Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (71 page)

After WWII most of Eastern Europe was in the Soviet orbit, and SF was popular in many East European countries for the same reasons as in the USS
R: it allowed a certain freedom from stultifying socialist realism. Josef Nesvadba (1926–2005) in Czechoslovakia incorporated numerous generic traits into SF stories; his collection The Lost Face is available in English translation. Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) did not consider himself a SF author, but he is the outstanding SF author of the period. His work is the exception to the rule for East European SF in the West: he is not marketed or sought out as a Polish writer, almost all of his work has been translated, the book covers spell his name wrong (not barring the “l” in his first name, pronounced like a “w”), and much of his opus is still in print in English decades after its first appearance. A medical education gave Lem a background in science. His work is extremely broad in scope and theme, ranging from Pirx stories for young adults to the philosophical depth of Solaris, the manic linguistic play (and underlying deep pessimism) of Cyberiad, and the psychedelia of Futurological Congress. Many of his works slyly mock socialist platitudes. (He has also been well served by translators; Michael Kandel, in particular, is a genius.) Lem said that the only Western SF writer worth reading was Philip K. Dick; the paranoid Dick was not pleased to be fingered by a Commie and feared LEM must be the acronym of some malevolent agency. Lem aged into a cranky critic, and his later writing is harshly critical of the cultural decline he saw all around him.

The period of “transition” after socialism tended to disrupt the development of SF in Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s in Hungary, where SF had been fairly vigorous, local writers chose to present their own work under plausible pseudonyms as translations from English. Publishers felt—perhaps with justice—that SF by Hungarian authors would not sell. In the twenty-first century, however, there is a wide and vigorous SF scene in Eastern Europe: the biggest SF convention in Europe, Tricon, takes place in Poland and the Czech Republic. Where Socialist-era fanzines stopped publication, attractive new magazines—often with “Science Fiction” on the cover alongside Fantastyka or whatever local equivalent—have sprung up and do a lively business. East European SF authors are extremely various; some are post-modern (like Zoran Živković, many of whose novels have been translated from Serbian into English); others are better known for other skills (like the Croatian rock guitarist and computer programmer Davor Slamnig). In magazines and bookshops, SF is cheek by jowl with fantasy and horror, and the genres often bleed together.

RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN SF IN THE WEST

Thanks largely to Darko Suvin, whose 1979 book
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
is seminal for SF scholarship, anyone serious about the genre has heard of the most important Russian and East European SF authors (up to the 1970s). Suvin devotes chapters to Lem and the Strugatskys. The MacMillan “Best Soviet SF” translations of the 1970s and 1980s, many introduced by Theodore Sturgeon, attended to how much a Soviet writer “could say” but also appeared to view SF as a place of common cause despite political differences. Isaac Asimov was editor of an early 1962 collection of Soviet SF in translation. During the Cold War, Russian or East European SF could be read as an important source of info about the enemy—or the reader could assume that SF authors were the voices of the future, in which East and West would agree better than in the present. Suvin’s rich and erudite study put a Marxist stamp on SF scholarship that has largely endured until the present. Suvin, himself an Eastern European, came to North America from Yugoslavia. (Today as well, some prominent scholars of SF bear tellingly East European names—Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, for example.)

With the end of the Cold War, however, formerly curious Western readers and publishers of SF have turned away from the Second World. This is largely due to problems of translation: only about 3% of books published annually in the US are literary translations, and SF tends to be crowded out of this limited market. If you want pulp, we have local pulp; if you want serious lit, well…does SF count as serious lit? Even if today’s Czech or Polish or Russian or Serbian SF is not as cerebral as the Strugatskys, it may demand more effort and engagement than American readers expect from genre fiction, or (God forbid) it might be depressing. The MacMillan series has gone out of print, though many volumes are still available used. Some of the best sources for Russian and East European SF today are journals, be they print or online:
World Literature Today
and Words Without Borders have recently produced admirable international SF issues that included Second-World works, and the 2009 Apex Book of World SF lists Zoran Živković prominently on the cover. It may well take Anglo SF fans time to emerge from their solipsistic universe, but with their rich tradition, imaginative response to Western SF and fantasy, and (sometimes) deep seriousness the Eastern European and Russian SF authors are well worth a look.

* * * *

Sibelan Forrester
is Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College, a specialist in modernist poetry and translation. Both myopic and astigmatic, she was an avid reader of SF as a young adult in Boulder, Colorado, but has only recently begun to unite this interest with her professional work. She encourages SF readers to be as open to texts, films and other works from distant countries and traditions as the best visions of a human future would have us be.

By the 1920s, the American magazine market was booming. Improvements in transportation, technology, and literacy, combined with much more limited entertainment options for most people, led to a growing number of “pulp” magazines (for the low-quality paper they were cheaply printed on) with lurid covers.

While pulp magazines tended to be geared to a specific audience, today’s genre distinctions were still very much in the future: Not only was there no real distinction between SF, fantasy, and horror, but many science fiction writers were simultaneously writing Westerns, detective fiction, or nurse stories, or whatever else was in demand that week. Because of the thriving magazine market, the pay was better than today. At the height of the Depression, it was possible for a prolific writer to eke out a living from short stories alone, which is no longer the case.

With not much genre book market to speak of, writers would have to make a living from stories. Bookstores were uncommon outside of major towns, and books were more likely to be sold through catalogs or ads in the backs of magazines.

Out of this burgeoning pulp market, some genre-specific magazines began to appear. Hugo Gernsback began by publising magazines for electronics enthusiasts with some fiction scattered in, but in 1926 founded Amazing Stories, the first magazine entirely devoted to science fiction. Weird Tales was publishing H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other writers who lived at the intersection of SF, fantasy, and horror. (Lovecraft’s weird horror and Robert E. Howard’s archetypal character Conan would make both writers posthumously famous, in the fantasy boom that would come forty years later, after the publication of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in North America.)

That’s not to overstate the quality of the 1920s and early 1930s pulp magazines. While there were some gems and stories of lasting influence, the emphasis was on fast writing and formulaic stories; the overall literary quality was low. Gernsback paid his writers poorly (and sometimes not at all), so
Amazing Stories
was disproportionately stocked with reprints of older stories and newer work by writers who would work cheaply. But beyond the immediate impact of the early pulp writers, many of whom are deservedly forgotton today, was a generation of writers- and editors-to-be who grew up reading the pulps and loving the tropes of SF and adventure fiction. And that generation would go on to create science fiction’s “Golden Age” in the late 1930s and 1940s.

(1889–1945)

I only encountered Miles Breuer’s writing indirectly for the first time. Jack Williamson wrote about a Nebraska doctor who had once been a well-known SF writer, and who mentored Williamson and helped him break into the field. It took some searching to find Breuer’s stories, which haven’t been reprinted much in recent years, but Williamson’s country doctor turned out to be a bit of a revelation: In an age that was all about pulp adventure fiction and over-the-top planetary romances, he was writing idea-driven hard SF about physics, more like the SF of the 1940s and 1950s, by which time he was prematurely dead. It was easy to see how this slightly-out-of-time writer would fall through the cracks, but for his influence on Williamson and other members of that first generation of hard SF writers whom he mentored, Breuer ought to be better remembered.

Breuer’s parents were Czech immigrants from Austria-Hungary. When Breuer was a toddler, his parents moved from Chicago to Nebraska so his father could finish his medical studies, and the family eventually settled in the Czech community of Crete, Nebraska. Breuer earned his own medical degree, married, and joined his father’s practice (with a World War I interlude in Europe serving as an officer in the Army Medical Corps). Soon he started writing as well, fiction and medical articles that appeared in the Czech-language press. He wrote a book (in English) on physical therapy that was published in 1925.

Breuer had a longstanding interest in H. G. Wells’s scientific romances. So when Hugo Gernsback founded
Amazing Stories
, Breuer began submitting stories, with his first, “The Man with the Strange Head,” appearing in 1927. Breuer eventually sold nearly forty stories plus two novels to
Amazing
, including collaborations with Williamson and with Clare Winger Harris.

Breuer suffered a nervous breakdown in 1942, and moved his medical practice to Los Angeles to convalesce. He died in 1945 after a brief illness.

First published in
Amazing Stories
, March 1930

Let the reader suppose that somebody states: “The gostak distims the dashes.” You do not know what this means, nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the dashes are distimmed by the gostak. We know that one distimmer of the dashes is a gostak. If, moreover, doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on.

—Unknown writer quoted by Ogden and Richards, in
The Meaning of Meanings
, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1923; also by Walter N. Polakov in
Man and His Affairs,
Williams & Wilkins, 1925.

*

“Why! That is lifting yourself by your own bootstraps!” I exclaimed in amazed incredulity. “It’s absurd.”

Woleshensky smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in the infinite kindness of his vast mind there were room to understand and overlook all the foolish little foibles of all the weak little beings that called themselves men. A mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces where a light-year is a footstep, where universes are being born and blotted out, where space unrolls along a fourth dimension on a surface distended from a fifth. To him, human beings and their affairs do not loom very important.

“Relativity,” he explained. In his voice there was a patient forbearance for my slowness of comprehension. “Merely relativity. It doesn’t take much physical effort to make the moon move through the treetops, does it? Just enough to walk down the garden path.”

I stared at him, and he continued: “If you had been born and raised on a moving train, no one could convince you that the landscape was not in rapid motion. Well, our conception of the universe is quite as relative as that. Sir Isaac Newton tried in his mathematics to express a universe as though beheld by an infinitely removed and perfectly fixed observer. Mathematicians since his time, realizing the futility of such an effort, have taken into consideration that what things ‘are’ depends upon the person who is looking at them. They have tried to express common knowledge, such as the law of gravitation, in terms that would hold good for all observers. Yet their leader and culminating genius, Einstein, has been unable to express knowledge in terms of pure relativity; he has had to accept the velocity of light as an arbitrarily fixed constant. Why should the velocity of light be any more fixed and constant than any other quantity in the universe?”

“But what’s that got to do with going into the fourth dimension?” I broke in impatiently.

He continued as though I hadn’t spoken.

“The thing that interests us now, and that mystifies modern mathematicians, is the question of movement, or, more accurately, translation. Is there such a thing as absolute translation? Can there be movement—translation—except in relation to something else than the thing that moves? All movement we know of is movement in relation to other objects, whether it be a walk down the street or the movement of the earth in its orbit around the sun. A change of relative position. But the mere translation of an isolated object existing alone in space is mathematically inconceivable, for there is no such thing as space in that sense.”

“I thought you said something about going into another universe—” I interrupted again.

You can’t argue with Woleshensky. His train of thought went on without a break.

“By translation we understand getting from one place to another. ‘Going somewhere’ originally meant a movement of our bodies. Yet, as a matter of fact, when we drive in an automobile we ‘go somewhere’ without moving our bodies at all. The scene is changed around us; we are somewhere else; and yet we haven’t moved at all.

“Or suppose you could cast off gravitational attraction for a moment and let the earth rotate under you; you would be going somewhere and yet not moving—”

“But that is theory; you can’t tinker with gravitation—”

“Every day you tinker with gravitation. When you start upward in an elevator, your pressure, not your weight, against the floor of it is increased; apparent gravitation between you and the floor of the elevator is greater than before—and that’s like gravitation is anyway: inertia and acceleration. But we are talking about translation. The position of everything in the universe must be referred to some sort of coordinates. Suppose we change the angle or direction of the coordinates: then you have ‘gone somewhere’ and yet you haven’t moved, nor has anything else moved.”

I looked at him, holding my head in my hands.

“I couldn’t swear that I understood that,” I said slowly. “And I repeat it looks like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps.”

The homely simile did not dismay him. He pointed a finger at me as he spoke. “You’ve seen a chip of wood bobbing on the ripples of a pond. Now you think the chip is moving, now the water. Yet neither is moving; the only motion is of an abstract thing called a wave.

“You’ve seen those ‘illusion’ diagrams—for instance, this one of a group of cubes. Make up your mind that you are looking down upon their upper surfaces, and indeed they seem below you. Now change your mind and imagine that you are down below, looking up. Behold, you see their lower surfaces; you are indeed below them. You have ‘gone somewhere,’ yet there has been no translation of anything. You have merely changed coordinates.”

“Which do you think will drive me insane more quickly—if you show me what you mean, or if you keep on talking without showing me?”

“I’ll try to show you. There are some types of mind, you know, that cannot grasp the idea of relativity. It isn’t the mathematics involved that matters; it’s just the inability of some types of mental organizations to grasp the fact that the mind of the observer endows his environment with certain properties which have no absolute existence. Thus, when you walk through the garden at night the moon floats, from one treetop to another. Is your mind good enough to invert this: make the moon stand still and let the trees move backward? Can you do that? If so, you can ‘go somewhere’ into another dimension.”

Woleshensky rose and walked to the window. His office was an appropriate setting for such a modern discussion as ours—situated m a new, ultramodern building on the university campus, the varnish glossy, the walls clean, the books neatly arranged behind clean glass, the desk in most orderly array; the office was just as precise and modern and wonderful as the mind of its occupant.

“When do you want to go?” he asked.

“Now!”

“Then I have two more things to explain to you. The fourth dimension is just as much here as anywhere else. Right here around you and me things exist and go forward in the fourth dimension; but we do not see them and are not conscious of them because we are confined to our own three. Secondly: if we name the four coordinates as Einstein does, x, y, z, and t, then we exist in x, y, and z and move freely about in them, but are powerless to move in t. Why? Because t is the time dimension; and the time dimension is a difficult one for biological structures that depend on irreversible chemical reactions for their existence. But biochemical reactions can take place along any of the other dimensions as well as along t.

“Therefore, let us transform coordinates. Rotate the property of chemical irre-versibility from t to z. Since we are organically able to exist (or at least to perceive) in only three dimensions at once, our new time dimension will be z. We shall be unconscious of z and cannot travel in it. Our activities and consciousness will take place along x, y, and t.

“According to fiction writers, to switch into the
t
dimension, some sort of apparatus with an electrical field ought to be necessary. It is not. You need nothing more to rotate into the
t
dimension than you do to stop the moon and make the trees move as you ride down the road; or than you do to turn the cubes upside down. It is a matter of
relativity.”

I had ceased trying to wonder or to understand.

“Show me!” was all I could gasp.

“The success of this experiment in changing from the
z
to the
t
coordinate has depended largely upon my lucky discovery of a favorable location. It is just as, when you want the moon to ride the treetops successfully, there have to be favorable features in the topography or it won’t work. The edge of this building and that little walk between the two rows of Norway poplars seems to be an angle between planes in the
z
and t dimensions. It seems to slope downward, does it not?—Now walk from here to the end and imagine yourself going upward. That is all. Instead of feeling this building behind and above you, conceive it as behind and below. Just as on your ride by moonlight, you must tell yourself that the moon is not moving while the trees ride by.—Can you do that? Go ahead, then.” He spoke in a confident tone, as though he knew exactly what would happen.

Half credulous, half wondering, I walked slowly out of the door. I noticed that Woleshensky settled himself down to the table with a pad and a pencil to some kind of study, and forgot me before I had finished turning around. I looked curiously at the familiar wall of the building and the still more familiar poplar walk, expecting to see some strange scenery, some unknown view from another world. But there were the same old bricks and trees that I had known so long, though my disturbed and wondering frame of mind endowed them with a sudden strangeness and un-wontedness. Things I had known for some years, they were, yet so powerfully had Woleshensky’s arguments impressed me that I already fancied myself in a different universe. According to the conception of relativity, objects of the
x, y, z
universe
ought
to look different when viewed from the
x, y, t
universe.

Strange to say, I had no difficulty at all in imagining myself as going
upward
on my stroll along the slope. I told myself that the building was behind and below me, and indeed it seemed real that it was that way. I walked some distance along the little avenue of poplars, which seemed familiar enough in all its details, though after a few minutes it struck me that the avenue seemed rather long. In fact, it was much longer than I had ever known it to be before.

With a queer Alice-in-Wonderland feeling I noted it stretching way on ahead of me. Then I looked back.

I gasped in astonishment. The building was indeed
below
me. I looked down upon it from the top of an elevation. The astonishment of that realization had barely broken over me when I admitted that there was a building down there; but what building? Not the new Morton Hall, at any rate. It was a long, three-story brick building, quite resembling Morton Hall, but it was not the same. And on beyond there were trees with buildings among them; but it was not the campus that I knew.

I paused in a kind of panic. What was I to do now? Here I was in a strange place. How I had gotten there I had no idea. What ought I to do about it? Where should I go? How was I to get back? Odd that I had neglected the precaution of how to get back. I surmised that I must be on the
t
dimension. Stupid blunder on my part, neglecting to find out how to get back.

I walked rapidly down the slope toward the building. Any hopes that I might have had about its being Morton Hall were thoroughly dispelled in a moment. It was a totally strange building, old, and old-fashioned looking. I had never seen it before in my life. Yet it looked perfectly ordinary and natural and was obviously a university classroom building.

I cannot tell whether it was an hour or a dozen that I spent walking frantically this way and that, trying to decide to go into this building or another, and at the last moment backing out in a sweat of hesitation. It seemed like a year but was probably only a few minutes. Then I noticed the people. They were mostly young people, of both sexes. Students, of course. Obviously I was on a university campus. Perfectly natural, normal young people, they were. If I were really on the
t
dimension, it certainly resembled the
z
dimension very closely.

Finally I came to a decision. I could stand this no longer. I selected a solitary, quiet-looking man and stopped him.

“Where am I?” I demanded.

He looked at me in astonishment. I waited for a reply, and he continued to gaze at me speechlessly. Finally it occurred to me that he didn’t understand English.

“Do you speak English?” I asked hopelessly.

“Of course!” he said vehemently. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Something’s wrong with something,” I exclaimed. “I haven’t any idea where I am or how I got here.”

“Synthetic wine?” he asked sympathetically.

“Oh, hell! Think I’m a fool? Say, do you have a good man in mathematical physics on the faculty? Take me to him.”

“Psychology, I should think,” he said, studying me. “Or psychiatry. But I’m a law student and know nothing of either.”