Astounding N-Grams

The most popular 4-word sequences in Harry Bates’s Astounding Stories of Super Science–from February 1930 to May 1931–are overwhelmingly locative:

• the edge of the       121
• the center of the    85
• the surface of the    81
• the side of the        80
• the bottom of the    74
• the end of the        71
• for the first time    67
• the gens of dalis    67
• at the end of        65
• the rest of the        64
• the top of the        64
• brigands of the moon    57
• at the same time    54
• dear editor i have    53
• in the center of    52
• the base of the        52
• the owner of the    52
• of one of the        50

The phrase “the Gens of Dalis” comes from Arthur J. Burks’s Earth, the Marauder, a novel published in three parts from July to September 1930 concerning tribal communities of the future, spread across the globe after a major ecological catastrophe.  Brigands of the Moon is the title of a serial novel by Ray Cummings that was especially popular among readers, who mention it in almost every “letters to the editor” section over this period.

The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen

Four years after publishing Ralph 124C 41+ in the pages of his pop technology magazine Modern Electrics, Hugo Gernsback published a second, far less studied work in his second imprint, The Electrical Experimenter.  This novel, The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen, ran from May 1915 to February 1917.

As a work of fiction, the novel is insufferable.  It reads as a series of lectures on physics, chemistry, and astronomy, all situated within a stock fantastic setting and strung together with the thinnest of narrative expositions.  But because this is a budding work of “scientifiction,” and beholden to the Gernsbackian tenets of scientific rationality, the narrative has to explain exactly how these lectures are transmitted from locations such as the Moon or Mars.

And here’s where things get interesting.  Münchausen, before leaving for Mars, sets up a relay station on the Moon capable of receiving his long distance audio transmissions and amplifying them for reception by the novel’s narrator, I.M. Alier, on Earth.  Gernsback selects the obscure recording device known as the telegraphone, patented by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, to be the substrate on which Münchausen’s transmissions are recorded for rebroadcast in the form of serial fiction.

The telegraphone was the first device to demonstrate the principle of magnetic recording, in this case on a spool of tightly wound wire that rotated past a recording head.  The affordances of this gadget –– its recording capacity, its read/write ability –– determine the pulse of the novel.  Each monthly installment begins with a “shrill, high-pitched note” or a “piercing screech in my ‘phones” and ends with “an abrupt, sharp click” or a “snapping noise and a rhythmic low sizzling.”  Thinking like a magazine editor, the Baron keeps a close watch over the length of his transmission and cuts it off before it runs over his quota.

“But I note by my chronometer that the time is up and in a few seconds the telegraphone wire on my radiotomatic on the moon will be to full capacity.  So I must cut off short.”  (137)

Yes, this work is clunky as a piece of fiction.  But Gernsback’s “gadget stories” use narrative (or something like it…) to systematically work through the affordances of various devices, real and imagined.

Hugo Gernsback and SF’s Handicraft Roots

While Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+ (a wordplay on “one to foresee for one”) is one of the foundational works of science fiction, it’s also widely agreed to be “the worst science fiction novel ever written” (Everett Bleiler; similar sentiments in a talk recently webcast on SF and architecture by Warren Ellis). Setting aside this work’s questionable merit (“Ralph 124C 41+, his heart thumping in a most undignified way, was acting more like a schoolboy than a master of science”), Gernsback’s work as a magazine editor provides some fascinating materials when considering the emergence of science fiction within an environment of fin de siècle technological utopianism and DIY experimentation with radio homebrew. I’ve been digging through some of the Firestone Library’s Gernsback materials and came across a few interesting points.

The Luxembourg-born Gernsback began his career as a publisher in 1908 with Modern Electrics, a hobbyist’s guide to wireless experimentation, including how-to articles, descriptions of the latest developments in the field, and speculations on the future of wireless technology. It was in this steampunk incarnation of Wired magazine that Ralph 124C 41+ was first published, and here that, strangely enough, Lewis Mumford published his first bit of writing at the age of 15, titled “A Portable Receiving Outfit.” Gernsback’s next big success wasScience and Invention, running from 1913 (originally as Electrical Experimenter) to 1931. In the August 1923 issue, Gernsback first edited a collection, calling on many of the same writers contributing technical pieces to write for this “Science Fiction Number.”

This issue served as a sort of trial run for Gernsback’s most famous publication, Amazing Stories, appearing in April 1926 and continuing, in one form or another, until the present day. In its early incarnations, the magazine largely published reprints of authors Gernsback wanted to appropriate as canonical works of “scientifiction,” a term he patented and attempted to popularize with Amazing Stories. One finds in the first two years of the magazine stories by Wells, Verne, and Poe. There simply wasn’t a large pool of authors writing in the genre (indeed, the “genre” at this point is little more than a business venture with no product), and those who were writing fiction along Gernsback’s lines of “a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” were put off by Gernsback’s less than attractive editorial style (he believed that publication is payment enough). Burroughs was too expensive to contract, and Lovecraft had a good enough following of his own.

One of Gernsbacks’ most important contributions is his development of a forum in which a community of genre fans could develop, in which a medium of popular criticism could develop around a particular set of aesthetic questions. He was one of the first magazine editors to regularly publish a letters to the editor section, responding each month. Indeed, in many of the correspondences between Gernsback and his readers, he seems to be behind the curve when discussing the poetics of the genre. In the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, nineteen year old reader Green Peyton Wertenbaker writes, “Scientifiction goes out into the remote vistas of the universe, where there is still mystery and so still beauty. For that reason scientifiction seems to me to be the true literature of the future. The danger that may lie before Amazing Stories is that of becoming too scientific and not sufficiently literary.” Gernsback’s unfortunate reply in the next month’s issue: “we should state that the ideal proportion of a scientifiction story should be seventy-five per cent literature interwoven with twenty-five per cent science.”

Gernsback never abandons his earlier technical publications, continuing with titles such asShort Wave Craft (seen above), Everyday Mechanics, and Technocracy Review. He opens a radio station WRNY which in 1928 broadcast one of the earliest radio programs with a live classical concert (conducted by fellow wireless enthusiast Joseph Kraus) and conducted experiments with television in the late 20s and into the 30s, though never with simultaneous image and sound–an image would be broadcast and then a sound over the same wavelength in a sort of shot countershot. One of the most interesting things about Gernsback’s regular editorials and critical writings (publishing a short essay in each of his several publications each month) is the degree to which his (if you want to call it this) literary criticism and technical writings feed into one another–and this seems to be the case in the fan letter, pop critical discussion that flourished in his magazine empire. In the passage below from the Feb-March 1931 issue of Short Wave Craft, one can just as easily imagine the “experimenter” to be the writer of fiction as the hobbyist tinkering with tubes and resistors. (And note the way that the nature of television–a medium which has yet to come into being–is already seen to be determined not by the nature of its technological support but by a certain aesthetic of its use–potential technics?)

With television on the threshold, an entirely new radio paradise has been opened to the experimenter; because television will, no doubt, be transmitted on the shorter wave lengths for a long time to come. The up-to-date experimenter is, of course, thinking about this and is following the new art in all its different branches; so that, when television finally ‘breaks,’ he will be equipped to work with it as thoroughly as he has been familiarized with transmission and reception, ‘phone as well as code.

Review: Moon (2009)

(Warning–several spoilers below, beyond what can pretty much be inferred from the trailer.)

It’s remarkable the lengths to which one must go these days to completely isolate a character in science fiction. Much of the work of Moon (dir. Duncan Jones) is spent explaining just how it is that a person can become utterly disconnected from the live flow of networks while still being able to receive prerecorded media. So, the conceit here is that we have discovered a way to supply 70% of the Earth’s power with solar energy; that “H3” from the sun is trapped in lunar rock on the dark side of the moon; that Lunar Industries, Ltd. employs a staff of one in its mining colony, Sam (played by Sam Rockwell), whose three-year contract is almost up; that communications relay satellites have been damaged by some solar flare; OR that mysterious dark pylons have been erected around the base in order to block any communication with Earth (not to neglect the ‘fiction’ elements in favor of the ‘science’ determining the protagonist’s seclusion).

This is the first in a series of reversals that Moon performs in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey. These obelisks, rather than appearing as unknown technological wonders and beacons of interplanetary communication, are used to block any transmission, carving out a solitary, dark space within already given technological systems.

Jones (born Zowie Bowie) obviously wanted Rockwell to have the space he needed in this role, and Rockwell’s particular style works nicely with the overall themes of the film. Hinting at the compressed life span and strange familial ties between identical Sam clones, a humorous father/son relationship develops between various versions. Sam shows Sam how to properly carve wood with the thumb closer to the blade. Sam tells Sam in his more decrepit state, “Jesus, your fly is down. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

The lunar base’s AI, named Gerty and voiced by Kevin Spacey, is also there for Rockwell to play off of. In yet another 2001 reversal, HAL 9000′s strangely emotive red eye is replaced here by Gerty’s small LCD screen with a severely limited range of emoticons––smile, mumble, blank, cry. Gerty’s sole function is to keep Sam safe, apparently even at the expense of the station and its mission. Seeing as this company is willing to dispose of (living) clones and reproduce them ad infinitum, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t program their steward more thoroughly. If the clone-on-clone relationship more or less works as comic relief, the one between AI and clone is a bit more sappy. Sam at one point declares, “We’re people Gerty, you understand?” When Gerty agrees to erase his own memory so that no trace is left of the Sam clone who rockets back to Earth.

With the dialectic of command/control paranoia and utopian space boosterism of 2001 thoroughly undone, we are left in the face of these sentimental closing moments wondering just what it is the film is getting across. Moon was screened at the Tribecca Film Festival, and the Q&A afterward detracted a bit from any interesting take on the place of the space opera genre in contemporary network, post-cyberpunk culture that the film itself may have had. Especially notable was Jones’s groan-inducing response during a Q&A after the screening to the question of whether this was a critique of corporate culture: “I dunno man, you tell me. I’m just a filmmaker.”

Regardless, the premise itself of isolation within networks does serve as a striking thought experiment–it seems that it’s not just Sam’s psyche that becomes isolated on the dark side of the moon once off the grid. Based on the very logic of this isolation, stored memory (which is implanted and uploaded into the clones) slips out of sync with the “liveness” of the present tense of networks. If there is one thing to take away from Moon’s mash-up of space opera with our contemporary networked discourse, it is the degree to which memory is now fundamentally reliant upon being distributed, networked.

SF in HD

Cory Doctorow has a recent article in Locus Magazine on why high definition is bad for science fiction films. Basically, the argument is: in the case of CGI special effects (SF films being the perfect genre for showcasing the next unimaginable spectacle), their quality–or at least definition–exponentially increases each year, as does the amount of money poured into such projects. While a film released five years ago might seem laughably outdated by today’s visual standards, a certain amount of longevity can be ensured by small-screen formats on which it may be harder to see the primitive blemishes of last year’s computer graphics. But with an attendant decline in the cost of bigger, high definition LCD screens, Doctorow says “Whatever longevity can be wrung from a movie by releasing it to smaller, more forgiving screens is cut short by the living-room behemoths that are being pushed on us today,” and the returns that can be anticipated by major studios for investing in $200 million SF blockbusters will be less and less. There is an inverse relationship between Moore’s law and the valuation of filmic SF spectacle.

But I think this argument might not consider the internal mechanics of SF’s reception and the increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia that we seem to be going through in popular culture, which becomes especially pronounced in the case of science fiction films. SF seems to have a different sort of half-life than other fictional modes, it ages much more quickly, in a way that I’m not sure how to talk about. Perhaps SF films draw off of a particular a mode of being in the world that is more easily forgotten, more fragile than the raw materials used in the construction of other types of (realistic) films? A mode of being with technologies that would otherwise be forgotten, but can only be recovered in any sense through some sort of patronizing nostalgia?