This Wikipedia article about the New Chronology of crackpot mathematician A. T. Fomenko reminded me of a weird story by R. A. Lafferty titled And Read the Flesh between the Lines. I know, I know: "weird story by R. A. Lafferty" is somewhat of a redundant phrase.
Anyway, the premise of the tale is exactly the inverse of Fomenko's theories: that historical periods like the Middle Ages and the Renaissance lasted in reality much, much longer than we now assume, and that we only know condensed and abridged versions of them.
Were there eight kings of the name of Henry in England, or were there eighty? Never mind; someday it will be recorded that there was only one, and the attributes of all of them will be combined into his compressed and consensus story.
(R. A. Lafferty: And Read the Flesh Between the Lines)
I'm not sure what was Lafferty's intent in writing the tale, but I think it serves as an accurate metaphor for the science fiction genre. Because science fiction is not really about the future, but about projecting and expanding into the future the concerns of the present. Writer Bernard Wolfe said it much better than I could, when talking about his novel Limbo:
Anybody who "paints a picture" of some coming year is kidding -- he's only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then, is a rather bilious rib on 1950 -- on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone on being 1950, only more and more so, for four more decades. But no year ever fulfills itself: the cowpath of History is littered with the corpses of years, their silly throats slit from ear to ear by the improbable.
Also, take Neuromancer by William Gibson. That book is a hip, distilled, concentrated version of the eighties, spread like delicious butter over a loaf of bread Twenty Minutes Into The Future long. The video arcades (now almost defunct thanks to consoles), the late Cold War still hanging in the air, the fears of japanese economic dominance...
So, reading old science fiction is like getting glimpses of that laffertian "expanded history", instead of the shorter version that is found in our textbooks and encyclopedias. I bet D. D. Harriman reached the Moon before NASA did; it just got edited out.
1 comment:
Very good point. Plus, thank you for reminding me that I need to read more Lafferty.
It seems that the more extrapolative a work of sf tries to be, the quicker it gets dated.
I wonder if authors who dig into the past to construct their futures will age better. I have a friend who says that Gene Wolfe and some others will become classics because they're retelling ancient human stories instead of making up new ones. It's a bit over my head but he may be right.
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