http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/09/11/echoes_from_sci_fis_golden_age/
A READING LIFE
Echoes from sci-fi's golden age
By James Sallis | September 11, 2005
When teaching science fiction, I always suggest that to fully understand a
story, one must know the period in which it was written. A story written
in the 1940s, for instance, may well come from a different mind-set and
from wholly different conventions - effectively from another world - than
our own. One has little trouble getting the story of ''Invasion of the
Body Snatchers," or even understanding in large part the sources of its
power: fear of being taken over, the threat of loss of self and identity,
the primal fear of sleep and what it may steal from us. But how greatly is
that understanding enhanced by the knowledge that, written and first
filmed in the heyday of the Cold War, ''Body Snatchers" is as much as
anything about the great Communist takeover?
Because much early sci-fi was poorly written, with shallow or stock
characterization and little regard for language (''still clunky after all
these years," as one critic put it), it endures poorly into our own time.
Yet some, from content, from the way it taps into grand themes and
archetypes, simply will not go away.
Notwithstanding my counsel to students, when I first read science fiction
I did so all in a jumble, H. G. Wells smack up against the latest issue of
If or Fantastic Universe, Robert Heinlein's ''The Puppet Masters" and Olaf
Stapledon's ''Odd John" in a single day. Most of these novels and stories
passed from memory. But a goodly number of them have traveled through the
years with me.
''Wasp," by Eric Frank Russell, for instance, published in 1957 and now
once again available from Gollancz in its Collectors' Edition series
($14.95).
Beginning his career in the '40s, Russell is part of science fiction's
golden age, the period that brought us Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore
Sturgeon, and that whole first generation of writers firmly rooted in
science fiction's pulp heritage yet adamantly working to reach beyond.
Many of these, including Russell, collected around John W. Campbell,
giving voice to Campbell's anti-authoritarianism, his insistence on the
primacy of scientific knowledge, his recondite xenophobia, and his firm
belief in American cowboydom: that one man, though a misfit in his own
society, can change the world.
James Mowry, the protagonist of ''Wasp," spends the first 17 years of his
life in the fascistic Sirian Empire (numerically superior), with whom our
own Terran Empire (technologically superior) is at war. Skin dyed purple
and ears pinned back, Mowry, a born troublemaker, is sent into enemy
territory as a wasp: an irritant, a one-man army, a terrorist.
He begins by slapping up paper stickers all about the city, introducing a
fictitious Sirian Freedom Party: ''War makes wealth for the few, misery
for the many. At the right time, Dirac Angestun Gesept will punish the
former, bring aid and comfort to the latter."
Soon he is chalking ''D.A.G." on brick walls, sending letter bombs and
planting mines, killing the odd militiaman or police officer. In short,
creating chaos.
Gritty stuff this, with well-sustained suspense and great chase scenes.
Even stripped of its humor, ''Wasp" would be a marvelous read, but what
makes it still more memorable (and more palatable) is that it's leavened
with the humor at which Russell excelled. Contemporary science fiction's
top comic writer, Terry Pratchett, says: ''I can't imagine a funnier
terrorists' handbook." There are wonderfully drole scenes, not to mention
early examples of black comedy and of government-speak, as in this Sirian
dispatch:
''For months we have been making triumphant retreats before a demoralized
enemy who is advancing in utter disorder."
I first read this novel not long after it came out, in 1957, being told
the Commies were coming for us any day and perhaps wondering idly, as I
read, where the nearest fallout shelter might be. I reread it in the years
of Vietnam, and now - again in wartime - this past week.
Rereading the novel, in a world where terrorists have replaced Commies and
serve as justification for excess and shortfall, gives off jolts of shock
that Russell could not have anticipated:
''Mail would be examined, and all suspicious parcels would be taken apart
in a blast-proof room. There'd be a city-wide search with
radiation-detectors for the component parts of a fission bomb. Civil
defence would be alerted in readiness to cope with a mammoth explosion
that might or might not take place. Anyone on the streets who walked with
a secretive air and wore a slightly mad expression would be arrested and
hauled in for questioning."
Literature endures because it shows us what we can be. It endures also
because it challenges what we know, tells us the world is not as it seems,
not as it has been explained to us. The impact of ''Wasp" on the
contemporary reader may not be quite what Russell intended, but sometimes
when all cylinders are firing, the art of the thing takes over, the story
comes into its own life. A man sits down to write a simple ripping yarn
and finds himself smack up against truths that have to be continually
rediscovered, generation by generation, day by day, in our effort to be
truly, wholly human.
James Sallis is currently in Italy as a guest of Festivaletteratura.
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