(1905) and D. W. Griffith's filmic version of the novel, The Birth of a Nation (1915), makes obvious sense, for the Martian novels also depict a white Southern male reestablishing racial order.
Simplistic as his adventure formula may seem, the simplicity still characterizes far more substantial works. George Allen England's Darkness at Dawn (1912), the first novel of a trilogy, provides a very different type of plot, but one that manifests the same ideology. In England's first science fiction story, The Lunar Advertising Co. (1906), technological advancement takes place within the modern economy: the moon, as a giant projection screen, becomes America's premier billboard. But in the trilogy, the economy disappears along with human civilization: an engineer and a stenographer wake up in a New York skyscraper to find themselves the last two humans alive in a world that has been destroyed by an 'Epic of Death.' They are soon attacked by 'demoniac hordes' of black, apelike creatures with a 'trace of the Mongol,' and Allan Stern, 'the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century,' must defend himself and the woman he grows to love against racial extinction. Facing a world 'gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased,' Stern nurtures his 'deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and women as they had once been.' Finally, in the last of the novels, The Afterglow, he establishes a new social system among the other survivors they encounter, a system in which man is free at last because of the elimination of money, the proliferation of scientific thought, and the introduction of the English language, that 'magnificent language, so rich and pure,' its purity mimicking the racial purity achieved once the 'horde' has been 'wiped out.' More precisely than Burroughs's work, then, England's trilogy occupies the ideology of its era, most familiar in Theodore Roosevelt's claim, from The Winning of the West (1899), that 'the - 363- spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been…the most striking feature in the world's history.' And England's novels exhibit the same contradictions as does Roosevelt's ideal of the 'strenuous life,' a call away from 'overcivilization' that is still a call to 'civilize' the world. For only in the face of civilization's demise does Allan Stern retrieve the ideals of 'labor and exploration' and transform himself from the 'man of science and cold fact' into a man who can feel the 'atavistic passions'; only in defending the woman he loves does the 'engineer' become an 'American.' The triumph of civilization simply leaves 'man civilized' with no 'other' against which to define himself; it leaves the hero and his world in a nonnarratable state.
This nonnarratable state is the very topic of John W. Campbell's prologue to Islands of Space (1930). In the typical history of science fiction, Campbell's editorial work at Astounding, begun in 1938, appears as the moment when science proper became the subject of science fiction. But just as this history itself writes that moment as an adventure — the hero Campbell rescuing science fiction and inaugurating the so-called Golden Age — so too his own fiction foregrounds the problem of adventure despite its greater scientific realism and its location of technology within an American corporate economy. Islands of Space begins by summarizing the previous endeavors of Transcontinental Airways: having initiated interplanetary travel and landed on Venus, the corporation found that, though 'similar to Earthmen,' the 'Venusians' had blue blood and double thumbs, making them 'enough different to have caused distrust and racial friction, had not both planets been drawn together in a common bond of defense' against the Black Star, Nigra. The Nigrans, functioning as the absolute other that cements comradeship, have been defeated, making the world of science uninteresting: 'The War was over. And things had become dull. And the taste of adventure still remained.' While there is some possibility that 'commerce over quintillions of miles of space' will satisfy this taste, the band of scientists soon find themselves involved in an interplanetary confrontation far from earth. They settle the dispute, adjudicate interplanetary relations, offer their technology to the winning side as a means of ensuring further peace, and thus establish American technocratic, neo-364- colonialist hegemony. The corporate adventure remains a fantasy of domination.
As science fiction begins to address the historical moment of its own production, the politics of such fantasies — politics per se — become more explicit and more explicitly resisted, as in When Worlds Collide (1933), a novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie that rewrites the Depression as a natural disaster. News of a planet's trajectory toward earth is first encountered in the papers as 'something novel, exciting,' but the ensuing panic requires careful governmental management: the unemployed are 'corralled en masse' to build shelters in the heart of the country, away from the coasts, which will disappear in the first tidal waves. A great migration from the coasts to the plains (reversing the historical migration from the Dust Bowl) transforms even millionaires into 'Oakies,' driving 'with their treasures heaped around them.' The president shows 'the good sense to kick politics in the face and take full authority upon himself,' and his radio reports ('we stand now on the brink of a situation from which we cannot hide') suggest a commitment to reason abandoned elsewhere, such as Germany, where fascists have begun to execute both communists and Jews. But even such 'non-political' acumen, of course, cannot forestall humanity's devastation. Outside any governmental auspices, a scientific 'League of the Last Days,' the focus of the novel, has secretly developed two rocket ships to take five hundred of the world's best minds to another planet, leaving 'the hordes' (science fiction's ubiquitous 'hordes') behind. Thus, the heroes of the novel accomplish their own eugenicist ends, but with a rational means that appears to stand fully outside politics (what the novel assesses as good and bad politics)and to stand outside economics — to stand for science itself. This account of the scientists' escape can be read as an allegory of science fiction's escapism — an effort to erase such earthly matters as fascism and depression while ultimately rewriting them.
The complications of technological resolution, which is to say technocratic domination, eventually become the object of science fiction's own scrutiny. In Fritz Leiber's Gather Darkness (1943), a 'Hierarchy' rules Megatheopolis by duping 'the masses' with scientific 'miracles'; in Jack Williamson's The Humanoids (1947), 'the virus -365- of science' appears in the form of robots who protect human beings to the point of denying them all pleasure. But these explicit challenges to science and its myth of progress may tell us less than the adventure formula's inability to understand that narrative of progress outside other narratives — of racial, economic, and national conquest. While Jean-François Lyotard, for one, has suggested that the postmodern moment is a time when the metanarrative of science (the grand narratives of speculation and emancipation) faces a legitimation crisis, that crisis already inheres in science fiction, which can find no grounds for science outside its ability to serve as an instrument and sign of power.
Unlike science fiction, which, with its focus on technology, necessarily confronts the idea of 'modernization,' the Western at its most formulaic simply preserves an unspecified American space and time within which gunslinging heroes can conquer villains and win hearts. Max Brand's first Western novel, The Untamed (1918), further delocalizes its action with references to mythology, which continued to provide him with metaphors, themes, and plots that universalize the protagonist's heroism rather than restricting it to any historical West. Proclaimed by Publishers Weekly as 'the king of the pulps,' so prolific as to need twenty pseudonyms, Frederick Faust, most famous as 'Max Brand,' accomplished such feats of productivity — writing over a hundred Western novels, working in all the popular genres (and inventing Dr. Kildare), inspiring as many as five movies in a single year (1921) — that it is little wonder his Westerns, purged of complication, have paradigmatic value. In Hired Guns (1923), for instance, Billy Buel, a gunman who loves to fight and hates to work, is hired to fight in Gloster Valley's nine-year family feud over the identity and possession of Nell (a Western Helen of Troy). His courage, gunmanship, and personal code of ethics resolve that feud and win the heart of the beautiful girl, with whom he leaves the valley. Just as the novel's isolated community stands outside time, so the hero stands outside the community, resolving its conflicts only to flee. The narrative syntax — the outsider establishes social justice, then returns to the outside — remains the staple of the adventure formula, which depicts a need for social change, but a change that must come from without, and from an individual's changeless heroism. -366-
This syntax underlies far more complex renditions of the Western, such as John Ford's, Stagecoach (1939), which, reestablished the pop, ularity of the Hollywood Western in the sound era. Based on a story by Ernest Haycox, Ford's film, displaying the desert crossing of a stage from Tonto to Lordsburg, isolates the passengers, consisting of social,outcasts, into a society of their own (a microcosm that has been read allegorically as 'America,' the country struggling against the natural world). The most socially disreputable of the characters (a prostitute, an alcoholic doctor, a gambler), threatened by Apache attack and faced with the birth of a child, reveal a humanity and a morality that far surpass the Victorian principles of the town, represented by the Ladies' Law and Order League. The opening scenes of the movie allow us to glimpse their lives within society, but the outlaw hero of the story, Ringo Kid (John Wayne), appears only once the. coach is well on its
