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The Spirit of
Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño
essay by Fred Fischer |
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The US edition (2019) |
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August
30, 2019
Philip José Farmer was featured in the 2019 translated work
of Latin American literary giant Roberto Bolaño’s The Spirit of Science Fiction.
In part the fictional Spirit contains Bolaño’s
letters of admiration to American science fiction writers, and the last
letter, to Farmer, underlines the Grand Master of Peoria’s
breakthrough role in introducing transgressive sexual themes to classic
American science fiction.
Spirit
was probably originally written in the early eighties when
Bolaño, perhaps channeling his life as a teenager in the
Mexico of the 1968 student movement, relates the coming-of-age of his
persona, Jan Schrella. What is “the spirit of
science fiction” if not the license and stimulation to
imagine and create worlds that transgress boundaries? And
what better author to represent that spirit than Philip José
Farmer, who introduced xenophilic relations with an evolved insectoid
race in The
Lovers, winner of a Hugo award. At the end of the
1960’s Farmer also wrote erotic novels for Essex House, such
as A
Feast Unknown, The Image of the Beast
and its sequel, Blown. |
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In his letter to Farmer, Bolaño proposes that PJF form a
committee to anthologize stories that treat how sex can be used to stop
interstellar wars and to solve problems on long space
flights. He mentions other authors to whom Farmer needs to
send invitations and suggests the names of couples that should be
paired for the long flights. Then he closes with an expression of his
admiration for the sci-fi author. |
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Dear
Philip José Farmer:
Wars can be ended with sex or religion. Everything seems to indicate
that there are no other citizen alternatives; these are dark days. We
can set aside religion for now. That leaves sex. Let’s try to
put it to good use. First question: what can you in
particular and American science fiction writers in general do about it?
I propose the immediate creation of a committee to centralize and
coordinate all efforts. As a first step—call it preparing the
terrain—the committee must select ten or twenty authors for
inclusion in an anthology, choosing those who have written most
radically and enthusiastically about carnal relations and the future.
(The committee should be free to select who they like, but I would
presume to suggest the indispensable inclusion of entries by Joanna
Russ and Anne McCaffrey; maybe later I’ll explain why, in
another letter. This anthology, to be titled something like American Orgasms in Space
or A Radiant Future,
should focus the reader’s attention on pleasure and make
frequent use of flashbacks—to our times, I mean—to
chart the path of hard work and peace that it has been necessary to
travel to reach this no-man’s land of love. In each story,
there should be at least one sexual act (or, lacking that, one episode
of ardent and devoted camaraderie) between Latin Americans and North
Americans. For example, legendary space pilot Jack Higgins, commander
of the Fidel Castro,
participates in interesting physical and spiritual encounters with
Gloria Diaz, a navigation engineer from Colombia. Or: shipwrecked on
Asteroid BM101, Demetrio Aguilar and Jennifer Brown spend ten years
practicing the Kama Sutra. Stories with a happy ending. Desperate
socialist realism in the service of alluring, mind-blowing happiness.
Every ship with a mixed crew and every ship with its requisite overdose
of amatory activity! At the same time, the committee should establish
contact with the rest of American science fiction writers, those
who’re left cold by sex or who won’t touch it for
reasons of style, ethics, market appeal, personal preference, plot,
aesthetics, philosophy, etc. They must be taught to see the importance
of writing about the orgies that future citizens of Latin America and
the U.S. can take part in if we take action now. If they flatly refuse,
they must be convinced, at the very least, to write to the White House
to ask for a cease in hostilities. Or to pray along with the bishops of
Washington. To pray for peace. But that’s our back-up plan,
and we’ll keep it under wraps for now. In closing, let me
tell you how much I admire your work. I don’t read your
novels; I devour them. I’m seventeen, and maybe someday
I’ll write decent science fiction stories. A week ago, I lost
my virginity.
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Warmly,
Jan Schrella
alias Roberto Bolaño |
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Excerpt(s)
from THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE FICTION: A NOVEL by Roberto
Bolaño, copyright © 2016 by the heirs of Roberto
Bolaño. Translation copyright © 2018 by Natasha
Wimmer. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved. |
Implicit in the letter is the notion that Bolaño admires
Farmer for his short stories and novels, many of which “deal
explicitly with sex,” as Leslie Fielder mentioned in his
praising review of Farmer’s novel Tarzan
Alive in 1972.
Farmer’s breakthrough story, “The
Lovers” (1952), and its widespread recognition,
inspired authors like Robert Heinlein at a time when John W. Campbell,
a major influence on classic science fiction and the editor of the
science fiction magazine Astounding,
reportedly refused publication of stories that included sexual themes.
In The
Book of Philip José Farmer, the titular author
relates that Campbell thought that Farmer’s short story, “My Sister’s
Brother” was “nauseating” due
to its depiction of alien reproduction. Heinlein, whose novels
published after “The Lovers” feature nudity and
free love, dedicated Strangers
in a Strange Land, considered by some to be the masterwork
of a sci fi master, to an engineer and two sci fi authors, one of whom
was Farmer.
At the time the short version of Farmer’s “The
Lovers” was first published, the notion of the
“separation of the other” in the United States
predominated among races, genders, and economic classes, to the degree
that miscegenation (loosely defined as “mixing
races”, and now considered a racist word by many) legally
prevented marriages between blacks and whites in many states. The U.S.
Supreme Court did not eliminate race as a barrier to matrimony until
1997. The intimate relationship in “The Lovers”
between the human protagonist and the alien shattered a science fiction
barrier and opened a door for many writers that followed.
As was the case of Philip José Farmer, a number of Roberto
Bolaño’s works were published posthumously,
including his novel 2666,
for which he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle
Award. At the time The
New York Times called him “the most significant
Latin American literary voice of his generation.” Also like
Farmer, Bolaño’s works are tied by the
resurfacing of characters in different short stories and novels, what
the Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction (online)
calls, “Bolaño's career-long strategy of
cross-referring passages and characters from one tale to
another.” There is speculation that
Bolaño kept in mind an overview of his literary metaverse,
as if he, in the words of the Encyclopedia,
“intended to comprise facets of some mosaical over-text that
he did not live long enough to bring to full maturity.”
The Chilean won the Romulo Gallegos prize for “novel of the
year” in 1999 for The
Savage Detectives, lifting him into the same category as
Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Argentine Jorge Luis
Borges. In this novel Bolaño distanced himself
from many of his fellow Latin American writers, rejecting staid notions
of Mexican poetry. “We were all in agreement that Mexican
poetry must be transformed.” (SD)
The big bang of
Philip José
Farmer’s metaverse was caused by a 56-pound meteorite that
fell in
Yorkshire, England in 1795, a few miles from the village of Wold
Newton. Contemplating the effects on the people nearby,
Farmer posited
that the rock’s crashing to earth altered the genes of the
passengers
and coachmen of a carriage in the near vicinity, and thus the Wold
Newton Family was born. The descendants of those affected
became
geniuses and super heroes like: Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan (Lord
Greystoke), Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Arsene Lupin,
and others.
Like Bolaño, Farmer the trickster was an outlier, and his
impact on science fiction continues today. |
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Wold
Cottage meteorite.
A
chondrite which fell near Wold Cottage Farm, near Wold Newton in 1795.
On display in the Natural History Museum, London, March 2013.
By Chemical Engineer - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=25358854
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