Tenn, “The Liberation of the Earth”; Asimov, “The Last Question”

Today

Campbell’s Astounding · Suvin’s definition · Satire and philosophy

The most influential editor of the Golden Age

John W. Campbell edited Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 to 1971 (retitled Analog in 1960).

An editor with this much control over a small market shapes a genre directly: he commissioned, rejected, rewrote, and set house taste for three decades.

A more theoretical definition of SF

Science fiction is “a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”¹

Suvin’s definition, unpacked

Every new SF world is distinguished from ours chiefly by a new technology, a drastic disruption, or an anomalous breach in accepted truths — an intrusive novelty, or novum (Latin, “new thing”).²
The novum is a device for casting light on ourselves: “All the epistemological, ideological, and narrative implications and correlatives of the novum lead to the conclusion that significant sf is in fact a specifically roundabout way of commenting on an author’s collective context.”
Those comments work by appeal to the reader’s intellect (cognition): the new aspects of the storyworld invite reflection on their real counterparts, whose essential contingency becomes visible and thinkable as a result (estrangement).

Today’s authors

William Tenn (1920–2010) — pen name of Philip Klass
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)

Born the same year; almost opposite instincts about what SF is for.

Tenn

“The Liberation of the Earth” (1953)

SF and comedy: parody or satire?

When SF is combined with comedy, the result is usually one of two things:

Parody — mimicry
Satire — deflationary exaggeration

Of the two, satire has the sharper critical edge, since it generally reveals the hypocrisy or pretension of its object.

Reading notes: “The Liberation of the Earth”

By its setting, this is a dying Earth story — a subgenre that grew through the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War and the start of the Atomic Era, when fears of nuclear war and its aftermath ran high.
Superficially it is a post-apocalyptic tale of human survival after repeated alien invasions. Our unnamed narrator is among the last surviving humans and can tell the story of humanity’s downfall only as oral history — presumably because every other human technology and institution has been destroyed.
To describe it that way leaves out its most important feature: it is funny. How does Tenn make a story with this plot funny? (Hint: narrative voice has a great deal to do with it.)
Who or what is the object of the satire? Keep the context in mind: by the author’s account, the Korean War specifically, and the early Cold War generally.

Asimov

“The Last Question” (1956)

Asimov, and the machines of 1952

Dozens of books — the Three Laws of Robotics formulated in the 1940s in the stories collected as I, Robot; the Foundation series and its future history.

Context for the story’s computers: early machines filled entire rooms. By 1947 transistors had replaced vacuum tubes, but the silicon chip was years away, as was the shift from analogue to digital. Most computers were too bulky and costly to own privately — though UNIVAC, a smaller and more affordable predecessor to the personal computer, was publicly available by 1951, and seems likely to have inspired the story.

Reading notes: “The Last Question”

Asimov was extremely prolific, but this story was his personal favorite.
Like Clarke’s fiction, it is ultimately about the relationship between science and religion. Where Clarke highlights the tension between them, Asimov finds a way to resolve it — albeit somewhat blasphemously, at least from a traditional monotheistic perspective.
Formally, the narrative moves forward chronologically but is divided into uneven sections, each set further into the future. It is also recursive: each section repeats roughly the same pattern of events, which lends a comic lightness of tone despite the heavy subject.
Thematically it is more straightforwardly philosophical than anything we have read, and marks a shift away from SF as pure adventure or as the encounter with the alien other. (Side note: there are famously no aliens anywhere in Asimov’s fiction, because Campbell did not like them.)
Instead of using SF for adventure (Burroughs) or psychological insight (Bradbury), Asimov is interested in how SF can think out philosophical questions. He makes it a more cerebral genre — returning it, in some ways, to its roots in Wells’s scientific romances and the fables of fantasy.

Thursday: Midterm Exam

75 minutes, pen and paper, in class, beginning promptly at 10:00. Key terms, passage identification, close reading of a provided quotation, and comparison of at least two texts.

Everything through today is fair game.