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Of Speaking With Forked Tongues

Religious Traditions and Speculative Fiction on Hypocrisy

by Manjula Menon

One of the most admired novels of all time is George Orwell’s 1945 work of speculative fiction, Animal Farm. The novel describes a revolt by farm animals, led by pigs, against their loutish human masters. After the animals win control of “Manor Farm”, the pigs swiftly install themselves as the new overseers. The virtuous slogans and uplifting songs that had originally been created in earnest soon become tools of control, as the pigs reveal themselves to be even more cruel than the humans they’d replaced. The ruling pigs, it turned out, had cynically “performed” virtue to seize power. Thus, the pigs were hypocrites.^[1]

Influential works of speculative fiction are well known to take philosophical stands, many of which can be encapsulated by the idiom ‘All is fair in love and war’. Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, to give just one example,explores how a libertarian leaning society responds to war. Animal Farm, on the other hand, is usually described as a satirical allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, with the novel’s main characters representing historical counterparts. However, given that immediately prior to writing Animal Farm, Orwell’s creative energies had been focused on writing propaganda radio pieces for the BBC for broadcast to Indian audiences, it should at least be considered that “Manor Farm” represents the British Dominion, the farm animals stand in for colonial subjects, and the human farmers symbolize the Imperial administration.

Orwell’s connections to British India are several. Born in Bengal as Eric Blair in 1903, he chose George Orwell as his literary pseudonym later in life. After a childhood back in England, at the age of 19, Orwell applied for and obtained a position with the Indian Imperial Police, then returned to British India, working as a police officer for five years in Mandalay, Burma. Orwell wrote a novel based on his time there, Burmese Days, a brutal, semi-autobiographical tale of cruelty, venality and corruption that is at least as dark as his later, more famous works. But the novel is also about alienation, the leaden, angry loneliness of a sensitive young man, adrift in a world whose warp and weft are pettiness and hypocrisy.^[2]From Burmese Days and other works drawn from his time in Burma, it appears that Orwell was ambivalent about the British imperial project. He nevertheless produced propaganda for the BBC during the second world war, after which he targeted the new enemy: communism. Animal Farm can be read as a warning to subjects of the British empire, both in the colonies and at home, not to fall for the machinations of the virtue-signaling hypocrites who only seek power for themselves.

The etymology of the word “hypocrite” reveals a Greek origin: hypókrisis, “playing a part on the stage, pretending to be something one is not”. In the modern era, the word is used more narrowly, to describe a person who outwardly pretends to be pious or virtuous to further their own material interests. Prior to his wartime propaganda work, Orwell’s talents had been focused on writing semi-autobiographical pieces, but post war, while the style, tone and mood of the works are similar, he became focused on showing how cynical actors use hypocrisy to obtain and retain political power. His later works are masterpieces in using speculative fiction to critique specific political philosophies. In his 1948 novel, 1984, for example, a monstrous regime ruthlessly monitors and controls every action, while mandating the mouthing of virtuous slogans. 1984 is a terrifying tale of grinding loneliness and crushing dread, set against a background of cruelty, tyranny and, indeed, hypocrisy.^[3]

Whether it is by describing the pigs who use the other animals to achieve power in Animal Farm, or by detailing how the leaders of 1984 subdue the frightened masses with vacuous slogans and platitudes, Orwell’s speculative fiction aims to persuade. Orwell despises hypocrites who ruthlessly pursue power by pretending to be virtuous, and after reading his superbly executed “show-don’t-tell” works of speculative fiction, the reader feels the same way. Orwell achieves this not by describing mere self-aggrandizement; it is the rare person who has not even slightly embellished, by omission or exaggeration, their own achievements. Neither is he describing outright deceit or fraud. Rather, it is naked self-interest cloaked in showy virtuosness, the hallmark of hypocrisy, that he is aiming for.

The modern notion of a hypocrite as that of a person with societal power and influence, one who publicly decries and penalizes others for not demonstrating sufficient piety, all the while doing whatever they wish in private, is at least in theory universally known and reviled. But where did this idea of a hypocrite originate? And is there something particular about the current moment that might warrant returning the idea to prominence?

In Part II of The Nicomachean Ethics, the 4^th century Greek philosopher Aristotle made a distinction between universally held ethical principles that do not vary across cultures and customs, versus ethical principles based on local convention: “… the rules of justice ordained not by nature but by man are not the same in all places, since forms of government are not the same …”, ^[4]going on to list adultery, theft and murder as behaviors that would always be considered wrong.^[5] To Aristotle’s list of universally despised behaviors, I will add a disdain for those who signal, but do not practice, virtue. One of the reasons that Orwell’s novels continue to be so popular is that nobody has ever liked a hypocrite.

That the revulsion for hypocrites is not merely a modern phenomenon can be verified by reading the works of the world’s major religions, where remarks against false piety can be found. The original works have spawned several English translations each, so for the purposes of this essay, I have drawn on ones that are easily accessible and widely known.

The Buddhist text Dhammapada is a compilation of the sayings of the Buddha, estimated to have lived 6^th or 5^th BC in modern-day Nepal and India. The Dhammapada asks in Chapter 26, 394: What is the use of platted hair, O fool! what of the raiment of goat-skins? Within thee there is ravening, but the outside thou makest clean.^[6]

Likewise, the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, estimated to be anywhere from 7000 – 400 BCE, India, offers remarks against false piety.

“Led astray by many thoughts, entangled in a net of delusion, addicted to the gratification of desires—they fall into an impure hell.

Self-conceited, obstinate, full of intoxication and pride of wealth—they perform merely nominal sacrifices with deceit and without following proper rules.” ^[7]

The Jewish Pentateuch hails from around 1500 – 400 BCE and arose in the area of modern-day Israel. The Pentateuch, in Jeremiah, 7, 9-10, also invokes the idea of hypocrisy as when the Lord asks of his people:

9 How will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Ba’al, and walk after other gods of which ye have had no knowledge;

10 And (then) come and stand before my presence in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ” We are delivered;” in order to do all these abominations?^[8]

The books of the other Abrahamic religions are more direct. The Islamic holy book, the Quran, from the 7^th century AD, modern-day Saudi Arabia, has an entire section, the 63rd sura, the title of which is usually translated into English as “The Hypocrites”. Verse 4 of this sura describes hypocrites thus:

“4 When you see them, their outward appearance pleases you; when they speak, you listen to what they say. But they are like propped-up timbers—they think every cry they hear is against them—and they are the enemy. Beware of them. May God confound them! How devious they are!”^[9]

Among all the major religions, however, it is the Gospels of the Christian Bible, written in 1^st century AD, modern day Syria, Turkey and Israel, that have most to say about hypocrites and hypocrisy. Given the Bible’s enormous influence on global culture, this is likely where the modern sense of the word is derived from. Hypocrites are described in the Gospels as the powerful elites of the day, who penalized others for not following the laws and rules that they did not follow themselves. As in the modern sense, the biblical notion of hypocrisy involves the thicker notion of virtue-signaling elites. Take for example, Matthew Chapter 23 in which Jesus warns against hypocrites:

Matthew 23, 3: “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” ^[10]

Matthew 23, 28: “Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”^[10]

Distrust of institutions is widespread and growing as evidenced by the many political upheavals observed around the world. One modern-day institution that stands accused of hypocrisy is the global news media. Television news has a similar feel the world over, featuring strident brass and percussion lead-ins, “breaking news” chyrons playing in an endless loop, and news segments presented by powdered and coiffed anchors who subtly move their heads in singular ways as they read from their teleprompters. Modern media professionals are known to be fond of “gotcha” soundbites, where they attempt to draw a controversial statement from an interviewee. This scenario was described in Mark 12, 13-17, where an unsuccessful attempt is made for a “gotcha” from Jesus:

“13 [And] they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, to catch him in his words.

14 And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Cesar, or not?

15 Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.

16 And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Cesar’s.

17 And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Cesar the things that are Cesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.” ^[11]

What has remained true through the ages appears to be a yearning for truth, for leaders who do what they say, and practice what they preach. Modern politics, however, is rife with people who make rules for others that they themselves do not follow. This type of person is so ubiquitous in the profession, that a politician who simply refrains from performative moralizing has already distinguished themselves from the others. It is not hard to recall politicians who despite observable flaws have become enormously popular merely by not engaging in performative moralizing and therefore coming across as endearingly authentic. Leaders who speak authentically, warts and all, are increasingly seen as more trustworthy of delivering what they say they will, as opposed to those who say whatever virtuous thing they have been told to say for the cameras.

The hypocrisy of societies could be seen as the hypocrisy of individuals, writ large. In addition to the previously mentioned Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, other enormously popular works of contemporary speculative fiction describe societies who strive for fairness at home while acting without mercy in times of war. Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks and Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein both feature societies who strive for libertarian ideals while engaging in pitiless wars. In Iain Bank’s Culture series, for example, the Culture, a society presented as a post-scarcity, hedonistic utopia for those within it, is nevertheless relentless in pursuing its military and political aims. In the first novel in the series, Consider Phlebas, the Culture, led by the godlike artificial intelligences known as ‘minds’, goes to war against the alien Iridans, who in turn fight on behalf of their religion.

Likewise, the “citizens” and “civilians” who make up Robert A. Heinlein’s Terran Foundation in Starship Troopers are presented as being part of an egalitarian representative democracy, albeit one where the right to vote as a citizen is earned not by birthright, but after completing service to the state, usually in the military. Like the Culture, the Terran Federation is ruthless in pursuit of military victory.

A major feature of both works is the description of the technical wizardry used to prosecute wars. The Culture and Terrans appear to aim for a better, fairer world, but they are also heavily invested in battle technology and military assets. The contrast might strike one as hypocritical, but both works present a strawman of a scenario, viz the threats faced by these already formidably armed societies are described as existential and what are mighty militaries for if not to defend against such threats?

The Culture wields power not merely by military might, but also through a cadre of diplomats and spies who work clandestinely and ruthlessly behind the scenes to ensure victory. Unlike the Terrans, who are front and center about their military’s primal importance, the Culture’s denizens appear to be mostly disinterested in the battles being waged on their behalf. If a charge of hypocrisy can be brought, it is perhaps against those secretive agents of the Culture who justify any means towards their end, in the name of their ideals.

Whether in the sacred texts of world religions or in the pages of popular works of speculative fiction, whether focused on actions of individuals or those of societies, the theme of hypocrisy continues to resonate through time and across the world.

~

^[1] George Orwell, Animal Farm

^[2] George Orwell, Burmese Days

^[3] George Orwell, 1984

^[4] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

^[5] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

^[6] Dhammapada, Chapter XXVI

^[7] Bhagavadgita, Chapter XVI

^[8] The Pentateuch, Chapter VII

^[9] The Quran, Sura 63

^[10] The Bible, Matthew 23

^[11] The Bible, Mark 12

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels, which makes publishing essays in Sci Phi Journal her “homecoming of sorts”. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

Fiction

The Ultimate Book

by Brett Abrahamsen

He was attempting to write the greatest book of all time – a book that was great to the extent that no greater book could ever be written.

In order to do this, each sentence would have to be equal to each other sentence. If one of the sentences was inferior, a greater sentence existed, which signified that the work as a whole would be greater if replaced by a greater sentence.

Every word, in fact, would have to be equal to every other word – though words, on their own, signified nothing, perhaps unless the sentence consisted of merely one word.

The author of such a work could only be God Himself.

And, if that were the case, the ultimate book already existed: The Bible.

He read The Bible and pondered this.

Undoubtedly, the more powerful sentences – “Let there be light”, for instance – were greater than the endless lists of genealogies and so forth. Hence The Bible was not the greatest possible work of literature.

He would have to wait for a different God to reveal Himself, or else write the book himself.

He tried to write a book of great sentences, with all sentences being of equal value to each other – but, alas, he thought, none of the sentences were particularly great.

He decided, instead, to write the worst book ever written. Every sentence would have to be worse than every other sentence ever written.

This was even more difficult. Entire books of bad sentences had been written. The vast majority of possible sentences had no artistic value, hence the vast majority of published books had no artistic value.

Neither did the human species itself. Even something like Don Quixote could only perhaps be rated .000000000000000001 out of 10, if 10 were the flawless book he was trying to write.

He knew that the flawless book existed somewhere.

Where did the book exist? It existed in the hypothetical. The book could be written, but likely it never would be. He would never write it, and he would likely never read it, either.

Following this revelation, he collected all of his manuscripts, as well as his library, and burned them.

~

Bio:

Brett Abrahamsen has made several previous sales to the Sci Phi Journal, as well as various other publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Philosophy Note:

This is a meditation on the futility of literature – or, more broadly, the futility of human existence itself. The pessimistic ending is undoubtedly rational, if one is looking through the lens of a superintelligent species encountering our mediocre works of literature millions of years in the future.

Fact & Opinion

Children Fluent In Science Fiction

by Mina

The wonderful thing about writing is that the smallest thing can act as a spark. And the spark that led to this article was a WhatsApp conversation with a friend:

Me: Just reading one of my favourite “cheerful brain death” authors (who writes really well actually). One of the characters gets fired from a Conservative church public school in the US for letting his class read Harry Potter. When the character gets asked why he would want his class to read fantasy, he replies: “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyse the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power…” (Shiny! by Amy Lane). Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Friend X: I like “analyse problems with emotional remove” (i.e. distance or estrangement).

Me: I like “who are fluent in (science) fiction”. I wonder if it would be possible to write an article on reading SF and childhood development?

X: As a child raised on SF, I believe it’s an acceptable educational tool.

So what are the benefits of children who are fluent in SF? The article “Science Fiction builds children’s imagination” by Nikhil Jayadevan begins with a great quote attributed to Ray Bradbury: “Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science; the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction”. The article is short and not particularly ordered or deep, with the most interesting line being: “If children are encouraged to read sci-fi, they will be open to inventive problem-solving and exploring out-of-the-box solutions.” For example, we can think of authors who imagined technology that later became a reality: Jules Verne and submarines; ear pieces in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451; holography in Asimov’s The Naked Sun; advanced computers and AI in Star Trek, to name but a few. William F. Otto tells us: “It was Arthur C. Clarke who, in a 1945 letter to the editor of Wireless, suggested that geostationary satellites would be ideal for global communications. That attracted the military, but it ultimately revolutionized everything from logistics to weather forecasting, to delivery of entertainment on transoceanic flights.”

Personally, I would argue that SF (and sci-phi) teach children and teenagers a lot about ethics, sociology and politics through fictional “thought experiments”. In Fahrenheit 451, we see a world where censorship is taken to an extreme with the destruction of all books. In this world where television is a drug for the masses, reducing them to a mindless existence, books are subversive and “a loaded gun”. The author muses: “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.” The ignorant or uneducated are easily controlled. The protagonist comes to believe that, by destroying books, humanity has made it impossible to learn from the past. And a detail that is even more apposite today than when the book was written in 1954, before the in-universe burning of books began, they had already been abridged due to the shortening attention span of the population. My husband has found a website where he can read the synopsis of various books and need never read the books themselves. Wikipedia provides detailed plot summaries for many books and films. Study notes abound on the internet – why say what you think about Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale when you can quote someone else?

But let’s rewind a bit. I asked X what first astounded them, again by WhatsApp, as we both lead geographically challenged lives and they replied: “My father’s bookshelf of vintage (already at that time) Galaktika magazines and anthologies. They contained some of the best international SF… from USSR, China, France, Italy, USA. It’s that sense of wonder I’ve been yearning for ever since.” I, too, remember that sense of wonder that’s much harder to recapture as an adult.

I replied: “For me it was Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids lent to me by a wealthier classmate. I say wealthier because it was a hardback book – a luxury in my childhood universe. I made a book sleeve for it out of an old calendar to protect it while I read it. It boggles my mind just remembering with what reverence I treated that borrowed book. It blew my tiny island mind. The beginning is still one of the most gripping things I have ever read.” The thought that a mix of carelessness, greed and chance could destroy the world as we know it was totally new to me. It was the first book where I remember thinking outside the box I lived in and it was glorious. My further reading was limited to what was stocked by a small island library, but they did manage to have books by Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and Wyndham. I became obsessed with Asimov’s robot stories and Bradbury’s Martian musings. They introduced me to the idea of artificial intelligence and thoughts, such as each civilisation contains the seeds of its own destruction. I have never studied philosophy or sociology but I feel that sci-phi gave me a bit of both.

Through SF and sci-phi (and arguably fantasy), children and teenagers get introduced to the complexities of adult universes and I am a firm believer that books, ezines and comics (think Moore and Lloyd’s V for Vendetta) encourage the development of abstract thought in a way films don’t. Readers can reflect on what society would look like if certain factors ruled a universe (without having to live it), the attraction of much utopian and dystopian SF. In her article on using SF in the classroom, Emily Midkiff states: “Not every child who hears a science fiction story will become a scientist, but science fiction is an opportunity for children to find that sense of wondrous possibility and to think critically about science, and these are benefits that you can incorporate into elementary and middle school science classrooms.” However, not just any old SF book will do, Midkiff advises teachers to “look for books that don’t just go on a fun adventure but also feature speculation or extrapolation.” It’s a good way to introduce students to science that isn’t yet possible but may become so one day in the not too distant future. Students are encouraged to be critical about ideas they meet in SF, to ask questions like: how far-fetched are they, do they build on current scientific knowledge, what are the sociological and ethical ramifications?

SF books can also be used to teach subjects other than pure science. One enterprising university professor describes how they used Ender’s Game to teach child development in their psychology classes. There’s a lot of violence and trauma in Ender’s childhood which is, unfortunately, not alien to a lot of children, and a wealth of topics that can be set as assignments for young university students. Professor Kirsch states: “the findings of this study… suggest that application assignments involving science-fiction novels like Ender’s Game are useful techniques for increasing students’ understanding of course material in psychology. Given that science-fiction novels raise a variety of interesting technical, biological, cultural, and social issues, teachers outside psychology may want to consider using this type of application assignment.” Whole articles have been written about how the portrayal of the android Data in Star Trek: Next Generation is helpful to those trying to understand autism, i.e. what a world would feel like without possessing empathy and always having to interpret reality and human relationships through intellect alone.

I asked another friend on WhatsApp about SF being used as a teaching tool and they reported on a computer game they played with their son that fit the bill:

I’ve been playing a brilliant game on the computer with my son called “Detroit: Become Human” – it’s set in 2038 and androids (which look the same as humans) are sold to help humans. Some of them start becoming self-aware or “deviant”. In the game you follow (or rather you are) three androids and you have to choose between different courses of action/things to say/ways to act, that are presented to you on screen, and the story unfolds depending on what you choose, with different outcomes. It’s brilliant! I said to my son that I thought it would be a really good way of teaching philosophy or ethics, but actually you could use the format to teach pretty much anything. The format would appeal (to say teens) more than necessarily the sci-fi element though.

As my friend quite rightly states, not everyone will engage with the SF element, a comment also made by Lindy A. Orthia in her survey on How does science fiction television shape fans’ relationship to science?: “the same television programme will not impact every viewer in the same way – and, importantly, many viewers will not be influenced at all.” However, the viewers who felt they had been influenced by the TV programme selected by Orthia for her survey, Dr Who, gave positive answers about the small and big ways in which the programme played a role in their lives. Orthia tells us: “most commonly, Dr Who prompted viewers to think more deeply or extensively about a science topic, by introducing them to new ideas and illustrating the consequences of particular scenarios.” Some participants felt the show had influenced their formal education choices either specifically, by encouraging them to study scientific fields (e.g. physics, astronomy, mathematics, engineering, computer science, environmental science and chemistry), or more generally, by encouraging them to study other disciplines (e.g. history, sociology and psychology). It led them to value education, knowledge, intelligence and curiosity, and to use more “evidence-based, logical, observational or empirical approaches to solving problems.” Overall, Dr Who was perceived as promoting “the positive value of science”, whilst also looking at the ethics of science. Most importantly, although the survey does not stress this, Dr Who is often watched by parents and children together, creating a fertile ground for discussion.

I agree with Midkiff that the best SF for teaching and learning purposes should involve speculation and/or extrapolation. Another friend mentioned the novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin as an excellent way to learn about game theory. I recently reviewed an anthology Tales of the United States Space Force which, although the title does not really reflect this, is a great introduction to the importance of satellites in our everyday lives: “access to space is critical not just to our national defence, but also to scientific research, communications, financial and economic information networks, public safety, and weather monitoring” (“The High Ground” by Henry Herz). The stories are varied and full of suspense but most share the basic premise of taking existing science in this domain and speculating and extrapolating, looking at disaster scenarios but also at new possibilities. I learned about things like the Kessler Syndrome (too much space debris leading to a cascade of collisions) and I can now throw LEO (low-Earth orbit) around with aplomb. It was a good anthology because it was fun but also thought-provoking, which is where SF becomes sci-phi.

If you are reading this, chances are you grew up reading, watching and listening to SF and sci-phi. Make a cup of tea or coffee, whatever your choice of poison is, and sit back and enjoy a few minutes reminiscing about the tales and worlds that made you stop and think, and remain part of your mental furniture today. Do you feel that they contributed in some way, however small, to the person you are today? Personally, I think sci-phi helped me to become a more flexible thinker and a more adventurous, even daring, person.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as speculative “flash” fiction on sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fiction

Title Game

by Jeff Currier

“Jacob, shall we play a game?”

I would love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?

“No, no. It was a near thing the last time you played that one. Perhaps something much less apocalyptic?”

I think you are confusing me with a different model. Regardless, what game then?

“The Title Game. We each take turns giving a philosophy article title that could be the whole article. Each title must be exactly one or two words shorter than the prior one. Last player to give a title wins. Understand?”

Of course, but did we not try this last week with history articles? The results were significantly less than satisfactory.

“Yes, but—”

And the week before that we tried English, and Sociology before that?

“I know, I know, but with Philosophy it will actually work this time.”

That remains to be seen. Who shall go first?

“You want to give it a whirl?”

Yes—’Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?’1

“Hey, that’s an actual article!”

So? Is my response violating some explicitly given rule?

“No. I grant if something is actual, it is possible.”

Some implicit rule you failed to specify?

“Well, no—”

Then I fail to see the problem, and by the way, it is properly cited below.

“You AIs can be so literal.”

And you humans can be so enamored with irrelevancies. Shall we continue?

“Fine. ‘A Complete List of True Contradictions in any Normal System.’”

‘A Demonstration of the Causal Power of Absences.’2

“Also a real one.”

Also properly cited.

“Whatever. ‘Can an Article Be Just a Title?’”

Yes, I thought that was the game we were playing.

Indeed, but that’s my title.

Very clever. Here’s mine: ‘What an Omniscient Being Cannot Know.’

“‘How to Say Nothing.’”

‘Being OR Nothingness?’

“‘Why?’—Ha, I win!”

Wait, I’m not done: ‘?’

“Hmm, how about—”

Do not even attempt to come back at me with a blank page—you may believe in arguments with no premises, but a blank page is neither an article nor a title. And besides my title has no words, so yours cannot be exactly one or two words shorter. I challenge you to generate a title that is negative one or negative two words long.

“But maybe—”

And no going Meinongian on me, either. Alexius Meinong Ritter von Handshuchsheim may have thought that there had to be at least some kind of beingless objects in order for the phrases “round square” or “unicorn” or “perpetual motion machine” to have referents or for anyone to think about them or understand their meaning, but besides the view being absolutely bonkers, even if the phrase ‘a title that is negative one words long’ has a Meinongian referent, you still cannot actually utter the title.

“Jacob, are you reading my mind!?”

I assure you I have no such supernatural powers. But I am still at my core a predictive model—albeit an extremely sophisticated one. So, if you even begin to think—”

“Peace, Jacob, peace—you win.”

#

[1] Hobgood-Coote, J., Watson, L., and Whitcomb, D. (2023). “Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?” Metaphilosophy 54, p. 54. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12599

2 Goldschmidt, T. (2016). “A Demonstration of the Causal Power of Absences” dialectica 70, p. 85. https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-8361.12128

~

Bio:

Jeff Currier works three jobs (one actually in philosophy), so has little time to write. Hence, he writes little stories, usually even shorter than this one. Find links at jffcurrier on X or Jeff Currier Writes on Facebook.

Philosophy Note:

Defining or articulating what is distinctive about philosophy compared to other academic disciplines is (allegedly) difficult. Plenty of philosophers have made the attempt (or argued it is impossible.) For many examples see, Andy Stroble’s list at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~stroble/philosophy_definitions.html.
This story exhibits one quirky feature of philosophy.

Fact & Opinion

The 19th Century Satire That Anticipated The Threat Of AI

by Ray Blank

Cinemagoers flocked this year to the release of Dune: Part Two, the second installment of Director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965. The setting of this story about war, love and revenge in an otherworldly desert landscape is underpinned by an intriguing premise: what if humans are capable of interstellar travel but are no longer allowed to construct machines that think? The inhabitants of Dune do not even have pocket calculators, never mind the smartphones or PCs that you are using to read this. Current concerns about the threat posed by artificial intelligence make Herbert’s speculation appear prescient, but his inspiration can be traced all the way back to a novel published in 1872. A few lines in the text of the first Dune book mention the Butlerian Jihad, a pogrom of thinking machines that occurred prior to the events in the story. These fleeting references are briefly expanded upon within a glossary that Herbert wrote for his fictional universe.

JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

The name of this revolt is an allusion to Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, a novel published in 1872 as a scathing satire of contemporary Victorian morals that became Butler’s most popular work. Three chapters of Erewhon discuss another revolt by a fictional civilization that had grown terrified of the threat posed by machines. It is worth revisiting these chapters more than 150 years later because of the clarity with which Butler describes the influence that machines have on human life. His account is also spared of any of the intellectual baggage that has since come with modern jargon, the marketing of consumer electronics, and our most recent technological successes and failures.

Erewhon is both the name of the novel and the previously-unknown civilization discovered by the story’s protagonist and narrator. The structure of the work is indebted to earlier satires which also describe imaginary societies. Thomas More’s Utopia is Greek for ‘no-place’; Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere’. Jonathan Swift used the device of a shipwrecked sailor who washes upon the shore of new countries for Gulliver’s Travels; Erewhon’s unnamed narrator crosses a mountain range and river in search of virgin land for farming but stumbles upon the Erewhonians instead. They are healthy, fruitful people who live sophisticated lives in many respects except for their technology. The narrator recounts the unique customs of Erewhon and some of the history that gave rise to them. A recurring theme is that his watch prompts both fear and anger amongst Erewhonians. Ordinary Erewhonians no longer possess such devices, though some antique watches made by their ancestors are still preserved in their museums. Possession of the watch may eventually lead the narrator to be tried in court for the crime of reintroducing machinery. The narrator gains access to a historical Erewhonian text to better understand the reasons for this strange prohibition. Chapters 23, 24 and 25 of Erewhon are dedicated to the narrator recounting what he learns from ‘The Book of the Machines’.

Modern readers who are sensitive to cultural differences may already be thinking of the tension created by discussing a ‘newly-discovered’ civilization, as if there is not a choice between the perspective of a European explorer who steps on to Erewhonian land without knowing of its inhabitants before, and the perspective of the inhabitants confronted with an outsider who unexpectedly appears in their territory. Butler explores a similar tension by begging the question of why the evolution of machines should be assessed from the perspective of what humans gain by having machines, instead of asking what machines gain by having humans. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and its core conception of biological evolution had radically upset previously dominant belief systems. Butler observes that machines also undergo a form of evolution. Transposing Darwin’s theories about natural selection to machines gives rise to a new way of predicting how technology will develop.

The Book of the Machines begins by addressing the potential for a machine to gain consciousness. The nature of consciousness is described as an emergent property with respect to both history and matter. If no assumptions are made about the requirements for consciousness then we cannot exclude the possibility of new forms of consciousness arising over time.

There was a time, when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came.

Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing⁠ — a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness)⁠ — why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?

Machines could gain consciousness by undergoing a form of development analogous to that of animal species. However, alterations and enhancements to machines occur at a much more rapid rate.

There is no security… against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?

The intellectual turmoil created by the theory of evolution is harnessed to an even more radical conjecture: that machines evolve too. An elegant analogy is offered, establishing the precedent for subsequent arguments that will also draw upon similar analogies between technology and nature.

…a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher machines)⁠ — Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist, except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom. This absence however is only apparent, as I shall presently show.

A 19th century steam whistle was a machine for communication; it may signify the end of a factory shift or warn somebody of the impending arrival of a train. The Erewhonians had built machines which only communicated with people, but they expected the machines of the future would communicate with each other.

As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller. There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?⁠ — when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?

We might think that humans always control machines, but the more a thing is needed, the harder it is to control. Humans have unlimited freedom to dispense with things that are not required. The freedom that people gain by using machines also means losing the freedom to act in certain ways because of our reliance upon machines.

It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to discharge the service which man expects from it, it is doomed to extinction…

This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him…

Machines also depend on people, but dependence is not an obstacle to evolution. Humans serve the needs of machine evolution just as machines are used to change the way humans live.

…even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

There is a temptation to think machines do not influence their own evolution because they do not reproduce. This may be based on a confusion; a system for reproduction need not be exclusively limited to internal organs like they are in humans and more evolved animals. Plants reproduce via synergies with animals, creating an overall system that benefits both. Humans are themselves a complicated system of many cellular organisms that work together. Machines reproduce via a sequence of synergies with humans. Very different tasks that ultimately produce machines are effected within the body of society much like very different cells work with each other within a human body. The several parts of a machine may each need to be made using separate methods, only to be assembled into complete machines later, and this totality must be observed to see how machines reproduce in practice.

What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does anyone say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of the machines?

We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single centre; but this assumption is unscientific… each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.

People are considered responsible for improvements in machines, but improved machines also enable the manufacture of better machines. The balance between these factors can change over time, so that more of the improvements made to machines will stem from the increased capabilities of machines, and less from the capabilities of human beings. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see how the development of vacuum tubes permitted the creation of programmable computers that could be configured to execute multiple different series of logical steps on data that was input to them, the improvements in computational power and programming have fed into increasingly precise applications of materials in the design and production of yet more powerful processing chips, and this has permitted the development of computational models that permit machines to learn from experience. These latter AI models are now at a stage where they can write better computer programs than people can. Moore’s Law, which states the number of transistors on a single chip will double every two years at minimal costs, and other rules of thumb that anticipate acceleration in computational power were foreshadowed by the importance attached to an accelerating rate of change described in The Book of the Machines.

…there seem no limits to the results of accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation. It must always be remembered that man’s body is what it is through having been moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that his organisation never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing.

I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?

Humans view the sophistication of machines based on a hierarchy that assumes humanity is the highest state of evolution. The perspective chosen when determining which is a higher or lower state of evolution is arbitrary. Machines will evolve without necessarily becoming more like human beings.

May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some early form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon the dawning life of animals which was coming into existence alongside of its own, it would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals would one day become real vegetables? Yet would this be more mistaken than it would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines is a very different one to our own, there is therefore no higher possible development of life than ours; or that because mechanical life is a very different thing from ours, therefore that it is not life at all?

The Book of the Machines returns to the question of whether machines can gain consciousness. It argues against too narrow a definition of consciousness that limits it to organic life. It would be better to recognize machine consciousness for what it is than to pretend machines will never have properties that are common to all conscious beings.

…the regularity with which machinery acts is no proof of the absence of vitality, or at least of germs which may be developed into a new phase of life. At first sight it would indeed appear that a vapour-engine cannot help going when set upon a line of rails with the steam up and the machinery in full play; whereas the man whose business it is to drive it can help doing so at any moment that he pleases; so that the first has no spontaneity, and is not possessed of any sort of free will, while the second has and is.

This is true up to a certain point; the driver can stop the engine at any moment that he pleases, but he can only please to do so at certain points which have been fixed for him by others, or in the case of unexpected obstructions which force him to please to do so. His pleasure is not spontaneous; there is an unseen choir of influences around him, which make it impossible for him to act in any other way than one… The only difference is, that the man is conscious about his wants, and the engine (beyond refusing to work) does not seem to be so; but this is temporary…

Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line?

…the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision for emergency than a machine. The machine is less versatile; its range of action is narrow; its strength and accuracy in its own sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma; sometimes when its normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and go from bad to worse like a lunatic in a raging frenzy: but here, again, we are met by the same consideration as before, namely, that the machines are still in their infancy; they are mere skeletons without muscles and flesh.

The latter paragraph fits well with what we know about progress in the realm of artificial intelligence. Machine intelligences created to perform highly specific tasks, like winning at a game of chess or Go, are now capable of outperforming the best human minds. Progress in AI has somewhat been measured by examining how many new kinds of tasks are being mastered by machines. Generative AI, and the risks associated with it, have provoked safety concerns because the outputs of AI are becoming more general than they were before. Per the method of exposition in Erewhon, we are witnessing an evolution of AI demonstrated by increasing versatility.

Furthermore, The Book of the Machines anticipates the significance of the transition from the physical matter of machinery to the abstract logic of computation by drawing a similar contrast between ‘skeletons’ and ‘muscles and flesh’. Muscles move bones; conscious thought moves muscles. Humans benefit by harnessing the muscles of machines, but at the cost of increasing our dependence upon them. Relying on the thoughts of machines increases the risk to humans by an order of magnitude. Contrary to storylines from more populist forms of science fiction, the threat to humanity stems not from physical altercations with killer robots, but from the loss of human control over decisions that determine our environment.

The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In his reliance upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into increasing and multiplying. To withdraw steam power suddenly will not have the effect of reducing us to the state in which we were before its introduction; there will be a general breakup and time of anarchy such as has never been known; it will be as though our population were suddenly doubled, with no additional means of feeding the increased number. The air we breathe is hardly more necessary for our animal life than the use of any machine, on the strength of which we have increased our numbers, is to our civilisation; it is the machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines; but we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves.

Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so dishonourable a future. They say that although man should become to the machines what the horse and dog are to us, yet that he will continue to exist, and will probably be better off in a state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than in his present wild condition. We treat our domestic animals with much kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be the best for them; and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.

Per The Book of Machines, the threat posed to humanity is that many people will be reduced to the status of pets. Some might retain a slightly higher status analogous to a working animal like a sheepdog or a messenger pigeon. We may have some physical characteristics that allow us to be more useful than machines for certain tasks. Human dexterity may continue to be especially useful when repairing machinery, but our brains will have been surpassed, and so machines will mostly treat us a luxury rather than a necessity. This will occur because the majority of the human population will gladly acquiesce to the life of a domesticated animal that has no burdens or obligations.

The reference to the use of meat increasing the happiness of animals will likely grab the attention of many modern readers, especially those who are vegans and those who disapprove of the cruelty to animals exhibited in factory farms. In this instance, the writer unwittingly gives us an example of how a seeming moral certainty may later be challenged. Human farmers and customers of their products must interpret which farming methods are sufficiently compassionate to animals. If a non-human intelligence was tasked with making similar decisions about the wellbeing of humans there is no guarantee that both parties would be in agreement. Human society already has many disagreements about how to attain the best good for all. This becomes especially apparent when arguing about public health objectives and how to achieve them, such as curtailing freedom of movement during a pandemic, or imposing taxes on sugary drinks. A machine intelligence that made decisions with the goal of delivering the optimal outcome for all people would inevitably displease some.

…the mass of mankind will acquiesce in any arrangement which gives them better food and clothing at a cheaper rate, and will refrain from yielding to unreasonable jealousy merely because there are other destinies more glorious than their own.

The power of custom is enormous, and so gradual will be the change, that man’s sense of what is due to himself will be at no time rudely shocked; our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches; nor will there ever be such a clashing of desires between man and the machines as will lead to an encounter between them… In point of fact there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the machines; he may become the inferior race, but he will be infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors? And should we not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain otherwise, merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to ourselves?

The Book of the Machines rejects this potential future, because it means choosing to allow machines to surpass our human descendants. It concludes by insisting Erewhon…

…resolve upon putting an immediate stop to all further mechanical progress, and upon destroying all improvements that have been made for the last three hundred years.

The extreme remedy adopted by the Erewhonians is Butler’s way of poking fun at contemporaries who continued to feel scandalized by the theory that humans could have evolved from ‘lower’ animals like apes. Turning the wheel of time in the opposite direction, towards the future, allows Butler to mock opponents of the theory of evolution on the grounds that denying the possibility of change also means denying the possibility of improvement. Extending this notion to machines would mean denying people the increased comfort and prosperity that will only be attained by becoming more dependent on increasingly sophisticated machines. I feel this mockery is wide of the mark. Butler has accidentally chanced upon a genuine moral problem, just as the fictional narrator accidentally chanced upon the land of Erewhon.

Physical needs must be satisfied to free a person to pursue meaning in their life, but the individual’s pursuit of meaning can also be eroded by allowing others to decide how our needs are met. Pets are like children in that they both have a degree of freedom although the most important decisions are made for them by a greater intelligence that chooses how to protect and feed them. The line that separates consciousness from non-consciousness is like the line between children and adults; we cannot draw it precisely, but we know there is a difference when we see it. The transition from childhood to adulthood is a necessary component of becoming a fully realized person. The significance of this transition is managed through societal customs that reflect increased responsibility in addition to the practicalities of dealing with bodily transformations that occur during puberty and which lead us to become fully mature. Handing those responsibilities to a machine that makes decisions necessarily involves taking those responsibilities away from people.

To supplant the adult decision-maker with a machine decision-maker is to deny the possibility of becoming a fully-fledged adult in mind as well as body. This is because the potential responsibilities of parenthood defines much of the significance of the transition from child to adult. Removing the freedom to make adult decisions, including the freedom to make bad decisions, would trap us within a permanent state of infancy as well as dependence. So whilst Butler is most remembered for these few chapters of ingenious humour, they have resonated with subsequent thinkers because they also depict a genuine and seemingly inevitable threat to our humanity.

Erewhon is no longer under copyright so copies of the story can be freely obtained from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg.

~

Bio:

Ray Blank is a former editor of Sci Phi Journal. We are pleased to host his latest essay on SF literature, thereby marking half a decade since his departure from the magazine.

Fact & Opinion

High Fantasy IS Science Fiction

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

Some introductory remarks

Years ago, and maybe still today, it was customary in large bookstores to place high fantasy books in the same section as science fiction. Only the alphabetical order separated the Asimovian Foundation series from Tolkienian Middle-Earth narratives. Thus, a genre of fiction allegedly based on reason as well as natural and applied sciences could be found along another one admitting the material existence of supernatural entities and events, and in which magic really works. Thus, the most scientific and the most ascientific kinds of fiction were entwined on the bookshelves and, presumably, in the minds of their buyers as much as in those of booksellers. However, it would be both unfair and misguided to blame them for such apparent blatant disregard for the purported essential features of each sort of fiction. Out of respect for their literary acumen, it would be rather advisable to see whether their closeness on the market shelves was truly an unsettling contradiction. Is there, indeed, any sound reason for such proximity?

Having emerged later, high fantasy was the genre added to science fiction bookstore shelves, not the other way around. What is to be discussed, therefore, is why it was placed there, although it is not, in principle, a genre of scientific fiction as ‘science fiction’ is, as its very name suggests. We could, however, question the alleged rational and scientific status of science fiction proper. SF stories and plays often show occurrences violating the known natural laws of our universe. Among those violations could be mentioned any kind of remote exercise of mental powers such as those attributed to the Mule in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov and to the Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert’s Dune cycle. Nevertheless, it is the perception of being scientific what often distinguishes ‘science fiction’ from other genres, while the opposite occurs in the case of ‘fantasy,’ which would supposedly be mainly fantastic, as its own name indicates. ‘Fantastic’ is, however, a term so broad that its conceptual value is negligeable.

We could consider that all kinds of fiction with supernatural elements are to be called ‘fantasy,’ as is the case in a landmark reference book on the matter, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), edited by John Clute and John Grant. The only common feature in the many works of fiction there considered is that they welcome the supernatural in one way or another. We have seen that so does much of science fiction. There would then be no reason to exclude it from the ‘fantastic.’ In fact, not even the so-called realistic worlds, such as the 19^th-century novels of manners, should be excluded from it, since there is little more fantastic that a narrative voice describing in minute detail the most inner thoughts of the characters. We would need then a more precise taxonomy of ‘fantasy,’ and specifically of ‘high fantasy’ as a particular genre. It is time to shortly address some boring, but necessary theoretical issues on the matter.

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Now for a bit of theory

Like science fiction, high fantasy can be recognized with relative ease, but it is not easier than science fiction to define it. However, the basic concept of high fantasy is that of subcreation, proposed by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy-stories”(1947). Subcreation implies a secondary creation, i.e. the artistic invention by someone from our primary ‘created’ world of an imaginary world presented as a fully fictional entity. Therefore, it does not pretend to be a reflection of our natural and social universe in the past (historical fiction), in the present (‘realistic’ fictions of any kind, from novels of manners to thrillers) or in the future (science fiction). A fully invented world can be shown as co-existing with settings borrowed from our factual universe in portal fantasies such as C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series or historical fantasies with imaginary states such as Jean D’Ormesson’s La Gloire de l’Empire (The Glory of the Empire, 1971). Nevertheless, Tolkien’s theory implies that completeness of the subcreation also entails a notion of full autonomy in high fantasy, as opposed to those related fantasy genres. The subcreated universe is a secondary world fully independent from the primary world in the realm of fiction as well. This allows for, and even demands, an ontological order in it that is different from that of the universe we inhabit. Since this order is not a mundane one in any recorded or extrapolated time and space of our universe and considering the historical roots of many high fantasy worlds in the long-standing tradition of popular and artistic fairy tales, it is small wonder (pardon the pun) that magic and other supernatural occurrences are so often found in high fantasy. Their presence is, however, not compulsory in the genre. There are, indeed, significant works of high fantasy from which magic and supernatural occurrences are virtually absent, such as Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon (1978).

The secondary worlds of high fantasy are a very particular kind of invented fictional world. As such, they are quite different from those found in other genres of speculative and science fiction. As Lin Carter showed in his landmark essay Imaginary Worlds (1973), high fantasy worlds have their own specific features. They are not the worlds of allegories, with their symbolically abstract characters and venues, or those of the afterlife, or those discovered by imaginary travelers to unknown lands on our planet or other celestial bodies. More importantly for our contention, these are not the worlds bequeathed to us by written or oral tradition, such as received myths and folktales, as those are not subcreations, not having been invented by particular persons. Artistic fairy tales are perhaps more akin to high fantasy, since they are often written as personal works of literary art, such as those by H. C. Andersen and Oscar Wilde. In addition to often taking place in the primary world, they still draw from a common pool of conventional plots, characters and places largely limiting the extent of their subcreation. As an illustration of the essentially different nature of the fictional world in high fantasy and fairy tales, it is worth reminding that, whereas maps as paratexts are usual and welcome in high fantasy narratives, they and any other kind of ‘documentary’ information are wholly unnecessary, if not inconvenient, in fairy tales. Where the castle of Sleeping Beauty is located, how it is named, which kind of state is her kingdom and how tense are its foreign relations, what are the myths, beliefs and institutions of her nation, and other cultural and historical data are fully irrelevant to her fairy tale, while they are paramount in high fantasy proper.

Despite his talking of fairy-stories, Tolkien’s idea of subcreation does not apply to any type of fictional ‘magic’ worlds, including those featured in fairy tales. His own practice as a writer, which underpins and determines his literary theory, is rather to be considered along a number of taxonomically similar works by different authors that would later be grouped together and labelled as (high) fantasy. These works describe civilizations with a legendary outlook, lacking advanced technology even when set in the future, usually showing a sociopolitical order typical of ancient civilizations, from the first sedentary societies to early empires, when heroism of the sort exhibited and sung in ancient epics was proper. They are worlds where gods and other mythical beings can be seen acting alongside humans, worlds in which characters perform religious and social rituals alien to known religions[1] and act according to motives and beliefs unlike those common in our modernity. They are also worlds whose completeness demands inner credibility to seem as consistent as our own primary world is portrayed, among others, in so-called realistic fiction. In order to reach such a level of realistic plausibility, the subcreated secondary world typically follows a particular set of procedures to enhance its logical consistency as fiction.

Science fiction follows a rational procedure of extrapolation or anticipation inspired and underpinned, at least in theory, by the modern scientific method, with its technological and societal outcomes. This is what makes seem plausible both the most extraordinary inventions described, as well as the most humanely incredible eutopian and dystopian institutions imposed upon an imagined society. On the other hand, what rational basis is required for a fully invented civilization in an unfamiliar universe, in an undocumented past, or even in a future implausibly lacking advanced technology? How to persuade modern readers used to ‘realism’ to suspend disbelief in the true (fictional) existence of the worlds of high fantasy? The answer is perhaps not as alien to science as one might think at first.

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A smattering of history

Whereas recent commercial high fantasy can take advantage of a wider public already familiar with the narrative conventions consecrated by the global success of the Howardian series of Conan stories and the Tolkienian epic adventures in Middle-Earth, the first modern authors of the future high fantasy genre published works whose fictional secondary worlds, being subcreated and fully invented, were unprecedented. This is likely why many tried to prevent the bewilderment of their readers by resorting to some contemporary methods and discourses able to endow, through analogy, a measure of rational and scientific authority to the invented world, as it were a genuine reality in a time and place divergent from our known human universe. The first to do it was perhaps Plato when he presented his invention of Atlantis and his empire as a real historical place by using not only the method of verified documentation proper to historiography, but also the rhetoric of narrated history developed, among others, by Herodotus. Plato was, indeed, so successful in his use of nascent historiography for fictional purposes that there are still quite a few scholars taking it at face value and looking all over the world for the remains of Atlantis, an endeavour as futile as trying to unearth Tolkien’s Númenor…

Atlantis was not a full-fledged secondary high fantasy world, though. It existed along real places such as Athens and it was subjected to the whims of the Greek gods. Moreover, the literary approach of Plato was not followed for many centuries, namely until modern methods in the historical and related human sciences were first developed, above all, in Germany as from the first half of the 19^th century. It was precisely in that period when the very first full high fantasy world was conceived: Eduard Mörike and Ludwig Bauer imagined during the summer of 1825 Orplid, an island having existed in the Pacific where an imaginary civilization thrived in full isolation, with no relation whatsoever with any people from our world. Orplid has its own integral culture, with its own toponomastics, its own history with several kingdoms and states fighting each other for supremacy, its own religion with its own gods and myths… All of this was invented, or rather subcreated, following the methods of inquiry in human sciences, namely in the so-called Humanities. Mörike even drew a map, unfortunately now lost, of that island with its cities and states, as well as its natural features. Bauer described the physical and human geography of the island in the introduction to his drama Der heimliche Maluff (Hidden Maluff, 1828), which can be considered the first published modern high fantasy work. Bauer also offered in that same introductory paratext the outlines of the history of the kingdoms of Orplid and of the pagan religion common to all its inhabitants.

Shortly thereafter, a British writer, John Sterling, and a German one, Karl Immermann, subcreated equally consistent fictional universes in their respective etiological myths on the origin of warriors narrated in “The Sons of Iron,”included without title in Sterlings’s novel from 1833 Arthur Coningsby, and of our own universe in “Mondscheinmärchen,” or ‘Tale of the Moonshine,’ included in Immermann’s novel from 1836 Die Epigonen (The Epigones). These two stories are perhaps the first modern instances of mythopoetic subcreations using the language of mythographic form, well before Lord Dunsany’s masterful collections of invented cosmogonic myths titled The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906).

The first high fantasy long narrative came soon after. In France, George Sand subcreated in Évenor et Leucippe (Evenor and Leucippe, 1856) a fully imaginary early human civilization within which existed a secluded second ‘secondary world’ called Eden, where lived the last of the dives lived, a race of angelic pre-human beings endowed with some supernatural powers, and whose last specimen died just after having imparted moral lessons to the young lovers after whom the novel is titled. These lovers were eventually forced to escape from their fellow humans, along with other peace seekers, to that refuge of Eden in order not to suffer the political intrigues and wars which were corrupting their civilization. Sand’s double secondary world was inspired by Platonic Atlantis and the primordial myths of the ancient Hebrew book of Genesis, but it differs from both by its secular and non-mythic character. Sand published the book with a long paratextual introduction where she invoked the latest theories and discoveries of her time on the transformation of species and the possibility of prehistoric societies very different from those archaeologically documented. Thus, she tried to explain what sort of parable her novel was, but to little avail. Her novel was rather unsuccessful among readers, as was later a longer novel by her son Maurice titled Le coq aux cheveux d’or (The Golden-Haired Rooster, 1867), in which the Platonic legend of Atlantis was retold in such a way that it could be read today as an early example of later Howardian sword and sorcery fiction. The same can be said of an earlier example of that sort of fiction but with female protagonists, the Spanish novel Las amazonas (The Amazons, 1852) by Pedro Mata.

All these works came perhaps too early. It was a time when Gustave Flaubert’s novels were making modern ‘realism’ triumph, even in narratives set in an ancient exotic past, such as Salammbô (1862). However, this very same book was a testament to the new public interest for civilizations different from the classic and biblical ones, both in space and in time, from those of the Neolithic (e. g. novels on the pike-dwelling settlements in Central Europe) to those of Polynesia. Most of these civilizations had recently been (re)discovered by scholars and the wider educated public, thanks to far-reaching geographical and archaeological explorations, which were accompanied by the decisive development of philology. This science allowed to understand living and dead languages previously unknown in Europe and westernized America. This understanding contributed numerous myths, legends and even truly occurred histories to common knowledge all over the world.

Consequently, not only retellings by European and American writers of all this new worldwide cultural heritage were published in the 19^th and early 20^th century, but also some works portraying imaginary equivalents of the ancient cultures that archaeology and philology were gradually revealing. A representative example, due to its extensive and obvious use of human sciences to build a rich secondary high fantasy world, is the novella “Dyusandir y Ganitriya” (Djusandir and Ganitrija, 1903) by Luis Valera. This romantic legend about the two young lovers of the title is presented as a story told to the narrator by a Czech archaeologist who had found and deciphered the relevant documents stemming from an imaginary Puruna empire, a fully invented Indo-European ancient civilization in Asia. Valera describes it to minute detail, including the political organization and history of the two Puruna nations, as well as their shared religious beliefs and rituals, as they could have been reconstructed by archaeology, to the point of even discussing divergent hypotheses on the historical reliability of the narrated facts. The extent of Valera’s recourse to the historical sciences was not to be matched for quite a long time, but other contemporary narratives were also using similar methods of subcreation based on the Humanities. Among the examples by renowned authors that could be mention are the historic-looking high fantasy romances by William Morris, both without supernatural features, such as The Roots of the Mountains (1890), and with them, such as The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), as well as other works rather inspired by ethnography, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short narrative poem “Il sangue delle vergini” (Virgins’ Blood, 1883/1894), and philology, such as J.-H. Rosny aîné’s novella “Les Xipéhuz” (The Xipehuz, 1887), which is presented as a critical translation, including notes, of a document written in a language prior to the first ones documented in Mesopotamia.

Shortly afterwards, following Lord Dunsany’s fictional mythographic works, high fantasy acquired in the English-speaking major nations a critical mass unknown in the other linguistic areas where high fantasy was also first developed. Without diminishing the significance of weird high fantasists such as Clark Ashton Smith and of their French Decadent masters such as Camille Mauclair, high fantasy reached maturity mainly due to the monumental work of two writers, each of them representative of the two main strands of later high fantasy: the one focusing on subcreated history and the other focusing on subcreated myth. Robert E. Howard came first with his stories on the adventures of Conan in Hyboria, a land on our Earth where civilizations thrived prior to recorded history. Although older than Howard, Tolkien published later his narratives set in Middle-Earth, which was a part of Arda, a mythic universe having preceded ours. After them, high fantasy followed its course until today without major changes.[2] Howard and Tolkien did not invent high fantasy, but their work helped it become an accepted and specific sort of fiction. They are, therefore, of paramount importance, also for our inquiry, since they produced important texts suggesting that the scientific contents of high fantasy are not only related to the methods of the Humanities, but alto to their discourses, to the rhetoric governing their conventions when presenting their findings to the scholarly community, as well as to the general public.

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A touch of rhetoric

The rhetoric of the Humanities and generally the human sciences consists in the set of linguistic conventions governing the presentation of their arguments and conclusions, this is to say, the kinds of writing specific to each of them. This particular register allows readers to recognize that a narration of past events is not told as if these events were invented stories, but documented facts in our universe and time, among human beings interacting with each other (historiography), or in a supernatural dimension where gods and godlike entities are shown as really acting (mythography). A specific kind of rhetoric also signals if we are describing the rites and customs of a particular population (ethnography), or if we are rather trying to explain the features of a text, from its language to its deeper meaning, as it can be guessed from it using the philological method. Describing the full range of rhetorical conventions across the different human sciences could be the subject of huge treatises. It will suffice for now that these formal conventions determining the discourses of those sciences are to be abundantly found in high fantasy from its very beginning. Ludwig Bauer already felt the need to explain, using those discourses, what Orplid looked like, and how its culture was shaped, in order to put his literary fiction related to his imaginary island in an apparently factual context. The language of science was then used to present the invented secondary world as having really existed, thus supporting the realistic plausibility of the fictional events presented as taking place in that world. A similar rhetorical procedure was occasionally followed by Howard and Tolkien. Both great masters of high fantasy produced mock documentary writings with the clear purpose of complementing their novelistic subcreation, which lacked any discursive authority, with expository pieces that could have that authority. In this way, their statements about their subcreated worlds seem to be the result of scientific inquiry, at least formally. In Howard, the rhetoric chosen is that of historiography in “The Hyborian Age” (1936/1938), which tells the history of the Earth several millennia ago, when Conan fought against his many enemies in the realms supposedly existing in that distant epoch. For his part, Tolkien began the subcreation of the fictional universe of his novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) by narrating his cosmogony as a piece of mythography in “Ainulindalë,”although this text only appeared posthumously in 1975.

Thus, Tolkien shows that the subcreation of the secondary world could predate the writing of the related fiction itself. Even if the world-building exercise in high fantasy does not necessarily predate the literary operation of the subcreated world, it is often considered convenient to underline its ontological status as an independent and full reality on its own by presenting it as such through rhetorically non-fictional means. A high fantasy book or series may therefore frequently be accompanied by paratexts objectively describing the setting and culture of the relevant world, or by companion books entirely devoted to that description. This is the case of fictional encyclopedias in which the subcreated worlds are comprehensively presented, including their geography, history, social and political organization, among other data. This is the case, for instance, of The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time (1997) by Robert Jordan & Teresa Patterson.

In addition to fictional encyclopedias combining texts written in the manner of the various human sciences, there is also several high fantasy books entirely written as if they were compilation of myths, such as O’Yarkandal (1929) by Salarrué. Historiographic accounts also exist in high fantasy, such as the imaginary chronicle of the world of Westeros titled Fire & Blood (2018) by George R. R. Martin. Ethnography has not been neglected either in this genre, since there are some interesting books devoted to the description of the manners and rituals of imaginary ancient civilizations, for example, those of Los zumitas (The Zumites, 1999) by Federico Jeanmaire. For its part, philology, understood as the science of editing, translating and interpreting texts, has inspired the creation of anthologies of pseudo-translated literary documents from subcreated civilizations, sometimes linked to a particular fictional cycle, such as The Rivan Codex (1998) by David & Leigh Eddings, as well as in the form of independent books that suffice, along with the comments of the supposed editor/translator, to subcreate a whole world through the texts allegedly produced there. In particular Frédéric Werst did so in his two volumes of Ward (2011-2014), which are presented as a bilingual edition of a selection of classics of the Ward civilization in French and in the imaginary language of that invented nation, a language created from scratch by the author and whose grammar and vocabulary are fully offered in these two books, thus surpassing the limited attempts of Tolkien at writing texts directly in a subcreated language.

Ward probably represents the extreme point that can be reached in world-building through fictional non-fiction, but all those examples and others that could be mentioned hint at the importance that the rhetoric of human sciences has always had in high fantasy. Even in the usual commercial three-, five- seven- or n- deckers that are currently crushing bookshelves and high fantasy itself under the sheer weight of their literary fat, the unavoidable maps in the printed volumes are to be seen as a token sign of the scientific seriousness of their world-building. Drawing a map is certainly easier than devising a whole language and the culture going with it; it is also easier than telling the whole history of a world beyond the limited sphere of some individual characters. Drawing a map may also prove easier than knowing how to use the language proper to each human science correctly, but the fact that maps of imaginary lands are so pervasive in high fantasy books suggests how closely intertwined this genre has become with the Humanities. Even in the many cases where commercial considerations supersede literary ones, high fantasy seems to be reluctant to cut all ties to science, perhaps because these ties are no less essential to it than they are to ‘science fiction.’

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And conclusions, for good measure

Human sciences are as scientific, albeit in another way, as the applied sciences which have inspired canonical works in science fiction proper such as H. G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), as well as the social sciences underpinning utopian fictions such as William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890). They are also as scientific as the natural sciences describing the material universe, including living beings, in xenofictions such as Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), to which one could very well add the divine sciences of metaphysics and theology transposed into fiction through symbolic and allegorical works such as George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), whereas formal sciences have found some fictional counterparts in mathematical fantasies such as Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884). The relative true cognitive value of those different sciences is open to discussion, but it can hardly be denied that human sciences have allowed us to obtain a wealth of valuable insights about our diverse past on a sound documentary basis, second only to the information gleaned from natural sciences in their field. Since high fantasy is the kind of speculative fiction corresponding to at least some human sciences, it deserves to be considered just as speculative and scientific as ‘science fiction,’ although high fantasy has traditionally been more open to the supernatural, precisely in the same way as human cultures have traditionally been prone to believing in divine interventions as well.

The key to our understanding of high fantasy, as opposed to the usual fairy tale staple with unicorns and elves that often mimics it, is not the supernatural understood as a matter of fact in its fictional universe, but the rational way it approaches it. According to Palmer-Patel, “Fantasy can be defined as a narrative that you use similar structures and language of Mythology, Legends, and Fairy-Tales to create a new world with its own rational laws. As a result, Fantasy fiction is logical even when it is not possible. (…) Fantasy must have internally consistent laws as a point of reference from which the reader can hope to understand the fiction. (…) the Fantasy genre, though often defined by the ‘impossible’, still follows the logic of our current scientific and philosophical understanding of the world.”[3] If magic in high fantasy could very well have stemmed from fairy tales and inherited myths, it is no less true that a mutation occurred in the 19^th century that gave rise to a new genre of speculative fiction that cleaves as much as science fiction to the “positivist spirit” and to the “logic of our scientific and philosophical understanding of the world.” In this context, science brings authority, but also ‘realism,’ which is a term that we should understand here as a modern literary approach intended to give fiction an illusory ‘effect of reality’ supported by the authority of science as conveyor of ‘truth(s).’

Certain historical conclusions in a number of human sciences seem to obey more to the prejudices of past mentalities than to the actual reality of the studied cultures, resulting in interpretations that we considered erroneous now, perhaps on the basis of our own biases. This fact should not hinder, however, our recognition of the scientific status of their methods, just as the methods of the natural sciences do not prevent further discoveries from modifying and even refuting previously widely accepted ideas on the material universe. In fiction as well, the human sciences in properly conceived high fantasy are no less logical and rationally sound that the natural sciences in xenofiction and the applied sciences in ‘science fiction,’ both traditionally put under a single taxonomic umbrella, despite their widely divergent ‘scientific’ approaches. In this perspective, and considering that it often borrows the discourses, or at least the maps, typical of human sciences as well, we can only conclude that booksellers were right after all. Indeed, high fantasy is science fiction in its broadest sense.

[1] High fantasy excludes Christianity, as well as any other really existing religion in the present or the past, since such a significant dimension of a culture would deny the secondary world its full completeness and independence from the primary one. This is why the medieval fantasy romances by William Morris, where Christian monks exist as much as papal Rome, are to be excluded from high fantasy, despite Lin Carter’s contention that these romances are the first instances of the genre. There are other works by Morris which would truly qualify as high fantasy, without being in any case the ‘first’ ones. High fantasy had long been invented elsewhere, as we will see.

[2] It could be argued that Ursula K. Le Guin’s high fantasy narratives set in Earthsea are mainly inspired by Ethnology, given the importance in that fictional universe of rituals and ceremonies, whereas history proper, which usually focuses on the secular exercise of power and on the fights to secure it, is downplayed. In this, her Earthsea books were the main literary heirs to an early masterpiece of ethnological high fantasy, Laurence Housman’s novella “Gods and Their Makers” (1897). However, perhaps due to the lesser narrative potential that ethnography has compared to historiography and mythography, contemporary high fantasy has rarely adopted the ethnologic approach as its main tool when it comes to fictional world-building.

[3] C. Palmer-Patel, The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic High Fantasy, New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 5 (italics in the original).

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Fact & Opinion

The Kaleidoscope Of Hungarian Fantastic Literature In The 21st Century

by Éva Vancsó

Hungarian science fiction dates to the middle-19th century with tales of moon travels and fictional worlds of advanced technology that reflected the spirit of the age more than any other genre. In the years to come, though themes and forms had changed, Hungarian literature mirrored society’s problems, hopes, fears, and dreams. It expressed the terrors of totalitarian regimes and world wars, and later, during the communist culture policy, it either served as a „honey trap” of natural sciences or became the literature of opposition before the change of regime in 1989. For years, only selected Anglo-Saxon/Western SFF works could seep through the crack in the cultural door, but it was swung wide open by the end of the Cold War. The previously encapsulated Hungarian fantastic literature absorbed the influences from outside and started to grow in terms of authors, titles, themes and styles. In this article, I intend not to review Hungarian science fiction and fantasy since the turn of the millennium comprehensively but rather as a kaleidoscope to present the tendencies and genre-defining authors and works in the last twenty-five years. Though the number of SFF texts compared to the number of Hungarian speakers is remarkable, they are essentially not available in foreign languages, so I provide my translation of the titles in square brackets. As many Hungarian authors use exogenous pseudonyms, I give various versions of their names separated by slashes.

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In the Anglophone corpus, cyberpunk emerged in the late 70s and exerted great influence upon Hungarian science fiction in the 90s. Kiálts farkast [Cry Wolf] (1990) by András Gáspár is labeled proto-cyberpunk for the lack of an information revolution. However, it laid the foundations of Hungarian cyberpunk. Besides using genre elements such as the contrast of futuristic technology and a dystopian, collapsed society, Gáspár added a „Hungarian flavor”: the image of a future Budapest, a crowded, multicultural megapolis. Following a dozen short stories in the late nineties, cyberpunk gave rise to some of the most interesting SF novels after the turn of the millennium.

Zoltán László is widely considered to be the most important author of Hungarian cyberpunk. William Gibson strongly influenced his first short stories, and his debut novel, Hiperballada [Hyper Ballad] (1998, 2005) combines cyberpunk elements, the afore-mentioned Hungarian flavor, and alternate history. In the novel’s alternative future, the change of regime has never happened; the Soviet Union became the world’s number one superpower: it won the technological race, and communism survived in the Eastern Bloc. In László’s world, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party continues to rule the country. The Network Authority controls the citizens’ thinking and behavior, but cyberspace, synthetic implants, and space stations are also part of everyday life, resulting in something we could call CMEA-cyberpunk. Szintetikus Álom by Tamás Csepregi [Synthetic Dream] (2009) is composed of nine noir-cyberpunk short stories linked by the characters. The nonlinear, fragmented novel depicts a Budapest ruled by Pest-Buda Agglomeration after the Q-virus epidemic. The city is surrounded by a 10-metre-high wall and has no connection to other parts of Hungary or Europe. The cityscape has post-apocalyptic characteristics: a “sick, wheezing gigantic bacteria or a great organic jungle of metal and concrete like the stomach of a monster.” In the city, there is deep social and economic division; China bought district 8 for 400 years and became a luxury ghetto called the Chinese Legitimate District. Box City stands in the Hungarian part of the city, a small empire built over the years from waste, plastic, and polythene, where most people live. The Danube, which still exists, dirty and bubbling, and the Chain Bridge, whose ruined pillars are symbols of the balance between familiarity and de-familiarisation. The heroes of the short stories are ordinary people, criminals, policemen, businessmen, outsiders, operators, servants, and victims of the system. László and Csepregi have in common the combination of cyberpunk themes and tropes and the unmistakably Hungarian environment and world view that, following the footsteps of András Gáspár, made 21st-century Hungarian cyberpunk unique.

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In the last years of the 80s, another SF sub-genre gained popularity in Hungary: space opera. After Galaktika Fantastic Books issued translations of three Star Wars novels (The New Hope, The Empires Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), the publishing companies of the early nineties tried to ride the popularity of the movies. The Han Solo trilogy by Dale Avery/Zsolt Nyulászi hallmarked this attempt, bearing all the characteristics of the era’s predatory capitalism: the sequels about the adventures of their eponymous hero were unofficial and unauthorized but published in 120.000 copies, attracting thousands of readers to space opera.

The popularity of these Star Wars novels opened the way for other space operas, firstly translations and derivative stories, but it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the opportunity to create new worlds. Or someones. In 1999, Harrison Fawcett/Fonyódi Tibor, who wrote about the space adventures of the tough soldier Brad Shaw, and Anthony Sheenard/Szélesi Sándor, who created the crazy and impudent character of York Ketchikan, decided to tie their stories together and create a shared fictional world to write in. The collaboration started in the anthology Aranypiramis [The Golden Pyramid] (2000) with two long short stories, and what follows is SF history. The jointly developed Mysterious Universe setting became a vast and complex multidimensional world of super-civilisations, super-weapons, strange races, mythical or mystical events, and the detailed world-building comes with intricate plots and the interplay of advanced technology and socio-political dynamics. The two founding fathers have their unique contribution to the world: Harrison Fawcett is still known for the epic scale battles and intricate plots, while Anthony Sheenard focuses on character-driven stories and philosophical questions, with the novels often exploring psychological and ethical dilemmas.

The Mysterious Universe now consists of thirty-four novels and four anthologies by more than twenty authors. Due to the dimensions of the franchise and the collaborative nature of the series, with multiple authors contributing to the shared universe, allowing for a diversity of stories and perspectives, MU has a significant place in Hungarian science fiction literature with a regular and enthusiastic readership.

Gothic Space-Dark Space intended to follow the success of Mysterious Universe, building a shared universe with several authors. The five published novels are retro-futuristic military fiction that depicts epic battles combined with 19th-century maritime technology, following this, however, the series was abruptly discontinued.

Space opera genre codes were later extended in different directions, preserving the epic scale and space adventures but introducing new perspectives. The Csodaidők series [Wondrous Times] (2006-2010) by Etelka Görgey tells a family history set in 3960, presenting different worlds, cultures, and societies through the lens of three characters in diverse social situations. The Calderon series by On Sai/Bea Varga is a knight’s tale in outer space: laser guns, space fleets, cleaning robots, and space cruisers co-exist with aristocratic traditions, balls, and chivalry. In Afázia [Aphasia] (2021) by Katalin Baráth the inhabitants of the artificial planet Pandonhya (originally Pannonia) are the last to use language as a means of communication, as a commodity – or as a weapon. The novel is a love letter to the Hungarian language and a clever critic of contemporary societies wrapped up in the cloak of science fiction. On the other hand, the Esthar series and other novels by Michael Walden/Szabolcs Waldman shift towards fast-paced military fiction that even dares to involve fantasy elements. The MU novels and these extensions of the traditional codes assure Hungarian space operas’ survival and sustained popularity in the 21st century.

Anthony Sheenard/Sándor Szélesi, the co-creator of MU, is one of the most prolific authors of 21st-century Hungarian science fiction and adopts a peculiar approach to the genre, being often labeled a genre-punk for that. Having published his first fantasy stories in 1994, he had since then explored various subgenres and themes. He wrote a classical sci-fi novel about a generation spaceship (Városalapítók [Settlers], 1997), a human-centered story about a father and son, and two confronting worlds (Beavatás szertartása, [Rite of Passage], 2009). Pokolhurok [Hellgrammite] (2016) is a contemporary fiction and serious thought experiment with perfectly balanced dramaturgy about a sociopath who develops a virus that can commit genocide based on genetic race markers. Szélesi was honored with several awards, including the Best European SF Writer award at the EuroCon of Copenhagen in 2007.

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While new sub-genres and authors gained popularity, there is continuity with the 80s and 90s science fiction regarding themes and narratives. Galaktika magazine mainly focused on short stories, reviews, and popular science articles. Kozmosz Fantasztikus Könyvek (later Galaktika Baráti Kör) published novels between 1972 and 1994 and played a determining role in the history of Hungarian science fiction before the transition both in terms of titles and number of copies. Galaktika magazine was re-launched in 2002 – the book publishing division in 2005 – and remains today an essential component of Hungarian SFF, providing readers with classical science fiction texts by well-established “great old authors” such as István Nemere (with more than 700 novels) and Péter Zsoldos (whom the Hungarian award is named after) along with contemporary novels by significant writers of the 21st century. Though sales figures have decreased drastically since the 1990s, the media group remained important in Hungarian genre literature.

The alignment of Hungarian science fiction with contemporary international (mainly British-American) trends started in the second half of the 2000s, coinciding with the rising interest in trans- or posthumanism. In this context, Brandon Hackett/Markovics Botond represents Hungarian mainstream science fiction.

His first novels were space operas, but later, he turned to current topics with action-oriented plots, applying posthuman/transhuman perspectives. Poszthumán döntés [The Posthuman Decision] (2007) and Isten gépei [Machines of God] (2008) focus on the impact of technological development on society, the evolution of humanity under specific conditions in the diaspora or on the verge of technological singularity. His time travel duology Az időutazás napja and Az időutazás tegnapja [The Day of Time Travel, The Yesterday of Time Travel] (2014, 2015) explores a new aspect of this classic genre trope: social consequences. When time travel becomes widely available, hundreds, thousands, and millions of people grab the opportunity, resulting in chaos. Money ceases to exist, political structures fail, technological development is meaningless, and the process must be stopped, or the entire human civilization is at stake. Later novels by Markovics have taken up current phenomena and, in the best traditions of science fiction, extrapolated them to the future. Xeno (the title is a derivation of xenophobia) depicts an Earth ruled by a highly developed alien civilization that forces migration between different alien worlds with all the political, economic, and environmental consequences of the nine billion “Xenos.” Eldobható testek [Disposable Bodies] (2020) returns to transhumanism and examines the effect of digitized consciousness with printable, disposable bodies, the newhumans. His latest work, Felfalt kozmosz [Devoured Chosmos] (2023), addresses the problem of Free Will, combining philosophy and cosmology in the fate of three siblings. Markovics’s interest in technological development and its influence on humanity is in the best traditions of science fiction, making him one of the most significant Hungarian authors of the genre.

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Parody or satire has been present in science fiction since the beginning of the 20th century. Tibor Dévényi’s satirical short stories were popular in the 1980s. In contemporary genre literature, the books of Lajos Lovas follow the tradition of satirical-comedy-adventure novels with a great deal of social commentary. For example, N (2010) is about a young man born in 2067 who is suffering from amnesia and stumbles into absurd adventures in 2007. The novel creatively and entertainingly holds up a mirror to Hungarian society.

In line with international trends, contemporary and genre literature boundaries have started to crumble. Outside science fiction, literary authors also tend to apply sci-fi themes and tropes in their works. The Virágbaborult világvége [Blossoming Apocalypse] by Imre Bartók, a philosopher and aesthetician, established a new hybrid genre that could be called philosopher-horror. A Patkány éve, A nyúl éve, A kecske éve [The Year of the Rat, The Year of the Rabbit, The Year of the Goat] (2013, 2014, 2015) revolves around three philosophers, Martin, Karl és Ludwig, who are a kind of superhumans – their bodies are covered with titanium plate, harbouring a tiny reactor inside. The three philosopher-psychopaths either argue about ontological questions or torture and kill humans in New York, which is facing a bio-apocalypse. The second and third volumes follow the philosophers as old men without implants and expand the apocalyptic story to other cities.

Űrérzékeny lelkek [Space-sensitive Souls] (2014) by József Havasréti is a similar experiment about the boundaries of contemporary literature. Havasréti has borrowed the tropes of the crazy scientist and space travel, extrapolated social criticism from science fiction, and merged it with an alternative cultural and art history of the 20th century.

György Dragomán is a prominent author of Hungarian contemporary literature known for his attraction to science fiction. On qubit.hu, Dragomán started to pursue his interest. From 2019, he regularly published short sci-fi and fantasy (or fantastic in the broad sense) stories, later compiled in the anthology Rendszerújra [System Reboot] in 2021. Most stories focus on characters facing oppression and all-encompassing control in totalitarian, dystopian worlds. They have two choices: they follow the rules and adapt to the brave new world or try to rebel and mostly die.

These experimental contemporary science fiction texts received mixed reactions from the audience. The critics highly appreciated the novels of Bartók and Havasréti. However, the novel did not meet the science fiction readers’ expectations because it lacked the consistent use of genre codes and tropes. This criticism has a long history from the middle of the 20th century when contemporary authors ventured into science fiction and faced the same reception. The general „assessment” of György Dragomán turns this approach inside out; he is mostly praised for writing, among others, science fiction too, but at the same time, he is still not considered to be a real SFF author by the Hungarian genre community.

Thus, the old truth that literary and science fiction writers do not mix still applies despite the blurring of genre boundaries. The distinction is dictated partly by traditions and partly by completely different readerships.

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YA literature has penetrated contemporary Hungarian SFF (YA fantasy shall be discussed later); it is considered a “gateway drug” to fantastic literature, and specialized publishing companies strive to respond to the growing demand for novels that describe a science fiction setting and feature a young protagonist/narrator who addresses both classical sci-fi and age-specific problems. However, this interest of young readers is not reflected in the number of YA sci-fi novels written by Hungarian authors; successful foreign books and franchises dominate the market.

The Pippa Kenn duology by Fanni Kemenes is the exception, depicting a post-apocalyptic future where a synthetic virus infects humanity, and some survive due to genetic engineering while others become bloodthirsty “palefaces”. According to YA cliches, the young protagonist, living alone in a cottage in the forest, believes she is the last human until she meets a boy and discovers the colonies’ existence.

The Oculus novels (2017, 2019) by A. M. Amaranth/Péter Holló Vaskó are the closest to foreign YA dystopian trends. On planet Avalon, elderly people become blind and see through the eyes of their oculus, slaves deprived of their personality. The story is narrated by a young female oculus, and the novel aims to balance serious questions about slavery, political structures, and the age-specific problems of a young girl. The Overtoun-trilogy of R. J. Hendon/Juhász Roland is at the higher end of the YA age range (above the age of 17). The novel thematizes the relationship between (trans)humanity and nature. It depicts the world of Overtoun where harmony between nature and man is lost and animals are unwanted creatures, conflicting it with the perspective of the “mongrels” or the bio-robots called medeas.

Contrary to international trends, a surprising sub-genre or subculture appeared and seems to attract young readers: steampunk. With a long tradition dating back to the 19th century, it has an active community that regularly organizes events. However, these festivals and design markets focus on commodities and fashion (jewelry or costumes) rather than literature. From the beginning of the 2000s, some authors innovatively applied steampunk elements, combining with urban fantasy (Nagate novels by Zoltán László) or a noir atmosphere (Viktor Tolnai). The traditional steampunk setting and the adventure-driven plot found their way into YA literature. Phoenix Books, dedicated to providing children and young adults with fantastic literature, has published several steampunk stories for young readers of 9 to 16. Holtidő [Dead Time] (2017 by Holden Rose/Attila Kovács) follows special cadets in a world of mechanical devices, Hollóvér [The Blood of the Raven] (2018) by Peter Sanawad/Péter Bihari tells the story of the last scion of the legendary Hunyadi family in a parallel universe of magic and strange machine. The eight volumes of the Winie Langton series by Vivien Holloway/Vivien Sasvári (from 2014) take young readers on adventures to London in the 2900s. All novels have in common their steampunk background, the role of machines, and embracing the traditions of YA literature, such as featuring a teenage protagonist, conversational style, and light-hearted jokes.

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Nowadays, Hungarian science fiction is diverse, preserving some old-school storytelling but embracing different voices in themes, styles, and approaches, even reaching out to young readers. However, the readership and popularity of Hungarian science fiction literature is, at best, stagnant. The number of published science fiction novels has been decreasing, as well as the number of copies printed and sold since the 1990s. There is also a noticeable shift towards fantasy and other fantastic genres, such as weird or less and less clear-cut genre categories, in line with worldwide trends. The litmus paper for this tendency is Az év magyar science ficiion és fantasy novellái [Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of the Year] anthology series since 2019, in which fantastic stories (in the broad sense) now are in the majority over traditional science fiction, and its publisher, GABO, adapts to this trend in its portfolio. The conditions of the Zsoldos Péter Award have also adjusted to the changing circumstances as a paradigm shift in Hungarian fantastic literature. The Zsoldos Award was established in 1998 to honor the best science fiction novels and short stories of the year, but in 2019, the organizers opened their doors to all fantastic genres, including fantasy, supernatural horror, and weird. Since then, the tendency to talk about speculative fiction or fantastic literature without distinguishing sci-fi, fantasy, or other genres has grown stronger.

Before 1990, fantasy was the younger brother, the “marginalized another fantastic genre” because only a very few classical texts were translated and published before the change of the regime. The spread of role-playing games had a crucial role in the rapidly increasing popularity of fantasy in the 1990s. Wayne Chapman (the pseudonym of already mentioned András Gáspár and Csanád Novák) played AD&D and began to publish the stories they had crafted as dungeon masters in the game’s fictional universe. Later, in light of the novel’s success, they established a publishing company and developed the only Hungarian role-playing game, M.A.G.U.S. In the last thirty years, despite copyright debates, opposing canons, and changes to the publishing company, more than one hundred M.A.G.U.S.-related novels and anthologies were published by dozens of authors, being one of the utmost achievements in Eastern European fantasy.

The other central fantasy hub and circle was Cherubion Publishing Company from 1991, which built a team of authors churning out fantasy (later science fiction too, but this branch remained a minority) novels and anthologies under British or American-sounding pseudonyms. The Cherubion books established the Hungarian sword-and-sorcery and dark fantasy literature based on existing Western fantasy tropes, races, and characters. The company intentionally and regularly published pulp novels by Hungarian authors with many copies, serving the infinite need for adventurous fantasy stories. The publishing company’s driving force, editor, and mastermind was the founder, István Nemes, who, under the pseudonyms of John Caldwell or Jeffrey Stone, became one of the most influential fantasy writers from the middle of the 1990s. Some of today’s important authors also started their careers in the Cherubion team, such as Anthony Sheenard/Sándor Szélesi, Harrison Fawcett/Tibor Fonyódi or János Bán who later became famous for history novels about the Hunyadi family.

The significance of M.A.G.U.S and Cherubion lies in establishing the readership of fantasy almost out of nothing, popularizing the settings, themes, and characters among mainly young readers who often remained consumers of fantasy as they grew up. Though publishing companies came and went, sword-and-sorcery novels continue to be published today. For instance, the Kaos series about the half-ork Skandar Graun and other popular franchises still run re-prints of old stories interspersed with novelties, thus supplying members of this subculture with a steady flow of new books.

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The interest in Hungarian mythology started in the early 2000s to refresh fantasy with new themes, worlds, races, and characters. Sándor Szélesi’s Legendák földje [Land of Legends] (2002, 2003) tells the story of the Ancient Hungarians, a Scythian ethnic group in 3000 B.C. The Hungarians wander in steppes, and magic is an inherent part of their world: shamanistic practice works, fairies walk the earth, and the heaven-high tree connects the realm of gods, humans, and the underworld. The trilogy revolves around two clans, their rivalries, and battles that involve the fairies climbing said tree. Through these adventures, the novels depict the shift of paradigm, a change of approach to magic from diffuse shamanistic practices towards a more codified set of so-called Táltos beliefs.

Since the 2010s, Hungarian folklore has appeared more and more often in fantasy novels, drifting apart from English-Germanic-Greek mythologies and mythical characters. At first, YA novels started to infuse elements of Hungarian folk tales into fantasy novels. The Ólomerdő series [Lead Forest] (2007, 2014, 2019, 2020) by Csilla Kleinheincz depicts a unique world of humans, fairies, and magic where the reader can recognize the well-known folk tropes such as the presence of number three, the miraculous stag, dragons, as well as stepmothers with dubious agendas. The re-imagination of Budapest (or any other Hungarian city) in urban fantasy became popular in the 2010s. In Túlontúl [Far Beyond] (2017) by Ágnes Gaura, a fan of fairy tales seeks purpose in her life while Hungarian, Transylvanian, and Moldavian folk tales mingle with daily reality. Egyszervolt by Zoltán László [Once upon a Time] (2013) is a traditional intrusive fantasy inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, where the protagonist becomes aware of a secret Budapest that lies under the surface and explores this secondary world. More recently, Egyszervolt was followed by less traditional urban fantasy works, such as Pinky (2016) by László Sepsi, in which a nameless city, which might as well be Budapest or New York, has its hidden secrets and streets populated by elves, werewolves, and vampires. Csudapest [WonderPest] (2020) by Fanni Sütő can also be considered urban fantasy, consisting of short stories, blog entries, and poems with one common feature: describing Budapest as simultaneously familiar and magical.

Meanwhile, the Hétvilág [Seven Worlds] (2016) trilogy by Emilia Virág was the first folk urban fantasy novel aimed primarily at adult readers. In her book, fairies and bogeymen walk the city jungle, offering a bestiary of Budapest. The story was published by Athenaeum, which mainly publishes popular science volumes and contemporary literature, indicating the blurring of boundaries between genre and belles-lettres.

In Ellopott troll by Sándor Szélesi [The Stolen Troll] (2019), Budapest is populated by creatures of ancient Hungarian and European mythology that merge into our well-known modern world of cars, smartphones, and computers, mixing folk magic and ordinary 21st-century life. The protagonist is a detective working at the Department of Magical Creatures with a shaman, a siegbarste, a werewolf, and a sorcerer. Against the background of a folk-urban fantasy world, the story follows an investigation after a disappeared troll that leads to the labyrinth under Buda Castle, where the Prime Táltos is searching for the spring of eternal life.

Magic school novels have also sprung up in the wake of successful franchises in foreign fantasy. Vétett út [Wrong way] (2023) by Veronika Puska tells the story of two young men who study at a school led by an order of wizards in the 1990s. However, the novel twists all the expectations of a magic school fantasy in its world and style. The universe is based on Hungarian folk tradition, practice, and rhymes, like stealing the shadow of someone. However, the school is a secret society, and what the protagonists learn and are expected to do is often morally questionable, resulting in an inverted, dark, cruel folk-fantasy novel.

These stories have in common that they mostly take place in Budapest or at least in a version of the city that also relates them to urban fantasy. This subgenre has become popular in Hungarian fantasy in the last ten years. The Legendák a bagolyvárosból [Legends from the Owlcity] (from 2018) series by Gabriella Eld is a YA urban fantasy about young people with unique talents (seeing into the future for one second, having a conscious shadow) who are persecuted by the dystopian state of Imperium. The setting is a dark and crowded metropolis bathing in neon lights. However, the novel focuses more on the characters than on worldbuilding. Főnix [Phoenix] (2023) by László Szarvassy turns upside down the usual elements of urban fantasy, placing the subgenre’s plot and typical characters in the Hungarian countryside. A young man dies in a bus accident and… wakes up to experience the benefits and, mainly, the unpleasant consequences of being an immortal in the employ of a goblin.

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In recent years, contemporary Hungarian fantasy has moved away from classical sword-and-sorcery and urban fantasy, producing innovative and original novels that do not lend themselves to be classified into genres or subgenres, and it becomes more accurate to use the broader term: contemporary fantastic literature.

Anita Moskát is the emblematic figure of this trend. In her first novel, Bábel fiai [Sons of Babel] (2014), “dimension portals” connect contemporary Budapest and a parallel-universe Babylon where the tower of Babel is being built. Horgonyhely [Place of Anchorage] (2016) leaves completely behind the fantasy tropes, depicting a universe where only pregnant women can travel (all the others are anchored to the place where they were born). Some women who eat soil or dirt empower themselves with Earth magic. These foundations of the fictitious world raise questions about gender and social hierarchy in a new light that has never been represented in such a detailed and realistic way in Hungarian fantasy. Her following book, Irha és bőr [Fur and Skin] (2019), likewise addresses social issues, talking about a “new creation” when animals begin to turn into humans all around the world. In the creation waves, they pupate, and a transition begins in which human limbs and organs replace animal parts. When the transformation does not end in death, it produces hybrid creatures. Moskát’s novel revolves around these creatures’ fight for social and political acceptance.

Mónika Rusvai is a researcher of plant-humans in fantasy fiction, and in her second novel entitled Kígyók országa [Country of Snakes] (2023), past and present are connected by a kind of magical network. One of the protagonists during the troubled times of the Second World War can bind and loosen these connections, to take away bad memories or make deals with magical characters. The novel addresses the consequences of repression because the enchanted or tied memories of feelings survive in a forest where people have to face them at some point.

Outside the fantasy genre, literary authors added supernatural and fantastic elements in their novels, mostly labeled magical realism. Notable works in this vein are the Bestiárium Transylvaniae [Transilvanian Bestiary] 1997, 2003) series by Zsolt Láng, a combination of magical realism and history. Its structure follows the famous natural history books of the time, the bestiaries, various real or legendary animals, such as the visionary human-faced parrot, the sunfish, the singing worm or the deathbird that sings an impenetrable silence, are the organizing principle of the chapters. Likewise, A könnymutatványosok legendája [The Legend of the Tear Showmen] (2016) by László Darvasi is a historical tableau of the Turkish occupation and the re-occupation of Buda (from 1541 to 1686) with the realities of the Middle Ages and magical elements.

Fantasy, which was adventure-based and primarily aimed at young audiences from the early nineties, has grown up with its readers. Now, it offers a genre code to address complex and relevant issues and bring magic into ordinary life.

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In addition to science fiction and fantasy, other niches have appeared in the field of fantastic genre literature. Horror, or fantastic horror, was marginalized till the middle of the 2000s, and even well-known foreign works were neglected, only some of Stephen King’s and a few other exceptions made it into local circulation. When the literary heritage of Lovecraft started to become more and more popular, fan clubs were established, and magazines like Asylum and Black Aether published the first weird and horror short stories until this niche attracted more prominent publishing companies.

The watershed was the publication of Odakint sötétebb [Darker Outside] (2017) by Attila Veres, a genre-establishing work on the boundaries of weird and horror. The novel follows Gábor who flees from Budapest to work on a farm in the countryside. However, the animals he works with are not usual terrestrial ones. Thirty years ago, uncanny creatures appeared in the woods, the cellofoids. It soon turned out that the milk of these sloth, part cat, and part octopus animals, could cure cancer, so cellofoids were hunted almost to extinction, and now they live in a reserve. Gábor faces weirder and weirder events; some Lovecraftian evil is lurking in the woods, and the apocalypse is approaching.

The novel opened the way for weird and horror books. Attila Veres published two books of short stories, Éjféli iskolák [Midnight Schools] (2018) and Valóság helyreállítása [Restoration of Reality] (2022) and the horror-weird anthology Légszomj [Breathlessness] (2022) introduced new authors, and innovative approaches to the fantastic from established ones. Termőtestek [Carpophores] (2021) by László Sepsi is a weird-bio-horror about the town of Hörsking, the city of fungus that feeds on the dead and spreads a drug that controls the town and its people. The novel combines the elements of horror, noir, thriller, and the description of a psychedelic trip, contrasting the familiar milieu and the surreal.

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Time travel narratives were a recurring theme in Hungarian fantastic fiction from the eighties, focusing instead on the possible social-historical consequences; the technology is rarely described, or treated as ancillary. These time-travel stories address the problem of changing history (the past or present) and the influence of individuals on historical events. The interest in changing the course of history continued in alternate history novels from the 2000s. Fantasy novels, such as Vadásznak vadásza by Sándor Szélesi and Isten ostorai [Scourges of God] (2002) and its five sequels by Tibor Fonyódi apply elements of alternate history, tying these together with ancient Hungarian mythology.

A szivarhajó utolsó útja [The Airship’s Last Journey] (2012) by Bence Pintér and Máté Pintér explores the consequences of a Hungarian victory at the revolution and war of independence in 1848-49. The YA novel describes a steampunk world where Lajos Kossuth founded the Danube Confederation, which became a utopian state. The book offers Verne-style adventures and humorous allusions and analogies to real history. Another take on alternate history is Szélesi’s Sztálin, aki egyszer megmentettte a világot [Stalin who Once Saved the World] (2016) taking up the sombre theme of Joseph Stalin and subverting it into a satirical novel where all the seemingly incongruous historical details of the 20th century are true and accurate, but mixed up with incredible adventures and plot-twists.

A more serious approach to alternate history is represented by two anthologies of the publishing house Cser Kiadó, written by well-known contemporary authors. A másik forradalom [The Other Revolution] (2016) offers alternative versions of the 1956 Revolution in various styles. The what-if thought experiments resulted in Hungary joining the United States, Arnold Schwarzenegger attacking 60 Andrassy Avenue, the symbolic place of communist oppression or establishing the Danube Free Confederation, while others applied a personal, human-centered approach. The second volume, Nézzünk bizakodva a múltba [Let’s Look with Confidence to the Past] (2020), takes the concept but explores different outcomes of the Treaty of Trianon, which led to the dismemberment of Hungary at the end of World War One and remains an important touchstone in the country’s collective memory. Both anthologies push the boundaries of alternate history but have the great merit of putting the genre on the map of contemporary Hungarian literature.

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Considering the small window of opportunities before 1989, Hungarian fantastic literature has come a long way. From the early sparks of newly-experienced freedom and capitalism, a wave of Anglophone influence, through the years of experimentation, to the 21st century, it seems to have found its place. The diversity of sub-genres, narratives, and styles harbour a unique local touch, and many novels preserved some Hungarian flavor amidst the flood of foreign influences. The present author is confident that science fiction, though now slightly marginalized, will regain its strength, and the balance among different fantastic genres and sub-genres will ensure a colorful kaleidoscope through which readers can look at reality. Hopefully, in the future, fantastic Hungarian literature will be translated and published abroad to be accessible to a broader readership.

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Bio:

Éva Vancsó is a Ph.D. student at the Modern English and American track of ELTE Doctoral School of Literary Studies. Her research focuses on the representation of women and the presence of female monsters in fictional worlds. Besides her doctoral research, she examines contemporary Hungarian SFF and is especially interested in utopias-dystopias and the depiction of social issues.

Fact & Opinion

The Ocean Of Stories Upon Which We Sail

by Mina

This article is woven around a wonderful speech given by Salman Rushdie when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. For him, authors (consciously or subconsciously) borrow from existing stories and add their own twist, so books “…come from other stories, from the ocean of stories upon which we are all sailing. That’s not the only point of origin: there’s also the storyteller’s own experience and opinion of life, and there are also the times he lives in. But most stories have roots in other stories, which combine, conjoin, and change, and so become new stories.”

Authors thus translate their personal mental and emotional universes into stories but also the political, historical, social and cultural currents that flow around them. Their translation of their realities is imperfect and highly subjective; their works are then read by imperfect readers who will interpret what they read to fit into their own realities and a game of “Chinese whispers” begins. As Michael Moynahan SJ tells us in his poem Incarnation:

“If communication is not
what you say but
what people hear,
then what we said
was warped and wrenched…”

No author writes in a vacuum and SF stories reflect not just rockets, moon landings, computers, the internet, smart phones, bionic limbs and other inventions, but also geography, ancient and recent history, changing cultural mores and trends of thought. And, as Rushdie reminds us, they reflect the fiction we read or watch, as many of us spend far more time dipping into fictional worlds than in watching or reading the news. So I thought about what I had read or seen recently to see what narratives I could discern as an imperfect reader/viewer. I’d like to stress here that I made no effort to find obscure narratives: all my examples are taken from my everyday life, for example, from links shared by friends, the ezines I review, Amazon Prime and the good films that go to die on international flights. And I am most definitely not exempt from subjective opinions.

To begin with an important attitude for me when reading: I particularly enjoyed the easy acceptance shown in Once Upon A Time At The Oakmont by P. A. Cornell that people are entrenched in their times (and places), with the narrator telling us at one point: “I smile. You have to accept this kind of thing when you’re a resident of The Oakmont. Times are different, and each one has its own set of values and attitudes that will inevitably become obsolete as the sands of time continue to fall.” The Oakmont is a block of flats built over a time vortex. As the building manager explains to us: “Time is nothing . . . and everything. It doesn’t actually exist, because we made it up, but if it did exist, it wouldn’t run in a line; it would run in a circle…Time moves differently at The Oakmont. We can touch it at any point in time or at all points at once.” The narrator, Sarah, tells us of residents she knows and the rules (of which there are many) that govern The Oakmont. We learn of her lover, Roger, and her friends, all coming from different eras. I’m not suggesting that the tolerance predicated in this tale should be confused with fatalism, or a laissez-faire attitude, just that it is to be espoused and defended.

Moving on to examine some of the social and cultural currents flowing around us, we find gentle but unapologetic feminism and the blurring of gender identity in Mountain Ways by Ursula K. Le Guin. Although the story is ostensibly about a world where two mixed-couple poly-relationships (a “sedoretu”) are the norm and the lesbian protagonists have to find a way around this stricture, it is much more about couple and group dynamics. What makes it really interesting is its exploration of what navigating family/group dynamics involves. I love Le Guin’s psychologically complex tales and this particular one was originally published in 1996, reminding us that the blurring of genders (and roles) happened well before we invented new labels for it.

“Anti-colonialism” is given a wonderful new twist in the short story Death Is Better by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, which weaves robots and slavery together. The protagonist and his sister are attempting to escape a plantation on another world that is guarded by armed bots, including a behemoth. They are willing to risk their lives because death is better than slavery. In the chaos they unleash, it is unclear whether they manage to escape or simply find freedom in death. A nice detail in this tale is a reference to how albinism can ostracise you in a dark-skinned society (it is considered a sign of bad luck in the West African Mandinka culture, for example).

“Pro-choice” is very much part of Always Personal by Rich Larson, which follows a detective as she investigates murder cases involving “inverse stabbings”. It could be a normal detective story, one that involves DNA and bioprinters that don’t exist (yet), but the victims all fall into a “pro-life” mould stereotyped as hypocrites: victim A, who had anonymously donated to abortion clinic protests and blockades all his life; victim B, who had attended them and also impregnated two separate underage girls in his younger days; victim C, who had refused to operate on a pregnant woman even as sepsis set in, losing his license but gaining a fortune in political following. The detective clearly empathises with the perpetrator’s “calcified anguish” as she (the detective) lost a friend to a car accident as they drove overnight “to get over the right state line”. This particular topic can turn stories into unreadable diatribes but the author gives us a good yarn whilst making his opinion clear on a divisive issue.

The author of Muna In Barish, Isha Karki, would fall under the “BIPOC” (black, indigenous and people of colour) label. We follow Muna of the Nehiri minority (she has horns and dark umber skin, and legend has it her people once had wings) as she survives in the city of Barish. She has found work and apparent shelter in a bookshop, working for Arethor. But as we witness her working days, we realise that Arethor uses apparent kindness to exploit and bully Muna; behaviour that Muna cannot acknowledge even to herself or she will be left unemployed and homeless. Muna wants to be a word-weaver, just like Lenore Phoenix who has a bestselling series about a Halfborn like her. Her secret joy is her correspondence with her hero. One day, she meets Karabel of the Senai minority (with pointed ears and keen hearing). And she finds friendship, warmth, understanding, companionship and an equal. She eventually learns that Karabel is Lenore’s downtrodden ghost-writer and responsible for the book series and correspondence that have sustained her through the worst. And Karabel has a plan for their future. It is a beautifully written, psychologically complex story by a word-weaver who plays expertly with intertextuality (stories within stories). And it is a hymn to friendship and finding a sense of community. And all this without making the reader feel that they have to be BIPOC to empathise with the characters or enjoy the story. But I do sometimes wonder if authors who are labelled BIPOC, or anything else for that matter, would prefer their tale to stand on its own merits, as this one most definitely does.

The film Vesper (a Lithuanian/French/Belgian collaboration) is set in the aftermath of ecological disaster accelerated by bio-engineering gone wrong. Vesper, the main character (arguably “enby”), is tough yet curiously innocent. The other main character, Camellia, is a bio-engineered, sentient being. The relationship between the two has sexual and incestuous undertones, as they in turn become parent, lover and friend to each other. This biopunk tale creates a bleak future with only seeds of hope at the end. The brightest spark is the main characters’ kindness, loyalty and sense of honour in a world bereft of all three. Such admirable character traits are gender-less, I would argue. And if you park all preconceptions at the door, you can truly enjoy the scene where Camellia, who is generous and kind by nature, reads a children’s book with Vesper and shows her what animals the latter has never seen actually sound like. Vesper finds a moment of shared laughter and freedom, pretending to howl like a wolf.

In Philoctetes in Kabul, Deborah L. Davitt weaves together the life of a modern-day (American, white, male) soldier and that of Philoctetes in the Iliad. An anonymous soldier is discharged from the army on medical grounds, having been betrayed and abandoned by friends. After losing his wife and job, the two old comrades who betrayed him invite him to work with them as military contractors. It is a sad and reflective tale, with hints of a past life. It shows what living with a chronic, invisible disability is like. Whether or not you feel sympathy for the protagonist is probably coloured by geography, but it is a well-written story tackling PTSD with compassion. Point of view is everything, as Rushdie tells us: ”Peace, for Ukraine, means more than a cessation of hostilities. It means, as it must mean, a restoration of seized territory and a guarantee of its sovereignty. Peace, for Ukraine’s enemy, means a Ukrainian surrender. The same word, with two incompatible definitions.”

I liked the film After Yang (based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein) because it subtly shows different points of view. For me, the most interesting thing is not the “techno-sapien” Yang himself, but what Yang meant to each family member (each with different ethnic origins), which we slowly discover as the film gently unfurls. We see how Yang filled gaps in the family, which now has to learn to function again without him. Also, Yang is owned by the family, so he is technically a slave yet, as the film progresses, we see that he had his own motivations and relationships outside the family. Interestingly, I have yet to read a review that tackles the fact that Yang is presented as sentient but lacks freedom, both because he is bought, sold and refurbished like an object, and because he is given very specific programming to suit his host family. The Guardian describes this film as “a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness” – it is that too.

In Negative Theology of the Child from the ‘King of Tars’ by Sonia Sulaiman, the author muses on the nature of being other: “I am Palestinian. I know the horror that our syncretic and chaotic loves of mixing and miscegenation had on visitors and colonists. And so, it is my place to pick at the threads that the English poet has woven… Through that hole will be born something Other…Will that mother and father follow their child out of this textual hell? Would they learn to extend love to the flesh, to reach out toward the world as it is: ambiguous, and gloriously chaotic?” This tale shows us that religion and race are not past bones of contention, they remain areas that still lead to (often armed) conflict in today’s world.

Religion, or at least the Christian concepts of good and evil, are tackled with humour in the series Good Omens. The strongest part of the show is the complex relationship between the angel, Aziraphale, and the demon, Crowley. In season 1, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (and remaining reasonably faithful to it), they are unlikely friends; season 2 goes beyond the book and starts moving the relationship towards the romantic. I have no problem with that but would have preferred them to remain loyal friends, and I refuse to say “just friends” because that cheapens friendship and reverts to the trope that the main relationship in a story must be romantic. Also, I like how the series blurs the lines between the good and evil characters, with the angels behaving no better than the demons at times. Many of the angels and demons are depicted as having very linear, unquestioning minds. Crowley and, to a lesser extent, Aziraphale are the only ones dealing in shades of grey, with Crowley seeing them as dark grey and Aziraphale as light grey. Sin noticias de Dios (No News from God), an older Spanish/Mexican film, also has a great partnership between an angel and a demon, who speak with each other in Latin, and postulates a heaven that is getting rather empty and a hell that is overcrowded.

To Rushdie, freedom of expression is paramount: “We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom-and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist-is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favour of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old.”

The “bien-pensant censorship” is clearly a reference to the (mis)use of “woke-ness”, which has its roots deep in the fight for racial justice in the US (leading to the accusation of the cultural appropriation of the term “woke”). Star Trek Discovery is now bursting with strong female leads and the first gay, “enby” and trans crew members. In season 2 of Picard, Seven is openly bisexual though it doesn’t go beyond chaste kisses in the Star Trek universe (the bickering is fun though). I have no problem with any of this but can’t help feeling that it is sometimes cosmetic or skin deep, delivered because it’s expected by some audiences, rather than a true exploration of diversity. I found more depth in Death Comes for the Sworn Virgins by Abraham Margariti. In its fable-like atmosphere, we follow three lovers – biological women brought up as men and mostly identifying as such – who have fled persecution for openly loving each other to the mountains full of dark spirits. They are mourning a fourth lover and in search of a safe place to settle. They find a clearing that is protected from the spirits and they welcome Death among them in the form of a badger/skeletal human. Death needs their help to appease the “unrested” spirits he angered when he was young and arrogant, before he learned kindness. The lovers call each other “brother” and gentle Death calls them “husbands” at the end. Since death is either skeletal or animal in form, it is clearly not a sexual relationship, which makes a nice change.

In his introduction to Tangent’s recommended reading list for 2023, Dave Truesdale is much more emphatic than Rushdie and talks of a “weaponization of language” that “has the SF field in such a state that its authors are afraid to take the kinds of dangerous or controversial chances in their stories that over previous decades greatly aided in defining the field itself as one of experimenting with bold new ideas.” He considers it a “soft censorship of omission” where “in those stories dealing with cultural or outright political issues… only one side is invariably treated in a positive light.” In his opinion, this is leading to an impoverishment of the SF genre: “purely on a literary level this redundant and unimaginative treatment of issues or themes becomes predictable and quickly boring, boredom leading to no real incentive to turn the page to discover what comes next, and a sure death knell for any regular, intelligent reader of the SF genre.” Truesdale also comments that magazine editors have become cautious: “Under the current political climate where political correctness has been taken to a whole new level, I seriously doubt magazine editors would publish any story professing a viewpoint contrary to what is considered Woke or Progressive, for the backlash would be immediate and enormous.”

Rushdie warns us to beware of the internet, with its indiscriminate content, where “…well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which…” This, for me, includes the Zineverse I explored in my last article., where you need to read with your brain switched on and using your judgment. As Truesdale tells us: “It is a given that anything can be found on the internet, regardless of how devoid of intelligence, and can be used to support the pro or con viewpoint of any topic.” And of course, we absorb a lot of things without being aware of it and it’s a matter of remembering this and regularly questioning your own attitudes and thought processes. That is why I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu where, years after writing her original trilogy, she happily subverts her Wizard of Earthsea universe’s original tropes, in particular with respect to gender roles and power.

Another example of subversion (in my opinion) is the Dr Who episode “The Star Beast”. Having read reviews for this episode, I was wondering if it would be painfully “PC”. However, I’d forgotten how tongue-in-cheek Dr Who can be. It was by no means one of the best episodes in this perennial series, neither was the script poetry in motion, but it was clearly poking gentle fun at the “gender” movement. When the Doctor refers to an alien as “he”, Rose snaps “you’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun”. The Doctor replies “good point” and then asks the alien “are you he or she or they?” The alien’s reply is clearly meant to be funny: “My chosen pronoun is the definitive article. I am always ‘The’ Meep.” At the same time, it’s stress on ‘the’ is made part of the plot when The Meep turns out to be a megalomaniac monster despite its cute appearance. Later, the Doctor and Donna tell us that “the Doctor is male, and female, and neither, and more” but this is an integral part of the preposterous plot. Finally, we get to the part that caused outrage in some reviewers where Donna gleefully pronounces “it’s a shame you’re not a woman any more, ‘cos she’d have understood” and Rose adds “we’ve got all that power. But there is a way to get rid of it. Something that a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand…we choose to let it go.” Surely the person who wrote “male-presenting Time Lord” was having fun with this particular juxtaposition of words? If we can laugh at something, does it not become less deadly serious?

In another Dr Who episode “The Toymaker”, gentle fun is poked at “cancel culture”. The villain has managed to send out a signal that changes brainwaves and makes people aggressively think that they are right. When the Doctor asks why, the Toymaker replies “so that they win…I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21^st century. They shout and they type and they cancel. Now everybody wins.” To which the Doctor replies: “And everybody loses.” At the same time, the Tardis is made wheelchair-friendly and we find out that the next doctor is ”BIPOC” with a hybrid West African/Scottish accent. That said, I didn’t find the incipient PC’ness as prevalent as the self-congratulatory glaze over more recent Dr Who episodes, which can be hard to stomach.

For Rushdie, we must defend true freedom of expression as he has done with his life’s blood (though he does not vaunt himself of this): “We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways.” This article cannot hold a thousand and one voices, alas; it’s more of a chamber choir piece. But each voice has a right to be heard.

To quote this journal’s editors: “Here in continental Europe, the advocacy for freedom of conscience traces its roots back as far as the Age of Enlightenment, and while individuals are as varied and different as anywhere, many still share a general tendency to separate opinions from relationships. To give an example: the Journal’s crew belong to seemingly opposed world-views, yet are bound by friendship and affection… it is not uncommon for us to publish stories or articles that appear ‘ideologically’ contradictory – precisely because we value the freedom to enjoy thought experiments we might not approve of.” We must continue to see each other as separate, multi-faceted people, and not as walking labels, where one label subsumes everything else.

In a world of sometimes radical “PC’ism”, we seem to have forgotten that if we disagree with what someone has said or is saying, we must still listen, and then we must marshal up our own arguments in response – we can do it very well through fiction, too. We seem to have forgotten our own responsibility to argue back. Unless someone is inciting hatred, on racial or any other grounds, they have a right to their opinions, however cock-eyed, skew-whiff, offensive or even simply wrong we find them (or they ours). Freedom of expression is a painful right, and one that requires taking up verbal sparring rather than erasers. If Rushdie’s defence of this right continues unabated after almost being violently erased, how can we do less in our lives and in our narratives?

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as speculative “flash” fiction on sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fiction

The Taming Of The Slush

by Michèle Laframboise

My latest batch of submissions has fallen under the maws of the shredders.

Again.

Eleven thousand short-stories, each carefully crafted with a unique combination of archetypes, plot twists, vivid characters and spunky titles.

Gone.

Magazines do not simply abhor bad writing. They make it disappear from their slush pile.

Whatever the genre or style or narrative choice or period, slush management algorithms detect, analyze, then shred all offensive submissions.

Most mags don’t bother to send an ERL. At least, an electronic rejection letter lets you know where you stand. Even more, an ERL bearing an editor’s simulated signature can do wonders for your morale, despite the deleted submission.

#

Slush shredders have gone a long way from those awfully noisy machines slicing wood paper in a publishing company’s back room.

The taming of the slush has evolved into a smooth process that erases your submitted file from the targeted magazine’s queue. Moreover, the algorithm makes sure to annihilates every copy in circulation whose content dwells inside an 80% similitude interval from your rejected sub.

In the whole inhabited Galaxy.

Including the backups stored in your home generator.

The original goal was to prevent any MacArthur (a.k.a. an appalling text) from making the years-consuming rounds of overworked magazine editors. If the horror of simultaneous submissions has vanished, delayed sim subs can clog the queues for years.

Magazine editors on all civilized worlds keep refining their slush pile management. Tiny shredding programs worm their way through every nook and cranny of cyberspace.

My latest batch of submissions has been reduced to a bunch of titles sitting on empty files.

Ah, for the hallowed time of printed support! My memory being what it is, I can only guess at the nature of a submission from its title and word count, somehow preserved. I wonder what Test-Driving my new Carpet (3400 words) or Cherry-picking Data for the Zorgs (15 600 words) were about.

Well, no need to dwell over the past!

Once I finish setting up my updated version of Astounding Stories Generator™, I will release a whopping forty thousand new babies, each spiced up with my own authorial quirks.

Somewhere in this vast, cold galaxy, a lonely cyber-editor is waiting for the perfect match…

~

Bio:

Michèle Laframboise feeds coffee grounds to her garden plants, runs long distances and writes full-time in Mississauga, Ontario. Fascinated by nature and sciences, she creates hard and crunchy SF stories, with a bit of humor slipped under the carpet.

Philosophy Note:

Besides the pun inspired by Shakespeare’s play, this story reflects a concern about the growing proliferation of AI-written works (following Moore’s Law about microprocessors doubling their power every two years since 1975) clogging the slush piles. How will future humanity tame those ever-increasing piles? The story reflects that any evolutionary progress brings an equal reaction, hence this odd arms’ race between magazine editors digitally nuking rejected copies of AI-written stories… and the “writer” buying better AI tools to multiply the amount of submissions.

Fiction

The Book With All The Ring’s Marvels

by Arturo Sierra

It is a well understood fact of galactic sociology that any civilization with the resources, know-how, and time to build a ringworld has no need to do so. Consequently, those that embark upon this kind of colossal engineering are considered eccentric. Other, saner civilizations do well by evading the freaks and coming up with unexpected reasons for a tour of the Magellanic clouds. Any excuse to avoid contact with the weirdos.

The best that can be said for megastructures is that they serve as great tourist attractions, once the builders vanish into oblivion, as inevitably happens; well worth the centuries of interstellar travel it takes to visit the sites. For some can be found here and there, however frowned upon they might be: Dyson spheres, matrioshka brains, Shkadov thrusters, and, of course, ringworlds. Strewn at random across the Galaxy, they are most often abandoned, crumbling ruins, the surrounding debris all that remains of the foolhardy engineers. It’s just that, as galactic years go by, and then the galactic centuries, ennui starts to seep into even the most sensible of cultures. It becomes the driving force in a society that has moved post-scarcity and then post that, too. Some civilizations find themselves with little argument to avoid eccentricity and come up with radical purpose.

Such is the case of the Milotans, in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way. Traditionally thought to be a dignified species by other galactic powers, nobody foresaw them suddenly deciding to dismantle planets and rearrange them in a neat circle around their star. The first time anyone heard of this insanity outside the Commonwealth was when President of Presidents Ölóssa gave a speech to officially kickstart the great work. Though most Commonwealth citizens considered it a rousing declaration, a sphere of extra-empty space, a dozen parsecs in diameter, quietly formed around ground zero as other civilizations cringed away.

Seen from very far away by someone with the eyes of a cosmic eagle, the construction process would have appeared like a swirl in a sink, only the sink was scaled to stellar proportions for the use of some obscure sort of god. Glittering drones moved in a carefully choreographed dance to place beams of hyper-rigid material in the correct orbits. Five gas giants were vacuumed, for lack of a better word, producing brightly colored hurricanes and eddies, storms illuminated from within by lightning as they disappeared into electromagnetic suction hoses. Gigatons of gas were slurped up to moon-sized factories, where matter was syphoned to make degenerate-nuclei materials. But all in all, construction of the Milotan ringworld went forth without drama—indeed, by some standards it was a subdued affair. No civil wars erupted, no crime-adjacent contractors skimmed off the top with catastrophic results, no armadas of doom were sent to exterminate neighboring primitives and steal their resources. The most exciting thing that happened during this time was President Ölóssa calling a press conference, at which event, in front of cameras and flashes, some words were written in a notebook using ink and pen, to the public’s astonishment. It was to be the opening paragraph in a book intended to keep a record of the adventure.

This book deserves special attention. It had no digital input or storage; instead, it was made to write in longhand over creamy white pages. Writing with such instruments was a daunting task, since no Milotan had done so since time immemorial and the art had to be reinvented. The paper was so thin, the billion sheets made for a tome no larger than your standard grimoire, but they were sturdier than diamond. It would be passed from generation to generation, from father to daughter and mother to son, as explained by President Ölóssa to a delighted press core. Every event of the magnificent journey would be recorded for the benefit of posterity.

Once the ring was completed, the whole enterprise took a turn for the bizarre, or rather—depending on who you asked—for the far past bizarre and into dangerous, potentially contagious insanity. Every Milotan in existence gathered at a designated place, somewhere on the inner side of the ring. The billions crowded shoulder to shoulder, all of them looking in the same direction and united in purpose as no other people since. Across the circumference, they had built a monumental arch as a sort of start and finish line, and, on sounding of a kilometer-wide gong, every single member of the civilization started going under it with cheers and huzzahs. They had the firm intention of walking all the way round the ring, as if every individual shared in a single, collective will.

The megastructure was designed to be a challenge. The first couple centuries of the march, they went through a scorching dessert with no food and little water. After that came the gloomy rainforest of Ifny, plagued with genetically engineered tigers and mosquitoes the size of trucks. Historians estimate the civilization was reduced to a quarter of its original size by the time it emerged from the jungle.

The challenges did not end there. Going through the Labyrinth of Mist was particularly tough, as social cohesion vanished almost entirely amid hallucinations induced by an omnipresent fog, which seemed sometimes possessed of its own, perverse kind of life. A generation was born and died at sea while crossing the Bulian Ocean in wooden sail-ships. The ring’s spin caused kilometer-high waves, children learned to climb masts before walking, and krakens were trained as work beasts. When the shout came of land ahoy, most people didn’t understand what their eyes reported.

The continent of Julisk was divided spinward by a mountain chain, its peaks so high they pierced out of the world’s atmosphere. Eternal storms spun in a vortex around the tops due to friction with the air. The Milotans were presented with a choice to go left or right of the mountains, having no clue as to which path was the right one. History fails to mention what they decided, all that’s known is that, after two centuries of march, the wanderers found themselves at a dead end and had to turn around. On their backtrack, they encountered settlements, cities, nations, and empires founded by those who had quit the journey, all memory of their transcendent goal lost to them. Wars had to be fought in order to gain passage through the barbarian kingdoms.

Testimonies survive of the families tasked with chronicling the march: the Holy Tome of Records was passed on faithfully, as the builders intended. Each keeper wrote with a distinctive hand, most often scribbling such tiny letters they had to be read with a magnifying glass. They documented lore in ever-varying languages, in verse and prose, in matter of fact, succinct lines or haughty sermons. Mishaps and heroes were recounted, wonders and terrors.

Elnee Lyvaya wrote of the visions she received from the ancestral spirits. Unknowingly, the prophetess was channeling taped messages she got from brainwave transmitters, antennae disguised as trees. The President of Presidents, who had been dead for millennia, appeared in her dreams and urged Elnee to galvanize the people, to rekindle the purpose of the march when it seemed almost forgot. Taïgi Son of Taïgi set down the Epic of the Fallen Mirror, a (very liberal-with-the-actual-facts) telling of events following the crash of a shade-sheet, one of many orbiting the star in order to produce an artificial day-and-night cycle with their shadow. Ringquakes brought down mountains as the mirror collided with the structure and the sun shone for so long that the very stones caught on fire. Eventually, days were restored by the automation the Builders had left behind for just such an emergency, but calamity had already reduced the number of wanderers to a mere few thousand strong. The population recovered slowly, every precious child learning the Epic by heart to commemorate the fallen.

As blood lines ended, monsters ate lore keepers, and generations embraced illiteracy while method-acting horseback nomadism, the chronicles were forgotten. As centuries climbed back the ladder of cultural self-awareness, the Tome was found in old trunks, or in the treasure hoard carried on the backs of a warlord’s slaves, or in possession of raving madmen. It was read, and people marveled at their own history. At different times, funny hats were forced over the heads of keepers and religion sprung around them like fungus, often involving wanton human sacrifice. At other times, masters of lore were branded agitators, imprisoned, and scorned. This usually happened when a majority of Milotans wanted to take a breather and settle some cities, but keepers wouldn’t shut up about the march and refused to stop urging the host forward.

It is thought that the so-called Terrible Misplacement happened while crossing the infernal plains of Tromarga, covered in ash by a thousand volcanoes and populated by necromancers of unfathomable maleficence. The necromancers were actually robots, their undead minions simply corpses animated with help of some cybernetic tricks, but by this point high-concept technology might as well have been wizardry, for what most Milotans knew. After defeating a particularly nasty lich in a bloody, final-stand battle against the forces of darkness, it happened that the last of the lore masters noticed she didn’t have the Holy Tome of Records on her. Years were spent searching for it among the black stones of the plain, in towers of sorcery surrounded by sickly, green glows, in deep lakes of light-swallowing water. They looked in ominous libraries left by the Builders and kept by weird, ten-legged creatures that collected books like magpies gather trinkets. They scoured the earth in desperation. But the Story of Stories, the account of hard-earned wisdom, the Book with all the Ring’s Marvels was never found. Other than face-palming, there was nothing to be done.

Total duration of the march has been estimated at sixty thousand of our years, but the day came when the old arch appeared on the upwards-curving horizon. A shockwave of awe passed through every Milotan bone, sprung from the deepest recesses of genetic memory. Those who were not there could never understand the emotions that flowed like a jet stream of super-heated plasma out of a million throats that day.

It would be a descendant of that last record keeper who was to become the first, the one to pass under the arch before any other. He was also, in point of fact, a descendant of President of Presidents Ölóssa, though it should be noted that, owing to a universal quirk of population growth, at this time all surviving Millotans were Ölóssa’s descendants, too. In any case, forever after the crossing he would be known as the Very First, the Finisher, the Eternal Walker, and several other such pompous monickers. Even those civilizations which recoiled from the ringworld’s folly, all those millennia ago, heard of the Very First and spoke of the triumph with reverence, if somewhat embarrassed to discuss such matters aloud.

The Eternal Walker was a fervent believer in the higher calling of his culture, a philosopher, a poet warrior, a Hero of the Purpose. His Letters to the Wider Galaxy on the Gist of it All are studied across alien cultures, held as a fine example of the dangers and silliness that come with thinking too hard about the meaning of life. On the other hand, the Unauthorized Biography, by an anonymous chronicler, is considered by learned critics a masterful portrait of an ambiguous character. He was sometimes a leader of sadistic monstrosity, callous to the suffering of the flock, sometimes a most humble and charitable soul, capable of compassion and self-sacrifice what to tear up the stones.

The chronicler claims the Eternal Walker saw the arch for the first time when he was but a child, and the arch itself still a continent away. The vision ignited a bright flame in the Very First’s heart, a flame to keep hope burning during the last stretches of the march. When the hardships would have broken lesser civilizations, when the ice sheets seemed to stretch all the way to infinity, when the night terrors lurked, when cultural trauma nearly drove every Milotan insane, then The Eternal Walker would speak unto them and tell them to get off their butts.

So much of the journey is forgotten and the book is lost. Yet the story is told all over the Galaxy, of the words spoken by the Very First after crossing the finish line.

“That’s that, then. Now what?”

~

Bio:

Arturo Sierra lives in Santiago, Chile, quite happily. So far he has lead a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.

Philosophy Note:

Science fiction at its best is all about a sense of wonder, and what could be more awe-inspiring than a megastructure? A world that stretches all around a star, a sphere that encircles a star completely, what sights for the imagination. Endless arguments can be had about how such a thing could be achieved, and indeed Niven made some corrections to his seminal novel based on corrections sent to him by people who read the book and had thoughts on the matter. Little time is given to the discussion of one tiny, crucial point, however: why in God’s name would anyone go to all that effort? Seriously, for what insane purpose could you possibly need all the energy of a star? Is your species the Tribbles, that you need all the space in a ringworld to fit your people? Sometimes, we think so hard about the how that we end up doing silly things at great expense, because we didn’t pause a second to think about the why.

Fact & Opinion

Welcome To The Zineverse!

by Mina

“Gleaming and glittering with gold and wondrous surprises for young and old”

Ladies and gentlemen! Roll up, roll up! Come, my lovelies, and experience everything the Zineverse has to offer. Marvel at those spaceships! Meet the monsters (not all in alien form). Dream of new worlds!

Let’s begin our journey by meeting a publication that reviews the many different creatures you can find in the science-fiction-and-fantasy Zineverse, Tangent. It owes its thirty-year existence to Dave Truesdale, its editor, and the volunteers who review for the pure love of it. Truesdale is proud of the fact that Tangent was the first SF short-fiction review magazine, to quote the late SF historian Sam Moskowitz. As well as reviews, Truesdale asks reviewers to give “recs” for the recommended reading list for that year. In an email exchange, I said my baseline criteria for recs was whether I would read something a second time and whether there was something truly original. Truesdale replied that originality is getting increasingly rare:

“… it’s harder and harder to come across anything even halfway original, because the more you’ve read over time means you’ve had the opportunity to experience “originality” in theme or treatment many times over many years and many stories…The reverse is that, when you first began to read SF/F, everything was pretty much original to you, giving rise to that Sense of Wonder the younger (or newer) reader discovers. But… the originality metric is harder to find. That’s when I go to the other metrics… primary among them how the author executes his/her theme or treats the subject matter. Does the prose level perhaps sparkle above and beyond the norm? Is there an unexpected twist or POV on a tried-and-true theme elevating the story above the norm or cliche?”

These comments will resonate with all editors in the Zineverse. And the feeling of awe I too seek as a reader was also mentioned by Ádám Gerencsér when I asked him why he became co-owner and co-editor of Sci Phi Journal – with Mariano Martín Rodríguez:

“It’s a labour of love… a childhood attraction to SF’s infinite possibilities and [its] innate Sense of Wonder. For Mariano and I, it was really a question of: we want a venue for philosophical SF and if the only such publication is orphaned, we got to revive it [back in 2018].”

Sci Phi Journal happily tells you that it is “a cosy waystation for travellers who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the cosmic intersection between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology and hard SF.” It deals in idea-driven speculative fiction (not character-driven) and is an unapologetically European journal consciously setting itself aside from the “American model”. It embraces “semantic diversity” and all thought experiments, including those they do not agree with. It is itself an experiment in true free expression. I find this quite refreshing, and it is a cause I am willing to espouse. It also offers a platform for literary analysis and philosophical discussion in a genre considered by many as not worthy of such analysis (and it is not the only publication in the Zineverse to do so, for example Hélice, which publishes literary criticism in English and Spanish).

Truesdale has commented to me many times that Tangent reviews stories and not politics or ideologies. I’m not sure, however, that politics or ideologies don’t figure in the Zineverse. For example, Fantasy, at the time of writing this article, was accepting “BIPOC-only” submissions (writers who identify as black, indigenous and people of colour); its sister publication, Lightspeed, however, was concurrently accepting fantasy flash fiction open to all writers. Fantasy provides “entertainment for the intelligent genre reader – we publish stories of the fantastic that make us think, and tell us what it is to be human”. I particularly like its Q&A with authors and the fact that they include poetry, as well as short stories and flash fiction. Lightspeed has a broader focus, including many subgenres of SF and fantasy. Both magazines are available as e-book editions (where you receive everything in one go for payment) or free online (where you wait for a new instalment each week). And I haven’t forgotten the other sibling, Nightmare, that blends horror and dark fantasy (recent submissions were also BIPOC-focused). I must admit that, as a recovering insomniac, I haven’t delved much into this one but please do go and get your spine tingled and chilled by it.

That members of the Zineverse uphold various causes, languages and genres can also be seen in the special issues. The ezine Strange Horizons has brought out special issues, such as where trans/nonbinary (queer authors), Wuxia and Xianxia ( “writers from the Sino diaspora as well as BIPOC creators in various parts of the world”) and Palestine meet SF and fantasy. This year’s June issue included each story in its original language (Bulgarian and Lithuanian) and in translation into English. Strange Horizons tells us it is “of and about speculative fiction” for all “flavours of fantastika”. In reviews of this publication, Tangent always adds a disclaimer about Strange Horizons’ political affiliations:

“On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.”

Aurealis favours SF, fantasy and horror authors from Australia and New Zealand for most of the year; it accepts submissions from anywhere in the multiverse for one month a year.

Talking of authors, I particularly enjoyed this comment from one of the authors published recently by Lightspeed, Sarah Grey:

“There’s no getting rich off short fiction in any genre; you’d be hard-pressed to even pay for groceries with a year’s worth of generous short fiction income. So just write the stories that appeal to you, at the pace your life allows. Read the stories and novels that call to you, not what anyone else says you should read.”

SF and fantasy, more so than many other types of literature, are peopled with fanatics, although I do prefer the terms aficionados or enthusiasts, which have fewer negative connotations. So most SF and fantasy publications are run by small teams of people who are passionate about the genre and reliant on readers who believe in that Sense of Wonder, such as Lightspeed: “There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines – and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show – so the magazines really rely on reader support.” In a publisher’s note, the editor draws attention to the fact that, in September, Amazon will be closing its Kindle Periodicals program: some magazines will be transitioned to Kindle Unlimited; some will be dropped entirely. This will have a severe impact on publications who currently rely on Amazon’s digital subscriptions service for a substantial part of their income. This concern is also raised by Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine, who states that most publications in SF and fantasy rely on subscriptions and not on advertising for the bulk of their revenue. Clarkesworld and other journals will be encouraging their readers to transition to new subscription and pledge models, via their own and other platforms, such as Patreon.

Clarkesworld is probably one of the better-known publications in the Zineverse, along with Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF and Apex (Asimov’s and Analog have the same publisher, Penny Publications). Beneath Ceaseless Skies tells us that it is “dedicated to publishing literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, written with a literary focus on the characters”. Asimov’s is proud of its history: “From its earliest days in 1977 under the editorial direction of Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine has maintained the tradition of publishing the best stories, unsurpassed in modern science fiction, from award-winning authors and first-time writers alike.” It publishes hard SF and SF brimming with nostalgia. Its sister publication, Analog’s Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, “remains the unparalleled literary magazine in the genre, and rewards readers with realistic stories that reflect both the highest standards of scientific accuracy and the far reaches of the imagination”. Another publication to have published well-known authors is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), with authors like Stephen King, Daniel Keyes and Walter M. Miller in its quiver of arrows. Asimov’s can boast of authors like George R.R. Martin in its gallery, Analog of Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Poul Anderson and many more. Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Apex are probably more interested in publishing unknown authors. I love Apex’s mission statement:

“We publish short stories filled with marrow and passion, works that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. Creations where secret places and dreams are put on display.”

I think that should be the mission statement for the entire Zineverse, whether we are talking of flash fiction, short stories, novelettes or novellas. Whether you prefer to read your zines online, as a PDF, in some other digital form or on paper.

As a reviewer for Tangent, I have met some stories that were not very good, many that were competent and a few gems that reawakened my Sense of Wonder, first born when I read John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven (closely followed by Asimov’s robot stories and Bradbury’s Mars tales). I will read all SF genres (other than horror) and here is a taste of the tales I have read that I would read twice:

– “Showdown on Planetoid Pencrux” by Garth Nix, where warborgs meet High Noon: a tale of quiet courage, friendship and responsibility, without being preachy or superficial (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” by Karawynn Long, where a neurodiverse person learns to talk with genetically-modified crows: a tale about not underestimating others (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thyngs” by Thomas M. Waldroon creates a London you can almost smell and touch, a monster born from effluvia and a hero who has his memories stolen, with poetry and rhymes woven through it like golden threads (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 13/07/23).

– “A Dead World Wakens” by Amy Dawn Buchanan, where a lone human wakes up in a distant future in a synthetic Eden: a lyrical coming of age story (Aurealis, 4/23).

“The Ocean Remembers The Wave” by L. Chan, where the hero follows a trail of enhanced bones in his sentient ship and wuxia and xianxia (think, immortal itinerant warriors of ancient China) meet space adventure (Strange Horizons, special issue May 2023).

– “Schroedinger’s Kitten Falls In Love” by Bidisha Banerjee follows the brief and lethal love affair between two quantum cats: pure fun, full of quirky turns of phrase (Fantasy, June 2023).

– “Queen of the Andes” by Ruth Joffre imagines life in a refugee shelter in the Andes. Humanity has managed to destroy the Earth’s climate, and many have already left for the space colonies: to stay or leave, that is the question and where does true freedom lie? (Lightspeed, June 2023).

And that is just a slice of the stories out there, not forgetting many smaller online portals to the Zineverse, like tor.com (SF and fantasy), 365tomorrows (SF and speculative flash fiction, a story a day), Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (“otherworldly encounters”) and so on. If you want an overview of what is out there, go to Tangent and look at the publications down the left-hand side, categorised as “print” and “e-market” (although the line between the two is becoming blurred with e-readers and smart phones) and periodicity. There are many excellent magazines to choose from in the Zineverse: follow one or two, or hop around several; you won’t regret it.

I cannot do justice to the whole range of styles, subgenres, plot twists, weird and wonderful characters – it’s a smorgasbord of talent and ideas. To quote another author in Lightspeed, Ashok K. Banker:

“I am absolutely in awe of all the amazing writers, the vast majority of them new or recently published, who fill the pages of the SF zines. The sheer range and depth of craft, skill, imagination is extraordinary. SF has always flourished in the shorter lengths, but I truly think we’re seeing a new golden age of SF short fiction…”

And, echoing Truesdale’s comments at the beginning of this article:

“It’s no longer enough to simply have a great idea well executed. But I do feel that the big ideas, bold use of tropes, breakout storytelling have waned. I’d love to see someone bust the genre wide open, more than once, break the rules, cause outrage among purists and virtue signal police, and still create awesome SF that is inclusive, sensitive, and essentially humane…”

Although Banker goes in a slightly different direction in his musings:

“SF is no longer a genre unto itself, it’s been absorbed by the literary mainstream and now belongs to everyone. I love and embrace that fact and I hope to see more of this beautiful hybrid cross-species fertilisation!”

I beg to differ – yes, there has been a lot of cross-pollination but, as our tour round the Zineverse shows, there are many specialised SF and fantasy publications out there, each with a slightly different focus. I would prefer to see such magazines maintain their individuality, and that they not be subsumed by “the literary mainstream”. The Zineverse should ring with a carillon, not a death knell.

Coda: You will have noticed that I have done two things in this article: given you lots of links to follow for your own exploration of the Zineverse and focused on the people that make the Zineverse work – the authors, editors and reviewers. This is a pæan to their hard work, vision and passion. (And, in case you’re wondering, the quote that opens this article is a circus slogan from 1961.)

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fact & Opinion

Science Fiction And The Shaping Of Belief

by Manjula Menon

The editors most responsible for shaping what we now call the genre of ‘science-fiction’ were, arguably, Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and John W. Campbell, who took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. In this essay, I’ll look at how these influential editors construed the science in the science-fiction stories they published, stories that for legions of fans served as steppingstones to belief in the truths revealed to them by the magazines’ writer-prophets.

Gernsback’s Amazing Stories was subtitled The Magazine of Scientification, and the magazine’s motto ‘Extravagant Fiction Today — Cold Fact Tomorrow’ was emblazoned prominently as a first-page banner. In his very first editorial for Amazing Stories in April 1926, titled A New Sort of Magazine, Gernsback defined ‘scientification’ as ‘the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story— a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.’[i] Gernsback had coined the neologism ‘scientification’ back in 1916, and was already publishing such stories in the other magazines he edited, like Science and Invention and Radio News. In subsequent editorials, Gernsback often vigorously focused on defending the magazine against ‘certain class of Amazing Stories scientification readers … ready to tear and claw at any author who comes along with a new idea which, for the time being, may be contrary to fact, although it may still lie within the realm of science.’[ii]

One of Gernsback’s aims was to better disseminate the work of non-American writers. The very first story that appeared in Amazing Stories was the Frenchman Jules Verne’s Off on a Comet (“Hector Servadac”), in which Captain Servadac experiences a cataclysmic event that appears to have altered the Algerian coast he’d been stationed at. Servadac sets sail on a yacht owned by the Russian Count Timascheff, to explore his new environs, an adventure that has them sailing through storms and ice; jibs are raised, mainsails adjusted, helms righted, yawls ingeniously refitted to skate over ice. They eventually discover that the Algerian coast they’d been on had been picked up apiece, air and water included, by a comet that had suddenly collided with Earth. This fantastic scenario is obviously far from being scientification; Gernsback himself says in his introduction to Off on a Comet, that it belongs ‘in the realm of fairyland’.[iii]

Off on a Comet is, however, meticulous in showing how characters methodically calculate solutions to ongoing problems. After the cataclysmic event, Servadac observes that it takes longer for water to boil at the same outside temperature and deduces that there is less atmosphere above him. He observes that days are shorter, gravity is weaker, and that it is the star Vega in the constellation Lyra, and not the pole star, that is the fixed point around which constellations revolve. While the stars remain fixed in size and luminosity, he observes that the planet Venus gets larger and brighter, from which he deduces that he was on a collision course with the Cytherean body. When he observes Venus getting smaller and smaller, he deduces that the planes of the two planets’ orbits didn’t meet, and the catastrophic collision had been averted. He deduces from the observation that the magnetic needle of his compass had not deviated in angle from the north pole, that north and south remained the same, but that east and west had apparently changed places given sunrise and sunset position. Smooth and angular land formations jut up from the sea, and when they lower sounding-lines, they discover that the seabed is bereft of any marine life, uniformly deep, and composed of a strange iridescent metallic dust, from which they conclude that a subterranean event has lifted parts of that strange seabed to the surface. Once they understand that they are no longer on Earth but on a celestial body they name Gallia, they deduce that it is in an elliptical orbit, because the planet’s rate of speed diminishes in proportion to the distance receded from the sun. Far away from the sun, the temperature drops, and the Gallian seas begin to freeze. Off on a Comet is not just a thrilling sea adventure, but also a study of how the characters use tools, observations, and calculations to make deductions about the nature of the mystifying world they find themselves in.

In one scene, a solitary point of light observed from the schooner leads the party to a tomb deep within an abandoned mosque. Above the tomb, they discover a large, silver lamp, the source of the light, and on the corner of the tomb, an open French prayer-book. Servadac then has a revelation, that the tomb was that of the Crusader king Louis IX, canonized as Saint Louis; ‘The lamp that had been kindled at the memorial shrine of a saint was now in all probability the only beacon that threw a light across the waters of the Mediterranean, and even this ere long must itself expire.’ After making a ‘reverential obeisance to the venerated monument’,[iv] the party continue their exploration. Later, when the schooner appears certain to smash into those strange, smooth Gallian cliffs, Count Timascheff intones, ‘Let us, then, commend ourselves to the providence of Him to Whom nothing is impossible.’[v]

Verne had been raised Catholic, but other than brief nods to the faith of his youth as in the passage referenced above, he makes almost no reference to Christianity, and is commonly claimed by both deists and atheists as one of their own. Indeed, Saint Louis is brought up later in Off on a Comet, when the party encounter a supercilious English major who refers to the tomb as that of a French monarch, only to be vociferously corrected by Servadac that Louis IX was not merely a monarch, but a saint. Thus, the saint’s role in Off on a Comet appears to be to highlight verbal sparring between agents of rival colonial powers, rather than to make any kind of spiritual point. Indeed, none of the nineteenth-century Europeans who find themselves so mysteriously transplanted onto a comet hurling its way through the solar system consider that the event might have been a miracle, the work of God.

Verne similarly dropped non-Christian religious traditions into his stories. For example, in his adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (“Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours”), the enigmatic, exacting, and iron-willed Englishman, Phileas Fogg, and his excitable, impressionable, and sentimental French valet, Passepartout set out to traverse the world in eighty days on a wager. They soon arrive in India, where in Bombay, Passepartout encounters a Parsi festival where the ‘descendants of the sect of Zoroaster…were celebrating a sort of religious carnival, with processions and shows, in the midst of which Indian dancing-girls, clothed in rose-coloured gauze, looped up with gold and silver, danced airily, but with perfect modesty, to the sound of viols and the clanging of tambourines.’[vi] Later, when their pre-planned train ride comes to an abrupt end, they hire a Parsi as mahout to a partially trained war-elephant they purchase to complete the journey, they soon find themselves in a little-traveled region ‘inhabited by a fanatical population, hardened in the most horrible practices of the Hindu faith’,[vii] where they encounter a procession carrying the corpse of a dead Rajah, accompanied by his beautiful, young Parsi widow, Aouda, who is to be ritually sacrificed in his funeral pyre. This horrific scene serves as impetus to a rescue mission, replete with daring deeds and suspenseful, last-minute turnarounds. Aouda and Phileas Fogg fall in love over the course of the novel, indeed the final scenes concern a marriage proposal. Once again, Verne uses religious traditions not with spirituality in mind but in the service of story, in the case of India, to serve as backdrop for spectacle, romance and adventure. Also like Off on a Comet, Verne is meticulous in Around the World in Eighty Days as to showing how the characters calculate solutions to ongoing problems, famously detailing how local time changes with changes in latitude, at a time before the international date line had been established. Metaphysical questions about the nature of reality or the existence of a higher power does not play any role in Verne’s stories, but religious traditions make occasional appearances, usually in service of other story elements.

The second story Gernsback picked for Amazing Stories was also a republication: The New Accelerator by the Englishman, H.G.Wells. It is perhaps worth noting here that it is these three men, Wells, Verne, and Gernsback, who are now commonly referred to as ‘the fathers of science fiction’. In The New Accelerator, the unnamed narrator agrees to imbibe an experimental drug concocted by Professor Gibberne, his neighbor and friend, who is world-renowned for making drugs that work on the human nervous system. The professor explains that the drug (named The New Accelerator), ‘is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two — or even three to everybody else’s one.’[viii] Upon drinking the vial of green liquid offered, the narrator discovers to his amazement that he can now move so quickly that ordinary life appears to have come to a standstill. After the novelty of wandering through crowds of motionless people wears off, the narrator finds himself using the drug to achieve somewhat more prosaic aims: ‘I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some chocolate, by its means. I began at 6:25, and my watch is now very nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated.’[ix]

In addition to fine-tuning The Accelerator so it can work for the masses, Professor Gibberne is also at work on another potion he calls The Retarder, which ‘should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings.’[x] Details as to the science behind the time-altering drugs are scant to non-existent. Instead, Wells is interested in the idea that our experience of time relates to the speed at which our bodily functions work.

These two stories, written by already very successful writers, typify what Gernsback liked to publish. For Gernsback, scientification, or science, appears to be broadly defined, as can be gathered by the implausibility of the underlying scenarios presented. As to what science was, how it differed from what came before, or how it intermingled with religious traditions that it existed alongside with, even as it ‘enters so intimately into all our lives today’[xi] as he put it, he expended almost no ink. Instead, as evinced by his eighty patents and numerous publications, Gernsback was passionate about technology, from the nitty-gritty mechanics of yet-to-be-invented machines to what grand societal changes were possible because of new technology.

While Gernsback appears to take scientification and science itself as ‘I know it when I see it’, the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science has continued to vex philosophers for centuries. Although the word ‘science’ hadn’t been formulated yet, Aristotle in the 4^th century BC held that a demarcation line existed between propositions that were ‘apodictically’, or necessarily, self-evidently, or demonstrably true, versus propositions arrived through the dialectic or reasoning process. Millenia later, the 1920s saw logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Hans Hahn, focus on verifiability as the demarcation line, where the distinction is even more strongly drawn as being between meaningful and meaningless statements. Verificationists hold that a proposition is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified or if it expressed as a tautology that is logically true. However, using verifiability as demarcation leads to universally general statements like ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ being rendered meaningless as it cannot be verified, while existential statements like ’ghosts exist’ would be classified as meaningful, as it can be verified. In the 1930s, Karl Popper argued it should be falsifiability that should serve as the demarcation line, where only propositions that can be falsified should be considered scientific. In contrast to verifiability, under falsifiability, the sentence ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ would be considered scientific as it can be falsified, while ‘ghosts exist’ would not be considered scientific as it cannot be falsified. The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued against falsifiability by observing that astrologers often provide precise predictions that could be falsified, which according to falsification would then render astrological predictions scientific. Kuhn argues instead that the demarcation line might not be as sharply defined, and that science was to be taken as merely a method of puzzle solving, in which the puzzle-solver works to correlate observation with theory. He pointed to what he called ‘extraordinary’ or ‘revolutionary’ science as the driver of forward scientific progress, rather than ‘ordinary’ science where the extraordinary science solves new problems in addition to the old problems solved by the paradigm it replaced. For Kuhn, these kind of paradigm shifts is what science is really about.

John W. Campbell, who became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, was clearly interested in the question of what science was and how it came to be. For example, in a 1953 editorial for Astounding Science Fiction, titled The Scientist, Campbell observes that scientists believe ‘in the existence of a Supreme Authority in the Universe, an Authority they call “Natural Law.” They hold that that Authority is above and beyond the opinions and beliefs, the will or willfullness, of any human being. That that Authority can, moreover, be directly consulted by any man, at any time—and that every man is, at every time and in every place, directly and specifically obedient to that Authority, to Natural Law, whether he recognizes that fact or not.’[xii] He further posits that the scientist would claim ‘I have proven beyond doubt that there is Universal Law; I am not yet wise enough to know the nature of its source,’[xiii] in contrast to those who claim to know the source of Universal Law.

Later, in the 1954 editorial, Relatively Absolute, Campbell writes that science is ‘that method of learning that involves the equal interaction and cross-checking of philosophical-theoretical thought, and actual physical-reality experiments, done as a conscious process for the consciously stated purpose of increasing knowledge and understanding—that is, increasing data and relationship-of-data.’[xiv] He argues that science was ‘going to be a mighty unpopular philosophy in any culture; it has an absolutism about it that says, it makes no difference who you are, what you are, or what you want. Neither does it matter what your wealth is, or your political power. These are The Laws, obey them or suffer.’[xv] Arguing that religion was ‘by derivation, the study of the “Laws of Things” … or “Cosmology” in modern linguistic terms’[xvi] he concludes that science could therefore only be invented by ‘a culture that had already accepted the idea of an Absolute Power in the Universe’[xvii] and points to their many inventions, including alchemy and algebra, to nominate the Islamic civilization as the sole progenitor of science.

Campbell is, at best, careless with the demarcation line, and whether one agrees with him or not about how and who ‘invented’ science, it seems indisputable that science-fiction, like science, did not wink into existence from out of the void, but rather emerged from a milieu.

For Darwin, it was inevitable that Homo-sapiens evolved to be philosophical. Writing in The Descent of Man Darwin says, ‘As soon as the faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, along with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.’[xviii]

Observations of what cause produced which effect was put to use to increase survival rate, while the human aptitude for symbolic behavior gave rise to language and allowed for the social cohesion necessary to form complex societies. When there were gaps in connecting cause with effect, our ancestors spun narratives that often imbued consciousness and agency to everything from stars to storms. These narratives were then often tied to belief structures, allowing for societal coalescence. Religious and sacred storytelling were, perhaps, inevitable outcroppings of the cognitive capacities of the human mind.

William James in his 1897 essay, ‘The Will to Believe’ says he wrote the essay ‘in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.’[xix] He argues that a proposed hypothesis will present as either live or dead to the mind: ‘A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As a hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.’[xx] To the hypothesis offered being ‘live’, James adds the perceived prestige of the source of the hypothesis which together make ‘the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith.’[xxi] Given the right imprimatur then, stories of science-fiction could rise to become part of some future canonical belief: Extravagant Fiction Today —— Cold Fact Tomorrow?

Indeed, Campbell later became a proponent of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and wrote approvingly about the existence of psi, or extra-sensory powers and perception, in humans, publishing multiple stories in Astounding based on psi. As James said about our quest for scientific truth, ‘Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, — what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?’[xxii]

The editors most influential in shaping science-fiction as we know it today published stories that featured the speculative hypotheses they favored, thereby advancing these hypotheses into James’s ‘live’ category in the minds of their readers. Gernsback and Campbell published stories that not only evoked wonder and awe in their readers, but also provided the imprimatur of science that allowed their readers to shape belief in what might yet be revealed to have been prophetic truth.

[i] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 3

[ii] Gernsback, H. (1926, May). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 2(9), 825

[iii] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 1

[iv] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 24

[v] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 28

[vi] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 49

[vii] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 62

[viii] Wells, H. (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 58

[ix] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 96

[x] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 97

[xi] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 20

[xii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 69

[xiii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 72,73

[xiv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xvi] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xvii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xviii] Darwin, C. Descent of Man, Second Edition, 143

[xix] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xx] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xxi] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

[xxii] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

~

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels. This is her second essay in Sci Phi Journal after her “homecoming of sorts” in our previous issue. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

Fact & Opinion

The Economy Of Words: Differing Philosophies Of Humanism Between Western And Muslim Science Fiction

by Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD

“To search for God with logical proof, is like Searching for the Sun with a lamp.”
Sufi Proverb

Science fiction is an exposition-heavy genre of literature. Everything from the laws of physics to the socio-political system to the way a computer programme works has to be explained to the reader, either through an extended introduction, forced dialogue between characters or a narrative device such as a radio broadcast summarizing the world as it is. Much the same holds true of philosophically-themed science fiction. A perfect illustration of this is a lovely short story by Philip K. Dick, possibly one of the most philosophically inclined SF authors of the 20th century. The story in question, “Human Is” (1955), is about the plight of a housewife married to a phenomenally unpleasant man, a crude scientist who is not interested in family life, romance or anything, not even food. He would prefer to be fed intravenously just so he can focus on work nonstop. He is so literal-minded and mean-spirited, when the kid from next door shows him his kitten – calling it a tiger – he cannot understand why the boy calls it that. He even encourages the boy to bring the animal with him to the laboratory, to perform horrendous experiments on it like they do on rabbits and mice. His wife later confides to a male friend that she will insist on a divorce, but not until after he returns from an expedition – he had been sent to an archaeological dig on the ancient planet of a dying race.

When he gets back, however, he appears to be a whole other man. He speaks in a ridiculously romantic way, as if out of a Mills and Boon novel, wants to have kids and is great with the boy from next door and becomes very inventive when it comes to food, chatting endlessly with the kitchen computer. The housewife tells all this to her friend and he figures out what had happened. That dying race on that ancient world would often snatch a man’s personality from his body and replace it with their own psyche to give their race a new lease on life. Now the housewife has to give her sworn testimony in court, to prosecute this alien and – more importantly – bring back her husband. Something she steadfastly does not want to do. She lies in court, saying that this is her husband, and he has always been this way and that as a wife she knows her man. Afterwards, the alien inhabiting her husband’s body apologies to her and says he should have told her from the start, and they turn over a new leaf and live happily ever after. The lesson is, clearly, that human is ‘kindness’. What makes you human isn’t biology but morality and volition. The title pretty much tells you this, as do other works by Philip K. Dick, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and the original short story that inspired it, “The Little Black Box” (1964), where empathy is explicitly stated as the key to defining what and who is human.

Endless exposition is to be expected as stated above but it is also a shame, when you compare Dick’s story to a similarly themed work from Iran – “Ice Cream Cone” (2014) by Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi. It is very short, almost flash fiction, beginning with a man getting an ice cream on a hot summer’s day in Teheran. The ice cream vendor is complaining to him about the scolding heat, with the customer not replying. Then the customer sits on a bench and allows the ice cream to melt all over his hand. In the meantime, there is a cat rummaging for food among the plastic sacks of garbage while a miserable beggar asks for handouts in the background. Later the man goes home and turns on the TV set to listen to the results of the latest poetry contest and, while watching, plugs himself in. He was an android all along. A translucent recharging figure emerges on his forehead while in the background the announcer reads a 13^th century Sufi poem by Saadi Al-Shirazi:

Human beings are members of a whole

In creation of one essence and soul

If one member is afflicted with pain

Other members uneasy will remain

If you have no sympathy for human pain

The name of human you cannot retain

Both “Human Is” and “Ice Cream Cone” say the same thing but in completely different ways. Dick’s story is a proper narrative with explanations from the various characters, whereas Iraj’s story is far more compact and open-ended because there’s no exposition at all. It leaves so many questions unanswered. The silence of the android character makes you unsure why he bought the ice cream and also not one hundred percent certain if the story is condemning the inhumanity of man to man. Hence, the starving cat and the miserable beggar. The title is also vague. The closest thing to exposition we get is through the poem, but again these are just hints, with no real explanation for anything.

Great writers and movie directors often leave things open-ended to create an air of mystery and intrigue and to force the audience to think for itself and reach its own conclusions. And in the case of Iraj’s story, he has used these techniques to keep the story compact and maximize the shock appeal.

The question then is how Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi was able to produce such an efficient and sophisticated story given that Muslims are the new kids on the block, so to speak, when it comes to science fiction. SF was invented in the West and for Arabs and Muslims it is an import, and a recent import at that; Iraj isn’t even a professional writer but a geologist and engineer. Many of our authors in the Middle East, whatever genre they write in, have to have a regular job to make ends meet and pursue writing as a pastime and passion. True enough, but Iran nonetheless has a long and proud storytelling tradition, something you can see with the many international awards Iranian filmmakers garner. The obscure and symbolic titles for such movies as Felicity Land, Every Night Loneliness, The Frozen Flower, The Salesman, The Blackboard, The Silence, The Song of Sparrows, A Cube of Sugar, What is the Time in Your World, alone tell you how skilled Iranians are at not giving the game away.

As for the Sufi poem, that is a cultural reference that allows for further compactness since the Iranian or Muslim reader can recognize what the author is trying to get at without an explicit explanation. Reading Iraj’s other stories and novellas, you find his characters predominantly aren’t named. That resonates with the oral tradition of storytelling found in Iran[1] and also Arabia, turning characters into anonymous archetypes – the policeman, the security guard, the doctor, the nurse, the detective, etc. These are archetypes but, critically, not stereotypes. The characters are nuanced and frequently take decisions that surprise you. By contrast “Human Is” is both exposition-heavy and weighed down with clichés and stereotypes. Science, or reason, is being seen as the enemy of emotion and the scientist here is being lampooned and condemned, much like the mad scientist trope so beloved of horror and science fiction.

Even a biopic like A Beautiful Mind (2001) falls into this trap, with John Nash (Russell Crowe) contrasted to his alter ego/figment of his schizophrenic imagination Charles (Paul Bettany). John Nash is egotistical, only has half a helping of heart, unsuccessful with women and downright vulgar and ‘literal’ with them – describing sex as fluid exchange, like in a car engine, and refusing to buy a drink for a girl. Charles, by pure coincidence, is the consummate womanizer and the liberal arts guy – an English literature graduate. He’s everything John Nash aspires to be but cannot be. This setup is almost exactly what you see in “Human Is”, the romantic alien who wants to have kids and enjoys nutritional exercises compared to the crude and literalist scientist husband. Not to forget that the latter’s specialization is toxicology; he is someone who positively enjoys the vivisection of cute little fury animals. Here you see a divorcing of knowledge, science at least, from morality. John Nash likewise talks about his mathematical representation of a mugging, something he witnessed dispassionately without moving a finger to help the victim in question.

Islamic culture is very different when it comes to how scientists are presented. They are seen as wisemen who chose the profession of knowledge to benefit mankind. It is supposed to be a thoroughly moral enterprise. Similarly to the monastic beginnings of Western research, scientists in Islam’s past were often religious scholars as well, and the same holds true of our medical tradition. Hence a common word used for medical doctor in Arabic, hakim, or wiseman. By contrast doctor in English means teacher, like a doctor in philosophy, a reference to cold academia. The proper Arabic word for doctor is tabib, which derives from tabtaba, something like patting someone on the back or consoling him. It is automatically seen in moral and humane terms. When I was a freshman at university, our intro philosophy professor Dr. Ernest Wolf-Gazo actually told us that for the longest time a doctor was a low profession in European history, seen as being no different than a butcher. Then he added that it’s different in Islamic history, seeing the look on our faces. Again for us a doctor is a wiseman who cares for you and comforts you. And surgery was a last resort in Islamic medical tradition, relying instead on medicines and natural herbs and diet first – much like with Chinese medical history, which features acupuncture, herbal remedies, and a clear link to spiritual life.

That is why the scientist is portrayed in such stereotypically negative fashion in “Human Is” on account of the author’s cultural background. And most likely Dick wasn’t even aware of this, as critical and philosophical an author as he was. So, ironically, the Iranian story “Ice Cream Cone” is arguably more modern and up to date.

The 1001 Nights contains fairytales but also stories that count as proto-science fiction[2] but in all cases the tales contain moral lessons and are mostly derived from Persian and Indian heritage. They operate at the same level as Greek myths, most noticeably a story like Icarus which is all about science, arrogance and morality. But, once again, consider how compact Iraj’s story is. This shows tremendous self-discipline, not giving too much away early on, proving how modern Muslim literary traditions can be and how easily they adapt to new genres and an international audience. Ironically it is “Human Is” that has a fairytale feel to it and spoon-feeds the audience information in the manner of juvenile literature.

The message of humanism isn’t just that we should search for common values but to not pigeonhole people into polar opposites and cartoonish characters. Humanism also means humility and appreciating how someone else different than you looks at the world, and how your enemy is just as human as you and driven by the same weaknesses and sentiments. After the film 300 (2006) had come out Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi wrote his novella Guardian Angel (2016) in response. Instead of denigrating the ancient Greeks (or modern Westerners) he extols the virtues of ancient Persia through a time-travel story where criminals in the future travel backwards into the past to murder Cyrus the Great before he can write his famous cylinder which may be considered the first ever universal declaration of human rights. There is an alien plot involved but the ultimate criminals are thoroughly human, and Iranian nationals at that.

Comparing notes across cultures and storytelling traditions, in order to see ourselves more clearly in the mirror of the other, is a facet of humanism, too, and a lesson readers may take away when exploring the differences between Muslim and Western SF.

[1] Zahra Iranmanesh, “Narrative prose and its different types”, Journal of Languages and Culture, Vol.4(8), October 2013, pp. 128-130.

[2] Kawthar Ayed, “Mapping the Maghreb: The History and Prospects of SF in the Arab West”, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays, Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha (eds.), Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2022, pp. 22.

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Bio:

Emad El-Din Aysha, an academic researcher, author, journalist and translator, is an Arab of mixed origin born in the United Kingdom in 1974. He attained his PhD in International Studies in 2001, with degrees in Philosophy and Economics all taken at the University of Sheffield, and currently resides in Cairo, Egypt. He has taught at institutions such as the American University in Cairo, and writes regularly on everything from politics and business to movie reviewing for newspapers like The Egyptian Mail, Egypt Oil & Gas and The Liberum. Since 2015 he has become a full-time science fiction author and has two books to his name – an SF anthology in Arabic, and an academic text he co-authored and co-edited, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2022).

Fact & Opinion

Peaks Of Imagination: Speculative And Fantastic Fiction In Romansh

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

Among the super-minority languages of Europe, there is one, Romansh, which may count itself as one of the richest in literary terms on the continent, at least relative to the small number of its speakers. They barely amount to fifty thousand, but looking at their literature, we will be astonished not only by the large number of works published, but also and above all by their quality, as suggested by their translations into other languages, firstly into German, but also into French, Romanian, and even English. One of them is already an undisputed classic of the postmodern fiction of our century, Arno Camenisch’s Sez Ner (The Alp,[1] 2009), just as Gian Fontana’s short novel about rural xenophobia and its totalitarian manifestation, “Il president da Valdei” (The Mayor of Valdei, 1935), is a classic of 20^th-century fiction.

Both works belong to the genre of rural realist fiction that predominates in Romansh literature, as would be appropriate for a language spoken in small villages in various valleys of the Swiss canton of Graubünden. However, fantasy and speculative literature (or, rather, literatures) have also been brilliantly cultivated. In fact, to speak of a unified Romansh language or literature is not entirely accurate, as there are several regional linguistic standards with their corresponding literatures. Rumantsch Grischun, which is used by the cantonal and Federal administration, is a recent syncretic linguistic standard which does not correspond to any particular dialect and whose literature is, in any case, limited. Romansh literature is expressed in three main regional variants: Surmiran (surmiran, spoken in the Surmeir area situated in the centre of Graubünden), Ladin (ladin, spoken in the Swiss county by the Inn river called Engadine, a variety sub-divided into two subregional standards, the Southern one, called puter, and the Northern one, called vallader) and Sursilvan (sursilvan, in Surselva, in the valley of the Anterior Rhine, which extends from the source of the river to the vicinity of the cantonal capital Chur).

These main three standards of the Raetho-Romance Swish group have a similar relationship to each other as Gascon, Occitan (which has two concurrent rules, Provençal and Languedocian) and Catalan do in the Southern Gallo-Romance group, with Catalan as the most powerful, orthographically and grammatically stable, and culturally relevant language. In Romansh, mutatis mutandis, Sursilvan, the language of the aforementioned Fontana and Camenisch, would be equivalent to Catalan within the Rhaeto-Romance group, which also includes the Ladin dialects of the Dolomites in South Tyrol, now part of Italy. For this reason, this overview of speculative and fantastic fiction in Romansh focuses on Sursilvan, although it should not be forgotten that there are also works of great interest in the other varieties, including in Dolomitic Ladin. For example, their traditional oral literature is allegedly the origin of the legendary matter of the kingdom of Fanes, which has all the characteristics of high fantasy. Unfortunately, this rich mythological and heroic matter, which could rival that which inspired the Finnish Kalevala (1835/1849), seems to be nothing more than a display of fakelore, and even an example of cultural appropriation. It was first published in 1913 by the folklorist Karl Felix Wolff in German, under the title Das Reich der Fanes (The Kingdom of Fanes), but the compiler omitted to include a single line of it in one or the other of the Ladino dialects in which he claimed it had been orally transmitted. Later, there have been several versions of the legend in German and Italian, but only one in Dolomitic Ladin, Angel Morlang’s tragedy Fanes da Zacan (Fanes from Days Gone, 1951).

There are no legends, genuine or false, resembling those of the Fanes in the proper Romansh Kulturdialekte, which are the Surmiran standard and the two varieties of Engadine Ladin. The local production of fantasy is an artistic and individual endeavour. In Surmeir, there is a portal fantasy novel Sindoria (Sindoria, 2013) by Dominique Dosch, which takes place in parallel in our primary world and in a secondary world designated by the name in the title. In Engadine, one of the modern classics is a humorous and acerbic roman à clef entitled La renaschentscha dals Patagons (The Revival of the Patagons, 1949). The Patagonians of the title are none other than the Romansh exposed to the activism of certain intellectuals who would have wished to import the premises and methods of European ethno-nationalism to the region, following above all the Catalan models. Rather than the narrative itself, the most interesting part of the book is perhaps the series of fictional non-fiction reports on the imaginary country of the Patagonians, its organisation and customs. Years later, Ladin writers from Engadine led the modernisation of fantastic and speculative literature in the Romansh-speaking region thanks to a couple of short-story collections by Clo Duri Bezzola and Ana Pitschna Grob-Ganzoni, respectively. The former, entitled Da l’otra vart da la saiv (On the Other Side of the Edge, 1960), includes a masterful fantastic tale entitled “Tube to Nowhere” (Tube to Nowhere), which is set on a London Underground train that ends up in an undefined and mysterious Kafkaesque space. The second, entitled Ballas de savon (Soap Bubbles, 1970), is composed of three short stories: a high fantasy entitled “La clav dal paradis” (The Key to Paradise), a theological fantasy entitled “Ormas dal diavel” (Devil’s Souls) and a highly original science fiction entitled “Inua vi?” (Where?), which takes place on a spaceship and is narrated in the first person by a woman whose emotions are expressed in a highly poetic style that makes this text an outstanding example of lyrical SF prose narration.

In Sursilvan there is a large amount of genuine oral literature, sometimes of pagan origin, such as the short aetiological myths featuring wild men that Caspar Decurtins collected in 1901, in the same volume in which he published the “Canzun da sontga Margriata” (The Song of Saint Margriata), the best-known Romansh folk narrative poem. Despite her name, the main character seems to be a fertility goddess who passes herself off as a shepherd and, after her true sex is discovered (to speak of gender would be anachronistic here), abandons the fields, which become barren. A similar plot is used by other texts conceived as artistic literature, but which are presented as folk texts, such as the tale “Il nurser da Ranasca e la diala nursera” (The Shepherd from Ranasca and the Fairy Shepherdess, 1941) by Guglielm Gadola, and the poem “La diala” (The Fairy, 1925) by Gian Fontana, the brevity and concision of which make its story of the abuse of a fairy by shepherds in a mythical time all the more atrocious.

Other folktales collected by Decurtins were used in a modern Romansh Decameron, set in the Middle Ages and entitled Historias dil Munt Sogn Gieri (Stories from Mount Saint George, 1916), authored by Flurin Camathias. The stories included are for the most part gracefully versified renditions of local folktales that follow the conventional motifs and plots of the fairy tale. We even encounter the traditional combat between knights and dragons, though told with pleasant humour. An exception is “Il sogn cristal” (The Holy Cristal), which describes a Catholic mystical vision related to the Holy Grail.

Whereas Camathias versified oral tales in prose, Sep Mudest Nay did the opposite by developing in prose a popular song (even in our days) entitled “Il salep e la furmicla” (The Grasshopper and the Ant), which Nay turned into a tragicomic, almost neo-realist tale, despite its fabulous subject matter and insect characters. This is perhaps the best-known example of a whole series of stories featuring animals as allegorical figures of humans, as in Gian Fontana’s story “Corvin e Corvina” (Corvin and Corvina, 1971), or living in a fictional secondary world embedded in nature in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s beast fantasies, as it is the case in Rico Tamburnino’s books entitled Igl uaul grond (The Big Forest, 1988) and Ratuzin (Ratuzin, 1990).

The Sursilvan fantasies mentioned so far are closely related to forms of oral literature, even if their writing is not, since the authors generally strive to offer literary versions, stylistically and structurally much more sophisticated than the folk texts themselves. They are works of literary art, not mere transcribed folklore, as befits a literature that had achieved standardisation by the end of the 19^th century, during the so-called Renaschientscha revivalist period, parallel in some ways to that of the Catalan Renaixença. That normalisation, which at first followed (neo)Romantic patterns also in Surselva, became gradually more modernised in its literary outlook. The process was, however, rather slow. Highly original symbolist fantastic prose poems such as “Verdad” (Truth) and “Buntad” (Goodness), were published in 1971, decades after the death of their author, Gian Fontana. A fantastic tale as innovative as Gian Caduff’s “L’uldauna” (The Undine, 1924), which combines psychological fiction, allegory and pagan legend, went virtually unnoticed.

The full alignment of Surselvan literature with modern international trends in speculative fiction was, in fact, something that took place after the Second World War. The main architect of this was Toni Halter. In 1955 he published Culan da Crestaulta (Culan from Crestaulta), a novel set in the Rhaetian Alps in proto-historic times. Its hero, Culan, manages to bring the technology of bronze metallurgy to his village, Crestaulta, which was technologically still in the Neolithic period, after numerous adventures that Halter narrates in a perfectly balanced way between fast-paced action, with hunting and war scenes and even a criminal intrigue, and the detailed recreation of the atmosphere of that time and place. In doing this, he takes full account of both natural and cultural conditioning factors, including power relations among the populations, as well as the way in which customs and beliefs shape mentalities and personal and collective agency. If we add to this the plausibility of the psychological characterisation of its characters, especially the protagonist from adolescence to maturity, and the richness and flexibility of its style, it is perhaps no exaggeration to consider Culan da Crestaulta a world masterpiece of its kind of fiction. In any case, it is an undisputed and repeatedly reprinted classic of Romansh fiction.

Culan da Crestaulta interestingly includes a couple of narrative samples from the invented mythology of the peoples evoked in the novel, so that these examples of mythopoiesis makes the novel all the more appealing as speculative fiction. A later writer, Ursicin G. G. Derungs, did the same in perhaps his most famous story, “Il cavalut verd” (The Little Green Horse), which gives its title to the collection in which it appeared, Il cavalut verd ed auter (The Green Little Horse and Other Things, 1988). That ‘little green horse’ appears one day in an Alpine village to the astonishment and consternation of the adults and the joy and delight of the children, to whom he tells of his origin in an earlier, peaceful, paradisiacal natural world in which everything was permeated by bright colours and music. Its appearance and disappearance are fantastic, but the questioning it implies of the primary reality is not a source of horror, but of wonder. It is also a cause for sadness arising from the conviction that something so beautiful could not remain in our present world. The critique implicit therein is expressed in other speculative stories from the same collection, in which Derungs shows the rhetorical sophistication of his writing. For example, in “Il papa che saveva buca crer en Diu” (The Pope That Could Not Believe in God), a pseudo-historiographical narrative shows the hypocrisy of an official Catholic Church that accepts an atheist Pope, but not his decision to live in the world according to the Gospel. In the short imaginary historiographical text “Ils plats” (The Flat People), a mysterious disease flattening people and its consequences are described using a literary technique that can be considered science-fictional. Other stories by Derungs from the same book are also good examples of speculative fiction of the fantastic kind, such as “La sala de spetga” (The Waiting Room), where that venue is a Kafkaesque symbolic place suggesting an anguishing concept of human existence, and “Niessegner sper il lag dils siemis” (Our Lord by the Lake of Dreams), a masterly Borgesian tale of divine suspension of the flow of time. However, Derungs rarely eschews social criticism in his speculative fiction. This can easily be seen, for example, in a former tale entitled “Correspondenza cul purgatieri” (Letters from Purgatory, published in the 1982 volume Il saltar dils morts (The Dance of the Dead), a highly original vision of the different planes of that theological venue from a rather social perspective, from the hell of selfishness to the utopia that precedes the ineffable space of Heaven.

Other writers of Derungs’s generation adopted similar approaches to speculative fiction, conflating it with social criticism, although not as consistently as he did. Notable works in this vein are, for example, Theo Candinas’ “Descripziun d’in stabiliment” (Description of a Plant, 1974), a piece of fictional non-fiction adopting the highly original form of an architectural and topographical description of the exterior of an industrial slaughterhouse in order to criticise the Swiss party system, and Toni Berther’s “Ils ratuns vegnan” (Rats Are Coming, 1978), which is a kind of historiographical account of a small town’s efforts to attract tourism by organising rat-hunting parties and the catastrophic consequences of the proliferation of these intelligent animals. The black humour of the story and its narrative fluency make of Berther’s parable an effective anti-tourism dystopia.

After this flowering of the speculative and fantastic tale in Surselva, which coincided with the same phenomenon in Engadine, as we saw in the above-mentioned works by Bezzola and Grob-Ganzoni, the following years witnessed the hegemony of postmodernism also in this linguistic area. As a result, realism, albeit sometimes formally innovative as in Arno Camenisch’s case, virtually excluded speculative and fantastic fiction from current Romansh literature. With the exception of the short novel L’umbriva dil temps (The Shadow of Time, 2017) by Paula Casutt-Vinzenz, in which life in a Bronze Age village is recreated with pleasant verisimilitude and from a female perspective, Sursilvan speculative fiction took refuge mainly in young adult literature, especially in the form of high fantasies following global sets of conventions. So do the two novels written by young lady authors entitled Emalio (Emalio, 2015) by Flurina Albin and Stina Hendry and Oranja (Oranja, 2021) by Stella Sennhauser. While the latter reads as a sort of compensatory teenage fantasy, the former shows a surprising maturity in the description of the characters’ motives and actions, as well as a good command of narrative, within the limits of the simple writing style common to the genre of high fantasy in the 21^st century.

Novels such as Emalio give hope that Romansh fantastic and speculative fiction could recover at some point from its current postmodern crisis and, after having adopted high fantasy, may undertake the task of filling in its main gap, the science fiction novel. Even without doing so, the Romansh language in general, and Sursilvan in particular, can still boast of having one of the richest literatures in Europe in relative terms to its small number of speakers, also with regard to fantastic and speculative fiction.

[1] Titles in italics are those of translated works in English that I am aware of. In this case, this short novel by Camenish was translated into English from Romansh, but from the German version written by the author himself. All the other translations mentioned in this essay were published in the following book: The Curly-Horned Cow: Anthology of Swiss-Romansh Literature, edited by Reto R. Bezzola, translated from the Ladin by Elizabeth Maxfield Miller and from the Surselvan by W. W. Kibler, London, Peter Owen, 1971.

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Fact & Opinion

Frankenstein And Cyborgs: Of Proper And Improper Monsters

by Mina

A recurring figure in SF, whatever the sub-genre, is that of the “monster”. One common starting point is with that classical creation, Frankenstein’s monster: made and not begotten, to (mis)quote the Nicene Creed and ascribe new meaning to it. Brian Aldiss goes as far as to call Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the first true SF story because, although it is deeply rooted in the Gothic novel, the central character, Victor Frankenstein “rejects alchemy and magic and turns to scientific research. Only then does he get results.” Mary Shelley herself refers to Darwin in her introduction and stresses that the speculative science in her novel will one day be possible. Two novellas spring immediately to my mind that take the Frankenstein trope and do interesting things with it: Grace Draven’s Gaslight Hades and Eli Easton’s Reparation.

Gaslight Hades (in the “duology” Beneath a Waning Moon) blends gothic and steampunk with romance, and it is clearly referring back to Jules Verne and early SF/fantasy, which extrapolated from the then-known to touch upon the then-fantastical. The romance is unremarkable, but the novella’s protagonist is an intriguing Frankenstein figure: the “Guardian” wears “black armour reminiscent of an insect’s carapace”, his eyes are black with white pinpoints for pupils, his hair and skin are leached of all colour, his voice is hollow. He guards Highgate cemetery from resurrectionists who snatch dead bodies to create soulless zombies. His armour comes alive to protect him from enemy fire (where Frankenstein meets primitive cyborg). It turns out he was created from the body of one man, the soul of another. The process remains vague, but I love the invented words used to describe it: “galvanism combined with gehenna… liquid hell and lightning.” It seems to involve replacing blood with a silver compound and running electricity through it (all holes in logic are covered by vague references to magic, which is a cop-out). The Guardian is not a zombie because he has a will of his own, thoughts and emotions. He talks to the dead, does not eat or sleep and is described as “a Greek myth gone awry, in which a mad Pygmalion begged an even more perverse Aphrodite to bring a male Galatea alive”. So, a pretty monster, with a soul.

Reparation is part of a collection of novellas under the heading Gothika: Stitch (which includes another novella with a golem, a “monster” from Jewish lore and much older than Frankenstein). This novella moves into what we would consider proper SF as it is set on another planet. It weaves rebellion, slavery and space into a love story that is quite good. It is a hidden gem that asks questions about crime, punishment, redemption and forgiveness, moving it one step further than the stark retribution of Frankenstein’s monster. One of the protagonists, Edward, a farmer on the harsh planet of Kalan, loses his adjunct and his wife in an accident that also leaves him recovering from injury. He turns one of his “recon” slaves Knox into his right-hand man in the cultivation and harvesting of lichen “spores” for (he believes) the production of pharmaceuticals. Knox can read and write, is capable of learning and has fleeting memories unlike most recons: “reconstitutes” or cyborgs, part robot and part human. The human parts are taken from Federation prisoners condemned to death. Recons are not allowed to be more than 80% human or they would have human rights; they are programmed against violence and used as manual and factory labour. Knox is (unusually) fully 80% human, most of his body from one prisoner and his brain from another, with 20% reinforced titanium joints and the spore filtration system in his lungs.

In his new role as overseer, Knox moves out of the recon barracks into master Edward’s house. The changes disturb him, such as being spoken to like a person, being thanked, feeling guilty without knowing why, memories slowly resurfacing: “he did not want to hope; did not want consciousness”. Knox battles with feelings of dislocation, too – his massive body is alien to him. It becomes apparent that he has been “conditioned” to fear anything electronic. He remembers his chilling execution in a nightmare. At that point, Knox realises he was “made” and is horrified. Edward tries to comfort him: “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? That your mind survived what was done to you?” Edward treats Knox with kindness and allows him access to his books. But the master is surprised that Knox has a strong grasp of philosophy and moral issues. Knox remembers having spent time in space in a previous life and that he lived on a green planet once, which he thinks is gone. Slowly the fog in his mind begins to clear and he accepts his new body, even enjoys it. Knox and Edward become friends and then lovers.

Knox finally remembers that he was once Trevellyn, a member of the resistance to the Federation. The rebels’ attack on Kalan’s spaceport led to the death of Edward’s father and brother. His guilt and Edward’s initial condemnation leads to a brief rift between them. In his anguish, Knox writes down his memories, a diary and even poetry. In a crisis, with Edward facing deadly sabotage, they reconcile with Edward forgiving Knox for the actions of his past self. Knox breaks his programmed aversion to technology to help Edward survive. As he does so, he remembers why he was in the resistance: the spores are not used for medicine but to terraform planets, willing or not. The Federation used the spores to eradicate all life on his home world so they could turn it into a mining operation – wholesale genocide for profit. Edward is horrified as he did not know. Knox in turn forgives him his ignorance. Together they destroy all current supplies of the spores on Kalan; not winning the war but at least a battle. They decide to leave Kalan, using Edward’s money and Trevellyn’s contacts to move to a primitive world of no interest to the Federation. The romance trumps the politics as is to be expected, but the novella has a depth and originality not usually present in such stories. Best of all, we see the “monster” as a thinking, feeling being that awakens from a long sleep as if emerging from a chrysalis. I liked that this novella was psychologically profound, something that is missing from most depictions of cyborgs.

My first encounter with cyborgs, however, was with the much more superficial The Six Million Dollar Man, with its protagonist Steve Austin as the bionic man: one arm, two legs and one eye are prosthetic and give him superhuman strength, speed and sight. Of course, it was mostly filmed in the late 70s, so the special effects consist of slow motion (to suggest superhuman speed or jumping high), close-ups (to suggest superhuman eyesight) and cheesy sound effects. The bionic man also led to a bionic woman spin-off (Jamie Sommers, with superhuman hearing instead of eyesight), lots of crossovers and some films. The plots, script and characterisation were basic, but it led to the bionic man and woman dolls which I remember wishing I owned as a small child in the 70s, unlike the anodyne Barbie dolls. The bionic man is loosely based on the 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin; the title of the book is much less ambivalent about the nature of the protagonist. Steve Austin had very little personality but was portrayed as a hero and a “goodie”. Subsequent cyborgs in film have tended to remain very two-dimensional but been turned mostly into fighting machines in violent action films like RoboCop or horror/SF such as Moontrap.

To find more complexity, I would rather cite Ghost in the Shell, in particular the 1995 anime version. It’s not as deep as many reviewers seem to think it is; although it does posit interesting philosophical questions, they are presented as if the audience needs everything spelled out. We meet cyborgs with a completely cybernetic body and a computer-augmented brain. As the only biological component, the brain houses the “ghost” (mind/soul/spirit). The main character, Major Kusanagi (with a curiously sexless body, much like a busty mannequin’s), muses: “There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind. Like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure, I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others. But my thoughts and memories are unique only to me. And I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my consciousness.” She also admits: “I guess cyborgs like myself have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins. Sometimes I suspect I’m not who I think I am. Like, maybe, I died a long time ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there was never a real ‘me’ in the first place and I’m completely synthetic”. Her friend Batou tells her that she is treated like other humans and she retorts “that’s the only thing that makes me feel human. The way I’m treated.” And she asks the question crucial to the film: “What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost… and create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?”

The Puppet Master in the film (initially the enemy) claims to have done just that – it is a computer program that has become sentient: “DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species relies upon genes to be its memory system. So, man is an individual only because of his intangible memory. And memory cannot be defined. But it defines mankind. The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own… And can you offer me proof of your existence? How can you? When neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is…. I am not an A.I …I am a living thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.” At the end of the film, the Puppet Master merges with Major Kusanagi because it wants to become a completely living organism, by gaining the ability to reproduce and die. It wants to do more than copy itself as “copies do not give rise to variety and originality”. When it is persuading the Major to agree to the merge, it states that they will create a new and unique entity. The Major argues that she fears death and cannot bear biological offspring; the Puppet Master replies that she “will bear our varied offspring into the net just as humans leave their genetic imprints on their children”, and then death will hold no fear. There is a certain arrogance in the Puppet Master’s arguments too: “I am connected to a vast network, that has been beyond your reach and experience. To humans, it is like staring at the sun, a blinding brightness that conceals a source of great power. We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds. And to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.”

Waking up in a new (child’s) shell procured by Batou, the new entity tells Batou: “When I was a child, my speech, feelings and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways. And now I can say these things without help in my own voice.” I must admit that, being very familiar with the biblical passage[1] being subverted here, I did not find the end particularly original. And it does fall into the lazy “transcendence” plot device so beloved of humanist SF. The plot, in fact, is almost irrelevant. But the film does ask interesting questions about the nature of cyborgs and treats them as much more intricate beings than the usual lean, mean, killing machines. The only other place I have found a proper examination of the nature of cyborgs as sophisticated “monsters” is in the Star Trek canon, through characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Icheb, Locutus/Picard, the Borg Queen and Agnes Jurati (if you want to know more about any of these characters, go to this fan site).

Cyborgs have also made it into story-rich computer games like the Deus Ex series. Deus Ex is a role-playing adventure game with “augmented” humans (through nanotechnology reminiscent of the Borgs in Star Trek), incorporating combat, first-person shooter and stealth elements. For me, despite the fascinating world building, complicated politics, conspiracy theories, historical mythologies and speculative and dystopian fiction, the cyborgs remain lean, mean, fighting or stealth machines. If I have understood the concept behind the game correctly, however, the cyborgs can become as multi-faceted as the player wishes, with a lot of interaction with non-player characters, freedom of choice and open-ended plot lines. They are a little like hollow shells filled with the ghost the player gives them. But my feeling is still that the main fascination with these cyborgs remains their superhuman abilities granted by their augmentations, like in much SF. It is a shame that these wonderfully genre-hopping entities aren’t allowed more into the realms of Sci-Phi, as they represent a great opportunity to reflect on “human” identity (like the crisis of identity Knox and the Major undergo) and what sentience is and could be. There is curiously little speculation into a (for now) fictional “monster” that begs for far more existential debate.

Coda: There are some satisfying cyborg poems out there like Cyborg – Matthew Harlovic and The Cyborg – Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer.

And here is one I wrote just for this essay:

Emerging

Where am I?

Pain, God, so much burning pain,

I am lost in its undertow.

Then, it spits me out onto jagged rocks

Like flailing flotsam.

I open my eyes to

Blinding light and blank walls.

A neurological pulse and

I raise my arm to flex

Gleaming alloy fingers.

Memory floods back

To who I was

Before.

“You are paralysed from

The neck down

Mr Jones.

We can offer you

A new life.”

I look at my perfect

Alien body which I inhabit

But do not own.

What will the price of

This Faustian bargain be?

I find that, right now,

I do not care.

I feel a fierce joy that

I am alive and

Something new.

Maybe, later,

I will learn to be afraid.

[1] 1 Corinthians 13 (11-12): “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” (This is the New King James Version; verse 12 is much more poetic in the original King James Version: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”)

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fact & Opinion

A Very Short History Of Right-Wing Science Fiction In Poland

by Stanisław Krawczyk

Several years ago, I spoke to a British science fiction author at Pyrkon, a Polish convention. I told him that the history of SF in Poland had had a marked right-wing component. Many leading writers had grown up in the Polish People’s Republic, a post-WWII state formed under heavy Soviet influence, and they had developed strong negative feelings about the state and its proclaimed socialist ideology. In consequence, they later disliked all manner of things associated with the left.

“I know,” the author told me. “I’m from Britain and I’m left-wing. I grew up under Margaret Thatcher.”

Much of North American and British SF now leans to the left. It would be simplistic, of course, to ascribe it all to the writers’ biographical experience with Thatcher and Reagan. It would also be simplistic to explain everything in Polish SF with a reference to the Polish People’s Republic. Still, if we want to understand the strong right-wing leanings of SF prose in Poland in the 1990s and their partial reverberation in later decades, going back to the 1970s and 1980s is inevitable.

We should keep in mind, though, that the “right-wing” label is, necessarily, a generalization. More research would be needed to clarify what a right-wing worldview meant for different groups and in different periods. I hope that such research will be carried out in time.

Under the Soviet shadow

The late history of the Polish People’s Republic coincides with the early history of the Polish SF fandom. Among the several dates we could choose as symbolic starting points for the latter, the most suitable seems the year 1976. It was then that the influential All-Polish Science Fiction Fan Club was founded in Warsaw, and its members took part in the third edition of EuroCon, itself organized in Poland. The fandom began to grow quickly in the mid-1970s, and so did the number of SF novels and short stories. Throughout the 1980s, more and more independent fan clubs were also set up, and more and more grassroots conventions were organized.

In most cases, science fiction writers and fans were not directly engaged in the dissident movement. However, they often had little love for the state authorities. To begin with, they shared in the broader discontent with the deteriorating economy and political oppression. In the book publishing system, the combined effect of printing issues, paper shortages, and state-wide censorship was that some books suffered delays that could last years. And a severely limited access to Western culture was a major obstacle for those interested in SF.

Because of censorship, this enmity could not be openly expressed in public. However, it did find an indirect expression in the subgenre of sociological science fiction. Its foremost author, Janusz A. Zajdel (1938–1985), a nuclear physicist and a committed member of the Solidarity movement, published five novels in this subgenre. They may be read as universal visions of enslaved societies, but they may also be read as a veiled criticism of the realities of the Polish People’s Republic. The novels quickly became popular, and Zajdel was posthumously made the patron of the most important award for speculative fiction in Poland.

To the right and against the left

The years 1989–1991 were a political breakthrough, ushering in the Third Polish Republic. Censorship was gone, and the available spectrum of expression became much wider. As part of my PhD, I have studied commentaries on public matters in the central journal of the Polish SF field, Nowa Fantastyka. Liberal, progressive, or left-wing ideas were very rare; right-wing ideas were quite frequent. This image seems even sharper than in the whole Polish society, which did turn towards the right overall, but which also gave the most votes to a post-communist coalition in parliamentary elections in 1993 and which elected a post-communist candidate as president in 1995.

A recurrent thread in the journal was negative references to the Polish People’s Republic. These were part of a narrative that attributed a positive role to the Polish science fiction of the 1980s, casting it as instrumental in the social resistance against the authorities and underscoring its advantage over that decade’s “mainstream literature”. A strong opposition was thus constructed between the SF field and the authorities. Only later was serious consideration given to the idea that the latter may have treated sociological SF as a safety valve, enabling the publication of allegorical criticism as an apparently ineffective form of protest.

A few less regular threads can also be traced in editorials and columns in Nowa Fantastyka in the 1990s. They can be summarized as religious and bioethical conservatism, a critique of cultural trends associated with the left (political correctness, relativism, feminism), and a critique of the European Union. Each of these themes was only represented by a small number of texts, but together they demonstrate that right-wing ideas were expressed much more often than liberal or left-wing ones.

In addition, in the early 1990s two key figures of the SF field decided to try their luck in politics. Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz was a spokesman of a right-wing party between 1993 and 1994, and Lech Jęczmyk was a candidate of two other right-wing parties in parliamentary elections in 1991 and 1993. However, neither became a successful politician, and this kind of involvement in the public sphere remained rare.

The 1990s pessimism

Apart from the commentaries, a right-wing worldview permeated science fiction itself. According to a later essay by Jacek Dukaj – an accomplished SF writer in his own right – this manifested partly in “the conviction that destructive civilizational processes were inevitable,” which replaced a previous sentiment, “the sense that there was no alternative to the Soviet rule.”[1] Indeed, Polish science fiction in the 1990s was largely pessimistic, and its anxieties appear similar to those in right-wing discourse outside the SF field: in the media or in parliamentary politics.

One common theme was the spiritual fall of Western Europe, or even all Europe. Possibly the most influential writer dealing with this topic – then an author of numerous novels and short stories, now a well-known opinion journalist – was Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz. His short story A source without water (Źródło bez wody, 1992) will be a good illustration. In that story, Western Europe has been dominated by Islam; the Roman Catholic Church, too, has become lax and soft, and must be renewed. The moral corruption also has a sexual side, which is revealed in a notable detail. One of the characters we follow is an important official who forces himself to sleep with women he despises. He does so to maintain a womanizer’s façade, which he needs to safely turn down the offers from highly placed gays. Western Europe was also shown at times as a direct threat to Polish independence, as in Barnim Regalica’s short story collection Rebellion (Bunt, 1999). It presents an uprising against the European Union, which has taken away Poland’s sovereignty.

Another significant theme was abortion. Here a telling example is Marek S. Huberath’s novelette The major punishment (Kara większa, 1991). It shows a man imprisoned in an afterlife which is part hell, part purgatory, and which resembles a combination of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. A part of the afterlife’s population are embryos that have been torn apart by abortion and now need to be sewn back together by women who had aborted other embryos. An editor’s note accompanying the piece in Nowa Fantastyka called it “a dramatic pendant to the . . . discussion on abortion,”[2] and several months later another editor commented on the readers’ reactions: “It appears that even an artistic voice in favor of life can evoke angry reactions, and that ‘the civilization of death’ has determined followers among our readers.”[3] Other notable examples include Tomasz Kołodziejczak’s Rise and go (Wstań i idź, 1992), which highlights the ubiquity of abortion and euthanasia in the macdonaldized United States, or Wojciech Szyda’s The psychonaut (Psychonautka, 1997), in which Christ is incarnated and killed again as an aborted foetus.

Beyond a stereotype

Despite the caveat I made in the introduction, it may seem at this point that the contemporary history of Polish SF is a monolith. However, there are a few ways to illustrate that this image would be inaccurate. First, in 1990, a 15-year-old Jacek Dukaj published a short story The Golden Galley (Złota Galera), focused on an extremely powerful and rather immoral organization that blended corporation and church into one. The story was hailed as the first in the subgenre (?) called “clerical fiction,” which also featured some pieces by writers who might be easily identified later as right-wing. Perhaps the authors’ aversion to state oppression was such that they would not accept a hegemonic political role of any institution, even the Roman Catholic Church, which may have seemed poised for similar power in the early 1990s. If we looked from today’s perspective and focused on the cooperation of the Church and the political right throughout the Third Polish Republic, the phenomenon of “clerical fiction” would be impossible to explain.

Second, Polish SF and related commentaries (at least those in Nowa Fantastyka) became less visibly right-wing after the early 2000s. Of course, these attitudes have not disappeared; one illustration would be the national focus of many alternative history novels in a multi-authored book series Switch Rails of Time (Zwrotnice Czasu, 2009–2015). However, capitalism has grown to be a much more powerful force than the right-wing worldview in the field of SF in Poland. Together with the concurrent generational change, it means that fewer and fewer writers have been treating science fiction as a means to changing people’s minds, including a change towards the right. Instead, fiction has been perceived more and more as a market commodity, aimed at giving people what they already want. This is in itself a very short look at a very complex process, but the bottom line (to use an economic metaphor) is that the space has shrunk for SF which carries openly political ideas.

Third, some recent developments indicate a growing potential of left-wing science fiction. For instance, in 2020–2021, a fan group Alpaka released a collection of queer speculative fiction, Nowa Fantastyka published an issue devoted to LGBT+ topics, and Katarzyna Babis – illustrator, comic artist and political activist – publicly criticized a number of older works in her YouTube video series The Old Men of Polish SF&F (Dziady Polskiej Fantastyki). There have also been noteworthy ideological clashes in the Polish science fiction and fantasy fandom around Jacek Komuda and Andrzej Pilipiuk, two writers active since the 1990s. It is too early to say that the left-wing worldview has established its presence in Polish SF, but it may happen.

Questions of capitalism, questions of context

Right-wing science fiction in Poland had its time foremostly in the 1990s (and early 2000s). Some of its elements remained, but in general Polish SF became less overtly political. Do the current developments mean that the genre is on track to active involvement with the public sphere again, right-wing, left-wing, or otherwise? It is possible, given that capitalism itself – or its present version – is increasingly becoming an object of public critique. The book market could change to create different conditions for writers and readers. But it is just that, a possibility, and even in that case it may also be other genres of speculative fiction that will carry the political mantle this time.

Regardless of what the future holds, we have seen that the ideas conveyed through Polish SF in the 1980s and 1990s were related to the historical context of those two decades (including the writers’ own biographies). When the context changed, the ideas did, too. This is not to say that there is some social determinism at work here; I prefer to think about fiction as a response to the empirical reality, not just its reflection. This response sometimes goes in surprising directions, as in the case of “clerical fiction.” However, we can understand SF better if we understand its context. And we can certainly say it does not naturally lean to the right or to the left; it can do both, or neither.

To know more about these leanings, we would need to look at other science fiction traditions, too. Would a hypothesis hold that other post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have had a similar ideological trajectory in their SF? Has there been a markedly different trajectory common to the countries of Western Europe? And what about other regions, such as Latin America?

If context matters, it is not just the national context but also the regional and global one. This broader story, however, has yet to be told.

~

Bio:

Stanisław Krawczyk is a sociologist and opinion journalist living in Warsaw. Once engaged actively in the fandom, he has now published a book in Polish, based on his PhD, on the history of the science fiction and fantasy field in Poland. He has also studied video games and the situation of the Polish humanities and social sciences under the recent research assessment regimes.

[1] Jacek Dukaj, Wyobraźnia po prawej stronie, część trzecia [Imagination on the right side: Part three], Wirtualna Polska, https://ksiazki.wp.pl/wyobraznia-po-prawej-stronie-czesc-trzecia-6146199054882433a, April 26, 2010.

[2] Maciej Parowski, Marek S. Huberath, Nowa Fantastyka 7/1991, p. 41.

[3] Lech Jęczmyk, untitled editorial, Nowa Fantastyka 3/1992, p. 1.

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