J. R. R. Tolkien

The Sociology of Science Fiction: Chapter IV

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My look at Stableford’s work continues.

Review: The Sociology of Science Fiction, Brian Stableford, 1987.

In Chapter IV, “The Expectations of the Science Fiction Reader”, Stableford tries to discover what sf readers get out of the genre. He looks at three questions: what sf readers say they get out of the genre, how the various definitions of sf serve as rules for composing sf works, and what writers and apologists of sf say about the genre’s function and value. 

Stableford argues that the whole question of science fiction as a genre is that reading a work of sf is different than reading another sort of novel. That’s what defines the genre. He quotes Darko Suvin as defining a genre as a system of expectations, based on prior reading experience, of a particular type of material. Even innovations in the genre are just an evolution of expectations based on past experience with sf.

What are those expectations? To get an idea, Stableford turns to the letters columns of sf magazines. There are a couple of methodological problems with this acknowledges Stableford. 

These are, first of all, a self-selected sample, and, of course, not all the letters received were printed though Stableford notes early sf pulps frequently had letters insulting certain stories.

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The Sociology of Science Fiction: Chapter II

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My look at Brian Stableford’s doctoral thesis continues.

Review: The Sociology of Science Fiction, Brian Stableford, 1987.

In the Chapter II of the book, “The Analysis of Communicative Functions”, Stableford looks at how the directive, maintenance, and restorative communicative functions work in sf.

Stableford says you would think that sf, deemed escapist fiction, would all be done in the restorative mode, but that’s not the case. Only a naïve, very inexperienced sf reader would think that. 

The crucial task would be to ask sf readers what they get out of reading the genre. 

There is, however, a sociological problem with creating a questionnaire to do that since it runs the risk of creating data artifacts. Fortunately, American sf magazines have long had feedback by readers in their letters columns. There is a problem of “content analysis” in regard to sorting sf into the three communicative categories.

Directive and maintenance are easy. Directive content is novel. Maintenance is familiar. 

Restorative is harder to pin down. Stableford says that, rather than using individual texts, he will do content analysis by theme. 

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Turn Off Your Mind

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I’ve longed liked Gary Lachman’s articles in the Fortean Times. I’m also an admirer of his work, under the name Gary Valentine, with the rock band Blondie, particularly his song “X Offender”.

So, it was only a matter of time before I decided to read one of his books.

Review: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, Gary Lachman, 2001. 

Lachman’s basic thesis is that several elements of the mystic 1960s led not just to the Summer of Love but the murders of Charles Manson and that the strains of thought that produced both go back to the late 1890s.

It’s an interesting story, but most parts of it were familiar to me already, and I’m not going to talk much about them. I am also not sympathetic to mysticism, the Summer of Love, or the spirit of the 1960s.

What I am going to talk about is the surprising amount of material in the book about writers and works of fantastic fiction and how they were connected to the mystic Sixties.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s not only wrote the very popular The Morning of the Magicians, but Bergier also wrote a letter praising H. P. Lovecraft that appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960, had Fortean material and centered on mysticism, transcendence, mutation and the evolution of consciousness. It was a heady mix that drew from the zeitgeist.

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Future Lovecraft

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Future_LovecraftFuture Lovecraft 2

This is not a recycled Amazon review because, to be honest, I sort of had ethical calms about posting it there. Why? Because I was, in a minor way, a contributor to the book. (It was my first contribution, in fact, to Innsmouth Free Press.)

However, the publisher understandably wanted the collection promoted by its contributors, so I compromised and wrote this up for LibraryThing and posted it on January 20, 2012.

By the way, there’s no way Paula and Silvia would let me get away with paragraphs this long for anything accepted by them.

Review: Future Lovecraft, eds. Silvia Moreno-Gracia & Paula R. Stiles, 2012.

From France, South Africa, Nigeria, the Philippines, Mexico, Canada, and the United States, the editors have gathered 38 reasons to “fear the future”, an assemblage of poems and stories with few duds.

Before I slice and dice and categorize the works, full disclosure requires that I note I’m one of the contributors.

While the editors’ definition of Lovecraftian fiction doesn’t always match mine, there’s plenty here that unquestionably slithers into that category. A list of the liveliest follows. Yes, Nick Mamatas’ “Inky, Blinky, Pinky Nyarlathotep” combines Pac-Man, transhumans, and primo cosmic horror. Don Webb’s “A Comet Called Ithaqua” (one of four reprints in this anthology) puts ghouls in space with, as the title hints, echoes of Algernon Blackwood and August Derleth. Lovecraftian fiction is, of course, famous for its tomes of esoteric blasphemy, but Helen Marshall’s “Skin” looks at a different set of disturbing literature. I knew from an opening quote from Francis Thompson’s militant poem “The Hound of Heaven”, I was going to like Julio Toro San Martin “Iron Footfalls” which mixes the Hounds of Tindalos with killer robots. “Tloque Nahuaque” from Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas makes a connection between Aztec gods and Lovecraft’s. The prose-poem that is A. C. Wise’s “Venice Burning” hides some illogic and vagueness, but I’m giving it a pass for its apocalyptic images of Venice and a rising R’lyeh. Anthony Boulanger “A Day and Night in Providence” is sort of a wry commentary on fantasy literature and the opposition between the poles of Saint Tolkein and the heretical church of Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard. And, speaking of Clark Ashton Smith, Leigh Kimmel’s “The Damnable Asteroid”, with its tale of asteroid miners being menaced in space, reminded me of some of Smith’s pulp science fiction. And the Mars setting of Meddy Ligner’s “Trajectory of a Cursed Spirit”, a gulag for a revived Russian communist state, also reminded me a bit of Smith’s Martian horror stories, but I also liked its mixture of Lovecraftian horror and unpleasantly real horrors from Russian history. Smith is evoked most explicitly in Jesse Bullington’s “The Door from Earth”, sort of a wry, action-packed sequel to Smith’s “The Door to Saturn”. I loved the title of Tucker Cummings’ “Concerning the Last Days of the Colony at New Roanoke” and the story, an academic examination of 17 objects found in the lost colony, didn’t disappoint. I have a weakness for this sort of pseudo-documentary puzzle piece. Orrin Grey’s “The Labyrinth of Sleep” is not only a sure-footed, compelling riff on Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter stories, but an excellent variation on all those science fiction stories which feature dreamnauts and their sleuthing and symbolic combat in the symbolic land of dreams. “Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee” from Molly Tanzer is effective far future horror of cannibalism, mutants, and a lake god in Cappadocia. Continue reading →

Tolkien, Ents, and World War One

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I have not yet read John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth or Janet Brennan Croft’s War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, but I want to. It’s less an interest in Tolkien than the greater subject of World War One’s influence on fantastic literature.

But now, after listening to a BBC podcast on the subject of wood in the Great War, both as an artistic symbol and as a practical material, I’m wondering specifically about how much of his conception of Ents derives from his war experience.

Memorable First Lines in Science Fiction and Fantasy

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I thought it might be interesting to start a list of memorable first lines in science fiction and, yes, fantasy novels.  By “memorable”, I mean memorable to me. And having the first line of a work stuck in your brain doesn’t automatically make the novel good. Conversely and obviously, not having a memorable first line doesn’t make a novel bad.

  • “Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So, if he’d ever killed a man, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman.
  • It was in that year when the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifixion of peasant children, but a similar fate for their household animals, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me. The War Hound and the World’s Pain, Michael Moorcock.
  • In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien.
  • This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying … but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice  … but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks … but nobody loved it. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester.
  • The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel. Neuromancer, William Gibson.
  • They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. Count Zero, William Gibson.

Various speculative fiction authors chime in with their favorites at I09.