science fiction n. 1

My last remembrance had been of reading Mr. Lloyd’s Etidorhpa…. The complete arrest of bodily function and tissue waste which the central figure of that remarkable science-fiction achieved at the point where gravitation ceases, somewhere between here and China, impressed me deeply.

The eleventh of Eric Temple Bell’s pseudonymous science fictions to get into book form during the last quarter-century, this deals with the science and mystery of evolution.

From the start—a little girl found wandering, shocked and staring, in the desert after her parents have been carried off to become an ant’s breakfast—Them! has it over other science fictions I have seen. Not just technically.

This brilliant Scotsman first began writing for American publication in 1950, and has since had a sizable number of first-rate science fictions in our magazines.

In literature, for instance, the works that are most political in this sense are those science fictions (notably neglected even by the litterateurs who call themselves ‘radical’) in which readers may inspect a diversity of fully fleshed visions of alternative life.

I think that what I’ve learned from the ratings that other science fictions have got is it does appear that there is an audience which will experiment with any new sf and will give it a try.

There are Huxley’s ritualistic group sex and bottle babies, Skinner’s boxes, and various minor science fictions—written by men, I hasten to add—in which women devour their mates or paralyse them and lay eggs on them, à la spiders.

There was not space, given the book’s parameters, to mention writer-director Kevin Willmott, an African American filmmaker producing serious, thought-provoking science fictions.