Notes from PulpFest-The Mystery of the Missing Magazine

I came away from PulpFest with a copy of The Pulpster, the official publication of the convention. A colorized photograph of H.P. Lovecraft is on the cover, and inside is an article called "Lovecraft's Lasting Legacy," written by various authors, editors, fans, and critics of Lovecraft and Weird Tales. Marvin Kaye contributed to "Lovecraft's Lasting Legacy" and provides clues to the Mystery of the Missing Magazine, which has not been seen in print in more than a year.

Sometime within the last decade, Mr. Kaye went to work for the Jekyll and Hyde Club in New York City. "I was given the role of Mr. Shroud," he writes, "the head butler and major-domo to Dr. Jekyll." (p. 46) In that role, Marvin Kaye (b. 1938) met fellow actor John Harlacher (b. 1976). Sharing a taste for the macabre, the two became friends. Upon learning that Mr. Kaye had once edited H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror (6 issues, 2004-2009), Mr. Harlacher urged him to acquire the property from John Gregory Betancourt (b. 1963). To Mr. Kaye's surprise, Mr. Betancourt, when contacted, offered him Weird Tales to go with H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, all for a bargain price. With both magazines in the bag, Marvin Kaye and John Harlacher created Nth Dimension Media, Inc., with Mr. Kaye as editor and Mr. Harlacher as publisher. That transaction took place in 2011. 

I don't know what legal arrangement the two men might have, but in my previous article, I suggested that Marvin Kaye the editor might be subordinate to John Harlacher the publisher. That's not necessarily the case. I also suggested that it was Mr. Kaye's decision to print an excerpt from Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Hoyt (2012) and that John Harlacher objected to that plan (at least after controversy inevitably and predictably ensued). According to Jeff VanderMeer, however, Mr. Harlacher and Mr. Kaye had dinner with his wife, then-editor Ann VanderMeer, in June 2012 (I think), during which they talked about their plans to print an excerpt from Revealing Eden. She advised them against it. That and other disagreements precipitated her resignation. John Harlacher may have tried to put a damper on the controversy, but it was already too late. To read accounts now, he seemed only to have thrown more fuel on the fire with his apologies and explanations.

Part of the problem in trying to reconstruct the sequence of events here is that the website for Weird Tales is no longer in existence except for as a placeholder, as one of my readers pointed out. There are still websites where you can read about the controversy over Revealing Eden, but only from one side, the side of the aggrieved. (1) The best place to start might be on a blog posting called "Weird Tales, Ann VanderMeer, and Utter Stupidity" by Jeff VanderMeer (her husband), dated August 20, 2012, here. Weird Tales itself remains silent.

Ann VanderMeer stayed on as editor for one issue of Weird Tales after its acquisition by Nth Dimension Media. That was the Winter 2012 issue, Volume 66, Number 3, whole issue number 359. Three issues edited by Marvin Kaye followed:

• Cthulhu Returns Issue, with a tribute to Ray Bradbury--Fall 2012 (Vol. 66, No. 4) #360
• Fairy Tales Issue--Summer 2013 (Vol. 67, No. 1) #361
• Undead Issue--Spring 2014 (Vol. 67, No. 2) #362

In this year's issue of The Pulpster, Mr. Kaye states: "[T]he next issue [of Weird Tales] in development is our 'Swords and Sorcery' issue." (p. 46) I don't know when Mr. Kaye wrote those words. I presume it would have been since last year's PulpFest, as decisions about next year's themes are worked out during this year's show. I don't suppose it matters. The controversy over Revealing Eden (though maybe not over Marvin Kaye or his company's actions) has died down. Nth Dimension Media has had more than a year during which to get a new issue in print. There are no doubt scads of sword-and-sorcery stories and art available for publication. And, still, Weird Tales is missing.

In closing his essay, Marvin Kaye writes:

Though [Weird Tales] was closed down several times, it always returns, which is why I called it "the magazine that never dies." It is now in its 92nd year. May it go on until it is at least 200-years-old, and beyond!

I wonder if he sees any irony in those words.

Note

(1) The controversy over Revealing Eden suggests that the current owners of the license to Weird Tales might have reason to remove the content of the website themselves. We simply can't say.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Where Is Weird Tales?

Weird Tales has been called "The Magazine That Never Dies," and in the ninety-two years since it was first published, Weird Tales has lived up to that sobriquet. This week, Weird Tales is being celebrated at PulpFest, the annual pulp magazine convention held in Columbus, Ohio. H.P. Lovecraft, who probably helped keep the magazine afloat, is also being celebrated on the 125th anniversary of his birth. Lovecraft is long gone. But where is Weird Tales?

Weird Tales was last seen in Spring 2014 when Volume 67, Number 2--whole issue number 362--was published. The editor was Marvin Kaye, the man who many years ago nicknamed his recent charge "The Magazine That Never Dies." It's either a coincidence or an irony that the Spring 2014 issue was subtitled "The Undead Issue," for the magazine that never dies appears to have done so after all. But then it has died before and has always come back, in 1924, 1973, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1998. Although Weird Tales was in print in almost every year from 1988 to 2014, the roster of publishers and editors in that time became bewildering. And now the magazine is lost.

Marvin Kaye succeeded the widely admired Ann VanderMeer as editor of Weird Tales with the Fall 2012 issue. He was at the helm for just three issues, Fall 2012, Summer 2013, and Spring 2014. Somewhere along the line he got himself into some trouble when he announced that Weird Tales would print an excerpt from Save the Pearls Part One: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt (2012). Written for young people, Revealing Eden is a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel of a world ruined by global warming. (1) If she had stopped with global warming, the author (and Marvin Kaye) probably wouldn't have caught any grief. It is, after all, a politically favored idea. Instead, Ms. Foyt proceeded to tell a story in which white people--the "pearls" of the title--are lower in status than are black people, specifically because of their skin color. (Black people are called "coals" in the book.) Ms. Foyt's book was self-published; the weight of the inevitable political charges against her might only have dragged her down. But then Marvin Kaye chained himself to Victoria Foyt's anchor, and he, too, went under when fans, authors, and publisher John Harlacher objected to his plan to reprint Revealing Eden. [Update, Aug. 19, 2015: John Harlacher's objection may only have been an attempt at damage control for a decision that he and Mr. Kaye may have made together. We can't be sure of some of these things because all the content on the Weird Tales website is gone.]

But is that why Weird Tales is missing from the scene? I don't know. If you look at the supposed website of the magazine, which is called Weird Tales but is found at a URL called www.weirdtailors.com (for some unknown reason), you will find only an image of the Undead Issue cover by Danielle Tunstall. (2) The website has been like that for almost a year. A former staff member told me that the original website was wiped out by another former staff member who, unbeknownst to his coworkers, had it stored on his own server. That sounds like a disgruntled former staff member. Whatever the case may be, he was probably well qualified to work for Hillary Clinton after that. No one since has rebuilt the Weird Tales website, and so it shows, appropriately, only the image of a zombie.

Weird Tales in its last four issues (from Winter 2012 to Spring 2014) was published by Nth Dimension Media, Inc., with an address at 105 West 86th Street, Suite 307, New York, NY 10024. The man in charge presumably is or was actor, director, and producer John Harlacher (b. 1976). However, the Weird Tales property itself is owned by Viacom, which acquired it from Robert Weinberg. I can't say for sure, but I presume Nth Dimension Media is or was operating under a license from Viacom, which may have had some plans for it, but nothing seems to have come of any of its plans or anybody else's plans. So as you can see, Weird Tales is still lost or missing.

Or dead.

Or maybe mostly dead, like Westley from The Princess Bride.

But Weird Tales has always returned from the dead, and I would wager it will again. But it won't be in time for PulpFest this weekend, so we'll have to celebrate without it. (3)

Notes

(1) Oddly, Revealing Eden, the first book in the Save the Pearls series, won an Eric Hoffer Award for the Young Adult Category in 2012. So some people liked it and some people hated it. Not having read it, I can't say what merits, if any, the book might have.

(2) The URL:

http://www.weirdtalesmagazine.com

redirects to:

www.weirdtailors.com

(3) As an aside, Weird Tales, in its first incarnation, was in print during every year from 1923 to 1954. In later incarnations, Weird Tales was in print in every year from 1988 to 1994 and from 1998 to 2014. If no issue comes out this year, then the second longest string of publication will be broken and we'll be starting over again at year one.

The most recent--or maybe the last--issue of Weird Tales, No. 362 from Spring 2014. The artist is Danielle Tunstall, a British artist and photographer. Note the ubiquitous zombie. If Weird Tales has died again, here's hoping for a resurrection or maybe a reanimation. Where's Herbert West when you need him?

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

This Week in Columbus: PulpFest

I'm taking time out from my series on politics in science fiction to let you know that the 44th PulpFest is taking place this week in Columbus, Ohio. The convention begins on Thursday afternoon, August 13, 2015, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Columbus and will run until 2 o'clock Sunday afternoon, August 16, 2015. This year, PulpFest will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of H.P. Lovecraft, as well as the magazine that showcased his work, Weird Tales. This year's guest artist will be Jon Arfstrom, cover artist for the original Weird Tales magazine. If you would like to learn more about PulpFest, click on the following link:

http://www.pulpfest.com/

One of the great questions about Weird Tales is: Why didn't H.P. Lovecraft ever get a cover story? I have a possible answer: His byline was guaranteed to sell magazines, so the magazine didn't need a Lovecraft cover story in order to appeal to its readers. Weak, but a possibility. I have another possible answer: maybe Lovecraft's work didn't lend itself very well to cover art, especially for a magazine that would have been displayed on the newsstand for a general readership vs. for a specialized readership. Weaker still and not really worth considering. In any case, it isn't true that Lovecraft never got a cover story in Weird Tales. In fact he got exactly one--this one--from May 1942. The problem was, you had to live in Canada to pick up a copy. The cover story was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright in 1933, published in booklet form in 1936, finally published in Weird Tales in January 1942, then reprinted in the Canadian edition of May 1942. This cover dispels any possibility that Lovecraft's stories may not have lent themselves to cover art. The Canadian-American illustrator and cartoonist Edmond Good (1910-1991) was the man behind the cover. He is in a category of one.

Here is Jon Arfstrom's first cover for Weird Tales. It was published in January 1952 when the artist was barely twenty-three years old. Now eighty-six, Mr. Arfstrom is one of the last living contributors to the original Weird Tales. I hope to see him at PulpFest.

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Frankenstein: A Monster of Gothicism and Science

I have been thinking about the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). It has been called the first science fiction novel, but Frankenstein is also, obviously, a Gothic romance that originated in a contest to write a ghost story. Like the monster itself, Frankenstein is an assembly, part one thing and part another. I haven't been able to reconcile those two parts, but I think I have figured out another problem to do with the origins of science fiction.

In reading about the development of the Gothic romance, I was surprised to learn that it has been interpreted as a reaction to the rationalism of the eighteenth century. That confused me, as I have associated Romanticism--of which Gothicism must be a part--with the liberalism and chaos of the French Revolution. I guess that's where I made my mistake. Likewise, I have associated Neoclassicism with the conservative, rational, and orderly periods of pre-revolutionary Europe, the American Revolution, and the post-revolutionary periods in Europe and America. There are some associations there, but Neoclassicism isn't so easily opposed to Romanticism, while conservatism may not even belong on that list. If you consider the dichotomy of the Dionysian vs. the Apollonian, it gets even more complicated, and maybe the theorizing starts to fall apart.

Anyway, in regards to Frankenstein, I thought: how can a Gothic romance be the first work of science fiction? I may be getting closer to an answer to that question, but it makes sense to me now that the roots of science fiction--and progressivism--are in reason and rationalism. (Maybe also in Neoclassicism or the Apollonian.) If we're working with opposites, then fantasy, weird fiction, and supernatural horror--together the genres of Gothicism, or, alternatively, the genres that look to the past--must be rooted, like conservatism, in the non-rational or anti-rational, the Romantic, the Medieval, and maybe even the Dionysian. (That list doesn't hold together very well, either, but then it's harder to theorize about conservatism, which is by nature anti-theoretical.) The natural form, then, for science fiction would be the novel, whereas the natural form for the Gothic story is the romance.

So Frankenstein seems to me a Romantic work, an inspiration for other Romantic works, and--together with other Gothic romances--a lead-in to the Gothic genres of fantasy, weird fiction, and supernatural horror. As I have said all along, those genres look to the past and by temperament are conservative. Science fiction, on the other hand, being about the future, tends to be progressive in its view and in its aims. By this analysis it is descended from the rationalism of the eighteenth century and--whether we like it or not--from the forces that brought about the French Revolution and eventually the Russian Revolution.

But what if science fiction has a Gothic strain as well? Edgar Allan Poe is supposed to have been the originator of science fiction in America. Peter Viereck considered him conservative in some ways. He was without doubt a Romantic. His stories--full of black cats; old, dark houses; living corpses; and other such trappings--is also without a doubt Gothic. So if the first science fiction novel was actually a Gothic romance, and the originator of science fiction in America was a conservative Romantic, my question remains: how can these things be reconciled? And is there really the divide that we imagine separating the scientific from the Gothic?

Science fiction in its first century and more (1818-1920s) was, like Frankenstein's monster, an assembly, part science and part romance. The nascent genre was even called scientific romance in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then came the scientific fiction, Scientifiction (1915, 1926), and finally science fiction (1929) of Hugo Gernsback, followed by the hard science fiction of the Golden Age under John W. Campbell, Jr. As it evolved, science fiction developed higher aspirations, to be taken seriously as literature, to be novelistic rather than romantic. That may have been true at no time more than in the 1960s or '70s. Then, in the early '80s, Romanticism I think seems to have revived--like Frankenstein's monster--with the arrival of a new kind of romance, written by a new romancer.

Now, on to William Gibson.

Frankenstein (Halcyon House, 1932) with illustrations by Nino Carbe (1909-1993), later an animator with Walt Disney, Walter Lantz, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and DePatie-Freleng.

Frankenstein in a paperback edition from 1953. Evidently there wasn't any novel that could not receive the redhead-with-cleavage treatment from paperback and pulp publishers. 

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Pipe Dreams and Premonitions-Part Three

Conservatism by Peter Viereck (Van Nostrand, 1956) is a companion volume to Liberalism: Its Meaning and History by J. Salwyn Schapiro (1958). Both are designed for college reading.

From Conservatism:

Lord Hugh Cecil, a leading twentieth-century philosopher of conservatism, defined that ism [sic] as "a force called into activity by the French Revolution [of 1789] and operating against the tendencies that that Revolution set up." (p. 10)

That would suggest that conservatism is merely reactionary or counter-revolutionary. However, there is an alternative within conservatism, i.e., Edmund Burke's brand of philosophy that fights "for the sake of traditional liberties" as opposed to the reactionary brand that fights "for the sake of traditional authority." (Italics are in the original, p. 11.) By marrying liberty to tradition, Burke (1729-1797) found a middle ground between the forces of innovation and those of reaction.

[Conservative philosophers] use the Latin term "a priori" for ideas deduced entirely from "prior" ideas, as opposed to ideas rooted in historical experience . . . . Conservatives condemn, with the term "rationalist blueprints," the attempts of progressives to plan society in advance from pure reason instead of letting it grow "organically" . . . like a living plant . . . . (p. 18)

In their theorizing and planning, progressives ignore the fact that they are playing with the lives of other people. To them, those lives are mere abstractions, no more than terms in an equation. (1) "Conservative theory [on the other hand] is anti-theoretical," according to Prof. Viereck. "The liberal and rationalist mind consciously articulates abstracts blueprints; the conservative mind unconsciously incarnates concrete traditions." (p. 17) So the conservative is not essentially, by Prof. Viereck's estimate, a theorist, a planner, or even a rationalist. The conservative, unbound by theory, is free in a way that the progressive can never hope to be.

What in politics is the self-destructive vice of the extreme reactionary--his remoteness from the present--sometimes becomes his virtue in art. The remoteness may give him perspective, the detachment that facilitates imaginative flights. Therefore, the most objectionable and bigoted reactionary may become in his art the most profound psychologist, the most sensitive moralist. (p. 17)

Non-rationalism or anti-rationalism, "remoteness from the present," imaginative flight, profound psychology, sensitive moralism--these would seem the characteristics of the conservative artist. They would also seem to be the foundation for a new movement in European culture to counter the cold, hard rationalism of the eighteenth century. According to Peter Viereck:

In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published their joint book of poems, Lyrical Ballads. It marked the revolt of the human heart against abstract eighteenth-century rationalists . . . . (p. 34)

It also, by some estimates, marked the beginning of the Romantic Era.

I was surprised in reading Conservatism that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are considered conservatives. Surprised because I had thought of them as Romantics and enamored of the French Revolution. But Romanticism, as it turns out, is in part a reaction to the rationalism behind the French Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge both became disenchanted by that revolution. (More on that in the next part of this series.)

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, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner. (dates removed, p. 103)

The first four authors are of course giants of Romanticism in America, and all six wrote Gothic tales. Poe's successor, H.P. Lovecraft, though a rationalist and a materialist, might easily fall into that list as well. Nietzsche, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky are also on the conservative side of the equation according to Prof. Viereck. I should note that Coleridge, Balzac, Hawthorne, and Poe had works in Weird Tales. I would be a little hard pressed to come up with any Neoclassical or rationalist writer of the eighteenth or nineteenth century who was similarly placed in the magazine. (2)

I'll close by writing about Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897), an art historian and author who was born in the same year Frankenstein was published and in the title character's home country. (More on Frankenstein next.) Burckhardt was no slouch; his reputation is firm. A friend of Nietzsche, he formulated with Nietzsche the concept of "massman," and, on his own, the concept of what he called "terrible simplifiers," that is, the leaders of massman. His opposite was Marquis de Condorcet, a progressive who believed in the future as a predictable and controllable unwinding of history. As it turns out, Condorcet died in the squalid jail cells of Utopia. He failed to foresee what his theorizing would bring about. It all turned out to be a pipe dream. Jakob Burckhardt, who would have been skeptical of innovation, including any attempt to plan or control the future, nevertheless foresaw it:

I have a premonition which sounds like utter folly, and yet it will not leave me: the military state will become one vast factory. . . . What must logically come is a definite and supervised stint of misery . . . daily begun and ended to the sound of drums . . . . In the delightful twentieth century, authoritarianism will raise its head again, and a terrifying head it will be. . . . My picture of the terrible simplifiers (terribles simplificateurs) is no pleasant one . . . . Naked force in command and the silencing of opposition . . . . (p. 159) (3)

Science fiction and progressivism look to the future, the former by extrapolation, the latter by a priori reasoning. Both would seem to pride themselves on their vision. Yet only conservatives--skeptical of innovation, aware of man's fallen nature, and with their eyes on the past--foresaw the coming of the twentieth-century totalitarian. Jakob Burckhardt foresaw it. So did Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Who, then, had the better vision? Who today? (4)

Notes

(1) Bill Ayers, for example, one of our current president's buddies, has spoken in an offhand way of the necessity of eliminating twenty-five million Americans from the equation, all in the name of progress.

(2) Revision (Aug. 9, 2015): This was to have been a footnote, but now as I think on it, my note has expanded into something more than a note, so I'll write it as a separate posting. You can access it here. (Link not yet ready.)
(3) Here is a preceding quote:

The world approaches two alternatives, either full democracy or an absolute lawless despotism. The latter will no longer be run by dynasties, for these are too soft-hearted, but by a military command disguised as republicanism . . . . (p. 159)

Here is Nietzsche's foretelling:

It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politics. A statesman who rears up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call "great" . . . . (p. 168)

and:

The democratising [sic] of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants . . . . (p. 169)

(4) And if the totalitarian state is a Utopia/Dystopia, and if stories of Utopia/Dystopia lie within the realm of science fiction, and if the perspective of the conservative gives him a better view of the future, who then would make a more accurate writer of science fiction? Him or the extreme progressive whose vision is clouded by his pipe dream of perfection?

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia and Oppression 101

Political correctness is a rapidly spreading and virulent disease that infects every human institution, including science fiction and, as it turns out, comedy on the university campus. It is of course a progressivist movement, a phenomenon exclusively of the Left. Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic boils down into one paragraph a lot of what I have been writing about lately:

O, Utopia. Why must your sweet governance always turn so quickly from the Edenic to the Stalinist? The college revolutions of the 1960s--the ones that gave rise to the social-justice warriors of today's campuses--were fueled by free speech. But once you've won a culture war, free speech is a nuisance, and "eliminating" language becomes a necessity.

She herself indulges in a little PC in her article, but when you get a chance, you should read:

"That’s Not Funny! Today’s College Students Can't Seem to Take a Joke" by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, September 2015.

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Pipe Dreams and Premonitions-Part Two

I have two books, two sides of a coin. Both were published in the 1950s by Van Nostrand under its Anvil imprint. First is Liberalism: Its Meaning and History by J. Salwin Schapiro (1958). I'll let Prof. Schapiro speak:

Man's natural goodness was eloquently proclaimed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He developed a theory that man in the state of nature was possessed of goodness which degenerated into corruption as a result of the coming of civilization. The existing social order was therefore the heritage of an evil past created by ignorance, violence, and tyranny. What was essential, according to Rousseau, was to establish a natural social order, one in harmony with man's goodness. Only then will the problems arising from the conflict between man and society be solved. (p. 18)

The whole liberal program seems to have sprung from those ideas, that man in a state of nature is essentially good and pure and that he is corrupted by society, therefore, if the past can be overthrown and society perfected, man can be made happy. It's why liberals emphasize society over the individual, why they believe that the individual is not responsible for and can't be held accountable for his actions, why they're always so busy with their tinkering and meddling, why they despise the past and look forward with such longing to the future. Rousseau's ideas also seem to be the origin of the idea that society and government, i.e., the State, are coterminous. Anyway, every story ever told about the goodness and purity of primitive societies vs. the corruption of civilized societies--Avatar for example, or the below-deck dance scene in Titanic--is, consciously or not, based on Rousseau's ideas.

The new faith in man and the new passion for change were inspired by the idea of progress. By progress was meant that man has moved, is moving, and will move in a beneficial direction. . . . Progress is the leading theme of Marquis de Condorcet's book, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [1795]. According to Condorcet, progress is an autonomous, linear, inevitable historical movement toward "perfectibility," the golden age of the future. (p. 18)

"[T]he golden age of the future," Utopia, in other words, the progressive dream, the dream also of science fiction writers and fans from the 1920s onward. Note the phrase "golden age," which is here applied to the future, but which has also been applied to the period of science fiction in America from 1938 to the 1950s. Note also the phrase "inevitable historical movement," implying that history is an unalterable force, and like a force--a physical force--measurable and predictable, in other words a science.

According to secularism, man's supreme aim was to attain happiness in this world through mundane ideas and scientific methods. (p. 19)

If happiness is attainable by mundane and scientific methods, then is it, too, material in nature? Liberals would seem to answer yes, and that's why, in their minds, the solution to human unhappiness is material rather than spiritual or familial, or at the very least psychological or emotional.

Finally, quotes from Condorcet (1743-1794) himself:

The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write [Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain], and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of his perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us. (p. 103)

and:

If man can predict with almost complete certainty those phenomena whose laws he knows; and if, when he does not know these laws, he can, on the basis of his experience in the past, predict future events with assurance[,] why then should it be regarded as chimerical to trace with a fair degree of accuracy the picture of man's future on the basis of his history? (p. 104)

There's the clincher: history is essentially a science. So, too, is the future. Through science we will know and be able to plan the future and to progress inexorably into that future--a future without limits, evermore perfect and perfectible, marked by ever-greater happiness, a Golden Age, a Utopia.

* * *

Here is another quote from Prof. Schapiro:

Liberals in general have believed in the existence of objective truth, discoverable through reason according to the scientific method of research, experiment, and verification. What is known as rationalism endeavors, by using reason, to subject all matters, religious as well as non-religious, to critical inquiry. The rationalist looks primarily to science for enlightenment. (p. 12)

In this age in which liberals believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, a person with XY sex chromosomes and male genitalia is a woman, and that race is a real, biological fact rather than simply a useful fallacy, it's hard to imagine that liberalism originated in reason and rationalism. (1) Understanding that liberalism originated in rationalism is one of the keys to understanding the history of science fiction, as well as the divide between science fiction and fantasy. It's also a key to the notion that science fiction may be inevitably political and perhaps unavoidably progressive in its outlook.

One final note before I move on to the conservative side of the equation: Marquis de Condorcet was an aristocrat, also a scientist and mathematician. He sought to apply science to what he believed were the problems of society, especially with the coming of the French Revolution in 1789. He was elected to the French Assemblée in 1791, "hoping," in the words of Wikipedia, "for a rationalist reconstruction of society." (2) Two years later the revolution turned against him, and he died in prison in 1794 either by murder or suicide. (3)

The French Revolution, an exercise in Utopia and a model for all the bloody and utopian revolutions to come, consumed Condorcet as it consumed so many of its revolutionaries. Eventually--inevitably--it came to a disastrous end as all utopian schemes must. Condorcet's vision of progress towards a perfect future turned out to be a pipe dream.

Notes
(1) Our Constitution, for example, is a supreme work of reason and based on classical liberal ideas. It's also conservative in the Burkean sense; its dual nature as both liberal and conservative is one of its great beauties and probably one explanation for its great success.
(2) I'm not sure how reconstruction is possible without a little destruction (or as our current president calls it, "fundamental transformation"), and I don't know why we should submit to "rationalist" plans for our lives, but maybe we're not supposed to ask these questions.
(3) If it was suicide, Datura--jimsonweed, perhaps a favored drug in fantasy and weird fiction--played its part. One example of the place of jimsonweed in genre fiction is in the movie Nightwing (1979).

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley