“Central to the superman idea, is, of course, the outcast, loneliness, the feeling of standing apart from other human beings. After the original, more complex or ambivalent science fiction classics dealing with supermen, Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmale, and Hans Dominik’s Die Macht der Drei, virtually all science fiction stories dealing with supermen have dealt with young ones, young and angry and alienated supermen, misunderstood by a cruel and stupid world. A very popular contemporary example is Marvel’s best-selling Spiderman comics, a modern superman with sinus trouble, girls trouble, money trouble. Most adolescents at one time or another feel that they stand outside the world, that no one really understands them and that other people are stupid. Science fiction fans tend to form a high opinion of their own group of science fiction fan friends, strengthening the conviction that they are really a breed of select supermen, standing apart from the mundane world which does not read or understood books - particularly science fiction. Tests made by and on fans on many occasions, in many countries during the past thirty years or so, unanimously suggest that fans - in their own opinion at least - are more intelligent than other people. No wonder superman tales have always been popular in science fiction.
A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan even started a Utopian community of sorts in 1943, when a group of American fans in Battle Creek, Michigan, lived together for nearly two years in the ‘Slan Shack’ community. Only fans were invited, and grandiose plans were drawn up for a ‘Slan Center’ consisting of an entire city block in Battle Creek, with its own grocery store, general store, common heating plant and electricity generating plant. Utopian societies have certainly been founded on flimsier premises than a common interest in science fiction and the belief in the Slanishness of oneself and one’s friends, but the project never materialized and the original Slan Shack, an eight-roomed house sheltering a dozen or so fans, finally was abandoned as well.
An exception to the misunderstood adolescent superman of science fiction is in one of my own favourites, the Mule, in Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, originally published as eight stories in the American magazine Astounding from May 1942 through November 1949). The Mule, an enigmatic mutation of superior intelligence and with the ability to play upon people’s emotions, appears in Foundation and Empire, soon unifying the entire known galaxy into a new, strong empire, using complicated Byzantine intrigues the like of which had seldom been seen in science fiction, until he finally meets his end in Second Foundation. A frail human being without most of the hero traits usually found in literary supermen, he is an oddly convincing and tragic personality and complex person who in many respects is the real principal character of the trilogy, certainly the most interesting of all the cardboard characters inhabiting this classic. He is no hero, though, and no science fiction fan community was ever founded to honour him.
The superman is in many respects the Utopian ideal of science fiction on a more personal level, coupled with the inevitable feeling of loneliness felt by many adolescents who prefer to read books instead of running round and hitting the other kids on the head with a baseball bat. The underlying dream of power is here, as is the feeling that one really ought to have the chance to change the whole world into something more glorious, or at least something more interesting. The fact that A. E. Vogt’s Slan, by far the simplest of all superhuman stories, is also the most popular in science fiction, never out of print since it first appeared and much imitated, tells, I think, a lot about the psychological mechanisms behind the lure of this science fiction theme”
- Sam J. Lundwall, Science Fiction: An Illustrated History. New York:Grossett & Dunlap, 1977. p. 184
[AL: Obviously, a 50 year old book - one of my favourites I’ve read over the years since being given an old copy by a friend in middle school - doesn’t necessarily tell us much about science fiction now, or is fully applicable to fandom now. Nonetheless, an interesting perspective on the superman and superhero in science fiction. Lundwall, a Swedish science fiction writer, was also a step removed from the American SF scene, and much more skeptical and critical about science fiction compared to the typical boosterism found in much SF writing and fandom at the time...or even now.]
