've heard many sins laid at the feet of science fiction before, but accusing an entire literary genre of murder is a new one for me. Salvador Dali, creator of extreme artwork, held extreme views as well, one of which I discovered quoted in the introduction to a new translation of one of Jules Verne's earliest works, The Begum's Millions (which was recently reviewed by John Clute on this site).
"Every time someone dies, it is Jules Verne's fault," wrote the artist in Dali on Dali. "He is responsible for the desire for interplanetary voyages, good only for boy scouts or for amateur underwater fishermen. If the fabulous sums wasted on these conquests were spent on biological research, nobody on our planet would die anymore. Therefore, I repeat, each time someone dies it is Jules Verne's fault."
It made me think less of Dali, an artist I have always admired, when I found this passage so many decades after he wrote it. How could the old surrealist not have realized that he and Verne were in the same business, the distribution of dreams? Whether I'm contemplating Dali's melting clocks or Verne's gravity-defying vehicles, I am still being transported to worlds not like ours.
Accuse Verne of murder? If we're going to start doing that, we might as well accuse all creative artists, including Dali, of the crime of causing us to ignore the real world during the moments that we appreciate their art. Whatever Verne's supposed offenses, Dali was a co-conspirator in them, and should have known it.
Coulter doesn't like us either
As you can tell, I got worked up over this quote. But there are some who would consider my fuming unjust, and would have us believe that hidden beneath Dali's seemingly sincere statement was a jester saying, "I keed! I keed!"
Or so I learned a few weeks after that initial discovery, when the mail brought a copy of the book Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing, by Timothy Unwin. I was still incensed over Dali's attack on Jules Verne and, through him, on all of us, when I came across Unwin's completely opposite analysis of the quote. He called those offending words a "supremely ironic take." He says that Dali "wrote mischievously." Personally, I see no intended irony or mischief here.
But I had to ask myself—was Dali playing me? He always liked to use his art to stir controversy, to invite a passionate response. Could that be what was happening? Had his tongue been firmly in cheek?
I don't think so. He may have been hammering away at us with hyberbole, but I take the underlying emotion as real. I've heard it many times before. Science fiction is a childish thing, a time-waster, not serious. It was an attitude shared by many of Dali's generation, and so it is wrong to try to divest him of it just because we now live in a time when science fiction is considered more seriously.
Luckily, now that science fiction has taken over the world, this has become an ancient attitude, right? I took comfort in the fact that such an opinion had gone the way of the dinosaurs and could not survive to this day, particularly not now that we've all benefited so from the science that science fiction has inspired.
Or so I thought ...
Enter Ann Coulter, the political pundit most recently in the news for saying that "We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens' creme brulee." I just found out that she recently also made disparaging comments about us by comparing science-fiction fans to jihadists. Or rather, what's worse, she disparaged jihadists by comparing them to us.
"These guys are klutzes," she wrote of the terrorists. "Nerds. Dweebs. In the Las Vegas of life they're at the convention center with the other Star Trek fans."
I guess I should consider it a form of progress that instead of being called murderers, we're now being compared to terrorists. But you know ... somehow I don't.
Thank you, Ann Coulter. Suddenly, Salvador Dali didn't seem so bad after all.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the latest issue of Nemonymous.
