The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: HOW SCIENCE FICTION CONQUERED THE WORLD [Hardcover]

Thomas M. Disch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 1998

This text traces Sci-Fi's phenomenal growth from the supernatural tales of Edgar Allan Poe to the utopian dreams and technological nightmares of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, to the end of the 20th century when it has become a multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Thomas Disch does for science fiction what he did for poetry in The Castle of Indolence. First, he treats it not as a playground for idle dreamers, but as a branch of serious literature with significant cultural impact. Second, he brings the perspective of a seasoned practitioner to bear in separating the wheat from the chaff.

For example, if you ever wanted to know why L. Ron Hubbard managed to start a cult but Philip K. Dick didn't, Disch is your man. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, Disch elaborates a vision of science fiction as one of the twentieth century's most influential manifestations of America as a culture of liars. Among the frauds are the alien abduction stories of Whitley Strieber, the sadomasochistic dominance fantasies of John Norman, and the co-opting of cyberpunk by postmodern academics and avant-gardists trying to stay hip.

Disch plays very few favorites, and when ideology gets in the way of good writing, it doesn't matter what side you're on. Subliterary feminist fantasies of matriarchial utopias get slammed just as hard as subliterary conservative militaristic wet dreams. Not even one of sci-fi's most beloved Grand Masters, Robert Heinlein, is unimpeachable; Disch correctly nails Heinlein on his consistent sexism and racism, as well as his gradual descent into solipsism. One of Heinlein's last novels, The Number of the Beast, is described as "the freakout to which [Heinlein]'s entitled as a good American, whose right to lie is protected by the Constitution."

What does Disch like? For starters: Philip K. Dick, the British New Wave as exemplified by J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and Joe Haldeman's Hugo- and Nebula-winning The Forever War, described as being "to the Vietnam War what Catch-22 was to World War II," and which he believes deserved a Pulitzer as well.

Disch may confirm your suspicions, or he may raise every last one of your hackles. But one thing this book will definitely not do is bore you.

From Publishers Weekly

With pungency and wit, Disch (The Castle of Indolence) explores the enormous cultural impact that SF has had over the past century, placing it in the tradition of tall tales and lying, arguing that SF "has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe." He argues for Edgar Allan Poe as the father of SF and devotes a chapter to what he calls "our embarrassing ancestor," whose many stories anticipate themes common in later SF. Space travel, nuclear holocausts, Star Trek, drugs, sex and feminism, religion, politics, imperialism in space, and race relations are among the topics Disch trenchantly investigates in stories by many of the field's best-known figures, past and present. Their admirers are likely to be uncomfortable or enraged by some of his comments, which reflect a thorough knowledge of SF both as an insider and an outsider (Disch largely ceased writing SF two decades ago) and of the wider world in which it developed. His concluding chapter, "The Future of an Illusion?SF Beyond the Year 2000," offers a bleak perspective. More than half the top 10 grossing films of all time have been SF, but the economics of filmmaking dictate action-adventure and dumb plots, contends Disch. Similarly, the economics of book publishing favor undemanding series. Retailers should encourage SF buffs to buy this provocative account but should also encourage them to supplement it with two valuable companions: Brian Aldiss's Trillion Year Spree (1986) and Edward James's Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1996).
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Edition edition (May 4, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684824051
• ISBN-13: 978-0684824055
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,336,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Infuriatingly Good Read, December 17, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: HOW SCIENCE FICTION CONQUERED THE WORLD (Hardcover)

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes not only science fiction, but the idea of science fiction. It is a bleak look at the genre, and utterly infuriating at times. The arrogance of Disch's tone in attacking the value of writers from Mary Shelley to Robert Heinlein to Ursula LeGuin will leave many readers shaking in anger.

I think you'll love it, too.

It is a book that begs an argument on nearly every page. Disch clearly has favorites, and he happily ignores good books from writers he's busy bashing - LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" gets passing mention, while he denigrates "Always Coming Home" repeatedly. Same for Heinlein - few of his juvenile books, almost universally considered his best, are in evidence.

But while Disch's biases are pretty clear, the strength of his arguments, particularly on the popularization of the genre through Star Trek and the UFO mythology, are tough to refute. What makes this book so very different from others on the genre is its willingness to see what science fiction means to people in general, not just a small elite who read the "literary-quality" science fiction. It's a refreshing change from the books that try frantically to justify the genre, all the time preaching to the choir.

Disch almost goes a little too far from time to time - apparently, for example, if you don't like Hal Clement's scientific explanations, you're just another idiot who should go back to watching Star Trek.

But I promise you, this book will make you think. And who doesn't love a good fight?

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars tough love, September 30, 2002

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (Paperback)

Mr. Disch, a well regarded science fiction writer, poet, playwright, and critic, here gives us a critical history of the scifi genre that resembles nothing so much as a drive-by shooting. When he's done, the field is lettered with the shattered reputations of the field's hacks (from John Norman to Newt Gingrich), quacks (from L. Ron Hubbard to Whitley Streiber), feminists (Ursula K. LeGuin & company), fascists (Robert Heinlein), technophiles (Greg Egan), proselytizers (Orson Scott Card), and so forth and so on. Among the offenses cited, besides bad writing, are a tendency to pander to the ... fantasies of young men, a willingness to exploit things like UFO crazes and apocalyptic beliefs, extreme right-wing politics, extreme left-wing politics, dumbing down for the mass audience, jargoning up for the academic crowd, employing ludicrous science, jingoism, racism, ... speciesism, etc. Hardly anyone comes off well--himself, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, Joe Haldeman and a very few more, plus Edgar Allan Poe gets an ambivalent nod, given credit not only for inventing science fiction but for embodying it entire in his work, both its good and its bad aspects.

Mr. Disch is particularly drawn to Poe as perpetrator of hoaxes, a talent he think central to science fiction. In fact, he believes lying to be central to our national character:

America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature,
as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.

In Mr. Disch's view, Poe and his successors mastered the art of telling people what they want to believe. And in stories like Mesmeric Revelation and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, he finds Poe to have anticipated nearly every theme that would be developed by subsequent writers:

1. Mesmerism

2. Dreams come true

3. Chip-on-the-shoulder superiority

4. Genuine visionary power

5. Great special effects

6. Sophomoric humor

7. Divine madness

Over the course of the book he shows how these themes have been employed for good and ill, by various writers, the overwhelming majority of whom he believes have exploited their readers dreams without living up to the admonition that forms the title of Delmore Schwartz's first collection of poems, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which Mr. Disch alludes to in the title of this book. Too often he finds his subjects dodging responsibility in favor of popularity, easy money, fadishness, and personal political predilections.

Inevitably the folks who come off worst here are the fans who let authors get away with this stuff. At best Mr. Disch portrays them as kind of reminiscent of the guys from your high school's A.V. club, with delusions of superpowered children, women who want to be dominated and alien races just waiting to be wiped out. At worst, they're militiamen like those from the Oklahoma City bombing or the members of the Heaven's Gate or Aum Shinrikyo cults. That is, they're totally gullible, susceptible to either homicidal or suicidal suggestion. And always they're the oft-caricatured geeky losers who attend Star Trek conventions.

As you can tell by now, this is a very dark vision of science fiction--one of the rare bright spots (according to Mr. Disch anyway) coming when it helped us learn to live with the atom bomb. Equally bleak is his prediction for the future, when movies and television, now that their effects can match our imaginations, take over from books. In the end what keeps us reading, even as he's telling us that most of what we're reading about is junk, is the quality of Mr. Disch's analysis and the sheer bravado with which he attacks his own peers, predecessors, and heirs. There's something here to alienate just about every reader, but the very equal opportunity nature of the drubbings he administers makes it hard to stay mad. If he's laying into an author you like or a political philosophy you admire, have no fear, on the next page he'll have moved on to authors and ideas you loathe. One admires the high moral seriousness to which he summons science fiction, but despairs as he says it's not happened in the past and isn't going to happen in the future. He kind of reminds you of the American colonel in Vietnam who opined: "We had to destroy the village to save it", except that Mr. Disch adds that the village is doomed anyway. This may be too upsetting for scifi fanatics but for the casual fan or the merely curious reader it's an enjoyable performance to behold.

GRADE: B-

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Recipe for Apoplexy, November 2, 2002

By 

Patrick Shepherd "hyperpat" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (Paperback)

There are only a few published books that treat science fiction as something worthy of notice and critical evaluation. This book attempts to go even further by trying to prove a hypothesis that science fiction has become so invidiously entangled in the everyday world that is now a given, an everyday component that shapes many of the cultural tropes and the thought processes of Joe Everyman.

Disch starts by examining the beginnings of science fiction as a separate literary genre, starting with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He does an excellent job of examining the themes and ideas that Poe originated, making a strong case that Poe should be considered the ancestor of SF, rather than the more commonly cited Shelley. But in his examination of Shelley Disch displays the first evidence that this is not a work of critical evaluation of the first rank, as he dismisses her book merely because "An unread author is no one's intellectual ancestor", ignoring both the possible influence on other writers some seminal works have, commonly read or not, and the fact that Shelley is far from an 'unread author'.

This same sloppiness is exhibited in some of his research on other authors, most notably Robert Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin. While he correctly presents the oddity that Heinlein, normally considered a strong conservative, at one point in his life ran on the Democratic ticket for a California State Assembly seat and was heavily involved with EPIC, the socialistic movement championed by Upton Sinclair, he repeats (in multiple places) the gossip that Charles Manson was a Heinlein disciple, something easily disprovable by examining the court records of Manson's trial. Le Guin is lambasted as a militant and underhanded feminist, with little examination of her extraordinary influence and place in the SF world as a strong literary writer whose themes include far more than just the battle of the sexes. In his chapter on religion and SF, once again he seems to be incomplete, showing a lot of material on L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology, but completely ignoring things like the Church of All Worlds, which originated from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and the fact that the two writers were well acquainted with each other and had discussed the practicalities of 'inventing' a new religion.

There are places where Disch is insightful, such as his exploration of the idea that the Star Trek societal model can be taken as a restatement of the perfect modern office culture, uni-sexed and culturally blind. But far too often he seems to ride off on his own personal hobby-horses, from UFO adherents to the Heaven's Gate cult to Reagan's SDI initiative, straining desperately to tie these phenomena to the mainstream of science fiction writing. Many of his bald statements caused me to approach a near-apoplectic condition as they were totally contrary to my own knowledge of events and the science fiction field (and I've been reading the stuff for forty-five years), while only a few brought a nod of agreement. In terms of proving his initial thesis, he is only partially successful, mainly succeeding at the lowest denominator level of Hollywood movies and the apathy of the average American to space exploration as 'old hat', but failing miserably at any good criticism of the literary value of science fiction and its influence on other forms of writing and the world at large.