Adventures in Time and Space: Lester del Rey's "Nerves"

Adventures in Time and Space series table of contents

The work of art does not refer immediately back to the person who presumably made it. When we know nothing at all about the circumstances that contributed to its production, about the history of its creation — when we do not even know the name of the person who made it possible — it is then that the work comes closest to itself. This is its true direction; it is this characteristic which is expressed in that superlative phenomenon, the masterpiece. Perfection, in the sense given this word by estheticians, is not what distinguishes the masterpiece, nor is the mastery which belongs to the artist and not to the work. Valéry is right to say that mastery is what permits one never to finish what one does. Only the artisan's mastery culminates in the object he fashions. For the artist the work is always infinite, unfinished. And thus the fact that the work is, the singular event of its being absolutely, is disclosed as not belonging to the mastery we associate with achievement. It belongs to another order. ...
        But: does an object fashioned by an artisan or with a machine refer to its maker any more than the work of art does? It too is impersonal, anonymous. It does not bear any author's name.
        Yes, this is true; it does not refer to the person who presumably made it, but neither does it refer to itself. As has often been observed, it disappears altogether into its uses. It refers to all it does, to its utilitarian value. The object never announces that it is, but how it serves. It does not appear. In order that it appear, — this too has often been said — a break in the circuit of usage, a gap, an anomaly has to make it leave the world, leave its senses. And it seems then that, no longer there, it becomes its appearance, its image — what it was before being a useful thing or a significant value. This is also when it becomes, for Jean-Paul Richter and for André Breton, a veritable work of art.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. Ann Smock)

Where others were primarily storytellers, he [Hugo Gernsback] was a didacticist who framed his expositions either as mild japes on fascinating facts or as guided tours through the technologically marvelous world of the future. Although he came to reprint Verne, Wells and Burroughs, he personally did not aspire to literature; he aspired to something much more like propaganda.
        To some, it was potent propaganda. The significance of Amazing Stories is not in having been the first all-speculative-fiction newsstand magazine; it was not, Weird Tales having been founded in 1923. The primary significance lies in that it was the first such magazine to employ the new technological optimism as distinguished from older, classic foci for speculation.

—Algis Budrys, introduction to Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era

[Erle Melvin Korshak, founder of Shasta Press] began reading science fiction in 1934, regularly getting issues of Astounding Stories and Wonder Stories from an older cousin after he had finished reading them. (The cousin later became an oil geologist, a logical development for a Depression teenager who started on science fiction magazines.)

—Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Over My Shoulder

After this, what more need be said about Lester del Rey's story "Nerves"? I am constitutionally incapable of leaving it at that, but I encourage you to stop reading now. Everything that follows is mere elaboration — perhaps dilution — of what has been said in the juxtaposition of these quotations.

There is a subclass (not a "subgenre") of sf that "disappears altogether into its uses." A strange fact is that as far as I can tell no writer specialized in this subclass, no writer was always an artisan — for all that many of them insisted that they were "only" craftsmen; indeed almost all of the major (or at any rate majorly productive) writers of the first several decades of sf regularly produced both it and the "broken" works that become something else.* I always think of Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote many works that seem intended only for use (Prelude to Space, for example) alongside many others that "announce that they are," the grand visionary works like Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End that he's loved and loathed for. The same goes for del Rey; a story like the famous "Helen O'Loy," odious as it may be, has that break in the circuit, where "Nerves" truly does disappear altogether into its uses.

*I want to make very clear here that to say that there is a difference between art and craft is not to say that a work of art is "better" in any way except that it is better at being art. In the specific case(s) I'll be talking about in this post I'll be speaking negatively of those works that "disappear into their use," but that is because of the nature of their use. I'm also aware that these kinds of distinctions have often been used in very damaging and oppressive ways, but even if they've been misidentified and misused the distinctions do exist; if we can't acknowledge that between a tool, in itself as a tool, and a painting, in itself as a painting, there is a fundamental difference of kind, then we can't talk about paintings at all.

The defining characteristic of this type of sf is that it does nothing other than to present something which does not currently exist, but which maybe could soon, as if it does in fact exist, and then proceed to examine some parts of its workings. And by "nothing else" I mean nothing else. So for example Prelude to Space has absolutely no interest whatsoever in anything other than examining how a manned space vessel might be launched from the surface of the earth, and "Nerves" has absolutely no interest whatsoever in anything other than how a nuclear facility might deal with an accident.

(In his essay on sf, Blanchot writes: "A good work of science fiction, to the same extent that it purports to anticipate the future on the basis of genuine knowledge, has interest only in and for the present. Posterity stops here at ten years. The more authentic the creation, the more rapid its descent into the commonplace. There remain literary merits, the pleasure of reading; the book then moves on to a different shelf, having betrayed its kind by hypocritically staking a claim on eternal values." It would be easy to take him here as engaging in the old "if it's good it's not sf," but I believe he is referring instead to what I'm talking about here, what he was talking about in the passage from The Space of Literature, and is suggesting that by "betraying its kind" the work of the artisan becomes the work of art. I would use different terms to make the observation, but the observation itself is sound.)

The use that I'm claiming for this type of sf work, in case my recourse to Eshbach (whose blithe assumptions, and what they reveal about sf, I've discussed briefly here) and Budrys did not make this clear, is propaganda.

Nerves was written early in 1942, when atomic power was discussed publicly only in the science-fiction magazines. It presupposes a world where atomic power is an accepted fact, where atomic-power plants are as commonplace as automobile factories. Writing in a curiously prophetic vein, Mr. Del Rey has furnished some very plausible — albeit fictional — answers to the questions in everyone's mind. What is an atomic-power plant like? How does it operate? What would happen if things got out of control?

—blurb introducing "Nerves" in Adventures in Time and Space

It is important to remember, now and for the rest of this post — indeed for the rest of this series of posts — that every move this anthology makes is one of active canon-creation, not passive canon-reflection. To overstate: it was this anthology and not the age itself that called "the golden age" into existence.

Keeping that in mind, what fascinates about this blurb is how completely inaccurate it is, in the strictest factual sense. The story is not about atomic power plants but rather about facilities for the production of atomic byproducts for use in industry and agriculture.* In the world of the story these atomic facilities are neither accepted nor commonplace. Rather, they are deeply contested, though the contestation occurs almost entirely outside of the story, and the few facilities that exist are operated mainly by one company, in a near-monopoly. The story itself deals far more with the possibilities of near-future medicine than with "prophecies" about the practical functioning of atomic facilities. And indeed, del Rey is writing not in a "prophetic" but rather, to borrow an observation from Samuel R. Delany, in an incantatory vein: he wishes to call what does not exist into being merely by describing it.

*From here on I'll keep using "atomic" even where we'd normally say "nuclear" to help distinguish the setting of the story from what we might be familiar with now from real life.

The several ways in which the blurb is factually inaccurate are revealing, though, because in a broader sense it is entirely accurate. How does a story that looks always slightly to the side of, seldom directly at, the functioning of a facility for the production of atomic byproducts, while focusing much more directly on the brutal violence these byproducts can do to the human body, manage to be read as, far from a dire warning of the inhumanity to come, a "prophecy" of the exciting coming world of atomic power?

"There's an answer somewhere, has to be!"

—Dr. Jenkins, in "Nerves"

And indeed there is. There always is. Science and technology create a problem (an atomic accident kills and maims hundreds, and threatens to destroy a vast swathe of North America if some way of averting disaster is not found quickly), and science and technology are there to find a solution, over and over and over again as "Nerves" careens through its seventy interminably action-packed pages. Radioactive substances have infiltrated a man's nervous system, causing his limbs to jerk so spasmodically that bones break and he may literally die of exhaustion? Not to fear, science has found a way to synthesize curare in doses far more controllable than nature (and the "South American primitives" to whom it was known "for centuries") ever dreamed, and it can dull the motor function long enough to effect a cure; and the pain can be stopped safely with "neo-heroin." A man's heart has stopped due to his exposure to intense radiation and heat? Send for the new machine that can be used to get it going again, and it will be helicopter'd in within the half hour. Byproducts of the accident due to decay within hours into substances that will react and blow up most of the continent?

        "You've got sort of a river running off behind the plant; get everyone within a few miles of it out of there, and connect the blower outlets down to it. Where does it end, anyway — some kind of a swamp, or morass?"
        "About ten miles farther down, yes; we didn't bother keeping the drainage system going, since the land meant nothing to us, and the swamps made as good a dumping ground as anything else." When the plant had first used the little river as an outlet for their waste products, there'd been so much trouble that National had been forced to take over all adjacent land and quiet the owners' fears of the atomic activity in cold cash. Since then, it had gone to weeds and rabbits, mostly. "Everyone within a few miles is out, anyway, except a few fishers or tramps that don't know we use it. I'll have militia sent in to scare them out."
        "Good. Ideal, in fact, since the swamps will hold stuff in there where the current's slow longer."

—"Nerves"

For the first time the story looks directly at the heart of the problem — the atomic facility and the accident itself — and for the first time the solution is not to throw a scientific-technological fix at the scientific-technological problem, but — "the land meant nothing to us" — to throw the scientific-technological problem into the natural world. (The way it ends up working is that the dangerous byproducts mixed with the water form a colloid that keeps the individual molecules far enough apart to stop them from reacting; they can then be treated with a substance that reacts with them more safely, generating nothing but heat that the water can absorb — "It'll cook the river bed up and dry it, but that's all!") Despite this very telling change, though, the cycle of problem-solution problem-solution continues, and only extremely rarely is there any suggestion that it might even be possible — let alone desirable — to step out of the cycle.

And every time there is such a suggestion, it comes always from the stupid mob, sf's traditional enemy. We've just seen them in the passage I quoted just above, the landowners (and other users of the land) whose fears of radioactive contamination somehow remain foolish (the dismissiveness fairly oozes out of that word, "trouble", and har har, look, they were willing to take money) even in the face of a potentially world-historical catastrophe caused by precisely that radioactivity. A few pages earlier we've seen the competent scientists and technicians and engineers and doctors who are running things fretting about the fact that "the population" (always a group separate from those who matter) might resort to "lynch law" if forced to evacuate, even though the scientists and technicians and engineers and doctors know, as one of them says to the plant manager (on whom "the mob's" anger would likely focus) that "it wasn't your fault." And then of course there are several disparaging references to the delays and restrictions imposed by "Congress," a body sf writers often misunderstand as having some relation to "the people," which serves the convenient propaganda purpose of convincing budding technocrats that government can never facilitate business and technology enough, that it is always restricting and should be pressured to be more helpful.

You might be interested to know that at the party one very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and the alien creatures.

—Joanna Russ, "On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft's"

But of course "Nerves" doesn't even have those, or anything equivalent. All it has is the cardboard heroes (and, after a fashion, heroines) and the values. (The jokey male camaraderie of the last page, the "ribbing," the slapping on the back and the winking...) Now, I'm not arguing that "Nerves" is bad because it wants a world I think is bad, or even because it's dishonest in its methods of trying to call that world into existence. (If that disqualified a work of art for me, I wouldn't — couldn't — be an sf reader, nor could I be a reader of much else.) Much of the analysis I've just done, of the ways in which "Nerves" is politically dangerous, is of a kind that I find — in isolation — tedious and pointless. That the sf of the first half of the 20th century hated the greater mass of the people, manufactured itself and its readers as an elite, and desired a technocratic nightmare world that it in many ways successfully effected, is, or should be, obvious. That it also did other things, things that often manage to achieve a kind of depth and truth difficult to articulate (and Russ's young woman articulates only a small portion of it), is perhaps less obvious but is nevertheless true. The difficulty here, looking at "Nerves," is trying to understand how it is that it, unlike many stories just as reprehensible, has nothing — nothing — to offer apart from its hideous incantations.

Is it a matter of setting? Most of the problems I've been talking about are difficult to imagine arising in anything but a near-future story; on the other hand, space operas and other far-future settings come with their own problems.

Is it a matter of technique? I have tended to argue that the most important defining characteristic of any given work of sf — the single thing that most sets it apart as its own work and that most drives what it is capable of doing — is the way it alternates between exposition methods, here infodumping, here incluing, here mixing the two in this way, here in that. Perhaps it is not insignificant that "Nerves" is almost 100% infodump, with incluing playing almost no role. It's not that infodumping is in itself "bad" (a foolish, meaningless thing to say) but that in the absence of any counterpoint with incluing (which even the sfnal "essays" of a writer like Lem have in abundance) the work succumbs to the kind of intellectual weakness that Delany identifies in the utopia, a form which no amount of clueless academic criticism can make identical with sf* but which this particular story comes very close to, in terms of structure at any rate.

*To say that works of sf can be utopian is to say something entirely different than to say that sf is utopia, or that utopia is sf.

Or is it a matter of outlook? The attitude toward technology I've been looking at in this post is very much the kind of mystification Russ was referring to in her "SF and Technology as Mystification," where the notion that technology is some force of nature that just "advances" on its own, without human input, is a cover for the machinations of capitalism; whether this mystification is presented by a booster, as here, or a nominal opponent, as in the academic panels Russ discusses, is essentially irrelevant: the mystification serves its purpose either way.

Of course it's all of these things — they all contribute — and none of them — many stories that live and breathe do some or all of these things and somehow manage to be more than propaganda.

We know that all ancient art was other than it seems to us to be. The white statues deceive us, but if we restore their colored coating to them, it is then that they appear false to us (and they are false, because this restoration disregards the power, the truth of time, which has erased the colors). A painting ages; one ages badly, the other becomes a masterpiece through the duration that decomposes its tones, and we are familiar with the fortuitousness of mutilations: this Victory to which only the flight of time could give wings, the heads from Bardo, of mediocre craftsmanship, that the sea has resculpted, has made fascinating. Moreover, the very means of our knowledge transform almost at will that which they help us to know: through reproduction, art objects lose their scale; the miniature becomes a painting, the painting separated from itself, fragmented, becomes another painting. Fictive arts? But art, it would seem, is this fiction.

—Blanchot, "The Museum, Art, and Time" (trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg), in Friendship

Obviously not nearly as much time separates us from "Nerves" as from the statues, but in the terms of modernity, of modern science, and of science fiction (again: "Posterity stops here at ten years," and though this has not in actual fact been the case, the observation remains true of the writing itself), 1942 was several eternities ago. The colors have worn, duration has decomposed the tones; and then, too, the story's being ensconced in an authoritative (and, in my secondhand copy, solidly built but heavily battered) hardcover from a major press, rather than in the disposable newsstand magazine it originally appeared in, makes it lose its scale, separates it from itself.

Plastic art is first in the service of religious sentiments or invisible realities around which the community perpetuates itself; art is religion, says Hegel. At this stage one finds it in churches, in tombs, under the earth, or in the sky, but inaccessible, invisible in a way: who looks at Gothic statues? We do; the others invoked them. The consequence of the disappearance of prayer was to make monuments and works of art appear, to make painting an art within reach of our eyes.

—"The Museum, Art, and Time"

To combine Blanchots, and to reassign the values attached to his observations all willy-nilly:

I tend to suspect that the difference between "Nerves" and, say, "Forgetfulness" — or indeed even "Requiem," which for all its self-serving propagandistic sentimentality, for all that I hate it, is something other than that as well — was largely invisible when these stories were first read. It is easy now to laugh at early sf readers (and tempting to compare them to contemporary ones in this regard) but what at first appears a simple lack of discernment may conceal something deeper: where we "look at" these stories, their first readers invoked them. They all disappeared into their uses, and the uses of all of them were, in a sense, propagandistic; it was these stories, after all, that made it "a logical development for a Depression teenager who started on science fiction magazines" to take his place in the oil industry — for countless like him to take their places anywhere in the emerging technocracy.

The stories, as "stories", were invisible. It is only the passage of time, the change in context, the coming to pass of what has, indeed, come to pass since they were written — and the way this changes the stories' "futurity," the way it transforms them into something that can laughably be called "prophetic," or just as laughably not — that makes them appear. It is only this that brings them within reach of our eyes. The passage of time and the change in context have transformed all of these stories, some into art, some not. However much I like to imagine that, had I been an avid sf reader in the era of Campbell's Astounding, I would have dismissed "Nerves" as garbage while recognizing "Forgetfulness" as a masterpiece, I'm not so sure. Perhaps "Forgetfulness" was always "broken" in the way it is now, and "Nerves" never was; perhaps not. Perhaps it is impossible to say.

Adventures in Time and Space: Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell's) "Forgetfulness"

Adventures in Time and Space series table of contents

An anthology that opened with a story named for the mass for the dead, held in remembrance, now continues with a story named "Forgetfulness." Where the Heinlein remembered one life which it insisted was extraordinary, what has been "forgotten" here are the achievements of a species (or, as we can say who try to be conscious of barely-submerged ideology, a single culture) over the course of millennia. Adventures in time, these stories about the pain of its passage?

Along with his earlier "Twilight" (not in this anthology, sadly) Campbell's "Forgetfulness" makes up a sort of diptych of ambiguously melancholic stories, written under the Don A. Stuart name, about The Fate Of Man [sic] in the almost obscenely distant future. In both stories our view of humanity in the future is heavily mediated, and we are deliberately prevented from gaining much sense of what it would be like to live in these future societies which we see only from the outside. "Twilight" was mediated through a complex formal structure involving multidirectional time travel and several layers of reported speech; here it is a formally much simpler — but equally peculiar and suggestive — matter of perspective.

"Forgetfulness" opens with a team of explorers from a planet called Pareeth landing on a world three and a half light years from their home; it is apparent almost immediately that this alien world is Earth. The earliest sign that this is the case, reinforced beyond all doubt by the second page (where among other things we learn that the people here call their planet "Rhth"), appears in the first paragraph, as "Ron Thule, the astronomer," stands in the airlock looking "out beyond" and sees that

above the western horizon, a pale ghost of the strange twin world of this planet, less than a third of a million miles distant, seemed a faint, luminous cloud in the deep, serene blue of the sky.

In "Twilight" too Campbell had used the moon as a signal of the strange mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity in his futures, but while there it was because the moon had changed, here it is because it is the same — familiar to us, but unfamiliar to those with whom we are asked immediately to identify. Seeing it through this alien-not-alien astronomer's eyes at the same time as we see it with our own, the moon takes on for the sympathetic reader a marvelously strange air in more ways than one. When I read this, for a moment I am able to see the moon as not just "the moon" but as the "strange twin world" it truly (or rather also) is; and too I am brought to find new beauty in its routine appearance in the sky through its description in terms that, however trivial, would not normally occur to me.

This familiar-unfamiliar perspective* continues, or rather repeats — and expands, spiraling outward through these repetitions — throughout the story. In the terms I have begun to lay out recently, the fictional writer and the fictional reader here are both people of Pareeth; everything is given us from their perspective, and we are expected to understand. Engaged as they are in the expansionist agenda typical of this colonialist brand of sf this perspective is, for those accustomed to the ways of American magazine sf and its successors, immediately familiar, for better or worse easy to slip into; and Joanna Russ's push-and-pull of belief and disbelief becomes a kind of double image, almost a palimpsest. What is curious, then, is that their expansion pushes them precisely onto Rhth — which is to say Earth, where "we" are; and though the Rhth-humans of this distant future are presented as being so massively removed from us as to be alien the story does not let us forget that they are, in some sense, us — that we should be concerned for their well-being in the face of the potential threat these also-human** newcomers pose, still more that we should be proud of their accomplishments: for these are The Triumph of Man.

*I would call it "estrangement" but I do not wish to invoke the specific baggage that term carries with it from outside of sf or from the sf criticism of Darko Suvin and his followers. Some of that baggage is relevant to what I'm talking about; much of it is not.
**There's some scientifically nonsensical fluffery explaining away their also-humanness, which is in itself interesting and deserves attention, but for my purposes here it need not concern us beyond the fact that their humanity is a factor in the issues of (un)familiarity I am discussing.

Just past the middle of the story there comes a moment where a second mission from Pareeth (made up of some but not all of the same people as well as many new ones), following the recommendations of the first mission and the orders of "The Committee of Pareeth," tell Seun, the representative of the Rhth people, that they intend to settle permanently in an abandoned city (clearly New York) near the Rhth people's small countryside settlement. Seun reasonably points out that the planet is full of empty cities, that he and his people would prefer that the people of Pareeth settle a bit further from them. The colonizers respond that they have their hearts set on this city, and anyway if they're near the Rhth people's settlement they can "help" them in their "development," or if not they can relocate them, because one place is surely as good as another to such simple folk — and then, ever so reluctantly, they threaten the Rhth people with annihilation if they do not acquiesce to Pareeth's whims.

The logic of colonialism. It dawned on me as I read this that what we have here is American magazine sf, early on, attempting (probably by accident) to form a critique of its own violent, genocidal, colonial urges: what happens when the reader is asked — and is able — to "identify" with the colonized and the colonizer equally? Of course, this is Campbell, and no matter how far he pushes himself, no matter how obviously some small part of him understood the problems with his ideology, no matter even how far he distances himself from himself with the Stuart name and brand (for it was a brand, and a perplexingly popular one at that), he cannot bring himself to let go of his "Earth people (read: white westerners) are always superior" dogma, and so "what happens" is that the colonized make a sudden show of overwhelming force in terms the colonizers understand and have to respect that, outside of science fiction, no colonized peoples have or would ever have access to, that forces an accommodation on their terms. The critique stalls; from "these violent impulses might be wrong" it turns into "these violent impulses are wrong, and will fail, only when enacted on us."

Despite this, though, the contradiction, even the paradox, remains; and it is one of many. To begin with, everything in the story is attended by a bizarre mixture of melancholy and triumphalism: even before the first paragraph gives us the moon it gives us Ron Thule with "something of a vast triumph in his eyes, and something of sorrow," and like the familiar/unfamiliar perspective introduced by that glimpse of the moon this triumph/sorrow will spiral in repetition and expansion throughout the story. In parallel to this (parallel spirals? — oh, I'm just not going to worry about it) is a presentation of the then-new state of constant technological advance as both permanent and impermanent: the Rhth humans have abandoned high technology (the forgetfulness of the title) because they are beyond it; their technology has, inevitably as the story would have it, progressed so far as to become non-technological.*

*Along these lines it is interesting to note that where this story presents The Triumph Of Man in the abandonment of technology, at first appearing to be The Decline Of Man, the other half of the diptych, "Twilight," presents The Decline Of Man surrounded by technology, at first appearing to be The Triumph Of Man. On the face of it this is hardly what one would expect of Campbell!

The people of Pareeth misunderstand Seun's constant "we have forgotten" refrain for the vast bulk of the story, thinking they have encountered a tragically diminished version of Rhth's former glory; only toward the end does Ron Thule realize that Seun's forgetfulness is the equivalent of the way he and his people (and we reading the story) have mostly forgotten how to make a fire without a match (or a heat ray), how to carve an effective flint knife, how to make a coat from an animal skin. Reading this I was put in mind of a moment in Karl Ove Knausgaard's marvelous novel A Time for Everything (which, as I must say every time I mention it, all sf readers should read, though it is not sf):

Everything we know is inextricably linked with loss and oblivion. And what knowledge does conquer is so infinitesimally small in comparison with what it jettisons that we might reasonably suspect it of being in retreat: why else does it always set its abandoned landscapes on fire? (trans. James Anderson)

What Knausgaard's scholar-narrator posits as retreat, Campbell/Stuart's narrator, like all committed positivists, sees as victory. But because this narrator is implicitly of Pareeth, a high-technological and highly self-regarding society, with this vast triumph comes sorrow. The landscape Rhth has set on fire is equivalent, even "superior" to that of Pareeth, and seeing this the people of Pareeth cannot help but see what they themselves have set on fire. In defeat their own victories take on a tragic tone, and not only because of the "sour grapes" attitude intrinsic to any self-regarding society faced with unaccustomed defeat.

All these contradictions and paradoxes pervade the story down to the smallest level of the language, and the "something of a vast triumph, something of sorrow" of the opening paragraph, followed by the "mighty cruiser"/"little band" (the spaceship, its crew) of the second, begins a pattern of contrast and self-contradiction that accelerates as the story goes on, ramping up until it seems hardly a sentence can go by without some construction like "dimly sparkling" or "tiny clatter" or "swift immobility"; in these surroundings even an otherwise innocuous phrase like "long moment" takes on something of this aura of paradox, of multiplicity. This tendency, which continues to the end of the story, reaches its climax just before the midpoint, when the men from Pareeth encounter the technologico-mystical source of Rhth's energy, "the sorgan unit," from which "flowed the power of the generator, instantaneously, to any ship in all space" back in the days when Rhth had such ships (it is this unit which has a "swift immobility"). As Seun explains with his silent telepathy:

"It created a field rotating" — and the minds of his hearers refused the term — "which involves, as well, time.
      "In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built. And in all that sweep, every sorgan unit tuned to it must follow. The power that drove it died when the city was deserted, but it is still making the first revolution, which it made and completed in the first hundredth of a second it existed.
      "Because it circled to the end of time, it passed this moment in its swing, and every other moment that ever is to be. Were you to wipe it out with your mightiest atomic blast, it would not be disturbed, for it is in the next instant, as it was when it was built. And so it is at the end of time, unchanged. Nothing in space or time can alter that, for it has already been at the end of time. That is why it rotates still, and will rotate when this world dissolves, and the stars die out and scatter as dust in space. Only when the ultimate equality is established, when no more change is, or can be will it be at rest — for then other things will be equal to it, all space equated to it, because space, too, will be unchanged through time."

(The oddity of this time-spanning device's appearance in a story about what time obliterates could be the subject of another essay; perhaps some other time.)

Looking on the sorgan unit, a single location encompassing all of space and time, a source of infinite power which literally is the powerless end-state of absolute entropy, a thing in eternal movement precisely because its lack of movement is so complete, the minds of Pareeth rebel; Ron Thule's "eyes twisted and his thoughts seemed to freeze," and this is even after Seun has exerted some telepathic force on him to prevent him from going insane.

It is too much even for the story itself. To this point, even with its contradictions and sorrow, "Forgetfulness" had been proceeding magisterially on its way (what else written in English at this time had this tone? did anything, in or out of sf?) as though nothing could disturb it, but here it begins to break down. Almost immediately after the encounter with this sfnal relative of Jorge Luis Borges' aleph it breaks off with a long dash and is suddenly interrupted by the interpolation of the "Conclusion of the Report to the Committee of Pareeth, Submitted by Shor Nun, Commander of the First Interstellar Expedition," which is itself fragmented, beginning as we're allowed to see it with the second half of a sentence, followed by the "Unanimous Report of the Committee of Pareeth on the First Expedition to the Planet Rhth," equally fragmented, cutting off mid-sentence before the story proper resumes.

It is as if the story is trying to combat the sheer magnitude of the irruption of the incomprehensible by retreating to these legalistic documents, with their pretense to authority and objectivity.* Afterwards, though nothing is the same (it is here that the break of several years between missions occurs, and the similar-but-different crew appears, with its similar-but-different approach to Seun and the Rhth people), the story seems able for a moment to regain its footing — but it is only a moment. Before long Shor Nun presents Pareeth's ultimatum, setting off Seun's response: to dislocate the many ships of the second mission in time and space, trapping them in some distant realm of entropy and timelessness at the end of the universe, altering and limiting forever their people's ability to perceive and move through space before returning them to their home at a time before they even left it.

*An authority whose problems, an objectivity whose falseness I have already touched upon above, in the discussion of Pareeth's colonialist agenda — which is laid out explicitly in these reports.

In this final section the story, in terms of event, becomes almost incomprehensible; it took me several re-readings to get my bearings enough to be able to summarize even this roughly the what-happened. The change is visible to the eye even at a quick glance at the page: the paragraphs shrink, dashes proliferate. On reading, one finds that sentences have been replaced by fragments; the earlier stateliness and clarity has been replaced, on the part of the characters and of the story itself, with panic and confusion. And things never really fully settle down; the final pages of the story have enough of a stillness for Ron Thule and Shor Nun to explain to themselves, and to us, what they think has just happened, but even the confirmation of their speculations in the penultimate sentence comes so unexpectedly and from so wondrous a source that the inattentive reader could easily miss it, or misunderstand it; and all that is left for "Forgetfulness" to do is to vanish with a sigh.

Adventures in Time and Space: Robert A. Heinlein's "Requiem"

Adventures in Time and Space post series introduction and table of contents

This definitive (or maybe better: defining) collection of "golden age" science fiction stories begins with one by Robert A. Heinlein and contains two more by him (only two other writers are represented three times: A.E. van Vogt and "Lewis Padgett"). In the introduction to my edition the superlative-crazed philistines Healy and McComas call him "possibly the greatest of the giants of those days" — those days being "that best of all possible times in science fiction." Heinlein, we can safely say, was important in the 1940s, and Healy and McComas were determined that he stay that way.

His importance to sf is still contentious, as witness the recent, utterly stupid, "you're not a fan if you haven't read him" kerfuffle.* Before that, more personally, Jonathan McCalmont's response to a pathetic attempt at canon-ossification by Gary Westfahl (today's heir to the superlative-crazed philistine throne) was the impetus behind the post that really got this blog going for me (though at this point I half want to repudiate that post, half want to extend it). But salutary as I find polemics like McCalmont's, and though I would never stand in their way, I can't really agree. Heinlein is central to this thing we call science fiction even today; from where I stand to insist otherwise, though it may be useful or even essential to an attempt to take sf in a different direction and therefore quite justified, is nevertheless simply counterfactual.

*About which I am considering writing a post being cranky at "both" sides, but we'll see. There's only so much thinking about Heinlein and the minds of sf people that I can take.

Funnily enough, I tend to see the ghost of Heinlein most strongly in those areas of sf that would most seek to evade him. The writers who find sf's tendencies toward didacticism distasteful or embarrassing, who wish to bring sf stylistically more in line with "the mainstream", and who (erroneously) think they can do this by valuing "incluing" (as I identified it in that above-linked early post, stealing the term from Jo Walton) over infodumping are using techniques that Heinlein played a (maybe the) major role in developing — this despite Heinlein's well-earned reputation for didacticism. Sf poetry's major award, the Rhysling, is named after a Heinlein character (without whom I wonder if the young Samuel R. Delany would have had the courage to write his early poet protagonists). And those writers who find the term "science fiction" inadequate, inaccurate, or too laden with negative connotations to describe what they do and so call themselves writers of "speculative fiction" — these writers being by and large as far from the pro-Heinlein camp as can be imagined — are, whether they know it or not, quoting Heinlein (who coined the term for these precise reasons) almost verbatim.

For me Heinlein's importance is unquestionable — but my god, how I hate him. I put off starting Adventures in Time and Space, which I am otherwise eager to read and write about, for months simply because the first story in it is by him. Of all the writers that I for whatever reason feel a need to read, he is by far the one I dread reading the most. As such, despite everything that I've said about his importance, I have actually read very little of his work. I pushed my way through his collection The Past Through Tomorrow last year, though I more sort of held it pinched between two fingers at arm's length and stared at it in nose-wrinkled distaste than actually "read" it; I yawned my way through Farmer in the Sky when I was about eleven (when almost any sf excited me); I have started and quickly stopped reading any number of his other stories and novels; and I think that's it for me and the man Delany names as one of his favorite novelists.

I've been trying for a long time to figure out why I dislike him so strongly. There are a number of obvious possibilities, but for me they all seem insufficient. It could be his politics, which are repellent; but then again I can read and find great beauty and illumination in countless other writers, both in and out of sf (e.g., Lovecraft, Heidegger), whose politics I find just as or even more unpalatable (indeed if vile politics were on their own enough to put me off a work or a writer I wouldn't be able to find the value in any "golden age" sf that I do). It could be the "traveling-salesman banter" (as James Blish incredibly accurately described it) that passes for dialogue in his stories, but no, I'm able to pass lightly over similar problems in writers like Asimov or McCaffrey to get at what's important. It could be the bizarre quotidianness of his imagination, where he so often seems to be spanning galaxies and millennia and introducing us to wondrous worlds and aliens and technologies merely to say "but nothing has changed, everything is just everyday, everything is boring", which often is a problem in other writers — but no, this is one of the things that, for me, Heinlein actually, occasionally, pulls off well and makes intriguing.* And it can't be the didacticism, since that's a big part of why I am drawn to sf in the first place! Reading "Requiem", though, I think I finally figured it out, or at least came upon the beginnings of understanding it. Let's take it slow.

*In this connection I'm reminded indirectly of Stanisław Lem's comment on the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, that though "earth is incapable of coming to grips with the consequences" of alien intrusion, "at the same time, the little world of humanity continues as before." There is also something of a connection here to what I find so endlessly fascinating about the stories of Cordwainer Smith, though the methods and the feeling there are utterly different.

The events of the story are as follows: an old man, Delos D. Harriman, who has devoted most of his life and his (conveniently) considerable fortune to making the dream of space travel come true, but has never gone himself, wants nothing more than to go to the moon; but because of his age and infirmity he is legally barred from doing so (there is much nonsense about how the very rich are oppressed because others seek to tell them how to spend their money). He finds some sympathetic pilots with their own ship and no class analysis who agree to take him. They go and he experiences the reality of space flight for the first time; they land on the moon and he steps onto its surface. After taking it in for a moment he dies, his body worn out by the strain of the trip, and one of the pilots buries him.

These events are simple, but structurally the story is quite complex. Delany compared the rhetorical variety of Heinlein's first story, "Life-Line" — which "embeds...a collection of newspaper headlines, telegrams, and court transcripts within its narrative in order to tell its tale" — to Dos Passos*, and "Requiem" behaves similarly. It begins with a poem (by Robert Louis Stevenson; if Heinlein is to be believed, it appears on Stevenson's gravestone in Samoa; me, I don't know these things) given not as an epigraph but just barely within the story proper; later on there is a sign advertising a fair attraction and a portion of a newspaper article, not to mention an extended series of flashbacks. The temporal structure, the play with time both within and without the story, is also complex and potentially interesting: Heinlein writes in "the present" about a man in "the future" who has accomplished x, y, and z in "the past" (from the character's point of view), but wants to do a, b, and c in "the future" (the future of the future, that is, which by the story's end is the present), and as he seeks to achieve this goal his mind plays over various other incidents in "the past", which is of course our future. In part this is merely the seldom-examined play of time created by sf's routine gesture of setting stories in "the future," but Heinlein seems to me anyway to be particularly interested in heightening the complexity.

*Yet another nail in the coffin, incidentally, of the many silly narratives told and re-told about the so-called "new wave", which is when most people say such techniques from the non-sf "avant garde" entered sf. John Brunner may have done it better, but if we're supposed to care who did it first — well, he didn't. The evaluation of the use of such techniques in sf as automatically good or automatically bad, well, that's a whole nother silly story.

As he does so, it quickly becomes apparent that he is also interested in making a metatextual commentary on sf itself. Harriman, a man living in an sfnal future, feels that he played an important role in causing this future to be sfnal, but nevertheless has been denied access to the sfnal aspect of this future. He looks back nostalgically at his life, dedicated to ushering in this sfnal future, as he plots his entrance into it — which he gains, and then dies. It does not take much to see Harriman as a (thinly-veiled) stand-in for the figure of the sf writer in the heroic Heinleinian mode, working tirelessly to bring about a techno-future he knows he will not live to see realized, looking back over his career and cursing a death that will come too soon. And here is where the problems come in, for me. Because Heinlein/Harriman always knows he's right. Others might think that dreams of space travel are silly or misguided, but he knows better. Others might try to convince him to devote what he no doubt thinks of as his capital to more prosaic pursuits, but he knows better.

Delany again, this time discussing the much later novel Farnham's Freehold:

Suffice it to say that what distresses one about the Heinlein argument in general, when it is presented in narrative form, is that it so frequently takes the form of the gentlemanly assertion: "Just suppose the situation around X (war, race, what-have-you) were P, Q, and R; now under those conditions, wouldn't behavior Y be logical and justified?" — where behavior Y just happens to be an extreme version of the most conservative, if not fascistic, program. Our argument is never with the truth value of Heinlein's syllogism: Yes, if P, Q, and R were the case, then behavior Y would be pragmatically justifiable. Our argument is rather with the premises: Since P, Q, and R are not the situation of the real world, why continually pick fictional situations, bolstered by science-fictional distortions, to justify behavior that is patently inappropriate for the real world? And Heinlein's unerring ability to see precisely how the real world would have to be changed to make such conservative behavior appropriate begins to suggest that his repeated use of science fiction to this end represents what existentialist critics used to call "bad faith."

Delany's concerns here are explicitly and specifically in the realm we call "political," and from what I understand about Farnham's Freehold the political stakes in that particular case are extremely high. But the general Heinleinian pattern he identifies* holds even when the stakes are significantly lower — even when they are not (so explicitly, so directly) political.

*Which, incidentally, is probably Heinlein's single most damaging literary legacy; whole schools of sf have built up around reproducing it.

So it is in "Requiem" that Heinlein has set up an elaborate structure on which to hang a contemplation of the nature and role of the sf writer (because, again, though Harriman is not literally an sf writer, he is so very plainly a stand-in for one), and he uses it only to brag about how heroic it is to be one. If it were the case that one had spent one's life advocating for a particular kind of future, and if it were the case that because of one's advocacy that future came to pass, and if it were the case that that future turned out to be every bit as great as one said it would be, and if it were the case that various small-minded fools tried to prevent one from...but no doubt you get the idea.

And the bad faith extends even further. For me it reaches its height at the moment when Harriman finally makes it to space — not yet to the moon, but en route, and he looks out the viewport for the first time. Indeed this was the moment when all of this crystallized for me:

There it was, all as he had imagined it so many times. The Moon swung majestically past the viewport, twice as wide as he had ever seen it before, all of her familiar features cameo-clear. She gave way to the Earth as the ship continued its slow swing, the Earth itself, as he had envisioned her, appearing like a noble moon....

And so on. "All as he had imagined it." "As he had envisioned her." Even "her familiar features," though factually more justified, is just the wrong tone. Harriman knew what it would be like to be in space all along. This is nothing other than Heinlein asserting that he is incontrovertibly and transcendently right about his projection of an experience he has never had — indeed at the time he is writing an experience that no one has ever had. "Science fiction was right — look, it says so in this science fiction story!" It is this blandly confident triumphalism that I dislike — no, more than than that; it is this triumphalism, this self-congratulatory certainty, that I find a fundamental betrayal of the science fictional (or, to give Heinlein his own word, the speculative) enterprise itself. From the perspective of 1940, the defining characteristic of space travel is that, though it is possible to make some technical statements about it with a fair degree of certainty and a number of other reasonable but less certain speculations, nevertheless no one has ever done it, and no one knows what, experientially, it will really be like. But for Heinlein, there is no "no one knows." Someone always knows, and that someone is always Heinlein.

All this considered, can it be any surprise that the supposedly hard-headed Heinlein here runs so counter to his reputation (but not, I suspect, his actual nature) and creates one of the most shmoopily sentimental stories I have ever read? From the moment we begin with some heinously colonialist and straight-up bad poetry (how embarrassing for Stevenson if it really is on his grave) to the moment we meet Harriman's "shrewish" wife*, from the lawyer's rousing speech arguing for the rich man's right to spend his money to the ending that all but unfurls the Delos D. Harriman flag on the surface of the moon to the accompaniment of the Delos D. Harriman National Anthem, the deck is comprehensively stacked. Oscar Wilde said that sentimentality is "the luxury of an emotion without paying for it," and we all know how capitalists hate to pay for their luxuries. For me the greatest of these unpaid-for emotions by far is what I earlier described as "cursing a death that will come too soon." Here we see the most basic of all of sf's bad faith, its original sin even, laid bare: the desire to know, with certainty, a world beyond the death of the — one's own — body.

* "I feel a headache coming on. Please try to be a little quiet when you come to bed," she says when he presents his having put all of their money into the development of space travel as a fait accompli and refuses to budge. Women! Can't make heads nor tails of 'em!

Perhaps it is for the best after all that Adventures in Time and Space starts with this story. I still insist that there is much beauty in sf's "golden age," and that it still speaks to us, but for such a, again, defining and definitive volume to begin with a story that declares so openly all of the bad faith, all of the lapses, all of the self-importance to which this era of sf was so prone — indeed that it built itself upon — and that at the time and still to this date threaten to submerge entirely what was good about this writing...well, it's only honest. With this fair warning, I, we, can be on the lookout. We know what dangers lie ahead.

Adventures in Time and Space

Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas's anthology Adventures in Time and Space (also published under the title Famous Science-Fiction Stories) is, like it or not (or both), a landmark. Whatever else was going on in (and out of) the tiny world of American magazine science fiction in the late 1930s and early 40s, it was this book that fixed those coordinates in time and space — indeed, much more specifically John W. Campbell's Astounding of those years, in which all but three of the thirty-five stories collected was originally published — as something that would be permanently referred to, whether in quotation marks or not, and however ludicrously, as a "Golden Age." This anthology, published at the early date of 1946, took the names Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Alfred Bester, Isaac Asimov, and many others* out of the pages of low-circulation magazines (where surely they must have thought they would stay, passing out of history forever with the disintegration of the pages) and put them into a hardcover book published by Random House, where they sit uncomfortably to this day.

*All of them men except for the woman hidden inside "Lewis Padgett," three of whose stories appear here.

I am firmly sympathetic to the view that this era was repulsive and embarrassing, because it sure was, but I perhaps even more firmly believe that, mixed in with all the bad, something remarkable happened in those years — something that remains largely unappreciated by its detractors and partisans alike,* something in at least the best of it that, if approached with a sympathetic eye and a different kind of understanding, is still vital, still has something to say to us. I named this blog "Marooned Off Vesta," after Isaac Asimov's first published story, not only because it's obviously a killer name for a blog thank you very much, but also because of my belief in the importance of going back to this moment in sf's history, not as origin and certainly not as litmus test, nor as "the good stuff" to be uncritically lauded and imitated, but as a moment at which something happened, something radically unlike anything else in the world; and it is my argument that a new understanding of just what this thing was and what it still has to say to us, placed alongside as many other things as our overlapping personal, social, and political needs demand (and these demands are many!), could help us to create a contemporary sf literature of great depth and vitality — a living, open literature miles different from both the largely routine one we have now and the nightmarish and restrictive one most sf "traditionalists" seem to want. Though I've touched on these feelings and beliefs before, I've not yet really explored any of them in any systematic way.

*Not to mention, most of the time, the writers themselves.

And so I'll be reading Adventures in Time and Space — not all at once, just a story here and there. I've read many of them before, some recently, some not since childhood; and though I haven't counted I believe more than half will be new to me. My ambition right now is to write an essay about each story, but if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time (hi mom!) you'll know how these ambitions of mine usually turn out (not to mention that the first story in the collection is by Heinlein, which, yeeeesh, barrier). At the very least, then, I hope to be struck from time to time with some thought that demands exploration, and I'll be putting those up here.

Table of Contents

1. Robert A. Heinlein, Requiem
2. Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell), Forgetfulness
3. Lester del Rey, Nerves