“Do you ever look at somebody and wonder, what is going on inside their head?” the first line of Pixar’s celebrated film from 2015, Inside Out, asks. Certainly, this is a question that many of the studio’s films pose. Pixar’s best work, after all, like much of the best literature, explores both the inner and outer worlds of its characters, resisting the urge — more common in non-Pixar Disney movies — to reduce its characters into one-dimensional heroes and villains.
In Inside Out, the emotions of a young American girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) become personified into separate, distinct characters — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger (played respectively by Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, and Lewis Black) — who literally navigate the evolving landscapes of Riley’s mind. The film garnered substantial critical acclaim on its release and inspired a number of essays on both the neuroscientific and philosophical implications of its depiction of how our emotions work. I fell in love with the film myself as it began, when composer Michael Giacchino’s gorgeous opening, “Bundle of Joy,” began to play. Relatively few critics, however, have dealt with the books behind the kind of imagery we see in the film, specifically with the long, rich history in literature of portraying interior worlds — and how those may differ or relate to Inside Out’s vision of the mind.
The personified emotions in ‘Inside Out’
For some critics, there is a key difference between literature and film: the former can easily show the inner worlds of a character — their version of Inside Out — while the latter can’t quite get inside a character’s head, constrained as they are by the camera’s external gaze. A.O. Scott, in his review of Inside Outfor the New York Times, indeed begins with this idea: “Literature, the thinking goes, is uniquely able to show us the flow of thought and feeling from within, but the camera’s eye and the two-dimensional screen can’t take us past the external signs of consciousness.”
Yet some films do manage to show us how a character thinks, and perhaps the better way to conceptualize this is in terms of how movies may do so. Federico Fellini’s 1965 film, Juliet of the Spirits, a beautifully surreal rendering of the protagonist Juliet’s mind, accomplishes this by altering the landscape of the movie to outwardly represent her dreamlike visions and thoughts. In MaVie en Rose (1997), a painful piece about a child named Ludovic trying to deal with gender dysphoria, director Alain Berliner relies on brighter color tones to signify happier times, and bluer tones to suggest how Ludovic’s mood darkens as her parents try to force her to be the boy they think she is. The anime film Paprika (2006) introduces hallucinatory settings which evolve to represent the dreams of its characters.
Top: Stills from ‘Ma Vie en Rose’ (1997). Bottom: Scenes from ‘Paprika’ (2006)
Sublime and shifting as its landscapes may be, Inside Out’s approach is still rather more conservative, in that the conceit it uses to show interiority is easy to follow and never feels random or disorganized. Although Riley’s train of thought goes, as the character Bing-Bong suggests, “all over the place,” it is represented by a literal locomotive confined to a track. By contrast, although there is organization in the depiction of internal thoughts in the work of a writer like James Joyce, the result feels less organized, more fractured — and, perhaps because of this, more accurate. APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake reveal a disquieting truth: the way our trains of thought leap unceremoniously from one track to another, whether we want them to or not.
The map to the mind in ‘Inside Out’
What does it mean to show a mind? How should one capture a mind, its hallways with their shadows and lamps, the galleries, the attic we push so many crates and catastrophes into, the basement we fear to step too deeply down in on certain nights of the soul, the insides and outsides too vast for this creaky metaphor of a mind as mansion, of brain as abode? Both film and literature must translate from a highly complex, dense internal language of neurons and synapses to one with half or less of the words, and some things will be lost as they do. Depicting interiority is never lossless. But once we acknowledge this, we can anticipate it better in our art. The art of depicting the human mind, in more ways than one, is the art of learning to lessen loss, and of learning that supremely important of life lessons, broadly applied: how to gain, even when we lose.
For a transgender person like me, interiority can feel both essential and accursed. How I see myself — how everyone sees themselves — is based on internal identification: I am this, I like this, I see myself like this. We have mental mirrors, which show us ourselves, show us identity aspects we already largely just know even before looking into said mirror: our sexual orientation, our likes and dislikes in the things we’ve experienced, and, of course, our sense of gender.
How we depict interiority can be political. There is a long history of portraying certain classes or groups of people as being less capable of thinking deeply, less capable of nuance, than others. I deeply admire James Baldwin’s seminal novel of queer experience, Giovanni’s Room; all the same, I still remember how I cringed reading the inner thoughts of the narrator when he came across people who may have been transgender women (they were described as presenting as women, calling each other by female pronouns) and reacted to them with revulsion. Their “utter grotesqueness made me uneasy,” he reflects, “perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much,” he adds in a sentence that could have come out of Heart of Darkness, “if monkeys did not — so grotesquely — resemble human beings.” The “grotesque” characters are given little chance to exist in the novel beyond this. Sometimes, the books we love hurt us, too.
For cisgender people, there is usually little need to translate at least the gendered aspect of how we see ourselves for the sake of the outside world. But for many binary and non-binary trans people, that need exists: we often want to bring who we see ourselves as on the inside to the outside, so others can see us for who we are, too. I always saw myself as female because when I thought of myself, that was simply who I was. It was counterintuitive to consistently not be addressed as, or told I was not, a girl. People sometimes mistakenly think someone “decides” they are transgender because of their preference for the types of things stereotypically associated with one gender: the colors they are drawn to, the toys they play with, or other such nonsense. No — we see ourselves consistently as a gender in the same way any cisgender person does, even if for some of us our sense is that we don’tfeel categorically like one thing or the other. The reaction of incomprehension and bewilderment to this fact by some cis people is a failure of imagination and empathy — a failure to look beyond external presentation to accept the possibility of another interiority. And as joyful as it can feel to be oneself, sadness follows close behind; whenever someone tells me I cannot be a woman simply because of my birth, it hurts, like seeing, suddenly, that the bridge of myself I have been walking along leads to Nowhere.
From the beginning of Inside Out, the characters of Joy and Sadness are connected in subtle ways. Joy’s hair is blue, like Sadness’ skin, and Sadness is the first emotion to appear besides Joy. Joy matures after she learns to accept the wisdom Sadness has to offer, and Sadness, too, learns from Joy. Emotions are permeable and interdependent, not separate; joy and sadness only work when they work together, like facing mirrors, leading back to one another. They are sister sentiments. And they equally have a function in making Riley whole; Sadness, after all, saves her in the end.
One of the small, silly reasons I loved Inside Out: Joy was a woman for Riley from the very start, just as joy was for me — and then came sadness, for a long set of blue years.
But I might never have come out at all, if not for the weight of all that blue.
There is a long history of the literature of interiority — literature that examines or attempts to depict the mind of a character. All literature, to some degree, arguably does this, but some texts make it far more of a focus. Perhaps the most overt examples of literary interiority appear in the twentieth century in connection with Modernism: Surrealism, which aimed to depict the inner life of dreaming, the subconscious, and the irrational; and the technique of stream of consciousness, which attempts to depict the unfiltered thought processes occurring within a character’s mind. Given Surrealism’s connection to the visual through its depiction of dreams, Surrealist literature is often less well-known than Surrealist paintings, sculptures, or film — even as each tries, with the unique qualities of its medium, to portray an oneiric illogicality. Literature which echoes this sense of the dreamlike, like Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, seems disorienting to read, yet that is precisely because it is a subtle, cinematic form of literary interiority capturing the feeling of dreaming and hallucinating.
The term “stream of consciousness” was coined in 1890 by William James — brother of Henry — in The Principles of Psychology. For William, consciousness was fluid, not able to be “chopped up in bits,” but rather more like “a river or stream.” In 1918, May Sinclair first applied the term “stream of consciousness” directly to a work of literature in a review of Dorothy Richardson’s novel Pointed Roofs, thus cementing the term as a reference to the device so many psychological novels would later use (though Richardson herself in fact detested the term). Writing that relies on stream of consciousness — like work by William Faulkner, José Saramago, Keri Hulme, Gabriel García Márquez, and Marcel Proust — often does show consciousness more faithfully than conventional prose.
But attempting to depict the interior life of characters, of course, dates back long before Sinclair and James. A distinctive early example of interiority comes from the Heian-era Japanese writer Sei Shōnagon, lady-in-waiting to the Empress Teishi, whose observational miscellany, ThePillow Book, was completed in the eleventh century. The book is eclectic and diverse, leaping from prose scenes to detailed descriptions to quips to lists, which sometimes resemble listicles. With such blunt and wonderful section titles as “Hateful Things,” “Elegant Things,” “Things That Should Be Short,” and “It is So Stiflingly Hot,” The Pillow Book offers a series of windows into the author’s mind. In “Hateful Things,” for instance, Shōnagon shares the following infuriating memories, and their terseness reveals much about her:
A flight of crows circles about with loud caws.
An admirer has come on a clandestine visit, but a dog catches sight of him and starts barking. One feels like killing the beast.
One has been foolish enough to invite a man to spend the night in an unsuitable place — and then he starts snoring.
Nonfiction does not always show us the writer’s mind. Perhaps surprisingly and unsurprisingly, fiction, which creates people, seems more often to directly depict how someone thinks. But Shōnagon does just this. Scattered and seemingly random, the patchwork lists and impressions of The Pillow Book capture the brain better than any orderly document could.
Like Shōnagon, but more focused on narrative, much of Virginia Woolf’s work attempted to capture that strange, protean element of the human mind: sometimes fluid, sometimes like a mist, now solid as something is brought into sharp focus. This is clear in those novels of hers which rove between minds and perceptions, as in Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. But the clearest example may be one of her shortest pieces, a story from 1925 called “The Mark on the Wall.” Virtually the entire story is a narrator’s meditation upon the identity of a distant mark on the wall, though each thought pulls further and further away from the mark itself. “How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,” the narrator thinks early on in the story, “lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it by the end.” Near the end another character appears and abruptly reveals that the mark is most likely a snail, leaving Woolf’s narrator disappointed at having the source of their interior rumination reduced to something so prosaic.
In “A Sketch of the Past,” an essay posthumously published by her husband, Woolf further delineates the ways in which our inner and exterior worlds connect. She describes feeling “shocks” while engaged in mundane things, during which she will suddenly have a great epiphany. This phenomenon she ultimately calls a “philosophy”:
“at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself … I see this when I have a shock.”
Much literature that captures human experience thoroughly and well contends with this idea of sudden, unbidden thoughts. Such thoughts may reveal our desires — or, even, the things we do not want but inexplicably still think up. In Patricia Highsmith’s seminal novel of lesbian love, The Price of Salt, the character Therese — who has fallen in love with a striking, regal woman named Carol — has a sudden extraordinary thought as she is being driven for the first time to Carol’s home: as they motor through a tunnel, Therese imagines the ceiling caving in on the car, crushing everything.
Still from Todd Haynes’ ‘Carol’ (2015), adapted from ‘The Price of Salt’
It is something one might desire and not desire all at once, the type of contradictory yet comprehensible thought so many of us have likely experienced. Therese, after all, is afraid of losing Carol. And so at the height of their bliss she imagines something that on the one hand would leave them suspended in it forever, while it would on the other see that bliss snuffed out.
This is the dark side of interiority: that our happiest memories can shift so easily, sometimes, into our nightmares.
In Inside Out, memories are stored in marble-like balls, each depicting a clear-cut scene from Riley’s life. Each of her memory balls, too, bears the color of one or more of the core emotions.
Still from ‘Inside Out’
So often we depict memories like this: as discrete scenes. Yet to me memories more often feel like glimpses, fluid snapshots. My first kiss, with a woman, under a guinep-orange evening; my first kiss, living as a woman, a sea away; my first kiss with a man, atop the blue-and-saffron cover of my bed, in the reptilian heat of an afternoon; a cluster of bamboos juddering against one another like bones, in a field of yellowing razor grass near my former home in Dominica; a languid Sunday, reggae from a past decade carrying on the wind across the valley from the speaker inside a distant house; blowing into bamboo cannons and their burst as they fire into the December night, alongside the excited laughs of me and my cousins, my aunt and uncle; a vast sea turtle hidden inside a crevice, the world filled with the drone of my own breath through scuba gear, bubbles floating up like little jellyfish.
Memories — like emotions — are permeable. They can change. And one ingenious aspect of Pixar’s film is to show how Riley’s happy memories can become sad, and vice versa. Perhaps this, too, is key to interiority: that as our memories change, so too do we.
Inside Out leaves us with some unresolved curiosities. It revels in the pathetic fallacy, a term coined by John Ruskin, referring to the phenomenon of ascribing human emotions to non-human entities or objects. While not necessarily a bad thing, anthropomorphizing emotions may not be the most accurate way to describe them. The embodied emotions residing in Riley’s head, like those of the pizza waitress in the end credits, are all mixed in terms of gender, and yet those of her parents and teacher are shown to be uniformly gendered. Is this a commentary on how gender expression is sometimes more fluid in children, or are some of the characters genderqueer? The movie never clarifies this. How do each of the emotions think? And, by showing Riley’s emotions having agency, it begs the question of whether Riley actually has free will, if she is in fact being controlled by her emotions. Like a kind of giant robot, she is literally steered — the word her emotions use — by a control panel inside her head, and the language of the film (“core memory,” “memory dump,” Joy asking “who is in charge of programming” during Riley’s surreal nightmares) merely reinforces this.
All the same, Inside Out is as much about what it shows as what it suggests.“What could happen?” Joy asks in the film’s final line, as Riley approaches the cusp of puberty — indicated by a mysterious button that reads “PUBERTY” on the control panel inside her mind. It’s a jokey line, but it also reveals what the greatest writers of interiority know: sometimes, the best way to reveal a mind is by leaving something unsaid — to let its resonances collect in the spaces of silence.
Few places, fictional or otherwise, invoke as much mystery or devotion as Twin Peaks, the eponymous setting of the 90’s television show that will see a revival in 2017. Mark Frost, the show’s co-creator and writer, is also an accomplished author of novels and nonfiction, his latest being The Secret History of Twin Peaks(Flatiron Books),a unique epistolary endeavor that charts the underbelly of the town from the days of early exploration in the Northwest.
Frost’s novel invites readers to solve a mystery as they read. As the narrator, cloaked in anonymity of known simply as The Archivist, unravels the history of the town through FBI case files, it is up to the reader to pick up clues as to who is taking us on this journey. For diehard fans it’s a chance to put their expertise to work, and for casual fans it develops a sense of devotion to the text, pulling them along as they read.
In a coffee shop near Portland’s Powell’s Books, Frost and I recently sat amid a din of baristas and a soundtrack of oddly fitting music such as Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand.” As a longtime fan of Twin Peaks it was overwhelming to spend time with one of the people responsible for the show’s existence and its mysteries, but having lost myself in the experience of the novel, which is buoyed by a striking design concept of artifacts and documents, I was eager to discuss the idea of crafting mythology and the blending of history and fiction.
Ryan W. Bradley: The initial announcement of the book said it was going to bridge the gap between the original series and the new one, but it doesn’t do that at all. Was that misreported or did the project evolve away from that?
Mark Frost: It was misreported. It was a generic press release that was put out before we really even knew what the book was. I quickly realized there was too much proprietary information that would have been contained in those gap years and might have been detrimental to the eventual series.
Bradley: So, that wasn’t something you ever thought about doing with the book?
Frost: Well, the series came first. The book was the second step. I knew I wanted to write the book, but even back when we were finishing the second season I used the success of the show to parlay a contract for my first book. That’s what I’d always really wanted to do. I started writing at seven, eight, or nine. That was my first love as a storyteller.
Bradley: Before you went into TV.
Frost: Yeah. I was a playwright. I studied at Carnegie Mellon. I was really thinking that was going to be my path and I did do that for seven or eight years and it was fine. I was having plays produced at various places in the midwest. But it was really about poverty. I got involved with a public television station in the Twin Cities. They hired me to make a documentary, and it was the act of making that movie that got me back into realizing… I’d already spent one year in Hollywood after my junior year of college writing television shows. At nineteen I was writing on Six Million Dollar Man, which felt silly on one level, but it was fun to make money. I didn’t grow up with very much, and I enjoyed being able to have a life. So, when it was time to go back to that in my late twenties, I headed to L.A. That was the right decision, it turns out. It took fifteen years, but I finally was able to figure out how I could get back into prose, and that’s been my main focus ever since.
Bradley: And you’ve written nonfiction, too, which probably helped in blending the material that makes up The Secret History of Twin Peaks.
Frost: Very much so. And having done a fair amount of documentary work, it’s a different sort of storytelling. In a film format you shoot first and ask questions later. The material evolves out of what you collect. It’s more like a found art than something you start from scratch.
Bradley: Was this format— the conspiracy theories and the alternate history of the United States — something you collected prior to starting work on the book?
Frost: My first thought was that I wanted to expand and broaden and deepen the universe of the show, and to do that I wanted to go back in time. That was the one dimension we hadn’t played with yet. I had to start with the arrival of American explorers in the area. Particularly with this area [the Pacific Northwest] and its explorers — this was a formative moment in westward expansion. And then I realized it was going to take me into this alt history — the Wilkinson conspiracy, the Meriwether Lewis murder conspiracy, which I didn’t know much about when I started this, only that there were peculiar circumstances and that perhaps the dominant version of what happened to him was not true. So, that became a really good template to set the idea of the book in motion: things are not often what they appear to be. And there was this tension that I have with the Archivist articulate, that fundamental difference between mysteries and secrets. Then I had the theme to work with.
Bradley: The book’s design, which is full of ephemera so to speak, is such a big part of the storytelling. You’ve mentioned how intensive that experience was, working with the design team. Were you involved in the source work and constructing how it would look?
Frost: I made recommendations at the start. Finding the sources was a little out of my purview, so I relied on them. I simply reacted to what they came back with. My goal was to try and tell as much of the story through the documents as possible. Even in my first and second draft I changed a lot of what had been more or less straight narrative from the Archivist into documents, in order to try and make that a predominant component.
Bradley: Was that part of the concept from the beginning?
Frost: Yeah, the idea of the dossier was a pretty early concept for me and then I really wanted to take it as far as I could. I thought it was a really good marriage of function and form.
Bradley: It adds such a strong dimension.
Frost: I think for a book associated with a visual experience — a television show — a strong visual component felt appropriate. The more we could make that part of the experience, even a visual experience of documents,the better. I wanted to get as much of a sense of authenticity as possible.
Bradley: There’s something really unique about using realism to provide an escape. A lot of people read fantasy or science fiction, etc. out of escapism, but I’m really interested in reality because it’s so hard to understand even while living in it. You can have a great marriage and great friendships, but when you really start thinking about how different you are from all those people it gets really confusing as to how you maintain those relationships. There is so much going on behind our vantage point of those people.
Frost: If you can drop something into a person’s life that cuts a hole in that veil for a minute…It always seemed to me, from a shamanistic standpoint, to go back to Joseph Campbell, that’s what art is supposed to do. That’s what storytelling is supposed to do. That was its function in a tribal society. It was supposed to cathartically get you out of yourself and give you a point of view on yourself that maybe you didn’t have before. So, I was hoping to do something here that would be a sort of American magical realism.
Bradley: It’s the flipside of Americana. And the show is that way, too.
Frost: There are a lot of iconic, sort of comfortable things that we cling to. [The show] captured that for a lot of people, and I think it revitalized a lot of those tropes. But then you think, but wait a minute, that’s not all there is, that’s just a thin veneer on top of life. What’s really going on underneath it? My experience of small towns was that all you had to do to experience a strange and alien world was to go visit your neighbors. There’s something weird going on around you at all times.
My experience of small towns was that all you had to do to experience a strange and alien world was to go visit your neighbors.
Bradley: There’s an advantage to what you guys did with the town — it becomes a character. It is both a villain and a hero and a mysterious neighbor. It gives you so much room to play in a novel like this.
Frost: Yeah, it becomes a lens through which you see all of this. That metamorphosis — from the frightened kid you meet to the cynical hardened investigator all the way to the perhaps enlightened fool. By the end of it, I thought that was a really interesting journey.
Bradley: You mentioned Joseph Campbell, which brings us to mythology, a big interest of mine. Aside from the classic idea of mythology, Greek or Roman or Norse, there is so much that we see now that we don’t even think of as myth. Americana is a kind of mythology. In the moment people didn’t think about diners as anything but restaurants, but now they are iconic, they are symbols.
Frost: It’s a tricky thing. It can turn into kitsch really quick if you’re not careful, or it can lead you toward something that seems central to the experience of being alive at a certain place and time. And that’s what we want it to stand for because it’s a shared experience. It’s a commonality. And if you grew up in my era, diners bespoke a certain experience and a certain way of living. It was branding before everyone knew what branding was. Then there was Edward Hopper and it got identified as that early on.
Bradley: Originally, when the show was first on, you guys thought you would be getting a third season. Were there stories that you were ready to tell that found their way into the book?
Frost: Yeah, we had started to do some preliminary work on season three way back when, and honestly I hadn’t kept any notes, but there were things that I was able to recall that were good breadcrumbs to follow going forward.
Bradley: Television shows, film, music, and books that develop cult followings become their own pop culture mythology. When you started writing the book was there a sense of pressure to follow that mythology and to work within the world that had created it?
Frost: The thing that folks have to remember is that we created the mythology. We dreamt it up, so I think that gives us a certain amount of license to take it wherever we choose. There have been a few complaints that there are things that aren’t consistent with the show. Well, the book is comprised of documents, not of words on stone tablets that we found under a burning bush. Documents by inference, through all human endeavor, are riddled with human imperfection. I actually included some typos on purpose and misinformation to simply duplicate reality. I know that creates a little cognitive dissonance for people who like to use the word “canon,” but canon is a little bit of a pretentious word. It’s a TV show, it’s not the collected works of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. If we want to change it, we are going to change it and that’s our prerogative. And that also reflects reality. Reality is fungible.
We created the mythology. We dreamt it up, so I think that gives us a certain amount of license to take it wherever we choose.
Bradley: It’s easy to get caught up in doing service to fans, but that also makes it really easy to lose track of the story that you want to tell, as the writer or as the artist. That’s probably a sign of what you’re talking about. You focused on telling the story that you wanted to tell. And, as you well know, you can’t please everyone.
Frost: Oh no, and you have to know that very early on. That’s impossible. That’s apparently the job of politicians, not artists. The notion that stories can vary or have inconsistencies or colliding facts also should be analysed when all is said or done. There is very little about the show or even the book that is accidental.
Bradley: It should be obvious to anyone who reads the book, or even flips through it, that this was a very meticulous project. The intent was there, it wasn’t slapped together as a tie-in. It’s very purposeful in its existence.
Frost: Yeah, it was a piece of work that I wanted to be able to stand on its own two feet. It obviously draws on a lot of material from the show, but for me it needed to be its own thing as well and that certainly was my goal.
Bad gifts happen to all of us — especially come December. They range from the innocently unwanted, like an ugly sweater, to the flat-out insulting, like an unasked for pair of Spanx. That’s the interesting part about gifts: for good or for ill, they make a statement about the relationship between the two gift-giving parties. Take East of Eden by John Steinbeck. At the beginning of this sweeping family saga, Cyrus Trask prefers his son Adam’s last-minute birthday gift, a stray puppy, over the heartfelt, hard-earned knife he gets from his son Charles. This incident is the last straw in the steadily decaying Trask brothers relationship. (Although, really, who wouldn’t prefer a puppy to a knife?) If you’re thinking that life-long hatred for your brother is an overblown reaction to an ill-recieved birthday present, let me assure you that’s just the beginning. Fiction can magnify an object’s resonance, allowing bad gifts to get awesomely destructive. From a single coveted necklace, Maupassant’s protagonist in “La Parure” ends up in complete financial ruin. Frodo Baggins gets a ring from his cousin Bilbo and suddenly he’s fighting an evil army in an attempt to save Middle-Earth.
Just how bad can these bad gifts can get? Read on for cursed necklaces, burdensome time-turners, unusable hair combs, and more truly terrible gifts that will make you feel better about getting your third Elf on the Shelf this holiday season.
1. The Stray Puppy in East of Eden by John Steinbeck
East of Eden contains some epic conflicts, starting with the sibling rivalry of Charles and Adam Trask. Their father, Cyrus Trask, overtly prefers Adam even though it is Charles who seems to love his father more. The boys envy and dislike comes to a head at Cyrus’ birthday when Cyrus prefers his son Adam’s gift — a stray puppy that Adam found — over Charles’ more thoughtful gift, a knife that he worked hard to afford. And thus the poor puppy becomes a puppet in the dysfunctional Trask family saga.
2. Sauron’s Ring in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
In the opening to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Bilbo Baggins gives his cousin Frodo a gift — then conveniently disappears before anyone realizes its significance. The gift is the famed ring of Sauron, which corrupts the wearer, and which the Dark Lord will do anything to get back. Frodo must embark on a dangerous mission to destroy the ring in Mount Doom, which is definitely the most intense return policy of all time.
3. The Haircombs and Watch Fob in ‘The Gift of the Magi’ by O.Henry
Written in 1905, “The Gift of the Magi” is O.Henry’s popular tale of Jim and Della Young, a poor married couple who want to buy each other Christmas presents, only they don’t have any money. The cash-poor couple does own two valuable objects: Della has long, beautiful hair, and Jim owns his father’s gold pocket watch. In a stellar use of dramatic irony, Della sells her hair to buy Jim a fob chain for his watch while Jim sells the watch to buy Della hair combs, rendering both presents useless. O.Henry ends the story by emphasizing that it’s the Young’s love for each other which is important, but as far as the actual gifts go, I think we can agree these are an epic fail.
4. The Time Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
In the third novel in the Harry Potter series, Dumbledore gives Hermione a Time-Turner, a device that allows her to take extra classes at Hogwarts by going back in time. This sounds great until you realize that Dumbledore gives an adolescent girl a gift which, if used incorrectly, has the power to completely mess up the universe. And in fact the Time-Turner becomes more of a burden than a help when Dumbledore tells Hermione that she has to use it to save the world from Voldemort. No pressure.
5. The Necklace in ‘La Parure’ by Guy de Maupassant
The protagonist of Guy De Maupassant’s cautionary tale of greed is Madame Mathilde Loisel, a poor woman who has always envied the wealthy and aspired to be rich. When Madame Loisel gets an invitation to attend a fancy party at the Ministry of Education, she convinces her husband to use his savings to buy her a new dress for the occasion. The dress isn’t enough to satisfy her, so she visits her wealthy friend Madame Forestier, who gives her a necklace to wear for the evening. Madame Loisel loses the necklace at the party and she and her husband go broke trying to replace it. Years later, Madame Loisel runs into Madame Forestier and learns that the necklace was a fake — she and her husband went into financial ruin over a piece of plaster and her superficial ambitions.
6. The Birthday Cake in The Hours by Michael Cunningham
One of the three narratives in Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel belongs to Laura Brown, a housewife in suburban California in 1949. Laura is baking her son a cake for his birthday, and it becomes the final straw in her mental breakdown. The homemade gift for her little boy becomes an emblem of her life; she feels simultaneously inadequate at executing the project, disgusted by its conventionality, and trapped by her family’s expectations. If her son knew that the cake would lead to his mother’s attempted suicide, I’m sure he’d have settled for Carvel.
7. The Moonstone in The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
At her eighteenth birthday party in a huge country mansion, Rachel Verinder receives the Moonstone, a yellow diamond that was looted from an Indian temple. Before she can even ask — Do these cursed diamonds go with this dress? — the stone is stolen. The resulting story, which T.S. Eliot called the first modern English detective novel, intertwines a whodunit with the history of colonialism in India.
8. Marcus’ Ear in Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey
When Emma Neufeld goes to Brazil, it’s as much to get out of her own staid life as to search for Beatriz Yagoda, the fiction writer whose work Emma has translated for years, and who has suddenly gone missing. Things get interesting for Emma, who enters into a hot affair with Beatriz’s son Marcus, only to receive a terrible “gift” left for her in an orange box at the front desk of her hotel: Marcus’ ear, sent by kidnappers demanding payment for Beatriz’ debt. “Within the bag was a blood-crusted ear she had licked so recently she could still taste it on her tongue.”
9. The Postcard in A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Once you give someone a gift, you can’t be held responsible for how they use it, as evidenced by the many Amazon gift cards I’ve used to purchase paper towels. In the third book in Murakami’s “Trilogy of the Rat,” a chain-smoking advertising executive receives a postcard from an old friend. The narrator likes the card’s pastoral scene but, instead of smartly sticking the postcard on his fridge, he appropriates the image and uses it in an ad campaign. The image contains a sheep with a star shaped birthmark which triggers a call from a shadowy man called The Boss, who tells the narrator he has two months to find the sheep or his life will be ruined.
This week, we published new poems by Mark Yakich. Here’s a conversation about his work with poetry editor Ed Skoog.
Hi Mark! I’m interested in what thread, if any, runs through these Spiritual Exercise poems that also runs through your other books, not only the collections of poetry but also Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide and the post-Katrina chapbook Green Zone: New Orleans?
For both Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide and Spiritual Exercises I’ve been interested in subverting accepted ideas. In the former, I’ve been disappointed in the poetry guides I’ve tried to read and use over the years. They always seem to be condescending or else puerile or simply an obstacle for me in reading and writing poems. I’ve regularly felt like John Irving’s Garp: “what others often find serious, I find silly, and what others often find silly, I find serious.”
How so?
In the case of Spiritual Exercises, I’m reconsidering what it means to be spiritual, what it means to pray or be reverent. For me, being irreverent involves a much deeper understanding of reverence. It’s like satire: how does one really fathom something? One makes fun of it in a serious way. Because in order to make fun of it (e.g. Jon Stewart style) one has to understand how it works, how it’s structured, and what’s truly at stake.
You say, “For me, being irreverent involves a much deeper understanding of reverence.” Which came first for you?
I don’t think I can parse out which — reverence or irreverence — came first for me. That is, they’ve always seemed inextricably linked. When I was a small boy, I continually questioned why things were the way they were. How come I had to learn math, for example, even if I liked it and was pretty good at it. But then there was traditional religion, which has always mystified me. My mom was Protestant and my dad was Catholic so often we had to go to both mass and service on Sunday mornings, or we went to neither — as though they would cancel each other out anyway. The point is, there were so many rules, especially on the Catholic side, that bored me and that felt arbitrary. I particularly recall having to make up the number of sins at confession and not confessing to what I thought were unforgivable sins, like masturbation which I didn’t even have a word for at twelve years old. Now, of course, I have a deep reverence for masturbation even if after that act I feel much sadder and more pathetic to be a human being.
I understand that the Stanislavski methods in “An Actor Prepares” are largely inspired by the Spiritual Exercises, which he knew well from growing up in the church. But they seem at odds, the private and spiritual vs. the public and expressive. Perhaps something similar obtains in comparison with poetry?
I didn’t know that Spiritual Exercises inspired Stanislavski — grand! And looking into it, I found Liam Neeson was re-inspired in his acting and his faith by the same. Neeson even says that “acting is a form of prayer,” which I can certainly agree with, and would add that “prayer is a form of acting.” Prayer, or if one prefers “spiritual exercise,” comes in a variety of forms — and is almost always in forms. That connection to poems, for me, has been — dare I say it — revelatory. To quote myself from my recent book Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide: “Poetry is a form of prayer. Though most poets don’t know to whom or for what they are praying.” Which sounds like a slight, but in fact is just a reminder that sometimes it’s okay not to know what you are praying for — that is, the act of praying is valuable, soothing, and perhaps itself enough.
As far as private/spiritual vs. public/expressive, I get your intent — how can acting, something very public, also be something spiritual which seems very individualistic? But I don’t find the two mutually exclusive. One can, for example, sing a spiritual by oneself, say in the shower, but then later also sing it with others at church. That said, I have often found praying in church very uncomfortable — kneeling there “making a pretense out of reverence before others” as I say in an essay about the shower as my most sacred space.
This month, we published weekly comics by the hilarious Joey Alison Sayers. Today, she answers a few questions for comics editor Sara Lautman.
You are a humorist. Was that part of the plan from the beginning? A more specific question: did you come to drawing by way of writing, or writing by way of drawing?
I’ve been drawing comics off and on since I was a kid. The first strip I did, when I was 7 years old, was a humor strip called “Play on Words” aka POW. My father co-authored it and it was very popular in my family, but no one else ever saw it. I’ve always written and done other creative things like playing music and occasionally writing poetry, but comics have always been my most consistent medium. Even when I write poetry it tends to be humorous. It’s not that I can’t be serious — I’ve written some pretty miserable and sad poetry thanks to a lifelong struggle with depression — but humor is more fun.
I’ve always veered toward humor in art and life. I guess I would have been a class clown if I hadn’t been so shy. That’s a pretty good recipe for a cartoonist, really: funny and shy. When I got serious about comics about fifteen years ago, doing funny stuff just seemed like the natural place to go. Even when I’ve done more serious, personal comics, like my autobio book Just So You Know, I told the story though a lens of humor.
Just So You Know is so great. I loved that one where your co-worker is talking about getting her period.
The title Just So You Know sounds tongue-in-cheek, like a sexual health brochure, but it really does serve the purpose that it’s maybe making fun of — making very specific emotional and social experiences accessible to anybody reading it.
Was Just So You Know conceived with that in mind — as a way to expedite your coming out story? It seems like the jokiness of the title, but also the warmth of it, suggests in a gentle way that the social practice of coming out is not quite fair. (The personal practice of coming out to oneself, of course, is an entirely different thing.)
The title Just So You Know wasn’t meant to sound like a sexual health brochure, but if I ever redesign the covers I’m definitely going to design them to look that way! The title was meant to convey this sort of breeziness about the subject matter that it didn’t really deserve. Like, “FYI, I’m trans, no biggie”. Whereas it was a pretty big biggie to myself, of course, and my family and friends. But the irony is that my coming out to acquaintances and strangers was actually pretty low-key. I had my share of stares and names and weird reactions, for sure, but I had a lot more support and understanding. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I’m sure that had something to do with it. But back to the book itself, I really was trying to show the lighter side of upending my life. Lots of trans memoirs deal with the pain and the struggle — which are very real — and I wanted to present the process of transition through the humorous moments. I think that resonated with a lot of people — both trans and cis. And it did provide a quick way to come out to people that I didn’t want to have that whole exhausting conversation with.
Did your community react to JSYK in any ways that were satisfying or disappointing or surprising? Was anticipating a response even part of the story, or was the reception just like, of course Joey made comics about this, she’s a cartoonist.
My comics community was extremely supportive. I got a lot of encouragement after I drew the first volume to continue it in a second one. The cartoonists I know are excited to read new stories and new perspectives. The comics community was pretty supportive of my transition, too. Overall, I was surprised by the support of everyone in my community. I transitioned ten years ago. It wasn’t as common of a thing. Trans people weren’t all over the internet and TV to the extent they are now. I thought more people would freak out and run away, but in truth I only lost one or two friends.
What were your favorite newspaper comic strips as a kid? Did you read serialized comics or collections of cartoons?
Oh, I read pretty much every strip when I was a kid. Even the soap opera ones, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what those were about. But my favorites were Peanuts and Garfield when I was really young. As I got older and more sophisticated, I discovered Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. And I loved the collections. Oh man, I’d read Garfield collections over and over. Also, when I was a kid, a friend of my dad’s visited Australia and brought me back all these collections of newspaper strips from there. They were incredible and so exotic to my little brain. I got super into this strip called Footrot Flats. It was about these farmers and their animals in the Outback and I understood probably 25% of the jokes because of the cultural differences. But I loved it just the same. It was like an alternate universe with all these jokes and strips that somehow existed without my knowledge.
And my love of comic strips has never really waned. As I got older, I got into Bizarro, and some of the snarkier strips. Then in high school I found Matt Groening’s Life in Hell. But it was when I discovered Lynda Barry’s comics, and This Modern World, and Tom the Dancing Bug, and all those cool, weird strips in alternative newsweeklies that the seed was planted in my brain that a handful of years later would grow into my desire to do a weekly strip. And that’s when I started Thingpart, my weekly strip that ran for a few years in a small handful of newsweeklies around the US and abroad. Unfortunately, I got into the newspaper comic business right around the time that the newsweeklies were cutting content and consolidating, and generally dropping comics altogether. That was the dark punchline to my first attempt to make it as a cartoonist. Fortunately, though, that didn’t deter me and I figured out how to put comics on the internet and now I’m (not remotely) rich and (a tiny bit) famous!
In Santa’s shop, just as he’s arranging his sack of presents into his sleigh, an elf reminds Santa about a problematic six-year-old boy. “There’s still the matter of this Calvin, sir,” the bespectacled elf says. “His list is 30 pages long, not including the supplement about incendiary weapons. The research dept. thought you should handle this one personally.” The elf hands Santa a thick dossier on the notorious child. Although the elf reveals that “surveillance documents some 400 incidents” that might put Calvin on the naughty list — which Calvin tries to explain away in his file through “extenuating circumstances” — the elf notes that “a tiger vouches for the kid’s character…says the kid tries to be sort of good if he’s not tempted otherwise.”
Santa makes up his mind and puts on his coat with a smile; meanwhile, Calvin can’t sleep due to the “suspense” of not knowing if he will get gifts from Father Christmas. This absurd yet meaningful episode sums up much of Bill Watterson’s Christmas-themed Calvin and Hobbes strips, which are not only valuable additions to the canon of Christmas literature, but which may also be some of the most representative of the holiday’s complexities — even more than an iconic text like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
It can be difficult not to make a Christmas narrative feel on-the-nose about ethics on the one hand, and a celebration of commercialism on the other.
What is the literature of Christmas? Defining it, like defining many literatures, is more complex than it may appear on the surface. Literature that uses Christmas as a focal point is perhaps the easiest definition, with many such texts aimed primarily at younger audiences, like Dr. Seuss’ iconic tale of the green Grinch and Chris van Allsburg’s The Polar Express. Christmas texts for adults are a little rarer, but they include memorable texts like Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol and Truman Capote’s lovely 1956 short story, “A Christmas Memory.” In the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving wrote a number of pieces centered around Christmas; one of his most influential was his 1809 Knickerbocker’s History of New York, which, in its satirical recording of Dutch colonial traditions, may have helped to cement some of the Christmas iconography so popular today. Notably, Irving described how “the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children” — and this was fourteen years before the New York Sentinel published perhaps the season’s most iconic text, “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” the poem often credited with originating many of the features still associated with popular depictions of Santa Claus today.
At the time Irving published Knickerbocker’s, New York had no Christmas; the only winter celebration was New Year’s. Irving also described in his later 1820 Sketch-Book traditions that, at the time, were disappearing, like kissing under mistletoe; that they exist today likely owes some debt to him. It can be difficult not to make a Christmas narrative feel on-the-nose about ethics on the one hand and a celebration of commercialism on the other, though the best writers of such tales are able to subvert both, while still drawing from cultural traditions.
Of course, it is easy to romanticize the holiday if our gaze and our memories are narrow. For someone like me, who is not religious, the holiday can feel frustrating, if family members or friends subtly or overtly try to convert you to a system of belief. Those of us who cannot afford to give presents, those of us who do not even have heat in our homes when the winter comes, are largely unrepresented in endless media images of Christmas defined by glittering warm homes, tall trees that shimmer like stars, presents. Some of us have lost the families we might once have gone home to; as a queer woman who came from a Caribbean island where being queer is often met with rejection or violence, returning home is no longer as simple as it was before I came out, and a small word like “family” can suddenly seem vast, strange, unfamiliar.
Those of us who cannot afford to give presents, those of us who do not even have heat in our homes when the winter comes, are largely unrepresented in endless media images.
And many places, like where I grew up, have snowless Decembers, even as much of the American-influenced media in my island — even local news stations and ads, sometimes — used images of snowflakes and snowmen to identify Christmas. Christmas, like most things, is made up of many stories. Yet I still saw something of myself in Calvin’s perpetual struggle with whether or not to throw a snowball at his neighbor, Susie Derkins; I might have thrown an old mango instead, and my sledding might have been letting the soft current of a shallow river dotted with black stones take me for a bit. But Calvin lived in the island for me as much as he did on the page.
What makes Watterson’s Christmas comics so resonant, to me, is how human they manage to be, how much they are premised upon failure. “I often use the Christmas season for Calvin to wrestle with good and evil,” Watterson wrote about his Christmas strips in The Tenth Anniversary Book. “He wants to be good, but for the wrong reasons.” He isn’t a role model, but he is certainly an existential model, filtered through the prism of a suburban six-year-old blonde American boy, of what it all too often means to be a person. Whereas Dickens’ didactic novella, A Christmas Carol, teaches a simple but significant lesson of kindness that Scrooge appears to take to heart in the end, Watterson’s comics are not so much didactic as they are demonstrations of something that seems even more human than Scrooge’s conversion to goodness: the fact that we are fallible, and will likely fail again and again to be good, though once in a while we may get it right.
When Scrooge is shown the error of his miserly ways — most notably, the fact that not only are people not upset by his future death but are actually relieved he is gone; and the death of Tiny Tim — he seems to undergo a profound volte-face. He not only vows to help Bob’s struggling family in a myriad of tangible ways but becomes “better than his word,” doing “infinitely more” than he had promised, as well as taking on a the role of “a second father” to Tiny Tim; beyond this, the narrator reveals that Scrooge “lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him that he know how to keep Christmas well, if many man alive possessed the knowledge.”
Scrooge is now something that few, if any of us, can truly be: perfectly good.
Despite having “no further intercourse with spirits,” Scrooge has transcended this earthly plane, in a way: he is now seemingly perfectly good. He has become an idol, an ideal, a phoenix of ethics. To be sure, not everyone readily believes in or accepts Scrooge’s stunning transformation; some people even “laughed to see the alteration in him,” perhaps because the contrast was so extreme. But Scrooge is now something that few, if any of us, can truly be: perfectly good. As genuinely heartwarming and, in its own way, universal, as Dickens’ tale is, there is also a kind of moral artificiality in it in the end due to how unswerving Scrooge appears to be in his newfound charity. Scrooge, like Mr. Gradgrind of Hard Times, represents a principle more than a person — and while this does not take away from my enjoyment of A Christmas Carol, it does make it seem less like an archetypal tale of the holiday than a guide to being good.
Calvin and Hobbes, by contrast, shows something more realistic. A Christmas Carol, like many fairy tales and fables, has a cautionary message for its audience; Calvin and Hobbes manages to relay a similar message, but in a much less one-dimensional way, a way that accepts failure and indecision, a way that is more human because of it. “When the strip captures real moments,” Watterson wrote in The Tenth Anniversary Book, “without making them saccharine and tidy — my work is very satisfying.” And Scrooge’s conversion, while certainly meaningful, does feel tidy; does Scrooge never feel tempted to return to his old ways? Does anyone ever change so utterly?
In a lovely, largely wordless Sunday strip, Calvin is preparing to hit Susie with a snowball, grinning devilishly as he scoops the snow. As he raises his arm to fling the projectile, Hobbes calmly interjects. “Some philosophers say that true happiness comes from a life of virtue,” he says, hands aristocratically behind his back, before walking off. Calvin pauses, looks at Susie again, then drops the snowball. In a series of panels without dialogue, Calvin, to the shock of his parents, begins doing all the good things he normally avoids: cleaning his room, taking out the trash, doing his homework, giving his mother a card with a heart on it, shoveling the snow, setting the table. He finishes in a panel surrounded by pure white, an old slate brushed clean — except that he becomes frustrated a panel later, then runs off and knocks Susie into the snow with a snowball, laughing like a supervillain. “Someday,” he tells Hobbes, “I’ll write my own philosophy book.” Hobbes responds that “virtue needs some cheaper thrills.”
While this strip doesn’t necessarily give us a moralistic lesson, it does provide one for life: it’s not easy to change who we are, and sometimes terrible things give us the most pleasure.
Calvin may not have learnt anything that makes him as good as Scrooge — but the difference is that Scrooge stops at that panel surrounded by blankness, content with his newfound charitableness. And while this strip doesn’t necessarily give us a moralistic lesson, it does provide one for life: it’s not easy to change who we are, and sometimes terrible things give us the most pleasure. Calvin and Hobbes, as this strip demonstrates, is not an ethics pamphlet, even as it suggests that being good — not throwing that snowball — is probably the better thing to do, even as it shows that many of us comically fail to do the right thing for the right reason. “Calvin usually learns the wrong lessons from his experiences, if he learns anything at all,” Watterson wrote. To see a world in a ball of snow, as Blake might have put it.
And when Calvin finally does do something genuinely kind, as by affirming his loving friendship with his tigrine companion — who is often his sarcastic, yet never sermonizing, moral superior — it means so much more because it’s such a change from his avaricious plans to get onto Santa’s good list. Greedy as the six-year-old is, Watterson’s own Christmas carol of sorts — a beautiful single-panel strip with a poem about Christmas eve, with Calvin lying against the tummy of a napping Hobbes, a fire behind them — has Calvin say that “tomorrow’s what I’m waiting for, / But I can wait a little more.” Temperance and loving friendship come together here — and it reveals what has always been the case about Calvin: that he may do many bad things, but at his core, he’s not a bad kid, something that describes many of us better than the extremities of Scrooge’s transformation.
It is possible these heartwarming little moments were homages to one of the comics that Watterson often held up as a primary influence, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which occasionally showed protagonist Krazy doing charitable deeds on the holiday for no reason other than their kindness, like giving coal briquettes to a poor family so that they might have warmth in the winter. And although Dickens was not a fan of evangelizing his beliefs, there is still an element of this in the end of A Christmas Carol; I prefer the more open, secular approach of Watterson’s strips, which neither endorse nor attack any particular set of beliefs.
The strip’s winter landscapes, too, are suggestive. Often wide open with white space, Watterson wanted to present the spare, austere atmosphere of a Japanese woodblock print. This openness is also an emptiness, a presence in absence, and it perhaps subtly reflects the comic’s continuity when it comes to ethical struggles: each new winter (or are they all, somehow, the same December?) is a kind of blank slate for Calvin, a fresh chance to try to get onto the good list. And Watterson often uses the landscape to explore ethical questions, with Calvin asking Hobbes about anything from the value of being good to the meaning of life while zooming down a snowy slope on a sled — usually ending with a crash.
Watterson uses the landscape to explore ethical questions, with Calvin asking Hobbes about anything from the value of being good to the meaning of life while zooming down a snowy slope on a sled.
Perhaps the most memorable inhabitants of his winter landscapes are the strip’s iconic, extraordinary snowmen, which also show something of the season. As Watterson said himself in the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, he often used the strip to “make fun of the art world” — and, more specifically, to satirize what he saw as the ever-widening gulfs between art, largely inaccessible academic interpretations thereof, and audiences who had little to no formal study in art history and who thus were in a sense barred from the works on display.
Watterson perhaps aims a bit too broadly here, in that sometimes art truly is meant to be difficult or even, on its surface, absurd; art, after all, may be one of the most difficult words to define, even as many people think they know it when they see it, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography. But there certainly is merit in many of Watterson’s critiques, particularly when he draws ironic connections between artists who at once spurn the public and yet wish to profit off of this same public. And in a bigger sense, the snowmen also reflect both the artificiality and evanescence of Christmas. They are caricatures of a superficial kind of art; all the same, they are often glorious. And the fact the snowmen will inevitably melt is a testament, both sarcastic and serious, to the impermanence of art and its creators alike.
They are both satires and affirmations of art; after all, in one narrative that gave its name to a collection, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons, Calvin’s grotesque creations come to life, much to his horror. The decorations we may put up during the holiday will come down, just as the snowmen will melt, but there can be joy in doing something so short-lived.
Failing is not uniquely human, of course; but failing to do good, then trying again even when one feels conflicted, certainly is, and this is the virtue of Watterson’s wonderful strip. “The best presents don’t come in boxes,” Hobbes tells Calvin one Christmas morning as Calvin gives his friend a hug — despite having forgotten to give his tiger any other presents — and these lovely moments, set against hitting people with snowballs, crashing into frozen ravines on sleds, and asking Santa — in an alphabetized list — for rocket launchers, make the strip a powerful statement for the season. It may not be universal in every respect. And it’s more and more difficult for me to let go and laugh as I remember, each day, the darkening political climate that is approaching. But art can help us through. And Watterson’s Christmas comics, as meaningful in the 1980s and ’90s as they are in 2016, transform the season into art like the best such stories.
If you’re looking for a movie to watch this holiday season, I do not suggest It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s one of those things that remains a classic despite not being any good, like Star Wars or turkey.
It’s a Wonderful Life is an art film (I assume, because it’s in black and white), and art films always make me sleepy, so I dozed in and out while watching this. It’s about a man played by Jimmy Stewart who takes his own life on Christmas Eve by throwing himself off a bridge. However, he’s in such an inebriated state — possibly brought on by drug use or alcoholism — that he suffers from vivid hallucinations of magical time travelers.
These beings turn Jimmy Stewart invisible and take him through town to show him all the things he did wrong. The last thing I want to do when I’m feeling bad about a choice I’ve made is to have to relive it. I’d much rather just go dancing and forget about all my troubles, but these time travelers are some real masochists.
Jimmy Stewart doesn’t once take advantage of his ability to turn invisible. He never tries to spy on a woman changing or knock a vase off an end table to freak somebody out. If I could turn invisible and time travel I would have been having way more fun than this guy, even if I was on the brink of suicide. In fact, especially in that case!
As you can imagine, there were a lot of things that made him want to kill himself, from financial to relationship problems. It’s also implied that he drowned a boy in a frozen lake. At any rate, Jimmy’s character is a real drama queen because he chose Christmas Eve to kill himself. What a way to ruin the holiday for everyone else.
There’s nothing likable about this character. He’s selfish and not much of a critical thinker. Every time his face came on screen I would hold my hand up so as to not have to look at him. He was much better in Rear Window.
Eventually he decides he wants to live, so the magical time travelers bring him back to life and he starts running through town screaming, “I’m alive! I’m alive!” That’s not news to anyone. The real news should be, “Time travel is possible! Time travel is possible! I can turn invisible!” He literally doesn’t tell anyone about what he’s experienced. That’s the ONLY thing I would be talking about.
I couldn’t even bear to finish this movie so I just turned it off. I hate to be so negative in one of my reviews, especially during such a happy time of year, but I feel the need to warn you not to watch this. There are plenty of other Christmas movies to watch, like Eyes Wide Shut.
I’m giving It’s a Wonderful Life one star because it’s Christmas.
BEST FEATURE: Jimmy Stewart is wearing a very stylish suit. WORST FEATURE: Donna Reed doesn’t sing at all.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing some pencil shavings.
The map of childhood is a map of shifting fears. Irrational but unwavering, the fears that haunted me as a girl can still be summoned by a certain sound, the glimpse of an image: wind in the dark, the size of the moon, floorboards creaking. I remember too how my fears were personified in the form of an androgynous flat-headed figure, which would appear in my room at night and place its hands around my neck, muting my cries. In this way the traumas that went unspoken were embodied and transformed, daytime disturbances becoming the terror of night.
In Carmen Boullosa’s novel Before, first published in Mexico in 1989, the narrator traverses a geography of fear, but there is no personification, no ghost, no single sinister character to terrorize her, no Sandman from whom she must run. Instead she experiences fear as an omnipresent force that permeates spaces, objects, and even language. Menacing steps pursue her throughout the scenes of her childhood, objects move around of their own accord, harassing her and sabotaging her plans, like the eucalyptus tree in her yard:
“Imagine its leaves chorusing hatred and revenge. Imagine its roots determined to go on the offensive, its branches, its bark, its buds riven with anger!”
The young woman who speaks cannot escape the malignant forces that surround her, but in this novel Boullosa turns the traditional ghost story on its head by giving us a narrator who speaks from beyond the grave, haunting as well as haunted, revisiting the memories of her childhood in order to recover a sense of self in the incorporeal realm where she is suspended. This character without a body, gripped by terror, should herself be a cause for alarm, but with her chatty, buoyant account of a singular Mexico City girlhood, she inspires more pity and affection than fear.
That Boullosa’s protagonist should speak from beyond the grave may be a nod to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo — among Mexico’s greatest novels — in which the inhabitants of a whole town speak in chorus from the tomb. Before also contains echoes of José Emilio Pacheco’s quintessential Bildungsroman, The Battles in the Desert: like Pacheco’s Carlos, Boullosa’s protagonist moves between the domestic and educational spheres of a rapidly modernizing Mexico City, an experience circumscribed, in both cases, by the characters’ belonging to a particular social class.
But Boullosa’s novel is playfully subversive rather than derivative, and converses with her precursors while forging a decidedly feminine — and feminist — path for the treatment of growing up (or failing at it).
Having lamented her solitude (“But nobody’s with me. Nobody, apart from my fear, my panic, my terror…”), Boullosa’s unnamed narrator recalls her birth and the fear that gripped her mother: “I return to the fear, a woman’s fear: the young woman bathed in sweat, her body suffering the violence of birth…” The fear, then, is associated from the outset with the brutality of female physiology. Peter Bush wisely retains this emphasis in his translation, but the original Spanish performs the more disruptive gesture of feminizing the definite article that accompanies the noun — la miedo: the jarring grammatical perversion suggests not that fear is of women but that it is itself essentially feminine. This feminization of fear sets the tone for the narrator’s entire quest, and is accompanied by her refusal to recognize the woman who gives birth to her as her mother.
“Boullosa turns the traditional ghost story on its head by giving us a narrator who speaks from beyond the grave.”
The protagonist’s birth is shot through with gender trouble. Her grandmother is disappointed that the baby isn’t a boy. The child’s father is absent from the birth, and pays little attention to his new daughter. A few pages later, though, we learn that unlike the mother, he seems able to develop a straightforward relationship with his children: he is “hugely happy with the girls he looked on in every sense as his rightful daughters. And we all were.” The ease of the paternal relationship is at odds with the ruptured maternal bond: the narrator laments, “I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid and I can’t shout Mom. It’s a cry I can’t utter, because I don’t possess that word.” As a girl, she seeks refuge in her parents’ room, but “Dad never let me sleep in their room, thinking my nighttime terror was ‘clowning,’ which was the word he used to describe it.” Her father, then, plays a part in widening the gulf between daughter and mother. Although he is scarcely present in the novel, the father reinforces a patriarchal structure that prevents the women from being tied together by forces other than fear.
Boullosa’s protagonist observes fellow victims of fear all around her. Her sisters and peers also fall prey to the menacing steps. María Enela, a classmate, is her companion in fear, but this force drives a wedge between the girls rather than bringing them closer: “I must avoid my own fear, a fear I reflected in her…” When Enela suffers a fainting fit in class and is taken away to the nurse, the narrator becomes convinced that together they might be able to combat what pursues them:
“I promised myself I would be brave and talk to Enela about the footsteps. I spoke to her silently. I wasn’t sure, perhaps we could oppose, and even defeat, a fate I didn’t fully understand but was beginning to glimpse desperately.”
But Enela never returns to school, the girls remain estranged, and Boullosa’s narrator is left with a sense of guilt and shame over her fate: “I didn’t need to compare myself with the flesh of the martyrs, as my schoolmates were doing, to know how puny I was…”
In several of this novel’s episodes, the hope of a bond made through mutual fear is similarly dashed. One of the novel’s most disturbing sections concerns a turtle and a pair of scissors. Frightened as usual by the mysterious nocturnal steps that pursue her, the protagonist roams into the kitchen, where she encounters a turtle being kept by the cook for a celebratory soup. The moment with the turtle is more intimate than the stunted friendship with Enela, even though in both cases the relationships are grounded in a shared experience of fear. For a moment, the girl and the turtle appear able to conquer what pursues them: “I walked through the dark clasping the turtle to my bosom like a defenseless lover, as terrified as I was, I said to her: ‘I’m going to look after you, don’t worry’…we could no longer hear the noise we were pursuing.” On her return to her room the girl discovers a pair of scissors under her pillow, breathing as if they were alive. She returns them, realizing only too late that she has been complicit in delivering a murder weapon: on her return to the kitchen she finds the scissors bloody, the turtle headless. Significantly, the ill-fated turtle is consumed in a soup eaten to celebrate the birthday of her distant, inaccessible mother Esther. But Esther is only amused by her daughter’s bewilderment, showing a cruel lack of attunement to the girl’s sensitive state.
“Sometimes as children, to evade our fears, we invent rituals.”
We avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk for fear of the emergence of monsters. We go to bed with a protective object, a talisman against anxiety and sleeplessness. Boullosa’s narrator takes white pebbles and with them designs playful geographies, a fantastic kingdom, with her sisters. The game augurs well: “Never has there been such a resplendent coronation as the one when I was crowned queen of my own kingdom, perched on a rickety chair on my bed, wrapped in a sheet.” The pebbles encircling the bed appear to remedy the night fear: “At the center of a territory invented by chance in a game I managed (finally!) to escape the painful darkness that closed in around me.” The magical solution, however, is temporary. Our heroine is at pains to explain that her fear cannot be categorized along with typical childhood neuroses — it is something different, deeper, visceral — and as such, we should not expect it to be done away with by superstitious rituals.
Her fears temporarily quelled, she continues to seek female figures with whom to bond. On vacation she meets a thirteen year-old girl who wears a premature, tired maturity, “sad and perfumed like an overripe fruit… a frustrated girl, a girl not kissed or caressed by her mom.” This girl speaks a language of innuendo that nearly pierces the narrator’s innocence and occasions her earliest friction with a young woman as a sexual being. When she pinches the narrator’s nipple, staining it with nail polish and leaving a “brutal, painful” stigmata on her skin, our narrator plunges into the pool to wash away the stain that brings her perilously close to knowledge of the adult world. After this incident, she can no longer find the pebbles. Soon after comes estrangement from her sisters, who begin to recede into the country of adolescence. The protagonist cries at their rejection of her, “not realizing that what I should have been mourning was the disappearance of the girls who had once been my sisters.” The closer she moves towards growing up, the more distant all possible remedies for the fear seem to become.
“[T]he novel becomes a testimony of the structural violence of family relationships and of the cruel bodily transformation of becoming a woman.”
These encounters with the pubescent Other are full of impending doom, as we sense the character’s progression toward a transformation against which she strenuously reacts, declaring, “this will never happen to me.” The anxiety crescendos when she returns home from a trip more harassed than ever by the sounds. As if anticipating her future as a ghost, she begins to haunt the family home by night, “never as big as it was then,” and seeks refuge in the forbidden space of Esther’s painting studio. This out of bounds room is a refuge associated with the distant mother; the protagonist allows herself to believe it will be safe, but her transgression is ultimately what triggers the catastrophe of Esther’s sudden death. In the whirlwind of noises that enter the forbidden room, the girl and her mother are once again brought together then torn asunder by the presence of the fear. The noises gather around them, objects in the studio become animate and turn “enraged” upon Esther, pursuing her at last. Only at the moment of this violent loss is the protagonist able to call Esther her “mother.”
In Before, Boullosa offers a coming of age tale of a girl who searches for role models, and for a map that might allow her, like her older sisters, to step forward into womanhood. What she sees instead are signs of the violence of being a woman in a physical body. Despite being surrounded by women, she is repeatedly unable to enter into communion with them. As Bildungsroman, the novel is decidedly ironic and rebellious, for the moment the protagonist reaches maturity, marked by her menstruation, is also the moment of her death — the completion of her physical maturity is also the moment she disappears from the physical realm. The feminine subject here meets with the impossibility of full acceptance, even by a sisterhood that turns out to be fragmented and hostile.
Without its fantastic elements, Before would be the story of a young woman who forms part of a family and yet finds herself isolated and alone in childhood. Steeped in the gothic and fantastic modes, the novel becomes a testimony of the structural violence of family relationships and of the cruel bodily transformation of becoming a woman. As I write this and remember my girlhood fears and the events that triggered them, I realize that Boullosa evades an identification of original trauma, instead suggesting that the trauma of her protagonist is rooted in living while female. The source of pain here is more troubling precisely because it refuses to be named. The culminating disasters of the novel appear to occur as a result of the fear, rather than having occasioned it.
In a novel where the structural violence of family makes anything but the protagonist’s ultimate erasure impossible, there is also, paradoxically, much to celebrate. This tale, told with the ebullience and urgency by now familiar to readers of Boullosa, becomes a rallying cry for the power of stories, for as she speaks from beyond the physical realm, the narrator of Before tells of the joy she finds in remembering:
“When I decided to tell you this, to invent you in order to tell this, and by having an interlocutor to have words myself, I didn’t imagine the bliss my memories would bring. Though I can exaggerate my epiphany, I might say I’ve come alive again.”
Though it might be impossible for the disembodied voice to recover her sense of the physical, and though the reader is perpetually aware of the irony of the attempt, it seems that despite the violence of the estrangement and ruptures of which she is victim, Boullosa’s storyteller is able to tell herself back into existence, even as the tale moves her towards annihilation.
This wide-ranging exploration of the impulses, movements, and unique voices in twentieth century science fiction originally appeared as the introduction to this year’s The Big Book of Science Fiction from Vintage Books. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s next project will be The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, also from Vintage.
Since the days of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, science fiction has not just helped define and shape the course of literature but reached well beyond fictional realms to influence our perspectives on culture, science, and technology. Ideas like electric cars, space travel, and forms of advanced communication comparable to today’s cell phone all first found their way into the public’s awareness through science fiction. In stories like Alicia Yáñez Cossío’s “The IWM 100” from the 1970s you can even find a clear prediction of Information Age giants like Google — and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the event was a very real culmination of a yearning already expressed through science fiction for many decades.
Science fiction has allowed us to dream of a better world by creating visions of future societies without prejudice or war. Dystopias, too, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, have had their place in science fiction, allowing writers to comment on injustice and dangers to democracy. Where would Eastern Bloc writers have been without the creative outlet of science fiction, which by seeming not to speak about the present day often made it past the censors? For many under Soviet domination during those decades, science fiction was a form of subversion and a symbol of freedom. Today, science fiction continues to ask “What if?” about such important topics as global warming, energy dependence, the toxic effects of capitalism, and the uses of our modern technology, while also bringing back to readers strange and wonderful visions.
No other form of literature has been so relevant to our present yet been so filled with visionary and transcendent moments. No other form has been as entertaining, either. Before now, there have been few attempts at a definitive anthology that truly captures the global influence and significance of this dynamic genre — bringing together authors from all over the world and from both the “genre” and “literary” ends of the fiction spectrum. The Big Book of Science Fiction covers the entire twentieth century, presenting, in chronological order, stories from more than thirty countries, from the pulp space opera of Edmond Hamilton to the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges, from the pre-Afrofuturism of W. E. B. Du Bois to the second-wave feminism of James Tiptree Jr. — and beyond!
What you find within these pages may surprise you. It definitely surprised us.
Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944.
What Is the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction?
Even people who do not read science fiction have likely heard the term “the Golden Age of Science Fiction.” The actual Golden Age of Science Fiction lasted from about the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and is often conflated for general readers with the preceding Age of the Pulps (1920s to mid-1930s). The Age of the Pulps had been dominated by the editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback. Sometimes called the Father of Science Fiction, Gernsback was most famously photographed in an all-encompassing “Isolator” author helmet, attached to an oxygen tank and breathing apparatus.
The Golden Age dispensed with the Isolator, coinciding as it did with the proliferation of American science fiction magazines, the rise of the ultimately divisive editor John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction (such strict definitions and such a dupe for Dianetics!), and a proto-market for science fiction novels (which would only reach fruition in the 1950s). This period also saw the rise to dominance of authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, C. L. Moore, Robert Heinlein, and Alfred Bester. It fixed science fiction in the public imagination as having a “sense of wonder” and a “can-do” attitude about science and the universe, sometimes based more on the earnest, naïve covers than the actual content, which could be dark and complex.
But “the Golden Age” has come to mean something else as well. In his classic, oft-quoted book on science fiction, Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1984), the iconic anthologist and editor David Hartwell asserted that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” Hartwell, an influential gatekeeper in the field, was making a point about the arguments that “rage until the small of the morning” at science fiction conventions among “grown men and women” about that time when “every story in every magazine was a master work of daring, original thought.” The reason readers argue about whether the Golden Age occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, or 1970s, according to Hartwell, is because the true age of science fiction is the age at which the reader has no ability to tell good fiction from bad fiction, the excellent from the terrible, but instead absorbs and appreciates just the wonderful visions and exciting plots of the stories.
No other form of literature has been so relevant to our present yet been so filled with visionary and transcendent moments.
This is a strange assertion to make, one that seems to want to make excuses. It’s often repeated without much analysis of how such a brilliant anthology editor also credited with bringing literary heavyweights like Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to readers would want to (inadvertently?) apologize for science fiction while at the same time engaging in a sentimentality that seems at odds with the whole enterprise of truly speculative fiction. (Not to mention dissing twelve-year-olds!)
Perhaps one reason for Hartwell’s stance can be found in how science fiction in the United States, and to some extent in the United Kingdom, rose out of pulp magazine delivery systems seen as “low art.” A pronounced “cultural cringe” within science fiction often combines with the brutal truth that misfortunes of origin often plague literature, which can assign value based on how swanky a house looks from the outside rather than what’s inside. The new Kafka who next arises from cosmopolitan Prague is likely to be hailed a savior, but not so much the one who arises from, say, Crawfordville, Florida.
There is also something of a need to apologize for the ma-and-pop tradition exemplified by the pulps, with their amateurish and eccentric editors, who sometimes had little formal training and possessed as many eccentricities as freckles, and who came to dominate the American science fiction world early on. Sometimes an Isolator was the least of it.
Yet even with regard to the pulps, evidence suggests that these magazines at times entertained more sophisticated content than generally given credit for, so that in a sense an idea like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12” undermines the truth about such publications. It also renders invisible all of the complex science fiction being written outside of the pulp tradition.
Therefore, we humbly offer the assertion that contrary to popular belief and based on all of the evidence available to us . . . the actual Golden Age of Science Fiction is twenty-one, not twelve. The proof can be found in the contents of this anthology, where we have, as much as possible, looked at the totality of what we think of “science fiction,” without privileging the dominant mode, but also without discarding it. That which may seem overbearing or all of a type at first glance reveals its individuality and uniqueness when placed in a wider context. At third or fourth glance, you may even find that stories from completely diffrent traditions have commonalities and speak to each other in interesting ways.
Death of Curate, Henrique Alvim Correa. War Of The Worlds Illustrations, 1906
Building a Better Definition of “Science Fiction”
We evoked the names of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells at the beginning of this introduction for a very specific reason. All three are useful entry points or origin points for science fiction because they do not exist so far back in time as to make direct influence seem ethereal or attenuated, they are still known in the modern era, and because the issues they dealt with permeate what we call the “genre” of science fiction even today.
We hesitate to invoke the slippery and preternatural word influence, because influence appears and disappears and reappears, sidles in and has many mysterious ways. It can be as simple yet profound as reading a text as a child and forgetting it, only to have it well up from the subconscious years later, or it can be a clear and all-consuming passion. At best we can only say that someone cannot be influenced by something not yet written or, in some cases, not yet translated. Or that influence may occur not when a work is published but when the writer enters the popular imagination — for example, as Wells did through Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds (1938) or, to be silly for a second, Mary Shelley through the movie Young Frankenstein (1974).
For this reason even wider claims of influence on science fiction, like writer and editor Lester del Rey’s assertion that the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest written science fiction story, seem appropriative, beside the point, and an overreach for legitimacy more useful as a “tell” about the position of science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s in North America.
But we brought up our triumvirate because they represent different strands of science fiction. The earliest of these authors, Mary Shelley, and her Frankenstein (1818), ushered in a modern sensibility of ambivalence about the uses of technology and science while wedding the speculative to the horrific in a way reflected very early on in science fiction. The “mad scientist” trope runs rife through the pages of the science fiction pulps and even today in their modern equivalents. She also is an important figure for feminist SF.
Jules Verne, meanwhile, opened up lines of inquiry along more optimistic and hopeful lines. For all that Verne liked to create schematics and specific detail about his inventions — like the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) — he was a very happy puppy who used his talents in the service of scientific romanticism, not “hard science fiction.”
H. G. Wells’s fiction was also dubbed “scientific romanticism” during his lifetime, but his work existed somewhere between these two foci. His most useful trait as the godfather of modern science fiction is the granularity of his writing. Because his view of the world existed at an intersection of sociology, politics, and technology, Wells was able to create complex geopolitical and social contexts for his fiction — indeed, after he abandoned science fiction, Wells’s later novels were those of a social realist, dealing with societal injustice, among other topics. He was able to quantify and fully realize extrapolations about the future and explore the iniquities of modern industrialization in his fiction.
The impulse to directly react to how industrialization has affected our lives occurs very early on in science fiction — for example, in Karl Hans Strobl’s cautionary factory tale “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907) and even in the playful utopian visions of Paul Scheerbart, which often pushed back against bad elements of “modernization.” (For his optimism, Scheerbart perished in World War I, while Strobl’s “reward” was to fall for fascism and join the Nazi Party — in part, a kind of repudiation of the views expressed in “The Triumph . . .”)
W.E.B Du Bois in 1918
Social and political issues also peer out from science fiction from the start, and not just in Wells’s work. Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is a potent feminist utopian vision. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) isn’t just a story about an impending science-fictional catastrophe but also the start of a conversation about race relations and a proto-Afrofuturist tale. The previously untranslated Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City” (1918) presages the atrocities perpetrated by the communism of the Soviet Union and highlights the underlying absurdities of certain ideological positions. (It’s perhaps telling that these early examples do not come from the American pulp SF tradition.)
This kind of eclectic stance also suggests a simple yet effective definition for science fiction: it depicts the future, whether in a stylized or realistic manner. There is no other definitional barrier to identifying science fiction unless you are intent on defending some particular territory. Science fiction lives in the future, whether that future exists ten seconds from the Now or whether in a story someone builds a time machine a century from now in order to travel back into the past. It is science fiction whether the future is phantasmagorical and surreal or nailed down using the rivets and technical jargon of “hard science fiction.” A story is also science fiction whether the story in question is, in fact, extrapolation about the future or using the future to comment on the past or present.
Science fiction lives in the future, whether that future exists ten seconds from the Now or whether in a story someone builds a time machine a century from now in order to travel back into the past.
Thinking about science fiction in this way delinks the actual content or “experience” delivered by science fiction from the commodification of that genre by the marketplace. It does not privilege the dominant mode that originated with the pulps over other forms. But neither does it privilege those other manifestations over the dominant mode. Further, this definition eliminates or bypasses the idea of a “turf war” between genre and the mainstream, between commercial and literary, and invalidates the (weird ignorant snobbery of) tribalism that occurs on one side of the divide and the faux snobbery (ironically based on ignorance) that sometimes manifests on the other.
Wrote the brilliant editor Judith Merril in the seventh annual edition of The Year’s Best S-F (1963), out of frustration:
“But that’s not science fiction . . . !” Even my best friends (to invert a paraphrase) keep telling me: That’s not science fiction! Sometimes they mean it couldn’t be s-f, because it’s good. Sometimes it couldn’t be because it’s not about spaceships or time machines. (Religion or politics or psychology isn’t science fiction — is it?) Sometimes (because some of my best friends are s-f fans) they mean it’s not really science fiction — just fantasy or satire or something like that.
On the whole, I think I am very patient. I generally manage to explain again, just a little wearily, what the “S-F” in the title of this book means, and what science fiction is, and why the one contains the other, without being constrained by it. But it does strain my patience when the exclamation is compounded to mean, “Surely you don’t mean to use that? That’s not science fiction!” — about a first-rate piece of the honest thing.
Standing on either side of this debate is corrosive — detrimental to the study and celebration of science fiction; all it does is sidetrack discussion or analysis, which devolves into SF/not SF or intrinsically valuable/not valuable. And, for the general reader weary of anthologies prefaced by a series of “inside baseball” remarks, our definition hopefully lessens your future burden of reading these words.
Silvina Ocampo
Consider Another Grand Tradition: The Conte Philosophique
Inasmuch as we have put on our Isolator and already paid some tribute to the “dominant” strain of science fiction by briefly conjuring up the American pulp scene of the 1920s through 1940s, it is important before returning to that tradition to examine what the Loyal Opposition was up to in the first half of the twentieth century — and for this reason, it is important to turn our attention to an earlier form, the conte philosophique.
Conte philosophique translates as “philosophical story” or “fable of reason.” The contes philosophiques were used for centuries in the West by the likes of Voltaire, Johannes Kepler, and Francis Bacon as one legitimate way for scientists or philosophers to present their findings. The conte philosophique employs the fictional frame of an imaginary or dream journey to impart scientific or philosophical content. In a sense, the fantastical or science-fictional adventure became a mental laboratory in which to discuss findings or make an argument.
If we position some early science fiction as occurring outside of the American pulp tradition but also outside of traditions exemplified by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, what remains as influence is both extremely relevant to science fiction and also relevant to more dominant traditions.
Early twentieth-century science fiction like Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream,” Scheerbart’s utopian fables, or Alfred Jarry’s “Elements of Pataphysics” from his novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911; first published in English in the 1960s) makes infinitely more sense in this context. More importantly, these stories take their rightful place within the history of speculative literature. Instead of being considered outliers, they can be seen as the evolution of a grand tradition, one that inverts the usual ratio of the fictional to nonfictional found in a typical conte philosophique. It is a mode that certainly helps us better understand Jules Verne’s fiction. In many cases, Verne was taking his cue from the trappings of the conte philosophique — the fantastical adventure — and using that form as a vehicle for creating his entertainments.
The conte philosophique, with its non/fictional fusion, also creates a fascinating link to Jorge Luis Borges and his essay-stories from the 1940s. These stories often serve as a vehicle for metaphysical exploration. Indeed, Borges’s work can in this context be seen as the perfect expression of and reconciliation of the (pulpish) adventure fiction he loved and the intellectual underpinnings of his narratives, which rely in part on severe compression into tale (coal into diamonds) rather than traditional short story. Other Latin American examples include Silvina Ocampo’s “The Waves” (1959) and Alicia Yáñez Cossío’s “The IWM 1000” (1975). Even Stanisław Lem in his Star Diaries voyages of the 1960s and 1970s is reimagining the contes philosophiques — there is the actual voyage (exciting enough!) but it is once again a pure delivery system for ideas about the world.
Although this tradition is not as common in the pulps, “science fiction tales” like A. Merritt’s “The Last Poet and the Robots” (1935) and Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966) can be seen as a fusion of the “speculative fairy tale” and the conte philosophique, or simply a mutation of the conte philosophique, which was itself influenced by ancient myths of fantastical journeys. Ironically, some of these stories add in elements of “hard science fiction.” Interpreted charitably and not from a position espousing the superiority of the conte philosophique, this form infiltrates the pulps in the sense that the pulps showcase the physical actuality of the contes philosophiques — they are contes physiques into which can be reinjected or refed an abstract quality — “what/why/how/if?” And they can embody that quality or kind of inquiry as subtext. (Whereas on the mainstream side of the divide that subtext must manifest as metaphysics to be considered literature or be doomed in terms of approval — as would any non-character-based fiction.)
In this context, whether just as a thought experiment to turn the tables and challenge dominant modes of thinking, or as a subversive “real” metaphorical or metaphysical construct, we could then come to see American pulp space-travel fiction as a kind of devolution — a mistake in which the scaffolding (or booster rockets) used to deliver the point of a conte philosophique (the journey) is brought to the foreground and the idea or scientific hypothesis (the “what if”) is deemphasized or subtextual only. A case of throwing out the baby to glorify the bathwater?
Science fiction in the United States has often positioned itself as the “literature of ideas,” yet what is a literature of ideas if they can only be expressed through a select few “delivery systems”? Aren’t there ideas expressed in fiction that we can only see the true value of — good or bad, sophisticated or simple — if we admit that there are more than a few modes of expression with which to convey them? In examining the link between the conte philosophique and science fiction, we begin to grasp the outlines of the wider context: how many of these “alternative” approaches are — rather than being deformed or flat or somehow otherwise suspect as lesser modes — just different from the dominant model, not lesser, and as useful and relevant. (For example, where otherwise to fit Czechoslovakian writer Karel Čapek — both his 1920s robot plays and his gonzo novel War with the Newts from the 1930s?)
Just like our definition of science fiction, this way of thinking about science fiction works both from the “literary mainstream” looking in or from genre looking out. The reason it works is that the position or stance — the perspective or vantage taken — is from outside of either. And this is in a sense pure or uncontaminated by the subjective intent — colonizing or foundationally assumed superior — of either “mainstream” literary or genre.
In taking this position (on a mountaintop, from a plane, in a dirigible, from the moon, within a dream journey) much less is rendered invisible in general, and more “viable” science fiction can be recovered, uncovered, or discovered without being any less faithful about our core definition. Thus, too, in this anthology we have the actuality of exploration and the idea of it, because both thought and action expend energy and are both, in their separate ways, a form of motion.
Perhaps the reason the conte philosophique to date has been undervalued as an influence on science fiction is because of the “cultural cringe” of the dominant American form of science fiction, which has consistently positioned itself in relationship to the literary mainstream by accepting the literary mainstream’s adherence to the short story as needing to have three-dimensional, psychologically convincing characters to be valid. Even reactions against this position (pre-Humanist SF) have in essence been defining science fiction in relationship to the über-domination of the mainstream.
This is particularly ironic given that a fair amount of early science fiction fails at the task of creating three-dimensional characters (while displaying other virtues) and thus as the century progresses the self-punishment the science fiction genre parcels out to itself for not meeting a standard that is just one tradition within the mainstream looks increasingly odd, or even perverse, as are excuses like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” The genre would have been far better off taking up the cause of traditions like the conte philosophique to bypass mainstream approbation rather than continually recycling the Mesopotamian Defense or the Hawthorne Maneuver (“Canon fodder Nathaniel Hawthorne was the first science fiction/fantasy writer”) to create legitimacy or “proof of concept” on the mainstream’s terms.
Weird Tales, July 1944.
Further Exploration of the Pulp Tradition
Remember the Age of the Pulps and later Golden Age of Science Fiction (the 1920s to mid-1940s)? Collectively, this era successfully exported itself as a system of plots, tropes, story structures, and entanglements to either emulate or push back against. It was typified not so much by movements as by the hegemonies created by particular influential editors like H. L. Gold, the aforementioned Campbell, and Frederik Pohl (at Galaxy).
Many of these editors, trying to create an advantage in the marketplace, created their own fiefdom, defended borders, laid down ground rules for what science fiction was and what it wasn’t. In some cases, it might be argued they had to because no one yet knew exactly what it was, or because enthusiasts kept encountering new mutations. These rules in the cutthroat and still-stuffy world of freelance writing could affect content quite a bit — Theodore Sturgeon reportedly stopped writing for a time because of one editor’s rules. Writers could make a living writing for the science fiction magazines in an era with no competition from television or video games — and they could especially make a living if they obeyed the dictates of their editor-kings. These editorial tastes would come to define, even under new editors, the focus of magazines like Amazing Stories, even if editorial tastes are not sound or rational systems of thought. Still, they shape taste and canon as much or more so than stable systems or concrete movements — in part because the influence of editors often exists out of the public eye and thus is less subject to open debate.
Writers could make a living writing for the science fiction magazines in an era with no competition from television or video games.
In a few other cases, magazines like Weird Tales successfully forged identities by championing hybrid or new modes of fiction, to the point of becoming synonymous with the type of content they provided to readers. Dashing men in dashing machines having dashing adventures were not as prevalent in such magazines, nor in this Golden Age era. It was more likely that the dashing man might have a dashing accident and be dashed up on some malign alien world or be faced with some dashing Terrible Choice based on being dashed on the rocks of misfortune.
In fact, much written in the mode of purely optimistic fiction has not aged well — in part because it simplified the complexities of a very complex world and the universe beyond. For example, with each decade what we know about what it takes to travel in space makes it more and more unlikely that we will make it out of our own solar system. Even one of the foremost supporters of terraforming, Kim Stanley Robinson, admitted that such travel is highly improbable in a 2014 interview.
The other reason this brand of science fiction has mostly historical value is because the twentieth century included two world wars along with countless significant regional conflicts, the creation of the atom bomb, the spread of various viruses, ecological disaster, and pogroms in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Against such a growing tally, certain kinds of “gee-whiz” science fiction seem hopelessly out of date; we need escapism in our fiction because fiction is a form of play, but escapism becomes difficult to read when it renders invisible the march of history or becomes too disconnected from readers’ experience of science, technology, or world events. When you also throw in institutional racism in the United States, a subject thoroughly ignored by science fiction for a very long time, and other social issues dealt with skillfully by non-SF through the first five decades of the twentieth century, it perhaps makes sense that there is very little from the Golden Age of Science Fiction in this anthology. Our representative choices are ones where the predictive nature of the story or its sophistication stands up to the granularity of the present day.
It is also worth remembering that in the wider world of literature writers outside of science fiction were trying to grapple with the changing nature of reality and technological innovation. After World War I, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and others experimented with the nature of time and identity in ways that at times had a speculative feel to it. These were mainstream attempts to engage with science (physics) that only entered into the science fiction tradition as influence during the New Wave movement of the 1960s.
This modernist experimentation and other, more recent evidence suggests that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, science fiction is not uniquely suited to interrogate industrialization or modern tech — many nonspeculative stories and novels have done so quite well — so much as it doesn’t seem as if science fiction could exist or have arisen without the products and inventions particular to industrialization. The physicality of science fiction depends on it in a way that other kinds of fiction do not (for example, historical fiction). Although a spaceship may be more or less a focal point, for example — potentially as unobtrusive as a cab (a ride to a destination) — this is in truth rarely the case. Because spaceships don’t exist yet, at least not in the way they are rendered in science fiction, as a literalization of the future. Even the most “adventure pulp” stories of early science fiction had to take a position: celebrate the extrapolated future of industrialization and ever-more-advanced technology or bemoan it, speak in terms of splendors and a “sense of wonder” or strike at the ideology behind such thinking through dystopia and examination of excesses. (In such a context, science fiction cannot be seen as escapist or nonpolitical so much as conformist when it does not ask “Why this?” in addition to “What if?”)
Still, the pulp tradition as it matured was never as hackneyed or traditional or gee-whiz as it liked to think it was or as twelve-year-old readers fondly remember. It was not nearly as optimistic or crude as the covers that represented it and that science fiction outgrew. In part, this was due to the influx or infusion of a healthy dose of horror from near the start, via Weird Tales and its ilk. Magazines like Unknown also often published fusions of horror and science fiction, and as some of the author/story notes to early stories in this volume indicate, the “rise of the tentacle” associated with twentieth-century weird fiction (à la Lovecraft) first appeared in weird space operas by writers like Edmond Hamilton. Among stories from this period that have relevance, many have a depth derived from the darkness that drives them — a sense that the underpinnings of the universe are indeed more complex than we know. In short, cosmic horror has been around for longer than Lovecraft and has helped to sustain and lend depth to science fiction as well.
A Saucer of Loneliness: Volume VII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.
Post–World War II: How Science Fiction Grew All the Way Up the Walls of the World
Largely because it has no “movement” associated with it, the 1950s are sometimes seen as a transitional period, but Robert Silverberg rightly considered the 1950s the true Golden Age of Science Fiction. The full flowering of science fiction in the US and UK dates from this period, in part because opportunities through magazines, book publication, and anthologies proliferated and in part because new and more inclusive gatekeepers entered the field.
The fiction of such highly literate and sophisticated writers like Fritz Leiber (mostly in fantasy and horror), James Blish, and Frederik Pohl came into its own in the 1950s, not just because these writers were encouraged by a much more vital publishing environment but also because of their background with the Futurians, a science fiction club, which had nurtured interests across a wide range of topics, not just genre fiction.
Blish’s “Surface Tension” (1952) demonstrates the fruits of that sophistication in its exploration of fascinating ideas about terraforming humans. Philip K. Dick started to publish fiction in the early 1950s, too; in his very first story, “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952), he staked a claim to that hallucinatory, absurdist, antiestablishment space in which he would later write classics like Ubik (1969) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
Arthur C. Clarke had been a fixture of the Golden Age but transitioned into the 1950s with such classic, dark stories as “The Star”(1955), as did Robert Heinlein. Ray Bradbury continued to write brilliant fiction, coming off of his success with The Martian Chronicles, and Robert Silverberg was extremely prolific in the 1950s, although our choice for a reprint from him was published much later.
Several underrated writers published some of their best fiction, too, including James H. Schmitz, William Tenn, and Chad Oliver. Tom Godwin shook things up with his very long “The Cold Equations” (1954), a good story not included herein that would become an item of debate for Humanist SF writers, some of whom would try to replicate it. Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” (1953), a harsh satire of alien invasion inspired by the Korean War, was a touchstone for protesters during the Vietnam War and become a classic. Damon Knight began to establish his legacy with the unusual and strange alien contact story “Stranger Station” (1956). C. M. Kornbluth (another Futurian) published some of his best stories during this era, including “The Silly Season” (1950) and “The Marching Morons” (1951), although these tales have not dated well. Other notable writers from the era include Robert Sheckley, Avram Davidson, and Judith Merril (who would achieve lasting fame as an anthology editor).
In hindsight, though, perhaps the most unique and important science fiction writer of the 1950s was Cordwainer Smith, who published most of his science fiction in the mid-1950s. His unique tales set on a far-future Earth and the surrounding universe came out of seemingly nowhere and had no clear antecedent. In “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950) and the story included herein, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955), Smith revitalized space opera just as he remade so much else across an oeuvre as influenced by Jorge Luis Borges and Alfred Jarry as genre science fiction. Even today, Smith’s stories stand alone, as if they came from an alternate reality.
Almost equaling Smith in terms of being sui generis, Theodore Sturgeon brought a willfully literary sensibility to his fiction and an empathy that could at times manifest as sentimentality. But in his best work, like “The Man Who Lost the Sea” (1959), Sturgeon displayed a much-needed pathos to science fiction. Sturgeon was also unafraid to explore horror and to take on controversial topics, and with each new story he published that pushed a boundary, Sturgeon made it easier for others to follow.
Another interesting writer, James White, wrote about a galactic hospital in stories like “Sector General” (1957), which in their reliance on medical mysteries and situations pushed back against the standard conflict plots of the day. In White’s stories there are often no villains and sometimes no heroes, either. This allowed White to create fresh and different plots; one of his best hospital stories involves taking care of an alien child who manifests as a huge living boulder and who has vastly different feeding needs than human children. Neither Smith nor White was as popular as writers like Arthur C. Clarke, but their body of work stands out starkly from the surrounding landscape because it took such a different stance while still being relatable, entertaining, and modern.
The fifties also saw more space made for brilliant woman writers like Katherine MacLean, Margaret St. Clair, and Carol Emshwiller. What MacLean, St. Clair, and Emshwiller all shared in their fiction was a fascination with either speculative sociology or extremes of psychological reality, within a context of writing unique female characters and using story structures that often came from outside the pulp tradition. MacLean in particular championed sociology and so-called soft science, a distinction from “hard” science fiction that would have seemed fairly radical at the time. St. Clair, meanwhile, with her comprehensive knowledge of horror and fantasy fiction as well as science fiction, crafted stories that could be humorous, terrifying, and sharply thought-provoking all at once. In some of her best stories, we can also see an attempt to interrogate our relationship to the animal world. Together, these three writers not only paved the way for the feminist science fiction explosion of the 1970s, they effectively created room for more unusual storytelling.
Elsewhere in the world, Jorge Luis Borges was continuing to write fascinating, unique stories, and the tradition of the science fiction folktale or satire was used by Mexican writer Juan José Arreola to good effect in “Baby H.P.” and other flash fictions. Borges’s friend and fellow Argentine Silvina Ocampo even wrote science fiction, not a form of speculation she was known for, with “The Waves” (1959), translated into English herein for the first time. In France, Gérard Klein was just beginning to publish fiction, with early classic stories like “The Monster” (1958), his emergence presaging a boom in interesting French science fiction. And, even though Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (the Strugatsky brothers) wouldn’t achieve international fame until the 1970s, with the translation of Roadside Picnic (1979) and other books, they were publishing provocative and intelligent work like the alien-contact story “The Visitors” (1958) in the Soviet Union.
That there was no particular unifying mode or theme of science fiction in the 1950s is in some ways a relief and afforded freedom for a number of unique writers. Clearly, the way was clear for science fiction to climb even farther up the walls of the world.
But, in part, they would have to do it by tearing down what had come before.
The New Wave and the Rise of Feminist Science Fiction
The overriding story of science fiction in the 1960s would be the rise of the “New Wave,” largely championed at first by the UK magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, and then finding expression in the US through Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) anthologies.
New Wave fiction had many permutations and artistic ideologies associated with it, but at its core it was often formally experimental and sought to bring mainstream literary technique and seriousness to science fiction. In effect, the New Wave wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible while also embodying, in many cases, the counterculture of the 1960s. New Wave fiction tended to be antiestablishment and to look with a cold eye upon the Golden Age and the pulps. Sometimes, too, it turned that cold eye on the 1950s, with New Wave writers finding much of what had gone before too safe.
But this opposition was sometimes forced on the New Wave by its detractors. For the average science fiction writer raised within the tradition of the pulps and existing within an era of plenty in the 1950s, especially with regard to the American book market, it must have been a rude awakening for writers from across the pond to suddenly be calling into question everything about their ecosystem, even if just by implication. The essential opposition also occurred because even though the 1950s had featured breakthroughs for many new voices, it had also solidified the hold upon the collective imagination of many Golden Age icons.
Further, the New Wave writers had been either reading a fundamentally different set of texts or interpreting them far differently — such that the common meeting ground between New Wave and not–New Wave could be like first contact with aliens. Neither group spoke the other’s language or knew all of its customs. Even those who should have made common cause or found common understandings, like Frederik Pohl and James Blish, found themselves in opposition to the New Wave.
In the event, however, the New Wave — whether writers and editors opposed it or lived within it and used it to create interesting work — would prove the single most influential movement within science fiction, with the concurrent and later rise of feminist science fiction a close second (and in some cases closely tied to the New Wave).
Out of the New Wave came countless writers now unjustly forgotten, like Langdon Jones, Barrington Bayley (both reprinted herein), and John Sladek, but also giants of literature, starting with Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard, and including M. John Harrison and Brian Aldiss (actually from an earlier generation, but a hothouse party-crasher). Subversive publishers in the UK like Savoy fanned the flames.
These writers were helped in their ascendency by the continued popularity of writers from outside of genre fiction whose work existed in sympathy to the New Wave, like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and William S. Burroughs, and those within genre who were sympathetic and winning multiple Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards, like Harlan Ellison. Ellison’s own work fit the New Wave aesthetic to a T and his dual devotion to championing edgy work by both new and established writers in his anthologies created an undeniable New Wave beachhead in North America. American writers like Thomas Disch and Philip José Farmer received a clear boost to their careers because of the existence of the New Wave. Others, like Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman, more or less wandered into the verdant (if also sometimes disaster-clogged) meadows of the New Wave by accident — having always done their own thing — and then wandered out again, neither better nor worse off. Unique eccentricists like David R. Bunch, whose Moderan stories only seem more prescient every day, could not have published their work at all if not for the largesse of daring editors and the aegis of the New Wave. (It is worth pointing out that his Moderan stories in this volume are the first reprints allowed in over two decades.)
As or more important was the emergence of Samuel R. Delany as a major voice in the field, and the emergence of that voice linked to New Wave fiction with bold, unusual stories like “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967). Delany just about matched Ellison Nebula Award for Nebula Award during this period and not only led by example in terms of producing sophisticated speculative fiction that featured diverse characters but also was, quite frankly, one of the only African-American or even nonwhite writers in the field for a very long time. Although the huge success of bestsellers like Dhalgren (1975) helped prolong the New Wave’s moment and furthered the cause of mature (and experimental) fiction within science fiction, it did not seem to help bring representative diversity with it.
Indeed, by 1972, Terry Carr wrote in his introduction to volume 1 of The Best Science Fiction of the Year,
By now the ‘new wave’ as such has come and gone; those stories that could stand on their merits have . . . These writers realize a truth basic to all art[:] Innovations are positive to the extent that they open doors, and an avant garde which seems to destroy rather than build will only destroy itself all the faster . . . Personally, I thought most of the work produced during the height of the ‘new wave’ was just as bad as bad science fiction has always been; if there has been an effective difference to me, it was only that I sometimes had to read a story more carefully to discover I disliked it.
Terry Carr was a good and influential editor (who grew with the times), but wrong in this case, although it seems unlikely anyone could have understood how fundamentally the New Wave had changed the landscape. Despite a certain amount of retrenchment after the mid-1970s — at least in part because of the huge influence of Hollywood SF, like Star Wars, on the genre as a whole — New Wave fiction had enduring effects and created giants of culture and pop culture like J. G. Ballard (the most cited author on a variety of tech and societal topics since the 1970s).
And, in fact, Carr was also wrong because the New Wave overlapped with another significant development, the rise of feminist science fiction, so the revolution was not in fact over. In some ways it was just beginning — and there was much work to do. In addition to conflict in society in general over the issues of women’s rights, the book culture had decided to cynically cater to misogynistic tendencies in readers by publishing whole lines of paperback fiction devoted to novels demonstrating how “women’s lib” would lead to future dystopias.
If it feels like a bit of a misnomer to call this “rise” the “ascendency” of “feminist” SF, it is because to do so creates the danger of simplifying a complex situation. Not only did the fight to create more space for stories with positive and proactive women characters in science fiction need to be refought several times, but the arguments and the energy/impulse involved in “feminist” SF were also about representation: about creating a space for women writers, no matter what they wrote. And they were further complicated by the fact that identification of an author with “feminism” (just as identification with “New Wave”) can create a narrowed focus in how readers encounter and explore that writer’s work. Nor, largely, would this first focus on feminist science fiction address intersectional issues of race or of gender fluidity. (It is worth noting that in the milieu traversed by American surrealists of the 1960s and 1970s, a territory that existed parallel to science fiction, intersectionality appears to have been more central much earlier.)
Kingsley Amis had pointed out in New Maps of Hell (1960), his influential book on science fiction published on the cusp of the New Wave, that “though it may go against the grain to admit it, [male] science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo.” This written in a context where few examples of complex or interesting women characters written by men seemed to exist, beyond a few stories by Theodore Sturgeon and John Wyndham (another one-off, marginally associated with the New Wave but, understandably and blissfully, enthralled by plants, fungi, lichen).
By the 1970s, writers like Joanna Russ were giving bold and explicit voice to the cause of science fiction by featuring women. Russ accused science fiction, in her essay “The Image of Women in SF” (1970), of “a failure of imagination and ‘social speculation,’” making the argument that the paucity of complex female characters derived from accepting societal prejudices and stereotypes without thought or analysis. This echoed sentiments about clichés and stereotypes later expressed by Delany with regard to race.
Feminist writers were concerned in part about the peculiar and unuseful way in which writers had for so long literalized archetypes, making women stand-ins and not individualized: Madonna/Whore, Mother Earth, etc. As the forever amazing and incisive Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her essay “American SF and the Other” (1975), “The women’s movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters — or old-maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs — or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes.”
The irony of having to push back against misogynistic portrayals in science fiction should not be lost on anyone. Within a tradition of “what if,” a tradition not of realism but of supposedly dreaming true and of expressing the purest forms of the imagination, science fiction had still chosen in many cases to relegate women to second- or third-rate status. In such an atmosphere, without a revolution, how could anyone, male or female or gender-fluid, see clearly a future in which such prejudices did not exist?
In such an atmosphere, without a revolution, how could anyone, male or female or gender-fluid, see clearly a future in which such prejudices did not exist?
Therefore the rise of feminist SF was about the rise of unique, influential voices whose work could be overtly feminist but was not of interest solely for that reason. Writers like James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Russ, Josephine Saxton, Le Guin, and others were in some cases core New Wavers or were writing corrections of Golden Era simplifications, much as Delany sometimes did, and in other cases bringing sociology, anthropology, ecological issues, and more to the fore in a way that hadn’t yet been seen. Rather than being narrow in focus, this fiction opened up the world — and did so from within an American and British science fiction community that was at times resistant.
Destination: Amaltheia, 1960.
The Important Role of International Fiction
Sometimes it is useful to take a step back and examine the frenzy of enthusiasm about a particular era from a different perspective. While the New Wave and feminist science fiction were playing out largely in the Anglo world, the international scene was creating its own narrative. This narrative was not always so different from the Anglo one, in that in regions like Latin America women writers generally had to work twice as hard to achieve the same status as their male counterparts. For this reason, even today there are still women writers of speculative fiction being translated into English for the first time who first published work in the 1950s through 1970s. These roadblocks should not be underestimated, and future anthologists should make it a mission to discover and promote amazing work that may at this time be invisible to us.
Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, and Damon Knight, all three excellent writers, were at least as influential in putting on their editor hats and were particularly useful in bringing new, international voices into the English-language science fiction field. These gatekeepers and others, including the ubiquitous David Hartwell, were sympathetic to international science fiction, and as a result from the 1950s through the 1980s in particular stories in translation appeared with more frequency. (It is worth noting, though, that in many cases what was translated had to conform to Anglo ideas about what had value in the marketplace.)
“International” science fiction may be a meaningless term because it both exoticizes and generalizes what should be normalized and then discussed in specifics country by country. But it is important to understand the overlay of non-Anglo fiction occurring at the same time as generally UK/US phenomena such as the New Wave and the rise of feminist SF — even if we can only focus on a few stories given the constraints of our anthology. For example, by the 1960s the Japanese science fiction scene had become strange and vital and energetic, as exemplified by work from Yoshio Aramaki and Yasutaka Tsutsui, but also so many other talented writers.
Although it wouldn’t be clear until the publication of a score of English-language Macmillan Soviet science fiction anthologies and novels in the 1980s — many of them championed by Theodore Sturgeon and the Strugatsky brothers — Russian and Ukrainian science fiction came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1960 to the mid-1970s, a number of writers little known in the West published fascinating and complex science fiction — some of it retranslated for this volume.
For example, Valentina Zhuravlyova published “The Astronaut” (1960), which managed to escape being an advertisement for the Soviet space program by virtue of its intricate structure and commitment to the pathos of its space mission emergency. The fairly prolific Dmitri Bilenkin, who would appear in several English translations, wrote “Where Two Paths Cross,” an ecological contact story still unique and relevant today. With its alien collective, the story could be said to comment on the communist situation. Perhaps the most unlikely Russian writer of the time was Vadim Shefner, whose graceful fiction, with its deceptive lightness of touch, finds its greatest expression in “A Modest Genius” (1963). How this subversive and wise delicacy evaded the Soviet censors is a mystery, but readers everywhere should be glad it did.
The best Soviet short-story writer of the era, however, was Sever Gansovsky, who wrote several powerful stories that could have been included in this anthology. Our choice, “Day of Wrath” (1964), updates the Wellsian “Dr. Moreau” trope while being completely original. Gansovsky was not as visionary as the Strugatsky brothers, whose Roadside Picnic would dominate discussion in the US and UK, but there is in his directness, clarity, grit, and sophistication much that compensates for that lack.
Many examples of Latin American science fiction from the 1960s and 1970s are yet to appear in English, so the complete picture of that time period is unclear. We know that Borges and Ocampo were still publishing fiction that was speculative in nature, as was another major Argentine writer, Angélica Gorodischer. Adolfo Bioy Casares published occasional science fiction, such as “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink” (1962), retranslated for this volume. The giant of Brazilian SF André Carneiro published his most famous story, “Darkness,” in 1965, a tale that stands comfortably alongside the best science fiction of the era. Alicia Yáñez Cossío’s “The IWM 1000” (1975) is another great example of Latin American SF from the period.
Yet, as noted, our sample as readers in English is still not large enough to draw general conclusions. All we can say is that in this volume you will find both synergy with and divergence from 1960s and 1970s Anglo SF that adds immeasurable value to the conversation about science fiction.
Art from the cover of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed
Cyberpunk, Humanism, and What Lay Beyond
The New Wave and the rise of feminist SF would always be a difficult epoch to follow because such giants strode the Earth and expressed themselves willfully and with intelligent intent during that era. But the two movements most associated with the 1980s and 1990s, cyberpunk and Humanism, would in their own ways be both quietly and not-so-quietly influential.
Cyberpunk as a term was popularized by editor Gardner Dozois, although first coined by Bruce Bethke in 1980 in his story “Cyberpunk,” subsequently published in a 1983 issue of Amazing Stories. Bruce Sterling then became the main architect of a blueprint for cyberpunk with his columns in his fanzine Cheap Truth. William Gibson’s stories appearing in Omni in the mid-1980s, including “Burning Chrome” and “New Rose Hotel” (reprinted herein), and his novel Neuromancer (1984) fixed the term in readers’ imaginations. The Sterling-edited Mirrorshades anthology (1986) provided a flagship.
Cyberpunk usually fused noir tropes or interior design with dark tales of near-future technology in a context of weak governments and sinister corporations, achieving a new granularity in conveying elements of the Information Age. Trace elements of the recent punk movement in music were brought to the mix by writers such as John Shirley.
Just as some New Wave and feminist SF authors, like Delany and Tiptree, had tried to portray a “realer” realism relative to traditional Golden Age science fiction elements or tropes, cyberpunk often tried to better show advances in computer technology and could be seen as naturally extending a Philip K. Dickian vision of the future, with themes of paranoia and vast conspiracies. The brilliant John Brunner’s TheShockwave Rider (1975) is sometimes also mentioned as a predecessor. (The Humanist equivalent would be Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.)
Writers such as Rudy Rucker, Marc Laidlaw, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan published significant cyberpunk stories or novels, with Cadigan later editing The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002), which contextualized cyberpunk within earlier influences (not always successfully) and also showcased post-cyberpunk works.
“Humanist SF” at times seemed to just be a call for three-dimensional characters in science fiction, with feminism added on top, sometimes with an emphasis on the so-called soft sciences, such as sociology. But Carol McGuirk makes an interesting point in an essay in Fiction 2000 (1992) when she notes that the “soft science fiction” that predominated in the 1950s (remember MacLean?) strongly influenced the New Wave, cyberpunk, and Humanist SF, which she claims all arose, in part, out of this impulse. The difference is that whereas New Wave and cyberpunk fiction arose out of a starker, darker impulse (including the contes cruels) replete with dystopian settings, Humanist SF grew out of another strand in which human beings are front and center, with technology subservient, optimistically, to a human element. (Brothers and sisters often fight, and that seems to be the case here.)
Practitioners of Humanist SF (sometimes also identified as Slipstream — ironically enough, a term coined by Sterling) include James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, Michael Bishop (a stalwart hybrid who at times partook of the New Wave), and Nancy Kress, with Karen Joy Fowler’s work exhibiting some of the same attributes but too various to be pigeonholed or in any sense to be said to have done anything but flown the coop into rarefied and iconic realms. (The gonzo fringe of the impulse was best expressed by Paul Di Filippo, who would go so far as to pose naked for one book cover.)
Humanism was initially seen as in opposition to cyberpunk, but in fact both factions “grew up” rather quickly and produced unique work that defied labels. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the perceived conflict was that cyberpunk seemed to revel in its science fiction origins without particularly caring what the mainstream thought, perhaps because they had access to a wider audience through pop culture; see: Wired magazine. Humanists on the other hand generally identified with core genre but wanted to reach beyond it to mainstream readers and convince them of science fiction’s literary worth. Interestingly enough, the cause of Humanist SF would be championed either directly or indirectly by the legendary Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, whose Clarion and Sycamore Hill (for more advanced writers) writers’ workshops tended to be of most use for those kinds of writers.
Critics of both “movements” argued that cyberpunk and Humanism were retrenchments or conservative acts after the radicalism of the New Wave of the 1960s and the rise of feminist SF in the 1970s — cyberpunk because it fetishized technology and deemphasized the role of governments even while critical of corporations. Readers from within the computer industry pointed to Gibson’s lack of knowledge about hacker culture in writing Neuromancer and suggested flaws in his vision were created by this lack. A fair amount of cyberpunk also promoted a more traditional idea of gender roles (imported from noir fiction) while providing less space for women authors.
Yet around the same time in Argentina Angélica Gorodischer was publishing such incendiary feminist material as “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985), and in the US one sui generis writer whose work pushed back against some of these ideas was Misha Nogha, whose Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist Red Spider White Web (1990; excerpted herein) portrays a nightmarish future in which artists are commodified but also exist in life-threatening conditions. Technology is definitely not fetishized and the hierarchies of power eventuate from every direction. The novel also features a unique and strong female main character who defies the gender stereotypes of the time. In this sense, Nogha’s groundbreaking novel pointed the way toward a more feminist vision of cyberpunk.
The criticism leveled against Humanism, meanwhile, was that it gentrified both the New Wave and feminist impulses by applying middle-of-the-road and middle-class values. (The more radicalized third-wave feminism science fiction of the current era fits more comfortably with New Wave and 1970s feminism despite not always being quite as experimental.) Yet, whatever the truth, what actually happened is that the best Humanist writers matured and evolved over time or had only happened to be passing through on their way to someplace else.
From Arrival (2016), adapted from a story by Ted Chiang
Arguably the most influential science fiction writers to come out of the 1980s and 1990s were Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Ted Chiang. In far different ways they would change the landscape of popular culture and how readers thought about technology, race, gender, and the environment. Ted Chiang’s influence exists mainly within the genre, but this may change due to forthcoming movie adaptations of his work. Karen Joy Fowler would begin to exert a similar influence via her nonspeculative novels like We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), which deals with the issue of animal intelligence and our relationship to that intelligence.
Fowler’s example provides some inkling of how such prominence occurs: by having ideas or fiction that breaks out beyond core genre. Although Gibson and Sterling could be said to have founded cyberpunk, for example, it is their writings, both fiction and nonfiction, beyond the initial cyberpunk era that have the most relevance, as they have broadened and sharpened their interrogations of modern society and the technology age.
Butler has undergone a resurgence in popularity and influence because her themes resonate with a new generation of writers and readers who value diversity and who are interested in postcolonial explorations of race, gender, and social issues. (And because she wrote wonderful, unique, complex science fiction unlike anyone in the field.) It is only Robinson who has achieved breakout influence and status while writing from within genre, forcing readers to come to him with a series of groundbreaking science fiction novels that are often referenced in the context of climate change. (Only Paolo Bacigalupi has come to close to being as influential since.)
However, cyberpunk and Humanism were not the only significant impulses in science fiction during this period. Other types of inquiry existed outside of the Anglo world during this period and extending into the twenty-first century. For example, a significant window for Chinese science fiction in the early 1980s (closed shut by regime change) gave readers such interesting stories as “The Mirror Image of the Earth” by Zheng Wenguang and others collected in Science Fiction from China, edited by Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy (1989; with an introduction by the indefatigable Frederik Pohl). Other remarkable Chinese writers, like Han Song, created enduring fiction that either had no real Western antecedent or “cooked” it into something unique — and eventually Liu Cixin would break through with the Hugo Award–winning novel The Three-Body Problem (2014), both a critical and a commercial success. His novella “The Poetry Cloud” (1997), included in this volume, is a stunning tour de force that assimilates many different strands of science fiction and, in a joyful and energetic way, rejuvenates them.. It in effect renders much of contemporary science fiction obsolete.
In Finland, Leena Krohn, one of her country’s most respected and decorated fiction writers, spent the 1980s and 1990s (and up to the present day) creating a series of fascinating speculative works, including Tainaron (1985), Pereat Mundus (1998), and Mathematical Creatures, or Shared Dreams (1992), from which we have reprinted “Gorgonoids.” Johanna Sinisalo has also been a creative powerhouse, and her Nebula Award finalist “Baby Doll” is included herein. Other fascinating Finnish writers include Anne Leinonen, Tiina Raevaara, Hannu Rajaniemi, Viivi Hyvönen, and Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen.
Other science fiction in the wider world includes Kojo Laing’s “Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ” (1992), which is not an outlier for this speculative fiction writer from Ghana, and Tatyana Tolstaya’s “The Slynx.” Both are highly original and not atypical examples of a growing number of fascinating voices from places outside of the Anglo hegemony.
Although not always thought of in a science fiction context so much as a dystopia one (The Handmaid’s Tale), Canadian Margaret Atwood contributed to the conversation with her MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–2013), which still holds up today as perhaps the single most significant and useful exploration of near-future ecological catastrophe and renewal. The significance of these novels in terms of mainstream acceptance of science fiction cannot be understated. Although science fiction had already conquered popular culture, without Atwood’s example the current trend of science fiction being published by mainstream literary imprints would be unlikely. This type of positioning also helps gain a wider, more varied readership for science fiction generally and accelerates the cultural influence of this kind of fiction.
The growing diversity in the twenty-first century of the science fiction community, combined with the influx of international science fiction and the growing acceptance of science fiction within the mainstream literary world, promises to create a dynamic, vibrant, and cosmopolitan space for science fiction literature in the decades to come.
Organizing Principles for This Anthology
In compiling The Big Book of Science Fiction, we have thought carefully about what it means to present to the reader a century’s worth of short stories, from roughly 1900 to 2000, with some outliers. Our approach has been to think of this anthology as providing a space to be representative and accurate but also revelatory — to balance showcasing core genre fiction with a desire to show not just outliers, but “outliers” that we actually feel are more central to science fiction than previously thought. It has also seemed imperative to bring international fiction into the fold; without that element, any survey of an impulse or genre of fiction will seem narrow, more provincial and less cosmopolitan.
Particular guidelines or thought processes include:
• Avoiding the Great Certainty (interrogate the classics/canon)
• Meticulous testing of previous anthologies of this type
• Identifying and rejecting pastiche previously presented as canon
• Overthrowing the tyranny of typecasting (include writers not known for their science fiction but who wrote superb science fiction stories)
• Repairing the pointless rift (pay no attention to the genre versus literary origins of a story)
• Repatriating the fringe with the core (acknowledge the role of cult authors and more experimental texts)
• Crafting more complete genealogies (acknowledge the debt from surrealism and other sources outside of core genre)
• Articulating the full expanse (as noted, explore permutations of science fiction from outside of the Anglo world, making works visible through translation)
We also have wanted to represent as many different types of science fiction as possible, including hard science fiction, soft (social) science fiction, space opera, alternative history, apocalyptic stories, tales of alien encounters, near-future dystopia, satirical stories, and a host of other modes.
Within this general context, we have been less concerned about making sure to include certain authors than we have about trying to give accurate overviews of certain eras, impulses, and movements. For this reason, most readers will no doubt discover a favorite story or author has been omitted . . . but also come across new discoveries and new favorites previously unknown to them.
We have also weighed historical significance against readability in the modern era, with the guiding principle that most people picking up this anthology will be general readers, not academics. For this reason, too, we have endeavored to include humorous stories, which are a rich and deep part of the science fiction tradition and help to balance out the preponderance of dystopias depicted in many of the serious stories. Joke stories, on the other hand, and most twist stories have been omitted as too self-referential, especially stories that rely too heavily on referring to science fiction fandom or core genre.
Because ecological and environmental issues have become increasingly urgent, if given the choice of two equally good stories by the same author, we have also chosen to favor stories featuring those themes. (For example, our selection from Ursula K. Le Guin.) One regret is not being able to include fiction by John Brunner, Frank Herbert, and other giants in the field whose novels are arguably much more robust and vital on this topic than their short fiction.
In considering the broadness of our definition of science fiction, we have had to set limits. Most steampunk seems to us to have more in common with fantasy than science fiction, and stories of the very far future in which science is indistinguishable from magic also seem to us to belong to the fantastical. For this latter reason, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories, and their ilk, will fall within the remit of a future anthology.
In considering international fiction we have chosen (after hard-won prior experience) to take the path of least resistance. For example, we had more access to and better intel about Soviet-era and certain strands of Latin American science fiction than some other traditions. It therefore seemed more valuable to present relatively complete “through-lines” of those traditions than to try to provide one representative story for as many countries as possible. In addition, given our access to international fiction and a choice between equally good stories (often with similar themes) set in a particular country, one by an author from that country and one by an author from the US or UK, we have chosen to use the story by the author from the country in question.
With regard to translations, we followed two rules: to be fearless about including stories not previously published in English (if deemed of high quality) and to retranslate stories already translated into English if the existing translation was more than twenty-five years old or if we believed the existing translation contained errors.
The new translations (works never before published in English) included in this anthology are Paul Scheerbart’s “The New Overworld” (1907), Hanz Strobel’s “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907), Yefim Zozulya’s “Doom of Principal City” (1918), Silvina Ocampo’s “The Waves” (1959), Angélica Gorodischer’s “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985), Jacques Barbéri’s “Mondocane” (1983), and Han Song’s “Two Small Birds” (1988).
The retranslated stories are Miguel de Unamuno’s “Mechanopolis” (1913), Juan José Arreola’s “Baby H.P.” (1952), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “The Visitors” (1958), Valentina Zhuravlyova’s “The Astronaut” (1960), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink” (1962), Sever Gansovsky’s “Day of Wrath” (1965), and Dmitri Bilenkin’s “Where Two Paths Cross” (1973).
In contextualizing all of this material we realized that no introduction could truly convey the depth and breadth of a century of science fiction. For this reason, we made the strategic decision to include expanded author notes, which also include information on each story. These notes sometimes convey biographical data and in other cases form miniature essays to provide general context. Sometimes these notes quote other writers or critics to provide firsthand recollections. In researching these author notes, we are very fortunate to have had access, in a synergistic way, to the best existing source about certain writers, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — with the blessing of its founders, John Clute, Peter Nicholls, and David Langford. Entries containing information from the encyclopedia as their nucleus are noted in the permissions acknowledgments (pages 000–000).
Finally, as ever, certain stories could not be acquired for this anthology — or for anyone’s anthology due to the stance of the estates in question. The following stories should be considered an extension of this anthology: A. E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shop” (1942), Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies — ” (1959), and Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” (1966). In addition, for reasons of space we have been unable to include E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), an excerpt from Gustave Le Rouge’s strange novel about a mission to a Mars inhabited by vampires (1909), and an excerpt from Doris Lessing’s 1970s science fiction novels.
If we have brought any particular value to the task of editing this anthology — and we will let others debate that question — it lies in three areas: 1) we love all kinds of fiction, in all of its many forms, and all kinds of science fiction; 2) we have built up an extensive (and still-growing) network of international literary contacts that allowed us to acquire unique content; and 3) we did not approach the task from the center of genre, which is where most editors of these kinds of anthologies have come from. We belong to no clique or group within the science fiction community and have no particular affiliation with nor disinclination to consider any writer in the field, living or dead.
That said, we are also not coming to the task from the sometimes too elevated height of mainstream literary editors with no connection to their speculative subject matter. We do not care about making a case for the legitimacy of science fiction; the ignorance of those who don’t value science fiction is their own affliction and problem (as is the ignorance of those who claim science fiction is the be-all and end-all).
Throughout our three-year journey of discovery for this project, we have also had to reconcile ourselves to what we call Regret Over Taxonomy (exclusion is inevitable but not a cause for relief or happiness) and Acknowledgment of the Inherent Imperfection of the Results. However, the corollary to this latter recognition is to never accept or resign oneself to the inherent imperfection of the results.
Now we hope you will put aside this overlong introduction and simply immerse yourself in the science-fictional wonders here assembled. For they are many, and they are indeed wondrous and startling and, at times, darkly beautiful.
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