The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion

This week I thought we could consider another forgotten female pioneer author of science fiction. I am listing the name she published most (all?) of her science fiction under instead of her real name Mary Maude Dunn Wright. This unusual Texas author lived from 1894-1967. She died in a Corpus Christi nursing home.

Lilith Lorraine was known primarily as a science fiction poet. She published at least seven books of poetry in her life and was most prolific in the early 1950s. Lorraine was also a publisher and started by first publishing SF poetry fanzines. She purchased and published Robert Silverberg's first short story in one of her magazines, the one in which she published her last short story.

Of primary interest for the purposes of my writing this for our group (which makes the discussion of the author different from anyone else's) is her science fiction work. She wrote seven stories during her life:

1. "The Brain of the Planet" (1929) Gernsback published chapbook
2. "Into the 28th Century" (Science Wonder Quarterly, Winter 1930)
3. "The Jovian Jest" (Astounding May 1930)
4. "The Celestial Visitor" (Wonder Stories March 1935)
5. "The Isle of Madness" (Wonder Stories Nov-Dec. 1935)
6. "Entropy" (published in a fanzine titled Orb, Vol. 3 #2, 1952)
7. "Ancestors" (The Avalonian #1, 1952)

The first of these titles is a novelette (or a long short story). It's often described as a "feminist utopia".

Her second story above has been described as "one of the most extreme feminist stories to appear in the early science fiction magazines" (Davin, 136). It's a socialist revolution that produces her "sexually egalitarian society." The magazine includes a photo of her.

So, why the gap between 1935 and 1952? According to Davin, Lorraine "drifted in other directions, becoming more and more immersed in poetry." She published mainstream poetry, under other pseudonyms presumably, and science fiction poetry as Lilith Lorraine. She was a poetry editor for Fantasy Book and wrote a column entitled "Songs of the Spaceways."

I wonder how Lorraine's work holds up some eighty plus years after she wrote it. Let's locate some of her work and find out. Shall we?

Note: Lilith Lorraine is the fifth is a series of important but forgotten women science fiction author pioneers. The other four you can locate in this folder to find out more about them, if you are interested:
1. Francis M. Deegan
2. Clare Winger Harris
3. L. Taylor Hansen
4. Ruth Laura Wainwright

Story #2, the one of greatest interest for me, has beautiful illustrations and is quite long. I found it here (starts on page 250): https://archive.org/details/Science_W...

I found story #3 in Gutenberg here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29809

Here is an interesting academic article about her first two works: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239995?...

Thanks, Dan. Interesting stuff & I appreciate the links to the stories. Let us know if you can't find some of them online. Maybe if several of us search we'll be able to find them.

Lilith Lorraine apparently wrote a prodigious amount of poetry. I found the following ad for just one of her books:

LET THE PATTERNS BREAK — $4.00
by Lilith Lorraine

There are over 500 poems in this fine edition by the world
famous poet, Lilith Lorraine. If you enjoy the unusual, the
prophetic voice of the atomic age, you will find it in this book
of more than 300 pages.

I was also able to find one poem which I can reproduce here since I am certain it's out of copyright.

WE'LL LAUNCH OUR SPACE SHIPS YET

The sirens of the satellites are leaning from their stars,
With the purple-crested princes of old imperial Mars,
The spider-kings of Pluto with their lizard-armoured slaves.
The cold, sardonic saurians that rise from Neptune’s waves.
The wing-shod men of Mercury, the pale Uranian knights.
The golden maids of Ganymede aglow with jewelled lights.

The guardains of the galaxies, the Legionaires of Space,
Are watching through their telescopes a self-destroying race.
Some are watching greedily and some with sorrowing eyes.
For some are human-weak and some compassionate and wise.

But all declare unanimously as thought-waves meet and blend,
"The earth -men choose the evil road that leads to journey’s end.
Soon there will burst a flower of flame and all the worlds will know
Another race has gone the way that only mad men go.’’

But on the seared and broken earth a strange new courage springs.
And on the very brink of doom the voice of freedom rings.
The swords of hate fall powerless before the conquering darts.
The quenchless will to brotherhood that glows in simple hearts.

Their song floats through the galaxies as the old earth sways and croons,
And sends her challenging echoing through all the listening moons;
"Sheer from the eagle’s battlements, with atom-flaming jet.
We’ll blaze the trails for brotherhood, we’ll launch our space-ships yet."

Lilith Lorraine

She was born and died in Texas, but lived during parts of her life in Mexico. In 1948, while the poetry editor of Fantasy Book, she lived in Rogers, Arkansas, site of the first Walmart store.

Found two more:

#4, described in the magazine as "a satirical novelette", is here: https://archive.org/details/Wonder_St...

#5 is a story about how many people who are really sane are being locked up, found here: https://archive.org/details/Wonder_St...

Best I could do for #1 was find a copy available for sale here at $9.99 http://www.angelfire.com/film/locatio... I'm interested, but not that interested.

Finding #6 or #7 would be amazing. Anyway, I couldn't do it.

SF poetry is unusual. Thanks for finding this. I don't really like it much, but it is interesting nonetheless.

I definitely plan on following all the links you've been posting over the weeks, Dan. I've got a reading project going this fall, but it should be done by winter and so then I can set time aside.

The poem is so fun!

Thanks all. I admit to really liking Lilith Lorraine's sonnet (above). I'm also intrigued by the idea of science fiction poetry. I've never heard of such a thing before, or known there was a period in SF history when it apparently flourished. Does anyone today still write it to any degree of quality or quantity? Where could one possibly publish it if one wrote it?

Lilith Lorraine's Let The Patterns Break may have originally sold for $4.00, but buying a copy today starts at $167. 00. It is a rare book indeed with only one review here on GoodReads. That review is one of the best I've ever read, even if I disagree with two of its author's points (1. Lorraine's present obscurity has nothing to do with her gender, and 2. any poet's poems will seem repetitious if they are a collection of ALL the poems that poet ever wrote until a certain point in life), and is well worth reading: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

I followed your link in message 5 about work #5. Too long for me to read right now, but fun to scan through the advertisements, etc. Strap-on binocles! What will they think of next!

Page 1 has an ad for a book by Maurice Renard, calling him the "H.G. Wells of France". He's not the only one to have been called that!

A letter from a reader offers a lesson on "Fascism" and "Communism" and hopes for more SF set in such societies.

Another letter says that the previous issue of the magazine was one of the best, especially for the story "Worlds of If" by Stanley G. Weinbaum, an author we were just mentioning in another thread as someone unjustly neglected today.

Yes, I know I'm going off topic....

For SF poetry, I have seen many short ones from time to time in the magazines, but never pay much attention to them. Seems more common in Fantasy. Tolkien certainly did a lot. So did Anne McCaffrey.

A gem of a quote from #2 above:

"He who tells a man a truth which he is not ready to receive, tells him a lie, but he who garbs truth in the raiment of fiction sometimes teaches the soul a lesson."

I was searching for her chapter book & found this biography.
https://www.joshuablubuhs.com/blog/li...

I didn't find the book, unfortunately.

Good quote!

Jim wrote: "I was searching for her chapter book & found this biography.
https://www.joshuablubuhs.com/blog/li... "

Wow! That was a long read, but utterly fascinating! Connections to Theosophy, Charles Fort, a run from the police, and from Earl Warren, to Mexico, multiple name changes, “The League for Sanity in Poetry,” against Ezra Pound, and others.... She was an interesting person for sure.

The article from JSTOR linked above (3rd link in message #2), troubled me with this statement [italics are mine]:

Her works are important to historians of SF for her communitarian Christian socialism, her feminist analysis of the economics of marriage, her presentation of an alternate technology of reproduction, her development of the theme of mental telepathy, and her justification of racial prejudice in terms of a science of eugenics.

But she was also strongly involved in Theosophy, which from the little I understand of it, does believe in telepathy, but is very much against racial prejudice. (Many scientists and SF authors were into Eugenics in the early 20th century.) Her eugenic views may have influenced the "Love Cult" that got her in trouble, where "The quest to make the Superman was literal, and involved prescribed sex between young people."

Interesting snippets from the article:

"Oakland 'Love Cult' Raided; 3 Women Jailed by Probers."

"They say that who wars with the gods must lose,
In life, in death, and after--
Perhaps--but ask when your arms you choose,
Are the gods immune to laughter?"

"She disliked the turn to Dianetics—preferring her own Character Over Chaos—and promoted new voices—she was the first to pay Robert Silverberg for a story. Lorraine sought to chase out what she saw as the vapid cliches of the genre (and, though this she did not say, replace them with her own, cosmic cliches)."

"...it is too broad a statement to call her writing “science fiction.” As Sneyd remarked, the distinctions in her writing between horror, fantasy, and science fiction were always hazy. If she is to be placed anywhere in the field, it is with those of a Theosophical bent, obviously, but also those who wrote cosmic horror, a la H.P. Lovecraft."

She believed "worshipping of science brought only pain in the material world."

Despite many typos, the article is very much worth reading. Her story could even make a nice novel or movie.

That's an astounding biography! I am reading #2 above, finding it very intelligently written, and it is entirely consistent with her biography.

The biography led me to look a little into Charles Fort. He has one book on Gutenberg.org. I skimmed it, not expecting much since Lorraine apparently did seances as a result of his inspiration. One Fortean line in particular stood out for its insipidity:

"We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists—that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness."

Whenever I think I should have lived in an earlier time, I just have to read something as silly.

Another SF poet is Steve Sneyd. He is apparently trying to write a biography of Lilith.

Interview with him here (barely mentions Lilith):
https://amazingstoriesmag.com/2015/03...

Dan wrote: "Whenever I think I should have lived in an earlier time, I just have to read something as silly...."

Sadly, the past has no monopoly on human stupidity.

Also on the topic of SF Poetry, I just stumbled across Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem. The author won the Nobel prize perhaps because of this. (And some say because he was on the Nobel committee.)

There is an opera version as well.