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A Science-Fiction Fantasy Andblackmagic”Not Was Beto Fiction Foray Into What Mccafferty Labels “Blades Phoenix on the Sword’

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A Science-Fiction Fantasy Andblackmagic”Not Was Beto Fiction Foray Into What Mccafferty Labels “Blades Phoenix on the Sword’ FUTURES NATURE|Vol 465|24 June 2010 A science-fiction fantasy The magic of the written word. Paul Di Filippo repeated. Howard — who died just last year at the JACEY Making a Case for Morrisian Fiction: Why lamentably early age of Heroic Epic Fantasy Is So Rare 105 on his Texas ranch by Professor L. McCafferty — was tapped to pen the (University of Syrtis Major Press, 2011) exploits of the pulp science Reviewed by Thomas Brightwork for hero Doc Savage, and turned Nature. all his energies in that direc- tion. And Weird Tales, under Some academics have nothing better to the inexpert editorship of do with their time than fruitlessly to argue H. P. Lovecraft, went bankrupt ‘What if?’ Of course, as any literate person the next year, sending Lovecraft knows, this mode of thought experiment himself into a non-literary career. is perfectly suited to science fiction, and (Yes, that beloved national institution, in fact is one of the main tools of that all- Lovecraft’s Yankee Ice Cream Company, encompassing literature that so dominates was founded by the same fellow.) today’s bookstores, cinemas, classrooms The subsequent several decades saw and canonical journals. But professors sporadic and limited incursions of such utmost seeking seriously to examine matters of fiction, cropping up like occasional cuckoo satisfaction literary history should restrict themselves eggs in the pages of various science-fiction and zest with to more scholarly tools and approaches, pulps: works by de Camp and Pratt, Hub- their daily lives, their careers and civic and avoid speculative avenues. We schol- bard, Leiber and Brackett. But without a challenges. The Age of the New Frontiers ars cannot, after all, compete with the likes committed editor or dedicated venue to had dawned, and science fiction was the of such living masters as Bester, Sterling, serve as a centre for their efforts, Morrisian perfect embodiment of it, eventually com- Atwood and Weinbaum. writers did not prosper. ing to dominate the literary world as it still For the first half of his book, however, Then, of course, the Second World War does to this day. Professor McCafferty does hew to the intervened. The dire events of that global It is at this point in his narrative that straight and narrow in impeccable fashion. calamity — can anyone forget such atroci- Professor McCafferty goes off the rails of This portion of his study forms a useful ties as the Nazi fire-bombing of Oxford, history and into a speculative terra incog- primer on the roots and brief efflorescence which wiped out so many promising schol- nita. He spins out an improbable scenario of a minor genre of fiction that nowadays ars, C. Lewis, J. Tolkien and a visiting Jos. by which Morrisian fantasy — an unlikely is as dead as the epistolary novel. Campbell among them? — concentrated and repugnant blend of megalomaniacal Professor McCafferty traces the birth the minds of both writers and readers on delusions; crude bipolar divisions of the of what he terms “Heroic Epic Fantasy” hard reality. Tales set in “secondary crea- world into good and evil; infantile narcis- or “Morrisian Fiction” back to the late tions” held no allure: they seemed to smell sistic Messianic beliefs; contravention of Victorian period, specifically the “prose of shirking one’s duty, of a wilful, unpat- the laws of physics and cosmology; retro- romances” of William Morris. He fol- riotic refusal to face tough facts and deal gressive privileging of monarchies and lows its haphazard development in the with them. ‘Escapism’ became a taunt feudalism; deliberate ignorance and sup- works of such forgotten authors as George and slur. Technology and science fiction, pression of the harsh crudity of pre-tech- MacDonald, William Hope Hodgson and however, went hand in hand, the litera- nological living conditions; and a reliance Lord Dunsany. McCafferty’s analysis of the ture serving as a playful and entertaining, on clichéd supernatural entities — could themes, tropes and styles of this kind of utopian laboratory to explicate and inspire have become a best-selling mode of fic- fiction are cogent and exhibit a keen intel- the modern, scientific path of progress — tion. So morbidly and upsettingly vivid is lect. He makes a particularly telling point admittedly, with no little allegiance to the McCafferty’s portrayal of this ridiculous when he focuses on the fact that the major- military-industrial complex. scenario — a world in which readers stick ity of these fictions took place in invented With the end of war, and the advent of their heads, ostrich-like, into overblown worlds, “secondary creations” with no the Western–Soviet détente, conditions and endlessly protracted multivolume tales apparent ties to our own continuum. It became even less hospitable for the Mor- of schools for wizards, omnipotent rings was this tragic flaw, we learn, that would risian writers. During the post-conflagra- and battles between vampires and were- ultimately doom the genre. tion Renaissance, all the world’s attention wolves, rather than creatively face the real In the twentieth century, during the era was concentrated on such shared human issues of the day and solve them — that of the pulp magazines, there were minor enterprises as space exploration, undersea one almost suspects the good professor has eruptions of such fiction, most notably in mining, macro-engineering and the con- gained illicit access to the Large Hadron the magazine Weird Tales. For instance, in struction of nuclear fusion power plants. Collider’s Multiversal Viewing Scanner, 1932, the famous writer Robert E. Howard Science education flourished at all levels, and has actually seen a warped timeline published his one and only story con- with competitive Knowledge Bowls — where such a sordid state of affairs is the cerning a barbarian named Conan: ‘The both domestic and between friendly rival hideous norm. ■ Phoenix on the Sword’. But this abortive countries — coming to overwhelm profes- Paul Di Filippo’s new novel, Roadside foray into what McCafferty labels “blades sional sports. International polls revealed Bodhisattva, will be available in spring 2010. He continues to review for various venues. FUTURES and black magic” fiction was not to be that the majority of citizens experienced 1110 © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
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