Review of Brett Petersen’s The Parasite from Proto Space & Other Stories: The 2020 Anthology from Before the Golden Age

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Brett Petersen’s The Parasite from Proto Space & Other Stories has been compared to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Charles Bukowski, among others. Suppose I told you that I not only agreed, but added Frank Herbert, Sam Delany, and Olaf Stapledon to that lustrous list, and added them after reading just the first two stories in Petersen’s anthology. In the words of Ringo, would you stand up and walk out on me? If you did, that would be your loss.

Because Peterson’s stream-of-consciousness, metaphor-of-metaphor prose hits all of that at times, and sometimes more. The 2020 anthology feels like it was written sometime in the 1930s to the early 1950s, that is, before the height of the Golden Age of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, even though its stories were written just a few years ago. The parasite in the title story is what used to be called, before and during the Golden Age, a bug-eyed-monster, except this BEM offers observations such as, “He turned the doorknob, which felt like one of Frosty the Snowman’s testicles.” Ok, there’s no way that could have been published in the 1930s. But that’s what makes The Parasite so strikingly original. It feels as if was written almost a hundred years ago, when Hugo Gernsback was riding high, but its attitudes and language smack your ... face with today.

Other stories feature worms from another dimension that eat our memories (not computer worms eating computer memories); a sentient goat, eppes (my word, Yiddish, tough to translate), that also gets hijacked to another dimension, apparently connected in some way to the one with the memory-eating worms; and— well, I’m not going capsule-summarize every story in this gonzo book.

Nor do I love every tale in this anthology. There’s a dark neo-pre-cyberpunk ambience coursing through the stories, sometimes too dark for my usually sunny taste. A father tells his son, “it won’t always be like this” (so good), and that proves true with an ugly vengeance. I prefer a little more hope. Another story features a murderous building, but its inherent black humor—the tenants “yank their window shades down like a skirt blown up by an undercurrent from a sewer grate”—is overwhelmed by the grim. The truth is that there is just one story with an unambiguously happy ending in this anthology, a space-faring tale in which an unlikely hero stops an extra-terrestrial construction from shattering “every preconceived notion we had about the universe” and then humanity. And perhaps one more with an uplifting ending, if an afterlife story can really be happy. I would have preferred more than one and a half of these happy-ish endings.

But be that as It may, Petersen’s way with words is superb, his dark imagination boundless, his eye for detail and logic in fleshing out these paranoid visions keen and impressive. If this sounds like your cup of dark tea, pick it up.

The Perversity of Things: review #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

Continuing with my reviews (#8 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) - at a more leisurely place now, reporting here on two gems in pages 52-55 of Wythoff's 59-page Introduction to the 359-page volume.

Wythoff describes Gernsback's keen concern with the definition of science fiction - or scientifiction, as Gernsback usually had it - which in turn led to a thoughtful, even profound, analysis of how much science and truth needs to be in the science fiction.   There are several bells that this discussion rung for me.

First, I'm reminded about both Karl Popper's and Marshall McLuhan's dislike for definitions.  Popper held that they were a distraction, and McLuhan was fond of quoting French poet Stéphane Mallarmé that “To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.”  I generally agree with that, but Gernsback's quest to define science fiction was valuable.

As Wythoff points out, it led Gernsback to probe the evolution of technology, with the realization that the science in science fiction was a progressing target.   A century later, anyone familiar with science fiction knows that it predicted and even provided a template for everything from space travel to gene-splicing (H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau).   In Gernsback's day, this was not as obvious, and he deserves credit for holding science fiction to the test of not only plausibility but physical possibility - which remains an important point of demarcation between science fiction and fantasy.(See this for my very brief definition of the two.)

Gernsback's focus on scientific possibility and truth led to what today is an astonishing example. Wythoff, writing before our current crisis regarding fake news, tells us about Gernsback's 1926 "The Moon Hoax," in an early issue of his Amazing Stories, which reprinted a series of articles in The New York Sun from 1835 which reported an intelligent civilization of the Moon.   Gernsback was confident, in 1926, that such a "hoax" would quickly be exposed by radio.   He of course missed not only Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" (thanks to my wife Tina for this example), but the way that our social media today not only unmask fake news but disseminate it.

I thought this example was so telling, that I just added it to my Fake News in Real Context.  That's what I mean about The Perversity of Things being a treasure trove to anyone who's interested in the evolution and impact of media.  And I'll be back here, sooner or later, with more.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ... #4 of X: Gernsback and the The First Amendment ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention and the Advent of Science Fiction

The Perversity of Things: review #7 of X: The Invention of Invention and the Advent of Science Fiction

Continuing with my reviews (#7 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) - which will be less frequent now, given the end of the winter break, but focusing here on pages 46-51 of Wythoff's remarkable 59-page Introduction to the 359-page volume.

Wythoff in these pages focuses on Gernback's contribution to the very way in which we conceive of invention - where what we today call new media come from, and what is the best environment, or the social structure most conducive, for these seedling inventions to develop into useful technologies.

I'd make two points here.  One is that it can't be coincidental that Alfred North Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World, observes that the most important invention of the late 19th century and the aptly-named Age of Invention was "the invention of invention" itself - or the very notion that human beings could create technologies that didn't already exist to do useful things - like talk to people who were miles away from us, move in automated vehicles, etc.  Whitehead published that book in 1925, right around the time that Gernsback was holding forth with similar ideas, which in effect proves the point: invention was in the air, not just in flying vehicles, but as a concept in everyone's minds.

Gernsback goes further, as we've seen earlier, and identifies the ideal inventor as a tinkerer not a corporate employee.   And he also goes further in considering the best circumstances for the invention to get into the mainstream - or, in terms of the Toy, Mirror, and Art schema I mentioned in my previous review, what is needed to jumpstart the new gimmick into widespread, practical use.

Wythoff then segues into another aspect of Gernsback's work, which is especially close to my heart (though actually most are), and is of course what most people associate with Gernsback: science fiction.   Wythoff's brief, and I agree, is not at all that this association is incorrect, but it is incomplete - because Gernback is far more than a pioneering publisher of short science fiction.   He's also a philosopher of technology, of considerable importance.

But Gernback's contribution to the birth and growth of that genre (short-form science fiction) was indeed enormous - and, unsurprisingly, idiosyncratic.  Wythoff observes that, in Gernsback's Amazing Stories and other science fiction publications, the process of invention was more prominent than the characters who did and reacted to the invention.   This spotlight on science over character stayed with science fiction for at least half a century, and still characterizes the leading science fiction magazine, Analog, which published 15 of my stories and 2 essays between 1995-2013 ("The Chronology Protection Case," "Loose Ends," and "The Orchard" are the best-known - see this list for details).

Indeed, Analog far more than Amazing Stories carried and still carries the mantel that Gernsback built for the science fiction magazine, and magazines in general, including an active, critiquing, tinkering readership.  But I'll leave that story for subsequent reviews of The Perversity of Things.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ... #4 of X: Gernsback and the The First Amendment ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

The Perversity of Things: review #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys

Continuing with my review (#6 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) - focusing now on pages 37-45 of Wythoff's rich 59-page Introduction to the 359-page volume.

Thought experiments have had a long and noble history in the evolution of human knowledge, ranging from Leonardo's sketches for devices that were not quite capable of being invented in his time, to Schrödinger's cat about quantum mechanics in our macro world which could never be implemented in actual reality.   Gernsback loved all modes of thought about what technology could accomplish, but as Wythoff details, Gernsback was unsurprisingly more like Leonardo than a quantum physicist.  Indeed, he favored more than sketches, and wanted writing in his magazines about devices that actually could be built, if often not quite performing as hoped or advertised.

Wythoff, much to my delight, has a quote from Gernsback about the first expressions of new technologies functioning as "toys".  You want to know why I think this is such a great book?  My first major, published article, reprinted half a dozen times, is entitled "Toy, Mirror and Art: The Metamorphosis of Technological Culture," which first appeared in 1977. Here's a link to a penultimate version, reprinted a decade later.  (I owe it another update, and will definitely put in a mention of Gernsback, with thanks and citation of Wythoff.)

The question with the technological toy is whether it will be developed any further.  One of the fascinating tidbits of history I did discover when I was researching TMA in 1976 was William Orton, President of Western Union Telegraph in 1881, who advised his hapless friend Chauncey Depew not to invest in Bell Telephone back then, five years after the telephone was invented, because it would never be more than a "scientific toy". (How hapless was Depew?  He was encouraged to run as a Republican against incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1888 but declined because he thought Cleveland was unbeatable.  Republican Benjamin Harrison went on to win the electoral vote that year.)

Gernsback, of course, was keenly interested in developing toys into usable, revolutionary technologies.  Wythoff shows how often Gernsback failed in his immediate future.  But the backdrop of reading The Perversity of Things is how often Gernsback succeeded in the long run. His remote-controlled wireless Telimco didn't do much in the early 20th century - but as soon as I post this review I'm going to catch up with my latest series streaming on Netflix, without leaving my chair, unless I want another cup of tea.

And at some point after that, I'll be back my the next is my series of reviews of The Perversity of Things.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ... #4 of X: Gernsback and the The First Amendment ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention, and the Advent of Science Fiction ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

The Perversity of Things: review #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations

Continuing with my review (#5 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I'm now focusing on pages 28-36 of Wythoff's 59-page Introduction to the 359-page volume, with the proviso that these reviews reflect my not Wythoff's organization of his motherlode of research and analysis.

Wythoff begins this group of pages with a discussion of the important role that women played in creating Gernsback's magazines (recognized by Gernsback) and in the ideal public pressing forward with the technological revolution - a presence which runs contrary to the historical gloss of middle-class young men being the carriers of these ideas, which as Wythoff shows also ignored the role of the working class.  But this sociology of science fiction and technocracy soon gives way to a consideration of an issue which is in many ways more fundamental: the tension between talented amateurs and corporate scientists as the spearheads of technological evolution.

Gernsback was clearly a champion of the latter, though Wythoff points out that Gernsback was not allergic to corporate culture, and willing to accept it if it further technological progress.   But the most significant part of this section is Wythoff's study of the sheer speed with radio was transformed from an amateur to a corporate endeavor - literally in a handful of years.   Not to get too melodramatic about this, but it is almost as if radio's very success, so fervently desired by its first amateur practitioners (who both constructed and listened to radio), spelled the very end of those amateurs, who could not possibly service the millions of Americans who quickly came to love and rely on radio, once its genie of entertainment and news was let out of the bottle.

I'd add here, however, that it's important to note that the amateur impulse, and the great things it engenders, was not extinguished with the corporate co-option of radio in the 1920s.  After all, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and the founders of Twitter were none other than amateurs in our own time, and although their revolutionizing inventions have now, too, become corporatized, there is no reason to think the amateur will not spring forth yet again in the future - or right now, though we don't yet quite know about it.

It's too bad that Gernsback didn't live long enough to see the digital revolution which his tinkering in the early days of electronic media presaged.  Like McLuhan, Gernsback died a little before the digital age which both foresaw, in different, complementary ways.   But their ideas and visions live on, and fortunately in the case of Gernsback, we have Wythoff's The Perversity of Things to carry it forward.

And I'll be back here soon with my next review of this book.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ... #4 of X: Gernsback and the The First Amendment ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention, and the Advent of Science Fiction ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

 

The Perversity of Things: review #4 of X: Gernsback and the First Amendment

Continuing with my review (#4 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016),  this time focusing on pages 26-28 of Wythoff's 59-page Introduction to the 359-page volume, because it tells us that Gernsback was a staunch opponent of government regulation of the nascent radio medium.

So I now have a third area of strong agreement with Gernsback and his work, joining science fiction and media theory: Gernsback not only understood the evolution of media, but got that we should not let the ham-handed government and its penchant for regulations get in the way of that.

Had I known that, I certainly would have mentioned Gernsback in my Flouting of the First Amendment 2005 keynote address - a central part of which is that the Federal Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC it created was a hindrance not a help to the evolution of broadcasting, and violated the First Amendment.  Wythoff again deserves credit for bringing Gernsback into this continuing controversy about how much if any government regulation of media is helpful and constitutional as we move further in the 21st century.

But Wythoff and I don't agree on everything regarding this issue.  He notes on page 27 that Gernback's "arguments against hasty legislation ... are very much reminiscent of advocates for net neutrality".   But net neutrality, though laudable as an ideal, is usually advocated as a government regulation - in other words, an example of the very kind of government meddling in the evolution of media that Gernsback was so eloquently and knowledgeably against. Wythoff is no doubt right that Gernsback the tinkerer would have been no fan at all of today's huge media corporations, but Gernback's often repeated contempt for and fear of government intervention in media development would have made him even less a fan of an FCC induced net neutrality as a way of limiting corporate power.  (My Why I Oppose Net Neutrality summarizes my opposition, pre-Gernsback and Wythoff.)

I would add here that underlying my and Gernsback's opposition to government regulation is not only an understanding of media evolution, but an optimism that this evolution by and large leads to good and better things.   This optimistic outlook, as Wythoff makes clear and I mentioned in previous reviews of The Perversity of Things, is also the basis of Gernsback's hopeful science fiction - in the tradition of Jules Verne, contradicted by the dystopian science fiction of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, furthered in cyberpunk which was and is specifically scathing about media evolution, in the latter part of the 20th century and the present (and, being a not 100% Gersnbackian, I've occasionally written a little of, I'll admit).

Wythoff goes on to describe the McLuhanesque "global village" that Gernsbach's "new minted citizens of the ether" (Wythoff's apt term) comprised - a development which didn't quite turn out the way Gernsback intended and predicted (and not just because of government interference), which I'll look at it my next review.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention, and the Advent of Science Fiction ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News


 

The Perversity of Things: review #3 of X: The Evolution of Media

Continuing with my review (#3 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), having now read pages 18-27 of Wythoff's 59-page Introduction to the 359-page volume:

Reading Wythoff's Introduction, as I've already said, is to encounter a wealth of information on every page, and occasionally a treasure-trove at that.  On page 25, for example, Wythoff tells and shows us how Gernsback thought about media in ways a lot like Marshall McLuhan, and understood them and their impact on our lives in similar ways.  Then, on the same page, we find that Gernsback had a special interest in the evolution of media, in particular how old and new media compete for survival. Wythoff observes that, in "Is Radio At a Standstill?" (1926), "Gernsback makes a striking media-historical analogy between the supposed threat that the rise of radio posed to established phonograph manufacturers and the impact of 'battery eliminator' radio sets" on "conventional battery manufacturers,"  concluding that "competing formats do not replace but rather force one another to find their own unique attributes, simply as a matter of survival."

As fate would have it, this was exactly one of the main points I made in my PhD dissertation, "Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media," which I sent up to Marshall McLuhan in the summer of 1978, before I gave it my dissertation adviser at New York University, Neil Postman. (Here is a recording of McLuhan's initial response, in a voice-mail he sent me, shortly later, after he had read "the first 100 pages".)  The way I put it in my dissertation - and in subsequent works, such as The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution - was that the media we invent compete for a place in the satisfaction of our human needs, or a "human/media ecological niche".  They often achieve this in surprising ways.  Radio not only survived but thrived in the aftermath of television, because it worked in our ecological niche of hearing without seeing (we can easily close our eyes, it grows dark every night, etc).  But silent movies did not survive the advent of talkies, because we rarely see without hearing (we have no earlids, etc).

Now, when I wrote that dissertation in the late 1970s (which will soon appear in translation by Wu Jianzhong in China), I of course knew about Gernsback, but as the founding editor of Amazing Stories and one of the founding parents of science fiction.   One of the values of Wythoff's extraordinary work is precisely that it calls attention to other, equally important and interrelated, contributions of Gernsback.  (I did manage to quote from Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone, 1914, by the pseudonymous Victor Appleton, in my dissertation - but only because I picked up a copy of that book at used book store.)

As a parting point for this review/musing, this section of the book also highlights Gernsback's sponsorship of illustrations in his magazines to the tell science fiction stories - in some ways, more effectively than the words,  In age in which cinema was just getting started, and television was a few years off, the illustration was the prime vehicle for our imaginative vision, and all that it could convey.  Gernsback, in that sense, was also a founder of the great and continuing tradition science fiction we see so prominetly on the screen.

And I'll be continuing these reviews soon.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #4 of X: Gernsback and the First Amendment ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention, and the Advent of Science Fiction ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

 

The Perversity of Things: review #2 of X: Learning by Doing

Continuing with my review (#2 of X) of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), having now read pages 9-17 of Wythoff's 59-page rich (an understatement) Introduction to the 359-page volume: Wythoff tells us that Gernsback advocated what current media studies calls "critical making" - or "a material engagement with technology as a means of understanding it".

This is a key concept, which was actually promulgated at some length and depth by the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, a contemporary of Gernsback, and author of Experience and Nature (1925), which argued not only that real experience with the world (in today's parlance, hands-on experience) was a good way of understanding it - in contrast to just thinking about it - but the best way of knowing it, and the only likely way to get reliable and reliably testable knowledge.  And, indeed, that's precisely the approach I took with my New New Media (2009) - studying what are now much more widely known as social media by using them, adopting them fully into my professional pursuits and life.   My Facebook and Twitter accounts, and this very blog, were started in that pursuit.

This anthropological approach to studying our own technologies was the reason gadgetry lived alongside science fiction in Gernsback's publications and work - the two were co-essential, mutually catalytic parts of Gernsback's same project: getting us, more of us, and better informed, into the future.

Wythoff's Introduction at this point commences a more traditional biography of Gernsback, though there's almost nothing traditional in his life's work or the way Wythoff presents it.  I was interested in such tidbits as Gernbach's father in Luxembourg made his money as a wine wholesaler. This provides another instance of the connection I've noticed between wine and the evolution of media, the most outstanding example of which is Gutenberg's use of the wine press and its interchangeable grape crushers in his development of the printing press and its interchangeable type, a crucial step beyond the static printing block technology invented in China.

I also didn't know - though maybe that's just me - that Lewis Mumford, ultimately a caustic critic not only of technological progress but many other things I hold dear, ranging from McLuhan's ideas to the need of our species to get beyond this planet into space, was first published, at 15 years of age, in Gernsbach's Modern Electrics, in the very same issue that carried the first part of Gernsbach's celebrated "Ralph 124C 41+".  (That issue was published in 1911.  Mumford was still at least even-handed about technology when his important Technics and Civilization was published in 1934, where I first got to know his work.  By the time of his publication in the two-part Myth of the Machine at end of the 1960s - Technics and Human Development and The Pentagon of Power - Mumford had become an implacable critic of the modern technological enterprise. He thought he had seen the light, but I always thought he had gone over to the Dark Side of thinking about technology.)

And I'll conclude this second review, with a promise for more, by noting that Wythoff offers us these spark plugs for thought by employing the possibilities of the printed page in a way that McLuhan would have admired, given his War and Peace in the Global Village, The Medium is the Massage, and other books in the late 1960s, where the image and the photograph were always in surprising relationships with the words on the page.  On page 17, for example, we find a part of a page from Modern Electrics intruding on the top of the page, with a newspaper clipping from the time intruding on the Modern Electrics page, all because the copy of Modern Electrics which Wythoff perused at the Princeton University Library actually had this clipping attached.  The Perversity of Things, in other words, not only has soaring and in-depth writing, but a layout to match it.

See also: The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ...  #4 of X: Gernsback and the First Amendment ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention, and the Advent of Science Fiction ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

 

The Perversity of Things: review #1 of X: Gernsback as Philosopher of Technology

I just started reading The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, edited by Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).  I've read the first 8 pages of Wythoff's 59-page masterful Introduction to the 359-page volume, and there's so much to say about this, because there's so much on every page, that I thought I'd post a series of reviews here, rather than try to cram everything that needs to be said about this volume into one long unwieldy review.  After all, I just posted three reviews of The Man in the High Castle second season on Amazon, even though I binge-watched it over two evenings.

I'm looking forward to spending ten times longer if not more on The Perversity of Things, which seeks to put Gernsback, most known as the father of pulp magazine science fiction due to his publication of Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted only to science fiction, beginning in 1926. I've always had a special interest in Amazing Stories, given that it was the first "pro" magazine to publish one of my science fiction stories - "Albert's Cradle" in 1993 (thanks again, Kim Mohan, who was editor) - but The Perversity of Things is much more than a meticulously researched compendium about Gernsback's philosophy of science fiction, though it is that, too.

But as the first eight pages of Wythoff's Introduction explain and detail - each page is a small feast for the intellect - this book is about Gernsback as a philosopher of technology, and his unrecognized position as such. Wythoff tells us that the title of this book comes from what Gernsback thought and said about "things" - "the perversity of things" -which can confound, confuse, and irritate us when we (the public) have no experience with them.  We, and alas, much of media criticism and what passes as scholarship, are therefore prone to see what's wrong not right with new technology and media, and blame them for every evil in our society (look at the beating Twitter has taken for Trump's election - as if Twitter somehow forced people to vote for him). Wythoff contends that Gernsback's life project was to do just the opposite - enable the public to learn what was right about new technology, and use it for the betterment of our species.

Wythoff supports his arguments not only with powerful logic, but comprehensive research expressed in copious footnotes and illustrations from the time (at this point, the beginning of the 20th century and its publications).  On the footnotes, it's been years since I've read such well-written mini-essays, and it's a pleasure and enlightening to see them again.  (The last time I did anything like this in my own work was in my Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age, 1988, which explored technology as an embodiment of human ideas and imagination.)

It's fair and sad to say that Gernsback ultimately lost his battle.  The Man in the High Castle, superb and astonishing as it is, represents the kind of science fiction that won, in 1962 when the novel was first published, and now.  As Wythoff points out, it's amazing that we had much optimism about science and technology after the ravages of the First World War, but we did.  And that somehow lasted even past the Second World War, but not the 1960s, when, as I mentioned in my review of Star Trek Beyond just last night, the Star Trek series on television represented the last major science fictional paean to how we could improve our species and the cosmos beyond our planet with our science and technology.

There have been some exceptions to this tide - such as some of the stories in Hartwell and Cramer's Hard SF Renaissance (2004) - but the fact that Wythoff put this book together and got it published by a major academic press, the fact that the Star Trek franchise is still flourishing, speak more ringingly to the survival of Gernsback's vision despite the pummeling it has received.  The Perversity of Things will be a handbook for the resurgence of that vision - it's the best new scholarly book I've read in decades - and I'll be back here with another installment of my reviews soon in the New Year.

See also The Perversity of Things: review #2 of X: Learning by Doing ... #3 of X: The Evolution of Media ... #4 of X: Gernsback and the First Amendment ... #5 of X: Amateurs vs. Corporations ... #6 of X: Thought Experiments and Toys ... #7 of X: The Invention of Invention, and the Advent of Science Fiction ... #8 of X: Definitions and Fake News

Star Trek Beyond: The Rescue of Optimism

Continuing with my reviews of important 2016 movies, which I certainly should have seen and reviewed much earlier - in this case, July - but, hey, time itself has always been somewhat malleable in science fiction, especially Star Trek,

Star Trek Beyond is the lucky 13th movie in the Star Trek movie series - lucky to be released around the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of Star Trek on television in 1966, now known as Star Trek: The Original Series or ST: TOS for short.  ST Beyond is third in the reboots, in which  J. J. Abrams re-presented the original Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al crew, beginning a little earlier in time than TOS, somewhat before and during their time as trainees in Starfleet Academy.

In a brilliant move, the 2009 Star Trek reboot also brought into play the original Spock from TOS, older, played by Leonard Nimoy, via an alternate universe gambit.   I mention this, not only to praise it again, but because in some ways my favorite single part of Beyond was Zachary Quinto's Spock looking at a photo of his alternate, older self (Nimoy) near the beginning of the movie, and the whole original crew, again, near the end.   It was a satisfying way to again to make a connection to what started fifty years ago.

And it had a special pull on the heart because Leonard Nimoy is no longer with us, having died at 83 years of age in 2015.  The fact that Quinto's Spock not only knew but loved his alternate self, whom we also had come to know and love, has given Nimoy even more of a continuing place and life in our ongoing popular culture.

There was, indeed, a lot of the past in Beyond, with an earlier starship, the USS Franklin, playing a major role in the story.  It's a Warp 4 ship, which puts it a notch below the Warp 5 speeds of the Enterprise in the Star Trek: Enterprise series, which depicts voyages of the first Starfleet starship.   This immersion in the past was good to see, continuing a tradition which goes back to TOS itself, and its making an episode - "Menagerie" - out of its pilot episode, in which Kirk was not even yet Captain of the ship.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the optimistic view that underlies all of Star Trek - in contrast, to say, Star Wars - comes from Victorian times, and lasted until a little beyond the middle of the 20th century, when it was assaulted but not destroyed by the cynicism and pessimism that hold so much sway today.   I've just begun reading a great anthology of the writings of Hugo Gernsback (compiled and with a pathbreaking introduction by Grant Wythoff), and his unbridled but well considered optimism about how we could and would improve our lot via science and technology (I'll be reviewing it here soon).  I share that view - and certainly Star Trek did as well.

And the inspiration of the Star Trek reboots, continuing with Beyond, is that it still does.  The stories are exciting, the repartee between Kirk and Bones and Spock is clever and fun, but it's the joy in the prospect of humans out in there in the stars that was always the beacon of Star Trek - a beacon drawing us to it and drawing us out there.  Star Trek has rescued that optimism that animated Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, and I look forward to its continued presentation as it pursues its bold, new voyages on the screen in our 21s century.

See also Star Trek: Reborn, Reset, Resplendent and Star Trek Into Darkness: Echoes, Resonances, and Great

Midnight in Paris: Time Traveling ala Woody Allen

A belated review of Woody Allen's 2011 movie, Midnight in Paris, which, considering that it's a time travel movie, it's amazing I didn't see and review much earlier.   The loss was mine - it's a wonderful movie - and thanks to my wife for suggesting we get it On Demand last night when there was nothing else to see on a cold, snowy night in New York City.

First, unlike Woody Allen's Sleeper, in which the hero is cryogenically frozen and jumps into the future that way, Gil in Midnight in Paris goes from 2010 to the past and back to the present like any decent, genuine time traveler.   The mechanism of the the time travel - the stroke of midnight on a quiet corner in Paris - is more like the means in Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Jack Finney's Time and Again, which is to say, close to magical - but still makes the cut as a legitimate time travel story as far as I'm concerned.

And it's excellent indeed, investing Woody Allen's sage, delightful repartee and style into a narrative in which Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and all manner of luminaries from the 1920s figure in our 21st-century hero's adventures in the past.   The neurotic Gil (well played by Owen Wilson) - a version of Woody Allen, despite Gil's Californian flair, as are all of Woody's male heroes - plays well and hilariously against these luminaries who no doubt are Woody's as well.  The attention to accurate detail of the 1920s, a key ingredient in my book in making any time travel to the past work, was mostly spot on.  The only slight error I caught was someone saying "science fiction" - although Hugo Gernsback did create the term some time in the 1920s, he much preferred the term "scientification" at first, and "science fiction" did not come into general use until a decade later.  But only a science fiction and time travel fanatic like me would know that.

The question always arises in these sorts of soft time time travel movies - that is, time travel without a machine or some sort of scientific explanation - as to whether the character is dreaming or really time traveling to the past or future.   Allen clearly answers this question near the end, when we're shown a private Parisian detective - who was hired to follow Gil by his about-to-be-father-in-law - running around in the age of Louis IV like a chicken without a head.  The scene is not only fall-down-funny but indicative that the time travel was not just in Gil's mind.  (Yes, Gil could have been dreaming that scene, too, but such solipsism is not much fun, and we see no other evidence of Gil dreaming - unlike, say, the Ethan Hawke character in The Woman in the Fifth, another recent Parisian movie.)

Like most of Woody Allen's movies, Midnight in Paris is not only funny but wise in the lessons it provides.  In this case, it's that everyone has their own favorite time in the past, but there's usually some of that still in the present, if you're lucky and alert enough to find it.   We enjoyed Midnight in Paris so much, we went on to see To Rome with Love, Woody Allen's 2012 movie, right after.  It was also excellent.  But Midnight in Paris is something special in the roster of both Allen's and time travel movies, and I predict it will become a classic.

                                                                   

Evolution of Science Fiction ... my 6-minute tour...

My infamous 6-minute tour on the history and evolution of science ... from The History Channel's 2002 Time Machine series...

From Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells, George Melies, Hugo Gernsback, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson ... I comment on all of them and more ... scientific romances, bug-eyed monsters, cyberpunk, and bio-tech science fiction ... with some really cool pictures as accompaniment...