SLAVES OF THE DEATH SPIDERS: Colin Wilson and Existentialist Science Fiction
I have before me the proofs of Colin Wilson’s new science fiction novel—or part of it anyway, this being only the first volume of a three-decker whose collective title is Spider World. Had it been written for the pulp magazines (in a much less prolix fashion, of course) it would probably have been called something slightly more melodramatic, but we live in dignified times nowadays. Instead of a twenty-thousand word first instalment of an Astounding serial, Slaves of the Death Spiders, we have nearly a hundred and fifty thousand words called The Tower, which is presumably to be followed by two more equally weighty tomes.
For the long-time science fiction reader this is a work redolent with echoes; among the works recalled to my mind while I was reading through it were Murray Leinster’s “Mad Planet,” Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core, Manly Wade Wellman’s The Dark Destroyers, and the film Star Wars. Let no one be put off by Colin Wilson’s reputation as an unorthodox and mildly esoteric philosopher; this is old-fashioned adventure fiction not so very far upmarket of the recent works of that other unorthodox philosopher L. Ron Hubbard. In the same way that the natural scepticism of the SF fan will lead him to wonder whether there may not be a hint of philosophical propaganda lurking beneath the surface of the ten volume Invaders Plan, however, so he will peer suspiciously at the ideative undercurrents of Spider World.
The first part of this first volume of Spider World introduces us to Niall, son of Ulf and Siris, brother of Veig, Runa and Mara. (In the great tradition of pulp SF hardly anyone in this world has more than one name, but we will later be surprised to encounter a Wellsian mock-cockney with eight wives who is incongruously called Bill Doggins. Niall also has an uncle called Thorg, but he is just spider fodder). Niall and his family live in the desert, where they must eke out a frugal living while dodging predators and watching for balloon-borne death spiders which might take them as slaves. All the insects and arachnids of this world are much bigger than the ones we know, and some of them are a lot brighter. As well as the death spiders, whose distinctive kind of intelligence is augmented by will-power that can exert physical force, there are sophisticated bombardier beetles which have their own civilization and their own human servants. Human beings are for the most part not as bright as they used to be when they ruled the Earth, mainly because they have been selectively bred by the death spiders for stupidity. Humans living wild, however—like Ulf and his family—are still pretty bright, and Niall soon shows himself to be an intellectual ball of fire, as one would expect of a hero whose ultimate mission will presumably be to save mankind from the yoke of awful servitude.
The cleverness of this small band is amply shown off in the first hundred-and-some pages, when they fight off a series of insectile nasties, domesticate a wasp and some ants, and undertake a dangerous journey to an underground city of free but decadent humans ruled by the surprisingly effete Kazak. Niall, in the course of these adventures, learns enough about his world to give us a rough idea of what it is like, and begins to develop the mental powers that will ultimately equip him to fight back against the spiders. He also finds an artifact left over from the ancient times, which enables him to kill a death spider. This most heinous of crimes precipitates a raid in which his family and the inhabitants of Kazak’s city are killed or enslaved. Ulf is numbered among the dead.
In the second part of the novel Niall follows the trail of his surviving family-members, hoping to rescue them. He is eventually captured by the wolf spiders—inferior minions of the death spiders—who are herding them into slavery. Their journey takes them across the sea, and during a storm Niall saves the life of one of these wolf spiders, who do not seem to be such awful chaps after all.
Once in the city of the death spiders, Niall finds himself in a peculiar position. The existence of his hidden talents is suspected by the Spider Lord, who refrains from ordering his death in the apparent hope of winning his loyalty and co-operation. This may seem unduly optimistic to the reader, but Niall’s experiences in the city show him that the great majority of the spiders’ servants think they have a pretty good life, all things considered, and that despite the spiders’ habit of eating them their conditions of service are reasonable. They can, at least, feel superior to the utterly stupid slaves. Even Kazak, who has been free, is willing enough to serve his new masters, all the more so when he lands the plum job of being the ultimate overseer. Niall, however, is not tempted.
Niall’s determination to oppose the spiders is redoubled when he manages to gain entrance to a tower which the spiders have been trying to destroy for many years. There a computer-generated guru explains to him that man’s hegemony was lost long ago when the Earth passed through the tail of a radioactive comet whose effects turned the ecosphere upside down and forced some men to flee the solar system. (This is the info-dump section where Niall is lectured for a while on matters of history, evolution, and so on, but we are not told why all the conventional arguments about the impossibility of giant spiders and insects are wrong.) The computer guru assures Niall that the spiders can be defeated, but coyly refuses to tell him how, spinning him a social Darwinist line about the survival of the fittest and men having to prove themselves worthy of salvation.
In the third part of the story Niall flees the spider city (aided at one point by a grateful wolf spider—not a cliché is spurned in this plot) and finally ends up in the city of the bombardier beetles, where he meets, not for the first time, the cheery explosives expert Bill Doggins. Doggins has no particular desire to help him, but Niall has fortunately found out the location of a long-lost arsenal, full of lovely explosives, blasters and other weapons of awful destructive power. This lure is enough to persuade Doggins to put together a crack team of guerillas to get hold of the weapons and let all hell break loose.
The Tower ends, after a brief spider-frying orgy, with the breaking of the treaty between the spiders and the bombardier beetles. Niall is free, but must live as an outcast. His adventure has taught him that the spiders can be opposed, not simply with super-weapons but with the power of the will, and that if humans can only learn to exploit their inner resources they can strike back against their mesmeric masters. Watch out for the next exciting episode!
* * * *
This may seem to be a far cry from The Outsider, that rapt commentary on tortured works of literary self-analysis which shot Colin Wilson to fame in the 1950s. It does not even have much in common with Wilson’s previous works of SF, which include two Lovecraftian novels, The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone, and The Space Vampires. The first two come perilously close to sinking beneath the weight of their pseudoscientific discourse, maintaining a deadly intellectual earnestness and a ponderously didactic tone. The third, despite being modelled more on van Vogt than on Lovecraft and being sufficiently similar to the average horror/SF melodrama to make a scary film, still has its fair share of the existentialist pontificating that can be found in Wilson’s other murder mysteries, and a certain amount of urgent theorizing derived from his investigation of The Occult. Compared with these books, which beg to be taken at least three-quarters seriously, Spider World seems to be very much a genre confection, possessed of a more entertaining esprit. Nevertheless, Spider World does fit in with the developing pattern of Wilson’s work, and it may well be that The Tower will prove to be a wolf spider in sheepish clothing; once this three-decker has its reader caught in its seductive web of melodramatic cliché they will suddenly find themselves staring into the beady eyes and slavering palps of that most hideous of all sciencefictional monsters: the author’s message.
According to his autobiographical reminiscences, Colin Wilson first fell under the spell of pulp SF when he was ten,1 during the war years. He rediscovered it in the 1960s, when he began to think seriously about all kinds of matters, and he then concocted an apology for it: SF was the literary voice of the scientific view of the universe—the grand cosmic perspective—and it was “trying to cure man of his hopeless addiction to the trivial and the obvious.”2 This is, in Wilson’s view, an important task, because it is his own.
What Wilson found in his literary outsiders, in the pages of Barbusse, Camus, and Hesse, was an agonized attempt to awake from an awful dream of mundanity and burst the imaginative horizons confining ordinary, habit-bound, religiously unthinking men. In The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962) Wilson brought together some very strange bedfellows, chapter one juxtaposing H. P. Lovecraft, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and August Strindberg as collaborators in an “assault on rationality.” The realism of Zola, Faulkner, and Graham Greene, the anti-novels of Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, the pessimistic avant-gardism of Beckett, the scientific imagination of Wells and pulp SF, the fantasies of the Gothic imagination, and the works of of Hoffmann, Gogol, Tolkien, and Sade are all examined as flights of the imagination in protest against the narrowness of everyday perceptions. The different directions taken by the imagination are said here to reflect the very different values of the writers, but the flight itself implies a common rejection of the bland acceptance of mundanity. The exercise of the imagination becomes a kind of groping for some higher and better purpose in human existence. SF, Wilson claims in this book, is mostly badly-written and cannot stand up to ordinary methods of literary criticism save in one or two exceptional cases, but it all has an essential virtue which no amount of literary incompetence can take away: it is a spur which urges us to grasp potentials which lie unrealized within us, to become citizens of the cosmos instead of residents of Ruislip.
In later books, most obviously The Occult (1971)—blurbed as “A study of the latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present”—Wilson informed us that these potentials really do lie within us, and that we might become supermen if only we could get a proper grip on ourselves. Our trouble, he insists, is narrowness of consciousness, which lulls us into “a state of permanent drowsiness, like being half anaesthetised,”3in which it is relatively easy to feel frustrated by our inabilities, but difficult actually to do much about it. He promises us, though, that once we understand “the mechanisms of consciousness,” and can cultivate the “Factor X” which lies latent there, the universe will really be our oyster.4
We have, of course, heard this promise before. L. Ron Hubbard promised it when he invented Dianetics and Scientology. John W. Campbell Jr. promised it during the psi boom of the 1950s, in his lurid editorializing as well as the fiction which he bought for Astounding/Analog, and also—it has recently transpired—in the voluminous letters which he wrote to his authors and friends. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that we now find in Wilson’s work a strategy of popularization very similar to one which has also been employed, in his exploits as writer and messiah, by Hubbard and, in his capacity as editor and agent provocateur, by Campbell.
What has happened to mankind in Spider World is a kind of well-deserved fall from grace. We failed to reach our true potential while we had the chance, wasting ourselves in war and luxury, and we paid the price when the miraculous comet gave spiders their chance. Spiders, the plot alleges, already make subconscious use of the psychokinetic power of their tiny wills in directing flies into their webs. Blown up to giant size, their will power is marvellously increased and they easily subdue humans, who have concentrated all their efforts on the cleverness of their hands. Because of this sin, we deserve to be enslaved by the spiders, who are morally entitled to use us as food (it is, after all, merely their nature—although one of the many things the info-dump does not explain is why Wilson’s spiders do not need to liquefy their food in the same fashion asthe ones with which we are familiar. The spiders are not all bad—and the bombardier beetles turn out to be scrupulously fair-minded, after their fashion—because the essential patient passivity of their fundamental nature means that they do not generally go in for wars and suchlike.
It is clear even from volume one of this saga that men will release themselves from the yoke of slavery only by cultivating will-power to go with their technological handiness. In so doing they will become whole beings, unlike their old selves or the spiders. The only thing which remains in serious doubt even at this stage is what will happen to the spiders. The pulpish scenario suggests that gung-ho genocide is the outcome to aim at, but we have already seen enough good words put in for them to harbor the suspicion that man and spider might be able to strike a better balance, achieving a symbiosis which transcends the present parasitism.
The way in which Niall’s brother Veig initially makes things much easier for the family by domesticating wild insects seems to be preparing the ground for an eventual pluralistic solution by which men, insects and arachnids can combine their different modes of consciousness for the mutual good. The Spider Lord’s current resemblance to Ming the Merciless and the Mekon may only be a blind. I must confess that I hope that things will go that way—in these liberal times the reckless speciesism of pulp SF is surely as outdated as its casual sexism—but I remain worried (for one thing, Wilson’s sexism is as cavalier as anything one might have found in Startling Stories).
* * * *
A cynical observer might suggest that there is a certain irony in what Colin Wilson is trying to do in Spider World. In earlier works he joined the ranks of those apologists who could not be content with the condescending judgment that SF consists of “fairy stories for adults who have failed to outgrow fairy stories.” When he first began to write SF stories, therefore, he was careful to pack them with lots of heavy stuff suggestive of more respectable literary relationships and existentialist chutzpah. He ran the risk, however, of lending credit to the sceptical argument that all his existentialist woffle and studied support for parapsychology was just part and parcel of the SF bag—i.e., “fairy stories for adults who have failed to outgrow fairy stories.”
The will-power of Spider World is difficult to see as anything other than the magic power of wishing, and one might easily be prompted to ask whether, if Colin Wilson wants us to take this even half-seriously, we need to take seriously anything else he has ever said. L. Ron Hubbard has surely done much the same thing; while he was invisible to his followers they might just about have been prepared to believe he was a kind of superman, but who in the world could possibly believe that of the hand that penned Battlefield Earth?
I have credited these observations to a hypothetical cynical observer because I do not entirely agree with the position. I do not believe that SF consists of fairy stories for people who have not outgrown fairy stories. For that matter, I would not want to be condescending about fairy stories either. I cannot believe, however, that the real merits of science fiction include the ability to tempt us into the development of some mysterious Factor X which will make us all supermen and save us from the possibility of becoming slaves of the death spiders. For this reason, I have mixed feelings about Spider World. If I am invited to take it seriously, I simply cannot; it really is too silly. If I am asked not to take it seriously, but only as a mere entertainment, then I will admit that it has a certain rough-hewn charm, like “Mad Planet” or Star Wars, but I will persist in regretting that it has very few of the authentic merits which can be found in good SF. It is low on originality, has a sprawling and ungainly plot, and it has not yet extended the horizons of the imagination at all. I still have hopes of the Spider Lord, though, and there may yet prove to be more things in this heaven and earth than I have dreamt of. I have a feeling that we have yet to meet the bees.
* * * *
Note (1995): The bibliography of Spider World became rather complicated. The Tower was split into three books for US publication as a series of “young adult” novels, and was there followed—as it was in the UK—by The Delta (1987). According to Wilson’s comments in the Third Edition of the St. James Press Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, however, all of this material constituted the first “volume” of the trilogy. A second “volume,” entitled The Magician, was due to be published in two actual volumes, but only the first of these—consisting of “The Assassins” and “The Living Dead”—seems to have made it into print. It appeared in 1992, under the intended title, from a different publisher. A projected third “volume” called The New Earth—intended to consist of three actual volumes—was planned but may not ever see the light of day.
I was never sent review copies of any of the subsequent volumes in the series and I never bothered to buy any of them, so I have no idea how my predictions are working out so far.