Fantastika

Today it’s exactly 100 years ago Hugo Gernsback published the first science fiction, sorry scientifiction magazine.

Hugo Gernsback (August 16, 1884 – August 19, 1967) was a Luxembourgian immigrant to the United States, who became involved with the hottest technology of the 1910s and 20s: radio. He had his own radio station, was involved with some of the first television broadcasts in America (in 1928) and before that he helped establish amateur radio broadcasting, setting up the world’s first electronics magazine in 1909. As an inventor, entrepreneur and endless tech boaster he had an optimistic view of the coming age of high tech could save the world and to promote that vision he started writing stories set in that future. His serial Ralph 124C 41+ (One To Foresee For One) is dreadful but it has that manic energy of the true tech freak.

Tempting as it is to call him the Raoring Twenties’ version of Elon Musk that wouldn’t do him justice, Unlike Musk he did actually invent and create the things he took credit for. (But like Musk, he wasn’t particularly keen on paying his employees if he didn’t have to…)

The one problem is, without him we might not have had Elon Musk either. Because that strain of perverted techno utopianism that Musk deals in got its start with Gernsback.

Because Gernsback noticed that the scientifiction he published in his radio and electronics magazines was quite popular, so he thought a new magazine wholly devoted to it might sell as well…

Launched on 10 March 1926, this hunch proved correct. Even when only offering reprints at first, Amazing Stories was a hit, creating a new pulp genre out of nothing. Obviously, there had been science fiction stories before: Wells, Verne, Poe, Shelley and a host of other 19th and early 20th writers had written some. There were also earlier pulp magazines like Argosy or Weird Tales that published stories of that nature.

But it was Gernsback who codified and named it. And it was his evangelism that would shape the genre into something that had loftier intentions than just providing its readers with fifteen minutes of a good time. Gernsback intended science fiction to be educational, to provide a guideline to the future that would be build by men like him. That strain of science fiction would for decades be the dominant strain of English language sf, further refined by John Campbell Jr at Astounding Science Fiction and his stable of writers (Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt etc).

Wunded but not quite killed off by the New Wave in the sixties, it survived long enough through editors and writers like Jim Baen and Niven/Pournelle that it was still around to infect people like Musk, whose visions of self driving cars and colonies on Mars are straight out of Amazing. Also baked into Gernsback vision of science fiction : a nascent fascism and fondness for genocide as the answer to all problems. That nice cover to the left is the first appearance of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark of Space series, in which our heroes start by committing genocide against one alien race and end up blowing up entire galaxies. Great fun.

So three slightly muted cheers for the invention of science fiction. Too bad the worst people in the world took all the wrong lessons from it.

I have to admit at being a little bit triggered by this obituary by Eric Berger over at Ars Technica:

Dan Simmons, the author of more than three dozen books, including the famed Hyperion Cantos, has died from a stroke. He was 77.

Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion.
[…]
In any case, fans of epic fiction have lost a giant, a great writer and epic storyteller with a gift for dark twists and colorful characters. We can only hope he has found a tree ship to take him to a celestial paradise rather than become infected with a cruciform.

To only talk about a science fiction writer’s most famous work in his obituary is an understandable choice, especially since it seems to have meant so much to Eric. But I wish he had paid some attention to another, more infamous text of Simmons too:

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”

“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”

Published in april 2006 on Dan Simmons’ own website, “the Time Traveler’s Tale” wasn’t fiction, but intended as a terrible warning of the grim future Simmons saw ahead of him. Yes, he had his brain fried by 9/11 and the ensuing War Against Terror. Just another dime a dozen islamophobe echoing the same tired rhetoric about Islam you saw on every other warblog at the time. For me, that completely ruined any enjoyment I could get out of Hyperion. Rereading it made clear that the vileness that fully erupted in that essay in 2006 was already present in Hyperion in 1989, just hidden better.