THE EVOLUTION OF A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER

 

 

The first contribution I can recall making to the SF field was when, at the age of about six and a half, I drew Martian fighting-machines all over the end-papers of my late grandfather’s Heinemann first edition of The War of the Worlds … which I still possess, and am holding on to in the vague hope that one day the drawings will add to rather than detract from its bibliographical interest.

No doubt it was, very foolish of whoever it was who left that valuable book in my nursery; however, it set in motion a process which culminated in my choice of a career. During my childhood I could never find enough SF. Once the bug had established itself in my mind, I was hooked. I read all of Wells’s work that I could lay hands on (discovering to my dismay that he wrote other novels apart from SF and that I didn’t like these), and naturally I read Verne’s books, and anything that even remotely smelt of SF was an excuse for me to abandon all other interests. How many people now, I wonder, recall a novel entitled The Devil’s Highway, about a mad scientist—Dr Munsker—who had discovered a new force called “ethericity” with which he planned to take over the world? I was rather on his side, as a matter of fact; he was deformed, and had been mocked and persecuted as a child …

Some time around 1942 I remember seeing a copy of what I think must have been Amazing Stories belonging to the GI boy-friend of one of my father’s land-girls—we were living on a farm at the time. I’ve never recognised that particular issue again, but I recall that its lead story concerned a robot who became human enough to fall in love. I remember also a copy of Marvel Tales in which the lead story was about a lost race of people with wings instead of arms; I believe the title was Angel from Hell. Similarly I began for the first time ever to buy comics of the D. C. Thomson type when a serial began in The Wizard about “Force 21”, a pseudo-gravitational force being employed to pull the Earth out of its regular orbit and avoid collision with a rogue planet, but long before that I’d discovered two instalments of a story about a group of survivors fleeing a ruined Earth and cruising the galaxy in a ship modelled on Cavor’s (but I hadn’t at that time read The First Men in the Moon) in search of a new home. Those I rescued from a pile of waste paper in a shop in Worcester, and dedicatedly read and reread … I assume they also were in a D. C. Thomson comic, but long before I chanced on them the story was over, and it was no use buying the current issues.

One way and another I did manage to get hold of a lot of SF, and when that failed I could always turn to non-fiction of the kind which held for me a corresponding magic: Jeans’s Through Space and Time, issues of Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia containing pictures of Flammarion’s grandiose futuristic projects such as a tunnel straight through the Earth, books by Eddington and other far less famous popularisers, some of whose titles I can recall—A New Model of the Universe was one that fascinated me, though I scarcely understood two pages together, and A Night Raid Into Space first gave me a hint of the scale of the galaxy and the span of universal time, although it was so out of date it did not even mention the discovery of Pluto.

By the age of nine I was a confirmed addict. It was then that, despairing of ever finding enough SF to glut my appetite, I attempted my first original story. I can remember nothing about it bar two facts: it featured a Martian called Gloop, and I couldn’t think how to put an ending on it.

Still, at least it served one important function in my life. I had more or less decided by then that I did not after all want to be a fighter pilot, and I was at a loss to know what I should be instead. (Problems of that order can become major obsessions at that age.) All of a sudden, I knew. I was going to be a writer.

 

The event which converted this belief from a childish fantasy into a firm commitment occurred early in 1947, when my father pointed to an item on a bookshop counter in Wallingford, where I was intending to spend my pocket money, and said, “That looks like fun.”

He was right. It was the April-1947 British reprint of Astounding. It contained Hal Clement’s Cold Front, van Vogt’s Film Library, Murray Leinster’s Rain Check, Philip Latham’s The Blindness…

It was from the publishers of that British reprint that I received my first rejection slip, informing me that they did not buy original stories but only made selections from the American edition. I was thirteen.

Now I did not only hope to be a writer. I was determined to be a writer.

Welcoming my obvious interest in science, my parents had concluded otherwise; I was to go into the family business, as it were (Brunner Mond was one of the big chemical companies which were incorporated into ICI), for the sake of security and an assured future. However, curiously, they sent me at the age of nine and a half to a prep school where no science was taught at all … unless you count “nature study”, which I do not! I discovered a gift for languages. When I was transferred at thirteen to Cheltenham College, I was told politely but firmly by the senior science master that owing to my extraordinary ineptitude in mathematics he would far prefer me to stay on the languages side. This is how it came about that I, a so-called science fiction writer, have never had a science lesson in my life.

As for this question of being a writer. … At the commencement of each winter term at Cheltenham boys were required to complete a questionnaire about themselves, including a section asking what they intended to do when they left. The first time I duly, and honestly, entered: “Author”. I was lectured by my housemaster and my form-master on the patent foolishness of such an ambition, warned of the insecurity I would risk and of the utter improbability of my ever making a living that way. On the remaining occasions when I had to fill in the form I boxed clever and put down: “Broadcasting.”

That was okay.

Pressure upon me to relinquish my ambitions remained so intense, in fact, that even when during my last term at school (I had just passed my seventeenth birthday) I sold my first paperback novel—thanks, I may say, to the assistance of H. J. Campbell, then editor of Authentic SF, and the influential Irish SF fan, Walter Willis, who had put my first-ever printed short-short story into his amateur magazine Slant—I did not especially care that it was retitled by the publisher and issued under a house pseudonym. What counted was that I received enough money to buy a typewriter of my own instead of borrowing one all the time.

Using that as leverage, together with a generally bloody-minded attitude, I succeeded in escaping from school (I choose my terms with care), and during the months that elapsed before I was conscripted into the RAF wrote and sold not only another short novel, this time to the American magazine Two Complete Science Adventure Books, but also a novelette entitled THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL … which John Campbell accorded the lead position, and the cover illustration, in Astounding. Not bad for a boy of seventeen, I thought—although I was still under that old pressure to abandon my dreams, and it bore the pen-name of “John Loxmith”.

 

My two years of Air Force service were the most futile, empty, and in general wasted period of my life. I was bored by the routine; I was disgusted by the company of professional killers; and I drew from it perhaps only one advantage, a conviction which endures to this day that the military mind constitutes the single greatest handicap under which the human race is condemned to labour, inasmuch as these people without imagination or compassion have been given the power to destroy our species. My detestation of them increases with every passing year, a fact which I suspect could easily be deduced from a study of my writing, as could my distrust of politicians who sacrifice honesty to the exercise of personal power and my loathing of those so-called Christians who bless weapons of war and condone such abominations as the use of atom-bombs, the napalming of Vietnamese children and the sectarian hatreds afflicting Ulster.

On reflection, however, I ought possibly to add a second benefit derived from those otherwise wasted years. It was seeing the reality underlying the claims of glory which finally soured me sufficiently on the Establishment for me to gather my courage and resolve once for all that I would never have any truck with it. Without that I might easily have lacked the guts to do as I did when I received a letter from a wealthy uncle informing me that ICI would pay for me to go through university provided I read the subjects they chose (I had a state scholarship and a place at Oxford waiting for me). I wrote politely back, to him and to the Ministry of Education, saying that they should offer this chance to someone who wanted it. I was heartily sick of being told what I ought to learn. I had a sneaking suspicion that there were other and more important things from which my attention was meant to be diverted.

I’ve never regretted reaching that conclusion. I’ve now spent almost twenty years trying to mortar up the gaps in my formal education, and I am still discovering that I was told lies or offered half-truths or a distorted version of the facts from start to finish of my schooling.

Of course the most important lacuna in my knowledge was a total absence of contact with the real world. From nine to seventeen I’d been in boys-only boarding schools; thereafter I’d been trapped in the artificial environment of the services; and in between I’d been isolated by the fact that my parents had almost literally no friends, never entertained, never held parties and never took me anywhere on holiday. At the time when I moved to London with the intention of supporting myself by writing I had scarcely anything to talk about. I could juggle with the standard SF themes of alien beings, robots, time-travel and the like; when it came to exotic passages of description I could lay on the adjectives with the best of them. But as to life-experience … Well, I’d been to Lausanne for four weeks to practise my spoken French.

Moreover at that time my chief market was the Nova group of magazines, New Worlds and Science Fantasy, and even if I was hitting them so often that in at least one issue I appeared under three different names, the going rate was two guineas per thousand words. The inevitable happened. I went broke.

In the nick of time C. S. Youd (“John Christopher”) told me he was looking for someone to stand in at his office while he did the boss’s job during the latter’s convalescence from a serious illness. I found myself hired as a technical abstractor on the Bulletin of Industrial Diamond Applications. It amused me that my first job was a technical one, in view of my aforementioned ignorance of formal science. However, it was adequately paid and not so demanding that I couldn’t write at weekends and in the evenings. Besides, it introduced me to that invaluable institution, the Patent Office Library.

After half a year there I went to work as an editorial dogsbody in the Books for Pleasure group, where I was soon joined by John F. Burke whom I’d previously known as a friend of Sam Youd and Ted Carnell and other members of the London SF Circle (I was and am a regular attender). I cannot say that I invested my entire attention in that job; the atmosphere of the company was so whole-heartedly commercial that on one occasion I recall hunting in vain for a copy of a book entitled Prehistoric Animals in which I’d written elaborate directions to the printers concerning essential corrections—the paintings were marvellous but the text was hopelessly obsolete, so I’d gone to some trouble to revise it for a new edition … and it transpired that it had been sent out by the sales department along with a batch of mint ones. We only got it back because the woman in (I think) Nottingham who had bought it complained about the way it had been scribbled on.

Again, I derived one useful advantage from this two-year stint: I learned to read and correct proof to a high standard. I had to proof-read books on a range of subjects I’d never studied, like cookery, and since I’m blessed with a memory like a fly-paper a mishmash of random data accumulated in my subconscious, on which I still often draw when I need to. But I paid dearly for it; my reading-speed went down from over 1000 words a minute to about 300, and I’ve never completely made good the deficiency.

In the meantime, however, I had met my wife Marjorie—far and away my most successful convert to SF. She had been convinced that it involved nothing but BEM’s and other horror-comic trappings. By judicious selection I was able to persuade her otherwise (I recall that Earth Abides was particularly helpful), and she stood by me, encouraged me, and to a large extent supported us financially, when I took another crazy decision and resigned from my job—I was in a hospital bed at the time—on the strength of having sold a novel to Ace Books. This was my first American book sale.

For a long time it was touch and go whether I would keep afloat. Now, however, I’ve been a freelance for nearly thirteen years (at time of writing), and thanks to the fact that I was able at one stage to churn out an astonishing amount of wordage per year I’ve established a solid readership for my work. I acknowledge, as do many SF writers, a debt to the Ace Doubles, where a beginning author like myself could “ride on the back” of a better-known personality—I shared sales in my early days with Poul Anderson, A. E. van Vogt, and other famous names—and then in turn serve as a prop to launch further novices. Thanks to this system, I was able to earn my bread-and-butter comfortably by about the age of 25 or 26.

At approximately the same time I began to conceive more ambitious plans. The depressing shallowness of much SF became apparent to me. The time of sheer wonderment at the infinite possibilities of applied technology was, in my view, over; the substantial theme which remained, and was primarily the prerogative of SF although being increasingly used in the so-called “main stream”, consisted in the examination of the impact of technological change on the human personality. I had already begun to experiment with stylistic devices to accentuate the implications of a plot (e.g. FAIR, 1956); now I wanted to move on from the relatively conventional narrative and stock SF situations that had characterised my first American novels (THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY, 1959; THE WORLD SWAPPERS, 1959) to something possessing more contemporary relevance and impact.

The project I settled on was one which had preoccupied many earlier writers, that of the conversion of a chess-game, move for move, into a story that would stand on its own merits. The result was THE SQUARES OF THE CITY, which I completed in May 1960 and which was then and for some time afterwards both my longest and my most ambitious novel (apart from a mainstream item which was never published) . Regrettably, it failed to find a publisher until Ballantine bought it in 1966 for what I thought then and still do think was a derisory advance, lower than I was by that time receiving for routine SF novels inferior to it both in literary quality and in thematic scope … but I was almost resigned to it never being published and was glad that someone had finally taken it on.

It was a great success. It ran second in the “Hugo” poll for best SF novel of the year. And I’m still wondering how my career would have changed if it had appeared in the year I wrote it instead of five years later. However, speculation about parallel worlds, while tempting to an SF writer, is an inherently unfruitful pastime. (Incidentally, nine and a half years went by before it was first published in Britain.)

Ever since, I have found it necessary to regard my writing as being divided into two categories: “ambitious” and “fun-type”. There is in fact no discontinuity between the two in my own mind; I can often get as much enjoyment out of something light but amusing (e.g., TIMESCOOP, 1969) as out of something substantial and demanding (e.g. THE JAGGED ORBIT, 1969). However, it would please me enormously if I could afford to restrict my output of “fun-type” books to the occasions when I genuinely felt in the mood for this kind of writing—as, I’m told, Graham Greene labels his works “novels” or “entertainments”, in accordance with the degree of ambition involved in their production.

This happy state of affairs has so far eluded me. I was under the confident misapprehension that it was about to occur in 1966, when my London agent obtained for me a two-book contract with a world-famous paperback company. I thought in high delight, “Now’s my chance to write as well as I know how!” I submitted three possible ideas; they selected two, and during 1966-67 I wrote them. One was QUICKSAND (1967) which turned out to be the best-seller of the 24 science fiction books Doubleday published in that year; the other was STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968) which won both the “Hugo” award and the British SF Award.

The publisher who had commissioned them turned them both down—in the former case, after sitting on the MS for longer than it had taken me to write the bloody thing. It is for this reason that I don’t expect the two of them together to have paid me a full year’s income before about Christmas 1971—five years later.

Given that situations of this kind are likely to crop up without warning, just at the moment when one imagines all is going smoothly, it is immensely difficult to develop one’s talent in the SF field according to a deliberate plan. For years at a time I have constantly found myself faced with the necessity of going back on my own tracks, tackling a novel which in the ultimate analysis is superfluous, and certainly does not represent an advance on what I have previously achieved … but which can be relied on, where a “difficult” or “unusual” book cannot, to put a little money in the bank in the immediate future. The unpleasant fall back to routine space-opera which followed the initial rejections on THE SQUARES OF THE CITY has been paralleled in many later cases, although once I’d had it happen to me I was a trifle more resilient in my reaction the second time.

Meanwhile, my subconscious development has not corresponded to what might be deduced from a study of a chronological bibliography. More and more I have become concerned with what might be called close-up SF, that is to say fiction which, while incorporating some element of the standard SF canon, is nonetheless primarily of the present and relates very closely to discernible current trends. In some cases this had led me completely out of the field (tenuous though its frontier may be), as in THE GAUDY SHADOWS (1970) which appeared as a murder mystery although its plot revolves around the discovery of a group of so far nonexistent hallucinogenic drugs. Contrastingly, I feel that some of my recent output may be said to have extended SF, rather than trespassed over its edge; the use in such novels as QUICKSAND and THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME (1967) of science-fiction elements in an otherwise wholly contemporary novel constitutes for me a kind of topological inversion that—like the image in a mirror—does not alter the thing perceived, but leads to a new appreciation of it.

Furthermore, I’ve been greatly concerned to interpret in fictional form some of my personal opinions. It has been rightly said that nobody wants Utopias any more; however, the dystopia or “awful warning” story is a great temptation, and given one crucial element can often succeed extremely well—the element in question being, of course, a dramatisation of the theme which escapes the risk of being didactic and involves the reader in the fate of the characters to the point where he cares what becomes of them.

From my own recent work the most significant example is the complex and committed novel THE SHEEP LOOK UP (Harper & Row, 1972), in which it is assumed that, owing to public apathy and the conviction of politicians that concern for the environment was just another fad which by next year will have faded away, pollution does in fact exceed our ability to reverse the destructive process we have set in train. It belongs, I suspect, in the same galère with Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo 90 or Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon, rather than in the tradition of “hard core SF”.

 

Throughout my writing career, it seems to me, one definite trend does recur and is continuing. Despite what I have said above about “going back on my tracks”, once I have made a significant breakthrough to what Damon Knight terms “a plateau of achievement” previously unattained, a subsequent novel will often reflect an increased concern with the subjective feelings of the characters rather than the external devices of the plot. My entire adult life has been, and still is, a voyage of discovery, and the mystery into which I am conducting this lengthy inquiry concerns the nature of myself and of my fellow-humans.

Thus, for example, although THE MARTIAN SPHINX (1965; as by “Keith Woodcott”) employs many stock trappings of old-time space-opera—a strange alien artefact on Mars, hostile BEM’s, and so forth—it does reflect that change which took place in my mind during the writing of its immediate predecessor, TELEPATHIST (1965; US title THE WHOLE MAN), and which I can neatly define. Much earlier, in 1958 to be exact, I had hit on what I thought was an excellent formula for generating an endless series of sword-and-sorcery adventure stories, all taking place in the mind of a master telepathic psychiatrist who himself was a crippled dwarf, forever subject to the temptation of letting go and accepting an imaginary world in which he could be a huge-thewed giant. (Some comparisons, it strikes me, might be drawn with certain of Michael Moorcock’s stories.)

However, having written one of these fantasy adventures, I found when I sat down to tackle another that I was far more interested in the personality of this mind-reading dwarf than I could ever be in the machinations of some artificially-contrived villain of the subconscious, and instead of going on with the projected series I wrote his biography, and the two novelettes ultimately combined, with much new material, to form TELEPATHIST.

As a direct consequence of this, the character of Jason Lombard in THE MARTIAN SPHINX is more solidly delineated than is any protagonist in my earlier sf adventures—though I retain great affection for Don Miguel Navarro of the Society of Time, in TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER (1962, revised and re-issued 1969).

Indeed I would not disown any of my published work, with the single exception of that very first sale I made while still at school; I hope and trust that none of the people who apart from myself recall the title and house-name behind which it was disguised will ever unveil my identity in that connection. Economic considerations have often compelled me to wrap and mail a half-good book, when what I should have done was put it on the shelf for a month and then re-write it end to end. Unfortunately the payment one receives in one’s early writing career seldom justifies perfectionism—would that it had done so for me! Instead of saying that out of my sixty-odd published books there are at least a dozen I feel extremely proud, of, I might be saying that I felt proud of everything I’d ever published. On the other hand, I certainly would not have explored the range of subject matter or the variety of literary styles which I have employed, so on balance perhaps things have turned out better for me as they are.

 

And what next?

Of one thing I can be sure: no more “conventional” SF. (Oh, I may occasionally find that an amusing idea has sprung full-blown into my mind, and I have time on my hands enough to devote 60,000 words to playing with it in order to produce a lightweight item similar to DOUBLE, DOUBLE (1967), which was undertaken purely in order to prove to myself that I could write an up-dated monster story … but that’s a different matter!)

But I don’t believe in the colonisation of Mars any more. I don’t believe in the Galactic Federation. I don’t believe in the imminent advent of the time-machine. And no matter how hard I try I can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to utilise these shopworn gimmicks in the creation of a story that satisfies my present critical standards. At best they come handy now and then if I hit on a plot where some pseudo-scientific device can be used as a form of narrative shorthand to compress and dramatise the clash between the characters. (See for instance THE EASY WAY OUT, in If, June 1971.)

On the other hand I do believe very firmly indeed that we ought all to be concerned about the future because that is where we shall spend the rest of our lives …

This paradoxical predicament must, I think, be what’s driven me more and more into other fields recently. I now give public readings of my poetry fairly often; last year a first printed collection appeared under the Poets’ Trust imprint (LIFE IN AN EXPLOSIVE FORMING PRESS, 1970), and this year another collection, TRIP, will be published by the Keepsake Press. I’ve done a science fiction film script, and am actively seeking the chance for another such assignment. I want to write a panoramic historical novel with strong contemporary relevance. I want to continue my exploration of a subject I broached in THE DEVIL’S WORK (1970)—what constitutes conscious evil in this post-religious, post-Freudian age? I have plots on hand for two non-SF novels which treat of that.

Does it therefore follow that a science fiction writer with pretensions must inevitably be squeezed out of the field?

I doubt it. On the contrary, my suspicion is that long ago science and its applied counterpart, technology, have so deeply affected our attitudes and our patterns of social behaviour that you can’t go anywhere and escape them. For a brief while, SF became isolated in what Dr Dale Mullen has called a “ghetto”. But this was an anomaly. There was no wall dividing the readership of The War of the Worlds from that of Tono-Bungay; nor that of The Sign of Four from that of The Lost World; nor that of Brave New World from that of Antic Hay. Equally, today, an admirer of Anthony Burgess accepts without question that this talented author should now and then hit on a science fiction theme and treat it with the same seriousness and conviction as his other novels.

It makes, in the upshot, no difference from which direction one approaches the central question of our time: will we, or will we not, survive the consequences of our own ingenuity? Both alternatives remain open. Having explored each quite extensively over the past several years, I find I can imagine either coming to pass. So, plainly, can a great many of my colleagues on both sides of the SF fence.

Here we are, then. And tomorrow is another day.

 

From Foundation: a review of science fiction, Vol. I, No. 1, copyright © 1972 by The Science Fiction Foundation as agent for the author.

 

“The H-Bombs’ Thunder”

 

Tell the leaders of the nations

Make the whole wide world take heed:

Poison from the radiations

Strikes at every race and creed.

Must you put mankind in danger,

Murder folk in distant lands?

Will you bring death to a stranger.

Have his blood upon your hands?

 

Shall we lay the world in ruin?

Only you can make the choice.

stop and think of what you’re doing,

Join the march and raise your voice.

Time is short; we must be speedy,

We can see the hungry filled,

House the homeless, help the needy,

Shall we blast, or shall we build?

 

Men and Women, stand together.

Do not heed the men of war.

Make your minds up, now or never,

Ban the Bomb for evermore.

 

From SING, October 1958. Air: traditional, “Life is Like a Mountain Railway”, aka “Miners’ Lifeguard”; words: John Brunner. The so-called “National Anthem of the British Peace Movement”, it was awarded the Sing Prize in 1958. All rights assigned to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament by the author.