The Spaced-Out Library
Book Reviews by Elmwood Kraemer
I'm taking a little time this issue for a look back at science fiction's past, back to the days when there was some talk of banning it. So it's a little essay instead of reviews this time, except for one thing. When I'm done with the essay, there'll be a single review of a book and that'll be the book I've reviewed this month. All because it says this is a column of book reviews. And so it is, but you know your reviewer is going to ramble a bit from time to time. Besides, I'm that Rambling Boy.
Where I grew up ( Calumet City , which like Hammond and Gary is difficult to find any more) there was always talk about getting rid of science fiction. You've heard about people calling it “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” These people called it worse than that. I used to point out to them, “then the taint would be removed from the newsstands?” and they had to admit that everything else that was there was deplorable rubbish, too—but still, there was something about SF that they especially disliked, particularly the women. The point that everything else on the stands was equally bad would get the men stopped, but when the women got going again, it would turn out that they were recommending getting rid of the newsstands. Science fiction was their Alpha Prime example, and I use that term with some cause. Genetics SF was what the women were particularly disliking. There was nothing like that in other fields of literature (although when someone said that, women would say that Mike Hammer walking into a trap was singularly similar).
I was particularly aware of this tendency toward book-banning when I picked up a copy of John Wyndham's RE-BIRTH . (Not recently. The book is apparently out of print.) The cover showed a modern-art impression of a fetus, not done in the gory manner of today's SF covers. This was a book about genetics malfeasance, likely to thrive in a milieu that included Jerry Sohl's THE ALTERED EGO , which was about brain surgery and far from excluding lobotomies from its topical range. Medical SF was getting a big start in the paperback market, and Alan E. Nourse's A MAN OBSESSED , about a guy being reworked in a hospital, was in Ace Double Novel form. DONOVAN'S BRAIN by Curt Siodmak (where'd I leave my copy?) was also pretty medical in an over-intimate sort of way, and the magazines were publishing stories like Phillip Jose Farmer's “Mother” and Judith Merrill's “That Only A Mother,” neither of which were views of childbirth that people liked very much. The whole trend was toward medical re-workings of the natural man, including genetics, and the women weren't liking it, probably comparing it to FRANKENSTEIN in their considerations. Nor did showing them a classic of that type, namely Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD , calm them down any. But the particular book I mentioned, Wyndham's, was the last straw. My reading tastes had been getting criticized, and I was told that the book was apt to have a bad effect on my development. This was enlarged to include all the other SF; it just wasn't having a good influence on me. Further discussion of the book brought the opinion, also from a woman, that the book should not be allowed to be run through a printing press. However, this comment brought the conversation up short because it had a similarity to what the book was about. Yonic symbolism became part of the dispute. The newsstands were seen as an unwanted intrusion into the normal social order, themselves developmental stations where unwanted elements could be introduced into a growing person's development. As the men in the discussion were somewhat at a loss, I took their initiative and said, “There's a book that's something like that, THE PUPPET MASTERS , by Robert A. Heinlein.” The remark was a mistake, except that I had to say something from the male viewpoint or an accusation of siding with women would be formulated, followed by an inquiry as to why I would be doing that. But when I described the plot of Heinlein's book it did not do very well at defending science fiction. The ladies found another book they didn't like the sound of on a dealer's list I had, SEEDS OF LIFE by John Taine. “Looks like they're still at it,” one of them said. Another said, “These people who write books like that all seem to be named ‘John.'” I said, “They both live in England , too.” But another gent required a third example of this and it turned out she was thinking of John Steinbeck, with further reference to “Saint Katy the Virgin.” “That name's Jewish,” the fellow said.
This was back when horror comics were being banned, and it looked like it might go on to include SF, too. But the point that it might include also mainstream books on the best-seller lists, for example, NOT AS A STRANGER , had been made, and after awhile there was book-banning afoot all over the literary field. So your literary person was not thriving, and indeed, these books, and particularly the medical ones, were not in the best of taste. When TROPIC OF CANCER came out, it seemed to me clean in comparison to mainstream medical writing, and it seemed that way to other people too, but then when the censorship relaxed there was NAKED LUNCH , somewhat getting the center of attention back to fantasy and science fiction.
Well, I might be a literary person today if all this controversy hadn't arisen, and you see me in an obscure place reviewing science fiction and cutting back out fast, instead of being a literary man. And I wouldn't want to be where I've been seeing literary people wind up. They complain about it and write poems about it. I just keep a little hobby running and that's good enough for me. If I wrote something it'd be pretty clean stuff, and I doubt if it would get published, which is all to the good, because I wouldn't want the consequences of having a book—there are also attacks on people whose writing is too clean.
But that isn't SF. Watch Alfred Bester's characters getting lobotomized, electrocuted, drugged, maimed, hypnotized and mutated and you'll see where SF is likely to be at. Of course, you're likely to run across abortions pretty regularly in mainstream books like PEYTON PLACE , or in the newspapers and news magazines, but SF puts a finer point on it and is more likely to follow the operation step by step. Medicine is a science, after all.
Some excuse for all this might be that the writers are trying to interpret life realistically, and that's the defense I always had for them, when I had one. In fact, we are living a life today that strongly resembles the worst SF. However, most of what is being written only adds to it, and it may be (as the book banners claimed) that SF was influential in causing much of the deterioration of life in our present times. For example, SF doesn't seem to be against pollution so much as showing some form of swamp life arising from it. Nor does it abhor mutation; it likes to speculate what form of Frankenstein monster will result from it. Far from deploring warfare, a discussion of what damages might be done by future weaponry is a preoccupation of any story with a conflict in it.
I myself prefer Flash Gordon, John Carter and Buck Rogers to an anti-hero, and would at this point recommend several books recently brought out by the Science Fiction Book Club, in which some of the coherency most common in the older approaches to science fiction is recovered.
UNDER THE MOONS OF MARS and RETURN TO MARS , the two of them being comprised of six books of the Martian series of Edgar Rice Burroughs, are pretty good editions with sensible cover art. Compare these with even the best of modern space adventures and you will find that STAR WARS and STAR TREK and BATTLEFIELD EARTH have less of a story to tell –true, the wars in these more recent books are wider in scope and have more characters, but that's just where the coherency is lost, and you have more of a war and less of a book. Compare these books with lesser books than these and you'll see the difference between stories and compendiums of abomination, which is what I consider DUNE to be.
THE COMING OF CONAN THE CIMMERIAN and THE BLOODY CROWN OF CONAN are more toward that area of abomination than are earlier science fiction books, which is evidence that fantasy has been merged with science fiction in modern writings. However, comparing this with present-day fantasies, you will find meaning and purpose in Howard's books that is lacking in the works of such authors as Terry Pratchett, whose books are principally satirical rather than having any good thoughts or considerations to convey. Today's horror, too, is obscure, murky and obscene in a way that Howard's works were not. Horror requires realism, and the characters in modern horror works have no identities or distinguishing features. Their protagonists tend to be monsters themselves, but an elementary manhood and womanhood are stressed in Howard's works.
THE LURKING FEAR gives the reader some indication of what H.P. Lovecraft was up to as a writer; but today's authors of similar fantasies are not up to anything and are simply chanting phrases. Lovecraft explored. A modern fantasy is a grotesquerie that requires exploration by those who are not squeamish.
CASTING THE RUNES demonstrates that M. R. James has something to say, has seen things he wishes to describe. He is not intent on destroying or mulching things he has seen at a distance, as is true of today's nihilistic ghost fantasy.
Now, for something new, this month's recommendation is THE GREAT BEYOND , a book which goes beyond Timothy Ferris' THE WHOLE SHEBANG and displays a more perceptive view of the cosmos than Carl Sagan's THE COSMIC CONNECTION . I told you this was the Spaced-Out Library and I'm reviewing a very spaced-out book. This book highlights some of the far-out aspects of mathematics and physics and applies them to a comprehension of the way-out-and-gone, bringing what has been “gone” because it was so far out back into a perspective, while taking the reader out to where it has gone, merging reader and concept into one vast, as the publisher puts it on the jacket, “Theory of Everything.” Paul Halpern is the author and John Wiley and Sons of Hoboken, New Jersey the publishers. It takes a mite out of your money-clip to purchase it, but you are buying a whole new way of looking at things. The book takes a close personal look at the lives of men who were far out and shows how they managed things, not ignoring their existential concerns. It hips you that topology leads you to unseen dimensions (of which Lovecraft spoke, and there is a quote from him at the opening of the book). It is the first book to recognize that there is actually a search for the infinite and unreckonable going on in the 20 th Century and proceeding into this one (not ignoring its antecedents) and to bring that search into a focus that can be apprehended by those hanging out behind the pioneers. True, it uses a lot of verbal hocus-pocus to accomplish its effects, but that is to be expected of a book that ranges beyond the known. Science ventures into magic from time to time, perhaps replenishing itself—we see that in the way fantasy has become related to science fiction. Here science encounters the spirit in a no-holds-barred approach that should be of great interest to the reader of science fiction and user of the computer. It's real New Age stuff. Unlike many a speculative fiction volume, it isn't written in a spirit of death, which is one of the prime attributes the book has. I'd say put it on your shelf. Although not very humane, it is by nature a book which ranges away from the crass materiality which I was discussing earlier in this column, which permeates so much of SF, and it should suit the transcendence crowd well enough. There you have it, a Book of the Month.