Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  About the time we started to destroy that world, industriously shrinking it to the size of a theme park or a shopping mall, we started writing about worlds out in space and their alien beings and ways. When the National Geographic ran short of exoticism, science fiction took over. Jack Vance seems to have enjoyed that compensatory invention immensely for its own sake; and he did it with the true Thousand and One Nights flair, the deadpan realism of the best traveler’s tales.

  The Languages of Pao was my favorite of the many Vance novels I bought in the sixties, because I liked its subject. Vance was always aware that language is an interesting and tricky business—unlike many science-fiction writers who still routinely present a whole planet or even galaxy of people(s) all speaking the same tongue. It is easier to explain airily that everybody speaks Ing-Lish ever since Urth installed the Galactic Empire than it is to cope realistically with Babel. But the trouble with a monolinguistic universe is that it’s shrunken, artificial—we’re back in the theme park, the shopping mall. Vance didn’t share the imperial, reductionist mind-set, common to his generation of sf writers, that dismisses variety as unimportant. Rather, he revels in it; his various peoples speak variously, and their names reflect the different phonologies of their languages.

  Vance’s writing style is certainly that of one to whom words, both the meaning and the sound, are important. He has—and it was a rare thing in science fiction in 1958—a real and personal literary style. His dialogue is often dignified and formal to the point of being stilted; people say things like, “This credence which you deprecate may be no more than fact.” This is a mannerism, but, if you accept it, a rather endearing one. The rhythm of his narrative is calm, sedate, musical; his descriptive passages are direct and exact. He gives you a sense of what the weather is, what the colors of things are, he places you in a setting: “Above reared the rock slope, far up to the gray sky, where the wild little white sun swerved like a tin disc on the wind. Beran retraced his steps.”

  This little passage is typical, the first sentence for its vivid description, poetic, exact, restrained; the second for its slightly old-fashioned phrasing and its simplicity. Vance did not waste words. He is as far as possible from the grab-’em-by-the balls school of action writing, yet he was an action writer: his plots move forward, not rapidly but steadily, with an impetus that carries the reader right along. He was in full charge of his story. The characters, the plot, the scenes, descriptions, actions, all are under control. And control is, perhaps, one of his great subjects.

  The Languages of Pao concerns a struggle for the control of a people: a political conflict, a moral debate. As in others of his books, it involves a vast population, but is acted out by a very few characters. One is a boy, Beran, inheritor of a world empire but reduced to dependence on a man of enormous power, Palafox. The plot is in fact the classic duel of father and son, complicated wonderfully by the fact that the father has literally hundreds of other sons. Pitting the father’s pitiless megalomania against the boy’s struggling sense of justice, Vance sets up his conflict cannily. Palafox, for all his power, is utterly controlled by the perverse society that formed him, and even the language which gives him his power; while Beran, because he is not committed to any one alternative, has a hope of freedom.

  The element of speculative science informing the plot is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which says (stated crudely) that our mental outlook is formed by our language: what one can think depends, to a large extent, on the words one has to think with. Because linguistics is a “soft” or social science, diehards of “hard” SF must dismiss this book as fantasy; but such quibbles grow ever quainter. Meeting the reasonable requirement of using a durable if much-questioned scientific hypothesis as a major element of the plot, Pao is excellent, solid science fiction. Vance understands Sapir-Whorf and, while applying it with due caution, elaborates it convincingly and spins a lively yarn out of it.

  I feel a certain old-fashioned quality to Pao. Perhaps it was always there, inherent in Vance’s dignified language, his unhurried pacing, and his avoidance of ubiquitous, gratuitous violence. But it may also have something to do, now, with Vance’s inescapable masculinism—an almost universal failing of the genre at that time. Women are perceived, if at all, as contingent on men—appurtenances. A shadowy girl, Gitan, plays a brief, passive role. Some nameless victims of Palafox’s lust are glimpsed. Beran has a father but no mother. He neither seeks nor finds a wife. Male interests are the only concern, men perform all actions except domestic service, men fill every leading position; even madness is gendered, for Palafox’s psychotic plan to populate the world with his sons is merely a hideous exaggeration of the male sex drive, the selfish gene embodied. What women want, feel, think, or are plays no part whatever in the book. This is of course true of many novels, even now, even those with nominally female characters. Vance’s lack of interest in half the population of the world was, at least, undisguised by hypocritical pieties.

  Respecting his writing as I do, I tried to see the story as a critique of male dominance, and it can be read so, but the reading is unconvincing in the complete absence of active women characters. So this fine novel may seem, to a modern eye, maimed. It is benign and thoughtful, yet its omission of half of humankind from agency cripples an otherwise just, subtle, and generous moral stance.

  Jack Vance made no pretense to literary greatness, I think, but he held himself to a far higher literary standard than most pulp-fiction and genre writers of his time, and he was true to his own vision. For that he deserves lasting honor. May a new generation of readers discover the joys of traveling far beyond the shopping mall and the theme park, to the eight continents of Pao, and the bleak heights of Breakness.

  H. G. Wells: The First Men in the Moon

  An introduction to the Modern Library edition of 2002.

  Since “genre” and “literature” are often supposed to be exclusive categories, many critics, publishers, and even authors, driven by commercialism or snobbery, deny that a work of literary science fiction is science fiction at all, and invent fancy names for it. H. G. Wells was not indulging in such squeamishness when he called his early stories “scientific romances.” Writing science fiction years before the genre had a name, he was, like a good biologist, simply giving an accurate label to a non-descript, a newly discovered creature.

  “Scientific romance” is a proper Linnaean double-barrel, genus and species. The word romance, alluding to the tradition of Lucian and Ariosto and Cyrano de Bergerac, links the older, imaginative and purely fantastical element of his stories with their speculative and intellectual element, which was without precedent.

  For Wells was the first writer of real note to write fiction as a scientist, from within science, rather than as an outsider looking on with excitement or complacency or horror at the revelations and implications of the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century. Percy Shelley saw the beauty science revealed; Mary Shelley saw the moral ambiguity of it; Jules Verne saw it as an endless technological spree; but Wells saw through its eyes. He was the first literary writer to form his mind in the passionate study of science under a great scientist. His year in Thomas Henry Huxley’s class in the Normal School of Science, in 1884, when modern biology was defining itself and redefining the world, gave him, as he said, his vision of the world.

  And much of the ambiguity of that vision throughout his writing life is a faithful reflection of the troubled ethic of the discipline.

  In an 1891 essay, “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” Wells wrote:

  Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room—in moments of devotion, a temple—and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary sputter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of a
ll that human comfort and beauty he anticipated—darkness still.

  When he wrote that, the physicists, still happy in Newton’s serenely illuminated universe, had not yet discovered their darkness; but the biologists had. It lay all round the match that Darwin struck. All Wells’s scientific romances may be read as investigations into the dark immensity revealed by the brilliance of the hypothesis of evolution.

  He has been scolded for the glaring impossibilities of his stories, their element of irresponsible romance. In The First Men in the Moon, published in 1901, the anti-gravity material, cavorite, is no more realistic than the dreams, gryphons, wings, and balloons that transported earlier moon voyagers—it might as well be a flying carpet. With typical self-deprecation (taken literally by too many critics trained only in the Jamesian forms of subtlety), he said in his preface to Seven Famous Novels that his method was “to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds.” Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implications.

  Of course the accurate narrative description of the nonexistent is a basic device of all fiction. The extension to the impossible is proper to fantasy, but since we seldom know with certainty what is or is not possible, it is a legitimate element of science fiction too. What if? is a question asked by both science fiction and experimental science, and they share their method of answering it: make a postulate and then carefully observe its consequences.

  What if we had a device for getting to the moon (within some sixty years we would, though it wouldn’t be cavorite), what if the moon had an atmosphere (Wells knew that it didn’t), what if its inhabitants were a highly intelligent species that had taken their social evolution into their own rather clammy hands—what then?

  The last of these What ifs is the big one. Wells’s enterprise is considerably larger and riskier than extrapolation from a current technology to a possible future one, Verne’s principal tactic. While Verne marvels happily at future mechanical wonders, Wells wonders where the amoral force of evolution may lead us, and, still more presciently, at what the social and moral implications of deliberate, rational control of evolution might turn out to be. This is a question that we, a hundred years later, watching corporate science blithely alter genetic codes in plants, animals, and human beings, are just beginning to ask.

  In an 1896 article, “Human Evolution, an Artificial Process,” Wells was one of the first to envisage Darwinian process as becoming no longer the work of blind chance, but of human management: unnatural selection. A year earlier, in The Time Machine, in the same year in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and five years later in The First Men in the Moon, he explored this vision through fiction.

  In The Time Machine, if the separation of humankind into grim Morlocks and effete Eloi is a deliberate coding of the hierarchy of social class into human genetics, it backfires rather dreadfully, since the aristocrats have ended up as long pork for the working class. The result of the thought experiment in Doctor Moreau is no happier. In the shorthand terms of a pre-Mendelian fiction, the manipulation of evolution by an obsessed scientist is a hideous failure, engendering only monsters.

  In The First Men in the Moon, the terms of the experiment are different and the outcome is ambiguous. It is not men who are selecting and breeding themselves for various uses and excellences, but alien beings, moon people. There is no doubt at all that the Selenites are rational and practical. As social insects have been shaped by millennia of random selection to fit their tasks perfectly, so the Selenites, through genetic management and by manipulation of fetuses or infants, have deliberately bred and molded themselves to form an efficient, peaceful, harmonious society, without poverty or violence. That their highly specialised individual bodies are to human eyes grotesque and frightful reflects more on our prejudices than on their morality. Aesthetically they are, to us, appalling; but ethically are they perhaps our superiors?

  By leaving judgment on this interesting question to two narrators singularly ill equipped to make any ethical judgment on anything, Wells leaves it ultimately up to the reader.

  The principal narrator, Bedford, is a venal, self-complacent bungler, ready for anything but good for nothing. Though his brutality, when it breaks out, is disgusting, he is acceptable as a comic hero rather than a villain because he is mostly so incompetent and so unconscious of his incompetence. Alone on the return voyage, he has one moment of cosmic understanding and piercing self-perception—“an ass . . . the son of many generations of asses”—but that soon evaporates. Back on earth he is quite himself again.

  The scientist Cavor is good at only one thing, but very good at that. He is almost as specialised as the Selenites. He is as selfless as Bedford is selfish. “He simply wanted to know. . . .” When he is left alone on the moon, his messages back to earth are admirable in their intellectual courage; he will observe and record to the bitter end. But he has made a religion of knowledge, setting it above moral values, community responsibility, and practical consequences, and it is this blind faith that finally betrays and destroys him.

  Earth’s first emissaries to the strange beings who live in the moon are thus themselves deformed, one by ruthless capitalism, the other by ruthless scientism. This is a very dark comedy, harking back to Swift in its indignation, but with a satiric double edge that reaches straight forward from Wells’s time to ours.

  Told in Bedford’s breezy, cheerful, bloodyminded style, it is also a thoroughly entertaining story, fast moving, often funny. It is lifted above mere adventure by intellectual riskiness and complexity, and also by its aesthetic power, which is uneven but in certain scenes unequaled—moments of the most dazzling descriptive intensity. The chapter “A Lunar Morning” might in itself provide an answer to the question, whether asked patronisingly or seriously, Why do people read science fiction? My paraphrase of that answer is: In hopes of receiving such writing as this—a ravishingly accurate vision of things unseen, an utterly unexpected yet necessary beauty: revelation as the scientist knows it.

  The passage is also an answer to mandarin critics who try to dismiss Wells as ignorant of literary technique and indifferent to aesthetic value. A more careful reader, Darko Suvin, in his essay “Wells as the Turning Point of the Science Fiction Tradition,” pointed to the poetic quality of Wells’s writing: “This poetry is based on a shocking transmutation of scientific into aesthetic cognition, and poets from Eliot to Borges have paid tribute to it.” The word shocking is well used. Such a transmutation remains rare enough to take the breath away.

  Another memorable scene is given us, late in the story, in Cavor’s drier voice. His Selenite guide has been showing him babies,

  confined in jars, from which only the fore-limbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection, while the rest of the body is starved. . . . It is quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.

  This fiercely ironic passage puts in question the whole issue of what is so euphemistically called “the division of labor,” by showing how it can most economically be achieved. Anyone who has read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World will see what the grandson learned from his grandfather’s st
udent. I find Wells’s satire both keener and more compassionate than Huxley’s.

  And then there is the Grand Lunar, with his enormous brain, “many yards in diameter,” looming like a vast inflated bladder out of the blue-lit darkness of the deepest caves of the moon, the image of all-but-disembodied intellect, the ultimate dream of pure Mind. “It was great. It was pitiful,” Cavor says, prevented by his own prized objectivity from realising that he is seeing an image of himself: mind isolated, without body, without love, trapped in darkness and the ugliness of hypertrophy.

  The sleep of Reason engenders monsters. . . .

  H. G. Wells: The Time Machine

  An introduction to the Modern Library edition of 2002.

  The Time Machine was published in 1895, and has never been out of print. It was the first major work by a young man who would become one of the best-known writers of the early twentieth century. It was, in fact, the story that brought him his first fame.