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n the 15 July 1972
issue of Saturday Review appeared one
of the most idiotic godawful articles I have ever wasted my time on. The title
was “Chic Bleak in Fantasy Fiction” and the author was listed as Bruce
Franklin, described as a former professor of literature at Stanford. The
article’s description read “Why do science fiction writers scare themselves with
visions of a brutal future? A leftist critic dismisses such Chicken Little
visions as mere capitalist despair and sees a bright future in which workers—and writers—are heroes.” Sadly, that is an
accurate description of the article—something that is not always the case with
those brief prose snippets intended to drag a reader into the piece.
Franklin’s basic difficulty is that he fails to recognize the
problems posed by mankind’s dominance over the earth (in line with the doctrine
that most leftist thinkers of the time espoused). A paragraph towards the
middle of the piece makes this transparent:
When you get right down to it, we are dealing with a ridiculous question:
Is the world really coming to an end? This is not the place to argue fully
theories of ecology and population. But we should be aware that scientists throughout the noncapitalist
world recognize that there is now more
food and available resources per capita in the world than ever before, that the
average standard of living is rapidly rising,
and that the means of production are developing tremendously faster than the rate of consumption.
This childish view (which is shared by present-day oil company
executives and global-warming denialists) was de rigueur in the bad old days of the early seventies, but it was
crap then and it is crap now. In Franklin’s ideology (shaped by the idealistic
fantasies of the now thoroughly-discredited Maoist “thinking”) human beings are
the be-all and end-all of the universe, its consummate triumph, the goal of all
its strivings, and it is therefore unacceptable to even imagine a world in
which insects vie for dominance.
And his examples of this mind-excursion are revelatory of the
limitations of his research: The
Hellstrom Chronicle and Them. He
complains (with as far as I can tell a straight face) that the “notion of
insects conquering and replacing people” is “totally preposterous”. “The plain truth
is that insects have never posed a threat to man’s existence, and we now have
unprecedented means for controlling them.” And this he apparently considers a
deep thought and a serious objection to a screwball documentary—an excuse for
showing off spectacular photographs of insects—that nobody is supposed to take
seriously. He considers Mary Shelley’s 1796 “literary fantasy of universal
plague” to be absurd since smallpox and bubonic plague have “been virtually
eliminated”. The trouble is, according to Franklin, that bourgeois critics …
can’t conceive of anything interesting to do in a decent society”.
And what does he think fantasy writers should write about?
Rather than the Burgess/Kubrick dystopian vision of youth run amuck, what about
a film depicting “a Puerto Rican street gang transformed into a revolutionary
party, setting up a drug program and a medical clinic, and organizing and
educating their people to win”? Wouldn’t that be more fun than watching a movie
about “the transformation of people into living zombies as their bodies are
taken over by vegetable beings grown in giant pods seeded from an alien world”?
(Personally I’m not that taken by either vision, but if I had to choose one I think I’d go with the living zombies over the revolutionary
street gang. Is this what TV is like in hell?)
The trouble is, Franklin thinks, that “[w]riters inside the
empire … identify with a doomed system and ruling class and then imagine the
possible forms of their own doom.” But the objective reality, according to
Franklin, is that capitalism is dying and “the people are winning, from Vietnam
to Lordstown, Ohio.” Well, we’ve seen how that played out in the four and a
half decades since then. And the people of Lordstown, Ohio—those “makers of
cars, typewriters, clothes, movie cameras, houses, and bourbon” that you so
idealized—they voted for Donald Trump.
[Note: According
to Wikipedia Howard Bruce Franklin “has written or edited nineteen books and
three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films. His
main areas of academic focus are science fiction, prison literature,
environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural
history. … He helped to establish science fiction writing as a genre worthy of
serious academic study.” It does not mention this blitheringly idiotic article
among his accomplishments.]
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