135 lines
9.1 KiB
Plaintext
135 lines
9.1 KiB
Plaintext
Rudyard Kipling Invented SF!
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<p>Ever had a moment when somebody else drops an insight on you, and you feel<br />
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totally stupid because you had all the facts and all the motivation to generate<br />
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it yourself, it was about something you’re expert at, but you<br />
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just…didn’t…see…it? And you should have, and you’re damn annoyed with<br />
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yourself for missing it?</p>
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<p><span id="more-234"></span></p>
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<p>This happened to me recently. I gave permission for the newletter<br />
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of the <a href='http://www.lfs.org/awards.htm'>Libertarian Futurist<br />
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Society</a> to print my essay <a href='http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sf-history.html'>A Political<br />
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History of SF</a> In it, I wrote:</p>
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<blockquote><p>
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Heinlein was the first of Campbell’s discoveries and, in the end, the<br />
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greatest. It was Heinlein who invented the technique of description by<br />
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indirection — the art of describing his future worlds not<br />
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through lumps of exposition but by presenting it through the eyes of<br />
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his characters, subtly leading the reader to fill in by deduction<br />
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large swathes of background that a lesser author would have drawn in<br />
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detail.
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>This is pretty much the standard account by historians of the<br />
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field. One William H. Stoddard wrote the newsletter editor as<br />
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follows. He agrees that Heinlein introduced indirect exposition into<br />
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SF, but observes:</p>
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<blockquote><p>
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In fact, that technique had already been used, several decades<br />
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before, in Rudyard Kipling’s two science fiction stories, “With the<br />
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Night Mail” and “As Easy as A.B.C.”
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>Mr. Stoddard goes on to note that Heinlein wrote a number<br />
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of Kipling tributes into his own work, most notably in the early scenes of<br />
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<cite>Citizen of the Galaxy</cite> (1957), and to speculate plausibly on<br />
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Kipling’s influence on Heinlein.</p>
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<p>This is the point at which I slapped my forehead and swore. For,<br />
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indeed, I know <cite>With the Night Mail</cite> well, have reread it<br />
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many times, and have described it to friends as an important work of<br />
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early proto-SF. I had noticed before that the story prefigures modern<br />
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Campbellian and hard SF very exactly in its concerns, its narrative<br />
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tone, and its management of information about the imagined future.<br />
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And that it could have been written by Heinlein if he had been more than<br />
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a child of five in that year; I <em>knew</em> this. But….grrr….I<br />
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missed the implications.</p>
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<p>You see, I had a perspective problem; my eyes were too modern. I<br />
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am so used to reading the idiom of hard SF in our time that until<br />
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William Stoddard pointed it out, I was unable to see quite how unique<br />
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and pathbreaking <cite>With the Night Mail</cite> had been in its<br />
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time. Once Stoddard woke me up to this point, I immediately realized<br />
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that the story was not, as I had previously thought, merely a sort of<br />
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historical curio thrown off on the way to modern genre SF, but almost<br />
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certainly one of the key steps without which modern genre SF as we<br />
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know it would never have existed!</p>
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<p>In researching the matter, I discovered an excellent essay by<br />
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long-time fan Fred Lerner, <a href='http://www.kipling.org.uk/facts_scifi.htm'>A Master of our Art:<br />
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Rudyard Kipling considered as a Science Fiction writer</a> which<br />
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develops this case in detail. Again, little in it was factually new<br />
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to me; the biggest surprise is the report that John W. Campbell<br />
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regarded Kipling as “the first modern science fiction writer”. But<br />
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Lerner draws together well-known facts into a new shape, arguing<br />
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effectively that both Campbell (the theorist of modern SF) and<br />
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Heinlein (its first great practitioner) both saw themselves as<br />
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explorers in a direction first set by Rudyard Kipling.</p>
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<p>Having considered the matter, I think the sharpest insight in<br />
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Lerner’s essay is his proposition that Kipling invented the technique<br />
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of exposition by indirection while writing his India stories; and that<br />
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it is in <em>Kim</em> (1901) — that great, warm, wonderful,<br />
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sprawling, picaresque novel of the Raj and the Great Game — that<br />
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the technique found expression in a form barely distinguishable from the SFnal<br />
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use Heinlein and those who followed him would put it to forty years<br />
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later. As Lerner himself puts it:</p>
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<blockquote><p>
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Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian<br />
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readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British<br />
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India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and<br />
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American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough<br />
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information for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest<br />
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stories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved<br />
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more subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright<br />
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exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled<br />
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through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other<br />
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stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that<br />
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characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it<br />
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gets the message across subliminally.
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>The point to keep bearing in mind (one that I think Lerner doesn’t<br />
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emphasize enough) is that this <em>had never been done before</em>.<br />
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There is no such subtlety in the contemporary proto-SF of H.G. Wells<br />
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(mostly between 1894 and 1907) and Jules Verne (between 1863 and<br />
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1905). These authors rely on expository lumps almost as heavily as<br />
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did pre-Campbellian genre SF in the 1910s and 1920s — and for<br />
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precisely that reason, they seem far more dated than <cite>Kim</cite><br />
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or <cite>With the Night Mail</cite> do to an SF fan reading today.</p>
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<p>My title exaggerates a little; Kipling did not single-handedly<br />
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invent modern SF. But I think we may safely credit him with inventing<br />
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the style of exposition that was to become modern SF’s most important<br />
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device for managing and conveying information about imaginary futures<br />
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and otherwheres. In doing so, he exerted an influence on the style, tone,<br />
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and even content of SF that remains pervasive.</p>
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<p>Once we understand this, there are some apparently accidental<br />
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features of the genre that make a great deal more sense. One is the<br />
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degree to which SF and SF-influenced fantasy, essentially alone among<br />
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modern genres, carry forward a tradition of high-quality<br />
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moral-didactic children’s fiction that can be read with pleasure by<br />
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adults. Robert Heinlein’s juveniles and even J.K. Rowling’s<br />
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<cite>Harry Potter</cite> sequence are not just coincidentally like<br />
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the Kipling of <cite>Kim</cite><cite>, </cite><cite>Stalky & Co.</cite> and<br />
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<cite>The Jungle Book</cite> — they are organically derived from<br />
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his work through the technique of indirect exposition.</p>
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<p>Another is the persistence of military SF. The similarity between<br />
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Kipling’s prose and verse about the North-West Frontier and genre SF’s<br />
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frequent celebrations of the military ethos in exotic surroundings is<br />
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hardly accidental either. These stories too, are all about indirect<br />
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exposition — immersing the reader in a strange and challenging<br />
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environment, not by telling but by showing. As I have discussed <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=47'>elsewhere</a>, military SF tends<br />
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to have as important subtext an examination of the soldier’s proper<br />
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relationship to his society — much as do Kipling’s barrack-room<br />
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ballads.</p>
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<p>Lurking behind both these features is SF’s abiding concern with<br />
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morality, right living, and humans’ place in the cosmos. Now of course<br />
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all literature touches these concerns; but part of the SF tradition is<br />
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a tendency to do so in ways that emphasize politics and psychology<br />
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rather less, and the inexorableness of natural law rather more.</p>
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<p>The archetypal example of this emphasis is Tom Godwin’s classic<br />
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<cite>The Cold Equations</cite> (1954), in which an innocent and likeable<br />
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girl stows away on a spaceship and must die — must, in fact, be<br />
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killed — because she overstrains the capacity of<br />
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the vessel, which is delivering supplies vitally needed to prevent<br />
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mass death.</p>
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<p>What is this, really, but Rudyard Kipling’s <a href='http://godscopybook.blogs.com/poem.html'>Gods of the Copybook<br />
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Headings</a> (1916) in the idiom of the Space Age? Perhaps Kipling’s<br />
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most lasting legacy in the <em>content</em> of SF is his insistence<br />
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(one expressed hardly ever, if at all, in literary genres other than<br />
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SF) that human feeling and social construction cannot override natural<br />
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law; that a tough-minded grasp of the way the universe actually works<br />
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is both possible and necessary.</p>
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