{"id":234,"date":"2005-12-02T01:49:15","date_gmt":"2005-12-02T06:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=234"},"modified":"2005-12-02T19:23:35","modified_gmt":"2005-12-03T00:23:35","slug":"rudyard-kipling-invented-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=234","title":{"rendered":"Rudyard Kipling Invented SF!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ever had a moment when somebody else drops an insight on you, and you feel<br \/>\ntotally stupid because you had all the facts and all the motivation to generate<br \/>\nit yourself, it was about something you&#8217;re expert at, but you<br \/>\njust&#8230;didn&#8217;t&#8230;see&#8230;it?  And you should have, and you&#8217;re damn annoyed with<br \/>\nyourself for missing it?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This happened to me recently.  I gave permission for the newletter<br \/>\nof the <a href='http:\/\/www.lfs.org\/awards.htm'>Libertarian Futurist<br \/>\nSociety<\/a> to print my essay <a href='http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/writings\/sf-history.html'>A Political<br \/>\nHistory of SF<\/a> In it, I wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nHeinlein was the first of Campbell&#8217;s discoveries and, in the end, the<br \/>\ngreatest. It was Heinlein who invented the technique of description by<br \/>\nindirection &mdash; the art of describing his future worlds not<br \/>\nthrough lumps of exposition but by presenting it through the eyes of<br \/>\nhis characters, subtly leading the reader to fill in by deduction<br \/>\nlarge swathes of background that a lesser author would have drawn in<br \/>\ndetail.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is pretty much the standard account by historians of the<br \/>\nfield.  One William H. Stoddard wrote the newsletter editor as<br \/>\nfollows.  He agrees that Heinlein introduced indirect exposition into<br \/>\nSF, but observes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn fact, that technique had already been used, several decades<br \/>\nbefore, in Rudyard Kipling&#8217;s two science fiction stories, &#8220;With the<br \/>\nNight Mail&#8221; and &#8220;As Easy as A.B.C.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Mr. Stoddard goes on to note that Heinlein wrote a number<br \/>\nof Kipling tributes into his own work, most notably in the early scenes of<br \/>\n<cite>Citizen of the Galaxy<\/cite> (1957), and to speculate plausibly on<br \/>\nKipling&#8217;s influence on Heinlein.<\/p>\n<p>This is the point at which I slapped my forehead and swore.  For,<br \/>\nindeed, I know <cite>With the Night Mail<\/cite> well, have reread it<br \/>\nmany times, and have described it to friends as an important work of<br \/>\nearly proto-SF.  I had noticed before that the story prefigures modern<br \/>\nCampbellian and hard SF very exactly in its concerns, its narrative<br \/>\ntone, and its management of information about the imagined future.<br \/>\nAnd that it could have been written by Heinlein if he had been more than<br \/>\na child of five in that year; I <em>knew<\/em> this.  But&#8230;.grrr&#8230;.I<br \/>\nmissed the implications.<\/p>\n<p>You see, I had a perspective problem; my eyes were too modern.  I<br \/>\nam so used to reading the idiom of hard SF in our time that until<br \/>\nWilliam Stoddard pointed it out, I was unable to see quite how unique<br \/>\nand pathbreaking <cite>With the Night Mail<\/cite> had been in its<br \/>\ntime.  Once Stoddard woke me up to this point, I immediately realized<br \/>\nthat the story was not, as I had previously thought, merely a sort of<br \/>\nhistorical curio thrown off on the way to modern genre SF, but almost<br \/>\ncertainly one of the key steps without which modern genre SF as we<br \/>\nknow it would never have existed!<\/p>\n<p>In researching the matter, I discovered an excellent essay by<br \/>\nlong-time fan Fred Lerner, <a href='http:\/\/www.kipling.org.uk\/facts_scifi.htm'>A Master of our Art:<br \/>\nRudyard Kipling considered as a Science Fiction writer<\/a> which<br \/>\ndevelops this case in detail.  Again, little in it was factually new<br \/>\nto me; the biggest surprise is the report that John W. Campbell<br \/>\nregarded Kipling as &#8220;the first modern science fiction writer&#8221;.  But<br \/>\nLerner draws together well-known facts into a new shape, arguing<br \/>\neffectively that both Campbell (the theorist of modern SF) and<br \/>\nHeinlein (its first great practitioner) both saw themselves as<br \/>\nexplorers in a direction first set by Rudyard Kipling.<\/p>\n<p>Having considered the matter, I think the sharpest insight in<br \/>\nLerner&#8217;s essay is his proposition that Kipling invented the technique<br \/>\nof exposition by indirection while writing his India stories; and that<br \/>\nit is in <em>Kim<\/em> (1901) &mdash; that great, warm, wonderful,<br \/>\nsprawling, picaresque novel of the Raj and the Great Game &mdash; that<br \/>\nthe technique found expression in a form barely distinguishable from the SFnal<br \/>\nuse Heinlein and those who followed him would put it to forty years<br \/>\nlater.  As Lerner himself puts it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nKipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian<br \/>\nreadership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British<br \/>\nIndia at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and<br \/>\nAmerican audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough<br \/>\ninformation for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest<br \/>\nstories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved<br \/>\nmore subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright<br \/>\nexposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled<br \/>\nthrough the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other<br \/>\nstories of India he uses King James English to indicate that<br \/>\ncharacters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it<br \/>\ngets the message across subliminally.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The point to keep bearing in mind (one that I think Lerner doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\nemphasize enough) is that this <em>had never been done before<\/em>.<br \/>\nThere is no such subtlety in the contemporary proto-SF of H.G. Wells<br \/>\n(mostly between 1894 and 1907) and Jules Verne (between 1863 and<br \/>\n1905).  These authors rely on expository lumps almost as heavily as<br \/>\ndid pre-Campbellian genre SF in the 1910s and 1920s &mdash; and for<br \/>\nprecisely that reason, they seem far more dated than <cite>Kim<\/cite><br \/>\nor <cite>With the Night Mail<\/cite> do to an SF fan reading today.<\/p>\n<p>My title exaggerates a little; Kipling did not single-handedly<br \/>\ninvent modern SF.  But I think we may safely credit him with inventing<br \/>\nthe style of exposition that was to become modern SF&#8217;s most important<br \/>\ndevice for managing and conveying information about imaginary futures<br \/>\nand otherwheres.  In doing so, he exerted an influence on the style, tone,<br \/>\nand even content of SF that remains pervasive.<\/p>\n<p>Once we understand this, there are some apparently accidental<br \/>\nfeatures of the genre that make a great deal more sense.  One is the<br \/>\ndegree to which SF and SF-influenced fantasy, essentially alone among<br \/>\nmodern genres, carry forward a tradition of high-quality<br \/>\nmoral-didactic children&#8217;s fiction that can be read with pleasure by<br \/>\nadults.  Robert Heinlein&#8217;s juveniles and even J.K. Rowling&#8217;s<br \/>\n<cite>Harry Potter<\/cite> sequence are not just coincidentally like<br \/>\nthe Kipling of <cite>Kim<\/cite><cite>, <\/cite><cite>Stalky &amp; Co.<\/cite> and<br \/>\n<cite>The Jungle Book<\/cite> &mdash; they are organically derived from<br \/>\nhis work through the technique of indirect exposition.<\/p>\n<p>Another is the persistence of military SF.  The similarity between<br \/>\nKipling&#8217;s prose and verse about the North-West Frontier and genre SF&#8217;s<br \/>\nfrequent celebrations of the military ethos in exotic surroundings is<br \/>\nhardly accidental either.  These stories too, are all about indirect<br \/>\nexposition &mdash; immersing the reader in a strange and challenging<br \/>\nenvironment, not by telling but by showing. As I have discussed <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=47'>elsewhere<\/a>, military SF tends<br \/>\nto have as important subtext an examination of the soldier&#8217;s proper<br \/>\nrelationship to his society &mdash; much as do Kipling&#8217;s barrack-room<br \/>\nballads.<\/p>\n<p>Lurking behind both these features is SF&#8217;s abiding concern with<br \/>\nmorality, right living, and humans&#8217; place in the cosmos. Now of course<br \/>\nall literature touches these concerns; but part of the SF tradition is<br \/>\na tendency to do so in ways that emphasize politics and psychology<br \/>\nrather less, and the inexorableness of natural law rather more.<\/p>\n<p>The archetypal example of this emphasis is Tom Godwin&#8217;s classic<br \/>\n<cite>The Cold Equations<\/cite> (1954), in which an innocent and likeable<br \/>\ngirl stows away on a spaceship and must die &mdash; must, in fact, be<br \/>\nkilled &mdash; because she overstrains the capacity of<br \/>\nthe vessel, which is delivering supplies vitally needed to prevent<br \/>\nmass death.<\/p>\n<p>What is this, really, but Rudyard Kipling&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/godscopybook.blogs.com\/poem.html'>Gods of the Copybook<br \/>\nHeadings<\/a> (1916) in the idiom of the Space Age?  Perhaps Kipling&#8217;s<br \/>\nmost lasting legacy in the <em>content<\/em> of SF is his insistence<br \/>\n(one expressed hardly ever, if at all, in literary genres other than<br \/>\nSF) that human feeling and social construction cannot override natural<br \/>\nlaw; that a tough-minded grasp of the way the universe actually works<br \/>\nis both possible and necessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever had a moment when somebody else drops an insight on you, and you feel totally stupid because you had all the facts and all the motivation to generate it yourself, it was about something you&#8217;re expert at, but you just&#8230;didn&#8217;t&#8230;see&#8230;it? And you should have, and you&#8217;re damn annoyed with yourself for missing it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}