Science fiction’s first Hugo, assassinating the PM Mantel-style, Stephen Fry’s podcast, and reader reaction: newsletter, January 31, 2020

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Hugo Gernsback and the invention of science fiction

When you write a really good mystery story or novel, you might get an Edgar Award. The source of the name of the award is as obvious as the name of the professional football team in Baltimore.

But what do you get if you write a really good science fiction story or novel? A Herb (H.G. Wells)? A Jules (Jules Verne)? A Mary (Mary Shelly)?

None of the above. You get a Hugo.

Why Hugo? The award from the World Science Fiction Convention is named for Hugo Gernsback, whom that association considers “the father of science fiction” literature.

The award seems all the more odd because Hugo Gernsback was by no measure a great writer — or even a very good one. Nor was he a particularly nice person.

Gernsback was born in Luxembourg in 1884, and after training in science in his native country and Germany, he immigrated to the United States when he was 20 years old. He had invented a dry cell battery that he felt he could sell more readily in the U.S. than in Europe. Gernsback found an emerging interest in — and market for — the new field of electronics, and he got into the business of importing electronic parts from Europe.

In 1908 he founded Modern Electronics magazine and developed a particular interest in the “wireless,” which we know today as radio. With that interest, Gernsback struck gold. He founded the Wireless Association of America which gathered 10,000 members in its first year. By 1912, he estimated, there were more than 400,000 people in America involved with this new medium of communication. He then started another magazine that eventually became Science and Invention, a publication that contained stories not only about scientific developments but fictional tales about where these developments might take us.

He called these stories scientifiction, but the term never caught on. Instead, the genre was known as science fiction. Gernsback made his own fictional contributions to the genre, but they are considered mediocre and insignificant.

Gernsback’s business dealings were shrewd and often questionable. He gained a reputation for paying his writers as little as possible and for sometimes not paying them at all. H.P. Lovecraft, for one, referred to him as “Hugo the Rat.”

But Gernsback’s genius and legacy were in recognizing the growing 20th-century appetite for the combination of scientific advancement and the human imagination.

Podcast recommendation: Stephen Fry’s Seven Deadly Sins

One of the most popular people of any stripe in the United Kingdom is Stephen Fry, an actor and writer who has been around for a long, long time. Fry is well-known to American audiences as P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, played next to Fry’s good friend Hugh Laurie. Fry, among his many other assets, has a magnetic voice, and he is putting it to good use these days with a series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

According to the podcast description:

I will take each one of the Seven Sins in turn, lay them out on the surgical table and poke, prod, pry and provoke in an attempt to try to anatomise and understand them; I hope and believe it will be, if nothing else, delicious fun and something of a change from the usual run of podcastery.

It is certainly a change and a delightful one, and I recommend you spent a half-hour a week with Fry and his thoughts. You may not agree with everything he has to say, but your time won’t be wasted.

Hilary Mantel, Margaret Thatcher, and the story of an assassination that didn’t happen

On a Saturday in the middle of 1983, author Hilary Mantel looked out of the bedroom window of her flat in Windsor, west of London, and saw something she never expected to see: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wandering around the garden of a nearby hospital. Thatcher was by herself, and Mantel could see her clearly.

Her first thought was that if she were an assassin, Thatcher would be dead.

“Immediately your eye measures the distance,” says Mantel, measuring each syllable, her finger and thumb forming a gun. “I thought, if I wasn’t me, if I was someone else, she’d be dead.” (The Guardian)

As someone who grew up in a working-class town near Manchester, Mantel had a visceral dislike for Thatcher, a feeling she calls a “boiling detestation.”

Those thoughts and feelings embedded themselves in Mantel’s head. There was a story there, but it wasn’t immediately apparent. She decided to let the thought stew. That it did — for more than 20 years.

Meanwhile, she produced two volumes of a trilogy of historical novels on Thomas Cromwell, chancellor to King Henry VIII. Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) won her Man Booker prizes (the top award for books in Great Britain). She is the only author to win the award twice.

As her readers were awaiting the final volume of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (available in March 2020), Mantel came out with a volume of short stories that took its title from the final story of the book, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014). The idea that had begun in those few moments in 1983 had finally come to fruition in a short story about a woman whose house had been invaded by IRA-like assassins who were waiting for Thatcher to emerge from her hospital stay.

Thatcher, who died in 2013, remains one of the most controversial of Britain’s politicians, and the Daily Telegraph’s decision to publish the story, followed by the revocation of that decision, caused a firestorm in 2014. The Guardian then published the story after the Telegraph dropped it, and you can read it at this link.

To her credit, Mantel wasn’t cowed by her critics. In fact, she poured gasoline on the flames with an interview in The Guardian that reiterated her feelings about Thatcher.

“When I think of her, I can still feel that boiling detestation. She did long-standing damage in many areas of national life, but I am not either of those people in that room [the characters in the story]. I am standing by the window with my notebook.” And yet, the trigger is pulled.
“I never voted for her, but I can stand back and appreciate her as a phenomenon. As a citizen I suffered from her, but as a writer I benefited.” The Guardian, Sept. 19, 2014.

And Mantel, despite her personal feelings, admires Thatcher as a character:

“Creativity in politics is rare but I think she had it,” Mantel admits. “Cromwell did too. But he was a negotiator and she detested consensus – she saw herself as an Old Testament prophet delivering the truth from on high. Cromwell used history to pretend the new things he was doing were old, and thus to soothe the English temperament. Mrs Thatcher despised history as a constraint.”

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