Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Volume 2

by Thomas D. Clareson (Editor)

Covering writers whose careers began in the 1950s, Volume II includes essays on J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Phillip José Farmer, Ursula LeGuin, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Mack Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, and Roger Zelazny.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

DISCLAIMER: My copy of *Voices For the Future* is a pretty plain white paperback without a Volume number. While my table of contents may have differed from the one in your copy, I will cover the individual essays individually so you can get a pretty quick idea of what was covered in the volume I read and what wasn't.

Anyways, I'm returning to Goodreads not to review my usual science fictional fare, but to review some criticism and analysis of science fiction, which is a side of the science fiction literature paradigm that I'd like to get more into throughout the next year or so. I write a lot of reviews here on Goodreads, but they're not written with the academic field in mind, and the kinds of things that more academic thinkers (like the ones collected here) pick up on and analyze are of a bit grander of a scale than my typical noticings, and I think it expands one's literary outlook to read material like this that sidesteps their normal thought processes. I was excited to read this and did feel a little let down by some of the pieces, but overall I'm glad I read this and would recommend this to you if you've read some of the big works of 30s-60s SF and are looking for some different takes on the material than your own...

JACK WILLIAMSON: I've read some of Williamson's more anthologized short fiction (most notably "With Folded Hands," the significant and enjoyable novella which got expanded into his boilerplate work *The Humanoids*), but the only novel of his that I've read was *The Stonehenge Gate*, which was his last novel and wasn't altogether very good. Hence, I didn't know what to expect going into his brief autobiographical piece "The Years of Wonder," but I actually liked it quite a bit. It went through his experiences submitting pieces to and writing for different magazines like Astounding and Science Wonder Stories, even though the whole time he hoped to make the Argosy (a quite esteemed magazine as far as slicks went). He recalls how Campbell inspired *The Humanoids* and provides a couple other anecdotes; this is the kind of thing that isn't particularly memorable in the normal sense but is the kind of historical material that keeps the things you want to know from the past alive. It was a worthy read for anyone who's read some of the pulp magazine SF.
There was an actual critical essay on Williamson called "The Comedy of Cosmic Evolution," but I had a fairly hard time relating to it. The writer - Alfred D. Stewart - hopped right into analyzing Williamson's debt to H. G. Wells, which (as a fan of Wells') I appreciated, and I found the breakdown between Wells' more pessimistic views on human technological progress and Williamsons' more hopeful predictions engaging. But when he gets into analyzing *The Humanoids* and *Bright New Universe*, Stewart kind of lost me; while his thoughts on Williamsons' use of the individualistic hero archetype were interesting, the piece as a whole felt a little herky jerky and somewhat unconvincing. It might just wind up being thanks to my unfamiliarity with the work covered, but I'm not convinced that there wasn't an authorial component to it...

OLAF STAPLEDON: Curtis C. Smith's "Olaf Stapledon's Dispassionate Objectivity" put this collection of essays back on the upswing for me. I read *Last and First Men* the other year and got quite a bit out of it, so I had a good idea of what Smith was talking about when he traced Stapledon's literary DNA back to Wells and all that. I think Smith does a little more with the Wells comparisons than Stewart when he looks at how Stapledon was an anti-Marxist leftist who stood against Wells' mechanical materialism.. After analyzing *Last and First Men* and juxtaposing its dispassionate narration with the first-person experience of *Star Maker*, Smith dives into Stapledon's explorations into supermen (*Odd John*, which was apparently once considered his most important work even though it sure isn't now, and *Sirius*) before closing out with thoughts on Stapledon's pseudo/post-Victorian mindset. This was a good piece and I enjoyed digging into an author I feel more comfortable discussing.

CLIFFORD D. SIMAK: Science fiction's ultimate pastural author gets a rundown in Clareson's own "The Inhabited Universe". It's pretty much a recap of his career from his short story apprenticeship of the 30s and early 40s through "Hunch," where he discovered his perennial themes of technological evolution changing us for the worst, which gets further explored through Clareon's breakdown of the benchmark fix-up novel *City*, which is sadly on my List of Shame (although I have read and enjoyed both *All Flesh is Grass* and *Why Sent Them Back From Heaven*, which were both enjoyable despite their shoddy endings). Most of the piece is just recaps of his short stories, but they do seem to be moving towards a point, and this is one of the better looks at an author's whole career. It does help show the difference between my kind of criticism and these folks' - if I was writing, I'd get into Simak's successes and failures as a plotter, at least - but it's good to get different opinions, right?

ASIMOV: Maxine Moore's "Asimov, Calvin, and Moses" should've been pretty engaging to me since I'd read a variety of Asimov's work (from the Robot novels to *Foundation* and an array of short fiction to *End of Eternity*), but I thought it was one of the blander entries here. Not against my taste like the Williamson one, just a little bland. Moore carries us through his three different kinds of stories in his universe, from the time-travel microverse (like *End of Eternity*), his Robot stories, and his Foundation universe, all through "The Last Question," which wraps up Asimov's perennial questions and his literary universe in one swoop. The recaps are relatively short and this is one of the shortest articles in here, but Moore does get in a few clever considerations about his penchant for wordplay or his body of work's unified goal of beating back entropy. Good, but nothing special.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN: I've read ten of his novels, an array of his short fiction, and even a semi-biography of his life (in Alec Nevada-Lee's *Astounding*, which you've probably heard of before and should definitely read if you're finding yourself on these kind of Goodreads pages), but David N. Samuelson still had a lot to explain to me in "The Frontier Worlds." It's a look through the three branches of Robert A. Heinlein's career, including his Future History of 1939/40s (where he turned out to be just the kind of author Campbell was looking for) and his juvenile novels. He doesn't agree with Alexei Panshin (who did a good deal of critical work about Heinlein which Samuelson seems largely derivative of) that his juveniles are his best, but he does rate ones that I like the most(such as *Tunnel in the Sky* and *Starship Troopers* (which started life as a juvenile even if it hasn't gone down that way) pretty highly. Interesting, we then have Heinlein's fantasies, which aren't just parts of the fantasy genre like *Glory Road* but explorations of Heinlein's fantasies, whether they're idealizing his brand of libertarianism (like in *Stranger in a Strange Land*) or one of Samualson's personal favorites, *Double Star*. He might not be the write guy to write an essay about Heinlein because he's overall not a huge fan of Heinlein - he finds his writing poor and likes to let us know - but he has some good points to say, and being the most thorough retrospective in the book, this is worth the read.

THEODORE STURGEON: Even though I've never read a Sturgeon novel (just some of the important shorts like "Microcosmic God" and the one about the gestalt that got expanded into *More Than Human*), Beverly Friend's "The Sturgeon Connection" was interesting. She uses two stories to illustrate her points: *More Than Human* to look into Sturgeon's thoughts on collective consciousness and "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" to further explore the realms of love and and sexuality that often pervaded his work, usually for the purpose of saving humanity or some crap like that. Sturgeon doesn't sound like the most thematically interesting writer based off that, but I'm excited to dig into some more of him when I get the chance since Friend has exposed me to some hidden depth that I never knew to look out for...

RAY BRADBURY: I don't like *Fahrenheit 451*. I find his skills more suited to things like *Dandelion Wine* or *Something Wicked This Way Comes.* I don't read him for his science fiction. And yet there are two essays about him here... 'tis the way of SF criticism. Willis E. McNelly's "Ray Bradbury - Past, Present, and Future" didn't do too much to expand my image of him because it dwelled on his contributions to the genre and how he contributed as much to literary fiction as he did to SF and all that usual stuff, but A. James Stupple's take seemed a bit more nuanced. He dove into how Bradbury was able to be nostalgic for the future and nostalgic for the past at the same time in an interesting paradigm which made Green Town, Illinois more than just an anecdote for his hometown. The future and the past rarely interact in fiction as sophisticatedly as they do through Bradbury. He does this by looking at *The Martian Chronicles*, *Dandelion Wine*, and *I Sing the Body Electric*. It expanded my view of him, and for that, I'm grateful.

HENRY KUTTNER, C. L. MOORE, LEWIS PADGETT et al: James Gunn, the only noteworthy SF writer to be writing in this essay, chose an interesting subject: a cataloging of the works of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore after they married, who wrote how much of which of their pennames' stories, and how they used different pseudonyms like Lewis Padgett to differentiate their stories when two or three of their works appeared in the same issue of, say, Astounding. These pen names evolved as time went on, and Gunn implies that the Padgett pseudonym became used for a certain kind of Moore story, which is interesting. Their prime seemed to be between 1942 and 1945, and their bibliographies during that time are laid out; there are summarization dalliances around the likes of "Vintage Season," but that's not the part that stuck out to me; it was the effective breakdown of an SF power couple that should be more widely recognized that got to me, and that'll probably get you too.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Our penultimate author ties with Heinlein as far as how much of him I've read; ten novels, one short story collection, and some other stories thrown around the ol' anthologies. "The Cosmic Loneliness"' author, Clareson once again, divides Clarke's work into a few different categories. He start with a look at *Childhood's End*, which is one of my personal favorite SF novels, and it was cool to hear Clareson set it against the backdrop of his work because I never realized just how different is was from the rest of his bibliography; all the other novels Clarke wrote were more or less about humanity expanding throughout the stars (except for *The Ghost in the Grand Bank*, a later, very minor novel that is barely worth mentioning), and *Childhood's End* shows humanity being actively prevented from exploring the stars. It's interesting, but so are Clareson's looks into *Prelude to Space* and "Lions of Comarre*, the latter of which I'd never even heard of! It was a good overview, owing some of Clarke's existence to the likes of Stapledon, and I enjoyed it.

KURT VONNEGUT: Finally, an author who I don't like much. The postmodern drivel (no matter how well done) of *Slaughterhouse Five* and the presumed drivel of *Sirens of Titan* (which I haven't actually read so I shouldn't judge) won't engage me, and neither will Thoams L. Wymer's dive into his "Swiftian Satire." I will admit that his comparisons of Vonnegut to Swift and other literary talents was good and gave his outlook a bit more dimension to me, but I was too far gone by the time this got interesting. It's not a bad piece, it's just... not one for me.

Overall, this was a bit of a mixed bag, but that's due as much to my biases as it is anything I'd objectively depend upon. I'll give it 7.5/10 because I think there are some real gems in here (like Williamson's essay and the overview of "Lewis Padgett") and think that some of my problems with certain pieces are because of the subjects covered. I have a similar volume which includes correspondence between authors that I'm looking forward to reading sometime, hopefully this year, and think I should dive into Aldiss' or Roberts' full histories of science fiction to help flesh out my background... before then, of course, I have to read some more science fiction. Stay tuned, and here's wishing your next critical exploration a fruitful one...