Damon Knight - In Search of Wonder by Essays on Modern Science Fiction

Author:Essays on Modern Science Fiction
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

16. THE JAGGED BLADE: James Blish

JAMES BLISH IS AN intense young man with a brilliant scholastic mind and an astonishing variety of enthusiasms—e.g., music, beer, astronomy, poetry, philosophy, cats. Until fairly recently he played two instruments and composed music; he still writes poetry and criticism for the little magazines, is a genuine authority on James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and an expert in half a dozen other fields. In college he was well on his way to becoming a limnobiologist when he discovered he was getting more A’s in English literature—and selling the stories he submitted to such magazines as Future, Cosmic and Super Science.

One man is obviously not enough for all this, and there are really two Blishes: the alertly interested, warmly outgoing human being, and the cold, waspishly precise scholast. Up till now, in his prose work at least, I think the two have always got in each other’s way; Blish’s early stories are almost oppressively devoid of any human color or feeling; they might be stories written by an exceptionally able Martian anthropologist.

“Beanstalk,” at least, is different. Sam, Sena, Dr. Fred—and in particular Maury St. George, the most fascinating science-fictional villain since Blacky DuQuesne—all the major characters are as big and as round as life; bigger, I suppose I should say, since all of them but Dr. Fred are polyploid giants. They are, if you like, supermen and women (and one dog, a bitch named Decibelle)—they’re taller, stronger, longer-lived than their cousins with the normal human number of genes—but their story is a story of recognizable, believable people. There is a really fantastic body of technique in this short novel, but unless you are looking for it you will never notice it; it’s submerged, where it belongs.

If a superman really is a superman, he ought to be able to neutralize the natural hostility of normal men enough to get along; this is the point made by Kuttner in the Baldy series and neglected by everyone else, from Stapledon to van Vogt, until now. Like Kuttner, Blish makes paranoia the Titans’ greatest hazard. Take a world in which there has already been much anti-Titan legislation and one anti-Titan pogrom, add a paranoid Titan who equates “superman” with “master race”—the result is explosive, and this is only the beginning. I am not going to tell much more about the plot, or Blish will say “supererogation” to me again; but I am going to say a great deal about the structure that underlies it and is interwoven with it.

Not merely embedded in “Beanstalk,” but inseparably united to make one coherent and symmetrical narrative, are whole exemplars or recognizable fragments of the following: a sports story; a love story; a Western story—plus, for good measure, a couple of panels from “Buck Rogers.”

Since the last thing I want is to scare anyone away from this work, I’d better repeat that this difficult technical feat takes place entirely in the submerged levels of the story. Wildly incompatible as the above-listed elements are, not

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