‘The market—oh God, how I hate that word.’
‘The market’, of course, is for us a market for some sort of writing. When we think about this past decade, we might also think back to a different decade: a decade at the end, not of the twentieth century, but of the nineteenth century.
At the end of that decade, we can find a remarkable work of fiction which has had substantial impact on writing in the twentieth century. And this is, of course, The Time Machine (1895). H.G. Wells’ novel was impressive for many readers, and not just any reader: for example, Henry James, when The Time Machine was published, was immediately impressed by that work, and indicated that he would himself hope at some stage to imitate H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Eventually, in about 1912, he did begin working on what was to have been a novel about time travel. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to finish that novel.
But there were at around that time many other works of a similar nature. For example, only a few years after The Time Machine was published, there was another work, in 1903, by Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Ray of Displacement, about another sort of travel. This was about developing a Y-ray that increased the space between matter so that solid bodies could pass through one another. Of course, something like that had to be included in The Time Machine if you were to travel through time to the future or the past.
So the thought of writing that kind of fiction was popular in those years amongst many writers and, one assumes, therefore, also very popular with many readers. But it wasn’t just fiction that was like that. Physics, at this time, was also particularly concerned about time and space. Although we identify Albert Einstein as someone who worked out how to connect time and space in physics, we could go back much earlier. For example, in music, over twenty years earlier, in the early 1880s Richard Wagner was composing Parsifal (1882). Here, Wagner’s mythological libretto indicates his interest in the connection between time and space, which was very important to him.
If you go forward instead of backwards in time and identify a change, you find that in the first decade of the twentieth century the composer Gustav Mahler was dealing with compositions handling time in a fundamentally very similar and ‘old-fashioned’ way. Then, from the teens of the twentieth century onward, you find Arnold Schoenberg and many other composers getting on to more complex time structures. So, around the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, there was a lot of interest in the way in which time and space are linked in music. And, of course, if you look at art works, again from about 1912 onwards, through Marinetti and the Futurists, in paintings and sculpture, you can see a change in the way of thinking. If you want a representative work, Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is a good example of somebody trying to do in art what was done by Wells or Spofford a little bit earlier, with respect to time and how it should be managed.
To take another example from writing, it is not hard to establish that Marcel Proust, in In Search of Lost Time, is largely concerned about the movement of time and how we recollect the past, how we anticipate the future, how all these are put together: how we handle these complex relationships between what we believe to be very fundamental aspects of our perception of the universe in which we live.
The key element of these works of fiction is that they try to explain to us how the world really exists. Wells in The Time Machine is trying to explain to us what the world is like in a universal sense. In that particular case, he goes and imagines the far past and the far future, but there is a continuum and that is, I suggest, the real world. When you come to a case like Parsifal, and music, perhaps it’s not quite so true that we’re talking about the real world. What Wagner is dealing with in the case of Parsifal is the Christian myth and the mythological notion of how time and space might be put together.
Interestingly enough, during the decade of the 1890s, William Morris was writing quite a few novels which were, in a sense, mythological. His approach was not to describe the world as it physically ‘really’ is, but rather to try to describe how the world might be. And he and a number of other writers at the same time tried to do exactly this. So one has writers such as Wells, Proust and a number of others trying to describe how the world really was, and occasionally having to deal with issues such as time, and then one also has other writers who thought it was useful to describe the world, not as it really was, but as it might be in some mythological sense.
An interesting development followed, from 1910 to the 1930s, when writers began to have the opportunity to demonstrate what they meant by the nature of the world. A very early example was Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (1911–12), in which Ralph, a future scientist, is able to describe to us what the world might be like in the future. Later, Gernsback realised that there was a substantial (though not a huge) market for this kind of description: that is, let us try to imagine what the world really might be, in more detail. Gernsback started to publish fiction of that kind, which eventually led to the first science fiction magazine in 1926. But, before that, other writers were able to enjoy approval by writing more stories of a mythological kind, so that Weird Tales began to be published from 1923 onwards.
But there was something different about the fiction that was published in these two magazines. It might have been about the old mythology. It might have been about the future. But, rather than being novels, this fiction was, to a substantial extent, short stories. From 1923, with Weird Tales, and 1926, with Amazing Stories, the magazine publishers gave writers an opportunity to publish short stories about ideas, not about people, and therefore they could use substantially different approaches to what they were wanting to examine.
Earlier, there had already been short stories and novels that we now might call ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’. The new magazines from the 1920s dealt basically in short stories. One other change also needs to be noted. By the time we come to the end of the twentieth century, when we consider the kind of fiction that we could describe as a genre, we have fiction which is set in the future or the past or an alternative past, and we have mythological fiction, but we also have examples of short fictions which don’t require the world that the writer has invented to be completely described. This is a kind of fiction that many people write. In fact, it is sometimes identified as being a fiction for a particular market.
‘The market—oh God, how I hate that word.’ That sentence appears in Tony Ramsay’s twenty-first-century radio adaptation of a novel written by George Gissing in 1891: New Grub Street. One consequence of the existence of a market for science fiction, or for fantasy, or for mythological fiction, is that works are published not because they have an idea or a structure that the author wants but, rather, because the author has had to contribute to a market that a publisher or an editor really wants. So it is important not to get confused between the kind of fiction that writers develop according to their own belief in what they need to express, and the kind of fiction that Gissing’s character Edwin Reardon remarks upon: ‘The market—oh God, how I hate that word.’ Alternatively, Gissing also give us an account of marketable skills, and let’s hope that writers in these stories do not match Gissing’s character Jasper Milvain: ‘My talent flourishes at 500 words’—their talent flourishes at a greater length.