Neuromancer-Part Two

Golden Ages & Afterwards

In one way or another, that question--Is science fiction dying?--has come up again and again in the past sixty-six years. The fact that it's still being asked makes the whole thing kind of ridiculous. After all, what else is there that takes sixty-six years--and counting--to die? Science fiction is obviously not dying. It's obviously not in trouble. People keep reading and writing it. I'm sure all of that will go on until there are no more readers in the world, a development that will probably come along at around the same time that the last of the pre-Internet, pre-smartphone generations die out. Science and technology--science-fictional developments manifested in the real world--may finally kill off science fiction.

Science fiction in the classic sense is future-oriented and ascendant. In contrast, weird fiction tends to be decadent and looks to--or obsesses over--the past. The weird-fictional protagonist is bound by the past. His science-fictional counterpart is unbound. There are no limits for him. He may achieve godlike powers. He may jaunt among the stars.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then did it afterwards decay, like uranium into lead? In the 1960s there was New Wave science fiction and by the 1980s cyberpunk. There were still hard science fiction and adventure science fiction, but I have the impression that those sub-genres were seen as old-fashioned and possibly looked down upon by the cool people in science fiction. The place to be as a science fiction writer--the leading edge of the whole project--was in a different kind of writing in which elements of weird fiction, horror, Gothics (my new word), and so on were injected into science fiction. I don't say that to state a fact, only to hypothesize or to apply an interpretation.

I have been using examples from the work of J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). We read his stories for our weird fiction/science fiction book club in April of this year (2026). Ballard is supposed to have been an author of the British New Wave. He is in fact considered a science fiction author. But stories such as the Poesque "Now: Zero" (Science Fantasy, Dec. 1959), the romantic/mythological fantasy "The Garden of Time" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Feb. 1962), and the Kafkaesque  story "The Concentration City" (New Worlds Science Fiction, Jan. 1957) are as much--or more--weird-fictional than they are science-fictional. In particular, "The Concentration City" reminds me not only of stories by Franz Kafka (the protagonist is named Franz--ironically "free")* but also of 1984 by George Orwell (1949) and the short story "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942), less so "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941), both by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

One of the primary differences between science fiction and weird fiction is that the science-fictional hero is or becomes powerful and triumphant--very often he is nearly perfect--whereas the weird-fictional protagonist is weak, flawed, cursed, insane, or otherwise mortal and human. You can hardly call him a hero. While you might identify with or aspire to be the science-fictional hero, you should be careful about his weird-fictional counterpart, for he often fails and is usually humiliated and defeated. Sometimes he even perishes.

I can think of two obvious examples of American science fiction authors who introduced New Wave or weird-fictional elements into their stories. They are Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) and Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024). I regret not having observed the passing of Barry Malzberg in 2024, but I didn't know until this year that he had died. By the way, he wrote a book called The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties. Unfortunately, it was published in 1982, before Neuromancer by William Gibson came along in that most appropriate of years, 1984.

To be continued . . .

-----

*Update (June 11, 2026): I have been watching videos from the 1980s this evening and have learned that there was a post-punk band called Josef K, named of course for the protagonist of Kafka's novel The Trial (1925). I have never read The Trial, but the movie version from 1962 has its Gothic and surrealistic elements. The publication of The Trial was arranged by Kafka's literary agent and friend Max Brod (1884-1968), who had a story, "Death Is a Temporary Indisposition," in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales. Ian Curtis of Joy Division was inspired to write "Colony" by reading Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony." For those who would like to read only about Weird Tales, its authors, and its stories, well, good luck trying to separate these things from all of culture.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part One

Introduction

Beginning with my blog entry of April 6, 2026, I have brought back some writing that has been until now only in draft form. That writing was from 2017, and it involved all kinds of things, as you have seen. I have written mostly about the so-called "New Weird," but I have also brought in, among other things, Charles Fort, the subject of continuity and what I call the genrification of fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, digital British temptress Amelia, and British music of the 1970s and '80s. I have also brought in William Gibson and his 1984 science fiction novel--or Gothic romance--Neuromancer.

Many years ago, I had planned to write a series on Neuromancer. I thought I might have had an original idea about it and its place in the history of science fiction. We should always remember, though, that there aren't that many original ideas left in the world. Mostly what we do is rehash what others have done before us, even if we don't know about them and their work. But in the interest of further cleaning up my draft essays from the past, I give you the first few paragraphs of part one of this series on Neuromancer, originally from 2015. The rest of today's entry, plus the remaining parts of this series, will be original material from 2026, even if it and they are based on ideas from the past.

* * *

A few months ago [on October 23, 2014], in an article called "Fantasy Killed the SF Star," I posed a question: Just what happened between 1979 and Gary Numan's "Cars," and 1996, when The Prodigy issued their song "Breathe"? One video is futuristic and science-fiction-like. The other is horrifying and filled with images of decay. Now I have an answer to that question.

Neuromancer happened.

That's kind of a flippant answer, but it bears some consideration. Neuromancer by William Gibson was published in 1984 [a fitting year for what amounts to a vision of dystopia]. Critics love the book, and it has proved extraordinarily popular. The New York Times called it "freshly imagined, compellingly detailed and chilling." The Chicago Sun-Times was less restrained: "Unforgettable," the reviewer wrote. "The richness of Gibson's work is incredible!" Other reviewers used the same kind of language, describing it "remarkably well-visualized," "rich, detailed, and vivid," "exceptional texture and vision," "fully realized," and so on. Then comes that word from the Washington Post: "kaleidoscopic, picaresque, flashy, and decadent." 

Emphasis added.

So: decadent science fiction? Is such a thing possible?

[And now my draft ends and new writing begins.]

My reason for asking that question is that we think of science fiction as being clean and pure, strong and lively, always forward-looking and future-oriented, always reaching towards and exceeding limits. Science fiction, then, is ascendant. If there are genres of descent or decadence, then surely weird fiction must be among them, for weird fiction is about the past and about limits imposed by God, law, doom, fate, and weird, also by family, culture, curse, guilt, custom, and tradition. In weird fiction, we are bound by the past and, like Jay Gatsby and friends, ceaselessly borne back into it, carried by this great flowing river without banks to our ocean of origin. In contrast, we look to the future with great hope and positivity. We believe that science and technology will solve all of our problems and make everything better. In the future we will be free and happy and unbound. Life will be good. Science fiction gives us an unfailing instrument by which we can beat against the current, a piece of technology to carry us forever forward.*

Or at least that those were the promises of science fiction during its first several decades.

The so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have ended in about 1950, at the beginning of the decade in which, coincidentally or not, pulp magazines also came to an end. (The last pulp magazine is supposed to have been the Western title Ranch Romances, which rode off into the sunset like Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder at the end of Blazing Saddles, and in the same year, 1974.) In the late 1950s and certainly by the early 1960s, there came a feeling that science fiction was dying. In fact, in 1960, science fiction fan Earl Kemp published a fanzine called Who Killed Science Fiction? Just because somebody asked that question doesn't mean that science fiction had died, or was dying, or soon would die. But something had obviously changed by the time Kemp wrote. Maybe he was a canary in the coal mine of his favorite fiction.

If science fiction was dying or already dead by 1960, then a new development seems to have come along just in time to save it. On December 4, 2022, in this space, I wrote:

The term New Wave as applied to British science fiction of the early 1960s was apparently an invention. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it was first used by P. Schuyler Miller "in his regular book-review column 'The Reference Library'" in the November 1961 issue of Analog. Miller is supposed to have been inspired by the French filmmakers' New Wave [originally Nouvelle Vague], but there may also have been inspiration in the title of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. 

I have been writing these past few weeks about the New Wave and New Worlds. If it's true that the New Wave saved--or at least reinvigorated or renewed--science fiction, then its British authors would seem to have done for American science fiction what the singers and musicians of the British Invasion did for American popular music and rock-and-roll at around the same time. And then they--the singers and musicians--did it again with punk, New Wave, and so on in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And then Neuromancer hit.**

To be continued . . .

-----

*To the politically minded person, science is progress and progress is a science.

**Since beginning this series, I have learned about British New Wave cinema from the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. I don't know who named it or when, but New Wave is obviously a translation of the French Nouvelle Vague of the same period. According to Wikipedia, "There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the angry young men" of British theater, and, I would add, of fiction. And if there were angry young men and new waves in cinema and mainstream literature, why would they not have crossed over into science fiction? The title of one British New Wave film, Hell Is a City (1960) makes me think of the conclusion of a totally unrelated story, "The Concentration City" by J.G. Ballard, which was first published in New Worlds Science Fiction, the New Wave science fiction magazine, in January 1957. Hell Is a City is set in Manchester, and New Wave cinema is supposed to have drawn attention to ordinary working-class life in northern England. There are and were, of course, plenty of bands that originated in Manchester, including Joy Division, its successor New Order, and The Smiths. They have been part of my writing lately, too. I'll close with a disclaimer: I am not British and never have been. I don't have any natural or native feel for British culture and society. All I know is what I read and see and what I'm capable of thinking about. My understanding of these things is necessarily incomplete, if not inadequate. So, a note to all British readers: please feel free to comment on everything about which I have written in these several series and to make corrections, explanations, and clarifications. I welcome your input.

[After writing the note above, I thought of the song and video "Life in a Northern Town" by the Dream Academy, from 1985. The video was filmed in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, not very far north of Manchester. That was more than forty years ago. I wonder if that time and place and way of life are equally as lost as that of the London of "West End Girls."]

Original text copyright 2015, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Problems in Science Fiction-No. 1

A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale. The problem was and is this: How do we write convincingly about the supernatural, the rural, and the irrational in a thoroughly materialist, urbanized, and (supposedly) rational age? Leiber tried to solve that problem and I think he succeeded. Part of his success comes from the fact that he recognized the problem straightaway and treated it directly in his work. You can see the results in stories such as "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941) and "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942).

Science fiction, too, has its problems. For example, as early as the 1950s, people began asking, Is science fiction dying? I have written about this problem, too. (See the label on the right.) If science fiction is dying, though, the dying is sure taking a long time. So maybe dying isn't a problem in science fiction after all. Anyway, the problems that I see in the genre are manifold, but in this series I want to cover just two of them.

* * *

Earlier this year, I read a short science fiction novel called The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany (Ace, 1965). I like these short novels from the 1950s and '60s, the kind that you can read in an evening and that don't break the back of your bookshelf. Mr. Delany's novel is interesting and entertaining, but as I read it, a thought occurred to me. Not a thought so much as a problem. That problem shows itself right in the title with the word Beta. It's inside, too: Centaurian, Sigma, Gamma, Epsilon, Delta, Alpha. It's elsewhere in science fiction, too, especially in the original Star Trek.

So what is the problem?

These and so many more names and terms in the science fiction of the future are from classical sources, from the culture, history, philosophy, literature, and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome.

And how is that a problem?

Well, despite the fact that the people of ancient Greece and Rome were pagans (at least before the Romans became turncoats by converting to Christianity), they were white Europeans (1), most of the names we know today were those of men, and they together founded a now hated thing, Western Civilization. Our politically correct culture is against these things, of course, and though you might comfort yourself by thinking that the standards of political correctness are by definition ever-changing, you should also know that hostility towards the classical world as the root of Western Civilization (along with the Judeo-Christian tradition) is rampant not only in academia in general but also in classical studies themselves and among classical scholars. For example, classical scholar Mary Frances Williams was recently giving a talk at a conference, one of her points being this:

It is important to stand up for Classics as a discipline, and promote it as the political, literary, historical, philosophical, rhetorical, and artistic foundation of Western Civilization, and the basis of European history, tradition, culture, and religion. It gave us the concepts of liberty, equality, and democracy, which we should teach and promote. We should not apologize for our field [. . . .] (2)

when she was interrupted by a fellow scholar who heckled her with these words:

"We are not Western Civilization!" (3)

I don't know anything about Ms. Williams or her heckler, and I don't really know very much about this controversy except that it appears to be part of a far larger one that, like a great, black hole, has engulfed everything within reach, including the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. My purpose here is simply to point out that a prominent scholar of classical studies would shout these words and believe this idea:

We are not Western Civilization!

So what does any of this have to with science fiction?

Well, if we ignore the question of whether a navel-gazing culture like our own will ever go into outer space, then we're left with the likelihood that nothing out there will ever be named for a person or concept that has come to us from ancient Greece or Rome, or for that matter from any other period of the history of Europe or the United States or Western Civilization in general. In addition, everything that is currently named for people or concepts from those periods will be renamed. Everything that we have will sooner or later be judged impure, and all of it will go into the memory hole. In other words, if, as a science fiction writer, you're going to make extrapolations into a fictional future, then you won't use any Greek or Roman names or roots or words or concepts in your work, as Samuel R. Delany and countless others have done before you. In fact, you won't use anything of real value from our past because all of it is or soon will be considered tainted by the sins of racism, sexism, imperialism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and so on and on, seemingly infinitely, into areas of sin that we don't yet know about but may yet sense. In their stead, you might try naming things after undocumented transgender Muslims, gay indigenous atheist revolutionaries, gender-fluid Marxists of color, and other peoples dwelling or soon to dwell at the intersections of oppression and resistance. (And you can forget about naming things after women and feminists. After all, they want to protect themselves from the abuses and depredations of people higher up on the ladder of victimhood. What a bunch of oppressors they are.) We already have people talking about racial and gender diversity in a proposed real-life Mars colony. That is, after all, the most important consideration when you're planning on how to survive on an alternately deeply-frigid-to-scorching-hot planet with barely any atmosphere and almost no water. (4)

At this rate, we'll never reach the stars.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

(1) "White" can be a pretty loose term when applied to Mediterranean peoples. If you want white, look at an Irishman or Scotsman.
(2) These words are not--I don't think--taken verbatim from her talk but from her written summary of her talk.

(3) Source: "How I was Kicked Out of the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting" by Mary Frances Williams, dated February 26, 2019, and published on the website Quillette, here.
(4) Douglas Adams, who was, we have to admit, a numbskull of a different stripe, anticipated all of this when he wrote his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the last episode of the BBC-TV show, a population of numbskulls arrives on Earth in the distant past. When someone points out that their design for a a wheel--it's hexagonal--can't possibly work, one of them responds, "All right, Mr. Wise Guy, you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be."

The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany (Ace, 1965), with cover art by Frank Kelly Freas (1922-2005), who of course did work for Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Beyond the Finland Station

I finished reading To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson last night. I'm glad to be out from under the shadow of this book, not only because of its excessive length--484 pages in the Doubleday Anchor edition of 1953--and not only for the author's less than engaging prose style. More than anything, I'm glad to have the book behind me because of its subject matter and for Wilson's apparent admiration for the ideas and historical figures--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and so on--described therein. Socialism is, as we now know, the ideology of mass murder. It's sickening to read a chronicle of its development, moreover, to follow an otherwise intelligent man in his appreciation of it. Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe Edmund Wilson was not as appreciative as I imagine. But I'm glad to have it behind me. Still, the centennial year of the Russian Revolution of 1917 continues. Still, an awareness of what that has meant is with us: 100 years and as many as 100 million dead at the hands of socialists the world over.

I wrote in yesterday's entry about the Listeners, the men and women who have dedicated themselves to the search for intelligent life in the universe. They listen and listen, certain that we will, at any moment, finally hear from our space brethren. That certainty is, it seems to me, religious in origin and intensity. It carries through many fields of endeavor, though. Even squatchers believe that we are on the verge of discovering definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot, if not finding the hairy beast himself. As Robert Crumb might say, Keep on Squatchin'.

Anyway, following is a quote to that point from To the Finland Station. The speaker is Lenin himself. The occasion is the beginning of the first Russian Revolution, from the spring of 1917:

Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch. . . . (p. 469)

Note the similarity in expression between the breathless Marxist revolutionary and any number of fervent believers of the last century and more as they await the coming of their most hoped-for event.

A century of political murder and mass starvation, imprisonment, and torture has intervened since Lenin spoke those words. Thank God--our God, not his--that "new epoch" is reaching its end, although leftists in the West have invented and put into practice new and far more subtle and insidious permutations in the form of political correctness, critical theory, cultural Marxism, etc. A second point, though: when and if we hear messages from outer space, they are not likely to be anything we hope for, expect, or predict. Imagine, for example, this bur under the blanket of the atheistic Listener: What if the people from the stars tell us that they believe in God? Better yet, what if they tell us they believe God sent to their planet a representative of himself who died for their sins? Imagine a real-life Mr. Spock who wants us to know that everything he does is washed in the green blood of the Vulcan Jesus. The Listeners in that case are likely to become Non-Listeners and to begin asking themselves, Where can we find a cotton ball big enough to plug the Arecibo telescope?

We should know by now that predictions based on a priori reasoning and abstruse theorizing about history and human nature are practically useless. The best predictions continue to be those made by conservatives who have some understanding of these things. To that point, another quote from To the Finland Station:

Victor Adler [an Austrian socialist, though apparently more moderate than his Russian counterpart] had once shocked Trotsky by declaring that, as for him, he preferred political predictions based on the Apocalypse to those based on Dialectical Materialism. (p. 429)

Dialectical Materialism, at least in later interpretations, can be taken as an a priori system and is seemingly used by some science fiction writers either as a backdrop for their work or as a means of making predictions in their work. Contrast that with the idea of the Apocalypse, especially as applied in genre fiction. The idea of a leftist or Marxist Apocalypse would seem an affront, a self-contradiction, an impossibility. Although Utopia is his prediction, Dystopia is the Leftist's preferred future. Apocalypse, it seems to me, is more nearly a conservative idea. But, as Robert Frost wrote:

Some say the world will end in fire, 
Some say in ice. 
From what I’ve tasted of desire 
I hold with those who favor fire. 
But if it had to perish twice, 
I think I know enough of hate 
To say that for destruction ice 
Is also great 
And would suffice.

Yes, ice--a freezing of history in the form of Dystopia--would suffice.

Alien Crucifixion (one version) by Frank Frazetta.

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Supernatural in Science

I don't want to overstate the idea that science fiction writers are progressives of the materialistic or atheistic type. To believe in earnest that human beings are nothing more than a soup of chemicals or bags of animated meat would seem to make art almost impossible, and any attempt at art by a person holding such a belief could hardly be received with any sympathy by readers. There has to be a ghost in the machine. Love, sadness, and all other human feelings must be treated as more than mere material forces if you expect anyone to read and like what you write. (It seems to me that atheists must postulate the existence of a chemical soul: everything human beings feel might be real and valid at a chemical level; it simply lacks spirit.) I also don't want to give the impression that writers of fantasy, weird fiction, etc., are deaf to the siren song of materialism, atheism, or Scientism. They obviously are not. But, again, how much heart can there be in the work of an author who believes in nothing? And who would read such a thing with any pleasure or hope of being uplifted or carried away, at least for a moment, from our troubling, mundane, quotidian existence?

Like I said, I'm reading To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History by Edmund Wilson (Doubleday Anchor, 1953). The book is an exploration of "the revolutionary tradition in Europe and the rise of socialism" (the blurb on the cover). Wilson expresses some admiration for Marx, specifically for the workings of his mind and Marx's written expression of his ideas. However, Wilson also points out weaknesses and flaws found therein. Here are long excerpts from a longer passage beginning on page 194:

The Dialectic then is a religious myth, disencumbered of divine personality and tied up with the history of mankind. "I hate all the gods," Marx had said in his youth; but he had also projected himself into the character of the resolute seaman who carried the authority of the gods in his breast and in one of his early Rheinische Zeitung articles on the freedom of the press, he declares that the writer must "in his way adopt the principles of the preacher of religion, adopt the principle, 'Obey God rather than man,' in relation to those human beings among whom he himself is confined by his human desires and needs." (1)

Karl Marx had identified his own will with the antithesis of the dialectical process. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world," he had written in his Theses on Feuerbach. "Our business is to change it." The will had always tended in German philosophy to play the role of a superhuman force; and this will had been salvaged by Marx and incorporated in Dialectical Materialism . . . .

For an active and purposeful man like Lenin it may be an added source of strength to have the conviction that history is with him, that he is certain of achieving his goal. The Dialectic so simplifies the whole picture: it seems to concentrate the complexities of society into an obvious protagonist and antagonist; it gives the confidence not only that the upshot of the struggle will certainly be successful, but that it will resolve all such struggles forever. . . . (2)

But conversion to the belief in a divine power does not have always an energizing effect. It was in vain that Marx tried to bar out Providence: "History does nothing," he had insisted in The Holy Family . . . . "History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends." But as long as he keeps talking as if the proletariat were the chosen instrument of the Dialectic, as if victory were predetermined, (3) he does assume an extra-human power. . . . "History is the judge; its executioner, the proletarian" [Marx wrote]. There is then a higher tribunal for which the working class is only the hangman. There is a non-personal entity called "History" which accomplishes things on its own hook and which will make the human story come out right, no matter what you or your opponent may do. The doctrine of salvation by works, as the history of Christianity shows, is liable to pass all too readily into the doctrine of salvation by grace. All too naturally, by identifying himself with the antithesis of the Dialectic, that is, by professing a religious faith, the Marxist puts himself into the state of mind of a man going upstairs on an escalator. The Marxist Will, which once resolved to change the world, has been transformed into the invisible power which supplies the motive force to run the escalator . . . .

Karl Marx, with his rigorous morality and his international point of view, had tried to harness the primitive German Will to a movement which should lead all humanity to prosperity, happiness and freedom. But insofar as this movement involves, under the disguise of the Dialectic, a semi-divine principle of History, to which it is possible to shift the human responsibility for thinking, for deciding, for acting--and we are living at the present time [ca. 1940] in a period of decadence of Marxism--it lends itself to the repressions of the tyrant. The parent stream of the old German Will, which stayed at home and remained patriotic, became canalized as the philosophy of German imperialism and ultimately of the Nazi movement. Both the Russian and the German branches threw out all that had been good in Christianity along with all that had been bad. The demiurge of German idealism was never a God of love, nor did it recognize human imperfection: it did not recommend humility for oneself or charity towards one's fellows. Karl Marx, with his Old Testament sternness, did nothing to humanize its workings. He desired that humanity should be united and happy; but he put that off till the achievement of the synthesis, and for the present he did not believe in human brotherhood. He was closer than he could ever have imagined to that imperialistic Germany he detested. After all, the German Nazis, too--also, the agents of an historical mission--believe that humanity will be happy and united when it is all Aryan and all submissive to Hitler.

That's a lot to read, I know. The point is that even Karl Marx, a giant of materialism and a fierce atheist--"I hate all the gods," he wrote--seems to have believed in a non-material force, even a god, called "History" which guides human affairs. (We can all be readily forgiven if we profess our non-belief in this Marxist god.) And if Marx the materialist and atheist believed with a paradoxically religious intensity in a non-material force, what science fiction writer of the past or present can stand against him? I will restate my point: anyone who writes from the point of view of the strict materialist, atheist, or believer in Scientism will run up against limits. He will, in that case, have two options: first, to adhere to his faith and come away baffled by the non-material nature of human beings and human existence, or second, to give in and admit, however silently or implicitly, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. The first choice is likely to result in the author's failure as an artist. The results of the second are less sure, but they may lead that author to some success as a human being.

Notes

(1) Note the arrogance: the writer--presumably Marx himself--does not live on earth as a human being. He is in fact "confined" here among human beings and is presumably a superior being of some kind or other. Wilson acknowledges as much a few pages later: "Instinctively Marx thinks of himself as being set above their [men's] world." (p. 209)

(2) This is the same language used by our most recent former president, the assertion that certain people and ideas are "on the wrong side of history"--that history is a force that cannot be directed away from inevitable and irreversible outcomes. I should point out here that Bill Maher, an outspoken atheist, recognizes that former president as one of his co-religionists. I'll trust Mr. Maher's judgment. If there's such a thing as gaydar among atheists--call it atheär--he is likely to possess it. I should also point out that the goal of Marxism is an ultimate and unchanging society: complete stasis where there can be no further revolution, just as in the assertion made by one of the characters in Zamyatin's We.

(3) We should remember here that Friedrich Engels, Marx's close associate and collaborator, was the son of a staunch Calvinist.

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Shoals of Reality

I'm back after having been gone for four weeks. I would like to pick up again on some of what I previously wrote about in "Skilled Destroyers," from May 20, 2017. In that entry, I wrote about how the conservative genres of fantasy, weird fiction, etc., are likely to continue easily enough as time goes by, whereas the more progressive genre of science fiction may run into problems, if it hasn't already. My supposition is that conservatism--not contemporary political conservatism but an older, non-political or anti-political conservatism--is more in tune with reality than is the fantasy of progressivism. More plainly, conservatism apprehends that we are fallen in our nature, whereas progressivism holds to human perfectibility as not only a possibility but as a natural and inevitable outcome of the irresistible force of history.

As I have thought more about all of that, it occurs to me that science fiction, because of its progressivism, inevitably runs into its own limits. In the 1930s, as science fiction emerged from the primordial soup of the scientific romance, things looked bright. Fans and authors of science fiction had faith in what Donald A. Wollheim called "the Infinite Future." There may have been good reason for that kind of faith in the 1930s, but by the 1980s or so, it seems to have soured. There was no longer an infinite future. Instead the future had shrunk. It had seemingly become delimited.

One of the things that has always bothered me about science fiction is its lack of human characterization--the sense that these are real human beings represented as characters and not mere mechanical parts of a plot. That lack of humanness may not be a bug of the genre, though. It may be a feature, for if science fiction is a progressive genre, and progressivism is essentially materialistic, seeing the individual as merely fodder for history and the unstoppable march of society or the State towards perfection, then the characters in a science fiction story are not especially important. They certainly don't have souls, as the human soul is an absurdity in a universe--and a genre--strictly governed by science and reason. Science and reason are among the limits about which I write today.

No science fiction author of any recent decade is foolish or naïve enough to attempt a nakedly progressive and utopian work as Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888), but it seems to me that every progressivist science fiction story is likely to wreck itself upon the shoals of reality as utopianism has wherever it has been attempted, in literature or in life. Utopia is an impossibility. It is literally nowhere. The idea of progress is delusional at best (except perhaps in the Christian sense). A belief in materialism, atheism, or Scientism is, I think, extremely unlikely to lead anyone to any far frontier. Each is a dead end--a narrowing gyre leading inescapably into the bottomless black hole of the self, the despairing, self-loathing, humanity-loathing self. I think that a mind bound by science and reason is also likely to be bound in its abilities to explore questions of human nature, the human soul, and the nature of the universe. The science fiction author who subscribes to materialism, atheism, and Scientism is far more likely to come away baffled by his encounter with important questions. It seems far more likely to me that only those who believe in something outside themselves--something infinite, eternal, and non-material--will reach out of themselves and into the universe. I am reminded of a poem:

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds,--and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of--wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air . . . . 

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew--

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

To continue, any science fiction story with progressivism at its core seems likely to me to run into the more conservative genres if it is to have any satisfying conclusion. And I mean that in both senses of the word, meaning, to run into as in a collision and as colors run, one into another. Instead of materialism and atheism, instead of science and reason, all of which are inadequate to the task, I think, there will be, in any successful genre story, an arrival at the non-material and the supernatural, the magical, the mystical, and the irrational. I think of Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977), a great work of the science fiction imagination (by a left-leaning author, no less) that turns on its conclusion to an implicit longing by the robot psychiatrist (literally, a materialist physician--see below) for a human soul. I think also of Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984), a science fiction novel--far less satisfying in my opinion than Gateway--best described I think as Gothic in its themes, mood, and imagery. (Neuromancer ≈ New Romancer, hence a return to the romantic origins of science fiction).

So is it the fate of every successful science fiction story to confront the reality of the human soul, of the persistence of mystery, and of the ultimate non-material nature of human existence? Does every successful science fiction story ultimately enter the realm of the more conservative form of the romance and the more conservative genres of fantasy, weird fiction, etc.? I guess that's what I'm saying. But does the evidence bear it out? Or has there been any successful and satisfying strictly materialist science fiction?

* * *

As a background to some what I have written here, I have some quotes from the book To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History by Edmund Wilson (Doubleday Anchor, 1953). I have this book from my aunt's house, from her estate which we have finally settled. The book sat on the floor of an upstairs bedroom of that Gothic house--Gothic in its atmosphere and in its decay--for years after thieves plundered it for everything of monetary value. (Thieves don't steal books.) I began reading it this week after returning here.

Early in his life, Karl Marx, that prize numbskull of the nineteenth century, wrote poetry. Edmund Wilson wrote about the subjects of some of these poems:

There are doctors, damned Philistines, who think the world is a bag of bones, whose psychology is confined to the notion that our dreams are due to noodles and dumplings, whose metaphysics consists of the belief that if it were possible to locate the soul, a pill would quite easily expel it. (p. 114)

Marx's poems are a critique of medical doctors, but if doctors are materialists who believe they can treat the diseases and afflictions of the human soul with their potions, was not Marx equally a materialist? We can see the descent of the materialist physician in literature and life, from Marx's time to our own: the nihilist Bazarov in Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862); the technicians in We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) who excise human "fancy," hence unhappiness, by performing an operation on men's brains; Doctor Stravinsky from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967), who reduces everything to a material explanation and joyfully goes about his work; Doctor George Hill Hodel, Jr., almost certainly a psychopath and possibly the Black Dahlia Murderer; and on and on. We are now in what is called a crisis of opioid addiction in this country. What else is the use of opioids--or any other drug for that matter--but a searching for a material solution to a non-material, i.e., spiritual, problem? Is not every person with an addiction merely a materialist physician prescribing for himself drugs in an attempt to treat his spiritual disquiet? Wouldn't it be easier to accept the non-material nature of our existence as a fact? I suppose not.

Next, in discussing Hegel, Wilson wrote:

Hegel had held that society, "the State," was the realization of absolute reason, to which the individual must subordinate himself. He afterwards said that what he had meant was the perfect state . . . . (p. 120)

The emphasis is in the original, but if it hadn't been, I would have put it there, for what else is the perfect state but Utopia, the dream of progressivism in all of its forms, even today? Again, if you're looking for perfection, look for where it is rather than where it cannot be. (Is Hegel, then, the systematizer and theorizer of the leftist/socialist/statist program that has resulted in so much poverty, misery, and murder?)

Finally, Wilson mentioned the French socialist Alexandre Théodore Dézamy (1808-1850) who "projected a somewhat new kind of community, based on materialism, atheism and science." (p. 145) Does that sound familiar? It does to me. We have the desire for the same kind of "community" today, perhaps in our science fiction, certainly in one of our major political parties. Subscribers to that party say conservative ideas are of no use because of their formulation (actually, discovery rather than formulation) by a bunch of dead white European men. Where do progressives think their ideas came from? A bunch of dead white European men wrote them down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but don't they actually date from the first fall of man?

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Skilled Destroyers

It becomes more and more plain to me that genre fiction in America is descended mostly from conservative writers--not conservative in the contemporary political sense, but in an older, non-political or even anti-political sense. One exception among the various genres might be science fiction, which tends to be, in its purest or original forms, progressive, forward-looking, and optimistic. But then you could make a case that Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a founder of science fiction in America (maybe the founder), and Poe was no liberal or progressive.

In reading Poe and reading about Poe recently, I came across the following quote again, from Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill by Peter Viereck (D. Van Nostrand Company, 1956, pp. 102-103):

Cultural Conservatives: Melville, Hawthorne. But, although a narrowly political conservatism in America may today require such a business élite [discussed in the previous section], conservatism need not be political at all. Instead, its characteristic American form may be a lonely soul-searching by American artists to transcend what Melville called "the impieties of progress." (1) Many of America's greatest literary figures have been cultural conservatives in their anti-optimism, their qualms about external reforms--for example, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Herman Melville (1819-1891), Henry James (1843-1916), [and] William Faulkner (1897-    ). Hyatt Waggoner's Hawthorne, 1955, represents the latest research of those scholars who see the real American cultural tradition as a conservative "tragic sense," affirming Original Sin and rejecting liberal illusions about progress and human nature. These liberal illusions, concludes Waggoner, "were useless for any artist who would not wilfully [sic] blind himself to the existence of tragedy. . . . The 'evolutionary optimism' of . . . nineteenth-century liberalism was affronted by anyone who concerned himself with the 'deeper psychology.'" [. . . .] The ideal inspiring America's cultural conservatives has been best expressed by a little-known quatrain of Melville:

.                    "Not magnitude, not lavishness,

                     But Form--the site;

                     Not innovating wilfulness, 

                     But reverence for the Archetype." (2)

My own notes:

(1) The quote is from Melville's epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), from Canto 21, "Ungar and Rolfe." In its original, the phrase is:

The impieties of "Progress" . . .

(2) This quatrain is the poem "Greek Architecture" in its entirety.

If you read a little more of "Ungar and Rolfe," you will find the following lines of dialogue. Ungar, a Catholic and a believer, speaks first. He is questioned by the more skeptical Rolfe, who is Protestant:

"True heart do ye bear
In this discussion? or but trim
To draw my monomania out,
For monomania, past doubt,
Some of ye deem it. Yet I'll on.
Yours seems a reasonable tone;
But in the New World things make haste:
Not only men, the state lives fast--
Fast breeds the pregnant eggs and shells,
The slumberous combustibles
Sure to explode. 'Twill come, 'twill come!
One demagogue can trouble much:
How of a hundred thousand such?
And universal suffrage lent
To back them with brute element
Overwhelming? What shall bind these seas
Of rival sharp communities
Unchristianized? Yea, but 'twill come!"
"What come? "
"Your Thirty Years (of) War."
"Should fortune's favorable star
Avert it?"
"Fortune? nay, 'tis doom."
"Then what comes after? spasms but tend
Ever, at last, to quiet."
"Know,
Whatever happen in the end,
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts--
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled--brutalized
By popular science--Atheized
Into a smatterer--"
"Oh, oh!"
"Yet knowing all self need to know
In self's base little fallacy;
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy."
America!

I have written before--or maybe I have just passed on the observation--that conservatives, though their eyes be directed on the past, are far better at predictions and prognostications than are liberals with their "illusions about progress and human nature." (See what happens when you read classic literature? You start using the subjunctive mood.) Look what Melville foresaw and look what we have now as night falls on the Dark Ages of Democracy: A fast-breeding state . . . a hundred thousand demagogues leading rival sharp communities . . . a civic barbarism of men, myriads of them playing their pygmy parts, all existing at a dead level of rank commonplace . . . unchristianized, disennobled, brutalized by popular science, atheized, debased into equality, yet each knowing all the self need know in self's base little fallacy. And though we don't yet have war, there are at least rumors of war among us. And all of it new confirmation of the fall of Adam, as if we needed any further evidence that we are indeed fallen.

In reading further in Viereck's book, I came on a section on George Santayana (1863-1952) and liberalism:

In Dominations and Powers, 1951, Santayana pointed out the paradoxical consequences of idealistic nineteenth-century liberalism: it either ended in twentieth-century anarchy or, to avoid anarchy, imposed its will on an unliberal world. But by imposing its will, it ceased to be liberal, became despotic. Because of these equally deadly alternatives, Santayana pronounced the history of liberalism "virtually closed." (p. 105)

I have written before, too, about these two alternatives, anarchy (or chaos, or, alternatively, apocalypse) and despotism (or tyranny, or, alternatively, dystopia). In drawing further distinctions, I think you could say that anarchy and despotism are real-world conditions, while apocalypse and dystopia are more nearly fantasies. And because they are fantasies of the future, apocalypse and dystopia can be considered science fiction, and it is within that genre that stories of this kind ordinarily reside.

It occurs to me now that both apocalypse and dystopia are outgrowths of a Christian worldview. Apocalypse is of course another name for the biblical Book of Revelation, which describes, by some interpretations, Christian end times. That's easy enough. Dystopia is a little tougher, but once you realize that Utopia is Dystopia, and that Utopia is simply either a Heaven or a Garden of Eden on Earth (both are called Paradise), then you can see that Dystopia is just another variation on what seems to me a Christian notion that time is an arrow rather than a circle and that it is flying fast and straight, inexorably towards the Millennium. In other words, history is a chronicle of progress, with the benighted pre-Christian era in the past and a glorious Millennial future awaiting us. Science fiction may be an outgrowth of a secular age of reason, but would it have been possible without the Christian concept of progress and of a looking forward to a glorious (and earthly) future?

* * *

I know I have written a lot here, but I can't pass up the opportunity to quote George Santayana at length. Again, from Conservatism, pp. 183-184, originally in Dominations and Powers (1951):

The hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. The traditional order, which was pregnant with all sorts of wars, civil, foreign, religious, and domestic, was to be relaxed precisely for the sake of peace. . . . When we have conceded everything that anybody clamors for, everyone will be satisfied. . . . Swimming in the holiday pond of a universal tolerance, we may confidently call our souls our own. . . . So, all grievances being righted and everyone quite free, we hoped in the nineteenth century to remain for ever in unchallengeable enjoyment of our private property, our private religions, and our private morals.

But there was a canker in this rose. The dearest friend and ally of the liberal was the reformer; perhaps even in his own inmost self was a prepotent Will, not by any means content with being let alone, but aspiring to dominate everything. Why were all those traditional constraints so irksome? Why were all those old ideas so ridiculous? Because I had a Will of my own to satisfy and an opinion of my own to proclaim. Relaxing the order of society, so as to allow me to live, is by no means enough, if the old absurdities and the old institutions continue to flourish. . . . No pond is large enough for this celestial swan . . . no scurry into backwaters will save the ducks and geese from annihilation. How should I live safe or happy in the midst of such creatures? . . . [Hence] the price of peace, as men are actually constituted, is the suppression of almost all liberties. The history of liberalism, now virtually closed, illustrates this paradox.

Again, a conservative writer and thinker foresaw the future, the future in which we now live, and one in which the liberal reformer, possessed of a "prepotent will," seeks not only to live free from traditional constraints but also to destroy traditional order and traditional institutions because he finds their continued existence so intolerable. There is peace in Dystopia and no freedom.

If Santayana was wrong about anything in the quote above, it may be that the history of liberalism is not yet closed. We see that every day, every time one among Melville's myriads playing his pygmy part throws a rock through the window of a person whose rights or property he covets . . . shoots pepper spray into the eyes of the woman who opposes his ideas . . . sets fire to a car or building at a protest against violence and hatred . . . silences by force the speaker with whom he disagrees . . . requires someone to labor for him under threat of legal penalty . . . revolts at any perceived contraction of the power of the State . . . and on and on. I suspect that the history of liberalism may never be closed, as liberalism as a state of mind is just one more bit of confirmation of the fall of Adam. If we exist in a fallen state, then we will continue to aspire to godhood and to order the universe in accordance with our own dark whims and desires. There will always be within each of us a skilled destroyer and a ruthless tyrant.

So that brings me back to Poe as a founder of genres of fiction. (I just finished reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is, in its final sequences, first, a story of Lost Worlds, then, a strange and mysterious dream-vision or apocalyptic fantasy.) If conservatism is in some apprehension of the truth about human nature, then the genres of fiction that tend towards a conservative worldview--weird fiction, supernatural fiction, horror, fantasy, historical fiction, romance--will go on easily enough. And if conservatism is right about the liberalism which rages against it, then the more liberal or progressive genres--namely, science fiction--will continue to struggle. You might consider the success or un-success of various genres to be a test of this hypothesis.

One alternative to a struggling science fiction is for there to be conservative version of the genre, a seeming contradiction, but not out of the question. There has been conservative science fiction before, and I imagine there is still some now, as well. Two examples from past and present are the very sub-genres about which I have written here, that is, apocalypse (or post-apocalypse) and dystopia. Both seem to be doing fine, and because the contemporary liberal or progressive in America has broken the mirror in which he might view himself, the latter--stories of dystopia--seem to be flourishing. Never mind that they tend to be descriptions of liberal rather than conservative excess, just as George Santayana implicitly predicted. The liberal or progressive reader likes them just the same and seems blissful to read them in his ignorance.

A picture illustrating the very last strange and mysterious words in the main action of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838). Illustration by the British artist Arthur David McCormick (1860-1943).

Revised on February 28, 2021.

Original text and caption copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley