Asimov's Three

The March 1939 issue in which Asimov's first published
story, Marooned Off Vesta appeared, 77 years ago!

April 6, 2016 marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Good Doctor, who sadly died in 1992 of heart and kidney failure.

Having been writing science fiction for 15 years, and having cemented his reputation with an impressive bibliography that included what is sometimes considered science fiction’s most famous story, Nightfall [1] Isaac Asimov was tapped to provide an essay for Reginald Bretnor’s [2] volume Modern Science Fiction: It’s Meaning and It’s Future (1953) where he was published alongside other big names of the era such as John W. Campbell, Rosalie Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, and Arthur C. Clarke.

The whole volume was of course mainly dedicated to the ways in which the authors imagined science fiction would impact society [3], including such titles as Science Fiction: Preparation for the Age of Science (Clarke), Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis (Philip Wylie), and Science Fiction, Morals, and Religion (Gerald Heard).  Asimov’s own contribution, Social Science Fiction, is perhaps most notable for its effort at a taxonomy of science fiction stories – which results in his assertion that there are ultimately three categories of science fiction story: Gadget, Adventure, and Social.  To illustrate, he imagines three 19th century authors writing about an “imaginary” device they tentatively call an “automobile”:

“Writer X spends most of his time describing how the machine would run, explaining the workings of an internal-combustion engine, painting a word-picture of the struggles of the inventor, who after numerous failures, comes up with a successful model. The climax of the yarn is the drama of the machine, chugging its way along at the gigantic speed of twenty miles an hour, possibly beating a horse and carriage which have been challenged to a race. This is gadget science fiction. […] 

 “Writer Y invents the automobile in a hurry, but now there is a gang of ruthless crooks intent on stealing this valuable invention. First they steal the inventor's beautiful daughter, whom they threaten with every dire eventuality but rape (in these adventure stories, girls exist to be rescued and have no other uses). The inventor's young assistant goes to the rescue. He can accomplish his purpose only by the use of the newly perfected automobile. He dashes into the desert at an unheard-of speed of twenty miles an hour to pick up the girl who otherwise would have died of thirst if he had relied on a horse, however rapid and sustained the horse's gallop. This is adventure science fiction. […] 

 “Writer Z has the automobile already perfected. A society exists in which it is already a problem. Because of the automobile, a gigantic oil industry has grown up, highways have been paved across the nation, America has become a land of travelers, cities have spread into the suburbs—and what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done? What is the solution? This is social science fiction.” (Asimov, "Social Science Fiction")

This can all of course be neatly summarized:

• Gadget story: describes how some hypothetical thing might work.
• Adventure story: describes how some hypothetical thing might be used to solve a problem.
• Social story: describes what society might look like when some hypothetical thing exists.

As anyone familiar with Asimov's work and his advocacy for SF to aim for literary achievement might predict, his essay largely advocates for the social story as being the pinnacle.

There are a couple of curious things about this position though, even ignoring the quibble (which I'm sure the Good Doctor would actually have agreed with) that it's a rare story indeed that neatly falls into just one of these categories.

One of the first thing that springs to mind is that, while Asimov doesn't obviously dismiss other kinds of fiction as unworthy, it's clear that in his opinion "social SF" is best placed to reach the "heights" of literary fiction.

While I'm right alongside Dr. Asimov in agreeing that social SF can be much harder to write, and certainly requires more writing skill than simply sketching out a neat idea in a flashy fiction wrapper, even in the era he was writing in and before it should have been obvious: the basic fact that writing a saleable story of the first two species doesn't require the type of literary skills Asimov advocated for in SF doesn't actually preclude their application.

I'm not of course suggesting that Isaac Asimov was ignorant of what came before him - on the contrary, looking at his early work in particular you can almost see the impact of previous writers in its inverse: Asimov's prose is consciously direct and unornamented, and while he develops over the course of his remarkably prolific career [4] even to the end his stories lack so much in the way of literary flourish that he has proven a slippery target for the ordinary literary critic. [5] For many, this is a huge plus: in fact, the ruthlessly plot-and-idea oriented writing that is Asimov’s hallmark is one of the things that made him so popular. [6] I’m not even suggesting that Asimov was himself without literary skill – in fact, despite constantly breaking cardinal rules of fiction (minimize exposition, show don’t tell, write natural, believable dialogue, and others) he demonstrates that he’s capable of some amazing characterization at important points in his plots (look at Liar! for example, or Second Foundation), not to mention the skillful way in which he contrived the narrative of (especially) longer tales, nesting plots and snapping together timelines in fascinating non-linear ways. [7]

No, Asimov certainly knew what he was about in developing his personal style, and I feel sure he had a good grasp of what had come before (indeed, what was still being produced by his peers when he started and into the 50s).  Where I disagree with him is really in his own words, which he gives us in his 3 paragraph author’s note at the beginning of Nemesis (1989) [8]:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing – to be ‘clear’. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally [9], or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize.  I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics –Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

You see, he is making a fundamental mistake here, I think – eschewing poetry and symbol and “art” in writing isn’t the only way to achieve clarity.  Certainly, it’s easy to become unclear if you rely too heavily on these things, but the bright imagery of Leigh Brackett’s descriptions, the rich language of Jack Vance’s satirical tweaks are anything but unclear in my mind.  And this mistake is where I think he gets his sense that social SF is where the genre is best placed to achieve literary quality.

He has taken the stance that only through clarity – by which he specifically means “unadorned writing” – can good SF stories be told (at least by him) and a relationship built with the readers.  From the perspective of this stance his idea that social SF has the best potential for literary quality makes perfect sense, I think, but it’s because the “artistic flourishes” he chose to avoid are what give stories of the first two varieties life, and his own style was in fact best adapted for painting the complex future stories he ultimately went on to write in his Robot series and in the Foundation books.

But this brings me to my second point: that I think Asimov’s idea that social SF is the realm in which science fiction was best able to aspire to literary achievement betrays the “class angst” shared by so many genre writers. 

In trying to find ways in which SF might “one day” aspire to literary greatness, Asimov makes himself complicit in placing SF – and other “genre” writing – as somehow automatically unliterary…and by extension unworthy.  In arguing for literary merit in SF he flies the flag high, but in the same motion tears it down again, somehow blind to the fact that SF was already literary: authors like Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis Stevens, Abraham Merritt and many others had already proven that, contemporaries of Asimov like Catherine Moore and Leigh Brackett [10] or the better known Ray Bradbury were still proving that, while they might not reach the heights every time (who does!) they were fully capable of it.

So where does this self-consciousness come from in genre?

I think it’s clear:

Somewhere along the line we have been convinced that stories that “merely” paint a picture of a complex object or scenario don’t count as literature.

Somewhere along the line we have been taught that stories that “merely” recounts an adventure don’t count either.

Genre writing – and science fiction in particular – have quite a lot of these kinds of stories, so obviously they don’t count as literature, right?

But of course we accept the military fantasy of the Illiad as literature, we accept the satirical travels of Gulliver as literature, we accept prose poems (which are surely no more than vivid descriptions of a scene, of a feeling), and Shakespeare’s murder mysteries (and what did you think Macbeth and Hamlet were?), we accept Beowulf, and most ironically we accept things like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Poe and Welles and Doyle and (ahem) Shelley as literature.

It’s long past time we realised that it isn’t (necessarily) the writing that makes people dismiss SF&F, detective stories, westerns, romance, etc as unworthy – it’s the formats they’ve been traditionally associated with.  Formats that were cheap, mass produced, and hungry for as much content as they could get: pulps.

Yes, this format paid little and produced a lot – not only was it hard for a writer to make a living [11] unless they produced astounding volumes for a multitude of venues, but the publications themselves had a challenge: they had to be cheap enough for nearly anyone to afford, they had to be substantial enough to seem good value for money, and they needed to produce often enough to remain visible in an incredibly competitive market.  These two factors pushed authors and publishers to pump out enormous volumes of text each and every month, so while the best writers could produce truly amazing work the fact was that any random story was probably merely mediocre. [12]

The economics of this era colours our perceptions and and the attitudes of people of the time, though I feel sure that there was an element of elitism involved as well: for the most part the pulps were dismissed as “yellow journals” without interest to authors who could publish in “legitimate” ways – and beneath the notice of the academy.  It wasn’t that there were no literary quality authors writing for the pulps, it was that they were tainted by turning to the pulps to facilitate their desire to write a kind of story that has captivated human beings for as long as there have been stories. [13]

Interestingly, I can see this phenomenon emerging again with the explosion of digital media.  It will be interesting to see if we can overcome the prejudices of our own era to see the gems hidden in the digital pulps.

--30--

1. Amazingly, published a mere 3 years after he had been inspired to try his hand at SF writing Nightfall was already Asimov’s 32nd story, though apparently only his 20th published (admittedly a remarkable acceptance rate).

2. Although little talked about today, Brentnor himself was an interesting character, whose career included writing propaganda to be sent to Japan during WW2 and membership in The Order of the Trapezoid in the 50s.  Yes, that one.  In SF, he’s mainly remembered today for his symposia and essay collections on the craft of writing it.

3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there seem to be a few Futurians in the credits…

4. Seriously: 500 books in 54 years? Even with story collections included that's remarkable. More astoundingly, he seems to have produced more than 100 of them just in his last 10 years!

5. Though not entirely impossible: Professor Emeritus James Gunn (University of Kansas/English Literature) seems to have done quite well, for one.

6. In an article published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (July 1980) Gunn noted two very interesting points about Asimov’s style: character is almost never significant, and the plot is driven forward in functional dialogue rather than action.  To quote his summary of the style: “The robot stories, and as a matter of fact almost all Asimov fiction – play themselves on a relatively bare stage.”  When I first read this comment I had an interesting thought: could it be that Asimov’s style reflected the “laboratory aesthetic” of his early era – the 40s and 50s? Anyone who has actually worked in a lab would of course sneer at the ideal as fantasy, but there can be no doubt that the whole minimalist lab filled with expanses of gleaming stainless-steel counters broken only by the occasional sleek machine and lit with the clear white of fluorescent strips was a powerful image.

7. Not that this is universally loved – personally, although I’m not a big Asimov fan (I like rich language and characterization) I think this is the most intriguing aspect of his writing, the way he could fit things together like the parts of some complex machine and make them mesh smoothly.  In light of his incredible output, the skill involved here is amazing.

8. In which, it should be said, he also takes the time to warn the reader that a) the story doesn’t (yet) connect to any of his other universes, and b) that the narrative structure is “odd”

9. And what does he think his non-linear intersecting timelines are if not experimental!?

10. Though their work was losing visibility at the time Asimov wrote his article.

11. We’re so much more fortunate now…

12. Thinking just of the venues that survived – because they realized that no matter how hungry they were to fill their pages, publishing actually bad work would be suicide.

13. Ironically, Ray Bradbury reputedly wanted to be a pulp legend like his mentors Moore, Kuttner, Brackett and Hamilton – and his failure to achieve his goal is a big part of what allowed his writing to be taken as literary rather than dismissed as pulp.  The same might be said of Orwell, whose best known works should surely be filed under SF&F.

Experimental Twitter

Last summer, I began an experiment.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning:

Back in 2013, at the urging of a friend (and also because work was hinting that it might soon be required) I created a Twitter account.  I was late to the party of course, mainly because - quite simply - I couldn't see any point to the platform, and it seemed as though everything I heard about it was bad.

I confess that although it didn't seem quite the cesspool anticipated, even after joining I found it difficult to see any value.

It was like listening to voices chittering in the darkness, occasionally adding my own mad whispers. At worst, it was like talking to myself in a dark room. At best, it was like raving on a street corner, with passers by simultaneously fascinated by my incoherence and wary of being spattered with foam shaken from my fevered lips.

I exaggerate of course, but the point: Twitter really isn't a "social media" platform. 

On top of the fact that it's impossible to say anything substantive in snippets of 140 characters, the utterly unfiltered nature of Twitter makes it impossible to really have anything like a meaningful conversation. Honestly, when taken as a social media platform - ie as a tool to facilitate exchanges between people - to me it seems like a distillation of the worst of the internet. The character restriction makes it next to impossible *not* to misconstrue nuance, the firehose-like flow of tweets makes it next to impossible to follow the flow of any interaction lasting more than a couple of tweets (unless you restrict yourself to a very small, very quiet circle - which seems to rather defeat the point), the very brevity and volume exacerbates the "channel surfing" short attention span of our age.

I tried, early on, to use Twitter in a "meatier" way but it quickly became clear that it was mostly useless for me except as a purely "push" platform, so in the end my use degenerated into little more than sporadic sharing of news items (if I remembered) and scratching out doggerel I knew no-one would ever see/notice in the morass, and which I would later collect back up and revise to publish in other, less pointless formats.

And so it was for about 2 years, until I began my experiment. (Bet you wondered when I'd be getting back to it!)

In the summer of 2015, I decided that I was going to try to make something useful out of Twitter. Inspired by some news-folk I followed who occasionally post multi-part Twitter essays, I decided to try something more substantive than the quasi-poems I'd hitherto been working with. I started with a few essays of my own, but they were unsatisfying; it was just too difficult to develop complex thoughts in that format. What I needed was something where I could stretch my metaphorical legs and pack meaning into small spaces just as I had tried to do with poetry.

The answer, of course, was fiction.

I had already played with fiction on Twitter, building up an elaborate interactive drama under a false account as a prank on the friend who had persuaded me to join - that was really a tweak aimed at his conviction that platforms like Twitter forced people to be more honest because of their enforced brevity and relative anonymity, a confection designed to demonstrate how easy it was to lie and how hard to detect false fronts online. But it did demonstrate an intriguing potential: would it be possible to use the unique character of the medium to build up a new way of writing a story?

I've dabbled with fiction for many years, mostly frustrated by the challenge of finding enough time to finish things I started, so it seemed as though the bite-sized format of Twitter would be ideal. The character limit would force me to write more compactly; the short attention spans would encourage me to keep story arcs short - Hemingway-spartan flash fiction in other words.

Over the past 6 months, I've tried to average about 1 story a week - a pace that I sometimes find challenging, but which has helped me develop some healthy habits.  In this time, I've noticed my writing change - not just on Twitter, but elsewhere as well.

I haven't always been successful at keeping stories within the realm of "flash fiction" - in fact it's not uncommon for me to range as far as fully fledged shorts, and I have written an aborted novella as well.  Everything has been "raw" - unedited and in some cases actually posted live, which has led to some odd editorial decisions on the fly.

But more importantly, the format has given me scope to experiment that a mere blank page wouldn't have - I've tried alternative ways of building stories: "tone painting" in a sort of prose poetry that merely sets a scene, skeletal-spare but otherwise straight up fiction, experimental "found object" stories that built themselves up from things I encountered in a place.

I even theorized and experimented with non-linear narratives - a kind of literary choose your own adventure story where the reader can choose to focus on alternate strands of the tale, following different characters perhaps even along alternate what-if paths - though ultimately that came to nothing (on Twitter) since the actual threading and linking capabilities of the platform simply wouldn't support what I had in mind.

Perhaps I'll continue writing on Twitter. It's certainly been good for me, and not only in terms of (in my opinion) improving my writing. I don't think it's an experiment anymore though - almost all of what I write there is now a story or fragments of one. It still seems necessary to use a curation utility like Storify to make stories coherent and available for review (my Storify is here if you'd like to see my work) but now that I've developed a system I hope it's relatively easy for followers to keep the thread of things. 

Twitter, as the platform its creators seem to have envisioned, still seems rather pointless to me, but I have to thank them for the utility of a place that serves as both a repository for first drafts (I intend to revise and submit a number of the stories produced in the past 6 months) and as a stone to sharpen my writing.

I guess it just goes to show: there's always a use for things.

Here there be Dragons - Anne McCaffrey

SFF lost a bright light in November 2011 with the death of Anne McCaffrey, who was born by chance on this day - April 1st, in 1926.

I will confess that I had never been overly interested in the Dragonriders of Pern books, and as such largely read her work only by accident – but what joyful accidents they were.  And what a fool I was to pigeonhole her as “that dragon lady.”

There really can be no doubt that McCaffrey was an excellent writer – she exploded onto the SFF scene in 1967 with two novellas, Weyr Search [1] and Dragonrider [2] – both nominated for Hugos, and both nominated for early Nebula Awards, Weyr winning Hugo in 1968 alongside Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage, and Dragonrider taking the Nebula in the next year. 

In fact, she wowed her peers right off the starting block – earning yet another Nebula nomination for novella Dramatic Mission in 1970, though she never earned a nomination in any category other than novella.

Her popularity among fans was just as great of course, with a slew of Hugo nominations over the years, not to mention: the E.E. Smith Memorial award in 1976 for achievement, the Ditmar and the Gandalf in 1979 for White Dragon, the Balrog for Dragondrums and the Stresa Eurocon for White Dragon in 1980, the Golden Pen in 1982, various Science Fiction Book club awards in the 80s and 90s, not to mention lifetime achievement awards like the Julie Award in 1999 and the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future in 2004.

McCaffrey was an incredibly prolific writer over her career as well, producing again and again over the years, writing stories and novels in several different universes, though Pern of course was her most famous, and even a pair of cookbooks.

To be honest, I was cursed early on with the bad luck of having the Pern books recommended to me by someone who had already been smeared by three strikes (seriously, I don’t even remember what else he had me read – just that they were awful and he gushed over them) and as I said really didn’t come across McCaffrey except by accident in later years, when I managed to enjoy The Crystal Singer, The Rowan, and several of the Brains & Brawn series.

The thing though is that really the Pern books never really appealed to me in those early years despite my love of fantasy at the time - and that’s even accounting for the early bias against them (honestly Dave, you have so much to answer for…) – but it’s a crying shame that for me – and I’m sure for many other people – Pern essentially defines McCaffrey.  The truth is that she wrote so much more than that.

One example (again, total accident that I encountered this) is her Brains & Brawn series: I stumbled on The City Who Fought by chance in a second hand store years ago, and truly enjoyed it.  It made some very interesting SF assumptions, and extrapolated beautifully toward both ways in which physically disabled people might be completely functional with the use of high technology and managed to present the disabled characters as – wait for it – just people who happened to have some special skills that applied to the dilemma presented.  

It didn’t even register at first that this was McCaffrey (and in fact, that particular book, like many of the B&B series, was a collaboration), but in retrospect I should have known: this was classic McCaffrey, and in fact something that if I’m honest has been a part of her work from the beginning.

You see, McCaffrey’s gift was to give us these unusual people but to somehow present them in a way that made them seem normal.  How does an ordinary working adult who digs through second hand book shops manage to identify so thoroughly with a boy who lives in a capsule at the center of a space station and can only speak or act through the computer system?  How do the millions of readers who love the series identify so thoroughly with a girl who learns to communicate telepathically with dragons?  The answer is really the same – McCaffrey manages to paint these characters in ways that make them almost like someone who lives just next door to us. 

That’s the kind of characterization that pulls readers in and makes them fall in love.

And that’s why I’m going to get off my ass and read some McCaffrey this month – to try to learn from one of the masters of the skill.

And though, thanks to Dave, I may approach some of the Pern books with trepidation, I’m sure I’ll spend most of the time wishing I'd done it while she was still alive.

So thanks in advance, Anne – I’m looking forward immensely to drenching myself in your world of dragons and thread.

If only I’d understood before.

###

1. Published in Analog, Oct 1967

2. Published in two parts, the first in Analog, Dec 1967, the second in Jan 1968

Back to Basics

The cover of one of Jules Verne's early scientific
romances, The Voyages of Captain Hatteras
at the North Pole, as published by
Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1864 

Today, I came across this article by author Darren Beyer.

I can't begin to describe how sad it is to me that an article like this is even possible, though I confess it's not at all surprising - and perhaps Beyer isn't to be blamed.

Beyer is right that science-rooted, story and character driven SF has been around for a while, and even right that for some time now it has been something of a niche market. 

But the sad thing is that he seems oblivious to the work that came before Campbell - the works of the 20s, 30s and 40s - and even earlier if we count the speculative scientific romances of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells - that, while not scientifically accurate by modern standards, were as scientific as the authors could achieve.
Oh, sure, there was a pew pew pew element right from the beginning I suppose - though even the heat ray riddled Martian invasion imagined by Wells was conceived as a serious speculation as to just how horrible war could become.  Even there, recent developments suggest that pew pew pew may not have been so much fantastic fluff after all.  But even so: I don't think any reasonable person would say that Wells and Verne and Shelley were obscure niche interests...would they?

The thing is that these pre-Campell authors were working in the dark - they were starting from nothing and "logicking up" their visions of the future from what they saw at the Worlds Fair or in Radio Magazine.  Sure, we wouldn't recognise some of their ideas as realistic today, but in many cases they seemed realistic at the time.  And many fo the "scientifiction" stories were being published in perfectly mainstream serials of the sort that were so popular in the 20s and 30s, not a marginal "ghetto" by any means, even if the maturing of the genre in the 50s and 60s led to it becoming one.  Remember: Hugo Gernsback didn't attempt to take scientific romance into an obscure (not really) dedicated pulp magazine named Amazing Stories until 1926 - and he did so specifically because of the requests he was receiving from readers of his more general titles for "more of this sort of thing."

Sure, the early Amazing era SF came along with a healthy dose of Buck Rogers, John Carter and Flash Gordon - but no: "smart science fiction" isn't "an emerging sub-genre" at all. It's a return to first principles.

I'm glad that Beyer and Weir and other authors of their frame of mind are enthusiastic about bringing "scientifiction" back - making strong speculative science futures that can be of interest to a wider audience.  I think the market is ripe for it - interest in new technologies and enthusiasm for their potential to change our world is at a high point like it hasn't been for decades.

But if Beyer and Weir and the others dismiss Verne and Wells and their descendants who published in the early pulp era as mere fantasists I think they're doing themselves a deep disservice.

--30--

Going Round and Round with Revolution

Pohl (left) & possibly Wollheim (right) look on as Jack
Williamson (center) meets a crowd at Nycon I in 1939.
Photo from Howard DeVore as published by FANAC  

So. 

With the closing of nomination ballots coming up (March 31) yet another Hugo season is upon us.

For many fans, the next few months will also be a season of tension and rancor, as the ongoing battle between what might be called “core Worldcon fandom” and “Puppies Sad or Rabid” once again flares up into actual shots fired.[1]

On the one hand, we have the objections of people who consider themselves fans – certainly avid readers and followers of SFF by all accounts – that certain hugely popular authors seem to get passed over at the Hugos in favour of work that simply checks politically popular boxes.  The extreme version of this objection alleges secret cabals (perhaps in the service of shadowy masters deep in the land of Mordor a major publisher) who manipulate the outcome of the Hugos either by organized voting campaigns or perhaps even by directly tweaking the voting system in their favour.

On the other hand, we have the counter-objections of the loyal fen, who demure, claiming that the only shenanigans are on the part of the Puppies and their highly recommended lockstep voting reading lists…claims that at times seem to echo with a curious harmony in the naturally entirely neutral journalism of the mass media.

Frankly, I find the claims on both sides to be laughably extreme.  I have my own thoughts on the actions that led to Vox Day’s ejection from SFWA that I won’t air here [2], but the whole Puppies vs Fandom thing has evolved into a conflict of unprecedented animosity.

Or has it?

The the scale may be larger as a feature of modern technology, but the fact is that this kind of political wrangling is nothing new to Worldcon: way back in the mists of time, at the very first Worldcon in 1939, an eerily similar dispute led to a group of fans being barred from the event entirely.

Cast your mind back to the late 1930s, a world in transition:

The world was finally emerging from a crushing depression, Europe was in turmoil following the Great War and a series of socialist and other revolutions, Hitler’s Germany was on the rise, having successfully annexed both Austria and Czechoslovakia while the great powers dithered, fascism was gaining power not only there but seemingly everywhere in opposition to the socialist wave, and technology was progressing at a break-neck pace.  

Just two months after the grand opening of the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and on the edges of this tumultuous time, the very first Worldcon was held in New York – NyCon I as it was eventually called.

Now, it must be said that this wasn’t by any means the first “con” – that honour goes to what Dave Kyle called The First Eastern Science Fiction Convention [3] [4], which was held in Philadelphia in 1936.  It was also by no means a large affair, mind, being just a visit to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society (PSFS) by members of the International Scientific Association (ISA), by reports of people who were there involving only a dozen people or fewer. [5] But this was a meeting of the early minds of American SF fandom:

•       John Michel - NY (who originated the idea of some outing for the NY chapter of the SFL in the first place)
•           Donald Wollheim - NY (who specifically suggested a visit to Philadelphia)
•           Milton Rothman – Phil (who hosted the meeting at his home and chaired the meeting)
•           Fred Pohl – NY (who served as secretary)
•           Dave Kyle - NY
•           William Sykora – NY
•           Herbert Goudket – NY (who was behind the camera for the apocryphal photo)
•           Robert Madle – Phil
•           Ossie Train - Phil
•           And some fellow named Hahn [6] along with, presumably, others to bring the total to about 12.

This is not a mere digression, however, since I suspect the seeds of revolution were planted on that fateful October 22 in 1936.

The key factor here is probably Sykora, who was an enormous fan from the beginning.  He wasn’t just a charter subscriber to Amazing Stories when the eponymous Hugo Gernsback launched it in 1926 but also a core member of a number of early science and SF associations, such as The Scienceers [7], the SFL (GNY branch), the International Cosmos Science Club, and the ISA.  An association of note that Sykora was most emphatically not a member of was the Futurian Society.  And so begins our real story.

 The Futurians numbered quite a few names that are well known in modern Fandom: people like Isaac Asimov, James Blish and his future wife Virginia Kidd, Damon Knight, Judith Merril – and some of the GNY-SFL members who traveled to Philadelphia: John Michel, Fred Pohl, Dave Kyle and Donald Wollheim.

Now, the New York Futurians [8] were remarkably influential, considering that they never really numbered very many, were never  and only lasted about seven years. But they /were/ intense, and differed from the more “ordinary” Gernsbackian SFandom, which insisted that fans and SF authors should ideally strive for the advancement of science – specifically, the Futurians were progressives of the time – Bohemian, anarchistic in organization, prone to free verse in poetry and decadence in literature and art.  They were sympathetic to the anarchist and communist efforts against fascist Franco in Spain (and other Fascists), and themselves defined a Futurian as one who:

“thru SF rise to vision a greater world, a greater future for the whole of mankind, and wishes to utilize his idealistic convictions for aid in a generally cooperative and diverse movement for the betterment of the world along democratic, impersonal, and unselfish lines.” [9]

Though Futurian thought was often referred to as Wollheimianism the idea really originated with John Michel in 1937:

At the 1937 Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, Donald Wollheim read a speech penned by Michel entitled “Mutation or Death!” [10] which denounced “the Gernsbackian delusion” of science alone as the way forward: Michel in this speech denounced Mussolini and other fascists, denounced what people might call today “the military industrial complex”, and declared the solidarity of SFandom with “the heroic defenders of Madrid and Shanghai.” – his declaration that SFandom was obligated to join forces to work toward a future utopian world state was taken by many to refer to communism (probably a justified assumption given the congruence between his rhetoric and that of Bolshevik revolutionaries of the era, not to mention Michel’s involvement in the Young Communist League)

This began a(nother) rather rancorous cycle of feuding in US fandom, with Michel and certain other Futurians (notably Donald Wollheim and Fred Pohl) growing increasingly political, which rubbed rather a lot of fandom the wrong way, including solid “Gernsbackian” science first fans such as Sam Moskowitz and William Sykora, the latter being a particular bugbear for the Michelian Futurists for reasons I really don’t understand – I presume simply because he was one of those who most bluntly told the kids to settle down. [11]

Things really came to a head, though, in 1939, at the time of the first official Worldcon, later dubbed Nycon by the inimitable Forrest Ackerman: this convention, being held under the auspices of the New York fandom, was chaired by Futurian nemesis Sam Moskowitz along with two others well hated by the utopians: William Sykora and James Taurasi.

These three men not only disapproved of the injection of politics into SFandom by the Futurians, but were keenly aware of the opinion of other fan organizations and more importantly the fact that the convention was likely to be fairly high profile owing to the fact that the Worlds Fair then going on in New York was themed “The World of Tomorrow” – how could the first ever major science fiction convention /not/ attract attention?  How would it look if brash, outspoken young men and women seemed to be talking (socialist) revolution?

As a result, the Triumvirate (as they were to be called) made a decision later known to fannish historians as “The Great Exclusion Act” to ban Michel, Wollheim, Pohl and others from attending, on account of rumours that they intended to issue yet another manifesto during the proceedings, whether approved or not – a concern that was based on past disruption at the smaller Newark convention in 1938[12] and the discovery of a pamphlet [13] that was written and distributed by fellow Futurian Dave Kyle and others [14].

So.

A dispute in fandom over what SF should be and what it should achieve.  A dispute over what the tone and obligations of fandom should be like.  A dispute, even, over what precisely defines rightfan and wrongfan thinking.

How does that quote go?  Ah yes:

 “History doesn’t always repeat itself.  Sometimes it just screams, 'Why don’t you listen to me?' and lets fly with a big stick.” – John W. Campbell Jr.

--30--

1. Metaphorically actual, obviously.

2. No, really.  I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while I don’t think I’d enjoy having a drink with the man he’s also been treated to what appears to be an unfair drubbing in the mass media.

3. But which the attendees officially dubbed the Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention in reference to the fact that both the Republican and Democratic national conventions had been held there earlier in the year.

4. And in fact, there’s even some dispute as to whether this was the first: it was a meeting, certainly, and they took the name “convention” for the business meeting, but it may be that the event held by the UK’s LeedsScience Fiction League in January 1937 was the first true “con”.

5. Though John Michel’s account in a fanzine later that year reputedly claims there were only 9 attendees (and he refers to a photo – though I haven’t been able to locate one) Dave Kyle – who was also there – says there were “barely a dozen” in his own recollection of the event .  I like to think of the attendance as being 10±2 with one of the minimal 9 – Herbert Goudket - being a kind of “Schroedinger’s Fan” as he was supposedly there, but not shown in the photo because he was behind the camera.

6. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Hahn’s given name…er…given, and as a result every time I see or write the name I have the irrepressible image of James Tiberius Kirk expressing his outrage at being outwitted by his ancient nemesis. I feel certain the gentleman in no way resembled Ricardo Montalban, however.

7. Possibly the first SF fanclub ever!

8. Not affiliated with other groups calling themselves Futurians, though the Left Coast group in LA with the same name did apparently move en masse to the Right Coast to join up with them…just in time for the society to collapse as a result of the lawsuit filed by Wollheim in response to “The X Document” – a one shot publication that detailed an internicene conflict among the Futurians of New York.

9. Thus saith Fancyclopedia 2.

10. Full text of Michel's manifesto "Mutation or Death" is available here: 

11. It should be remembered that many of the players in this drama were younger than Michel, who at the time of Nycon 1 in 1939 was only 22 – some of them were still in their teens throughout this controversy!

12. This convention was marred by accusations of high-handed and dictatorial action by the organizers, and various sniping among political factions in fandom…sound familiar?

13. The full text of the famous Yellow Pamphlet is here. 

14. Who, strangely, despite being the nucleus of the decision to Exclude, was allowed to remain.  All reference to this seems to agree that he was allowed to stay because he was already in the hall…and yet, it appears that some others who were distributing the pamphlet, including Robert Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth and Jack Gillespie were ejected. I’m at a loss as to what the difference was, unless it was simply that Kyle was physically inside the hall at the time the decision was made, while the others were distributing pamphlets outside.

Other Lenses, Other Worlds

Almost certainly not what C.S.Lewis had in mind [1]
(image of Narasinha, avatar of Vishnu,
slaying Hiranyakashipu from krishna.com )

The greatest argument for reading much and reading widely is the chance to see sides of things that were invisible to the authors - if only by virture of having a completely different perspective. [2]

An excellent example of this is this article by Vishwas R. Gaitonde on viewing Narnia through a Hindu lens.

Gaitonde takes us on a tour of the Narnia Chronicles, pointing out places where some of the ideas of Hinduism [3] can be seen resonating with the text.

At first blush, this seems surprising - didn't Lewis write the Narnia Chronicles as a kind of Christian allegory? [4] Certainly, given Lewis's reputation as an apologist this would seem to be the obvious assumption.

However, the story may be more complicated, and in this case at least it's possible that the fresh, invisible perspectives that Mr. Gaitonde sees through a Hindu lens may not be entirely unintended by Lewis.

Lewis wasn't always an ardent apologist.  Raised in the Church of Ireland [5], he lost his religion in middle school and for years afterwards seems to have been an unsatisfied atheist.  Not, of course, that atheism is fundamentally unsatisfying [6] - it's just that he seems to have spent rather a lot of time searching for something to fill the void that was left when he turned away from his church.  Indeed, biographies of Lewis note that he initially "renounced his faith" to explore mythology and paganism, and it seems that he didn't really become what we would call an atheist today [7] until he had suffered through the trials of the Great War. [8]

More, on his return to Oxford and completion of his studies (which had been interrupted by military service) Lewis may ultimately have found himself on the English faculty [9] but he also lectured for a time in Philosophy - and it may be that he was still "seeking" at this time, because he seems to have continued questioning and suffering until his rather sudden and painful reconversion in the late 1920s, first to a kind of theism and then finally back to the Church of England. [10]

Now here's the thing: By the time he published The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950, Lewis had established himself as a well known apologist and firmly created the public image of a Christian.  But Lewis was also a scholar of literature - particularly mythologies - in an era when Europe was developing a keen interest in Eastern religions.  Combine this with his interest in the occult, paganism, and Celtic revival and the pan-Indoeuropean theories that informed various kinds of pagan and Celtic reconstructionism of the era certainly crossed his path - and surely also the "reconstruction by analogy" ideas did as well, drawing on the sophisticated polytheisms of the East to build an idea of what Celtic and Norse mysticisms may have been like.

Now, from Lewis's own writing we get the sense that he really didn't respect Hinduism (or, indeed, any non-Christian religion), particularly if we start our look at his ideas with his essay "Christian Apologetics" in which he neatly dismisses several world religions as merely heresies of one another, and in the space of a paragraph refutes Hinduism's claim on being a "true religion".  Looking into his work in Narnia, one also gets the sense from his treatment of Tash that perhaps he dismisses the gods of other religions as irrelevant.

But we must remember: Lewis was a convert - that he had REconverted back to Christianity may not be relevant: converts are, after all, notoriously strident in their views.  Sadly, there seem to be none of Lewis's writings prior to his conversion that have survived without at the very least being edited by the author himself - as such, it's hard to see what understanding of world religions he may have had.  Certainly, his comments on non-Christian faiths in later writing, while not mean-spirited, do seem to indicate a lack of deep understanding.

However, there is that early period of searching, and there is his writing in The Abolition of Man which seems to reflect a rather broad knowledge - and in particular, Hinduism is mentioned.

Moreover, there is the fact that his student and lifelong friend, Alan Griffiths converted to Catholicism in the same year Lewis returned to Anglicanism, taking the monastic name Bede and eventually becoming known for his involvement in the Christian ashram movement in India, where he blended Hindu (mainly yogic) mysticism with Christianity in his evangelism.

Griffiths in fact began his study of yoga and the vedas in the late 40s and it seems likely that he and Lewis discussed - and probably corresponded - on the subject, given both their deep interests in religion and Christian apologia.

I can't know what went through Lewis's mind as he wrote the Narnia Chronicles, of course - at least not beyond what he himself has told us in his own autobiographical writing.  But it seems unlikely to me that he was unaware of some of the basic ideas of Hinduism (and other religions) and the nature of his personal quest for spiritual fulfillment, his two years as a theist, all this suggests that in his personal thoughts at least he likely saw much universal truth in the world's great religions.  Given his personal history and the times in which he lived, it would have been a common thing to assume that these universal truths (things like "do unto others..." and love/peace as a fundamental moral goal) issued from a common source: the God of Abraham - and that those other religions that echoed the tenets of Christianity were unfortunately confused as to the "truth."

This is speculation, of course, but given this as an assumption is it so far fetched to think he may have drawn on his own knowledge of other religions in his creation of a fantastic world in which his own Savior might have manifested in another form?  Certainly, this idea - the idea of "the lamb" who, in Narnia at least, manifests as "the lion" (as explained by Aslan himself in Voyage of the Dawn Treader), and presumably manifests in other ways in other worlds (there being a multitude, as we learn in The Magician's Nephew) seems to be a nod to the idea of Hindu avatars.

Despite Lewis's deep Christian convictions through the latter half of his life, and the fact he held these ideas at the time he wrote the Narnia Chronicles, I personally find it difficult to ascribe all the echoes of other world religions in his works to accident.  It's possible he didn't deliberately craft his writing to include them, but I feel certain that his interest in mythology and fairy stories would have planted the seeds in his mind, and that he would certainly have drawn on symbols and imagery that corresponded to his own understanding of Christianity.

So yes, there are other lenses through which we can read these works, and I can certainly see the interesting ways in which Mr. Gaitonde found to read the Narnia Chronicles through Hindu eyes.

But these books aren't so much a set of Christian stories as a set of mystical stories - and in the 20th Century, where better for an British scholar in 1950 to find mysticism than in India?

###

1. Though it would make the conflict between Aslan and Tash much cooler!

2. I don't actually hold to the "death of the author" theory of reading, but I do think it's blindingly obvious that readers can bring their own perspectives to works, and that this perspective can lead to their own thoughts and images.

3. Assuming Hinduism to be a homogeneous entity, of course.

4. No, actually - Lewis himself said in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature:

"Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them.  This is all pure moonshine.  I couldn't write in that way." (p46 in my 1982 Harcourt edition - near the beginning of the essay "Sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said"

5. Just a rather green sort of Church of England, really...or would that be Orange?

6. Though I suppose the example of Socrates shows it can cause bitterness - though perhaps not always in the atheists themselves.

7. At the time Lewis proclaimed himself atheist, in England at least the term might just as well have meant "non-Christian" - as indeed it does in some parts of the world today.

8. Lewis was not only injured in combat, but lost a close friend during the war - a friend close enough that he seems to have made a promise to make sure his friend's mother was taken care of, and in fact eventually the two lived together despite the 20-some year difference in their ages.  There has been speculation that they were lovers (of course - such speculation always occurs when a man has a particularly intimate relationship with a woman) but Lewis consistently refers to her in correspondence and other writings as his "mother," which makes me think it may simply have been a very close emotional and intellectual relationship.

9. Lewis had developed a strong interest in mythology, particularly Northern European mythology such as the Icelandic Eddas, and was apparently involved in the Celtic revivalist movement - a natural fit for a transplanted Irish scholar, and excellent qualifications for his installment in the new Medieval and Renaissance Literature faculty at Magdalene College.

10. Much to the rather famous chagrin of his friend and fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien, who had hoped he would become Catholic. Lewis turned to theism in 1929, then (the story goes) committed to Christianity again after a midnight walk and discussion with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

A. Merritt - The Invisible Man

Stolen mercilessly from Wikipedia -
Merritt in about 1920.

Abraham Grace Merritt, better known by his byline A. Merritt, was born on January 20, 1884 - happy (belated) thirteenty-second birthday Mr. Merritt!

Merritt is an interesting example of the way in which SFF has changed over the years, and how these changes have led to the bizarre invisibility of influential writers.

Merritt's bibliography isn't all that long compared to his contemporaries in "fantastic fiction", but he started early and was weighty enough that he was the subject of an interview in Science Fiction Digest's "Titans of Science Fiction Series" (Jan 1933) and the inimitable Forrest J Ackerman reported that when Merritt's day job prevented him from attending the 1st Worldcon in 1939 a group of fans visited him at The American Weekly offices afterwards.

Oddly, despite being credited with inspiring Lovecraft [1] and other contemporaries such as Richard Shaver, and Hannes Bok (not to mention several authors of the "Golden Age" to come), being listed on "best ever" lists for horror and fantasy/science fiction as late as the 80s [2], having been translated and reprinted in other languages decades after his death [3], being voted "favourite author of all time" by readers of Argosy in 1938, having his name in the title of a magazine [4] and creating an enduring cult masterpiece in The Snake Mother [5], Merritt's name rarely comes up these days.  How could such an influential author be so generally unknown today?

Part of the answer probably comes from his writing - Merritt's rich prose is without question quite different from the rather spartan styles that came to be the norm in the 50s and 60s.  Like many other writers from the first half of the 20th century, the density of Merritt's writing is such that for many people it's a love it or hate it proposition.  Not that this rich style has entirely fallen out of fashion - not only have other authors of the period and with similarly "purple" style continued to be popular right up to today (um...Lovecraft?) but other writers continued to see success with richer language than the blunt "Hemingway-esque" style that began to dominate in the 50s and 60s (eg Jack Vance) and of course many well regarded modern writers work hard to achieve rich, lyrical prose. [6]

But even accounting for changes in stylistic tastes, by all rights, you'd think that Merritt would continue to enjoy some level of popularity - so why is it that according to my "rigorous" research [7] there have been next to no reprints of Merritt's work this century? (and few at the end of the last)

I think the answer probably lies at the feet of the same forces that resulted in "The Great Delisting" which I've mentioned before. [8]

"The Golden Age" of science fiction is typically thought of as being the the 1940s just after John W. Campbell took over editorial control of Astounding, but like Robert Silverberg [9] I prefer to think of the 50s as the true golden age of SF.  In part, this is because some of my absolute favourite SF authors begin to emerge in this era, but mainly it's because this is when I start to see the cracks forming.

In the 1950s, Campbell's grip on the fate of science fiction was unshakable - he had total editorial control of Astounding, and Astounding was the premiere periodical of the time, with the best pay rates and the highest profile.  It goes without saying that Campbell's vision of what science fiction should be was enormously influential.  This is the era in which "technological visions of the future" increasingly became the very definition of science fiction, and this is when the heirs of Campbell's first generation of writers really came into their own.

At the same time, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was making waves - and creating a template for "fantasy" as the fiction of magical pasts in contrast to the scientific futures being painted in "hard" science fiction. While fantasy elements continued to play a part in science fiction for some years [10] it seems as though the two sub-genres were increasingly in opposition, and creating alternate worlds that were increasingly isolated from one another.

The New Wave era of the late 60s and 70s made an effort to re-blur the lines between fantasy and science fiction, but really it didn't stick - by the time the RPG boom of the 1980s was underway (and in some ways because of it) the categories were becoming increasingly ossified, at least in terms of commercial considerations:

There were shelves for science fiction in the bookstores and the libraries, and on them you expected to find Niven and Heinlein and other tales of spaceships and ray guns and the future.

There were shelves for fantasy, where you might or might not find reflections of Tolkien's elves and hobbits, but you'd certainly find re-imagined pasts filled with magic and monsters, and faced with sword in hand.

There were shelves for horror - still often the horror of the occult and demonic forces, but also shading into the horror of blood and death, and certainly an increasingly distinct category.

This three-way split was by no means hard and fast - you still occasionally found crossover and blends in the 80s - but it was rapidly ossifying, in part due to the standardized business practices of the successful franchise chains that were becoming a powerful force in the publishing industry. [11]

Worse: fast forward to the 90s and later, and the genre categories get carved in stone by massive marketing efforts like Amazon where, with the challenge of browsing at all, it suddenly becomes critical for works to match the tags that will bring the right customers to them.

The thing about Merritt [12] is that while he was a highly influential writer of fantastic fiction, his work is rooted in a tradition that doesn't easily fit into modern genre categories.  Most of his celebrated works are stories that might best be described as "fantastic adventure fiction" - the tales revolve around a contemporary (to the intended reader) protagonist who discovers something curious and follows a trail that leads to the discovery that "all is not as it seems."  These are tales of the weird, of occult realities that lie hidden from ordinary people.

Which shelf do you even put this on in a modern bookstore?

While some of Merritt's contemporaries can be shoehorned into one of our modern categories or another - Lovecraft into horror, Ray Cummings into SF, for example - Merritt's development of this particular set of tropes is harder to sort.  The closest we might see in the modern context might be something like Dan Brown or the X-Files, both of which deal with a similar kind of "contemporary protagonist discovers a hidden dimension of reality" kind of adventure story, but I suspect the style needed to carry off a modern "conspiracy theory" adventure piece is a discouragingly large step from Merritt's work.

Unfortunately, this leaves him without any clear heirs to claim his legacy - and more importantly, it leaves booksellers with a head-scratching problem: if they did reprint some of Merritt's work, where should it be displayed to ensure the right readers see it? What kind of cover art should it have to signal what kind of story it is?

And these considerations are above and beyond the basic question of whether the ordinary social norms reflected in Merritt's work will be acceptable to a modern audience. [13]

It's a shame that a combination of shifts in literary taste, narrowed definitions of genre, and certainly to some extent shifts in social attitudes [14] would render such an important writer nearly invisible to today's fans.  Merritt is an author who definitely warrants a look by anyone who is interested in seeing where some of the common tropes of modern fantasy and horror come from - and luckily, although most of his work languishes in the unreprinted void of the Great Delisting a fair amount of it is out of copyright in some parts of the world and available online in one format or another.

Take a look, embrace the heavier prose of yesteryear - once you get used to it, you're in for a wild ride!

--30--

1. The Moon Pool and The Conquest of the Moon Pool which appeared in installments in All-Story Weekly 1918-1919 seem to have been the proximate cause of Lovecraft's Deep Ones (in The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931)), and some people see a strong link between Merritt's "The People of the Pit" (Jan 1918) and HPL's At the Mountains of Madness (also 1931)) - but it should also be noted that Lovecraft had harsh words for the way Merritt's style developed over the years:

"Abe Merritt - who could have been a Machen or Blackwood or Dunsany or de la Mare or M.R. James.... if he had but chosen - is so badly sunk that he's lost the critical faculty to realise it... Every magazine trick & mannerism must be rigidly unlearned & banished even from one's subconsciousness before one can write seriously for educated mental adults. That's why Merritt lost - je learned the trained-dog tricks too well & now he can't think & feel fictionally except in terms of the meaningless & artificial cliches of 2-cent-a-word romance. Machen & Dunsany & James would not learn the tricks - & they have a record of achievement beside which a whole library-full of cheap Ships of Ishtar & Creep, Shadows remains essentially negligible" -- From Lovecraft's letters: SLV.400-01 (7 Feb(?) 1937)

2.  Moorcock and Cawthorn cite Ship of Ishtar as one of Merritt's best works in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books - curiously, quite at odds with Lovecraft's assessment of the work as representing the corruption of the periodicals (see the quote above) - and in 1985 a major collection of Merritt's work was published, including poems, essays and writings about him by others.

3. As just one example, Hayakawa Bunko published Seiji Dan's translation of The Snake Mother as one of their "classic SF" collection in 1971: http://kicchan.s19.xrea.com/img/hayakawasf.html cat.# SF0020 - sadly Hayakawa doesn't seem to still have this item on catalog - however a translation of People of the Pit by Jitsuko Haneda was published by Asahi Sonoda in 1986.

4. Seriously - the guy was popular: http://www.gwthomas.org/amerritt2.htm

5. Enduring enough that despite The Face in the Abyss being published in 1931, Snake Mother herself was the subject of winning costumes at least twice long afterwards - Myrtle Jones won the Pacificon masquerade with her Snake Mother costume in 1946, and Kathy Sanders appeared in the same guise - but with hand maidens! - at Westercon in 1980.

6. The difference of course is that many of these modern writers are aiming for something rather more like prose poetry - yes, the language is rich and poetic, but it sometimes seems almost as though "plot" has fallen out of fashion.

7. A scan of Amazon - which was subsequently contradicted by the discovery of a Merritt omnibus available on Google Play.

8. But have yet to expand on as promised - I'm working on it, I swear.

9. In his essay "Science Fiction in the Fifties: The Real Golden Age" 

10. Even Campbell had a thing for telepathy and the like for a while.

11. Interestingly, it occurs to me that the big box "we have everything" bookstores like Chapters and Barnes & Noble were late in expanding to the UK - though it's obviously a franchise chain, I don't recall W.H. Smith having the same kind of approach at all - and perhaps this explains the fact that British imprints seem to have adopted firm divisions a bit later, if my admittedly porous memory of the UK in the 80s can be relied on.

12. And Lovecraft as well, actually - his popularity waned for a while before resurfacing in the horror boom of the 70s.

13. As an example, when Tor's "Advanced Readings in Dungeons and Dragons" covered Merritt, they raised some concern about treatment of race and women - to be honest, my sense is that while attitudes of the time were of course quite different from today, the truth is that Merritt's treatment of women and minorities was really quite liberal for the period.  In addition to making allowances for social changes over the more than a century since his birth it's probably also important to take into account the fact that he was almost constantly riffing on the "lost civilization" trope standardized by Haggard - as such it's expected that we will have an intrepid explorer (probably a "colonist") who then encounters a variety of "aboriginal" people.  In Dwellers in the Mirage, while a bit patronizing the depiction of First Nations people is quite positive, while the story itself revolves around proto-Aryan invaders who worship a demonic god - it would be simplistic to dismiss Merritt's work as racist.

14. Honestly, I don't think political considerations like worrying about unacceptable attitudes toward race, gender, class etc