Genre Or Chimera: Resonance in SF Origins‪.‬

[Delivered January 2001 in Hong Kong by invitation of Gary Westfahl] Perhaps the urge to travel and, what is more, to make real discoveries is as strong in all of us as it was in Keats when he confessed that he had traveled much in "realms of gold." But like Keats most of us also must confess that it is hard to get farther than reading Chapman on Homer. And yet such armchair exploration may be exciting enough in its own way, and may yield results. The discoveries can materialize substantially, in fact, if one believes enough in words themselves and in a sort of organic unity across vast separations in time and space. I offer a related belief system that is linked to words and to popular writings, but I will save that revelation for the end of this paper. At the start it is necessary, however, for me to establish a methodology for discovery that stems from the resonance inherent in words and images themselves. I will call this methodology romantic historicism in order to evoke the various "new" historicisms we have come to depend upon and, at the same time, to distinguish it from the more detailed data gathering of the cultural historians. Following Peter Raby in my epigraph above, I admit to huge gaps in my knowledge of cultural and historical detail. To fill these gaps, I make use of the lucky serendipity in my reading and of conceptual resonance that I see in that reading. But the real foundation for my notion of romantic historicism as a redeemed approach from the past is found in the famous climax to the ninth section of Wordsworth's Intimations Ode. Like Hazlitt, who reputedly had to do it now and then due to a lack of books at hand, I can quote the gist of these climactic lines from memory and do so often: