BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (12)
By:
November 22, 2025
University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW is pleased to share a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Also see Josh and Mark’s previous exchange 49th PARALLEL.
BROKEN KNOWLEDGE: FIRST CONTACT | WHAT IF? | A HYBRID GENRE | COUNTERFACTUALS | A HOT DILUTE SOUP | I’M A CYBORG | APOPHENIC-CURIOUS | AN AESTHETICS OF DIRT | PAGING DR. KRISTEVA | POLICING THE GENRE | FAMILIAR STRANGENESS | GAME OVER | THE WORLD VIEWED | DEFAMILIARIZATION | SINGULAR CREATURES | ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGIST | THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCREEN-TIME | HOMO SUPERIOR | EVERYTHING IS US.
26th October 2022
BOSTON
I keep slowing down the pace of our exchange, sorry! Too many irons in the fire. I’m also intimidated by how lengthy and erudite your latest missive is. Also, we haven’t had a facetime call for a while — hope this finds you well?
One of my biggest time-sinks, at the moment, is line-editing the first-ever English translation of 1935 Bangla sf novel (The Inhumans), by the Indian Bengali writer Hemendrakumar Roy, which I’d commissioned from Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay — a Global Culture studies professor at the University of Oslo, who is also a leading sf and genre fiction scholar. Chattopadhyay has done a terrific job, but I feel compelled to help “punch up” his version before we submit the ms to MITP. Which is a lot of work! But this is humblebragging, on my part, because I’m so very pleased to find myself in a situation where I can help introduce non-English sf from the Radium Age to English-language audiences. I’m also working to assign a translation of Marietta Shaginyan’s 1923–25 satirico-sf thriller Mess-Mend, in which an American millionaire plots to destroy the Russian Revolution. Because of the political situation now, any translator and/or introduction writer we use has to be carefully vetted by the MIT corporation — MIT doesn’t want to become a “useful idiot” for Putin, seems to be their anxiety. I’m also working with our friend Seth on the next round of RA series covers.
To answer your question about robots and the uncanny… Like you, I’m sure, I was profoundly influenced by reading Philip K. Dick’s novels and stories featuring uncanny androids, some of whom don’t know they’re androids. Which become novels about epistemology — how do we know what we know? Can we ever really perceive reality or arrive at a final truth? (No.) I made the rookie mistake, in my twenties, of rapidly reading a dozen PKD novels in a row — vertiginous stuff. (Shout out to Peggy Blonder, who forced these books on me, and who passed away recently — too young.) In the course of my research into Radium Age proto-sf I’ve discovered all sorts of electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or “robots” (a term introduced in 1921, by Karel Čapek; his brother coined it, riffing on the Czech word for unpaid labor imposed on serfs) that might free us from the burden of labor… or else run amuck and destroy/enslave us. Before Yul Brynner, Daryl Hannah, and Brent Spiner played troubled biomechs, replicants, and skin-jobs, Radium Age proto-sf authors asked what, exactly, distinguishes an “android” — a term, meaning “human-like,” first popularized in an 1886 French scientific romance — from one of us humans?
Robots appear as early as William Wallace Cook’s A Round Trip to the Year 2000, a dime-novelish satire from 1903, but I think we can probably trace their status as avatars of the uncanny to “System,” a 1908 pseudo-sf story by the Čapek brothers about an industrialist who routinizes his workers… until one of them becomes “humanized” by the sight of a woman. (You heard it here first, I have only recently discovered this story.) Mechanization, routinization, Taylorization — work whose methods, hours, and pace aren’t decided by the worker makes us not inhuman, exactly, but less-than-human. Which is uncanny. Robots are the inverse of this: if the routinized worker is an almost-inhuman human, then the robot is an almost-human inhuman. Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., which is set in a factory, would popularize the uncanny robot, and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (she and her husband, Fritz Lang, developed the scenario together — then she wrote the novelization while he made the movie) also uses the robot to make a point about dehumanized workers. I should also mention an obscure novel from 1926 by Claude Farrere, the title of which has been translated as Useless Hands — it’s about “useless” workers who strike when their jobs are taken by robots. (They’re slaughtered, of course.)
When we remove the robot from the factory context, Čapek’s original point gets rather blunted. The robot just becomes another creepy humanoid monster — altogether too human for our liking, but no questions of exploitation need be raised. Which is what is so terrific about Blade Runner — the replicants are revolting workers! PKD was by no means a Marxist, but he was very interested in how humans in modern society were increasingly malleable and controllable; he worried about androidization. Plenty to talk about on that theme.
You’re right that the world of pulps was very male — particularly from the mid-1930s onward, with the rise of the “armpit slicks” — men’s adventure magazines — from the 1940s through the early 1970s. I used to buy these when I’d find them in junk stores — I was fascinated by the sadistic torture covers, the guys-fighting-animals covers (“Weasels Ripped My Flesh”), and above all by their campily macho titles: Stag, Adam, Rage (For Men), Man’s World, For Men Only, Man to Man, Man’s Story, World of Men, Real Men, Man’s Daring, Man’s Conquest, American Manhood, Man’s Adventure, Male, All Man, Impact, Rugged Men, Real (For Men), Man’s Book, Man’s Peril, Men — over-compensating a wee bit perhaps, were we? However, beginning c. 1920 there were dozens of pulp romance titles, too — like Love Story (one of the most successful of all pulps, reaching a circulation of 600,000 in the early 1930s), and Ranch Romances (the most popular of many western romance pulps, e.g., Lariat and Rangeland Romances, and supposedly the last pulp to be published in America — surviving until the late 1960s). Plus: All-Story Love, Gay Love, Love Book, Love Fiction Monthly, Complete Love, Cupid’s Diary, Sweetheart Love, Thrilling Love… But if you zoom out and look at all pulps, yes — male, male, male.
Your mention of Waugh reminds me of your earlier note about Vile Bodies (1930), in which he imagines a pocket-sized “Huxdane-Halley” bomb — mashing up the names of Aldous Huxley with that of the scientist and science writer J.B.S. Haldane — for the dissemination of leprosy germs. Greene, alas, didn’t write any sf of which I’m aware; though there’s a 1942 Ealing Studios WWII propaganda movie, Went the Day Well?, which is narrated from the near future after the war is over; it’s based on Greene’s 1940 story “The Lieutenant Died Last.” Our next big email exchange should be on the subject of WWII movies, which you and I both enjoy quite a bit….
What a philistine I am to respond to your thoughtful notes on Waugh and Greene and genre with OCD-ish notes about whether or not they wrote science fiction. But since you brought up Beckett… Before reading your latest note, it had never occurred to me to read Waiting for Godot as sf, though Fin de partie most surely is sf. Like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, serialized the same month that Beckett’s second-most famous play was first performed, Fin de partie begins at the end… of everything. We’re never informed what has happened, but the first line of the play is Clov’s “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” (Hamm, in a later exchange with Clov: “All is… all is… all is what?” [Violently.] “All is what?” Clov: “What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment.” [He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards Hamm.] “Corpsed.”) Brrr. BTW, Beckett once told an interviewer that the most important line in the play is Nell’s “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Will you please explain why this is the key to Fin de partie. PS: The play’s title is translated as Endgame, though Game Over would make much more intuitive sense to most people these days.
See how I brought this back to the Alien franchise? (Bill Paxton’s character shouts “Game over, man!” at one point in 1986’s Aliens.)
I’m jealous of your students who get to take your course on film and the uncanny. And I’d be exceedingly jealous if your course were structured the way you’d prefer: a movie a week, followed by in-depth discussion of that one movie. It’s also great that you’re analyzing aesthetics – something I should have studied in school, since my day job requires me to form opinions about how graphic design elements, colors, typography, the use of white space, etc., convey ideas, values, and emotions within the context of a particular culture or category. Anyone who pays close attention to the surface of things — in film studies, camera movements, lighting, blocking, special effects, set design, costume design, sound design, etc. — should take as their motto Wilde’s quote: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” But can you say more about why film is an inherently uncanny medium — more so than any other medium? I’m not sure I get it, yet.
Your note about the protagonist who does not exist in North by Northwest is provocative, and makes me think about what Hitchcock said (dismissively) to Truffaut about “Macguffins” (i.e., the stolen jewels, in a heist movie, or stolen papers, in a spy movie — which set the plot of a genre movie going): “The main thing I’ve learned over the years is that the MacGuffin is nothing.” What a genius — he made genre movies without MacGuffins!
It’s exciting to imagine what conclusions you’ll reach, as you continue this line of research, particularly insofar as they touch on a couple areas of what I take to be your greatest interest: the survival of democracy in an era whose norms and forms are increasingly, if not fascist, then at least illiberal; and the survival of human-ness in an era that feels ever more post-, un-, or inhuman. Wonder if you’d want to touch on these topics at all, next time?
PS: What is a “Sort-of-Janeite”? What is a Janeite?
Josh
ALSO SEE: Josh’s BEST 250 ADVENTURES of the 20th CENTURY list | Mark on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | Mark and Josh’s exchange 49th PARALLEL.