New York Review of Science Fiction October 2014

By Brian Stableford, Fruma Klass, Michael Andre-Driussi and 7 more

Special Sex and Memory Issue
Brian Stableford: French Speculative Sex
Fruma Klass: On Knowing Fred Pohl
Michael Andre-Driussi: American Film on Hitler
Emily Hosokawa: Changing Forms of SF Sublimity
Mariano Villareal: The State of Spanish SF
Michael Levy on the final Thomas Covenant novel
A.P Canavan on Ian Esslemont’s Assail
Dan’l Danehy-Oakes on Daryl Gregory’s Afterparty
Joe Sanders on Peter Watts’s Beyond the Rift
Fran Wilde on Eileen Gunn’s Questionable Practices

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Maroney
• Release date: Nov 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502204905

Book preview

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The New York Review

of Science Fiction

October 2014

Number 314

Vol. 27, No. 2

Contents

Brian Stableford: Speculative Sex: The First Gropings

Fruma Klass: Fred Pohl—An Appreciation

The Last Dark: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book Fourby Stephen R. Donaldson, reviewed by Michael Levy

Assail (Novels of the Malazan Empire vol. 6) by Ian C. Esslemont, reviewed by A.P. Canavan

Michael Andre-Driussi: Anglo-American Movies Responding to Hitler, 1936 to 1941

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

Emily Hosokawa: The Evolution of the Sublime in SF: Non-Stop, The Left Hand of Darkness, and 2312

Mariano Villareal: Science Fiction from Spain

Beyond the Rift by Peter Watts, reviewed by Joe Sanders

Questionable Practices by Eileen Gunn, reviewed by Fran Wilde

Photos

Editorial: The Changing Leaves

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

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Heather Masri, Sophie Logan, Bernice Mills, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814

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Copyright © 2014 Burrowing Wombat Press.

Brian Stableford

Speculative Sex: The First Gropings

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In English-language speculative fiction, the possibility of sexual intercourse as topic of speculation was more or less ruled out by prevailing standards of literary diplomacy until the 1960s, and it was a subject that required a certain amount of daring to be broached even in France. Nevertheless, the scope and the incentive were there for anyone unafraid of grasping the nettle, and a number of writers did so in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Those first attempts are worthy of attention and comparison as enterprising attempts to move into uncharted literary and philosophical territory.

There are, of course, a wide range of questions that speculative fiction might potentially have addressed by way of introduction to the topic, but they can be broadly divided into four categories relating to the differences that might be made to the experience of sexual intercourse by new social organizations, new technologies, new developments in human physiology or anatomy, and interaction with alien beings. The four categories are not entirely distinct, of course, particularly with respect to the first, which could overlap with any of the others, and there is a considerable gray area at the boundary between the second and the third. Nor were all four equally available for investigation, given that the taboos governing mentionability were relaxed in a somewhat patchy fashion, chronologically speaking—as a consideration of particular examples will easily exemplify.

Of the handful of works that I want to employ as examples, only one was translated into English during the quarter-century in question, and its English translation was strictly bowdlerized, thus nullifying its possible contribution to the argument, and only one other was translated in the course of the entire twentieth century, although all of them are available in English now, mainly thanks to the heroic efforts of Black Coat Press.

Before proceeding to a brief, clinical examination of the specimens in question, however, it is probably appropriate to say something about their literary precursors because the development of speculative sex did not occur without a certain amount of necessary foreplay. Before there was speculative sex as well as alongside and inextricably associated with it, there was fantasy sex, not simply in the quasi-tautological sense that all sexual experience is to some extent fantasy, the imagination routinely playing a larger part in it than mere organ-grinding, but in the more specific sense that supernatural literature as it developed through the nineteenth century—more so in France than anywhere else—was often intensely eroticized, very frequently dealing, with varying layers of diplomatic veiling, with the potentialities of sexual desire and fulfillment.

That situation was complicated, of course, by the fact that all the veiling of discussion of sexual intercourse in common parlance as well as naturalistic literature typically employed symbolic and often frankly supernatural vocabulary. The complication in question, however, was a crucial element of the eternally elaborate negotiation between fictional representation and real experience, and it made supernatural fiction especially in the context of the Symbolist movement the ideal vehicle for addressing such issues indirectly.

Given the role played by the imagination in sexual experience, in fact, it is not at all surprising that sexual attraction and the problematics of its fulfillment are central topics of what Alexander Baumgarten, the founder of modern esthetic theory, called heterocosmic creativity: the secondary creation of worlds within texts that differ in some respect from the world as experienced. This is not the place to discuss the question of whether there is, in fact, any artistic creativity that is not heterocosmic, although anyone wishing to contend that there is not would find the task much easier by adopting the treatment or avoidance of sex in naturalistic fiction as a test case. It is only natural, however, that readers whose experience of actual sex is woefully unsatisfactory—which might or might not be everybody; what do I know?—might be interested to read fictitious descriptions about satisfactory sex, including and perhaps especially, symbolically reconfigured and supernaturalized sex.

The erotic supernatural fiction of Théophile Gautier is particularly useful in this regard as an exemplar, firstly because it is so variable and partly because it is so consistent, in spite of that variability in its fundamental conviction that the only authentically fulfilling sexual intercourse would be forced almost as a matter of tautology to reach beyond the mundane. In his fiction, amour is essentially unsatisfactory while it is limited by the satisfactions that an actually accessible partner can provide because the ideal of optimism must necessarily exceed mere grasp, and only the exotic and the supernatural can fill in the gap. The variability with which Gautier expressed and extrapolated that instruction took in politely clad sex with living legends (Une nuit de Cléopâtre), ghosts (Arria Marcella), and vampires (Clarimonde); sex assisted by quasi-supernatural charisma (Fortunio) and supernatural time-twisting (Avatar); and—climatically, in the sense that it was his last literary gasp—sex between disembodied spirits (Spirite).

Because much speculative fiction is merely supernatural fiction rejargonized, we might expect to find the fundamental erotic charge and the fundamental assumption of such fantasies as these replicated in stories of speculative sex, and modern readers familiar with post–New Wave science fiction would probably have no difficulty thinking of a few Gautieresque clones of that sort. Any writer working seriously with a vocabulary of ideas drawn from scientific speculation rather than supernatural tradition, however, and, more importantly, importing a measure of the philosophy of science into his endeavor is compelled to adopt a change of attitude. The alteration in question is neatly illustrated by the first significant literary work of the twentieth century that attempted to bring sexual intercourse squarely into the sights of the speculative imagination: Alfred Jarry’s Le Sûrmale (1902; tr. as The Supermale).

The first chapter of the novel describes a conversation at a house party at André Marcueil’s château, sparked by his remark that the erotic act is unimportant, since it can be performed indefinitely. Marcueil’s argument is that sexual intercourse in the past has only retained human interest and fascination precisely because of the problem addressed in such detail by Gautier: that it was forever reaching hopefully for something essentially beyond its grasp, thus remaining in permanent suspense. As Marcueil puts it, it was an "acte en puissance [a potential act], and it was that unfulfilled potentiality that was the engine of what one of his questioners calls sentiment," embracing both erotic desire and all the froth of love.

The past tense is appropriate to that description because, as Marceuil suggests, he is now in a position to transcend the limitation. Also present at the house party is the American chemist William Elson, the inventor of what is described in the text (in English) as a Perpetual-Motion-Food, a dietary supplement that dramatically enhances the physical fortitude of the human body. Marcueil believes, although he has not yet tried