Incunabula, or the Origins of the Genre
Neal Stanifer
recently, I began doing scholarship on science fiction as a genre, and I
have been putting together a chronology, drawing upon various critics
and writers who have expressed theories as to the origins of SF. These
accounts vary widely from one another, with the mean being somewhere
around the time of Shelley and Poe. Some, however, insist upon the
Gernsback Era in the early to mid-twenties as the starting point, at
least of "modern" SF. A handful even consider SF just an offshoot of
fantastic literature in general, and will go back as far as the legend
of Gilgamesh for precursors.
Because I normally view SF as a marketing category rather than a
restrictive genre, I've tentatively placed its incunabular (infant)
origins at about the 1830s with the invention of the steam rotary
press. But I wanted to get some feedback from others on this n.g.
Where would you place the origins of SF, and why?
Neal
Ethan Merritt
Neal Stanifer <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote:
>A handful even consider SF just an offshoot of
>fantastic literature in general, and will go back as far as the legend
>of Gilgamesh for precursors.
This is the semi-official position of this newsgroup, for which the
*.sf.* in its title refers to "speculative fiction". From time to time
a newcomer will vociferously insist that science fiction is categorically
different, but so far this viewpoint has not prevailed.
>Because I normally view SF as a marketing category rather than a
>restrictive genre, I've tentatively placed its incunabular (infant)
>origins at about the 1830s with the invention of the steam rotary
>press. But I wanted to get some feedback from others on this n.g.
So you're choosing a starting date based on technology rather than
on literary content? In that case why limit the argument to SF?
If you are interested in the effects of mass production and distribution
then you might as well look at its impact on all targetted genres.
>Where would you place the origins of SF, and why?
Hmmm. My first thought would be _Gargantua et Pantagruel_ (ca. 1532).
It is a fantasy which is not evidently a retelling of earlier
traditional tales, traditions, or myths. It was a popular success.
It had elements of social commentary, something which has remained
a strong thread in contemporary SF. I'm not scholar enough to
comment on what Pantagruel's direct antecedants were, if any; possibly
one could push the starting date for this combination of elements back
even earlier.
--
Ethan A Merritt
Crispin Roche
"Neal Stanifer" <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message
news:3D7A37AD...@tulane.edu...
Are you interested in the origins of the term "science fiction" and its
attribution to a class of literature or in the actual literature itself?
If the former I have no idea when the term/label was first coined but as for
the latter well the elements of fantastical journeys, strange devices and
strange creatures, which are the basis of much science fiction, have been
used in literature for a long time. But in many cases the fantastical
elements are allegorical rather than features of the story solely in their
own right and I would suggest that it is when the strange creatures and
devices exist for their own sake, and when the fantastic journey is just
that, a journey, that modern science fiction actually began. As such, for
me, modern science fiction began with Jules Verne and was developed by
H.G.Wells.
Crispin Roche
or modern science fiction I personally would place its origens with Verne
and Wells
Andrew Wheeler
My theory is that "science fiction" (the thing that, as Damon Knight put
it, we're pointing it) *was* invented by Hugo Gernsback in the '20s. He
assembled it from pieces cobbled together from existing parts of
literature (especially the scientific romance) and from journalistic
science non-fiction (hence the hallowed Infodump), but he did set out to
build something specific and I believe that he did succeed.
Now, mind you, much that can be called "science fiction" (or, even more
widely, "speculative fiction") does *not* have the same origin. British
writers in general are less influenced by Gernsback and his tradition,
for example, and the non-Anglophone parts of the world have even
stranger relationships to this specific tradition.
But I do think a reasonable distinction can be drawn between "everything
that has fantastic elements" and "things that know they're Gernsback's
descendants, and act or react in specific ways." The latter is
reasonably definable; the former isn't. And, if you want to talk about
the history of "science fiction," it's best to start with Gernsback
(though you probably need to work backwards as well as forwards --
precursors are very important, even if they're not within the main tradition).
But every fantastic voyage does not necessarily have anything to do with
modern SF -- Lucian of Samosata and his buddies (I think) get dragged
into a lot of "origins of SF" discussions to perk up the pedigree and
keep the pulpy genre roots under the carpet.
--
Andrew Wheeler
--
Far beyond the moon and stars,
Twenty light-years south of Mars
Spins the gentle Bunny Planet,
And the Bunny Queen is Janet.
Neal Stanifer
>
>
> So you're choosing a starting date based on technology rather than
> on literary content? In that case why limit the argument to SF?
> If you are interested in the effects of mass production and distribution
> then you might as well look at its impact on all targetted genres.
I'm limiting my explorations to SF for two reasons: SF doesn't receive
enough attention in academic circles (or if it does, it's sometimes the
wrong kind of attention); and more importantly, I really like SF. So I
decided to take a look at how mass-production techniques changed SF (or
permitted it to change itself) over the years. To do this, I'm starting
where the marketing category seems to begin. Though technically Science
Fiction didn't exist as a term until 1929, there is ample evidence of
the appeal of "that kind of story" in the cheap presses as far back as
the 1830s.
This is not to say that there was no fantastic literature before
mass-production presses, only that conscious marketing of particular
types of fiction only makes sense when the larger market comes into
existence. Even if fantastic literature was popular among those who
could afford library editions before the advent of mass-production, the
Industrial Revolution changed not only the production and distribution
of the media, but also the kind of product served up. Penny Dreadfuls,
Dime Novels, Pulps, and Paperbacks. That sort of thing.
The ideas I'm trying to explore (outside of this n.g.) have to do with
the rise of marketing categories and their influence on new works
produced within those categories, whether the categories in question are
SF, Fantasy, Horror, or Literary Fiction.
>
> >Where would you place the origins of SF, and why?
>
> Hmmm. My first thought would be _Gargantua et Pantagruel_ (ca. 1532).
> It is a fantasy which is not evidently a retelling of earlier
> traditional tales, traditions, or myths. It was a popular success.
> It had elements of social commentary, something which has remained
> a strong thread in contemporary SF.
Your answer squares with some others I've read (and by the way, I'm not
necessarily looking for scholarly answers), especially among those who
are interested in fantastic literature in general.
Neal
Neal Stanifer
>
> My theory is that "science fiction" (the thing that, as Damon Knight put
> it, we're pointing it) *was* invented by Hugo Gernsback in the '20s. He
> assembled it from pieces cobbled together from existing parts of
> literature (especially the scientific romance) and from journalistic
> science non-fiction (hence the hallowed Infodump), but he did set out to
> build something specific and I believe that he did succeed.
Yes, he certainly did, though he wasn't even the first to do so. Not
even the first in pulps. That honor may in fact go to Argosy or Weird
Tales or even Edward Stratemeyer for his Frank Reade Library series of
dime novels (wherein the immortal Tom Swift debuted). But you're right,
I think, in the sense that Gernsback gave this "kind" of literature an
identity, and that, in turn, made it available to marketing efforts.
>
> Now, mind you, much that can be called "science fiction" (or, even more
> widely, "speculative fiction") does *not* have the same origin.
This is something I've considered. I'm mainly concerned with U.S. SF,
but I may have to do some research into the Penny Dreadfuls and see what
I can scare up.
>
> But I do think a reasonable distinction can be drawn between "everything
> that has fantastic elements" and "things that know they're Gernsback's
> descendants, and act or react in specific ways." The latter is
> reasonably definable; the former isn't.
I feel the same way. I think I understand the reasoning behind the
"speculative fiction" approach, but that cuts off certain kinds of
inquiry that might be fun to take up. And I do think there are some
distinctions which can be made without unnecessarily restricting either
"fantastic" or "science fiction."
>
> But every fantastic voyage does not necessarily have anything to do with
> modern SF -- Lucian of Samosata and his buddies (I think) get dragged
> into a lot of "origins of SF" discussions to perk up the pedigree and
> keep the pulpy genre roots under the carpet.
Yes, this is something that I've noticed with academic critics. I'm not
interested in dressing the family monkey in an ill-fitting tuxedo. I
like the family monkey. I grew up with him. I'd rather spend the day
with Vinge, Van Vogt, and Vonnegut than with Dreisser, James, and
Proust.
Then again, if someone is concerned with the "fantastic" in literature
(as I take the term Speculative Literature to represent), I can
understand the willingness to include Lucian, as well as Homer, Ovid,
Beowulf, Cyrano, and even Walpole. Of course, if we're trying to build
the subset "fantastic literature," we may come to find that it's almost
the same size as the set "literature" in the long run.
Neal
Allan Griffith
>So I
>decided to take a look at how mass-production techniques changed SF (or
>permitted it to change itself) over the years.
I would have thought that the appearance of a mass audience as a
result of the gradual extension of literacy to a larger and larger
proportion of the population was far more relevant. But I guess if
you're an SF fan you're going to look for a technological rather than
a sociological explanation!
The growth of circulating libraries (around the mid-18th century I
think) would also be a factor. Books were criplingly expensive at
that time, so libraries were a huge factor in allowing more people
access to books.
The growth in scientific knowledge in the late 18th and early 19th
century, and the challenge this presented to the traditional religious
view of how the world worked, must also have been a major factor. The
poet Shelley was fascinated by science, and was an avowed atheist at a
time when this still wasn't a terrifically popular thing to be. His
wife wrote a book that must have a very strong claim to being the
first science fiction novel. There seems to be a connection there.
Al
Allan Griffith
>This is something I've considered. I'm mainly concerned with U.S. SF,
Aren't you concerned that this bias is going to make any conclusions
you come up with very limited in their relevance? Why take such a
parochial view?
Al
Neal Stanifer
>
> Neal Stanifer wrote:
>
> >So I
> >decided to take a look at how mass-production techniques changed SF (or
> >permitted it to change itself) over the years.
>
> I would have thought that the appearance of a mass audience as a
> result of the gradual extension of literacy to a larger and larger
> proportion of the population was far more relevant.
The growth of literacy is certainly important, even indispensible in the
rise of so-called proletarian literature like the Pulps. It wasn't my
point that the press taught people to read. My point was that the press
gave them something *to* read. And mass market press gave them mass
market product, beginning with the Penny Dreadfuls, working its way
through Dime Novels and Shilling Shockers, and finally into the Pulps
and the Paperbacks.
The circulating libraries you speak of were, by and large, circulating
library editions of books, not mass market product. There was a
difference in audience, in some cases, and in any case, this was never a
stand-in for mass market publication.
In fact, the circulating libraries such as Moody's were around at the
same time as the steam press, and the kinds of literature distributed by
each was often qualitatively as well as quantitatively different.
[Steam Literature rarely made any claims, for instance, of being
edifying or improving.]
>
> The growth in scientific knowledge in the late 18th and early 19th
> century, and the challenge this presented to the traditional religious
> view of how the world worked, must also have been a major factor.
Certainly, I would agree. In fact, part of what I hope to examine is
what seems to me to be a reciprocal exchange between Science Fiction
(and its immediate forebears) and science and engineering. What did SF
take away from science and what did it give back? I agree with you that
there is a connection there, and I'm probably going to be spending some
time tracking down precisely what those connections were, outside of the
obvious.
Neal
Neal Stanifer
Well, simply put, I have to narrow this down to a scope which permits me
to actually finish the thing within my lifetime. This doesn't mean I
won't be pointing out plenty of British and French (and even Czech, in
the case of Carel Capek) borrowings and influences. But I need to keep
this project within certain bounds so that I can actually begin and end
it in a reasonable amount of time.
Still, this is still in its formative stages, so I may find myself
noticing overlaps between American and British marketing and
genre-construction which simply cannot be overlooked. I suspect that
may be the case, at which point I'll have to economize elsewhere,
perhaps by shortening the time-frame. Whatever happens, I'm hoping not
to slight any contributions, though the work is not intended to be
encyclopedic.
Neal
Christopher Henrich
You might want to look up an anthology, edited by August Derleth,
titled (IMS) _Beyond Time and Space_, published ca. 1950. It goes from
Plato (the story of Atlantis) to then-recent SF. Where, along this
line, does"real" SF begin?
--
Chris Henrich
Fire3Sky
>titled (IMS) _Beyond Time and Space_, published ca. 1950. It goes from
>Plato (the story of Atlantis) to then-recent SF. Where, along this
>line, does"real" SF begin?
There was also a set of anthologies called "The Road to Science Fiction". It
was published in 4 volumes, and I think the titles were "From Gilgamesh to
Wells", "From Wells to Heinlein", "From Heinlein to Here", and "From Here to
Forever".
I think the editor was James Gunn, but you might want to check that on the
ISFDB.
Fire3Sky
Alan Gore
>Because I normally view SF as a marketing category rather than a
>restrictive genre, I've tentatively placed its incunabular (infant)
>origins at about the 1830s with the invention of the steam rotary
>press. But I wanted to get some feedback from others on this n.g.
I would place the origin of the genre as we know it today in Victorian
Europe, with Verne and Wells. This seems to have coresponded with a
surge of popular interest in technology that followed the Industrial
Revolution. Note that other popular authors in that era, such as
Kipling and Jack London, wrote some stories in the genre.
ag...@qwest.net | "Giving money and power to the government
Alan Gore | is like giving whiskey and car keys
Software For PC's, Inc. | to teenaged boys" - P. J. O'Rourke
http://www.alangore.com
Htn963
On the off-chance that you are not trolling again in your typical
Aussie-twit fashion, the US developed and perfected the Sf genre as we know it
today. Most of the Sf works, good and bad, still come from the US, and so do
most of the marketshare.
While you do have Egan and the Mad Max movies, that is still not quite
enough for US to take you that seriously. Guess whether I'm trolling now.
--
Ht
|Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
--John Donne, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions"|
Allan Griffith
>On the off-chance that you are not trolling again in your typical
>Aussie-twit fashion,
An immediate resort to personal abuse. Which means I must be talking
to a ten-year-old, but here goes.
>the US developed and perfected the Sf genre as we know it
>today. Most of the Sf works, good and bad, still come from the US, and so do
>most of the marketshare.
Whether SF is an American invention depends on how you define SF,
doesn't it? If you define the origins of SF in such a way as to
ignore writers like Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Aldous
Huxley, George Orwell, then you could see it as being a purely
American invention. Space opera, that least interesting of all SF
sub-genres, I could see as being a purely American invention.
Al
Neal Stanifer
>
> Htn963 wrote:
>
> >the US developed and perfected the Sf genre as we know it
> >today. Most of the Sf works, good and bad, still come from the US, and so do
> >most of the marketshare.
>
> Whether SF is an American invention depends on how you define SF,
> doesn't it? If you define the origins of SF in such a way as to
> ignore writers like Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Aldous
> Huxley, George Orwell, then you could see it as being a purely
> American invention. Space opera, that least interesting of all SF
> sub-genres, I could see as being a purely American invention.
At the risk of being drawn into the baiting and counter-baiting going on
here, I'd like to address a couple points you just made. And I
apologize up front for having missed a previous message you posted --
I'm using a campus server which is entirely hit-and-miss when it comes
to newsgroups (if it weren't free, and/or I weren't poor, I'd drop it
like a scalding handful of soup).
First, you bring up the salient point (perhaps the most salient) that
much depends upon how you define SF. This is something my own studies
will try, at least, to get away from by focusing on print culture and
market economics. I'm less interested, academically, in whether or not
the legend of King Arthur (e.g.) is SF, than I am in how SF became the
bookstore juggernaut it is today. The latter issue, as I see it, has
more to do with marketing and merchandising (on both sides of the pond)
than it does with generic conventions and literary duckspeak. So that's
where I plan to go with the study.
Connected with this, however, is the matter of whether Shelley, Verne,
Wells, Huxley (et al) have anything to do with SF. I'd be a fool to
deny their influences, surely. Nor do I have to. When Hugo Gernsback,
often (IMO falsely) credited with being the father of modern SF, began
Amazing, he called for stories along the lines of what he had read in
Poe, Verne, and Wells. So modern SF's beginnings, if we wish to trace
them back only as far as Papa Gernsie, are already transnational --
American, Belgian, French, and British. If we fold in Karel Capek
(Czech) and E.T.A. Hoffmann (German), we have a veritable League of
Nations of speculative fiction.
Now, as for space opera, I have to disagree with you as to its being
"the least interesting of all SF sub-genres." That statement is highly
subjective. Much space opera is trite and archetypically pulpish, but
that doesn't necessarily make it a groaning read. Personally, I
consider the more extreme examples of "hard" SF to be the least
interesting, reading as some of them do like fanciful textbook proofs of
the laws of astrophysics. Wooden characters, simplistic plots, and pat
resolutions, after all, are not confined to space opera.
And if American writers "perfected" space opera, they hardly invented
it. Writers of early space opera were as influenced by Verne and Wells
as their editors were, and what is space opera but a more
action-oriented Voyage Extraordinaire? Around the Universe in Eighty
Days with rayguns and BEMs. Or First Men in the Moon writ large and
stuffed with cliff-hanging conflict. The difference is one of degree,
not kind.
Neal
wamccabe
voyage - seems to have everything that would become a cliche in SF along
with a few of the regular themes - wonderful inventions, immortality, time
travel (?) )map it out a bit through Verne, Wells, Poe, try to find some of
the other victorian adventures, maybe the american pulp magazines
(comparatively rare anywhere else on the planet), or the "literate" version
(regular books, no genre label), and into some kind of diaspora in the
sixties.
"Neal Stanifer" <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message
news:3D7A37AD...@tulane.edu...
> I've been a Science Fiction reader as long as I could read, but
> recently, I began doing scholarship on science fiction as a genre, and I
> have been putting together a chronology, drawing upon various critics
> and writers who have expressed theories as to the origins of SF. These
> accounts vary widely from one another, with the mean being somewhere
> around the time of Shelley and Poe. Some, however, insist upon the
> Gernsback Era in the early to mid-twenties as the starting point, at
> least of "modern" SF. A handful even consider SF just an offshoot of
> fantastic literature in general, and will go back as far as the legend
> of Gilgamesh for precursors.
>
> Because I normally view SF as a marketing category rather than a
> restrictive genre, I've tentatively placed its incunabular (infant)
The "restrictive" idea is arguable. If you have a good enough book it will
sell without a genre label to almost anyone except those who read genre
fiction exclusively. If the book is obviously genre material the general
reader will often be put off by the author's assumptions so you're going to
sell more copies if you put a genre label on it.
> origins at about the 1830s with the invention of the steam rotary
> press. But I wanted to get some feedback from others on this n.g.
>
> Where would you place the origins of SF, and why?
>
> Neal
---
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<snip>
> At the risk of being drawn into the baiting and counter-baiting going on
> here, I'd like to address a couple points you just made. And I
> apologize up front for having missed a previous message you posted --
> I'm using a campus server which is entirely hit-and-miss when it comes
> to newsgroups (if it weren't free, and/or I weren't poor, I'd drop it
> like a scalding handful of soup).
>
Google is free, and while it has problems, it is better than the
server you describe sounds to me. There are other free news access
points foranyone with web access.
<snip>
-DES
BrainsAkimbo
>
> Where would you place the origins of SF, and why?
>
You may want to check Bruce Sterling's 'Catscan'
columns for some interesting reflections on
this topic:
http://dub.home.texas.net/sterling/catscan.html
My vote goes to Poe, mainly because the other
precursors never get actually read.
Just my $0.02
-- BA
Neal Stanifer
>
> Neal Stanifer <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message news:<3D7A37AD...@tulane.edu>...
>
> >
> > Where would you place the origins of SF, and why?
> >
>
> You may want to check Bruce Sterling's 'Catscan'
> columns for some interesting reflections on
> this topic:
>
> http://dub.home.texas.net/sterling/catscan.html
Thanks for this. I hadn't stopped here before, and I should have.
>
> My vote goes to Poe, mainly because the other
> precursors never get actually read.
This puts you in line with Thomas Disch, at least, though he doesn't
seem to voice an opinion whether the precursor is read or not. In
truth, I can't say I do, either. I think it may be a mistake to judge
the originary source based on our current reading tastes. It's a little
like saying IBM invented the computer because so few people have heard
of Babbage. And anyway, I'm one of those masochists who actually enjoys
Verne, Wells, and even (gasp) the Frank Reade Library.
To take that logic further, though, is to get into an unpopular argument
about what SF originally meant, even before it was SF. And yet, that's
probably what my project will end up doing, to judge from what I've
collected so far. People, and especially fans, don't like to get into
that sort of swamp, and for good reason; it alienates and offends some
of the very people you might find yourself standing next to at a
convention. Academics, unfortunately, have little choice. (But then,
we're generally offensive by nature.)
>
> Just my $0.02
Hey, it was worth at least a buck forty.
Neal
BrainsAkimbo
> BrainsAkimbo wrote:
> >
> > http://dub.home.texas.net/sterling/catscan.html
>
> Thanks for this. I hadn't stopped here before, and I should have.
>
Glad to be of help. I'm planning on re-reading those
in the near future.
Sterling's article on Silverberg SF compilation
is quite interesting, and also his stuff about Verne.
> >
> > My vote goes to Poe, mainly because the other
> > precursors never get actually read.
>
> This puts you in line with Thomas Disch, at least, though he doesn't
> seem to voice an opinion whether the precursor is read or not. In
> truth, I can't say I do, either. I think it may be a mistake to judge
> the originary source based on our current reading tastes. It's a little
> like saying IBM invented the computer because so few people have heard
> of Babbage. And anyway, I'm one of those masochists who actually enjoys
> Verne, Wells, and even (gasp) the Frank Reade Library.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. When I refered to precursors
that weren't read, I was thinking of Lucian of Samosata,
Rabelais, Cyrano, and all the pre-Poe "SF writers".
You seem to be unable to read my mind... that's good.
Poe and the Post-Poe SF writers like Verne and
Wells seem to be read and loved to this day, like
you say.
>
> To take that logic further, though, is to get into an unpopular argument
> about what SF originally meant, even before it was SF.
I'm not an ultra-expert on the subject, so correct
if I'm wrong...
If you are interested in SF as a marketing category,
then the origins of the category will lie somewhere
between the invention of the steam press, as you
rightly point, and, say, Hugo Gernsback. There seems
to be some kind of evolution from Poe to Verne
(the Tom Clancy of the 19th century?) to Wells
(accused of "inventing" by Verne) to E. Rice
Burroughs.
An evolution that seems to move further away from
established facts & scientific speculation
to some kind of 'visionary' narrative-but-not-quite,
as Sterling would put it, with the thinnest
veneer of 'science'. Scientific rigor comes
back with Campbell, but by that time a story
needed to be quite 'far out' to be considered
SF.
That's why George Orwell and Aldous Huxley
never got nominated for an Hugo :-)
Well, those are my opinions, and as I said I'm not
an expert. Corrections are welcome.
Good luck on your project,
-- BA
Ethan Merritt
BrainsAkimbo <brains...@netscape.net> wrote:
>
>Sorry if I wasn't clear. When I refered to precursors
>that weren't read, I was thinking of Lucian of Samosata,
>Rabelais, Cyrano, and all the pre-Poe "SF writers".
[shrug] Isn't that just another case of deciding from the
outset whether he wants to limit consideration to works
in English or even to American fiction? I don't know exactly
who reads what in the larger world, but my own knowledge of
Rabelais comes from high school reading; ditto for Cyrano.
And that was a US high school, though admittedly one with
a strong French language track. Are there not places
where Rabelais is more widely read than Poe?
--
Ethan A Merritt
Dan Clore
I've read and enjoyed Lucian, Rabelais, and Cyrano de
Bergerac. And I would recommend them all for fantasy readers
who like "real literature".
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
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written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
BrainsAkimbo
> >
> > Sorry if I wasn't clear. When I refered to precursors
> > that weren't read, I was thinking of Lucian of Samosata,
> > Rabelais, Cyrano, and all the pre-Poe "SF writers".
> > You seem to be unable to read my mind... that's good.
> >
> > Poe and the Post-Poe SF writers like Verne and
> > Wells seem to be read and loved to this day, like
> > you say.
>
> I've read and enjoyed Lucian, Rabelais, and Cyrano de
> Bergerac. And I would recommend them all for fantasy readers
> who like "real literature".
>
I'll add them to my to-read list. Thanks for the tip.
Ah, so little time, so much to read... And re-read...
-- BA
BrainsAkimbo
> In article <16256da0.02091...@posting.google.com>,
> BrainsAkimbo <brains...@netscape.net> wrote:
> >
> >Sorry if I wasn't clear. When I refered to precursors
> >that weren't read, I was thinking of Lucian of Samosata,
> >Rabelais, Cyrano, and all the pre-Poe "SF writers".
>
> [shrug] Isn't that just another case of deciding from the
> outset whether he wants to limit consideration to works
> in English or even to American fiction?
Touche.
Of course, Rabelais and Cyrano are literary heavyweights,
with an influence on Western literature way beyond
the SF community.
What book by Cyrano would you recommend to the
non-francophone uninitiated? Any good English translations
out there?
On the English-only SF issue: IMHO SF as a marketing
category as it currently exists
was invented in the US (I'm not an expert,
so any corrections are welcome). Like with the
TV soap opera or the comic strip formats, once the
marketing category was defined, lots
of writers in lots of countries started working
within this definition.
And SF, like the comic strip, has lots of
(sometimes illustrious) precursors from whom
it took certain elements (and left aside
certain other elements, like Lucian's use of
the Dactylic Hexameter).
Just my $0.02.
-- BA
Joe Bernstein
from the library computer I'm using. Ironic, considering that this is
the most scholarly post I've attempted to make in some time. Anyway,
since the first three attempts used up a fair amount of time, and the
library closes soon, this will be fairly graceless, as will any
further posts I might manage to make in this thread tonight. Argh.
Neal Stanifer <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message
news:<3D7AC968...@tulane.edu>...
> I'm limiting my explorations to SF for two reasons: SF doesn't receive
> enough attention in academic circles (or if it does, it's sometimes the
> wrong kind of attention); and more importantly, I really like SF. So I
> decided to take a look at how mass-production techniques changed SF (or
> permitted it to change itself) over the years. To do this, I'm starting
> where the marketing category seems to begin. Though technically Science
> Fiction didn't exist as a term until 1929, there is ample evidence of
> the appeal of "that kind of story" in the cheap presses as far back as
> the 1830s.
But is that appeal a market category? I suspect not, but am not sure.
> This is not to say that there was no fantastic literature before
> mass-production presses, only that conscious marketing of particular
> types of fiction only makes sense when the larger market comes into
> existence.
This, anyway, is patently untrue. The Romans could distinguish among
the kinds of fiction that were comedy, tragedy, and epic (and the
distinction between fantasy and realism was in fact known to them, as
a distinction in particular between epic and comedy). I believe the
Chinese also had the idea, a few centuries later (because Chinese
literature in Roman times contained very little fiction at all).
Moreover, I'm not convinced there was conscious marketing of
particular types of fiction in the mid-19th century Anglophone
markets, either. What evidence do you have of this? My understanding
had been that most fictions of the time appeared in more or less the
same places.
Finally, I'm not entirely sure of your late date for a genuinely
popular market. My reasons for doubting are slender - the period
roughly 1500 to 1800 is my weakest - but are: 1) Robert Darnton's
<The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France>, which I
haven't read, but whose title obviously implies some sort of market;
2) the fact that ballads circulated widely as broadsheets and
pamphlets in Tudor England (this is where most of the ballads' oldest
copies come from, and how we know many ballads' political ends).
> Even if fantastic literature was popular among those who
> could afford library editions before the advent of mass-production, the
> Industrial Revolution changed not only the production and distribution
> of the media, but also the kind of product served up. Penny Dreadfuls,
> Dime Novels, Pulps, and Paperbacks. That sort of thing.
Here, I think you're on stronger ground. The key word here is
"changed". Please don't fall into the trap historians of modernity so
often fall into, of assuming that some widespread human behaviour
never existed until Date X; your real story is how new ways for human
behaviour to work created, in turn, new things on the face of the
earth.
For example. John Clute argues in <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> that
for fantasy to exist there must be a hegemonic concept of reality (of
the possible) for it to play against, and that such a concept didn't
exist in the West until the 17th century. I disagree in part because
I know that the Romans had such a concept in the 1st and 2nd
centuries, and know further that some of the things they used as
markers of fantasy (notably the Olympian gods) remained usable as such
markers forever after, even during times when I'd agree with Clute
that the concept of reality *in general* was relatively permissive.
Where I'd *agree* with Clute (and, in effect, with you) is that I
don't know of an earlier period in which a hegemonic concept of
reality was also scientific in a way meaningful to us, such that a
science fiction could usefully grow in its shadow. Thus I think that
earlier works I do see as science fictional (Lucan's <Pharsalia>, the
<Gospel of Nicodemus>, are two I've noticed) are basically sports,
random literary phenomena, and I know of no genuine tradition of
science fiction older than the 17th century.
A book I know of that should be significant to this but that I haven't
read either is <Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750> by Lorraine
Daston and Katharine Park. Obviously concepts of the possible are
critical to the existence of science fiction too, so I should think
Daston and Park would be a useful book for you to read (as it will be
for me when I get that far). You might also want to look at <The Man
in the Moone>, an anthology of works from the 16th-18th centuries (if
I remember right) that the editors see as science fictional.
I should probably explain that parenthesis two sentences back. I've
been working for too many years now on a history of fantasy, in which
so far I've got chapters on the Egyptians and the Persians, and am
getting ready to do the Greeks. I applaud your interest in market
categories partly because I share it, although I break down what you
seem to see as one classification into two. That is, I deal with
modes (Fantasy, Realism, etc.) - my book is a history of fantasy as a
mode, althogh modes in general are extremely boring to work with - and
also with traditions (epic, scientific romance, etc.) and market
categories (Fantasy, Western, etc.). I think your "marketing
categories" seem to be conflating my "traditions" and "market
categories", although maybe I'm misunderstanding you. In any event, I
think both of us could benefit from corresponding, and you *might*
find it worthwhile to see some of what I've written on this group
(maybe also on humanities.classics) in the past, in which case your
search terms at Google should be "tradition" and/or (preferably and)
"market category", with "Bernstein" as author (I've changed addresses
several times).
Anyway, I look forward to talking with you in this thread. If the
computers will let me do so...
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer and clerk j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/>
Neal Stanifer
>
> Neal Stanifer <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote:
>
> > I'm starting
> > where the marketing category seems to begin. Though technically Science
> > Fiction didn't exist as a term until 1929, there is ample evidence of
> > the appeal of "that kind of story" in the cheap presses as far back as
> > the 1830s.
>
> But is that appeal a market category? I suspect not, but am not sure.
It is if you consider that contemporary periodicals on publishing
(Publisher's Weekly, et al) were grouping not only types of media
(story-papers, dime novels, etc.) but also types of story. And they
were discussing, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the effects of
targeted demographics on sales and circulation. In other words, they
knew (or thought they knew, at least) who was buying their product and
why.
>
> > This is not to say that there was no fantastic literature before
> > mass-production presses, only that conscious marketing of particular
> > types of fiction only makes sense when the larger market comes into
> > existence.
>
> This, anyway, is patently untrue. The Romans could distinguish among
> the kinds of fiction that were comedy, tragedy, and epic (and the
> distinction between fantasy and realism was in fact known to them, as
> a distinction in particular between epic and comedy). I believe the
> Chinese also had the idea, a few centuries later (because Chinese
> literature in Roman times contained very little fiction at all).
Here I think you're missing my point. I'm not arguing that genre was
born of the Industrial Revolution. I'm arguing that marketing
strategies and practices which became standard in the nineteenth century
exerted tremendous force on what we call genre today, such that
formalist considerations of genre are difficult to square with
publishing practice. This is not to say that publishers don't recognize
the difference (e.g.) between short fiction and the novel, or between
comedy and tragedy even in the classical sense. Only that their primary
concerns are more closely allied to marketing concepts. In other words,
publishers don't just print novels; they print novels with an audience.
[That idea, of course, didn't spring up because of the rotary press.
But the Industrial Revolution did give birth and consciousness to new
types of readers, and publishers therefore saw new opportunities to make
money.]
>
> Moreover, I'm not convinced there was conscious marketing of
> particular types of fiction in the mid-19th century Anglophone
> markets, either. What evidence do you have of this? My understanding
> had been that most fictions of the time appeared in more or less the
> same places.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, and especially around the 1860s
(which saw the "story-papers" breathe their last), new forms of print
product were arriving on the scene, including the all-important dime
novels and "cheap libraries," those "yellow-backs" the moralist critics
loved to hate. Leather-bound books of high literary value were not
marketed in these formats, though they might be serialized in newspapers
and magazines. [Fence-jumpers like Charles Dickens were not really
exceptions to this when you consider that he set out with the intention
of writing popular rather than high-brow literature, and that he was
only canonized in hindsight.]
>
> Finally, I'm not entirely sure of your late date for a genuinely
> popular market. My reasons for doubting are slender - the period
> roughly 1500 to 1800 is my weakest - but are: 1) Robert Darnton's
> <The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France>, which I
> haven't read, but whose title obviously implies some sort of market;
> 2) the fact that ballads circulated widely as broadsheets and
> pamphlets in Tudor England (this is where most of the ballads' oldest
> copies come from, and how we know many ballads' political ends).
I take your point, and I should have been clearer. When I speak of a
mass market, I am referring to the kinds of production and distribution
strategies which took printing and publishing to larger and larger
stages. I'm also speaking of a cultural product directed at a new
market among the so-called masses, and made possible largely through
increased literacy and leisure time among the working classes.
The archetypal case-in-point is, of course, Luis Senarens. Senarens
wrote the earliest American science fiction stories for Tousey's Frank
Reade Library, and his work greatly influenced Jules Verne, who in turn
greatly influenced the editorial tastes of Hugo Gernsback, who gave
science fiction its name. Senarens was published in dime novels whose
readership was almost entirely adolescent boys and working-class men.
[Historical footnote: there were other dime novels which targeted female
audiences, and which were actually purchased and read by them in huge
numbers. Where are the studies of these women's pre-pulps? Ya got me.]
One other point in regard to mass market literature concerns its
content. Before the Industrial Revolution (and even after it, all the
way up to today), most lower-class people were buying "useful" books
when they bought books. These works ranged from bibles to treatises on
herbs and so forth. Fiction sold, but not anything like it began to do
in the time of the penny presses. And much of the fiction which did
sell was classical or moral or both, and thus "improving." When the
novel was born, it was castigated for being harmful to people's moral
health. While that didn't end with the rise of the mass market, it was
easier for publishers to ignore without going bankrupt.
>
> > Even if fantastic literature was popular among those who
> > could afford library editions before the advent of mass-production, the
> > Industrial Revolution changed not only the production and distribution
> > of the media, but also the kind of product served up. Penny Dreadfuls,
> > Dime Novels, Pulps, and Paperbacks. That sort of thing.
>
> Here, I think you're on stronger ground. The key word here is
> "changed". Please don't fall into the trap historians of modernity so
> often fall into, of assuming that some widespread human behaviour
> never existed until Date X; your real story is how new ways for human
> behaviour to work created, in turn, new things on the face of the
> earth.
Precisely. I wish I'd put it that way myself. The trick here is not to
play the game of stark periodicity. That is, as you point out,
modernism's greatest failing. And yet we do see new types of stories
emerging in an age of new technologies (and this is particular important
to the genesis of science fiction), ranging from the social novels of
Dickens to the urban detective tales of the Beadle and Tousey
libraries. Although we know of Da Vinci's drawings of flying machines
and Cyrano's crazy "humours"-influenced schemes about getting to the
moon, it is almost impossible to imagine Senarens writing "Frank Reade,
Jr., and his Queen Clipper of the Clouds" before, say 1800. The Age of
Steam gave birth to a flood of scientific speculation which was very
different in degree (if not always in kind) from the speculations of
earlier ages. And the synergy between content and material
circumstances is especially remarkable in the case of SF, where a story
about a new kind of transportation might reach its audience precisely
because it is distributed through a new type of transportation (as in
the case of Jack Wright's new-fangled locomotive).
>
> For example. John Clute argues in <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> that
> for fantasy to exist there must be a hegemonic concept of reality (of
> the possible) for it to play against, and that such a concept didn't
> exist in the West until the 17th century. I disagree in part because
> I know that the Romans had such a concept in the 1st and 2nd
> centuries, and know further that some of the things they used as
> markers of fantasy (notably the Olympian gods) remained usable as such
> markers forever after, even during times when I'd agree with Clute
> that the concept of reality *in general* was relatively permissive.
Like you, I'd disagree with Clute's dating, but for different reasons.
We have evidence of complex and relatively coherent cosmologies in
English as far back as the Middle Ages. In fact, their consensus about
reality was in many ways more coherent than our own today, and certainly
a good deal more homogeneous. What they didn't have was the Age of
Reason, the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume, Carlyle, and so on. In short,
they didn't have science as we came to know it. For that reason, it's
easy to dismiss them as primitive thinkers with a poor handle on
"reality," when in fact anyone who has read _Revelations of Divine Love_
or Bede's _Ecclesiastical History of the English People_ knows this is a
misconception with no basis in fact.
> Where I'd *agree* with Clute (and, in effect, with you) is that I
> don't know of an earlier period in which a hegemonic concept of
> reality was also scientific in a way meaningful to us, such that a
> science fiction could usefully grow in its shadow.
Exactly. Incidentally, some of the reading I enjoy best is the earliest
dabblings in "science" and "natural philosophy," those often
wrong-headed but sincere jaunts of fancy which could be either
hilariously funny (humours theory and Maxwell's demon) or frightening as
hell (phrenology and pre-Mendelian racialisms).
>
> A book I know of that should be significant to this but that I haven't
> read either is <Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750> by Lorraine
> Daston and Katharine Park.
I've written these works down, and I'll look into them. Thanks for the
tips.
>
> I applaud your interest in market
> categories partly because I share it, although I break down what you
> seem to see as one classification into two. That is, I deal with
> modes (Fantasy, Realism, etc.) - my book is a history of fantasy as a
> mode, althogh modes in general are extremely boring to work with - and
> also with traditions (epic, scientific romance, etc.) and market
> categories (Fantasy, Western, etc.).
I have a writer friend who becomes very skeptical when he reads a
contemporary writer being described as a "fabulist" or "magic realist."
He will often exclaim "Just admit you're a damn fantasy writer, you
coward." To an extent, I agree with him. Writers wishing to escape the
whiff of the genre ghetto sometimes disguise their content as something
more elevated, and if they don't do this, maybe their editors or
publishers will. I've picked up allegedly literary SF books which have
no indication anywhere on them (even in the gushing blurbs of praise on
back covers) that they are SF. I think I understand why this is done,
but it still makes me sad. It reminds me of a very popular rock band
which formed in my old hometown of Bakersfield, California, and (when
they made it onto the covers of numerous magazines) described themselves
as being "from the L.A. area." Yeah, right -- if that "area" stretches
200 miles beyond its furthest suburb. They just didn't want to be
thought of as hicks, which is the (partly deserved) reputation
Bakersfield carries.
> I think your "marketing
> categories" seem to be conflating my "traditions" and "market
> categories", although maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
My sense is that you're misunderstanding me. I can see that SF and
Fantasy carry with them the story types, tropes, and other techniques
born of many genuine literary traditions, from myth and fable to the
Gothic fragment to the cozy domestic drama. But when I refer to
"marketing categories," I mean just that -- something which justifies
placing this book on that shelf rather than another shelf, and a kind of
language which permits books to be promoted to professionals and
consumers in an existing market. Traditions certainly have something to
do with these, but I think the categories can be examined in ways other
than through the traditions by which they are informed.
> In any event, I
> think both of us could benefit from corresponding,
Sounds good.
Neal
Neal Stanifer
> > where the marketing category seems to begin. Though technically Science
> > Fiction didn't exist as a term until 1929, there is ample evidence of
> > the appeal of "that kind of story" in the cheap presses as far back as
> > the 1830s.
>
> But is that appeal a market category? I suspect not, but am not sure.
It is if you consider that contemporary periodicals on publishing
(Publisher's Weekly, et al) were grouping not only types of media
(story-papers, dime novels, etc.) but also types of story. And they
were discussing, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the effects of
targeted demographics on sales and circulation. In other words, they
knew (or thought they knew, at least) who was buying their product and
why.
>
> > This is not to say that there was no fantastic literature before
> > mass-production presses, only that conscious marketing of particular
> > types of fiction only makes sense when the larger market comes into
> > existence.
>
> This, anyway, is patently untrue. The Romans could distinguish among
> the kinds of fiction that were comedy, tragedy, and epic (and the
> distinction between fantasy and realism was in fact known to them, as
> a distinction in particular between epic and comedy). I believe the
> Chinese also had the idea, a few centuries later (because Chinese
> literature in Roman times contained very little fiction at all).
Here I think you're missing my point. I'm not arguing that genre was
born of the Industrial Revolution. I'm arguing that marketing
strategies and practices which became standard in the nineteenth century
exerted tremendous force on what we call genre today, such that
formalist considerations of genre are difficult to square with
publishing practice. This is not to say that publishers don't recognize
the difference (e.g.) between short fiction and the novel, or between
comedy and tragedy even in the classical sense. Only that their primary
concerns are more closely allied to marketing concepts. In other words,
publishers don't just print novels; they print novels with an audience.
[That idea, of course, didn't spring up because of the rotary press.
But the Industrial Revolution did give birth and consciousness to new
types of readers, and publishers therefore saw new opportunities to make
money.]
>
> Moreover, I'm not convinced there was conscious marketing of
> particular types of fiction in the mid-19th century Anglophone
> markets, either. What evidence do you have of this? My understanding
> had been that most fictions of the time appeared in more or less the
> same places.
>From the mid-nineteenth century onward, and especially around the 1860s
(which saw the "story-papers" breathe their last), new forms of print
product were arriving on the scene, including the all-important dime
novels and "cheap libraries," those "yellow-backs" the moralist critics
loved to hate. Leather-bound books of high literary value were not
marketed in these formats, though they might be serialized in newspapers
and magazines. [Fence-jumpers like Charles Dickens were not really
exceptions to this when you consider that he set out with the intention
of writing popular rather than high-brow literature, and that he was
only canonized in hindsight.]
>
> Finally, I'm not entirely sure of your late date for a genuinely
> popular market. My reasons for doubting are slender - the period
> roughly 1500 to 1800 is my weakest - but are: 1) Robert Darnton's
> <The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France>, which I
> haven't read, but whose title obviously implies some sort of market;
> 2) the fact that ballads circulated widely as broadsheets and
> pamphlets in Tudor England (this is where most of the ballads' oldest
> copies come from, and how we know many ballads' political ends).
I take your point, and I should have been clearer. When I speak of a
> > Even if fantastic literature was popular among those who
> > could afford library editions before the advent of mass-production, the
> > Industrial Revolution changed not only the production and distribution
> > of the media, but also the kind of product served up. Penny Dreadfuls,
> > Dime Novels, Pulps, and Paperbacks. That sort of thing.
>
> Here, I think you're on stronger ground. The key word here is
> "changed". Please don't fall into the trap historians of modernity so
> often fall into, of assuming that some widespread human behaviour
> never existed until Date X; your real story is how new ways for human
> behaviour to work created, in turn, new things on the face of the
> earth.
Precisely. I wish I'd put it that way myself. The trick here is not to
play the game of stark periodicity. That is, as you point out,
modernism's greatest failing. And yet we do see new types of stories
emerging in an age of new technologies (and this is particular important
to the genesis of science fiction), ranging from the social novels of
Dickens to the urban detective tales of the Beadle and Tousey
libraries. Although we know of Da Vinci's drawings of flying machines
and Cyrano's crazy "humours"-influenced schemes about getting to the
moon, it is almost impossible to imagine Senarens writing "Frank Reade,
Jr., and his Queen Clipper of the Clouds" before, say 1800. The Age of
Steam gave birth to a flood of scientific speculation which was very
different in degree (if not always in kind) from the speculations of
earlier ages. And the synergy between content and material
circumstances is especially remarkable in the case of SF, where a story
about a new kind of transportation might reach its audience precisely
because it is distributed through a new type of transportation (as in
the case of Jack Wright's new-fangled locomotive).
>
> For example. John Clute argues in <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> that
> for fantasy to exist there must be a hegemonic concept of reality (of
> the possible) for it to play against, and that such a concept didn't
> exist in the West until the 17th century. I disagree in part because
> I know that the Romans had such a concept in the 1st and 2nd
> centuries, and know further that some of the things they used as
> markers of fantasy (notably the Olympian gods) remained usable as such
> markers forever after, even during times when I'd agree with Clute
> that the concept of reality *in general* was relatively permissive.
Like you, I'd disagree with Clute's dating, but for different reasons.
We have evidence of complex and relatively coherent cosmologies in
English as far back as the Middle Ages. In fact, their consensus about
reality was in many ways more coherent than our own today, and certainly
a good deal more homogeneous. What they didn't have was the Age of
Reason, the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume, Carlyle, and so on. In short,
they didn't have science as we came to know it. For that reason, it's
easy to dismiss them as primitive thinkers with a poor handle on
"reality," when in fact anyone who has read _Revelations of Divine Love_
or Bede's _Ecclesiastical History of the English People_ knows this is a
misconception with no basis in fact.
> Where I'd *agree* with Clute (and, in effect, with you) is that I
> don't know of an earlier period in which a hegemonic concept of
> reality was also scientific in a way meaningful to us, such that a
> science fiction could usefully grow in its shadow.
Exactly. Incidentally, some of the reading I enjoy best is the earliest
dabblings in "science" and "natural philosophy," those often
wrong-headed but sincere jaunts of fancy which could be either
hilariously funny (humours theory and Maxwell's demon) or frightening as
hell (phrenology and pre-Mendelian racialisms).
>
> A book I know of that should be significant to this but that I haven't
> read either is <Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750> by Lorraine
> Daston and Katharine Park.
I've written these works down, and I'll look into them. Thanks for the
tips.
>
> I applaud your interest in market
> categories partly because I share it, although I break down what you
> seem to see as one classification into two. That is, I deal with
> modes (Fantasy, Realism, etc.) - my book is a history of fantasy as a
> mode, althogh modes in general are extremely boring to work with - and
> also with traditions (epic, scientific romance, etc.) and market
> categories (Fantasy, Western, etc.).
I have a writer friend who becomes very skeptical when he reads a
contemporary writer being described as a "fabulist" or "magic realist."
He will often exclaim "Just admit you're a damn fantasy writer, you
coward." To an extent, I agree with him. Writers wishing to escape the
whiff of the genre ghetto sometimes disguise their content as something
more elevated, and if they don't do this, maybe their editors or
publishers will. I've picked up allegedly literary SF books which have
no indication anywhere on them (even in the gushing blurbs of praise on
back covers) that they are SF. I think I understand why this is done,
but it still makes me sad. It reminds me of a very popular rock band
which formed in my old hometown of Bakersfield, California, and (when
they made it onto the covers of numerous magazines) described themselves
as being "from the L.A. area." Yeah, right -- if that "area" stretches
200 miles beyond its furthest suburb. They just didn't want to be
thought of as hicks, which is the (partly deserved) reputation
Bakersfield carries.
> I think your "marketing
> categories" seem to be conflating my "traditions" and "market
> categories", although maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
My sense is that you're misunderstanding me. I can see that SF and
Fantasy carry with them the story types, tropes, and other techniques
born of many genuine literary traditions, from myth and fable to the
Gothic fragment to the cozy domestic drama. But when I refer to
"marketing categories," I mean just that -- something which justifies
placing this book on that shelf rather than another shelf, and a kind of
language which permits books to be promoted to professionals and
consumers in an existing market. Traditions certainly have something to
do with these, but I think the categories can be examined in ways other
than through the traditions by which they are informed.
> In any event, I
> think both of us could benefit from corresponding,
Sounds good.
Neal
wamccabe
> Allan Griffith wrote:
> >
Verne and Wells are pretty much indisputable, Gernsback is little more than
a point on a line that connects them to the modern equivalent. As for
Huxley, Orwell, Capek and such, they are of a later period and a different
tradition. They have written material that we take to be science fiction but
it seems certain that they never thought of such things when they wrote the
story and the influence of this material is doubtful within the field.
> Connected with this, however, is the matter of whether Shelley, Verne,
> Wells, Huxley (et al) have anything to do with SF. I'd be a fool to
> deny their influences, surely. Nor do I have to. When Hugo Gernsback,
> often (IMO falsely) credited with being the father of modern SF, began
> Amazing, he called for stories along the lines of what he had read in
> Poe, Verne, and Wells. So modern SF's beginnings, if we wish to trace
> them back only as far as Papa Gernsie, are already transnational --
> American, Belgian, French, and British. If we fold in Karel Capek
> (Czech) and E.T.A. Hoffmann (German), we have a veritable League of
> Nations of speculative fiction.
>
Neal Stanifer
>
> "Neal Stanifer" <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message
> news:3D7E091C...@tulane.edu...
> > Allan Griffith wrote:
> > >
> Verne and Wells are pretty much indisputable, Gernsback is little more than
> a point on a line that connects them to the modern equivalent. As for
> Huxley, Orwell, Capek and such, they are of a later period and a different
> tradition. They have written material that we take to be science fiction but
> it seems certain that they never thought of such things when they wrote the
> story and the influence of this material is doubtful within the field.
While I'm unwilling to ascribe to Gernsback some Zeus-like paternal
quality, I think his influence on the field at the time it was coming to
know itself was more important than you seem to allow. His example
provides the first coherent agenda for a science fiction literature, and
while it was replaced later by Campbell's more positivist agenda, and
later by any number of rising and dissipating movements, it left a
lasting mark.
You're right about Huxley, Orwell, and Capek, of course, as far as early
or incunabular SF is concerned; their influence is felt later, where it
is felt at all (though in the cases of Huxley and Orwell, at least, I'm
pretty sure it's felt). Perhaps their inclusion beneath the umbrella of
SF (and several critics do include them) has more to do with how SF sees
itself now than it does with what they wrote or set out to write. Of
course, this same could be said of Poe, Verne, and Wells, who never
wrote "science fiction," after all. Extraordinary Voyages, yes;
Scientific Romances, yes; even tales of terror; but not Science Fiction,
simply because the name had not yet been coined. This sounds facile, I
know, but I think it's important because later writers producing work
for an existing and self-conscious market know what they are writing.
It has a name and a set of codes and conventions, and even when they
choose to violate those conventions creatively, as the New Wave did
spectacularly and others have done more subtly or singularly, they are
still writing within the market. Not so, the earliest writers. Their
markets were both qualitatively and quantitatively different from what
we find even as shortly afterward as the 1920's.
This is where critical judgment is called for. We don't want to spit
out the mouth with the mouthwash, so we should scout for antecedents to
SF. But neither do we want to include all literature with any degree of
the fantastic or the speculative under the umbrella of SF. That way
lies confusion and multiplication, and it threatens even the loosest
coherence of the category.
The hardest trick, as I see it, is in deciding which path backward
through the literature will provide us with the most useful set of
antecedents, and perhaps in justifying such genealogical methods in the
first place. This is a subjective inquiry in the best of cases, and
even my task of setting the hunt for a pedigree alongside economic
analysis of the market will not turn it into anything approaching a
science. In some cases, we are helped out a bit, as when Verne
acknowledges the influence of dime novel writer Luis Senarens on his own
tales, or when Verne squabbles with Wells over the unscientific whiff of
cavorite. But in most cases, we are confronted with silence.
Neal
Joe Bernstein
my only option in dealing with RASFW, is that if I hit the "Escape"
key, this asinine web browser decides that this means "Erase
everything I've already written and start over." Which is
emphatically not what it means in my usual news posting software.
Damn it.
Anyway, here goes with another second try.
Neal Stanifer <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message
news:<3D824405...@tulane.edu>...
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > Neal Stanifer <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm starting
> > > where the marketing category seems to begin. Though technically Science
> > > Fiction didn't exist as a term until 1929, there is ample evidence of
> > > the appeal of "that kind of story" in the cheap presses as far back as
> > > the 1830s.
> >
> > But is that appeal a market category? I suspect not, but am not sure.
>
> It is if you consider that contemporary periodicals on publishing
> (Publisher's Weekly, et al) were grouping not only types of media
> (story-papers, dime novels, etc.) but also types of story. And they
> were discussing, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the effects of
> targeted demographics on sales and circulation. In other words, they
> knew (or thought they knew, at least) who was buying their product and
> why.
I think it's time I ask you to get specific about dates. My problem
with your chronology is that I don't know of actual publications
sorted out by fictional content any earlier than the late 19th century
- heck, even that is guesswork on my part; where I'm *really* sure is
the 1920s. I'm prepared to believe that distinctions were appearing
earlier than that in ways that might be compared to the subgenres of
SF today: put a rocket ship on the cover and depending on what kind
of rocket it is, it might be a space opera or it might be near-future;
put a dragon on the cover and it's probably imaginary-world; etc. I
do know that there were *class* distinctions in literature, but that's
not the same thing (and it's noteworthy that the scientific romance
was not specific to lower-class publication practices).
(Resists the urge to hit the escape key before going on. Damn IE
anyway.)
Now, if there are articles in <Publishers' Weekly> in the 1830s that
talk about how to get mysteries to mystery readers and confessions to
true-confession readers, then at some level, you're right. But if
those articles are in the 1860s, then my discomfort abates some; and
if the ways in question fall significantly short of the genre walls of
the mid-20th century, then I begin to think we have a viable
chronology. I just find it hard to fathom that there could have been
serious marketing talk about fictional types for a *century* before
anyone got the bright idea of starting publications specific to
particular types. (Were there failures of, say, all-mystery
magazines, that made people reluctant to start all-whatever
magazines?)
> > > This is not to say that there was no fantastic literature before
> > > mass-production presses, only that conscious marketing of particular
> > > types of fiction only makes sense when the larger market comes into
> > > existence.
> >
> > This, anyway, is patently untrue. The Romans could distinguish among
> > the kinds of fiction that were comedy, tragedy, and epic (and the
> > distinction between fantasy and realism was in fact known to them, as
> > a distinction in particular between epic and comedy). I believe the
> > Chinese also had the idea, a few centuries later (because Chinese
> > literature in Roman times contained very little fiction at all).
>
> Here I think you're missing my point. I'm not arguing that genre was
> born of the Industrial Revolution. I'm arguing that marketing
> strategies and practices which became standard in the nineteenth century
> exerted tremendous force on what we call genre today, such that
> formalist considerations of genre are difficult to square with
> publishing practice.
OK. See, I was taking you literally. I don't see that it would be
nonsensical for a Roman bookseller (and there were booksellers in the
Roman empire) to offer epics on a different table from comedies, even
though the "larger market" had not yet come "into existence".
But I was thinking on the way home after posting that post about how I
distinguish traditions from market categories, and what I came up with
pointed in exactly the direction you're talking about and, I gather,
primarily interested in:
To me, a tradition is something that writers, or at most readers, do.
Classical epic is a tradition because Apollonius emulated Homer and
Hesiod, because Vergil emulated Homer, because Ovid inverted Vergil
and Lucan inverted the lot of them, because Statius, Valerius Flaccus
and Silius Italicus all emulated Vergil (while Statius also emulated
Lucan and Valerius also emulated Apollonius), and so on world without
end. In other words, I'm talking some combination of form (they all
used similar metres and archaising language) and influence as
manifested in both form and content. In other cases we may not know
whether a tradition existed. I'm intensely curious whether the
manuscript that we get <Beowulf> from was some tenth-century Saxon's
Collection of Great Fantasy. (I'm told not, but someday will check
for myself.) Again, the tradition may demonstrably be a conflation.
To some extent this is true even of classical epic - not only does
Apollonius know nothing of Vergil, who is later, but more importantly,
the Greek writers centuries *after* Vergil also knew nothing of him,
because Vergil wrote in Latin. A more interesting case is
Anglo-American fantasy. It's perfectly obvious that the Inklings
represent a real anglophone tradition, and it's perfectly obvious that
the fantasy-as-a-little-sister-of-science-fiction deal that grew out
of <Weird Tales> and <Unknown> represents another one. It's much less
obvious that the Inklings and <Weird Tales> are a *single* tradition,
although I understand that Tolkien read (and enjoyed) Robert E.
Howard, which pretty much requires him to have read <Weird Tales>.
And it's frankly bizarre that James Branch Cabell and George MacDonald
should be seen as part of a single tradition. But in real life,
thanks to the post-facto proselytising of Lin Carter and others,
Cabell and MacDonald *are* in fact influences on sometimes the same
bona fide authors of today. Although the proselytisers were usually
also authors, I think it's reasonable to say that the fantasy
tradition we now have is largely reader-created: Carter's influence
was as an enthusiastic reader selling books to other readers, not as a
writer, God knows.
Market categories, on the other hand, are to my mind driven by
sellers: booksellers, publishers, maybe editors. By and large, these
are modern things because fictions in general - heck, narratives in
general - weren't distinguished in the markets until fairly recently,
or so I assume (for all I know, Chinese practice will disprove this...
there isn't enough evidence about Roman). We have Caxton in his
preface to Malory explicitly disavowing any responsibility for whether
the story is true *or* possible. But interestingly enough, I do know
of a non-modern market category: Athenian Tragedy. We know that the
writers of tragedy changed things dramatically over the years,
eventually resulting in works radically different from what the Big
Athenian Three had written. We know that the Big Three themselves,
although fundamentally they followed the same formal rules, made
changes themselves. It's pretty obvious that they paid attention to
each other, even though they were much too dignified to say so in the
works, so they were a tradition. But the way most people actually
experienced Athenian tragedy was through co-productions between the
state and the leading citizens. We know that something like
Euripides' <Helen>, which does not have a sad ending, is a tragedy
partly through its form, metre and chorus and so forth, and partly
through its being by Euripides, who was after all a tragedian; but the
Athenians, and later the people in other cities who imported Athenian
works, knew <Helen> was a tragedy because it was performed in a
trilogy at one of the great Dionysian festivals. Even a very formally
*weird* work like <Prometheus Bound> is a tragedy thanks to this
imprimatur.
Well, but. What does this say to modern writers? I mean, if anything
intrinsic to the writing is a "tradition", and "market categories" are
reflected only in the way the writing is presented, then presumably
there is a whole tradition going on today of writers who urgently want
to write what the Harlequin line's editors, or the Goosebumps', say
they want to publish. This is, obviously, perfectly silly.
Harlequins differ in content from other romances, let alone other
novels, but it's not because of a tradition. It's not a sign of
influence among writers that so many science fiction novels of the
late 1960s and early 1970s were very close to 160 pages long. Nor is
*this* a new modern thing *either*: it's pretty obvious that a
sizable chunk of first century Roman epic was written partly on funds
obtained from dramatic readings of the exciting bits, and the one
surviving epic that we know to have been funded thus (Statius's
<Thebaid>) is, sure enough, full of exciting bits, not all of which
are well linked.
As I reread what I quoted to see how it links to this effusion, I note
with amusement that we've switched places: your last sentence I
quoted notes the *differences* between marketing and writing practice,
while here I am noting where they *collide*.
> > Moreover, I'm not convinced there was conscious marketing of
> > particular types of fiction in the mid-19th century Anglophone
> > markets, either. What evidence do you have of this? My understanding
> > had been that most fictions of the time appeared in more or less the
> > same places.
>
> From the mid-nineteenth century onward, and especially around the 1860s
> (which saw the "story-papers" breathe their last), new forms of print
> product were arriving on the scene, including the all-important dime
> novels and "cheap libraries," those "yellow-backs" the moralist critics
> loved to hate. Leather-bound books of high literary value were not
> marketed in these formats, though they might be serialized in newspapers
> and magazines. [Fence-jumpers like Charles Dickens were not really
> exceptions to this when you consider that he set out with the intention
> of writing popular rather than high-brow literature, and that he was
> only canonized in hindsight.]
OK, fair; I shouldn't have been dumb enough to forget Dickens. But
note that Dickens's books *were* reviewed in the highbrow periodicals;
this is part of what I meant by "appeared". Maybe they were more
widely accessible than books that weren't serialised, but both were
there.
Are you saying that Senarens, say, was *not* reviewed in the <Saturday
Review> or wherever?
Snipping Senarens amid much else, we get to
> [Historical footnote: there were other dime novels which targeted female
> audiences, and which were actually purchased and read by them in huge
> numbers. Where are the studies of these women's pre-pulps? Ya got me.]
I'm flabbergasted if they haven't been Discovered by feminist Ph.D.
students. What on earth is the American university system *good* for,
then?
> Although we know of Da Vinci's drawings of flying machines
> and Cyrano's crazy "humours"-influenced schemes about getting to the
> moon, it is almost impossible to imagine Senarens writing "Frank Reade,
> Jr., and his Queen Clipper of the Clouds" before, say 1800. The Age of
> Steam gave birth to a flood of scientific speculation which was very
> different in degree (if not always in kind) from the speculations of
> earlier ages.
Um? Um?
This is my hook for recommending another book to you. M. R.
Ghanoonparvar's <Prophets of Doom> is half a study of 20th-century
Iranian fiction in general, and half a study of a particular novel.
The first half includes a chapter that lists about twenty different
genres, so to speak, most of which are almost fantasy or science
fiction without any of them actually *being* fantasy (I think one or
two might really be science fiction).
My impression is that this is also to a considerable extent the
18th-century English landscape. Travel stories were truly wild then;
that is, after all, what Swift was satirising, no? In that
<Dictionary of Imaginary Places> book, I once set out to catalogue the
sources by century, and there were a *lot* from the early modern
period.
I think the difference was in kind *more* than in degree. I don't
really want to expand on this here because, again, this is *not* my
strong era; there's a limit to how many feet I can fit in my mouth at
one go. But I'd be very surprised if a simple difference of degree
was what separated the writers of the 18th century from those of the
19th, if it was just a matter of the 19th-century writers being *more*
speculative, and not also *differently* speculative.
> > For example. John Clute argues in <The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> that
> > for fantasy to exist there must be a hegemonic concept of reality (of
> > the possible) for it to play against, and that such a concept didn't
> > exist in the West until the 17th century. I disagree in part because
> > I know that the Romans had such a concept in the 1st and 2nd
> > centuries, and know further that some of the things they used as
> > markers of fantasy (notably the Olympian gods) remained usable as such
> > markers forever after, even during times when I'd agree with Clute
> > that the concept of reality *in general* was relatively permissive.
>
> Like you, I'd disagree with Clute's dating, but for different reasons.
> We have evidence of complex and relatively coherent cosmologies in
> English as far back as the Middle Ages. In fact, their consensus about
> reality was in many ways more coherent than our own today, and certainly
> a good deal more homogeneous.
I'm perplexed. Here I mean specifically reality as the definer of
what is possible. My impression was that there were lots of societies
in which "Is this possible?" was generally treated as uninteresting,
and that most Christian societies until modernity came along behaved
this way. (This is why it's so hard to do fantasy in Christianity. I
mean, if you present Jesus sinning, you're really a heretic, not a
fantasist; but if you present Hell as having ten levels rather than
nine, you're really a speculative theologian, not a fantasist.
Augustine is quite explicit about this: if you want to lie without
being taken literally, write about Jupiter, not Christ. The great
modern Christian fantasists resolved the difficulty by making their
impossibility be their world, rather than their god, and thus stumbled
into the secondary world concept.)
What I have in mind here is something like Herodotus, with his
gradations of "Well, I think I buy this" and "Well, that sounds
unlikely, but who really knows?" and "This is totally outrageous".
Herodotus much more often shrugs and says "Can't really tell" than he
decrees what's possible and what isn't. In this respect he's very
different from later Greek historians, who tended to have very strong
(if often mistaken) ideas of the possible, but very similar to what
little I've read in the mediaeval chronicles.
> I have a writer friend who becomes very skeptical when he reads a
> contemporary writer being described as a "fabulist" or "magic realist."
> He will often exclaim "Just admit you're a damn fantasy writer, you
> coward." To an extent, I agree with him. Writers wishing to escape the
> whiff of the genre ghetto sometimes disguise their content as something
> more elevated, and if they don't do this, maybe their editors or
> publishers will. I've picked up allegedly literary SF books which have
> no indication anywhere on them (even in the gushing blurbs of praise on
> back covers) that they are SF. I think I understand why this is done,
> but it still makes me sad.
Here I sharply disagree with you. For one thing, it's fairly well
documented that there are people publishing as science fiction writers
who are refugees from the worse paid, worse published literary market.
Interestingly, it turns out that John Crowley was one such, although
he has now allowed the literary market to reclaim him. (His first
books came out from Doubleday Science Fiction because Doubleday bought
them, but also because he'd stumbled into science fiction and
concluded that some of what he wanted to write could best be done from
within it. Thus <Engine Summer>, which had started out I gather as a
novel about hippies, well over a decade before he sent it off in its
final form.)
Beyond that, there are differences of kind between literary sf and
genre sf. Genre sf is free to assume all kinds of reading protocols
that literary sf isn't; I defy you to rewrite a book like <Hyperion>
or <A Fire upon the Deep> so that it could be read by someone who'd
never read science fiction before. Literary sf is free to try all
kinds of ideas that genre sf has long since rejected as implausible or
unworkable. When I read genre sf and literary sf on the same
concepts, I tend to find utterly different treatments, even today.
I'm less familiar, as it happens, with magical realism and suchlike,
but in broad outline I'm quite certain that the same thing holds.
*Very* few secondary worlds appear in the literary market. In fact,
among works first published in English, far as I know, the setting is
almost always a modern one. I believe that the "how to be a wizard"
vein, that Charles de Lint, among others, mines, also appears in
segments that *look* "mainstream" to SF readers, but I don't think
Starhawk gets reviewed in the little magazines any more than de Lint
does. If you know of a work published in the literary market in the
last twenty years that has dragons or elves, you're one up on me.
Much modern genre fantasy concerns good and evil; I feel safe in
saying that this is not such a major theme in literary fantasies.
Well, let's see, that's setting, plot, characters, and theme...
*Obviously* there's lots of crossover. I'm not trying to say that the
walls of the ghetto are sealed tight. But I think there are so many
differences that quite a lot of writing can be done only within, *or*
only outside, the genres. (Although someone who's written a literary
fantasy work but can't sell it to the literary market is *far* more
likely to be able to sell it to a genre line, than the other way
around... I think the plausibility bar and such make this less
possible for science fiction, but am not sure.) So I see no need to
assume that writers of science fiction whose books don't say "SF" on
them are trying to put one over on readers. Undoubtedly *some* are,
but it's not like the literary market has any monopoly on dishonest
writers! And some are writing things that it made sense to them to
publish in the literary market, possibly because they grew up reading
Doris Lessing's science fiction or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fantasies
and think the literary market is the natural home for what they write.
> But when I refer to
> "marketing categories," I mean just that -- something which justifies
> placing this book on that shelf rather than another shelf, and a kind of
> language which permits books to be promoted to professionals and
> consumers in an existing market. Traditions certainly have something to
> do with these, but I think the categories can be examined in ways other
> than through the traditions by which they are informed.
OK, then. There I certainly agree.
wamccabe
> wamccabe wrote:
> >
> > "Neal Stanifer" <nsta...@tulane.edu> wrote in message
> > news:3D7E091C...@tulane.edu...
> > > Allan Griffith wrote:
> > > >
> > Verne and Wells are pretty much indisputable, Gernsback is little more
than
> > a point on a line that connects them to the modern equivalent. As for
> > Huxley, Orwell, Capek and such, they are of a later period and a
different
> > tradition. They have written material that we take to be science fiction
but
> > it seems certain that they never thought of such things when they wrote
the
> > story and the influence of this material is doubtful within the field.
>
> While I'm unwilling to ascribe to Gernsback some Zeus-like paternal
> quality, I think his influence on the field at the time it was coming to
> know itself was more important than you seem to allow. His example
> provides the first coherent agenda for a science fiction literature, and
> while it was replaced later by Campbell's more positivist agenda, and
> later by any number of rising and dissipating movements, it left a
> lasting mark.
>
for a very tightly defined genre but, with Verne etc. there was enough of a
body of work that much of Gernsback's influence was imposing a label on
something that already existed. If that label still defined the genre,
Gernsback would have a more prominent position. If Campbell is also to be
included, you'd probably have to take Palmer's sensationalism and promotion
which, although more appropriate to media SF, still have some weight.
I admit that I don't know as much about this period of US publishing as I
might - I've read a little on the subject and heard convention-style
speeches/ lectures but I never did see the original material that much.