DIY History | Transcribe | Hevelin Fanzines | Reader and Collector, v. 3, issue 6, January 1946

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Reader and Collector, v. 3, issue 6, January 1946

Page 16

16

form of electric walls and suspended life, making Sleeping Beauty or Brunhilda, scientific guinea pigs, but none the less romantic or adventurous. In the futuristic type all the scientific themes mentioned in the first chapter are used; the racial-memory, the metamorphic, the fold in time, the Atlantean, and the sorcerer.
This transformation of the myth under the unknowing sponsorship of science would have surprised the men who were deploring the growth of realism at the end of the nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde, the then reigning king of the fabulous, wrote an epitaph to the age of wonder that had been before, and deplored the realistic, scientific, and psychological writings of the new age, in his much-quoted essay "The Decay of Lying." He wrote that "surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, (we) will harken to her (fantasy) and try to borrow her wings."
Looking forward to the time when realism will disappear, although he does not dare prophesy the date, he says that then "the very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail around the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and .... champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls."4
It was a very short time indeed before these mythical items appeared again in literature. Acting as the Greeks did when the science of Ionia destroyed their old concepts, futuristic mythological writers have returned to those things, although in new forms. Monsters of the sea swim through many pulp tales and high-pooped galleys are now seen as space ships such as Buck Rogers' and Dr. Huer's in the comics. As for the dragons, King Kong, 20, 000, 000 B.C., and The Lost World in the motion picture field have filled the eyes of audiences with amazing dragons, a worse. The strange combination animals of the mad scientist, or the biblogically
__________________
4. Intentions, pp. 52-53.

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16 form of electric walls and suspended life, making Sleeping Beauty or Brunhilda, scientific guinea pigs, but none the less romantic or adventurous. In the futuristic type all the scientific themes mentioned in the first chapter are used; the racial-memory, the metamorphic, the fold in time, the Atlantean, and the sorcerer. This transformation of the myth under the unknowing sponsorship of science would have surprised the men who were deploring the growth of realism at the end of the nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde, the then reigning king of the fabulous, wrote an epitaph to the age of wonder that had been before, and deplored the realistic, scientific, and psychological writings of the new age, in his much-quoted essay "The Decay of Lying." He wrote that "surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, (we) will harken to her (fantasy) and try to borrow her wings." Looking forward to the time when realism will disappear, although he does not dare prophesy the date, he says that then "the very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail around the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and .... champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls."4 It was a very short time indeed before these mythical items appeared again in literature. Acting as the Greeks did when the science of Ionia destroyed their old concepts, futuristic mythological writers have returned to those things, although in new forms. Monsters of the sea swim through many pulp tales and high-pooped galleys are now seen as space ships such as Buck Rogers' and Dr. Huer's in the comics. As for the dragons, King Kong, 20, 000, 000 B.C., and The Lost World in the motion picture field have filled the eyes of audiences with amazing dragons, a worse. The strange combination animals of the mad scientist, or the biblogically __________________ 4. Intentions, pp. 52-53.