Boundaries of Phantasmagoria

Principles of Science-Fantasy II

I hate tropes. I really hate tropes. I fucking hate tropes with the passion of a thousand fiery burning stars. That grotesque word, ‘trope’ has eaten the minds of weak minded fools who now mistake mere trappings for aesthetics or rhetoric or dialectic. The logic, the telos of dreams or stories or myth no longer controls, but rather, a rigid taxonomy that obfuscates more than it clarifies.

’That’s not science fiction because there’s unexplained magic!’

’That’s not science fantasy because they explained the magic!’

Mysteries no more invalidate a story grounded in grimly hopeless mechanistic and materialist universe any more than a clearly defined metaphysics invalidate a story founded upon a universe of mystery and marvels.

People are stupid.

Sigh.

Consider, for a moment, Shambleau, by CL Moore.

Being the first of the Northwest Smith series of ‘space westerns’ featuring our titular outlaw space cowboy having (mis)adventures with his Venusian side-kick in a future solar system colonized by the great powers of Earth, Shambleau seems like it should be straightforward to classify. Rockets - check. Colonizing the solar system - check. Ray guns - check and check. Simple right?

Not so fast fren, consider the opening paragraph.

“Man has conquered Space before. You may be sure of that. Somewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out of which comes echoes of half-mythical name —Atlantis, Mu—somewhere back of history’s first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to house star-roving ships and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues—heard Venus’ people call their wet world “Shar-ardol” in that soft, sweet, slurring speech and mimicked Mars’ guttural “Lakkdiz” from the harsh tongue of Mars’ dryland dwellers. You may be sure of it. Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own. There have been too many myths and legends for us to doubt it. The myth of the Medusa, for instance, can never have had its roots in the soil of Earth. That tale of the snake-haired Gorgon whose gaze turned the gazer to stone never originated about any creature that Earth nourished. And those ancient Greeks who told the story must have remembered, dimly, and half believing, a tale of antiquity about some strange being from one of the outlying planets their remotest ancestors once trod.”

What is this? Ancient astronauts - check. Atlantis and Mu - check and check. Fantastic beasts accurately described by classical myth and legend - check.

How unscientific!

Because CL Moore, peace be upon her, was writing within the auld Pulp tradition, before the iron curtain of genre was first builded to deceive us, there is no difference. Consider that this story was first published in 1933 in Weird Tales alongside Clark Ashton Smith (namely The Holiness of Azédarac, part of the Averoigne cycle), and therefore her two fisted space cowboy man of action and his pretty boy Venusian side-kick could get into ray gun shoot outs with Red Martians and Venusian dino-riding amazons, moon-frogs, and girls with snakes for hair that just want to consume your soul, and also Great Old Ones and horrors from beyond Space and Time, things that should not Be!

In fact, CL Moore would give us perhaps the English language’s first crossover story(?) in The Quest of the Starstone wherein the manly man of action, outlaw space cowboy Northwest Smith must team up with CL Moore’s other famous creation, the swashbuckling mistress of the sword, Jirel of Joiry to fight an evil black space-sorcerer and necromancer most foul, presumably intent on some ill-conceived and unsane arcane apotheosis potentially averting the future timeline of Smith and man’s second Space Age. Of course Northwest has second thoughts and an epic team-up ensues. Thrills, chills, suspense, the unquiet dead, horrible tortures, star crossed love!

As if that wasn’t Romantic enough, CL Moore cowrote Starstone with her future husband Henry Kuttner.

D’awwww.

And THAT is the difference between ‘science fiction’ and ‘science fantasy’, not trappings, but Romance. Both in the sense of wonder, awe, and adventure and in the sense of the unification of man and woman.

And of course, we must all acknowledge that the archetype of space cowboy, so vividly realized by Moore with Northwest Smith lives on in his literary descendants; Malcom Reynolds, Spike Spiegel, and most obviously and perhaps most relevant to our purposes here, Han freaking Solo.

eyyyyyy!