ON SCIENCE-FICTION CRITICISM by James Blish

RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY 171 August 1968 Vol 3, No.3 Editor: Leland Sapiro RQ Miscellany Associate and assistant editors: Jim Harmon, Jim Sallis, Redd Boggs Bill Blackboard, Jon White HAPPENINGS UP NORTH Send all correspondence and manuscripts to : Thanks are owed to Ivor Rogers and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee for their May "Secondary Universe" conference, the Box 40 Univ. Sta., Regina, Canada most informative fantasy event in recent years. Inspection of local breweries made it difficult to behave with the dignity expec TABLE OF CONTENTS ted from the Crown's Canadian representative—and I found myself attending Professor Kilby's keynote address in absentia and RQ Miscellany .......................... 171 sleeping through Judith Merril's lunch-hour speech, tfowever, I Blish, van Vogt, & the Uses of Spengler can attest personally to other interesting events, including sym RichardD. Mullen.... 172 posia on contemporary s.f. and on its precursors (with Samuel Delany, Tom Clareson, etc.), a showing of Ed Emsh's film. "Rela H.G. Wells, Critic of Progress tivity," and performances, by Prof .Rogers' students , of plays dis (3rd of 5 parts) ..Jack Williamson .... 187 cussed this issue under the heading,"Ray Bradbury off Broadway." Some Religious Aspects of Lord of the Rings Sandta Miesel ....." 209 Also to be praised are Peter Gill, Ken Smookler, et. al. for their July Triple Fan Fair at Toronto. Difficulties—but no com On Science Fiction Criticism plaints— resulted from the open-air exhibit of paintings and its James Blish................. 214 three-block separation from the Fair's cinematic portion; what remains clearest in memory are the convention's positive aspects Jeweled City —Roger Zelazny's speech (his best of the year), a symposium on Kris Neville 218. Space Odyssey: 2001 (with explanations why banality was delib Ray Bradbury in France erately introduced into this movie), and what was possibly the? Sam Moskowitz ................226 only edible convention dinner (at L'Escargoir's French res taurant) ever served. Ray Bradbury off Broadway John Boardman............ 229 COMMEMORATIVE ISSUES Cordwainer Smith The current J.G. Ballard and Cordwainer Smith items originally Roger Zelazny.............232 had been scheduled for special issues dedicated to these writers Opere Citato —and are printed now because financial troubles may cause these Harry Warner, Jr. .. 234 issues to be postponed forever. There is a puzzle with regard to Cordwainer Smith, who stated in the interview described on p.233 The Seasonal Fan that his first published story, "War No. 81-Q," appeared in a Jim Harmon ......................238 1928 Amazing Stories. A search through my files and the Bleiler Selected Letters ............................... 243 -Ditky Index reveals no such title in any s.f. magazine of the 20's—and there is no explanation I can offer. Front cover: Charles Schneeman Relative to Jeweled City, Kris Neville explains that he made no attempt to mimic the literary style of J.G. Ballard because?-- Robert Gilbert 170, 233, 249 ATOM 251, 252 George Foster, Jr. 174, 176, 179, 184, 185 .. .while style is central and unique to a writer, it' s somewhat peripheral to a writer's ideas except in those cases where it Jack Gaughan 190, 193, 196, 199,201, 204 is a substitute and an end in itself... I was attempting...to Jay Kinney 220, 222, 224 Dan Adkins 236 take...some of the major elements that Ballard likes to play with (geometric forms, surrealistic scenes, birds, time re DEA 208, 211, 213, 231 Mike Higgs 216, 240 versal, decaying landscapes, jewels? evolutionary reversals, Mike Gilbert 172, 187, 209, 218, 226, 229 etc.) and by his technique of exploiting the reader by...ap peals to subconscious responses...to combine these raw mater Gretchen Schwenn 186, 207, 225, 243 ials to tell a story that I felt was more relevant to the human Copyright 1968 by Leland Sapiro condition than the abstractions he seems to find of such trans cendent importance. All I did was to rearrange the elements and 50c per issue Si.50 per year try to tie them together—the geometric forms to the birds to Read picture-panel from top down the nest-building to the decaying landscapes, and eventually identify members of RQ's editorial sta • to place the jewels in decaying landscapes befouled by birds, Jim Sallis, Bill Blackbeard, Leland Sapiro, etc. etc. It is intended as a serious criticism of Ballard's Redd Boggs, Jim Harmon, Jon White. writings on Ballard's own terms. (continued on page 250) THE USES OF SPENGLER 173 172 The aim once attained;—the idea,, the entire content of Cfikh, vmlVcc^ anbik/uws of inner possibilities, fulfilled1 and made actual—the Cul ture suddenly hardens, it mortifies,, its blood congeala, ita force breaks down, and it becomes1 Civilization, the thing which we- feel and understand in the words Egypt ic- ism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such it may, like the worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust its decay ing branches toward the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic by CrPkfaavS <£X cM^icn^ world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness... (I,106):. The West has reached full civilization, and its culture is dead,, but its civilization, and its empire, may endure for centuries or millenia. #1 — THE SPENGLERIANISM OF "BLACK DESTROYER" Since "Black Destroyer"'5 is still being reprinted and is 4 That Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West has been of some use to science-fiction writers is indicated in the probably much better known than The Voyage of the Space Beagle, following note by James Blish: we will deal with the short story itself rather than with the revision in which it forms Chapters 1-6 of the novel. The first two published stories by A.E. van Vogt were ex plicitly Spenglerian—in fact the characters lectured each Although Mr. Blish is not quite correct in saying the char other out of Per Untergang des Abenlandes at some length acters lecture each other out of Spengler, it is certainly true1 while Black Destroyer and the Discord in Scarlet crept that the archeologist lectures the other members of the explo closer and closer—but van Vogt soon abandoned this rather ration team out of a Spengler he has committed to memory: difficult thinker for the more manageable scholia of gen "There is a mystery here. Take a- look, all of you, at that eral semantics , Bates eye exercises, and Scientology. My majestic skyline. Notice the almost Gothic line of the ar own "Okie" stories were also founded in Spengler (though chitecture. In spite of the megalopolis which they created I hope less obtrusively), which may begone reason why they these people were close to the soil...Here is the equiva reminded some reviewers of van Vogt. lent of the Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic Spengler is indeed a difficult thinker—or at least a difficult cathedral, growing out of the ground, earnest, big with writer—as anyone will discover who attempts to make a table destiny" (p.187). similar to the one that appears with this essay. Part of the Doric, pyramid-period, and Gothic art are products of spring difficulty stems from our tendency to equate cultures with em time cultures; megalopolises are created only by civilizations. pires and other political units, a delusion from which Toynbee Since Spengler hardly allows for such a contradiction, our Spen should have freed us even if Spengler did not. A related dif glerian is right in finding it mysterious. The accuracy of his ficulty lies in the title: "the decline of the West" inevitably memory can be seen from this sentence by the master himself:: suggests "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire," and one is "The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral, likely to assume that Spengler is predicting the military con grow out of the ground, earnest, big with destiny" (II, 92). quest of the West rather than merely arguing that the West is in a certain kind of decline. Still another lies in the fact The archeologist distinguishes correctly between civiliza that Spengler uses the words culture and civilization sometimes tion and culture, but is confused on the Battle of Tours: in such a way that they appear to be synonymous with society This is not a decadent, hoary-with-age civilization, but and sometimes as technical terms with opposed meanings. kfhat- a young and vigorous culture, confident, strong with pur ever may be true of things, two words synonymous with a third pose. There it ended. Abruptly, as if at this point cul are not necessarily equal to each other, and we should under ture had its Battle of Tours? and began to collapse like stand from the beginning that for Spengler culture and civili the ancient Mohammedan civilization. Or as if in one leap zation are opposed states in the spiritual history of a society: it spanned the centuries and entered the period of con A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens tending states. In the Chinese civilization that period out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, occupied 480-230 B.C., at the end of which the state of and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded Tsin saw the beginning of the Chinese Empire. This phase and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring...It Egypt experienced between 1780—1580 B.C. of which the last century was the 'Hyksos'—unmentionable—time. The dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its Classical experienced it from Chaeronea—338—and, at the possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, pitch of horror, from the Gracchi—133—to Actium—31 B.C.

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