The Centrality of Gothic Fiction in Modern Genre Fiction

Question: To what extent are the "weird" genres--supernatural horror, science fiction, and fantasy--distinct" genres? Or, are they truly separate and autonomous traditions? Should we write histories of supernatural horror, science fiction, and fantasy? Should be categorize works along those lines? Should literary critics and fans discuss their differences?

Or, are these genres they part of the same tradition?

Many would say swiftly and categorically provide answer: "they are distinct."

J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, and Stephen King are clearly qualitatively distinct writers writing in different traditions and genres that treat different plots, characters, and conflicts. Right? What does Bilbo's quest to Erebor have to do with an investigation into the Cthulhu cult? What do the three laws of robotics have to do with Uruk-hai? How is Arkham relevant to the Foundation?

I would agree that the modern weird genres are distinct, but I have some essential conditions. Although, at this point, due to several causes, these genres have become separate and distinct, they are, and importantly so, connected, and most likely share an origin point.

Beginning as literary genres, they all emerge from the same deep and variegated cultural stream, which is literary history, of course. But such a flaccid, generalizing claim is not so interesting. So, let's get more specific.

I think there is a compelling case to be made for the idea that supernatural horror, science fiction, and fantasy emerge from the tradition of "Gothic" fiction in the late 1700s.

What is "Gothic" fiction? Let me spend the rest of this brief post giving a general overview of "the Gothic."

First, what does that word, "Gothic," even mean? It is one that changes meaning with context. In its earliest use, it referred to "the Goths," a quasi-historical group of Germanic people who were, at least in the popular imagination of 18th century Europe who were intrigued by them, responsible for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.

Thus, when the adjective "Gothic" is used in English in the 18th century to describe architecture, art, and literature, the actual Germanic tribes who are referred to by the Goths had been homogenized in the European imagination.

I don't want to go into the complicated ancient historical distinctions here. Let it suffice it to say that there were several types of "Goths," and the two major strains who played an important role in the establishment of the culture of the middle-ages were referred to by by historians as the "Visigoths" (western Goths) and "Ostrogoths" (eastern Goths). To summarize, "Gothic" refers to the aesthetic style of the "the Goths," which was already a shorthand for a people who had been homogenized and mythologized by the European imagination.

So, when the adjective "Gothic" is used by 18th century Europeans to describe architecture, art, and literature, it is a very loose reference, which means non-Roman or even "Medieval," i.e. from the middle ages. But the theme that gave this reference power, I think, was time.

The Gothic, as a loose tag, referred to something outside of time.

Here are some undeveloped speculations and questions:

To what extent is science fiction a literature unfettered by time? It often focuses on the future. To what extent is fantasy a literature unfettered to time? It often focuses on the cultural past and myth. How about horror and its relationship to time? It channels elements of both fantasy and science fiction to the extent that it dramatizes the destruction of the ordinary, the order, the natural law, and so renders a violation, a transgression, and often of time, i.e. the past returns, erupts into the present. That which is dead doesn't stay dead.

Could these "Gothic" genres, these "weird" genres, thematize the destruction of the ordinary. I think they do indeed trouble the orthodoxy of now.

Stanley G. Weinbaum, "A Martian Odyssey"

Stanley G. Weinbaum's, "A Martian Odyssey," published in Hugo Gersnbeck's Wonder Stories in 1934, treats the strange experiences of a surveyor, Jarvis, who, after crashing his rocket ship, has to hike his way back to his base ship, the Ares, over 800 miles of bizarre and inhospitable martian landscape. In the course of his difficult journey he encounters several strange creatures: a hypnotic tentacle monster that kills by projecting itself as the deepest desire of its selected prey, a bird-like intelligent creature named Tweel, a race of silicon-based mindless pyramid builders, and a barrel-shaped race of suicidal scavengers.

Much of the story focuses on the relationship between the protagonist and Tweel, who struggle to understand each other in spite of language and logic barriers. A general question posed throughout the story is whether or not Tweel is as intelligent as Jarvis. This dynamic reminds me of the movie, Enemy Mine (Wolgang Peterson, 1985), about how a human and an alien have to come to understand each other and trust each other to survive an inhospitable planet.

There are several memorable moments from this story, such as when the barrel-shaped creatures the protagonist and Tweel encounter parrot back the protagonist's English. There is another element near the end of the story, a strange crystal produced by the barrel-shaped creatures that possesses strong healing properties. Here is how it's described:

There was something [...] shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to the beat Tophet. The light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge, and then I noticed the funny thing.

After an exciting battle the protagonist is separated from Tweel and saved by his companions, other engineers on the Ares, but in the course of being saved, he steals the crystal. This is a common, enduring mythological and literary trope. Here the crystal is a kind of life-giving lotus, such as that sought by Gilgemesh, or the Holy Grail, sought by the Knights of the Round Table.

Toxic Beauty in Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) allegorizes the effect of scientific knowledge on human relationships. The three main characters, the young man Giovanni Guasconti, the mad botanist Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, and his daughter Beatrice, interact to narratively test the idea that perhaps the pursuit of scientific knowledge is toxic to romantic love.

The story takes place in medieval Padua in the botanical gardens of the University of Padua, which, through the logic of allegory, becomes a version of the Garden of Eden. In this view, Giovanni and Beatrice are the innocent Adam and Eve figures and Dr. Rappaccini is the serpent/satantic figure.

Dr. Rappaccini cultivates a variety of toxic plants and creates a few deadly plants through artificial means. In the course of doing this, he subjects his daughter, Beatrice, to a poisonous environment. Beatrice then develops a tolerance for poison but she also becomes poisonous herself. Her touch shrivels flowers. Her breath kills insects. Her kiss is deadly. And despite all of this, she is sublimely beautiful. Consider when Giovanni sees her for the first time:

There emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young woman [...] beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy.

But, upon deeper scrutiny, there is revealed something sinister to her beauty:

The impression the stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they--more beautiful than the richest of them--but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask.

Beatrice here makes me think of the Batman villainess, Poison Ivy, although, unlike Poison Ivy, this particular poisonous woman hates the toxic garden her father has created.

The conflict of the story proceeds from the vexed love that Giovanni develops for Beatrice. He sees her strolling in the garden everyday and so falls hard, and she for him as well. Beatrice never allows Giovanni to kiss her and she never embraces him, and soon he discovers her tragically poisonous nature. Even more, he discovers that since he has been hanging out with her in this toxic garden he, too, has become toxic and therefore unable to return to society. Beatrice is wracked with guilt because she thinks she has doomed them both to social isolation. We she tries to cure herself by drinking an antidote to her poisons, she dies.

Beatrice is the first of many female personifications of knowledge, inspiration, and truth, a literary tradition going all the way back to the Muses of Greek Mythology. I find Beatrice's poisonous quality compelling. She combines the allure of knowledge with the threat it also holds. I find it intriguing that this ambivalent view toward science appears as early as it does, fourteen years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1959) decentered the human animal. Rappaccini isn't a Darwinian figure, though; he is one of our first SF mad scientists, a inhuman sorcerer whose pursuit of knowledge leaves no room for the human.

Empyreome: "Space Too Deep, Orbit Too Wide"

I just got a flash fiction published in Empyreome magazine, titled Space Too Deep, Orbit Too Wide. It is a science fiction horror about a group of "deepspacers" who have a malfunction on their ship and have to stop on an unmapped, unexplored planet.