![]() ![]() ![]() Just as I, for instance, who have no taste for cards, could not find anything very useful to say by way of warning against deep play. Even if it is a vice to read science fiction, those who cannot understand the very temptation to that vice will not be likely to tell us anything of value about it. In this way, one may say of a kind not only (as Wordsworth says of the poet) that 'you must love it ere to you it will seem worthy of your love', but that you must at least have loved it once if you are even to warn others against it. And if you do not know what sort of people they are, you will be ill-equipped to find out what conditions have made them so. If you have never enjoyed a thing and do not know what it feels like to enjoy it, you will hardly know what sort of people go to it, in what moods, seeking what sort of gratification. But here as elsewhere those who hate the thing they are trying to explain are not perhaps those most likely to explain it. This is of course a perfectly legitimate attempt. Moreover, most of these articles were chiefly concerned to account for the bulge in the output and consumption of science fiction on sociological and psychological grounds. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist? Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. ![]() Above all, it should not masquerade as criticism of individual works. But it is, I think, the most subjective and least reliable type of criticism. Criticism of kinds, as distinct from criticism of works, cannot of course be avoided: I shall be driven to criticize one sub-species of science fiction myself. I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look much alike to me: if I wrote about them I should therefore infallibly write drivel. It is very dangerous to write about a kind you hate. For another, many were by people who clearly hated the kind they wrote about. For one thing, most were not very well informed. Of the articles I have read on the subject (and I expect I have missed many) I do not find that I can make any use. There seems, in fact, to be a double paradox in its history: it began to be popular when it least deserved popularity, and to excite critical contempt as soon as it ceased to he wholly contemptible. It was after this that the genre began to attract the attention (always, I think, contemptuous) of the literary weeklies. Then, perhaps five or six years ago, the bulge still continuing and even increasing, there was an improvement: not that very bad stories ceased to be the majority, but that the good ones became better and more numerous. About this time the name scientifiction, soon altered to science fiction, began to be common. The execution was usually detestable the conceptions, sometimes worthy of better treatment. In America whole magazines began to be exclusively devoted to them. ![]() Then, some fifteen or twenty years ago, I became aware of a bulge in the production of such stories. I had read fantastic fiction of all sorts ever since I could read, including, of course, the particular kind which Wells practised in his Time Machine, First Men in the Moon and others. And lately I have had the same sort of experience again. I had been walking, and reading Trollope, for years when I found myself suddenly overtaken, as if by a wave from behind, by a boom in Trollope and a short-lived craze for what was called hiking. A like thing happens to one's private recreations. Sometimes a village or small town which we have known all our lives becomes the scene of a murder, a novel, or a centenary, and then for a few months everyone knows its name and crowds go to visit it. Shop: Roman Catholic "RC" Brand Original White Logo Collection Premium Tee | Multiple colors and sizes available! ![]()
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