Space operas boldly go to the heart of the human soul

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My father still lovingly recounts the first time he saw Star Wars back in 1977 (later retroconned as Star Wars: A New Hope). When the movie opened with the star destroyer crossing the screen in pursuit of Princess Leia’s ship, a chill ran my father's spine. He later said he knew he was seeing something totally new and exciting.

And he did, along with millions of people around the world. Never mind that Star Wars wasn't close to being original and new, having been inspired by both earlier films like Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and the entire written genre of space operas. Which had itself been partly inspired by westerns.

But none of that mattered to filmgoers.

I was a young child when Star Wars debuted, so I don’t remember the film’s hype. But I do remember my father’s excitement after he saw it. He and my mother decided to see it again, and this time they took me.

And there began my love affair with science fiction, as I wandered away from my parents while they stood in line for the screening. I didn’t have a destination in mind but eventually I wandered into a dark theater and found an empty seat and sat down and watched Star Wars by myself.

Or, I watched the first half of Star Wars. Somewhere in the middle of the movie my parents and the theater staff found me. Now that I have children I understand how scared my parents were at my disappearance.

I don’t remember what happened after they found me. Perhaps I’m blocking the trauma of their screams and any punishment I received. But from then on I was a Star Wars fan. I played with every Star Wars toy I could find. Star Wars action figures filled my days with dreams of distant, star-filled galactic horizons. A diecast Millennium Falcon, which I flew by hand as a child across the fields near my house, has landed on my desk and begs to be played with as I write these words.

Only after seeing Star Wars did I begin reading literary science fiction and discover that the film not only wasn’t overly original, but that George Lucas had borrowed his themes and motifs from a number of genre sources. Among these was what is likely the first space opera as readers would recognize the genre, The Skylark of Space by E. E. "Doc" Smith, published in Amazing Stories in 1928.

There are a number of earlier stories which can lay claim to being space operas, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ highly influential Barsoom series, featuring his famous hero John Carter of Mars. But E.E. Smith introduced something different with Skylark: true interstellar travel and space ships combined with adventures on other planets. He continued this trend with his influential Lensman series of stories.

He also introduced mediocre writing and poor science, with the space engine at the center of his Skylark adventures powered by copper which is magically transformed when connected to an unknown “element X.” But if the heart of the ship’s space drive made no sense, the heart of the story resonated with readers. They ate it up.

As did other authors, who began playing in the space opera sandbox of stars, mixing romance with the clash of civilizations and interstellar drama and action. Authors such as Leigh Brackett (known as the “Queen of Space Opera”) and C. L. Moore filled the pulp magazines with these exciting stories.  As did A. E. van Vogt, who published the well-known novel The World of Null-A. Even Isaac Asimov space opera’ed away with his extremely influential Foundation series. These space operas and many more set the stage for the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

But space operas didn’t only exist as written stories. The genre has long been a multi-media spectacle, with the Flash Gordon comic strip and movie serials exposing generations of kids and adults to rocket ships and lasers. Even George Lucas was a fan. Before making Star Wars, Lucas evidently tried to adapt to the big screen the Flash Gordon comics strip and serials but couldn’t secure the rights. As recounted by Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola, who went with Lucas to try purchasing the rights, Lucas was very depressed at losing out on the Flash Gordon space opera before declaring, “Well, I'll just invent my own.”

And he did.

In the 1960s and ’70s space operas fell out of fashion in the written science fiction genre, possibly as a result of the New Wave movement and other SF trends. Not that space opera vanished. Instead, the genre was merely biding its time, with novels by Poul Anderson, C. J. Cherryh, Gordon R. Dickson and others still captivating readers.

Then Star Wars showed the world how much people loved space opera, and a new group of authors like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, and many more started creating what’s called New Space Opera. From there even newer authors have run with the genre in totally unique directions, such as Ann Leckie with her Hugo and Nebula winning Ancillary Justice series and Jack Campbell with his Lost Fleet series.

It’s fitting that at the end of her life the Queen of Space Opera Leigh Brackett wrote the early script for The Empire Strikes Back. While there’s debate about how many of Brackett’s words and creations remain in that Star Wars sequel, I like to believe her spirit — and the spirit of the worlds she created through her stories — gave the film its heart and soul.

And that heart and soul is why people respond to space operas. We know the stories are melodramatic and unrealistic. We know the special effects are there to dazzle us, be they effects on the big screen or mentally created by words on a page. But that doesn’t matter. Space opera stories are fun and exciting and resonate with the deep urge inside humanity to see what exists beyond the horizon. Or in the case of space operas, beyond the next world or galaxy.

Last year my family saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Yes, the film is a copy of the original Star Wars: A New Hope. Yes, the story makes a pointed effort to manipulate the emotions while also dishing up big steaming helpings of nostalgia for the original film.

But I don’t care. My entire family enjoyed the movie. I’m particularly pleased that my youngest son loved it. Up to this point he'd refused to watch most of the older Star Wars films, saying the series was silly, cliched and out of date.

Yet he embraced the new film and has already seen it twice.

Each new generation finds their own space operas. That’s another thing I love about these stories.
 

Note: This essay was originally published in the Czech SF/F magazine XB-1.

What happens when the science fiction worldview goes universal?

The title of American author Thomas Wolfe’s famous posthumous novel might be You Can’t Go Home Again, but most authors do go home over and over during their lifetimes. When I visit relatives in my home state of Alabama I am always asked how my writing career is going, where my upcoming stories will be published, and what new stories I’m working on.

But while my relatives are thrilled at my literary success, the funny thing is few of them actually read my stories.

One relative even told me she can’t read science fiction stories. While she reads lots of fiction and particularly enjoys the mystery genre, science fiction doesn’t make sense to her. She can’t read SF stories because she literally doesn’t understand the world creation and themes and ideas which support the genre.

When my relative first told me this, I couldn’t believe it. After all, science fiction is everywhere in today’s world, from TV to films to video games. Even technology fashions such as smartphones and tablets and wearable tech are influenced by science fiction. How could someone not understand the underlying themes and motifs of the SF genre?

But then I read an essay by genre author and critic Shaun Duke and understood why my aunt doesn’t read SF. In this essay Shaun suggested people consider science fiction as one of the “supergenres” alongside realistic fiction and anti-realistic fiction, underneath of which would then exist the traditional genres of historical novels, crime stories, romances, fantasies, mysteries, and so on.

As Shaun said, “These supergenres would not necessarily define the genres beneath them, but they would suggest a relationship between genres that moves beyond narrative practice, but never quite leaves it behind. A fantasy novel might be as much historical as it is anti-realist; the former is a narrative practice, while the latter is a conceptual ‘game.’“

Shaun makes some fascinating points in his essay. However, I wonder if Shaun didn’t take his thought experiment far enough. Perhaps instead of even speaking of science fiction as a genre or supergenre, we should instead speak of SF and other established genres as viewpoints toward seeing the world.

After all, fiction itself is a worldview, a way of saying that certain types of stories have not truly happened and likely will never happen. The “fiction” worldview allows people to approach fictional stories with a different frame of mind than the viewpoints we have when approaching historical texts, or memoirs, or poetry, or even real life. And within the viewpoint of fiction rest more individualized views of what fiction can accomplish. These individualized viewpoints—our traditional genres like fantasy, horror, romance and so on—essential set up people to understand what they’re about to experience.

Just as the human mind must learn to interpret the sensory inputs we receive from our eyes and ears—allowing us to know that this image we’re seeing is a tree and that buzzing sound a bee—so too must people learn to understand the fictional stories they experience. Hence the existence of genres, which help people understand the fictional motifs and themes and beliefs they're about to encounter.

Now before people attack this theory of mine, let me state that I also understand there’s more to genre than merely worldview—in our current 21st century world there’s also a marketing aspect to genres which publishers and authors use to sell books, along with social communities of readers connected with each genre. However, I think this worldview theory is still a useful way to understand part of why genres exist.

And if it’s true that genre should in part be understood as a literary viewpoint, this would also help explain why my relative is unable to read science fiction. Her worldview—the way she sees the universe and her place in it—does not encompass a science fiction spin on reality. To her, SF is literally outside the realm of things she’s willing to accept as being part of existence.

The good news for the science fiction worldview is that growing numbers of people are both accepting it and seeing the world through SF eyes. We live in a time of vast technological and societal change, where humanity’s old assumptions and cultural norms are being forced to adapt to new circumstances at a dizzying speed. It’s no wonder science fiction films and TV shows and video games and manga are so popular.

But this also raises the question of what happens to the SF literary genre when the science fiction worldview becomes so ubiquitous.

Most people approach SF these days through mediums other than the written word. And while science fiction may be popular in visual mediums like films, fewer people than ever are actually reading SF literature, meaning that those who still read SF are trending older and older. This is the exact opposite of other literary genres like fantasy and horror.

At a recent convention I asked a well-known author why he thought written fantasy had eclipsed the science fiction genre in recent years. This author (whom I can’t name because it was a private conversation) said that “Unlike with the fantasy genre, science fiction is still trying to discover what it wants to say.”

But what if the problem with SF isn’t that it doesn’t know what to say to 21st century audiences, although I believe that is part of the problem. What if the worldview of science fiction, centered around technological change and futurism and humanity’s place in the universe, no longer strikes many people as being unique to the genre because this worldview has become common among a sizable portion of humanity.

In short, what if SF’s worldview is now the defacto worldview of so many people that the literary genre itself seems rather tame and boring?

I don’t know if this is true, but it’s what I’m contemplating these days as I write my stories. But if there’s any truth in this, for science fiction literature to again become relevant then how our genre views the world—and our genre’s place in our fictional understandings of life—must change.

Note: This essay was originally published as one of my monthly columns in the Czech SF/F magazine XB-1.

Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka

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What do you get if Philip K. Dick worked a crap job at Walmart while simultaneously being treated for mental illness and talking to interdimensional beings? You'd get the year's best debut SF novel, Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka.

Stay Crazy is the story of Emmeline, a young woman with paranoid schizophrenia who works a dead-end job at Savertown USA, the cost-cutting big box store which sucks the soul out of everything it touches. Emmeline sees her job as a step toward getting her life back together after a recent mental breakdown. But when a strange being from another dimension begins talking to Emmeline through the RFID chips in the store's merchandise — warning of a pending global apocalypse — she must find a way to both save the world while not suffering another breakdown.

Stay Crazy mixes a fast-paced science fiction plot with deft social criticism, characters you'll love, and laugh-out-loud humor. The novel is also an excellent exploration of neurodiversity and how there are multiple ways to see both your own life and the world around us.

I highly recommend people read this novel, which is the best debut novel I've read this year. Erica Satifka is a highly talented writer which a rich imagination and I look forward to reading her next novel.

My World Fantasy Convention schedule and info

I'm attending the World Fantasy Convention from October 27 to 30 in Columbus, Ohio. I'm both covering the convention for the media like I did at Worldcon (follow me at @jasonsanford to see my coverage) and taking part in two panels.

I'll also be giving away signed limited edition copies of my novelette "Blood Grains Speak Through Memories," published earlier this year by Beneath Ceaseless Skies. If you see me feel free to ask for one.

My panels:

Friday at 1 pm, DELAWARE CD
Fantasy Emerging from Crisis. Are there trends in fiction that can be tied to global crises? E.g., certain kinds of fantasy emerged from the instability that led up to WWI. The Lord of the Rings is a clear response to the Great War. Are there directions we can anticipate with near-future environmental conflicts (water wars), destabilizing natural disasters, rising seas, income inequality issues, etc. perhaps leading to more political works (especially considering the popularity of Game of Thrones)? 9/11 produced Lavie Tidhar’s World Fantasy Award winning Osama and also inspired stories by Lucius Shepard, Richard Bowes, Jack Ketchum, and others. Fantasy inevitably arises from the zeitgeist. It can also come right out of the headlines. Chris Phillips, Jason Sanford (m), Gary K. Wolfe, Chrisopher Husberg, Caroline Yoachim

Saturday at 9 pm, DELAWARE CD
Strange Drugs. Opium and the like have always had a romantic allure. How about imaginary drugs? Alice in Wonderland? Clark Ashton Smith? How does the fantasy pharmacopeia differ from the real thing? What kind of drug do you take to see into the future or enter another world? Brady McReynolds, Jason Sanford, Anya Martin, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, E.J. Stevens (m)

I considered not attending this year's con because of all the controversy surrounding World Fantasy. However, the con is local to me and I already had a ticket. More importantly, the convention also responded to criticism by vastly improving their program. And, as always, the main attraction of any con is seeing all the people I like and admire in the genre community.

So we'll see how the con goes. And I'm definitely looking forward to seeing everyone.

Disturbed by Lovecraft, whose racism and hate weren't merely a product of his times

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Note: I write a monthly column for the Czech SF/F magazine XB-1. The magazine's October 2016 issue is a special horror-themed edition and I was asked to write about the problematic heritage of H. P. Lovecraft. Which I did. The column caused a bit of controversy when it was published, with a few readers saying Lovecraft wasn't racist or was merely a product of his racist times. Below is the English version of the column in this month's XB-1 along with a follow-up response I wrote, which was published on the magazine's website.
 

Disturbed by Lovecraft

In the “foreweird” to the acclaimed anthology The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Moorcock writes “the appeal of the weird story is precisely that it is designed to disturb.”

Perhaps no 20th century writer has disturbed more people than H.P. Lovecraft. While Lovecraft was relatively unknown when he passed away in 1937, his body of work — including the stories which formed the basis of the "Cthulhu Mythos" — lived on, as did the works of the Lovecraft Circle, a group of writers published in the seminal magazine Weird Tales with whom Lovecraft regularly exchanged letters. These writers used aspects of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories in their own works, keeping Lovecraft’s themes and ideas going.

One of these authors, August Derleth, even founded the publisher Arkham House expressly to keep Lovecraft in print. Derleth also wrote many stories in Lovecraft’s universe, even — controversially — using Lovecraft’s notes to create new stories, which Derleth then listed as being co-authored by himself and Lovecraft.

But more on other authors writing Lovecraftian fiction in a moment.

You may have noticed I’m not bringing up the themes and elements of Lovecraft’s fiction. The reason for this is there’s little need. Not only have far better writers than myself examined and critiqued Lovecraft’s fiction, the mythos behind his stories have arguably become more famous than his fiction itself. The entire world has embraced Lovecraft’s view of “cosmic horror” complete with tentacled elder gods and powerless humans and the wrath of an evil universe. These themes have become so well-known they’re almost cliches.

As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer wrote about Lovecraft in The Weird, he “believed that life is ultimately incomprehensible to human beings and the universe is a cold, hostile place.” This Lovecraftian worldview has permeated far and wide into the greater culture, just as the paranoid worldview of another famous genre author — Philip K. Dick — has likewise spread far and wide.

People who haven’t read Dick’s stories still know his worldview, even if they don’t know his name. The same with Lovecraft.

And Lovecraft’s reputation is intimately bound with stories created by other writers. As I mentioned, fellow Weird Tales authors wrote stories using Lovecraft’s tropes and mythos, a trend continued by even more writers after his death. Today the list of authors who both write Lovecraftian stories or have been influenced by Lovecraft read like a who’s who of horror and dark fantasy and includes China Miéville, Clive Barker, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, Gemma Files, Laird Barron, Storm Constantine, and many more. In addition, Lovecraft has also had a major influence on the visual storytelling mediums, from video games to films like Alien and Ghostbusters, both of which contain major Lovecraftian elements.

But despite this acclaim, Lovecraft has also never been more controversial.

Part of this controversy is because Lovecraft was not a great literary wordsmith — as proof, read his story "The Cats of Ulthar," which is more an idea of a story, a summary of a story, than a true story with fleshed-out characters, developed plot, and rising and falling action.

Yet the larger reason Lovecraft is so controversial has little to do with his storytelling manner. Instead, it’s the beliefs which formed the core of his own self and permeated into his writings. You see, Lovecraft was a hardcore racist and antisemite. Meaning he would have implicitly rejected many of the authors who have carried on the tradition of his stories, or authors who received the World Fantasy Award with his likeness on the award statue, such as Nnedi Okorafor.

And no, Lovecraft wasn’t merely reflecting the racism and hatred of his times. Some of his contemporaries were extremely disturbed by his racism and pointed out the issue to him, to no avail.

It is difficult to separate Lovecraft’s racism from his stories. For example, “The Horror at Red Hook" is both one of Lovecraft’s most well-known stories and one of his most racist, with Lovecraft describing Aryan civilization as being all that stands against the “primitive half-ape savagery” of lesser races.

This aspect of Lovecraft’s writing makes him a difficult author to totally embrace in this day and age. Author Victor LaValle grew up reading and loving Lovecraft’s tales even as he was appalled at the racism in Lovecraft’s life and stories. In response, LaValle wrote his powerful 2016 novella The Ballad Of Black Tom, which directly deals with all these issues even as it works the “The Horror at Red Hook” into something totally new, re-imagining the story and the Lovecraftian mythos so they’re seen through the eyes of a black man in 1920’s America.

Some Lovecraft fans complain about such re-examinations of Lovecraft’s racism, believing it is an attempt to remove Lovecraft from his place in the genre he helped build. But this view is nonsense. Lovecraft's influence on dark fantasy and horror isn't going to disappear merely because people are aware of the troubling aspects of his life and writing.

No, Lovecraft's legacy is secure because of all the authors and creators who took his ideas and ran with them. Most people are able to appreciate Lovecraft's influence on horror and dark fantasy while also acknowledging the negative aspects of his life and work.

You can see this dual attitude clearly in Nick Mamatas’ new novel I Am Providence, which is a murder-horror mystery set at a Lovecraft literary convention. In the novel Mamatas has one of his characters sum up Lovecraft’s influence as follows:

“What Lovecraft did do, better than anyone, was radically decenter the human experience from the art of fiction. Critics, or people who just don’t ‘get it,’ complain that Lovecraft’s characters are paper-thin cyphers who faint at the slightest hint of cosmic horror lurking in the ink-black sky. Correct, but that is a thematic strength, not an auctorial weakness. We are alone in an infinite universe, or so far from anyone else out there that it hardly matters. If we were to encounter alien life-forms … they might destroy us, accidentally or from an ethic of pure malevolence.”

I believe that quote sums of why Lovecraft’s vision still holds such power. And before anyone thinks Mamatas is fawning over Lovecraft, his novel also rips Lovecraft apart for the moral failings of his life.

Stories embracing Lovecraft's universe while also critiquing Lovecraft's views are how it goes these days, and that’s not a bad thing.

END OF XB-1 COLUMN

Response to those who say Lovecraft merely reflected the racism and hatred of his times

H.P. Lovecraft lived in what has been called the nadir of American race relations. Because of this many people attempt to excuse Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism as merely being a product of his time.

However, Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism went far beyond the norm even of those horrific times. And as times changed, Lovecraft didn’t change with them, instead sticking firmly to his racism and anti-Semitism.

Lovecraft’s hateful views were a major concern of his wife Sonia Greene, who was Jewish. Sonia was extremely disturbed by Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism and repeatedly raised this issue with Lovecraft, as related in this Wired article which states “Greene told a biographer later that she kept reminding Lovecraft about her own background, but it didn’t seem to dissuade him from his fear of Jews and other immigrants.”

Sonia even once confronted Lovecraft on how she was a member of a group he despised, to which he responded by saying she “no longer belonged to these mongrels.”

Despite Sonia repeatedly raising these issues with Lovecraft, she later wrote, “Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.”

It’s likely even Lovecraft knew his views were not the standard racism and hate of his day. Otherwise, why would he have worked so hard to defend his views? An example of this is related in S.T. Joshi's A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft and his Time. Joshi describes how Charles D. Isaacson wrote an essay on racial tolerance which also attacked the film Birth of a Nation for inciting “racial hatred.” In response Lovecraft wrote that “Mr. Isaacson’s views on racial prejudice … are too subjective to be impartial.”

Isaacson responded with an essay attacking Lovecraft, saying that the author “is against tolerance of color, creed and equality, upholds race prejudice…”

The year this exchange took place? 1915. Even that long ago people were willing to call out Lovecraft for his racism.

Lovecraft’s friend Wilfred Branch Talman also noted Lovecraft’s racism, although unlike with the Isaacson exchange Talman merely dismissed Lovecraft’s “racist viewpoint” as being part of the bizarre 18th century aristocratic pose Lovecraft affected. But the fact that Talman even noticed Lovecraft’s racism during one of the most racist times in American history speaks volumes about how bad Lovecraft’s views were.

The idea that Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism wasn’t merely a product of his times is also taken up by many of the people who have studied the author’s works in recent years. For example, in the intro to The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, editor Paula Guran writes “Lovecraft’s prejudice seems, at the very least, somewhat more pronounced than many of his contemporaries.”

Guran’s view is echoed by China Miéville in his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition by H.P. Lovecraft, where Miéville writes “Two things are sometimes adduced to excuse (Lovecraft). One is that it was 'the time' — people were just 'like that' back then. This is an unacceptable condescension to history: people were emphatically not all like that.”

As I stated in my original XB-1 essay, despite Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism his legacy is secure because of the many authors and creators who have taken his ideas and run with them. In addition, most people are able to appreciate Lovecraft's influence on horror and dark fantasy while also acknowledging the negative aspects of his life and work.

But none of that means we should ignore or excuse his racism and hate.