TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

[Matthew Cissell]

Some days ago I mentioned Adam Roberts treatment of TP and asked how people felt about categorizing TP as SF. Someone (sorry, I don't remember who) mentioned that at the time it looked like SF that was being done in the so-called New Wave period (Female Man, Crash, etc).

I'll throw in on that now. Without explaining my view in great depth let me say that what TP has done strikes me as a way to write SF without it looking very SF. I don't equate SF with robots and gizmos (as someone said), but for many people robots and spaceships are a big part of SF. In TP the rocket stands in for the spaceship as the automaton stands in for the robot (i'm sure someone must have made this point before, but you'll forgive my ignorance). THis is a thought in the back of my mind when I read TP.

The other night while trying to read myself to sleep I picked up my collection of Nabakov short stories (Penguin "Collected Stories") and started one that I had somehow missed the first time through. At the end of the collection is a piece called "Lance". (Please forgive me if this well known to you good folk or has been posted before in some way.) On the second page I read the following (a long quote but worth it if you don't know it):

I not only debar a too definite planet from any role in my
story-- from the role every dot and full stop should play in my
story (which I see as a  kind  of  celestial  chart)--  1  also
refuse  to  have anything to do with those technical prophecies
that scientists are reported to make to reporters. Not  for  me
is  the  rocket  racket.  Not  for me are the artificial little
satellites that the earth is promised; landing  starstrips  for
spaceships  ("spacers")--  one,  two,  three,  four,  and  then
thousands of strong castles  in  the  air  each  complete  with
cookhouse  and  keep, set up by terrestrial nations in a frenzy
of  competitive  confusion,  phony  gravitation,  and  savagely
flapping flags. Another  thing  I  have  not  the slightest use for is the
special-equipment business--  the  airtight  suit,  the  oxygen
apparatus--  suchlike  contraptions. Like old Mr. Boke, of whom
we shall hear in a minute, I am eminently qualified to  dismiss
these  practical  matters  (which  anyway  are  doomed  to seem
absurdly impractical to future spaceshipmen, such as old Boke's
only son), since the emotions that gadgets provoke in me  range
from  dull  distrust  to  morbid  trepidation. Only by a heroic
effort can I make myself  unscrew  a  bulb  that  has  died  an
inexplicable death and screw in another, which will light up in
my face with the hideous instancy of a dragon's egg hatching in
one's bare hand. Finally,  I  utterly  spurn  and  reject so-called science
fiction. I have looked into it, and found it as boring  as  the
mystery-story  magazines-- the same sort of dismally pedestrian
writing with oodles of  dialogue  and  loads  of  commutational
humor. The clichиs are, of course, disguised; essentially, they
are  the  same  throughout all cheap reading matter, whether it
spans the universe or the living  room.  They  are  like  those
"assorted"  cookies  that differ from one another only in shape
and shade, whereby their shrewd makers ensnare  the  salivating
consumer  in  a  mad  Pavlovian  world where, at no extra cost,
variations in simple  visual  values  influence  and  gradually
replace flavor, which thus goes the way of talent and truth, 

Now how many things can you find that make you think of TP? More importanly it was published in 1958 (while VN was still teaching at Cornell) in "Nabakov's Dozen", when TP starts writing. Might this have been part of the fertile ground that allowed the seed to take root and grow? Whaddya tink?

curious mc