I read a long time ago an essay about American literature and how many stories and novels begin with a character arriving on a train. An example given in that essay is Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron (1951). In the first episode of Dark Shadows (1966), Victoria Winters, played by Alexandra Moltke, travels to Collinsport by train. The former is considered a Southern Gothic novel. The latter was part of a Gothic revival in popular culture during the 1960s and '70s. The title Lie Down in Darkness sounds like it could be a vampire story. Dark Shadows becomes a vampire story.
Railroad stories are or tend to be Romantic (or Gothic), even if they rely on technology in order to get the story literally moving. A possible explanation: railroad trains originated in the first half of the nineteenth century, in fact during the Romantic Era (or Gothic Revival period) and before science and technology took over Western thought and culture. (Old railroad trains look like Gothic monsters and railroad stations like Gothic churches and cathedrals.) There are or must be science fiction stories that take place on trains, but it's hard to think of any. If John Frankenheimer's film The Manchurian Candidate is part science fiction (or low science fiction--see below), it has a sequence set on a train, but that sequence is not science-fictional. It's actually the beginning of a romance. The film Horror Express, from 1972, blends science fiction with the horror, monster, and weird fiction genres. If this movie is science fiction, it's a Gothic kind of science fiction, as monster stories tend to be. (I'm against genrification, but I might be in favor of considering monster stories as their own separate genre or sub-genre.) "Take the Z Train" by Allison V. Harding (Weird Tales, Mar. 1950) leaps to mind as an example of a weird-fictional tale set on a train. "The Return of Paul Slavsky" by Captain George Warburton Lewis (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923) is another, and a good, though minor one. There are many, many more Romantic or Gothic stories--genre and non-genre stories alike--that involve train travel. We could start making a list. We might finish around the end of next year.
Another possible explanation: a story set on a train is like one set on board a ship, and that makes it a Romance, for ships predate science, and there is a romance of the sea.* There was even a Baby Boomer TV show made by this equation: Romance + Ship = The Love Boat. Stories set on fast, high-technology-type conveyances can be Romances, too, but not necessarily.
Once they enter the realms of fantasy, airplane stories and car stories are more often science-fictional than horror-, Gothic-, or weird-fictional, although they may include horror, Gothic, and weird elements, too. A perfect example is "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" by Richard Matheson, adapted to an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963. It's a monster story and a story of psychological horror and modern anxiety, but it can also be seen as a kind of science fiction story in that it's about a creature of the air that lives by damaging and destroying technological works. (He must be one of the gremlins of the World War II years. AMC named one of its cars of the 1970s after his relatives.) The Twilight Zone was hosted by Rod Serling. His older brother, Robert J. Serling, who worked in aviation, wrote a novel called The President's Plane Is Missing (1967). The older Serling's novel is a thriller, but it's also a story set on the day after tomorrow, in other words, it is a speculative or alternative future history, or a near-future history. Does that make it science-fictional?
A couple of years ago, I wrote about planes and trains in an entry called "Weird Webs and Sci-Fi Lines." In particular, I made a point that if Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air (2001) had been written in 1960 about air travel in 2001, it would have been a science fiction story. That's how great a part the details of air travel play in Mr. Kirn's novel. The automobile dates from almost the twentieth century, the airplane from the twentieth century. Both came along after the early nineteenth-century Romantic Era had faded away. By 1900, science and technology strode over our culture, displacing or even kicking aside the traditions upon which other genres of fiction are based. They even displaced religion. In his book The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Henry Adams wrote (in the third person) about his visit to the world's fair in Paris in 1900, his encounter with a new force and symbol in the form of the dynamo, and how it changed his way of looking at the world:
to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. (Chapter XXV)
I wonder if the hall of dynamos was on Divinity Avenue, as in e.e. cummings' poem.
There is romance in travel by car and airplane. There is even an expression, "the romance of the road." And just because a story is about being in the air or especially about being on the road doesn't mean that there is necessarily an emphasis on the technology of flying or driving. But if there is an emphasis on the car as a way of traveling--or rocketing--through time and space, and if the story is dependent upon the science and technology of automobiles, then maybe the car story can be considered a kind of low science fiction. If high science fiction is about the effects that distant, speculative, or extrapolative science and technology have on human beings, then is low science fiction about the same kind of effects that near or current science and technology have? Or is a car story just a car story? (I'm proposing a thesis and shooting down my thesis, both at the same time.)
High science fiction. Low science fiction. These terms already existed before I began writing today. I take it that they are analogous to low fantasy and high fantasy. If they work in fantasy, why shouldn't they in science fiction? I have heard Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) described as science fiction. If it is, it would have to be a kind of low science fiction because it can plausibly (maybe) take place in the world of today, no extra science or technology needed. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer (what a contrast in surnames), is a crime/detective story, but it's also sometimes considered a science fiction film. It's the earliest movie I have seen with an answering machine: technology bears on the plot. In the movie, everybody is looking for a locked box inside of which is a mysterious radiological hazard: science and technology bear even more on the plot. In fact they are central to it, and yet the story takes place in the present day of 1955. The end of the movie is nothing short of apocalyptic. In monster movies from the 1950s, A-bombs and radiation awaken monsters or bring them about by genetic mutation. In Kiss Me Deadly, they do the same things to people, i.e., they awaken the monsters in us or turn us into monsters in pursuit of their power.
The screenplay for Kiss Me Deadly was written by A.I. Bezzerides (1908-2007). No, he was not a machine, although he was an engineer. In the near future there will be a different kind of A.I. writing screenplays. In trying to think of the first novel about cars and driving, I remembered his novel The Long Haul, from 1938. It was made into a movie called They Drive by Night in 1940, starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. I have seen the movie but have never read the book. Now I'll have to go looking for it. (Kiss Me Deadly and They Drive by Night both begin with picking up a female hitchhiker.) Billy Idol is now making a return appearance to this blog, for on his debut album with Generation X, the self-titled Generation X from 1978, there is a song called "Kiss Me Deadly," presumably named for the earlier film. Kiss Me Deadly was an influence upon French moviemakers of the Nouvelle Vague, the name of which was (or must have been) an influence upon the names of British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and British new wave music of the 1970s and '80s. The French group Nouvelle Vague have made a name for themselves by redoing British new wave songs, often in the mode of Brazilian bossa nova. I just heard one of the originals tonight, "Let Me Go" by Heaven 17. Nouvelle Vague remade songs by lots of other groups about which I have written lately, including Joy Division.
In looking further for the first novel about cars and driving, I have discovered The Scarlet Car by the American author and journalist Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916), published in 1906. Before that, there was an epistolary novel, The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor-Car by a husband-and-wife writing team, Charles Norris Williamson (1859-1920), a Briton, and Alice Muriel Williamson (1858-1933), an American, from 1902 or 1903. Williamson was also an engineer. He and his wife wrote a number of novels involving automobiles and motoring, as it was called then. She may actually have been the principal author of their books, and that makes me happy, for she was an American. I like to think that Americans were the first to write stories about cars and driving. And imagine: people born before or during the Civil War wrote those first car stories. In 1908, Royal Book Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, published a dime novel called Automobile Lillian: The Daring Girl Bandit of Arizona. The author of that book appears to have been anonymous. Gawen Brownrigg, also British, wrote Later Than You Think (1938), about auto racing. There were many more novels about auto racing after that, and some of them were made into movies. World War II intervened, but after that we were off to the races.
There is a lot of driving in that quintessential American novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). There are also lots of cars and driving in movies from that time and later. Moviemakers seem to have caught on to cars and driving faster than did authors of short stories and novels. Science fiction authors wrote about electronics, rayguns, robots, and rocketships. Cars and driving were left to those working with lower levels of science and technology. An exception: the Tumblebugs in Robert A. Heinlein's story "The Roads Must Roll," in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940. In that story, the roads themselves move and carry people from place to place. As in Italian Futurism, speed counts. By the way, George C. Patton was the first American to use motorized vehicles--three Dodge touring cars--in a military attack. That was in 1916 in Mexico. Maybe he had taken a lesson from Automobile Lillian.
Finally, I have one example of a science-fictional car story, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by Ian Fleming, from 1964. The subtitle is "The Magical Car," and Fleming's novel (or Romance) is naturally a fantasy, also a crime/suspense story and a children's story, but why not science fiction, too? (Does that mean that My Mother the Car, from 1966, is also science fiction? Or was it low fantasy? Either way, critics have not been kind. Here's one more thing for inside the parentheses: maybe KITT from Knight Rider was a souped-up Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.) By the way, the original Chitty Bang Bangs, real-life automobiles from the 1920s, were powered by airplane engines. And that brings me to . . .
Last year I read a book called Wild Wheels: Thrilling Adventures of Men and Cars, edited by Don McKay and published by Dell in 1968. One of my favorite stories in that book is "The 6 Transistors Go to the Races" by Allen Childs, originally in Boys' Life in May 1966. It's a very funny story about a group of teenagers who fill their tank with aviation gas and accidentally get themselves into an auto race. It's a car story, a humorous story, and a teenager story. But if the premise of the story depends upon technology, can we also call it a kind of science fiction? I'm not sure. But if we can, it must fall into the category of low science fiction, if there is such a thing. The flubber-powered car in The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) is more obviously science-fictional. After all, aviation fuel exists in the world of today. Putting it into your gas tank is only mildly extrapolative.
The creation of low science fiction as a critical or analytical category would of course be a further genrification, of which there has probably been too much already. Can we allow it? Or should there be just one broad and overriding genre for every story, regardless of how else it can be categorized? That would avoid the muddiness of genrification that has been going on for some time now. I'm not sure we can get rid of genres completely, but simplicity is better than overly intellectualized and academic complexity. After all, most people who read, read for fun. And car stories are fun. I wish there were more of them.
-----
*There was a clipper ship called the Romance of the Sea, launched in 1853. It was built by Donald McKay (1810-1880), who was obviously not the same Don McKay who edited Wild Wheels. The figurehead of the Romance of the Sea included the names of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, described in a contemporary newspaper account as "the greatest romancers of the century." If the science fiction authors of the twentieth century were the new romancers, then Scott, Cooper, and their contemporaries must have been among the old.
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
No comments:
Post a Comment