This is the region of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley found an objective correlative for the cold intellectual currents of her day. It has maintained, and even implemented, its power to our day.
We need to resist a temptation to classify rigidly, thinking to achieve intellectual clarity by so doing. There is no contradiction involved in regarding this remarkable transitional novel as a Gothic story, as one of the great horror stories of the English language, and as the progenitor of modern SF.[19]
Nobody seeks to argue that Frankenstein is not a horror story. The influence of the movies has greatly persuaded us to concentrate on the horror aspect. Yet the movies have always cheapened Mary Shelley’s theme. The creature is usually turned into a dotty bogeyman, allowed only to grunt, grunt and destroy. It is presented as alien to humanity, not an extension of it.
Mary Shelley depicts the creature as alienated from society. Just when we have learned to fear the creature and loathe its appearance, she shows us the reality of the case. This is no monster. It is a lost soul. Above all things, it wishes to reverence its absent creator.
Every good Frankenstein-watcher has his own opinions about the monster. It is the French Revolution, says Suvin. It is Percy Bysshe Shelley, says Christopher Small. It is an hermaphrodite, says William Veeder. It and Victor are two different modes of one consciousness says Mary K. Patterson Thornburg.[20] I have come to believe that the stricken creature is Mary herself, that she found in the monster a striking objective correlative for her misfortunes at birth. Later in her career, in her other SF novel, she projects herself as Verney, the Last Man in a world of death wandering alone without a soulmate.
The novel is firmly anti-alchemy. The science is not very clear—impossible, if you like—but it is science as perfectly distinct from alchemy, although Mary was writing some years before the word ‘scientist’ was coined. As for the philosophical and transcendental qualities, they arise from the central science-fictional posit, just as they do in Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and rule the novel out of the SF stakes no more than does Woolf’s psychological element.
If I were rewriting BYS now, I should qualify Frankenstein’s pre-eminence by allowing more discussion of the utopianists of eighteenth-century France, and such works of the Enlightenment as Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1770).[21] The hero of this work wakes up seven centuries in the future, to a world of scientific and moral advance. But between such examples and later ones come the guillotines of the French Revolution, to deliver a blow to pure utopianism from which it has not recovered. The prevailing tone was to be set, at least in the Anglo-American camp, by the glooms of Gothic-Romanticism. As Bruce Sterling says, the colour of SF is noir.
I began by saying that the question of function was involved with the question of origin. To regard SF as co-existent with literature since Homer is to bestow on it no function not also operative in literature; which contradicts the experience of most of us who enjoy both literature and SF.
To regard SF as ‘all starting with Gernsback’ is to impoverish it to an unfair degree. SF then becomes a kind of gadget fiction, where every story more than ten years old is hailed as a ‘Classic’, and reputations can be made by rewriting one’s previous story ad infinitum. SF may be a microcosm, but it is larger than a back yard.
To speak practically, one has to consider how best to introduce historical SF to new readers or students. Should one confront them with Homer’s Odyssey, Mercier’s Year 2440, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the wretched crust of Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+? I trust that the answer is obvious.
It was a passage in BYS concerning Hugo Gernsback which most offended readers. This, it appears, was what Sam Moskowitz was attacking me for at the Lunacon. Later, the enthusiast David Kyle took me to task for saying that Hugo Gernsback was arguably one of the worst disasters ever to hit the SF field. Well, admittedly I stated the case strongly in order to be heard above the sound of choristers praising Old Uncle Hugo, but there was truth in what I said. Ten years later, I would parse the remark: worse disasters have struck since, notably commercial exploitation.
Kyle’s Pictorial History of Science Fiction (1981), scores slightly better than Lester del Rey’s. It actually manages to mention the title of one of my novels, Barefoot in the Head (‘extravagant if not incomprehensible’). The gain is offset by a veiled threat. The last time anyone said such rough things about Gernsback, we are told, ‘was at the 1952 Chicago con; a fan named Chester A. Polk was sent to hospital and Claude Degler, head of the Cosmic Circle, drove Don Rogers out of fandom for good’.
Alexei Panshin, reviewing BYS in F&SF, also threatened to have me drummed out of the regiment.
Fans like Kyle have had to watch SF taken out of their hands, when once they must have thought it was in their pockets. Well, chums, it belongs to Big Business now, so we’re all losers. The media have taken over—and First Fandom is preferable to the Fourth Estate.
More ambivalent is the attitude of general critics of the field. There’s a feel of punches being pulled. Tom Clareson, in ‘Towards a History of Science Fiction’,[22] evades the issue entirely, with a bland paragraph on Frankenstein which follows on a reference to Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. In James Gunn’s history of SF,[23] he gives BYS a more than friendly nod, but cannot resist delivering the familiar litany of defunct magazines, backed by displays of gaudy covers. Like del Rey, Gunn names none of my fiction; like del Rey he lumps me in with the New Wave, though obviously without malice. In his later four-volumed critical anthology,[24] Gunn—always honest and painstaking—becomes more venturesome; he is a ‘safe’ scholar moving slowly to a more individual, and creative, position.
Clareson and Gunn, like Kyle and Moskowitz, may be regarded honourably as old-timers in the field. Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, one gathers, are relative newcomers—as their ‘thinking person’s guide to the genre’ demonstrates.[25] This means they cannot reel off litanies of dead stories in dead magazines. It also means they adopt Frankenstein as the progenitor of the species. Hooray! No matter they don’t acknowledge where exactly they derived the idea from. They are genial about BYS, and mention in passing that I have written fiction, though of all my novels only Barefoot in the Head is named. More laziness! Perhaps someone somewhere taught it once. Charles Platt, are you blushing?
All the critical books I have mentioned are quirky, including my own. I am less conscious of quirks in two recent encyclopaedic works, Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction[26] and the John Clute, Peter Nicholls Encyclopedia of SF,[27] both of which seek to be dispassionate in judgement. Both take cognizance of the range of my work over the last twenty-five years, short stories as well as novels, for which I am grateful.
Clute’s Encyclopaedia is more bulky than The Oxford Companion to English Literature. It is a fact worthy of consideration.
On the whole Billion Year Spree has entered the blood stream. I have gained fewer black marks for it than for my defence of the New Wave writers in England during the 1960s, when I fought for their right to express themselves in their own way rather than in someone else’s. Despite the attempts of persons like del Rey to lump me in with the New Wave, I flourished before it arrived, and continue still to do. That experience taught me how conservative readers of SF are, for all their talk about The Literature of Change.