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CRITIQUE OF FANTASY, VOL. II Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) Laurence A. Rickels CRITIQUE OF FANTASY VOLUME 2 The Contest between B-Genres Brainstorm Books Santa Barbara, California critique of fantasy, vol. 2: the contest between b-genres. Copyright © 2020 Laurence A. Rickels. This work carries a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform, and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors and editors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2020 by Brainstorm Books An imprint of punctum books, Earth, Milky Way https://www.punctumbooks.com isbn-13: 978-1-953035-18-9 (print) isbn-13: 978-1-953035-19-6 (epdf) doi: 10.21983/P3.0278.1.00 lccn: 2020939532 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: “Palm Springs, CA,” July 8, 2016. Photograph by moominsean. Frontispiece: “Séance Fiction,” 2020. Photograph by Nancy Barton. Contents Preface 15 (In which the author sees the TV show Westworld go forward with androids that are surrogates on the Internet reaching back through the history of the contest between B-genres) Chapter 1 Links with the Missing 19 The Soup (The first American superhero fantasy arises in alternation with science fiction stuck in the revolving door of the E.R. Burroughs crypt) Test Rooms (Mike Kelley, Harry Harlow, Martha Graham, and Isamu Noguchi) MOE-THER (John Bowlby on the case of Charles Darwin) Play Mobility (Beginning with the transitional object, according to D.W. Winnicott, creativity from the vantage of the reader or receiver relies on and resides in the play in the object relation) The Trace Against Time (Henri Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso captures the artist’s wish to retain the whole process of painting, discarded version by discarded version, as the other work of art. Carried forward within the retention span that Pablo Picasso wished upon is his inner girl) Chapter 2 A New Mythic Fairy Tale 59 Deserters (Gotthard Günther on the stories that are the stations of “Overcoming Space and Time,” as announced by the title of his edited collection. In the beginning there is Clifford D. Simak’s “Desertion.” Neoteny between Stephen J. Gould and Konrad Lorenz) Desert Ghosts (Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” is the story in Günther’s collection that blasts the metaphysical aspect of the heavens. Paul Mayersberg’s adaptation projects the American west as the limit concept of the film medium and new frontier of haunting. Old ghosts and new ghosts in The Dead Don’t Die) Overcoming Subject, Will, Time, and Reality (Günther’s countdown to an overcoming continues: John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” Stanley Weinbaum’s “The Lotus Eaters,” H. Beam Piper’s “Time and Time Again,” and A.E. van Vogt’s “Resurrection”) Dianetics of Enlightenment (Following out Günther’s further reflections on van Vogt’s work, we traverse the clearing text of demolition of metaphysical traditions, which was syndicated in a therapy the author helped pioneer, which modifies the crypt for storage of symptoms that cannot be busted) Vogt by Hollywood (On the trail of the legend that Alien robbed van Vogt. The stations in Dan O’Bannon’s staggered acknowledgment of van Vogt: Dark Star, Planet of the Vampires, and Lifeforce) Tentacular Demonology (Our precarious relationship to tentacular thought according to Vilém Flusser) Through the Looking Glass (The final selection in Günther’s collection Overcoming Space and Time is Lewis Padgett’s “Mimsy Were the Borogroves.” According to Padgett’s story according to Günther, when metaphysics no longer compels an impasse it can be breached at last by a new technology) R.I.P. in Time (Time travel in two stories by Padgett is already the cinematic introject looping through their film adaptations: The Twonky and Timescape) Fairy Chess (The novel The Fairy Chessmen concludes the Lewis Padgett standard edition of Lewis Carroll as the fantast not of folksy psychosis but of science and logic) Chapter 3 Fantasy Strikes Back 119 Other World and Other Time (In Out of the Silent Planet and The Dark Tower, C.S. Lewis sets out to improve upon H.G. Wells, retrofitting the flight to the moon and the adventure of time travel for compatibility with medievalism – until brought to a full stop by concessions to psychoanalysis) NICE (The criminal organization in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength models Ian Fleming’s introduction of SPECTRE. But the underworld of World War Two that Fleming admitted as spectral player in Cold War conflicts was for Lewis the postwar reprisal of the nihilism, heightened in the setting of the Pax Americana by its equation with science fiction, which shall be overcome by Christian fantasy) Suicide Planet (In Melancholia, Lars Von Trier takes back Sergei Tarkovsky’s emendation of the conclusion of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. The Wagnerian crescendo that ends the world takes no prisoners: there are no other lifeforms in the universe) Impossible Planet (Lewis’s Peralandra orbits the withdrawal of Venus from science fiction in letters and film. SF films set on Venus fly in the face of fantasy. The encrypted wish factory of the Krells in Forbidden Planet, which set a new special effects standard, is cognate with the impossible planet) Making the Least Last (Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker inspired Lewis’s trilogy. In the first novel, Stapledon includes Venus as a stopover in the evolution of intelligent life culminating in natural flight and ending in Jonestown) Venus Libitina (The goddess of beauty was destined to perform in sitcom representations of love and marriage. In this therapeutic netherworld, the goddess can wear a beard as transgender supplement. Weaving and tying the knot extend her influence to the milieu of friendly masochism and indefinitely postponed marriage, which bind Wonder Woman under the goddess’s protection to her superpowers) Zelpst Reflection between Genres (From Philip José Farmer’s Venus on a Half Shell to P.K. Dick’s The World That Jones Made the attributes of the goddess go into our reception of the planet bearing her name) Chapter 4 The Law of B-Genres 157 The Wizard of Was (Zardoz, Tron, THX 1138, and the future prospect of aphanisis between fantasy and science fiction, between Jacques Lacan and Ernest Jones) Mekky (“The Waveries” in P.K. Dick’s estimation and What Mad Universe in Günther’s view nominate Fredric Brown the premier allegorist of the line wavering between science fiction and fantasy. In Brown’s novel the mechanical brain says that fiction is reality waiting to happen. Last Action Hero) I Am Robot (The logic that Asimov’s robots follow is so multiple that Günther cannot reconcile the stories with the epistemology of conceivable robot making and agency. In the movie I, Robot, psychopathic idealism is the reverb of the evacuation of adolescence from the robotic streamlining of the future) Crash Course (J.G. Ballard identifies Cyril Kornbluth and Robert Sheckley as his American precursors while denying that P.K. Dick was any influence at all. The drive-by eros, the primal father, and the almost endless traffic between Ballard’s Crash and Kafka’s “The Judgment”) Hunter Games (Sheckley advanced a subgenre of future games of violence dispensing and dispensing with the need for warfare. Sheckley re-entered the game when he novelized the film adaptation of his story, which led to the trilogy of game worlds) Left-Handed Tribute (Ursula Le Guin is the emissary of science fiction on planet fantasy: The Lathe of Heaven, novel and film, The Left Hand of Darkness, and City of Illusions) Bibliography 213 Index 223 Preface In the “Introduction; or, How Star Wars Became Our Oldest Cultural Memory” of the first volume of Critique of Fantasy, the gambit of a contest between science fiction and fantasy was already sketched out. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis aimed to separate the fantasy from the techno-science foregrounded in works by H.G. Wells, for example, and raise the fantasy or fairy-story to the power of an alternate adult literary genre. My study of the contest between the B-genres for ownership of the evolution of the social relation of art out of the condemned site of daydreaming required in the first place a reading apparatus, which the first volume derived from psychoanalytic theories of daydreaming’s relationship to conscious thought, the uncon- scious, and artistic production as well as from their prehistory, the philosophies of dreams, ghosts, willing and wishing.
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