The inclination when comparing the two Manhattan Tranfers is to set up a modernism-postmodernism dichotomy, an approach that is at once productive and problematical. Does Stith radically reconfigure, or ultimately reconfinn, Dos Passos's vision? Underlying such an inquiry also is the question of Dos Passos's relevance to the discourse of science fiction: why would a writer like Stith backtrack all the way to an early Twentieth Century text when extrapolating his own vision of the near future? So while this Dos Passos-Stith relation hitherto has been critically neglected, the following pape r will attempt to chart the intertextual dynamics of the two Manhattan Transfers, to consider how each text is elucidated by its juxtaposition with its counterpart. By drawing consciously-and continuously-on Dos Passos, Stith crafts a hermeneutic lens for viewing his own novel. Stith finds in Dos Passos more than a quick launching point for his own science fiction, more than a booster rocket that is soon discarded.

Manhattan thus experiences a more literal transfer in the year 2012, but Stith is not merely playing with the title of the Dos Passos novel. Deploying the standard alien-abduction plot on an epic scale, Stith depicts the entire island of Manhattan and its inhabitants being hauled off into deep space by mysteriously motivated spaceships. Stith would extend the trip with his 1993 science fiction novel, the homonymous Manhattan Transfer. Neither Dos Passos nor his protagonist, however, could have envisioned how far John E. * 'Pretty far,' Jimmy Herf announces as his vague destination in the closing line of John Dos Passos's 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer (404).

Manhattan Transfer by John E. Stith