Ironically, this devaluation, or at least devalorization, of the fantastic began at a time when the outlines of the modern popular genres of the fantastic were first being laid down in a series of seminal works: the Gothic novel and the stories of Poe provided a rough template for what would become horror fiction; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (also derived largely from the Gothic, but with the crucial distinction that her protagonist rejected supernaturalism and alchemy in favor of experimental science) established many of the preconditions of science fiction; the extended fairy-tale narratives of the German Romantics and their English imitators (which included Thackeray and Ruskin as well as MacDonald) first articulated the portaled alternate realities that became a key element of modern fantasy. Each of these works spawned substantial numbers of imitators during the next century; genre literary historians have now pretty firmly established lengthy bibliographies of scientific romances before H. G. Wells, of supernatural horror tales before Bram Stoker and H. P. Lovecraft, of large-scale visionary fantasies before J. R. R. Tolkien. Many of these works are even worth reading today, and some are absolutely startling. Few, however, have survived outside the narrow interests of collectors and genre historians.
Despite the temptation for champions of the fantastic to seek conspiracies of suppression—suggesting that residual Puritanism led Victorian readers to view the unfettered imagination with something akin to panic, for example, or that fantastic tales implied a kind of mutability of history and reality that the dogma of realism could not subsume—the fact is that the protocols for reading the fantastic were not so much suppressed as diverted: into children’s literature, into historical novels, into false medieval narratives, into the literature of sensation, sometimes even into the substrata of the tale being told (this is more or less what happens to Gothic supernaturalism in the novels of the Brontës). The once-estimable Lord Bulwer-Lytton may have written science fiction (The Coming Race, 1871) or weirdly cockeyed spiritualist fantasy (A Strange Story, 1862), but his most famous end-of-the-world tale remains The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), in which the apocalyptic vision is mitigated by the comforting conceit that the world being destroyed isn’t ours, and that the events described with such obvious relish aren’t going to happen to us, but already happened to someone else, someone not English. Victorian apocalypses offered something of the same lascivious frisson as those popular marble sculptures of nubile slave girls in chains—the rationale may have been historical representation, but at the level of pure voyeuristic sensation, the intent was unmistakable: I only read Playboy for the stonework. George MacDonald may have written two of the seminal adult fantasy novels in English, Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895), but the wider popularity of his children’s fairy tales such as “The Golden Key” (1867) and At the Back of the North Wind (1871) permitted many readers to regard these fairly radical nonconformist visions as little more than aberrant offshoots of his career as a children’s writer (though he did write a number of realistic provincial Scottish novels as well). Lest we suspect that this particular strategy of marginalization was peculiar to the Victorians, we might take a look at Edmund Wilson’s famous 1956 Nation review of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which he easily dismissed as “a children’s book that has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the ‘juvenile’ market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake.” The notion that “fantasy for its own sake” is a kind of aberrant indulgence is a succinct expression of what had happened to the reading of the fantastic over the preceding century.
The act of reading fantastic literature became marginalized not only ideologically, by virtue of its content, but commercially, by virtue of its venues of publication. The two are not unrelated: each of the emergent genres of the fantastic (fantasy, horror, science fiction) included tropes and images which were highly sensational, and therefore highly degradable. Despite the wishful thinking of many science fiction historians, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its Gothic trappings, didn’t immediately give rise to intellectual works of science fiction about the possibilities of science or the nature of artificial life, but rather to a series of often lurid stage adaptations (two separate productions were already onstage when she returned to England in 1823) that continued throughout the nineteenth century and segued into the movies throughout the twentieth. The Gothic novel itself seemed to split into two streams: on the one hand, the brooding, atmospheric tales of the Brontës and their successors, some of which eventually earned canonical status; on the other, such penny dreadfuls or “bloods” as Varney the Vampire by (probably) John Malcolm Rymer, which ran endlessly and almost plotlessly for some 109 weekly installments between 1847 and 1849, and which may still represent some sort of low point in the history of horror fiction, which has more than its share of low points. (To be sure, there was a middle ground, characterized by the classic English ghost story and by such writers as Wilkie Collins and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, though Collins is now principally remembered as a precursor of the mystery novel and Le Fanu as a writer of popular romances.) And fantasy, as we’ve already seen, tended largely to remain associated with children’s books, although Arthurian and other pseudomedieval fictions remained popular throughout the century, emerging as full-fledged fantasy narratives in the prose work of William Morris by late in the century.
In America, the question of commercial marginalization of the fantastic genres would eventually express itself even more dramatically, with the rise of the pulp magazines and the attendant culture of pulp. The Gothic novel had quickly found a home in the American wilderness in the work of Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, though for the most part these writers shied away from overt supernaturalism, and certain works by Poe and Hawthorne are even frequently cited as precursors of science fiction (Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta,” for example, or Hawthorne’s “Rappacini’s Daughter”). But science fiction as something resembling a genre in the modern sense became much more visible in the pages of the dime novels—a particularly delicious and often-imitated example was Edward Ellis’s 1868 The Steam Man of the Prairie, featuring a human-shaped steam engine chuffing about the Wild West—and eventually in the pages of the cheaply made magazines published by Frank Munsey and others (some date the beginning of the “pulp era” to 1896, when Munsey transformed a former boys’ weekly paper into an all-adventure-fiction magazine called the Argosy). By the 1920s, the outlines of what would become the familiar pop genres of horror and science fiction were being sketched out in two important pulps: the former in Weird Tales, founded in 1923, and the latter in Amazing Stories, founded in 1926. Weird Tales published a fair amount of fantasy of the “sword-and-sorcery” variety (most notably Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” stories in the 1930s), but it wasn’t until 1939 that a fairly serious—though shortlived—attempt was made to create a modern fantasy pulp tradition with the publication of Unknown, intended as a fantasy companion to editor John W. Campbell, Jr.’s successful science fiction magazine, Astounding.
From a purely literary standpoint, the pulp tradition didn’t do anyone much good. All we have to do is look at the adjectives in the titles of these pulps to figure out what was going wrong: Weird, Amazing, Astounding, and dozens more: Wonder Stories, Marvel Tales, Terror Tales, Horror Stories, Eerie Mysteries, Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, Strange Stories, Astonishing Stories, Bizarre, Stirring Science Stories, Thrilling Stories (and later Thrilling Wonder Stories), Gripping Terror, Imaginative Tales, Rocket Stories, Planet Stories, and on and on, an endless parade of gerundives and adjectives that seemed to promise their readers passivity: these are not stories that you have to read, these are stories that will do things to you, that will leap off the page unmediated by any readerly acts of decoding, grab you by the suspenders, and pummel you into submission. Your task is not to understand—to see, feel, or hear—it is merely to be horrified, astounded, amazed, astonished, terrified, stirred, gripped, and thrilled. Don’t
ask what’s behind the curtain: we’re exhibiting a giant at a fair here. It shouldn’t be surprising that the famously lurid cover art for these pulps (which has become a fetish in itself among collectors) shares certain principles of color, composition, and draftsmanship with the art of sideshow posters and traveling circuses.
More important than their appearance, though, was the manner in which the pulp magazines turned their stories into perishable goods, complete with sell-by dates. The history of literary ephemera dates back centuries, of course, but even in the dime novels and the Salisbury Square bloods, the stories were the products; one presumably picked up the next installment of Varney the Vampire because it was Varney the Vampire, because the text was roughly coequal with the text-product being sold. But readers of Weird Tales, even though they would quickly develop favorite writers, picked up the next copy because it was Weird Tales, trusting the editors to fill the magazine with stories that fulfilled some often unarticulated template of what the magazine represented. In the science fiction field, at least, this led to enormous power devolving on the editors, who essentially took over the debate as to what the field was or ought to be. Even today, the Hugo Awards presented at the annual world convention of science fiction fans are named after the field’s first famous editor, Hugo Gernsback, who founded Amazing Stories in 1926, and readers often refer to the genre’s “golden age”—the period which introduced such now-revered authors as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein—as “the Campbell era,” after John W. Campbell, Jr., who began editing Astounding Stories (which he quickly renamed Astounding Science Fiction) in 1937. The authors, on the other hand, were sometimes reduced to writing stories on demand to satisfy an idea of the editors, or in more demeaning cases to writing stories that would exactly fill a hole in the next month’s issue or that would somehow make sense of a prepurchased cover illustration. This is a tradition that would continue for years after the pulps had been replaced by the only slightly less garish digest-sized magazines of the 1950s. And few if any writers for these magazines had any reason to believe that their stories would survive beyond the few weeks that the magazines containing them remained on the stands. What passed for literary debate about the nature of the fantastic was by now purely proletarian: in the letter columns of the magazines, a farmer from Kansas might have an equal platform with the writers and editors themselves, and might even have an edge, since he (or she) was holding next month’s quarter.
For most serious readers, the fiction in the pulps was all but invisible, at best a guilty pleasure, at worst an assault on the moral order. But at the same time, amid all the lurid tales of hungry elder gods looking for a snack and galaxy-busting backyard scientists, a kind of outsider aesthetic was being forged, just as it had been forged among the Victorian children’s fantasists or the inheritors of the Gothic tradition. This aesthetic didn’t really begin to be articulated until some of these ephemeral tales began to be collected in books. H. P. Lovecraft, for example, died in 1937 after building a considerable following as well as a circle of imitators in the pulps, but it wasn’t until two years later that two of these imitators, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, founded a publishing firm called Arkham House with the express intent of preserving Lovecraft’s work, which they had been unable to interest mainstream publishers in. Even before that, an early horror anthology titled Creeps by Night had been assembled by no less a luminary than Dashiell Hammett in 1931, and Lovecraft himself had been reprinted (along with other Weird Tales regulars such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith) in a British anthology series, originally titled Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson between 1925 and 1937. In 1943, the first science fiction anthology to be labeled as such was Donald A. Wollheim’s The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, presented as one of the wildly eclectic series of one-off special-interest titles which also included The Pocket Book of Home Canning and The Pocket Book of Crossword Puzzles. By the end of the 1940s, however, larger and more comprehensive anthologies began to appear. Science fiction saw Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas’s Adventures in Time and Space (1946), while horror fiction, in addition to Lovecraft, saw Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis M. Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944); both eventually gained lasting influence by remaining in print for years as part of Random House’s Modern Library. The indefatigable anthologist Groff Conklin mined both genres in a series of some forty-one anthologies over a twenty-two-year period, ending with his death in 1968. Genre fantasy, having never quite established a firm foothold in the pulps, didn’t fare as well, although there were such occasional titles as The Saturday Evening Post Fantasy Stories, edited by someone named Barthold Fles in 1951, and a collection of tales from the short-lived Unknown Worlds in 1948.
The major significance of these anthologies was to provide a distillation of pulp and other stories which then began circulating among new generations of readers. But at the same time, there was evident in many of them a sense that these fields had become “ghettoized,” isolated from the literary mainstream, and a concomitant sense that the anthologists were about the business of establishing a kind of de facto canon, as well as a de facto literary history. Some of these anthologies actively hungered for respect: Hammett’s collection of horror tales, for example, included Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” while a 1950 anthology by August Derleth (the same one who had set about resurrecting Lovecraft) tried mightily to establish a pedigree by including selections from Plato, Rabelais, Swift, and Bacon. Judith Merril, who edited the most popular “year’s best” anthologies of science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s, found ways to include stories by Eugene Ionesco, Robert Nathan, John Steinbeck, and even Walt Kelly and Garson Kanin in her generous definitions of these genres. This search for a usable past and respectable relatives continued well into the 1970s when genre fantasy, now established as a viable market segment in the wake of the Tolkien craze of the sixties, began to seek its own roots: the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter from 1969 through 1974, reprinted works by William Morris, James Branch Cabell, and George Meredith together with classic genre and pulp writers; surely one of the irreproducible moments of the lingering 1960s was discovering a mass-market prose translation of Book I of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso at the local newsstand in January of 1973.
In the end, though, the renascence of the fantastic would not emerge from its search for illustrious relations, its efforts to carve makeshift canons from pulp fiction, or even the befuddled gaze of academia, which eventually produced a sizable body of postmodernist theorizing, three or four academic journals devoted to science and fantasy fiction, and college courses in which ’Salem’s Lot could be assigned, as well as works by Lovecraft, Tolkien, Heinlein, Le Guin, or the most recent favorite among science fiction academics, Philip K. Dick. Instead, the signal development of the last few decades has been the emergence of a generation of writers—though “generation” is a misnomer, since these writers currently range in age from the twenties to the seventies—whose ambitions lay in what we might call recombinant genre fiction: stories which effectively decompose and reconstitute genre materials and techniques together with materials and techniques from an eclectic variety of literary traditions, even including the traditions of domestic realism. This eclecticism became most famously visible in the science fiction field in the 1960s with the “New Wave” associated with Britain’s New Worlds magazine, which showcased experimental work by such authors as J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and M. John Harrison—each of whom, in their later careers, moved comfortably between mainstream fiction, genre work, and more indefinable literary fabulation. Science fiction has since been visited by a number of other such movements—the cyberpunks of the 1980s in the wake of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the “new humanists” who reacted to the cyberpunks, the “literary hard science fiction” (“hard science fiction” being an older term for stories that adhere rigorously to limitations imposed by physical science) of such authors as Greg Bear, Joe Haldeman,
and Gregory Benford. Today, M. John Harrison is one of the touchstones of literary science fiction in the United Kingdom, just as Gene Wolfe is a touchstone in the United States; both authors, significantly, began their careers as genre writers in genre magazines, and Wolfe is still known mostly within the science fiction community for his complex, ornate, and infinitely subtle novels of distant futures.
Horror and fantasy, perhaps less politically organized than science fiction, have been less susceptible to manifestos and movements, but they are not without their schools, from the “Lovecraft circle” of the 1930s to the “splatterpunks” of the 1990s—whose fiction was pretty much what the label suggests—or the current Goths, who seem to regard horror as a lifestyle as much as a body of fiction; the fiction is often a mechanism for validating the attitude. Fantasy, at least of the broadly commercial variety, has been so dominated by the quest structure of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings that it barely leaves room for movements (though there have been a few, such as the “urban fantasy” associated with writers like Charles de Lint); some popular current fantasy series have long since left the simple quest-trilogy structure behind, and generate not so much sequels as metastases. But these fields as well have given rise to touchstone authors whose works seem to demand a reinvention of the ways in which we read genre. Peter Straub’s 1979 novel Ghost Story may seem to offer a veritable motif index of supernatural tropes, but in fact is a serious and ambitious interrogation of the notion of the ghost story in all its forms, told in a complexly structured narrative which belies the notion that such tropes can support only linear tales of single-minded revelation. Angela Carter, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), revealed that the fairy-tale redaction—itself virtually a subgenre of modern fantasy—could unpack deep and troubling conflicts of culture and gender, while her novels freely manipulated time and space using techniques drawn from surrealism, magic realism, and science fiction. John Crowley, who began his career clearly identified as a science fiction writer, virtually exploded the possibilities of several familiar fantasy tropes in his iconically titled 1981 novel Little, Big, in which the title refers not only to the notion of an ever-expanding inner world within the framework of the outer, but to the structuring of the novel itself; and in the Aegypt sequence of novels (1997-2000), which expands the notion to reveal a complex secret history of the world. Elizabeth Hand (who like Crowley began by writing science fiction), in novels such as Waking the Moon (1994) and Black Light (1999), has found ways of bringing the familiar tropes of ancient warring supernatural forces and the resurrection of a goddess into the domestic arenas of the college novel or the arts novel, without sacrificing the characterological demands of either. None of these writers, I would argue, can be read fully without an appreciation of their use of genre materials—of the valorization of Story that remains at the center of the fantastic genres even in their most demeaned forms—but none can be fully read with only an appreciation of those genre materials, either.
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