tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3770861767173688889.post1900114771654897480..comments2023-04-26T00:55:44.495-07:00Comments on Fantastic Worlds: Jack Williamson, "The Prince of Space" (Retro Review, 1931)Jordan179http://www.blogger.com/profile/04175992431854812417noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3770861767173688889.post-57323017898393141682011-02-24T09:59:09.833-08:002011-02-24T09:59:09.833-08:00But of course the reader of the 1930's assumed...But of course the reader of the 1930's assumed that what the Prince of Space did was necessary to save all Mankind, even though to us he comes across as <i>best</i> as a Well-Intentioned Extremist (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WellIntentionedExtremist).<br /><br />This attitude was never utterly universal <b>(*)</b>, and it would start to change soon after Jack Williamson wrote this story, however. We see well-realized non-human aliens (as opposed to, say, <i>human</i> aliens such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Red Martians or E. E. "Doc" Smith's Osnomians). I direct you to Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934, http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/science_fiction_library/a_martian_odyssey.html) which had numerous alien races -- sympathetic, unsympathetic and merely <i>strange</i> -- and the other stories in that universe (http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff11/index.htm) expanded this further.<br /><br />You can see the change work its way through the 1930's, which I think was the crucial decade for the attitude shift. Sometimes, you can see the change working through the stories of the <i>same author</i>. For instance, the same year (1931) that he wrote "The Prince of Space," Jack Williamson wrote "The Moon Era," which had the hero fighting on the side of a <i>very</i> sympathetic non-human alien against some seriously <i>un</i>sympathetic non-human aliens. Yet the first works in his "Legion of Space" series featured hostile aliens who had to be exterminated <i>en masse</i> to enable humanity to survive (the Medusae in <i>The Legion of Space</i> (serialized 1934) and the Cometeers in <i>The Cometeers</i> (serialized in two parts, 1936 and 1939). After the 1930's, though, Jack Williamson mostly wrote about <i>sympathetic</i> aliens, such as in the Starchild Trilogy, which includes sapient <i>stars</i>.<br /><br />Likewise, E. E. "Doc" Smith turned from a universe in which most really alien aliens were hostile (Skylark) to one in which shape and biochemistry was generally irrelevant to political alignment (Lensman). In the <i>Skylark</i> series (mostly written in the 1920's to mid 1930's), one reason given <i>for</i> the utter intolerance and aggression displayed by the Fenachrone is that they are chlorine-breathers rather than oxygen-breathers; in the <i>Lensman</i> series (mostly written in the late 1930's to early 1950's), <i>both</i> Boskone and Civilization feature very human-like and very non-human aliens, both in biochemistry and form: allegiance to one or the other cause is a matter of cultural choice, rather than biological destiny.<br /><br />An obvious factor in the change was World War II. Science fiction writers, along with the rest of the Western world, recoiled at the horrors produced when the Nazis put racialist doctrine into real-world practice. The realization of the inhumanity of such policies was generally a good thing, both for science fiction and for the larger Western world.<br /><br /><b>===<br />(*)</b> Note Edgar Rice Burroughs' Green Martians, who though an <i>unsympathetic</i> non-human alien race boasted sympathetic <i>members</i>, such as Tars Tarkas and his daughter. In fact, Burroughs <i>rejected</i> the concept of racially-based good and evil <i>at the time when it was most dominant</i>, and in many of his novels he goes out of his way to demonstrate that even sympathetic cultures can produce unsympathetic individuals, and unsympathetic ones sympathetic individuals.Jordan179https://www.blogger.com/profile/04175992431854812417noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3770861767173688889.post-19584892441544450262011-02-24T09:58:34.047-08:002011-02-24T09:58:34.047-08:00Writers in the early 20th century were also very m...Writers in the early 20th century were also very much conditioned by various versions of the illiberal ideas that had already caused the World War I and were paving the road to World War II. In the East this had led to the rising of the Soviet Union; in Central Europe Fascism was rising; in the West this largely took the forms of various sorts of Spencerian Social Darwinism, Technocracy, and various racialist movements, including Eugenics. This was deemed "progressive" politics at the time: note the role of the (Progressive Democrat) Woodrow Wilson in rolling back the previous (relatively) racially-egalitarian policies of the (old-line) Republican Party, particularly in his Federal hiring and Mexican foreign policies.<br /><br />The relevance of this history to the evolution of science fiction concepts is that many, perhaps <i>most</i> science fiction writers took for granted that rival sapient species would express their rivalry in battles to the death <i>as RACES</i> (rather than, say, cooperating, competing non-violently or forming cross-racial political factions or economic combines, some of the other obvious possibilities in a contact situation). Victory in such a struggle would prove one's evolutionary superiority, greater fitness to survive and hence (as the theory was taken to mean by many people at the time) greater <i>right</i> to survive.<br /><br />(the ways in which this doctrine fed into the rising ideology of Fascism, particularly in its most virulent Nazi form, should be obvious).<br /><br />This was of course a severe misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, as Darwin would no doubt have pointed out were he still alive. Darwin was well aware that the struggle for survival included cooperative and non-destructively competitive as well as desructively competitive strategies. But what's important is that <i>this is what many people believed at the time</i>: hence they believed that science had "disproved" classical liberalism, and "scientific" socialism (Communism or Fascism, depending on whether it was international and interracial or national and racialist) was the wave of the future. This belief strengthened after the onset of the Great Depression, which was widely seen as the "failure of capitalism" -- note the publication date of 1931.<br /><br />This led to stories in which "cool and unsympathetic" aliens engaged Man in struggles to the death, and such was seen as perfectly-rational behavior on the part both of the aliens and of the human heroes who led Mankind to (often-genocidal) victories over them. The first such story was of course the aforementioned <i>War of the Worlds</i> from 1898, 33 years before "The Prince of Space."<br /><br />This of course meant that we rarely got to learn the aliens' point of view, and their own cultures were never very well developed, which made the stories less enjoyable. It also led to situations which are to <i>us</i> Values Dissonance (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ValuesDissonance) where <i>we</i> would say What The Hell Hero (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitle0z548336167v) regarding genocides of aliens by heroes who didn't really need to go that far, as I argue was the case in <i>this</i> story (also note that the Prince of Space <i>also</i> wiped out the (innocent) Martian slave race along with their (belligerent and murderous) masters).Jordan179https://www.blogger.com/profile/04175992431854812417noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3770861767173688889.post-83391889301038050712011-02-24T09:57:50.279-08:002011-02-24T09:57:50.279-08:00"Prince of Space" was published in 1931 ..."Prince of Space" was published in 1931 by <i>Amazing</i>; John W. Campbell would later be editor of another magazine, <i>Astounding</i> (later called <i>Analog</i>), starting in 1937. The editor of <i>Amazing</i> in 1931 was Thomas O'Conor Sloane<br /><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._O%27Conor_Sloane<br /><br />a physicist and electrical engineer, and an in-law of Thomas Edison. Oddly for a science fiction editor, he believed manned spaceflight impossible, even though he published stories (such as this one) which assumed that it would one day become routine.<br /><br />I think that the notion of hostile aliens was taken for granted in early science fiction: specifically, hostile <i>Martians</i> dated all the way back to H. G. Wells' <i>War of the Worlds</i> (1898). Given early 20th century concepts of Mars as a dying ecosystem older than the Earth, it even sort of made sense: the Martians would be more technologically advanced than Earthmen, and would desire our younger and richer planet as a new home.<br /><br />(and yes, I see the problems with the concept, including what is to me the most obvious one -- namely, why didn't the Martians invade when we were pre-industrial or even pre-sapient, and consequently little able to resist them. But the implications of Deep Time were less well understood by 1920's science fiction writers than by modern ones).Jordan179https://www.blogger.com/profile/04175992431854812417noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3770861767173688889.post-23210513196469982632011-02-24T08:19:24.728-08:002011-02-24T08:19:24.728-08:00Was John W. Campbell an editor when that was writt...Was John W. Campbell an editor when that was written, because his worldview would explain the lack of sympathetic or even interesting aliens?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com