Monsters, Magicians, Movies: The Tempest and the Final Frontier

Abstract

Space, of course. For mid-century America, expansion upwards seemed to offer that combination of invitation and threat, possibility and necessity, in which science fiction has thriven. It cannot be surprising that The Tempest should have inspired writers of science fiction as much as it inspired other ambitious recreative works of the same period. Their story – a posterity of pulp – is less well known than the one post-colonialists have told. This neglect is curious, since the story is political, and involves questions of power and the responsibility of the scientist, of the definition of civilization and the ‘were-I-human’. It even overlaps the post-colonial, in novels which look at the moral repercussions of what came to be called ‘first contact’. By contrast, however, the science fictions are less concerned with the status of the individual creative writer, of who owns the word, or of the establishment of a new national literature in a nation language. It is a difficult story to tell briefly, because, in literary-historical terms, it involves descent lines which comprehend collateral branches of the family. And it is a genealogy of quarrels.