The War Nerd Iliad emphasizes the alienness of the ancient Greeks, which reminded commenter Graham of the classic sci-fi he’d read — which reminded me of an author whose work pervasively influenced science fiction and fantasy:
Poul Anderson, a leading American science fiction writer, has these words to say about one of his predecessors: “He is for everyone who responds to vividness, word magic, sheer storytelling. Most readers go on to discover the subtleties and profundities.” His colleague Gordon R. Dickson calls him “a master of our art.” The man they are praising was born in the 19th century and died in the 20th. He wrote of new inventions and future wars, and warned of the social consequences of technological change. And he exerted an immense influence on modern science fiction.
They are not speaking of Jules Verne (1828-1905) or of H.G. Wells (1866-1946). True, both names come immediately to mind when we seek the roots of science fiction. When Hugo Gernsback founded the first real SF magazine in 1926, he filled out the early issues of Amazing Stories with reprints of their stories. The writers who shaped modern science fiction, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, read Verne and Wells as boys. But today their works have achieved the status of classics: much honored but little read. It was their contemporary Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who has exerted the most lasting influence on modern science fiction. And it was Rudyard Kipling of whom Poul Anderson says, “His influence pervades modern science fiction and fantasy writing”.
Like Verne and Wells, Kipling wrote stories whose subject-matter is explicitly science-fictional. “With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.” portrays futuristic aviation in a journalistic present-tense that recalls Kipling’s years as a teenaged subeditor on Anglo-Indian newspapers. “The Eye of Allah” deals with the introduction of advanced technology into a mediaeval society that may not be ready for it.
But it is not this explicit use of science and technology in some of his stories that makes Kipling so important to modern science fiction. Many of Kipling’s contemporaries and predecessors wrote scientific fiction. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Conan Doyle are among them. Yet echoes of their work are seldom seen in today’s science fiction. Kipling’s appeal to modern readers lies instead in his approach and his technique.
The real subject-matter of Rudyard Kipling’s writing is the world’s work and the men and women and machines who do it. Whether that work be manual or intellectual, creative or administrative, the performance of his work is the most important thing in a person’s life. As Disko Troop says in Captains Courageous, “the most interesting thing in the world is to find out how the next man gets his vittles”.
This is not a view shared by most of 20th-century literature; nor is Kipling’s special sympathy with the work of Empire. This may explain why Rudyard Kipling has received less attention from the literary establishment than his writings deserve. But he was an enormously popular writer, especially among working people. Even to this day he is widely quoted, often by people who would be shocked to learn the source of the colorful expressions they so often use. Today’s science fiction writers find their audience among the same strata of society that in Victoria’s time read Kipling: adults engaged in the shaping of our world and young people exploring what life has to offer.
Kipling’s writing embodies an attitude toward that work that places its satisfactory completion above convenience, desire, and comfort in the scheme of things. This attitude toward work and duty is also characteristic of modern science fiction. It places men and women in the role of creators and maintainers, rather than victims. It prefers exploring the intricacies of the craftsman’s vision to indulging the subtleties of the narrative voice.
This exaltation of work and duty may be unfashionable in literary circles today, but no technological society can flourish without it. Science fiction may not be essential to the survival of Western civilisation; but some literary tradition that embodies its essential attitudes will always accompany humankind on its road to the stars. The influence of Rudyard Kipling will be writ large upon that literature, whatever form it may take, for many years to come.
Kipling faced the same technical problem that the modern science fiction writer faces: the need to make an alien time and place understandable to his audience. Whether the scene be India under the British Raj or Mars under the Solar Federation, the reader needs to know the essential differences in biology, technology, and sociology that govern the characters and their actions. This information needs to be provided without interfering with the narrative. The reader wants a story, not a lesson.
John W Campbell, the magisterial editor who shaped the Golden Age of science fiction, considered Rudyard Kipling the first modern science fiction writer. Kipling, he explained, was the first to go beyond simply providing the reader with the essential background information needed to read his story. He was thinking here of “With the Night Mail”. When this pseudo-journalistic account of transatlantic dirigible traffic first appeared in 1905, the text was accompanied by weather advisories, classified advertisements, shipping notices, and a wide range of other snippets intended to suggest that the tale was in fact appearing in a magazine published in 2000. All this stage business was extraneous to the story, strictly speaking; but it did help to establish the setting.
Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough information for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest stories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved more subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it gets the message across subliminally.
Modern science fiction writers and their readers have become so accustomed to this sort of thing and so dependent on it that it has made much of the genre literally unreadable to many who have not learned its reading protocols. Samuel R Delany has observed that a statement that is meaningless in mimetic fiction (such as “The red sun is high, the blue low”) can be a matter of simple description in science fiction, and a statement that could only be metaphorical (“Her world exploded”) might be meant as literal fact in SF. It is this divergence in the way words are used, rather than any particular exoticism of subject-matter or the use of experimental narrative strategies (here SF is usually very conservative), that separates modern science fiction from the literary mainstream. And all this began with Kipling.
It is certainly a matter of fact that Kipling’s works are immensely popular among SF writers. Allusions to Kipling in story titles and quotations from his verse may be found throughout the genre. Autobiographical essays and story introductions widely acknowledge Kipling as a favorite writer and a major inspiration. David Drake and Sandra Miesel have assembled two anthologies of stories written under the influence of Kipling, accompanied by introductions in which the likes of Poul Anderson, L Sprague de Camp, Joe Haldeman, and Gene Wolfe describe the impact that reading Kipling has had on their own writing. (Heads to the Storm, and A Separate Star: A Science Fiction Tribute to Rudyard Kipling were both published by Baen Books in 1989.)
But the best way to understand why Kipling has exerted so great an influence over modern science fiction is to read his own work. Begin with Kim, the most successful evocation of an alien world ever produced in English. Follow the Grand Trunk Road toward the Northwest Frontier, and watch the parade of cultures that young Kimball O’Hara encounters. Place yourself in his position, that of a half-assimilated stranger in a strange land; and observe carefully the uneven effects of an ancient society’s encounter with a technologically advanced culture. SF writers have found Kim so appealing that several have told their own versions of the story: Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and Poul Anderson’s The Game of Empire are two of the best.
Then look at Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, two collections of linked stories in which Kipling brings incidents of English history and prehistory to life, both for the children for whom the books were ostensibly written and for their elders. One could classify them as time-travel stories, thus bringing them into the taxonomy of science fiction. But their real relevance lies in the careful evocation of time and place, echoed in so many later stories by other writers who bring a modern observer into direct contact with earlier days.
And by all means read Kipling’s own science fiction stories. Most of these were collected in Kipling’s Science Fiction (New York: Tor Books, 1992), edited by the late John Brunner, a noted British SF writer. But anyone with access to the standard collections of Kipling’s short stories will be able to find them.
I’ve discussed As Easy As A.B.C. before.
My father (RIP), a member of the Greatest Generation, was pretty damn alien to me. His overt machismo, his readiness to resort to violence, his independence and refusal to accept authority, his adventurism, his pride in work accomplished…None of that exists in the modern generations, X, Millenial, Zyklon…
He was at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. He would have gone to Korea, if my mother hadn’t had a SF. He wanted to go to the oil fields in Arabia, another SF.
He was and remains a total mystery to me, and I lived with him for 23 years.
Kipling? “Sons of Martha” speaks to those of us who provide the underpinnings that keep the lights on and the roads open.
I think John W. Campbell also wrote of his concern that humanity was turning from being “homo faber” to “homo ludens” [man the maker to man who plays] in terms of social trends.
In retrospect, I think that was overblown in some ways but still seems deeply true in others. Despite the existence of a “maker” movement. We’ll have to see how it all works out, but the patterns of technological development and social development seem to have turned the process of making in directions other than the big human projects of mid century. Then again, it was weird tinkerers who first gave us cars and flight. I don’t know what to make of it. Perhaps there are both trends undercutting the kind of creativity and work Campbell revered and others reinforcing them.
I dimly recall those Kipling anthologies and/or other works from SF writers of the 80s praising his work just as you describe. I suspect he still has his following but less so among younger writers. I’d be curious.
Kim is, of course, perhaps the best and certainly among the most well-done attempts to convey the alienness of a world, a culture, a people, civilization, place, along the lines you suggest. It is famously a cult favorite in the intelligence world — one sees this referred to everywhere since, I think, Allen Dulles said something about it. It should be a favorite among SF, AH, and even political thriller writers.
In SF, as I alluded to in that earlier comment, writers of all sorts have certainly done both well and poorly in creating alien cultures.
They often pretend they are alien but they are actually too human, just reflecting human traits the author doesn’t like or recognize — a common failing of Star Trek writers. I never understood why Earth humans should find it the least bit difficult to understand Romulans, Klingons, or Cardassians, save that the writers projected themselves into the future, and so Federation humans had an extraordinarily narrow moral perspective on everything.
I thought Gordon Dickson did a very good job in creating convincingly “alien” cultures by deliberately using humans who reflected specific mentalities in his Dorsai novels. I still find it interesting that he effectively projected human civilizations defined by mentality and behavior mode rather than ethnicity or culture as we would understand them today. Still never quite equalled. More alien than some SF cultures populated by non-human beings.
Frank Herbert credibly created a plausibly alien human society of the far future despite it not aiming to be alien — he just stripped away enough of the assumptions of our times. And some of the subcultures were pretty freaky.
Cordwainer Smith [can't recall his real name] was also somewhat good at this. Also, for some folks, his work will now seem alien even across a couple of generations, in addition to the alienness he built into the stories. Consider carefully the implications of “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal”.
Some of the best culture building I have seen came from CS Friedman and CJ Cherryh.
In particular, Friedman’s “In Conquest Born” posits an eternal war between two human-descended interstellar societies. One was technocracy gone mad with a soupcon of psychic power. The other was a martial society mostly of military technocrats but ruled by an isolationist warrior-caste subrace whose aesthetic and morals were sort of anti-Klingon. The warrior class as sensualist rather than moralist. It’s also brilliant characterization of the main antagonists.
CJ Cherryh’s trilogy KEsrith, Shonjir and Kutath AKA the Mri Trilogy, is perhaps the best culture-building, human fish out of water, human has to assimilate to alien values saga I ever read. I can hardly praise too highly. Of course, as human creations the Mri can’t be truly alien any more than any other such characters, but Cherryh wildly exceeds the demands of credibility with them. The story could be considered Dances with Wolves in Space, if the cultural distance between the Americans and the Sioux were multiplied a hundredfold. Also great if you like stories of wandering peoples, lost worlds, lost histories, the desperate effort to preserve culture and identity.
Star Trek novel-verse writers in the days when I read them [80s to mid-90s] were often abysmal. One effort to flesh out Vulcan culture made them seem like avatars for a sort of Jane Jacobs worship of local neighborhoods, with the Earth female protagonist at one point utterly mesmerized by the simple practice of a young Vulcan taking over the menial sweeping work of an older one while reciting a ritual phrase. It was a bit heavy handed and silly. OTOH, one TNG writer did a good job developing a culture in which everyone wore literal masks, to appear maskless was punishment or disgrace, and the maskmaker was a exalted craftsman with their own special masks as identifiers. It was quite clever stuff. I believe it was called “Masks”…
The classic examples from that world were John Ford [I know nothing else of him] who wrote “The Final Reflection”, and Diane Duane, who did “My Enemy, My Ally” and its sequels. Superseded by TV canon, but really excellent efforts to flesh out the Klingon and Romulan cultures. Ford’s Klingons, in particular, are quite different from how they evolved on TV.
All the best works are implicitly aware that as human artefacts these cultures can’t be really alien but try to construct from the elements that will seem the most alien, singly or when combined, or the most stark contrasts with the prevailing assumptions of the readers at least.
We in the modern west ought to be better at it- most of humanity through most of history including our own ancestors and probably the majority of humanity today are our aliens and we constantly and loudly proclaim in the media our inability to understand their inscrutable motives. I’m not immune either, just with different aliens.
Cordwainer Smith was the nom de plume of Paul Linebarger. He did wrote the book on psychological warfare under his own name though. He was definitely an unusual fellow.
That “Masks” episode sounds a bit like Jack Vance’s The Moon Moth, from 1961.