Science Fiction (Eric Rabkin)

I am retiring this blog.  Eight posts in twenty months, and not many more pageviews than that.

I am in the process of listening to several courses by the Teaching Company that are out of print.  Since they do not appear on TTC's website, I have nowhere to note my observations about them.  But I have this blog, so there ya go.  The first course is Science Fiction by Eric Rabkin, which consists of eight 45-minute lectures:
Lecture 1: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Emergence of Science Fiction
Lecture 2: Jules Verne and the Popular Passion for Science
Lecture 3: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction Parables of Social Criticism
Lecture 4: Pulp Culture, World War II, and the Ascendancy of American Science Fiction
Lecture 5: And the Winner Is…Robert A. Heinlein
Lecture 6: Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, and the Expansion of Science Fiction
Lecture 7: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Modern Science Fiction Film
Lecture 8: New Wave, Cyberpunk, and Our Science Fiction World

I was very impressed that even after completing the Drout course, I still learned quite a few things, even about the very same topics that Drout had covered (Frankenstein, pulp fiction, the "golden age", Heinlein, Bradbury, LeGuin).  Nevertheless, he seems to cover a lot less ground.  Drout's course is only marginally longer (1 more hour), yet covers much more.  Two big gaps in Rabkin's course are Frank Herbert (Rabkin doesn't cover him because he think LeGuin is better, whatever dude) and Cordwainer Smith.

One serious complaint I have about the course is the bizarre interpretations that Rabkin has about many stories.  On occasion, he provides a genuinely interesting comment or truly original insight.  But most of the time it's the banal "critical theory" silliness that makes up so much of literary analysis these days.  Dracula is an allegory for the upper class "literally" sucking the blood out of the working class.  Them (the 1954 B-movie) isn't really about giant ants; it's about communists and the McCarthy persecution.  Rinse Blather Repeat.

Most annoying of all is his repeated insertion of Oedipal conflict into stories where no such subplot exists or was ever intended.  He inserts in into Wells, he inserts it into Heinlein, he even inserts it into Godzilla.  Then he lectures on how you see this plot device again and again and again.  Well, sure you do ... if you keep inserting it into everything you read or see.

Overall rating: 3.5/5.0

Asimov

I recently listened to a Modern Scholar audiobook on science fiction literature (From Here to Infinity by Michael Drout, which I HIGHLY recommend), which prompted me to think about or even re-read a lot of authors I read years ago.  Among these was Asimov, of whose later works I was not really a big fan for reasons I couldn't elucidate well.  This morning I ran across a review by J. Hunter Johnson that expresses my general impression quite insightfully.

Foundation's Edge is the first step in his disowning the Foundation trilogy. The entire basis of the character of the Mule is destroyed. The Seldon plan is disowned as being ultimately worthless, and a cheap-jack psionic mysticism is offered in its place.

Having returned to the worlds of his youth, Asimov determined to unite his two grand universes. There are no robots in the Foundation universe so it was necessary to eliminate them. He did this in The Robots of Dawn and Empire and Robots, in which he disowns the thesis of the human/robot cooperative culture. The Spacers are discounted as not being viable; Daneel, on the other hand, is promoted into a mind-controlling demi-god. He followed these two with Foundation and Earth, in which it is ultimately revealed that Daneel is the master mind behind human history.  This was the capstone of his of his campaign to disown the work of his youth by rewriting the juice out of it. The value of the Seldon plan had been discounted; the Mule had been emasculated; and Daneel had been destroyed by deification. He wasn't done.

Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation are farragos of implausible melodrama.  Concealed within them however is the final discounting - the revelation that the Seldon plan was never feasible in the first place.

Mr Johnson mentions the authorized trilogy by Benford, Bear and Brin, but I will not discuss those books.  They are to Asimov's work as the Herbert/Anderson books are to Frank Herbert's Dune.

New play added to Shakespeare canon

In 1727 an enterprising lawyer and writer of pantomimes with ambitions to become a leading figure in the theatre staged his greatest coup: a lost original play by William Shakespeare. The London Journal greeted Lewis Theobald’s production ecstatically, exclaiming: “The good old Master of the English Drama is by a kind of Miracle recall’d from his Grave, and given to us once again.” However, for most of the three centuries since its debut, Double Falsehood; or, the Distrest Lovers has been ridiculed as a hoax or just disregarded. Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare, one of the best regarded scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays, published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.