Denki Jidai (a brief history of Japanese SF 2/3)

As we saw in part one, Japan’s rich literary history had prepared Japanese writers for the influx of European style speculative fiction in the mid-1800s, and by the end of the century the flow of imported work had reached firehose rates as the literate public scrambled to learn as much as they could about the outside world from which they’d been separated for so long.

But Japan’s speculative fiction history isn’t just about imports, nor is it about imitation: As with many things adopted and adapted by the Japanese during the Meiji Era they combined the new with the old and made something unique and compelling.

A blog post is really far too short to do the subject justice, but I hope you’ll join me for a wild ride from the beginning of the 20^th Century, and into the “Denki Jidai” (the electric era)!

The Stumbling Block

Context: I was reading a story I thought was great, then felt it starting to stumble, and just reached the part where I would get out my form letter to say "I regret to say..."

Iron Tengu, Bamboo Girl (a brief history of Japanese SF 1/3)

These days, no-one really questions Japanese influence on modern science fiction – from the dark Orientalist fantasies of Japanese corporatism as a symbol of oppression in cyberpunk near futures, through Japanese industry’s place as a signal for “high tech”[1], and on through the ongoing anime and manga boom Japan seems almost omnipresent in modern science fiction.

Strangely though, despite Japan’s place as almost symbolic of near-future technological wonders[2] Japan’s own rich SF history is very little known in the English-speaking world. Oh, most people who grew up with TV in the 80s and 90s have some inkling of what was going on, but apart from kids’ cartoons and some thinly veiled adaptations of Western classics[3] the view from the West would largely make it seem as though the history of Japanese SF is short and reactive.

This is a shame, as Japan’s unique domestic SF culture has deep roots of its own.

Write Short, Write Fast, Write Often

Original images by Sebastien D'ARCO, animation by Koba-chan CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1044915

I really think short stories are a neglected form in genre fiction.

There's a real pressure to write long because it seems like the only way to get into print for a lot of people - at least, to get into print in what feels like a meaningful way. But the bar to getting a novel out the door is much higher than for a short.

Campbell vs Wollheim

Jacopo Zucci's "The Golden Age" (1575)

I recently returned to Robert Silverberg's essay on the "Golden Age" of SF.

It's interesting how Silverberg characterises Campbell's influence, especially how it contrasts with Wollheim's opinion. I think, though, that they're really on the same page:

I think to start with what Campbell was looking for was something along the lines of Gernsback's "SciEng Evangelism" but with the kind of near-slick writing you could find in Merritt and Moore and other greats of the 30s (taking into account that Moore was still going strong in the 40s and on into the 50s - I'm not sure why she doesn't merit a mention here, but suspect it's because Silverberg is focusing on SCI-fi, and over the years she has been classified strongly as fantasy)

But it grows evident in the later years of the 50s and on into the 60s that he was curating Astounding/Analog with a heavy hand. Even some of his "golden boys" occasionally griped that Campbell was giving them marching orders or entirely rewriting stories. And with the end of the hot part of WW2 and the opening of the cold front with the USSR, the 50s was also kind of a "golden age" of prophesies of doom - it seems inevitable that "cold hard logic" applied to predictive SF would generate an unhealthy serving of that tone.

The key is to note which of the Campbell crew were also getting accolades from Wollheim: Heinlein in particular gets comment for his upbeat, optimistic visions of interplanetary civilization.

So yeah, the 50s is a Golden Age, but I think it's also the period in which SF began to diverge into what Wollheim called the Welles vs Verne branches - enthusiastic utopianism vs scientism. This right after SFF - the larger category - had begun to diverge (partly because of the Campbell/neoFuturian movement) into clearer fantasy and "scientifiction" streams.

Who needs another hero?

Heroes. Who needs them!

Just another holier-than-thou vehicle for someone’s personal hangups.

Just another over-inflated cardboard cutout, a power fantasy made flesh.

Too strong, too competent, too perfect.

Real life isn’t like that.

Real people aren’t heroes.

And heroes have no place in serious fiction for mature adults.

Right?

Wrong.

Fat Cats and Hippies

Frank Zappa gave the interview this clip is from to MTV's "The Cutting Edge" in 1987. In this section he outlines a problem he saw with the music industry of the 80s - a problem he saw developing years earlier.

I hope you'll listen to the interview - it's just 4 minutes long. But for the moment here's the issue in a nutshell, and in Zappa's own words: