The Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on September 22 with Zero Mostel in the leading role. Eight year later it would break the record for Broadway performances set by Life with Father in 1947. ∗Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe debuted at the New York Film Festival in September. Lumet’s film cast Henry Fonda as an American President facing an accidental nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, dramatizing a theme that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb had satirized earlier in the year.
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January 2011
What makes science fiction the literature of choice for so many? Arthur C. Clarke, the novelist and scientist, gave a good answer once, when asked why he chose to write in this genre: “Because,” he said, “no other literature is concerned with reality.”
Clarke didn’t say what sort of reality he had in mind, but there are two that suggest themselves. One of those significant realities of our time is science and technology. Those are the things that have made this century move so fast, in ways that earlier generations could hardly even imagine, and science fiction has played some part in accelerating their progress. In the 1930s there was no television, radio showed little interest in science, even the daily newspapers covered it scantily and not very well; but science-fiction magazines were exploring in every pulpwood issue the latest concepts from genetics and nuclear physics to cosmology. I think it is fair to say that a majority of the world’s leading scientists today were first turned on to their subjects by reading science-fiction stories.
I would not know how to make a list of ‘The Twelve Best Science-Fiction Novels of All Time.” The stories I like best are so frequently totally unlike each other that it is unfair to try to measure them on the same scale. Instead, here is simply a list of the science-fiction novels that I loved most at first reading, have reread quite recently, and still love.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, 1895 (New American Library, 1984) . Or, indeed, almost anything by Wells, who was the first writer to make humanly plausible excursions into worlds and times wholly unlike our own arid to do it with unfailing grace.
The Skylark of Space by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., 1928 (Berkeley Publishing Group, 1985) . The first and best writer of space opera, with his first pioneering work. It is not a masterpiece of English prose, but oh how the interstellar adventures of its hero, Richard Seaton, thrilled me with their celebration of science and technology— and still do.
The captain of a transatlantic liner was his ship’s social arbiter as well as her commander. In consultation with the purser—and often only after contacting the home office—he carefully surveyed the passenger list, selecting from it for his own table in the great dining saloon that handful of men and women whose prominence was so obvious that even the most socially ambitious travelers would be willing to accept assignment elsewhere.
South Carolina’s white population saw its gravest fears confirmed when a group of about twenty slaves began a rebellion near the Stono River, twenty miles from Charleston, on the morning of September 9. The insurrection appeared to be coordinated with the outbreak of war between England and Spain.
While the local planters were attending Sunday church services, the slaves pillaged a store for weapons, then started moving south along the road to the recently founded colony of Georgia, hoping to reach the city of St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. As their ranks swelled, the band gained confidence, chanting slogans, burning houses, and killing any whites they encountered. In
order to keep the alarm from spreading, the rebels made hostages of slaves who resisted joining them.
As British and American infantry clashed outside the city of Baltimore, a British fleet trained its guns on Fort McHenry on the afternoon of September 13. For the rest of the day and throughout the night the British fired mortars, rockets, and shells at the out-gunned fort, and then they sent a landing party ashore to finish off the battered Americans.
Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” appeared in the September issue of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine . Poe had been hired to co-edit the magazine in July at a salary of ten dollars per week and had immediately begun to remodel it. During his year at Burton’s Poe filled 132 pages of the magazine with his poetry, stories, and reviews, raising its circulation from five thousand to twenty thousand in the process. In characteristic fashion, however, Poe burned out on the job; his alcoholism and animosity toward the owner of Burton’s led to his departure in June of 1840. ∗On September 25 France signed a commercial treaty with the Republic of Texas, becoming the first European country to recognize Texan independence from Mexico.
Gen. William T. Sherman’s Federal army entered the abandoned city of Atlanta on September 2 following a five-week siege. As the manufacturing and transportation center of the Deep South, Atlanta had long been a focus of Union strategy; its loss effectively reduced the Confederacy to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Hull House opened in Chicago’s impoverished Nineteenth Ward on September 14. Founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, former classmates who had been shocked by their encounter with urban poverty during a tour of Europe, Hull House offered a range of health services, English classes, child day care, and cultural activities to Chicago’s underprivileged. With Addams financing the house out of her own income for the first several years, Hull House was soon providing community services to more than two thousand people a week. Addams’s work at Hull House earned her a national reputation that she used to promote progressive views on feminism, pacifism, and social reform. Her activism was unpopular in some circles, but by the time of her death in 1935 she was recognized as one of the moral forerunners of the New Deal.
Two separate events on September 5 laid the groundwork for America’s eventual entry into World War I. In Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson ordered that the U.S. Navy provide wireless stations in Europe for direct transatlantic communications. Wilson allowed belligerent nations on both sides to use the wireless to send encoded messages, a gesture of American neutrality that Germany later abused by using the line to propose a military alliance with Mexico against the United States. Revelation of this, the “Zimmerman Telegram,” would be decisive in Wilson’s decision to declare war on Germany.