Customer Reviews

The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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?

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-

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.

Disch's attacks on such deserving targets as L. Ron Hubbard are characterized by excellent scholarship. His history of the UFO-abduction crowd follows the paper trail meticulously, showing how abduction literature has walked the fence between fact and fiction, and his account of Robert Heinlein's early political life is fascinating. The level of scholarship seems to fall precipitously in his chapter on women in SF, however. While LeGuin should certainly not be immune from criticism, and while her work does contain much to criticize-- for example, while she is very good at showing an individual character's growth or change, she is less adaept at showing societal change, except as an aggregate of individuals all undergoing the same epiphany; political ideals are strongly present in her work but mechanisms are notably absent. But Disch makes none of these points, and fails to present any coherent picture of LeGuin's works, and their faults, and instead vents his spleen in phrases like "One does not read LeGuin for pleasure", a statement no more useful to criticism than it is true. The attention to the paper trail is also absent; he not only ascribes motives and meanings to LeGuin's works without apparently having read her own comments about them, but also, judging from his statements about the plots of her novels, he does not seem to have reread any of them prior to writing this book. The entire chapter is filled with this sort of casual misinformation-- for example, he lists C.L. Moore among women SF writers who were brought to the field through their husbands, when Moore had been writing solo for 4 years before her marriage to Henry Kuttner. I would recommend this book, but with the caveat that the reader interested in LeGuin and women SF writers in general should supplement it with a history of women in SF and perhaps some of LeGuin's own essays.

Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of" is an intensely personal and opinionated exploration of the SF genre and its connection with popular culture. Its scope is enormous; Disch begins at the historical roots of the genre, moves on through the Golden Age of the 40s and 50s, travels towards mainstream literature on the New Wave of the 60s, visits the feminist movement of the 70s, and finally arrives at a bleak, unhappy present- remaining entertaining throughout, an applaudable feat.

Disch's unorthodoxy manifests early, when he proclaims Edgar Allan Poe the founder of SF, rather than the usual honorand Mary Shelley. His justifications for this decision are not compelling; his claim that Shelley's "Frankenstein" is unread is not proven, and his complaint that Shelley dodges providing a scientific rationale for Frankenstein's creation could be equally applied to the hypotheses of many acclaimed New Wave novels of the 60s, notably those of Samuel Delany and Roger Zelazny. A great degree of scientific fuzziness is present in all but the hardest SF.

Disch's bias surfaces elsewhere. His politics lean to the left, as do those of many SF writers, and help shape the list of authors he chooses to condemn. He cannot resist indulging in the occasional Heinlein bashing, although he usually keeps a tight leash on the savagery of his attacks. He devotes an entire chapter to the "military SF" subgenre of Jerry Pournelle and associates, relegating it, unfairly, to the same trash bin he reserves for right-wing milita literature of the sort publicized by Timothy McVeigh. To his credit, however, he also rebukes those leftist SF authors whose writings serve as thin masks for the promotion of their particular utopias. His exposition of how Ursula K. LeGuin abuses the editorial responsibilities her fame has garnered for her, of how she uses the anthologies she compiles to revise the history of SF to promote her PC matriarchal vision of the future, is as dead-on target as a critique can possibly be.

(...)

One final thought. Disch paints a morbid picture of the current and future status of the SF genre, unveiling a landscape of Star Trek serializations and Tolkien-clone trilogies resembling Huxley's legions of Gammas and Epsilons. Whether the past was as rosy as he claims is debatable; my local used bookstore is filled to the brim with Edgar Rice Burroughs clones, Asimov imitators, and similar chaff from the supposed Golden Age. Time will sift through the current crop and find the classics, as it as always done. Or so those who love SF hope.

Let me begin by stating that I have read very little science fiction in my life. I picked up Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" primarily because I had read and immensely enjoyed "The Castle of Indolence", his superb collection of essays on "poetry, poets and poetasters". I also was aware of Disch's reputation as a "literary" writer of science fiction, an author who reputedly stood above the pulpy cauldron of a genre often castigated as "low brow", and was interested in his opinion of the significance of science fiction-a significance which is strongly suggested by the subtitle of this book: "How Science Fiction Conquered the World"

"The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" is a wide ranging, opinionated romp through science fiction, a book which keeps you turning the pages with an avidity more typical of a horror or suspense novel. Beginning with the claim that science fiction is, at its root, an American genre that originated with Edgar Allen Poe ("our embarrassing ancestor"), Disch propels the reader through nearly two centuries of writing, showing how science fiction has been able to combine genuine visionary power with the most irrational, "lumpen-literature" characteristics of the black-print-screaming tabloid headlines about UFO abductees. In chapter after chapter, Disch renders strong opinions and insightful observations on how science fiction has evolved over the years, how that evolution has affected our view of the world and its possible futures, and how science fiction has been able to appropriate and define political, religious and social perspectives on the world. Along the way, Disch takes on feminism ("Can Girls Play Too? Feminizing Science Fiction"), Republicans ("Republicans on Mars-Science Fiction as Military Strategy"), and, not surprisingly, the unmitigated xenophobic need for an "other" ("The Third World and Other Alien Nations").

The most compelling thing about "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of", however, is that it makes you want to sit down and read some of these science fiction writers-at least if you're like me, and haven't already.

Disch has written an immensely fun book, a welcome addition to the tiny library of worthwhile sci fi criticism. It is not really a history or even an organized study of the genre, but a romp through a series of topics that interest Mr. Disch. For a seasoned reader, it is fun, infuriating, and thought provoking. It is not a balanced or neutral book, but is as personal and unfair as a letter to the editor of a newspaper. If you like s.f., you will find much enlightening here, and you will find things so annoying you will want to shred the book into little, tiny pieces.
Disch uses a lot of ad hominem comments and personal recollections to spice up his narrative, and this can be both the best and the worst of it. Unlike some other reviewers, I certainly don't find any "left wing" biases in Disch, but that shows you how personal this book is. His views are his own, and follow his momentary inclinations, rather than any fixed program.
That may be the problem: in the title and in his opening remarks, Disch addresses a fascinating question: how has s.f. affected the way we (Americans in particular) see the world? To what extent is it the dreams our stuff is made of? How did Science Fiction conquer the world? For my taste, he abandons that theme way too early and goes off on random fishing expeditions after feminists, strategic gaming s.f., and the Great White Whale, Robert Heinlein. That is why I give this book 3 stars.
"Dreams" clearly reflects science fiction as it stood around 1990, which is when much of this book was written, I believe. I feel that some of its concerns are a little parochial, in terms of time, nationality (we are not all Americans), and personality. Clearly poor Ursula K. LeGuin said something he didn't like at some point, and I am not sure that Heinlein's every utterance is as important for good or ill as Disch takes for granted.

If you are looking for a comprehensive view of science fiction, please read Brian Aldiss; his work is still the gold standard. If you want to be informed, intrigued and exasperated, please read this book. I recommend it as something to share with s.f. loving friends; you will have hours of fun discussing just why Disch is wrong-- and what more can you ask of a book?

Let me begin by stating that I have read very little science fiction in my life. I picked up Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" primarily because I had read and immensely enjoyed "The Castle of Indolence", his superb collection of essays on "poetry, poets and poetasters". I also was aware of Disch's reputation as a "literary" writer of science fiction, an author who reputedly stood above the pulpy cauldron of a genre often castigated as "low brow", and was interested in his opinion of the significance of science fiction-a significance which is strongly suggested by the subtitle of this book: "How Science Fiction Conquered the World"

"The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" is a wide ranging, opinionated romp through science fiction, a book which keeps you turning the pages with an avidity more typical of a horror or suspense novel. Beginning with the claim that science fiction is, at its root, an American genre that originated with Edgar Allen Poe ("our embarrassing ancestor"), Disch propels the reader through nearly two centuries of writing, showing how science fiction has been able to combine genuine visionary power with the most irrational, "lumpen-literature" characteristics of the black-print-screaming tabloid headlines about UFO abductees. In chapter after chapter, Disch renders strong opinions and insightful observations on how science fiction has evolved over the years, how that evolution has affected our view of the world and its possible futures, and how science fiction has been able to appropriate and define political, religious and social perspectives on the world. Along the way, Disch takes on feminism ("Can Girls Play Too? Feminizing Science Fiction"), Republicans ("Republicans on Mars-Science Fiction as Military Strategy"), and, not surprisingly, the unmitigated xenophobic need for an "other" ("The Third World and Other Alien Nations").

The most compelling thing about "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of", however, is that it makes you want to sit down and read some of these science fiction writers-at least if you're like me, and haven't already.

None of the reviews here have pointed out the serious mistakes Disch makes in trying to defend his thesis that SF began with books from an American man, not a British woman. He states that Mary Shelley's work was privately published with money from her rich in-laws and was only read by the few. Any good reference work on English literature will put this straight: Shelley's work was an enormous commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Her in-laws despised her and after Shelley's death -- which left her poverty stricken, as he'd borrowed heavily against his inheritance -- refused even to help her children. What's more, the story was so popular that various theatre companies in England and America mounted productions; at one point, in 1854 I think it was, there were three competing productions in London alone. A person didn't even have to know how to read to learn about the book and its ideas -- one of these productions was very "penny dreadful" and attracted a most decidedly un-elite audience. One has to ask why Disch distorts the truth so drastically -- I suspect that his later chapter on women's sf, equally distorted and denigrating, just might provide a clue.

I applaud Mr. Disch's willingness to take on this topic. Very few people have looked at Sci-Fi as a serious literary endeavor. To that end, he wrote a fascinating and thoroughly interesting account of the origins of the Science Fiction and the effect it has had on our society. My biggest complaint about the work is that it should have been longer. Disch stresses a few authors in his work, but leaves out a great deal of territory that could have made this an even better read. I enjoyed reading about Poe and found that Disch has a compelling argument for annointing him as the first SF writer. However, I felt the author spent too much time on areas that I feel are totally unrelated to SF work, such as alien abduction and religious cults. I disagree with the premise that the Heaven's Gate cult is an off-shoot of American SF. I did not think that this part of the book fit in with the theme.

Disch correctly points out in his introduction that he will leave out many authors and works that will anger or disappoint their fans. It is important to remember that this book is not a literary review or critique of the assembled works of SF, but an attempt to fit the genre into the broader scope of literary endeavor. That being said, I do think that Herbert's "Dune" should be remembered more than just for the distinction of having been made into a bad movie. And while I truly love Heinlein, and I did get a kick out of the author's apparent love/hate relationship with both Heinlein and his political views, the book at times seemed more of an analysis of Heinlein than of the SF genre as a whole. I really don't think that too many people changed their entire world view after reading "Farnham's Freehold".

Overall, this book should be highly recommended to anyone researching some of the authors of the 50's and 60's as they make up the bulk of Disch's work. As stated above, it is not a review of your favorite author. In fact, if your favorite author is Ursula LeGuin, please don't buy it. However, if you enjoy seeing a certain female SF writer get nailed in the teeth for a little hypocrisy, you'll enjoy at least one chapter.