Monday, December 30, 2013

THE HENRY BOTT-ISAAC ASIMOV FEUD PART II: THE BOILING POINT

Science fiction writer and reviewer, Henry Bott's review of Second Foundation in the June 1954 issue of Imagination: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy, seemed more a trashing of author and book than any legitimate form of criticism then, and still reads that way today.

Bott's Filled with denigrating phrases unrelated to the content of the book itself that seemed calculated to injure the most impervious ego. Among them,  "neither a writer nor a story-teller", "heavy-handed and ponderous",  "elephantine prose", "endless philosophizing, (on a juvenile level)", "obscure sociological fantasies", "the soap opera of science fiction" and the clincher "it's not a good book!" Among other things, Bott seemed to have overlooked the fact that the Foundation series had been wildly popular with fans when it appeared in magazine form and readers were clamoring to see it in hardcover.

That these declamations must have been hurtful to even so resilient an ego as Asimov proclaimed his to be. But with his usual mildness of temper, Asimov maintained a dignified authorial silence. Everything might have blown over had Bott had left it at that one review. But Bott didn't stop there. Just three months later, in the September 1954 issue of Imagination, Bott struck again with an equally scathing review of author and material when he took on The Caves of Steel. This time Asimov could bear it no longer and boiled over, albeit in the rather mild and harrumphing way that might have been expected of him.

And here is that second Bott review that set Asimov off. Bott wrote:

"Doubleday ordinarily produces much of the best science fiction printed today. Your reviewer has tried to be objective in analyzing this novel, but . . .



"With that dubious beginning, I review another Asimov novel. ­Somebody must like his stories because they are published in an endless chain, but it is hard for me to see why. I think I shall be really "gone" if I must read another of these epics.


"The canvas is of course, the galaxy—nothing less. There is the robot and the super-empire.



"Using these ingredients in his inimitable way, Asimov hurls a furious barrage of words at the helpless reader. With Tom Swiftian naivete, characters move around in a really never-never world. Insipidity and dullness characterize the plodding story. This venomous condemnation of the story will not be shared by everyone, but then perhaps everyone has not read through the jungle of this sort of writing. When you have finished, you ask, "why?"



"The murdered Spaceman, a corpse in steel-roofed New York's vastness, is remembered by the robot detective and ... you fill in from there. I need coffee after this one!"

One might have  thought that after two such provoking reviews, with no stopping in sight, the publisher would have anticipated a negative response from Asimov and fandom in general. And there was one. But perhaps that was exactly what publisher William Hamling and reviewer Bott wanted. For such a controversy was bound to bring readers to their pages and, in a Ray Palmer like move (and Hamling was a Palmer protege), increase the magazine's circulation.

If so, Bott and Hamiling were right. Asimov  replied the very next month in Charles Lee Riddle's noted fanzine, Peon. More a rumination than a broadside, the piece, titled "Why Can't the Author Meet His Critics?"  was by turns incisive, insightful and philosophical. And it kept the subject on the front pages of the science fiction world.


(Of course, Asimov had the last laugh. Everywhere else the book was seen as a modern classic and is still regarded so, and taught, in college classrooms today.)

And watch for Asimov's reply to Bott on this blog next week.






Sunday, December 29, 2013

THE MICHAEL FLANNIGAN TRILOGY:THE METAPHYSICAL AND PHILOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF THESE SF CLASSICS


THE UNDYING QUEST – ANOTHER EYE TO SEE 
Stuart J. Byrne
(from the Introduction to The Golden Gods, Flannigan II)

My publisher, Jean Marie Stine, was rather intuitive when she asked me some surprise questions about The Golden Gods, the sequel to Land Beyond the Lens.  At first glance, The Golden Gods would seem to be a fairly traditional sci-fantasy sword and sorcery yarn, except for the ironical twist of handicapping the hero in the body of his enemy.  But Jean Marie sensed that there was in this picture a broader canvas behind the frame.  There is much here of alien language structure, and also certain subtle depths of metaphysical concept.  She wanted to know more about this suspected background – or did I just put the story together haphazardly and make it all up as I went along?
  Well, she found me out.  There is much to tell.  As a former comparative philologist, I always had fun concocting alien languages in my stories.  A part of philology is also phonetics, which has a direct connection with the law of consonant change in the evolution of languages throughout the entire Indo-European language tree.  English itself is impoverished where some of the richer speech sounds is concerned, such as glottal stops and labio-palatal aspirants, and so forth.  Some of the strange spellings of names in the present story attempt to represent some of these more exotic sounds, but they are handicapped by the limitations of the English alphabet.
  As to metaphysics, this was the real stretch of the canvas behind the frame, although at that time,   The fact is that the essence of science-fiction and fantasy is that ineluctable Sehnsucht, or longing, in the human spirit to ever seek and find.  To compensate for the frustration of being denied ultimate revelations, we all traditionally played the game of "what if," imagining what the Answer would be.  It was once called the Utopia syndrome.  But the game can take on serious dimensions if out of all the "what ifs" a viable allegory emerges.  And this, I believe, intuitively went into the structuring of the present story.
more than half a century ago, it was largely institutional.
   Michael Flannigan's desperate search allegorizes the human quest for revelation, which reaches afar to unknown spheres and trudges in spirit exhaustion through cloying dusts of ignorance and futility, but ever driven onward by the fervent hope of an Answer.  Thus behind it all is the irony that Man expends his genius in reaching for the stars when the nearest and least explored horizon lies within ourselves – as is allegorized by Flannigan's lost cavern in the Rheingold crater.  Transition from faith to Knowing was his Lens...
   And the allegory involving twin god vehicles for Gurund Ritroon and his adored Mnir'sr Nikin'ra is but a broad stroke on the canvas to depict the golden androgyny of our immortal souls.
   The proof, that intuitive thought may not be recognized when it is present, was demonstrated to me when only now, before Jean Marie's challenge to explain, the realization comes to me that in the ugly countenance of the villain emperor, Gon'sr Lit'ri, was an obvious key to the metaphysical concept.
   The face of evil has but a single eye...!
Stuart J. Byrne
2006

Get The Land Beyond the Lens Book I, FREE in Kindle at Amazon.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

THE ISAAC ASIMOV-HENRY BOTT FEUD OVER BOTT'S REVIEW OF SECOND FOUNDATION

In the June 1954 issue of Imagination Science Fiction, author and reviewer Henry Bott, in his review of Isaac Asimov's concluding volume in the Foundation trilogy, Second Foundation, set off a firestorm of controversy. He ripped the book up one side and down the other, defamed Asimov's ability as a writer and panned the book. Second Foundation needs no defense, and the elements Bott decried make it apparent that he perceived nothing of what Asimov was attempting to accomplish philosophically.  Bott was often perceptive in his book review column for Imagination, titled "Science Fiction Library." But less so in this instance, along with others who fail to perceive that the central them of the series lies in Mayor Salvor Hardin's assertion that, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." The original three books in the Foundation saga are about nothing else, showing various ways problems that seem certain to end in armed conflict can be resolved sans violence by an astute thinker with the right strategy via a kind of psychological and sociological akido. (Not surprisingly this was a theme close to the heart of the heart of the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell Jr., who published the Foundation stories, and one that consistently turns up in the magazine's pages, as considered by many writers, throughout Campbell's tenure.) Asimov was understandably unhappy with such a slam review, and said so publicly in the popular fanzine, Peon. Bott and his publisher, William L. Hamling, would respond in the March 1955 issue of Imagination. The review that set off the controversy is below.

SECOND FOUNDATION
by Isaac Asimov. 224 pages. Gnome Press, New York, N. Y.
   It was with difficulty that this reviewer read this book and with even more difficulty that he wrote this review; certainly it will bring down the wrath of Asimov fans.
     Isaac Asimov is an ,educated, articulate man, but he is neither a writer nor a story-teller. Heavy-handed and ponderous, Asimov grinds out ream after ream of elephantine prose about his ridiculous "Galactic Empire," filled with endless philosophizing, (on a juvenile level) obscure sociological fantasies, and massive technological monologues.
     Hari Seldon, Bayta Darel, Han Pritcher and Arkady Darel'skitter about the Galaxy, involved in improbable activities in the improbable "Second Foundation" fighting desperately to save themselves from the villain to end all, the "Mule."
     Second Foundation is a sort of modern Graustark. Asimov's preoccupation with kingdoms and empires would have been quite fitting four decades ago, but now . . . What connection this has with science-fiction is hard to understand. Asimov's stories are the "soap opera" of science fiction. Not to be compared with the excellent "space opera" of Doc Smith or Campbell some twenty years ago!
    You might say, "Stop the vituperation—what's the story about?" I'll answer,. "Princesses and kingdoms, empires and galaxies and fairy godmothers. Even Mules! In short—nonsense!" Read it if you must, but don't say that you weren't warned — it's not a good book!
-Henry Bott 

 Asimov's disgruntled response in Peon, and. Bott's reply in Imagination, will be published here soon in a forthcoming blog post.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

HAMILTON OR HEINLEIN - WHO INVENTED THE FUTURE HISTORY?



For decades, most science fiction reference works have credited Robert A. Heinlein with creating the field’s first "future history." In this sense, a future history is a fictional projection devised by an author charting what humanity's future might be like over several centuries or even millennia and against which many of that author’s stories are set. Familiar examples include Asimov's Foundation stories, Dickson's Dorsai series, and Brin's Uplift saga.

Typically scholars have pointed to the March 1941 issue of Astounding, where to
much fanfare by the awe-struck editor, Heinlein presented his now-famous chart of one possible future course for humankind, indicating broad social trends, key inventions, and just where in the chronology various of his stories fit. Encompassing the colonization of other planets, a fundamentalist dictatorship in the U.S., interplanetary conflict, vastly extended lifespan, and eventual star travel (and pointing toward an increasing maturity in the human race as a whole), it was impressive then, and remains impressive now.
What most SF historians seem to have overlooked is another important sf writer, Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977), whose future history was first drawn up in the late 1920s, at least a decade before Heinlein's, and within which he had already written some two dozen novels and stories before Heinlein made his first appearance in a mag. Oddly, not only was Hamilton's future history created first, but it was published publicly first – a year
earlier than Heinlein's in May 1940 – an event which appears to have gone unnoticed by genre historians. It may be that Heinlein's future history attracted more notice since it had appeared in the most successful and respected of sf magazines, the august Astounding Science Fiction (today renamed Analog Science Fact and Fiction), whereas Hamilton's description of his future history appeared in the less reputable pages of the lurid sf pulp, Thrilling Wonder Stories.
Hamilton called it "my 'History of the Solar System,'" although it followed humankind's destiny much further than that, much further, in fact, than Heinlein's. According to Hamilton, this history  was the "most ambitious piece of writing I have ever undertaken is one that will never be published.  It Is my 'History of the Solar system,' a nonfiction work to which I have been slowly adding for some time.

"I began it as a simple chronology.  It seemed to me that it was hard to write about  the future if you did not have a fairly definite idea of your own of what the  future was going to be like. A writer, I thought, ought to have some coherent framework on which to hang his tales of future events—then they would be apt to be more logical in each story.

"I set up a simple chronology of the main evens in the Solar System as I foresaw them.  Please understand I make no claim to be a prophet. Nobody can really write the history of the future until it happens.  But this is my own particular guess as to the way it may happen.

"I've tried to stick to this framework in my stories since then.  It covers only the main tides of future history, the greater crises and changes.  There is plenty of room In it for an unlimited number of new stories, I believe."  Ultimately this future history was to encompass the vast majority of Hamilton’s stories, from the early tales like Crashing Suns, Outside the Universe and Locked Worlds of the mid-to-late 1920s through his later, critically-acclaimed, mature works of the 1960s such as The Star of Life, The Haunted Stars and Star Hammer.

It even encompassed the Captain Future stories, knitting all his work into a disparate whole. Various portions of this future were published in letters-to-the-editor and story-behind-the-story columns, as well as in footnotes to some novels.

Below from the May 1940 Thrilling Wonder Stories “The Story Behind the Story” column is the piece where Hamilton first laid out a major chunk of his chronology and provided a bit of background on how and why he evolved his future history. Preceding it are the original editorial headline and introducing Hamilton’s somewhat informal essay.



"TOMORROW’S HISTORY

“'One of these days we expect to have Edmond Hamilton drop into our office, a voluminous Manuscript entitled "History of the Solar System," written on indestructible parchment, tucked under his arm.  Until that time, however, we'll have to be content to let Author Hamilton disburse the doings of the worlds centuries hence in piece-meal form, in his various fictional offerings, and in this department. For Edmond Hamilton, as we have noted on a previous occasion, is the future's Number I historian.  He has compiled the geographies, the habitats, the colonization’s, the conquests and the wars of all the nine planets with encyclopedia-like thoroughness. And whenever he wants a plot for a story he merely thumbs through his fifty cubic feet of reference notes, finds a likely subject, and taps out a corking yarn.’



This is Edmond Hamilton’s original 1940 description of his history of tomorrow:

“The most ambitious piece of writing I have ever undertaken is one that will never be published.  It Is my "History of the Solar system," a nonfiction work to which I have been slowly adding for some time.

I began it as a simple chronology.  It seemed to me that it was hard to write about  the future if you did not have a fairly definite idea of your own of what the  future was going to be like. A writer, I thought, ought to have some coherent framework on which to hang his tales of future events—then they would be apt to be more logical in each story.

I set up a simple chronology of the main evens in the Solar System as I foresaw them.  Please understand I make no claim to be a prophet. Nobody can really write the history of the future until it happens.  But this is my own particular guess as to the way it may happen.

I've tried to stick to this framework in my stories since then.  It covers only the main tides of future history, the greater crises and changes.  There is plenty of room In it for an unlimited number of new stories, I believe.  Now and then one of my older stories, written before I started adhering to the History, bobs up in a magazine.  But in the main, as readers of THRILLING WONDER STORIES and its companion magazines will recognize, I have adhered to my chronology.

It may be interesting to give an idea of the scheme -of my History, by quoting here the titles of the first few sections of it.

"EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION, 1971-2011." This deals with the first pioneering flights in space, from that of Johnson to the moon in 1911, up to the successful colonization of Icy Pluto.  This was, of course, an era of rapidly expanding Earth Influence.

"THE FRONTIER ERA, 2011-2247" is the section devoted to the wild two hundred years in which the System Government, with headquarters on Earth, struggled to bring the half-explored nine worlds, with their colonists and native planetary peoples, under complete law and order, against the opposition of space-pirates, plotters and scientific criminals who In some cases actually threatened to overthrow the Government itself.

"ERA OF INTERPLANETARY SECESSION, 2247-2621." takes up the fateful four centuries in which the various colonized planets began to drift toward a desire for independence from the System Government.  It describes the Martian Rebellion of 2463, the  Swampmen Uprising on Venus. and the other  bids for independence that the System Government struggled to put down. It ends with the date, August 17, 2621, when President Alderdice of the System government signed the fateful Recognition of Independence which  recognized planets as free,  self-governing worlds.

“I need not go on with  the History here,  since the above will give an idea of its  scheme. But, whenever I have had a little spare time I have added to this mass of material, sometimes drawing maps of the swamps and lands of Venus, or the mountain ranges of Uranus, sometimes writing a detailed little account of some event that particularly interested me. In fact, though I started the History simply for convenience, I soon found it a fascinating thing to work on."

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Kings-Two-Thousand-Centuries-ebook/dp/B005DXONWA/(Hamilton ended the outline he provided Thrilling Wonder Stories here. But this only encompassed the early years of the settling of the solar system. We will feature an expanded version of this history that Hamilton wrote later, detailing the remaining years of the two thousand centuries his history of the future encompassed in a forthcoming blog.)

The climax of this twenty thousand year history is Hamilton's novel, The Star Kings, available from Futures-Past Editions in Kindle at Amazon for only $3.75.