Si Le Grain Ne Meurt

This image is by Anton Kurka. Born in Vienna Austria 1899 Kurka emigrated to the USA, probably in the 1920s. By the 1940s he was working as a commercial artist in New York, and was in demand. He produced many images for adverts, created a number of popular American Civil War-themed illustrated maps and, occasionally, on commission, he made science-fiction art. This painting, which Kurka called ‘The Ultimate Re-sowing of the Human Race—4,000 AD’, was used as the cover for If: Worlds of Science Fiction (Jan 1953). It does not relate to any of the stories in the issue (it has nothing whatsoever to do with Miller's cold-war satire, named in the bottom left hand corner). A gigantic, cyclopean robot is sowing the bodies of human beings like seeds into a ploughed field. The humans are naked and, it seems, alive. Although the fall from such a height would presumably kill them, they seem unconcerned, even happy, as they tumble and freefall through the sky.

The robot’s single red eye glowers, and its crab-claw hands looks alarmingly sharp; and yet the image is one of a strange husbandry. It resembles—which is to say, anticipates—Frank Frears’ ‘Please Fix It Daddy’ (the cover for October 1953’s Astounding), except that the Kurka image is not about pathos or death, but manifestly about rebirth. These humans, in the distant year 4000, will fall like seeds and like seeds be reborn.

When I was learning French at school in the 1970s, our teacher—many of whose lessons involved telling us to read a chapter of the textbook in silence whilst he got on with the Times crossroad at his desk at the front of the class—instructed us not to bother with the subjunctive, that verb case for unfulfilled wish or condition. ‘No actual French speakers use it,’ he told us, airily. ‘There’s no need to learn it.’ This turned out not to be true, as I have discovered from many subsequent visits to France. There are plenty of instances of the French subjunctive in popular use, not least in science fiction: ‘May the force be with you’ is an English subjunctive (‘may … be’) that in French is: ‘que la Force soit avec vous’. Another example is the Biblical phrase ‘Si le grain ne meurt’: John 12:24-26 (in the New King James Version: ‘most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain’)—a statement to do with the cycles of the seasons, of farming, but also of the divine resurrection of Christ, who died and went into the tomb only to be gloriously reborn, and therefore of the Christian promise of life after death. The phrase has more secular implications, too: French writer André Gide entitled his autobiography Si le grain ne meurt (1924), detailing both his conventional Parisian childhood, and his adult coming to terms with—that is, his rebirth—his homosexuality.

This image, the giant robot farmer sowing its field—complete with human-sized farmhouse much too small for it—the happy naked humans tumbling through the grey sky: it’s a science-fictional appropriation of that Johannine text. Many sentences beginning with If ... must needs use the subjunctive, Indeed, we could shift the case from grammar to concept, and describe science fiction itself as storytelling in the subjunctive mode.

Here's another version of the Kurka image: lower res, and with a bluer, brighter colour field, but clean of the annoying letters scribbled on the higher res image at the head of this post.