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: Mundane-SF issue of Interzone

Led by Geoff Ryman, the subgenre known as Mundane-SF was recently showcased in the June issue of Interzone Magazine. The short stories published there follow the program for SF laid out by Ryman’s Mundane Manifesto (no longer online), which, at first sight, seems like little more than a tirade against space opera (no interstellar travel, no extraterrestrial life, no alternate dimensions) and a conservative turn toward the ‘science’ in science fiction (sustainability, genetic engineering, biocomputers, virtual reality). Sadly, much of Ryman’s SF reform movement builds off of a conception of the genre as escapist and childish, as growing out of “an adolescent desire to run away from our world.” Ryman chides, “it’s never too late to grow up.”

In a response to the Mundanes, Ian McDonald writes, “A little thought experiment: if this manifesto had existed in the 1950s, how closely would its SF resemble the world as it exists today?” Does the general lack of rigor Ryman locates in SF extend back to the genre’s earlier days? Should all fiction dealing with interstellar travel and its moral, political, and religious repercussions be dubbed ‘childish’ even though the possibility of a space-faring society was the hard SF trope for at least thirty years? McDonald: “It’s a poor manifesto that would venerate Verne (tech-speculation) but consigns much of H.G. Wells’ core texts to the ‘bonfire of stupidities’ (interplanetary war, aliens, time-travel . . .).” Mundane SF highlights a tension that has existed between the genre’s two poles since its beginnings, between Stanislaw Lem and Robert Heinlein, between Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry. If anything, the concerns of the Mundanes at this moment seem to confirm a science fictional projection by Lem in his 1973 essay “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction”:

I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radical changes effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead science fiction into a crisis, which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more and more apparent that the narrative structures of science fiction deviate more and more from real processes, having been used again and again since they were first introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms.

While Mundane SF seems to respond to this crisis, an intervention at the level of form would be more welcome then a condemnation of the content of the entire genre as childish escapism.

My reservations aside, the results in this issue of Interzone are mixed. The stories tend to foreground objects, the more successful of which weave them into the everyday life of the characters, the less successful merely listing them like an inventory (“plastic cubes for currency, long cheese, textiles, copper and gold wire from Ormud, wine and distilled wine from Karpat…”) A narrative focus on objects is in itself nothing new, a classic example of this being Maria Irene Fornes’s play Mud in which a set of objects that will be set into motion in the coming action is ceremoniously placed on the mantle at the opening of each scene.

One odd similarity between these stories, with the possible exception of Élisabeth Vonarburg’s “The Invisibles”–an amazing account of, impossibly, becoming lost in isolated bubble cities with five districts, one for each finger–is the relative ease of orientation into the story worlds. Part of the distinct pleasure of reading SF is the process of cataloging those initial elements of narrative noise in the story or novel’s opening pages, the neologisms–”I can’t keep in mind at all times which inertials are following what teep or precog” (Dick)–or oxymorons–”east european steel” (Gibson)–that the reader saves for later assemblage into a coherent world system. Immersion into the Mundane stories is, well, mundane. The transition from our world to that of the story is not very stark, save for its fancy proper nouns: “The distance from Sola to the island of Ureparapara is approximately three hours by boat with an outboard motor, assuming the sea is calm” (Lavie Tidhar, “How to Make Paper Airplanes”). “It was a bright chilly day when the ship came into the harbor, turned gracefully as her sails were lowered while she slid into the end of the dock, her flotation out-riggers nudging up to the tarred wood” (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, “Endra-From Memory”).

This sense of familiarity, of orienting the stories within our own world, is most successful in R.R. Angell’s “Remote Control,” where a sysadmin watches over a MMOG. Gradually, we realize the avatars of these players or “riders” exist in physical reality. The movements of the riders control “Web-Cam-Servo-Rifle” robots that patrol the US-Mexico border, and players pay for the privilege of logging on and shooting at Mexicans as they attempt to cross. Newbies are harassed for merely maiming the “sheep,” who adapt by crossing en masse and hoping for the best, since the machines can only hold so many bullets. The story is punctuated by the sysadmin’s repeated appeal–”don’t touch my screen!”–pointedly drawing the line between fantasy and reality in the tactility of the first-person shooter genre. Users get ten minutes or three shots, whichever comes first, and players who happen to spawn into an overheated robot must painfully endure “looking around without being able to shoot.” This is simple, effective, classic “what if” SF.

If Mundane SF is to have any significance, it will not reside in a mere shift of locus from outer space to bioterror; it will not be in an attenuation of those themes that have always marked SF as SF (although cross pollination between ‘mainstream’ lit and SF as well as other genre fiction has been very important in the fiction past 10 years–see Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and collections of McSweeney’s Astonishing Stories). This significance could only be located in what SF has always done best not with its content but with its form, by estranging the flow of everyday life, by seeing its processes through a totality of links with the past.

When Ryman writes, “If there is an estrangement between science and science fiction, then it should be possible to do something about it,” he seems to be pointing toward the perceived atrophy in SF’s ability to imagine probable futures through a significant engagement with current science and technology. The problem seems not to be that “the future is now” and therefore SF has no more purpose, or that our contemporary moment is more science fictional than any work of SF could possibly imagine. The problem as I see it resides with the completeness and speed with which the new is immediately appropriated in contemporary culture. Our blindess to the future is a byproduct of an amnesia toward our technological past. “Cyberspace” is a prime example of this. The internet and its rapidly expanding infrastructure is not some singularity borne directly out of the pages of SF, rendering the genre obsolete and exceeding it in ways that the genre could never hope to encompass (here I’m thinking of William Gibson’s recent, reactionary forays into the present tense). The internet and its thoroughly televisual architecture is an intensification of the same at the price of imagining anything differently. If there is no other configuration of the web thinkable by SF today, then why not?

A true revolution in SF would engage with the possibilities of the form outside of traditional genre fiction boundaries. What do I mean by this? Al Gore’s speeches ten years ago on the “information superhighway.” Advertisements for gadgets that have the ability to prefigure our ineteraction with that technology before it is released. Fiction like Chabon‘s and Lethem‘s. Media theory that uses close readings of SF as jumping off points or inspirations for its own speculative inquiry (see N. Katherine Hayles and Fredric Jameson).

This is the great danger of Mundane SF: that in its misguided emphasis on finding new content for the genre (even though one story is basically the plot of Waterworld, and another is bad cyberpunk), it will forget what the form is capable of. Their use of the term “mundane” itself seems to forget that this word was used as a counterpoint for SF critics in the 60s and 70s. Mundane comes from the latin for “world,” and these critics (esp. Samuel R. Delany) used the term to set SF apart from fiction located in our world. SF would “poise in a tense, dialogic, agonsitic relation to the given” (Delany). While conceivably the term “Mundane SF” could be used as an oxymoron or a program for deploying science fiction’s cognitive estrangement much more closely to the given world (as do Lethem and Chabon who recently won a Hugo), there is little evidence to support this idea. Instead, Ryman glaringly and repeatedly misspells Delany’s name in his writings outlining a program for Mundane SF. In its fetishization of the new at the level of content, Mundane SF forgets the heritage of its own namesake and risks propagating the very historical (and speculative) blindnes it wishes to critique.

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?