Remarks Occasioned by Antoni Slonimski’s The Torpedo of Time

A true “biography” of SF would read like the story of a fallen woman—say, Dostoyevsky’s Sonia. Born of learned and imaginative parents, the genre came into the world possessed of noble intelligence and wit. But it also had a fatal flaw: it was too attractive for its own good. It was its entertainment value which, in the context of the economic pressures and blandishments of modern book-marketing, led it into prostitution, demeaning to its rational inheritance and also to its generic integrity (in all senses of the word). Antoni Slonimski’s The Torpedo of Time (1924) stands as a poignant reminder of SF’s now-lost innocence. It exemplifies what SF used to be—and points to what it might have become had it not yielded to the seductions of the marketplace. What Slonimski’s book offers is not a slick idea more or less loosely attached to an otherwise sensational (if not prurient) tale, but a thought profoundly embedded in the very substance of the fiction—a thought about the nature of history, about the futility of human historical ambition. The Torpedo of Time is not a polished work by present-day standards. Yet even in the naïvety of Slonimski’s literary technique there is something appealingly innocent. All in all, this book of his puts to shame most of the “sophisticated” stuff that no wadays walks the streets as SF. (RMP)

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