He evidently has little respect for the romantic and modemist conception of the artist as charismatic rebel against ordinary morality, as genius, as the true hero of all literature. ![]() The Genesis poet is by the standards of the present a rather peculiar literary personality. However, I have kept the passage because I believe that, by the time the poet was writing, the term science fiction had come to mean any narrative that rose above popular psychology and that addressed itself to serious philosophical themes and in particular any narrative that dealt with the matter of Mars. In our sense of science fiction there is no reason why the Genesis poet should praise the form, since the events he describes were for him plain fact and predate him by more than a century. Nevertheless it is likely that my own cultural, psychological, and esthetic biases have entered into the poem.įor instance, the defense of science fiction in Act II scene i may derive some of its passion from my own experience of the shortsightedness of the literary establishment with regard to this form of writing, a shortsightedness encountered by the novel itself in its first hundred years of existence in modem Europe. ![]() He has deliberately appropriated, for instance, the epic invocation at the beginning, the epic structure, and the epic simile, transformed by technological magic into a kind of blueprint. Perhaps indeed some of its archaisms result from his inexact grasp of twentieth-century idioms and ideas, though it is clear that he is ambitious to transcend local temporal variants and speak to the great epic tradition that stretches from Gilgamesh into the distant future. I do not even know whether he is aware of having passed the poem over to a twentieth-century redactor and editor the ending of the poem suggests that he guesses at this possibility. Doubtless many twenty-first and twenty-second century concepts have been rendered by me in a garbled or metaphorical way, or perhaps the poet himself, like Milton’s angel Raphael when he instructs Adam, invented twentieth-century equivalents for them, using his historical imagination. He communicated the poem to me in a way that is impossible to explain I have transcribed it as exactly as I could. The poet of Genesis will not be born until over a hundred years have passed. Scene v The Scductions of Garrison and TripitakaĪCT V: The Words of the Sibyls of the Sibyl ![]() Scene iii The Coming of Tripitaka to Mars
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