I like clever sets, and small theatres require them. Will Lowry’s design for Plainview High didn’t disappoint. An irregular section of school hallway in purple and teal dominated up center. Decorated with bulletins, a calendar, a single locker, and a delightful “Read” poster of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (a really entertaining book that I recommend), the upstage wall served multiple purposes, including Scotty the Hotty’s bedroom. While this might have been done in such a way to lessen the impact of the high school set, always seeing the high school underscored the school environment’s omnipresence in the life of a teen. I particularly liked the two panels on each wall which, when folded out, displayed slogans for the Jaguars, but, when turned flush to the wall, revealed lockers for the students. Rounding out the set were a small set of bleachers and a floor motif suggesting the football field.
While one would expect the play’s influences to be material such as the Percy Jackson series or really any number of young adult works dealing with high school and fantasy, what really comes out in Schulenburg’s work is a much older tale told through the ages in various forms. The “loathly lady” finds expression in the Irish Fenian Cycle in Diarmuid and the Loathly Lady, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Norse Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga, Arthurian legend in the Marriage of Sir Gawaine and Dame Ragnelle, and Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In all of these, an ugly woman is transformed by a man wanting or being tricked to be with her. She becomes incredibly beautiful and desirable, and the ugliness was just a curse. I supposed if you squinted really hard, you could manage to only walk away with the notion that things are not always as they seem on the surface. And yet.... Essentially, a woman is saved by a man and, in spite of her lack of beauty, he transforms her with his attentions. Beauty, physical beauty, is always the end result. Can you hear my scorn?
Schulenburg, however, is a crafty playwright and upends the old tale. The girl is average, but her act of saving the Glowing Girl makes her not so much beautiful—though there is that—as larger than herself. Spielmann’s outward appearance as Jane is not changed, but her confidence, that sense of being kissed by the universe, makes her greater. The real focus of the conflict is not on Jane’s beauty or lack thereof, but between the life-granting forces of the Glowing Girl and the destructive power of the Mirror Man.
Jane the Plain offers a different take on the teen experience—a John Hughes-meets-Joseph Campbell, Pretty in Myth portrait. The production acknowledged the beautiful, comic, and frightening tipping point we all face between the either/or of childhood and the both/and of being an adult without waxing nostalgic, and while it makes some simplifications as a nod to the “genre” of teen shows, it complicates these as well—with cell phones and avatars of larger things. It gave the audience what high school memories always are at heart—a fairy tale containing a few hard-won lessons.
Jen Gunnels lives in the never-ending high school known as The Adult World, as do we all.
Donald M. Hassler
The “Tangled Bank” of Science Fiction and War in the Long Twentieth Century
When that great European warrior, Napoleon, agreed to the sale of the vast, unknown expanse of the Louisiana Purchase early in the nineteenth century to the peace-loving and agrarian American Thomas Jefferson, one might say that the die had been cast for the long march into the long twentieth century of war and war writings. American science fiction capitalized on that adventure and action-packed development, had a lot to write about with regard to the many wars and offers now a bit of a palliative to the haunt of war. Ironically, the golden exuberance and energy in scientific discovery that was exemplified so well by Jules Verne’s early science enthusiasm, a parallel to Lewis and Clark’s exploration of Jefferson’s purchase, might have carried its momentum into continuing and happy technological progress in our time. In fact, science and science fiction did just that. Most of us live longer and happier lives.
But there was a haunt in the progress of science that has colored our time with the darkness of struggle and war in as intense a fashion as history seems ever to have known. Savagery and primitive violence asserted themselves into the long twentieth century in a manner that could not have been anticipated. American expansionism and industrial capitalism, expansion even when the geography is finite, represent the ideal venue for the Darwinian theory of struggle, adaptation, and potential. The major Napoleonic and imperial force of our own time, embodied in Hitler and the lesser monsters after him, delights in the potential for expansion. Adolf Hitler himself loved the American frontier and wanted to find more room for German expansion in order to play out his cowboy-superman fantasies.
Further, the new genre of American science fiction crafted or battled for its own considerable hegemony in the twentieth century. We had the frontier. We inherited, just like the English and the Germans, warlike images from nineteenth-century science and philosophy. We had our own American Darwinists. Thus it ought not be surprising how widespread and intense are the images of war in American sf.
According to the fine study by Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin (2011), the trauma in our thought produced by the images for potential struggle and conflict in the huge “tangled bank” of nature was seminal. She argues that the groundbreaking Darwinian science empowered not only the monsterism of aggressive and territorial warfare but also the superman complex for empire building as men tried to adjust to Darwin’s findings and to his eloquent writing. The label that Richter introduces into her analysis, even diagnosis, is “anthropological anxiety” (163). Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom she highlights in her book, and Jack London are key American writers in the early century before our science fiction had fully coalesced. But much of the harshness and agony of the First World War was left to English and Modernist writers such as H.G. Wells and war poets such as Wilfred Owen to depict. Even so, a recent review of a new biography of Jack London does make explicit the Darwinian theme: “By telling stories about ... near-bestial men struggling for survival in a brutal environment ... a new range of cruelties and sorrows [was] available to fiction” (Crain 76).
Grand Adventure Stories Before the Cold War
Some critics argue that Hugo Gernsback single-handedly promoted American science fiction with his marketing of pulp magazines so that the other enterprises in this budding empire could discover a readership (cf. Gary Westfahl’s essay “Space Opera”). In any case, the magazine readership loved monsterism, space adventure, and even rational progressivism in the troubled ’30s between the wars. Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft mined the monsterism ore. Characters in Howard such as Esau Cairn, Solomon Kane, and especially Conan are strange and exciting mutants that only the wild frontier’s dynamic natural potentiality could have generated. Space adventure picks up the much more positive sense of future development. E.E. “Doc” Smith, beginning with The Skylark of Space (1928), creates an interplanetary police force much like our own United Nations police force with enough storytelling resonance that all the Star Trek tales carry its (positive) warlike powers, especially in a recent series of spin-off novels by David R. George III about Trek’s Federation at war. Our American hope in the decade prior to the Second World War was that the military could be a rational way to manage the horror of war even if we must bend the Prime Directive of nonintervention as we Americans seem continually to have to do.
As in so many areas where he led the way for American science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein more or less defined modern technological warfare in Starship Troopers (1959) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965). Published well after the conclusion of the Second World War, those two books nevertheless capture the positivism of the ’30s. Heinlein gave a speech to fans at the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, just months prior to Pearl Harbor, in which he advised the young fans that those who think about the future were best equipped to deal with political troubles in the world, with the impending war (cf. Rich 337). The Mobile Infantry in Starship Troopers had delighted many readers with its futuristic weap
onry. Here is how Mike, the master computer in Harsh Mistress, sees the notion of war (paraphrased by clever, tough narrator Mannie): “Mike reasoned so: What is ‘war’? One book defined war as use of force to achieve political result.… In war, this done by ‘weapons’—Luna had none” (107). So Mike sets out to make whatever weapons he can through sheer ingenuity.
Heinlein’s qualified positive vision for war (the progressive vision that Mannie represents is so linear that its failure to reach an endpoint or “peace” is ultimately and profoundly troubling) was shared by many of the energetic, young fans who would shape American science fiction. The Futurians not only worked hard to market their stories before and after the Second World War but some also endorsed a positive political program for intervention that they called “Michelism.” Cyril Kornbluth was only fifteen and Frederik Pohl three years older when the “Futurian Science Literary Society” held its first organizational meeting in Manhattan on September 18, 1938, and the turbulent history began of trying to make fandom and stories themselves practical and instrumental in social progress. These teenage writers loved the literature produced in the pulp magazines, but they were serious activists too. By early 1957, just a little over a year before his death, Cyril Kornbluth gave a speech at the University of Chicago (later published in The Science Fiction Novel edited by Basil Davenport) in which he lamented the failure of sf as social criticism. He said he did not want their work to be socially impotent but acknowledged some glimmer of hope for Michelism by noting that The Space Merchants (1953) had received a long review in The Industrial Worker (Hassler “Space Merchants” 22).
Isaac Asimov, always the most puckish among the Futurians, attacked the monsterism of fascism and empire head-on and directly in its face. Just as Hitler’s monstrous thousand-year Reich was striving to be born at the end of the 1930s—with the League of Nations and Wilsonian idealism virtually bankrupt—Asimov made the decision to embrace empire and territoriality. Others had written a lot of space opera about acquiring and holding territory, but it was Asimov who studied Gibbon and modeled a millennial Galactic Empire in his “Foundation,” a concept that had the creative energy and emotional appeal to spawn new stories for another half century. To win and to hold territory by any means is a major survival activity, and many wars and war stories are predicated on such primitive struggles. Even our most civilized cultural activities seem to be driven by territoriality and conquest. Territory in the writing world is competitive, even predatory. (Asimov’s “Galactic Empire” began with scattered stories in Astounding, grew to the Foundation Trilogy by the 1950s, and continued in sequels and prequels even beyond his death—a very successful empire indeed.) This territoriality is also extremely filial or generational. We want to expand our empires where we think our fathers have been. We will return to this notion, finally, as a modicum of palliative for war in the conclusion of this essay.
Fantasy War during the Cold War and its Hot Sequels
Winston Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in 1946, and gradually it became clear that a Cold War had followed immediately on the ending of the Second World War. Nearly all the Futurians had joined one way or another in the war effort, and now as they got back to their “wordsmithing” (the label that Kornbluth and Pohl used for writers in The Space Merchants) changes could be seen in tone and, even, in the scope of the war stories produced in American science fiction. Some of the change was simply satire and war fatigue. Both Kornbluth and Philip K. Dick wrote alternative histories about the Russians or the Germans having won the war. Henry Kuttner’s earlier Fury, which started as a short story during the Second World War when he was disqualified from service for medical reasons and later became a novel, is a bitter, ironic take on the need for war to keep culture progressing. But the more drastic irony and tonal shift with the advent of the Cold War had to do with what Heinlein had identified: the importance of weaponry. His revolutionary Loonies just had “rocks.” Cold War America had the Bomb, and soon after, so did Russia and several others. This seemed like much too rapid a development in war, accelerating or even outstripping Darwinian adaptation. A 1949 story by Kuttner titled “Cold War,” which primarily concerns itself with family feuding, contains the line, “Look at them little genes mutate” (323). When Ray Bradbury looked back three decades later at Kuttner’s images about who or what would adapt in the long struggle of this Cold War, he knew that it was partly a matter of children: “Kuttner had no family, but ... his children live here in this book” (Bradbury xv).
The Victorian Anthony Trollope had speculated playfully on superweapons following the Franco-Prussian War in his last novel The Fixed Period (1882). By our period, however, much of the playfulness had been replaced: the new savagery and the technological wizardry fascinate American science fiction writers even in their horror. Two summaries late in the Cold War period demonstrate this: Paul Brians’s Nuclear Holocausts (1987) and Martha Bartter’s The Way to Ground Zero (1988). Most recently and in the same class of critical work, Under the Shadow by David Seed presents a key part of the premise that underlies this short essay: Victorian science opened the floodgates for both the actual wars in the long twentieth century and for the fictional works that depict war. While Virginia Richter points to Darwin, Seed starts with the Curies since nuclear weaponry is his theme: “The discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s would qualify as beginning what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm shift...” (9). One must notice, also, that the paradigm shift cannot just be in weaponry, which Heinlein’s Mike says is central to warfare, but also in frame of mind and in spirit. Our time and our fictions have become more savage.
The Cold War coincided with more women writing American science fiction about war. Judith Merril did not begin sharing enthusiasms and writing notes with the activist Futurians until the Cold War, and when she did, her collaboration with Kornbluth on the military Gunner Cade (as by “Cyril Judd,” 1952) contained the ironic undercutting engendered by the Korean Conflict, McCarthyism, and the Eisenhower “military-industrial complex.” As the Cold War continued and the waves of feminism advanced, women produced strange experiments with narrative in contact with the enormity of war. Writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Joan Slonczewski were able to deny or repress warlike behavior entirely in their work. Le Guin is able to overwhelm aggression effectively with her notion of “simultaneity” in The Dispossessed (1974), and Slonczewski has produced novels out of Cold War solemnity that lean on botany and plantlike adaptations to slow, to mute, to make sing our hard animal natures. Other women write traditional space opera about warring camps and heroics where women are truly Amazons. Pamela Sargent, Elizabeth Moon, and Lois McMaster Bujold are some of the standouts. Nancy Kress can be very fanciful in the face of holocaust situations that her readers know only too much about—reaching back even to the Spanish Civil War when the Second World War and the Cold War had not yet emerged (cf. Hassler, “Relation”).
In an award-winning essay in the 1990 volume of Science Fiction Studies, H. Bruce Franklin suggests that Viet Nam is an American “fantasy.” He means more in the sense of a nightmare, and he had said something similar about Heinlein himself earlier. This strange, experimental characterization of late-century wars—and these can now be extended to Iraq and to the worldwide wars on terror America is forced to engage in—may reflect as well the massive Orson Scott Card set of narratives about Ender Wiggin as child-warrior. But it is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) that most fully captures the notion and bears it home. Some critics argue that the Haldeman tale is a parody of Heinlein’s linear sense of “foreverness.” Mannie and Prof’s revolution will always continue. But clearly no one wants war to go on forever. And so the tonal enormity of Haldeman’s tale demands either laughter or a “cure”—or both. Strangely, the genre of American science fiction itself offers just such a cure as well as, possibly, a joke or two once this extremity of our war-haunted century is reached.
A Military Historian and Child of Genre Wars
The g
enre that capitalized upon space opera and its superheroes changed subtly at the warring edges on the gothic frontier of struggle; that change provides the final section of this essay. In fact, my reading is that the vast hegemony of this warlike presence in American science fiction becomes so troubling that the genre itself adapts to move away or, at least, to modify the empire of “forever” war. Strangely this is done by using the past, and so I am reminded of the haunting phrase in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that I.F. Clarke adapted for the title of his massive reference book on the literature of future wars, Voices Prophesying War. Clarke omits Coleridge’s “ancestral”; one can highlight that word, however, in order to emphasize the filial and generational elements that enter science fiction writing with the notion of “steampunk” as a new development in the genre.
One might conclude this essay on war stories within the usual boundaries of American science fiction leading up to the recent Hugo-winning novel, John Scalzi’s Redshirts (2012) that depicts both the adventure and the horror of war as well as the collapse into a sort of empiremania. But it is at the edges of this empire itself, almost like the Gothic frontier of the Roman Empire, where one can discover what is most interesting in these efforts both at depiction of warlike behavior and at efforts for peace. Two main texts and inspirations for this section are the Jerry Cornelius stories of Michael Moorcock (born 1939, an ominous year in the warring twentieth century), and then the second of Caleb Carr’s “alienist” novels, The Angel of Darkness. Carr was born in 1955, in the midst of the Cold War.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 310, June, 2014 Page 8