Volume 22, Number 15 · October 2, 1975
Coffee Break for Sisyphus
By Michael Wood
Structural Fabulation
by Robert Scholes
University of Notre Dame Press, 111 pp., $6.95
Alternate Worlds
by James Gunn
Prentice-Hall, 256 pp., $29.95
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Avon, 341 pp., $1.75 (paper)
Sign of the Unicorn
by Roger Zelazny
Doubleday, 186 pp., $5.95
'So with a kind of madness growing upon me,' Wells's Time Traveller said, 'I flung myself into futurity.' Robert Scholes's suggestion in Structural Fabulation—the initials, you will notice, are S and F—is that we should fling ourselves in the same direction. 'I am asserting,' he asserts, 'that the most appropriate kind of fiction that can be written in the present and the immediate future is fiction that takes place in future time.' Scholes thinks some of us may find his book too polemical, but really it is just too rhetorical, an assembly of rickety simplifications and overstatements. Admittedly it began life as a series of lectures, but that excuse will go only so far. Scholes is distinctly too eager to advise us. Those who read no one but Jacqueline Susann and Leon Uris and Arthur Hailey are in Scholes's view 'dangerously uninformed' about reality. 'To live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, we must see into the future' (Scholes's italics). It seems more likely that to live at all in the future, we need to see into the present.
Review, 4557 words
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