Breaking Out of the Sf Box: Recent Studies of James Blish and Ursula K. Le Guin

BREAKINGOUT OF THE SF BOX: RECENTSTUDIESOF JAMESBLISH AND URSULA K. LE GUIN NicholasRuddick David Ketterer. Imprisonedin a Tesseract:The Life and WorkofJamesBlish. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1987.xvi + 410 pp. Illus. Bernard Selinger. Le Guin and Identityin Contemporary Fiction.Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. xii + 183 pp. In Robert Heinlein's story "--And He Built a Crooked House--," a group of Californians explore a real-estate developer's dream-come-true, an eightroom hypercuboid structure that occupies only as much space as one ordinary room. This is the tesseract of Ketterer's title: a four-dimensional analogue of a cube. The tesseract is a topological metaphor for science fiction itself, a place that seems to offer a heady freedom inaccessible to dwellers in the three-dimensional world of the terrestrial, the mundane, the "mainstream." Tesseractwas a natural title for the 1936fanzine in which the fifteen-year-old James Blish published some of his earliest work.1 Yet, as in the Heinlein story, what seems to be a gateway to the new world can rapidly mutate into a prison. For Blish, as Ketterer reveals in this major new critical biography, science fiction itself became the box he felt he was trapped in. The fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin seems to have escaped the prison-house of generic categorization. Yet the portrait Bernard Selinger draws in his monograph is of an author hurling herself again and again at the wall of differancethat at once bounds and constitutes the world. Ketterer, of Concordia University, is one of the handful of Canadian scholars who have done significant work almost entirely within the field of science fiction. He attempts here to provide nothing less than "the first fullscale and complete treatment of a contemporary writer of science fiction" (xi). He isnot going as far out on a limb as it may seem: Blish died in 1975, and his papers are deposited with the Bodleian Library. The Bodleian is a big place; Ketterer's fellow-academics, secure that their obliviousness to James Blish is justified by his being a "sci-fi" writer, could hardly view this project as a hindrance to their own on the Stein Circle or the Silver Fork School. But if one must work on a "sci-fi"writer, whyBlish? 102 Nicholas Ruddick The answer is that Blish is interesting and important in a variety of ways to anyone with a mind not totally closed by generic prejudice. He wrote, Ketterer admits, far too much that was "as ephemeral and tawdry as most SF' (1). Yet this man with a "genuine faith" in transfinite mathematics (219) produced A Case of Conscience (1958), one of the finest of all modern fictional critiques of Christian theology, and a novel which Ketterer dissects with Jesuitical subtlety. He wrote Doctor Mirabilis (1964), a fictionalized biography of Roger Bacon, for which Ketterer makes a convincing case. This is a difficult, scholarly, and long-out-of-print work; its distinction is assured by its being rejected as unsalable by twenty-three American publishers before being taken on by Faber & Faber. He produced a number of outstanding short stories, among them "Surface Tension" (1952), a story about how microscopic men "seeded" on a new planet by humanity discover the macrocosm by breaking through the surface of the puddle which is all they know of the universe. Ketterer calls it a "classicembodiment of the model of conceptual break-through so central, both structurally and thematically, to the nature of SF' (63), and is particularly good on the sexual substrate of this theme. 2 "Common Time" (1953), a startling concretization of the implications of special relativity, he compares favorably with Kafka's "Metamorphosis" as an examination of an awakening to a transformed state. We also learn that Blish, a fertile coiner of neologisms (gas giant, pantropy, spindizzy), was a poet who published homages to Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams and James Joyce, "the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare" (Blish qtd. 283). At the same time he churned out radio plays, movie and TV scripts, sports and jungle stories (and one love story, "The Torrid Type") for the pulps, and eleven Star Trek collections, the last six of which were...