© 2003 M.A.Padlipsky; 2011, 2021 The Literary Estate of M.A.Padlipsky.
Note: Between an early, importantish historical datum (boldfaced) and a couple of late, interestingish opinions (also boldfaced), which I'd very much like you to see, there's perhaps more detail about Form here than will be of interest to some readers. Well, OK, make that of interest to more than a very few readers. So if you find things getting dull after you've seen the first boldfaced point, do feel free to hit the End key; but it would be nice if you scrolled back up a couple of screens' worth once you got to the bottom, to see both a brief but pertinent paragraph about the Content and said possibly interesting opinions....
What happened was that on August 8, 2000 Peter e-mentioned that he and John were going to be sponsoring an "sf site". I of course immediately replied:
>
why, then, y'll probably want a copy of the 2nd [*] known academic thesis on s.f. as literature on it.of c., i don't have a scanner. but maybe if nobody around there wants to send me one [suitable for an elderly mac; i.e., scsi, i suppose] i cld prevail upon bill to make good on his threatxxxpromise to scan his copy in....
[*] it was the 1st known one for around 35 yrs, until i happened across a mention of gunn's having done a master's a yr or 2 earlier. still the 1st m.i.t. thesis on s.f.aslit., of c.For added value, your humble editor provide cross-reference to the earlier work.
<
[emphasis added, 11/03] in my usual personal e-correspondence shiftless approach to typing, meant to save a little wearntear on the wristsnfingers (and shoulders ... and, latterly, neck, dammit). Don't worry about exactly who Peter, John, and Bill "Bill" is your Humble Editor here, and Literary Executor. are at this point, but do be aware that naturally I'd BCC'd Bill.
A week went by with no response from anybody. Then on the 15th I
was invited by Bill to FTP the half-a-meg of "caviar.zip".
After a grin at the filename (because, as he of course well knew, a
large portion of the thing had to do with a novel by Theodore
Sturgeon)
Your Humble Editor will admit to being slightly less humble while basking in the master's praise for this pun.
and an hour or two of figuring out how to unzip on the
"Performa" I'd explicitly gotten so as not to have to
confront Whinedopes 95 when I'd needed a new computoy ~4 years
previously and a friend had offered me use of the Employee Discount
plan at Apple (I viewed it as the ultimate Microsoft-aversion
therapy, myself), sure enough it turned out there were all these
".doc" files in it. After sundry misadventures, I even got
them all to open, so that I could begin to proofread them.
The next I've-lost-count hours over the next who-knows-how-many days were spent cleansing the scanned files. (For the benefit of any who read this who haven't had to deal with the results of even allegedly pretty good "OCR" software, if you can avoid doing so, do.) In the course of that, I realized I ought to say a few things about how I chose to render the e-ificiation of what had been a manually typed document in its p-youth, in consultation with Bill, who's a skilled amateur typographer, or whatever the Fancy is for printer--though, in fairness to him, it must be noted that I decided not to accept a number of his good suggestions for no better reason than that they ran counter to my arbitrary tastes.
(No, it didn't take three years to finish proofreading--though the Padlipsky's Law which holds "There's always one more typo" dictates that I haven't finished yet, of course. It's just that the "SF site" never happened, and for any number of reasons I didn't get around to doing anything with the results until sometime around October of 2003, when the event sketched in the Corrigendum to the Bibliography prompted me to finally get around to doing a month or more's worth of final polishing and then set about getting permission from M.I.T. to do whatever I wanted with it, including but not limited to putting a copy in/on my "personal web page" ... a permission necessitated by the fact that, as far as I knew then or even know now, back when I submitted it the copyright belonged to the 'Tute.)
Soooooo.... The typeface that seemed to come closest--or at least
acceptably close--to the original typing was "Times", so I
chose it (except for this section, "obviously" ... unless
you've got your "browser" set to enforce your own font
choices, and your choice happens to be "Times", anyway,
and/or unless it's of a vintage that doesn't deal correctly with the
generation of "HTML" I'm using and does things I can't
influence w/r/t fonts). But the idea wasn't to do a facsimile. After
all, I'd mainly had it retyped in '68 in order to do some clean-up so
as to make it submitable for publication, so fixing further typoes
and spelling errors still seemed to be fair game, to the extent I
could bring myself to look for them amidst all the de-underlining of
spaces and turning right-parentheses back into the commas they
started out as and the like.
I even caved-in and went along with Bill's "spellchecker's" view about not doubling final consonants when suffixing, just to be a good sport (although I did draw the line on "advertising" vs. "advertizing", since I still find the former awf'leh Anglofahl and I never was that Anglophile even in my Anglophile youth, before all the field trips to Scotland in aid of my real area of research interest led me to become Caledonaphile instead).
And changing from indented paragraphs to "block" ones made double sense: not only wasn't it necessary to save paper by avoiding the doublespaces anymore, but when I did the conversion it was seemingly also the case that "HTML" was shamefully inept at dealing with indents, so it's more convenient to change when the version you're working on is intended to be webulated (especially when the change can be effected for the whole file at once, with relatively little additional risk to the wristsnfingers). Actually, make that triple sense: I also prefer the "look"--which consideration also eventually convinced me to drop the typewriter-necessitated underlining in favor of italics, I should add ... thus perhaps suggesting that I'm not hopelessly Twentieth Century no matter what They say. (Well, OK, at least not mid-Twentieth Century....)
There are probably a couple of other "look" points I'm ... over-looking, but aside from noting that
(a) I did decide, albeit somewhat reluctantly, to use "cascading stylesheets" after Bill explained the underlying technotheology to me. There are, however, a couple of hidden kickers w/r/t stylesheets: As I found out far too late in the game, it turns out you have to be on-line for them to work right; had I known that at the outset I don't think I'dve gone to all the trouble to put 'em in. In the event, I also discovered that older browsers which are supposed to work with stylesheets don't work correctly even if you are on-line, so I proceeded to go to even more trouble to take 'em out. [For some non-thesis-germane ruminations on all this, see, but only if you feel like it, A Digression on Form and Discontent.]
and that
(b) even more reluctantly as well as quite belatedly, I did decide to segment Chapters I and III into putatively more "Web-friendly" shorter portions (though not into anything as paltry as the Web-trendy, "post-TV", preadolescent attention span-pandering little snippets that current fashion tries to dictate),
the only other point I choose to make at this juncture is about the Content:
On that score, the points I made in the '68 Prefatory Afterthoughts still hold: for reasons of "historical accuracy" and/or "preservation", and of what must frankly be called laziness, I've left the thesis, per se, alone. With one irresistible exception a few years ago, it also seemed right to leave the Prefatory Afterthoughts alone, even though they were written some eight years after the thesis, per se.
(Time out, before what passes for the big finish, for a just-recalled, moderately germane Treasured Memory, in order to avoid giving in to the temptation to tinker even more with the Prefatory Afterthoughts: Chapter III did see the dark of print in the interim [with permission, of course], in the M.I.T. Science Fiction Society's "fanzine", The Twilight Zine, in 1963. Its length had necessitated publication over two issues, actually, which led to my getting to see--in the second issue, which I'd otherwise not have received a copy of, not being a member of the Society--the highly commendatory Letter to the Editor about the first segment that became the Treasured Memory. The author observed that reading the detailed analysis of More Than Human had made him realize how much Sturgeon wrote like Faulkner ... or perhaps it was just that Padlipsky wrote about Sturgeon the way "the learned literary men" wrote about Faulkner. I loved it.)
There is one, I dunno, call it a "meta-irony" that does bear mention somewhere, though, and I guess here's the only place for it, especially since it'll let me make a couple of points that I'm itching to make: I really did have to fight to get to do the thesis (well, make that The Thesis, by now--seems fair to me, anyway) in '59, because Science Fiction was deemed to be of questionable "intellectual respectability". Indeed, I even had to agree to alter the title--originally intended to be "More Than Pulp (?): [...]"--to get the Department to let me do it, fond though I was of that parenthetical question mark. By '85, however, when The Book had been published by a "real publisher" (which I have reason to believe paid me royalties on every other copy it sold, b/t/w; "just a little publisher humor"--and reality), and so had an apparently good opportunity to get The Thesis published as well (the publisher being a textbook house), I was told that there was no need for it anymore, since "everybody knows" science fiction was legit lit. Well, let me say this about that: even now, I strongly suspect that almost nobody knows that science fiction is legitimate literature, because almost everybody thinks that the "sci-fi" crap "Hollywood" disgorges is what science fiction is.
A somewhat Sibylline conclusion, then: On one of the two occasions when I actually got to meet Sturgeon I had the opportunity to ask him whether the Sturgeon's Law story was apocryphal. He said, "No. It's just as you heard it. I really was at a writers meeting and some guy really did tell me I was a fine writer but why did I waste my time on science fiction, didn't I know 90% of science fiction is crap, and I really did reply 'Indeed, 90% of science fiction is crap; however, 90% of everything is crap.'" And so I got to tell him Padlipsky's Corollary to Sturgeon's Law: "Ted, you're an optimist. The Law should be applied recursively: 90% of what's left is no damn good." It earned me a smile. And it furnishes me with if not a similie at least a punchline: When it comes to that which is labeled science fiction that's meant to be shown on a screen, Padlipsky's Corollary should be applied recursively, too.
plink here to get to the Table of Contents
or here to proceed to the Prefatory Afterthoughts