I am going to be teasing my listeners and viewers with a thesis in a few videos and podcasts. The first is up:

And, after a few teasing mentions of the thesis, I will then defend it!

The thesis has to do with the importance of science fiction and fantasy for developing a more accurate picture of reality.

But I’m not in the mood to really get into it, so I am only dropping hints.

This latest video is also on Rumble:

I would greatly appreciate it if you could sign up for Rumble and subscribe to my channel (@wirkman) and “give a rumble,” too.

On Rumble is where my LocoFoco video channel resides, too.

I am recording a new podcast with David Ramsay Steele next week. So stay tuned. You won’t want to miss it.

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The epochs of science fiction production and readership:

1. Iron Age: Lucian’s True History through all those utopias up till Mary Shelley.
2. Industrial Age: Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus through The Coming Race and Erewhon and the ultra-popular Jules Verne oeuvre (and many obscurities, such as the short stories of Edward Page Mitchell) to The War of the Worlds and The Food of the Gods.
3. Radium Age: From just prior to Great War to John W. Campbell’s hiring at Astounding in 1937, this period featured literary classics such as We and Brave New World, the pulp fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s extremely popular efforts and Gernsback’s considerably more obscure “scientifiction” crowd, and many breakthrough oddball efforts, like George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931).
4. Golden Age: This period featured stiff competition among sf journals, the popularity of writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Simak, and the rise of “sci-fi” fandom.
5. Philippians and the New Wave: Though hints of a new approach to sf can be found in the works of Philip José Farmer and Philip K. Dick, it was in the late Sixties that writers and editors such as Judith Merrill, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch and others brought new literary sophistication to the genre. They called it “the New Wave,” and I am mainly familiar with the American wing of the movement, chiefly through Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology and its sequels.
6. Cyberpunk & Cinema: In the Eighties, a strain evolved out of catching the curl of accelerated but ambiguous history, and inspired by the work of many past masters, focusing on progressive technology and decadent culture. This “cyberpunk” came to dominate literary sf trends, at least until the rebirth of space opera in a more sophisticated, Midcult form, while popular sf and its fandom were subsumed under the Masscult phenomena that congealed around the cinematic series Star Trek and Star Wars.

It’s all been post-historical since then, a postmodern diversity.

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Man vs. the Monsters

Murray Leinster’s The Forgotten Planet is as perfect an example of classic science fiction as one could hope to find. It’s a 1950s’ ”fix-up” novel of a few stories from the 1920s. In that sense, it is almost a century old.

On the surface it qualifies as pure adventure, and thankfully without the clunky sophomoric (as if teen-imagined) view of romance that used to dominate pulp sf. (You know: pulchritudinous blonde daughter of a bespectacled scientist thrown together with a teen athlete boy or a nerd.) But it is rigorously worked out from a simple premise, and is as “hard science” as this sort of thing can be.

It is, in fact, the best example of a fix-up that I can think of, for it is seamless in its construction. Well, not exactly, I guess: the prologue and epilogue are the most obvious fix-up parts, a tad more elegantly written than the crisply narrated body of the text. But that’s apt, too.

It really is impressive.

And it is an apparent inspiration for Brian Aldiss’s masterwork, Hothouse. Like it, we have non-civilized human being in the future in constant battle for survival on an alien planet. In this case, though, it’s not Earth. The planet is not named. After multiple seedings of life, the barren planet was forgotten by human interstellar civilization, and then a ship crashed on it, and the survivors had to fend for themselves, losing their culture in the process. The story features one young man who begins to develop an ability to think, and to dare to try new ways to survive. Against giant spiders and insects, mainly.

A very few typos in this edition. I have another, early Ace edition of this book, but cannot find it. When I find it I’ll sell one of them. Or both? I hate to get rid of books I may need to refer to again.

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While Eye in the Sky is often hailed as Philip K. Dick’s first successful original novel to be published in his lifetime, I find it a bit clunky, a little rough around the edges — a contrivance.

I’m reading, again — after four decades! — his The Man Who Japed, written the same year, 1955. And this is much better constructed, not “clunky” at all. It is an original work, from the title to the imagined future to the plot to the characterizations. Arguably this is his first real success among those published during his waking, breathing life.

I’ve hedged here, twice mentioning the books of Dick’s published while he was alive — and for good reason: early on, he was trying to succeed as a non-genre novelist, but his “realistic fiction” was completely orthogonal to the warp and woof of the age, and all of his “mainstream” novels were rejected until he proved himself a success in science fiction. And then the only one of these early works to be published before he died, Confessions of a Crap Artist, saw print in 1975. I read it in the mid-80s and disliked it, but another of these early novels, Puttering About in a Small Land, came out a few years after his death, and I read it and thought it first-rate at the time. Alas, I now have no memory of it.

The Man Who Japed was one of the very first of PKD’s novels I read, soon after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and The Man in the High Castle (1962). I knew nothing about it going in; I just liked the title.

In his first two decades of writing, Dick wrote to keep the wolf from the door. He took amphetamines to enable him to achieve a 60-pages-per-day output. As a consequence, his writing is very uneven, prose and character and plotting. The Man Who Japed stands out among those early works, and shows a writer finding his way.

Here are two early passages. The first helps explain the title, the second builds the social world a century hence, a world Dick explicitly drew to dissuade critics and fans and enemies from thinking he was a leftist — for he based the “highly moral” future America on the totalitarian social controls of pre-Cultural Revolutionary Red China.

Dick was an instinctive individualist. His political thought was thoroughly anti-totalitarian, as can be seen over and over again in his best work, not least being the great paranoiac novel Radio Free Albemuth (1976; 1985). In The Man Who Japed, a contractor-propagandist beheads and defaces the statue of the fascist leader of the future, and does not know why — for he suffers from a kind of amnesia. A blockage of memory. His discovery of his own motive is the reader’s discovery of a key to liberation: mocking the trite and destructive memes of oppression.

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