INVISIBILITY

   The fantasy of being able to make oneself invisible is a common childhood daydream. As with all such daydreams, literary treatments of the theme tend to be cautionary tales; the three-decker novel The Invisible Gentleman (1833) by James Dalton is the most extravagant example. No goodcomes of it in such early sf stories as Edward Page MITCHELL's "The Crystal Man" (1881), H.G. WELLS's classic The Invisible Man (1897) andJack LONDON's "The Shadow and the Flash" (1903), though C.H. HINTON was unconcerned with moralizing in "Stella" (1895). Almost as common as stories of being invisible are stories of confrontation with invisible adversaries, in which feelings of fear and insecurity with no immediate and obvious cause are dramatically symbolized. Many stories in this vein inhabit the borderland between supernatural fantasy and sf; notable examples include Fitz-James O'BRIEN's "What Was It?" (1859), Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887), Ambrose BIERCE's "The Damned Thing"(1893), George Allan ENGLAND's "The Thing from Outside" (1923), H.M. Egbert's The Sea Demons (1925; Victor ROUSSEAU), Edmond HAMILTON's "The Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926), H.P. LOVECRAFT's "The Dunwich Horror" (1929), Eric Frank RUSSELL's Sinister Barrier (1939; 1943; rev 1948) and Murray LEINSTER's War with the Gizmos (1958). Invisibility is a staple of cinematic special effects, displayed to good effect in the classic The INVISIBLE MAN (1933) - based on Wells's novel and borrowing someinspiration from Philip WYLIE's The Murderer Invisible (1931) - but not so well in its inferior sequels, and with varying success in 3 tv series, all likewise called The INVISIBLE MAN , featuring invisible crime-fighters and secret agents.In more recent sf, invisibility - sometimes more metaphorical than literal - is usually deployed symbolically. An invisible manned bomb-carrier is featured in "For Love" (1962; vt "All for Love") by Algis BUDRYS. In Damon KNIGHT's "The Country of the Kind" (1956) andRobert SILVERBERG's "To See the Invisible Man" (1963) criminals are "exiled" from society in that people simply refuse to see them, so that they suffer agonies of loneliness; the notion is inverted in Gardner R. DOZOIS's "The Visible Man" (1975), in which other people become invisibleto the outcast. The idea of unnoticed communities existing in the interstices of everyday society is developed by Fritz LEIBER in The Sinful Ones (1950 Fantastic Adventures as "You're All Alone"; exp 1953; rev 1980)and Christopher PRIEST's THE GLAMOUR (1984). Stories in which people fade from original inconsequentiality into literal or metaphorical invisibility include Charles BEAUMONT's "The Vanishing American" (1955), Harlan ELLISON's "Are You Listening?" (1958) and Sylvia Jacobs's "The End of EvanEssant" (1962). More extensive and elaborate accounts of the existential politics of individual invisibility can be found in H.F. SAINT's Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987), filmed as MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992), and Thomas BERGER's Being Invisible (1988). A pseudo-technological essay at achieving invisibility is depicted in The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT (1984). A theme anthology is Invisible Men (anth 1960) ed Basil DAVENPORT.

   BS