Today I’m going simultaneously in two directions: I am demanding that Open Access policies be extended to the literary works of deceased authors, and I am praising a rare book (which has caused me to consider the matter of literary legacy). Let’s see if I can be minimally coherent.
Books have this way of deciding when you are ready for them. Suddenly, you notice that references to them in other books glow as if highlighted by a fluorescent felt pen, and then you know the time has come to read them. This has happened to me recently with Norbert Wiener’s essay The Human Use of Human Beings (1950, 1954) and with Naomi Mitchison’s novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). In the first case, a Google search and two mouse clicks led me to an online free .pdf. In the second, I got trapped by BookDepository, which now has 15 of my hard-earned euros (for a mere 176 pages of a poorly printed book).
Wiener, the father of cybernetics, died in 1964, and, so, his copyright extends to 2034, following US legislation (life + 70 years). Accordingly, Amazon.com offers The Human Use of Human Beings in 27 different formats, divided among first-hand print, second-hand print, and .mobi for Kindle. Someone, however, the self-styled ‘conspirators’ of www.asaunder.org, have released a .pdf which promptly found a way into my own Kindle (via www.calibre-ebook.com). I have already read Wiener’s fascinating warning against the subordination of human beings to machines, the very instruments his cybernetics revolutionized in the Second Industrial Revolution. I have learned this way that technophobia is rooted in the least expected minds; also that scientists like Wiener despaired about how the need to win World War II against Hitler had led to the (nuclear) horrors of the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. (not yet gone, think Ukraine).
Have I hurt Wiener’s heirs? In legal terms, I may have. Yet I feel that too restrictive legislation is hurting me and anyone else who wants to learn by withholding knowledge from public access. I respect the rights of the living authors, being one myself; yet, I totally support the implementation of Open Access policies, which are making research available in the shortest possible time lapse, particularly research paid with public funds. You may be thinking that I should draw a line, in any case, between the un-paid articles we produce, with costs covered by grants and our salaries, and books which, by definition, depend on a separate contract. Perhaps. The point I am making here, though, is that copyright should cease with the author’s death, whether the author is a researcher like Wiener or a literary author like Naomi Mitchison.
Mitchison died much more recently, in 1999, at the very ripe age of 101. I had stumbled upon her name often when reading about Scottish Literature and was more or less aware that she was an important figure. I am, however, just beginning to grasp her importance. Mitchison published more than 90 books, had 7 children, was a social and political activist in several fronts… read the Wikipedia entry and judge for yourself whether this was a woman or several, living a kind of multiple quantum life.
At least 2 of her novels, Solution Three (1975) and Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), which I have just finished reading, were science-fiction. Now, the edition of Memoirs here by my side is part of the Naomi Mitchison Library by publishers Kennedy & Boyd of Glasgow, who aim at “offering twenty-first century readers the opportunity to discover her”. I should think that 21st-century readers would rather the Scottish Government or some Scottish university uploaded all her works for the whole world to read, but, of course, (British) copyright legislation is preventing this from happening. It’s complicated, isn’t it? You have a prolific, first-rate author whose books are mostly out of print, and you do have the means to make them universally available (think Project Guttenberg) yet the choice made (by whom?) is the traditional one: reprint the books. Make readers pay.
SF readers are used to finding gems like Memoirs of a Spacewoman no matter how invisible they may be and, indeed, the Internet Speculative Database (isfdb) carries notice of the diverse utopian and SF novels in the Mitchison Library re-published by Kennedy and Boyd. The additional problem is that, unfortunately, the preface for Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Isobel Murray, the emeritus professor in charge of editing Mitchison’s volumes, is totally unsympathetic towards SF. Mitchison’s novel, she tells us, “begins not with space ships or amazing rays, but with a list of people.” She is at pains to deny that, look at the title, Memoirs of a Spacewoman is SF because, as the back cover blurb reads, the protagonist Mary “is also a very credible human.” I am used to finding very credible humans in SF novels and I wonder what kind of literary snobbishness is blinding Murray into thinking that SF is all about “amazing rays”. Her preface then, does nothing to help place this amazing novel where it deserves, actually distancing it from its true potential audience.
I was bowled over by Mitchison’s tale of Mary, the spacewoman who acknowledges with total candour that she loves being an inter-planetary explorer as much as she loves making babies. In Mary’s post-gender society, men and women are equally engaged in space exploration (at one point she becomes part of an all-woman expedition); the relativistic passage of time allows Mary, besides, to enter a variety of romantic relationships with complete freedom on both sides. Her babies become then the centre of her life for a year (until they are ‘stabilised’) and she moves on. Her job consists of establishing communication with alien species within a strict protocol of non-interference (I’m sure Iain Banks knew the Memoirs well…). In Mary’s civilization respect for the environment is fundamental, and communication with Terran animal species habitual. There are only a couple of academic pieces on this novel and one deals indeed, with this aspect. Oh, yes, and there is an Indian female scientist, and other non-white space explorers.
Mitchison penned this in 1962, only three years after Heinlein’s classic militaristic SF novel Starship Troopers and, what is far more relevant possibly, before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) started second-wave feminism. Indeed, years before Ursula K. Le Guin opened up the way for feminism to enter SF in the late 1960s. I always say that what I love about SF is the possibility of imagining a post-gender civilization in which women can choose to live as they please but until now I thought we were moving towards that kind of novel. Now I know we already had it in Memoirs of a Spacewoman, 53 years ago!!, but somehow missed it.
As we’ll miss it again, for who, in the age of the internet, will notice a book by a dead Scotswoman, published by a small Glasgow printing press? I don’t think either the printers nor he heirs will make all that money, after all… How many readers lost for this and for many other rare books!
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