Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ Love’, Foundation, 6.

      11. Lester del Rey, The World of Science Fiction, New York, Garland Publishing, 1980.

      12. An instance is ‘The story’, a scatty review of BYS in Robert Conquest’s The Abomination of Moab, London, Maurice Temple Smith, 1979.

      13. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London, Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1981 (Routledge paperback 1990).

      14. Darko Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1979.

      15. In Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, ed. Harry Harrison, New York, Random House, 1973

      16. Leonard Woolf, ed., The Annotated Frankenstein, New York, Clarkson N. Potter Inc., 1977.

      17. David Ketterer, Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality, Victoria, BC, University of Victoria, 1979.

      18. David Ketterer, ‘Frankenstein in Wolf’s Clothing’, in Science Fiction Studies, 18, July 1979.

      19. For an impressive and up-to-date confirmation of Mary Shelley’s interest in science, see the long introduction by Marilyn Butler to her edition of Frankenstein, The 1818 Text, London, Pickering and Chatto, 1993.

      20. Studies by these three authors are: Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and Frankenstein, London, Gollancz, 1972; William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1986; and Mary K. Patterson Thornburg, The Monster in the Mirror: Gender and the Sentimental/Gothic Myth in Frankenstein, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Publications, 1987

      21. Discussed in ‘Since the Enlightenment’, in Brian Aldiss, This World and Nearer Ones, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.

      22. In Marshall Tymn, ed., The Science Fiction Reference Book, San Bernardino, CA, Borgo Press, 1981.

      23. James Gunn, Alternate Worlds, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1975

      24. James Gunn, The Road to Science Fiction, 4 volumes, New York, New English Library, Mentor, 1977-81.

      25. Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, London, Oxford University Press, 1977.

      26. New York, Bowker, 1976, Fourth Edition, 1995.

      27. London, Orbit, Second Edition, 1993. Editors, John Clute & Peter Nicholls.

      28. Samuel JR. Delany, ‘Reflections on Historical Models of Modem English Language Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 7, Pt. 2, July 1980, reprinted in Starboard Wine, 1984.

      Bibliography

      Betty T. Bennett, ed., The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins Press, 3 vols, 1980–1988.

      Betty T. Bennett & Charles E. Robinson, eds., The Mary Shelley Reader, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins Press (Softshell Books), 1990.

      Paula R. Feldman & Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds., The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2 vols, 1987.

      Robert Gittings & Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys 1798–1879, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.

      George Levine & U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds., The Endurance of ‘Frankenstein’. Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1979.

      Charles E. Robinson, ed., Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins Press (Softshell Books), 1990.

      Mary Shelley, New Introduction by Brian Aldiss, The Last Man, London, The Hogarth Press, 1985.

      William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys. The Biography of a Family, New York, W. W. Norton and Co., 1989.

      Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Fontwell, Centaur Press, 1970. Or as A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway & Denmark, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics, 1987.

      Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited with introduction and notes by Marilyn Butler, Frankenstein: or. The Modern Prometheus. The 1818 Text, London, William Pickering, 1993.

       STURGEON: THE CRUELTY OF THE GODS

      What a battering we took in those first years of reading science fiction! What a pounding and pummelling with the extraordinary, with the extravagant, with the extra-mural! What a sexless time we had of it in those big spaceships thundering through the American void towards planets where just to take one breath—well, I can remember when you simply opened the airlock door and sniffed to see that the air was okay … And if it wasn’t okay, obviously anything could happen, shape-changing being the least of it.

      The problems we faced on those planets! The awful creatures we encountered! Not that things were much better on Earth. Even before nuclear war was invented, ruined cities abounded. Plagues were always breaking out, ants were mutating, madmen gabbling strait-jacketed in mental wards proved to be sole possessors of the awful Truth about Earth …

      Sometimes, terrible new and ingenious threats were just round the corner, awaiting their moment to burst forth. A twisted millionaire with a power complex was breeding a new species, little creatures who could survive any manner of disaster he brought down on them. And the little creatures were planning to escape and strike back. As a boy, you could not help wondering, awed, what manner of man could dream up such a story. He must be a marvel. Why, there was magic even in his name—Theodore Sturgeon …

      There it was, perpetually cropping up attached to the stories I most admired. Sturgeon: quite an ordinary Anglo-American word among exotics like A. E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Heinlein, Simak and Kuttner. Yet—spiky, finny, odd. And it was not his original name. Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo, to the usual boring, undeserving parents. That was on Staten Island, the year the First World War ended.

      So there were two of him, as there are of many a good writer. A bright side, a dark side—much like our old SF image of Mercury, remember, so much more interesting than banal reality. He had a mercurial temperament.

      The bright side was the side everybody loved. There was something so damned nice, charming, open, empathic and elusive about Ted that women flocked to him. Men too. Maybe he was at the mercy of his own fey sexuality. If so, he was quizzical about it, as about everything. One of his more cutesy titles put it admirably: ‘If All Men Were Brothers, Would you Let One Marry Your Sister?’. Not if it was Sturgeon, said a too-witty friend.

      He played his guitar. He sang. He shone. He spoke of his philosophy of love. Ted honestly brought people happiness. If he was funny, it was a genuine humour which sprang from seeing the world aslant. A true SF talent. Everyone recognized his strange quality—’Faunlike’, some nut dubbed it; faunlike he certainly looked. Inexplicable, really.

      Unsympathetic father, unsatisfactory adolescence. Funny jobs, and ‘Ether Breather’ out in Astounding in 1939. So to an even funnier job, science fiction writer. СКАЧАТЬ