Science Fiction Studies
(#79 = Volume 26, Part 3 = November 1999)
ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE WELLS
William
B. Fischer. German
Theories of Science Fiction: Jean Paul, Kurd Lasswitz, and After
George
Locke. Wells in Three Volumes? A Sketch of British
Publishing in the 19th Century
Christie
V. McDonald. The Reading and Writing of Utopia
in Denis Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
atrick
Parrinder. News
From Nowhere, The Time Machine, and the Break-Up of Classical Realism
Darko
Suvin. The Alternate
Islands: A Chapter in the History of SF. With a Bibliography on the SF
of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance
PRoy
Arthur Swanson. The True, the False, and the
Truly False: Lucian's Philosophical Science Fiction.
David
Winston. Iambulus' Islands of the Sun
and Hellenistic Literary Utopias
William Fischer
German Theories of Science Fiction: Jean Paul, Kurd
Lasswitz, and After
Abstract.-- German writers have produced a major, though neglected,
body of SF and SF criticism. This essay discusses early German theories
of SF, with particular attention to Leben des Quintus Fixlein and
Vorshule
der Ästhetik by "Jean Paul" (Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825)
and a later novelist and historian of science often called the Father of
German SF: Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910), author of Auf zwei Planeten
(1897) and numerous essays, influenced by Goethe and Kant, on the aesthetics
of SF. Jean Paul wrote science-oriented fantasies and whimsical pieces,
while Lasswitz (a historian of science and teacher of mathematics, philosophy
and physics at the Gymnasium Ernestinum at Gotha) was more oriented to
new scientific discoveries. But both participated (as theoreticians and
as fiction writers) in the development of German SF, and their ideas deserve
a place in the history of SF and the methodology of SF criticism. For the
most part, the German critics exhibit a solid foundation in aesthetic theory,
an interest in philosophical and ideological discussion, a thorough knowledge
of mainstream literature, and an impressive familiarity both with German
and non-German SF.
[A response by Edward J. Tabler, and William
Fischer's reply, appear in SFS 17 (March 1979)]
George Locke
Wells in Three Volumes? A Sketch of British Publishing
in the 19th Century
Abstract.-- This brief article cannot undertake to explore every
tributary of 19th-century British publishing that may have provided an
occasional outlet for science fiction. But generally speaking, I argue
that British science fiction found its feet in the shilling shockers and
their editorial requirements of short novels, and was refined by the high
standards demanded for the high fees paid by Pearson’s Magazine,
The
Strand, and their competitors during the twenty years before the First
World War. Suppose the three-decker novel had not been killed off in the
1890s. Suppose Newnes, Pearson and Harmsworth had not revolutionized magazine
publishing in Britain at the same time. Would Wells have written all his
scientific romances? I suspect not, and venture to suggest that his SF
writing would have been confined to a few short stories, The Time Machine,
and possibly one or two other novels before he moved on to Kipps
and The History of Mr. Polly. Wells’s SF was the product of the
publishing trends of his time.
Christie V. McDonald
The Reading and Writing of Utopia in Denis Diderot's
Supplément
au voyage de Bougainville
Abstract.-- In S/Z and Barthes par lui-mème,
Roland Barthes has suggested that utopia is every writer’s province: his
task—or his pleasure—is to bestow meaning, and he cannot do this without
an alteration of values, a dialectical movement similar to that of a yes
/ no opposition. Such is the polarity between nature and culture in Diderot’s
Supplément
au voyage de Bougainville: the description of Tahiti (a "natural" society)
becomes a springboard for critique of contemporary European culture. Yet
something seems to go awry when the apparent simplicity of Diderot’s thematic
statements are not borne out on other levels of the text. In the heterogenous
and plural meanings produced within this single work, we find an acute
questioning of the relationship between utopia, the problem of origins,
and the text as writing. To ask if one has seen what Diderot wanted us
to see is to seek out a single voice in an irreducible plurality of voices,
a unity in dispersion.
Patrick Parrinder
News from Nowhere, The Time Machine and
the Break-Up of Classical Realism
Abstract.--William Morris’s News From Nowhere and H. G. Wells’s
The
Time Machine are based on a fusion of propaganda and dream. Their complexity
is due in part to generic interactions: Morris turns from the degraded
world of Dickens to create his negative image in a Nowhere of mutual trust
and mutual fulfillment. Wells writes a visionary satire on the utopian
idea that reintroduces the romantic hero as explorer and prophet of a menacing
future. Both writers were responding to the break-up of the coalition of
interests in mid-Victorian realistic fiction, and their use of fantasy
conventions asserted the place of visions and expectations in the understanding
of contemporary reality. Schematically, we may see Wells’s SF novel as
a product of the warring poles of realism and utopianism, as represented
by Dickens and Morris. More generally, to study the etiology of works such
as News From Nowhere and The Time Machine is to ask fundamental
questions about the nature and functions of literary "realism."
Lyman Tower Sargent
Themes in Utopian Fiction in English Before Wells
Abstract.-- The different forms of utopia (eutopia, dystopia, or
utopian satire) may be commonly defined as species of prose fiction describing
in some detail a non-existent society located in time and space. In all
its forms, utopia has been ill-served by scholarship. Many studies have
been published, but they have often been flawed by a lack of definitional
care and a failure to consider bibliographical problems. As a result, poor
scholarship has sometimes been canonized by other scholars who have incorrectly
assumed the accuracy of past work. Here, I indicate what themes concerned
utopians before the impact of Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells. Since there
were about 400 utopias published in English in the period under consideration,
it would be impossible to summarize each work. I therefore pass over the
few famous works that have been analyzed many times and emphasize little-known
works—from Stubbes’s "The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) through Goldsmith’s
Asem,
the Man Hater (1765) and Paulding’s "The Man-Machine, or the Pupil
of Circumstances" (1826). Eight utopias were written in English during
the sixteenth century, thirty during the seventeenth, thirty during the
eighteenth (many concerned with the consequences of excessive regulation),
and over 160 were published between 1800 and 1887. Between 1888 and 1895,
there were about the same number of utopias written as in all the previous
eighty-seven years. What happens to the utopia after Wells? No one really
knows. The twentieth-century utopia is the least studied of all, the bibliography
is the most difficult to establish, and the books are, surprisingly, often
difficult to locate.
Darko Suvin
The Alternate Islands: A Chapter in the History
of SF, with a Select Bibliography on the SF of Antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and the Renaissance
Abstract.--Using More’s "Utopia" to suggest the genre’s reaffirmation
of a world consonant to human nature, this essay surveys the earlier forms
synthesized by More—the ancient legends of Cockayne, Dante’s Divine
Comedy (More rejects the Earthly Paradise as a place outside history),
Plato’s Republic, Aristophanes’ The Birds, Iambulus, and
others. Sir Thomas More brilliantly adapts such earlier motifs, establishing
the utopian as a rounded and isolated location (valley, island, planet)
and emphasizing the inner organization of utopia as a formal, ordered system.
This system is utopia’s supreme value: there are authoritarian and libertarian
but no unorganized utopias. Following More, utopian writers describing
the coming about of a new social order assume that all such changes must
be explained in terms of the installation of a new social contract. In
the Renaissance, the contract-maker is usually a founding hero, but later
it will increasingly be a democratic revolution. Finally, following More,
utopias use a dramatic strategy that counts on surprise effects. Though
formally closed, significant utopian writings are in permanent dialogue
with their readers—open-ended, like More’s. Francis Bacon and François
Rabelais show later developments in the utopian tradition, exposing the
latent contradiction of More’s crypto-religious construction of Utopia.
After the Rabelaisian flowering, Campanella and Bacon mark a reaction against
Renaissance libertarian humanism—and the logical next step was the end
of utopia as an independent form. Having lost a fertile connection with
popular longings, utopia—for all the effort of the 18th century "state
novel"—disappears from the vanguard of European culture until Fourier and
Chernyshevsky.
Roy Arthur Swanson
The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian's
Philosophical Science Fiction
Abstract.-- Today, it is generally agreed upon that Lucian of Samosota,
the Greco-Syrian satirist of the second century A.D. who wrote literary
fantastic voyages, is an important figure in the early history of science
fiction. The substance of his contribution to this genre, however—particularly
his estimates of fiction as potentially superior to philosophy and to scientific
cognition—have not been much considered. I propose here a reading of Lucian’s
"true fictions" as truth-serving fiction: he exposes false views and misdirections
in "philosophy" and is in fact a writer of philosophical science fiction.
(The term "philosophical science fiction" is to be understood, not as referring
to sf written by a philosopher or in a philosophical vein, but as indicative,
in this case, of sf written by a satirist about philosophy.) Clarification
of the phrase "true fictions" will include commentary on the word "true"
in its Greek form and some attention to the proper translation of the title
provided for his voyages, variously rendered as "A True Story," "(The)
True History," and "True Histories." Lucian’s philosophical science fiction
suggests that philosophy and fiction are complementary explorations into
truth, but philosophy tends to claim success where fiction is content to
sustain and constantly to renew.
David Winston
Iambulus' Islands of the Sun and Hellenistic
Literary Utopias
Abstract.-- The original of Iambulus’ narrative (written sometime
between 165 and 50 BC) is not extant, and were it not for excerpts made
by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheke, we should have to rely on
two meager references in Lucian and Tzetzes. In introducing True Histories,
his parody of imaginary-voyage literature, Lucian singles out Ctesias and
Iambulus as representative. The latter, says Lucian, wrote much that was
incredible about the lands in the great sea, but, though obviously fabulous,
his story was not unpleasing. Ionnes Tzetzes (Chiliades) noted that
Iambulus wrote of round animals found in the islands of the Ethiopians,
and of double-tongued men who could converse with two different people
simultaneously. Finally, from Diodorus’ excerpt (in spite of its disorder)
we may reconstruct in some detail the form and content of this early utopian
work. In general, Greek literary genres are sharply defined, and each has
a set of themes (topoi) peculiar to itself. Conforming to this usage,
Iambulus’ work exhibits themes frequently found in Greek utopias. Indeed,
Iambulus’ main source—besides travel narratives on India—was the Greek
utopian tradition of extraordinary voyages. Shaped by his imaginative genius,
however, these disparate traditional elements became a distinct utopian
art-form that found a permanent place in European literature.
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