ENGLISH ARTICLES

SATIRE

A term derived from the Latin satura, referring to a mixture of fruits or other foodstuffs, applied analogically to poetic medleys produced by such Roman poets as C. Lucilius (second century b.c.). The form was sophisticated by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Satires written in a mixture of verse and prose were called Menippean—after a Greek writer whose Works were similarly mixed (although they were not satirical)— by their pioneer, M. Terentius Varro. The other principal Roman satirists in the Menippean tradition were Petronius and Seneca. The term subsequently broadened out to describe any literary composition whose purpose was to ridicule and censure some perceived vice or folly by exaggerating its incongruities, or to ridicule the pretensions of particular powerful individuals.

Satire enjoyed a significant resurgence in seventeenthcentury England, in the poetry of such writers as Samuel Butler and John Dryden, and a rich tradition of English prose satire was established in the early eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Elements of the satirical method of comic exaggeration had, however, previously been adopted into such genres of prose fiction as the traveller’s tale; the caricaturish methods of satire readily lent themselves to the construction of hypothetical societies reached by means of fantastic voyages, so there was always a strong element of satire in fanciful accounts of *space travel and *Utopian fiction. The great majority of the texts that can be seen retrospectively as ancestral to *scientific romance and *science fiction have some satirical component, and satirical motives refined the narrative methods and devices of the Voltairean *conte philosophique. Although Voltaire used satire as a weapon against religious and philosophical dogmatism, it had already been used to assault the supposed delusions of scientists in the third part of Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts … by Lemuel Gulliver (1726; aka Gulliver’s Travels), which mocks the Academy of Projectors of the flying island of Laputa (a parody of the Royal Society) and regrets such technological transformations of human life as the uncomfortable immortality of the senile Struldbruggs of Luggnagg. The fourth part, in which the natural nobility of the equine Houyhnhnms is contrasted with the disgusting habits of the anthropomorphic Yahoos, established an important prototype for the use of *alien viewpoints in the sceptical examination of the human condition. Gulliver’s Travels became one the most influential of all literary exemplars; the example of its breadth, fervour, and extremism combined with that of the savage irony of the nonfictional ‘‘A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents’’ (1729) to establish archetypes of a uniquely vigorous species of ‘‘Swiftian satire’’.

Most subsequent ‘‘Gulliveriana’’ imitated Swift’s softer targets—subsequent voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag far outnumber those to Laputa or the land of the Houyhnhnms, although Mr. Oscar Preen in Japan and Laputa (Tinsley’s Magazine 1869–1870) and Wendell Phillips Garrison’s The New Gulliver (1898) are exceptions—but the bolder writers who invented entirely new realms for Gulliver and his clones to explore often made use of scientific speculation in constructing their imaginary societies. Notable examples include Barry Pain’s ‘‘The New Gulliver’’ (1913), Frigyes Karinthy’s Utazas Faremido (1916; trans. as Voyage to Faremido) and Capillaria (1921), and the first and last stories in Adam Roberts’ SAGAN, CARL (EDWARD) (1934–1996) Swiftly (2004). A contest of sorts between antiscientific Swiftian satirists and proscientific Voltairean satirists extended from the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first, both sides increasing their offensive weaponry as the battleground gradually became wider and its ideological landscape progressively more complex.

The fervent disputes of twentieth-century political satire were, in general, far more superficial than those of the Swift-Voltaire contest, but the progressive development of technology remained a key element of their background, because one of the charges most commonly issued against political parties and attitudes was that of being ‘‘behind the times’’, unready and unable to respond to new challenges. The failure of shortsighted statesmen to make adequate provision for future change is a constant preoccupation of political satirists, which became increasingly acute as the pace of social change accelerated. Twentiethcentury examples of political satire became increasingly inclined to take such considerations aboard, as in Anatole France’s L’ıˆle des pingouins (1908; trans. As Penguin Island), Rose Macaulay’s What Not (1919), Hilaire Belloc’s But Soft—We Are Observed (1928), Upton Sinclair’s Roman Holiday (1931), Harold Nicolson’s Public Faces (1932), and John Gloag’s Winter’s Youth (1934).

The customary rhetorical stance of satirists identified with the emergent British genre scientific romance—
whose archetypal products included H. G. Wells’ The Wonderful Visit (1895), Grant Allen’s The British Barbarians (1895), Eimar O’Duffy’s The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928), and Eden Phillpotts’ Saurus (1938)—was defiantly Voltairean, although Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) introduced a powerful Swiftian exemplar to the genre. American science fiction preferred action-adventure formulas developed from Vernian romance, but the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs were by no means innocent of satire, and a much more obvious subspecies was soon imported to the pulps by Stanton A. Coblentz, in The Sunken World (1928; book, 1948), The Blue Barbarians (1931), and In Caverns Below (1935; book 1957 as Hidden World). Pulp science fiction’s political satires were notable for their tendency to assume that political disputes are essentially meaningless within the greater context of insistent *technological determinism—a view given striking expression in Miles J. Breuer’s ‘‘The Gostak and the Doshes’’ (1930).

The use of *aliens for satirical purposes was always considered fair game in pulp science fiction, but the example set by Voltaire’s Microme´gas (1752)—in which intellectually superior aliens demonstrate the folly of human vanity—seemed uncongenial to many genre stalwarts. John W. *Campbell Jr. preferred to invert the formula in the magazines he edited, featuring stupid aliens who had much to learn from humans, although writers such as Eric Frank Russell occasionally contrived to twist this pattern advantageously, in such stories as ‘‘The Waitabits’’ (1955), and also to make ingenious use of a galactic society background in which widely different human societies could be satirically compared, as in ‘‘… And Then There Were None’’ (1951). On the other hand, Campbell—encouraged by his brief association with Robert A. *Heinlein—presided over a marked change in genre science fiction’s uses of political satire, developing a much keener appreciation of the ways in which political reorganisation might assist the cause of technological progress, especially in the context of the *Space Age: an awareness common to the satirically inclined works of writers from opposite ends of the political spectrum, such as H. Beam Piper and Mack Reynolds.

The demise of the action-orientated pulps and the rise of a new post–*atom bomb cynicism regarding *progress and *technology combined their effects to make 1950s science fiction particularly hospitable to satire—a licence indulged to the full by such writers as Frederik *Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Sheckley. All of these writers contrived to find fertile middle ground between the Voltairean and Swiftian traditions, mercilessly attacking misapplications of technology while retaining a fundamental respect for science, at least as a precious antidote to its poorer alternative, dogmatism. Writers outside the genre were less inclined to make such fine distinctions, a thoroughly Swiftian scepticism being retained by such writers as Bernard Wolfe, in Limbo (1952), and Kurt Vonnegut, in Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), and Cat’s Cradle (1963), although the Voltairean opposition was maintained in Doris Meek and Adrienne Jones’ The Golden Archer (1956; by-lined Gregory Mason).

This difference in inclination was preserved into the 1960s, when several U.S. satirists using science fiction motifs—most notably Thomas M. Disch and John T. Sladek—allied themselves with British ‘‘new wave’’ science fiction before winning acceptance in their own country. The association of Disch and Sladek with the British movement had an invigorating effect because much of the movement’s domestically produced satire was conspicuously polite—Brian W. Aldiss’ The Primal Urge (1961) and The Dark Light Years (1964) are cardinal examples. The sharpness of Disch’s sarcasm, as displayed in ‘‘White Fang Goes Dingo’’ (1965; exp. book as Mankind under the Leash, aka The Puppies of Terra) and The Genocides (1965), and the hectic quality of Sladek’s wit, as displayed in The Reproductive System (1968; aka Mechasm), provided useful exemplars, although the United States also produced such scrupulously polite satires as Hortense Calisher’s Journal from Ellipsia (1965). The most significant extension of satire into cinematic science fiction, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1963), appeared in this period.

The principal evolution of satire in the 1970s and 1980s, both within and without the science fiction genre, was associated with the rapid growth of feminism, which provided a new challenge to assumptions about the scope, virtue, and significance of technofetishism and technologically determined social change, reflected in such works as Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), James Tiptree Jr.’s ‘‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’’ (1977), Josephine Saxton’s The Travails of Jane Saint (1980), and Candas Jane Dorsey’s ‘‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’’ (1988). Speculative fiction inevitably became a target for satirisation itself, especially the manifest imaginative excesses of pulp science fiction, which were further exaggerated in the visual media and comic books. Such satire inevitably began with ‘‘in-jokes’’ such as Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe? (1948; exp. book, 1949), Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero (1965), and George O. Smith’s ‘‘Speculation’’ (1976), and a strong tradition of incestuous parody was maintained within the fan community by such writers as David Langford, who extended his wit to such demolitions of commercial work as Earthdoom! (1987; with ‘‘John Grant’’ [Paul Barnett]). A much greater scope for such work was, however, opened by the expansion of generic science fiction into other media, where a substantial satirical sector was eventually established by such productions as Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio version, 1978; novel series launched 1979; TV adaptation, 1981; film, 2005), Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s Red Dwarf (TV series launched 1988; tie-in novel series launched 1989), Third Rock from the Sun (TVseries launched 1996), and the film Galaxy Quest (1999).

The riotous clamour produced by this kind of selfreferential satire far outshone other kinds of satire using speculative tropes from 1980 onwards, although futuristic satires reflecting contemporary trends, such as John Kessel’s Good News from Outer Space (1989) and Harvey Jacobs’ Beautiful Soup (1993) continued to maintain an elegantly sophisticated edge to such fiction. The Voltairean tradition was forcefully maintained by such writers as James Morrow, especially in the trilogy begun with Towing Jehovah (1995), while such works as James Lovegrove’s Untied Kingdom (2003) and John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance (2003) kept the tradition of technologically sophisticated political satire alive into the twenty-first century. Attitudes to the use of satire within speculative fiction tend to differ sharply in critical evaluations. Critics affiliated to the genre, who share *hard science fiction’s commitment to the notion of technological progress as a good in itself, tend to regard satire as a marginal activity, whose primary merits are Voltairean; critics trained in the academy, on the other hand— who are far more likely to be sceptical about the connection between technological and social progress—usually conserve their loudest applause for Swiftian materials. Scientists are, however, occasionally willing and able to use satire as a weapon against their critics, as in Alan Sokal’s parody of *postmodernist analysis.