Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?
--from Manifesto of Futurism by F.T. Marinetti (1909)
It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. [. . .] Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations--impossible 100 years ago--are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.
Science fiction: the work of the new romancers!
And could there be this equation as a result:
New romancer ≈ Neuromancer
Is that where William Gibson got the title for his seminal cyberpunk novel first published in 1984?
The operative word in science fiction is science. It would seem in opposition to romance, and yet science fiction began as a kind of romance. Long before the term scientific romance was applied to stories of this type, what we can call proto-science fiction was the work of artists with a romantic (and conservative) cast. Hugo Gernsback wrote:
Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of "scientifiction." It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread. [Boldface added.]
Gernsback included "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Although Poe's story is proto-science-fictional, it is more nearly a weird tale or horror story. Today we might split genres even more finely and call it a tale of body horror. (The narrator's description of Valdemar's bodily plight reads like the details of a post-mortem medical examination.) But then it was written before there were pulp genres, and so it slides easily from one genre to another along a continuum. In other words, it crosses the boundaries that were constructed only after the twentieth century began, just as the mesmerized Valdemar crosses boundaries between life and death.
Speaking of genres and sub-genres, cyberpunk is supposed to have been a successor to the British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s. The leading New Wave magazine was of course New Worlds, the plural of the new world identified by Hugo Gernsback in his manifesto in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Note the roots of later magazine titles, too: Wonder and Fantastic. Also note that the mathematical symbol that lies between the two expressions shown above, and that signifies their relationship, looks like waves on the ocean. New waves would seem to have thrown cyberpunk upon the shores of science fiction like Odysseus washed up in Scheria, from which seagoing ships of unsurpassed speed sail forth. The Italian Futurists sought speed--the speed of the automobile, "a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot." In science fiction, there is the speed of super-light-speed tachyons, of rocketships driven by anti-acceleration, the warp speed of starships, and the instantaneous speed of psychic communications, jaunting, subspace radio, and the real-world force of gravitation, which bends light and allows travel through time by way of the trusty slingshot effect. The inhabitants of Scheria are the Phaeacians. Like Slans and the other superior men of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, they possess psychic powers--or else their ships do, for their ships understand what they are thinking and know where they want to go. Are they alive? Or is some strange and mysterious science or technology at work here? How have the Phaeacians built machines of such wonder that they can read their minds and respond to their wishes? The Phaeacians must surely be among the first science-fictional people in our literature. Their science is so fantastic that it would seem indistinguishable from magic.
The Italian Futurists issued their manifesto in 1909, at the outset of a century of speed and violence and aggression. Their emphasis was on newness, youth, and the destruction of the past and of all old things. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback offered his own much gentler manifesto in the introductory pages of Amazing Stories. He emphasized newness, too, even if he turned to the works of the past to fill his pages. But there was speed in his magazine as well, exemplified in H.G. Wells' story "The New Accelerator," from 1901. That inaugural issue closes, however, with "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a Gothic tale of death and decay, one told in extremis. It is slow rather than fast, decadent rather than ascendant, focused on ultimate limits and the failings of life and the human body rather than on limitless futures. Unlike the Phaeacians and their ships, the "science" of mesmerism, in operation between two minds and two wills in Poe's tale, is unequal to the task. The whole thing breaks down, ending with a quite literal breakdown in the subject's body. There is no superior man, nor any superior science here. There is only the descent of the weird-fictional character into the most gruesome of endings. Ironically, Valdemar's name is a compound of "power" and "fame."
To be continued . . .
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
No comments:
Post a Comment