Science fiction: Better clever than wise
I’m giving myself a little course in science fiction. I’ve read plenty of sci-fi. I even took a class on genre fiction in college called “Monsters, Aliens & Cyborgs: Encounters with the Other,” but I wanted to come back to a thoughtful study of the genre now that I have some age and experience.
The first book is War with the Newts by Czech author Karl Capek, probably most famous for inventing the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R. War with the Newts is excellent. It’s acerbic. It’s incisive. It rakes absolutely everyone over the coals. While there is a definite flow to the narrative and some of the characters do occasionally reappear, there is not a protagonist in the classic sense. Each chapter is a slice or vignette that illustrates in one episode some part of the larger story of man’s encounter with the newts. Each chapter also has a different format; some are straightforwardly narrative; others read like transcripts; one of the chapters has copious footnotes; newspaper articles are quoted at length; and the last chapter is the author talking to himself. As such, it’s very much a book that would have bored me as a younger man, and I’m glad I came to it later.
It is recognizably science fiction, but as is usually the case with early works in any genre, it reads more like the literature of the period than anything we’re used to calling sci-fi. It lacks the hallmarks and tropes that came to define the genre in the post-war era, which to a modern reader makes it seem like a refreshing departure. In fact, it’s more satire than science fiction. It just happens to use the fantastic Other as a foil: We’re never given the point of view of the newts. This is a book about man — not individual people, but us as a species — and Capek does a deft job of making his characters just silly enough that we can recognize them as such without delving into outright comedy. It’s so artful that I have to despair a little!
I got the impression that’s what del Toro was going for with the characters in The Shape of Water. Both are ostensibly stories about mankind’s first encounter with a lost species of intelligent, bipedal amphibian. Both are critical. Unlike Capek, del Toro approaches from the direction of the monster film and tries to elevate it — The Creature From the Black Lagoon as light erotica, which is popular now. I so wanted to rattle off Chuck Tingle-style titles as I watched it last night — Alien Sex Slaves of Area 51, Pounded in the Snatch by a Fishman God — but the other people in the room wouldn’t have got the joke.
Such imagery has a long history in art. It’s used effectively in works like Hokusai’s “Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” for example. The problem for me with the film, and the probable reason for its popularity, is that it’s basically erotic fan fiction and not much more. Rather than being a mechanism of insight, all of the characters remain in a state of perpetual adolescent ambivalence, where on the one hand they want to be fully human, to be welcomed by the human community, but on the other, they also want to stay in their room and be the monster. Neither Giles nor Zelda come to terms with their situations. Indeed, the very final scene is Elisa in a rapturous orgasm of ambivalence in the canal.
Contrast that to Naked Lunch or Dead Poet’s Society, movies that tackle similar themes but whose characters are ultimately forced to step out of adolescent ambivalence and face the terror of adulthood, with its promise of tragedy or redemption.
I suspect The Shape of Water will feel very dated in 80 years, whereas War with the Newts, at 82 years old, still has something important to say. It’s a good jumping off point for my little self-directed course because it functions as literature first. I hesitate to call it a “bridge” because that makes it seem like the author had some insight into what was going to happen over the 20 years after the book’s publication (1936), which of course he didn’t. War with the Newts is not “proto-Asimov.” It stands entirely on its own.
In fact, despite being similar in form and structure to Foundation, in many ways, War with the Newts is a lot sharper than Asimov. In Foundation, the nature of humanity is a kind of mathematical given. It’s not something to be lived. It’s something to be held at arm’s length, studied and dissected and ultimately manipulated away. Foundation is 1950s-era Behavioralism’s wet dream.
That shift in focus between the two books is important. Science fiction ultimately has more concern for ideas than the human condition. It doesn’t preclude it. Science fiction can have heart, but there’s definitely a sense that when writing science fiction, it’s better to be clever than wise.
cover image by Kristina Collantes
