Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.
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The absence of humour in science fiction, apart from his liking for the genre, appears to have prompted Kingsley Amis to write Hemingway in Space in the December 21, 1960, edition of Punch. The story was published in the satirical magazine as part of a series of parodies.
This is the impression one gets after reading American-Canadian sf writer Judith Merril’s introduction to Hemingway in Space which she included in her anthology 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F a year later.
“One of Mr. Amis's sharpest criticisms of science fantasy in general was the lack of good humorous writing in the field. From the examples he cited, and those he did not, I suspect we do not always laugh at the same jokes. Not always; at least one exception (and probably several more) appeared in the series of parodies published in Punch last year,” Merril noted in her 1961 Dell anthology.
I'm relatively new to sf and especially humour in sf. I didn’t see it either in the title, Hemingway in Space, however amusing it sounds, or in the story which reads like any other sf tale.
The story is set around Mars. Philip Hardacre, the main character, a young man and his annoying wife Martha, and Ghlmu, an old, grizzled two-headed Martian, are hunting for a space monster with their Wyndham-Clarke blasters. The monster is xeeb, a large and ferocious creature prowling that part of the galaxy. After spotting the phosphorescent creature, Philip insists on stepping out into space without his Martian friend. He takes the young man along with him. In the end, however, Ghlmu is killed while saving Philip and the young man.
Other readers might see humour in the story where I didn’t; perhaps, in the dialogue between Martha, “the boring, senseless bitch,” and Philip and Ghlmu, whom she and her husband hired to take on the monster. Philip Hardacre can’t stand her and would gladly get rid of her and xeeb together. In the story Earthmen and Martians seem to be friends and Venus is inhabited. In short, it’s a decent sf story.
The 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F contains more than thirty short stories. Other writers include Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Howard Fast, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov, Henry Sleser, and Brian W. Aldiss, among others. It also includes an essay ‘How to Think a Science Fiction Story’ by G. Harry Stine, ‘The Year in S-F’ by Judith Merril, and ‘S-F Books — 1960’ by Anthony Boucher.
If you’d like to read just this story, you can click here.
In his biography The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), writer and academician Zachary Leader has described Amis as “the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” Amis has parodied sf on more than one occasion, including in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960) where he looks at the genre in a lighter vein as well as in Something Strange, a short story that first appeared in Spectator (1960) and later in his first collection of stories My Enemy's Enemy (1962). Clearly, I need to read more sf humour by Kingsley Amis.
This is the impression one gets after reading American-Canadian sf writer Judith Merril’s introduction to Hemingway in Space which she included in her anthology 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F a year later.
“One of Mr. Amis's sharpest criticisms of science fantasy in general was the lack of good humorous writing in the field. From the examples he cited, and those he did not, I suspect we do not always laugh at the same jokes. Not always; at least one exception (and probably several more) appeared in the series of parodies published in Punch last year,” Merril noted in her 1961 Dell anthology.
I'm relatively new to sf and especially humour in sf. I didn’t see it either in the title, Hemingway in Space, however amusing it sounds, or in the story which reads like any other sf tale.
The story is set around Mars. Philip Hardacre, the main character, a young man and his annoying wife Martha, and Ghlmu, an old, grizzled two-headed Martian, are hunting for a space monster with their Wyndham-Clarke blasters. The monster is xeeb, a large and ferocious creature prowling that part of the galaxy. After spotting the phosphorescent creature, Philip insists on stepping out into space without his Martian friend. He takes the young man along with him. In the end, however, Ghlmu is killed while saving Philip and the young man.
Other readers might see humour in the story where I didn’t; perhaps, in the dialogue between Martha, “the boring, senseless bitch,” and Philip and Ghlmu, whom she and her husband hired to take on the monster. Philip Hardacre can’t stand her and would gladly get rid of her and xeeb together. In the story Earthmen and Martians seem to be friends and Venus is inhabited. In short, it’s a decent sf story.
The 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F contains more than thirty short stories. Other writers include Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Howard Fast, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov, Henry Sleser, and Brian W. Aldiss, among others. It also includes an essay ‘How to Think a Science Fiction Story’ by G. Harry Stine, ‘The Year in S-F’ by Judith Merril, and ‘S-F Books — 1960’ by Anthony Boucher.
If you’d like to read just this story, you can click here.
In his biography The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), writer and academician Zachary Leader has described Amis as “the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” Amis has parodied sf on more than one occasion, including in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960) where he looks at the genre in a lighter vein as well as in Something Strange, a short story that first appeared in Spectator (1960) and later in his first collection of stories My Enemy's Enemy (1962). Clearly, I need to read more sf humour by Kingsley Amis.
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