The World Beyond the Hill
Alexei PanshinEn Beğenilen The World Beyond the Hill Sözleri ve Alıntıları
En Beğenilen The World Beyond the Hill sözleri ve alıntılarını, en beğenilen The World Beyond the Hill kitap alıntılarını, etkileyici sözleri 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.
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.
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.
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.
Certain lines of literary descent from Walpole—the Gothic romance, the rational detective story, the historical novel—could not tolerate the implausible and so abandoned transcendence in favor of a strict adherence to “the facts”. These lines became mythically sterile.
Other forms that owe something to Walpole, like heroic fantasy and the supernatural horror story, could not give up the old spirit-based transcendence. But they were not effective myth, either. They were conservative. They looked backward. They ignored “the facts.” And so they have been reckoned implausible escapist fantasy.
While other Western literary forms have favored either mystery or plausibility, SF is the line that has striven to be complete myth.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Writers in Weird Tales even invented a new genre—sword-and-sorcery—that preserved magic, the occult, and the materials of the lost race story by removing them to remote moments in time. Clark Ashton Smith at times wrote of a magic-haunted dying Earth—a flat Earth—under the red sun of the far future. And, in his Conan stories (1932-36), Robert E. Howard, a Texan, recounted the adventures of a vigorous young barbarian in a world of black magic and sorcery located between the fall of Atlantis and the rise of known history.