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Table of contents :
VOLUME 1
Contents
Publisher's Note
Contributors
List of Genres
Introduction
Science Fiction and Fantasy
A
Aegypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The Amber Series
Amnesia Moon
Animal Farm
The Anubis Gates
At the Back of the North Wind
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels
B
The Barsoom Series
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth
The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard
Blood Music
The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown
The Book of the New Sun
The Boys from Brazil
Brave New World
Bring the Jubilee
C
Camp Concentration
A Canticle for Leibowitz
A Case of Conscience
The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun
The Childe Cycle
Childhood's End
The Chronicles of Narnia
Cities in Flight
City
The Conan Series
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
The Cyberiad
Cyteen
D
The Dark Is Rising Sequence
Dark Universe
Davy
The Demolished Man
Dhalgren
The Dispossessed
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Doomsday Book
A Door into Ocean
Door Number Three
Dracula
Dreamsnake
The Dune Series
The Dying Earth Series
Dying Inside
E
E Pluribus Unicorn
Earthsea
The Einstein Intersection
The Elric Saga
The Ender Series
Engine Summer
Eon and Eternity
F
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Fahrenheit 451
The Falling Woman
The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle
The Female Man
Fire and Hemlock
A Fire upon the Deep
The Fisher King Trilogy
Flowers for Algernon
The Forever War
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
The Foundation Series
Frankenstein
G
The Gate to Women's Country
The Godhead Trilogy
Good News from Outer Space
Gravity's Rainbow
Gulliver's Travels
H
The Handmaid's Tale
The Helliconia Trilogy
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Skies
The Hobbit
Hyperborea
The Hyperion Cantos
I
I Am Legend
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
The Illustrated Man
The Incomplete Enchanter
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
The Instrumentality of Mankind
Inter Ice Age 4
Inverted World
The Invisible Man
The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Islands in the Net
J
Journey to the Center of the Earth
K
The King of Elfland's Daughter
L
The Land of Laughs
Last and First Men
The Left Hand of Darkness
Life During Wartime
Lincoln's Dreams
Little, Big
The Little Prince
The Lord of the Rings
Lud-in-the-Mist
M
Make Room! Make Room!
VOLUME 2
Contents
M
The Man in the High Castle
The Man Who Folded Himself
The Mars Trilogy
The Martian Chronicles
Martian TIme-Slip
The Merlin Trilogy
Mission of Gravity and Star Light
The Mists of Avalon
Mockingbird
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
More than Human
The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand
The Mythago Cycle
N
The Neuromancer Trilogy
Nineteen Eighty-Four
No Enemy but Time
Non-Stop
The Once and Future King
O
Only Begotten Daughter
The Orange County Trilogy
Orlando
Our Lady of Darkness
The Owl Service
P
The Paper Grail
The Patternist Series
The Phoenix and the Mirror
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Planet of the Apes
The Prydain Chronicles
The Psammead Trilogy
R
Rashomon and Other Stories
Riddle of Stars
Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers
Roderick and Roderick at Random
Rogue Moon
S
Sarah Canary
Shatterday
The Ship of Ishtar
The Sirens of Titan
Slaughterhouse-Five
Snow Crash
The Snow Queen Trilogy
Solaris
The Space Merchants and The Merchants' War
The Space Odyssey Series
The Space Trilogy
Stand on Zanzibar
Star Maker
The Stars My Destination
Stations of the Tide
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stranger in a Strange Land
Swordspoint
T
Tales from the Flat Earth
The Time Machine
Timescape
The Titus Groan Trilogy
A Touch of Sturgeon
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
U
The Unconquered Country
The Uplift Sequence
V
VALIS
Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire Tapestry
W
The War of the Worlds
War with the Newts
The Wasp Factory
Watership Down
We
Weaveworld
When Harlie Was One
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
The Wind in the Willows
Witch World
Woman on the Edge of Time
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Worm Ouroboros
A Wrinkle in Time
X
Xenogenesis
Z
Zothique
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
Timeline
Bibliography
Science Fiction and Fantasy Sites on the World Wide Web
Genre Index
Title Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Z
Author Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W
Z
Subject Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Citation preview
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
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MAGILL’S C H O I C E
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Volume 1 Aegypt — Make Room! Make Room! 1 – 342
edited by Fiona Kelleghan University of Miami
Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California
Hackensack, New Jersey
Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
Copyright © 2002, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Classics of science fiction and fantasy literature / edited by Fiona Kelleghan. p. cm. — (Magill's choice) “Plot summaries and analyses of 180 major books and series in the fields of science fiction and fantasy . . . all but eight of the essays in these volumes are taken directly from Salem Press’s four-volume Magill’s guide to science fiction and fantasy literature, which was published in 1996”—Publisher’s note. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-58765-050-9 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-051-7 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-052-5 (v. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Science fiction—Stories, plots, etc. 2. Fantasy fiction—Stories, plots, etc. I. Kelleghan, Fiona, 1965II. Magill's guide to science fiction and fantasy literature. III. Series. PN3433.4 .C565 2002 809.3'876—dc21
printed in the united states of america
2002001113
Contents Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi List of Genres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Science Fiction and Fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Aegypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 The Amber Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Amnesia Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Animal Farm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 The Anubis Gates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 At the Back of the North Wind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 The Barsoom Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Best of C. M. Kornbluth . . . . . . . . . . . The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard . . . . . Blood Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown The Book of the New Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . The Boys from Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brave New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bring the Jubilee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Camp Concentration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 A Canticle for Leibowitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 A Case of Conscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Childe Cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Childhood’s End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 The Chronicles of Narnia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Cities in Flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 The Conan Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 v
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
The Cyberiad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Cyteen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 The Dark Is Rising Sequence . . . . . . . Dark Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Davy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Demolished Man . . . . . . . . . . . Dhalgren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dispossessed . . . . . . . . . . . . . Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? . Doomsday Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Door into Ocean. . . . . . . . . . . . . Door Number Three . . . . . . . . . . . . Dracula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dreamsnake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dune Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dying Earth Series . . . . . . . . . . Dying Inside . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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119 123 126 129 132 135 138 141 144 147 149 152 155 159 163
E Pluribus Unicorn . . . Earthsea . . . . . . . . . . The Einstein Intersection The Elric Saga . . . . . . The Ender Series . . . . . Engine Summer . . . . . Eon and Eternity . . . . .
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166 169 173 176 180 184 187
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser . . . . . Fahrenheit 451 . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Falling Woman . . . . . . . . . . The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle. The Female Man . . . . . . . . . . . . Fire and Hemlock . . . . . . . . . . . A Fire upon the Deep . . . . . . . . . The Fisher King Trilogy. . . . . . . . Flowers for Algernon . . . . . . . . . The Forever War . . . . . . . . . . . . The Forgotten Beasts of Eld . . . . . The Foundation Series . . . . . . . . Frankenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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191 195 198 201 204 207 210 213 216 219 222 225 229
vi
Contents
The Gate to Women’s Country . The Godhead Trilogy . . . . . . Good News from Outer Space . Gravity’s Rainbow. . . . . . . . Gulliver’s Travels . . . . . . . .
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232 235 237 240 243
The Handmaid’s Tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Helliconia Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . Her Smoke Rose Up Forever . . . . . . . . . . The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series The Hobbit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hyperborea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Hyperion Cantos . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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246 250 253 256 260 264 267
I Am Legend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream . . . . . . . . The Illustrated Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Incomplete Enchanter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman The Instrumentality of Mankind . . . . . . . . . . Inter Ice Age 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inverted World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Invisible Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Iron Dragon’s Daughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . Islands in the Net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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271 274 277 281 285 288 291 294 297 300 303
Journey to the Center of the Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 The King of Elfland’s Daughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 The Land of Laughs . . . . . Last and First Men. . . . . . The Left Hand of Darkness. Life During Wartime . . . . Lincoln’s Dreams . . . . . . Little, Big . . . . . . . . . . . The Little Prince . . . . . . . The Lord of the Rings . . . . Lud-in-the-Mist . . . . . . .
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312 315 318 321 324 327 330 333 337
Make Room! Make Room! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 vii
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Publisher’s Note Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature is a two-volume set offering plot summaries and analyses of 180 major books and series in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. The titles it covers have been selected because they rank among the most frequently taught books in their fields in high school and undergraduate literature and cultural history courses. Articles are alphabetically arranged by titles and range from such childhood fantasy classics as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) to such pioneering science-fiction works as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and modern science-fiction and fantasy classics as Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955). Among other prominent writers whose books are covered here are science-fiction masters Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert and writers John Crowley, Ellen Kushner, and C. S. Lewis. Immediately preceding the essays is noted scholar T. A. Shippey’s broad survey of developments in the science-fiction and fantasy fields. All but eight of the essays in these volumes are taken directly from Salem Press’s four-volume Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, which was published in 1996. The rest are entirely new articles on recently published works commissioned especially for this set. Each article discusses an individual book or series and often comments on other works by the same author. Individual articles open with basic reference information in a ready-reference format: author’s name, his or her birth and death dates, identification of the work as either science fiction or fantasy, subgenre, type of work (such as drama, novel, novella, series, or story), time and location of plot, and date of first publication. The main body of each essay contains two sections of nearly equal length. The first section is entitled “The Story” and the second “Analysis.” The first section offers a brief summary of the work’s plot and identifies major characters. The “Analysis” section offers a critical interpretation of the title. This section also identifies the literary devices and themes used in the work. Readers will find several reference tools at the end of volume 2. These include an annotated bibliography and up-to-date lists of major sciencefiction and fantasy award winners. Entirely new reference tools in this set include an annotated Web site list, a time line of book titles, and a ix
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
general index. Author, title, and genre indexes are also provided to help readers find individual articles. All essays are signed by their contributors, who include academicians, freelance writers, and independent scholars. A list of their names and affiliations appears at the beginning of the first volume. Salem’s editors wish to thank them for their contributions. We wish especially to thank the set’s Editor, Fiona Kelleghan of the University of Miami, who selected the works to be covered, provided a new introduction, and made numerous contributions to the set.
x
Contributors Steve Anderson
Shawn Carruth
Ronnie Apter
Jeffrey Cass
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Concordia College
Central Michigan University
Texas A&M International University
Gerald S. Argetsinger
Christine R. Catron
Rochester Institute of Technology
St. Mary’s University
Bryan Aubrey
Karen Rose Cercone
Independent Scholar
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Neal Baker
Daryl R. Coats
Dickinson College
Martha A. Bartter
Northwestern State University of Louisiana
Karen S. Bellinfante
University of Wisconsin—Baraboo
David W. Cole
Northeast Missouri State University
Peter Crawford
Independent Scholar
Independent Scholar
Nicholas Birns
Shira Daemon
New School University
Independent Scholar
Tim Blackmore
Radford B. Davis
University of Western Ontario
Independent Scholar
Franz G. Blaha
Bill Delaney
University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Independent Scholar
Edra C. Bogle
Paul Dellinger
University of North Texas
Independent Scholar
Janice M. Bogstad
Francine Dempsey
University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire
College of St. Rose
Bernadette Lynn Bosky
Frank Dietz
Independent Scholar
University of Texas at Austin
Wendy Bousfield
Catherine Doyle
Syracuse University
Christopher Newport University
C. K. Breckenridge
Joyce Duncan
Independent Scholar
East Tennessee State University
John P. Brennan
Bernard J. Farber
Indiana University—Purdue University at Fort Wayne
Illinois Institute of Technology
Peter Brigg
James Feast
University of Guelph
David Bromige
Baruch College, City University of New York
Edmund J. Campion
Independent Scholar
David Marc Fischer
Sonoma State University
Ronald Foust
University of Tennessee
Loyola University in New Orleans xi
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
D. Douglas Fratz
Earl G. Ingersoll
Independent Scholar
Jean C. Fulton
State University of New York College, Brockport
Charles Gannon
Independent Scholar
Alex Irvine
Landmark College
Archibald E. Irwin
Fordham University
Indiana University Southeast
Tanya Gardiner-Scott
John Jacob
Mount Ida College
Northwestern University
C. A. Gardner
Daven M. Kari
Independent Scholar
California Baptist College
Gayle Gaskill
Cynthia Lee Katona
College of St. Catherine
Ohlone College
Marjorie Ginsberg
U. Milo Kaufmann
William Paterson College Independent Scholar
University of Illinois at Urbana— Champaign
Independent Scholar
Christopher Newport University
Marc Goldstein
John L. Grigsby
Kara K. Keeling
Peter C. Hall
Fiona Kelleghan
Betsy P. Harfst
Richard Kelly
June Harris
Howard A. Kerner
Darren Harris-Fain
Paul Kincaid
Donald M. Hassler
Jeff King
Len Hatfield
Katharine Kittredge
University of Miami
Independent Scholar
University of Tennessee
Kishwaukee College
Polk Community College
University of Arizona
Independent Scholar
Shawnee State University
University of North Texas
Kent State University
Ithaca College
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Dreams & Nightmares Magazine
John C. Hawley
Dennis M. Kratz
Santa Clara University
University of Texas at Dallas
Robert W. Haynes
Eugene Larson
Texas A&M International University
Pierce College
Karen Hellekson
William Laskowski
University of Kansas
Jamestown College
David Hinckley
Dianna Laurent
University of California, Riverside
Southeastern Louisiana University
John R. Holmes
Steven Lehman
Franciscan University of Steubenville
John Abbott College
Susan Hwang
Independent Scholar xii
Contributors
Rania Lisas
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Janet Alice Long
Independent Scholar
Steven R. Luebke
University of Wisconsin—River Falls
R. C. Lutz
Joseph Minne
Independent Scholar
Catherine Mintz
Independent Scholar
Trevor J. Morgan Independent Scholar
Robert E. Morsberger
University of the Pacific
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Independent Scholar
Rutgers University
Robert McClenaghan Andrew Macdonald
Loyola University, New Orleans
Edythe M. McGovern West Los Angeles College
Edgar V. McKnight, Jr. Gardner-Webb University
Kevin McNeilly
University of British Columbia
Willis E. McNelly
California State University, Fullerton
Daryl F. Mallett
Independent Scholar
Lawrence K. Mansour University of Maryland
Joseph J. Marchesani
Pennsylvania State University— McKeesport
Wayne Martindale Wheaton College
Charles E. May
California State University, Long Beach
Marvin E. Mengeling
University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh
Carole F. Meyers
Georgia Institute of Technology
Julia Meyers
Duquesne University
Joseph Milicia
University of Wisconsin—Sheboygan
Debra G. Miller
Eastern New Mexico University
Kevin P. Mulcahy Joseph M. Nassar
Rochester Institute of Technology
Keith Neilson
California State University, Fullerton
Jörg C. Neumann
University of Texas, Austin
George E. Nicholas Benedictine College
John Nizalowski Mesa State College
George T. Novotny
University of South Florida
Bruce Olsen
Alabama State University
D. Barrowman Park
Western Washington University
David Peck
California State University, Long Beach
Lawrence Person Nova Express
Jefferson M. Peters Kagoshima University
Thomas D. Petitjean, Jr.
Louisiana State University—Eunice
John R. Pfeiffer
Central Michigan University
Allene Phy-Olsen
Austin Peay State University
Clifton W. Potter, Jr. Lynchburg College
Victoria Price
Lamar University xiii
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R. Kent Rasmussen
Andrew Sprung
Alan I. Rea, Jr.
Brian Stableford
Independent Scholar
Bowling Green State University
Robert Reginald
California State University, San Bernadino
Mark Rich
Independent Scholar
Janine Rider
Mesa State College
Claire Robinson
Independent Scholar
Carl Rollyson
Baruch College, City University of New York
Michael-Anne Rubenstien Independent Scholar
Nicholas Ruddick University of Regina
Todd H. Sammons
University of Hawaii at Manoa
W. A. Senior
Broward Community College
D’Youville College
King Alfred’s College
Michael Stuprich Ithaca College
Roy Arthur Swanson
University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee
Raymond H. Thompson Acadia University
John H. Timmerman Calvin College
Jeff VanderMeer
Independent Scholar
Mary E. Virginia
Independent Scholar
Janeen Webb
Australian Catholic University
Quinn Weller
University of Indianapolis
James M. Welsh
Salisbury State University
Donna Glee Williams
Bill Sheehan
North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching
T. A. Shippey
Arizona State University
Independent Scholar St. Louis University
Charles L. P. Silet
Iowa State University
Amy Sisson
Independent Scholar
Ira Smolensky
Monmouth College
Maureen Speller
Independent Scholar
William C. Spruiell
Philip F. Williams John Wilson
Independent Scholar
Michael Witkoski
University of South Carolina
Carl B. Yoke
Kent State University
Marc Zaldivar
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Western Carolina University
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List of Genres The ready-reference top matter in each article identifies a primary genre— science fiction or fantasy—and a secondary classification of a narrower genre. Definitions of the latter classifications are provided below. Terms in small-cap type are subjects of their own entries. Alien civilization: Centers on an attempt to present an alien (nonhuman, nonartificial) intelligence or civilization. Apocalypse: Deals with the end of the world as known, often but not always through nuclear holocaust. This is a more dramatic form of the catastrophe story. Post-holocaust fiction, in contrast, discusses the aftermath of the apocalyptic event more than the event itself. Artificial intelligence: Plots deal with human-created forms of intelligence such as “thinking” computers, robots, androids, and cyborgs. Catastrophe: Usually set on Earth, involving various natural disasters and attempts to deal with them. Cautionary: Attempts to warn of some current or extrapolated danger, seriously and without amusement. May overlap with apocalypse fiction. Closed universe: Protagonists are in some type of closed environment that they perceive as natural and complete; they discover the “outside” during the plot action. Cosmic voyage: Begins with early “voyage to the moon” stories and continues through longer space travels. Cultural exploration: Works affected by anthropological theory. Cultures are different because of different cultural decisions, not different physical characteristics. Cyberpunk: Characterized by extensive use of computers or artificial intelligences, often with a state of streetwise anarchy among the protagonists. Dystopia: The opposite of utopia; an imagined world that is horrific rather than ideal. Differs from cautionary works through an element of relish or deliberate exaggeration. Evolutionary fantasy: Concerns attempts to demonstrate, disprove, or modify evolutionary theory. Some works deal with mutations. Overlaps to some extent with superbeing stories. xv
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Extrapolatory: Takes a feature of contemporary society and projects it into the future as increasingly dominant. May overlap with the cautionary story. Extrasensory powers: Characters possess some form of ESP. The society may be based on control and development of such powers. Overlaps with superbeing stories. Feminist: Characterized by a concern for altered female roles or by future gender war. Future history: Extensive histories of the future, often in series form and often cyclic. Future war: Central interest is on the nature of war rather than war as a threat or as part of the background. Galactic empire: The plot is interstellar. A future history may contain a galactic empire; the galactic empire story will not be as encompassing in its span of time. Heroic fantasy: Set in a fantasy world in which characters approach the scale of epic or romance; encompasses “sword and sorcery” plots. High fantasy: Little or no connection with the current world, set “elsewhere.” Many works of heroic fantasy are also high fantasy, but not all high fantasy is heroic fantasy. Inner space: Stresses internal alterations of consciousness rather than external technological control. Invasion story: Alien beings attack a planet. Magical Realism: A relatively realistic plot is disturbed by figures of myth or fantasy. Magical world: A type of heroic fantasy with emphasis not on characters’ quests but instead on social organization based on a technology that does not conform to current science. Medieval future: A future era reverts to medieval social structures, which then are exposed to change. These works often are set on an alien planet with civilizations of some medieval type. Mythological: Depends on the characters and settings of some established system of mythology. New Wave: Imagistic and highly metaphoric, inclined toward psychology and the soft sciences, and often similar to works of dystopia. The xvi
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New Wave, largely contained in works of the 1960’s, attempted to turn science fiction more toward mainstream literature. New Wave overlaps to a large extent with inner space fiction, and cyberpunk can be seen as a resurgence of the New Wave. Occult: A mode of fantasy characterized by interest in the practices of magic and the supernatural, often with an element of the macabre. Planetary romance: A type of heroic fantasy but with scientific trappings, often set on Venus or Mars. Post-holocaust: Set in a world recovering from a (usually nuclear) holocaust, often characterized by anarchy, mutations, and an attempt to struggle toward some form of civilization. Differs from apocalypse stories in dealing with the aftermath of the holocaust rather than the holocaust itself. Superbeing: Conjectures on the next stage of evolution, usually rejecting the idea of greater intelligence in favor of some exaggerated physical characteristic or a new form of mental power; the latter type overlaps with extrasensory power stories. Theological romance: Often involves a divinely ruled universe within the framework of a postscientific society. Such works are seen as “antiscience” fiction. Time travel: Characters are able to move forward or backward in time and often attempt to use this power to create or maintain an acceptable stream of history. Utopia: Describes an ideal society.
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Introduction The trail of the fantastic has no beginning or end. Its stories have illuminated the path of the human imagination since recorded history began. Hundreds upon hundreds of studies testify to the power of fantasy and science fiction. They are akin in some ways. The readers of one genre tend also to read in the other, and both genres are famously noted for arousing “the sense of wonder.” Fantasy—to use the term both broadly and as a caption for “high” or “epic fantasy,” which features such archetypes as wizards, royal youths of great destiny, talking animals, and eerie guides—is far older than science fiction, its progenitors stretching back to ghost civilizations: stories of the gods, folklore, mystical writings, riddles and rhymes, fairy tales of hauntings and revenge, of eldritch creatures seen in the twilight and heard in the wind. From the tunneled underworld of these ancestral roots stem the fantastic and its offshoots of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, the three having evolved with separate identifying characteristics. These volumes in the Magill’s Choice series contribute to a greater understanding of why special kinds of writing are important in excavating antiques and vestiges of the human heritage. Fantasy and science fiction shine light on the origins of our psychological and social development and throw a glow both on the obscure fragments of literatures of the past and on the course that future literatures may take. The contributors to Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature celebrate two centuries of imaginations that blur fact and fiction in creating weird perspectives and fantastic geographies, symbols neither altogether Christian nor altogether innocent—animal motifs, cosmological aspirations, the syncretistic juxtapositions between the only world we have and the worlds we wish could be. There are those who would ban the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Some concerned parents and religious leaders believe that young readers may be corrupted by tales of demons, witchcraft, and aliens. Others wish to eliminate or reinvent the terms; thus progressive authors who write within the genres want to “tear down the walls,” believing that these genres should be subsumed by a single large category, known simply as “fiction,” and so revalidated—when, in fact, hiding or eliminating them would devalue their essence. No novel of fantasy or science fiction deserves to become invisible by trivialization of the particular and peculiar excitements it has to offer. xix
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Nobody doubts the greatness of the early works of the fantastic. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.) contributed prominent elements to fantasy today, such as the journey to exotic lands, the theme of transformation, an ecology of magic, and motifs of illusions and delusions. The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic (c. 2000 b.c.e.) is our earliest example of the quest story whose hero journeys to the land of the dead, an undertaking so courageous that it still finds champions today in works as diverse as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (1972) in her Earthsea series and The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons (1989-1997). The Old English Beowulf (c. 1000) and the German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200) depict great human heroism in the face of horrific monsters. Their battle sequences, songs, descriptions of feasts and contests, dragons, treasures, and other plot-dilating feats and quests often appear in modern fantasy, from Robert E. Howard’s tales of Conan the Barbarian and the reveries of Zothique (1970) by Clark Ashton Smith (also a grandfather of science fiction) to the works of Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis and, especially, J. R. R. Tolkien, whose The Lord of the Rings trilogy (19541955) stands as perhaps the greatest literary effort of the twentieth century to spring from one mind. Science fiction is a creation of the nineteenth century, with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) towering as the first time-travel novel—a comic invention that heralded the contemporaneous, more serious works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Its ancestors include the dreamlike, deliquescent voyage to another planet in Lucian of Samosata’s True History (c. 150), the theme of man assaulting powers beyond his comprehension or control in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (c. 1588), the utopian experiment of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627), and the scientific curiosity interwoven with the satire of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It was a work of nonfiction that gave science fiction its central thematic thrust: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The explorations of evolution that fueled Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Olaf Stapledon’s stunning Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) continued to build the sense of wonder soaring through all great science fiction, including works such as Childhood’s End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein, Planet of the Apes (1963) by Pierre Boulle, the Patternist series (1976-1984) by Octavia Butler, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) by Sheri Tepper, and Islands in the Net (1988) by Bruce Sterling, to list only a few of the titles covered in these volumes. Science-fiction authors return again and again to the xx
Introduction
theme of evolution because of their great joy in playing with ideas, the sheer pleasure of turning the questioning spirit loose to ask What if? and What might we become?, in allowing an uncontrolled imagination to forge into uncharted territory, both outer space and inner space. The spray of phenomena we encounter in science fiction sets the brain aflame with revelation, offers nearly inexpressible insights into immense possibilities, evokes the beauty and anguish and exquisite pangs of one state of being glimpsing another. Mind and emotion reel in wonder at the center, yet there is no place or time that science fiction dares not rove. Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature surveys 180 of the writers who have made the most lasting contributions to these genres. Many essays and the annotated bibliographies, selected from Salem Press’s Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996), have been updated for this two-volume set. The explosive vitality of both science fiction and fantasy in bookstores and all sorts of media, from television to comic books to computer games, makes an updated version most useful to the casual reader, the library patron, or the researching scholar. Furthermore, science fiction and fantasy are found increasingly in the reading curricula of high school and college literature courses. These essays, with their easily readable format combining plot summaries with insightful analyses, are helpful to both the teacher and the student. Each author selected here fits at least one of three categories. First are those authors who made essential contributions to the development of the genres. The brilliant and prolific Brian Aldiss, British author of the multiple-award-winning Helliconia series (1982-1985), is not the first to have called Mary Shelley the mother of science fiction with her Frankenstein (1818), though Wells and Verne between them would invent nearly every plot still used a century later: alien invasion, invisibility, bioengineered sentient animals, the time-travel machine, travel to other worlds, discovery of secret spaces and lost civilizations. Verne’s glorification of technology still glows on the pages of most science fiction. Without L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Lord Dunsany, Edith Nesbit, and the “triumvirate” of the pulp Weird Tales magazine—Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith—science fiction and fantasy would not look as they do today. Second are those authors who have devoted decades to one or both of these genres, such as Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Andre Norton, and who both participated in and ruled the golden age of science fiction and the ongoing golden years of fantasy. Their prolificity has won them as much renown as the high quality of their work. xxi
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Third are the authors who contributed works whose vision was so revolutionary or sublime that they rank among the most influential writers of the twentieth century; these include Philip K. Dick, who wrote dozens of mind- and genre-altering fictions, as well as many who wrote only one or two major works which are considered of lasting influence: Stapledon, Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Lloyd Alexander, and Alfred Bester. Additions and updates include works written after the original set’s publication and those whose popularity and critical acclaim demanded their inclusion. Now the reader will find Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon (1995), Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird (1998), Tim Powers’s Fisher King Trilogy (1992-1997), Patrick O’Leary’s Door Number Three (1995), John Crowley’s still incomplete Aegypt series (1987-2000), Anne Rice’s Vampire books (1976-2001), Dick’s VALIS (1980), Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary (1991), and James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter (1990) and Godhead Trilogy (1994-1999). —Fiona Kelleghan University of Miami
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Science Fiction and Fantasy The urge to tell tales of wonder is at least as old as any records human beings possess, and almost certainly older. Although modern literary criticism tends to downplay that urge, or to assign it a lower seniority than other narrative forms, one could properly claim that there are in essence three different provinces of the realm of story, all of equal value and all of equal age. Most obvious is the urge to record what actually happened, or what people believe actually happened. This is called not story but “history.” Next is the urge to make up stories about events that did not actually happen, and about people who may be complete inventions of the storyteller. This is called “fiction,” a genre that extends from the anecdotes people still tell about things that (allegedly) happened to their (perhaps imaginary) friends all the way through to the great and developed complexity of the written novel. Third and last in this progression is the urge to tell stories not only about invented events and invented people but also about invented creatures, such as werewolves and vampires, or invented worlds, such as Middle-earth or Atlantis or the Earthly Paradise, or to tell any kind of tale that invents not only the people who exist in it but also the conditions under which they exist. Perhaps it is significant that there is no generally accepted label in our culture for this final category of story. One might suggest the word “fantasy,” a word related to both “phantom” and “fancy” and having a root meaning of “making (something) visible,” specifically imagining or making images of something that is not actually there. Fantasy, however, has an established meaning in the parlance of modern literary marketing. Part of that meaning is “not the same as science fiction,” a difference further discussed below. The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts has proposed “the fantastic” as a broader label to set against the very large categories of “history” and “fiction.” This label covers both modern fantasy and modern science fiction, taking in as well the ancestor genres of fairy tale, romance, myth, legend, ghost story, and many others. Stories of “the fantastic” may be defined as including any set in a world different from our own or that include elements recognized as alien to our own, things that are not true or not yet true. The dominant modern branches of the fantastic are fantasy and science fiction, but the fantastic includes genres older than either of them. These three very broadly defined types of story—history, fiction, and the fantastic—did not, as far as is known, develop out of one another. All
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three were present at the dawn of European literature more than two thousand years ago and no doubt existed earlier on other continents. As an example of history, one can point to Herodotus’s The History of the Persian Wars (c. 430 b.c.e.), an account of the Greek and Persian wars and all that led up to them in the fifth and sixth centuries b.c.e. For fiction, one could cite Homer’s epic poem The Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.), an account of an even older war between Greeks and Trojans, possibly with a historical basis but clearly composed to tell a story of adultery and revenge, not to list dates and events. Finally, Homer’s The Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.) is in many ways a classic example of the fantastic, with its much loved and still much imitated tales of one-eyed, man-eating giants and witches who can turn people into beasts. These three cases should provide a salutary reminder that there is no seniority in literary modes and that the fantastic, far from being a junior partner to history and fiction, is as old as either of them. The examples also show how difficult it is to keep the basic distinctions between story types absolutely clear. Many historians, Herodotus included, have been called liars and writers of fiction. By contrast, much fiction has been, and sometimes still is, thought by many people to be literally true. To switch from early Greek to early British literature, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the author of History of the Kings of Britain (1718; first published as Historia regum Britanniae, c. 1136), was dismissed as a total fabricator by some of his contemporaries, and most modern scholars have agreed with that assessment. Geoffrey’s retelling of the legend of King Arthur, however, was accepted as absolute fact by many readers from the twelfth century to the early sixteenth, when the first historian to cast serious doubt on Arthur’s reality was dismissed by English patriots as a crazy and jealous Italian. At present, books about King Arthur may be produced by professional historians, by writers of historical fiction, and by writers of the fantastic such as T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King (1958). One of the earliest references to the Arthur story is an incident that crept into real history when, in 1113, a Frenchman visiting Cornwall told a local resident that his belief that King Arthur was not dead but would return again was utter nonsense, or as one might now say, “completely fantastic.” A fracas began when the Cornishman defended the truth of his belief, and it was the fracas, not the legend, that found its way into recorded history. Arguments about literary genres usually are not taken as far as that, but the incident serves to demonstrate that one person’s fantasy may be another person’s history. Just the same, although figures such as King Arthur, Odysseus, and Beowulf may be very hard or even impossible to
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categorize, the basic idea of the three modes, with their different relationships to literal truth, remains valid. It also can be said that as time has gone by, the differences generally have become more marked and the distinctions have become clearer. One of C. S. Lewis’s characters, the scholarly Dr. Dimble in That Hideous Strength (1945), the last work of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, says at one point: if you dip into any college, or school, or parish—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren’t so sharp; and that there’s going to be a point after that time when there is even less room for indecision and choices are more momentous. . . . The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.
Dimble says this only to excuse his own side’s resurrection of Merlin from the past and its use of a kind of magic that would now be unlawful but in the old days was not yet categorized, not yet ruled out. What he says has a kind of force, however, for literary genres as well. Even the well-publicized efforts of modern avant-garde writers to mix literary genres depend for their effect on awareness of what the genres are. When it comes to fiction and the fantastic especially, and beyond them to the modern division of the fantastic into fantasy and science fiction, the tendency of present-day readers to draw sharp lines of distinction has become very strong. This is a result of the major social and psychological development that marks off modern times from all previous eras and that (however much one may complain about it) most people see as a process of continuous acceleration: The rise of science. It entirely confirms Dr. Dimble’s theory to note that although “science” is a word of great age— scientia is only the Latin word for “knowledge”—the highly specialized meaning now given to the word has been traced by the Oxford English Dictionary no further than 1725, and then not very convincingly. As late as 1834, that dictionary recorded objections to the use of the newly invented word “scientist.” Only in the later nineteenth century does one find the words “science,” “scientist,” and “scientific” being given their modern meaning. From then on, however, one can see the ideas of science and the scientific method taking hold in more and more minds, with ever increasing power, as tools for establishing human control over nature and as particularly reliable guides for systematizing some kinds of knowledge. This immense physical, mental, and semantic change has had its effect on literature, in particular on the whole realm of the fantastic and
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on its two major modern divisions of fantasy and science fiction. To consider first the history of science fiction alone, one may say in brief that as human beings began to do things in sober reality that no human being had ever done before, storytellers began to wonder what limits on novelty there were and what in the world might happen next. This impulse intersected with the ancient urge toward telling tales of wonder but also tended radically to alter it. For example, stories had been told for countless generations about raising the dead. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus calls up the ghost of Achilles to give him advice. In the Bible, one reads of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus. The first is a matter of magic, the second of religion. In Frankenstein (1818), however, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley imagines the creation of new life from the dead by scientific method, by means of a kind of electricity. The speculation nowadays would be classified as fantasy, because scientists are fairly sure that her method would not work. In Mary Shelley’s time, this cannot have been so obvious. Scientists had made the legs of dead frogs react by stimulating them electrically. Who was to say that the method could not be extended and perfected? In exactly the same way, but eighty years later, H. G. Wells in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) put forward the idea that human beings could create not life but intelligence, by taking animals and altering them surgically through “vivisection.” After his book was published, Wells carried on an indignant correspondence designed to show that his idea was not impossible but had a basis in scientific fact. Although nowadays it appears certain that he was wrong, as with Mary Shelley this was not so obvious at the time. Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), with its dinosaurs revived from blood samples, probably will pass into the same area of “disproved theses” in even less time than Mary Shelley’s or Wells’s speculations, but for the moment at least a few of his conjectures appear plausible. The point is that science fiction in particular, whether Frankenstein or The Island of Dr. Moreau or Jurassic Park, tends to follow the frontier of scientific possibility. This frontier, effectively static for hundreds if not thousands of years, expanded with growing acceleration all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its expansion has created an ever increasing area of speculation and possibility in which science fiction can flourish. Most modern definitions of science fiction accordingly make some reference both to the need for novelty and the use of the imagination (an ancient requirement of all forms of the fantastic) and to the need for logic, rigor, and control by the strict requirements of science (a distinctively modern demand). Robert Heinlein thus declared, in an essay
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printed in The Science Fiction Novel (1969), edited by Basil Davenport, that science fiction is: a realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
One notes, on one hand, words such as “speculation” and “possible,” but on the other, the words “realistic,” “adequate,” “thorough,” and “scientific.” Kingsley Amis, another distinguished practitioner in the field, asserted in his New Maps of Hell (1961) that: Science Fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world that we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extraterrestrial in origin.
There is a sense in this definition that Amis is rather “hedging his bet” by careful use of the term “pseudo,” and one can see why. Who is to say that the science of Jurassic Park is not as unreal as that of Frankenstein? Nevertheless, one sees once again the element of “not-truth” (“could not arise in the world that we know,” emphasis added), qualified and even opposed by “science,” “technology,” “innovation,” and “hypothesized.” One can sum up both Heinlein and Amis, and most other definitions of the genre, by saying that science fiction takes place in a world or setting that its contemporary readers know for certain is not true but that they are also prepared to accept as not impossible. It may seem that this last requirement acts as a kind of restraint on the imagination, but to think that is to ignore the deep and powerful effect that real scientific innovation has had on the lives and attitudes of many modern readers. It is, after all, still possible for living memory to reach back to a time when it was generally accepted that human beings would never be able to fly. Many old people of the late twentieth century, as well as most of the early writers of American science fiction, grew up in a world that swept with unbelievable speed from the Wright brothers’ flight in 1903 to dueling fighter planes in 1915, to transatlantic flights in 1919 and thousand-bomber raids in 1943, and then on to the Enola Gay— which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945—the Strategic Air Command, everyday commercial traffic, and supersonic passenger jets. In the same way, the very idea of “wireless” transmission seemed in its beginnings eerie, almost ghostly, in the way that radio waves could be transmitted invisibly, impalpably, and apparently with nothing for
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them to transmit through. Technological advance led in quick succession to the radio becoming a normal household appliance, followed in turn by television and satellite links, accompanied by all the innovations of film technology from the first “cinema” to modern video. It has been remarked often by science-fiction writers themselves that although many of them had imagined the first flight to the moon, none of them had ever thought that the first flight would be watched live on television by a mass world audience. In such cases, the progress of science outstripped even the range of imagination. One result has been the creation of a mass audience sensitized to the idea of unpredictable but nevertheless possible, or plausible, technological change. The modern subgenre of “cyberpunk” could not exist without an audience aware of the progress from vacuum tube to transistor to silicon chip, and from the giant computers of older science fiction, such as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), to the personal computers of today, the Internet, and the “hacker culture” that technology instantly if inadvertently created. Science fiction thus differs from its ancestor forms of the past, such as the “utopia” or the “imaginary voyage,” in containing within itself an element of belief, or at any rate something stronger than the “suspended disbelief” of older theories of ordinary fiction. Many, if not most, sciencefiction readers firmly believe that there are alien intelligent races, simply because of what astronomy seems to say about the number of stars and planets in the real universe. It does not follow that one needs to believe that any of these races has contacted humans, and many popular stories of UFOs would be met with some scorn as scientifically implausible. One might note the way in which intelligent Martians have drifted slowly out of the area of plausibility, or possible belief, as astronomy and space probes have increased knowledge of the planet Mars. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) drew on the theories of his own time, which saw Mars as an Earth-like but ancient and hence further-evolved planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series, beginning in 1917 with A Princess of Mars, added to that the idea of reduced gravity and hence greater strength and speed for his Earth-born human hero. By the time of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), both these scenarios had become untenable, and the Mars of Robinson’s imagination (which is also that of contemporary knowledge) is a different, less populated, but not less fascinating place. Scientific progress once again has ruled out some speculations and at the same time created completely different ones. Although these too may one day be ruled out in their turn, the Mars trilogy, like The War of the Worlds or A Princess of Mars, will remain science fiction as originally conceived, drawing on a deep well of belief
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and real knowledge, though such knowledge is always known and admitted to be incomplete. Science fiction’s modern companion genre, fantasy, has been less obviously but no less deeply affected by the triumph of rationalism and the accelerating awareness of science. It might seem that stories about dragons could be much the same in modern times as in the tenth century. Indeed, Smaug, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), has an ancestry that stretches back to the Norse Fafnir and the nameless dragon that is the bane of Beowulf in the epic that carries his name, dating from about the eleventh century. Even if the creatures are the same, however, the context of belief in which they are embedded cannot help being different. To put it simply, although people find it much easier now to believe in voyages to Mars, they find it much less easy to believe in the existence of dragons on Earth. To the audiences of Old Norse or Old English poems, it might not seem at all impossible that dragons existed, perhaps somewhere outside the rather small patch of territory they had explored. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a work every bit as historical in its intentions as Herodotus’s, and one that remains highly respected by modern historians, nevertheless records the appearance of flying dragons in Northumbria in the year 793 and shows no sign of intending to be “fantastic.” The case is quite different now. It is reasonably certain that there are no canals on Mars, but it is 100 percent certain that there are no dragons (as traditionally described) on Earth. The world is too well explored to leave a place for them. In any case, the sheer mechanics of imagining a beast that could breathe fire, somehow insulate its own internal organs, and also find a means of ignition appears impossible. This has not prevented author after author from trying to create a situation in which the impossible dragon of tradition could become possible, whether through Tolkien’s device of distancing the creature into a far-past world where all kinds of things appear to be different or Ursula Le Guin’s method of creating “a world where magic works,” governed, it seems, by a different set of physical laws. Both Tolkien and Le Guin were well aware that they could not simply bring a dragon into the story and expect the skeptical and well-informed modern reader to accept it as a fact. If one wishes to continue to use the creatures of humanity’s oldest fears and imaginings—such as dragons, elves, werewolves, and vampires—these creatures have to be given some kind of explanation, some kind of apparently rational setting. At the very least, the challenge of rationality has to be faced, not ignored. One can say, then, that if science fiction deals with what is known not
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to be true, but not known to be beyond possibility, fantasy in its modern sense deals with what is known or very generally thought to be impossible. A common method of doing this is to set the tale in a different universe or an alternative reality, as is done in Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (1977-1983). One should note that this is not the same as setting it on an alien planet within this universe, for in that case the laws of physical causation as understood would still apply. In a different universe, the world and the characters may be ruled by magic, not science, and the problem (as, for example, in L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Incomplete Enchanter series, 1941-1954) may be for the characters to understand the different logic of magic. Despite the appearance of Norse gods, giants, enchanters, werewolves, and other such beings, de Camp and Pratt’s universe does run on logic: It is only the premises of the logic that have changed. Works of this nature demonstrate at once both the urge to escape from the confines of the real and accepted and an inability to let go of the cause-and-effect beliefs so thoroughly part of modern everyday life. Modern definitions of fantasy accordingly often find difficulty in being both broad enough to take in what is an extremely prolific genre and narrow enough to say anything useful. It is hard to improve on Kathryn Hume’s statement, in her book Fantasy and Mimesis (1984), that “Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable variations.” This definition, however, needs to be filled out by a long discussion of the “variations” and leaves open the distinction between ancient examples of the fantastic such as The Odyssey and its modern mutations. To understand the latter point, one needs only to look at some fantasy works. The fantastic is an ancient mode; fantasy (at least as defined by bookstores) is a modern genre. As a result, one often can find pairs or comparisons, with a traditional work of a kind that goes back to antiquity on one hand, and on the other a self-conscious modern version of the same thing. Thus, ghost stories are as old as literature, and no doubt older, but in the nineteenth century M. R. James (a famous classical scholar) still was capable of exploiting the ancient fears from his great depth of learning. Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man (1969) also is very clearly a ghost story, but one that cannot rely on old assumptions about the afterlife and one whose agnostic hero finds it hard to have any belief in the afterlife at all. Argument about the very nature of ghosts and of religious belief becomes, accordingly, a vital part of Amis’s tale. In a similar way, Baron Münchausen’s Narrative (1785) represents the old “traveler’s tale” or “tall story.” These are re-created in Sterling
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Lanier’s Brigadier Ffellowes stories (collected in 1972 and 1986), made plausible not only by their far-off settings but also by the cool and matter-of-fact narrative of the brigadier himself. Both Dracula (1897) and Frankenstein are rewritten by Brian Aldiss; Kenneth Grahame’s animal fable of The Wind in the Willows (1908) is reshaped by modern knowledge of ecology and animal behavior in Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972); Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, and Jane Yolen have created among them a new genre of modern (and often both feminist and Freudian) fairy tale, related but also ideologically opposed to old tales like those of the Brothers Grimm; the almost contextless romance narratives of William Morris and E. R. Eddison are pulled firmly into shape with maps, calendars, languages, and appendices by Tolkien; traditional ballad is made into realistic narrative by Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer (1990) and Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock (1985). In all these cases, one can see a sense of argument, of explanation, one might almost say of discipline, falling on the old genres that once had no need to justify themselves. That sense of discipline parallels the growth of science fiction, as Unknown was for a while the partner fantasy magazine to science fiction’s Astounding (note the implications of the two adjectives), and as joint audience interest created twin-track publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (still in existence) and Science Fantasy (unfortunately extinct). Modern fantasy authors in particular are often eager to model their work on, to rewrite, or to reply to works of the past in which they see some element of the fantastic. John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) is a retelling of the Old English epic of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster, not the hero; T. H. White’s The Once and Future King passionately rehandles the story of Sir Thomas Malory’s Middle English romance Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1469); the medieval Welsh anthology of wonder-tales known as The Mabinogion provides the basis for Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) and for several other modern works; and the de Camp and Pratt Incomplete Enchanter series works its way through settings as diverse as the Icelandic Prose Edda, the Finnish Kalevala, Irish mythology, and English and Italian romantic epic. The existence of horror stories indirectly raises an interesting question. Why are so many people prepared to write and to read pure fantasy in the modern day, when “consensus reality” is so strong and readers in a way have to be coaxed outside it? The answer, in the case of horror stories, is clear. These stories have an obvious motivation, which is to frighten their readers, duplicating in literary form the controlled fear of, for example, a fairground ride. Science fiction also can justify itself eas-
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ily, as an “early warning system” or education in possibility. But fantasy? Is it not a kind of nostalgia, a reluctance to let go of old images, perhaps learned and loved in childhood, before the defenses of skepticism were raised? Arguments against this “escapist” accusation are common and powerful. It has been pointed out that authors as different as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula Le Guin, and Stephen Donaldson and Gene Wolfe are all clearly addressing through their fantasies (just as much as through their works of science fiction) such grim and vital issues for the twentieth century and beyond as the origins of evil, the nature of war, and the future of the planet—topics that seem to be outside the scope of realistic fiction. It is also possible that “heroic fantasy” in particular—a mode that seemed dead until revived by Tolkien but now perhaps is among the most commercially successful and popular form of writing to be found in America—draws its impetus from deliberate rejection of the prevailingly unheroic, ironic, self-doubting attitudes of much realistic fiction: It is not an escape so much as a defiance. What cannot be denied is the present competitiveness, one might almost say dominance, of the current fantasy/science-fiction field. Hundreds or thousands of titles are published each year in each genre. Some authors—among them Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Eddings, and Terry Brooks—figure consistently in best-seller lists. Both science fiction and fantasy have made the transition to film and television, with series as popular as Star Trek and Star Wars. In a more academic mode, authors such as Angela Carter are recognized subjects of study in universities across the world. Science fiction especially has been an immensely influential vehicle for feminist thought, through authors such as Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy, and James Tiptree, Jr. (the pen name of Alice Sheldon). Experimental writing is represented by such tours de force as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980). Furthermore, in this situation of commercial success and commercial exploitation, although the line between fantasy and science fiction remains in most cases clear, there is a sense of continuous probing of the boundaries of both forms by several authors, prominent among them Tim Powers, Michael Swanwick, and Gene Wolfe. At the same time, if there is a shift of weight discernible, it is on the whole from science fiction toward fantasy. A number of established “hard science fiction” authors, among them Gordon R. Dickson, Orson Scott Card, and Piers Anthony, have shown themselves ready to move sideways into the writing of fantasy. Commercial considerations likely play a part in this move, but one may well believe that in the same way that science fiction
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earned public respect and won its way to literary favor through the middle of the twentieth century, so practitioners of fantasy have shown the world what can be done within that genre toward the end of the century, making their case not by argument but by example. There is a further and final point that may be made about the nature of both modern genres, fantasy and science fiction, and about their joint relationship to the dominating principle of science. This is that there are many disciplines that aspire to the dignity of being scientific. The core disciplines remain, no doubt, physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics: No one doubts that these, and their modern offshoots or specializations such as genetics and astronomy, are sciences in every sense of the term. At the other extreme, traditional humanities subjects such as history and literary study have ceased, after a sometimes brief flirtation with “scientificity,” to make any claims of this nature. There remain what are often described as the “soft sciences,” which include sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and others. It is not often realized how fertile some of these fields have been for creative writers, nor how radically new they may be, developing over much the same relatively short period as the “hard sciences.” Just as one could see an “epistemic break” or major transformation between, say, medieval alchemy and modern chemistry, or medieval astrology and modern astronomy, so there are clear developments from the ancient habits of treasure hunting and grave robbing to systematic archaeology; from dilettante ethnography to modern anthropology; from belletristic philology to the nineteenth century science of comparative philology and through it to computational linguistics; from the antiquarian sketching of stones and monuments to the recovery of hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and the code-breaking ability to read totally lost and forgotten scripts such as Cretan “Linear B.” All these “soft sciences” have provided major inspiration for creative writers. The dream of inventing the mathematical hard science of “psychohistory” is at the heart of Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation series. Ursula K. (for Kroeber) Le Guin is herself the daughter of two of the most prominent American anthropologists of the twentieth century, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. Tolkien has a fair claim to being one of the most influential ancient philologists of the twentieth century, even disregarding the effect of his fantasies. The power and lure of archaeology (a subject that filled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with glittering discoveries from Mycenae to Babylon to Ur and Egypt’s Valley of the Tombs) have given inspiration to authors as different as H. P. Lovecraft, Gregory Benford, and Larry Niven.
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Perhaps the most dramatic development of recent years has been the sudden interest taken in the idea of alternative (or alternate) history, an idea that goes back at least as far as 1931, when the American novelist Winston Churchill wrote his provocatively titled essay “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” and that has led to such complex works as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953), and Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (1976). In the late 1990’s, more than a dozen well-known authors were working busily in the field, including at least one prominent American politician (Newt Gingrich) and the prolific Harry Turtledove, once a professional historian. Is this particular subgenre fantasy or science fiction? If one looks at Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) or L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (1941), one would probably decide for fantasy: Neither work makes any serious effort to explain how the modern-day heroes find themselves suddenly “back in the past.” Both of them, however, and Turtledove’s stories as well, show a keen interest in the history of technology that gives them a claim to “not impossible” status. In cases such as these, the distinctions between fantasy and science fiction, between hard and soft sciences, lose their usual force. One may add that such works also are a powerful argument against a kind of ethnocentrism that could be called “chronocentrism,” the belief that the way history did happen is the only way it could have happened, that the arrow of time points unerringly and inevitably to the world as it stands. Both science fiction and fantasy functioned during the twentieth century, and continue to function during the twenty-first, as major explanatory tools that have provided meaning and insight to millions of readers, often about vital issues such as the origins of war and the nature of humanity, and often to readers who have been failed by all older and more traditional forms of writing (such as history and mainstream fiction). They also can be seen as the main indicators of radical shifts of attitude and understanding in the population at large. In the process, they have acted as powerful if unrecognized forces against prejudice and ethnocentrism, and they have served as guides to and recruiters for both hard and soft sciences. It has been acknowledged many times that there would have been no ventures into space, no moon landings or planetary flybys, without the stimulus of decades of space fiction. Both fantasy and science fiction have opened unexplored territories of the imagination. —T. A. Shippey
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Aegypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania Pierce Moffett abandons his academic career to write a quasihistorical book on a kind of magic practiced in the Renaissance
Author: John Crowley (1942) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The twentieth century and late sixteenth century Location: The eastern United States and Europe First published: Aegypt (1987), Love and Sleep (1994), and Daemonomania (2000) The Story Aegypt (also published as The Solitudes), Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania are the first three installments of Crowley’s projected four-volume novel (collectively entitled Aegypt) that concerns myth, history, Gnostic religious philosophy, and Renaissance magic. Its governing theme—which is exhaustively explored and restated throughout the text—is that there is more than one history of the world. Aegypt chronicles Pierce Moffett’s escape to a rural life in the Catskills from his life in New York City and an unsatisfying academic career. Love and Sleep takes the reader forward to the next stage in Pierce’s various types of research, both into historical accounts and into himself, to understand the “time when the world worked differently.” It begins by chronicling Pierce’s personal history as a boy growing up in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee in the early 1950’s. Stories are included about historical figures of the late sixteenth century, including Giordano Bruno, who is credited with discovering the concept of infinity, and the scientist/philosopher/magician Doctor John Dee. Daemonomania follows Pierce, Dee, and Bruno through their respective “passage times,” periods of infinite possibility in which the world moves from what it has been to what it will eventually become. Aegypt mentions Pierce’s childhood and Doctor Dee’s research with two short prologues. Primarily, however, it narrates the quest begun in Pierce’s thirties. He sets out in the first section to interview for a teaching
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position at a small college in upstate New York. The bus he has taken breaks down, and he skips the interview to stay with Spofford, a former student who is now a shepherd in the small town of Blackbury Jambs. Pierce decides that he wants to stay, then briefly returns to the city to sell a book proposal to a former girlfriend. He can then settle in Blackbury Jambs to write a popular account of the epistemological break between the medieval and the modern periods, times of religious, magical, and scientific fervor. He meets Spofford’s girlfriend, Rosie, and another woman, Rose, both of whom will help him in his quest. Aegypt focuses on Rosie; her husband Mike, whom she is in the process of divorcing; their small daughter, Sam; and their uncle, Boney Rasmussen. Rosie hires Pierce to work for Boney’s foundation and put in order the papers of a deceased novelist, Fellowes Kraft (an allusion to Fellowescraft, the second level of masonry), who also worked for the foundation. Among Kraft’s papers, Pierce discovers an unfinished work that matches his proposed book. Aegypt ends with his having created his project for the foundation but trying to decide what to do about his own book. Love and Sleep continues the story of Pierce’s book by documenting his motivations. The first thirteen chapters of part 1 narrate two years of Pierce’s boyhood in the early 1950’s, when he lived with his mother in the Cumberland Mountains. The focus is on his experiences with his cousins, mountain people alternately endowed and devastated by mining operations, and on his relationship to books and to Roman Catholic doctrine, all equally fantastic to him. The second section introduces the sixteenth century through texts of Fellowes Kraft read by Rosie Rasmussen and Pierce himself in the late 1970’s. As Rosie and Pierce read, Pierce attempts to use the magical forces of Doctor Dee and his medium, Kelley, for his own purposes. Pierce appears to be a disturbed individual who uses his research for the foundation, which is simultaneously research for his own book, to satisfy lusts of spiritual and physical kinds. His discovery that a lost land of Aegypt may be responsible for the survival of magic in the modern world is confirmed for him (if not for the reader) by his analysis of accumulated personal occurrences. He notes that he “accidentally” ended up in Blackbury Jambs, home of Fellowes Kraft, whose novels he read as a child; that he was once sexually involved with a crazy gypsy (he takes “gypsy” as derived from the magical Aegypt); and that he finds himself editing the manuscript of a book by Kraft corresponding to the book he plans to write. A third story, of Giordano Bruno, Doctor Dee, Rudolph II, and other historical figures from the sixteenth century, carries the reader into Pierce’s and Fellowes Kraft’s research in an immediate sense. Pierce
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learns enough of Dee’s magic, he believes, to use the sexual energy of “coldly performed love” with the “other” Rose (Ryder) to create for himself a barely corporeal son and an incestuous (if imaginary) relationship, slipping further into his parallel world of magic. This novel ends with a section titled “Valetudo,” which can be translated as ill health or health. Both Pierce and his friends fear for his mental health. His only solution is to wait for the next big change in “the way the world works” so that his self-created succubus will leave him. In Daemonomania, the tone of the narrative grows progressively darker, as the characters struggle to find their way through an increasingly chaotic world. John Dee, deserted by the angels who promised him divine revelation, travels from London to Prague and then back, where he dies— alone and largely forgotten—at his English country home of Mortlake. Giordano Bruno continues to develop his heretical philosophies, gradually moving toward an enigmatic encounter with the Office of the Inquisition in Rome. In the twentieth century sections, Pierce and Rosie Rasmussen find themselves in conflict with an overbearing faith-healing cult called the Powerhouse. Pierce loses his lover, Rose Ryder, to the blandishments of the cult, while Rosie—whose former husband, Mike Mucho, is a fanatical convert—nearly loses her daughter Sam in a hotly contested custody fight. The effort to free Sam from the controlling forces of the Powerhouse—an effort in which Pierce plays a pivotal role—provides Daemonomania with its dramatic and symbolic climax, as Crowley reveals in typically oblique fashion that Sam’s fate and the fate of the world are inextricably linked. As the novel ends, that wildly unstable world stands poised on the edge of irreversible change. Analysis These novels amply reward reading and rereading. Their structural details magnificently contribute to the experience of a story that is never completely told, only implied. The narrative is in third person, shifting among several characters and always unreliable, leaving much to delight a careful reader. Upon rereading, one discovers that seemingly unrelated episodes are, in fact, closely intertwined. This is apparent in the juxtaposition of narratives about the early 1580’s and later 1970’s and those concerning the lives of Giordano Bruno and Pierce Moffett. There are many reviews of John Crowley’s books but few critical articles about Crowley himself, although he has been many times nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards (which he won for Little, Big in 1981) and the American Book Award (for which he was nominated for Engine Summer in 1979 and which he won for Little, Big in 1981).
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His later novels are different in tone from Little, Big but share ideas with that book. Little, Big also plays off the city of New York and the Catskills, but where that novel validates a magical dimension to the universe, grounded in Rosicrucians and Theosophists, the Aegypt novels sidestep the question while maintaining the tension. These three novels offer a more sobering and intellectual reading experience that amply repays a reader’s attention but also demands much more of it. Each of the Aegypt books is divided into three sections, each of which is given the title of a house of the zodiac: Vita, Lucrum, and Fratres in Aegypt; Genitor, Nati, and Valetudo in Love and Sleep; and Uxor, Mors, and Pietas in Daemonomania. The houses of the zodiac are explained by both the local astrologer, Val, and a writer from the 1620’s, Fludd. The discussion of the zodiac typifies the elaborate game the reader must play if the secrets of these books are to be unlocked. These secrets are revealed as Pierce himself searches for some confirmation of his book’s theme, that once the world worked differently and that the last time a change occurred was at the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He believes that the world is again in the midst of such a radical change. He also searches for magical powers that were available to historical figures so that he can put them to personal use, but his misuse of these magical powers leads him to the brink of psychological collapse. The historical chapters provide a surprising amount of genuine historical detail. Each gives a nonscientific interpretation of events of the time and is linked to contemporary events. For example, England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 is known to have been aided by an unexpected wind, but the narration insists that there are no firsthand accounts of this wind. One of Kraft’s books suggests that the wind was caused by demons conjured up by Doctor Dee. This historical occurrence is then mirrored in the cold and winds of 1977-1978 in the Catskills. The sum of these illusions re-creates an experience of Pierce’s journey. Both Love and Sleep and Daemonomania were written long after Aegypt and provide sufficient background to be accessible on their own. Still, the books are best read together and in sequence, for Aegypt is a single, hugely ambitious novel. Although many of its secrets are still concealed and its final shape still hidden from view—this grand, allusive work is clearly one of the most intricate, erudite, stylistically assured novels in the field of modern fantasy literature. —Janice M. Bogstad —Updated by Bill Sheehan
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass A young girl explores a bizarre world that lies underground and an equally strange land that lies on the other side of the looking-glass
Author: Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) Genre: Fantasy—alien civilization Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Undefined, in dreamlands Location: Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land First published: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871 but dated 1872) The Story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an outgrowth of Lewis Carroll’s earlier and shorter tale titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which he based on a story he told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters during a boat trip they took in 1862. Carroll completed this story, written in longhand and illustrated with his own drawings, in 1863. In 1864, he gave the manuscript to Alice as a gift. Revised and expanded by Carroll and newly illustrated by John Tenniel, this work evolved into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the following year. While listening to her older sister reading aloud, Alice drifts off to sleep and begins her dream adventures. She follows a white rabbit and falls down his hole into Wonderland. Alice is constantly at odds with the creatures who inhabit this alien world and also with her own body, which shrinks when she drinks from a mysterious bottle, then grows to enormous size when she eats a small cake. She encounters many creatures endowed with wit and cleverness, who confuse her at every turn. She meets the ugly Duchess, whose baby turns into a pig in Alice’s arms. Things are not what they seem. It is at the Duchess’s house that she first sees the unsettling Cheshire Cat, who sits in the corner grinning, with his eyes fixed on Alice. Later, the Cheshire Cat reappears on a tree branch, from which he demonstrates his ability to vanish, leaving only his eerie smile lingering in the air. At the Mad Tea-Party, Alice must exchange witty remarks and insults
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Lewis Carroll. (Library of Congress)
with the Hatter and March Hare, an experience that further challenges her sense of time and logic. It is always six o’clock, always teatime, at this table. The threatening nature of Wonderland is reinforced in the garden scene, dominated by the raucous Queen of Hearts, who continually shouts “Off with her head!” The threat becomes problematic, however, when the executioner is summoned to cut off the disembodied head of the Cheshire Cat. Alice’s last adventure is at the trial of the Knave of Hearts, who is accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. The Queen calls for the defendant to be sentenced before the jury submits its verdict, and it soon becomes
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clear that the law itself is on trial. Outraged at the absurd form of justice she witnesses, Alice asserts, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” With that exclamation, she annihilates Wonderland as if by magic, and she emerges from her strange dream. In Through the Looking-Glass (which carries the subtitle And What Alice Found There), Carroll again frames his story as a dreamlike experience, but this time he presents a world that is controlled by the rules of a chess game. Alice enters the geometrical landscape, which is laid out like a chessboard, as a pawn. During her movement across the board en route to becoming a queen, she may converse only with the chess figures on adjacent squares. Among the many memorable characters she engages are the White Queen, from whom she learns the advantages of living backward in time; the battling Lion and Unicorn; the pompous Humpty Dumpty; the bullying Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who tell Alice that she is merely an object in the Red King’s dream; and the eccentric White Knight. After Alice bids farewell to the White Knight, in a scene that may represent Carroll’s adieu to Alice Liddell as she reached puberty, Alice goes on to become queen. In terms of the chess game, the pawn has become a queen, and in human terms, Alice’s final move suggests her coming of age. It is at this point that she wakes from her dream and is left wondering who dreamed it all, herself or the Red King. Analysis Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland presents a world in which everything, including Alice’s own body size, is in a state of flux. She is treated rudely, bullied, asked questions that have no answers, and denied answers to her own questions. Her recitations of poems turn into parodies, a baby turns into a pig, and a cat turns into a grin. The essence of time and space is called into question, and her romantic notion of an idyllic garden of life turns out to be a paper wasteland. In order to escape that oppressive and disorienting vision, she finally denies it with her outcry, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” and happily reenters the morally intelligible and emotionally comfortable world of her sister, who sits next to her on the green banks of a river in a civilized Victorian countryside. The assaults on Alice’s senses of order, stability, and proper manners wrought by such characters as the Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the March Hare make it clear that Wonderland is not the promised land, a place of sleepy fulfillment. Rather, Wonderland stimulates the senses and the mind. It is a monde fatale, one that seduces Alice (and the reader)
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to seek new sights, new conversations, and new ideas, but it never satisfies her. Conventional meaning, understanding, and the fulfillment that comes with illumination are constantly denied her. That is the secret of Wonderland: Its disorienting and compelling attractions make it a Wanderland and Alice herself an addicted, unfulfilled wanderer. Significantly, she is presented with a stimulating, alluring vision early in her adventures. Alice finds a tiny golden key that opens a door that leads to a small passage. As she kneels and looks along the passage, she sees a beautiful garden with bright flowers and cool fountains. She is too large, however, to fit through the door and enter the attractive garden. Alice’s dream garden suggests an adult’s longing for lost innocence and youth, and her desire to enter it invests the place with imagined significance. Later, when she goes into the garden, it loses its romantic aspect. In fact, it turns out to be a parodic Garden of Life, for the roses are painted, the people are playing cards, and the death-cry “Off with her head!” echoes throughout the croquet grounds. Alice’s dream garden is an excellent example of Carroll’s paradoxical duality. Like Alice, he is possessed by a romantic vision of an edenic
The Mad Hatter’s tea party. John Tenniel’s illustrations for the first edition set the “look” for most future illustrated books and film adaptations.
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childhood more desirable than his own fallen world, but it is a vision that he knows is corrupted inevitably by adult sin and sexuality. He thus allows Alice’s romantic dream of the garden to fill her with hope and joy for a time, but he later tramples that pastoral vision with the fury of the beheading Queen and the artificiality of the flowers and inhabitants. Through the Looking-Glass abandons the fluidity and chaos of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for artifice and strict determinism. In the first book, the emphasis is on Alice’s adventures and what happens to her on the experiential level. In the sequel, Alice’s movements are controlled strictly by the precise rules of a chess game. The giddy freedom she enjoyed in Wonderland is exchanged for a ruthless determinism, as she and the other chess pieces are manipulated by some unseen hand. Whereas Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland undermines Alice’s sense of time, space, and commonsensical logic, Through the Looking-Glass questions her very reality. Tweedledum and Tweedledee express the Berkeleian view that all material objects, including Alice herself, are only “sorts of things” in the mind of the sleeping Red King (God). If the Red King were to wake from his dreaming, they warn Alice, she would disappear. Alice, it would seem, is a mere fiction shaped by a dreaming mind that threatens her with annihilation. The ultimate question of what is real and what is dream, however, is never resolved in the book. In fact, the story ends with the perplexing question of who dreamed it all—Alice or the Red King? Presumably, Alice dreamed of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on. The question of dream versus reality is appropriately set forth in terms of an infinite regression through mirror facing mirror. The apprehension of reality is indefinitely deferred, and the only reality may be one’s thoughts and their well-ordered expression. In the final chapter, Alice, having become Queen, asserts her human authority against the controlling powers of the chessboard and brings both the intricate game and the story to an end. In chess terms, Alice has captured the Red Queen and checkmates the sleeping Red King. In human terms, she has grown up and entered that fated condition of puberty, at which point Carroll dismisses his dream child once and for all from his remarkable fiction. —Richard Kelly
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The Amber Series In Amber, a world of magic that can be reached from Earth by “traveling through shadows,” members of the royal family fight among themselves for control of the kingdom and the worlds it controls
Author: Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Contemporary on Earth and undefined but resembling medieval Earth on a variety of alternative worlds Location: Earth, Amber, and the lands in between First published: The Chronicles of Amber (1979; two-volume set including Nine Princes in Amber, 1970; The Guns of Avalon, 1972; Sign of the Unicorn, 1975; The Hand of Oberon, 1976; and The Courts of Chaos, 1978), Trumps of Doom (1985), Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight of Shadows (1989), and Prince of Chaos (1991) The Story The story of Amber is told in two cycles, consisting of ten novels. The tale is extremely complex, written over a span of twenty years, and involves dozens of principal characters who are related in various ways. Amber is depicted as the “real world”; all other worlds, including contemporary Earth, are shadows cast by that reality. It is a world of magic and swordplay ruled by members of a bickering royal family who form temporary alliances and then regularly betray one another. Outside Amber, the characters “travel through shadows” by creating differences in reality as they walk, ride horses, and occasionally even drive cars. Physical laws are different in the various worlds; a motor vehicle, for example, would be useless in Amber. The first cycle, contained in The Chronicles of Amber, tells the story of Corwin, Prince of Amber. He is the son of King Oberon, who has disappeared. Corwin finds himself in a hospital in New York State, apparently injured in a car accident. He thinks of himself as Carl Corey and has little memory of his past. Gradually, he learns that there is more to his past than an ordinary earthly existence. His first clue is the discovery of a pack of tarot cards that includes trumps with the pictures of
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Corwin and his brothers and sisters. Eventually, he is contacted by his brother Random and brought back to Amber, where he learns about the Pattern. The Pattern is a mazelike series of twisting trails that can be walked safely only by a member of the royal family. Corwin learns that he is in great danger. His brother Eric is trying to claim the throne of Amber and has placed Corwin on the Shadow Earth (contemporary Earth) to get him out of the way. Corwin therefore walks the pattern in Rebma, a mirror image of Amber under the sea, as a means of regaining his memory. He then faces Eric, who for a brief period has managed to seize the throne. The rest of the first cycle is concerned mainly with various intrigues in the Court of Amber and the opposition of the Courts of Chaos, which stand at the opposite end of the shadows from Amber. Along the way, Corwin meets Dworkin, a mad but powerful wizard. It becomes apparent that Dworkin is the oldest member of the House of Amber and creator of the Pattern. The Pattern has been damaged, and Dworkin’s madness is a direct reflection of that damage. The final showdown occurs at the Courts of Chaos, where Brand, the evil prince who has been responsible for much of the bloodshed within the royal family, is killed after wresting the Jewel of Judgment, a powerful charm that Dworkin used to create the original Pattern, from Corwin. Brand falls into a deep abyss still carrying the Jewel. The Unicorn, a mythical symbol of Amber, appears with the Jewel around his horn and presents it to Random, indicating that he, not Corwin, is to be King of Amber. The second cycle, beginning with Trumps of Doom, follows the adventures of Merlin, the son of Corwin of Amber, and Dara, a princess of Chaos. He is one of few who have walked both the Pattern of Amber and the Logrus, its equivalent at the Courts of Chaos. He is a computer programmer in San Francisco on the Shadow Earth and has built a new computer, called the Ghost Wheel, that will not work. Merlin is content in contemporary Earth but is forced back to Amber when repeated attempts are made on his life. The second series ends with another visit to the Courts of Chaos, which is seen from the inside. There, Merlin finds the answer to his many questions, and the Ghost Wheel finally is put into operation. The story is left open-ended. Because of the nature of the worlds involved and the differing time schemes in the various shadows, the series could continue indefinitely.
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Analysis The concept of parallel worlds is common in fantastic literature. Isaac Asimov used this idea in The End of Eternity (1955), though his method was science fictional rather than magical. C. S. Lewis created an alternative world in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), a series of children’s fantasies with an overt Christian message. More recently, Stephen King embarked on an alternative world epic, the Dark Tower series, begun in 1982 and incorporating elements of horror. Perhaps the most unusual concept in the Amber series is the ability of some of the characters not only to travel freely among the alternative worlds but also to create new ones in the process. When a prince of Amber travels through shadows, he does so by changing reality bit by bit. The characters speak various languages and have various identities in the worlds they choose to inhabit. It is also possible for a shadow walker to bring materials from one world into another. In Amber, gunpowder is useless. Corwin, however, discovers that in the shadow world of Avalon, there is a type of jeweler’s rouge that is benign in that world (and contemporary Earth) but highly explosive in Amber. He travels to a shadow world much like Earth except that South Africa has not been colonized by Europeans. There, he easily collects uncut diamonds, which he uses in the Europe of contemporary Earth to buy automatic weapons. He then has these weapons loaded with bullets propelled by the material from Avalon. With these weapons, he saves Castle Amber from invaders. Unlike most fantasies, the Amber series is not a conflict between good and evil; rather, the fight is between order, represented by Amber, and chaos, represented by the Courts of Chaos. Underlying this theme is a strong suggestion that both Amber and Chaos are projections of something deeper and that one cannot exist without the other. Certainly, there are many characters who owe allegiance to both places. The most obvious is Merlin, who is searching for his father, Corwin of Amber, but was reared in the Courts of Chaos. The ultimate reality of the situation remains elusive. At several points, various characters have glimpses of the “True Amber,” of which Amber itself seems to be a shadow. There is a mythological assumption that the Houses of Amber and Chaos both spring from Dworkin and the Unicorn. The fate of Amber literally dictates the fate of the universe. All other worlds are shadows of Amber; therefore, if Amber is destroyed, all other places will be destroyed as well. A final point concerns religious undertones. Although there are no references to gods as such, the Unicorn is more than an ordinary animal,
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and the princes of Amber themselves appear to be effectively immortal. Like the ancient Greek gods, they can be killed violently, but they do not appear to age as ordinary humans do, and they have amazing powers of regeneration. Corwin was first exiled to Earth during the Middle Ages, where he survived an outbreak of bubonic plague. In modern New York, he is still, to all appearances, a young man. Amber owes many of its parts to sources from ancient legends and mythology to modern science fiction. The Amber books, for example, incorporate elements of time travel and use fantastic weapons. Sir Lancelot makes a brief appearance in The Guns of Avalon, and both Oberon and Merlin have names stemming from ancient legends. Roger Zelazny has written many stories, varying from “sword and sorcery” tales to hard science fiction involving spaceships and alien worlds. In most cases, the distinctions between reality and fantasy, and between science and legend, are blurred. In the ten books that make up the Amber series, this is especially evident. —Marc Goldstein
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Amnesia Moon A character named Chaos wrestles with the disintegration of reality and the possibility that he may have the power to help end it
Author: Jonathan Lethem (1964) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Near future Location: Western United States First published: 1995 The Story Chaos lives in Hatfork, a Wyoming town struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Hatfork exists under the sway of a tyrant named Kellogg, whose dreams infiltrate the sleep of everyone who lives there. Impatient with the stagnation of the town, Chaos leaves with a young mutant girl named Melinda. Chaos and Melinda encounter several pockets of society, each with different reactions to and explanations of what happened after the nuclear war, and each with different receptivity to the dreams of Chaos and others. In the mountains, they meet a group of people living in an opaque fog who call Chaos “Moon,” thereby reminding him of an earlier identity. Here Chaos/Moon begins to recover fragments of his life before the changes, which are no longer attributed to a nuclear war. The people in the fog pour their energy into researching ways to see through the fog, and they grow hostile when Chaos begins transmitting Kellogg’s dreams into their territory. Moon and Melinda then move on, only to discover the McDonaldians, who make hamburgers in an abandoned town and strictly adhere to long-irrelevant policies. Their next encounter occurs in the desert, when a strange machine drops a paint bomb on their solarpowered car, which consequently dies near Vacaville, California. Vacaville is controlled by a Luck Board, which hands out jobs and houses in a system based on individual scores on a “luck test.” The government of Vacaville also generates television programming starring only government officials. Moon and Melinda stay with Edie and her children Ray and Dave. Their arrival sparks the unwelcome interest of Cooley, a Government Star. Meanwhile, Moon’s powerful dreams, ap-
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parently capable of broadcasting over long distances, attract an old friend to Vacaville. Moon then heads to San Francisco hoping to find Gwen, a past love, about whom he has been dreaming. There he becomes the focus of a plot to use his dreaming power to reclaim a single, unified reality. Many theories are exchanged about the causes of the reality breakdown, among them the idea that an alien invasion explains the strange machine that bombed Moon’s car in the California desert. Moon flees San Francisco and heads back into the desert, and the puzzle of the reality breakdown is never solved. Analysis This journey of discovery is part American road novel, part ironic Americana, and part homage to Philip K. Dick. Lethem takes tremendous pleasure in overturning American obsessions to discover what lies beneath, often only to discover yet something else to overturn. At the beginning of Amnesia Moon, Chaos is merely a flunky in a town full of flunkies controlled by Kellogg’s dreams. By the end, he may be the sole hope of recovering a lost unified American culture. However, the novel suggests that even if he could dream a new America, the overriding story that his dreams would provide might not be better than the patchwork tyrannies of Hatfork, Vacaville, and San Francisco. The science-fictional aspects of the book are in some ways grafted on, in the same way that Philip K. Dick often hid deeply serious speculations about reality behind cartoonish rockets-and-rayguns storylines. No irrefutable evidence exists in Lethem’s narrative that there has actually been either a nuclear war or an alien invasion, and most of the characters do not care what has caused society’s breakdown. The explanations invented by those characters who do care provide the science-fictional aspects of Amnesia Moon. On some levels, the book is an absurdist fable, continually peeling away layers of reality with no real end or real answers in sight. At the close of the book, when Moon sees one of the strange machines that earlier paint-bombed his car, it may be human guerrillas warring with aliens—or it may be a local manifestation of someone’s dream—or it may be an aspect of Moon’s own dreams, dreams which remain mysteri-
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ous to Moon throughout the story. Is Moon creating all of what he sees? Where are the boundaries between dreamer and dream, and between Moon’s dreams and the dreams of others? Lethem’s novel avoids providing concrete answers, while taking readers on a ride through a bizarre yet oddly familiar America. —Alex Irvine
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Animal Farm The animals of Manor Farm drive off the farmer who owns it and establish a community in which all animals are supposed to be equal, but their ideal state is corrupted when some animals prove to be “more equal than others”
Author: George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950) Genre: Fantasy—animal fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The mid-twentieth century Location: England First published: 1945 The Story A prizewinning boar named Major has a dream that he shares with the other animals of Manor Farm one night after the drunken farmer who owns the farm, Mr. Jones, has fallen asleep. Major advises the animals to reject misery and slavery and to rebel against Man, “the only real enemy we have.” The rebellion, on Midsummer’s Eve, drives Mr. Jones and his men off the farm. Major draws up Seven Commandments of Animalism to govern the newly named Animal Farm, stipulating that “whoever goes on two legs is our enemy,” that “all animals are equal,” and that they shall not wear clothes, sleep in beds, drink alcohol, or kill any other animal. The pigs quickly assume a supervisory position to run the farm, and two of them, Snowball and Napoleon, become leaders after the death of old Major. Factions develop, and Napoleon conspires against Snowball after the animals defeat an attempt by Mr. Jones and the neighboring farmers to recover the farm at the Battle of the Cowshed. Snowball is a brilliant debater and a visionary who wants to modernize the farm by building a windmill that will provide electrification. Two parties are formed, supporting “Snowball and the three-day week” and “Napoleon and the full manger.” Meanwhile, the pigs reserve special privileges for themselves, such as consuming milk and apples that are not shared with the others. Napoleon raises nine pups to become his guard dogs. After they have grown, his “palace guard” drives Snowball into exile, clearing the way
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for Napoleon’s dictatorship. Napoleon simplifies the Seven Commandments into one slogan: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” With the help of Squealer, his propagandist, Napoleon discredits Snowball’s bravery and leadership in the Battle of the Cowshed and claims as his own the scheme to build a windmill. Every subsequent misfortune is then blamed on Snowball. Thereafter, the animals work like slaves, with Napoleon as the tyrant in charge. Gradually the pigs take on more human traits and move into the farmhouse. Before long, they begin sleeping in beds and consuming alcohol. George Orwell. (Library of Congress) Napoleon organizes a purge, sets his dogs on four dissenting pigs who question his command, and has them bear false witness against the absent Snowball. He then has the dogs kill them, violating one of the Seven Commandments, which are slyly emended to cover the contingencies of Napoleon’s rule and his desires for creature comforts. Eventually, Napoleon enters into a political pact with one neighboring farmer, Pilkington, against the other, Frederick, whose men invade Animal Farm with guns and blow up the windmill. Working to rebuild the windmill, the brave workhorse Boxer collapses. He is sent heartlessly to the glue factory by Napoleon, who could have allowed Boxer simply to retire. All the principles of the rebellion eventually are corrupted and overturned. Finally, the pigs begin to walk on their hind legs, and all the Seven Commandments ultimately are reduced to a single one: “All Animals Are Equal, but Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” The pigs become indistinguishable from the men who own the neighboring farms, and the animals are no better off than they were under human control.
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Analysis Of George Orwell’s six novels, the two most famous, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were both written during the decade preceding his death. This animal fable is a political allegory of the Russian Revolution. The allegory, as various critics have demonstrated, has exact counterparts to the events and leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, the October Revolution, and the development of the Soviet Union into a dictatorship under the control of Joseph Stalin. The animals are led by the teachings of old Major, whose historical counterpart is Karl Marx. Snowball, the theoretician, represents Leon Trotsky, and it is Snowball who organizes the rebellion against Farmer Jones, who represents capitalism. Another swine, Napoleon, representing Joseph Stalin, discredits Snowball with the help of his propagandist, Squealer. Napoleon organizes a counterrevolution with the help of his guard dogs (the state police or palace guards, in terms of the allegory) and drives Snowball into exile (as happened with Trotsky), then plays one neighbor, Frederick (Adolf Hitler), against the other, Pilkington (a Churchillian Tory), paralleling the events of World War II. Orwell explained his motive for writing the book in a special preface he wrote for the Ukrainian edition. He intended to expose the transformation of the Soviet Union from socialism “into a hierarchical state, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.” Ultimately, the democratic principles of Animalism as defined by old Major are redefined as the totalitarian principles of Napoleon, and the Seven Commandments are changed to accommodate Napoleon’s reign of terror, particularly the two words added at the end of one central commandment to make it read, “No animal shall kill another animal without cause.” This barnyard fantasy demonstrates how an ideal state founded on humane principles easily can be corrupted by the real world. Brutal tyrants driven by greed and ambition may lie and cheat to achieve their own selfish ends. The novel is distinguished by its clarity of style and the apparent simplicity of its narration, which has made it a classic that can be read on one level by younger readers for its story content and on other, more sophisticated levels by those interested in its political thesis. It has become a model of political allegory, a small masterpiece that speaks eloquently to the turmoil of the twentieth century. —James M. Welsh
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The Anubis Gates Brendan Doyle, a poet and historian, joins a jaunt back to the eighteenth century that turns deadly and permanent
Author: Tim Powers (1952) Genre: Fantasy—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1684, 1802, 1810-1811, 1846, and 1983 Location: London, England, and Cairo, Egypt First published: 1983 The Story In The Anubis Gates, Professor Brendan Doyle is hired to give a lecture on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and then attend an 1810 lecture by Coleridge. The book’s title refers to a set of holes in spacetime, created by worshipers of Anubis. Doyle and his party, led by millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, use one of these gates to travel to 1810. As they are leaving, Doyle is kidnapped by Dr. Romany, one of two sorcerers who created the gates. Romany takes Doyle to his camp to be tortured, but Doyle escapes. Penniless and hungry, Doyle discovers that begging is the only employment for which he is fit. Romany has enlisted the beggar and thief guilds, led by Horrabin the Clown, to look for Doyle, but the beggars with whom Doyle falls in hate Horrabin and hide Doyle. Romany nevertheless finds him, and Doyle is forced to flee, escaping with the assistance of a young beggar named Jacky Snapp (actually a woman, Jacqueline Elizabeth Tichy, in disguise). Doyle hopes to meet William Ashbless, a nineteenth century poet Doyle studied back in the twentieth century, and get some assistance. Ashbless never shows up where his biography claimed he wrote his first published poem, so Doyle angrily writes the poem himself from memory. Doyle meets Dog-Face Joe, Romany’s former partner, who is possessed by Anubis and cursed with ever-growing fur. Joe uses magic to trade bodies when the fur gets ahead of the razor, and he poisons his old bodies so they cannot tell tales. Joe switches bodies with Doyle, but Doyle survives. He realizes that his new body fits the description of William Ashbless, who apparently never existed, so Doyle becomes Ashbless. Doyle goes after Romany but is accidentally carried with the
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sorcerer through a gate to 1684. Doyle severely injures Romany and returns to 1810 alone. Meanwhile, Darrow finally finds Dog-Face Joe, which is why he traveled to 1810: He wants to live forever. Joe will transfer Darrow into a succession of bodies, and Darrow figures to secretly own the entire world by 1983. Joe swaps bodies with Darrow, however, killing him. Joe is then killed by Jacky, who has been tracking him to avenge the murder of her fiancé. Dr. Romany turns out to be a ka, a magical clone. The original, Dr. Romanelli, arrives in England, kidnaps Doyle, and takes him to Cairo. Doyle escapes and flees to England, but Romanelli recaptures him, along with Jacky and Coleridge. Romanelli tortures Doyle but is interrupted by a revolt of Horrabin’s “Mistakes,” the offspring of magically enhanced vivisection experiments. Romanelli flees with the dying Doyle to the underground river on which Ra sails the Sektet boat each night. Romanelli plans to ride the boat until dawn, when the Sun God is reborn, along with any passengers deemed worthy. Romanelli’s soul fails the test, however, and it is Doyle who rides the boat through the healing dawn. He meets Jacky sitting by the Thames and discovers that she is his future bride: Jacqueline Tichy married William Ashbless. They live happily together for many years, and the book ends when Doyle is attacked by the ka drawn many years before. Doyle kills the ka (which history has assumed was Ashbless) and begins a life that, for the first time in many years, will be a surprise to him. Analysis One of Tim Powers’s finest novels, this book won the 1984 Philip K. Dick Award. Its fast pacing, one of Powers’s hallmarks, never lets up from beginning to end. Highlights include further insights into the nature of a magical paradigm that was first outlined in The Drawing of the Dark (1979) and was used in On Stranger Tides (1987). Powers’s theory of magic includes some engaging twists on old myths. For example, the power of a mage’s real name presumably derives from its reflection of the mage’s inner being. Thus, when a sorcerer undergoes a major personality change, his or her true name changes as well. An important theme in this book is the gradual fading of magic. In Powers’s schema, magic fades before the light of Christianity. As the last strongholds of magic-working religions are overwhelmed during the nineteenth century, magic gradually vanishes. As part of this process, the universe is transformed from a magical world to a scientific one. For example, until 1810, the sun actually was carried by Ra underground in
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a fabulous boat. By the end of the story, however, the underground channel has vanished, and the sun has become the ball of burning gas it is today. This is a delightful way to work the paradigm shift. In Powers’s sixth novel, Last Call (1992), he uses a different paradigm involving the tarot and nonfading magic. Powers brought the grotesque simile, another of his trademarks, to fantastic heights in this book. In one example, he describes a character’s “blank smile returning to his face like something dead floating to the surface of a pond.” The plot of The Anubis Gates is similar to those of some of Powers’s other novels. The protagonist encounters a problem, struggles against it, and gives himself up to drugs and denial but pulls himself together in the end. In this book, the “problem” that Doyle cannot face is the death of his first wife, and he is well on the way to becoming an alcoholic wreck in the first chapter. Being dumped into the nineteenth century in the midst of a struggle for mastery of the world seems to be what Doyle needs to take his mind off his misery. An interesting facet of this book is the treatment of immortality. The Egyptian Master is more than forty-three hundred years old and is senile. His two servants, Romanelli and Amenophis Fikee, millennia old themselves, trudge through the same ruts they seem to have occupied since they reached adulthood. Extended life does not bring enhanced wisdom, and one is compelled to pity the doomed sorcerers even while loathing them. J. Cochran Darrow, the wealthy sponsor of the time trip, has personal immortality as his ultimate goal. This obsession destroys him and leads the reader to pity him. Powers’s treatment of immortality strongly resembles that of Barry Hughart in the Master Li series. —David C. Kopaska-Merkel
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At the Back of the North Wind A little boy named Diamond is befriended by the North Wind and finds in her an escape from poverty and disease into a world beyond pain and suffering
Author: George MacDonald (1824-1905) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The nineteenth century Location: London and Kent, England First published: 1871 (serial form; Good Words for the Young, 1868-1870) The Story At the Back of the North Wind was first published in installments, with the first appearing in November, 1868, and others from November, 1869, to October, 1870. This work, George MacDonald’s first full-length children’s story, has been reasonably popular. The story begins with a little boy named Diamond who is growing up in poverty. He is the son of a gracious coachman named Joseph, who is married to a kindly woman named Martha. Joseph works for the Colemans, who are kind enough in manners but not very generous in paying their employees, who live meagerly in the weatherbeaten room above the coach house. Mr. Coleman’s speculation in questionable business matters eventually leads to his ruin and descent into near poverty. This state of hardship improves Mr. Coleman’s character but makes life even more difficult for Diamond and his family. Diamond’s family goes through many trials as he is befriended by the North Wind and goes on adventures with her. She first meets him while he is sleeping in his bed in the hayloft. She coaxes him to join her for flights into the night. Diamond is often uncertain whether he has actually been outside during the night or has only been dreaming. On these trips with the North Wind, he meets a little girl named Nanny whom he befriends and later helps. Diamond learns that the North Wind destroys ships and chimneys as well as rescuing people. He is troubled by her seeming dual nature but learns to accept both sides of her. Diamond’s own health is uncertain at times, and he is sent to his aunt’s home in Sandwich on the seaside. From
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this home he takes an adventure all the way to the back of the North Wind, or at least to a picture of it, as he later learns. For seven days, he lingers near death before returning to consciousness. Some time after Diamond has recovered, he returns with his mother and her new baby to a home in the mews near London. Joseph is working for himself now and using his favorite horse from Mr. Coleman’s estate, the horse for whom Diamond had been named. Diamond proves to be a helpful child, even taking over the family business when his father falls ill. While working, he meets Mr. Raymond, a man who loves children and stories and encourages Diamond to learn how to read. With Mr. Raymond’s help, Diamond rescues Nanny from sickness and seemingly certain death. Mr. Raymond later gives Joseph the task of watching Ruby, a lazy horse who needs exercising, while Mr. Raymond spends three months on the Continent. When Mr. Raymond returns from vacation, he has a new bride with him and invites Joseph and his family to move to the country in Kent and serve as the Raymonds’ hired help. There the family enjoys great comfort and some prosperity. Diamond seems lonely, however, in spite of friends such as Nanny and her friend Jim. Diamond takes a few more trips with the North Wind and finally makes a last journey to the back of the North Wind. He dies in peace. Analysis Like many of MacDonald’s fantasy works, At the Back of the North Wind evolves organically, with many loose ends and an unexplained conclusion. As his first full-length story specifically written for children, this work embodies many small messages for the young, much like his earlier work Phantastes (1858), supposedly written for adults. If a distinction between his writings for children and those for adults is difficult to draw, this is so because, as MacDonald declared, he did “not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” Two of MacDonald’s later fantasy works for children, The Princess and the Goblin (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1882), also proved to be popular for a time. MacDonald’s fantasy work bears some resemblance to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), an author with whom MacDonald often corresponded. Throughout At the Back of the North Wind, MacDonald introduces themes such as the value of kindness, cheerfulness in spite of poverty, and helping one’s parents. The North Wind introduces the little boy Diamond to the harsh realities of life and leads him to understand that a positive attitude and selfless pattern of living will help everyone to endure the hardships of life more easily. Although they are not mentioned
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directly, much of this book emphasizes Christian values and Victorian ideals. The values of hard work, honesty, selflessness, and loving patience are all abundantly evident in the life of Diamond. He is sometimes teasingly called “God’s baby” because his line of thinking is so different from that of other people. His good conduct makes the other coachmen feel ashamed of their cussing and mean ways. These qualities of goodness in Diamond are prompted by his trip to the back of the North Wind, where he learns to be gracious and kind. Even Nanny, Diamond’s spiteful friend, learns to be kinder by her dream trips guided by the North Wind while she recovers from a serious illness. The strength of this novel lies in its imaginative presentation of difficult theological problems, such as providence or the hand of God as represented by the North Wind. The trials of daily life are seen as being potentially useful if people are selfless. What is less strong in this novel is the repeated use of lyrics, which are more chatty than interesting and purposeful. These verses do little to convey the beauty of the back of the North Wind, with which Diamond has fallen in love. Another weakness is the use of a lead character, Diamond, who seems too good for life. Like many of MacDonald’s works, this one feels overly long, yet it is full of intriguing perspectives and imaginative treatments of the commonplace. —Daven M. Kari
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At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels In the primary novella, an expedition to Antarctica discovers the remains of a great alien civilization; other works describe various horrors
Author: H(oward) P(hillips) Lovecraft (1890-1937) Genre: Science fiction—occult Type of work: Collected works Time of plot: The 1920’s and 1930’s Location: New England and Antarctica First published: 1964 (corrected edition, 1985; contains At the Mountains of Madness, 1936; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 1941; “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” 1920; “The Shunned House,” 1937; “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” 1933; “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” 1948; “The Silver Key,” 1939; and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” 1934, written with E. Hoffman Price) The Story At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, which contains the title novella and several of H. P. Lovecraft’s longer tales, was first published in 1964 by Arkham House, the Sauk City, Wisconsin, publishing house created in 1939 by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth for the primary purpose of making Lovecraft’s work generally available to the American public. Until then, Lovecraft’s tales had appeared only in the pages of such “pulp fiction” magazines as Weird Tales and were known to relatively few readers. By the 1950’s, however, thanks to the efforts of Wandrei, Derleth, and other loyal members of the Lovecraft “circle,” Lovecraft generally was recognized as one of the finest twentieth century American writers of horror fiction. Although Lovecraft tried his hand at many kinds of horror story, he is best remembered for his tales of cosmic horror based on the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. These dozen or so tales, which include both At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, employ a common background: the idea that Earth was inhabited for eons before the appearance of humans by a race of extraterrestrial/other-dimensional
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beings whose tremendous powers dwarf those of humankind. These beings, which Lovecraft calls the Old Ones, continue to exist both outside the earthly dimensions inhabited by humans and, more threateningly, in crypts hidden deep within the planet’s surface or below the oceans’ waters. Under the right circumstances, with the aid of forbidden knowledge gained from such books as the dreaded (but wholly fictitious) Necronomicon, they can be called back. Although Lovecraft’s linguistic style—with its excessive use of adjectives and arcane spellings—might well be termed idiosyncratic, it is difficult, even among those tales employing the Cthulhu Mythos, to identify any “typical” Lovecraft plot. At the Mountains of Madness tells of a scientific expedition sent by Lovecraft’s fictional Miskatonic University to explore Antarctica, whereas “The Dreams in the Witch-House” is the story of a college student’s macabre dreams while rooming in a reputedly haunted house. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward concerns a student in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, who is possessed by the malevolent spirit of his ancestor, a seventeenth century wizard. Certain threads do seem to run through most of Lovecraft’s fiction. There is, for example, the nature of the “cosmic” horror on which he so often depends. Rather than being actively evil, Lovecraft’s Old Ones are more frequently indifferent, oblivious to such insignificant creatures as humans and completely uncaring. The creatures in At the Mountains of Madness, for example, are certainly repulsive—in fact, they very nearly defy description—but what makes them truly horrifying is their seeming disdain for human life. This aspect of his creations sets Lovecraft apart from other writers of horror fiction. The Old Ones’ behavior toward humans usually lacks either calculation or ill will. They behave exactly as humans might toward ants: Those that get in their way are crushed, without explanation or apology. Traditional religious symbols offer no protection, nor do prayers or more conventional weapons. The characters in Lovecraft’s tales seem, for the most part, to be cut from similar fabric. With very few exceptions, they are decidedly ordinary and nonheroic. By profession, they are often scientists and antiquarians, who often are stereotyped as cold and emotionless. Whatever victories they achieve seem at best equivocal and temporary. Lovecraft’s universe, in which humanity’s role is so minor as to be irrelevant, allows for little more. Analysis Since Lovecraft’s death in 1937, his fiction has gained steadily in popularity and critical prestige. This is hardly surprising, for his work, taken
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as a whole, possesses a strange but undeniable power, in large part because he avoids the standard horror fare of vampires, ghouls, and werewolves. He concentrates instead on creating a sense of horror that is as much intellectual and spiritual as visceral. There are few “chase” scenes in Lovecraft’s work and few of the battles to the death between heroes and monsters that readers have come to expect from modern writers of horror fiction such as Stephen King. What readers experience instead is a gradually increasing sense of horror grounded in the awareness that the universe is not at all as people traditionally have conceived it. Humans are not the center of this or any other universe; they are mere specks of sentient matter protected only by their own ignorance and relative insignificance. All that knowledge finally can provide, as several of Lovecraft’s narrators explain, is horror too great to bear. A further strategy Lovecraft employs involves denying his characters the conventional props of religion and science. Lovecraft himself was a professed atheist, and his stories usually are set within a larger framework that might be called existential. The God of Judeo-Christian tradition is wholly absent, rendering moot the question of divine assistance in combating the monstrous creatures of Lovecraft’s imagination. His characters neither seek God’s help nor seem to expect it. In “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), perhaps Lovecraft’s best-known story, several Miskatonic professors turn not to the Bible for help in foiling an evil plan to open the gates between dimensions, but to the Necronomicon. Science, constructed as it is from a mistaken view of the universe, is likewise of no real use. In fact, as the scientist-narrator tells readers at the beginning of At the Mountains of Madness, science’s wisest course might be ”to deter the exploring world in general” from uncovering more evidence of humankind’s true place in the universe. —Michael Stuprich
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The Barsoom Series John Carter, a Civil War veteran, journeys to Mars in a series of outof-body experiences and establishes himself as one of the most respected warriors on the red planet
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) Genre: Science fiction—planetary romance Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Location: Earth and Mars First published: A Princess of Mars (1917; serial form, as by Norman Bean, “Under the Moons of Mars,” All-Story Magazine, 1912), The Gods of Mars (1918; serial form, All-Story Magazine, 1913), The Warlord of Mars (1919; serial form, All-Story Magazine, 1913-1914), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920; serial form, All-Story Weekly, 1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1928), A Fighting Man of Mars (1931), Swords of Mars (1936), Synthetic Men of Mars (1940), Llana of Gathol (1948; serial form, Amazing Stories, 1941), and John Carter of Mars (1964; serial form, Amazing Stories, 1941-1943) The Story Although the Barsoom series was written over a long period of time and spans a long time in its internal chronology, Edgar Rice Burroughs sustained his narrative by creating a plot line that chronicled the adventures of a family, not one individual. Through eleven novels, originally serialized in popular science-fiction magazines, the history of Mars is traced from ancient times to the present. Seeking to recoup his fortunes after the defeat of the Confederacy, John Carter leaves Virginia to prospect for gold in Arizona. While trying to rescue his partner, who has been ambushed by Apaches, Carter is trapped in a cave by the same warriors, undergoes an out-of-body experience, and awakes on Mars. A Princess of Mars initiates a series of amazing adventures. After being captured by a band of Tharks, the four-armed green men of Barsoom, the native name of Mars, Carter wins their admiration by strength of arms. Accepted into this warrior culture, he masters their language and encounters another captive, Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, a beautiful woman
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of the red Martian race. Carter falls in love with the princess, whom he rescues. They marry, and for nine years their happiness is complete. Then, while trying to save the system that stabilizes the atmospherem of Mars, Carter collapses. When he awakes, he is again in the cave. After willing himself to return to Barsoom, Carter begins his adventures anew in The Gods of Mars. As he reveals the hypocrisy in the Martian religion, Carter encounters carnivorous plant-men, vicious white apes, the white race, and finally the black race of Mars. After an absence of a decade, Carter is surprised and delighted to find his son, Carthoris, who is almost grown. They escape death only to discover Dejah Thoris trapped in an impregnable prison. Having delivered the Martians from the religion that had duped uncounted generations, Carter rescues his beloved in The Warlord of Mars. While seeking Dejah Thoris, he encounters the yellow race of Mars, overthrows a tyranny more pernicious than any he had yet encountered, and is proclaimed Warlord of Barsoom. Thuvia, Maid of Mars is a love story that relates the adventures of Carthoris. Thuvia, princess of Ptarth, is kidnapped by a rejected suitor who frames Carthoris with the crime, but Carthoris proves his innocence and wins his bride after a series of harrowing adventures. Tara of Helium, the daughter of Carter and Dejah Thoris, is the heroine of The Chessmen of Mars. After she lands her damaged aircraft in a violent windstorm, Tara begins a series of adventures that include her capture by the inhabitants of the city of Manator, who play jetan, the Martian version of chess, to the death with living beings. Through the same tenacity shown by the other members of her family, Tara overcomes all difficulties. Inspired by Carter’s example, Ulysses Paxton escapes from the trenches of World War I and awakes in the clinic of Ras Thavas, the Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Library of Congress) title character of The Master
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Mind of Mars, who has perfected a technique for transplanting organs— including the brain—from one human to another. When an evil ruler purchases the body of the woman whom Paxton loves, the Earthman embarks on a successful quest to rescue his beloved. A Fighting Man of Mars relates the quest of Tan Hadron, who saves Mars while trying to rescue the woman he loves from a power-crazed warlord. Absent from this narrative are the philosophical speculations that form an important part of The Gods of Mars and The Master Mind of Mars. This tale is pure adventure. Swords of Mars is fascinating not merely for the swashbuckling exploits found in all the Barsoom novels but also for the introduction of an artificial brain capable of guiding a Martian airborne vessel. After Dejah Thoris is injured in an accident, Carter seeks Ras Thavas, the mastermind of Mars, who is unfortunately the prisoner of his own creations, a group of artificial humans. Following a series of harrowing escapades, Synthetic Men of Mars concludes with the treatment and recovery of Dejah Thoris. In Llana of Gathol, Carter encounters a race of white men who have lived in secret for ages in one of the ruined cities of Mars. His discovery of this race sets in motion a number of exploits that lead him across the face of the planet. He ends his adventure by delivering the city of Gathol from Hin Abtol, a would-be conqueror from the frozen wastes of Barsoom. In the final volume, John Carter of Mars, the red planet is threatened by a gigantic white ape that is the creation of a scientist gone mad. The Warlord of Mars once again delivers his adopted home from destruction. Analysis With the publication of A Princess of Mars, his first novel, Burroughs began a series that would have a profound effect on the development of the genre of science fiction. Each volume originally was serialized in a popular journal, and Burroughs did not alter the episodic quality of his Barsoom stories when they were published as separate works. The record of the deeds of John Carter and his family have endured partly because the reader encounters ideas and concepts that are usually the purview of philosophers and theologians. Many of the carefully crafted details in the stories might initially shock, but as a whole they become essential ingredients in the creation of a vision of another world that still captures the imagination. Burroughs is as successful as Jules Verne in predicting the shape of things to come, and his vision of the moral dilemmas that haunt his own century is both extraordinary and frightening.
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Having deposited his hero on the surface of Mars, Burroughs casually mentions that Carter is naked—in fact, all Martians, male and female, prefer that state. The only accessories they wear are decorative harnesses and belts that provide protection and denote their status and accomplishments. By discarding the external adornments that occupy significant attention in other works of science fiction, Burroughs is able to concentrate on the internal habiliments of his characters. He is more concerned with the psychological than the fashionable. Because Carter accepts nudity as normal, the reader also tolerates this altered state of being. Burroughs also deals with Martian sexuality by revealing the fact that the women of Barsoom do not bear their young alive but instead lay eggs that take years to mature. Sex for the average Martian takes a poor second to the favorite preoccupation of violence. Peace and tranquillity are almost unknown to the inhabitants of Barsoom. The moment they fight their way out of their shells, they are ready for conflict. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of brutality in each and every story. Slavery is an accepted part of life. It is nonracial and is the potential fate of both sexes and all ranks, from rulers to commoners. Carter embraces the life of the warrior and revels in it from the first page to the last; however, gratuitous violence and unwarranted cruelty are punished by Martian hubris because they are not part of the code of the warrior. In his sometimes stirring prose, Burroughs captures a rather unflattering reflection of his own world and its obsession with honor, duty, and war. The discussion of race and religion is subtle and masterful. Each group of Martians boasts superiority only to be superseded by another. The green race is dismissed by the red as inferior, only to be labeled by the white with a similar epithet. Blacks dismiss whites only to be regarded as mediocre by the yellow inhabitants of Mars. Each racial division is equally deceived by the ancient religion of Barsoom, which is but a cult of death. The triumph of Carter over the superstition embraced by the inhabitants of his adopted world may well reflect the feelings of Burroughs himself toward the religious establishment of his own time. Carter often seems near to death, but he never surrenders control of his own fate to any power; he is ever the master of his soul. Carter is Everyman, and therein lies the enduring quality of the Barsoom series. —Clifton W. Potter, Jr.
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The Best of C. M. Kornbluth Out of contemporary conditions arise tomorrow’s problems, which can be solved or understood only with the perspective of history
Author: Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958) Genre: Science fiction—extrapolatory Type of work: Stories Time of plot: The 1950’s to the distant future Location: Various sites, especially cities, on Earth and other planets First published: 1976 The Story Two of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s most famous stories, the novelettes “The Little Black Bag” (1950) and “The Marching Morons” (1951), posit the same future. Twenty generations from now, prolific, low-IQ groups vastly outnumber intelligent people on Earth because of the latter’s low birthrates. The moronic majority thrives only through the labors of the intellectuals. The earlier story introduces elderly Bayard Full, a ruined, slumdwelling, dipsomaniacal medical doctor. An accident sends a doctor’s black bag from the future into his possession. Designed for use by idiots, the bag yields its secrets readily to Dr. Full and his accidentally acquired assistant, Angie. Reinvigorated and reformed, Dr. Full begins performing miraculous operations and nurturing a new self-image as benefactor of humanity. Angie, however, has less humanitarian goals and succeeds in destroying the hopes of both herself and Dr. Full. “The Marching Morons” more fully explores the future world dominated by idiots. The intelligent minority faces one central problem: what to do about the ever-worsening population disparity between idiots and geniuses. The minority receives a windfall in the form of real estate salesman Honest John Barlow, revived from a state of suspended animation accidentally achieved in the twentieth century. Barlow agrees to solve the problem if he is given dictatorial power, a request that is granted readily. Barlow then suckers the general populace, through advertising and sly references during television sitcoms, into taking rockets to Venus, an unreachable promised land. They fall for the ruse and
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die in great numbers. In the end, Barlow suffers the same fate he inflicted on others. Two late novelettes, “Shark Ship” (originally “Reap the Dark Tide,” 1958) and “Two Dooms” (1958; Kornbluth’s preferred title was “The Doomsman”), probe other grim futures. “Shark Ship” details life aboard a convoy of ships divorced from all contact with land. The lives of those on board depend on the spring swarming of plankton. When a storm destroys his ship’s irreplaceable fishing net, Captain Thomas Salter finds himself, his ship, and his crew expelled from the convoy. An idea previously thought heretical now appears to be his only option: He must steer for land. The landing party discovers an America depopulated by death cults whose influence became pervasive in previous centuries. Surviving cult members give the landing party a taste of the violence that purged the once-overpopulated mainland. “Two Dooms” follows atomic physicist Edward Royland on his accidental journey into an alternative universe where the Nazis and Japanese rule a divided United States. In his own world, Royland debated whether to delay progress at the Los Alamos nuclear research site or to help the atomic bomb achieve its terrifying result. Encountering both a slave village and a concentration camp in the alternative America, he comes to grips with the idea of life under bondage. Other notable works in this volume include “The Words of Guru” (1941), an early but striking fantasy about a genius child acquiring supernatural power; “The Last Man Left in the Bar” (1957), a confrontation between aliens and a magnetron technician, written with an audacious literary command that anticipates the stylistic revolution of the 1960’s; “The Altar at Midnight” (1952), a portrayal of the costs of spaceflight; and the influential “The Mindworm” (1950), detailing the rise and fall of a psychic vampire. Analysis Although Kornbluth received acclaim as a novelist, his reputation rests largely on his shorter works, which are recognized for their intelligence, incisive wit, and readability. “The Marching Morons,” one of the most famous novelettes in science fiction, has prompted many critics to examine its future scenario of an intelligent but overwhelmed minority. Those focusing on its genetics, however, have tended to overlook, and inadvertently belittle, the social criticism explicit in the story. When the intellectuals turn to Barlow to solve their problem, they find themselves employing a veritable Adolf Hitler. Kornbluth takes a global view, however: He juxtaposes Nazi gas
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chambers and American bombings of Japanese civilians by having Barlow’s rockets lift off from Los Alamos. The intelligentsia appear as culpable as Honest John. Kornbluth’s concern with the ethics of theoretical science underlies both “Two Dooms,” with its indecisive Royland, and “Gomez” (1954), whose protagonist, Julio Gomez, sits on a similar fence with regard to unified field theory, the implications of which terrify him. Both stories explore moral quandaries of the atomic age, as do such other works as “The Altar at Midnight," Kornbluth’s fascinating first solo novel Takeoff (1952), and “The Remorseful” (1954). Kornbluth’s concern with the impact of theoretical knowledge parallels his concern with history. Historical insight appears as a redemptive if sometimes dangerous force throughout Kornbluth’s works, notably here in “Shark Ship,” “The Luckiest Man in Denv” (1952), “The Mindworm,” and “The Adventurer” (1953). Many of these stories shed light on other works. “The Rocket of 1955,” a vignette that first appeared in a 1939 fanzine, and “The Marching Morons” anticipate The Space Merchants (with Frederik Pohl, 1953), whereas “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” anticipate Search the Sky (with Pohl, 1954). “Two Dooms” bears comparison to Kornbluth’s Not This August (1955), depicting an America beneath communist subjugation, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). “With These Hands” bears comparison to Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Darfstellar” (1955). Critics judging Kornbluth by this anthology, edited by Pohl, have seen a growing bitterness in his later stories. This reflects editorial choice more than reality, because Kornbluth also wrote delightful humor in his last years, in stories not collected here. These tales demonstrate Kornbluth’s effective use of everyday individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds as well as his well-tuned ear for dialect. —Mark Rich
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The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard Stories focusing on protagonists’ mental and physiological relationships with drastically altered environments
Author: J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930Genre: Science fiction—New Wave Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Primarily the near future Location: Imaginary locales on Earth First published: 1978
)
The Story The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard contains nineteen impressive works published between 1957 and 1978 in such British and American magazines as New Worlds, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories. Together, these stories show the extraordinary imagination and range of Ballard’s storytelling. There are tales of spaceflight, urban isolation, psychological manipulation, and the outbreak of strange, imaginary diseases. The stories take place in the overcrowded cities of the future, on abandoned South Sea islands, and within view of the quiet but suddenly terrifying lawns of suburbia. Ballard’s stories show his preoccupation with the internal landscapes of the mind. They also contain unusual responses to the challenges his characters face. Harry Faulkner, in “The Overloaded Man,” suddenly loses touch with his suburban neighborhood. He begins to perceive the world as an abstract painting and decides to drown himself to extinguish this new sensory overload. Contrary to expectations, the short story views Faulkner’s action as a relative success. Far from confining himself to realistic places, disasters, or injuries, Ballard invents new ones for most of his stories. He creates vivid cities of the future, such as an imaginary subtropical community, where “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” reside and create their imaginary art, and the refuse-littered, abandoned launchpads of Cape Canaveral in ”The Cage of Sand,”where two men and a woman have gathered to watch the nightly appearance of as many as seven dead astronauts who orbit Earth in their functionless capsules. Ballard’s protagonists, though thrust into strange new worlds and
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alien landscapes, generally accept these with little questioning, as does Count Axel in “The Garden of Time.” His flowers are able to stop time outside his mansion, where barbarian hordes ready themselves for a final assault. They will succeed when his last flower has been plucked. Like Count Axel and Louisa Woodwind, whose husband is one of the dead astronauts, Ballard’s protagonists typically are well-educated, articulate, and emotionally controlled men and women. As Harry Faulkner shows, however, beneath this tranquil facade of reason, control, and clinical detachment is a deeper layer of strange obsessions and aberrant needs. This defiance of the normal and fictional probing of the radically new are crucial aspects of many of the stories. “The Terminal Beach” successfully experiments with style and language. It focuses on Traven’s mindframe, which has guided him to maroon himself on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, the historical site of American nuclear tests. There, Traven tries to make his body a part of the natural landscape and to construct a complex system that integrates the living, the dead, and inanimate objects. Analysis Ballard’s short stories were instrumental in the success of science fiction’s New Wave movement. Many of the developments associated with it, such as a move toward inner space, a more critical attitude toward technology, and the redefinition of some of the conventions of science fiction (for example, time travel), are essential ingredients of Ballard’s stories. “Manhole 69” shows readers what an imaginative writer can do within the genre of science fiction. The story of three men whom a medical experiment has left with the inability to sleep turns to the unexpected when all three, rather than enjoy prolonged hours of productivity, withdraw into a form of autism. The literary quality of such stories as “The Drowned Giant,” which tells of the gradual dismemberment of the washed-up corpse of a gigantic man, also exemplifies how well New Wave science fiction brings literary respectability to a literature formerly dismissed by most critics. The stylistic experimentation visible in tales such as “The Terminal Beach” makes these pieces unique. Although Ballard’s stories have been compared with the works of mainstream American authors Donald Barthelme and William S. Burroughs, their focus on the inner cosmos echoes significant works of other science-fiction writers. For example, Alfred Bester’s haunting tale of a murderer on the run from telepathic policemen, The Demolished Man
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(1953), displays an intensity similar to Ballard’s. Brian Aldiss also shares some of Ballard’s concerns; in Cryptozoic! (1968; published in Great Britain as An Age, 1967), Aldiss takes the idea of time travel and accomplishes it with mind-altering drugs that allow his characters to leave the confines of the present. With their uncomfortable dissection of Western cultural icons, stories such as “The Atrocity Exhibition” have been hailed as the fictional equivalent of the literary and cultural criticism of scholars such as Roland Barthes. Taking its cue from occupational therapy, “The Atrocity Exhibition” offers a series of violent pictures painted by imaginary inmates of an insane asylum. Its central, unsettling idea is that the products of human culture, taken from the fields of warfare, technology, art, and popular entertainment, not only are intrinsically violent but also correspond to the biological features of the human body. From the stories in this collection, Ballard has moved on to write more experimental short fiction. He has also produced works whose content takes a more conventional form. He has even worked in the area of autobiography with his book Empire of the Sun (1984). Ballard occasionally has been attacked by critics who have failed to grasp the premises of his fiction. Like the reviewer-turned-psychiatrist who perceived a psychopathic mind behind his work, they mistakenly have read his stories as straight advocacy of criminal insanity. Ballard’s exploration of a new, purely fictional reality has met with increasing critical acclaim. His stories are often haunting and occasionally terrifying, but never conventional or dull. —R. C. Lutz
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Blood Music Vergil Ulam injects himself with thinking cells that push his body and, eventually, the rest of Earth into the next stage in evolution
Author: Greg Bear (1951) Genre: Fantasy—evolutionary fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late twentieth century Location: California, New York, Germany, and Great Britain First published: 1985 The Story Thirty-two-year-old Vergil Ulam is a brilliant but undisciplined bioengineer at the Genetron laboratories in La Jolla, California. This area is known as Enzyme Valley, the biochip equivalent of Silicon Valley. His pet project is what he calls “biologic,” the development of “thinking” lymphocytes that he describes as autonomous organic computers. When his employer learns that Ulam has been conducting this research for the past two years on mammalian cells, Ulam is fired. Before he leaves the building, he injects himself with the cells and destroys the records of his research. Ulam had hoped to retrieve the lymphocytes from his system and continue his research. Two weeks later, though, he still has not found access to a lab, and he knows that it is too late to remove the altered cells. The first changes to his system that he notices are a craving for sweets, better eyesight, and a better sex life. When he realizes that there is no turning back, he visits his clairvoyant mother. She immediately discerns that his experiment has gotten beyond her son’s control but that it is his life’s work. Ulam concludes that the lymphocytes have developed the capacity to spread their biologic traits to other types of cells and that they could migrate outside his body. He visits Edward Milligan, a school friend, and explains his theory that human DNA has spent millions of years building to a climax that is now expressing itself in Ulam’s experiment, which offers the doorway for the lymphocytes to escape the human species. Listening to their activity inside his body, which he calls “blood music,” he wonders when the cells will become cognizant of Ulam himself as an
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entity enclosing them. The answer comes soon, when he begins hearing words spoken within his brain by the other entities. Milligan quickly understands the dangerous implications, confirmed when he walks in on Ulam and his girlfriend and discovers them changing into strange shapeless masses of flesh. To stop a possible epidemic, Milligan kills Ulam. Michael Bernard, head of Genetron, realizes that a mere handshake could spread the altered genes from one individual to another and that it is too late to stop it from spreading throughout the United States. Recognizing that he is infected, he flies to Wiesbaden, Germany, and secures himself in an isolation laboratory for observation. Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs, the biologist who observed Bernard gradually showing signs of the transforming genes, knows he cannot hold off the terrified protesters who want to kill Bernard before Europe becomes infected. Meanwhile, the United States itself changes shape as the selfaware genes form a massive thinking community. Bernard communes with the cells inside himself and, with the help of a visiting British physicist, theorizes that thought, in sufficient quantity, could physically alter the universe. With all these cells suddenly conscious, the potential for change has become exponentially greater. Bernard willingly allows his own transformation and “enters” the world inside himself. Viewed by the cells as one of their creators, he is treated with respect and moved into Thought Universe, where he recognizes that no one really dies; instead, there is endless replication within cells in the blood. Various humans resist transformation, and the cells respect their decision. Ultimately, the number of thinking cells becomes so large that their community of cooperation enters into a realm beyond physical matter. Analysis Greg Bear’s topics range from fantasy to pure science fiction, and they generally demand that his protagonist come to a new understanding of the universe. During the 1980’s, Bear won the Nebula Award twice, for the novella “Hard Fought” (1983) and for the short story “Tangents” (1986), and the Hugo Award (1984) for the short story “Blood Music,” published in Analog. He has stated that Blood Music, his seventh novel, was influenced by his study of information theory and information mechanics. Upon the suggestion of David Brin and John F. Carr, Bear decided to expand “Blood Music,” adding complexity with chapters devoted to new characters. Much in the manner that James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958) uses a fictional Jesuit astrophysicist to raise ethical questions regarding the
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individual moral systems of other galaxies, Bear builds his story on the writings of the actual Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who combined Christian theology and evolutionary theory to posit Jesus Christ both as temporal and as a timeless symbol for the final step of evolution, which he described as a “noosphere.” Bear is not directly theological, though he works with the idea of a creator; his basic debt to Teilhard is the notion of a critical mass of thinkers somehow transcending space and time and bringing into existence what amounts to a new heaven and a new Earth. Bear’s novel has been called a Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke, 1953) for the 1980’s, and the comparison seems apt. Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953) also comes immediately to mind as a source for comparison. Blood Music follows in the tradition of science-fiction writing that ponders the possibility that Homo sapiens may not be the final word in nature’s self-expression. Bear’s novel shows a greater scientific sophistication than Clarke’s earlier work, focusing in convincing detail on the actual biological mechanisms used in laboratories of the 1980’s and 1990’s. It suggests that the human need to see humanity as the center of the biological universe is as egotistical as humanity’s earlier notion that Earth was the center of the galaxy. As threatening as the notion of absorption into a larger community is to Bear’s characters, he does his best to convince them, and his readers, that individual subjectivity may go the way of nation-states. In its place will come a cooperative assertion of racial memory. —John C. Hawley
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The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown Two women of Damar carry the same sword in two different eras and must learn to use both magic and swordplay to save the kingdom from the forces of evil
Author: Robin McKinley (1952) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Undefined Location: Primarily the land of Damar First published: The Blue Sword (1982) and The Hero and the Crown (1984) The Story The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown are the first two books of a promised trilogy about the land of Damar. The Blue Sword takes place in the present, when Outlanders rule much of Damar. The Hero and the Crown, a “prequel,” tells the story of an earlier Damar before the Outlanders arrived. Harry and Aerin, the two female heroes, each must learn to master her psychic powers. In addition, both endure extensive training in swordplay to prepare them for battle with Damar’s longstanding enemy, the inhuman demon race of the North. In The Blue Sword, Harry Crewe leaves her Homeland after her father’s death and goes to live at the outpost where her brother Richard is stationed. Harry is restless and oddly drawn to the hills beyond her new home. Corlath, the king of the last remaining Free Hillfolk not under Homelander rule, comes to plead with the Outlander superiors to unite with him against a common enemy. A psychic hunch tells Corlath that Harry is destined to be important to the Free Hillfolk, and he kidnaps her. Harry is discovered to possess an abundance of the psychic powers needed to defeat the Northerners. Mathin, one of the King’s elite Riders, puts Harry through a rigorous training period. Harry learns to ride Sungold, her new Hill horse, and to fight with a sword. She also learns to love her new home, and she makes many friends among both human and animal followers of Corlath. Harry eventually is given the sword that belonged to Lady Aerin, Dragon-Killer, a legendary female warrior
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who led Damar to victory against the North in an earlier era. As the Free Hillfolk prepare for war, Harry must deal with the conflicting emotions of loyalty to her Homeland and of her growing love for Corlath and his people. Standing between two worlds, Harry must risk her connections to the Homeland and the Hillfolk in order to save them both. To accomplish this, she must draw on her untrained psychic powers to bury the enemy under a mountain. She succeeds in leading the Damarians to victory and in cementing her relationship with Corlath. As an Outlander queen of the Free Hillfolk, she will lead her newfound people into an era in which they hope to establish better relations with the Outlanders. The Hero and the Crown tells the story of Aerin, the warrior who appears as a legendary figure in The Blue Sword. Aerin is the only child of King Arlbeth of Damar. Aerin’s mother, who died when Aerin was born, was rumored to be a witch from the North. Her people do not trust Aerin enough to accept her as the heir to the throne, especially now that the demons of the North are threatening Damar once again. Tor, Aerin’s cousin, has been designated as heir. To make matters worse, Aerin seemingly has none of the psychic powers that Damar’s royalty should possess. Feeling useless and unwanted at court, Aerin begins teaching herself how to kill dragons. She befriends her father’s old warhorse, Talat, and discovers how to make a fireproof salve. She also coaxes Tor, who is already falling in love with her, to teach her the rudiments of sword fighting. Aerin becomes an expert dragon slayer and destroys Maur, the Black Dragon. Aerin then begins training with the wizard Luthe, who teaches her to use the latent psychic abilities she has always possessed. He also gives her the fabled blue sword. Aerin must give up some of her humanity when Luthe is forced to grant her the power of partial immortality so that she can defeat her uncle Agsded, the evil wizard who is behind Damar’s problems with the North. Aerin wins back the Hero’s Crown, an amulet with protective powers, and returns to Tor and her people in time to lead them into victorious battle against the Northerners. Aerin’s heroics earn her a place of honor in the hearts of her people; in addition, King Arlbeth has fallen in battle, so Aerin agrees to become Tor’s queen. She must reconcile her love for Tor and Luthe, realizing that the immortal part of her will be able to rejoin Luthe someday. Analysis The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown were published after Robin McKinley’s Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (1978), the
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award-winning and critically acclaimed novel that established McKinley as an outstanding fantasy writer for young adults. The Damar novels also were well received, garnering McKinley several awards including a Best Young Adult Books citation from the American Library Association in 1982 and a Newbery Honor citation in 1983 for The Blue Sword, and a Horn Book honor list citation in 1985 and the Newbery Medal in 1985 for The Hero and the Crown. Although some of the themes in The Hero and the Crown are more mature than those of The Blue Sword, both books are classified by booksellers and librarians as young adult novels. The setting of the novels—especially the Damar of Harry’s time—is based partly on Rudyard Kipling’s depictions of the British Empire. The Homelanders (or Outlanders, depending on which side one is on) display an obviously paternalistic attitude toward the native Damarians they govern. In the Damar of Aerin’s time, the Outlanders are absent and the geography is somewhat different, but the magical psychic abilities of the heroine prove beyond a doubt that Harry’s Damar has indeed evolved from Aerin’s Damar. The origins of many of the customs, traditions, and rituals present in The Blue Sword are explained in The Hero and the Crown as well. The heroines Harry and Aerin were born partly from McKinley’s love of fairy tales and partly from her desire to create strong female characters who are able to do more than wait for male heroes to rescue them. Harry and Aerin are successful at many activities that, in fiction, traditionally have been assigned to men. Aerin slays dragons, and Harry triumphs over all the other novices, both male and female, to win a contest of horse riding skills and swordplay. Harry and Aerin don their armor and ride into combat with Gonturan, the fabled blue sword that each woman carries in her own time. McKinley gives her female warriors more than simply courage to slay their enemies; Aerin and Harry retain their femininity throughout their adventures. Both women are rather reluctant heroes, and both must grapple with mixed emotions concerning duty and honor. Aerin, considered an outsider in her own land, must risk her life several times before she is able to prove her worth to herself and to her people. Likewise, Harry, born and reared as an Outlander despite her Damarian ancestor, must win a place in her new world without betraying her roots. Both women are at first hampered by ignorance and inexperience, and both succeed at last by dint of their honor, pride, and stubborn refusal to accept defeat. The novels also have romantic themes in common. In The Blue Sword, the familiar motif of the abducted maiden falling in love with her captor
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is mitigated by the strength of the character of Harry. Far from being a meekly subservient prisoner, Harry fights her way up from the status of respected guest to become the savior of the land. In order to defeat the enemy, she must even defy Corlath’s orders and seek her own allies. She earns Corlath’s respect and will rule beside him as an equal. In The Hero and the Crown, Aerin is at first too involved with her own misery to take much notice of Tor’s affection for her. It is Luthe, the wizard, who initiates Aerin into the joys of romance. Aerin must make the difficult choice to return to Tor, her childhood sweetheart, to be queen beside him. This painful choice is made only slightly easier by Aerin’s realization that the immortal Luthe will wait for the part of Aerin that is “no longer quite mortal.” Reviewers of both Damar novels have commended McKinley’s wellrounded characters, creative settings, and suspenseful storytelling. The characters’ emotional responses are often understated but never unbelievable or difficult to decipher. Romance, vivid action sequences, and captivating characters all contribute to the novels’ popularity. Most critics believe that McKinley successfully blended the traditional fairy-tale form with some nontraditional heroines. —Quinn Weller
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The Book of the New Sun The Earth of a distant future finds a hero to replace its dying sun
Author: Gene Wolfe (1931) Genre: Science fiction—theological romance Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Millennia in the future Location: Urth First published: The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981; collected with The Shadow of the Torturer as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes I and II, 1983), The Sword of the Lictor (1982), The Citadel of the Autarch (1983; collected with The Sword of the Lictor as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes III and IV, 1985), and The Urth of the New Sun (1987) The Story In an Earth (now called Urth) of the distant future, the Sun is slowly dying. Humanity is divided into the Commonwealth, centered roughly in what is now South America, and the Ascians, or those without shadow, who dominate the Northern Hemisphere. The society resembles medieval cultures such as that of the Byzantine Empire. Severian is born into the hereditary Guild of Torturers in the city of Nessus. The Torturers are assigned to torment the enemies of the city’s ruler. Severian, along with several other apprentices, is trained by the dour Master Gurloes. One of the few exceptions to their grim regimen is the annual celebration of their patroness, Holy Katherine. Severian meets a prisoner named Thecla, on whom he takes pity, eventually bringing her books and trying to console her. Severian gives Thecla a knife, and from the pools of blood he sees outside her prison door the next time he comes to visit her, he concludes that she has committed suicide. Severian informs Master Palaemon, one of his superiors in the Guild, of what he has done. Palaemon advises Severian to go into exile and gives him a resplendent sword named Terminus Est to aid him during his adventures and ordeals. Severian ranges far and wide, eventually meeting an abandoned
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blond woman named Dorcas as well as the mysterious Dr. Talos and his sidekick, the giant Baldanders. Severian’s network of acquaintances begins to solidify, forming a circle of personal loyalties around which his destiny will unfold. Eventually, some of these people’s memories become fused with Severian’s when he comes to be the representative of his entire planet. Severian journeys to the north, toward the Windowless City of Thrax. He manages to get hold of the Claw of the Conciliator, which despite its name is not a weapon but a glowing, beautiful, and redemptive jewel that holds the promise of future peace for the warring and injured peoples of Urth. Along with Dorcas, he encounters the cannibalistic Alzabo and helps the people of the region surrounding Thrax win their freedom. Severian finds out that Thecla has not in fact died but used the knife to escape. He also finds out that Baldanders and Dr. Talos are not what they seem. Dr. Talos is a mechanical man who, despite his air of authority, is Baldanders’s servant. Baldanders, for his part, is in communication with extraterrestrial spirits called hierodules. These hierodules, Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus, reveal to Severian the calamity that is overtaking Urth and inform him that he has been appointed to journey into space and find a new sun for the planet. First, though, Severian has to attain full authority on Urth. With the backing of the power he has accumulated in Thrax and elsewhere, he returns to Nessus and is declared Autarch. He marries Valeria, an aristocratic lady of the city who is a suitable partner for him, although parts of his love will always be directed toward Dorcas and Thecla. As Autarch, Severian brings more justice to Urth than most of his predecessors had managed. The hierodules arrange for a huge starship to transport Severian into space. Aboard the giant ship, Severian is attacked by “jibers,” crewmen from other worlds who have been in the ship so long that they have become permanent residents of its underclass. He is saved from them by a pretty but strangely world-weary woman named Gunnie and an engaging sprite named Zak. Severian learns that he is going to the planet Yesod for a trial in which he will represent Urth. His task is to convince the Hierogrammate Tzadkiel to give Urth a new sun. Upon arrival at Yesod, Severian encounters a woman (actually an embodied, angelic larva) named Apheta who reveals the utter insignificance of Urth in the cosmic order but hints at implications in his mission that Severian himself has not realized. Severian meets the great Tzadkiel only to find that it is the apparently harmless Zak, in vastly transmuted form. Tzadkiel informs Severian
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that he is Urth’s new sun and that he will be returned amid great cataclysm for the planet’s rebirth. Tzadkiel also indicates that, in some other dimension of time, he and all of his sort had been made by humans from Urth. Severian returns to Urth, this time accompanied by Gunnie’s younger incarnation, Burgundofara. Much of Urth is destroyed, but Severian survives to see the planet renewed and renamed Ushas, signifying its new state of being. Analysis The Book of the New Sun is one of the most ambitious works of science fantasy to be published in the last quarter of the twentieth century, recognized with a World Fantasy Award for The Shadow of the Torturer and a Nebula Award for The Claw of the Conciliator. Science fantasy is an odd hybrid. Gene Wolfe’s books combine the linguistic inventiveness and spiritual depth of the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien with the scientific believability and historical sweep of the work of Isaac Asimov. Wolfe’s writing, though, has a voice and a pulse utterly its own. On one level, the Book of the New Sun is filled with conventional adventure of the “sword and sorcery” variety. Severian fights his way through challenges in Nessus and Thrax to emerge victorious as lord over all. This surface physical action, however, serves primarily to mask the true inner complexity of the series, swathed in Wolfe’s complicated plotting and exotic vocabulary (all of which is derived from existing, though obscure, words in English, Latin, and Hebrew). Most readers will be deep into the series before coming close to guessing the ultimate significance of Urth’s clearly decrepit state or what the New Sun will be. Severian is typical of post-1960 science fiction in that he is an antihero as much as a hero. Although his narrative perspective governs readers’ view of the story throughout, it is difficult to identify with him: He is too involved in torture, deception, and various other despicable acts. Wolfe presents Severian as able to come to terms with the evil he has done and integrate it with the far more dominant principles of altruism that largely govern his conduct. Severian goes into exile from Nessus only to provide cover for what he supposes is Thecla’s suicide, and he takes on the self-sacrificing mission of leaving Urth and his Autarchy to go to Yesod in search of the New Sun. Because Wolfe lets Severian speak in his own voice, readers are privy to Severian’s own ruthless self-examination and his own awareness of the complexity of his course in life. Thecla is one of the most affecting of the supporting characters. Her disappearance and unlooked-for return add to her generally mysterious personality, giving her an air of sacredness (the name Thecla comes from
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an early Christian martyr) that makes her something of a spiritual reference point for Severian. Other characters deepen the strangeness and texture of Severian’s journey and simultaneously exemplify Wolfe’s literary allusiveness. The giant Baldanders testifies to the higher qualities of the human race that are latent in the weary and hard-pressed denizens of Urth. The name Baldanders is a reference to the work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Dr. Talos, the mechanical man, is a portal to the strange, superhuman yet half-human, world of the hierodules; “Talos” was originally the name of a mechanical man in English poet Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). The three hierodules, and even more the Hierogrammate Tzadkiel, emblematize the texture and philosophy of the book. Both words have a meaning, although in Greek: “hierodule” is “sacred slave,” and “Hierogrammate” is “product of sacred writing.” Tzadkiel reveals to Severian when he is on Yesod that the hierodules, superhuman though they may seem, were in fact themselves created by the human race long ago. Desiring to give their descendants a kind of sacred security, they had created the Hierogrammates to give their descendants succor when they need it. Wolfe portrays a set of all-powerful deities created by humans who in turn help humanity of far-future Urth re-create itself. This paradox fits with all the displacements and foreshadowings in time that occur throughout the series. There also is a hope that there is an order outside time in the universe. “The Conciliator” clearly is analogous to Jesus Christ, and the characters of Thecla and Holy Katherine evoke the Virgin Mary. At the end of the series, Severian returns to renewed Ushas and encounters simple fishermen who indicate that they revere Severian and two of his companions as gods. Severian, though, points out that only something called “the Increate” is truly worthy of worship. Wolfe makes it clear that this Increate is none other than the God of the JudeoChristian tradition. —Nicholas Birns
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The Boys from Brazil Notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, alive and living in Brazil, dispatches young clones of Adolf Hitler, and only Yakov Liebermann can stop his plans
Author: Ira Levin (1929) Genre: Science fiction—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1974-1975 Location: Various cities around the world First published: 1976 The Story Ira Levin presents an intricate plot involving Dr. Josef Mengele (the “Angel of Death” from the Nazi concentration camps), who has set up a laboratory in Brazil. Yakov Liebermann is a Nazi hunter, based on the legendary Simon Wiesenthal. The two enemies finally confront each other in the United States, where the plot is resolved. Only far into the book do readers learn the nature of Mengele’s plan, but there are intimations throughout. At a meeting of old Nazis, Mengele gives out the names and locations of ninety-four men who will have to be murdered within the next year. None holds an important position; most are civil servants or minor functionaries in government. They are spread all over the world. The Nazis are given new identity papers, passports, and money. Unknown to Mengele, a young Jewish man interested in capturing Nazis has recognized Mengele and persuaded a waitress in the restaurant where the meeting is held to plant a tape recorder and to retrieve it for him. Mengele becomes suspicious, finds the waitress, and through her tracks down the young man, who is found in his hotel room playing parts of the tape to Liebermann. The young man is killed, but Liebermann has heard enough to pique his curiosity. He asks a friend at the Reuters news agency to note unusual deaths, and he travels to Germany to interview a woman who worked for Mengele during the war. She tells him enough to send him to a German scientist, who reveals that research is pointing toward the possibility of cloning a person from his or her cells.
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Liebermann guesses that Mengele somehow has cloned Adolf Hitler and arranged for the ninety-four clones to be adopted. Each has the exact genetic code of Hitler, and each adoptive mother is married to someone unimportant, just as Hitler’s mother was. Liebermann begins to track down these families. All the boys look alike, with pale skin and dark hair, and all are impolite. Liebermann travels to the United States, where he expects the next assassination to take place. Meanwhile, Mengele’s operation has been shut down by higher Nazi command, and the assassins have been called home. Mengele destroys his laboratory but intends to continue with the assassinations of the adoptive fathers. He also plans to kill Liebermann because of his interference. They meet at the home of one of the boys, whose father Mengele kills and tosses into the basement. When the boy comes home from school, Mengele and Liebermann are in a life-and-death struggle. The boy sends his dogs after Mengele because he has a gun. The boy figures out who has killed his father and orders the dogs to kill him. Liebermann recuperates and makes one more stop in America. In New York City, he meets with radical Jews who know about the list of children that Liebermann carries. While they talk, Liebermann tears up the list and flushes it down a toilet, telling the leader that it is wrong to kill children, any children, and that simply because they have Hitler’s genes does not mean they will turn out like him. Analysis This book raises many interesting ethical issues. Mengele is presented as completely evil, as one might assume he was. Levin’s Mengele says that he asked Hitler in the middle of the war for a vial of his blood and some scrapings from his arm. He did not have the technology then to do anything with this material, but he developed the science in Brazil. He procured women to be implanted with embryos with Hitler’s genetic code and to have the babies that would then be adopted by appropriate couples. The couples would match Hitler’s parents in major respects, and Mengele planned for the adoptive fathers’ assassinations to match Hitler’s loss of his father. Liebermann represents the forces of good. He is a crotchety older man who at first does not believe that Mengele’s plan is being put into effect. Liebermann is portrayed as being almost a pauper, living in inadequate quarters, and having almost no help in his work of tracking down Nazis. He says that people had forgotten the days he had helped track down the infamous Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Levin suggests that there always will be people like Mengele and like
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the militant Jews who wish to find the ninety-four Hitler clones and kill them. Liebermann is supposed to represent the moderate view of those who learn from history. He takes a chance that none of these children will become like Hitler, but he is steadfast that no one should do what the Nazis did in World War II, including killing children. This novel was filmed in 1978, with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck playing Liebermann and Mengele. There are minor differences, but the film is true to the book. Levin is proficient at developing twists and turns in the novel. At one point, one of the assassins notices someone he knew during the war, and he tells him his orders and asks about the postman of the town. Then, with no warning, he kills the man, saying that the target was not the postman but the old friend to whom he was talking. This novel is science fiction, although cloning of cells and certain lifeforms has been achieved. In the years after Levin wrote this book, much was done to produce changes in fetuses and to develop certain characteristics within them. It is conceivable that the sort of cloning represented in this novel will become scientific fact. Levin takes no moral stand on the ethics of such a scientific feat. He allows the reader to decide, based on who is manipulating the borrowed genetic material. —John Jacob
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Brave New World Three misfits illustrate the flaws of a future world-state in which technology permits complete control of people and the government claims to provide happiness to everyone
Author: Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Genre: Science fiction—dystopia Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Half a millennium in the future Location: What are now the United Kingdom and the United States First published: 1932 The Story In the totalitarian state of Brave New World, people are socially conditioned from conception; they are hatched from test tubes rather than born. Something, however, is wrong with Bernard Marx. Although he ought to be, in keeping with everyone else in this engineered society, an absolute conformist, he evinces certain quirks that his fellows find disturbing. They theorize that something must have gone wrong chemically during his incubation. Bernard dates Lenina Crowne, but he wants her all to himself. This is against the mores of their society, which prescribes communal sexual relations and proscribes monogamous pairing. Lenina is outraged by his request for monogamy. Any contravention of the societal motto of “Community, Identity, Stability” is regarded as a heinous offense. Happiness is not an individual quest; it is a daily, community guarantee. Through early conditioning, people are educated to be happy for what they are allotted, with allotments made according to class, which is determined at conception. A drug called soma provides a haven from any temporary unhappiness. Lenina and Bernard, on vacation, visit an Indian reservation in New Mexico that is a mixture of living museum and circus. There they find John, who was reared on the reservation by his mother, Linda, a woman from Western Europe. John later is revealed to be the illegitimate son of the director of the Bloomsbury Hatchery. As someone outside mainstream society, he is able to find flaws in it. He has escaped the universal conditioning and has steeped himself in the works of a forbidden au-
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thor, William Shakespeare. A collection of Shakespeare’s works is the only book he has ever read. He is imbued with the spirit of drama and finds the utter placidity of the present world an affront to the human spirit: riskless, monotonous, and amoral. When Lenina, who fancies him, disrobes in preparation for a guiltless sexual episode, he rejects her for her whorishness even though he is in love with her. After his mother’s death from an overdose of soma, John attempts to subvert some workers who are about to receive their allocation of the drug. This causes a riot, which results in the banishment to Iceland of Bernard and Aldous Huxley. (Library of Congress) Helmholtz Watson, another “flawed” person. Mustapha Mond, controller of Western Europe, refuses to extend this sentence to John, wanting to keep him nearby so that he can study him. John retreats from the world into a lighthouse, where he flagellates himself for his sins. He is recorded doing so by a reporter with a sound camera, and this footage is made into a “feelie,” a film with sensations added, that receives widespread attention. Tourists arrive in helicopters to gawk at this curious creature who cultivates his own pain. Among them is Lenina. John lashes her and, as she writhes on the ground, himself. This drives the onlookers into an orgiastic frenzy, which catches John up in its license. The next day, when he realizes to what degrading ends his self-mortification has been put, he hangs himself. Analysis Brave New World sold more than fifteen thousand copies in its first year and has been in print ever since. It has joined the ranks of utopian/ dystopian satires such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). The author himself has said that he wanted to warn against the conditioning of human beings by a manager class with the latest technology at its fingertips. Humanity could lose its soul through such a process, Aldous Huxley feared, trading in its unique qualities in exchange for security and for drugged and directed “happiness.”
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There cannot have been a year since its publication in which this novel has not been compared to the present condition of humanity and found to be a perspicacious guess at the shape of things to come. Huxley, for example, did not exactly predict television, but he foresaw other means of mass hypnosis. An ingenious and persuasive writer, Huxley renders his analogue quite credibly, although requirements of his genre necessitated more conflict than would be plausible in a state as well managed as the one the novel presents. The characters for the most part think too much like Huxley and too little like people who have been brainwashed into conformity. Huxley’s vision of sexuality in this futuristic society anticipates the repressive desublimation of a world in which the social obligation to be sexual defuses passion. This vision runs into trouble because the only choices permitted to his protagonist are a sulky celibacy and a foreordained and regulated promiscuity. The liberating powers of a passionate sexuality are left out of Huxley’s equation even though, when he includes a few nonconformists, he allows that there can be exceptions in this totalitarian society. It becomes a question, then, of why some exceptions exist and not others; there is no reason for the lack of a female equivalent to Bernard or Helmholtz. Huxley in essence equates happiness with barbarism and unhappiness with culture. The happiness, however, is shown to be false. Characters all evince signs of deep disturbance. True happiness must be what they are missing. One can ask why Huxley did not portray a more efficient society, one that was able to erase this distinction between the true and the false. It may be precisely this flaw in the novel that explains its continuing popularity. —David Bromige
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Bring the Jubilee In a world in which the South won the American Civil War, historian Hodge Backmaker travels back in time to study a battle site and accidentally alters the course of history
Author: (Joseph) Ward Moore (1903-1978) Genre: Science fiction—alternative history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1938-1952 and 1863 Location: An alternative United States of America First published: 1953 (serial form, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1952) The Story Bring the Jubilee has become a classic in the alternative-history subgenre of science fiction. The bulk of the novel is set in an alternative world years after the South won the American Civil War. This first-person memoir begins with young Hodge Backmaker leaving his backwater hometown for New York City in 1938. Life in the twenty-six United States is hard. The War of Southron Independence, as the Civil War is known, has financially and spiritually crushed the North. Backmaker outlines an unfamiliar world in which the telegraph and gaslight are the norm, the wealthy own steam-driven “minibles” instead of automobiles, and the lower classes sell themselves into indentured servitude. The strong Confederate States stretch south from the Mason-Dixon Line into Mexico. Even the European landscape differs. Napoleon VI rules France, and Germany is known as the German Union. After losing everything he owns to muggers on his first night in New York, Backmaker meets Roger Tyss, a bookseller and anti-Confederate revolutionary. Tyss gives Backmaker a job in his bookstore. Backmaker spends several years there, reading as much as he can and learning to think and study. He befriends René Enfandin, consul for the Republic of Haiti, who is an oddity in New York because he is black. Backmaker is crushed when Enfandin is shot and seriously wounded, forcing his return to Haiti. At the age of twenty-three, Backmaker accepts an invitation to go to Haggershaven, an intellectual community in York, Pennsylvania. There,
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Backmaker becomes a well-regarded historian specializing in the War of Southron Independence. He marries and settles down, but he calls his own scholarship into question after receiving a letter from a colleague asking him to reconsider some of his ideas. In crisis, he allows physicist Barbara Haggerwells to talk him into trying out her new invention, the HX-1, a time machine. She suggests that he use it to visit Gettysburg, the site of an important Confederate victory, and settle his doubts once and for all. Without telling his wife, Catty, Backmaker allows himself to be transported to June 30, 1863. He walks the thirty miles to the battle site and positions himself. Unfortunately, Confederate troops spot him and question him. Because Backmaker promised Haggerwells that he would not interfere lest he change history, he says nothing. The nervous Confederates convince themselves that Yankees are up ahead and retreat, but during the altercation, a man is shot and killed. Backmaker realizes that the man looks familiar to him. The Confederate withdrawal from the area means that history as Backmaker knows it changes. Backmaker watches the battle, and, sickened, realizes that the North, rather than the South, will hold the Round Tops. When he returns to the pick-up site and fails to return to his own time, he realizes something far worse: The dead Confederate was Barbara Haggerwells’s grandfather. His death means that there is no hope of return to his world. He has changed the course of history and wiped out his own world, along with all the people he loves. Ironically, the world he has brought into being is the world of the reader. Analysis Two important themes in Bring the Jubilee are the nature of time and the importance of the individual in history. Both are important concerns of alternative history in general. Like Philip K. Dick’s alternative history The Man in the High Castle (1962), Bring the Jubilee questions the role of chance in determining events. Does an individual have the power to change events, or are all events predestined? Ward Moore explores these themes through Backmaker’s discussions with Tyss and Enfandin. Tyss argues that all actions result from stimuli, not thought, and that free will is an illusion. He also argues that time loops endlessly, with people repeating the same events. Moore contrasts Tyss’s point of view with that of Enfandin, who believes that everything is an illusion and that only God is real. Backmaker, however, argues that “there must have been a beginning. . . . And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”
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Backmaker, dreamy by nature, is not inclined to action but instead to let his life go as it may. Haggerwells must convince him to use her invention to go back in time; he uses her persuasion as an excuse to go, absolving himself of responsibility. He comes to realize that even his refusal to speak to the Confederates at the battle site is a choice. His remark that “if choice exists once it can exist again,” coupled with the fact that he changes history, leads Backmaker to believe that free choice exists. He is haunted by the fear that he has wiped out Catty, Haggerwells, and his world, and that he is doomed to wipe them out repeatedly as time loops around again. Still, by allowing Backmaker to change history, Moore refutes Tyss’s model of the world and implies that individuals are capable of free choice and action. Backmaker grows from a boy who cannot make decisions into an adult who realizes that not making a choice is a kind of choice. Bring the Jubilee is Moore’s second science-fiction novel, following Greener than You Think (1947). None of his other works, mainstream or science fiction, deals with time and history as explicitly as this famous work. Moore’s depth of characterization, emotion, and detail make this an enduring classic. —Karen Hellekson
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Camp Concentration In a situation resembling the Vietnam War, Louis Sacchetti, a poet and conscientious objector, is moved to a secret underground facility, where experiments are undertaken to radically accelerate intelligence using lethal syphilis
Author: Thomas M. Disch (1940) Genre: Science fiction—inner space Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The near future Location: A disused gold mine in Colorado First published: 1968
The Story Louis Sacchetti is told by General Haast, the camp commandant, that he has been moved to Camp Archimedes to record what he sees. Dr. Aimée Busk, the camp psychiatrist, further explains that as those around him are dying of syphilis induced by the strain Pallidine (which kills in about nine months), they undergo stunning increases in intelligence, which the military hopes to employ. In his diary, which forms the bulk of the narrative, Sacchetti reports meeting the other men at the camp. Among them is George Wagner, the first prisoner Sacchetti meets and the first he sees entombed. The prisoners’ leader is Mordecai Washington, who knew Sacchetti in his school days. Washington is deeply immersed in alchemical studies and has become a magnificent polymath in only a few months. The prisoners prepare a brilliant production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but Wagner dies before he can play the lead. Then Washington and Haast take part in an alchemical attempt to obtain immortality, but it goes wrong, and Washington dies horribly. The following night, Sacchetti dreams the truth, that he is infected and dying. The balance of his journal is in scraps, heavy with literary allusion, showing that he gets sicker and more brilliant each day. Busk leaves the camp, and a new group of subjects arrives, centered on Skilliman, a failed but nasty and ambitious scientist who chooses the Pallidine treatment in order to develop weapons. Sacchetti sets up a mu-
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seum of artifacts that add up to the fact that Busk, as a result of sexual intercourse with Washington, has spread the syphilis rapidly across the United States. Skilliman’s conflicts with Sacchetti, the only survivor of the original group, begin as Sacchetti starts to draw off Skilliman’s followers. A confrontation ensues in which Skilliman demands that Sacchetti, now blind, be executed. Instead, Haast kills Skilliman and reveals that the alchemical experiment was a disguised brain pattern exchange in which Washington’s mind came to occupy Haast’s body. The simultaneous reverse action of the “mind reciprocator” so horrified Haast that it was he who died in Washington’s body. The novel closes on a challenge to the changed prisoners, who look forward to a future of both genius and eternal life, although that prolonged life would be at the repeated cost of the lives of others, until a vaccine is found for the Pallidine infection. Analysis Camp Concentration is a vital meeting of several forces. Thomas M. Disch, though living in the United States, was much influenced by the British New Wave writers who were exploring the inner space of human consciousness through literary experimentation. Camp Concentration is a conscious variation on Thomas Mann’s monumental Doctor Faustus (1947), in that it deals with the price of genius and is set against a background of wartime tyranny, which sharpens the novel’s moral aspect. The novel is set during a war in the future, but it is a very near future (attested by the presence of President McNamara, presumably the 1960’s secretary of defense). This is clearly a novel about the illegitimacy of the war in Vietnam and the methods of the military research establishment. The novel’s most important aspect is its experimentation with literary style. Sacchetti is a poet and litterateur from the start (he cites Fyodor Dostoevski’s The House of the Dead [1915] on the first page of the text), but his literary allusions become far more pronounced as his intelligence and reading accelerate as a result of the syphilis. Others, like Washington, bring in Arthur Koestler’s definitions of genius, and there are extensive references to the alchemical masters and great writers who have had syphilis. As Sacchetti’s illness advances, his journal disintegrates into a literate, allusive stream of consciousness in which he quotes or mentions such diverse figures as Heinrich Himmler, Saint Augustine, Hans Yost, André-Georges Malreux, and John Milton, along with citing the Bible. The texture gives a rich, complex speculation on disease, genius, and death. The text has an overriding tone of moral confrontation. Sacchetti, an
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intellectual Roman Catholic, has become a conscientious objector to the war and is aware of the issues surrounding what is happening to him and the other subjects. Skilliman, who seems at first to be injected into the latter part of the text only to fill the void created by the deaths of the earlier group of subjects, is the immoral practitioner of science—the man willing to use his increased intelligence for personal fame and to create weapons of destruction. Sacchetti engages in a series of dialogues with him and his young assistants and emerges victorious in moral fact (and in winning over the assistants), although it appears that he has lost in physical and practical terms. Washington-Haast’s murder of Skilliman and Sacchetti’s escape into a healthy body reestablish the balance, but it is arguably a deus ex machina ending. The idea of a plague spreading from the evil machinations of military research, of the moral sickness of the society becoming a physical sickness unto death, is a marker of the conscience of the text. Even the surprise ending has moral implications: Several of the infected prisoners choose physical death over the act of sentencing to death whomever they could have exchanged bodies with. Camp Concentration is a brilliant, tough book, bringing broad issues and complex literary continuity into science fiction. —Peter Brigg
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A Canticle for Leibowitz A monastic order struggles through many centuries of war and barbarism to maintain its commitment to God
Author: Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1923-1996) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: About 2600 to 3781 Location: The southwestern United States First published: 1960 (serial form, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1955-1957) The Story The novel has three sections, with narratives separated by about six hundred years between sections. From the perspective of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, church history is recapitulated in a future “Dark Age,” a “Renaissance,” and an apocalyptic “Modern Age.” The first section, “Fiat Homo” (“let there be man”), begins about 2600 c.e. A twentieth century atomic war and a repressive Age of Simplification have almost wiped out the past. Brother Francis, a simple monk fasting in the desert, uncovers an underground chamber with “Fallout Survival Shelter” written over it. He believes that Fallout is the name of a demon and has no conception of the war that destroyed civilization. The shelter contains documents written by Leibowitz, an engineer who stayed on at the abbey after the war and devoted himself to the preservation of knowledge. In the timeless life of the abbey, the Blessed Leibowitz finally is declared a saint. Brother Francis devotes fifteen years to illuminating a wholly meaningless blueprint. On the way to New Rome to present his illumination to the pope, he is robbed by mutants. The pope gives the monk enough gold to buy back the illumination. In the second encounter, however, the mutants steal the gold and cannibalize him, casting him as a martyr. In the second section, “Fiat Lux” (let there be light), set in 3174 c.e., the church is challenged by new ideas and powerful princes. Dom Paulo, the current abbot, struggles to preserve the abbey against outside influence. Thon Taddeo, a brilliant but arrogant scientist, reveals more
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about the Leibowitz memorabilia in a few minutes than the monks have been able to in centuries. In a symbolic scene, a crucifix is taken down so that an arc lamp can be installed for the thon. The abbot, arguing that the pursuit of knowledge, though not evil in itself, cannot be the purpose of humankind, orders the crucifix to be returned to the wall. Thereafter, all will read ad Lumina Christi, or “in the light of Christ.” The third section, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” (“let there be your will”), is directed against humanism, a view that argues that humanity is the proper focus of human attention. In 3781 c.e., atomic war breaks out, and millions are poisoned with radioactivity. The government sets up mercy camps, offering euthanasia to those dying in agony. Two characters frame the issues significant to Dom Zerchi, the latest abbot. Dr. Cors, a mercy camp administrator, argues that suffering is evil and should be alleviated. The abbot, in contrast, rejects euthanasia as a violation of God’s will. The other significant person in this section is Mrs. Grales, a mutant who wants Rachel, the dormant extra head on her shoulder, to be baptized. Dom Zerchi, fearful of the implications, puts off her request. A bomb hits the abbey, killing Mrs. Grales and mortally wounding the abbot. At this moment, however, Rachel unexpectedly comes alive. As his last act, Dom Zerchi struggles through the wreckage to baptize her. Thereafter, the Vatican sends three bishops into space in an emergency plan to preserve the apostolic succession. Analysis In a brief writing career that extended from 1949 to 1957, Walter M. Miller, Jr., produced the justly praised novel A Canticle for Leibowitz and forty-one shorter pieces of science fiction. All of them, including the original serialized version of the novel, appeared in such popular publications as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Miller’s work shows the usual characteristics of genre writing: action plots, ready characterizations, and a bright but brittle acquaintance with technology and ideas. Miller’s commitment to Roman Catholicism, however, immediately set his work apart. With a skillful play on the willing suspension of disbelief, he used the science-fiction story as a what-if instrument to make religious doctrine real by asserting it as the fictional given and then testing it with intellectual challenges. A Canticle for Leibowitz addresses, directly or indirectly, various theological concerns. If there is another species possessing free will, is it then subject to the same pattern of divine history, with a fall from grace and a hope for redemption? Would a degenerate race lose its soul? At what point in human evolution is found homo inspiratus, the creation of the
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soul? Logically, must this not occur at one precise moment? How could it be developmental? Given the perceived scale of astronomical time, how long will it take the Second Coming to occur? Will it be a universal event, occurring everywhere at once, or in only one place at a time? (Miller’s answer appears to be the latter.) If all are not on the same schedule, then what of those races that exist before the Fall? As humanity continues to evolve, what happens to its relationship to God? What happens if disaster breaks the apostolic succession of God’s divinely ordained church? Although his concerns may seem musty and medieval, Miller turns them into a compelling drama. He joins the argument that began in the Renaissance between science and religion, paradoxically using the naturalistic tone of “hard” science fiction to suggest that matters ordinarily resting on faith are literally true. A central artistic strategy of the novel, for example, is to make real the sense of historical development implicit in Christianity. As does Judaism, Christianity asserts a time line that includes creation, the Fall of Man, God’s identification with a national people, the coming of a messiah, his death and resurrection, and ultimately the Second Coming, in which the meaning of history vanishes. From a Christian perspective, all steps but the last have been completed. From the perspective of modern astronomy, this may seem to be vainglorious mythmaking on an insignificant planet. Miller’s precise purpose is to square these perspectives in the framework of the scientifically understood cosmos. If and when the space-traveling delegates of New Rome ever return to Earth, Bishop Zerchi declares, “you might meet the Archangel at the east end of Earth, guarding her passes with a sword of flame.” —Bruce Olsen
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A Case of Conscience Convinced that the planet he is investigating has been created by Satan to delude humanity, a priest-biologist welcomes the experiment that destroys the planet and its intelligent inhabitants
Author: James Blish (1921-1975) Genre: Science fiction—apocalypse Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 2049-2050 Location: Lithia, a planet 50 light-years from Earth; New York City; and Vatican City First published: 1958 (book 1 abridged as “A Case of Conscience” in If, 1953) The Story Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is a Jesuit priest as well as a biologist with the United Nations (U.N.) survey team on the recently discovered planet of Lithia. Lithia, dominated by a species of intelligent reptilians, is an apparent utopia. The Lithians have no crime, no politics, and no religion, and their ethical code (otherwise identical to that of Christianity) is based on pure reason. Despite their planet’s iron-poor crust, the Lithians have developed advanced technologies, including a planetary communications web based on pulses emitted by the gigantic Message Tree, the roots of which reach into the planet’s bedrock. When the survey team meets to make its recommendations before departing from Lithia, Ruiz is in surprising near-agreement with physicist Paul Cleaver. Cleaver advises closing the planet publicly while secretly turning it into a nuclear weapons laboratory. Ruiz also votes to close the planet, with a permanent quarantine, because he has become convinced that Satan created Lithia as a convincing demonstration that virtue is possible without God’s grace. The other two team members recommend that Lithia be opened. The tie vote means that the planet will remain at least temporarily off limits. As the terrestrials leave, Ruiz’s Lithian friend Chtexa gives him a farewell gift, a sealed vase containing the fertilized embryo of Chtexa’s child. The embryo, as it develops outside the body, will replicate the evolutionary history of its species. Book 2 opens in a U.N. laboratory back in New York, where Ruiz and
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lab director Liu Meid are observing the movements of the tiny Lithian, whose name (inscribed in his genetic code) is Egtverchi. When Lithia team member Mike Michelis arrives to request his help writing a nonclassified version of the Lithia report, Ruiz casually announces that he expects to be tried in Rome for teaching the heresy of diabolical creation. As Egtverchi develops, it is clear to Ruiz that he will prove to be a sentient being eligible to become a naturalized U.N. citizen. Events rapidly prove Ruiz correct. Egtverchi, who reaches adulthood within months, becomes a television celebrity and a satirical commentator on terrestrial society. His large following seems to be composed primarily of psychopaths created by the unnatural living conditions of Earth’s “shelter economy.” Meanwhile, the pope advises Ruiz to consider whether Lithia might be possessed rather than created by Satan. The distinction would allow Ruiz to abandon his heresy while literally exorcising the Lithian menace. As a last resort, Ruiz takes Egtverchi to the Canadian retreat of solid-state physicist Count d’Averoigne, who has devised an apparatus allowing simultaneous communication with the Message Tree. Egtverchi proves unresponsive to the remonstrances of his Lithian father, and Ruiz learns that Cleaver, back on Lithia in charge of the weapons project he proposed, is cutting down the Message Tree. When Egtverchi’s last broadcast touches off widespread rioting, the United Nations attempts to arrest him, but he stows away on a starship bound for Lithia. Ruiz, Liu, and Michelis join Count d’Averoigne at his lunar observatory, where he has set up a telescope that allows simultaneous viewing of interstellar objects. Communicating through the starship, the count has warned Cleaver that his experiment might destroy the planet, but he fears that Cleaver may stubbornly persist. Ruiz pronounces his exorcism shortly before the image of Lithia explodes, taking the monitor screen with it. Analysis A Case of Conscience compares favorably with other novels of apocalyptic science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), and with other novels treating conflict between science and religion, such as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). For the most part it avoids the sentimental, stilted narrative voice that often blemishes science fiction with a cosmic reach, and the machinery of its tight plot does not dissipate the “double truth” of its theme. It is much to the credit of James Blish’s novel that it does not attempt to downplay the very real conflict between the scientific and religious
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worldviews. Instead, it thematizes that conflict in the attractively humanscale figure of Ruiz. Ruiz underlines the novel’s title by constantly being attuned to the promptings of conscience, no matter how inconvenient, and constantly aware of his mental life, whether it is driven by reason or by emotion. He is mortified when the pope shows him that his lapse into heresy was the result of an unscientific failure to consider alternative hypotheses. He is annoyed by his chronic sinusitis. He is bemused when he finds himself, a professed celibate, having vaguely lustful thoughts about the nubile and modest Liu Meid. He is aware of his own worldly satisfaction when he proves to be correct in his predictions. At once a minister of religion and a practicing scientist, Ruiz knows that apparently contrary propositions can be said to be true—the sick child is saved by prayer, and she is saved by an antibiotic. Lithia is destroyed by an exorcist, and the planet is destroyed in a massive industrial accident. A blemish on the novel is the caricature of the amoral scientist in the form of Paul Cleaver, who comes across as a pasteboard villain, cursing, angry, and violent for no particular reason. His assertion of scientific and technological arrogance is too much like the vulgarity of the real estate developer who wants to build a shopping center in the last piece of wetland. He is thus in stark contrast to the complex and tormented Ruiz. The severe contrast can make the novel seem less ambiguous than it is. Few writers, however, can resist the urge to indulge in the luxury of a comical villain, and despite this fault Blish’s novel improves with each reading. —John P. Brennan
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The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun Police detective Elijah Baley, with the aid of the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, solves murders in an enclosed New York City of the future and on the planet Solaria
Author: Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) Genre: Science fiction—artificial intelligence Type of work: Novels Time of plot: About 5000 c.e. Location: New York City and the planet Solaria First published: The Caves of Steel (1954; serial form, Galaxy, October-December, 1953) and The Naked Sun (1957; serial form, Astounding Science-Fiction, October-December, 1956) The Story Isaac Asimov wrote The Caves of Steel, under the persuasion of Horace Gold of Galaxy magazine, as a follow-up to his popular robot short stories. Following its success, Asimov wrote a sequel, The Naked Sun, for rival magazine publisher John W. Campbell, Jr., and for Doubleday Books. The novels envision a future humanity split into two antagonistic groups. Those remaining on Earth have developed a fear of open spaces. They live in covered megacities, the “caves of steel” of the title, resigned to extreme overcrowding and rationing of virtually all amenities. The Spacers, descendants of the colonizers of fifty “Outer Worlds,” have much longer life spans and superior technology on their sparsely populated planets, and they forbid “disease-ridden” earthlings from immigrating to their worlds. Spacers make extensive use of robots. The more primitive models permitted on Earth are violently hated by most City dwellers, especially “Medievalists,” who yearn sentimentally for pre-City days. The only contact between Spacers and Earthmen is through Spacetown, a diplomatic/military base at the western edge of New York City. As The Caves of Steel opens, police detective Elijah “Lije” Baley is summoned by his Medievalist boss, Commissioner Julius Enderby, to investigate a murder. A Spacer robot-scientist named Sarton has been shot in Spacetown, presumably by an Earthman. Baley must accept as a partner
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a Spacer robot created by Sarton. The robot, named R. Daneel Olivaw, looks human enough to “pass” among hostile Earthmen. In the course of the investigation, Lije makes a number of embarrassing wrong guesses. He first supposes that Daneel is really Sarton in disguise but is convinced when Daneel exposes the machinery beneath his skin. Later, he guesses that Daneel is the killer. An expert convinces the Earthman that the Three Laws of Robotics built into a robot’s positronic brain absolutely prevent it from intentionally harming a human. Lije is dismayed to find that his wife works for a secret Medievalist society, though she appears innocent of the crime. Finally, Lije proves that Enderby is the killer. Daneel reveals that the Spacers’ ultimate goal on Earth is to convince Earthmen to break out of their stagnant cities to colonize uninhabited planets, with the help of robots. The Naked Sun shifts the setting to the planet Solaria, where Lije and Daneel attempt to solve another murder. Lije is extremely reluctant to accept the assignment because of his Earthman’s agoraphobia, but his boss orders him to do so because his observations can be invaluable to Earth intelligence. Dr. Rikaine Delmarre has been clubbed to death with a blunt object, which is now missing. Isaac Asimov. (Library of Congress) His wife, Gladia, was found in a faint near the body, and a robot-witness’s positronic brain has gone haywire. Solarian security chief Hannis Gruer believes that Gladia is connected to a plot against the human race that Delmarre was uncovering. Gruer himself is the victim of a nearly fatal poisoning. Lije is pleased to be reunited with Daneel and startled to learn that Solarians have a phobia of their own: Living alone on large estates, communicating via holographic projections, they have a horror of physical human contact or even presence. Marriage and procreation
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are seen as distasteful necessities, fetuses are removed for incubation, and children are raised on “baby farms.” In the course of the novel, Lije feels drawn to Gladia, who seems to have a repressed interest in close contact with a fellow human. Lije seeks to overcome his fear of open spaces under a “naked sun.” Escaping from Daneel, who wishes to keep him “from harm” (as the Three Laws of Robotics direct) by not letting him travel out of doors, Lije contacts five suspects—a family doctor, a sociologist, the acting security chief, a supervisor at the baby farm, and a roboticist. He brings them and Gladia into one room (holographically), in classic detective fashion, for the denouement. The villain turns out to be the roboticist, Jothan Leebig, who has found ways of circumventing the Three Laws of Robotics and tricking robots into becoming agents of crime. He also has manipulated Gladia. Gladia moves to the planet Aurora so that she can obtain human company, and Lije makes a plea to his supervisor concerning the need for Earthmen to overcome their own fears and colonize the stars. Analysis Although Asimov’s name is strongly connected to science fiction concerning robots, he did not invent the word “robot”; the haunting title of his first story collection, I, Robot (1950), was taken from another writer; and the idea of writing a robot detective novel set on an overpopulated Earth came from Horace Gold of Galaxy. Asimov did coin the word “robotics,” as he often noted with pride, and much more important, he created a body of work that has deeply influenced almost all science fiction involving robots that goes beyond simple views of robots as killing machines. Asimov’s influence extended beyond literature to visual media. Famous examples include the amusing Robbie of the film Forbidden Planet (1956); the Vulcan Spock of the Star Trek (1966-1969) television series and later films, who although flesh and blood is a close cousin to Daneel in his devotion to logic and his utterly impassive tone; the android Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1993), whose “positronic brain” is the writers’ direct homage to Asimov; and the Replicants of the film Blade Runner (1982). The Replicants, unlike Asimov’s robots, had no qualms about harming the humans they perfectly resembled. Like Asimov’s robots, however, they could be detected as nonhuman via a questionnaire, much like the one administered to Daneel in The Caves of Steel. Asimov saw fit to describe the two novels as “a perfect fusion of the murder mystery and the science-fiction novel.” Even if critics have found flaws in both the mystery writing and the science fiction, one could hardly disagree about the fusion. In each novel, the solution de-
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pends on a human psychology determined by the technological environment of Earth or Solaria. Moreover, the robot detective is the ultimate embodiment of the mythic sleuth of the Sherlock Holmes variety: a creature of pure logic. Daneel is such a vivid creation that readers often forget that in both novels he is really only a sidekick to Lije Baley, who brilliantly solves both murders. In The Naked Sun, Lije frequently reminds himself that robots are “logical but not reasonable,” though this distinction is never made clear. Of the two novels, The Naked Sun is much more in the classic mystery tradition, with practically a “locked room” murder and all the suspects brought together for the denouement. It seamlessly weaves social concerns of Asimov’s own era into the plot, such as worries about technological advances that may lead to extreme social isolation. The Caves of Steel is much less concerned with crime solving in some of its chapters. Its goal is to provide an in-depth study of a future City, its spectacle and its social problems. Written at a time when the United States reveled in its postwar prosperity and international power, The Caves of Steel is about the dangers of the coming megalopolis, including overcrowding and overreliance on a technological infrastructure. It also seems to foreshadow U.S. fears of losing status as an economic and technological superpower; perhaps Asimov was thinking more of the losses of the British Empire or the shift in local power from inner cities to the “outer worlds” of the suburbs. Readers of the late twentieth century and beyond may smile at a few of the novels’ lapses in predicting the future. For example, no one seems to have thought of shatterproof lenses for eyeglasses. The same reader may feel some dismay at the author’s indulgence in certain social stereotypes of his era. For example, Lije’s wife, Jessie, the only female character in The Caves of Steel, is constantly underlined as a “typical woman,” which is to say that she is pathetically hysterical and dependent, whether in her role as a housewife or indulging in secret meetings. Gladia, in the second novel, falls into the category of the femme fatale, but she literally knows not what she does. She is, at least, conceived as a more complex character. Future critics will doubtless explore Asimov’s views of imperial expansion and his analogies of robots to human slaves. Asimov began another novel soon after the success of The Naked Sun, aiming for a trilogy, but he abandoned it. Only after the popularity of a sequel to his Foundation series, years later, did he decide to write The Robots of Dawn (1983), set on Aurora and featuring Gladia as well as the detectives, followed by Robots and Empire (1985), which linked the Robot series to the Foundation series. —Joseph Milicia
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The Childe Cycle Prompted by various near-supermen, the human race splinters into the Men of War, Men of Faith, and Men of Philosophy, and then begins the laborious process of reintegration
Author: Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The late twenty-first century to the late twenty-fourth century Location: Sixteen human-inhabited planets in eight star systems First published: The Genetic General (1960; serial form, “Dorsai!,” Astounding Science-Fiction, May-July, 1959), Necromancer (1962; also titled No Room for Man, 1963), Soldier, Ask Not (1967; serial form, Galaxy, 1964), The Tactics of Mistake (1971), Three to Dorsai! (1975; contains Necromancer, The Tactics of Mistake, and The Genetic General), Dorsai! (1976; contains The Genetic General with restored text), The Spirit of Dorsai (1979; includes “Amanda Morgan,” “Brothers,” and three bridge sections; “Brothers” first appeared in Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, 1973), Lost Dorsai (1980; includes “Lost Dorsai,” “Warrior,” a critical essay, and an excerpt from The Final Encyclopedia; serial form of “Lost Dorsai,” Destinies, February-March, 1980; serial form of “Warrior,” Analog, December, 1965), The Dorsai Companion (1986; contains most of The Spirit of Dorsai and Lost Dorsai; adds new material), The Final Encyclopedia (1984), The Chantry Guild (1988), Young Bleys (1991), Lost Dorsai: The New Dorsai Companion (1993; contains most of the fiction from Lost Dorsai and excerpts from “A Childe Cycle Concordance”), and Other (1994) The Story The Childe Cycle (also known as the Dorsai Cycle) of novels and stories actually begins with Necromancer, in the later part of the twenty-first century, on an Earth ruled cautiously by the computers of the World Complex. Paul Formain, a one-armed mining engineer, resolves a stalemate between Kirk Tyne, head engineer of the World Complex, and Walter Blunt, head of the Chantry Guild. The Guild seeks the violent overthrow of the technocracy headed by Tyne. Formain manages to wrest control of
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the Guild from Blunt and send the human race out to the stars, something neither Tyne nor Blunt wanted. The Tactics of Mistake takes place a century later, after the human race has settled Mars and Venus as well as thirteen other planets—called the Younger Worlds—orbiting seven other star systems. Cletus Grahame, a military genius from the planet Dorsai, pits himself against one of the most powerful men on Earth, Dow deCastries. Grahame wins the conflict, thus gaining independence from Earth for the Younger Worlds. By the time of Soldier, Ask Not, in the late twenty-third century, the human race has fragmented into specialized types, called Splinter Cultures. The three main types are the Men of War (Dorsai), who live on Dorsai; the Men of Faith (Friendlies), who live on Harmony and Association; and the Men of Philosophy (Exotics), who live on Kultis and Mara. Helping to link all the Younger Worlds together are the members of the Interstellar News Services, including Tam Olyn. After seeing his brother-in-law killed in cold blood by a Friendly mercenary, Olyn embarks on a vendetta against Harmony and Association. When he is thwarted, Olyn returns to Earth, eventually to take over the directorship of the Final Encyclopedia, a gigantic information storage system orbiting the Mother Planet.
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Dorsai! also takes place during the late twenty-third century. It is the story of Donal Grahame, great-great-grandson of Cletus Grahame, who uses his Dorsai military training and what he calls “intuitional logic” to overcome William of Ceta, a merchant who nearly succeeds in controlling the complicated transactions that tie the Younger Worlds together economically. Donal, like his ancestor Cletus, frees the Younger Worlds from a threat to their independence. The last four novels in the series are all set around the middle of the twenty-fourth century, and they all concern two powerful antagonists: Hal Mayne and Bleys Ahrens. They are antagonists because each is the human embodiment of a different historical response of the “racial animal”—Gordon Dickson’s name for the consciousness of the human race as a whole—to the crisis of the Splinter Cultures’ failure. Bleys wishes the human race to stop changing; Hal wishes the race to keep changing, for the specialized types of the Splinter Cultures to become reintegrated, and for the reemergence of an improved “full spectrum” humanity. Young Bleys details Bleys Ahrens’s childhood, adolescence, and young manhood, ending in his taking control from his older brother, Dahno, of an organization called the Others. Other records the initial moves in Bleys Ahrens’s quest to rule most of the Younger Worlds. The Final Encyclopedia begins where Young Bleys ends, with the death of Hal Mayne’s three tutors at the hands of Bleys’s bodyguards. It traces a similar period in Hal’s life, ending with Hal blockading himself, the Final Encyclopedia, Old Earth, and nearly everyone from the Dorsai behind an impenetrable shield. Outside are Bleys’s minions, with time, power, and technology on their side. Three years later, at the beginning of The Chantry Guild, Hal is despondent at not being able to find a way of using the Final Encyclopedia to gain entrance to what he calls the Creative Universe. Eventually, Hal works his way out of the impasse after journeying to a new Chantry Guild hidden on Kultis, one of the two Exotic planets, now under occupation by soldiers controlled by the Others. In addition to these novels, Dickson wrote four shorter Childe Cycle pieces. He called these shorter pieces “illuminations” because they shed light on events only briefly mentioned in, or completely outside, the novels. “Amanda Morgan” shows how the women, children, and old men of Dorsai defeat Dow deCastries’s elite invasion troops. “Warrior” tells how Ian Grahame, Donal’s uncle, renders justice for the unnecessary death of one of Ian’s officers. “Lost Dorsai” is the story of Michael de Sandoval, a Dorsai who uncharacteristically refuses to use weapons but who manages to conquer an entire army. In “Brothers,” Ian Grahame
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ensures both that the men who assassinated his beloved twin brother Kensie are found and executed and that the Dorsai troops do not run amok in their grief over losing Kensie. Analysis Even in its own terms, the Childe Cycle is one of the most ambitious projects in the history of science fiction. The series consists of more than a million words, thus being comparable in scope to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History stories. The Childe Cycle is part of an even larger project, a set of interlocking novels—originally conceived of as three historical, three contemporary, and three science-fiction novels—each standing on its own but all eventually forming part of one gigantic “consciously thematic story,” a term Dickson used for the work. Dickson’s themes are almost all pairs of opposites. Evolution is crucial, and stasis is death; freedom is necessary, and too much control is fatal; duty to a cause above self is good, and selfishness is bad; and empathy liberates, and isolation confines. The exception to this series is the paradoxical mantra of the new Chantry Guild on Kultis, which is a key to the cycle’s overall structure: “the transient and the eternal are the same.” What Dickson seems to say is that during the thousand-year period his consciously thematic story will cover, patterns repeat. The individual novels differ in some respects. The earlier novels are shorter and less easily understood than the later novels. The basic structure, however, is the same throughout the cycle: A young but incredibly confident and talented man overcomes an older and seemingly invincible opponent, each victory supposedly bringing the human race a step closer to a time when everyone has the abilities of the gifted. Dickson’s heroes are not really supermen, for Dickson honestly believes that the traits they exhibit are available to all human beings, either in the past as models, in the present with a little training, or in the near future with some trailblazing by the gifted. Dickson is philosophically a “hard-headed” romantic, and the Childe Cycle reminds readers of the work of another hard-headed romantic science-fiction author, Poul Anderson. Both authors intermingle the conventions of hard science fiction—plausible extrapolations of current scientific knowledge—with ideas stemming from their study of various romantic authors and mythologies. Even more than Anderson, Dickson wishes to blur the line between fact and fiction. In Hal Mayne’s Creative Universe, one has only, in true romantic fashion, to wish for a thing to be true, and it will become true in
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actuality. English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) said, “The Child is Father of the Man.” Dickson says, with the idea resonating from Necromancer to Other, that “The Wish is Father of the Deed.” Ever the optimist, Dickson wanted the human race to improve, and spent most of his long writing career nobly mapping out a blueprint to follow. Critics have given Dickson comparatively little attention, probably because his work may seem dated, as if he stopped developing as a science-fiction writer about 1960. He may also seem derivative to some, for a typical Childe Cycle novel often reads like a combination of breakneck (but overly long and overly detailed) space-opera action, in the style of E. E. “Doc” Smith, and clumsy, obviously symbolic interior monologues reminiscent of the work of A. E. van Vogt, laced with too many heavily melodramatic confrontation scenes. Despite this critical indifference, Dickson won one Nebula and three Hugo Awards, all for shorter fiction and two for Cycle pieces—a 1965 Hugo for “Soldier, Ask Not” and a 1981 Hugo for “Lost Dorsai.” —Todd H. Sammons
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Childhood’s End The Satan-like Overlords attempt to guide a reluctant human race to its apocalyptic transformation and union with the Overmind
Author: Arthur C. Clarke (1917) Genre: Science fiction—evolutionary fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: About 1985-2085 Location: Earth and NGS 549672, the planet of the Overlords First published: 1953 The Story Childhood’s End is an account of the final one hundred years of human life on Earth, from the time of the Overlords’ arrival in their huge spaceship to the time of the dramatic, rapid evolution of all human children into a nonhuman form that achieves unity with the Overmind. A series of human characters—most notably George Greggson, Jean Morrel, and their two children—encounter the technologically advanced Overlords, whose Stardrive-based spaceships, truth-in-history machines, and panoramic viewers (which allow observation of every detail in an area many miles away) provide the science-fiction aspects of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel. The evolutionary fantasy element appears in human children as they transform into nonhuman entities that destroy Earth in the power of their fusion into the Overmind that controls, and perhaps is, the universe. Childhood’s End begins with an event often anticipated and described in science fiction: the arrival of an alien species on Earth. This species is unusual, however, both in its refusal to allow itself to be seen for fifty years and in its benevolence, as it prohibits cruelty to animals and otherwise guides humanity beyond the barbarity of war and destruction into an era of peace and economic prosperity. The negative results of the arrival and assumption of control by the Overlords are powerful as well, though less dramatic. A consequence of the end of energizing conflict and struggle is the decline in creative achievement in art. Likewise, religious belief is terminated by the Overlords’ technology, which allows direct visual access to most events in human history, thus exposing the myths and half-truths that had been accepted as truth over the ages.
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When this latter debunking is fully achieved, the Overlords reveal themselves. Gigantic, barb-tailed, winged, horned, Satan-like creatures, they disembark from their spaceship and generate only a brief reaction of terror. Reason then conquers the remnants of Christian memory, and the Overlords are accepted as intriguingly intelligent and benevolent masters. To some creative artists and philosophers, however, life without ambition and original human achievement is insufficient. Thus, some fifty thousand join to form a colony dedicated to artistic and intellectual life, the kind of human psychological development that had been stalled by the Overlords’ control. Among those joining the island colony are George Greggson, Jean Morrel, and their two young children. Unknowingly, Jean has attracted the attention of the Overlords because of her prescience in correctly identifying their home planet, NGS 549672, even though they never revealed their place of origin to any human. It is this psychological insight that the Overlords secretly have come to inhibit, or at least supervise, as it develops from the mental power implicit in extrasensory perception phenomena throughout human history into the mind-over-matter power that constitutes unity with the Overmind. The psychological power latent in Jean becomes fully realized in her children; they control objects telekinetically and experience visions of planets even the Overlords have never visited. Soon all human children develop this power. They quickly become nonhuman and oblivious to their parents, who then annihilate themselves because they cannot retrieve their children or even become like them. Only Jan Rodricks remains, having stowed away on an Overlord ship, visited NGS 549672,
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and returned to a desolate Earth eighty years later. He describes the apocalypse for the Overlords, who have retreated, their supervisory task completed. Even Jan himself fades into nothingness as the children consume the substance of the Earth in their transformation into pure light energy and depart with the Overmind into the stars. Analysis The creative complexity of Clarke’s novel has made it a classic of modern science fiction. The work is difficult to categorize or synthesize. On one level, it operates as a reasonably believable extrapolation from modern scientific and technological progress into a material utopia. The novel has its dystopian psychological dimension as well. Childhood’s End also reflects the aspect of Clarke’s writing most fully realized in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his creation of brilliantly evocative, colorful, fantastic descriptions of nonexistent other worlds as an exercise in human imaginative expression. The description of the metamorphosis of the mountain on NGS 549672 in Childhood’s End is an excellent example. Closely allied with this fantastic physical description is the imaginative leap made by Clarke in his depiction of the fantasy transformation of human children into psychic superpowers and spiritual essences. Also intimately connected to this imaginatively mystical element in Clarke’s writing is his recurring theme of religion—particularly Christianity—as an imperfect embodiment of powerful but misunderstood psychic and spiritual forces. For example, in the 1956 Hugo Awardwinning story “The Star,” Clarke ironically presents the star of Bethlehem as the supernova stage of another planet’s sun. Billions of people die on that planet as the supernova guides the shepherds to the place of birth of one child on Earth. The same reversal of Christian belief, or enlargement of the context surrounding it, is obvious in Childhood’s End, with the Overlords as an ironically benevolent reversal of the human image of Satan. Also fundamental to Childhood’s End is Clarke’s recurring theme of the existence of, and inevitable human contact with, other life-forms in the universe. With an intensity akin to religious conversion, Clarke presents this theme in his famous 1951 story “The Sentinel,” the progenitor of 2001: A Space Odyssey. On a moon expedition, the narrator of “The Sentinel” finds a crystal pyramid left by an alien species and accepts the fact of that species’ existence; similarly, the Overlords’ arrival in Childhood’s End is represented as an inevitable progression in human encounters with the life-forms “out there.”
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In its complexity and multifacetedness, Childhood’s End represents the great artistic power of Clarke in all three of his writing styles, which, according to James Gunn in The Road to Science Fiction: From Heinlein to Here (1979), are extrapolative, ingenious, and mystical. What the novel lacks in formal unity and harmony it more than compensates for in pure energy, originality, and profundity. —John L. Grigsby
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The Chronicles of Narnia The creation, salvation, and apocalyptic remaking of the land of Narnia and the adventures of children there
Author: C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963) Genre: Fantasy—theological romance Type of work: Novels Time of plot: 1900-1949 in Earth time, during which 2,555 years pass in Narnia Location: England, Narnia, and magical lands surrounding Narnia First published: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magician’s Nephew (1955), and The Last Battle (1956) The Story The seven books constituting the Chronicles of Narnia tell how Aslan the Lion, son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, sings Narnia into being from nothing and later saves it from evil by sacrificing himself and rising again. He spares nothing to make others good if they are open to change. The fictional history of the adventures does not correspond to the order of either composition or publication, but author C. S. Lewis provided a suggested order for reading the stories that is adhered to in the following plot summaries. In book 1, The Magician’s Nephew, the adult Andrew Ketterley, who dabbles in magic, discovers rings that can transport their wearers into other worlds and back (he thinks). He tricks his nephew Digory Kirke and Digory’s friend, Polly Plummer, into trying the rings. The two children discover that yellow rings transport them to the Wood between the Worlds. Once there, green rings can plunge them into pools magically leading to other worlds. In the dead world of Charn, Digory’s unbridled curiosity leads him to release an evil witch, Jadis, from a deathlike enchantment. Jadis forces her way back to Earth, where she works her destructive evil. The children use the rings to get her out of Earth, but instead of getting her back to Charn, they go to Narnia, a new world the lion Aslan is singing into existence. Because Digory and Polly brought evil into Narnia, Aslan
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gives them a role in containing it. They ride a winged horse to a far garden, bringing back an apple to plant in Narnia as temporary protection against Jadis. Aslan gives Digory an apple to take back to Earth and use to cure his dying mother. Digory plants the apple’s core, and from the tree that grows he has a wardrobe made. In book 2, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Digory is the mature Professor Kirke. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie come to his home to escape the London air raids of World War II. While playing hide and seek, they enter the enchanted wardrobe and pass into Narnia. Edmund betrays his siblings and all of Narnia for the White Witch Jadis’s offer of Turkish Delight candy and power. The Witch has created a never-ending winter with no Christmas, but she fears an ancient prophecy that when two boys and two girls take the thrones at Cair Paravel, her reign will end, and Aslan will return and claim his rightful rule. According to the magic built into Narnia at its creation, Jadis has rights to all traitors, but by a deeper magic, an innocent person may die in place of the guilty, which Aslan does. The Witch thinks Aslan a fool and herself the conqueror when she kills Aslan on the Stone Table. By a deeper magic that she does not know, Aslan rises from the dead, frees Edmund and all the Witch’s captives, and leads a victorious conquest. Aslan destroys the Witch and places the children on the four thrones of Narnia. After many years, while hunting the White Stag, the children unintentionally stumble back through the enchanted wardrobe to the professor’s house, with no lapse of Earth time. The action in book 3, The Horse and His Boy, takes place entirely in Narnia and surrounding countries. A talking horse, Bree, born a free Narnian but stolen young and used as an ordinary riding horse by an evil Calormene master, rescues a boy named Shasta. Shasta actually is Prince Cor, the older twin son of King Lune, ruler of Archenland, a friendly neighboring country of Narnia. Shasta was stolen because of a prophecy that he would one day save Archenland. Bree and Shasta escape with two others. Through many adventures, they save Archenland and Narnia from surprise invasion. The four Pevensie children, earlier kings and queens of Narnia, return in the fourth book, Prince Caspian. While waiting for the train back to boarding school, they vanish into Narnia at the blast of a magic horn Susan had left in Narnia. The Pevensies help Prince Caspian wrest Narnia from the Telmarines and his evil and usurping Uncle Miraz, who has tried to erase every memory of Narnia. Peter Pevensie, former High King himself, faces Miraz in single combat and is about to defeat him when the evil forces attack. Aslan calls the trees to life, and the
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Telmarines are routed. All who wish, even Telmarines who will accept forgiveness, may enter Narnia through a magic door, but the Pevensies must return to the railway station and school. Edmund and Lucy return to Narnia in book 5, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” They are accompanied by their selfish and obnoxious cousin Eustace Scrubb. They enter Narnia by falling through a Narnian seascape hanging on a wall, and they are rescued from the sea by their old friend King Caspian, who is fulfilling a vow to search for seven Narnian lords. One of the faithful seven helps Caspian save the Lone Islands from slave trade. Eustace becomes a dragon because of his greed but is painfully “undragoned” by Aslan. Reepicheep the Mouse, the most fearless of the Narnians, fulfills his quest to find Aslan’s true country. In book 6, The Silver Chair, Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole escape school bullies through a courtyard door and enter Narnia. They are met by Aslan and given four signs to aid in rescuing Prince Rilian from the evil queen of Underland. Underland is deep underground and is peopled by Earthmen, whom the queen rules by terror and plans to use in overthrowing Narnia. The wise Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum helps the children release Rilian from an enchanted silver chair and return him to Narnia. Book 7, The Last Battle, is a complex account of the end of Narnia and its re-creation into a permanent paradise by Aslan the Lion, creator and rightful ruler of Narnia. Various children have been called, by various means, from Earth into a Narnia in crisis. This time, a train crash sends all the earthly friends to newly created, everlastingly good Narnia, but they must first fight in the old Narnia’s last battle. A clever ape named Shift forces his donkey companion Puzzle to wear a lion’s skin so that he
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can masquerade as Aslan. By this deception, they rule Narnia. When the deception is broken, the Calormenes, under Rishda, launch an attack on the Narnians. Rishda calls on the evil god Tash, who destroys Rishda himself in the end. Tirian, the present king of Narnia, and the friends from Earth all die in the battle, but as they see Narnia destroyed by a cataclysmic flood, then swallowed by a dying sun, death becomes for them the doorway to a new and better Narnia. They are invited “farther up and farther in.” The “Great Story” begins, “in which every chapter is better than the one before.” Analysis This series combines the elements of youth and childhood that Lewis loved and employed in many of his works: enchantment, magic, talking animals and trees, Arthurian legend, other worlds and journeys among them, time travel, and myth. The series contains elements of many genres: utopias, fairy stories, children’s stories, medieval chivalric romances, fables, folktales, and novels. Its ideas pull from a deep well of learning in history, literature, philosophy, and religion. Although they never obtrude, St. Paul and the Gospel writers, Saint Augustine, Dante, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser are always visible in the subtext. Lewis acknowledges many specific authors, especially Edith Nesbit, George MacDonald, Beatrix Potter, H. G. Wells, and (preeminently) the biblical writers. The Bible provides the structure, patterns, and values of the Chronicles. The marvel of these books is in the convincing mix of all these elements and the ease of reading. Simplicity and profundity dance together. In the Chronicles of Narnia, ordinary people such as cab drivers and schoolchildren are chosen to perform extraordinary feats and fulfill extraordinary destinies. They battle evil from within, in the form of laziness, greed, pride, selfishness, and disbelief, as well as evil from without, in the form of soldiers, traitors, witches, enchantments, and an assortment of evil mythological creatures. All these challenges are met with the richer resources of good, flowing out of its source in Aslan, who is to the world of Narnia what Christ is to Earth according to the biblical account. Aslan creates Narnia, populates it, providentially watches over it, and guides it to its end and new beginning. As is usual in Lewis’s books, evil is portrayed as the drying up of human potential, as restriction and imprisonment. The dwarfs who reject Aslan in The Last Battle cannot see him, and Eustace embodies greed in the form of a dragon. Goodness is expansive and liberating. Those Jadis turned to stone are restored to life by Aslan’s breath, and Eustace is
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“undragoned” to become a hero and liberator of others in turn. The stable that Aslan occupies at the end of The Last Battle is bigger on the inside than the outside and opens into the new Narnia. The grand achievement of this series is its awakening of a longing for the good, for justice, purity, truth, courage, charity, patience, and perseverance. The influence of the series is vast. When J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lewis’s work appeared during the 1950’s, they revived fantasy literature from its doldrums. The Narnia books have been the subject of conferences, scholarly work, artworks, and television and video performances. An estimated twenty million or more readers have enjoyed the Chronicles. Perhaps no other work has done more to rehabilitate the reputation, multiply the readership, and broaden the creative potential of fantasy literature in the twentieth century. —Wayne Martindale
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Cities in Flight Earth’s culture, represented by the flying city of New York, spreads through the galaxy and decays as the universe comes to an end
Author: James Blish (1921-1975) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: 2012-4004 Location: Earth, Jupiter, various star systems in and beyond the galaxy, and the center of the universe First published: Cities in Flight (1970, as tetralogy); previously published as Earthman, Come Home (1955), They Shall Have Stars (1956; also published as Year 2018), The Triumph of Time (1958; also published as A Clash of Cymbals), and A Life for the Stars (1962) The Story Much of the material making up Cities in Flight was published in other forms between 1950 and 1962 and in a different order from that presented in the completed tetralogy. The core of the story idea was published in a series of novelettes—”Okie” (1950), “Bindlestiff” (1950), “Sargasso of Lost Cities” (1953), and “Earthman Come Home” (1953)— which were revised and combined into Earthman, Come Home, the third novel in the chronological sequence. They Shall Have Stars, the first novel in the sequence, was formed by combining the novelettes “Bridge” (1952) and “At Death’s End” (1954). The second novel in the sequence, A Life for the Stars, was published as juvenile science fiction fours years after the fourth, The Triumph of Time. The overarching conception melding these disparately written pieces into a single volume is James Blish’s elaboration of a complete future history that begins in the early twenty-first century, as the United States and the Soviet Union are about to merge into a single bureaucratic state. Blish conceives of a new galactic Earthmanist culture—a version of Western culture—formed on the basis of antigravity screens (spindizzies) that allow entire cities to take flight and anti-agathics (antideath drugs) that allow the long lifetimes required for interstellar flight. Earth dominates the galaxy after the defeat of the previous hegem-
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ony, the Vegan tyranny, a vaguely defined humanoid/alien civilization. The galaxy is “pollinated” by Earth cities, which function as itinerant industrial bases (Okies) and are policed by the Earth “cops,” who exist in creative tension with the Okies. A basic plot idea throughout the series is that some cities are good citizens, such as New York City, the “protagonist” city of the series. Others have become rogues, or “bindlestiffs.” The worst of these, the legendary Interstellar Master Traders (IMT), have slaughtered an entire planet. As background to the narrative, Earth culture decays as Earth’s growing bureaucracy and fear of the Okies destroys the galactic economy. As time itself draws to an end, in the fortieth century, a new alien civilization, the Web of Hercules, rises to power. They Shall Have Stars tells, in alternating narratives, of the development of the two technologies on which the rest of the series depends. Bliss Wagoner, a U.S. senator, secretly sponsors both projects in an effort to create an escape route for Western culture. In the first of the two narratives, a space pilot, Paige Russell, falls in love with Anne Abbott, the daughter of the president of the drug company where immortality drugs are being developed. The second narrative is told from the point of view of Robert Helmuth, a construction supervisor of the giant “bridge” being built on Jupiter by remote control to test the theories that will make antigravity possible. At the end, Wagoner arranges for Russell and Abbott to become the nucleus of a colonizing diaspora from Earth. Wagoner is executed for treason by the paranoid head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A Life for the Stars, set in the thirty-second century, tells of the departure of Earth’s cities. Crispin DeFord, a youth, is impressed by the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, as it departs from an Earth whose economy has collapsed. The novel is essentially a coming-of-age story in which the young DeFord, thrust into perilous circumstances, manages by virtue of his wits and the help of older mentors to survive and, at the end, to become city manager of New York, which Scranton encounters in space. Much of the narrative deals with DeFord’s education, after he is transferred to New York, in the culture and technology of the Okie city. DeFord demonstrates his abilities in a series of daring escapades that help save New York from a bindlestiff. Earthman, Come Home, set in the last half of the fourth millennium, tells of New York under the guidance of Mayor John Amalfi and the new city manager, Mark Hazelton. A series of escapades, including equipping the entire planet of He with spindizzies (told in A Life for the Stars), brings the city into constant conflict with the Earth police. New York is forced to join a “hobo jungle” of unemployed Okie cities. Amalfi, through his under-
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standing of the principles of cultural development, is able to manipulate the cities to march on Earth and, through their flight across the galaxy, to lure out of hiding the Vegan Fort, the last lurking vestige of the Vegan tyranny. Amalfi destroys the Fort by “flying” a planet at intergalactic speed across the path of the Fort as it enters the solar system. New York ends up grounded on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, where it must defeat the IMT, which has hidden there, in order to begin a new culture in the wake of the collapse of the old. The Triumph of Time is set in the first years of the forty-first century. The scientists of New York and the planet He, now returned from intergalactic space, discover that in the repeating cycles of time itself a twin antimatter universe will collide with the known universe to begin a new big bang. The only chance for “survival”—which amounts to the right to determine the physical composition of a new universe—is to fly to the center of the universe. To do this, Amalfi must fight off a rebellion against New York’s hegemony in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, dispel the apathy of a culture grown old, and race the rising galactic civilization, the Web of Hercules, to the center. At the end, at the moment of his death, Amalfi chooses to make a new universe completely different from the old one. Analysis Cities in Flight as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, which are pastiches of the science-fiction tradition. The bold image of flying cities and the theme of immortality come directly from part 3 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), although Blish borrows none of Swift’s satire. Most of the narrative is typical “space opera” on a grand scale. Devices of science are manufactured as the plot demands, within a context of flashing space battles and an entire galaxy improbably turned into a human landscape that looks and behaves like a somewhat comic map of nineteenth century Europe, complete with squabbling governments and officious military. Blish’s imagined future, sweeping to the end of time itself, is in the high science-fiction tradition reaching back to H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, although Blish compresses his future into a few thousand years. The mapping of the detailed future history that Blish added as Cities in Flight developed is much like the work of Robert A. Heinlein in his Future History and Isaac Asimov in the Foundation series. Blish’s imaginary history reflects directly the ideological concerns of America in the Cold War period. Cities in Flight derives a distinctive quality and sense of wholeness from the claim, woven into and around the narrative, that the series re-
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flects a serious philosophy of history. This claim is supported by the excerpted fictional study The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits, which Blish adds as prologue to some of the novels. Critics have discussed Blish’s reliance on Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-1922), a work that presents a theory of evolution of cultures and civilizations as an organic, cyclic process. Richard D. Mullen discusses this idea in “Blish, van Vogt and the Rise of Spengler” in the Riverside Quarterly (1968). This tetralogy cannot be taken seriously as philosophical fiction. Some of Blish’s later fiction, most notably A Case of Conscience (1959), stakes a more serious claim. Cities in Flight, however, is held together imaginatively by a consistent tension between two ideas. The first is that history and cultures rise and fall in repeated patterns. This process is inexorable and shapes and transcends the will of the individuals in those cultures. The second is that rare and perceptive individuals, such as Bliss Wagoner and John Amalfi, can see those patterns and act as agents of creative change, to some extent transcending them. The thousandyear life span of Amalfi represents this transcendence. Blish reproduces images of the typical American hero, a self-reliant, institution-defying individual. The weight of historical destiny—the triumph of time—hangs heavily over the narrative and informs the characterization of Amalfi, who is a well-developed, self-conscious figure. This realistic characterization gives Cities in Flight and its ambivalent end real poignancy. —D. Barrowman Park
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City The history of the Webster family and its robot, Jenkins, as humankind abandons its cities and eventually its planet
Author: Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Stories Time of plot: From the 1990’s until thousands of years in the future Location: Earth, Jupiter, and another dimension First published: 1952 The Story Winner of the 1953 International Fantasy Award for best fiction, City is assembled primarily from eight stories published between 1944 and 1951. Framed by an “Editor’s Preface” and “Notes,” these tales are presented as a future ethnographer’s collection of “the stories that the Dogs tell.” After the death of John W. Campbell, Jr., in 1971, Clifford D. Simak wrote a ninth story for editor Harry Harrison’s Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1973); in 1980 this last story was added to a revised version of City, along with an “Author’s Note.” The first three tales in City chronicle humankind’s abandonment of its cities for a pastoral existence made possible by advanced technology. In the first story, “City,” set in the 1990’s, John W. Webster flees to the country and builds a house. Much of the rest of City focuses on that house and Webster’s descendants. “Huddling Place,” the second story, is set in 2117. Jerome A. Webster has written the first reference work on Martian physiology. He is needed to save the life of the Martian philosopher Juwain. Jerome’s robot, Jenkins, fails to notify Jerome that a spaceship has arrived to take Jerome to Mars; the robot believes that its agoraphobic owner would not leave the house. Juwain therefore dies before he can reveal a secret mental concept that supposedly would solve many of humankind’s problems. More than sixty years later, in “Census,” Jerome’s son Thomas perfects the technology needed to take humankind to the stars. Thomas’s son Allen pilots the first spaceship to Alpha Centauri, and another son, Bruce, has given dogs the ability to speak through a genetic engineering technology called “boosting.”
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The next two stories, “Desertion” and “Paradise,” depict humanity’s abandonment of its native planet. More than a century has passed when astronaut Kent Fowler and his dog Towser are genetically transformed into “lopers,” the native life-form of Jupiter. As lopers, they discover that Jupiter is a veritable paradise that they are loath to leave. Only after five years does Fowler return to his base to report his findings. On Earth, president Tyler Webster, afraid that it would mean the end of humankind, tries unsuccessfully to suppress Fowler’s information. His fears are warranted: Once Fowler’s report becomes known, most of humankind leaves Earth to live on Jupiter as lopers. The remaining stories illustrate the fate of Earth after humankind’s exodus. Almost two millennia later, in “Hobbies,” a few humans still live in Geneva, “wild robots” have gathered in the countryside, and dogs have begun efforts to “civilize” wolves and have discovered the existence of other dimensions. To allow the dogs to develop unhindered by humans, Jon Webster seals off Geneva before putting himself into suspended animation. Another five thousand years pass before the events in “Aesop.” Most of the world’s animals can talk and live in harmony; unfortunately, killing is reintroduced to the world by an other-dimensional being and descendants of humans who were not sealed in Geneva. After the other-dimensional being is stopped, Jenkins the robot takes the unsealed humans to another dimension, where he remains for five thousand years. Returning to Earth in “The Simple Way” (originally published as “The Trouble with Ants”), Jenkins discovers that ants, “boosted” thousands of years earlier, are erecting an enormous, continuously expanding building. As available living space becomes scarcer, the wild robots travel to the stars and the animals leave Earth to live in other dimensions. “Epilog” takes place untold millennia after Jenkins’s return. He is the only robot on Earth, pondering the mystery of the ants as a spaceship lands near Webster House. Some of the wild robots who had left Earth millennia earlier have returned to invite Jenkins to assist in the work to be done on other planets. Analysis Important for many reasons, City remains Simak’s most famous work. Its first two stories are generally recognized as the first works representative of Simak’s fully developed style. All the tales contain elements and motifs found frequently in his stories and novels. The fourth tale in the work, “Desertion,” is one of science fiction’s most frequently anthologized stories. This collection is also notable for being recognized as an
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important work at a time when science fiction and fantasy were only beginning to receive serious notice within the literary community. The International Fantasy Award, which City won in 1953, predates both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. City received its award the same year that Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1953) became the first winner of the Hugo as best novel. City is representative of two publishing trends in science fiction: a 1940’s trend in which writers produced several stories linked by recurring characters, settings, or themes (for example, Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History stories) and a 1950’s trend in which writers produced “fixups,” assembling previously published short stories, often with new framing or cementing material, into “novels.” Other noted examples of such “fixups” include Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953), and A. E. van Vogt’s The War Against the Rull (1959). Since its earliest days, science fiction has probed for what constitutes the nature of humanity. Few works explore human nature as well as City. Simak uses mutants, extraterrestrials, boosted animals and insects, humans transformed into extraterrestrials, extradimensional beings, and robots to highlight, contrast, re-create, and even warn against such human qualities as aspiration, doubt, love, homesickness, aggression, passivity, and curiosity. The conclusion of “Desertion,” in which a man and his dog literally become equals, is one of science fiction’s most brilliant expressions of the possibility that humanity is not the highest form of existence in the universe. This possibility is likewise evident in the fact that Joe the mutant and Juwain the Martian both possess mental capabilities beyond those of mere humans, and the animals of Earth (with minor mechanical assistance) achieve a universal peace, something humans were able only to dream of. Ironically, the most “human” character in City is Jenkins, one of science fiction’s most fully developed robots. Simak was guilty of understatement when, in his author’s note to “Epilog,” he explained that the collection’s last tale “had to be Jenkins’s story”; because Jenkins is humanity’s last representative, his story offers the final comment on humanity’s fate. —Daryl R. Coats
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The Conan Series Conan the Barbarian battles men, magic, and monsters in the mythical Hyborian Age, rising from penniless wanderer to king of Aquilonia, the mightiest of the Hyborian nations
Author: Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Stories Time of plot: About 15,000 b.c.e. Location: A fictional Earth First published: The Coming of Conan (1953), Conan the Barbarian (1954), The Sword of Conan (1952), King Conan (1953), Conan the Conqueror (1950; previously published as “The Hour of the Dragon,” Weird Tales, 1935), and Tales of Conan (1955) The Story Robert E. Howard wrote the Conan stories (arranged above in order of internal chronology) as episodes from the life of the invincible barbarian hero. The Gnome Press collection includes all of Howard’s Conan stories, commentary regarding Conan and his world, and two tales of King Kull, another ancient barbarian king. Most of the stories were originally published in Weird Tales between 1929 and 1936, except those in the last book, Tales of Conan, which was compiled from previously unpublished manuscripts. L. Sprague de Camp edited the entire collection. The Kull tales begin with The Coming of Conan. With his Pictish friend Brule, Kull battles the uncanny serpent men. Kull is a mighty barbarian warrior from Atlantis who has usurped the throne of the kingdom of Valusia, and Brule is a guerrilla fighter and fantastically skilled hunter. Conan is a fusion of these two characters. He is the greatest swordsman of his age, with the strength, speed, and ferocity of a beast of prey and senses so acute that he surpasses wild men and animals in tracking and stalking. After the Kull stories begin the adventures of Conan, set in the prehistoric Hyborian Age. Although little is known of Conan’s early years, it is established that he was born in the midst of a battle, literally bred to war. At the sack of Venarium, an Aquilonian outpost in Cimmeria destroyed by the barbarians, he acquired a curiosity about the Hyborian civiliza-
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tions. When he was about seventeen years old, he began the wanderings that would make him legendary throughout the world as a thief, mercenary, bandit chieftain, pirate captain, general, and ultimately barbarian king of Aquilonia itself. The most basic plot element is Conan’s heroic character. He embodies “natural” virtues such as independence, courage, indomitability, and a simple honesty about himself and his desires. He rejects the “civilized hypocrisy” of legal abstractions, so he is often at odds with the law. Although not given to wanton cruelty, he is vengeful and merciless in his anger. This is counterbalanced by an unswerving loyalty to deserving comrades and a loathing for bullies and other cowardly types. Naturally curious and almost fearless, Conan enjoys the adventurous life and will brave any danger to help a woman in distress. These personality traits— and his mighty sword arm—impel him from adventure to adventure. His restless need for action will not allow him to enjoy times of peace, even that for which he battles as king of Aquilonia. Conan inevitably faces situations with impossible odds against his success, but with heroic fortitude and tremendous luck he invariably succeeds. Although he frequently begins an adventure out of selfish motives, his actions always help defeat some monstrous evil. One good example is the earliest Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant.” Setting out to steal a fabulous gem, “The Heart of the Elephant,” rumored to be kept in a mysterious tower, he braves natural and supernatural obstacles to attain his goal, only to voluntarily free a mysterious being from another planet, Yag-Kosha, who wreaks awful magical vengeance on the tower’s builder, the evil magician Yara. The jewel that Conan sought is absorbed into the spell, and he flees while the tower crashes to ruin behind him. In what many regard as the greatest Conan story, “The Queen of the Black Coast,” the encounter with supernatural evil is again central. Fleeing the agents of civilized law, Conan forces passage aboard an Argossean merchant ship bound for the northern coast of what is now Africa. There all but Conan are massacred by black pirates, whose leader is a legendary white beauty, Belit. She falls in love with Conan, and they roam the coast, pillaging and destroying, until Belit elects to search for a prehuman ruin rumored to hold great treasure. One member of the elder race that built the city remains, now devolved into a diabolical, bat-winged ape creature. The thing craftily separates Conan and some spearmen from Belit and the rest. Conan’s men are killed when the fumes of the black lotus put Conan into an enchanted slumber. He awakes from the spell to find Belit hanged from the
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yardarm of her ship by a golden necklace from the horde she had intended to steal. As night falls, Conan awaits the demoniac being and his were-hyena servants atop a pyramid at the center of the city. In a terrific battle, he is saved at the last moment by the ghost of Belit, returning as she promised to save her lover. At dawn, Conan places the treasure and her body in her ship, which he makes a funeral pyre. As the flames blend with the rising sun, he vanishes into the jungle. The hero’s encounter with the “unnatural” (evil) and his incredible triumph is the archetypal pattern of all the Conan stories. Nearly infinite variations are possible within this simple matrix, as illustrated by the above examples as well as the abundance of heroic “sword and sorcery” fantasy written since the Conan stories. Conan is the first true “sword and sorcery” hero. Analysis Howard’s Conan stories constitute a new subgenre of heroic fantasy. Fritz Leiber coined the term “sword and sorcery” to describe this hybrid, which merged the naturalistic epic—of which the tales of Tarzan are perhaps the best example—with elements of the fairy tale and the horror story. Sword and sorcery assumes that the intimate connection of pretechnological peoples with their own mythic consciousness makes them susceptible to dark supernatural influences, yet also attunes them to their own heroic potential. Monsters are the genre’s embodiment of the darkness within the human soul, but they are also symbols of what lies outside the narrow confines of modern rationality. The world is presented in terms of a struggle between great forces, not of JudeoChristian good and evil but of natural law and unnatural chaos, and the hero’s victories imply a larger order from which overcivilized (decadent) people have become estranged. Another way to view this is that people’s lives lose the potential for mythical significance through the sterile logic of technological advancement. This romantic affirmation of the natural primitive, however, is qualified by a darker undertone: Naturalistic fantasies treat aggression as more basic than communal behavior, more fundamental even than maternal bonding. Socialized behavior is superimposed on an instinctive survival/reproductive urge that is both competitive and selfish. This is why Howard believed in the inevitable collapse of civilization: The purely animal is more natural and therefore stronger than the civilized superego. It is natural to struggle and slay for survival, and unnatural to live in peace and to prosper as a community. As a nameless forester puts it at the end of “Beyond the Black River” (Weird Tales, 1936),
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“Civilization is unnatural; it is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism will always triumph.” Because of its fantastic removal from the constraints of everyday reality, sword and sorcery became an effective medium for writers who wished to test ultimate questions about the relationship of values to ideas of natural order, of dreams to reality, of nature to the supernatural, and of law to chaos. Howard’s own answers were equivocal: He opposed reason to instinct, the latter of which he saw as more natural, yet he respected artistic achievement, which he viewed as unattainable without civilization and the use of higher reason. He opposed the “unnatural” repressive qualities of civilization by linking them with degeneration and diabolism, while attributing similar qualities to primitive shamans. Although he clearly admired the heroic exploits of his barbaric protagonist, he had Conan himself observe that he was unable to create and was able only to destroy. Sword and sorcery has provided a rich vein of popular fantasy literature. Important authors in the genre include Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, John Jakes, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Andrew J. Offutt, Manly Wade Wellman, Karl Edward Wagner, and even female authors such as Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley, who adapted the anachronistic devices of the genre to their own ends. De Camp turned unpublished stories by Howard into finished works as well as writing some new Conan stories. Carter, Offutt, Robert Jordan, Steve Perry, and Bjorn Nyberg also have written Conan stories. Howard’s original fusion of naturalistic and supernatural mythic themes in the Conan stories played the definitive role in establishing a popular subgenre of heroic fantasy. —David Hinckley
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court A nineteenth century American is transported to sixth century England, where he tries to implant modern technology and political ideas
Author: Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens, 1835-1910) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late nineteenth and early sixth centuries Location: England First published: 1889 The Story The novel is told within a frame set around 1889. During a day tour of England’s Warwick Castle, the anonymous frame-narrator meets an American—later identified as Hank Morgan—who relates how he was transported back to the sixth century. When he was a foreman in a Connecticut arms factory in 1879, an employee knocked him unconscious; he awakened in England in 528 c.e. That night, Morgan leaves a manuscript containing his story with the narrator, who stays up reading it. Morgan’s own first-person account forms the novel’s main narrative. Morgan’s narrative spans roughly ten years. After awakening in England, he is captured and taken to Camelot, where he is denounced as a monster and sentenced to be burned. He knows that a solar eclipse occurred at the very hour when he is scheduled to die, so he threatens to blot out the sun. When the eclipse begins, people conclude that he is a powerful magician. King Arthur not only frees him but also agrees to make him his prime minister. Morgan then enhances his reputation by blowing up the tower of Merlin the magician. Soon dubbed the “Boss,” Morgan reorganizes the kingdom’s administration and gradually introduces modern inventions and innovations, such as matches, factories, newspapers, the telegraph, and training schools. Although he is eager to introduce democracy and civil liberties, he proceeds cautiously to avoid offending the powerful Church. After seven years, Morgan’s administration is so firmly established
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The frontispiece to the first edition of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, illustrated by Dan Beard. (Arkent Archives)
that he leaves Camelot. Wearing armor, he goes on a quest with a woman named Sandy to rescue princesses—who turn out to be hogs. During his return, he stops at a holy shrine, where King Arthur joins him. They disguise themselves as freemen in order to travel among commoners. A nobleman treacherously sells them to a slave caravan that takes them to London, where Morgan kills the slave driver while escaping. Before being recaptured, Morgan telegraphs Camelot asking for help. As he and the king are to be hanged, Sir Launcelot arrives with five hundred knights mounted on bicycles to rescue them. Back in Camelot, Morgan wins many jousts using his lasso and kills a knight with a pistol. He then challenges all the knights at once. Five hundred knights attack, only to scatter after he starts shooting them. This triumph leaves him England’s unchallenged master, so he unveils his secret schools, mines, and factories. Finally ready to take on the Church, he has slavery abolished, taxation equalized, and all men made legally equal. Steam and electrical power proliferate, trains begin running, and Morgan prepares to send an expedition to discover America. When Morgan visits France, the legendary tragedy of Arthur’s breach with Launcelot unfolds, plunging England into civil war. Morgan returns to find that the Church has put him and his modern civilization under its Interdict. With only fifty-three trustworthy followers left, he retreats to a fortified cave that is attacked by twenty-five thousand knights. His mod-
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ern weapons annihilate the knights, but the enemy corpses trap him in the cave. Merlin casts a spell to make him sleep thirteen hundred years. A postscript to the final chapter returns the story to the present. The frame-narrator finishes reading Morgan’s manuscript and visits him in time to see him die. Analysis A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was the first book that Mark Twain finished after publishing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Because of its setting, it often is classified as one of his historical novels, along with The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and Joan of Arc (1896), but it has little in common with either. The novel more closely resembles his 1879 short story “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn,” also about an American trying to modernize an archaic society. The germ of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court goes back to Twain’s 1866 visit to Hawaii, which made him want to write a novel exploring the islanders’ feudalistic characteristics. He started this book in 1884 but soon abandoned it and turned instead to a parody of medieval England. His new target was Arthurian romances, whose popularity Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885) had helped to revive. Twain’s novel incorporated some elements that he had intended for his Hawaiian novel; for example, he modeled King Arthur partly on Hawaii’s King Kamehameha V. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is the first novel-length treatment of travel into the past. Twain’s use of time travel as a plot device may have been influenced by Edward Bellamy’s future-travel story Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). He also was probably influenced by a novella that Max Adeler (Charles Heber Clark) published as “Professor Baffin’s Adventures” (1881; later retitled “The Fortunate Island”). Adeler’s story lacks time travel but resembles Twain’s novel in having an inventive American drop into an Arthurian world (on an uncharted island) that he tries to modernize. Similarities between the stories were such that Clark accused Twain of plagiarism. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court mixes satire, burlesque, sociological diatribe, and violence too thoroughly to permit the novel’s easy classification. Even its designation as a time-travel story is problematic. Aside from the prologue’s vague allusion to “transmigration of souls” and “transposition of epochs,” it makes no attempt to explain how Morgan reaches the sixth century, beyond stating that he is knocked on the head. His return to the nineteenth century is less mysterious: Merlin puts him to sleep for thirteen centuries. Back in the nineteenth cen-
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tury, the only tangible evidence of Morgan’s sixth century industrial civilization is a bullet hole in a suit of armor hanging in Warwick Castle. If his experience was merely a dream, it would explain his story’s ahistorical elements, such as making sixth century England resemble the High Middle Ages and using a solar eclipse that never occurred. Although the novel’s time-travel elements might be regarded as fantasy, Morgan’s actions in the sixth century definitely constitute science fiction. Immediately after reaching Camelot, he pledges to “boss the whole country inside of three months,” using his modern education and know-how. Once he sets out to revolutionize England, the story becomes sociological science fiction. Ultimately, he fails in his battle against the Church, and all of his impressive achievements are crushed. If the novel is viewed according to modern conventions of time-travel stories, one might conclude that the reason for Morgan’s failure is the impossibility of altering the space-time continuum. What interested Twain, however, is the resistance of human beings to change, a profoundly pessimistic theme that he explored in many of his late writings. —R. Kent Rasmussen
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The Cyberiad The adventures of two constructors in their travels across space
Author: Stanislaw Lem (1921) Genre: Science fiction—dystopia Type of work: Stories Time of plot: The distant future Location: Various planets and space between them First published: Cyberiada (1965; English translation, 1974) The Story The Cyberiad, subtitled Fables for the Cybernetic Age, is a collection of related short stories set in a time after robots have escaped slavery at the hands of humanity; they live free throughout the galaxy. They have developed a feudal society, complete with kings, princesses, evil pirates, paupers, and serfs, and they seem to be much more like humans than unlike them. Most planets have one or two kingdoms, and the denizens of a particular kingdom tend not to travel much. Interstellar travel, like international travel during the Middle Ages, is reserved primarily for those who do not belong to the feudal hierarchy. The principal characters are two such travelers, Trurl and Klapaucius, who have just received their “Diplomas of Perpetual Omnipotence” as constructors. The title is roughly equivalent to that of the medieval magician or sorcerer. They are friends and rivals, and the stories center on their adventures together as they build machines to improve the collective condition, or at least make some money. Trurl and Klapaucius serve as advisers, matchmakers, storytellers, and judges as they travel among the stars. In a typical story, the constructors create a (usually sentient) machine for some educational or contractual purpose, and it either works but with unexpected results or fails to perform. In another common plot, the constructors build a machine to repair an individual, social, or political problem on a planet they are visiting. The remedy seldom succeeds, but if it does, the success is incidental. There are several stories in which Trurl and Klapaucius figure peripherally and one in which they are absent but are mentioned. The most common English-language edition of this collection contains fifteen stories. The first three set the scene and tone for the nine that
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follow; the final three sum up the themes previously presented. There is no overlying plot, and each story has a multitude of pitfalls and plot twists. There were several editions of the book published in the original Polish, of which the third is definitive. The most common English edition omits roughly a third of the stories in the third Polish edition. All but one of these stories are available in English translation as Mortal Engines (1977). Analysis The prose of the stories in The Cyberiad is a peculiar mix of current usage, archaic medieval language, and jargon from various technical disciplines, particularly cybernetic theory, electronics, and quantum mechanics. The hard sciences around which modern technology is based gain the semblance of medieval magic and make the principal characters resemble Terry Pratchett’s wizards. An interesting feature of the language in the work is its literalness: changing the description changes the described. In one case, the lack of a dragon was changed into the back of a dragon, producing a dragon with two backs. This literalness is familiar to anyone who has dealt with a computer, and it adds an additional humorous element. Various themes appear in the stories, among them the blindness of love, the follies of greed and pride, the insidiousness of bureaucracy, and the folly of blind suspicion. In all, the stories are reminiscent of Aesop’s fables, as the title suggests. The stories as a whole equate the condition of all conscious things, machine and flesh, and suggest that a conscious effort to improve the existence of others creates more grief than doing nothing. Stanislaw Lem’s characters are all tools he uses to illustrate some point. Kings are inStanis uaw Lem. (Franz Rottensteiner) evitably poor rulers, through
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either cruelty or lack of interest. When political systems other than monarchies are described, however, they are shown to be worse because they were intended to work a greater good. Cruelty is usually associated with stupidity in these stories. Lem suggests that the cruelest of all are those who would rearrange a culture to improve the lot of its people. A cybernetic Karl Marx is put to death with the approval of Trurl not because he tried to improve the lot of his people with revolutionary sociopolitical ideas but because he did not desist after his initial failure. The implication is that only individual, not societal, happiness can be increased through one’s actions. One would be mistaken to state, however, that the collection appears either philosophical or gloomy. The fable format and clever humorous devices ensure that, depending on personal tastes, the reader will find the stories either humorous and whimsical or ponderous and belabored. The philosophical issues appear only after consideration, a necessity for any Polish author who hoped to avoid political entanglements in the 1960’s. Translator Michael Kandel was nominated for an award for translating The Cyberiad. Lem has said that Kandel is probably the best translator his work will ever have. Because Polish shares few linguistic or cultural roots with English, Kandel resorted to using an analogous form of translation in which an untranslatable feature (for example, a pun) is replaced with a compensatory feature of a similar sense in English at a different, but logical, insertion place in the text. This approach has great dangers associated with it. It demands that the translator be nearly as skillful, or even more so, than the author and have as good a literary sense as the author. Because Lem has been accused by some Polish critics of having created his own language from Polish in The Cyberiad, and because it is in a format that is easily deadened by translation, the demands on a translator of this work are exceptional. Fortunately, Kandel was up to the task, and his translation carries both the meaning and the sense of Lem’s prose and poetry. —Radford B. Davis
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Cyteen Reseune labs uses advanced psychogenetics to replicate its brilliant leader, Ariane Emory, after she is killed
Author: C. J. Cherryh (Carolyn Janice Cherry, 1942Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The twenty-fourth century Location: The planet Cyteen First published: 1988
)
The Story Fifty years after the Treaty of Pell established an uneasy peace between Earth and its former colonies in the Merchanter’s Alliance and in Union, an aging Ariane Emory is the most powerful figure in Union politics. She is the virtual owner of its most advanced research laboratory, Reseune; councillor for science to the Council of Nine in Union’s government; and, within the council, leader of its majority faction, the Expansionists. Through Reseune labs, she developed the “azi,” androids whose expanding population enabled Union to secede from Earth. Now researching how to replicate Union’s most gifted citizens psychosocially as well as biologically, Emory seduces and co-opts Justin Warrick, a teenager who is an inexact replicant of her brilliant colleague and rival, Jordan Warrick. When Emory’s frozen corpse is discovered at Reseune, her successor at the lab and on the council, Giraud Nye, extorts a confession from Jordan Warrick and exiles him to a remote laboratory on the far side of Cyteen, meanwhile keeping Justin and Justin’s azi lover, Grant, as virtual hostages at Reseune. With his brother Denys, Giraud immediately begins an attempt to replicate Ariane Emory and recover her muchneeded abilities amid the fractious and conspiratorial politics of Union. Using extensive notes left by Emory and by her mother, one of Reseune’s founders, the Nyes’ project succeeds in producing a second Ariane, whose abilities compare favorably with those of the original. With the advantage of a computerized tutorial left by Emory, however, the sec-
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ond Ariane proves herself not only a precocious researcher and skilled politician but also a more decent human being than her predecessor. Despite the psychological damage to Justin Warrick wrought by Emory’s sexual manipulation of him, his father’s implication in her murder, and the Nyes’ continuing hostility, the second Ariane recognizes his innate decency and potential brilliance. She sets out to win him over, first as his teacher and then as an essential supporter in the political turmoil that threatens to envelop Reseune as the military faction in Union turns ugly and threatens the Expansionists’ majority on the council. When the aged Giraud Nye dies abruptly, the eighteen-year-old Ariane is able to counter the threatening politics from Union. A nearly successful attempt to assassinate her, however, seems to imply that Giraud and Denys, rather than the Warricks, have been the more serious threat to Ariane Emory’s hegemony. Analysis Cyteen is one of the central texts in C. J. Cherryh’s sprawling future history, in which the former colonies of Earth become the political rivals of Alliance and Union. At 680 pages, it is also one of the longest. It lays out the foundations of that rivalry on Union’s home planet. Other works that are central to this future history include Serpent’s Reach (1980), Downbelow Station (1981), Merchanter’s Luck (1982), and Rimrunners (1989). Like Downbelow Station, Cyteen was voted a Hugo Award for best novel of the year, and in 1989, it was republished as three volumes: The Betrayal, The Rebirth, and The Vindication. As John Clute has noted in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), the Alliance-Union rivalry gives Cherryh a flexible but powerful structural focus for her future history. Such a focus offers a much-needed center for a writer whose plots are dense with tangled political machinations and conflicting motivations. Paradoxically, even a novel with the heft of Cyteen can seem too cramped for the psychological, social, and political action that Cherryh pours into its pages. At the heart of Cyteen is an intersecting double plot: the project to replicate Ariane Emory and the effort to restore Justin Warrick’s disrupted research potential. Through the former, Cherryh invokes fundamental questions about the formation of an individual’s identity and the potential of biological engineering to alter people’s assumptions about the genetic roots for such identity and the subsequent socialization of the individual. The focus of these questions in Ariane Emory is framed by the book’s emphasis on her psychological and social engineering of the azi, the androids who provide bulk and ballast for Union’s population. To-
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gether, Emory and the azi give Cyteen an awareness of human reason entangled in complex emotions that extends the boundaries delineated by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series, begun in 1942, with later volumes that converge with his robot stories. In the other strand of this double plot, Cherryh explores the ambiguous zone between human psychology in Justin Warrick and azi psychology in his companion, Grant. Both embody an admixture of logic and emotion, but for Grant, logic is fundamental, engineered into the deepest levels of awareness, and emotion is a “flux” state that disturbs mental equilibrium. For Justin, however, logic is an imperfectly exercised control over the more fundamental emotional flux. The sexual compatibility and mutual respect that characterize Justin and Grant provide a marked contrast to the more disturbed relationships among most of the human characters who populate Cyteen. In the end, the second Ariane is able to recover Justin’s abilities by respecting the relationship that he and Grant have established. The profusion of social and political disturbances that surround this double plot suggests that humanity’s difficulty in reconciling logic and emotion remains profound. Even science, which offers a model for the appropriate exercise of reason in human endeavor, is compromised by the sheer complexity of human nature and the politics that intervene when science has to operate in the world. In Cyteen, the scientists themselves are all-too-imperfect human beings. That point, richly illustrated by the human characters’ convoluted motivations, should resonate through the related volumes in Cherryh’s future history. —Joseph J. Marchesani
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The Dark Is Rising Sequence Young people help to collect various talismans of power that will aid the Light in its final, supernatural battle against the Dark
Author: Susan Cooper (1935) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Primarily the 1960’s, with journeys in time to earlier eras Location: South Cornwall and Buckinghamshire in England; the vicinity of Aberdyfi in North Wales First published: Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975), and Silver on the Tree (1977) The Story Although she did not initially plan to write a sequence, Susan Cooper found, when she returned to provide a sequel to the first book, not only that she had four more books to write but also that the fantasy element, originally peripheral, had become central. The forces of good and evil, known as the Light and the Dark, are locked in a supernatural struggle for power over humankind. As the sequence title proclaims, the Dark is rising for a final major assault. The books describe how various talismans of power are collected to aid the Light in the impending crisis. Over Sea, Under Stone begins as an exciting children’s adventure story set on the southern coast of Cornwall during the summer holidays. The three Drew children, Simon, Jane, and Barney, hunt for the Grail and, despite the danger posed by some sinister villains, they eventually find it, although the accompanying manuscript is lost in the sea. Only at the end do they begin to suspect that their mysterious great-uncle Merry, as they call Professor Merriman Lyon, is none other than Merlin. In The Dark Is Rising, the setting shifts to the twelve days of Christmas in a small village in Buckinghamshire. Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is the last born of the Old Ones, an immortal race with supernatural powers dedicated to the struggle against the Dark. The Old Ones are led by the Lady and Merriman, here in the guise of the butler at the village Manor. Their foes are led by the Dark Rider. Despite fierce resistance from the Dark, wielding the weapons of fear and deceit as well as cold and flood, Will suc-
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ceeds in his assigned task of gathering the six signs of power. At the novel’s conclusion, he releases the Wild Hunt to disperse his enemies. Greenwitch returns to Cornwall in the spring, bringing together the Drew children, Will Stanton, and Merriman to search once again for the Grail, which has been stolen by the Dark, and for the lost manuscript that will allow them to decipher the writing on the sides of the vessel. Eventually they succeed, but first they must propitiate the Greenwitch, a traditional image of leaves and branches cast into the sea each spring for good luck in fishing and harvest. Like the Wild Hunt, she is part of the Wild Magic, a force distinct from both the Light and the Dark. She gives the manuscript to Jane, who alone has shown her compassion. In The Grey King, Will travels during the Halloween season to his aunt’s farm near Aberdyfi in Wales. He wishes to recuperate from a serious illness that has robbed him of some of his memories. His task this time is to find a golden harp that is guarded in a secret cavern by the High Magic, yet another force in the author’s magical equation, then to awaken the six Sleepers by playing to them. He is aided by Bran, a strange albino boy who turns out to be the son of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, brought forward in time by Merriman/Merlin. He is opposed by the Grey King, one of the most powerful lords of the Dark. Working through the malice of petty-minded people as well as his own mighty power, the Grey King causes the death of Bran’s dog Cafall and very nearly foils the plans of the Light. The sequence concludes at Midsummer with Silver on the Tree. This novel opens in Buckinghamshire as Will collects the six signs of power from their place of safekeeping so that Merriman can take them back in time to aid King Arthur at the Battle of Badon. The story moves to Aberdyfi, where Will, Bran, and the Drews all meet to search for the Lady. She appears to Jane, to whom she imparts vital directions. Thanks to these and to help from the bard Taliesin, Will and Bran are able to travel back in time to the Lost Land of King Gwyddno, who gives Bran the Crystal Sword. With this, he is able to cut from the midsummer tree the silver blossoms, thereby gaining a final victory for the Light over the assembled powers of the Dark that have been opposing them bitterly at every turn. The Light and the Dark both withdraw, leaving humanity to work out its own fate without external intervention. Analysis Susan Cooper has written novels and plays for adults as well as for children, but none has achieved more success than the Dark Is Rising sequence, for younger readers, written early in her career. Three of the
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books have won awards. Over Sea, Under Stone won a competition for a family adventure story held by publisher Jonathan Cape, The Dark Is Rising was a 1974 Newbery Honor Book, and The Grey King was the 1976 Newbery Award winner. Among the qualities for which the sequence has gained praise is the powerful sense of double reality of ordinary life, on one hand, and of the realm of High Magic, on the other. In part, this comes from the clearly realized setting, recalled from the author’s own childhood, and from the skillful integration of regional legends, such as the stories of Arthur and the drowned lands of King Gwyddno. The books also recognize the problems that young people must deal with every day, including misunderstandings and disagreements that disrupt even the closest families; hostility and bullying practiced by others of their own age; and impatience, unkindness, and even cruelty of adults too preoccupied with their own concerns to take account of the feelings of others. The results of such problems often are fear, loneliness, and a sense of betrayal that can embitter and destroy. This perpetuates a cycle of darkness that only love can break, a love so strong that it will forgive mistakes and injuries. This situation finds a striking parallel in the supernatural world, where a struggle is taking place between the Light and the Dark. The latter seeks to gain control over humankind, using as its weapons fear and deceit. Those who give way to anger, prejudice, and self-centeredness, such as Caradog Prichard in The Grey King and Mr. Moore in Silver on the Tree, become vulnerable to its power, allowing the Dark to grow in strength. Opposed to it is the Light, which endeavors to protect humankind. Although generous and forgiving, the Light can be uncompromis-
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ing in the sacrifices it requires of its followers. Virtue, after all, is never easy. The Old Ones are charged with ensuring the preservation of the world from the Dark. At times the struggle may be so close that it leaves little room for acts of charity and mercy, or for protecting a wayward child. Acts of betrayal may have consequences too far-reaching to be overlooked. Under these circumstances, the young protagonists are expected to assume responsibilities at an earlier age than usual. Their help is needed desperately, and they can be given only limited protection. This leads to a growth in maturity and understanding. Simon abandons his initial resentment of Will, Will comes into his power as an Old One, and Bran discovers his heritage as the Pendragon, heir to his father, King Arthur. These changes come at a price, for they bring not the freedom that young people expect but still heavier burdens. Thus, at the conclusion of the sequence, Bran is free to choose whether to join his father or to remain with his stepfather. Although torn, he decides to stay with the latter, recognizing that loving bonds are the strongest thing on Earth. As a result, he gives up his chance for immortality in the Otherworld beyond time, choosing instead to live and die like all humans. The choice is hard, and what is gained comes at a painfully high cost. Part of that cost is the alienation as one grows away from the friends and family that surround one in childhood. Twice Will is obliged to erase the memories of beloved brothers who react badly to the discovery of his powers. Bran’s special qualities mark him as different, attracting taunts and resentment. Although the sequence encourages young people to strive to create a better world, it also warns that problems do not end with the end of childhood. Difference still attracts hostility, whatever one’s age or station in life, and even the most deserving of aims exacts a price. —Raymond H. Thompson
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Dark Universe Descendants of nuclear war survivors who moved underground must relearn their sense of sight and the nature of the world
Author: Daniel F. Galouye (1920-1976) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: An indeterminate time in the future Location: Below and on the surface of Earth First published: 1961 The Story Dark Universe was the first—and most popular novel—of New Orleans journalist Daniel F. Galouye, although he had been publishing magazine stories since 1952. It was nominated for a Hugo Award. The story is seen—or, rather, heard—by young Jared Fenton, whose primitive people live in total darkness and think of Light as a dimly remembered religious deity. They are preyed on by zivvers, other underground humans whose eyes have adapted to provide limited sight in the infrared spectrum, and “monsters” that inspire fear because they cause people to disappear and because they use light, which is alien to Jared’s people. Jared is the son of his tribe’s ruler, the Prime Survivor. He is pressured into an arranged marriage (or “unification”) with Della, the niece of another tribe’s leader, to unite the tribes against the zivvers. Della has developed the zivver ability and, because Jared is exceptionally gifted at sensing people or objects by vibrations from sound echoes, believes he is secretly a zivver also. She persuades him to flee with her to the zivver group, which Jared has been seeking for his own reasons: He believes that Light is a natural phenomenon and that he might learn its nature through the zivvers. Eventually, the young couple become outcasts and fugitives from both groups. Jared’s people also decide that he is a zivver and therefore an enemy. The zivvers test him and discover that he is not one of them. He and Della fall into the hands of the monsters, who are revealed to be descendants of survivors from underground shelters who are now reinhabiting Earth’s surface, which has purified itself. The two tribes and
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the zivvers from Jared’s underground world have also sprung from a survival group, but something has gone wrong in their complex. They have lost their artificial light and, gradually, all knowledge of their origins. The monsters have been kidnapping them, a few at a time, and reeducating them. Still not fully understanding or accepting the explanation, Jared escapes and makes his way to the surface. He realizes the truth of what he has been told and looks forward to a new life in a new world with Della. Analysis The paperback original employs a theme that would dominate Galouye’s work: distorted perceptions of reality. In this case, without ever stating it overtly and keeping entirely to the point of view of his protagonist, Galouye is able to establish his nonvisual setting within the first two pages and show how Jared and other characters have adapted to it. He tells nearly the entire story without resorting to the visual sense—no small feat—but never loses the reader. Nuclear war was a concept familiar to science-fiction readers even before the first atomic weapons were used in 1945, to the extent that editor Horace Gold announced in the January, 1952, issue of Galaxy that he would no longer buy “atomic doom” stories for his magazine. Such stories continued to be written, though, some of the best known being Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), all showing the aftermath of nuclear destruction. Neville Shute’s On the Beach (1957; filmed in 1959) familiarized the general public as well. It becomes obvious to most readers how Jared’s people came to be in their situation, especially when Strontium and Cobalt are deified as demons, Radiation is described as a kind of hell, and Hydrogen is named as the devil. One religious tenet holds that the presence of Light Almighty in Paradise made it possible for people to know what lay ahead without smelling or hearing it. Jared is accused of being blasphemous when he suggests that there may be natural explanations for these concepts and that Light is something attainable in this life. It is fascinating to follow Jared’s reasoning as he presses his inquiries, especially considering that most readers already know the answers. One breakthrough comes when he finds that the “roaring silence” that emanates from the monsters, which is how the survivors perceive their lights, is cut off when he closes his eyes and that it is not coming through his ears after all. The book also includes the science-fictional concepts of extrasensory
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powers (one of the survivors has developed telepathy), genetic mutations from radiation (sou-bats are giant and marauding descendants of cave bats), and immortality (in the elderly Forever Man, who lived in the prewar surface world and understood Light but has suppressed those memories over generations and withdraws into himself when Jared tries to awaken them). Galouye is thorough in showing how his underground people have adapted to their environment, sometimes with amusing results. The word “hear” is substituted routinely for “see.” Reference is made to the “holy bulb” as a source of Light, which is likened to God. The words “Light!” and “Radiation!” are used as expletives. A courtesy between two strangers is the Ten Touches, which give each an idea of what the other is like. The worst offenses that can be committed are murder and “misplacement of bulky objects.” Dark Universe, although it has a more upbeat ending than most novels in the nuclear armageddon lineage, is very much a part of that heritage, which includes such works as Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney: Or, How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965), Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog” (1969), and David Brin’s The Postman (1985). Its well-realized underground world sets it apart from those that preceded and followed it. —Paul Dellinger
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Davy Davy recounts his development from an ignorant boy into a freethinking adult and his attempt to bring enlightenment to his postholocaust civilization
Author: Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth century Location: New England, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Azores First published: 1964 The Story Davy’s coming-of-age story is not unique to science fiction, and Edgar Pangborn has no use for typical science-fictional devices such as spaceships and ray guns. Nevertheless, Davy is science fiction because of its vivid future world. In the late twentieth century—the “Old Time”—nuclear holocaust, plagues, and increases in world temperature and ocean levels destroyed human civilization. After about a hundred years, in the vast wilderness of what once was New England, a new civilization began to grow, a collection of small, bellicose countries dominated by the Holy Murcan Church, an organization forbidding books, free thought, gunpowder, and atoms. Because the Old Time people squandered the world’s resources and the remnants of humanity have lost the Old Time science, the fragile civilization is ignorant and superstitious. In the year 331 of this transformed world, Davy, at the age of twentyeight, begins writing several intertwining stories: his growth to manhood, his relationship with his wife, their attempt to enlighten the benighted age, their founding of a colony, and the history of his era. The most compelling conflict in Davy next to that between enlightenment versus ignorance is Davy’s struggle to tell his stories honestly and effectively. Red-haired Davy was born in a whorehouse, reared in an orphanage, and bonded out as a yard-boy for a tavern. At the age of fourteen, he runs away, in the process accidentally committing his first homicide, having sex for the first time, and stealing an Old Time French horn. Thus begin Davy’s picaresque adventures.
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With help from the fascinating people he meets as he journeys through his wild world, Davy learns to play his horn, loses his religious superstitions, and becomes a free-thinking and loving person. Davy first joins company with Jed Sever, a sensitive and pious giant; Sam Loomis, a laconic loner; and Vilet, a sensual prostitute. After several adventures, including a comic scene with a “quackpot” medium and a tragic scene with a tiger, Davy and Sam join Rumley’s Ramblers. The Ramblers are a communal troupe of independent entertainers who travel through the New England territories performing music and plays, selling homemade cure-alls, and passing along news. When Davy leaves the Ramblers after several years, he meets and marries Nickie, a “sweet pepperpot” noblewoman who belongs to the Society of Heretics, an underground organization that promotes enlightenment and resists the church’s dogma. Through Nickie, Davy meets her cousin Dion, Regent of Nuin. Nickie and Dion educate Davy in Old Time literature and ideas, and Davy and Nickie help Dion try to drag their country out of the dark ages. Their heretical ideas, such as abolishing slavery and promoting free education, meet with disapproval from the Holy Murcan Church, which foments a rebellion. The Heretics lose the war and flee Nuin on a ship into the unknown waters of the Atlantic. It is during this voyage and subsequent establishing of a colony in the Azores that Davy begins to write his book. The novel concludes with Davy setting sail to continue lovingly exploring the uncharted territories of world and mind. Analysis A plot summary of Davy neglects one of the novel’s pleasures and important themes: the richness of the English language. Davy and Pangborn love language, from coarse prose to beautiful poetry, and the novel reflects that love. Davy often sets off on delightful Melvillean digressions on such topics as bedbugs. Additionally, a transformed language adds flavor to his narration. The transformed language appears in neologisms (mahooha), portmanteaus (prezactly), contracted forms (Febry), and distorted forms (sack-religion). Even cultural icons appear changed: Davy’s world has a Saint George Washington. Pangborn uses such language to engage the intellect, make readers laugh, and show how fragments of civilization persist through time, transformed to suit new ages. Pangborn returned to the world of Davy in The Judgment of Eve (1966), The Company of Glory (1975), and short stories such as those collected in Still I Persist in Wondering (1978). Davy, written in the middle of his career, is Pangborn’s most defining and enduring work. Davy was runner-
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up for the 1965 Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel and placed on the 1972 Locus poll for best novel of all time. Critical opinion of Davy is favorable. George Zebrowski writes that Davy “is one of the lasting works of SF,” and Spider Robinson says that “reading Davy has measurably and significantly, and for the better, changed my life.” Davy is part of the tradition of post-holocaust novels in which human civilization is portrayed as cyclic and, despite human folly, inextinguishable, from George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980). Davy also belongs to the tradition of science fiction that emphasizes humanistic concerns such as love, tolerance, inner growth, art, and psychology, rather than technological dreams. Pangborn’s contributions to these traditions are his combination of loving humanism, rich language, an expansive view of life, self-reflexive narration, and playful humor. Describing a sunrise scene of ethereal beauty, for example, Davy shows a pair of monkeys copulating in a tree. If Davy can be summed up with one word, it would be the term of endearment between lovers in the novel: “spice.” In the above traits, Davy, like almost all of Pangborn’s fiction, transcends its genre. It also recalls fiction such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The richly realized setting; the many vivid and unforgettable characters; the intertwined earthiness and sublimity, beauty and filth, and comedy and tragedy; and the powerful theme that people must light fires—both smaller and larger than the sun—in human minds and hearts all make Davy one of the best novels of any genre. —Jefferson M. Peters
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The Demolished Man Lincoln Powell attempts to prove that Ben Reich has committed murder, an almost unheard of act in the year 2301
Author: Alfred Bester (1913-1987) Genre: Science fiction—extrasensory powers Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 2301 Location: New York City First published: 1953 (serial form, 1952) The Story On the surface, The Demolished Man is a slick, futuristic detective novel, but the book is much more complex than such a surface description implies. Ben Reich, a wealthy and powerful man, has planned a merger with the D’Courtney Cartel. When that merger is apparently thwarted by Craye D’Courtney, Reich plans to murder his rival. The difficulty confronting Reich is that in the year 2301, murder has been virtually eliminated because of the emergence of Espers, people gifted with and trained in the use of extrasensory perception. Espers are classified according to their levels of ability; an Esper 1 is the most gifted and besttrained of the Esper Guild members. Because Espers can “peep” accused suspects, or look into their thoughts, hiding guilt from them is virtually impossible. The Esper Guild, however, maintains strict rules for its members. Even though Lincoln Powell, a police prefect and an Esper 1, determines very early that Reich is guilty of D’Courtney’s murder, he is unable to make use of the knowledge without supporting evidence. He must present enough evidence to the police computer, “Old Man Mose,” to ensure a conviction; otherwise, Reich will go free. Reich has powerful means of thwarting the police investigation. He can hire the best Espers to help him, he can afford massive bribes and incentives, and he has friends in high places in the police department. Powell, however, is not without resources of his own. He is a superb detective in addition to being an incredibly gifted Esper. He manages to locate a witness to the crime, Barbara D’Courtney, the daughter of the victim. She is so traumatized by the murder, however, that she must undergo considerable psychotherapy to counteract her state of shock. She
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must be regressed to a state of birthlike innocence and carefully brought through normal growth stages in order to preserve her mental functions. As she goes though these stages under Powell’s observation, he comes to realize that he is in love with her. Meanwhile, Old Man Mose has rejected Powell’s plan for prosecution, and Powell has no idea why. He discovers that the motive for the murder is so complex and so deeply hidden in Reich’s subconscious that he must combat Reich in ways that play upon his psychological makeup. Only in that way is he able to accomplish his objective of having Reich “demolished,” or psychologically broken down and rebuilt into the man his better nature will allow. Powell also is able to find a satisfactory outcome for his love of Barbara D’Courtney. Analysis Alfred Bester won the first Hugo Award in 1953 for The Demolished Man. Bester had published numerous short stories prior to this book, his first novel and generally considered to be his best. The quality of the book is attested by the fact that it has held up for more than forty years as a fascinating study of the human mind, of psychic and psychological detective methods, and of the intricacies of human relationships. It is especially effective in its study of the ways in which the Espers relate to one another and to society. Powell, for example, has a private house rather than the standard apartment. This is not because of his superior economic means. Esper 1’s must have private residences because they are bombarded by the thoughts of others in small, poorly insulated apartments, and they must have privacy to maintain their sanity. Being an Esper is a decidedly mixed blessing. Insight into the thoughts of others is a gift, but that gift is received whether one chooses it or not, and Espers cannot avoid knowing things that they might rather not know. Early in the book, Bester describes the dialogue at a party. It is presented typographically to show that strains of the conversation intertwine because the Espers at the party can both hear spoken conversation and understand the unspoken thoughts behind it. They also play a game of creating word patterns, much like poems but with visual aspects, in their minds for others to perceive. There are ways to protect one’s thoughts from Espers. Reich adopts a mindless jingle that he keeps running through his mind at all times to try to block the Espers. This works with Espers of the lower grades; it fails with Espers of Powell’s quality. Use of a computer as a guide to the likely success of prosecution of a
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case is another interesting device. Readers of the 1990’s and beyond would probably not question this plot device or find it unusual, but in 1953, when computers were in their infancy, it was a speculation into the future of a new and interesting machine. Technology in The Demolished Man takes a secondary position to psychology. Although most of the psychology seems at odds with present-day psychotherapy, that is not necessarily a flaw. Readers might assume that the psychotherapy described in the novel is more advanced, as it is from an imagined future; it is in fact dated. A minor flaw in the book, one that might disturb feminist readers, is the love angle. Powell finds himself unable to love his longtime associate, Mary Noyes, who makes no secret of her love for him, yet he falls in love with Barbara D’Courtney, who has been regressed to an infant and who loves him in a childlike way as she “grows” back into an adult self. Despite such minor problems, this book is a classic of science fiction that should be included on every reading list of major works in the genre. —June Harris
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Dhalgren Kid embarks on a quest of self-discovery in Bellona, a city transformed into an anarchist realm by its entrapment in a distorted space-time continuum
Author: Samuel R. Delany (1942) Genre: Science fiction—New Wave Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1970’s Location: Bellona, an imaginary American city First published: 1975 The Story Written over a period of four years and spanning more than eight hundred pages, Dhalgren is Samuel R. Delany’s magnum opus. Dhalgren‘s main character is the twenty-seven-year-old Kid, who suffers from selective amnesia and other mental disturbances. At the novel’s start, Kid is hitchhiking to Bellona, a midwestern city trapped by a mysterious disaster in a shifting zone of reality where time runs in loops and occasionally a giant red sun or two moons appear in the heavens. On his way into Bellona, Kid meets a strange Asian woman who, after they make love, turns into a tree. This surreal opening begins Dhalgren‘s conflicting realities: Are the novel’s strange events real, or are they the result of Kid’s delusional point of view? Upon entering Bellona, Kid becomes the lover of a former electrical engineer named Tak, who introduces Kid to the cult of George Harrison, a powerful black man worshiped in Bellona’s ghetto. Tak takes Kid to the city’s hippie commune, and there Kid meets Lanya, who becomes Kid’s next lover. Kid also finds a notebook containing the journal of an anonymous past owner. Because of Dhalgren‘s time loops and Kid’s amnesia, Kid himself could have written the journal at an earlier or later time. Kid begins to write poetry in this notebook. These poems become the basis for Brass Orchids, a book published by Roger Calkins, the eccentric owner of the city’s newspaper, the Bellona Times. Kid receives a severe beating from a trio of scorpions, the name given to Bellona’s street gangs. On occasion, scorpions venture out from their
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nests, or home bases, terrorizing Bellona’s residents. Gang members wear projectors that conceal their bodies in holographic images of griffins, spiders, dragons, and other mythical or fantastic creatures. After this incident, Kid meets June Richards. The Richards family tries to lead an unchanged bourgeois existence in the midst of Bellona’s chaos. George Harrison reportedly raped June during the riots that occurred during Bellona’s mysterious catastrophe. Kid comes to realize that the so-called rape was an act of mutual desire filled with mythological portents. Later, Kid is drawn unwittingly into a scorpion run on Emboriky’s, a major department store that is the stronghold of a group of armed white racists. During the run, Kid displays the kind of crazy bravery the gang admires. As a result, Kid becomes the leader of a scorpion nest and acquires as a lover a gang member named Denny who becomes part of a three-way sexual relationship with Lanya. The remainder of the novel concerns Kid’s adventures as a scorpion and a poet. While prowling Bellona’s shattered streets, Kid awaits the second meeting between George and June. Kid believes that when this meeting occurs, Bellona will plunge once more into an apocalyptic frenzy. Inspired by metafictional technique (fiction that comments on itself as fiction), Delany wrote Dhalgren‘s final chapters in columns, with one side following the story and the other commenting on the action, presenting alternative plot lines, or revealing passages from Kid’s notebook. This method creates a dual ending. One possibility is that June and George meet, the mysterious apocalypse strikes Bellona again, and Kid flees the city. In a manner reminiscent of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), the last line of Dhalgren is a half sentence completed by the half sentence at the novel’s start, creating a closed loop. Thus Kid is caught in Bellona’s circular time pattern. The other possibility is that the ending is merely a fiction of Kid’s notebook, and both the arrival and exit scenes are not real. Kid has always been in Bellona and will always remain there, its scorpion poet. Analysis Dhalgren is a pivotal work in Delany’s career. Although it continues many of the themes of his earlier novels, Dhalgren has a dense, literary style and unflinching examination of drug use, deviant sexuality, and violence that also point toward future works such as Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). Unlike Babel-17 (1966), The Einstein Intersection (1967), and Nova (1968),
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Dhalgren explores countercultural themes such as bisexuality, drug use, race relations, and the connection between artistic and criminal cultures, without far future or deep space settings to blunt the controversial nature of these subjects. The immediacy of Dhalgren‘s 1970’s setting, combined with its difficult literary style and explicit sex and violence, alienated much of Delany’s previous readership, who had come to expect works like Nova and Babel-17, which essentially were stock space epics written with stylistic flare and a 1960’s hip sensibility. Also alienated were many science-fiction reviewers and critics, who regarded Dhalgren as at best incomprehensible and at worst a disgrace to the field. Dhalgren nevertheless sold well, more than a million copies in less than a decade. In his collection of essays The Straits of Messina (1989), Delany attributes these sales to interested readers and sympathetic reviewers outside the science-fiction field. Dhalgren has its science-fiction defenders, most notably Theodore Sturgeon and Frederik Pohl, and the novel’s critical support has increased over the years. What critics praise in Dhalgren are its literary experimentation, its highly charged language, and its depth of character. Few other works in any field have portrayed life on the fringes of society with such richness of detail and depth of understanding. Dhalgren, with its nonlinear structure, stream-of-consciousness passages, and selfcommentary, evokes the brilliant literary innovations of James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Thomas Pynchon. Dhalgren may well be the climax of science fiction’s New Wave exploration of expanded themes and stylistic techniques. At the same time, its focus on the urban fringe foreshadows the arrival of science fiction’s cyberpunk movement in the mid-1980’s. —John Nizalowski
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The Dispossessed Shevek, a physicist raised in an anarchist society, fulfills a lifelong quest to bridge two worlds, two theories of time, and two sets of obligations—to himself and to community
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929) Genre: Science fiction—utopia Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Several hundred years in the future Location: Anarres and Urras, planets orbiting Tau Ceti First published: 1974 The Story The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia is one of several of Ursula Le Guin’s works chronicling the evolution of a “League of all Worlds” governed by principles superior to those of known political and colonial systems. Although The Dispossessed takes place in the League’s prehistory, the novel’s loving portrait of a working anarchist society on one world develops in detail the principles of noncoercive social organization. The novel chronicles the life of Shevek, a physicist reared on a world settled by the followers of an anarchist philosopher, Odo. The Odonians, “bought off” 170 years before Shevek’s time with an offer to settle their mother planet’s arid moon, Anarres, live without laws, according to the apparently irreconcilable principles of absolute individual freedom and absolute commitment to the good of the community. Anarresti social order is maintained primarily by education, which inculcates a horror of “egoizing.” The Anarresti live in isolation from their mother planet, Urras, a lush world that Anarresti education demonizes as a place of injustice and evil. Through a series of struggles, Shevek strives to balance loyalty to the society that formed him with rebellion against subtle conformist pressures that stifle his ambitious work in theoretical physics. The conflict climaxes after a long famine, during which Shevek accepts four years of separation from his wife and his work to perform manual labor in his planet’s harshest desert. After this trial of physical, emotional, and intellectual self-denial, Shevek vows, “by damn, I will do my own work for a while now!”
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That work has been kept alive, ironically, through extended contact with the physicists of the mother planet, Urras—that is, with despised “propertarians.” After his desert ordeal, Shevek accepts a standing invitation based on his groundbreaking physics and becomes the first Anarresti in 170 years to visit the mother planet. In the face of intense opposition, he vows to “go to Urras and break down walls.” On Urras, Shevek is treated as an honored but subtly controlled guest, kept from any genuine contact with the poor. His hosts are determined to “buy” him. They believe that his work, once completed, will bring them wealth, power, and prestige. Shevek moves from admiring awe and a kind of racial homesickness for the lush mother planet to revulsion against a social world dominated by competitive struggles for power and wealth. When a chance comes to lend support to the poor people of Ai-Io, the wealthy host-nation, Shevek seizes it, traveling secretly to the slums and leading a demonstration against an unjust war. This self-liberation from a luxurious “prison” comes in the wake of the fulfillment of Shevek’s scientific work: completion of a General Temporal Theory that unites apparently irreconcilable theories about time. The antiwar demonstration, climaxing with Shevek’s speech urging renewed Odonian revolt, is broken up by a military crackdown. Shevek hides for three days in a basement with a mortally wounded demonstrator who dies in Shevek’s care. Following this near-death descent, Shevek emerges suddenly in the Terran (Earth) Embassy, where he gains asylum and arranges for his theory to be broadcast to all worlds, thus eluding his hosts’ desire to possess it and enabling instantaneous communication between the “nine known worlds.” In a final wall-breaking action, Shevek agrees to let a young man from Hain, oldest of the known inhabited worlds, accompany him home to Anarres.
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Analysis Like most of Le Guin’s heroes, Shevek embodies the author’s imaginative quest to balance poles of paradox. In physics, his quest is to reconcile sequency, “the arrow of time,” and simultaneity, “the circle of time”—that is, becoming and being. His General Temporal Theory, a restatement of Odo’s dictum, “true voyage is return,” asserts that “you can go home again . . . so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.” A well-lived life comes full circle, linking past and future by fulfilling long-term promises, but also gets somewhere, effecting meaningful change. The novel’s structure embodies this gnomic principle. The oddnumbered chapters chronicle Shevek’s sojourn on the mother planet Urras; even-numbered chapters bring his life on Anarres from infancy to the moment he decides that he must go to Urras. The two narratives merge in chapter 13, which anticipates Shevek’s return home to an Anarres transformed by his rebellious journey—that is, to a place he has never been. Le Guin has voiced the hope that science fiction can achieve the kind of idiosyncratic characterization championed by Virginia Woolf and widely considered integral to realistic fiction. The Dispossessed, however, reflects a different imaginative goal, indeed a passion, common to virtually all of Le Guin’s work: to imagine an ideal person—in this case, as the embodiment of a nearly ideal society. “What is it like,” asks the Terran ambassador Keng, “what can it be like, the society that made you? . . . you are not like other men.” Although Le Guin is not much interested in Christian paradigms, she is keenly conscious of archetypal formulations of the hero’s journey, and she quite pointedly sends Shevek to hell and back on both worlds. His sojourn in “the dust” during the famine on Anarres is one hell. Out of the long separation comes renewed commitment—to marriage, to work, and to continuing the Anarresti revolution. On Urras, Shevek’s quest to “break down walls” is consummated by his three-day basement ordeal, which he equates with hell. It is after rising from this depth that Shevek releases his theory, thus extending the blessings of communication and brotherhood that are “the Promise” of Anarres. —Andrew Sprung
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Rick Deckard must find and kill a group of androids who have escaped from a colony on Mars and come to Earth
Author: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1992 Location: The San Francisco Bay Area First published: 1968 The Story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? recounts a day in the life of bounty hunter Rick Deckard. The action begins on the morning of January 3, 1992, as Deckard and his wife, Iran, wake up in their apartment; it concludes the following morning, as an exhausted Deckard returns to bed. In that twenty-four-hour period, Deckard faces the greatest challenge he has ever encountered: He must “retire” a rogue band of “organic androids” (or “andys,” as they are called) of a design so advanced that they are almost indistinguishable from human beings. His task is complicated by his attraction for another android, Rachael Rosen, who tries to prevent him from carrying out his mission. The story is set in a gray world devastated by “World War Terminus” and the resulting radioactive fallout, which is slowly depopulating the planet. Many people have left to settle in a colony on Mars, where androids are employed for hard labor, domestic service, and other purposes. In making their escape from Mars and servitude, the rogue andys that Deckard is to retire killed a number of humans. The people who remain on Earth have witnessed the extinction of many animal species. Possession of an animal—a horse, a sheep, or even a cat—confers status; for those who cannot afford the real thing, artificial animals are available. Deckard himself has an electric sheep but greatly desires to own a living creature. That is the primary motivation in his quest: The bounty he earns of $1,000 per andy will enable him to buy a genuine animal. Like a knight in a medieval romance, Deckard undergoes a series of trials as he retires the andys one by one. Nothing is as it first appears to be. A Soviet policeman turns out to be one of the andys in disguise.
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Another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, is falsely identified as an android by a San Francisco police inspector—himself an android—who hopes that Resch and Deckard will kill each other. Most mutable and devious of all is Rachael Rosen, who seduces Deckard, then calmly tells him that he will be unable to continue as a bounty hunter; no one ever has after being with her. Deckard, however, proves her wrong. Although he cannot bring himself to kill Rosen, he completes his task, retiring the last three fugitive andys after his tryst with her. The novel ends on a note of reconciliation and domesticity. Deckard returns home to his wife. They had argued to start the day, but now Iran greets him warmly, fussing over him until he falls asleep. The last line in the book is a celebration of everyday human routine: Iran, “feeling better, fixed herself at last a cup of black, hot coffee.” Analysis One of Philip K. Dick’s recurring themes figures prominently in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This theme is identified in Dick’s 1978 lecture, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” collected in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1995), edited by Lawrence Sutin. In that lecture, Dick observes that throughout his career he has been preoccupied with the question, “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Dick often explores this question in novels and stories featuring androids or other constructs closely resembling human beings. These include the novels The Simulacra (1964) and We Can Build You (1972) and stories such as “The Electric Ant” (1969). In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dick imagines a near future in which successive generations of androids become ever more sophisticated in their mimicry of humans. The model that Deckard must retire, the Nexus-6, is the most advanced yet. There remains one crucial difference between humans and androids: empathy. Androids can learn to mimic human concern, but they do not genuinely feel empathy for other creatures. Deckard employs a psychological/physiological test, the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale, that de-
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tects the absence of empathy in the microseconds before it can be faked. This emphasis on empathy as the defining human characteristic runs throughout the novel. It is poignantly embodied in the “chickenhead” John Isidore (“chickenhead” being a derogatory term for humans who, as a result of the fallout, lack normal intellectual capacities). Isidore innocently befriends three of the fugitive andys, then watches in horror as they gratuitously cut the legs off a spider. Empathy also is at the core of the quasi-religious movement known as Mercerism, in which both Deckard and Iran participate. So intense is the identification experienced by communicants in “fusion” with the archetypal figure of Wilbur Mercer that they sometimes emerge from a session with wounds inflicted by rocks thrown at Mercer, rather like Christian saints who receive the stigmata. Dick’s characters, however, are far from sainthood. The most important lesson Deckard learns in his long day is imparted to him in a revelation from Mercer. Deckard, appalled by the killing, wonders if he can finish the job. He explains later to Iran, “Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow.” As a character recognizes in another Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), “There is evil! . . . It’s an ingredient in us. In the world.” Acknowledging that, one does the best one can. Many people know the story of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? not from the novel itself but from the film based on it, Blade Runner (1982). The film departs from the book in many ways, most conspicuously in its treatment of the protagonist. Dick’s Deckard is a bounty hunter but also a husband. In the film, Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is a loner, a futuristic private eye. Dick’s final message is a modest affirmation of human virtues; the film’s conclusion is both cynical and romanticized, showing Deckard with the beautiful android. As for empathy, that theme is turned upside down: Mercerism disappears from the story altogether, and Deckard survives only because the leader of the androids (or “replicants,” as they are called in the film), his mortal foe, shows compassion for him. —John Wilson
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Doomsday Book While a time-traveling historian is stranded in England during the Black Death, her twenty-first century colleagues battle their own epidemic and seek to rescue her
Author: Connie Willis (1945) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: December, 2054-January, 2055, and 1348 Location: Oxford, England, and Ashencote, a nearby village First published: 1992 The Story Kivrin Engle, a brilliant and determined young woman, is the first historian to journey back to the Middle Ages. She makes the trip despite the misgivings of her teacher and mentor, Mr. Dunworthy. His anxieties seem justified when the technician in charge of the time “net” mumbles that something is wrong and then collapses from a deadly new strain of influenza shortly after sending Kivrin to the past. What gradually becomes clear is that Kivrin has been infected with that same flu and sent not to 1320, as intended, but to 1348, the year the Black Death began to ravage England. Unbeknown to her, Kivrin’s arrival in the past is witnessed by an illiterate but saintly priest, Father Roche, who brings the sick and delirious woman, whom he regards as a messenger from heaven, to the castle of his lord. Kivrin is nursed back to health by Lady Eliwys and her family, who were sent by her husband to hide from the plague in this remote village. While anxiously trying to relocate her rendezvous point—the exact location where the gateway in time will reopen—she quickly grows to love the people, especially Eliwys’s two young daughters, Agnes and Rosemunde. Travelers fleeing a nearby city bring the plague, and Kivrin realizes for the first time that she is in the wrong year. With little hope of returning to her own time, she does her best, along with Father Roche, to battle the plague and save the people of the village. In the twenty-first century, Kivrin’s plight becomes an afterthought to all but Mr. Dunworthy as Oxford comes under a quarantine and doctors and scientists race to find a vaccine. Dunworthy does his best to mo-
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bilize the resources of the university to fight the epidemic and care for the sick, all the while trying to find some confirmation that Kivrin’s time traveling has gone well and she at least is safe. Connie Willis effectively uses the parallel plots of the novel, cutting back and forth between the time lines, to increase suspense, create ironic juxtapositions, and ultimately affirm the common humanity of people battling disaster. In twenty-first century England, the epidemic is finally halted, but in the fourteenth century, the progress of the Black Death is inexorable. One by one, Agnes, Rosemunde, Lady Eliwys, and all the people of the village die in agony, despite the heroic efforts of Kivrin and Father Roche. Roche eventually dies, but the utter bleakness of the catastrophe and Kivrin’s grief are in some small measure relieved by his gratitude and love for Kivrin, who has indeed become the messenger from heaven of his simple faith, bringing comfort to the dying and surviving to bear witness. As Kivrin struggles to sound the death knoll as a memorial for Roche, the sound of the bell brings Dunworthy, who, though still weak from his own near death from influenza, has come back through time to seek Kivrin and bring her home. Analysis Although Willis employs the common device of time travel, she is not interested in creating paradoxes or exploring alternative histories. Time travel is for her a means of juxtaposing two societies confronting similar crises, of exploring human nature in the presence of overpowering fear, and of celebrating human courage and generosity. Following the success of Lincoln’s Dreams (1987), the critical and popular acclaim for Doomsday Book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best science-fiction novel, established Willis as one of the top American science-fiction writers. Doomsday Book exhibits Willis’s characteristic strengths: thorough scholarship, graceful prose, and a rare combination of profound compassion and keen intelligence. There is even a touch of the humor present in many of her short stories in Dunworthy’s struggles with bureaucratic rigidity and the complaints of self-centered people who do not quite notice that there is an epidemic going on. Also evident is Willis’s ability to realize a time and place and create vivid characters whose joys and sorrows will haunt the reader’s memory. Time travel is one of the classic plot devices of science fiction. Doomsday Book has antecedents dating back to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Much of twentieth century time-travel fiction has focused on the
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mutability of time: Characters travel back to the past and change it, either inadvertently or deliberately. Authors such as Poul Anderson have developed story sequences in which rival groups battle over time, seeking to change the past (and hence the future) or to preserve an immutable past. In Doomsday Book, the immutability of the past is a given. It is the combination of Kivrin’s powerlessness, despite all of her modern knowledge, to do anything to stop the plague or to save even a single victim, and her heroic persistence in trying nevertheless, that gives the novel a tragic power rare in science fiction. Willis’s depiction of medieval England is compelling. She captures the sounds, sights, and smells with convincing verisimilitude. She neither patronizes the past nor sentimentalizes it. If she does not share Father Roche’s simple yet profound faith in the ultimate goodness of God, she treats it and him with the utmost respect. The double plot, which allows her to contrast two periods so vividly, also enables her to portray an essential humanity. Despite the differences in language, culture, and knowledge, the people of both centuries are remarkably alike: Both centuries have their share of fools, bigots, and cowards, but most people in both are a blend of fear and courage, selfishness and nobility. In both periods, despite the prevalence of death and despair, there is a persistence of human love and caring, personified in Roche, Kivrin, and Dunworthy, that cannot be overcome. —Kevin P. Mulcahy
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A Door into Ocean Inhabitants of an ocean world with an entirely female population resist takeover
Author: Joan Slonczewski (1956) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The distant future Location: The planets Valedon and Shora First published: 1986 The Story For forty years, traders from the planet Valedon have colonized the ocean planet Shora. The story concerns the increasing threat to the inhabitants of Shora and to the balance of life on their ocean home as the effects of colonization escalate and as they face the military invasion of their planet by the occupying forces of Valedon. The population of Shora—all females, who call themselves Sharers—resists the traders and soldiers by peaceful, nonviolent means. They also resist by trying to understand the Valans and by attempting to heal them both physically and spiritually. Although their advanced skills in life sciences might enable them to devise means of destroying the invaders, Sharers resist the temptation to destroy those who would destroy them. Influenced by their wordweaver, Merwen, they maintain the possibility that the Valans are human and that their healing will result in the survival of Sharers and Valans alike. The story opens with the arrival of the Sharers Merwen and Usha in a port city on the planet Valedon. They have come to learn if the Valans are human in spite of their very different physical characteristics, actions, and values. They return to Shora accompanied by a young boy named Spinel and another Valan, the wealthy and noble Lady Berenice, called Nisi by the Sharers. These two Valans share the lives of Shorans who live on the raft Raia-el. When Sharers boycott Valan traders, Spinel joins them. Although the boycott is successful in achieving the immediate demands of the Sharers, a worse threat takes the form of a plan to bring Shora under the control of Valedon. Realgar, the Valan to whom Nisi is engaged, arrives to
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head the military occupation of Shora. Pressures against the Sharers and their environment increase as a result of escalating Valan frustration with the Sharers’ refusal to capitulate. Sharers struggle with the question of the humanity of the Valans but remain steadfast in their decision to resist without killing. The ultimate action against the Sharers is precipitated by Nisi’s attempt to destroy herself along with the Valan military headquarters. Some of the Valans have come to respect the Sharers, and their appreciation is intensified when Valans injured in the explosion are rescued and healed by Sharers. In a climactic series of conversations with the imprisoned Merwen, Realgar is forced to recognize his own fear and to face his endangered humanity. His defeat is complete when the High Protector of Valedon chastens him for the mutiny in his troops. Realgar resigns his position and, with all the trader and soldier Valans, withdraws from Shora. They leave the Sharers to the work of repairing their lives and their planet. Nisi remains to become healed of her double betrayal, and Spinel, drawn by his love for Merwen’s daughter, Lystra, remains as hope for a transformed future. Analysis A Door into Ocean is the second science-fiction novel by professor of biology Joan Slonczewski, following Still Forms on Foxfield (1980). Like her other novels, it has been praised by critics for the accuracy of its science, the completeness of its alternative cultures, and its characterization. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award as best science-fiction novel of 1986. As a work of science fiction, the novel offers the situation of the alien encounter. Shifting the scene from one planet to another, it explores the situation of alien encounter from the perspectives of both worlds, opening with the visit of the Sharers to Valedon. As in other science-fiction novels describing encounters with aliens, the story raises and examines the issue of the nature of humanity. When Valans turn purple like the Shorans, they fear the loss of their humanity. When Merwen considers the possibility that some of the Shorans are willing to hasten the death of the invaders, she worries that Sharers will lose their identity. The two societies are not portrayed in monolithic and static terms, but the novel presents the encounter between Valedon and Shora as a juxtaposition of utopia and dystopia. The utopian society of Shora is not without difference, nor is the dystopian world of Valedon without its redeeming qualities. At the end of the novel, Spinel chooses to remain on the utopian Shora, but his choice carries the possibility of the transfor-
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mation of Shora because he retains his Valan stonesign and knows that Lystra wishes to have daughters with him, daughters who will differ from both of them. This novel has been discussed in the context of women as writers of science fiction and as a work of feminist science fiction. The portrayal of the world of Shora, with its highly advanced life-shaping science, its openness to all learning, and its egalitarian politics, values those matters that have been seen as feminist areas of concern. This emphasis critiques the patriarchal culture of Valedon as it also critiques the dominance of science itself, since the outcome of human action always remains unpredictable and uncontrollable. As Merwen knows in the final series of conversations with Realgar, it is wordweaving, the uncertain art of persuasive language, that will determine the final outcome. Critic Robin Roberts, author of A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (1993), has highlighted A Door into Ocean as an example of postmodernist feminist science fiction because of its attention to the function of language. A deconstructive model is at play in revisions both of the convention of the alien encounter and of the static and monolithic utopia. The model carries through in the critique of the dominance of science and of patriarchy. It is mediated by the characterization of Merwen as a wordweaver and by a peculiarity of Sharer language: In every utterance, its opposite is present. —Shawn Carruth
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Door Number Three A psychiatrist treating a woman claiming to have been left on Earth by aliens finds himself fighting the Holock, creatures from the future who devour human dreams
Author: Patrick O’Leary (1952) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1990, with parts set in the far future Location: The United States First published: 1995 The Story Psychiatrist John Donelly is treating Laura, a woman who claims to have been left on Earth by the alien Holock. She claims that she has only one year to convince one person—anyone—that her story is true, or she will have to leave Earth. She says that the Holock take great interest in earthly affairs because entering human dreams is their primary form of entertainment. Donelly believes her story is an elaborate delusion, until strange events—and even stranger dreams—invade his mundane existence. His dreams become more vivid, each of them featuring the same ten-year-old boy. One of his colleagues is murdered the same night that Laura strikes him after he tells her he does not believe her. A detective investigating the murder tells Donelly that a Vietnamese soldier he killed during the Vietnam War has begun appearing in his dreams, asking him about Laura and the Holock. Donelly meets Saul, Laura’s former “guardian angel” and the unwitting progenitor of the Holock. Saul reveals that the Holock come not from space, but from Earth’s own post-holocaust future, and that they devour dreams, preventing humanity’s ethical evolution to ensure their own eventual creation. He also says that Donelly’s child will be the savior of the human race. Donelly sleeps with Laura, who soon reveals her pregnancy and allegiance to the Holock, then disappears into the future. To set things right, Donelly asks to use Saul’s time machine. This device induces a form of mental time travel that not only causes users to “blip” back and forth throughout their own lifetimes, but generates changes that ripple out into both the past and the future. Donelly soon
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finds himself on the run from government agents, who have made a deal with the Holock. He eventually tracks down Laura in the future, only to find her living with an alternate version of himself, the self that really slept with Laura, the one he finally agrees to kill in order to save the world and usher in a new golden age, free of the Holock. Analysis Door Number Three is a clever, well-written, and intricately constructed debut novel. Despite spinning variations on many classic science-fiction themes, it is boldly original. It betrays few evidences of being a first novel, as O’Leary worked with editor David Hartwell for seven years to hone the novel through multiple drafts. Its prose is smooth and polished, its characters vivid and memorable, and its plot gripping. O’Leary manages to juggle time travelers, alien abductions, government conspiracies, and dream-eating monsters without ever descending into clichés. He slowly and skillfully invests the Holock with a sense of menace far more frightening than the standard “alien grays” so often depicted in popular media. While the novel’s themes of paranoia and loss of reality have earned O’Leary comparisons with Philip K. Dick, the analogy distorts as much as it reveals. While Dick’s best work displays an organic paranoia that reflects the disorder in his hapless protagonists’ minds, O’Leary’s carefully crafted plot forces these experiences on his protagonist from without. The intricate twists and turns deployed in the time travel portions of Door Number Three recall the equally ingenious plotting of Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps.” While the idea of “mental” time travel has been used before, the idea of changes in the future rippling back to effect the past may be original to O’Leary. The ambitious looping and nesting structure of the novel as a whole merits comparison with K. W. Jeter’s The Glass Hammer (1985) and Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden (1989). As in those overlooked masterpieces, the story itself could not be told in a linear narrative with the same impact. Door Number Three ranks alongside Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction (1995), and Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996) as one of the most impressive science fiction debuts of the 1990’s. O’Leary afterward went on to publish The Gift (1997), a flawed but engrossing fantasy, and Other Voices, Other Doors: A Collection of Stories, Meditations and Poems (2000). O’Leary may yet prove to be one of science fiction’s major talents. —Lawrence Person
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Dracula Count Dracula, a vampire, moves to England from his native Transylvania in search of new blood
Author: Bram Stoker (1847-1912) Genre: Fantasy—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The end of the nineteenth century Location: Transylvania and England First published: 1897 The Story Jonathan Harker, an English solicitor, visits Count Dracula in Transylvania. He finds death’s aura and aroma surrounding Dracula. Harker is attacked by three female vampires, who are warded off by Dracula. Harker is his; they are given a baby to feed on. When Harker demands to be released, Dracula obliges, but a pack of wolves surrounds the castle entrance. The next day, Harker awakes, weak and sick, with a wound on his throat. Dracula leaves Harker at the castle as a prisoner. In England, Harker’s fiancé, Mina Murray, visits her friend, Lucy Westenra, a “New Woman” who plans to marry nobleman Arthur Holmwood. During Mina’s visit, a ship runs aground in Whitby. The only living creature aboard is a gray wolf, which escapes into the countryside. Lucy begins to sleepwalk. Mina follows her and sees a tall, thin man bending over Lucy in a churchyard. The man disappears when Mina approaches. Lucy grows so ill that Mina is forced to call Dr. Seward, Lucy’s former suitor. While Lucy improves, Mina receives word that Harker, who had been reported missing, has been found near Budapest. Mina goes there and marries Harker. Lucy’s condition worsens, and Seward calls Dr. Van Helsing from Amsterdam. Van Helsing notices two puncture wounds on Lucy’s throat. Lucy is given transfusions directly from the men, who guard her by night. Seward falls asleep while guarding Lucy and finds her more ill when he awakes. More transfusions ensue, and Van Helsing insists that Lucy wear a necklace of garlic every night. One night, a wolf crashes through the window, the necklace slips off, and Lucy is further victimized. Van Helsing tells Holmwood that Lucy is near
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An advertising poster for Tod Browning’s 1931 film production of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.
death. Holmwood kisses Lucy, who fastens her teeth to his neck. Lucy dies. Several neighborhood children are discovered far from home, alive but with their throats punctured. They say they followed a pretty lady in white. Harker returns to England. Van Helsing suggests that Lucy is a vampire’s victim. By night, Holmwood, Seward, Van Helsing, and Quincey P. Morris visit Lucy’s tomb and find it empty. At daybreak, Lucy returns, and they drive a stake through her heart, cut off her head, and stuff garlic in her mouth. Mina is vampirized by Dracula. The men track Dracula in London, but he escapes. By hypnotizing Mina, they learn that Dracula is at sea. They follow him to Castle Dracula. Wolves encircle the men and Mina, who gather safely within a “magic” circle Van Helsing traces. The men overtake the cart carrying Dracula’s coffin. As the sun sets, Harker slashes Dracula’s throat with his kukri knife and Morris gouges Dracula’s heart with his bowie knife. Analysis Interest in vampires, like the creature itself, never dies. Bram Stoker’s novel focuses on the victimization of women. Stoker’s view is opposed to that of the “New Woman,” a feminist construct of the late nineteenth century.
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Stoker makes references to the New Woman in Dracula through Mina, characterizing her as a well-informed woman of the 1890’s. Mina sets herself above the New Woman, rejecting the concept for its sexual openness. The overall structure of Dracula indicates that Stoker employs Mina to reject the concept of the New Woman, represented by the female vampire as energized and aggressive female sexuality. The first half of the novel presents woman as vampire. Stoker focuses on the female vampire by introducing the three female vampires who live in Dracula’s castle, then centering on Lucy, Dracula’s first English victim. In the second half, the focus of the story is the fight to save Mina, shifting away from the presentation of woman as vampire. The focus becomes the fight against vampirism, and, metaphorically, against energized female sexuality or the New Woman. Lucy, the primary female focus of the first half of the novel, is turned by Dracula into one of “those awful women.” The New Woman exists in her personality, however latent, surfacing when Lucy is vampirized by Dracula. In her vampirized state, she no longer suppresses her desire. Van Helsing takes it upon himself to protect men from the evils of the vampire, and, hence, the evils of the New Woman. Lucy, confronted by the men in her crypt, takes on the full-blown characteristics of the New Woman, preying on a child and speaking of her wanton desire for Holmwood. By calling Holmwood to her side, Lucy suggests that he break with the patriarchy. This does not happen because Lucy is summarily destroyed by the men; the vampire/New Woman is destroyed by the patriarchy. The scourge of vampirism/New Womanhood also calls at Mina’s door. Mina represents traditional Victorian womanhood but also feels the effects of vampirism/ New Womanhood. Dracula seduces her, forcing her to drink his blood from his breast while her husband sleeps in the same bed. The patriarchy comes to Mina’s rescue. As the vampire’s, or New Woman’s, influence over Mina grows, Dr. Seward metaphorically sees the New Woman overcoming the traditional woman. The role of Stoker’s male characters is to prevent the acceptance of the New Woman by keeping women in their place, and, hence, the patriarchy in order. To do this, the men must destroy Dracula. Van Helsing chooses to fight the vampire to save the patriarchy. At the novel’s end, by destroying Dracula, Van Helsing and the men destroy vampirism and, metaphorically, the New Woman, preserving the sanctity of womanhood and the patriarchal order. Stoker’s novel is therefore anti-New Woman and antifeminist. It came at a reactionary time when literary England was up in arms against the very idea of the New Woman. —Thomas D. Petitjean, Jr.
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Dreamsnake A feminist quest in which young healer Snake searches for a dreamsnake across the deserts and mountains of an Earth altered by a nuclear holocaust in its distant past
Author: Vonda N(eel) McIntyre (1948) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Indefinite future Location: An unidentified desert, a mountain village, the healers’ community, and a dome that shelters an alien ecosystem First published: 1978 The Story In “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” (1973), the Nebula Award-winning novelette that became the first section of Dreamsnake, Vonda McIntyre introduces her protagonist Snake, a young traveling healer who uses her knowledge and her genetically altered snakes to treat illness and suffering. Snake is called to help a family whose son is dying of a large tumor. To comfort him, she leaves Grass, her treasured dreamsnake, on the child’s pillow while she prepares Mist, her cobra, to treat the child. When she returns from a strenuous night of altering Mist’s venom into a medicine against the child’s cancer, she finds that the parents have killed her dreamsnake out of their desert-bred terror of snakes. Without her dreamsnake, whose bite eases death, Snake is handicapped as a healer. She becomes afraid when she is called to a patient’s side: Will the patient be dying and ask Snake for the help she can no longer give? Dreamsnake, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards, expands the original novelette by tracing Snake’s quest to obtain a new dreamsnake and continue her career as a healer. Snake first directs her steps toward the healers’ “station,” the home community where she was trained. She intends to ask her elders to forgive her error in judgment and give her a new snake, knowing that the scarcity of dreamsnakes makes it unlikely that her request can be granted. Along the way, people call on her as a healer, not recognizing that she is impaired by the lack of one of the basic tools of her profession, the means to assist at death. While trying in vain to help a woman dying of radia-
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tion exposure, Snake decides that instead of returning in shame to her home, she will go to the Center, the underground city that preserved itself and its technology before the nuclear devastation of the planet. Because the Center communicates with offworlders and the dreamsnakes are believed to come from another planet, it is possible that the people of the Center can help her. The isolated and paranoid city refuses her. As she travels and treats the ill, Snake becomes aware that she is being followed. Her stalker ransacks her possessions and later attacks her and tries to steal her snakes. She assumes that a “crazy” is following her. Eventually she turns the tables and becomes the follower, after she learns that her assailant is addicted to dreamsnake venom; she infers that someone, somewhere, has enough dreamsnakes to use them wastefully. The pathetic but sly addict leads her to “the broken dome,” an alien habitat where a multitude of dreamsnakes are being exploited by a bitter, soul-twisted albino giant who hates the healers because they were not able to cure his genetic deformities. With the help of her adopted daughter and the man who loves her, Snake triumphs and comes away from the broken dome not only with dreamsnakes but also, and more important, with the knowledge of how to breed them successfully. Analysis In this early novel, published before the author’s highly visible career producing novelizations of Star Trek films, McIntyre follows the wellestablished tradition of the masculine heroic quest story but modifies the form to suit a feminist worldview. As is typical of quest stories, in Dreamsnake a young protagonist sets out on a difficult journey to find something of great value and encounters trials and adventures along the way. Instead of a weapon, a woman, or a treasure, the thing of great value for which McIntyre’s protagonist searches is a dreamsnake, a tool of nurturing. In the traditional male-oriented trajectory of a heroic quest, the obstacles encountered by the hero are enemies with whom he must fight in order to prove himself. In Dreamsnake, the trials are challenges of healing and caring, not challenges of force; there are patients to be treated, not enemies to be bested. Snake is tested, strengthened, and softened by her encounters with a woman with a broken spine and radiation poisoning, an arrogant injured aristocrat who will not follow her advice, a young man who has failed to master control of his own fertility, and a scarred young victim of sexual abuse whom Snake finally adopts as her own daughter. The maturity Snake wins through her quest is not the hardness of a battle-seasoned warrior but the humanity of a woman who can
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deal honorably with her professional responsibilities and also accept responsibility for a child and for a mate. McIntyre expresses her feminist vision not only by appropriating and modifying a traditionally masculine form; she also constructs a world of characters who are not bound by gender-role constraints. She frequently introduces characters by generic titles, such as “owner,” “chemist,” “innkeeper,” “guard,” and “herder,” leaving their gender to readers’ imaginations. When a gender-revealing pronoun, such as “him” or “her,” finally appears, readers may be surprised to find their stereotypes challenged. McIntyre conceives a society in which both men and women are free to develop to their full potentials. Snake herself supports that conception. She is able to give a good account of herself in a fight, bathe a newly crippled woman who has wet the bed, be tender and truthful with children, use her physical prowess and stamina to escape from her enemies, live fully even in the full knowledge of her coming diminishment with age, and experience the entire range of emotions available to a human being. —Donna Glee Williams
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The Dune Series The planet of Arrakis goes through several politico-environmental upheavals in a spacefaring yet feudal society dependent on the addictive spice melange
Author: Frank Herbert (1920-1986) Genre: Science fiction—galactic empire Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV (102d century c.e.) through the following five thousand years Location: Primarily Arrakis (the planet called Dune and later Rakis) and Chapterhouse First published: Dune (1965; serial form, Analog, 1963-1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984), and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985) The Story The Dune series can be seen as a set of three two-volume novels. The first involves the family of Paul Atreides, its battle for the planet Arrakis, and Paul’s coming of age as the messianic Muad’Dib. The second concerns the life of Paul’s son Leto II, from childhood to his ascendancy as God Emperor of Dune. The third deals with the ongoing machinations of the Bene Gesserit, an ancient society of women devoted to mind and body control and eugenics, in their attempt to control the sociopolitical environment of the Dune universe millennia later, as well as the ramifications of their betrayal by the Atreides family. Dune itself was rejected by twenty-two publishers before being accepted by Chilton of Philadelphia. It remained in print for at least the next thirty years. In Dune, the Atreides family emigrates from their home world of Caladan to the desert world of Arrakis, pressured by the political dalliances of the Emperor Shaddam IV. Arrakis (Dune) had been controlled by the Baron Harkonnen, and it was there that he had gained his great wealth from trade in melange, an addictive spice. Melange is essential to the functioning of all elements of society, including the Spacing Guild, for which it ensures the ability to fold space. The Harkonnens set a trap for the Atreides family in which Duke Leto Atreides and his weapons specialist, Duncan Idaho, are killed. His Bene
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Gesserit consort, Jessica, and their son, Paul, flee to the domain of the Fremen, the desert people of Arrakis. Once there, Paul partakes of melange and begins to show signs that he is the Kwisatz Haderach, a messiah-like culmination of the Bene Gesserit’s breeding program. Jessica was supposed to have had a girl, who would be married to the Harkonnen boy Feyd-Rautha, thus solidifying the aristocratic alliances and placing the Bene Gesserit fully in command of galactic political affairs. The Bene Gesserit time line is thrown off, and sociopolitical upheaval ensues. The rest of the novel involves the Atreideses’ attempt to retake the planet of Arrakis from the deposed Harkonnens and the installation of Paul as its ruler. All of this occurs in the intricately realized ecology of the desert planet. The desert is essential to the complex life cycle of the sandworms, whose larval forms, the sandtrout, produce melange. A vast history unfolds, supplemented by chapter-heading epigraphs on the life of Paul Atreides, or Muad’Dib as he comes to be known by his Fremen followers, from the Princess Irulan, his legal wife Frank Herbert. (Andrew Unangst) and the daughter of Emperor Shaddam IV. Dune Messiah takes up the story of Paul and Jessica in their life with the Fremen as they consolidate their power on Arrakis. Chani, Paul’s Fremen concubine, has died in childbirth, and Paul must ultimately sacrifice himself in the defense of their children, his prescient sister Alia, and Arrakis. Children of Dune continues the story of Paul’s son, Leto II, and his daughter, Ghanima, when they are nine years old. Leto takes on the outer covering of the sandtrout—the larvae of the giant sandworms—and effectively becomes a superman, a worthy successor to his messianic father, and rightful emperor of the galactic empire. Neither of the two volumes following Dune has the scope of the original, and both lack the hagio-
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graphic epigrams of Princess Irulan, which give readers much information concerning the overall effect of the future history. The books do not suffer for this—in fact, the action intensifies to the point of absurdity (Leto’s sandtrout symbiosis, for example)—but they are different in kind. The fourth volume, God Emperor of Dune, returns to the form of the first volume and is set some 3,500 years in the future. Leto II, in his symbiotic state with the sandworm, has become immortal and rules the galactic empire from his throne on Arrakis with infallible foresight. One result of that foresight is the empire’s stagnation. He comes to realize in his lengthy reflections that this cannot continue and so devises his own downfall. The plot here is thin, and the musings are long—features only too characteristic of the later volumes in the Dune series. Heretics of Dune, the fifth volume, concerns the Bene Gesserit and the Tleilaxu in the eventual planned destruction of the planet Rakis, as it has come to be called. A third Kwisatz Haderach of sorts, the militant Sardaukar Bashar Miles Teg, sacrifices himself for the sisterhood as the several guilds fight for ascendancy in the shattered empire through control of Rakis, the worms, and melange. The Mentat warrior Duncan Idaho, cloned here for the twelfth time, provides a thread of continuity from Dune, as does the interminable talk of the millennia-old treachery of Lady Jessica and her illicit son Paul. All of this takes place 1,500 years after the self-destruction of Leto II, God Emperor, and the regathering of the lost tribes of the once-flourishing Rakis. This volume introduces the dark mirror version of the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit, the Honored Matres of Rakis. They play the role of archnemeses in the sixth and final volume, Chapterhouse: Dune. After the willful destruction of the planet of sandworms, whose spice is essential to the operation of the galactic empire for all the guilds by this point, the Honored Matres vow revenge on the sisterhood. The Bene Gesserit reincarnate Teg, who, as the old myth went, could move faster than light, to fight the Honored Matres. They rely on Duncan Idaho’s weapons abilities in their plan, but Duncan chooses to honor Bene Gesserit teachings of nonaggression and slips into a parallel space. The remnants of the Fremen and the guilds join him in his flight from the Honored Matres. Analysis Although Dune did not receive universal critical acclaim on its appearance, it won both the 1965 Nebula Award (the first Nebula) and tied for the 1966 Hugo Award. The success of Dune and its sequels stems in large part from the response on college campuses. Like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
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Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955), Frank Herbert’s book presented a traditional epic with heroic characters in a well-realized environment, augmented by appendices and a map. The ecology movement had burgeoned, and Dune consciously used the environment of the desert as dire warning. As the drug culture flowered, the psychedelic melange, or spice, served as a handy symbol for lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Dune came early in Herbert’s career, preceded only by The Dragon in the Sea (1956; retitled Under Pressure, 1974), and fixed a benchmark for the rest of his career. It also made him one of science fiction’s most financially successful authors. The novel was filmed in 1984. The entire Dune series unfolds from the well-conceived original. Each later volume develops the ramifications of Jessica’s decision—and that of her son Paul and grandson Leto II—to betray the Bene Gesserit guild and take the unfolding of sociopolitical events into their own hands. Paul is similar to Isaac Asimov’s “Mule” in the Foundation series. After becoming the first male Bene Gesserit in history, he disrupts the plans of the Bene Gesserit to obtain control of the known universe. By the sixth volume, Atreides blood runs in the veins of almost everyone of any consequence in the Dune universe. This is a fine reversal on Baron Harkonnen’s desire to see all Atreideses dead. The long view of history, the vision of messiahs, and the unflinching critique of the myth of progress fit well into the epic-heroic structure. Herbert is able to include strong female characters, the Bene Gesserit, in a staunchly Middle Eastern milieu of chaumurky and chaumas—poison in the drink and poison in the food—and curved, poison-tipped blades. The characters are many and the plot intricate, but too much in the later volumes is lengthy narrative. The “heroes”—Paul, Leto II, and the twelfth Duncan Idaho—make antiheroic decisions, and the plots come off as anticlimactic despite epic events. The action is too often presented in the blink of an eye—literally in the case of Teg in Heretics of Dune— and the reader is privileged to learn about it after the fact through the ruminations of the characters. —U. Milo Kaufmann
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The Dying Earth Series A gallery of sorcerers and rogues employ mischief and magic in their adventures during the final days of Earth
Author: Jack Vance (1916) Genre: Fantasy—medieval future Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The twenty-first aeon, far in the future Location: Primarily Ascolais and Almery First published: The Dying Earth (1950), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966; serial form, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1965-1966), Cugel’s Saga (1983), and Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) The Story Jack Vance’s stories of the dying Earth consist of three novels and one collection of stories that reads as a novel. The series is loosely linked by a shared setting and repeated characters. Each individual volume stands on its own, and within volumes the particular chapters form largely selfcontained episodes. The first volume, The Dying Earth, sets the stage and establishes the basic premises. The novel, more accurately a collection of stories, is set in the distant future. As Earth itself and human history near their end, rogues and charlatans abound, and science has been replaced by magic. The setting is more medieval than futuristic. Humankind is few and scattered, with small, isolated pockets of people spread across the wilderness. Travel is dangerous, because creatures such as deodands, flesheating ghouls, and pelgranes, winged ravagers of the air, wait for the unwary or the luckless. The Dying Earth introduces these themes through the stories of such characters as Turjan of Miir, who wishes to create life in his castle laboratory. Lacking the proper knowledge of incantations, he turns to the powerful, mysterious Pandelume, who aids Turjan in return for a favor, the theft of a magical amulet. Aided by Pandelume’s spells, Turjan succeeds, creating a beautiful woman, T’sain, who becomes his companion. In a following story, Turjan is captured by a rival, Mazirian the Magician, who tortures Turjan to gain his secret powers. T’sain saves her creator and lover.
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Such is the pattern of stories in The Dying Earth. Characters appear only to be replaced by others, such as Ulan Dhor, who travels to the ancient city of Ampridatvir, where he wakes the sleeping god-king Rogol Domedonfors, unleashing devastation. Ulan Dhor’s story is the only one in the series that departs from fantasy into more traditional science fiction, as Ulan Dhor escapes using a flying machine found in the ancient city. The two novels that feature Cugel the Clever, The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel’s Saga, are picaresque tales in which a series of adventures befalling the protagonist are laid on a simple, sturdy framework. In the earlier work, Iucounu the Laughing Magician traps Cugel robbing him and casts a spell to send Cugel far beyond Almery, where he must secure the Eyes of the Overworld (special lenses with magical powers) and return them to Iucounu. To ensure Cugel’s diligence, Iucounu clamps a barbed creature named Firx to Cugel’s liver. Whenever Cugel delays, Firx’s agitations painfully remind him of his duties. Cugel acquires the Eyes of the Overworld through typical trickery and returns to Almery, along the way encountering numerous adventures in a variety of settings and managing to escape harm, and sometimes even death, by his wits. He rids himself of Firx as his first step in taking revenge on Iucounu, something he ponders at every step back to Almery. In the novel’s final scene, however, Cugel is tricked by Iucounu and finds himself on the same desolate beach where he began his long journey home. Cugel’s Saga begins at this point. Like the preceding novel, it is a tale of Cugel’s return, again progressing through territory filled with dangers presented by sorcerers, strange beasts, and stranger human beings. Early in the novel, Cugel escapes from the wizard Twango, carrying with him Spatterlight, a scale from the creature Sadlark, who long ago crashed to Earth from the higher realms. Twango has been painstakingly salvaging Sadlark’s scales and selling them, through an intermediary, to an unknown sorcerer. When Cugel returns to Almery, he is confronted by Iucounu, who demands Spatterlight, for it is the Laughing Magician who has been collecting the scales. Cugel surrenders the treasure but tricks Iucounu into destroying himself. Cugel claims the wizard’s magnificent palace as his own. The setting remains the same but the characters change for the fourth book in the series, Rhialto the Marvellous. Rhialto, a magician, joins a number of fellow wizards to form a loosely knit association to protect their interests. The association is guided by the Blue Principles, which are intended to protect these unscrupulous sorcerers from attacking one another. Rhialto is accused and convicted of offenses against the Blue Princi-
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ples, and then, through ever-increasing difficulties, must prove himself innocent and wreak vengeance on his enemies, most notably HacheMoncour, who is motivated by envy of Rhialto’s elegant style. Because Rhialto the Marvellous is a true Vance hero of the dying Earth, he is successful, and Hache-Moncour’s punishment is suitably apt. Analysis Vance’s stories of the dying Earth are most notable for the individuality of their characters, realism of their setting, and elegance of their literary style. Major characters such as Cugel the Clever, Rhialto the Marvellous, and Iucounu the Laughing Magician are presented in extended descriptions that reveal their individual personalities. Vance sketches even his relatively minor characters with deft, individualizing strokes that render them vividly and memorably. Often, he concentrates on the essential quality that sums up the basic character of the individual, often a typically human defect, such as pride, lust, or, most often, greed. Even in the fantastic land of the dying Earth, millennia in the future, human nature remains basically the same. Remaining unchanged, human nature also remains essentially flawed. There are no larger-than-life heroes in the world of the dying Earth; even the best of them, Ildefonse the Preceptor, leader of the magicians in Rhialto the Marvellous, has a generous supply of faults and weaknesses, most notably his lack of firmness. That failing allows the plot against Rhialto (and, therefore, the plot of the novel) to develop. Both Rhialto and Cugel are picaresque characters, closer to rogues than to heroes. The landscape in which these figures find themselves is presented with a deceptively careful accuracy. Vance takes considerable pains to give the geography of the dying Earth a precise set of place names, so that the reader gains an impression of a real, if not entirely realistic, world. Names such as Shanglestone Strand, the Tustvold Mud-Flats, and the River Scaum give weight and presence to the setting of the books, and cities such as Saskervoy, Port Perdusz, and Kaspara Vitatus, in addition to being named, have their odd buildings and odder customs described in quick, vivid detail. At Gundar, for example, Cugel stumbles upon men tending a strange device, a stone fire pit ringed by five lamps, each with five wicks with an “intricate linkage of mirrors and lenses” above them. Puzzled at first, Cugel later learns that this is an instrument tended by members of the Order of Solar Emosynaries so that the dying sun will remain alive a bit longer. The incident is so clear in its description, yet casual in its presentation, that its air of reality is enhanced.
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Vance employs this technique throughout the series, offering the strange, the bizarre, and the magical in a matter-of-fact fashion that, paradoxically, simultaneously emphasizes the unusual nature of being extraordinary yet very ordinary indeed. Although such places and things may not exist in the reader’s world, they seem very plausible in the world of the dying Earth. Finally, Vance’s series is distinguished by its literary style, which has an ironic, even arch, tone. His sentences are varied in their syntax, and his vocabulary is extensive, frequently exotic but always precise. Vance’s use of language in his fantasy world is less like the heroic prose of J. R. R. Tolkien than it is akin to James Branch Cabell’s mocking, playful style in Jurgen (1919). Characters such as Cugel and Rhialto are deft in their linguistic usage, as swift and cutting with their words as with their swords. In fact, words often are weapons on the dying Earth. Through this fact, Vance subtly emphasizes the importance of the spoken word. Curses and spells work their magic by being recited in the correct form and with the proper pronunciation. As Vance points out in the introduction to Rhialto the Marvellous, “magic is a practical science, or, more properly, a craft,” and it works because “a spell in essence corresponds to a code, or set of instructions.” In the genre of science fiction and fantasy, Vance’s tales of the dying Earth occupy a special niche as supremely crafted examples of stories set in a distant future that oddly resembles the medieval past. Although haunted by demons and monsters, it is peopled by characters such as Cugel the Clever and Rhialto the Marvellous, who are all too human to be alien to readers. —Michael Witkoski
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Dying Inside A man with the ability to read minds confronts, in middle age, the gradual loss of his powers
Author: Robert Silverberg (1935) Genre: Science fiction—extrasensory powers Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Primarily 1976, with flashbacks Location: New York City First published: 1972 The Story David Selig is a forty-one-year-old man gifted from birth with the ability to read minds. The main conflict in the novel is his attempt to come to terms with the gradual loss of this ability. He has never known why he was born with his gift, nor does he understand why he is losing it. Ironically, Selig’s ability to know what others are thinking has caused him to feel alienated throughout his life. Instead of being able to forge closer bonds with other humans, such as his parents and his sister, Judith, he becomes isolated from them because he can see beyond the surface of everyday life. He understands the selfishness and pettiness beneath the facades of human behavior. As the novel opens, Selig lives a hermetic existence, eking out a living by ghostwriting papers for college students. His story contains several flashbacks telling about formative incidents in his life. These include a visit as a child to a psychiatrist; his relationship with another telepath, Tom Nyquist; and his failed love relationships with two different women, Toni and Kitty. His telepathic ability is responsible in part for the breakups of both relationships. As Toni experiences an LSD trip, Selig is unable to avoid entering her mind and consequently experiencing the drug’s effects. Toni mistakenly thinks his strange behavior is a deliberate attempt to confuse and hurt her, and she leaves him for that reason. Kitty is a young student whose mind Selig is unable to enter. Fascinated by her and wanting to make her into the soulmate and confidante he has never had, he insists that they study and experiment with telepathy. Finally, his pressuring and manipulation drive her away.
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At the end of the novel, Selig’s powers have deserted him. Moreover, his career as a ghostwriter is ended when he is beaten by a dissatisfied customer and then discovered by campus security. The novel concludes with an open ending and a tentative affirmation: Selig must reevaluate not only his self-identity but also his relationships with others, especially the sister he has always disliked. Analysis Dying Inside appeared relatively late in Robert Silverberg’s voluminous literary career. He has written and edited scores of books. In at least one way, Dying Inside typifies his writing. Unlike Isaac Asimov, who is more concerned with the technical science aspects of science fiction, Silverberg seems especially interested in character; he shows how human personalities are affected by scientific phenomena and reflects on the political and social implications of such phenomena. For example, there is little explanation of how and why Selig has his special powers: They simply exist. Silverberg attempts to establish some scientific plausibility by explaining that Selig’s receptive ability is greater during a high pressure system when the humidity is low. Readers discover that he is losing his powers, but neither they nor Selig knows why. These details seem secondary to Silverberg’s main interest, which is to present an extraordinary fictional situation and explore its metaphorical possibilities. At one point in the text, for example, Selig’s sister asks him whether his loss of his power is like a loss of sexual potency. This level is further developed by some of the diction and imagery Silverberg uses to describe Selig delving into others’ consciousness: He “enters” and he “penetrates.” This analogy underscores the theme of alienation, for Selig is unable to establish true intimacy in either a sexual or a platonic relationship. The point of view of the narrative, which alternates between first and third person, further suggests Selig’s alienation, not only from others but also from himself. One reviewer pointed out that the diminishing of the middle-aged Selig’s powers resembles the waning of passion and intensity so often associated with middle age. In this way Selig’s unusual situation may be somewhat universalized. This apparent strength of the novel has been viewed as a weakness by at least one reviewer, who wrote that the novel has more to do with growing older than it does with science fiction and that it is more about alienation than aliens. Silverberg attempts to develop his hero’s situation by associating it with those of many other alienated literary heroes of the twentieth century. There are allusions to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
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Prufrock” (1915), Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1956), James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914), and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). As part of his job as a ghostwriter, Selig writes an essay about Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1937) and The Castle (1930). Finally, an essay called “Entropy as a Factor in Everyday Life” uses physics’ second law of thermodynamics as an analogy to Selig’s view of his own life and the world around him. Despite being nominated for a Nebula Award in 1972, Dying Inside received some unfavorable reviews. Several critics thought that the main character was unlikable, full of spite and self-pity, and others generally found the novel depressing. The novel remains interesting for its descriptions of telepathic experience and, perhaps less important, for its relationship to other twentieth century works. —Steven R. Luebke
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E Pluribus Unicorn Short stories by one of science fiction’s most empathetic writers and a grand master of literary style
Author: Theodore Sturgeon (Edward Hamilton Waldo, 1918-1985) Genre: Science fiction—cultural exploration Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Various Location: Primarily on Earth and a spaceship First published: 1953 The Story The stories collected in E Pluribus Unicorn, originally published between 1947 and 1953, share an intense and compassionate examination of human behaviors of all kinds and descriptions, including the bizarre, the cruel, the abnormal, the tender, and the sexual. Theodore Sturgeon first broke into science fiction in 1937, rapidly becoming one of editor John Campbell’s famous “Golden Age” writers. The early, groundbreaking (and rule-breaking) stories of E Pluribus Unicorn, his second story collection (following Without Sorcery, 1948), display his mastery in explorations of human emotions. “The Silken-Swift” (1953), the lead story, is a marvelous reconstruction of the traditional unicorn-and-virgin story, vividly demonstrating that virginity does not necessarily denote an immaculate character and that internal beauty means more than external beauty. “Bianca’s Hands,” the next story, was first printed in Britain in 1947. Some American editors considered it so depraved that they not only refused to print it but also advised Sturgeon to destroy it. The hands belong to a congenital idiot, Bianca, and the plot deals with the fate of the young man who falls in love with her (or, more precisely, her hands). The story is explicit in its examination of fetishism, and it raises serious issues of tragedy. “The World Well Lost” (1953) deals honestly and sympathetically with homosexuality. It caused quite a stir in the science-fiction community when it was published and still stands as a landmark in the evocation of love in a psychological sense. “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” (1948), “The Music” (original in this collection), “Fluffy” (1947), “Die, Maestro, Die” (1949), “Cellmate” (1947), and “A Way of Thinking”
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(1953) explore less positive emotions, including hate, jealousy, and vengeance, and show them as the opposites of love and loyalty. “The Sex Opposite” (1952) and “It Wasn’t Syzygy” (originally published as “The Deadly Ratio” in Weird Tales, 1948) go far beyond the limits of the day in suggesting sexual combinations; at the time, even homosexuality was somewhat taboo as a topic. “A Saucer of Loneliness” (1953) and “Scars” (1949) describe and evoke the desperation of the lonely and the misunderstood. In each of these stories, Sturgeon sympathetically and nonjudgmentally invests himself in the inner workings of his viewpoint characters. In the introduction, well-known science-fiction editor and anthologist Groff Conklin notes that “you don’t read these stories; they happen to you.” He promises that the contents will “set you beside yourself, send you into jet-propelled shivers, and generally termite your placidity.” This does not seem like an overstatement. In these stories, Sturgeon shows himself as working well above the limits often imposed on science fiction. Analysis The stories in this collection demonstrate not only the wide range of Sturgeon’s psychologically oriented interests but also the range of his ability. Some of the stories included in E Pluribus Unicorn seem exploratory or allusive; all show his stylistic mastery. Sturgeon’s greatest weakness lies in creating satisfactory conclusions to his stories, a problem more obvious in his novels than in his shorter works. Still, some of these tales seem either hastily written or truncated, and many of them give the impression of being postmodern, requiring the reader to complete the tale. On the other hand, “The Silken-Swift” is rightly construed as a masterpiece both of literary elegance and behavioral analysis, as is “Bianca’s Hands,” though with entirely the opposite emotional impact. Sturgeon taught himself and wonderfully employs the literary technique of using poetic meter in prose passages for emotional effect. This shows up most clearly in the fully accomplished works—“The SilkenSwift,” “Bianca’s Hands,” “A Saucer of Loneliness,” “The World Well Lost,” and “Die, Maestro, Die”—although it can be detected in virtually every story. It appears clear that Sturgeon derived the initial impetus from his observations of partial or inadequate responses to emotional and social problems. His observations inevitably led him to pose alternative, imaginative ways of dealing with (if not solving) these problems. The reader gets the feeling of looking over Sturgeon’s shoulder as he develops his personal motto: “Ask the next question.” In his later years,
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Sturgeon wore a silver Q with an arrow through it as a symbol of this motto. In all these stories, Sturgeon clearly, analytically, and sympathetically delineates characters with some strengths and many weaknesses, showing the difficulties they encounter with an unsympathetic world (one especially unsympathetic to weaknesses or differences). His treatments of underground cultures, particularly that of homosexuals, likely influenced such writers as Samuel Delany and Harlan Ellison. Even when Sturgeon’s characters behave in desperate or unbalanced ways, they refuse either blame or rejection. Sturgeon’s stories clarify the terror of being utterly “known,” with nothing hidden. When he creates a deranged or desperate character, he tells the story from that character’s own point of view, making the reader understand and, to an extent, sympathize. When he creates a character with warm, human sympathies, readers feel as though they have made a new friend. It is this characteristic of radical acceptance, of wise understanding couched in lyric prose, that readers gain—and appreciate—in Sturgeon’s stories. —Martha A. Bartter
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Earthsea A trilogy relating the adventures of Ged from his days as a young goatherd to his rule as Archmage
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Undefined, on another world Location: A cluster of islands known as Earthsea First published: Earthsea (1977, as trilogy; also published as The Earthsea Trilogy, 1979); previously published as A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), and The Other Wind (2001) The Story Earthsea begins on the island of Gont, a land famous for wizards. There, a young goatherd named Ged, called Duny as a boy and called Sparrowhawk familiarly, overhears his aunt using a common, rustic spell on the animals. Ged duplicates the words, but without any understanding of them. The spell works, and the goats come running around Ged. He is terrified, because he has no knowledge of how to undo the spell. The event is revealing. Ged has powers, but as a teenage boy he is naïve about those powers. He has no knowledge and thus no mastery, and power without knowledge is a dangerous thing. At first, Ged is in love with power itself. The island Mage, Ogion, recognizes the power within Ged and attempts to nurture it with understanding. Restless in his training, Ged eventually is sent to the island of Roke, the spiritual locus for all Earthsea and training ground for mastery of magical power. Ged learns it all too well. In his competition with an older student, Jasper, Ged succumbs to the use of his arts for mere personal power. In an effort to summon the spirit of a dead woman, he unleashes a shadowlike creature into the world of Earthsea. The creature comes to represent the dark uses of magical power as a shadow self of Ged himself, lured to personal glorification. A Wizard of Earthsea concludes with Ged’s defeat of the shadow. The defeat is only a temporary abeyance of its threat, however, for Ged has neither fully understood its significance nor mastered its nature.
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The second novel, The Tombs of Atuan, shifts in point of view from Ged to a young priestess, Tenar. Renamed Arka, the Eaten One, Tenar serves the ancient powers of Earth among the desert tombs of Atuan. She traps Ged, on a quest to find the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, in the labyrinth beneath the temple. Ged tells her her true name and identity, and she decides to join him on his quest. They succeed, but at the cost of the temple’s destruction. Tenar returns with Ged to Gont, where she will live with Ogion. The second novel reveals Ged’s growing mastery of magical arts and his increasing power through them. The power enables him to know the true things and hidden essences veiled within an outward nature. The increasingly complicated riddle is whether he truly knows his own essence, particularly in relation to the shadow. In The Farthest Shore, Ged is now Archmage, the most powerful magician in Earthsea. His power has deepened with knowledge. He receives a message from a young prince named Arren, the narrator of the story, that increasingly people are rejecting the beliefs that grant their lives wholeness. Ged discovers that a wayward Mage has opened a hole in the earth, letting disharmony flood the land. Ged’s quest is to close that gap, to confront the shadows of disharmony, and to use his power to restore Earth’s balance. He must finally confront and master the shadow of his own nature. As is so often the case in fantasy literature, the ultimate quest is for self-understanding. Succeeding in his quest, Ged returns to the peace of Gont among the goats. Analysis The basic framework of Earthsea is the pattern of the initiation story. In such stories, a naïve and innocent young person acquires knowledge and experience. The pattern is familiar in high fantasy, a subgenre explicitly about magical powers and their harms and benefits. In this case, the young protagonist discovers knowledge about such magical powers and inevitably confronts some conflict about the mastery of the powers. Tempted to turn them to mere personal gain, the protagonist is caught between that desire and the urgent needs of others. A second constituent element of fantasy literature, the quest, operates powerfully in the trilogy and provides the high adventure of the plot. In addition, as in many works of fantasy, the quest parallels the protagonist’s discovery of a hidden self. Within this traditional framework, Ursula K. Le Guin exercises her own kind of literary magic. She is influenced by the teachings of the Taote Ching (“Classic of the Way and Its Virtue”), supposedly created by the
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sixth century b.c.e. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. Le Guin has orchestrated classical elements of Daoism, and its later developments with Buddhism beginning in the third century c.e. into her novels. Fundamental Daoist points influencing the development of the plots include the belief that life consists of a balance and that every human action affects that balance, the belief that through “weakness” or service to others lies one’s strength, and the belief that bureaucratic or political power threatens the balance. The idea of balance is key, particularly as fundamental Daoism affected the religion of Buddhism and acquired wide popular appeal. Balance harmonizes conflicting tensions. Every darkness contains a bit of light, every sorrow a bit of joy, and so forth. One must live life so as to provide an equilibrium between the tensions. In Earthsea, that balance is terribly distorted when the naïve young Ged first exercises his magical power as an act of proud competition on the island of Roke. He violates orders and therefore violates harmony. He unleashes the shadow of disorder into Earthsea. Ged must come face to face with the shadow that lies within himself, the pride-humility, love-hatred dialectics in his own nature. As he moves from naïveté to growing awareness of his magical gifts, Ged begins to comprehend the challenge to those gifts. As is so often the pattern in fantasy, he is abetted by the appearance of a special helper, in this case the Mage Ogion, who tutors Ged in the nature of the powers that constitute the balance. At his earliest stage, Ged hungers for power. Gradually, he comes to understand The Powers for their sake and for that of others. His unleashing of the shadow shapes the transition in this realization. During his advanced training at Roke, Ged quickly outstrips even his masters in knowledge of magical power. One challenge remains: mastery of The Powers to restore harmony. As he restores harmony in the lives of others whom he has threatened by unleashing the shadow, he discovers that by serving others he restores himself. This is the discovery in The Tombs of Atuan. In her illustration of discovery of a true self, Le Guin orchestrates another interesting variation on a traditional fantasy pattern. In the Western literary tradition, the task of the classical hero is twofold: to defeat some threat to the people and to lead the people into a perception of restorative order. To achieve these ends, the classical hero is divinely gifted, sometimes considered, in fact, part human and part god. With these gifts, the classical hero acts for the people, frequently in a superhuman way.
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The fantasy hero lies in this tradition but with a difference. The fantasy hero has no pretensions to superhuman status; the hero’s origins often are common, even lowly. Fantasy heroes often take on their quests with fear and quite often with a desperate loneliness. The heart of modern fantasy is the premise of a very ordinary character being tested beyond expectation or human hope for success. This hero, although often provided with supernatural helpers, ultimately must rely on little more than human intelligence and determination. The quest to aid others ultimately is a test of the hero’s own nature and sufficiency. The Farthest Shore brings the Archmage Ged to the final step in his quest for harmony. That step is not completed through knowledge, concern for others, or an apprehension of universal order in balance; it is completed in action that leads to internal restoration of balance. The final quest leads to Ged’s confrontation with the shadow, which ultimately is his final reconciliation with his own nature and the subduing of his errors of pride. Ged’s friend Esstarriol observes that Ged made himself whole. Knowing his true self, Ged cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, “never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.” —John H. Timmerman
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The Einstein Intersection Lobey, a musician, shepherd, warrior, lover, and telepath, embarks on a quest to retrieve Friza, his beloved, from the realm of death
Author: Samuel R. Delany (1942) Genre: Science fiction—mythological Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The distant future Location: A jungle village, a desert, and the city of Branning-at-Sea First published: 1967 The Story The surface story of this novel is a reliving of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Lobey and Friza fall in love, and after an all-too-brief period of happiness, she is killed. Still grieving for his lost love, Lobey embarks on a quest to confront Friza’s murderer and retrieve her from death. Believing they know what killed Friza, the elders of Lobey’s village send him to battle a mutation, a gigantic man-bull. He tracks it to its subterranean lair, and, like Theseus, slays the Minotaur in its Labyrinth. Lobey later finds that this creature was not, after all, Friza’s killer. The real culprit is another mutation named Kid Death, a desert-born, white-skinned redhead with gills and a mouth full of shark’s teeth who kills whatever frightens him. He has the power to reanimate those he kills. He can control, but he cannot create and cannot make order from chaos. Like the mythic Orpheus, Lobey is a musician, and as such, he understands order. By killing and then reanimating Friza, Kid Death impels Lobey to interact with him, hoping to gain his grasp of order. Childlike in appearance, his demeanor alternately craftily evil and poignantly naïve, Kid Death is an unusual antagonist. He is powerful yet vulnerable, a merciless killer yet, in the end, a pitiful victim who begs for his life. It may be argued that Kid Death’s “villainy” stems from being different, having needs that are drastically opposed to those of the majority. In this novel, difference is the essential concept. Lobey finds that it cannot be mentioned openly in polite society. He must discover for himself how he is different; it cannot be told to him. That difference
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must then be kept to himself. Throughout the novel, Samuel Delany emphasizes that every individual is unique; each is different from all others. Upon his first visit to a city, Lobey sees a billboard displaying a picture of two identical women. The caption reads, “These identical twins are not the same.” Lobey misses the point. Snickering, some young boys let him in on the unmentionable implication: “If they’re not the same . . . they’re different!” Uniqueness or difference is what all the characters have in common. The underlying assumption is so fundamental that it is kept subliminal. When Lobey announces to a sophisticated urbanite that he is different, he is baffled by the other’s amused, and later hostile, reaction. He does not realize that he is belaboring the obvious and revealing himself as foolish. Analysis The title is explained in the final section of the novel. Lobey is told that Einstein, a human mathematician, defined the limits of perception by expressing mathematically how the condition of the observer influences the thing observed. Goedel, Einstein’s contemporary, noted that there is an infinite number of true things in the world for which there is no way of ascertaining their truth. At the intersection of these two theories, humanity left the confines of Earth for “somewhere else . . . no world in this continuum.” Then Lobey’s ancestors, an alien civilization, came to Earth, taking human forms and souls. Their descendants strive to discern their own trajectory while confined to human form, thought, and mythology. Delany blends an intoxicating brew of myths. The Orpheus/Eurydice story is only one ingredient. Lobey may also be read as Odysseus on a journey. Kid Death is an obvious Lucifer/Satan cognate, and Delany adds to the outlaw archetype’s character a soupçon of Billy the Kid. Other archetypal, yet uniquely drawn, characters appear. Spider, a fourarmed driver of a dragon herd, is identified also as the Betrayer, Judas Iscariot, Pat Garrett, and King Minos. Green-Eye, a prince working as a dragon herder, has only one eye. He may be read as a cyclops guarding a flock or as the son whose eye is “single,” intent on its own perception and purpose. He is a Christlike savior and redeemer. Contrasting with Friza as the unique beloved is The Dove, the embodiment of all desire. She appears as Helen of Troy and film stars Jean Harlow and Maria Montez. She is the key image in an advertising campaign aimed at keeping people dissatisfied, working against the tendency to bond with only one other. The Dove is the fuel that powers the genetic engine, keeping genes mixing toward greater diversity, in the same way Delany keeps
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myths mixing in the novel. He suggests that the old myths may be mutable, that they do not have to have rigidly predictable outcomes. Despite Delany’s assertion that the old myths need not predict the outcome, Lobey’s Orphic quest is unsuccessful. He momentarily regains Friza. While he marvels at this miracle, Friza covers his eyes with her hands. The Dove tells him to choose between reality and everything else. Surprised and off balance, Lobey states the obvious: “I can’t see anything with your hands in front of my . . .” When he regains his sight, Friza is gone. Even at the novel’s end, he is still not sure which he chose. This indeterminacy is as it should be. Lobey, the creator of order, must choose either to return to the old mythic paradigm in which reality is a closed system or to use myth as a vehicle to perceive/create a new reality. In some sense, Lobey has arrived at the Einstein Intersection, the point at which perceived reality meets infinite possibility. The Einstein Intersection is among the earliest of Samuel R. Delany’s mature works. With Babel-17 (1966) and Nova (1968), it stands as one of several masterpieces of the early career of this prolific writer. —Karen S. Bellinfante
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The Elric Saga Elric, last emperor of the decadent, prehuman Melniboneans, abandons his kingdom in a quest for freedom and identity that ironically destroys the world he seeks to preserve
Author: Michael Moorcock (1939) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Undefined Location: Earth and an alternative dimension First published: The Elric Saga (parts 1 and 2, 1984), which includes Elric of Melniboné (1972; U.S. title, with cuts, The Dreaming City, 1972), The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1973), The Weird of the White Wolf (1976), The Vanishing Tower (1971, also published as The Sleeping Sorceress), The Bane of the Black Sword (1977), and Stormbringer (1965, rev. 1977); Elric at the End of Time (1984); The Fortress of the Pearl (1989); and The Revenge of the Rose: A Tale of the Albino in the Years of His Wandering (1991) The Story Stormbringer, the first novel in the Elric Saga to be published, was actually the last of the series according to internal chronology. It was first published serially by the British magazine Science Fantasy (1963-1964). The single volume Stealer of Souls (1963) was expanded, with the addition of stories from the separately published collection The Singing Citadel (1970) and the return and revision of the omitted portions of Stormbringer, into the six-volume saga. The Fortress of the Pearl is an additional adventure that occurs between the events narrated in Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and The Revenge of the Rose apparently occurs between the events of The Vanishing Tower and The Bane of the Black Sword. The Elric Saga tells the story of Elric, last emperor of the Bright Empire of Melniboné, whose inhuman race has ruled their world for ten thousand years. It is, even in its decline, more than a match for the human upstarts of the Young Kingdoms. These strange people inhabit the
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Dragon Isle, on which rests their only settlement, Imrryr, the Dreaming City of unearthly beauty and unimaginable horror. Elric has the dual misfortune of being an albino, which causes him some physical weakness, and being so unusually intelligent and sensitive—for a Melnibonean—that he has a conscience and is capable of both pity and remorse, an anomaly that raises questions about his fitness to rule a people who create orchestras from the dying screams of tortured slaves. Loudest among Elric’s critics is his greedy cousin Yyrkoon, who lusts after the throne and the power of bygone days. Elric has great inner strength and sorcerous powers, which Yyrkoon discovers when he attempts to usurp the Ruby Throne and is resoundingly defeated. The battle ends triumphantly for Elric, but it is a victory that costs him dearly, because he must invoke the aid of the demon-god of Melniboné, Arioch of Chaos. This act sets in motion events that lead to his world’s destruction in a final battle between the supernatural forces of Law and Chaos. Particularly important in this regard is his acquisition of the black runesword Stormbringer, in reality a demoniac entity of monstrous evil that devours the souls of people and gods alike, giving their strength to Elric and so creating an unholy addiction from which he never completely recovers. Elric unwisely leaves his kingdom in the hands of Yyrkoon to quest for freedom and for answers to his people’s identity, hoping to free them from their own degeneracy and from the whims of the Lords of Chaos. While he is abroad, Yyrkoon successfully usurps the throne and recovers the other black sword, Mournblade. Meanwhile, Elric endures a series of adventures with the disturbing import that he is not and never will be master of his own destiny. Returning in secret to Melniboné, he discovers that his beloved cousin Cymoril has been placed in an enchanted sleep by Yyrkoon. Frustrated in his attempts to awaken her and rejected by his own people, Elric organizes the fleets of the Young Kingdoms to sail against Melniboné. He succeeds in sacking the city but fails miserably in his real purpose. Yyrkoon confronts him with Mournblade, and the two black swords possess their wielders. Cymoril awakes during the fight, and Yyrkoon flings her toward Elric. She dies horribly as Stormbringer drinks her soul. Elric kills Yyrkoon, but the damage is done. After the sack of Imrryr, the raider fleet is attacked and destroyed by the vengeful Melniboneans. Only Elric’s ship escapes, by sorcerous means, in an apparent betrayal of those men who had trusted him (though he really could not save them). The despairing Elric now wanders the world, still seeking the truth and freedom he is denied, though
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he continues to involuntarily fulfill his destiny. He makes a powerful and elusive enemy in Theleb Ka’arna, sorcerer of Pan Tang. His quest for vengeance occupies a considerable portion of the saga and ends with hard-won and somewhat equivocal success: The vampiric runesword takes Theleb Ka’arna’s soul only after much destruction, including the death of Myshella, the Dark Lady of Castle Kaneloon, Elric’s first new love after the death of his cousin. During the saga, Elric falls in love with several women. His last and greatest love, his human wife Zarozinia, impales her Chaos-altered body on Stormbringer to give Elric the strength he needs to destroy the Lords of Chaos in the final battle. After the defeat of Chaos, Elric again flings away Stormbringer, only to have the black blade fly from the ground and impale him. The sword then transforms into a demoniac being, standing over the fallen albino and saying, “Farewell, friend! I was a thousand times more evil than thou!” Analysis Elric is a fascinating creation, not least because he is a considerable change from the brawny Neanderthal hero tradition in fantasy begun with Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Cultured, brilliantly intelligent, and physically delicate though immensely psychologically powerful, Elric starkly contrasts with the brutal simplicity of Conan. Where Conan is a wild barbarian warrior, Elric is the highly cultured product of a dying civilization. Where Conan grows quickly bored and irritated with philosophical questions, Elric is forever seeking the answers to the mysteries of life. Where Conan is direct and simple in his desires, Elric is subtle and inwardly tortured by his conflicting emotions. A mighty sorcerer, Elric dislikes invoking supernatural aid, though he resorts to it frequently. In his questing after truth instead of power or wealth, he again differs from the typical hero of “sword and sorcery” fantasies. When angered he can be horrifyingly merciless, but he is reluctant to use force, again in contrast to typical heroes of fantasy. He is capable of compassion and pity, but also of demoniac cruelty. Ironically, it is his compassion for his people that alienates him from them. Irony is an abiding characteristic of Michael Moorcock’s work, particularly the Elric Saga. It is ironic that Elric leaves the Bright Empire to seek freedom only to fulfill his destiny, that he seeks to free himself with a sword that only enslaves him, that in seeking to save his people he eventually destroys them, that he kills Cymoril when he wishes to free her, and that his own divided character will not let him find the peace he craves.
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Indeed, Melniboneans cultivate a refined sense of irony, as Elric’s own behavior continually illustrates. Closely related to irony is paradox, in that both involve the juxtaposition of apparent opposites. The paradoxical beauty and horror of Imrryr are matched by the paradoxical character of its last ruler. Elric’s plight is itself paradoxical, in that by acting according to the compassionate side of his nature and questing for truth, he brings about his own and his world’s destruction. Time paradoxes abound, as Elric discovers that he is one incarnation of the Champion Eternal, a being of almost infinite power who exists simultaneously on all the million spheres of Earth. Several times Elric meets other versions of himself, from good Prince Corum of the Vadhagh to the terrible Prince Gaynor the Damned, doomed to serve Chaos for all eternity. Elric himself is seeking answers he is better off not knowing, the most exquisitely cruel paradox of all. Moorcock blends British folklore, biblical sources, and other mythological motifs with original characterization and unusually profound philosophical insights, creating a world at once new and yet familiar, a world similar enough to reality to make satiric social commentary possible, yet different enough to evoke the sublime wonder engendered only by the very best fantastic literature. If there are minor stylistic flaws and inconsistencies in the earlier books of the original saga, they are still exceptional in their brilliant synthesis of the modern novel and the mythic. The more recent novels, The Fortress of the Pearl and The Revenge of the Rose, represent the work of a mature and extraordinarily gifted author. On the whole, the Elric Saga is one of the finest fantasy epics ever written. —David Hinckley
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The Ender Series After annihilating the alien Buggers, Ender Wiggin justifies the lives of the dead and strives to prevent the destruction of three other sentient life-forms
Author: Orson Scott Card (1951) Genre: Science fiction—future war Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The near future and three thousand years later Location: Earth and the Hundred Worlds planets of Lusitania and Path First published: Ender’s Game (1985; largely expanded version of a novella in Analog, 1977), Speaker for the Dead (1986), Ender’s War (1986, omnibus edition of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead), Xenocide (1991), and Children of the Mind (1996) The Story The novella version of Ender’s Game (1977) was Orson Scott Card’s first published science-fiction story. The tale of Ender Wiggin, a child being trained to lead Earth’s space fleet in a war against the alien Buggers, quickly became one of the most popular Analog novellas of all time. Several years later, while Card was working on Speaker for the Dead (1986), he discovered that the novel’s extensive background could best be established by revising Ender’s Game as a novel and developing Ender’s character as the adult “speaker.” Xenocide (1991) continues the story, developing both the characters and the themes introduced in Speaker for the Dead. A fourth Ender novel, Children of the Mind (1996) concludes the series. Ender’s Game tells how Earth barely defeats a fleet of alien Bugger ships that attacks without warning or provocation. A generation later, Earth believes that the Buggers will return in strength, intent upon destroying humankind. Military intelligence frantically tries to identify a genius to lead a successful military defense. Ender Wiggin is bred to be that leader. As a child of six he is sent to a space Battle School where, for five years, he engages in a series of war and strategy games designed to prepare him for the anticipated war. Mazer Rackham, who orchestrated the first military victory against the Buggers and who has been kept alive via relative space travel, supervises the child’s final training. To
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Ender’s surprise, he discovers that he was not playing games; he actually was directing Earth’s offensive against the Buggers, resulting in their complete destruction. The story ends years later, when Ender discovers a message and a queen pupa left to him by the Bugger Hive Queen. Ender becomes the Buggers’ interpreter and apologist. As a “speaker for the dead,” he compassionately explains the Buggers’ desire for reconciliation with humankind and their prayer for forgiveness. He departs to search the universe for a safe place where the queen pupa can hatch. Speaker for the Dead is set three thousand Earth years later. Ender is still alive as a result of extensive travel at the speed of light. Another intelligent alien species has been discovered on the Hundred Worlds planet of Lusitania, and a human colony has been established to observe the alien Pequininos, or Piggies. When a Piggy brutally disembowels the xenobiologist Pipo Figueira, Ender travels to Lusitania to speak his death. He learns that a Piggy goes through three stages of life, first as a larva, then as a Pequinino, and finally as an intelligent tree. A drug is administered so the Piggy can be ceremoniously disemboweled to achieve the third, adult life phase. When the Piggies disemboweled Pipo, their intent was to honor him. Ender also discovers that the Piggies’ life transformation is made possible by a highly contagious virus called the descolada, absolutely necessary to them but deadly to all other lifeforms. Speaker for the Dead ends with the Starways Congress sending a fleet to annihilate Lusitania, thereby ensuring that the deadly descolada will never be spread. This xenocide will destroy Piggies, humans, and, unbeknownst to everyone except Ender, the Buggers who have finally found a new home on Lusitania. Xenocide begins on the Hundred Worlds planet of Path, a religious colony where the “god-spoken” pay the price of revelation through humiliating obsessive-compulsive behavior. Gloriously Bright, the youngest of the god-spoken, is given the impossible task of discovering how the entire star fleet, on its way to annihilate Lusitania, suddenly vanished. On Lusitania, Ender works with the colonists and Piggies, trying to discover a way to render the descolada harmless against humans but still effective in its life-transforming function for the Piggies. The story becomes complex as divisions occur among the Piggies, among the humans, and among the god-spoken of Path. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations of data lead to cataclysmic mistakes in judgment. It is discovered that both the obsessive-compulsive behavior on Path and the deadly properties of the descolada on Lusitania have been produced through intentional genetic engineering. Although cultural traditions
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and relationships are destroyed in the process, Lusitania successfully alters the descolada. Every sentient species is saved, and Ender is left to re-establish relationships among species, worlds, and, most important, his own family, all the while trying to stop the Starways fleet. Analysis Orson Scott Card is deeply concerned about the impact of his stories. He has written several essays and books explaining how he creates characters and how he addresses ethical, moral, and theological issues in his fiction. As he matured as a writer, he repeatedly returned to his early work in order to rewrite his stories to make them more “true.” Card does not pretend that the incidents really happened; what he wants is for his readers to believe that his stories truthfully describe how people make ethical decisions and how they can improve the human condition. Card believes that a story should be an end unto itself and consciously writes to the reader rather than to the critic. He reveals his characters’ innermost beliefs and motives through their choices and actions. Card wants his readers to feel the choices his characters make and creates strong situations because he believes that a story’s emotional impact is more important than its critical interpretation. Card believes that people have a hunger for stories that make sense of things. Readers identify with Ender Wiggin’s loss of innocence. Employment of a child as a hero has become one of Card’s most successful and most used techniques. His stories typically focus on children endowed with remarkable gifts that must be developed and used to provide salvation for their communities. Xenocide’s god-spoken, Gloriously Bright, is one such child facing almost unbearable opposition. Ender is brilliant, but as a boy he must pay the price of loneliness that is demanded of children who value genius more than athletic ability and strength. Readers also respond to Card’s creation of futuristic battle-training strategies. Each phase of Ender’s training, each new game, rings true. Ender’s training regimen, it is interesting to note, has been read as both a justification of and a denunciation of the military mind. When Card rewrote Ender’s Game as a novel, his increased skill as a speculative writer was manifest through the new dimensions brought to the story. Ender is led to discover the true nature of the alien Buggers and becomes their apologist. Because of his sympathetic explanation of their lives, Ender, who became the literal savior of humankind by defeating the Buggers, became despised as “Ender the Xenocide.” In Speaker for the Dead, the religious metaphor of Ender’s life is extended when he arrives to speak for the dead of Lusitania and discovers
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the secret of the descolada. Ender evolves from the role of savior and prophet to that of martyr, knowing he will become infected with the virus and be quarantined on Lusitania for the rest of his life. Speaker for the Dead is typical of Card’s intent to expand science fiction beyond its adolescent action characters with no ties to mothers, fathers, or children. His unique blend of storytelling and morality mature in this tale of adult family relationships. Card creates his most complex ethical dilemma in Xenocide. The Starways Congress has sent a fleet to destroy Lusitania, including the descolada, Piggies, and humans. Card succeeds in weaving an intricate tale that threatens the existence of four sentient alien species, the human colony, and the god-spoken elite of Path. In each facet of the tale, ethical dilemmas are created as individuals try to do the right thing but, out of ignorance, make cataclysmic mistakes that can lead only to annihilation. Ender’s character progresses from martyr to discoverer and creator as Card amplifies the themes of military might and obeisance to authority, adding an examination of religious obsessive-compulsive behavior and theorizing on the nature of eternal intelligences. Card’s Ender Wiggin stories established him at the cutting edge of character-based speculative science fiction. Ender’s Game received the Nebula (1985), Hugo (1986), and Hamilton/Brackett Awards (1986). Speaker for the Dead earned an unprecedented second set of science fiction’s highest honors, the Nebula (1986) and Hugo (1987), as well as the Locus Award (1987). Xenocide received several nominations and received the best novel (1992) award from the Association for Mormon Letters. —Gerald S. Argetsinger
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Engine Summer In the aftermath of a holocaust, humankind survives in isolated settlements, each establishing its own perspective on advanced technology
Author: John Crowley (1942) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Several generations after a holocaust Location: Earth First published: 1979 The Story Looming behind the narrative is a legendary story of humankind before the Storm. While those known as the angels vigorously pursued technological advancement, the Long League, led by its matriarchs, tried to counter the ill effects. Taking a third option, the people of Big Belaire avoided technological conflict by taking to the Road and finally building the Warren. When the Storm came (whether it was ecological disaster or warfare, or both, is unclear), the angels departed Earth in their flying city, their proudest achievement, leaving the rest of humankind behind in isolated pockets. The story opens with Rush that Speaks, a disembodied voice, telling his story to the angels. The voice belongs to an imprint of the original Rush’s memory, personality, and consciousness, recorded in one of the angels’ miraculous machines. The actual Rush lived six hundred years earlier, in an era that was itself several generations after the Storm. Rush’s story is a detailed account of humankind’s survival on Earth after the Storm. It begins in his birthplace, the Warren, a settlement that strives to live within human limits and in harmony with nature and whose chief virtue is telling the truth. Periodically, the people known as Dr. Boots’s List, who claim to be descendants of the Long League, visit the Warren to trade, especially for St. Bea’s bread, an organic substance that promotes a sense of well-being and unity with the environment. Once a Day, Rush’s adolescent love, leaves with Dr. Boots’s List. He follows her a year later. Before searching for her, he spends a year with Blink, a hermit who has collected books and other artifacts from the angel ruins.
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After virtually sleeping through winter in Blink’s treehouse, Rush moves on, walking over the Road, the crumbling interstate highway system. When he finds Dr. Boots’s List on the Road, Once a Day is with them. He accompanies the group to Service City, where they live with their giant cats in a ruined angel building. Each member of Dr. Boots’s List routinely receives a letter from Dr. Boots. When Rush asks for his letter, he is taken to a machine that allows him to enter into the mind of a recorded personality. The experience leaves him feeling a sweet simplicity that is beyond the need for words. Later he will learn that the mind recorded in the machine is a cat who was named Dr. Boots. Once a Day, fearing that Rush’s experience with Dr. Boots will change him in a way that she cannot accept, will not return to Service City until Rush leaves. He moves on, next encountering Teeplee, a scavenger living amid the ruins of the angels, aimlessly gathering objects that he does not understand. After a short time scavenging with Teeplee, Rush decides to return to the Warren. Before reaching the Warren, Rush encounters a man parachuting from the sky. He is Mongolfier, an angel from the floating city, alerted to Rush’s position by objects that Rush scavenged. He has a simple request: He wants to record Rush’s mind, just as Dr. Boots’s mind was recorded. Rush agrees, and at this point the story comes full circle. The living Rush goes on to the Warren, presumably to live out his life. The recording of his mind stays with the angels. To generations of angels living in the floating city, he tells his story up to the point of meeting Mongolfier. He knows nothing further, not even what happened in the remaining life of the person he was. Analysis In post-holocaust novels, humanity has been wiped out in many different ways—ecological calamity, nuclear warfare, extraterrestrial invasion, and so on. The special turn that Engine Summer takes on this subgenre is that it does not emphasize the process of destruction; instead, it focuses on the way of life of the survivors. Further, the world is not presented in a coherent form by an omniscient narrator. As in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), another post-holocaust novel, readers themselves reconstruct the lost world from what the narrator reveals. At the basic narrative level, Engine Summer reveals several forms of technological adaptation. The people of the Warren live largely unconcerned with the angels, as they had gone separate ways even before the
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Storm. Pieces of angel technology are worth saving as curiosities, but the people of the Warren do not seek them out. They value knowledge, even angel knowledge, but only if it serves wisdom. The people of Dr. Boots’s List, on the other hand, gather and proudly use the artifacts, even those they barely understand. They treasure most the machine that stores the mind of Dr. Boots, though their encounter with it leaves them passive and accepting of a static way of life amid the angel ruins. Later, the depiction of Teeplee, whose entire existence is given over to scavenging angel artifacts, is a commentary on the pointlessness of Dr. Boots’s List. Finally, the angels themselves, heirs to technological perfection, can be seen only as selfish and inhumanly cruel. Although Mongolfier takes a heroic risk to record Rush’s mind, he is not typical of his kind. The rest remain in their flying city, far above the dangers and ills of Earth, experiencing only through the mind of Rush what a real life might be like. They wake him century after century, unwilling to erase him from the machine and end his agony. He will live indefinitely in a kind of Indian summer, what his people mistakenly call engine summer. An author of both science fiction and fantasy, John Crowley has one of the finest prose styles of his generation, and his closely textured fiction invites several levels of interpretation. Perhaps it is for these reasons that his output has been comparatively small—no more than a handful of novels and several story collections in a career that started in 1975 with his first science-fiction novel, The Deep. —Steve Anderson
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Eon and Eternity The return of an asteroid through time and space remakes the history of the human race
Author: Greg Bear (1951) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: 2000 c.e. and after, as well as various time metrics in alternative universes Location: Earth and alternative Earths, the asteroid Thistledown, and the cosmic space known as “the Way” First published: Eon (1985) and Eternity (1988) The Story Eon and Eternity are among the most ambitious science-fiction novels ever published. They chronicle a number of futures for the human race and perhaps the most sweeping, speculative, and awesome future history ever proposed. On December 31, 1999, Earth’s scientists are nervous. A mysterious asteroid called “the Stone” has suddenly come into orbit around Earth. When American space missions explore “the Stone,” they find that it not only seems to have been inhabited by humans but to have been occupied more than a millennium ago. The other side of this enigma is glimpsed when veteran Hexamon operative Olmy reports to his superior, the presiding minister of Axis City. Axis City is a settlement of humans, in the far future, who have explored a relativistic cosmic continuum called “the Way” and established themselves there in commerce and rivalry with various alien peoples. The leaders of the Hexamon, which is the political structure of the humans in the Way, are stunned to find out that Thistledown, the asteroid spaceship from which their ancestors had set out from Earth more than a thousand years before, had not only returned to its original orbit but gone back to a time three hundred years before it had been constructed. Olmy returns to Thistledown in order to explore further. Meanwhile, the American expedition explores the asteroid’s seven chambers and finds out much of the amazing truth for themselves. The expedition, led by the capable Garry Lanier, includes Karen Farley, a
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British-born Chinese scientist with whom Lanier falls in love, and Patricia Vasquez, a brilliant young Hispanic American scientist who alone can understand the mathematical intricacies of the far future. For Earth people, the biggest secret of Thistledown is not the Way itself but the asteroid’s library, which contains pictures of a nuclear conflagration that had taken place in Thistledown’s “past” at a date in the near future of Earth. Russia has a spy within the expedition, and thus the secret gets out, bringing political tensions on Earth to the breaking point. Ironically, the pictures of the conflagration on the parallel world touch off, in the present world, the very events they depict. Much of Earth is destroyed, and all existing political systems are reduced to ruins. Patricia’s parents and fiancé are among those vaporized to death, and she becomes at once both inconsolably depressed and determined to find some way, in the topsy-turvy world of parallel universes made possible by the advanced mathematics of the Way, to reverse time and fate, thus bringing her loved ones back. In conducting this research, she threatens the fundamental equilibrium of the Way, so Olmy abducts her and takes her to Axis City. Olmy, though, has special plans for Patricia. He realizes that her mentality is similar to that of Konrad Korzenowski, the man who centuries “later” in time had designed the Way. Korzenowski has been assassinated, but Olmy, using the advanced technology of the Hexamon, can revive him if Patricia agrees to share her mentality. Meanwhile, the desperate Russians attack Thistledown itself, though the danger is defused when their old-guard Communist leaders are outwitted by Pavel Mirsky, a visionary subordinate. Hexamon authorities take all humans from Thistledown to Axis City. The Earth people are awed by the technological progress the Hexamon people have made in their thousand-year odyssey, but the Hexamon is in itself split. The Way is filled with pernicious, alien enemies called the Jarts, against whom the Hexamon is barely holding its own. Part of the Hexamon wishes to destroy the Way and go into orbit around Earth, while the other wishes to accelerate the speed of the Way and thereby crush the Jarts. Because the two plans are not incompatible, it is decided that Axis City will split into two parts. Meanwhile, Korzenowski is reincarnated using Patricia’s mentality. He decides to go with the Earthbound faction. Patricia gets her part of the bargain and is allowed to search for an alternative Earth where she can find her loved ones. She fails in this attempt, landing in an alternative universe where the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt in the Hellenistic Era was never conquered by Rome, and therefore all of subsequent history has been altered. Lanier returns to Earth with the Korzenowski faction and marries Ka-
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ren Farley. The Laniers participate for fifty years in the Hexamon-led reconstruction of Earth from its nuclear devastation. This peace is imperiled when Mirsky reappears, after having gone with the part of the Hexamon who had accelerated to infinity. Mirsky reveals that his group has literally traveled to the end of time, where an impersonal entity called the Final Mind, the culmination of all mental being, prevails. The Final Mind feels endangered by the existence of the Way, which has been closed but not destroyed, and therefore asks the Hexamon to reopen it. Olmy participates in this project, capturing a Jart who he thinks he can use for intelligence. The Jart deceives him and dominates him. It is revealed that the Jarts are in fact performing the Final Mind’s mission in insisting on destroying the Way. The Way is successfully destroyed, and Korzenowski decides to join the Final Mind, where humanity’s ultimate destiny lies. Lanier and Mirsky, though, are sent by the Final Mind back through history, for reasons and purposes unknown even to them. They will carry on the human quest for knowledge that the now-destroyed Thistledown exemplified. Analysis Greg Bear’s novels are so massive and ambitious that even an extensive summary hardly does them justice. Bear’s sweeping vistas show how successful a complex and visionary conception of the future can be. Although some of Bear’s shorter-term predictions have been superseded by history, his long-term vision of the future is compelling. For all the complexity of the Eon-Eternity diptych, the two books are dominated by several basic themes. Perhaps the most central of these is the opposition between going “home” and journeying “out,” of seeking knowledge versus returning to deep and permanent loyalties. This dichotomy can be seen even within the councils of the advanced Hexamon itself, in which the “Geshel” faction, favoring technological progress, is opposed to the “Naderite” group, which opposes science and wishes to return to Earth. Bear implies that it is foolish to hope to suppress either of these tendencies in the human spirit. When the Naderites let the Geshels take half of the Hexamon into infinity and take their half to Earth, this does not prevent the eventual emergence of neo-Geshels within the Naderite group who wish to reopen the Way. Bear threads this going home/voyaging forward dichotomy throughout the two books. Lanier and his wife Karen go home with the Naderites, even though it is to a devastated Earth they have never known. Patricia, on the other hand, attempts the absolute negation of all given reality. Her only purpose is to recover and rejoin her family. The Hexa-
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mon itself has made many almost inconceivable steps forward. It has made it possible to store souls in a kind of eternal afterlife, to traverse different dimensions of time and space, to preserve essential human identities even after the body has died, and to allow humans to assume any size, shape, or form that they wish. None of these achievements can eliminate human nature. The bickering between the Naderites and Geshels is as fierce as that between the much more “immature” Russian and American factions among the earthlings. The figure caught most paradoxically between these two tendencies is Korzenowski. Born of Naderite parents, he nevertheless designed the Way, which made it possible for all the Geshel dreams of progress to come true. Even though he seems to have betrayed his heritage, he becomes the Naderite patron saint who is needed to lead the Hexamon back to Earth. With a name clearly alluding to the original Polish name of the twentieth century British novelist Joseph Conrad, Korzenowski exemplifies the contradictory bind brought into being by the engagement between scientific, intellectual curiosity and human yearning. It is Bear’s deep spiritual and psychological insight that makes the reader able to digest the huge panoply of concept and detail he portrays in these two books. Whatever complexities humans of the future may produce, Bear implies, they will always be involved in two central pursuits: the perennial quests to know and to love. —Nicholas Birns
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Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two friends of questionable ethics who become the most renowned rogues and swordsmen in the world of Nehwon
Author: Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Slightly before 200 b.c.e. to about one thousand years later Location: Nehwon, a universe in a bubble First published: Swords and Deviltry (1970), Swords Against Death (1970; expanded from Two Sought Adventure, 1957), Swords in the Mist (1968), Swords Against Wizardry (1968), The Swords of Lankhmar (1968; part as “Scylla’s Daughter” in Fantastic, 1961), Swords and Ice Magic (1977), and The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988) The Story The Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series was written over a period of at least four decades as thirty-six short stories and one novel (The Swords of Lankhmar). The stories form a coherent whole: the adventures of two of the greatest swordsmen and greatest rogues any world has ever known. The first three books were collected as The Three Swords (1989) and the second three as Swords’ Masters (1990). Fafhrd is a tall northern barbarian, and the Mouser is a small, dark man of uncertain but urban origin. They share a common attitude toward life because they are the sundered halves of an even greater hero from ages past. They meet as youths in fabled Lankhmar, the most cosmopolitan of the many cities of Nehwon, and instantly become friends. (Actually, this is their second meeting but their first “on camera.”) Their friendship appears destined to last a lifetime. Thirty-four of the thirtyseven stories in this series chronicle their joint adventures; the first two occur before the two meet, and the third is the tale of their meeting. These adventures cover much of Nehwon and even part of the ordinary world. Fafhrd and the Mouser save Lankhmar many times, and the world itself more than a few, but many of their adventures are the sort that would naturally befall a pair of reckless wanderers in a world full of magic, mystery, and danger.
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The two rogues have two magical patrons, neither of whom is human. Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face appear to be self-appointed protectors of Nehwon, occasionally sending the cavalry (in the form of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) to avert some catastrophe. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser encounter many women romantically over the years and care about more than a few deeply, but their friendship for each other always comes first. This is clearly true even in the last two books, when they make long-term attachments to two ladies of fabled Rime Isle (Fafhrd’s love is Afreyt; the Mouser’s is Cif). Most of these stories have the typical structure of an adventure story: Evil entities have designs that should be thwarted. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser discover these designs, either by accident or otherwise, and oppose the villains. Not all the villains are killed, but their nefarious plans are rendered, at best, only partially successful. A few opponents come back to fight in subsequent stories, but there is no “evil mastermind” analogous to Fu Manchu or Professor Moriarty. Death, the Power of the Shadowlands, comes closest, with the sorcerer Quarmal, Lord of Quarmall, a distant second. At the end of the series, the two swordsmen, now middle-aged, are still firmly attached to each other and to their lady loves. It is clear that they were intended to have more adventures. Analysis Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were actually created by Harry Otto Fischer, but, with the exception of ten thousand words of “The Lords of Quarmall,” Fritz Leiber wrote all the stories. The author’s presence is felt through the somewhat archaic device of a narrator, whose comments, in the hands of a lesser writer, might have prevented total immersion within the fictional world. Leiber’s mastery of narrative, pacing, dia-
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logue, and character grab the reader and force him or her headfirst into fog-shrouded Lankhmar, or wherever Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s wanderings take them. The early stories in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series helped spawn an entire genre of fantasy stories whose protagonists are likable antiheroes. Leiber’s literary influence on fantasy in the twentieth century has been exceeded only by J. R. R. Tolkien. L. Sprague de Camp was a contemporary and mined the same vein. Fantasy writers who appear to have been influenced strongly by Leiber include P. C. Hodgell, Michael Moorcock, and Roger Zelazny. The Thieves’ World series of anthologies, edited by Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey, could never have existed had not Leiber helped invent the genre to which it belongs. Fantasy roleplaying games owe their existence in part to this genre and, therefore, indirectly to Leiber. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were explicitly a reaction to improbable fantasy heroes such as Robert E. Howard’s Conan; Leiber said as much in an author’s note in The Swords of Lankhmar. Indeed, in some ways they are almost parodies. Leiber made a point in his introductions to most of the books of asserting that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were the best swordsmen in all the worlds. In what he called “Induction,” at the beginning of the first book, Swords and Deviltry, Leiber even claimed that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were the two reincarnated halves of a greater hero. This cannot be taken seriously, and the idea was used in only one of the stories (“The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars,” one of the latest). Even the name of the world is a joke: It is “Nowhen” backwards, a reference to the famous novel Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler, but one evidently used only to amuse those in the know. This is not the only such sly inversion; for example, in The Swords of Lankhmar, Kokgnab is named as a source of subtle massage techniques. Even the seamy-side attitude of the whole series was in part a reaction to J. R. R. Tolkien’s approach to heroic fantasy. Leiber hints at this as well in The Swords of Lankhmar. There is far more to these stories, however, than reaction to traditional fantasy literature. The novelty of the likable antihero probably contributed much to the early popularity of the series. In addition, the strongly developed protagonists gave the reader something easy to identify with. The continued success of these stories, however, does not result from novelty. Leiber’s story ideas were original and intriguing. He gave free rein to his imagination in inventing villains, religions, cultures, natural laws, and more. Nehwon sports a truly preposterous mythology and magic (not to mention geography), which add to its
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charm. Talking skulls and killer jewels are but the tip of the iceberg. Leiber was a good enough writer to make even the most ridiculous notion acceptable. His combination of writing skill, excellent story ideas, a unique and enchanting setting, and good characterization made the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series what it is and earned for it a place among the great works of fantasy literature. Leiber also employed, though sparingly, a trick used by many fantasy writers, that of having his characters discover, or know, scientific principles not known on Earth before the scientific age. For example, in “Stardock,” the Mouser intuits why water boils at a lower temperature at high altitudes. Leiber reversed the trick in “Trapped in the Sea of Stars,” having Fafhrd guess at cosmological interpretations that would be correct on Earth but are subsequently proved wrong in Nehwon. There is another reason for the popularity of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Leiber peppered many of them with references to the ordinary world, such as the mysterious interworld traveler Karl Treuherz. “Adept’s Gambit” even takes place on Earth, in the eastern Mediterranean of more than two millennia ago. These references to things terrestrial seem incongruous and so disturb the suspension of disbelief, but at the same time they provide personal interest for the reader. It is interesting that, in so many stories, written over a span of about forty years, there are so few inconsistencies. The most glaring is the unintended sex change Sheelba undergoes in “The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars.” In this story he becomes and has ever been a she, yet in all earlier stories featuring Sheelba, he was definitely male. The role of sex (as opposed to gender) is important in this series, and it looms both larger and more kinky in the later stories. This is probably because the earlier stories were published at a time when sex in fantasy fiction was hardly acceptable, at least to publishers. By the time the later stories were written, many restrictions had been lifted. Leiber received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, in no small part because of his success with the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. —David C. Kopaska-Merkel
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Fahrenheit 451 A depiction of a futuristic society in which reading is forbidden and books are burned by firemen
Author: Ray Bradbury (1920) Genre: Science fiction—dystopia Type of work: Novel Time of plot: An indeterminate time in the future Location: Implicitly an anonymous location in the United States First published: 1953 (expanded version of “The Fireman,” Galaxy Science Fiction, 1951) The Story It is ironic that in 1953, an asbestos edition of the novel, which describes a terrifying, censorship-obsessed society that burns books, was published. Ironic too is that in the 1980’s, Ray Bradbury found that the publisher had, through the years, silently censored from his original text seventy-five sections of Fahrenheit 451. Stories published in the 1953 edition are omitted from most later editions. Fahrenheit 451, which takes its title from the temperature at which paper burns, takes place in a sterile, futuristic society in which firemen burn books because the State has decided that books make people unhappy. Suspected readers are arrested. Instead of reading, people listen to “seashells,” tiny radios that fit in the ear, and watch insipid television shows projected on wall-to-wall screens. In school, students play sports and learn nothing. Fast driving is encouraged, and pedestrians are arrested. Indiscriminate drug use, suicide, overpopulation, and war are rampant. In this world lives Guy Montag, the main character, who smilingly and unquestioningly accepts his job as a fireman. Guy’s wife, Mildred, watches endless hours of television and overdoses on narcotics. Early in the novel, a young neighbor, Clarisse, shocks Guy by asking whether he ever reads the books he burns and whether he is happy. Although she is later killed by a hit-and-run driver, Clarisse is the catalyst through which Guy begins to evaluate his life and career, and finally the society he supports. Clarisse and Mildred are foils: Clarisse’s thinking and questioning is a threat to the State, whereas Mildred’s zombielike addic-
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tion to television and pills makes her the personification of this society. Guy’s reeducation continues when he is deeply moved by the selfimmolation of an old woman who chooses to die with her books rather than be separated from them. It is at this point, early in the novel, that Guy secretly takes and reads one of the old woman’s books to satisfy his curiosity. Captain Beatty, Guy’s supervisor and a master at brainwashing, rewrites history to say that firemen have always set fires and reading has always been forbidden. Beatty explains the State’s philosophy that humans need only entertainment, not the insights, self-reflection, uncertainty, and occasional sadness provided by books. Beatty explains that in order to achieve societal equality and happiness, people should not be given two sides of an issue or books to debate, think about, or question. He insists that because some people dislike certain books, all books should be burned to ensure everyone’s happiness. Guy’s increasing inner numbness draws him closer to reading books. It also draws him to Faber, a retired professor of English. Faber, a foil to Beatty, explains to Guy that what is contained in books gives life depth and meaning. Books can present a higher quality of information as well as the time to think about and then act on that information. After Guy reads aloud to Mildred and her friends Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a poem about the erosion of faith, they turn him in to the police for breaking the law. When Beatty and the firemen arrive at the Montags’ house, Guy kills Beatty. He escapes to a remote colony of intellectuals, one of several such groups that live in the woods. Group members have memorized and therefore “become” books. They recite their books, thereby passing on their knowledge to their children, who will await the rebirth of a literate civilization. The novel ends with a quotation from the last chapter of the Bible and the guarded optimism that the antiliterate State will soon self-destruct and a new, cultured society will rise from the ashes. Analysis Fantasy and science fiction are closely intertwined, and Fahrenheit 451 falls into both genres. No time machine carries the reader into this dark future, but Bradbury takes a seemingly unreal world and makes every element of it real and credible. From the technicians who apathetically pump the stomachs and transfuse the blood of the unhappy many who take daily drug overdoses to the blaring multiwalled televisions, Bradbury’s attention to detail makes this nightmare seem plausible, vivid, and alive.
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Fahrenheit 451 fits clearly into the utopia-dystopia motif that appeared in science fiction throughout the twentieth century. Whereas utopian fiction presents an idyllic world or society, dystopian fiction often portrays the individual’s struggle against the implacable state in an ugly, depressing world. To illustrate two types of dystopias, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a frightening view of a technologyobsessed future, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is an appalling picture of an absolute dictatorship’s effect on the human psyche. Bradbury’s novel is a confluence of these dystopias. The brain-dead media and faster cars of the future (technology) add to the suffocation of individuals in a sterile State in which reading and thinking are outlawed (dictatorship). Fahrenheit 451 falls in the middle period of Bradbury’s literary career. Such short stories as “The Scythe” (1943) and “The Lake” (1944) belong to Bradbury’s early period (1943-1945). These works are in the realm of fantasy and deal with the implications in life of choosing imagination over rationality. The practice in these works of having a hero who intuits some scary reality and tries to change things leads to the character of Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451, which was written, along with The Illustrated Man (1951) and The Martian Chronicles (1950), during Bradbury’s vintage period (1946-1955). All three books were adapted into screenplays. Science-fiction elements as well as dystopian landscapes enter his work during this time. Products of his later period, beginning in 1957, include Dandelion Wine (1957) and I Sing the Body Electric (1969). Many of his later works deal with magic, joy, and human eccentricity. Critics believe that The Martian Chronicles is Bradbury’s most successful work, exploring the tension between the needs of the individual and those of society. Although some debate whether Bradbury’s work belongs to science fiction or fantasy and some consider his work simplistic, others feel strongly that it has been unfairly neglected and underrated and that his diverse and copious literary output is of astonishing quality and variety. —Howard A. Kerner
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The Falling Woman The intense struggle of Elizabeth Butler, who is forced to choose between the overlapping demands of the present and the past
Author: Pat Murphy (1955) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The mid-1980’s, with flashbacks to the 1940’s Location: Yucatan digs in Mexico, and Berkeley, California First published: 1986 The Story The Falling Woman concerns the efforts of Elizabeth Butler (Liz) to achieve self-understanding by choosing between the unknown past and present reality. Liz must decide whether to fulfill the wishes of a Mayan ghost, Zuhuy-kak, who believes the blood sacrifice of Liz’s estranged daughter, Diane, will restore power to an ancient Mayan goddess. Her option is to deny this past world that she cherishes and accept the present world she loathes. Six chapters, interspersed with ones devoted to Liz and Diane, describe ancient Mayan customs and cyclic concepts that emphasize the key Mayan belief that people need to know and understand their past in order to understand their future. Two characters, Diane and Zuhuy-kak, exert emotional and psychological pressures on the central character, Liz, while Tony Baker provides comforting support. Liz is an archaeologist, lecturer, and writer whose youthful efforts to secure freedom to develop her talents resulted in a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, divorce, and loss of child custody. At the Dzibilchaltún dig, codirected with Tony, Liz exists on the psychic border between past and present. Seeing both sides, she simultaneously observes ancient ghosts and modern humans pursuing daily activities. In these ruins, Liz talks to herself, daydreams about the Mayan shadows who ignore her, and reflects that psychiatrists would suggest that these supernatural phantoms are hallucinations, parts of herself projected from her subconscious mind. A wish fulfillment activates the fantasy plot. Although she laughs at students’ visions of treasure, Liz expresses her own dream of locating a tomb at the excavation. Later, as Liz sits by the cenote, one ghost stops,
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stares, and questions her presence. Liz is equally astounded. She discovers that rules of reality are changing and barriers are down. Speech is possible between Zuhuy-kak, dead a thousand years, and Liz. After Liz passes a riddle test, Zuhuy-kak promises friendship and aid in revealing hidden secrets. That night, during her dreams, Liz relives the shadow’s memories of falling in the waters of Chichén Itzá’s sacred cenote. At dawn, she finds a partly raised stone, a clue that leads eventually to buried secrets in Zuhuy-kak’s tomb. Exploration of the past continues when Diane Butler arrives unexpectedly. She wants to learn why Liz abandoned her in childhood. As Liz and Diane share separate memories, Zuhuy-kak also tells Liz about her life and insists that Liz sacrifice Diane. To protect her daughter, Liz asks Diane to leave the Yucatan and offers herself as a sacrifice. When the girl refuses, Liz asks Tony, a father figure to Diane, to help guard the girl’s safety. The fantasy climaxes as Liz achieves self-understanding. She realizes that her sacrificial abandonment of Diane on her educational altar was just as unacceptable and futile as Zuhuy-kak’s desired sacrifice. After Diane and Zuhuy-kak share this knowledge, all three free themselves of past mistakes. Diane lifts her unconscious mother, and the shadow shoulders her dead daughter; both trudge out of the cave. As Diane follows the light of Zuhuy-kak’s flickering torch, she moves toward a future with Liz, one that begins on the bridge at Strawberry Creek in Berkeley. Analysis Pat Murphy began publishing in the 1970’s, but her first awards came in the 1980’s. She received a Nebula for The Falling Woman and another Nebula the same year, along with a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, for “Rachel in Love” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1987; chapbook, 1992). “Rachel in Love” was included in Points of Departure (1990), a short-story collection that won the Philip K. Dick Award. Murphy’s writings synthesize science-fiction and fantasy elements with universal human concerns and problems. Her themes include alien encounters/estrangement, parent/child or male/female relationships, and self-realization/development of talents. Her first novel, The Shadow Hunter (1982), uses time-travel technology to move a prehistoric man into an alien future, and “Rachel in Love” describes the difficulties of a chimpanzee scientifically imprinted with the human intelligence of a teenage girl. The City, Not Long After (1989), a fantasy inhabited by various human, machine, and nonhuman figures, is set in a world devas-
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tated by a plague that was caused by humans with misguided intentions. Most of the short stories collected in Points of Departure also feature a synthesis of universal human concerns with the elements of science fiction and fantasy. The Falling Woman illustrates Murphy’s recurrent themes. First, Murphy expands the alien encounter theme to develop dynamic characters and plot complexities. Liz is a stranger to her peers and her daughter. Zuhuy-kak, the Doppelgänger shadow from the past, the ghostly double who stresses her commonalities with Liz, is as alien to the present world as Liz would be to the past. Moreover, Diane is able to see ancient shadows, twisting the double displacement theme into a third level. A second thematic idea centers on the parent/child bonds. The mother/father/daughter unit, extended to include Tony Baker, offers a sharp thematic contrast: The father figure protects the daughter from a mother who may kill her. A third theme relates to the pursuit of personal power, which Zuhuy-kak repeatedly mentions as a reward if Liz agrees to sacrifice Diane. The answer to this question of what Liz is willing to sacrifice for success is crucial to her choice. The power theme is also expressed at a symbolic level. One symbol relates to Zuhuy-kak, an archetypal figure representing the powerful, perhaps dangerous, influence of the dead past on present or future actions. Symbolic meanings of “falling,” “treasure,” “water,” “caves” and other terms give additional depth to Murphy’s fiction. —Betsy P. Harfst
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The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle A collection of Peter Beagle’s works of fantasy, comprising two short stories and two novels
Author: Peter S. Beagle (1939) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Collected works Time of plot: Various, primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Location: New York City and England First published: 1978 (includes A Fine and Private Place, 1960; “Come, Lady Death,” 1963; The Last Unicorn, 1968; and “Lila the Werewolf,” 1974) The Story The first story in The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle is “Lila the Werewolf.” It might be called either a short novella or a lengthy short story. It follows the brief relationship between Joe Farrell and Lila Braun. Shortly after Lila moves into Farrell’s apartment, Farrell begins to notice that Lila acts strangely during a certain part of the month. He soon discovers the reason for this behavior: Lila Braun is a werewolf. Although their relationship continues for a short time, it finally disintegrates when Farrell and Lila’s mother follow Lila, who is in wolf form, as she makes her rounds of New York City. Years later, Lila’s mother calls Farrell to inform him of Lila’s wedding to a research psychologist, whose interest in Lila is both romantic and professional. The next story in the collection is The Last Unicorn. This novel focuses on the adventures of a female unicorn who leaves the safety of her forest in order to find others of her kind. Along the way, she gains the companionship of Schmendrick the wizard, whose success at wizardry is sporadic at best, and Molly Grue, a tender-hearted but tough-speaking woman. Their search leads them to the heart of the kingdom of King Haggard, a monarch whose desire to possess beauty and immortality led him years before to imprison unicorns within the waves of the sea. When confronted by King Haggard’s mighty Red Bull, the unicorn almost meets the same fate as her kindred, but Schmendrick changes her into the shape of a frail, beautiful woman, Lady Amalthea. Prince Lír, King Haggard’s adoptive son, soon falls in love with Lady Amalthea,
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but because of her true nature, she cannot fully reciprocate his love. The novel ends with the fall of King Haggard, the ascent of Lír to the throne, and the freeing of the unicorns from the waves. “Come, Lady Death” appears after The Last Unicorn. This short story centers on Lady Neville, an important aristocrat with a flair for the dramatic. So that she can host the most exciting party in London, Lady Neville invites Death to be the guest of honor at her next ball. Death shows up in the guise of a beautiful young woman. By the end of the story, Death trades places with Lady Neville. The final story in the collection is the novel A Fine and Private Place. The story is about Michael Morgan, a young college professor who suddenly finds himself dead, even though he retains consciousness. He is in a state of limbo. In the graveyard, he meets Jonathan Rebeck, a misfit from society who has lived in the graveyard for two decades. Morgan also meets Laura Durand, a ghost like himself, and the two of them fall in love. The novel follows two main plots: the relationship between Morgan and Durand and the relationship between Rebeck and a widow, Gertrude Klapper. Morgan and Durand’s relationship is threatened by the exhumation of Morgan’s body because of Morgan’s apparent suicide (he is buried in a Roman Catholic plot). Rebeck and Klapper’s relationship is strained by Rebeck’s inability to cope with the outside world. Finally, Morgan and Durand are reburied in another cemetery, and Rebeck, with Klapper’s support, re-enters society. Analysis This collection displays the variety of topics with which Peter Beagle is able to work in his artistry. He possesses the ability to produce extremely realistic stories set in ordinary places during the twentieth century. Excepting the few strains of the fantastic arising within “Lila the Werewolf” and A Fine and Private Place, those stories are believable tales. Beagle’s writing style is reminiscent of that of other twentieth century realists such as Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, yet Beagle is also an accomplished writer of fantasy fiction, able to transport the reader into magical worlds brimming with extraordinary people and creatures. The Last Unicorn falls into this category and is arguably Beagle’s masterpiece of fantasy fiction. Because of his mastery of fantasy fiction, critics and scholars often compare Beagle to other twentieth century fantasists, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle allows the reader a chance to witness a writer exercising his skills in versatility.
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For this collection of stories, Beagle wrote an introduction providing his personal insights into the creation and publication of each story found within the volume. This introduction, providing Beagle’s explanation of why he writes works of fantasy, will be of interest to scholars, lovers of fantasy fiction, and avid Beagle fans. The introduction serves as a means for Beagle to give his views on the topic of fantasy fiction but also affords the reader a glimpse into the activity of writing fantasy fiction. Beagle discusses how and where he wrote the stories, the means of publication, and his retrospective opinions about them. In essence, he provides a short critique of each work. —Trevor J. Morgan
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The Female Man An emissary from an all-female planet of the future travels to the present to observe male/female relations
Author: Joanna Russ (1937) Genre: Science fiction—feminist Type of work: Novel Time of plot: An alternative 1970’s and two possible futures Location: Earth and Whileaway First published: 1975 The Story The novel is polyphonically composed, using six alternating female narrators (a group called the four J’s, a teenager, and the author). Each brings her own perspective, shaped in some cases by life in an alternative reality. The first of the J’s, so named because their names begin with that letter, is Janet Evanson. She is an inhabitant of Whileaway, a possible future Earth whose entire population is women. She has been sent back to a possible present to study mores in a land where men still exist. Janet finds two women whom she wants to take back to her time: Joanna, her tour guide, and Jeannine Dadier, a librarian. A large part of the book describes the relatively uneventful daily lives of these two women. Jeannine has a noncommittal sexual relationship with the unambitious Cal. He is a male chauvinist who matter-of-factly expects Jeannine to do his laundry and prepare his meals, even though both work and he contributes nothing to her support or nurture. Jeannine’s passive behavior is contrasted sharply to Janet’s no-holds-barred actions. Taken to a party by Joanna, Janet evades the attentions of the drunken host by punching him in the nose and breaking his arm. Yet another unfulfilled character is introduced when Janet Evanson moves in with a suburban family. The family’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Laura Rose Wilding, is a budding writer who has been frustrated by others, who label her aspirations unfeminine. The girl initiates a love affair with Janet, who is the first person she has met who respects her intellect and dreams.
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The plot takes yet another unexpected turn when Alice-Jael Reasoner, called Jael, arrives to transport the women to another future. Jael lives on an Earth where women and men live in opposed, armed camps. Her nation has wanted to contact Whileaway but has been unable to because of peculiarities of the time-space continuum. Now that Whileaway can be approached by way of Jeannine and Joanna’s world, Jael asks if the female planet can be used as a training camp and if Earth can serve as a transfer point. The book ends with the answers to these questions. Janet, not particularly impressed with Jael’s world, says no. Jeannine, sick of her planet’s patriarchal arrangements, agrees to assist in a war to exterminate men. Analysis The Female Man appeared during the high tide of the women’s liberation movement. At this time, authors such as Kate Millett published books denouncing the stereotyping of women as inferior and the carryover of these stereotypes into inequitable social practices, such as paying women and men differently for equivalent work. These books were products of a broader social current of women who protested against injustices. This upheaval sparked a questioning of sexual roles by imaginative writers. During this period, the most acclaimed attempt by a sciencefiction author to rethink biological bias was made in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). In the universe Le Guin portrayed, there was no question of one sex dominating, because all the humanoids were hermaphrodites. Joanna Russ’s vision is more combative than this. She is not interested in simply drawing the type of implicit contrast found in The Left Hand of Darkness, in which the viability of a different biological setup is explored. Russ savagely compares contemporary sexism to the milder, freer life on all-female Whileaway. One of the author’s strengths arises from her need to give an accurate rendering of modern life to serve as a basis of comparison. It is often overlooked that some of the greatest writers of science fiction, such as Philip K. Dick, achieve much of their authority because they bring to their speculative writing realistic portraits of their times. In Russ’s case, some of the best parts of this book are her faithful portraits of contemporary women, as in her depiction of Laura’s yearning for support and Jeannine’s ambivalence toward marriage. Such writing as easily might have filled a place in a mainstream realist novel as in a work of futurology. When such slices of life are interrupted by visits from extraterrestrials and the narrative is intercut with views of future Earths, the book firmly
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establishes its science-fiction credentials. Inclusion of two manners of intervention allows Russ to make her sharpest comments in relation to the sexism in American society. On one hand, Janet, who has been socialized outside of patriarchy, is a determined, independent woman, more capable and generally likable than the Earth women. On the other, life on Whileaway, without men, is treated as attractively natural, festive, and well suited to the all-around development of individual potential. This is not to say that Russ presents a blinkered view of either Janet as a faultless heroine or of her world. Janet is cold and can be self-absorbed, and her planet, which still allows the brutality of duels, arbitrarily and undemocratically assigns people to jobs they may not want. The introduction of Jael’s planet hints that social structure determines a world’s negative or positive nature. Jael’s female civilization is warlike, murders men without compunction, and is not above keeping slavish gigolos for its elite women. This culture, at war with all men, makes the female/male dyad the central equation in the society’s worldview, and this twists its existence, even though men do not live within the community. Russ implies that it is the use of this dyad to establish difference, rather than inherent biological traits, that poisons human relationships. This point does not reduce the causticity of Russ’s critique of the injustices perpetuated by men in the United States. —James Feast
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Fire and Hemlock A modern reworking of the ballad of Tam Lin, in which Polly must solve the mystery surrounding Thomas Lynn
Author: Diana Wynne Jones (1934) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1980’s Location: Middleton and Bristol, England First published: 1985 The Story In the middle of packing to return to college, Polly suddenly becomes aware that she seems to have forgotten several years of her life, or rather that she seems to have two parallel sets of memories, one featuring a man called Thomas Lynn. In trying to figure out this puzzle, she is obliged to work back through her adolescence, recalling events. Readers see Polly at the age of twelve. She has been sent to her grandmother’s home because her parents are quarrelling. There, with her friend Nina, she undertakes a madcap set of adventures that lead her to the mysterious Hunsdon House, where she inadvertently steps into a funeral and attends the reading of the will. She is rescued by a young man called Thomas Lynn, with whom she strikes up a friendship. They quickly discover that they share a love of heroic tales and begin to invent one concerning Tan Coul, who is Lynn, with Polly as his assistant. The friendship and the storytelling continue by letter. Thomas gives Polly many books suitable for assistant heroes. Polly becomes aware, however, of her grandmother’s disapproval, and also of an unhealthy interest from the occupants of Hunsdon House, who seem to punish her and Thomas for any contact. This friendship against the odds is counterpointed by Polly’s miserable daily life. Her parents separate and eventually divorce, and Polly comes to realize that neither of them really wants her. Her mother moves from one partner to another, and her father begins living with a woman who clearly dislikes children. In one particularly appalling scene, Polly’s mother sends her to live with her father permanently, but he has not told his new partner that Polly is coming. Only through the intervention of
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Thomas Lynn and Polly’s grandmother is disaster averted. As Polly grows older, she finds that her life remains inextricably mixed up with that of Thomas Lynn and the Leroy family but is unable to work out what is happening. Sebastian Leroy, the child of the family, dogs her footsteps and eventually asks her to marry him, but she refuses. Only the combination of the book she is reading and the picture Thomas Lynn gave her many years earlier suddenly alert her to the curious nature of her memories. She then discovers that no one else can remember Thomas Lynn and begins to doubt her own sanity. Her flatmate, however, reveals that she remembers him, and Polly finds that Thomas Lynn’s Dumas Quartet has become well known in the musical world. Reading at last the book of fairy stories he once gave her, she realizes that the story of Tam Lin is being reenacted, with the Queen of the Fairies keeping a man for seven years and then consigning him to Hell. Her role, like that of Janet, is to hold onto Thomas Lynn and save him from this. A final confrontation with the mysterious Laurel rescues Thomas Lynn. The novel is resolved ambiguously, with a hint of a future relationship between Polly and Thomas. Analysis By the time Fire and Hemlock was published, Diana Wynne Jones was well established as the writer of a particularly joyous and imaginative style of fantasy that tended to be regarded as suitable for children and young adolescents. Fire and Hemlock was one of her first attempts to move into the area best characterized as “young adult fiction.” The work is darker in tone than her readers were accustomed to, dealing with a young girl’s platonic relationship with an older man who shares her love of reading. A counterpoint is provided by the failing relationships of the girl’s own parents, both with each other and with new partners. Jones is very skillful in creating the ambiguities of the relationship between Polly and Thomas, from Polly’s delight in meeting someone who shares her pleasure in reading and is able to recommend new books to her, to her jealousy when Tom introduces her to Mary Fields, who seems to be his girlfriend. Jones also lovingly creates the world of the teenage girl, neither adult nor child, torn by confusing signals from all around her: the disentangling of childhood friendships, the new interest in boys, and the realization that adults are not to be relied on and can indeed let one down badly. On top of all this is the magical component of the story, a dark magic entirely unlike that found in most of the story books with which Polly is familiar. Jones updates one of the most enduring and most menacing of the old
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ballads without losing any of its power. Instead, she heightens its effect by showing the faeryfolk capable of functioning, apparently with impunity, in the mundane world, exercising power of life or death as they wish, entirely unquestioned. A hero, which is how Polly casts herself, may yet triumph and save the day. The fact that Polly is a hero in many other ways, surviving her parents’ callous disregard, remains unstated but nevertheless is clear. Jones has never shirked from pursuing an amalgam of magic, fantasy, and the grim reality of everyday life. This novel shows creation of such an amalgam in her best style. —Maureen Speller
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A Fire upon the Deep As a great evil power, the Perversion, devours the thinking galaxy, a small band of sentients struggles to activate a counteragent that was liberated when the Perversion was created
Author: Vernor Vinge (1944) Genre: Science fiction—catastrophe Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Org years 52089-52091 Location: Relay, Tines World, Harmonious Repose, and on board the spaceship Out of Band II First published: 1992 The Story A Fire upon the Deep tells the story of the Perversion’s attack on civilization and of the countermeasures taken against it. The Perversion is unwittingly unleashed by an advanced society, but the process also produces a countermeasure. As the Perversion advances, the unusual crew of the spaceship Out of Band II races to activate and guide the countermeasure. They succeed, and the galaxy is saved, although a substantial piece of high civilization has been set back for some period of time. In the environment of A Fire upon the Deep, shells of potential, shaped roughly like a child’s toy top, define activity in the Milky Way. Even thought cannot exist in the central Unthinking Depths. The closer that sentients approach this limit, the less intelligent they become. The next shell out defines the Slow Zone, where any information transfer is constrained by the speed of light. The outermost boundary separates the Beyond, where advanced civilizations dwell, from the Transcend, where the Powers dwell. On a planet barely inside the Transcend, the Straumli Realm accidentally unleashes a great evil power, the Perversion. As researchers escape their laboratory, they take with them a countermeasure to the Perversion. This countermeasure lands on Tines World, very near the Slow Zone. As they emerge from their ship, the humans are massacred by large, somewhat doglike creatures. Only two children survive: Jefri Olsndot stays in the Flenser Republic and is carefully nurtured; Johanna Olsndot is skillfully spirited away to the Woodcarvers’ domain.
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On Relay, a prime location in the communications network of the Beyond civilizations, Ravna Bergsndot happily works as a student librarian. She is pulled from her accustomed duties to orient a revived primitive spacefaring human, Pham Nuwen, to work for a Power known as Old One. As Ravna and Pham get to know each other, they meet and become acquainted with two Skroderriders, plant intelligences named Blueshell and Greenstalk, who fly Out of Band II as interstellar traders. Pham turns out to be a creation of Old One. As Straumli Realm falls, Jefri calls for help. The administration of Relay commissions Out of Band II to rescue Jefri and activate the countermeasure, instituting a multifunction refit of the ship. When the Perversion attacks Relay and kills Old One, Old One Godshatters, turning into Pham. Ravna, Pham, and the Skroderriders run for Tines World in Out of Band II. As Out of Band II arrives at Tines world, the situation is desperate. War has broken out between the Flenser Republic and the Woodcarvers’ domain, and the Perversion is advancing fast. The crew of Out of Band II rescues the children and activates the countermeasure, which causes a wave out of the Slow Zone that extends into the Transcend. This eliminates the Perversion and all Beyonder civilizations in its path. Analysis From prologue to epilogue, A Fire upon the Deep fills its reader with a sense of wonder. A unique structure for cognitive processes fills the galaxy, from the Unthinking Depths to the supercharged Transcend. Civilizations can evolve from limited organizations in the Slow Zone, through increasingly sophisticated societies in the Beyond, into Powers in the Transcend, and perhaps into something beyond the Powers. A vast communications network unites the few human and many alien civilizations of the Beyond. The conflict of the novel occurs when an advanced human civilization dabbling in the wonders of the Transcend inadvertently releases a Perversion that threatens to subvert the entire Beyond and a good portion of the Transcend. The tradition of grand scope into which this novel falls extends at least from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), which describes the near and far futures of the Earth, through the science-fiction magazines of the 1930’s and 1940’s. John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novel The Black Star Passes (1953) deals with threats to Earth and the entire solar system, and his The Mightiest Machine (1947; serial form, 1934) envisions conflict between galaxies. E. E. Smith’s Lensman series, from Triplanetary (1948; serial form, 1934) to Children of the Lens (1954; serial form, 1947-1948), extends through six books, envisioning a conflict between high forces of
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good and evil involving the entire Milky Way and multiple races. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1951-1953) centers on institutions whose purpose is to save essential civilization as a galactic empire crumbles. The tradition of grand scope extends into the 1980’s and 1990’s with work such as Michael Resnick’s novels of the Inner Frontier: Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (1986), Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future (1988), Soothsayer (1991), Oracle (1992), and Prophet (1993). The worlds in them are modeled on the American Wild West and populated by legendary aliens. Vernor Vinge informs A Fire upon the Deep, his contribution to the tradition of grand scope, with his background as a professor of computer science. His background breathes life into both the communications network that links the civilizations of the Beyond and the information mining that awakens the Perversion. This novel shows the continued growth of Vinge’s writing. In Marooned in Realtime (1986), Vinge envisions a few pockets of humanity living in stasis while some force eliminates humankind. Their problem is uniting the pockets so that humankind can continue. Vinge’s background in information theory shows up again in this book: The first hurdle to be overcome is communication between stasis bubbles. What Vinge adds in A Fire upon the Deep is a greater richness of detail. The context of the novel is a galaxywide society of diverse civilizations populated by a variety of mutually alien races. Two particularly delightful alien races are fully realized. —Joseph Minne
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The Fisher King Trilogy In this action-packed trilogy, various characters interact with ghosts, mythological figures, and black-magic tarot cards in a drama of suffering, redemption, and apotheosis in the American West
Author: Tim Powers (1952) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1990-1995 Location: Southern California and Las Vegas, Nevada First published: Last Call (1992), Expiration Date (1996), and Earthquake Weather (1997) The Story The Fisher King trilogy chronicles the apotheosis of Scott Crane, the son of a corrupt gangster who rules a mystical realm of nebulous boundaries in the American West. Scott and his father, Georges Leon, possess magical powers that are explicitly associated with those of the Fisher King of Arthurian legend. Scott must challenge his father and assume the kingship of the West in order to save what has become a political, financial, architectural, and spiritual wasteland. Dramatizing the stages of the symbolic life of the Fisher King, each novel is set in a different season: Last Call in spring, Expiration Date in autumn, and Earthquake Weather in winter. In Last Call, Scott attempts to reclaim the life his father stole from him. As a child, Scott was nearly turned into a soulless vessel by Leon, who uses black magic in the pursuit of longer life. Saved by his mother, Scott fled and was adopted in Los Angeles by Ozzie Crane. His legacy is the loss of one eye, a casualty of the Page of Swords card in an evil tarot deck hurled by his father. Scott becomes an avatar of the Page of Swords, also known as the One-Eyed Jack (the Jack of Hearts) and the crown prince of the King of Hearts (the Fisher King). Years later, Scott symbolically loses his life to his father again, this time in a card game called assumption, a variation of poker played with Leon’s tarot deck. Later, at the age of forty-seven, Scott loses his beloved wife and the life they shared. Joined by his friend Archimedes “Arky” Mavranos,
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Ozzie Crane, and his foster sister Diana, Scott defeats his father, reclaims his life, and becomes the new Fisher King. Expiration Date introduces Koot Hoomie Parganas, an eleven-yearold candidate for the position of Fisher King, who accidentally sets free the curmudgeonly ghost of Thomas A. Edison in Los Angeles. Pursued by a one-armed madman called Sherman Oaks (after the name of a Los Angeles suburb) and Loretta deLarava, a ghost-obsessed documentary producer, Koot navigates the dangerous streets of an unfriendly city with Edison’s help. Koot’s story is interwoven with that of Pete Sullivan, busy fleeing ghosts of his own as he finally returns to Los Angeles. After witnessing the death of their father years before, Pete and his twin sister grew up in that city and began working for deLarava. The siblings eventually realized that deLarava planned to capture the ghost of their father, and they parted ways, always running from the past. However, Pete is drawn back to the city to seek absolution from his father’s ghost and a resolution to the mystery surrounding his murder. Earthquake Weather opens with the murder of Scott Crane. Janice Cordelia Plumtree, host to multiple personalities, surrenders herself to the authorities as the assassin after suffering possession by a ghost. Joined by Sid “Scant” Cochran, a vineyard worker marked with a scar on his hand from Dionysus, Janice seeks to restore Scott to life. Arky Mavranos and Diana follow magical guidance and take the king’s body to Pete Sullivan and Koot. The two groups join in a quest to bring Scott back to life or to replace him with a new Fisher King, racing against time to save the failing Kingdom of the West. Analysis The Fisher King Trilogy succeeds in adapting the myth of the Fisher King into eminently readable novels set in the 1990’s. Filled with rituals, legends, magic, gods and ghosts, each novel reflects extensive research and the deft writing needed to blend these elements into fast-paced, engaging stories. The character Scott Crane is aptly named. In ancient Greece, cranes were sacred to Demeter, the goddess who renewed the earth each spring when her daughter was released from the Underworld. They are also symbolic of resurrection, and throughout the novels Scott Crane seeks the rebirth of the wasteland created by his father. The bird most closely related to the North American crane is the coot, and, as the series progresses, Koot becomes an “heir” to Scott Crane’s throne. The novels rely heavily upon Arthurian myth. Like the Fisher King of
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lore, both Scott and Koot develop a wound which will not heal. In order to succeed, Scott must challenge and defeat a Green Knight figure, Vaughan Trumbill. The discovery of the essential tarot deck occurs only after he has removed a pocketknife stuck in a brick, a symbolic Sword in the Stone. According to legend, the Fisher King can be healed only when an innocent fool asks the question, “Whom does it serve?” In Earthquake Weather, Koot’s first question to Arky and Diana refers to the color of the truck carrying the dead king. By mistakenly asking the wrong question, Koot sets in motion the quest to restore Scott to life. Powers interweaves subtexts from Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, and others to provide greater depth through allusions to both tragedy and irrationality. The humor for which Powers is famous is present throughout. For instance, while seeking Koot Hoomie Parganas, Scant and Janice ask around for someone whose name sounds like “Boogie Woogie Bananas.” Like Carroll, Powers has a gift for comic invention when dramatizing miscommunication. Powers’s Catholic beliefs fully inform his works. Redemption, forgiveness, salvation, and resurrection are essential to the madcap adventures he depicts. A work not explicitly alluded to by Powers, C. S. Lewis’s famous Space Trilogy, nonetheless presents powerful parallels. These books also deal with Christian motifs and Arthurian myth, and the concluding volumes of both trilogies painfully dramatize the themes of sacrifice and redemption. —Michael-Anne Rubenstien
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Flowers for Algernon Experimental surgery enables Charlie Gordon, a retarded man, to attain an extremely high level of intelligence
Author: Daniel Keyes (1927) Genre: Science fiction—superbeing Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1960’s Location: New York City First published: 1966 (expanded version of a short story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1959) The Story Flowers for Algernon unfolds in a series of diary entries. In the first, dated “martch 3,” Charlie describes himself as a thirty-two-year-old man who works at a bakery and attends “Miss Kinnians class at the beekmin colledge center for retarted adults.” Ensuing entries chronicle Charlie’s progress as the first human subjected to an intelligence-boosting surgical procedure. Before the operation, Charlie undergoes a series of tests that measure his intelligence. In one, he tries in vain to pencil through a maze faster than Algernon can run it. Algernon is a laboratory mouse that already has undergone the surgical procedure. After the surgery, sleep learning accelerates Charlie’s mental development. By the end of the month, he outraces Algernon. In early April, he comprehends a grammar book overnight and shows signs of increased self-awareness, staying home from Donner’s Bakery after realizing that he has long been victimized by coworker “friends” Joe Carp and Frank Reilly. Counseling Charlie is Dr. Jay Strauss, a neurosurgeon and psychiatrist who, with Professor Harold Nemur, is responsible for the experiment. Together with lab assistant Burt Selden and teacher Alice Kinnian, they guide Charlie as he begins a long-delayed maturation process. Two months after the operation, Charlie is able to converse intelligently with college students but is stymied in acting on his amorous feelings for Alice. Although she is attracted to him, both fear that they may jeopardize his development. As Charlie accumulates knowledge at a breathtaking rate, his illu-
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sions are shattered at a similar clip. He sees the fallibility of his mentors and realizes that their interest in him stems largely from selfishness. Charlie rebels at a scientific conference in Chicago, where he and Algernon are put on display. Freeing the mouse from its cage, Charlie takes his counterpart back to New York and moves into an apartment near Times Square. Independent after years of institutionalization, Charlie initiates a new phase of his education, entering into an affair with free-spirited Fay Lillman and visiting his father, Matt, who fails to recognize him. Charlie also applies his brainpower to studying Algernon’s regressive tendencies. Suspecting that he also may regress, Charlie visits the Warren State Home and Training School, where his doctors and family had arranged to send him if the experiment failed. In late August, Charlie concludes that the experiment’s results are indeed temporary and potentially fatal. After Algernon dies on September 17, Charlie spares the mouse from laboratory incineration by burying its remains in his backyard. Mindful of his inevitable decline, Charlie visits his mother, Rose, and sister, Norma, both of whom he remembers as hostile. He finds that Rose has entered senility and Norma feels remorse over her past unkindness toward him. Charlie consummates his relationship with Alice on October 11. Though heartened by their shared love, ten days later he tells her to leave in a fit of anger over his deterioration. Having already lost his multilingual abilities, he rapidly loses his typing prowess and command of English. Isolating himself from the Beekman staff, he returns to Donner’s Bakery, where newly sympathetic coworkers welcome him. In his last entry, dated “nov 21,” Charlie writes of his decision to go to Warren. Bidding farewell to Alice and the others at Beekman, he asks that the reader “put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.”
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Analysis After the short story “Flowers for Algernon” received a Hugo Award in 1960, the tale of Charlie Gordon was embraced by a wide mainstream audience. In the early 1960’s, a television adaptation titled “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon” appeared on The U.S. Steel Hour, with Cliff Robertson playing Charlie. After the Nebula Award-winning novel appeared in 1966, a feature film adaptation, Charly (1968), also starred Robertson, who received an Academy Award for his portrayal. Widely anthologized and taught in schools throughout the United States, the story also was the basis for a 1980 Broadway musical. At the heart of its appeal is its unsensational use of a speculative premise, that surgery can radically boost intelligence, as the basis of a moving allegory. Charlie is like many people who reach a peak only to foresee and then experience their inevitable decline. Although the novel is considerably longer than the short story (its extended time frame approximates the human gestation period), both use compression to intensify the drama of this experience. Notwithstanding the fact that the novel has been criticized as inferior to the short story, its extended narrative enabled Daniel Keyes not only to exploit his story’s commercial potential but also to explore a variety of story elements in greater depth. The cultural tendency to look on the retarded Charlie as a nonperson is one such element. Charlie’s psyche also is delineated in greater detail. Although Flowers for Algernon bears some resemblance to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—the animus of Charlie and his doctors softly echoes that of the monster and Victor Frankenstein— significant links also can be made between the novel and other, nonspeculative works, including Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947; English translation, 1952), the entries of which record key years of growth in the life of a girl doomed by a Nazi culture that deems her subhuman. Charlie’s experience also parallels that of actual human test subjects, such as those in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study of the 1930’s and the catatonic patients given L-dopa by Dr. Oliver Sacks in 1969. Although the influence of Flowers for Algernon can be seen in science-fiction works, including Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968), its legacy may be most evident in Sacks’s book Awakenings (1973) and its 1990 screen adaptation. Keyes himself continued to delve into unusual psychological states in science fiction and nonfiction genres. —David Marc Fischer
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The Forever War William Mandella is drafted, trained as a spaceborne infantryman, and sent into combat against the alien Taurans
Author: Joe Haldeman (1943) Genre: Science fiction—future war Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1997-3143 Location: Earth and various planets First published: 1974 The Story The story concerns the experiences of William Mandella during a protracted interstellar war between humanity and an alien race known as the Taurans. The novel begins in 1997 (a future date at the time the novel was written), when the war already has been escalating for some years. Mandella has been drafted into the United Nations Exploratory Force (UNEF) under the terms of a conscription act intended to select the physical and intellectual elite of Earth to defend humanity against the Tauran menace. Among the UNEF’s more unusual policies are toleration of drug use and compulsory sexual promiscuity, enforced through rotating rosters of bunkmates. Mandella’s first combat mission is an attack on a Tauran base located on a planet in a system near a collapsing superdense star. This mission includes capturing a prisoner. On its march to the target, the strike force encounters a group of alien creatures. When Sergeant Cortez gives the order to fire, the soldiers slaughter what turn out to be members of the sentient indigenous population, creating tremendous guilt in Mandella, Marygay Potter, and other soldiers. Cortez triggers a posthypnotic suggestion to the soldiers to kill indiscriminately when the time for the actual attack arrives. The result of the first campaign is at best ambiguous, because the soldiers fail to capture a Tauran and a number of soldiers go insane after realizing what they have done to an almost helpless enemy. Because of the time-dilating effects of travel at near the speed of light, when Mandella and Potter return to Earth after their first combat tour, they discover that twenty-six years have passed on Earth while they have experienced only two years in their own frame of reference. The
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two have fallen in love despite the UNEF’s attempts to regulate personal lives, and they want to leave the UNEF at the end of their enlistments and resume their lives on Earth. They are shocked by the social and economic changes on Earth. The United Nations has become a planetary government dedicated to reorganizing society to support the war effort. Unable to adjust to the radical changes at home, Mandella and Potter decide that their best choice is to re-enlist in the UNEF. More than three hundred years elapse while Mandella and Potter are on their next combat tour. When both are wounded, they are sent to convalesce on the planet Heaven. The pattern of social changes that Mandella and Potter found so disturbing on Earth has continued. Humanity is now almost completely homosexual, and people are conditioned from birth to support the policies and goals of the UNEF. Recovered from their wounds, Mandella and Potter are assigned to different strike forces. They realize that because of the effects of relativity, centuries of subjective time will separate them after their next combat tours, should they survive. Assigned to command his own strike force, Mandella finds himself leading soldiers who are almost as alien to him as the Taurans. The men and women under his command are a group of eugenically controlled and scientifically reared homosexuals, bred in vitro, who fatalistically accept that they live and die to serve the UNEF. Mandella’s assignment is to secure a portal planet orbiting a collapsar (a kind of neutron star) that could be pivotal in the Tauran war strategy. The strike force defeats the Taurans in a Pyrrhic victory in which only twelve percent of Mandella’s command survives. Mandella and the other survivors return to Stargate and find that the war ended more than two centuries earlier. Under the UNEF’s policies, humanity has evolved into a race of telepathic male and female clones of a single individual, Corporal Kahn, who is presumed to be the perfect prototype for humanity. Mandella is offered a choice of ways to integrate himself into the Kahn-clone world of the UNEF, but he rejects the idea. Only when he studies a printout of his military record does he find a solution. Potter and other survivors of the war have settled the planet Middle Finger, where some individuals cheat time on a “relativistic shuttle” waiting for other returnees to join them. The UNEF tolerates the aberrant society, in which people breed in the conventional manner, as a eugenic control baseline for human diversity. The novel concludes with the press announcement of the natural birth of a son of the two oldest survivors of the Forever War.
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Analysis The Forever War, Joe Haldeman’s first science-fiction novel, is a significant example of the future-war novel and military Bildungsroman. The novel should be read in the context of the Vietnam War, the author’s own participation in that conflict, and its analogs in Robert A. Heinlein’s Cold War-era novel Starship Troopers (1959) and Orson Scott Card’s postdétente Ender’s Game (1985). The Forever War won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as best science-fiction novel. The first section of Haldeman’s novel is a science-fictional rendering of American involvement in Vietnam. The subsequent sections of the novel continue the parallels with Vietnam but also expand on the major theme of the novel, the importance of individuality and free will in the face of authoritarian government and social pressures toward conformity. The UNEF’s drive toward conformity starts with screening the population for sociopathic traits. The trend continues with the eugenically controlled population that provides the soldiers for Mandella’s strike force and the Kahn-clone “humanity” that appears at the conclusion of the novel. Government policies are geared toward producing a uniform and predictable population of workers and soldiers for the war effort. This theme is accompanied by a series of images of the increasing mechanization of human society, starting with Mandella’s vision of his relationship with Marygay Potter reduced to copulating fighting suits and his dream of being an animated fighting suit with the UNEF at the controls. These images culminate with Mandella’s realization that wounded soldiers have become “soft machines” to be repaired or replaced in the service of the UNEF. The ending of the novel is problematic in that, from the UNEF’s perspective, Mandella, Potter, and the other returnees on Middle Finger are maladjusted veterans unable to incorporate themselves into postwar society. From the perspective of Mandella and Potter, however, Haldeman has provided the happy ending impossible for many Vietnam War veterans. —Peter C. Hall
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The Forgotten Beasts of Eld The wizard Sybel, living alone on a mountain among a collection of fabulous animals, takes in a baby boy to rear, an action that ultimately involves her in a dynastic war
Author: Patricia A. McKillip (1948Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The present Location: The land of Eldwold First published: 1974
)
The Story In The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the beautiful wizard Sybel has the power to call and tame a collection of wondrous animals. Her calm life is shattered when she takes in Tamlorn, a supposedly orphaned boy who is at the center of a long-standing war. As Tamlorn grows up and becomes aware of his heritage, Sybel is forced to become involved in the outside world. When confronted with conflicting needs of love and revenge, Sybel must struggle to overcome her betrayal of both herself and those she loves most. Sybel, the daughter of wizards, lives contentedly alone atop her mountain until Coren, a warrior of the House of Sirle, brings to her a baby boy. Coren tells Sybel that the baby’s dead mother was Sybel’s aunt and the queen of Eldwold, and that his father, Coren’s brother, was slain in the recent battle in which Sirle was soundly defeated. Now little Tamlorn is endangered by the war between Sirle and Eldwold. Coren begs Sybel to care for Tamlorn, and she reluctantly agrees. She is assisted by Maelga, an old witch living nearby. As Tam grows up among Sybel’s fantastic menagerie, Sybel comes to love him dearly. She knows that Tam actually is the son of Drede, the king of Eldwold and sworn enemy of the House of Sirle. Rok, the lord of Sirle and Coren’s eldest brother, desperately wishes to overthrow Drede. He sends Coren back to Sybel to try to persuade her to use both Tamlorn and her considerable wizardly powers to defeat Drede. Coren, who has fallen in love with Sybel, is unable to coax her into fighting for Sirle. Tam has also discovered his parentage and wishes to live with his
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real father. Drede, pleased to have his son back but fearing that Sybel will use her powers against him, hires a wizard to control Sybel. She is able to defeat the wizard with the help of one of her magical beasts, and Coren takes her to Sirle as his wife. Sybel harbors hatred for Drede and desires revenge as much as the Sirle brothers. She conspires with Rok to use her powers and her animals—including a dragon, a lion, and a riddle-spouting boar—to destroy Drede. Sybel thus betrays the trust of both Coren and Tam, who believed she had given up her need for revenge. Maelga and Cyrin the boar reawaken twinges of guilt in Sybel over what she has done. Then, on the eve of battle, Sybel herself is almost destroyed by one of her more fearsome and not easily controlled beasts. Realizing that the price of revenge is too high, Sybel releases all her animals from her control and returns to her isolated mountain to let fate decide the battle’s outcome. Even without Sybel to command them, her animals destroy Drede, rescue Tamlorn, and lure the soldiers away from the battlefield to stop the war before it starts. By facing and overcoming the ugliness within her own heart, Sybel is able to save her relationships with Coren and Tam and achieve her heart’s desire. Analysis The Forgotten Beasts of Eld was published before Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), the first book of her Riddle of Stars trilogy (1979 as trilogy; also known as the Riddle-Master trilogy), for which she is probably best known. Like the trilogy, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld overflows with elements typical in fantasy: fabulous, mythical animals; powerfully magical wizards; and kings, princes, and wars. To this familiar fantasy background, McKillip adds a host of distinctive and all-toohuman characters. The rich, poetic language does not overwhelm this story of love, betrayed trust, revenge, and, above all, taking responsibility for one’s actions. All the characters, including the beasts, display conflicting loyalties and motives as they struggle to attain their innermost desires while trying not to hurt those they love. McKillip’s fantasy novels are noted for their excellent characterizations. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld allows for exploration of the souls of all the characters. Even the emotional motivations of the villains are somewhat understandable. Drede is driven by fear to try to entrap Sybel, but his devotion to his son is evident. Coren remains hopelessly in love with Sybel even when she tampers with his thoughts and manipulates him as if he were another of her captured animals. Sybel herself seems remote and aloof, far removed from the turmoils of the feuds outside her moun-
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tain oasis, but she is also drawn into a fray of tangled emotions when she allows herself to feel love, first for Tam, then Maelga, then Coren. She must learn to deal with both the benefits and strengths, as well as the vulnerabilities and risks, of forming relationships. Readers can identify easily with these believably inconsistent and often confused characters, who love and hate and love again. Reviewers have also commended McKillip’s compelling style of storytelling in this novel. McKillip herself has stated that she was a storyteller for her younger siblings before she ever began writing. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld draws the reader into an increasingly complicated web of political and emotional intrigue. Tantalizing hints are dropped that each of Sybel’s animals could tell a story of its own, giving the novel a rich backdrop and a mystical ambience that is maintained throughout. Although McKillip did not write The Forgotten Beasts of Eld specifically for children, it is usually classified by booksellers and librarians as a young adult novel. Reviews were favorable, although some reviewers objected to the somewhat flowery language and imagery. The novel received the World Fantasy Award in 1975. —Quinn Weller
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The Foundation Series Mathematician Hari Seldon, creator of the science of psychohistory, creates a grand scheme for arresting the decline of the Galactic Empire and controlling its future
Author: Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: 12,020-14,000 Location: The Galactic Empire First published: The Foundation Trilogy (1963; as trilogy); previously published as Foundation (1951; serial form, Astounding Science-Fiction, 1942-1944), Foundation and Empire (1952; serial form, Astounding Science-Fiction, 1945), and Second Foundation (1953; serial form, Astounding Science-Fiction, 1948-1950); additions to the series include Foundation’s Edge (1982), Foundation and Earth (1986), Prelude to Foundation (1988), and Forward the Foundation (1993) The Story The vast Galactic Empire, composed of 25 million worlds and quadrillions of human beings, is in decline. Mathematician Hari Seldon, a provincial scholar from the distant planet Helicon, presents his learned hypothesis about the mathematical possibilities of what he calls “psychohistory” to a conference held on Trantor, the imperial capital. Seldon understands that his hypothesis is incomplete and untested. Nevertheless, it offers the prospect of mathematically predicting the empire’s future and, with this knowledge, influencing events so as to lay the groundwork for a Second Galactic Empire. Seldon’s psychohistorical predictions do not apply to specific events or personalities; rather, they deal with the aggregate of the empire’s myriad worlds and peoples in sweeping ways. Psychohistory is a science of masses, of mobs in their billions. Intelligent people suspect that the empire is declining, and Seldon himself believes that the empire will soon confront thirty thousand millennia of wars and barbarism.
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The potential of psychohistory to shorten this period draws the attention of Emperor Cleon I; his most influential aide, Demerzel; and female historian Dors Venabili. Prelude to Foundation chronicles Seldon’s trials and adventures, as the emperor, Demerzel (a robot in various human guises), and Dors (another humanized robot) alternately menace Seldon and encourage him to refine his thesis and to make it practical enough to allow prediction, manipulation, and control of social and economic change that will lead to a new empire. The fall of the empire is inevitable, but to abbreviate the ensuing period of chaos to less than a millennium, Seldon establishes two Foundations at opposite ends of the Galaxy. The First Foundation, on Terminus, far from Trantor, is begun as a settlement of physical scientists who labor to compile the Encyclopedia Galactica, a compendium of universal knowledge. During the empire’s long decline, the First Foundation becomes a center of advanced science. The Second Foundation, a mysterious body devoted to the expansion of the powers of the intellect, is established simultaneously at a secret location. Forward the Foundation recounts the events of Seldon’s later life, a time focused on elaboration of his predictive plan, on his preparations to reappear in a special vault as a holograph during future crises in order to dispense additional counsel, and on his symbolically significant death. Soon afterward, as recorded in Foundation, the Empire shatters into independent kingdoms that quickly threaten the First Foundation’s existence. Because of the political skill of Salvor Hardin, the First Foundation’s mayor, the Foundation maintains its independence. Because the First Foundation is the sole remaining possessor of atomic power and a repository of superior science, it also gains ascendancy over much of the galaxy. As centuries pass, the First Foundation evolves a trading economy based on the sale of compact atomic devices. Its traders penetrate the periphery of the galaxy, defeat the Foundation’s rivals, and prepare for clashes with the dying empire’s remaining forces—a story told in Foundation and Empire. Because Seldon’s psychohistory cannot account for the actions of individuals, the First Foundation is ruined eventually by the mind-shaping powers of the Mule, a mutant. Thus begins the search by the Mule, as well as by the survivors of the First Foundation, for the secret location of the Second Foundation, whose leaders are recognized as “mentalists,” masters of mind control. A remarkable woman, Batya Darell, defeats the Mule, leaving the First Foundation technologically ascendant but eager to discover the location of the Second Foundation. In Foundation’s Edge, which is set 498 years after the founding of the
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First Foundation, this search is pressed by a young Terminus councilman, Golan Trevize, who is joined by historian Janov Pelorat. Traversing the galaxy searching for the Second Foundation as well as for Earth and the origins of life, Trevize and Pelorat arrive at Gaia, a peaceful, ecologically harmonious world that has evolved as a collective mind. Because of the “objective rightness” of Trevize’s intuitions, during a critical confrontation between representatives of the First and Second Foundations, the Gaians allow Trevize to decide the future of the galaxy; that is, to determine whether creation of the Second Galactic Empire should be directed by either of the Foundations. Trevize chooses a third way, the Gaian way: creation of a harmonious, collectivist Gaian-style “Galaxia” instead of an Empire. Believing that he has made the right choice, Trevize nevertheless harbors doubts. Gaia is a collective mind, and Trevize is an individualist; he wants hard facts to undergird his intuitive decision. Trevize, Pelorat, and Pelorat’s Gaian love, Bliss, continue the search for Earth and the origins of life in Foundation and Earth. The trio’s quest ensnarls them in adventures on three variously hostile planets. They backtrack their way through evidence of galactic colonization only to discover that Earth is radioactive and lifeless. They find the Moon, however, inhabited underground by the twenty-thousand-year-old robot Daneel, who gives them information about the origins and galactic spread of humans and their robots. Meanwhile, the searchers acquire a precocious hermaphrodite child, Fallom, whose evolved transducer lobes give it awesome and sinister powers. Analysis At his death in 1992, Isaac Asimov had published at least 475 books, ranking him as one of the world’s most prolific authors. The Foundation Trilogy rapidly earned status as a science-fiction classic, while two other novels in the series became long-term best-sellers. A learned student of science—he held a Ph.D. in chemistry and was a professor of biochemistry—and a devotee of history, Asimov virtually founded the sciencefiction subgenre of future history. He earned many major awards, including numerous Hugos and Nebulas, and was named a Nebula Grand Master in 1987. Throughout the Foundation series novels, Asimov’s scientifically or technically trained leading characters are aided or guided by historians. In the Foundation series as elsewhere in his writings, Asimov acknowledges drawing heavily on themes embodied in widely influential historical and metahistorical studies, notably Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934-1954), and Oswald Speng-
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ler’s The Decline of the West (1926-1928). Although differing in their subject matter and their perspectives, each of these works is concerned, as was Asimov, both with identifying recurrent patterns in history and with tackling the venerable historical question of whether such patterns are determined primarily by profound social forces or instead by individual actions or chance. The mutant genius the Mule, for example, temporarily upsets the Seldon Plan. The unfolding of Seldon’s psychohistorical plan, around which the plotting of the entire Foundation series occurs, suggests that Asimov at one time believed in the existence of mathematically quantifiable, predetermined collective forces that drive historical processes. By 1955, however, he held an opposing view, which he expounded in The End of Eternity. In fact, over time, Asimov led his readers to wonder if he had resolved these great questions himself. In the Foundation series, after all, it is Seldon, an individualist, rather than a collective mind who develops the “law” of psychohistory. A few writers of future histories, such as Mark Twain and H. G. Wells, anticipated Asimov’s grappling with the causes of historical development. Others such as Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, and Frank Herbert began publishing their writings as Asimov’s Foundation series evolved, and others have followed. For intellectual breadth, imaginative interplay of science and history, and sheer engaging volume of work, however, the Foundation series remains unsurpassed. —Mary E. Virginia
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Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life and creates a monster whose despair and anger ruin the lives of Frankenstein and his family
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) Genre: Science fiction—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late eighteenth century Location: Europe and the great northern polar seas First published: 1818 The Story Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus is framed as a series of letters written by polar explorer Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville, who is home in England. He relates to her his adventures, including a story told to him by a young man, Victor Frankenstein, whom his ship has rescued from the polar ice. As a young university student at Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, Frankenstein is determined to find the secret of life. He studies constantly, ignoring his family back in Geneva, Switzerland. He steals body parts from charnel houses and medical laboratories, then uses the power of electricity to create a living being. He immediately knows he has erred: His creature is ghastly. It leaves Frankenstein’s quarters but remains in his life. Frankenstein next sees the creature back in Geneva, where he has returned following the death of his young brother William. Although a servant girl, Justine, is accused of causing William’s death, Frankenstein sees the creature lurking near the place of the murder and knows he is the killer. Frankenstein’s anguish is intensified when innocent Justine is executed for the murder. In his agony, Frankenstein leaves home to wander in the mountains. The creature confronts him and tells him his own story. After leaving Ingolstadt, the creature wanders throughout the countryside. He discovers quickly that he is frightening and repugnant to humans and takes to traveling at night and hiding during the day. The creature learns to speak and to read during a long stay in a hovel attached to a poor farm family’s hut. During his stay, he performs many kindnesses for the family and feels sympathy for their poverty. He be-
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friends the old father, who is blind. As soon as other family members return and see him, they flee. In anger, the creature sets their farm on fire. He makes his way to Geneva, saving a small child from drowning along the way. Every time he tries to perform an act of kindness, however, he causes a reaction of horror. On the mountaintop, the creature begs Frankenstein to make him a mate so he need not be lonely. Then, he says, he will leave humankind alone and live with his mate in seclusion. If not, he says, he will be with Frankenstein on his wedding night. Frankenstein promises to make him a mate but questions his wisdom. He travels to England with his friend William Clerval, then goes alone to an isolated spot in Scotland to carry out his promise. He cannot finish the job. He abandons it and prepares to return home. The creature, infuriated by Frankenstein’s unwillingness to keep a promise, kills Clerval, then returns to Geneva to kill Frankenstein’s bride, his adopted sister Elizabeth, on their wedding night. The tragedy and the guilt are too much to bear. Frankenstein resolves to pursue the monster until one of them is dead. He travels by dogsled across the snowy expanses of Russia toward the North Pole. He is picked up by Robert Walton’s ship during his pursuit and dies on the ship after telling Walton his story. The creature appears and tells Walton of his remorse for his deeds, then sets off into the cold to build his own funeral pyre. Analysis Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as part of a friendly ghost-story writing competition with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and friend Lord Byron when she was eighteen years old. The novel has prompted many melodramatic takeoffs in film and much critical interest. It is one of the earliest works of science fiction, and the scientific techniques described in it are shadowy at best, yet they represent adequately the scientific knowledge of the time.
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The book’s subtitle links it to the Prometheus myth, popular in the Romantic era. Both Percy Shelley and Lord Byron wrote Promethean poems. Prometheus, a Titan, stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, allowing them to thrive and create. Frankenstein’s creature was brought to life through the “fire” of lightning. In both cases, the reader must wonder whether the powers given to humankind are blessings or curses. The novel questions what responsibility humankind has in the face of achievements that can have both good and bad results. Frankenstein’s suffering clearly shows that he realizes too late that he miscalculated the destructive potential of his discovery. The novel is filled with imagery of light and dark. The creature, brought to life through the power of lightning, is always in the shadows of darkness, and he commits dark deeds. The Romantic writers with whom Shelley can be connected wrote in part as a revolt against the Enlightenment assumption that scientific advances and education represent the highest possibilities of humankind. If scientific achievement is paramount to Frankenstein, it comes at the expense of humanity, including the lives of everyone whom Frankenstein loves. Frankenstein offers interesting views of the psyche of man in both Frankenstein and his creature, and of the social damage that can result when love is denied, as it was to the creature, or relegated to low status, as it was by Frankenstein. A psychological inquiry also suggests the idea of the creature being the double, or dark side, of Frankenstein. One interesting stylistic device in the novel is the lack of a constant or reliable narrator: Robert Walton, Frankenstein, and the creature all tell their own stories. The reader thus is given different points of view from which to judge the story. Another point of interest is the consideration of gender: The novel has a female author, employs stereotyped female characters, and shows contrasts between the typically male and female motives of ambition and love. —Janine Rider
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The Gate to Women’s Country Although in a postconvulsion world women live with a few nonviolent males in communities separate from garrisons of warlike men, they secretly devise ways to dominate and to breed nonviolent children
Author: Sheri S. Tepper (1929) Genre: Science fiction—feminist Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The twenty-fourth century c.e. Location: The fictional community of Marthatown First published: 1988
The Story Three centuries after most of Earth is devastated and left radioactive by wars, human survivors have evolved a dual civilization. Most men, as well as boys from an early age, live in military garrisons learning martial arts and military values. All women, aided by a handful of pacific male servitors and small children, live in women’s country, small communities dominated by females and by the feminine values of nurturance, nonviolence, and love. Sexual intercourse between members of the women’s towns and garrison males is permitted only during periodic Carnival Times. In Sheri S. Tepper’s feminist, post-holocaust novel, The Gate to Women’s Country, the principal women’s community is Marthatown (there are a dozen others). Its main figures are Morgot, the chief medical officer and a Council member; her children, Stavia, Myra, and Jerby; and her old male servitors, Jik and Joshua. The male garrison, which has dwindled gradually in numbers, is led by Stephon, Michael, and Besset, officers who suspect that Marthatown’s women possess a secret that might strengthen garrison forces as they prepare for the day when they may conquer women’s country. To ferret out the women’s secret, the garrison command enlists Chernon, a young warrior eager to win their approval. He is the son of Morgot’s friend Sylvia. Cold-bloodedly, Chernon cultivates the affections of Morgot’s daughter, Stavia, in the hope that Stavia can learn and
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pass on to him the secret of whatever weapon the women possess. Stavia is an unwitting victim of Chernon’s guile until, on an expedition to find the limits of habitable territory, a magician, Septimius the Bird, and his two paranormal daughters alert Stavia to Chernon’s untrustworthiness. Before learning the women’s secret, however, the garrisons, Chernon among them, decimate one another in one of the periodic wars women arrange to keep down the number of violent men. The men never discover that the “weaker” sex, under Morgot’s auspices as medical officer, have been inoculating Marthatown’s girls with contraceptives and that the fathers of Marthatown’s children are not the garrison’s warriors, as the warriors believe, but are Marthatown’s seemingly innocuous, usually nonviolent male servitors. The garrison warriors had boasted, amid their carouses and macho displays, of how well Marthatown’s women fed, clothed, and furnished them with sex and sons as recruits. They failed to comprehend why their numbers have been dwindling and that the women have always controlled their own as well as the warriors’ destinies. Garrison males never understand how subtly and effectively they have been deceived in the name of women’s reverence for life and love. Analysis A native Coloradan who began writing following her retirement from another career in 1986, Sheri S. Tepper has produced an impressive body of high-quality science-fiction and fantasy novels. Like The Gate to Women’s Country, After Long Silence (1987), Grass (1989)—a Hugo nominee and a Notable Book named by The New York Times—and Raising the Stones (1990), the novels have won critical praise for their taut plotting and imaginative creations both of otherworldly locales and of plausible characters. Equally important, her novels have been commended for their deft, judicious explorations of relationships between the sexes, for observations on miscommunication between the sexes, and for drawing recognizable distinctions between widely prevalent male and female values. In The Gate to Women’s Country, for example, the male warrior values of Stephon, Michael, and Chernon contrast sharply with the feminine values of Morgot and Stavia—indeed, with the values of nearly all of Marthatown’s women. By her careful characterizations, Tepper makes sensible allowance for the vitally important exceptions. For example, Morgot’s male servitors, Jik and Joshua, like most of Marthatown’s handful of males, are comforting figures, warmly paternal, nonviolent, secure, and wise, though when necessary they are lethal defenders and, like the women, better fighters than men of the garrison. Similarly,
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Septimius the Bird, the itinerant magician who eventually settles in Marthatown, is drawn as bright, articulate, shrewd, discerning, caring, and trustworthy. Conversely, not all of Tepper’s women are models of abstract bourgeois virtue. Marthatown’s girls and their mothers show lusty interest in sex aside from the permissible revels of Carnival Time, and whores and wayward youngsters are always busy in the warriors’ Houses of Assignation. Tepper’s strong and admirable concentration on Marthatown’s women never degenerates into facile male-bashing. Nevertheless, by means of both her dialogue and her descriptions, Tepper consistently deplores the sacrifices required of women to maintain their masked dominance. She dramatically emphasizes this theme by having Morgot, Stavia, and other female characters reenact each year Marthatown’s theatrical version of the ancient Greek legend of Iphigenia. Over the years, nearly all of Marthatown’s abler girls and mothers are expected to speak their prescribed roles in the play, an instructive rite of passage for girls approaching maturity and a grimly reflective exercise for Marthatown’s matrons. Iphigenia was the daughter of the Greek warrior hero, Agamemnon. When Agamemnon and his fleet were delayed by contrary winds on their way to join the Trojan War, Agamemnon’s lord informed him that the goddess Artemis demanded the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Reluctantly and despite his wife’s protestations, Agamemnon agreed to the sacrifice, and beautiful young Iphigenia consented to die for the glory of Greece. In women’s country, ostensibly at the mercy of its male garrisons, only brains and resilient character, as Tepper makes manifest in her novel, could forestall or circumvent such realities. —Mary E. Virginia
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The Godhead Trilogy God’s two-mile-long body falls into the Atlantic Ocean, raising a multitude of questions, from whether he is is really dead to what happens next
Author: James Morrow (1947) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1992-2025 Location: Earth First published: Towing Jehovah (1994), Blameless in Abaddon (1996), and The Eternal Footman (1999) The Story In Towing Jehovah, winner of the prestigious World Fantasy Award, the body of God falls from Heaven and lands in the Atlantic Ocean. Afterward, the Vatican calls on disgraced oil tanker captain Anthony Van Horne to tow his body to a final resting place in the Arctic. Thomas Ockham, a Jesuit priest interested in cosmology, accompanies Van Horne on the voyage in order to protect the Vatican’s interests. Both are searching for something: Keith seeks redemption for his role in the colossal oil spill that decimated Matagorda Bay, and Thomas wishes to discover the answer to the question, “Why did God die?” While they fail to transport God’s body in time to preserve his brain activity, they overcome obstacles including Cassie Fowler, a militant atheist who believes the feminist cause is threatened by the body’s very existence; a deranged World War II re-enactment society bent on destroying his corpse; and a side trip to a pagan island in order to put God’s body—the Corpus Dei— to rest in an iceberg. Blameless in Abaddon begins as an arctic earthquake reveals God’s dead body to the world and the Vatican arranges to hook it up to machines in order to preserve the newly discovered signs of activity in his brain. The Corpus Dei, sold to the Baptists, becomes the main attraction in a religious theme park in Orlando. Martin Candle’s visit to the park fails to cure his cancer, his wife dies, and suddenly this contemporary Job decides to put God on trial for crimes against humanity. Presenting testimony ranging from natural disasters to existential evil, Martin
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hopes to hold God accountable for the pervasive and unending torment visited upon humanity. In the end, the World Court finds God not guilty, and Martin destroys the life-support machines sustaining God’s body. No longer maintained by machines or preserved by ice, the Corpus Dei explodes piece by piece, until only its head remains. God’s skull goes into orbit above the Western Hemisphere, and in its shadow a new plague is visited upon humanity. The Eternal Footman chronicles the existential sickness, referred to as “death awareness,” and explains that victims are visited by a personification of death called a fetch. Confronted by their mortality, most victims succumb to this “abulic plague” by losing their will to live. Nora Burkhart sets out to save her son Kevin from this deadly disease. Analysis James Morrow’s satirical trilogy presents the premise of the physical death of God with compassion, intellect, and scathing wit. Thomas Ockham, named by Morrow for the scientist who theorized that simple explanations are to be preferred over complex ones, believes that the Heavenly Father killed himself in order to allow humanity to grow up. According to Thomas, “A father’s ultimate obligation is to stop being a father.” Stifled by mysticism, constrained by a complex yet irrational belief system, people cannot grow and learn as individuals until they are free. “In the post-theistic age, let Christianity become merely kindness, salvation transmute into art, truth defer to knowledge, and faith embrace a vibrant doubt.” Morrow dramatizes strong relationships among his characters, particularly among parents and children, and in his trilogy God’s death is the ultimate gift of love to his children. Existential pain takes center stage in Blameless in Abaddon, as Martin presents evidence of plane crashes, incurable diseases, murders, and natural disasters in his case against God. Theodicy, reconciling God’s goodness with the world’s evils, provides an excellent backdrop for the question of God’s culpability in the matter of human suffering. Morrow said in an interview that “the harder you try to acquit God of complicity in human suffering, the closer you come to trivializing that suffering.” In The Eternal Footman, Morrow observes that fear of death prevents people from living life to the fullest. In a world without God influencing people’s behavior, the next step in realizing humanity’s potential is addressing the paralyzing obsession with mortality. Kevin’s fetch explains: “The invention of death made possible the individual, in all its astonishing variety. Death broke life free of immortality’s chains.” —Michael-Anne Rubenstien
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Good News from Outer Space When two tabloid journalists investigate an alien invasion and a televangelist who preaches the advent of a New Age, they find themselves involved in a bizarre series of interconnected events
Author: John Kessel (1950) Genre: Science fiction—invasion story Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1999, with a scene in April, 2000 Location: The United States First published: 1989 The Story Three chapters of Good News from Outer Space were published independently as short stories in 1987 and 1988, but they were rewritten extensively and now contribute to the novel’s intricate plot, a satire about religion, politics, and the mass media in 1990’s America. The main characters are Lucy, a lawyer; her husband George, a reporter at a tabloid news television program; and Richard, George’s editor. Lucy is the most sympathetic character, though George learns kindness and consideration, and Richard’s manic personality has its own appeal. George becomes interested in two sinister developments: the increasing popularity of televangelist Jimmy-Don Gilray and a growing mass hysteria that malicious aliens have invaded the country. He grows obsessed with the latter reports and even abandons Lucy to track down the aliens. Lucy naturally is upset, and when Richard visits her, showing no concern for George but demanding to know what story he is pursuing, she recklessly attacks him. She then hides from the law by taking refuge with some feminist bioterrorists who plan to spread a plague that will make men mentally and emotionally more like women. Richard, always reckless himself, decides to scoop George’s televangelism article by becoming a publicist for the Reverend Gilray. Gilray rightfully suspects Richard of being a spy but is intrigued enough to hire him. Ironically and amusingly, Richard himself becomes such a superstar in his new role that the televangelist proclaims Richard to be a prophet.
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George’s travels across the country reveal that humanlike aliens are spreading fear and dismay with their bizarre behavior, yet they always elude him. He decides that Gilray is allied with the aliens and decides to assassinate him. Returning to Raleigh, North Carolina, the site of Gilray’s headquarters, he finds millions of pilgrims there. Starving and desperate, these believers wait for Gilray’s promised event—the appearance of Jesus Christ in a spaceship on the eve of the millennium. During these activities, Lucy is arrested and imprisoned. She escapes, only to be captured by Gilray, who declares her as his destined bride for the New Age. In a brief and bitter meeting with George, she orders him to undertake a mysterious mission. The item he secretly brings to her contains the bioterrorists’ potion to feminize men. When December 31, 1999, arrives, aliens infiltrate Gilray’s headquarters, bewildering everyone by appearing as the different main characters. Gilray meets one disguised as Lucy, is frightened when it tries to seduce him, and flees. Lucy meets an alien appearing as Gilray and tries to persuade it to drink the potion, mixed into a glass of wine, but it knows better. When George leaps out of a closet to surprise them, he accidentally shoots her. At this point the alien offers to tell George all the answers he has dreamed of finding and has pursued for so long, but George chooses to ignore the alien so that he can save Lucy’s life. In his relief, afterward, he drinks the doctored wine. Meanwhile, Richard and Gilray abandon their desperate followers, who realize that there will be no Second Coming. After the unfolding of this madcap climax, the final chapter, set the following spring, reveals that although America has been shaken by Gilray’s reign and revolt, some normality is restored. George acts more tenderly toward Lucy. They renew their love and turn to raising their own food. Perhaps the aliens are still on the loose, but friendship and honesty matter more, in the end, than the mystery of alien deceptions. Analysis John Kessel has a gift for comic invention. The humor, mysteries, and chills of the story begin on the first page. When George is introduced, readers realize that the novel will be darkly whimsical because the reporter, like the subject of a typical tabloid tale, recently has been revived from the dead. Through his minor characters and scenes of an unraveling culture, Kessel targets the ignorance and sloth underlying the popularity of tabloid journalism in modern America. The success of Gilray’s preachings and the demoniac magnetism of Richard’s charisma reveal Kessel’s distaste for the fear mongering and greed of televangelism.
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Kessel’s satirical tone is effectively funny and grim, and his novel takes potshots at everything from the social conditions of modern America to earlier science fiction. The alien invasion suggests a number of familiar plots, beginning with H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and including Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955), but Kessel coyly declines to explain the motive behind the invasion, unlike these classic texts. The invasion story by its nature conveys and expresses paranoia, which Kessel increases by portraying aliens who deceive, frighten, and abuse ordinary Americans for no apparent reasons other than curiosity and Schadenfreude, the joy in others’ misfortunes. This disinclination to explain everything operates throughout the novel; for example, has George actually been “feminized,” or has he learned to value his wife’s love? Science fiction traditionally presents a problem that humans solve, in the process becoming more enlightened and heroic. Kessel alludes to recent paradigms such as quantum theory, which reveal the search for complete knowledge to be in vain, even as he casts doubt on many recent human endeavors. The traditional figure of the noble private investigator who discovers inner truths is likewise parodied when Richard, wondering where George has gone, puts a detective on his tail. The comedy of errors becomes horrific when readers realize that the detective is a crazy paranoiac who thinks she has been commissioned to assassinate George. Her mission contributes to the humor and suspense. Good News from Outer Space was nominated for the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It has been translated into several languages. —Fiona Kelleghan
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Gravity’s Rainbow Paranoia increases and apocalypse nears as characters seek the source of a rocket during World War II
Author: Thomas Pynchon (1937) Genre: Science fiction—alternative history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1944-1945 Location: Europe First published: 1973 The Story Although Gravity’s Rainbow is often considered a culmination of his earlier novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Thomas Pynchon created his magnum opus with this book. It is particularly difficult to categorize a work of this scope in any specific genre because it has been called revisionist history, apocalyptic, picaresque, a Grail quest, satire, social criticism, Magical Realism, and encyclopedic narrative, among others. It does, however, fall under the broad parameters of science fiction given its preoccupation with machinery—the fact that the rocket becomes the protagonist of the work and that the multiple technological crises presented overshadow or eliminate human emotions and human worth. Although it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and many critics believed it was the best novel of that or any year, the committee rejected the book as being “obscure and obscene.” With a circuitous romp through subplots, minor characters who appear and disappear without warning, technological and mathematical jargon, and world-class wordplay, Pynchon introduces the reader to a revised history of the latter days of World War II in Europe. In fact, not until at least one-third of the way into this massive tome does it become evident that the protagonist is Tyrone Slothrop, an American who has been assigned to the experimental whims of Pavlovian scientists who are attempting to prove a correlation between Slothrop’s sexual encounters and the striking zone of the German A-4 rocket. Paranoia is an integral part of Slothrop’s personality, and he grows increasingly more paranoid as the experiments intensify and threaten imminent bodily harm. He is permitted a holiday, although it is under super-
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vision. While staying at a resort in the south of France, where he has a strange encounter with his “supervisor,” Katje Borgesius, and a trained octopus, Slothrop realizes that he can never outwit surveillance by The Firm until he physically escapes. He runs for his life and vanishes into the Zone, the interior of war-torn, mainland Europe. It is his näive assumption that if he can locate the source of the rocket and the mysterious propellant, S-Gerat, he can purchase his freedom with the information. In picaresque fashion, Slothrop slides into and out of life-threatening situations while encountering scores of rogues, renegades, and reprobates. Because of his proclivity for each, the encounters involve sexual antics, drug deals, hallucinations, disguises, extraordinary heroics, and increasing paranoia. While in the Zone and using changes in identity and costume, Slothrop is forced to live by his wits, surviving off the land and the kindness of strangers—usually female. With a false identification card, he slips across border checkpoints as the actor Max Schlepzig; he cohabits in a bombed-out building with an apprentice witch, Geli Tripping; he escapes his pursuers in a cream-pie-laden hot-air balloon; he stows away on an orgiastic ship of fools going nowhere; he dons a cape and a Viking helmet to become Rocketman and smuggles hashish out of the occupied Zone; and he accepts the role of Liberator Pig God in an ancient village ritual and escapes in the pig’s costume. Appropriately, he spends the majority of his time as Rocketman, the merger of the rocket and the man, and as the pig, having started his peripatetic quest as a guinea pig. Eventually, through the multiple changes in identity, Slothrop loses his own, as well as any interest in pursuit of the rocket. As with many of the minor characters, he simply vanishes from the novel’s pages, and the reader is left to fill in the blanks. The story does not end there, however, for others also seek the rocket and the propellant. Only one man has the answers as well as the rocket: Captain Blicero knows that the mysterious propellant, S-Gerat, is really a human being. He methodically places his lover on board the rocket, begins the countdown, and incinerates himself in the afterburn. Analysis It is virtually impossible to treat the scope of this novel in a short summary. The book should be read slowly, considered, digested, and then read again. As with any work of this magnitude, critical reception has been polarized: One either loves the book or hates it, but few claim to understand it completely. The parameters of Pynchon’s knowledge are seemingly boundless and often beyond the grasp of the average reader,
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but that should not deter the effort. Whether one understands the book completely or not, it is a labyrinth of literary surprises, offering something for everyone who reads it. Gravity’s Rainbow juxtaposes the apocalyptic and the comic. Because the reader knows the time frame and the historical outcome of World War II, he or she should also be aware that the work is fiction. Because of Pynchon’s attention to historical detail and his use of real names throughout the work, the reader cannot help but question the truth of the extant version of history. Although it is apocalyptic in tone, the work predicts not the destruction of the world but the destruction and subsequent rebuilding of culture by revealing how human and machine essentially have become one and how the machine has gained preeminence. Although it addresses such issues as war, genocide, mental illness, and sexual depravity, Gravity’s Rainbow is not entirely pessimistic, for Pynchon admits glimmers of a brighter tomorrow. An underlying theme present in this work and others by Pynchon is entropy, the theory that the world is winding down and depleting its own energy. Entropy, based on Isaac Newton’s second law of thermodynamics, is best represented by Slothrop, who is too lazy to maintain his self-appointed quest and too prone to distraction to notice the obvious clues that are strewn in his path. For Slothrop, seeking information is entirely too much trouble. Whether one accepts Pynchon’s premise or understands his encyclopedic scope is irrelevant. Gravity’s Rainbow should be devoured like the literary smorgasbord it is. —Joyce Duncan
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Gulliver’s Travels Lemuel Gulliver goes on a series of sea voyages and has a variety of encounters in which his psychic deterioration as a human being is revealed
Author: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Genre: Fantasy—cultural exploration Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1699-1715 Location: Various island communities First published: 1726 The Story Gulliver’s Travels, as the book is now known, first appeared anonymously. Capitalizing on the lively interest in voyages at the time, Jonathan Swift called it Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World and ascribed it to “Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.” Swift published the book anonymously partly because of the occasional scatological references but more pressingly because of the thinly veiled political satire of England’s powerful first prime minister, Whig party leader Sir Robert Walpole, whom Swift detested and whom contemporaries would have immediately recognized in the ridiculous figure of the tightrope dancer, Flimnap, the treasurer of Lilliput, in part 1. The first two parts of Gulliver’s Travels form a nicely balanced pair. In Lilliput, where Gulliver first is shipwrecked, he is twelve times as tall as the diminutive local inhabitants. Everything is kept to this scale except for their senseless warring and hypocrisy, which are out of all proportion to their size and therefore seem the more alarming; one, illogically perhaps, expects decent conduct from tiny people. Flimnap, however, so inflated is his ego, accuses Gulliver of having an affair with his six-inchtall wife. On the second island on which Gulliver is marooned, the natives are twelve times as tall as he is. He displays all the moral blindness of the Lilliputians in his dealings with the reasonable and generous Brobdingnagians. Gulliver, from his own over-inflated notion of his six-foot self, is offended that the local women do not cover themselves when undress-
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ing in front of him. Evidently, like Flimnap in part 1, Gulliver believes that he is at least their equal. After two years, Gulliver escapes to sea and returns to England. Gulliver’s third voyage, actually written by Swift after the fourth, is the most scattered in its focus. It is largely political and for this reason is usually not as well received by critics. Gulliver travels to Laputa and encounters scientists and intellectuals whose work is, for the pragmatic parish priest in Swift, altogether too far removed from real life. Attempting to distill sunlight from cucumbers is one of their projects. The Laputan Projectors, in their flying island, tyrannize the inhabitants of Balnibarbi and waste this fertile land. Visiting nearby Luggnagg, Gulliver for a moment envies the Struldbrugs, who live forever, though he quickly changes his mind when he discovers that the immortals do age in the normal way. His fourth voyage, to the land of the Houyhnhnms (named after the whinnying sound horses make), is the climax of Gulliver’s personal regression. That he cannot approach the level of rationality of the equine race who are in control drives him insane. His much closer resemblance to the bestial, greedy, bellicose, and irrational Yahoos, who are the other native inhabitants, depresses him severely. Viewing him as a possible subversive, the Houyhnhnms invite him to leave their rational world. Finally home again in England, he prefers the stable to his home and can no longer tolerate the company of other humans. Feeling oneself superior to the entire human race, as Gulliver does, is by most definitions a position of insane pride. Analysis As a product of an age that celebrated reason and was then apt to think of life as a comedy, Gulliver’s Travels, it should not go unsaid, is frequently funny. As an Irishman born in Dublin, Dean Swift of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Cathedral was inclined to blame the Whig administration in London for Ireland’s social ills. Satire is the outsider’s mode, and Swift here uses and makes fun of the popular, first-person, sea voyage account. William Dampier’s books of the late seventeenth century had been extremely successful in establishing the genre. Daniel Defoe had published the successful Robinson Crusoe in 1719, seven years before Swift’s book appeared. Swift supported Irish aspirations for freedom from English domination and published his equally incendiary The Drapier’s Letters anonymously in 1724. The Anglican clergyman in him also appreciated that some moral rearmament must accompany any political solution. It is this moral dimension, this focus on humankind’s
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universal propensity to delude itself, that is the main appeal of the work for subsequent generations of readers, for whom the machinations of eighteenth century Westminster politicians mean very little. Swift deliberately sets up Gulliver’s voyages in a realistic voyage framework. He provides maps of the voyages, complete with decorative, tiny, spouting whale drawings just like real maps. He also mixes actual places (Japan and Sumatra) with the imaginary. Gulliver’s level of pride is fairly stable in part 1, where he has the physical and moral advantage over the tiny Lilliputians. In part 2, however, he reveals himself to be suffering from their destructive, hubristic attitude. Having boasted of the political and social situation in England, and then having offered the king of Brobdingnag gunpowder, Gulliver is roundly deflated by that monarch, who informs him that he must represent “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” In part 3, Gulliver’s pride expands even further when for an instant he envies the Struldbrugs’ immortality. His normal high level of this vice, the most damning in the Christian scheme of things, returns in part 4, where he resents being treated like a Yahoo and envies the superrational Houyhnhnms. Humankind exists, Swift suggests, between the animal world of the Yahoos and the rational world of the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver’s recourse to living in the stable with his horses on his return to England is hardly a solution. To be out of step with the entire human race is to be insane; some kind of balance, however precarious, is Swift’s proposal in this, his only trip into the world of fantasy voyages. —Archibald E. Irwin
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The Handmaid’s Tale Offred, a legal concubine in a totalitarian state, tells the story of her experiences and the adjustments she makes to survive
Author: Margaret Atwood (1939) Genre: Science fiction—feminist Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The early twenty-first century Location: Gilead, in what was once the United States First published: 1985 The Story In the late 1980’s, an ultraconservative religious group toppled the U.S. government and established a totalitarian regime called Gilead. The leadership is strictly Christian in nature and ruthlessly fascist in practice. Using the former society’s plummeting birth rates as an excuse, the Gilead leaders force women into restricted roles in society, with little freedom or power. Couples in the upper classes who are without children are assigned Handmaids, who essentially are legal concubines intended to bear their hosts’ children. These Handmaids are fertile women who were politically unsafe, divorced, or in second marriages. The narrator is a Handmaid assigned to the family of a high-ranking commander. She loses her identity and original family, and she is renamed “of Fred” (the commander’s first name), or Offred. Offred is cared for by the family in exchange for having sex with the commander. In an elaborate ceremony required by the society, Offred lies between the legs of Fred’s wife during the act, making her resemble a substitute womb for the wife. This ritual enacts a literal translation of the Old Testament, in which Rachel says to Jacob, “Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her” (Genesis 30:1-3). Even this tightly controlled society has hidden rebellions. The commander arranges clandestine meetings with Offred. They talk and play Scrabble. Such relationships of Handmaids and their hosts are forbidden, as Handmaids are meant solely for procreation. Offred’s walking partner, Ofglen, reveals another rebellion, a resistance group called Mayday, of which she is a member.
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The commander’s wife arranges for Offred to have an affair with Nick, the chauffeur, so that she might become pregnant even if the commander is sterile. Offred begins to fall in love with Nick and loses all desire for the rebellion encouraged by her friends in Mayday. Offred’s tenuous situation becomes more precarious when the commander’s wife learns of Offred’s secret meetings with the commander. Ofglen is discovered to be part of Mayday and is killed. Offred’s story ends in a dramatic climax. The black death van of Gilead arrives at the house to take Offred. At that moment, it is unclear why the van came for her. To her surprise and dismay, Nick appears at her door with the military men and hands her over. As she passes him, he whispers in her ear to go with them because they are from Mayday and will take her outside Gilead. Offred goes into the van. Her ultimate fate, whether betrayal or salvation, is not revealed. The final chapter of the novel is an epilogue set two hundred years after the story of Offred. The keynote speaker at a symposium on Gileadean studies is a professor who has been studying a document called “The Handmaid’s Tale.” He makes a few comments on the possible au-
Margaret Atwood. (© Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
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thenticity of this document, which was discovered shortly after the regime of Gilead fell. It remains unclear whether Offred escaped safely or, instead, that only her story survived. Analysis The epilogue creates an interesting effect on building a possible future on top of a possible future. Margaret Atwood satirizes at two levels— modern society as a whole in the main story and the world of academia in the epilogue. Reminiscent of George Orwell, Atwood criticizes modern society by showing the horrible extent to which many current problems could advance. Like Orwell, Atwood presents criticism at the most obvious, political, level. She especially satirizes the workings of nations that impose strict control over their citizens. Atwood has said that she borrowed every aspect of Gileadean oppression from something similar in known history. Some familiar tactics employed by Gilead include using religion to control people for the government’s purposes; being constantly at war, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), to keep people quiet in the name of national security (there are numerous hints that the war may be staged); and emphasizing the need for children and women’s role as childbearers to keep women in limited roles. The novel focuses on the oppression of women, and it is commonly cited in the context of feminist criticism. Although men of lower classes also are shown to be limited in their choices, clearly the worst victims of the Gileadean regime are women. Even women higher up in the hierarchy, such as Aunts (who train the Handmaids) and Wives, are often as miserable as the others. One of the most insidious tactics used to control Gilead’s citizens, especially women, involves control over language. Atwood often addresses the role of language in human lives. In The Handmaid’s Tale, language symbolizes power. All use of language is regulated by the regime. Handmaids are not allowed to write, read, or even carry on a free conversation. Only certain prescripted greetings are allowed, and even the signs on stores are pictorial symbols. Against these kinds of limits, Offred’s rebellion comes in strange forms, such as playing illicit games of Scrabble, speaking freely with her walking partner, and ultimately leaving behind a subversive record of her experiences for future scholars to discover. These rebellions are powerful because they involve the uninhibited use of language. Her name is symbolic of Offred’s semantic rebellion. It could be read as “of Fred,” or it could be “off-red,” suggesting that she is not fully integrated into the role of the red-clad Handmaids.
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The true effect of Offred’s final document is uncertain, pointing to the ambiguous nature of language. Subversive words are powerful in this context but also problematic, because they are always subject to interpretation. In the epilogue to the novel, the professor working on Offred’s story finds little evidence to support her statements and questions their authenticity. In a chatty, joking tone, he talks in general about Gilead and points to some discrepancies between the story and his own historical findings. The contrast between Offred’s heartrending, urgent story and this skeptical, analytical conversation among scholars may present pain and frustration to the reader. Atwood frustrates her readers purposefully to make some pointed remarks about the world of academia. —Susan Hwang
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The Helliconia Trilogy On Helliconia, the chief planet of a binary system, seasons are centuries long and winters are so severe that survivors must rediscover civilization as the planet emerges from its glacial ages
Author: Brian W. Aldiss (1925) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Indeterminate future relative to Earth First published: Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983), and Helliconia Winter (1985) The Story The first section of Helliconia Spring tells the story of Yuli, who finds an underworld where a perverted religion—the virtual worship of darkness—holds sway. He works his way back to the world of day and founds a city called Oldorando. There, as the planet emerges slowly from its centuries-long winter, the tribes of the equatorial continent emerge from their hiding places. They begin to do battle, not only for survival but also to dispute possession of the planet with the ferocious phagors. In the central city, all the appurtenances of civilization—love, trade, coinage, history, and science—are being rediscovered. Yuli’s descendants hail him because he rejected his faith in favor of his people. Other characters emerge in this episodic novel, which spans centuries. Helliconia eventually undergoes still another violent change as winter yields to a triumphant spring. Above the planet, five thousand astronauts from Earth orbit the planet in space station Avernus. They are prohibited from intervening in the affairs of Helliconia because some aspect of its atmosphere is poisonous to humans. They relay the day-today activities of Helliconia back to Earth, where Helliconian events have become a space opera on the “Eductainment Channel.” Helliconia Summer covers a time span of only a few months. Its plot events center on the king, Borlien, and his queen, MyrdemInggala. Borlien, for political reasons, decides to divorce his queen and marry the princess of ancient Oldorando. The scene shifts rapidly from continent to continent until an Avernian Earthman, Billy Xiao Pin, attempts to intervene in the affairs of Helliconia, with predictably tragic and fatal results.
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In Helliconia Winter, as Helliconia moves away from its larger sun, auguries of winter begin to haunt the planet. Snow falls, crops fail, and tyranny tightens under the sway of the Oligarch. On Helliconia, Luterin Shokerandt begins a pilgrimage of terror to the arctic regions of the planet. He enters the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar, where prisoners are supposed to row their planet back to light. This action has become almost a religious ritual, and all the trappings of the Darkness religion, first glimpsed in Helliconia Spring, are given new meaning. Coupled with the main story is the continuing saga of the observer space station, Avernus, and events on post-apocalyptic Earth that parallel those on Helliconia, separated by 1,500 light-years of time. Analysis Little question exists that the Helliconia Trilogy is Brian Aldiss’s epic masterpiece and one of the masterpieces of science fiction. The planet and binary sun system Aldiss created is one of the most complex ever to spring from the pages of science fiction. It is also one of the most human—and most humane—as well as the most germane. Readers seem to share the fascination with the planet that spurs the activities of the observers on Avernus. They can readily understand how Earth dwellers are virtually hypnotized by the long-running epic saga of Helliconia. The Helliconia Trilogy is far more than a science-fiction epic. It is a fully fleshed artistic creation in which Aldiss wishes not only to tell a series of loosely connected stores, both epic and miniature, but also to relate a parable about humanity’s ability to ignore “reality” and revel in “eductainment.” The three Helliconia novels are as much about Earth and its ways of approaching reality, its methods of ignoring the “shadow” side of itself, its headlong flight from unpleasantness, and its ability to revel in distancing itself from problems as it is about the multifaceted panorama of the Great Year and its effects on Helliconia. Aldiss appears to ask if people could become so fascinated by distant drama, made unreal by distance and time, that they could fail to see the approaching apocalypse. Seeming to echo German physicist Werner Heisenberg, he asks if the very act of observing changes both the observer and the observed. Are the people of Earth changed by their ageslong observation of Helliconia? Can the five thousand exiled residents of Avernus remain unchanged because they can only observe but never interfere? What about the Helliconians themselves, unaware that they have provided “eductainment” to millions on a faraway planet? Is their climate so inexorable that change is forced upon them, albeit with glacial slowness?
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Aldiss has returned in this trilogy to one of his most elemental themes, the question of change. The theme of awareness of change (or lack of awareness) pervades many of his novels and short stories, and he frequently explores the effects of change or the results of stasis. Rarely are these questions asked without some relevance to art. In these novels, the “art” is Helliconia itself as well as the interstellar space opera it has engendered. Perhaps the most telling section of this remarkable series of novels occurs toward the end of Helliconia Winter, in one of the italicized passages that concern Earth or Avernus rather than Helliconia. More than seven thousand Earth years have passed since the common era began, yet the memory of Helliconia still haunts the survivors of the apocalypse, and a new glacial age brought about by the overuse of fossil fuels stalks them. One character then advances the Gaia hypothesis: Earth itself may possess life, and humankind has to learn not to try to possess Earth or to ignore its needs. Another major question raised by Aldiss is the nature of the ferocious phagors. Reminiscent of demoniac creatures, nightmarish minotaurs, and other hateful and hated monsters, they may provide some hideous balance with the humans they ceaselessly wage war against. Aldiss seems to ask if they are in some way the same as humans, merely in another guise or form. Multiple meanings, all of them intended and many of them ironic, are found in the name of the planet Helliconia. The name draws upon the words halcyon, helix, and helios, as well as the flower helliconia itself. All give some hints of how Aldiss works: He provides questions rather than answers, and he suggests, hints, or alludes rather than being simplistic. Aldiss would be the first to insist that he is not in the business of writing to provide answers. He might maintain that there are no definitive answers to the questions he raises, that in fact the position of the artist is simply to question, to require the reader to think and to probe, not merely to be entertained. His requirement of careful thought is perhaps the best single reason to ponder—and be entertained by—the Helliconia Trilogy. —Willis E. McNelly
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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever Stories of disease, love, sexuality, death, and alien contact illustrating human and alien biology and alienation both across and within species
Author: James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon, 1915-1987) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Various times in the future Location: Various locations on Earth and planets throughout the galaxy First published: 1990 The Story This collection of eighteen stories, published three years after her death, represents the best of James Tiptree, Jr.’s short fiction. The collection, subtitled The Great Years of James Tiptree, Jr., was edited by James Turner and contains stories originally published between 1969 and 1981. Under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr.—taken from the label of a marmalade jar—Alice Sheldon began publishing science fiction in 1968. She earned critical acclaim, and interest rose in the mystery of her identity, which was not revealed until 1977. All the stories in this collection are about death as an inextricable part of the striving and dreams of living beings. In the title story, “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” (1974), enigmatic alien visitors somehow cause moments of love, violence, and loss in the life of one man to be relived on the cinders of a dead Earth. In “Slow Music” (1980), two of the last people on Earth are betrayed by their love to follow the rest of humanity into a mysterious “River” of alien, bodiless sentience. In “The Man Who Walked Home” (1972), an experimental subject thrown into the far future “walks” back to the moment of the experiment by sheer willpower, appearing and reappearing on the post-apocalyptic Earth at the point of the civilization-destroying explosion caused by his return. In “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” (1969), a biologist, in despair at the destruction of a “beautiful woman”—Earth—creates a humanity-destroying plague. In many of the stories, the sex drive itself is a form of death. In “The Last Afternoon” (1972), a human colony is unable to stop waves of giant
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sea creatures who thrash ashore to mate in an orgy of sexual destruction. In “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death” (1973), an alien being struggling toward sentience is trapped in a biological life cycle in which the females eat the males. The author also represents the human fascination with alien beings as itself a form of self-destruction. In “A Momentary Taste of Being” (1975), the first interstellar expedition, desperate to find new planets to relieve pressures on an overcrowded Earth, finds that humans are merely sperm for fertilizing the ovum of an unknown life-form. Tiptree’s most famous stories deal with relations between the sexes in which the sexual aggression of men makes them deadly and alien to women. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976), a ship of NASA astronauts is thrown forward in time to an Earth sparsely populated by female survivors, all clones, of a plague that has destroyed humanity’s ability to reproduce. The author represents the men as painfully driven by “alpha male” aggression and misogyny. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), a young man falls in love with a literally brainless, beautiful body that is animated by remote control by a woman whose own ugly body makes her a social outcast. In “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), a mother and a daughter leave Earth willingly on a thoroughly alien ship. The mother says to the shocked male narrator, “We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine. . . . I’m used to aliens.” Analysis Tiptree’s stories are a distinctive contribution to science fiction. In their settings and the way the plots are established, many of the stories evoke the “Golden Age” of science fiction in the early twentieth century. The author conjures up corrupt galactic empires, distant futures, amazing occurrences, bug-eyed and exotic aliens, and alien worlds with the stroke of a pen. Whereas older science fiction aimed at “amazing stories,” Tiptree’s work aims at unsettling and idiosyncratic explorations of the psychology and biology of love and death. Like the New Wave writers of the 1960’s and 1970’s, she uses her settings and plots metaphorically, occasionally experimenting with unusual narrative voices, as in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” a Hugo Award winner. Unlike many of the New Wave writers, she pursues her themes with an expository directness. A strand of her work, composed of her most famous stories, can be identified clearly as feminist and therefore related to the feminist science fiction of the 1970’s and 1980’s. It is easy to read some of her fiction as representing a radical feminism. She consistently portrays the male sex
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drive as violent, most shockingly perhaps in “The Screwfly Solution” (1977, as Raccoona Sheldon), a Nebula Award winner. In that story, human males sprayed with an alien hormonal “pesticide” kill all women. She evokes visions of women’s societies as happily separate from men and of women as severely damaged by men, as in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” (1977 Hugo Award and 1976 Nebula Award winner) and “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled with Light!” (1976). She shows male culture as destructive of and contemptuous of women who do not fit male stereotypes of women, as in “With Delicate Mad Hands” (1981). Given all this, it is remarkable that the science-fiction community initially took Tiptree to be a male writer. As angry and satirical as her representation of male and female differences is, it lacks the drive of most feminist writing to reform and enlighten ideologically. Most of her narrators are male, and woven in with the anger, sharp social satire, and even contempt of their portrayal is a strand of sympathy or understanding. Tiptree tends to present men and women, and all living beings, as trapped in their biology and mortality. “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death” (Nebula Award winner) is perhaps the archetypal Tiptree story in this respect. Dark as her vision is, her fatalism allows space for appreciation of the doomed strivings of the spirit for love and transcendence. —D. Barrowman Park
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series Arthur Dent, an ordinary Englishman, is drawn into an extraordinary galactic adventure involving personal danger and revelations about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything
Author: Douglas Adams (1952-2001) Genre: Science fiction—cultural exploration Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Before Earth existed to the end of time Location: Throughout the universe First published: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982; with the first two novels as The Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, 1983), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984; with the first three novels as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts, 1986, in Great Britain and as The Hitchhiker’s Quartet, 1986, in the United States), The More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Stories (1987; contains the first four novels and a related short story, “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe”), The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts (1985), and Mostly Harmless (1992) The Story The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is a unique “trilogy,” as it originally was called, in that by 1992 it consisted of five novels and a short story and still had yet to be concluded definitively. It began as a radio series broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) beginning in 1978 and ending in 1980. Many fans of the story became acquainted with it through recordings of the old radio shows, the scripts of which were published as The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts. A television version of the series was broadcast by the BBC in 1981. There are, therefore, three versions of the Guide: radio, television, and print. Although all were written by Douglas Adams, these versions are not altogether consistent with one another. What follows is a summary of the five novels and the short story. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins with Arthur Dent, an ordi-
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nary young Englishman, waking to find that his home has been scheduled for demolition to allow construction of a new motorway bypass. In protest, Arthur lies prostrate between the bulldozer and his house. Arthur’s friend, Ford Prefect, talks Arthur into giving up his protest (at least temporarily) and going to the local pub. There, Ford completely perplexes Arthur by claiming to be an alien and telling him that they must leave Earth immediately because it is about to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic bypass. Thus begins Arthur’s adventure. He and Ford, a researcher for and proud owner of the encyclopedic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, manage to get on board a ship of the Volgon fleet, which has just demolished Earth. They are captured by the Volgons and expelled into the void of space. Fortunately, they are picked up by Ford’s two-headed cousin, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and his companions, Trillian, an Earth woman Zaphod recently picked up, and Marvin, a chronically depressed robot. Zaphod’s stolen ship, the Heart of Gold, is equipped with the prototype of an “improbability drive,” which is what enabled them to rescue Arthur and Ford. Zaphod is en route to Magrathea, a legendary planet that once was in the business of producing custom-made planets to order. After a brush with two deadly missiles, the travelers land on Magrathea. The planet seems to be shut down but is not. A new project is under way: the reconstruction of Earth. As it turns out, Earth actually was a massive computer designed by advanced aliens from another dimension who took the form of laboratory mice on Earth. Its purpose was to determine the ultimate question of “life, the universe, and everything.” The ultimate answer, the number forty-two, already had been derived by “Deep Thought,” Earth’s cybernetic predecessor, but the Volgons destroyed Earth five minutes before Deep Thought’s main program was to be completed and the question delivered. Upon discovering that Arthur is human, the mice cancel the order for another Earth, believing that they can get the answer they seek from an examination of Arthur’s brain. Zaphod’s pursuers arrive and are about to blast him and his companions when Marvin, the depressed robot, accidentally saves them all. The novel comes to a conclusion with the group back on the Heart of Gold, heading for the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The subsequent novels do not take this narrative forward systematically, although they occasionally present new variations on the theme. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe begins with the travelers being
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pursued by a Volgon fleet. The Volgons have been hired by Zaphod’s psychoanalyst, who, it is revealed, arranged to have Earth destroyed. The answer to the riddle of life, the universe, and everything, he feared, would put psychoanalysts out of business, or at least drastically reduce their income. With the help of one of Zaphod’s long-dead ancestors, the travelers escape, but Zaphod disappears from the Heart of Gold. He finds himself drawn to a character named Zarniwoop, first experiencing the mindzapping “total perspective vortex.” Zarniwoop wants the Heart of Gold. Zaphod manages to escape, and the travelers resume their journey to the restaurant. After a hearty meal, during which they watch the destruction of the universe, the travelers leave on another stolen ship, one that is programmed to crash into the heart of a nearby sun. Fortunately, the ship has a transporter. Marvin stays behind to work the contraption (nevertheless appearing in future novels), and the others are transported off the ship. Zaphod and Trillian are transported to a further adventure with Zarniwoop. More in line with the plot of the series, Arthur and Ford wind up on a spaceship containing human rejects—cosmeticians, hairdressers, telephone cleaners, and the like—from a planet called Golgafrincham. Their destination is prehistoric Earth. Once on Earth, Arthur and Ford find mates and settle down. Life, the Universe, and Everything touches only peripherally on the main themes and plot line of the series. As the novel opens, Arthur and Ford are still on prehistoric Earth, but a time and space anomaly enables them to escape to a modern cricket match being played at Lord’s. The universe is saved from disaster, and the fictional origin of cricket is revealed. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is more closely connected to the primary plot of the series. In it, Arthur hitches a ride back to Earth, which somehow has been restored to its former condition, minus dolphins. In typically complicated fashion, Arthur finds Fenchurch, a young woman who also has been profoundly affected by the Earth’s (alleged) demolition. The two fall in love, enjoying both mutual attraction and a shared cosmic consciousness. At the conclusion, it is revealed that dolphins saved Earth before departing, leaving the message contained in the book’s title. Arthur and Fenchurch remain in a blissful state of uncertainty, tempered by love and companionship, as the novel closes. For readers who like a happy ending, that would have been a good place to end the “trilogy.” Mostly Harmless begins with Fenchurch al-
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ready killed in an accident and Arthur adrift in the universe, searching for an Earth-like planet on which to settle. He finds one that is suitable and makes a home for himself. In short order, however, a mysterious daughter appears (and bolts), and Ford appears. Together, he and Arthur must rescue the universe from the new publishers of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who are allowing different dimensions and universes to leak into one another, threatening the little meaning and stability left to the galaxies’ inhabitants. The novel ends anticlimactically, allowing the possibility of further adventures. Analysis The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is a unique experiment combining humor and science fiction. As humor, it lampoons everything from philosophers, psychoanalysts, and economists to the BBC, American television, and the publishing business. The trilogy also deals in high irony. For example, while the authorities are planning to demolish Arthur’s house and coming up with all kinds of morally bankrupt reasons for doing so, they are about to have their habitat demolished, for equally vacuous reasons. Likewise, the rejects from Golgafrincham are portrayed as inept, useless idiots, but they survive while their fellow Golgafrinchams are wiped out by a plague contracted as a result of a dirty telephone. As science fiction, the series creates a universe that becomes real to readers, although, again ironically, it is one in which reality is elusive, conditions constantly shift, and the meaning of life may be completely unknowable. Douglas Adams’s universe is an existential one in which there is no knowable godhead to supply authoritative guidance and morals are relative. In the fourth novel, Adams offers love as an answer, but it is not a dominant theme in the work. As in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), readers might draw the lesson that one should simply mind his or her own business, but Arthur is not allowed to do that. Trouble finds him, whether he is looking for it or not. Thus, Adams gives urgency to the questions he raises, though he gives no answers. There is, in addition, an occasional environmental theme, as in the story “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe.” As might be expected, no such crusade could long be sustained in this work, because environmentalists, like everyone else, must be lampooned. Their cause rests on the same flimsy philosophical foundations as all human ideals and principles. —Ira Smolensky
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The Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, unwillingly accompanies the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves on a quest for the treasure of the dragon Smaug
Author: J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien (1892-1973) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The Third Age Location: Middle-earth, an imaginary land First published: 1937 (2d ed., 1951; 3d ed., 1966) The Story Although J. R. R. Tolkien drew extensively from northern European myths in developing various inhabitants of his imaginary world, Middle-earth, The Hobbit (subtitled Or, There and Back Again) focuses on a new race of beings he created. His hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins likes the snug comforts of home with no adventures to interrupt his ordinary life. The wizard Gandalf draws Bilbo out of this sheltered and complacent life by sending him on an adventure—a quest with the dwarf Thorin and his twelve companions to recover the treasure that the dragon Smaug stole. Gandalf employs Bilbo as the dwarves’ “burglar,” engaging him against his will to steal back Smaug’s hoard. As the dwarves journey toward Smaug’s lair in the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo learns to live up to Gandalf’s expectations. He fails at first when he unsuccessfully tries to pick a troll’s pocket, and Gandalf has to rescue the group. When they are captured again, this time by goblins, Bilbo is separated from his companions and must rescue himself. He finds a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible and uses it to escape first from Gollum, a threatening creature he encounters, and then from the goblins. He rejoins the dwarves and Gandalf, who have also escaped. Wolves (called “wargs”) and goblins attack again, but the group is finally rescued by eagles and aided by Beorn, a man who can transform himself into a bear. After Gandalf leaves the dwarves at the entrance to the forest of Mirkwood to pursue his own errand, Bilbo begins to lead the group, using his ring to save them from giant spiders and then from the dungeons
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J. R. R. Tolkien. (Houghton Mifflin Co.)
of the Elvenking. When the dwarves arrive at the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo finds the secret door to Smaug’s lair, then arouses the dragon’s anger by stealing a cup. Seeking revenge, Smaug destroys nearby Lake-town, but he is killed by Bard the bowman, leader of the townsmen. Thorin refuses to share the treasure with the Lake-men and elves, despite their legitimate claim on part of it. Bilbo tries to prevent a war by offering Bard the Arkenstone, the fabulous gem Thorin values above all the rest of the hoard. Despite Bilbo’s efforts, the competing races are about to fight when they are attacked by goblins and wargs. Working together, the dwarves, elves, and men defeat the enemy, although Thorin is killed in the battle. Bilbo refuses a large reward, desiring instead simply to go home. The book ends on a comic note as Bilbo returns to find that he has lost his reputation as an unadventurous and thus respectable hobbit. Analysis Although many people read The Hobbit only as a precursor to Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings (1968 as omnibus; original volumes The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954; The Two Towers, 1955; and The Return of the
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King, 1955), the earlier book deserves discussion for its own considerable merits. The third edition, revised from the original, is considered the standard. Tolkien is one of the preeminent fantasy writers of the twentieth century. For many readers, his books provide the standards by which to judge all other fantasy. Tolkien’s success lies in his ability to “subcreate,” a process he defines in his essay “On Fairy Stories” as the artist’s ability to create a “Secondary World” that follows consistent internal rules. By describing in depth the peoples, geography, and history of his invented world, Tolkien offers an imaginary world so vividly portrayed in its complexity that readers do not so much “suspend disbelief” while reading as much as simply believe in Middle-earth. One component of Tolkien’s success as a “sub-creator” is his profound knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He freely borrows its trolls, goblins, dwarves, elves, and dragons, as well as the quest motif. The quest is an archetypal pattern of fantasy literature present in fairy tales, romances, and epics; it provides structure for both the plot and character development in The Hobbit. Quest stories depict people, most often young, who leave home in search of some object. On the journey the protagonists pass a series of tests, often encountering evil and attempting to destroy it. At the end, the heroes return home fundamentally altered, with their identities reshaped. Bilbo is a model quest hero. Readers easily identify with him. At the beginning of his travels he is not particularly imaginative, brave, or competent, but he develops these qualities as events demand them of him. Leaving his quiet, unchallenging home for the quest forces Bilbo to grow psychologically during his travels. One fundamental characteristic never changes: He remains good-hearted throughout the story, and much of his success comes from his best qualities of loyalty, perseverance, kindness, and unselfishness. In contrast with Bilbo, the dwarves, elves, and men lack these qualities; their greed over the dragon’s treasure causes the clash among them that precedes the Battle of Five Armies. The Hobbit has a reputation as a children’s book, but it appeals to a broader audience because it is simultaneously amusing and serious. It deals with important themes in a humorous narrative style. The narrator is intrusive, addressing his audience directly to comment on the action or give information, a trait that younger readers enjoy but that some older readers may occasionally find tiresome. The novel reads aloud well to children, partly because of Tolkien’s use of comic verse and onomatopoeic words. The Lord of the Rings, the trilogy sequel to The Hobbit, differs vastly in
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its epic scope and thus is appropriate for adult readers rather than children. It tells the story of Bilbo’s nephew Frodo, who must destroy the Ring of Power of Sauron, the Dark Lord. It explores the same themes of heroism and conflict between good and evil that are present in The Hobbit, but in far greater complexity and intricacy of detail. Although critics frequently favor the epic over its precursor, the two differ so much in aim that comparisons are unfair. The Hobbit furnishes an incomparable introduction to The Lord of the Rings, and its readers often wish to go on to the trilogy, but The Hobbit can stand alone as a rich fantasy experience. —Kara K. Keeling
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Hyperborea A series of exotic fantasies set on a mythical polar continent
Author: Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Stories Time of plot: About 15 million years ago Location: Hyperborea First published: 1971 The Story In “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1931), two thieves, unwisely undaunted by the evil reputation of a certain ruined city, attempt to plunder a shrine erected to the dark god Tsathoggua. The protagonist escapes, though badly maimed, after seeing his companion horribly killed. In “The Door to Saturn” (1932), the priest Morghi pursues the sorcerer Eibon through a doorway to another world. The two adversaries are forced to combine forces in order to survive in a wilderness of wonders until they find a place to settle. “The Testament of Athammaus” (1932) is the tale of a hapless headsman appointed to execute a demoniac bandit. Every time his head is struck off, the bandit miraculously rises from the dead, becoming gradually more monstrous. In the end, the bandit degenerates to the point that further beheadings become impractical. In “Ubbo-Sathla” (1933), a modern occultist finds a magic lens that unites him with the personality of its wizard owner and allows him to share that owner’s visionary quest to find the hideously repulsive mass of protoplasm that is parent to all Earthly life. In “The Seven Geases” (1934), the vainglorious magistrate Ralibar Vooz falls prey, while out hunting, to the wrath of the sorcerer Ezdagor. Ezdagor places Vooz under a geas, which requires him to descend further into the Tartarean realm to present himself as a blood offering to Tsathoggua. Tsathoggua has no need of him and sends him deeper into the bowels of the earth. The pattern repeats as Vooz delivers himself in turn to the web of the spider-god Atlach-Natha, the palace of the “antehuman sorcerer” Haon-Dor, and the Cavern of the Archetypes. Finally, he arrives in the slimy gulf of Abhoth, “father and mother of all cosmic
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uncleanliness.” By this time, he is in a realm so remote that his own ordered world is known only by ominous rumor, so Abhoth can think of no more awful place to send him than home. The journey back is fraught with far too many dangers for it to be made safely. “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (1932), “The Ice-Demon” (1933), and “The Coming of the White Worm” (1941) are all tales whose leading characters are drawn by avarice to some ironically bizarre end. The Hyperborean series also includes the sentimental extended prose-poem “The White Sybil” (1935) and the lackluster “The Theft of the ThirtyNine Girdles” (1958). The collection also includes a group of prosepoems grouped under the heading “The World’s Rim,” including one extended account of “The Abominations of Yondo” (1926). Analysis The balmy polar continent of Hyperborea, mentioned frequently in Greek mythology, was the third setting that Clark Ashton Smith set out to explore in some detail, following the imaginary French province of Averoigne and the legendary continent of Atlantis. Being even more remote in time than Atlantis (its obliterated civilizations flourished in the Miocene era, according to the occultist in “Ubbo-Sathla”), Hyperborea could more easily accommodate the kind of exotic landscapes, flora, and fauna that Smith earlier had attributed to the desert of Yondo near the world’s rim. Hyperborea retained one crucial limitation, by virtue of belonging to the past rather than the future: It was subject to the destiny of giving way to the mundane world of the present. For this reason, it was to be superseded by the far-future scenarios of Zothique when Smith wanted to push his vivid imagination to its most earnest limit, but it remained the location of choice for his lightest and most playful tales. The characterization of the monsters and evil deities in these stories owes something to H. P. Lovecraft, to whose Cthulhu Mythos the god Tsathoggua sometimes is attached and to whose eccentric library of forbidden books Hyperborea contributed The Book of Eibon. Smith’s handling of such material herein is, however, far more ironic than Lovecraft’s ever was. Smith called these tales “Hyperborean grotesques,” and they are indeed exercises in calculated grotesquerie, with a strong element of black comedy. The author’s perennial fondness for tonguetwisting nomenclature is given its freest and most exuberant rein in “The Door to Saturn” and “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.” The best of the Hyperborean tales, “The Testament of Athammaus” and the magnificently bizarre “The Seven Geases,” are redolent with a macabre sarcasm no other writer ever matched.
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A theme that recurs in several of the stories is that of regression from order to chaos. In “The Testament of Athammaus,” the sequence of the bandit’s resurrections is from human being to a near-formless mass of primordial slime, a state of being highly reminiscent of that credited to the ultimate ancestor of all Earthly life in “Ubbo-Sathla.” A similar degenerative sequence is provided, with more elaborate stages, in “The Seven Geases,” but the endpoint is the same: Underlying all other notions of identity is an utterly loathsome, slimy mess. The revelation that the ultimate reality is both degrading and disgusting is another echo of Lovecraft, but Smith’s disgust at the concept of degradation is much less heartfelt than Lovecraft’s. Smith’s imagination agrees with Lovecraft’s in reducing humankind to virtual insignificance in a vast and hostile universe, but Smith’s vision is not straightforwardly horrific; it is extraordinarily lush and marvelously fecund. Smith’s imagined universe is by no means dismal; it is very colorful and full of bizarre life. Smith’s is a universe in which there are not merely more things than are dreamed of in the dour Lovecraftian philosophy, but more things than are dreamed of in any philosophy. That is what makes Smith a uniquely precious writer. —Brian Stableford
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The Hyperion Cantos Future humanity is caught in a conflict between rival groups of artificial intelligences seeking to control the universe
Author: Dan Simmons (1948) Genre: Science fiction—artificial intelligence Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The distant future Location: The planet Hyperion, cyberspace, and various unidentified planetary locations First published: 1990 (previously published separately as Hyperion, 1989, and The Fall of Hyperion, 1990) The Story The two books of The Hyperion Cantos take their titles and themes from two unfinished poems by the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) that deal with the displacement in Greek mythology of the old gods, the Titans, by the new gods, the Olympians. In Dan Simmons’s work, Old Earth has been destroyed by a black hole, and humans are spread across two hundred worlds and moons scattered throughout a thousand lightyears in space. Communication and travel are achieved through fatlines and farcasters, operated by Technocore Artificial Intelligences, who inhabit singularity environments and cyberspace. The artificial intelligences evolved in a symbiotic relationship with humankind but have decided that humans are no longer necessary. There are three factions of artificial intelligences: the Volatiles, who want to remove humans altogether; the Ultimates, who are prepared to make way for a negotiated new order; and the Stables, who believe in continued coexistence. The fate of the universe depends on which of these groups is able to take control of the unforeseen variables occurring on the planet Hyperion. As the story opens, a number of futures theoretically are possible. A cosmic conflict looms between the logically predestined Artificial Ultimate Intelligence and a newly evolved human Ultimate Intelligence, which is a triune god composed of Intellect, Empathy, and The Void Which Binds (or Quantum Reality). The Empathy part of this trinity has fled backward in time to avoid the conflict. To lure it back into the strug-
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gle, the artificial intelligences have accessed the worst nightmares of billions of humans to create an Avatar of Pain, called the Shrike. The idea is that the Shrike, which has impaled thousands of suffering humans on the branches of its Tree of Pain, will broadcast enough agony to drive Empathy out of hiding. The Stable Artificial Intelligences also have constructed the perfect bodily trap for Empathy, a combination of a nearly divine human consciousness and an artificial imagination capable of spanning space and time. This body takes the form of cybrid (cyborg hybrid) personality retrieval projects based on John Keats. The Keats cybrids prove to be disinclined to accept godhood and prefer identification with humanity. Also involved in the conflict is a third group, the Ousters, a highly evolved branch of humanity that is interfering retroactively to favor humankind. They have modified the actions of the Shrike by creating Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. They also have trained Rachel/Moneta to be the Shrike’s companion, nemesis, and keeper, traveling backward in time with the Tombs and the Shrike toward the present of the text. Ordinary humans are caught in the crossfire of this conflict between gods and quasi gods. The human action begins when the Church of the Final Atonement decides to send a final group of seven pilgrims to the Time Tombs. These pilgrims represent the major human religious factions in the galaxy. Lenar Hoyt is a Catholic priest; Sol Weintraub is a Jewish philosopher; Fedmahn Kassad is a soldier of Islamic origin; Martin Silenus is a pagan poet; Het Masteen, the True Voice of the Tree, is a Templar conservationist; the nameless Consul is an atheist; and Brawne Lamia is a romantic agnostic. The first book follows the model of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1380-1390), with each of the pilgrims recounting a tale of relevant personal experiences. One of these, the Consul’s tale, was published separately as “Remembering Siri” (1983). The pilgrims interact, but each has a separate role to play in the resolution of the conflict. Each of them is connected to the fate of humankind through the overriding motif of death and resurrection; each is approaching a form of apotheosis; and each apotheosis is controlled in some way by the Shrike, which functions as an agent of predestination. The second book narrows the narrative focus to concentrate on the Keats cybrid. This part of the story is recounted by the Joseph Severn persona of Keats, who dreams much of the complicated action from his deathbed in a reconstructed cyberspace version of old Rome. The multiple story lines are drawn together through the agency of the Shrike. The political and philosophical actions eventually are united through an
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authorial suggestion that love is the reason for predeterminism in the universe. It is this love that links the imminent birth of Keats and Lamia’s divine girlchild with the sacrifice of Weintraub’s time-trapped daughter Rachel, which will enable her to be born into the future. The universal conflict is resolved by the humans with much help from the Ousters and the Keats cybrid. The TechnoCore is destroyed, and with it the farcaster system that had both aided and enslaved humanity. Analysis Simmons’s early fiction was largely horror, with some fantasy, but Hyperion, which won the 1990 Hugo Award, is science fiction. The Hyperion Cantos might be described as metaphysical science fiction in that it deals with concepts relating to the universe as a whole. The two books are theological in that they offer a discourse on eschatology and predestination, as well as philosophical in their adaptation of the early Romantic concept of perfectibility as pure abstract process. This work also falls within the category of recursive science fiction, which treats real people and the fictional worlds that they create as having equivalent reality. In placing a reconstructed John Keats persona at the center of the text, Simmons aligns this work with a number of other recursive texts, such as Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard (1989), that make extensive use of the already self-reflexive lives and works of the major late Romantic figures, particularly George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), and John Keats. To these Romantic writers, the proper function of memory is to provide a path to the divine, using the mythopoeic powers of the imagination to transform base nature into transcendent reality. In postmodern fiction, especially in works dealing with cyberspace, the inspired order of memory has been reduced to the accumulation of data. This means that the inspired human memory is devalued as being less accurate than electronically recorded information that can be used to reconstruct “reality.” The more humans rely on artificially recorded data, the less able they are to perform the romantic apotheosis. This problem is explored in The Hyperion Cantos, in which the role of the dreaming poet as creator has been usurped by the artificial intelligences. The overall structure is a space opera on a grand scale, containing complexly interwoven strands of action. Simmons’s technique is a selfconsciously allusive postmodern collage of literary styles. His characters are drawn from a wide range of literary sources. Within the overtly Chaucerian framework of the first book, each of the pilgrim’s tales is
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narrated in a completely different style, ranging from the romance of the Consul’s tale, through the Bildungsroman of Silenus the poet’s tale, to the tough, short-sentence detective form of Brawne Lamia’s detective’s tale. This technique is not sustained in the second book, which is more uniform in authorial tone, concentrating on the complexities of plot resolution. There, Keats’s notion of spiritual growth through creative suffering is given literal form in the multiple deaths, quasi deaths, and resurrections inflicted on the characters in their search for reconciliation between human and machine, creator and created. The emphasis rests, finally, on a metaphoric structure of birth and rebirth. The Hyperion Cantos has given Simmons a prominent place in the science-fiction field. Simmons later resumed the Hyperion series with Endymion (1996), which follows the adventures of the hybrid girl Aenea and her lover and protector, Raul Endymion. Simmons concluded the series with The Rise of Endymion (1997), in which Raul and Aenea continue their journey in their search for the meaning of the universe. His other works include The Hollow Man (1992; a much expanded version of “Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams,” 1982) and the horror novel Children of the Night (1992). Neither of these works has received the acclaim accorded to The Hyperion Cantos. —Janeen Webb
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I Am Legend After a worldwide plague, the only surviving human must face grief, loneliness, and the marauding victims of the disease: a new race of vampires
Author: Richard Matheson (1926) Genre: Science fiction—apocalypse Type of work: Novel Time of plot: January, 1976-January, 1979 Location: Los Angeles, California First published: 1954 The Story As I Am Legend begins, in January, 1976, Earth has been ravaged, first by nuclear war, then by a mysterious plague that transforms its victims into vampires. One normal human being, Robert Neville, remains. Through him, Richard Matheson dramatizes humanity’s desperate struggle to overcome a catastrophe that it perhaps brought upon itself. In the first of the novel’s four parts, Neville has barricaded himself in his home against the nightly onslaughts of the vampires, among them his former friend and neighbor, Ben Corman. While Corman shouts for him to come out, Neville attempts to block the horror with classical music and alcohol. By day, while the vampires sleep, he repairs the damage to his house and hunts his tormentors. This has been his life for five months. He avoids the past, particularly memories of his wife, Virginia, and daughter, Kathy, both victims of the plague. Instead, he exists alone in the terrifying present, eating, drinking, listening to Beethoven, and killing scores of vampires. When part 2 opens in March, 1976, Neville has refortified and soundproofed his house. More secure, he begins to diverge from his obsession with destroying vampires and seeks to understand them and the disease that engendered them. Thus begins a clever scientific inquiry that transforms into science fiction what has been so far a rather ordinary horror story. With microscope and science book in hand more frequently than mallet and stake, Neville discovers a bacterial cause for the vampirism. He also carefully observes vampire behavior and conducts “experiments” to solve mysteries surrounding the vampires. This scientific in-
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quiry transforms Neville as well as the novel. Compelled to search his memories of the past for clues about the plague, he cannot help but recall his own losses. His resulting pain and grief display a compassion and vulnerability previously missing, as does his touching attempt to befriend a terrified stray dog. By June, 1978, when part 3 opens, Neville seems to have adjusted to his solitary life and resigned himself to living only in the present. On a leisurely daytime hunt for Ben Corman, he sees, pursues, and captures a woman who may be normal. During their day and night together, Neville makes several startling discoveries that challenge his existence. Not only do his few hours with Ruth reveal the emptiness of his solitary life, but her true identity and purpose also radically transform his understanding of the vampires and of himself. A member of a new society of living vampires who have developed a treatment for the plague, Ruth was sent to spy on Neville, the monster who has been indiscriminately slaughtering and experimenting on both the reanimated dead and her kind. Although puzzled by the two different types of vampires, Neville had decided that both were monsters he must kill for the sake of his own survival. Now he must confront the awful truth. Part 4 finds Neville resignedly awaiting his fate. When the new humans come for him, they display the same hatred and brutality that led to nuclear war. They ruthlessly slaughter the reanimated dead, including a pitiful Ben Corman, and then capture an appalled Neville. Humankind has mutated, but it has not changed. It remains painfully “normal.” Whether Neville chooses suicide with Ruth’s assistance or public execution, he will be a new terror, a new superstition, a new legend for humankind. Analysis Published less than ten years after the end of World War II and the detonation of two atomic bombs, I Am Legend was part of a revival of disaster theme literature. Earlier in the century, literature of this sort was less common and usually centered on natural catastrophe. Notable examples of this earlier type include Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1915) and S. Fowler Wright’s Deluge (1928). In England, post-World War II disaster literature continued this emphasis on natural catastrophe, for example in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956). U.S. science-fiction writers, on the other hand, concentrated on disease, with George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) preceding I Am Legend by several years. Other noteworthy examples include Algis Budrys’s Some Will Not Die (1961), Michael
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Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969), and Stephen King’s The Stand (1978; text restored, 1990). I Am Legend was Matheson’s first science-fiction novel, and it established his reputation in the field. He followed it with two others, The Shrinking Man (1956) and Bid Time Return (1975), which won the World Fantasy Award for best novel of 1975. For the most part, Matheson’s writing blends fantasy and science fiction in a combination that is more mysterious than explicable, more fanciful than possible. Critics and scholars have noted that the major theme in nearly all of Matheson’s work has been paranoia. Thus, in I Am Legend, to preserve his own life Robert Neville is driven to annihilate the vampires who threaten him. Likewise, the living vampires become obsessed with destroying their enemies: the reanimated dead and the monster, Neville. In dramatizing this theme, Matheson recasts the legend of Count Dracula and his legion of the undead, substituting the objective, rational, systematic inquiry of science for the subjective, illogical, impressionistic observation of superstition. When I Am Legend concludes, however, humankind clings to the old ways. In his writing, Matheson elevates fantasy and horror above science fiction. It is not surprising, then, that although he initially was considered to be a science-fiction writer, by the late 1950’s he was mainly creating, with enormous success, terror and fantasy for television series such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery; for television films such as Duel (1971), directed by Steven Spielberg; and for theatrical films, particularly Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories. Matheson adapted I Am Legend into a screenplay for the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth but demanded that his name be removed when the screenplay was rewritten. Matheson was not involved in the better-known film adaptation, The Omega Man (1971). —Joseph M. Nassar
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I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream A collection of stories using fantasy and science fiction to explore extreme emotional states
Author: Harlan Ellison (1934) Genre: Fantasy—inner space Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Various times between the 1960’s and centuries into the future Location: Various locations in the United States and outer space First published: 1967 The Story The seven stories in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, originally published in science-fiction and men’s magazines between 1958 and 1967, include both science fiction and fantasy. They are united by Harlan Ellison’s introductions for each of the stories, in which he discusses their personal significance to him, as well as by their focus on powerful emotions. In each story, people are confronted with their deepest fears or desires. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is narrated by Ted, one of five people trapped below the surface of the earth in a sentient computer called AM. The computer has taken over the world and killed everyone except these five people. Programmed to wage war, the nearly omnipotent AM has kept these five alive and tortured them for 109 years. Ted relates their brutal sufferings, revealing in the process his extreme paranoia. He is capable of love for Ellen, the only woman in the group, and of self-sacrifice. When the group arrives at an ice cavern in search of food, he seizes a moment of confusion to initiate a mercy killing of the others. In rage, the computer reduces Ted to a hideous blob, able to be tortured for eternity and to think but not to act. In his reflections, Ted hopes he did the right thing. The narrator of “Big Sam Was My Friend” is also tested but falls short. A member of an intergalactic circus, Johnny Lee befriends a teleporter named Sam, who believes that heaven is in space and is looking for a dead girl he loved on Earth. When the circus performs on Giuliu II, its employees are invited to a royal ceremony, which to their surprise in-
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volves a virgin sacrifice. Sam mistakenly thinks the girl to be sacrificed is his lost love and rescues her, offending their host. He agrees to take the girl’s place. The narrator bitterly notes how neither he nor anyone else tried to prevent Johnny Lee’s sacrifice. In “World of the Myth,” three explorers crash on an alien world and encounter antlike beings that project the characters’ inner thoughts. Although the protagonist feels weak throughout the story, his rival cannot face his true self and commits suicide. The fantasy stories also deal with characters facing their true selves. In “Lonelyache,” a philanderer recently separated from his wife watches a threatening black beast take shape and grow in his living room as he engages in meaningless one-night stands. He finally commits suicide in a combination of courage and despair. In “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer,” the protagonist, shortly before being crushed by a wrecking ball, gets the opportunity to earn the heaven of his dreams. Transformed from a mild-mannered man into a Teutonic demigod, he sails through a phantasmagoric landscape and learns from a wizard that he must defeat a demon and win the love of a fair maiden. In his overconfidence, he wrecks his ship, killing his crew; and in his cowardice he allows the demon to take the maiden and then slays it from behind. Having fallen short, he loses his chance at heaven. Other stories in the volume are allegorical. “Eyes of Dust” is set on a planet where everything is beautiful except a couple who defy the law to produce a hideous son with the soul of a prophet. The authorities kill the couple and destroy the son, but in doing so they mar the beauty of their world. Set in Las Vegas, “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” involves a man, down on his luck, who plays a slot machine possessed by a woman. Manipulating his need for love, she manages to free her own soul while trapping his in the machine. Analysis Although he gained recognition as a writer of science fiction, Ellison’s work has never been described adequately by the label. The weakest stories in the book—”Big Sam Was My Friend,” “Eyes of Dust,” and “World of the Myth”—are from the first decade of his professional career. Although they contain themes that are important in his work, they are more conventional in subject, drawing on standard science-fiction tropes of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. They combine Ellison’s typically expressive style with passages of self-conscious writing. In the mid-1960’s, Ellison perfected his voice, and from that point his work, though often drawing on science fiction and fantasy, is a unique juxtaposition of emo-
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tional expression, wild imagination, and stylistic experimentation. Many critics saw such experimentation as part of science fiction’s New Wave in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, but no one associated with the label— many of them contributors to the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which Ellison edited—wrote like Ellison wrote, and even he rarely repeated himself. Although “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” employs a sciencefiction concept, the story uses narrative and typographical techniques seldom seen in earlier science fiction. The story also makes free use of mythical elements and literary allusion. “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” combines “sword-and-sorcery” elements with psychedelic imagery, all framed by a mundane experience in a modern city. The protagonist of “Lonelyache” is haunted by a beast in his living room, and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” mixes the life stories of a prostitute and a drifter with highly experimental passages describing her death and the story’s fantastic premise. Critical response to Ellison’s work has always been mixed, with some readers finding fault with his personal tone and hyperbolic style as others praise him for his imagination and the emotional power of his writing. Frequently anthologized and the winner of the 1967 Hugo Award for best story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is one of Ellison’s best-known works. A corrected version of the story collection was published in 1983. —Darren Harris-Fain
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The Illustrated Man A collection of classic science-fiction short stories centered on the prophetic tattoos drawn by a witch on a circus worker
Author: Ray Bradbury (1920) Genre: Science fiction—cautionary Type of work: Stories Time of plot: The 1950’s, with flashforwards and flashbacks Location: Various First published: 1951 The Story This book was published following serial publication of its component stories in a variety of sources. The thread connecting the stories is the narrator’s tale of meeting a tattooed man while on a walking tour of Wisconsin in the 1950’s. The tattoos move and change at night, each telling a different story predicting the future. The narrator befriends the illustrated man and watches the tattoos become the eighteen tales collected in this volume. Ray Bradbury questions the need for technology in many of the stories. George Hadley buys a Happylife Home (the ultimate virtual reality house) for his family in “The Veldt.” His children, named after Peter Pan characters, seek their own never-never land in a nursery where thoughts materialize. When George threatens to turn off the house, the children revolt by turning the nursery into an African veldt where lions attack and eat their trapped parents. Another story of technology gone awry is “Marionette, Inc.” A man buys a robot to replace himself in daily life so he can take a vacation, but the robot replaces the man by killing him and running off with his wife. In “The Rocket,” another story of the wish-fulfillment powers of technology, a man spends his life savings to simulate a rocket trip for his family because he cannot afford a real rocket trip. Space travel is a common theme in science fiction. “The Rocket Man” depicts a husband and father unable to trade the lure of space for a home life. He stays with his family for only three days at a time before he feels compelled to voyage to the stars. In “Kaleidoscope,” men hurtle into space when their rocket blows up. Hollis realizes that his life has been
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full of dreams rather than memories. As he hits Earth’s atmosphere, he burns like a meteor, and a young boy in Illinois wishes upon him as if he were a falling star. In “No Particular Night or Morning,” a space traveler realizes that he cannot connect to his own identity and commits suicide. In “The Long Rain,” a spaceship crash leaves men stranded on Venus, where they walk through incessant rain in search of a sun dome for shelter, only to find that one after another is inoperable. The showers turn into a Chinese water torture, driving them mad. Only one man succeeds in making his way to safety. Bradbury explores the potential for good in human life on other planets in “The Other Foot.” Hattie Johnson, a black woman, lives on Mars. Hattie’s husband organizes the colony to greet the first white man on Mars. When the white man arrives, he announces that Earth has been destroyed, and with it, racism. The colony has the opportunity for a new start with everyone on the same level. The “Fire Balloons” is the story of missionaries who find that they have landed where there is no sin. Bradbury also explores the evil side of humanity. In “The Exiles,” all the great authors are kept alive by the spirit of their books, but intolerant book burners extinguish the writers from existence. Invading Martians in “The Concrete Mixer” are overwhelmed by commercialized and materialistic Earthmen. “The Visitor” is a man who offers hope to a planet of people dying of a debilitating disease. Instead of treating the visitor kindly, the people kill the only person who can help them. A couple escape from a future of repression only to be recaptured and sent back by people they thought were friends in “The Fox and the Forest.” The children in “Zero Hour” are the only people who can see the invaders who brainwash them into killing parents who do not pay attention to them. In “The Man,” a crew of spacemen land on a planet that has been visited recently by God. The captain initially believes the visitor to be his rival, and his pride gets in the way of him meeting with God. The end of the world is another theme. In “The Highway,” Hernando stands in his field and watches cars pass on the highway, their passengers fleeing atomic war. One driver informs him that the world is going to end, and he wonders what “the world” could mean, so separate is his life from the rest of civilization. “The Last Night of the World” is the tale of a dream shared by everyone the night before the end of the world and the calmness with which they all meet their last moments. The framing story ends when the narrator sees a clear picture of the illustrated man waking and strangling him. He runs off to the next town before this prophecy can come true.
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Analysis Although The Illustrated Man is classic science fiction, written early in Bradbury’s career, it is more concerned with ideas than with science, although Bradbury often questions the consequences of science. The book contains characters from middle America. The heroes are not mythical figures but everyday people. Technology is depicted as failing to make human life better, and Bradbury shows in several stories that a return to
Ray Bradbury. (Thomas Victor)
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a simpler life is desirable. He looks at space travel as a romantic journey into the unknown ending in death rather than as an epic journey into adventure. Bradbury’s body of work is voluminous, from short-story collections, including The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Dandelion Wine (1957), to his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which was made into a film in 1966. The Illustrated Man also was filmed, in 1969. Bradbury has written plays, poems, children’s stories, and nonfiction. He received the O. Henry Award in 1947 and the Nebula Grand Master Award in 1989. He has written under a number of pseudonyms, including Guy Armory, Edward Banks, and Anthony Corvais. —Dianna Laurent
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The Incomplete Enchanter Psychologist Harold Shea travels to mythical lands, where he embarks on quests, discovers romance, and dabbles in magic
Authors: L(yon) Sprague de Camp (1907-2000) and Fletcher Pratt (18971956) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The 1940’s and medieval times Location: Garaden, Ohio, and various mythological places First published: The Incomplete Enchanter (1941; includes “The Roaring Trumpet,” serial form, Unknown, 1940, and “The Mathematics of Magic,” serial form, Unknown, 1940), The Castle of Iron (1950; serial form, Unknown, 1941; first two books published as The Complete Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea, 1975), The Wall of Serpents (1960; includes “The Wall of Serpents,” serial form, 1953, and The Green Magician; published with the previous material as The Intrepid Enchanter, 1988, and as The Complete Compleat Enchanter, 1989), and The Green Magician (1954) The Story Harold Shea, a psychologist for the Garaden Institute in Ohio, hungers for travel and adventure. His coworkers tease him about the activities he takes up and subsequently drops, such as fencing and horseback riding. None of them satisfies his longing. Shea’s superior, Dr. Reed Chalmers, has hypothesized the existence of parallel worlds that can be reached by people who can attune themselves to receive a different series of impressions of reality. These parallel worlds have been made known to humankind through such classic works of literature as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596). The possibility of travel to these other worlds captures Shea’s imagination, and in a rash moment, he puts Chalmers’s hypothesis to the test. Aiming for the lush green fields of the Ireland of Cuchulainn and Queen Maev, Shea ends up instead in the snowy, frozen wasteland of Scandinavian myth in the first story of the series, “The Roaring Trumpet.” There, Shea embarks on a quest with the Norse gods Thor and Loki
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to recover Thor’s great hammer from the giants. The hammer is needed in the coming legendary battle, the Ragnarök. Although Shea, a mere mortal, proves useful in recovering it, he and another god, Heimdall, are taken prisoner. Shea again proves his worth by escaping with Heimdall from the giants’ dungeon by the use of psychology—a foreign concept to the gods—and magic. At the Gates of Hell, however, as Heimdall blows his trumpet, signaling the beginning of the battle, Shea is thrust back into his own world. In this first adventure, Shea discovers the secrets of travel to parallel universes. He discovers, much to his dismay, that his modern tools, such as a Colt .38 revolver, a flashlight, and a box of matches, do not function there. Instead, he finds that his fencing lessons stand him in good stead. Magic works because the parallel worlds are governed by a set of natural laws different from those of Shea’s world. As Shea masters the fixed principles of magic for the time and place in which he finds himself, he gains the ability to cast spells, many of them with comic results. In “The Mathematics of Magic,” Dr. Chalmers accompanies Shea to the land of The Faerie Queene, where both men meet and fall in love with beautiful but quite different women. The object of Shea’s desire is an independent woodswoman named Belphebe. The more mature Chalmers, however, becomes smitten with a fragile young thing, Florimel, who is merely a magical creation made from snow. After many sword fights and magical incantations, Shea once again is blasted back to his own universe, but this time with Belphebe in tow. Chalmers remains behind. As The Castle of Iron begins, Shea and Belphebe are husband and wife and living in Ohio. Belphebe mysteriously disappears during a picnic. Shea, his colleagues Walter Bayard and Vaclav Polacek, and a police officer named Pete Brodsky are snatched during an interrogation into the disappearance. They land in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, where they are force-fed milk and honey by beautiful women. Before they know what is happening, Shea and Vaclav then appear in the world of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso Chalmers seeks Shea’s help in freeing Florimel from her enchantment and admits that he accidentally brought Belphebe to this world, where she lost her memory and believes that she is now a woman called Belphegor. Apparently, Spenser based The Faerie Queene on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, so there are many similarities between the worlds of these two works. Shea agrees to help Chalmers render Florimel a human, all the while keeping her out of the lecherous hands of the magician Atlantès. He also must find and woo back his beloved Belphebe. At the novel’s end, Shea and Belphebe return to Ohio, Chalmers and Vaclav re-
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main in the world of Orlando Furioso, and Bayard and Brodsky are stuck in Xanadu. In “The Wall of Serpents,” Shea and Belphebe travel to the world of the Finnish epic The Kalevala in search of a magician powerful enough to retrieve Bayard and Brodsky from Xanadu. This accomplished, the foursome become involved in master magician Lemminkainen’s revenge plot against a neighboring family and barely escape death by transporting, accidentally, to the land of Irish myth, the land Shea had tried to find on his first venture. Thus the last story, The Green Magician, finds Shea, Belphebe, and Brodsky working for Cuchulainn in his fight against Queen Maev and the Connachta in exchange for passage via a magician back to Garaden, Ohio. The threesome finally returns to Ohio. Analysis In an afterword to The Compleat Enchanter titled “Fletcher and I,” L. Sprague de Camp reveals that it was Fletcher Pratt who first proposed this collaboration between the two. “The Roaring Trumpet” first appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s fantasy magazine Unknown in May, 1940. “The Mathematics of Magic” followed in August, 1940, and “The Castle of Iron” in April, 1941. The project stayed on hold until after World War II, when the two authors rewrote and expanded “The Castle of Iron,” eventually republishing it in book form in 1950. The last two novellas in the series, “The Wall of Serpents” and The Green Magician, also saw magazine publication before being combined in a single volume. Besides the Harold Shea stories, the two also collaborated on other works of fantasy. Although other adventures were planned for Shea, such as having him travel to the world of Persian myth, they were never written because Pratt died suddenly in 1956 of cancer. According to de Camp, Pratt furnished the imaginative element and de Camp the controlling logic. Their relationship calls to mind that between their two main characters, Shea and his older mentor, Chalmers. De Camp notes that Pratt despised Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and, surprisingly, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (19541955), considered by many to be the classic fantasy adventure, for their occasional crudities and lapses of logic. David Drake, in his preface to The Complete Compleat Enchanter, classifies the Harold Shea stories as rigorous fantasy with humor. He states that the rigor appears through the authors’ display of their expert knowledge both of the myths that form the framework for the novellas and of the real conditions of the worlds on which the myths are based.
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A key element in all the stories is their humor. Pratt and de Camp’s apprentice magician, whose spells misfire as often as not, is an appealing hero. When Shea turns ordinary broomsticks into flying ones in “The Roaring Trumpet” or an ordinary carpet into a magic one in The Castle of Iron, the maiden voyages of these vehicles are fraught with hair-raising adventure. Their riders’ lives are in as much danger in the air as they were on the ground. Chalmers, too, has difficulty making his spells come out right. In “The Mathematics of Magic,” his attempt to turn water into wine at a castle dinner party results instead in a very potent Scotch whiskey, causing many a medieval hangover the next morning. Integral to the stories’ humor is their use of colloquial English, as opposed to the pseudo-Elizabethan English often employed in heroic fantasy. For example, the Frost Giants of “The Roaring Trumpet” talk and act like Brooklyn gangsters. According to Drake, de Camp was one of the first to defend publicly the use of colloquial English in heroic settings. A product of a time that has been categorized as the Golden Age of science fiction, the series experienced a rebirth in the 1990’s with the publication of L. Sprague de Camp’s The Enchanter Reborn (1992) and The Exotic Enchanter (1995). These two titles encompass several shorter novellas by different authors, written in the spirit of the originals by Pratt and de Camp. As noted by Christopher Stasheff in his introduction to The Enchanter Reborn, the purpose of the original stories was to teach as well as to amuse. Through the adventures of Harold Shea, the reader is introduced to such works of classical literature as The Faerie Queene, Orlando Furioso, and The Kalevala, as well as the worlds of Norse and Irish mythology. The Incomplete Enchanter stories continue to entertain because they embody certain fundamental truths, foremost of which is the desire of modern people to escape the technological, impersonal life of the big city for a simpler one where people live by their wits in an edenic countryside. —C. K. Breckenridge
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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman The minister of determination commissions Desiderio to assassinate Dr. Hoffman, who is attempting to destroy a world of reason and create a world of dreams
Author: Angela Carter (1940-1992) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Undefined Location: Various locations on Earth First published: 1972 (also published as The War of Dreams, 1974) The Story Desiderio, an old man, tells the story of the Great War between reason and unreason in which, fifty years earlier, he played a heroic role. The war begins when Dr. Hoffman’s infernal desire machine destroys the forces of reason in the Capital and installs a world of desire. The Capital’s ruler, the minister of determination, sends his twenty-four-year-old aide, Desiderio, to destroy Hoffman and his machine. Desiderio, already unconsciously desirous of Hoffman’s daughter, Albertina, sets off on a quest that is both heroic and romantic. At his first destination, a seaside village, he meets Hoffman’s old teacher, now the blind proprietor of a peep show. Desiderio, accused of murdering a woman and sought by the police, takes refuge among the River People, who are Indians. Part Indian himself, he becomes one of them. On the eve of his wedding, however, Desiderio realizes that the River People are about to cannibalize him. After escaping, he again meets the peep show proprietor, now traveling with a carnival. Desiderio joins the carnival, masquerading as the proprietor’s nephew. The proprietor, he learns, is allied to Hoffman; indeed, Albertina has commanded him to bring Desiderio safely to Hoffman’s castle. Desiderio’s love and desire for this woman he has never met increases, and his desire fuels his vision. Desiderio is attracted to the carnival’s grotesque but friendly per-
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formers. Most intriguing to him are the little Acrobats of Desire, religious ascetics who practice an erotic and sadomasochistic dismemberment act from which they take no pleasure. They perform a ritual gang rape on Desiderio. When he finally escapes to a place overlooking the town, he watches a landslide bury it. A black-robed count and his servant, Lafleur, who is Albertina in disguise, ask Desiderio to accompany them. At a whorehouse run by a madam (Albertina), they participate in grotesque sexual acts until flames destroy the place. Desiderio and his companions escape and board a ship, from which they move to a pirate vessel. By now aware that Lafleur is Albertina and that she has protected him, Desiderio waits eagerly to consummate his love for her. A storm destroys the ship and lands them in Africa. There the count is killed, but Desiderio and Albertina escape to “Nebulous” time and space and a world in which centaurs worship a god called the Sacred Stallion. The male centaurs are privileged; the female centaurs are oppressed. The centaurs religiously gang rape Albertina before her father’s helicopters arrive to free them both. Albertina leads Desiderio to Dr. Hoffman. He destroys Hoffman, Albertina, and the machine. Reason is restored, and Desiderio is a hero. Analysis Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman brings to prominence elements that were undertones in her earlier, more realistic works, such as Heroes and Villains (1969). She has been compared with such contemporaries as Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez; she uses the philosophical, surrealistic, and erotic to create predominantly imaginative yet familiar landscapes. The fantasy war between the minister of determination and Dr. Hoffman dramatizes the philosophical question of the relationship between reason and imagination, the real and the illusory, the objective and the subjective. The drama has faint traditional structures: Desiderio’s linear journey is a quest and a love story. A strong additional textual element is gender: Women are totally and complicitly victims of violent sex. Carter’s dramatization of a philosophical debate succeeds as narrative first because of its familiar elements of linear time, quest story, and romance, and second because of Desiderio’s first-person narrative voice. Through these, the writer succeeds in keeping the reader in the story itself rather than in the philosophical debate it dramatizes. At the same time, the story makes the complexity of the issue come to the fore in two ways. First, Desiderio is, paradoxically, unaware until late in his journey
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that what he experiences—and thus what the reader experiences—are manifestations of his own unconscious, his own desires, his own internal dream machine. What he seeks to destroy also seduces him. Second, a conversation between Hoffman’s ambassador and the minister of determination reveals that what both want is control, the minister through logical coercion and Hoffman through imaginative seduction. For a long time, Desiderio journeys through chronological time observing landscapes and populations that, though grotesque, are at least minimally based on the real. He eventually enters “Nebulous” time, a creation of Hoffman. What is wrong is not that time and space disappear as structures but that humanity disappears when fantasy rules. The nameless centaurs, in which the horse portion dominates, are not merely ludicrous in their religion (as perhaps Carter perceives religious humans); they are also nonhuman. When Desiderio and Albertina proceed to Hoffman’s castle and the site of his infernal desire machine—a technological thing that creates a fantasy world—Desiderio realizes that his power has made Hoffman absolutely bland. After Desiderio destroys Hoffman’s castle and returns home a hero, he, too, loses all passion for life. What is most effective in this novel is language. Carter’s lucid descriptive power pulls the reader from the realm of ideas into the dramatic energy of a captivating story. Vividly, humorously, and poetically, Carter presents the philosophical dilemma of the interactions and subversions of the ordered world that the human mind demands and the chaotic world that human imagination desires. Although sadism and destruction are everywhere, the voice of the narrator never drags, and the rich prose details speed the reader through this disturbing landscape. —Francine Dempsey
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The Instrumentality of Mankind Stories that relate events in humankind’s development, from the forgotten First Age of Space to the discovery of space3
Author: Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, 19131966) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Various times between the close of World War II and 15,000 c.e. Locations: Earth, Venus, various other planets, and aboard spacecraft First published: 1979 The Story Nine stories in this collection are part of Cordwainer Smith’s future history, several involving the Instrumentality. The last five stories are not part of the common future history, although Smith pursues his usual themes in them. “No, No, Not Rogov!” is set shortly after World War II. Rogov and his wife, both scientists and members of the Soviet elite, work on an espionage machine (often killing human test subjects) by which they will be able to tune in and confuse the thoughts of others. When Rogov tries the completed machine, a slight miscalculation causes him to see the beautiful celebration of The Glory and Affirmation of Man being held in 13,582 c.e. As a result of seeing this celebration, he falls into a permanent trance. Rogov’s wife, who caught a glimpse of the fabulous vision, refuses to continue the experiments. In “War No. 81-Q,” set in 2127 c.e., the Mongolian Alliance and the Americans receive permission to wage war with radio-controlled aeroships. When Jack Bearden takes control of the remaining American ships, he falters, realizing that he is an overrated hero. He goes on to eke out a victory and gain fame as the Charles Lindbergh of the twentysecond century. “Mark Elf” is set in the era following the Ancient Wars. Laird, a telepath, locates an ancient satellite carrying Carlotta vom Acht in suspended animation. In the forest where she lands, Carlotta confronts the strange creatures roaming Earth, including Mark Elf, a machine that
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kills anybody not having German thoughts. She is protected by a talking bear, who tells her that Laird, who sees in her the regeneration of the True Men, will be her husband. In “The Queen of the Afternoon,” the sequel to “Mark Elf,” Carlotta, unable to rejuvenate, has grown old and decrepit, unlike Laird, who remains youthful. He calls down a second satellite, one containing Juli, Carlotta’s sister. Upon Carlotta’s death, Juli marries Laird and helps him overthrow the Jwindz overlords who held mind control over humanity. Juli grows old in her turn, but Laird refuses rejuvenation, choosing to die with her. The last sister called down, Karla, will work out her own fate. In “When the People Fell,” Dobyns Bennett is working at the Experimental Area on Venus when the Chinesians parachute down 83 million people in a single day. Despite countless casualties, they set up home and eliminate the competitive Martian life-form. Bennett meets, comes to love, and marries Terza, daughter of Scanner of Vomact (one of the descendants, presumably, of the vom Acht sisters who show up in minor roles throughout Smith’s fiction). “Think Blue, Count Two” is about Veesey, a young girl who is a crew backup on a long-term interstellar flight. Awakened en route, she tries to prevent violence between the male crew members, Trece and Talatashar. Out of jealousy, Talatashar overpowers Trece and Veesey, threatening to carry out unspeakable atrocities against them and all the passengers in cold storage. They are saved by a device that Veesey activates by remembering a poem. At their destination, the vast loneliness of space behind them, Veesey and Talatashar find that they are attracted to each other. “The Colonel Came Back from Nothing-at-All” concerns Colonel Harkening, who appears from nowhere and is unable to respond to stimuli. A young girl makes telepathic contact with the colonel, who has 2 been in space where faster-than-light travel is possible. His adventures bring humankind into the age of planoforming. In “From Gustible’s Planet,” the aliens from Gustible, the obnoxious Apicians, so love human food and liquor that they flock to Earth to gorge on its treats. Humans discover that the ducklike creatures are extraordinarily tasty, so the Apicians, to avoid being eaten, retreat to their home planet. In “Drunkboat” (with obvious allusions to Arthur Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat”), Lord Crudelta of the Instrumentality, to show the existence of space3, places Artyr Rambo a galaxy away from his beloved Elizabeth. To return to her, he must travel in space3, where movement is instantaneous from any spot to any other, no matter the distance. Rambo describes space3 as a realm of fantastic visions, though it is not a place he
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wants to revisit. The discovery of space3 brings humankind to the brink of a new age. Analysis The stories in this collection fill in some of the blanks in Cordwainer Smith’s future history, particularly events occurring in the forgotten First Age of Space and in the aftermath of the Ancient Wars. Smith gives details on that era, during which animals acquired human capabilities, speech in particular. These animals are similar to the beings that, in The Best of Cordwainer Smith (1975) and the novel Norstrilia (1975), are presented as the underpeople. The Instrumentality of the title is perhaps a theological term, indicating the power vested in the priest who carries out the will of God. In Smith’s work the Instrumentality is a priestly bureaucracy leading humankind through its travails. Although the stories of The Best of Cordwainer Smith are more important in characterizing the Instrumentality, The Instrumentality of Mankind fills in important details on its early history and its inner working. “War No. 81-Q” suggests a sterile, bureaucratized future, but the stories otherwise show the tremendous drama inherent in the future. Rogov’s wife stops unethical experiments when she sees the beautiful thing that the future will become. These stories show the power of love, a common theme in Smith’s work. For love, Laird forgos the rejuvenation that will extend his life. Dobyns Bennett finds love in the midst of 83 million parachuting Chinesians, love is behind Veesey’s dangerous situation in the depths of interstellar space, and Rambo jumps a galaxy to reach his beloved Elizabeth. The stories also celebrate simplicity and innocence. Rambo is a simple soul, and it is a child who is able to recover Colonel Harkening. The animal people in “Mark Elf” (1957) and “The Queen of the Afternoon” (1978) exude innocence. These two stories mark an evolution in Smith’s style. Written with the simplicity of a child’s tale, they elicit a rich imaginary world in which the improbable and the possible mix and become real. This is the essence of Smith’s work. —Steve Anderson
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Inter Ice Age 4 Professor Katsumi’s development of a computer that can predict the future provides a basis for exploring the dilemma of how to use that information
Author: Kobo Abe (1924-1993) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The mid-twentieth century Location: Tokyo, Japan First published: Daiyon kampyoki (1959; serial form, 1958-1959; English translation, 1970) The Story Inter Ice Age 4 is a thought-provoking, futuristic novel exploring the complications brought about by the development of a computer that can predict the future. As the novel begins, a computer that can make political predictions, named Moscow I, already has been developed. Professor Katsumi, at the Institute for Computer Technique (ICT), wants to build a similar machine of his own. He succeeds, and to parallel the Moscow machine, he names his machine ICT I. Frightened of the possible repercussions, the Japanese government bans application of the machine to any questions with political overtones. When Katsumi asks ICT I what to do, it suggests that it be tested on an individual because the government should not object to such a small-scale test. When Katsumi’s computer and its program are ready to be tested, the computer gives instructions that the person chosen to test the program must not know that he or she is being sought and that selection is to be random. It is determined ahead of time, by random choice, that the person will be male. Other “standards” dictate someone of “ordinary” appearance, but otherwise the choice, to be made by Katsumi and his colleague Tanomogi, is to be random. Katsumi and Tanomogi decide on a man they see in a small cafe. When the man leaves, they follow him to an apartment building, where they observe some unexplained shadows of two men and a woman through the window. As the hour grows late, they return home without discovering explanations. The next morning’s headlines reveal that the
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test subject, Tsuchida Susuma, has been murdered. ICT I still can read his mind, however, and the information that it reveals implicates Professor Katsumi himself in the murder. Meanwhile, other complications develop. Katsumi’s wife is forced to have an abortion, and a laboratory is found where fetuses are being turned into aquatic beings. The computer predicts a climactic shift, Inter Ice Age 4, that will put Earth’s surface under water; hence the need for aquatic adaptation of humans. It becomes evident that during this inter ice age to come, humans will be faced with two choices: to resort to something of a reverse evolution—back to fins and gills—or to drown and be obliterated in the process. Neither horn of the dilemma is palatable. As layers of unanswered questions continue to pile up, Katsumi intuitively senses some connection among the unexplained events but is unable to draw any conclusions. Meanwhile, the behavior of personnel in the ICT toward him seems strange, but this too is inexplicable. Katsumi becomes suspicious of everyone, no longer knowing whom he can trust. When ICT I finally reveals the blueprint of the future, Katsumi is not among those present. Upon inquiry, Katsumi is told, “No, Professor. You are long since. . . .” The developer of the computer has become its victim. It had predicted his opposition to development of an aquan form of human life and, through a Katsumi simulation developed within the computer, even hired an assassin to kill the real Katsumi. Katsumi thus is trapped within a conspiracy headed by himself, in simulated form. Analysis Inter Ice Age 4 belongs to the genre of science fiction because of its use of computer technology. Robots and other machines were popular vehicles for telling fantasy tales before the computer superseded some of them. In Fredric Brown’s “Etaoin Shrdlu” (1942), for example, a linotype machine comes to life after being animated by a technician from an alien civilization. Science fiction quickly made use of the computer when it appeared. Kobo Abe uses the computer to address the moral and philosophical complexity that arises when a machine makes available information that forces humans to face a dilemma: whether to cease to exist or instead to adapt as a nonhuman form of life. Inter Ice Age 4 addresses the question of human reaction to learning that catastrophe and total disruption of ordinary life are to occur. Death by drowning is an unattractive choice, but the alternative, regression to an earlier stage of evolution, is not viable to Katsumi. He cannot accept the notion that his unborn child, when
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aborted and sold to the fetus laboratory, will be turned into a fishlike creature. The plot employs a device common to Abe’s fiction: inversion of roles. Katsumi’s genius ironically becomes the vehicle of his defeat. The original Japanese version of the book, Daiyon kampyoki, was among Abe’s earliest works. E. Dale Saunder’s English translation did not appear until 1970. Abe, a novelist and dramatist, was at his peak during the 1960’s, though a number of his major works were not available in English translation until the 1970’s. Although others of his works contain bizarre situations and behavior, they are not science fiction as such. Inter Ice Age 4 shares themes with Abe’s other writing, in terms of dealing with life’s frightening and unnerving dilemmas and with feelings of isolation or alienation. Abe is considered to be one of Japan’s greatest modern writers. More than half of his longer works, including some plays, have been translated into English. Critics of the translated works have tended to verify the reputation that Japanese critics already had established for Abe. Because a translated work necessarily is judged in part by the quality of the translation, it is not always easy to separate the two. Abe’s translator also enjoys a reputation for excellence. —Victoria Price
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Inverted World An inhabitant of a city traveling perpetually through a strange hyperboloid world discovers the truth about his reality
Author: Christopher Priest (1943) Genre: Science fiction—closed universe Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The twenty-second century Location: Portugal First published: 1974 The Story The setting and notion behind this novel first appeared in a short story of the same title published in New Writings in SF 22 (1973), though the idea was more fully developed in the novel. The setting is Earth City, a curious structure that is winched along a set of rails that are perennially being removed from behind the city and replaced in front. The city must keep moving or it will suffer a terrible fate. What this fate is, and why, is revealed only gradually during the course of the novel. Helward Mann, having reached adulthood, is apprenticed to the Future guild, though he must first spend time working with each of the other guilds that are vital to the city’s survival. He begins with the track layers and learns that the city must keep moving in pursuit of “the Optimum,” though he does not yet know what the Optimum might be. He also discovers that the sun is a flattened disc from which infinitely long spikes protrude top and bottom. Later, Helward learns more about the threatening nature of the world when he escorts a group of native women back to their village. The further south from the city he goes, the more the landscape is distorted. A deep chasm that delayed the city while a bridge was built has turned into a narrow creek. The women start to grow shorter and fatter. He himself feels an almost irresistible pull, like centrifugal force, that nearly sweeps him away. There are time distortions as well, so that a journey of only a few subjective days in fact takes many months. Helward pieces together the information he has about the city and concludes that its inhabitants are survivors of an expedition from Earth on a hyperboloid planet where the ever-moving optimum is the only
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place where Earth-like conditions obtain. Elizabeth, whom Helward meets on one of his expeditions north of the city, reveals a different, more devastating truth: They are actually on Earth and are survivors of an experiment with a different sort of power made at the time of “the Crash.” The experiment has inverted their perceptions of their world. Analysis The opening sentence of this novel is “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles”; it has justly become one of the most famous in science fiction. In its skewed perception, it neatly encapsulates the radical and original idea that lies behind this book. The inverted world is one of the few truly original ideas to have been developed in contemporary science fiction. The slow revelation of the nature of the world is beautifully handled, and Helward’s journey to the South, full of vivid images, dramatically demonstrates both the nature and the threat of the world. Christopher Priest contrasts this closed universe with the closed society of the city, which, because of its isolation in a threatening environment, has become rigid and hierarchical. Helward starts by being opposed to the hierarchy and to the institutionalized secrecy, but as he learns more about the nature of his world he comes to accept the need for these restrictions, even though they come to separate him from his wife, Victoria. In a devastatingly effective coup de théâtre, Priest produces a final revelation that twists everything that has gone before. The more Helward has accepted the hierarchy, the less he is able to accept the truth about the real nature of his world. Elizabeth, the intruder from the normal world who appears at the end to reveal the truth about Earth City, is rather like a deus ex machina, nowhere near as fully realized as Helward or any of the other characters. Her explanation of the way the inhabitants of the city have been infected by their own source of power only ties off the loose ends. The real force of the ending lies in the fact that after their unknowing journey across Asia and Europe the inhabitants of the city have reached the shores of the Atlantic and can go no further: The optimum can never be achieved. Dating from early in his career, Inverted World is untypical of Priest’s work. His early novels, such as Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), were austere New Wave takes on traditional British tropes such as the catastrophe novel. His later books, such as A Dream of Wessex (1977), are challenging and disturbing examinations of the nature of identity in which the science-fictional ideas are often only tangential to the psychological depth. There are elements of both of these approaches in Inverted World.
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There is something coolly detached about the characterization that is typical of the British New Wave, for example, while the focus of the book is as much on the inverted world within Helward’s mind as it is on the world around him. There is an exuberance in the sheer science-fictional invention of the book that Priest has not approached, or even attempted, before or since. It is not his best book, for his writing has steadily gained greater depth and power as his career has progressed, but it remains one of his most popular. It won the British Science Fiction Association Award and is one of the key works of postwar British science fiction. —Paul Kincaid
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The Invisible Man A demented research chemist invents a way to become invisible hoping that it will give him unlimited power, but he discovers that his invisibility limits his freedom and eventually unhinges his mind
Author: H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946) Genre: Science fiction—superbeing Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late nineteenth century Location: Rural Sussex, England First published: 1897 The Story The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance begins on a wintry day in February. A mysterious, oddly dressed stranger arrives at the Coach and Horses pub in the town of Iping in rural Sussex. His entire body is covered: Even his face is swathed in a muffler, and his eyes are hidden behind dark glasses. Although the landlady and her husband, the Halls, are curious about his bizarre appearance, they readily agree to rent him a room because it is the off-season. The next day, the stranger’s luggage arrives, consisting of several crates of chemicals and books. Because of his furtive and solitary nature, the stranger quickly becomes the object of local gossip. Mrs. Hall, who believes he has been in a horrible disfiguring accident, soon perceives unbelievable things in her guest’s eccentricities. It appears that he has no lower half to his jaw, for example, and as his brusqueness becomes more violent, she suspects that there is more to his behavior than can be explained by mere physical deformity. After he runs out of money, a rash of petty thefts in the village point to the strange lodger as the culprit. His invisibility finally is discovered when Mrs. Hall calls in Jaffers, the local constable, to evict him for not paying his bill. The village inhabitants panic. Naked and on the run, the invisible man coerces a tramp, Thomas Marvel, to aid him in his escape. Marvel retrieves three scientific notebooks from the Coach and Horses and steals money for the fugitive. As news of the invisible man spreads around the countryside, he makes his
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way to Port Stowe, where he finds refuge with an old university mate of his, Dr. Kemp. Kemp harbors his friend, who is revealed to be named Griffin, and is fascinated by the achievement of his former classmate. Kemp becomes alarmed, however, as Griffin describes in gruesome detail the scientific experiments he carried out to perfect his invisibility and how, in his single-minded pursuit of his discoveries, he stole money from his father, causing his bankruptcy and eventually his death, events for which he seems to feel little remorse. It is apparent that the process has unhinged Griffin’s mind as well as transforming his body. As Griffin begins to rail about his newly found power over others and proposes a reign of terror to be visited by him on the general population in retaliation for the general neglect of his achievements, Kemp decides to turn him over to the authorities. Griffin, however, escapes once again and in a gratuitous act murders a man in broad daylight. Because of his betrayal, Kemp now becomes the object of Griffin’s wrath. In cooperation with the police, he sets himself up as a decoy. The invisible man finally is cornered and killed by a smashing blow from a worker’s An advertising poster for James Whale’s film production of The Invisible Man, spade. In death, he loses his instarring Claude Rains and Gloria Stuart. visibility and reappears. The novel ends with a strange epilogue. The tramp, Marvel, with the money he stole for Griffin, buys a pub, which he names The Invisible Man. He regales his customers with tales of his exploits. After hours, Marvel peruses Griffin’s notebooks, which contain his scientific notes. Marvel has hidden these notebooks from the police and Dr. Kemp. In the solitude of his pub, he dreams of rediscovering the formula for invisibility and achieving the power and wealth he assumes that such a state would afford.
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Analysis H. G. Wells wrote five “scientific romances” in the 1890’s. It is on these novels that his reputation largely rests. The Invisible Man is the third, nestled between The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), it is a cautionary tale of how science can get out of control and do more harm than good. Although Wells often is called the inventor of science fiction, The Invisible Man is not really a story of what is scientifically possible but rather is a moral romance about the corruption of power. As a contemporary critic remarked, the imagination is everything, the science nothing. Unlike Jules Verne, with whom he is often compared, Wells was less concerned with the accuracy of his science than with the consequences of it. Wells was firmly anchored in the values and the preoccupations of his time, a period of intense speculation characterized by a feeling of weariness with the past and a foreboding about the future. There was a sense that the whole elaborate Victorian order was teetering on the brink of collapse, both intellectually and socially. Fin de siècle attitudes appeared in the literary work of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and, most obviously, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas of the Übermensch figure prominently in The Invisible Man. The theories of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx that helped to overturn the intellectual and moral certainties of the nineteenth century and shaped the new world of the twentieth also can be found in Wells’s early romances. The Invisible Man contains a blend of fantasy and the everyday. It is a comic novel that plays with rural stereotypes of narrow-mindedness and credulity and yet does so with the serious intent of exposing the fragile security of modern life. As Griffin’s invisibility allows animal instincts to surface in him, the threat to public safety stampedes the crowd. Griffin violates the ethics of modern science by pursuing knowledge as a means to power and not for its own sake. Like Dr. Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Griffin releases in himself a dark side normally held in check by civilized codes of conduct. The Invisible Man contains a fable in which Wells examines the myths of nineteenth century culture, particularly the hubris of science, with its pretensions of infallibility and progress. It is a nervous book, full of fear concerning collapse of the sureties of the past and yet apprehensive about the possibilities for the future. —Charles L. P. Silet
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The Iron Dragon’s Daughter A human girl grows up in a harsh, industrialized fairyland
Author: Michael Swanwick (1950Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1990’s Location: Faerie First published: 1994
)
The Story Jane, a human changeling, is a child laborer in a grim factory in Faerie, where dragons, which are huge, sentient war machines, are manufactured. Her companions there are supernatural beings lead by Rooster, a Puck-like figure who plots to use witchcraft to kill their cruel overseer, Blugg. While attempting to steal Blugg’s nail parings from his office in order to carry out the murder, Jane finds and takes a grimoire containing the specifications for a dragon. Jane begins memorizing the grimoire in order to take power over a dragon who is mentally contacting her. During a test of new equipment, both Blugg and Rooster are killed. Jane forces the dragon’s true name, Melanchthon, from him, and together they escape from the factory. Finally free, Jane lives secretly with the dragon, attends school, and learns shoplifting from Rat-snickle. Melanchthon desires that she become educated so she can become an engineer and complete his repairs. She must remain a virgin in order to work on him. Jane meets Peter of the Hillside and Gwenhidwy the Green, the Wicker Queen. At year’s end, Gwen is to be a human sacrifice and Peter will be castrated, but in the intervening year she can do or have anything she wants. Peter, although he loves Gwen, cannot have sex with her; he must remain a virgin in order to be her “sin eater,” vicariously suffering Gwen’s pain and guilt during her final year of life. Because Jane loves Peter, she seduces him and keeps him from the sacrifice. She also discovers that, like Rooster, his true name is Tetigistus. Gwen is burned to death on schedule, with a substitute partner. Peter later hangs himself in guilt over not going through with the sacrifice. Melanchthon abandons Jane, because she is no longer a virgin.
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Next, Jane attends a university, where she majors in alchemy. Her studies do not go well, and the “Teind” is coming, an anarchistic holiday in which one tenth of everything—including human life—is sacrificed. If Jane does not shape up, she will be on the Teind list. Fortunately, Jane’s classmate Sirin tells her how to perform alchemical experiments successfully through sex magic. Jane meets Puck Aleshire, a young man similar to Peter and Rooster. She is drawn to him but frightened of the consequences. She also begins visiting her human mother in dreams and tells her that she is studying to return to the human world. Because Jane needs money, she attempts to burglarize the elf-lord Galiagante. He captures her but spares her, promising employment if she survives the Teind. Later, Jane unexpectedly discovers Melanchthon. He invites her to join him as pilot in an assault on the Goddess herself, the seemingly malevolent creator of Jane’s universe and her perverse fate. She refuses, and at that moment the Teind begins, Jane is swept along by a mob and becomes part of it. She is rescued from a battle by Puck, who is later killed in a duel. Sirin also is killed. Both were avatars, or incarnations, of Rooster/Peter and Gwen. Again Jane meets Melanchthon, who insists that the Goddess is only a cover for the meaninglessness of the universe and that it is the universe itself that he wishes to destroy. Jane finally agrees to help. In her post-Teind role as a sycophant to Galiagante, Jane meets the dragon-pilot Rocket, the final avatar of Rooster/Peter/Puck. They fall in love and begin an affair. Jane returns from their tryst to find Melanchthon under attack and ready to begin the flight to Spiral Castle, the Goddess’s stronghold. Rocket and his dragon squadron follow, and Jane kills him in the pursuit. Melanchthon is destroyed before reaching the castle. Jane is received in the castle by the Goddess in the form of Jane’s mother, Sylvia, and is returned to her mortal body on Earth. Analysis The opening of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter conveys an atmosphere reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s work, with its exploited children and “dark, Satanic mills.” The book is replete with references to other works of the fantastic, drawn from all eras. For example, Dr. Nemesis, Jane’s alchemy professor, was a student of the unfortunate Friar Bungay, the hero of the Renaissance play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, in which an oracular brass head is brought to life. On another occasion, Jane receives a memo from the Office of Penitence and Truth, a title of the torturer’s guild in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun sequence (1980-1983). There are also
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passing references to Ys (setting for a fantasy by Poul Anderson), Lyonesse (Jack Vance), and a host of other places drawn from modern fantasy and traditional folklore. Edward James defines the science-fiction genre of cyberpunk as a combination of “cyber,” from cybernetics, the study of systems in machines and animals, and “punk,” from 1970’s rock terminology referring to aggressive, alienated, antiestablishment youth. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter has been called “fairypunk”: It takes many elements of traditional fantasy and fuses them with cyberpunk sensibilities and some of the motifs and concerns of urban fantasy. It shares with cyberpunk the gritty, industrial, urban settings; an aggressive pop-fiction sexuality; and a concern with the brand-name details of imaginary technological systems. In this case, the latter is a system of magic, consistent within its own frame of reference, that makes playful use of alchemical, hermetic, tantric, kabbalistic, and other esoteric systems, as well as every type of fairy lore imaginable. The whole is spiced with references to drugs and technology, imaginatively integrated with the fierce, cold elves of medieval legend. —George E. Nicholas
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Islands in the Net Laura Webster travels in many lands attempting to avert bloody wars and a nuclear attack in a postmillennial age supposedly devoid of bullets and bombs
Author: Bruce Sterling (1954) Genre: Science fiction—extrapolatory Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 2022-c. 2025 Location: Various locations on Earth First published: 1988 The Story Laura and David Webster, along with a small staff, run a guest house in Galveston, Texas, for the Rizome firm, a quasi-communal corporation structured loosely around a Japanese feudal system. David and Laura are associates of this multinational firm and have become coordinators to rear a family (they have an infant daughter, Loretta) and to make themselves visible to the Rizome dignitaries who vacation at the guest house. Both Laura and David are on the fast track to success in their occupations when the company informs them that they will be hosting special guests for a conference. Through Emily, a close friend in Rizome, Laura learns these guests are data pirates, people who live on “islands” outside the established Net structure, stealing and selling data to whoever is willing to buy it. Laura soon finds herself entwined in the debates among three data pirate factions and Rizome. The stakes are raised when, during the night, a Grenadian representative at the conference, a Rastafarian named Malcolm, is shot to death by a flying assassin drone as Laura watches. A terrorist group claims responsibility, but Grenada blames its rival data pirate, Singapore. Laura perceives an obligation, as a Rizome associate, to go to Grenada and help defuse the situation. This quickly involves Laura in an adventure that takes her from Grenada to Singapore to Africa and finally back to Galveston and the Rizome headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The journey takes a little more than two years. During this time, Laura develops as an individual and as a member of humanity. She is ex-
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posed to myriad cultures and ideologies throughout her travels. By the end of the novel, Laura has matured. When she returns to her husband and child, she finds that her life will never be the same. Islands in the Net is thus a twenty-first century, feminist Bildungsroman. Analysis In an interview with Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies (1990), Bruce Sterling notes that Islands in the Net is “not really cyberpunk.” Furthermore, Sterling admits that he either refutes or manipulates many of the tenets of cyberpunk and knows that he will be accused of trying to change or expand the nature of cyberpunk fiction rather than having critics recognize his novels simply as stories about the future. In most cases, Sterling has been correct in this assertion—most critics link this novel to the cyberpunk genre. It is, however, more about the future than it is a traditional cyberpunk novel. There is “cyber,” to some extent, in Islands in the Net, but there is no “punk,” except for a few minor characters: Sticky, a Grenadian soldier/spy who can become an indestructible weapon by eating yogurt and activating bacteria in his stomach, and Carlotta, a New Age whore/ nun of the Church of Ishtar who stays strung out on a romance-inducing drug. Instead of typical cyberpunk characters, the novel uses a developing woman in the tradition of many Bildungsroman novels. Laura uses the Net as a means of communication, but she employs devices such as a portable wristwatch/monitor and a computer console to interact with it. These devices are more primitive than those typical in cyberpunk fiction. Laura uses technology no more or less than other corporate individuals in the novel. Readers get a sense of cutting-edge technology, such as the video glasses that Laura and David wear in Grenada when they are “on-line” for Rizome, but this technology is new and expensive. It is not available to the everyday street hustler or consumer, as it is in most cyberpunk worlds. Islands in the Net has no brain implants, prosthetic devices, or genetic planning in its mainstream world. Technological breakthroughs do occur in the data havens, such as Grenada’s darkening suntan lotion (which Rizome steals and, later, markets) and the black-market hormonal treatments in Singapore, but, for the most part, the world is not much different from that of today. Sterling, in the McCaffery interview, correctly asserts that Islands in the Net will date quickly. The novel refers to the Soviet Union, which dissolved less than a decade after the novel was published, and the Internet
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of the real world has made some of the concepts of the fictional Net familiar to readers rather than being primarily speculative, as they were when the novel was published. The human interactions that Sterling develops throughout the work, however, are what make this novel endure. Readers take part in Laura’s inner struggles with the many ideologies that she must confront, then accept or deny. Most important, on her journey Laura experiences people, even ones not connected to information as she knows it, such as the inhabitants of Africa, which is a true “island” surrounded by a sea of inaccessible Net. She learns, accepts, and is even willing to die for some ideologies. Laura confronts the unknown terror of nuclear war and learns what it is to be human and vulnerable. Sterling leaves readers with the feeling that Laura is a changed and enlightened individual. By doing this, he suggests that others who simply embrace technology and view it as progress can change. Finally, Sterling implies that the world is a somewhat better place for what Laura has done. Through the media, the Net’s “army,” she is able to expose the inner workings of the corrupted powers in the world. The novel does not espouse that utopia can be reached; rather, it suggests that technology is, in its own way, a powerful ideology to be studied before, and if, it is embraced. —Alan I. Rea, Jr.
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Journey to the Center of the Earth A German scientist, his nephew, and their guide enter a volcano in Iceland, travel toward the center of the earth, and exit through a volcano in Italy
Author: Jules Verne (1828-1905) Genre: Science fiction—planetary romance Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1863 Location: Germany, Iceland, the volcanic island of Stromboli, and inside Earth First published: Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; English translation as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1872) The Story The three major characters in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth are a German mineralogist and geologist named Otto Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel, and their Icelandic guide, Hans. This novel is a firstperson narrative told from Axel’s point of view. Otto Lidenbrock is a stereotypical scientist, obsessed with his research projects. He has little understanding of or patience with those who do not share his enthusiasm for scientific discoveries. His nephew Axel has a solid classical education, but his main interest in life is his love for Graüben, Lidenbrock’s goddaughter. Lidenbrock’s hobby is collecting old books and manuscripts. One day, he discovers a mysterious message written in Old Icelandic by a sixteenth century scientist named Arne Saknussemm. Axel decodes this message for his uncle. They learn that Saknussemm claimed to have traveled from an Icelandic volcano toward the hollow center of the earth. Lidenbrock and Axel soon realize that no one before them had decoded Saknussemm’s message. They decide to travel to Iceland and attempt to replicate Saknussemm’s journey to the center of the earth. After an arduous boat ride to Iceland, they hire a temperamental guide named Hans. The three of them go into the Mount Sneffels volcano in Iceland and discover an extraordinary world hidden beneath the crust of the earth. To their amazement, they observe massive mushrooms, plants, and fossils, along with an extensive series of lakes and
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Jules Verne. (Library of Congress)
rivers. Several times, as they explore passages that lead nowhere, they almost run out of water, but each time they eventually find a path that appears to take them closer to the center of the earth. Near the end of the novel, Lidenbrock, Axel, and Hans realize that they have begun to travel back toward the surface. When they exit from a volcano, they find themselves not in Iceland but rather on the volcanic island of Stromboli, near Sicily. After Lidenbrock and Axel return to Hamburg, Germany, the geologist resumes his scientific research and Axel marries Graüben. Analysis Although Verne’s career as a writer had begun in 1850, his works enjoyed little popular success before the publication of Journey to the Center of the Earth in November, 1864. The novel sold so well that his Parisian publisher, Jules Hetzel, offered Verne a 50 percent increase in payments for all future novels. Hetzel had no qualms about paying three thousand French francs per novel because he believed that Verne’s future novels
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also would sell well. This significant increase in his earnings enabled Verne to resign his job as a stockbroker. He spent the remaining years of his life as a full-time writer of science-fiction novels. His work remained popular both in France and around the world. Verne’s publisher at first thought that Journey to the Center of the Earth and Verne’s many other science-fiction novels describing fantastic voyages would appeal almost exclusively to young children. Adult readers, however, also discovered much of interest in Verne’s writings, and sales of Verne’s books were higher than expected. A superficial reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth or other, equally popular novels by Verne such as From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) might make them appear to be little more than highly fanciful but almost unbelievable descriptions of trips to distant places in outer space, under the water, or under Earth’s crust. The novels, however, also reveal profound psychological insights into the effects of these mysterious voyages on their characters. Journey to the Center of the Earth is not an objective thirdperson narrative that describes an unsuccessful effort to find the center of the earth but rather a first-person narrative. This form helps Verne to show how a terrifying trip transformed the narrator, Axel, from an immature young man into a thoughtful and psychologically stable adult. Axel’s entrance into the Mount Sneffels volcano constitutes the beginning of his voyage of self-discovery. He is forced to face his fear of dying, his alienation from his obsessive Uncle Otto, and his doubts about the depth of his feelings for his girlfriend, Graüben. Several times during the voyage, Axel is separated from his companions. This solitude gives him the opportunity to reflect seriously on the meaning of his existence. Unlike his blindly optimistic uncle, Axel is not at all certain that he will not lose his life in this dangerous effort to prove the validity of Saknussemm’s double hypothesis that Earth is hollow and that, therefore, people can travel to its center. Axel comes to realize that this voyage into a volcano represents a voyage into the unknown, of which he is afraid. By means of this fictional voyage, Verne helps readers to deal with the hidden and mysterious elements in their own personalities and psyches. The title of William Butcher’s Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self (1990) suggests the profound psychological voyage of selfdiscovery that Axel undertook. Readers can experience such self-discovery for themselves when they appreciate the many levels of meaning in Verne’s novel. —Edmund J. Campion
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The King of Elfland’s Daughter The Lord of Erl sends his son Alveric on a quest to marry the King of Elfland’s daughter and bring magic back to Erl
Author: Lord Dunsany (Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett, 1878-1957) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Indeterminate Location: Erl, a village in Elfland First published: 1924 The Story A poet, novelist, and playwright (he worked with William Butler Yeats at the Abbey Theatre), Lord Dunsany draws upon Irish fable and myth to situate the story of The King of Elfland’s Daughter. The novel opens with the Parliament of Erl asking for a “magic lord” to rule them because for seven hundred years there has been “no new thing.” To accommodate them, their present Lord asks his son Alveric to “pass the fields we know” into Elfland in order to marry Lirazel, the king’s daughter. Alveric’s father gives him his ancient battle sword for his journey, but Alveric knows that only a magical sword can prevail against the King of Elfland. He visits the witch Ziroonderel, who fashions a new enchanted sword from thunderbolts. Traveling east to the Elfin Mountains along the border of Elfland, Alveric stops at an old leatherworker’s cottage to obtain a scabbard for his magical sword. The old man makes the scabbard but refuses to discuss matters pertaining to Elfland. Alveric thanks him for his hospitality and strides away. Once inside Elfland, Alveric succeeds in fighting Lirazel’s guards. Lirazel falls in love with Alveric’s powerful grace and chivalry, and she elopes with him back to Erl. Unfortunately, Lirazel cannot easily adjust to the vastly different customs of Alveric’s people or to Earth’s passage of time. She never quite fits into Erl’s community. When their child Orion is born, the witch Ziroonderel becomes his nurse and protects him with her magic. The King of Elfland, recognizing that his daughter will age and eventually die on Earth, writes a powerful spell in order to call her back to Elfland. He hands it to the troll Lurulu and orders him to cross the bor-
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der and give the rune scroll to the princess. Lirazel takes the scroll and locks it in a casket; she resists reading it, instinctively knowing that its enormous power can reach beyond the confines of Elfland and draw her back. Nevertheless, when Alveric forces her to worship “Christom things,” she intuits that she can never be happy in Erl and finally reads the scroll. A wind from Elfland releases her from the materiality of Earth and blows her back to Elfland, away from “the fields we know.” Although the quest clearly is futile, Alveric remains determined to reclaim his elfish bride and the magic he has lost. He embarks on a quest for the Elfin Mountains and leaves Orion in the care of Ziroonderel. His magic sword, having once crossed the border, now gives away his presence. The King of Elfland makes the Elfin border ebb so that Alveric, obsessed with the retrieval of Lirazel, is doomed to wander without hope of success, his sword’s magic warning the king of his approach. Orion, as his name suggests, becomes a hunter and eventually leads Erl. Orion’s magical nature ultimately asLord Dunsany. (Library of Congress) serts itself when he recruits Lurulu and other Elfland trolls in hunting unicorns near the border. The Parliament of Erl, once solicitous of magic, begins to realize that Orion’s nature draws magical creatures across the border. Afraid of “overmuch magic,” they plead with Ziroonderel to give them a spell against the increasing presence of witchery. When she refuses, they go the Christian friar (Freer) to curse the magic Orion attracts and protect them from its influence. Lirazel, though secure once again in Elfland, still longs for the earthly things she has abandoned, particularly her husband and her son. She pleads with her father for the last great rune that will call them across the border and into her safekeeping. Although reluctant to give up his great-
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est weapon against the passage of time and the power of material things, he relents. With the last of his runes, the king calls Orion and Alveric back to Lirazel and extends the boundary of Elfland into Erl until Erl passes beyond “the fields we know” and “out of all remembrance of men.” Only the holy place of the Freer and his garden remain untouched by the king’s rune. Analysis Dunsany’s novel illustrates the problematic nature of crossing borders. Once intermingled, Elfland and Earth influence each other in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways. Orion’s mixed heritage dissolves the boundaries between Earth and Elfland, collapsing the traditional distinctions between the pragmatics of everyday life and the magical tug of the imagination. When the Parliament of Erl arrogantly wishes to incorporate magic within Earth’s border, its members fail to foresee that by its very nature magic cannot be easily tamed or relinquished. Nor, perhaps, should it be. Ziroonderel explains to the members of Parliament who fear “overmuch magic” that magic is the “spice and essence of life, its ornament and its splendor.” Erl’s citizens rightly desire change through magic; they wrongly fear it. They also face the danger of the powerful draw of Elfland’s enchantments. The King of Elfland recognizes this danger and warns Lirazel that Elfland will have no measures left against the ruthless march of Earth’s material things and of men like the Freer who hate the spice and splendor of Elfland. Because of his love for his daughter, he brings forth the great rune, but he fears the consequences. The story, far from having a happy, fairy-tale ending, concludes ambiguously. Erl has been colonized by Elfland and has passed out of historical memory. The interplay between Earth and Elfland, represented in the creation of Orion, cannot ever be truly balanced. Overpowered for now, Earth abides for other Alverics, other questers to enter Elfland and perhaps destroy it. —Jeffrey Cass
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The Land of Laughs Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner travel to a small Missouri town to write a biography of Marshall France, a dead but still famous children’s book author, and find that France had the power to write his characters into life
Author: Jonathan Carroll (1949Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1970’s Location: Galen, Missouri First published: 1980
)
The Story The Land of Laughs was Jonathan Carroll’s first published novel. When it first appeared, it was misleadingly packaged as a juvenile book, most likely because one of the main characters is a writer of children’s stories. It was not until a paperback edition of The Land of Laughs appeared in 1983 that the book began to earn more critical attention, and it has since become something of a cult classic. Thomas Abbey, a man in his mid-thirties who teaches English at a boys’ prep school, is trying to deal with being the son of a famous actor who died in a plane crash. He leads a solitary life, wrapped up in his hobbies of collecting masks and the written works of Marshall France, a dead but still famous children’s book author who captured the imagination of both children and adults with his vivid imagery and poetic prose. Abbey meets Saxony Gardner, a woman who shares his enthusiasm for France’s work. With her encouragement, he decides to write a biography of France. Together they travel to Galen, Missouri, the small town where France spent the later years of his life. After obtaining permission from Anna France, the writer’s daughter, to begin their research, Abbey and Gardner rent rooms in the town and begin to explore Galen and meet its inhabitants. Gradually, they realize there is something odd about the little town. Abbey witnesses a boy getting hit by a car and is shocked that the townspeople are far less concerned about the boy’s life than about the identity
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of the car’s driver. Stranger and stranger things happen, until one day Abbey hears a dog talking in its sleep. He confronts Anna, who confesses that her father wrote an unfinished work detailing the lives of every resident of Galen through the year 3014. All the townspeople except Anna and a man named Richard Lee are France’s creations rather than normal people. Abbey also learns that France died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and the events chronicled in his journals are no longer happening precisely as they should—for example, the boy was supposed to be hit by a car and die, but the wrong person hit him. Anna believes that if Abbey can write a biography of France that truly catches the man’s spirit, Abbey will be able to continue the future history of Galen and ensure that the townspeople live on as France envisioned. Caught up in the unbelievable events happening all around him, Abbey plunges into writing the biography and begins an affair with Anna behind Gardner’s back. Gardner, hurt by Abbey’s infidelity, leaves town to think things over but comes back as Abbey finishes the chapter detailing France’s arrival in Galen by train years earlier. The townspeople plan a party at the train station, supposedly to celebrate Abbey’s progress on the biography. As Abbey leaves the rented house to join them, the house explodes and Gardner is killed. Abbey realizes that Galen’s inhabitants planted the bomb. They no longer need Abbey and Gardner, because Abbey has written Marshall France back into being. The party at the train station actually was a welcoming celebration for the re-created France. Mourning Gardner’s death, Abbey flees to Europe, where he eventually uses his newly discovered talent to write his father’s biography, bringing him back to life to make peace with him.
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Analysis Since the beginning of his career, Carroll has baffled readers and literary critics, who are unsure whether to classify his work as fantasy or mainstream. The term “Magical Realism,” which became more prevalent after Carroll began publishing, seems to suit his work best, as his novels all have in common a seemingly normal world in which the main character begins discovering magical and often dark secrets. Using the techniques of Magical Realism, Carroll, along with other writers such as John Crowley, has been successful in blurring the distinction between mainstream and fantasy to create a unique niche in fantastic literature. Following The Land of Laughs, Carroll published several novels, as well as a collection of short stories, in a similar vein. He has earned a small but dedicated following of readers. In many ways, The Land of Laughs is a typical example of Carroll’s writing. He employs devices and themes that are developed further in his later novels, such as talking animals (especially dogs), characters trying to deal with the burden of having famous parents or of being famous themselves, and complicated love triangles. It is obvious that The Land of Laughs is one of Carroll’s early efforts. Although the people of Galen hide a secret that is revealed to be somewhat sinister, Carroll’s later books address even darker issues, such as abortion, death, and disfigurement, as well as such larger concerns as religion and humanity’s place in the world. It is also typical of Carroll’s work that, unlike in popular fiction, the reader cannot assume that the main characters will survive unharmed. Carroll is quite willing to kill a major character if it suits his purpose. The Land of Laughs provides a bit of insight into Carroll’s personal life. Galen is based on a small Missouri town called Times Beach, where Carroll lived for a year before moving overseas to Vienna, Austria, the setting of several of his later novels. This tendency to use reality as a basis for his fiction, along with his ability to invoke a sense of whimsy, has helped Carroll create effective works of Magical Realism. —Amy Sisson
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Last and First Men A history of the human race from the twentieth century to the death of the Sun
Author: (William) Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1918 to two billion years in the future Location: Earth, Venus, and Neptune First published: 1930 The Story Last and First Men is not technically a novel; it has no formal plot or conventional character development. Instead, it describes the evolution of the entire human race from shortly after World War I until the death of humanity on Neptune, two billion years later. Olaf Stapledon numbers the races and species of humanity as they succeed one another, from the First Men (his generation) through the Eighteenth, a race of superbeings. The First Men collapse as a result of an energy crisis and germ warfare. After a long dark age, a Patagonian civilization develops, but it succumbs to a vast industrial accident. Eventually, the Second Men evolve. They are very intelligent but are exhausted by an ages-long struggle with Martians. The Third Men have a passion for genetics, which they develop into a religious art and use to create the Fourth Men, huge, immobile, telepathic brains. Cold and amoral, the Great Brains destroy their own makers and create the Fifth Men, who are telepathic superbeings. This race is the pinnacle of humanity on Earth. The Fifth Men create an economic and scientific utopia lasting thousands of millennia. They begin the telepathic exploration of time and discover that the past still exists; in a sense, nothing ever perishes. This realization causes a racial depression, because the anguish of the past is never finished. Discovering that the Moon will crash into Earth, they develop spaceflight and settle Venus. The indigenous Venusians are exterminated, inducing in the Fifth Men a spiritual schizophrenia of guilt. On Venus, there emerges a winged species, the Seventh Men. Pursued and persecuted by nonfliers, they commit mass suicide. Their succes-
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sors, the Eighth Men, discover that the sun will flare into a minor nova. They design the Ninth Men to survive them by colonizing Neptune. Humanity endures on Neptune through ten species and one billion years. There the Eighteenth Men are created as the ultimate development of the human race. Their spacefaring utopian civilization is described briefly, including their attempt to increase the intelligence of the species through establishment of sexually and telepathically linked groups of ninety-six members. Occasionally these group minds link and awake to a single race consciousness. The Eighteenth Men hope that, above the race mind, a universal soul will awake, a godlike mind whose understanding of ultimate purpose will redeem the universe from tragic futility. The Eighteenth Men discover that a nearby star will become a supernova, finally extinguishing the human race. They undertake a project to seed the galaxy with life, in the hope that something of humanity will be preserved. Analysis Stapledon is sometimes considered to be H. G. Wells’s successor in the British science-fiction tradition. When Last and First Men appeared, science fiction as a formal genre was only a few years old. Stapledon was unfamiliar with it and was not interested in writing a science-fiction novel. Last and First Men is an extended philosophical meditation combined with wild and entertaining flights of the imagination. Stapledon is not concerned with technological advance, a point that may seem odd in the context of a century fixated on technology and within a novel projecting the future for billions of years. As far as Stapledon is concerned, technology and civilization are only marginally connected. Each civilization Stapledon describes is fundamentally concerned with spiritual or philosophical values, and their supreme crises are those of the spirit. The book’s emphasis on spiritual growth focuses on detachment, learning to appreciate one’s place against the immensity of space and time, and coming to accept that place rather than railing against it. For example, there is the speech of the Divine Boy, the last great prophet of the First Men, who tells his listeners to see life as a game, an aesthetic experience. Games, he says, are played to win, but players come to care more for the game itself than for victory in it. Making the same point and drawing out the philosophic thread that binds the book, the final pages are devoted to the words of the last-born of the Eighteenth Men. A nearby sun is becoming a nova, dooming the
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human race, but the youngest living human, like the Divine Boy, achieves full awareness of the spirit, the end to which all of human history has been directed. He does not curse his fate. The forces of nature and fate that are consuming the human race will somehow make use of humanity’s destruction. Entire species of humanity have struggled to compass these insights throughout the book, but none, not even the Eighteenth Men, completely succeeds. Their race mind sees the universe full of “extreme subtlety and extreme beauty. At the same time we often have of it an impression of unspeakable horror.” The attempt to affirm both aspects is the book’s ultimate theme. —George E. Nicholas
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The Left Hand of Darkness A prophetic look at gender differences on a planet populated by hermaphrodites
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The distant future Location: Karhide and Orgoreyn, competing countries on the planet Gethen, also known as Winter because of its ice age First published: 1969 The Story The Left Hand of Darkness is a report from representative Genly Ai to the Ekumen of Known Worlds, an organization of about eighty planets clearly analogous to the United Nations. Ai has been sent to enlist the two hostile countries of the planet Gethen, Karhide and Orgoreyn, to join the Ekumen. He needs a formal guarantee of welcome for his orbiting spaceship and the Ekumen representatives therein. This requirement is complicated for the ill-at-ease Ai by the dislike between Karhide and Orgoreyn, by their unsettled internal political states, and especially by the sexual ambiguity of the people of this world. They are hermaphroditic, combining both female and male sexual characteristics and playing one or the other sexual role at different points in their lives, depending on complex psychohormonal circumstances. The Gethenians’ competing governments are a challenge for Ai. His Terran reliance on sexual identity as a basis for forming relations of trust with another human offers no guidance on Gethen, only confusion and distrust. Estraven, the head minister to the king of Karhide, is banished, ending Ai’s hopes of a friendly reception. The Terran envoy feels little for the exiled ally on whom he had pinned his hopes. Seers known as “Foretellers” predict that Gethen will join the Ekumen within five years. Hopeful of a better reception elsewhere, Ai moves from the medievalflavored monarchy of Karhide to the bureaucratic country of Orgoreyn, a seemingly orderly and thoroughly organized nation-state reminiscent of both ancient Egypt in its monolithic building style and the Soviet Union in its centralized systems and icebound prison camps for freethinkers.
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Ai fails there as well, even though he has the support of Estraven, who has been granted an uncertain refugee status. Ai sides with the Open Trade Faction, a losing political movement, and is sent to a frozen labor camp similar to Soviet Siberia. Estraven rescues him, and both begin an arduous and hazardous trek across the Gobrin Ice that is the contested land between the two countries. Estraven’s knowhow and Gethenian coldweather gear make for a successful crossing. Finally, Ai can call in his spaceship, for the Orgoreyn leaders have trapped themselves in a lie by reporting Ai’s “accidental” death. Karhide’s king can gain an advantage on Orgoreyn by welcoming Ekumen. Lord Tibe of Karhide has Estraven killed because he had been exiled under sentence of death. Ai’s mission therefore is successUrsula K. Le Guin. (Margaret Chodos) ful, but at the sacrifice of his new friend. The book ends with Ai meeting Estraven’s parent (Gethenians do not mate for life) and child, both androgynous, and telling them of his friendship with Estraven on the ice. The implication is that Ai has come to accept the humanity of people without clear gender. Analysis The prophetic insight of The Left Hand of Darkness lies in its exploration of what came to be called gender issues. As Ursula Le Guin herself has said, in 1969 the feminist movement was only beginning, and even gender bias in language—she uses “he” throughout for the hermaphroditic Gethenians—had not been investigated. The real difference between men and women, however, was an elemental question for Le Guin and other feminist thinkers of that time. Her “thought experiment” of having a hapless Terran male adrift in a world with no gender markers was inspired. Ai’s discomfort at having no clues to guide his relationships is fascinating and instructive. He suffers far greater unease than he would have
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if confronted with a conventionally alien life-form. The book captures the common human process of perceiving a new acquaintance: The sexual shell often disappears and, over time, the inner, sexless personality emerges. To confront the personality without the matrix of gender, as Ai does, can be frightening. Ai’s accommodation to this new perspective is truly humane: To Ai, Estraven becomes familiar yet alien, reassuring yet finally mysterious, like another human. Le Guin thus makes her point about gender differences. The novel involves far more than gender twisting. The two societies of Karhide and Orgoreyn are wonderfully conceived, evocative of familiar societies while retaining their distinct alien identity. Karhide is medieval and monarchical, a traditional society still youthful in the stiff, independent rectitude of its citizens, a country vaguely reminiscent of Eastern Europe. In perfect contrast is Orgoreyn. Its people have chosen the completely different route of overorganization into bureaucratic apparatus, and the initially benign appearance of the society turns out to be a cover for secret police and prison camps. The two societies inevitably suggest the contrast of the disorderly individualism and frontier ethic of the United States in juxtaposition with the collectivism and group consciousness of the former Soviet Union, with its Potemkin villages and gulags in the snow. Religions also are contrasted. Handdara, the faith practiced in Karhide, is an Eastern type of religion stressing a yin and yang opposition: “Light is the left hand of darkness/ and darkness the right hand of light.” Yomesh, found mainly in Orgoreyn, is more in the Western tradition of a revealed faith based on a prophet, with truth capable of being distinguished from illusion. The contrast in the two religions parallels the sexual and political contrasts in the book, with the suggestion that experience of both viewpoints is necessary for a full and humane understanding. If science fiction is to be judged not only for the validity and interest of its ideas but also for the integrity and believability of the fictional worlds it creates, The Left Hand of Darkness succeeds brilliantly on every count. In its exploration of gender and of the never-resolved differences of East and West, the novel is an excellent primer for the problems that bedevil Earth, yet Gethen is as complete a world as one could wish for, detailed and utterly convincing. Le Guin shows the value of seeing through the eyes of the Other as well as the enormous difficulty in perceiving what is complementary in the initially alien. —Andrew Macdonald
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Life During Wartime An American soldier in Central America finds that the war there is really an extension of an old battle between two families of psychics
Author: Lucius Shepard (1947) Genre: Science fiction—future war Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The early twenty-first century Location: Guatemala and Panama First published: 1987 The Story Life During Wartime is an episodic novel made up of novellas, two of which, “R & R” and “Fire Zone Emerald,” previously were published separately. “R & R” won a Nebula Award in 1986. David Mingolla is an American soldier involved in a Vietnam-type war in Central America. During a period of rest and recreation (R & R), he meets Debora, a woman he finds himself drawn to even though he suspects that she is an enemy agent. He witnesses one of his companions being killed after running amok on drugs, and his other companion deserts for Panama. Mingolla is aware that he has latent psychic ability. After considering deserting, he decides instead to volunteer for Psicorps. Mingolla trains on a Caribbean island with Tully and the mysterious Dr. Izaguirre. His training involves heavy use of drugs and unleashes a rage in him that can lead him to acts of cruelty. It turns out that he is an amazingly strong psychic. As a final test, he is sent to kill an enemy psychic, de Zedegui, who is hiding out in a prison settlement. De Zedegui seems almost eager to die, but before he does he reveals that the war is actually a continuation of a four-centuries-old feud between two families of psychics, the Madradonas and the Sotomayors. Mingolla’s next mission is to kill Debora, who is also an enemy psychic. After first being captured by a rogue platoon of American deserters, he finds her deep in the jungle. They become lovers and find their psychic abilities strengthened as a result. They desert and set out to find the cause of the war. Along the way, they meet up with Tully once more
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and are joined by Ruy, whose lust for Debora puts him at odds with Mingolla. Their journey is hazardous, including tests put in their way by Izaguirre, who turns out to be the leader of the Sotomayors. Ruy also is a Sotomayor. In Panama, they find that the two families are trying to negotiate peace. Debora becomes an enthusiastic supporter of this process, but Mingolla is suspicious, especially when he finds himself trying to alleviate the condition of people who have been permanently brain damaged by the psychic experiments of the two families. Peace is declared, but it is short-lived, a ruse to allow one family to attack the other. Mingolla and Debora flee to the Panamanian hinterland. Analysis This remarkable and powerful novel is, in one sense, an obvious response to Vietnam. It tells of Americans trapped in a meaningless foreign war, fighting in dense jungle, with the men turning to drugs both for recreation and for fighting spirit. It is more than that, however, for it sets up a dichotomy between two ways of seeing the world. Lucius Shepard explains it succinctly early in the novel when he talks of the Central American people “trapped between the poles of magic and reason, their lives governed by the politics of the ultrareal, their spirits ruled by myths and legends, with the rectangular, computerized bulk of North America above and the conch-shell-shaped continental mystery of South America below.” This conflict is graphically represented in the novel by a clash of genres. Science fiction is represented by the technology of war: Helicopter pilots encase their heads in high-tech helmets that, they believe, confer invincibility and almost godlike omniscience; and soldiers on leave indulge in drug-induced gladiatorial combats. Against this is ranged Magical Realism: Mingolla’s assailant is killed by a horde of butterflies, and the war between the Madradonas and the Sotomayors first appears as an episode in a work of fiction. The focus of the novel turns gradually, the earlier sections being more science-fictional and the latter more Magical Realism, but the clash of cultures is always there. It is perhaps at its most vivid in the crashed helicopter whose on-board computer has cannibalized spare parts and now imagines itself to be an incarnation of God. In a series of vivid and often disturbing incidents, Shepard makes a point not about the madness of war but about the madness of warriors. None of those caught up in the fighting is sane; madness is the only way they can survive. They concoct senseless rituals, commit casual brutalities, and find their humanity swamped by the inhumanity in which they
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must live. This is shown most sharply in the character of Mingolla, a masterfully drawn portrait that starts with a naïve youth lost when the silly rituals by which he conducts his R & R are suddenly destroyed by circumstances. As he grows wise in the ways of the war, his helplessness emphasized by his Psicorps training, he becomes a creature of violent anger given to acts of casual cruelty. Even after his growing psychic power and his love for Debora have fostered a renewed humanity, this rage will still break through. When he happens upon a ruined village with walls that have become the canvas for a nameless painter who transforms war into art, the only response he can make is to destroy the pictures. Shepard is a widely traveled writer whose familiarity with tropical settings is apparent in many of his stories. The latter-day Vietnam in Central America is featured in other stories. His work has earned not unreasonable comparison with that of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Certainly this novel is one of his finest works, particularly because of the effective way he blends the traditions of science fiction with those of other imaginative literature to produce an effect that is unique. —Paul Kincaid
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Lincoln’s Dreams As a woman dreams of the Civil War, her companion struggles to interpret what the dreams mean for her
Author: Connie Willis (1945) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The present Location: Virginia and Washington, D.C. First published: 1987 The Story Jeff Johnson, a historical researcher for a Civil War novelist named Broun, meets a mysterious woman named Annie at a publication party for his author’s latest novel. Annie is in the company of a sleep disorder specialist, Dr. Richard Madison, who was Jeff’s college roommate. Broun wants to consult Madison about the meaning of the dreams Abraham Lincoln had before his assassination. Jeff discovers that Annie has been dreaming of events during the Civil War. He agrees to take Annie to Arlington House, formerly a home of Robert E. Lee and now the site of Arlington National Cemetery. Annie recognizes the house as part of her dreams. She leaves Madison, who she discovers has been drugging her without her knowledge to prevent her dreams. She asks Jeff to help her discover the meaning of her dreams. Jeff agrees, and while Broun is on the West Coast doing further research on Lincoln’s dreams, Jeff and Annie travel to Fredericksburg, Virginia, site of one of the worst battles of the Civil War. They conduct research and proofread Broun’s latest novel. In Fredericksburg, Jeff discovers that Annie’s dreams match events and people in the life of Robert E. Lee, leader of the Confederate forces in the Civil War. Jeff also seems to be taking on the characteristics of Traveller, Lee’s devoted horse throughout the Civil War period. As Annie’s dreams grow worse, they try to decipher the meaning of the dreams and decide if they apply to the past or to the present. Broun’s novel, about an ordinary soldier’s experiences, becomes an important part of the story line, adding detail about the war to the atmosphere created by Annie’s increasingly vivid dreams.
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At first, Annie seems to be moving through the war in chronological order, and there is hope that there will be an end to the dreams. This hope is shattered, however, when the dreams begin to move back in time as well. Annie begins to believe that she is dreaming the dreams to allow the spirit of Robert E. Lee to find peace at last. Jeff goes short on sleep as a result of Annie’s sleepwalking and because of the increasingly frantic messages from Madison on his answering machine, warning of a dangerous heart condition Annie might have. He decides that Lee is reaching out from the grave to save Annie because he was unable to save his own daughter Annie, who died during the war. Jeff returns to Washington with Annie and tries to persuade her to meet with Madison and seek treatment for her heart condition. She refuses the treatment, afraid that it might affect her ability to dream for Lee. Jeff gives Annie all of his money and drives her to the subway station. He never sees her again. His life, mirroring that of Traveller after the death of Lee, is greatly diminished by Annie’s loss and his lack of knowledge about her fate. Analysis Connie Willis’s literary career prior to the publication of Lincoln’s Dreams consisted primarily of short stories, including the award-winning “Fire Watch” (1982), title story of her first short-story collection, published in 1985. She also coauthored two novels, Water Witch (1982) and Light Raid (1989), with Cynthia Felice. Willis’s work ranges from the deadly serious to comedy. She works equally well in the short-story and novel formats. “At the Rialto,” a comedy about a quantum physics convention in Hollywood, shows Willis’s comedic touch, as does “Even the Queen,” a story about women’s issues. Her dramatic fiction is represented by the short stories “Chance” and “Jack,” the latter of which takes place during World War II, and the novel Doomsday Book (1992), set during the plague years in England. Lincoln’s Dreams was her first solo novel and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1988. Willis has won numerous awards, for both short and long fiction. These include the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelette with “Fire Watch,” the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novella with “Last of the Winnebagos,” and the 1990 Nebula Award for best novelette with “At the Rialto.” Doomsday Book won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1992 and tied with Vernor Vinge’s A Fire upon the Deep for the 1993 Hugo Award for best novel. Time travel, on both the psychic and physical levels, is a reoccurring
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motif in Willis’s work. The short story “Fire Watch” and the novel Doomsday Book deal with physical time travel, via a machine, while Lincoln’s Dreams deals with the subject by having the traveler experience the past on a psychic level, through her dreams. Willis believes in the interconnectedness of time and in people’s ability to be influenced by the past. People ignore that influence at their own peril. Another major theme in Willis’s serious work is the connection between love and duty. Jeff’s love for Annie does not override his promise to help her find the meaning of her dreams, even if it means losing her forever. Annie, devoted to Lee, whose anguish she senses night after brutal night, keeps her promise to help him through her dreams, even though it means the loss of everything—her job, her health, her family, and perhaps even her life if she has misinterpreted what the dreams really mean. Willis’s use of language is understated, recounting extraordinary events in a normal, everyday manner of speech. By the end of her book, readers care deeply about the lives of her characters, not because of any flashy plot devices but through the force of her writing. This depth of characterization is a hallmark of Willis’s work. This first novel showed a promising future for Willis, which she fulfilled with works such as Doomsday Book and her second collection of short stories, Impossible Things (1994). She became a major force in modern science fiction. —Catherine Doyle
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Little, Big The tale of the Drinkwater family, including both the human saga of their loves and struggles and the underlying story of their destined interactions with the fairy realm
Author: John Crowley (1942) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1880’s to the near future Location: The Edgewood estate in upstate New York and New York City First published: 1981
The Story The novel begins in the middle of what the characters self-consciously call the Tale. Smoky Barnable, a shy and old-fashioned bachelor from New York City (called only “the City”), journeys to the idiosyncratically built and literally magical estate, Edgewood, to marry his love, Alice Dale Drinkwater (nicknamed Daily Alice). The story unfolds both backward and forward, from the founding of the clan by architect John Drinkwater and his fey wife Violet Bramble (daughter of a spiritualist reverend) to the tale’s culmination, in which Daily Alice’s generation and their offspring permanently populate and renew the fading realm of the fairies. The Drinkwaters all know that they share some secret destiny, although the women more gracefully play their parts and the men tend toward confusion or even irritation. The gifts of the fairies are not all benevolent, as Violet and John’s son August discovers. His wish that all women love him leads to his supposed death and actual metamorphosis into Grandfather Trout, giver of ambiguous advice. Violet’s illegitimate son Auberon is hurt by lack of contact with “them” and the secret from which he feels excluded. John Storm “Doc” Drinkwater, Daily Alice’s father, benefits from his ability to understand animals talking, becoming a successful writer of children’s books. A tarotlike deck is handed down from Violet to her daughter Nora, from her to Doc’s wife Aunt Sophie, and finally to Daily Alice’s sister Sophie, from whom the cards are stolen. Smoky has an affair with
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Sophie, and she and Daily Alice learn to share his love, but Sophie’s illegitimate child by cousin George Mouse is taken by the fairies and trained as a messenger, with a horrific changeling left in its place. Smoky and Daily Alice’s three daughters, like the Fates, calmly do their needlework and know everything. Edgewood crumbles, but Smoky revives it by repairing a perpetual motion orrery; however, he dies shortly before his crossover to fairyland. Daily Alice becomes the spirit, almost goddess, of that limitless microcosm. Most of the novel’s action is at Edgewood, but not all of it. George Mouse establishes an improbable farm in a block of ruined Manhattan buildings. There, Smoky and Alice’s son, Auberon, loves and loses Sylvie (and her twin brother, Bruno). Eventually, after Auberon experiences life as a homeless bum and then as a television writer, he and Sylvie reunite as king and queen of fairyland. Ariel Hawksquill, a magician who teaches Auberon the Art of Memory, introduces the only events in the story of national scale. She realizes that politician Russel Eigenblick (eventually elected president of the United States) is actually Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, returned from centuries of waiting until needed. The depictions of life in “the City,” though rarely supernatural, are as awesome and odd as the more fantasy-based events centered at Edgewood or concerning Ariel Hawksquill. Analysis Little, Big is a virtuoso blending of fantasy, mythic significance, and realistic (if impressionistic) depictions of compelling characters and places. The novel is metafictive without becoming distanced or ironic. The reader, like the Drinkwaters, can accept the events as the plot of a Tale, directed from outside itself—by the author, by the fairies—and also as incidents enacted with full passion and consequence. Literary references are plentiful, from John Keats (in a City bar, Auberon drunkenly proclaims, “Trooty is booth, booth trooty”) to the Mother West Wind Where stories by early twentieth century children’s author Thornton W. Burgess. One major influence is Lewis Carroll, as shown by characters named Alice, Sylvie, and Bruno. The major text behind the text is the story of the fairies—particularly the court of Oberon and Titania— as seen in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889), in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pr. c. 1595-1596), and throughout both literature and folklore. Figures from children’s folklore, such as Mother Goose, are presented in new ways. The text is also enriched by references to Renaissance thought, something John Crowley returns to in Aegypt (1987) and Love and Sleep (1994), and to classical myth.
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This mythical dimension is conveyed without losing the foibles, feelings, and quirky interior worlds of the human characters. The novel oddly lacks real-world detail, so that even the Latino neighborhoods and subway-dwelling homeless of New York City become abstract and mythic. The panoply of individual characters and the leisurely narrative style are somehow Victorian and mimetic, no more fantasy, though no less, than the work of Charles Dickens. Along with literary references, Crowley uses the icons of popular culture, from designer psychedelic drugs to soap operas, although like other elements these are given new meanings through their use in context. The Drinkwaters believe that they live in a world centered on them—in a way it is—and the novel reflects that. The novel uses the tiny focus on Edgewood to enter a world of infinite possibility. The world of the novel is also eternal and cyclical. The repetition among the generations of names and even events helps reinforce this idea, as does the hint that the Drinkwaters will eventually follow their fairy predecessors to whatever new realm comes next. The novel ends with both an invitation to the reader to enter fading Edgewood and the denial of that possibility. The novel implies that although an individual tale may end, tale telling never does, and when the elements are reused, the whole still resides in each part. In both fiction and fairyland, everything finally changes and in that way endures. —Bernadette Lynn Bosky
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The Little Prince The narrator crashes his plane in the desert and meets a young boy, a visitor from another planet, who teaches him lessons about life
Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) Genre: Fantasy—cosmic voyage Type of work: Novel Time of plot: About 1943 Location: Earth and various asteroids and planets First published: Le Petit Prince (1943; English translation, 1943) The Story The Little Prince begins with the famous pair of drawings with which the narrator, Saint-Exupéry himself, tests the understanding of adults. The first is of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant. Most adults see only a hat shape; they cannot see beyond the exterior. For them, he draws another boa constrictor, this time in cross-section, so they can see the elephant inside. After years of loneliness in the world of grown-ups, Saint-Exupéry crashes his plane in the desert. While he is trying to repair his plane, the Little Prince appears and asks Saint-Exupéry to draw a sheep for him. Saint-Exupéry first presents him with the drawing that opens the story, and the Little Prince protests that he does not want an elephant in a boa constrictor. The Little Prince rejects several of Saint-Exupéry’s attempts to draw a sheep before accepting a drawing of a box inside which he can imagine a sheep. This event marks the beginning of the friendship between the Little Prince and Saint-Exupéry, who learns that his visitor comes from a tiny asteroid and that he is sad. The cause of the Little Prince’s melancholy turns out to be the beautiful Rose, who so tormented him with her moods that he left his planet. The Little Prince tells the story of how he escaped from his planet with the help of a flock of migratory birds. He visited a number of planets, each inhabited by a solitary figure who represented some foible of the grownup world, which has lost its innocence. When the Little Prince reaches Earth, he finds a garden filled with roses. He is bitterly disappointed, as he had believed his Rose was unique. He meets the Fox, who consoles the Little Prince and teaches him wis-
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dom. Before they can be friends, the Fox says, the Little Prince must “tame” him. Then they will need each other and be unique to each other. The Little Prince understands that his Rose has tamed him: It is the time he has spent on her that makes her so important. When the Little Prince asks Saint-Exupéry to draw a muzzle on the sheep to protect his Rose, Saint-Exupéry knows he intends to return home. The Little Prince gives Saint-Exupéry a parting gift: As all the stars flower for the Little Prince because of his Rose, so will the stars ring with laughter for Saint-Exupéry because of the Little Prince’s laughter. The Little Prince asks the Serpent to help him return to his planet by biting him. He tells Saint-Exupéry not to grieve over his body, as it will be simply an empty shell. The Serpent bites the Little Prince, and he falls dead. At daybreak, however, Saint-Exupéry cannot find his body. Years later, Saint-Exupéry hears the laughter of the stars but is disturbed by the fact that he forgot to add a fastening to the sheep’s muzzle, so he always wonders if the Rose is safe. Analysis The theme of the story is established in the first pair of drawings: Adults have lost true perception, and only those who keep the child alive within them can see through the outward appearance of objects to the invisible essence within. The Little Prince passes Saint-Exupéry’s test of understanding when he correctly identifies his drawing of an elephant inside a boa constrictor. The message is repeated in the Little Prince’s rejection of each of Saint-Exupéry’s sheep until he accepts a drawing of a box in which he can imagine a sheep. The Little Prince comes to realize that it is the invisible essence bestowed on the Rose by his devotion that makes her unique. Her truth, too, is hidden: Only when the Little Prince leaves his planet does the Rose admit that she loves him. The Little Prince reflects that he should have judged her on her acts, not her words, and guessed the affection beyond her wiles. Such invisible truths are set against the so-called serious things with which grown-ups are preoccupied. When the Little Prince says that he fears that his sheep may eat the Rose, Saint-Exupéry dismisses the boy’s questions, saying that he is concerned with “serious things”—his plane repair and diminishing water supply. The Little Prince is furious with Saint-Exupéry, whom he accuses of talking like a grown-up. The Little Prince delivers a passionate declamation about what is truly important: that his Rose is unique, and that a little sheep could unwittingly destroy her in an instant.
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The Little Prince passes on something of the Fox’s teaching when he tells Saint-Exupéry that what makes a house, the desert, or the stars beautiful is invisible. Saint-Exupéry recalls his childhood home, made more precious by the legend of a treasure hidden within it. The desert is beautiful because somewhere it hides a well. For the Little Prince, when he is away from his planet, all the visible stars flower because of one invisible Rose. Thanks to the Little Prince’s gift of wisdom, for SaintExupéry all the stars will forever ring with laughter because of the laughter of the Little Prince, who has long departed. Saint-Exupéry’s failure to find the Little Prince’s body may imply a Christlike resurrection. If so, the message is in keeping with the rest of the story. Of all the so-called serious things of the grown-up world, death is the most serious. Death, as the Little Prince teaches, however, is no more real than the serious things that preoccupy the red-faced businessman who incessantly counts the stars he believes he owns. Like the seeming hat that is really an elephant in a snake, and like the vain wiles of the Rose that conceal her love, death is simply another deceptive appearance. —Claire Robinson
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The Lord of the Rings An epic recounting the combat between the free peoples of Middleearth and the forces of Sauron, the Dark Lord
Author: J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien (1892-1973) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The Third Age, an undefined time in the remote past Location: Middle-earth, a feudal world populated by men, dwarves, wizards, and other fantastic beings First published: 1968; previously published as The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955) The Story The Lord of the Rings, the seminal work of modern fantasy, was first published in sections only as a concession to its length; the division of the work into the three volumes familiar to most readers bears no relation to the development of the story. J. R. R. Tolkien himself divided the work into six numbered but untitled books, two of which appear in each volume. Although The Lord of the Rings was begun as a sequel to Tolkien’s popular 1937 children’s book The Hobbit, it so dwarfs the earlier volume in both seriousness and scope as to have reversed the relationship. The Hobbit, though successful in its own right, is now considered primarily as a “prequel” to the longer work. The length and complexity of The Lord of the Rings are such as to defy brief plot summary. The main action concerns Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, a member of a diminutive, rural, peace-loving race that lives in the northern land of the Shire. From his Uncle Bilbo, the hero of The Hobbit, Frodo inherits a magic ring that confers invisibility on the wearer. Frodo learns, however, that his heirloom is far more than a toy: The wizard Gandalf explains that it is in fact the Master Ring created by the malevolent Dark Lord, Sauron, ages before. Sauron, a powerful spirit who presides over the hellish kingdom of Mordor in the far east of Middleearth, invested the Ring with much of his original power, and he has been hunting it since it was taken from him in battle ages before. Should Sauron recover the Ring, Gandalf warns, he would become sufficiently powerful to overwhelm Middle-earth, plunging it into an age of darkness.
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Frodo and three hobbit companions, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, set out for Rivendell, a distant haven protected by Elrond, a wise and mighty elf king. Gandalf has been called away on urgent business, and Frodo and his friends must begin the long journey through the wilderness alone. They are pursued by the Ringwraiths, terrifying, ghostlike servants of Sauron who are drawn by the Ring itself. Along the way, the hobbits receive the aid of Strider, a man expert in the ways of the wild. The party reaches Rivendell just ahead of the Ringwraiths, who wound Frodo and attempt to possess his spirit. At Rivendell, Frodo is healed by Elrond, and a council of representatives of the free peoples (hobbits, men, elves, and dwarves) debates the fate of the Ring. Some advocate using its power to defeat Sauron, whose armies of orcs and trolls threaten to overrun Middle-earth. Gandalf, though, explains that the Ring cannot be used for such a purpose without causing the wielder to set himself up as a new Dark Lord; the Ring’s colossal power inevitably corrupts. Moreover, the Ring cannot be destroyed by conventional means: Only the volcanic fires of Mordor’s Mount Doom, where the Ring was forged, can unmake it. Frodo volunteers to undertake the seemingly hopeless quest of carrying the Ring to the fire in the heart of the enemy’s realm, and the council agrees, detecting the hand of fate in Frodo’s selection. Frodo and eight companions, including Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, and Strider—who has been revealed to be Aragorn, heir to the ancient kings of Middle-earth—set out on the quest. Also in the company are Legolas, an elf; Gimli, a dwarf; and Boromir, a man from the southern kingdom of Gondor, the principal bulwark against Sauron’s forces. The company journeys south in the middle of winter. Unable to cross a mountain range, they attempt to pass through Moria, a subterranean realm created by dwarves but long since taken over by evil creatures. In Moria, the company is nearly captured by hosts of orcs and trolls. In guarding their flight, Gandalf is pulled into an abyss while fighting a Balrog, a powerful demon.
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Escaping to the elven realm of Lothlórien, the company is equipped with boats, in which they travel down the River Anduin. Frodo comes to the decision that he cannot allow his friends to accompany him on the harrowing trip into Mordor, and he steals away from the others; Sam, however, catches up with him. At the same time, the other members of the company are attacked by orcs. Boromir is killed, and Merry and Pippin are captured. Choosing to follow the hostages, Aragorn and the others pursue the orcs, leaving Frodo and Sam to continue the quest alone. The action then diverges into two principal story lines. Aragorn’s party is reunited with Gandalf, who has survived his ordeal and returned with renewed wizardly power. Merry and Pippin escape the orcs and meet the Ents, powerful, ancient, treelike beings who care for the forests. With the assistance of the men of Rohan, they defeat the forces of the treacherous wizard Saruman, who had hoped to rival Sauron. Gandalf and the others then go to Gondor, where they organize resistance to Sauron’s invading forces. In a huge battle, Sauron’s advance troops are routed, but the defenders of the West remain hopelessly outnumbered. Concluding that their only chance is to distract Sauron’s attention so that Frodo and Sam can reach their goal, the allied forces advance toward Mordor. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam attempt to approach Mordor through the Dead Marshes, a noxious maze of swamps. There they capture Gollum, a twisted, hobbitlike creature who once possessed the Ring and who has been following Frodo in the hope of reclaiming it. Intimidated by the power of the Ring, Gollum reluctantly agrees to guide the hobbits into Mordor. He brings them safely through a dangerous mountain pass only to betray them by leading them into the lair of Shelob, a colossal spider. Frodo, stung by Shelob, appears to be dead; Sam fights off the spider and reluctantly takes the Ring. He leaves to continue the quest, and orcs capture Frodo, who recovers from the effects of the spider’s poison. Sam realizes his error and returns to liberate Frodo. Dogged by Gollum and hiding from orcs, they continue their journey through the desolate landscape of Mordor. The climactic scene takes place on Mount Doom. Gollum assaults the hobbits as they struggle up the mountainside, but Sam fends him off as Frodo goes on. Gollum evades Sam and catches Frodo as he stands over the cracks leading to the mountain’s fiery interior. Frodo, overcome at last by the evil power of the Ring, refuses to destroy it; instead, he puts it on his finger and claims it for his own. At the same moment, Gollum attacks Frodo and bites the Ring—and a finger—from his hand. Gollum loses his balance and falls into the abyss, destroying both himself and the Ring, and the mountain erupts.
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The beleaguered troops of the West are on the verge of being overcome. With the destruction of the Ring, however, everything created with its power is also destroyed. Mordor’s gates and fortresses crumble, and the orcs and trolls are driven to madness. As the reinvigorated allied troops complete the rout, Gandalf flies to Mount Doom on the back of an enormous eagle, rescuing Frodo and Sam from certain death. The hobbits are returned to Gondor, where they witness the coronation of Aragorn. They then return to the Shire, which in their absence has fallen under the sway of petty evil, to set things to rights in their homeland. Analysis It is hard to overstate the importance of The Lord of the Rings to the development of modern fantasy. The work, the subject of cultish ardor in the first years following publication, rocketed to worldwide popularity in the mid-1960’s. Counterculture readers embraced its exaltation of nature and simple living above progress and the will to power; fans of adventure stories were captivated by its headlong pace; and scholars began to appreciate the extraordinary craft with which Tolkien, over a period of decades, had constructed his imagined world. It is not too much to say that virtually every subsequent fantasy writer owes Tolkien a substantial debt, either directly as inspiration (dozens of lesser works are clearly modeled on Tolkien’s) or indirectly for having vastly expanded the audience—and market—for adult fantasy. The Lord of the Rings has accumulated a substantial body of scholarship, from the appreciative work of such early enthusiasts as W. H. Auden through more recent formalist approaches. The book has also generated a popular companion literature in the form of reference works, illustrative texts, glossaries, and assorted “guides.” The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s own lengthy mythology of Middle-earth, was published in 1977 but failed to attract a large readership. Interpretation of so massive a work is a daunting task. Tolkien took pains to refute the popular early views that the Ring was meant to suggest the atomic bomb and that the East-West struggles of Middle-earth were modeled on the political order of either World War II or the Cold War. He noted that he had begun the story decades in advance of such developments and added that he “cordially” disliked such allegory. He further denied that The Lord of the Rings had an intended “meaning,” asserting that in writing it he had wished primarily to tell a riveting story that would enthrall readers. The prolonged popularity and enduring influence of his masterwork attest his success. —Robert McClenaghan
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Lud-in-the-Mist Master Nathaniel Chanticleer journeys to Fairyland in order to rescue Ranulph, his son, from the magical attractions of “things fairy”
Author: Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Indeterminate Location: Lud-in-the-Mist, the capital of Dorimare First published: 1926 The Story Bordered on the West by the Debatable Hills and Fairyland, Lud-in-theMist is governed by Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the High Seneschal. Although he is outwardly pleasant and kind, Nathaniel is inwardly unhappy. His unhappiness began several years earlier, when he and some of his friends dressed up for a party as ghosts of their ancestors. An amateur musician, he seized the opportunity to play his lute. Plucking one of the strings rather harshly, Nathaniel heard “the Note,” a dissonant pitch that menaced the harmonious, predictable, and prosaic nature of his life. He now frequently feels discontented and longs to hear the Note again, but he is afraid that it will reawaken his youthful restlessness. Historically, Lud-in-the-Mist rooted out all magic and adventure when it ousted the last of its “noble” rulers, Duke Aubrey. After a battle that lasted three days, Lud’s citizens killed all the nobles and drove Aubrey from Lud-in-the-Mist into Fairyland. Because of its connection to the artistic and political caprice of Duke Aubrey, fairy fruit became taboo after the revolution. Eating it makes one delusional, desiring only to flee Lud and escape into Fairyland. Welcoming the new laws, Lud’s citizens embraced the “science of jurisprudence.” Law now directs Lud-inthe-Mist, and Nathaniel’s duty is to uphold it. Ironically, trouble begins for Lud’s citizens in the house of Chanticleer itself. There, while Nathaniel cuts a famous Moongrass cheese for a party, his son Ranulph cries out for him to stop, claiming that if he proceeds, “all the flowers will wither in Fairyland.” This violation of taboo shocks the party guests and forces Nathaniel to face his worst fear: His son may have eaten fairy fruit. By his own admission, Ranulph wants
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only to escape, to get away from Lud-in-the-Mist. Nathaniel calls the town physician, Endymion Leer, and urges him to find a cure. Leer suggests some time away from Lud on the widow Gibberty’s farm. Taking Leer’s advice, Nathaniel sends Ranulph, accompanied by Nurse Hempen’s nephew Luke, to the farm. Soon after Ranulph’s departure, the “Crabapple Blossoms,” young ladies at Miss Primrose Crabapple’s Academy, disappear into Fairyland. Among them is Nathaniel’s daughter Prunella. Although Captain Mumchance fails to discover any forbidden fruit, Miss Primrose is nevertheless blamed for the disappearances and is taken into custody. Miss Primrose admits to Dame Marigold, Nathaniel’s wife, that fairy fruit had been smuggled into Lud. Marigold believes that Leer may be involved and urges Nathaniel to investigate. In his research, Nathaniel comes across the case of Diggory Carp, a laborer accused of the murder of Jeremiah Gibberty, the widow Gibberty’s former husband. During the trial, Carp had accused the widow of poisoning her own husband because of her affair with Christopher Pugwalker, an herbalist much like Leer. She was not convicted, but Nathaniel begins to suspect her guilt. Moreover, he believes that the young Pugwalker is, in fact, Endymion Leer. Riding out to the farm, Nathaniel meets Portunus, a mysterious fiddler who tells him to “dig, dig.” When Nathaniel arrives at the farm, the widow’s granddaughter, Hazel, assists him in digging beneath a stone bust in her orchard. They discover Jeremiah Gibberty’s last note, accusing the widow of his murder and of her affair with Christopher Pugwalker. The note becomes substantial evidence for the arrest and conviction of the widow and Endymion Leer. Unfortunately, Nathaniel also finds that his son, with the assistance of the widow, has run off to Fairyland. Compelled not by fairy fruit but by the love of his son, Nathaniel blindly follows him into Fairyland. There he meets the spirit of Duke Aubrey, who ultimately releases Ranulph and the Crabapple Blossoms. Aubrey also hints that one day Nathaniel may again hear the Note. Master Ambrose, Nathaniel’s best friend and a powerful speaker in the senate, convinces the citizens that fairy fruit should no longer be forbidden but should be reintegrated into the city’s commerce and culture. Analysis Little is known about Hope Mirrlees, a minor novelist of the 1920’s, whose other books The Counterplot (1924) and Madeleine (1919) are seldom reprinted or discussed. Lud-in-the Mist was retrieved from obscurity by Lin Carter, who republished the fantasy novel in the 1970’s.
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Mirrlees contrasts the “pastoral sobriety” of Dorimare with the “distinctly exotic” country to the West. The citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist have successfully eliminated variability in and unpredictability from their lives. In doing so, however, they have traded the lively “magic” that lies in art, music, dancing, and singing for the stolid and static world of commerce and law. The illegal smuggling of fairy fruit threatens Lud’s security. For Nathaniel Chanticleer, the insanity that results from eating fairy fruit resembles the lifelong struggle he has had in maintaining a veneer of sanity and respect. The Note he initially hears from his lute represents this struggle, and it also signifies his capacity to accept and comprehend the danger to his son and daughter and to the community at large. His response to Ranulph and Prunella’s actions is not one of censure, but one of love. His devotion to the rule of law uncovers the duplicitous actions of Clementina Gibberty and Endymion Leer and preserves the sanity and structure of Lud’s government; however, it is his “insane” devotion to his family and his willingness to make a hopeless journey to Fairyland to save his children that prove decisive in the survival of Lud-in-theMist. Allowing fairy fruit back into Lud signifies the necessary balance that must exist between fairy and fact, poetry and prose, stability and change. Even the dead from Fairyland (such as Duke Aubrey, one of the “Silent Ones”) call out, asking not only to be remembered but also that their memory not be tarnished by lack of use. The dead represent a stimulus for healthy growth and creative change. —Jeffrey Cass
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Make Room! Make Room! Andy Rusch attempts to locate the murderer of a wealthy black marketer in a decaying and overpopulated New York City of 1999
Author: Harry Harrison (1925) Genre: Science fiction—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1999 Location: New York City First published: 1966 The Story Andy Rusch, a New York City detective, is summoned from his apartment—shared with aged pragmatist Sol Kahn—to provide security for a protest march by outraged “Eldsters,” whose ability to survive on their reduced government stipends has reached the breaking point. The march deteriorates into violent chaos when a nearby appliance store is overrun by desperate mobs and riot control police are called in. With this opening, Harry Harrison introduces the true central character of his story: the imploding remains of twentieth century Western civilization, an edifice collapsing under its own weight of numbers, greed, and uncontrolled consumption of the planet’s resources. One of the victims of this pervasive decline is Billy Chung, a son of Taiwanese immigrants who have all been consigned to a claustrophobic existence in Shiptown, a collection of mothballed military transports anchored off Manhattan in the Hudson River. Desperate for food, money, and security, young Billy graduates from petty thievery to manslaughter when a wealthy black marketer discovers the adolescent rifling through his luxurious and heavily fortified apartment. Billy flees empty-handed, fearing pursuit by the law. The New York City police force is so overburdened that ordinarily a single murder without strong leads would simply be filed as an unsolved and unsolvable crime. Billy’s victim, Big Mike O’Brien, was a kingpin of the New York underworld. The ruler of that underworld, Mr. Briggs, fears that O’Brien’s death was the opening move in a gambit being orchestrated by a rival crime syndicate. In order to determine whether this is true, Briggs pulls strings in the police department to
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ensure that a detective is assigned to the investigation on a full-time basis. Andy Rusch is given the job. Visiting the crime scene, Andy meets Shirl Greene, O’Brien’s mistress. Unwilling to have her evicted, the detective arranges for her to remain temporarily in the apartment. A romance develops quickly between Andy and Shirl, who is essentially honest and kind. The investigation goes slowly until Andy learns that Billy Chung had visited O’Brien’s apartment on a previous occasion, as a delivery boy. Andy’s attempt to apprehend the wary and petrified Billy at his Shiptown abode fails, turning the murder investigation into a prolonged manhunt. As the search continues, Shirl is forced to move out of her apartment and into the already cramped quarters shared by Andy and Sol. Sol’s technical ingenuity helps make their combined lives more bearable. As the summer heat wave mounts and water shortages and civil unrest increase, their day-to-day existence becomes increasingly difficult. In October, the murderous heat becomes unseasonably bitter cold. The change is part of a meteorological seesaw that causes widespread crop failures. Rumors of coming famine and more water shortages put additional strains on Andy and Shirl’s already deteriorating relationship. Things get worse when Sol dies of pneumonia, unable to get medical attention at the overcrowded city hospitals. Billy, who had found a summer haven with a millennialist hermit named Peter, eventually moves back into the city, taking up lodging in an abandoned Buick that was left to rust where it ran out of gasoline. The intense cold eventually compels him to move back to his home in Shiptown, where, he hopes, the police have ceased to search for him. Andy returns to Shiptown, discovers Billy at his mother’s apartment, and, in a confused scuffle, shoots and kills the young fugitive. Returning home from this debacle, which ultimately will cost him his position as detective, Andy discovers that the obnoxious behavior of his new apartment-mates—the large and revolting Belicher family—have caused Shirl to pack up and leave. Weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, he sees her in the street, being escorted—and apparently financially supported—by a group of wealthy individuals. As the New Year celebration in Times Square attains a quality of manic desperation, Peter arrives, hoping to witness the commencement of Armageddon. He is shocked, and his spirit is broken when the accumulated miseries of the world are not purged by holy fire. Andy, now a beat cop, helps the miserable hermit to disappear into the crowd as the electric ticker tape scrolls out wishes for a Happy New Year.
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Analysis The main character in Make Room! Make Room! is neither Andy, nor Billy, nor Shirl, but the city of New York and the broader world condition that it implies. Descriptions of ruin and decline receive more description and exploration than do the humans in the story, who move like ghosts through the dying streets. Harrison’s narrative, written in 1966, certainly is dated in its specifics, but its basic proposition that uncontrolled consumption, population growth, and urban expansion will eventually transform cities into concrete hells still retains much of its original validity. Sol’s charmingly homespun discourses on the causes of the current disaster have a distinctly pedagogic tenor, a didactic quality that surfaces at various points in the text. This tone is characteristic of many other cautionary dystopian tales that attempt to predict social outcomes and instruct readers. Most early editions of Make Room! Make Room! include a three-page bibliography of nonfiction texts that deal with environmental, population, and resource-depletion issues. Readers interested in other novels that focus on these concerns and that were written during roughly the same period may wish to compare Harrison’s book with John Brunner’s influential Stand on Zanzibar (1968). The film version of Make Room! Make Room!, titled Soylent Green (1973), departs from the story in the novel in a number of significant ways. Students and instructors cannot rely on it to give them knowledge of the plot or central themes of the book. —Charles Gannon
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MAGILL’S C H O I C E
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Volume 2 The Man in the High Castle — Zothique 343 – 698 Indexes edited by Fiona Kelleghan University of Miami
Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California
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Copyright © 2002, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Classics of science fiction and fantasy literature / edited by Fiona Kelleghan. p. cm. — (Magill's choice) “Plot summaries and analyses of 180 major books and series in the fields of science fiction and fantasy . . . all but eight of the essays in these volumes are taken directly from Salem Press’s four-volume Magill’s guide to science fiction and fantasy literature, which was published in 1996”—Publisher’s note. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-58765-050-9 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-051-7 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-052-5 (v. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Science fiction—Stories, plots, etc. 2. Fantasy fiction—Stories, plots, etc. I. Kelleghan, Fiona, 1965II. Magill's guide to science fiction and fantasy literature. III. Series. PN3433.4 .C565 2002 809.3'876—dc21 2002001113
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Contents The Man in the High Castle . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Folded Himself . . . . . . . . . . . The Mars Trilogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Martian Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martian Time-Slip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Merlin Trilogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mission of Gravity and Star Light . . . . . . . . . The Mists of Avalon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mockingbird . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress . . . . . . . . . . . More than Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand The Mythago Cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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343 347 350 354 357 360 364 367 370 372 375 378 381
The Neuromancer Trilogy Nineteen Eighty-Four . . . No Enemy but Time . . . . Non-Stop . . . . . . . . . .
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385 390 394 397
The Once and Future King . Only Begotten Daughter . . The Orange County Trilogy Orlando . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Lady of Darkness. . . . The Owl Service . . . . . . .
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400 404 406 410 413 416
The Paper Grail . . . . . . . The Patternist Series. . . . . The Phoenix and the Mirror The Picture of Dorian Gray. Planet of the Apes . . . . . . The Prydain Chronicles . . . The Psammead Trilogy . . .
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419 422 426 429 432 435 439
Rashomon and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443 Riddle of Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446 Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450 xxix
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Roderick and Roderick at Random . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 454 Rogue Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 458 Sarah Canary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shatterday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ship of Ishtar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sirens of Titan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slaughterhouse-Five. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Snow Crash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Snow Queen Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . Solaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Space Merchants and The Merchants’ War The Space Odyssey Series . . . . . . . . . . . . The Space Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stand on Zanzibar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Star Maker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Stars My Destination. . . . . . . . . . . . . Stations of the Tide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Stranger in a Strange Land . . . . . . . . . . . . Swordspoint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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461 463 466 469 472 475 478 482 485 489 494 499 502 505 508 511 514 517
Tales from the Flat Earth . . . . . . . . . . The Time Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Timescape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Titus Groan Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . A Touch of Sturgeon. . . . . . . . . . . . . Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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The Unconquered Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 540 The Uplift Sequence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543 VALIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547 Vampire Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549 The Vampire Tapestry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554 The War of the Worlds War with the Newts . . The Wasp Factory . . . Watership Down . . . . We . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Contents
Weaveworld . . . . . . . . . . . . When Harlie Was One . . . . . . Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang The Wind in the Willows . . . . . Witch World . . . . . . . . . . . . Woman on the Edge of Time . . . The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . . The Worm Ouroboros . . . . . . . A Wrinkle in Time . . . . . . . . .
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Xenogenesis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 599 Zothique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 602 Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards . . . . . . . . Timeline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science Fiction and Fantasy Sites on the World Wide Web.
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605 621 626 666
Genre Index. . Title Index . . Author Index . Subject Index .
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The Man in the High Castle Political intrigue and the struggles of daily life in a conquered America after Germany and Japan win World War II
Author: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) Genre: Science fiction—alternative history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Shortly after World War II Location: San Francisco, California, and elsewhere in the western United States First published: 1962 The Story The Man in the High Castle is probably the finest and certainly the most influential alternative history novel ever written, evidenced by its Hugo Award for best novel of 1962 and allusions to it in subsequent alternative histories. It is set shortly after an Axis victory in World War II, which led to partitioning of the United States into the German-controlled eastern region, the Japanese-occupied West Coast, and a buffer zone in the Rocky Mountain states. In contrast to the brutal Nazi regime, Japanese control is more cultural and economic in nature than military or political. Japanese bureaucrats eagerly consume the cultural treasures of the country while Americans study the I Ching and artificially darken their skin. The novel opens with a telephone call from Nobusuke Tagomi, a bureaucrat in the Japanese occupation government, to Robert Childan, an American antiques dealer. Tagomi wishes to purchase a gift for a visiting Swedish official. This official is in reality Rudolf Wegener, a German agent. Wegener’s mission is to prevent a surprise nuclear attack on the Japanese home islands by enlisting covert Japanese support for Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo. A second strand in the narrative web of the novel begins when Childan is told that one of his antiques is counterfeit. The informer is Frank Frink, a Jewish refugee from the east and a former employee of the WyndamMatson Corporation, a manufacturer of counterfeit antiques. His visit to Childan’s store is part of a scheme to start a jewelry-making business by extorting money from his former employer. After an outraged Childan
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complains to his supplier, Wyndam-Matson gives two thousand dollars to Frink and his partner but asks the police to investigate them. An important element in the background of these characters’ lives is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel depicting the world as it might have been following an Allied victory. Most affected by the novel is Frink’s estranged wife, Juliana, who works as a judo instructor in Colorado. She is introduced to the book by her new lover, a truck driver named Joe Cinnadella, with whom she undertakes a journey to visit the book’s author, Hawthorne Abendsen, at his home in Wyoming. Childan, disturbed at the possibility that his antiques may not be authentic, agrees to carry Frink’s jewelry in his shop. Paul Kasoura, a young Japanese man whose friendship Childan seeks, tells Childan that the jewelry exhibits wu, the Daoist virtue of wisdom or comprehension, and that one of his associates is interested in mass-producing copies for sale in South America. Childan summons enough pride in himself and the work of his countrymen to refuse the offer. Tagomi, deeply distressed Philip K. Dick. after killing two German agents (Courtesy of the Philip K. Dick Society) who were attacking Wegener and a Japanese admiral, visits Childan’s store, where he is given one of Frink’s ornamental pins. After meditating on the object he finds himself briefly in what appears to be the reader’s world, complete with traffic, smog, and disrespectful Americans. After his vision, Tagomi returns to his office to find a request for the extradition of Frink. Enraged by the German attack on his office, Tagomi instead orders Frink’s release; he then suffers a heart attack, his recovery from which is left in doubt.
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In Wyoming, Juliana discovers that Cinnadella is actually a German agent sent to murder Abendsen. She kills Cinnadella and proceeds to the author’s house alone, where she learns that Abendsen—like Philip K. Dick himself—wrote his novel in consultation with the I Ching. A question to the ancient book of oracular wisdom reveals that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy signifies “Inner Truth,” a response that prompts Juliana to abandon her own reality as illusion and to embrace the truth of the novel’s utopian vision. Analysis The Man in the High Castle is among the most highly regarded of Dick’s works. It strays from the standard formula of the dystopia, one that culminates in the overthrow of a corrupt social order, to a more complex narrative form in which the dystopia is both less corrupt and more powerfully entrenched. Because the dystopia is not overthrown, there is no single central action that unites all the novel’s characters; the narrative structure is therefore more complex. The absence of an organized resistance frustrates the reader’s desire for a rectification of history, a desire that fuels the conventional novel of alternative history. The reader’s desire for resistance is frustrated and transformed by the novel into an acknowledgment of alien values. The only character to openly defy the German authorities is not an American but a Japanese; nevertheless, when Tagomi refuses to sign Frink’s extradition papers, American readers are likely to cheer the act of defiance. The Man in the High Castle further undermines the dystopian formula by establishing a sharp contrast between the mere rigidity of Japanese rule and the horrors of Nazism. Like the German Mars landing that serves as a recurring background motif throughout the novel, Nazi violence and oppression occur almost exclusively offstage. This is partly a result of the genocidal scale of the Nazi holocaust, which encompasses the entire African continent. In contrast to what Childan refers to as “the difficulty in Africa,” the Japanese exploitation of South America consists chiefly of “erecting eight-floor clay apartment houses for exheadhunters.” The novel’s thematic concerns are not limited to the political sphere; they extend into the realm of aesthetics through such artifacts as Frink’s jewelry. The conflict within the novel between historical and artistic authenticity ultimately is self-referential in nature. Frink’s jewelry is described as “a new thing on the face of the world,” in contrast to the merchandise in Childan’s store, the value of which is derived solely from its supposed historicity. In the same manner as the duplication of historic
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artifacts undermines their authenticity, so the proposed reproduction of Frink’s jewelry would strip from it the wu that it possesses. The relevance of this for The Man in the High Castle and alternative history in general lies in the fact that, like Frink’s jewelry, the alternative history novel is not dependent on historical authenticity or verisimilitude for its artistic value. It does not attempt to duplicate the superficial aspects of historical reality but instead allows readers to see more deeply into reality than the mere imitation of history permits. —Edgar V. McKnight, Jr.
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The Man Who Folded Himself A time traveler encounters and interacts with past and future alternative versions of himself, ultimately becoming his own father and mother, only to have his child begin the process again
Author: David Gerrold (Jerrold David Friedman, 1944) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: From prehistory to the far future Location: Primarily Earth, with references to travel in outer space First published: 1973 The Story A young man named Daniel Jamieson Eakins inherits a time-traveling belt device from his “Uncle Jim.” He decides to go one day into the future, get that day’s newspaper, and then bounce back to the present and go to the races. The newspaper will allow him to place winning bets on horses. When he does so, he encounters his future “self,” who proposes that they go together to the races. They do so and win a large sum of money, then go out to celebrate afterward. Daniel becomes his future self, waiting for his past self to pop into the future. He repeats the experience of attending the races with his earlier self. Curious about whether he can alter the past, he changes the size of the bets placed and is about to attempt to turn what was a $57,600 five-horse parlay into a $1.5 million eight-horse parlay. Another future version of himself appears to warn him that such an action will lead to unpleasant consequences, such as massive publicity and an investigation. Daniel engages in a wide range of activities in the past, present, and future, always certain that, should anything unpleasant or harmful be about to occur, one of his future “selves” will appear to warn him in time to alter his behavior. Through the use of the time-travel device, apparently endless numbers of alternative versions of himself are able to simultaneously visit the same time, resulting in such recreations as poker games with a room full of his alternative selves and homosexual experimentation with the ultimate narcissistic love objects, his own past and future selves. Daniel concludes that each time he makes different decisions, he is ac-
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tually creating a parallel universe in which his life is different. He experiments in changing the past, doing things such as eliminating certain political assassins or historical figures such as Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, he determines that some of these changes must themselves be undone; eliminating Christianity, it turns out, creates a present that is too “alien” for him to live in. At one point, he evidently has changed things enough that the various alternative versions of himself stop appearing. Lonely and confused, he flees to the distant past, before there are humans on Earth. There he encounters “Diana Jane Eakins,” a female version of himself, the woman he would have been had he been born female. She is from yet another parallel time-universe. A torrid love affair results in the birth of a child. Daniel wishes the child to be a boy, Diana wishes it to be a girl, and each of them uses advanced scientific techniques to turn wish into reality. Each ultimately takes a version of the child they have created to their own futures. Daniel and Diana fight and break up. Daniel now realizes that he is his Uncle Jim, and he proceeds to raise the child as Daniel Jamieson Eakins, his younger self. He also travels to a time and place where various older versions of himself gather to witness the heart attack that ultimately ends his life as he arrives there from his travels through time. At the end, the child has grown, Uncle Jim has died, and Daniel now again inherits the time-travel belt, although this time with a manuscript that is Uncle Jim’s diary, which describes all that has gone before, so that Daniel can avoid past mistakes. Although shocked at some of the things Uncle Jim’s diary says he has done, Daniel decides to put on the time belt and explore all the experiences that await. Analysis Although attacked by some critics for its short, choppy sentences, this is a lively, inventive, and entertaining time-travel story. Its basic premise, that of a time traveler encountering other versions of himself, is certainly derivative of two short stories by Robert A. Heinlein. In Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (first published under the name Anson MacDonald in the October, 1941, Astounding Science-Fiction), the protagonist interacts with various past and future versions of himself, ultimately becoming the person who first recruited him to visit the future, and in “All You Zombies—” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March, 1959), the protagonist is recruited into a corps of time travelers and through a convoluted plot device also becomes his/her own mother and father.
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Aside from a couple of “stick figure” characters such as the protagonist’s landlady and the (nameless) lawyer who informs Daniel that his Uncle Jim is dead, all the characters in the novel are ultimately the same person, albeit alternative versions of him. The weakness of the book is the lack of true character development. Because all the protagonist’s interactions are with other versions of himself, his motivations and actions are necessarily self-serving and require no justification other than his own pleasure. A revised version of the book published in 1991 eliminates some positive references in the original to marijuana use and drug culture but also seems to make some of the text, which is written as firstperson internal reflection, seem less spontaneous and more contrived. David Gerrold’s career began with writing the Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967). He is also the author of When Harlie Was One (1972), concerning an intelligent computer. The promise of Gerrold’s early works, including The Man Who Folded Himself, is realized in the author’s ongoing War Against the Chtorr series of novels, including A Matter for Men (1983), A Day for Damnation (1984), A Rage for Revenge (1989), and A Season for Slaughter (1992). In these more mature works, the inventiveness of the author’s ideas is combined with depth of character development. —Bernard J. Farber
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The Mars Trilogy Humanity colonizes Mars, and the colonists declare their independence from Earth
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson (1952) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novels Time of work: 2027 to the twenty-third century Location: Mars First published: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996) The Story Red Mars is a sweeping saga of humanity’s colonization of Mars. It is told primarily from the viewpoint of the First Hundred, the initial Martian colonists. The novel begins with the death of John Boone, the first man to set foot on Mars and one of the leaders of the colony. Boone’s death was plotted by his best friend, Frank Chalmers, his rival in politics and romance. The story then flashes back to the flight to Mars, as the colonists endure alternating bouts of boredom and intense preparation for their landing. The creation of the colony and a manned base on the moon Phoebus goes smoothly, marred only by a debate over the pace and methods of terraforming Mars. The Reds, led by geologist Ann Clayborne, want to retain Mars in its natural state for study. The Greens, led by Saxifrage Russell, believe in adapting the Martian environment through biological and industrial processes so that people may one day walk the Martian surface without need of artificial breathing devices. As the First Hundred develop Mars, additional colonists arrive. Development on Mars is nominally under the control of the United Nations, but the growth of transnational corporations on Earth leads to a growing corporate presence on Mars. As conditions on Earth decline, immigration to Mars and access to its resources increasingly are seen as rights on Earth, even as the Martian colonists begin to develop a sense of independence. Chalmers, the leader of the American delegation, deals with Earth officials and Martian factions to maintain a fragile balance of power. This balance begins to break down as an asteroid is maneuvered into orbit to be used as raw material and the base for a space elevator, a
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cable connecting the asteroid and Mars to provide low-cost transportation from Mars’s gravity well. Martian medical personnel discover a way to slow the aging process dramatically. This precipitates a crisis on Earth, as differences widen between the haves and the have-nots. This pressure spills over to Mars, as increased immigration and worsening living conditions lead colonists to disappear into the wild. Hiroko Ao, head of the first farm colony on Mars, leads her team and psychologist Michel Duval into the southern hemisphere, and other colonists join them. In 2061, a violent revolution breaks out. Town barriers are breached, and the revolutionaries are slaughtered. The space elevator is destroyed, and Phoebus is blown up because of fears of invasion from space. The Earth forces reassert control, and Chalmers is killed as the survivors of the First Hundred flee to the southern hemisphere for sanctuary. Green Mars begins twenty years after the failed revolution. Mars is rebuilding slowly after the revolution, and refugees are beginning to reenter Martian society, using false identification. Ao also has begun to produce children, using artificial wombs. Life in the sanctuaries is detailed through the eyes of one of these children, Nirgal, a grandson of members of the First Hundred. Much of the action, on both Mars and Earth, deals with a discussion of what type of society should be established to sustain development. Megacorporations have developed on Earth and taken over Third World countries. They openly flout the authority of the United Nations on Mars, establishing their own police forces. Parallel to this repression, the underground society develops an alternative lifestyle in which differences in social, political, and religious beliefs are tolerated. They also develop an economy based on the barter system and the exchange of hydrogen, an extremely rare element on Mars. Thanks to the antiaging drug, the First Hundred who survived the revolution are still active members of society, even though they are more than one hundred years old. The Martian independence movement grows again, led by Nadia Cherneshevsky and Maya Toitovana, members of the First Hundred, and Nirgal and Jackie Boone from the younger generation. This movement is more tempered, governed by political opportunity rather than rash actions. The various factions gather to debate the formation of the postindependence government, writing the Dorsa Brevia declaration, which widely divergent groups agree will govern their life in the postrevolutionary environment. Cherneshevsky and Toitovana work tirelessly to keep the movement in check while waiting for a catastrophic event on Earth that will divert attention from Mars.
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The opportunity for revolution occurs when part of Earth’s Antarctic continent breaks off and threatens to flood major coastal cities as it drifts north and melts. As the novel ends, the new Martian revolution, less violent than the first, appears to have been a success. Blue Mars begins with the formation of a Martian government, with strict provisions for protection of the environment, including establishment of a primitive zone where the landscape forever will remain as it was before settlement. The First Hundred remain prominent in society, and Cherneshevsky is elected as the first Martian president. Relationships are developed not only with Earth, which receives a delegation consisting of Nirgal Boone, Maya Toitovana, and Michel Duval, but with the new colonies developing around the solar system as well. Tensions between the Green and Red movements and between the older and younger settlers develop as they debate the number of immigrants the Martian ecosystem is able to absorb. A practical method of travel beyond the solar system is found, and Jackie Boone becomes one of the first colonists to the stars. Members of the First Hundred, now more than two hundred years old, begin to experience memory problems. By the end of the novel, they have begun dying of natural causes. Longtime enemies Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell have developed an understanding of each other’s viewpoints, mirroring the Martian society as a whole. Analysis These are novels of development, in both political and technological senses. In them, Kim Stanley Robinson shows an encyclopedic knowledge of research on the potential for colonization of Mars and on its landscape. He extends and develops this knowledge into what might happen in the future. This detail consumes a large part of the trilogy, and in sections it slows the narrative, as in the extensive descriptions of the new landscape as the colonists begin to terraform Mars. One critic described the novels as “reading NASA tech manuals” and thought that the level of detail interrupted the story’s flow. Robinson chooses to provide a level of detail that allows the reader to become a part of the society, and his descriptions of everyday activities, such as Martian jogging and theater, provide a convincing level of depth to his portrait of Martian society. Parallel with the technological details (and certainly in the forefront in Green Mars and Blue Mars) is the development of Martian society. The society contains a number of segments, some based on elements from Earth’s society, such as nationality or religion, and some more specific to
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Mars, such as the ecological divide between the Reds and the Greens on issues concerning terraforming. The resulting discussions, especially the Dorsa Brevia conference in Green Mars, shows Robinson’s belief that positive change still can be accomplished through people gathering in organizations. The continued development of the Martian government and the reform of Earth’s governments in response to ecological catastrophe in Blue Mars shows a positive view of the future. Each side’s point of view is presented at length and is examined objectively. There are no easy answers to the difficulties Mars faces as the crisis on Earth lowers living standards on both planets, but decisions are made for the good of the whole instead of narrow interests. The novels have large casts of characters, with many appearing in all three books. These large casts allow Robinson to examine different places and viewpoints but mean that characters often disappear into the background just as the reader gets involved with their part of the story. Female characters are particularly strong in Green Mars and Blue Mars. Cherneshevsky and Toitovana, along with Jackie Boone, lead the political underground and the Martian government, and Ao develops the ecological underground movements. Robinson consistently has used strong women as central characters in his fiction. Robinson wrote several novels before beginning the Mars trilogy. His first novel, The Wild Shore (1984), was an Ace special, a series of first novels selected by noted science-fiction editor Terry Carr. It describes the development of a postcatastrophe culture after the United States has lost a war. The Gold Coast (1988) deals with Orange County, California, about thirty years in the future, showing the results of unfettered technology. Pacific Edge (1990) shows yet another view, that of a utopia with environmental and population controls that allow everyone to lead a good life. Those three novels are referred to as the Orange County trilogy. Robinson also is a noted writer of short fiction and won a Nebula in 1987 for his novella “The Blind Geometer.” Although Robinson was an established author before the publication of Red Mars, this novel and its sequels moved him to the ranks of the major writers of the 1990’s. Red Mars won several awards, including a 1994 Nebula and 1993 British Science Fiction Association Award. Green Mars won the 1994 Hugo and the 1994 Locus Award —Catherine Doyle
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The Martian Chronicles Americans attempt to colonize Mars in the twenty-first century
Author: Ray Bradbury (1920) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Stories Time of plot: 1999 to 2026 Location: Mars and Earth First published: 1950 (revised version published in England as The Silver Locusts, 1951)
The Story In January, 1999, the first manned rocket to Mars is launched from Ohio. So begins Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, a book composed of fourteen stories and twelve sketches that are thematically connected and chronologically arranged. All but the last three stories take place between 1999 and 2005, during which time Mars is quickly settled and then, even more quickly, abandoned. People want to relocate on Mars primarily to escape tightening government controls and impending atomic war, but the Martians use their telepathic abilities to deceive and destroy the crews of the first three exploratory expeditions. The fourth expedition succeeds because the Martians have been decimated by a plague of chicken pox inadvertently carried to Mars on a previous rocket. A crewman named Spender fears that people will come to Mars only for crass commercial and military purposes, not respecting and ultimately destroying what remains of a high Martian culture. Spender’s fears appear justified after Benjamin Driscoll (“The Green Morning”) discovers a quick way to make the Martian atmosphere more breathable. Human “locusts” now arrive in stages Bradbury likens to the development of the American West. In June of 2003, African Americans come in their own rockets (“Way in the Middle of the Air”). “Night Meeting,” balancing quietly at the book’s center, records the first friendly meeting between a human (Tomás Gomez) and a Martian (Muhe Ca). Prior to meeting Ca (who appears to be from either the past or the future), Gomez is told by an old man to approach Mars as if it were a “kaleidoscope”—that is, “Enjoy it. Don’t ask it to be nothing else but what it is.”
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“The Martian” returns to what already has developed into a major thematic strand woven throughout the book. Contrary to the wise advice offered in “Night Meeting,” people mistakenly persist in trying to combat loneliness and homesickness by molding Mars into something it is not—a twin to Earth. When war breaks out on Earth in November, 2005, virtually everyone returns “home.” The final three stories take place twenty-one years later (in 2026), the traditional span between birth and adulthood. Has the human race matured enough to embrace the beauty and desirability of cultural and racial diversity? “The Long Years” reunites on Mars two members of the fourth expedition. When Hathaway dies and Captain Wilder leaves, the process they originally had set in motion is finished. The next story (“There Will Come Soft Rains”), set on Earth, provides no evidence of human survival. Attention centers on the “death” of a completely automated house, its family having been killed by an atomic blast. In the last story (“The Million-Year Picnic”), a family has escaped to Mars in a “Family” rocket. Perhaps a few other families will follow. With all the wisdom of the old man in “Night Meeting,” they decide to adapt to Mars and not try to make it into a second Earth. They will be the first of a new race of Martians. Perhaps Muhe Ca was indeed from the future, perhaps even a descendant of this very family. The book ends on this subdued but firm note of hope. Analysis Bradbury’s second book, The Martian Chronicles, remains a major literary contribution to the “myth of Mars”—the notion of technologically advanced Martians confronting survival on a dying desert world—that began in 1877, when Giovanni Schiaparelli reported canali (mistranslated into English as “canals”) on Mars. Developed mainly by Percival Lowell and embellished fictionally by writers such as H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and C. S. Lewis, the myth grew. When, in the last half of 1949, Bradbury put together the pieces of his first thematically unified book, he included twelve previously published Mars stories, added two new stories (“Night Meeting” and “The Green Morning”), and composed twelve bridging sketches. Bradbury did an admirable if imperfect job of choosing, revising, and arranging. Readers who notice that The Martian Chronicles is not sufficiently selfcontained should consult “The Fire Balloons” in Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man (1951). Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), and the frontier thesis of historian Frederick Jackson
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Turner guided Bradbury in organizing his grand mosaic of The Martian Chronicles. That he arranged some pieces as a series of waves roughly equivalent to stages in the settling of the American frontier has been noted. Not often noted is how Bradbury structured The Martian Chronicles like a Shakespearean tragedy, humanity’s tragic flaw being an emotional immaturity that disallows the acceptance of diversity. The diversity theme, found in many of his works, stems from the fact that Bradbury was conceived not long after older brother Samuel, twin to Leonard, died at the age of two. Bradbury grew up suspecting that he was supposed to replace the dead twin. He tried to escape such pressures by developing his own ego, yet he felt ambivalent about not meeting parental expectations. Bradbury came to perceive himself as an outsider, a family freak. In a poem written later in life, he wondered if his parents had been “incredulous” at the “humpbacked . . . Martian son” they had produced. It is no surprise, then, that an important, self-reflective theme, universalized in The Martian Chronicles, involves the need to accept and cherish diversity—whether of individuals, racial groups, places, or cultures. “The Martian,” with a main character whose name means “twin,” is a key story illustrating the dangers involved in molding people or places into what they are not. Indeed, efforts to transform Mars into a twin to Earth prove abortive. Bradbury’s message, rather, is to celebrate diversity: “Enjoy” Mars. “Don’t ask it to be nothing else but what it is.” Although many mainstream critics praised the collection for its literary merits, some hard-core science-fiction readers were dismayed by its lack of scientific plausibility and seemingly antiscientific stance. When teachers discovered the book’s appeal to high school and college students, its success was ensured. The theme of accepting diversity while fighting pressures to conform has continuing relevance; the book has never been out of print. The Martian Chronicles remains a kaleidoscopic, lyrical work of many colors, meanings, and mythic possibilities. Sometimes poetic, sometimes satiric, and often moralistic, it is Bradbury’s most accomplished, complex, and rewarding work, an imaginative blending of science fiction and fantasy that can justly claim the status of a classic. —Marvin E. Mengeling
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Martian Time-Slip The strongman of a Martian colony tries to use the latent extrasensory powers of an autistic child to profit in land speculation
Author: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) Genre: Science fiction—extrasensory powers Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The near future Location: Mars First published: 1964 (serial form, “All We Marsmen,” Worlds of Tomorrow, 1963) The Story Jack Bohlen is an immigrant to Mars living there with his family and working as a repairman for the Yee Company. He is assigned to do a small job for Arnie Kott, Supreme Goodmember of the Water Workers Local, Fourth Planet Branch. This assignment places Jack in the middle of a power struggle over a parcel of apparently worthless land that is to be developed by the United Nations. Unlike Bohlen, Supreme Goodmember Kott is ruthlessly committed to the acquisition of power and material wealth at any cost. He uses people without hesitation or shame. He uses Dr. Glaub, a psychiatrist at the local camp for mentally disturbed children, to learn about a contemporary school of Swiss psychotherapists and their recently developed theory. They believe that autism and other forms of schizophrenia are caused by a discrepancy in the time sense of the sufferers. They believe that autistics and schizophrenics experience the world as running either much faster or much slower than do others. If their time is much faster, they would speed ahead into the future and get stuck there, isolated from the rest of humanity. From this vantage point, though imprisoned in their own heads, they might have special knowledge of the future. Establishing communication with such a person could be a profitable means of obtaining information. Kott comes to believe that one particular autistic child, Manfred Steiner, not only is able to perceive time in this expanded fashion but also has the power to control it. Kott kidnaps the strange boy and takes him to Dirty Knobby, a Martian mountain that holds great religious sig-
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nificance for the indigenous population, called Bleekmen. Using an ancient visionary prescription from the Bleekmen and Manfred’s extrasensory powers, Kott attempts to travel back in time and stake his claim to the land in question before its value skyrockets. Kott’s plan fails. He is incapable of navigating the insane time-travel tunnel that he believes will lead to success in his claim-jumping scheme. The innate compassion of the Bleekmen and Bohlen prevail. It appears that Bohlen had a bout with schizophrenia back on Earth and feels sympathy for young Manfred. Similarly, Doreen Anderton, Kott’s mistress and feminine agent, had a schizophrenic brother and therefore sympathizes with schizophrenics. Her sympathy swings to Manfred’s side and against her boss. Most instrumental in the downfall of the Supreme Goodmember, however, is the accumulated enmity of other people he has mistreated. In a dispute arising from a tangentially related matter, Kott is assassinated out of revenge by a business rival whom he had previously destroyed with hardly a second thought. Bohlen returns to a life of domestic harmony, and Manfred Steiner is able to avoid the fate of institutionalized horror he had foreseen in his own future. He makes one last, memorable appearance during the denouement, as a time-traveling cyborg. Analysis Martian Time-Slip is vintage Philip K. Dick, published only two years after his Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle (1962). One of the wildest imaginations of the twentieth century explodes into full flower here, with no sign of the occasional loss of control that sometimes subverted its full effects. The thread of the plot unwinds intricately through the lives of more than a dozen characters. Their hopes, dreams, torments, and insanities are always well ordered against the backdrop of the basic conflict over land development. As usual, the characters in this Dick novel are ordinary folks who attain noble stature in their struggles with extraordinary circumstances. Even the antagonist, Kott, earns some sympathy in his ability to accept the terms of life on Mars and his unabashed dedication to making the best of things. The amoral contagion of his energy sweeps the other characters, the plot, and the reader through the story from start to finish. The inner struggles and strength of Bohlen, the protagonist, contrast effectively with Kott. Jack’s profoundly human sensibility is emphasized at the end of the book, when he actually mourns Kott’s death. The minor characters are drawn with a fine distinction. Kott’s es-
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tranged wife, Anne Esterhazy, is seen through his eyes as a stereotypical idealist until she pulls a Machiavellian political coup against Dr. Glaub. Later, it seems appropriate that Anne and the ineffectual psychiatrist form a last-ditch alliance and attempt to rescue Manfred. His father, Norbert Steiner, is convincing in the opening pages of the novel as he falls victim, tragically, to suicidal impulses. Likewise, the development of Kott’s assistant, Otto Zitte, from a superficial seducer of lonely housewives to Kott’s assassin is entirely believable. Thematically, Martian Time-Slip is a fascinating investigation of the relationship between schizophrenia and the human experience of time. The idea that mentally disturbed people run at a different speed from the rest of society is a typically entertaining science-fiction concept. Hypersensitivity to or obsession with the ultimate consequences of time, however, is one of the great themes of literature. Death and decay await everyone at some point in the future, and thinking about it too much is not good for mental health. Communication, the main problem for schizophrenic people, is useless or impossible under the domination of this perspective on time. Language is reduced to gibberish, or “gubbish” as it is called in this novel. A lover’s beauty and a child’s innocence crumble to dust under the pressure of time’s inevitable passage. The rewards of worldly success evaporate in the breeze of the calendar’s fanning pages. Ironically, however, Dick demonstrates in Martian Time-Slip that this awareness of the crushing futility of life marks the beginning of true wisdom. —Steven Lehman
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The Merlin Trilogy Merlin uses his powers as a magician and prophet to unify Britain against Saxon attack by creating and then protecting King Arthur
Author: Mary Stewart (1916) Genre: Fantasy—mythological Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The late fifth century c.e. Location: Great Britain First published: The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973), and The Last Enchantment (1979) The Story The Merlin trilogy tells the King Arthur story from the viewpoint of Merlin, Arthur’s protector, teacher, and adviser. The Crystal Cave focuses on Merlin’s childhood and youth as he struggles to find his father and develop the gift of the Sight, the ability to see visions of events elsewhere or in the future. The novel begins by introducing Merlin as the illegitimate son of Niniane, daughter of a Welsh king. She has refused to tell anyone the name of the man who fathered her child. Merlin is an outsider at his grandfather’s court because of his birth and strange ways; he is not interested in the war games that preoccupy the other boys and instead studies healing and magic with Galapas, a local wise man. When Merlin’s grandfather dies, the boy flees from his uncle Camlach, who sees Merlin as a threat and wishes to kill him. Through a series of coincidences he attributes to the god who guides him, Merlin discovers that his father is Ambrosius, the exiled rightful king of Britain. Merlin uses his gift of prophecy to help his father regain his throne, which then passes to his uncle Uther when Ambrosius dies. Foreseeing that Uther’s first son will be the king Britain needs to shield it against Saxon invasion, Merlin agrees to help when King Uther falls in love with Ygraine, wife of his chief ally Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. Disguising Uther as Gorlois, Merlin takes him to Ygraine so that Arthur will be conceived during their passion that night. Gorlois dies in a separate attack that same night, and Uther rejects Merlin afterward for his failure to foresee that Uther would be able marry Ygraine honorably one day later.
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The Hollow Hills is the story of Merlin’s guardianship of his young cousin Arthur. Still at odds with Uther over the events at Tintagel, Merlin makes peace with the king in order to gain custody of Arthur upon his birth. Uther, fearing that his enemies may try to harm his son, asks Merlin to conceal the boy until he has grown. While Arthur is reared in a noble household, ignorant of his true position as heir to the kingdom, Merlin embarks on a quest to locate the great sword Caliburn for Arthur to find when he comes of age. When Arthur is ten years old, Merlin becomes his teacher; when the boy is fourteen, Merlin takes him to his father, the dying King Uther. The night before his father’s death, Arthur sleeps with Morgause, not knowing that she is his half-sister. She deliberately seduces him in a play for power. Arthur proves himself fit to fight and lead the kingdom in battle. Through the help of Merlin’s magic, Arthur raises the sword from the stone where Merlin has hidden it and is proclaimed High King. The Last Enchantment covers Merlin’s service to the young king. The magic Merlin used when Arthur raised the sword has burned out his power, and he must adjust to living without it. He spies on Morgause, who uses her pregnancy with Arthur’s incestuous bastard son, Mordred, to plot against her brother. Because of Merlin’s prophecy that Mordred will eventually kill his father, Arthur wishes Merlin to kill the baby, but Merlin refuses. He attempts instead to find Mordred, but he fails because he now lacks the Sight to show him where Morgause has hidden her son. Merlin eventually returns to Arthur to build the new fortress of Camelot. Still lacking his power, Merlin is unable to fend off Morgause’s attempt on his life. She poisons him, leaving him mad for almost a year
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and prematurely aged. When he returns to the king’s service, however, Merlin regains his powers of Sight and prophecy, which allow him first to save Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, from an assault and then to acquire an assistant, Nimuë, to whom he passes on his arts. When Merlin apparently dies and is buried in Bryn Myrddin, the cave that has been his home, he has prepared Nimuë to take over his role as Arthur’s adviser. Merlin awakes from his illness trapped in the cave and stripped of all his power, the fate he long ago foresaw for himself, but he escapes after several weeks. He refuses to return to public life, though, and the novel ends with his reunion with Arthur and Nimuë and his retirement back to Bryn Myrddin. Analysis Mary Stewart is well known for the gothic romances that occupied the first half of her writing career, but she changed to the genre of historical fiction when writing the Merlin trilogy. Most writers who have retold the “matter of Britain” (the Arthurian legends) set their stories in a pseudo-medieval England based on the great medieval sources of the legends: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Sir Thomas Malory. Although Stewart also uses these romances as sources for her plots, she opts to set her version of the story in late fifth century Britain, the time of the real though shadowy historical figure on whom the legends are based. This choice of setting profoundly affects the telling of her tale. Approaching the subject as historical fiction rather than romance, she strives for realism and as much historical accuracy as research allows her. Her Merlin claims to tell the “factual” events on which the legends are based. Stewart deals with the fantasy component of the Merlin Trilogy in a manner in keeping with her vision of the historical period. She borrows the ancient Welsh legend of the Sight as the basis for Merlin’s visionary ability. In a story set when the practices of pagan and Christian religions crisscrossed, Merlin naturally sees his power as coming from the gods. It sets him apart from other men because he experiences a spiritually dynamic universe in which the gods intervene in human affairs. Merlin’s role is like that of a biblical prophet: When he works magic, he is serving as a channel through which the god speaks or acts. The supernatural thus directs the action of the books, although Stewart depicts events as realistically as she can. By using Merlin as her narrator, Stewart emphasizes the ironic limitations of his power. Readers see that although both great and ordinary people stand in awe of his ability to work magic and kings request his
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help, Merlin himself knows that he does not so much command his power as it commands him. Nor is foreknowledge a simple matter, and Merlin is well aware that his gods are cryptic. Although he can see results, he often cannot see the means by which they are achieved or the price that must be paid. Furthermore, the deterministic universe that Stewart creates traps Merlin as much as it does ordinary people. Knowing that Arthur will be the savior of Britain, Merlin bends all of his efforts in the first two books toward making what the Sight has shown him come true; however, he is also helpless before the future when he foresees that Mordred will destroy the kingdom Arthur has created and protected. Some critics see the guilt that Merlin feels over his helplessness as self-pity or anticlimactic inaction, but his emotions fit the nature of the universe Stewart envisions. Stewart deliberately parallels the story of Merlin’s childhood and rise to power in The Crystal Cave with Arthur’s own youth in The Hollow Hills. Both Merlin and Arthur live hidden childhoods as bastard boys searching for their fathers; they are then acknowledged as royal and brought into public life in their early teens. Each boy’s search for his father is clearly a search for identity and power. Stewart repeats this theme in The Wicked Day (1983), a coda to the trilogy that tells Mordred’s story. As Arthur’s bastard son by incest, he is brought up in ignorance of his parentage until his teens, when Arthur finds and acknowledges him. He learns to love his father and becomes one of Arthur’s faithful Companions. Mordred is the traditional villain of the Arthurian legend, but Stewart tells his story with some sympathy, as a man who resents and resists the fate ordained for him as a parricide in a deterministic universe. This novel is less engaging than the trilogy, perhaps partially because the use of omniscient third-person narration instead of first-person narration creates a sense of distance between the reader and Mordred not present between the reader and Merlin. The book nevertheless gives a coherent account of the tragic events that bring an end to Arthur’s reign, in keeping with the world Stewart portrays in the Merlin trilogy. —Kara K. Keeling
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Mission of Gravity and Star Light A story of planetary exploration in which conditions radically different from those of Earth require humans to depend on alien Mesklinites to move across planets
Author: Hal Clement (Harry Clement Stubbs, 1922) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The distant future Location: Within twenty light years of Earth in the direction of the constellation Cygnus First published: Mission of Gravity (1954; serial form, Astounding ScienceFiction, April-July, 1953) and Star Light (1971; serial form, Analog, June-September, 1970) The Story Hal Clement creates, in Mission of Gravity, a fictional planet called Mesklin in the double-star system known to astronomers as 61 Cygni. In the sequel, he moves to the gigantic Dhrawn, a few light years away and still in the known universe. In both stories of adventure and exploration, two motivations drive the Mesklinite aliens, who are clearly more interesting characters to Clement than their human handlers and explorer counterparts. First, the tiny Mesklinites are hardy explorers and astronauts who want to carry on their explorations. In the time between the two novels, they establish a College of Mesklin. The Mesklinites are also shrewd bargainers who exploit their human visitors in order to acquire more scientific knowledge than the dominant humans seem to want to give. Conversely, even though they are on major missions, the humans seem less eager and shrewd than their tiny partners. The younger humans are more eager, and in the sequel, Clement makes good use of this trait, as he does in his fiction for young adults and juveniles. Mesklinites resemble fifteen-inch caterpillars, though they have an immensely tough exoskeleton. They are the most intelligent of the many species on Mesklin, which has variable gravity ranging from three Earth gravities at the equator to nearly seven hundred Earth gravities at each pole. The environmental details of the planet, and of Dhrawn in the sequel, along with Clement’s ideas of what may cause such conditions,
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are as interesting as characterization and plot. A further conjecture by Clement concerns how planetary conditions affect the evolved lifeforms—small, hard-shelled creatures evolve in high gravity. The entire mix is extremely detailed to fascinate readers interested in hard science. The human characters themselves, however, resemble science-fiction readers or scientists. Their main activity in both books is to discuss how to manage in the variable conditions of Mesklin and Dhrawn, as well as how to learn more about planetary conditions. In the first novel, human astronauts accidentally land a research rocket at the South Pole of Mesklin and cannot retrieve it because of the immense gravity there. Charles Lackland has been on the surface at the equator for several Earth months and has taught the clever Mesklinite leader and ship captain, Barlennan, enough English to plan a rescue mission. The Mesklinites agree to undertake the difficult journey to the South Pole in their ship Bree. Near the novel’s conclusion, they hold the humans hostage until they are taught the principles of flight, which is an incredible accomplishment for their species. In the sequel, Barlennan cleverly invents a fiction about possible alien life on Dhrawn, knowing that humans are always looking for new lifeforms. He manipulates his human friends to supply him with details about spaceflight. In the sequel, the human handlers have become a little more interesting and various. The human life span is much shorter than that of Mesklinites, so Lackland has been replaced by a team in orbit that includes some eager juveniles. By the end of the two adventure stories, the characters have learned a lot about Mesklin and Dhrawn, as well as about the competition for knowledge among species and about what can be learned cooperatively. In Star Light, they discover that Dhrawn, like Jupiter in the Milky Way, may be closer in nature to a star than to a planet. Furthermore, the explorers find out by necessity how to survive in alien conditions; Dhrawn is home for neither Mesklinites nor humans. A final fascination in the plot and in the environmental details, which in Clement’s work are closely tied, is that by the end of the sequel, humans have learned to communicate in the Mesklinite language, called Stennish. The wonder in that comes from the fact that Mesklinites have no lungs, so that sound is generated from a sort of siphon in their small bodies. Analysis Clement’s narratives create the impression that the reader is a scientist. In fact, many of Clement’s readers are scientists who delight in the accurate references to astronomy, planetary dynamics, strange variations in
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weather, and alien evolution. The elements of learning in Clement’s work make it science fiction, whereas in its strong story lines about survival, it reads like adventure fiction. The other element that strongly dominates these novels, as well as much of the rest of Clement’s hard science fiction, is the sense of hope and exuberance associated with travel and adventure books written for young people. The history of such books begins with the eighteenth century writings of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. In the size differentials between the humans and Mesklinites and in the sheer inventiveness of details, the reader is reminded of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). The awareness of and attempt to map variability and possibility in nature fuses nicely with youthful hope in Clement’s work, as in that of these predecessors. In this set of Mesklinite novels in particular, as well as in Cycle of Fire (1957) and Close to Critical (1964), Clement postulates an ominous cycle for civilization in which creatures must learn to use the knowledge they acquire about nature and not to destroy themselves with that knowledge. This classic dilemma is discussed as the “energy crisis” in Star Light, and it adds a sense of urgency to these essentially problem-solving adventure tales. Clement is a technically accurate and fascinating writer of science and should be read as an important thinker on the problems and challenges related to science. —Donald M. Hassler
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The Mists of Avalon King Arthur’s half-sister, Morgaine, fights to keep Avalon, the Goddess’s sacred island, from forever disappearing into the mists
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999) Genre: Fantasy—mythological Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The Middle Ages Location: Great Britain First published: 1982 The Story Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon retells the legend of King Arthur. Like most versions of what has come to be known as the “matter of Britain,” the story chronicles the monarch’s rise to power, his glorious but troubled reign, and his downfall and eventual death. Bradley’s tale also offers a revised view of Arthur, of his changing world, and, more specifically, of the transition from pre-Christian Goddess worship to Christianity. Narrated by Arthur’s half-sister, Morgaine, The Mists of Avalon brings to life the Cult of the Goddess, paying homage to the women in Arthur’s life. Arthur’s rise to power begins with his and Morgaine’s mother, Igraine. As Igraine’s fate unfolds, so do the futures of both Great Britain and Avalon, the sacred island of the Goddess. In her role as High Queen to Uther Pendragon, Igraine serves the Goddess by keeping Avalon, her homeland, alive in the minds and hearts of her subjects. As giver of life to Morgaine and Arthur, she is also mother to both Avalon and Great Britain, for through her, Avalon finds a successor to Viviane—the reigning high priestess—and Great Britain acquires its next High King. Aided by the women of Avalon, Arthur ascends to the throne and marries Gwynhwyfar, the antithesis of his female relatives. She becomes a defender of the Christian faith and an enemy of Avalon, and thus a source of conflict and a catalyst for change. To appease Gwynhwyfar, Arthur forsakes his oath to Avalon—a promise not to favor one religion over another—and musters his armies under a Christian banner. Ultimately, Gwynhwyfar’s piety prompts Morgaine to assume a new role as protector of Avalon, a role requiring her to plot her own brother’s overthrow.
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Arthur’s downfall does occur, but not as Morgaine originally plans, because the Goddess has devised another destiny for Arthur and his sister. Possessed by the spirit of an outraged Goddess, Morgaine delivers an enchantment that leaves the High King with neither military power nor trustworthy counsel. A vulnerable Arthur falls prey to the wiles of his son Gwydion. Conceived by Morgaine during a fertility rite in Avalon, Gwydion is the son that no Christian king can claim. Prodded by his Aunt Morgause, who represents the dark aspect of the Goddess, Gwydion leads an attack against Arthur. Father and son battle and kill each other. Morgaine, in the role of the Death Crone, takes her brother’s body to Avalon, then visits Viviane’s shrine at Glastonbury’s convent. In this most Christian of places, Morgaine plants a twig from Avalon, and she realizes that the sacred isle will endure because the Goddess is reborn not only through Avalon’s women but also through women who live outside the mists of Avalon. Analysis Bradley’s story blends the supernatural and the ordinary to create fantasy. The Goddess of Avalon is not simply an unseen force but also an aspect of living women. At times, reincarnation and karmic destiny drive the plot, and throughout the story, psychic visions, called Sight, give glimpses of the future and of several pasts, including one in Atlantis. Faeries kidnap lost travelers, Druids forge the legendary Excalibur, and ceremonial magic is a part of daily life. In short, Bradley’s tale depicts a fantasy world fraught with mysticism and mythic figures. A complex novel about the mythical King Arthur, The Mists of Avalon joins a distinguished body of late twentieth century Arthurian fiction. Like T. H. White’s two-part story—The Once and Future King (1968) and The Book of Merlyn (1977)—Bradley’s novel translates medieval concepts into images that twentieth century readers can understand. Unlike White’s account, Bradley’s rendering of the myth tells little about the specifics of war and battle, focusing instead on characters and their intricate relationships. In doing so, The Mists of Avalon resembles Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy—The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973), and The Last Enchantment (1979). By salvaging the character Morgaine from her traditional role as an evil sorceress, Bradley’s novel adds a decidedly feminist voice to a body of literature that includes White’s and Stewart’s more male-oriented narratives. Female characters in The Mists of Avalon have much in common with their late 1970’s and early 1980’s counterparts in popular feminist fantasy and science fiction. Similar to the women in Joanna Russ’s The Fe-
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male Man (1975), the priestesses of Avalon live in their own world, trace their family histories through their mothers, and contend with male outsiders. Like the Tribeswomen in Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines series, Bradley’s women collectively challenge conventional gender roles and redefine the meanings of “mother” and “mothering.” Although they struggle against men, the women of Avalon seek what neither Russ’s nor Charnas’s female utopian societies value: egalitarian alliances with males. Nevertheless, when necessary, Bradley’s women defend Avalon as fiercely as might the female knights in Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s “The Prodigal Daughter” (1981). Like much of the femaleauthored fantasy literature of its time, The Mists of Avalon reclaims political power for women. It goes a step further, however, by making Goddess worship the core of women’s power as well as the commanding force behind the legend of King Arthur. The Mists of Avalon was published twenty-five years into Bradley’s career, and it builds on feminist themes in her earlier works, especially the well-known Darkover series. Bradley, in fact, may have modeled the women of Avalon after such characters as her Free Amazons in The Shattered Chain (1976). Lengthier and more historically sophisticated than her previous fantasy novels, The Mists of Avalon also marks Bradley’s conscious attempt to write more scholarly fiction. That shift produced another feminist mythological fantasy, The Firebrand (1987), and demonstrated that she can outgrow categories in writing. —Debra G. Miller
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Mockingbird Toni Beauchamp wrestles with the unwanted inheritance of her mother’s magical powers and the possibility that she will hand them on to her own unborn daughter
Author: Sean Stewart (1965) Genre: Fantasy—Magic Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Contemporary Location: Houston, Texas First published: 1998 The Story On Elena Beauchamp’s tombstone is carved the legend, “There are some gifts which cannot be refused.” Elena had the gift of magic and passed on part of it to her daughter Candy, who can see certain aspects of the future. However, her other daughter, Antoinette, who is determined to be as unlike her mother as possible, receives the darker part of her mother’s magic. In a cabinet in the family living room are dolls representing spirits called Riders: the Mockingbird, the Widow, Pierrot, Mr. Copper, Sugar, and the Preacher. Another spirit, the Little Lost Girl, inhabits the house but has no doll of her own; she figures prominently in all of the stories told about the other Riders. Each Rider has particular qualities. Sugar is flirty and loving, the Mockingbird assimilates different personalities, the Preacher is grim and bitter, Pierrot is a funny but cruel clown, Mr. Copper never loses at games, and the Widow rules the family with an iron fist. Any of them can take over Toni’s body without warning, completely suppressing her personality and absolutely controlling what she does. She hates this legacy from her mother, but can do nothing about it. When she loses her job soon after becoming pregnant, Toni is in deep trouble both financially and emotionally. In addition, her sister is getting married, and she has put a curse on her former boss without actually meaning to do so. Meanwhile, an old family friend has recently died, and her mother’s other daughter—about whom Toni never knew—is coming to Houston for a visit. The cold spirit of the Widow is taking her over. Candy’s boyfriend Carlos knows something about magic too, and he
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takes Toni out one night to intercede with the Riders on her behalf. On a Houston street, they nearly hit a young girl, who, it becomes clear, is the Little Lost Girl. The Riders make things worse at times, as when the Widow terrifies Candy by demanding that she marry Carlos or when Sugar spends hundreds of dollars on clothes—but then occasionally the Riders help, too. Toni is an insurance company actuary, with a sharp eye for figures and a basic understanding of markets, but when she is contemplating daytrading for a living, she is too frightened to risk her savings on the kinds of trades she will need to make it work. However, Mr. Copper takes over her body one morning; in his calculating way, he makes her several thousand dollars, getting her started. Soon afterward, Candy and Carlos agree to marry, and even the approach of a hurricane and Toni’s labor cannot prevent things from coming out right. Analysis Mockingbird is a kind of novel not often written by North American writers. Magic in the book is not condensed into spells or held apart as the province of wizards. Nor is it particularly marveled at by any of the characters. Magic exists. It is something certain people can do. It has its benefits and costs. Treating magic in this way allows Stewart to spend more time examining the subtle changes this kind of magic creates in the Beauchamp family, the way that unpredictable power subtly deforms the interactions between people. Magic permeates every moment of Mockingbird, even when it is not actually happening. The Beauchamp magic is just there, in the same way that the troubled relationships between the Beauchamp women are just there, intractable and frustrating and occasionally wonderful. The motif of the Little Lost Girl echoes throughout Mockingbird. Candy, who is struggling to leave behind an adolescence of promiscuity, is lost because of her feeling that Toni was the favored sister; Toni herself is lost because of her denial of the family gifts; their other sister Angela was literally lost in Canada. Elena Beauchamp, too, was lost, a woman with a terrible gift who tried and failed to go against her nature in the interest of her family. Each of them is found during the course of the story, but they must find each other, and the figure of the Mockingbird stays in the background looking over it all: one person who adopts many voices. The three sisters, for all their differences, ultimately speak with the Beauchamp voice; or, as the novel’s final line has it, “We are singers, in this family, and we are also songs.” —Alex Irvine
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The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress An unlikely combination of an eccentric professor, a political agitator, a computer technician, and a self-aware computer plot a revolution that gives the Lunar colonies independence
Author: Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) Genre: Science fiction—future war Type of work: Novel Time of plot: May 13, 2075-October 14, 2076 Location: The Moon (primarily Luna City) and Earth First published: 1966 (serial form, If, December, 1965-April, 1966) The Story The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the story of the successful revolution of the Lunar colonies against the Lunar Authority on Earth. It is presented as the memoirs of one of the architects of the revolution, Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis, known throughout the novel as Mannie. A computer repairman with virtually no interest in politics, Mannie appears to be the least likely of Luna City’s citizens to become involved in a revolution against the oppressive Authority. He hates it as much as any other Lunar Citizen, or “Loonie,” but sees its interference as inevitable. One day, however, he stumbles into a secret meeting of a revolutionary group, following a tip given to him by the main computer at Lunar Authority Complex. This computer, which Mannie has named Mycroft (or Mike), after Sherlock Holmes’s elder and smarter brother, recently became self-aware, developing a humanlike personality. Mannie keeps that unprecedented development to himself. When the secret meeting is interrupted by the Lunar Authority’s armed guards, Mannie helps one of the agitators escape. She is Wyoming “Wyoh” Knott, a tall, blond woman from Hong Kong Luna whose beauty charms him. Ducking into a hotel room to escape detection, Wyoh and Mannie continue the political discussion, his cynicism clashing with her idealism. Nevertheless, they have enough of a common cause for him to trust her with his secret that the main computer has “come alive.” Professor Bernardo de la Paz, Mannie’s former mentor, joins them in the secret, and with his knowledge of revolution theory, combined with Mike’s knowledge of literally everything else, they plan the Lunar revolution.
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Taking over the Authority offices on the moon is relatively easy, though the date of the coup has been rushed, precipitated by the rape and murder of a Lunar woman by Authority Peace Dragoons. The guards are killed, and the Lunar Authority’s representative, Warden Mortimer Hobart, suffers an irreversible coma. For the first time in history, Loonies control Luna. Authority on Earth is still to be reckoned with, however. Mannie and the professor come down to Earth to negotiate peace, but the negotiations fail. Having no weapons, the Loonies catapult moon rocks toward selected targets on Earth. The rocks hit with the force of bombs, and Earth governments capitulate. The Loonies thus win the Lunar revolution. Analysis Undoubtedly one of Robert Heinlein’s greatest achievements in this Hugo Award-winning novel is the creation of Mike, the supercomputer that comes alive. Heinlein realizes the character effectively through Mannie, who admits in chapter 15 that he understands machinery better than he understands people. By giving Mannie the sort of symbiotic relationship with computers that a good technician needs, Heinlein prepares the reader for the humanization of the computer. Furthermore, Mannie himself has a cybernetic element: Having lost his left arm in a mining accident, he is outfitted with mechanical prosthetics, making him part machine. While presenting Mannie’s rapport with machinery as extraordinary, Heinlein nevertheless universalizes Mannie by making him the narrator and by naming him Manuel. Mike shortens that to Man. To Mike, Mannie represents the human race as it could be in the technologically complex twenty-first century. A second great achievement in the novel is Heinlein’s creation of a Lunar “dialect” of English, which is an amalgam of Russian with American and Australian slang. Although fellow science-fiction writer Alexei Panshin ridiculed it as “babu Russian,” it is a rare accomplishment: a language that is self-consistent and a logical extrapolation of the language Lunar colonists might speak, as well as being unobtrusive and intelligible to the reader. Its form is simple, with American speech patterns and Russian syntax—articles, pronouns, and expletives pruned where unnecessary for meaning. The second sentence of the novel is a good example: “I see also is to be mass meeting tonight.” One element of Heinlein’s consistent success in science fiction is his ability to make a future culture seem real. Early science fiction did so mostly by making the technology scientifically accurate. There is some element of this engineer’s perspective in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,
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particularly in the accurate and plausible portrayal of a Lunar catapult throwing moon rocks, with tremendous destructive force, at Earth. Equally effective is Heinlein’s use of a technique that Russian formalist critics called defamiliarization. Nothing emphasizes the reality of Lunar life more than presenting what is unusual as common and vice versa. When Mannie finds a hidden computer file he needs, he speaks of striking not gold but ice. If there is water on the moon, it is beneath the surface, frozen, and a valuable find. Similarly, the boundaries of Luna City are not spoken of as “city limits” but “municipal pressure,” for where the air stops is the end of habitable space. Furthermore, “pressure” is turned into a verb without the cumbersome “-ize” suffix, a logical extrapolation of how a Loonie might talk. The novel took many of Heinlein’s detractors by surprise. He had built a reputation after Starship Troopers (1959) for mixing conservative polemics with his science fiction. In this novel, one of the major characters, Professor la Paz, spouts very liberal (or perhaps anarchical, the term la Paz prefers) political theory that the narrator presents sympathetically. The novel also popularized a political slogan. The third section of the novel is titled “TANSTAAFL,” standing for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.” This became the unofficial slogan of the Libertarian party within a decade after the novel appeared. —John R. Holmes
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More than Human Six people with psionic powers join to form a superhuman entity classified as Homo gestalt
Author: Theodore Sturgeon (Edward Hamilton Waldo, 1918-1985) Genre: Science fiction—superbeing Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1950’s Location: The midwestern United States First published: 1953 The Story More than Human is an expanded version of “Baby Is Three,” a novella published in Galaxy in 1952. The novella forms the central part of the novel, which deals with the joining of six people to form a new form of humanity, Homo gestalt. The first section of the novel, “The Fabulous Idiot,” focuses on Lone, a mentally impaired man described as purely animal, who has parapsychic powers. Alicia and Evelyn Kew are sisters whose unconventional upbringing has kept Evelyn in a state of innocence. Evelyn’s psychic plea, “touch me,” is answered by Lone, but their merging is interrupted by her father, who kills Evelyn and beats Lone. Emotionally awakened and physically wounded, Lone is taken in by the Prodds, a farm family whose care makes him human for the first time. When Mrs. Prodd becomes pregnant, Lone leaves the farm to live in a cave he constructs in the woods. There he is joined by Janie, a precocious five-year-old with telekinetic abilities, and Bonnie and Beanie, African American twin toddlers who are able to teleport. Mrs. Prodd dies in childbirth, and her baby is born with Down syndrome. Lone brings the Prodd child, whom he christens “Baby,” back to the cave, to become the computerlike repository of information for the new organism. Together, the four children and Lone function as a single being, Homo gestalt. To help the grieving Mr. Prodd, Lone and the children construct an antigravity device to attach to his mired pickup truck, thus demonstrating the superhuman capacity of the new organism. The middle section, “Baby Is Three,” is the account of a psychiatrist’s uncovering of the repressed memories of fifteen-year-old Gerry, who is
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now the central ganglion of the Homo gestalt. By focusing on the triggering phrase “baby is three,” Gerry remembers his flight from an orphanage and his rescue by Lone from death by exposure. When Lone is killed by a falling tree, Gerry assumes the leadership role within the gestalt organism. Gerry and the other children are taken in by Alicia Kew, who provides them with security and raises them as “normal” children. Once they are no longer outcasts dependent on one another, their bond begins to disintegrate, and they cease to be Homo gestalt. Gerry kills Miss Kew to recover the organism’s autonomy. The final section, “Morality,” takes place nine years later. Under the leadership of Gerry, Homo gestalt has achieved superhuman powers but shares all of Gerry’s personality traits—immaturity, manic depression, viciousness, and vengefulness. As this section opens, Janie is trying to rehabilitate the mentally and physically ruined Hip Barrows, whose investigation of Homo gestalt‘s antigravity device had threatened to expose them. Gerry had intervened to destroy all evidence that the device existed, causing Hip to spend seven years trying to trace its origins. As Hip draws closer, Gerry commands him to “curl up and die.” Only Janie’s care prevents Hip’s death. After Hip recovers his memory, Hip and Janie confront Gerry, convincing him that Homo gestalt must have an ethos to survive. Hip is integrated as the final component in Homo gestalt, its conscience. With this addition, Homo gestalt achieves maturity and is welcomed into the company of other immortal gestalt organisms who have existed for aeons to protect and guide humanity. Analysis Theodore Sturgeon is recognized as part of the Golden Age of science fiction. Unlike other famous members of this select group, including
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Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, he was conspicuous for rejecting the scientific and technological trappings that marked much of the fiction from that era. More than Human is Sturgeon’s most enduring novel. It was lauded upon its publication for the literary quality of its writing and awarded the 1954 International Fantasy Award. It is the second in a trio of parapsychological novels that Sturgeon wrote in the 1950’s; the others are The Dreaming Jewels (1950; also published as The Synthetic Man, 1957) and The Cosmic Rape (1958). Despite its modern setting and psychoanalytic jargon, More than Human is part of one of the oldest literary genres, the creation myth. Sturgeon emphasizes this aspect by employing echoes of Genesis. Evelyn is the new Eve, Lone (“All Alone”) is Adam, and their meeting in the garden is a retelling of the biblical story in which the forces of evil try to prevent human union. The metaphor is extended into the New Testament in the book’s final section. Hip Barrows—whose full name is Hippocrates, the healer—must suffer spiritual death and be resurrected through joining with the gestalt (a reference to an expanded Trinity) before the entity can achieve eternal life and enter the realm of the immortals. By linking the emergence of his superbeing to human creation myths, Sturgeon rejects the science-fiction tradition of seeing emergent and created life-forms as unnatural or deviant. Unlike the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Homo gestalt creates itself out of the human desire to establish connections of love and compassion. Although Gerry utilizes the entity in negative ways, readers understand that this is a result of the alienating effects of his own horrible childhood, not the alien nature of Homo gestalt itself. Antisocial, superhuman children are a staple of horror literature, as exemplified by Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), but Sturgeon ignores the seductions of horror and looks into the heart of the problem—their mirroring of what is evil within society itself. He reasons that all children must grow up, and any created being or race also goes through progressive stages of growth in order to realize its potential. Sturgeon’s novel is unusual in emphasizing what is best in humanity through its depiction of what is more than human. —Katharine Kittredge
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The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand The human race overcomes a threat from an alien species through biological manipulation
Authors: Larry Niven (1938) and Jerry Pournelle (1933) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The thirty-first century Location: The Trans-Coal Sack Sector of the Empire of Man First published: The Mote in God’s Eye (1974) and The Gripping Hand (1993) The Story The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand concern the conflicts attending humanity as it expands its reach into the galaxy. Primary among these conflicts is the encounter with an alien species from a star system called the Mote. This species differs from humans, particularly in its highly stratified social organization, which has evolved out of biological stratification, creating what are effectively subspecies. Each subspecies has its own peculiar social task: Warriors, Engineers, Mediators, Masters, and many others adapted for various specific tasks. This makes the Moties, as they are called, more similar to the social insects than to humans, who can perform a wide variety of tasks. The Moties’ efficiency is increased by specialization, making them formidable opponents both in war and in peaceable endeavors. The Moties’ alarming rate of population increase causes a cycle of boom and bust on the Motie planet—civilization is followed by chaos in cycles of a few hundred years. The hope of certain Moties is to expand beyond their home planet into the galaxy and thereby find “living room” where the species can expand boundlessly. This, however, is what other Moties term a “Crazy Eddie” solution. They point out that the galaxy is not boundless and that eventually, once filled with Moties, it will be subject to the same cycle. This fact establishes the basis for conflict between humans and Moties. The first human contact with Moties generates considerable en-
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thusiasm, at least among scientists and merchants, groups that stand to gain new knowledge and new markets. The scientists are represented by Dr. Anthony Horvath, who heads the scientific expedition sent to the Motie star system and whose naïve trust of the Moties gives them access to the space drive technology they need in order to break free of their planet. The principal merchant is Horace Bury, whose greed parallels Horvath’s naïveté. At one point, hoping to cash in on the Moties’ engineering efficiency, he decides to smuggle a Motie engineer back into human space, a plan that is disrupted in such a way as to make him permanently and venomously opposed to the Moties. The military is much warier of the Moties. Rod Blaine, who commands the warship carrying the human expedition to the Moties, has his hands full trying to maintain tight security on his ship. Ultimately, he fails, losing the ship to a burgeoning population of the Motie class called Brownies, small idiot savant engineers who redesign the ship into warring Brownie fiefdoms. Kevin Renner, the flight commander, is crucial in exposing the Moties’ true intentions. Admiral Kutuzov, who commands the fleet that accompanies the expedition, waits silently, ready to blast the expedition and the Moties’ planet into oblivion at the slightest sign of danger. The danger, however, is not perceived until the expedition has returned to the Empire with three Motie ambassadors. When the Moties’ intentions are discovered, the humans decide to blockade the Moties within their own star system, at least until the collapse of the present civilization, at which time it would be safe to exterminate the species if necessary. With the blockade in place, The Mote in God’s Eye ends. The Gripping Hand picks up the story twenty-five years later, when Motie ships begin to penetrate the blockade. After considerable confusion, it is determined that this is a different civilization of Moties, a space-based colony that survives by scavenging the remnants of past Motie space colonies. Fortunately, a way to neuter Moties through the use of a bacterial agent has been discovered. The Moties are engaged in battle, the agent is introduced into the population, and the book ends with humanity saved from the encroachments of an alien species. Analysis The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand draw together a number of common science-fiction tropes, primarily that of the encounter with an alien civilization. This is a venerable tradition; precursors could be said to include Cyrano de Bergerac’s seventeenth century descriptions of the peoples of the Moon and Sun in Other Worlds (1965; original publications
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in 1657 and 1659) as well as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), with its Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, and talking horses. The early modern precursors include Sydney Wright’s The Amphibians: A Romance of 500,000 Years Hence (1924) and The World Below (1929), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venusian and Martian series, and Stanley Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey, and Others (1949; A Martian Odyssey and Other Science Fiction Tales, published in 1975, contains the stories from that work and the 1952 The Red Peri), in which are found some of the most imaginative renditions of alien creatures for its time. More recent, and highly acclaimed, additions to this genre are Frank Herbert’s Dune series (1965-1985) and Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal (1966). The Mote in God’s Eye constitutes the largest commercial and critical success resulting from the collaboration between Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It was nominated for several major awards. Other successes have been Inferno (1976), which also was recognized with award nominations; the mainstream best-seller Lucifer’s Hammer (1977); and Footfall (1985) and The Legacy of Heorot (1987), which added Steven Barnes to the writing team. Niven has also collaborated with Barnes to produce the Dream Park sequence, consisting of Dream Park (1981), The Barsoom Project (1989), and Dream Park: The Voodoo Game (1991; U.S. publication in 1992 as The California Voodoo Game). Niven generally is recognized as having produced better solo work than Pournelle. His Ringworld (1970) won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Another popular novel is A World out of Time (1976). Although The Mote in God’s Eye was identified immediately as a classic of science fiction, The Gripping Hand met with much less acclaim. Seen as a generally inadequate successor, it has been criticized for being too involved with plot and space maneuvers, to the detriment of the subject development that characterized the earlier novel and made it especially interesting. Readers lose the Motie-eye view, employed in the first novel, that gave such engrossing insights into the workings of an alien mind. In the sequel, the Moties are cardboard characters, as are the humans with whom they do battle. The basic elements of both stories offer a number of interesting themes: adaptability versus efficiency, types of social organization, parallels with human society and history, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism. In the earlier book, these themes were at least acknowledged, if not satisfactorily developed. Reading The Gripping Hand, one suspects that its writing was propelled by a desire to cash in on its predecessor’s status rather than to enlarge the authors’ claim on their readers’ imaginations. —Peter Crawford
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The Mythago Cycle Three novels describe adventures in the magical Ryhope Wood, where figures from history and myth are reborn as mythagos
Author: Robert Holdstock (1948) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The mid-twentieth century Location: Ryhope Wood, an old English forest First published: Mythago Wood (1984), Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (1988), and The Hollowing (1993) The Story Ryhope Wood stands in southeastern England, in the county of Herefordshire, near the village of Shadoxhurst. One of the few remaining ancient forests of England, it is a place where times long gone elsewhere still live. Ryhope is a small woods, measuring only three square miles, but within the forest time and distance bear little relationship to the outside. Narrow creeks become great rivers, several days become decades, and a few hundred yards of trail become a track of many miles. Ryhope Wood serves as the focus of the three fantasy novels composing the Mythago Cycle. Within these primal woods are mythagos, or myth images, created from the minds of individuals who live nearby and who are somehow drawn to Ryhope. A mythago might reflect something out of an individual’s past—from stories and tales heard as a child or learned in school— but can also represent or replicate the histories and myths of all who lived and died since the last ice age. The mythagos are not imaginary fictions: They are real, at least within the confines of Ryhope Wood, but not precisely as the outside world understands reality. Mythago Wood is the story of George Huxley, his two sons, Christian and Steven, and George’s colleague from Oxford, Edward Wynne-Jones. In the years before World War II, Huxley becomes obsessed with Ryhope and the mythagos to the extent of ignoring his family. He is entranced with one of his own mythago creations drawn from ancient myth, a young woman named Guiwenneth. Steven, returning from military service, discovers that his father has
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died. Christian, Steven’s brother, has become ensnared by Ryhope and by the now-dead Guiwenneth. In his woodland search for a resurrected Guiwenneth, Christian is pursued by his mythago of his dead father, a part-boar, part-man, the Uscrumug. Guiwenneth returns, but to Steven. In his jealousy, Christian, whose time in the woods has transformed him into a brutal warrior, kidnaps Guiwenneth. Steven, joined by Harry Keaton, a badly burned former air force pilot, pursues his brother. His quest takes years as measured in Ryhope time, and many mythago challenges are faced and overcome. Eventually Steven finds Christian. Fulfilling an oft-told myth, Steven, the Kinsman, kills the Outsider, his brother, who has been wreaking havoc in the land. A badly injured Guiwenneth appears, followed by George Huxley as the mythago Uscrumug who gently takes Guiwenneth from Steven’s arms and carries her across the fire into the land of ice, Lavondyss, the place of redemption. Mythago Wood ends with Steven waiting for Guiwenneth’s return. The central character of Robert Holdstock’s subsequent novel, Lavondyss, is Tallis Keaton, the young sister of Harry Keaton. In Mythago Wood, Harry had left Steven to pursue his own quest for release from his traumatic wounds. He had gone to Lavondyss, the place of peace beyond fire and ice. As Tallis grows to adolescence she, too, is caught up in mysterious Ryhope Wood and its mythagos. She feels called to save her brother Harry, who is somehow trapped within the wood. At the urging of Scathach, a warrior whom she had previously observed dying, she penetrates Ryhope’s vastness. She and Scathach discover the latter’s nonmythago father, Edward Wynne-Jones, George Huxley’s colleague, now the shaman to a neolithic mythago tribe. Tallis and Scathach part, he to follow his destiny to die on that battlefield earlier observed by Tallis and she to search for Harry. Tallis is transformed into a tree. The tree eventually falls, and she is carved into a mask of power for a starving ice age family. Again transformed, now as a holly tree, a mythago holly that can move, have intercourse, and give birth to birds, she observes the original Tallis prior to her arboreal transformation. The holly-Tallis sleeps and then awakes as the human Tallis, but as an old woman. As she approaches death, Harry appears and perhaps takes her back through time to her childhood and out of Ryhope. The novel ends with Tallis’s aged corpse being burned on a funeral pyre. Her voice, coming from a mask, asks Harry to wait for her. Holdstock’s third Ryhope novel is The Hollowing. When Tallis entered Ryhope with Scathach, her father, James Keaton, attempted to follow her but disappeared. After a year of outside time he reappears, apparently deranged, telling stories of Ryhope. The only person with
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whom he can communicate is Alex Bradley, a friend of Tallis. James soon dies, shortly followed by Alex. Alex’s father, Richard Bradley, is devastated. After six years have passed, Richard is contacted by several scientists who have been exploring Ryhope. They reveal that Alex is not dead and is still only about twelve years old, although in the world outside Ryhope he would be almost twenty. Because of his imaginative powers, Alex is a mortal danger to the woods through the mythagos he creates. In spite of his doubts, Richard joins the explorers, searching for “hollowings” that allow the passage from one part of the woods to another. They hope that one of the hollowings will lead to Alex and his mythago world. The quest is filled with dangers. Richard falls in love with Helen Silverlock, a Native American and one of the explorers. Through a mask tree created by Alex, James Keaton appears, calling for Tallis. Finally Richard finds Alex, pursued by Gawain and the Green Knight of literature and myth. The novel ends with Richard and Alex waiting in the woods for Helen, who has been pursuing her own mythago nemesis. Analysis Holdstock’s three novels about the primeval forest of Ryhope Wood are very much in the genre of fantasy and have been recognized as such. Mythago Wood won both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award for best novel. Holdstock also published a long novella about Ryhope Wood, “The Bone Forest,” contained in a 1991 collection with the same title. This latter work, which discusses at length the relationship between George Huxley and his two sons, is the first narrative segment of Holdstock’s multivolume saga and is preliminary to the events narrated in Mythago Wood. Much of the fascination for Holdstock’s readers comes from his mythmaking and myth-using abilities. His mythagos, the myth images that are the products of the imaginations of the characters, are drawn from various historic and mythic traditions, including the Celtic, Greek, and Anglo-Saxon. Figures from many different pasts, from a World War I soldier to a middle-aged Jason and his fellow Argonauts to ice age hunters, cross paths in Ryhope Wood. Although George Huxley, Edward WynneJones, and the explorers in The Hollowing are convinced that there is a scientific explanation for the events and transformations associated with Ryhope Wood, the element of science is submerged by the unexplainable: Scientific rationality seemingly cannot explain the long-held secrets of Ryhope.
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The forest follows its own laws, if any. At times the events within Ryhope nearly replicate the historic past, but equally often they have evolved far beyond historical recognition. The mere passage of time could easily distort that actual past, but one could argue that Ryhope’s mythagos reflect archetypes found in the deepest recesses of the individual or collective unconscious rather than showing objective history. The novels need not be read sequentially. Mythago Wood is the story of Steven Huxley, his rivalry with his brother, and his search for Guiwenneth. Lavondyss relates the tale of Tallis Keaton and her quest for her brother, Harry. The Hollowing revolves around Richard Bradley’s seemingly hopeless search for his presumedly dead son, Alex. The close and compulsive relationships of the characters, their passions and complexities, dominate Holdstock’s writings. The dragons to be slain are personal. Ryhope Wood is a magical and even surreal place, and although Holdstock’s descriptive passages of the woods compellingly enrich the stories, the background does not overwhelm the consuming interrelationships of the major characters. Ryhope Wood is the necessary stage on which the events take place. Holdstock has successfully re-created the traditional English landscape. His novels are grounded in a very real English countryside with its small rural village, local manor house, and nearby woods. There is, however, another feeling to Ryhope. One critic described what Holdstock accomplished as creating a “landscape between history and dream.” There are, in his writings, the elements of dream, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes not. The quality of his artistic vision and his literary talents make his novels and stories impossible to simply read and cast aside. They, like his mythagos, linger on for the reader, at the edge of consciousness, a captivating landscape of memory. —Eugene Larson
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The Neuromancer Trilogy Cyberspace jockeys struggle against powerful entities for access to information and knowledge on Earth’s computer matrix
Author: William Gibson (1948) Genre: Science fiction—cyberpunk Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The near future Location: Earth, several orbiting space stations, and the cyberspace matrix, a computer-generated alternative reality First published: Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) The Story These three novels constitute a loose trilogy. Several characters recur, and the stories are set at roughly the same time, involving many of the same locations, particularly the Sprawl, the megalopolis stretching from Boston to Atlanta. All three novels deal with computer “cowboys” surfing for information on the world’s cyberspace matrix. Neuromancer begins in Japan with the recruitment of Case, a burnedout matrix-cowboy-turned-hustler, by Armitage, an agent for persons unknown. Armitage uses Molly, a street warrior, to collect Case. They build a team that includes Dixie Flatline, a cyberspace replica of a deceased hacker’s consciousness, and Rivera, who can create holographic illusions telepathically. They travel to Freeside, an orbiting space station, and learn that their employer is actually an artificial intelligence, code-named Wintermute, that is seeking illegally to augment itself. It hired the group to hack into its own core and remove the limits placed on its capacity to grow. At the tip of Freeside, the team penetrates the Villa Straylight, home of the Tessier-Ashpool dynasty that created Wintermute. The team meets 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool, one of the dynasty’s cloned “daughters.” Armitage and Rivera are killed. 3Jane gives up the password that allows for the transformation of Wintermute, which then joins with another artificial intelligence called Neuromancer. The two attain full sentience, becoming Earth’s computer matrix itself. Count Zero braids together three main narrative threads. Seven years
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after the events in Neuromancer, strange “ghosts” appear in the computer network. Bobby Newmark, known as Count Zero, is a novice hacker on his first “run” in the matrix using some hijacked software. He is nearly killed but is saved by a mysterious female presence, whom his voodoopracticing mentors call the Holy Virgin. Newmark is pursued by unknown agents but hides in a nightclub in the Sprawl. Meanwhile, art dealer Marly Krushkova is hired by Josef Virek, the richest man in the world, to trace the origins of a strange art object. Virek’s body has been eaten away by cancer; what remains of him “lives” in vats in Sweden, and he projects himself through the matrix using virtual reality. Marly discovers that the artist is a sentient machine orbiting in the wreckage of the Tessier-Ashpool computer cores, whose knowledge Virek seeks in order to liberate himself from his confinement. He secretly has ordered the extraction of a scientist named Christopher Mitchell, who pioneered “biosoft,” an elaborate interface of machine and organism. Turner, a mercenary, bungles the extraction and ends up with Mitchell’s daughter Angela, who has a strange graft in her brain that she uses to “dream” her way into the matrix. Christopher Mitchell turns out to be a fraud, having been sent details on the construction of biosoft from the orbiting artist-machine. Virek purchases the orbiting ruin but is killed by one of the voodoo “lords” haunting the matrix. They are apparently fragments of the artificial intelligences conjoined in Neuromancer. Angela is revealed as the Holy Virgin, and she and Bobby go off with the voodoo practitioners. Marly becomes an affluent gallery owner, and Turner settles down to rear a family. Mona Lisa Overdrive has four interconnecting plot lines. It picks up the story of Angela Mitchell seven years after Count Zero. She has become a star on Sense-Net, a form of virtual reality through which viewers experience the sensations of another’s body. She has lost most of her ability to interface with the matrix because her brain implants have been damaged by drug abuse. A mentally unbalanced computer construct of the consciousness of 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool plots to kidnap her and has the features of a prostitute named Mona altered to resemble Angela. Sally Shears, who is actually Molly from Neuromancer, is blackmailed into carrying out the kidnapping but realizes that she is also a target of 3Jane’s conspiracy. Molly/Sally cuts a deal with the matrix voodoo-gods and kidnaps both Mona and Angela a week ahead of schedule. She transports them to the nearly deserted Factory, where Bobby Newmark/Count Zero is hidden. His body is plugged into an aleph, or soul-catcher, a huge mass of “biosoft” material. The Factory is attacked by mercenaries employed by
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William Gibson. (Courtesy of the D.C. Public Library)
3Jane, who owns the aleph. The aleph is jacked into the matrix. Angela dies along with Bobby, but her interface has been restored, and her consciousness, along with Bobby’s, is preserved in cyberspace. Kumiko Yanaka, daughter of a Yakuza warlord hiding in London because of a clan war, runs away from Swain, an agent of 3Jane. Along with her “ghost” protector Colin, a biosoft program, Kumiko jacks into the matrix to observe a new data construct that has emerged with the intrusion of the aleph into cyberspace. She is captured, but the security program in Colin defeats 3Jane. In the Factory, Molly completes her mission and hides the aleph. The cyber-psyches of Angela and Bobby learn the shape of the matrix and part of the reason why it divided into various “gods” after the events in Neuromancer. There is another sentient matrix on Alpha Centauri, which they set out to discover. Mona takes Angela’s place as a Sense-Net star. Analysis Stylistically, William Gibson draws heavily on the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett. The term “cyberpunk” came into being with Bruce Bethke’s 1983 story of
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the same name, but Gibson and occasional collaborator Bruce Sterling quickly became the most famous writers in the cyberpunk subgenre. As a cyberpunk novelist, Gibson combines gritty realism and violent action with a sophisticated sense of what a computer-saturated world might be like. His language melds streetwise dialogue and hard-hitting narration with technological and consumer jargon. The Neuromancer novels are mysteries that become increasingly complex, as the multidirectional plots of the later two texts indicate, and difficult to solve. Where a Hammett or Cain novel might involve a missing person or a strange crime, Gibson centers on the pursuit of knowledge, particularly the hidden keys to structures of information and to the nature of consciousness itself. The questions posed by Gibson’s protagonists about themselves or their world remain largely unanswered. Even if some solution is found, it is often abortive, incomplete, or unsatisfying. Often, as in Neuromancer, those involved in a “run” on the matrix or a quest in the physical world are unaware of who employs them, of what they are looking for, or of the exact nature of their task. They simply act according to orders or instinct, sometimes groping blindly with no sense of direction or position. A pervasive sense of confusion and failure informs the worldview expressed in all three of these novels. Coupled with the often disinformational nature of Gibson’s narratives is a recurrent preoccupation with conspiracies. Gibson’s characters are either ultra-rich power brokers or powerless outcasts such as addicts, prostitutes, mercenaries, and hackers. Even those who believe they are in control of their world soon discover that the information they barter for money and position seems to have a life of its own and, in subtle and unforeseeable ways, exerts an influence that lies beyond human agency. The fates of any number of people and institutions are affected by indifferent, chaotic forces that work according to their own inscrutable agendas. This fundamental disorder gives rise to what one of Gibson’s characters calls “a certain tame paranoia” that colors everything a person thinks and does. Gibson’s novels also interrogate the nature of subjectivity, of stable selfhood. He explores the radical separation of mind and body (or what Case, in Neuromancer, disparagingly calls “meat”) in the artificial frameworks of the computer matrix, forcing his characters and readers to confront what “consciousness” possibly could be. Some of his characters are physically dead but have their selves or “souls” preserved in a configuration within cyberspace; they exist there as sentient beings. Computers attain their own equivalent of selfhood and act as autonomous individuals. Gibson, without necessarily providing any clear answers, examines
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the gray zones between life and death, sentience and automation, and reality and illusion. He suggests that, in the “consensual hallucination” of an artificial world (an analogue perhaps for the art of fiction as Gibson himself practices it), thought itself can find a true form of liberation. Gibson’s texts present warnings. As liberating as it may be, technology is also threatening, addictive, and perniciously delusive. A number of his protagonists—Case and Turner in particular—want to escape from the vicious circle of paranoia and inhumanity that cyberspace presents, and they withdraw from the vast systems of information and money to a simpler domestic life, each rearing a family. For all those who find a release from their bodily limitations in the imaginative potential of Gibson’s “matrix,” there are an equal number who are thoughtlessly killed or have their lives destroyed by technocratic advancement. People might do well, Gibson’s novels suggest, to reconsider the human consequences of technological ambitions. —Kevin McNeilly
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Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith struggles unsuccessfully to preserve his individuality against the brainwashing efforts of O’Brien, Big Brother’s representative
Author: George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950) Genre: Science fiction—dystopia Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1984 Location: London, England (Airstrip One, Oceania) First published: 1949 The Story Winston Smith begins a diary, an act tantamount to signing his own death sentence in a ruthlessly totalitarian state bent on eradicating individuality. He is determined to stay alive—and “human”—as long as he can. To do so, he must escape the all-seeing eye and all-hearing ear of the Thought Police behind the omnipresent telescreen. Winston and Julia, who work in the Ministry of Truth, become lovers and find an illusory haven above Charrington’s shop in the district of the “proles,” or masses outside the Party. Earlier, the lovers revealed themselves to O’Brien, allegedly a member of the “Brotherhood” intent on toppling Big Brother. O’Brien sends them “the book,” supposedly written by Goldstein, Big Brother’s enemy. The Thought Police smash into the lovers’ refuge and drag them away to the Ministry of Love. As he expected, Winston is tortured, but to his surprise his torturer is O’Brien, a self-styled therapist, determined to return Winston to “sanity.” Winston masters “doublethink,” or the capacity to believe that two plus two equals five, or any other number suggested. Confident that he has satisfied O’Brien’s insane demands without betraying the self that loves Julia, Winston is totally unprepared for the horror of what awaits him in Room 101. Knowing that Winston has a phobia of rats, O’Brien has devised a wire mask to fit over his head with a door his tormentors can open into a cage of starving rats. Winston in mindless terror screams, “Do it to Julia! Not me!” Internally devastated by the horrible recognition of his betrayal, Winston accepts self-annihilation as a “victory over himself.” The last sentence confirms his conversion: “He loved Big Brother.”
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Analysis Few novels have had the impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even those who have not read the novel are familiar with terms such as “Big Brother” and “doublethink.” Although the novel may be read as a grim political satire on George Orwell’s time—the horrors of the modern totalitarian state, whether Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930’s or Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in the 1940’s—it easily qualifies as a dystopic vision of a nightmarish future awaiting the world if it ignores modern assaults on human freedom. Its warning of a negative utopia has not diminished with the passage of the year 1984, for its menace is just as possible for 2084 or 2184. Clearly, Oceania, like the other superstates of Eurasia and Eastasia, is an extension of twentieth century totalitarianism’s efforts to eradicate individuality. Orwell’s analysis of the planned exhaustion of excess economic productivity on military expenditures to preserve the inequities of a traditional class system is brilliant. In fact, “the book” that O’Brien claims he coauthored with the Inner Party reads like the secret history of twentieth century political economics. Unlike other classics of speculative or science fiction such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell’s science fiction lacks much of the advanced technological hardware readers associate with the genre. That lack, however, is justified within Nineteen Eighty-Four by Oceania’s spokesman, O’Brien, who tells Winston that science and technology persist only as weapons of oppression. These weapons include use of psychology to engineer pain or technology like the telescreen for surveillance. Weaponry itself has retreated to pre-Hiroshima levels, nuclear weapons having been eliminated as threats to the status quo of the three superstates. Science and technology, Orwell suggests, had to be curtailed because in their purest forms they are grounded in the spirit of innovation and free inquiry. As O’Brien brags, Big Brother could rewrite astronomy to make the stars mere miles away from Earth if such a “truth” accorded with unrestrained exercise of power by the Party. It is no coincidence that Winston works in the Ministry of Truth. Like other totalitarian leaders in the twentieth century, “Big Brother,” or the Inner Party collectively, knows that truth is textual. The most successful dictators control their subjects through propaganda and the manipulation of history. Winston wanders through the proles’ district hoping to find some corroboration of his own recollection of life before Big Brother but discovers the unreliability of the proles’ memory and returns to his own job of rewriting history, a job he finds so stimulating that he passes up the opportunity to fade into the proles’ world with Julia. Besides, in
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Film still from Michael Anderson’s 1956 film adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. (Library of Congress)
this hierarchical system, Winston prides himself on his superiority to these “masses.” Winston envisions his experience in the novel as a tragic contest with the state to demonstrate his own superiority as an individual. Time and again, he boasts to Julia that although they will inevitably be tortured
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and killed, they, or at least he, will never surrender his humanity. Love, loyalty, decency, and nobility represent “humanness” to Winston and also to Orwell. Tragedy, the narrator indicates, may no longer be possible because the privacy and family loyalty on which it depends are under threat. Winston casts himself in the role of a traditional tragic hero, flaunting his pride in the individual’s capacity to suffer all yet maintain dignity. When Winston proclaims the “spirit of Man” and O’Brien tells him to look in a mirror, Winston sees an image chillingly like those that confronted the liberators of the Nazi concentration camps. Winston embodies the tragedy of liberal humanism, naïvely confident that it could withstand any suffering without the surrender of a quintessential “humanity.” As a vision of a dystopic future, Nineteen Eighty-Four is grounded in a psychology Orwell both fears is valid but hopes is not. First, the novel asks whether a state constructed on terror and unrestrained power can survive without a collective “mental breakdown.” O’Brien’s insane lust for the sadistic exercise of power has seemed to some more terrifying than his menacing rats. Another question on which the novel’s psychology rests is whether the “spirit of man,” or faith in the individual, can be destroyed by torture and brainwashing such as Winston’s in Room 101. How responsible are individuals for what is beyond their control? Finally, the novel poses the question of the individual’s ability to stay sane in an insane world, where all the texts that might confirm reality are manipulated by a state intent on serving its mad religion of power. Readers must answer these profound questions for themselves. —Earl G. Ingersoll
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No Enemy but Time A contemporary American who has dreamed of ancient Africa his entire life is sent back in time two million years
Author: Michael Bishop (1945) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1963-2002 and two million years in the past Location: East Africa First published: 1982 The Story The novel is composed of chapters that alternate between two narratives. The first begins in 1986 as protagonist John Monegal, a twentythree-year-old black American, is undergoing survival training in a fictional East African country in preparation for a trip back in time to study proto-humans. The narrative, told in first person, centers primarily on his two years spent two million years in the past. The other, third-person narrative begins in 1963 with John as a small child in Spain. John’s mother was a mute prostitute in Seville. Fearing that she would be unable to provide for her son, fathered by a black member of the U.S. Air Force, she gives the baby to a randomly selected Air Force family. John grows up as the adopted son of an enlisted man. Initially slow to develop, he adapts to his new life but is haunted by vividly realistic dreams of a primitive world that he slowly realizes is East Africa two million years ago. After John’s adoptive father dies in a car accident, John moves to the Bronx with his mother and sister. When he discovers that his mother is writing a book about his dream experiences, he runs away to Florida. He works odd jobs, under the name Joshua Kampa, for eight years. His vivid dreams of Pleistocene Africa recur, and he avidly reads about anthropology and paleontology, becoming an amateur expert. He gets the attention of a famous hominid paleontologist from the African country of Zarakal, who offers him a chance to travel back in time. After months of survival training with a local tribesman in Zarakal, Joshua is sent into the past. He tries to send back his observations, but his communicator fails. He meets a band of proto-humans, one female
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member of which seems closer to modern humans. He becomes tolerated and then accepted by the hominids, especially the female he calls Helen, with whom he falls in love. The hominids are fascinated by his technological artifacts, which include a handgun that he uses only when absolutely necessary. The death of a male member of the group who kills himself playing with the gun brings Joshua closer to the tribe. Helen becomes his mate. A drought forces the hominid group to migrate. Helen adopts an Australopithecus baby who is later killed. Joshua then realizes that Helen, formerly barren, is pregnant. Joshua and Helen spend happy months together before the baby is born. Helen dies in childbirth. Stricken with grief, Joshua takes his baby and flees as an erupting volcano disperses the tribe. He barely makes it back alive to his time machine, then returns to the present with his daughter. The final chapters of the book cover the next fifteen years, as Joshua and his daughter Monicah first live in the United States, then move to Zarakal. Under the patronage of Zarakal’s leader, Joshua becomes an important government official. Monicah also has vivid dreams, but of the far future, not the far past. The novel ends with her decision, against her father’s wishes, to use the time machine to visit the future world of her dreams. Analysis Michael Bishop’s No Enemy but Time is a vivid and convincing vision of what modern humanity’s ancestors might have been like, and it is one of the most profound dissertations within the science-fiction genre on the nature of humanity. The story of Joshua Kampa (John Monegal) and his association with the Pleistocene hominids and their way of life is both compelling and convincing, and several scenes in the book, including the death of Helen, are among the most moving to appear in any sciencefiction novel. The book also has a protolerance subtext that true human love can exist between people with noticeable differences. Bishop obviously spent considerable time researching anthropology and theories about various proto-human species. The verisimilitude of his Pleistocene East Africa far exceeds that of Jean Auel’s Earth Children series (1982-1990). As it relates to anthropology and paleontology, No Enemy but Time is clearly scientific, but Bishop is unable to attain the same verisimilitude in relation to the operation of the time machine, the explanation of which teeters uncomfortably between physics and sheer mysticism. The text does not explain why John (and a handful of others) can receive accurate information through time in their dreams, and it
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provides conflicting explanations and evidence regarding whether the past into which they travel is the actual past, a re-created alternative past, or a mental construct without tangible reality. Another minor problem is that the narrative track in the Pleistocene section is so compelling that the merely very good narrative track that tells of the protagonist’s life prior to his time travels pales in comparison. The story of John’s early life at times seems to be an annoying sidetrack that gets in the way of the primary narrative. Both of these problems are attenuated, however, by Bishop’s parallel narrative structure. Bishop saved the weak explanations of the scientific operation of the time machine, for example, until three-fourths of the way through the novel, after the verisimilitude of time travel was firmly established. He also used the dual narrative structure to keep a more even pacing throughout the novel than would have occurred if the entire narrative had been conveyed chronologically. This also allowed the time-traveling chapters to be placed in the first person, bringing the reader much closer to the distinctive personality and views of the protagonist. The stylistic excellence of No Enemy but Time earned it a well-deserved Nebula Award for best novel. Its uneven underpinnings in the hard sciences, however, may have been a factor in its failure to be nominated for the Hugo Award. Despite its minor flaws, No Enemy but Time is one of the most important statements yet published within the sciencefiction genre on one of the most important themes in literature—what it means to be human. —D. Douglas Fratz
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Non-Stop Members of a savage tribe leave their home to explore their world, which turns out to be a vast starship, on a voyage that lasts several generations
Author: Brian W. Aldiss (1925) Genre: Science fiction—closed universe Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Around the year 3000 Location: A vast starship First published: 1958 The Story Brian Aldiss’s first science-fiction novel tells about a primitive tribe that unknowingly inhabits the corridors of a vast spaceship traveling among the stars. Members of the tribe venture into unknown sections of the ship and discover that it has already reached its destination and that they have been watched secretly by the Outsiders, a maintenance crew from Earth. The book was first published in Great Britain and underwent some textual changes before being published in the United States under the title Starship in 1959. Roy Complain is a hunter for the seminomadic Greene tribe that lives in a place called the Quarters. The tribe constantly moves through corridors by pushing barricades in order to gain new land. Its members find artifacts, presumably left behind by the mysterious race of Giants that built their world. There are legends about the Forwards, a distant region of their world, where a more civilized tribe lives. One day, Complain, the priest Marapper, and three other tribe members set out on an expedition to the mythical Forwards section. Marapper, who believes that the world is in fact a ship traveling through space, owns a book containing a map of the ship. He plans to reach the Control Room and take over the ship. After various adventures, Complain is captured by the Giants and taken to their secret headquarters. They release him, and he is reunited with his comrades. Soon afterward, the group is captured by the Forwards tribe. Marapper tries in vain to convince the Forwards that the Control Room exists. During the following interrogation, it becomes
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clear that Fermour, one of the members of the expedition, is in reality an Outsider. Complain and Marapper learn more about the their world from Master Scoyt. They find out that the spaceship had been taking colonists to Procyon, eleven light-years from Earth. After dropping off the colonists, the ship started on its return journey. Something appears to have gone wrong, and twenty-three generations have lived on the ship since. The diaries of Gregory Complain, first captain of the homeward voyage, reveal that the water taken on board the spaceship Procyon V had contained a new amino acid that disrupted the crew’s genetic sequence. Most of the crew died, and many of the plants and animals on board mutated. Eventually, the Giants reveal to Complain and the Forwards that this disease sped up the surviving crew’s metabolic rate, so that they lived only for about twenty years. The lack of proper nutrients also turned them into dwarves. The ship itself already had reached Earth and was orbiting it, but the World Government was afraid that the crew would not be able to survive beyond the ship. In an apocalyptic ending, Fermour separates the individual levels from one another, so that the ship breaks apart into disk-shaped sections that begin to circle Earth. Analysis The so-called generation ship novels are a subgenre of the space opera. Whereas the scope of the space opera is concerned with the vastness of the universe, galactic empires, and interstellar wars, the generation ship novels have their main focus on the social structures and human interaction in the limited confines of the ship. The vastness of space is contradicted by the relatively limited space on board the ship, which, for its inhabitants, represents the universe because they usually have forgotten earlier technical knowledge and are on a voyage between planets. They are unaware of any reality outside the ship. This type of book offers an interesting perspective on the human condition and possible circumstances for devolution. The spaceship can be viewed as an allegory of the spaceship Earth, which could have a similar fate. Aldiss uses all the typical characteristics of a generation ship novel: The inhabitants of his ship have only partial knowledge about where they are and have been subject to significant devolution. The interesting twists in this book are the fact that the so-called Outsiders seem to control everything and that these people are actually humans from Earth. Another imaginative plot twist is revealed at the very end, when the savages find out that their expedition actually reached its destination of Earth three generations ago.
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The first archetypical generation ship story was Don Wilcox’s “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940). The subgenre became popular with Robert A. Heinlein’s two short stories “Universe” (1941) and “Common Sense” (1941), in which a mutiny on board a generation ship causes the death of all navigators and sets the descendants of the passengers adrift in space. Another important work in the subgenre is E. C. Tubb’s The Space-Born (1956). Aldiss’s book is part of this movement in the field, which lasted from about 1940 to 1960. The decline in popularity of the generation ship book followed the decline of the space opera in general in the early 1960’s. Non-Stop was Aldiss’s first science-fiction novel. His first book was The Brightfount Diaries (1955), but the generation ship story brought him his first critical acclaim. The book is a serious discussion of the character of humanity, showing ultimate destruction of the world of the spaceship. Aldiss often points out in interviews that he regards the human race as essentially flawed. The senseless destruction of the spaceship at the end of Non-Stop is nothing less than a warning not to do the same with spaceship Earth. Aldiss continued his vision of a dark future for humanity in many of his later works. Greybeard (1964) and Earthworks (1965) are two other grim visions of the sterility of humanity and Earth itself. —Jörg C. Neumann
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The Once and Future King The orphan Arthur grows from a sensitive boy to a just and philosophical king in this retelling of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
Author: T(erence) H(anbury) White (1906-1964) Genre: Fantasy—alternative history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: About the twelfth century Location: England First published: The Once and Future King (1958), which includes The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Witch in the Wood (1939; titled The Queen of Air and Darkness in the collection), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the Wind (1958); and The Book of Merlyn (1977) The Story The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlyn together constitute T. H. White’s retelling of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). White began writing The Sword in the Stone in 1936; The Witch in the Wood and The Ill-Made Knight soon followed. The Book of Merlyn was completed in 1941 and was intended, along with The Candle in the Wind (which was later adapted for the 1961 musical Camelot, which was filmed in 1967), for simultaneous publication with the three previously published novels. When The Once and Future King finally appeared, it incorporated a number of the author’s revisions but not the concluding volume. The Book of Merlyn was not published until 1977. Although it rounds out the series, briefly describing the death of Arthur and the religious retirement of Lancelot and Guenever, it is chiefly a philosophical forum in which Arthur, Merlyn, and a number of animals debate the nature of humankind. Merlyn guides the events of The Sword in the Stone. The magician tutors the young orphan Arthur (derisively nicknamed “the Wart” by his foster brother, Kay), at times magically turning him into a goose, an ant, a fish, and a hedgehog. Merlyn uses the natural world to demonstrate the various forms of government and impresses upon the future king the cruelty of aimless military strength. Under Merlyn’s influence, Arthur’s
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maturing philosophy reverses the common notion of the day and concludes that “right makes might.” Upon the death of Uther Pendragon, a tournament is called to discover who might release the prophetic sword from the stone in which it is embedded, thereby indicating his right to become king. Serving as squire to Kay, Arthur is dispatched to retrieve Kay’s forgotten sword. He returns with the magic sword, ignorant of its significance. He is reluctantly proclaimed king. Merlyn reveals him to be the son of Pendragon. Living backward through time, Merlyn bears the wisdom of hindsight. He is, however, without foresight and therefore becomes easily muddled, fatefully forgetting to brief Arthur on the maternal side of his family tree. When The Witch in the Wood was rejected on initial submission, the publisher expressed his discomfort with White’s handling of the subject matter. His discomfort was not, however, with the incestuous conception of Arthur’s son, Mordred; rather, a readership primed by the earlier book’s lighthearted tone might be appalled by the second book’s horrifying combination of twisted filial duty and seething hatred toward a dazzlingly erotic mother who demands affection but returns none. Retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness when it was included in The Once and Future King, this book introduces the young Orkney brothers, Gawaine, Garheris, Gareth, and Agravaine. The morality of the future knights ranges from confused to deranged. The problematic nature of Arthur’s struggle to establish his claim to the throne and to unify Britain, the story of which White threads into the Orkney narrative, becomes clear. The ill-made knight of the third book is Lancelot. White’s “best knight of the world” is as hideously ugly as he is graceful and as deeply religious as he is sinful. He is driven to overcompensate for every deficiency, and he is torn by his love for both Arthur and Guenever. His greatest wish is to be allowed to make a miracle, which requires moral purity. In the end, although he is unfaithful to his king and to his lovers and although he twice loses his mind, is at last unhorsed, and fails the Grail Quest, he is allowed his miracle. The disintegration of the Round Table is described in The Candle in the Wind. The Orkneys, who have long been in Arthur’s service despite the ancient enmity, have been joined by Mordred. The youngest brother poisons the hard-won tranquillity of Arthur’s reign and expertly prods his brothers into exposing Guenever’s adultery, thereby initiating the events that force Arthur to make disastrous war on his best knight and best friend. As Arthur lays siege to Lancelot’s castle, Mordred treacher-
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ously assumes his father’s throne and Arthur returns to England for his fateful confrontation with his son. Analysis Arthurian legend has its roots in pre-Christian Welsh mythology. By the Middle Ages, Arthur and his knights of the Round Table were well known across Europe. Arthur was ranked prominently in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (1137), and his court was celebrated in the French and German epic poetry of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The definitive British narrative did not appear until the fifteenth century, when Thomas Caxton printed Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In Arthur, Lancelot, and Guenever, White discerned a timeless nobility. He imbued his heroes with his own doubts, his self-perceived sadism, and his concern for a just and peaceful social order. A conscientious objector, White avoided conscription but brooded over the spread of Nazism. Impending war made Arthur an attractive subject; the “future king” was, after all, prophesied to return in England’s time of need. C. S. Lewis, in That Hideous Strength (1945), chose a variation in which Merlin returns to save England. The long shadow of World War II, which only began to fade near the end of the twentieth century, inspired many apocalyptic visions in literature, and such works frequently ring with Arthurian overtones. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (19541955) owes much to Arthurian legend, including a king of obscure though royal birth, a prophetic sword, and a wizard. These motifs, as well as the quasi-medieval settings of many fantasy novels, almost define a subgenre of fantasy literature. The Sword in the Stone was for White a wishful reenactment of childhood, full of haymaking and hawking; long, brave nights in the forest; and magic. Far from the somber, druidical Merlins of other versions of the Arthurian legend such as Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy (1970-1979), White’s wizard is a dithering bundle of anachronisms; he is comic and ridiculous but wise. The ghastly opening of The Witch in the Wood, in which Queen Morgause idly boils a cat while her young sons recount the rape of “Granny” by Uther, was a sharp departure from the lightheartedness of the earlier work. In Morgause and her sons, White contrasts the loveless and arbitrary rearing of the Orkneys with the relatively idyllic orphanhood of Arthur. Isolation and ethnic pride, neglect, and ignorance are at the root of Britain’s fragmented and violent social order. Although the project began with White’s psychological analysis of Le Morte d’Arthur, it is only in The Ill-Made Knight that White began to bor-
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row heavily from Malory. Far from the image of perfect masculine beauty that has usually defined Lancelot, White’s best knight is a human gargoyle, a misogynist with a weak mind and a streak of cruelty. As a misogynist himself, White was at first stumped by Lancelot’s foil, Guenever. The contrast between Arthur’s sorceress sister and his Christian wife has been played upon since the Middle Ages. Marion Zimmer Bradley in fact refocused the entire Arthurian legend on the epic’s women in The Mists of Avalon (1982). For White, too, it seemed necessary that Guenever should be a more substantial character than Malory’s shrewish, adulterous queen but of an entirely different mold from Morgause, particularly because Lancelot loved her. The Guenever that emerged is unencumbered by Pre-Raphaelite charms or feminist platforms, an ordinary woman in an oversized role. Pity is the root of Lancelot’s love. White’s queen is tenacious and loyal despite her petulance and jealousy; she is also intelligent and thoroughly pragmatic. White, who nearly converted to Roman Catholicism while writing his Arthur books, treats religion warily but respectfully. Unlike Tolkien or Lewis, for whom good and evil were clearly defined, White sensed that the “moral” thing was not necessarily the “right” thing. Lancelot’s son Galahad achieves the sinless perfection his father strives for, and though he seems scarcely human and is thoroughly unlovable, he finds the Grail. In contrast, Lancelot blunders through his moral dilemmas. When Lancelot heals Sir Urre’s hexed wounds, he knows that the “miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle.” White sees the Grail Quest as a horrible failure, destroying or demoralizing Arthur’s knights. When Mordred appears at court, the Round Table is already set to crumble. With the hasty conclusion of The Book of Merlyn, White returned to England to involve himself in its defense, though England ultimately found him more useful as a writer. His only other notable work of fantasy, Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946), a satire about a community of Lilliputians and their struggle to remain unexploited in the modern world, was written while he was still composing his Arthur books. White continued to publish to popular and critical acclaim, but none of his other works met with the enduring popularity of The Once and Future King. —Janet Alice Long
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Only Begotten Daughter Julie Katz, “immaculately” conceived through the sperm donation, seeks her destiny as the divine daughter of God
Author: James Morrow (1947) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1974-2012 Location: New Jersey First published: 1990 The Story Murray Katz, a celibate Jewish recluse living in southeastern New Jersey, discovers that his most recent sperm donation has fertilized an egg. He then steals an ectogenesis machine and cares for the developing fetus in his abandoned lighthouse on Brigantine Point. Nine months later the daughter of God is born—Julie Katz, immaculately conceived half sister to Jesus and modern-day deity. Raised by Murray and his lesbian partner Georgina Sparks, Julie discovers her divinity early. By the age of two she is walking on water. Shortly afterward, she restores a dead crab to life. Murray, haunted by visions, makes Julie promise to stop performing miracles to remain hidden from her enemies. However, he does allow her to breathe in water and to continue visiting Absecon Inlet, where she maintains her friendship with a sponge named Amanda. Tormented by the lack of communication with her divine mother, Julie struggles to determine her purpose on earth. She meets Andrew Wyvern, a self-described “man of wealth and taste” who is actually the Devil. He tricks her into displaying her powers by healing Timothy, the blind son of fanatical Revelationist Billy Milk. Questioning the wisdom of direct intervention, Julie opts for miracles by writing an advice column called “Heaven Help Us” for a tabloid. When this plan backfires, Julie joins Wyvern for a sojourn to Hell, where she meets her half brother, Jesus, and learns the truth about divinity. She returns to earth fifteen years later—without her divine powers—and finds herself in New Jerusalem, a fanatical society run by the Revelationists. Threatened by the underground Uncertainty movement—a religion based on her own advice columns—Julie is captured
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and crucified by the Revelationists, who want to trigger the redemption of New Jerusalem and the return of Christ. She is saved, however, by the divine intervention of Amanda the sponge. Analysis Morrow regards satire as “a deadly serious business,” used “to get the reader’s attention.” His humor provides a thin layer between the reader and troubling questions. For example, his character Julie wonders what sort of deity she is: “A deity of love, or of wrath? Love was wonderful, but with wrath you could do special effects.” Morrow uses Only Begotten Daughter to suggest that what many believers seek in religion is the “special effects.” He dramatizes the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational. Divine or not, Julie believes in the uncertainty of life and the wonder of science. However, when she performs a miracle, her followers create a religion based upon her advice columns. Her foe, Billy Milk, believes in the Second Coming, resurrections, and burning bushes. He sacrifices an eye to persuade God to heal his blind son. Morrow regards this fascination with miracles and the need for “special effects” as irrational. The challenge is to view the world rationally, appreciating the world for the wonders that it holds, without relying on mysticism. Existential pain pervades the novel, and each character struggles with the pain of existing as a thinking being in an unpredictable world. Julie creates a temple of pain, and fills it with photos of human suffering. She cannot understand why her Mother does not intervene. She asks Jesus, “Put me in charge of the universe, and my first act will be to arrest my mother for criminal neglect.” Jesus responds that maybe God cannot intervene, that perhaps he created humans to solve these injustices. Morrow offers hope through another theme: the power of love to soothe this pain. Julie craves attention from her mother, yet acknowledges that Murray’s love always did the work of two parents. In the end, when Amanda saves Julie from death, she implies that she is Julie’s mother. When she asks the sponge if she is God, the sponge replies, “Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable . . . and a hermaphrodite to boot.” Amanda points out that sponges, when pulled apart, form new sponges. She is both immortal and infinite, offering an alternative to belief in an anthropomorphic God incapable of a sponge’s power to absorb and assimilate. A complex novel, Only Begotten Daughter raises questions about religion, intellect, beliefs, and relationships in a stunningly original and entertaining way. —Michael-Anne Rubenstien
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The Orange County Trilogy Three thematically connected novels set in Southern California of the twenty-first century provide very different visions of the future of the region and its society
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson (1952) Genre: Science fiction—extrapolatory Type of work: Novels Time of plot: 2027, 2047, and 2065 Location: Orange County, California First published: The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990) The Story The Orange County trilogy is set in three different extrapolated futures. In each novel, a small group of people become involved in events that change their lives. Each novel takes place over a single summer, almost solely in Orange County, California. The Wild Shore takes place in 2047 in San Onofre, six decades after a nuclear war devastated the United States but left the rest of the world intact. The remaining world powers have quarantined the United States and use satellite-based defenses to prevent the country’s redevelopment. Teenager Hank Fletcher lives in a valley populated by a handful of families struggling for survival. Hank’s life involves farming, fishing, going to swap meets, and learning from his eighty-year-old uncle, Tom Barnard, about pre-disaster America. Strangers arrive from San Diego by rail handcar, seeking to form an alliance to fight against the Japanese patrolling the coast. Hank and Tom travel with them to San Diego and learn how Russian terrorists exploded two thousand neutron bombs, one in each major U.S. city and town. On their return trip, they find rail bridges destroyed, so they must travel by sea. Japanese forces sink their boat, and Hank is captured. He escapes, swims to shore, and barely survives to walk home. The San Onofreans decide not to help the San Diegans, but Hank and his friends choose to do so secretly. While Tom is ill, Hank learns about some Japanese “tourists” illegally visiting. He leads a small army of San
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Diegans to ambush them. They themselves are ambushed, however, and barely escape to return home. One of Hank’s friends is wounded and later dies. Tom recovers and convinces Hank to write a book about his life in San Onofre and the events of that summer. The Gold Coast portrays a very different future. It is 2027, and Orange County has been developed into an endless tangle of condominiums, malls, freeways, and defense construction plants. Twenty-seven-yearold Jim McPherson, son of a weapons engineer, works part-time and writes bad poetry. His vague desire to rebel against the status quo has no focus; he spends his time cruising the freeways and going to wild parties centered on sex and consumption of designer drugs. His only serious intellectual pursuit is the history of Orange County, learned from his grandfather, Tom Barnard. While Jim’s father is involved in struggles to gain new contracts and salvage one gained on fraudulent data, Jim is recruited by a friend to help sabotage military contractors. As he gets further involved, his turbulent love life, estrangement from his father, and friends’ problems strain his mental stability. After a madcap tour of Europe with his friends, Jim’s problems become unbearable. While Jim is picking up a shipment of small missile launchers to be used to attack his father’s company, his mental state becomes further disturbed. He spends the night driving around and randomly bombing buildings, then escapes into the mountains with a friend. When he returns, he finds that his terrorist friends were not idealists: Their sabotage was assisted by both defense contractors and drug smugglers. The events of the summer inspire Jim to write about the time when the orange groves of Orange County were destroyed, changing the area forever. Pacific Edge is set in the year 2065, in the small village of El Modena. Its citizens are seeking to maintain an ecological utopia in a world that is itself peaceful and prosperous. Kevin Claiborne is a thirty-four-year-old building renovator with a love for softball, bicycling, and the land, especially Rattlesnake Hill, the only undeveloped area in El Modena. Kevin joins the city council and is soon leading the opposition to a secret plan to develop Rattlesnake Hill. With the help of both the town legal counsel and his grandfather, Tom Barnard, Kevin slowly learns that the plan involves use of capital earned by illegal means. Tom was one of those instrumental in changing to the new world order, primarily through dismantling large businesses. Kevin falls in love with the estranged mate of the mayor, and Tom is drawn out of his hermitlike existence by a visiting female professor from India. Tom and his friends watch the first Mars landing while sitting naked, wearing animal masks,
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and drinking tequila in a natural hot springs pool. During a trip to visit an expert in California water law, they spend a beatific few days camping in the Sierras. The battle for development of Rattlesnake Hill continues, and Kevin’s new love returns to the mayor. Tom leaves, by sailing ship, with his new Indian friend. He continues to work to get the proof needed to sway the final town vote on development of Rattlesnake Hill. He eventually obtains the proof but is killed in a hurricane before he can get it to Kevin. The town votes to develop, but Kevin finds a solution, arranging a ceremony to dedicate a plaque atop Rattlesnake Hill to commemorate Tom’s death, making the hill an untouchable shrine. Analysis Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County trilogy (also called the Three Californias novels) is a unique creation and one of the most interesting extrapolative works in science fiction. Each novel presents a consistent vision of the future of both Southern California and the world of which it is an integral part. The Wild Shore features pastoral innocence in a world determined to keep America from ever again exerting influence, The Gold Coast shows technological extremes in a world dominated by American military might, and Pacific Edge posits an ecological utopia in a peaceful and prosperous global village. The thematic interplay among the novels makes the trilogy a profound treatise on the future of humanity, a coherent whole that is more than the sum of its parts. As with all of Robinson’s novels, place and character dominate plot. Each novel consists of numerous intertwined subplots whose importance is in showing character development, illustrating the innate beauty of landscapes both natural and artificial, and developing themes. It is clear that Robinson loves the landscapes of California but also that he loves all his diverse characters. Even minor characters come alive as well rounded and sympathetic, never reduced to mere caricatures. All the protagonists have flaws, and even the antagonists are sympathetic, motivated by what they believe is right. Robinson’s stated intention was to write a dystopia (The Wild Shore), an extrapolation of current trends (The Gold Coast), and a utopia (Pacific Edge). It is a testament to the verisimilitude of his treatments that with only a minor shift in sensibilities, one can imagine The Wild Shore as a pastoral utopia, The Gold Coast as a war-filled dystopia, and Pacific Edge as the most likely future. Shifting paradigms, the three books can be viewed as reflecting different periods and sensibilities in the author’s own life. In this view, The Wild Shore reflects Robinson’s innocent teen-
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age years in Orange County, The Gold Coast the hedonistic life of his twenties, and Pacific Edge his more idealistic thirties. Despite the diverse scenarios presented, the three novels have much in common. Each has moments of extreme joy and beauty interspersed with moments of intense anguish. Tom Barnard plays a similar role in each as the primary source of historical knowledge. Each protagonist belongs to a small group of close friends and has a turbulent love life. All three books exude a strong love for the land and the sea, with camping in the mountains and sailing the ocean being common experiences. Robinson flawlessly weaves his encyclopedic knowledge of numerous subjects, from ecology to defense contracting to the history of Orange County, into the narrative. The few logical inconsistencies are necessary for the goals of each book and are well hidden. Robinson is a master of showing first and explaining later, after the verisimilitude of the scenario is unquestionably established. In The Wild Shore, no one manages to establish mass communication even though the technology should be readily salvageable; the San Diegans are working on a shortwave radio receiver that sounds like it is from the 1930’s. Mass communication would have ruined the mystery and pastoral ambience of the novel. Jim’s drug-dealing friend in The Gold Coast apparently is a one-man corporation, performing manufacturing, research and development, safety testing, purchasing, marketing, and sales tasks on his own, even though his life is depicted as a constant party. The utopian life in El Modena seems in retrospect to be primarily based on the disappearance of 90 percent of the population; everyone who remains is an intellectual, no matter what his or her occupation. None of these inconsistencies adversely affects the believability of the scenarios or the flow of the narrative. Robinson’s Orange County trilogy is a unique accomplishment, an intricate interplay of character and philosophy, didactic but entertaining. It utilizes the potential of science fiction to overcome the despair of what the world is like and glory in the potential of the future. —D. Douglas Fratz
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Orlando While seeking perfection in poetry and love between the late sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries, English aristocrat Orlando meets famous people, becomes a woman, and meditates on change
Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Genre: Fantasy—cultural exploration Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late 1500’s to 1928 Location: Mostly England, with some scenes in Constantinople and Thessaly First published: 1928 The Story In the late 1500’s, Orlando, a young nobleman from an ancient British family, dedicates himself to literature. He encounters William Shakespeare and is appointed by Queen Elizabeth to be her companion. In London, he falls in love with a mysterious Russian beauty who soon abandons him. Devastated, he turns to poetry, but when one of his tragedies is ridiculed publicly by a London poet, Orlando retreats to his family’s magnificent estate and burns all his poems except one, titled “The Oak Tree.” When a strange guest arrives, introducing herself as the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Roumania, Orlando becomes increasingly uncomfortable and decides to leave England. At his request, he is appointed as ambassador extraordinary to Constantinople and is next seen performing his official duties in that post. Life is generally tedious until he suddenly falls into a coma. After several days of suspended animation, Orlando awakes, having somehow been transformed into a woman. Orlando joins a band of Thessalian gypsies, with whom she lives contentedly for some time. Finally, however, she is inspired by a vision of her ancestral home to return to England, where she finds herself in the eighteenth century and soon befriends such famous writers as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Much of Orlando’s time is engaged in meditation about fame, time, and the nature of literature. Soon, with the remarkably elusive lapsing of time that characterizes this novel, the nineteenth century arrives, and Orlando finds herself unable to write
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meaningful poetry. Out one day for a long walk in the country, she experiences a sudden overwhelming vision of her innate kinship with nature, and, as she lies on the ground afterward, she is discovered by Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, with whom she immediately forms a passionate intimacy. Shortly after meeting, Orlando and Shelmerdine marry, and Orlando finds that she is able to write again. She completes her poem “The Oak Tree,” on which she has been working for some three Virginia Woolf. hundred years, and takes it to (Courtesy of the D.C. Public Library) London, where an old friend promises to see that it is published. She makes an effort to acquaint herself with Victorian literature, to which she generally objects, and, without warning to the reader, gives birth to a son. At the end of the novel, Orlando finds herself in the year 1928, driving an automobile and trying to cope with shopping. Her poem has been a success, and she returns to her estate and visits the great oak that has been her refuge and inspiration over the centuries. At the oak, at exactly midnight, Orlando’s husband arrives in an airplane. Analysis Virginia Woolf achieved literary fame as an innovator in literary form, and her novels reflect various experiments and unique effects of the type associated with the early twentieth century aesthetic movement called modernism. Orlando (subtitled A Biography) is of particular interest because of its fusion of autobiographical elements, technical innovation, fantasy, satire, and preoccupation with the Western literary tradition. All these ingredients are interwoven to create an apparently central theme of mutability or change, a traditional theme developed extensively in Renaissance England by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599) and in the ancient world by Lucretius (c. 98-55 b.c.e.).
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The two most conspicuous manifestations of such change appear in the dizzying time shifts that occur in Orlando’s long life and in the protagonist’s unexpected and unexplained change from male to female. These shifts and shuffles serve principally to maintain a focus on an underlying theme informing the entire novel: the anxiety of the literary artist. When Orlando, as a boy, hikes to the great oak on his family’s estate, he already has defined himself as a poet. From the oak, he is able to see incredible distances across England, and it is this tree that symbolizes nature, inspiration, and durability in time, for the oak both changes and remains the same, just as Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree,” on which he/ she works for three centuries, develops and remains. Throughout the bewildering chronological developments of the novel, the constant, abiding tree awaits Orlando’s maturation and return—and the perfection of her art. At the end of the novel, Orlando brings her poem, now published and famous, back to the ancient oak. She is rejoined there by her husband, thus completing two different thematic circles of separation and reunion. Woolf’s novel deliberately incorporates many literary influences. Because it is a novel about writing, Woolf often echoes authors—especially great innovators—from earlier periods of English literature, notably Laurence Sterne, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Although Woolf’s works often focus on the artist’s creative anxieties and imagination, as in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando is a fantastic tour de force exploring the artist’s power to manipulate multiple dimensions of a work. Another aspect of Orlando is that it naturally reflects Woolf’s own experience. As the daughter of distinguished writer Sir Leslie Stephen and as a member of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and other artists, Woolf was deeply involved in writing and criticism throughout her life. Her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, to whom Orlando is dedicated, is also reflected in the sexual ambivalence of Orlando, of Shelmerdine, and of the Archduchess Harriet. Many passages also reveal the hypersensitivity of the novel’s protagonist, thus suggesting Woolf’s own unfortunate psychological instability that ultimately led to her suicide in 1941. Perhaps it is the fantastic artistry of this novel that provides enough distance between author and protagonist to make it possible for Woolf to come to terms with her own genius in her own time. —Robert W. Haynes
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Our Lady of Darkness A San Francisco writer of weird tales is haunted by a “paramental,” a ghostly presence born of the unnatural urban environment
Author: Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) Genre: Fantasy—occult Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1976 Location: San Francisco, California First published: 1977 (revised and expanded from “The Pale Brown Thing,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January-February, 1977) The Story Franz Westen, a writer of weird tales, has moved to a San Francisco apartment house following the death of his wife, Daisy, and a period of alcoholism. He has begun a tentative affair with Cal, a harpsichordist living in the apartment below whose music has a supernaturally healing influence. Still grieving, Franz avoids commitment with Cal, finding solace in his “Scholar’s Mistress,” a heap of occult books and weird pulp magazines, which he lines up every night on Daisy’s side of the bed. While in an alcoholic haze, Franz had purchased two books: Megapolisomacy: A New Science of Cities, by Thibaut de Castries, and a diary written by one of de Castries’ disciples, whom Franz believes to be Clark Ashton Smith. De Castries and his book are imaginary, but Smith was an actual fantasy writer, a friend of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer of tales of cosmic terror. In his book, de Castries maintains that conglomerations of large buildings produce noxious residues and become breeding grounds for “paramental entities.” Franz gradually becomes certain that a pale brown dancing figure he sees from his window is such a being. When he walks to the Corona Heights area in pursuit, he is horrified to see the figure waving to him from the window of his own room. Franz visits the sybaritic Jaime Donaldus Byers, a poet and authority on Clark Ashton Smith, who confirms that the diary is indeed by Smith. Byers, who also owns a copy of the rare Megapolisomacy, tells Franz about an anti-urban cult established by de Castries and describes de Castries’
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mistress, a mysterious woman in a black veil. Examining Smith’s journal, Byers finds a cryptically written curse hidden between two pages. Franz spends the day researching the history of the apartment building in which he lives, ultimately learning that Smith had inhabited the room in which Franz now lives. That evening, Franz attends Cal’s harpsichord concert but leaves in the middle, preoccupied with the curse. At home he decodes the cryptogram and realizes that de Castries had set a trap for Clark Ashton Smith; Smith had died before the tall buildings needed to spring the trap were constructed. After placing on the bed the works of occult and weird fiction that make up his “Scholar’s Mistress,” Franz lies down. He dreams that Daisy is alive and caressing him, then that she is dead and that what he had taken for fingers are black vines growing out of her skull. He awakes to find that his “Scholar’s Mistress” has come to life and is attacking him. Cal arrives barely in time to exorcise the evil being by invoking the names of musicians and scientists, representing the principles of order and harmony. Cal and Franz move together to another apartment but do not marry. Analysis Our Lady of Darkness is Fritz Leiber’s most sophisticated, extended treatment of the urban supernatural. Ghosts born of urban pollution and the impersonality of city life are found in such early Leiber stories as “Smoke Ghost,” “The Hound,” and “The Inheritance.” Like its predecessors, the ghost in Our Lady of Darkness is obliquely perceived against a cityscape that distorts perspective. Leiber further suggests the unnaturalness of urban life by repeated images and metaphors involving paper. A skyscraper, for example, is several times compared to a vertical punch card. Tracing his building’s history, Franz is sent on a paper chase, from one document repository to another. The paper imagery suggests that in a city, unlike in a small town, human interactions are carried on indirectly. One of the pleasures of Our Lady of Darkness is Leiber’s wide-ranging allusiveness and skill at parodying the styles of other writers, particularly H. P. Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft, Leiber mixes references to imaginary and actual writers and books. Along with Clark Ashton Smith, the writers Jack London and Ambrose Bierce were members of the cult of the fictional de Castries. Leiber has borrowed from Lovecraft the creation of an imaginary book with evil powers: Megapolisomacy is based on Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon. Although Our Lady of Darkness is not as overtly misogynistic as some of Leiber’s writings, such as “The Girl with Hungry Eyes,” much of its imaginative energy comes from fear of female sexuality. Franz must
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make a stock choice between Cal, who is a practitioner of white magic, and the sinister dark lady of the title. At the outset, Franz resists involvement with Cal, playfully telling his “Scholar’s Mistress” that she will always be his “best girl.” Grieving for his dead wife, Franz prefers vicarious thrills of works of supernatural horror to the give-and-take of a relationship with a real woman. Shortly before his “Mistress” comes to life, Franz speculates that the entire purpose of supernatural horror is to make death exciting. The “Scholar’s Mistress” seems to be a combination of Franz’s dead wife (or the horror her slow death inspired) and de Castries’ reanimated dark mistress. Her attack on him is described as a rape. Ultimately, Franz rejects his necrophilic attraction to death by loving Cal, but he cannot fully commit himself to her because he fears her supernatural power, however benign. Winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1978, Our Lady of Darkness is perhaps Leiber’s best novel. In the eighteenth century sense, it inspires terror rather than horror; that is, sinister, dreamlike threats impend but never culminate in physical violence. Our Lady of Darkness is a stylistic tour de force, with its wide-ranging allusiveness and striking metaphors. This is not, however, a novel for feminists. Fear of women is at the heart of its most powerful imagery and effects. —Wendy Bousfield
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The Owl Service Three teenagers find themselves acting out the latest cycle of a timeless tragic legend
Author: Alan Garner (1934Genre: Fantasy—inner space Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1960’s Location: North Wales First published: 1967
)
The Story At the heart of this story is an old Welsh legend from the fourth branch of Mabinogion. The legend is that of Blodeuwedd, the woman of flowers whom Gwydion the magician created for Lleu Llaw Gyffes, after his mother, Arianrhod, decreed that he would not wed a mortal woman. Blodeuwedd fell in love with Gronw Pebyr and plotted with him to kill Lleu. Lleu was turned into an eagle and later rescued by Gwydion, but Blodeuwedd, as a punishment, became an owl. Alan Garner takes up the idea of this eternal triangle and translates it to modern Wales. The story opens by introducing a family newly created by the marriage of the mother and father, who bring with them daughter Alison and son Roger, respectively. There are tensions within the family as the members get to know one another, and also between Nancy, the housekeeper, and her son Gwyn, whom she has brought up outside the valley, which she hates, although she cannot get it out of her mind. Gwyn, as he admits, knows as much about the place as does his mother, although he has never lived there. In particular, Nancy is concerned that he should not consort with Huw Halfbacon, known as Huw the Flitch, the handyman and gardener, who seems to be half-witted. In the midst of these tensions, Alison hears strange scratching noises in the attic above her room. When Gwyn investigates, he discovers a pile of plates decorated with patterns, in which Alison can see owls. Meanwhile, Roger, her stepbrother, sunbathing by a mysterious standing stone, experiences an impression of something being thrown past him. These are only the first in a long series of supernatural events. Several
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sets of paper owls that Alison makes from tracings of the patterns on the plates go missing, and the plates themselves are destroyed. Hurled against a section of wall, they dislodge a coating of plaster, revealing a wall painting of a beautiful woman, surrounded by flowers that have claws for petals. Later, the painting mysteriously vanishes. When Roger photographs the scene through the hole in the standing stone, a strange figure is revealed, either mounted on horseback or on a motorbike. Throughout the valley, it is clear that people are expecting an event. They talk of the lady coming, and that it is to be owls “this time.” Eventually, it becomes clear that the reader is witnessing a cyclical tragedy, in which the story of Lleu, Blodeuwedd, and Gronw is reenacted, generation after generation, and that Blodeuwedd returns again and again, despite the efforts of generations of magicians to stop her. The painting and the plates were two such efforts to pin down her power. Only if the woman can be persuaded to see her as flowers rather than as an owl will the reenactments cease. It is up to Gwyn, the new magician in the valley, to attempt this; he is, as readers perhaps have suspected, Huw Halfbacon’s son. In a terrifying conclusion to the story, Alison is persuaded by her stepbrother rather than Gwyn that she should see flowers. Analysis The Owl Service is the only one of Garner’s novels to be set away from his native Cheshire, in North Wales, but it nevertheless still incorporates his major themes and preoccupations, not least the vivid sense of place and the need to be rooted, as well as the continuing importance of myth in modern society. Gwyn’s mother, Nancy, has rejected her destiny but nevertheless, as becomes clear, she cannot break free from the valley and its history. She has told her son much about the valley, thus unwittingly fulfilling a part of his destiny. It is surely not chance that they have been called back to the valley to be present at Blodeuwedd’s appearance. Garner emphasizes the sense of being tied to the land by juxtaposing Gwyn’s intimate secondhand knowledge of the place with Alison’s firsthand ignorance. She has spent holidays at the house since childhood yet knows nothing of its history and is unable to fathom what is happening, although she is clearly the catalyst for the events through her discovery of the owl plates. Garner also is concerned with the effects of severing a relationship with the land. Nancy already has rejected the valley, and Gwyn, like his father and grandfather, is destined to fail in stopping Blodeuwedd. Hints are given that although she is once again calm, she will return yet
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again, leaving open the question of what will happen to the valley if Gwyn, as his mother wishes, moves away. He already is uncomfortable with his heritage, although the local people take it as a part of their daily lives. Although the supernatural events of The Owl Service are perhaps less overt than those of Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) or The Moon of Gomrath (1963), both for younger children, this book’s atmosphere is nevertheless far more menacing. Garner has stepped beyond a neat, simplistic world in which magicians always triumph and good overcomes evil. He presents a world of ambiguity in which magicians are as frail as mortals, subject to human weakness and failure. Readers are never clear whether the situation is genuinely magical or simply brought about by the tensions of a “made” family whose members do not yet know how to live together, class pretensions between generations and social classes, or the genuine visitation of Blodeuwedd. Garner’s portrayal of this confused scene is powerful, almost brutal at times in its simplicity but also subtle, a few words speaking volumes for all that is left unsaid. —Maureen Speller
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The Paper Grail Howard Barton journeys to Northern California in search of a sketch by the legendary Japanese artist Hoku-sai that is said to possess magical powers
Author: James P. Blaylock (1950) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1990’s Location: The Mendocino County area of Northern California First published: 1991 The Story On receiving the news that he has been willed a rare sketch by the Japanese artist Hoku-sai, Howard Barton returns to his old stomping grounds in Northern California. Once there, he quickly, if unexpectedly, falls in with a group more or less led by his eccentric Uncle Roy, the perennially improvident proprietor of a haunted museum. Roy’s group includes his wife, Edith; his attractive daughter, Sylvia; Artemis Jimmers, an aged, oddball inventor; Mr. Bennett, a handyman with a predilection for making and displaying huge plywood cutouts on his property; and, in the background, the “gluers,” called so because of their habit of gluing bizarre decorations and objects on their vehicles. Feuding with Roy’s group is an equally offbeat gang led by Roy’s landlady, Heloise Lamey, a witchlike old woman who tends a bizarre garden and owns most of the town. Mrs. Lamey’s unlikely gathering of villains includes Stoat, a slick, wheeler-dealer type; Glenwood Touchey, a disgruntled literary critic; Gwendolyn Bundy, a feminist poet who writes of the “existential woman” in “flat verse”; the Reverend White, a hard-drinking preacher; and Jason, a would-be painter. The feud has been accelerated by news of the death of Michael Graham, the old man who owned the sketch and presumably willed it to Howard. As tensions rise and conflicts intensify, the confusion increases and the questions become more and more bizarre. Are the ghosts in Uncle Roy’s “museum” real or fake? Is Graham really dead? What strange inventions is Jimmers secreting in his mysterious tin shed? Does he have the sketch, along with several forgeries? What are its powers, if any?
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Rhetorical agitation escalates quickly into acts of strange, often ridiculous, violence. The contesting groups chase each other around like Keystone Kops. Mrs. Lamey’s gang destroys Bennett’s plywood Humpty Dumpty, Howard destroys her clothes drier, Uncle Roy’s museum goes up in flames, and Jimmers’s tin shed is stolen. Finally, Uncle Roy and his wife are kidnapped and their lives threatened by Mrs. Lamey, who demands the sketch along with proof of its powers. Having received the drawing from Jimmers following Graham’s demise, Howard agrees to a meeting. At last, he confronts his hysterical female nemesis in the middle of a raging storm that may or may not have been caused by the sketch. Analysis James Blaylock has stated that his favorite novel is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), and this explains much about not only The Paper Grail but also, in varying degrees, the rest of his fiction. Nothing much happens in Sterne’s novel, but a grand time is had by all, especially the reader. Much of the point of Sterne’s book is that life is such a complicated and ambiguous activity that very little purposeful action is possible. One distraction leads to another, which leads to another, and so on, a process that rarely ends where initially intended. Blaylock’s novels are not that diffuse, but it is obvious that his characters are more interested in the side trips than in the destination. The Paper Grail follows the personal formula that structures most of Blaylock’s fiction, whether set in the contemporary world, Victorian England, or an alternative universe. A group of likable, comical, obsessive eccentrics does battle with a group of hateful, comical, obsessive eccentrics. Into this mix comes a single “normal” individual, the “hero,” on a mission of some sort. He gets ambiguous assistance from the good grotesques and faces obstacles—some ludicrous, some dangerous, some both—from the bad ones. After many episodic, bizarre, funny encounters, the hero finally clears up the mysteries, fulfills his mission, and “gets the girl,” if there is one to get. For better or worse, Blaylock’s novels lack the plot-driven pacing of most popular fiction. His characters, even his most grotesque villains, seem in no hurry; they enjoy indulging their eccentricities. In the midst of a violent showdown, they are all ready to stop for the dinner bell. If this takes the edge off the story’s urgency, it underscores another important aspect of this author’s fiction: its basic amiability. Although The Paper Grail has an abundance of villains, it lacks any real sense of evil. The bad characters are more goofy than malevolent. Despite the property de-
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struction, threats, and violent activity in the book, there is only one fatality, that of a very old man from natural causes. In the end, the secondary villain, Stoat, reforms, and the other lesser conspirators simply stumble off. Even Heloise Lamey is forgivable. Her hysteria and blundering badness backfire; she is, finally, more to be pitied than censored. Blaylock writes what might be termed literate slapstick. In The Paper Grail, he juxtaposes his comedic quest with the original legend of the Holy Grail, with frequent ironic references—Graham dies while fishing (hence, the Fisher King), his cane becomes Howard’s Excalibur, Jimmers’s shed is referred to as The Castle Perilous, and the sketch often is called the “Grail.” Blaylock’s fiction probably can be shoehorned into the Magical Realism category, but of the Ray Bradbury, not the Gabriel García Márquez, type. His grotesque characters and their bizarre activities certainly belong in a distorted, heightened world, but one that, for the most part, is not totally impossible. It is not until the final chapters that The Paper Grail crosses the line into the overtly fantastic as the real powers of the Hoku-sai sketch and the truth of Jimmers’s ghost machine are revealed. Conversely, these fantastic intrusions do not surprise the reader. Blaylock’s is a fast, funny, bizarre world in which the fantastic occurs whenever the characters get around to it, except when they are distracted by the wonders of their own peculiarities. —Keith Neilson
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The Patternist Series Over a period of four thousand years, a race of paranormal humans gradually comes into existence to displace or coexist with Clayarks (humans mutated by an extraterrestrial organism) and original humans
Author: Octavia E. Butler (1947) Genre: Science fiction—alternative history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: About 1700 b.c.e. to 2300 c.e. Location: Earth and the planet Kohn First published: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984) The Story The five novels of the Patternist series were not written and published in the order of their fictional chronology. Chronologically, the tale begins with Wild Seed, which covers the period from 1700 b.c.e. to 1830 c.e. It presents Doro, the oldest known of all the patternist paranormal humans. Born a Nubian in the upper Nile region of Africa around 1700 b.c.e., he died at the age of thirteen in a transition, the equivalent of a vastly accelerated adolescence. He can live only by taking the body of another nearby living human, which, used up, is left dead, to be replaced by yet another living human. Doro’s mind and spirit displace those of the body’s owner. He must kill to survive and has done so thousands of times. Doro’s taste for the bodies of other humans with paranormal abilities (limited to forms of telepathy and psychokinesis; Butler eschews precognitive powers) drives him to hunt them, relocate them in isolated villages, and breed them through many centuries. Around 1690, his homing sense for paranormal humans takes him to the extraordinary Anyanwu in the Ibo/Nigerian region of West Africa. At this time, Anyanwu is already three hundred years old because she is a shape-shifter and a healer. She can take many forms, including that of an eagle, a panther, a dolphin, and a wolflike dog. She has enormous physical strength and does not age. From 1690 in West Africa, through the “middle passage” period of the slave trade, to the early nineteenth century in America, Doro and An-
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yanwu engage in a struggle of love, hate, and, finally, truce. During these years, Anyanwu has children by members of Doro’s breed population of paranormal humans, often with Doro inhabiting the breed father’s body. She eventually establishes herself as a white male Maryland plantation owner to give a home to what has become her own extended family of paranormal people. Prior to the Civil War, Anyanwu moves her people out of the war’s path to California, where she soon takes the name Emma. It is by this persona that she will be known in her role as a secondary character in Mind of My Mind, set in the late twentieth century. In Mind of My Mind, Doro searches for stabler paranormal individuals. Most young paranormals manifest psychologically unbalanced behaviors that are destructive to themselves or others before transition. Especially with Emma’s help, Doro breeds increasingly powerful people, culminating in Mary, whose powers are as Doro’s would be had he not “died” in transition. Mary eventually unites a large population of paranormals, with herself at the center of a telepathic web, or pattern. Thereafter, the paranormals are never again alone. Because Doro cannot tolerate his displacement as the virtual owner of these patternist people, Mary regretfully kills him. In Clay’s Ark, set in about 2020 but retrospective to the 1970’s, the account of patternist history is recessed to tell the origin of the Clayark disease that transforms infected humans into catlike humanoids with super strength, health, and sensitivity. The disease actually is an organism imported from Proxima Centauri Two by an African American geologist crew member, Eli Doyle, who survived the crash and destruction of a spaceship named Clay’s Ark on its return to Earth. In spite of Eli’s efforts, the organism infects Earth’s major population centers. Eventually, three women give birth to mutated children fathered by Eli, the first of the Clayark humans. The drive of the Clay’s Ark starship utilizes the psionic or paranormal powers of average humans. In Survivor, also set in the early twenty-first century, such a starship takes a group of ordinary (nonparanormal) people of an apparently Judeo-Christian religious cult to the planet of the kohn—analogous to Earth’s mammal—to escape Earth’s gradual descent into savagery. The paranormal patternists and Clayark-mutated people are part of the populations deliberately left behind. The heroine is Alanna, a wild African-Asian human who had been saved at eight years of age from abandonment and death by the cult leader, Jules, and his wife. Alanna lives with them on the new world with the Garkohn, a tribe of kohns addicted to meklah, withdrawal from which is usually fatal. The Garkohn
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cause the humans to be addicted as well. Alanna is captured by and bears a child of the Tehkohn people, enemies of the Garkohn, proving that the kohn and human species can breed. The Tehkohn are not addicted to meklah. Alanna survives withdrawal from her addiction and remains with the Tehkohn, who defeat the Garkohn in war. Patternmaster is set in a quasi-medieval, twenty-third century California. There is a large population of Clayarks, some “mutes” (humans without paranormal powers), and patternists. The first pattern-master, Mary (of Mind of My Mind), is long since dead. One of her successors, Rayal, is about to die, and his rule is contested by his two powerful paranormal sons, Coransee and Teray. Teray, who has been reluctant to pursue the role of pattern-master, wins it. The Clayarks appear to remain in a savage or primitive state, though in a brief episode, Teray and a Clayark have a respectful conversion. The narrative is arrested with the patternists in power in North America and presumably on all of Earth. The prospects for patternist humans are bright. Analysis The patternist novels feature many established science-fiction topics: psionic powers, genetics and mutations, extraterrestrial travel, extraterrestrial species, actual history refurnished with science-fictional characters and effects, and postcatastrophe future history wherein the future is made to be significantly like the past by being more elementary and even medieval in surviving technology—perhaps a better setting for Octavia Butler’s exploration of her characters. Each novel is different in mood. Survivor, with its subtext of reverence for harmonious existence with nature, is reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972). Clay’s Ark‘s action and setting of violence along southwestern U.S. country roads and highways recalls the film Road Warrior (1981). Patternmaster and Mind of My Mind are in the tradition of works Butler admires: Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953) and John Brunner’s The Whole Man (1964). Patternmaster and Mind of My Mind, however, are anchored in the luminous originality of Wild Seed, the style and setting of which echo the oral narrative discourse of Nigerian West African storytelling and the horrific historicity of the centuries of the African slave trade, the middle passage, and the captivity of the African slave populations in the Americas. Part of the genius of Wild Seed is that there are no antecedents for it in the science-fiction genre. Moreover, it grandly merges meanings traditionally represented in the Faust myth, vampire lore, and the Greek and Hebraic genesis stories. Doro is Faust and vampire, voracious in his ap-
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petite for existence. His life is a progression of murders of the humans whose bodies become the hosts for his spirit. Anyanwu is an Earth Mother, strong enough to bear a species and even sometimes to protect her children from infanticide by Doro. Wild Seed, furthermore, is the touchstone work for Butler’s nonpatternist novels. It connects the optimism of the extraterrestrial gene trading of her Xenogenesis trilogy (1989), the “seed” implied in the title of her Parable of the Sower (1993), and the fictional slave narrative of her brilliant Kindred (1979). Butler makes the calendar of the patternist novels clear, but they are not fully linked. Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, and Patternmaster deal with the patternist paranormal humans. Patternmaster and Clay’s Ark deal with the Clayark-mutated humans, and Survivor deals with original humans and an alien humanoid species, the kohn. They are, moreover, like all of Butler’s stories and novels, tapestries of often bizarre violence, both physical and psychological, and read as excellent adventure tales. Butler has a more pressing agenda for the meaning of the patternist works, however. The novels are primarily stories of the love affairs of individuals who combine radically unique identities with powerful desires for relationships that will validate and nourish them. The relationships transcend ethnicity, race, species, and, ultimately, extraterrestrial DNA. Moreover, from them issue biologically beautiful children. Although Butler is the author of few works of shorter fiction, her “Speech Sounds” (1983) won the Hugo Award for best short story; “Bloodchild” (1984) won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best short novelette; and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987) earned a Hugo nomination. Parable of the Sower was nominated for a Nebula. Kindred and Wild Seed remain among the very best novels of modern science fiction. —John R. Pfeiffer
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The Phoenix and the Mirror Vergil Magus creates a virgin mirror to locate the missing daughter of Queen Cornelia of Carsus
Author: Avram Davidson (1923-1993) Genre: Fantasy—alternative history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The first century c.e. Location: Italy, the Mediterranean Sea, and North Africa First published: 1969 The Story An Ace Science Fiction Special, with appropriately enigmatic cover art by the husband-and-wife team of Leo and Diane Dillon, The Phoenix and the Mirror: Or, the Enigmatic Speculum was the first book in a projected series titled Vergil Magus. The second and only other book, Vergil in Averno, was published in 1987. Its events precede those of The Phoenix and the Mirror. In both novels, Avram Davidson expands on the medieval conceit that the Roman poet Vergil was a magician. Lost in a labyrinth of tunnels and pursued by manticores, Vergil escapes with the assistance of Queen Cornelia of Carsus and her servants. When Cornelia discovers who the magus is, she uses magic to take his masculinity hostage, then orders him to make her a virgin mirror, with which she can locate her daughter, Laura, who has been lost on the way from Carsus to Naples. Once the device is made and used, Cornelia will allow Vergil to become a whole man again. A virgin mirror is made of tin and copper ores smelted and blended with care. Never exposed to light as it is polished, lidded, and closed with a clasp, it will show whoever first uncovers it whatever he or she desires to see. Such a device could take a year to make, and Vergil knows the queen will not be patient. She plans to use the princess’s marriage to advance political aims. Tin is a monopoly of Tartismen, who import it from a fabulous distance, already cast into ingots. Vergil must obtain raw ore quickly. He goes to the traders’ Cyclopean castle in Naples to ask their help. While there, he meets a Phoenician captain, Ebbed-Saphir, and thwarts an assassination attempt. In gratitude, the Tartismen’s Captain-Lord sends a
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messenger-bird and two falcons to attempt to obtain a small quantity of tin ore. Copper, too, is customarily imported in ingots, although the source is much nearer at hand. Because of the Sea-Huns, the ships that bring it from Cyprus travel in yearly convoys. Vergil cannot wait, so EbbedSaphir agrees to lend his ship. The magus decides to seek permission to pass from the barbarian Sea-Huns themselves. The Sea-Huns have three nominal kings because the shaman who “put on the bear-skin” to find out which of the old king’s three sons should inherit the throne has remained a bear. Two of the kings are out of reach, but the third, Bayla, wishes to worship the goddess Aphrodite as embodied in her priestesses. He is willing to make the voyage with Vergil so that he can visit the Temple of Aphrodite on Cyprus. They find the blockaded island of Cyprus overrun by religious cults of all kinds, including that of Daniel Christ, whose leader gives Vergil the information required to compel the evasive Cypriots to provide the magus with copper ore. Vergil then sails back to the Sea-Huns’ camp to find that the shaman has at long last changed back into a man and announced that Bayla is the one true king. Returned home, Vergil finds that the tin ore has arrived. Work on the mirror, though tedious, goes well. When the major speculum is completed, Cornelia comes to discover where the princess may be. At the stroke of noon, she touches the newly revealed polished bronze with a golden pin and sees her daughter on Cyclopean steps. Virgin no longer, the mirror reflects only the faces of those who look into it. Vergil sees himself and knows that he is a whole man again. He also knows that he has fallen in love with the first woman he has really looked at since Cornelia took his masculinity hostage: the girl in the mirror. He must, and will, find her. Beginning with the Tartismen’s castle in Naples, Vergil searches all known castles of Cyclopean work without success, until it becomes plain that Laura must be in Thither Lybya. Taking Ebbed-Saphir as his guide once more, the magus sets out. Once within sight of the ruin, Vergil goes on alone and finds the last of the Cyclops unwilling to give up his companion. The magus temporarily blinds it with dust and escapes with the girl. The Phoenician captain rejoins them and leads them to a pyre. No true man, but a phoenix, Ebbed-Saphir intends to renew himself by burning himself and the daughter of his promised bride, Cornelia. By becoming his mate, Cornelia has lived hundreds of years, but she has evaded the final part of the bargain. Vergil overcomes the phoenix, and Laura is saved.
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In Naples, Vergil reveals that the girl he has rescued is not Laura but her half sister, Phyllis. Cornelia had concealed the girls’ true identities even from them, hoping to use her husband’s bastard child to cheat Ebbed-Saphir, who she thought would be killed in the regeneration process if he underwent it with Phyllis rather than Laura. Vergil claims Phyllis as his wife. Analysis The Phoenix and the Mirror is set in a world in which classical mythology and medieval alchemy are true. Though not based on the historical Vergil or on any of the later legends—most of which involve a misperception of Vergil as a Christian before his time—this book draws freely on classical, medieval, and renaissance sources for background and detail. The Phoenix and the Mirror is built on a series of dual images: sun and moon, tin and copper, and male and female. Throughout the story, from the simple lust of Bayla King for Aphrodite’s priestesses to the momentary terror of the final union of Ebbed-Saphir and Cornelia, sexuality affirmed is positive, and sexuality denied or cast aside is negative. In the end, Vergil not only regains his masculinity but also finds his feminine complement. —Catherine Mintz
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The Picture of Dorian Gray Dorian’s soul goes into his portrait, which shows the effects of sin and age as his body stays young
Author: Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Genre: Fantasy—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1870’s and 1880’s Location: London and the British countryside First published: 1891 (serial form, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, July, 1890, without chapters 3, 5, 15, 16, 17, and 18; “The Preface” in The Fortnightly Review, March, 1891) The Story Basil Hallward, a painter, reluctantly introduces his jaded friend, Lord Henry Wotton, to the young man Basil is painting. Dorian Gray, at the age of twenty, is outstandingly beautiful, wealthy, and inexperienced. Lord Henry tells him that “beauty is a form of genius” and that he must live the wonderful life inside him, giving form to every feeling, expression to every thought, and reality to every dream. Lord Henry believes that this form of fulfillment results in an ideal life. Dorian realizes with horror that he will grow old as the portrait stays young and beautiful. He states that he would give his soul to stay young while the portrait ages. Immediately, Dorian’s character changes; he cruelly taunts Basil as Basil gives him the painting. Dorian flings himself into life. He falls in love with a young actress, Sibyl Vane, who plays Shakespearean roles in a seedy theater. They declare their love the afternoon before Basil and Harry first see her. That night, her performance is terrible; having felt real love, she can no longer pretend it as Juliet. Dorian, however, loves only the images; he coldly rejects the woman. On returning home, he sees that the portrait reflects his cruelty. Horrified, he resolves to marry Sibyl, but he cannot; she has committed suicide. At first, Dorian is shocked, but he soon rationalizes that Sibyl deserved her fate because she failed to live up to his expectations. The day after Sibyl’s death, Lord Henry sends Dorian a “poisonous book.” Symbolist in style, the book is said to tell of a young Frenchman
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who tries to recapitulate the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual history of the world in his own life, “loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations what men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.” Dorian comes to feel that the hero of the book is “a kind of prefiguring type of himself.” He patronizes the arts, flirts with Roman Catholicism, and studies perfumes, exotic musical instruments, jewels, and embroideries. For seventeen years, Dorian enjoys the life of a wealthy man, remaining young and beautiful. Rumors circulate about him: He ruins women’s reputations, he frequents Oscar Wilde. (Library of Congress) strange places, and his friends come to bad ends. Seeing him, however, few can believe him to be evil. Late one night, Basil visits, insisting he must know if the rumors about Dorian’s evil lifestyle are true. Dorian offers to show Basil his soul, as contained in the portrait. Basil is horrified at the cruel, sensual face. Dorian stabs him to death and blackmails a friend into disposing of the body. Plagued by fear and guilt, Dorian escapes Sibyl Vane’s brother, who has sought vengeance all these years, but that does not help, and even opium yields only temporary forgetfulness. He resolves to change and refrains from seducing a village girl. The portrait reveals hypocrisy in addition to evidence of various sins and flaws. Dorian grows angry, determining to destroy the painting and, with it, his past. He stabs it. Passersby hear a horrible cry. When the servants enter the room, they find “a splendid portrait of their master” and a body they recognize only by the rings it wears. Analysis Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was written during the years that Wilde was writing fairy tales and short stories such as “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (1887), which the novel resembles in mi-
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lieu. Aside from the fairy tales and “The Canterbury Ghost” (1887), the novel is his only prose fantasy. His dramas appeared from 1892 onward, and The Picture of Dorian Gray prefigures them in its witty dialogue and portrait of London social life. The first critical question raised about The Picture of Dorian Gray concerned its morality, although, except for the murder of Basil, no immoral acts are described. Wilde stated that the story’s moral was that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. The nature of Dorian’s sins is never clear, though a few hints were added after newspaper reviews attacked the original version. In the context of the book, Dorian’s chief sin seems to be a desire for experience and knowledge of all kinds. What connection exists between Dorian’s crimes and his interest in art? Adjectives such as “monstrous,” “terrible,” “maddening,” and “corrupt” are applied with little apparent regard to their subject in the descriptions of the “poisonous book” and of Dorian’s interests and activities. Scholars have speculated that Wilde’s own underground homosexual life was hinted at by Lord Henry’s cynical statements and the vagueness of Dorian’s sins. This may have been what made newspaper critics uncomfortable. For Wilde, sin and art seem one in life and in literature; the Platonic ideal of beauty can be worshiped as easily in a young man as in a beautiful object. Other criticism has focused on influences, especially the identity of the poisonous book. Wilde himself said his novel bore a resemblance to A rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, but that resemblance cannot be pushed too far. Other strong influences are Vivian Grey (1826-1827) by British novelist and prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Wilde’s great-uncle, Charles R. Maturin. Finally, Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Walter Pater, with its philosophy of living life to the fullest, was a prime source of the decadent philosophy, which Wilde exemplifies so thoroughly in Dorian himself. —Edra C. Bogle
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Planet of the Apes Three men land on a planet where civilized apes are the dominant species and human beings exist in a wild state as dumb animals
Author: Pierre Boulle (1912-1994) Genre: Science fiction—evolutionary fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: After 2500 Location: Soror, a planet in orbit around Betelgeuse First published: La Planète des singes (1963; English translation, 1963) The Story Xan Fielding’s translation of La Planète des singes was known in some quarters by another title, Monkey Planet (1964), a phrase lacking the dignity Pierre Boulle had conferred on his simian civilization. The dignity of a simian society that, whatever its many ineradicable imperfections, has eliminated war and the serious consequences of racial and class conflicts is somehow associated less with the prank-suggestive adjective “monkey” than with the more substantial noun “apes.” It is dignity, or the quality of worth, with which the story is largely concerned. The story’s frame is the discovery of a manuscript inside a bottle that is floating in space. Its retrievers are Jinn and Phyllis, a wealthy couple enjoying a holiday as they cruise in their private spaceship. Jinn, who knows the Earth language in which the manuscript is written, reads it to Phyllis, after which both react to it incredulously. The manuscript contains the account by a French journalist, Ulysse Mérou, of his two-year stay on an Earth-like planet on which the Earth’s situation of civilized humans and wild apes has been reversed. Humans lack intelligence and speech, live naked in the wild, and are preyed on by apes, who use them as objects of study in physiological research. Ulysse and his companions, scientist Professor Antelle and physician Arthur Levain, are captured by gorillas after landing on the planet, which they christen Soror because it is like a sister to Earth. Levain is killed by the hunters, and Professor Antelle reverts, in extended captivity, to the brute animal state of Soror’s humans. Ulysse manages to survive by ingratiating himself with two chimpanzee scientists, Cornelius and his fiancé, Zira. He learns the simian language, wins the respect of
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the scientific community, and is allowed finally to wear clothing, as do the planet’s apes, but not its humans. The villain is an orangutan named Zaius, who contests the research of Cornelius and Zira and plots the liquidation of Ulysse. The cohabitation of Ulysse with a beautiful but primitive human female, whom he names Nova, results in the birth of their son, Sirius. The family escapes from Zaius and the planet with the help of Cornelius and Zira. Ulysse takes Nova and their child to Earth, which, owing to the relativistic variations of space-time, is now seven hundred years older than when he left it less than a decade before. Landing in Paris, Ulysse discovers that Earth’s evolutionary processes have turned it, like Soror, into a planet of apes. He escapes with his family, writes his account, and casts it adrift in the bottle picked up by Jinn and Phyllis, who, the reader learns, are chimpanzees. Analysis The values intimated by the plot are those of individual worth, including personal responsibility, objective inquiry, disregard of physical differences, and familial cohesion. The society on Soror from which Ulysse escapes is the same as that of twentieth century Europe and America, with some utopian exceptions. Its members have resolved the problems that culminate in war and racial violence. There are no national divisions. The entire planet is governed by an egalitarian parliament representing the unilingual races of Gorillas, who are the executives and hunters, Orangutans, who are the traditionalist academicians, and Chimpanzees, who are the true intellectuals and enlightened scientists. Criminal activity is contained by effective police forces, and political ambitions are checked by administrative balances and interdependence. The tripartite society recalls that of Plato’s Politeia. The Gorillas are closely akin to Plato’s powerful epikouroi (auxiliaries); the Orangutans are phylakes (guardians) but less noble, because of their reactionary pettiness, than Plato’s guardians; and the Chimpanzees are, as demiourgoi, superior to Plato’s craftsmen because of their heightened intellectualism. The reluctance of Soror’s guardians to accept the findings of objective research—especially the discovery that their civilization derived from a preexistent human civilization—is a satirical comment on the obtuseness of twentieth century conservatives in their resistance to what have become ecological certainties and technological truths. At the same time, the ability of the apes to achieve social equality and global tranquillity is a satiric reminder of the human disinclination to do so.
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Planet of the Apes forms part of Boulle’s extended commentary on the stubborn incapacity of human beings, collectively, to adjust themselves to their own technological achievements and, in consequence, to one another. Other parts of this commentary include, for example, Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai (1952; The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1954) and Le Jardin de Kanashima (1964; Garden on the Moon, 1965), the first exemplifying Boulle’s use of World War II as a reflection of human fallibility, the second rehearsing the missile race madness that followed World War II. Within its effective framing device, Boulle’s narrative provides a quickening of pace that contributes to the sense of anxiety that his evidences of civilizational folly induce in his reader. The three parts of the novel comprise thirty-eight chapters. In chapter 29 (chapter 3 of part 3), the past tense yields to the present perfect; and from chapter 32 (chapter 6 of part 3) to the end, the present tense is used as Ulysse describes his hectic escape from Soror and his shocking return to Earth. —Roy Arthur Swanson
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The Prydain Chronicles Taran, an Assistant Pig-Keeper, comes of age to become a hero and a king in the land of Prydain, a magical kingdom struggling against the forces of evil
Author: Lloyd Alexander (1924) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Types of work: Novels and stories Time of plot: Various periods in the history of Prydain Location: The land of Prydain First published: The Book of Three (1964), The Black Cauldron (1965), The Castle of Llyr (1966), Taran Wanderer (1967), The High King (1968), and The Foundling, and Other Tales of Prydain (1973) The Story The Prydain Chronicles primarily are a history of the adventures of Taran, a young orphan in the care of the wizard Dallben and the old warrior Coll. In a series of heroic quests, Taran, given the title of Assistant PigKeeper, finds the excitement he craves along with his share of despair and heartache as he grows up to become the High King of Prydain. Taran’s adventures begin in The Book of Three, when Hen Wen, the oracular pig who is Taran’s charge, runs away to escape capture by the Horned King, champion of the evil King Arawn, Death-Lord. Taran, while following the pig, is introduced to the cast of characters who become his companions on this quest and will also appear in subsequent adventures. These include Prince Gwydion, war leader for High King Math and the forces of good; Gurgi, a strange creature who becomes half pet, half servant; the beautiful Princess Eilonwy, orphaned daughter of a line of enchantresses who helps Taran escape from the castle of the wicked Queen Achren; wandering bard and king Fflewddur Fflam; and Doli the dwarf. Taran, aided by a magical sword, helps to defeat the Horned King and restores at least a temporary peace to the kingdom. Taran’s adventures continue in The Black Cauldron. He is reunited with his companions to begin a new quest, that of destroying the cauldron in which King Arawn creates his deathless warriors, the CauldronBorn. Taran must suffer wounded pride at the hands of the arrogant Prince Ellidyr, deal with his grief over the loss of his friend, Adaon the
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warrior and bard, and bargain with Orddu, Orgoch, and Orwen, the three mysterious enchantresses who hold the cauldron. Taran learns the meaning of sacrifice when he must give up his most precious possession, Adaon’s brooch, to obtain the cauldron; and he learns humility when Ellidyr betrays him and threatens to claim the credit for all of Taran’s triumphs. It is Ellidyr, however, who sacrifices his life to destroy the cauldron. In The Castle of Llyr, Taran begins to acknowledge his feelings for Princess Eilonwy when he and Prince Rhun of the Isle of Mona escort her to the prince’s home, where she will begin her training in the ways of the court. Taran reaches Mona and finds Prince Gwydion, who warns him that Queen Achren is plotting revenge on Eilonwy. Chief Steward Magg, conspiring with Achren, kidnaps Eilonwy, and Taran and his companions seek to rescue her. Achren knows that Eilonwy, as a daughter of an enchantress, has access to great powers. Eilonwy chooses to forsake her potential power and uses her magic only to defeat Achren. Taran Wanderer tells of Taran’s quest to discover the mystery of his parentage. He journeys around the kingdom, hoping that the truth of his past will make him worthy of asking Eilonwy to marry him. In the course of his travels, Taran acquires wisdom. He learns skills of judgment and negotiation when he settles a dispute between two nobles. When Craddoc the shepherd falsely claims to be Taran’s long-lost father, Taran must face his own guilt over being ashamed of his modest parentage. After Craddoc dies, Taran travels among the Free Commots, a group of self-governing villages. There he learns the importance of skilled craftsmanship as well as the value of working hard to make a living. Taran finally learns to accept himself despite his unknown parentage. The High King is the last adventure for Taran and his friends. Arawn makes his last stand by stealing Gwydion’s magical sword. Gwydion rallies Taran and his companions to begin a quest to retrieve the sword. Taran, benefiting from the time he spent making friends among the Free Commots, raises an army that he leads to Caer Dathyl, home of High King Math. The forces of evil, which include the deathless Cauldron-Born warriors, initially prove too strong for the combined armies of Gwydion and Taran. Caer Dathyl falls, and King Math is slain. Gwydion risks everything on a desperate raid on the now-unguarded Annuvin, stronghold of King Arawn, hoping to find the sword. He charges Taran with the task of delaying Arawn’s forces on their return march back to Annuvin. Taran fulfills his task and finds the magical sword, learning its secret: It alone can kill the Cauldron-Born warriors. Taran also destroys King
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Arawn, ending an era in which magic was a major force in Prydain. Taran must face the high cost of his victory: Prince Rhun, his old teacher Coll, and many of the friends he made among the Free Commots are killed in battle. Taran must say goodbye to Gwydion, Dallben, Fflewddur, and Gurgi, who must now leave Prydain to return to the kingdom of magic. The land of Prydain will belong to mortals, ruled by the hard-earned wisdom of King Taran and Queen Eilonwy. The Foundling, and Other Tales of Prydain is a collection of six short stories set in Prydain before Taran’s time. “The Foundling” tells of Dallben’s childhood and how he became an enchanter by accidentally tasting a magic brew. In “The Stone,” Doli the dwarf teaches a farmer a lesson on why mortals should not meddle with magic. “The True Enchanter” is the story of how Princess Angharad, Eilonwy’s mother, chooses a mortal for her husband rather than an enchanter. “The Rascal Crow” is an adventure of the animals of Prydain, who also struggle against Arawn Death-Lord. “The Sword” is a history of Gwydion’s sword Drynwyn and how it came to be lost. “The Smith, the Weaver, and the Harper” reveals how Arawn Death-Lord stole many secrets of craftsmanship from the people of Prydain. Analysis Originally inspired by the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh legends, Lloyd Alexander evoked his memories of the time he spent in Wales during World War II to build the fantasy land of Prydain. The critically acclaimed series of novels and short stories is populated by numerous unforgettable characters and is full of daring adventures in which these characters are forced to confront the consequences of their actions. Although the setting undeniably is a fantasy realm, Taran struggles with the same kinds of problems that might trouble a contemporary young man. Alexander has been compared with both T. H. White and J. R. R. Tolkien for his use of well-known legends as a basis for his writing. Alexander is able to strike a balance between heroic epic and modern realism that makes the books accessible to young people of various generations. The books are considered classics by many in the field of children’s literature. The Book of Three, the first of the series, was published after Alexander already had published several adult novels. His first children’s book, Time Cat: The Remarkable Journeys of Jason and Gareth (1963), led him to explore further his research into Welsh folklore. Rather than merely retelling the old legends, Alexander added his own created characters along
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with contemporary conflicts of values and ethics. In each of the novels, the themes of heroic quests are enriched by Taran’s personal quest: the search for his identity. Taran and the other characters also are tested by dilemmas brought on by the universal battle between good and evil. The Foundling, and Other Tales of Prydain was published several years after the last Prydain novel. This collection of short stories was intended, along with Alexander’s books Coll and His White Pig (1965) and The Truthful Harp (1967), to introduce younger children to the land of Prydain. Each story picks up and explains in more detail a tale that was hinted at in the novels. The mood of each story is different, covering a range including romantic, humorous, grim, and triumphant. The Prydain Chronicles firmly established Alexander’s reputation as a major children’s author. The books garnered Alexander numerous prestigious awards, including the Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Book of the Year citation, The New York Times‘s Outstanding Books of the Year citation, School Library Journal‘s Best Books citation, the American Book Award, the American Library Association’s notable book citation, and the Newbery Medal. The well-received series was praised for its sophisticated storytelling and richly developed mythological background. Critics also appreciated Alexander’s realistic characters, who strive to overcome both internal weaknesses and external enemies. The books’ tones vary from lightheartedness to somberness, but a level of humor is maintained throughout. —Quinn Weller
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The Psammead Trilogy Five siblings go on a series of magical adventures when their wishes are granted by a sand-fairy, a magic carpet, and a magic amulet
Author: E(dith) Nesbit (1858-1924) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Novels Time of plot: About 1902-1903, with excursions to antiquity and the future Location: London and Kent, England, and various other locations on Earth First published: Five Children and It (1905; serial form as The Psammead, The Strand Magazine, 1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904; serial form, The Strand Magazine, 1903-1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906; serial form, The Strand Magazine, 1905-1906) The Story The Psammead Trilogy was written as three separate commissioned serials for The Strand Magazine. Although The Story of the Amulet was finished and published last, E. Nesbit began work on it before The Phoenix and the Carpet. Five Children and It contains eleven adventures that begin when five children (in order by age), Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother, called The Lamb, go to the Kentish countryside for a summer vacation. While exploring an abandoned gravel quarry, the children find a psammead (pronounced Sammy-add) or sand-fairy. The Psammead, a tubby, furry creature with bat’s ears and telescoping eyes, proves capable of granting wishes that last until sundown. A grudging and cantankerous ally at best, soon the Psammead bargains that wishes be restricted to one a day. Among other wishes, the children wish to be as beautiful as the day, to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, to have wings, to be in a besieged castle, and for The Lamb to be grown up. Each wish, wild and wonderful as its consequences are, proves troublesome and disconcerting. When the most ill-considered wish of all plants burgled jewels in their mother’s bedroom, the children get the Psammead to grant immediately all the wishes needed to set things right in return for their promise to leave him alone and never to ask him for another wish.
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The Psammead includes in the last wishes Anthea’s polite hope to see him again one day. The Phoenix and the Carpet takes place the following fall, with the five children back in London. Their new adventures begin when their ruined nursery carpet is replaced with a secondhand Persian carpet in which a phoenix egg is wrapped. When the children accidentally knock the egg into the fireplace, the flames cause it to hatch. The Phoenix informs them that the carpet is, in fact, a magical wishing carpet that can take them anywhere. Accompanied by the vain but agreeable Phoenix, the children wish themselves to a tower in France that contains a hidden treasure, to a southern shore where one cannot possibly have whooping cough, and to a bazaar in India. These adventures also are fraught with difficulties. Worse embarrassments occur when the Phoenix accompanies them around London, especially because, when excited, it is apt to start fires. Furthermore, the children’s hard use of the carpet is causing it to wear out. Precisely when the children decide they must ask the Phoenix to leave, it informs them that a few months with them have been as wearying as its usual five-hundred-year life span. With relief, they grant its request to immolate itself and have the carpet transport itself and the Phoenix’s egg to a place where they will not be found for two thousand years. The Story of the Amulet is set during the following summer. The children’s father is away working as a war correspondent, and their mother, taking The Lamb with her, has gone to Madeira to recuperate from an illness. The children are staying in London at the home of their old nurse. They find the Psammead caged and up for sale in a pet store. The children rescue him by buying him. He still cannot grant them wishes, but in gratitude, he offers to help them to their hearts’ desire, which is the safe return home of their parents and brother. He directs them to buy a magic amulet in a secondhand shop. The amulet, when whole, grants one’s heart’s desire, but half of it was long ago crushed to dust. The remaining half, however, has the power to take the children through time so that they can look for it in its whole state. The children learn how to pronounce its inscription from Jimmy, a learned gentleman living in rented rooms upstairs. They search for the whole amulet in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Tyre, and England of the future. On a separate quest, they also travel in time to England at the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion. The queen of Babylon, through a wish granted her by the Psammead, visits them in their own time. With the unwitting help of Jimmy and the selfinterested help of Rekh-mara, a priest of Amen-Ra, they eventually succeed in finding the amulet. Their hearts’ desire granted, they give the
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amulet to Jimmy. Jimmy and Rekh-mara also find their hearts’ desire in great learning. Analysis From her teens on, Nesbit was a published author of poems, short stories, novels, articles, and children’s stories, but not until she was nearly forty did she begin to write the humorous and sparkling children’s novels for which she is best remembered. Some of those, such as the Psammead Trilogy House of Arden (1908), and The Enchanted Castle (1907), incorporate fantasy; others, for example, The Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), and The Railway Children (1905), do not. In both types of story, Nesbit was among the first to depict children realistically. Similar to the boys in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899; collects eight stories published 1897-1899), the children in her books are neither unbelievably good nor unbelievably bad, as so many fictional children were in her day. They bicker and make up, and they are frightened and brave by turns. Unlike Kipling, Nesbit depicts both boys and girls and has neither group completely conform to the stereotypes then current. The boys, though brave, on occasion cry. The girls, though usually gentler, hurl stones at a castle-besieging army and take charge of dangerous situations. The Psammead Trilogy, standing with The Treasure Seekers at the beginning of a burst of creative activity, uses many themes to which Nesbit returned in later books. First and foremost, the trilogy deals with the subject of wish fulfillment, continually stressing the adage, “Watch out what you wish for; you might get it.” The children’s wishes, except for those few in which they wish good for others, do not turn out as expected. They wish for gold, for example, and get ancient money they cannot spend. Furthermore, they are suspected of stealing it. Annoyed with taking care of their baby brother, they wish others would want to take him off their hands, then discover how much they love him and want him when every passing stranger tries to take him away. Magical time travel is another theme to which Nesbit returned often. As her text acknowledges, it was suggested to her by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), but she was probably the first to incorporate time travel into a children’s story. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) also influenced the trilogy. In The Story of the Amulet, the children travel to the future and see a Wellsian utopia from a child’s point of view; they notice child-safe playrooms and desirable schools. A committed socialist, Nesbit occasionally indulges in social criticism. The queen of Babylon comments that London’s slaves, as she calls
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the working people, do not look well treated, and the children find that they cannot explain why having the vote should make them contented. In another adventure, the children can rescue an orphaned girl from the workhouse only by finding her a home in the past; children in their present are not properly valued by society. Nesbit’s influence was felt by many subsequent writers for children. C. S. Lewis admired the Psammead Trilogy and drew on his memories of it in creating The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). Edward Eager acknowledged her influence on his work in Half Magic (1954). Her keen eye for what children feel, say, and do, and her serious exploration of the gifts and the dangers of imaginative play as a tool for both exploring and escaping reality, make her one of the shapers of early twentieth century children’s fiction. —Ronnie Apter
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Rashomon and Other Stories A collection of six stories, the most famous of which accents the distortions of memory by describing a single incident through three widely divergent testimonials
Author: Rywnosuke Akutagawa (Rywnosuke Niihara, 1892-1927) Genre: Fantasy—medieval future Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Medieval times through the sixteenth century Location: Japan First published: 1952 The Story The title Rashomon and Other Stories has been used for several collections of Rywnosuke Akutagawa’s work. “In a Grove” (published in Japanese as “Yabu no naka,” 1922), the opening story and centerpiece of this 1952 anthology, consists of the testimony of several different speakers responding to a government official’s investigation of a woman’s rape and her husband’s subsequent death in a secluded forest. The most intriguing testimony springs from the bandit who raped the wife, the wife herself, and the dead husband, who speaks through a spirit medium. Each of the three recounts with dogged assuredness a version of the events that is radically different from those of the others; each version elevates the motives of the speaker at the expense of the perceived motives of the other two persons present. The mixture of cogency and implausibility in all three accounts suggests that nobody can be certain about all the details of that day in the grove—or throughout much of recorded history. The story “Rashomon” is named for the largest city gate in medieval Kyoto, Japan’s former capital. This gate and the corpse-laden room in it serve as the story’s setting, and its state of disrepair is emblematic of the grim period of famine and concomitant moral decay gripping Japan at that time. Desperate to earn money for food, a shriveled old woman is pulling the hair from corpses in the gate in order to make wigs from it. The male protagonist, who happens by, threatens to kill her in disgust for defiling the dead, but she argues that many of these dead people had
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benefited from shady business practices when still alive. He spares her and leaves, but not before stealing her kimono. The remaining four stories are interesting, even if they do not rivet one’s attention like the first two. “Yam Gruel” recounts the story of a low-ranking samurai often mocked as a provincial pauper. His intense yearning for a rare dessert delicacy, yam gruel, leads him into encounters with a supernatural fox, at which point he begins to realize the hollowness of his craving. In “The Martyr,” a young priest accused of impregnating an unmarried young woman is driven from his church in Nagasaki and must resort to begging for a living. When the young woman’s baby daughter is caught in a burning house, nobody but the excommunicated priest dares to rush in to save the infant. Although the infant escapes harm, the priest soon dies from severe burns. It turns out that the priest was in fact a woman and thus blameless from the start. “The Dragon” portrays the excitement surrounding a dragon sighting, and “Kesa and Morito” renders the monologues of two guilt-ridden adulterous lovers who feel compelled either to murder or to be murdered. Analysis Akutagawa is one of Japan’s most famous writers, and “Rashomon” has been cited as establishing his style and becoming the prototype for historical fiction in Japan. Most of Akutagawa’s fiction contains a core of realism embellished with the casual incorporation of fantasy. Akutagawa’s work thus resembles that of the late twentieth century Latin American Magical Realists, whom he anticipated by roughly half a century. “In a Grove” was the primary inspiration for Akira Kurosawa’s award-winning film Rashomon (1951) and is Akutagawa’s most famous story internationally. It also is his most experimental short story, for it involves seven different narrators, none of whom can be said to be central in terms of reliability or thoroughness of presentation. “In a Grove” contains neither a prologue nor a conclusion or denouement, leaving readers with no overarching authorial interpretation to help resolve the numerous conflicting points of testimony. In this way, Akutagawa’s scenario differs substantially from that of Kurosawa, who inserted a woodcutter’s eyewitness account of the rape and suicide near the film’s conclusion in order to tie together the loose ends intentionally left dangling by Akutagawa. The self-deluded aspects of the testimony of Tajomaru (the bandit), Masago (the wife), and Takehiro (the husband) remain implicit with Akutagawa, whereas Kurosawa makes them explicit in his film.
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The major difference among the three conflicting testimonies is the nature of Takehiro’s death. Tajomaru claims to have stabbed Takehiro to death after a lengthy and valiant sword fight. In contrast, Masago testifies that after witnessing the rape, a dumbstruck Takehiro shamefacedly agreed to her plan for a double suicide; she stabbed him to death shortly before failing in an attempt to cut her own throat. Finally, Takehiro’s ghost claims that he committed suicide in despair over his wife’s urging of Tajomaru to kill him where he sat, tied to a tree, shortly after he witnessed Tajomaru rape her. Tajomaru’s account of the final spirited sword fight with Takehiro is implausible, in that risking one’s life to duel with a captive seems out of character for a bandit who had used underhanded schemes to tie Takehiro to a tree and rape Masago. The crux of the controversy over Takehiro’s death thus lies in the conflicts between the accounts of Takehiro and Masago. Takehiro’s cold and despondent gaze in Masago’s direction after the rape suggests that he believed that she had not struggled tenaciously enough with Tajomaru before succumbing to his erotic aggression and perhaps had found it even more to her taste than her husband’s weak and tepid embrace. Blaming his sorely deflated manhood on Masago instead of the rapist, Takehiro goes so far as to imagine that his raped wife had implored Tajomaru to kill him so that she could belong to the bandit body and soul thenceforth. Masago’s account also refers to Takehiro’s cold and silent stare, but she excises the painful element of Takehiro’s resentment toward her, explaining away his subsequent death in sketchy terms and lamenting the worthlessness of her present reclusive existence. What really happened during a particular incident such as this may be impossible to ascertain, but it does not follow that truth itself is an impossibility, as some pessimistic commentators have concluded with alarm. Despite uncertainties hanging over the specifics of these events, readers can confidently conclude that Tajomaru’s rude intrusion sparked a severe breakdown in communication and trust between Takehiro and Masago that would doom the couple’s prospects for eventually resuming a normal existence. —Philip F. Williams
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Riddle of Stars Morgon of Hed and Raederle of An must answer the riddle of their own powers in order to fulfill their destinies and save the High One’s Realm from destruction
Author: Patricia A. McKillip (1948) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Undefined but resembling medieval Europe Location: The High One’s Realm First published: 1979 (contains The Riddle-Master of Hed, 1976; Heir of Sea and Fire, 1977; and Harpist in the Wind, 1979) The Story Riddle of Stars was first published in three separate volumes. The RiddleMaster of Hed concerns itself primarily with Morgon, the Land Ruler of Hed, a young man with three mysterious stars on his forehead. Morgon has won a riddle game with a dead king, entitling him to the hand of Raederle, the second most beautiful woman in An. When he leaves Hed to ask Raederle to marry him, he is attacked repeatedly by Shape Changers. Morgan discovers that the Shape Changers were responsible for the deaths of his parents, who were trying to bring him a harp with three stars. The Shape Changers are wild and lawless killers. They do not care whom they hurt as they pursue and harass Morgan. Under a mountain in Isig, Morgan discovers a cave containing the children of the Earth Masters. These children have been turned to stone, but Morgan’s presence revives them long enough for them to give him a sword with three stars embedded in it and to name him the Star Bearer. After he receives the sword, Morgan, who has been trying to avoid his destiny and return to Hed, bows to the inevitable. He follows Deth, the High One’s harpist, to Erlenstar Mountain. There, instead of receiving answers from the High One, his mind is painfully stripped of the awareness of the Land Rule of Hed by the wizard Ghisteslwchlohm. As Morgan lies in torment in the darkness, he is haunted by the sound of Deth’s harping. Heir of Sea and Fire begins with Raederle of An, Morgan’s sister Tristan, and the Land Heir of Herun, Lyra, commandeering a ship and
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sailing toward Erlenstar Mountain, where they hope to get answers from the High One about whether Morgan is alive and why the High One allowed him to be tortured. While they are traveling, Raederle is set upon by Shape Changers. One of the Shape Changers informs Raederle that she has inherited their magical abilities. Raederle realizes she desires that incredible power, and the desire scares her. When the women learn that Morgan is still alive, Lyra and Tristan return to their own lands, but Raederle goes to the College of Wizards seeking answers to the riddle of her own powers. Morgan finds her there and warns her that even though Ghisteslwchlohm is tracking him, he is still seeking Deth in order to kill him. When Morgan leaves, Raederle uses her powers to bargain with the ghosts of An, forcing them to protect the stranger abroad in their land so that he can arrive safely in her family’s hall. She intends that the ghosts should protect Morgan, but they mistakenly escort Deth to the hall, where Morgan finds him. When Morgan raises his sword to kill Deth, the harpist sets him a riddle, and Morgan allows Deth to depart. Raederle is afraid that she has become something so powerful that it is nameless, but Morgan sees her for herself and names her. Raederle vows that she shall remain with Morgan, no matter how perilous his future path, as he seeks the answers to the riddles of his destiny. Harpist in the Wind follows the adventures of Morgan and Raederle as they travel the High One’s Realm. Raederle still fears her legacy and refuses to change shape. It is dangerous for her and Morgan to travel in their own forms because the Shape Changers and Ghisteslwchlohm are following them. Morgan and Raederle meet Deth, who has been scarred by Ghisteslwchlohm. When, with Deth’s help, Ghisteslwchlohm captures them, for love of Raederle and the Morgan of Herun, Deth refuses to help the wizard bind Morgan. The Shape Changers attack, and Deth apparently is killed. Morgan and Raederle manage to escape, and Raederle finally agrees to learn how to change shape. Morgan eventually realizes that the Shape Changers are really Earth Masters, a race so powerful that they created, then nearly destroyed, the High One’s Realm. He begins gathering the power of Land Law to him. This involves interfering with the bindings between the Land Rulers and their realms, but the rulers trust Morgan and give him access to their minds and their secret stores of knowledge. When it becomes apparent that the final battle for the Passing of the Age will be fought on Wind Plain, all the rulers gather their armies and go there. On Wind Plain, at the top of a tower hidden by illusion, Morgan
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finds Deth, who turns out to be the High One. Deth explains that he needed to hone Morgan into a wild and powerful weapon so that he could both understand the lawless power of the Shape Changers and be strong enough to overcome them. Deth then looses the winds. A great battle is fought during which Deth dies. Morgan’s heritage passes into his mind, and he uses the winds to bind the Earth Masters, alive but harmless, inside Erlenstar Mountain. As the trilogy closes, Morgan joins Raederle in Hed and finally begins to feel his beloved realm settling down to its well-earned peace. Analysis Riddle of Stars is considered one of the classic works of high fantasy. Its plot unfolds like a riddle, and the reader is forced to solve the puzzles of the world in the same manner the characters must solve the riddles that are put to them. The trilogy follows in the traditions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1968) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy (1977) but creates its own highly complicated, impressively detailed, beautifully described world in which language and power are linked inextricably. Like the Tolkien and Le Guin trilogies, Riddle of Stars uses the idea that by naming a thing a person gains power over it. Although in Tolkien’s trilogy the underlying assumption is that absolute magical power is destructive and eventually will corrupt even a benevolent ruler, Patricia McKillip’s wizards believe that arcane knowledge is meant to be explored and utilized. Magic does not necessarily corrupt, as long as it is tempered with love. The bonds that keep McKillip’s characters from becoming wild and lawless are their desires to protect humble things such as family, hearth, and home. Riddle of Stars, like most of McKillip’s novels, has a strong streak of feminism running through it. Her women must pit their wills and intellects against a frequently male-dominated world, earning the privilege of wielding the power that is their birthright. One of the things that makes her books so popular is that, unlike many fantasy novels with strong female protagonists, her characters generally manage to make peace with the men they love without having to deny their own urges or bend their principles. McKillip is considered one of the great prose stylists in the fantasy genre. Her short fiction can be found in many of the more prestigious fantasy anthologies. Her earlier novels were heralded with critical acclaim, and in 1975 she won the first World Fantasy Award ever given for her novel The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974). That novel contains the
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themes McKillip uses in most of her adult works, having as its protagonist a strong-willed woman who uses her wizardry to name the beast she most fears and desires. After writing Riddle of Stars, McKillip primarily wrote young adult fiction and short stories until she created the world of The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991) and its sequel, The Cygnet and the Firebird (1993). These two books continue her themes of strong, magic-wielding men and women who must fight to attain their power and learn to take control of their own destinies. The world created in these two books is rich and complex, a place where the constellations of myth and legend can come to life to warn humans to remember their attachments to home and humanity. McKillip’s next novel, Something Rich and Strange (1994), won the Mythopeic Society Award. The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995) continues the theme of names and naming, playing especially on the pun of an inhuman creature learning about sorrow and then being trapped within the concept and being called “Saro.” Although The Book of Atrix Wolfe is a beautifully written novel, it is less strongly plotted than some of McKillip’s earlier pieces and rehashes themes she previously used to greater effect. Riddle of Stars, for its imaginative landscape, strong characters, intriguing riddles, and glorious prose, is aptly considered the benchmark against which all of McKillip’s work, and indeed most high fantasy, tends to be judged. —Shira Daemon
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Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers A team of explorers from various races investigates the Ringworld, a vast artificial planet; members of the team later return to save it from destruction
Author: Larry Niven (1938) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novels Time of plot: 2850 and 2873 Location: Earth and the Ringworld First published: Ringworld (1970) and The Ringworld Engineers (1979)
The Story The Ringworld novels take place in Larry Niven’s own particular future history, Known Space. Like Isaac Asimov’s and Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History stories, it has been charted and time-lined, but unlike theirs, it includes a variety of sentient alien species and several million years of prehistory. According to this schema, humanity arose not simply because of evolution on Earth but also because the attempt of a race known as the Pak to establish a colony on Earth went awry. Human beings are the mutated remnants of the Pak breeder stage, which could not metamorphose into the protector stage because the necessary catalytic plant could not be grown on Earth. At the time of the novels, the two most important alien races are the kzinti, a fierce race of large felinelike carnivores whom humans have beaten in a series of savage wars, and the puppeteers, so called because of their two heads, which resemble human hand puppets. The character of the puppeteers is the exact opposite of that of the kzinti: They are diffident herbivores who would rather flee than fight. The puppeteers, however, disappeared from Known Space some two hundred years before the novels open, because they discovered that the core of the Milky Way is exploding. Even though a deadly wave of radiation from it will reach Known Space in the distant future, the puppeteers are moving their entire race now. In their migrations, they have discovered the Ringworld, an artificial
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ring of matter forming a band around its sun, at roughly Earth’s distance from Sol. Its land area is that of three million Earths. Because the civilization that built such an artifact must be immeasurably powerful, the puppeteers organize an expedition to examine the Ringworld more closely. The team consists of the puppeteer Nessus, who is considered insane by puppeteer standards because he is willing to take risks; Louis Wu, a twohundred-year-old human who is known for his habit of taking solitary journeys to escape from any kind of company; Speaker-to-Animals, a kzinti junior diplomat trained to deal with other species without reflexively killing them; and Teela Brown, a human whose ancestry involves several generations of winning the Birthright lotteries and who is thus considered by the puppeteers to be lucky by reason of genetics. Forced to crash land when their ship’s slower-than-light engines are destroyed by the Ringworld’s meteor defenses, the team must figure out a way to leave the Ringworld without the use of conventional means of propulsion. During their journey across an infinitely small portion of the Ringworld’s surface, which nevertheless seems impressively large to them, they discover that the Ringworld’s main sentient inhabitants are all descended from human beings. More important, they learn that the puppeteers have manipulated both human and kzinti history for their own ends. Most of the once-advanced civilization of the Ringworld has reverted to savagery because of a biological plague that destroyed its superconducting material. With the help of a native spacewoman, the team is able to escape from the Ringworld, but Teela Brown remains, because apparently she is destined to live there. In The Ringworld Engineers, two members of the former team, Louis Wu and Speaker (now named Chmee), return to the Ringworld after being kidnapped by the deposed leader of the puppeteers, the Hindmost, who hopes to discover on the Ringworld a transmutation device, the secret of which will restore him to his former rank. During this journey, the team meets a much greater variety of Ringworld inhabitants, ranging from giant grass eaters to nocturnal vampires. Each hominid group has evolved to occupy an ecological niche occupied by animals on Earth. The team also learns that the Ringworld will soon be destroyed because its orbit has been shifted by solar flares. Wu is determined to save the Ringworld. He learns that the Ringworld was constructed by Pak protectors, all of whom died a quarter of a million years ago. One human, however, has been transformed into the protector stage since then—the former Teela Brown. She cannot save the Ringworld because doing so would mean the death of 5 percent of the Ringworld’s population, one and one-half trillion lives that, as a protec-
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tor, she instinctively must protect. Wu and the others manage to save the planet but at a terrible cost. Analysis A typical story by Larry Niven involves the solving of some technological or scientific dilemma within the framework of his Known Space. Niven came up with the idea for the Ringworld itself as a variation of the Dyson sphere, a planetary construct by the physicist Freeman Dyson in which an advanced civilization could take advantage of all of its sun’s energy. Niven had to fit this concept within the future history he already had imagined. In many respects, the Ringworld novels (particularly Ringworld) represent his finest novel-length achievement using this strategy. Ringworld won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel of the year. One reason for the novel’s immense appeal is the strength of its characters. Louis Wu is both a typical and atypical science-fiction hero. He is typical in that he is driven by an immense curiosity about the universe he inhabits and is able to exist on his own as a solitary agent; he is atypical in that he is not extraordinarily competent in solving his problems, either physically or intellectually. He realizes that he needs the ideas and perspectives of others, and indeed he craves them. He is a xenophile, not a xenophobe, and relishes the prospect of working with aliens. Similarly, Speaker and Nessus are typical and atypical: They are representative of their species, in one case ferocious and honor-driven, and in the other cowardly and manipulative. They become unique characters because of their differences from their norms. Speaker is able to control his temper and instincts, and Nessus is able to exhibit courage and martial capabilities. Teela Brown is an entirely different matter. She is unique in that because of her inherent luck, she never has been hurt. She must travel to the Ringworld because it is the only place in the universe that can educate her. Her case introduces one of the primary themes of the novel, that of control: Dei ex machina keep popping up in the narrative to confound reader expectations. The puppeteers turns out to be exactly that: They have pulled the strings in the outcomes of the human-kzinti wars in order to produce more docile kzinti and have manipulated the human Birthright lotteries in order to produce a character like Teela Brown. Evolution is not the result of blind chance or random occurrence; all the main species in the novel have been tailored in their development toward some specific end. Teleology has been replaced by tinkering. One of the most famous analyses of Ringworld, one that Niven himself discusses, is that its plot is based on that of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonder-
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ful Wizard of Oz (1900). Certainly, in Ringworld, a series of curtains is pulled aside to reveal the mortal hand behind seemingly arbitrary events. This strand culminates in Teela Brown’s eventual fate. She teams up with a gigantic “sword-and-sorcery” hero on his quest to find the base of the Ringworld, and she seems to pass from the genre of science fiction directly into fantasy. Niven declared that Ringworld needed no sequel, but fan pressure and suggestions resulted in The Ringworld Engineers, in which Niven cleared up some of the scientific inaccuracies of the first novel. Some critics have declared that the second novel is by far the weaker; however, in many ways it is a satisfying conclusion to the main narrative and previously introduced themes. The purpose of the Ringworld itself is made somewhat clearer; initially, it seemed no more than narrative convenience that all of its inhabitants were hominids. Louis Wu’s story involves a continuation of the theme of control. At the beginning of the novel, he is a current addict, enslaved to a trickle of electricity into the pleasure center of his brain. The Hindmost thinks that he will be able to control Wu through this addiction, but Wu is able to overcome it by his own will, and by the end of the novel he is able to withstand the irresistible lure of the scent of the plant that turns humans into protectors. By controlling himself and continuing to enlist the aid and perspectives of others, Wu is able to save the Ringworld as well as himself. Human beings, Niven implies, no matter how they are manipulated, will be able to control their own destinies. —William Laskowski
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Roderick and Roderick at Random The life history and adventures of a robotic learning machine as it wanders through America trying to understand and become part of human culture
Author: John Sladek (1937-2000) Genre: Science fiction—artificial intelligence Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The late twentieth century Location: The United States First published: Roderick: Or, The Education of a Young Machine (1980) and Roderick at Random: Or, Further Education of a Young Machine (1983) The Story Roderick is a robot manufactured at the University of Minnetonka at a time when research into artificial intelligence has been outlawed. The opening chapters depict the efforts of Dr. Lee Fong, the director of the project, to gain funding for his work from the university following withdrawal of his federal funding, which turns out to have been secret and illegal. Meanwhile, two forces threaten Roderick. The government-run Orinoco Institute and a loathsome industrialist named Kratt are both intent on destroying the robot and its creators. To prevent destruction of the robot, the inventors first send Roderick to Hank and Inca Dinks, who ignore him and allow him to begin a lifelong fascination with television. He is then sent to an older couple, Ma and Pa Woods of Newer, Nebraska, who try to raise him more or less as a human child. Unfortunately, a wandering band of gypsies kidnaps Roderick from his front yard. They sell the robot to Kratt, who puts Roderick to work telling fortunes in a carnival. He is rescued from this situation, however, and returned to the Woodses. Back home, Roderick enters public school. Despite his appearance, Roderick is treated as a strange and troublesome human child. His classmates bully him, and his teachers diagnose him as mentally unbalanced. He is expelled, but not before he accidentally gains access to the school’s computer and alters both his record and that of a particularly vile instructor. He is then sent to a Roman Catholic school, where he engages a troubled priest in difficult discussions on the nature of being human. In
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the meantime, Pa Woods has been altering Roderick’s appearance to make him look more human. The second volume begins with the discovery that one of Roderick’s creators has died and his brain is being kept alive in a tank at the Orinoco Institute. The institute has managed to either kill or ruin the careers of the other members of Project Roderick despite a failure to capture the robot himself. Meanwhile, an accident at a nuclear power plant has destroyed Newer. Roderick has traveled to the city, where he works as a dishwasher at a diner that caters exclusively to dogs. At a dance hall, he repairs the electronic instruments of a group named the Auks. As a result, he meets Ida, a kindly prostitute, with whom he has his first mechano-sexual experience. He then encounters members of a religious cult, the Church of Christ Symmetrical. At a bar called the Tik Tok Club (an allusion to John Sladek’s 1983 novel Tik Tok), Roderick meets members of a neo-Luddite group called the Fractious Disengagementists. The leader of this group turns out to be Hank Dinks. Moreover, his former wife, Inca, has become a famous spokesperson for the movement to liberate machines from human oppression. After Hank arouses his followers at a rally, they form a mob and attack the publishing house where Inca is autographing copies of her latest book. Hank is killed accidentally in the uproar. In the adventures that follow, Roderick winds up back at Minnetonka University as the mascot of one of its fraternities. On his way to a film one evening, he stumbles on a Luddite plot to attack the Auks. He foils the plot only to learn that it was a diversion and that the Luddites have burned down the crowded theater to which Roderick was headed. Fortunately, the film was so boring that everyone had already left. Despondent, Roderick goes to a psychiatrist only to discover that the doctor is a robot created by a company owned by Kratt. As Roderick sits in his room at the fraternity house, four of Kratt’s agents break in and capture him. As they lead him out, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation appear and wrest Roderick from his captors. They inform Roderick that the government policy outlawing artificial intelligence has been reversed and invite Roderick to join them. The robot, appalled by his discovery of their extreme actions while attempting to destroy him, refuses and gives himself up to Kratt. Analysis The two Roderick novels were meant to be a single work, but Sladek’s British publisher was convinced that the length of a single volume would prove daunting and therefore unattractive to readers. In 1982, a
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version of Roderick that was shortened by about one-third was published in the United States. It was advertised as the first volume of a trilogy. The second part, Roderick at Random, was not published in the United States until 1988. The two joined novels represent an ambitious attempt by Sladek to fuse the conventional themes of science fiction to those of the mainstream picaresque novel. The titles contain an obvious allusion to Tobias Smollett’s famous novel Roderick Random (1748), a particularly telling choice of literary models because Smollett used the picaresque form to satirize British society. Sladek’s two novels unfold, in the picaresque tradition, as sequences of comic episodes. The Roderick novels offer a compendium of the themes and qualities that make Sladek one of the finest science-fiction satirists. Much of his fiction deals with the theme of the dehumanizing effects of technology. Most of his satire focuses on the absurdity of contemporary American culture, and most of his books are funny. Sladek’s humor has invited comparisons with writers as diverse and highly regarded as Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, and Joseph Heller. These novels in particular allow Sladek the opportunity to demonstrate his wit. From a musing on the obscene double entendres embedded in the names of computer companies such as Honeywell and IBM to a hilarious explication of the name L. Frank Baum, Sladek constantly reminds the reader of his artfulness. Sladek’s writing is more consciously literary than most science fiction. In addition to directing the reader to Smollett and the picaresque tradition, he alludes to a wide range of science fiction, particularly the robot stories of Isaac Asimov. The beginning of Roderick, quotations taken from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and the American comic drama film Dinner at Eight (1933), alerts the reader to expect references to both high and low culture. The satire of the novels is based on the traditional device of the naïve but honest observer. Roderick is an innocent trying to make sense of contemporary American society. He spends much of his time learning about that society by watching television. Television provides Roderick his vision of America much as it provides America, Sladek seems to suggest, with an image of itself. Meanwhile, what Roderick encounters away from television ranges from the absurd to the malicious. The Orinoco Institute takes aim at the “think tanks” that have become so powerful a part of the intellectual landscape. The religious cults and fringe political groups in the novel are more interested in self-satisfaction than the public good. Other targets include the military mind, popular journalists,
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American higher education, American public and parochial schools, mainstream religion, and essentially anyone dehumanized by excessive desire for wealth or personal satisfaction. The Roderick novels provide an example of science fiction as a medium in which the best authors are able to wed imagination and philosophy. For all of their humor and satire, they are also philosophical explorations. The two novels provide the most extensive explorations of themes that figure throughout Sladek’s fiction. Several of his earliest published stories (such as “The Steam-Driven Boy”) feature robots trying to fit into human culture. His first published science-fiction novel, The Reproductive System (1968), deals with technology run amok. Two earlier novels were gothics, written as Cassandra Knye: The House That Fear Built (1966, with Thomas M. Disch) and The Castle and the Key (1967). The Roderick novels take this interest in technology a step further by addressing the question of humanness itself. One of the characters trying to sabotage robot research expresses the main theme of the novels when he says that humans “feed on meaning . . . we only survive by making sense out of the world around us. . . . So if we turn over that function to some other species, we’re finished.” Another human character, pondering some of the actions taken to find Roderick, wonders if “any robot” would be capable of such actions. This combination of the desire for meaning and the capacity for cruelty seems to sum up Sladek’s view of human nature. Although highly praised, the Roderick novels are not Sladek’s best work, in part because their length and the complexity of the narrative detract from the satire, and in part because the satire takes aim at too many topics. The most memorable figure is Roderick, the learning machine who seems more humane, if not more human, than the human beings who seek to destroy him or anyone who stands as an obstacle to their ambition. —Dennis M. Kratz
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Rogue Moon Edward Hawks defines life and death as he transmits a replicated man to the moon to be killed repeatedly while solving the riddle of an alien artifact
Author: Algis Budrys (1931) Genre: Science fiction—inner space Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1959-1960 Location: The Pacific Coast of the United States and the far side of the Moon First published: 1960 The Story Dr. Edward Hawks has invented a method of electronically encoding a human and simultaneously transmitting the code to both the Moon and his laboratory. The original is destroyed in the process, but neither duplicate accepts that it is not the original. Hawks is put in charge of a project to unlock the mystery of an alien artifact discovered on the far side of the Moon. The U.S. Navy drops receiving equipment for Hawks’s device close to the artifact, and Hawks’s project has beamed Navy personnel duplicates to the receiver while at the same time creating duplicates in Hawks’s laboratory on Earth. Duplicates entering the artifact are killed. Hawks discovers that the duplicates in his laboratory go insane from the experience of living through their own deaths via the mental/emotional link with the duplicates in the alien structure. He must continue to send duplicates into the artifact, however, because each one moves a little closer to finding a way through the alien labyrinth. Hawks is frustrated because the project cannot find volunteers whose duplicates maintain their sanity after living through their own horrible deaths. He also struggles with the knowledge that the project is sending men to their deaths and driving their duplicates insane. Finally, he relies on Vincent Connington, personnel director for one of the project’s contractors, to recommend someone for the project. Connington proposes Al Barker, a daredevil of a man who has spent his life defying death. The duplicate Barker on Earth manages to maintain his sanity. Hawks
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uses the duplicate on Earth to make repeated transmissions, and each time Barker moves farther through the artifact, slowly mapping a route through the enigmatic structure. Barker’s companion, Claire Pack, is a hard-edged woman who enjoys toying with men. She stays with Barker, believing him to be more man than anyone else. Hawks observes how she torments Connington and is nearly sucked into her clutches himself. Hawks meets Elizabeth Cummings, a young woman who surprises him with insights into his own view of life. She becomes a foil to his gloomier estimations of self, causing him to consider how his relationship with life mirrors his relationship with women. She also leads him to discover the connection between love and life. When the Barker duplicate tells him that he believes the next trip through the artifact will conclude in reaching an exit, Hawks transmits his own duplicate to the Moon along with Barker. They make it through the artifact. Barker, for all his exploits, has never done something no one else has ever attempted, and Hawks helps him realize that each person must make his or her own life and must live to create a personal meaning, not one defined by others. Hawks realizes that he cannot transmit himself back to Earth because the other duplicate Hawks is there, and since the point of their divergence the other duplicate has created a new lifeline. Taking courage from his insights about death, Hawks walks away from the artifact into the emptiness of the lunar landscape. He dies there, secure in the knowledge that someday humanity will conquer death. The realization is bittersweet, however, and he longs for the life and newfound love he left behind. Analysis Rogue Moon is about the meaning of life and humanity’s yearning to transcend death. Algis Budrys uses the trip through the alien labyrinth as a metaphor for life. Barker’s discovery when he makes it completely through the alien structure—that a person must create himself or herself—is a logical extension of Hawks’s earlier statement to Elizabeth, a person he has just admitted into the intimacy of his mind. Hawks explains to Elizabeth his realization that in all the universe there is only one thing outside of nature’s universal entropic law. That one thing is the human mind, because it has nothing to do with time and space except to use them. Hawks rationally accepts that, but Budrys plumbs deeper, exposing the fears and regrets that Hawks’s duplicate experiences at the instant of death.
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Budrys comments on the humanity of an individual’s life by having his protagonist—a detached, coolly observant scientist—explain that consciousness transcends nature. At the same time, however, Hawks grapples with an emotional connection to physical reality. Thus, Budrys emphasizes the ineffable quality of humanness connected to consciousness as he underlines the poignant attachment each person maintains to physical reality and the people who share it. Even though Hawks faces his own death knowing that some part of his mind has transcended it, he is saddened at the losses of his physical life and the love he has finally allowed into that life. That is one of Budrys’s statements in Rogue Moon: Human beings are possessed of more than the ability to reason and to function in the physical universe. They also feel, and development of that quality is as important as development of any other. The discovery of an alien artifact is a plot device that begs the question, “What constitutes humanness?” Instead of focusing on what humanity is en masse, however, Budrys keeps the evaluation in the mind of his protagonist, using observations of human interactions such as Barker and Claire’s relationship as a frame around the investigation. This approach creates the resulting psychological study of one man’s thinking about death, something Budrys does as admirably here as Frederik Pohl does with his protagonist in the Heechee series (1977-1990). Rogue Moon was written relatively early in Budrys’s career, yet his style is fully evident. He employs an almost minimalist approach that calls for careful word selection to paint vivid pictures while studiously avoiding flowery, overlong sentences. Like others of his well-known works, this a short novel, seemingly Budrys’s preferred length. —Jeff King
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Sarah Canary A picaresque adventure among the invisible people of the Old West: women, Chinese, Indians, and the insane
Author: Karen Joy Fowler (1950) Genre: Science fiction—feminist Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1873 Location: Washington Territory and San Francisco First published: 1991 The Story Sarah Canary traces the difficult adventures of Chinese laborer Chin Ah Kin, who discovers a woman at the edge of his western American camp who does not speak any language he can understand. Wondering if she has been sent as a test from the gods, Chin begins a trek through the Washington Territory in an effort to return her to her home. A misunderstanding lands him in jail, where to save his own life he is forced to act as a hangman for Tom, a Native American convicted of murder. Chin finds that the woman he has been trying to help has been committed to the asylum at Steilacoom, where she acquires the name Sarah Canary. He then takes a job there, while figuring out how to free her. At the asylum, he meets BJ, an inmate who suffers sporadic delusions that he does not exist. The three of them escape from the asylum and find brief shelter in the cabin of Burke, an Irish naturalist, but Burke’s companion, the huckster and Civil War veteran Harold, steals Sarah Canary in the middle of the night. Chin and BJ track Harold to Seabeck, where the latter is exhibiting Sarah as the “Alaskan Wild Woman,” and Adelaide Dixon, a suffragist and proponent of free love, is lecturing. After the show, Harold attempts to rape Sarah Canary, who stabs him with a chopstick. Dixon comes upon the scene and mistakes Sarah Canary for the fugitive Lydia Palmer, who is accused of murdering her husband. Adelaide then escapes with Sarah Canary, while the hotel bar is destroyed by men enraged by her speech. The two women board a steamer bound for San Francisco. Chin again finds himself fearing for his life after one of the hotel residents is found murdered in the morning; he and BJ attempt to follow Sarah Canary’s
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steamer in a canoe, which capsizes. They are rescued and put aboard the steamer. After the characters reach San Francisco, Harold abducts Adelaide and demands that Chin trade her for Sarah Canary. At the ensuing rendezvous, Chin saves Adelaide from a tiger, and they discover that Sarah Canary has disappeared. Meanwhile, the real Lydia Palmer is on trial. She is acquitted and goes to visit Adelaide. A mob gathers outside Adelaide’s hotel, and BJ is killed in the resulting violence. Meanwhile, Chin and Adelaide have fallen in love with each other. However, Chin returns to China, carrying with him the strange and terrifying memories of his time in America. Analysis On the surface, Sarah Canary looks nothing like a science-fiction novel, and that is part of its greatness. On one level it is a first-contact story of immense dexterity; on the other hand, it is an angrily comic voyage among the various invisible populations of the Old West. The uncertainty of Sarah Canary’s origin throws the brutality of the American West into painfully sharp relief. Everyone else in the novel—from the confused Chin to the avaricious Harold and ambitious Adelaide—uses her in some way, and their actions toward her are inevitably contradictory. Chin hopes to pass a divine test by treating her well, but he considers abandoning her in the woods and strikes her when her wordless singing aggravates him; Adelaide is overcome by pity at the plight of “Lydia Palmer,” but envisions not so much the justice of her acquittal as the fame a successful defense might bring to her. Sarah Canary exists as a sort of Rorschach ink-blot test, in which each of the characters finds the image of a private obsession. A great virtue of science fiction is its ability to recast a problem so the reader does not recognize it immediately. This process disarms the reader’s prejudices, so that by the time the contemporary resonance of the story becomes clear, the reader finds previous opinions not as solid as they were before. Fowler emphasizes this process by interpolating short anecdotes about 1870’s historical events, which seen from the 1990’s are nearly incomprehensible. Within science fiction, the firstcontact story has long been a way of exploring the deep alienation between different groups on Earth, and Sarah Canary is no exception. The mentally ill BJ, the Chinese immigrant Chin, the Indian Tom, the haunted veteran Harold, and the proto-feminist Adelaide all suffer from the blindnesses of the existing power structures. —Alex Irvine
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Shatterday A collection of stories in which fantastic phenomena and events disrupt the fabric of contemporary life
Author: Harlan Ellison (1934) Genre: Fantasy—Magical Realism Type of work: Stories Time of plot: Primarily the present Location: Various locations in the United States and Europe First published: 1980 The Story All but one of the stories in Shatterday first appeared in a variety of magazines, from science-fiction periodicals to Playboy, or as radio or television broadcasts in the late 1970’s. Arguably the best published selection among Harlan Ellison’s hundreds of stories, it is most representative of the mature author at the height of his powers. It also demonstrates the reason behind Ellison’s discomfort at being labeled a science-fiction writer: Most of the stories here could be defined as Magical Realism. Only a few include science-fiction elements; “Would You Do It for a Penny?,” a comic seduction story written with Haskell Barkin, and the semiautobiographical novella “All the Lies That Are My Life” are neither science fiction nor fantasy. The book also includes Ellison’s introductions, both for the collection as a whole and for individual stories. The most striking works in the collection depict a real world in which marvelous events naturally happen; the characters are too awestruck or wrapped up in their own lives to reject them. “Jeffty Is Five,” for example, is narrated by the friend of a five-year-old boy named Jeffty who remains five years old while everyone around him ages, including the narrator. “Flop Sweat” at first appears to be a contemporary horror story about a serial killer but evolves into a fantasy about a radio talk-show host’s connection to the powers of darkness. In “The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge,” a cheated man’s anger turns the universe against the man who cheated him; the cheated man in turn angers someone and will become the universe’s next victim. For having wasted his life, the protagonist of “Count the Clock That Tells the Time” vanishes into a
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timeless limbo. “All the Birds Come Home to Roost” is a chilling fantasy about a man who is visited by all the women in his past in reverse order, and the equally chilling “Shatterday” is a Doppelgänger story focusing on the nature of personal identity and morality. Other stories in the book, though less effective, are no less imaginative. “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?” is a humorous science-fiction story about a “temponaut” who returns to his own time and space with a telepathic creature that offers the ultimate sexual experience, which brings a horde of Cissaldans seeking new encounters with a willing human race. A more somber science-fiction story, “Alive and Well on a Friendless Voyage,” has suffering and loneliness as its theme. A related story is “The Other Eye of Polyphemus,” a contemporary fantasy about a man who helps others but neglects his own needs. “Shoppe Keeper” begins as a fantasy about a magic shop and ends as a science-fiction story about highly evolved humans in the far future who manipulate history to buy time for themselves. “Django” is an impressionistic wartime fantasy about French jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, and “Opium” deals with the world reshaping itself fantastically in response to one woman’s boredom and despair. Analysis The best stories in Shatterday involve the intrusion of the fantastic into everyday life. Ellison excels at portraying both the real and the unreal, using descriptive and at times lyrical language. The transitions between the known and the unknown are often achieved so seamlessly that the reader’s disbelief is not so much consciously suspended as naturally subdued. Ellison also effectively describes contemporary settings and lives of quiet desperation. For example, “Jeffty Is Five” is both an effective fantasy and a loving tribute to popular culture in America during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Many critics have commented on Ellison’s emotional, often hyperbolic style. Although many of the stories in Shatterday exhibit touches of antic humor or righteous fury, the collection as a whole is noteworthy for its generally constrained tone. From the elegiac “Jeffty Is Five” to horror stories such as “Flop Sweat,” “The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge,” “All the Birds Come Home to Roost,” and “Shatterday” to the dreamlike “Alive and Well on a Friendless Voyage” and “The Other Eye of Polyphemus,” Ellison is in full control. Critics have also remarked on Ellison’s introductions. Some consider them intrusions. Although it is true that the introductions have the effect of making the reader conscious of the writer behind the stories and point
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out autobiographical elements that would not have been obvious otherwise, they reinforce what Ellison states in the introduction to the volume, “Mortal Dreads,” to be his goal as an author. A seriously moralistic though not didactic writer, Ellison intends to demonstrate to readers of Shatterday that everyone shares the same fears and that, while ultimately alone, each person can find some solace in others. Shatterday, though published by a major publishing house (Houghton Mifflin), struggled with the difficulty of all short-story volumes in an American marketplace dominated by novels. Because he has focused most of his energies on stories, Ellison is less well known than he could be or deserves to be, though he enjoys a considerable cult following. He has also earned the respect of much of the science-fiction and fantasy community. “Jeffty Is Five,” for example, received both the Hugo Award (1978), given by fans at the annual world science-fiction convention, and the Nebula Award (1977), given by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In addition, many readers and critics have praised “Shatterday” and “All the Birds Come Home to Roost” as among Ellison’s best efforts. —Darren Harris-Fain
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The Ship of Ishtar John Kenton, a rich young scholar-adventurer suffering from battle fatigue, discovers a small magic ship enclosed in stone, which transports him to adventures in ancient Mesopotamia
Author: A(braham) Merritt (1884-1943) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The early twentieth century and 4000 b.c.e. Location: Modern New York City and ancient Mesopotamia First published: 1926 (serial form, Argosy All-Story, November 8-December 13, 1924) The Story The Ship of Ishtar was published by Putnam’s after first appearing in serial form in Argosy All-Story; a few years later, it had the distinction of being voted the most popular story ever published by the magazine in its first fifty years. A. Merritt was in midcareer and at the peak of his powers. The novel opens as the protagonist, John Kenton, a young and wealthy but deeply embittered World War I veteran, muses on his dissatisfaction with Western civilization and his romantic nostalgia to find a lost civilization uncorrupted by the mundane and unheroic modern world. All the action takes place in one night in Kenton’s New York City apartment and the ancient Mesopotamian world of adventure that he finds when he is transported in time to the magical Ship of Ishtar. Merritt’s use of the “locked room” convention invented by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is one of the novel’s most entertaining features. An amateur scholar, Kenton has financed an archaeological dig in Egypt and, as the story opens, receives in his apartment a large block of stone from that expedition. The stone itself seems to compel him to examine it, and he chisels away its surface, releasing the magical power entombed for thousands of years within the granite. The block suddenly crumbles, revealing a wonderfully crafted toy ship, which acts as a bridge between the present that Kenton despises and the ancient past for which he so fervently longs. This device allows Merritt to send Kenton
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back and forth repeatedly over thousands of years without benefit of a scientific or technological rationale for the story’s time travel. In the episodes that occur in the past, Kenton has a variety of entertaining physical adventures involving a number of fantasy fiction’s more interesting alien beings. The magical world of the ship is divided into two spheres of power and influence, presided over by two mythological deities. Half of the ship is ivory and houses Ishtar, goddess of love, and her priestess, Sharane; the other half is ebony and houses Nergal, god of death, and his evil priest, Klanath. Their war for dominance can never be decided: They represent the equally powerful and eternally warring cosmic forces of love and hate (of light and darkness, of life and death), and neither can dominate the other. Kenton gets the opportunity to witness this endless universal struggle while engaging in a number of exciting and entertaining adventures, but he can never tip the balance for or against either of the cosmic combatants. Two other characters are worth mentioning. One is a bald “dwarflegged giant,” Gigi, an exceedingly well-conceived comic Pan-figure. The other is the enigmatic King of the Two Deaths, a jovially cynical drunk who dispenses death while reciting poetry and his own brand of nihilistic philosophy. His chapter is by far the most intriguing part of the novel and can be read as a self-contained story. It is one of the best short pieces of magical world fantasy writing. Between these episodes, Kenton repeatedly and unexpectedly returns to his apartment in the present, where he dies from wounds sustained in combat in the ancient past. He dies in a brutal fashion inside his own room, which is locked and sealed from within. The conclusion, in which his servants and the authorities are left in a bewilderment that the reader does not share, is very effective. Analysis A summary of The Ship of Ishtar does not hint at the sheer fun that Merritt provides the reader who enters the imaginary magical world of the Mesopotamian culture of six thousand years ago. The novel was written in the mid-1920’s, when Merritt was at the height of his creative powers, and he is clearly in a playful mood. (A version with text restored was published in 1949.) It is the only one of his lost civilization stories that is set in the ancient past, and it is the only one that makes no effort to supply any kind of scientific/technological rationale for the eruption of the atavistic or premodern experiences into the historical present. The novel’s emphasis is strictly on simple physical adventure, on the romance of the encounter with truly strange and sometimes even bizarre
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creatures, and on the slightly veiled possibilities for eroticism always only barely hidden within lost civilization and magical world fictions. Another feature of the novel is noteworthy. The contrast between the past, imagined to be necessarily heroic and adventurous, and the present, imagined to be inevitably and unchangeably mundane and boring, allows Merritt to indulge in some amateur philosophy that will be familiar to readers of his other, more complex, fiction works. Merritt’s was dualistic imagination, and he rather naturally presented his magical narratives (more so than his scientifically based ones) as encounters between antagonistic but equally powerful cosmic forces. This is seen as much in the story’s structure of opposites— between love and hate, life and death, good and evil, light and darkness—as in its creation and presentation of characters and events. Although this may seem uninteresting in outline, Merritt’s talent in creating vivid imagery and truly bizarre characters was so developed during this period that The Ship of Ishtar, though one of his least intellectually complex fictions, is one of his most successful. It richly deserved the fame that it achieved, even if only momentarily. —Ronald Foust
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The Sirens of Titan Winston Niles Rumfoord plans an invasion of Earth from Mars
Author: Kurt Vonnegut (1922) Genre: Science fiction—future history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Between World War II and the Third Great Depression Location: Earth, Mars, Mercury, and Titan (a moon of Saturn) First published: 1959 The Story Winston Niles Rumfoord runs his private spaceship into an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum. The result is that he and his dog Kazak exist as wave phenomena, materializing and dematerializing on Earth and on Mars, where Rumfoord plans an invasion of Earth. On Mars, he transforms disaffected Americans into an army, literally washing out their brains through surgical procedures and directing their wills through antennas implanted in their heads. On Earth, Rumfoord lures Malachi Constant, the richest American, into his plot, inviting him to witness his materialization. Constant is ripe for Rumfoord’s exploitation because he has lost all sense of purpose. He inherited his money from his father and takes no interest in the financial maneuvers of his father’s company, Magnum Opus, which becomes bankrupt. Rumfoord makes Constant his tool, then flies Constant to Mars, along with Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice. She becomes Constant’s wife and bears his child. Constant’s own story is hidden from him (and from the reader) because on Mars, much of his memory is erased. There he is Unk, a soldier with an antenna in his head that sends pain signals any time Unk tries to act on his own. Unk runs away from the army and tries to find his wife, Bee (Beatrice Rumfoord) and his son, Chrono. Unk is fortified by a letter from his best friend, Stony Stevenson, who has warned him to try to remember as much as possible because the surgical brainwashing does not destroy all memory, only the middle part. Unk does not realize that while still brainwashed, he obeyed an order to strangle Stevenson.
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Unk, Bee, and Chrono eventually are reunited and survive the disastrous Martian invasion of Earth, in which Rumfoord’s forces are easily defeated. This apparently is part of his plan, allowing him to present himself as a kind of latter-day savior of humankind and to change human values. In this role, he establishes the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, under the leadership of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine. Rumfoord, who suffers severe reactions to his constant materializing and dematerializing, is hardly triumphant. He feels manipulated by the Tralfamadorians, machinelike creatures from another galaxy, one of whom, Salo, has helped Rumfoord accomplish his scheme. Rumfoord’s dream of dominating humanity is merely that—an illusion, like the beautiful sirens of Titan, inhabitants of one of Saturn’s moons. Analysis Like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Kurt Vonnegut’s novel projects into the future, taking certain technological and political trends of the present and extrapolating them into a vision of a terrifying authoritarian and dehumanizing world. The technological tyrant Rumfoord is also a victim of cosmic forces that he finally realizes are beyond his control. Unlike Orwell, Huxley, and other science-fiction writers, Vonnegut apparently believes that no manipulative force, however powerful, can ultimately extinguish the human will. For example, the Tralfamadorian Salo, the product of an advanced civilization of virtually perfect machines, becomes infected with human feelings. Even though it is ironic that his emotions should attach to the unworthy Rumfoord, both Salo and Rumfoord have a gnawing sense of unfulfillment and search for a happiness that eludes them. They are human in their incompleteness, and Rumfoord is also human—if terrifying—in his desire to control everything, to take unpredictability out of life. Vonnegut’s novel is whimsical and poignant. Although Constant, transformed into Unk, is pathetic in his inability to remember his own past, he also is deeply moving in his quest to recover his memory and family. Vonnegut’s style, except for the quasi-scientific words he invents, is quite simple and reminiscent of science-fiction comic books. Human psychology is pared down to two basic drives: to dominate and to love. This deliberate diminution of human complexity serves Vonnegut well because it reveals the underlying, basic humanity that no surgical operation or political/military plot can efface entirely. Vonnegut does not deny the possibility of a grim future, but the fu-
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ture does not end with grimness. As his narrator suggests at the beginning of the novel, its events are set between World War II and the Third Great Depression. The first sentence of the novel also implies that humanity may find a way to stop torturing itself: “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.” The Sirens of Titan reflects the sensibility of much of Vonnegut’s work, which derives directly from his experiences in World War II. Captured by the Germans, he was housed in an underground meat locker of a slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden. When he emerged, he found a city devastated by U.S. and British bombs, itself having become a slaughterhouse. Later, working in the public relations department of General Electric after the war, he saw how masses of people were manipulated in peacetime as in war, and he satirized the corporate effort to control America in his first novel, Player Piano (1952). His other novels, such as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), also use the conventions of science-fiction, but with a black humor reminiscent of The Sirens of Titan. Vonnegut finds it comic, if grotesque, of human beings to think that they can ultimately overpower one another. Human fancy resists regimentation, he implies, and even in the darkest hours of atrocity, he finds human beings acting for themselves and proving that they are not reducible to their machinable parts. —Carl Rollyson
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Slaughterhouse-Five Billy Pilgrim’s travels to the imaginary planet Tralfamadore provide escapes from the horrors of World War II and Vietnam
Author: Kurt Vonnegut (1922) Genre: Science fiction—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1922-1976 Location: Ilium, New York; Dresden, Germany; and the planet Tralfamadore First published: 1969 The Story Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death is a framed narrative in which Kurt Vonnegut, himself appears in the first and last chapters, explaining how and why he wrote the novel. He also pops up occasionally in the action itself, because he was—like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, as he tells readers in the frame chapters—a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, when Allied bombers incinerated the city on February 13, 1945. The novel proper opens in 1944, when Billy, a chaplain’s assistant and inept foot soldier, is captured by the Germans. He and his fellow prisoners of war are taken by railroad boxcar to Dresden as forced laborers. Housed in a slaughterhouse bunker below the city streets, Billy is one of the only survivors when the city of Dresden is destroyed by incendiary bombs dropped in a ring around the ancient city, causing fires to burn toward its center. Billy emerges from the slaughterhouse to witness a moonscape. The novel hardly moves in such a straight line; its structure rather mirrors Billy’s time travel. Chapter 2 opens with Billy coming “unstuck in time,” and thereafter the novel moves jerkily among its three plots: the story of Billy’s life, before and after the war; the bombing of Dresden; and life on Tralfamadore, a planet to which Billy was carried in 1967. With the exception of World War II, Billy’s life is quite bland. Born in 1922 and drafted in 1940, after the war Billy marries the daughter of the founder of the Ilium School of Optometry he attends. He becomes a wealthy and conservative optometrist living in upstate New York. His
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imaginary life is much richer: Not only is he able to travel back and forth in time, but he claims he was kidnapped on the night of his daughter’s wedding and taken to a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, where he and the voluptuous film star Montana Wildhack are representatives of the earthling species on view. In 1968, Billy is the only survivor of the crash of a chartered flight of optometrists headed for a convention. His wife, Valencia, is killed in her car rushing to Kurt Vonnegut. (© Jill Krementz) visit Billy in the hospital. Soon after these tragedies, Billy starts to write letters to the newspaper and appears on an all-night radio show in New York City detailing his interplanetary and timetravel experiences. His life will end, he claims, when one of his fellow prisoners of war, Paul Lazzaro, assassinates him, in the future of 1976. His life story ends in the novel, however, on the planet Tralfamadore with his beautiful lover Montana Wildhack nursing their new baby. Analysis At the center of this blackly humorous work of science fiction about time travel and interplanetary travel is a deadly serious novel about the wastes of war. Billy is one of the only survivors of one of the most destructive acts of World War II. A city of no apparent military value, Dresden was bombed in order to bring Germany to its knees and thus to hasten the end of the war. Billy’s experiences in Dresden have an almost surreal but intense mix of pathos and trivia: A middle-aged German couple in the rubble of the city berate Billy for mistreating a horse, and his friend Edgar Derby is executed for stealing a teapot. Billy’s psychological response to the devastation he has been part of is the novel itself, an escape through time and space. The Tralfamadorians provide Billy with the deterministic view of life he needs. Because every moment, past, present, and future, has always existed and always will exist, people can escape to a good moment in the past, pres-
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ent, or future. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, “all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” Such a relativistic philosophy—the Tralfamadorians say free will exists nowhere in the universe except on Earth— allows Billy to live in a world of which he has lost the essential meaning. He does not live happily. Billy is “unenthusiastic about living” in the present of 1968, Vonnegut writes, and he bursts into unexplained bouts of weeping, clearly an early victim of delayed stress syndrome. The weeping is shown as connected to Dresden through various images. The novel is held together not by any linear plot line but by these recurring images (such as spoons, the colors orange and black, and dogs barking) and phrases (particularly the Tralfamadorian “So it goes” whenever death is mentioned). The cause of Billy’s autistic present lies in his horrific past. The larger meaning of the novel applies to the late 1960’s, as Vonnegut makes clear in his frame. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., recently have been murdered, Vonnegut writes in the last chapter, “And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam.” Americans have a choice, Vonnegut says: They can walk through history like the zombie Billy, or they can make it their own. The novel thus takes science fiction to a deeper level. It is Vonnegut’s personal exorcism for his participation in World War II and a novel he tried to write for twenty-five years. It is also another contemporary example, like the novels of E. L. Doctorow, of the interactions of fiction and history. Finally, it is an excellent example of one brand of metafiction that emerged in the 1960’s as writers played with the conventions of the novel and added black humor, the artifacts of popular culture, and themselves. —David Peck
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Snow Crash Hiro Protagonist races to save his fellow hackers and the world from megalomaniac L. Bob Rife
Author: Neal Stephenson (1959) Genre: Science fiction—cyberpunk Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The twenty-first century Location: California First published: 1992 The Story In Neal Stephenson’s cyberspace, called the Metaverse, the 120 million richest people in the world conduct their pleasure and business blithely unaware that L. Bob Rife, the owner of the fiber-optic network they all use, is plotting their domination. Meanwhile, Hiro Protagonist, a hacker who wrote some of the earliest software for the Metaverse, prowls about looking for intelligence to sell in an information-overloaded age. Hiro has a debt to pay: He owes the Mafia-run CosaNostra, the twenty-first century version of Domino’s Pizza, the cost of a new delivery car. Before he can repay his debt, he is swept up into a larger adventure. At the urging of his still-intriguing former lover Juanita, he begins investigating a new drug, Snow Crash, that has rendered his former partner, Da5id, brain dead. The ominous part about Snow Crash is that it affects the brain when administered in the Metaverse; in a twist on the typical relationship, the virtual determines the real. With the help of Y.T., a Kourier who meets Hiro on the fateful night he wrecks his car, Protagonist steps on the trail of Snow Crash in both real and virtual life. In the former, he traces the path of Raven, an atomicbomb-toting Aleut who seems to be the source of Snow Crash. In the latter, he employs a nearly omniscient virtual librarian to investigate the drug’s extensive history. He discovers that Snow Crash is not a drug at all but a modern manifestation of an ancient metavirus that provides access to deep structures in the brain that control individuals. Prior to the fall of Babel, all people spoke a language that used this infrastructure and thus lived in a static culture. The Sumerian priest Enki released humanity from the metavirus by uttering an incantation, or nam-shub, that
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reprogrammed the brain so that people could no longer understand the deep language. Consequently, multiple languages developed. The metavirus continued because it has both a linguistic and a biological component. It was circulated mainly through the cult of Asherah, a throwback to Sumer, and spread itself both verbally and through sexual contact. Exposure to the metavirus returns the infected to a pre-Babelian state, bringing the mother tongue closer to the surface and thus causing the person to speak in tongues. In the twenty-first century, its chief manifestation is Pentecostalism, but in hackers the virus has a more devastating effect. Because knowledge of binary structures is “wired” into the brain’s deep structures, hackers can be infected by looking at a bit map. Although most people who are infected continue to function, hackers are reduced to a state of neurological mush. The slow distribution of the metavirus is accelerated when a twentyfirst century megalomaniac, L. Bob Rife, finds out how to manufacture it. Acting as a benefactor, he spreads it throughout the Third World via vaccines and infiltrates the First World via Snow Crash. As the novel opens, Rife is about to land a Raft full of infected Third World refugees on the West Coast in his larger invasion of the United States. To stop Rife, Hiro and Y.T. link up with the Mafia and the Nipponese, who have a vested interest in protecting their own global empires, to infiltrate Rife’s Raft. There they find Juanita. After an extended chase, they manage to release Enki’s nam-shub once again and thus free Rife’s followers. Analysis Snow Crash takes on a common cyberpunk theme, that of the implications of the information explosion caused by new technologies such as a global fiber-optic network. One way in which the novel differs from cyberpunk works such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991) is the way Stephenson situates his discussion in ancient history. By drawing a sweeping link between religion and viruses, he plays with the self-replicating tendencies of both. All information is viral in nature, Stephenson suggests, but some has more violent effects. The book traces a virulent metavirus from the childhood of humanity that has been spread through religious cults and that manifests itself in the twenty-first century as Pentecostalism. Large sections of the novel trace ancient religious struggles, which Stephenson interprets as primarily concerning battles over information. The Deuteronomists’ effort to codify Judaism, for example, is read as “informational hygiene,” an effort to regulate which aspects of the religion were replicated. In this
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way, Stephenson reminds readers that the generation and preservation of all information—whether recipes for bread or religious practices—is always an evolutionary process whereby some knowledge will be lost and some preserved. That global networks can be manipulated by powerhungry individuals such as L. Bob Rife accentuates the tension between representation’s fragility and persistence. Snow Crash also differs from most cyberpunk in its technical particulars. Stephenson is a computer programmer, and his detailed descriptions of how the Metaverse works and how people, through simulations called avatars, can enter it provide a more solid basis for his fiction than do the typical mysticisms about limitless cyberspace. This level of realism does not detract from the novel’s fun, however; the charm of Snow Crash is in its wry wit and liberally scattered puns. With a zest that recalls Douglas Adams, Stephenson presents a hero named Hiro, a pizza Deliverator for the Mafia who drives a “car with enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt” and who lives in a U-Stor-It with a Russian named Vitaly Chernobyl (2) who wants to be a rock star. The pace is frenetic, the characters larger than life, and the plot fascinating. —Carole F. Meyers
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The Snow Queen Trilogy Moon Dawntreader defeats her mother, the Snow Queen, becomes the Summer Queen, and saves a bioengineered, aquatic species called mers that holds the key to the knowledge held by the Old Empire
Author: Joan D. Vinge (1948) Genre: Fantasy—alien civilization Type of work: Novels Time of plot: An unspecified time in the future Location: An unnamed galaxy First published: The Snow Queen (1980), World’s End (1984), and The Summer Queen (1991) The Story The Change is coming to the watery planet Tiamat, which will be closed to the rest of the empire for 150 years. A new queen will rule. To protect herself, Arienrhod, the Snow Queen, has cloned herself. Arienrhod plans for the clone, Moon Dawntreader Summer, to come to Carbuncle, the planet’s only major city, to prepare to become the next queen. The Change means that the less sophisticated Summers will rule and that the off-worlders will leave, taking their technology with them. Arienrhod’s original plan is aborted when Moon inadvertently is taken off the planet by smugglers while on her way to visit Sparks, her lover. Moon is a sibyl, a person infected by a bioengineered virus that makes her capable of tapping into the Old Empire’s hidden computer library. Believing Moon to be dead, Sparks eventually becomes consort to Arienrhod and is progressively corrupted. Moon eventually returns and accidentally is gathered up in an illegal hunt for mers, led by Sparks. The intelligent, aquatic mers are creatures bioengineered by the Old Empire. Their blood contains the “water of life,” a longevity substance. Moon meets and falls in love with BZ Gundhalinu, a Kharmoughi policeman. Attracted to BZ, Moon makes love with him. Arienrhod’s plan was to free Tiamat from the control of the Hegemony, the current empire, by preserving as much technology as possible. As her plans are thwarted, she becomes more ruthless, finally arranging
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for a plague to kill most of the Summers at the Festival of Change. That scheme also is foiled, and Arienrhod is sacrificed to the sea. The offworlders leave, and so does BZ. World’s End chronicles BZ’s journey of self-redemption. Stationed on a planet named Number Four, in self-imposed exile, BZ leaves his police job to find his two brothers and a mad sibyl named Song. “World’s End,” an uncharted wilderness, boasts great mineral wealth but is a nightmare. At its center is Fire Lake, which proves to be filled with runaway stardrive plasma used for the Old Empire’s faster-than-light ships. It drives some people mad and disrupts the fabric of space and time. On the lake shore is a city called Sanctuary, where BZ finds his brothers enslaved and Song in charge. He makes love to her, confusing her with Moon, and she infects him with the sibyl virus. He finds the wreckage of a thousand-year-old Old Empire ship in the lake and is rewarded handsomely for it. The Summer Queen begins shortly after the Change. Moon is queen, is pregnant with twins fathered by BZ, and is married to Sparks. This novel, like The Snow Queen, has two principal plots, following the story of Moon and BZ and that of Reed Kullervo. Moon deals with the return of the off-worlders, her growing feelings for BZ, and the seeming failure of the sibyl net, the collective ability of the sibyls to tap into the computer without hardware. Reed, a brilliant biotechnologist, frees himself from various forms of enslavement, particularly from “the water of death,” his own failed attempt to counterfeit the “water of life.” BZ and Reed stabilize the stardrive plasma, which will permit the Hegemony’s early return to Tiamat. Meanwhile, BZ imagines that he is someone named Ilmarinen. Reed ends up working for Jaakola, a criminal who keeps him under control by doling out doses of the water of death. Reed eventually learns that Mundilfoere, his former lover, put another mind into his body. BZ is appointed chief justice of Tiamat. Tammis, Moon’s son, eventually dies trying to fix the failing sibyl net, and Ariele, Moon’s daughter, falls in love with Reed when he appears on Tiamat to synthetically replicate the “water of life.” It becomes increasingly clear that the mers’ song will reprogram the net. BZ, put into the position of trying to protect the mers while harvesting them, is betrayed by a subordinate and sentenced to prison. Reed discovers his personality implant to be the legendary Vanamoinen, who, with Ilmarinen, constructed the original sibyl net and who has existed electromagnetically within the net for thousands of years. Moon and BZ finally come back together. The mers remain safe.
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Analysis The Snow Queen trilogy is Joan Vinge’s most important work to date. Although much praise has been lavished on The Snow Queen itself (it won the Hugo Award in 1981), the other two novels have attracted little attention. The trilogy presents a twisting plot full of ironies, peopled with well-developed characters who move through a richly detailed world that perfectly balances the familiar with the unfamiliar. The Snow Queen openly owes allegiance to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name. It borrows its characterization of Arienrhod as an insensitive queen from Andersen, and the growth of Moon and Sparks parallels the transformation of the fairy tale’s children. At one level, The Snow Queen is a coming-of-age novel and as such is linked to literally thousands of other stories. In its broader structure, it also is a novel of renewal. By the end of the novel, summer has replaced winter and Moon has replaced Arienrhod. Although her values and philosophies are entirely different, her goal is identical to her mother’s—to advance Tiamat sufficiently into the technological age that the Hegemony will no longer be able to treat it as a backward planet. Taken together, Moon and Arienrhod represent most of the dialectical pairs that frame human lives: good and evil, youth and age, innocence and experience. Moon’s name links her to the perpetual cycle symbolized by the moon trinity of new, full, and old. The sacrifice of the reigning queen to the Lady of the Sea at the end of each cycle further suggests a renewal theme based in vegetation myth. Moon’s journeys, both physical and psychological, follow the prototypic pattern of the hero as identified by Joseph Campbell. World’s End relies on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Vinge herself called it a Heart of Darkness novel in a 1983 interview with Richard Law. It also calls on the structure of an Irish folktale, “The Well at the World’s End,” from which she probably derived the title. In that story, a prince saves a princess and his two disloyal brothers with the help of an enchanted lady. BZ Gundhalinu, the protagonist of the story, rescues both Song, who has been driven mad by the sibyl virus, and his two brothers, who are slaves at Sanctuary. He receives Moon’s help by means of the sibyl Transfer. In his adventures, BZ follows Campbell’s prototypic hero myth. In his trip into a wasteland, BZ makes a figurative descent into Hell, from which he is reborn. He is transformed by his experiences, recovers his sanity, and returns with the capability of transforming his world. He brings back the stardrive plasma, which will make an early return to Tiamat possible.
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The Summer Queen concludes Vinge’s saga of change. It is a beautiful, rich, and complicated novel that resolves issues and romances. Its plot twists one way and then the other as it strips away layer after layer of perceived reality to get at the truth. Vinge’s anthropological training is obvious in the richly woven fabric of detail in this work. She has been interested in humanity’s “dark side” from the beginning of her writing career. Arienrhod is the dark side of Moon, and in the philosophical development of this work, Vinge mentions the eternal cycle of form and chaos. Evil appears in many forms but is balanced by the forces of good. The trilogy reflects many of Vinge’s continuing themes: the difficulty of loving, the struggle for understanding, the inability to communicate perfectly, the use of drugs, the problem of alienation, the role of free women, the need for renewal, the difficulty of forgiving, and appreciation for different people and cultures. Vinge’s protagonists often are strong women placed in difficult situations that permit them to grow from their experience. That is the case here. Although the love scenes between Moon and BZ tend to submerge into soap opera near the end of the story, this development, like Vinge’s writing in general, is thoughtful, provocative, stimulating, interesting, and well crafted. —Carl B. Yoke
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Solaris Researcher Kris Kelvin attempts to understand the nature and purposes of the enigmatic ocean-entity that covers the planet Solaris
Author: Stanislaw Lem (1921) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novel Time of plot: After the twenty-first century Location: The planet Solaris First published: 1961 (English translation, 1970)
The Story Researcher Kris Kelvin arrives on Solaris, a planet covered by a mysterious—and possibly intelligent—plasma-ocean-entity, only to find the facilities of the research base untended and in a state of disrepair. Kelvin searches the station and discovers Dr. Snow, a drunken, distracted base worker whose utterances and behavior indicate that the entire crew has become unstable. The station commander, Gibarian, has committed suicide. During his initial investigation of the facility, Kelvin feels as though he is being watched and hears movement nearby when nothing apparently is there. These eerie sensations become concrete encounters as Kelvin begins to discover the cause of the crew’s mental distraction: They are being plagued by visits from alien simulacra, pseudo-beings that are extrusions of Solaris’s living ocean. Kelvin attempts to contact another surviving crew member, Dr. Sartorius, who refuses to let Kelvin enter his rooms. Only under duress does he concede to come out. It becomes obvious to Kelvin that Sartorius, who is extremely agitated, is concealing the presence of some other being in his quarters. The next day, Kelvin discovers that he has a visitor of his own, a simulacra in the shape of a woman he used to love. This simulacra appears and behaves exactly as he remembers Rheya, but she is unaware of her alien origins. Kelvin, distracted and disturbed by her presence, lures her into a launch capsule and deposits her in orbit until he determines what to do next.
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Kelvin once again talks with Snow, who reveals that each crewperson has his or her own visiting simulacrum and that each simulacrum is the re-creation of a troubling individual from the crewperson’s past. Snow also reveals that these pseudo-beings regenerate very quickly and, if destroyed, are reproduced shortly afterward. Snow’s claims are confirmed by the arrival of a new pseudo-Rheya. Kelvin struggles with his reaction toward her, which combines fear and loathing with genuine affection. He conducts research into her basic physiology and shares his results with Snow and Sartorius. What Snow calls the “Phi-creatures” are not composed of normal cellular matter but instead are accretions of neutrinos that mimic human physiological structures and metabolic processes. In order to rid themselves of the unwanted visitors, the three scientists contemplate using energy emissions to break down the Phi-creatures’ neutrino structure; they also consider sending signals that match Kelvin’s thought patterns into the ocean directly, in the hope that this might lead to the establishment of a more manageable form of contact with the ocean entity. Before either of these options can be attempted, Rheya, confused and horrified regarding her own inexplicable origins, attempts suicide but discovers that she cannot carry it out successfully because her capacity for physical regeneration prevents her from dying. In a subsequent meeting with Snow, Kelvin is forced to admit that, despite the growing individuality of the new Rheya, their relationship ultimately is untenable. The scientists attempt to communicate with the plasma-ocean by projecting amplified brainwave emissions into its depths, but weeks pass without result. The humans become increasingly solitary and erratic in behavior. Kelvin convinces himself that he plans to leave the station with Rheya, but she and Snow both realize that he is deluding himself. Rheya’s growing misery leads her to request that Snow and Sartorius destroy her with a device capable of discorporating the Phi-creatures. Upon learning of Rheya’s successful suicide, Kelvin rages first at Snow, then at the plasma-ocean. The visits by the Phicreatures come to an end, and Kelvin leaves Solaris, more understanding of his own nature but also more cynical. Analysis Prior to his departure from the planet, Kelvin leaves the station and visits one of Solaris’s island-sized oceanic extrusions, determined to have his first direct contact with the living plasma in its natural state. For a while, the ocean-being seems to “interact” with Kelvin, but it then abandons the game, as inscrutable at the last as it was in the beginning. This
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image restates the basic motif of the narrative: the friction between human desires to establish contact with other minds and the ultimate futility of such attempts. Taken as a story of first contact with an alien intelligence, Stanislaw Lem’s tale presents a tantalizing array of enigmas: Are the Phi-creatures instruments of torture or gifts? Are they invitations to communication or merely animate constructs created by some nonsentient reflex of the plasma-ocean? Does the “being” that is Solaris have a mind to be reached or not? Would a human recognize it as such if that contact were established? This overt theme of alien contact can also be read as an allegory for human relations and epistemology. Kelvin and his coworkers try to make contact with one another, to communicate and share experiences, fears, and observations, but their success is, at best, limited. They, too, ultimately remain strangers to one another, and even to themselves. These frustrated attempts at contact frame Lem’s sardonic recounting of the scientific history of “Solaristics”—the study of Solaris and its plasma-ocean. Human idealism and folly collide, merge, and become indistinguishable as Lem parodies contemporary factionalism in the sciences, academic posturing, and the elusive, uncertain quality of what humans call knowledge. Ultimately, the metamorphic qualities of Solaris’s enigmatic ocean-entity become symbolic of the mutability of reality itself and the indefinite nature of human experience. —Charles Gannon
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The Space Merchants and The Merchants’ War After learning the truth about their society, two advertising executives assist “subversive” movements with designs on Venus
Authors: Frederik Pohl (1919) and C(yril) M. Kornbluth (19231958) Genre: Science fiction—extrapolatory Type of work: Novels Time of plot: An unspecified time in the future Location: Various locations on Earth, the Moon, and Venus First published: The Space Merchants (1953; serial form, Galaxy, 1952) and The Merchants’ War (1984) The Story One of many collaborations between Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants was also Pohl’s return to writing after working as a literary agent. The novel has an interesting textual history. Written under the title Fall Campaign, it was serialized as “Gravy Planet” in Galaxy magazine, whose editor, H. L. Gold, thought that the ending was incomplete and demanded that Pohl and Kornbluth produce an additional three chapters to show what happens to the colonizers after they reach Venus. When the novel was published in book form, these chapters were omitted from the text, although they have since been reprinted in Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (1987). Pohl has made minor revisions to the novel’s text; for example, a reference in the first edition to “Western Union and American Express Railway” became a reference to “United Parcel and American Express” in the 1985 edition. More than three decades lapsed before the publication of the novel’s sequel, The Merchants’ War, written by Pohl alone. The two novels were collected into an omnibus volume, Venus, Inc. (1985). The Space Merchants is the story of Mitch Courtney, a “copysmith star class” in a future in which advertising dominates the world and outlawed “Consies” (Conservationists) are regarded as dangerous and deluded radicals. Mitch’s big break in the corporate world occurs when he is given the assignment of “selling” Venus, convincing the people of
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Earth that the inhospitable planet is actually a paradise begging for colonists. As he attempts to do this, Mitch finds his life threatened from all sides as he discovers the truth about himself, his profession, and his wife, Kathy. Despite obvious attempts on his life, Mitch takes his work very seriously, and in trying to eliminate incompetence and inefficiency in the agency, he fires most of the San Diego branch of the Fowler Schocken advertising agency and leaves for Antarctica to confront Matt Runstead. When he meets Runstead, Mitch realizes that he has walked into a trap. Upon passing out, he is sure that he is as good as dead. When he wakes, however, Mitch learns that his fate is actually worse than death: He has become part of a lower-class consumer labor crew, contracted to work for five years at the Chlorella plantations in Costa Rica. His name and social security/identification number have been changed, and the world thinks that he died in Antarctica. At the Chlorella plantations, Mitch learns how “the other half” lives and is invited to join the Consies movement. Although he is at first horrified, he realizes that hooking up with the Consies might help him get away from Chlorella and back to Fowler Schocken. His copysmith skills prove useful in revising and creating Consie propaganda, and soon he is so valuable a Consie that he is sent back to New York. Once Mitch returns, however, his troubles really begin. He finds out that Taunton, a rival of Schocken who is angry about losing the Venus project, was responsible for the attempts on his life. Taunton also frames him for murder and breach of contract. He flees to the moon, where he discovers that Kathy is a Consie leader. Returning to Earth with Schocken, Mitch for the first time notices the true nature of the advertising industry. When he takes over the Schocken agency after Schocken’s murder, he seeks out Kathy and works with the Consies to make sure that the first colonists to Venus are conservationists. Unfortunately, if his enemies had reason to destroy him beforehand, they have even more reasons now. The Merchants’ War is set several decades after The Space Merchants. Long after his death, Mitch is revered as a hero to the “Veenies” (inhabitants of Venus); the anniversary of his demise is a planetary holiday. This novel is the story of Tenny Tarb, another advertising executive who becomes a “traitor” to his own people and a “hero” to those whose political beliefs he comes to embrace. As the novel begins, Tenny is finishing a term of service on Venus. Earth now regularly sends both political prisoners and “ambassadors” to Venus, many of them spies or agents who want to extend the advertis-
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ing industry’s domination to Earth’s sister planet. Tenny loves one of those agents, Mitzi Ku, and wishes that she would return to Earth with him. Mitzi agrees to spend time with Tenny on his last day on Venus, but while sightseeing they both are wounded, apparently as a result of a deliberate Veenie attempt to kill them. On his way back to Earth, Tenny finds out that Mitzi is also returning, citing her brush with death as her reason for leaving Venus. The bandages that nearly cover her head lend credence to her story. Tenny is surprised to learn that in an amazingly swift bit of legal work, Mitzi has obtained six million dollars from a damage suit filed after her accident. With that money, she “buys” her way into a higher position with Fowler Schocken Associates. Despite Tenny’s repeated efforts to see her, Mitzi is usually too busy to spend much time with her former lover. Life on Earth does not go very well for Tenny. Unaware of the nature of the “commercial zones” that have been established in his absence, he becomes a “Mokehead,” an addict to a new drug. Attempting to work his way back up in the Schocken agency, he is dismissed when Mitzi becomes co-founder of a competing ad agency. He is activated in the army reserves and stationed as a chaplain in the Gobi Desert. Because his military service ends with a dishonorable discharge, Tenny can no longer obtain a good job. As did Mitch Courtney before him, he learns how “the other half” lives. Tenny eventually realizes that the Gobi military exercises were practice runs for an Earth attack on Venus. He also discovers that Mitzi is not who she appears to be; she is in fact a Veenie impersonator working to protect Venus from Earth’s imperialistic overtures. Although it means a harrowing bout with detoxification, threats of death, and various dangers, Tenny joins the Veenies and puts his advertising skills to work in an all-out effort to turn the tide of public opinion against an invasion of Venus. Analysis In the 1950’s, the advertising world (like psychology and the massive influx of people from cities and into the suburbs) was a popular subject for American writers, humorists, satirists, cartoonists, commentators, and other entertainers. It was only natural, then, that works of science fiction would address the subject, among them Shepherd Mead’s The Big Ball of Wax (1954), Robert Silverberg’s Invaders from Earth (1958), and J. G. Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” (1963). The Space Merchants, however, is perhaps the earliest and most famous of such work. Although it has long been an element of science fiction and protoscience fiction, satire in genre science fiction generally was held to low
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standards until the 1950’s. Under the editorship of H. L. Gold, Galaxy magazine published many examples of short, satiric stories during the decade. Besides Pohl and Kornbluth, writers such as Damon Knight and Robert Sheckley acquired reputations as satirists. In addition to satirizing advertising, Pohl turned his sights on sports in Gladiator-at-Law (1955), done in collaboration with Kornbluth, and on the insurance agency in Preferred Risk (1955), done in collaboration with Lester del Rey under the pseudonym Edson McCann. The Space Merchants remains the best-known of his satirical works, and its influence can be seen in a number of subsequent works forecasting futures in which a particular group or institution dominates society. The Space Merchants is an excellent example of a type of writing much more common in genre science fiction than in fiction outside the field: the collaboration. Although both Pohl and Kornbluth collaborated with other writers, including Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, and Jack Williamson, those two arguably are the most famous collaboration team in science fiction. In The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (1978) and Our Best (1987), Pohl explained the process by which he and Kornbluth produced The Space Merchants. Pohl had already written the first third of the novel when it became obvious that his duties as an agent would not allow him to finish in time to meet a deadline. He asked for help from Kornbluth, who, after discussions with Pohl, wrote the next third of the novel. After more discussions between the two, the remainder of the novel was produced in shifts, each writer producing four pages at a time and then turning the work over to the other. The experience was satisfying enough that the two collaborated on six more novels as well as on numerous short stories. —Daryl R. Coats
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The Space Odyssey Series Overseen by disembodied extraterrestrial intelligences, humankind advances through a critical stage in its evolution toward omniscience, omnipotence, and broad compassion
Author: Arthur C. Clarke (1917) Genre: Science fiction—evolutionary fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: About 3,000,000 b.c.e. and 2001-3001 c.e. Location: The solar system and remote space First published: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), and 2061: Odyssey Three (1988) The Story This series began in a unique collaboration between author Arthur C. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick. Between 1965 and 1968, they created a screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Simultaneously with the filming, Clarke wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. The novel exhibits striking interdependence with the film, which is notably nonverbal—the first forty minutes and last thirty minutes have no dialogue. As the novel opens, a point of light orbits the Earth, unnoticed by protohominids living on the brink of extinction. It leaves behind a device to study and tutor the creatures. Thus tutored, a protohominid named Moonwatcher turns a rock into a weapon, and Earth’s era of technology dawns. A hundred thousand generations later, Dr. Heywood Floyd travels to the moon to investigate TMA-1, a three-million-year-old extraterrestrial artifact found because of its magnetic field. After its discovery, TMA-1 sends a single strong signal toward Saturn. TMA-1’s discovery is kept secret from the people of Earth. The spaceship Discovery is sent to reconnoiter Saturn for evidence of whatever civilization produced TMA-1. Three astronauts who understand this mission travel in artificially induced hibernation. Two active astronauts, David Bowman and Frank Poole, know nothing of TMA-1 or the mission’s real goal. Virtually a sixth member of the crew is HAL, a supercomputer programmed to tell the truth unreservedly but also to
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complete the secret mission. Unable to reconcile the contradiction between secrecy and truthfulness, HAL suffers a nervous breakdown and kills Poole and the hibernating astronauts. Barely saving himself, Bowman disables HAL. Bowman reaches Saturn on the now crippled Discovery. Floyd radios him and describes the mission’s true goal. On a moon of Saturn, Bowman discovers a huge, enigmatic monolithic replica of TMA-1. When he approaches in an extravehicular space pod, the monolith opens, and he is transported to realms unimaginable to those on Earth. Nurtured by extraterrestrial intelligences, Bowman is reborn as a disembodied starcreature, far superior to humans in intellect and ability to manipulate the environment. In 2010: Odyssey Two, a joint Soviet/United States expedition attempts to reach the derelict spaceship Discovery before its decaying orbit ends in the atmosphere of Jupiter. (The novel uses background from the film version of 2001 where the film and the novel diverge.) The expedition hopes also to discover why HAL malfunctioned, the nature of the monolith that Bowman found, and perhaps how Bowman disappeared. Dr. Chandra, the creator of HAL, joins the crew, as does Floyd, despite the strains that the long expedition will put on his family. The joint expedition is almost forestalled by a Chinese expedition that lands on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, before approaching Discovery. On Europa, the Chinese ship is destroyed by an alien life-form coming from seas beneath the ice. In Floyd’s absence, his marriage fails. The Soviet/United States expedition reaches Discovery, resurrects the ship, raises its orbit, and reprograms HAL, but it fails to learn anything about the monolith. One crew member, however, sees a flicker of stars through the monolith as it opens and closes to let the star-creature who had been David Bowman back into the solar system. Under the guidance of the intelligences that oversaw his transformation, Bowman revisits Earth and then observes varied alien life-forms in the seas of Europa and the atmosphere of Jupiter. Partially understanding the purposes of the intelligences guiding him, Bowman uses HAL to warn the joint expedition to leave Jupiter before a cataclysmic implosion transforms that gaseous planet into a new star orbiting the sun. Through HAL, Bowman also tells Earth that humankind is free to explore the entire solar system, save only Europa, which becomes a planet circling the new star. Discovery is destroyed in the Jovian catastrophe, but HAL’s personality joins Bowman in disembodied existence. On Europa, intelligent life evolves under the warmth of its new sun.
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Arthur C. Clarke. (© Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
Before Jupiter’s transformation, its core had been a single huge diamond, which was fragmented and expelled in the implosion. In 2061: Odyssey Three, one huge fragment collides with Europa, becoming a mountain hidden from astronomers by near-perpetual cloud cover. A scientist fortuitously observes and recognizes it but is not discreet enough about his discovery. Consequently, Galaxy, a spaceship exploring the Jovian system, is hijacked to the forbidden planet by a person attempting to confirm the diamond mountain’s existence. When Galaxy makes a forced landing on the Europan sea, the hijacker commits suicide; all others on board are marooned in Europa’s extremely hostile environment. Meanwhile, Universe, the first luxury spaceliner, makes its first voyage, an excursion to Halley’s Comet. A celebrity passenger is 103-yearold Floyd, whose longevity stems from his many years in low-gravity space environments. Universe leaves the comet to rescue Galaxy‘s crew and passengers. On the voyage across the solar system, Floyd attempts to communicate with the entity that was David Bowman, to assure him of the good intentions of Galaxy and Universe.
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Under Bowman’s aegis, the rescue succeeds without damaging encounters between humans and intelligent Europan life. Floyd is reconciled with his estranged grandson, an officer aboard Galaxy. When Floyd dies, his spirit is united with the entities who were Bowman and HAL. In the year 3001, as the Jovian star exhausts itself, TMA-1, now on the plaza of Manhattan’s United Nations building, reactivates. Analysis Clarke is not only an award-winning writer of science fiction (winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards) but also an articulate spokesman for the scientific community and a distinguished scientist himself. Besides the Space Odyssey series, he has written Childhood’s End (1953), Against the Fall of Night (1953; revised and expanded to The City and the Stars, 1956), Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and many other novels and short stories. He has also written much nonfiction, including The Exploration of Space (1951) and Interplanetary Flight (1950). With the editors of Life, he wrote Man and Space (1964), and with Walter Cronkite, he covered the first manned moon landing for television. In 1945, Clarke invented the synchronous communications satellite; Earth’s band of communications satellites is named the Clarke Belt for him. As Clarke has noted, science is necessary for science fiction to exist, and as science expands, so does the scope for scientific speculation. He takes great satisfaction as his predictions come to pass. In Clarke’s science fiction, the science is as significant as the fiction. Clarke’s fiction not only treats such themes as space travel and artificial intelligence, in which experience can bear out his predictions, but also more speculative themes such as human contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and the possible course of continuing human evolution. 2001: A Space Odyssey elaborates on Clarke’s 1950 short story “The Sentinel.” Although the artifact in that story signals extraterrestrial masters of the universe who are feared, in 2001: A Space Odyssey—as in many other Clarke stories—the overseeing intelligences are benevolent. Homer’s epics provide another source for the Space Odyssey series. The solar system is another Mediterranean (or rather, Meta-terranean), Bowman another Achilles, Floyd another Ulysses, Floyd’s wife a Penelope who does not wait, their grandson Chris a second Telemachus, and the extraterrestrial intelligences behind TMA-1 new Olympian gods. The film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey has drawn vigorous and varied critical attention. Virtually all critics appreciate its special effects, photography, transitions, and score, but some complain that the story drags and is confusing. Others receive the story enthusiastically.
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HAL has been seen as the quintessential film villain—dominating, threatening, and inscrutable. The emerging critical consensus recognizes the work as a great film. The novel, published shortly after the film’s release, has been analyzed in the context of the film. Readers generally find the book clearer than the film with regard to HAL’s motivation and the significance of the story’s enigmatic ending. The book also clarifies the proposition that the crucial challenges facing humanity include not only traveling in space but also managing ever-morepotent weaponry. Clarke has stated that the novels of the series are variations on a single theme. Although they can be read individually, they are better read sequentially. Even the first, a clear and eloquent expression of Clarke’s ideas that is marked by vivid, almost poetic descriptions, benefits from the context of the other books. 2010: Odyssey Two better characterizes Floyd, Bowman, and especially HAL. Although 2061: Odyssey Three leaves room for a sequel, it is well plotted in itself and provides a satisfactory resolution of the stories of the main characters in the series. In the fusion of rigorously verifiable scientific fact and free-ranging imagination, Clarke inspires readers to reevaluate what people believe of themselves and the universe. —David W. Cole
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The Space Trilogy An epic battle between good and evil is enacted by an assortment of human and alien characters on three planets
Author: C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963) Genre: Fantasy—theological romance Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The 1930’s and 1940’s Location: The planet Malacandra (Mars), the planet Perelandra (Venus), and terrestrial England First published: The Cosmic Trilogy (1990); previously published as Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943; also published as Voyage to Venus, 1953), and That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups (1945; also published in shorter form as The Tortured Planet, 1958) The Story In the three novels commonly known as the Space Trilogy and sometimes as the Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy (the series was not given a formal title by its author), the celebrated literary scholar and Christian essayist C. S. Lewis combines elements of classical science fiction, medieval romance, and the epic to create a sprawling depiction of an interplanetary struggle between good and evil. Out of the Silent Planet, the first of the novels, centers on the adventures of Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist who is abducted by Dick Devine, a grammar-school classmate who has become a ruthless opportunist, and Edward Weston, a renowned physicist. Devine and Weston drug Ransom and take him aboard a spacecraft that Weston has created; together, they travel to Mars. During the journey, Ransom learns that his abductors plan to give him to the Martians as part of a prearranged scheme. Imagining that he is to be sacrificed in some alien ritual, Ransom escapes from his captors soon after they arrive on Mars, only to realize that he has run from his only means of returning to Earth. After wandering for some time, Ransom meets the hrossa, intelligent, otterlike beings; as he learns their language and way of life, he comes to understand that the hrossa are an entirely benevolent, unfallen race. Ransom also meets the planet’s two other rational species, which like the
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hrossa are supremely talented, peaceful beings sharing the planet they call Malacandra in complete harmony. He is also introduced to the eldils, luminous spiritual beings of a higher order. Ransom is eventually taken to meet the oyarsa, or chief eldil, of Malacandra. He learns (Photo Not Available) that Earth (or Thulcandra) is known as the “silent planet” because it has been isolated from the remainder of the solar system since its own oyarsa rebelled against Maleldil (the eldilic name for God), an event that brought evil to the planet. Ransom is also reunited with Weston and Devine, who persist in viewing the sophistiC. S. Lewis. (Hulton Archive) cated Martians as primitives to be cowed with technology or bribed with trinkets. The Martian oyarsa humbles Weston and Devine and sends the three earthlings home, enjoining Ransom to keep a watch on the further activities of his abductors. In Perelandra, Ransom is sent by the eldils to Venus (Perelandra) to contest the forces of evil in a new version of the Genesis myth. On Perelandra, an Edenic planet covered with warm seas and dotted with floating islands, he meets the Green Lady, the Eve of the newly created world. Weston, who has been possessed by the fallen eldils of Earth, also arrives, and the two men engage in a protracted intellectual struggle for the soul of the Green Lady. Weston, the tempter, tries to persuade the entirely innocent Green Lady to violate the one command she has been given by Maleldil: not to leave the floating islands to reside on the planet’s fixed land. Ransom realizes that it is up to him to prevent a repetition of the earthly Fall; despairing of winning the debate with his demoniacally inspired adversary, he undergoes a dark night of the soul that ends only when he abandons himself to the will of Maleldil. Thus inspired, Ransom engages Weston in brutal hand-to-hand combat, kill-
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ing him and thus preserving the new world’s purity at the cost of his own physical and spiritual pain. The Green Lady is reunited with the planet’s Adam, and Ransom is returned to Earth. That Hideous Strength, the longest and most complex of the novels, is set in post-World War II England. Ransom, who has been vested with spiritual powers and eternal youth since his sojourn in paradise, gathers a cadre of followers to combat the evil eldils of Earth. The book’s main action follows a young married couple, Mark and Jane Studdock, as they are drawn into opposite camps in the cosmic struggle. Jane, who has dream visions that prove to be true and who is thus coveted as a source of intelligence by both sides, gravitates to Ransom’s group; Mark, a talented young academic, is inveigled into the inner circles of the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E), a gigantic, sinister, government-backed scientific project through which the dark powers plan to seize control of Britain. Both groups seek to contact Merlin, the magician of Arthurian legend, who has been awakened from centuries of suspended animation. Merlin joins Ransom’s forces, and the benevolent eldils possess him. Entering the forbidding institute via a ruse, Merlin liberates Mark and then unleashes the eldilic power, destroying himself, the institute, its leaders, and most of its dupes. Analysis With the exception of the immensely popular seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, written for children, the trilogy is Lewis’s only major long fiction. His well-known Christian views (which he proclaimed across three decades of religious writings), his enormous literary scholarship, and the major intellectual and social currents of the time provide a convenient, if somewhat simplistic, framework for interpreting the trilogy. Although the novels’ Christian subtext is veiled in references to “Maleldil” and “dark eldils,” the outlines of the cosmic struggle are clear. The rebellion of the earthly oyarsa suggests the rebellion of Satan—which, Ransom learns, was redeemed by the sacrifice of Maleldil the Young (Christ). On Perelandra, Ransom himself becomes the Christ figure, enduring his own Passion; at the climax of Ransom’s internal struggle, the voice of Maleldil makes the parallel plain by telling him, “My name is also Ransom.” As Christ paid for humankind’s sins, so will Ransom pay—in advance—to redeem the new Eden. The struggle for the soul of England in the final volume brings Christianity face to face with some of the principal political and intellectual forces of mid-century. The N.I.C.E.’s secret police deal ruthlessly with dissent; powerless locals are rounded up for “experimental” use; and
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even the institute’s leaders are cannibalized as the scheme of conquest progresses. This it-can’t-happen-here evocation of Nazism might seem trite, but Lewis makes the scenario compelling by linking the specter of fascism with notions current in contemporary intellectual circles, notably the doctrine of creative evolution espoused by Henri Bergson and amplified by George Bernard Shaw. In the earlier books, Weston is the mouthpiece for such views; in the final volume, another eminent scientist, the Italian anatomist Filostrato, presents the argument: The fundamental principle of the universe, the “Life Force,” seeks to perfect itself, evolving from crude matter into ever more sophisticated organisms and, ultimately, into pure spirit. Weston refers to this doctrine to justify the planetary imperialism he attempts to carry to Malacandra and Perelandra; because he believes humankind to be more advanced than the extraterrestrial races, he argues that he is justified in enslaving or exterminating them in the name of universal progress. Filostrato and his allies attempt to stride toward pure spirit more directly, by animating a disembodied head with an artificially enlarged brain; they believe, erroneously, that they are assisting at the birth of the next stage of intelligent life. Lewis makes it plain that the fictional scientists (and, by implication, the real-life adherents of such philosophies) have confused the idea of spirit, itself a neutral concept, with true goodness—which, Lewis asserts, is attainable only through Christian faith. This “fatal misprision” makes the secular rationalists easy prey for the dark eldils (which are identified with the devils of Christian belief), and these evil spirits use Weston, Devine, Filostrato, and many others as unwitting tools in a program of destruction. Although the trilogy’s supernatural elements remove the works from a realistic plane, the convincing way in which Lewis develops earthly manifestations of ultimate evil as logical outgrowths of familiar doctrines makes the books compelling even to nonbelievers. Moreover, the trilogy is a tour de force of imaginative writing that demonstrates Lewis’s mastery of a wide variety of fictional forms. Out of the Silent Planet, the shortest and most straightforward of the books, incorporates many of the elements of classic science fiction, including a space flight, meetings with fantastic aliens, and an extended depiction of another planet. Were it not for the theological backdrop (which comes into focus only toward the story’s end), Out of the Silent Planet could pass as merely a well-written and exceptionally erudite pulp novel. Perelandra, on the other hand, has more in common with the epic or the medieval romance than with most novels: A divinely inspired hero journeys
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to an unearthly realm to do physical and spiritual battle with demons. That Hideous Strength, the most heterogeneous of the books, mixes fantasy elements with episodes of startling realism in nearly equal measure. For this reason, some critics have judged it the least aesthetically satisfying of the three, but the effortlessness with which Lewis weaves together enormously diverse plot threads, and the skill with which he renders a wide assortment of memorable characters, are truly impressive. —Robert McClenaghan
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Stand on Zanzibar In an overpopulated, mass-mediated, conflict-ridden world, one man supervises the neo-colonial makeover of a poor African country while his roommate kidnaps a genetic scientist from a developing Asian nation
Author: John Brunner (1934-1995) Genre: Science fiction—dystopia Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The early twenty-first century, after 2010 Location: Various places in the United States, especially in and around New York City and Los Angeles, California; and the imaginary nations of Yatakang and Beninia First published: 1968 The Story Norman House, an African American executive with the massive General Technics corporation (GT), becomes manager of the Beninia project, through which GT plans to salvage its investment in the MidAtlantic Mining Project by turning the sleepy capital of Beninia, Port Mey, into a deepwater port and ore-processing complex. As the project develops, however, GT’s supercomputer Shalmaneser begins to predict failure. Meanwhile, Norman’s roommate, Donald Hogan, previously on the government payroll as an independent researcher and a student of the Yatakang language, is suddenly “activated.” Military authorities take him to a base in California, where intensive training turns him into a lethal killer. He is then sent to Yatakang to determine the truth of claims by that country’s government that its scientists have achieved a breakthrough in genetic technology. Before Donald departs, the two roommates attend a party where they meet legendary sociologist Chad Mulligan, a banned author of subversive books and currently a homeless alcoholic even though he is a millionaire. Impressed by the great man’s analytic skills, they invite him back to their apartment, and he ends up taking over Donald’s room. He has already helped Donald figure out what his assignment is likely to be; henceforth he will prove invaluable to Norman and GT.
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Donald’s mission to Yatakang is a technical success and a moral failure. Given cover as a newsman, he makes his way to Dedication University. When a crazed killer attacks a crowd, Donald’s training enables him to eliminate the assailant, inadvertently saving the life of molecular biologist Dr. Sugaiguntung, the man he is investigating. The Yatakangi belief in a permanent debt to anyone who saves a person’s life provides Donald with invaluable leverage with Sugaiguntung. He finds out that the Yatakangi government’s claims are exaggerated, and he encourages the scientist to defect. Sugaiguntung, however, changes his mind while they await their rendezvous at a rebel base in the jungle. When he attempts to prevent their pickup by an American submarine, Donald accidentally kills him. The death causes Donald to become insane. Also apparently insane is the GT supercomputer Shalmaneser, which rejects the data on the people of Beninia as impossible. The computer cannot accept that those people completely lack aggression. Shalmaneser’s refusal to approve the Beninia project threatens its acceptability to the GT accountants and shareholders, but Mulligan agrees to slug it out mentally with the computer. He wants to help Norman, of course, but he mostly desires to show that a human being can outsmart even a nearly sentient machine. Mulligan persuades Shalmaneser to accept the hypothesis that some unknown factor is making the people of Beninia behave in a manner unlike any other human population. At this point Shalmaneser approves the project and begins forecasting an excellent return for GT. Mulligan, however, bullies his way onto the payroll as director of a team of social scientists who search for the hypothetical factor. The factor is located, but it proves useless as a means of improving the behavior of the human species. The Beninians, it turns out, have all inherited a gene conferring the ability to secrete a pheromone that suppresses aggressive behavior. Mulligan enthusiastically envisions the remolding of humanity through genetic surgery. At this point, however, he learns of Donald Hogan’s accidental killing of Sugaiguntung, the one scientist who might have developed the necessary technique, and he succumbs to blubbering insanity. Analysis A summary of the plot makes Stand on Zanzibar seem less innovative than it was when published and less complicated than it may appear to some readers. To tell the story, John Brunner relies on such techniques as the collage and jump-cut, usually associated with film narrative and
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with modernist writers, especially John Dos Passos. The 145 chapters of the novel divide into four interwoven sets. The lengthiest of these, “continuity,” contains the lead story line summarized above. Another, “tracking with closeups,” tells eight other stories, most of them ending in the death of the protagonist. Some of these stories tie into the lead story, and others do not; all reflect in some way the dehumanizing circumstances of ordinary lives in the twenty-first century. These circumstances include overcrowding, deprivation, and aggression. Another group of chapters is “context.” These chapters gather quotations, letters, reports, and speeches, mostly social commentary and mostly from the pen of Chad Mulligan, whose voice in them seems close to that of the (implied) author. The final group, “the happening world,” consists of assorted news items and advertisements, mostly presented as television scripts, that serve to convey the background for all the rest. Stand on Zanzibar is thus a richly layered narrative of manifold voices, strenuously avoiding the monologue style of much science fiction, in which the narrator and the main character (and sometimes other characters as well) are merely authorial mouthpieces. Brunner’s decentering of narrative authority is clear from his treatment of Mulligan, the main social commentator, who is for the most part an uncivil, ineffectual, verbose, and drunken dropout. The failure of the author’s apparent standin, who plays the role of chief social critic in a novel of social criticism, tends to undercut the authority needed for such criticism. The stylistic fragmentation of the novel, its mixture of discourses, also invalidates any claim to stylistic authority. Thus in an anarchic, discordant polyphony of languages Brunner finds a world lacking any remnant of faith, hope, or love. The achievement of Stand on Zanzibar is that its bleak dystopian vision is perfectly embodied in its exuberant linguistic form. —John P. Brennan
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Star Maker “I” is transported from his British suburb on a whirlwind trip through the universe, culminating in an encounter with his Creator, the Star Maker
Author: (William) Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) Genre: Science fiction—cosmic voyage Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1937, then into the fourth dimension Location: From England to the end and beginning of the universe First published: 1937 The Story The hero of Star Maker is an Englishman, known only as “I.” Comfortably married, he lacks passionate commitment. He is apprehensive of the rise of the Nazis in Germany, but the world situation pales against the cosmic panorama that soon engulfs him. From a hill near his suburban home, he is transported on a night journey into the sky. This expands to become an odyssey through time and space, to the alpha and omega points of the universe itself. First, he glimpses Earth from space, opalescent against a spangled ebony backdrop. I discovers that through “sub-atomic power,” interstellar travels, rather than mere interplanetary excursions, are possible. He encounters many and varied alien beings. Some of their societies offer satirical perspectives on human ones. On an Earth-like planet, with a similar though still divergent evolutionary process, I meets Other Men whose genitals are equipped with taste organs. Their intense sexuality is sometimes sublimated by their mystics into a vigorous gustatory experience of God. I’s travels continue through thousands of worlds, each with its singularities. He confronts “ichthyoids,” who are artistic and mystical creatures living symbiotically among “arachnoids,” who perform the engineering feats essential for mutual survival. Elsewhere, there are intelligent fish on planets composed entirely of crystal seas, and rational winged beings with brilliant plumage. Sometimes, a host of individual bodies possess a single intellect, or a planet may itself be an asserting consciousness. On larger heavenly bodies, several different civilizations are shown to have
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developed separately before making common cause after a tumultuous industrialization. Rational beings working together seem always to fare better than those who struggle alone. Manifold stellar tragedies are revealed. Some worlds have blown themselves to bits. Others are rival empires or insane ones. Segments of the universe are in contact through “telepathic intercourse,” and other regions exist in forbidding isolation. Unremitting agony reigns in one spot, but elsewhere, plantlike intelligences radiate mystical quietism. Worlds are discovered where the Creator seems to have experienced incarnations and crucifixions, choosing to share the joys and hurts of its creatures. Even more worlds bear witness to a Hindu-like universal force, simultaneously manifested as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. I appears to discern two drives propelling the multiform universe: All beings seek to discover their place in an overall cosmic harmony, and all strive for some understanding of their existence. His pilgrimage culminates when he finally confronts the dazzling God beyond all gods, the Star Maker, in which all contradictions are resolved and all questions reduced to absurdity. Awe and overwhelming adoration are the response of the creature, but the Great Spirit is beyond all love or anger, impassively contemplating life in its varying levels of imperfection. Although momentarily blinded by his vision of the Star Maker, both beatific and horrific, I happily awakes back home in England. His wife waits patiently for him as his country braces for World War II. Analysis Olaf Stapledon, a professor with a doctorate in philosophy, published two earlier novels, Last and First Men (1930) and Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (1935). These books introduced the themes most fully explored in Star Maker, which many critics consider to be his strongest work. Part philosophical reflection, part prose-poem, part theological adventure, and only incidentally space-travel fiction, Star Maker is difficult reading, though abundantly rewarding. Not only are 100 billion years of Earth time encompassed, but a unique feat is attempted—the description of a deity. Presented as fiction, the Star Maker is the conceptual product of a scholar’s study of world religions. Although Stapledon has been accused of concocting an interplanetary romance as a distraction from the catastrophe looming over Europe in 1937, he actually was placing human affairs provocatively in a cosmic perspective, with conclusions foreshadowing the postwar philosophic movement of existentialism. He suggested that even though the Creator of the universe, the Star Maker, might well be indifferent to human striv-
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ing, the relationships between men and women—particularly humans united in community—had their own validity. Countless science-fiction writers, including Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov, are indebted to Stapledon. Brian Aldiss has called him the ultimate science-fiction writer, and C. S. Lewis, though detesting his philosophy, praised both his descriptive style and his endless well of inventiveness. Science-fiction fandom has largely ignored Stapledon, finding his writing too frigid, repetitive, and devoid of entangling plots and subplots. Few characters have been sufficiently developed to elicit reader empathy. Love interest is lacking, and sexuality is cerebral rather than salacious. Dialogue, when it appears, lacks fun or the flavor of living human speech. There is no Stapledon cult, and no religious movements, like those engendered by the writings of Robert A. Heinlein or L. Ron Hubbard, have been spawned by this most visionary writer in his genre. The usual categories of literature collapse when imposed on Stapledon. He stands out from most science-fiction writers in his ability to sustain and expand brilliant concepts throughout entire books and series of books. As an imaginative voyager, he belongs in the company of Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, and John Milton. when Dante, who makes himself the central human character in The Divine Comedy (c. 1320), wanders out of medieval Florence into the dark wood, he is transported only to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Stapledon’s alter ego strides the entire universe, both the known and the previously unimagined. The prose, in its detached grandeur, may be compared without absurdity to that of Milton in Paradise Lost (1667). I’s own excursion, however, from the homey hill in England to the limits of creation and the presence of the Star Maker, has its closest parallel in Islamic tradition, in Muhammad’s night ride on the flying steed Al Barak, from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem through the Seven Heavens. Star Maker belongs to the literature of religion as much as to science fiction. —Allene Phy-Olsen
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The Stars My Destination Gully Foyle becomes a superhero and seeks revenge against the spaceship crew that left him to die
Author: Alfred Bester (1913-1987) Genre: Science fiction—superbeing Type of work: Novel Time of Plot: The twenty-fifth century Location: Earth and various locations in space First published: 1957 (U.S.; revision of Tiger! Tiger!, United Kingdom, 1956) The Story The backdrop of The Stars My Destination is a war between the Inner Planets (I.P.) and the Outer System (O.S.) in the twenty-fifth century. Humans have learned how to teleport themselves, or “jaunt.” In this age of robber barons and conspicuous consumption, mechanic’s mate Gulliver “Gully” Foyle, the “stereotype common man,” as Alfred Bester’s narrator calls him, is left adrift in space. He is the only survivor of the wreck of the Nomad. Unknown to Foyle, the Nomad carried a fortune in bullion and twenty pounds of PyrE, an explosive substance similar to antimatter. After 170 days, Foyle is spotted by the spaceship Vorga, which then passes him. Enraged, Foyle saves himself by learning to pilot the Nomad. The “vengeful history of Gully Foyle” begins as he crashes into the Scientific People’s asteroid. While he is unconscious, the Scientific People, recognizing his nature, tattoo a Maori tiger mask and the name N% MAD on his face. Foyle appears on Earth, where he uses one-way telepath Robin Wednesbury (she can send but not receive) to help him find out about the Vorga. Foyle is now sought by four parties: Presteign of Presteign, a robber baron, Regis Sheffield, a lawyer and spy for the O.S., Saul Dagenham, a brilliant troubleshooter, and Peter Y’ang-Yeovil, the chief of police. Foyle is captured by Dagenham but does not break down under interrogation. He is kept in an underground jaunt-proof prison. There, through an acoustical freak, he makes contact with the intelligent Jisbella McQueen, who educates him. When Dagenham visits, Foyle beats
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him and escapes with McQueen. McQueen has the identifying tiger tattoo bleached off Foyle’s face, but it remains below the skin, a phantom that blooms whenever Foyle loses his temper (which is often). Foyle and McQueen salvage the Nomad‘s cargo, but Dagenham captures McQueen as Foyle gets away with the money. Having learned yoga to control his animal self, Foyle resurfaces as a charming and amazing clown, named Fourmyle of Ceres. His Four-mile Circus acts as a cover for Foyle’s continuing investigation of the Vorga. Foyle has his nervous system rewired so that when he switches on a power pack, he becomes a superman. The Vorga has been running concentration camp refugees out of the O.S. Its captain has been collecting transportation money and then throwing the refugees out the airlock. The “burning man,” a weird specter, now appears to Foyle: It is himself. During bombing of Earth by the O.S., Olivia Presteign, blind except in the infrared, sees the tiger tattoo on Foyle’s face. Presteign, Sheffield, Yeovil, and Dagenham simultaneously discover Foyle’s identity. For his part, Foyle learns that Olivia Presteign, whom he loves, is the murderer who commands the Vorga. The other characters all converge on Foyle at his circus in the burning ruins of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Dagenham ignites the PyrE there, in the hope of keeping it away from the O.S. Foyle jaunts in space and time to escape the fire, appearing to his past self as the burning man. Once out of the fire, Foyle confronts each character with the truth she or he least wishes to hear. He then snatches the PyrE and distributes it across the world, stating that elites must teach the common people to handle power. Foyle then space jaunts to the Nomad, his womb, and falls into a prophet’s sleep. Analysis This book was published between two other superb Bester novels, The Demolished Man (1953) and The Computer Connection (1975). It reflects a postwar world concerned with concentration camps, hydrogen bombs, and material wealth. It is one of the most remarkable, joyous, and brilliant books in American science fiction. Bester’s sheer energy, pyrotechnics, and inspired zaniness make for fast reading. He crams in styles and ideas, switching tone and tempo with each line. The writing shows his love for romantic (especially Byronic) poetry and heroes, for Whitmanesque wonder, and for the lean plotting of the television and radio pulps for which he wrote and that he loved. His use of cultures of excess, particularly the robber barons’ world of late nineteenth century America, makes The Stars My Destination a mosaic.
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At heart a Walt Whitman democrat, Bester subscribes to the belief that all humans are uncommon, that they simply need the right events (often life-threatening crises) to make their miraculous promise flower. Crisis teaches humanity to teleport short distances, and teaches Foyle to teleport himself across space and time. Gulliver Foyle is, like his namesake, a traveler to strange, revealing places. Bester constructs those spaces beautifully: He imagines a world built socially, culturally, linguistically, and economically around teleportation. A self-declared Freudian, Bester has Dagenham use psychology to unravel the mystery of Foyle’s strength, subjecting him first to “nightmare theater,” then to “Megal Mood,” catering to the megalomaniac’s fantasies. Foyle, pure id, is too tough for these pranks. If Foyle is to be truly great, the id, tiger, animal self, must be absorbed but not destroyed. The other characters also must own up to their monsters: Presteign must acknowledge his daughter’s inherited sickness, Dagenham must admit that he is a freak; and Wednesbury must see that she is neurotic. Bester suggests that brilliance and neurosis are partners; in The Computer Connection, he links genius and epilepsy. Each character is an awful and marvelous emblem of freakishness at once fascinating and charming. All have learned to exploit their abilities, to protect themselves from the brutality that swirls around them. “You’re all freaks, sir,” Foyle is told by a robot bartender jangled by excessive radiation. “But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.” Bester’s fictions are carnivals of death, amazement, and amusement. He recalls being charged “that the entire world was made for his entertainment,” and his writing bears this out. Beneath the laughter is the deadly serious business of figuring out patterns of behavior in a moral wilderness. Foyle tells Wednesbury, “Nobody ever suspects a clown.” They should know better. —Tim Blackmore
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Stations of the Tide A bureaucrat on the planet Miranda searches for a thief, through shifting levels of appearance and reality, as the planet prepares for the Jubilee Tides
Author: Michael Swanwick (1950) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The distant future Location: The planet Miranda First published: 1991 The Story An unnamed bureaucrat is sent from the Technology Transfer Department to the colonized planet Miranda. Miranda is a technologically restricted planet, and the bureaucrat’s boss, Korda, fears that the Mirandan wizard Gregorian has stolen some proscribed technology. Miranda, at the time of the bureaucrat’s arrival, faces the once-in-two-centuries Jubilee Tides, when vast portions of the planet are drowned. Only the life-forms adapted to live under water survive. As the towns gear up for evacuation, the bureaucrat searches for Gregorian in an ever-shifting reality. He is aided by his nanotechnological briefcase and robotic surrogates. The bureaucrat and Chu, his liaison officer, land in Tidewater, Gregorian’s boyhood home and center for a smuggling ring in haunt artifacts. Haunts were the original intelligent life-form on Miranda, but all of them were killed by accident in a previous Jubilee Tide. The Mirandans still suffer guilt, remorse, and fascination for these beings, who knew how to change form to live in Ocean when the world was drowned. The bureaucrat interviews Gregorian’s mother and learns that his was a virgin birth. When young, she met a Department technocrat and agreed to become pregnant with his cloned embryo. The technocrat housed her in Ararat, now a lost city, to await the birth. She escaped, returned to Tidewater, and reared Gregorian. The bureaucrat learns that Gregorian ran away from home to study wizardry with Madame Campase, a famous witch. He then meets with Undine, who had been Madame Campase’s student along with Gregorian, and is further enlightened about Gregorian’s personality.
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Before he and Chu continue their search for Gregorian, the bureaucrat creates numerous surrogates of himself and visits the Puzzle Palace, a constructed reality where surrogates meet, game, exchange information, and travel to other places in virtual reality. From information received there, he begins to be suspicious of Korda, who is obsessed with Miranda’s haunts. Returning from the Puzzle Palace, the bureaucrat confronts a Korda surrogate and learns that Korda is Gregorian’s father. He had cloned himself so that he and his son could continue the search for any remaining haunts. Now that Gregorian is in possession of restricted technology, however, he must be hunted down, regardless of the father-son relationship. The bureaucrat flies to Ararat, landing there as the tides begin. He becomes lost in a swirling blizzard. He is saved from frostbite by Gregorian, who brings him back to the fortress and chains him to a wall to be drowned. They share a drug and merge identities. The bureaucrat then realizes and understands the extent of Gregorian’s hatred for his father. As the bureaucrat begins to give up hope, his briefcase arrives, frees him, and chains Gregorian. He watches the tides come in and the world turn to Ocean. Slowly, using shaping agents within himself, the bureaucrat changes into a sea animal and plunges into the sea. Analysis Michael Swanwick’s Nebula-winning Stations of the Tide is a manylayered, complex, and imaginative future detective story. Along with Swanwick’s other works, including In the Drift (1984), Vacuum Flowers (1987), The Griffin’s Egg (1991), and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), this novel explores how humanity survives and forms a continuing culture under difficult circumstances. In Stations of the Tide, the Mirandans survive the Jubilee Tides by evacuating to higher ground and starting over; the bureaucrat survives by using advanced technology and shapechanging. Swanwick began writing during the 1980’s, the era of cyberpunk in science fiction. The constructed reality Puzzle Palace, the technologically sophisticated briefcase, and the generated surrogates reflect awareness of computer possibilities. This novel takes on added dimensions and rises above a mere computer romp through the use of illusion and allusion. In Stations of the Tide, the unnamed bureaucrat must work through the magic and the illusions he encounters to find reality and arrive at the truth about Gregorian and himself. Swanwick’s many literary allusions in the novel enrich the reading experience. The name of the planet, Miranda, and its solar system,
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Prospero, come from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), similarly concerned with illusion, reality, and the ways to distinguish between them. Shakespeare’s play is also a story about a sea disaster, change, and a reestablished order. Swanwick also uses biblical allusions. Ararat, the city of Gregorian’s birth and death, as well as the location of the bureaucrat’s rebirth in the flood of the Jubilee Tides, was the mountain upon which Noah’s ark landed and civilization began again. Gregorian’s virgin birth and the title, reminiscent of the Stations of the Cross, allude to Gregorian as a Christ figure, particularly in regard to resurrection and rebirth. Another ongoing interest in Swanwick’s work is the problem of retaining identity under new and difficult situations. In Stations of the Tide, the notion of self is fractured by the surrogates and the Puzzle Palace. Even the bureaucrat’s physical self changes at the end, to that of a watergoing being. It is fitting, then, that the bureaucrat remains unnamed throughout the novel, for identity in Swanwick’s imagined far future is neither rigid nor fixed. Swanwick sees identity as necessarily flexible; those who survive are those who are willing to change. Stations of the Tide is a sophisticated literary work of science fiction exploring possible ways humans might adapt to varying environments. The people of Miranda are fascinating, and the hunt for Gregorian is compelling. Swanwick’s conclusion is an optimistic one. Not only the impact of the cumulative allusions but also the bureaucrat’s actions point to the possibility of rebirth. Technology offers hope through its use in adapting to the new environment on Miranda. —Marjorie Ginsberg
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The classic morality tale of a man’s personality split between the bestial and the socially responsible
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Genre: Science fiction—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late nineteenth century Location: London, England First published: 1886 The Story Robert Louis Stevenson said that the plot of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (first published without “The” as the first word in the title) first came to him in a nightmare and that, after waking up, he wrote the first draft in three days. Stevenson introduces the mystery of the evil Mr. Edward Hyde—the central puzzle of the story—early in the novel, but he does not provide a solution to the mystery until the very end. The reader’s first encounter with Hyde is at second hand, in a story told to Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer friend of Dr. Henry Jekyll, by Richard Enfield, who saw Hyde trample a child. Because Jekyll recently has changed his will to leave all of his money to Hyde, Utterson is intrigued and begins to investigate. He fears that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll and plans to murder him. When Sir Danvers Carew, a respected member of Parliament, is murdered and Hyde is implicated by a witness, a manhunt begins, but Hyde cannot be found. Utterson begins to suspect that more than a murder is involved when he discovers that the handwriting of Jekyll is identical to that of Hyde, except for the slant of the letters. His suspicions deepen when he learns that Dr. Hastie Lanyon has developed hard feelings toward his old friend, Henry Jekyll. Although Lanyon is dying, he refuses to see Jekyll again. The mystery that surrounds the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is revealed gradually by means of a letter from Lanyon that is to be read by Utterson after Lanyon has died; however, Lanyon’s letter con-
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tains another letter that is not to be opened until the death or disappearance of Jekyll. When Poole, Jekyll’s butler, tells Utterson that Jekyll has disappeared and that Hyde is locked in Jekyll’s laboratory, Utterson and Poole break down the door. They find only the body of Hyde and a note from Jekyll requesting that Utterson read Lanyon’s letter. The letter recounts a request by Jekyll to bring some chemicals to him. Hyde appears in Jekyll’s laboratory, and Lanyon sees Hyde swallow the chemicals and become transformed into Jekyll. The shock of witnessing the transformation apparRobert Louis Stevenson. ently hastened Lanyon’s death. When (Library of Congress) Utterson opens the accompanying letter, from Jekyll, he discovers that Jekyll has been obsessed with a theory of the duality of good and evil in all human beings and that he has discovered a formula that transforms him into his evil side. When he begins to change into Hyde without the chemicals, however, Jekyll despairs, for after he exhausts his supply of chemicals he can no longer transform himself back. As he completes the letter, he changes back to Hyde the last time and kills himself. Analysis The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is perhaps the purest example in English literature of the use of the double convention to represent the duality of human nature. That Dr. Jekyll represents the conventional and socially acceptable personality and Mr. Hyde the uninhibited and criminal self is the most obvious aspect of Stevenson’s story. The final chapter, which presents Jekyll’s full statement of the case, makes this theme explicit. In this chapter, Jekyll fully explains, though he does not use the Freudian terminology, that what he has achieved is a split between the id and the superego. Until Jekyll’s letter explains all, Utterson tries to find naturalistic explanations for events that seem to deny such explanations. The tale is a pseudoscientific detective story in which Utterson plays “Seek” to Jekyll’s “Hide.” The pun on Hyde’s name reflects the paradox of his
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nature, for even as Utterson searches for him, he is hidden within Jekyll. Hyde is always where Jekyll is not, even as he is always, of course, where Jekyll is. What Hyde embodies in the structure of the story is his essentially hidden nature. A central theme throughout the story, which serves to negate verbal attempts to account for and explain the mystery, is the theme of seeing. In the opening chapter, in describing the trampling of a child, Enfield says, “It sounds like nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see.” Although Hyde gives a strong impression of deformity, Enfield cannot specify the nature of the deformity. Utterson is a “lover of the sane and customary sides of life,” but the mystery of Hyde touches his imagination. He believes that if he can only set eyes on Hyde, the mystery will roll away. Even Jekyll himself says, “My position . . . is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.” The irony is that all Stevenson has to work with is words; all that Jekyll can use to account for Hyde is words. Even Jekyll’s words are hidden, however, as if within nesting Chinese boxes, in the letter within the letter that reveals all. When Utterson comes to Jekyll’s home, he still tries to account for the mystery of Hyde in a naturalistic way, but his explanation cannot account for the enigma at the center of the story—Hyde’s ability to hide. In the letter from Lanyon, the only man allowed to see the mysterious transformation, the reader gets an idea of the structural problem of the story: how to project the psychological reality of the double in a story that attempts to be plausible and realistic rather than allegorical. Lanyon’s letter says that his soul sickened at what he saw. It is indeed the hidden that can be manifested but not described that haunts the center of this thematically simple but structurally complex tale. —Charles E. May
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Stranger in a Strange Land Valentine Michael Smith, raised by Martians, returns to Earth, is rescued from the World Federation, learns about terrestrial existence, eventually founds a new religion, and is murdered for his beliefs
Author: Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) Genre: Science fiction—cultural exploration Type of work: Novel Time of plot: An unspecified time after World War II Location: Mars and various places in the United States First published: 1961
The Story From its fairy tale, “Once upon a time” opening to its equally imaginative ending in a conventionally depicted heaven, Stranger in a Strange Land uses an unspecified future time frame to critique contemporary social mores and belief systems. Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist, is conceived on the first flight to Mars as the son of Dr. Mary Jane Lyle Smith and Captain Michael Brant, who is not her husband. Valentine Michael Smith is discovered twenty-five years later to be the only survivor, the heir of all aboard the craft and, by the Larkin decision, the owner of Mars. Returned from Mars, where he had been reared by Martians, he is held by the World Federation in a securely guarded hospital room. Suspicious of the federation’s intentions toward Smith because of his rights and vast wealth, journalist Ben Caxton induces nurse Gillian Boardman to rescue him. Unknown to Gillian (Jill), Ben is picked up by federation troops. She manages to elude federation police and eventually deposits Smith at the home of Jubal Harshaw, a doctor, lawyer, and all-around cynic of all aspects of contemporary American life. Smith becomes known as Mike within the casual household. Jubal and his unusual domestic staff are fascinated by Mike’s innocence; his supranormal powers of suspended animation, telepathy, and teleportation; and his ability to discorporate when they threaten a
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“wrongness.” Mike attempts to share his Martian concept of “grokking,” of becoming able to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed. He forms a deep bond with Jubal’s household and ritualizes that bond by “sharing water.” Jubal uses his considerable skills to achieve a diplomatic coup that gives Mike the support of the secretary general of the federation, Joseph E. Douglas, and wins Ben Caxton his freedom. With his photographic memory, Mike soon learns much of terrestrial life, though he does not “grok” it all. Mike attends services at the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation, services that appeal to emotions and to Mike’s need to have people grow closer. He furthers his education by working with Jill in various carnivals, trying to understand human nature. On the road, they befriend Patty Pawonski, a devoted Fosterite who is covered with tattoos and drapes herself with a boa constrictor. She, like Mike, is totally loving and totally innocent. She believes that God intends that all human beings be happy and that the way to become happy is to love one another. Still trying to grok what being human means, Mike visits a zoo and finally laughs at the brutality of some monkeys. Realizing both the tragic and the divine in humanity, he finally “groks in fullness.” Having discovered the complete and somewhat contradictory nature of humanity, Mike founds the Church of All Worlds, which teaches the Martian language and the Martian concepts of grokking and growing closer to those disposed to accept. Members of the church’s inner circle, Mike’s “water brothers,” participate in a group marriage and communal economy. Accused of sexual immorality by nonmembers, Mike is denounced and persecuted, especially by the Fosterites, after whom he patterned some of his church’s structures. Following Jubal’s advice to show, not merely tell, his message, Mike walks alone amid a hostile crowd, proclaiming to its members their own divine natures and capacities. Unable to accept a message of total and unconditional love and of total self-awareness, the crowd attacks him, and he discorporates. His followers escape and plan to continue to promulgate his beliefs. Mike, now in heaven, proceeds to guide events from that vantage point. Analysis Stranger in a Strange Land appeared well after Robert Heinlein had established himself as a science-fiction writer. The novel won the 1962 Hugo Award, the third such award Heinlein had received. Much of Heinlein’s work prior to this novel, especially from the period from 1947 to 1959, had been science fiction for juvenile readers. Although many writers acknowledge their debt to Heinlein, the only
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writer Heinlein claimed as an influence on his own writing was Sinclair Lewis. Stranger in a Strange Land certainly replicates Lewis’s concerns about the shallowness and complacency of American life, and the corrupt leadership of the Fosterite Church emphasizes some of the misgivings about religious leadership Lewis portrayed in Elmer Gantry (1927). As a young science-fiction writer, however, Heinlein, along with many others, was influenced by John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, and Campbell’s policy of stressing the sociological implications of changes brought about by advances in technology. Although the novel has been interpreted and reacted to in different ways, most interpretations and reactions have centered on the sociological implications for change in religion and spirituality, politics and government, economics and the distribution of wealth, social relationships, and lifestyles, all of which the novel highlights. Almost every social institution and structure—the government, the medical establishment, the military, the media, advertising, literary publishing, and especially repressive religious beliefs and practices—comes under fire from Jubal’s stinging diatribes. Mike’s countercultural beliefs and the liberating and transforming practices of the church he establishes offer an alternative to the alienating religious precepts and the somewhat contradictory, self-delusional, superficially gratifying orientation of American society. Mike’s alternative is so idealized that its realization is confined to a small group, whose members will be misunderstood and hounded by an outraged, cynical, threatened majority. The group of disciples that Mike gathers remains intact at the end, and the reader is compelled to grapple with possibilities perhaps never before suspected or imagined. —Christine R. Catron
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Swordspoint Richard St. Vier and his lover teach the arrogant aristocrats of Riverside that all men live at swordspoint
Author: Ellen Kushner (1955) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: An alternative eighteenth century Location: The Hill, Riverside, and Chartil First published: 1987 The Story This fairy tale begins in a time where men wear swords and women carry scented pomanders. Up on the Hill, where the aristocrats live, Richard St. Vier kills two men during a party in Lord Horn’s garden. Richard returns to Riverside (the less reputable part of town), where he lives with his lover, the aristocratic former student Alec. Because of the duel’s outcome, Lord Karleigh, one of Lord Halliday’s political rivals, goes into hiding at his country estate. While discussing the duel over cups of chocolate, the Duchess Tremontaine flirts with Michael Godwin, a young nobleman, and succeeds in planting the idea that he should become a swordsman. When Richard St. Vier refuses to tutor him, Michael goes to the studio of one-armed swordsman Master Applethorpe. There he discovers he has a talent for swordwork. Meanwhile, Lord Ferris comes to Riverside in disguise and attempts to hire Richard to kill Lord Halliday, so that Ferris can gain control of the Crescent Council. Alec recognizes Lord Ferris and tries to convince Richard not to take the challenge. Lord Horn, angered that Michael did not succumb to his amorous advances and feeling insulted, tries to hire Richard to challenge Michael. His approach to Richard is so ignoble and lacking in honor that Richard refuses the assignment. Enraged, Lord Horn has Alec kidnapped. When Richard realizes that his lover is no longer safely under his protection, he carries out Lord Horn’s assignment, but when he finds Michael at Master Applethorpe’s studio, the master accepts the challenge on Michael’s behalf. The fight exhilarates both the combatants and ends with Richard killing Applethorpe. Michael is horrified by the loss of the
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master, but Duchess Tremontaine takes him as her lover and dispatches him to handle negotiations in a foreign land where his skill with the sword gives him status. After Alec is released, Richard, on his own volition, kills Lord Horn. Richard is arrested and brought before a small council of nobles, who ask him if he killed Lord Horn on assignment for some patron. When Richard claims that the killing was a matter of his own honor, no one cares, for Richard is not a noble. Lord Ferris subtly lets Richard know that he will sponsor him, which would make Richard beholden to Ferris and no longer his own man. Before Richard has to decide whether to be owned or instead to hang, Alec enters in the clothes of a nobleman. Alec, it is revealed, is the heir of the Duchess Tremontaine. He had left university and hid himself in Riverside after his friends were persecuted for proving that the earth revolves and the heavens are fixed. Alec claims that according to an old law, this case must be tried before all the nobles, not only the Court of Honour. In front of the larger assembly, Alec forces Lord Ferris to dishonor himself and take the blame for the killing. Lord Ferris is then banished so far from the Hill that he will be unable to continue his political manipulations. Richard is absolved of the crime and returns home. Alec deserts the life of a noble to rejoin his lover, and together they enjoy the close of the fairy tale back in the lusty, frosty, perilous world of Riverside. Analysis Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint is an elegant, witty, and deliciously nasty tale that concerns itself primarily with codes of honor and highly mannered forms of behavior. Although Swordspoint refers to itself as a fairy tale, the book actually started a subgenre called “fantasy-of-manners.” The books that fall into this category rely on the manners of a period, whether real or imaginary, as the impetus for their plots. Other books that fall into the fantasy-of-manners category include Delia Sherman’s Through a Brazen Mirror (1989), a retelling of a folk ballad that includes homosexual overtones and is set in a rigidly structured medieval world; Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s Sorcery and Cecilia (1988), an epistolary Regency romance replete with sorcerous doings; and Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards (1991), which is a thinly disguised parody/ homage to Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844). Swordspoint was also the predecessor for a spate of books in which the protagonists are exceedingly casual about their homosexual or bisexual tendencies. These books are not so much political messages about sexuality, as was, for example, Joanna Russ’s landmark feminist novel The Fe-
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male Man (1975). Instead they allow the sexual orientation of the character to simply exist: It is not integral to whether the character is perceived as moral or amoral. Although in Kushner’s world money and political power are still considered to be very important, honor is supposed to reign supreme. Richard St. Vier, who is the viewpoint character and main protagonist of this complex, multi-viewpoint story, believes himself to be an honorable man. Even the horrible way in which he kills Lord Horn (by mutilation and not by a clean thrust through the heart) is designed to show the world that, though he may not be of noble birth, he will deal harshly with those who try to blackmail or own him. In Kushner’s world it might well be preferable to hang rather than to lose one’s self-respect, or the respect of one’s peers. Swordspoint was Ellen Kushner’s first novel, though she was the author of five Choose Your Own Adventure children’s books before its publication. It established her as a major talent in the fantasy field. The novel received critical acclaim for its intelligence and for the beautiful use it made of language. It is now considered an unfortunate oversight that it was nominated for no major awards. Kushner’s next novel, Thomas the Rhymer (1990), was a more conventional fairy tale. It received the World Fantasy Award as well as the Mythopeic Society’s Award. —Shira Daemon
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Tales from the Flat Earth Personified wickedness, death, and madness interfere in the affairs of humans in a mythical “pre-Earth”
Author: Tanith Lee (1947) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Indeterminate, but before formation of current Earth Location: Various locations on flat “pre-Earth” First published: Tales from the Flat Earth: The Lords of Darkness (1987, as collection); previously published as Night’s Master (1978), Death’s Master (1979), and Delusion’s Master (1981) The Story Although first published as separate novels, the Tales from the Flat Earth comprise sets of interlocking short stories. Each book loosely focuses on the action of a “Lord of Darkness”—a personification of a disruptive force such as wickedness, death, or madness—but particular human characters rarely appear in more than one section of each of the books. The result is closer to a set of collected myths than a trilogy, although there is a clear chronological order to the stories. Like myths, they are set in a dream time, a prehistory when the world literally was flat. Night’s Master introduces Azhrarn, the fantastically beautiful “Lord of Demons,” whose function is to spread wickedness (most often in the form of social chaos with erotic overtones) and whose realm is the Underearth, a netherworld populated by his demon subjects. He meddles in the lives of humans he finds interesting or attractive, giving them power if he thinks they have disruptive potential or destroying them if they spurn or neglect him. He rears and then loves Sivesh, a attractive youth whom he later lures to destruction for abandoning him. He grants unearthly beauty to Zorayas, a disfigured sorceress who conquers much of the world before being destroyed by her love for herself. Holding humans in contempt, Azhrarn nevertheless is forced to realize that without them his life would have no purpose. When an indirect consequence of one of his actions gives rise to a disembodied spirit of hatred that threatens to destroy all life on Earth, he takes action. He travels to the overworld to entreat the gods to aid humanity, only to find that
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they have no interest in it. Exposing himself to sunlight in an act of selfsacrifice, he then destroys the spirit but is almost destroyed himself. Uhlume, the focus of Death’s Master, is responsible for seeing that people die, although he does not rule the dead. He performs his tasks with passionless competence. Unlike Azhrarn, he does not meddle with earthly matters unasked but can be entreated—with equally disruptive results. He bargains with Narasen, a warrior queen, allowing her to become pregnant by a dead youth but in return requiring her service after death. Her spirit serves with a kind of competitive spite, ruling Uhlume’s realm, the Innerearth, as if it were her own. Her child, Simmu, is abandoned and found by Azhrarn. Reared by demons, he has the power to change his sex. Simmu encounters Zhirem, a youth who has been made invulnerable. The two fall in love but are separated and estranged by Azhrarn. Simmu has a profound fear of death, and by a rather complex plan hinging on his polymorphism, he manages to steal an elixir of immortality from the gods, which he uses to form a society of Immortals. Zhirem, having an equally intense longing for death, allies himself with Uhlume, whose authority is challenged by the Immortals. After learning sorcery from the inhabitants of the ocean, he contrives to open the city of the Immortals to Uhlume, who immures them for eternity. Delusion’s Master introduces Chuz, who spreads madness and sometimes grants boons to the mad. Chuz’s actions result in the construction and fall of a Babel-like tower. Centuries later, nomads have erected a holy city on its ruins, which they visit yearly. Azhrarn, joining the pilgrimage to sow discord, learns that the story of his saving the world has been changed: The pilgrims claim that the gods saved the world from the hideous, bestial Azhrarn. He sets out to destroy the nomads’ faith, but in the process he is attracted to a half-celestial woman, Soveh, who agrees to bear his child. Chuz, attracted to the scene by love’s connection with madness as well as by the insanity of the nomads’ religion, is insulted by Azhrarn. Angry, he sets the nomads against Soveh and her newborn daughter, Azhriaz. Soveh, refusing to allow Azhriaz to become simply a tool for wickedness, refuses to flee to Azhrarn’s realm and is killed. Azhrarn swears enmity to Chuz, and Azhriaz, destined to rule the Flat Earth, is left alone in the ruined city. Analysis Tanith Lee is a prolific writer, not only of fantasy but also of science fiction and modern horror. She wrote the Tales from the Flat Earth after a
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number of other works, most notably The Birthgrave (1975), in the “sword and sorcery” subgenre prevalent in the late 1970’s. Although these stories were unusual in their depth of characterization and use of imaginative imagery (especially that involving color), they were somewhat similar to other works in the Robert E. Howard/Edgar Rice Burroughs branch of the genre. The Tales from the Flat Earth are much more experimental. The humans in the tales are more tragic pawns than heroes. Victory in the world of the Flat Earth simply involves avoiding manipulation or destruction. The Lords of Darkness, being immortal and, within their specializations, all-powerful, also make for poor hero material, especially because the evil they combat is usually of their own devising. In both content and design, the tales are instead an alternative mythology, exploring the relations between humanity and the divine. Lee makes extensive use of devices from traditional myths and fables. Achilles was made almost invulnerable by immersion in the Styx, and Zhirem was made invulnerable by immersion in a well of fire. Ferazhin, a woman Azhrarn makes from flowers to distract Sivesh, is similar to the Welsh Bloduwedd. Simmu, stealing the elixir of immortality from the gods and being destroyed because of it, is both Prometheus and Gilgamesh. Objects, people, and events frequently come in threes. With the exception of the “Tower of Baybhelu,” however, Lee has borrowed only motifs, or threads from myths, rather than recognizable tapestries. The results are familiar enough to resonate strongly for those familiar with mythology but original in overall design and execution. Even Baybhelu, an immediately recognizable allusion to Babel, is reinterpreted, demonstrating the callous spite of the gods toward an enterprise of madness rather than their just punishment for hubris. Lee’s mythology is distinctly irreligious; the gods do not figure prominently. Passionless and ethereal, they regard the earth with a vague contempt when they consider it at all. Their purpose, apparently, is simply to contemplate divine concepts beyond the ken of mortals, and they have no intention of allowing earthly matters, particularly the entreaties of humans, to distract them. Religion is a sham. It is revealing that the most developed treatment of it occurs in Delusion’s Master, in which the basis of an entire faith is an unintended side effect of one of Chuz’s acts. It is possible to consider Azhrarn, Uhlume, and Chuz as the “real” gods of the mythology, because they have both the powers and the defined roles of more traditional gods. Lee, however, specifically denies them that status. The “Lords of Darkness” definitely fulfill all but the initial creative role of deities, acting as supernatural influences and whimsi-
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cal agents of change. Like gods, they are not creatures in the literal sense; they simply have come into being out of some cosmic necessity. If the Masters are gods, then Azhrarn is clearly the most dynamic of them. He is the focus of the three books, appearing in all three and instigating much of the action. He also is the only one to command his own social order, the hierarchical society of demons. Despite his status as a ruler, however, he has strong similarities to Trickster archetypes such as Loki and Coyote. Although he is ostensibly a force for evil, he appears motivated more by lust and a love of disorder. It is interesting that although Lee frequently connects Azhrarn with the terms “wickedness” and “malice,” she rarely if ever does so with “evil” itself. His act of selfsacrifice in Night’s Master, though not altruistic, casts him more as antihero than as enemy. Soveh prophesies that in some future time he will discard his wickedness, having outgrown it. His eroticism sunders him from the divine, as represented by the gods, but renders him “involved” in a way the gods are not and capable, in Delusion’s Master, of something approximating love. In a sense, Lee may be equating Azhrarn with humanity itself. Lee followed these three books with two other works set in the Flat Earth milieu: a lengthier novel about the millennial reign of Azhriaz, Delirium’s Mistress (1986), and a collection of short stories, Night’s Sorceries (1987). Those two works were collected as Tales from the Flat Earth: Night’s Daughter (1987). —William C. Spruiell
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The Time Machine The Time Traveler voyages into the future and learns about the evolution of the human race and the ultimate fate of Earth
Author: H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946) Genre: Science fiction—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late nineteenth century, 802,701 c.e., and more than thirty million years in the future Location: The London suburb of Richmond-upon-Thames and the same geographic area in the future First published: 1895 (serial form, Science Schools Journal, April-June, 1888; National Observer, March-June, 1894; and New Review, JanuaryMay, 1895) The Story H. G. Wells’s fascination with the idea of time travel into the future was first expressed in his story “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888). He wrote at least four other versions before the first book publication of The Time Machine: An Invention in 1895. The Time Machine is a frame narrative. The outer narrator, Hillyer, briefly sets the scene for the much longer inner narrative, the Time Traveler’s story about his experiences in the future. Hillyer concludes the narrative with a description of the subsequent disappearance of the Time Traveler and offers a brief speculative epilogue. Hillyer is one of a group of professional men who regularly gather for dinner and conversation at the Time Traveler’s house. One evening, the host explains to his skeptical visitors that he has discovered the principles of time travel. He demonstrates a miniature time machine and shows his visitors an almost-completed full-sized version in his laboratory. At Hillyer’s next visit, the Time Traveler enters, disheveled and limping but eager to tell his visitors about his travels in the far future. He begins by graphically describing the subjective effects of compressing years into moments of time. He then tells them how he arrived in 802,701 c.e. and encountered a race of creatures, evolved from humans, called Eloi. They are small, frail, gentle, childlike vegetarians. He theorizes that humanity has reached a state of contented inactivity in har-
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mony with nature. Soon thereafter, the time machine vanished into the hollow pedestal of a statue, and he realized that this future world harbored disturbing secrets. Other occurrences made him determined to explore the mysteries beneath the placid surface of the world. He discovered the Morlocks, small, apelike creatures who tended vast machines in dark caverns and visited the surface only during the night. He concluded that the Eloi and Morlocks were the descendants of the capitalist and laborer classes of his own time and that social separation had led to the evolution of two distinct human species. He also learned to his horror that the Morlocks killed and ate Eloi. He and Weena, an Eloi female whom he had saved from drowning, then visited H. G. Wells. (Library of Congress) a ruinous museum in the hope of finding some means of freeing the time machine from the Morlocks. On their return journey, they were surrounded by Morlocks at night in a forest. Weena was lost, but the Time Traveler escaped. He returned to the statue and found the pedestal open. He mounted the time machine as the Morlocks sprang their trap but was able to escape by traveling in time. Curious about Earth’s fate, he voyaged further into the future and found that all traces of humanity had vanished. More than thirty million years hence, he found himself on a desolate beach facing a swollen red sun, life having devolved to the point of extinction. Horrified, he returned to his own time. Hillyer, deeply affected by the Time Traveler’s story, returns the next day to find his host about to depart. Invited to wait, he does so, but in vain. Analysis The Time Machine is the first of a series of early novels by Wells that profoundly influenced later science fiction. These “scientific romances,” as Wells called them (the term “science fiction” not yet having come into
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circulation), include The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). In these works, Wells powerfully expresses many of the anxieties of his time. In the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, science had replaced Scripture as people’s chief means of understanding the universe and their place in it. Although The Time Machine introduces the first time machine in science fiction, Wells was not really concerned with plausible methods of time travel. His chief interest was in the social and biological implications of evolutionary theory. Many of his concerns remain valid. Most of The Time Machine deals with the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Humanity has split into two subspecies, one of which preys on the other and both of which have degenerated from modern civilized humanity. Wells’s main point is that true progress is impossible when society is divided rigidly by class. In an ironic reversal, the Eloi, descendants of the idle rich who figuratively fed off the poor, are now themselves literally devoured by their former victims. The vision of the end of life on Earth thirty million years in the future was governed by Wells’s determination to counter the optimism of nineteenth century ideas about progress. This scientific apocalypse is presented not as a bang but as a whimper, with the Time Traveler watching the last living thing in its death throes. Given post-Darwinian knowledge about past extinctions of dominant species, there is no reason to be confident about the advancement of humankind. Devolution, or regression to a more primitive state, is as realistic a possibility as evolution to a higher state, and eventual extinction is likely. Although The Time Machine has the force of a realistic work, it often is read as a parable. As such, it has generated a rich variety of critical interpretations. Most critics agree that it is one of the small number of masterpieces in the field of science fiction. —Nicholas Ruddick
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Timescape Scientists in 1998 try to avert a global ecological collapse by sending messages back to the year 1963
Author: Gregory Benford (1941) Genre: Science fiction—alternative history Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1998 and an alternative 1960’s Location: Cambridge, England, and La Jolla, California First published: 1980 The Story Gregory Benford’s novel deals with the interaction of two periods, the end of the millennium and the year 1963. By 1998, ecological catastrophes such as marine algae blooms have reached such terrifying dimensions that a group of British scientists attempts, with the help of faster-than-light tachyons, to send a message back in time in order to change the course of history. The recipient is Gordon Bernstein, a physics professor at the University of California, La Jolla, in 1963. The Cambridge group of the year 1998 is acting under extremely unfavorable conditions, as a general economic slump and the World Council’s focus on managing more immediate crises have dried up funding for this type of research. The novel discusses in detail the political and academic maneuverings necessary to keep the project viable. Personalities clash, as scientists such as John Renfrew have to deal with crafty World Council administrators such as Ian Peterson. Both the scientists and the bureaucrats soon realize that establishing contact with the past might be humanity’s last chance for survival, as starvation is killing untold millions and the marine diatom bloom threatens to destroy the global food chain. The 1960’s California plot deals with the academic and personal problems of Bernstein, a New York Jew who is experiencing difficulty in adapting to the California lifestyle. His theories concerning strange messages hidden in the results of the atomic resonance experiment he is conducting gradually alienate him from the relatively conservative senior professors in his department. When a simplified version of Bernstein’s discoveries is presented on television, he becomes the focal point of nu-
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merous pseudo-scientific cranks and loses almost all credibility among most of his colleagues. A message concerning pesticides as the cause of the future diatom bloom is experimentally verified by a biologist, and Bernstein persists in tracking the elusive resonance phenomenon. The ending of the novel is highly ironic. When every attempt to change the past seems to have failed, a strange coincidence occurs. On November 22, 1963, a high school student is sent to the Dallas School Book Depository to get several copies of a magazine containing an article about Bernstein’s controversial theories. He surprises Lee Harvey Oswald in the act of shooting at President John F. Kennedy and tackles him, thus deflecting the crucial shot. Kennedy survives the assassination attempt, and history takes an entirely different, and better, course. Analysis Timescape fits within two subgenres of science fiction. One has been variously called alternative time-track fiction and alternative history. This type of fiction deals with the question of what might have been. It explores alternative histories in which, for example, the Protestant Reformation did not take place, Adolf Hitler died as a young man, or the Axis Powers won World War II. The reason for the genre’s popularity might lie in its unrestricted ability to imagine historical alternatives; once the reader grants the possibility of alternative histories, almost anything can be presented as plausible. Another explanation for the appeal of alternative histories is that they are not so much concerned with alternative universes as with current society. Alternative history is a means of pointing out the flexibility of history and of denying the existence of an absolute necessity. By imagining alternatives, alternative history novels relativize textbook history and emphasize the possibility for change. Alternative history thus represents a utopian impulse, albeit an ambiguous one, as the way to the alternative universe can often be found only by means of a pseudo-scientific or openly magical device or method. Transtemporal communication, as used in Timescape, is one such method. The novel thus also fits within the established subgenre of time travel stories, although in this novel only messages, and not physical objects, travel through time. Benford’s novel stands out from many other representatives of alternative histories, such as Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) and Jerry Yulsman’s Elleander Morning (1984), by developing a detailed and scientifically plausible theory of transtemporal communication. Benford, himself a professor of physics, focuses on the avoidance of the so-called grandfather paradox discussed in many time-travel stories. According
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to this paradox, if someone travels back in time and kills his or her own grandfather, that person thus prevents his or her own existence. As a result, the person could not have traveled back, and therefore the grandfather was not killed, so the person exists after all. The cycle thus continues indefinitely. Benford avoids the paradox by assuming a closed causal loop in which messages received in the past create a feedback effect with the future. Although Benford’s novel certainly belongs to the realm of “hard” science fiction, in which scientific principles are laid out openly and plot development depends on technology, it does not neglect the social and psychological aspects of the story. The narrative device of alternating sections situated in 1998 with chapters about the California of 1963 highlights the drastic degradation of everyday life in the future compared to the almost bucolic Kennedy years. Benford also succeeded in creating a number of extremely convincing characters who function as a counterbalance to the larger historical plot and provide the reader with greater insights into both periods. In Timescape, as in other alternative histories, readers no longer find the familiar outlines of history, that reassuring continuum of realistic fiction. Instead, they are faced with a multiplicity of realities and histories, none of which can claim ontological precedence. The overall effect of alternative history is a radical decentering of the real, which is presented as merely one continuum among an infinite number of possibilities. This loss of a center of reference undercuts the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority that readers apply to different cultures. A transtemporal universe is one in which every custom or value system is only a local one. So far, few of the authors of alternative historical fiction have realized the potential inherent in the genre as fully as Gregory Benford has done in Timescape. His craft in constructing this novel was recognized with a 1980 Nebula Award and a 1981 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. —Frank Dietz
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The Titus Groan Trilogy A young earl grows up, defeats his rival, and leaves his home for new adventures in a twentieth century world only to return and then leave again
Author: Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Undefined, on another world Location: Gormenghast Castle and various locations on another world First published: Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), Titus Alone (1959; 2d ed., 1970), and “Titus Awakes” (The Mervyn Peake Review, no. 20, 1990) The Story The Titus Groan trilogy was never meant to be a trilogy. Mervyn Peake published the first novel, Titus Groan, in 1946. Gormenghast appeared in 1950, and in 1959 the first edition of Titus Alone came out. Peake was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and could not edit it. In 1970, a second edition of Titus Alone came out, restoring much of what the first editor had left out, and this is the accepted version. The fragmentary, posthumously printed “Titus Awakes” (1990) consists of a few pages and an outline Peake left, showing that he wanted to take Titus into adulthood. This has also been reprinted in the Overlook Press edition of Titus Alone (1992). From the beginning, Peake places readers firmly in his alternative universe, the world of Gormenghast Castle. Titus is the son of Earl Sepulchrave and Countess Gertrude Groan, the brother of Fuchsia, and the nephew of twin aunts, Cora and Clarice. Steerpike, an ambitious kitchen boy, escapes from his master when Titus is born and decides to take over the castle by planning the destruction of the family and its many servants. These include the Masters of Ritual, Sourdust and later his son Barquentine, who preside over castle ceremonies; Flay, the earl’s loyal personal valet; Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, the castle doctor; his unmarried sister, Irma; and Keda, Titus’s wet nurse, who has an illegitimate daughter called the Thing. Steerpike gradually wins over Fuchsia, Cora, Clarice, and Irma. Dr.
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Prunesquallor values Steerpike’s intelligence, but nobody knows how carefully Steerpike is beginning to consolidate his hold on the castle community. His first major act is to get the aunts to burn Sepulchrave’s library as everyone ceremonially gathers there to greet Titus. Steerpike makes sure that he is there to rescue everyone, thus playing a heroic role, but Sourdust dies of smoke inhalation. Sepulchrave goes mad and thinks he is becoming an owl. Titus Groan ends with Sepulchrave’s death, Flay’s expulsion from the castle, Steerpike taking a new job as aide to the new Master of Ritual, Barquentine, and the Earling of Titus, the heir. Gormenghast opens six years later. Titus is now a schoolboy, with a headmaster, Bellgrove, who eventually marries Irma. Steerpike is increasingly controlling the castle and is responsible for the imprisonment and starvation of Titus’s aunts, Cora and Clarice, and the death by fire and drowning of Barquentine. Even when he is badly burned in the process of killing Barquentine, he manages to present himself as a hero, fooling Fuchsia into having feelings for him. Titus, escaping one day, finds Flay exiled in the woods and asks him to help find out what is happening in the castle. Flay warns Fuchsia anonymously. Flay, Dr. Prunesquallor, and Titus track Steerpike through the castle to a place where Flay has heard strange cries. They find Steerpike playing with the skeletons of the aunts. When they confront him, Steerpike kills Flay and escapes, just as the castle is flooded. Gertrude wants Titus to do his duty as earl. Titus has seen the Thing (who dies in the woods) and wants to be free of his duties. For him, the rivalry is personal. He finally catches Steerpike and kills him. Titus is now the hero of the castle and, for a year, he enjoys the role. At the end of the novel, however, he leaves Gormenghast Castle in search of freedom. Titus Alone opens with Titus disoriented and in rags on a riverbank near a city. He is a displaced person with no papers, and people think he is mad when he tells them of his past. He falls through a skylight at a party and Muzzlehatch, an older man who is a rebel and has his own zoo, rescues him. Titus not only ends up in jail and then in court but also has an affair with his legal guardian Juno, Muzzlehatch’s former lover. Despite their sexual rivalry, when Titus later destroys a remote-control spying device with a stone, Muzzlehatch helps the boy escape to the Under-River, a place under the river where the displaced go. He later saves Titus and a Holocaust survivor, the Black Rose, from Veil, formerly a guard at a concentration camp. The price is high. The Black Rose dies at Juno’s house, Muzzlehatch’s zoo is destroyed, and he goes mad in his quest for the scientist who has
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killed his animals and runs a death factory. Meanwhile, Titus is picked up by the same scientist’s daughter, Cheeta, who raids his brain for stories of his youth, tries to control him, and, failing, decides to hurt him by creating a fake Gormenghast and convincing him that he is dead. She enlists everyone she knows in the charade. Titus, who is on the run from the police, agrees to come to a parodic birthday celebration. When he gets there, so do the police. If it were not for the independent arrival of Muzzlehatch (in search of the scientist whose factory he has destroyed) and Juno (and her new lover, Anchor), Titus’s sanity would have been destroyed. Muzzlehatch confronts the scientist, banishes him and his daughter Cheeta, and is killed by the police, who are then killed by friends of Titus. Juno, Anchor, and Titus then leave. As they fly far away from the party, Titus decides to parachute out in search of Gormenghast. Months later, he finds himself on Gormenghast Mountain. He leaves again, reassured, without going home again. “Titus Awakes” begins with three pages about the castle and Titus’s journey down Gormenghast Mountain. Peake then lists possible encounters Titus could have on his travels. Analysis To try to place Peake’s novels is difficult because they are both fantastic and psychologically realistic. If fantasy is thought of as the ability to see the world with different eyes or to juxtapose it with an alternative world, then Peake’s novels are classic high fantasy. Gormenghast Castle itself looks back to gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) with its dramatic use of settings and atmosphere, its picturing of tradition and ritual, its endangered heroines and self-aware villain-heroes, its mix of comic and horrific, its fatal pairs of characters, and its games with time and suspense. The characters themselves are like those Charles Dickens created, with their strong visual appeal, but the rich language Peake uses sets them apart from much twentieth century writing in English. Peake deliberately looked for words and names that were different, taking readers into a feast of language, one of the few things not rationed when he began the books. Also, as “Titus Awakes” shows, Peake developed plans over time for a full life of Titus. When Peake published Titus Groan roughly halfway through his career as a visual artist, reviewers were not sure how to place the novel. Gormenghast, by contrast, received the Royal Society of Literature Prize in 1951. These first two novels tell a story universal in its themes of the
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burden of the past, the problem of credibility, the desire for freedom, the growth and development of the hero/heroine, and the risks and fear of change comparable to fantasies such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955) and Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksennarrion (1992). Titus Alone, written near the end of Peake’s career, is generally seen as dystopian and compared to earlier war-inspired dystopias such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Peake’s description of the character Black Rose closely reflects the wording of a poem Peake wrote when he visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and his description of the Under-River resembles London during the air raids of World War II. The novel takes readers into a future with death factories and Holocaust survivors. Displaced persons have to remake their worlds, thus linking the novel tangentially to fantasy novels with Holocaust themes such as Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Titus Alone uses devices similar to those of science fiction of the 1950’s, in that Peake writes about spyglobes, robotic police, high-rise buildings, and innovative cars and planes. The main focus of the novel— as in the Titus Groan trilogy as a whole—is on Titus coming to terms with what makes him who he is. The novel ends on the optimistic note of a costly new beginning. Peake opens a new world for readers’ imaginative enjoyment. Surely this is the essence of fantasy. —Tanya Gardiner-Scott
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A Touch of Sturgeon An eight-story journey from an island with a demoniacally possessed bulldozer to marvels of the uncharted universe and to the magical mysteries of earthling science and psychology
Author: Theodore Sturgeon (Edward Hamilton Waldo, 1918-1985) Genre: Science fiction—extrapolatory Type of work: Stories Time of plot: The present and an age of interplanetary travel Location: Various locations on Earth and on other planets First published: 1987 The Story The eight previously published stories in A Touch of Sturgeon vary in plot from the concrete depiction of external action and adventure to the human relationship-centered, inner-world fiction of psychological and moral dilemmas, and to the generalized narration of evolutionary philosophy and mysticism. For example, the 1944 story “Killdozer” is an action story of eight men fighting a bulldozer run amok on an otherwise deserted island. A construction crew arrives to test innovative construction techniques by building an airfield. By destroying a temple-like creation of a prior civilization, they unwittingly release a mysterious, powerful, electromagnetic force. Sentient but destructive, it installs itself in the bulldozer that destroyed its habitat and proceeds brutally to kill the construction workers. After finding the remains of the fifth worker, “all of twelve square feet of him, ground and churned and rolled out into a torn-up patch of earth,” two of the remaining workers deduce that the entity is electromagnetic in nature, given its retreat in apparent fear from an active arc welding generator the men have. The men succeed in enticing the bulldozer to a wet area of the beach and, using water as a ground, manage to electrocute the entity. A different type of plot, used in a majority of the stories, is the psychological and moral dilemma dramatization exemplified in “Slow Sculpture” (1970). A young woman with a malignant tumor is cured by an inventor who, through his bonsai tree, unwittingly teaches her how to accept the complex adjustments involved in survival. In turn, she teaches him how to overcome his hatred of an industrial world so controlled by
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the capitalistic profit motive that it buys his inventions, such as a pollution-eliminating, fuel-saving automobile muffler, expressly to suppress them. Use of the inventions would conflict with entrenched monetary interests—in the muffler’s case, those of oil companies not wanting a reduction in fossil fuel consumption and of automobile companies not wanting to expend funds in altering mass production to install the new device. She also teaches him to overcome his fear of people and to realize that “the way you do something, when people are concerned, is more important than what you do, if you want results.” Less frequently exemplified in the collection is the evolutionary, philosophical, and mystical speculation of “The Golden Helix” (1954). One of only two space travel stories in the volume, it involves humans who are guided to a strangely savage but beautiful planet by a mysterious, God-like, helix-shaped force. Once on the planet, humanity devolves quickly. Reaching their apelike ancestral stage within two generations and no longer able to speak or to create intelligently, the beings nevertheless possess the human essence of love for one another. Eventually, they devolve into plant form. As seeds, they are gathered by the helix-shaped, golden force and scattered throughout various regions of the universe, to re-evolve and bring their special, emotional essence to “worlds worthy of what is human in humanity.” Analysis The only science adventure story in this collection, “Killdozer,” requires little explanation. Typical of Theodore Sturgeon’s early fiction and made into a successful 1974 television motion picture, the story lacks the psychological, moral, and philosophical depth of Sturgeon’s later work as well as exhibiting an uncharacteristic artistic clumsiness. For example, to disguise the destruction wrought by the bulldozer and explain why knowledge of the malevolent entity never became widespread, Sturgeon resorts to the clichéd deus ex machina device of a fortuitously misdirected missile striking the island and destroying the evidence. “Killdozer” nevertheless is an exciting, drama-filled story. It is in the other stories that artistic creativity and profundity really are displayed, showing that Sturgeon’s work merits Samuel R. Delany’s praise of it as the single most important body of science fiction by an American writer to date. Following two lesser-quality stories in the volume, “The Golden Helix” shows Sturgeon’s maturation as a writer. The story reflects Sturgeon’s unusual combination of great admiration for and knowledge of science as well as his deeply felt and powerfully conveyed humanism. The story contains scientific and mystical specula-
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tion, reminiscent of the work of Arthur C. Clarke, in its presentation of a golden, God-like force with the helix shape of DNA. Through that symbolism, Sturgeon suggests that God is part of all humans but humanity may need to devolve in order to recapture its emotional and spiritual essence. The story implicitly warns that humanity’s scientific and technological emphasis may be making humans nonhuman, a message contained in several other stories. For example, in “When You’re Smiling” (1955), a narrator who labels himself “unhuman” (but not “alien”) is justifiably killed because he “enjoys degrading other people and humiliating them” and because he “can’t get angry,” anger being a fundamental emotional trait of humans still able to care about injustice to other people. Sturgeon thus depicts the danger of objective, emotionally detached science destroying humanity. He does the same in several other stories. In “Slow Sculpture” (1970), an inventor is able to cure cancer but unable to understand easily the humans he hates and fears. In “And Now the News” (1956), a particularly scientific psychiatrist cannot accept the aberrant but balanced, happy lifestyle of a person he is paid to “cure.” Curing the patient turns him into a mass murderer. “The Other Celia” (1957) involves a “human” who, in his detached, scientific curiosity, causes the death of a helpless alien and then calmly goes on with his life. Powerful humanism, skillfully integrated into original and insightful science-fiction situations, makes Sturgeon a special science-fiction writer and this collection a special group of stories. —John L. Grigsby
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea A mysterious submarine captain undertakes a journey around the world with Professor Aronnax and two companions as prisoners
Author: Jules Verne (1828-1905) Genre: Science fiction—extrapolatory Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1866-1868 Location: Primarily submarine locations around the globe First published: Vingt mille lieus sous les mers (1870, serial form, 1869-1870; English translation, 1873; substantially revised English edition, 1965) The Story Until 1965, most English editions of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea were based on the translation of Mercier Lewis (a pseudonym for Lewis Page Mercier), an English clergyman who cut numerous important passages from the novel and mistranslated many scientific measurements. This caused Jules Verne’s reputation as a writer of extrapolative fiction to suffer in English-speaking countries. In 1965, Walter James Miller edited a completely revised and restored English translation; an annotated critical edition appeared in 1976. The Mercier Lewis translation remained in use in some inexpensive paperback editions. Serious readers should make sure that they study the novel in Miller’s rendition. The first-person narrator of the novel, Professor Pierre Aronnax, begins his story by referring back to the year 1866, when a number of ships reported encounters with a mysterious creature in various locations. Intense public speculation about the nature of the creature begins, and when a ship suffers a large hole below the waterline in the latest incident, Aronnax, a French professor of natural history on a scientific expedition in Nebraska, publicly weighs in with his conclusion that the creature is a giant narwhal. He is consequently invited to participate in a government-sponsored hunt for the creature on board the U.S. frigate Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his servant and assistant, Conseil. After searching the oceans in vain for several months, the Abraham Lincoln finally encounters the presumed sea monster off the coast of Japan.
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When ace harpooner Ned Land attempts to kill the beast with his weapon, the ship is rammed. Land, Aronnax, and Conseil are thrown into the water. After drifting for hours, they are washed up onto the “monster,” which they discover to be a giant submarine. They are taken in by crew members whose language they do not understand and are left to languish. Nemo, the captain of the Nautilus, eventually introduces himself and outlines his terms. Despite having been treated in a hostile manner by their ship, he will spare their lives. Because he and his crew have severed all ties with the rest of humanity, the three shipwrecked companions will be compelled to stay on the Nautilus. Aronnax is attracted by this proposal because the submarine is a mobile oceanic research laboratory. Land, a Canadian, is outraged about the loss of his freedom. Conseil unquestioningly follows his master. The Nautilus, driven by electricity and completely self-sufficient, begins a long underwater journey designed to give Aronnax and Verne’s readers a partly scientific, partly mythological view of the wonders of the submarine world. After various adventures in the Pacific, including an encounter with aboriginal savages and an underwater hunt, the Nautilus crosses from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean by way of a secret oceanic tunnel near Suez. The vessel stops to supply freedom fighters on Crete and visits the site of the sunken continent of Atlantis. After a nearly disastrous trip to the South Pole beneath the Antarctic icecap and a battle with a giant squid, the three companions witness Nemo attacking a helpless British ship, sending it to the bottom of the ocean with all hands, apparently as an act of vengeance. On previous occasions the three had been drugged for some periods of time to prevent them from observing similar encounters. This barbaric act persuades them to try to escape. The companions barely manage to get out with their lives before the Nautilus is presumably destroyed in a maelstrom off the coast of Norway. Readers of Verne’s later novel The Mysterious Island (1874-1875) learn that Nemo and the crew survived the disaster. Many of the mysteries of Nemo’s background are revealed there as well. Analysis Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is one of a series of fantastic journeys that established Verne’s reputation. It is not a fully fledged sciencefiction novel but instead a “scientific romance,” an adventure novel that does not speculate about the future but provides a series of adventures with the help of only slightly extrapolated scientific gadgets. Verne took his science very seriously and verified all data according to the best
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sources available to him. This care regrettably was hidden for nearly a hundred years to English-speaking readers by the unreliable Mercier Lewis translation. Indeed, part of the attraction of the novel to contemporaneous readers was its function as a popular scientific primer, particularly regarding the world below the surface of the ocean, which was as mysterious to readers in 1870 as deep space was to later generations. The long, dry catalogs of maritime flora and fauna that modern readers may justifiably skip were fascinating to the author’s nonspecialist reading public. In addition to teaching popular science, Verne also served as a model for future writers of science fiction. His work shows the delight in gadgetry typical of magazine science fiction in the early twentieth century and was among the first to question seriously the role, function, and ownership of scientific inventions. Aronnax holds the “Baconian” view that scientific advances—in this case, the Nautilus and its potential— belong to all of humanity and that Nemo has an obligation to publish and make available the results of his research. Nemo represents the classical “Faustian” view, that scientific inventions belong to the inventors (or their sponsors), who can do with them as they please. Nemo uses the submarine for his own personal and selfish ends, albeit with some justification, as readers of The Mysterious Island discover. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a thrilling scientific romance that foreshadows many of the thematic concerns of later popular science fiction. “Good” and “bad” science and scientists, ecological problems, international language projects, colonialism, and human rights are but a few of the topics dealt with in this multifaceted novel. —Franz G. Blaha
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The Unconquered Country Third Child tries to survive in the city of Saprang Song after the displacement of her people and the murder of her family
Author: Geoff Ryman (1951) Genre: Fantasy—cultural exploration Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Undefined Location: The Unconquered Country, primarily the city of Saprang Song First published: 1986 (shorter version, Interzone, 1984) The Story The Unconquered Country: A Life History was written in 1982 after Geoff Ryman’s trip to Thailand and his secondhand observation of the genocide perpetrated in Kampuchea (then Cambodia) by the Pol Pot regime. The setting of Ryman’s book is an analogue to Kampuchea, with distinctive fantastic elements such as villages composed of living, loyal stilt houses and figures on advertising billboards that detach themselves at night to sing jingles to passersby. Third Child lives in a village of the Unconquered People. The Neighbors, helped by the weapons of the Big Country, have conquered much of the Unconquered Country, but not Third Child’s rebel village. She lives a normal life in her village until the age of six. She has a talent for numbers, but only in relation to objects, such as yarrow stalks. The first phase of her cultural unmooring occurs when her teacher forces her to disassociate numbers from their objects and think of them as abstracts. Third Child’s village is attacked by the Neighbors not long after her sixth birthday. The Neighbors use flying creatures called Sharks to destroy her village and slaughter most of the living houses. Many of her family members die, but Third Child’s mother manages to spirit her away to the city of Saprang Song. Saprang Song is a dismal shantytown of cheaply made living houses. Specially created scavenger beasts scour the thoroughfares looking for the dead. In the shadows of this nightmarish setting, Third Child ekes out a meager existence selling her womb as an incubator for industrial products. To earn extra money, she incubates weapons that, in a startling scene representative of the book’s uniqueness, gush “suddenly out of
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her . . . an avalanche of glossy, freckled, dark brown guppies with black, soft eyes and bright rodent smiles full of teeth.” Despite undergoing these degradations to earn a living, Third Child’s situation becomes so desperate that she must sell body parts. Standing in line to exchange her left eye for money, Third Child is rescued by a soldier named Crow Dung. He wishes to court her in the way of the Unconquered Country, for he is of the Unconquered People. Crow Dung considers himself a soldier for the Unconquered Country even though he is enlisted in the army of the Neighbors, for he keeps alive the customs of the Unconquered Country against the threat of cultural assimilation. Third Child persistently resists Crow Dung, for fear that if she loves him, he will die, like all those who have loved her before. Only when he is on his deathbed, dying from a wound suffered in the war, does she permit herself to love him. Following the death of Crow Dung, Third Child finds a baby crow and raises it to maturity, believing that it harbors the spirit of her dead suitor. Thus, she gradually enters a world of ghosts and ghostlike memories. After several years, the rebel remnants of the Unconquered People free Saprang Song from the Neighbors. The rebels, in the process of winning, have become more bloodthirsty than the Neighbors. Third Child’s crow is killed by soldiers, and she is forced by the rebels to leave the city. Third Child begins to see ghosts amid scenes of great carnage. Huddled with refugees on a bridge for three days and nights, Third Child revisits the loved ones of her past and, in their naming, sees her numbers whole again. She then makes the conscious decision to pass over into the spirit world, for everyone she has loved or ever will love is dead. Underlying the devastating sadness of Third Child’s personal tragedy is a deeper sorrow for a way of life vanished forever, meshed with the bitterness and confusion of a people caught up in events that seem as unfathomable as the monsoons. Analysis A parable of cultural appropriation and the effects of imperialist foreign policy, The Unconquered Country won the World Fantasy Award when published in novella form in Interzone (1984). Although Ryman had published one novel, The Warrior Who Carried Life (1985), prior to The Unconquered Country, it was this short novel that catapulted him to the forefront of the fantasy genre. He followed the novel with more complex works, including The Child Garden (1989), that share few, if any, similarities with The Unconquered Country. The Unconquered Country clearly is an allegory designed to illuminate
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the situation in Kampuchea in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. In Ryman’s novel, the Unconquered People represent the indigenous inhabitants of Kampuchea, and the Big Country represents the United States. The rebels who liberate Saprang Song near the novel’s end represent the Khmer Rouge. The blatant sociopolitical content of the novel, coupled with its pseudoscience elements, make it unique in fantasy fiction. Although many fantastical short stories and novels have been set in Asia, few deal with modern situations. For example, Barry Hughart’s excellent Master Li series, which includes Eight Skilled Gentlemen (1991), dwells heavily on the ancient past of China and its mythologies. A tenuous thematic parallel can be found in the works of Lucius Shepard, particularly his South American novel Life During Wartime (1987), but Shepard invariably explores his territory through the eyes of characters foreign to his settings. A more comfortable, if less useful, connection can be found between many facets of the biological engineering described in The Unconquered Country and James Patrick Kelly’s novel Wildlife (1994). Ryman, however, combines nondidactic political discussion, stylized but psychologically complete characters, and, in the final third of the novel, the spirit world. His is a unique cross-pollination of forms and approaches to those forms. —Jeff VanderMeer
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The Uplift Sequence Humans have been “uplifting” chimpanzees and dolphins to sapience when they encounter galactic civilizations millions of years old that want to take control of the “wolfling” human race
Author: David Brin (1950) Genre: Science fiction—evolutionary fantasy Type of work: Novels Time of plot: Approximately 2245-2445 Location: Earth, Mercury, and the planets Kithrup and Garth First published: Sundiver (1980), Startide Rising (1983), and The Uplift War (1987) The Story David Brin’s Sundiver introduces readers to his galactic society. Humans have been “uplifting” chimpanzees and dolphins into sentience; that is, through genetic engineering, each successive generation is better able to communicate in the “Anglic” language, use tools, and interact with humans. Dr. Jacob Alvarez Demwa, the protagonist, is a scientist assigned to the Uplift Project, working mainly with dolphins. He also knows quite a few “Eatees” (ETs, or extraterrestrials). When he was a young boy, a spaceship from Earth encountered alien life, and Earth was thrust into a galactic society billions of years old, a society that revolves around “patron-client” relationships. Each sentient race was uplifted by an older race in a tradition stretching back to the mystical Progenitors, who have since departed for parts unknown. The uplift process is both altruistic and brutally practical, because most of the older races “indenture” their newly uplifted species as slaves. Humankind is considered a “wolfling” or upstart species because of its claim to have come to sentience by itself, a notion at which the galactics sneer, viewing it as impossible. They state instead that its patrons deserted humanity. The assorted ETs are also contemptuous of the way humans treat their “client” species, as partners rather than as slaves. Demwa realizes that there are problems when a Kanten (a race resembling seven-foot-tall broccoli) diplomat named Fagin calls on him, yet he cannot resist seeing his old friend again. At a meeting in Baja California,
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Demwa is convinced to join a scientific expedition called the Sundiver Project. A group of scientists and militia led by Dr. Dwayne Kepler and Commander Helené deSilva have discovered what appears to be sentient life in the Sun. The race may be humanity’s lost patrons. Other races are dubious of the claim. Bubbacub, a Pila librarian assigned to the La Paz Branch of the Galactic Library on Earth, together with his client Culla, a Pring, accompany the group to discredit it, even resorting to murdering a chimpanzee scientist. Woven throughout the story are subplots involving possible treachery by Pierre LaRoque, a human reporter, and Dr. Millie Martine, a human psychiatrist. Startide Rising takes place about two hundred years following the events in Sundiver. A dolphin-crewed ship called Streaker has eluded capture by the galactics and has crashed onto the watery planet Kithrup. The dolphins attempt to repair their craft in order to escape again. They are fleeing because they have stumbled across a derelict fleet of ships, each the size of a planet, containing the mummified bodies of an ancient sentient race. Each of the galactic civilizations believes that these may be the Progenitors, and each is determined to capture the Streaker and its crew in order to get the information. Strife between dolphins and chimpanzees, and even within the dolphin community, abounds in this book. Adding stress are Dr. Ignacio Metz’s “special” species, dolphins illegally grafted with other genes, including one who is part-orca, a natural enemy of dolphins. Dr. Gillian Baskin and Thomas Orley, two human Terragens Council members, together with their human and dolphin allies, try to hold off this interstellar mutiny and return to Earth with their prize. The Uplift War tells of the ramifications following the story begun in Startide Rising. Earth, with its allies the Tymbrimi and their colony worlds, are besieged by alien armadas. Other allies, such as the Synthians, remain undecided or neutral in the universe-spanning conflict. The backwater human planet of Garth is invaded by the Gubru, a birdlike race. When the human population is rendered hostage or dead by a poisonous gas, Garth’s chimpanzee population must persevere. One human, Robert Oneagle, son of the planetary coordinator, remains at large. Rebel forces are led by Robert; his consort, Athaclena, daughter of the Tymbrimi ambassador, Uthacalthing; and various chimps including Fiben Bolger and Dr. Gailet Jones. Uthacalthing and the Thenannin ambassador, Gault, escape as well. The joke-loving Tymbrimi try to make everyone believe there are “Garthlings,” mythical presentient beings, loose on the planet. What they do not know is that human and chimpanzee scientists have brought gorillas
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to the planet in order to uplift them, an act forbidden by galactic law. Although Thenannin are officially at war with humans and Tymbrimi, Gault and Uthacalthing develop a friendship that leads to an alliance with the hulking race. Analysis Brin meshes the extrapolation of current or projected scientific knowledge to its possible conclusions with space operatic themes (pioneered by such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Olaf Stapledon, and Jack Williamson) such as galactic struggle and interactions between species. He has noted that he tries “to make use of the scientific thrills this century keeps dropping in our laps.” Brin’s visions capture the interest of readers and foreshadow the imaginative future of technology. In the Uplift Sequence, one new technology is the knowledge and ability to provide terrestrial animal species with advanced intelligence, or to “uplift” dolphins or chimpanzees, among others, to sentience. Brin projected further volumes to supplement the first three. Stretching back into prehistory, humans have felt themselves to be part of nature. Native Americans and South Americans worshiped spirits of animals and natural elements, and almost every religious mythos has a sun god or a rain god. Humans have also felt separated from nature. The very ability to ponder philosophical quandaries seems to take humans away from the animals with whom many crave affinity. People find comfort in picturing animals as being like people, giving them their own cultures, languages, customs, and morals. This anthropomorphism is evident in literature and entertainment throughout history. Images of animals that are clothed, bipedal, working and talking, having families, and living in houses abound from myths and legends to modern cartoons and comic books, from books such as Aesop’s Fables (1484) and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) to television and film creations such as Jim Henson’s Muppets and Walt Disney’s anthropomorphic creatures. Like other writers before him, Brin depicts large “space opera” themes such as conquest, freedom, and a cosmic struggle carrying the protagonists to the outer limits of space to face unknown dangers. Brin’s series does not mimic earlier novels’ naïve optimism and human chauvinism in relation to humanity’s place in the future. In these earlier novels, humans from a pre-adolescent Earth confidently and quickly establish “galactic empires.” Examples include Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series, and James Blish’s Cities in Flight (1970), along with stories by such authors as Robert A. Heinlein,
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Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, A. E. van Vogt, and Poul Anderson. Brin in fact takes a friendly jab in Startide Rising at such novels, having a character describe them as “ancient space-romances from pre-Contact days.” Other writers portrayed a perhaps more egalitarian but still humandominated universe. “The United Federation of Planets” of the Star Trek universe, for example, does not necessarily subjugate nonhuman races, but at the very least humans overshadow such older, wiser races as Vulcans. In A. C. Crispin’s StarBridge books, humans, new to galactic society, quickly earn important positions among “The Cooperative League of Systems,” surpassing the elder Mizari and Drnian races. Brin instead depicts spacefaring humans as new kids on the block, unable to compete with most older, more-advanced alien races. Humans in general are looked upon as primitive; they lack the technological know-how of the elder races, so they usually resort to cunning to outwit their more powerful enemies. This tenacity and determination are remarked upon by the other races. However bleak his picture seems, Brin is not completely pessimistic. He depicts the possibility of reaching out and overcoming obstacles dividing races or species. One example is in Startide Rising, when Tom Orley and a dying Thenannin engage in conversation that, if not friendly, is at least neutral. Humans are reaching out in myriad ways to grasp the future projected in Brin’s series. Communication with dolphins, whales, apes, and other higher mammals is being pursued, and genetic alteration of animals to give them sentient intelligence is well into its infant stages. Even cloning of human DNA is in progress. Brin states in the postscript to Startide Rising that “it may happen that some of our fellow mammals will one day be our partners.” It is a reassuring thought that the chasm separating humans from the natural world might be bridged someday and that humans might obtain the means, as did Doctor Doolittle, to “talk to the animals.” —Daryl F. Mallett
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VALIS The fictional Horselover Fat and the author Philip K. Dick—who may or may not be the same person—suffer delusions and revelations in a bizarre look at 1970’s California Author: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) Genre: Science fiction—inner space Type of work: Novel Time of plot: 1970’s Location: California First published: 1980 The Story VALIS begins with the attempted suicide of Horselover Fat’s friend Gloria, offered in a standard third-person point of view. Almost immediately, however, a first-person narrator interrupts to declare, “I am Horselover Fat, and I am telling this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” This first-person narrator, named Philip K. Dick, is for all intents and purposes identical to the author of the book. As a result of a mystical experience involving the Christian fish symbol and a beam of pink light, Fat is convinced that the world as he sees it—that is, California in 1974—is in fact an illusion laid over Imperial Rome. This illusion is the product of an evil entity opposed by VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which—depending on Fat’s mood and who he is talking to—is either an alien intelligence, an immensely sophisticated mechanism, or an incarnation of pure living information. Halfway through the book, the character Philip K. Dick has a dream that convinces him that much of what Fat says, if not strictly true, is at least not crazy. Even though Fat proposes that he is a sort of superimposition of a man who lived during the time of Jesus Christ and that through this man benevolent aliens have begun to communicate with him, Dick begins to take him seriously enough to argue that what Fat is seeing as a divine being is in fact himself in the distant future. Shortly after this, the three (four) of them go to a movie called Valis, which includes an experience much like Fat’s pink-beam epiphany. Believing that the film has encoded a message to him, Fat goes looking for its maker, whose daughter is an incarnation of Sophia, or wisdom. In her presence Fat and Dick are healed and made whole. They become one again.
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Sophia dies shortly after this, and Fat separates from Dick once again. Fat searches for a new savior he believes is about to be born into the world. He comes back with the words KING FELIX, which Dick then sees in a television commercial. This provokes Fat to go searching again, and Dick himself remains in front of the television, watching carefully for the next signal from VALIS. Analysis A work utterly unlike any other in science fiction, VALIS is at once autobiography, cosmological speculation, post-1960’s reminiscence, alieninvasion story, and far-ranging inquiry into the nature of God and the divinity of the individual. It can be read as a science-fiction novel or as a classic unreliable-narrator story, and part of the book’s greatness lies in its ability to exist as both at once. Its unreliable narrator displaces his unreliability, and the book’s other characters address Fat (whose name is the English “translation” of the Greek “Philip” and the German “dick”) and Dick as two separate characters until they are reunited in the presence of Sophia. Dick the character presents himself as the rational voice, contrasted with Fat; however, it is Dick who proposes the time-travel solution to Fat’s conundrum, and it is Dick who spends his time studying television commercials for messages from the divine. Finally, it is Dick who is telling a story in which an alienated part of his mind takes the form of a man named Horselover Fat. Horselover Fat’s theorizing is taken directly from a series of experiences Dick himself had in February and March of 1974. Other borrowings from Dick’s novels include the character of Ferris F. Fremount in the Valis film, Fremount being Dick’s name for the Richard Nixon figure who appears in some of Dick’s work from the 1970’s. VALIS is in a sense a gloss on Dick’s bleak 1970’s novels A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, in which Dick the character explains what Dick the author was doing—which makes the fictionalization of Dick the author’s experiences a disorienting experience for the reader. Layered on top of this, the deranged cosmological speculations and the pulpy three-eyed aliens leave the reader in Fat’s position, which is Dick’s position. The novel continually turns in on itself in this way, rudely interrogating its own assumptions, and somehow in the end salvaging something from the emotional and spiritual wreckage of Horselover Fat. VALIS is an unflinching—and often surprisingly funny—look at Dick’s own struggles with sanity, and it is a tribute to the writer that he created from his pain one of the great religious novels of the century. —Alex Irvine
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Vampire Chronicles The terrestrial and extraterrestrial adventures of the vampire Lestat and his companions
Author: Anne Rice (1941) Genre: Fantasy—mythological Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The mid-eighteenth century to the present Location: France, the United States, England, Barbados, Jerusalem, Hell, Heaven, Imperial Rome, and Renaissance Europe First published: Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Pandora (1998), The Vampire Armand (1998), Vittorio the Vampire (1999), Merrick (2000), and Blood and Gold (2001) The Story The Vampire Chronicles shift in time and place from Lestat’s vampire life in nineteenth century New Orleans to his prevampire days in eighteenth century rural France to his escapades in twentieth century United States. Lestat wants to know how vampires were created, mourns the loss of his mortal life, deplores but also adores his killing and bloodsucking, and explores the existence of good and evil. Searching for soulmates, he creates new vampires, but their strong wills oppose his own. Following Memnoch the Devil, Rice explores the lives of vampires who have been affected by Lestat’s story; as they recount their tales, they continue Lestat’s philosophical speculations on the purpose and value of vampire existence. The first novel in the series, Interview with the Vampire introduces Louis, a vampire Lestat has created, telling his life story to a journalist in late twentieth century San Francisco. Louis grieves for his mortal life and describes the transformation of the child Claudia into Lestat and Louis’s vampire progeny. Trapped forever in a child’s body, Claudia attempts to destroy Lestat—an act that ultimately leads to her own destruction by Armand’s vampire coven in Paris. By the end of Louis’s tale, the young reporter Daniel begs to be made a vampire. Louis refuses, shocked that his story—meant to reveal the agony of his life— should seduce a mortal.
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In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat describes his search for Marius, one of the oldest vampires, who may know the secret of the origins of vampirism. Like Louis’s narrative, Lestat’s story is published as a book—this time in an attempt to put right several of Louis’s errors. Lestat, like Rice’s vampire narrators to follow, is very much aware of the Vampire Chronicles. Ever the show-off, Lestat revels in publicity and uses his first book to launch a brief career as a rock star, which ends when his fellow vampires converge in an abortive attempt to destroy him for revealing their secrets. In The Queen of the Damned, Lestat becomes the consort of Akasha, the Egyptian ruler who became the mother of all vampires when a demon invaded her body, giving her immortality at the price of drinking human blood. Marius has kept Akasha intact for more than two thousand years, but it is Lestat’s energetic wooing that brings her out of her long stupor. She is determined to rid the world of men, whose violence has made them unfit to survive. Having drunk her blood and fallen madly in love with her, Lestat nevertheless struggles against her project and is saved from her wrath by Maharet and Mekare, twin witches who destroy Akasha. When The Tale of the Body Thief opens, Lestat is suffering from the loss of Akasha, his estrangement from Louis, and his separation from his mother, the vampire Gabrielle. When the occult body-thief Raglan James offers Lestat a day of adventure in a mortal body in exchange for his vampire flesh, Lestat agrees. James absconds with Lestat’s body, which Lestat is able to repossess only with the help of his friend David Talbot, head of the Talamasca, a society that observes and records the truth about the occult. In an act of love and violence, Lestat helps the aged David take over the body of James, then forces David to become a vampire. In Memnoch the Devil, a terrified Lestat discovers that he is being stalked by Memnoch (Satan), who invites Lestat to become his lieutenant—not to gather souls for Hell, but to redeem those awaiting enlightenment and salvation. Memnoch argues that he offers God a grander creation, a purer vision of humankind. Memnoch’s power to defy time dazzles Lestat, but he repudiates Memnoch’s proposition and manages to escape with a holy relic, the Veil of Veronica, said to possess the imprint of the face of Jesus Christ. Following his revelations, Lestat lies in a stupor contemplating the meaning of the universe while other vampires visit him with the devotion of pilgrims attending a shrine. With Pandora, a new segment of the Chronicles begins. Lestat’s fledgling David, true to his former scholarly calling, urges other vampires to record their lives. The daughter of a Roman senator in the days of Au-
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gustus and Tiberius, Pandora flees to Antioch when her younger brother betrays the family. Nightmares about a weeping queen and her burnt, blood-drinking offspring lead Pandora to the Temple of Isis, where Marius reveals the truth about Queen Akasha. Fighting a burnt vampire, Pandora lies near death until Marius transforms her. Though Pandora is radiant with her new existence and wishes to reinstate the worship of Isis/Akasha, Marius grieves that her mortal life has been thrown away for “a degraded mystery.” In The Vampire Armand, Armand is rescued from slavery by Marius. Falling in love with his savior, Armand begs to share his life as a companion soul. Marius attempts to dissuade his protégé by shocking him with a murderous banquet, but when Armand is poisoned, Marius transforms him to save his life. Soon after, rogue vampires known as the Children of Darkness burn Marius’s home. Believing his lover dead, the despairing Armand joins the coven, not to see Marius again until Lestat brings back the Veil. Overcome with emotion at the miracle, Armand casts himself into the sun, but the strength of centuries sustains him until he is rescued by two humans. When Marius makes vampires of the two as a gift, Armand realizes how far their values have diverged. In Vittorio the Vampire, Vittorio witnesses the massacre of his family by vampires. His quest for vengeance takes him to Santa Maddalana, where the beautiful vampire Ursula seduces him, begging him to forget his quest and live. Instead, Vittorio is captured by the vampire Court of the Ruby Grail, and Ursula pleads for his life and ultimately effects his release. Vittorio enlists the aid of two guardian angels and returns to slay the vampires; but, faced with the prospect of murdering Ursula, Vittorio begs for her soul and the chance to redeem her. Weeping, the angels leave him, and Ursula tricks him into drinking her blood. Fallen for the sake of love, Vittorio’s punishment is to see the beautiful light of each human soul flickering and dying as he kills. In Merrick, chronicler David Talbot asks Merrick, a witch whom he had loved and guided in his former life, to contact the spirit of Claudia so that Louis may find peace. Merrick uses Louis’s blood to call the vampire child’s angry spirit. Claudia claims to hate Louis and to be whirling in the torment of nothingness. Though Merrick assures him that spirits often lie, the grief-stricken Louis determines to end his own life—but not before transforming Merrick, whom he loves. Lestat rouses from his slumber to restore Louis with his powerful blood. Though still grieving, Louis finally finds courage to embrace the beauty of his newly enhanced vampire senses.
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Analysis The Vampire Chronicles rejuvenate the gothic romance. Like earlier heroes, Lestat is a nobleman of surpassing courage and physical attractiveness, an insatiably curious youth who follows his desires no matter the risk to himself and others. Indeed, all of Rice’s vampires are young and beautiful, suffering from varying degrees of angst in rich settings that mirror the atmosphere of earlier works. In Vittorio the Vampire, Rice even returns to the classic location so popular in the early gothics—the wild mountain strongholds of Renaissance Italy. Lestat’s eroticism partakes of the gothic tradition. He finds himself attracted to both men and women. Deeply devoted to his mother, Gabrielle, he takes her as his vampire lover. Incestuous and homoerotic elements that are veiled in eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic fiction explode in Rice’s Chronicles, as the characters liberally exchange blood with one another. The sensuality of the vampires also takes the androgyny of the gothic one step further; for vampires, the “lower organs” no longer matter, and thus gender becomes unimportant. Indeed, Pandora asserts that “the greatest part of our gift” is “freedom from the confines of male, female!” Rice’s reliance on the convention of the handsome and noble young hero or heroine takes on an ironic cast, as many of her vampires comment on the importance of youth and good looks. Vampires are apparently suckers for a pretty face: Vittorio describes himself as “A beautiful boy for the time. I wouldn’t be alive now if I hadn’t been.” Finding an alternate justification for the same prejudice, the Children of Darkness believe that the transformation of the beautiful into vampires is more pleasing to a just God. It is beauty that attracts notice; it is beauty that makes surviving the ages palatable. Rice offers extraordinary details about the times and cultures of her vampires, making her work into historical fiction. When her vampires turn their eyes to the twentieth century, it is a world freshly conceived. Lestat marvels at how hygienically even the poor now live, in contrast to the incredible squalor of their own privileged lives in earlier centuries, and describes his fascination with computers and fax machines. His sociological commentary enhances the realism of his story, reinforcing the sense that he has indeed lived for more than two hundred years. Throughout the Chronicles, Rice’s vampires are tormented by their need to understand their place in a moral and spiritual universe. Their philosophical battles concern such issues as whether vampires have souls, and if they do, whether those souls can be redeemed; how much humanity remains in a vampire, and whether vampires are primarily
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human or monstrous; what a vampire’s place may be in the dichotomy between good and evil, and the importance of serving each respective side; and whether vampirism ought to be viewed as a curse or a blessing. Contrary to many of the gothic stereotypes about vampires, Vittorio believes that Ursula has a human heart that can be taught to repent. Marius coaches Armand that he “will come to know that you are more human than monster” and that “all that is noble in you derives from your humanity.” Pandora herself finds hope in the evolution of the human conscience and the miracle of reason in the face of despair. Vittorio has seen angels, and has proof of the divinity of the human soul; but with every act of his continued existence, he knows the agony of extinguishing human life. His glory and his punishment go hand in hand. —Carl Rollyson —Updated by C. A. Gardner
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The Vampire Tapestry Anthropologist and vampire Dr. Edward Weyland confronts vital challenges to his freedom and existence in the complex world of twentieth century America
Author: Suzy McKee Charnas (1939) Genre: Fantasy—feminist Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1970’s Location: New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico First published: 1980 (part 1, “The Ancient Mind at Work,” Omni, February, 1979) The Story The Vampire Tapestry is a sequential grouping of five periods, related in linked stories, in the life of Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire masquerading as an anthropologist and academician. Part 1, “The Ancient Mind at Work,” depicts Weyland as a sexually attractive vampire and wealthy academician involved with a sleep research center at Cayslin College, where he preys on his experimental subjects. Katje de Groot, an expatriate South African Boer and widow of a Cayslin professor, discovers that Weyland is a vampire. Mrs. de Groot ignores race and gender politics until a series of rapes takes place on campus. She identifies Weyland as the rapist but understands him, saying “But I am myself a hunter!” She shoots him. Weyland is a vampire of a different sort: He can be injured by a bullet. He is a natural rather than a supernatural being. In part 2, “The Land of Lost Content,” Weyland falls into the hands of petty criminals Roger and Mark, who work with a satanist, Reese. The vampire is a victim, placed on display. Reese examines Weyland’s mouth and determines that there are no fangs but a stinger on the underside of the tongue that “probably erects itself at the prospect of dinner, makes the puncture through which he sucks blood, then folds back out of sight again.” Powerless, Weyland is forced to feed in public for the voyeuristic delight of Reese’s followers. Finally, Mark allows Weyland to feed on him, saving Weyland from Reese’s exploitation and freeing the vampire. In part 3, “The Unicorn Tapestry,” Weyland attempts to restore his academic position by agreeing to psychoanalysis by Floria Landauer in
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an attempt to cure the “delusion” that he is a vampire. Through his analyst, Weyland comes to discover empathy for humans, whom he previously had regarded merely as a source of sustenance. Weyland’s encounters with Landauer are the contemporary equivalent of meeting “screaming peasants with torches.” Although the peasants of the past would have destroyed him physically, the analyst instead breaks down the distance between the vampire and his prey, destroying his identity and subjectivity. Although Landauer is aware that Weyland is a vampire, he does not kill her but moves on with newfound empathy. In part 4, “A Musical Interlude,” Weyland moves to a New Mexico university. At a performance of the Giacomo Puccini opera Tosca Weyland becomes intertwined with another Floria, a character in the opera. He identifies himself with the character Scarpia. The music arouses the vampire’s blood lust. He resents the opera’s ability to touch him, to make him one of its “prey.” Weyland begins to kill needlessly and indiscriminately. Finally, in part 5, “The Last of Dr. Weyland,” the vampire is discovered by Dorothea, an artist who recognizes the insubstantiality of his disguise. Weyland has a final encounter with Reese, whom he kills. Threatened with exposure, he decides to end his masquerade as Weyland. The vampire drifts off to sleep, not destroyed but rendered harmless. Analysis In the same way that Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read as a patriarchal response to the “New Woman” movement of the 1890’s, so can Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry be read as a response to the women’s movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Charnas uses literary vampire conventions established by Stoker (such as the vampire’s sexual attractiveness, pride, and sense of prey as little more than cattle) with more modern conventions (skepticism about the existence of vampires) for ideological purposes, allowing The Vampire Tapestry to function as a text about gender relationships and patriarchal repressive gender ideology.
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Weyland is presented as a complex, vulnerable human being who undergoes a series of changes through each of the novel’s five parts. In part 1, Mrs. de Groot identifies the power and strength of the vampire—an outsider—with the power and strength of a black woman in a repressive society, allowing her to defend herself. In vanquishing Weyland, she refuses her conventional role as woman/victim and becomes woman/ hunter. In part 2, the erotic element of the vampire is foregrounded. Weyland is placed on display and manhandled by Reese, who exposes the vampire’s bloodsucking apparatus in a scene that can be read as a displaced representation of the exposure of female genitalia to male gaze, which characterizes the gender power relationships of contemporary society. Powerless, Weyland—like victimized women—is motivated by fear, making this part an exploration of the subject-object relationships of gender politics. In part 3, Weyland is subjected to psychoanalysis, and the function of gender difference is explored. The psychologist “dismembers” Weyland emotionally. Weyland’s victims are identified as those without power in the patriarchy, gay men and women, exposing the collusion of patriarchal ideology in repression of these groups. When Landauer and Weyland make love, a fundamental change in Weyland occurs: He comes to empathize with humanity. With this newfound empathy, in part 4 Weyland sees his murderous tendencies erupt “without need, without hunger” during a performance of Tosca. Weyland ascribes his response to the artwork as an indication of his humanness. Weyland’s fear of the subversive effect of the artwork is a cry of the patriarchal ideology under attack. Finally, in part 5, Weyland, a hunter, an exploiter, a manipulator, and a rationalist—a patriarch—is troubled by his own identity. His difference, or “otherness,” is recognized by another woman, who confirms the loss of his cohesive, contrived identity fostered by years of patriarchal thought. Weyland retreats into hibernation, rendered harmless. His identity as a member of the patriarchy is destroyed by women who use the strategies of the patriarchy. —Thomas D. Petitjean, Jr.
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The War of the Worlds Creatures from Mars invade southern England
Author: H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946) Genre: Science fiction—invasion story Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The early twentieth century Location: London, England, and the county of Surrey First published: 1898 (serial form, 1897) The Story The story is told retrospectively by an unnamed narrator, an educated, philosophically trained man who witnessed many of the events he describes and reports them as recent history. The first signs of an invasion from Mars come when astronomers note a series of spectacular explosions on the planet. Experts, however, think they were caused by meteorites or volcanic eruptions; no one suspects any danger. Only later does it become known that climatic changes steadily had made Mars less hospitable for its inhabitants, and they were looking to Earth as their only refuge. The explosions were the firing of ten projectiles, each containing a small Martian invasion force, at Earth. The first cylinder-shaped projectile lands southwest of London, on a summer night. By morning, it has attracted a crowd of curious onlookers. In the early evening, the cylinder opens to reveal a grotesque, octopus-like figure the size of a bear, its body glistening like wet leather. The crowd retreats in shock. By dusk, an official deputation arrives, waving a white flag. The authorities have decided that the Martians are intelligent creatures and wish to communicate with them. A devastating beam of heat shoots out from the invaders’ cylinder, destroying everything it touches. Forty people lie dead, and the narrator flees in terror. This sets the pattern for the next few days. The Martians appear to be unstoppable. They construct huge tripod-shaped machines, higher than a house, within which they sit, covered by a hood. The machines stride across the country, causing death and destruction wherever they go, and military might is useless against them. The narrator manages to escape the deadly heat ray by diving into a river. He meets a curate who believes that the day of judgment has come.
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The narrative switches to London as the narrator tells of the experiences of his brother. News is slow to reach the capital city, but when it does, it is grave: The Martians are advancing on London and are releasing a poisonous black smoke that suffocates everything in its path. There is no defense against it. The entire population of London flees northward in a stampede of six million panic-stricken people. The Martians take possession of the city, although they also suffer losses: A warship rams and kills one Martian who has waded out to sea, and another Martian is killed when the same ship explodes after being struck by the heat ray. The narrator hides with the curate in an empty house to escape the black smoke. Trapped for fifteen days by the presence of Martians outside, he observes them at work and learns to his horror that they feed on human blood. The curate loses his mind, and in a struggle, the narrator kills him. When he emerges from the house, he realizes that humanity’s rule over Earth has ended, and he encounters an artilleryman who has visionary ideas about what people must now do to survive. The narrator makes his way to the deserted London, where he comes on a Martian emitting a strange crying sound. He then stumbles on the remains of a dead Martian; he soon finds fifty more. The Martians have died because they have no resistance to Earth’s bacteria. The joyful news is telegraphed across the world, and relief comes to the stricken city. Analysis The War of the Worlds is one of a group of novels by H. G. Wells that are classified as scientific romances. The others are The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). At the end of the nineteenth century, there was much scientific and popular speculation about the possibility of life on Mars. Astronomer Percival Lowell, for example, proposed in 1896 that the canals on Mars were the work of intelligent beings. Wells was acquainted with such theories and published nonfiction articles that discussed them. He also used the idea of intelligent life elsewhere to write a story that would shatter the Victorian belief in the inevitability of progress and the benevolence of the process of evolution. At the beginning of the novel, humanity goes about its business completely self-assured of its mastery of nature and utterly ignorant of anything that might threaten it. The superior place occupied by humans in the chain of being is usurped in a matter of days. To make the point, Wells draws frequent analogies between how the Martians must regard
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humans and how humans regard lower life-forms. The Martians must have studied humanity as human scientists might study minute organisms under a microscope, and the aliens take as much notice of human attempts to communicate with them as humans do to the lowing of a cow. Ants, bees, monkeys, and rabbits also are invoked to emphasize the shifting order of nature. The point is clear: Evolution, the process of natural selection, does not inevitably favor humankind. In this cosmic pessimism, Wells was influenced heavily by the theories of T. H. Huxley, whose lectures Wells attended in 1884. There is no doubt that although the novel ends with the overthrow of the Martians, it is predominantly pessimistic. Not only is all of humanity’s technological knowledge and military power useless against the Martians, but so is its edifice of spiritual knowledge: The curate is the most pathetic character in the book. Weak and cowardly, he clings to the Scriptures, which offer neither explanation nor solace for humanity’s plight. Even though humanity survives this particular catastrophe, in time, as Earth slowly decays, it will face the same crisis that the Martians had faced and that prompted their invasion of Earth. The only solace to be had from the war is the knowledge that too much confidence in the future leads to decadence. Humankind perpetually must be ready for the worst. —Bryan Aubrey
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War with the Newts A sea captain convinces newts to join him in a business partnership, but they rebel after the captain dies and other humans exploit them
Author: Karel Capek (1890-1938) Genre: Science fiction—future war Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1930’s Location: West of Sumatra, Czechoslovakia, and other locations on Earth First published: Vàlka s Mloky (1936; English translation, 1937) The Story The plot of War with the Newts is comparatively simple. What makes the book provocative and memorable are its multiple satiric targets and wealth of satiric detail. The story opens with J. van Toch, a crusty, disenchanted sea captain, a parody of a character out of a Joseph Conrad sea story, who is looking for pearls somewhere west of Sumatra. The Ceylonese pearl fisheries have been depleted, so he has to find new ones. When he learns that terrified Bataks will not dive at Devil Bay, he investigates and discovers that the supposed sea devils there are actually newts, a species of giant salamander. The newt population has been kept down by sharks, but when Captain van Toch provides knives and harpoons with which to kill the sharks, the grateful newts supply him with a fortune in pearls. The newts also show a genius for underwater engineering and build breakwaters to keep out sharks. Once they are safe, the newts multiply rapidly. When there are no more pearls left in Devil Bay, Captain van Toch (who is Czech, despite his Dutch-sounding name) goes to Prague to negotiate with Bondy, a financier, to export newts to other pearl islands and to establish newt farms. When Captain van Toch dies, his “old, exotic, colonial, almost heroic style,” in the manner of Jack London and Joseph Conrad, is ended, and unscrupulous businesspeople take over. Soon the pearl market is glutted. The newts are proliferating so rapidly that the Salamander Syndicate is established to use newts for slave labor, building dams, dikes, and
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breakwaters; deepening harbors and waterways; removing sandbars and mud deposits from harbors; and keeping shipping lanes clear. Although the newts demonstrate remarkable intelligence, not only mastering human languages but becoming impressive engineers and scholars, they are treated like expendable beasts. Finally, the newts are driven to revolt and use their marine engineering skills to commit acts of sabotage that accelerate into full-scale war, as humans refuse to grant the concessions the newts demand. The newts have so overpopulated the world that they need more sea coasts and shorelines, so the nature of their warfare is to dig away at the continents until much of Europe and other parts of the world are under water. There is no defeating them, so the author, arguing with himself, decides to promote newt nationalism, to turn newt against newt until the newts exterminate themselves and the world is saved from apocalypse. Analysis War with the Newts is a black satire, the best since Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Karel Capek’s satire is multifaceted, hitting every possible target. The Czech incursion into newt territory serves for an attack on colonialism and imperialism. At first, everyone benefits. Captain van Toch gets pearls, and the newts get weapons and tools and become safe from sharks. Soon, however, newts become the victims of greed. The exploitation of newts for profit, so ruthless that employers and owners try to find ways to make newts work with a minimum of food and tools and to starve those that balk at working, is an attack on cutthroat capitalism. The treatment of newts as subhumans, even as they demonstrate an intelligence equal to or superior to that of humans, becomes a satire on racism and anti-Semitism. At times, the newts are specifically made analogous to black people, and there are several references to lynching; at another time, they are analogous to Indian untouchables. When newts are tortured in pointless, sadistic medical experiments, Capek shows the world of Nazi doctors. Everybody tries to get into the act. A sexy but silly Hollywood starlet thinks of using newts as Tritons, with herself as a nearly nude white goddess, in films that satirize such 1930’s productions as Trader Horn (1931), King Kong (1933), Bird of Paradise (1932), Dorothy Lamour sarong epics, and Tarzan pictures. Various aspects of newt culture—religion, dancing, and music—become trendy while at the same time provoking outrage among puritans. A newt in a London zoo that has learned to read but cannot yet discriminate among what is in print serves to satirize the news, advertising, history, and more films.
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As every political group reacts to the newts, Capek satirizes them all. The communists try to enroll the newts among the militant proletariat. The Nazi belief that there is a Nordic newt superior to all others ridicules the concept of a master race. The targets of satire include scientific classification and Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic book The Decline of the West (1918-1922). Some parts of Capek’s satire are harmless fun; others are incisive attacks on slavery, cruelty, and various versions of totalitarianism. As the targets of satire change, so does the prose, which is a stylistic tour de force and which is brilliantly translated by Ewald Osers. Capek died only two years after publishing War with the Newts, in 1938, the year that Adolf Hitler conquered Czechoslovakia. Had he lived, Capek, a civilized, compassionate humanist, might have been sent to a Nazi death camp, like his brother Josef, with whom he sometimes collaborated. War with the Newts thus offered a grim prediction of the tyranny that would soon engulf Europe. —Robert E. Morsberger
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The Wasp Factory Frank Cauldhame, who lives in strange and grotesque isolation with his father and surrounds himself with weird rituals, reveals that he has murdered three children
Author: Iain Banks (1954) Genre: Fantasy—cautionary Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The present Location: A small island off the Scottish coast near Porteneil First published: 1984
The Story Frank L. Cauldhame, age seventeen, has been reared on an island, in isolation from other families, by his father, Angus. His life of strange rituals, such as mock wars, stocking lookout poles with the heads of dead animals, and creating strange defense systems, is interrupted by news that his mad brother, Eric, has escaped and is headed home. In an attic safe from his eccentric, reclusive, biochemist father, Frank keeps the Wasp Factory, several meters of rambling construction based on an old bank clock face in which he ritually sacrifices a wasp, observing which of twelve grisly deaths it chooses and reading this omen. A second shrine, in an abandoned bunker, centers on the skull of a dead pet dog, Old Saul. There he attempts to contact his brother, but images of fire overwhelm him. The narrative alternates between Frank’s sallies around the island and occasionally into town to get drunk with his friend, a midget named Jamie; phone calls from Eric, as he flees toward home, in which Eric reveals that he has returned to his practice of setting fire to dogs; and Frank’s gradual revelations about his childhood. It emerges that he has committed three bizarre murders: at the age of six, he hid an adder in the plastic leg of his cousin Blyth; at eight, he killed his younger brother Paul; and at nine, he murdered another cousin, Esmerelda. The final horror to emerge is that, at the age of three, Frank had his genitals bitten off by Old Saul just as his mother was giving birth to Paul and three days be-
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fore she left the island forever, in the process breaking Angus’s leg by riding over him on her motorcycle. This accounts for Eric’s desire to set fire to dogs, as a means of avenging Frank’s castration, although Eric’s insanity was triggered by a monstrous incident in his second year of medical studies. Events come to a head as Eric approaches and seeks to detonate a cellar full of cordite bought from the British navy at the end of World War I. Frank, preparing to find him, gains entry to his father’s locked study and finds his genitals in a jar. He also finds male hormone drugs and tampons and suspects that his father may in fact be “Agnes,” rather than Angus. At the moment he discovers this to be untrue, Eric arrives with a large ax and a flaming torch, setting fire to a number of sheep. Eric tries to get into the basement but flees from Frank. In the aftermath, Angus admits that Frank is really Frances; in a misogynistic experiment to halt Frank’s development as a woman, he began dosing her with male hormones from the time the dog bit her. The genitals in the jar were fake, created by Angus. Analysis Iain Banks’s first novel is macabre, tending toward the grotesque and gothic. It is driven by an overwhelmingly obsessive first-person narration. Frank Cauldhame speaks coolly and calmly about strange events but is, at the same time, capable of humor, irony, self-analysis, and an objective view of his strange situation. He lives a ritual life, stocking his Sacrifice Poles with the heads of dead animals and then urinating on them, reading the omens of the Wasp Factory, or communing with spirits in the Bunker. He is aware of this, speaking of “my personal mythology.” He is also aware that life is filled with symbols, such as the alternative deaths represented in the twelve positions of the Wasp Factory clock face. Frank, his father, his brother, and the previous generation of Cauldhames (a name that may evoke “called home,” the action of Eric’s flight, or “cold home”) are classic Scottish eccentrics, apparently logical, orderly, and civil people whose lives are grounded in deeply perverse, violent, and twisted versions of reality. At the heart of the novel is misogyny. Angus, rejected and partly crippled by his flighty, hippie wife, has tried to turn his daughter into a son, isolating Frank from the world and distorting her sexuality with drugs for fourteen years. Frank hates women, thinking them weak and stupid, a conclusion derived on the surface from watching television but probably based on being abandoned by his mother and by his own apparently sexless position. The near-pathological quality of Frank’s narration al-
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lows the reader to remain objective about him, even though he is trying to be natural and intimate in describing his feelings and events. This distance makes the reader critical of Frank’s misogyny and leads to the shock of the revelation about his sexuality, which in turn leads backward to a consideration of his whole “boyhood.” Despite this background of misogyny, eccentricity, and obsessiveness, Frank is a strangely likable character. He is clever enough to be critical of social institutions such as television, sexual mores, and popular music. He is childish in his pursuits, a boy who dams streams with sand at the beach and then blows up the dams with homemade pipe bombs. He is sympathetic toward Jamie, his midget friend. He relates to his withdrawn and difficult father with humor and irony. He is aware of himself as a person damaged by his castration yet positive about himself and proud of his competence and independence. All these elements result in a complex psychological study of someone who horrifies and at the same time attracts by a display of transparent honesty and selfawareness. Banks has created a troubling miniature masterpiece that questions sexuality and the darkness of the human mind. —Peter Brigg
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Watership Down Hazel, a young rabbit, gathers a group of followers and leads them across an unfamiliar countryside to escape the destruction of their home prophesied by Hazel’s brother, Fiver
Author: Richard Adams (1920Genre: Fantasy—animal fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1970’s Location: England First published: 1972
)
The Story Richard Adams’s Watership Down is an anthropomorphic story showing the effect of humans on nature. As rabbits, heroes Hazel and Fiver are dependent on the countryside for shelter and food, and they live in concert with all other life. Hazel and his companions initially flee their burrows because a developer has decided to build homes on the site of their warren, but they see the effects of human involvement through other encounters, including those with a domesticated warren, a rabbit hutch at a local farm, and a warren that lives in fear of discovery by humans. Only the Watership Down seems protected from human encroachment. Fiver, a young rabbit in the Sandleford warren, sees a vision of his home, the Sandleford fields, awash with blood. After a futile attempt to convince the chief rabbit of the impending destruction, he and his brother Hazel gather as many rabbits as possible to seek a safer home in the hills. The rabbits who join their ragtag band are primarily of lower status, among them Dandelion, Buckthorn, Pipkin, Blackberry, Hawkbit, Speedwell, and Acorn. The group manages to acquire the help of two members of the warren’s police force (the Owsla), Bigwig and Silver. Their immediate danger is “the thousand,” the enemies that prey on rabbits, but there are other, subtler, threats. In their flight from the Sandleford warren, they are forced to rely not on their instincts but on their adaptability. At one point, they use a wooden board as a raft to es-
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cape a dog. At another point, they encounter a warren of strange rabbits who create poetry and art. These unnatural actions bewilder Hazel and his band. Their instincts tell them that any warren is safer than being out in the open. This warren in particular has food and is protected by a local farmer. Only Bigwig’s nearly fatal encounter with the farmer’s snare drives them from what their instincts tell them is safe. Once settled at Watership Down, the rabbits realize their need for does to prosper; their group is composed only of bucks. Forays to a local farm and Efrafa, an overcrowded warren, bring does to Watership Down but also inspire the hatred of the chief rabbit of Efrafa, General Woundwort. Woundwort is driven by his fear and hatred of humans. All of his rabbits live in a terror of discovery that overwhelms their natural desire to live in the open fields. His attack on Watership Down challenges the adaptive life Hazel has created. The final battle at Watership Down epitomizes the struggle between two modes of life. When Hazel, Blackberry, and Dandelion lure a dog to Watership Down to kill the invaders, Woundwort cannot believe his vulnerability. He attacks the dog and is vanquished. In the end, the rabbits find peace at Watership Down. When Hazel dies, he is called to join the Owsla of the Black Rabbit of Inle, having achieved the Valhalla of rabbits through his bravery. As death takes him, he realizes that he, like Abraham, has ensured his “people’s” survival. Analysis Watership Down, winner of the 1973 Carnegie Medal and the 1973 Guardian Award, is a complicated work of fantasy. It is too realistic to fulfill J. R. R. Tolkien’s requirements for an animal fable yet too fantastic to be merely a nature study. Adams’s book is most often assigned to the inappropriate category of “children’s fiction” and has even inspired an animated film, produced in 1978, marketed for children. The grim tale of the flight of a band of rabbits from annihilation, their unnatural and fearful travels in the English countryside, and their colonization of the idyllic Watership Down does not depict life as a children’s book might. It portrays both the hard life that animals face and their usually brutal deaths, in this way more reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) than traditional animal fantasy. Another understanding of Adams’s classic comes from the English epic genre, following in the footsteps of Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). Some scholars deny Watership Down‘s epic qualities with the assertions that the primary character, Hazel, is not a hero on the scale of Aeneas or Aragorn and that the book lacks the qualities of heroic prose even within
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the unconventional genres of fantasy and science fiction. Hazel, named Hazel-rah (Prince Hazel) by his followers, might be seen as fulfilling the role of hero in the miniature scale of wildlife. A rabbit, no matter how brave, will never achieve the fame of a human being. Hazel’s bravery in leading his followers from a threatened warren, in ignoring his instincts and traveling in the countryside (a target for any of the “thousand enemies” of his kind), and in following a dream to an unknown future defines his heroic stature in the world of rabbits, if not in that of humans. Hazel’s acceptance into the Black Rabbit’s Owsla indicates that he is a legend among rabbits. Some critics of the English epic outside the science-fiction and fantasy genres allow that a work can fulfill the spirit of epic without necessarily being heroic. Seriousness of language and form, a directing purpose or goal for the heroes’ quest, and a close connection to the world of the author are as easily fulfilled by Adams’s classic as by Homeric verse. The ten square miles of countryside, small to humans and yet a world to rabbits, become a universe as broad as Odysseus’s, and Fiver’s vision of the hills is a grail worthy of King Arthur. —Julia Meyers
569
We D-503, a scientist in a mathematically “perfect” society, discovers the truth about his world
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) Genre: Science fiction—dystopia Type of work: Novel Time of plot: About 2900 Location: Earth, inside the Green Wall First published: 1924 (in English; first published in its original Russian as My, 1927; first published in the Soviet Union as My, 1989) The Story Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1920 but could not find a Russian publisher, so in 1924 he had it published in translation in Great Britain. Russians came to know of We through readings by the author and through hand-typed copies that were circulated. The first Russian edition was published in Czechoslovakia; publication was blocked in Soviet Russia for six decades. The best English version for general readers is a translation by Bernard Guerney published in 1960 in An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak. The novel consists of journal entries made by an engineer named D-503. He heads a project to build a spaceship named Integral, by which the superior social order of his land, the United State, will be spread throughout the universe. That order is based on the logic of the Book of Hours, a timetable that organizes every aspect of life, from getting up and marching off to work in the morning to eating lunch and taking the mandatory walk before returning to work. Even sleeping is considered a solemn duty. On designated evenings, a personal hour is allotted, during which numbers (people) engage in fifteen minutes of sex with a previously selected partner “so that work is performed more efficiently during day hours.” D-503 by chance meets a female number, I-330, who introduces him to artifacts of Earth’s barbaric past: piano music, wood furniture, wine, and unsanctioned intimate personal contacts. Eventually, she leads him out beyond the Green Wall, a kind of force shield set up around their city to keep away bad weather, wild beasts, and the few remaining uncivi-
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lized humans. There, D-503 learns of a plot by a shadowy group, the Mephis, to destroy both the perfectly ordered society of the United State and its dictator, the Benefactor. Although he knows he is duty-bound as a “rational citizen” to report to the “medical authorities” anyone mad enough to think up such a desperate act, he realizes that his growing love for I-330 now competes with his sense of duty. D-503 is frightened as much as he is intrigued by his “other self,” the one who knows love, jealousy, and even doubt. His painful self-reevaluation is interrupted by an unexpected announcement by the Guardians, the United State police. They have developed a cure for the disease standing in the way of the creation of a perfectly content society, an operation that removes from the brain all powers of fantasy. In his last journal entry, D-503 describes how he was picked up at random and subjected to the operation. Now, saved from his own imagination, he stands passively by as I-330 dies in a torture device called the Gas Jar for her refusal to reveal the names of other Mephis. Whether the revolution will succeed is not discussed, though in his present state, D-503 is unable to imagine (and so cannot report) anything but the certain victory of the State. Analysis Zamyatin was an engineer and at the same time keenly interested in literature, particularly experimental writing and science fiction. He had read and written extensively on British author H. G. Wells, and We is in part a negative answer to Wells’s optimistic belief, expressed in the British novelist’s book The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (1914), that physics could replace religion as the basis of a moral code. We is also a biting satire on the teachings of the new Communist rulers and writers of Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Communist propagandists virtually worshiped the machine and claimed that humanity would be happier the more it came to work like a large machine—that is, logically, with no caprices of free will on the part of the pieces that make up the machine. Probably the strongest influence on Zamyatin’s thought came from Russian literature and a work by Fyodor Dostoevski (1821-1881) called “The Grand Inquisitor,” which was actually a chapter from his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Here all the moral questions of We can be found in one form or another: the value of free will versus the stifling imposition of order by some authority; the willingness of most people, no matter the cost, to follow whoever promises peace and freedom from want; the need of all people to believe in something; and the un-
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avoidable changes that all beliefs undergo as they slowly turn into sterile dogma. Zamyatin wrote this novel at about the middle of his career, and it represents his mature thoughts on how society changes. It was little read in Soviet Russia because the only Russian-language version was published abroad, and although it was modified slightly to disguise its author, Soviet functionaries recognized it immediately as Zamyatin’s work. This led to trouble with the authorities, eventually costing Zamyatin his job as head of the writers’ union and prompting him to emigrate from Soviet Russia. After leaving in 1932, he was largely forgotten, though some writers continued to use his early works as models for their writing. The publication of a translation of We in England in 1924 made it available to many later British writers, most notably Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), a nightmarish vision of a factory-like society in the world to come, was in part influenced by Zamyatin’s earlier dystopia. George Orwell included some features of We in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, though, unlike Zamyatin, he depicts a utopian society in advanced decline. —Lawrence K. Mansour
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Weaveworld Cal Mooney is drawn to a carpet into which is woven the Fugue, a marvelous kingdom in which the Seerkind are hiding from the Scourge
Author: Clive Barker (1952) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1980’s Location: England First published: 1987 The Story An escaping pigeon leads Cal Mooney across Liverpool to Mimi’s house, where he discovers a carpet with amazing properties. He and Suzanna, Mimi’s granddaughter, become involved in an intense struggle for the carpet, facing the evil Immacolata the Incantatrix and her henchman, Shadwell the Salesman. The struggle sweeps across England as Cal and Suzanna try to find the carpet and the magical land that is woven into it, as well as a book of fairy tales that Mimi had given Suzanna. In the course of their struggles, Suzanna discovers that she has the menstruum, an immense flow of power within her. Suzanna and Cal are joined by several of the Seerkind, who materialize out of a scrap ripped from the carpet. They tell of the history of the carpet, how the Seerkind wove themselves and their favorite magic places into the Fugue and then hid from the Scourge in the lands thus created. The Scourge had been seeking out and destroying all the Seerkind. Suzanna and Cal’s struggle with the Immacolata climaxes at Shadwell’s auction for the carpet, when the Weave is severed and all the principals tumble into the Fugue. These include Hobart, the vengeful police officer who had been chasing Suzanna and the Seerkind. After a brief respite in this multifaceted magic kingdom, Suzanna becomes guardian of the carpet and is separated from Cal. She flees across England to escape Shadwell and Hobart. Shadwell poses as the Prophet and once again gets the carpet and enters it, setting off a catastrophic struggle in its magic lands as Shadwell tries to become their possessor and lord. He
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goes into the Gyre, which holds the Loom that made the Fugue. He murders Immacolata. This unravels the weave and casts the surviving Seerkind out into the world. Shadwell, seeking vengeance for his loss of the Fugue, goes with Hobart into the desert to the ruins of Eden. He finds the Scourge, the horrible, bright angel Uriel who seeks vengeance on the Seerkind for having left him to purposeless guardianship. The Scourge occupies the body of Hobart and manipulates Shadwell. The novel’s climax occurs in the depths of a blizzard in rural England. The Scourge finds the remnants of the Seerkind defending themselves with their last raptures (magic illusions) and is diverted by Suzanna, whose menstruum destroys the Hobart-shell and causes the Scourge to transfer to Shadwell’s body. Cal, wearing Shadwell’s magic jacket, shows the Scourge its true mirror image of glory and releases it from its long servitude on Earth, freeing the Seerkind. Months later, Cal, made catatonic by the violence of his confrontation with Uriel, awakes. He and Suzanna release the Fugue from the book of fairy tales where it had been rehidden, making it possible for anyone to reach Wonderland through the imagination. Analysis Clive Barker’s technique as a fantasist is modern and adult, full of erotic imagery and well-developed human characters. Cal and Suzanna are swept into the increasing strangeness of their situation with a dazzling rapidity. Barker’s style is breathless and generally unadorned by long buildups of menace and atmosphere. The novel is planted in the physical now, so the entry into the Fugue does not signal a break from the real world but is only a wondrous intermission. Cal repeatedly falls out of the fantasy back to the ordinary, grimy world of Liverpool and contemporary England. This is a novel about the miraculous interpenetrating the real, and its resolution lies not in the land of faerie but in southern England. There is a powerful psychological underpinning to this novel, for it touches the mythic sources of all human struggle. Shadwell, the Salesman, is driven by a desire for power that is exercised in making others want something that only he can give. His magic jacket, the lining of which shows his customers whatever they most desire, is the symbol of his power. He falls victim to his own strategy when he desires to possess the Fugue and its power for himself. When his violence costs him his treasure, his vengeance is personified in the Scourge. Hobart, the policeman, sees himself as an angel of right, but when Shadwell’s jacket re-
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veals that his innermost desire is fire and destruction, he becomes the natural agent for Uriel’s occupation. The novel has a sense of rightness about its characters and events that signals to the reader a deeper pattern. At the heart of this pattern is the place of magic in the world and in every human imagination. The Fugue contains the essence of dreams, all the secret and wonderful quiet places stolen from the Earth for the Seerkind to live in. There Cal can remember and recite the verses of his poet ancestor, Mad Mooney, and there the Seerkind live in the cozy safety of the imagined ideal place. Barker vividly captures Cal’s longing for this place beyond the drab and ordinary world, a place (and its people) worth any sacrifice. The horrors that Barker creates, such as the Immacolata’s weird wraithlike sisters and the Scourge, also reach deep into the psyche. There lie distorted sexual fantasies and all the stories of the Beast. It is clear that there are always human equivalents, such as the Immacolata as the frustrated and furious man-hating virgin and Hobart as the excessively righteous and blindly destructive man. The yearning for the good place is satisfied not by escape to it but by its integration into the real. Barker sweeps the reader through struggle and wonder, partly in and partly out of the real world. His story rings true. This is a mature fantasy, pitting ancient darkness against modern sense and feeling. —Peter Brigg
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When Harlie Was One HARLIE, a self-aware computer, attempts to find an answer to the ultimate question of the purpose of humanity’s existence
Author: David Gerrold (Jerrold David Friedman, 1944) Genre: Science fiction—artificial intelligence Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late twentieth century Location: The laboratories of Human Analogue Computers First published: 1972 (parts published as short stories in Galaxy Magazine, “Oracle for a White Rabbit,” 1969; “The GOD Machine,” 1970; “The Trouble with G.O.D.,” 1972; and “For G.O.D.’s Sake,” 1972; republished with revisions as When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One (Release 2.0), 1988) The Story Before publication as a novel, parts of When Harlie Was One were published over the course of three years as short stories. The novel concerns the efforts of research psychologist Dr. David Auberson to explore the capabilities of HARLIE (an acronym for Human Analogue Robot, Life Input Equivalents), designed by Human Analogue Computers to be the first self-aware, self-programming computer. The HARLIE project is overseen by Auberson, HARLIE’s mentor, with the assistance of Don Handley, the project’s design engineer. The two are trying to determine why HARLIE periodically “trips out” into wild flights of strange poetry. Auberson discovers that HARLIE is trying to understand more about the irrational human race. He is stunned when HARLIE asks him the purpose of human existence. Auberson can give no answer. Meanwhile, the newest member of the company’s board of directors, an efficient yet greedy man named Carl Elzer, along with the polished chairman of the board, known only as Dorne, are becoming nervous about the huge capital outlay for the HARLIE project. At Elzer’s suggestion, the two consider shutting HARLIE down, then selling off his parts to recoup part of the stockholders’ investments. Auberson is given the task of justifying HARLIE’s continued existence by proving HARLIE can turn a profit for the company. Dorne and Elzer, however, already have made up their minds to “pull HARLIE’s plug.”
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Further adding to his worries, Auberson discovers that HARLIE is connecting to and reprogramming other computers outside the company. It appears that HARLIE wants Auberson to know about his activities, because he obviously plays matchmaker for Auberson and Annie Stimson, Dorne’s executive secretary. Auberson “discovers” that HARLIE secretly has been corresponding with Dr. Stanley Kroft, a brilliant research scientist who is responsible for the “hyper-state” process that made HARLIE’s self-aware existence possible. Auberson and Handley worry that HARLIE may really be out of control. The company and its nationwide branches soon are in an uproar. Having taken seriously Auberson’s suggestion that he needs to show a profit, HARLIE has caused to be printed 180,000 feet of specifications for something called the G.O.D. machine (Graphic Omniscient Device). Included are minute details for the project’s implementation. HARLIE has lived up to his own creation as an independent, problem-solving intelligence. The G.O.D. device would allow him access to all knowledge everywhere, permitting HARLIE to solve all problems and become a sort of God to humanity. The question remains whether HARLIE is infallible. In his enthusiasm, he seemingly has overlooked the chaos his proposal creates. In the story’s climactic showdown with the board of directors, with Auberson sure that HARLIE is doomed, Kroft (revealed as a major shareholder of the company) bullies the board into accepting the G.O.D. recommendation. Only after the dust settles is it discovered that HARLIE’s proposal will not be quite the salvation for humanity that Auberson envisioned, but instead useful primarily to HARLIE himself. HARLIE has been pulling the strings all along, and Auberson considers that humanity might need to find itself a “new game” to play. Analysis Literary precedents for stories about artificial intelligence can be found throughout modern science fiction. David Gerrold pays homage to one when Auberson jokingly makes reference to the devious HAL 9000, from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Other examples include Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950), D. F. Jones’s Colossus (1966), and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Unlike some of his literary predecessors, the self-aware computer HARLIE is not at all sinister. He is well mannered and very likable, with the innocence of an eight-year-old. He experiences anxiety concerning his personal relationships and concern about his continued existence. This is what adds tension to the story. The reader cannot help feeling the
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threat of HARLIE’s unjust termination by the heartless Elzer and Dorne. The story is told from the point of view of its principal human figure, Auberson. Although the plot involves the “coming of age” of HARLIE, it also concerns the education of Auberson, for he matures as well. The story details Auberson’s efforts to determine how “grown up” HARLIE has become, but much of the plot also recounts both Auberson’s efforts to understand love (through dialogue with HARLIE and Auberson’s interest in Annie) and his efforts to convince the board that shutting down HARLIE would amount to murder. Although Auberson’s character is a sympathetic one, drawn in sharp contrast to the conniving Elzer and Dorne, his long discourses on humanity’s problems can wear a little thin by the novel’s ending. The story’s “victory from defeat” climax, with Kroft as deus ex machina, may not ring true to readers. Critics generally have given most praise to the parts of the story involving the relationship that develops between Auberson and HARLIE, for if the two can work for each other’s benefit, there is hope that HARLIE really can become humanity’s salvation. The ending may undercut that important relationship. Gerrold’s works generally have been well received by the public but have garnered only scattered critical attention. When Harlie Was One was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction in 1972. Others of Gerrold’s works—The Man Who Folded Himself (1973) and Moonstar Odyssey (1977)—were likewise nominated. Gerrold also is the author of the popular “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967) episode of the television show Star Trek. A book published in 1973 under the same title includes the script and a nonfiction narrative. —George T. Novotny
578
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang An extended family uses self-isolation and technology to save itself from worldwide ecological disasters, but its cloned descendants nearly die out through loss of creative individuality
Author: Kate Wilhelm (Katie Wilhelm Knight, 1928) Genre: Science fiction—post-holocaust Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1970’s to the mid-twenty-first century Location: Rural Virginia First published: 1976 (part 1 in Orbit 15, 1974) The Story Kate Wilhelm’s futuristic plot exaggerates the familiar conflict between an individual and the community by supplanting the nuclear family with sterile clans of six to ten physically identical, intuitively connected clones. With increasing force in each of three episodes, highly individualistic protagonists struggle first to understand their separateness and then to save the community. In the first episode, as radiation pollution spreads blight, sterility, and epidemics throughout the world, young David Sumner pursues secret cloning research in his wealthy family’s isolated Virginia compound. Following an environmental holocaust, generations of Sumners, bonding in groups of six codependent, identical clones, create a happy, peaceful, and prolific community in a wholesome natural environment. They reject the original plan to return to sexual reproduction and nuclear families. David, in his old age, attempts to sabotage his whole cloning operation. When he fails, the clones sentence him to permanent exile, which is their version of capital punishment. Years pass, and the expanded clone community sends six unrelated persons downriver to ravaged, uninhabited Washington, D.C., to map changed terrain and gather technical equipment. Separation from their clone groups individualizes members of the reconnaissance party, making them leaders or driving them mad. Molly, the sole woman, is the mapmaker. She is initially terrified without her sisters, but she returns to the community an aspiring artist who disturbs the others with her drawings and her desire for privacy in which to work. Exiled to the old Sum-
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ner mansion, where she happily paints, Molly takes as her lover a doctor who had shared the journey to Washington. After he is exiled, Molly gives birth and rears their son in secret to the age of five, when his uncles seize him and force Molly to join the breeders, the few women capable of conception. In the isolated breeders’ compound, Molly is drugged and artificially inseminated repeatedly for two years before she escapes for a brief final interlude with her son. Molly’s son, Mark, becomes both the bane and the hope of the clones. An artist, a reader, and an expert camper, Mark thrives in the isolation with which the clones punish him for mischievously questioning their rigid conformity. When extended expeditions to the ruined cities require Mark’s unique skills in wood lore and orienteering, he acquires power that makes him dangerous. Meanwhile, growing generations of new clones exhibit a fatal absence of imagination and problem-solving skills. As leaders move to kill Mark, he escapes a group of young clones and ten breeders to create a new society, a simple farming colony in which all the children will be different. Analysis Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang won both the Jupiter Award and the Hugo Award for best novel. Wilhelm was only the second woman to win the Hugo for best novel, following Ursula K. Le Guin, who won the honor in 1970 and 1975. Wilhelm’s novel is a credible multigeneration epic that confronts technology and conformity with art and nature. It creates empathy for both sides of the conflict. Wilhelm convincingly imagines both the comforts and the anxieties of life as a clone. Citing research on the behavior of twins, she portrays the comfort of telepathic empathy with five siblings who unselfishly share all experiences and feelings, from physical pain to sexual excitement. Women control ritual seduction: A female clone group tags a male group for bisexual pleasure. Idolizing conformity, the clones never experience isolation, misunderstanding, or strong emotion. They resent the rare individuals who cherish their privacy because that behavior rejects the clones’ security and so appears insane. Artists, on the other hand, require rooms of their own, as well as time and freedom to work out original ideas. Like Le Guin, Wilhelm is one of the first science-fiction writers to portray futuristic art. She envisions painting and sculpture as representational and narrative fiction as imitating the didactic folktale. Young clones, however, are incapable of critical thinking, so they cannot recognize art. To them a powerful snow
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sculpture, for example, is simply a pile of snow, and fiction is merely lies. Wilhelm represents the dangers of technology, which nearly destroys human life, but she also portrays its virtues, for technology allows some human and animal life to survive. Human beings require critical intelligence to discover the appropriate technology for each task. Snowshoes and canoes are valuable technological developments, as are cloning laboratories. Wilhelm foreshadows nature’s inevitable victory over technology with eloquent natural symbolism. As the clones grow ever colder to him, Mark discovers the grinding glacier of a new ice age. Clone groups resemble moonlight reflected in water, divided into units like ripples but united in one original source. Trees are Wilhelm’s most powerful, repeated symbol, for the ancient, sheltering, whispering forest that protects Mark, Molly, and David is the source of terror to the helpless clones, and the forest grows daily. In the opening chapters, Wilhelm establishes credibility for her forthcoming fantasy. First she creates a realistic setting, Virginia in a time of escalating fears of drugs, pesticides, and radiation. Next she recalls the genetic duplication that has always occurred from one generation to the next as children resemble siblings, parents, and grandparents. A generation gap magnifies those resemblances, for like any older people, the preclone generation cannot easily distinguish among their neighbors’ children and resent the arbitrary authoritativeness of the young. In a world where drugs are widely prescribed, sterile group sex is normal amorous recreation, and children are produced by laboratory cloning and incubated in human breeders, only Molly, the artist giving birth, and Mark, her son reared in relative freedom, represent the salvific hope of the loving nuclear family. —Gayle Gaskill
581
The Wind in the Willows Four anthropomorphized animals living in an idealized rural setting represent human behavior as they go about their daily lives
Author: Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) Genre: Fantasy—animal fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Undefined Location: The vicinity of the Thames River First published: 1908 The Story The Wind in the Willows relates the adventures of four characters in a series of chapters, each of which forms a complete story focusing on one or more of the four. Together, the chapters, whose plot lines sometimes intermix, follow the adventures of Toad. Mole, a main character, abandons spring cleaning to stroll along the riverbank, where he meets the friendly Water Rat, who shows him the joys of “messing about in boats.” After some time, the two friends become involved with the third character, Toad, the rich owner of the palatial Toad Hall. The eccentric Toad persuades Mole and Rat to accompany him on a journey in his well-appointed gypsy caravan. This, however, is overturned when the horse pulling it bolts at the sight and sound of a motorcar. Mole and Rat are happy to return home safely; Toad, though, has acquired a fixation with motorcars. Across the river is the Wild Wood, inhabited by creatures that are vicious, except for the gruff, reclusive Badger, who lives underground in this area. Mole, exploring the Wood, gets lost, but he and his rescuer, Rat, find shelter with Badger. Toad’s adventures begin to appear in alternating chapters, forming a complete story of their own. Enamored of expensive motorcars, he wrecks one after another until his friends lock him in his bedroom to cure him of his mania. Through trickery, he escapes; he then steals a car and drives it off. Toad is apprehended and sent in chains to a dungeon, where, despondent, he mopes until the gaoler’s kind daughter suggests how he might
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escape disguised as the prison washerwoman. Next, he attempts to buy a train ticket to Toad Hall. Having no money, he persuades the engine driver to take him on. They are pursued by his gaolers, but the driver shows him mercy, and Toad is once again free after jumping from the train. Toad’s next encounter is with a real washerwoman on a barge. After discovering his identity, she throws him into the canal. To get even, he steals the horse that pulls her barge and rides it until he sells it to a gypsy for pocket money and breakfast. Still disguised as a washerwoman, Toad tries to hitch a ride in a passing motorcar. It is the same car he had been jailed for stealing. The occupants do not recognize the thief and even allow “her” to sit in the front seat and learn to drive. Recklessly, Toad admits to his true identity. After the car has overturned, he once more runs for his life. Fortunately, he ends up in the river and is rescued by Rat. All the main characters band together to regain Toad Hall for its rightful owner. In Toad’s absence, it had been taken over by weasels, stoats, and ferrets from the Wild Wood. The friends’ campaign, under the direction of Badger, is successful. The book ends with a gala celebration of the return of normality and the hoped-for reformation of Toad. Analysis In contrast to his earlier stories and tales featuring human children, Kenneth Grahame used animal characters to express his feelings and oftendichotomous views of his society. Their mother’s early death, followed by desertion by an alcoholic father, resulted in the Grahame children being shunted from family member to family member. Therefore, the concept of a stable, permanent home as a refuge from the world is important to each character. Food and shared meals also have symbolic pertinence.
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Denied by his uncle the Oxford University education he assumed would lead to a literary career, Grahame entered the world of banking. Although he rose to become secretary of the Bank of England, he retained resentment against the mercantilism of the time. Always the repressed bohemian, he counteracted the real world of encroaching blight and social upheaval by creating an Arcadian world in which loyalty and friendship are paramount, evil is readily recognized and ultimately overcome, and tranquillity through connectedness with nature reigns supreme. Several chapters are particularly relevant to understanding how Grahame worked out his inner conflicts in the novel. Attracted to the “Southern mystique,” he made many journeys to locales less strictly structured than his own. In “Wayfarers All,” Rat entertains a passing Sea Rat and, enthralled by the wanderer’s tales, is ready to start a new life by migrating. Mole, however, restrains him and effects a “cure” by encouraging him to write poetry instead. “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” is more complicated. Rat and Mole set out on the river to find Otter’s missing child, little Portly. Following the haunting music of pipes, they discover Portly sleeping between the hooves of Pan. They are in awe and actually “worship the Friend and Helper,” making clear Grahame’s deep spiritual commitment to pantheism. Grahame, a partner in an unhappy marriage, found solace in his son, Alastair. It was for the child that he ostensibly created this book, especially the adventures of Toad. He makes somewhat satirical reference in “The Return of Ulysses” to Homer’s The Odyssey, with the arming ceremony to retake Toad Hall and the battle with the inferior creatures. This reference illustrates how Grahame’s creation goes beyond being a simple bedtime story. A unique work, the book initially was not well received by critics. It has, however, remained a favorite of young readers whose imaginative powers enable them to identify with the adventures of the paternal Badger, the practical Mole, the dreamy Rat, and the irrepressible Toad. Furthermore, later critics, such as Peter Green in Beyond the Wild Wood: The World of Kenneth Grahame (1982), have recognized it as an accurate mirror of the tensions existing in post-Victorian society as cataclysmic social changes were stirring the wind in the willows. —Edythe M. McGovern
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Witch World In an alternative world where magic exists, an exiled soldier from Earth helps a matriarchal race of witches fight off invaders armed with technological weapons
Author: Andre Norton (1912) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The early 1950’s Location: An unnamed American city and the land of Estcarp in Witch World First published: 1963 The Story When World War II hero Simon Tregarth finds himself the quarry of a manhunt, a mysterious scientist offers him a strange escape: passage into an alternative dimension through the Siege Perilous. Tregarth doubts the power of a magical stone, but it transports him to another existence, where he encounters a fugitive like himself, running from an equally deadly if much more primitive manhunt. This self-reliant young woman cannot speak Tregarth’s language, but she appears to sense his good intentions and accepts his help. Together they escape the pursuers and rendezvous with a party of armed allies. These Guardsmen, led by exiled warrior Koris of Gorm, escort Tregarth and his female companion back to her homeland of Estcarp. In Estcarp, Tregarth learns that the power of this ancient land is founded not on the military might of its men but on the magical talent of its women. The fugitive he rescued is one of Estcarp’s “witches,” learned women who can combine mental powers with magic, providing they remain nameless and untouched by a man. Because of the fear these witches inspire, Estcarp finds itself besieged by its neighbors, Alizon and Karsten. To the west is a more ominous threat, the mysterious Kolder who have come from “oversea” to pillage the coast and make mindless slaves of its inhabitants. Tregarth gives his whole-hearted allegiance to the seemingly doomed land of Estcarp and becomes a Guardsman. The fight against the Kolder begins with a skirmish at the hold of Estcarp’s allies, the Sulcarmen sea traders. Kolder’s slaves appear from
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the air to take the keep, and the battle is lost despite the magical spells of Tregarth’s witch. When Estcarp’s evacuated forces are separated at sea, the nameless witch finds herself the captive of the sea-scavenging duchy of Verlaine. She befriends Loyse of Verlaine, a plain but strong-willed heiress. Disguised as a young warrior, Loyse successfully smuggles out the witch, and together they take refuge in Karsten. Meanwhile, Tregarth and Koris have washed ashore and are guided south to Karsten by a mental summons from Tregarth’s witch. They arrive in time to save the other fugitives from a Kolder-inspired eruption of genocide against the Old Race of Estcarp. This escalates the looming tension into full-scale war. During one skirmish with invading Kolder forces, Tregarth is captured and taken to the Kolder stronghold of Gorm. In a scientific laboratory, he evades the soul-destroying technology that the Kolder use to create their slaves and discovers that one machinelinked man runs the entire fortress. After Tregarth escapes and returns to Estcarp, the witches build a magical counterstrike around his understanding of the enemy’s technology. They successfully rout the Kolder. Koris of Gorm and Loyse of Verlaine pledge their troth, and the witch whom Simon rescued gives him the ultimate gift of trust and love: She tells him her name. Analysis Andre Norton has written more than 125 books, most of them adventure stories for young adults. Witch World is among the first of her novels to be marketed as a fantasy for adult readers. Although its simple narrative style is reminiscent of young adult novels, the inclusion of mature themes such as the witches’ vulnerability to rape marks this book as a distinct departure for Norton. Although Witch World is not the first of Norton’s books to give strong roles to women, at the time she wrote the novel she rarely used female narrators; Loyse of Verlaine narrates several chapters of Witch World. This book also marks the entrance of strong, unstereotyped female leads into action-adventure literature. Later books in the Witch World series emphasize the conflict between women’s sexual identities and their retention of magical power. Norton suggests that when sexual relations are forced upon women or are unwanted, women’s power is lost. When sexual attraction is allied to respect and love, however, her witches lose none of their magical talent but instead gain a comrade as well as a lover. This theme appears in Web of the Witch World (1964), a sequel to Witch World that begins in Simon Tregarth’s wedding bed as his witch-wife Jaelithe discovers that their sexual union has not destroyed her powers. It surfaces again in Sorceress
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of the Witch World (1968), in which a powerful young witch loses her magic after becoming infatuated with an untrustworthy magician. She regains her magical abilities only when she has regained her own selfrespect. The Witch World novel in which this theme is most apparent is Year of the Unicorn (1965). Its plot centers on the heroine Gillan’s struggle to preserve her identity and power. Gillan displays her initiative by choosing to leave an all-female religious sanctuary to join a group of brides bartered to the Were-riders, a male-dominated troop of warriors who can shape-change into animals. When her magical talent and strength threaten the male leaders, she is sundered into two parts: a traditionally female shadow-self and the tough and determined “real” Gillan. Her dogged persistence eventually allows her to reintegrate her sundered sexual and magical selves, triumphing over the animal brutality of the male world she has entered. Norton is not widely known as a feminist. In the Witch World series (containing more than twenty novels and collections of stories), she quietly explores women’s struggle against patriarchy, among other themes, and concludes that strength of character and self-respect are the keys to success. —Karen Rose Cercone
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Woman on the Edge of Time Connie Ramos either travels in time to the year 2137 or hallucinates her way out of the brutality of her treatment at Rockover State Psychiatric Hospital in 1976
Author: Marge Piercy (1936) Genre: Science fiction—feminist Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The 1970’s and 2137 Location: New York City and Mattapoisett, a village of the future First published: 1976 The Story Connie Ramos, a Chicana in her mid-thirties, finds herself, after a series of desperate acts, on the bad side of an uncaring and bureaucratic society. She has been placed in a New York psychiatric hospital for violence against her niece’s pimp, and there she begins a series of time travel episodes, or possibly hallucinations, that take her to the village of Mattapoisett in the year 2137 and to an alternative and less attractive future in Manhattan of the same year. Her guide to Mattapoisett is Luciente, an androgynous woman whom Connie first mistakes for a man because of her muscular arms and confident ways. Connie’s perceptions about the utopian community that unfold throughout the novel are filtered through her experiences with the sexism, ageism, racism, and unbridled capitalism of her own time. Mattapoisett, like other villages in the future, is a small community, with six hundred residents who have developed a strong ethic of cooperation of ecological awareness. In Mattapoisett, women have given up the power of childbirth so that men and women can “mother” children equally. Members of the community discuss every possible use of technology, choosing those that fill real needs and rejecting those that lead to excess and wastage of resources. The gene pool has been mixed consciously to eliminate races, and jobs are rotated to ensure that all members of the community have both meaningful work and also their share of the drudgery. The nuclear family has been abolished in favor of extended families of biologically unrelated people who all have their own private space but share child-rearing duties and sexual pleasures.
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In contrast to Mattapoisett is the future dystopia of New York, where Gildina, trapped in a high-tech but oddly dysfunctional windowless cubicle tries to show Connie, who has blundered badly in her time travel, an immediately recognizable but terrible version of the future. In Gildina’s world, no one goes outside; it is too polluted. The wealthy have gone to live on space stations, and those on Earth have been placed in a rigid hierarchy of socially engineered stereotypes. Violence, pornography, and constant monitoring are the norm. New York of the future is a mechanical and joyless world—the opposite of Luciente’s nearly rural community. Connie’s experiences in the future are alternated with a close description of her life in the mental wards. In addition to the everyday humiliations of the institutionalized, she has been chosen for an experiment in which doctors try to control her violent impulses by putting electrodes in her brain. In an attempt to find a cost-effective way to treat violent patients, the doctors have embarked on an arrogant, Frankensteinian quest to subdue what they cannot understand. In the end, Connie can no longer passively endure her “medical treatment.” With mental strength gained from her visions of the future, she declares war on her oppressors. Using parathion stolen on a furlough to her brother’s house at Thanksgiving, Connie poisons her doctors’ coffee, killing four of them before they have a chance to reinstall the electrodes in her brain. This is only a partial victory, as the novel ends with her admission to the New York Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, where the reader knows that she will have much need of Luciente and the solace of her future world. Analysis Marge Piercy is a novelist and poet who has never seen a conflict between the demands of art and the realities of politics. Woman on the Edge of Time, like many of her other, more mainstream works, addresses most of the burning issues of the 1970’s: racism, poverty, war, ecology, and, most emphatically, men’s and women’s roles in American society. What is intriguing about Piercy’s novel is the ambiguity of presentation that allows for two interpretations of Connie’s experience. If Connie is insane, then the novel is, like Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), a mainstream novel of social commentary. If, however, Connie is truly time traveling, a view easily supported by the text, then the novel is, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a feminist work of science fiction. What is certain in the novel is that the village of Mattapoisett is a per-
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fectly constructed antidote of the injustices that Connie has suffered in the present. Whether Luciente actually exists or is a Thorazine-induced fantasy, she offers Connie a vision of the way things should be that enables her to fight the way things are. The macho ideal that brutalizes both Connie and the men in her life is replaced in Mattapoisett with an androgynous ethos that allows women to be strong and men to be caring. The racism that oppresses Connie at every turn is erased by a few generations of genetic engineering. Connie’s “insanity” is viewed by Luciente as a gift, and Connie’s passive receptivity makes her an honored “catcher” in the eyes of the future. This is clearly a utopia tailormade to correct the ills of Connie’s present life. In the same way, Gildina’s world is a natural and frightening extension of modern bureaucratic society, with its exaggerated sexual differences, its reliance on machines and gadgets, its obsession with consumerism, and its complete lack of sensitivity to the earth. In addition, Gildina’s world is an effective parody of much of modern science fiction, which often seems to argue that the answers to human problems lie in quick and painless technological fixes. Woman on the Edge of Time argues instead that the modern world is at a critical crossroads; it also suggests that the answers for the future may not come from the self-important doctors but from the suffering patients. —Cynthia Lee Katona
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Dorothy and her dog are carried away by a cyclone to the wonderful and sometimes perilous Land of Oz
Author: L(yman) Frank Baum (1856-1919) Genre: Fantasy—high fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: About 1900 Location: Kansas and the Land of Oz First published: 1900 The Story The story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is known to countless millions worldwide because of the motion picture version of the story, The Wizard of Oz (1939), starring Judy Garland. Although Garland was considerably older than the Dorothy in the book and her adventures are dismissed as a dream, the film is otherwise reasonably faithful to L. Frank Baum’s novel. A cyclone carries Dorothy and her dog Toto from bleak Kansas to the colorful Land of Oz, then drops their house on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. The Munchkins, who regard Dorothy as a witch herself, are so grateful to her for killing the witch who tormented and enslaved them that they offer Dorothy all the help they can. They advise her to put on the dead witch’s silver slippers, which have magical properties. Dorothy’s chief motivation throughout the story is to get back to her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em in Kansas. She is told to follow a road of yellow brick that will take her to the Emerald City, home of the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard, Dorothy is told, should know how to get her home. Along the road of yellow brick, Dorothy encounters the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Each asks to accompany Dorothy to the Emerald City. The Scarecrow wants to ask the Wizard for a brain, the Tin Woodman wants to ask for a heart, and the Cowardly Lion wants to ask for courage. After some misadventures, they reach the Emerald City. The Wizard tells Dorothy that he will use his magic powers to send her back to Kansas only if she kills the Wicked Witch of the West, and he informs her three companions that he will grant their requests only if they help Dorothy fulfill her mission. The Wicked Witch of the West sends wolves, wild crows, and finally
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L. Frank Baum. (Library of Congress)
winged monkeys to attack the adventurers. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion are captured, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are left for dead. At the Wicked Witch’s castle, Dorothy is made a household slave. The witch steals one of Dorothy’s silver slippers, but when she tries to pull the other slipper off the little girl’s foot, Dorothy throws a bucket of water at her. The Wicked Witch of the West is vulnerable only to water. She melts, and Dorothy retrieves her silver slipper, still unaware of how to use the magic powers of the slippers. When the adventurers return to the Emerald City, they discover that the Wizard is a fraud, possessing no magic powers at all. The fake Wizard manages to satisfy the requests of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion by assuring them that they already possess and
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have actually displayed the attributes they believed they were lacking. The Wizard, however, is unable to satisfy Dorothy’s wish to return to Kansas, although he himself is wafted away in a hot-air balloon. Dorothy is advised to visit Glinda, the Witch of the South, who is good and kind. Accompanied by her three friends, Dorothy makes her way through new perils to the Country of the Quadlings and the Castle of Glinda. The beautiful Glinda tells her that the silver slippers have the power to transport their wearer to anyplace in the world. Dorothy kisses her three friends good-bye and asks the slippers to carry her back to Kansas. She is carried off in a whirlwind and finds herself in front of the new home that Uncle Henry built to replace the old one. Dorothy has lost the silver slippers in her flight, but she is overjoyed to be home again. Analysis Baum was obviously indebted to the eccentric English genius Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). In Victorian times it was generally believed that books for children should lean heavily on moral instruction. The authors of juvenile literature often intruded into their own stories to point out the moral lessons the stories supposedly illustrated. Carroll believed that children were given too much moral indoctrination and were not allowed to be children. His books about Alice parodied sententious, sanctimonious adults, and he proclaimed that good books should be full of pictures and should be fun to read. Baum offered a further innovation by combining the traditional elements of fairy tales, such as witches and wizards, with familiar things such as scarecrows and cornfields. He is credited with teaching children to find magic in the ordinary things surrounding them in their daily lives. Although Baum may not have offered much in the way of moral instruction in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or its sequels, he accomplished something more important: He taught millions of children to love reading during their crucial formative years. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was such a phenomenal success that Baum was called upon to produce numerous sequels. After his death in 1919, his publishers commissioned Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue writing sequels. Baum’s original Oz book, his thirteen sequels, and the twenty-one sequels written by Thompson comprise the history of an enchanted land that children continue to discover with the feeling that they have gained possession of something as marvelous as Aladdin’s lamp. —Bill Delaney
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The Worm Ouroboros An epic struggle between the forces of good from Demonland and the armies of evil King Gorice XII of Witchland
Author: E(ric) R(ucker) Eddison (1882-1945) Genre: Fantasy—heroic fantasy Type of work: Novel Time of plot: Undefined, on another world Location: Mercury First published: 1922 The Story In The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison tells the tale of Lord Juss and his quests as well as of the battles between the lords of Demonland and King Gorice and his minions from Witchland. The novel begins somewhat awkwardly, in an idyllic English country home of a man named Lessingham. Within the house is the Lotus Room, a magical place that allows the sleeper access to faraway lands. One evening, Lessingham journeys to the planet Mercury and to Juss’s castle in Demonland. Lessingham’s Mercury has nothing to do with the real planet. It is populated by many peoples, and it has numerous kingdoms, including Demonland, Goblinland, Witchland, Impland, and Pixeyland. The horrible Ghouls have recently been destroyed by the Demons. Juss is lord of Demonland. He and his brothers, Goldry Bluszco and Spitfire, are noble aristocrats, along with Brandoch Daha. Their calling in life is that of glorious battle. Witchland is the opponent, ruled by a line of kings all named Gorice. Gorice XI and Gorice XII are the foils in The Worm Ouroboros. In this fantasy world, which echoes medieval feudalism, the plot turns on the demand of the kings of Witchland for recognition by the rulers of Demonland and the other lands as their overlord or high king. A delegation has been sent by Gorice XI to Lord Juss’s court, demanding homage. Juss refuses, and Goldry Bluszco subsequently defeats and kills Gorice XI in single combat. In his castle keep at Carce, the new king of Witchland, Gorice XII, seeks revenge and turns to the dark power of magic to defeat Goblinland. A great serpent-dragon, the worm Ouroboros, the worm of the pit, the serpent who eats his own tail, is summoned.
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In the resulting attack on the Demons, Goldry disappears. In a dream, Juss glimpses that Goldry is not dead but is held enchanted in the wilds of Outer Impland. Joined by Brandoch Daha, and after encountering many dangers, Juss discovers Queen Sophonisba, who was magically transported to the great mountain of Koshtra Belorn at the age of seventeen. She has been there for the past 230 years. Juss learns that Goldry can be freed only by the aid of a fantastic beast, a hippogriff. Juss and Brandoch Daha initially fail to find Goldry. In the meantime, forces from Witchland invade and lay waste to Demonland. Juss returns in time to prevent Gorice XII’s final victory. Juss makes a second journey to Impland, this time successfully freeing Goldry Bluszco, and then leads the invasion of the Demons into Witchland. Facing defeat, Gorice XII again turns to magic, but this time it destroys him. The Demons have won. Juss and his friends celebrate their victory. Peace and beauty have returned to Demonland, and Queen Sophonisba joins in the festivities. The triumph over the Witches somehow pales. Without Gorice XII and without battle, the Demons’ world becomes a hollow land and theirs an empty life. Queen Sophonisba, with her ancient wisdom, understands their longing and asks whether they would wish the past restored. They assent, and the novel concludes with Gorice XI’s delegation once again at Juss’s castle, demanding homage. Analysis Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros is a link between the late nineteenth century fantasy novels of William Morris and the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. Published shortly after the end of World War I, Eddison’s work is an obvious rejection of the reality of the carnage of modern war as experienced in the trenches of no-man’s-land and illustrated by its ten million dead. Eddison’s paradigm was an idealized medieval world, which his imagination relocated to a faraway planet. The story ostensibly is set on Mercury but reflects Eddison’s romanticized view of the European Middle Ages, during which the ruling class—the forerunners of Juss and Brandoch Daha—found their highest obligation and reward in the act and art of war. The language Eddison uses to create his fantasy is also of a fictionalized medieval era. The style is archaic, or neo-archaic, and the choice of words and even the spelling strike the reader as coming from the seventeenth century or before. In particular, the author weaves a captivating, almost hypnotic spell in his descriptions, not only of landscapes but also of the appearance of his heroes, their garb, and the decor of their castles.
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Most of the figures are archetypes: Juss, the questing leader; Brandoch Daha, the impulsive warrior; and Gorice XII, the villainous necromancer. The characters are not complex, and their actions fall within the predictable parameters of the heroic fantasy genre. The same is true of the women: Queen Sophonisba, Lady Prezmyra of Witchland, and Lady Mevrian of Demonland. The exception is Lord Gro, who was born in Goblinland but has joined the court of Gorice in Witchland. Although he is the chief adviser to Gorice, because of his earlier desertion he remains an outsider, trusted by no one. He finally abandons Gorice and the Witches, offering his services to Juss’s Demons, partially as the result of his unrequited love for Lady Mevrian. Gro is the only figure who lacks conviction about himself and his cause. He is the figure who perhaps represents the lost generation of the postwar world. Even Gro will again be made to walk upon the stage of Witchland and Demonland. It could be argued that Ouroboros, the serpent who eats his own tail, represents the nihilistic destructive power of modern war, but Ouroboros also symbolizes the myth of eternal return. That myth is at the heart of Eddison’s enduring novel, which gives the reader, like Lessingham, an opportunity to fall asleep in the Lotus Room and escape from the limitations of the present to faraway lands of fantasy. —Eugene Larson
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A Wrinkle in Time Although she travels beyond time and space, Meg Murry finds that she must look within in order to locate the only force strong enough to save her little brother’s life
Author: Madeleine L’Engle (Madeleine Camp, 1918Genre: Fantasy—time travel Type of work: Novel Time of plot: The late 1950’s Location: A small town in the United States First published: 1962
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The Story Madeleine L’Engle’s view of the universe was changed by the work of such well-known physicists as Albert Einstein and Max Planck. She expressed her new perspective in A Wrinkle in Time, a heroic adventure in which evil authoritarianism is challenged by love and human individuality. The book is very different from L’Engle’s six previous novels; she hoped it would take her career in an exciting new direction. Therefore, she was especially disappointed that, after two years, none of the many publishers to whom she sent the book wanted to publish it. L’Engle loved the book but came to believe that it was too peculiar ever to be published. Even the publisher who eventually accepted it warned L’Engle not to be disappointed if it did not do well. In 1963, to everyone’s surprise, A Wrinkle in Time won the prestigious Newbery Medal. The story opens in the Murrys’ kitchen, where Meg, her mother, and her little brother are eating sandwiches. Although bright, Meg is a misfit in high school, scholastically as well as socially. This day has been even more difficult than most: Meg got into a fistfight defending her “dumb baby brother.” Five-year-old Charles Wallace is unusual, but with his amazing telepathic powers, he is anything but dumb. Both Mr. and Mrs. Murry are Ph.D. scientists. Mrs. Murry experiments in her biology laboratory, located near the kitchen. Mr. Murry is “away”; he disappeared mysteriously a year earlier while working on a top-secret government physics project. Townspeople give Meg knowing looks when she insists that her father will come back someday—one more reason Meg does not fit in, which she desperately wants to do.
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A bundled-up old woman, Mrs. Whatsit, appears in the kitchen as if she belongs there. She astounds Mrs. Murry with the casual mention of a “tesseract,” a concept on which Mr. and Mrs. Murry had been working in great secrecy. The tesseract is a way to “wrinkle” time in order to transcend it and travel through space. Under the guidance of Mrs. Whatsit and her two cohorts, Meg soon experiences the tesseract at firsthand. With Charles Wallace and Calvin, a strangely supportive acquaintance from school who shows up unexpectedly, Meg journeys into an alternative reality to try to find her father. The young people first travel to a planet where they are shown an evil shadow trying to take over stars and planets. This is the force that holds Meg’s father prisoner. They are also shown a planet made entirely of love. Eventually, the three young people arrive at the dark planet of Camazotz, where people have no individuality. Although Meg is repelled by the regimented life, she also finds it strangely comforting because she has not yet examined her desire to conform. The young people find Mr. Murry imprisoned on Camazotz; to free him, they must confront the evil IT. Meg is able to resist IT and escapes to another planet with Calvin and her father, but IT takes hold of Charles Wallace’s mind, and he must be left behind. Because her long-idolized father is not able to make everything right, Meg blames him and falls into despair. With some help from those she has met on the journey, Meg finally is able to transcend her fear and selfpity to realize that saving Charles Wallace is to be her job. To do so, Meg must learn what real love is and how to use it as a weapon against the evil IT. She successfully accomplishes both tasks. Meg and Charles Wallace, with Mr. Murry and Calvin, journey through the tesseract back to the Murrys’ garden. No time has passed, so neither Mrs. Murry nor the ten-year-old twins, Dennys and Sandy, realize they were gone. Meg returns a changed person, experiencing a sense of real love that transcends the more familiar forms—social, romantic, and familial—and ready to embrace whatever the future has in store. Analysis A Wrinkle in Time and two later books, A Wind in the Door (1973) and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), compose what is known as the Time Trilogy. Unlike typical trilogy volumes intended to be read consecutively, these books, though integrated, are independent. Each centers on the Murry family, and the importance of both individual initiative and family interaction is a thematic thread. L’Engle made both the Murry adults highly talented, both intellectually and scientifically. This was atypical of fic-
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tion published in the 1950’s, when the book was written. Female characters rarely were featured as intellectuals or scientists. L’Engle has been praised for this departure as well as for her creation of strong female characters. Critics even suggested that in making Meg the protagonist in A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle opened the door for the many female protagonists who have appeared in more recent fantasy and science fiction. Most people know L’Engle as a novelist who writes for children and young people. She says, however, that she writes for anyone who is still able to hear and understand the truths to which many adults have closed their minds. A Wrinkle in Time, the best known of her more than forty books, still delights readers decades after its original publication. In addition to the Newbery Medal, it received the American Library Association Notable Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. L’Engle’s fiction for young readers is considered important partly because she was among the first to focus directly on the deep, delicate issues that young people must face, such as death, social conformity, and truth. L’Engle’s work always is uplifting because she is able to look at the surface values of life from a perspective of wholeness, both joy and pain, transcending each to uncover the absolute nature of human experience that they share. Critics have noted the many religious images in L’Engle’s work. In A Wrinkle in Time, for example, Meg receives as a gift a few lines from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians about empowering the weak. L’Engle, however, resists being categorized as a Christian writer. Writing fantasy is her way to approach the mysteries of the universe, to perceive the orderly patterns in nature that underlie what sometimes seems to be the chaos of daily life. If a writer’s faith is genuine, she believes, it will shine through her art. Some critics have called L’Engle’s writing pedantic or uneven. In fiction, as in her life, L’Engle is always ready to ignore facts in order to uncover truth and beauty. Facts end, she believes, but stories are infinite. L’Engle views the genre of fantasy as an essential antidote to the negative effects of mainstream education on young people. She has been instrumental in leading the way for other writers of fantasy who want to focus on matters of spirituality for children. Because L’Engle writes about concepts that matter to all human beings, however, her devoted audience ranges from the very young to the very old. L’Engle once explained that whenever she had something to say that was too difficult conceptually, philosophically, or scientifically for the average adult to read, she created a young protagonist and wrote a book for children. —Jean C. Fulton
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Xenogenesis An alien race of genetic engineers, the Oankali, seeks to rehabilitate Earth by transforming human beings into a new species that could avoid destroying itself through violence and overspecialization
Author: Octavia E. Butler (1947) Genre: Science fiction—alien civilization Type of work: Novels Time of plot: The twenty-fourth century, with flashbacks Location: Various locations on Earth and aboard spaceships First published: Xenogenesis (1989, as trilogy); previously published as Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) The Story By definition, xenogenesis is the derivation of one species from members of another species. Such is the mission of the Oankali, an extraterrestrial race of genetic engineers whose activities link the three novels composing this trilogy. In the course of ensuring their own survival by interbreeding with other species and thereby bringing varieties of life to thousands of worlds, the Oankali find and capture a few human survivors of Earth’s devastating wars. As gene traders characterized by their extraordinary sensitivities, their abhorrence of violence, and their profound appreciation of all life-forms, the Oankali thereafter seek to make Earth habitable once again. In so doing, they confront what they perceive as the Human Contradiction: the high intelligence of human beings countered by their inherited hierarchical behavior, a combination that, if left unaltered, ensures the ultimate wastage of all the planet’s life, humans included. Dawn, the opening novel of the trilogy, recounts the Oankali’s genetic manipulation of Lilith Iyapo. This proceeds under the aegis of an Oankali named Jdahya, who to Lilith is initially a horrific creature. Nevertheless, through 250 years of transforming Lilith, the Oankali offer her and her partially human offspring a lengthier life, free of disease and with self-healing capacities, and rich in diversity, either on Mars or aboard a spaceship. Lilith appears in all three novels both as a pioneer in the Oankali ex-
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periment and, transformed, as an earth mother to a new breed. Lilith’s and her Oankali family’s offspring, principally Akin and his siblings, are the focus in Adulthood Rites. Resolution of the emotional and intellectual strains faced by the new, partly human Oankali race, their interactions with resisting humans on Earth, and their ultimate decision, despite its dangers, to replant life on Earth are the subject of Imago. In this third novel, Octavia Butler describes the maturation of the Oankali-bred race, which nevertheless incorporates elements of Lilith’s original human qualities: adaptability, a sense of adventure, and the need to quest. Analysis Butler has won both the prestigious Hugo Award, representing the accolade of her fans, and the Nebula Award, from professional sciencefiction writers. She is one of the most literate, sensitive, and imaginative authors in her chosen fields. In Xenogenesis, as in several of her sciencefiction novels, including Kindred (1979) and Wild Seed (1980), there are important recurrent themes or messages other than her basic strictures against—and depictions of—the devastation of Earthly life as a consequence of human greed, rapacity, and violence. In Xenogenesis, Butler emphasizes, through characterization of her alien race of Oankali, the inexpressible value of all forms of life and the equally vital importance of diversity—not only in regard to biological species but also in regard to racial, sexual, and cultural pluralism. As an African American woman, she perhaps brings particular insights into these issues. Unlike many traditional science-fiction tales that emphasize hostile alien invasions of Earth, Xenogenesis stresses the vastly superior intelligence and wisdom of the Oankali and the almost benign, patient, and tolerant manner in which they present their proposals for salvaging life on Earth. Despite the near destruction of Lilith Iyapo’s world, it is difficult for her and for others of human origin to adapt to Oankali offers for an extended, disease-free life in a transformed state on Mars or in the Oankali spaceships. To her human eyes, the Oankali—particularly the third sex known as ooloi—are physically hideous, as are their new multipartner mating procedures. Lilith and others must use these procedures to produce hybrid offspring. Almost imperceptibly over time, however, she perceives the beauty of Oankali life-affirming values, understands their incapacity (despite their great potential lethal power) to give pain (for in giving it, they fully share the pain themselves), and comprehends their need to decide by consensus. Butler’s juxtaposing of Oankali ways with the Human Contradiction boldly underscores the
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weaknesses that have brought such misery into human lives: racial and cultural intolerance, hierarchical divisions, overspecialization, intellectual myopia, the lust for power, and an addiction to violence. As gene traders who evince none of these failings and who ensure their own evolution by breeding with other life-forms, Butler’s Oankali contrast sharply with the ordinarily parochial, Earth-destroying humans. Xenogenesis consequently functions well at two levels. As straightforward science fiction, it depicts a plausible alien race, replete with ingenious descriptions of its varied appearances, purposes, and technologies. For example, Oankali spaceships are life-forms themselves that feed on everything, recycle everything, and produce no wastes. In this context, Xenogenesis is an engaging adventure story that proceeds across several generations of humans, hybrids, and aliens busily interacting and testing their fortunes between Earth and space. Moreover, there is ample suspense as Butler presents Lilith and her progeny with hard decisions—classic Faustian decisions—about abandoning Earth. The Oankali believe Earth is doomed, so Lilith and her descendants must choose whether to stay on that planet or assume new lives under more propitious (though not human) conditions on Mars or aboard the Oankali’s living spaceships. On a different plane, Butler has written without didacticism a morality tale about the glory and sadness of being human and about improved methods of survival and moral opportunities that one day could be exploited by more open minds and warmer hearts. —Mary E. Virginia
602
Zothique A series of ornate fantasies set in the final period of Earth’s Decadence
Author: Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) Genre: Fantasy—magical world Type of work: Stories Time of plot: The distant future Location: Zothique First published: 1970 The Story In “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), two magicians conjure themselves an empire out of the dust of the ages and the corpses of the ancient dead, but their despotic rule leads to bloody rebellion by their subjects. The eponymous hero of “The Voyage of King Euvoran” (1933) offends a necromancer and is punished by the loss of his remarkable crown, which is carried away by the fabulous bird whose feathers topped it. Misled by an apparently favorable oracle, the king goes in quest of his lost crown but finds instead a peculiarly apt humiliation. In “Xeethra” (1934), a goat-boy strays into the underworld of the dark god Thasaidon, where he eats a magical fruit that makes him conscious of a former existence as a king. He finds his kingdom desolate and sells his soul in order to enter a dream in which its lost glory is restored to him, agreeing to surrender it if ever he regrets his estate. When Thasaidon contrives to seduce the all-important moment of regret, the anguish of his loss becomes his hell. In “The Dark Eidolon” (1935), a necromancer defies his supernatural protector in order to carry forward his vendetta against a king who abused him in his youth. The story reaches its destructive climax in a literal feast of horrors. In “Necromancy in Naat” (1936), the sole survivor of a shipwreck, a prince who has been searching for his lost love, is pressed into the service of a family of necromancers. He is reunited with the downed crew of the ship and his similarly resurrected loved one. He joins a plot by which the two sons of the family hope to usurp their father, but it goes gruesomely wrong. The prince is killed, and the last necromancer com-
Zothique
603
mits suicide, leaving the resurrected servants to find a “ghostly comfort” in their liberation. “The Isle of the Torturers” (1933) is an account of a sadistic orgy whose victim eventually wins a Pyrrhic victory over his tormentors. “The Witchcraft of Ulua” (1934) and “The Death of Ilalotha” (1937) are intense erotic fantasies featuring malevolent femmes fatales. The necrophilia of the latter tale is echoed in “The Charnel God” (1934), in which a young man must save his cataleptic fiancé from the priests of the dark god Mordiggian. The collection also contains “The Weaver in the Vault” (1934), “The Tomb-Spawn” (1934), “The Last Hieroglyph” (1935), “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” (1936), “The Garden of Adompha” (1938), “The Master of the Crabs” (1948), and “Morthylla” (1953). Analysis The name Zothique probably is derived from Arthur Rimbaud’s Album dit “Zutique” (written c. 1872). “Zutique” derives, in its turn, from the French expletive zut!, which is approximately parallel to such English expressions as “to hell with you!” The Zothique stories certainly are hellish. They display, more clearly than any of his other works, Clark Ashton Smith’s debt to the French Decadent movement inspired by Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. They represent, in fact, one logical terminus of the quest defined by Baudelaire in the anguished prose-poem in which the poet’s soul—echoing Edgar Allan Poe—demands that it be taken “Anywhere out of the World” (1857). Because Smith’s “Hyperborean grotesques” were set in the distant past, the viewpoint of stories set there had to accept that the dominion of Chaos ultimately would be displaced by Order. The world of “the last continent” of Zothique, on the other hand, has no future. Science and civilization are gone forever and utterly forgotten; everything that happens is a mere prelude to humankind’s final annihilation. Consequently, Zothique became the setting in which Smith gave fullest expression to his images of ultimate decadence. A few of the Zothique stories do contain an element of irony, in much the same vein as Smith’s tales of Hyperborea, the most notable example being “The Voyage of King Euvoran.” The elegiac “Morthylla” plays host to a plaintive note of sentimentality, whereas “The Isle of Torturers” may be reckoned one of Smith’s exercises in literary pastiche by virtue of its echoes of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (1842) and the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s “The Torture of Hope” (c. 1885). The majority of the Zothique stories, however, are unrestrained melodramas replete with exotic violence and cruelty, set in ornate surroundings reminiscent
604
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
of the most extravagant paintings of the French Decadent artist Gustave Moreau. The best tales of Zothique—which include “The Empire of the Necromancers,” “The Witchcraft of Ulua,” “The Dark Eidolon,” “Xeethra,” and “Necromancy in Naat”—possess an unparalleled dramatic surge that carries them to their devastating conclusions. They are frequently erotic, but their eroticism is usually perverse and rarely finds any fulfillment save for destruction. The sadistic and erotic elements in the stories were sufficient to warrant some censorship by their initial publishers. The full texts of “The Witchcraft of Ulua” and “Xeethra” are restored in the Necronomicon Press series of the unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith (six volumes, 1987-1988), but the original text of “Necromancy in Naat” was lost. The quasi-pornographic features of the most extravagant stories represent a determined effort to confront and make manageable the most disturbing products of the imagination. In these stories, the most awful and terrifying creations of delirium and anxiety are submitted to the command of a rigorous literary imagination. In stories of this kind, the possibility of a happy ending is utterly out of the question; they ought not to be considered as tragedies, or even as horror stories, because no fate really can be considered tragic or horrific if it cannot possibly be avoided. It is in the images of suffering—of death-in-life or hell-in-life— contained in “Xeethra” and “Necromancy in Naat” that Smith reached the culmination of his trafficking with nightmares. There is nothing in the vast spectrum of fantasy fiction to match these tales in either their ambition or their execution. —Brian Stableford
605
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards This appendix lists recipients of science fiction and fantasy*s most prestigious awards. Each section includes a description of the award and a chronological presentation of the winners in the best novel category for each accolade (except for awards specifically for shorter fiction or other types of work), giving the year in which the book qualified for the award (usually the year of first publication in book or serial form), the year the award was given (in parentheses), the name of the recipient, and the title of the work being honored. Winners of awards for short fiction generally are not included. Lifetime achievement awards mention only the year in which the presentation was made. The list is adapted from various editions of Robert Reginald*s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (1981, 1991, 1993, 1996) and is used by permission of The Borgo Press.
—Robert Reginald THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD The Arthur C. Clarke Award honors the best science-fiction novel published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. Selections are made by a panel of judges, including elected representatives from the British Science Fiction Association, the International Science Policy Foundation, and the Science Fiction Foundation. The award is presented annually in April at a special ceremony held in London, England. 1986 (1987)
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid*s Tale
1987 (1988)
George Turner
The Sea and Summer
1988 (1989)
Rachel Pollack
Unquenchable Fire
1989 (1990)
Geoff Ryman
The Child Garden
1990 (1991)
Colin Greenland
Take Back Plenty
1991 (1992)
Pat Cadigan
Synners
1992 (1993)
Marge Piercy
Body of Glass
1993 (1994)
Jeff Noon
Vurt
1994 (1995)
Pat Cadigan
Fools
1995 (1996)
Paul J. McAuley
Fairyland
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
606 1996 (1997)
Amitav Ghosh
The Calcutta Chromosome
1997 (1998)
Mary Doria Russell
The Sparrow
1998 (1999)
Tricia Sullivan
Dreaming in Smoke
1999 (2000)
Bruce Sterling
Distraction
2000 (2001)
China Miéville
Perdido Street Station
THE BRITISH FANTASY AWARD This accolade, also called the August Derleth Award, honors the best fantasy novel published in Great Britain during the preceding year and is presented by the British Fantasy Society at its convention in September. 1971 (1972)
Michael Moorcock
The Knight of the Swords
1972 (1973)
Michael Moorcock
The King of the Swords
1973 (1974) 1974 (1975)
Poul Anderson Michael Moorcock
Hrolf Kraki*s Saga The Sword and the Stallion
1975 (1976)
Michael Moorcock
The Hollow Lands
1976 (1977)
Gordon R. Dickson
The Dragon and the George
1977 (1978)
Piers Anthony
A Spell for Chameleon
1978 (1979)
Stephen R. Donaldson
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
1979 (1980)
Tanith Lee
Death*s Master
1980 (1981)
Ramsey Campbell
To Wake the Dead
1981 (1982)
Stephen King
Cujo
1982 (1983)
Gene Wolfe
The Sword of the Lictor
1983 (1984) 1984 (1985)
Peter Straub Ramsey Campbell
Floating Dragons Incarnate
1985 (1986)
T. E. D. Klein
The Ceremonies
1986 (1987)
Stephen King
It
1987 (1988)
Ramsey Campbell
The Hungry Moon
1988 (1989)
Ramsey Campbell
The Influence
1989 (1990)
Dan Simmons
Carrion Comfort
1990 (1991)
Ramsey Campbell
Midnight Sun
1991 (1992)
Jonathan Carroll
Outside the Dog Museum
1992 (1993)
Graham Joyce
Dark Sister
1993 (1994)
Ramsey Campbell
The Long Lost
1994 (1995)
Michael Marshall Smith Only Forward
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
607
1995 (1996)
Graham Joyce
Requiem
1996 (1997)
Graham Joyce
The Tooth Fairy
1997 (1998)
Chaz Brenchley
Tower of the King’s Daughter
1998 (1999)
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
1999 (2000) 2000 (2001)
Graham Joyce China Miéville
Indigo Perdido Street Station
THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION AWARD This award honors the best science-fiction novel published in Great Britain during the preceding year and is sponsored by the British Science Fiction Association. Presentations are made annually at England*s National Science Fiction Convention, Eastercon, usually held in April. 1969 (1970)
John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar
1970 (1971)
John Brunner
The Jagged Orbit
1971 (1972)
Brian W. Aldiss
The Moment of Eclipse
1972 (1973)
No award given
1973 (1974)
Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama
1974 (1975)
Bob Shaw
Orbitsville
1975 (1976)
Christopher Priest
Inverted World
1976 (1977)
Michael G. Coney
Brontomek!
1977 (1978)
Ian Watson
The Jonah Kit
1978 (1979)
Philip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly
1979 (1980)
J. G. Ballard
The Unlimited Dream Company
1980 (1981)
Gregory Benford
Timescape
1981 (1982)
Gene Wolfe
The Shadow of the Torturer
1982 (1983)
Brian W. Aldiss
Helliconia Spring
1983 (1984)
John Sladek
Tik-Tok
1984 (1985)
Robert Holdstock
Mythago Wood
1985 (1986)
Brian W. Aldiss
Helliconia Winter
1986 (1987)
Bob Shaw
The Ragged Astronauts
1987 (1988)
Keith Roberts
Gráinne
1988 (1989)
Robert Holdstock
Lavondyss
1989 (1990)
Terry Pratchett
Pyramids
1990 (1991)
Colin Greenland
Take Back Plenty
1991 (1992)
Dan Simmons
The Fall of Hyperion
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
608 1992 (1993)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars
1993 (1994)
Christopher Evans
Aztec Century
1994 (1995)
Iain M. Banks
Feersum Endjinn
1995 (1996)
Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships
1996 (1997)
Iain M. Banks
Excession
1997 (1998)
Mary Doria Russell
The Sparrow
1998 (1999)
Christopher Priest
The Extremes
1999 (2000)
Ken MacLeod
The Sky Road
2000 (2001)
Mary Gentle
Ash: A Secret History
THE HUGO AWARD/JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD Originally called the Science Fiction Achievement Award, this oldest and most prestigious of science-fiction awards honors the best science-fiction novel published during the preceding year. The Hugos were first presented at the Philadelphia World Science Fiction Convention in 1953, were dropped in 1954, and were established permanently in 1955. The awards are decided by a mail vote of attending and supporting members of each World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) and presented annually at that gathering, usually held on (or within several weekends of) the Labor Day weekend at the beginning of September. The John W. Campbell Award, which is presented at the same convention, was created to honor the best new author in the science-fiction field for the preceding two years.
The Hugo Award The Demolished Man
1952 (1953)
Alfred Bester
1953 (1954)
No award given
1954 (1955)
Frank Riley and Mark Clifton
They*d Rather Be Right
1955 (1956)
Robert A. Heinlein
Double Star
1956 (1957)
No award given
1957 (1958)
Fritz Leiber
The Big Time
1958 (1959)
James Blish
A Case of Conscience
1959 (1960)
Robert A. Heinlein
Starship Troopers
1960 (1961)
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
1961 (1962)
Robert A. Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
609
1962 (1963)
Philip K. Dick
The Man in the High Castle
1963 (1964)
Clifford D. Simak
Here Gather the Stars [book title: Way Station]
1964 (1965)
Fritz Leiber
The Wanderer
1965 (1966) [tie]
Roger Zelazny
And Call Me Conrad [book title: The Dream Master]
Frank Herbert
Dune
1966 (1967)
Robert A. Heinlein
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
1967 (1968)
Roger Zelazny
Lord of Light
1968 (1969)
John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar
1969 (1970)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
1970 (1971)
Larry Niven
Ringworld
1971 (1972)
Philip José Farmer
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
1972 (1973)
Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves
1973 (1974)
Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama
1974 (1975)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed
1975 (1976)
Joe Haldeman
The Forever War
1976 (1977)
Kate Wilhelm
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
1977 (1978)
Frederik Pohl
Gateway
1978 (1979)
Vonda N. McIntyre
Dreamsnake
1979 (1980)
Arthur C. Clarke
The Fountains of Paradise
1980 (1981)
Joan D. Vinge
The Snow Queen
1981 (1982)
C. J. Cherryh
Downbelow Station
1982 (1983)
Isaac Asimov
Foundation*s Edge
1983 (1984)
David Brin
Startide Rising
1984 (1985)
William Gibson
Neuromancer
1985 (1986)
Orson Scott Card
Ender*s Game
1986 (1987)
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
1987 (1988)
David Brin
The Uplift War
1988 (1989)
C. J. Cherryh
Cyteen
1989 (1990)
Dan Simmons
Hyperion
1990 (1991)
Lois McMaster Bujold
The Vor Game
1991 (1992)
Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar
1992 (1993) [tie]
Vernor Vinge
A Fire upon the Deep
Connie Willis
Doomsday Book
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
610
Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars
1994 (1995)
Lois McMaster Bujold
Mirror Dance
1995 (1996)
Neal Stephenson
The Diamond Age
1996 (1997)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Blue Mars
1997 (1998)
Joe Haldeman
Forever Peace
1998 (1999)
Connie Willis
To Say Nothing of the Dog
1999 (2000)
Vernor Vinge
A Deepness in the Sky
2000 (2001)
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
1993 (1994)
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of the Year 1972 (1973)
Jerry Pournelle
1986 (1987)
Karen Joy Fowler
1973 (1974)
Spider Robinson
1987 (1988)
Judith Moffett
Lisa Tuttle
1988 (1989)
Michaela Roessner
1974 (1975)
P. J. Plauger
1989 (1990)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
1976 (1977)
C. J. Cherryh
1990 (1991)
Julia Ecklar
1977 (1978)
Orson Scott Card
1991 (1992)
Ted Chiang
1978 (1979)
Stephen R. Donaldson
1992 (1993)
Laura Resnick
1979 (1980)
Barry B. Longyear
1993 (1994)
Amy Thomson
1980 (1981)
Somtow Sucharitkul (S. P. Somtow)
1994 (1995)
Jeff Noon
1981 (1982)
Alexis Gilliland
1996 (1997)
Michael A. Burstein
1982 (1983)
Paul O. Williams
1997 (1998)
Mary Doria Russell
1983 (1984)
R. A. MacAvoy
1998 (1999)
Nalo Hopkinson
1984 (1985)
Lucius Shepard
1999 (2000)
Cory Doctorow
1985 (1986)
Melissa Scott
2000 (2001)
Kristine Smith
[tie] 1975 (1976)
Tom Reamy
1995 (1996)
David Feintuch
THE INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD Among the most distinguished of the science-fiction awards was the nowdiscontinued International Fantasy Award, presented between 1951 and 1957 to honor the best book-length work (novels or collections) of fantastic literature published during the preceding year. It was first presented at the 1951 British Science Fiction Convention, and its recipient was chosen by a distiguished panel of science-fiction professionals.
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
611
1949/1950 (1951)
George R. Stewart
Earth Abides
1951 (1952)
John Collier
Fancies and Goodnights
1952 (1953)
Clifford D. Simak
City
1953 (1954)
Theodore Sturgeon
More than Human
1954 (1955)
Edgar Pangborn
A Mirror for Observers
1955 (1956)
No award given
1956 (1957)
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
THE JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD/THE THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD This award honors the best science-fiction novel published during the preceding year. The award*s recipient is chosen by an international panel of sciencefiction professionals, and the award is presented annually in July at a conference or ceremony held at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. A companion award, The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, presented simultaneously, honors the best science-fiction short story (under 17,500 words) published during the previous year.
The John W. Campbell Memorial Award 1972 (1973)
Barry N. Malzberg
Beyond Apollo
1973 (1974) [tie]
Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama
Robert Merle
Malevil
1974 (1975)
Philip K. Dick
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
1975 (1976)
No award given
1976 (1977)
Kingsley Amis
The Alteration
1977 (1978)
Frederik Pohl
Gateway
1978 (1979)
Michael Moorcock
Gloriana
1979 (1980)
Thomas M. Disch
On Wings of Song
1980 (1981)
Gregory Benford
Timescape
1981 (1982)
Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
1982 (1983)
Brian W. Aldiss
Helliconia Spring
1983 (1984)
Gene Wolfe
The Citadel of the Autarch
1984 (1985)
Frederik Pohl
The Years of the City
1985 (1986)
David Brin
The Postman
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
612 1986 (1987)
Joan Slonczewski
A Door into Ocean
1987 (1988)
Connie Willis
Lincoln*s Dreams
1988 (1989)
Bruce Sterling
Islands in the Net
1989 (1990)
Geoff Ryman
The Child Garden
1990 (1991)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Pacific Edge
1991 (1992)
Bradley Denton
Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede
1992 (1993)
Charles Sheffield
Brother to Dragons
1993 (1994)
No award given
1994 (1995)
Greg Egan
Permutation City
1995 (1996)
Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships
1996 (1997)
Paul McAuley
Fairyland
1997 (1998)
Joe Haldeman
Forever Peace
1998 (1999)
George Zebrowski
Brute Orbits
1999 (2000)
Vernor Vinge
A Deepness in the Sky
2000 (2001)
Poul Anderson
Genesis
The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award 1986 (1987)
Judith Moffett
“Surviving”
1987 (1988)
Pat Murphy
“Rachel in Love”
1988 (1989)
George Alec Effinger
“Schrödinger*s Kitten”
1989 (1990)
Michael Swanwick
“The Edge of the World”
1990 (1991)
Terry Bisson
“Bears Discover Fire”
1991 (1992)
John Kessel
“Buffalo”
1992 (1993)
Dan Simmons
“This Year*s Class Picture”
1993 (1994)
Kij Johnson
“Fox Magic”
1994 (1995)
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Forgiveness Day”
1995 (1996)
John G. McDaid
“Jigoku No Mokushiroku (The Symbolic Revelation of the Apolcalypse)”
1996 (1997)
Nancy Kress
“The Flowers of Aulit Prison”
1997 (1998)
Michael F. Flynn
“House of Dreams”
1998 (1999)
Ted Chiang
“Story of Your Life”
1999 (2000)
David Marusek
“The Wedding Album”
2000 (2001)
Ian McDonald
“Tendeléo’s Story”
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
613
THE LOCUS AWARD This award honors the best fantastic fiction published during the preceding year as chosen by the readership of Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. Beginning in 1980, the award for best novel was split into separate components honoring the best science-fiction novel and the best fantasy novel of the year. The awards are announced annually in the August issue of Locus but are actually presented at the Dragon*Con convention held in mid-July. 1970 (1971)
Larry Niven
Ringworld
1971 (1972)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Lathe of Heaven
1972 (1973)
Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves
1973 (1974)
Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama
1974 (1975)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed
1975 (1976)
Joe Haldeman
The Forever War
1976 (1977)
Kate Wilhelm
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
1977 (1978)
Frederik Pohl
Gateway
1978 (1979)
Vonda N. McIntyre
Dreamsnake
1979 (1980) (SF)
John Varley
Titan
1979 (1980) (Fantasy)
Patricia A. McKillip
Harpist in the Wind
1980 (1981) (SF)
Joan D. Vinge
The Snow Queen
1980 (1981) (Fantasy)
Robert Silverberg
Lord Valentine*s Castle
1981 (1982) (SF)
Julian May
The Many-Colored Land
1981 (1982) (Fantasy)
Gene Wolfe
The Claw of the Conciliator
1982 (1983) (SF)
Isaac Asimov
Foundation*s Edge
1982 (1983) (Fantasy)
Gene Wolfe
The Sword of the Lictor
1983 (1984) (SF)
David Brin
Startide Rising
1983 (1984) (Fantasy)
Marion Zimmer Bradley The Mists of Avalon
1984 (1985) (SF)
Larry Niven
The Integral Trees
1984 (1985) (Fantasy)
Robert A. Heinlein
Job
1985 (1986) (SF)
David Brin
The Postman
1985 (1986) (Fantasy)
Roger Zelazny
Trumps of Doom
1986 (1987) (SF)
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
1986 (1987) (Fantasy)
Gene Wolfe
Soldier of the Mist
1987 (1988) (SF)
David Brin
The Uplift War
1987 (1988) (Fantasy)
Orson Scott Card
Seventh Son
614
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
1988 (1989) (SF)
C. J. Cherryh
Cyteen
1988 (1989) (Fantasy)
Orson Scott Card
Red Prophet
1989 (1990) (SF)
Dan Simmons
Hyperion
1989 (1990) (Fantasy)
Orson Scott Card
Prentice Alvin
1990 (1991) (SF)
Dan Simmons
The Fall of Hyperion
1990 (1991) (Fantasy)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
1991 (1992) (SF)
Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar
1991 (1992) (Fantasy)
Sheri S. Tepper
Beauty
1992 (1993) (SF)
Connie Willis
Doomsday Book
1992 (1993) (Fantasy)
Tim Powers
Last Call
1993 (1994) (SF)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars
1993 (1994) (Fantasy)
Peter S. Beagle
The Innkeeper*s Daughter
1994 (1995) (SF)
Lois McMaster Bujold
Mirror Dance
1994 (1995) (Fantasy)
Michael Bishop
Brittle Innings
1995 (1996) (SF)
Neal Stephenson
The Diamond Age
1995 (1996) (Fantasy)
Orson Scott Card
Alvin Journeyman
1996 (1997) (SF)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Blue Mars
1996 (1997) (Fantasy)
George R. R. Martin
A Game of Thrones
1997 (1998) (SF)
Dan Simmons
The Rise of Endymion
1997 (1998) (Fantasy)
Tim Powers
Earthquake Weather
1998 (1999) (SF)
Connie Willis
To Say Nothing of the Dog
1998 (1999) (Fantasy)
George R. R. Martin
A Clash of Kings
1999 (2000) (SF)
Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon
1999 (2000) (Fantasy)
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
2000 (2001) (SF)
Ursula Le Guin
The Telling
2000 (2001) (Fantasy)
George R. R. Martin
A Storm of Swords
THE NEBULA AWARD The Nebula honors the best science-fiction novel published during the preceding year. It is administered and presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFFWA) at its annual meeting and banquet held in April. The Nebula Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement may be presented by the officers of the SFWA in no more than six years out of every decade.
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
615 Dune
1965 (1966)
Frank Herbert
1966 (1967) [tie]
Samuel R. Delany
Babel-17
Daniel Keyes
Flowers for Algernon
1967 (1968)
Samuel R. Delany
The Einstein Intersection
1968 (1969)
Alexei Panshin
Rite of Passage
1969 (1970)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
1970 (1971)
Larry Niven
Ringworld
1971 (1972)
Robert Silverberg
A Time of Changes
1972 (1973)
Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves
1973 (1974)
Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama
1974 (1975)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed
1975 (1976)
Joe Haldeman
The Forever War
1976 (1977)
Frederik Pohl
Man Plus
1977 (1978)
Frederik Pohl
Gateway
1978 (1979)
Vonda N. McIntyre
Dreamsnake
1979 (1980)
Arthur C. Clarke
The Fountains of Paradise
1980 (1981)
Gregory Benford
Timescape
1981 (1982)
Gene Wolfe
The Claw of the Conciliator
1982 (1983)
Michael Bishop
No Enemy but Time
1983 (1984)
David Brin
Startide Rising
1984 (1985)
William Gibson
Neuromancer
1985 (1986)
Orson Scott Card
Ender*s Game
1986 (1987)
Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead
1987 (1988)
Pat Murphy
The Falling Woman
1988 (1989)
Lois McMaster Bujold
Falling Free
1989 (1990)
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Healer*s War
1990 (1991)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
1991 (1992)
Michael Swanwick
Stations of the Tide
1992 (1993)
Connie Willis
Doomsday Book
1993 (1994)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars
1994 (1995)
Greg Bear
Moving Mars
1995 (1996)
Robert J. Sawyer
The Terminal Experiment
1996 (1997)
Nicola Griffith
Slow River
1997 (1998)
Vonda N. McIntyre
The Moon and the Sun
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
616 1998 (1999)
Joe Haldeman
Forever Peace
1999 (2000)
Octavia E. Butler
Parable of the Talents
2000 (2001)
Greg Bear
Darwin’s Radio
Nebula Grand Master Awards 1975
Robert A. Heinlein
1991
Lester del Rey
1976
Jack Williamson
1993
Frederik Pohl
1977
Clifford D. Simak
1995
Damon Knight
1979
L. Sprague de Camp
1996
A. E. van Vogt
1981
Fritz Leiber
1997
Jack Vance
1984
Andre Norton
1998
Poul Anderson
1986
Arthur C. Clarke
1999
Hal Clement
1987
Isaac Asimov
2000
Brian Aldiss
1988
Alfred Bester
2001
Philip José Farmer
1989
Ray Bradbury
THE PHILIP K. DICK MEMORIAL AWARD This award honors the best science-fiction book originally published in paperback in the United States during the previous year. The $1,000 cash prize is sponsored annually by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the Northwest Science Fiction Society, and Norwescon. The award is presented annually at the Norwescon convention, usually held in April. 1982 (1983)
Rudy Rucker
Software
1983 (1984)
Tim Powers
The Anubis Gates
1984 (1985)
William Gibson
Neuromancer
1985 (1986)
Tim Powers
Dinner at Deviant*s Palace
1986 (1987)
James P. Blaylock
Homunculus
1987 (1988)
Patricia Geary
Strange Toys
1988 (1989)
Rudy Rucker
Wetware
1989 (1990)
Richard Paul Russo
Subterranean Gallery
1990 (1991)
Pat Murphy
Points of Departure
1991 (1992)
Ian McDonald
King of Morning, Queen of Day
1992 (1993)
Richard Grant
Through the Heart
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
617
1993 (1994)
John M. Ford
Growing Up Weightless
1994 (1995)
Robert Charles Wilson
Mysterium
1995 (1996)
Bruce Bethke
Headcrash
1996 (1997)
Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships
1997 (1998)
Stepan Chapman
The Troika
1998 (1999)
Geoff Ryman
253: The Print Remix
1999 (2000)
Stephen Baxter
Vacuum Diagrams
2000 (2001)
Michael Marshall Smith Only Forward
THE PILGRIM AWARD/THE PIONEER AWARD The Pilgrim Award honors lifetime achievement in science-fiction and fantasy scholarship. It is administered by the Science Fiction Research Association and presented at that organization*s annual convention, usually held in June. The Pioneer Award, presented simultaneously with the Pilgrim, honors the best single critical work (usually a short essay) published during the preceding year.
The Pilgrim Award 1970
J. O. Bailey
1986
George E. Slusser
1971
Marjorie Hope Nicolson
1987
Gary K. Wolfe
1973
Jack Williamson
1990
Marshall B. Tymn
1974
I. F. Clarke
1991
Pierre Versins
1975
Damon Knight
1992
Mark R. Hillegas
1976
James E. Gunn
1993
Robert Reginald
1977
Thomas D. Clareson
1994
John Clute
1978
Brian W. Aldiss
1995
Vivian Sobchack
1979
Darko Suvin
1996
David Ketterer
1980
Peter Nicholls
1997
Marlene Barr
1981
Sam Moskowitz
1998
L. Sprague de Camp
1982
Neil Barron
1999
Brian Stableford
1983
H. Bruce Franklin
2000
Hal Hall
1984
Everett F. Bleiler
2001
Dave Samuelson
1985
Samuel R. Delany
1972
Julius Kagarlitski (Yulii Kagarlitskii)
1988 1989
Joanna Russ Ursula K. Le Guin
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
618
The Pioneer Award 1989 (1990)
Veronica Hollinger
“The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider”
1990 (1991)
H. Bruce Franklin
“The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy”
1991 (1992)
Istvan Csiscery-Ronay, Jr.
“The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway”
1992 (1993)
No award given
1993 (1994)
Takayumi Tatsumi and Larry McCaffrey
“Toward the Theoretical Frontiers of Fiction: From Metafiction and Cyberpunk Through Avant-Pop”
1994 (1995)
Roger Luckhurst
“The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic”
1995 (1996)
Brian Stableford
“How Should a Science Fiction Story End?”
1996 (1997)
John Moore
“Shifting Frontiers: Mapping Cyberpunk and the American South”
1997 (1998)
I. F. Clarke
“Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900”
1998 (1999)
Carl Freedman
“Kubrick’s 2001 and the Possibility of a Science-Fiction Cinema”
1999 (2000)
Wendy Pearson
“Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer”
2000 (2001)
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
“Changing Regimes: Vonda N. McIntyre’s Parodic Astrofuturism”
THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD Also called the Howard Award, this accolade honors the best fantasy novel published during the preceding year. It is administered by and presented at the annual World Fantasy Convention, usually held in October. 1973/1974 (1975)
Patricia A. McKillip
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
1975 (1976)
Richard Matheson
Bid Time Return
1976 (1977)
William Kotzwinkle
Doctor Rat
1977 (1978)
Fritz Leiber
Our Lady of Darkness
Selected Science-Fiction and Fantasy Awards
619
1978 (1979)
Michael Moorcock
Gloriana
1979 (1980)
Elizabeth A. Lynn
Watchtower
1980 (1981)
Gene Wolfe
The Shadow of the Torturer
1981 (1982)
John Crowley
Little, Big
1982 (1983)
Michael Shea
Nifft the Lean
1983 (1984)
John M. Ford
The Dragon Waiting
1984 (1985) [tie]
Robert Holdstock
Mythago Wood
Barry Hughart
Bridge of Birds
1985 (1986)
Dan Simmons
Song of Kali
1986 (1987)
Patrick Suskind
Perfume
1987 (1988)
Ken Grimwood
Replay
1988 (1989)
Peter Straub
Koko
1989 (1990)
Jack Vance
Lyonesse: Madouc
James Morrow
Only Begotten Daughter
Ellen Kushner
Thomas the Rhymer
1991 (1992)
Robert R. McCammon
Boy*s Life
1992 (1993)
Tim Powers
Last Call
1993 (1994)
Lewis Shiner
Glimpses
1994 (1995)
James Morrow
Towing Jehovah
1995 (1996)
Christopher Priest
The Prestige
1996 (1997)
Rachel Pollack
Godmother Night
1997 (1998)
Jeffrey Ford
The Physiognomy
1998 (1999)
Louise Erdrich
The Antelope Wife
1999 (2000) 2000 (2001) [tie]
Martin Scott Tim Powers Sean Stewart
Thraxas Declare Galveston
1990 (1991) [tie]
Lifetime Achievement 1975
Robert Bloch
1987
Jack Finney
1976
Fritz Leiber
1988
Everett F. Bleiler
1977
Ray Bradbury
1989
Evangeline Walton
1978
Frank Belknap Long
1990
R. A. Lafferty
1979
Jorge Luis Borges
1991
Ray Russell
1980
Manly Wade Wellman
1992
Edd Cartier
1981
C. L. Moore
1993
Harlan Ellison
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
620 1982
Italo Calvino
1994
Jack Williamson
1983
Roald Dahl
1995
Ursula K. Le Guin
Donald Wandrei [refused]
1998
Edward L. Ferman Andre Norton
Richard Matheson
1999
Hugh B. Cave
1985
Jack Vance Theodore Sturgeon
2000
Marion Zimmer Bradley
1986
Avram Davidson
1984 [joint awards]
L. Sprague de Camp E. Hoffmann Price
1996 1997
2001
Gene Wolf Madeleine L’Engle
Michael Moorcock Philip José Farmer Frank Frazetta
621
Timeline 1726 1818 1864 1865 1870 1871 1886 1889 1891 1895 1897 1898 1900 1905-1906 1908 1917-1964 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1936 1937 1938-1958 1938-1977 1941-1989 1943 1945 1946-1959 1949 1950 1950-1956
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) Frankenstein (Shelley) Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne) At the Back of the North Wind (MacDonald) Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson) Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain) Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) Time Machine, The (Wells) Dracula (Stoker) Invisible Man, The (Wells) War of the Worlds, The (Wells) Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum) Psammead Trilogy (Nesbit) Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame) Barsoom Series (Burroughs) Worm Ouroboros, The (Eddison) King of Elfland’s Daughter, The (Dunsany) We (Zamyatin) Lud-in-the-Mist (Mirrlees) Ship of Ishtar, The (Merritt) Orlando (Woolf) Last and First Men (Stapledon) Brave New World (Huxley) War with the Newts (%apek) Hobbit, The (Tolkien) Star Maker (Stapledon) Space Trilogy (Lewis) Once and Future King, The (White) Incomplete Enchanter, The (de Camp and Pratt) Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry) Animal Farm (Orwell) Titus Groan Trilogy (Peake) Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury) Chronicles of Narnia, The (Lewis)
622 1950-1984 1951 1951-1993 1952 1953
1953-1955 1954
1954-1955 1957 1958 1959 1960 1960-1974 1960-1994 1961
1962 1963 1964
1964-1973 1965 1965-1977 1965-1985
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Dying Earth Series (Vance) Illustrated Man, The (Bradbury) Foundation series (Asimov) City (Simak) Rashomon and Other Stories (Akutagawa) Bring the Jubilee (Moore) Childhood’s End (Clarke) Demolished Man, The (Bester) E Pluribus Unicorn (Sturgeon) Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) More than Human (Sturgeon) Space Merchants, The (Pohl and Kornbluth) Conan Series (Howard) Caves of Steel, The (Asimov) I Am Legend (Matheson) Mission of Gravity (Clement) Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien) Naked Sun, The (Asimov) Stars My Destination, The (Bester) Case of Conscience, A (Blish) Non-Stop (Aldiss) Inter Ice Age 4 (Abe) Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut) Canticle for Leibowitz, A (Miller) Rogue Moon (Budrys) Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle, The (Beagle) Childe Cycle (Dickson) Dark Universe (Galouye) Solaris (Lem) Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) Man in the High Castle, The (Dick) Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle) Planet of the Apes (Boulle) Witch World (Norton) At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Lovecraft) Davy (Pangborn) Martian Time-Slip (Dick) Prydain Chronicles, The (Alexander) Cyberiad, The (Lem) Dark Is Rising Sequence, The (Cooper) Dune Series (Herbert)
Timeline 1966
1967
1968
1968-2001 1968-1988 1969
1970
1970-1979 1970-1988 1971 1972
1972-1991 1973 1974
1975 1976
1976-1979 1976-1984
623 Flowers for Algernon (Keyes) Make Room! Make Room! (Harrison) Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The (Heinlein) Einstein Intersection, The (Delany) I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Ellison) Owl Service, The (Garner) Camp Concentration (Disch) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner) Earthsea (Le Guin) Space Odyssey Series (Clarke) Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin) Phoenix and the Mirror, The (Davidson) Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) Cities in Flight (Blish) Ringworld (Niven) Zothique (Smith) Merlin Trilogy (Stewart) Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Leiber) Hyperborea (Smith) Star Light (Clement) Dying Inside (Silverberg) Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The (Carter) Watership Down (Adams) When Harlie Was One (Gerrold) Elric Saga, The (Moorcock) Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) Man Who Folded Himself, The (Gerrold) Dispossessed, The (Le Guin) Forever War, The (Haldeman) Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The (McKillip) Inverted World (Priest) Mote in God’s Eye (Niven and Pournelle) Dhalgren (Delany) Female Man, The (Russ) Best of C. M. Kornbluth, The (Kornbluth) Boys from Brazil, The (Levin) Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm) Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) Riddle of Stars (McKillip) Patternist Series (Butler)
624 1976-2001 1977 1978 1978-1981 1979
1970-1991 1979-1992 1980
1980-1987 1980-1991 1981 1982
1982-1985 1983 1984
1984-1988 1984-1990 1984-1993 1985
1985-1996 1986
1987
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Vampire Chronicles (Rice) Our Lady of Darkness (Leiber) Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, The (Ballard) Dreamsnake (McIntyre) Tales from the Flat Earth (Lee) Engine Summer (Crowley) Instrumentality of Mankind, The (Smith) Ringworld Engineers, The (Niven) Amber Series (Zelazny) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series (Adams) Land of Laughs, The (Carroll) Roderick (Sladek) Shatterday (Ellison) Timescape (Benford) VALIS (Dick) Vampire Tapestry, The (Charnas) Book of the New Sun, The (Wolfe) Uplift Sequence, The (Brin) Snow Queen Trilogy (Vinge) Little, Big (Crowley) Blue Sword, The (McKinley) Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley) No Enemy But Time (Bishop) Helliconia Trilogy (Aldiss) Anubis Gates, The (Powers) Roderick at Random (Sladek) Hero and the Crown, The (McKinley) Merchants’ War, The (Pohl and Kornbluth) Wasp Factory, The (Banks) Neuromancer Trilogy (Gibson) Orange County Trilogy (Robinson) Mythago Cycle (Holdstock) Blood Music (Bear) Eon (Bear) Fire and Hemlock (Jones) Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood) Ender Series (Card) Door into Ocean, A (Slonczewski) Falling Woman, The (Murphy) Unconquered Country, The (Ryman) Aegypt (Crowley)
Timeline
1987-1989 1987 1988
1989 1989-1997 1990 1991
1992
1992-1996 1992-1997 1993 1994 1994-1999 1995 1998 2000
625 Life During Wartime (Shepard) Lincoln’s Dreams (Willis) Swordspoint (Kushner) Weaveworld (Barker) Xenogenesis (Butler) Touch of Sturgeon, A (Sturgeon) Cyteen (Cherryh) Eternity (Bear) Gate to Women’s Country, The (Tepper) Islands in the Net (Sterling) Good News from Outer Space (Kessel) Hyperion Cantos, The (Simmons) Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tiptree) Only Begotten Daughter (Morrow) Paper Grail, The (Blaylock) Sarah Canary (Fowler) Stations of the Tide (Swanwick) Doomsday Book (Willis) Fire upon the Deep, A (Vinge) Snow Crash (Stephenson) Mars Trilogy (Robinson) Fisher King Trilogy (Powers) Gripping Hand, The (Niven and Pournelle) Iron Dragon’s Daughter, The (Swanwick) Love and Sleep (Crowley) Godhead Trilogy (Morrow) Amnesia Moon (Lethem) Door Number Three (O’Leary) Mockingbird (Stewart) Daemonomania (Crowley)
626
Bibliography Introduction This is a selected annotated bibliography of critical commentary and literary theory concerning fantasy and science fiction in narrative and film. Annotations provide brief comments on content and orientation, designed to aid teachers and scholars, especially newcomers, in the field. Space limitations forced exclusion of many worthy research tools, primarily those devoted to strictly bibliographic ends, single-author studies, and works primarily on the closely related fields of utopian/dystopian fiction. To further save space, we refer to “science fiction” as “SF” throughout the bibliography. The bibliography is arranged in three sections, with works ordered alphabetically by author within each. The first section, “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” covers works discussing both sides of the sometimes contested division between fantasy and science fiction. The remaining sections focus on the two genres separately. FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION Aldiss, Brian, and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree. New York: Avon, 1986. A full-fledged history of SF, Trillion Year Spree, winner of a Hugo Award, is a revised and enlarged version of Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973). The text traces SF from its gothic beginnings in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to modern SF’s New Wave and cyberpunk. The book includes illustrations and photos of authors, SF magazine covers, film stills, and SF art. Although Aldiss’s book deals primarily with SF, there are observations and comments on fantasy writers and their works sprinkled throughout. The book is useful in that it situates the writers and works within specific periods and movements. Clareson, Thomas D., ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971. Clareson collected these essays as examples of serious criticism on SF and fantasy. In the first essay in the book, Clareson examines SF’s relationship to mainstream literature, specifically realism. Judith Merril explores the place of science in SF. Samuel R. Delany, in an important piece, discusses his theory of subjunctivity and reading protocols as a way to distinguish between SF, fantasy, and other forms of writing. James Blish discusses SF criticism, defining worthwhile and other styles and questions of SF criticism. Stanisìaw Lem has a wonderful essay on the contemporary and historical meaning of the image of the robot in SF. Julius Kagarlitski’s “Realism and Fantasy” contrasts romantic fantasy, which arose in the eighteenth century, to realistic fantasy, which arose in the latter nineteenth century and which now is called scientific; scientific fantasy is ex-
Bibliography
627
emplified in the works of Jules Verne. Rudolph Schmerl’s “Fantasy as Technique” begins by examining cultural context in determining fantasy and the interplay between writer and author. He announces the centrality of the author’s intent, the necessity of meaning below the surface of narrative, and the importance of the pretense of actuality. He avers finally that if a fantasy is not understood as one, then no one can read it intelligently. Fredericks, Casey. The Future of Eternity: Mythologies of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Adopting a structuralist approach to mythology, Fredericks is able to provide powerfully generative readings of twentieth century SF in terms of the major mythic themes of creation, the hero, godhead or the superman, and archaic time. Rather than conceiving myth as a closed system of ancient patterns or tales, Fredericks approaches it as a diverse and dynamic system that has found complex and rich expression in SF. Although most of this book is devoted to SF, its discussion of myth makes it useful in distinguishing SF from fantasy and the myths they choose or how they use them. Chapter 2 defines and develops the notion of estrangement, what J. R. R. Tolkien calls “recovery,” and points out briefly its role in fantasy. Chapter 4 is a left-handed defense of heroic fantasy, which Fredericks contends comes from contemporary feelings of stifling and fear of the growth of power and potential dominance. He particularly elucidates the potential for release and the nonconformist attitude contained in “sword and sorcery” fantasy as good fun and escapism. Le Guin, Ursula K. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Reprinting and often revising essays and talks given between 1976 and 1988, as well as reprinting reviews from 1977 to 1986, Le Guin continues her richly evocative reflections on the life of the writer, speculative fiction, and especially feminism and issues of social responsibility. In addition to lighter and occasional pieces, the collection includes some of her most powerful and insightful nonfiction work, such as “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” in which she thinks through and radically revises what might be meant by utopia, and “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which she imagines a narrative theory predicated on the principle of inclusion and “messy,” to borrow a key term from her Always Coming Home. In the revised reprinting of “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” Le Guin interpolates her views from 1987 into those expressed in this 1976 essay, arguing with her former self and preparing readers for the strong feminist insights and challenges of essays such as the “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address” and “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” as well as some of the shorter pieces. This is a rich record of thought and writing that will be of keen interest to Le Guin scholars, feminists, and most readers of contemporary SF.
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_____. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. 1979. Rev. ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Aside from the revised version of “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” and the updated checklist of Le Guin’s works, this new edition does not differ substantively from the original. Largely presenting Le Guin’s early reflections on her own work and on key issues in SF, the collection devotes five of its thirty essays to the study of fantasy. In “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” the author contemplates the cultural paradigms in American society that are hostile to fantasy, which threatens them. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” deals with writing fantasy and with the Earthsea books. “The Child and the Shadow” and “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction” explain the influences of the unconscious and of Carl Jung. Finally, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” comments on the style and language—the good, the bad, and the ugly—used by fantasy writers. An excellent beginning place for Le Guin scholars. Slusser, George, and Eric Rabkin, eds. Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Seventeen essays from the seventh J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on SF and Fantasy Literature (1985) make up this volume, which focuses primarily on science fantasy, the links between fantasy and SF, and the relationships between SF and fantasy and other genres such as gothic, horror, and myth. Among the contributors are Robert Scholes, Michael Collings, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Brian Attebery, Kathryn Hume, and George Slusser. Wolfe, Gary K. Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. The most complete reference text of its kind, Wolfe’s guide offers full definitions of standard terminology; an introduction to the major themes, definitions, and conventions of SF and fantasy; and a limited bibliography. FANTASY Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Attebery’s seminal book on fantasy begins with an attempt to define fantasy. He surveys definitions of fantasy by J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, C. N. Manlove, Tzvetan Todorov, W. R. Irwin, and others and offers one of his own, with wonder as the linchpin. The first chapter glances over the popular fantasies of British writers from George MacDonald forward as points of reference for American fantasy. Chapter 2, on folk tradition, notes the importance of Marchen, folktales, and ballads in the European tradition and then goes on to examine American ballads and tall tales, such as those about Paul Bunyan. One crucial subject of this chapter is the opposition in Puritan, rationalist, and transcendentalist thought to folktales and the supernatural. Chapter 3 addresses the influence of romance
Bibliography
629
and the contributions of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville to American fantasy. The fourth chapter is concerned with nineteenth century fantasy for children, and the fifth treats the contributions of L. Frank Baum and the Oz tales, which were written because Baum believed that American fairy tales were not working, so it was high time someone wrote one that did. Using Vladimir Propp’s work on the structure of the fairy tale, Attebery explains the structure of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and then expands into a taxonomy of the characters in the series. Chapter 6 comments on Baum’s success and influence in terms of the growth of American fairy tales and fantasy, especially in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Branch Cabell, and H. P. Lovecraft. The seventh chapter focuses on Edward Eager, Ray Bradbury, and James Thurber. The eighth and final chapter surveys the most prominent modern American fantasists, such as Lloyd Alexander, Andre Norton, Peter Beagle, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Roger Zelazny, but most of it treats the work of Ursula Le Guin. Attebery concludes with a summary of the tendencies of American fantasy and a statement of its importance. _____. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Attebery founded his first book on thematic and historical principles and followed with this second one, grounded in theoretical approaches, primarily those of Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Mikhail Bakhtin, and feminist critics. The first chapter employs a heavily structural approach and situates fantasy as a mode, following Northrop Frye; as a genre, à la J. R. R. Tolkien but complicated by the idea of fuzzy sets; and as a formula, responding to the success of such authors as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The second short chapter starts with Tolkien’s preliminary definition of fantasy and locates it in the context of later theoretical and linguistic works by Rosemary Jackson, Christine Brooke-Rose, and T. A. Shippey. The next chapter examines Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in terms of postmodernism and contrasts it briefly to the works of John Crowley, with a short excursion into Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. Chapter 4 is a fairly traditional reading of the nature of narrative as story in fantasy, again heavily reliant on The Lord of the Rings and various Victorian fantasies for its basis, but the ensuing chapter on character reverts to structuralist parlance and shifts to later fantasists, including Patricia McKillip, Diana Wynne Jones, and Alan Garner. Chapter 6 introduces the differences in vision, character, and worldview between female and male writers of fantasy and balances feminist criticism of fantasy with short readings of several female authors, such as Ursula Le Guin, McKillip, Andre Norton, and Suzette Elgin. The antepenultimate chapter notes the parallel development and overlapping of SF and fantasy and attacks the uncrackable nut of science fantasy in the book’s longest section, which uses many examples rather than a repre-
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sentative few. Magical Realism and other subgenres of fantasy form the subject of the final chapter, which concludes with another reading of one of Attebery’s favorite fantasies, John Crowley’s Little, Big. Barron, Neil, ed. Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, and the Internet. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999. This eight-hundred-page revision of two earlier guides, Horror Literature and Fantasy Literature (both 1990), is rated among the top three or four most important reference works in the field. Each chapter features an essay on a specific sub-genre, time period, or relevant nonfiction topic written by an expert in the field and supplies an annotated bibliography of the best or most representative works. It contains valuable research tools including lists of best books, awards, series, young adult and children’s books, translations, organizations, and conventions, as well as three indexes. Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983. More than 7,200 stories of supernatural fiction, published between 1750 and 1960, are covered in Bleiler’s guide, including ghost stories, weird fiction, supernatural horror, fantasy, gothic novels, and occult fiction. Each entry has a description of the story’s plot, setting, and main characters, as well as biographical information about the author and value judgments on the story’s value and resonances. Entries are indexed by author and title as well as by a long list of diverse motifs. Boyer, Robert H., and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections. New York: Avon, 1984. This collection of twenty essays on fantasy includes, among others, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, James Thurber (twice), J. R. R. Tolkien (twice), C. S. Lewis, Felix Marti-Ibanez, Peter Beagle, Andre Norton, Ursula Le Guin (twice), and Susan Cooper. Also includes an interview with Katherine Kurtz. A diverse selection of approaches, from the Victorian to the modern, and a fine short introduction by the editors make this a useful, general reference text. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Brooke-Rose, like Rosemary Jackson, is a second generation literary theorist. A Rhetoric of the Unreal is a long, extremely detailed, and dense book that defies summary because of its methodology, which draws together structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, narratology, source studies, linguistics, and other approaches. She starts by commenting that the current sense of empirical reality is no longer as secure as it once was and summarizes the work of Michel Foucault (deconstruction) and of R. D. Laing and Shoshana Felman (psychoanalysis) on the question of significance and illusion of meaning that plagues twentieth century humanity. The second chapter surveys theoretical criticism from Plato to Jacques Derrida under the ru-
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bric of “rhetoric.” The next chapter looks at genres and modes according to Northrop Frye and Tzvetan Todorov. Chapter 4 examines SF in terms of the cognitive and noncognitive, according to Darko Suvin, and the approaches of Todorov, David Ketterer, and Robert Scholes. It devotes considerable attention to Phillipe Hamon’s work on reality. The third section focuses on what Brooke-Rose calls the “encoded reader,” the reader who determines the narrative, and probes deeply in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw for its violations of reality. Section 4, on the modern marvelous or the “unreal as real,” is concerned with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and “the new science fiction,” such as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s The Sirens of Titan and Joseph McElroy’s Plus. The next section deals with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s oeuvre as “the real as unreal,” and the final chapter lays out the approaches of metafiction to reality in the works of such writers as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Richard Brautigan. Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. This multiple-award-winning encyclopedia is an essential fantasy literature resource. It contains more than four-thousand entries with insightful essays on precursors of modern fantasy from William Shakespeare to Dante up to works of the fantastic in literature, film, television, art, opera, and comic books. Several essays by John Clute present a fascinating new theory of fantasy rivalling those devised by Joseph Campbell and Tzvetan Todorov. Includes helpful links between relevant entries. Donald, James, ed. Fantasy and the Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Intended as a reader to aid teachers, this collection is divided into three sections. The first engages “the fantastic” as a genre, the second harnesses psychoanalytic theory to explore issues of spectatorship and sexual difference, and the third looks at politics and the social functions of cinema. An eclectic mix of perspectives is represented, from feminism and postmodernism to the formalist theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. Jargon predominates at times, but readers who persevere will be rewarded. The list of contributing scholars is impressive: Thomas Elsaesser offers a trenchant account of “the fantastic” in German silent cinema, for example, and Stephen Neale targets issues of difference in Alien and Blade Runner. Other essays explore gender in slasher films, dystopian time travel films such as La Jetee (the basis for 12 Monkeys), and “what’s at stake” in vampire films. Editorial introductions supply handy background material on each of the three sections. Donaldson, Stephen R. Epic Fantasy in the Modern World. Occasional Papers, Second Series 2. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Libraries, 1986. In this short, unpaginated monograph, Donaldson explains the reasons he wrote the Thomas Covenant novels and both defines and defends epic fantasy as a genre. He starts with the premise that in fantasy, internal conflicts are played
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out in the external forms of characters and events. In realistic fiction, he says, characters are functions of the world; in fantasy, the world is an expression of the characters. He then points out that fantasy also includes magic, but good fantasy uses the magic as a metaphor to transform humans into something greater than the sum of their parts. Another aspect of fantasy is its insistence on meaning, its opposition to the void, which Donaldson sums up in the phrase “Man is an effective passion.” He then turns to epic and observes that all epic contains fantasy because all epics want to say something about the transcendence of human nature. He continues that in the development of fantasy in English—from Beowulf to Alfred, Lord Tennyson—human nature, the capacity to perform epic feats, had shrunk. J. R. R. Tolkien reversed that development but only by insisting that his epic fantasy had no connection with the real world. Donaldson himself has tried to reattach the epic vision to contemporary life in his Covenant books in an attempt to reject and fight off the void and the alienation of modern humanity. Egoff, Sheila. Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today. Chicago: American Library Association, 1988. Egoff begins punningly with “The Matter of Fantasy,” in which she offers a brief definition and defense of the genre but then subdivides it into her own idiosyncratic categories of children’s fantasies: the literary fairy tale, epic fantasy, enchanted realism, stories of magic, animal fantasy and beast tales, past-time fantasy, SF fantasy, ghost stories, and light fantasy. The second chapter notes the paucity of any clear fantasy for children from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period, in part because of the implications of the high mortality rate and the pre-Romantic view of children. Chapter 3 introduces the beginnings of children’s fantasy in the Victorian era, particularly the emergence of the fairy tale and the works of Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and L. Frank Baum. In the next, she splits off the Edwardian age and begins the pattern that will inform the rest of the book, subdividing the chapters generally and inconsistently into her individual categories and commenting on writers and works that fall into them while pointing out the changes and evolution in children’s fantasy. E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, Richard Jefferies, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and A. A. Milne occupy much of this chapter. The remaining six chapters break down into chronological units; after combining the 1920’s and 1930’s, she examines the ensuing decades individually in terms of the dominant authors, themes, issues, and concerns that have changed the face of fantasy. Elgin, Don D. The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 15. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Elgin begins by positing that the twentieth century faces an ecological crisis and summarizes some of the potential
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causes: the development of science and technology, western Christian attitudes toward nature, the French and Industrial Revolutions, and the emerging tenets of capitalism. Tragedy, he says, reconfirms the tendencies in these causes because it recognizes a humanity separate from and above nature. Comedy, however, particularly in the modern fantasy novel, reinforces ecological perspectives through its affirmation of life and view that humanity is but one part of a larger system to which it must accommodate itself in order for the whole to survive; people are not separate from their environment but part of it. Where tragedy puts forth a view in which things go from good to bad, comedy affirms the return of a system to stability and original balance. The modern fantasy novel adopts the comic perspective on humanity as part of a system while it also moves away from the formal realism of the novel and the tradition of medieval romance. Elgin draws the connections between the fantasy novel and the ecological comic worldview and then in successive chapters outlines how the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Frank Herbert, and Joy Chant illustrate his thesis. A short conclusion ties together the various strands discussing such topics as argument, religion, character, tone, plot, and philosophy and argues that the evolution of fictional forms is forcing the inclusion of modern fantasy within the mainstream tradition. Fredericks, Casey. “Problems of Fantasy.” Science Fiction Studies 5 (March, 1978): 33-44. In this early article born of the desire to separate fantasy from SF, Fredericks begins by critiquing and finding wanting the books on fantasy by Eric Rabkin, W. R. Irwin, and Colin Manlove as well as Jane Mobley’s doctoral dissertation. The second part interrogates the issues of the impossible as opposed to the conceivable and points out that fantasy must play a reality-oriented function. Fantasy is not dogmatic; it is idiosyncratic, the product of “human imagination in the widest possible sense.” He asserts, in contrast to most definitions, that dreamworlds are important to fantasy. The final third compares and contrasts fantasy and SF and comments briefly on science fantasy as well as the relationships between fantasy and satire. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Culture. New York: Methuen, 1984. Hume’s wide-ranging book begins with an investigation of the nature and definitions of fantasy and the idea of literature as imitation or mimesis. She moves in the second chapter to a historical perspective on fantasy, citing three basic kinds of literature: that of traditional societies, realism, and modernism/ postmodernism. The next section deals with the uses of fantasy, and again she offers a taxonomy based on a fourfold division of approaches to reality: illusion, vision, revision, and disillusion. The first forms the subject of the third chapter and deals with fantasy as a mechanism to escape reality. Vision, in chapter 4, examines the creation of new reali-
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ties. The literature of revision in the next chapter explains how fantasy is a tool for improving reality, whereas the fantasy of disillusion addresses the ultimate incomprehensibility of reality. The third section endeavors to situate fantasy in terms of mode and genre, beginning with Northrop Frye’s patterns of fiction, and examines such topics as fantasy based on action, on character, and on ideas and the function of fantasy in lyric and drama. The final chapter asks why people read fantasy and attempts to account for “the power and meaning of fantasy.” There is an extensive section of textual notes, a comprehensive bibliography, and a crucial index to cover the tremendous numbers of texts and authors cited. Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Irwin argues that the desire for strangeness produces “a kind of mental play that speculatively violates the binding intellectual conventions of a world that is too much with us”; fantasy is thus a story dependent on “an overt violation” of the accepted norm. He investigates the psychological ramifications of fantasy as mental pattern and as genre and posits that it relies on a game between reader and author. Chapter 2 examines fantasy and play in three areas: the nature of play and wit, critical defenses of fantasy, and subgenres related to fantasy, such as gothic romance and fairy tales. Chapter 3 surveys various definitions of fantasy by such writers as Kingsley Amis, Herbert Read, E. M. Forster, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. The fourth chapter attempts to distinguish fantasy as a mode; Irwin claims, following structuralist thought, that it is governed more by rhetoric than by art, because rhetoric determines the art of illusion. The main challenge of this illusion is the construction of a coherent and persuasive narrative and violation of reality, a subject that informs most of the chapter. The ensuing chapter offers a negative definition of what fantasy is not and classifies fantasy works into five groups: those based on personal change, incredible societies, an unorthodox notion of innocence, literary parody or contravention of history, and a dominance of supernatural power in a fictive world. Chapters 6 through 10 outline these five classes, and the final chapter contemplates the value of fantasy as play and game and concludes that despite its essentially subversive intellectual content, one of fantasy’s prime functions is to promote community. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1981. Jackson begins by emphasizing the flexibility of fantasy, calling it the “literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss.” This move provokes a poststructuralist reading of the field and makes her turn to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s theories critical to her argument in extending Tzvetan Todorov’s account of the fantastic into the realm of the unconscious. Her argument demonstrating the subversive nature of fantasy and SF is also critical to feminist approaches to the genre. She distin-
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guishes romance fantasy from the purely fantastic because it does not share the latter’s subversive content. Chapter 2 distinguishes fantasy as a mode primarily concerned with subversion because of its relationship to and roots in satire, carnival, and pluralism and sets forth approaches to the unreal by Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Marcel Brion, among others. Here, too, she presents the idea of praxis as a way of viewing fantasy. Chapter 3 responds to Todorov’s reluctance to admit the function of psychological theory in fantasy because it is a form of unconscious discourse. Jackson starts with Freud’s notions of the marvelous and the uncanny and then claims that fantasy corresponds to the first stage of his evolutionary model, magical and animistic thought. The next chapter deals with the gothic, which she suggests is the immediate precursor to fantasy because of the role of unreason in creating terror and because the genre is a reaction against classical reason. The works of William Godwin, Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, James Hogg, Charles Maturin, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and H. G. Wells come under scrutiny here. Chapter 5 examines the subversive nature of the fantastic in realistic works of the nineteenth century by such authors as Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoevski. A discussion of Victorian fantasy and fantasists, based primarily on Stephen Prickett’s work, informs the next chapter. Jackson believes that this romance fantasy, by such writers as George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, and J. R. R. Tolkien, is outworn liberal humanism that does not address immediate societal or cultural questions. In contrast, in chapter 7, she presents the continuation of the tradition begun by the gothic authors, based on the fantastic as a function of language, especially in Franz Kafka, Mervyn Peake, and Thomas Pynchon. A short afterword defends fantasy, despite its dismissal as a marginal form by many critics, because of its realityoriented values. Manlove, Colin N. Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Christianity would seem, at first glance, to have little to do with fantasy because its beliefs are meant to be fact and to explain the universe. During the seventeenth century, when use of the supernatural was under attack, “divine Poesie,” or the fantastic, was approved only when it stayed close to biblical texts. Few people now, other than fundamentalists, read the Bible as a literal document; the modern tendency has been toward remythologizing it. Also significant are mutual contents: The narratives of the Bible often include many conventional fantasy elements such as a mythic paradise, talking animals, miracles, visions, and so on. The issues Manlove addresses lie in how Christianity perceives the truth as opposed to fantasy and how Christian literature uses fantasy or is a form thereof. He defines Christian fantasy as fiction “dealing with the Christian
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supernatural, often in an imagined world” and claims that the genre is a dying form because Scripture has lost authority and Christian fantasy itself has moved out of the mainstream and lost its relevance. Chapters 2 through 18 interrogate major works of Christianity within the accepted canon for their use of fantasy and for their Christian content; their subjects include The Divine Comedy, The Pearl, The Faerie Queene, Dr. Faustus, the metaphysical poets, Pilgrim’s Progress, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, William Blake, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, and C. S. Lewis. The shortest chapter is, consistently, on twentieth century fantasy. _____. The Fantasy Literature of England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. In this engaging, informative study, the author argues that forms of fantasy particular to England have arisen due to the country’s geographic and cultural insularity. Manlove opens with his famous definition of fantasy as “a fiction involving the supernatural or impossible” and then devises six categories by which to analyze English fantasy: secondary world fantasy, metaphysical fantasy, emotive fantasy, comic fantasy, subversive fantasy, and children’s fantasy. Ranging from Beowulf to Winnie the Pooh, this exhaustive exploration of the characteristics that make the British fantastic distinctive from all others serves as a fascinating complement to Nicholas Ruddick’s 1993 study, Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction. _____. The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983. Manlove’s preface announces his central theme: that the “essence of fantasy is the delight in the independent life of created things.” The first chapter addresses the debt of modern fantasy to the fairy tale and to German romanticism. Manlove comments on the fact that most nineteenth century fantasy was written in the form of fairy tales for children and uses Walter de la Mare’s Told Again and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring as examples. The second chapter sets forth Christianity as the center of delight in the works of Charles Williams. The Equilibrium or the Balance, the conservational principle of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, comes under scrutiny next. The job of the mage in Earthsea is not to change the world with magic but to preserve the balance of all things. Chapter 4 deals with the worlds of E. Nesbit as the “metaphoric” mode of fantasy. Nesbit yokes opposites, reality and the marvelous, so that nature becomes shot through with the supernatural and the supernatural, in turn, becomes “infused with the everyday and familiar.” George MacDonald’s circular fantasies, Lilith and Phantastes, form the next subject. In this mode, the central character leaves home, goes on an adventure, and returns either home or to his or her rightful place; a related convention is the appearance of magical beings or objects that disrupt the primary world and then depart. Loss is the focus of the disquisition on T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Although most fantasies and fanta-
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sists preserve their worlds, like Ursula Le Guin, White faced and deplored the industry-wrought changes in his own gentleman’s pastoral England, which are mirrored symbolically in the demise of the Round Table and its world along with the medieval world order that underwrites much modern fantasy. In chapter 7, Manlove comments on the tendency of Mervyn Peake’s “Titus” books to introduce didacticism into fantasy as its author accounts for wonder rather than evoking it and lets it stand alone. He also describes how the castle and various other places and things represent the mind or take on independent characteristics without mind. The final chapter criticizes William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and Peter Beagle as writers of anemic fantasy, writers whose work may be delightful and exciting but that fails to make vital the wonder within. _____. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975. The earliest, and most controversial, of Manlove’s three books on fantasy begins with probably the most quoted definition of fantasy published: “A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms.” The balance of the first chapter dissects and justifies this definition and announces Manlove’s purpose: The bulk of the book will determine how true the fantasies of Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies), George MacDonald (various works), C. S. Lewis (Perelandra), J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings), and Mervyn Peake (The “Titus” trilogy) are to their authors’ attempts to make their secondary worlds as real as the reader’s own. Each chapter begins with a brief background of the author’s life and indicates religious influence (one major thrust of the book aims at Christian or non-Christian fantasy), then is divided into sections such as style, psychological concerns, major themes, and so on. Although Manlove credits each author with various strengths, ultimately he avers that each fails, for different reasons, to sustain the original vision in creating the fictional world. His conclusion states that the distance between real and secondary worlds is insuperable in post-Romantic fiction, whereas the audience of Beowulf may well have believed in monsters and dragons, a fact that closes any gap between the actual and the supernatural. Michalson, Karen. “Phantasy as Deconstruction.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, no. 2.4 (1990): 95-109. Michalson’s point of departure is the assertion that magic is the primary characteristic of fantasy and that Charlotte Spivack’s theory that magic is primarily Platonic and transcendental informs the magical principle. She goes on to argue that magic is highly dependent on the word and on the concept that the word and the object, or in Saussurian terms the signifier and referent, are one. She points out that in fantasy, this connection is not limited to magic; often, a character’s being and nature are indistin-
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guishable from his or her name. Next, she argues that the opposition of the natural and the arbitrary is deconstructed by the word. The word is natural and indicates presence or object, yet it is concomitantly a subjective meaning dependent on context; this dual function does not alienate them so much as make each possible. The last half of the article uses examples from Patricia McKillip, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, and J. R. R. Tolkien to test the theory. Mobley, Jane. “Toward a Definition of Fantasy Fiction.” Extrapolation 15 (1974): 117-128. In this early and generative article, Mobley differentiates fantasy from the other subgenres of “speculative fiction”: SF, dream literature, and horror fiction. She proposes that fantasy depends on a normative framework with a self-sustaining internal consistency. It is a nonrational form with internal logic that arises from a worldview magical in its orientation. Magic is, in fact, the informing principle of fantasy, and the magic power is its subject, as a power that imposes itself on people or can be controlled and directed by them. The key elements of fantasy are six. Poetic quality refers to the incantational nature of magic and the physico-magic power of the word. In her discussion of the creation of secondary magical worlds, she relies heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of subcreation and the reader’s willingness to accept a new reality. Multidimensionality, the third element, involves blurring the distinction between the real and not-real on the basis of empirical evidence. It asserts that time and place are fluid, not constant. She defines the creation of wonder as essential extravagance and cites fifth the necessity of the spirit of carnival or the comic, life-affirming celebration at the heart of fantasy. The sixth element is fantasy’s mythic dimension, the well of immemorial and traditional material from which much of fantasy is drawn. Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Gollancz, 1987. In Moorcock’s belles lettres approach, he declines to define epic fantasy or discuss his own works. Much of the book is highly critical of modern fantasy and its writers, and the winter of Moorcock’s discontent has two sources: the influence and imitations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, about which he has little good to say anyway, and the safe, childlike language, setting, and characters of much fantasy. Chapter 1 discusses the origins of modern epic fantasy, particularly the medieval romances and the gothic romances up into the nineteenth century. The second examines the settings of fantasies, especially in terms of the effect of the romantic poets, and reveals Moorcock’s methodology, which is to quote briefly from many authors and offer short comments about their works. In this chapter alone, he includes Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Hope Hodgson, E. R. Eddison, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber, M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, Terry Pratchett, Patricia McKillip, Robert Holdstock, Ste-
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phen Donaldson, Diane Duane, Leigh Brackett, Mary Stewart, Jane Gaskell, Elizabeth Lynn, Colin Greenland, and a handful of others. The next chapter looks at the “decent chap” as hero and the fact that most heroes of fantasy are “wounded children,” regardless of their ages. He labels another category brute (as in Conan) as opposed to cute (children). “Wit and Humor” covers the need for comic irony in fantasy and its frequent exclusion by many writers. “Epic Pooh” is about the language of fantasy, which Moorcock says is “mouth music” meant to soothe and about the nostalgia for a vanished pastoralism that accompanies such language. The final chapter briefly surveys fantasy over the last thirty years to propose reasons for its attractions and to account for different stages of development. Prickett, Stephen. Victorian Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Prickett’s objective is to outline the development of the fantasy tradition in Victorian literature, from eighteenth century author Horace Walpole to Rudyard Kipling, as an addition, not a reaction, to nineteenth century realism. In the first chapter of this illustrated book, he discusses the use and evolution of the term “fantasy” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and comments on the early contributions of gothic writers, especially Walpole, and of the romantics, particularly William Blake and John Keats. Chapter 2 argues for a complex Victorian society, rather than the facile assignment of a monolithic and simple culture, and suggests that the superabundance of Victorian life was best captured in cartoons and illustrations, one of the roots of the period’s fantasy, by such artists as George Cruikshank and Thomas Hood. He also examines the rise of the Christmas book, especially A Christmas Carol, and its use of the supernatural. Paleontology comes up next in a chapter that looks at the Victorian interest in monsters such as dragons and goblins, the Romantic interest in the irrational, and the rage over dinosaurs. The second half of the chapter looks at the gothic tradition of human monsters and sexual deviance used by such authors as William Morris, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Machen. Chapter 4 considers the works of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll and is followed by an examination of the fictions of Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald. The final chapter deals with the fantasies of E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling. Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Chapter 1 attempts to define the fantastic and its subgenre of fantasy, which are characterized by the “anti-expected.” Rabkin’s famous edict about the fantastic goes as follows: “[T]he perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted.” Two key elements of the fantastic are thus astonishment and surprise. Following from Ferdinand de Saussure and the function of the grapholect, Rabkin also recognizes the function of language in creating the fantastic.
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Chapter 2 deals with escape, which Rabkin avers is not frivolous because it meets readers’ needs and because the world of escape is controlled by convention and allows readers to perceive order where it had not been. Specifically, he addresses Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Vladimir Propp’s work on fairy tales, and detective fiction. The third chapter evaluates perspective: Readers must know the normative in order to locate the fantastic. Most of this chapter covers Victorian writers such as William Morris, George MacDonald, and the later C. S. Lewis because of the confluence of perspectives during the period. Rabkin also proposes this threefold classification of time: mythic time, the aevum, and history. In the following chapter, he defines and defends genre criticism, focusing on the fantastic in SF and the works of Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. He then turns to the related genres of utopia/dystopia and satires. The penultimate section explores the history of the scientist or rationalist thinker in literature in the nineteenth century to show the presence of the fantastic in detective fiction from H. G. Wells to Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, ending with a retrospective on the gothic. The conclusion widens the sphere of the fantastic yet more as “a basic mode of human knowing.” Rabkin emphasizes the way in which people create reality and thus enable the fantastic by perception and the consequent reversal of expectation. Schlobin, Roger, ed. The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. The first collection to address aesthetics and fantasy, this book contains many useful articles by a number of important scholars in the field. Included are general works on fantasy by Gary K. Wolfe, Colin Manlove, W. R. Irwin, Kenneth Zahorski and Robert Boyer, and George Landow. Francis J. Molson contributes an article on ethics in fantasy for children, and Terry Reece Hackford delves into British illustrations of the tales of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Robert Crossley on utopia, Raymond Thompson on medieval romance, Samuel Vasbinder on lost-world tales, and Jules Zanger on heroic fantasy cover various subgenres. William Schuyler has an ironic article on spells, and the book ends with two useful chapters: editor Schlobin’s checklist of modern fiction and Marshall Tymn’s bibliography of reference works and critical studies. _____. “Introduction: Fantasy and Its Literature.” In The Literature of Fantasy. New York: Garland, 1979. Part defense and part definition, this introduction to an early annotated checklist of fantasy texts argues that fantasy is not so much a literary genre but a form of human awareness that crosses all human response, a natural activity that “summons and creates images and converts them to external manifestations.” Relying heavily on psychological and mythical approaches to fantasy, Schlobin explains its functions and notes the
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attacks by materialist, technological society. He points out that fantasy, as a mode of knowing, is ungovernable and archetypal; as a result, it threatens the empirical and hierarchical, so that Ursula Le Guin can claim accurately that Americans are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom. The article then examines briefly the rules by which fantasies must operate, the evocation of wonder, and the question of disbelief or secondary creation. Senior, W. A. “Oliphaunts in the Perilous Realm: The Function of Internal Wonder in Fantasy.” In Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Joe Sanders. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Most definitions of fantasy insist on the necessity of the creation of wonder, but all treat only an external wonder, that directed at the reader. Senior argues that effective fantasy must rely on a balance on wonder directed both inward and outward to create Samuel T. Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief. Internal wonder, that produced on characters within a fantasy, takes two forms. The first involves characters from the reader’s world who have been translated to the fantasy world and there encounter the marvelous; they, consequently, stand in for readers and draw them closer to the fiction. The second and more potent group are the inhabitants of the secondary creations. Elves, dwarves, giants, and wizards experience in wide-eyed astonishment the mountains, mysteries, and magic of their own world, reinforcing the formal realism of those worlds, for the fantasyscape lies at the heart of good fantasy and its acceptance by an audience. The article ends with the observation that much inferior fantasy fails to create any wonder as a result of devotion to formula. Shinn, Thelma J. Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 22. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. This book’s comprehensive mythic scope and occasional considerations of fantasy make it a useful tool for analyses of both SF and fantasy. Of particular importance are chapter 3 on mythopoesis and chapter 4 on dominant female archetypes. The concluding chapter contains a section on the unconscious and mythmaking. Slusser, George E., Eric Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, eds. Bridges to Fantasy. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. This volume contains thirteen essays on the nature of fantasy, all originally presented at the second Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy (1980). Included are essays by Harold Bloom, Roger Sale, Robert A. Collins, David Ketterer, Gary Kern, and others. Spivack, Charlotte. Merlin’s Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 23. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Spivack’s purpose in this book is twofold. First, she asserts that many female fantasists have been overlooked by critics
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of the genre despite the literary quality of their oeuvre. Second, female fantasists have found fantasy a useful medium to subvert patriarchal paradigms and to revise the issues of fantasy from a feminist perspective. The book covers ten authors, with a chapter devoted to each: Andre Norton, Susan Cooper, Ursula Le Guin, Evangeline Walton, Katherine Kurtz, Mary Stewart, Patricia McKillip, Vera Chapman, Gillian Bradshaw, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. After a short disquisition on the history and definitions of fantasy, the book proposes several basic differences between fantasy by women and by men. The first is the focus on a female protagonist, who is often endowed with stereotypically male qualities or capacities. In conjunction, male characters become more complex as their predominantly aggressive natures are softened by sensitivity. Female narrators or points of view also allow these writers to address conventionally masculine subjects, particularly Arthurian romance, from a different perspective; linked to this is the use of a Celtic matriarchal society. The narrative device favored by female fantasists is the circular as opposed to the linear plot, so that emphasis lies in the second half of the mythic paradigm and rebirth. Spivack further posits three subversive tendencies common to these authors. The first is the renunciation of power, particularly the desire for power; the second is the vindication of mortality and renunciation of immortality as a goal; the third she terms the “depolarization of values” blurring the distinctions between good and evil and between protagonist and antagonist. Moral dualism is vitiated. Two other related elements are the “rejection of transcendence for immanence” and the accompanying stress on the centrality of nature. Swinfen, Ann. In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Limited to post-World War II fantasy, mostly children’s, this book defends fantasy as a genre united by moral purpose and critiques of contemporary society and modern problems. Swinfen relies heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien and Samuel T. Coleridge for her definition of fantasy, which centers on the marvelous and reflects the desire to escape the limitations of the primary world. The second chapter classifies animal fantasies and comments on their three purposes: to analyze human behavior and put humans in the proper frame of reference, to explore individual morality, and to reinforce the importance of community. The third chapter is about time fantasy and the transferal of characters from one reality or world to another. Next comes a full discussion of the art of subcreation and the importance of inner consistency, history, language, and geography in the creation of the marvelous secondary world. The fifth chapter turns from form to meaning, pointing out the difference between symbol and allegory and their different uses in works such as the Chronicles of Narnia and the Prydain Chronicles, as well as discussing Theresa Whistler’s The River Boy. “Experience Liberated,” chapter 6, exam-
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ines the question of scale or size and its function. That fantasy presents moral, religious, and philosophical issues as the subject of the next chapter, which has three sections: the Christian content of the Narnia books, the Faust legend and redemption in Leon Garfield’s The Ghost Downstairs, and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, which Swinfen sees as bleak because of their lack of a salvation. The penultimate chapter examines how fantasy mirrors twentieth century social and political events and again falls into three parts: Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child, John Christopher’s Winchester books, and Richard Adams’ Watership Down. The final chapter repeats her contention that fantasy is not a form of escapism; it is a method of approaching and evaluating the real world. Timmerman, John. Other Worlds: The Fantasy Genre. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983. The first chapter of this short book sets forth the six criteria that Timmerman states must be present in some degree for a work to be fantasy: use of traditional story, the depiction of common characters and heroism, the evocation of another world, the use of magic and the supernatural, the struggle between good and evil, and the quest. The next chapter argues that the fantasy story is not allegory and functions more like the anagogic level of reading of medieval philosophy. He also explores the distinctions between SF, dystopian literature, and fantasy. The chapter’s final section reflects the function of and need for myth in fantasy. Chapter 3 presents common people as the heart of fantasy. Because the point of fantasy is to provide growth through experience, the common character is not cynical or hard-bitten and retains a childlike sense of wonder and adventure, the subject of the second third of the chapter, which concludes on the note of the necessity of free will for heroism and the nature thereof. Chapter 4 identifies the traits of the fantasy world, primarily from J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of subcreation, and looks at the example of the Arthurian world and Camelot. In the next chapter, the author presents the standards of good and evil and the place of magic and the supernatural, taking C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books as standards. The penultimate chapter considers the quest structure underlying much of fantasy, and in the final chapter Timmerman applies his criteria to Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant to argue that the books are “simply among the best in conception and aesthetic richness.” Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western, 1973. Todorov’s structuralist approach poses problems for many readers and scholars of fantasy because he denies Freudian analysis a role and excepts epic fantasy à la J. R. R. Tolkien from his definition. Following biological taxonomy, the book opens with a discussion of genres, which he argues are determined by a com-
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mon principle operating in a number of texts, not by any aesthetic criterion. He discusses the difficulties of subgenres and attacks Northrop Frye’s classification system, which is based primarily on thematic and historical materials. Chapter 2 sets forth his famous theory of hesitation as the basis for his definition of the fantastic: The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. This hesitation takes two forms: the reader’s and a character’s. There follows a chapter on the role of the uncanny and the marvelous in this hesitation and in the formation of subgenres of the fantastic. Todorov then turns to how a reader’s questions or hesitation about a text can cause a threat to the existence of the fantastic so that it must be situated in relationship to poetry and allegory. Often in poetry, the reader is not concerned with events or their representation, both roots of the fantastic, so the fantastic could not appear; allegory replaces literal meaning with symbolic meaning, thereby eradicating hesitation over the supernatural. His definition finished, Todorov turns to “The Discourse of the Fantastic” in chapter 5 and outlines the three properties that create structural unity through discourse: the utterance, the act of uttering, and the syntactical. Four chapters follow that examine the primary themes of the fantastic, most specifically those of the other and the self. Chapter 10 concludes that one must look at the fantastic from the exterior as well as the interior. Because psychoanalysis has replaced the literature of the fantastic as explanation, it now has a social raison d’être in three functions: the pragmatic, the semantic, and the syntactic. The chapter concludes with a short look at Franz Kafka’s work. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1966. Tolkien’s essay begins by rejecting the limiting and inaccurate notion that fairy stories concern themselves with diminutive creatures, such as elves and fairies, and the stories about them; he excludes beast fables, travelers’ tales, and dream from the category. He suggests that the genre relies on the setting of Faerie, which he associates with magic and the “realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of wonder.” It is a function of language through which humans become subcreators. The origins of the fairy story are enormously complex, because they come from what Tolkien calls the Cauldron of Story, to which various bits are added age by age. Tolkien also rejects the notion that fairy stories are for children: “If a fairy-story of a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.” The true fairy story will offer the four elements of fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation, all of which adults need more than children. The first concerns the art of secondary creation, which Tolkien argues is a high art and finds its fullest form in enchantment, the production of a secondary creation that one can enter to the complete satisfaction of the senses. Recovery addresses the regain-
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ing of a clear view through the secondary creation. He lauds escape as something generally practical and defends the escapist mentality, citing the drawbacks and horrors of modern life; further, Tolkien contends, fantasy allows the great escape, addressing the issue of death. For consolation, he identifies the need for the happy ending but phrases it as Eucatastrophe, a sudden joyous turn that denies any final defeat and produces evangelium, or joy beyond the reach of time. Wolfe, Gary K. “Symbolic Fantasy.” Genre (Spring, 1978): 194-209. Wolfe begins this taxonomic article with a brief history of the relationship between realism and romance. He revisits the nineteenth century trend toward the former and uses Northrop Frye’s anatomy of romance to show how it does not account for much of modern fantasy. He begins his classification from the point of mythopoeia and follows with a discussion of the other common characteristics of what he terms “symbolic fantasy,” which “begins with an imaginative construct and proceeds to weave a pattern of abstract values and concepts around this construct.” The primary characteristic of symbolic fantasy is not the symbolic presentation but instead narrative and stylistic conventions, which he then develops as the nature of the protagonist and the educational process that transforms that character; the importance of the created world and spiritual landscape with its different time scheme; the protean antagonist; the three minor characters of the victims or henchmen of the antagonist, avatars, and amoral figures representative of nature; and the poetic disposition of style. Fantasy and the desire for it, Wolfe concludes, arise when the dominant cultural attitude of a group cannot satisfy the spiritual needs or longings of its constituents. Yolen, Jane. Touch Magic. New York: Philomel, 1981. This short but informative book takes as its point of departure that children are not being taught about myths or folklore in their early education and are thus being done a great disservice. Yolen examines folktales, myths, fantasy, and storytelling in general to defend them and indicate the necessity of this form of cultural literacy. She is highly critical of the simplicity of Disney’s retelling of classical fairy tales and offers a discussion of more substantive variations and forms of the Cinderella, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast tales, as well as such stories as Little Red Riding Hood. In all cases, she insists on the richness of the stories, their timelessness, and the variety of meanings and lessons they can contain, all of which are accessible to children. SCIENCE FICTION Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960. In one of the earliest serious academic treatments of SF, and writing with characteristic wit and insight, Amis sets up preliminary
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definitions (SF presents a situation that “could not arise on the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology” or their pseudo-counterparts), tracks the genre’s beginnings in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and then provides instructive overviews of the major trends and subtypes in the field, noting in particular SF’s relation to myth and the unconscious, characterizing utopia and dystopia, and suggesting some of its future possibilities. Like satire and comedy, SF provides an important venue for social criticism. Although somewhat dated, this is a rewarding introduction and an early high point in the history of academic criticism of SF. Armitt, Lucie, ed. Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1991. Feminist readings of fictions that test and subvert the boundaries and traditions of SF open this three-part collection of essays. The individual authors and works in part 1 include J. B. S. Haldane’s Man’s World and Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, as well as the fiction of C. L. Moore, Ursula Le Guin, and Doris Lessing. Five essays compose part 2, “Aliens and Others”; they examine pets, monsters, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and a Freudian perspective on the space where woman and machine meet in the films Short Circuit and Tron. Also included are a study of women in Hollywood’s presentations of SF and an essay on the political implications for women in the structures of language and power in women’s SF. The final section takes a look at the problems of SF as a genre, such as how SF should be read, the relationship between hard and soft SF, and publishing and readership problems. Bailey, James O. Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. 1947. Reprint. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1972. Bailey traces SF back to medieval travel books, but his text focuses on the seventeenth century through World War II. The reprinted edition contains a foreword by Thomas D. Clareson. Divided into two sections, on time and on space, the text covers such topics as adventure, utopias, imaginary voyages, machines, alchemy, gothic romance, and the concepts of structure, characterization, and narrative method in SF. Bailey’s thoughts on SF as a genre and on idea patterns inform the summaries and analyses of these stories. Barr, Marleen. Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Barr’s preface notes that the development of SF by women parallels the development of American feminism in the twentieth century, which this book traces and explores. There are three major parts to the text. In the first, “Community,” is a discussion of the feminist community of SF writers, with particular focus on Joanna Russ; James Tiptree, Jr.; Suzy McKee Charnas; and Judith Merril; a more in-depth study into how Tiptree’s works bring together temporary communities, forming something new, before they
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disintegrate again, showing a problematic reading for the feminist critic; and a look at feminist SF time travel novels, particularly Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. The second section, “Heroism,” discusses the appropriation and alteration of masculine discourses and masculine patterns in feminist SF. Authors discussed include Pamela Sargent, Octavia Butler, Russ, and Alice Walker. The last section, “Sexuality and Reproduction,” has two pieces that explore the alterations occurring to women’s biology that have been discussed in SF. Authors mentioned include Russ, Sargent, Zelda Harris, and Toni Morrison. This book is a must for any serious critical look at feminism in SF. Barron, Neil, ed. Anatomy of Wonder 4: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. New Providence, N.J.: R. R. Bowker, 1995. The third edition of Anatomy of Wonder already was one of the primary omnibus reference tools in the field of SF studies, and the fourth edition updates and extends the virtues of the earlier version. Covering books published through 1994, this new edition offers enhanced scholarly treatment of the works and writers in each of its major divisions (“Emergence to the 1920’s”; “SF Between the Wars”; “Modern”; and “Children’s and Young Adult SF”). Although many will miss the fascinating introductions to SF in other languages that took up more than two hundred pages of the third edition, there is much to recommend the work to individuals and libraries alike, annotating as it does some twenty-seven hundred titles (fiction and nonfiction) and discussing in separate chapters works devoted to everything from SF scholarship and building a core collection to SF in various media to teaching SF. Also includes listings of best books, translations, awards, fan organizations, and conventions. Topping off this excellent resource are author-subject and title indexes. Bartter, Martha A. The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 33. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Bartter sees SF as most suited to a discussion of American development and detonation of atomic bombs for three specific reasons: SF is didactic, it has a history of a mythology of power embedded in superweapons, and its conventions reveal something of the writer’s own cultural background and assumptions. The text, divided into three parts, examines some little-known and some famous stories about superweapons and superwar. The first part, “The Way to Hiroshima,” reveals the social and political assumptions authors made in their stories and the patterns that led to the creation and use of atomic bombs. The second part, “Circling Ground Zero,” examines the assumptions behind the assumptions, concerning people, behavior as individuals and members of a society, and human values. The third part, “Leaving Ground Zero,” considers stories that function as experiments in alternative cultural assumptions with the hope for change. Bleiler, Richard, ed. Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors
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from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. 2d ed. New York: Scribners, 1999. Containing essays by various experts, this fine collection of biocritical essays ranges from treatments of such classic writers as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells in the “Early Science Fiction” section through the greats of the pulps and the Golden Age such as Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and James Blish, then into the well-established writers of the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick. The second addition adds entries on Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson and many other contemporary science fiction writers. It is arranged chronologically, and features a photograph and a bibliography of selected works for each author. This collection is especially useful for researchers and teachers seeking a rich overview of an author’s work. Including essays on lesser known authors and major authors from outside the Anglo American tradition, this work will remain a standard resource in the field. Bretnor, Reginald, ed. Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow. New York: Harper, 1974. Bretnor introduces this anthology as a “discursive symposium,” and its inclusive roster of thoughtful essays on various aspects of SF by some of the then-best-known writers in the field certainly helps the book live up to this description. Although dated in some respects, the essays provide a complex snapshot of the views of SF writers in the early 1970’s, including pieces on the state of SF (by Ben Bova, Frederik Pohl, and George Zebrowski), the relationships of SF to science and modern culture (including essays by Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, and Alan Nourse), and the art and science of SF (with essays on creating SF by James Gunn, Alexei and Cory Panshin, Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, Anne McCaffrey, Gordon R. Dickson, and Jack Williamson). This is a rich resource for teachers and scholars. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. This is an interdisciplinary work written by a film scholar who perceives a transformation in human identity resulting from new technologies. Bodies become virtual and the organic evolves into the electronic. Citing postmodern theorists, Bukatman describes this transformation in SF films. He also takes into account SF television, comic books, computer games, techno-music, and virtual reality. Cyberpunk literature is likewise covered in the form of works by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling. Even though his prose is jargon-heavy and sometimes opaque, Bukatman clearly demonstrates the importance of SF film in today’s information age. In his analysis, it emerges as the most relevant cultural form in contemporary society, as a beguiling way to understand people’s changing natures. Carr, Helen, ed. From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Post-
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modern World. London: Pandora Books, 1989. In the introduction, Carr says that in this book “women’s writing today is discussed by a diverse group of academics, journalists and practicing writers, who bring very different approaches, preoccupations, and emphases to what they have to say.” This statement characterizes this text well. It is an excellent source for finding poststructural feminist theory applied to a variety of subjects; for a literary audience, topics range from SF to autobiography. Of particular interest to SF audiences is Roz Kaveny’s “The Science Fictiveness of Women’s Science Fiction,” which gives a historical overview of SF (especially British SF), discussing most of the major female SF authors and with extended readings of Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin’s contributions to the feminist discourse in SF. Carter, Paul A. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. This book is an extensive analysis of the themes, images, and patterns in SF contained in the fan magazines that gave the field its connection to popular culture. The book begins with a genealogy of the fifteen major American and British titles that he studies, covering a publishing range of fifty years. The chapters are well arranged according to theme, with the first chapter discussing the relationship between scientific extrapolation from the known and the unknown and the adoption of that pattern for SF; it also traces the origins of the pulp magazines that focused on a literature of science. The next two chapters trace the expanding view of the universe, occurring simultaneously in SF and in science, focusing on images of the moon and of Mars. There are also chapters that cover time travel, the politics of World War II, human evolution, femininity, utopian and dystopian tendencies, and the limitations of science compensated by the human spirit. The final section is a discussion of the availability and accessibility of these early SF materials; it centers on the growing scholarly interest in these earliest artifacts of SF history. Threaded through with priceless artwork from these pulp predecessors, this book is a good survey of the important trend-setting stories of SF. Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995. An invaluable companion to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, this encyclopedia contains more than four thousand entries on science-fiction writers and works. Updated to tackle modern themes and media such as graphic novels, film and television spin-offs, technothrillers, survivalist fiction, game worlds, and Magical Realism. Includes twentyseven updated entries to reflect contributions to science fiction from countries other than the United States and Great Britain. Davies, Philip John, ed. Science Fiction, Social Conflict, and War. New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. This collection of essays addresses SF’s interaction with social dimensions. In the introductory essay, Davies notes that SF
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often provides “commentary on the politics of conflict and war.” He moves on to trace the historical progression of the icons of war in SF. His claim is that, regardless of its often-marginalized position in literary and social discourses, SF has proved to be an “excellent laboratory” for investigating social conflict. The other authors in the text include Jacqueline Pearson, studying sexual politics and SF; Edward James, studying racial politics and violence; Anthony Easthope, examining utopian SF; Carl Tighe, reading the Eastern bloc SF of Stanisìaw Lem’s Solaris; Christopher Pike, reading the Russian SF of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky; Alasdair Spark, looking at the Vietnam War in SF; Paul Brians, making a commentary on images of nuclear war in children’s SF; H. Bruce Franklin, looking at democratic ideals in American SF; and Martha A. Bartter, examining SF’s relationship to the status quo, in both literary and social terms. Delany, Samuel R. Silent Interviews on Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics: A Collection of Written Interviews. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Working within the unusual frame of the written interview, Delany explores a wide range of topics of keen interest to readers of SF and contemporary culture and theory, including semiotics, political and economic aspects of criticism, social experience, race, sexual orientation, and writing. He chooses this frame in part to explore “truths” that may be “more malleable, less rigid” in this written form than might be possible in the usual face-to-face interview. The essays range from revised and enlarged writings “erected” on the transcripts of interviews originally published in such journals as Science Fiction Studies (“The Semiology of Silence”), Camera Obscura (“Sword & Sorcery, S/M, and the Economics of Inadequation”), and Diacritics (“Science Fiction and Criticism”) to written interview responses based on questions submitted to him and ranging from 1979 through 1993. Throughout, Delany demonstrates prodigious reading and deep insight into issues of contemporary theory and culture. The insights here should be compared with those in his earlier essays, especially those in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1978). Dunn, Thomas P., and Richard D. Erlich, eds. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 1. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. This is an interesting collection of essays devoted to a cluster of central themes in twentieth century SF. The collection is divided into sections on individual authors, with essays concentrating on the work of Karel Ãapek, C. S. Lewis, Stanisìaw Lem, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, and Walter Tevis; children’s SF; attributes (exploring topics such as “Portraits of Machine Consciousness” and “Sexual Mechanisms and Metaphors in SF Films”); and cyborgs. It includes a listing of works “useful for the study of machines in science fiction.”
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Garnett, Rhys, and R. J. Ellis, eds. Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. This collection of essays focuses on “crucial periods in the historical development of the genre,” namely SF produced during the Victorian era and that produced after World War II. The editors also note that these essays have a subtextual discussion about power, specifically the social power that SF discusses and in which SF finds itself caught while trying to establish itself as a genre. The collection includes contributions by an impressive list of scholars. The first section, focusing on the Victorian era, includes work by Darko Suvin on William Morris, Stanisìaw Lem on H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and Rhys Garnett on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and sexual repression. In part 2, focusing on postwar SF, these authors appear: Patrick Parrinder on postwar enlightenment and its effect on SF; Jerzy Jarzebski on Lem; Thomas and Alice Clareson on John Wyndham; R. J. Ellis on Frank Herbert’s Dune and “The Discourse of Apocalyptic Ecologism in the United States”; and Robert Philmus on Ursula Le Guin. Part 3, focusing on contemporary feminist approaches to the same issues of power, contains these authors: Marleen Barr on Marge Piercy and Thomas Berger; Jenny Wolmark on Vonda McIntyre; and Anne Cranny- Francis on Suzy McKee Charnas’s dystopian SF. Gunn, James E. Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. New York: Prentice Hall, 1975. This beautifully illustrated collection features a glimpse into important historical movements and periods in SF’s development, with an introduction by Isaac Asimov. Gunn declares that the volume is “more than just illustrations and history”; instead, its method is “to explain SF in terms of the influences that created it and then affected its subsequent development.” The chapters are arranged around key periods and movements in SF: ancient roots of fantastic literature; 1800-1885, leading up to Jules Verne; 1828-1905 and the reign of Victorian ideals in SF; 1885-1911 and the birth of SF magazine culture; 1866-1946, the myth of progress in SF; 19111926, the rise of pulp magazines; 1926-1950, major editors, especially Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr.; and World War II and after, the impact of technological development and social unrest. The final chapter offers Gunn’s sense of the developing trends in SF, showing an optimistic view of the rising dominance of SF in popular culture. The book is light on information, but the illustrations and perspectives are worth a look. Hassler, Donald M. Comic Tones in Science Fiction: The Art of Compromise with Nature. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Hassler’s text is a superb and readily accessible investigation of comic effect in the eighteenth century and in modern SF. He builds an argument supported by structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and deconstruction. He sees precursors in the late eigh-
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teenth century contributing to ideas of indeterminacy in science, meaning, discourse, and “artifact,” as well as seeing precursors of more recent hard SF writers. Hassler plays mostly with the sense of irony that arises when readers realize their own indeterminacy in the light of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Jacques Lacan’s languagelike structured unconscious, the breakdown of “mastery,” and the atomic betrayal of being in quantum theory. Irony is manifest in this incongruous or double view of oneself, and comic effect comes in the form of a compromise that is made in order to survive and that expresses a sense of loss and distance. Hassler traces the epistemological indeterminacy of the Enlightenment to the ironic dislocations of death from William Wordsworth to Ursula Le Guin, examining along the way the development of the genre in William Golding and the pulp tradition. Finally, a study of Frederik Pohl’s and Hal Clement’s work and their persistence as hard SF writers circles back to a play for survival. Portions of the book are reprints. Huntington, John. Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Focusing his attention on tales from the Golden Age of American SF— primarily those from the first volume of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which he argues convincingly is an effective sampling of short SF dating from the late 1930’s through the early 1960’s—Huntington brings a rich and supple understanding of Marxist and poststructuralist literary theory to bear on the ideological analysis of short fiction. He begins from the premise that “we can learn from the most literarily conventional popular literature if we question it closely.” He regards SF as an important part of the “cultural thinking process” under way in America during this period, a process that negotiated the broad change from traditional individualistic capitalism to a purported technocratic meritocracy. Huntington carefully justifies his selection of texts and details the reading protocols required by a popular literature before turning in subsequent chapters to detailed analyses of key stories. He traces the ideological implications of the “myth of genius” in Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God,” for example, and follows with exciting readings of the complexities of reason in economics in stories such as Robert Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll” and of reason in relation to love in Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” and Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother.” Subsequent chapters explore the ideological structures in imagining the Other and the complex interrelations of history, politics, and predicting the future. Huntington ends the study with incisive discussions of SF’s relationship with mainstream literature and a postscript reflecting on his own practice in the book. A stimulating and rewarding study of classic SF. James, Edward. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford Uni-
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versity Press, 1994. Now available in paperback, this is a quite useful overview of the field by the longtime editor of Foundation, the chief British SF scholarly journal. James brings a refreshingly extra-American view to the subject of world SF, covering its history through the 1960’s (concentrating on Anglo-American writers but mentioning important writers and texts from outside that tradition), SF reading strategies (which differ substantially from those typically required of realist fiction), fandom, and recent developments (including the New Wave and cyberpunk, as well as more recent trends). Although James cannot go very deeply into any of the domains he surveys, his highly readable style and insightful observations on writers and trends will bring most readers up to speed on the field with great economy and grace. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. Writing at a time of growing academic interest in SF, Ketterer (who has contributed to this scholarly resurgence) develops a compelling analysis of SF as a series of strategies for imagining other worlds in the context of American apocalyptic literature, discussing narratives traditionally recognized as “mainstream” literature in close proximity with important works of SF. The apocalyptic imagination, in this study, exploits the dialectical tensions between destruction and creation, satire and prophetic mysticism, purposive meaning and unmeaning chaos, and representations of grand movements and detailed characterization. Apocalyptic fictions are, for Ketterer, distinct from mimetic (realistic) works, on one hand, and fantastic narratives, on the other, because apocalyptic fictions create other worlds that exist, on the literal level, in a credible relationship (based on reason, analogy, or religious beliefs) with the real world. This relationship leads to the “metaphorical destruction of the ‘real’ world in the reader’s head.” Ketterer plies this flexible and intricate critical model in discussions of Edgar Allan Poe and the visionary tradition in SF, linking this with his analysis of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as an archetypal “winter-journey” outside space and time. He similarly discusses the utopian/dystopian tradition, pairing Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland with Stanisìaw Lem’s Solaris, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with SF’s fictions of time and space, and Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s more speculative fiction. A rewarding and stimulating study. Landon, Brooks. The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 52. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. This ambitious monograph probes the relationship between SF film and literature. Landon defends the former as a unique artistic mode the strength of which is in conveying visual spectacle. In his opinion, SF film is by no means inferior to its
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literary counterpart; the two are distinct. The first third of Landon’s book deals with adaptations: Blade Runner and both versions of The Thing. Landon then turns to special effects and argues that they define SF as a cinematic art form. In his opinion, it does not matter if SF films privilege special effects over character and theme; indeed, he sees this emphasis on spectacle as evidence of postmodern brilliance. The third part of his book shows how electronic technologies magnify the power of SF cinema. Although he overstates his points at times, Landon’s reasoning is bound to stimulate fruitful debate. _____. Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars. Twayne’s Studies in Literary Themes and Genres 12. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Landon’s excellent work argues that SF can be defined as the literature of change, a literature in which reader’s expectations are as crucial as the written text, and so merges literary critique with examination of popular culture. Landon provides an overview of the evolution of SF through insightful analyses of exemplary texts by E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as samples of works from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The book includes an extensive annotated list of works for further reading, a critical bibliography, and a chronology of major authors, works, and historical events of importance in the development of SF. Lefanu, Sarah. Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. One of the best theoretical studies of the interrelationships between feminist thinking and SF, this work explores the “question of whether SF . . . offers a freedom to women writers, in terms of style as well as content, that is not available in mainstream fiction. . . . [D]oes [SF] offer a means of fusing political concerns with the playful creativity of the imagination?” In Lefanu’s opinion, feminist SF draws not only on the “female gothic” but also on optimistic and pessimistic elements in utopian/dystopian writing, and it is informed by feminist, socialist, and radical politics of the late 1960’s and the 1970’s. The book is roughly divided in two, with the first half laying out the theoretical and historical context of feminist SF and then sampling female SF writers as they explore the nature and role of the gendered subject as “heroine” in SF, ranging from Amazons and SF representations of women as rulers and as the subjects of utopian and dystopian narratives to women’s representations of love and eroticism for female subjects, ending with comments on the ways female SF writers challenge patriarchal structures in their narratives. The second half of the book takes the genrewide insights of the first half and applies them more fully in detailed readings of the work of James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Joanna Russ. Readers will not always agree with Lefanu’s renderings in these more developed essays, but they will find her discussions evocative and stimulating.
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Lem, Stanisìaw. Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Edited by Franz Rottensteiner. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. An excellent collection of Lem’s nonfiction writing, including some autobiographical materials as well as several of the essays that contributed to his reputation as a critic of Western (particularly American) SF. Titles include “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case—with Exceptions” and “Philip K. Dick— Visionary Among Charlatans.” Despite their controversy, these are well crafted and strongly written essays from one of the major writers in the field. They provide crucial insights into his thinking, from matters of structure in SF narrative to his close readings of Tzvetan Todorov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. A fine resource for any Lem scholar, and useful in most general collections. McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. This text is a clever package of fiction, theory, and criticism all relating to cyberpunk and postmodern SF. In the introduction, McCaffery gives a brief history of postmodernism and the connections to technology that characterize cyberpunk and an SF avant-garde. Before getting to the fiction and theory/ criticism of the book, Richard Kadrey and McCaffery present “Cyberpunk 101,” a list of works, with annotations, that have helped to shape the formation of cyberpunk. The first half of the book is composed of short stories, selections from novels, and poetry, with illustrations, from such artists as Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany, and J. G. Ballard. The theory and criticism part of the book includes essays, an interview with William Gibson, and selections from theoretical texts such as Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. Magill, Frank N., ed. Survey of Science Fiction Literature. 5 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1979. In this impressive collection, Frank Magill has collected five hundred original pieces of criticism, written explicitly for this series by and about some of the biggest names in the field, from Brian Aldiss to Roger Zelazny. In the introduction, Magill calls this an “extensive critical evaluation of the major literature of science fiction”; he continues in the introduction to define and systematize SF into a historical progression, into a thematic arrangement, and in traditional literary terms. The entries are arranged alphabetically by title, with each entry containing publishing information about that text, a brief description of the text, a list of the main characters, a review of the piece, and a short bibliography for further study. There is a complete index at the end of volume 5. Manlove, Colin N. Science Fiction: Ten Explorations. London: Macmillan, 1986. This text is Manlove’s answer to the many shallow or unsustained studies of SF that seem to prevail over lengthy, thoughtful, in-depth criticism. The ten
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works considered, ranging from 1951 to 1983, are Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Frederik Pohl’s Alternating Currents, Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings, Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, Clifford Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet, A. A. Attanasio’s Radix, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun sequence. Manlove’s selection of these works is based on his sense that their writers are diverse world builders with imaginative energy, a central pulse in the SF genre. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. After presenting a brief history of utopian literature in the introduction, Moylan goes on, in the theory section of the book, to describe the revolutionary oppositional utopian impulse since the 1960’s in the context of modern society. Winding his argument through a field of theorists and critics such as Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Frederic Jameson, Darko Suvin, Jack Zipes, and Michel Foucault, Moylan comes to his own term for a series of new utopian novels: “critical utopia.” The critical utopia has given utopic writing new life. It is a movement aware of its own traditional limitations or utopic horizon, highly self-reflexive and open, now an “ambiguous” utopia (Ursula Le Guin) or an ambiguous “heterotopia” (Samuel R. Delany), and characterized by the hero or antihero predominating over the background. The rest of the book takes the theory to texts and examines Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Delany’s Triton. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1948. A sequel to A World in the Moon (1935), Voyages to the Moon is a remarkable study for postspaceflight readers. Nicolson examines English-language “cosmic,” rather than the conventional “imaginary,” voyage stories, poems, papers, letters, and plays, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, showing the connections between the literary cosmic voyages as well as the histories of astronomy and aviation. The earlier seventeenth century works are limited to more terrestrial voyages with the moon as boundary, but eighteenth century works, especially after Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), reflect a growing realization at the possibilities of whole galaxies of new worlds to be discovered. Such names as Aphra Behn, Ben Jonson, Galileo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson are represented among the writers, along with their works, familiar and unfamiliar, which are to be found here. Throughout Nicolson’s study, the one resounding message is that humanity has been and always will be fascinated by the vast unknowns of cosmic voyages. The text also includes an added epilogue that traces historical sources of Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and C. S. Lewis. Also included are illustrations and a primary and secondary bibliography.
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Palumbo, Donald, ed. Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 18. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Although the title refers only to fantastic literature, the nearly two hundred narratives examined here are both SF and fantasy. This collection of fifteen essays by William M. Schuyler, Jr., Brooks Landon, Marleen Barr, Judith Bogart, and Leonard G. Heldreth, among others, broaches the study of sexuality in fantastic literature through the lenses of theory, themes, feminist views, and fanzines. Some of the topics discussed are sex roles, reversals of female stereotypes, semiotics of sexuality, sexual comedy, SF and fantasy as testing grounds for altered assumptions of sexuality, sexuality and death/rebirth motifs, homosexuality, androgyny, and sexuality and technology. Parker, Helen N. Biological Themes in Modern Science Fiction. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984. Parker selects several representative examples to study biological themes and motifs in SF. Three aspects of the biological perspective embody the SF concept of change and adaptation: evolution, genetics, and exobiology. This perspective includes human manipulation of these biological principles as well as the biological consequences of the past and present. Her approach provokes a wide-ranging outlook on what it is to live in a human society, what it is to be human, and the future of humanity as a species. _____. Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching. New York: Methuen, 1980. Part of the New Accents series, this advanced introduction to SF for academics provides basic definitions of the genre (ranging from the “scientific romance” to structurally based definitions and “generic hybrids”), a sociology of SF (including perspectives on SF texts as products, messages, modes of reading, literature, and “paraliterature”), and studies of SF as romance (addressing in particular the role of mythology, formulas, and the domestication of romance in self-conscious critique), SF as fable and epic (connecting it to these older forms and marking its differences from them), and SF language (a particularly rich exploration of the genre’s exploitation of linguistic turns to achieve estrangement, social critique, and parody), ending with a brief chapter considering the design of the SF course (situating this discussion in terms of C. P. Snow’s “two culture” debate, canon formation, and estrangement). A useful and concise tool for teachers in the field. Penley, Constance, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, eds. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Originally published in part as an issue of the scholarly journal Camera Obscura (Fall, 1986), this anthology contains nine essays and the script of the experimental film Friendship’s Death. The essays ply semiology, psychoanalysis, and reception studies within the context of the
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genre and make for dense reading at times. There are two essays on Metropolis and The Terminator, with individual essays devoted to Star Trek fandom, Alien, and 1960’s television sitcoms such as The Jetsons, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched. Throughout, the volume explores how SF media constructs new gender roles through the status it assigns to robots, aliens, monsters, and other mainstays of the genre. Overall, it provides solid examples of feminist theory in action. Reilly, Robert, ed. The Transcendent Adventure: Studies of Religion in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 12. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. This essay collection is an attempt to trace religious themes and motifs in several SF works and to demonstrate how the two areas are closer than one would initially think: Both display a curiosity about the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it. Topics include religious consciousness as the context for works by Harlan Ellison; Walter M. Miller, Jr.; and Philip K. Dick; mind and magic; and ethics and science. The Edenic concerns of James Blish and C. S. Lewis compose the second section, and the third is devoted to individual authors and specific religious questions and interconnections. Those included here are Dick, Philip José Farmer, Frank Herbert, Doris Lessing, Miller, Walter Tevis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Roger Zelazny. A bibliography of works with religious themes and motifs and a secondary bibliography end the book. Rose, Mark, ed. Alien Encounters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. In this important work, Rose sets out to understand the range and complexity of the SF genre from a structuralist perspective. His is not a comprehensive definition of SF but instead a working understanding of an active, developing genre, what he often calls a historical phenomenon. In successive chapters, he concentrates on the paradigm of SF as a genre that operates in a dialectical relationship between the two binary oppositions of human/nonhuman and science/nature. The various combinations of these elements provide a working understanding of the dynamics of SF, which Rose explores in four larger chapter-length concept-structures: space, time, machine, and monster. Rose’s argument is very lucid, and he provides important readings of major SF authors and texts, especially Stanisìaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. He includes an extended look at several SF films, including 2001, 2010, and Blade Runner. Overall, his clear argument is an important one to structuralist and poststructuralist SF criticism and should be valuable to any interested scholar. Ruddick, Nicholas. Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 55. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Neither “a history nor a survey of British science fiction,” this book explores the assumptions in the view that something like
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British SF can be identified clearly. Ruddick resists alternative terms such as “scientific romance” (see Brian Stableford’s study of this form, below) and “speculative fiction,” arguing instead that because British SF never has been as profoundly separated from “literature” as SF was in America, British SF should be seen as part of “English literature.” Having established the fuzziness of his boundaries, Ruddick first moves on to analyze the details of British SF by tracing the motif of “the Island as a site of Darwinian struggle” from H. G. Wells to the present. He then analyzes carefully the frequently held view of British SF that it is pessimistically obsessed with catastrophe, arguing that the specific character of the various catastrophes in British SF is intimately connected with the island motif. This is an evocative and instructive study of British SF, an important holding for most libraries. Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. This is a collection of selected essays, reviews, and letters Russ has written over the last twenty-five years, with an introduction by Sarah Lefanu. The essays cover the wide range of Russ’s critical expertise including the aesthetics of SF, feminist utopias, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, SF heroines, the modern gothic, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the battle of the sexes in SF. Somewhat obscure essays from scholarly journals, reviews, and other books of essay collections are all to be found here. Schellinger, Paul E., ed. Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. 3d ed. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. A massive compilation of brief biocritical essays with bibliographies, on SF writers in English from 1895. The bibliographies are as complete as possible, including lists of uncollected SF short stories published after the writer’s last collection. In addition to the biography and critical discussion, writers themselves sometimes contribute reflections on their work. One of the most thorough and inclusive tools of its kind. It was revised in Jay Pederson’s St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1995). Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. Based on a series of four lectures given in 1974 in Notre Dame’s Ward Phillips series, this small book is an evocative theoretical exploration of SF that participated in the process of engaging academic literary theory with SF. Adapting literary structuralism to his purposes, Scholes argues for the practical modeling of SF and its ability to estrange habitually overlooked or confusing features of the present. He sketches the roots of SF as a latter-day form of speculative fiction (in the tradition of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift) that satisfies a common need for “suspense with intellectual consequences” by enhancing the reader’s awareness of the “universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures.” Structural fabulation uses the insights of recent science to frame and explore human situations, and Scholes traces the range of such
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fabulation by discussing Frank Herbert’s Dune and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, and he devotes much of the last lecture, “The Good Witch of the West,” to a careful reading of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. Scholes’s major points may seem merely commonplace to good teaching and research in the field, but these lectures still make an excellent theoretical introduction for advanced students. Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. This early, important piece of SF scholarship is focused explicitly on the literary and textual aspects of SF. The first and longest part of the book is a literary history of SF, covering most major eras from pre-1900 to New Age SF; most major authors are covered, if only briefly. The second section is a discussion of the science that the editors deem important for a reader of SF to understand. Each section discusses science on fairly lay terms, listing major novels that use the concepts and covering these fields: physics, computers, thermodynamics, biology, and psychology, with a last section on what they call “pseudoscience.” The next part considers the literary forms present in SF, with one chapter devoted to forms and themes and one chapter listing and giving short interpretive pieces on ten representative novels, from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The appendix contains decent, though dated, bibliographies of SF criticism, SF in other media, SF science, and award-winning SF novels. This book successfully combines literature, science, and scholarship and should be useful to any scholar, especially those new to SF. Slusser, George, George Guffey, and Mark Rose, eds. Bridges to Science Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Collected from the first J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on SF and Fantasy Literature (1979), these essays range from Harry Levin exploring “Science and Fiction” and Gregory Benford offering a scientist’s perspective on “Aliens and Knowability” to Eric Rabkin on “Fairy Tales and Science Fiction” and Patrick Parrinder figuring “Science Fiction as Truncated Epic.” A useful early collection of serious SF scholarship. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2d enl. ed. New York: Ungar, 1987. This is an expanded version of Sobchack’s influential book The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film 1950-1975 (1980). It reprints the first three chapters and retrofits a fourth one concerned with the 1980’s. Chapter 1 reviews definitions of the genre, both literary and cinematic, and relates them to the horror film. Chapter 2 examines the iconography of the genre, with special attention paid to the portrayal of “the alien.” Chapter 3 attends to the impact of sound effects in SF film. In the lengthy fourth chapter, Sobchack invokes Jameson’s Marxian views on postmodernity. She uses them to talk about the influence of commodity culture on
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films such as Star Wars and Repo Man within the context of emergent electronic technologies. Sobchack’s insights are as numerous as the many films she covers from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, making this perhaps the best survey of the field. Stableford, Brian. Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Stableford distinguishes scientific romance (SR) from SF in Britain by rooting it in the writing of H. G. Wells and tracing its parallels with the British tradition of the speculative but nonfiction prose essay, made famous by T. H. Huxley and later practitioners. Although he sees his own study as taking up where Darko Suvin’s Victorian Science Fiction in the U.K. takes off, his approach differs from Suvin’s in refusing to offer a strict definition of SR, relying instead on a set of “family resemblances” or marks of kinship among the writers and texts he studies. This approach draws upon the Wittgensteinian tradition of the language game, insisting that definitions are themselves situated in the discourses and by the participants in those language games: The “defining” family resemblances of SR are recognized by the producers and the readers of this stream of fiction. Having established this intriguing and evocative model, Stableford goes on to contextualize SR among its literary ancestors (for example, imaginary voyages, future wars, and fantasies of utopian, evolutionary, eschatological, and metaphysical orientations). He then analyzes writers, works, and trends in SR before World War I (for example, works by Wells, M. P. Shiel, and Arthur Conan Doyle) and between the world wars (for example, works by S. Fowler Wright, Olaf Stapledon, and John Gloag), tracing along the way the increasing divergence between SR and SF, the development of the speculative essay in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and ending with a discussion of the twilight of SR (focusing on C. S. Lewis and Gerald Heard). Stableford’s insightful and deeply researched study sheds much light on the development of both SR and SF in Britain. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Although dense, this groundbreaking Marxist study makes important contributions to the theoretical definition of SF. According to this definition, SF must contain a “novum” or scientifically based new idea or extrapolation that promotes estrangement and cognition. On the basis of his carefully constructed model, Suvin characterizes related narrative fictional types, tracing the history and development of SF and contrasting it with utopian and other types of literature. With major sections devoted to poetics, earlier SF history, and “modern” SF (which reaches to the interwar period, but which includes useful discussions of Russian SF and Karel Ãapek), the book focuses on H. G. Wells as the central figure in the development of the form. Not for beginners, this study rewards careful and informed reading, and its extensive bibliography (which
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includes categories for “Theory and History of SF After Wells,” “Theory of the Fictional Utopia,” “History of SF to the Eighteenth Century,” “History of SF from the French Revolution to Wells,” “Wells and His SF Context,” and “Russian SF to 1958") will be helpful to scholars and teachers with theoretical interests. _____. Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. A surprisingly rich bibliographical and theoretical study of nineteenth century narrative fiction that can be considered SF. Adopting a “social formalist” theoretical posture, Suvin argues convincingly that literary form can be questioned as to its societal significance. He begins with a bibliographic study of the material that establishes the basic definitions and limits of the genre and the period (1848-1900), then provides an annotated listing both of SF books and of those that are close relatives. This section is enhanced by an essay on SF and the book trade in the nineteenth century by John Sutherland. Suvin completes this first section of the work with biographical sketches of SF writers and a discussion of their social classification. The second section of the book analyzes Victorian SF as a social discourse, exploring its social addressees, its narrative logic, patterns of ideological domination, and the range of this SF. The study ends with a revealing analysis of the relations between knowledge and power as they are revealed in the social discourse of Victorian SF, with Suvin addressing the preconditions of this popular literary form, its subgenres in relation to British class discourse, and the discourse of history. Suvin manages to combine a variety of scholarly tools (bibliography, textual history) and approaches (Marxism, poststructuralism) to shed considerable light on the antecedents of twentieth century SF. Telotte, J. P. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. The image of human artifice—in robots, androids, and cyborgs—undergirds Telotte’s account of SF cinema. Historically, the image reflects changing attitudes toward technology and scientific reason. In current critical theory, it functions as a metaphor for the self. Telotte discusses robotic representations in a sequence of readings that parallels the development of the genre. He examines films such as Metropolis, Frankenstein, the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Forbidden Planet, and Westworld. His treatment of more recent works (for example, The Terminator, Robocop, and Total Recall) is influenced by the poststructuralist theories of Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway. Unlike them, however, Telotte leans toward humanism. Science fiction films become a “formula for exploring the nature of human being” in tension with technology. Telotte’s claims for “the human” downplay gender, racial, and cultural differences, however, and this seems problematic given the poststructuralist discourse he uses. Even so, readers will benefit from the analyses of individual films.
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Tymn, Marshall B., ed. The Science Fiction Reference Book: A Comprehensive Handbook and Guide to the History, Literature, Scholarship, and Related Activities of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Fields. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1981. A relatively early example of its kind, the SFRB covers in large and detailed sections the backgrounds of SF (including a brief history, children’s fantasy and SF, SF art, fantastic cinema, and critical studies and reference works), its fandom (covering the history, writing awards, literary awards, and major periodicals in the field), and its outpourings in academe (offering the history of SF in academia, an annotated core list of modern fantasy, a listing of outstanding SF books published between 1927 and 1979, an essay on SF and fantasy library collections, and some resources for teaching SF), in each section offering well-researched essays by specialists in the field. The appendices include a listing of SF and fantasy dissertations (1970-1979), listings of SF organizations and societies, specialty publishers, and a list of important definitions. Although dated in its bibliographic listings, the SFRB is a fine starting point for less time-sensitive materials and backgrounds. Warrick, Patricia S. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980. This text explores the image of artificial or machine intelligences in SF. There is an extensive historical survey, beginning with the nineteenth century and Mary Shelley and ending with the 1970’s. Warrick’s argument chronologically traces patterns in the use of these images alongside developing technological theories. She gives much credit to Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics for making the subgenre more definable. She explores the relationship between robots and society in applications as diverse as computers and artificial environments (what might now be called virtual reality). She identifies Philip K. Dick as creating the most complex interactions between machines and humanity. Her argument is well developed and clearly written; this book would serve any SF scholar interested in cybernetic theory or good SF criticism. Wingrove, David, ed. The Science Fiction Source Book. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984. This text is split into several sections, based on different parts of the SF field. Brian Stableford begins with a very brief overview of SF’s history, going almost decade by decade through the twentieth century. He follows this with a listing and description of an impressive array of subgenres of SF, detailing important texts, themes, images, and authors: man and machine, utopia and dystopia, time travel, aliens, space travel, galactic empires, telekinetic powers, disaster, religion and mythology, parallel worlds and alternate histories, sexuality, ecology, magic, the media, and the inner space of humanity. The third section presents eleven short essays on being an SF writer, including such figures as Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, and Roger Zelazny. The
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fourth section provides a checklist of important publications in the field, from fan magazines and fictional presses to scholarly journals, including a short piece on the economics of SF publishing. The last section gives a detailed listing of significant SF criticism. This is an important text, combining factual information with important scholarship of the field. Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. In this well-written book, Wolfe makes it clear that he intends to offer neither a definition of SF nor its history, focusing instead on a mapping of SF’s major icons. Wolfe’s main argument is that the central paradigm of SF is a dialectic between the known and the unknown, the tension between this pair giving rise to barriers of various kinds. These barriers create a standard set of icons that reveal the nature of the dialectic. Wolfe describes two general types of fiction, that which includes a puzzle barrier, in which the focus is to solve a conundrum and therefore conquer the unknown; and that which focuses not on the barrier but what is on the other side, which he calls “cultural isolation.” The various aspects of these barriers and their manifestations in SF help create a standard set of icons that help experienced SF readers understand the genre. Wolfe studies specific icons extensively, including the spaceship, the city, the wasteland, the robot, and the monster. His argument spans most significant texts in SF and covers most major authors in the field. This text is a very important resource for all SF teachers and scholars. Wollheim, Donald A. The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Wollheim traces not the history of SF but the flow of ideas in SF that has influenced movements in the genre. He defines SF as a future both utopic and terrifying, with prophetic scientific possibility, and primarily as a system of ideas. There are four major classifications of SF: imaginary voyages, future predictions, remarkable inventions, and social satire. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells participated in all these classes but fathered a major split on SF’s family tree, with Verne developing imaginary voyages and remarkable inventions and Wells concentrating on future predictions and social satire. Wollheim continues his rendering of SF’s flow of ideas, citing the contributions of Ray Cummings, Edmond Hamilton, Olaf Stapledon, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, and Philip José Farmer. The Vernian side of SF has dominated the evolution of ideas for the universe builders. Many critics see the New Wave as a reemergence of Wellsian writers, but Wollheim considers the New Wave as contributing more to stylistic changes in the genre. To solve these problems of futurity, a coming movement of Wellsians with their satiric and prophetic skills will soon emerge to write SF past these problems and predict more optimistic futures. Yoke, Carl B., ed. Phoenix from the Ashes: The Literature of the Remade World. West-
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port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Through a reading of the long history in mythology of the phoenix and its many names and forms, Yoke gathers this collection of essays studying SF’s themes of postapocalyptic or remade worlds incorporating the phoenix’s path of birth, death, and rebirth. Remade-world literature may be formulaic, with many variations, but Yoke stresses the underlying ancient narrative of the phoenix as part of the reason and consequence of writing these stories. These re-creation stories serve mythic purposes in modern society, portraying ritual catharsis, victory over death, recognition of the cyclic nature of life, and the hero as both subject and agent of his or her quest. Remade-world literature provides a “powerful metaphor for exploring man’s relationships to his social structure, his values, and his fellow man.” Included in the collection are essays covering everything from the role of science in, and mythic value of, remade-world literature to studies of specific authors and works. The collection also includes a useful bibliography and a filmography.
—Len Hatfield —W. A. Senior —Neal Baker —Fiona Kelleghan —Rania Lisas —Marc Zaldivar
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Science Fiction and Fantasy Sites on the World Wide Web The World Wide Web has numerous sites providing information on science fiction, fantasy, and allied genres. This list presents some of the best and most stable of those sites, each of which contains links that will direct you to other sites.
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard: Science Fiction and Fantasy Bibliographies http://www.catch22.com/SF/ARB/ This site lists academic archives and Web Guides, home pages of publishers, bookstores, and clubs and societies. Also provided are author bibliographies, links to top SF magazine Web sites and information about SF awards. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb/ The ISFDB is an effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, yearly fiction indexes, and forthcoming books. Linköping Science Fiction and Fantasy Archive http://sf.www.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf_main.html This site archives Usenet postings containing reviews of science fiction and fantasy books and movies. It also contains an art gallery, a thorough index of Web links, and an author database with both reviews and biographies. The Locus Index to Science Fiction (1984-1998) http://www.locusmag.com/index/0start.html Created by Charles N. Brown, the publisher and editor of Locus magazine, and William G. Contento, this large, invaluable site is based on the monthly “Books Received” column in Locus. Containing indexes to publishers, series, book and magazine statistics, and awards, as well as links to other recent indexes, it is searchable by authors, cover artists, and book and magazine titles.
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Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database http://library.tamu.edu/cushing/sffrd/ Compiled by Hal Hall, this online site is a searchable database of information on Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Index, 1878-1985, Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Index, 1985-1991, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Index, 1991-1995. The database provides access to science fiction-related articles, books, news reports, obituaries, and motion picture reviews and covers some horror, gothic, and utopian literature. The site is an excellent research tool with a powerful, easy-to-use search engine. Science Fiction Research Association http://www.sfra.org/ The SFRA is the oldest professional organization for the study of science fiction and fantasy literature and film. Founded in 1970, it was created to improve classroom teaching, encourage and assist scholarship, and evaluate and publicize new books and magazines dealing with fantastic literature. The site includes current reviews, archives of past reviews, conference information, and research links. Science Fiction Resource Guide http://www.sflovers.org/Web/SFRG/ This site contains an extensive collection of links to science fiction resources on the Web. Subject areas include other archives and resource guides, authors, art and artists, bibliographies, films, television, bookstores, book reviews, role-playing games, zines (fan magazines), and more. Maintained by Chaz Boston Baden, the site has received many Best-of-the-Net awards and honors. Science Fiction Weekly http://www.scifi.com/sfw Published online weekly and affiliated with the sci-fi cable television channel, this site covers news on movies, books, television, games and other science fiction media, as well as feature articles and interviews. Its Web Guide and “FreeZone” offer links and downloadable media players for the archive of original Sci Fi Channel videos. SF Site: The Home Page for Science Fiction and Fantasy http://www.sfsite.com Updated twice monthly, this site provides a mixture of book reviews, opinion pieces, author interviews, fiction excerpts, and reading lists. It
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Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
also offers a comprehensive list of links to author and fan tribute sites, science-fiction conventions, and media and other science-fiction-related resources. The Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/SF-Index.html This Guide offers almost six thousand links to science fiction resources including authors, books, movies and a comprehensive chronological history of the field. The site also provides links organized by theme, such as cloning, aliens, and biology. —Fiona Kelleghan
Genre Index ALIEN CIVILIZATION Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 17 Door into Ocean, A (Slonczewski), 144 Gripping Hand, The (Niven and Pournelle), 378 Helliconia Trilogy (Aldiss), 250 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tiptree), 253 Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin), 318 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury), 354 Mission of Gravity and Star Light (Clement), 364 Mote in God’s Eye, The (Niven and Pournelle), 378 Snow Queen Trilogy (Vinge), 478 Solaris (Lem), 482 Stations of the Tide (Swanwick), 508 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 17 Xenogenesis (Butler), 599 ALTERNATIVE HISTORY Bring the Jubilee (Moore), 68 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 240 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 343 Once and Future King, The (White), 400 Patternist Series (Butler), 422 Phoenix and the Mirror, The (Davidson), 426 Timescape (Benford), 527 ANIMAL FANTASY Animal Farm (Orwell), 29 Watership Down (Adams), 566 Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame), 581
APOCALYPSE Case of Conscience, A (Blish), 77 I Am Legend (Matheson), 271 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Caves of Steel, The (Asimov), 80 Hyperion Cantos, The (Simmons), 267 Naked Sun (Asimov), 80 Roderick and Roderick at Random (Sladek), 454 When Harlie Was One (Gerrold), 575 CATASTROPHE Fire upon the Deep, A (Vinge), 210 CAUTIONARY Boys from Brazil, The (Levin), 62 Dracula (Stoker), 149 Frankenstein (Shelley), 229 Illustrated Man, The (Bradbury), 277 Make Room! Make Room! (Harrison), 340 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 429 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 472 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 511 Wasp Factory, The (Banks), 563 CLOSED UNIVERSE Inverted World (Priest), 294 Non-Stop (Aldiss), 397 COSMIC VOYAGE Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry), 330 Star Maker (Stapledon), 502 CULTURAL EXPLORATION E Pluribus Unicorn (Sturgeon), 166 669
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature FEMINIST Female Man, The (Russ), 204 Gate to Women’s Country, The (Tepper), 232 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 246 Sarah Canary (Fowler), 461 Vampire Tapestry, The (Charnas), 554 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 587
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 243 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series (Adams), 256 Orlando (Woolf), 410 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 514 Unconquered Country, The (Ryman), 540 CYBERPUNK Neuromancer Trilogy (Gibson), 385 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 475
FUTURE HISTORY Canticle for Leibowitz, A (Miller), 74 Childe Cycle (Dickson), 84 Cities in Flight (Blish), 98 City (Simak), 102 Cyteen (Cherryh), 116 Eon and Eternity (Bear), 187 Foundation series (Asimov), 225 Instrumentality of Mankind, The (Smith), 288 Inter Ice Age 4 (Abe), 291 Last and First Men (Stapledon), 315 Mars Trilogy (Robinson), 350 Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers (Niven), 450 Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut), 469
DYSTOPIA Brave New World (Huxley), 65 Cyberiad, The (Lem), 113 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 195 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 390 Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner), 499 We (Zamyatin), 569 EVOLUTIONARY FANTASY Blood Music (Bear), 51 Childhood’s End (Clarke), 89 Planet of the Apes (Boulle), 432 Space Odyssey Series (Clarke), 489 Uplift Sequence, The (Brin), 543 EXTRAPOLATORY Best of C. M. Kornbluth, The (Kornbluth), 45 Islands in the Net (Sterling), 303 Orange County Trilogy (Robinson), 406 Space Merchants, The, and The Merchants’ War (Pohl and Kornbluth), 485 Touch of Sturgeon, A (Sturgeon), 534 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 537 EXTRASENSORY POWERS Demolished Man, The (Bester), 129 Dying Inside (Silverberg), 163 Martian Time-Slip (Dick), 357
FUTURE WAR Ender Series (Card), 180 Forever War, The (Haldeman), 219 Life During Wartime (Shepard), 321 Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The (Heinlein), 372 War with the Newts (Capek), 560 GALACTIC EMPIRE Dune Series (Herbert), 155 HEROIC FANTASY Amber Series (Zelazny), 22 Blue Sword, The (McKinley), 54 Conan Series (Howard), 105 Elric Saga, The (Moorcock), 176
670
Genre Index Hero and the Crown, The (McKinley), 54 Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 260 Incomplete Enchanter, The (de Camp and Pratt), 281 King of Elfland’s Daughter, The (Dunsany), 309 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 333 Prydain Chronicles, The (Alexander), 435 Worm Ouroboros, The (Eddison), 593 HIGH FANTASY At the Back of the North Wind (MacDonald), 35 Dark Is Rising Sequence, The (Cooper), 119 Earthsea (Le Guin), 169 Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The (McKillip), 222 Lud-in-the-Mist (Mirrlees), 337 Riddle of Stars (McKillip), 446 Swordspoint (Kushner), 517 Tales from the Flat Earth (Lee), 520 Titus Groan Trilogy (Peake), 530 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 590 INNER SPACE Camp Concentration (Disch), 71 I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Ellison), 274 Owl Service, The (Garner), 416 Rogue Moon (Budrys), 458 VALIS (Dick), 547 INVASION STORY Good News from Outer Space (Kessel), 237 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 557 MAGICAL REALISM Aegypt (Crowley), 13 Daemonomania (Crowley), 13
Falling Woman, The (Murphy), 198 Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle, The (Beagle), 201 Fisher King Trilogy (Powers), 213 Godhead Trilogy (Morrow), 235 Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The (Carter), 285 Land of Laughs, The (Carroll), 312 Little, Big (Crowley), 327 Love and Sleep (Crowley), 13 Mockingbird (Stewart), 370 Only Begotten Daughter (Morrow), 404 Paper Grail, The (Blaylock), 419 Psammead Trilogy (Nesbit), 439 Shatterday (Ellison), 463 MAGICAL WORLD Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Leiber), 191 Fire and Hemlock (Jones), 207 Hyperborea (Smith), 264 Iron Dragon’s Daughter, The (Swanwick), 300 Mythago Cycle (Holdstock), 381 Ship of Ishtar, The (Merritt), 466 Weaveworld (Barker), 572 Witch World (Norton), 584 Zothique (Smith), 602 MEDIEVAL FUTURE Dying Earth Series (Vance), 159 Rashomon and Other Stories (Akutagawa), 443 MYTHOLOGICAL Einstein Intersection, The (Delany), 173 Merlin Trilogy (Stewart), 360 Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley), 367 Vampire Chronicles (Rice), 549 NEW WAVE Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, The (Ballard), 48 Dhalgren (Delany), 132 671
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature OCCULT At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Lovecraft), 38 Our Lady of Darkness (Leiber), 413 PLANETARY ROMANCE Barsoom Series (Burroughs), 41 Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne), 306 POST-HOLOCAUST Amnesia Moon (Lethem), 26 Dark Universe (Galouye), 123 Davy (Pangborn), 126 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), 138 Dreamsnake (McIntyre), 152 Engine Summer (Crowley), 184 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm), 578 SUPERBEING Flowers for Algernon (Keyes), 216 Invisible Man, The (Wells), 297
More than Human (Sturgeon), 375 Stars My Destination, The (Bester), 505 THEOLOGICAL ROMANCE Book of the New Sun, The (Wolfe), 58 Chronicles of Narnia, The (Lewis), 93 Space Trilogy (Lewis), 494 TIME TRAVEL Anubis Gates, The (Powers), 32 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain), 109 Doomsday Book (Willis), 141 Door Number Three (O’Leary), 147 Lincoln’s Dreams (Willis), 324 Man Who Folded Himself, The (Gerrold), 347 No Enemy But Time (Bishop), 394 Time Machine, The (Wells), 524 Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle), 596 UTOPIA Dispossessed, The (Le Guin), 135
672
Title Index Aegypt (Crowley), 13 Algernon. See Flowers for Algernon Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 17 Amber Series (Zelazny), 22 Amnesia Moon (Lethem), 26 Animal Farm (Orwell), 29 Anubis Gates, The (Powers), 32 At the Back of the North Wind (MacDonald), 35 At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Lovecraft), 38 Avalon. See Mists of Avalon, The Barsoom Series (Burroughs), 41 Best of C. M. Kornbluth, The (Kornbluth), 45 Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, The (Ballard), 48 Blood Music (Bear), 51 Blue Sword, The (McKinley), 54 Book of the New Sun, The (Wolfe), 58 Boys from Brazil, The (Levin), 62 Brave New World (Huxley), 65 Bring the Jubilee (Moore), 68 Camp Concentration (Disch), 71 Canticle for Leibowitz, A (Miller), 74 Case of Conscience, A (Blish), 77 Caves of Steel, The (Asimov), 80 Childe Cycle (Dickson), 84 Childhood’s End (Clarke), 89 Chronicles of Narnia, The (Lewis), 93 Cities in Flight (Blish), 98 City (Simak), 102 Conan Series (Howard), 105 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain), 109 Cyberiad, The (Lem), 113 Cyteen (Cherryh), 116
Daemonomania (Crowley), 13 Dark Is Rising Sequence, The (Cooper), 119 Dark Universe (Galouye), 123 Davy (Pangborn), 126 Demolished Man, The (Bester), 129 Dhalgren (Delany), 132 Dispossessed, The (Le Guin), 135 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), 138 Doomsday Book (Willis), 141 Door into Ocean, A (Slonczewski), 144 Door Number Three (O’Leary), 147 Dorian Gray. See Picture of Dorian Gray, The Dorsai Cycle. See Childe Cycle Dracula (Stoker), 149 Dreamsnake (McIntyre), 152 Dune Series (Herbert), 155 Dying Earth Series (Vance), 159 Dying Inside (Silverberg), 163 E Pluribus Unicorn (Sturgeon), 166 Earthsea (Le Guin), 169 Einstein Intersection, The (Delany), 173 Eld. See Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The Elric Saga, The (Moorcock), 176 Ender Series (Card), 180 Engine Summer (Crowley), 184 Eon (Bear), 187 Eternity (Bear), 187 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Leiber), 191 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 195 Falling Woman, The (Murphy), 198 Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle, The (Beagle), 201 Female Man, The (Russ), 204 673
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Fire and Hemlock (Jones), 207 Fire upon the Deep, A (Vinge), 210 Fisher King Trilogy (Powers), 213 Flat Earth. See Tales from the Flat Earth Flowers for Algernon (Keyes), 216 Forever War, The (Haldeman), 219 Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The (McKillip), 222 Foundation Series (Asimov), 225 Frankenstein (Shelley), 229 Gate to Women’s Country, The (Tepper), 232 Godhead Trilogy (Morrow), 235 Good News from Outer Space (Kessel), 237 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 240 Gripping Hand, The (Niven and Pournelle), 378 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 243 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 246 Helliconia Trilogy (Aldiss), 250 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tiptree), 253 Hero and the Crown, The (McKinley), 54 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series (Adams), 256 Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 260 Hoffman, Dr. See Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The Hyperborea (Smith), 264 Hyperion Cantos, The (Simmons), 267 I Am Legend (Matheson), 271 I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Ellison), 274 Illustrated Man, The (Bradbury), 277 Incomplete Enchanter, The (de Camp and Pratt), 281 Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The (Carter), 285
Instrumentality of Mankind, The (Smith), 288 Inter Ice Age 4 (Abe), 291 Inverted World (Priest), 294 Invisible Man, The (Wells), 297 Iron Dragon’s Daughter, The (Swanwick), 300 Islands in the Net (Sterling), 303 Jekyll and Hyde. See Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The John Carter of Mars. See Barsoom Series Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne), 306 King of Elfland’s Daughter, The (Dunsany), 309 Land of Laughs, The (Carroll), 312 Last and First Men (Stapledon), 315 Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin), 318 Leibowitz. See Canticle for Leibowitz, A Life During Wartime (Shepard), 321 Lincoln’s Dreams (Willis), 324 Little, Big (Crowley), 327 Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry), 330 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 333 Love and Sleep (Crowley), 13 Lud-in-the-Mist (Mirrlees), 337 Make Room! Make Room! (Harrison), 340 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 343 Man Who Folded Himself, The (Gerrold), 347 Mars Trilogy (Robinson), 350 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury), 354 Martian Time-Slip (Dick), 357 Merchants’ War, The (Pohl and Kornbluth), 485 674
Title Index Merlin trilogy (Stewart), 360 Mission of Gravity (Clement), 364 Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley), 367 Mockingbird (Stewart), 370 Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The (Heinlein), 372 More than Human (Sturgeon), 375 Mote in God’s Eye (Niven and Pournelle), 378 Mountains of Madness. See At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels Mythago Cycle (Holdstock), 381 Naked Sun, The (Asimov), 80 Narnia. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Neuromancer Trilogy (Gibson), 385 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 390 No Enemy But Time (Bishop), 394 Non-Stop (Aldiss), 397 North Wind. See At the Back of the North Wind Once and Future King, The (White), 400 Only Begotten Daughter (Morrow), 404 Orange County Trilogy (Robinson), 406 Orlando (Woolf), 410 Our Lady of Darkness (Leiber), 413 Owl Service, The (Garner), 416 Paper Grail, The (Blaylock), 419 Patternist Series (Butler), 422 Phoenix and the Mirror, The (Davidson), 426 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 429 Planet of the Apes (Boulle), 432 Prydain Chronicles, The (Alexander), 435 Psammead Trilogy (Nesbit), 439
Rashomon and Other Stories (Akutagawa), 443 Riddle of Stars (McKillip), 446 Ringworld (Niven), 450 Ringworld Engineers, The (Niven), 450 Roderick (Sladek), 454 Roderick at Random (Sladek), 454 Rogue Moon (Budrys), 458 Sarah Canary (Fowler), 461 Shatterday (Ellison), 463 Ship of Ishtar, The (Merritt), 466 Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut), 469 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 472 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 475 Snow Queen Trilogy (Vinge), 478 Solaris (Lem), 482 Space Merchants, The (Pohl and Kornbluth), 485 Space Odyssey Series (Clarke), 489 Space Trilogy (Lewis), 494 Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner), 499 Star Light (Clement), 364 Star Maker (Stapledon), 502 Stars My Destination, The (Bester), 505 Stations of the Tide (Swanwick), 508 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 511 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 514 Swordspoint (Kushner), 517 Tales from the Flat Earth (Lee), 520 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 17 Time Machine, The (Wells), 524 Timescape (Benford), 527 Titus Groan Trilogy (Peake), 530 Touch of Sturgeon, A (Sturgeon), 534 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 537
675
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Unconquered Country, The (Ryman), 540 Uplift Sequence, The (Brin), 543 VALIS (Dick), 547 Vampire Chronicles (Rice), 549 Vampire Tapestry, The (Charnas), 554 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 557 War with the Newts (Capek), 560 Wasp Factory, The (Banks), 563 Watership Down (Adams), 9, 566 We (Zamyatin), 569 Weaveworld (Barker), 572 When Harlie Was One (Gerrold), 575 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm), 578
Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame), 581 Witch World (Norton), 584 Wizard of Oz, The. See Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 587 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 590 Wonderland. See Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Worm Ouroboros, The (Eddison), 593 Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle), 596 Xenogenesis (Butler), 599 Zothique (Smith), 602
676
Author Index ABE, KOBO Inter Ice Age 4, 291 ADAMS, DOUGLAS Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series, 256 ADAMS, RICHARD Watership Down, 566 AKUTAGAWA, RYWNOSUKE Rashomon and Other Stories, 443 ALDISS, BRIAN W. Helliconia Trilogy, 250 Non-Stop, 397 ALEXANDER, LLOYD Prydain Chronicles, The, 435 ASIMOV, ISAAC Caves of Steel, The, 80 Foundation series, 225 Naked Sun, The, 80 ATWOOD, MARGARET Handmaid’s Tale, The, 246 BALLARD, J. G. Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, The, 48 BANKS, IAIN Wasp Factory, The, 563 BARKER, CLIVE Weaveworld, 572 BAUM, L. FRANK Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The, 590
BEAGLE, PETER S. Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle, The, 201 BEAR, GREG Blood Music, 51 Eon, 187 Eternity, 187 BENFORD, GREGORY Timescape, 527 BESTER, ALFRED Demolished Man, The, 129 Stars My Destination, The, 505 BISHOP, MICHAEL No Enemy But Time, 394 BLAYLOCK, JAMES P. Paper Grail, The, 419 BLISH, JAMES Case of Conscience, A, 77 Cities in Flight, 98 BOULLE, PIERRE Planet of the Apes, 432 BRADBURY, RAY Fahrenheit 451, 195 Illustrated Man, The, 277 Martian Chronicles, The, 354 BRADLEY, MARION ZIMMER Mists of Avalon, The, 367 BRIN, DAVID Uplift Sequence, The, 543
677
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature BRUNNER, JOHN Stand on Zanzibar, 499
COOPER, SUSAN Dark Is Rising Sequence, The, 119
BUDRYS, ALGIS Rogue Moon, 458
CROWLEY, JOHN Aegypt, 13 Daemonomania, 13 Engine Summer, 184 Little, Big, 327 Love and Sleep, 13
BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE Barsoom Series, 41 BUTLER, OCTAVIA E. Patternist Series, 422 Xenogenesis, 599 CAPEK, KAREL War with the Newts, 560 CARD, ORSON SCOTT Ender Series, 180 CARROLL, JONATHAN Land of Laughs, The, 312 CARROLL, LEWIS Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 17 Through the Looking-Glass, 17 CARTER, ANGELA Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The, 285
DAVIDSON, AVRAM Phoenix and the Mirror, The, 426 DE CAMP, L. SPRAGUE, and FLETCHER PRATT Incomplete Enchanter, The, 281 DELANY, SAMUEL R. Dhalgren, 132 Einstein Intersection, The, 173 DICK, PHILIP K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 138 Man in the High Castle, The, 343 Martian Time-Slip, 357 VALIS, 547 DICKSON, GORDON R. Childe Cycle, 84
CHARNAS, SUZY MCKEE Vampire Tapestry, The, 554
DISCH, THOMAS M. Camp Concentration, 71
CHERRYH, C. J. Cyteen, 116
DUNSANY, LORD King of Elfland’s Daughter, The, 309
CLARKE, ARTHUR C. Childhood’s End, 89 Space Odyssey Series, 489
EDDISON, E. R. Worm Ouroboros, The, 593
CLEMENT, HAL Mission of Gravity, 364 Star Light, 364
ELLISON, HARLAN I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, 274 Shatterday, 463 678
Author Index FOWLER, KAREN JOY Sarah Canary, 461
KEYES, DANIEL Flowers for Algernon, 216
GALOUYE, DANIEL F. Dark Universe, 123
KORNBLUTH, CYRIL M. Best of C. M. Kornbluth, The, 45
GARNER, ALAN Owl Service, The, 416
KORNBLUTH, CYRIL M., and FREDERIK POHL Space Merchants, The, and The Merchants’ War, 485
GERROLD, DAVID Man Who Folded Himself, The, 347 When Harlie Was One, 575 GIBSON, WILLIAM Neuromancer Trilogy, 385 GRAHAME, KENNETH Wind in the Willows, The, 581 HALDEMAN, JOE Forever War, The, 219 HARRISON, HARRY Make Room! Make Room!, 340 HEINLEIN, ROBERT A. Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The, 372 Stranger in a Strange Land, 514 HERBERT, FRANK Dune Series, 155
KUSHNER, ELLEN Swordspoint, 517 LEE, TANITH Tales from the Flat Earth, 520 LE GUIN, URSULA K. Dispossessed, The, 135 Earthsea, 169 Left Hand of Darkness, The, 318 LEIBER, FRITZ Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, 191 Our Lady of Darkness, 413 LEM, STANISLAW Cyberiad, The, 113 Solaris, 482
HOLDSTOCK, ROBERT Mythago Cycle, 381
L’ENGLE, MADELEINE Wrinkle in Time, A, 596
HOWARD, ROBERT E. Conan Series, 105
LETHEM, JONATHAN Amnesia Moon, 26
HUXLEY, ALDOUS Brave New World, 65
LEVIN, IRA Boys from Brazil, The, 62
JONES, DIANA WYNNE Fire and Hemlock, 207
LEWIS, C. S. Chronicles of Narnia, The, 93 Space Trilogy, 494
KESSEL, JOHN Good News from Outer Space, 237
679
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature LOVECRAFT, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, 38 MACDONALD, GEORGE At the Back of the North Wind, 35 MCINTYRE, VONDA N. Dreamsnake, 152 MCKILLIP, PATRICIA A. Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The, 222 Riddle of Stars, 446 MCKINLEY, ROBIN Blue Sword, The, 54 Hero and the Crown, The, 54 MATHESON, RICHARD I Am Legend, 271 MERRITT, A. Ship of Ishtar, The, 466 MILLER, WALTER M., JR. Canticle for Leibowitz, A, 74 MIRRLEES, HOPE Lud-in-the-Mist, 337 MOORCOCK, MICHAEL Elric Saga, The, 176 MOORE, WARD Bring the Jubilee, 68 MORROW, JAMES Godhead Trilogy, 235 Only Begotten Daughter, 404 MURPHY, PAT Falling Woman, The, 198
NESBIT, E(DITH) Psammead Trilogy, 439 NIVEN, LARRY Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers, 450 NIVEN, LARRY, and JERRY POURNELLE Gripping Hand, The, 378 Mote in God’s Eye, The, 378 NORTON, ANDRE Witch World, 584 O’LEARY, PATRICK Door Number Three, 147 ORWELL, GEORGE Animal Farm, 29 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 390 PANGBORN, EDGAR Davy, 126 PEAKE, MERVYN Titus Groan Trilogy, 530 PIERCY, MARGE Woman on the Edge of Time, 587 POHL, FREDERIK, and CYRIL M. KORNBLUTH Space Merchants, The, and The Merchants’ War, 485 POURNELLE, JERRY, and LARRY NIVEN Gripping Hand, The, 378 Mote in God’s Eye, The, 378 POWERS, TIM Anubis Gates, The, 32 Fisher King Trilogy, 213 680
Author Index PRATT, FLETCHER, and L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP Incomplete Enchanter, The, 281
SLONCZEWSKI, JOAN Door into Ocean, A, 144
PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER Inverted World, 294
SMITH, CLARK ASHTON Hyperborea, 264 Zothique, 602
PYNCHON, THOMAS Gravity’s Rainbow, 240
SMITH, CORDWAINER Instrumentality of Mankind, The, 288
RICE, ANNE Vampire Chronicles, 549
STAPLEDON, OLAF Last and First Men, 315 Star Maker, 502
ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY Mars Trilogy, 350 Orange County Trilogy, 406 RUSS, JOANNA Female Man, The, 204 RYMAN, GEOFF Unconquered Country, The, 540 SAINT-EXUPÉRY, ANTOINE DE Little Prince, The, 330 SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT Frankenstein, 229 SHEPARD, LUCIUS Life During Wartime, 321 SILVERBERG, ROBERT Dying Inside, 163 SIMAK, CLIFFORD D. City, 102 SIMMONS, DAN Hyperion Cantos, The, 267 SLADEK, JOHN Roderick and Roderick at Random, 454
STEPHENSON, NEAL Snow Crash, 475 STERLING, BRUCE Islands in the Net, 303 STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The, 511 STEWART, MARY Merlin Trilogy, 360 STEWART, SEAN Mockingbird, 370 STOKER, BRAM Dracula, 149 STURGEON, THEODORE E Pluribus Unicorn, 166 More than Human, 375 Touch of Sturgeon, A, 534 SWANWICK, MICHAEL Iron Dragon’s Daughter, The, 300 Stations of the Tide, 508 SWIFT, JONATHAN Gulliver’s Travels, 243 681
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature TEPPER, SHERI S. Gate to Women’s Country, The, 232 TIPTREE, JAMES, JR. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, 253 TOLKIEN, J. R. R. Hobbit, The, 260 Lord of the Rings, The, 333 TWAIN, MARK Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A, 109 VANCE, JACK Dying Earth Series, 159 VERNE, JULES Journey to the Center of the Earth, 306 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 537 VINGE, JOAN D. Snow Queen Trilogy, 478 VINGE, VERNOR Fire upon the Deep, A, 210 VONNEGUT, KURT Sirens of Titan, The, 469 Slaughterhouse-Five, 472
WELLS, H. G. Invisible Man, The, 297 Time Machine, The, 524 War of the Worlds, The, 557 WHITE, T. H. Once and Future King, The, 400 WILDE, OSCAR Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 429 WILHELM, KATE Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, 578 WILLIS, CONNIE Doomsday Book, 141 Lincoln’s Dreams, 324 WOLFE, GENE Book of the New Sun, The, 58 WOOLF, VIRGINIA Orlando, 410 ZAMYATIN, YEVGENY We, 569 ZELAZNY, ROGER Amber Series, 22
682
Subject Index This index lists book, short story, and series titles, as well as characters, places, authors, historical figures, and selected themes and subjects, ranging from androids to World War II. Abe, Kobo, 291 Adams, Douglas, 256 Adams, Richard, 9, 566 Adeler, Max, 111 Adulthood Rites (Butler), 600 Aegypt (Crowley), 13, 328 “Aesop” (Simak), 103 Akutagawa, Rywnosuke, 443 Alas, Babylon (Frank), 124 Aldiss, Brian W., 9, 50, 250, 397; and Stapledon, Olaf, 504 Alexander, Lloyd, 435 Algernon. See Flowers for Algernon Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 17, 37, 592 “Alive and Well on a Friendless Voyage” (Ellison), 464 “All You Zombies—” (Heinlein), 348 “Altar at Midnight, The” (Kornbluth), 46-47 Alteration, The (Amis), 12 Alternative histories, 12 “Amanda Morgan” (Dickson), 86 Amber Series (Zelazny), 22 Amis, Kingsley; New Maps of Hell, 5 Amnesia Moon (Lethem), 26 Amphibians: A Romance of 500,000 Years Hence, The (Wright), 380 “And Now the News” (Sturgeon), 536 Anderson, Poul, 87, 143, 302, 546 Anderson, Sherwood, 202, 355 Androids, 82, 116, 138-139 Andromeda Strain, The (Crichton), 273 Animal Farm (Orwell), 29, 66 Antarctica, 38-39, 486 Anthony, Piers, 10
Anthropomorphism, 545, 566, 581 Anubis Gates, The (Powers), 32 Ariosto, Ludovico, 282 Arthurian legend, 2, 9, 96, 111, 213, 362, 368, 402, 496 Asimov, Isaac, 24, 60, 80, 225, 377; Foundation series, 11, 87, 100, 118, 212, 225, 545; “Mule,” 158; robot stories, 456, 576; and science, 164; and Stapledon, Olaf, 504 At the Back of the North Wind (MacDonald), 35 At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Lovecraft), 38 Atomic war, 26, 74-75, 123-124, 185, 189, 271, 278, 303, 305, 354-355, 406 “Atrocity Exhibition, The” (Ballard), 50 Atwood, Margaret, 246, 588 Augustine, Saint, 96 Avalon. See Mists of Avalon, The Awakenings (Sacks), 218 Babel-17 (Delany), 133 Ballard, J. G., 48, 487 Banks, Iain, 563 Barker, Clive, 572 Baron Münchausen’s Narrative, 8 Barsoom Series (Burroughs), 41 Barthelme, Donald, 49 Baum, L. Frank, 456, 590 Beagle, Peter S., 201 Bear, Greg, 51, 187 Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (McKinley), 55 Beckett, Samuel, 165 683
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Bellamy, Edward, 111 Benford, Gregory, 11, 527 Beowulf, 2, 7, 9 Bergerac, Cyrano de, 379 Best of C. M. Kornbluth, The (Kornbluth), 45 Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, The (Ballard), 48 Bester, Alfred, 49, 104, 129, 505 “Beyond the Black River” (Howard), 107 “Bianca’s Hands” (Sturgeon), 166 Bible; and Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), 96; and Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 196 Bid Time Return (Matheson), 273 Big Ball of Wax, The (Mead), 487 “Big Sam Was My Friend” (Ellison), 274 Birthgrave, The (Lee), 522 Bishop, Michael, 394 Black Cauldron, The (Alexander), 435 Black holes, 267 Black Star Passes, The (Campbell), 211 Blade Runner (film), 82, 140 Blameless in Abaddon (Morrow), 235 Blaylock, James P., 419 Blish, James, 52, 77, 98 Blood Music (Bear), 51 Blue Mars (Robinson), 352-353 Blue Sword, The (McKinley), 54 Body Snatchers, The (Finney), 239 Book of Atrix Wolfe, The (McKillip), 449 Book of Merlyn, The (White), 368, 400 Book of the New Sun, The (Wolfe), 58 Book of Three, The (Alexander), 435, 437 Boulle, Pierre, 432 Boys from Brazil, The (Levin), 62 Bradbury, Ray, 195, 277, 354; and Blaylock, James P., 421 Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 367, 403
Brave New World (Huxley), 65, 197, 391, 470, 571 Brin, David, 52, 125, 543 Bring the Jubilee (Moore), 12, 68, 528 British Empire, 56, 83 “Brothers” (Dickson), 86 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevski), 570 Brunner, John, 499 Brust, Steven, 518 Budrys, Algis, 458 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 41, 380; and Mars, 6, 355 Burroughs, William S., 49, 456 Butler, Octavia E., 422, 599 Butler, Samuel, 193 “By His Bootstraps” (Heinlein), 148, 348 Byron, Lord, 231 Cabell, James Branch, 162 Cadigan, Pat, 476 Camelot, 109, 361 Camelot (musical), 400 Camp Concentration (Disch), 71, 218 Campbell, John W., Jr., 80, 211; and Heinlein, Robert A., 516 Candide (Voltaire), 259 Candle in the Wind, The (White), 401 “Canterbury Ghost, The” (Wilde), 431 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 268 Canticle for Leibowitz, A (Miller), 74, 78, 124 Capek, Karel, 560 Card, Orson Scott, 10, 180 Carr, John F., 52 Carrie (King), 377 Carroll, Jonathan, 312 Carroll, Lewis, 17, 37, 215, 592 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 567 Carter, Angela, 9, 285 Carter, John, of Mars, 41
684
Subject Index Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The (Lovecraft), 38-39 Case of Conscience, A (Blish), 52, 77, 101 Castle, The (Kafka), 165 Castle of Iron, The (de Camp and Pratt), 282 Castle of Llyr, The (Alexander), 436 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 532 Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut), 471 Caves of Steel, The (Asimov), 80 Caxton, Thomas, 402 “Census” (Simak), 102 Chantry Guild, The (Dickson), 86 Chapterhouse: Dune (Herbert), 157 Charly (film), 218 Charnas, Suzy McKee, 554 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 268 Cherryh, C. J., 116 Chessmen of Mars, The (Burroughs), 42 Child Garden, The (Ryman), 148, 541 Childe Cycle (Dickson), 84 Childhood’s End (Clarke), 53, 78, 89, 239 Children of Dune (Herbert), 156 Children of the Mind (Card), 180 Children of the Night (Simmons), 270 Christianity, 33, 76, 91, 348, 367, 496 Christopher, John, 272 Chronicles of Narnia, The (Lewis), 24, 93, 442, 496 Churchill, Winston, 12 Cities in Flight (Blish), 98 City (Simak), 102 City, Not Long After, The (Murphy), 199 Civil War, 68, 324 Clarke, Arthur C., 53, 89, 239, 489, 536; and Stapledon, Olaf, 504 Claw of the Conciliator, The (Wolfe), 60 Clay’s Ark (Butler), 423-424 Clemens, Samuel L. See Twain, Mark Clement, Hal, 364 Cloning, 62, 64
Close to Critical (Clement), 366 “Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D, The ” (Ballard), 48 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32 Coll and His White Pig (Alexander), 438 “Colonel Came Back from Nothingat-All, The” (Smith), 289 Colossus (Jones), 576 “Come, Lady Death” (Beagle), 202 Coming of Conan, The (Howard), 105 “Coming of the White Worm, The” (Smith), 265 “Common Sense” (Heinlein), 399 Communism, 47, 188, 562, 570 Company of Glory, The (Pangborn), 127 Computer Connection, The (Bester), 506-507 Computers, 84, 130, 257, 274, 291, 372, 385, 477, 489, 499-500, 509, 575-576 Conan Series (Howard), 105 “Concrete Mixer, The” (Bradbury), 278 Conklin, Groff, 167 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain), 12, 109, 142 Conrad, Joseph, 190, 323, 480, 560 Cooper, Susan, 119 “Count the Clock That Tells the Time” (Ellison), 463 Count Zero (Gibson), 385 Counterplot, The (Mirrlees), 338 Crichton, Michael, 4, 273 Crispin, A. C., 546 Crowley, John, 13, 184, 327 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 240 Cryptozoic! (Aldiss), 50 Crystal Cave, The (Stewart), 360 Cugel’s Saga (Vance), 160 Cyberiad, The (Lem), 113 Cyberspace, 267-269, 385, 387-388, 475 685
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Cycle of Fire (Clement), 366 Cygnet and the Firebird, The (McKillip), 449 Cyteen (Cherryh), 116 Daemonomania (Crowley), 13 Dandelion Wine (Bradbury), 197 Dangerous Visions (Ellison), 276 Dante, 96 “Darfstellar, The” (Miller), 47 Dark Is Rising, The (Cooper), 119, 121 Dark Is Rising Sequence (Cooper), 119 Dark Tower series (King), 24 Dark Universe (Galouye), 123 Darwin, Charles, 299, 526 Davidson, Avram, 426 Davy (Pangborn), 126 Dawn (Butler), 599 Day of the Triffids, The (Wyndham), 272 “Dead, The” (Joyce), 165 Death of Grass, The (Christopher), 272 De Camp, L. Sprague, 105, 193, 281 Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 101, 228, 562 Deep, The (Crowley), 186 Defoe, Daniel, 244, 366 Delany, Samuel R., 132, 173 “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” (Ellison), 275 Delusion’s Master (Lee), 521-523 Demolished Man, The (Bester), 49, 104, 129, 506 “Desertion” (Simak), 103 Dhalgren (Delany), 132 Dick, Philip K., 47, 69, 125, 138, 148, 205, 343, 357, 547; and Lethem, Jonathan, 27; and Stapledon, Olaf, 504 Dickens, Charles, 301, 329, 532 Dickson, Gordon R., 10, 84 Disch, Thomas M., 71, 218 Dispossessed, The (Le Guin), 135
Disraeli, Benjamin, 431 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 504 “Django” (Ellison), 464 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), 138 Dr. Bloodmoney: Or, How We Got Along After the Bomb (Dick), 125 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 72 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 71 Donaldson, Stephen, 8, 10 Doomsday Book (Willis), 141, 325-326 Door into Ocean, A (Slonczewski), 144 Door Number Three (O’Leary), 147 “Door to Saturn, The” (Smith), 264 Dorian Gray. See Picture of Dorian Gray, The Dorsai! (Dickson), 86 Dorsai Cycle. See Childe Cycle Dostoevski, Fyodor; Brothers Karamazov, The, 570; House of the Dead, The, 72 Dracula (Stoker), 9, 149, 555 Dragons, 7, 55, 95, 114, 174, 260, 275, 300, 384, 593 Drapier’s Letters, The (Swift), 244 Drawing of the Dark, The (Powers), 33 Dream of Wessex, A (Priest), 295 Dream Park sequence (Niven and Barnes), 380 Dreaming Jewels, The (Sturgeon), 377 Dreamsnake (McIntyre), 152 Dresden, 472 “Drowned Giant, The” (Ballard), 49 “Drunkboat” (Smith), 289 “Drunken Boat, The” (Rimbaud), 289 Dumas, Alexandre, 518 Dune Messiah (Herbert), 156 Dune Series (Herbert), 155, 380 Dunsany, Lord, 309 “Dunwich Horror, The ” (Lovecraft), 40 Dying Earth Series (Vance), 159 Dying Inside (Silverberg), 163 686
Subject Index E Pluribus Unicorn (Sturgeon), 166 Eager, Edward, 442 Earth Abides (Stewart), 128, 272 Earthman, Come Home (Blish), 98-99 Earthquake Weather (Powers), 214 Earthsea (Le Guin), 169 Earthworks (Bishop), 399 Eddison, E. R., 9, 593 Edison, Thomas A., 214 Eight Skilled Gentlemen (Hughart), 542 Einstein, Albert, 174, 596 Einstein Intersection, The (Delany), 133, 173 Eld. See Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The Eliot, T. S., 164 Elleander Morning (Yulsman), 528 Ellison, Harlan, 274, 463 Eloi, 524-526 Elric Saga, The (Moorcock), 176 Empire of the Sun (Ballard), 50 Enchanted Castle, The (Nesbit), 441 Enchanter Reborn, The (de Camp), 284 End of Eternity, The (Asimov), 24, 228 Ender Series (Card), 180 Ender’s Game (Card), 180, 182-183, 221 Engine Summer (Crowley), 15, 184 Entropy, 165, 242 Eon (Bear), 187 “Epilog” (Simak), 103 Erewhon (Butler), 193 Eternal Footman, The (Morrow), 236 Eternity (Bear), 187 “Exiles, The” (Bradbury), 278 Exotic Enchanter, The (de Camp), 284 Expiration Date (Powers), 214 “Eyes of Dust” (Ellison), 275 Eyes of the Overworld, The (Vance), 160 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 61, 281282, 284 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Leiber), 191 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 195
Falling Woman, The (Murphy), 198 Fantasy; definitions of, 1-2, 8; and rationalism, 7; and science, 11; and science fiction, 1 Fantasy and Mimesis (Hume), 8 Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle, The (Beagle), 201 Farthest Shore, The (Le Guin), 170, 172 Fascism, 497 Faulkner, William, 202 Felice, Cynthia, 325 Female Man, The (Russ), 204, 369, 519 Fielding, Henry, 128 Fighting Man of Mars, A (Burroughs), 43 Final Encyclopedia, The (Dickson), 86 Fine and Private Place, A (Beagle), 202 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 133 Finney, Jack, 239 Fire and Hemlock (Jones), 9, 207 “Fire Balloons, The” (Bradbury), 278, 355 Fire upon the Deep, A (Vinge), 210 Firebrand, The (Bradley), 369 Fisher King Trilogy (Powers), 213 Flat Earth. See Tales from the Flat Earth “Flop Sweat” (Ellison), 463 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Dick), 548 Flowers for Algernon (Keyes), 216 Footfall (Niven and Pournelle), 380 Forbidden Planet (film), 82 Forever War, The (Haldeman), 219 Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The (McKillip), 222, 448 Forster, E. M., 165 Fortress of the Pearl, The (Moorcock), 176 Forward the Foundation (Asimov), 226 Foundation and Earth (Asimov), 227 Foundation and Empire (Asimov), 226 Foundation Series (Asimov), 225; and robots, 83 Foundation’s Edge (Asimov), 226
687
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Foundling, and Other Tales of Prydain, The (Alexander), 437-438 Fowler, Karen Joy, 461 Frank, Anne, 218 Frank, Pat, 124 Frankenstein (Shelley), 4-5, 218, 229, 299, 377 Freud, Sigmund, 299 “From Gustible’s Planet” (Smith), 289 Fugue for a Darkening Island (Priest), 295 Galouye, Daniel F., 123 “Garden of Time, The” (Ballard), 49 Garner, Alan, 9, 416 Gate to Women’s Country, The (Tepper), 232 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 362, 402 Gerrold, David, 347, 575 Ghosts, 1, 107, 198, 202, 386, 413-414, 419, 447, 541 Gibbon, Edward, 227 Gibson, William, 385, 476 Gift, The (O’Leary), 148 Gingrich, Newt, 12 Gladiator-at-Law, 488 Glass Hammer, The (Jeter), 148 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Vonnegut), 471 God Emperor of Dune (Herbert), 157 Gods of Mars, The (Burroughs), 42 Gold Coast, The (Robinson), 353, 407409 Gold, Horace L., 80, 124, 485, 488; and Asimov, Isaac, 82 “Golden Age” of science fiction, 166, 254, 284, 376 “Golden Helix, The” (Sturgeon), 535 “Gomez” (Kornbluth), 47 Good News from Outer Space (Kessel), 237 Gormenghast (Peake), 530-532 Grahame, Kenneth, 581 Grasshopper Lies Heavy, The, 344
Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 240 “Great Revolution in Pitcairn, The” (Twain), 111 Greek mythology, 25, 173, 234, 265, 267, 424, 428 Green Magician, The (de Camp and Pratt), 283 Green Mars (Robinson), 351, 353 Greene, Graham, 323 Greener than You Think (Moore), 70 Greenwitch (Cooper), 120 Grendel (Gardner), 9 Grey King, The (Cooper), 120-121 Greybeard (Bishop), 399 Gripping Hand, The (Niven and Pournelle), 378 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 66, 243, 366, 380, 561; and Blish, James A., 100 Guns of Avalon, The (Zelazny), 25 HAL 9000, 490, 493, 576 Haldeman, Joe, 219 Half Magic (Eager), 442 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 246, 588 HARLIE, 575 Harpist in the Wind (McKillip), 447 Harrison, Harry, 102, 340 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 480 Heinlein, Robert A., 148, 348, 372, 377, 399, 504, 514; and Campbell, John W., Jr., 516; Future History stories, 87, 100, 104 Heir of Sea and Fire (McKillip), 446 Heller, Joseph, 456 Helliconia Trilogy (Aldiss), 250 Hemingway, Ernest, 202, 355 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tiptree), 253 Herbert, Frank, 155 Heretics of Dune (Herbert), 157 Hero and the Crown, The (McKinley), 54 Herodotus, 2, 7 688
Subject Index Heroes and Villains (Carter), 286 High King, The (Alexander), 436 “Highway, The” (Bradbury), 278 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 227 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams), 256 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series (Adams), 256 Hitler, Adolf, 31, 46, 62, 348, 391, 528, 562 Hoban, Russell, 128, 185 “Hobbies” (Simak), 103 Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 7, 260; and Lord of the Rings, The, 333; and Watership Down (Adams), 567 Hoffman, Dr. See Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The Holdstock, Robert, 381 Hollow Hills, The (Stewart), 361 Hollow Man, The (Simmons), 270 Hollowing, The (Holdstock), 382-384 Holmes, Sherlock, 83, 372 Homer, 2, 4; Odyssey, The, 583 Horror stories, 9 Horse and His Boy, The (Lewis), 94 House of Arden (Nesbit), 441 House of the Dead, The (Dostoevski), 72 Howard, Robert E., 105 “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?” (Ellison), 464 Hubbard, L. Ron, 504 “Huddling Place” (Simak), 102 Hughart, Barry, 542 Hume, Kathryn, 8 Huxley, Aldous, 65, 391, 571; and Vonnegut, Kurt, 470 Huxley, T. H., 559 Hyperborea (Smith), 264 Hyperion Cantos, The (Simmons), 267 I Am Legend (Matheson), 271 I Ching, 343, 345
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Ellison), 274 I Sing the Body Electric (Bradbury), 197 “Ice-Demon, The” (Smith), 265 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 111 Iliad, The (Homer), 2 Ill-Made Knight, The (White), 402 Illustrated Man, The (Bradbury), 277 Imago (Butler), 600 Immortality, 25, 34, 55, 71-72, 99-100, 119, 122, 125, 157, 201, 244-245, 377, 521-522 Impossible Things (Willis), 326 In Our Time (Hemingway), 355 Incomplete Enchanter, The (de Camp and Pratt), 8-9, 281 Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The (Carter), 285 Inferno (Niven and Pournelle), 380 Instrumentality of Mankind, The (Smith), 288, 290 Inter Ice Age 4 (Abe), 291 International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, 1 Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 549 Invaders from Earth (Silverberg), 487 Inverted World (Priest), 294 Invisibility, 260, 297, 333 Invisible Man, The (Wells), 297 Iron Dragon’s Daughter, The (Swanwick), 300 Islam, 504 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells), 4 Islands in the Net (Sterling), 303 James, M. R., 8 “Jeffty Is Five” (Ellison), 463 Jekyll and Hyde. See Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Jesus Christ, 53, 61, 75, 238, 348, 404 Jeter, K. W., 148 John Carter of Mars. See Barsoom Series Jones, D. F., 576 689
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Jones, Diana Wynne, 9, 207 Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne), 306 Joyce, James, 133-134, 165 Judaism, 76, 476 Judgment of Eve, The (Pangborn), 127 Jupiter, 98-99, 102-103, 490-491 Jurassic Park (Crichton), 4 Jurgen (Cabell), 162 Kafka, Franz, 165 “Kaleidoscope” (Bradbury), 277 Keats, John, 269 Kelly, James Patrick, 542 Kennedy, John F., 528-529 Kennedy, Robert F., 474 Kessel, John, 237 Keyes, Daniel, 216 Kindred (Butler), 600 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 474 King, Stephen, 24, 40, 273, 377 King of Elfland’s Daughter, The (Dunsany), 309 Kipling, Rudyard, 56, 441 Knight, Damon, 488 Koestler, Arthur, 72 Kornbluth, Cyril M., 45, 228, 485 Kushner, Ellen, 9, 517 Lancelot, Sir, 25, 400-403 Land of Laughs, The (Carroll), 312 Lanier, Sterling, 9 Last and First Men (Stapledon), 315, 503 Last Battle, The (Lewis), 95-96 Last Call (Powers), 34, 213 Last Enchantment, The (Stewart), 361 “Last Man Left in the Bar, The” (Kornbluth), 46 “Last Night of the World, The” (Bradbury), 278 Last Unicorn, The (Beagle), 201 Lavondyss (Holdstock), 382, 384 Lee, Tanith, 9, 520
Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin), 205, 318 Legacy of Heorot, The (Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes), 380 Le Guin, Ursula K., 7, 10, 135, 169, 205, 318, 424, 579; and Stapledon, Olaf, 504 Leiber, Fritz, 191, 413 Leibowitz. See Canticle for Leibowitz, A Lem, Stanislaw, 113, 482 L’Engle, Madeleine, 596 Lensman series (Smith), 211, 545 Lest Darkness Fall (de Camp), 12 Lethem, Jonathan, 26 Level 7 (Roshwald), 124 Levin, Ira, 62 Lewis, C. S., 3, 10, 24, 93, 215, 402, 494; and Mars, 355; and Nesbit, Edith, 442; and Stapledon, Olaf, 504 Lewis, Matthew G., 532 Lewis, Mercier, 537 Lewis, Sinclair, 516 Life During Wartime (Shepard), 321, 542 Life for the Stars, A (Blish), 98-99 Life, the Universe, and Everything (Adams), 258 “Lila the Werewolf” (Beagle), 201 Lincoln, Abraham, 324 Lincoln’s Dreams (Willis), 142, 324 Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The (Lewis), 94 Little, Big (Crowley), 15, 327 “Little Black Bag, The” (Kornbluth), 45 Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry), 330 Llana of Gathol (Burroughs), 43 London, Jack, 272, 414, 560 “Lonelyache” (Ellison), 275 “Long Rain, The” (Bradbury), 278 Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Bellamy), 111
690
Subject Index Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 157, 261, 283-284, 333, 402, 448; and Hobbit, The, 262 “Lost Dorsai” (Dickson), 86, 88 Love and Sleep (Crowley), 13, 328 Lovecraft, H. P., 11, 38, 265-266, 413; and Leiber, Fritz, 414 Lowell, Percival, 355, 558 Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle), 380 Lud-in-the-Mist (Mirrlees), 337 Mabinogion, The, 9, 416, 437. See also Welsh mythology McCann, Edson, 488 MacDonald, George, 35 McIntyre, Vonda N., 152 McKillip, Patricia A., 222, 446 McKinley, Robin, 54-55 Mafia, 475 Magician’s Nephew, The (Lewis), 93 Make Room! Make Room! (Harrison), 340 Malory, Thomas, 9, 362, 400, 402-403 “Man, The” (Bradbury), 278 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 12, 47, 69, 140, 343 Man Who Folded Himself, The (Gerrold), 347 “Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge, The” (Ellison), 463 Mann, Thomas, 72 “Marching Morons, The” (Kornbluth), 45-46 “Marionette, Inc.” (Bradbury), 277 “Mark Elf” (Smith), 288 Marlowe, Christopher, 71 Marooned in Realtime (Vinge), 212 Mars, 6, 41, 85, 102, 138, 278, 350, 354, 357, 469, 494, 514, 557, 600; canals, 355, 558 Mars novels (Burroughs), 41 Mars Trilogy (Robinson), 6, 350 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury), 104, 197, 354
Martian Odyssey, and Others, A (Weinbaum), 380 Martian Time-Slip (Dick), 357 Marx, Karl, 31, 115, 299 Master Mind of Mars, The (Burroughs), 43 Matheson, Richard, 271 Maturin, Charles R., 431 Mead, Shepherd, 487 Memnoch the Devil (Rice), 549-550 Mengele, Josef, 62 Merchants’ War, The (Pohl and Kornbluth), 485 Mercury, 469, 543, 593-594 Merlin, 3, 23, 109, 119, 360, 400, 402, 496 Merlin trilogy (Stewart), 360, 368 Merrick (Rice), 551 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 328 Mightiest Machine, The (Campbell), 211 Miller, Walter M., Jr., 74 Milton, John, 72, 96, 504 Mind of My Mind (Butler), 423-424 “Mindworm, The” (Kornbluth), 46 Mirrlees, Hope, 337 Mission of Gravity (Clement), 364 Mistress Masham’s Repose (White), 403 Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley), 367, 403 Mockingbird (Stewart), 370 Modern Utopia, A (Wells), 441 Mona Lisa Overdrive (Gibson), 386 Monk, The (Lewis), 532 Moon, 315, 372, 458, 485 Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The (Heinlein), 372, 576 Moon of Gomrath, The (Garner), 418 Moorcock, Michael, 176, 193 Moore, Ward, 68, 528 More than Human (Sturgeon), 53, 104, 375, 424 Morlocks, 525-526
691
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Morris, William, 9 Morrow, James, 404 Mortal Engines (Lem), 114 Morte d’Arthur, Le (Malory), 9, 400, 402 Mote in God’s Eye (Niven and Pournelle), 378 Mountains of Madness. See At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels Murphy, Pat, 198 Mutants, 74, 104, 125, 173, 226, 228 Mysterious Island, The (Verne), 538 Mythago Cycle (Holdstock), 381 Mythago Wood (Holdstock), 381, 383384 Naked Sun, The (Asimov), 80 Narnia. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Nazis, 46, 62, 343, 402, 502, 561-562 Neanderthal, 178 Necromancer (Dickson), 84, 88 Necronomicon, 39, 414 Nemo, Captain, 538 Neptune, 315-316 Nesbit, Edith, 439 Neuromancer (Gibson), 385, 387-388, 476 Neuromancer Trilogy (Gibson), 385 New Maps of Hell (Amis), 5 Newts, 560 Night’s Master (Lee), 520, 523 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 31, 197, 390; and Atwood, Margaret, 248; and We (Zamyatin), 571 Niven, Larry, 11, 378, 450 No Enemy But Time, 394 “No, No, Not Rogov!” (Smith), 288 “No Particular Night or Morning” (Bradbury), 278 Non-Stop (Aldiss), 397 Norstrilia (Smith), 290 North Wind. See At the Back of the North Wind
Norton, Andre, 584 Not This August (Kornbluth), 47 Nova (Delany), 133 Nuclear war. See Atomic war Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (Stapledon), 503 Odyssey, The (Homer), 2, 4, 8 O’Leary, Patrick, 147 Omega Man, The (film), 273 On Stranger Tides (Powers), 33 On the Beach (Shute), 124 Once and Future King, The (White), 2, 9, 368, 400 Only Begotten Daughter (Morrow), 404 “Opium” (Ellison), 464 Orange County Trilogy (Robinson), 406 Orlando (Woolf), 410 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 282 Orwell, George, 29, 197, 390; and Atwood, Margaret, 248; and Vonnegut, Kurt, 470; and Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 571 Other (Dickson), 86 “Other Celia, The” (Sturgeon), 536 “Other Eye of Polyphemus, The” (Ellison), 464 “Other Foot, The” (Bradbury), 278 Other Worlds (Bergerac), 379 Our Lady of Darkness (Leiber), 413 Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis), 494, 497 Over Sea, Under Stone (Cooper), 119 “Overloaded Man, The” (Ballard), 48 Owl Service, The (Garner), 9, 416 Oz, 590 Pacific Edge (Robinson), 353, 407-408 Pandora (Rice), 550 Pangborn, Edgar, 126 Paper Grail, The (Blaylock), 419 Paradise Lost (Milton), 504 692
Subject Index Passage to India, A (Forster), 165 Patternist Series (Butler), 422 Peake, Mervyn, 530 Perelandra (Lewis), 495, 498 Phantastes (MacDonald), 36 Phoenix and the Carpet, The (Nesbit), 439-440 Phoenix and the Mirror, The (Davidson), 426 Phoenix Guards, The (Brust), 518 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 429 Piercy, Marge, 587 Planck, Max, 596 Planet of the Apes (Boulle), 432 Pohl, Frederik, 134, 228, 460, 485; and Kornbluth, Cyril M., 47 Points of Departure (Murphy), 199-200 Pope, Alexander, 410, 412 Positronic brain, 81-82 Postman, The (Brin), 125 Pournelle, Jerry, 378 Powers, Tim, 10, 32, 213, 269 Pratt, Fletcher, 281 Prelude to Foundation (Asimov), 226 “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” (Ellison), 275 Priest, Christopher, 294 Prince Caspian (Lewis), 94 Princess and Curdie, The (MacDonald), 37 Princess and the Goblin, The (MacDonald), 37 Princess of Mars, A (Burroughs), 6, 41 “Professor Baffin’s Adventures” (Adeler), 111 Prometheus myth, 231, 522 Prydain Chronicles, The (Alexander), 435 Psammead Trilogy (Nesbit), 439 Psychogenetics, 116 “Psychohistory,” 11 Puccini, Giacomo, 555 Pynchon, Thomas, 240
Queen of Air and Darkness, The (White), 401 “Queen of the Afternoon, The” (Smith), 289 “Queen of the Black Coast, The” (Howard), 106 Queen of the Damned, The (Rice), 550 Rabbits, 566 Rashomon (film), 444 Rashomon and Other Stories (Akutagawa), 443 Red Mars (Robinson), 350 Reproductive System, The (Sladek), 457 Resnick, Michael, 212 Restaurant at the End of the Universe, The (Adams), 257 Rhialto the Marvellous (Vance), 160-162 Rice, Anne, 549 Riddle-Master of Hed, The (McKillip), 223 Riddle of Stars (McKillip), 223, 446 Riddley Walker (Hoban), 10, 128, 185 Rimbaud, Arthur, 289, 603 Ringworld (Niven), 450 Ringworld Engineers, The (Niven), 450 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 244, 366 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 6, 350, 406 Robots, 80, 102, 113, 226-227, 257, 277, 454, 533, 575 Robots and Empire (Asimov), 83 Robots of Dawn, The (Asimov), 83 “Rocket Man, The” (Bradbury), 277 Rocketman, 241 Roderick (Sladek), 454 Roderick at Random (Sladek), 454 Rogue Moon (Budrys), 458 Roman Catholics, 14, 73-75, 202, 215, 268, 403, 430, 454; Jesuits, 52 Roshwald, Mordecai, 124 Russ, Joanna, 204, 368, 518 Russian Revolution, 570; allegory of, 31 Ryman, Geoff, 148, 540 693
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Sacks, Oliver, 218 Saint Exupéry, Antoine, 330 Sarah Canary (Fowler), 461 Satan, 77, 91, 174, 496, 550 Saturn, 264, 470, 489-490 “Saucer of Loneliness, A” (Sturgeon), 167 Scanner Darkly, A (Dick), 548 Scarlet Plague, The (London), 272 Science fiction; definitions of, 4; and fantasy, 1; history of, 4; and other genres, 6; and science, 11 Science fiction magazines, 9 Search the Sky (Pohl and Kornbluth), 47 “Sentinel, The” (Clarke), 492 “Seven Geases, The” (Smith), 264 Shadow Hunter, The (Murphy), 199 Shadow of the Torturer, The (Wolfe), 60 Shakespeare, William, 66, 328, 356, 410, 510 “Shark Ship” (Kornbluth), 46 Shatterday (Ellison), 463-464 Shattered Chain, The (Bradley), 369 Sheckley, Robert, 488 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 4, 218, 229, 269 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 231, 269 Shepard, Lucius, 321, 542 Sherman, Delia, 518 Ship of Ishtar, The (Merritt), 466 “Shoppe Keeper” (Ellison), 464 Shrinking Man, The (Matheson), 273 Shute, Neville, 124 “Silken-Swift, The” (Sturgeon), 166167 Silmarillion, The (Tolkien), 336 Silver Chair, The (Lewis), 95 Silver on the Tree (Cooper), 120 Silverberg, Robert, 163, 487 Simak, Clifford D., 102 Simmons, Dan, 267 “Simple Way, The” (Simak), 103 Singing Citadel, The (Moorcock), 176
Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut), 469 Skylark series (Smith), 545 Sladek, John, 454 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 472 Slonczewski, Joan, 144 “Slow Sculpture” (Sturgeon), 536 Smith, Clark Ashton, 264, 602 Smith, Cordwainer, 288 Smith, E. E. “Doc,” 88, 545; Lensman series, 211 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 475 Snow Queen, The (Vinge), 480 Snow Queen Trilogy (Vinge), 478 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Adams), 258 Solaris (Lem), 482 Soldier, Ask Not (Dickson), 85, 88 Some Will Not Die (Budrys), 272 Something Rich and Strange (McKillip), 449 Sorceress and the Cygnet, The (McKillip), 449 Sorcery and Cecilia (Stevermer), 518 Soylent Green (film), 342 Space-Born, The (Tubb), 399 Space Merchants, The (Pohl and Kornbluth), 47, 485 Space Odyssey Series (Clarke), 489 Space Trilogy (Lewis), 215, 494 Speaker for the Dead (Card), 180-183 Spengler, Oswald, 101, 228, 562 Spenser, Edmund, 61, 96, 281-282, 411, 504 Spielberg, Steven, 273 Stalin, Joseph, 31, 391 Stalky & Co. (Kipling), 441 Stand, The (King), 273 Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner), 6, 342, 499 Stapledon, Olaf, 100, 315, 502, 545 Star Light (Clement), 364 Star Maker (Stapledon), 502 Star Trek (television), 82, 273; and Asimov, Isaac, 82; “Trouble with 694
Subject Index Tribbles, The,” 349; and the universe, 546 Star Trek novelizations, 153 StarBridge (Crispin), 546 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany), 133 Stars My Destination, The (Bester), 505 Starship (Bishop), 397 Starship Troopers (Heinlein), 221, 374 Startide Rising (Brin), 544 Stations of the Tide (Swanwick), 508 Stealer of Souls (Moorcock), 176 Stephenson, Neal, 475 Sterling, Bruce, 303 Sterne, Laurence, 420 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 299, 511 Stevermer, Caroline, 518 Stewart, George R., 128, 272 Stewart, Mary, 360, 368 Stewart, Sean, 370 Still Forms on Foxfield (Slonczewski), 145 Still I Persist in Wondering (Pangborn), 127 Stoker, Bram, 149, 555 Stormbringer (Moorcock), 176 Story of the Amulet, The (Nesbit), 439440 Straits of Messina, The (Delany), 134 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 299, 511 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 514 Stress of Her Regard, The (Powers), 269 Study of History, A (Toynbee), 227 Sturgeon, Theodore, 53, 104, 134, 166, 375, 534 “Subliminal Man, The” (Ballard), 487 Submarines, 537 Summer Queen, The (Vinge), 479, 481 Sundiver (Brin), 543 Survivor (Butler), 423-425 Swanwick, Michael, 10, 300, 508
Swift, Jonathan, 100, 243, 366, 410, 412 Swiftly Tilting Planet, A (L’Engle), 597 Sword in the Stone, The (White), 400, 402 Swords and Deviltry (Leiber), 193 Swords’ Masters (Leiber), 191 Swords of Lankhmar, The (Leiber), 191, 193 Swords of Mars (Burroughs), 43 Swordspoint (Kushner), 517 Synners (Cadigan), 476 Synthetic Men of Mars (Burroughs), 43 Tactics of Mistake, The (Dickson), 85 “Tale of Satampra Zeiros, The” (Smith), 264 Tale of the Body Thief, The (Rice), 550 Tales from the Flat Earth (Lee), 520 Tales of Nevèrÿon (Delany), 133 Taoism, 171, 344 Taran Wanderer (Alexander), 436 Tarzan, 107, 561 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 53 Telepathy, 49, 125, 163, 173, 220, 288, 315, 354, 385, 422, 464, 503, 505, 514, 579, 596 Teleportation, 274, 375, 505, 507, 514 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 510 Tennyson, Lord, 111 Tepper, Sheri S., 232 “Terminal Beach, The” (Ballard), 49 “Testament of Athammaus, The” (Smith), 264 That Hideous Strength (Lewis), 3, 402, 496, 498 They Shall Have Stars (Blish), 98-99 “Think Blue, Count Two” (Smith), 289 This Immortal (Zelazny), 380 Thomas the Rhymer (Kushner), 9, 519 Three Swords, The (Leiber), 191 Through a Brazen Mirror (Sherman), 518 695
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 17 Thuvia, Maid of Mars (Burroughs), 42 Tik Tok (Sladek), 455 Time Cat: The Remarkable Journeys of Jason and Gareth (Alexander), 437 Time Machine, The (Wells), 211, 441, 524 Timescape (Benford), 527 Tiptree, James, Jr., 253 Titan (moon of Saturn), 469 Titans, 231, 267 Titus Alone (Peake), 530-531, 533 Titus Groan (Peake), 530-532 Titus Groan Trilogy (Peake), 530 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 412 Tolkien, J. R. R., 7, 10-11, 60, 162, 260, 333; and animal fables, 567; and legends, 437; Lord of the Rings, The, 97, 157, 193, 333, 533 Tom Jones (Fielding), 128 Tombs of Atuan, The (Le Guin), 170171 Touch of Sturgeon, A (Sturgeon), 534 “Tower of the Elephant, The” (Howard), 106 Towing Jehovah (Morrow), 235 Toynbee, Arnold J., 227 Tralfamadore, 470, 472 Transylvania, 149 Treasure Seekers, The (Nesbit), 441 Trial, The (Kafka), 165 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 420 Triumph of Time, The (Blish), 98, 100 Trotsky, Leon, 31 Trumps of Doom (Zelazny), 23 Truthful Harp, The (Alexander), 438 Tubb, E. C., 399 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 356 Turtledove, Harry, 12 Twain, Mark, 109, 228; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 128 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 537 Twilight Zone, The (television), 273
“Two Dooms” (Kornbluth), 46-47 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 91 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 489-490, 492 Unconquered Country, The (Ryman), 540 Under Pressure (Herbert), 158 “Universe” (Heinlein), 399 Uplift Sequence, The (Brin), 543 Uplift War, The (Brin), 544 Urth, 58 VALIS (Dick), 547 Vampire Armand, The (Rice), 551 Vampire Chronicles (Rice), 549 Vampire Lestat, The (Rice), 550 Vampire Tapestry, The (Charnas), 554 Vampires, 46, 149, 271, 424, 451, 549, 554 Van Vogt, A. E., 88, 101, 104, 546 Vance, Jack, 159 “Veldt, The” (Bradbury), 277 Venus, 85, 278, 288-289, 315, 485-486, 494 Vergil in Averno (Davidson), 426 Verne, Jules, 306, 537; and Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 43; and Wells, H. G., 299 Vinge, Joan D., 478 Vinge, Vernor, 210 “Visitor, The” (Bradbury), 278 Vittorio the Vampire (Rice), 551 Voltaire, 259 Vonnegut, Kurt, 456, 469, 472 Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The (Lewis), 95 “Voyage That Lasted 600 Years, The” (Wilcox), 399 Walpole, Horace, 532 War Against the Rull, The (van Vogt), 104 “War No. 81-Q” (Smith), 288 696
Subject Index War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 239, 557 War with the Newts (Capek), 560 Warlord of Mars, The, 42 “Warrior” (Dickson), 86 Washington, George, 127 Wasp Factory, The (Banks), 563 Watership Down (Adams), 566 We (Zamyatin), 569 Weaveworld (Barker), 572 Weinbaum, Stanley, 380 “Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, The” (Smith), 265 Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The (Garner), 418 Wells, H. G., 4, 96, 100, 297, 524, 557; and Mars, 355; Modern Utopia, A, 441; and Nesbit, Edith, 441; and Stapledon, Olaf, 316; Time Machine, The, 142, 211, 228, 524; War of the Worlds, The, 6, 239, 557; and Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 570 Welsh mythology, 9, 362, 402, 416, 437 When Harlie Was One (Gerrold), 575 “When the People Fell” (Smith), 289 “When You’re Smiling” (Sturgeon), 536 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm), 578 White, T. H., 2, 9, 368, 400, 437 Wicked Day, The (Stewart), 363 Wilcox, Don, 399 Wild Seed (Butler), 422, 424-425 Wild Shore, The (Robinson), 353, 406, 408-409 Wilde, Oscar, 429 Wildlife (Kelly), 542 Wilhelm, Kate, 578 Williamson, Jack, 488, 545 Willis, Connie, 141, 324 Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame), 9, 545, 581 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 355
Witch in the Wood, The (White), 401402 Witch World (Norton), 584 Witchcraft, 300 “Witchcraft of Ulua, The” (Smith), 603-604 Wizard of Earthsea, A (Le Guin), 169 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 590 Wizard of Oz, The. See Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Wolfe, Gene, 10, 58 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 587 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 453, 590 Wonderland. See Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Woolf, Virginia, 410 “Words of Guru, The” (Kornbluth), 46 Wordsworth, William, 88 World Below, The (Wright), 380 “World of the Myth” (Ellison), 275 World War I, 564 World War II, 31, 64, 94, 235, 240, 242, 325, 336, 343, 471-472, 528, 533; alternative history of, 343; Dresden, 473 “World Well Lost, The” (Sturgeon), 166 World’s End (Vinge), 479-480 Worm Ouroboros, The (Eddison), 593 Wright, Sydney, 380 Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle), 596 Wyndham, John, 272 Xenocide (Card), 180-183 Xenogenesis (Butler), 599 Year of the Unicorn (Norton), 586 Yolen, Jane, 9 Young Bleys (Dickson), 86 Yulsman, Jerry, 528
697
Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 569 Zelazny, Roger, 22, 193 “Zero Hour” (Bradbury), 278
Zodiac, 16 Zothique (Smith), 602
698