WSFF Links to Books and Authors
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2d edition:
Links to Books, Authors, and Topics Mentioned in the Text
Introduction
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Cycle
Chapter 1: Hard Facts for First-Time Novelists
William Gibson
Robert Jordan
Locus Online
Chapter 2: The Past, Present, and Future of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Thomas More, Utopia
Samuel Butler, Erewhon
Aldous Huxley, Island
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Ursula K. Le Guin
James De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat’s Cradle
Frank Herbert, Dune
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Yevgni Zamyatin, We
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Esther Friesner, Chicks in Chainmail
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
Amadis of Gaul
Lord Dunsany
Saki
E. R. Eddison
J. R. R. Tolkien
H. P. Lovecraft
C. S. Lewis
Terry Pratchett
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Chapter 3: Understanding Genre
Crawford Kilian, Icequake
Crawford Kilian, Tsunami
Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, Icefire
Tevis,
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Robert A. Heinlein, Sixth Column
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Frank Herbert
SF Clichés
Laws of Science Fiction Writing
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Star Trek
Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
Greg Bear, Moving Mars
Allen Drury
William LeQueux, The Invasion of 1910
H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, The World Set Free
Nevil Shute, On the Beach
Alfred Coppel, Dark December
Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold
Daniel Kalla, Pandemic
Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity
Olaf Stapledon, Odd John
Wilmar Shiras, Children of the Atom
. Shiras
Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
K. Eric Drexler
Crawford Kilian, Gryphon
Jack London, The Scarlet Plague
H. G. Wells
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids
John Barnes, Mother of Storms
John Christopher, The Death of Grass (also published as No Blade of Grass)
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer
George R. Stewart, Earth Abides
Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Ray Bradbury
Jack London, The Iron Heel
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell
Fredrik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
Isaac Asimov, The Stars, Like Dust
Code of Hammurabi
Crawford Kilian, Lifter
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall
Crawford Kilian, Rogue Emperor
Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South
John Jewitt, The Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt: Captive of Maquinna
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
William Sanders, The Wild Blue and the Gray
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Keith Laumer, Worlds of the Imperium
William Sanders, Journey to Fusang
Crawford Kilian, Greenmagic
Crawford Kilian, Redmagic
Conan
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dave Duncan
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Reindeer Moon
Sean Stewart, Resurrection Man
Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan
Peter Dickinson, The Blue Hawk
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Beginning Place
C. S. Lewis, Narnia
James Blish, Black Easter
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Fantasy Clichés
The Grand List of Fantasy Clichés:
The Not-So-Grand List of Overused Fantasy Clichés:
The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam:
Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
John Updike, Toward the End of Time
Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution
Gore Vidal, Live from Golgotha
Thomas Pynchon, V
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet
Chapter 4: Creating Your Fictional World
Terry Bisson, Talking Man
Fantasy Name Generator
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
James Hilton, Lost Horizon (Shangri-La)
Hal Clement, Iceworld
Chapter 5: Developing Efficient Work Habits
Abhishek Kumar, How to Create Good Work Habits
Kate Morgenroth, Work Habits
Famous Writing Habits?
Chapter 6: Research and Soul Search
Greg Knollenberg, Internet Research Resources for Science Fiction Writers
SpecFicWorld, Research Resources that Might Interest Speculative Fiction Writers
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Articles on Writing
Robert J. Sawyer, Research: Secret Weapons of Science
Crawford Kilian, Rogue Emperor
Google, Babylonian mythology: The Assyro-Babylonian Mythology FAQ
Cthulhu (H. P. Lovecraft)
Samuel Fussell, Muscle
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Science Magazine
Nature Magazine
Scientific American
New Scientist
Isaac Asimov
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Hawking
Louis Agassiz
Robert Oppenheimer
Kenneth Koch
Chapter 7: Elements of a Successful Story
Deus ex machina
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
See also my review:
Chapter 8: Developing Characters
Fictional Character
Writing Exercises for Creative Fiction Writers (Characterization, Prose Style, and Language)
Fiction Factor: Characters
James Patrick Kelly, You and Your Characters
Chapter 9: Plotting
On Plot
Anton Chekhov
Chapter 10: Constructing a Scene
Sheri Cooper Sinykin, How to Write a Scene”
Wikipedia, Scene (fiction)
(fiction)
Chapter 11: Narrative Voice
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
Rashomon
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Tales from the White Hart
Iain Banks, Feersum Endjinn
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Chapter 12: Exposition and Dialogue
Judy-Lynn Del Rey
Lloyd Abbey, The Last Whales
Last Whales: Lloyd Abbey
Gabriel García Márquez
Watergate Tapes
Rudy Rucker, Freeware
Chapter 13: Symbolism and All That
Heroic Archetypes
The Archetype of the Hero’s Quest
S. M. Stirling
Chapter 14: Mechanics of Manuscript Production
SFWA, FAQ Answered for Beginning Writers
Chapter 15: Selling Your Story
SFWA, The Business of Writing
Chapter 16: Researching Publishers and Agents
Writers’ Union of Canada, Finding a Publisher
Writers’ Union of Canada, Literary Agents
Finding a Book Publisher
Small Press Center for Independent Publishing
Writer’s Market
Publishers Weekly
The Writer Magazine
Writer’s Digest
Richard Curtis, How to be Your Own Literary Agent
Scott Meredith, Writing to Sell
Chapter 17: The Publishing Contract
Writers Union of Canada, Self-Help Contract Package
SFWA, The Business of Writing
SFWA, Print on Demand
SFWA, Writer Beware
Crawford Kilian’s Writing Fiction blog
Periscope Writing
By Crawford Kilian
(Writing Fiction Blog)
Chapter 1
Once I’ve written the first chapter of a novel, I keep going back to it to figure out what happens next.
That’s because the first chapter strikes the theme and sets us up for most of what’s going to happen.
Let me give you some examples from Henderson’s Tenants. It starts with Mike Henderson, age 53, getting a death sentence from a college classmate who’s now a physician: pancreatic cancer, still a killer in the year 2030. Doc gives Mike some new painkillers (addictive and hallucinogenic, but with a life expectancy of 7 months, who cares?).
On the way home, Mike gets mugged and robbed of his computer specs (the computer itself is under the skin of his left arm, about 5 cm in diameter). He gets home, where he can at least use the pixelite screen on his apartment wall to interact with his computer. The default image of the screen is a realtime image of Vancouver harbor circa 1650: a huge forest with a few villages and orcas playing in the water.
Mike, we learn, is a former nanotech innovator and entrepreneur who’s been driven out of business after a Japanese nanotech firm caused a horrendous mess. So Mike is broke, unemployed, and dying...in a Vancouver that’s part of a satellite Canada, locked into a semifascist US that’s been waging “the War” for 30 years. His only consolation is that he’s on BS--Basic Support, a minimal welfare scheme keeping most people from starving or revolting while the War goes on and on.
Mike’s shabby one-room apartment is in a formerly comfortable part of North Vancouver, with a lovely view of the harbor and also of a homeless camp right across the street. He buys most of his food in a market occupying the parking lot of a former supermarket. The other customers are broke people like himself.
I wrote chapter 1 as “periscope writing” -- a way to learn what was going on in Mike’s world, before I’d really committed myself to this story. Then I kept going. But I knew that the bits and pieces of chapter 1 were going to have to pay off later in the story.
So the painkiller turns out to be critical to helping Mike solve some major problems--but it also sets us up for a major discovery about the nature of the human mind. The death sentence gives him the motivation to break the law when he’s offered a chance to create a major nanotech breakthrough that will save the life of a brain-damaged kid. The pre-industrial image of Vancouver 1650 is a kind of edenic vision that Mike will be able to regain for humanity.
The homeless people downstairs also have to factor into the story--most are Mexicans, living by usually criminal means. And the building’s tenants themselves are going to be important, however negligible they may be in the society of 2030.
I didn’t have all these items in mind when I wrote chapter 1. But I’ve learned to trust my subconscious; if it wants painkillers or a mugging or a vision of Vancouver as Eden, I’m happy to provide it. Then I’ve just got to build those details into story elements.
Right now I’m still uncertain about some of the details. Was the mugging just a random attack, or something set up by the Homies--the Homeland Security bad guys who want to recruit Mike into “defensive” nanotech even if it’s technically illegal? Mike rejects an open offer from the Homies, and then accepts a similar offer from a Korean chaebol--but are the Koreans on the level, or just more sophisticated in dealing with a dying genius?
A lot of fiction writers have trouble coming up with a good plot; my problem is over-plotting, making everything so meshed that it gets ridiculous. But I can sense some kind of inner logic working on the story so far, and I’ll just have to follow where it leads.
Ten Steps for Pre-Editing
By Crawford Kilian
(Writing Fiction Blog)
A lot of apprentice writers lavish most of their work, understandably, on character, plot, narrative, dialogue, and description. They often forget that to an editor, their manuscript is not an epoch-making breakthrough and the first great novel of the new century. To an editor, a manuscript is work.
Too many of us make more work for our editors than we should. It's not just that we don't follow the format guidelines every publisher sets out on its Website; we don't even follow basic English usage. In a very few cases this is tolerable; the writer's storytelling is so good that it's worth cleaning up the spelling and punctuation. Isaac Asimov, a famously fast and prolific writer in the Typewriter Age, single-spaced his manuscripts with no margins because he saved time by not inserting a fresh sheet of paper as often. Jack Kerouac used a roll of teletype paper so he wouldn't have to change sheets at all.
Long-suffering editors will deal with these foibles when the outcome is a sure success. But if you're a brand-new author, your editor may simply decide you're not worth the effort. Nothing personal, but the time spent cleaning up your spelling probably won't bring a nickel into the house, since first novels are notorious money-losers.
One of my editors told me that his house had a hugely successful but only semi-literate author, whose manuscripts had to be exhaustively (and exhaustingly) cleaned up. He also told me that Canadian authors' manuscripts tended to be welcome in New York publishing houses because we're more literate than our American cousins. Not better writers, necessarily—just better spellers and punctuators.
Having completed a weekend of correcting Canadian students' spelling and punctuation, I'm not sure I agree. If true, the US schools are in worse shape than I'd imagined.
So I always tell aspiring writers to present a manuscript that need an absolute minimum of copy-editing. That will free the editor from inserting commas and semicolons, and enable her to look at the overall shape and structure of your novel. What does that mean?
1. A double-spaced, laser-printed manuscript with inch-wide margins all around, numbered in the upper right-hand corner. Don't bother with a header containing your name and the title unless the publisher specifically asks for it.
2. A serif font, 12 or 14 point. Sans serif fonts are hard to read in long text, and boldface fonts are even worse. Long passages in italics are also unpopular (some publishers insist on ordinary roman text underlined to indicate italics, just like the old typewriter days).
3. Paragraphs with first lines indented half an inch from the left-hand margin, and a ragged right margin. That ensures easier reading, since a right-justified margin means extra-wide spaces between some words. The space between paragraphs is just one double-space, not two.
3. Ideally, no paragraphs split between pages.
4. Correct spelling for the intended market. So if you're submitting to a London or Toronto house, your hero swims across the harbour as a labour of love. In New York, it's harbor and labor. Correct spelling, by the way, will not result from your spellchecker. Spellchecker codes are written by Satan's own software engineers. You will have to check dictionaries. You will also be wise to set up a usage list, ensuring consistency in spelling of proper names or special terms. Your editor will create such a list too, but you can save her a lot of work by doing it first.
5. Correct punctuation, especially in dialogue. If you write:
"Darling I love you". She said.
...your editor will have to repunctuate it as
"Darling, I love you," she said.
...while snarling, "Idiot! I hate you!" under her breath.
6. Correct paragraphing, again a common dialogue problem: Every time you quote a different speaker, you need a new paragraph:
"Hi, Bill."
"Hi, Tom," said Bill.
"May I ask you a question?" asked Tom.
"Fire away!" Bill replied.
(By the way: your dialogue should make it so clear who's speaking that you rarely need to add "asked Tom" or "Bill replied.")
7. Correct grammar means paying attention to all those boring rules about subject-verb agreements, run-on sentences, and dangling modifiers. This is basic craft, and if you're serious about writing it ought to be easy enough. You may even be able to find a course in copy-editing and proofreading that will pay for itself many times over. If terms like "subordinate clause" and "noun phrase" refuse to become understandable, consider hiring a freelance editor to go through the manuscript for you. This won't solve your plot and character problems, but it will make those problems easier to deal with.
8. Chances are your publisher will also expect an electronic version of your manuscript, and this can pose problems too. Your ms. should be in the publisher's preferred word processor (usually Word, but not always), and readable on the publisher's computer. So if you use a Mac and your publisher is PC, you'll have to save a version in a PC-readable format. The publisher's Website will probably tell you exactly what kind of electronic ms. they want.
9. Before you print off the finished ms., print off a copy for yourself. Let it get stone cold. After a week or two, go through it as your editor will, with pen in hand. You'll find all kinds of typos, awkward repetitions, and similar blemishes. This is the time to catch them, but it's not the time to revise the whole damn story! At this point you are the world's worst judge of your own stuff. If your editor sees problems, she'll give you good advice on how to solve them. After all, she's seen them in dozen of other manuscripts.
10. Now print out your manuscript, making sure it meets your publisher's guidelines. Put it in an envelope and send it off to its first real reader, your editor. You've done what you could to make her job easier, and she'll appreciate it. At this point, you and your novel need all the friends you can get, and a clean, professional-looking ms. will make your editor a very good friend indeed.
Royalties
By Crawford Kilian
(Writing Fiction Blog)
Got a call from my nonfiction publisher, Self-Counsel Press, this afternoon: my royalty statement was available, and did I want to come in and pick it up? Since their office is close to my campus, I dropped in on my way home.
It wasn't much, but more than I'd expected, for sales from May to October. This was for two books: Writing for the Web (in two editions) and Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. And it gives me a reason to talk about books and money.
Royalties used to be pretty straightforward: 10% of list price for hardback books, 6-8% for mass-market paperbacks. The advance was a prepayment on those royalties, and if you sold enough copies you would "earn out" the advance and then look forward to twice-yearly payments...perhaps for years.
It's more complicated now.
Increasingly, publishers are being beaten to death by "returns": booksellers can accept a batch of books and then ship them back if they don't sell within some (very short) period of time. The bookseller then gets credit for the next batch of books. Without this option, many booksellers wouldn't buy anything from publishers except absolutely guaranteed best-sellers.
But it means publishers can't tell for months if they're really selling any books at all. So modern contracts specify that part of the author's royalties will be held back "against returns" for six additional months.
In addition, publishers increasingly offer royalties based not on the list price of the book (which is almost always discounted anyway), but on the discount price paid by the bookseller--usually 60% of list price, and sometimes even less.
So you've got a novel on the market with a list price of $30. In the old days you'd have received $3 for every copy sold. If you got a $3000 advance, you'd earn out when your book had sold a thousand copies.
Now, however, you may get a royalty based on only 60% of list price: the bookseller paid $18 per copy, so you get $1.80. You'll have to sell a lot more copies to earn out. (Sales to book clubs are nice, but they're at such a deep discount that you get even lower rates.)
Foreign royalties can complicate matters. When I was publishing paperback novels in the US, my royalty was usually 8% of list price: about 64 cents for a $7.95 book. (The royalty would rise to 10% or even 12% on any copies sold beyond 150,000...in my dreams!)
But copies sold in my own country, Canada, were "foreign" sales, and on those I got a royalty of only 4%.
Of course I pay taxes on my royalty income. But under Canadian law I can take some considerable deductions on my income tax as long as I occasionally make more money from writing than I spend to make the writing possible. Five consecutive years of losses, and the tax people will say it's a hobby, and the deductions will stop. Until that evil day, I can claim deductions on my computer lease, software, book purchases, research expenses, travel, office furniture, and so on.
And when I donated my papers and memorabilia to a local university library last year, I got a huge charitable deduction—so don't throw anything away, including those awful first drafts!
We Canadians have another kind of royalty, and it's not the Queen. The Public Lending Right Commission goes out every year and visits ten different public libraries. It has a list of books published by Canadian authors, and every time it finds one of those books in the holdings of a library, the author makes about $40. This is to compensate the authors for sales lost because library users are such cheapskates.
If the book is in all ten libraries, that's $400. And when you've published 20 books, many of them held in Canadian libraries, it begins to add up...even for books that have been out of print for 20 years.
The drawback in the economics of modern book publishing is that publishers are increasingly reluctant to take a chance on a book unless they think it's going to be a blockbuster. The "mid-list" book that would sell slowly but build a readership is almost gone. Publishers can't afford to keep them in the warehouse, and booksellers can't afford to keep them on their shelves. Meanwhile, cash-flow problems keep publishers from gambling on promising new writers...because the booksellers are so slow to pay for the books they sell, and so quick to return the copies they can't sell.
Not a pretty picture. But you weren't really planning to get rich by writing fiction, were you? Or nonfiction?
Science Fiction and the Internet
Del Rey Internet News, October 1995
For many readers of my generation, growing up just after World War II, science fiction wasn’t something we found in our school libraries, still less in the curriculum. It was a misfit genre: it baffled most people, and its publication in lurid pulp magazines (those Art Deco robots! those shrieking maidens in bronze brassieres!) made it distinctly unacceptable to parents and other authorities.
Well, we were misfits too, usually too few in a given neighborhood to find many kindred souls. For us, community most often expressed itself in print, in the letter columns and editorials of the SF magazines. There we’d find views that echoed or challenged our own, a culture that dealt seriously with issues our parents and classmates didn’t even recognize. And we read about the fortunates in the SF community who could actually meet face to face at conventions and club events.
Far away in Mexico City, I read about conventions in New York that seemed impossibly glamorous; I read about fanzines produced by other SF readers; I read the lively, opinionated correspondence in magazines like Astounding—not yet Analog—and dreamed of sending in my own views. (When I finally did, it was to pan Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, which had just appeared in Astounding as a serial. John W. Campbell, the editor, didn’t print my letter.)
Those letters and fanzines were a prototype of today’s Internet newsgroups: steady exchanges of opinion, news and gossip springing from a shared love of the genre. Access to that early community, however, was difficult; if you didn’t actually live in a town holding a convention, how could you hope to attend? And if you lived in another country altogether, you could only eavesdrop.
So I grew up aware of the SF fan community, but not at all part of it. I didn’t attend a convention until I was over thirty; when I did, it was only to glimpse Ursula Le Guin, the guest of honor, and then to leave out of sheer shyness.
That sense of separation has persisted, though I’ve attended some very enjoyable conventions and met some wonderful people since. With the advent of the Internet, however, a new community has arisen—one that seems to me both more sophisticated and less informed than that of forty years ago.
For an SF author, the presence of so many readers on the Net can be an enormous advantage. We have very little sense of our audience without it. We get an idea for a book; we write it over a period of months or even years; we wait still longer for publication and then for royalty statements. Some of us may enjoy hundreds of letters from fans, but many of us don’t get more than a letter or two for every 20,000 copies sold.
So authors don’t know our own culture as well as we should. We know the books and authors who inspired us to try writing; our own books are really extended fan letters themselves, responses to the challenging ideas thrown out to us by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov, and Le Guin. And we recognize that their novels are a response to the authors they read in their youth. What we don’t know is how our readers respond to our own work.
And here is where the Internet shows us something about our readers. Heinlein, Asimov, Le Guin and other writers who began publishing in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s had few role models within SF. They wrote SF but read in many genres, and they expected their readers to be widely read as well—even if we were kids.
Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s Against The Fall Of Night, later revised as The City And The Stars. It’s rich with literary allusions to the Bible, to Jonathan Swift, and to other classic sources. His novel Childhood’s End is almost unintelligible without a solid grounding in Christianity, and a couple of courses in John Milton would help as well. Those of us who read these authors as children hadn’t read Milton, of course—but when we did, we recognized that the “escapist” novels our parents had fretted over were actually literature.
The authors of that Golden Age were almost too successful. They created genres and subgenres so popular that many readers (like me) sought to imitate them...without necessarily sharing the literary background that made their books so powerful. Some of us got published anyway, and attracted readers who then sought to imitate us. But they were still farther from the source.
When I follow the discussions in SF newsgroups, I see the results. The genre is over a century old (if we date it from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells). But for many younger readers, Clarke is only the author of the Rama series and of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other postwar writers like Philip K. Dick are of interest only to experts or Blade Runner fans. So discussions tend to focus on very current authors, or on a handful of the old masters. (Heinlein’s Starship Troopers still provokes lively debate—and who ever talks about books from the mainstream bestseller lists of 1959?) The commentary, however, reflects the changes in the genre.
The impression I gain from many postings on the Net is that a generation gap has developed within the SF/fantasy community. Older readers (and writers) have a pretty good perspective on the development of the genre, and they can judge new work in the light of what came before it. Younger readers, lacking this perspective, are missing a great deal. Just as my generation didn’t always “get” the literary allusions in Arthur C. Clarke or J. R. R. Tolkien, many of today’s young readers are ignorant of even the recent influences on the new books they’re reading.
This is not to condemn young readers (least of all for being young), but to regret what they’re missing. A genre-creating book like Starship Troopers creates an excitement that its imitators lack; they are, after all, imitators, lacking the new ideas and visions of their founder. For my generation, SF was by definition a literature of new ideas and visions; today it too often resembles a mass-production industry for a readership that wants familiar material, not something new and surprising. Discussions of SF on the Net therefore resemble debates on the comparative merits of Pizza Hut versus Boston Pizza without reference to Italian cuisine.
If this discovery through the Net hasn’t been entirely welcome, it is still useful information. As a teacher, I have to determine my students’ areas of ignorance before I can deal with them. As a writer, I need to know what my readers know, and to work from there. Every novel is a kind of collaboration between writer and reader, an interactive education for both. Heinlein (to name just one of my literary mentors) taught me a great deal; his greatest lesson, I think, was that the student eventually must revolt from the mentor rather than slavishly imitate.
Out of the growing community on the Net, new genres will arise as the readers of SF and fantasy test their responses against those of others. Some of the genre-creating books will generate only a host of clones; but an increasingly sophisticated SF/fantasy community will prefer new visions. As a novelist I will be truly happy if my readers say: “Great! But I can top that!”—and then do so with books that in turn inspire still newer rebellions.
How the Web is Changing Books
BC Bookworld, 2000
The Web is barely ten years old, yet it’s already changed books for both readers and writers. More change is coming.
The change is all the more dramatic because the World Wide Web is technologically far inferior to the technology that Gutenberg gave us. Books are portable, readable without electricity, easy to navigate, and cheap. They even smell good. A book on the Web requires an expensive computer, access to the Internet, and a reader who will tolerate eyestrain and fuzzy screen resolution.
Computers rev us up and dumb us down. We grow impatient with any delay in getting what we want off the Web, but when we get it, we find our reading speed slows down thanks to the dreadfully bad resolution of current computer screens. Books, by contrast, calm us down and smarten us up. We relax with a book in our lap and read at high speed.
Nevertheless, the Web has made life far easier for book readers and writers as well. Some “e-book” publishers provide access to books in the public domain that readers can download for nothing. (They’ll have to pay to download more recent titles.) Other sites like Project Gutenberg give away classic books. A few months ago I tried to find a 1908 H.G. Wells novel, The War in the Air. A bookseller reported it as out of print, but it was available on the Web. I downloaded it in a few minutes, and could get almost everything else Wells ever wrote, if I wanted it.
Wells isn’t the only out-of-print author who’s benefited by the Web; I’m another one. Seven of my science-fiction novels are back in circulation thanks to the Web. You can read them for nothing at , an electronic publisher. You can also order custom-printed copies. Judging from my very modest royalties, not many people want such resurrected novels, but they’re still reaching a few readers who otherwise would never have the opportunity.
Web publishers like are also offering new opportunities for writers who might never break into print through traditional means. Maybe it’s just a form of vanity publishing, but if you’re ready to pay the typesetting costs for your book, companies like iUniverse will put it on the Web and make it available to readers. Your sales may never cover what you’ve spent, but you’ll still be published. And unlike old-fashioned vanity publishers, online houses also provide new writers with courses, access to established writers, and a whole literary community.
Other kinds of literary communities are springing up on the Web as readers find one another. The other day I checked to see if Dalton Trumbo’s classic anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, was listed. Not only was it listed -- it had 153 reader reviews. A book published over 60 years ago, rarely receiving much recent critical attention, is still shocking and moving readers. And the Web is giving them a chance to share their feelings.
To research my early novels, I haunted the libraries of the Lower Mainland. Today I just fire up a search engine and do research at home -- including checking library catalogues for items not available online. For nonfiction projects, the Web is an even more valuable resource.
Books as physical objects will be around for a long time, but they’re also acquiring online “shadows”--Websites where the bookseller can promote them, like or Indigo.ca, but also sites where the publisher or author can actually modify them. Some textbooks now offer sites where students can pick up additional or updated material.
Holden Caulfield wanted to be able to call up the authors of books he really liked; he was born too soon. Many authors are extremely easy to reach on the Internet, and I’ve had the pleasure of electronically meeting the authors of many books I’ve enjoyed recently. (Almost universally, they’re grateful for the fan mail and anguished over their publishers’ perceived failure to promote their books.) This interactivity between author and reader may be a genuine revolution in the history of books.
That’s because print has traditionally been a “one-way” medium. The book goes out; not much comes back except a few reviews or letters (and, usually, many unsold copies). This accords with the “instrumental” communication model first developed by telephone engineers half a century ago. But computers run on a different, “constructivist” model, in which monologue turns inevitably to conversation. Once, the reader’s response was limited to scribbling in the book’s margins, or writing a letter to the author. A very small number of literary critics might build up a body of analysis for one another in academic journals. But now, as in the case of Trumbo’s novel, ordinary readers can compare notes, share insights, quarrel, and generally create a multi-author “echo book.”
The echo book is only one new genre. Hypertext fiction and nonfiction are flourishing as well. In such works the author writes “chunks” of text, perhaps enhanced by graphics and sound, and readers can move around inside the work any way they like. Narrative therefore can change from reading to reading, and certainly from reader to reader. (Just as Wells foresaw war in the air, Kurt Vonnegut foresaw hypertext fiction. His alien Tralfamadorians, who see all time simultaneously, write literature that juxtaposes events to create esthetic effects -- usually ironic ones.)
One of the important effects of computers in general is the transfer of creative power to individuals and small groups. Just as digital movies can now be created on one’s own computer, the creation and publication of books has been made far cheaper -- just as Gutenberg’s press was cheaper than hiring squadrons of copyists. With every such transfer of power, people have been eager to express ideas too marginal or subversive or vulgar to have been expressed by the old technology. We certainly see millions of pages of dreadful writing on the Web; millions more are sure to come.
But new communities of discourse are springing up, learning the conventions of Web-based genres (if not the conventions of spelling and grammar). As they gain experience and sophistication, we will see a new definition of “popular literature.” The novel itself had to wait for the printing press and a large, reasonably literate audience. We will eventually see new hyper-novels, perhaps the creation of hundreds of people over a period of decades, which will invite the most rigorous comparison with the print-based masterpieces of the past.
The Cheerful Inferno of James De Mille
Journal of Canadian Fiction, Summer 1972
James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is probably the most unjustly neglected novel in Canadian fiction. Originally published in 1888, eight years after De Mille’s death, Strange Ms went through two anonymous editions before 1900, when a third edition appeared with his name. The novel lapsed into obscurity after that, until its republication in 1969 as one of the New Canadian Library series. Since then it has begun to reach the wide audience it deserves, though many readers treat it as a curiosity or as a “cult” novel like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Reasons for the neglect of Strange Ms are not hard to find. As a Utopian satire, it invites comparison with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and many other similar works. As an exotic adventure story, it is usually measured against the works of Haggard and Verne. Fred Cogswell, in Literary History of Canada, has asserted that Strange Ms is directly “indebted to Haggard and Verne.” (113) R. E. Watters has pointed out the impossibility of such influences (De Mille was dead before Haggard began publishing and before Verne had been translated), but suggests Erewhon as a possible model for Strange Ms. (viii) De Mille’s novel has therefore been dismissed, or at least downgraded, as a mere imitation. Even in his friends, De Mille has not been fortunate: R. W. Douglas, almost fifty years ago, called Strange Ms “a great book, perhaps the greatest ever produced by a Canadian writer,” (43) but his examination of it is more appreciation than criticism.
Critical response to Strange Ms has been misled first by the assumption that it is derivative of better-known Utopian satires and adventure tales, and second by a misunderstanding of its structure, a narrative interrupted by seemingly irrelevant interchapters in which a symposium of “experts” comments on the story. Cogswell in particular has objected to the function and effect of the symposium:
This pseudo-scientific commentary is interspersed with the action and is thus designed to make the book more suspenseful as well as more credible. Although ingenious, the commentary is often more boring than convincing and take up a disproportionate number of pages. (113)
A careful examination of Strange Ms, and of the facts of De Mille’s life, will show that the author’s influences are far earlier than Haggard or Butler; and that Strange Ms may well have been written at the beginning of De Mille’s career, in the 1850s or 1860s, rather than at its close in the late 1870s.
James De Mille was born in Saint John, NB, in 1833. His father was Nathan Smith De Mill, a prosperous lumber merchant. (De Mille seems to have added the final “e” from personal preference.) Religion was extremely important in shaping De Mille’s life; he took an enthusiastic part in a “revival” while a student at Horton Academy, and much of his early writing first appeared in the Christian Watchman, a periodical edited by his brother Elisha, who was an Anglican minister. “From his father,” says De Mille’s biographer Douglas E. MacLeod, “he inherited a strong sense of duty and a willingness to serve others. But De Mille also received from his father a puritanical reverence for work.” (16)
After travels in Europe with his brother in 1850-52, De Mille entered Brown University, graduating with an MA in 1854. He showed considerable aptitude for both ancient and modern languages, and pursued personal interests in books on travel and religion. In 1853 he delivered a speech on Arabian fiction; he also began writing sketches and humorous verse. (MacLeod 26)
Between 1854 and his return to academic life in 1860, De Mille’s life was dominated by three business failures: his church’s, his father’s and his own. A number of prominent New Brunswick Baptists had invested in an Ohio mining venture; among them were Nathan De Mill and Dr. Edmund Crawley, the president of Acadia College. Though Crawley took personal charge of the company, it went bankrupt. De Mille was staying with Crawley’s sons in Cincinnati at the time, and seems to have worked for a time as Dr. Crawley’s secretary. (MacLeod 31-34)
Returning to New Brunswick in the middle 1850s, De Mille found his father’s lumber business in serious trouble. Intending both to help his father and to establish himself in a congenial career, De Mille started a bookshop. His capacity for work was remarkable; even while running his new business, De Mille continued to read widely and to carry on the writing career he had begun at Brown. His first novel, The Martyr of the Catacombs, may have been published, as a novelette or serial, as early as 1858; it was issued as a book in 1865.
The bookshop, however, did not prosper. In 1859, De Mille and his partner dissolved the firm. Its debts totaled $20,000, for which De Mille made himself liable. Despite prodigious efforts both as a teacher and as a popular writer, he was not to free himself from those debts until the early 1870s. Even then, the responsibilities of his own growing family compelled him to go on turning out sensational novels.
Between 1860 and 1864, De Mille taught at Acadia College. Offered an appointment as Professor of History and Rhetoric at Dalhousie, he accepted. Before assuming his new post, however, he took a year’s leave of absence to prepare for it. During this year he also worked on his first serious published novel, Helena’s Household, which appeared in 1867. (MacLeod 41)
De Mille evidently found it hard to place Helena’s Household with a publisher; even after he succeeded, drastic revisions were required to suit the market. Harry Lyman Koopman, in an article on De Mille in the Brown Alumni Monthly, says the revision of Helena’s Household “was so disagreeable that to avoid a repetition of it, De Mille resolved in future to give the publishers what they would take without question.” (28) This he managed to do quite competently. Through the late 1860s and early 1870s, he produced a stream of popular novels and boys’ books. Six appeared in 1872 alone, and De Mille’s total production reached nearly thirty titles in a career only fifteen years long.
His income from writing was respectable, and an indicator of his professional success. In 1870, for example, Harper’s purchased the manuscript and copyright for The American Baron for $2,000; De Mille accepted an equal sum for Self Doomed in 1872 (the latter work was published under a different title, presumably, since it does not appear in any bibliographies of De Mille’s work). By the late 1870s, however, his income seems to have dwindled somewhat, perhaps because of a drop in popularity or a weaker market. A Castle in Spain was sold to Harper’s in 1878 for only $750; The Elements of Rhetoric, on which he worked for seven years, was published under an agreement to pay an 8 percent royalty, but sold few copies since a similar text appeared just before it. (Exman)
Determined though he was to escape from debt and to support his family comfortably, De Mille had little respect for mere material prosperity. Speaking at the sixteenth opening of Dalhousie College, in October 1878, he warned that
The age is too much given up to mere money getting. … We see around us too much high living and low thinking. Plain living, high thinking, culture of the mind, denial of the body—these are surely noble aims. (MacLeod 92)
There must have seemed little connection, in his own experience, between those “noble aims” and prosperity. His father’s faith and integrity had not guaranteed a stable lumber market; the support of respectable Baptists had no preserved the West Columbia Mining and Manufacturing Company from bankruptcy; his own intelligence and piety had not kept the bookshop from failing. Only by grinding out simple-minded thrillers had he gained some financial independence. A man whose morality was brightened by a lively sense of the absurd, De Mille must have relished the irony in his role as upholder of “Plain living, high thinking, culture of the mind, denial of the body”—virtues unavoidable to those like himself.
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder offers a detailed examination of the ways in which those virtues can be perverted. As entertainment, Strange Ms is highly successful; not the least of the ironies surrounding the novel is the willingness of its readers to take it as an archaic thriller and nothing more. But the work is primarily a Utopian satire. While it includes much general criticism of contemporary values, Strange Ms is an attack on irreligion, particularly that which disguises itself as altruism. Nowhere does De Mille make his purpose explicit, however; it must be deduced from his ironic use of the conventions of satire and romance.
Northrop Frye offers some extremely useful insights into Strange Ms if we consider it as an example of what he has called “Menippean satire” or “anatomy”—”a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern.” (310) As Frye defines it, anatomy can range from pure fantasy to pure morality, or combine the two; fantasy produces the “literary fairy tale,” while “The purely moral type is a serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other words a Utopia.” (310) The Utopia is marked by the use of the dialogue or symposium, in which a number of listeners hear and discuss a traveler’s account of a distant land; Frye notes that, “the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of character.” He goes on to observe that “The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon.” (311)
The anatomy, especially as Utopia, has other qualities as well. Chief among them is a morally significant language, often synthetic, as a satirical device. Examples of this device are numerous. Sir Thomas More’s original Utopians speak a Greco-Latin dialect, which suggests that they have gone as far toward social perfection as is possible without Christianity. Swift’s use of languages in Gulliver’s Travels has a similar purpose; Laputa, “the whore,” is one of his more obvious puns. Orwell’s Newspeak and Tolkien’s many languages are modern examples.
Another convention of the Utopian satire is a setting on an isolated, womblike island wherein the hero discovers the truth about the Utopian society only after a hazardous entry. More’s Utopia is an artificially created island, with a central sea accessible only by a narrow and treacherous channel. Butler’s Erewhon, set in New Zealand, can be reached only through a narrow, perilous canyon; Orwell’s Airstrip One conceals the truth about itself in the womb of Room 101.
A book or document is often used to show us the society, rather than portraying the society directly. We cannot understand Oceania, for example, until we have read Emmanuel Goldstein’s book on “Oligarchical Collectivism”; Vonnegut’s wretched San Lorenzo, in Cat’s Cradle, is described through two books, one by the prophetic Bokonon. The hero’s account may itself form such a document, as in the cases of Zamiatin’s We.
Finally, the Utopia is often shown as existing outside the normal sequence of time: in Oceania, the clocks strike thirteen and no one known for sure what year it s, and in Shangri-La the inhabitants live for centuries.
All of these conventions can be found in Strange Ms. The “single intellectual pattern” is a vision of a society whose altruism is insane because it is godless. The society is seen from the point of view of a symposium of outsiders, who comment upon it as it is portrayed in Adam More’s papyrus document. The symposium exhibits both the “conflict of ideas rather than of character” and the “mass of erudition” which Frye says are characteristic of this form of satire. De Mille’s Antarcticans, the Kosekin, speak a dialect of Hebrew; the significance of this, however, is lost on the symposium. As in other Utopias, the land of the Kosekin is located in the interior of an island, and can be reached only through a long subterranean channel. And, as in other Utopias, the land of the Kosekin is outside normal time since the sun shines for six months out of the year and is below the horizon for the other six; the Kosekin, lovers of darkness, stay home in the sunny season and travel about in the long Antarctic night.
These structural elements clearly establish Strange Ms as an anatomy, the modern form of Menippean satire, and De Mille’s adroit use of the form shows that he has read More and Swift carefully and perceptively. He intensifies his satire by combining it with a remarkable parody of the conventions of the heroic quest. Adam More’s career is worth examining in some detail, since it involved a journey through the underworld, a symbolic death, the slaying of dragons, and the hero’s assumption of the roles of king and social redeemer.
Adam More is an English sailor whose ship is becalmed in Antarctic waters in 1844. With his shipmate Agnew, he takes a lifeboat to a rocky islet for some seal hunting. Separated from their ship in a blizzard, More and Agnew lose all sense of direction, and cannot even tell if the current is bearing them north or south, to life or death. They find the remains of a long-dead sailor on another island and give the body a Christian burial, a ritual that comforts them:
“More, old fellow,” said Agnew, “I feel the better for this; the service has done me good.”
“And me too,” said I. “It has reminded me of what I had forgotten. This world is only part of life. We may lose it and yet live on. There is another world; and if we can only keep that in our minds we shan’t be so ready to sink into despair.” (39)
Their conventionally pious remarks carry a double meaning, of which they are unaware; in fact, everything they say has ironic overtones. Returning to their boat, the sailors are soon squabbling over their probable destination. The optimistic Agnew is convinced they will eventually be carried north to safety; More retorts that the current “will take us to death, and death only.” (40) When he envisions the South Pole as a maelstrom or as an opening into the interior of the earth, Agnew rejects such ideas as
“dreams, or theories, or guesses. There is no evidence to prove them. Why trouble yourself with a guess? … Do not imagine that the surface of the earth is different at the poles from what it is anywhere else.” (41)
He has the last word in this exchange of fatuities and truisms, for More is now utterly depressed by their surroundings, a bleak channel between steep black cliffs: “There was not only an utter absence of life here in these abhorrent regions, but an actual impossibility of life which was enough to make the stoutest heart quail.” (42)
Yet within this land they find human beings. Agnew at once wishes to land and meet them; More recoils from the idea. The natives seem to him to be “animated mummies…small, thin, shriveled, black, with long matted hair and hideous faces.” (43) Agnew finally prevails, pointing out that “appearances often deceive, and the devil’s not so black as he’s painted.” (45) The devil is still the devil, however, and Agnew pays for his optimism with his life. Just before this happens, More has a “wild thought”—”that we had actually reached, while yet living, the infernal world, and this was the abode of devils.” (47) More escapes without realizing that Agnew has attained the highest goal of the Kosekin, death, and at the hands of wretched paupers who are the most esteemed members of Kosekin society. More subsequent progress, in Kosekin terms, is a steady descent from the peak of their society to its bottom.
As his boat enters the subterranean chasm through which the current flows, More is symbolically buried much as Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym had been by other black Antarctic savages. The link is implicitly acknowledged when More describes the floor around him as “the very blackness of darkness” (54) —the exact Biblical phrase which Pym uses to describe bring buried alive: “The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of lungs, the stifling fumes … carry into the human heart a degree of appalling awe and horror not to be tolerated—never to be conceived.”
Falling asleep as he drifts through the underground channel, More dreams nightmares which reflect an existential hopelessness: “a certain deep underlying feeling that possessed my soul—a sense of loss irretrievable, an expectation of impending doom, a drear and immitigable despair.” (60) He has confronted the prospect of personal extinction both consciously and unconsciously; it has become assimilated into his soul as Christianity has evidently failed to do. Throughout his ordeal, More scarcely considers the religion that had consoled him earlier; not until his boat emerges from the channel into a sunlit sea does he turn to God and give thanks. Even then speaks not of God but the sun, “the Almighty Ruler of the skies,” (60) as his deliverer.
At this point De Mille introduces a vivid and evocative image. He supposes the polar regions to be somewhat flatter than the rest of the earth’s surface, so that it is possible to see for hundreds of miles:
Out at sea, wherever I had been, the water had always limited the view; the horizon had never seemed far away; … but here, to my bewilderment, the horizon appeared to be removed to an immeasurable distance and raised high in the air, while the waters were prolonged endlessly. … It seemed like a vast basin-shaped world, for all around me the surface appeared to rise, and I was in what looked like a depression; yet I knew that the basin and the depression were an illusion. (60)
The “New World” in which More finds himself is not merely at the opposite end of the earth; it is concave rather than convex, our world turned inside out. What is hidden in our world is now clearly visible; More, however, will fail to see what now lies plain before him. For him, the view is always limited; though he knows the basin is an illusion, he forgets what Agnew had said: “Do not imagine that the surface of the earth is any different at the poles from what it is anywhere else.”
More is soon rescued by the Kosekin, small and slender people with dark hair and gentle expressions. They treat him very kindly and install him in comfortable quarters in one of their towns, built in a cave system away from the sunlight. Here he meets Almah, a lovely young girl who is clearly not a Kosekin, and begins to learn something about his hosts. The Kosekin love darkness and selflessness. At the top of their society stand the paupers, who have done so much for others that they now possess nothing. The rich and powerful are at the bottom, and must endure being served by others. The Kohen, a kind of High Priest, is such a person. As he makes clear to his new friend More, this pitiful condition is entirely his own fault, the result of poor character:
“I was born,” said he, “in the most enviable of positions. My father and mother were among the poorest in the land. Both died when I was a child, and I never saw them. I grew up in the open fields and public caverns, along with the most esteemed paupers. But, unfortunately for me, there was something wanting in my natural disposition … I soon fell into evil ways, and gradually, in spite of myself, I found wealth pouring in upon me. … I was too weak to resist; in fact, I lacked moral fibre, and had never learned how to say ‘No’. So I went on, descending lower and lower in the scale of being. I became a capitalist, an Athon, a general officer, and finally Kohen.” (134)
The Kohen is, however, honest enough to admit that he and the other townsfolk are delightedly impoverishing themselves at the expense of More and Almah, whose “extraordinary indifference to wealth” has caused them to be systematically bilked (if that is the word) by Kosekin bent on pauperdom.
The Kosekin love death as well as poverty and darkness. The will even brave the hostile glare of daylight for a chance to be killed in a “sacred hunt,” carried out against various species of dinosaur. More compares one of these beasts to the “fabled dragons such as may be seen in pictures.” (101) Like teams of St. Georges, the Kosekin attack their prey with total disregard for their own safety. Death in such a hunt is a high honour, and one of the Kohen’s duties is to finish off those who have been only wounded, “to show that they had died for others. … This is their highest blessing.” (98) More has kept the rifle and pistol he had brought from the ship, and becomes an accomplished, if reluctant, dragon-slayer.
Some Kosekin, by gaining special distinction, are honoured by being sacrificed on ceremonial occasions. The very noblest, who embody the highest Kosekin values, are permitted to be eaten as well. In this “New World” that realizes the old world’s ideals, it is to be expected that the Word is made flesh and then eaten. More, however, is profoundly shaken by this revelation, and gains an insight that is to be confirmed at the close of the novel:
Of what avail was all this profound respect, this incessant desire to please…? Was it anything better than a mockery? Might it not be the shallow kindness of the priest to the victim reserved for the sacrifice? Was it, after all, in any degree better than the kindness of the cannibal savages on the drear outer shores who received us with such hospitality, but only that they might destroy us at last? Might they not all belong to the same race, dwelling as they did in caverns, shunning the sunlight and blending kindness with cruelty? It was an awful thought! (110)
Even in its own altruistic terms, Kosekin society is no Utopia. The wealthy classes, More tells us, seethe with discontent:
More than once there has been a violent attempt at a revolution, so as to force wealth on the paupers; but as a general rule these movements have been put down and their leaders severely punished. The paupers have shown no mercy in their hour of triumph; they have not conceded one jot to the public demand, and the unhappy conspirators have been condemned to increased wealth and luxury. (139)
The Kosekin nations often make war upon one another, usually because one has tried to “force a province upon another,” (141) or to make the other richer. As soldiers, the Kosekin hold paradoxical values:
If they are defeated they rejoice, since defeat is their chief glory; but if they are victorious they rejoice still more in the benevolent thought that they have conferred upon the enemy the joy, the glory, and the honour of defeat. (140)
Much of the plot of Strange Ms hinges on the Kosekin attitude toward love. When More announces his love for Almah, everyone assumes that they will wish to be parted. Since love is a selfless emotion, it cannot be truly gratified by the presence of the beloved, still less by the requital of that love. There is a further complication. For years, Almah has been kept as a sacred hostage, awaiting the day when a man like her should arrive. Once they have experienced the joy of love, they will be honoured by being sacrificed at a special rite in the Kosekin metropolis.
More and Almah allow themselves to be transported to the Amir, or metropolis, where they meet the Kohen Gadol, richest and most powerful of the Kosekin and therefore the lowest. Only just above him is his beautiful daughter Layelah, who does not share Kosekin values but is willing to take advantage of them. She falls in love with More and nearly seduces him away from Almah. Trying as much to escape from Layelah as from the impending sacrifice, More and Almah steal a tame pterodactyl and fly across the sea. Recaptured by Layelah and others, the lovers are placed on different beasts for the return flight. As Layelah and More return to the Amir, she points out the contradiction in his loyalty to Almah: If he stays with Almah, both will be sacrificed, but if he flees with Layelah, Almah will be spared. More’s response is to shoot their pterodactyl, which falls into the sea. As Watters points out in his introduction to Strange Ms, “rather than desert Almah by living with Layelah, he will desert her by dying with Layelah.” (xvii)
In fact, neither dies; they are rescued and return safely to the Amir. More and Almah are honoured by elevation to the rank of pauper, formally separated, and then sent to dark cells to await the Antarctic dawn, several months hence, when they will be sacrificed. At he separation ceremony, More recognizes a “nightmare hag” who had been among the savages on the bleak outer coast. They are, as he had suspected, “honoured Kosekin exiles, dwelling in poverty, want, woe, and darkness, all of which have been allotted to them as a reward for eminent virtues.” (237)
At the dawn sacrifice, More is allowed to bring his rifle and pistol. He has used them repeatedly, without much impressing the Kosekin, but when he desperately shoots the chief pauper and the “nightmare hag,” it produces an awe-struck response from the assembled throng. Known to them by the unpleasant name of “Atam-or,” meaning “man of light,” More is now renamed “Father of Thunder” and “Judge of Death.” He and Almah take advantage of the consternation to proclaim themselves the new rulers of the Kosekin. They grant the paupers the boon of exile to a certain death; all other classes are to enjoy a diminution in the wealth of one-quarter. The Kosekin applaud More and Almah for their willingness to take on the burden of wealth and power, and the story concludes.
In Kosekin terms, More’s career has of course been a disaster. Having met the Kosekin exiles as an equal in misery, he has rejected them and drifted into their homeland. Here he loses his pauper status at once; like Almah, he grows rich at his own expense, so to speak. By the time he attempts to escape with Almah, he is very near the bottom of the social heap, and only a serious misunderstanding of his motives causes the paupers to make him one of themselves. Despite this unjustifiable promotion, More throws away his opportunity for a glorious death and voluntarily puts himself once more at the bottom of Kosekin society. By so doing, he resolves many social problems and creates a Kosekin Utopia.
Nevertheless, More’s triumph as a social redeemer is achieved only at great personal cost, both from the Kosekin point of view and our own. They must see him as a fool—a holy one, perhaps, but still a fool. And we must regard him as equally foolish for wishing to be king over such a people.
More is a prig, a ninny, and hypocrite; Almah is no better. Their attitude to Kosekin cannibalism is a good example of their immaturity. She warns him not to attend the “Mista Kosek,” an important festival, but refuses to explain herself. He goes anyway, and upon realizing that it is a cannibal feast, he overreacts:
It was a sight of horror—awful, tremendous, unspeakable! For a moment I stood motionless, staring; then all the cavern seemed to swim around me. I reeled, I fell, and sank into nothingness. (118)
Recovering in Almah’s grotto, he chides her for the vagueness of her warning; her limp excuse is that cannibalism “is too terrible to name. Even the thought is intolerable.” (118-119)
More’s response to Layelah’s advances is equally inadequate. Though he loves Almah, he is tempted by Layelah’s forwardness:
I think I deserve sympathy. … With us a young lady who loves one man can easily repel another suitor; but here it was very different, for how could I repel Layelah? Could I turn upon her and say “Unhand me”? Could I say “Away! I am another’s”? Of course I couldn’t: and what’s worse, if I had said such things Layelah would have smiled me down into silence. … I had stood a good deal among the Kosekin. They love of darkness, their passion for death, their contempt of riches, their yearning after unrequited love, their human sacrifices, their cannibalism, all had more or less become familiar to me, and I had learned to acquiesce in silence; but now when it comes to this—that a woman should propose to a man—it really was more than a fellow could stand. I felt this at that moment very forcibly; but then, the worst of it was that Layelah was so confoundedly pretty, and had such a nice way with her, that hang me if I knew what to say. (175)
Layelah may be cynical, but she is no hypocrite, and her honesty and self-knowledge contrast sharply with More’s foolish hypocrisy. The passage quoted suggests that More’s values have become gradually corrupted since his arrival from the outside world, but in fact his values are really identical to those of his hosts, as they themselves are convinced. His maidenly swoons, his daydreams of escape, his futile flight with Almah to the sterile Island of Fire, his desperate murder of the Chief Pauper—all these responses only involve him more deeply in the world of the Kosekin, and suggest that his supposed love of life is only a self-deceiving love of death.
If this is an accurate interpretation of Adam More’s character, then our response to the Kosekin is inadequate if it resembles More’s. We may share his shocked amazement at their outrageous beliefs and customs, but we must find better reasons for our feelings than More can.
Some possible alternative responses are offered by the symposium that reads More’s manuscript; unfortunately, the members of the symposium are no wiser than More himself. For example, Melick, the cynical “litterateur from London,” ignores everything but the story’s form:
“I simply criticize it from a literary point of view, and I don’t like his underground cavern with the stream running through it. It sounds like one of the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor. No do I like his description; he evidently is writing for effect. Besides, his style is vicious; it is too stilted. Finally, he has recourse to the stale device of a sea serpent.” (75-76)
Melick’s comments, of course, forestall our making just such criticisms; De Mille can thus have his sea serpent and laugh at it as well.
Dr. Congreve’s scientific rebuttal of Melick’s remarks helps to restore the tale’s plausibility, but also reflects De Mille’s “Menippean exuberance”; Congreve piles fact upon fact, fascinated by minutiae and ignorant of their significance. His equally limited colleague, Oxenden, demonstrates brilliantly that Kosekin is an evolved dialect of Hebrew, and that the Kosekin are therefore the Ten Lost Tribes. Yet he and the rest of the symposium seem to miss the implications of his analysis: that if the Kosekin are our spiritual cousins, and have simply pursued our common heritage to its logical extreme, then we shall have to re-examine the Judeo-Christian foundations of our present values to see whether they, or we, have been found wanting. Such a re-examination will have to go beyond Lord Featherstone’s idiotic anti-Semitism and his canting assertion that “Too much money’s a howwid baw, by Jove!” (151)
How specific are De Mille’s targets? Although More and the symposium are English, it seems fairly clear that North America, and especially Canada, are singled out as most deserving comparison with the Kosekin. More enters his Antarctic heaven in Chapter VI, which is entitled “The New World.” The Kosekin spend half the year indoors, a life-style similar to the Canadian stereotype. The channel down which More and Agnew are carried seems physically similar to the Gulf of St. Lawrence; this suggests that the Kosekin elite who dwell on the outer coast are analogous to Canadian Maritimers. In one respect, the Kosekin seem like characters out of Ralph Connor or Edward William Thomson: they are profoundly moved by the Scotch and Irish songs that More plays on his violin. As More observes, the Kosekin “seemed to be not unlike the very race which had created this music, since the Celt is at once gentle and bloodthirsty.” (111) He goes on to tell us what he played:
I played “Tara,” “Bonnie Doon,” “The Last Rose of Summer,” “The Land of the Leal,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Lochaber.” …They seemed to hunger and thirst after this music, and the strains of the inspired Celtic race seemed to come to them like the revelation of the glory of heaven. …
It is a land of tender love and remorseless cruelty. Music is all-powerful to awake the one, but powerless to abate the other; and the eyes that weep over the pathetic strains of “Lochaber” can gaze without a tear upon the death-agonies of a slaughtered friend. (111-112)
Yet De Mille’s satire is ultimately aimed at not a particular class or nationality, but at a philosophical attitude. Everyone in the novel—More, Almah, the Kosekin, and the members of the symposium—is godless. Though More gives the dead sailor a Christian burial, his words and actions show that his Christianity is the thinnest of veneers. When the emerges from the subterranean passage into the land of the Kosekin, he gives thanks to “the Almighty Ruler of the skies”; it is clear, especially in retrospect, that he is referring to the sun, not to God. More’s sun worship is explicit at the close of the novel, when in triumph he greets the first rays of the dawn:
The long, long night at last was over; the darkness had passed away like some hideous dream; the day was here—the long day that was to know no shadow and no decline—when all this would should be illuminated by the ever-circling sun—a sun that would never set until his long course of many months be fully run. “O Light!” I cried; “O gleaming, golden Sunlight! O Light of Heaven!—light that brings life and hope to man!” And I could have fallen on my knees and worshipped that rising sun. (251)
Here More shows that he is not only a pagan, but a stupid and shortsighted one. He is still condemned to an inevitable death, though it may be postponed; eventually he will have to face the “drear and immitigable despair” of death in a world without God. His lack of religion also means that the disgust that he and Almah feel toward the Kosekin is based on nothing more than shallow bigotry. In fact, all of them may share the same bleak religious outlook. In his significantly brief comments on Kosekin religion, More says:
I could make nothing of it. They believe that after death they go to what they call the world of darkness. The death they long for leads to the darkness that they love; and the death and the darkness are eternal. Still, they persist in saying that the death and the darkness together form a state of bliss. They are eloquent about the happiness that awaits them there in the sunless land—the world of darkness; but for my part, it always seemed to me a state of nothingness. (142)
The ambiguity of More’s last phrase is clearly intentional; it refers to both the Kosekin and himself. Their only real difference is simply a matter of attitude.
The members of the symposium show little interest in Kosekin religion. Oxenden does “preach a sermon” comparing Kosekin values to those of Buddha and Sophocles. But when he thoughtfully remarks, “I sometimes think the Kosekin may be nearer to the truth than we are” (223-224), he shows he has missed the point. The Kosekin and we share the same values, and are equally far from the truth.
The land of the Kosekin is a Heaven without a God, a Heaven in which Christian principles are upheld, but Christ is not. Cut off their source, such principles turn into grotesque perversions, mockeries of themselves such as the Kosekin’s cannibalistic Eucharist. Heaven, in other words, becomes Hell, but without even Hell’s permanence; the land of the Kosekin is a Manichean realm swinging endlessly between light and darkness, until good and evil become meaningless terms. “Plain living, high thinking, culture of the mind, denial of the body—these are surely noble aims,” De Mille has asserted. But nobility is attainable only in a meaningful, Christian universe; in a godless, absurd world, nobility is as meaningless as everything else.
The exact date of composition of Strange Ms is uncertain. It was one of a number of works that De Mille never saw published. Douglas E. MacLeod, in his biography of De Mille, offers an interesting case for an early composition date:
James’ brother, Alfred Henry De Mill, … says in a letter addressed to Dr. Pryor on March 6, 1880,
“The ‘Copper Cylinder’ Mss is one of the first stories ever written by James & he was never able to make a successful denouement to the plot in it, & consequently I do not think he ever offered it for sale.”
Elsewhere in another letter he says that the “Copper Cylinder” should be “received” as De Mille’s last work. (103-104)
This is the only concrete evidence we have for an early composition date, but MacLeod offers other arguments that tend to confirm Alfred Henry De Mill:
It is very difficult to imagine De Mille writing such a carefully constructed novel as A Strange Manuscript in the 1870s; he was then working on his Elements of Rhetoric for seven years and also producing much popular fiction. The manuscript was probably written sometime in the 1860s, although the 1850s cannot be lightly dismissed as the period during which the novel may have been commenced. A notebook of De Mille’s from his junior year at Brown University (1853) contains some interesting and possibly relevant pen-and-ink sketches by him. A comparison of a few sections of A Strange Manuscript with several sketches in the notebook will indicate that, even when he was a college student, some of the ideas later incorporated into A Strange Manuscript were already important to him. (104)
These sketches, which MacLeod presents in his thesis, include a walled city with galleys ranked on its waterfront; a carriage drawn by a pair of large birds and driven by a black man, much like the bird-drawn vehicles of the Kosekin; a man being carried aloft in the talons of a huge bird; and a galley with square-rigged sail, like the ships of the Kosekin.
MacLeod also includes a reproduction of a manuscript copy of “Eggs Eggs Eggs,” a comic verse that appeared in De Mille’s The Dodge Club, first published in 1869; one stanza, as MacLeod points out, is clearly influenced by Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”:
Down down down! Round round round!
The Maelstrom hurled me out of the world
And oh! no bottom I found—
Down down down! whirl whirl whirl! (105)
Marginal sketches illustrate the nightmare that is the poem’s subject. These include a man astride a strange winged creature and a figure spinning in a whirlpool. Among the monsters mentioned in the poem are an iguanodon and an ichthyosaurus—creatures mentioned by Dr. Congreve as fitting More’s description of two of the “dragons” hunted by the Kosekin. (146-147)
If De Mille was using such images even in the early 1850s, the date given in the novel’s first sentence—”It occurred as far back as February 15, 1850”—may not have been chosen at random. He was then 17, halfway though his year at Acadia College and no doubt reading widely; it might well have been on that day that he first read Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and conceived his own tale. Equally speculative, but perhaps worth considering, is the possibility that the success of Butler’s Erewhon in 1872 discouraged De Mille from publishing Strange Ms, which has many superficial similarities to Erewhon. It certainly does not seem likely that De Mille, with no time to waste, should read Butler’s novel, write a much more competent treatment of the same theme, and then file it away. In the 1870s he was too much the professional writer to embark on such a pointless project.
There are also arguments for a late composition date, however. Strange Ms shows a skilled writer in complete control of his material, and it certainly does not seem to be an apprentice’s work. In Strange Ms itself, De Mille includes a throwaway line that might be made by a professional writer more readily than by a novice:
The Meleks and Kohens, whom I at first considered the highest, are really the lowest orders; next to these come the authors, then the merchants, then farmers, then artisans, then laborers, and, finally, the highest rank is reached in the paupers. (141)
In putting authors near the bottom of Kosekin society, wealthy but without prestige, De Mille might be making a wry comment on his own case, when his thrillers brought him money but little status.
On the basis of the available evidence, it seems likely that De Mille did begin work on Strange Ms quite early, perhaps even while in college, but did put it into its final form until some years later. Further investigation into this question would be worthwhile. If De Mille was simply an industrious hack with the luck and wit to write one good novel toward the end of his career, well and good; it is still the best novel written in nineteenth-century Canada, and one of the best in all Canadian fiction. But if it was in fact written by a young novelist who was then compelled by financial need to waste his talent on potboilers, it could be said that the potential for a serious ironic tradition existed in Canadian literature over a century ago.
On July 30, 1887, Annie De Mille sold Strange Ms to Harper’s for $800, “in full for serial and book form use.” (Exman) It was little and late for the best work of a writer who had made two and half times as much for trivial sensational novels. Strange Ms has always suffered more from bad luck than from its own flaws; it is time to give it the attention and recognition it deserves.
Bibliography
Cogswell, Fred. “Literary Activity in the Maritime Provinces: 1815-1880,” in Carl F. Klinck et al., eds. Literary History of Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1965.
De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, intr. R. E. Watters. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969). Citations in my text are from this edition.
Douglas, R.W., “James De Mille.” Canadian Bookman, January 1922.
Exman, Eugene, Archivist, Harper & Row. Personal communication, March 1, 1972. I am indebted to Mr. Exman for his generous aid in researching Harper’s files for this study.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Koopman, Harry Lyman. “Literary Men of Brown, III: James De Mille.” The Brown Alumni Monthly VIII (July 1907). Quoted in MacLeod, 42.
MacLeod, Douglas E. “A Critical Biography of James De Mille.” Unpublished MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 1968. I am indebted to this study for much of the biographical material presented here.
Poe, Edgar Allen. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in Selected Writings of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.
Looking Backward, Looking Ahead
January Magazine, January 2000
Somewhere in downtown Boston, a man named Julian West lies in suspended animation in an underground concrete cell. He’s been there since the spring of 1887, and on September 12, 2000, a retired physician named Leete will discover Julian’s crypt, revive him, and introduce him to the wonders of life in the last weeks of the 20th century.
Such, at least, is the premise of Looking Backward 2000-1887, a novel first published in 1888 by an ex-lawyer named Edward Bellamy. Not many people know of it now, but a century ago it was an enormous, million-copy bestseller. Hundreds of “Bellamy Clubs” sprang up all over the USA, dedicated to helping to bring about the author’s vision of a fair, free society. Bellamy’s program became that of the People’s Party, and won hundreds of thousands of votes at the turn of the century. The scholars and political thinkers of the next two generations saw Looking Backward as one of the most influential books of the century, right behind Marx’s Capital. Whether to debate Bellamy’s ideas, or to cash in on interest in Utopias, scores of other authors published their own visions of future paradise. Among them were H.G. Wells, Anatole France, and (eventually) Woody Allen in his film Sleeper.
Looking backward now, within a year of the season Bellamy described, we can see how mistaken his prophecies were. But somehow the fault seems to lie not with him, but with us. It’s not that his forecasts were wrong, but that we (and our parents and grandparents) failed to live up to them.
Bellamy was a Massachusetts-born son of a minister, with a strong sense of social justice. Educated as a lawyer, he left the profession after taking just one case, when he realized he would be called on to represent people he didn’t believe in. Turning to freelance writing, he made a career for himself in the 1870s and 1880s, America’s “Gilded Age” of enormous wealth and appalling poverty. His major work began as a pure fantasy, but evidently it took hold of his imagination and drove him to work out the details of a genuine Utopia.
America in the 1880s certainly didn’t look like Utopia at all. Labour unrest was pandemic, corporations grew and merged and merged again, and the government seemed unable or unwilling to intervene. In the beginning of his novel, Bellamy portrayed his world in the “parable of the carriage,” in which he described society as a huge vehicle pulled along a hard road by a hungry majority, while a well-fed minority enjoyed seats on the carriage where they could criticize the ability and morality of those who pulled them.
His hero, Julian West, has a specially soft seat in the carriage. The last in a line of independently wealthy New Englanders, in 1887 he is a 30-year-old who’s never worked a day in his life. He’s about to marry, but the ancestral mansion is decaying; striking workers are slowing the construction of a new house in a better neighbourhood. An insomniac, Julian has a local hypnotist put him into a trance; when he awakes in 2000, he concludes that a fire must have destroyed the house, leaving his underground bedroom untouched but unnoticed.
With a chronological age of 143, but biologically only 30, Julian finds himself in the care of the Leete family, who now live on the site of Julian’s former mansion. They show him a smokeless Boston of splendid public buildings and tree-lined streets. Before he can really explore it, however, Dr. Leete traps him into a series of endless monologues explaining what’s going on in America at the end of the 20th century.
Julian learns that everyone in America (and in Mexico and most of Europe) belongs to an “industrial army.” Every citizen stays in school until age 21, then does three years of basic labour, and goes on to work in some self-chosen occupation until age 45. From then until death (at age 85 or 90), retired workers pursue their own personal interests.
Julian’s amazed to learn that everyone gets the same salary, regardless of their job. If some jobs, like mining, are hard to fill, the government reduces the hours; easy work involves longer working days. The salary is plenty to cover basic expenses, and is paid--in advance-- in the form of a yearly credit card. The only demand on workers, whether highly talented or mentally defective, is that they do their best. A talented person who doesn’t live up to his or her potential will come in for severe criticism; those who do excel will enjoy very high status and respect, but no additional income.
Women have their own designated occupations, and are represented in government by a woman “general” who can veto laws that affect women Modest households make housework unnecessary, and since women are paid just as much as men, no woman needs to marry just to escape economic hardship. Public dining halls liberate women from shopping and cooking (and families can reserve private dining rooms complete with waiters).
Dr. Leete explains that all jobs have equal status; the waiter who serves him deserves as much respect as the doctor would when serving the waiter as a physician. People have every right to choose the work they most enjoy, and to change jobs when they like.
This state of affairs runs with what must be a gigantic bureaucracy, yet the government is far smaller than in the 19th century. It has no military, no legislators (or even lawyers), and few police. Crime --without an economic motive for it --amounts to a handful of cases of “atavism,” throwbacks to primitive violent behaviour. The economy produces anything for which there is a demand. Owning lots of private goods only creates domestic clutter, and people prefer to spend money on public places and events.
Bellamy sometimes shows a startling foresight. Not only does his society run on credit cards, but production operates on a “just in time” basis that minimizes waste. Barely a decade after the invention of the telephone, he imagines live music being piped in by phone to private homes, with a wide range of selections available at any hour of the day or night. On Sundays, people stay home to hear popular preachers deliver their sermons. Gigantic department stores (all within easy walking distance) offer samples of goods; customers order what they want and it’s delivered to their homes.
Some of his throwaway lines are equally startling. In the industrial army, every person deserves a basic level of support simply by being a person, one of the heirs to human knowledge and wealth accumulated over centuries. A talented person who doesn’t achieve his potential is despised; a disabled person who does what he can is admired. No one, even children, is economically dependent on any other person--though parents raise their children lovingly. School is mandatory through post-secondary --among other reasons, says Dr. Leete, because every child deserves to have educated parents.
Bellamy’s vision of literary life almost anticipates Web publishing. Anyone can publish, but new authors must pay for publication out of their own credit, and they set their preferred royalties--knowing their books won’t sell if the price is too high. If sales are good, authors get “furloughs” from their regular jobs and can continue writing and publishing. Popular endorsement is the only real yardstick of literary merit, with the whole country voting to award the coveted “red ribbon” to the most esteemed writers, artists, engineers, physicians and inventors.
Literature itself is dramatically different from that of the 19th century. Julian West is spellbound by a novel lacking all the traditional problems: no contrasts drawn from “wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one’s self or others.” Instead the author has written “a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfettered by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart.”
Immigration is wide open; if it’s a young immigrant, the receiving country pays the immigrant’s homeland for the costs of education. If it’s a retired migrant, the receiving country gets the benefit of another pension, paid by the homeland. (Bellamy explains international trade fairly plausibly, but he doesn’t say how the “advanced” nations deal with the less advanced, which presumably still have armies.)
Perhaps most surprising, this state of affairs has come about without violence. Dr. Leete explains that the trend to monopoly in the late 19th century led finally to a single national monopoly that owns everything and employs almost everyone. (Individuals in groups can pay out of their credit cards to buy the services of preachers, artists, and newspaper editors.)
One reason for Bellamy’s wide appeal was that he explicitly rejected labour organizations and class warfare as the means to achieving his Utopia. A “Nationalist” movement, embracing all classes, has set up this new society and organized it along military lines while abandoning the military itself. (The first Bellamy Club was composed of retired army officers in the Boston region.) His trust in technical fixes appealed to a country dazzled by the progress of technology. Bellamy’s Nationalism had no taint of European Marxism or other foreign ideas, but it had a solid faith in work-created wealth as the basis of morality. As socialist as it seems, his 20th-century America seems like a very libertarian kind of country.
A commentator says that Nationalism would have worked in a society of Edward Bellamys, but not in one of ordinary people. While his book made him rich, Bellamy poured almost all his income into promoting his ideas as a serious political agenda. When he died in 1898 of tuberculosis, Nationalism was still a going concern, competing well against both the mainstream parties and against more aggressive ideologies. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, it lost ground first to traditional working-class socialism and then to communism--which must have looked like a travesty of Bellamy’s vision.
Looking backward now on the book and the age it helped to shape, it’s striking to see the similarities with our own time. Our papers tell us about ever-bigger mergers, ever-richer concentrations of capital. Less loudly, they remind us about the growing gap between rich and poor, the insecurity of daily life. Our young people go from college into jobs as waiters, but respect themselves far less than Dr. Leete’s young waiter did.
Bellamy and millions of others saw the problem and tried to do something to solve it, to work out a practical system that would both increase wealth and share it. They refused to keep pulling the carriage with no reward but the criticism of the passengers.
A century later, and after decades of apathy, Bellamy’s kind of social activism may be reviving. The protests in Seattle about the World Trade Organization echoed Bellamy’s sense of justice, though the violence of some protesters looked like “atavism” as Bellamy would have defined it. He would have seen the WTO as a kind of parody of his national monopoly, rationalizing trade and production but not really solving the problem of wasteful competition.
When we look backward to 1888, just a century before the fall of communism, we can see that there was, perhaps, another way we might have tried. It too might have failed, but surely not as grotesquely and brutally as our Utopias--communist and capitalist--have failed. Perhaps the future will look backward at Seattle as the start of yet another quest for a free, fair society.
Climate Change Is Easy; Culture Change Is Hard
By Crawford Kilian
The Tyee
The Day After Tomorrow is a dumb movie about global warming. Forty Signs of Rain (Bantam Books, $37) is a smart novel about how scientists and politicians deal with global warming—and with each other. The author, Kim Stanley Robinson, is less worried about climate change than he is about our cultural limitations in facing extraordinary threats.
His focus is on the anthropology of scientists and politicians—primates who still think with the habits acquired a million years ago on the African veldt. Like apes concerned about food and status, his characters scheme to get funding for biotech projects that might help absorb CO2. They plot to sneak environmental legislation past a hostile president. But when global warming finally hits with a vengeance, they’re as staggered as everyone else.
The author, Kim Stanley Robinson was in town the other day to promote his novel (the first of a trilogy), and I had a chance to interview him.
CK: Forty Signs of Rain is a classic “anatomy” as Northrop Frye defined it—a kind of satire on scholarship and intellectualism. The scientists try to deal rather ineptly with climate, politics, and their own personal lives. Did you set out to portray scientific individuals and communities, using climate change as a backdrop, or did the scientists take over a novel about climate change?
KSR: I wanted to write about scientists, and how climate change would present a challenge to science’s way of doing things. The political structure since World War II has really marginalized science. The scientists won that war, with the bomb and radar and penicillin. But they wanted to make policy, not just carry it out, and that scared Truman. He didn’t think scientists should make policy any more than the military should. So he structured the National Science Foundation to marginalize scientists. I got to know the NSF when it sent me to Antarctica as a writer in residence.
The thing is, scientists do need to help make policy. Environmental disaster might drive this trend, and my scientists will have to do just that in the second and third volumes of this trilogy. But I’ll show them making some mistakes along the way.
CK: You have a cameo appearance by a president who looks and sounds like a hybrid of Reagan and Bush (“several recent presidents … with a little dash of Ross Perot”). He doesn’t believe in global warming, and he laughs off scientific arguments. Was this just for fun, or to convey your sense of what science is up against these days in the US?
KSR: Both. I wanted a president coming on stage who related to our present moment. Bush is too poisonous and dim, so I wanted to give my future president some wit and quickness of mind. Besides, this is also a political comedy.
CK: You show us a group of Tibetans who now live on an island in the Bay of Bengal, and they’re in Washington to try to prevent rising sea levels from drowning their new home. They seem almost like people who belong in a different book, but they do challenge the American scientists they meet. How are you going to develop this theme in the next two volumes?
KSR: There’s a trip to Khembalung, their threatened island, in volume two. The Tibetans will continue to infuse American science with a Buddhist component. Buddhism has a very scientific attitude, and it can give a purpose to our scientific empiricism.
The rest of Robinson’s trilogy will appear in June 2005 and June 2006. By then we will doubtless have read and seen many more fictional treatments of global warming. Most, like The Day After Tomorrow, will advocate Doing Something About the Weather. But not many will advocate doing something about ourselves. In Forty Signs of Rain, the real upheaval doesn’t come in the form of storms or droughts, but inside people’s minds. It’s a much more threatening forecast than floods and famines.
Mark Twain, Father of the Internet
By Crawford Kilian
The Tyee, January 8, 2007
Mark Twain died in 1910, a lifetime before the founding of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet and the Web. So that you could read this on The Tyee, hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers worked for years to get the clanking, room-sized computers of the 1960s to communicate with one another. You’ve probably never heard of them: Vinton Cerf, JCR Licklider, Robert Taylor, and Paul Baran, to name just a few. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, was a latecomer.
Yet I contend that Mark Twain (one of the great science-fiction writers of all time) first conceived the Internet. Like the wizards of the 1960s and 70s, his contribution has been forgotten. But like Arthur C. Clarke, who conceived the earth satellite and could have patented it, Twain understood the idea of the Internet before the scientists did. If anything, he leaped beyond the text-based Internet to the just-dawning world of video chat and vlogging (video blogging).
Even Twain scholars seem to have missed his foresight on this subject. I discovered it by accident, in browsing through the 24 volumes of his collected works in the “Author’s National Edition.” In an 1898 short story called “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” he describes an invention called the “telelectroscope,” a gadget hooked up to the phone system: “The improved ‘limitless-distance’ telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues.”
The story itself revolves around the unjust conviction of an American army officer for the murder of Szczepanik, the inventor of the telelectroscope. On death row, the officer is allowed to use the invention. That narrator, who appears to be Mark Twain himself, is a friend who spends time with the doomed officer as he surfs around the world:
“. . .day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bars.
“He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement. I sat in his parlor and read and smoked, and the nights were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him say, ‘Give me Yedo[Tokyo]’; next, ‘Give me Hong-Kong’; next, ‘Give me Melbourne.’ And I smoked on, and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote under-world, where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their daily work. Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened.”
The actual story, alas, is pretty bad. Clayton, the condemned officer, is about to be executed, and Twain, remaining in his friend’s cell, looks through the telectroscope at an event in Beijing (the coronation of the Czar as emperor of China). In the crowd he sees the inventor of the device, who hasn’t been murdered at all. The narrator manages to stop the execution, and within minutes Szczepanik is conversing with his supposed murderer:
“A messenger carried word to Szczepanik in the pavilion, and one could see the distressed amazement dawn in his face as he listened to the tale. Then he came on to his end of the line, and talked with Clayton and the governor and the others; and the wife poured out her gratitude upon him for saving her husband’s life, and in her deep thankfulness she kissed him at twelve thousand miles’ range.”
Twain then describes how “for many hours the kings and queens of many realms (with here and there a reporter) talked with Szczepanik, and praised him; and the few scientific societies which had not already made him an honorary member conferred that grace upon him.”
The story then degenerates into a second part about whether Clayton can be pardoned for a crime he didn’t commit. (You can read it at ) It is all very melodramatic, but Twain clearly understood the basic concept of the Internet: effortless world travel through an electronic medium. Just past the centenary of his imagined “telelectroscope,” we who surf the Web should pause to thank America’s greatest author—a man ahead of his time in more ways than one.
Children of Men
By Crawford Kilian
Writing Fiction Blog
I have been watching science fiction movies since 1950, when I was nine and Rocketship XM and Destination Moon gave my whole generation a reason to go into space. But they were movies intended for 9-year-olds. Now, after a mere 57 years, I have finally seen a science fiction movie for adults: Children of Men.
I’m not blaming the moviemakers, or even the audiences. Science fiction started as a literary genre for scholars and intellectuals. They used it to poke satirical fun at themselves: Take this abstruse idea and push it far enough, and look at the mess it’ll make.
Starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, SF became a hybrid genre, its abstruse ideas mated to heavy-breathing popular romance: epic journeys, larger-than-life heroes, slavering monsters, and babes in brass brassieres. As such, it offered newly literate audiences a chance to explore the thinking of scientists and philosophers—but on their own inevitably shallow terms.
Almost as soon as movies emerged, they did the same thing: in 1902 George Melies made a movie about a spaceship launched to the moon. Later filmmakers pursued SF themes: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Frau im Mond, for example, and Things to Come with a script by H.G. Wells himself.
Going for the Image, not the Idea
Inevitably, these SF films were doomed by the demands of the genre: They had to show us the future in images that would knock us out, images that no one had ever seen before. But they had to be the ideas of the time, the way audiences were thinking in 1905 or 1938 or 1950.
The original scholarly SF had been interested in ideas, not in character, and the future was just a convenient place to dramatize those present-day ideas. Film came along at a time when the myth of progress was becoming entrenched, so the future in film was a better time than today.
A century of relentless progress since Melies has left its beneficiaries less enthused about the future. But even recent SF films portraying grim futures have shown us amazing technical progress: Star Wars gave us interstellar ships the size of a sports car or a small planet, and the TV series Firefly took place on planets all shaped by super science to look just like southern California.
So the mood of the present has changed, and evidently we no longer expect progress of any kind. With Children of Men, we appear to have finally outgrown our crush on gadgets, and begun to look at what we are actually doing with them.
The movie’s MacGuffin—the plot device—is silly if we take it literally: Women have become infertile, and no one has been born since 2009. So the pregnancy of a scared young black girl has enormous political significance in a Britain run by a fascist military. The government is rounding up illegal immigrants and offering a suicide drug called Quietus (“You decide when it’s time”).
Getting the girl to a haven outside Britain is the whole story, a straightforward chase. The real purpose of the chase is to show us a Britain where a few still live in comfort (with Picasso’s original Guernica as dining-room decoration) but most live horribly and the immigrants live worst of all, in cities turned into monstrous concentration camps.
How the Other Half Dies
In a routine made-for-teens SF movie, the high-tech violence of the chase would be the whole purpose. We would see advanced-looking weapons and levitating cop cars (as in Blade Runner). In Children of Men, the violence is the violence of today: the weapons are automatic pistols, rocket grenade launchers, tanks, and finally jet fighters. The only difference is that the violence is happening in Britain instead of Gaza or Belgrade or Beirut or Baghdad.
Or Mexico City. Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican director, is also working on Mexico ’68, a film about the Tlatelolco massacre of students on the eve of the 1968 Olympics. He’s grown up in a part of the world that knows first hand about life under military tyranny.
In a recent interview (), Cuarón has flatly stated that the film is about the present, not the future. He is not even trying, as Ray Bradbury did in Fahrenheit 451, to prevent some unpleasant future by warning us of what might happen if we don’t mend our ways.
He is showing us our own world, but instead of dishing out the violence on tedious brown people in the Third World, we ourselves are getting the violence. The bombs go off in our coffee shops; the tanks are blowing up our apartment buildings. The violence of the terrorist Fishes is identical to the violence of a terrorist state. And the sterility of our women is the sterility of our politics, giving us nothing to live for and nothing to live by.
A Bankrupt First World
If Children of Men offers us any hope, it’s in Kee, the pregnant black girl: the culture of rich white males has clearly run right out of ideas. The First World can serve as midwife to the Third, but that’s about it. Even terrorism, that European invention, doesn’t advance the Fishes’ cause. As Winston Smith wrote in his diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “If there is hope, it lies with the proles.”
So Alfonso Cuarón has taken the abstruse ideas with which we congratulate ourselves—technological progress, high living standards, democratic institutions that serve only the elite—and mocked them to our faces. He has shown us the price that others pay when we defend our privileges, and what a price we ourselves pay for so little gain.
And if we have any hope of preventing the future from taking revenge on our present, it lies in the fact that a movie like this, using the commercial conventions of the thriller, can make us confront ourselves.
Running Down The Road
By Crawford Kilian
First published as “When ‘Art’ Goes All Sci-Fi” in The Tyee, December 6, 2006
Literary authors sometimes like to take holidays in the shabby Third World genres like romance, thrillers, and fantasy. Offhand, I can think of several who’ve landed in my own genre, science fiction: Paul Theroux in O-Zone, Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, Updike in Toward the End of Time.
I can understand the attraction. These authors go straight to the usual tourist traps—nuclear war, overpopulation, oppressive governments—pick up some local colour, and go home with stories that will both entertain and horrify their usual readers. It’s not exactly sex tourism, but it suggests that mainstream literature can be a little too genteel and boring sometimes.
The latest tourist is none other than Cormac McCarthy, who has already partied in the western (Blood Meridian) and the regional novel (All the Pretty Horses). He is an author I both admire and detest: He’s an amazing storyteller, but technically he’s just another dumb gringo tourist who can’t hold his mescal.
McCarthy’s fatal flaw is that he can’t go for two paragraphs with reminding us that he’s a hell of a good writer, and that makes him a terrible writer. He’s like a playwright who hangs around onstage, commenting on his actors’ performance and stepping on their lines.
Hazards of a high-calorie style
In some of his earlier novels, McCarthy has dealt with murderous brigands and hapless young Texans trapped in Mexican jails. He describes appalling slaughter and torture in a high-calorie style that critics smack their lips over.
The effect is like contemplating a corpse whose eyes have been gouged out, each cratered crimson socket filled with thick whipped cream and a fine maraschino cherry. It’s a style easy to parody, but it reveals a deeper problem in McCarthy’s writing.
Well, here he is in The Road, a post-nuclear horror novel that’s winning praise everywhere. I’ll add a little praise myself: It is one of the scariest SF novels I have read in a long time. Some of the descriptions are brilliant—if that’s the word I want for a world lost in a blue-grey twilight. I had to stay up late to finish it. Most SF novels are instantly forgettable, but some of McCarthy’s scenes will stick in my memory for years.
But it stinks as science fiction, and it stinks as plain fiction.
Let’s start with its failures as SF, a genre where the story simply can’t happen without some plausible application of known science. In this case, McCarthy is very cagey: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” That’s all he’ll tell us about his MacGuffin, the plot gimmick that launches the story.
This seems to be a nuclear war, because for the next ten years the earth is in some kind of nuclear winter. The sun never breaks through the overcast, and nights are pitch-black. It’s always cold. It rains or snows all the time, but even after ten years people need to wear masks to filter out the ashes that drift everywhere.
A nuclear war, however, would leave radioactive ashes. McCarthy’s survivors suffer from malnutrition and cold, but not from radiation poisoning.
Those survivors appear to have suffered a total bankruptcy of social capital. Some “communes” exist, but we never see any. Instead we see small groups, like the protagonist and his son, or slightly larger groups of brutal cannibals, complete with sex slaves. Everyone has been reduced to scavenging for stray cans of food or roasting babies on spits.
This is very scary, all right, but it presumes a highly unlikely failure of social cohesion right down to the neighbourhood level. McCarthy’s disaster couldn’t have killed off every sergeant-major and police chief.
In SF, we’ve been kicking these post-disaster ideas around ever since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, her little-known follow-up to Frankenstein, and especially since Hiroshima. It’s just not a plausible outcome.
The pretensions of bad punctuation
Even as straight fiction, The Road runs crooked. McCarthy is fond of that sure sign of literary pretension, dialogue without quotation marks:
What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I’m not.
The hero is sensibly filling the bathtub with water right after the disaster, and he’s so concerned with this job that his use of apostrophes also becomes slapdash.
This hero is nameless: He’s just “the man” or “he,” and his son is “the boy.” His wife, until she commits suicide, is “his wife.” They live in a world without names, described in prose that might be called Icelandic baroque: The flat, saga-like style suddenly erupts with gaudily unlikely expressions.
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened tree. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.
The paragraph from which I take this excerpt is typical. The average word in it has 4.6 characters, and the average sentence is ten words long. The Flesch-Kincaid readability scale says a grade 5 pupil could understand it.
But McCarthy must have his cold autistic dark and vestibular calculations—better said, his protagonist must have them. The man is clearly very smart and very educated, a capable survivor. We see the story through his eyes and understand it with his vocabulary. Dying of TB, driven by the need to protect his son, he still thinks and perceives with a vocabulary as rich and perceptive as Cormac McCarthy’s.
The significance of language and of its absence
The man realizes that words are disappearing; humanity is becoming dehumanized by its loss of language. (The moral significance of language is of course yet another SF convention, understood and exploited by authors from Thomas More to Kurt Vonnegut.) He has taught his son to read, and tells him stories when they’ve camped for the night. The two of them pore over ragged road maps as they plod southward toward the sea and some hope of warmth.
You would expect such an intellectual, especially in such conditions, to be a positive chatterbox, reveling in names, telling stories and reminiscing while he and his son push their shopping cart down the road. If the world of language was vital to the man before the clocks stopped, he should be trying to pass along to his son as much as possible of that world. Instead, his speech has dwindled to catchphrases: “We’re the good guys. We carry the fire.”
The namelessness of McCarthy’s world makes the setting literally generic: The closest we can guess to the region is that it’s somewhere in the US south, where kudzu—dead at last—covers the blackened hills. The only place name in the novel is Tenerife—the home port of a wrecked yacht that the father plunders when they reach the sea at last. Why mention Tenerife and not the names of the Alabama or Mississippi towns they’ve walked through?
I could accept and believe the man as a destroyed intellectual, smart enough to survive at the cost of his language—if McCarthy’s language had only reflected that destruction. After ten years of nuclear winter, terms like “autistic dark” and “vestibular calculations” should not even occur to him.
So McCarthy won’t even respect the integrity of his own protagonist’s suffering, much less give him a name. All the awful events of this novel are just occasions for Cormac McCarthy to remind us that he, not his miserable cart-pushing pilgrim, is the real hero of The Road.
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