A Paean to Hugo Gernsback and Qu Qiubai
An American Capitalist And A Chinese Communist
In Newtonian physics, an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon from without. In Marxist dialectics, an object is characterized by its internal contradictions and if it seems static this is only an illusion caused by our limited perspective. I wouldn’t say I’ve been static lately but my internal contradictions, acted upon by the snowy weather, have resulted in a piqued interest in studying philosophy and a neglect for my writing.
I’ve always been interested in philosophy as an interstitial element of literature and politics but I have no real background in it. To rectify this, I’ve been reading selections from Confucian classics in A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy compiled and translated by Wing-tsit Chan, Nick Knight's monograph Marxist Philosophy in China From Qu Qiubai to Mao Zedong, 1923-1945, and a touch of Hegel.
Confucius and Mencius have me considering my various filial duties, although perhaps with a little ironic detachment. I'll never be a superior man if I don't wash the dishes regularly and look after my cats properly, etc. And Knight has me considering an unlikely connection between Qu Qiubai and another literary man of a very different stripe, the father of American magazine science fiction Hugo Gernsback.
I'm going to assume ignorance on the part of my readers with regard to both Qu and Gernsback. As a broke young man, Qu Qiubai (1899-1935) entered China's only Russian language school in hopes of getting a job working for the railroad. There he was exposed to Marxism. Eventually he traveled to the Soviet Union and joined the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. By dint of being one of the only Chinese people who spoke Russian at the time, he was elevated to party leadership. Though by inclination his main interest was literature, he spent much of his time translating and writing explanations of European and Soviet Marxist social theory and philosophy because he was sort of the only man for the job at the time. During the period of collaboration between the Chinese Nationalists of the Kuomintang and the Communists, Qu was installed (briefly) as the dean of the newly established Shanghai University and chair of its sociology department. When the Kuomintang flipped on the Communists, Qu fought them as a guerrilla and was captured. He was executed at age 36.
As a broke young man, Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), a Jew from Luxembourg, immigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen. He was a tinkerer and entrepreneur involved in the import of radio parts from Europe and publishing magazines about electronics and science. He had sort of a sideways path into literature. In his magazines, he began publishing fiction that demonstrated the promethean potentiality of science to create ever more wonderful gadgets. Readers liked these stories and, around the same time Qu was popularizing Marxist social theory and philosophy in China, Gernsback founded the magazine Amazing Stories which was the first genre specific magazine for what we now call science fiction. At the time, Gernsback coined the term "scientifiction" to describe its content and constructed a canon for this kind of literature going back to Leonard da Vinci and Francis Bacon and coming up to modern times through Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells. Gernsback viewed science fiction as a didactic literature for educating and interesting people, especially boys, in science. Though Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, he was soon back at it with another publishing company and was a big figure in science fiction magazines through 1936 with Wonder Stories and related titles. He died in hospital at the age of 83. The annual Hugo Awards still bear his name.1
Qu was a Chinese Communist and Gernsback was an American capitalist, albeit a relatively unsuccessful one. Qu loved literature but ventured into politics because of what he viewed as necessity. Gernsback loved tinkering and electronics but ventured into literature because of what he viewed as opportunity. Both men loved science and both were Renaissance men. In his book, Knight demonstrates that Qu had a command of the whole Western philosophical canon and was informed enough to write about social theory and the latest scientific discovers. This was on top of his political responsibilities and his literary activity. In addition to his publishing and other business activities, Gernsback was an inventor. He held 80 patents at the time of his death. He also published three novels and a number of stories of his own. His 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+2 allegedly predicts “dozens” of now commonplace scientific innovations.3
Now Gernsback had a strong relationship to the idea that science fiction has predictive power, particularly in the area of technology. In a 1952 speech to the World Science Fiction Convention, Gernsback makes a roundabout argument that a psychologist will someday prove that science fiction actually influences the mental processes of inventors.4 It is this predictive element in Gernsback’s conception of science fiction that builds a bridge for me to Qu’s Marxist philosophy.
Knight spends much time tarrying over Qu’s handling of the contradiction in Marxism between determinism and human agency. Through the spilling of much ink, Qu concludes that Marxism is determinist but not fatalistic. In short, the ultimate cause of social phenomenon are contradictions in the economic base of society which determine in large part people’s consciousness. For Qu, there’s no such thing as undetermined free will. However, as society develops and more knowledge about the processes underlying it becomes available, conscious human activity has a greater potential to be an important second order cause of social phenomenon insofar as it takes scientific observations about society into account. Put another way, “genuine ideals” linked with “real life” have predictive power. Qu goes as far as to proclaim, “Genuine ideals are tomorrow's reality.”5 Within limits, human beings can figure stuff out and realize it.
Qu’s quote, in substance if not in exact verbiage, could be pulled from the cover of one of Gernsback’s magazines. In the 20th century, both Marxism and American magazine science fiction espoused the ability to predict and deliver a better future. Qu, a Chinese revolutionary, predicted a communist society. Gernsback, an American businessman, predicted an abundance of technological marvels for the average consumer.
A balance sheet of the past century of Chinese socialism is beyond the scope of this post and, indeed, probably beyond the scope of this publication. I’ll also avoid a commentary on the state of the technology available to consumers in the United States.
Still it’s interesting that the old Gernsbackian belief in science fiction’s predictive power remains basically intact in many quarters. This despite that the old Gernsbackian ideology of didacticism has largely withered away and that the focus on the science in science fiction has also largely receded. And, you know, I get it. If you watch old episodes of Star Trek, they had iPads, etc. But I also think a conversation about science fiction’s predictive power tends to miss what is going on in the genre.
Moreover, it is without question that in explaining and circumscribing human predictive power, Qu has the better of Gernsback. Not that Gernsback systematized his philosophy in a rigorous way but one comes away from reading him and his magazines and considering his life with at least an ability to grope towards it. Science fiction’s predictive power is seemingly all powerful. Surely there must be some limit to what human beings can figure out and realize.
For more on Gernsback, check out the introduction to Grant Wythoff’s collection of Gernsback’s writings The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction.
See if you can work out the pun in the title.
“The Impact of Science-Fiction on World Progress,” speech by Hugo Gernsback to the 1952 World Science Fiction Convention, reprinted here.
Ibid.
Emphasis mine. Quotes are Knight’s translation of Qu from Qu Qiubai wenji, Vol. 2 used in Knight’s text. As best I can tell, Qu’s work is unavailable in English translation.