Archive for December, 2009

Christmas Review

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

I know what you’re asking – the question on the tip of your tongue, which you dare not speak. “Was there any decent Science Fiction published in The Idler between 1892 and 1895?”

Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve read every issue so far and the answer is – well, no. Not really. There’s lots of miasmic, vague, heading-in-that-direction sort of stuff but only about four outright occurances of something I’d consider anthologising, and even then it’s mostly been social fantasy. No spaceships. No aliens. No robots.

Not yet, anyway. 1895, the year I’ve just got to, is a bit of a watershed year for sf, because it’s the year H. G. Wells kicks things up a notch with the publication of The Time Machine. He proceeds to churn out genre classics (quite literally) at the rate of one a year, peaking in 1898 with The War of the Worlds, whose shadow most present-day sf still lives under.

My suspicion, yet to be verified, is that the months following the serial publication of Wells’s debut in ‘95 will see an acceleration in the appearance of more traditionally-definable sf in the other periodicals, as editors realise that there’s money in this kind of writing.

It may well not be the case, however – if you immerse yourself in genre writing from the 1890s, one of the first things you’ll notice is that westerns, society tales, romances, detective stories, interviews and reviews are all bound together by their common vehicle of transmission – by the house style and editorial principles of the journal in which they are bound together. Science Fiction is just part of this huge milieu, and although Wells plays an important role in crystallising it, he by no means invents it.

In any case, The Idler is likely to lag behind the trends set by the bigger periodicals – magazines like The Strand, which I’ll be coming to later on in my research. As its title suggests, The Idler is edited in a slightly more idiosyncratic manner than its rivals. Its chiefs seem to me likely to put their own aesthetic judgments ahead of whatever the market is doing when Wells’s work starts taking off.

I wish I could show you some of my Idler photocopies without the Bodleian firing me into the sun. As a cop-out, I quote from their special ‘Advanced Woman’ number (not a sci-fi Advanced Woman, I hasten to add). This passage is written by Mary L. Prendred under the heading ‘How to Court the Advanced Woman’:

In the first place, I submit that the ‘Advanced Woman’ [...] does not so much require to be courted as convinced. The word ‘court’, I take it, signifies to solicit, cajole, persuade, or – as a slang term defines it – canoodle, and the so-called ‘New’ woman is not to be canoodled. Either she falls in love or she doesn’t; and if she doesn’t, it is not necessarily due to any failure of method on the part of the man who wants to marry her. He may, at all events, be sure that she is quite ready to wed the one who can command her respect, attract her senses, and assure her of his right to her, whether he be intellectually her superior, equal or inferior. For the most highly-developed woman is not all brains, and there are to be found in the average man diverse other qualities as compelling and worthy of worship as intellectuality. Moreover, there ought to be less difficulty about coming to an understanding with an ‘Advanced Woman’ than with a  traditional one. The latter is hemmed in by pretences and the fear of what outsiders may say or think. The former should be free from such considerations, and, when a man has satisfied her that he is desirable, should be prepared to meet him with the frankest encouragement. Coyness and modesty are not confused in the mind of the ‘Advanced Woman’.

Nothing to do with Science Fiction at all, of course – but we do have the upturning of old values, and, by inference, the idea of a new and consciously created social order. Ally this to the didactic tone of the piece and its situation in a magazine alongside westerns and detective stories and you get a slightly different picture. Even if sf has yet to make its grand entrance, the ground is very well prepared for it.*

So who knows? I’m going in to the post-Time Machine years with as few preconceptions as possible, and only a thorough and extended reading of as many issues as I can get my hands on will give us the answer. Will sf explode onto the scene after Wells, or will it continue the slow emergence I have already detected? Stay tuned…

* This is not to suggest that all sf emodies the progressive values of Miss Prendred. Indeed, it arguably spends the twentieth century failing in this supposed goal so effectively that the majority of men and women currently ‘courting’ could do far worse than examine closely the passage I have quoted…
Very few genres disempower women as much as sf will go on to do in the 1960s. Equally, however, it is difficult for me to read Prendred’s words without thinking of the aspirational essays which Wells would go on to write in the 1900s. My main point is that sf’s arrival is very far from divorced from its cultural and material context, however fantastical its subject-matter. These are all issues which require much more time spent on them, and I shall spend it.

In the first place, I submit that the 'Advanced Woman' [...] does not
so much require to be courted as convinced. The word 'court', I take it,
signifies to solicit, cajole, persuade, or - as a slang term defines it
- canoodle, and the so-called 'New' woman is not to be canoodled. Either
she falls in love or she doesn't; and if she doesn't, it is not
necessarily due to any failure of method on the part of the man who
wants to marry her. He may, at all events, be sure that she is quite
ready to wed the one who can command her respect, attract her senses,
and assure her of his right to her, whether he be intellectually her
superior, equal or inferior. For the most highly-developed woman is not
all brains, and there are to be found in the average man diverse other
qualities as compelling and worthy of worship as intellectuality.
Moreover, there ought to be less difficulty about coming to an
understanding with an 'Advanced Woman' than with a traditional one. The
latter is hemmed in by pretences and the fear of what outsiders may say
or think. The former should be free from such considerations, and, when
a man has satisfied her that he is desirable, should be prepared to meet
him with the frankest encouragement. Coyness and modesty are not
confused in the mind of the 'Advanced Woman'.

Posted in Research Updates | 2 Comments »

Concerning Anthropology

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

If you were researching the construction of scientific facts, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a book called Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts might prove useful. It’s by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar and it came out in 1979, although you should get the newer 1986 edition because it has an extremely amusing reference to Borges (literally – it’s a reference) in the preface.

The concept is as promising as the title. Latour spends several months in a laboratory in California, living among scientists as an anthropologist would live amongst some strange south sea tribe, immersing himself in their practices and culture in an effort to better understand them. It’s an interesting idea, largely because (for me at least) it underlines the fact that even a layperson who is relatively well informed about science has little to no idea of the actual workings of a lab. This is a point which Latour and Woolgar provide some insight into – they say that scientists distance the knowledge they create from the material conditions of its creation. Science presents itself as pure knowledge, but thinking of it as such in a laboratory, amidst the machinery, caged animals, lab technicians and so on, proves difficult.

Although I don’t outright disagree with any of this, I’ve been having big problems with Latour and Woolgar. I think what makes me uneasy about their project is that whilst they have no problem critiqueing the assumptions of neuroendocrinology (the field in which the lab they study operates) they spend a lot of time making assumptions about the efficacy of anthropological and sociological method, which of course have their origins in exactly the same place.

‘Science studying science’ should be interesting but, for some reason, it isn’t. Jonas Salk, who runs the lab in question, writes in his rather guarded preface that “[t]he authors’ tools and concepts are crude and qualitative, but their will to understand scientific work is consistent with the scientific ethos”. Crude indeed – at one point, the layout of the lab is described through the eyes of a fictitious ‘observer figure’ who has all the cultural touchstones of western society (so he knows what a phone is, for instance) but is completely ignorant of the practices of science. The inevitable result is that science is Othered; appears strange and even ridiculous. These funny people write numbers on test tubes all day, then they throw the test tubes away. Isn’t that weird?! There is no part of any modern society that you couldn’t do this to, and surely one of the most susceptible figures for such a treatment would be this observer figure himself. Imagine if another observer were watching him.

This is a well-documented issue in anthropology, and I am not an anthropologist, so I am not qualified to discuss it. I am not a sociologist or a scientist either, so far from dismissing this book – which may well be of value to anybody working in these areas – I am simply going to say that I, personally, found it tough going, and, whilst thought-provoking, ultimately unrewarding.

I’m not the only one, though. Here’s Martin J. S. Rudwick in The Great Devonian Controversy (1985), another book I’ve been reading lately. It’s quite a long quotation, but I promise it will be worth it:

These ethnographers or microsociologists of science have given some detailed and illuminating accounts of routine procedures in scientific research. But with few exceptions they have described the research in a static manner, failing to show how the procedures are used in a temporal process to develop some new scientific conclusion. Furthermore, they often show an extreme skepticism – or at least, an extreme agnosticism – about the status of the knowledge the scientists claim to be producing. In miminizing if not discounting its reference to any ‘real’ external world of nature, their accounts of science open up a gulf in self-understanding between themselves and the scientists they observe – a gulf which surely no modern anthropologist would find tolerable in the interpretation of exotic cultures.

Then there’s a footnote which proves that this is a reference to Latour and Woolgar. Literally – it’s a reference.

Posted in Books | 4 Comments »