![]() ![]() As an example, I would cite Charles Pellegino’s Dust. Stories of animals and bugs getting above their place in the great chain of being can have the same utilitarian benefit – an analytic autopsy on what social, environmental, and technological factors make our civilization possible – as works of disaster science fiction. ![]() The rise of a new race of animal or insect life to threaten man’s dominion over the earth can be used for adventurous, satiric, or ironic purposes but little else. He divides these stories between mutant animals and mutant humans.īefore he gets started he makes a claim similar to what he did about the value of the disaster sub-genre of science fiction, and I object to it for similar reasons. But most mutants in these stories before the 1940s were animals or insects and not humans. It confirmed my memory and Gunn’s claims that mutant stories have been around for a long time in science fiction. I double checked the “ Mutants” entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It’s the alien presence of the mutant that matters. A “mutant” plot can be set in the past, present, or future. Gunn says right up front that “the problem of mutations” has no set pattern of protagonist or setting. Mutants don’t seem a plot category but a theme or motif. (And, no, Gunn didn’t throw an exclamation mark in after “mutants”.) We’re at the last subcategory of the “plots of circumstance”. ![]() My look at James Gunn’s Modern Science Fiction: A Critical Analysis continues. ![]()
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