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Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish by David Ketterer

1988; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1988.0039

1913-4835

Helen Molitor,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

may lead to perplexity — but even this cannot be very bad, for perplexity is, after all, a type of openness, and can lead to fresh assessments. What Tetreault says about Shelley (198) can be applied adequately to his own method: “The structure of [Shelley’s] dramatic lyrics especially inscribes a reader, granting us a footing on which we are invited to participate in the text.” NOTES 1 William Reach, Shelley’s Style (New York and London: Methuen, 1984). 2 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I. 361. 3 Brian Nellist, “ Shelley’s Narratives and ‘The Witch of Atlas,’ ” in Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool, 1982), pp. 160-90. From this poem, according to Nellist (184), we can learn only that “ the imagination is an uncomfortable home.” Robert c. casto / York University David Ketterer, Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1987). xvi, 410. $29.50 (u.s.) David Ketterer intends “ to provide the first full-scale and complete treatment of a contemporary writer of science fiction” (xi), and full-scale the book cer­ tainly is. Ketterer incorporates material from the Blish collection at the New Bodleian, the files of Faber and Faber, private collections of Blish letters, and all of the writer’s publications, including his early pulp and “ fan mag” ones, as well as commentaries by his wives, collaborators, friends, and fans. Further, Ketterer identifies references not only to such fifties’ favourites as Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Spengler but to Georg Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, to the 1930s Buck Rogers comic strip, and to a Blish cat sometimes called “ Poor Original Curfew” and sometimes “Formed Stool Conway.” In addition Ket­ terer supplies an excellent bibliography of Blish’s writings, tracking some stories through revisions, reprints, and finally expansions into a novella or novel.1 The book is also complete, in that it presents an intelligently structured paradigm for Blish’s work, arguing that Blish moved from fairly conventional futuristic extrapolation to an attempt simultaneously to construct and to escape conceptual frameworks. But both Blish and Ketterer finally agree that such Kuhnian breakthroughs are usually not merely fictional but delusive. Hence, Ketterer argues, Blish’s final and only genuine breakthrough was his “post-Futurian understanding [that science-fiction depends] upon both his­ torical paradigms. .. and upon the supposedly antithetical genres of fantasy and realism” (30). 235 After a brief introductory biography, the book is divided into three sections to reflect the pattern of Blish’s own interests. Section I, “Science-Fiction Fu­ tures,” briskly treats Blish’s earliest pulp stories, discussing some and sum­ marizing the rest in footnotes. The next chapter deals with the early works on pantropy, polyploidy, and tectogenesis, all concepts involving futuristic genetic manipulation. The section concludes with a chapter on A Case of Conscience, still probably Blish’s best-known work in academic circles and his first experiment with problematic endings. This 1958 novel ends with a planet “disappearing” as a dubious nuclear experiment occurs simultaneously with a Jesuit’s exorcism. The reader must consider whether the planet was an unfallen Eden awaiting the arrival of its Great Deceiver or an artifact of that Deceiver, created to deny the primacy and necessity of God (an heretical position since it postulates Satanic crea­ tivity) or a planet possessed by the devil though created by God. Other ele­ ments in the novel suggest that Lithia may have no reality at all and, as Ketterer proposes, perhaps then the novel is that paradox — a partially intentional “ ‘deconstructive’ play of language” (104). Section II, “Historical Models,” traces Blish’s interest in Kuhnian and Spenglerian theory first through a number of works involving new paradigms and problematic endings, including schizophrenic narrators, surrealistic tech­ niques, and explosive reversals of paradigms (115 , 148, 158) — though some such reversals seem more like de Maupaussant than Kuhn. A second chapter in this section discusses Cities in Flight as “Wagnerian Spenglerian Space Opera,” with impressive philosophical antecedents and symbolism. But, as Ketterer admits, “ It might be objected that, in . . . pulp space opera, the kind of intricate verbal and symbolic structure epitomized by...