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This World and Nearer Ones
Brian Aldiss


Aldiss’ acclaimed 1979 essay collection reissued for the first time in over thirty years.Most of the arts – architecture, music, painting, cinema – come under review in this thought-provoking collection of essays first published in 1979.Aldiss writes here with characteristic humour the complex unity of art and science which forms the inner mystery of science fiction, and reveals new aspects whilst ‘exploring the familiar’.Brian says: ‘A collection of essays on a wide variety of subjects, including literature, film, politics, current affairs, art and the author’s own life.’









THIS WORLD AND NEARER ONES

BY BRIAN ALDISS










Contents


Title Page (#u0b5e96e3-0671-5351-9727-55cdc7aedd44)

Introduction and Acknowledgements



Ever Since the Enlightenment

James Blish and the Mathematics of Knowledge

Dick’s Maledictory Web

Why They Left Zirn Unguarded: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

Nesvadba: In the Footsteps of the Admirable Čapek

Verne: The Extraordinary Voyage

Vonnegut: Guru Number Four

Barefoot: Its First Decade

The Gulf and the Forest: Contemporary SF in Britain

Looking Forward to 2001

The Hiroshima Man

From History to Timelessness

The Hashish Club

1951: Yesterday’s Festival of the Future

The Sower of the Systems: Some Paintings by G. F. Watts

The Fireby-Wireby Book

SF Art: Strangeness with Beauty

The Film Tarkovsky Made

Kissingers Have Long Ears

Spielberg: When the Mundane Breaks Down

Sleazo Inputs I Have Known

It Catechised from Outer Space: Politics in SF

The Flight into Tomorrow

Burroughs: Less Lucid than Lucian

‘Yes, well, but …’

The Universe as Coal-Scuttle

California, Where They Drink Buck Rogers

Modest Atmosphere with Monsters

Cultural Totems in the Soviet Union

A Swim in Sumatra

About the Author

Also part of The Brian Aldiss Collection

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher




Introduction and Acknowledgements (#u769fe0b6-0aa0-515d-8526-25f1e4638119)


Did dinosaurs dream? Was there, in those tiny saurian brains, room for night-visions which related obliquely, flickeringly, to the daylight Mesozoic world? Looking at a triceratops skull, where the chamber designed for the brain forms a dungeon in a great Chillon of boney armament, I find it impossible to think that consciousness, however dim, would not have wanted the emergency exit of dreams from such confinement.

And later. Those scampering tarsiers who were our remote ancestors – they must have experienced dreams of such towering paranoid ambition as to wake them twitching in their treetop nests – or whatever sort of nocturnal arrangements tarsiers prefer – only to find themselves unable to cry, or even to know they were unable to cry, ‘Today a eucalyptus tree, tomorrow the world!’

Dreams must have preceded thought and intention. They are the argument with reason omitted. The essays in this volume concern themselves with dreams, or applied dreams, or reason; the applied dreams of art and science contain both elements.

In these idle things, dreams, the unity of everything is an underlying assumption. Scientists have always needed artists to broaden their imaginations; artists have needed scientists to sharpen theirs. When William Blake wrote, ‘To see a world in a grain of sand …’, he was not referring only to a visionary experience, as is customarily supposed when the lines are quoted; but also to the strictly practical business of looking through the microscopes of Robert Hooke and Antony van Leeuwenhoek.

However important dreams may be, they are far from being our whole story. For the human species, reason must take precedence, for reason is a human monopoly. Animals have reasoning ability; we have reason. Twelve million years ago the great physical world, this world, was different in no important way from the world of today. But the living world was greatly different: there was no reason, no pair of eyes to take a cool look at what was going on over the left shoulder or after the next meal. There were no human beings. Only tarsier dreams.

This prosaic reflection has been acceptable coinage for only two hundred years, if that. The great divide in the history of thought under which we all live, even the least philosophical of us, is brought about by the theory of evolution: that theory heard as a mutter in the seventeenth century, rising to a prolonged murmur in the eighteenth, and finally becoming articulate last century. Evolution has sharpened our ideas of time; the world of living things, previously frozen into immobility like a stop-action movie shot, has burst into action in our understanding, filling us with fresh understandings of change.

Darwin, Wallace, and the many men of vision whose work went towards formulating evolutionary theory – not least Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle who remained a lifelong opponent of Darwin’s ideas – altered our way of viewing both the world and ourselves. Possibly it is just a coincidence that during the eighteen fifties, when The Origin of Species was published, photography was all the rage. In particular, the stereoscope, without which no good Victorian family was complete, was familiarising people with ancient civilisations and the beauties of other countries and times. A new way of seeing was in the air.

Photography combines art and science in an ideal way. It is now so much a part of our lives that we hardly notice its all-pervasive nature. Yet it has not persuaded us to regard art and science as the complex unity I believe they are.

In their modest way, these essays represent my lifelong interest in working in this ambiguous area. They could also be said to trace the path through the last two centuries which can be seen leading us towards a fruitful concept of the present; for our present is just someone else’s discarded future. We tread in the ruins of futures as well as of the past.

As for the essays themselves, they are also ruins in their way. They are salvaged from years of work I have done whilst not plying my trade as novelist and short story writer, expended in reviews and articles, mainly trying to educate myself. Everything has been revised or rewritten – or thrown out in disgust.

Although not every essay concerns itself with science fiction, this volume is being published in connection with a science fictional event, the Thirty-Seventh World Science Fiction Convention, Seacon, being held in Brighton, England, during August 1979, at which I am British Guest of Honour (the American Guest of Honour being Fritz Leiber).

Whilst the ordinary novel slumbers, paralysed perhaps by the gibbous awfulness of the twentieth century, SF makes its cislunar excursions. Year by year, its progeny grow. Science fiction now accounts for between ten and twelve percent of fiction sales. Yet it is very little discussed. When reviewed by newspapers and literary journals, it is either ‘done’ in a special issue, as a mad annual diversion, or else confined to small cemeteries on the fringes of a book page – semi-hallowed ground, the sort of spot where suicides are buried, its titles lying athwart one another like uprooted gravestones.

Other special purgatories are reserved for science fiction authors. They are invited to appear on BBC television with people like Uri Geller, Bruce Bellamy, or Dr Magnus Pyke. They are introduced at literary luncheons with jokes about their not having two heads or green skins (less of that lately, thank goodness). They have to endure conversations with people who assume automatically that they believe, as do their interrogators, in Flying Saucers and telepathy and Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle and God as Cosmonaut and acupuncture and macrobiotic foods and pyramids that sharpen razor blades. They are scrutinised closely by their neighbours for traces of android-like behaviour.

At festivals of literature, they are regarded askance by chairmen of panels, who may make jocular interjections if they chance to refer to either E. E. Smith on the one hand or Dr Johnson on the other. More orthodox writers present suspect them of earning far more money than they do, or far less. (Both are true, by the way.)

All this may suggest that I have reasons to dislike being labelled an SF author. I have my reasons; but I do not dislike being an SF author. On the contrary. Although my first loyalty is to literature, I owe a great deal to a field to which I have been able to contribute something.

I am regarded as a difficult author, because I write non-fiction as well as fiction, ordinary fiction as well as science fiction, and occasionally what is considered a difficult book; but in my experience the readership of SF, on its more informed level, is remarkably patient, and will always endeavour to comprehend what they at first find incomprehensible.

Let me name two additional advantages in being a writer of science fiction, apart from becoming pampered Guest of Honour at a Convention, since they are germane to these essays.

Firstly, over the last twenty years, the span of my writing career, science fiction has developed remarkably all round the world, the toothed peak of its progress rising like a population graph. Playing a role in that process has been tremendously rewarding.

Despite all the expansion, readers and writers have managed to remain closely in communication, as this Convention indicates. This may be in part because of the indifference of people beyond the field, and the condemnation of critics armed only with the antique weaponry of standard lit. crit.; but it more probably springs from an inner mystery – the attempted complex unity of art and science – in SF itself. Because of that mystery, which every writer tries to interpret in an individual way, and because of the indifference from outside, we have been forced to form our own body of criticism, our own canons of taste; we have established our own editors, reviewers, scholars, booksellers and publishers, in a remarkable burst of creativity for which I can think of no parallel. We have done it all ourselves and given the world a new literature, whether the world wants it or not.

Secondly, that close community of interest, that fascination with the mystery, is global, and not confined to Western Europe or the United States. Largely thanks to friendly connections overseas, I have been able to travel about the world a good deal in the last decade, as some of the contents indicate, and have wandered as far afield as Iceland, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, Japan, Brazil, Sicily, Mexico, Australia, Sumatra, and now Brighton. (Some of the trips were made by good old private enterprise, such as the Mexico and Sumatran ventures, but I should perhaps add that the Soviet visit was laid on by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the GB/USSR Association, to whom I wish to express my thanks.) Even the most casual traveller abroad must notice the way in which the whole world is caught up in a scramble of change.

In England at least, reviewing is very much part of a writing career, a valuable part; low pay and the general education give one a feel for the somewhat marginal job of authorship. As well as reviewing for the Oxford Mail, for which I worked for many years, I have written articles for a spectrum of journals, among them the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Punch, Penthouse, and the Guardian. To the latter, I contributed an irregular series on art, which I wish I had found time to continue. I have reviewed films for this paper and that, and for the BBC. I have read for publishers and for the Arts Council. I have contributed to countless fanzines. Millions of words, wind into the wind.

From all that material, I could have bundled together enough wordage to fill several volumes. But a book is a book is a book, and rarely a collection of old journalism. I have tried to reshape everything in order to make a new book. Only in the section entitled ‘Rough Justices’, where I appear primarily as reviewer, is the material almost as originally published.

‘Ever Since the Enlightenment’ is based on a speech given in Canberra, thanks to Colin Steele. The James Blish article is a development of an interview I made with Blish; earlier stages of the article appeared in Foundation and a critical volume for Queensland University Press edited by Kirpal Singh and Michael Tolley (to both of which gentlemen my thanks for aid beyond the scope of literature). ‘Dick’s Maledictory Web’ appeared first in Science Fiction Studies and then as an introduction to an edition of Dick’s Martian Time-Slip. ‘Why They Left Zirn Unguarded’ is based on a review which appeared in Vector. The Nesvadba article appeared as an introduction to an edition of Nesvadba’s In the Footsteps of the Abominable Snowman. The Vonnegut article is based on one which appeared in Andrew Mylett’s Summary. The ‘Barefoot’ article is based on an introduction for a Swedish translation of Barefoot in the Head which, despite gallant efforts by John Henri Holmberg and Sam Lundwall, never got published. ‘The Gulf and the Forest’ is based on an article with the same title which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

‘Looking Forward to 2001’ is based on a speech delivered to the Oxford Union, with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.

‘The Hiroshima Man’ is an extended version of a review which appeared in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. ‘The Hashish Club’ appeared as an introduction to a book of the same name, published by Peter Owen. ‘1951’ appeared in slightly different form in Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier’s A Tonic to the Nation.

‘The Sower of the Systems’ is based on a review of a Watts exhibition published in the Guardian. ‘The Fireby-Wireby Book’ appeared in a fanzine, Cidereal Times. ‘The Film Tarkovsky Made’ was first published in Foundation. ‘Kissingers Have Long Ears’ is based on an article written for Art and Story. ‘Spielberg’ began life as a lecture delivered at the ICA.

‘Sleazo Inputs I Have Known’ was published in Foundation. ‘It Catechised from Outer Space’ was published in New Review. ‘The Flight into Tomorrow’ appeared as an introduction to an edition of Harness’s The Paradox Men. The Burroughs article appeared in Punch. ‘Yes, well, but …’ appeared in Science Fiction Studies. ‘The Universe as Coal-Scuttle’ was developed from two reviews which appeared in the New Statesman.

‘California’ is based on an article in the Guardian. ‘Modest Atmosphere’ was broadcast in the BBC Third Programme, with George Macbeth and me playing all twelve voices, and later appeared in Encounter. Passages from ‘Cultural Totems’ appeared in New Review.

Two awards for criticism have been bestowed upon me. I am first holder of the James Blish Award for Excellence in Science Fiction Criticism (1977), presented for services to SF, with particular reference to my book Science Fiction Art (a revised version of the text of which is included here), and the introduction to Philip K.Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (which is included here). In 1978, the SFRA presented me with a Pilgrim Award in recognition of distinguished contributions to the study of science fiction, with particular reference to Billion Year Spree, and my anthologies.

To both these bodies, the British and the American, I offer my thanks for such encouragement. Come, gentlemen, what more fascinating subject for study is there?

Brian W. Aldiss

Oxford

December 1978




Ever Since the Enlightenment (#u769fe0b6-0aa0-515d-8526-25f1e4638119)


There is no finality in the current state of the world. The present power blocs within which we pass our lives in this posture or that will be gone in two hundred years as surely as the Holy Roman Empire or Byzantium.

Europe’s security was threatened by Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The removal of that threat in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries paved the way for a comparatively halcyon period for Europe (already prospering from its scientific discoveries and its ventures in the New World or round the globe) which we call the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.

The Ottoman Empire was once as mighty as China. In July 1683, Ottoman armies stood at the gates of Vienna, and Christendom itself was besieged. After sustained fighting, the Turks retreated, leaving behind colossal hordes of treasure, as well as piles of coffee which, disseminated through coffee houses, helped to make Europe a more civilised place. From this battle dates the rise to power of the Habsburg Empire.

A distinguished part in the battle for Vienna was taken by Prince Eugène of Savoy, a great general who was later to play a larger and more decisive role in the fight for the integrity of Europe.

If you sail down the Danube from Vienna, you come eventually to a place where the river flows round a dramatic outcrop of rock. Standing on top of this rock is a great fortress with green roofs. You can enter the fortress nowadays and eat an excellent meal in its chambers. This is Petrovaradin; before the country became Jugoslavia, these lands belonged to Austria, and the fortress was Peterwardein, but wienerschnitzel has given way to razniči and hajdučki čevap. Here, in 1716, Eugéne and his army defeated a great Turkish force, killing six thousand of them. The spoils were enormous, and enriched the European imagination as well as the pockets of Eugène’s men. Eugène himself retained the Grand Vizier’s tent, which was sumptuously decorated in gold and contained many apartments; it was so large that five hundred men were required to pitch it.

Sail a little farther down the Danube. Where it meets its tributary, the Sava, Belgrade stands, set in a great curve of the river, now a modern capital, once an Ottoman fortress. There, almost exactly a year after his victory at Peterwardein, Eugène of Savoy inflicted another defeat on the Ottoman Power.

There is never security without arms. Following the Turkish defeat, Belgrade itself, Hungary, sections of Bosnia and Serbia became part of the Habsburg domains, and the menace to western Europe was dispersed. Over the mounds of corpses and coffee, the way for the enormous progress of the eighteenth century was open – though of course the European states still squabbled amongst themselves.

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason sought for balance, the kind of balance enshrined in the great houses of the period, with East wing balanced against West, in the rapid advance of justice and civil order, in the antitheses of Johnsonian prose, as well as in the paradoxes and heroic couplets of Pope’s poetry. Humanism progressed, science progressed, all arts elaborated themselves – not least in music, where the pale counterpoint of Domenico Scarlatti was transformed into the complex statements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. And the industrial revolution gathered in a tide which still floods round the remotest shores of the world.

There now appears something slightly one-dimensional about the world of the Enlightenment, so greatly has social modification worked since then. In its peaceableness, its reasonableness, the Enlightenment lacks our painful perspectives on human nature. We can no more resurrect its values than read the poems of Ossian. Captain Cook was allowed to sail where he would in time of war, unmolested by his enemies, who recognised the value of his scientific research. G.B.Tiepolo painted the Queen of the Nile in High Renaissance costume, being concerned not with anachronism but with what looked best. In the eighteenth century you dressed up for science, as you did to have your portrait painted.

It is less with Tiepolo than Cook that we are concerned, although art and scientific discovery are closely linked during this period.

Tiepolo, luminary of a maritime republic, like Turkey in eclipse, died at virtually the same time as Cook was setting up his observatory in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. The old painter’s day was done, his style superseded by the classicism of Mengs. James Cook also represented a new style. His painters, under Sir Joshua Banks, had no truck with queens or goddesses; they were trained to scientific observation. Cook himself was an excellent cartographer, and carried on his voyages new-style theodolites and accurate chronometers to chart his way.

Nor was it only in instrumentation, in the gadgetry, that things were changing. Other mariners, such as Samuel Wallis, had sailed the Pacific before Cook, and sought the mysterious Southern Continent; but they had been too ill on reaching those far waters to carry out their proper duties. Scurvy and dysentery claimed their crews. Cook observed proper diet, proper hygiene, and his crews stayed fit.

The South Seas acted as counterbalance to what enlightened Europeans experienced as the smallness of Christendom. Eighteenth-century security bred boredom. A new world was needed. In fact, what was eventually discovered was unsought: new dimensions of time, evolution, Romanticism and the complex of ideas which dominate our own times, whether we realise it or not.

We have a sense of the future very clear in our age, but all ages have their infancies in previous ones. Romanticism, evolutionary theories, speculations on time, were none of them new to the nineteenth or even the eighteenth century. While the bells of Rome and every other European capital were ringing for the relief of Vienna and the defeat of the Turks, Thomas Burnet in Cambridge was translating into English his Telluris Theoria Sacra; it was published in 1684 as The Sacred Theory of the Earth. In a sonorous style which imitates Sir Thomas Browne, Burnet reveals his cosmological theory, which states that, before Creation, Earth was perfectly smooth like an egg until such time as it hatched and released a universal Flood. Burnet remarks, in a striking phrase, that we ‘have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins’.

Despite his egg theory, Burnet was no fool, and believed that since we had been endowed with Reason, we should exercise it to discover and understand the world in which we found ourselves. This is the doctrine of the Age of Reason.

Burnet continues, ‘The greatest objects in Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold … Whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.’ Perfect Romantic doctrine, looking forward to Burke – and back to Lord Bacon: ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’

The great philosophers of the time, Berkeley in particular, were more effectively working changes in perception. But new philosophies filter only slowly through the general populace; it was the voyages of men like Cook in undiscovered places which immediately caught the public imagination.

The motives behind the exploration of those distant regions were mixed, as man’s motives generally are, as the motives for the Apollo flights to the Moon in the sixties were. Unlike the discovery and opening up of the North American continent, the story of the South Seas must remind us of our own generation’s experience of space travel – not least in a remark Cook makes in one of his letters; in his reference to his ‘ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go’, even the phraseology forges an unsought parallel between the Endeavour and the starship Enterprise.

To an eighteenth-century man, that distant part of the globe was the equivalent of a new planet, a watery planet like Perelandra. In some respects very like Perelandra; for, as in C. S. Lewis’s novel the inhabitants of Venus act out a religious drama, an allegory, so the inhabitants of the South Pacific served to act out some of the preoccupations of eighteenth-century man. Were they models of what the Ancient Greeks had been, enlightened people in a state of grace with nature; were they corrupt savages in need of a missionary; or were they sinless, Adams and Eves before the Fall, inhabitants of multitudinous Edens?

More than one construction can generally be made from one set of facts. Just as SF writers become accustomed to hearing from uninformed reviewers that they are ‘new Wellses’ or ‘latter-day Vernes’, so Europeans, striving to focus on the essential qualities of newly discovered races, claimed that they were ‘what the ancient Britons were before civilisation’, while the Australian aborigines were compared with Gaelic bards. Not analogies only but morals were to be drawn. As William Cowper put it, in the first book of his poem, The Task:

E’en the favoured isles,

So lately found, although the constant sun

Cheer all their seasons with a grateful smile,

Can boast but little virtue; and, inert

Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain

In manners – victims of luxurious ease.

It is a Protestant viewpoint not entirely dead today.

From the discoveries, from the debates, new sciences sprang. ‘Geography is a science of fact,’ said Bougainville, knowing he challenged an older and contradictory point of view. The depressing story of Tasmania – its history of the slaughter of the indigenous population boding ill for the inhabitants of any possible future planet any possible future space-travellers might come across – is lightened only by the French expedition there in 1802, when François Péron made the first anthropological record. Péron established amiable relations with the Tasmanians, and brought back to Europe 100,000 animal specimens, of which 2500 were of unknown species. Numerous meetings with the inhabitants were faithfully recorded.

All such findings were closely linked to the continuing search for the nature of man. Péron himself, addressing the French authorities, declared, ‘No doubt it is wonderful to gather the inert moss which grows on the eternal ice of the Poles, or to pursue into the burning heart of the Sahara those hideous reptiles which Nature seems to have exiled in order to protect us from their fury; but – let us have the courage to say it – would it be less wonderful, less useful to society, to send with the naturalists on this mission some young doctors specially trained in the study of man himself, to record everything of interest in both moral and physical matters which diverse peoples may have to reveal – their habitat, their traditions, their customs, their maladies both internal and external, and the cures which they use?’

The study of man himself. It was a sensible and enlightened goal. Yet, only a year after the French expedition to Tasmania, the British established a penal colony there. The wretched Tasmanians were then hunted to death, suffering alike at the hands of criminals and philanthropists. All became extinct within thirty years. The unfittest had not survived. Neither the most enlightened statesmen, nor all the rococo in all the churches in Europe could stem a general extermination.

Ideas or ideologies always arise which cushion us from clear perceptions of our own cruelty; the Victorians took refuge in a popular view of Darwinism, garbled in a loose phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’; the Nazis believed they were ridding the German race of impurity by massacring six million Jews; Stalinists justified the Great Purge by their sterile belief in the entrails of Marx and Lenin; and the West turned a blind eye to the killing of perhaps a million Chinese in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 because the victims were labelled Communist.

Despite the slaughters, the findings brought back by British and French three-masters stimulated a debate on the nature of man and his place in the universe which still continues. The slow, creaking three-masters have been replaced by speedy surrealist kitchen utensils cutting up the sky. The findings of Mariner spacecraft, with their startling crop of pictures, the harvest from Pioneers, Vikings and Voyagers, give impetus to the quest for extraterrestrial life. But our modern findings are undoubtedly less corporeal: eighteenth-century sailors copulated on warm sands with the dusky ladies of the South Seas in exchange for nails. The rewards of technology were never better or more immediately demonstrated.

The more efficiently the early engines could be seen to work, the faster they multiplied. The faster they multiplied, the more dominant they became. It was like a re-run of the story of prehistoric reptiles. Samuel Butler observed this phenomenon clearly and, in Erewhon (1872), gives one of his scribes this ominous sentence: ‘The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians are to man.’ The argument goes on, ‘I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.’

Butler’s fear was not a particularly common one, judging by the success of technology. When Cook was killed in 1779, Britain was rapidly becoming covered with a network of canals – the first modern transport system, the biggest thing since Roman roads. Soon no major city lay farther than fifteen miles from a busy water link. In another generation, the new roads had arrived; 1600 Road Acts went through Parliament between 1751 and 1790. On new roads, new light coaches – a new thing; all classes could afford to travel. And in a further generation, at the moment when coaching had reached its zenith of speed and organisation, in came the men from the North with their railways, and swept into darkness with a vast exhalation of coal smoke, the slow moving past.

When the painter J. M. W. Turner, born as the American War of Independence began, died in 1851, the Western world had undergone one of its greatest periods of transition – and was undergoing another.

New landscapes required new perceptions. The interpretation by trained artists of those exotic panoramas first sighted over the taffrail of the Endeavour or the Bounty led to the overthrow of a classical generalised style of art in favour of the art of the closely studied and the particular. This is what Ruskin means when he says in Modern Painters, apropos of Turner, that, ‘For the better comfort of the non-imaginative painter, be it observed, that it is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture.’ So Zoffany and Reynolds give place to Constable and Ward, and early Turner to late.

The earthworks thrown up all over England to accommodate the railway line left their mark in the minds of men. When Brunel built his Great Western Railway from Paddington to Bristol, the comparative feebleness of his steam-power meant that the track had to run level to within 1/12,000th of an inch for the whole hundred-mile journey. One can see Brunel’s cuttings still, guarding the line up the Thames valley to Oxford. There lie the chalk strata, put down millions of years ago by minute creatures, brought back to the grimy light of day a century ago by sturdy Victorian navvies.

A cardinal perception dawned: that the rocks of old Earth, or the coral islands of the new oceans, were petrified Time. It was almost but not quite what Burnet meant when he said: ‘We have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins.’ Embalmed in gritty streets lay secrets of past history just as urgent as a journey from Birmingham to Liverpool. Understanding lent a window on epochs long past and on times to come.

Geology was in many ways the giant, the Prometheus, of nineteenth-century science, bursting open the other doors of the cultural gallery. It is a curious linkage of the physical and the metaphysical to think of the poor stonemason, Hugh Miller, chopping away in the dust of the red sandstones of Scotland, and thereby helping to sketch that teeming pageant of organic life we now accept without blinking: that pageant which belongs with amino acids in a nameless ocean, and the first single-celled creatures, and which swells in grandeur and colour and possibly hideousness through the ages of amphibians and rampant trees and great dinosaurs that walked like men, on to the dodo and to Us, going about our archaic rituals. That pageant is among the most permanent to emerge from the permanent ways of the Railway Age.

Almost all that we can learn or imagine is inherited, the produce of the labours of others. So it always was. Aided by the work of Miller, and of Lyell and James Hutton and Wallace and others, Charles Darwin pieced together the jigsaw of facts which form evolutionary theory. Darwin’s researches took him many years; they began when Captain Fitzroy, a godfearing sailor, had the misfortune to take Darwin aboard the Beagle.

The voyage of the Beagle was almost as momentous as that of the Endeavour; its findings concluded part of the debate opened up by Cook. No longer ‘in doubt to deem himself a God or Beast’, man now saw himself ranged with the animals rather than the angels. Theology was never to be as popular again; but zoology won many adherents.

The early geologists learnt to distinguish between rocks of a sedimentary character and rocks formed by what Darwin calls plutonian processes. One wonders how far this dramatic inorganic model of rock-formation influenced that other great iconoclast of last century’s thought, Sigmund Freud, when formulating his theories of conscious and unconscious, from which latter well up the raw lavas of the personality’s core.

Whilst new cosmologies were discovered in the heavens – the first star photographs were taken in the 1850s – the earth yielded immense troves of dinosaur bones, notably in North America, like strange stations on the route of the railroad. Students of both Earth and sky helped roll back the carpet of the globe’s prehistory. The consequent development of scientific understanding, which takes in first one discipline and then another, creating channels of fresh thought like a flood inundating a parched land, has structured our mental frontiers; we abandon its watchtowers for superstitious faiths at our peril. Yet ours is an age easily tempted towards the mysticism of drugs and the bending of spoons by telepathy – not least because last century’s advances opened the doors of lunatic asylums as the complex nature of human mentality was unlocked, leaving us heir to a lessened fear of madness.

Whichever way we go, we see strange panoramas. As far as we can know, our vision is unique in the universe. And mankind is at present only at the beginning of its corporate lifetime.

Decade by decade, more time was needed in which to contain scientific findings related to the age of the Earth, and to cosmology. The good Bishop Ussher’s estimate that God created the world one morning in 4004 BC was laughable by Lyell’s time – the iguanodon upset that tea party. Just as men looked back to a truer perspective, other findings encouraged them to look forward. That was a new thing, too.

Not all that was new was of a sort to induce optimism. Though evolution could be made to stand as a justification for ruthless economic oppression or empire-building, it does not, on a proper evaluation, encourage any permanent feeling of security. The same might be said of Lord Kelvin’s reformulation of the second Law of Thermodynamics, which carried with it intimations of the heat death of the universe. Utilitarianism was a bleak enough creed for men; how much worse to find it written in the stars themselves.

As for a work designed to counterbalance the optimism of the Enlightenment, Malthus’s influential Essay on Population, its message that poverty and starvation, and more poverty and starvation, was mankind’s lot, added little to the gaiety of nations. Fortunately, in the New World, the wide prairies of the Mid-West seemed to give the lie to Malthus; in many ways, the United States could escape from the gloomy prognostications of Europe.

In Europe, the century culminated in a general pessimism (brought on, it must be added, by a series of dire events, revolutions and wars, as much as by depressing books). Great inventions, too, brought inventive whispers of mortality. I mentioned photography in my introduction. Photography brings us news of distant places; it sometimes appears, through the medium of the cinema screen, to bring us light itself, clothed in images of majestic beauty. Yet its primary use – at least among ordinary people – is to record ourselves and our families, and thus to expose as never before the ageing process, the heat death of the individual, to the very generations who have lost belief in the consolations of the Hereafter.

Photography is comfortless (Susan Sontag has recently made perceptive remarks on this score). It gives a twist to the Enlightenment philosopher Berkeley’s new theory of vision. ‘The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived,’ said Berkeley. Now we have become so enslaved by our cameras that we hardly exist unless we have been perceived by the lens; I have known functions to be called off because the television cameras were not coming – therefore the event was not important enough, even in the eyes of its participants, and ceased to exist.

In the nineteenth century, as now, the sketchy frameworks of possibility expanded at exhilarating speed. Yet the new light fell only on the old darkness of the human condition. The physical laws of the universe were disclosed as conveying less warmth than a kindly Providence.

In the autocratic societies of Enlightenment Europe, it mattered not what the common people thought. They had their own hand-down folk culture; new things were for the learned, the élite, whose opinions both had influence and could be influenced. After the American and French revolutions, that situation changed. Nineteenth-century Europe seethed with populist movements. In democratic societies, the people have influence, and so must be influenced. It was necessary to disseminate the grand gloomy ideas which had originated through science (science itself had suddenly become democratic, not to mention riddled with socialists). The people must learn to rule as well as being ruled.

Means of dissemination of ideas were provided by technological developments. All things conspired to the swifter propagation of information, from mechanical inventions such as the development of the rotary press, to repeals of newspaper tax and the abolition of excise duty on paper, to the establishment of municipal libraries and public museums. The Victorian Age spawned penny encyclopaedias and many factual publications, whilst nourishing the growth of the novel which – in England at least – had appeared defunct in the decade when Queen Victoria came to the throne.

Grand gloomy ideas do not necessarily make headway in a period of euphoric advancement such as the early Victorians enjoyed. ‘We are on the side of Progress,’ said Macaulay. The novelists, chasing other goals than philosophy, established the novel as a great social force and as a social form. The forte of the novel was the portrayal of character striving with character within society. Balzac or Zola, Mrs Gaskell or Trollope, Dostoevsky or Turgenev, this was the novelist’s territory. And this, by the way, was the territory on which the newly arrived literary critics based their activities.

Complacency is always on the side of Progress. William Morris, near the end of the century, talks of ‘the Whig frame of mind, natural to the modern prosperous middle-class men, who, in fact, so far as mechanical progress is concerned, have nothing to ask for’. The first novelists to attempt evolutionary themes and essay the grand gloomy ideas were three autodidacts, Samuel Butler, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells.

To call Butler an autodidact is to exaggerate. He was of the prosperous middle class, his father being a canon of Lincoln, and he was educated at Shrewsbury and Cambridge. But he repudiated his father’s religion and influence, becoming virtually a different man by leaving home for New Zealand, where he farmed sheep. In New Zealand, he began his literary career, the fruits of which are noted for their anti-Christian and unorthodox flavour – foremost among them being Erewhon (1872).

One can see that Erewhon is not science fiction; one can also see how in crossing of some mysterious many ways it resembles science fiction. An imaginary journey, the crossing of some mysterious barrier (in this case mountains), and the discovery of another society with attendant marvels – these are the common stock alike of the medieval romance and of modern science fiction. Erewhon also has negative attributes which distance it from the ordinary novel. The central figure is solitary, a corollary of which is that there is no great emotional depth in the story; and human psychology is not a strong element of the design, which focuses instead on what is new, unknown. What is new and unknown is embodied in a series of brilliant ideas, brilliantly handled in a satirical way which reminds us somewhat of Peacock or, to look forward, Aldous Huxley. These ideas stem in the main from Darwinism, a subject to which Butler devoted several books.

Thomas Hardy attended Darwin’s funeral. His sombre imagination was fired by the misty stretches of landscape revealed by evolutionary thought.

We do not read Hardy for his ideas, thought they are present – the ideas of a dreamer more than an intellectual; we may read him as the novelist of countryside now largely vanished, though Hardy could scarcely distinguish one flower from another. In fact, what is most compelling in the Wessex novels is the struggle at all levels between traditional and disruptive new ways of thought. More directly, an evolutionary emphasis is present from the early novels to – and climaxing in – The Dynasts (1903), Hardy’s great para-historical drama with an evolving Immanent Will.

The case of H.G.Wells, who was taught by Darwin’s friend and ally, Thomas Huxley, is too familiar to need examination here. Like Hardy, Wells got his education where he could, and taught himself by teaching. His brilliant entry into the literary field marks the con- gruence of two grand gloomy ideas, evolution crossed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Time Machine (1895). The Time Machine is distinctively science fiction in the way that The Dynasts distinctively is not. Indeed, it is science fiction in a way that much later science fiction is not – not only does it contain new ideas, but it combines them in a new way. Small wonder that it has been the exemplar of much that followed.

The Island of Dr Moreau, published the year after The Time Machine, shows Wells again worrying the bone of evolution. Wells himself pointed to its similarities with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And he says, ‘I have never been able to get away from life in the mass and life in general as distinguished from life in the individual experience, in any book I have ever written.’ This viewpoint of Man as Statistic, typical of many an SF writer, is encouraged by Malthusian thought. Wells and Hardy and Butler, being outside the swim of middle-class society, had little to lose by a new approach; it came naturally to them to express what was not received wisdom, and to propagate the unpopular. With the unpopular, Wells caught the popular ear.

These distinguished English writers were preceded by considerable writers from across the Channel. France was the first country of the Enlightenment; in Paris in 1771 was published a book which is in every way a product of its age – except that it is recognisably kin to science fiction.

While Cook was busy discovering Botany Bay, Boston was holding its Tea Party, and the first iron bridge was being built, Sebastien Mercier published his predictive work, L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante. Mercier visualised a time, seven centuries ahead, when society had improved and perfected itself. The actual and the metaphorical Bastilles have vanished. This futuristic utopian fiction was translated and published in other European countries and eventually in the newly independent America.

How was it that the English by contrast took, even then, a much less sanguine view of the future? I cannot resist contrasting Mercier’s dream of the future as a place of fountains and fine buildings with the typically British preoccupation with disaster. Take for instance, an anonymous squib by one ‘Antonius’ published in Lloyd’s Evening Post for 25-28 November, 1771 (and never noticed again until now). It looks two centuries ahead to a ruinous Britain overcome by an American Empire.

Two Americans are guided round London by a poor Briton. The latter provides a running commentary as follows:

‘Yonder is a field of turnips, there stood the Palace of Whitehall; as to St James’s there are no traces of that left, it stood somewhere near that pond. Here stood that venerable pile of antiquity, Westminster Abbey, which was founded in the year 796; at the west end was the famous Chapel of Henry the Seventh, in which were interred most of our English Kings. That on the right is the remains of Queen Elizabeth’s tomb; that on the left, those of King William the Third; all the rest are swept away by time.

‘The whole church had been ornamented with monuments of Admirals, Generals, Poets, Philosophers, and others, two of which only we found legible, that of Locke and Newton, some being quite defaced, and others we could not come at on account of the ruins fallen in upon them. – What a melancholy sight, we exclaimed, that this venerable dome, dedicated to God, should be now converted into a stable!’

And so on. South Sea House is a mere jakes, its infamy well known. India House was destroyed one hundred and sixty years earlier, ‘for the blood they shed in India called for vengeance, and they were expelled the Country’.

Why this dark vision? Only a generation after Antonius, a girl of eighteen was writing the melancholy and perverse Frankenstein – an English girl of eighteen. Perhaps our national lack of hope has preserved the country from some of the excesses inflicted on the rest of the world in the last two centuries.

In the erudite and naive patchwork of creations we call science fiction, there is no other figure like Jules Verne; even his fellow-countrymen have not come to terms with him. Beyond pointing out that his immense Voyages Extraordinaires stands like an Enlightenment fortress which slowly crumbles into the darkness of the twentieth century, I prefer to mention two of his honourable predecessors who also precede H. G. Wells.

Restif de la Bretonne’s La Decouverte Australe par un Homme-Volant, was published in 1781. It is a major speculative work describing flying machines, airborne fleets, and a civilisation in the wilds of Australia (something no living Australian would dare postulate). In a later work, Les Posthumes (1802), Bretonne describes other planets and extra-terrestrial beings.

But in 1854, in Paris, a much more intensely science-fictional work was published: more science-fictional because it uses for its structure those grand gloomy ideas I have already mentioned. Charles Ischir Defontenay’s novel Star ou Psi de Cassiopée combines symbolism and science fiction; the result is rather like a painting by Gustave Moreau. Star is a sophisticated story concerning a remote solar system of which Star, oddly enough, is not the sun but the planet, the sole planetary body of a system containing three suns and some satellites.

The humanoid races living on Star exhibit the features of various conflicting evolutionary theories. The Savelces result from miscegenation between a god and a small worm; the Ponarbates derive from animal species which occasionally give birth to superior types; the Nemsedes are the fruit of a kind of spontaneous generation ‘born from the sour lime of the soil heated by electric air’, and so on. One of Defontenay’s tribes is hermaphrodite, anticipating similiar themes by Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula Le Guin by a century or more.

Defontenay’s tone might be described as religious but cheerful, which possibly explains why his remarkable book was forgotten for so long.

By the end of the nineteenth century, pessimism was coming back into fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary lists as one of the meanings of the word Future, ‘A condition in times to come different (esp. in a favourable sense) from the present.’ Significantly, the usage quoted comes from 1852. The optimism of that favourable sense of the word had evaporated forty years later, when Wells’s first novels appeared. But gone forever was the eighteenth-century attitude expressed by Pope, ‘Oh, blindness to the future, Kindly given.’ Nineteenth-century findings rendered it both necessary and possible to speculate on the future; knowing the worst was a new tool in the intellectual armoury.

It may be that part of the stigma still attaching to science fiction lay originally in the fact that the men who helped create it as a form of expression were themselves outsiders, or regarded themselves as outsiders; examination of, say, one hundred typical texts would probably reinforce the theme of isolation (prominent for instance in Frankenstein). Even in overpopulation novels, which proliferated in the sixties of this century, the solitary individual occurs, almost in defiance of his context.

Isolation is manifestly one of the problems liable to crop up on a newly discovered planet, where you can find yourself alone except for a computer, a captain who has got religion, and the ship’s cat. It was particularly to the concept of new planets that American SF writers turned when they entered the science fiction lists with the launching of the pulp magazines. This phenomenon is generally explained as the Quest for the Last Frontier. It is less glib to consider imaginary planets as evidence of the fear and attraction of isolation.

Just as Hollywood on the West Coast of the USA was largely run by émigrés – Hungarians and the like – so was the pulp industry, peddling dreams and traumas on the East Coast. The émigrés came from the over-populated cities of Europe to another over-populated American city. Many SF writers, editors, and publishers were strangers in a strange land, autodidacts like Hardy and Wells. Isaac Asimov is a case in point. Born in a suburb of Smolensk in Russia, he was brought over to the United States at the age of three. His family settled in Brooklyn; his father ran a candy store. By the age of nine, Asimov Jnr was reading SF and educating himself by it; since when, with great single-mindedness, he has been trying to educate the rest of us. There can be few sciences which have not escaped his net. (The abrupt uprooting in early childhood sets him in a class with Mary Shelley, Nerval, Wells, Stapledon, Ballard, Aldiss, and many others).

Although we can point to the new science-fictional planets as logical extensions of such fictitious lands as Laputa and Butler’s Erewhon, we should bear in mind scientific considerations as well as literary ones. True, as the terrestrial globe shrinks, it is increasingly difficult to convince readers of the probability of finding even a satirical utopia in some undiscovered nook. Arthur Conan Doyle’s siting of the Lost World in the Amazon was plausible in 1912 (Professor Challenger’s ‘journey to verify some conclusions of Wallace and Bates,’ and his discovery of scientifically accurate and astonishing water-colours, designedly remind us of Cook’s and Darwin’s expeditions to undiscovered regions). After World War I, the increasing range of flying machines made similar caches of evolutionary anachronisms less and less likely. Science, a creative part of man’s mind, banishes literature, another creative part. One could chart the banishment of Doyle’s dinosaurs down the scale of fiction, down the scale of likelihood, to the boys’ magazines of the thirties, to the comics of the forties and fifties, to the Hanna Barbera cartoons of the sixties, and from the Matto Grosso to inside Everest, and from Atlantis back to – for in the most desperate fantasies credulity is neither here nor there – South America.

As the imagination needed new planets for its proper exercise, the new tools of theoretical science could supply them. This is revealed in the chief literary use to which new planets were put in early science fiction. Satire and utopianism, favourite ploys of the eighteenth century or earlier, were no more. The new planets did not form stages on which man could enact his social problems; instead, they were themselves the centre of the action, working models of scientific thought.

For to imagine out the full implications of evolution, geology, Malthusianism, and the famous Second Law, one needs to construct either a time machine, as Wells did, or a planet that represents Earth in an earlier or later stage of its life history. Even existent planets were converted for this purpose. By common consent, Mars became a dried up senescent version of Earth, and Venus a model of earlier terrestrial history, hot and steamy, sweltering under a Jurassic dream. Both models totally ignored astronomical fact, but fulfilled the need to act out in imagination current scientific theories.

The other element that assisted in the model-making was Infinite Lay Time. That also was a nineteenth-century invention. All time machines are ILT vehicles. Before their invention by sceptical theoretical scientists and mathematicians, anyone venturing back in time to 4004 BC would have banged his head on solid rock. The new speculative element, which rendered time immense, allowed the time traveller to go back far beyond page one of Genesis or forward beyond Armageddon to the ultimate heat death of the universe. SF writers had the job of making both accessible to the lay imagination. No-one else would touch the daunting task.

The connections between our world of today and the Enlightenment are now faint, erased by the horrors of our century, two world wars and the long-planned, long-term massacres of millions of people by Hitler and Stalin and their willing agents. Yet there are echoes. Europe has shrunk again, and is threatened by a new kind of Turk, though we are hardly likely to finance a new Prince Eugène.

Science fiction is here to stay, or will stay as long as we can at least speak of progress and dare to look at the future. In the West SF writers are still not mouthpieces of the state; one can see for them a unique function as disseminators of philosophical and scientific thought. Writers like Wells and Huxley excelled in that role, as did Olaf Stapledon, with his imaginative transformations of combined evolutionary and cosmological theory.

But the great commercial success of science fiction in the seventies diminishes the possibility that it will be treated even by its practitioners with proper seriousness. Money is not the enemy, but the greed for money. SF has become a sort of cultural reflex like the mother-in-law joke, used to sell cars and biscuits. Every time it is so used, it is drained of challenging ideas. Eventually it may become so trivial, so light, that it will sink below the intellectual horizon.

Paradoxically, this new commercial success comes at a time when its prime base – the grand gloomy ideas I have described – has worn thin, as genre material always does. As it becomes or tends to become less a literary genre, so – paradoxically again – it is being greatly taken up by universities, especially in the States, and the first international congress of SF critics has been held in Palermo (for SF is now an international pursuit, endowed by UNESCO).

But, science fiction has always been contradictory, and its best creators of a sturdily independent kind. This is perhaps the time of greatest potential for them and for the genre.

Even in a popular film like Star Wars, admittedly a mammoth with the brains of a gnat, one perceives at least latent thought. Although Star Wars was widely condemned by SF writers for its triviality, one can see how easily the idea of the Force as a spiritual weapon, rather than Robin Hood’s stave, could have been developed and deepened. The rebels would then have been fighting against the evil of the Empire with values on their side with which a general public would readily have identified; it could have entered scenes upon which, instead, it merely gazed.

The Force is a sort of corrupt version of the Samurai code. To have inserted the true thing with all its ritual of fasting and self-discipline and chivalric intent into the film would have increased immensely the film’s significance without spoiling the pace. Admittedly, Luke Skywalker would then have become less of a Disney kid; it is not sufficient to have togged him up with a shorty Roman toga instead of giving him a character.

Star Wars was pretty, but underestimated its audience’s intelligence. One of the lessons of the Enlightenment is that people are, on the whole, glad to learn and take pleasure in knowledge. Criticism should never be too prescriptive, but my hope is that science fiction will retain its old magic, and its sturdy if gloomy philosophical basic.




James Blish and the Mathematics of Knowledge (#u769fe0b6-0aa0-515d-8526-25f1e4638119)


We did not have the time to learn

everything that we wanted to know

Retma’s epitaph for Man in A Clash of Cymbals

The science fiction of James Blish presents us with a number of pleasurable dichotomies. Under the cloak of technological activity, he is a visionary of an old-fashioned kind, able, like Blake, to hold infinity in his hand. Such visionaries usually speak out against technology; but Blish saw in technology a chance to bring us nearer to the seat of knowledge, which – I hope to show – he equated with wisdom. Technology and the advance of science, in Blish’s view, bring us nearer to the ends and beginnings of things which loom so largely in Blishian cosmologies.

Windows on eternity open in all his novels. I knew Blish well for several years before his death in 1975 and he often spoke fondly of his early novel, Fallen Star (The Frozen Year, US title). A window on eternity opens early in that novel:

‘My post gave me a direct view of the magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in the act of blowing up – as, in miniature, it was; the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower of more than two hundred mesons.

Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that – a record of the undoing of one of the basic building blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe – could have resisted asking for a closer look.’

In asking for a closer look at the photograph, Julian Cole becomes involved as a journalist on the International Geophysical Year expedition to the Arctic. A member of the expedition, Joseph Wentz, dies, and a short oration is made over his dead body by Farnsworth, the leader of the expedition. The oration includes these words: ‘If You [God] … exist, and if You are still thinking about men, think of Joe Wentz. He admired Your fine workmanship in the stars, and never reproached You for spoiling him.’

Another member of the expedition responds angrily, ‘It is proven: He never punishes crime; He cares nothing for stars; why should He care about man?’ Much of Blish’s work is devoted to answering this question. Is there a God? Does he care? Can we achieve answers to these vital questions by pushing science (knowledge) to its extremes?

Juxtaposed, these questions form a central riddle, the nature of which changes slightly throughout Blish’s long career. Blish never satisfactorily answers the riddle himself. This may imply a failure as a theoretical novelist, but the riddle is often embodied in an image of great power; this is his success as a poet. The riddle is given form in Fallen Star, for instance, by the little pebble which Farnsworth embeds in an ordinary ice cube.

The pebble is a tektite fallen to Earth from the region of the asteroid belt, and consists of sedimentary rock. The implications of this find are tremendous. An asteroidal protoplanet once existed which supported oceans for a long period. So its climate must have been warmer than Mars; it must have had an atmosphere. A later discovery carries these theories further. There was life on the planet. And it was destroyed by the Martians within the period of Man’s span on Earth. There has been War in Heaven. As Farnsworth says – ‘Cosmic history in an ice cube!’

These and similar preoccupations explain why Blish felt such admiration for C. S. Lewis, to whose memory Black Easter is dedicated. Yet Blish is of what we may term the Campbell Generation; his work bears at least superficial resemblances to the other writing forged on John W. Campbell’s anvil. The Okie series, for example, gathered into book form as Cities in Flight, ran in serial form over a number of years in Campbell’s Astounding. Beneath the galactic gallivantings, however, lies something more hard-headed than anything in Heinlein, more intellectual than anything in Asimov, and more immense than anything in Van Vogt. Moreover, that something has little in common with the two SF writers Blish most admired, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth, for he rarely attempts the romantic and satiric modes in which Kuttner and Kornbluth are most successful.

In their spirit of enquiry, Blish’s novels are centrally science fictional. It is in the direction of that enquiry that Blish’s originality lies. We can only hope that some critic will come along and investigate his whole considerable oeuvre for us, revealing Blish’s true stature. I hope to point to a few lines of enquiry in this essay.

One main topic in the Astounding to which Blish contributed his early stories may be summed up in that striking phrase of Winston Churchill’s: ‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science.’ Campbell’s writers, whatever they might profess on the surface, were ambivalent regarding the virtues of the future world to which they saw themselves progressing as the outriders of culture. Time and time again, their stories dramatise experiments which – like those of Wernher von Braun in real life – metaphorically aim for the stars but hit London. Only in the stories of Isaac Asimov do we glimpse some kind of ordered and rational future. Yet, in the most popular of all sagas to emerge from Campbell’s forge, Asimov’s Foundation, (the title of that civilisation which Hari Seldon must preserve against the forces of decline) culture has nothing to do with the arts and humanities: it signifies merely an extrapolated twentieth-century technology which encases Trantor in metal, opposed by a barbarism which rides in spaceships.

Blish’s conception of culture and of science is more profound: he sees beneath them to their warring source. He perceived how every civilisation is dominated by a few major ideas and how these ideas become gradually outmoded, dooming the culture concerned; the fate of the Martians in Fallen Star is not that their planet has lost its atmosphere, but that they ‘have gone frozen in the brains’. Blish appreciated the seminal value of the pre-Classical culture in Greece, and dismissed out of hand Campbell’s assertion that ‘Homer was a barbarian’. Ideas infused from other sources can regenerate older cultures, as is demonstrated in Dr Mirabilis, the biography of the ‘miraculous doctor’, Roger Bacon, over which Blish laboured so long. The same seminal thought moved Blish to yoke four totally distinct books, A Case of Conscience, Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, and Mirabilis, together as an uncomfortable tetralogy entitled After Such Knowledge. His obsession with the true scientific nature of cultures is dramatised in The Seedling Stars which owes much to Olaf Stapledon. There an Adapted Man is not so much a man as an Idea from Earth, inserted into an alien environment to regenerate it (the reverse of the situation in Fallen Star).

The Seedling Stars is ultimately crude because the grand experiment of seeding stars takes little account of the feelings of the living beings forced to participate in the experiment, despite the moralising about the venture which goes on. Blish was interested in morality as a consciousness structure, while singularly lacking conventional moral tone. Individual lives rarely moved him. What concerned him was connecting together incompatible structures; he had come to believe, through Oswald Spengler, that there were no eternal verities, not even in the mathematics which is the basis of culture; hence his pre-occupation with eschatology.

A passage in Spengler’s Decline of the West must have attracted Blish’s attention, and certainly is relevant to the present day.

‘The modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the “true” – to wit, the Classical – mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.’

Our culture, sensing that the numbers in the Renaissance hour-glass are running out, is now trying belatedly to derive notations from other cultures previously ignored. Hence such manifestations as Tao Physics – and possibly SF itself.

Throughout Blish’s writing, we find two predominant preoccupations: that some culture or phase of culture is coming to an end (generally with a new beginning implied in that end) and that fresh ideas transfigure culture. Both these preoccupations find resolution in concepts of number. What excites him is not the individual – how could it, given those preoccupations – but the alembic of mathematics.

So his books conclude with cryptic sentences, the like of which never was on land or sea.

‘Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.’

God is dead.

‘And so, by winning all, all have I lost.’

Creation began.

Then he, too, was gone, and the world was ready to begin.

This last is the final line of one of Blish’s less appreciated novels, A Torrent of Faces, written with Norman L. Knight and, like Dr Mirabilis, a slow growth. It concerns – so the author tells us – a utopia of over-population. Blish did not regard this as a contradiction in terms. Again, numbers exercised their appeal. He says, ‘Our future world requires one hundred thousand cities with an average population of ten million people each. This means that there would have to be seven such cities in an area as small as Puerto Rico, about twelve to sixteen miles apart, if the cities are spread evenly all over the world in a checkerboard pattern.’ This culture survives only because a large portion of mankind lives under the oceans.

A Torrent of Faces is a cascade of figures. Every conversation seems to flow with them. As Kim and Jothen fly towards the mountain range of Chicago, she tells him, ‘Somewhere inside is the headquarters of the Civic Medical Services. I was born there. Every day approximately fifteen thousand babies are born there. The nine outlying regional centres produce about the same number daily …’ And so on. It is all rather like the scene at the end of A Clash of Cymbals where, heading for the collapse of the universe at the metagalactic centre of the universe, Hazelton borrows Amalfi’s slide-rule to do a few setting-up exercises.

This is not just a ploy to baffle us with prestidigitation; the power of numbers is a real thing for Blish. In A Clash of Cymbals, it creates a new universe. Amalfi, the hero of the Okie saga, becomes the godhead, the very substance of the new universe (‘the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into pleasure …’). Never was life everlasting achieved on such a scale.

This apocalyptic idea of one state of being leading to another is fundamental to a number of Blish’s novels and stories: one system of thought similarly supersedes another. Poor scientific Roger Bacon, arriving at Westminster, occupies a room foul with marsh gas from the sewer below; when he ignites it and blows himself up, he believes it to have been a visitation by the devil.

Blish’s work as a whole is remarkable for the visitations it numbers from both devils and angels. They were perhaps his way of injecting a conflicting irrational idea into the rationalism of Campbellian SF. Such creatures earn themselves a book title – The Night Shapes. This is not one of Blish’s best novels; perhaps Darkest Africa, with uneasy references to Rider Haggard – though E. R. Burroughs is nearer to the mark – suited the Blishian temperament less well than the Arctic. A terrible valley, likened to Eden, ‘burns out’ (and so becomes Hell?), releasing the night shapes. ‘The night shapes aren’t animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They’re the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They’ve always lived there. They always will.’

The context does not support the premise. But the premise of such night shapes often supported Blish.

Not only did he see them as convenient shorthand for an alien system of thought intruding itself on the cartesian universe, he had a markedly individual belief in Good and Evil. Through his windows on eternity he watched the Fall re-enacted. His purest version of the Fall is played out on Lithia, the planet in A Case of Conscience, the first volume of After Such Knowledge. That ponderous title, After Such Knowledge, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ Nobody earns forgiveness in Blish’s worlds; the math is against it. Religion’s no help. Even the Devil has to suffer by taking up the burdens of God at the end of The Day After Judgement.

Not that Blish believes in or asks us to believe in actual devils. But he has an interest in them which some might find excessive. He likes to hold the proposition open, if only as one of ‘the multitude of great ideas belonging to other cultures’ (devils being far from a Christian prerogative); perhaps he teased himself by the quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters used in Black Easter: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.’

The night shapes in the African valley soon found more sophisticated embodiment. When devils materialise in Death Valley (in The Day After Judgement), the whole world is under threat. Language is used as a defence against them, as language has conjured them, US military intelligence protects the troops from the dreadful knowledge of demons by use of typical military double-talk:

‘Enemy troops are equipped with individual body armour. In accordance with ancient Oriental custom, this armour has been designed and decorated in various grotesque shapes, in the hope of frightening the opposition. It is expected that the American soldier will simply laugh at this primitive device.’

Earth has become a hinterland of Hell. This is the Blishian law: close to home, devils appear. Farther away from Earth, apparitions become more celestial. Not only is Mother Earth inescapably soiled by her fecundity; Blish shares the belief, common to many American SF writers of his generation, that for Man to remain on Earth is to invite stagnation (as if the Chinese show any signs of stagnation by remaining in China).

Lithia, only forty light-years away from Earth, may or may not be the province of the devil. But far away, far from home in the centre of the galaxy, in the light, in the Heart Stars, there we find angels. ‘Inside that vast dust cloud called the Greater Coal Sack, the Angels orbited and danced in their thousands, creatures older than the planets, older than the suns, many of them as old as the universe itself.’

What, we may well wonder, lies behind the fantastic notion of a localised evil, and of a heaven accessible to star-travellers? Are we to regard this as just another mad sci-fi idea, or take it seriously, perhaps as an extended version of John Donne’s lovely paradox:

At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise

From death?

Deploying this vision through several books, Blish demands we take serious notice of it if we are to take him seriously.

So what are all these angels and devils doing, flitting so anachronistically through modern science fiction? The answers are complex, and spring from the complex nature of James Blish, who contained in himself much of the crabbed knowledge and temperament of his star, Roger Bacon. Sometimes, we are meant to take the devils literally, as in Black Easter and The Day After Judgement; sometimes, they are deployed more metaphorically. As for the vast distance wherein we are purified, where we may meet with angels, they also represent passages of time, during which knowledge and judgement can be achieved. Several Blishian heroes make at least part of the journey, and acquire part-purification.

One who makes it all the way is Mayor John Amalfi. He becomes more than angel, God (a reversal of the way in which the Devil becomes God by visiting Earth in Day After Judgement – here the factors of the equation are transposed). For it is Amalfi, of all Blish’s human characters, who travels farthest; and the anti-agathics which make him nearly immortal ensure that he can travel almost forever. So in Blishian terms he has to head away from Earth. At the end of Clash of Cymbals, he reaches metagalactic centre, where a new universe is coming into being. Amalfi virtually creates that new universe, in one orgasmic burst of parthenogenesis.

This climax is Blish’s most daring reach for balance, for a treaty between good and evil, armistice between love and death. But the longing for treaty, for balance, is continually expressed, often in metaphor. There is a wish to see standard religion take its place beside a rigorous science (typically, in A Case of Conscience); then demons will become mere humans in armour and humans angels without armour.

The contradictions between antipathetic systems are ones Blish is constantly driven to bridge. In a memorable story entitled ‘Bridge’ (later incorporated into the tetralogy Cities in Flight, as part of the novel They Shall Have Stars), he dramatises the journey of a man across a perilous ice bridge on Jupiter, a bridge which represents the joining of two incompatible systems, since the man is not on Jupiter in actuality but illusion. An actual crossing of the ice bridge can never be achieved. Oppositions admit of no real bridges, or not under any math at present accessible to us.

It was towards such a bridge that Blish worked. His writing slowly becomes more concentrated towards the problems of knowledge and evil (that is, if we exclude the volumes of Star Trek which Blish turned out – for money but also, presumably, for relief from his pursuit of his dark quarry). The devils become thicker, the angels fewer.

In two renowned stories, Blish subsumes the symbolic angels and devils into mathematical functions.

In ‘Common Time’, Garrard is the pilot of an experimental inter-stellar vessel, capable of accelerating to near-light velocities. He finds himself undergoing extreme time-dilation.

‘During a single day of ship-time, Garrard could get in more thinking than any philosopher on Earth could have managed during an entire lifetime. Garrard could, if he disciplined himself sufficiently, devote his mind for a century to running down the consequences of a single thought, down to the last detail, and still have millenia left to go on to the next thought. What panoplies of pure reason could he not have assembled by the time 6,000 years had gone by? With sufficient concentration, he might come up with a solution to the Problem of Evil between breakfast and dinner of a single ship’s day, and in a ship’s month might put his finger on the First Cause!’

The passage carries a reminder of Sir Thomas Browne, physician of Norwich whose writings Blish enjoyed (‘Julius Scaliger, who in a sleepless fit of the gout could make two hundred verses in a night, would have but five plain words upon his tomb …’). The quotation from ‘Common Time’ gains vigour from deployment of similar antitheses. It is the mark of a genuine writer that, in the fibres of one characteristic sentence, he delivers a minute image of his whole thought, much as physicists once believed the whole solar system was modelled in the atom.

Without being aware of any contradiction, Garrard leaps between sentences from dreaming of ‘panoplies of pure reason’ to solving the Problem of Evil, as if he (or rather Blish) believes Evil could be resolved by Reason; the two questions are presented not as oppositions but complementaries. ‘Common Time’ was published in 1953, in the same year as first publication of A Case of Conscience. In A Case of Conscience also, Evil seems curiously to be something only discernible by tortuous reason. How fortunate, then, that Ruiz-Sanchez happens to combine the function of scientist and priest.

One of the tokens of Lithian evil is the mystery surrounding mating and birth on the planet. Chtexa, a Lithian with whom Ruiz-Sanchez talks, explains that he is living alone because no female has chosen him to fecundate her eggs that season. The priest asks, ‘And how is the choice determined? Is it by emotion, or by reason alone?’

‘The two are in the long run the same,’ replies Chtexa.

If emotion and reason are the same ‘in the long run’, then so it seems are religion and science. ‘Clouds and clouds’ of angels follow the Ariadne back to Earth, riding the same Standing Wave as the ship (but the Standing Wave was in a field which ‘relatively rejected the universe’). In that same novel, The Star Dwellers, the children have a tiny transistorised transceiver often unusually employed; as young Sylvia says, ‘Dad uses it to talk to Lucifer.’ (Similarly, the characters in Black Easter listen to Armageddon taking place over Radio Luxembourg. We have to assume that Blish thought such feats possible if there are wholly new ideas of number yet to be revealed.)

Such formulae are passing strange. Therein lies their attraction; they force us to recall the intimate connection between mathematics and reality. Blish’s vision encompasses remote equations where the sedimentary strata of reason are indistinguishable from the igneous deposits of emotion.

He works towards a universe Milton accepted with one that Dirac envisioned, to justify the esoteric problem of evil with the recondite spin of the electron. This is not a problem one meets with regularly in science fiction, yet many people confront it daily. There is always a demand for a New Jerusalem among our dark satanic mills.

As Blake saw eternity in an hour, so the great Mary Somerville, translator of Laplace, saw a proof of the unity of the Deity in Differential Calculus. The American Edward Everett declared, a bit more gushingly, ‘In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together.’ Perhaps Leslie A. White came nearer to Blish’s position – and to Spengler’s – when he remarked that ‘Mathematics is a form of behaviour.’

So could belief in a Dirac transmitter, like absolute trust in God, free us from sin? Such seems to be Blish’s assumption in his justly renowned story, ‘Beep’, published the year after A Case of Conscience and ‘Common Time’. ‘Beep’ builds a remarkable bridge between love and judgment.

In ‘Beep’ we have with a vengeance a culture coming to an end and a fresh idea transforming culture, wrapped up in numerology. The peculiar structure of the story is designed to exhibit these transformations to best effect. (I refer to the original novella, not the slightly revised version published under the Browneian title, The Quincunx of Time.)

One of the pleasing ingenuities of ‘Beep’ lies curled up within its title; like a Samuel Palmer chestnut tree alert within the confines of a conker, so a forest of implications unpacks from the title’s meaningless seed of noise. Here we encounter ‘Common Time’ Garrard’s dream come true: the ‘panoplies of pure reason’ can be unravelled in less than ‘a single day of ship-time’ through the Dirac computer. This achievement results in a universe of rigid causal laws; the banishment of Chaos, the imposition of an Order more rigorous than anything we could achieve today with our inferior math.

‘Beep’ contains a central image, which, being a numerological incantation, banishes all devils:

‘I’ve heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, [says one of the characters] travelling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light years – but what kind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension.’

Communication, however, mysterious at first, is achieved; help is forthcoming.

Communication begets communion. ‘Beep’ concerns one of the central problems of a galactic civilisation, how to overcome those immense lines of communication stretching across space and time. Blish’s Dirac transmitter provides a remarkable solution to the problem. For not only does it in part abolish space and time (bringing the metagalactic centre to our doorsteps, so to speak) but it proves to be, in effect, a machine which abolishes the Problem of Evil, root and branch. Heisenberg-Born-Dirac wield more clout than the Holy Trinity.

The story goes on to demonstrate what good effects follow – including having one of the characters married almost forcibly to a transvestite lady of mixed ancestry (to his great benefit).

Unravelling the skeins of this strange tale, Blish posits that if freewill could be removed from human affairs there would be no sin (a contrary assumption, if I have my theology correct, to the ones in A Case of Conscience – and, par example, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange).

Determinism shapes all activity: human consciousness is ‘just along for the ride’, or ‘helpless’. An embodiment of this is the Richard Strauss persona, resurrected to create a masterpiece, in ‘A Work of Art’. Again, events rule. Blish manages to make this hellish proposition sound utopian. The world of ‘Beep’ is the happiest one in the Blishian canon; as one of the characters remarks, ‘The news is always good.’

This connection between instant communication and freedom from sin is bold – yet we commonly equate non-communication (secrecy) with wickedness. Blish makes the situation real by showing what tender care is taken by the Service to see that lovers always meet as planned, thus maintaining future events in their predestinate grooves. Never before did Secret Service so closely resemble Marriage Bureau.

Most SF writers, slaves to catastrophes, portray instant communication as something which can be seized upon and perverted to further the aims of the conqueror. In ‘Beep’, it is seized upon to bring further peace. Is Blish trying to equate instant communication with perfect communion? There seems no other way to explain why his all-powerful Service is so incorruptible. The Event Police have become veritable Angels on Earth.

Other riddles attend us. We puzzle at the way Blish has planted two people in disguise – one in the inner, one in the outer story. They assume their disguises for devious purposes, yet neither meets with so much as mild disapproval when they are discovered.

Perhaps deception carries no penalties in a utopia. The deceit is maintained for benevolent ends (though theologians, not least Ruiz-Sanchez, would look askance at that). But, in this utopia, deceit cannot be feared, since there is no aggression. If you remove reasons for aggression, will aggression vanish? Does the wish to throw stones disappear on a perfectly sandy beach? Useless to ask such questions about the world of ‘Beep’, since the Dirac transmitter makes cause and effect inoperative by rendering the whole universe totally open to scrutiny. After such knowledge, there is no room for Judgment Day.

If you grant that ‘Beep’ is of a utopian disposition, then you have to grant that it is a rare sort of story indeed, even among Blish’s cabinet of curiosities. I know of no other galactic empire which could be remotely regarded as utopian; in general, the sewers of these glittering Trantors are clogged with the dismembered bodies of the oppressed. Yet, given angelic guidance, even Trantor could be made to blossom.

James Blish, in his wisdom, did a lot of strange things. He was a thinker, a maker, until the day of his death. Unlike so many science fiction writers – enslaved by editors, formulae and prospect of riches – he did not grow less interesting as he grew older, as he engaged in a daily fight with death and the night shapes. One of the themes that ‘Common Time’, ‘Beep’, and A Case of Conscience have in common is immortality: immortality of thought, immortality of material things, immortality of evil. When the city of Dis makes its dreadful apparition in the seared lands of America which Blish had by then vacated, we feel it as an eruption of a dreadful cancer – largely forgotten, yet ever-living.

In the volumes of the Cities in Flight series, along with the spin-dizzies go the anti-death drugs that confer extreme longevity on all. In the years when Blish was writing of Mayor Amalfi and the cities, he was carefree enough to use the idea as no more than a plot-device. But the evil days would come, and what was merely thought would be entirely felt. Reason and emotion would unite.

Like Mayor Amalfi, James Blish has made the perilous crossing into another state of being, where perhaps little survives but mathematics. In the words of Browne, he is ‘by this time no Puny among the mighty Nations of the Dead; for tho’ he left this World not many Days past, yet every Hour you know largely addeth unto that dark Society; and considering the incessant Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive that there dieth in the whole Earth so few as a thousand an Hour.’

As for the works Blish left behind, there were, as we might anticipate, several that will remain incomplete and uncompleted; for those that are complete we must be grateful. At their best, the cadences of his prose are spare, capable of keeping us alive to the unsparing intellect behind them. His originality, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, must always ensure that we remember his name when the rolls of leading science fiction writers are called; but he would seek no finer epitaph than that which one of his characters bestowed on mankind: ‘We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.’




Dick’s Maledictory Web (#ulink_14f456f8-8e69-5825-a107-b4c89c5e6839)


‘The trail levelled out and became wider. And all was in shadow; cold and damp hung over everything, as if they were treading within a great tomb. The vegetation that grew thin and noxious along the surface of rocks had a dead quality to it, as if something had poisoned it in its act of growing. Ahead lay a dead bird on the path, a rotten corpse that might have been there for weeks; he could not tell.’

Arnie Kott is on his way back into a schizoid variant of the recent past. Philip K. Dick is in the middle of one of his most magical novels, Martian Time-Slip.




The setting is Mars, which is now partly colonised. Colonists live along the water system, where conditions of near-fertility exist.

This web of civilisation is stretched thin over utter desolation. There is no guaranteeing that it can be maintained. Its stability is threatened by the Great Powers back on Earth. For years, they have neglected Mars, concentrating dollars and man-hours on further exploration elsewhere in the system; now they may interfere actively with the balance of the colony.

Behind this web exists another, even more tenuous: the web of human relationships. Men and women, children, old men, bleekmen – the autochthonous but non-indigenous natives of Mars – all depend, however reluctantly, on one another. When poor Norbert Steiner commits suicide, the effects of the event are felt by everyone.

Behind these two webs lies a third, revealed only indirectly. This is the web connecting all the good and bad things in the universe. The despised bleekmen, who tremble on the edge of greater knowledge than humanity, are acutely aware of this web and occasionally succeed in twitching a strand here and there, to their advantage; but they are as much in its toils as anybody else.

These three webs integrate at various coordinate points, the most remarkable point being AM-WEB, a complex structure which the UN may build some time in the future in the FDR Mountains. The structure is visible to Steiner’s autistic son, Manfred, who sees it in an advanced stage of decay.

Its function in the novel is to provide a symbol for the aspirations and failures of mankind. The structure will be a considerable achievement when completed; which is not to say that it is not ultimately doomed; and part of that doom may be decreed by the miserable political and financial manoeuvrings which form one of the minor themes of this intricately designed novel.

Martian Time-Slip comes from the middle of one of Dick’s most creative periods. The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962. In 1963 came The Game-Players of Titan and then, in 1964, The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth, Clans of the Alphane Moon, and the present volume. Although Dick is a prolific author, with some thirty novels appearing in fifteen years, his production rate is modest when compared with many other writers in the prodigal field of science fiction.

One of the attractions of Dick’s novels is that they all have points at which they inter-relate, although Dick never reintroduces characters from previous books. The relationship is more subtle – more web-like – than that. There is a web in Clans of the Alphane Moon, made by ‘the world-spider as it spins its web of destruction for all life’. The way in which Mars in the present novel is parcelled up between various nationalities is reminiscent of the parcelling up of Earth into great estates in The Penultimate Truth, and The Game-Players of Titan. The horrifying corrupt world of Manfred’s schizophrenia, the realm of Gubble, reminds us of the tomb world into which John Isidore falls in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or of one of the ghastly fake universes of Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. When Jack Bohlen, in the first few pages of the novel, awaits the arrival of his father from Earth, change is about to creep in; and change is often paradoxically embodied in someone or something old, like the Edwin N. Stanton lying wrapped up in newspaper in the back of Maury Rock’s Jaguar, in the opening pages of We Can Build You. And so on.

Such building blocks are by no means interchangeable from book to book; Dick’s kaleidoscope is always being shaken, new sinister colours and patterns continually emerge. The power in the Dickian universe resides in these blocks, rather than in his characters; even when one of the characters has a special power (like Jones’s ability to foresee the future in The World Jones Made) it rarely does him any personal good.

If we look at two of the most important of these building blocks and observe how they depend on each other for greatest effect, we come close to understanding one aspect of Dickian thought. These blocks are the concern-with-reality and the involvement-with-the-past.

Most of the characteristic themes of science fiction are materialist ones; only the concern-with-reality theme involves a quasimetaphysical speculation, and this theme Dick has made peculiarly his own. Among his earliest published stories is ‘Impostor’ (1953), in which a robot believes himself to be a man; the faking is so good that even he cannot detect the truth until the bomb within him is triggered by a phrase he himself speaks. Later, Dickian characters are frequently to find themselves trapped in hallucinations or fake worlds of various kinds, often without knowing it or, if knowing it, without being able to do anything about it. In The Man in the High Castle, the world we know – in which the Allies won World War II and the Axis Powers lost – is itself reduced to a hypothetical world existing only in a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which the victorious Japanese and Germans have banned.

And it is not only worlds that are fake. Objects, animals, people, may also be unreal in various ways. Dick’s novels are littered with fakes, from the reproduction guns buried in rock in The Penultimate Truth which later are used, and so became genuine fakes, to the toad which can hardly be told from real in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, to the androids masquerading as human in the same novel. Things are always talking back to humans. Doors argue, medicine bags patronise, the cab at the end of Now Wait for Next Year advises Dr Eric Sweetscent to stay with his ailing wife. All sorts of drugs are available which lead to entirely imaginary universes, like the evil Can-D and Chew-Z used by the colonists on Mars in Palmer Eldritch, or the JJ-180 which is banned on Earth in Now Wait for Next Year.

The colonists on the Mars of this present novel use only the drugs available to us, though those are generally at hand – in the very opening scene we come across Silvia Bohlen doped up on phenobarbitone. Here the concern-with-reality theme is worked out through the timeslip of the title, and through the autistic boy, Manfred.

Manfred falls into the power of Arnie Kott, boss of the plumbing union which, because water is so scarce, has something of a stranglehold on Mars (a typical piece of wild Dickian ingenuity). Arnie worries a lot. He asks his bleekman servant, Helio, if he has ever been psychoanalysed.

‘No, Mister. Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness.’

‘Howzat, Helio?’

‘Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what Mister.’

‘I don’t get you, Helio.’

‘Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black night-without-bottom lies, the pit …’

Of course, there are many ways of falling into the pit, one of which is to have too much involvement-with-the-past. Dick admits a fascination with the past, quoting lines of Henry Vaughan:

Some men a forward motion love

But I by backward steps would move …

Whilst saying how much he enjoys the junk of the past, Dick adds, ‘But I’m equally aware of the ominous possibilities. Ray Bradbury goes for the Thirties, too, and I think he falsifies and glamourises them …’ (Daily Telegraph Magazine, 19 July 1974). The casual remark reveals much; Dick perceives fiction as a quest, not a refuge.

Arnie Kott has an innocent fascination with objects of the past – he possesses the only spinet on Mars. In the same way, Robert Childan’s trading Mickey Mouse watches and scarce copies of Tip Top Comics to the victorious Japanese (in The Man in the High Castle) is represented as entirely innocuous. Trouble comes when the interest with the past and all its artifacts builds into an obsession, like Virgil Ackerman’s Wash-55 a vast regressive babyland which features in Now Wait for Last Year.

And this is indeed where Dick parts company with Ray Bradbury, and with many another writer, in or out of the science fiction field. If he sees little safety in the future, the past is even more insidiously corrupting. So dreadful is Manfred’s past that you can die in it. The past is seen as regressive; one of the most striking Dickian concepts is the ‘regression of forms’ which takes place in Ubik, that magnificent but flawed novel in which the characters try to make headway through a world becoming ever more primitive, so that the airliner devolves into a Ford trimotor into a Curtis biplane, while Joe’s multiplex FM tuner will regress into a cylinder phonograph playing a shouted recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

In Martian Time-Slip, the involvement-with-the-past is general, as well as being particularised in Manfred’s illness. Mars itself is regarded by Earth as a has-been, and is patterned with has-been communities based on earlier versions of terrestrial history. Here it is especially difficult to escape damnation.

With the past so corrupting, the present so uncertain, and the future so threatening, we might wonder if there can be any escape. The secret of survival in Dick’s universe is not to attempt escape into any alternate version of reality but to see things through as best you can; in that way, you may succeed if not actually triumphing. The favoured character in Martian Time-Slip is Jack Bohlen, whom we last see reunited with his wife, out in the dark garden, flashing a torch and looking for someone. His voice is business-like, competent, and patient; these are high ranking virtues in the Dickian theology. It is significant that Jack is a repairman (‘an idiot who can fix things,’ says Kott), a survival job, since it helps maintain the status quo. Similar survivors in other novels are pot-healers, traders, doctors, musical instrument makers, and android-shooters (since androids threaten the status quo).

The characters who survive are generally aided by some system of knowledge involving faith; the system is rarely a scientific one; it is more likely to be ancient. In Martian Time-Slip, it is the never-formulated paranormal understanding of the bleekmen; Bohlen respects this vague eschatological faith without comprehending it, just as Kott despises it. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, the four thousand year old Chinese work of divination, performs a similar function in the The Man in the High Castle, whilst in Counter-Clock World Lotta Hermes randomly consults the Bible, which predicts the future with an alarming accuracy. In both Dick’s two early masterpieces, Time-Slip and High Castle, this religious element – presented as something crumbling, unreliable, to be figured out with pain – is well-integrated into the texture of the novel.

Dick’s next great book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, was written very soon after Martian Time-Slip, and the two are closely related, not only because Mars is in both cases used as a setting. To my view, Eldritch is a flawed work, over-complicated, and finally disappearing into a cloud of quasi-theology; whereas Martian Time-Slip has a calm and lucidity about it. But in Eldritch we also find an ancient and unreliable metastructure of faith, in this case embodied in the ferocious alien entity which fuses with Eldritch’s being.

‘Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox … and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become … maybe that’s the source of the knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding.’

So muses Barney Mayerson. Jack Bohlen desperately needs a transcendental act of fusion; he is estranged from his wife, sold by his first employer, threatened by his second, invaded by the schizophrenia of the boy he befriends. He sees in this mental illness, so frighteningly depicted in the book, the ultimate enemy. From this ultimate enemy comes the time-slip of the title and that startling paragraph which seems to condense much of the feeling of the book – and, indeed, of Dick’s work in general, when Bohlen works out what Manfred’s mental illness means: ‘It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.’

This is the maledictory circle within which Dick’s beings move and from which they have to escape: although almost any change is for the worse, stasis means death, spiritual if not actual.

Any discussion of Dick’s work makes it sound a grim and appalling world. So, on the surface, it may be; yet it must also be said that Dick is amazingly funny. The terror and the humour are fused. It is this rare quality which marks Dick out. This is why critics, in seeking to convey his essential flavour, bring forth the names of Dickens and Kafka, earlier masters of Ghastly Comedy.

Martian Time-Slip is full of delightful comic effects, not least in the way in which Steiner and the lecherous Otto Zitte ship illegal gourmet food items from Earth in unmanned Swiss rockets. Dick’s fondness for oddball entities and titles is much in evidence, notably in the surrealist public school, where the Emperor Tiberius, Sir Francis Drake, Mark Twain, and various other dignitaries talk to the boys. Below this easy-going humour lies a darker stream of wit. Arnie Kott’s terrible and fatal mistake of believing that reality is merely another version of the schizoid past is also part of the comedy of mistakes to which Dick’s characters always dance.

There is a deeper resemblance to the work of Dickens and Kafka. Dick, like Dickens, enjoys a multi-plotted novel. As the legal metaphor is to Bleak House, the world-as-prison to Little Dorrit, the dust-heap in Our Mutual Friend, the tainted wealth to Great Expectations, so is Mars to Martian Time-Slip. It is exactly and vividly drawn; it is neither the Mars as adventure-playground of Edgar Rice Burroughs nor the Mars as parallel of Pristine America of Ray Bradbury; this is Mars used in elegant and expert fashion as metaphor of spiritual poverty. In functioning as a dreamscape, it has much in common with the semi-allegorical, semi-surrealist locations used by Kafka to heighten his Ghastly Comedy of bafflement. (Staring at his house standing in the meagre Martian desert, Bohlen smiles and says, ‘This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this.’)

Dick’s alliance, if one may call it that, with writers such as Dickens and Kafka makes him immediately congenial to English and European readers. It may be this quality which has brought him reputation and respect on this side of the Atlantic before his virtues are fully recognised in his own country.

Perhaps I may be allowed to add that I feel particularly delighted to see this novel added to the growing list of titles in the Master Series. I read it over a decade ago in the American Ballantine edition, admired it greatly, and recommended it over the next few years to several British publishers. Some seemed to feel that it was too ‘advanced’ for the English market; also there were contractual difficulties. One admirer of the book was Mr Ronald Whiting, who was establishing his own publishing firm, but he was defeated by various unlucky circumstances; his firm closed down before it could publish Martian Time-Slip.

Since then, Martian Time-Slip had been floating round in a limbo of its own, in a tombworld of non-publication, with nothing ever happening to it again.



1. Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick, NEL, 1976. This edition marks its first English publication, belated but perhaps – in view of Dick’s growing reputation as a master of science fiction – not untimely.




Why They Left Zirn Unguarded: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (#ulink_e9666d7e-2155-58b1-b19c-5260c8f11ef3)


The early and mid-fifties formed a period of great richness for SF (although we did not notice at the time). Magazines sprouted and proliferated as never before, in a last glory before the onslaught of paperbacks – in much the same way, I imagine, that all the crack stage-coach runs in this country were at their peak in the very years the railways were making them obsolete.

Smith’s bookstalls were flooded with covers celebrating marvels of astronomy and space-engineering, much as they now sport anatomy and the freaky electronics of pop. Then it was that one bought one’s first Galaxys, F&SFs, Thrilling Wonders, IFs, Spaces, Fantastics, and the lesser but delectable breeds, all of which seemed to be edited by Robert Lowndes: Future, Original, and Dynamic. These magazines were not imports but British reprints.

Among the clever new names, one searched particularly for those of Richard Matheson, William Tenn, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, and – if one was smart enough – J. G. Ballard. They were all short-story writers; the SF magazines were the ideal medium; and none of them was as much fun as Robert Sheckley.

The typical Sheckley appearance was in Galaxy, edited by the celebrated madman H. L. Gold, where he appeared beside other celebrated madmen like Alfred Bester and Theodore Sturgeon. Madmen are essential to SF. We still have madmen today, but often the madness gets into the style rather than the story, as with Harlan Ellison and some of the layabouts in New Worlds Quarterly. Sheckley kept his madness honed to a fine point by writing clear English about utterly convincing impossibilities. After all the sobersides in Astounding, it was marvellous to read a man whose characters never scored victories (though they rarely suffered utter defeat), whose planets were lunatic and draughty, whose aliens pursued totally inane rituals (like the Dance of the Reciprocal Trade Agreement), whose technologies were generally dedicated to perfecting robots which lurched and squeaked, and whose spaceships were never airtight.

That whole epoch, and the entire Sheckley thing, comes back very clearly as one reads this omnibus


– which is possibly an adverse criticism, for we have a somewhat one-dimensional view of Sheckley here. All the stories hail from the fifties, when Sheckley was young and clever. Now he’s old and clever, experience has had him by the lapels like one of his malfunctioning robots, and it would have been valuable to have been offered a few later fruits from his tree.

Those later fruits have a taste of acid to them, a fragrance of corruption, and a feel of loss, which makes the best of them more memorable than the earlier ingenuities which Conquest rightly celebrates.

For instance, in a 1972 short story, ‘The Mnemone’:

‘But these are futile gestures. The truth is, we have lost Xanadu irretrievably, lost Cicero, lost Zoroaster. And what else have we lost, what great battles were fought, cities built, jungles conquered? What songs were sung, what dreams were dreamed? We see it now, too late, that our intelligence is a plant which must be rooted in the rich fields of the past.’

There’s a note he never sounded in the fifties. Sheckley had roots only in the future. Nor could he write such a funny-poignant tale as his ‘Zirn Left Unguarded, the Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead’, (published in Nova 2, edited by Harry Harrison, 1972), in which Sheckley tenderly mocks the romantic-savage-analytical mode of science-fantasy of which he always had such easy mastery. And in Nova 3, there’s his ‘Welcome to the Standard Nightmare’, which is all that Sheckley ever was: the old ingenuity is still there, and a whole planet surrenders to one Earthman; but the mood is darker, the etching done with acid that bites deeper into the copper than once it did.

The story ends with the words: ‘For the Lorians were an advanced and intelligent people. And what is the purpose of being really intelligent if not to have the substance of what you want without mistaking it for the shadow?’ In the fifties, Sheckley’s characters were travelling too fast to worry about what was substance, what shadow.

My disagreement, then, is with editor Robert Conquest, not with Sheckley. He could have given us a more dimensional study of Sheckley. That has not been his intention. He admires Sheckley’s skill in telling an ingenious story, and he includes those stories which seem to him to exemplify this rare ability.

The result is a portly volume containing one Sheckley novel, Immortality Inc., and a dozen short stories, among them several well-known and beloved by the SF fraternity, such as ‘Pilgrimage to Earth’, ‘A Ticket to Tranai’, ‘The Prize of Peril’, and ‘The Store of the Worlds’. Not a bad story among them.

Many of these stories use as their material the basic Shecklian preoccupations: the awfulness of institutions and corporations, the craziness of trying to establish a relationship with anyone, the arbitrariness of society’s mores, the difficulties one can get into with women, the sheer down-at-heel ghastliness of the galaxy. These, you might say, are almost anyone’s preoccupations; no disagreements or surprises there. The nice, the odd, thing about Sheckley’s preoccupations is that they are all counterbalanced by their very opposites. The television company that exploits you to the point of death is scrupulous to a pernickety degree; the girl genuinely loved you, but it was just a financial deal; it’s as efficient to hold citizens up in the street and rob them as to collect income tax, terrestrial fashion; your wife is perfectly nice, but when you find her in her lover’s arms, it’s because you refused to keep her in stasis; uncomfortable though we may find most worlds, there are races who are worse off, and leap from sun to sun complaining of the cold. In effect, Sheckley’s madness is presented with a disarming reasonableness. At least his future’s no worse than the present; and if you think the galaxy’s hell, try staying at home. He’s telling you a story, not presenting a case.

Of course Sheckley does have a case. His importance as a writer lies in his entertaining embodiment of the underdog’s viewpoint; his AAA Ace Agency stories in Galaxy represent a way in which human beings are forced to exploit each other under a capitalist system; indeed, they go beyond that – for this is science fiction, and Sheckley shows how human beings, even given great powers, will always exploit each other under any system. It is this understanding, paradoxically exhilarating and so much more to be prized than any cheap ideological identity tag, which powers his fiction and at the same time prevents more generous general acknowledgement of his strengths.

The madness is Blakeian, and so always unwelcome to the fearful. But for Sheckley it is a necessity that human relationships should continually break down, that Zirn should perpetually be left unguarded.

Somewhere in the Sheckley hierarchy is another pre-occupation. It would be too much to call it a hope. But ever and anon comes the thought that there might be a system of non-material things when circumstances fall out less laughably than in our world. Conquest introduces us to several stories of this nature. Immortality Inc. is Sheckley’s version of the Afterlife – several Afterlives, in fact. But the Afterlife is no more satisfactory than this life – Sheckley is no Bradbury or Finney, dreaming forever of a bright childhood world; he’s too much of a realist for that.

When a somewhat Asimovian machine is invented by a superrace which can provide answers to all the most baffling philosophical questions of the universe, there is nobody around to phrase the questions properly; the God is useless. Even the Almighty makes an almighty hash of things in one of these stories, calling all the robots up to Heaven on the day of the final Judgement, and leaving mankind below on the battlefield. Sheckley’s is a universe of makeshift lives – Kingsley Amis coined the perfect term for it: a comic inferno.

The story here I find most touching (I once anthologised it myself) is ‘The Store of the Worlds’. The protagonist finds happiness. He gets a whole year of it, and it costs him everything he has. Admittedly, the year includes a maid who drinks, trouble at the office, a panic on the stockmarket, and a fire in the guestroom; but it is a year of ordinary family life, containing, in Sheckley’s phrase, desire and fulfillment. Nobody’s on the run, nothing shoots at anything, everyone is comprehensible.

Like Orwell, Sheckley is a utopianist. Unlike all other utopianists, Sheckley’s and Orwell’s ambitions are almost dauntingly humble – just to be left alone, to have a girl, a drink, a stroll in the park, a room to yourselves. Only one fancies that more fun would go on in Sheckley’s shack than Orwell’s. (An eccentric parenthesis: I’ve always suspected that Orwell wrote 1984 after reading Van Vogt; maybe he wrote Animal Farm after reading Sheckley.)

Robert Conquest hopes to introduce the civilised pleasures of Sheckley to a readership beyond the SF audience; in his introduction he likens himself to Belloc introducing Ernest Bramah, or E. C. Bentley introducing Damon Runyon. Bramah is a good touch, for there is something of a Kai Lung about Sheckley. He reminds me too of another excellent story-teller, ‘Saki’, H. H. Munro.

Unless I am mistaken, Conquest also addresses himself to the SF readers. First he warms their hearts by telling them what they long suspected (but are reassured to hear from anyone with credentials as imposing as Conquest’s), that H. G. Wells is every bit as much the artist as Henry James; then he slips it to us that James is ‘a model of unpretentious clarity compared with many more recent phenomena’. Here, one experiences three or four bodings, in anticipation of yet another Conquest–Amis tract on the worthlessness of anything in SF written since Mike Moorcock attained the age of puberty. Fortunately, the crisis is avoided; Conquest is too adroit to attempt praise of Sheckley by dispraise of lesser breeds.

However, this volume is a great success, a product of Conquest’s dedication to the art as well as a celebration of Sheckley’s skills. Many a writer would wish as distinguished an anthologist – most of us have to patch our own stories together.

1. The Robert Sheckley Omnibus, edited & introduced by Robert Conquest, Gollancz, 1973.




Nesvadba: In the Footsteps of the Admirable Čapek (#ulink_056ba3e3-162d-5a13-b821-d0df7d0fae77)


Josef Nesvadba and I are about the same age. We have met twice, once when he was travelling through London, and, many years later, when I was travelling through Prague, where he lives. This seems entirely appropriate, since Nesvadba’s fictions are often filled with long and complex journeys. He is that compelling kind of writer who reminds us that our lives are really somewhat ramshackle fictions, full of unlikely coincidences and people who do not always behave in character.

The perfidious plot-lines of our lives first brought us together in 1965, when something Nesvadba said made a striking impression.

He was talking about his stories, and how he was attempting a sort of psycho-fiction, as he called it. We were agreeing, I seem to recall, that authors who called themselves science fiction writers should not regard science fiction as simply realistic simulation of an hypothecated future; we saw it more as a contemporary form of celebration of the mysteries that pervade human life. We admitted ruefully that the other kind was more commercially popular and, at this point, I underwent the experience of hearing Nesvadba say that a collection of his psycho-fiction stories had been published in Prague in a paper bag.

Prague is a magnificent city where High Baroque and Art Nouveau styles in architecture meet. At the entrance to Nesvadba’s flat in the centre of the city, two voluptuous caryatids, less demure than Artemis would have allowed, guard the door he passed through daily. In the celebrated Golem Restaurant, I bought a packet of Apollo-Soyuz cigarettes and smoked them, though I normally detest cigarettes. I stood in the apartment building where Franz Kafka was born, looking up the winding stairwell; by a lugubrious turn of fate, the building has now been taken over by one pseudopod or other of Communist officialdom. Sometimes I have nightmares, dreaming I am Kafka. So I was scarcely bowled over, or only slightly bowled, to hear that publishers in Kafka’s city should have issued Josef Nesvadba’s work in this unorthodox manner.

The more I considered, the more it seemed appropriate that his kind of fiction should receive such treatment, the more easily I could visualise readers dipping into the bag, bringing out a tale like a pastrami sandwich, and munching thoughtfully on it in one of the little cafés in the shade of Hradčany Castle.

As are many Czechs, Nesvadba is a cosmopolitan, as familiar with Hollywood as with Paris. He speaks several languages, and his English is good. However, on this occasion I had mis-heard him. His paper bag was in actuality the less unusual paperback. I’m sorry about that. I still feel that his food for thought, and his story-telling techniques, are remarkable enough to be singled out for special treatment. The present publishers have voted against the paper bag format also, but it remains a privilege to be introducing Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished science fiction writer to paperback readers in this country.

These stories


are set in the narrow alleyways of the mind. Black humour is scarcely dispersed by low-wattage electric bulbs. Whole life-cycles of ghastliness are displayed with gusto in very few lines.

‘The dragoons had been the pride of our town. They had ruuined my marriage. Two years after the wedding my wife ran away with Captain Imre Kovacs to Salgotaryan. Perhaps that’s what turned me against soldiers. Especially dragoons. I gave up my flat and never left my basement laboratory after that. I sleep there and a waitress brings me my meals from the restaurant. I have few demands on life.’




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