1. Eimar O'Duffy
***
Eimar O'Duffy
Eimar O'Duffy was an Irish satirist, poet, playwright, and novelist, and was the author of the Cuanduine trilogy and Life and Money.
British engineer C. H. Douglas (1879–1952) launched the Social Credit movement when he wrote a book by that name in 1924. According to Douglas, the true purpose of production is consumption, and production must serve the genuine, freely expressed interests of consumers. Each citizen is to have a beneficial, not direct, inheritance in the communal capital conferred by complete and dynamic access to the fruits of industry assured by the National Dividend and Compensated Price. The concept of economic democracy through Social Credit had immediate appeal in literary circles. Names associated with Social Credit include Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Eimar O'Duffy, Sybil Thorndyke, Bonamy Dobrée, Eric de Maré and the American publisher James Laughlin. In 1933 O'Duffy published Asses in Clover, a science fiction fantasy exploration of Social Credit themes. His Social Credit economics book Life and Money: Being a Critical Examination of the Principles and Practice of Orthodox Economics with A Practical Scheme to End the Muddle it has made of our Civilisation, was endorsed by Douglas.
Eimar O'Duffy's Aloysius O'Kennedy (or Cuanduine) sequence "makes satirical points about contemporary civilization... by assessing modern life through the eyes of characters who are, or claim to be, figures of Irish legend. The second volume mounts its comparatively sustained satire through its heroes' voyage to a utopia where everything is, not unusually, inverted. The third, set like the first in Ireland after 1950, musters the forces of legend to defeat US capitalism in the form of the egregious King Goshawk." (Encyclopedia of SF)
* King Goshawk and the Birds (1926)
* The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1929)
* Asses in Clover (1933)
Showing posts with label New Kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Kids. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
New Kids theorists (1884-93)
1. David Ben Gurion
2. Ernst Bloch
***
David Ben Gurion (1886-1973)
Born in Plonsk, Poland, Ben Gurion would eventually become the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion's passion for Zionism, the movement he helped found, culminated in his instrumental role in the founding of the state of Israel. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben Gurion helped build the state institutions and oversaw the absorption of vast numbers of Jews from all over the world.
In 1935 Ben Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ben Gurion instigated a policy of restraint ("Havlagah") in which the Haganah and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defence. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and Ben Gurion supported this policy.
Ben Gurion played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting Palestinian exodus.
* Ben Gurion was a labor Zionist — in his view, exile had distorted Jewish society, primarily by preventing Jews from engaging in productive labor. Only a state sustained by a population of productive Jewish citizens held out any hope of Jewish survival. Only a Zionist socialist ethos could instil a level of altruism sufficient to build a Jewish economy and polity in Palestine. Like H.G. Wells, for example, he believed that a capitalist economy would not induce an adequate degree of cooperation or dedication. He wanted to condition Jews to the virtues of work and to alienate them from the idea of exploiting others. A Jewish state with a dominant working class would create an exemplary society which would serve as a model of equity and justice to the world.
* After the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Ben Gurion extolled the virtues of statehood. Israel's highly divergent population adhered to values inimial to the ethos of a modern state, he believed, and Israelis had to learn not to subvert the authoritative exercise of state power. A new national ideology which prepared Jews for self-government had to be formulated.
***
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)
Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.
After finishing his doctorate in 1909 (in Munich), he went to work with Georg Simmel, the famous sociologist and exponent of "life philosophy" in Berlin. Then he moved to Heidelberg where he established a close friendship with the already prominent aesthetician, and future Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács (1885), who introduced him to the intellectual circle around Max Weber.
Like all members of the New Kids cohort, he grew up in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism," and tended to be nostalgic for a golden age — in the mythical past, in fairy tales, in childhood itself. Bloch transformed this backward-looking nostalgia, however, into a forward-looking utopian vision.
* WWI created the conditions for Bloch's unique eschatological reading of Marx, which he then fused with elements of neo-Kantianism, "life philosopy," and an "authentic expressionist impulse" to produce his first great work, The Spirit of Utopia (1918). This book set the stage for Bloch's later attempts to ground the concept of utopia in the unfinished character of reality as such and to forward a dynamic vision of nature as a set of unrealized potentialities which could become purposive if humanity decided to make them so.
* Ultimately, Bloch would fashion an ontology in which Being would be seen not as a static or finished entity but rather as inherently retaining an unexplored horizon that constantly projects a utopian novum. Thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, human existence is understood as necessarily manifesting "anticipatory" qualities that point to a utopia which does "not yet" exist, but which nevertheless stands open to realization.
* Bloch's encyclopedic masterpiece, The Principle of Hope (1959), would analyze such anticipatory utopian projections in the realms of religion, art, and philosophy, as well as the daydreams and manifold occurrences of everyday life. Marx appears as just one example of utopian thinkers stretching back to medieval mystics, neo-platonists, and the thinkers of antiquity. From such a (cosmic?) perspective, people are seen as anthropologically motivated by a complex of instinctual drives which bring about a hope of the best world and a sense of frustration or Angst at not attaining it.
* Bloch was primarily concerned with analyzing the concept of utopia and calling for further experimental thinking. His works lack specifics regarding how the utopian order might be brought about, what institutions are necessary to ensure its liberating character, or even what socio-cutural relations should inform it. (For Russell Jacoby, this is precisely the strength of Bloch's work.) In other words, though he was a socialist, Bloch's philosophy need not lead to any particular form of socialist politics.
* For Bloch, past periods of history are not dead time but rather the repository of unresolved contradictions which can reassert themselves for good or ill. (This is a terrific reason to study history, by the way.) He produced an all-encompassing and experimental philosophical standpoint which speaks to humanity's best hopes for the future even while holding on to the most progressive unrealized possibilities of the past.
Author of, among other books:
Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918)
Spuren (1930)
Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Inheritance of our Time, 1935) — a study of Nazism
Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954-59, 3 vols.)
2. Ernst Bloch
***
David Ben Gurion (1886-1973)
Born in Plonsk, Poland, Ben Gurion would eventually become the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion's passion for Zionism, the movement he helped found, culminated in his instrumental role in the founding of the state of Israel. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben Gurion helped build the state institutions and oversaw the absorption of vast numbers of Jews from all over the world.
In 1935 Ben Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ben Gurion instigated a policy of restraint ("Havlagah") in which the Haganah and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defence. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and Ben Gurion supported this policy.
Ben Gurion played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting Palestinian exodus.
* Ben Gurion was a labor Zionist — in his view, exile had distorted Jewish society, primarily by preventing Jews from engaging in productive labor. Only a state sustained by a population of productive Jewish citizens held out any hope of Jewish survival. Only a Zionist socialist ethos could instil a level of altruism sufficient to build a Jewish economy and polity in Palestine. Like H.G. Wells, for example, he believed that a capitalist economy would not induce an adequate degree of cooperation or dedication. He wanted to condition Jews to the virtues of work and to alienate them from the idea of exploiting others. A Jewish state with a dominant working class would create an exemplary society which would serve as a model of equity and justice to the world.
* After the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Ben Gurion extolled the virtues of statehood. Israel's highly divergent population adhered to values inimial to the ethos of a modern state, he believed, and Israelis had to learn not to subvert the authoritative exercise of state power. A new national ideology which prepared Jews for self-government had to be formulated.
***
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)
Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.
After finishing his doctorate in 1909 (in Munich), he went to work with Georg Simmel, the famous sociologist and exponent of "life philosophy" in Berlin. Then he moved to Heidelberg where he established a close friendship with the already prominent aesthetician, and future Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács (1885), who introduced him to the intellectual circle around Max Weber.
Like all members of the New Kids cohort, he grew up in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism," and tended to be nostalgic for a golden age — in the mythical past, in fairy tales, in childhood itself. Bloch transformed this backward-looking nostalgia, however, into a forward-looking utopian vision.
* WWI created the conditions for Bloch's unique eschatological reading of Marx, which he then fused with elements of neo-Kantianism, "life philosopy," and an "authentic expressionist impulse" to produce his first great work, The Spirit of Utopia (1918). This book set the stage for Bloch's later attempts to ground the concept of utopia in the unfinished character of reality as such and to forward a dynamic vision of nature as a set of unrealized potentialities which could become purposive if humanity decided to make them so.
* Ultimately, Bloch would fashion an ontology in which Being would be seen not as a static or finished entity but rather as inherently retaining an unexplored horizon that constantly projects a utopian novum. Thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, human existence is understood as necessarily manifesting "anticipatory" qualities that point to a utopia which does "not yet" exist, but which nevertheless stands open to realization.
* Bloch's encyclopedic masterpiece, The Principle of Hope (1959), would analyze such anticipatory utopian projections in the realms of religion, art, and philosophy, as well as the daydreams and manifold occurrences of everyday life. Marx appears as just one example of utopian thinkers stretching back to medieval mystics, neo-platonists, and the thinkers of antiquity. From such a (cosmic?) perspective, people are seen as anthropologically motivated by a complex of instinctual drives which bring about a hope of the best world and a sense of frustration or Angst at not attaining it.
* Bloch was primarily concerned with analyzing the concept of utopia and calling for further experimental thinking. His works lack specifics regarding how the utopian order might be brought about, what institutions are necessary to ensure its liberating character, or even what socio-cutural relations should inform it. (For Russell Jacoby, this is precisely the strength of Bloch's work.) In other words, though he was a socialist, Bloch's philosophy need not lead to any particular form of socialist politics.
* For Bloch, past periods of history are not dead time but rather the repository of unresolved contradictions which can reassert themselves for good or ill. (This is a terrific reason to study history, by the way.) He produced an all-encompassing and experimental philosophical standpoint which speaks to humanity's best hopes for the future even while holding on to the most progressive unrealized possibilities of the past.
Author of, among other books:
Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918)
Spuren (1930)
Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Inheritance of our Time, 1935) — a study of Nazism
Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954-59, 3 vols.)
Monday, January 5, 2009
SF authors born 1884-93: 1885
1. F. Britten Austin
***
F. Britten Austin (TK)
TK
* Battlewrack
* By the Aero-Mail
* On the Borderland
* The War-God Walks Again
TK
***
F. Britten Austin (TK)
TK
* Battlewrack
* By the Aero-Mail
* On the Borderland
* The War-God Walks Again
TK
SF authors born 1884-1893: 1891
1. Otis Adelbert Kline
***
Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)
American writer, literary agent. Frequent contributor to pulp magazines. Popular for shoddy knockoffs of Edgar Rice Burroughs' sword-and-raygun romances.
* "The Malignant Entity" (Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924). TK
* TK
* The Prince of Peril: The Weird Adventures of Zinlo, Man of Three Worlds Upon the Mysterious Planet of Venus (McClurg: Chicago, 1930). The second story in Kline's Venus series. The protagonist is a Martian, who has previously occupied the body of an Earthman, and who is now translated to Venus in the body of Prince Zinlo. A wicked nobleman is trying to assassinate Zinlo, who is crown prince. (Ripoff of Anthony Hope's 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda?)
* TK
***
Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)
American writer, literary agent. Frequent contributor to pulp magazines. Popular for shoddy knockoffs of Edgar Rice Burroughs' sword-and-raygun romances.
* "The Malignant Entity" (Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924). TK
* TK
* The Prince of Peril: The Weird Adventures of Zinlo, Man of Three Worlds Upon the Mysterious Planet of Venus (McClurg: Chicago, 1930). The second story in Kline's Venus series. The protagonist is a Martian, who has previously occupied the body of an Earthman, and who is now translated to Venus in the body of Prince Zinlo. A wicked nobleman is trying to assassinate Zinlo, who is crown prince. (Ripoff of Anthony Hope's 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda?)
* TK
Thursday, January 1, 2009
SF authors born 1884-1893: 1892
1. Pearl S. Buck
2. Edward Shanks
***
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)
Pearl S. Buck also known as Sai Zhen Zhu, was a prolific American sinologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer. In 1938, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." With no irony, she has been described in China as a Chinese writer. Before 1934, Pearl Buck once held the nationality of the Republic of China.
* Command the Morning (J. Day, New York: 1959). Borderline SF: Interpretation of the complicated motives behind a team building the atomic bomb. Not Radium-Age SF.
***
Edward Shanks (TK)
TK
2. Edward Shanks
***
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)
Pearl S. Buck also known as Sai Zhen Zhu, was a prolific American sinologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer. In 1938, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." With no irony, she has been described in China as a Chinese writer. Before 1934, Pearl Buck once held the nationality of the Republic of China.
* Command the Morning (J. Day, New York: 1959). Borderline SF: Interpretation of the complicated motives behind a team building the atomic bomb. Not Radium-Age SF.
***
Edward Shanks (TK)
TK
SF authors born 1884-93: 1890
1. Karel Čapek
2. H. P. Lovecraft
3. E.E. Smith
***
Karel Čapek (1890-1938)
Čapek, one of the most influential Czech litterateurs of the 20th century, was born in Malé Svatoňovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). The name is pronounced something like "Chop-ek." An internationally important playwright, novelist, and essayist — and a fine satirist. He studied philosophy and received his doctorate in Prague in 1915. After the independence of Czechoslovakia he allied himself to the theatrical world; with his brother Joseph he managed a theater. His first books were collaborations with hia brother, the pair being noted for their verse play The Insects (1920). About the same time Karel, alone, achieved international success with his drama R.U.R., which first opened in Prague in 1921.
Čapek "can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel," a Wikipedia entry notes, as of this writing. "However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a mainstream literary figure who used science-fiction motifs." Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Čapek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations.
Capek is remembered as one of the European authors who wrote about the evils of "scientific barbarism" which could be seen in the rise of Nazism and Fascism. In the 1930s, Čapek's work focused on the threat of brutal Nazi and fascist dictatorships. His most productive years coincided with the existence of the first republic of Czechoslovakia (1918–1938). Soon after it became clear that the Western allies had refused to help defend Czechoslovakia against Hitler, Čapek refused to leave his country — despite the fact that the Gestapo had named him Czechoslovakia's "public enemy number 2." Čapek died of double pneumonia on December 25, 1938, shortly after part of Bohemia was annexed by Nazi Germany following the so-called Munich Agreement. His brother died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
After the war, Čapek's work was reluctantly accepted by the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia, because during his life he had refused to accept a communist utopia as a viable alternative to the threat of Nazi domination.
Čapek's most important non-SF works attempt to resolve problems of epistemology, to answer the question: "What is knowledge?" Examples include "The Tales from Two Pockets", and the first book of a novelistic trilogy that includes Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life.
MORE ABOUT ČAPEK
* R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama (Doubleday, Page: Garden City, N.Y., 1923; the play — Rossumovi univerzální roboti — premiered in '21). Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama (Doubleday, Page: Garden City, N.Y., 1923; the play premiered in '21). This surreal morality play takes place in the 1960s or so, and it's set in the factory of a (USA?) manufacturing concern that has shipped hundreds of thousands of "Robots" — biological humanoids designed for cheap labor — around the world. (The term, coined by Čapek's brother, comes from the Czech for "serf labor," or "drudgery." We'd call Čapek's Robots "androids," now. See Spock-like sketch from the '22 New York production, at left.) The Robots, which have a limited life span, are supposedly soulless. Not so, claims Helena Glory, a liberal activist married to the factory's GM (who envisions a utopia in which humans won't have to do any work). At Helena's urging, R.U.R.'s scientists develop Robots tricked out with extra humanity... at which point they rise up and exterminate humankind. In an epilogue, Alquist, R.U.R.'s construction engineer and the last surviving human, give his blessing to two new-model Robots, Primus and Helena, who have discovered love. Dubbing them the new Adam and Eve, Alquist warns them to avoid the sins that destroyed his own species, then sends them forth to be fruitful and multiply.
READ IT | IMAGES FROM THE PLAY
PS: R.U.R. was written in 1920, premiered in Prague early in 1921, was performed in New York and London in 1922, and published in English translation in 1923. The following year, G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton (both of whom wrote some SF) were among those in London participating in a public discussion of the play. Capek responded, via The Saturday Review, to what he felt was the excessive thematic attention they and other critics paid to one of his devices: "For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots." It is one of the most frequently anthologized plays ever written.
* The Absolute at Large (1922 as Továrna na absolutno; published in translation, Macmillan, London, 1927). In the near future (i.e., the Thirties), a Czech scientist invents "perfect combustion," and an industrial concern starts manufacturing an atomic reactor that provides cheap energy — with an unexpected byproduct: God. To be precise, it's the Absolute, the spiritual essence that permeates every particle of matter... or did, anyway, until matter began to be annihilated by the super-efficient Karburetor. Instrumental rationality, and the capitalist cult of efficiency, are satirized brilliantly by Čapek. As they're released from imprisoning matter by the Karburetors and Molecular Disintegration Dynamos cranked out in the thousands by Ford Motors (the novel's Czech title means "the factory of the Absolute") and other manufacturers around the world, God-particles infect humankind with wonder-working powers and ecstatic religious sentiments. What's more, the Absolute begins operating factories itself, producing far too many finished goods for anyone to consume: "It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day." As a result, economies collapse, unemployment is universal, and from 1944 through 1953, fanatical sects whose -isms (including rationalism, nationalism, and sentimentalism) are religious only in the broadest sense do battle. Every single country on the planet is drawn into the Greatest War, during which everyone invades everyone else, atomic weapons are deployed, and civilization collapses. Now, that's instrumental rationality operating at peak efficiency.
FULL TEXT (CZECH) | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY
* Krakatit: An Atomic Fantasy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925). An English translation of the Czech author's 1924 novel. A queer inventor discovers the most powerful explosive ever, but he refuses to share it with (see above) Earth's flawed political powers. The Art Deco jacket design captures both the excitement and terror of such a discovery. The stylish typeface says, "Not to worry, the future is awesome!" But K. Romney Towndrow's artwork — an explosion rending the very planet in half — says, "Yes, worry." Still, this is a satire, so we're not encouraged to take things too seriously; the illustration kinda reminds us of limelights in a canyon of skyscrapers. It's as though we were approaching a 1925 Hollywood movie opening, perhaps Marion Fairfax's The Lost World. Fun facts: The book was adapted as a 1947 movie (d. Otakar Vávra) and a 1960 opera (Václav Kašlík); both are supposed to be tremendous. The 1925 US edition of Krakatit has a more restrained, but still fun, jacket.
* War with the Newts (1939 in English; Válka s mloky, Dr. Borovny, Prague, 1936). Dystopian satire. Intelligent nets become "civilized." One of the best modern satires on intolerance, militarism, and exploitation. MORE TK.
***
H. P. Lovecraft (TK)
TK
***
E.E. Smith (TK)
TK
2. H. P. Lovecraft
3. E.E. Smith
***
Karel Čapek (1890-1938)
Čapek, one of the most influential Czech litterateurs of the 20th century, was born in Malé Svatoňovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). The name is pronounced something like "Chop-ek." An internationally important playwright, novelist, and essayist — and a fine satirist. He studied philosophy and received his doctorate in Prague in 1915. After the independence of Czechoslovakia he allied himself to the theatrical world; with his brother Joseph he managed a theater. His first books were collaborations with hia brother, the pair being noted for their verse play The Insects (1920). About the same time Karel, alone, achieved international success with his drama R.U.R., which first opened in Prague in 1921.
Čapek "can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel," a Wikipedia entry notes, as of this writing. "However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a mainstream literary figure who used science-fiction motifs." Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Čapek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations.
Capek is remembered as one of the European authors who wrote about the evils of "scientific barbarism" which could be seen in the rise of Nazism and Fascism. In the 1930s, Čapek's work focused on the threat of brutal Nazi and fascist dictatorships. His most productive years coincided with the existence of the first republic of Czechoslovakia (1918–1938). Soon after it became clear that the Western allies had refused to help defend Czechoslovakia against Hitler, Čapek refused to leave his country — despite the fact that the Gestapo had named him Czechoslovakia's "public enemy number 2." Čapek died of double pneumonia on December 25, 1938, shortly after part of Bohemia was annexed by Nazi Germany following the so-called Munich Agreement. His brother died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
After the war, Čapek's work was reluctantly accepted by the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia, because during his life he had refused to accept a communist utopia as a viable alternative to the threat of Nazi domination.
Čapek's most important non-SF works attempt to resolve problems of epistemology, to answer the question: "What is knowledge?" Examples include "The Tales from Two Pockets", and the first book of a novelistic trilogy that includes Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life.
MORE ABOUT ČAPEK
* R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama (Doubleday, Page: Garden City, N.Y., 1923; the play — Rossumovi univerzální roboti — premiered in '21). Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama (Doubleday, Page: Garden City, N.Y., 1923; the play premiered in '21). This surreal morality play takes place in the 1960s or so, and it's set in the factory of a (USA?) manufacturing concern that has shipped hundreds of thousands of "Robots" — biological humanoids designed for cheap labor — around the world. (The term, coined by Čapek's brother, comes from the Czech for "serf labor," or "drudgery." We'd call Čapek's Robots "androids," now. See Spock-like sketch from the '22 New York production, at left.) The Robots, which have a limited life span, are supposedly soulless. Not so, claims Helena Glory, a liberal activist married to the factory's GM (who envisions a utopia in which humans won't have to do any work). At Helena's urging, R.U.R.'s scientists develop Robots tricked out with extra humanity... at which point they rise up and exterminate humankind. In an epilogue, Alquist, R.U.R.'s construction engineer and the last surviving human, give his blessing to two new-model Robots, Primus and Helena, who have discovered love. Dubbing them the new Adam and Eve, Alquist warns them to avoid the sins that destroyed his own species, then sends them forth to be fruitful and multiply.READ IT | IMAGES FROM THE PLAY
PS: R.U.R. was written in 1920, premiered in Prague early in 1921, was performed in New York and London in 1922, and published in English translation in 1923. The following year, G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton (both of whom wrote some SF) were among those in London participating in a public discussion of the play. Capek responded, via The Saturday Review, to what he felt was the excessive thematic attention they and other critics paid to one of his devices: "For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots." It is one of the most frequently anthologized plays ever written.
* The Absolute at Large (1922 as Továrna na absolutno; published in translation, Macmillan, London, 1927). In the near future (i.e., the Thirties), a Czech scientist invents "perfect combustion," and an industrial concern starts manufacturing an atomic reactor that provides cheap energy — with an unexpected byproduct: God. To be precise, it's the Absolute, the spiritual essence that permeates every particle of matter... or did, anyway, until matter began to be annihilated by the super-efficient Karburetor. Instrumental rationality, and the capitalist cult of efficiency, are satirized brilliantly by Čapek. As they're released from imprisoning matter by the Karburetors and Molecular Disintegration Dynamos cranked out in the thousands by Ford Motors (the novel's Czech title means "the factory of the Absolute") and other manufacturers around the world, God-particles infect humankind with wonder-working powers and ecstatic religious sentiments. What's more, the Absolute begins operating factories itself, producing far too many finished goods for anyone to consume: "It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day." As a result, economies collapse, unemployment is universal, and from 1944 through 1953, fanatical sects whose -isms (including rationalism, nationalism, and sentimentalism) are religious only in the broadest sense do battle. Every single country on the planet is drawn into the Greatest War, during which everyone invades everyone else, atomic weapons are deployed, and civilization collapses. Now, that's instrumental rationality operating at peak efficiency.FULL TEXT (CZECH) | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY
* Krakatit: An Atomic Fantasy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925). An English translation of the Czech author's 1924 novel. A queer inventor discovers the most powerful explosive ever, but he refuses to share it with (see above) Earth's flawed political powers. The Art Deco jacket design captures both the excitement and terror of such a discovery. The stylish typeface says, "Not to worry, the future is awesome!" But K. Romney Towndrow's artwork — an explosion rending the very planet in half — says, "Yes, worry." Still, this is a satire, so we're not encouraged to take things too seriously; the illustration kinda reminds us of limelights in a canyon of skyscrapers. It's as though we were approaching a 1925 Hollywood movie opening, perhaps Marion Fairfax's The Lost World. Fun facts: The book was adapted as a 1947 movie (d. Otakar Vávra) and a 1960 opera (Václav Kašlík); both are supposed to be tremendous. The 1925 US edition of Krakatit has a more restrained, but still fun, jacket.
* War with the Newts (1939 in English; Válka s mloky, Dr. Borovny, Prague, 1936). Dystopian satire. Intelligent nets become "civilized." One of the best modern satires on intolerance, militarism, and exploitation. MORE TK.***
H. P. Lovecraft (TK)
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E.E. Smith (TK)
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SF authors born 1884-93: 1888
1. Miriam Allen deFord
2. Thea von Harbou
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Miriam Allen deFord (TK)
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Thea von Harbou (1884-1954)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German actress and author of Prussian aristocratic origin. She was born in Tauperlitz in the Kingdom of Bavaria. In 1905, she published her first novel. She then started to work as an actress, beginning in 1906. She married her first husband, the actor and director Rudolf Klein-Rogge, in 1914. In 1920, she wrote her first film script, Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, Mysteries of India), together with Fritz Lang. Lang became her second husband in 1922, and they collaborated in the following years, writing the screenplays for Metropolis and M together. They divorced in 1933.
In 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler came to power, Von Harbou joined the National Socialist German Workers Party, which presumably led to the divorce from Lang, who left Germany in 1934 for Paris after his film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was banned by the Nazi government. Lang's mother, although religiously a convert to Catholicism, was Jewish. Harbou wrote the script for Der Herrscher (1937), directed by Veit Harlan and starring Emil Jannings. The movie celebrates unconditional submission under absolute authority, eventually finding reward in total victory.
After the war she was detained by the British military government, and then did unskilled labor, such as cleaning up rubble from the bombing. After receiving a working permit she did some synchronizing of movies, but also continued to write scripts.
1914-23
* Metropolis (Berlin, 1926; and London, 1927). An Expressionist novel set in a hyper-capitalist city-state whose Pharaonic master, Joh Fredersen, deplores those all-too-human weaknesses that make his laborers inferior to machines. He orders the mad inventor-magician Rotwang to build him "machine men"; instead, Rotwang creates a machine woman whom he names Futura, or Parody: "The being was, indubitably, a woman. In the soft garment which it wore stood a body, like the body of a young birch tree, swaying on feet set fast together. But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver." Futura's face is rendered in the exact likeness of Maria, the "soul" of the workers (and Fredersen's pinko son's object of affection), and it's sent among the rebellious workers as an agent provocateuse. The workers revolt, and Futura/Maria is destroyed — along with much of Metropolis. Fun facts: Von Harbou and her husband, film director Fritz Lang, developed the scenario for Metropolis, then she wrote the novelization while he directed the classic 1927 movie. Yes, that's where Clark Kent's city got its name.
* The Girl in the Moon (Readers Library: London, 1930). Translated from 1928 German edition. Also published in abridged form in 1930, with stills from the movie Die Frau im Mond, as The Rocket to the Moon: From the Novel, The Girl in the Moon. Unspecified near future: Wold Helius, a brilliant German scientist, has successfully sent objects beyond the earth's gravitational field and an unmanned space probe around the moon. The lunar probe has rveealed that there is an atmosphere, vegetation, and insects on the other side of the moon — a manned expedition is planned. MORE TK
SCRIPTS (SELECTION):
1914-23
* Destiny (1921) directed by Fritz Lang
* Phantom (1922) directed by F. W. Murnau
* The Expulsion (1923) directed by F. W. Murnau
* The Grand Duke's Finances (1924) directed by F. W. Murnau
* Michael (1924) directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
* Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, King of Crime) (1922)
* Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (Siegfried's Death) (1924)
* Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhilde's Revenge) (1924)
* Metropolis (1927). Metropolis is a 1927 silent science fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and Thea von Harbou. Lang and von Harbou wrote the screenplay in 1924, and the story was novelized by von Harbou in 1926. It is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film stars Alfred Abel as the leader of the city, Gustav Fröhlich as his son, who tries to mediate between the elite caste and the workers, Brigitte Helm as both the pure-at-heart worker Maria and the debased robot version of her, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist who created the robot.
* Spione (Spies) (1928)
* Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), from her novel Die Frau im Mond (1929)
* M (1931)
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2. Thea von Harbou
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Miriam Allen deFord (TK)
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Thea von Harbou (1884-1954)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German actress and author of Prussian aristocratic origin. She was born in Tauperlitz in the Kingdom of Bavaria. In 1905, she published her first novel. She then started to work as an actress, beginning in 1906. She married her first husband, the actor and director Rudolf Klein-Rogge, in 1914. In 1920, she wrote her first film script, Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, Mysteries of India), together with Fritz Lang. Lang became her second husband in 1922, and they collaborated in the following years, writing the screenplays for Metropolis and M together. They divorced in 1933.
In 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler came to power, Von Harbou joined the National Socialist German Workers Party, which presumably led to the divorce from Lang, who left Germany in 1934 for Paris after his film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was banned by the Nazi government. Lang's mother, although religiously a convert to Catholicism, was Jewish. Harbou wrote the script for Der Herrscher (1937), directed by Veit Harlan and starring Emil Jannings. The movie celebrates unconditional submission under absolute authority, eventually finding reward in total victory.
After the war she was detained by the British military government, and then did unskilled labor, such as cleaning up rubble from the bombing. After receiving a working permit she did some synchronizing of movies, but also continued to write scripts.
1914-23
* Metropolis (Berlin, 1926; and London, 1927). An Expressionist novel set in a hyper-capitalist city-state whose Pharaonic master, Joh Fredersen, deplores those all-too-human weaknesses that make his laborers inferior to machines. He orders the mad inventor-magician Rotwang to build him "machine men"; instead, Rotwang creates a machine woman whom he names Futura, or Parody: "The being was, indubitably, a woman. In the soft garment which it wore stood a body, like the body of a young birch tree, swaying on feet set fast together. But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver." Futura's face is rendered in the exact likeness of Maria, the "soul" of the workers (and Fredersen's pinko son's object of affection), and it's sent among the rebellious workers as an agent provocateuse. The workers revolt, and Futura/Maria is destroyed — along with much of Metropolis. Fun facts: Von Harbou and her husband, film director Fritz Lang, developed the scenario for Metropolis, then she wrote the novelization while he directed the classic 1927 movie. Yes, that's where Clark Kent's city got its name.
* The Girl in the Moon (Readers Library: London, 1930). Translated from 1928 German edition. Also published in abridged form in 1930, with stills from the movie Die Frau im Mond, as The Rocket to the Moon: From the Novel, The Girl in the Moon. Unspecified near future: Wold Helius, a brilliant German scientist, has successfully sent objects beyond the earth's gravitational field and an unmanned space probe around the moon. The lunar probe has rveealed that there is an atmosphere, vegetation, and insects on the other side of the moon — a manned expedition is planned. MORE TK
SCRIPTS (SELECTION):
1914-23
* Destiny (1921) directed by Fritz Lang
* Phantom (1922) directed by F. W. Murnau
* The Expulsion (1923) directed by F. W. Murnau
* The Grand Duke's Finances (1924) directed by F. W. Murnau
* Michael (1924) directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
* Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, King of Crime) (1922)
* Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (Siegfried's Death) (1924)
* Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhilde's Revenge) (1924)
* Metropolis (1927). Metropolis is a 1927 silent science fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and Thea von Harbou. Lang and von Harbou wrote the screenplay in 1924, and the story was novelized by von Harbou in 1926. It is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film stars Alfred Abel as the leader of the city, Gustav Fröhlich as his son, who tries to mediate between the elite caste and the workers, Brigitte Helm as both the pure-at-heart worker Maria and the debased robot version of her, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist who created the robot.
* Spione (Spies) (1928)
* Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), from her novel Die Frau im Mond (1929)
* M (1931)
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SF authors born 1884-93: 1887
1. Ray Cummings
2. Frigyes Karinthy
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Ray Cummings (TK)
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Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938)
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* Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (1916 novella, translated from Hungarian in 1966). In 1914, Gulliver signs on as a ship's surgeon on a British ship torpedoed in the Baltic. He escapes in a hydroplane, and is then drawn into a strange-looking machine hovering above him. He awakens on an unidentified planet in another solar system. The planet is ruled by intelligent machines, who regard organic life as a loathsome disease of matter; they classify Gulliver with their planet's bestial tree people. They've been observing Earth, and are pleased to see that WWI is in the process of exterminating all human life. Gulliver decides that machines — which don't wage wars — really are superior, and asks to be improved. The machines give him a cranial shot of mineral matter, to improve his understanding, then transport him back home... with the promise that, when he has evolved sufficiently, they'll fetch him again. Gulliver (now a cyborg?) returns to England, where he finds his family and the world around him loathsome and corrupted.
2. Frigyes Karinthy
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Ray Cummings (TK)
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Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938)
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* Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (1916 novella, translated from Hungarian in 1966). In 1914, Gulliver signs on as a ship's surgeon on a British ship torpedoed in the Baltic. He escapes in a hydroplane, and is then drawn into a strange-looking machine hovering above him. He awakens on an unidentified planet in another solar system. The planet is ruled by intelligent machines, who regard organic life as a loathsome disease of matter; they classify Gulliver with their planet's bestial tree people. They've been observing Earth, and are pleased to see that WWI is in the process of exterminating all human life. Gulliver decides that machines — which don't wage wars — really are superior, and asks to be improved. The machines give him a cranial shot of mineral matter, to improve his understanding, then transport him back home... with the promise that, when he has evolved sufficiently, they'll fetch him again. Gulliver (now a cyborg?) returns to England, where he finds his family and the world around him loathsome and corrupted.
SF authors born 1884-93: 1886
1. Joseph O'Neill
2. Olaf Stapledon
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Joseph O'Neill (TK)
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(William) Olaf Stapledon (TK)
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2. Olaf Stapledon
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Joseph O'Neill (TK)
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(William) Olaf Stapledon (TK)
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New Kids Generation (1884-93)
A version of this post originally appeared at the Boston Globe blog Brainiac, on 6/16/08.
The 1884-93 cohort (particularly Europeans) came of age in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism" (György Lukács's phrase) infused with cultural modernism, a certain apocalyptic vision, vaguely socialist aspirations, and a new philosophical spirit that stressed the moment of subjective experience. Lukács meant the phrase pejoratively: Though the note of conservative (medievalist, even) skepticism sounded in Carlyle's romantic-anticapitalist Past and Present (1843) may have been a genuine critique of the horrors of early capitalism, he wrote, in the years leading up to WWI, this attitude transformed itself into a quietist longing for a mythical golden age where everyone lived together in harmony and peace.
"Make it new," insisted Lukács's contemporary, Ezra Pound, known as a member of the "Lost Generation." It's true that Pound, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Peirce, and Sylvia Beach, for example, are members of the same generational cohort. But famous Losts like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley are in fact members of the Hardboiled generational cohort (1894-1903), while Lost elders Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein are actually Psychonauts (1874-83). Instead of the Lost Generation, then, let's call Americans and Europeans born from 1884-93 the New Kids.
"New," after Pound's modernist dictum, which represented a queer, self-contradictory admixture of reactionary and anarchic impulses. Why "Kids"? Disgusted by the world created by their elders, the New Kids looked to children as exemplars. Randolph Bourne, for example, lamented that the older generation ruled the world, "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." In Europe, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin noted that utopian socialism is nourished by the fairy tales and fantasies of childhood. And of course "dada," one of childhood's first words, became the moniker of a reactionary-anarchistic art movement, whose members were almost entirely New Kids.
Anarchists and reactionaries have little in common except for their illiberalism. Rejecting the myth of Progress, illiberal Modernists left- and right-wing alike preferred to dabble in mythopoeia, the creation of a new mythology based on motifs and characters mined from mythologies. (The term "mythopoeia" was itself coined by a New Kid: J.R.R. Tolkien.) European and American New Kids like Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Marc Chagall, Thomas Hart Benton, Milton Avery, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Alban Berg, meanwhile, were also busy mining the collective unconscious for the "clear essence" of impressions and mental images, which they expressed in the form of simple short-hand formulae and symbols — hence the term Expressionism.
Is there something hopeful, even utopian in the New Kids' adolescent, backward-and-forward-looking, mythopoetic, romantic-anticapitalist, quasi-Expressionist SF, Horror, and Fantasy? Yes and no. New Kids rejected the Enlightenment project, the myth of Progress... yet an enlightened (non-positivistic, self-critical and ironical, unresolved and non-totalizing, even spiritual) Enlightenment seemed imminent. "[W]e drift unfamiliar to ourselves, immersed in darkness," writes Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia (1918), in a brooding passage that could have been lifted from Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Joseph O'Neill, or Seabury Quinn. "But the thought of [utopia] is at hand, for only we proceed slowly forward, darkly, atomistically, individually, subjectively, within everything moving or amassing, as the unresolved utopian tension constantly undermining everything shaped."
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I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
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Science Fiction writers born 1884-93:
* Clark Ashton Smith (The Uncharted Isle)
* Seabury Quinn (The Phantom Fighter)
* Hugo Gernsback (Ralph 124C41+, editor of Amazing Stories, coined term "science fiction)
* Yevgeny Zamyatin (WE)
* Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker)
* Joseph O'Neill (Land Under England)
* Ray Cummings ("The Girl in the Golden Atom")
* Frigyes Karinthy (Voyage to Faremido, Capillaria)
* Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, The Rocket to the Moon)
* Miriam Allen deFord
* Karel Čapek (The Absolute at Large, Krakatit, R.U.R.)
* H. P. Lovecraft (SF includes At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness)
* E.E. Smith (The Skylark of Space)
* Edward Shanks (The People of the Ruins)
* F. Britten Austin (Battlewrack, By the Aero-Mail, On the Borderland, The War-God Walks Again).
* Otis Adelbert Kline (The Prince of Peril, numerous stories in pulp SF magazines)
* John Ernest Bechdolt (The Torch)
* Alexander Belayev (The Amphibian, The Struggle in Space)
* Eimar O'Duffy (King Goshawk and the Birds, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, Asses in Clover)
* Pearl S. Buck (Command the Morning, 1959)
* Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here, 1935)
NB: * A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool) is an honorary Psychonaut.
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Meet the New Kids.
1884: Harry S. Truman (33rd US President, 1945-53), Eleanor Roosevelt (Activist, First Lady under FDR), Damon Runyon (Journalist, Guys and Dolls), Norman Thomas (leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America), Waldo Peirce (American painter), Roger Nash Baldwin (Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union), Sara Teasdale (Poet), Robert J. Flaherty (Film director, Nanook of the North). Elsewhere: Hugo Gernsback (influential SF author and editor, founded Amazing Stories in 1926), Bronislaw Malinowski (Founder of social anthropology), Walter Huston (Actor, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Ivy Compton-Burnett (Novelist), Georges Duhamel (Novelist, Civilisation), Theodor Heuss (President of Germany, 1949-59), Hideki Tojo (Prime Minister of Japan 1941-44), Max Beckmann (ex-Expressionist painter associated with Neue Sachlichkeit), Hugh Walpole (best-selling English novelist), Clement Davies (Leader of the UK Liberal Party, 1945-56), John Ernest Bechdolt (American SF writer), Alexander Belayev (Russian SF writer). Honorary Psychonauts: A. Merritt (SF author), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka's literary executor), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess), Jean Piccard (extreme balloonist).
1885: Ezra Pound (American poet, The Cantos), Leadbelly (American musician, "Goodnight Irene"), Sinclair Lewis (American novelist, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry), George S. Patton (American military leader), Will Durant (American historian, anarchist?), Ring Lardner (American journalist, Gullible's Travels), Charles Merrill (Founder of Merrill Lynch), Milton Avery (American modern painter), Theda Bara (American actress), Wallace Beery (American actor), Harry Blackstone (American magician), Jerome Kern (American composer), Edna Ferber (American novelist, Show Boat and Giant), Gabby Hayes (American actor, perennial sidekick), Billie Burke (American actress), Louis Untermeyer (American poet, anthologist). Elsewhere: D.H. Lawrence (British novelist, Lady Chatterley's Lover), Erich von Stroheim (Austrian actor, director), Emmy Hennings (German Dadaist performer and poet), Louis B. Mayer (Belarussian-American film and TV producer, the final "M" in MGM), György Lukács (Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, founder of Western Marxism), Ernst Bloch (German Marxist philosopher, utopian theorist), Alban Berg (Viennese composer), François Mauriac (French novelist), Allan Dwan (Canadian film director), Lionel Atwill (English actor), Niels Bohr (Danish physicist, Father of Quantum Theory), St. John Philby (British spy, Arabist), F. Britten Austin (minor SF writer, paranoid future-war novels).
1886: Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Ma Rainey, H.D., Aldo Leopold, Ed Wynn, Margaret Anderson, Willis O'Brien, Clarence Birdseye, Ty Cobb, Henry King, Edward Everett Horton, Joyce Kilmer, Alain Locke, Fred Quimby, Charles Ruggles, Rex Stout, Edward Weston, Nell Brinkley. Elsewhere: Hugo Ball, Martin Heidegger, Al Jolson, Raoul Hausmann, Olaf Stapledon, Karl Korsch, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jean/Hans Arp, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Diego Rivera, David Ben-Gurion, Michael Curtiz, Karl von Frisch, Frank Lloyd, Hugh Lofting, George Mallory, Kay Nielsen, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Williams.
1887: John Reed, Sylvia Beach, Raoul Walsh, Robinson Jeffers, Chico Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Marianne Moore, Georgia O'Keeffe, Floyd Dell, George Abbott, Fatty Arbuckle, Ruth Benedict, Walter Connolly, Jim Thorpe, Jack Conway, John Cromwell, Norman Foerster, William Frawley, Conrad Hilton, Alvin York. Elsewhere: Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Marcus Garvey, Arthur Cravan, Rupert Brooke, James Finlayson, Julian Huxley, Chiang Kai-Shek, Boris Karloff, Paul Lukas, Erwin Schrödinger, Edith Sitwell, Blaise Cendrars, Bernard Montgomery, Ernst Roehm.
1888: T.S. Eliot, Irving Berlin, Raymond Chandler, Eugene O'Neill, Harpo Marx, Maxwell Anderson, Beulah Bondi, Anita Loos, John Foster Dulles, Heywood Broun, Richard E. Byrd, Dale Carnegie, S.S. Van Dine, Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert Moses, Franklin Pangborn, John Crowe Ransom, Tris Speaker, Edgar Church. Elsewhere: Josef Albers, F.W. Murnau, Katherine Mansfield, Vicki Baum, Georges Bernanos, Nikolai Bukharin, Joyce Cary, Maurice Chevalier, Giorgio de Chirico, Barry Fitzgerald, T. E. Lawrence, Fernando Pessoa, Knute Rockne, Ernst Heinkel, Nestor Makhno (Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader).
1889: Walter Lippmann, Thomas Hart Benton, Conrad Aiken, Seabury Quinn, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Ray Collins, W. S. Van Dyke, Waldo Frank, Erle Stanley Gardner, Alfred E. Green, Lambert Hillyer, Edwin Hubble, Shoeless Joe Jackson, William Keighley, Robert Z. Leonard, Donald MacBride, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. Elsewhere: Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Höch, Jean Cocteau, Arnold Toynbee, James Whale, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anna Akhmatova, R. G. Collingwood, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gabriel Marcel, John Middleton Murry, Claude Rains.
1890: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Man Ray, H. P. Lovecraft, Groucho Marx, Frank Morgan, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Marc Connelly, Robert Armstrong, Edward Arnold, Robert L. Ripley, Clarence Brown, Jelly Roll Morton, Katherine Anne Porter, Frederick Lewis Allen, Edwin H. Armstrong, Birdman of Alcatraz, Conrad Richter, Eddie Rickenbacker, Colonel Sanders. Elsewhere: Fritz Lang, Charles de Gaulle, Ossip Zadkine, Egon Schiele, Ho Chi Minh, Karel Capek, Agatha Christie, Stan Laurel, Michael Collins, Naum Gabo, Vyacheslav Molotov, Aimee Semple McPherson, Claude McKay, Adolphe Menjou, Boris Pasternak, Jean Rhys.
1891: Henry Miller, Cole Porter, Fanny Brice, Leo Burnett, W. Averell Harriman, George E. Marshall, Archie Mayo, Irving Pichel, Carl Stalling, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Earl Warren. Elsewhere: Antonio Gramsci, Max Ernst, David Sarnoff, Otto Dix, Rudolf Carnap, Edward Bernays, Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian dramatist, author), Ronald Colman, Reginald Denny, Edmund Goulding, Pär Lagerkvist, Gene Lockhart, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergei Prokofiev, Erwin Rommel, Herbert Asbury (Novelist, The Gangs of New York), Otis Adelbert Kline (SF writer).
1892: Harold W. Ross, Grant Wood, James M. Cain, Janet Flanner, Maxwell Bodenheim, Oliver Hardy, Gummo Marx, Archibald Macleish, Charles Atlas, Djuna Barnes, William Powell, William Beaudine, Charles Brackett, Joe E. Brown, Pearl S. Buck, Eddie Cantor, William Demarest, Alfred A. Knopf, Gregory La Cava, Alfred Lunt, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mary Pickford, Hal Roach, Frank Tuttle, Wendell Willkie. Elsewhere: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Lubitsch, Richard Huelsenbeck, J.R.R. Tolkien, Leo G. Carroll, J. Paul Getty Sr., Erwin Panofsky, Basil Rathbone, Haile Selassie, Manfred von Richthofen, Jack L. Warner, Rebecca West.
1893: Dorothy Parker, Lillian Gish, Anita Loos, William Moulton Marston, Helen Hokinson, Beatrice Wood, Clark Ashton Smith, Dean Acheson, Russel Crouse, Donald Davidson, Allen W. Dulles, Jimmy Durante, Edsel Ford, Harold Lloyd, Huey Long, John P. Marquand, Hattie McDaniel, Karl Menninger, Mae West. Elsewhere: George Grosz, Hermann Goering, I. A. Richards, Chaim Soutine, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Howard, Victor Gollancz, Alexander Korda, Karl Mannheim, Mao Zedong, Eimar O'Duffy (Irish satirist, author). Honorary Hardboileds: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró.
HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS GENERATION: Walter Gropius, Lon Chaney Sr., William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini (all born 1883); Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess (all born 1894).
MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró (all born 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (1891, but claimed she was born in 1901, so I think it's OK).
MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: A. Merritt, Gerald Gardner, Emil Jannings, Max Brod, Amedeo Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Jean Piccard (all born 1884).
The 1884-93 cohort (particularly Europeans) came of age in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism" (György Lukács's phrase) infused with cultural modernism, a certain apocalyptic vision, vaguely socialist aspirations, and a new philosophical spirit that stressed the moment of subjective experience. Lukács meant the phrase pejoratively: Though the note of conservative (medievalist, even) skepticism sounded in Carlyle's romantic-anticapitalist Past and Present (1843) may have been a genuine critique of the horrors of early capitalism, he wrote, in the years leading up to WWI, this attitude transformed itself into a quietist longing for a mythical golden age where everyone lived together in harmony and peace.
"Make it new," insisted Lukács's contemporary, Ezra Pound, known as a member of the "Lost Generation." It's true that Pound, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Peirce, and Sylvia Beach, for example, are members of the same generational cohort. But famous Losts like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley are in fact members of the Hardboiled generational cohort (1894-1903), while Lost elders Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein are actually Psychonauts (1874-83). Instead of the Lost Generation, then, let's call Americans and Europeans born from 1884-93 the New Kids.
"New," after Pound's modernist dictum, which represented a queer, self-contradictory admixture of reactionary and anarchic impulses. Why "Kids"? Disgusted by the world created by their elders, the New Kids looked to children as exemplars. Randolph Bourne, for example, lamented that the older generation ruled the world, "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." In Europe, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin noted that utopian socialism is nourished by the fairy tales and fantasies of childhood. And of course "dada," one of childhood's first words, became the moniker of a reactionary-anarchistic art movement, whose members were almost entirely New Kids.
Anarchists and reactionaries have little in common except for their illiberalism. Rejecting the myth of Progress, illiberal Modernists left- and right-wing alike preferred to dabble in mythopoeia, the creation of a new mythology based on motifs and characters mined from mythologies. (The term "mythopoeia" was itself coined by a New Kid: J.R.R. Tolkien.) European and American New Kids like Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Marc Chagall, Thomas Hart Benton, Milton Avery, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Alban Berg, meanwhile, were also busy mining the collective unconscious for the "clear essence" of impressions and mental images, which they expressed in the form of simple short-hand formulae and symbols — hence the term Expressionism.
Is there something hopeful, even utopian in the New Kids' adolescent, backward-and-forward-looking, mythopoetic, romantic-anticapitalist, quasi-Expressionist SF, Horror, and Fantasy? Yes and no. New Kids rejected the Enlightenment project, the myth of Progress... yet an enlightened (non-positivistic, self-critical and ironical, unresolved and non-totalizing, even spiritual) Enlightenment seemed imminent. "[W]e drift unfamiliar to ourselves, immersed in darkness," writes Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia (1918), in a brooding passage that could have been lifted from Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Joseph O'Neill, or Seabury Quinn. "But the thought of [utopia] is at hand, for only we proceed slowly forward, darkly, atomistically, individually, subjectively, within everything moving or amassing, as the unresolved utopian tension constantly undermining everything shaped."
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Science Fiction writers born 1884-93:
* Clark Ashton Smith (The Uncharted Isle)
* Seabury Quinn (The Phantom Fighter)
* Hugo Gernsback (Ralph 124C41+, editor of Amazing Stories, coined term "science fiction)
* Yevgeny Zamyatin (WE)
* Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker)
* Joseph O'Neill (Land Under England)
* Ray Cummings ("The Girl in the Golden Atom")
* Frigyes Karinthy (Voyage to Faremido, Capillaria)
* Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, The Rocket to the Moon)
* Miriam Allen deFord
* Karel Čapek (The Absolute at Large, Krakatit, R.U.R.)
* H. P. Lovecraft (SF includes At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness)
* E.E. Smith (The Skylark of Space)
* Edward Shanks (The People of the Ruins)
* F. Britten Austin (Battlewrack, By the Aero-Mail, On the Borderland, The War-God Walks Again).
* Otis Adelbert Kline (The Prince of Peril, numerous stories in pulp SF magazines)
* John Ernest Bechdolt (The Torch)
* Alexander Belayev (The Amphibian, The Struggle in Space)
* Eimar O'Duffy (King Goshawk and the Birds, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, Asses in Clover)
* Pearl S. Buck (Command the Morning, 1959)
* Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here, 1935)
NB: * A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool) is an honorary Psychonaut.
***
Meet the New Kids.
1884: Harry S. Truman (33rd US President, 1945-53), Eleanor Roosevelt (Activist, First Lady under FDR), Damon Runyon (Journalist, Guys and Dolls), Norman Thomas (leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America), Waldo Peirce (American painter), Roger Nash Baldwin (Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union), Sara Teasdale (Poet), Robert J. Flaherty (Film director, Nanook of the North). Elsewhere: Hugo Gernsback (influential SF author and editor, founded Amazing Stories in 1926), Bronislaw Malinowski (Founder of social anthropology), Walter Huston (Actor, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Ivy Compton-Burnett (Novelist), Georges Duhamel (Novelist, Civilisation), Theodor Heuss (President of Germany, 1949-59), Hideki Tojo (Prime Minister of Japan 1941-44), Max Beckmann (ex-Expressionist painter associated with Neue Sachlichkeit), Hugh Walpole (best-selling English novelist), Clement Davies (Leader of the UK Liberal Party, 1945-56), John Ernest Bechdolt (American SF writer), Alexander Belayev (Russian SF writer). Honorary Psychonauts: A. Merritt (SF author), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka's literary executor), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess), Jean Piccard (extreme balloonist).
1885: Ezra Pound (American poet, The Cantos), Leadbelly (American musician, "Goodnight Irene"), Sinclair Lewis (American novelist, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry), George S. Patton (American military leader), Will Durant (American historian, anarchist?), Ring Lardner (American journalist, Gullible's Travels), Charles Merrill (Founder of Merrill Lynch), Milton Avery (American modern painter), Theda Bara (American actress), Wallace Beery (American actor), Harry Blackstone (American magician), Jerome Kern (American composer), Edna Ferber (American novelist, Show Boat and Giant), Gabby Hayes (American actor, perennial sidekick), Billie Burke (American actress), Louis Untermeyer (American poet, anthologist). Elsewhere: D.H. Lawrence (British novelist, Lady Chatterley's Lover), Erich von Stroheim (Austrian actor, director), Emmy Hennings (German Dadaist performer and poet), Louis B. Mayer (Belarussian-American film and TV producer, the final "M" in MGM), György Lukács (Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, founder of Western Marxism), Ernst Bloch (German Marxist philosopher, utopian theorist), Alban Berg (Viennese composer), François Mauriac (French novelist), Allan Dwan (Canadian film director), Lionel Atwill (English actor), Niels Bohr (Danish physicist, Father of Quantum Theory), St. John Philby (British spy, Arabist), F. Britten Austin (minor SF writer, paranoid future-war novels).
1886: Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Ma Rainey, H.D., Aldo Leopold, Ed Wynn, Margaret Anderson, Willis O'Brien, Clarence Birdseye, Ty Cobb, Henry King, Edward Everett Horton, Joyce Kilmer, Alain Locke, Fred Quimby, Charles Ruggles, Rex Stout, Edward Weston, Nell Brinkley. Elsewhere: Hugo Ball, Martin Heidegger, Al Jolson, Raoul Hausmann, Olaf Stapledon, Karl Korsch, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jean/Hans Arp, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Diego Rivera, David Ben-Gurion, Michael Curtiz, Karl von Frisch, Frank Lloyd, Hugh Lofting, George Mallory, Kay Nielsen, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Williams.
1887: John Reed, Sylvia Beach, Raoul Walsh, Robinson Jeffers, Chico Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Marianne Moore, Georgia O'Keeffe, Floyd Dell, George Abbott, Fatty Arbuckle, Ruth Benedict, Walter Connolly, Jim Thorpe, Jack Conway, John Cromwell, Norman Foerster, William Frawley, Conrad Hilton, Alvin York. Elsewhere: Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Marcus Garvey, Arthur Cravan, Rupert Brooke, James Finlayson, Julian Huxley, Chiang Kai-Shek, Boris Karloff, Paul Lukas, Erwin Schrödinger, Edith Sitwell, Blaise Cendrars, Bernard Montgomery, Ernst Roehm.
1888: T.S. Eliot, Irving Berlin, Raymond Chandler, Eugene O'Neill, Harpo Marx, Maxwell Anderson, Beulah Bondi, Anita Loos, John Foster Dulles, Heywood Broun, Richard E. Byrd, Dale Carnegie, S.S. Van Dine, Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert Moses, Franklin Pangborn, John Crowe Ransom, Tris Speaker, Edgar Church. Elsewhere: Josef Albers, F.W. Murnau, Katherine Mansfield, Vicki Baum, Georges Bernanos, Nikolai Bukharin, Joyce Cary, Maurice Chevalier, Giorgio de Chirico, Barry Fitzgerald, T. E. Lawrence, Fernando Pessoa, Knute Rockne, Ernst Heinkel, Nestor Makhno (Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader).
1889: Walter Lippmann, Thomas Hart Benton, Conrad Aiken, Seabury Quinn, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Ray Collins, W. S. Van Dyke, Waldo Frank, Erle Stanley Gardner, Alfred E. Green, Lambert Hillyer, Edwin Hubble, Shoeless Joe Jackson, William Keighley, Robert Z. Leonard, Donald MacBride, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. Elsewhere: Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Höch, Jean Cocteau, Arnold Toynbee, James Whale, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anna Akhmatova, R. G. Collingwood, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gabriel Marcel, John Middleton Murry, Claude Rains.
1890: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Man Ray, H. P. Lovecraft, Groucho Marx, Frank Morgan, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Marc Connelly, Robert Armstrong, Edward Arnold, Robert L. Ripley, Clarence Brown, Jelly Roll Morton, Katherine Anne Porter, Frederick Lewis Allen, Edwin H. Armstrong, Birdman of Alcatraz, Conrad Richter, Eddie Rickenbacker, Colonel Sanders. Elsewhere: Fritz Lang, Charles de Gaulle, Ossip Zadkine, Egon Schiele, Ho Chi Minh, Karel Capek, Agatha Christie, Stan Laurel, Michael Collins, Naum Gabo, Vyacheslav Molotov, Aimee Semple McPherson, Claude McKay, Adolphe Menjou, Boris Pasternak, Jean Rhys.
1891: Henry Miller, Cole Porter, Fanny Brice, Leo Burnett, W. Averell Harriman, George E. Marshall, Archie Mayo, Irving Pichel, Carl Stalling, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Earl Warren. Elsewhere: Antonio Gramsci, Max Ernst, David Sarnoff, Otto Dix, Rudolf Carnap, Edward Bernays, Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian dramatist, author), Ronald Colman, Reginald Denny, Edmund Goulding, Pär Lagerkvist, Gene Lockhart, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergei Prokofiev, Erwin Rommel, Herbert Asbury (Novelist, The Gangs of New York), Otis Adelbert Kline (SF writer).
1892: Harold W. Ross, Grant Wood, James M. Cain, Janet Flanner, Maxwell Bodenheim, Oliver Hardy, Gummo Marx, Archibald Macleish, Charles Atlas, Djuna Barnes, William Powell, William Beaudine, Charles Brackett, Joe E. Brown, Pearl S. Buck, Eddie Cantor, William Demarest, Alfred A. Knopf, Gregory La Cava, Alfred Lunt, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mary Pickford, Hal Roach, Frank Tuttle, Wendell Willkie. Elsewhere: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Lubitsch, Richard Huelsenbeck, J.R.R. Tolkien, Leo G. Carroll, J. Paul Getty Sr., Erwin Panofsky, Basil Rathbone, Haile Selassie, Manfred von Richthofen, Jack L. Warner, Rebecca West.
1893: Dorothy Parker, Lillian Gish, Anita Loos, William Moulton Marston, Helen Hokinson, Beatrice Wood, Clark Ashton Smith, Dean Acheson, Russel Crouse, Donald Davidson, Allen W. Dulles, Jimmy Durante, Edsel Ford, Harold Lloyd, Huey Long, John P. Marquand, Hattie McDaniel, Karl Menninger, Mae West. Elsewhere: George Grosz, Hermann Goering, I. A. Richards, Chaim Soutine, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Howard, Victor Gollancz, Alexander Korda, Karl Mannheim, Mao Zedong, Eimar O'Duffy (Irish satirist, author). Honorary Hardboileds: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró.
HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS GENERATION: Walter Gropius, Lon Chaney Sr., William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini (all born 1883); Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess (all born 1894).
MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró (all born 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (1891, but claimed she was born in 1901, so I think it's OK).
MEMBERS OF THE NEW KIDS COHORT WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: A. Merritt, Gerald Gardner, Emil Jannings, Max Brod, Amedeo Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Jean Piccard (all born 1884).
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
SF authors born 1884-93: 1884
1. John Ernest Bechdolt
2. Alexander Belayev (Belyaev?)
3. Hugo Gernsback
4. A. Merritt
5. Yevgeny Zamyatin
***
John Ernest Bechdolt (1884-?)
US journalist. He was with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 1906-16. He then moved to New York to work as a reader at Munsey Publications. His first novel was The Torch.
* The Torch (Argosy, January 24, 1920). Adventure in the New York of 3050 AD after a world catastrophe.
***
Alexander Belayev (Belyaev? 1884-1942)
Russian author, confined to bed for years by tuberculoisis of the spine. He produced many SF books, of which only two have seen English translation (true?).
Alexander Belayev, the first-and very nearly the best-Soviet science fiction writer, was born in 1884 in Smolenak. When a little boy Alexander was full of ideas. One of them was to fly. And he did fly - from the rooftop - until one day he fractured his spine. This was put right, but at the age of 32 he developed bone tuberculosis and was bed-ridden for nearly six years and later for shorter stretches. His first novel, Professor Dowell's Head, serialized in a popular magazine in 1926, was an immediate success. Since then Belayev wrote fifty-odd novels - many of them as topical as if written today - reaching the one-million copy mark by January 1942 when he died near Leningrad. His best known books are the Amphibian, A Jump into Nothingness and the Island of Dead Ships.
* The Amphibian (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, nd — late '50s; original publication?). Originally written in 1928. It is similar to Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, but set in Argentina with the creation of weird life forms including a man with gills. It was filmed as The Amphibian Man. "The Amphibian will throw you back to a time when skin and deep-sea diving had not yet made the Silent World begin yielding up its secrets on a really big scale, as aqualung and snorkel are doing today, and present to you Alexander Belayev's 1928 prevision of the ocean mastered by mankind. Sea-devil has appeared in the Rio de la Plata. Weird cries out at sea, slashed fishermen's nets, glimpses of a most queer creature astride a dolphin leave no room for doubt. The Spaniard Zurita, greed overcoming his superstition, tries to catch Sea-devil and force it to pearl-dive for him but fails. On a lonely stretch of shore, not far from Buenos Aires, Dr. Salvator lives in seclusion behind a high wall, whose steel-plated gates only open to let in his Indian patients. The Indians revere him as a God but Zurita has a hunch that the God on land and the devil in the sea have something in common. Enlisting the help of two wily Araucanian brothers he sets out to probe the mystery. As action shifts from the bottom of the sea to the Spaniard's schooner The Jellyfish and back again, with interludes in sun-drenched Buenos Aires and countryside, the mystery of Ichthyander the sea-devil is unfolded before the reader in a narrative as gripping as it informative."
BUY THE 2001 EDITION
MOVIE: "There is panic in a small seaside town as reports of a "sea devil" are terrifying the local fishermen. No one has seen him up close, but a beautiful girl named Gutiere meets and falls in love with the so-called devil, who turns out to be an amphibian man whose element is the sea. By falling in love with Gutiere, who is forced to marry the treacherous Zurita, he is subjecting his life to a deadly risk. This romantic melodrama, based on Alexander Belyaev's novel, was a box-office smash in the USSR in 1961. This immensely popular science fiction film is taken from the novel by Russian author Alexander Belyayev. A scientist has turned his son into an amphibious creature. Ikhtiandr Vladimir Korenev frightens the superstitious pearl divers of the mythical Latin country as he lurks in his underwater world. Ikhtiadr falls in love with the beautiful fisherman's daughter Guttiere Marianna Vertinskaya after he saves her from a shark attack. When she marries a despicable diver, Ikhtiandr leaves his liquid life behind to walk on land. His time on land is limited and he must eventually return to the water to survive. Evil villains try to kill him by making sure he does not return to the safety of the water. Korenev was a popular Russian heartthrob and for years had a dedicated following of enamored female fans. Marianna Vertinskaya later went on to place Ophelia in the brilliantly produced Russian version of Hamlet. She continues to be one of Russia's most respected theater actresses. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide"
* The Struggle in Space (1928; translated A. Parry) (Arfor, USA, 1965). Death rays, evil Americans, and the conquest of the USA.
***
Hugo Gernsback (TK)
TK
* Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (Stratford Co.: Boston, 1923. Serialized in Modern Electrics, April 1911-March 1912. Revised for book publication.) TK
***
A. (Abraham) Merritt (1884-1943)
American (born in New Jersey) journalist, successful newspaper editor (at the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York's American Weekly); from 1937-43 was editor in chief of the American Weekly. Amateur student of archaeology, anthropology, magic, and the history of mythology and religions.
During the 1930s and '40s, Merritt was considered the greatest SF writer of modern times; he even had a magazine — A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine — named in his honor. Bleiler suggests that Merritt's clumsy art nouveau style — ornament (failed attempts at incantatory prose rhythms, near-parodic showers of adjectives, ham-fisted references to the world's myths and religions) thrown upon an otherwise bare, formalized surface — might be to blame. Though this is precisely what pulp fiction readers at the turn of the century admired his writing for.
* "The People of the Pit" (All-Story, January 5, 1918). Set in Alaska. A recognition of alien horrors lurking unsuspected beneath the surface of things. The narrator meets a dying man who tells of descending infinite steps and encountering, at the bottom of a valley, an alien world dominated by prehuman, hostile, incomprehensible beings that seem to be animated light. Man is powerless against these higher beings.
* "The Moon Pool" (All-Story, June 22, 1918). The story that — with its sequel — established Merritt's reputation. A story of supernatural horror told in terms of science fiction. Set around the megalithic ruins of Ponape, in Micronesia. A shining, seemingly insubstantial being emerges from a pool in an underground vault among the ruins. Accompanied by musical effects and sensations that combine utter bliss and pain, the Dweller absorbs those it encounters.
* "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" (All-Story, February 14 - March 29, 1919). Sequel to "The Moon Pool." A Lost Race story, with motifs from H. Rider Haggard's When the World Shook (1919). Wicked villains, a lustful vamp, muscular heroes — treachery, plots, and counterplots. An exploration party opens the portals that seal off the Dweller and, to the accompaniment of scientific marvels, enters a huge subterranean world inhabited by the descendants of people from a lost continent. The science of the hidden land is higher than that of the surface world, but there are signs of decadence: tyranny, a luxurious and debased ruling class, and a frightful religion based on feeding the Shining One, the Dweller of the first story. At the moment, the sunken land is ripe for either emerging and conquering the world, or falling into civil war. The Shining One, it transpires, is a synthetic being created by a prehuman race of intelligent reptilian beings; the victims he's taken over all still exist, half-alive, within its membranes. We also encounter various alien forms of life, and the Silent Ones, three of the reptilian semideities who exist, half-imprisoned, until they can find the courage or strength to destroy the Shining One. An obnoxious Irish-American hero and a wicked German (later, Russian) also figure in the plot.
* The Metal Monster (Argosy All-Story, August 7 - September 25, 1920). Merritt called this his "best and worst" novel. Set in Central Asia, it is a lost-race novel (ancient Persians) with a metal being — larger than a city block — composed of living metal molecules roughly comparable to the molecules of a human body or the pieces of an erector set. This alien being, sentient and intelligent after its own fashion, is strangely involved in an erotic empathy with a human female. But it carries within itself, among its variously shaped components, the seeds of civil war. Ultimately it short-circuits itself, plans for world geometrization unrealized.
* The Ship of Ishtar (Argosy All-Story, November 8 - December 13, 1924). A long novel set in a parallel world where the divinities of ancient Mesopotamia openly interfere in human life and themselves carry on strongly felt feuds. (Hello, Douglas Rushkoff's Testament.) Unusual in ending with the death of all the major characters. In the late 1930s, readers voted this the best story to ever appear in Argosy and All-Story.
* "The Woman of the Wood" (Weird Tales, August 1926)> The 2d-most popular work ever to appear in Weird Tales. On one level a story of madness, and on another of supernatural empathy. McKay, staying in the Vosges, sees the trees as beautiful men and women. They beg for help against the woodcutter Polleau and his family; attempting to aid the trees, McKay is responsible for the deaths of th Polleaus.
* The Face in the Abyss (1931: Combines "The Face in the Abyss" (Argosy All-Story, September 8, 1923) and its sequel, "The Snake Mother" (Argosy All-Story, October 25-December 6, 1930). Set in the isolated fastnesses of the Andes, where remains of ancient Atlanteans still live. Although possessed of fragments of their former superior science, the people of Yu-Atlanchi are hopelessly decadent and ready for a suitable purge. Greed and Folly are hypostatized abstractions that take part in life and influence humans. The Snake Mother is the last survivor of a race of serpent-people who first set man on the path toward civilization. An uneven novel.
* Dwellers in the Mirage (Argosy, January 23-February 27, 1932). Merritt's finest SF work? Set in Alaska. A Central Asiatic culture — with elements of Norse religion and mythology — survives in a lost valley in Alaska, hidden beneath a miragelike atmospheric lens. The culture of this lost land worships a horrible monstrosity, which now emerges from another dimension. Leif's ancestral memory (or psychosis) takes over his personality and wreaks havoc on him and his associates. Another memorable character: the erotic, power-mad Lur. In early versions, Leif escapes with Evalie (a girl from outside the valley); in later versions, Evalie is killed by Lur, and although Leif escapes he's utterly broken. E.F. Bleiler writes that "the frequent mythological comparisons are, for the first time in Merritt's work, integrated with the story and not merely obtrusive atmospheric devices."
* "The Last Poet and the Robots" (Fantasy Magazine, April 1934). TK Bleiler says: "trivial."
***
Yevgeny Zamyatin (TK)
* I've written about WE for the Boston Globe.
More TK
2. Alexander Belayev (Belyaev?)
3. Hugo Gernsback
4. A. Merritt
5. Yevgeny Zamyatin
***
John Ernest Bechdolt (1884-?)
US journalist. He was with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 1906-16. He then moved to New York to work as a reader at Munsey Publications. His first novel was The Torch.
* The Torch (Argosy, January 24, 1920). Adventure in the New York of 3050 AD after a world catastrophe.
***
Alexander Belayev (Belyaev? 1884-1942)
Russian author, confined to bed for years by tuberculoisis of the spine. He produced many SF books, of which only two have seen English translation (true?).
Alexander Belayev, the first-and very nearly the best-Soviet science fiction writer, was born in 1884 in Smolenak. When a little boy Alexander was full of ideas. One of them was to fly. And he did fly - from the rooftop - until one day he fractured his spine. This was put right, but at the age of 32 he developed bone tuberculosis and was bed-ridden for nearly six years and later for shorter stretches. His first novel, Professor Dowell's Head, serialized in a popular magazine in 1926, was an immediate success. Since then Belayev wrote fifty-odd novels - many of them as topical as if written today - reaching the one-million copy mark by January 1942 when he died near Leningrad. His best known books are the Amphibian, A Jump into Nothingness and the Island of Dead Ships.
* The Amphibian (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, nd — late '50s; original publication?). Originally written in 1928. It is similar to Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, but set in Argentina with the creation of weird life forms including a man with gills. It was filmed as The Amphibian Man. "The Amphibian will throw you back to a time when skin and deep-sea diving had not yet made the Silent World begin yielding up its secrets on a really big scale, as aqualung and snorkel are doing today, and present to you Alexander Belayev's 1928 prevision of the ocean mastered by mankind. Sea-devil has appeared in the Rio de la Plata. Weird cries out at sea, slashed fishermen's nets, glimpses of a most queer creature astride a dolphin leave no room for doubt. The Spaniard Zurita, greed overcoming his superstition, tries to catch Sea-devil and force it to pearl-dive for him but fails. On a lonely stretch of shore, not far from Buenos Aires, Dr. Salvator lives in seclusion behind a high wall, whose steel-plated gates only open to let in his Indian patients. The Indians revere him as a God but Zurita has a hunch that the God on land and the devil in the sea have something in common. Enlisting the help of two wily Araucanian brothers he sets out to probe the mystery. As action shifts from the bottom of the sea to the Spaniard's schooner The Jellyfish and back again, with interludes in sun-drenched Buenos Aires and countryside, the mystery of Ichthyander the sea-devil is unfolded before the reader in a narrative as gripping as it informative."
BUY THE 2001 EDITION
MOVIE: "There is panic in a small seaside town as reports of a "sea devil" are terrifying the local fishermen. No one has seen him up close, but a beautiful girl named Gutiere meets and falls in love with the so-called devil, who turns out to be an amphibian man whose element is the sea. By falling in love with Gutiere, who is forced to marry the treacherous Zurita, he is subjecting his life to a deadly risk. This romantic melodrama, based on Alexander Belyaev's novel, was a box-office smash in the USSR in 1961. This immensely popular science fiction film is taken from the novel by Russian author Alexander Belyayev. A scientist has turned his son into an amphibious creature. Ikhtiandr Vladimir Korenev frightens the superstitious pearl divers of the mythical Latin country as he lurks in his underwater world. Ikhtiadr falls in love with the beautiful fisherman's daughter Guttiere Marianna Vertinskaya after he saves her from a shark attack. When she marries a despicable diver, Ikhtiandr leaves his liquid life behind to walk on land. His time on land is limited and he must eventually return to the water to survive. Evil villains try to kill him by making sure he does not return to the safety of the water. Korenev was a popular Russian heartthrob and for years had a dedicated following of enamored female fans. Marianna Vertinskaya later went on to place Ophelia in the brilliantly produced Russian version of Hamlet. She continues to be one of Russia's most respected theater actresses. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide"
* The Struggle in Space (1928; translated A. Parry) (Arfor, USA, 1965). Death rays, evil Americans, and the conquest of the USA.
***
Hugo Gernsback (TK)
TK
* Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (Stratford Co.: Boston, 1923. Serialized in Modern Electrics, April 1911-March 1912. Revised for book publication.) TK
***
A. (Abraham) Merritt (1884-1943)
American (born in New Jersey) journalist, successful newspaper editor (at the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York's American Weekly); from 1937-43 was editor in chief of the American Weekly. Amateur student of archaeology, anthropology, magic, and the history of mythology and religions.
[I]n the fields of science fiction and fantasy there is probably no other great reputation of the past that has suffered as much as that of A. Merritt.... [O]ne could call him the most romantic (in the late nineteenth-century sense of the word) major science fiction writer of his day, perhaps of the twentieth century. Among his contemporaries only the young C.L. Moore came close to him in sweeping ideas, high emotion, and perpetual suggestions of deeper phenomena beneath the surface of events. — E.F. Bleiler, Science Fiction Writers, ed. Richard Bleiler, 2d edition
During the 1930s and '40s, Merritt was considered the greatest SF writer of modern times; he even had a magazine — A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine — named in his honor. Bleiler suggests that Merritt's clumsy art nouveau style — ornament (failed attempts at incantatory prose rhythms, near-parodic showers of adjectives, ham-fisted references to the world's myths and religions) thrown upon an otherwise bare, formalized surface — might be to blame. Though this is precisely what pulp fiction readers at the turn of the century admired his writing for.
The mythic quality of Dwellers in the Mirage, with its formal structuring and psychological inner drama, is still vital... as for the rest of Merritt's work, it belongs back in the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps occasionally to be stroked for nostalgia, but maintainable only by taxidermy. — E.F. Bleiler, Science Fiction Writers, ed. Richard Bleiler, 2d edition
* "The People of the Pit" (All-Story, January 5, 1918). Set in Alaska. A recognition of alien horrors lurking unsuspected beneath the surface of things. The narrator meets a dying man who tells of descending infinite steps and encountering, at the bottom of a valley, an alien world dominated by prehuman, hostile, incomprehensible beings that seem to be animated light. Man is powerless against these higher beings.
* "The Moon Pool" (All-Story, June 22, 1918). The story that — with its sequel — established Merritt's reputation. A story of supernatural horror told in terms of science fiction. Set around the megalithic ruins of Ponape, in Micronesia. A shining, seemingly insubstantial being emerges from a pool in an underground vault among the ruins. Accompanied by musical effects and sensations that combine utter bliss and pain, the Dweller absorbs those it encounters.
* "The Conquest of the Moon Pool" (All-Story, February 14 - March 29, 1919). Sequel to "The Moon Pool." A Lost Race story, with motifs from H. Rider Haggard's When the World Shook (1919). Wicked villains, a lustful vamp, muscular heroes — treachery, plots, and counterplots. An exploration party opens the portals that seal off the Dweller and, to the accompaniment of scientific marvels, enters a huge subterranean world inhabited by the descendants of people from a lost continent. The science of the hidden land is higher than that of the surface world, but there are signs of decadence: tyranny, a luxurious and debased ruling class, and a frightful religion based on feeding the Shining One, the Dweller of the first story. At the moment, the sunken land is ripe for either emerging and conquering the world, or falling into civil war. The Shining One, it transpires, is a synthetic being created by a prehuman race of intelligent reptilian beings; the victims he's taken over all still exist, half-alive, within its membranes. We also encounter various alien forms of life, and the Silent Ones, three of the reptilian semideities who exist, half-imprisoned, until they can find the courage or strength to destroy the Shining One. An obnoxious Irish-American hero and a wicked German (later, Russian) also figure in the plot.
* The Metal Monster (Argosy All-Story, August 7 - September 25, 1920). Merritt called this his "best and worst" novel. Set in Central Asia, it is a lost-race novel (ancient Persians) with a metal being — larger than a city block — composed of living metal molecules roughly comparable to the molecules of a human body or the pieces of an erector set. This alien being, sentient and intelligent after its own fashion, is strangely involved in an erotic empathy with a human female. But it carries within itself, among its variously shaped components, the seeds of civil war. Ultimately it short-circuits itself, plans for world geometrization unrealized.
* The Ship of Ishtar (Argosy All-Story, November 8 - December 13, 1924). A long novel set in a parallel world where the divinities of ancient Mesopotamia openly interfere in human life and themselves carry on strongly felt feuds. (Hello, Douglas Rushkoff's Testament.) Unusual in ending with the death of all the major characters. In the late 1930s, readers voted this the best story to ever appear in Argosy and All-Story.
* "The Woman of the Wood" (Weird Tales, August 1926)> The 2d-most popular work ever to appear in Weird Tales. On one level a story of madness, and on another of supernatural empathy. McKay, staying in the Vosges, sees the trees as beautiful men and women. They beg for help against the woodcutter Polleau and his family; attempting to aid the trees, McKay is responsible for the deaths of th Polleaus.
* The Face in the Abyss (1931: Combines "The Face in the Abyss" (Argosy All-Story, September 8, 1923) and its sequel, "The Snake Mother" (Argosy All-Story, October 25-December 6, 1930). Set in the isolated fastnesses of the Andes, where remains of ancient Atlanteans still live. Although possessed of fragments of their former superior science, the people of Yu-Atlanchi are hopelessly decadent and ready for a suitable purge. Greed and Folly are hypostatized abstractions that take part in life and influence humans. The Snake Mother is the last survivor of a race of serpent-people who first set man on the path toward civilization. An uneven novel.
* Dwellers in the Mirage (Argosy, January 23-February 27, 1932). Merritt's finest SF work? Set in Alaska. A Central Asiatic culture — with elements of Norse religion and mythology — survives in a lost valley in Alaska, hidden beneath a miragelike atmospheric lens. The culture of this lost land worships a horrible monstrosity, which now emerges from another dimension. Leif's ancestral memory (or psychosis) takes over his personality and wreaks havoc on him and his associates. Another memorable character: the erotic, power-mad Lur. In early versions, Leif escapes with Evalie (a girl from outside the valley); in later versions, Evalie is killed by Lur, and although Leif escapes he's utterly broken. E.F. Bleiler writes that "the frequent mythological comparisons are, for the first time in Merritt's work, integrated with the story and not merely obtrusive atmospheric devices."
* "The Last Poet and the Robots" (Fantasy Magazine, April 1934). TK Bleiler says: "trivial."
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Yevgeny Zamyatin (TK)
* I've written about WE for the Boston Globe.
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