Xenograffiti (2 page)

Gold shifted the emphasis to the social sciences, and like his predecessors Gernsback and Campbell, cultivated a new group of authors to write science fiction as he saw it (Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, Philip José Farmer, John Brunner, and Robert Silverberg all date from this period). Psychology was an integral part of these stories; Gold’s school asked such questions as: How would societies of tomorrow be affected by ensuing technological and sociological changes? What kind of philosophy would future and alien societies be founded on? Individual man’s inner, conjectured powers and mutations (ESP, telepathy, etc.) were carefully probed and measured, especially as they affected the society in which man dwelt. Farmer, James Rush, and others criticized current mores of religion and sex, formerly taboo subjects, and now touched upon for the first time with any intelligence. By 1960 this type of modern science fiction had almost completely displaced earlier forms. A major factor in the rise of its popularity was perhaps the upswing of the SF novel which began in the late 1940s. At first specialty houses, and then larger firms and paperback lines, began active programs in publishing hardcover and paperbound SF books. The magazines began to die.

By the early 1960s it was evident that a new wave in science fiction was about to break over the field, washing away the sense of stagnation. Fritz Leiber’s
The Big Time
(Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, 1958), Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
(Best Novel, 1962) and
Starship Troopers
(Best Novel, 1960), and works by Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison all pointed to the advent of new styles and new ideas. The climactic turning point in 1962 saw the first publication of the works of J. G. Ballard in America, and the first stories by Roger Zelazny and the first novel of Samuel R. Delany. The New Wave, as it has been termed, has been defined by Judith Merril as:

...nothing more than the application of contemporary and sometimes (though mostly not very) experimental literary techniques to the kind of contemporary/experimental speculation which is the essence of science fiction.

In another context she states:

Inside science fiction the best people are reaching toward poetry, metaphysics, religion, psychology, symbolism, and myth as systems through which to explore the nature of man; and reaching too for the new techniques of expression being explored in the experimental and avant-garde fringes of the “mainstream.”

The New Wave, then, consists of innovations in both style and content. Each New Wave writer varies widely in his own application of the different modes, some stressing expression, some content, and a few balancing the two. One finds that in expression these works contain poetic phrasing, fragmentary plots, loosely connected episodes, and in general mainstream avant-garde forms. Tone is personal and very much subjection.

Content forces the greatest gap between these writers and their predecessors. The New Wave explores man’s inner nature and those disciplines closest to him: the fine arts. Thus, one may find fragments of poetry, artists as heroes (something which never occurred previously), problems without resolutions, a sense of great promise never attained, and much more, both exalting and detrimental. The stress has turned to what Ballard calls “inner space: that area where the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche meet and fuse.” Science and technology become mere props, backgrounds for a story universal in scope and time, a tale which can occur anyplace or anytime.

As a result, science fiction today is in a state of great confusion, upheaval, controversy, and argumentation. The best of the new authors are writing New Wave stories; many of the finest older writers have followed their lead in changing style and outlook. But while it is generally recognized in the field that the New Wave is the wave of the future, there remains an Old Guard who is resisting strenuously its inevitable takeover. Campbell, Asimov, and others bitterly resent the New Wave’s hold on science fiction critics and the new generation of writers, regarding it as not sufficiently oriented towards science and technology. Their definition of science fiction closely follows that of Kingsley Amis:

Science fiction is that class of prose literature treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science and technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin.

Stories in which technology is only a stage setting are regarded by such critics as fantasy.

[several paragraphs cut]

Looking back, it seems that progress in science fiction has been made in extremely swift spurts followed by a decade or fifteen years of consolidation and even stagnation (it is hoped that events will proceed somewhat more rapidly with the New Wave). The future now looks bright: the New Wave was a necessary step for the field if science fiction was ever to rejoin the mainstream, if it was ever to produce quality literature, as it is now doing. This final jump six years ago left the genre quivering in shock, but it also seems to have pushed it abreast and even ahead of modern fiction. Where today can one find imagination, new ideas, different and changing modes of expression, and the most human and finest writing of our time? The New Wave, which is, I am proud to state, a part of science fiction. There is no doubt in my mind that science fiction is where the best literature is being written today.

ANDREW LANG
AND
THE BOOK OF DREAMS AND GHOSTS
(1972)

It’s a curious phenomenon of the writing world that so many of its better-known practitioners should find, at death, not only the demise of their earthly lives, but also a relatively rapid waning of their respective literary reputations. Perhaps it’s just natural to strike out at the man who can no longer defend himself, or maybe it’s the idea that since no further works will derive from the author’s pen, whatever promise he showed earlier in his career was never quite realized; whatever the reason, it happens with astonishing regularity. Some authors never manage to recover from these critical postmortems, and spend the rest of literary eternity neither condemned nor praised, but merely dumped together with 3000 other hacks into some odd writers’ limbo, or footnoted in one of an unending plague of literary histories. Others may eventually recoup a semblance of their former glory when it is discovered, quite by accident, that their books are somehow still in print, and much to everyone’s surprise, still apparently being read with both enthusiasm and relish. Andrew Lang is one of these select few, for we are now witnessing a broad revival of Lang materials that augurs well for the ultimate literary judgment on this romantic Scotsman.

Lang was born at Selkirk, Scotland on March 31, 1844, at the family estate of Viewfield. The Langs were locally prominent, having settled in Selkirk some seven generations previous, and having held various town offices during much of that period. Andrew’s father, John Lang, was Sheriff/Clerk of Selkirk at the time of Andrew’s birth; like most of the Langs a businessman by profession, John Lang (a name later used by Austin Tappan Wright for the hero of his utopian novel,
Islandia
) had married Jan Sellar, daughter of a steward to the Duke of Sutherland, in 1843. Andrew (a common name in the Lang family) was their first child. He was a precocious youth, and taught himself to read by the age of four. Even then he possessed a remarkable memory for trivia, and by the age of seven or eight had searched out every available romantic tale and novel. He preferred short adventure fantasies, or the much longer histories of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, to the stodgier classics of accepted literature. A trip to boarding school at Edinburgh at age ten sent him further into his bookish world, until he spent so much time devouring novels that all prose fiction was forbidden him by the schoolmasters. When he was then found reading Lord Byron’s long romantic poem,
Don Juan
, his teachers gave up hope of restraining the boy’s inclinations, and lifted the ban.

It was during these years that Lang’s basic character was determined: raised in the Scottish countryside on Highland ballads and tales, and entertained thereafter largely through his own excursions into the literary world, he developed a lifelong devotion to romances and myths of every kind, and spent his most productive years collecting such tales, authoring them himself, and writing literary essays about them. Even at Edinburgh Academy, where he was force-fed Latin and Greek, he suddenly encountered the
Odyssey
of Homer, and found himself swept up in the grandeur of its epic story, not only reading it in the original Greek, but devouring the
Iliad
as well.

Lang transferred to St. Andrews University in 1861, and it was about this time that his readings broadened to include the old occult and alchemistic masters. Legend has it that he even tested some of the ancient formularies himself, practicing the olden rites in the “haunted tower” of St. Andrews; hearsay has not, alas, provided the results of these experiments. His reactions towards the occult were somewhat mixed: while his nature inclined him towards belief in the transcendent and romantic (he was proud, for instance, of a family tradition assigning the Langs Gypsy blood, despite its probable untruthfulness); he could still parody the Latin original of magician Cornelius Agrippa with a phrase of his own: “
Hoc opus diligenter perlexi, et dico ut in amplissimo verbi sensu Bosh vel Rot vel Bolly sit
” (“This book has surveyed [its field] accurately, and I say in the fullest sense of the word that it’s bosh, rot, and bolly”). In later years he tried to remain open-minded on the subject, and succeeded to the extent that his opinions then are difficult to judge from today’s perspective; even the introduction to his major work on the subject,
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
, is curiously noncommittal.

Lang entered Balliol College at Oxford in 1864. His talents as a writer were just beginning to shine forth, and one of his schoolmates noted that he could “knock off” an essay on any subject whatever in half an hour’s time. By the time he went to Merton College, Oxford, in 1868, he was writing poetry, and his first book appeared during his stay there in 1872. He left Oxford in 1875, partly because of an impending marriage to Leonora Alleyne (school rules at the time forbade extension of a fellowship to married students), but primarily because of an expanding and rapidly developing career as an essayist and reviewer, a following to which he devoted thirty-seven years.

Lang was a scholar, poet, essayist, romantic novelist, and anthologist of the fairy tale; his first collection of poems was followed by more than sixty other books scattered throughout a dozen areas of knowledge. As a literary historian, he is best known for three studies of Homer which refuted the then-popular theory of collective authorship for the
Odyssey
and
Iliad
. He authored a history of Joan of Arc, and solved an historical puzzle with his novel,
Pickle the Spy
. His poetry, although published early in his career and never truly popular, had, nevertheless, a profound effect on its time, and certainly influenced British poetry of the first decades of the twentieth century. He knew well both Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard, and collaborated with the latter on
The World’s Desire
, a fantasy sequel to the adventures of Odysseus. His own love for the romantic novel caused him to write a triad of fantasies set in the imaginary lands of Pantouflia and Fairnilee.

He is chiefly known today, and was best known in his own lifetime, for a series of twelve anthologies of fairy tales. His theme, as exemplified in the first of the series,
The Blue Fairy Book
(1889), was to present the best myths and tales of all times and civilizations in popular and readable form, packaged to attract children, and translated or rewritten to suit the language of his time. Called the “Rainbow” series for the distinctive color featured in each title, the books were an enormous commercial success, and remain in print to this day from Dover Publications.

The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
first appeared in 1897, and was the first serious attempt to relate and retell the best-attested stories of psychical phenomena and ghosts with any kind of critical sense. Lang researched sources reaching back to classical times, and covering all civilizations, to discover what he believed to be the most authentic encounters of humanity with the unknown. Although he took no public stand on the material’s veracity, he himself claimed to have seen three specters in his lifetime, one in 1869 of a deceased professor, another of a dark girl in 1894, and a third, the death omen of a cat, shortly before he died in 1912. His attitude is best summarized in his own words: “I do firmly believe that there are human faculties as yet unexplained, as yet inconsistent with popular scientific ‘materialism.’ I do believe, with all students of human nature, in hallucinations of one, or of several, or even of all the senses. But as to whether such hallucinations, among the sane, are ever caused by psychical influences from the minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt.” There is no doubt, however, of the value of
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
in preserving these accounts, and in the contribution to literature of its author, Andrew Lang.

THE PARODIES OF H. RIDER HAGGARD
(1978)

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) achieved almost instant fame with
King Solomon’s Mines
, published in 1885. The book had been written in just six weeks, after his brother had challenged him to produce a better story than a recent adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Haggard followed his bestseller (it has never been out-of-print since its initial publication) with
She
(1887), which rapidly became even more popular than the earlier book. Although Haggard lived another thirty-eight years and wrote many more novels, including three others featuring Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and another fifteen or so with Allan Quatermain, hero of
King Solomon’s Mines
, as principal character, he was never again to achieve the recognition he garnered for these two early romances. His later novels have generally been forgotten and are nearly all OP at this writing.

The popularity of
She
and
King Solomon’s Mines
prompted a host of imitations, as publishers tried to take advantage of Haggard’s success. Indeed, the author can be said almost to have founded the “lost race” category single-handedly, for although books of this type had been published prior to 1885, it was only after that date that the genre truly began to flourish. Haggard’s fictions established all the conventions of the genre: white European or American explorers are led by mysterious messages or documents or the need to rescue other explorers into a non-surveyed part of the world, where they discover the remnants of long-lost civilizations, races, aliens, or peoples. Often these groups are bastardized descendants of such ancient groups as the Incas, Greeks, Egyptians, or Sumerians, now reduced to savagery by centuries of inbreeding. Inevitably, the explorers escape back to the modern world where “real” civilization still rules, despite the best efforts of their captors, and often the lost races are destroyed in the process. There are, of course, many different variations on this basic theme, but the pattern is the same in almost all.

The lost race genre flourished for about forty years, from the year
King Solomon’s Mines
popularized the genre to to about the time of Rider Haggard’s death, when the last unmapped areas of the world—the Polar Regions—were finally explored and filled in with aerial surveys. Other common settings for lost race books were Africa, central Asia, the jungles of the Amazon basin, the deserts of Australia, or the uncharted islands in little-traveled parts of the Ocean, often the Pacific. Most of the later stories were set in Antarctica. After 1930 fantasy writers began moving their settings into space or other dimensions, and the lost race category virtually vanished from the scene. Only a handful has been published since World War II.

Haggard’s popularity in the mid-1880s is also reflected in the large number of parodies of his work published at that time. Haggard was not the only writer of the Victorian era to get a huge public response to his work. Sir George Chesney’s future war pamphlet,
The Battle of Dorking
, had been followed by fifteen or more sequels, replies, arguments, and denials during the year it was published (1871); indeed, sequels were still being issued thirty years later. Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, 2000-1887
was similarly rewarded with a spate of imitations when it appeared in 1888, and the author was prompted to write his own sequel in response,
Equality
(1897), which produced its own group of imitations. Novels written to comment on Bellamy’s ideas were appearing as late as the 1980s, when the late Mack Reynolds produced a set of pastiches featuring Julian West, Bellamy’s protagonist.

But the response to Haggard was very different: instead of sequels, we have satires and parodies. Altogether, nine of these books were published in 1887, when the author reached the peak of his popularity. The true number of these works, and the correct information concerning the editions and authors, has long been confused by their relative scarcity and unavailability. No library or private collection appears to have a complete set. And although they received wide circulation at the time they were published, most were printed in cheap paperback form and printed on very poor quality paper; copies of the American editions which survive are generally brittle, yellowed, and crumbling.

The confusion is compounded by similarities in titles between the American and British books, and by the erroneous assumptions of scholars and bibliographers that the British and American volumes are the same. Everett F. Bleiler, writing in his
The Checklist of Fantastic Literature
, states:

The authorship of the parodies is debatable. The Library of Congress attributes all five parodies [
He
,
It
,
Bess
,
King Solomon’s Wives
, and
King Solomon’s Treasures
] to John De Morgan (born 1848), an American writer of historical romances and juveniles, who was later to write many paperbacks for Street and Smith. The British Museum lists only
He
, in the large-paper edition, and attributes it to Andrew Lang and Walter H. Pollock.... J. E. Scott, in his bibliography of H. Rider Haggard, on the basis of a letter from E. Vizetelly, the British publisher of
King Solomon’s Wives
, to the British periodical
Sketch
, attributes
King Solomon’s Wives
to Sir Henry Charles [actually Chartres] Biron, a British jurist.... It seems obvious from the sources quoted above that the Library of Congress attribution of these two titles [
He
and
King Solomon’s Wives
] to De Morgan is erroneous; and that Lang, Pollock, and Biron were the true authors.

But this is not obvious at all, and is, in fact, an unjustified assumption. Actually,
all
of the attributions cited by Bleiler are correct, for there are two different books with the title
He
, and two different versions of
King Solomon’s Wives
. This becomes obvious when one compares the bibliographical data for the books.

The British edition of
He
, by the Author of
It
,
King Solomon’s Wives
,
Bess
,
Much Darker Days
,
Mr. Morton’s Subtler, and Other Romances
, was published by Longmans, Green early in 1887; it consists of 119 pages of very large type. The American version,
He: A Companion to She, Being a History of the Adventures of J. Theodosius Aristophano on the Island of Rapa Nui in Search of His Immortal Ancestor
(no attribution of authorship), was issued in April of 1887 by Norman L. Munro, three months later than the Longmans edition, in 213 pages of very small type; both of these books are included in
They: Three Parodies of H. Rider Haggard’s She
, edited by R. Reginald and Douglas Menville (New York: Arno Press, 1978).

King Solomon’s Wives; or, The Phantom Mines
, by Hyder Ragged [
i.e
., Biron], was published by Vizetelly & Co. of London in 1887 in 125 pages of large type.
King Solomon’s Wives
, by the Author of
He
,
It
,
Ma
,
Pa
, etc. [issued anonymously], was released by Norman L. Munro in 1887 in 239 pages of small type. The Munro edition was written by John De Morgan. The issue is confused further by the fact that the Munros later reprinted the Vizetelly book in one of their other series, the Seaside Library, in 100 pages of small type, complete with original pseudonym and subtitle. The Biron version has been reprinted in the anthology
King Solomon’s Children: Some Parodies of H. Rider Haggard
, edited by R. Reginald and Douglas Menville (New York: Arno Press, 1978).

In addition to the two Munro books cited above, De Morgan also penned three other parodies for this paperback line:
It: A Wild, Weird History of Marvelous, Miraculous, Phantasmagorical Adventures in Search of He, She, and Jess, and Leading to the Finding of “IT”: A Haggard Conclusion
, a direct sequel to
He: A Companion to She
, and also featuring Aristophano as protagonist;
King Solomon’s Treasures
; and
Bess: A Companion to Jess
. The latter two books were also reprinted in
King Solomon’s Children
, and
It
was included in the anthology,
They
. The two remaining parodies,
Ma
and
Pa
, are not fantastic; both were written anonymously for Norman L. Munro in the spring of 1887 by Jacob Ralph Abarbanell, another hack writer for the line.

It is not recorded what Rider Haggard himself thought of these efforts. But if parody is the sincerest form of flattery, surely he must have been amused.