Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Edited by William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A Routledge Series Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor “Like Parchment in the Fire” “Visionary Dreariness” Literature and Radicalism in the English Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime Civil War Markus Poetzsch Prasanta Chakravarty Fighting the Flames Between the Angle and the Curve The Spectacular Performance of Fire at Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Coney Island Willa Cather and Toni Morrison Lynn Kathleen Sally Danielle Russell Idioms of Self-Interest Rhizosphere Credit, Identity, and Property in English Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Renaissance Literature Writings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jill Phillips Ingram Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner Machine and Metaphor Mary F. Zamberlin The Ethics of Language in American Realism Jennifer Carol Cook The Spell Cast by Remains The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American “Keeping Up Her Geography” Literature Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in Patricia A. Ross Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture Strange Cases Tanya Ann Kennedy The Medical Case History and the British Novel Jason Daniel Tougaw Contested Masculinities Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Revisiting Vietnam Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray Memoirs, Memorials, Museums Nalin Jayasena Julia Bleakney Unsettled Narratives Equity in English Renaissance The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Literature Melville, and London Thomas More and Edmund Spenser David Farrier Andrew J. Majeske The Subject of Race in American “You Factory Folks Who Sing This Science Fiction Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Sharon DeGraw Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan Wes Mantooth The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction Sharon DeGraw I~ ~~o~f!;n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2007 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2007 Taylor & Francis The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on appropriate page within text. ISBN: 97804159790 I 6 (hbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeGraw, Sharon, Ph.D. The subject of race in American science fiction / Sharon DeGraw. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-97901-6 (alk. paper) 1. Science fiction, American--History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Subjectivity in literature. 4. Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 1875-1950--Criticism and interpretation. 5. Schuyler, George Samuel, 1895---Criticism and interpretation. 6. Delany, Samuel R.--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS374.S35D38 2006 813'.0876209355--dc22 2006027408 In memory of my mother, Marilyn DeGraw Contents Acknowledgments ix Chapter One Burroughs 1 Chapter Two Schuyler 53 Chapter Three Delany 105 Appendix Timeline 187 Notes 189 Works Cited 213 Index 225 vii Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank Dr. Robert Shelton for his continual encourage- ment, insight, and patience. Without him, I would not have finished this project. In addition, Dr. Katherine Fishburn has been instrumental to the theoretical development of my ideas. Finally, I must acknowledge the sup- port of my family. In particular, my father and mother always encouraged my educational endeavors and have helped me with my graduate studies in too many ways to name. My father was a cheerful proofreader for the present manuscript as well. Likewise, my husband has always believed in me and, since the birth of our two children, has been a wonderful ‘babysitter.’ Thank you all for your help—I certainly needed it. ix Chapter One Burroughs IN THE BEGINNING The genre of science fiction is widely considered to have started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in Great Britain in 1818. However, as Rob- ert Scholes and Eric Rabkin note in a brief history of science fiction, “When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, science fiction had neither a name or any recognition as a separate form of literature [and t]his situation lasted for a century” (7). Such generic ambiguity and critical retrospection mark the field of science fiction studies. In a more comprehensive history of science fiction, Edward James highlights the sharp rise in English language texts deal- ing with the future from the 1850s onward. He states that “[t]hroughout the [19th] century, most of the respected (male) writers of fiction in the United States had dabbled in what we could call science fiction” (Science 33)1. How- ever, “[s]f was first named, and first became a genre, in the science fiction magazines published in the United States before the Second World War” (E. James, Science 66). In such a literary context, early writers of science fiction were not consciously writing within the genre. In fact, many wrote with other genres in mind. For example, when Edgar Rice Burroughs began his writing career in the 1910s, he wrote adventure fiction for all-fiction magazines. We simply classify many of his texts as science fiction from a con- temporary critical vantage point. ERB merits special attention from Edward James because he is “probably the most influential of the writers who began in the pulps” (Science 45). Given the lack of generic formation before the first decades of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that “[m]any of the important names in the early science fiction magazines had already written science fiction for several years in the general fiction pulps” (ibid). The science fiction texts were simply published alongside other popular adventure 1 2 The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction tales—the westerns of Zane Grey, the African adventures of H. Rider Hag- gard, and the northern stories of Jack London, for example.2 In the United States, the combination of a “fin de siecle” feeling (E. James, Science 31), an increase in literacy, and a growing interest in “science and technology” led first to the inclusion of science fiction in cheap, all-fiction pulp magazines and then the increasing specialization of these magazines up through the 1930s (Scholes and Rabkin 35). In his book, The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, Paul Carter chronicles the rise of the pulps and their association with science fiction. Carter begins the first chapter with Hugo Gernsback because he founded and edited Amazing Stories, “the first periodical in the world devoted solely to science fiction” (4). In addition, as the editor of several pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Gernsback had a formative effect on the evolution of the genre. As Edward James asserts, “The creation of specialist science fiction magazines was a recognition of the existence of a genre, and once that genre was named, in the late 1920s—first as ‘scientifiction,’ and then as ‘science fiction’—we get our first attempts at definitions. It is no coincidence that the first definitions came with the coiner of those names, Hugo Gernsback” (Science 52). Both Carter and James emphasize Gernsback’s scientific positivism and the tremendous influence of the “Gernsback-Sloane-Tremaine-Campbell [edi- torial] guidelines” on science fiction (Carter 18). Education of the public, progress, and extrapolation were all key components of the editors’ focus on science. However, despite this scientific emphasis and attempts to define the genre accordingly, science fiction has always had a dual nature in which the fictional format is equally important as the science. Gernsback, for example, suggested that the ideal science fiction text would be one quarter science and three quarters romance (E. James, Science 52). In this context, Carter notes that some science fiction writers “were simply impatient at the neces- sity for interrupting their storylines to get the science straightened out. They were, after all, writing for cash for magazines published as men’s-adventure pulps in which fast action was the sine quo non” (19). Edgar Rice Burroughs was one such writer. He serves as a representative early science fiction writer in his incredible output and the multi-generic aspect of his work. Due to the generic ambiguity of early science fiction—its lack of theoretical definition and roots in other literary genres—Burroughs combined adventure fiction, romance, and science fiction, often in one text. In fact, despite giving Burroughs a prominent place in their histories of the science fiction field, both Carter and James oppose ERB to Gernsback’s scientific focus. Edward James asserts that “[t]here was little or no pretence at scientific correctness in Burroughs” (Science 45–6), and he follows the lead of Brian Aldiss, another Burroughs 3 science fiction historian, in labeling Burroughs’ work as escapist and thought- stifling (Trillion 164–5). While the debate over the definition and generic boundaries of science fiction continues to this day, 3 a strong uniformity of perspective existed in other key areas of the early science fiction field. First, a single, highly individ- ualistic action hero took center stage in the majority of the texts due to the literary roots of American science fiction in adventure fiction. This heroic protagonist was almost always male and of Anglo descent. The protagonist’s textual dominance, heroic nature, and representative status all combined to convey the normalcy and universalism of the Anglo male perspective. The hero represented not only his country and/or race, but also ideal manhood and the entire human race (in opposition to aliens).4 Many times the protagonist also narrated the story, obscuring even the possibility of competing per- spectives.

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