Science Fiction Themes and Clare Winger Harris

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One of the darlings of the Gernsback magazines was author, Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968). She may be the first official “fan-girl” of that era, being the first woman to publish Science Fiction under her own name. (Francis Stevens was a better writer but was actually Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Catherine Lucille Moore was the darling of Weird Tales but SF fans often ignored that magazine to their own peril.) Harris wrote a dozen stories beginning with “A Runaway World” (Weird Tales, July 1926) but her Gernsback premiere was the long story “The Fate of the Poseidonia” (Amazing Stories, June 1927). Her last was “The Ape Cycle” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Spring 1930). After 1930, she no longer produced fiction. (She self published a collection of her ten years in SF called Away from Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science in 1947.) I’m not sure why she left SF writing.

But Clare did leave one last parting gift in 1931, a letter to Wonder Stories, August 1931 that delineated the Science Fiction genre as Harris saw it. Here is that letter:

 

Let’s look at these sixteen story types. Some are evergreen, while others have lost their shine since the 1930s.

1 – Interplanetary space travel.

As long as people in the real world reach for outer space, this one will be fresh. Stories that dwell on how an intergalactic drive works are less common these days, as we can all go “Oh, it’s warp drive, like on Star Trek.” The amount of “real” is a factor with novels like Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011) versus the Space Opera versions of Star Wars. For decades the idea of interplanetary travel was laughed at. Once humans walked on the Moon, that all changed. But not always for the better. Many simply lost interest.

2- Adventures in other worlds.

Seeing what life is like elsewhere has been a huge category for SF, with Earthmen visiting all sorts of planets. These began as a kind of Manifest Destiny drivel and have in recent years become a way to explore the effects of colonization. Alien life offers a wonderful mirror for humanity to gaze into. I don’t see this one going anywhere. Recent classics like Ursula K. Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) inspire generation after generation who read it. On television, it was Star Trek that used the space frontier as podium. There has been way too much arguing about “woke” Star Trek lately. (Some of you haven’t been paying attention.)

3- Adventures in other dimensions.

Not a big category these days in SF. Back in the day, there were Red Dimensions and Blue ones and the Fourth and Fifth and even Sixth! More likely to turn up in a Horror novel than an SF one, though George R. R. Martin’s “Nightflyers” (Analog, April 1980) does both. Math concepts in the 1920s and 1930s drove this one. Our understanding of the concepts behind this has changed. It seems like an old idea that is just waiting for a big new novel. For more on dimensions, go here.

4- Adventures in the micro or macro-cosmos.

Fitz-James O’Brien started this one with “The Diamond Lens”. Ray Cummings’ The Girl in the Golden Atom (1918) was the first novel based on it. Henry Hasse’s “He Who Shrank” (Amazing Stories, August 1936) might have been the pinnacle. The 1930s was full of shrinkers. For many this was done with Fantastic Voyage or Honey, I Shrink the Kids, but Ant-Man brought it back recently in the movies.

5- Gigantic insects.

This can be as simple as the giant bug films of the 1950s and 60s but also includes Mothra in the Japanese cinema. Robert A. Heinlein made his aliens super-bugs in Starship Troopers (1959). Orson Scott Card used it for much bigger things in his Ender’s Game series. The Formic Wars will make you see ants and SF differently. For more on giant insects, go here.

6- Gigantic man-eating plants.

One of my personal favs, this category includes all those killers vines in space since Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” (Wonder Stories, July 1934) to the much more ambitious The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham. The killer fungus of The Last of Us is the most recent version. (Yes, I know fungi are not plants, but they get grouped together.) Frank Herbert’s The Green Brain (1966) links killer plants to ecological topics. For more on giant killer plants, go here.

7- Time travel, past or future.

Time travel is a big category because it has its own sub-categories. There is the straight time travel story where people go forwards or back in time ala H. G. Wells, or the excellent Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1975) which does it with suspended animation instead of a time machine. There are also Time War, Time Patrol (Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson) and Alternate History subsets. Alternate history begins with Francs Stevens and The Heads of Cerebus back in 1919. Murray Leinster gets more credit with “Sideways in Time” (Astounding Stories, June 1934).

8- Monstrous forms of unfamiliar life.

Well, this is a huge category when you consider it includes most of the monster stuff, from Alien to Alf. It can be horrific as aliens invade or it can be funny with Resident Alien. What the human-alien interaction will be is what interests us, laugh or cry. Again, a favorite for me. For more on monstrous forms of life, go here.

9- The Creation of super-machines.

From killer robots to super computers, to Terminators to Autobots and back again, the super-machine is an obvious response to technology. Mary Shelley started it, even though her monster is flesh and blood (recycled but still living.) Stories about very human androids offer another mirror for our own natures whether it be Data, R. Daniel Olivaw or The Bicentennial Man. We love and hate our technology.

10- The creation of synthetic life.

This is really the place for Frankenstein (1818) but it is a much bigger group of tales. As with super-machines, the Replicants can be property or humanity. The Slime and Blob stories fall in here too.

11- Mental telepathy and mental aberrations.

This was a huge category in the 1940s and 1950s, with A. E. van Vogt’s Slan (1940) and all the other mutant stuff. Of course, others offered us tragic stories like J. D. Beresford’s The Wonder (1919), to John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) and Chocky (1968). What we do with our new found powers makes us heroes or villains as The X-Men tells us issues after issue. For more, go here.

12- Invisibility.

Another Wells category that has waned but never disappeared. We are more deliberate about being invisible, asking how would that be possible? far more than those who enjoyed it in the Pulps. For invisibility, go here.

13- Ray and vibration stories.

This category has been relegated to the comics, I think. The Hulk gets a blast of gamma radiation and boom. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was used to explain many things that are impossible from weapons to mutation to super-duper cool stuff.

14 – Unexplored portions of the globe, submarine, subterranean, etc.

Well, there are supposedly no frontiers left on Earth but this isn’t really true. Michael Crichton did his riff on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871) in Sphere (1987) as John Wyndham did in The Kraken Wakes (1953). The deep oceans remain untouched. James Rollins did a great job of the subterranean in Subterranean (1999). This is the Jules Verne-type category, and it has not flourished like the Wellsian stuff. If we can’t find them on Earth, we can always go into space to find new ones as in W. Michael Gear’s Donovan series. For more subterraneans, go here. 

15- Super intelligence.

Brainiacs abound but not many new works do. Being really smart gets less attention than being big and green. This trope gets paired with super-machines nowadays as we worry that the smartest thing on Earth is an AI. (It’s also really hard to write about someone being smarter than the author.) This category contains the classic “bum-headed aliens“.

16- Natural cataclysms; extraterrestrial or confined to the earth.

The disaster novel continues to gain in popularity as Climate Change continues. Super-tornadoes (not to mention those full of sharks), killer cold, killer waves, and so on. This genre shares its time with more factual and possible books and films, The Impossible (2012) about a true natural disaster to 2012 (2009), a John Cusack film that stretches disaster to the end of the world. There is also the post-apocalyptic version like The Planet of the Apes franchise. How we survive after a massive disaster allows us to explore all the other story types.

My first reaction to this list is to ask: how many of these began with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells? Verne gets 3 while Wells gets all 16. So what Harris is discussing is really not new to the 1930s but dates back to 1860-1890s. This shouldn’t be surprising since Hugo Gernsback filled the early pages of Amazing Stories with Verne and Wells reprints, partly to save money and partly to educate new writers what Science Fiction looked like.

I will also admit that the style and literary approach of modern novels can’t be compared with most 1930s SF writers. That’s not what I am on about here. What I am looking at is thematically, what have we added? What is new? Not much. I can only think of one theme that has been spawned since, and that is what we generically call “CyberPunk”. Stories about computers, the Internet, communications and the culture of that new reality. So kudos to William Gibson. (And Murray Leinster who wrote “A Logic Named Joe” in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946.) You could lump them into “The creation of super-machines” but I think that may miss some essential elements.

Conclusion

Finally, I have to admit that Science Fiction themes haven’ really changed much at all. But the writing of Science Fiction has. Thanks to eighty years of stories, novels, movies and comic books, the genre (though not adding any new themes) has expanded on those themes. Take “The creation of synthetic life” for instance. This could be clunky Otis Adelbert Kline tale like “The Malignant Entity” from May-June-July 1924’s Weird Tales but it also embraces the works of Philip K. Dick who begged the question: “What is it to be human?” in his stories of simulacra and androids. And all the writers in between. These themes are old, but new writers, including all the authors I mentioned from the 2017 list, breathe freshness into them, explore new angles and make Science Fiction worth reading, whether in 1890, 1930 or 2018.