Magic, page 18
THE RELUCTANT CRITIC
WRITERS RARELY AGREE ON ANYTHING about their craft, but they do tend to join forces against the critic. I am far too gentle a soul myself to say nasty things about people, but here is what I managed to say in a book of mine called Familiar Poems Annotated while talking about Robert Frost:
“His poetry seems to please the critics, and because it is plain-spoken, rhymes and scans, it pleases human beings as well.”
Here’s what Lord Byron says: “As soon / Seek roses in December, ice in June; / Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; / Believe a woman or an epitaph, / Or any other thing that’s false, before / You trust in critics.”
Coleridge’s opinion is this: “Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.”
And Lawrence Sterne’s: “Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
Enough! You get my point!
And yet—every once in a while—I find myself trapped—forced to the wall—driven into the ground—and very much against my will—
I am forced to be a critic!
Science Digest asked me to see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and write an article for them on the science it contained. I saw the picture and was appalled. I remained appalled even after a doctor’s examination had assured me that no internal organs had been shaken loose by its ridiculous sound-waves. (If you can’t be good, be loud, some say, and Close Encounters was very loud.)
To begin with there was no accurate science in it, not a trace; and I said so in the article I wrote and which Science Digest published. There was also no logic in it, not a trace; and I said that, too.
Mind you, I’m not one of these purists who see nothing good in anything Hollywood does. Hollywood must deal with large audiences, most of whom are utterly unfamiliar with good science fiction. It has to bend to them, meet them at least halfway. Fully appreciating that, I could enjoy Planet of the Apes and Star Wars.
Even when my good friends, Ben Bova and Harlan Ellison, denounced the latter unstintingly, I remained firm. Star Wars was entertainment for the masses and did not try to be anything more. Leave your sophistication at the door, get into the spirit, and you can have a fun ride.
Close Encounters, however, took itself seriously or put on a show of doing so. It was pretentious, and that was fatal. What’s more, it made its play for UFOlators and mystics, and—in its chase for the buck—did not scruple to violate every canon of good sense and internal consistency.
I said all this in my article and then the letters came.
Some of them complained that I had ignored the virtues of the picture. “What about the special effects?” they asked. (They were referring to the flying chandelier at the end.)
Well, what about them? Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions, or reading a bad book for the dirty parts. Optical wizardry is something a movie can do that a book can’t but it is no substitute for a story, for logic, for meaning. It is ornamentation, not substance. In fact, whenever a science fiction picture is praised overeffusively for its special effects, I know it’s a bad picture. Is that all they can find to talk about?
Some of those who wrote me were hurt and appalled that anyone as obviously good-natured as I could possibly say such nasty things. I did rather bite my lips at that; it’s no fun to force one’s self into the twisted semblance of a critic. Yet there comes a time when one has to put oneself firmly on the side of Good.
Some asked me angrily who I thought I was and what made me a judge of science fiction anyway. They had seen every science fiction movie made in the last five years and they knew a lot more about science fiction than I did. —Well, maybe they did; I didn’t argue the point.
And one and all, they came down to the same plaintive cry, “Why do you criticize its lack of science, Dr. Asimov? It’s just science fiction.”
God, how that stings! I’ve spent a lifetime loving science fiction, and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that’s just science fiction.
It’s just science fiction so it’s allowed to be silly, and childish, and stupid. It’s just science fiction, so it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s just science fiction, so you must ask nothing more of it than loud noise and flashing lights.
That’s the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that’s what just science fiction is.
My favorite letter, though, came from someone whose name was familiar to me. He had written me on a number of earlier occasions and I quickly learned never to answer. He has ideas on every possible scientific subject; and in every single case he is wrong, calamitously wrong, mastodonically wrong. He is an unappreciated national treasure, for he is so unanimously wrong that by taking the direct opposite of his views you will be more often right than if you listened to the wisest sage.
His Erroneousness took issue with my comment that the aliens in Close Encounters acted with utter illogic (and I had cited a number of instances). They’re aliens, he said, explaining it to me carefully so that I would understand. They’re supposed to be illogical.
Well, then, I suppose all you need are illogical writers, writers who never heard of logic. Illogic would come so naturally to them that they would have no trouble portraying aliens.
It was a well-rounded incomprehension totally worthy of my correspondent.
John Campbell once issued the challenge: “Show me an alien thinking as well as a man, but not like a man.”
Easy? I’ve tried many a hard thing in my science fiction career, but I’ve never had the nerve to tackle that one (except maybe a little in the second part of The Gods Themselves). Stanley Weinbaum managed a bit of it in the case of Tweerl in A Martian Odyssey. Olaf Stapledon managed a bit of it in the case of John in Odd John.
Do you suppose that those fellows who put together the screenplay of Close Encounters could do it by just pushing in some of their own native illogic?
Let me give you an example of what I mean in the other direction.
Suppose you wanted to portray an amiable nitwit, a pleasant simp with about as much brains as you can pack into a thimble. And suppose you want him to be the first-person narrator. Do you suppose you can find yourself an amiable nitwit or a pleasant simp and have him write the book? After all, he is one; whatever he writes is what an amiable nitwit or a pleasant simp would say.
Let me point, then, to P. G. Wodehouse’s books about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Bertie Wooster tells the story and with every line reveals himself to be an amiable nitwit, a pleasant simp. But those books are perfectly written by someone who is nothing of the sort. It takes damned clever writing to have someone betray himself as a silly ass in every line and yet do it so smoothly you never ask yourself, “How is it that that silly ass is telling the story so well?”
Or to come closer to home, consider Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon in which the narrator begins a moron, becomes brighter and brighter, then duller and duller, and ends as a moron. The moron-parts were clearly the hardest to write, for Keyes had to make Charlie sound like a moron without making the story sound moronic. If it were easy, the best way to do it would be to have a moron write it.
So Close Encounters has its uses, too. It is a marvelous demonstration of what happens when the workings of extraterrestrial intelligence are handled without a trace of skill. It makes one feel added wonder and awe at stories in which extraterrestrial intelligence and other subtleties are handled with painstaking skill—as in those we try to find for this magazine.
THE UNICORN
A RECENT ANTHOLOGY I HELPED EDIT is entitled Mythical Beasties and contains thirteen fantasies, each featuring a different well-known but nonexistent animal. Of course, that’s fantasy, not science fiction, but I got to thinking—
People of all ages and places have, at one time or another, invented nonexistent animals and added copious detail. The process is very likely the same as that which science fiction writers use to invent extraterrestrial creatures. Our ET organisms are as nonexistent and, if we’re lucky, as plausible, as those that are invented for myths and legends. Perhaps the same process is involved, and if we consider the legendary creatures we may get some insight into a way in which we build up zoological and botanical denizens of a world circling Alpha Centauri A.
Picking a mythological beast at random, let’s consider the unicorn. How did the unicorn come to be imagined?
To many a person it wasn’t imagined. It was real. The evidence? The very best. The unicorn is mentioned in the Bible, and the Bible is God’s word, is it not?
Here’s a biblical description of God: “God hath brought them [the Israelites] out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.” (Numbers 23:22.) Another description—this time of the tribe of Joseph: “His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns.” (Deuteronomy 33:17.)
God asks Job the following question: “Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?” (Job 39:10.) The psalmist begs God, “Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou has heard me from the horns of the unicorns.” (Psalms 22:21.) He also says, “But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn.” (Psalms 92:10.) And Isaiah says, “And the unicorns shall come down with [them] …” (Isaiah 34:7.)
Of course the Bible from which I have been quoting isn’t the inspired word, exactly. It is the Authorized Version (the King James) and it is only a translation. The translators may, after all, have made a mistake. The Hebrew word translated as “unicorn” is, in each case, re’em. What does that really mean?
If we turn to the New English Bible, the most accurate translation yet made, we find that the Numbers quotation reads as follows: “What its curving horns are to the wild ox, God is to them, who brought them out of Egypt.” In every other reference I’ve cited, re’em is translated as “wild ox.”
The wild ox is the “aurochs” (from a German word meaning “primeval ox”). Its scientific name is Bos primigenius, which is Latin for “ox, firstborn.” It is probably the ancestor of domestic cattle. It was a large and fierce bovine, standing six feet at the shoulder, with large horns spreading far outward. The horns and strength of the wild ox were worth using metaphorically, but the animal is no more. The last living aurochs is supposed to have died in Poland in 1627.
But how did we ever go from “wild ox” to “unicorn”?
Well, the Assyrians carved wild oxen in bas-relief to serve, I presume, as symbols of strength and vigor. The Assyrians, however, were not masters of perspective. They carved a side view and simplified matters by letting the horn on the side of the viewer overlap exactly the far horn.
What one saw was a single horn, so the Greeks called it, slangily, monokeros (“one-horn” in Greek) and that became the word for re’em in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible. In the Latin translation of the Bible it became “unicorn” (“one-horn” in Latin) and unicorn it stayed in the King James.
Of course, the biblical references speak only of horns and strength. Where do the rest of our notions of the unicorn come from? For that we have to turn to non-biblical sources.
About 400 B.C., there was a Greek physician and scholar, named Ctesias, who lived for some years in Persia and who wrote a history of the Asian kingdoms: Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and India.
In his books (which have not survived and which we know of only from scattered commentaries by other Greek writers) he referred to one Indian animal which he described as a kind of wild ass, white in color, and with an eighteen-inch-long, straight horn in its forehead. That is essentially the picture of the unicorn we have to this day—a graceful horselike creature with one long horn in its forehead.
We can guess that no such creature exists. If it was horselike then it must belong to the group of animals that include the horses, asses, and zebras, and not one of this group, not one, either living or extinct, has ever had horns, let alone a single horn. Consequently, any report that the unicorn is horselike can’t be so.
Where did Ctesias get his description from, then? He was probably an honest man who did his best to tell the truth, but people do tend to be gullible, and he was undoubtedly repeating hearsay that had become distorted even before it had reached his ears.
As it happens, there is a one-horned animal in India—the Indian rhinoceros. Of course, the horn is not a true horn but a concretion of hair. It is not on the forehead, but on the snout. It is not long and straight but rather short and curved. And although the rhinoceros is more closely related to the horse than it is to the wild ox, it is not horselike in appearance.
Could there be a confusion with another animal? Very likely. There is an antelope called the oryx, rather rare now, but common in ancient times, when it was found widely in Arabia and Babylonia. It has a long horselike face, so that it might be considered to be a kind of wild ass (even though it isn’t). And on its head, it has two long, straight horns, so that it is sometimes called the scimitar-horned oryx. Seen from the side, the two horns overlap and you seem to see a one-horned horselike creature.
Ctesias might thus have combined the appearance of the oryx, which he must have seen, and which he must have known had two horns, however it might have seemed like one from the side, with the tale of the strange Indian animal that travelers agreed had only a single horn.
It was the horn that made the unicorn so valuable to people who believed in its existence. All kinds of wild legends grew up about the horn. It was supposed to be an aphrodisiac if it was ground up and added to drinks. It was also supposed to be a supreme antidote to poison, so that the powder some might think would increase one’s manly vigor, others might think would purify and make harmless the wildest poisons. Either way, the horn was something greatly to be desired.
Naturally, people, such as sailors, who were known to have traveled to far countries and to have seen strange sights were likely to be believed if they came back with horns they said had been obtained from unicorns. They could sell those horns at enormous prices, and they often did.
The horns that were thus sold to gullible landlubbers were indeed long and straight, and were also twisted into a tight left-handed spiral. It is for this reason that most drawings of unicorns show the horn to be twisted in such a spiral.
Where did sailors get such horns?
Well, there is a small whale, about fifteen feet long, called the “narwhal,” a name which may come from a Scandinavian expression meaning “corpse-whale” because of its dead-white color. Its scientific name is Monodon monoceros, which is Greek for “one-tooth, one-horn.”
Despite the Greek name, the narwhal has two teeth. In the male narwhal, however, the left tooth develops into a straight tusk, sticking forward out of the mouth, a tusk which may grow to be as much as nine feet long, half the length of the body or more. The tusk is grooved in a left-hand spiral and looks exactly like the horn we see in pictures of the unicorn.
In fact, the unicorn horn is the narwhal tusk, for that is what sailors tended to bring home and palm off on the unsophisticated as the genuine, miracle-working horn of the unicorn.
And now we see how a mythological animal gets its form and shape. It is usually built up out of bits and reminiscences from real animals. Contributing to the unicorn in one way or another are the wild ox, the rhinoceros, the oryx, and the narwhal.
And this is how science fiction writers tend to get their extraterrestrial creatures, too. It is very difficult to be totally original.
Once, though, there was a very early story I wrote (in 1940 actually) called “Half-Breeds on Venus” which made the cover of the magazine in which it appeared. The artist drew a creature that looked very dinosaurian, except that it had a single fang right in the front of its upper jaw. No such single fang is to be found in any bilateral animal, living or extinct, and it was beautifully original. I thought it was the only good thing about the story. (To be sure, Ollie the Dragon in Kukla, Fran, and Ollie had just such a fang, but he came along years later.)
UNKNOWN
DURING THE LAST FEW DAYS, I HAVE been leafing through The Fantasy Almanac by Jeff Rovin (Dutton, 1979) with a certain amount of pleasure. Rovin is very good on the Greek myths, folktales, and traditional monsters, though I’m a little ho-hum on the modern ephemera of super-heroes and movie monsters.
There was, however, one entry which struck me as superfluous and that was “Asimov, Isaac.” What Rovin said of me was accurate enough but there was nothing to give any hint that I had any connection with fantasy. The few works of mine which he cited were strictly science fiction. One of the spurs to my working my way through the book, then, was to see if I could find any justification for the inclusion.
I finally found it, for there, in the S’s, was “Starr, Lucky,” under which he listed my six Lucky Starr novels, originally published under the pseudonym of Paul French. At first, I thought this another gratuitous inclusion since my Lucky Starr books were strictly science fiction (nor does he imply anything else). I then realized that he was thinking of Lucky Starr as a superhero, in the long line ranging from Gilgamesh to the Incredible Hulk. Well, I don’t think Lucky is anything more than a plain ordinary hero, but at least I have my explanation, which was all I wanted.
Much worse than the inclusion of your unhumble servant, however, was an exclusion. Rovin includes an entry on Weird Tales, as he should, but he does not include Unknown, the best fantasy magazine that ever existed or, in my opinion, is ever likely to exist.
The way it started, according to the story I heard at the time, was this. Eric Frank Russell submitted a story called “Forbidden Acres” to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. It was a very powerful story of an Earth that is secretly controlled by extraterrestrials with an advanced technology. Certain Earthmen learn that “we are property” and try to fight it. Campbell wanted the story intensely but he felt that it was not legitimate sf and did not belong in the pages of Astounding. Rather than reject it, however, he determined to start a new magazine, one devoted to “adult fantasy.” This magazine he named Unknown and its first issue was dated March, 1939. Its lead novel was the Eric Frank Russell tale, retitled “Sinister Barrier.”
