weird capsule reviews
the golden age of science fiction, stranger heinlein, james blish
These are capsule reviews for (some) things I’m reading in the process of researching Weird Sisters. If you don’t want to follow this category, you can see instructions on how to adjust your subscription here. Bookshop links are affiliate links.
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Alec Nevala-Lee, 2018)
Sometimes I worry about an imaginary young man who is out there saying to himself “you’d never be able to write a book about men in science fiction.” He’s so despondent! Never fear, young man: you can. In fact, someone has. And, furthermore, it’s a good book. Take up thy spacesuit with good cheer.
Apologies to Alec Nevala-Lee for joking about his book and the Substack gender grievance mill because—it really is good. Nevala-Lee follows his four enmeshed subjects from their early days writing for (or, in Campbell’s case, editing) the pulps, and the ways in which their relationships ultimately fractured beyond repair. Campbell became increasingly dictatorial (and racist), Asimov retreated from science fiction into popular science, Heinlein’s rightward swing left his old friends hurt and alienated, and L. Ron Hubbard… well, you know what happened with L. Ron Hubbard.1 The ending of all biographies are sad, but the end of Campbell’s life, in particular, is very depressing—a portrait of a declining and insecure man, completely obsessed with quack science, who has alienated all of his old friends and proteges.
One quibble… I do think this book could have spent more time on the fiction itself, and not just the social world that produced it. Ultimately, these guys and the “Golden Age” of science fiction that they represent are only as interesting as what they produced, but the science fiction itself often feels indistinct. This paragraph is representative of the way Nevala-Lee writes about the actual fiction:
Hubbard’s stories appealed to such fans as Asimov and Ray Bradbury, but most were forgettable. The exceptions were Death’s Deputy, perhaps his best story, which came out of conversations with Campbell about “a man who officiates, all unwillingly, for the god of destruction”; Final Blackout, the postnuclear war novel that had impressed Heinlein; and Fear, a work of straight horror that had been conceived over grilled steaks at the editor’s house. Bradbury called this last story a “landmark novel in my life,” and he was so taken by it that he privately recorded it as a play.
So… what is Fear even about? Why did Ray Bradbury like it so much? Why is Death’s Deputy “perhaps his best story”?2 There is an obvious reason not to dwell at length on Hubbard’s stories here, which is that they’re probably not very good. I get that. Still, I wanted a little more about the fiction.
Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein, 1961)
Michael is a boy raised by Martians on Mars; when brought back to human society, he is puzzled by things like “a taboo on cannibalism,” “the necessity of clothes,” and so on. In the first leg of the book, he’s very naive and helpless but also very dangerous because he can make people and things cease to exist at will. At a certain point, quite abruptly, he grows up, at which point he founds a telekenetic sex cult.3 But you know… a good one.
Among the things one can say about Stranger in a Strange Land is that it was the first science fiction book to hit the New York Times bestseller list.4 I think that this makes sense because the “science fiction” aspect of this book is in some ways pretty light, but also because about half of the book is orgies. What I mean by calling this “light” is that the conceit of a person whose formative years are spent outside of human society suddenly encountering the world is a plot we know.5 In some respects, it’s a story that is almost a thousand years old. So, you know: it’s Mars and not a desert island (or wolves). There are self-driving cars and videophones and so on. But you could really dispose of all of that.
I’m not sure the phrase “of its time” has ever been more apt than it is when applied to this book. The long, long speeches about how social norms are arbitrary if you think about it, man (though, somehow, the Martians’ arbitrary norms are always right); the atmosphere of sexual liberation that is devoid of feminism (“nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault”); the ways in which human technology has progressed a lot and yet also people’s living and working patterns are essentially the same.…6 I think it really can’t be overstated what a drag the back half of this book is to read, when the plot has no stakes whatsoever and we’re just living through speech after speech after speech. Even the orgy scenes are really just moments in which people get to make speeches.
On the other hand, the thing about this book, much like Starship Troopers, is that I can’t quite shake the feeling that Heinlein is a chauvinist pig who nonetheless likes women in a basic way that makes him feel sort of harmless to me.7 It’s kind of like looking at R. Crumb drawings. You’re like I really didn’t need or want to know this much about you, but there’s something sort of wholesome about it. Heinlein just wants to be surrounded by very smart women who are naked and throw spaghetti at him from time to time. Is that a crime???? Would it be a crime on Mars??????
A Case of Conscience (James Blish, 1958)
A theory: great Catholic art, as opposed to good Catholic art, has to court repugnance. I don’t mean it has to present repugnant things, which anybody can do, but that it has to force its protagonists in directions where their conclusions and obligations have a high chance of ending up at odds with the reader’s.8 (This pursuit of repugnance can go too far and get cute, at which point you are reading bad Catholic art.) In A Canticle for Leibowitz, this moment of repugnance comes when a priest refuses to euthanize a dying mother and child. In Muriel Spark’s books, it comes from the detached and omniscient cruelty of her authorial voice. And in A Case of Conscience, it is genocide.
I wasn’t predisposed to like this book because my prior experience with Blish came mostly from “How Beautiful With Banners,” a story he published in Damon Knight’s Orbit 1, and which is like a parody I’d write of a bloated science fiction story.9 Secondly, it does have to be noted re: above, James Blish ain’t Catholic, which means I, personally, would not actually accept his book as “Catholic art,” but I didn’t realize this fact until after I’d written out my theory. Anyway, though, I did like it.
The planet of Lithia is populated entirely by rational lizard beings and is rich in precisely the material one would use to make fission bombs. Four scientists have been sent to Lithia to make a study of the planet. One of the scientists, Cleaver, wants to turn the planet into a bomb factory. He has no interest in the native culture and feels they can easily be enslaved. Another of the four, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, who is also the one who has gone furthest in getting to know the Lithians, is a Jesuit. He is troubled by his observation that the Lithians are rational but never seem to experience conflict between what they want to do and what they ought to do. He begins to think that the planet has been created by Satan, even though the belief that Satan can create anything is heretical.10 He believes the planet should be quarantined from further human contact.
But even as he leaves, he accepts a gift from Chtexa, a Lithian friend, that will make such a quarantine impossible, even if everybody agreed with him: a beautiful sealed vase that carries Chtexa’s son Egtverchi. Upon reaching maturity, Egtverchi, who retains the Lithians’ rational capacity but lacks their social habituation, becomes a force of destruction and chaos.11
One of the more interesting aspects of this book is that Ramon is both steadfast in his belief that Lithia is Satanic while also affectionate and even protective of the Lithians themselves. Even if his reasoning leads him to believe that Chtexa is a demonic creation, that is not how he actually treats Chtexa (or Egtverchi), or even really how he feels about Chtexa (though it is how he feels about Egtverchi).12 The “theologically correct” conclusion at which Ramon eventually arrives—which is that actually Lithia is an illusion and not a true creation—still doesn’t stop him from feeling distressed by the harm that Cleaver, in his pursuit of the planet’s resources, is wreaking on the planet’s environment. Blish writes a novel in which people are mostly arguing about ideas without making the people themselves one to one representatives of ideas.
Something that really stands out is how willing people were to believe Hubbard, even when they figured out that Hubbard was a pathological liar on other subjects. When Heinlein told Hubbard that, essentially, the guy was not welcome to visit him anymore, he added that he’d always be willing to lend Hubbard money on account of his heroic war service. As you can probably guess, that heroic war service didn’t exist. Nevala-Lee quotes Heinlein observing he kept meeting Hubbard’s ex-disciples who still basically believed in him: “Ron is a jerk, Ron is a nut—but nevertheless he is the prophet of the One True Faith.”
One of the surprises of this book was the degree to which Hubbard was respected and liked by his peers, as well as quite successful as a pulp writer. I’d always heard his popular fiction referred to in such a way that he sounded like someone who was a failed hack novelist. Actually, he was a very successful hack novelist (in addition to being a pathological liar and all the rest of it).
With (frankly) a certain resemblance to dianetics.
I suspect that this tells you a lot about how much the other books on the list were selling.
It’s not even all that different in type from John in Brave New World, though of course since he is raised on a reservation he is still a part of human society, just not “normal” human society.
Also, the ways in which this is an anything-goes nudist sex cult that is also not gay (as we are informed what feels like five hundred times but I think perhaps only three). It is not gay. Nothing gay is happening. There are no rules because thou art God but do not be gay.
How likely is it that I will regret typing this? I feel like the answer is “very likely.”
i.e. Maria Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, a novel I do not like, has repugnant things in it but they don’t involve the commitments of her Jesuit protagonist.
Opening paragraph:
Feeling as naked as a peppermint soldier in her transparent film wrap, Dr. Ulla Hillstrøm watched a flying cloak swirl away toward the black horizon with a certain consequent irony. Although nearly transparent itself in the distant dim arc-light flame that was Titan’s sun, the fluttering creature looked warmer than what she was wearing, for all that reason said it was at the same minus 316° F. as the thin methane it flew in. Despite the virus space-bubble’s warranted and eerie efficiency, she found its vigilance—itself probably as nearly alive as the flying cloak was—rather difficult to believe in, let alone to trust.
Gah!
The steps by which he arrives at this conclusion are probably the least convincing part of the book to me. I enjoyed this comment from the director of the Vatican Observatory (a Jesuit):
“An awful lot of it,” he said then, “is that those stories are written by people who don’t have intimate knowledge of scientists in general, and certainly not of Jesuits.” Without my having to name titles, he criticized the classics. “The Arthur Clarke story, ‘The Star,’ you just scratch your head and go, ‘What is he thinking of?’ You look at A Case of Conscience and [its] theology isn’t only bad theology, it’s not Jesuit theology.”
“The Sparrow,” he added, “drives me nuts.”
Glad to see “The Star” singled out here because I also hate that story.
For whatever reason I could only really picture the Lithians as Lyle:
This made the part of the book where Egtverchi is running his own “thou art God” cult (no sex in this one) a little comic. Oh Lyle!
The ultimate solution to his dilemma—to attempt to exorcise the planet—would naturally do nothing if in fact the Lithians are what they seem to be.
Heinlein is another one for my “it’s possible to be very, very sexist and not particularly misogynist” file. Though my go to example is always Anthony Trollope, who clearly believes that women have special qualities and a special job, but also is constantly arguing on behalf of them against an imagined male reader who thinks it’s stupid to care about dances and dresses.
The problem of science fiction's relationship to actual science and actual religion as institutions is an interesting one. SF comes into its own in the '30s, in an era where science advancement is widely experienced and widely publicized, and in which scientific education is moving into the mainstream, but where the institutions that can employ the people who would be interested in having scientific careers are constrained by the economic emergency. You end up with a lot of writers who have less education and less opportunity for employment than they would like, so they need to take what jobs are available and learn about whatever they're interested in on their own.
In practice, this means learning about technology through popular science magazines, and learning about religion from various popular outlets descended from the Theosophical Society. The idea that the science of the future will involved the development of latent human powers like telekinesis and telepathy is one of the three declared objectives for the formation of the TS, and it's the point of contact between classic products of SF like Scientology, "Stranger in a Strange Land", and Clarke's "Childhood's End".
In other words, it's not surprising that, despite a desire to write about science and religion, SF writers write about both of them so badly. Being a research scientist or clergy in a mainstream religion requires a lot more education than the pioneers of science fiction were able to obtain. An interesting test case is Asimov, who earned a PhD in chemistry, but who considered his most important contributions to science fiction to be his Three Laws of Robotics (arguably pertaining to electrical science, but really a matter of philosophical ethics) and the Foundation books (arguably sociology or economics), neither one of which has anything to do with chemistry. In other words, while Asimov was not an autodidact in his professional life, he made a point of writing fiction about matters in which he was an autodidact.