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Introduction: If This Goes On
- Wesleyan University Press
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Introduction If This Goes On Gerry canavan And it is now that our two paths cross. Both simultaneously recognise his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian. He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his Scorpion’s mouth. He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like to see him removed to some other planet. W. H. Auden, “Vespers” (Part 5 of Horae Canonicae) Borrowing his categories from Auden, Samuel R. Delany has written that two ideological positions are available to us in modernity, each one carrying either a positive or a negative charge. One can imagine oneself to be the citizen of a marvelous New Jerusalem, the “technological super city where everything is clean, and all problems have been solved by the beneficent application of science ”—or else one can be a partisan of Arcadia, “that wonderful place where everyone eats natural foods and no machine larger than one person can fix in an hour is allowed in. Throughout Arcadia the breezes blow, the rains are gentle, the birds sing, and the brooks gurgle.” Each position in turn implies its dark opposite. The flip side of the Good City is the Bad City, the Brave New World, where fascist bureaucrats have crushed the soul of the human, machines have replaced work and love, and smog blocks out the stars; the other side of the Edenic Good Country is the Land of the Flies, where the nostalgic reverie of an imagined rural past is replaced instead by a reversal of progress and an unhappy return to the nightmare of history: floods, wars, famine, disease, superstition, rape, murder, death.1 These loyalties shape our political and aesthetic judgments. The person whose 2 I ntro du c tI o n temperament draws her to the New Jerusalem, Delany goes on to say, will tend to see every Arcadia as a Land of the Flies, while the person who longs for Arcadia will see in every city street and every shiny new gadget the nascent seeds of a Brave New World. What seems at first to be a purely spatial matter (in what sort of place would you rather live?) turns out in this way to be as much about temporality and political projection (what sort of world are we making for ourselves?). Delany’s four categories imply speculation about the kind of future we are building and what life will be like for us when it arrives. In this respect Delany’s schema is of a piece with the dialectic between “thrill and dread,” between utopia and apocalypse, that Marshall Berman says in All That Is Solid Melts into Air defines “modernity” as such: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”2 Though Berman pays little attention to the emergence of SF in that work, his description of modernity as the knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse nevertheless usefully doubles as a succinct description for virtually every SF narrative ever conceived. And little wonder: SF emerges as a recognizable cultural genre out of the same conditions of technological modernity that generated literary and artistic modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the ecstatic techno-optimistic anticipation of Amazing Stories founder Hugo Gernsback matched always by the unending cavalcade of disaster, catastrophe, and out-and-out apocalypse that Everett and Richard F. Bleiler, in their massive index to the SF of the period, group under the single evocative heading “Things Go Wrong.”3 Indeed, the persistence (and continued popularity) of SF into the contemporary moment can perhaps be thought of as the last, vital vestige of the original modernist project: from dazzling architectural cityscapes and off-world colonies to superweapons run amuck and catastrophic climate change, from Marinetti’s worship of progress, technology, and speed to Kafka’s deep and abiding suspicion of the project of modernity as such, SF extends the overawing directive to “make it new” to the farthest reaches of time and space. Delany argues that the dialectics between city and country and between utopia and apocalypse that generate our New Jerusalems, Arcadias, Brave New Worlds, and Lands of the Flies are crucially operative in basically all SF. Thus the pastoral Arcadia of Wells’s Eloi in The Time Machine (1895) is...