in orderto interpretsome content of a semantic characterby means of such a con-dition used as a signal-object, then all such classificatoryargumentslosetheir power.What thereforeis basically wrong in SF is the abolition of differencesthat have a categorical character:the passing off of myths and fairy talesfor quasi-scientific hypotheses or their consequences, and of the wishfuldream or horror story as prediction; the postulation of the incommen-surable as commensurable; the depiction of the accomplishment ofpossible tasks with means that have no empirical character;the pretensethat insoluble problems (such as those of a logical typus) are soluble.But why should we deem such procedureswrong when once upon atime myths, fairy tales, sagas, fables were highly valued as keys to all


31/50

ON THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE FICTION 31cosmic locks? It is the spirit of the times. When there is no cure for cancer,magic has the same value as chemistry: the two are wholly equal in thatboth are wholly worthless. But if there arises a realistic expectation ofachieving a victory over cancer, at that moment the equality will dissolve,and the possible and workable will be separated from the impossible andunworkable. It is only when the existence of a rational science permits usto rule the phenomena in question that we can differentiate between wish-ful thinking and reality. When there is no source for such knowledge, allhypotheses, myths, and dreams are equal; but when such knowledgebegins to accumulate, it is not interchangeable with anything else, for itinvolves not just isolated phenomena but the whole structure of reality.When you can only dream of space travel, it makes no difference what youuse as technique: sailing ships, balloons, flying carpets or flying saucers.But when space travel becomes fact, you can no longer choose whatpleases you rather than real methods.The emergence of such necessities and restrictions often goes un-noticed in SF. If scientific facts are not simplified to the point where theylose all validity, they are put into worlds categorically, ontologically dif-ferent from the real world. Since SF portrays the future or the ex-traterrestrial, the worlds of SF necessarily deviate from the real world,and the ways in which they deviate are the core and meaning of the SFcreation. But what we usually find is not what may happen tomorrow butthe forever impossible, not the real but the fairy-tale-like. The differencebetween the real world and the fantastic world arises stochastically,gradually, step by step. It is the same kind of process as that which turnsa head full of hair into a bald head: if you lose a hundred, even athousand hairs, you will not be bald; but when does balding begin--withthe loss of 10,000 hairs or 10,950?Since there are no humans that typify the total ideal average, theparadox of the balding head exists also in realistic fiction, but there atleast we have a guide, an apparatus in our head that enables us toseparate the likely from the unlikely. We lose this guide when readingportrayals of the future or of galactic empires. SF profits from thisparalysis of the reader's critical apparatus, for when it simplifies physical,psychological, social, economic, or anthropological occurrences, thefalsifications thus produced are not immediately and unmistakablyrecognized as such. During the reading one feels instead a general distur-bance; one is dissatisfied; but because one doesn't know how it shouldhave been done, is often unable to formulate a clear and pointed criticism.For if SF is something more than just fairy-tale fiction, it has theright to neglect the fairy-tale world and its rules. It is also not realism,and therefore has the right to neglect the methods of realistic description.Its genological indefiniteness facilitates its existence, for it is supposedlynot subject to the whole range of the criteria by which literary works arenormally judged. It is not allegorical; but then it says that allegory is notits task: SF and Kafka are two quite different fields of creation. It is notrealistic, but then it is not a part of realistic literature. The future? Howoften have SF authors disclaimed any intention of making predictionsFinally, it is called the Myth of the 21st Century. But the ontologicalcharacter of myth is anti-empirical, and though a technologicalcivilization may have its myths, it cannot itself embody a myth. For myth


32/50

32 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIESis an interpretation, a comparatio, an explication, and first you must havethe object that is to be explicated. SF lives in but strives to emerge fromthis antinomical state of being.A quite general symptom of the sickness in SF can be found by com-paring the spirit in ordinary literary circles to that in SF circles. In theliterature of the contemporary scene there is today uncertainty, distrust ofall traditional narrative techniques, dissatisfaction with newly createdwork, general unrest that finds expression in ever new attempts and ex-periments; in SF, on the other hand, there is general satisfaction,contentedness, pride; and the results of such comparisons must give ussome food for thought.I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radicalchanges effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead SFinto a crisis which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more andmore apparent that the narrative structures of SF deviate more and morefrom all real processes, having been used again and again since they werefirst introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms. SFinvolves the art of putting hypothetical premises into the very complicatedstream of socio-psychological occurrences. Although this art once had itsmaster in H.G. Wells, it has been forgotten and is now lost. But it can belearned again.The quarrel between the orthodox and heterodox parts of the SFfraternity is regrettably sterile, and it is to be feared that it will remain so,for the readers that could in principle be gained for a new, better, morecomplex SF, could be won only from the ranks of the readers of main-stream literature, not from the ranks of the fans. For I do not believe thatit would be possible to read this hypothetical, non-existent, andphenomenally good SF if you had not first read all the best and most com-plex works of world literature with joy (that is, without having beenforced to read them). The revolutionary improvement of SF is thereforealways endangered by the desertion of large masses of readers. And ifneither authors nor readers wish such an event, the likelihood of apositive change in the field during the coming years must be considered asvery small, as, indeed, almost zero. For it would then be a phenomenonof the kind called in futurology "the changing of a complex trend", andsuch changes do not occur unless there are powerful factors arising out ofthe environment rather than out of the will and determination of a few in-dividuals.POSTSCRIPT. Even the best SF novels tend to show, in the developmentof the plot, variations in credibility greater than those to be found even inmediocre novels of other kinds. Although events impossible from an objec-tive-empirical standpoint (such as a man springing over a wall sevenmeters high or a woman giving birth in two instead of nine months) do notappear in non-SF novels, events equally impossible from a speculativestandpoint (such as the totally unnecessary end-game in Disch's CampConcentration) appear frequently in SF. To be sure, separating theunlikely from the likely (finding in the street a diamond the size of yourfist as opposed to finding a lost hat) is much simpler when your standardof comparison is everyday things than it is when you are concerned with


33/50

JULES VERNE AND FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM 33the consequences of fictive hypotheses. But though separating the likelyfrom the unlikely in SF is difficult, it can be mastered. The art can belearned

Documents

Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973