The World Beyond the Hill
Alexei PanshinThe World Beyond the Hill Sözleri ve Alıntıları
The World Beyond the Hill sözleri ve alıntılarını, The World Beyond the Hill kitap alıntılarını, The World Beyond the Hill en etkileyici cümleleri ve paragragları 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.Among that which was discarded when Western man set out on his special path was traditional myth with its spirit-based transcendent symbology. The appearance and development of SF can be understood as the gradual re-establishment of myth in the Western world, starting from first principles, and phrasing itself in a new, deliberately “non-spiritual” symbolic vocabulary.
We also have an answer to H.G. Wells’s inability to imagine what an ordinary man might find to do out there amongst the enigmatical immensities. The Skylark of Space suggests that even if we had no other reason to travel to the stars, our own human conflicts, attitudes and aspirations might be enough in themselves to provide motive to go and reason to act once we arrived.
Month after month, Asimov would journey to Campbell’s office with a new story in hand, not yet sure precisely what was required, but always hoping that he might have come closer to the mark this time. And month after month, Campbell would interrupt his work to give Asimov personal attention, read his latest story, and then promptly reject it.
SF, when Wells took it up, was like a small child raised inside a closed house, daring occasional peeks through the curtain, but always turning back to the familiar world within. H.G. Wells, in the period in which there was nothing he didn’t dare to imagine, took science fiction by the hand, and led it outdoors.
With the coming of this era of the ordinary Joe, the popular arts in America took on a legitimacy they had never had before. Suddenly, at the end of the Thirties, there was a creative Golden Age in one medium after another all across the spectrum of popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies and cartoons to swing music to comic books.
At the time when John Campbell became an editor in 1937, there were still only three SF magazines: Astounding, Amazing and Thrilling Wonder. But by 1941, no fewer than twenty-one different SF pulp magazines were being published.
In the course of 1941, Robert Heinlein would, tactfully but effectively, force the acceptance of everything he might submit to Campbell by telling the editor, “I’ll send you a story from time to time . . . until the day comes when you bounce one. At that point we’re through. Now that I know you personally, having a story rejected by you would be too traumatic.”
Ultimately, these postwar aristocratic fantasies were not at all successful in evading the modern scientific universe that they so despised. It is by no accident that both Jurgen and The Worm Ouroboros (a title that refers to the world-girdling serpent that bites its own tail) were circular in construction, ending just where they began, with nothing changed or accomplished by the passage of four hundred pages. These fantasies aimed to run away from the scientific universe, only to be thrown back into it by a kind of self-applied, self-defeating judo move.
Üç Robot Yasası
Campbell said: “Look, Asimov, in working this out, you have to realize that there are three rules that robots have to follow. In the first place, they can’t do any harm to human beings; in the second place, they have to obey orders without doing harm; in the third, they have to protect themselves, without doing harm or proving disobedient.”
Asimov would take up these operating principles proposed by Campbell and give them formal expression in his stories as the Three Laws of Robotics.
The Future became the locus of the rational perfection that would be. And precisely for that reason, it was no home for proto-SF.
The Romantic wildmen who first developed the materials of science-fiction-literature-to-come were rebels against the Age of Reason. They doubted social progress, rejected perfection, and assiduously sought the irrational. The utopian Future—the heartland of rational perfection—was the last place they would find what they were looking for.
To the defenders of spirit, science fiction was impious materialism carried to an extreme of presumption and pride. To simple kick-a-rock materialists, science fiction was contrary to self-evident reality. It was idle fancy. But whichever your belief might be, SF appeared excessive.