Cursory Notes on the Articles
Here are notes/issues/thoughts I took from the articles:
The Future of an Illusion: Capitalism is causing the demise of science fiction, so that novels are more trashy and lack a moral basis; this cycle will continue and progressively become worse.
Aliens Among Us: Capek has a clear line of development that can be attributed to his experiences (such as Nazism, capitalism); this was a well reasoned and understandable article until the end, in which it states that Capek was the most “American,” which I found confusing.
Russian SF and Its Utopian Tradition: I thought this was a good article to sum up the history of Russian SF, just as the H.G. Wells one provided a nice overview of his work.
Phillip Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans: So I understand that PKD is creating original narratives and such, but why is Lem so obsessed with just him? Haven’t others made creative stories? I don’t have any grasp of this genre, but it seems as though there have to be other authors in the “trashy” SF who are creative.
About the Strugatskys Roadside Picnic: Lem makes a very convincing argument for this interpretation of Roadside Picnic, and I wish I had read the story so that I could engage more with this text.
Society After Revolution: This article details what was expected to arise from a communist revolution, and it is really interesting to see the parallels between these expectations and the utopian SF works.
Varieties of the Utopian: I found the graph at the end to be the most useful section of the article.
The Unknowability Thesis: This article outlined many of the things that we discussed in class about Solaris and it was interesting to compare it to The Invincible (this comparison might be useful for anyone using Solaris for their longer paper)
Science Fiction, A Hopeless Case – with Exceptions: Lem seems to be making the same points over and over again; he seems to attribute all the problems of SF to the readers, but I believe that they are probably stuck in this “vicious circle” he describes just as much as the authors are. It is important to consider whether one would rather have these trashy novels or no SF, but it seems as though they will continue to be produced whether Lem likes it or not.
-Nicole
Capitalism seems to constantly be causing the demise of everything, and yet somehow nothing ends up actually being demolished. Funny, that. I’m not a huge fan of it, but it never seems to be as monstrous as people make it out to be. It seems that the changes in market preferences often correct trends that would produce terrible problems, which I think we might be seeing in sci-fi today. But I’m not an economist.
I really don’t think the quality of sci fi as a whole is decreasing. It might be on the rise, in my opinion, now that publishers realize that there’s a market for literary sci-fi, and that fanfiction and other online works are filling the niche that pulp once filled. I’m certainly seeing a lot of promise in sci-fi lately; it seems the most talk (on blogs etc.) is about genre-bending or highly original works. Again, I think that the internet has caused the dialogue within science fiction fandom to proceed along a very different line than it once did at conventions and in fanzines. Fanzines never really allowed a sustained dialogue between multiple people about the pros and cons of the works discussed, and in my experience conventions never lend themselves to any sort of insightful discussion, only to celebration of works without considering what makes them good and why some are better than others. But because the internet naturally gives rise to argumentation as well as lengthy essays, I think the kind of dialogue that Lem wishes there was now occurs all the time.
By the way, if you want to see science fiction being discussed online in an interesting way, I have a few sites to recommend. One is the blog Omnivoracious, my favorite book review blog, which treats genre fiction and literary fiction with equal gravity. (http://www.omnivoracious.com/) Another is io9, which is a blog about science, science fiction, and the future, which often reviews books from the perspective of their relevance to modern science, technology, and society. (http://io9.com/#!books) And a third is that 4chan board I mentioned in class, /lit/, where you will see some of the most obscene and angry serious discussion of literature that you have ever laid eyes on, as well as a lot of thoughtful and respectful ones. (http://boards.4chan.org/lit/)
Oh, and in response to Lem: I really do wonder what he thought of Heinlein and Bradbury. Perhaps he thought Heinlein too pulpy, and didn’t think of Bradbury as a sci-fi writer? Who knows. And I don’t forgive him for deliberately neglecting LeGuin. I am glad he acknowledged Stapledon as an important and valuable author; he is FAR too often forgotten. Guys, read something by Stapledon. In your copious free time.
But I do think that, at the time of his writing, Lem did have a point, in that there really weren’t a lot of talented and creative science fiction writers in widespread knowledge, and that if they were there they weren’t being acknowledged by fandom. I don’t think it would be easy at all to find anyone similar to Dick in that day and age, especially in terms of the “trashy” sections of the genre. It really took the cyberpunk movement, which came a few years later (and was heavily, heavily influenced by Dick), to popularize the idea of turning trashy tropes into serious and relevant art.
Thank you, Nicole, for this useful summary of the readings!
Julia gives a good take on the role of capitalism (and thank you for the links to the online discussions!), so let me take on the question of why Lem only liked Philip K. Dick. I would posit that despite his sophistication as a reader Lem presumed that advertising and publicity in North America and Britain would work the same way as the planned economy in Eastern Europe: the best writers would learn to adapt to the system just enough, would rise to the top, and would become familiar (at least as names) to anyone who was serious about culture. Lem can’t have had time to read a whole lot of SF and sift through the crap to find the gems (gems which, as Disch points out, can get adulterated pretty easily by the temptations of the market – SF writers need to make a living too), and whom would he have asked for recommendations about good writers or books? I would guess that he met Asimov at some conference, and was put off by Asimov’s prolific production and market-savvy attitude. (It’s all very well to be a snob of SF if you’re writing in a system where anything good is gratefully snatched up by readers desperate for something real and good, readers who don’t have access to the huge range of crap that the market economy has always provided.)
The story of how Lem himself managed to write and publish so much in a system like that is one worth hearing, and I’m very sorry that I don’t know Polish so I can research that.
Note too that the only person besides Lem who mentions Stapledon is the theory mandarin Fredric Jameson: interesting. I’ll make a note to go read something by him (Stapedon, I mean).