First Published in
Science Fiction Quarterly, summer 1942.
The Futurians in 1938 - DAW is top row at the right.* |
Coming straight after
Lowndes, we have one of the most important editors in the later
development of SF. Wolheim was already a seasoned pro at age 28 when
this story was published, having made his first professional sale 10
years previously. He was an active SF fan and had been involved in
one of the earliest of fandom’s schisms.
In the 30s, Hugo Gernsback
had used the pages of Wonder Stories to promote the official-sounding
‘Science Fiction League’ as a kind of rallying point for the
growing fandom movement. Ashley observes that ‘For science fiction
fans [emphasis in original] the fiction came secondary in
Wonder Stories.’ One of SF’s biggest magazines had become
a house organ for a social group, rather than being about stories at
all.
Wolheim was expelled
from the Science Fiction League in 1935. He’d been responsible for
setting up the International Scientific Association which, in
Ashley’s words, ‘opposed the Science Fiction League’ on the
basis that fan organisations should be separate from commercial
publishers. The feud lasted a few years and numerous splinter and
fringe groups grew up in its wake, like protestant religious factions
in the 17th century. Wolheim was later a founding member
of The Futurians, perhaps the most influential group in the history
of SF, and certainly in the genre’s golden age.
In light of all this,
this story becomes less an individual work and more like a rallying
cry for certain types of fan.
‘Up There’ is a
very gentle story. It has a disarmingly wry tone that invites the
reader to smile indulgently at both the apparently eccentric old
Uncle Ephraim who believes the stars are painted on the dome of night
sky and the puzzled nephew who narrates. It’s based on a theory
expounded by Charles Fort, that the ideas of contemporary astronomers
were no less based on distant observation than their discredited
ancestors – why should we believe the modern observers over their
ancestors? Do have they have any more evidence than the astronomer’s
of antiquity?
Charles Fort’s book
Lo! was serialised in Astounding in 1934, and so his ideas
entered the SF community. This wasn’t the first story to use his
ideas and it certainly wasn’t the last time that this kind of
pseudo-science fed-in to the grand SF narrative. When we come to look
at vol 3 of the series we’ll have time to consider such unedifying
spectacle as the Shaver mysteries and Joseph Campbell’s
enthusiastic launch of Scientology in the pages of Astounding
Science Fiction.
For now, though, I’d
just like to draw attention to the degree that rational philosophical
enquiry was the meat and drink of the social side of SF. Lot’s a SF
writers and critics bleat on about how it’s all about characters,
but this story feels more like the opening salvo of a kind of high
school level philosophical debate. I can almost imagine the ‘Tips
for Teachers’ that appear at the bottom of the last page: ‘Ask
the class to discuss what evidence they have for (a) that the moon is
a planetoid in orbit around the Earth, (b) that the stars a bodies
like our sun at a great distance and/or (c) the existence of
Australia.’
It’s not a great
story, and Wolheim is chiefly interesting for becoming one of the
most influential publishers in the history of SF when he established
DAW SF in 1965. He clearly understood what made SF special, he knew
quality when he saw it, and he could even put it all in order in a
workman-like way. But like Lowndes before him just doesn’t seem to
have had the unique circumstances or insight that make a story really
come alive.
Themes: skepticism,
folksy wisdom, geezers, the back-shed genius, Forteanism, phatic
fandom.
* Top image: I've shamelessly swiped it from Frederick Pohl's The Way the Future Blogs. It shows the Futurians at Pohl's apartment in 1938. You can read more about it here.
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