Titus Groan, Rama, and Others
Peter Jackson
> In article <Pine.OSF.4.21.010312...@osf1.gmu.edu>,
> soh...@osf1.gmu.edu writes:
> > 3) Lensman. I found the complete set of Lensman books for $4.00. However,
> > halfway through Triplanetary I have to ask: Does it get any better? I've
> > been told that Doc Smith used a very archaic, pulpy style, but I wasn't
> > expecting something so ... purple.
>
> Purple is a good description. Smith is as purple as it gets. He never
> changed. I liked the Skylark series better.
It does get better though. If you are finding Triplanetary hard going, then
reading the order the books were written might be a better option. Triplanetary
is very much a prequel. First Lensman is better, but the series proper starts
with Galactic Patrol.
Peter
The Walkers
Quite so. Only after going from _Galactic Patrol_ (itself a little inferior
to the later books) through _Children of the Lens_ ought one to essay the
"first" two (after-written) books--if at all.
Doc Smith ain't for the ages, but he can be a lot of fun in an innocent
sort of way. His redeeming value is that he never took himself or his
works terribly seriously--as witness the series' recurring minor character
Chester Q. Fordyce, hack s.f. writer.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
Great Science-Fiction and Fantasy Works
http://owlcroft.com/sfandf
Douglas Muir
> Doc Smith ain't for the ages, but he can be a lot of fun in an innocent
> sort of way. His redeeming value is that he never took himself or his
> works terribly seriously--as witness the series' recurring minor character
> Chester Q. Fordyce, hack s.f. writer.
There's a big difference between the early Lensman books and the later ones.
_Triplanetary_, _Galactic Patrol_, and _Grey Lensman_ were written in 1934,
1937-8, and 1939, respectively. _Children of the Lens_ and _First Lensman_
came a decade later, in 1948 and 1950 (_Second Stage Lensman_, written in
1942-3, falls between the two groups, but is closer to the earlier works in
style and theme).
The later books are quite a bit better written. The prose is less purple, and
they show some subtlety, including the sort of self-deprecating humor you
describe. This doesn't mean they're necessarily "better" books -- _First
Lensman_ is actually a bit dull, and _Children_ suffers from having to live up
to several books worth of buildup. But they're a lot less wince-inducing to a
contemporary eye.
Doug M.
Douglas Muir
> Doc Smith ain't for the ages, but he can be a lot of fun in an innocent
> sort of way.
Actually, come to think of it, I just recently reread _Galactic Patrol_... and
I was /amazed/ by the number of overtly fascistic elements I found in it.
Now, before those knees start jerking, I cut my SFnal teeth on Doc Smith, and
I don't think that he was a fascist, or that the Lensman books were fascist
literature. But there really are startlingly many fascistic elements in the
books, or at least in _Patrol_. From the "spotlessly gleaming black and
silver" of their uniforms, to the "war of utter and absolute extermination"
against Boskone, to the comment that "such [Kinnison's] stock was too good
not to be propagated", to the fascination with manliness, to the repeated
throwaway references to the 'unfit' ("it was honey-combed from within by the
usual small but utterly poisonous percentage of the unfit")... I mean, once
you start noticing it, it's everywhere.
It got to the point where I found myself flinching at the destruction of the
Overlords of Delgon. Yes, yes, the Overlords are monstrously evil, slavers
and sadists and psychic vampires. But as Kinnison and vanBuskirk are
incinerating the 'nest' of cowardly, manipulative Overlords, they're thinking
that "this unbelievably monstrous tribe needed killing, root and branch. Not
a scion or shoot of it should be allowed to survive, to continue to
contaminate the civilization of the galaxy." Ummm.
Not to mention the fact that the good guys have Anglo-Saxon or Dutch names
(Kinnison, Henderson, Thorndyke, Allerdyce, Blakeslee, Van Buskirk, etc.),
while the bad guys are vaguely Eastern European (Helmuth, Wolmark, Kritsky)...
though I suppose the latter is just the pervasive background racism of the
day, rather than fascism per se.
Now, _Patrol_ was written in 1937-38. A lot of vaguely fascistic ideas were
in the air at that time, so it's not too surprising that some of them got into
a milSF novel. Perhaps there's an analogy to the way conservative
libertarianism has become common in milSF in the last 10 or 15 years. But as
far as I know, nobody's ever sat down and picked through the Lensman books to
look for specific influences. Fascism certainly isn't the only one, or even
the biggest (I can spot contemporary pulps, westerns, A.A. Merritt and perhaps
even Lovecraft), but it's certainly... striking... and I'm a bit surprised
that nobody seems to have picked up on it.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
David T. Bilek
<dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
>Now, _Patrol_ was written in 1937-38. A lot of vaguely fascistic ideas were
>in the air at that time, so it's not too surprising that some of them got into
>a milSF novel. Perhaps there's an analogy to the way conservative
>libertarianism has become common in milSF in the last 10 or 15 years. But as
>far as I know, nobody's ever sat down and picked through the Lensman books to
>look for specific influences. Fascism certainly isn't the only one, or even
>the biggest (I can spot contemporary pulps, westerns, A.A. Merritt and perhaps
>even Lovecraft), but it's certainly... striking... and I'm a bit surprised
>that nobody seems to have picked up on it.
>
>Thoughts?
>
I suspect that Norman Spinrad, at least, picked up on it. Isn't that
exactly the sort of thing he was commenting on in _The Iron Dream_ by
Adolph Hitler?
-David
Rick
news:3B00E344...@starpower.net...
> Now, before those knees start jerking, I cut my SFnal teeth on Doc Smith,
and
> I don't think that he was a fascist, or that the Lensman books were
fascist
> literature. But there really are startlingly many fascistic elements in
the
> books, or at least in _Patrol_. From the "spotlessly gleaming black and
> silver" of their uniforms, to the "war of utter and absolute
extermination"
> against Boskone, to the comment that "such [Kinnison's] stock was too
good
> not to be propagated", to the fascination with manliness, to the repeated
> throwaway references to the 'unfit' ("it was honey-combed from within by
the
> usual small but utterly poisonous percentage of the unfit")... I mean,
once
> you start noticing it, it's everywhere.
>
With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
facists.
@hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
<dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>The Walkers wrote:
>
>> Doc Smith ain't for the ages, but he can be a lot of fun in an innocent
>> sort of way. His redeeming value is that he never took himself or his
>> works terribly seriously--as witness the series' recurring minor character
>> Chester Q. Fordyce, hack s.f. writer.
>
>There's a big difference between the early Lensman books and the later ones.
>_Triplanetary_, _Galactic Patrol_, and _Grey Lensman_ were written in 1934,
>1937-8, and 1939, respectively.
? IIRC, the earliest Astounding I own is November, 1941, and "Grey
Lensman" is the cover story.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric D. Berge
(remove spaces for valid address)
Clay lies still, but blood's a rover
Breath's a ware that will not keep
Up, lad! When the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.
- A.E.Housman, "Reveille"
------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthias Warkus
...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
> With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
> elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
> and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
> facists.
It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
(as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
fascist ideas.
mawa
--
THINGS THE WORLD NEEDS MORE OF #3:
Beautifully typeset at-signs.
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
> It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
> ...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
> > With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
> > elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
> > and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
> > facists.
>
> It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
> (as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
> destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
> fascist ideas.
It wasn't racially based, though.
Rick
news:slrn9g2jn...@audrey.my.box...
> It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
> ...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
> > With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
> > elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking
uniforms,
> > and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
> > facists.
>
> It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
> (as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
> destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
> fascist ideas.
Well, the author of the book of Numbers managed to write about it many
centuries before the word "facism" existed.
Douglas Muir
>
> It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
> ...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
> > With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
> > elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
> > and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
> > facists.
>
> It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
> (as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
> destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
> fascist ideas.
Yep.
Also, that list of fascistic elements was neither complete nor conclusive. I
could go on. There's the collectivist ideology of the Patrol, which
explicitly states that individuals exist to serve the greater good. The
genetically based elitism, of course. The fascination with willpower and the
triumph of the will... hell, Smith even capitalizes it as Will, just like the
contemporary Silver Shirts.
Then there's the conflation of all forms of collective violence -- police,
military, and internal security -- into one. And the identification of
military force with capital-C Civilization. For all of _Galactic Patrol_, the
Patrol *is* Civilization (which seems to mean, incidentally, that
Civilization in the Lensverse is two parts Royal Navy and one part J. Edgar
Hoover's FBI). Civilian authority doesn't exist, and the only civilian who
appears in the book (the owner of the _Prometheus_) is a moral inferior
motivated purely by greed.
The means-to-an-end moral relativism. "He would use man or woman, singly or
in groups; ships; even Prime Base itself; exactly as he had used them -- as
pawns as mere tools, as means to an end. And having used them, he would leave
them as unconcernedly and unceremoniously as he would drop pliers and spanner".
For goodness' sake, the damn book opens with a display of perfectly
synchronized precision marching.
Again, I'm not saying Smith was a fascist, any more than Asimov was a Marzist
for writing a series in which history unfolded according to deterministic
laws. But Asimov (as he freely admitted) was influenced by Marxist ideas that
were in the air in the late '30s and early '40s. So I don't think it's a
stretch to think that Smith was simlarly influenced by fascist concepts.
After all, in 1938, a reasonable man could easily believe that the future
would hold lots of precision marching, eugenics, black-and-silver uniforms,
and wars of absolute extermination. I'd just like to know if anyone has tried
to trace the precise lineage, is all.
(On a lighter note, I'd also like to know why minor characters will suddenly
sometimes slip into a ridiculous faux-British dialect, with a "right-o" this
and a "jolly good" that. What's that about?)
Doug M.
Richard Harter
Warkus) wrote:
>It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
>...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
>> With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
>> elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
>> and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
>> facists.
>
>It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
>(as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
>destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
>fascist ideas.
It is very hard to believe that you have any acquaintance with
history.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net,
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 a pop on those
little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards.
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
> (On a lighter note, I'd also like to know why minor characters will suddenly
> sometimes slip into a ridiculous faux-British dialect, with a "right-o" this
> and a "jolly good" that. What's that about?)
If I remember the scene you're talking about (the Patrol hospital
ship?), IIRC, the pilot *was* British! Remember that a lot of the
Boskonians early on were Tellurians.
Pete McCutchen
<dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>Also, that list of fascistic elements was neither complete nor conclusive. I
>could go on. There's the collectivist ideology of the Patrol, which
>explicitly states that individuals exist to serve the greater good. The
Not all individuals, though. Just those who have chosen a life of
service -- members of the Patrol, essentially. My guess is that
ideals of service would resonate pretty well with, say, your average
Marine.
My impression was that there was a quite substantial private sector.
>genetically based elitism, of course.
They do have that, though it's not so much a matter of race per se, so
much as the idea of this one particular bloodline, maintained and
enhanced over millions of years by the Arrissians. Not something for
which there's a very good real world analogy, I don't think.
The fascination with willpower and the
>triumph of the will... hell, Smith even capitalizes it as Will, just like the
>contemporary Silver Shirts.
But Will is just one characteristic of a Lensman, not the whole thing.
Lensmen don't succeeded through pure will; they succeed through will,
combined with various other factors -- i.e., incorruptibility.
Granted, KK is a determined fellow, but, given the challenges before
him, one would expect that.
>
>Then there's the conflation of all forms of collective violence -- police,
>military, and internal security -- into one. And the identification of
The Galactic Patrol does seem to be an umbrella organization, which
has responsibility for both internal and external security. (What's
the difference between "police" and "internal security," btw?) But
Boskone is an opponent which threatens to destroy Civilization through
both through attack and through subversion. In that context, it makes
perfect sense that the Galactic Patrol reacts to Boskonian threats
across a broad front.
One assumes that most planets do have cops who arrest "normal"
miscreants not tied to Boskone. The Patrol only becomes involved when
there's either an angle involving interstellar trade -- pirates and
the like -- or when there's a clear link to Boskone. Garden-variety
killers and rapists are apprehended by ordinary cops.
>military force with capital-C Civilization. For all of _Galactic Patrol_, the
>Patrol *is* Civilization (which seems to mean, incidentally, that
>Civilization in the Lensverse is two parts Royal Navy and one part J. Edgar
>Hoover's FBI). Civilian authority doesn't exist, and the only civilian who
>appears in the book (the owner of the _Prometheus_) is a moral inferior
>motivated purely by greed.
In _Children of the Lens_, doesn't he interact with planetary
Presidents? It's my sense -- though I don't honestly have cites at
hand -- that the Patrol can override local authorities, but that, in
fact, Civilization is a pretty loose confederation of independent
democratic states that all support a common defense arrangement.
>
>The means-to-an-end moral relativism. "He would use man or woman, singly or
>in groups; ships; even Prime Base itself; exactly as he had used them -- as
>pawns as mere tools, as means to an end. And having used them, he would leave
>them as unconcernedly and unceremoniously as he would drop pliers and spanner".
He's an intergalactic secret agent, set on defending Civilization
against a Terrible Menace. Of course he uses the forces at his
command. What's the trouble with that?
>
>For goodness' sake, the damn book opens with a display of perfectly
>synchronized precision marching.
Yes, I agree; that beginning is sort of creepy.
--
Pete McCutchen
Douglas Muir
> I suspect that Norman Spinrad, at least, picked up on it. Isn't that
> exactly the sort of thing he was commenting on in _The Iron Dream_ by
> Adolph Hitler?
Yeah, I was thinking of that while rereading _Patrol_. It made me upgrade
_Iron Dream_ half a notch, from "okay, I read it, I got the idea, moving right
along now" to "Hmm, might be worth looking at again sometime".
Doms = Overlords of Delgon = ... Yeah, a bit creepy if you look at it a
certain way.
Doug M.
Douglas Muir
> > (On a lighter note, I'd also like to know why minor characters will suddenly
> > sometimes slip into a ridiculous faux-British dialect, with a "right-o" this
> > and a "jolly good" that. What's that about?)
>
> If I remember the scene you're talking about (the Patrol hospital
> ship?), IIRC, the pilot *was* British! Remember that a lot of the
> Boskonians early on were Tellurians.
Yeah, but it crops up all over the place.
I'll have to reread _Grey Lensman_ one of these days and see if he kept it up.
Doug M.
Douglas Muir
>
> >There's a big difference between the early Lensman books and the later ones.
> >_Triplanetary_, _Galactic Patrol_, and _Grey Lensman_ were written in 1934,
> >1937-8, and 1939, respectively.
>
> ? IIRC, the earliest Astounding I own is November, 1941, and "Grey
> Lensman" is the cover story.
My source is sfsite.
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/a_exact_author.cgi?Edward_E._Smith
Gray Lensman (1951)
Magazine Appearances:
Gray Lensman (Part 1 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.] - Spelled
"Grey Lensman" on cover of Astounding.
Gray Lensman (Part 2 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.]
Gray Lensman (Part 3 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.]
Gray Lensman (Part 4 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.]
Are you sure you're talking about November 1941, not November 1939? According
to that same site, the 11/39 issue had part 2 of Grey Lensman:
Astounding Science Fiction, Nov 1939
Auth/Ed: John W. Campbell, Jr.
Year: 1939
Price: $0.20
Pages: 162
Cover: Hubert Rogers
Contains the following works:
Serials/Complete Novels
Gray Lensman (Part 2 of 4) Edward E. Smith
(as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.)
Novelettes
Power Plant Harl Vincent
Short Stories
Habit Lester del Rey
Misfit Robert A. Heinlein
Spacewreck Oscar A. Boch
This Ship Kills! L. Ron Hubbard
(as Frederick Engelhardt)
Essays/Articles
"There Ain't No Such!" (Part 1) L. Sprague de Camp
Space War Tactics Malcolm Jameson
(You know, even considering that 20 cents then was about $2 - $2.50 today,
that was a hell of a deal.)
Doug M.
David T. Bilek
I've always felt that the "Heroes uber Alles" type of SF personified
by the Lensman stuff was exactly what he was talking about. And, in
fact, a lot of SF has a kind of creepy fascination with the superior
versus the inferior. Slans anyone?
We go with it, because in a lot of SF the superior people are *right*
about being superior. But then again, so was Feric Jaegar, yes?
Ugh, I did a google on Iron Dream for kicks and got a couple sites by
Hitler apologists. Apparently some people have appropriated the term
"The Iron Dream" (explicitly taken from the Spinrad) to describe their
outlook.
-David
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
I really don't remember any other instances. Let me know which others
you find :)
Ross TenEyck
There's a bit in _First Lensman_ -- at the ball, where Samms gets
shot -- where the senior Kinnison is criticizing the sidearm choices
of a couple of the junior Lensmen, on the grounds that they're too
powerful -- if they actually fired them, they'd take out several
dozen innocent bystanders. He explicitly says that while one
should, of course, try to avoid that sort of thing when reasonably
feasible (as it was in that case), it's still perfectly OK to
mow down the civilians by the truckload when the situation seems
to call for it.
The rather casual attitude towards civilian lives always struck
me as kind of creepy, even when I first read the book.
--
================== http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~teneyck ==================
Ross TenEyck Seattle, WA \ Light, kindled in the furnace of hydrogen;
ten...@alumni.caltech.edu \ like smoke, sunlight carries the hot-metal
Are wa yume? Soretomo maboroshi? \ tang of Creation's forge.
aRJay
<dougla...@starpower.net> writes
>Matthias Warkus wrote:
>>
>> It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
>> ...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
>> > With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
>> > elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
>> > and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
>> > facists.
>>
>> It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
>> (as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
>> destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
>> fascist ideas.
>
>Yep.
>
>Also, that list of fascistic elements was neither complete nor conclusive. I
>could go on. There's the collectivist ideology of the Patrol, which
>explicitly states that individuals exist to serve the greater good.
Like the French Foreign Legion you mean or the Royal Navy you mean?
>Then there's the conflation of all forms of collective violence -- police,
>military, and internal security -- into one. And the identification of
>military force with capital-C Civilization. For all of _Galactic Patrol_, the
>Patrol *is* Civilization (which seems to mean, incidentally, that
>Civilization in the Lensverse is two parts Royal Navy and one part J. Edgar
>Hoover's FBI).
No there are civilian police forces etc. out there it's just that we
rarely meet them, after all how much of Galactic Patrol (or any of the
others) is set outside of a military base, ship or enemy territory.
Remember the scene in Grey Lensman (IIRC) where Kinnison cuts in on all
those Generals to dance with Clarissa.
> Civilian authority doesn't exist, and the only civilian who
>appears in the book (the owner of the _Prometheus_) is a moral inferior
>motivated purely by greed.
>
Civilian authority does exist but it is mostly offstage, your reading of
the ship owners character seems to be almost entirely subjective. Note
again that the book is not about civilians nor are many scenes set
amongst them.
>The means-to-an-end moral relativism. "He would use man or woman, singly
>or
>in groups; ships; even Prime Base itself; exactly as he had used them -- as
>pawns as mere tools, as means to an end. And having used them, he would
>leave
>them as unconcernedly and unceremoniously as he would drop pliers and
>spanner".
>
>For goodness' sake, the damn book opens with a display of perfectly
>synchronized precision marching.
>
This sounds like a comment T.Deus would make, precision drill is
performed now in such fascist hotbeds as the UK for ceremonial purposes,
it was even more common in the 1930's.
>
>Again, I'm not saying Smith was a fascist, any more than Asimov was a Marzist
>for writing a series in which history unfolded according to deterministic
>laws. But Asimov (as he freely admitted) was influenced by Marxist ideas that
>were in the air in the late '30s and early '40s. So I don't think it's a
>stretch to think that Smith was simlarly influenced by fascist concepts.
>After all, in 1938, a reasonable man could easily believe that the future
>would hold lots of precision marching, eugenics, black-and-silver uniforms,
>and wars of absolute extermination. I'd just like to know if anyone has tried
>to trace the precise lineage, is all.
>
>(On a lighter note, I'd also like to know why minor characters will suddenly
>sometimes slip into a ridiculous faux-British dialect, with a "right-o" this
>and a "jolly good" that. What's that about?)
>
It's about said characters (the pirate pilot right?) being of British
origins and such dialect being more common back then than now
particularly amongst the types in the RAF.
--
How does a rocket/jet engine work?
"It's not that hard.
Stuff goes in, stuff happens, stuff goes out faster than it came in."
- Ian Stirling
aRJay
James Nicoll
Ross TenEyck <ten...@alumnae.caltech.edu> wrote:
>Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>>On Tue, 15 May 2001 14:53:07 -0400, Douglas Muir
>><dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
>>>The means-to-an-end moral relativism. "He would use man or woman, singly or
>>>in groups; ships; even Prime Base itself; exactly as he had used them -- as
>>>pawns as mere tools, as means to an end. And having used them, he would leave
>>>them as unconcernedly and unceremoniously as he would drop pliers and spanner".
>
>>He's an intergalactic secret agent, set on defending Civilization
>>against a Terrible Menace. Of course he uses the forces at his
>>command. What's the trouble with that?
>
>There's a bit in _First Lensman_ -- at the ball, where Samms gets
>shot -- where the senior Kinnison is criticizing the sidearm choices
>of a couple of the junior Lensmen, on the grounds that they're too
>powerful -- if they actually fired them, they'd take out several
>dozen innocent bystanders. He explicitly says that while one
>should, of course, try to avoid that sort of thing when reasonably
>feasible (as it was in that case), it's still perfectly OK to
>mow down the civilians by the truckload when the situation seems
>to call for it.
>
>The rather casual attitude towards civilian lives always struck
>me as kind of creepy, even when I first read the book.
>
_Of course_ we're expendible.
Isn't there a scene where the waste heat from blasters gets a
neighborhoor so hot the bricks in the buildings ignite. Hate to be the
insurance companies on that world. Hrm, unless 'Lensman Damage' is
considered an act of God.
--
The Canadians were a hospitable and tolerant desert people,
living on the edge of a wilderness of snow and permafrost. Winnipeg,
Regina and Saskatoon were cities of the northern desert, Samarkands
of ice. J.G. Ballard
Michael J. Lowrey
> Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> writes
> >For goodness' sake, the damn book opens with a display of perfectly
> >synchronized precision marching.
> >
> This sounds like a comment T.Deus would make, precision drill is
> performed now in such fascist hotbeds as the UK for ceremonial purposes,
> it was even more common in the 1930's.
Heck, it's the only thing in Boy Scouts I was ever _really_
good at.
Wasn't there a thread here a while back about anarchist
cheerleading squads? Sometimes a Precision Lawnmowing Team
is just... a lawnmowing team.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
not much of a drummer
Mark Atwood
> aRJay wrote:
> > Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> writes
> > >For goodness' sake, the damn book opens with a display of perfectly
> > >synchronized precision marching.
> > >
> > This sounds like a comment T.Deus would make, precision drill is
> > performed now in such fascist hotbeds as the UK for ceremonial purposes,
> > it was even more common in the 1930's.
>
> Heck, it's the only thing in Boy Scouts I was ever _really_
> good at.
I'd been in a fair number of BSA troops growing up and I *never*
*EVER* saw any sign of precision drill. The closest I'd ever seen was
everyone standing up when someone was awarded their Eagle.
--
Mark Atwood | I'm wearing black only until I find something darker.
m...@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Dan Swartzendruber
> Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> >On Tue, 15 May 2001 14:53:07 -0400, Douglas Muir
> ><dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
> >>The means-to-an-end moral relativism. "He would use man or woman, singly or
> >>in groups; ships; even Prime Base itself; exactly as he had used them -- as
> >>pawns as mere tools, as means to an end. And having used them, he would leave
> >>them as unconcernedly and unceremoniously as he would drop pliers and spanner".
>
> >He's an intergalactic secret agent, set on defending Civilization
> >against a Terrible Menace. Of course he uses the forces at his
> >command. What's the trouble with that?
>
> There's a bit in _First Lensman_ -- at the ball, where Samms gets
> shot -- where the senior Kinnison is criticizing the sidearm choices
> of a couple of the junior Lensmen, on the grounds that they're too
> powerful -- if they actually fired them, they'd take out several
> dozen innocent bystanders. He explicitly says that while one
> should, of course, try to avoid that sort of thing when reasonably
> feasible (as it was in that case), it's still perfectly OK to
> mow down the civilians by the truckload when the situation seems
> to call for it.
>
> The rather casual attitude towards civilian lives always struck
> me as kind of creepy, even when I first read the book.
I don't think you're being entirely fair here. A Lensman would never casually commit mass
mayhem. Killing dozens of innocent civilians as collateral damage in the process of
protecting a critical figure such as Virgil Samms would be under the "greatest good of the
greatest number". It may not be very egalitarian, but a figure like Samms (or Kimball
Kinnison later) really were essential - their death at the hands of the bad guys who
ultimately result in far more pain, suffering and death than otherwise.
Dan Swartzendruber
> Isn't there a scene where the waste heat from blasters gets a
> neighborhoor so hot the bricks in the buildings ignite. Hate to be the
> insurance companies on that world. Hrm, unless 'Lensman Damage' is
> considered an act of God.
If I recall correctly, they did evacuate the area. Also, although I don't recall it being
stated explicitly, given the high level of prosperity, I would imagine that in a scenario
like this (you're probably remembering Prellin's "office building" which was actually a
disguised superdreadnought), the Patrol would compensate people for their lost property.
Looking at it from their POV: what are they supposed to do? Ignore an enemy fortress in the
middle of one of their cities?
@hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
<dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>Eric D. Berge wrote:
>>
>
>> >There's a big difference between the early Lensman books and the later ones.
>> >_Triplanetary_, _Galactic Patrol_, and _Grey Lensman_ were written in 1934,
>> >1937-8, and 1939, respectively.
>>
>> ? IIRC, the earliest Astounding I own is November, 1941, and "Grey
>> Lensman" is the cover story.
>
>My source is sfsite.
>
>http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/a_exact_author.cgi?Edward_E._Smith
>
> Gray Lensman (1951)
> Magazine Appearances:
> Gray Lensman (Part 1 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.] - Spelled
> "Grey Lensman" on cover of Astounding.
> Gray Lensman (Part 2 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.]
> Gray Lensman (Part 3 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.]
> Gray Lensman (Part 4 of 4) (1939)[as E. E. Smith, Ph.D.]
>
>
>Are you sure you're talking about November 1941, not November 1939? According
>to that same site, the 11/39 issue had part 2 of Grey Lensman:
My mistake - Nov. 1941 was the first installment of "Second Stage
Lensman". In my own defense, the cover shows an Aryan type in grey
coveralls striking a manly poste.
The Walkers
[...]
> Actually, come to think of it, I just recently reread _Galactic
> Patrol_... and I was /amazed/ by the number of overtly fascistic
elements I found in it.
[...]
In the welter of responses what I have not seen is a suggestion
that an awful lot of the stuff cited would have been seen at the
time as straightforward patriotism--good, clean, All-American,
rugged-jaw, clean-shaven, honest, do-gooding. America was on
the verge of war, whether that was consciously realized by
many or not, and that era's version of ardent ANTI-fascism
actually had a lot in common with its supposed antithesis.
In sum, those elements are not so much fascistic as simply
militaristic and jingoistic. (Whyever do you suppose the
baddies had names like the Eich?)
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
http://owlcroft.com/sfandf
Dan Swartzendruber
I think people are also forgetting a rather important point. To wit: Civilization was under
the equivalent of martial law (I don't mean in a strictly legalistic sense, but rather, in
the sense of the severity of the threat they were facing). Many countries in the world have
nominally democratic governments where citizens routinely give up far more of their personal
liberties than most Americans can understand (not making a value judgment, just an
observation). What creeps out many people is that they think (rightly so) that no-one can be
trusted with that degree of power. But again, this misses the fundamental point that the
Lensmen are incorruptible. This may not be realistic in our real world, but this is fiction.
In that universe, incorruptibility of the Lens wearers is axiomatic, and they oversee the
Patrol, which is probably why most of the law-abiding citizens we see (en passant) in the
series, seem to have no problem with the degree of power wielded by Lensmen (and under them,
the Patrol).
Nathan Russell
>"Michael J. Lowrey" <oran...@uwm.edu> writes:
>
>> aRJay wrote:
>> > Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> writes
>> > >For goodness' sake, the damn book opens with a display of perfectly
>> > >synchronized precision marching.
>> > >
>> > This sounds like a comment T.Deus would make, precision drill is
>> > performed now in such fascist hotbeds as the UK for ceremonial purposes,
>> > it was even more common in the 1930's.
>>
>> Heck, it's the only thing in Boy Scouts I was ever _really_
>> good at.
>
>I'd been in a fair number of BSA troops growing up and I *never*
>*EVER* saw any sign of precision drill. The closest I'd ever seen was
>everyone standing up when someone was awarded their Eagle.
I'm an Eagle myself, and a member of the OA, and my father was the
Scoutmaster, and the closest I saw to drilling was when people lined
up for roll call at summer camp.
I would be extremely interested in an email address or screen name for
a leader of one of the troops that did precision drilling, since I
never saw such a practive mentioned by any scout/leader, or discussed
even briefly in any of the 2-3 thousand pages of various official
publications (handbooks, merit badge books, magazines, etc) that I
read.
I remembered this thread at the barber shop, and was about to post
myself when I saw your post.
Nathan
David Johnston
> > The rather casual attitude towards civilian lives always struck
> > me as kind of creepy, even when I first read the book.
>
> I don't think you're being entirely fair here. A Lensman would never casually commit mass
> mayhem.
Sure he would. He just wouldn't commit mass mayhem for no reason.
Adam Benedict Canning
wrote:
> Isn't there a scene where the waste heat from blasters gets a
>neighborhoor so hot the bricks in the buildings ignite. Hate to be the
>insurance companies on that world. Hrm, unless 'Lensman Damage' is
>considered an act of God.
Thats the battle against the spacegoing finacial institution from
hell.
The Patrol payed for the reconstruction. [And nice holidays for the
cities population who had been evacuated previously.]
Adam
Dan Swartzendruber
You must have a different definition of the word than I do.
Matthias Warkus
...and The Walkers <wal...@owlcroft.com> wrote:
> [...]
>
> > Actually, come to think of it, I just recently reread _Galactic
> > Patrol_... and I was /amazed/ by the number of overtly fascistic
> elements I found in it.
>
> [...]
>
> In the welter of responses what I have not seen is a suggestion
> that an awful lot of the stuff cited would have been seen at the
> time as straightforward patriotism--good, clean, All-American,
> rugged-jaw, clean-shaven, honest, do-gooding. America was on
> the verge of war, whether that was consciously realized by
> many or not, and that era's version of ardent ANTI-fascism
> actually had a lot in common with its supposed antithesis.
That's a very compelling idea and explains for a lot of the 'fascism'
in Smith. However, for example the Smithian notion of eliminatory
total war against the 'villains' was obviously *not* a part of
"straightforward patriotism" in the US.
Had it been, the country I live in would not exist in its present
form, and maybe I wouldn't be alive.
mawa
--
There is hardly anything more touching in the world than the faint,
irregular purr of a cat with chronical bronchitis.
Matthias Warkus
...and Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
> >It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
> >...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
> >> With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
> >> elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
> >> and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
> >> facists.
> >
> >It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
> >(as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
> >destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
> >fascist ideas.
>
> It is very hard to believe that you have any acquaintance with
> history.
It is very hard to believe that you are familiar with Occam's razor.
mawa
--
They're expending enough energy just taking in oxygen on a daily
basis, you think they have any synaptic activity left over to devote
to Intelligent Thought?
-- Synth F. Oberheim <sy...@yenta.alb.nm.us>
Matthias Warkus
...and Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >genetically based elitism, of course.
>
> They do have that, though it's not so much a matter of race per se, so
> much as the idea of this one particular bloodline, maintained and
> enhanced over millions of years by the Arrissians. Not something for
> which there's a very good real world analogy, I don't think.
Oh, the SS were planning to become exactly that. Qv. "Lebensborn e.V."
Douglas Muir
> > Actually, come to think of it, I just recently reread _Galactic
> > Patrol_... and I was /amazed/ by the number of overtly fascistic
> elements I found in it.
>
> [...]
>
> In the welter of responses what I have not seen is a suggestion
> that an awful lot of the stuff cited would have been seen at the
> time as straightforward patriotism--good, clean, All-American,
> rugged-jaw, clean-shaven, honest, do-gooding. America was on
> the verge of war, whether that was consciously realized by
> many or not, and that era's version of ardent ANTI-fascism
> actually had a lot in common with its supposed antithesis.
Now this is a sensible and insightful response, and one IMO tolerably well
supported by the book.
F'rinstance. Right at the beginning, there's that goose-stepping display of
perfectly synchronized marching in "microscopically perfect" black and silver
dress uniforms. And then the class faces "the Ogre" -- the Commandant of
Cadets, Fritz von Hohendorff. "Martinet, tyrant, dictator, he was known
throughout the Solar System as the embodiment of soullessness... he seemed to
glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly rigid disciplinarian that
Earth had ever known."
Now, that's not just vaguely fascistic, it's getting darn close to being
overtly so. Except that after the cadets have reported in and gotten their Lenses...
...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
It's a striking episode, and it partially (though IMO not entirely) subverts
the implicit fascism of the opening scene.
And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
group of Germans doing that. This sort of thing is why I agree that the
Lensman books are not fascist, for all that they do contain some disturbingly
fascistic elements.
I think there's also at least one other way to look at some of these elements:
viz., that they arise out of the can-do, damn-the-consequences attitude
peculiar to the age group now known as the Greatest Generation. Technocratic
but egalitarian, ebullient but deferential to received authority,
group-oriented but admiring of masculine heroism, and always inclined to Get
The Job Done regardless of collateral damage... it's the set of attitudes that
flew the Atlantic, built the TVA and the Interstate Highway System, landed at
Normandy and dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima. It's a generational mind-set
that's largely absent from early 21st century America (though some say it may return).
> In sum, those elements are not so much fascistic as simply
> militaristic and jingoistic.
Mm, no, disagree. Or rather, I agree that militarism is an important element
that shapes the narrative; it's just not the /only/ important element.
There's nothing about militarism or jingoism that inherently requires (say) a
genetically superior elite, wars of utter extermination, or fascination with
capital-W Will. You don't find those elements dominating the narrative in Tom
Clancy, or for that matter in David Weber. They're fascistic rather than
specifically militaristic.
>(Whyever do you suppose the baddies had names like the Eich?)
One thing that struck me as odd in _Galactic Patrol_: all the good-guy names
(and I counted over a dozen) are Anglo-Saxon, except for the Valerians, who
are Dutch, and Clarissa MacKinnon, who's a Scot. There aren't even any
vaguely French or Irish names of the sort that have been in the US mainstream
forever (Revere, Calhoun, etc.); they're, like, Nelson, Henderson, Thompson,
Jenkins, Smith, and such.
Except... two or three of the good guys had German names. Uhlenhuth, von
Hohendorff, and at least one other.
Not sure of the significance. But note that the Eich came a little later --
_Grey Lensman_ was written in 1939.
As noted, the only "ethnic" names (Wolmark, Kritzky) belong to Boskonians.
And if you're looking for authorial manipulation of names, Boskone=Bolsheviks
seems at least as plausible as Eich=Third Reich.
Doug M.
Douglas Muir
>
> On Tue, 15 May 2001 14:53:07 -0400, Douglas Muir
> <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
> >Also, that list of fascistic elements was neither complete nor conclusive. I
> >could go on. There's the collectivist ideology of the Patrol, which
> >explicitly states that individuals exist to serve the greater good. The
>
> Not all individuals, though. Just those who have chosen a life of
> service -- members of the Patrol, essentially.
Who are center stage for 98% of the books.
> My impression was that there was a quite substantial private sector.
Very much in the background. In fact, in the core trilogy -- GP, GL, and SSL
-- we really have no idea what sort of economic system is behind the Patrol;
we get only a few glimpses of it.
There's much more evidence of a very large /public/ sector. Look at the size
and number of the fleets and bases. Sure, that might be a consequence of
galactic scale, but look too at the speed with which the Patrol can mobilize
resources. In GP two entire new types of ship, the fast cruisers and the
maulers, are produced and deployed en masse within a matter of months.
> The fascination with willpower and the
> >triumph of the will... hell, Smith even capitalizes it as Will, just like the
> >contemporary Silver Shirts.
>
> But Will is just one characteristic of a Lensman, not the whole thing.
> Lensmen don't succeeded through pure will; they succeed through will,
> combined with various other factors -- i.e., incorruptibility.
> Granted, KK is a determined fellow, but, given the challenges before
> him, one would expect that.
We're moving into the "but horses have four legs, too" realm here.
When we're talking about broad political and philosophical movements, there's
no single element of X that can't be dismissed as being equally an element of
Y. Even swastikas and fasces aren't purely fascist symbols; sure. But when I
see a book, written in 1937, that has
fascination with capital-W Will
glorification of collective violence
conflation of all forms of collective violence
spiffy black-and-silver uniforms
wars of absolute extermination
eugenics
collectivist ideology
strong emphasis on "masculine" virtues
militarism
ends-justify-the-means moral relativism
an all-male elite* that's physically, mentally and morally superior
a protagonist who's explicitly identified as genetically superior
multiple references to the 'unfit'
genocide
and synchronized marching displays to boot, then I do think we're seeing what
any reasonable person would call fascistic elements. Several posters have
pointed out that various of these elements can occur independently of fascism,
and of course that's true; hell, all of them can. But the collective effect
is pretty suggestive.
*Clarissa MacKinnon being the exception that proves the rule. Her eventual
elevation to Lensman status is evidence of her genetic superiority to other
women, not of the Patrol suddenly waking up and realizing it's excluding half
the human race as inferior.
> One assumes that most planets do have cops who arrest "normal"
> miscreants not tied to Boskone.
Like the presence of a large private sector, this is an assumption with little
if any basis in canon. I can't think of a single non-Patrol law enforcement
officer appearing in the core trilogy.
Doug M.
Jon Leech
Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>Pete McCutchen wrote:
>> My impression was that there was a quite substantial private sector.
>
>Very much in the background. In fact, in the core trilogy -- GP, GL, and SSL
>-- we really have no idea what sort of economic system is behind the Patrol;
>we get only a few glimpses of it.
I vaguely recall an exchange (Kinnison complaining about how much he
was costing in ships? something like that) where he was told that there
were so many millions of planets in Civilization that they had the
lowest tax rate in history - 1.5% is the figure coming to mind - yet
could still build immense fleets.
Jon
__@/
The Walkers
>
> It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 16:47:22 -0700...
> ...and The Walkers <wal...@owlcroft.com> wrote:
> > [...]
> >
> > > Actually, come to think of it, I just recently reread _Galactic
> > > Patrol_... and I was /amazed/ by the number of overtly fascistic
> > elements I found in it.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > In the welter of responses what I have not seen is a suggestion
> > that an awful lot of the stuff cited would have been seen at the
> > time as straightforward patriotism--good, clean, All-American,
> > rugged-jaw, clean-shaven, honest, do-gooding. America was on
> > the verge of war, whether that was consciously realized by
> > many or not, and that era's version of ardent ANTI-fascism
> > actually had a lot in common with its supposed antithesis.
>
> That's a very compelling idea and explains for a lot of the 'fascism'
> in Smith. However, for example the Smithian notion of eliminatory
> total war against the 'villains' was obviously *not* a part of
> "straightforward patriotism" in the US.
>
> Had it been, the country I live in would not exist in its present
> form, and maybe I wouldn't be alive.
Well, there is often a difference, I submit, between what people
*think* they think and what they really think. It's one thing
to be all het up about the bad guys, crush 'em into the ground,
grind 'em under the heel, and another to go out and do it in
the flesh. Propaganda (or its kissin' cousin booster stories,
like the Lensman stuff) works on the same theory as that of
the kid who asks Santa Claus for three roller skates to try
to assure getting at least a pair. I think there were a
heck of a lot of people in that era who thought the equivalent
of the later notorious suggestion we "bomb 'em back to the
Stone Age."
Thank God we didn't really do that, though it seems that each
time we come a little closer.
Richard Harter
A problem with your litany is that you are writing it from the
perspective of the post Nazi world; we know what the consequences are
of putting this particular mixture together are. A lot of the things
in your list were part of the zeitgeist. The "good guys" were almost
as racist as the "bad guys" in the 20's and 30's. Eugenics was
respectable; babble about Will was au courant (reread George Bernard
Shaw somtime with a critical eye); "the only good Indian is a dead
Indian" was acceptable; et cetera. The thing is, fascism was not an
aberration in Euroamerica - it was an intensionification of features
of the existing culture.
A second problem is a confusion between militarism and fascism. Both,
perhaps, are undesirable but they are not the same animal. The
military games - the spiffy uniforms, the emphasis on structure and
discipline, the band of brothers, display in formation - is a
universal of human behaviour, one that long precedes fascism and
postdates it.
A third problem is the word "collectivism". Communism, soviet style,
for all of its undesirable features, was not fascism and the various
collectivist movements were not fascism. A peculiar feature of the
fascist (and Nazi) movements was the aggregation of massive bodies of
men in display as an instrument of intimidation. Collateral with the
display was gangsterism - beatings of opponents. Recall the power of
the KKK in the 20's and 30's.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net,
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 a pop on those
little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards.
Richard Harter
Warkus) wrote:
>It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 19:04:42 GMT...
>...and Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>> >It was the Tue, 15 May 2001 13:56:16 GMT...
>> >...and Rick <kimber....@verizon.net> wrote:
>> >> With the exception of the bit about the unfit, I don't find the other
>> >> elements particularly facistic. Lots of armies had cool-looking uniforms,
>> >> and wars of utter destruction are hardly unique to or original with the
>> >> facists.
>> >
>> >It's *very* hard to believe that anyone writing about a war of utter
>> >(as in "kill every last man, woman and child of them") racial
>> >destruction around 1937 could have done it without being inspired by
>> >fascist ideas.
>>
>> It is very hard to believe that you have any acquaintance with
>> history.
>
>It is very hard to believe that you are familiar with Occam's razor.
Hard for you, perhaps.
Neil Barnes
news:k7a3gtsl1879qb2br...@4ax.com:
> My mistake - Nov. 1941 was the first installment of "Second Stage
> Lensman". In my own defense, the cover shows an Aryan type in grey
> coveralls striking a manly poste.
That's no way for a fine upstanding Lensman to behave! Unless, of course,
it was an olde Eddorian sponsored poste, and therefore a legitimate target.
Neil
Neil Barnes
news:3b01d733...@news.btconnect.com:
> Thats the battle against the spacegoing finacial institution from
> hell.
>
I wonder whether Neil Innes ever read that?
'It's fun to charter an accountant,
and sail the wide accountancy...'
Neil
Jordan S. Bassior
>That's no way for a fine upstanding Lensman to behave! Unless, of course,
>it was an olde Eddorian sponsored poste, and therefore a legitimate target.
The Poste were an upright race, but rigid -- anatomically similar to the
Rigellians but not very intelligent. "Thick as a Poste" was a common expression
in their sector. The Boskonian race known as the Fense oppressed them for
millennia, before the yoke was thrown off by Passt the Martian Patrolman, later
made an honorary member of that race and known to one and all as First Passt
the Poste.
--
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
--
"To urge the preparation of defence is not to assert the imminence of war. On
the contrary, if war were imminent, preparations for defense would be too
late." (Churchill, 1934)
--
Michael J. Lowrey
This was late 1960s in Miami. I don't remember the name of
the Scoutmaster, nor the number of the troop. Our
Scoutmaster was obsessed with it, and I just assumed (being
a kid) that it was standard practice. I want to say that I
vaguely wondered why other troops weren't doing it the way
we were (close-order-drill practice at 9:00 p.m.), but that
may be my memory retconning things.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
believed in the ideals being taught; sorry they are
interpreting "morally straight" so rigidly nowadays
Michael J. Lowrey
> That's a very compelling idea and explains for a lot of the 'fascism'
> in Smith. However, for example the Smithian notion of eliminatory
> total war against the 'villains' was obviously *not* a part of
> "straightforward patriotism" in the US.
>
> Had it been, the country I live in would not exist in its present
> form, and maybe I wouldn't be alive.
"The only good Injun is a dead Injun." "Nits make lice."
There are precedents in the U.S., keemosabe.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
still enjoys Doc
James Nicoll
Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
snip
>F'rinstance. Right at the beginning, there's that goose-stepping display of
>perfectly synchronized marching in "microscopically perfect" black and silver
>dress uniforms. And then the class faces "the Ogre" -- the Commandant of
>Cadets, Fritz von Hohendorff. "Martinet, tyrant, dictator, he was known
>throughout the Solar System as the embodiment of soullessness... he seemed to
>glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly rigid disciplinarian that
>Earth had ever known."
>
>Now, that's not just vaguely fascistic, it's getting darn close to being
>overtly so. Except that after the cadets have reported in and gotten their Lenses...
>
>...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
>down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
>explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
>informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
>the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
>
>It's a striking episode, and it partially (though IMO not entirely) subverts
>the implicit fascism of the opening scene.
>
>And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
>group of Germans doing that. This sort of thing is why I agree that the
>Lensman books are not fascist, for all that they do contain some disturbingly
>fascistic elements.
Ah, but German Fascism isn't the only flavour. It's not even
the original flavour but a Johny come lately.
Could you see Italian Fascists acting that way?
[Not a defense of fascism]
--
The Canadians were a hospitable and tolerant desert people,
living on the edge of a wilderness of snow and permafrost. Winnipeg,
Regina and Saskatoon were cities of the northern desert, Samarkands
of ice. J.G. Ballard
P. J. Edwards
wrote:
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
>>...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
>>down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
>>explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
>>informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
>>the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
>>
>>It's a striking episode, and it partially (though IMO not entirely) subverts
>>the implicit fascism of the opening scene.
>>
>>And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
>>group of Germans doing that. This sort of thing is why I agree that the
>>Lensman books are not fascist, for all that they do contain some disturbingly
>>fascistic elements.
>
> Ah, but German Fascism isn't the only flavour. It's not even
>the original flavour but a Johny come lately.
>
> Could you see Italian Fascists acting that way?
Hell, I can see Nazis acting that way. Elite Nazis, at least, who'd
not only bought the Uebermensch line but though they were It - and
didn't mind admitting it behind closed doors. Do you know Himmler's
"great and unwritten chapter of history" speech to the SS? Not quite
"smoke 'em if you got 'em", maybe, but very chummy.
Phil
--
Phil Edwards http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/amroth/
"Let the good Lord do the driving" - Jon Langford
David Johnston
Not once did a Lensman stop and say, "Is it the right thing to do to blow
up an entire planet, noncombatants and all?" that I can recall, or find it
painful to have to do it that we saw.
Douglas Muir
> A problem with your litany is that you are writing it from the
> perspective of the post Nazi world; we know what the consequences are
> of putting this particular mixture together are.
Okay, but why is this a "problem"?
> A lot of the things
> in your list were part of the zeitgeist.
Sure. That's kind of my point, actually.
> The "good guys" were almost
> as racist as the "bad guys" in the 20's and 30's.
Sure. Racist, sexist, and often jingoistic as all hell, too. Some of the
pulps from the '30s make _Galactic Patrol_ read like Ursula LeGuin.
> Eugenics was respectable; babble about Will was au courant (reread George
> Bernard Shaw somtime with a critical eye);
's the only way I ever would read Shaw, and under protest at that. -- But,
again, this is more or less my point; and it's the reason I'm referring to
these elements as "fascistic" rather than "fascist". These tropes were in the
air at that time.
Again, I'd make the analogy to Asimov and the Foundation books. Asimov wasn't
a Communist, but he picked up on the Marxist idea of historical determinism,
and it was a major element in the series. It was an idea that was very much
in the air at that time. In Asimov's case, though, we know the line of
transmission. In Smith, the origins of his ideas are more obscure. We don't
seem to know much about Smith's political views, or what he liked to read, or
what the major influences on his thinking were. That's what I'd like to know.
> A second problem is a confusion between militarism and fascism. Both,
> perhaps, are undesirable but they are not the same animal. The
> military games - the spiffy uniforms, the emphasis on structure and
> discipline, the band of brothers, display in formation - is a
> universal of human behaviour, one that long precedes fascism and
> postdates it.
See my post yesterday on this topic. There are both militaristic and
fascistic elements in the book. The two overlap, but some elements are distinct.
> A third problem is the word "collectivism". Communism, soviet style,
> for all of its undesirable features, was not fascism and the various
> collectivist movements were not fascism.
Sure. There are people who argue for an essential identity between communism
and fascism, but I'm not one of them. There were some common elements,
though, one of which was the submission and submergence of the individual in
the common good.
As another poster has pointed out, there's not always a clear line between
this and an honorable ethic of service. But in the core trilogy, nobody seems
to have much of a life outside the Patrol.
Doug M.
Dan Swartzendruber
Which planet full of noncombatants did they blow up?
aRJay
>The Walkers wrote:
>
>
>> > Actually, come to think of it, I just recently reread _Galactic
>> > Patrol_... and I was /amazed/ by the number of overtly fascistic
>> elements I found in it.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> In the welter of responses what I have not seen is a suggestion
>> that an awful lot of the stuff cited would have been seen at the
>> time as straightforward patriotism--good, clean, All-American,
>> rugged-jaw, clean-shaven, honest, do-gooding. America was on
>> the verge of war, whether that was consciously realized by
>> many or not, and that era's version of ardent ANTI-fascism
>> actually had a lot in common with its supposed antithesis.
>
>Now this is a sensible and insightful response, and one IMO tolerably well
>supported by the book.
>
>F'rinstance. Right at the beginning, there's that goose-stepping display of
>perfectly synchronized marching in "microscopically perfect" black and silver
>dress uniforms. And then the class faces "the Ogre" -- the Commandant of
>Cadets, Fritz von Hohendorff. "Martinet, tyrant, dictator, he was known
>throughout the Solar System as the embodiment of soullessness... he seemed
>to
>glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly rigid disciplinarian that
>Earth had ever known."
>
>Now, that's not just vaguely fascistic, it's getting darn close to being
>overtly so. Except that after the cadets have reported in and gotten their
>Lenses...
>
goose-stepping. Highly militaristic I'll grant you.
>...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
>down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
>explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
>informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
>the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
>
know' about that scene because _Galactic Patrol_ was the first book with
Lensmen in it. Oh by the way you misspelled march as goose-step again
powers are a significant factor.
>
>>(Whyever do you suppose the baddies had names like the Eich?)
>
>One thing that struck me as odd in _Galactic Patrol_: all the good-guy names
>(and I counted over a dozen) are Anglo-Saxon, except for the Valerians, who
>are Dutch, and Clarissa MacKinnon, who's a Scot. There aren't even any
>vaguely French or Irish names of the sort that have been in the US
>mainstream
>forever (Revere, Calhoun, etc.); they're, like, Nelson, Henderson, Thompson,
>Jenkins, Smith, and such.
>
standings is Raoul LaForge, another is Widel Holmberg possible your
missing German.
>Except... two or three of the good guys had German names. Uhlenhuth, von
>Hohendorff, and at least one other.
>
>Not sure of the significance. But note that the Eich came a little later --
>_Grey Lensman_ was written in 1939.
>
>As noted, the only "ethnic" names (Wolmark, Kritzky) belong to Boskonians.
>And if you're looking for authorial manipulation of names,
>Boskone=Bolsheviks
>seems at least as plausible as Eich=Third Reich.
>
>
>Doug M.
--
How does a rocket/jet engine work?
"It's not that hard.
Stuff goes in, stuff happens, stuff goes out faster than it came in."
- Ian Stirling
aRJay
Ross TenEyck
>In article <3B018865...@starpower.net>, dougla...@starpower.net
>says...
>> Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>>
>> > > (On a lighter note, I'd also like to know why minor characters will suddenly
>> > > sometimes slip into a ridiculous faux-British dialect, with a "right-o" this
>> > > and a "jolly good" that. What's that about?)
>> >
>> > If I remember the scene you're talking about (the Patrol hospital
>> > ship?), IIRC, the pilot *was* British! Remember that a lot of the
>> > Boskonians early on were Tellurians.
>>
>> Yeah, but it crops up all over the place.
>>
>> I'll have to reread _Grey Lensman_ one of these days and see if he kept it up.
>I really don't remember any other instances. Let me know which others
>you find :)
If memory serves, it "crops up" twice -- but on closer inspection,
it's the same character both times.
--
================== http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~teneyck ==================
Ross TenEyck Seattle, WA \ Light, kindled in the furnace of hydrogen;
ten...@alumni.caltech.edu \ like smoke, sunlight carries the hot-metal
Are wa yume? Soretomo maboroshi? \ tang of Creation's forge.
Ross TenEyck
>Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>>"Michael J. Lowrey" <oran...@uwm.edu> writes:
>>> Heck, it's the only thing in Boy Scouts I was ever _really_
>>> good at.
>>I'd been in a fair number of BSA troops growing up and I *never*
>>*EVER* saw any sign of precision drill. The closest I'd ever seen was
>>everyone standing up when someone was awarded their Eagle.
>I'm an Eagle myself, and a member of the OA, and my father was the
>Scoutmaster, and the closest I saw to drilling was when people lined
>up for roll call at summer camp.
When I was in the Cub Scouts, we did a little bit of it --
it wasn't emphasized, but I do remember standing out in the
schoolyard doing right face, left face, march in step, etc.
In fact, I think they even managed to get a genuine Army
drill sergeant for us... why, I can't, at this late date,
tell you.
>I would be extremely interested in an email address or screen name for
>a leader of one of the troops that did precision drilling, since I
>never saw such a practive mentioned by any scout/leader, or discussed
>even briefly in any of the 2-3 thousand pages of various official
>publications (handbooks, merit badge books, magazines, etc) that I
>read.
Can't help you there... that particular Scout group more or
less dissolved about the time I hit Webelos, when the guy
who had been doing most of the organizing moved away and
nobody stepped up to replace him.
mike stone
>Except also there is no evidence for the loaded description
>goose-stepping. Highly militaristic I'll grant you.
Is it any worse than you would find at many US Military schools when Smith was
writing?
Would it be truer to say, not so much that he is Fascistic, as that Fascism was
simply the attitudes of the 1920s and 30s carried to their ultimate conclusion
- but these attitudes existed in milder forms elsewhere
--
Mike Stone - Peterborough England
"The English people are like the English beer.
Froth on top, dregs at the bottom, the middle excellent" - Voltaire
Douglas Muir
> Would it be truer to say, not so much that he is Fascistic, as that Fascism was
> simply the attitudes of the 1920s and 30s carried to their ultimate conclusion
> - but these attitudes existed in milder forms elsewhere
It's true as far as it goes. But then we have to ask, why is Smith's work
pervaded by those particular ideas and attitudes, as opposed to others?
I've mentioned Asimov's _Foundation_ series a couple of times already. In
addition to being influenced by Marxist determinism, Asimov also flirted with
Oxford Union pacifism. This, too, comes out in his books -- "violence is the
last refuge of the incompetent", and all that.
So, Smith selected a lot of ideas and tropes from the
militaristic/fascistic/jingoistic complex, while Asimov was picking from the
Marxist/Fabian Socialist/pacifist boxes. I'm just wondering /why/.
-- The late '30s were a very strange time. Intellectually febrile; lots of
weird ideas floating around. This was a period in which _Gone With the Wind_,
_Atlas Shrugged_, and _The Grapes of Wrath_ were all influential bestsellers.
Both fascistic and Marxist ideas were about as close to the US mainstream as
they ever would get. Reading books from that period can be startling
sometimes. So in that sense, yes, _Galactic Patrol_ is just one example of a
larger phenomenon.
It's going to be interesting to see how Smith muted or changed these elements
in the later books. I haven't reread _Children of the Lens_ in years, but I
remember it as being very different from the three books before it, both in
writing style and in "feel". I always thought this was because Smith's
writing style changed a lot (mostly for the better) between 1937 and 1948, but
now I'm wondering how much it may have reflected changes in the world around him.
Doug M.
Mark Atwood
>
> Can't help you there... that particular Scout group more or
> less dissolved about the time I hit Webelos, when the guy
> who had been doing most of the organizing moved away and
> nobody stepped up to replace him.
ObFiction: /Follow Me Boys!/.
--
Mark Atwood | I'm wearing black only until I find something darker.
m...@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Kevin J. Maroney
>Now, that's not just vaguely fascistic, it's getting darn close to being
>overtly so. Except that after the cadets have reported in and gotten their Lenses...
>
>...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
>down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
>explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
>informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
>the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
>And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
>group of Germans doing that.
The Germans, even in uniform, were not automata, you know. They joked,
and laughed, and palled around just like human beings.
Militarism isn't synonymous with fascism, either.
--
Kevin Maroney | kmar...@ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
<http://www.nyrsf.com>
Michael J. Lowrey
> Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
> >Now, that's not just vaguely fascistic, it's getting darn close to being
> >overtly so. Except that after the cadets have reported in and gotten their Lenses...
> >
> >...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
> >down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
> >explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
> >informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
> >the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
>
> >And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
> >group of Germans doing that.
>
> The Germans, even in uniform, were not automata, you know. They joked,
> and laughed, and palled around just like human beings.
That one slid right past me! Jeez, Douglas: German !=
Nazi. (Especially here in Milwaukee, where the typical
ancestral German was run out of his/her homeland for
revolutionary activities and general freethought.)
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
whose wife's German family came from the Amana Colonies
Douglas Muir
> > >...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
> > >down, and smoke 'em if they got 'em. He then spends the next several pages
> > >explaining how the Lens works ('as you know, Jeeves'), but in a very relaxed,
> > >informal atmosphere -- comradely, almost democratic. And then, at the end,
> > >the cadets form back up and goosestep out again.
> >
> > >And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
> > >group of Germans doing that.
> >
> > The Germans, even in uniform, were not automata, you know. They joked,
> > and laughed, and palled around just like human beings.
>
> That one slid right past me! Jeez, Douglas: German !=
> Nazi.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Yes, I'm well aware that German and Nazi are two very
different things. I should have said "contemporary German", c. 1937.
Doug M.
Michael J. Lowrey
Even in 1937, most Germans were NOT like the stereotype you
evoked with "[y]ou couldn't imagine a group of Germans doing
that."
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
Cultures & Communities Program
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Nancy Lebovitz
Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
>It's true as far as it goes. But then we have to ask, why is Smith's work
>pervaded by those particular ideas and attitudes, as opposed to others?
>
>I've mentioned Asimov's _Foundation_ series a couple of times already. In
>addition to being influenced by Marxist determinism, Asimov also flirted with
>Oxford Union pacifism. This, too, comes out in his books -- "violence is the
>last refuge of the incompetent", and all that.
>
>So, Smith selected a lot of ideas and tropes from the
>militaristic/fascistic/jingoistic complex, while Asimov was picking from the
>Marxist/Fabian Socialist/pacifist boxes. I'm just wondering /why/.
And I hate doing this, but I'm going to throw in _Starship Troopers_
--it's very pro-military, but it's not as fevered as Smith, and it
isn't pro-genocide.
>
>-- The late '30s were a very strange time. Intellectually febrile; lots of
>weird ideas floating around. This was a period in which _Gone With the Wind_,
>_Atlas Shrugged_, and _The Grapes of Wrath_ were all influential bestsellers.
_Atlas Shrugged_ came out in 1957. IIRC, Rand took about ten years to
write it.
>Both fascistic and Marxist ideas were about as close to the US mainstream as
>they ever would get. Reading books from that period can be startling
>sometimes. So in that sense, yes, _Galactic Patrol_ is just one example of a
>larger phenomenon.
>
>It's going to be interesting to see how Smith muted or changed these elements
>in the later books. I haven't reread _Children of the Lens_ in years, but I
>remember it as being very different from the three books before it, both in
>writing style and in "feel". I always thought this was because Smith's
>writing style changed a lot (mostly for the better) between 1937 and 1948, but
>now I'm wondering how much it may have reflected changes in the world around him.
>
For starters, _Children of the Lens_ is about a tiny group, not a huge
organization--Smith was enthusiastic about everything he liked, and
in _Children_, there's a lot of focus on individual differences rather
than large scale discipline.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Nancy Lebovitz
Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
>In article <3B02C6DB...@starpower.net>,
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>>
>>-- The late '30s were a very strange time. Intellectually febrile; lots of
>>weird ideas floating around. This was a period in which _Gone With the Wind_,
>>_Atlas Shrugged_, and _The Grapes of Wrath_ were all influential bestsellers.
>
>_Atlas Shrugged_ came out in 1957. IIRC, Rand took about ten years to
>write it.
>
came out in 1938. On the other hand, I don't think Rand wrote an influential
bestseller till _The Fountainhead_ (1943).
Sea Wasp
>
> >From: aRJay aR...@escore.demon.co.uk
>
> >Except also there is no evidence for the loaded description
> >goose-stepping. Highly militaristic I'll grant you.
>
> Is it any worse than you would find at many US Military schools when Smith was
> writing?
I dunno.
My take on it would be that whether you see such elements or not will
be determined to a large extent by your background.
When I read the passages in question, I visualized a bunch of people
marching like in a parade. "Goose-stepping" I visualize as a VERY
specific kind of march, involving popping the legs WAAAAAY up higher
than is comfortable, and I didn't imagine these people doing that. I
saw them basically just doing regular walking movements that they had
synchronized perfectly.
People also make points about the uniforms; it took someone in this
group pointing it out to me for me to even realize that some people
associate black-and-silver uniforms SPECIFICALLY with the Nazi regime.
Me, I just saw 'em as cool colors to combine due to contrasts.
So it may well be that this is mostly a matter of associations and
experience. My impression of the scenes was much more what some people
have posited for those reading it at the time -- patriotism in the
midst of a near-warfare situation (later a hot warfare situation),
focused on the military.
--
Sea Wasp http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.html
/^\
;;; _Morgantown: The Jason Wood Chronicles_, at
http://www.hyperbooks.com/catalog/20040.html
David Johnston
Apart from Eddore, which planet that they blew up is all that unlikely
to have noncombatants?
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
> > > Not once did a Lensman stop and say, "Is it the right thing to do to blow
> > > up an entire planet, noncombatants and all?" that I can recall, or find it
> > > painful to have to do it that we saw.
> >
> > Which planet full of noncombatants did they blow up?
>
> Apart from Eddore, which planet that they blew up is all that unlikely
> to have noncombatants?
Jarnevon. Ploor. The Eich homeworld.
Douglas Muir
> >So, Smith selected a lot of ideas and tropes from the
> >militaristic/fascistic/jingoistic complex, while Asimov was picking from the
> >Marxist/Fabian Socialist/pacifist boxes. I'm just wondering /why/.
>
> And I hate doing this, but I'm going to throw in _Starship Troopers_
> --it's very pro-military, but it's not as fevered as Smith, and it
> isn't pro-genocide.
Yah, but RAH-and-fascism is a topic that's been discussed to death. It's been
done... generally not very well, but it's been done. Smith-and-fascism hasn't
been done at all. Which is weird, because the fascistic elements in Smith are
much, much more overt.
> >-- The late '30s were a very strange time. Intellectually febrile; lots of
> >weird ideas floating around. This was a period in which _Gone With the Wind_,
> >_Atlas Shrugged_, and _The Grapes of Wrath_ were all influential bestsellers.
>
> _Atlas Shrugged_ came out in 1957. IIRC, Rand took about ten years to
> write it.
My bad; I got publication dates mixed up. You're right, Rand was just getting
going. But I think the main point still holds.
> For starters, _Children of the Lens_ is about a tiny group, not a huge
> organization--Smith was enthusiastic about everything he liked, and
> in _Children_, there's a lot of focus on individual differences rather
> than large scale discipline.
I read the Lensman books for the first time at age 10 or 11, and I can
remember being baffled by the differences between the books. Even then, I
could tell that the core trilogy formed a coherent unit, that _Triplanetary_
orbited it at a modest distance, and that _First Lensman_ and _Children_ were
very, very different.
And I remember being annoyed at _Masters of the Vortex_; hyped as the seventh
in the series, it wasn't a Lensman book at all -- just set in the Lensverse,
barely. My first clear awareness of deceptive marketing in SF.
But as to _Children_... I'm going to have to read it again, but IIRC Smith
seems to handle at least some of his old tropes with gentle self-mockery.
Hence the hack SF writer, and so forth.
Still blows up inhabited planets left and right, of course.
Doug M.
mike stone
>My impression of the scenes was much more what some people
>have posited for those reading it at the time -- patriotism in the
>midst of a near-warfare situation (later a hot warfare situation),
>focused on the military.
Personally I have always associated the series more with World War _One_ than
Two.
The Eddorian leader is called the "All-Highest" (a former subsidiary title of
the Kaiser) and disputes between high-ranking Boskonians can be settled by a
duel with old-fashioned sabres - which also happened in Hohenzollern Germany
Outside Germany in the same period, there was a distinctly "militaristic" mood
even in the democracies. Men like Teddy Roosevelt and Lord Roberts were touting
the virtues of "National Service" (alias conscription) both for defence and
because it was somehow good for the character :-) Fortunately it didn't "stick"
in the English-Speaking world, where it would take _two_ wars to make peacetime
conscription acceptable, and then only temporarily. But the military virtues
were definitely in the fashion during the first decade or two of 20C, and those
years were probably formative ones for Smith, who was born in 1890.
Michael J. Lowrey
> >From: Sea Wasp sea...@wizvax.net
> >My impression of the scenes was much more what some people
> >have posited for those reading it at the time -- patriotism in the
> >midst of a near-warfare situation (later a hot warfare situation),
> >focused on the military.
>
> Personally I have always associated the series more with World War _One_ than
> Two.
>
> The Eddorian leader is called the "All-Highest" (a former subsidiary title of
> the Kaiser) and disputes between high-ranking Boskonians can be settled by a
> duel with old-fashioned sabres - which also happened in Hohenzollern Germany
>
> Outside Germany in the same period, there was a distinctly "militaristic" mood
> even in the democracies. Men like Teddy Roosevelt and Lord Roberts were touting
> the virtues of "National Service" (alias conscription) both for defence and
> because it was somehow good for the character :-) Fortunately it didn't "stick"
> in the English-Speaking world, where it would take _two_ wars to make peacetime
> conscription acceptable, and then only temporarily. But the military virtues
> were definitely in the fashion during the first decade or two of 20C, and those
> years were probably formative ones for Smith, who was born in 1890.
Some would add the Boy Scouts movement to this list,
although the paramilitary element has been toned down
considerably over the years.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
former Scout himself
David Johnston
Yeah right. The Eich were nothing but droolingly evil monstrosities, even their
just born offspring. They had no guys who just got up in the morning and
went to <work> in a <factory> and then went home again and fartriculated his three
<spouses> before settling down to hibernate for the next day.
How do we know that?
aRJay
<rgo...@telusplanet.net> writes
_Galactic Patrol_ no planets destroyed by the patrol.
_Grey Lensman_ the planet Helmuth's base was on wrecked by self destruct
device (uninhabited by that time). The planet Jalte's base was on
destroyed by negasphere any indigenous life forms exterminated by
Boskone prior to attack. Jarnevon the Eich home world from the
description of the Eich it is unlikely that there were any
non-combatants there.
_Second Stage Lensman_ I don't recall any planets destroyed.
_Children of the Lens_ Ploor is the only planet that I remember being
destroyed.
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
It's pretty clear from authorial comments that none of the proxy races
are "just average joes". If they weren't evil through and through, they
wouldn't be proxies.
Douglas Muir
> It's pretty clear from authorial comments that none of the proxy races
> are "just average joes". If they weren't evil through and through, they
> wouldn't be proxies.
Yeah, but the willingness to characterize entire intelligent species as "evil"
is definitely one of the disturbing elements in the books. And this happens
not just once, but again and again -- the Overlords, the Eddorians, the Eich,
the Ploor. All purely and wholly evil, deserving nothing but extermination.
Compare and contrast to the scene in _Galactic Patrol_ where Kinnison takes
over the human-staffed Boskonian base. He goes to some effort to separate out
the sheep from the goats there, and manages to salvage quite a few "good"
human Boskonians and arrange pardons for them. The fact that Smith isn't
always so cavalier with mass extermination makes it that much more disturbing
when he is.
Doug M.
Sea Wasp
I don't find it disturbing at all. Humans cover the range, other
races may not. In the case of the Bad Hats, it's made clear that they
DON'T cover the range. There are no Eich who question the Council of
Boskone, no Eddorians who sympathize with the Arisians, no Ploorans
who have empathy and concern for lesser races. That's the way they
are. Why should it be any more disturbing than having some kind of
unobtanium like Dureum? We define it as X, we demonstrate that it IS
X, and for the purposes of the story, X is what it is.
mike stone
>Some would add the Boy Scouts movement to this list,
>although the paramilitary element has been toned down
>considerably over the years.
I have heard it claimed that the motto "Be Prepared" originally meant "Be
prepared to _die_ (ie for one's country) but I wouldn't swear to that
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
I understand what you're saying. I think you're shooting the messenger
here, though. Whether you think it's realistic or likely that an entire
race is evil is not at issue. If it's made clear that a particular race
is ruled by a totalitarian, evil regime (as in fact all the proxy races
are), the point is not that they are "deserving of nothing but
extermination", but that there is no feasible alternative. You are
Kimball Kinnison, and you have just discovered the location of Boskonian
GHQ (you think, anyway). The Eddorians are clearly and totally evil,
that is made very clear (there are not very many of them, and any "weak
sisters" have long since been culled from the population). They then
spend the next N million years making sure any races under their direct
control do not stray from the straight and narrow (enforcing this by
physical and/or mental force as and when necessary). It's not hard for
me to believe that the specific races you mention all suck - they were
bred that way. The reason Kinnison had any options in some cases (the
hospital ship case, and a couple of others) were in our galaxy, among
races that hadn't been Eddorianized (due to the hidden influence of the
Arisians).
David T. Bilek
I've thought about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that
*in a novel*, when considering something like fascistic elements, it
doesn't matter whether the entire species is evil through and through.
We're talking about viewing the novel from the outside and finding
things the author put in either consciously or unconsciously.
Smith could have made the proxy races conflicted, or only partly bad,
but he *chose* to make them evil through and through just so the good
guys could wipe them out without pause. Thus, saying "but they
deserved it" doesn't negate the idea that genocide is seen as an
acceptable thing... because the author stacked the deck that way,
if that makes any sense. And I'm sure it doesn't. It sounds good in
my head, anyway.
Spinrad's _The Iron Dream_ (though better in the idea than the
execution, imo) and more recently MacLeod's _The Cassini Divison_ say
it better than I. For example (and please, nobody mention Godwin, it
doesn't apply here) if Hitler (cf the Iron Dream) wrote an SF story in
which genocide was seen as acceptable, because the "bad guys" deserved
it, would that make it any less an objectionable idea, or would
fascist elements in the book be any less fascist because they made
sense in the context of the novel? Not really.
-David
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
> 've thought about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that
> *in a novel*, when considering something like fascistic elements, it
> doesn't matter whether the entire species is evil through and through.
> We're talking about viewing the novel from the outside and finding
> things the author put in either consciously or unconsciously.
Granted.
> Smith could have made the proxy races conflicted, or only partly bad,
> but he *chose* to make them evil through and through just so the good
> guys could wipe them out without pause. Thus, saying "but they
> deserved it" doesn't negate the idea that genocide is seen as an
> acceptable thing... because the author stacked the deck that way,
> if that makes any sense. And I'm sure it doesn't. It sounds good in
> my head, anyway.
No, it makes sense just fine. I'm just not sure why people can't seem
to see past the point that you do happen to have a completely evil race
that can't be dealt with, just exterminated. I don't see why that's
creepy or whatever. This whole story is a black&white morality play,
nothing any more complicated than that. Slamming it because you think
(I don't mean you literally, David) it implies that the author is trying
to sneak in some icky ideas in this fashion is a non-starter, IMO.
David T. Bilek
<dsw...@druber.com> wrote:
>In article <3B042F18...@starpower.net>, dougla...@starpower.net
>says...
See my other post for more on this, but while what you're saying is
true, it doesn't address the point. This is a meta discussion, and
pointing to justification for genocide within the text doesn't enter
in to it.
Doug is saying that Smith's gung-ho genocide is disturbing, especially
when taken in the context of the many fascist elements. You are
trying to counter this by saying the genocide was justified. But
you're ignoring the fact that it's only justified *because the author
wrote it that way*. That doesn't make the author's outlook any less
disturbing, only the characters.
Nobody is arguing that the character's weren't justified, but we're
not talking about the characters. I could write a story in which a
very Normanesque view of gender relations was justified, with men
enslaving women sexually, etc. But it wouldn't be any less disturbing
because it was justified in the context of the story.
-David
Dan Swartzendruber
says...
> See my other post for more on this, but while what you're saying is
> true, it doesn't address the point. This is a meta discussion, and
> pointing to justification for genocide within the text doesn't enter
> in to it.
>
> Doug is saying that Smith's gung-ho genocide is disturbing, especially
> when taken in the context of the many fascist elements. You are
> trying to counter this by saying the genocide was justified. But
> you're ignoring the fact that it's only justified *because the author
> wrote it that way*. That doesn't make the author's outlook any less
> disturbing, only the characters.
Disturbing is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Frankly, the whole
fascist thing is really overblown, from my POV. Maybe I'm a fascist
SOB, but I just don't see what the big deal is with positing a race that
is inherently evil and can't be reasoned with, such that exterminating
them is the only solution.
> Nobody is arguing that the character's weren't justified, but we're
> not talking about the characters. I could write a story in which a
> very Normanesque view of gender relations was justified, with men
> enslaving women sexually, etc. But it wouldn't be any less disturbing
> because it was justified in the context of the story.
I understand that. I just don't think it's a good parallel (I can see
situations where enslaving women is necessary, but it's a necessary
evil. As opposed to exterminating the alien race which is engaged in a
war with us where if we don't exterminate them, they will exterminate
us).
Vegard Valberg
>
> In article <3b044686...@nntp.we.mediaone.net>, dbi...@mediaone.net
> says...
> > See my other post for more on this, but while what you're saying is
> > true, it doesn't address the point. This is a meta discussion, and
> > pointing to justification for genocide within the text doesn't enter
> > in to it.
> >
> > Doug is saying that Smith's gung-ho genocide is disturbing, especially
> > when taken in the context of the many fascist elements. You are
> > trying to counter this by saying the genocide was justified. But
> > you're ignoring the fact that it's only justified *because the author
> > wrote it that way*. That doesn't make the author's outlook any less
> > disturbing, only the characters.
>
> Disturbing is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Frankly, the whole
> fascist thing is really overblown, from my POV. Maybe I'm a fascist
> SOB, but I just don't see what the big deal is with positing a race that
> is inherently evil and can't be reasoned with, such that exterminating
> them is the only solution.
Well actually the Arisians specifically sent a message to the Eich
hoping that at least some individuals would listen and change their
ways, in other words hinting that the species was not entirely
irredeemable.
> snip
---
--
- Vegard Valberg
My e-mail adress is <Vval...@online.no>,
that is two v's, not one W.
Steve Taylor
> I vaguely recall an exchange (Kinnison complaining about how much he
> was costing in ships? something like that) where he was told that there
> were so many millions of planets in Civilization that they had the
> lowest tax rate in history - 1.5% is the figure coming to mind - yet
> could still build immense fleets.
Though tha's somewhat overstated IMHO - keep in mind the fantastic
thionite smuggling profits the patrol could make, by virtue of having
the only base on Trenco, itself the only source of thionite. I reckon
about half their black budget would be from the thionite rackets.
> Jon
> __@/
Steve
Steve Taylor
> And I remember being annoyed at _Masters of the Vortex_; hyped as the seventh
> in the series, it wasn't a Lensman book at all -- just set in the Lensverse,
> barely. My first clear awareness of deceptive marketing in SF.
I can only offer a humble "Me Too!". I was severely pissed off by that,
though I think I was too naive to understand the concept of marketting
scam yet - I just felt there'd been some awful mistake. Primal childhood
trauma!
> Doug M.
Steve
Dan Swartzendruber
> Well actually the Arisians specifically sent a message to the Eich
> hoping that at least some individuals would listen and change their
> ways, in other words hinting that the species was not entirely
> irredeemable.
True. Mentor gave (some of them) a chance, which of course, they refused.
Steven Rogers
Just to show that mileage varies, I liked MOV _because_ it did not focus on
the Lensmen. I think that Smith's storyverse was a marvelous place to knock
around in, and I loved a glimpse at the nooks and crannies bypassed by the war.
Also, I think that the characterization in that story - expecially that Vegan
cat-girl - was some of his best.
Steve
Yoicks! And Away!
Steve Taylor
> Just to show that mileage varies, I liked MOV _because_ it did not focus on
> the Lensmen. I think that Smith's storyverse was a marvelous place to knock
> around in, and I loved a glimpse at the nooks and crannies bypassed by the war.
> Also, I think that the characterization in that story - expecially that Vegan
> cat-girl - was some of his best.
Fair enough - the pain came from the way the books was presented as a
new Lensman book (publishers fault, not authors) - and thus clashed with
my expectations.
> Steve
> Yoicks! And Away!
Steve
mike stone
>Yeah, but the willingness to characterize entire intelligent species as
>"evil"
>is definitely one of the disturbing elements in the books. And this happens
>not just once, but again and again -- the Overlords, the Eddorians, the Eich,
>the Ploor. All purely and wholly evil, deserving nothing but extermination.
>
Which is how some people (not all) in the allied countries had talked about the
Germans during WWI
>Compare and contrast to the scene in _Galactic Patrol_ where Kinnison takes
>over the human-staffed Boskonian base. He goes to some effort to separate
>out
>the sheep from the goats there, and manages to salvage quite a few "good"
>human Boskonians and arrange pardons for them. The fact that Smith isn't
>always so cavalier with mass extermination makes it that much more disturbing
>when he is.
You got the same divide in WW2 propaganda films. There were some that showed
the occasional good (ie anti-Nazi) German, but afaik none that ever showed a
good Japanese
Richard Harter
<dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>Richard Harter wrote:
>
>> A problem with your litany is that you are writing it from the
>> perspective of the post Nazi world; we know what the consequences are
>> of putting this particular mixture together are.
>
>Okay, but why is this a "problem"?
There is the usual confusion between Naziism and Fascism. There were
a number of Fascist states in Europe in the thirties - Italy, Spain,
and Portugal I recall definitely, Austria and Rumania IIRC, as well as
Nazi Germany which was definitely a special case. Your list ran:
N fascination with capital-W Will
N glorification of collective violence
D conflation of all forms of collective violence
(1) spiffy black-and-silver uniforms
(2) wars of absolute extermination
(3) eugenics
(4) collectivist ideology
F/N strong emphasis on "masculine" virtues
F/N militarism
N ends-justify-the-means moral relativism
N an all-male elite* that's physically, mentally and morally
superior
(5) a protagonist who's explicitly identified as genetically
superior
N multiple references to the 'unfit'
N (6) genocide
The 'N' refers to items associated specifically with Naziism rather
than Fascism generally. The 'D' refers to a dubious assertion. The
notes are:
(1) Spiffy uniforms are a near universal
(2) Wars of extermination were definitely a Nazi specialty; more than
that, it was not generally understood until very late in the game
that the Nazis meant to conduct such
(3) Eugenics was a widespread conception
(4) Neither Fascism nor Naziism were collectivist
(5) This arguably goes with Nazi race theories
(6) Genocide was not part of Fascism although it was implicit in the
Nazi program; it is an ancient human practice.
You can argue that Smith presented a universe in which the elements
which made Naziism a horror were cleaned up and sanitized and I think
I would agree with you. Then again, one could say the same thing
about video games. The point I was getting at is that circa 2000 the
holocaust is part of our reality; in 1937 it was not part of anybody's
reality.
>> A lot of the things
>> in your list were part of the zeitgeist.
>
>Sure. That's kind of my point, actually.
>
>
>> The "good guys" were almost
>> as racist as the "bad guys" in the 20's and 30's.
>
>Sure. Racist, sexist, and often jingoistic as all hell, too. Some of the
>pulps from the '30s make _Galactic Patrol_ read like Ursula LeGuin.
Sax Rohmer will do nicely as an example.
>
>
>> Eugenics was respectable; babble about Will was au courant (reread George
>> Bernard Shaw somtime with a critical eye);
>
>'s the only way I ever would read Shaw, and under protest at that. -- But,
>again, this is more or less my point; and it's the reason I'm referring to
>these elements as "fascistic" rather than "fascist". These tropes were in the
>air at that time.
But, but, but, Shaw is quite good as a writer, albeit he wanders off
the deep end at times. I think we are in agreement about the tropes
being in the air at that time.
>
>Again, I'd make the analogy to Asimov and the Foundation books. Asimov wasn't
>a Communist, but he picked up on the Marxist idea of historical determinism,
>and it was a major element in the series. It was an idea that was very much
>in the air at that time. In Asimov's case, though, we know the line of
>transmission. In Smith, the origins of his ideas are more obscure. We don't
>seem to know much about Smith's political views, or what he liked to read, or
>what the major influences on his thinking were. That's what I'd like to know.
That is a good question. I suspect that Smith was pulling these
things from the pulp literature of the time and that he wasn't
thinking in political terms. The division between the good guys and
the bad guys in black and white is part and parcel of pulp. The
question you might ask is why these tropes were pervasive in pulp
literature.
As it happens I've recently read an interesting book along those
lines, _Cult Fiction_, by a culture studies guy. Very briefly, the
illegitmate literature, i.e., popular literature sans legitimization
by the literary establishment, appeals to (in class jargon) the lumpen
proletariat. That is, it is read by people who are isolated by age,
social position, or economic circumstance. The connection is that it
is the lumpen proletariat who were the base of the Fascist movements.
Tropes which you do not mention but which are relevant are power
fantasies and conspiratorial theories. Both are integral to Smith and
to the Nazi movement. The commonality arises, I am suggesting,
because they were both, so to speak, selling into the same audience.
>
>
>> A second problem is a confusion between militarism and fascism. Both,
>> perhaps, are undesirable but they are not the same animal. The
>> military games - the spiffy uniforms, the emphasis on structure and
>> discipline, the band of brothers, display in formation - is a
>> universal of human behaviour, one that long precedes fascism and
>> postdates it.
>
>See my post yesterday on this topic. There are both militaristic and
>fascistic elements in the book. The two overlap, but some elements are distinct.
>
>
>> A third problem is the word "collectivism". Communism, soviet style,
>> for all of its undesirable features, was not fascism and the various
>> collectivist movements were not fascism.
>
>Sure. There are people who argue for an essential identity between communism
>and fascism, but I'm not one of them. There were some common elements,
>though, one of which was the submission and submergence of the individual in
>the common good.
Okay. Collectivism has a specific meaning. There is another term for
what you are talking about but I don't recall what it is off hand. It
has been a long time since I've read Smith (and I'm not an admirer of
his work to begin with) but my impression is that this is not a
legitimate criticism.
>
>As another poster has pointed out, there's not always a clear line between
>this and an honorable ethic of service. But in the core trilogy, nobody seems
>to have much of a life outside the Patrol.
Again, I don't think this is a fair cop.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net,
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 a pop on those
little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards.
Douglas Muir
> There is the usual confusion between Naziism and Fascism.
Well, no. Some of the tropes listed were more specifically Nazi than
generally fascist, but "Nazi" is just a specialized and extreme subset of "fascist".
> There were
> a number of Fascist states in Europe in the thirties - Italy, Spain,
> and Portugal I recall definitely, Austria and Rumania IIRC, as well as
> Nazi Germany which was definitely a special case.
Hungary, too. European Fascism tended to overlap with right-wing Catholic
authoritarianism, with Vichy France and Croatia as intermediate cases.
Your list ran:
>
> N fascination with capital-W Will
That's an N/F. Mussolini loved to go on about Will, too.
> N glorification of collective violence
N/F. All the fascist states went in for this. Martial virtues, combat, and
conquest were central to fascist ideology.
> D conflation of all forms of collective violence
> The 'D' refers to a dubious assertion.
Not sure why you think so, but it's just one point out of sixteen or so, so
never mind.
> (1) spiffy black-and-silver uniforms
> (2) wars of absolute extermination
> (3) eugenics
> (4) collectivist ideology
> F/N strong emphasis on "masculine" virtues
> F/N militarism
> N ends-justify-the-means moral relativism
N/F. I could give you specific quotes from the Duce's speeches.
(We're so used to thinking of Mussolini as "not as bad as Hitler" that we
often forget what an asshole he was in his own right.)
> N an all-male elite* that's physically, mentally and morally
> superior
> (5) a protagonist who's explicitly identified as genetically
> superior
> N multiple references to the 'unfit'
> N (6) genocide
>
> The 'N' refers to items associated specifically with Naziism rather
> than Fascism generally.
> (1) Spiffy uniforms are a near universal
Mm, not really. The US has never gone in for them in a big way. Yah, all our
armed forces have dress uniforms, but they're pretty tame by world/historical
standards. And "black and silver" dress uniforms have definitely gone out of
style since 1945.
> You can argue that Smith presented a universe in which the elements
> which made Naziism a horror were cleaned up and sanitized and I think
> I would agree with you.
Yeah. I'd say that's a fair statement.
> The point I was getting at is that circa 2000 the
> holocaust is part of our reality; in 1937 it was not part of anybody's
> reality.
No, but by 1938 (when GP was completed), anyone with eyes to see knew that
Hitler and the other fascists were bad, bad actors. Runaway militarism,
persecution of the Jews, withdrawal from the League, the Ethiopian war and the
Spanish intervention... and, you know, Hitler had already laid out most of his
program in _Mein Kampf_. A few people (Winston Churchill, most notably) read
it carefully, took it seriously, and realized the man meant exactly what he
said; most closed their eyes and continued to delude themselves.
(And a significant minority believed, right up to Pearl Harbor, that Hitler
was the good guy, or at least the lesser of two evils. Read some of Charles
Lindbergh's speeches, and remember that Lindy was filling auditoriums and
attracting radio audiences of millions. Not to mention Father Coughlin, or
Joe Kennedy, or any number of others.)
But it was all out there for anyone who was paying attention.
> >Sure. Racist, sexist, and often jingoistic as all hell, too. Some of the
> >pulps from the '30s make _Galactic Patrol_ read like Ursula LeGuin.
>
> Sax Rohmer will do nicely as an example.
Yeah, I was thinking of him.
> >> Eugenics was respectable; babble about Will was au courant (reread George
> >> Bernard Shaw somtime with a critical eye);
> >
> >'s the only way I ever would read Shaw, and under protest at that. -- But,
> >again, this is more or less my point; and it's the reason I'm referring to
> >these elements as "fascistic" rather than "fascist". These tropes were in the
> >air at that time.
>
> But, but, but, Shaw is quite good as a writer, albeit he wanders off
> the deep end at times.
Mm. I've never liked him -- I think he thought too highly of himself, and let
it infect his writing -- but leave that be.
> I think we are in agreement about the tropes
> being in the air at that time.
Yep.
> That is a good question. I suspect that Smith was pulling these
> things from the pulp literature of the time and that he wasn't
> thinking in political terms.
You may be right. I'm reserving judgment until I can dig up copies of the
rest of the books and reread them.
> The question you might ask is why these tropes were pervasive in pulp
> literature.
Yah, that'd be relevant. Although not IMO conclusive. I'd still be wondering
why this particular set of tropes. Pulp literature included a lot of stuff
that wasn't remotely fascistic or militaristic. I mean, Ray Bradbury and C.L.
Moore came out of the pulps too.
> As it happens I've recently read an interesting book along those
> lines, _Cult Fiction_, by a culture studies guy. Very briefly, the
> illegitmate literature, i.e., popular literature sans legitimization
> by the literary establishment, appeals to (in class jargon) the lumpen
> proletariat. That is, it is read by people who are isolated by age,
> social position, or economic circumstance.
Hmm. Not sure I agree here. The pulps had broad popular appeal -- arguably
broader than SF today. And pulp wasn't all of a piece. While a lot of pulp
was utter trash, some of it had real literary merit.
> The connection is that it
> is the lumpen proletariat who were the base of the Fascist movements.
> Tropes which you do not mention but which are relevant are power
> fantasies and conspiratorial theories.
Yeah!
I didn't mention them, no, but they're definitely present in the Lensman
books. Civilization and Boskone are both being run by conspiracies -- a
benign one in the case of Arisia, and a nested set of malevolent ones for
Boskone. And a recurring trope is the underground cavern full of unpleasant
entities exercising psychic powers to dominate at a distance: the Overlords,
the Eddorians, the Eich.
> The commonality arises, I am suggesting,
> because they were both, so to speak, selling into the same audience.
So you're suggesting convergent evolution rather than cross-fertilization. Hm.
> >As another poster has pointed out, there's not always a clear line between
> >this and an honorable ethic of service. But in the core trilogy, nobody seems
> >to have much of a life outside the Patrol.
>
> Again, I don't think this is a fair cop.
Not sure why not. In the core trilogy, we get only glimpses of
"Civilization", and it's not really made clear why it's morally superior to
Boskone.
(One of the things that struck me about _Patrol_ was that Smith briefly
attempts to distinguish between the two by saying that for Boskone, ends
always justify the means... and then, a hundred or so pages later, says
_exactly the same thing_ about Kinnison.)
The focus is on the struggle, much more than the reasons for the struggle.
And the characters only have relevance WRT the struggle. I can't think of a
single instance in the core trilogy where a character is depicted as doing
anything that's not related to the ultimate conflict... pausing to kick back
with a beer for a moment, as it were. Nobody has a personal life. Even the
Kinnison/MacKinnon love affair is manipulated behind the scenes, by the older
generation (Admiral Haynes and the doctor, because "such stock was altogether
too good not to be propagated") and, behind them, the Arisians.
Total devotion to the cause and total submergence to the conflict. If not
specifically fascist per se, that's a notion that fascists would be very
comfortable with.
Doug M.
Nancy Lebovitz
David T. Bilek <dbi...@mediaone.net> wrote:
>
>I've thought about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that
>*in a novel*, when considering something like fascistic elements, it
>doesn't matter whether the entire species is evil through and through.
>We're talking about viewing the novel from the outside and finding
>things the author put in either consciously or unconsciously.
>
>Smith could have made the proxy races conflicted, or only partly bad,
>but he *chose* to make them evil through and through just so the good
>guys could wipe them out without pause. Thus, saying "but they
>deserved it" doesn't negate the idea that genocide is seen as an
>acceptable thing... because the author stacked the deck that way,
>if that makes any sense. And I'm sure it doesn't. It sounds good in
>my head, anyway.
>
like about the Pern books--they're set up so that most people *have*
to be compliant with rules they don't understand (low tech society,
arbitrary menace that comes around every two hundred years, only
the elite has records). I much prefer the engineerish "people
can learn what they need to know" style of sf. (This may lead
to a discussion of the difference between mere compliance and
necessary specialization--I admit that I don't quite have that
formulated.)
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Nancy Lebovitz
>> which made Naziism a horror were cleaned up and sanitized and I think
>> I would agree with you.
>
>Yeah. I'd say that's a fair statement.
>
presented as pretty good guys. What they are is folks who've been
"purifying" their race for so long that it's standard practice.
>> The point I was getting at is that circa 2000 the
>> holocaust is part of our reality; in 1937 it was not part of anybody's
>> reality.
>
>No, but by 1938 (when GP was completed), anyone with eyes to see knew that
>Hitler and the other fascists were bad, bad actors. Runaway militarism,
>persecution of the Jews, withdrawal from the League, the Ethiopian war and the
>Spanish intervention... and, you know, Hitler had already laid out most of his
>program in _Mein Kampf_. A few people (Winston Churchill, most notably) read
>it carefully, took it seriously, and realized the man meant exactly what he
>said; most closed their eyes and continued to delude themselves.
>
includes the extermination of the Jews. It was published in 1937.
>> As it happens I've recently read an interesting book along those
>> lines, _Cult Fiction_, by a culture studies guy. Very briefly, the
>> illegitmate literature, i.e., popular literature sans legitimization
>> by the literary establishment, appeals to (in class jargon) the lumpen
>> proletariat. That is, it is read by people who are isolated by age,
>> social position, or economic circumstance.
>
>Hmm. Not sure I agree here. The pulps had broad popular appeal -- arguably
>broader than SF today. And pulp wasn't all of a piece. While a lot of pulp
>was utter trash, some of it had real literary merit.
>
I'm inclined to think that new genres are apt to be considered pulp--
mysteries were considered a vice when they were new, but are relatively
respectable now.
Kevin J. Maroney
>I don't see why that's
>creepy or whatever. This whole story is a black&white morality play,
>nothing any more complicated than that.
Some of us find black&white moralities plays creepy, precisely because
things are more complicated than that.
--
Kevin Maroney | kmar...@ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
<http://www.nyrsf.com>
Dan Swartzendruber
kmar...@ungames.com says...
> Dan Swartzendruber <dsw...@druber.com> wrote:
> >I don't see why that's
> >creepy or whatever. This whole story is a black&white morality play,
> >nothing any more complicated than that.
>
> Some of us find black&white moralities plays creepy, precisely because
> things are more complicated than that.
Different strokes I guess. If all I ever read was morally simplistic
stories (like Lensman), I guess I could see the creepy aspect. As it
is...
Nathan Russell
>Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>
>> It's pretty clear from authorial comments that none of the proxy races
>> are "just average joes". If they weren't evil through and through, they
>> wouldn't be proxies.
>
>Yeah, but the willingness to characterize entire intelligent species as "evil"
>is definitely one of the disturbing elements in the books. And this happens
>not just once, but again and again -- the Overlords, the Eddorians, the Eich,
>the Ploor. All purely and wholly evil, deserving nothing but extermination.
Smith is hardly the only SF author to exhibit that sort of species
bias - almost every author except Card does it at some point.
Nathan
Andreas Morlok
"Michael J. Lowrey" wrote:
>
> Douglas Muir wrote:
> >
> > Michael J. Lowrey wrote:
> >
> > > > >...the Commandant smiles "almost boyishly" and tells them to be at ease, sit
....
> > > >
> > > > >And there is indeed something very American about it. You couldn't imagine a
> > > > >group of Germans doing that.
> > > >
> > > > The Germans, even in uniform, were not automata, you know. They joked,
> > > > and laughed, and palled around just like human beings.
> > >
> > > That one slid right past me! Jeez, Douglas: German != Nazi.
> >
> > Sorry, I wasn't clear. Yes, I'm well aware that German and Nazi are two very
> > different things. I should have said "contemporary German", c. 1937.
>
> Even in 1937, most Germans were NOT like the stereotype you
> evoked with "[y]ou couldn't imagine a group of Germans doing
> that."
Well, depends. Douglas is probably closer to the truth, subordination
was deeply ingrained in this generation (or still is, if you talk
to living examples). However, you can find a very similar mindset
like that Douglas described in German SF written by members of that
generation (e.g. Perry Rhodan, if anyone remembers).
-----*
Andreas Morlok
Institut fuer Planetologie, Muenster
ifp.uni-muenster.de
"Unversucht bleibt unerfahren"
(Aus dem Dreissigjaehrigen Krieg)
Vegard Valberg
Actually we don't know, some of them might take it, you do realise that
the Eich weren't really exterminated when their homeworld was destroyed?
I mean no more than humanity would be if Earth was destroyed.
Dan Swartzendruber
> Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> >
> > In article <3B0459B0...@online.no>, Vval...@online.no says...
> > > Well actually the Arisians specifically sent a message to the Eich
> > > hoping that at least some individuals would listen and change their
> > > ways, in other words hinting that the species was not entirely
> > > irredeemable.
> >
> > True. Mentor gave (some of them) a chance, which of course, they refused.
>
> Actually we don't know, some of them might take it, you do realise that
> the Eich weren't really exterminated when their homeworld was destroyed?
> I mean no more than humanity would be if Earth was destroyed.
True enough. Which makes the genocide accusations kind of silly.
Richard Harter
<dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>Richard Harter wrote:
>
>> There is the usual confusion between Naziism and Fascism.
>
>Well, no. Some of the tropes listed were more specifically Nazi than
>generally fascist, but "Nazi" is just a specialized and extreme subset of "fascist".
This won't do. To exaggerate, that's like saying hummingbirds are
just a specialized and extreme subset of tetrapods and then go on to
say that nectar sipping is a verterbrate trait.
A problem with the word "fascism" (and its sister "fascistic") is that
they are spread across a spectrum of right-wing authoritarian
movements and governments. What happens is that people pick up a
feature of one instance of fascism and treat it as being
characteristic of fascism generally.
>Your list ran:
>>
>> N fascination with capital-W Will
>
>That's an N/F. Mussolini loved to go on about Will, too.
That he did. It's a "man of destiny" characteristic. I don't recall
whether in Italian fascism that extended much beyond him into the
party philosophy. The Nazis, like the communists, devoted a
considerable amount of effort to "party philosophy". My impression,
and I could be wrong, is that with the Nazis it was systematic, with
Mussolini it was personal puffery, and with the other fascist states
it was minor or not present.
>> N glorification of collective violence
>
>N/F. All the fascist states went in for this. Martial virtues, combat, and
>conquest were central to fascist ideology.
Okay. I thought you meant something else by the term. Martial
virtues, yes. Combat and conquest, no. They were central to Nazi and
Italian Fascism, but not to the rest of the lot.
>
>
>> D conflation of all forms of collective violence
>> The 'D' refers to a dubious assertion.
>
>Not sure why you think so, but it's just one point out of sixteen or so, so
>never mind.
>
>> (1) spiffy black-and-silver uniforms
>> (2) wars of absolute extermination
>> (3) eugenics
>> (4) collectivist ideology
>> F/N strong emphasis on "masculine" virtues
>> F/N militarism
>> N ends-justify-the-means moral relativism
>
>N/F. I could give you specific quotes from the Duce's speeches.
>
>(We're so used to thinking of Mussolini as "not as bad as Hitler" that we
>often forget what an asshole he was in his own right.)
I certainly agree about his being an asshole. Here again though you
have to look at the whole and not just the leader, and at the various
instances and not just the excesses of one country. You also have to
pin it down more. A ends-justify-the-means moral relativism is a
characteristic of real-politik.
>
>
>> N an all-male elite* that's physically, mentally and morally
>> superior
>> (5) a protagonist who's explicitly identified as genetically
>> superior
>> N multiple references to the 'unfit'
>> N (6) genocide
>>
>> The 'N' refers to items associated specifically with Naziism rather
>> than Fascism generally.
>
>> (1) Spiffy uniforms are a near universal
>
>Mm, not really. The US has never gone in for them in a big way. Yah, all our
>armed forces have dress uniforms, but they're pretty tame by world/historical
>standards. And "black and silver" dress uniforms have definitely gone out of
>style since 1945.
That's why the word "near" was in there. Black and silver are out
because all of the Nazi symbolism has, ah, acquired a bad aroma.
Pre-poisoning-by-the-nazis the black-and-silver uniforms were just
fashion.
[snip agreement - what fun is that]
>> The point I was getting at is that circa 2000 the
>> holocaust is part of our reality; in 1937 it was not part of anybody's
>> reality.
>
>No, but by 1938 (when GP was completed), anyone with eyes to see knew that
>Hitler and the other fascists were bad, bad actors. Runaway militarism,
>persecution of the Jews, withdrawal from the League, the Ethiopian war and the
>Spanish intervention... and, you know, Hitler had already laid out most of his
>program in _Mein Kampf_. A few people (Winston Churchill, most notably) read
>it carefully, took it seriously, and realized the man meant exactly what he
>said; most closed their eyes and continued to delude themselves.
>
>(And a significant minority believed, right up to Pearl Harbor, that Hitler
>was the good guy, or at least the lesser of two evils. Read some of Charles
>Lindbergh's speeches, and remember that Lindy was filling auditoriums and
>attracting radio audiences of millions. Not to mention Father Coughlin, or
>Joe Kennedy, or any number of others.)
>
>But it was all out there for anyone who was paying attention.
All you say is true but it seems to me that you are arguing against
yourself.
[snip]
>> The question you might ask is why these tropes were pervasive in pulp
>> literature.
>
>Yah, that'd be relevant. Although not IMO conclusive. I'd still be wondering
>why this particular set of tropes. Pulp literature included a lot of stuff
>that wasn't remotely fascistic or militaristic. I mean, Ray Bradbury and C.L.
>Moore came out of the pulps too.
That is true. As to the particular tropes part of it, I think, has to
do with psychological displacement. Let me quote from myself and then
expand on that:
Science Fiction is also a literature of escapism, a function
for which it is admirably suited. One might even say ominously
well suited. It allows for the maximum psychological
displacement from the here and now - one can literally go to
the ends of space and time to get away. It is also permits the
maximum displacement of status. Here and now may be acne and
unpopularity at school. Sf allows you to concern yourself with
the fate of the world or of the galaxy or even of the entire
universe. Big potatoes.
Science fiction, at the time Smith wrote, was to a substantial extent
a literature by misfits for misfits. Nowadays the misfits have
redefined reality to include themselves. Then, though, the typical SF
reader was an introverted adolescent male and the typical SF author
was a rather odd duck. They didn't just write about weird things;
they were weird.
[Side note: In _In Search Of Wonder_ (1956, rev 1967) Damon
Knight has a chapter entitled "One Sane Man: Robert Heinlein",
a proposition that a modern reader might look askance at in
view of his later work, but one which stood up well at the
time Knight wrote. Go back and read the big names of the
Golden Age - Hubbard, Van Vogt, and Smith - and Heinlein is a
veritable beacon of sanity. We won't even mention Lovecraft.]
The suggestion I am making here is that power fantasies and
displacement are co-mingled. The further you get away from mundania
the larger you are in the fantasy stage and the more the rest of
humanity is depersonalized. Smith, in effect, invented a new and much
bigger kind of fantasy stage.
>
>
>> As it happens I've recently read an interesting book along those
>> lines, _Cult Fiction_, by a culture studies guy. Very briefly, the
>> illegitmate literature, i.e., popular literature sans legitimization
>> by the literary establishment, appeals to (in class jargon) the lumpen
>> proletariat. That is, it is read by people who are isolated by age,
>> social position, or economic circumstance.
>
>Hmm. Not sure I agree here. The pulps had broad popular appeal -- arguably
>broader than SF today. And pulp wasn't all of a piece. While a lot of pulp
>was utter trash, some of it had real literary merit.
That's true but irrelevant. "Illegitimate" fiction normally has a
broad popular appeal and some had real literary merit. The latter
term btw tends to be culturally defined. The point is that the masses
outnumber the elite. The elite defines what is worth reading, what is
"real literature" and the masses reas what they want to read.
>
>
>> The connection is that it
>> is the lumpen proletariat who were the base of the Fascist movements.
>> Tropes which you do not mention but which are relevant are power
>> fantasies and conspiratorial theories.
>
>Yeah!
>
>I didn't mention them, no, but they're definitely present in the Lensman
>books. Civilization and Boskone are both being run by conspiracies -- a
>benign one in the case of Arisia, and a nested set of malevolent ones for
>Boskone. And a recurring trope is the underground cavern full of unpleasant
>entities exercising psychic powers to dominate at a distance: the Overlords,
>the Eddorians, the Eich.
Along these lines there is the "homo superior" trope. This works the
same territory. If, in the here and now, you are a nebbish there is a
pleasure about and identifying with the hero as superior human being
with superior attributes. Homo superior is a commonplace in fiction
but in SF it is often carried to extremes.
The connection with Nazism (and Fascism generally) is that these
movements worked the same territory. The Nazis, the leadership, and
to a large extent the membership, were second-raters and failures in
"real life". They acted out on the political stage the same sorts of
psychological maneuvers that were part and parcel of the SF
experience.
>
>
>> The commonality arises, I am suggesting,
>> because they were both, so to speak, selling into the same audience.
>
>So you're suggesting convergent evolution rather than cross-fertilization. Hm.
Even so; that's a good way to put it. That's not to say that there
was there was no cross-fertilization. The tropes were part of the
zeitgeist, after all. Still, I'm suggesting that the tropes gained
popularity because of the social and economic setting of the times.
>
>
>> >As another poster has pointed out, there's not always a clear line between
>> >this and an honorable ethic of service. But in the core trilogy, nobody seems
>> >to have much of a life outside the Patrol.
>>
>> Again, I don't think this is a fair cop.
It's not a fair cop because "not having a life outside the Patrol" is
(a) partly a matter of auctorial selection, and (b) not necessarily
relevant to "an honorable ethic of service".
>
>Not sure why not. In the core trilogy, we get only glimpses of
>"Civilization", and it's not really made clear why it's morally superior to
>Boskone.
Smith, after all, is not that great a writer.
>(One of the things that struck me about _Patrol_ was that Smith briefly
>attempts to distinguish between the two by saying that for Boskone, ends
>always justify the means... and then, a hundred or so pages later, says
>_exactly the same thing_ about Kinnison.)
Things tend to work out that way in extended struggles. I can't
comment on what was actually said because, as I have said, it has been
a long time since I've read Smith and I have no great urge to reread
him. He reads too much like a video game.
>
>The focus is on the struggle, much more than the reasons for the struggle.
>And the characters only have relevance WRT the struggle. I can't think of a
>single instance in the core trilogy where a character is depicted as doing
>anything that's not related to the ultimate conflict... pausing to kick back
>with a beer for a moment, as it were. Nobody has a personal life. Even the
>Kinnison/MacKinnon love affair is manipulated behind the scenes, by the older
>generation (Admiral Haynes and the doctor, because "such stock was altogether
>too good not to be propagated") and, behind them, the Arisians.
>
>Total devotion to the cause and total submergence to the conflict. If not
>specifically fascist per se, that's a notion that fascists would be very
>comfortable with.
Total devotion to the cause and total submergence to the conflict are
very much not specifically fascist. "Kill them all, God will know his
own." is much more ancient and much more universal (although
apparently that particular bit never actually was said.) If you
haven't read it I will suggest that you read Northcote Parkison's
"biography" of Horatio Hornblower, a pleasure to read in its own
right. The passage I am thinking of, though, is the following:
"To understand Hornblower's proposal and Cornwallis's reeaction we
have to remember that the senior officers of 1793-1815 had all been
trained in the War of American Independence; a war fought between
gentlemen on either side. Admiral Rodney had been living in France
when the war began. Howe had thought it enough to defeat the French,
if he could; he did not talk of destroying them. Even Pellew had a
great friend among his opponents. He and others retained some sense
of chivalry. Thus a ship-of-the-line in battle never fired at an
enemy frigate unless she fired first. The game was played according
to the rules; rules which might be broken but which were still held to
exist. The French Revolution brought about an abrupt change of
atmosphere, there being few gentlemen left on the French side. Some
idea of fair play lingered even then but Napoleon lowered the tone
still more, aiming now at his enemy's destruction. Some senior
officers of the Royal Navy became almost as ruthless, Nelson being the
chief of these. After them, however, came younger men, and Hornblower
among them, who had been trained in this particular war. Theirs was a
war against the first of the modern dictators. Of the older and more
chivalrous warfare they knew nothing. A world at peace they could
scarcely remember, having seen it only from the classfroom. Among
them, moreover, were some, like Cochrane, who had been influenced by
the industrial revolution. There were some inventive minds among
these, turning to new and terrible devices."
William Hyde
c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
> On Fri, 18 May 2001 10:38:00 -0400, Douglas Muir
> <dougla...@starpower.net> wrote:
>
>>Richard Harter wrote:
>>
>>
>>N/F. All the fascist states went in for this. Martial virtues, combat, and
>>conquest were central to fascist ideology.
>
> Okay. I thought you meant something else by the term. Martial
> virtues, yes. Combat and conquest, no. They were central to Nazi and
> Italian Fascism, but not to the rest of the lot.
I'd say that both Hungary and Croatia were keen
on conquest. Given their limited resources they
couldn't do much without help from Germany, but a
look at the offical Hungarian and Croatian borders
circa 1943 shows considerable expansion.
Spain was too weak to conquer anybody, but they
did hold on grimly to their African colonies.
The Iron Guard in Rumania was far too busy trying
to limit the land grabs of the USSR, Bulgaria and
Hungary to think of expansion.
Germany and Italy were the only such states to have
a realistic chance of being world powers, but I
think the lot of them were keen on expanding their
territories. Maybe the "clerical-facist" dictatorship
of Austria was an exception.
William Hyde
Department of Oceanography
Texas A&M University
hy...@rossby.tamu.edu