The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue #296 April 2013
Author: Kevin J. Maroney
Date: 2013-04-28 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press

The New York Review of Science Fiction

ISSUE #296 April 2013 Volume 25, No. 8 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

- Lomig Perrotin: I Will Whisper in the Dark

- Brian Stableford: Notes on the Origins of the Term “Scientific Romance” and Its Implications for the Development of Science Fiction

- Darrell Schweitzer: Rusty’s Space Ship Flies Again

- Christopher S. Kovacs and Susan M. MacDonald: A Third Sampling of Medical Myths and Errors in Genre Fiction

- Maarten Nellestijn: Doctor Atomic: Science Fiction Opera

- Thomas A. Easton: The Prime Error

PLUS

- More on possession in HPL, photos, and an editorial.

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors.
Alex Donald, Webmaster; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Jen Gunnels, Heather Masri, Lisa Padol, Christine Quinones, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Eugene Reynolds, Jason Strawsburg and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

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I Will Whisper in the Dark

Lomig Perrotin

A photographic exploration of the world of H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the fathers of modern fantasy literature, though he is better known for his contributions to horror. Born in 1890 in Providence, he died in poverty in 1938, never having known success in his lifetime. His work, which was the first to link scientific materialism and the supernatural, is characterized by the idea that behind the apparent banality of our existence lies a sickening and blasphemous truth. This truth cannot be revealed to the world, and Lovecraft himself shared it with us only in fragments to protect us from our own curiosity. There is resistance, opposition, even rebellion in the author’s inability to testify about the cosmic horrors that seem to watch humanity from beyond. To convey this resistance, I needed to explore the limits of the photographic medium. So I used cliché-verre, a technique of etching photographic material to create a mixed negative, blending the realistic aspect of photography with the graphic effects of drawing. Neither photographs alone nor illustration could reproduce this particular blend of horror and oneirism that characterizes the work of the master of Providence.

This work was displayed in November 2012 at Galerie 154: 154, rue Oberkampf, 75011, Paris.

—Lomig Perrotin, Les Lilas, France

I.

That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never learned its title, for the early pages were missing. . . .

—“The Book,” 1934

II.

Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.

—“From Beyond,” 1920

III.

Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. . . .

The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves.

—“The Haunter of the Dark,” 1935

IV.

When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams . . . Then . . . those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth.

—“The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928

V.

Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial cause. . . . How could they be otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?

—At the Mountains of Madness, 1931

VI.

The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—The shape rose up from the altar, and there were five hundred that howled. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . .

—“The Thing on the Doorstep,” 1923

VII.

At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots—surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience.

—“Herbert West, Reanimator,” 1921–22

VIII.

I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks. . . . Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.

—“The White Ship” (1919)

IX.

He knew his room was in the old Witch House. . . . A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had . . . given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.

—“The Dream in the Witch-House” (1932)

X.

It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. . . . It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened.

—“The Color out of Space,” 1927

XI.

At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected.

—“The Festival,” 1923

XII.

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. . . .

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried.

—At the Mountains of Madness, 1931

Notes on the Origins of the Term “Scientific Romance” and Its Implications for the Development of Science Fiction

Brian Stableford

It is impossible to determine with any certainty who coined the term “scientific romance” or when it was first used in print. The earliest use of the phrase that it was possible to find in December 2012 by searching for it among the digital documents indexed by the Hathi Trust and Google Books is in a footnote to a dissertation on Saxon law by the barrister James Ibbetson, first published in 1780. In that essay, Ibbetson refers scathingly to a suggestion that a medieval Saxon legal custom might have originated in Troy, and the corollary account of its importation to Britain, as “the dreams of prejudice and scientific romance” (36).

The idea that refugees from Troy, led by one Brutus, credited by legend as Britain’s first lawgiver, had once settled in Britain was already ancient in 1780. It had been credited by scholars to Celtic legends allegedly preserved in Welsh chronicles and had become sufficiently familiar for many English writers, including Edmund Spenser and John Milton, to allude to it, but it is certainly fanciful. Indeed, the entire legendary “history” of Britain prior to the reign of King Alfred is a vast tissue of fantasies, much of it invented by the Normans in the wake of the eleventh century “conquest” in the spirit of “romance,” and it was subsequently subjected to a continual process of remolding as litterateurs and scholars attempted to reconcile Norman fancy with previous Saxon and Celtic fancy.

In all probability, James Ibbetson, as a man of law, meant to imply little more by his scathing dismissal of the Trojan origins of British law than the mere fact that it was nonsense—but given that, the fact that he chose not merely the term “romance,” but the term “scientific romance,” is revealing. If we are to understand why that particular portmanteau term came into existence in the latter half of the eighteenth century, it might be helpful to examine briefly the contemporary implications of both of its components more closely.

The English word “romance” comes from a group of French words, including both roman and romance, derived from the Old French romanz, whose approximate meaning was “vernacular” and which was usually used to refer to documents translated from Latin. “Romance” was imported to the English language by the Normans after the conquest, but its French equivalents were in the midst of a striking evolution by then. They were used in a general sense with reference to “romance languages” descended from Latin. But in the eleventh century, they were more frequently and more particularly used with reference to a genre of poetry and prose fiction that had begun with translations of Latin epic poetry but had soon given birth to prolific original composition. Just as the translations had referred to what was by then a distant mythologized past, the imitations and pastiches also looked back nostalgically to a whole series of mythologized distant pasts.

By the middle of the twelfth century—the heyday of the conquering Normans, who had originated as invaders from Scandinavia—such works had become enormously popular. They had become a kind of ideological enshrinement of the feudal political system, glorifying the contemporary hierarchy of kings, barons, and knights by extending it backwards into imaginary pasts and crediting it with imaginary virtues. In the late Middle Ages, the rulers of both France and England had long been descended from northern invaders—the Franks and the Saxons—who had partly displaced and partly absorbed previous cultures, loosely describable as Gauls and Celts. Both had been previously conquered by the Romans, so the mythological pasts cooked up in France and England in the twelfth century were blessed with a rich complexity and confusion of inherited and improvised materials.

Literary “Romance” was, in consequence, an inherently syncretic genre, tacitly celebrating the kind of unification obtained by conquest and reorganization that was characteristic of the actual history of feudalism as well as the flattering ideological image that romancers tried to construct. Although the “chivalric romance” glorifying knightly prowess in combat was at its heart, it also embraced “courtly romance,” which offered an idealized depiction of intimate relationships, and it was enthusiastic to embrace all kinds of local superstitions and gather them into a generalized melting-pot—always, of course, with the proviso that any threats originating from such dubious folk apparatus could not withstand the ideological forces of Christian faith and knightly heroism.

In France, where political domination was shared by two sets of northern invaders whose mastery was by no means total or wholly secure, the key imagery of chivalric and courtly romance was nostalgically attached to and partly derived from cultures with a longer local history. The courtly apparatus was associated with the southern region of Provence, whose Roman roots had been conflated with Arabic influences imported via Moorish Spain, and the chivalric apparatus had a particular link with the western region of Brittany, the population of which had strong ethnic links with those of Cornwall and Wales. When the Normans imported Romance into England, therefore, it was only natural that the romances relating to the island should concoct an imaginary history that was distinctly affiliated to the Breton chivalric strand of French romance with a relatively light seasoning of courtly romance. The imaginary history in question focused primarily on legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the wizard Merlin, to which was added—by courtesy of an unfinished allegory penned by Chrétien de Troyes—the striking original element of the quest for the Holy Grail. The tale of Brutus and his earlier refugees from Troy became a minor element in that vast tissue of invention.

The entire substance of medieval romance is deliberately fanciful. It is an extravagant, fantastic, magnificent, and beautiful tissue of blatant lies. Like all fiction, however, it relied to some extent for its rhetorical effect on the assertion of its truth, and the more blatant its lies were, the harder it had to emphasize its pretense: a necessary paradox. It would probably be unsafe to say that composers of romances were never fooled by their own inventions because charlatans are notoriously liable to fall prey to their own patter, but in the main, the inventors of romances cannot have been unaware that they were weaving pure fantasies, even though they were obliged to assert the opposite in order to pay due court to their readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief.”

The vast majority of hearers and readers of medieval romances cannot have been fooled by that imposture any more than modern children can really believe in Santa Claus, but in the same spirit of preserving rhetorical effect, they might well have pretended to believe, at least temporarily. Subsequent scholars, however, were sometimes much less certain of the total falsehood of romance, having an innate tendency of their own to suspect and to judge that, even if it were not literally or entirely true, something in writing must surely have a seed of reliability within it. Indeed, one of the primary activities of scholarship throughout the ages, if not the primary activity, has been the sustained and determined endeavor to prove the false true, especially if it has been written down.

Paradoxical as it may seem, that tendency coexists with a strong desire on the part of scholars to pose as hard-headed skeptics, partly out of sincerity but partly because of the necessity to establish and conserve their own rhetorical effect. Scholars are inherently far more likely to fall prey to their own patter than inventors of romance; indeed, it is a rare scholar who does not. There is no fantasy that tries harder to pretend to be fact than scholarly fantasy.

There is too much that is obviously fantastic in the substance of medieval romance for it ever to have been taken at face value by scholars, but that never prevented scholars from looking for “the truth behind the fiction.” In the British context, that has included searching for the “real” King Arthur and the “real” Merlin behind the myths—or, at least, for “authentic” Celtic myths and legends underlying the supposedly bastardized Norman inventions.

Such are the fashions of scholarship that quests for those particular unholy grails were largely conducted in terms of arguments from authority for centuries after the initial documentation had taken place. As the perceived weight of arguments from authority began to decline by comparison with the perceived force of arguments based on objective evidence—scientific arguments—thus bringing about “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment,” the manner in which scholars interested in romance conducted their research, interpreted their findings, and reported their conclusions inevitably shifted.

Some scholars of the Enlightenment took up the position that, because there was not an atom of worthwhile objective evidence, the rational conclusion was that the substance of romance was unworthy of scholarly attention. But some did not, preferring to recruit scientific—or, at least, seemingly scientific—methods and theories to the analysis of their data, in the hope of teasing out whatever precious grains of insight were lurking within it, whether ethnographic, psychological, or linguistic in character.

The latter tendency became intricately involved with a spectacular resurgence in the latter part of the eighteenth century of a new kind of self-declared and unrepentant Romanticism, which deliberately took up an ideological position opposed to “Classicism” in art and scholarship alike. It was doubtless the awareness of the existence and ambition of that movement that prompted James Ibbetson to refer in his footnote to scholarship willing to entertain the thesis that British law had Trojan foundations not simply as “romance” but as “scientific romance.” Had he had the concept of “pseudoscience” available in his vocabulary, he might have used that instead, but in 1780, science was not sufficiently advanced for its practitioners to be able to detach its reality from its appearance in any convincing manner. At any rate, Ibbetson was not simply dismissing the idea of Brutus the Trojan lawgiver as a fantasy but as a scholarly fantasy—which he doubtless considered, as a hard-headed lawyer, to be a uniquely silly kind of fantasy.

Just as the meaning of the word “romance” had, the meaning of the word “science” had shifted over time. The concept moved from being generally synonymous with “knowledge” to being associated with a particular theory of knowledge: the notion that only convictions based on rigorous empirical observation and tested, if possible, by experimental proof could qualify as reliable knowledge rather than mere opinion.

It may be worth noting here that one important new concept that was coming into prominence at the end of the eighteenth century was that of the “scientist.” The word was not formally coined until the 1830s by William Whewell while he was laying the groundwork for his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), but Whewell was right to observe that it was a term whose time had come. There was already an abundance of people to whom it could and ought to be fitted: people who were making a profession, a career, and a vocation out of the pursuit of new truths by means of the scientific method of enquiry. Key exemplars of that phenomenon were provided in Britain by the members of Erasmus Darwin’s Lunar Society—including Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew Boulton—who were heavily committed to both the vocational practice of science and to its popularization via education.

Although it might seem that there was a fundamental opposition between the interests of that profession on the one hand and the resurgence of a new Romantic movement in literature and art on the other, sufficient to make the concept of “scientific romance” intrinsically oxymoronic, the matter was not so simple. In the same way that literature and art seemed to some observers to have become hidebound and stultified by the presumptions of “Classicism,” so it seemed that philosophy in general and “natural philosophy” in particular were also being held back in their progress by ancient arguments whose weight—ultimately based on Classical authority—no longer ought to be credited. There was a revolutionary spirit extending across all the fields of human endeavor, crying out for a sweeping transformation of the so-called Age of Enlightenment and establishing a kinship between all intellectual sorts of rebels against perceived tradition, reflected not merely in communication and friendship but in a certain overlap of endeavor.

Beginning in Germany and spreading to France and thus being considered doubly foreign by its opponents when it began to become manifest in England, the “Romantic Movement” produced philosophers interested in art and artists interested in philosophy, encouraging philosophers to use literary methods of analysis and artists to adopt and explore philosophical themes. While artists became interested in the brutal and the reckless—“the sublime” as well as or even rather than “the beautiful”—and hence in the archaic and the supernatural, scholars affiliated to the cause began to take a renewed interest in folklore in terms of its connections with linguistics and national consciousness. That helped to make the artists more attentive to the philosophical connotations of their materials and encouraged scholars to dabble in the production of Romantic fiction.

Because of this tendency, a number of writers did indeed begin to produce works—sometimes influential and popular works—that might warrant retrospective description and consideration as “scientific romances,” many of which rejoiced in their own seemingly chimerical character. Erasmus Darwin produced two key examples in The Botanic Garden (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803). Such works began to appear with increasing frequency in the eighteenth century in Germany and France and began to appear in Britain in modest profusion in the early nineteenth century.

The phrase “scientific romance” crops up infrequently but repeatedly in documents indexed by the Hathi Trust and Google Books published throughout the first six decades of the nineteenth century, used in the same way that Ibbetson had used it—which is to say, deploring any tendency of scientists to make fanciful claims and any tendency on the part of people making fanciful claims to sanctify them as “scientific.” The phrase seems to have been particularly common, as might be expected, in works dealing with the perceived ideological conflict between science and religion, religion’s defenders routinely wanting to write off scientific ideas that challenged dogmatic belief as illegitimate “romances.”

There are, however, two significant British literary works published early in the century that employ the term in their supplementary material in a revealing manner, given their fictional contents, and which therefore warrant more detailed consideration: the satirical novel Flim-Flams! Or the Life and Errors of My Uncle and the Amours of my Aunt, first published in 1805 under the by-line “Messieurs Tag, Rag and Bobtail,” written by Isaac D’Israeli, and a story series by the Irish Catholic writer Gerald Griffin published in volumes with various different titles, including The Christian Physiologist (1830) and The Offering of Friendship (1854).

Although Isaac D’Israeli was widely read in philosophy, including natural philosophy, it was literature that was his primary interest, and the developments of modern science lay somewhat beyond his expertise. Although that did not stop him from poking fun at science, he does appear to have been a trifle tentative in his approach and a trifle embarrassed by his achievement. When Benjamin Disraeli wrote a memoir of his father’s life for inclusion in later editions of The Curiosities of Literature, he does not even mention his father’s satirical novel, which was not only issued under a preposterous pseudonym but was revised in between its two editions of 1805 and 1806, the second being retitled Flim-Flams! or the Life and Errors of My Uncle and His Friends.

The phrase “scientific romance” crops up in the elaborate introductory material to the text when the author introduces the protagonist, sarcastically, as “the Sir Charles Grandison, or the Amadis de Gaul of the world of scientific romance” (D’Israeli vol. 1, 2). Sir Charles Grandison is the eponymous hero of Samuel Richardson’s 1753 response to Henry Fielding’s parodies of his previous novels, and was designed as a paragon of virtue, although D’Israeli, who appreciated Fielding far more than Richardson did, probably thought him sufficiently absurd as to need no further parody. Amadis de Gaul is the hero of the archetype of the sixteenth-century Iberian romances that took over and revitalized the defunct tradition of French romance and which enjoyed a tremendous vogue before being outclassed and outshone, in the eyes of subsequent commentators by Miguel de Cervantes’s devastating parody of their conventions and artifices, Don Quixote (1607). Amadis of Gaul had been translated into English in 1803 by Robert Southey; D’Israeli presumably thought that it had arrived in nineteenth-century England also without any need of further parody, given that Don Quixote was already well-known there.

D’Israeli uses the phrase “scientific romance” in much the same way as James Ibbetson, and the purpose of the text’s account of the fictitious uncle’s eccentricities is to poke fun at many ideas that D’Israeli had found in contemporary scientific texts in the course of his reading. The uncle is a chemist whose reputation is said to rest on his enormous patience in repeating experiments hundreds of times and always getting the same result. He is said to have “a particular genius [for the] anti-sublime in science,” that being “the science of turning the big into the little” (vol. 1, 74).

In the course of the narrative, which mostly deals with the uncle’s relationships with other members of a scientific club known as the Constellation or the Pleiades—reflective of the Lunar Society—scathing accounts are offered of craniognomy (what later became known as phrenology), the meteorology of Luke Howard, geological accounts of the shaping of the Earth by volcanic or hydrologic action, recent conflicting accounts of the properties of nitrous oxide—“philosophical brandy”—and so on, in company with abusive dismissals of theorists in general as builders of “magicians’ bridges” that only they can cross. Mockery is also directed at female scientists in the account of the protagonist’s wooing of and marriage to a female astronomer who subsequently cuckolds him. The most elaborate and extensive satirical assault is, however, on proto-evolutionism, in the course of which the novel’s footnotes—which are even more elaborate than those attached to the poem in Darwin’s The Temple of Nature—cite Benoît de Maillet, Lord Monboddo, and Delisle de Sales, as well as Darwin himself.

In the course of the serial demolition carried out by Flim-Flams!, D’Israeli offers a much fuller account of the range of varieties of “scientific romance” than can be found elsewhere in the period, but there was probably no one else in England during the period who read as voluminously and as omnivorously as D’Israeli, at least with such a caustic eye. Because he is attempting to emphasize the absurdities of “scientific romance,” D’Israeli is reluctant to indulge in it himself, but he simply cannot resist the temptation to indulge in a little philosophical speculation of his own. In comparison with the substance of generic scientific romance, the most interesting passage in the story is one in which the uncle actually encounters a homunculus: a “miserable fruit of experimental philosophy” (vol. 3, 11) grown artificially from a microscopic seed, who has recapitulated in his development the kind of evolutionary sequence described by Darwin in the embryological development and subsequent growth of a single individual. The homunculus constitutes an anticipatory literalization of what subsequently came to be known as Haeckel’s Law: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Alas, the finished homunculus is a dwarf, stigmatized by a tail, like the primitive humans envisaged by Lord Monboddo. Partly in consequence, he enjoys no Darwinian “happiness of life” but is a wretched individual regretful of his own perverse existence.

The elaborate introductory material to Flim-Flams! begins with a series of fictitious “anticipatory reviews,” including one from the Anti-Jacobin, a Tory periodical set up by George Canning and others to fight back against the satirical radical press which attacked both “Jacobin poetry” (especially Southey and Coleridge) and “Jacobin science” (especially Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley). The “review” in question does not express any hostility to the book’s assaults on science but does dismiss the entire exercise as trivial and protests its deceptiveness, evidently but absurdly failing to appreciate its sarcasm—and, indeed, D’Israeli had no real reason to think that the editors of the Anti-Jacobin would approve of him. They had no way to know, of course, that he was the father of a future Tory prime minister, but even if they had been able to know that, it is by no means obvious that Canning would have approved of Benjamin Disraeli in that capacity, all the more so because the younger Disraeli became a novelist and satirist himself, by no means reluctant to use Romantic methods and themes.

Isaac D’Israeli would surely have been regarded from the Anti-Jacobin viewpoint as warranting a certain amount of guilt by association with the Romantic movement despite having no hint of the “Jacobin” about his politics. He was personally acquainted with several Romantic poets and at least one of Britain’s “Jacobin scientists” (Humphry Davy). One of the longer journalistic essays collected in Curiosities of Literature praises “Romances” as a form of artistic endeavor and contrasts modern exemplars with “Novels” in a fashion that is not entirely to the advantage of the latter.

D’Israeli had practiced what he preached in this regard, publishing a collection of his own Romances (1799), which was perhaps enough in itself to identify him as a significant contributor to the British Romantic movement. It would have been surprising, therefore, if he had not had a little sympathy for “scientific romance,” and Flim-Flams! is, in fact, a very mild satire which often betrays an obvious fascination with the ideas that the author cannot quite bring himself to take seriously—and which Tag, Rag, and Bobtail do, after all, attribute to an uncle for whom they clearly have a family affection in spite of his eccentricities.

That kind of wry sympathy was not a problem for the author of the other early literary work indexed by the Hathi Trust that embraced the term “scientific romance”: the Irish Catholic writer Gerald Griffin. Griffin’s dogmatically based opposition to “scientific romance” was far more earnest. His “Tales Illustrative of the Five Senses,” first appeared in the Christian Apologist in 1830. The series was evidently conceived as an ideological reply to attempts by proto-psychologists to co-opt the human soul into a mere mechanical adjunct of the senses. Although Griffin makes no specific reference to Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794) or The Temple of Nature, the theses set out in those two books are, at the very least, significant specimens of the position that Griffin attacks; his method is only dissimilar in that he uses prose fiction in preference to poetry to illustrate his own ideas, and places his nonfictional commentaries before the stories rather than alongside or after them.

Griffin’s specific use of the term “scientific romance” is to declare, pompously, and rather optimistically, that “the day of scientific romance is past” (149). However, as with “The Loves of the Triangles” (the Anti-Jacobin’s famous parody of Erasmus Darwin’s “The Loves of the Plants”) and D’Israeli’s satire, the narrative method of Griffin’s opposition becomes itself a wry foreshadowing of what would later become the literary genre of “scientific romance.”

The first section of the text begins with an account of the anatomy of the eye and the physiology of sight as known at the time and then proceeds to an account of “the uses and government of sight” crediting it as the principal agent of the imagination. Griffin compliments the sense of sight on permitting literature and then invites the reader who wants to “appreciate the excellence of this wonderful organ” simply to look up at the night sky and remember the true size, distance and number of the stars, concluding that it is hardly possible after having done so to imagine an impious astronomer or anatomist. The story illustrating the sense in question is “The Kelp-Gatherer,” a brief, sentimental account of the restoration of a blind mother’s sight by surgery on her cataracts.

In the same way, the second story features the restoration of a young deaf-mute’s hearing and voice. The third part features “the sense of feeling” and the illustrative story, “The Voluptuary Cured” maintains the pattern of sensation lost and found. The author has little to say about the physiology of smell, and “The Self-Consumed” is a very peculiar illustration thereof, being a strange tale whose protagonist encounters a victim of “lycanthropia”—the insanity of believing oneself to be a werewolf—apparently induced by having witnessed a case of spontaneous human combustion in stressful circumstances. The latter phenomenon is explained hypothetically in a footnote by the highly implausible suggestion that it might result from bathing with the aid of ill-chosen cosmetics. Consideration of the sense of taste inevitably brings the censorious Griffin back to consideration of the vices of “voluptuaries,” but “The Selfish Crotarie” (a crotarie is a harper) is a historical tale of the ancient Irish fighting against Danish colonists, the relevance of which is distinctly dubious.

The frame-text goes on, however, to discuss the intellect—consciousness and its attributes—in order to conclude that truth must ultimately be obtained by something beyond the scope of the five senses combined with the application of reason. The narrative voice complains about those who claim otherwise, naming no scientists but only “infidel poets” whom he affects to pity: Shelley and Byron. In this section too there is an exemplary tale, and the author abandons naturalism altogether to turn to fantastic allegory in a manner reminiscent of Erasmus Darwin, although inclining toward a very different moral.

In “A Story of Psyche,” the titular character is banished from Eden for having committed a crucial sin, but compensation for her fallen plight is offered by her two children, Judgment and Imagination—a boy and girl respectively, the latter being, in her turn, the parent of Science. Guided by Imagination, Science, and the Senses, Psyche is led on a quest for happiness through the gate of knowledge in spite of the advice of Judgment to cultivate virtue instead, but she occasions evil wherever she goes. When Imagination finally deserts her, she seeks out Judgment again, only to find him metamorphosed into Philosophy, quoting Socrates, Newton, and Democritus. All is not lost, however, and she is eventually guided back to the true path of progress by ardent prayer.

For Griffin’s Psyche as for D’Israeli’s homunculus, there is no innate “happiness of life” but only the misery of the fallen state, from which the only possible escape is piety—a piety that only holds out the remote promise of reward, a heaven undescribed by its virtue of being unimaginable. It is not obvious why Griffin or his devout readers—the book must have been popular to have gone through so many editions although it is forgotten today—felt that this was a preferable outlook to the one embraced by The Temple of Nature. But they were not lacking in support in the next century and a half when there was to be no shortage of people who wished sincerely, if somewhat hopelessly, that the age of “scientific romance” would very soon be past. In Griffin’s own day, it had hardly begun.

The Ibbetson/D’Israeli/Griffin usage of “scientific romance” was also repeated, naturally enough, in 1845 by at least one reviewer of Robert Chambers’s evolutionist account of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, prompting the introducer of the second American edition, George B. Cheever, to observe that “This book has well been called a scientific romance” (vii). The apparent acceptance of the term encouraged some favorable reviewers to use it, too. When Archibald Tucker Ritchie’s The Dynamical Theory of the Earth was reviewed in Annals and Magazine of Natural History in 1851 the reviewer compared it to Chambers’s Vestiges, calling the latter a “delightful scientific romance.” In the same year, a reviewer in Macphail’s Edinburgh Ecclestiastical Journal and Literary Review described Robert Hunt’s Panthea as a scientific romance in a similarly complimentary manner. The geological account of the Earth’s past popularized by Chambers and rhapsodized by Hunt continued to attract the use of the phrase. In 1884, a reviewer in Popular Science Monthly applied it, as if it were the natural term to use, to Alexander Winchell’s pioneering endeavor in “astrogeology,” World-Life; or, Comparative Geology.

The abandonment of insulting implication by some of the mid-century users of the phrase presumably helped clear the way for the development of the somewhat different meaning that was later appropriated for reference to H. G. Wells. The French-derived usage that crops up in comments on translations of Jules Verne’s early works was also used in the frame narrative of Henry Holt’s 1867 translation of Edmond About’s L’Homme à l’oreille cassée (1862, published in the U.S.A. as The Man with the Broken Ear), in which it is a straightforward translation from the French roman scientifique. A reference in William Stanley Jevon’s Principles of Science (1874) to Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur the pluralité des mondes as a scientific romance was probably inspired in the same way.

The use of the term in Moritz Kauffmann’s Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx (1879) might be reckoned particularly significant in that it combines the idea of scientific romance with other notions that were to remain closely linked with it, with specific reference to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. Kauffmann states that New Atlantis

embodies Bacon’s visions of the future, and is remarkable not only as a philosophical speculation or scientific romance, but as being the outcome of sane reflection, containing but few, if any, of those chimerical extravagancies to be found in other Utopias. In the description of the conditions of mankind here, we have nothing but the practical results he anticipated from a practical and diligent study of nature according to his own principles. (18)

Although not intended as a definition of, or manifesto for, scientific romance, the remark highlights the more serious ambitions of that form of “philosophical speculation.”

The use of “scientific romance” as a descriptive term with no pejorative implication continued in the 1880s. In 1884, the publisher William Swann Sonnenschein issued a pamphlet entitled Scientific Romances No. I: What Is the Fourth Dimension? by C. H. Hinton and followed it up with four further pamphlets in the series, numbered II-V, which were then bound up into a book as Scientific Romances: First Series (1886). As promised, other pamphlets followed, but the series was interrupted after two more for reasons too complicated to go into here.

The Swann Sonnenschein series helped to make the phrase sufficiently familiar to invite pedantic modification on the part of hesitant users. A reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1885 referred to the Earl of Lytton’s Glenaveril; or, The Metamorphoses as “a scientific romance in verse.” In 1889, a review in the English Illustrated Magazine referred to “the quasi-scientific romance of Jules Verne and his imitators,” and the following year a reviewer in the Athaeneum referred to Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space as “a pseudo-scientific romance of the Jules Verne type.” The meaning of “scientific romance” that referred to works of fiction rather than conjectural essays in nonfiction seems to have become more frequent than its mildly insulting rival after 1870, but the other did not disappear entirely, and it continued to crop up in popular science magazines in the early twentieth century.

The quasi-oxymoronic ambiguity of the phrase, mischievously exploited by D’Israeli and still retained in the odd admixture of speculative essays in Hinton’s series, is a thoroughly Romantic phenomenon. The notion that scientific writing should not only stick to reportage but to dour reportage from which all metaphor, illustration, and decorative style has been ruthlessly eliminated along with more vulgar forms of inexactitude seemed innately conservative and “Classicist” by the end of the eighteenth century, even though it had no Classical ancestry and had good arguments to support it. The proposition that literary romance ought not to allow itself to be fettered by any allegiance with a discipline intrinsically opposed to enchantment and fancy has also had eloquent advocates, but that too seemed a trifle obsolete to eighteenth-century writers eager to introduce serious implications into their work and to employ fanciful apparatus for serious rhetorical purposes. There was, therefore, every reason why the dismissive use of the term “scientific romance” should at least be counterbalanced and perhaps displaced by a more generous implication.

Several notable British scientists of the nineteenth century had a definite poetic streak in their writing which often led them to rhapsodize about the wonderful implications of their discoveries. To some extent, this arose from a desire to dramatize their findings for the layman, communicating something of the excitement of scientific inquiry, but it was also intimately connected with the ongoing battle of ideas whereby men of science were trying to displace or modify the dogmas and prejudices of religion. In that contest, it was often considered strategic folly simply to argue flatly that certain beliefs encouraged by religion had been found to be false and that the actual truth of some such matters had now been ascertained. The war was not so much about individual items of belief but a struggle of world-views to which aesthetic and moral considerations were far from irrelevant, and many would-be champions of science who went in search of converts to their cause were very sensitive to the esthetic considerations of their work.

The impact of geology, cosmology, and evolutionary theory on traditional views of “man’s place in nature” and on moral and metaphysical philosophies relating to that question inevitably became one of the central themes of British scientific romance. In dealing with such notions, the best writers of scientific romance exhibited a philosophical ambition that was quite remarkable and noticeably different in its tone and implication from those of French and American writers of speculative fiction. Their greater reluctance to involve themselves in that particular war of ideas and their typical manner of handling it when they did inevitably reflected differences in the religious cultures of the three nations, and the different influences of religious culture on publishing policy. French Romanticism and American Romanticism each had their own distinct flavor—as, for that matter, did French anti-Romanticism and American anti-Romanticism—and those differences affected the way that science was viewed by scientists as well as laymen.

The most obvious difference of that kind is perhaps the heavy American emphasis on technology and the practical application of science at the expense of theory and philosophy as reflected in the glorification of Thomas Alva Edison as an archetype of pragmatic American genius. That emphasis not only affects the typical patterns of American science fiction but American attitudes to speculative fiction from Europe and hence attempts to locate writers like Verne and Wells within the generalized “history of science fiction.” Although Wells became a very popular writer and a key exemplar in France and America as well as in Britain, it does not follow that readers in those various countries were paying attention to the same aspects of the fiction, and it is undeniable that the patterns of his influence and that of generic scientific romance in France and America were different from one another and different from the pattern of their influence in Britain.

Brian Stableford lives in Reading, Kent.

Works Cited

- Cheever, Rev. George B. “Introduction” In Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers. Second US Edition. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845.

- D’Israeli, Isaac. Flim-Flams! Or, the Life and Errors of my Uncle, and the Amours of my Aunt . . . (as by Messieurs Tag, Rag, and Bobtail). In three volumes. London: John Murray, 1805–06.

- Griffin, Gerald. The Christian Physiologist: Tales Illustrative of the Five Senses. London: Edward Bull, 1830.

- Ibbetson, James. A Dissertation on the Judicial Customs of the Saxon and Norman Age. London: B. White, 1780.

- Kauffmann, Rev. M. Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx. London: Kegan Paul, 1879.

Rusty’s Space Ship Flies Again

Darrell Schweitzer

It is enough to make me feel old, the realization that I’ve just gone back to the very first science fiction novel I ever encountered and that encounter took place more than 50 years ago. Fifty-two years ago, to be precise. When I was in the third grade, and therefore 8—this would have been late 1960 or early 1961—the teacher read the class a chapter of a science fiction book as a special treat in the last fifteen minutes or so of each school day as we waited for the bus. For decades thereafter, I didn’t know the title or author, but I could remember that it was about some children (I didn’t remember the characters specifically) who built a wooden spaceship in the back yard, rather the way many kids used to build tree houses. The boy in charge of the project had found a “heat shield” in the city dump, which he nailed onto the front of the vessel. Shortly thereafter, an alien came to claim this, explaining that the mysterious disk was a “flying saucer” on which the ill-tempered ruler of the planet Eopee sometimes banged his cup. When he did, it went flying through space. This alien had been sent to fetch it. Now that it was nailed onto the front of the spaceship, he had no choice but to bang the “cup” on the “saucer” and take the ship and the children into space with him. But, alas, he could not remember where Eopee was! So they went on a tour of the solar system looking for it, until at the very end the alien remembered (or recited) a bit of verse:

O messenger from Eopee

From Andromeda galaxy . . .

At the end of the story, the kids ended up back home, and their mother assumed it was some game they were playing. Of course, she did not believe a bit of their adventures.

I think even at the time I knew that should be “AnDROMeda,” not “AndroMEda,” and that either the pronunciation was wrong or something was wrong with the meter. I’d been taught to read on Dr. Seuss and had some (nontechnical) idea of what meter was.

Decades later, I found the book, which proved to be Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman (Doubleday, 1957). This is one of two children’s science fiction books written by Ms. Lampman, the other being The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek (1955). There is a short biography of this author in the second volume of Robert Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (Gale Research, 1979), which tells us that the author was born in 1907, was first a radio continuity writer and later a full-time writer, wrote in fields other than science fiction, won a Dorothy Canfield Fisher Memorial Children’s Book Award in 1962 for something called City Under the Back Steps, and won a Western Writers of America Spur Award in 1970 for Cayuse Courage.

Now at the age of 60 I have actually read Rusty’s Space Ship. I find that my memory of it was fairly accurate. There are minor details I had wrong: the spaceship was built in Rusty’s garage, not back yard, and the alien wielded not the planetary ruler’s cup but another “saucer” which, when folded up like an umbrella, was a bit more practical for the purpose. Otherwise it was as I recalled it: the tour through the solar system, a scene in which the hero has to crawl out on the hull and strike the “saucer” on the nose to get the spaceship moving, and so forth, leading to the conclusion with the disbelieving parent. I had even remembered the two lines of verse correctly.

The hero is a boy of 10 or maybe a little older. He is accompanied by his friend, Susan, and their dog, Cookie. This is not a teen book but a preadolescent book. Rusty is of the age where he has previously been perfectly happy to play with the tomboyish Susan, but now he’s beginning to feel it an affront to masculine pride to carry on as before. She feels that the boys are excluding her. She is the last to be picked on a team for sports and so on. But in private, in the garage, Rusty reverts to their former relationship and proudly shows Susan his latest creation, which he christens the Terra Terror 1.

Then the alien arrives, disguised in a hat and fur coat swiped from a clothesline. This is Tiphia, who, despite the feminine ending on the name, is male. Tiphia is a first-time junior messenger from Eopee, sent on his first mission to retrieve that saucer. He is desperately eager to prove himself capable, for all he forgets things sometimes. But he does endlessly praise the ineffable wisdom and goodness of his planet’s ruler, the great Gwump, from whom all blessings flow, and if he sounds a little bit like a Chinese Communist extolling Mao Zedong, well, that is surely my adult perception adding something in retrospect that isn’t really in the book. Here is a typical example of one of Tiphia’s ditties:

In Eopee there is no greed,

You wish aloud for what you need,

And if you’re too polite to say,

Why, Gwump will grant it anyway.

All hail, Eopee, hail! (152)

Physically, Tiphia looks rather like a green lizard that walks upright and has rather humanlike arms but no claws. He is conveniently telepathic and, even more conveniently, dispenses pills which relieve the children of all need for breathing (though they still must wear clothespins over their noses to control the impulse). Thus, wearing dark goggles to block out the unfiltered sunlight, they are ready to soar off into space.

Needless to say, the level of scientific accuracy in this book is nowhere near the Hal Clement level or that of the Heinlein juveniles. Sometimes the “science” is downright frivolous, as when, after a narrow escape, the children look back on the surface of Mars and realize that the “canals” and seasonal dark areas are actually swarms of billions of ants. Mercury is locked with one face toward the sun. They land on the hot side, and the dog’s license melts right off its collar, and the children’s shoes begin to smoke, but otherwise they are unharmed. Venus proves to have rather comfortable temperatures beneath its cloud cover, and the place is inhabited by rather imaginatively conceived semigaseous creatures no more substantial than soap bubbles. Mars has its ants. That Jupiter has a cold surface and thundering rivers of liquid methane is not a totally obsolete notion for the late ’50s and was certainly not unknown in the respectable, adult science fiction of the decade or in the art of Chesley Bonestell. The spaceship lands on the rings of Saturn, which are described as billions of tiny moonlets packed together like pebbles on a beach. The Eopeean messenger’s handbook warns against landing on Saturn itself. We find out why: it is hypnotic. Everyone whirls around the planet, staring at it, hypnotized into seeing whatever they most desire until an escape is effected.

Where Ms. Lampman falls down badly is basic physics. She does not seem to understand acceleration or gravity at all, thinking the latter something that ends when you leave a planet’s atmosphere. Thus in the space between planets, the occupants of the Terra Terror float weightlessly, but as soon as they enter an atmosphere, they thump to the floor.

Needless to say, it is absurd to hold a book like this to a hard sf standard. That’s not what it’s for. It is a piece of whimsy, ideal for a third-grade teacher reading to her charges in 1960. The teacher probably didn’t understand the science, either. This was the era of “duck and cover” air raid drills, which the kids did not take very seriously, particularly when the very same teacher explained that if the Russian pilot dropped his atomic bomb right on our school, you could forget it, but if he dropped it in the Treadway Inn (a large establishment about the equivalent of two city blocks away), you might have a chance. Well, at age 8 I already knew something about World War II, and I knew what had happened at Hiroshima fifteen years earlier and that the blast radius of an A-bomb was measurable in miles, not yards. Admittedly, I probably didn’t know any more about acceleration and gravity than my teacher did. This was the tail end of an era of innocence, when kids’ stories, which used to be outright fairy tales, maybe even with fairies in them, now looked to outer space and other planets but were still a species of fairy tale, not quite taken seriously. Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepherd were about to go up. The “technological Pearl Harbor” of the Sputnik launch had already happened, though I had no awareness of it. Hearing Rusty’s Space Ship was, I think, the first time I had ever encountered a story of interplanetary travel, and it came right at a time of endings and beginnings and it was, in a subtle way, a life-changing event.

The story also has, I should mention, a socially progressive conclusion. Rusty gets over his incipient male chauvinism, determined that, however much the other boys in the neighborhood might object, Susan will be allowed to join his Space Patrol, even if she is a girl, because she’s the only other person he knows who has any experience out there. Could the notion of a female astronaut be far behind?

Darrell Schweitzer grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and somehow never managed to see an episode of Captain Video or Space Patrol as a child.

A Third Sampling of Medical Myths and Errors in Genre Fiction

Christopher S. Kovacs and Susan M. MacDonald

The September 2011 and March 2012 issues of NYRSF featured our two prior essays on medical myths and errors perpetuated in genre fiction. This third essay has been prompted by our recent reading and viewing of new and older works. As before, the guiding principle is that getting the facts correct is a fundamental rule of writing. Our intent is not to ridicule anyone but instead to educate authors and readers about some of the medical myths, misconceptions, and errors perpetuated in fiction. We give illustrative examples largely from well-known authors in order to show that even best-selling writers perpetuate the same mistakes. Our main message is that background research should include double-checking significant medical/surgical facts for plausibility and correctness. Relying on the Internet or Hollywood depictions may lead to perpetuation of myths and errors, whereas running ideas by a physician with expertise in that area may rescue the author from potential embarrassment. A significant factual error can cause laughter at the wrong moment and throw a reader out of the story.

Getting the medical facts wrong or exaggerating a rare outcome so that it seems probable can have damaging consequences for readers and viewers. A vivid example is the 1989 mainstream motion picture Steel Magnolias in which Julia Roberts played a young woman with type 1 diabetes. She has a dramatic hypoglycemic seizure at the beginning of the movie and later becomes pregnant despite being warned that pregnancy is hazardous for a diabetic. She develops kidney failure, goes on dialysis, has a kidney transplant, rejects it, and dies. Even today, nearly twenty-four years after the movie’s release, mention of this film frequently resurfaces during prepregnancy counseling sessions. In many instances “helpful” mothers-in-law or aunts have recommended and loaned this terrifying eye-opener to a diabetic woman in order to “prepare her” for pregnancy.

The facts are that preexisting kidney or eye damage can progress in pregnant women with type 1 diabetes, especially those with very poorly controlled disease. For this reason, routine monitoring is important. Uncommonly there is measurable deterioration of kidney function or change in a retina sufficient to warrant laser treatment. Progression to dialysis or blindness during or soon after pregnancy is an extremely rare outcome and nearly impossible in a woman who begins pregnancy with normal kidneys and eyes. Most diabetic women have gestational or type 2 diabetes, both of which are far less likely to be associated with significant kidney or eye damage during pregnancy.

Overall, although what happens to Julia Roberts’s character in that movie is not impossible, it is an extremely unlikely series of events that occurs over an even more improbably rushed time frame. It is far more likely for her to succumb from causes unrelated to diabetes, such as a car accident, a blood clot, or cancer. This movie created an unnecessary nightmare for many diabetic women contemplating pregnancy.

Treating dehydration with ocean water or urine

In Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi , the titular character is shipwrecked at sea and recognizes that although he is surrounded by water, he cannot drink any of it, whereas the tiger that shares the lifeboat is not so restricted. Real-life accounts have described how consumption of seawater caused mouth and throat burns from the salt, swelling of the throat, severe thirst, confusion, delirium, and rapid death. But in Thor Heyerdahl’s autobiographical Kon-Tiki , he recounted how he consumed seawater and freshwater in a 40:60 ratio while traveling 5,000 miles in a raft across the Pacific Ocean. And Alain Bombard of France claimed to have survived 65 days at sea while consuming a pint and a half of seawater daily. The World Health Organization, various navies, and ocean survival manuals all warn not to drink seawater. But some survival guides claim that consuming up to 32 ounces of ocean water per day is perfectly fine. What is the truth among all these conflicting claims?

Blood contains salts, nutrients, and waste products, and the levels of these are carefully regulated in order to maintain normal health and function of cells. The most abundant salt in ocean water and blood is sodium chloride. A high blood sodium level dehydrates and shrinks cells, leading to progressive lethargy, confusion, seizures, coma, and death. The kidneys must excrete water in order to excrete sodium, and there is a limit to how concentrated the urine can be made. The concentration of sodium in ocean water is so high that if someone relies on this as the only source of water, then about twice the amount of water consumed must be excreted to get rid of the excess sodium. If you’re becoming dehydrated and drink one liter of ocean water but have to pee out two liters to compensate, that accelerates the dehydration and downward spiral toward death. And if you’re dehydrated enough that you can’t pee out those two liters, the retained excess sodium causes a more rapid rise in the blood sodium, and that hastens death too. [See Sidebar for more details.]

Thor Heyerdahl chose to mix seawater and freshwater in a 40:60 ratio. This created a sodium concentration about one-third higher than the normal blood sodium concentration and about four times the salt concentration of athletic rehydration drinks (e.g., Gatorade). Although it would taste quite salty, Heyerdahl’s concoction is a manageable sodium load for the kidneys of a well-hydrated individual; the excess sodium can be excreted. It wasn’t necessary for Heyerdahl to do this, but if his freshwater supply was running low, it would enable him to make it last longer.

Alain Bombard wanted to prove that a man could survive for weeks by drinking seawater, and he later claimed to have survived 65 days at sea while consuming a pint and a half of it per day. Whether he actually did consume that amount remains in dispute. He certainly could not have consumed seawater exclusively because doing so would have killed him within days for the reasons explained above. What is overlooked by many who refer to this account is that he readily admitted to drinking rain water and the liquids from raw fish, and so his intake of freshwater may have been more than enough to compensate for any intake of seawater. He was quite dehydrated and ill when he finally reached port. It is this apocryphal tale that has caused some survival guides to recommend that shipwrecked individuals consume up to 2 pints of seawater per day in order to stay hydrated. But it’s not something that most experts recommend ever trying; as the sole fluid source, it will lead to a quick death. If seawater is consumed, it must be mixed with freshwater in a manner similar to what Heyerdahl did.

Drinking urine is also proposed as a way to maintain fluid balance in someone who has no access to freshwater. As an emergency short-term source of fluid, it is acceptable. As the sole fluid source, it will rapidly become as concentrated as seawater but even more toxic due to high levels of urea and other waste products. And so drinking urine exclusively is also strongly discouraged as a means of survival.

Frank Herbert’s Dune features the Fremen stillsuit which reclaims water from sweat, urine, and feces and then makes it available for the wearer to drink. Importantly, the name stillsuit refers to the suit’s ability to distill the reclaimed water to the equivalent of freshwater, in part by use of “salt precipitators.” A properly fitted and functioning stillsuit reduces moisture loss to less than a thimbleful per day. Other sf authors have described recreational consumption of urine, and in such occasional doses the only toxicity will be from any alcohol or drugs consumed by the donor. See Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man or Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s “Storming the Cosmos.”

Taste and smell

The family of gustatory experts in Isaac Asimov’s “Good Taste” repeatedly extol the importance of taste buds and tongue in discriminating among hundreds of thousands of different molecules that contribute to the flavors in a single dish. “My tongue wearies. I can no longer taste anything,” declares Chawker Minor, to which Elder Chawker replies, “taste buds blunt when not used.” Chawker Minor also lectures that “it all ends with the tongue no matter where you start.”

But it is a misconception that only our taste buds taste the foods we enjoy. The taste buds sense sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami (glutamate, also called “meatiness”). The tongue also senses other aspects of food such as temperature, texture, astringency, and so forth. But it is our sense of smell (olfaction) that gives us about 90% of what we appreciate as “taste.” The olfactory nerves operate in the nose and upper palate. A wine connoisseur appreciates the importance of clear nasal passages and a keen sense of smell in order to fully taste a wine. Anyone who has ever eaten while suffering a severe cold or clogged sinuses can appreciate that the taste of food becomes blunted. Smokers have a reduced sense of taste because of the deadening effect that smoke has on the olfactory nerves. A renewed sense of taste after smoking cessation contributes to overeating and weight gain. These nerves are also fragile and easily severed by a blow to the head, which is why boxers and head injury victims can abruptly lose the ability to smell and taste.

The sense of smell’s role in controlling taste is evident in Kallman’s syndrome, a condition that primarily causes failure of puberty to onset. In about 20% of people with Kallman’s syndrome, the olfactory nerves fail to form, and such individuals have complete inability to smell (anosmia). They are left with only the rudimentary aspects of taste provided by the taste buds and tongue. For the anosmic individual, the inevitably bland taste of food mandates other approaches to create flavor, such as the extreme use of salt, vinegar, mint, or sweetness. Varying textures, colors, and temperature of foods also add appeal to anosmic individuals.

We have informally polled our anosmic Kallman’s patients on whether they can recall how they first realized that they could not taste or smell. In all affected men, it was the realization that some unperceived aspect of farting, rather than the sound, that caused their sisters to run screaming from the room or hurriedly open the car windows. In the affected women, it was the repeated pleas by girlfriends to smell their perfume and learning to say “Mmm, you smell nice,” without ever sensing what the other girls seemed to delight over.

Speed of infections and poisonings

Infections generally spread quite slowly because they are held in check by chemical signals, antibodies, cells of the immune system, and physical barriers within and between cells and tissues. Once an infection becomes blood-borne, it can spread faster. Tuberculosis is a particularly slowly developing but persistent infection caused by a mycobacterium. It normally enters an individual through inhalation and develops very slowly at first. Left untreated, it can gradually destroy the lungs. But in Robert Downey, Jr.’s, latest portrayal of Sherlock Holmes (A Game of Shadows), Dr. Moriarty laces Irene Adler’s kerchief with spores of a highly virulent form of almost instant tuberculosis. She inadvertently inhales deeply from the kerchief, manages to walk a few steps, coughs, collapses, and dies. There is no known infection that could convert from spores to live bacteria and then spread and kill, all within a minute of inhalation. What’s even more idiotic about that scenario is that the grieving Holmes breathes deeply from that discarded kerchief. Bacterial spores from “instant tuberculosis” should still be present, but Holmes remains completely unaffected.

The same film also makes several other glaring medical blunders. It features a curare-laced dart in the calf that causes near instantaneous paralysis and death. A sufficient dose given intravenously could do that within one minute, but not a needle in the calf. Instead it would cause paralysis that begins in the calf muscle and spreads upward with a window of at least 20–30 minutes before total paralysis sets in after a high enough dose. The victim would certainly realize that something is wrong, confess critical facts to Holmes, and perhaps even receive the antidote in time. Dr. Watson also uses an intracardiac injection of adrenaline to resuscitate Holmes after he’s succumbed to massive blood loss. We’ve dealt with Hollywood’s fascination with the intracardiac injection and the “stay awake don’t die” scenarios in the earlier essays, but we’ll add here that if one’s heart has stopped because there’s no longer enough blood to pump, the adrenaline will just make that stopped heart quiver a bit faster while still having no blood to pump. The movie climaxes with Holmes surviving a multi-story plunge down a mountainside waterfall. He does this by being armed with a tiny, primitive oxygen device that will somehow keep him from drowning, aided by his powers of relaxation that will overcome gravity, thereby preventing him from being smashed to a pulp when his accelerated body meets the water, trees, or rocks far below.

Misconceptions about cloning

Cloning is a popular science fiction trope that is often incorrectly portrayed. In order to understand the problems, we first need to explain some background science.

The cells of nearly all tissues and organs are called somatic cells. The tens of thousands of genes that program the development of each individual are arranged within chromosomes. The nucleus of each somatic cell normally contains 46 chromosomes. These somatic cells are diploid, meaning that the chromosomes are arranged in 23 pairs. One of each pair comes from the mother while the other comes from the father. The fertilized egg divides repeatedly and ultimately gives rise to every cell in the body, with every normal somatic cell containing the same 23 pairs of chromosomes. When a somatic cells divides, the chromosomes are first duplicated to become 92 in total (23 doubled-pairs), and then the cell splits in two (mitosis), sending a full set of 46 chromosomes into each new somatic cell.

But within the ovaries and testicles there are specialized cells called germ cells, which create the gametes, i.e., the ova (eggs) and sperm. During the development of the gametes, a process called homologous recombination enables sections of chromosomes to be swapped between the matched pairs. The result is that, for example, each copy of chromosome 14 in the gametes becomes a unique mosaic or fusion of maternal and paternal parts; it is no longer identical to either of the original pair of chromosome 14 within the somatic cells. The developing gamete cell then divides in two (meiosis), with each daughter cell taking just one from each pair of chromosomes. Consequently, ova and sperm are haploid, containing just 23 unpaired chromosomes. When a sperm fertilizes an egg, two haploid sets of chromosomes come together to create a unique diploid cell with the 46 chromosomes (23 pairs) normally needed for human development. The mixing and matching of parts of chromosomes during egg and sperm production and the combination of maternal and paternal chromosomes in one fertilized egg mean that the child will be genetically distinct from either parent.

In contrast to normal reproduction, cloning implies that a somatic cell with its 46 chromosomes has been used to create a new organism that is genetically identical to the original. This can be done by replacing the chromosomes of a newly fertilized egg with those from a donor somatic cell or by forcing a somatic cell to behave as it were a newly fertilized egg. In theory a clone could be made from any somatic cell (skin, blood, etc.). The cloned offspring will be genetically identical to the original. Much like twins, a clone will resemble but not be completely identical to the original, because certain aspects of physical features and personality arise from environmental influences (nutrition, exercise, sun exposure, injuries and scars, education and experiences, etc.). Fingerprints change due to environmental influences and would differ between clones just as they differ between identical twins. Lois McMaster Bujold made an error by having the clones Miles and Mark Vorkosigan share identical fingerprints. Although detective Sidney Hurst in Peter F. Hamilton’s Great North Road wonders why someone bothered to cut off the dead clone’s finger tips—“it might make sense for a normal crime victim, but not [a clone]”—a murdered clone should be identifiable by its fingerprints. The clone of Duncan Idaho in Frank Herbert’s Dune sequels won’t have the memories of the original because memory is stored in networks of specialized brain cells and not in the chromosomes or mitochondria of somatic cells.

Probably the most famous example of a hard science fiction writer getting cloning wrong was Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth. The original Malcolm Makenzie and his wife have a daughter who is born mindless—“no one at home in the lovely shell their bodies had fashioned”—and dies at six years of age. He is devastated by this, and his marriage breaks up as a result. Further investigation reveals that “the fault lay in Malcolm’s genes. . . . Sometime during his shuttling back and forth between Earth and Mars, a stray photon that had been cruising through space since the cosmic dawn had blasted his hopes for the future. The damage was irreparable, as Malcolm discovered when he consulted the best genetic surgeons of four worlds.”

It is true that radiation, toxins, age, and other factors can damage the chromosomes within the germ cells. In a woman this means that many of her remaining eggs may carry mutations that make it unlikely for conception to occur or for a normal baby to be born. In a man it can result in the inability to produce new sperm or an increased likelihood of making sperm that harbor harmful mutations. Malcolm Makenzie doesn’t want to risk fathering another abnormal child, so he chooses to be cloned. So far, so good. But Clarke describes that the radiation-induced damage in Mackenzie’s gametes is shared by his clone, forcing each clone to reproduce in turn by cloning. Clarke got it wrong; all of the somatic cells will not share the radiation-induced damage done to the gametes (otherwise Malcolm Mackenzie would be dead), and so his condition would not be passed on to the clones. To put it another way, radiation damage that prevents or damages sperm production is the physical equivalent of castration. If Mackenzie had his testicles or even his appendix surgically removed, his clones would still be born with all organs intact.

Clarke was normally quite careful in getting his science correct. In an afterword to the paperback reprint, he admitted that “several expert readers have accused me of grave error by assuming that Malcolm would pass on the Makenzie defect to his clones. Though I was well aware of this problem (and tried to avoid it by being carefully unspecific) I did not go into the matter as seriously as I should have done. I am still hoping that some ingenious geneticist will be able to contrive a solution; unfortunately, I doubt if I will be able to understand it” (305). A potential solution is much simpler than Clarke envisioned. Perhaps due to his own father being exposed to radiation during space travel or simply through chance, Malcolm Makenzie could have been born with a novel mutation that made him unable to produce healthy sperm (such genetic conditions occur today) or which proves fatal to any of his offspring. Such a mutation would be in all of Mackenzie’s somatic cells and gametes, and therefore his clones would share the same defect.

In Peter Hamilton’s recent Great North Road, the original Kane North engineered three clones of himself. Each of these clones has the ability to self-clone simply through the act of sexual intercourse with women. Large families of North clones have arisen, numbering hundreds of individuals in total. Hamilton never offers an explanation for the North clones’ remarkable ability to self-clone through normal sexual intercourse except to say that “Kane’s distinctive biological identity was locked in and dominant in every cell throughout the body, including the spermatozoon. Any woman having a child by one of the brothers produced yet another copy of the original.” Are North’s sperm somehow so powerful that they force the ejection of the chromosomes in the ova? But since sperm contain a unique haploid mix of chromosomes, this would still be an insufficient explanation. North’s sperm would have to contain a complete diploid set of 46 chromosomes identical to the somatic cells in order to enable him to father true clones through sexual intercourse. The complex genetic engineering required for this would effectively make North non-human. Whatever the mechanism for North’s seemingly powerful sperm, the successive generations of clones have errors that “creep into the DNA as it replicates itself,” such that the fourth generation “had both physiological and psychological abnormalities” and the fifth generation “tended not to survive very long.” Consequently, the fourth generation were “quietly and diplomatically sterilized” to prevent them from cloning themselves further through their unique ability. Sterilizing the fourth generation would not prevent them from traditional cloning because any somatic cell in the body can be used as the source of the DNA.

Carbon monoxide vs. carbon dioxide poisoning

We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide that our cells generate as a waste product. A higher content of carbon dioxide causes the blood to be more acidic, but this is normally prevented by sensors in the brain that stimulate breathing in response to a rising carbon dioxide content. As noted in a previous essay (NYRSF 277), increasing carbon dioxide content of the air and blood is a more potent stimulator of breathing than falling oxygen content.

In the Macmillan UK first edition of Peter Hamilton’s Great North Road, a character is described as having carbon dioxide poisoning, and to be pale, confused, and headachy. But there really isn’t an entity such as Hamilton described. If the carbon dioxide content of inhaled air is higher than normal, it causes rapid and deeper breathing to blow off the increased carbon dioxide in blood. What Hamilton may have meant is hypoxia, which occurs when there isn’t enough oxygen. The victim will feel air hunger, breathe rapidly, become confused, and then fall unconscious. The skin will be pale or dusky. The treatment is mainly to supply fresh air or oxygen, and that is what was done in Hamilton’s novel.

But Hamilton may instead have been thinking of carbon monoxide poisoning, and indeed, on a later page he refers to the patient as having a “carbon monoxide fugue.” It’s unfortunate that Macmillan’s copy editor failed to pick up on the author’s mention of carbon dioxide three times and carbon monoxide once, all within a few pages. The editor for the later Del Rey U.S. first edition was evidently more alert because carbon monoxide is mentioned all four times. But carbon monoxide poisoning leads to a different presentation and requires a specific treatment, neither of which is what Hamilton described.

Carbon monoxide arises from incomplete combustion such as in gas-powered engines. In an enclosed room, carbon monoxide concentration will rise, and in turn its concentration in the lungs and blood will increase. Oxygen is carried from the lungs to all cells of the body by binding to hemoglobin within red blood cells. But carbon monoxide binds more avidly than oxygen to hemoglobin. If a victim breathes air that has a normal oxygen content but a high carbon monoxide content, the hemoglobin will preferentially bind and carry carbon monoxide, leaving little or no space for oxygen. Consequently, the person suffocates despite a normal concentration of oxygen in the air. The victim is not pale but characteristically very pink or rosy, and this will also be evident in the gums or nail beds of a dark-skinned individual. The blood will also appear very bright red, which can fool paramedics and ER physicians into thinking that the victim is well oxygenated. The redness is caused by carbon monoxide binding to hemoglobin. Simply giving a victim fresh air or oxygen will do little or nothing because carbon monoxide binds so avidly to hemoglobin. Instead the mandatory treatment is to put the patient in a hyperbaric chamber so that very high pressures of oxygen force the carbon monoxide off the hemoglobin and also increase the amount of oxygen dissolved in blood. If Hamilton’s character truly had carbon monoxide poisoning, he’d have died if the only treatment given was to move him into fresh air.

Seizures and jaw muscles

In our first essay (NYRSF 277), we noted how a common myth that the tongue will be swallowed during a seizure and that anyone rendering first aid must force the jaw open to prevent this from happening. The reality is that not only is it impossible to swallow the tongue, but the jaw muscles are so powerfully clenched during a seizure that they will not be easily opened by a bystander. Broken teeth are more likely. And yet in recent novels, characters continue to casually open the mouth of a seizing person in order to stop tongue swallowing. In Kelley Armstrong’s Spell Bound, the character “wrenched her mouth open to hold the tongue down” during a poison-induced seizure. Had she momentarily achieved that jaw opening, she would have lost fingers when the jaw inevitably snapped shut. In Charles Stross’s The Apocalypse Codex, a character casually uses the reverse end of a taser to open the mouth and prevent the tongue from being swallowed. That maneuver could conceivably result in the tasering of the hapless individual who performed this maneuver.

One might ask: if this myth is believed by so many people in real life, what is wrong with having characters do the same in fiction? The reality is that basic CPR training teaches how to properly respond to seizures. In any crowd where someone hollers to hold the person down and shove something in the mouth to stop the tongue from being swallowed, we hope that there will also be someone knowledgeable enough to countermand those orders.

The gymnastics of space sex

The concept of zero-gravity sex is one that fascinates space enthusiasts and figures in many science fiction novels. Has it been achieved yet? One of us participated in a panel on space medicine at Chicon 7 with astronaut Story Musgrave and took the opportunity to ask him whether he or any astronaut he knew of could report first-hand (so to speak) experience with sex in microgravity. He laughed but declined to respond.

Microgravity creates practical problems that the space sex enthusiast must consider. In any sexual position, one relys on gravity to anchor oneself to a surface (e.g., the bed, the wall, the partner) to accomplish a thrusting motion. Consider also Newton’s Third Law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Any thrusting or pushing movement of one partner toward the other will cause the two individuals to fly apart, unless a tether keeps them linked together. In the woman on top position, as she enthusiastically pushes down with arms and legs to raise herself, she may achieve escape velocity as she rises up, up, and away.

These problems lead to the reality that sex in microgravity may resemble worms wriggling against each other, as the partners clutch and grab each other to keep from pushing each other apart. Sleeping tubes, open at both ends, may become popular to enable a hands-free approach to staying together.

Newton’s First Law states that an object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. This means that bumping against walls is inevitable, and so a padded room may be necessary to avoid serious injury. It also means that when the act is over, an unceremonious push away from each other may be needed, lest the couple float in the middle of the room for hours until they drift in reach of a handhold. Or perhaps keeping one individual tethered to the wall will not only prevent injury but also avoid being left helpless in the middle of the room after the climax. In other words, even if one isn’t into bondage, some restraint is likely needed for satisfactory zero-G sex.

Floating or sinking in water?

In Kelley Armstrong’s Spell Bound, a character remarks that human bodies sink in water until they die. This is an oversimplification. In reality, most humans can float whether alive or dead, due to such factors as the specific gravity of the body normally being close to that of water, buoyancy created by extra fat in the tissues, the air content of the lungs, and air trapped by loose clothing. Floating is even more likely in salt water than freshwater. Many people are able to float face-up on the surface with no swimming movements required. But leaner individuals and especially those with denser bone structure will simply sink.

Additional factors affect whether a body floats or sinks from the start. If the person dives or is dropped into water, the body will sink to a depth consistent with the momentum of the fall and the weight and specific gravity of the body and then will rise toward the surface. How close to the surface the body comes will depend upon such variables as the specific gravity of the body, the weight of soaked clothing, whether it is salt vs. freshwater, and whether the person is conscious vs. unconscious or dead. In someone who struggles to the surface and eventually drowns, the inhalation and swallowing of water and escape of air from the lungs contribute to the body sinking. A body tossed into the water after death can have greater buoyancy due to air in the lungs as compared to someone who drowned.

In bodies that sink after drowning, decomposition creates gases within the tissues, increasing buoyancy, and some of the outer tissues (hair and skin) slough off or are consumed by fish and parasites. All of these changes increase the corpse’s buoyancy and cause it to return to the surface. That return will be faster in a tropical vs. temperate climate, summer vs. winter, stagnant vs. running water, warm vs. cold water, and salt vs. freshwater. This is why a staple of crime fiction is to weight the body with concrete or chains before dumping it in the water. Whether the body floated from the beginning or rose to the surface later, it will normally assume a face-down position because the head is proportionately denser and heavier than the rest of the body.

Humans are mostly water

In the lengthy climax of Batman Begins, a microwave device traveling on a subway train vaporizes Gotham’s water supply. The microwaves are so potent that they instantly boil the water inside thick metal pipes, prompting manhole covers to explode outward from the pressure of water turned to steam. But the largest component of human bodies is water, held in by a relatively fragile casing of skin and subcutaneous tissues that are easily penetrated by microwaves. So why weren’t Batman and everyone in the vicinity turned into steam and component dry chemicals? Star Trek got this right when Dr. McCoy recognized in “The Omega Glory” that we are just a few pounds of chemicals and the rest is water. In that episode, a viral illness reduced most of the crew of the starship Enterprise to powder and discarded clothing. Even the Adam West film Batman: The Movie recognized how much of the human body is water; in it, the villains use a dehydration gun to reduce to dust the ambassadors to the United World Organization Security Council.

Pupillary responses

In the second essay of this series (NYRSF 283), we explained some of the misconceptions about pupillary responses and the meaning of fixed and dilated pupils. In William Preston’s “Unearthed” (Asimov’s, September 2012), a character has intact pupillary reactions to light, and is assumed to be sighted. But that conclusion is not correct. The presence or absence of the pupillary reflexes does not necessarily tell us whether the patient has normal vision or is blind. The pupils react to light through reflex arcs controlled in the brain stem independent from the processing of visual information within the brain’s visual cortex. A patient with cortical blindness cannot see because the visual information cannot be processed, but the pupillary reflexes can be normal. A patient who loses function of the third cranial nerve will have absent pupillary responses but normal vision. Certain drugs and mechanical injury to the pupil will prevent pupillary responses while not affecting vision.

Traction

Traction refers to drawing or pulling on a long bone through the use of weights and pulleys. Pins and wires are inserted into the bone to anchor the weights; a boot or a series of straps can also be used to anchor them. Although often depicted in movie scenes when anyone has broken an arm or a leg, modern orthopedic techniques have largely made traction obsolete. Traction may still be used either to stabilize a long bone fracture in the early days of healing or to correct orthopedic abnormalities such as a shortened limb that may have been caused by a prior fracture. But when used to correct such orthopedic problems, it is used for six weeks or longer. More commonly today limb length discrepancies are fixed by distraction osteogenesis, in which the bone is deliberately cut in two and the two pieces are kept slightly apart by a mechanical device. New bone begins to fill the gap, and the device is progressively adjusted to increase the gap until the desired limb length is achieved.

In Jo Walton’s Among Others, Morganna is struck and killed by a car, while her twin Morwenna (the protagonist) survives with injuries. “My hip got all smashed up, and my pelvis.” She walks with a cane and complains about chronic pain in one leg. After another doctor looks at her x-rays, she is abruptly ordered to spend “a week in traction . . . my leg is held out on this thing, elevated on white metal bars, strapped in place, stretched agonizingly so it hurts like hell every second, and the rest of me is forced flat. I can hardly move at all.” She has limited access to pain medication. She wonders why the doctor is doing this and remarks, “He wouldn’t strap someone to a contraption just for nothing.” After seven days spent in excruciating pain due to this traction, she is released. The doctor orders her to use a metal cane, not the wooden one she had received from fairies. She is worse than before, racked with pain, and spends a lot of time in bed to recover. She eventually has acupuncture, which reduces the leg pain and improves her mobility. The acupuncturist remarks that the traction may have “done [the leg] some violence . . . and been unwise.”

Walton herself walks with a cane and in an interview said that “all of the disability stuff in the book is entirely from experience. It’s a mythologization of part of my life. It’s a fantasy novel, but it’s drawing on autobiographical material” (“It’s a mythologisation. . .”). But the use of traction in the manner described is unusual, even for 1979. No benefit is likely to be achieved after one week in traction in a young woman who’d suffered a hip fracture many months before.

But we suspect that Walton’s unusual description of traction was not an error. Instead it appears to have been deliberately planted as evidence that Morwenna’s mother is truly a witch using her powers to make her daughter’s life miserable or even to kill her. Morwenna had earlier remarked that pain causes fairies to keep away from her, and those seven days in traction drove them away until the acupuncture later reversed her pain. The doctor’s insistence that she use the metal cane and not the one provided by the fairies is another clue that Morwenna’s mother is at work here. For many readers it may not be until the end of the novel that it becomes clear that Morwenna hasn’t been idly fantasizing about having magical powers, and that her mother truly is a malevolent witch who tried to kill both daughters. The episode in traction may simply seems like a confusing event that is never explained. But for the knowledgeable reader, that week of traction is a substantial clue that someone, likely Morwenna’s mother, is influencing the actions of others to cause her harm.

Disasters and Triage

A common scenario played over and over in movies, television, and books is the disaster. A train has gone off the rails and bodies litter the tracks. Terrorists have launched an attack on unsuspecting civilians and devastation reigns. A plague’s invasion has left masses of innocents on the verge of death. Into each maelstrom strides the intrepid medical hero. Identifying a critically injured victim, spurting large volumes of blood and clearly on the verge of death, he/she launches into an extensive, life-saving procedure. Often this includes a lot of yelling while defibrillating the patient and performing CPR. Miraculously the patient lives and is carted off for more medical support elsewhere. The hero dashes off to the next life or death situation.

In real life, disaster training is aimed at triaging patients into strata: who can be easily saved, who needs more invasive but available treatment, and who will not survive without extensive treatment. The goals are to salvage the most patients possible with the available resources. That means not wasting limited equipment, medications, and medical time on patients who are unlikely to survive without extensive treatment. Patients on the verge of death would be identified as such, marked in such a way to notify all medical personnel who pass by, and left to die. Efforts would be focused on helping the salvageable victims. The television show M*A*S*H reasonably depicted triage in some of its episodes. In disaster scenarios, cardiac defibrillators are not useful in the field; more cost effective are stores of occlusive dressings, fluid for resuscitation, antibiotics, pain medication, and simple surgical instruments.

In any disaster or emergency response setting, there are important checklists that the responders must follow. Checklists are boring and spoil the drama in movies or books. But the truth is that without them many vital items during a disaster response would be missed. Rescue personnel always have checklists they must consult before they rescue any individual. Senior leaders are consulted and apprised of the conditions. Without checklists and in the high-adrenaline stressed situation of an emergency response, even the most seasoned clinician or rescue technician can make a simple mistake. A crucial step may be forgotten, or an unjustified procedure may put the rescue team at risk. For instance, Coast Guard search-and-rescue teams check the weather conditions, visibility, equipment batteries, tidal charts, and a dozen other things before they attempt a rescue at sea. Rescues by helicopter at sea have been aborted, leaving the victims seen but abandoned in the water, because the conditions are unsafe for the rescue team to approach them. Paramedics normally don’t rush into burning buildings or locations with gunshot victims until firefighters or police declare that it is safe to do so.

Conclusions

We again hope that authors and readers have learned some of the medical myths, misconceptions, and errors to be avoided and will consider consulting experts for medical matters that are pertinent to the plot. One should beware of Internet sources such as blogs and Wikipedia because the medical information there is rife with errors and myths, having been written in large part by the lay public. If an injury or medical condition is mentioned during the narrative, then the symptoms, signs, and treatment should be reasonably and accurately depicted. If writing about clones, the author should know enough about cloning so that the implications for the characters are correctly and realistically described. When the author deliberately misrepresents a medical or surgical procedure—as Jo Walton appears to do in Among Others—it would be helpful to give the reader some indication that this is intentional, that the wrong procedure is a clue to something else going on. And in the worst case scenario, we don’t want another fiction like Steel Magnolias to adversely affect so many unsuspecting individuals who fear unlikely consequences because of how a disease is depicted in a book or on screen.

Of Blood and Salt and Sea Water

The sodium concentration of human blood is ~140 mmol/l (millimoles per liter); seawater is ~480 mmol/l; fresh water is only ~0.2–1.0 mmol/l. Sodium and the other abundant salts give human blood an overall salt concentration (osmolality) of ~280 mOsm/l (milliosmoles per liter) as compared to seawater at ~1,200 mOsm/l. The maximal urine concentrating ability is ~1,200 mOsm/l, but at this high concentration, 600 mOsm/l is needed for the obligatory excretion of urea and other salts. Therefore, if someone consumes 1 liter of seawater containing 1,200 mOsm of sodium, 1 liter of maximally concentrated urine could get rid of only 600 mOsm of sodium from seawater, requiring a second liter of urine in order to get rid of the other 600 mOsm of sodium. Some sodium will also be lost in sweat at a concentration that is similar to freshwater so it’s not a significant route for getting rid of excess sodium after consuming seawater. If the person is rapidly sweating out water in the sun, fresh water is needed to replace those losses.

Simply put, consuming 1 liter of seawater will force about 2 liters of urine output in order to maintain a near-normal serum sodium, thereby accelerating the dehydration. As the person becomes more dehydrated, the kidneys will no longer be able to excrete the excess sodium, and the blood sodium will rise more rapidly to critical levels. There is no question that exclusively consuming seawater must be avoided. On the other hand, mixing seawater with fresh water in a 40:60 ratio creates a sodium concentration of ~190 mmol/l as compared to the normal blood sodium of ~140 mmol/l. Such a mix of water will taste quite salty but in a well-hydrated person normal kidneys should be able to handle that sodium load without undue fluid loss. And so mixing seawater with fresh water may be a reasonable way of stretching a limited fresh water supply. But a seawater:fresh water ratio that gives a sodium concentration closer to 50 mmol/l would be even better as it mimics the concentration of athletic rehydration formulas. back to main article

Christopher S. Kovacs, MD, and Susan M. MacDonald, MD, live in Paradise, Newfoundland.

Works Cited

- Clarke, Arthur C. “Additional Note.” Imperial Earth. New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

- Barnett, D. “Jo Walton’s Among Others: ‘It’s a mythologisation of part of my life’.” The Guardian, 2 October 2012. <www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/02/jo-walton-among-others-interview>. Accessed 27 March 2013.

Doctor Atomic: Science Fiction Opera

Maarten Nellestijn

I only get frightened when—and it happens very rarely—I think I have an idea. That is, what people find isn’t frightening. But the understanding of it sometimes has this quality.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer, Wonders Are Many

The opera Doctor Atomic (2005) by John Adams and Peter Sellars deals with, in Adams’s words, “the great mythological tale of our time” (Adams 273). It is about the events leading up to and including the first atomic bomb explosion on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists are followed during the critical moments just before this first nuclear test. While the male scientists and military officials are dealing with technical problems that arise shortly before the test, their women—represented by Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, and their Native American maid, Pasqualita—safely stay behind at the Los Alamos base. They passively reflect upon the destructive potency of the weapon under development, offering oracular visions of the future. During the course of the opera, the initially unconcerned Oppenheimer becomes increasingly aware of the moral implications of the project.

The opera seemingly transgresses the divide between high and low culture. Adams titled it Doctor Atomic because he wanted “something that had more of a populist ring to it” and thought it “resonated with science fiction and the American middlebrow impression of scientific geniuses” (Adams 276). In interviews, he disclosed that he found inspiration in science fiction films of “the late ’40s and early ’50s.” These featured “a nuclear explosion in the desert [which] would result in some disturbing phenomenon, something frightening and threatening” (May 225). In Doctor Atomic “there are moments when the music [conveys] that frisson of 1950s sci-fi movies” (Wilson 30).

But does Doctor Atomic actually refer to science fiction films? What elements in Doctor Atomic make it possible for an audience to hear it as science fiction? Clichés in science fiction film music do exist, but what makes it film music is the fact that it is used in a film. Most film music is based on musical traditions that exist independently of their filmic context. Perhaps the opera’s plot and staging reinforce the association between Doctor Atomic and science fiction.

To answer these questions, I will compare the 2007 performance by De Nederlandse Opera (Sellars) with a selection of relevant science fiction films. I have chosen three films from the ’50s: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953; directed by Eugène Lourié, music by David Buttolph), Godzilla (1954; directed by Ishirô Honda, music by Akira Ifukube), and Them! (1954; directed by Gordon Douglas, music by Bronislau Kaper). I will look at musical and plot characteristics but will also discuss a selection of scenes from both the films and the opera that show conspicuous musical similarities. Further, I will also look into staging and sound design aspects of especially the opera 2007 performance, to show how these participate in marking Doctor Atomic as science-fictional.

Doctor Atomic & Mythology

The opera seems to cross the border between mythology and history in a rather intriguing way. The libretto by Peter Sellars is a collage of poetry, extracts from the Bhagavad Gita (part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata), scientific literature, disclosed secret documents, and biographical texts. I consider Doctor Atomic and the science fiction films discussed here as works with mythological elements because they mystify twentieth-century technological developments and fantasize about their consequences for the future. These works each function as a parable concerning the possibilities, responsibilities, threats, and progresses emanating from this modern technology. In 1984 Jacques Derrida argued that, while nuclear arsenals were certainly knowable and existent, the scenario of a nuclear war only “has existence through what is said of it,” and because it is in a way unknowable, “a fable, then, a pure invention: in the sense in which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are inventions” (Derrida 23). From this perspective, the atomic bomb and its implications form an ideal basis for a modern mythology.

From the start, the idea was to present the story of Oppenheimer and his scientists in a mythological fashion. Adams found that the early history of nuclear fission was “the great mythological tale of our time” and “was a parable about ecology” (Adams 273). Mankind imagined himself as godlike: “[W]ould we succumb like one of those vainglorious Greek or Norse gods, overcome by our imagined sense of power and unable to measure its destructive potential until it was too late to pull back from the brink?” (273). Oppenheimer, of course, should figure as the personification of this human god. Shortly after the war, Oppenheimer became a “virtual media star, second only to Einstein in the public’s image of the ‘genius’ scientist” (269). In a way the subject was archetypical, able to “summon up in a few choice symbols the collective psyche of our time” (May 235).

Sellars agreed on this mythological perspective and connected it to a moral stance:

John and I have chosen . . . essentially a 24-hour period into the first atomic bomb test, with the audience knowing subsequently there will be Hiroshima. In this case, very much like the Greek dramatists, it’s helpful to take a mythological subject that the audience already knows. They already know what happens later in the story, so it becomes interesting to watch the steps leading up to the conclusion that the audience already recognizes. (Sellars)

In the opera, what signals this mythological dimension to the audience? One example is that on the evening of the test, a thunderstorm breaks out. While this actually happened on the night of the real test, so much stress is placed on this storm that it seems like earth’s warning against the events that will follow. Some of the scientists fear that the explosion will ignite the earth’s atmosphere, a scenario that was actually disproved long before the real test. The conflict of conscience is raised to a conflict between nature and technology. Direct reference to preexisting mythology is made through the apocalyptic chorus “At the Sight of This,” based on an extract from the Bhagavad Gita.

This conflict between nature and rationality is expressed in gendered terms. Pasqualita and Kitty Oppenheimer seem to represent a kind of otherworldliness and function as the work’s conscience. Pasqualita evokes a Tewa religious setting through her text, and Kitty’s ominous “Easter Eve 1945” (after a Muriel Rukeyser poem) gives us a glimpse of the world to come. This is not just reminiscent of das ewig Weibliche of the Faust legend—for which Adams himself argues (Adams 285)—but also evokes a certain earth-motherly notion, reminiscent of the Greek myths of Rhea and Gaia.

Paul Williams argues that especially during the 1980s some scholars discussed the Cold War arms race in terms of sexual difference and gender theory. Nuclear arms were manufactured and managed by male-run institutions, while women were seen as the most important leaders of the protest against increased nuclear arms supplies. The Women’s Peace Movement could be seen as an example of such female resistance (Williams 247). Doctor Atomic reflects a similar binary division between male aggression and female oracularity or providence.

’50s Science Fiction as a Popular Mythology

In The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, the films The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, and Them! are mentioned as archetypical examples of films depicting apocalyptical nuclear scenarios made during the ’50s (Bould and Vint 93). Apocalyptic science fiction flourished in the period’s climate of great changes in capitalism and consumerism. The heightening of the Cold War conflict—with increased nuclear testing, stockpiling, and policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)—brought on anxiety about the possible end of civilization (82). Bould and Vint largely follow Bruno Latour in their definition of science fiction, according to which “the separation of science from the social world is complex and reciprocal.” Bould and Vint, in accordance with Latour, state that it is impossible to maintain a “separation of science from the social world, politics from nature, subjects from objects, humans from non-humans, and the linguistic from the material” (4). Science fiction comes about through “a process that translates the heterogeneous world of things into systems of signification” and the formation of “a rhizomatic network of connections with other human and non-human actants” (5). This characterization of science fiction as a mediating genre proves practical for both Doctor Atomic and my selection of films because it similarly implodes the barrier separating science and nature, human subjectivity and scientific objectivity.

Beast, the first film, features an atomic test on Antarctica that awakens a frozen dinosaur, which sets a destructive course for New York to return to its prehistoric nesting grounds. The film’s plot conflict between nature and technology has been mirrored many times. It featured a deserted location with a nuclear explosion, nature taking revenge in the form of an angered or mutated monster, a binary division of alarmed and curious scientists accompanied by beautiful female assistants, and natural hindrances seemingly preventing the monster’s destruction.

Perhaps the most iconic example of the ’50s nuclear monster genre is the Japanese film Godzilla. It is about a mythological dinosaur-like monster living under sea, angered and mutated by nuclear radiation due to American bomb testing, and wreaking havoc by setting Tokyo on fire. The natural balance is upset by the nuclear explosion, leading to nature avenging itself in the form of the monster, Godzilla. The opening scene depicts a fishing boat witnessing a distant nuclear explosion, after which some of the fishermen fall ill. This refers to an actual incident. In March 1954, the Japanese fishing boat The Lucky Dragon was accidentally exposed to fallout from a thermonuclear bomb test on Bikini Atoll. This sickened several crew members, one of whom died six months later (Swenson-Wright 152). In the film, after defeating Godzilla, one of the scientists involved warns that “if they keep experimenting with deadly weapons another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world” (Honda).

Them! actually uses the New Mexico desert as its locus, and its story takes place a few years after the Trinity test. The 1945 explosion’s fallout led to the mutation of common ants into gigantic and ferocious monsters. In the end, the army saves the day, but there is a warning message: “When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict” (Douglas).

There are many more examples of monster films from the ’50s concerned with one form or another of nuclear arms criticism. In many respects, they fit Adams’s description of the type of science fiction film he found inspiration in. Doctor Atomic does not deal with the bomb in a metaphorical way, using a monster. It deals with the actual bomb, but it similarly offers a critical perspective wrapped in a shroud of myth. Perhaps Doctor Atomic’s monsters live in the imagination of the scientists, who fear for the moral and potentially apocalyptic consequences of their experiment. While the science fiction films talk in metaphors about the myth of the creation of nuclear weapons, the opera deals with what perhaps is the ur-myth.

However, there are also some obvious differences. Doctor Atomic makes explicit use of classical mythological archetypes, and this not the case with these science fiction films. The films express a strong hierarchy between men and women, something that is perhaps to be expected of ’50s cinema. In Doctor Atomic, gender is less clearly linked to the binary division between nature-technology and aggression-providence. In the case of Them!, the male-female and aggression-providence binary becomes even more problematic, as the male-run army in the end saves the world from the radiated ants.

Nuclear Arms Criticism

Adams and his long-time collaborator Sellars have had previous experience with operas dealing with politically charged twentieth-century historical subjects. Their collaboration led to the acclaimed Nixon in China (1987) and the controversial The Death of Klinghoffer (1991).

However, Adams does not consider his music to be centered on political or moral criticism despite the subjects of his operas made in collaboration with Sellars. “It’s going to take another few decades for the whole ‘CNN opera’ reference to be laid finally to rest” (May 229). “I’m not interested in lecturing my audience, teaching a social parable in the manner of a Brecht Lehrstück” (235). While Adams certainly is aware of the moral conflict involving the atomic bomb, he does not explicitly speak of a critical agenda, but he does speak of a more abstract ecological conflict and the scientists’ moral dilemma.

In an interview in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sellars echoes the same sentiment: “We live in an age where everything is so heavily propagandized and organized to convince you of something and to make you buy something. . . . My job is not to tell you what to think, it’s just to make you think” (“The Bulletin Interview: Peter Sellars” 15). But in an interview distributed on the DVD of the 2007 performance of the opera, he expressed a strongly critical opinion: “[N]ot one nuclear weapon is a good thing. . . . So, to once again bring up the atomic topic, to put it on people’s minds. . . . Everybody is just happily shopping, and nobody really thinks about it” (Sellars).

There are many aspects of Doctor Atomic which one might interpret as aimed towards nuclear arms criticism. Oppenheimer’s conversion from his initial refusal to hear other scientists’ objections to an attack on Japan to awareness of the moral implications of his actions is central to the opera. And the explosion itself is not depicted neutrally at all: the accompanying sound of shrieking babies precludes any sense of objectivity. Afterwards, a Japanese woman can be heard asking for water and her lost husband.

Modernism and the Technological Other

The critical press in part perceived the science fiction sound referred to by Adams while others noted a “modernist” feel. Marilyn Tucker of The American Record Guide heard “sounds and noises that are reminiscent of the musique concrete of Varese [sic]” (Tucker); Jeremy Eichler of The Boston Globe noted “lyrical outbursts [including] the rhythms of Stravinsky, the orchestral brawn of Wagner, and the finish and colors of Ravel” (Eichler); Alex Ross of the New Yorker felt the music “weds a cool Stravinskian precision and rhythmic vitality with a kind of seething Wagnerian dread. Rapid caffeinated figures dart around the orchestra like hyperactive electrons” (Ross). Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times wrote that “[s]kittish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score. . . . You hear evocations of sci-fi film scores and bursts of Varèsian frenzy” (Tommasini, “Countdown to the Eve of Destruction”). Ross wrote something quite similar: “Many of these sounds are familiar from the forbidding archives of modern music past, not to mention a hundred sci-fi movies. There’s a sense in Doctor Atomic that Adams is mobilizing the entire ghoulish army of twentieth-century styles” (Ross). Perhaps to Adams the story of the creation of a terrible weapon by scientific reasoning was best expressed by using modernist music.

In his autobiography, Adams expresses dissatisfaction with much of twentieth-century composing styles. He is especially referring to atonal, serial, and electronic music as practiced by Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. According to Adams, these are composers with “a posture of dispassionate scientific investigation as their operative model” (Adams 31). He describes his own maturing as a composer as a conflicting process, having felt at a loss with what he saw as the lack of potential for expressivity in modernist compositional techniques—atonal and serial techniques in particular. He writes that these techniques led to a limiting of the composer’s “expressive palette.” Atonality, he adds, “rather than being the Promised Land so confidently predicted by Schoenberg, Boulez, and Babbitt, proved to be nothing of the kind” (106). However, at the same time, as a fledgling composer he seems to have felt obliged to take these musical developments seriously. He was especially impressed with Boulez, “who possessed the intellectual powers to stake out and defend his positions” (31).

After a long time of experimenting with different methods of composition, with results ranging from a piano quintet to Cage-inspired electronic music created by splicing tapes, he felt that he “had not found a voice . . . on which to build a musical language” (87). Then he composed Phrygian Gates in 1977, inspired by minimal music such as Terry Riley’s In C, compositions by Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. While Adams’s style quickly evolved beyond minimalism’s ethos of simplicity and repetition, its workings permeate famous later works ranging from Nixon in China to On the Transmigration of Souls (2002).

As noted above, many critics mentioned Doctor Atomic’s modernist feel. Perhaps to Adams the story of the creation of a terrible weapon by scientific reasoning was best expressed by using atonal or serialist-like music. In his autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, he describes how he experiences Anton Webern’s music and that of composers inspired by it:

The music of Webern, presented to me in the classroom as paradigm of modern sensibility, was unique, original, personal. But expressively it made me feel tight and constricted, its defining characteristic an emotional parsimony that, when taken up by later practitioners of that style, was most of the time bleak and unfeeling. (Adams 104)

Science fiction film music is traditionally littered with the use of modernist composition techniques, Lisa M. Schmidt argues. In many science fiction films, she argues, modernist musical tropes such as atonal techniques and synthesized or electronic sounds are used to give voice to the unknown: “that which is non-human, alien or monstrous” (Schmidt 38). In Doctor Atomic¸ atonal and electronic composition techniques are similarly used to give musical expression to things and ideas both dangerous and technological. Isabella van Elferen notes that electronically created and/or amplified sounds can give voice to the technological, uncanny, or spectral on the medium level (van Elferen 122). While even music never heard before will inevitably trigger the listener’s memory through association—and thus collapse present and past—recorded music makes this collapse of past and present more powerful due to its being a repetition of a past event (124). Such nostalgic transgressions of history can function to recall a “sanitized,” sentimental, and desirable idea of the past (127). Musical citations and recorded sounds in Doctor Atomic function much in the same way, recalling the old fear and resistance provoked by military technology of the nuclear variety.

As noted in the introduction, it is not possible to see science fiction film music as entirely separate from preexisting musical genres. This becomes especially obvious in the use of electronic collage and microtonality in some of the scenes in Doctor Atomic. Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is scored with similar music, but this film’s soundtrack is actually a compilation of pre-existing concert music ranging from Aram Khachaturian to György Ligeti. However, in the context of Doctor Atomic¸ it also becomes difficult to do the opposite. References to atonal, serial, and electronic twentieth-century music can just as well be interpreted as references to science fiction. In the next paragraph I will establish a direct link between the music of Doctor Atomic and the three discussed films.

Modernist Music as Science Fiction

Musically, the three films and Doctor Atomic have a lot in common. To point out the obvious, all are scored for symphonic orchestra. In the films, strings, brass, and percussion play the most prominent roles. Strings are often used to express a sense of premonition or anxiety. In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a group of scientists watching through binoculars are waiting for the explosion to commence (this scene starts at 13:57 on the DVD). The explosion will simultaneously be a sign of their experiments’ success and the awakening of the fictional rhedosaurus. The scene is accompanied by the strings section, first playing a sequence of chords placed on a low drone in the bass. When the countdown starts, the instrumentalists start to play with vibration and add a tense high note. The aria “Batter my Heart” from Doctor Atomic (based on a John Donne sonnet) has much in common with this scene’s music. The ritornello—an instrumental refrain—is based on a very similar sounding drone figure, followed with a tense high note. This time it is spiced up with a typically Adams-sounding rhythmic pulse. The similarity is so striking that it is not unthinkable that Adams paraphrased Beast’s music in this scene.

In Godzilla, when the protagonist monster sets Tokyo on fire, a threatening melody reminiscent of the “Dies Irae” hymn—a chant from the Gregorian requiem mass about judgment day—is played by the brass section, punctuated by pounding timpani and piano (at 43:40 on the DVD). In Beast, the monster’s attack on the city is accompanied by the complete orchestra, playing conspicuous and dissonant brass figures (at 55:00 on the DVD). To name just one of the instances of prominent use of the brass section in Doctor Atomic, the overture contains alarming-sounding, banging cluster chords—chords with closely stacked dissonant pitches—that, right at the start of the opera, sound like an ominous warning (see example 1).

As noted in the paragraph above, dissonance is often used to express the threat of the unknown. For example, when in Them! the protagonists descend into the ants’ nest in the desert in order to destroy the colony, the scene is accompanied by the string section and an eerie-sounding celesta (at 39:45 on the DVD). The instruments play soft, atonal-sounding figures, reminiscent of the later music of modernist trendsetters like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. The interlude “Rain over Sangre de Cristos” in Doctor Atomic contains similar, eerie-sounding atonal figures played on the harp and celesta (see example 2). The figures accompany Pasqualita’s lullaby for Katherine—J. Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer’s infant child. The “cloud-flower” that “blossoms” in the song invokes the image of the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and the tingling chromatic sounds of the harp and celesta floating on the uncertain rhythms of the wind could be its spores, its nuclear fallout. In fact, a similar celesta figure can be heard in scene three of act one, when Captain James Nolan warns General Leslie Groves and Oppenheimer about the horrible consequences of nuclear radiation.

Furthermore, Them! and Godzilla both make frequent use of irregular and unusual metric divisions, such as 5/4 time. Doctor Atomic likewise bulges with strange meters and abrupt meter changes. The overture, again, offers a good example. Adams used such structures in many of his other works, but the jagged rhythmic style seems especially apt in Doctor Atomic.

Finally, there is a scene in Doctor Atomic that sounds surprisingly similar to a scene in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Just before the opera scene “Countdown Part I,” Oppenheimer and Groves have been told that the approaching tropical storm might foil the experiment. In the scene that follows, the strings start to play a jagged chromatic motive, and the brass section plays an irregular percussive figure. The choir produces ominous shrieks; then the brass mutes, and the strings temporarily interrupt their unnerving motion. During a scene in Beast the protagonist, Professor Nesbitt, falls ill after a confrontation with the rhedosaurus, and is transported to New York by airplane (at 15:34 on the DVD). The music in this scene sounds remarkably similar to the “Countdown Part I” fragment. The Beast fragment contains a similar jagged string motif, while the brass section plays punctuated figures, but here in a less complex and less varied fashion than in Doctor Atomic.

Sound Mixing

There is another sonic aspect to Doctor Atomic that makes it sound cinematic. Many sound effects are used in the opera, such as that of rain and thunder during “Rain over Sangre de Cristo,” or shrieking babies during the explosion at the end. These effects and also the amplified sound of the orchestra were mixed in surround sound during performance. The sound of the explosion itself was even created in a manner reminiscent of the roar of Godzilla. Adams made the explosion by looping a timpani roll and by processing the sound digitally to make it sound like an explosion (Adams 290). In Godzilla, the roar was made by using tape-splicing techniques to modify a double bass recording (Hosokawa 48). The explosion in Doctor Atomic was played back so loudly during the sound check that according to Adams “it ought to make half the audience barf” (Else)—thus creating a physical experience through loud sound effects that is also experienced in modern cinema.

Some critics paid attention to Doctor Atomic’s sound design aspects. While the use of electronic or digital instruments or amplification is not without precedent in opera, the use of music technology in opera has hardly ever been as conspicuous (Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s 1959 opera Aniara is a possible exception to this. Next to having space travel as its subject and oddly contrasting serialist music with popular idioms, it prominently features electronic tape parts reminiscent of the soundtrack of the film Forbidden Planet [1956; directed by Mark Wilcox, music by Louis and Bebe Barron]). Mark Thomas Ketterson in Opera News—writing about a performance in 2008 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago—noted that “[p]urists may object to the use of amplified ambient effects . . . [but] these were tremendously effective, as tastefully executed by sound designer Mark Grey” (Ketterson). Entertainment Design dedicated a small article to sound designer Mark Grey’s collaboration to the project and discussed the equipment used to facilitate the soundscapes Adams created for the opera. The article lists a Mach 5 Software Sampler, a Digital Performance Sampler, and the software synthesizer Absynth. The soundscapes were played back on an eight speaker set-up, enveloping the audience not only from the sides but also from above and below. While Act I was mainly rendered using a stereo set-up including a center speaker, the second act used many surround effects. The singing of the chorus was also digitally processed. During both the première and the Dutch performance released on DVD, Mark Grey was attendant and equipped with both a laptop and the score, following cues in order to trigger different effects at the right moment and to mix the orchestral and vocal sounds (Reveaux, “Gray Matter”).

Perhaps the use of body microphones and the live mixing of the singers’ voices can be considered to be the most controversial technological aspect. Traditionally, sound balance in opera performances is achieved through collective efforts of the conductor, orchestra, and singers. Body microphones can offer an alternative method of overcoming these balance problems. In the case of Doctor Atomic, this proved to be especially useful because it would be hard for singers to compete with the large orchestra and electronically amplified sound effects bare-voiced. However, the use of this technology was not met by unanimous acclaim. Tommasini found that the première performance “was troubled by balance problems” and stated that “if you are going to abandon 400 years of tradition and amplify singers to get the balances right, then get the balances right” (Tommasini, “Countdown to the Eve of Destruction”). Some months later he dedicated a whole article to the amplification aspects after witnessing a performance by the San Francisco opera. Asking “Is this the beginning of the end?”, he discussed the introduction of amplification in Broadway musicals. He claimed that the musical shifted focus from “the lyrics (which grew less subtle and intricate), to the subject matter and musical styles (the bigger, the plusher, the schlockier, the better).” Would a new generation of singers with thin voices only adjusted to amplification come about, and would we lose “natural talents and nurtured attentive audiences,” as happened with the Broadway musical? He even drew a connection between the use of amplification and the “national problem” of hearing loss due to rock music experienced by the baby boom generation (Tommasini, “Pipe Down! We Can Hardly Hear You”). Doctor Atomic is not just about science fiction, but it is operatic science fiction in its own right. Tommasini’s article can be interpreted as a classic example of distrust of new technology, not unlike those expressed in the films discussed above.

Staging

In many aspects, Sellars’s 2007 production of Doctor Atomic is geared to a realistic and historically accurate representation. The DVD opens with a montage of historical video footage depicting, among other things, fire bombings and mutilated bodies contrasted with rationalized and mechanized arms production. The footage is musically accompanied by a Varèsian soundscape, mixed with realistic sound effects such as the sound of an airplane and a nostalgic and distorted recording of Jo Stafford’s “The Things We Did Last Summer.” When the overture begins, the proscenium becomes visible, and we see the chorus and dancers, whose choreography was provided by Lucinda Childs. The dancers not only function to express the mechanical motions of weapons manufacturing but also provide a moving image of the bomb’s plutonium core. The singers and dancers are dressed with historical accuracy. In an interview, costume designer Dunya Radicova said that there “was a tremendous amount of research because we had to know as much as possible about what it might have been like to have been there.” Sources for the costumes ranged from museum collections to photographs. However, she was not strictly concerned with realism. “We are even putting in a little bit . . . of Hollywood’s image of the war, in essence to make a connection for the audience, because that’s what they know more than the reality” (Reveaux, “Designing Dr. Atomic”).

The documentary Wonders Are Many (Else) parallels the creation of Doctor Atomic with the history of the Manhattan Project. This documentary shows how the bomb prop used for the premiere staging was modeled as precisely as possible from photographs of the “gadget”—which was the code name used in the Manhattan Project. The same holds true for the scaffolding from which the bomb is suspended during a large part of the opera. During the aria “Batter my Heart” (discussed above), the scaffolding is overhung with a white sheet, removing the bomb from view. A spotlight is placed behind the construction, and as a result the bomb casts a circular shadow on the sheet, calling the Japanese flag to mind. Later in the opera, the scaffolding is removed, while the bomb is left hanging from the theater’s ceiling. Under it is placed the crib of baby Katherine Oppenheimer. Paul Wells—of the Canadian Maclean’s Magazine—reacted to the scene that “[a]s metaphors go, this one is as subtle as a brick. The Bomb—The Menace That Hangs Over All Our Children” (Wells). Here, the sounds of thunder are accompanied by lighting resembling lightning as the introduction to Pasqualita’s lullaby (discussed above) is heard.

The most important scene, of course, is the explosion that concludes the opera. The main part of the opera arguably tries to simulate what Christian Metz calls “the impression of reality” experienced by cinema audiences (Metz 4). One could also argue that Doctor Atomic resembles the illusionism of Wagnerian opera, about which Bertolt Brecht said that “the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot . . . becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art” (Brecht 38). But this scene brings about a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, as the singers and dancers face the audience as they watch the explosion. According to Adams, this was done to make “[t]he audience members gradually realize that they themselves are the bomb” (Adams 291). Many documentaries depict scientists intently watching the explosions that prove their experiment’s success. This is also true for some science fiction films. For instance, in Beast, the scientists can be seen watching the explosion through goggles (see above). However, Godzilla and Them! only show footage of explosions. For Godzilla it can be argued that the explosion is a foreign affair, rather like a “natural” disaster not subject to human agency. In Them!, the causality of the explosion is an affair of a previous generation, of which the consequences still have to be suffered. Doctor Atomic’s explosion brings history into the here-and-now, signaling to the audience that the threat is not over yet and that the individual’s capacity in the nuclear status quo should not be underestimated—see Sellars’s pronouncement cited earlier that he wants to “once again bring up the atomic topic” (Sellars).

Example 1: Cluster chords of overture, mm. 1–7.

Example 2: Harp and celesta parts of “Rain over Sangre de Christos,” mm. 76–8.

Musical Criticism

In this article I have briefly examined musical, mythological, and nuclear-critical aspects of both Doctor Atomic and my selection of science fiction films. In the scenes of the opera I have discussed, either stylistic elements occur which are also prominent in the science fiction film soundtracks discussed, or the musical material directly resembles that of a certain film scene. In some cases, especially those of “Countdown Part I” and the orchestral introduction to “Batter my Heart,” it is not unthinkable that they were actually paraphrases from the film music of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

It is not only the musical material—or Hollywood-like “historical” costumes and cinematic sound design—that can make one think of science fiction; both the opera and the films contain a mythological dimension. There are some differences in this respect between Doctor Atomic and the science fiction films that I examined. Because of the opera’s emphasis on realism, Doctor Atomic’s subject matter seems to have been treated more seriously: there was no need to use an unrealistic metaphor like a monster for either nuclear weaponry or the dangers and fears it brought into the world. But a critical message transpires throughout; there is a conflict between nature and technology, between spirituality and science without moral considerations. This critical dimension is supported by the staging created by Sellars.

Not only can those musical, mythological, and critical aspects be observed in the opera, but, as we have seen, they were also intentional. The association of Doctor Atomic, with an emblem of fear of nuclear warfare in the form of science fiction serves to underline its actual subject matter: the moral dilemma faced by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists and the fear their creation was to inspire for many years to come. Adams said he did not want to lecture his audience about the atomic topic. The libretto and staging were mainly Sellars’s work, but Adams’s contribution to the project, including the choice of referring to ’50s monster science fiction film music—and thus the historical fear expressed through the films of the genre—seems to make the nuclear arms criticism in Doctor Atomic all the more outspoken.

Maarten Nellestijn lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Works Cited

- Adams, John. Doctor Atomic. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2005.

- ——. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

- Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

- Brecht, Bertolt. “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre.” Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett. London: Methuen & Co, 1964.

- “The Bulletin Interview: Peter Sellars.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64.1 (2008).

- Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter & Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984).

- Douglas, Gordon. Them! (1954). Warner Bros., 2009.

- Eichler, Jeremy. “An Opera that Hovers on the Threshold of the Nuclear Age.” The Boston Globe Oct. 16 2008.

- Else, Jon. Wonders Are Many. New Video Group, 2007.

- Honda, Ishirô. Godzilla (Gojira) (1954). Warner Bros., 2006.

- Hosokawa, Shuhei. “Atomic Overtones and Primitive Undertones: Akira Ifukube’s Sound Design for Godzilla.” Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Philip Hayward. Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2004.

- Ketterson, Mark Thomas. “Chicago.” Opera News 2008.

- Lourié, Eugène. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Warner Bros., 2004.

- May, Thomas. “John Adams on Doctor Atomic.” The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer. Ed. Thomas May. New Jersey: Amadeus Press, 2006.

- Metz, Christian. “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.” Film Language : a Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

- Reveaux, Tony. “Designing Dr. Atomic.” Entertainment Design July 2005.

- ——. “Gray Matter.” Entertainment Design Sept. 2005.

- Ross, Alex. “Doctor Atomic: Countdown.” The New Yorker October 3, 2005.

- Schmidt, Lisa M. “A Popular Avant-Garde: The Paradoxical Tradition of Electronic and Atonal Sounds in Sci-Fi Music Scoring.” Sounds of the Future: Essays on Music in Science Fiction Film. Ed. Matthew J. Bartkowiak. North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.

- Sellars, Peter. John Adams : Doctor Atomic. Opus Arte, 2008.

- Swenson-Wright, John. Unequal Allies?: United States Security and Alliance Policy Towards Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

- Tommasini, Anthony. “Countdown to the Eve of Destruction.” The New York Times October 3, 2005.

- ——. “Pipe Down! We Can Hardly Hear You.” The New York Times January 1, 2006.

- Tucker, Marilyn. “Doctor Atomic by John Adams.” American Record Guide 2006.

- van Elferen, Isabella. “‘And Machine Created Music’. Cybergothic Music and the Phantom Voices of the Technological Uncanny.” Digital Material. Ed. Joost Raessens et al. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

- Wells, Paul. “The New Barihunk.” Maclean’s 118.42 (2005).

- Williams, Paul. “Nuclear Criticism.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould et al. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.

- Wilson, Mark. “Doctor Atomic to Premier in San Francisco.” Physics Today Sept. 2005.

The Prime Error

Thomas A. Easton

In the history of science fiction, many writers have considered the question of whether there is a Most Important Thing for human beings to do—and then, of course, what that Most Important Thing might be. Candidates for Most Important Things have included humanity’s manifest destiny to spread out and conquer the universe, Reason (with a capital R), individual competence, the pursuit of knowledge, and more. Star Trek’s Prime Directive—that we should not meddle (even in a well-meaning way) in the affairs of alien intelligences—has been expressed by so many writers that, despite the negative phrasing, it may be a good candidate for the greatest of Most Important Things.

That there is such a consensus concerning the Prime Directive suggests that many writers have looked at human history and politics—and even at some of the other candidate Most Important Things—and seen a tendency to meddle in the affairs of others. They have also concluded that such meddling is a major way in which we mess things up. They might even agree that it is humanity’s Prime Error.

And perhaps it is. It would certainly be possible to find a great many real-life examples to illustrate the case. But I would like to look at another candidate for humanity’s Prime Error.

In Highway of Eternity (Del Rey, 1986), Clifford D. Simak (1904–88) wrote:

He is looking for the basic errors we humans made and . . . [he] has found a few . . . the problem of surpluses, the profit motive, and the war motive which arises from one man or tribe having more than another man or tribe may have; or the need of huddling—the need of men and women to huddle in tribes, nations, and empires, reflecting that terrifying sense of insecurity that is part of the human psyche. (12)

Greed and war are pretty basic, and they have provided so many writers—in sf and out of it—with material that it hardly seems worthwhile to devote an essay to explaining why they are errors, much less Prime Errors. But huddling? Here is a novel idea, not one exploited by hordes of other scribblers. It deserves a closer look.

Simak was a journalist who lived his entire life in the Midwest, working for Minneapolis newspapers from 1939 to 1976. He was not widely traveled, perhaps because of a sense of insecurity such as he mentions in Highway of Eternity. I cannot say more than “perhaps,” for it is impossible to psychoanalyze a writer dead for 25 years. But the idea of huddling is one that Simak returned to many times, especially in his famous “Huddling Place” (1944), part of the City series. This is the tale Jerome Webster, a man powerfully attached to the family homestead of many generations. He feels its woods and fields and trout stream in his very bones, and though he traveled in his youth, he no longer cares to leave the homestead. Webster even calls it a sort of agoraphobia. And when an old friend asks his presence on Mars to carry out an operation only he can do, he cannot go. The homestead, his home and hearth, has become “a trap that would never let him go.”

Webster did not initally see being trapped in such a way as a universal human problem. It was personal, even familial (shared by the character’s father, and perhaps his grandfather, who “never went anywhere, either”). Humanity as a whole was “huddling” less than ever, for the once-teeming cities had been largely abandoned. People were moving out to the planets. But, of 250 men invited to visit his character, only three could tear themselves away from familiar haunts, and Webster feared that his personal problem was not his alone.

Indeed, in City’s 1973 “Epilog,” the world was left to robots as the humans left, and, in time, even the robots huddled, slaves to memory and attachment, subject to anxiety at the prospect of departure. Huddling became not just a human problem but one of all intelligent beings.

It is not, of course, an insuperable or even a continuous problem. Giving up attachment to old, familiar patterns need not mean abandoning all of the past. “All the Traps of Earth” (1960) shows an ancient robot, last servitor to an old family whose last member has died, inventorying the estate, including himself, and realizing that he did not want to have his mind destroyed so he could be resold. Better to flee the traps of custom and law and expectation until, in time, he finds a world that needs him and where he can huddle once more, trapped by his own need to be of service. But at this point, huddling is not a problem, for the character no longer feels trapped. Fulfilled is a better word. He has refound his niche.

By the time of Highway of Eternity, more than 40 years after “Huddling Place,” Simak apparently had thought much more upon the problem, which may or may not have been his own. Huddling, attachment to the familiar and reluctance to depart from it, became in his mind one of humanity’s major errors. The opposite of error—Simak’s own Prime Directive—is a willingness or even eagerness to venture forth, to explore, to embrace the new. This is a more conventional science-fictional theme, but it repeats so often and so powerfully in Simak’s work that, especially in conjunction with the Prime Error of huddling, it gains significance.

Why embrace the new? For knowledge, Simak says in “Jackpot” (1956), “The Big Front Yard” (1958), Way Station (1963), and more. And if you can’t go looking for knowledge in the flesh or have it brought to you as in Way Station, go in mind as in Time Is the Simplest Thing (1961) and Project Pope (1981). With both methods, you meet others and broaden your perspective.

Is broader perspective the benefit whose lack makes huddling a Prime Error? Many of the world’s ills do indeed seem attributable to parochial and short-term thinking. The interests of the few and the present are favored over those of the many and the future. We can see this dichotomy in religious conflicts, economic disasters, or debates over what to do about environmental problems. So here, no matter what he started from, may be the conclusion to Simak’s thought: Go forth, open yourself, learn and learn some more, and the universe is yours.

To the science fiction fan, this is not a terribly profound thought. Fans take it quite for granted, having breathed it in from the very start of their exposure to science fiction. Yet this thought was handed to them in their reading. They did not come to it slowly, working it out over the course of four decades as did Simak. To him, it was a discovery. I’m sure that it did not escape him that the basic idea was close kin to what he did as a journalist, going out into the world daily to discover what new thing had unfolded among people unknown.

Perhaps, if he indeed shared in the anxiety he described in 1944, learning that one could go forth physically and mentally reconciled him to his own tendency to huddle.

Thomas Easton lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Possession and Lovecraft: An Exchange

Darrell Schweitzer and Kevin J. Maroney

DARRELL SCHWEITZER: Sometimes I feel as if I am trying to bat down shoggoths with a hammer. In the very issue in which we have Graham Andrews graciously acknowledging that he hasn’t read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a good long while, we have JeFF Stumpo perpetuating exactly the same error on page 9 in the midst of an otherwise excellent article (NYRSF 294). I wonder why Ward is so commonly misread. It is not actually all that subtle. Lovecraft tends to spell out his “clues” quite explicitly. The novel is not about “a dead necromancer who possesses the body of his descendent, Charles Ward.” It is about a necromancer who is physically resurrected from his “essential saltes” by his descendant. The necromancer, Joseph Curwen, bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Ward, but there are differences. Ward has a birthmark on his leg; Curwen does not. Curwen has a “witch mark” on his chest and a scar on his forehead that Ward lacks. The resurrected Curwen assumes the identity (complete with a fake beard as a disguise) of “Dr. Allen,” whom Ward presents to his parents as a colleague.

It’s about time everybody gets out their corrected edition of the Arkham House At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels and reread key passages. On 194–197, we are given some intercepted correspondence of Joseph Curwen’s old-time colleagues (still surviving from the eighteenth century) in which they plot against “ye Boy” who is too “squeamish” to follow their eldritch agenda, for all he may have collaborated with them to this point. Dr. Willett (the family physician, who is the protagonist of the novel) and Charles Ward’s father read this and realize that the bad guys are plotting against young Charles. On 225, it is made very clear that the person taken to be “Charles,” who is now in the madhouse, has the scar that was visible in the old portrait of Curwen (now destroyed), which the real Charles does not. Dr. Willett soon figures out what has happened. “Dr. Allen” has murdered Charles and attempted to impersonate him, not very convincingly, which is why he was hauled off to a madhouse. On 227, Dr. Willett goes into Charles’s study and locks the door. Detectives have already gone through this room but noted nothing other than “Dr. Allen’s” discarded glasses and fake beard. (Someone even pencils glasses and a beard onto a photo of Charles Ward and produces a recognizable likeness of Mr. Allen.) Ward’s father is listening outside. He hears wood creak. There is a cry. The air fills with noxious odors. Willett burns quite a bit of material in the fireplace and removes more in a covered basket. A little while later, he writes to the elder Ward, telling him that they must agree to a cover story about how “Charles” escaped from the asylum, never to be seen again, but reassures him that in a year or so he may put up a headstone at a certain spot in a cemetery where the remains of the real Charles Ward are buried (229–31). Willett then confronts the person he knows to be Joseph Curwen in the asylum, defeats him by magic, and reduces him to a fine dust. There is no “possession.” The physically resurrected Curwen co-exists with Charles Ward for a time until Curwen murders Ward, then impersonates him. What Dr. Willett found behind the wall in the study, of course, was the decayed body of Ward where Curwen had hidden it. He partially burned it in the fireplace and removed the rest in the basket.

I do not understand the confusion. It’s as if, after all this time, many readers were not really sure what is actually going on in, say, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lovecraft spells it out if you read him closely.

KEVIN J. MARONEY: I blame myself for not catching that—I was too caught up in the argument of the piece as a whole, I suppose.

Certainly I agree that Ward does not involve possession except in the most metaphorical sense. Some of the confusion must arise from the fact that parts of Ward are reenacted in “The Shadow out of Time,” which does feature possession—Nathaniel Peaslee’s long “fit of amnesia” (while he is possessed by the Great Race) is very similar to the “amnesia” that “Charles” exhibits after he has been replaced by Curwen.

“The Thing on the Doorstep” absolutely does feature possession as well, though the events play out very differently. I think that’s why, even though your interpretation of the events of Ward matches mine, it’s an easy mistake to make: possession runs throughout Lovecraft’s work over a significant span of his modern-era stories.

DARRELL SCHWEITZER: You’re right that there is real possession in “The Shadow Out of Time” and even a replay of some elements of Ward. Of course the reason is totally different. In “Shadow” the alien mind really is in Prof. Peaslee’s body. In Ward it is a matter of the physically resurrected Curwen, who just happens to resemble Ward, trying to impersonate him after he has murdered him.

Lovecraft did tend to recycle bits of his “repudiated” stories like that. The whole speech of Nyarlathotep at the end of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is replayed by Yog-Sothoth in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” We tended to forget that for all Ward is now seen as a major work, in Lovecraft’s lifetime it was a repudiated manuscript he did not think worth typing up.

Yes, there is possession in “The Thing on the Doorstep.” What we’re seeing in all three stories is an instance of someone (or something) from the past trying to impersonate someone from the present and not doing a very good job of it. Impersonation, not possession, is the common element.

The Power of Narrative Conference, Boston University, April 2013

The main conference hall at The School of Management, Boston University

David Hartwell, preparing to speak at the Conference

Jay Lake & Peter Straub at ICFA 2013

Another ICFA 2013 photo: Stephen R. Donaldson & Gary Wolfe, foreground; IAFA President Sydney Duncan & ICFA GOH Kij Johnson, background

How the Game Is Played in Atlantic City

Back in June 2011, John Perich wrote on Overthinking It about an emerging genre. His basic premise was this:

You’d be forgiven for confusing the many, many period dramas that have aired on premium cable in the last six years. . . . Rome, The Tudors, Deadwood, Spartacus, Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, Camelot, Game of Thrones, and doubtless others. The historical eras depicted by these films span thousands of years—and even enter the realm of fantasy—and several continents. But they all share one genre. In this genre, familiar stories are retold with an emphasis on violence, sex, and dishonest scheming. If there’s not a better name for this genre, I’m calling it Blood, Tits and Scowling. . . .

The beauty is that, when you put them all together, it creates a perpetual engine for drama. www.overthinkingit.com/2011/06/28/blood-Tits-and-scowling.

The whole essay is worth reading for anyone interested in the mechanics of storytelling. In addition to discussions of the particularities of telling stories at extended length, he goes on to discuss precisely why the BT&S mode is such a comfortable fit for stories set in either fantasy worlds or historical periods so distant they “might as well be another world.”

A fine example of the similarities came that year. The Game of Thrones episode “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things” concludes with a chance encounter at a crossroads inn: Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf, the king’s brother-in-law, meets Catelyn Stark, a lady of house Tully, wife of the king’s most trusted advisor. Catelyn believes that Tyrion has attempted to murder her son. In George R. R. Martin’s novel, the scene unfolds thus:

“You in the corner,” she said to an older man she had not noticed until now. “Is that the black bat of Harrenhal I see embroidered on your surcoat, ser?”

The man got to his feet. “It is, my lady.”

“And is Lady Whent a true and honest friend to my father, Lord Hoster Tully of Riverrun?”

“She is,” the man replied stoutly.

Ser Rodrik rose quietly and loosened his sword in its scabbard. The dwarf was blinking at them, blank-faced, with puzzlement in his mismatched eyes.

“The red stallion was ever a welcome sight in Riverrun,” she said to the trio by the fire. “My father counts Jonos Bracken among his oldest and most loyal bannermen.”

The three men-at-arms exchanged uncertain looks. “Our lord is honored by his trust,” one said hesitantly.

“This man came a guest into my house, and there conspired to murder my son, a boy of seven,” Catlyn proclaimed to the room at large, pointing. Ser Rodrik moved to her side, his sword in hand. “In the name of King Robert and the good lords you serve, I call upon you to seize him and help me return him to Winterfell to await the king’s justice.”

Six months later, the second episode of the second season of Boardwalk Empire featured this scene. “Chalky” White, the undisputed leader of the black criminal gangs of Atlantic City, is held in a large, segregated, cell with several other prisoners. Dunn Purnsley, newly arrived from Baltimore, starts taunting White.

WHITE: . . . get your finger out of my face.

PURNSLEY: What I don’t like about you? . . . the uppity way you tell the world you better than Dunn Purnsley when all you be is another jigaboo in a jail cell.

WHITE (speaking past Purnsley to another prisoner): Harold C. Madison. How your daddy keeping?

HAROLD: Tolerable, sir. He thank you for the doctor bill.

WHITE (to a second prisoner): Noah Hookway. . . . Things good down at the gold room?

NOAH: Supposed to work today.

WHITE: I’ll talk to ’em. (to a third and fourth prisoner) Timothy. Cornelius.

TIMOTHY: Mama grateful for the turkey, sir.

WHITE: All righty then. (The others grab Purnsley from behind and beat him. Chalky returns to his bunk.)

Centuries, universes apart. History is a series of stories. The same words shape them; the same narratives flow around.

Stories repeat because the shapes of the bricks are all alike.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors

Table of Contents

- I Will Whisper in the Dark

- Notes on the Origins of the Term “Scientific Romance” and Its Implications for the Development of Science Fiction

- Rusty’s Space Ship Flies Again

- A Third Sampling of Medical Myths and Errors in Genre Fiction

- Doctor Atomic: Science Fiction Opera
- The Prime Error
- Possession and Lovecraft: An Exchange

- The Power of Narrative Conference, Boston University, April 2013

- How the Game Is Played in Atlantic City