Inner Space, Early Manifestos, and the Billion Year Spree …
Kingsley Amis’s stormy affair with science fiction becomes more and more perplexing. In 1960, New Maps of Hell was the most important critical work on s-f that had yet been published, and to a large extent still remains so. Amis threw open the gates of the ghetto, and ushered in a new audience which he almost singlehandedly recruited from intelligent readers of general fiction who until then had considered science fiction on a par with horror comics and pulp westerns.
What marked New Maps of Hell, like Amis’s reviews of the time and the considerable influence he brought to bear on publishers and literary editors alike, were his generosity and enthusiasm. Sadly, though, this was soon to change. By the mid-1960s, those of us active in science fiction began to hear the first growls of disapproval, saw ourselves glared at across the conference room, felt our kidneys punched in a jocular but unmistakably menacing way.
For the past fifteen years, in a stream of reviews, articles and interviews, Amis has vented an increasingly bilious contempt for almost everything science fiction has produced. As he writes in his introduction to this new anthology: ‘Science fiction has come from Chaucer to Finne-gans Wake in less than fifty years … now you can take it anywhere, and it is not worth taking.’ Yet Amis still returns again and again to spit into the poisoned well.
What have we done to deserve his hostility? To some extent Amis’s distaste for science fiction can be put down to simple pique. Sharp observer though he was of 1940s and 1950s s-f, his prediction in New Maps of Hell that science fiction would become primarily a satirical and sociological medium proved totally wrong. In fact, American s-f veered away into interplanetary fantasy (Le Guin, Zelazny, Delany), while the British writers began to explore the psychological realm of inner space.
Almost the only writer to turn to sociological satire was Amis himself, in The Alteration, and Russian Hide-and-Seek. Bearing in mind the rather modest talent for s-f that Amis displayed in those works, and his restless genre-hopping, perhaps his dissatisfaction is secretly, dare I say it, with …?
Whatever the root cause, Amis’s contempt for post-1960 science fiction seems bound up with his growing hatred of almost everything else that has happened in the world since then. Deriding the s-f New Wave, he refers to its links with the ‘Sixties scene, along with pop music, hippie clothes and hairdos, pornography, reefers.’ He tells us that the writers were visited by ‘restlessness and self-dissatisfaction, by the conscious quest for maturity and novelty, by the marsh-light of experimentalism.’
Worse horrors waited in the wings. ‘In came shock tactics, tricks with typography, one-line chapters, strained metaphors, obscurities, obscenities, drugs, oriental religions and left-wing politics.’ Good heavens, I remember now, those hairdos, that music, those oriental religions…
The perpetrators of all this are whipped unmercifully. Moorcock’s fiction ‘gives rise to little more than incurious bewilderment’. Aldiss, in Barefoot in the Head, ‘interlards an adventure story with stylistic oddities, bits of freak talk, poems, some of them “concrete”’. As for Ballard, on whom no verdict can be harsh enough: ‘Solipsistic … mystification and outrage … physical disgust … stories with chapters sub-divided into numbered paragraphs [not true] … has never been in the genre at all.’
The readers are equally despised and patronized: ‘My remarks on the readership of the genre refer of course to its higher levels; the average is probably pretty low, especially today.’
To read this long-threatened postscript to New Maps of Hell is an unsettling experience. Apart from his sour tone, Amis is so ill-informed about the present state of science fiction, and seems to imagine that it is dominated by would-be intellectuals imitating Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor.
In fact, science fiction today (certainly in the United States, its main centre of activity) is entering the most commercial phase it has ever known. The New Wave, along with almost all the more intelligent magazines and anthologies, has long since been inundated by a tsunami of planet fiction, sword-and-sorcery sensationalism, and Star Wars rip-offs, propelled by a reactionary s-f writers’ guild closely interlocked with the New York publishers.
What science fiction needs now is a clear, hard and positive voice like that of the Kingsley Amis of 1960. The accurate judgments he made then are evident in his choice of 1950s s-f in The Golden Age of Science Fiction, classics such as Pohl’s ‘The Tunnel under the World’, Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’, and H. Beam Piper’s ‘He Walked Around the Horses’, a brilliant tale of a Napoleonic disappearance, told in the form of – what’s this? – chapters subdivided into numbered paragraphs. Kingsley… !
Does the future still have a future? As we move closer to the year 2000, which looms in front of us like a forbidding planet, we might expect all manner of millenarian fears to invade our lives. Surprisingly, we appear to have turned our backs on the future, and tend to gaze nostalgically upon a re-invented past that most of us never managed to enjoy the first time around. If anything, there appear to be fewer millenarian cults at present than there were twenty years ago in the heyday of the Moonies and the Maharishi. Perhaps our own fin-de-siècle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism that we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.
All the same, I miss the large dreams, the heady, transcendental fantasies that fill the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and have been the stuff of science fiction since Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein nearly 200 years ago. It may be that we have already dreamed our dream of the future, and have woken with a start into a world of motorways, shopping malls and airport concourses which lie around us like the first instalment of a future that has forgotten to materialize.
Did the future arrive too soon, some time around the mid-century, the greatest era of modern science fiction? It has always struck me as remarkable that one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements, Neil Armstrong’s landing on the Moon, a triumph of courage and technology, should have had virtually no influence on the world at large. The great record-breaking attempts of the 1920s and 1930s generated an endless spin-off in architecture, fashion and design. I can remember my own childhood, when even static objects like teapots were streamlined, and much of the furniture and kitchen equipment around me seemed to be forever moving past at 100 m.p.h.
Neil Armstrong may well be the only human being of our time to be remembered 50,000 years from now, but to us his achievement means almost nothing. There are no teapots shaped like an Apollo spacecraft. Chromium, the most futuristic of all materials, is disapproved of by the conservationist lobby, and everything is dominated by matt black and the Mercedes look, at once aggressive and paranoid, like German medieval armour.
One reason why the Apollo moon-landings failed to touch our imaginations is that science fiction got there first, just as it has anticipated so much of our lives, effectively taking all the fun and surprise out of existence. Fifty years ago the Hollywood film convincingly brought to life the s-f writer’s visions of the future. When Star Wars appeared in 1977, the technology of film was so advanced that it could even show an advanced technology in decline, and cinema screens were filled with rusty spaceships like old tramp steamers and futuristic cities that resembled some forgotten World’s Fair left out too long in the rain. President Mitterrand’s grandiose architectural schemes, like the Défense complex in Paris, may be magnificent at first sight but are curiously unconvincing in their hold on time, since we have already anticipated their decay into the Pyramids of the future, a knack that science fiction has taught us.
Turning the pages of this remarkable encyclopedia, one has the sense that science fiction has foreseen every future that the human race can conceivably have in store for itself. Dystopias move past like sinister battleships in a menacing review. Time paradoxes pull inside out the sock of everyday reality. The furthest future is colonized, with mankind abandoning its biological past and assuming the form, first, of hyper-intelligent computers and then, finally, of electromagnetic radiation, giving birth to the stars and the planets in an act of generous play. Dreams of virtual reality dismantle our most deeply held beliefs in the difference between the real and the illusory.
All this is the stuff of popular culture, and science fiction is the folk literature of the twentieth century, with the folk tale’s hot line to the unconscious. As mandarin culture gradually atrophies, and the serious novel shrinks towards the role now played by poetry, the popularity of science fiction continues to grow, exerting a huge influence on the imagery of advertising, film and television, on pop videos, paperback covers and record sleeves. One can almost make the case that science fiction, far from being a disreputable minor genre, in fact constitutes the strongest literary tradition of the twentieth century, and may well be its authentic literature. Within its pages, as in our lives, archaic myth and scientific apocalypse collide and fuse. However naively, it has tried to respond to the most significant events of our time – the threat of nuclear war, over-population, the computer revolution, the possibilities and abuses of medical science, the ecological dangers to our planet, the consumer society as benign tyranny – topics that haunt our minds but are scarcely considered by the mainstream novel. If few great names stand out in science fiction, this reflects its collaborative nature, just as no great names stand out in the design of the Boeing 747 or, for that matter, Chartres Cathedral.
In recent years more and more mainstream novelists have been attracted to science fiction – Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, Kingsley Amis, Angela Carter, P. D. James – drawn by its immense vitality and vocabulary of ideas. It may be that their arrival is the kiss of death that marks the end of modern science fiction, or its transformation into a new form that will carry it into the next millennium.
All these questions are covered in the thoughtful essays found in this encyclopedia. A curious aspect of science fiction is that a literature devoted to the future should now have accumulated an immense past of its own. There are countless societies and academic institutes devoted to the history of science fiction, cataloguing every obscure detail of its authors’ lives. But I was pleased to read that longevity is a prominent characteristic of both science fiction and its writers. The books remain in print, and their authors, by and large, live to an advanced age. I never for a moment believed anything else.
One unfortunate by-product of the Russian-American space race is likely to be an even closer identification, in the mind of the general public, of science fiction with the rocket ships and ray guns of Buck Rogers. If science fiction ever had a chance of escaping this identification – from which most of its present ills derive – that chance will soon be gone, and the successful landing of a manned vehicle on the Moon will fix this image conclusively. Instead of greeting the appearance of the space-suited hero with a deep groan, most general readers will be disappointed if the standard paraphernalia of robot brains and hyper-drives is not present, just as most cinema-goers are bored stiff if a western doesn’t contain at least one major gun-battle. A few westerns without guns have been attempted, but they seem to turn into dog and timberland stories, and as a reader of science fiction one of my fears is that unless the medium drastically reinvigorates itself in the near future the serious fringe material, at present its only justification, will be relegated to the same limbo occupied by other withering literary forms such as the ghost and detective stories.
There are several reasons why I believe space fiction can no longer provide the main wellspring of ideas for s-f. Firstly, the bulk of it is invariably juvenile, though this is not entirely the fault of the writers. Mort Sahl has referred to the missile-testing site at Cape Canaveral as ‘Disneyland East’, and like it or not this sums up the attitude of most people towards science fiction, and underlines the narrow imaginative limits imposed by the background of rocket ships and planet-hopping.
A poet such as Ray Bradbury can accept the current magazine conventions and transform even so hackneyed a subject as Mars into an enthralling private world, but science fiction can’t rely for its survival on the continued emergence of writers of Bradbury’s calibre. The degree of interest inherent in the rocket and planet story – with its confined physical and psychological dimensions and its limited human relationships – is so slight as to make a self-sufficient fictional form based on it almost impossible. If anything, however, the success of the manned satellites will only tend to establish the limited psychological experiences of their crews – on the whole accurately anticipated, though unintentionally, by s-f writers – as the model of those to be found in science fiction.
Visually, of course, nothing can equal space fiction for its vast perspectives and cold beauty, as any s-f film or comic-strip demonstrates, but a literary form requires more complex ideas to sustain it. The spaceship simply doesn’t provide these. (Curiously enough, in the light of the present roster of astronauts, the one authentic element in old-style space opera is its wooden, one-dimensional dialogue. But if one can’t altogether blame Commander Shepard for his ‘Boy, what a ride,’ Major Titov’s dreamless sleep after the first night in space was the biggest let-down since the fall of Icarus – how many s-f writers must wish they had been writing his script!)
But my real objection to the central role now occupied by the space story is that its appeal is too narrow. Unlike the western, science fiction can’t rely for its existence upon the casual intermittent pleasure it may give to a wide non-specialist audience if it is to hold its ground and continue to develop. As with most specialized media, it needs a faithful and discriminating audience who will go to it for specific pleasures, similar to the audience for abstract painting or serial music. The old-guard space opera fans, although they probably form the solid backbone of present s-f readership, won’t be able to keep the medium alive on their own. Like most purists, they prefer their diet unchanged, and unless s-f evolves, sooner or later other media are going to step in and take away its main distinction, the right to be the shop window of tomorrow.
Too often recently, when I’ve wanted to stimulate my imagination, I’ve found myself turning to music or painting rather than to science fiction, and surely this is the chief thing wrong with it at present. To attract a critical readership science fiction needs to alter completely its present content and approach. Magazine s-f was born in the 1930s and like the pseudo-streamlined architecture of the thirties, it is beginning to look old-fashioned to the general reader. It’s not simply that time travel, psionics and teleporting (which have nothing to do with science anyway and are so breath-taking in their implications that they require genius to do them justice) date science fiction. The general reader is intelligent enough to realize that the majority of the stories are based on the most minor variations on these themes, rather than on any fresh imaginative leaps.
Historically, this type of virtuosity is a sure sign of decline, and it may well be that the real role science fiction has to play is that of a minor eclectic pastime, its few magazines sustained by opportunist editorial swerves after the latest popular-science fad.
Rejecting this view, however, and believing that s-f has a continuing and expanding role as an imaginative interpreter of the future, how can one find a new wellspring of ideas? First, I think science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extraterrestrial life forms, galactic wars and the overlap of these ideas that spreads across the margins of nine-tenths of magazine s-f. Great writer though he was, H. G. Wells has had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction. Not only did he provide it with a repertory of ideas that have virtually monopolized the medium for the last fifty years, but he established the conventions of its style and form, with its simple plots, journalistic narrative, and standard range of situation and character. It is these, whether they realize it or not, that s-f readers are so bored with now, and which are beginning to look increasingly outdated by comparison with the developments in other literary fields.
I’ve often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid. Similarly, I think science fiction must jettison its present narrative forms and plots. Most of these are far too explicit to express any subtle interplay of character and theme. Devices such as time travel and telepathy, for example, save the writer the trouble of describing the interrelationships of time and space indirectly. And by a curious paradox they prevent him from using his imagination at all, giving him very little true freedom of movement within the narrow limits set by the device.
The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences -rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn’t matter a hoot. What we need is not science fact but more science fiction, and the introduction of so-called science fact articles is merely an attempt to dress up the old Buck Rogers material in more respectable garb.
More precisely, I’d like to see s-f becoming abstract and ‘cool’, inventing fresh situations and contexts that illustrate its theme obliquely. For example, instead of treating time like a sort of glorified scenic railway, I’d like to see it used for what it is, one of the perspectives of the personality, and the elaboration of concepts such as the time zone, deep time and archaeopsychic time. I’d like to see more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time-systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics, all in all a complete speculative poetry and fantasy of science.
I firmly believe that only science fiction is fully equipped to become the literature of tomorrow, and that it is the only medium with an adequate vocabulary of ideas and situations. By and large, the standards it sets for itself are higher than those of any other specialist literary genre, and from now on, I think, most of the hard work will fall, not on the writer and editor, but on the readers. The onus is on them to accept a more oblique narrative style, understated themes, private symbols and vocabularies. The first true s-f story, and one I intend to write myself if no one else will, is about a man with amnesia lying on a beach and looking at a rusty bicycle wheel, trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them. If this sounds off-beat and abstract, so much the better, for science fiction could use a big dose of the experimental; and if it sounds boring, well at least it will be a new kind of boredom.
As a final text, I’m reminded of the diving suit in which Salvador Dali delivered a lecture some years ago in London. The workman sent along to supervise the suit asked how deep Dali proposed to descend, and with a flourish the maestro exclaimed: ‘To the Unconscious!’ to which the workman replied sagely: ‘I’m afraid we don’t go down that deep.’ Five minutes later, sure enough, Dali nearly suffocated inside the helmet.
It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it!
How far do the landscapes of one’s childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one’s imaginative writing? Certainly my own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and where the surrounding countryside, in the centre of the flood-table of the Yangtse, was an almost continuous mirror of drowned paddy fields and irrigation canals stirring sluggishly in the hot sunlight. On reflection it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last ten years in London.
One of the subjects of the novel is the journey of return made by the principal characters from the twentieth century back into the paradisal sun-filled world of a second Triassic age, and their gradually mounting awareness of the ambivalent motives propelling them into the emerging past. They realize that the uterine sea around them, the dark womb of the ocean mother, is as much the graveyard of their own individuality as it is the source of their lives, and perhaps their fears reflect my own uneasiness in re-enacting the experiences of childhood and attempting to explore such dangerous ground.
Among the characteristic fauna of the Triassic age were the crocodiles and alligators, amphibian creatures at home in both the aquatic and terrestrial worlds, who symbolize for the hero of the novel the submerged dangers of his quest. Even now I can vividly remember the enormous ancient alligator housed in a concrete pit half-filled with cigarette packets and ice-cream cartons in the reptile house at the Shanghai zoo, who seemed to have been jerked forward reluctantly so many tens of millions of years into the twentieth century.
In many respects this fusion of past and present experiences, and of such disparate elements as the modern office buildings of central London and an alligator in a Chinese zoo, resembles the mechanisms by which dreams are constructed, and perhaps the great value of fantasy as a literary form is its ability to bring together apparently unconnected and dissimilar ideas. To a large extent all fantasy serves this purpose, but I believe that speculative fantasy, as I prefer to call the more serious fringe of science fiction, is an especially potent method of using one’s imagination to construct a paradoxical universe where dream and reality become fused together, each retaining its own distinctive quality and yet in some way assuming the role of its opposite, and where by an undeniable logic black simultaneously becomes white.
Without in any way suggesting that the act of writing is a form of creative self-analysis, I feel that the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seen obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer’s mind. The dream worlds invented by the writer of fantasy are external equivalents of the inner world of the psyche, and because these symbols take their impetus from the most formative and confused periods of our lives they are often time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity.
This zone I think of as ‘inner space’, the internal landscape of today that is a transmuted image of the past, and one of the most fruitful areas for the imaginative writer. It is particularly rich in visual symbols, and I feel that this type of speculative fantasy plays a role very similar to that of surrealism in the graphic arts. The painters Chirico, Dali and Max Ernst, among others, are in a sense the iconographers of inner space. Dali, regrettably, is now in total critical eclipse, but his paintings, with their soft watches and minatory luminous beaches, are of almost magical potency, suffused by that curious ambivalence that one can see elsewhere only on the serpentine faces in the paintings of Leonardo.
It is a curious thing that the landscapes of these painters, and of Dali in particular, are often referred to as dream-like, when in fact they bear no resemblance to the vast majority of dreams, which in general take place within confined indoor settings, a cross between Kafka and Mrs Dale’s Diary, and where fantastic images, such as singing flowers or sonic sculpture, appear as infrequently as they do in reality. This false identification, and the awareness that the landscapes and themes are reflections of some interior reality within our minds, is a pointer to the importance of speculative fantasy in the century of Hiroshima and Cape Canaveral.
Brian Aldiss’s exuberant title gives a fair summary of all the excitements to be found in this book – I thoroughly enjoyed it, and read it from cover to cover without a pause, a rare event for any reader these days, and a reflection of the tremendous built-in power of imaginative fiction. Even in summary (or perhaps especially in summary), these accounts of fabulous voyages, extraordinary inventions, cautionary tales and Utopian satires leap off the page. Billion Year Spree is vividly written, witty, encyclopaedic in its scope, far ranging in its ideas, tolerant of fools (an over-abundant species in this branch of fiction), and above all affectionate towards the strange company of knaves and naives, hacks and geniuses who move through its pages like a troupe of over-excited travelling players, conning anyone they can with their unlimited blarney. The highest compliment I can pay this book is to say that hardly a single sane man appears throughout it.
Another of the great pleasures it gave me was the realization of just how little of this fiction I had read – if for no other reason, Billion Year Spree is guaranteed a steady sale to all those people who for some reason need to read the absolute minimum of Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Asimov and Tolkien, and will now be able to breathe an enormous sigh of relief as they scan these brief – and, I’m convinced, accurate – summaries.
At the same time, a slight sense of unease came over me as I read the last chapters of this book. (These sections, where Aldiss brings the history of science fiction up to the present day, are a masterpiece of diplomacy – a sociable man, Brian clearly wants to be able to go on attending science fiction conventions here and in the United States without being clubbed over the head by some outraged author’s well-aimed Hugo. On reflection, he should have commissioned me to write these last two chapters …) What unnerved me was the odd feeling I had of the Academy closing around me, of the plywood partitions of the Modern Literature department being erected around my mind, and around those of ail the other writers exercising their talents for fantasy and invention. One of the most inaccurate jibes levelled at the so-called New Wave is that its writers suffered from delusions of literary grandeur, that they took themselves far too seriously. In fact, in my own personal experience, it is the absolute reverse which is true. The most pompous and self-important writers, both here and in the States, are those who are apparently the most ‘commercial’ and non-literary. It is they who are endlessly lecturing and pontificating, forming writers’ societies and bogus foundations, filling the fanzines with their literary pretensions, their absurd awards and other nonsense. By comparison, most of the New Wavers I know spend their time lying around and romancing over a bottle.
Perhaps, however, the tightening embrace of Academe is merely a reflection that modern science fiction has come to an end. Anything that happened five minutes ago is already the centre of a cult, embedded in lucite and put on the display shelf. Modern science fiction (by which I mean the s-f of the thirty-year period 1926 to 1957, from Gernsback’s founding of Amazing to the first flight of Sputnik I and the beginnings of the short-lived space age) has already become a victim of this nostalgia. Despite the protestations of its most vocal supporters, the obvious fact is that no new writers have emerged to follow on from where, for better or worse, the founders of modern science fiction – van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov, etc. – began. And this is for the obvious reason that nothing remains to be done. The imaginary universe invented by these writers is self-defined and self-limited; the greatest weakness of this particular science fiction is that its writers have been able to define it so exactly. Unfortunately, here, unlike the western, the clock runs against it. The ever-accelerating changes brought about by science and technology have not merely transformed our lives, but made inevitable the emergence of a new science fiction that will more accurately and more imaginatively interpret these changes to us. There is, in fact, the curious paradox that classical science fiction (that is, pre-Gernsback) has far more relevance to us, and in a sense is far more modern than the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, in that it is no longer tied to a period that by its recent passing seems that much the more out-of-date. H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, Morcau and Time Machine have shaken off the patina of the merely contemporary; by comparison Campbell’s Astounding and Analog, with their third-rate 1950s jargonizing, their blue-collar intellectual clap-trap, are absolutely of the America of the Reader’s Digest, Betty Grable, and popular newspaper sensations such as Dianetics.
A large part of the problem faced by the protagonists of modern American science fiction is the unfortunate fact that America herself has slammed on the brakes. By this I mean that the enormous moral, psychological and imaginative reserves possessed by the United States in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s lay in that huge system of excitements and possibilities enshrined in the notion of the ‘future’. The future would be better, and America had a monopoly of the stuff. All this has now gone into reverse. The future has now been abandoned as a zone of imaginative excitement, and most of the values of modern America are under severe scrutiny. All this leaves the older generation of American science fiction writers high and dry. Most of them are now too old to change their ways – they have no place to go but forward, and the road is closed.
However, as Aldiss points out in Billion Year Spree, these matters are of comparatively local interest. One of the great values of this book is that we can see classical, modern and contemporary science fiction within the larger context of imaginative fiction. Arguments about whether Gulliver’s Travels and 1984 are science fiction or whether, say, Brave New World should be admitted to the club (these three novels virtually designed the premises), fade away when we see the huge sweeps of cautionary and speculative fiction laid out in front of us.
Since its beginnings, roughly speaking, I would say, at the start of the Industrial Revolution (Aldiss fixes on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), science fiction has been distinguished by two features: first, its imaginative response to science and technology; and second, its attempt, now more or less abandoned by the so-called mainstream novel, to place some kind of metaphysical and philosophical framework around man’s place in the universe. However crudely (and most of the confusions about the position of science fiction in the literary frame of things would be avoided if it were called by a more accurate title – ‘popular science fiction’), science fiction has continued to perform both these roles. As Billion Year Spree demonstrates, most of the major imaginative writers of the past 250 years have at some time written science fiction, and it is a tribute to the genre that they needed to do so.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the twentieth century. What the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow – or, more exactly, in about ten years’ time, though the gap is narrowing. Science fiction is the most important fiction that has been written for the last hundred years. The compassion, lucidity and vision of H. G. Wells and his successors, and above all their grasp of the real identity of the twentieth century, dwarf the alienated and introverted fantasies of James Joyce, Eliot and the writers of the Modern Movement. Given its subject matter, its eager acceptance of naivety, optimism and possibility, the importance of science fiction can only increase. I believe that the reading of science fiction should be compulsory. Fortunately, compulsion will not be necessary, as more and more people are reading it voluntarily. Even the worse science fiction is better — using as the yardstick of merit the mere survival of its readers and their imaginations — than the best conventional fiction. The future is a better key to the present than the past.
Above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future. What can Saul Bellow and John Updike do that J. Walter Thompson, the world’s largest advertising agency and its greatest producer of fiction, can’t do better? At present science fiction is almost the only form of fiction which is thriving, and certainly the only fiction which has any influence on the world around it. The social novel is reaching fewer and fewer readers, for the clear reason that social relationships are no longer as important as the individual’s relationship with the technological landscape of the late twentieth century.
In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizcs that the role of the writer today has totally changed – he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer.
It is now some fifteen years since the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi remarked that the science fiction magazines produced in the suburbs of Los Angeles contained far more imagination and meaning than anything he could find in the literary periodicals of the day. Subsequent events have proved Paolozzi’s judgement correct. Fortunately, his own imagination has been able to work primarily within the visual arts, where the main tradition for the last century has been the tradition of the new. Within fiction, unhappily, the main tradition for all too long has been the tradition of the old. Like the inmates of some declining institution, increasingly forgotten and ignored, the leading writers and critics count the worn beads of their memories, intoning the names of the dead.
Meanwhile, science fiction, as my agent remarked to me recently, is spreading across the world like a cancer – a benign and tolerant cancer, like the culture of beaches. The time-lag of its acceptance narrows – I estimate it at present to be about ten years. However, as people become more confident, so they will be prepared to accept change, the possibility of a life radically different from their own. Like green stamps given away at the supermarkets of chance and possibility, science fiction becomes the new currency of an ever-expanding future.
The one hazard facing science fiction, the Trojan horse being trundled towards its ghetto – a high-rent area if there ever was one in fiction – is literary criticism. Almost all the criticism of science fiction has been written by benevolent outsiders, who combine zeal with ignorance, like high-minded missionaries viewing the sex-rites of a fertile aboriginal tribe and finding every laudible influence at work except the outstanding length of penis. The depth of penetration of this earnest couple, Lois and Stephen Rose, is that of a pair of practising Christians who see in science fiction an attempt to place a new perspective on ‘man, nature, history and ultimate meaning’. What they fail to realize is that science fiction is totally atheistic; those critics in the past who have found any mystical strains at work have been blinded by the camouflage. Science fiction is much more concerned with the significance of the gleam on an automobile instrument panel than on the deity’s posterior – if Mother Nature has anything in science fiction, it is VD.
Most critics of science fiction trip into one of two pitfalls – either, like Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell, they try to ignore altogether the technological trappings and relate s-f to the ‘mainstream’ of social criticism, anti-utopian fantasies and the like (Amis’s main prophecy for science fiction in 1957 and proved wholly wrong), or they attempt to apostrophize science fiction in terms of individual personalities, hopelessly rivalling the far better financed efforts of American and British publishers to sell their fading wares by dressing their minor talents in the great-writer mantle. Science fiction has always been very much a corporate activity, its writers sharing a common pool of ideas, and the yardsticks of individual achievement do not measure the worth of the best writers, Ray Bradbury, Asimov, Bernard Wolfe (Limbo 90), and Frederik Pohl. The anonymity of the majority of twentieth-century writers of science fiction is the anonymity of modern technology; no more ‘great names’ stand out than do in the design of consumer durables – or for that matter of Rheims Cathedral.
Who designed the 1971 Cadillac El Dorado, a complex of visual, organic and psychological clues of infinitely more subtlety and relevance, stemming from a vastly older network of crafts and traditions than, say, the writings of Norman Mailer or the latest Cape miracle? The subject matter of science fiction is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a colour TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artefact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator – all in all, close to the world of the Pop painters and sculptors, Paolozzi, Hamilton, Warhol, Wesselmann, Ruscha, among others. The great advantage of science fiction is that it can add one unique ingredient to this hot mix – words. Write!
Visions of world cataclysm constitute one of the most powerful and most mysterious of all the categories of science fiction, and in their classic form predate modern science fiction by thousands of years. In many ways, I believe that science fiction is itself no more than a minor offshoot of the cataclysmic tale. From the deluge in the Babylonian zodiac myth of Gilgamesh to contemporary fantasies of twentieth-century super-science, there has clearly been no limit to our need to devise new means of destroying the world we inhabit. I would guess that from man’s first inkling of this planet as a single entity existing independently of himself came the determination to bring about its destruction, part of the same impulse we see in a placid infant who wakes alone in his cot and sets about wrecking his entire nursery.
Psychiatric studies of the fantasies and dream life of the insane show that ideas of world destruction are latent in the unconscious mind. The marvels of twentieth-century science and technology provide an anthology of destructive techniques unrivalled by even the most bizarre religions. As Edward Glover comments in War, Sadism and Pacifism (1947), ‘Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realisation of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.’
As an author who has produced a substantial number of cataclysmic stories, I take for granted that the planet the writer destroys with such tireless ingenuity is in fact an image of the writer himself. But are these deluges and droughts, whirlwinds and glaciations no more than over-extended metaphors of some kind of suicidal self-hate? Though I am even more suspicious of my own motives than of other people’s, I nevertheless think not. On the contrary, I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game.
Within the realm of fiction, the writer of the catastrophe story illustrates, in the most extreme and literal way, Conrad’s challenge – ‘Immerse yourself in the most destructive element – and swim!’ Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness. It is the inflexibility of this huge reductive machine we call reality that provokes infant and madman alike, and in the cataclysm story the science fiction writer joins company with them, using his imagination to describe the infinite alternatives to reality which nature itself has proved incapable of inventing. This celebration of the possibilities of life is at the heart of science fiction.