Trimmings From The Triffid's Beard - Volume 1

by

Alan Robson

Publication History and Credits

Fifth edition published in 2010 as an E-Book (Without illustrations)

Fourth edition published in 2002 (HTML on CD and the Web)

Third edition published in 1997.

First printing March 1997.

Second edition published in 1994.

First printing January 1994.

First edition published in 1993.

First printing May 1993.

The Blue Phrog Agency in conjunction with Burning Tiger Press

P.O. Box 11-708

Wellington

New Zealand

Edited by Karen Heatley.

All articles copyright (c) Alan Robson 1993.

All illustrations copyright (c) the artists 1993.

All rights reserved.

ISBN 0-473-01975-2

Cover art by James Bryson

Proofread by Nathan Torkington, Amy Gale, Gaynor Bradfield and R. N. McLean.

Typeset by Karen Heatley.

Printed copies bound by Victoria University Printery.

Printed by the Burning Tiger Press.

Special thanks to Alex Heatley.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

For Alan and Alex

Karen and Nicholas

who inspired me

and for Ian

who christened me

Foreword

Once, at a convention, I walked into a party where a group were busy gossiping about other people in fandom. As usual the gossip was malicious and vile. It had been a long night. I challenged the group to say something nice about people for a change.

Instantly there was a change in the air, you could see it happen. As we went around the group getting each person to name someone they liked in fandom, you could see people thinking: “ who should I name, which name will show the least weakness, who will be offended if I don’t mention them”.

When the circle came around to me, I answered: “Alan Robson. I’d do anything for him”. “How about being suspended from a parallel bar and letting him tickle you with a peacock’s feather?” said a voice hidden in the dimness of the room and bearing a faint English accent.

“Of course,” I replied without hesitation. “I said I’d do anything”.

Years later, I wrote an article for a SF magazine that was a criticism of Media Science Fiction (Star Trek, Blake’s 7—that sort of thing). The very next issue had a rebuttal that poured scorn upon my arguments.

I was annoyed, I wrote a seventeen hundred word rebuttal to the rebuttal and the editor rejected it—which was just as well, my rebuttal was longer than the original article. But I became even more annoyed.

Then Alan came to dinner. The after dinner talk turned to writing and I produced my article. Alan read it. Then I let him read the rebuttal. I gloated, I would be vindicated. Alan would side with me.

Alan read both articles, then he thought for a moment. He looked at me and said: “You both believe strongly in your positions and you both argue them very well.”

I looked at Alan in shock and then burst out laughing, he’d brought me back to reality with a thump. It really wasn’t something to get angry about.

And that is Alan Robson. In all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him take sides in a disagreement among fans. Wherever you find people moaning about the faults of others, Alan is there to mention their virtues.

Elsewhere I have said that Alan is the Switzerland of Kiwi fandom (when I said that to Alan, he grinned and said: “Switzerland is a beautiful country; people can swim in my lakes and admire my fountain”).

Alan came to Aotearoa in 1981, and within months of his arrival he had made a splash in SF circles by being part of the team that won the first ever SF quiz to be held at a National convention.

Shortly after that he was a regular attendee at the Wellington branch meetings of the National Association of Science Fiction. It was there that Alan and I became fast friends. I don’t know why, I was an obnoxious, brash youth still in my teens, and Alan was fourteen years my senior. But somehow we found that we enjoyed each other’s company. For me, Alan was everything I wanted to be, immensely well read, soft-spoken, gentle, witty. If I have matured over the years, it is in part, due to Alan being one of the best role-models I could have wished for.

Over the years Alan has been involved in every part of fandom. He has organised conventions (Windycon ’83, Kiwicon), presented quizzes at conventions—an Alan Robson quiz, with its fiendish questions is still one of the high points for many fans attending a convention—and he has appeared on panels on topics as varied as Sex in Science Fiction and When was the Golden Age of SF? Whenever Alan attends a convention, he is always somehow involved, if only as an entertaining, witty and knowledgable person to talk with, on virtually any topic.

The most enduring thing that Alan has been doing over the last twelve years is writing. He has been producing essays on Science Fiction since he arrived on these shores and they have rolled out in a steady stream. After a while the print media took notice and reviews and articles have appeared by Alan in both the Listener and The Dominion Sunday Times.

Fandom was not without appreciation either. In the four years that fannish awards have been presented at the National conventions, Alan has won the Best Writer award every year.

This volume celebrates twelve years of writing by Alan. I am proud to be associated with publishing it. And I look forward to many more years of Bearded Triffids.

In the pages of this book, Alan will tell you that, according to Alfred Bester, the best way to end an article (or a preface) is with your best anecdote…

Alan appeared on a panel with Forest J. Ackerman at one convention. The topic of discussion was the obsession of collecting.

I was in the audience but that didn’t stop me from trying to be a third panel member. Alan had just said that collecting books was a fine obsession, and the person who dies with the most books wins. I couldn’t pass up an opening like that! I put my hand up and said: “I’ve known Alan for a long time, and I know that he has more books than me. And he keeps getting more books, faster than I can add to my own collection”.

“But what Alan doesn’t know is that I have a trump card in this contest. You see I’m younger than Alan, so I just have to wait…his collection will be mine!”

The room erupted into laughter. And I grinned, smug in having scored a point in our friendly rivalry. Alan waited for the laughter to die.

“You know,” he said, “I visit Alex from time to time, and when I admire a book that he has that I don’t have, he gives it to me. I realise now that it isn’t a gift… it’s a loan”.

Alex Heatley 1993

Introduction

If you had come up to me twelve years ago and asked me to spend the next twelve years writing a continuing series of essays I would have laughed in your face. How on earth could I have twelve years worth of essay ideas? It simply wasn’t possible.

Well…

These essays began life in Warp, the magazine of New Zealand’s National Association for Science Fiction (NASF), and they migrated from there to Alex Heatley’s Phlogiston. It is largely due to Alex’s persistence, cajolery, persuasion, pleading and bullying that they have continued for so long. Once he sent me a dummy issue of Phlogiston. It consisted of fifteen pages, all blank but for the legend:

We regret the absence of The Bearded Triffid in this issue of Phlogiston.

I can take a hint. He got his article.

One of the articles in this collection appeared in the eponymous Killer Kung Fu Enema Nurses on Crack, a magazine published by Peter Hassall of Wellington. He asked me to write the article for the first issue and my immediate reaction was to refuse. How could anybody write an article around a title like that? But then I realised that I could, and so I did, and I remain very proud of the result. It has nothing to do with science fiction, but I hope you enjoy it.

Looking through creased and faded and smudged carbon copies (for the early articles) and dusty disk files buried in long forgotten directories (for the later ones) was a nostalgic exercise. I confess I had forgotten much of what I said and thought over the years. I find that the Alan Robson of today does not always agree with the opinions of the Bearded Triffid of yesterday. It is a humbling experience to disagree with yourself. However I have resisted the urge to tinker and apart from correcting a few errors of fact I have let the essays appear as originally written.

I meant these things at the time that I wrote them, so let them stand. They represent a triffid growing up.

In one case, though, I have added some value. Herein you will find the text of a speech I gave as the fan guest of honour at Windycon, a SF convention held in Wellington in 1987. Almost two years after the event, I woke up at 3am laughing hysterically because I had just thought of a new joke for the speech. Then I remembered I had already given it and the joke had come too late. I fell into a slough of despondency and went back to sleep. When I awoke next morning, I remembered the joke, and it was still funny and I’ve been dying to tell it to somebody ever since. So now you can read it in all its glory.

I hope you enjoy these essays. They were written to entertain just as much as to promulgate my opinions.

Alan Robson

The Bearded Triffid

A Truly British Yankee…

First published in Warp 25, November 1981.

To read Eric Frank Russell is to read American.

His stories look, sound and feel American, which is very surprising; Russell is British, through and through.

He was born at Sandhurst in 1905, the son of an Army instructor, and later entered the army himself for a time (1). After attempts at the usual sorts of careers that those who eventually become professional writers enter into, he published The Saga of Pelican West in the February, 1937 edition of Astounding Stories. From then on, until the 1950s he produced a whole string of stories and novels, most of them published in Astounding under the editorial control of John W. Campbell. In 1955 he received the ultimate accolade by winning a Hugo for his short story Allamagoosa. This is how Isaac Asimov described him, in his introduction to Russell’s story in the 1963 edition of The Hugo Winners:

Let’s see, as I recall, he is six feet seven inches tall (when he’s sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Then too, I distinctly remember, there was a small flashing golden aura about his head, the occasional play of hissing lightning flashes when he moved it suddenly, and the distant rumble of thunder when he spoke. (2)

Obviously an impressive man. No wonder he wrote for Campbell!

But why did all his stories sound American? Why did he make such a deliberate attempt to turn transatlantic? The answer is not hard to find…money!

When Russell was writing, the best market for SF was Astounding; it paid more than any other outlet, and it paid on acceptance, not on publication, which was normal for many other magazines. Indeed, many of them were so late in their payments that they gained the reputation of paying “on lawsuit”!

Astounding was edited by an idiosyncratic man with some very definite opinions. Russell's stories from this period are almost invariably carbon copies of every one of Campbell’s prejudices. Which is to say that Earthmen are always White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who look and sound like they come from the American Mid-West. And the dastardly aliens are always very dastardly and very alien and very inferior to the brave Earthmen. Campbell loved this sort of thing; I don’t think he ever published a story where the Earthmen lost. His favourite stories were a xenophobic wet dream, and they reflected very accurately his own philosophy of life. (3)

It seems pretty clear that Russell decided quite early on that if he was going to sell to the highest paying market, he would write formula stories designed to push all of Campbell’s buttons. It is a matter of history that he succeeded brilliantly, and was seldom out of the pages of Astounding during that magazine’s heyday. Indeed, he was appearing so often that he adopted at least one pen-name to disguise his frequency; The Mechanical Mice appeared in 1941 under the pseudonym ‘Maurice G. Hugi’. It was an instantly forgettable story of an invention with no apparent function and tiny metal robots that scuttled around stealing watches. (4)

But does all this mean that because Russell was writing to a seemingly cynical formula he was therefore writing poor stories—hackwork?

The answer is certainly no. If formula-writing for Campbell invariably produced poor stories, Astounding would never have been such a popular magazine, and Campbell would never have had the effect that he did on the SF genre. And it cannot be denied that it was Campbell who was principally responsible for forcing the field out of its juvenile beginnings into maturity. As the field grew, it necessarily left him behind, but during the period when Russell was writing, his power and influence were unquestioned. He was, quite simply, the best. And you don’t become the best by encouraging hackwork. So even though Campbell had his prejudices, and even though Russell pandered to them so shamelessly, the result was not always poor writing. Sometimes it was, as I hope to show, but when Russell was firing on all cylinders, there was no-one to touch him. The limits of a formula do not, of themselves, imply mediocrity. That is a function of the skill of the writer and nothing else.

So what of Russell as a writer? What was it that he brought to the Campbell formula that lifted it above itself?

Humour.

Never forget that Russell was British—if you like, typically British. He knew that nothing was really sacred. He knew how to laugh, both at himself and at others. He was the first of the SF humourists. Others have followed the trail that he blazed—Fredric Brown, Harry Harrison, Robert Sheckley—but Russell did it first, and in many respects he did it the best. It is his claim to fame and it allows us to place him among the all time greats.

A handful of short stories and novels; these are all we have. Russell was blind to his own strengths and sometimes he tried to be serious—with dire results. Also, he was not always in perfect control of himself and his medium, and he tried to be funny with results that were equally dire. I defy anyone to read Sentinels From Space or Sinister Barrier or Top Secret without wincing. They are awful—cliched products of a hack era with no lasting value whatsoever. (Yes, I know that Sinister Barrier is one of his most famous stories; but fame does not imply merit. Ask yourself why you’ve never seen a copy of it. As far as I can determine, it hasn’t been available in the UK since 1943.)

But consider Wasp or The Great Explosion or Next of Kin or Men, Martians and Machines or the Hugo-award-winning short story Allamagoosa. These are classic examples of a very funny man in perfect control of his medium.

So that is my thesis—Russell wrote formula stories, hackwork if you like. Some were good, some were bad. But his one great strength was his humour and it brought some of these stories out of the hack pile and elevated them to the status of “classic”—which is a horrible word, but no other will do. All I have to do now is prove the truth of this thesis.

Wasp and Next of Kin concern one man alone against a planet full of nasty aliens. Naturally he wins through and the aliens get their come-uppance. Campbell would never have allowed anything else. (I’m not sure whether Campbell actually published Wasp. My copy gives no details of previous publications. However, it doesn’t make any difference to the argument. It’s a good book no matter who published it.)

The Great Explosion is really a series of linked novelettes about a spaceship exploring Earth’s lost colonies. The planets were colonised by nutters from Earth. Earth was glad to get rid of them, and promptly forgot all about them, which is how they got lost. The spaceship has come along to see how they have made out after all this time, and to re-establish contact.

Diabologic concerns one man against a planet full of nasty aliens. Naturally the aliens get their come-uppance. Campbell would never have allowed anything else. Now, where have I heard that one before…?

Allamagoosa is about an offog.

Thus described, the stories sound banal in the extreme. But style, of course, is everything. Just look at Ray Bradbury. He has been writing beautifully for years about absolutely nothing at all. He is, simply, full of sound and fury. I leave you to determine the significance. At the other extreme is Asimov, who has an almost total lack of style but is brim full of content. Russell, being British, is a master of compromise, and out of the fusion of these two approaches, has produced something greater than the sum of its component parts. Hence the word “classic” that I used a while back. The plots are banal. The cliches so threadbare you could see through them on a foggy, moonless midnight. Nevertheless, the method of handling lifts them above themselves, and they will stand reading and rereading—usually.

And finally they are, dammit, fun. Let’s not lose sight of that, let’s not sneer. No-one would pretend for a moment that Russell produced great literature (whatever that is). But he could entertain you and that is no small talent.

In this extract from The Space Willies (the American title of Next of Kin), Leeming is eavesdropping on a radio conversation between two aliens.

The unknown life-form manning the vessels had loud, somewhat bellicose voices, but spoke a language with sound-forms curiously akin to Terran speech. To Leeming’s ears it came as a stream of cross-talk that his mind instinctively framed in Terran words. It went like this:

First voice: “Mayor Snorkum will lay the cake.”

Second voice: “What for will the cake be laid by Snorkum?”

First voice: “He will starch his moustache.”

Second voice: “That is night-gab. How can he starch a tepid mouse”

They spent the next ten minutes in what sounded like an acrimonious argument about what one repeatedly called a tepid mouse, while the other insisted that it was a torpid moose. Leeming found that trying to follow the point and counterpoint of this debate put quite a strain upon the cerebellum. He suffered it until something snapped. Tuning his transmitter to the same frequency he bawled. “Mouse or moose, make up your goddam minds.”

This produced a moment of dumbfounded silence before the first voice grated, “Gnof, can you lap a pie-chain?”

“No he can’t,” shouted Leeming, giving the unfortunate Gnof no chance to brag of his ability as a pie-chain lapper.

There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, “I shall lambast my mother.”

“Dirty dog,” said Leeming, “shame on you.”

The other voice now informed mysteriously, “Mine is a fat one.” “I can imagine,” Leeming agreed.

“Clam-shack?” demanded Gnof in tones clearly translatable as, “Who is that?”

“Mayor Snorkum,” Leeming told him. (5)

That could have come straight out of a Goon Show. Indeed, it was contemporary with the Goons at the height of their popularity. It is pure nonsense, and it has no other purpose than to be nonsense. I cannot help thinking that Spike Milligan would have approved. Certainly, it never fails to induce a minor form of hysterics in me.

However, I don’t want to make extravagant claims. Russell didn’t always get it right.

Consider Diabologic.

The situation is quite simple. A superior Earthman lands on a planet of backward aliens—who nevertheless have space travel. His mission is to prove to them just how superior the Terran culture is to their own. By confusing them with logical paradoxes that twist up their thinking so that they end up bickering about the paradoxes amongst each other, he wins the day. Divided, the aliens fall. Three cheers for the big strong Earthman.

I first read this story as a child, and it made a huge impression on me. I only read it once, but I never forgot it. It was one of the best, the cleverest stories that I’d ever read. It excited and intrigued me. It turned on my “Sense of Wonder”. I loved that story.

Rose coloured glasses, I’m afraid. Rereading the story for this article, I found it appalling.

The difference is, I’ve grown up in the meantime. I know now things that I didn’t know then. I know that the story is derivative. It is tired and unoriginal. Russell confuses the aliens with Zeno’s Paradox. Big deal. None of the paradoxes he invokes so glibly are original with him, and neither is the confusion that they cause. He uses them without thought, straight off the shelf, and with the more sophisticated eyes of an adult I can see that the story is unsatisfying because, as a story, it contains within itself a further paradox that Russell missed. Any aliens sufficiently technologically advanced to get into space (as these have done) would see right through the Earthman’s deception. Nobody that clever can be that simple-minded. Even if the paradoxes were new to them, (unlikely, but allowable in the context), they should have been able to spot the flaws in the argument. Such understanding is basic to the mathematics that allow space travel, among other things.

Paradox—and the story falls apart and disappears up its own flawed premises.

Nevertheless, the child that I was loved that story simply because the child did not know about the paradoxes Russell introduced into the story. That poor child thought they were original and clever and exciting. Who wouldn’t, the first time they met them?

So perhaps the conclusion you can draw is that the reading and appreciating of Russell are a function of the age and maturity at which you approach him. I was very disappointed that rereading Diabologic meant re-evaluating it. There are some memories and impressions that it hurts to lose. That was one of them.

But then I reread Wasp and my faith was restored. Oh what a brilliant book that is. Humourous certainly, but with an underlying seriousness that comes to the fore every now and then. There is some sadness here, some pain. And it is real.

The plot, as usual, is ridiculous in the extreme. The old “Earthman-alone-against-a-planetful-of-hostile-aliens”.

Earth is at war with the Sirian Combine. Sirians are purple humanoids with small, tight ears. Mowry, the Earthman hero, is dyed purple and has his ears surgically altered. He is sent to infiltrate one of the alien’s planets and, all by himself, cause mayhem, sabotage, corruption and destruction. He must bring the entire planet to heel.

That he succeeds brilliantly goes without saying. In one sense, the novel is a textbook on how to undermine the confidence, the very existence, of a civilization, a style of life, a political system. Mowry is the first urban guerilla of SF, and his tactics are horribly familiar:

Next he went to the crowded main post office, took half a dozen small but heavy parcels from his case, addressed them and mailed them. Each held an airtight can containing a cheap clock-movement and a piece of paper, nothing else. The clock-movement emitted a sinister tick just loud enough to be heard if a suspicious-minded person listened closely. The paper bore a message short and to the point.

“This package could have killed you. Two different packages brought together at the right time and place could kill a hundred thousand. End this war before we end you!” (6)

Passages such as this mean that here we have a basically serious book. Despite the humour (and there is humour), it is nevertheless strangely sombre in parts. Perhaps this is as close as Russell ever came to writing “literature”. Certainly the events in it mimic those with which all of us are well acquainted from similar situations today. And the society portrayed in the novel has disturbing overtones of the totalitarian regimes that sprang up around the world as Russell was growing up. The correspondences are obvious, and so is the conclusion. For once, Russell was writing with his heart, rather than his head. This is a very personal book, full of personal statements. And from it we can deduce that his opinions are not Campbell’s opinions. He sets up, and then shoots down, many of Campbell’s sacred cows. This is what makes me suspect that Campbell did not publish this story. Despite the undeniable fact that Earth “wins” in the end, the route to victory is paved with subtle (and not so subtle) attacks on Campbell’s status quo.

For example, this is how the novel explains its title. Wolf, Mowry’s boss, tells him how a car has crashed, killing four people, just because the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp that had flown in through the window and started buzzing around his face.

“…The weight of the wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn’t even use it.

Nevertheless, it killed four big men and converted a large powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

“I see the point”, agreed Mowry, “but where do I come in?”

“Right here,” said Wolf. “We want you to become a wasp.”  (7)

The analogy is clever. Mowry, the human wasp, can destroy a planet, despite his relative weakness. The idea occurs several times throughout the book, and it is a skilful metaphor, very apt, very convincing.

But what about Campbell’s often stated preference for the White Anglo Saxon Protestant hero, WASP as it is frequently abbreviated? If Russell wasn’t poking fun, why did the WASP hero dye himself purple and deny his colour? Here is a small plea for racial harmony. White is purple, but the equation could read black just as easily. So much for the WASP (or wasp) hero.

Despite Campbell, Russell appears to have been somewhat of a preacher for racial equality and tolerance. It appears as a theme in many of his stories (sometimes overtly, other times more subtly). This has been noted by other commentators. (8)

This book reinforces my belief in the cynicism of the prolific Russell sprawling all over the pages of Astounding, pushing all of Campbell’s buttons one after the other. There was much more to him than his hack work implied. Wasp proved it.

Next of Kin (or The Space Willies in America) has almost exactly the same plot as Wasp. But this time the serious undertone is missing. This book is played strictly for laughs. Here Russell has produced a small masterpiece—a genuinely funny novel whose humour does not pall on rereading. The only other one I know of in SF is Harry Harrison’s Bill, The Galactic Hero, and I know of no higher compliment than to compare Russell’s novel with Harrison’s.

Leeming, the hero, is flying around the galaxy spying on the enemy planets. His ship is forced down and he is captured. How can he get home safely and at the same time defeat the aliens? That is the problem.

In this novel, Russell, tired of ray guns and blaster, invents the most ingenious (and funniest) hand weapon I have ever come across.

…he had a defence that was extremely effective but hateful to use, namely a powerful compressed-air pistol that fired breakable pellets filled with a stench so foul that one whiff would make anything that lived and breathed vomit for hours—including, as often as not, the user.

Some Terran genius had worked it out that the real king of the wild is not the lion nor the grizzly bear but a kittenish creature named Joe Skunk, whose every battle is a victorious rearguard action, so to speak. Some other genius had synthesized a horrible liquid seventy-seven times more revolting than Joe’s, with the result that an endangered spaceman could never make up his mind whether to run like hell and chance being caught, or whether to stand firm, shoot, and subsequently puke himself to death. (9)

So how does Leeming escape? He makes a bopamagilvie and talks to his Eustace through it. Wouldn’t you?

A bopamagilvie is simply two bits of copper wire twisted into loops, and a Eustace is an invisible, symbiotic superman. Every Earthman has one, and woe betide anyone who harms an Earthman; his Eustace will take a terrible revenge. Eventually, the aliens become convinced of the truth of this nonsense. And then…

The story is eminently logical, and very farcical. But it is not just surface. It has depth.

Leeming builds his bopamagilvie…

When the right moment arrived he lay on his belly and commenced reciting through the loop the third paragraph of Rule 27, Subsection B, of Space Regulations. He chose it because it was a gem of bureaucratic phraseology, a single sentence one thousand words long meaning something known only to God.

“Where refuelling must be carried out as an emergency measure at a station not officially listed as a home-station or definable for special purposes as a home-station; under Section A (5) amendment A (5)B providing that the emergency falls within the authorized list of technical necessities as given in Section J (29-33), with addenda subsequent thereto as applicable to home-stations where such are…”.  (10)

At this point (fortunately for the reader), Leeming is interrupted by his alien jailers.

Russell is indulging in a little harmless leg-pulling. The bureaucratic mind is one of his favourite targets, and he returns to again and again in his work (Allamagoosa is perhaps the cleverest example). His satire is usually gentle and it slides in gently. You don’t feel the barbs until it is too late. But the barbs are there. It is this satirical side to Russell that drove me to compare this book with Bill, The Galactic Hero. Both these works can be accepted on their own terms as simply amusing stories. But both have something beneath the skin, if you care to look. When he wants to, Russell can wield a clever typewriter.

The Great Explosion is perhaps his tour de force. Strictly speaking it is not a novel. Rather it is a sequence of linked novelettes. A spaceship visits several planets which have been colonised by various “Nut Cults” from Earth in the dim and distant past. Each planet gives us one novelette in the sequence.

Again, this is not an original idea. But the wit and wisdom of the writing takes this stock situation and does something quite clever with it, proving yet again that no idea is so hoary that someone can’t do something original with it. It may not be Art, but it will do until the real thing comes along.

One of the novelettes, under the title …And Then There Were None appears with alarming regularity in anthologies and collections with the generic title The Universe’s Best Ever SF of All Time—so it must have something going for it.

The nut cult that have taken over this particular planet are followers of Ghandi, an old Earth mystic. They have a curious economy based on mutual favours (obligations, or “obs” as the story has it), and a secret weapon. The secret weapon is the phrase “Freedom—I won’t”. The basic premise is that if an enemy says “do this” and the entire population refuses, what can the enemy do? The only course open to him, other than giving in, is to punish the entire population—which in practice probably means killing a few people pour encourager les autres. But suppose it doesn’t? Suppose the people still refuse to obey? What then? If the situation continues, to kill more people can only lead to genocide, and that solves nothing because a dead population cannot do what is required of it anyway. But to allow the population to continue to refuse to obey is to admit defeat. The enemy is powerless. It has no choice but to admit defeat, and to depart.

But the weapon is dangerous. It requires an unprecedented degree of solidarity. If even one person weakens and says “I will” then, by implication, the whole culture has lost. The enemy are the victors. Ghandi never managed to make it work properly in real life. It is just too dangerous; the degree of mutual co-operation required is just too large. People aren’t built that perfectly.

However, Russell assumes that it works for this planet, and takes it from there. If you are feeling allegorical, the points made about India and the Raj are self-evident, and I certainly don’t want to belabour the obvious. Russell shows that Empires (on the large scale) and Governments (on the small scale) are basically ridiculous. The will of the people is sufficient to ensure the best for the people, no matter what others may think (or pretend to think, for their own ends) is best for the people. All it needs is solidarity. This can be very nihilistic. In the extreme, nobody wins, and everyone loses. Russell realized this, hence the economy, based on obligations, enforcing a mutual interdependence, ensuring “realistic” goals, and keeping the losers and the parasites on the outside, since they couldn’t build up enough “obs” to fit in, to stay alive.

These are complicated waters, and Russell steers his narrative over them with his usual humour. The philosophy never gets seriously in the way of the story. But his humour is as naked a weapon as he has ever used. The sword is sharp, and he is not afraid to make deep cuts with it. As in Wasp (which had a similar theme concerned with the basic frailty of governments) this is the real Russell talking from the heart. What a strange philosophy for an officer and gentleman raised in the Sandhurst tradition.

At the end of the story, the crew of the spaceship, by and large, recognise the validity of Ghandi’s philosophy. They desert from the ship. They become (in the language of the story) Gands. And then there were none.

It is hard to understand why Campbell published this story. It is a polemic against all that he held dear. It pushes none of his buttons—its nihilism would have been anathema to him. It denied the American Way of Life and the American Way of Government. One can only surmise that he recognized that here was a story of genius. Whether or not you agreed with what it said was unimportant. Some stories just have to be published. Campbell was the best editor in the field. He knew what made a good story. He knew when he had to put up and shut up. This one was just too good to miss. Let a rival magazine have it? Never! And so he published it, in 1951, and it has lasted well, and Campbell’s genius as an editor is unchallenged.

“Suppose that when I go back to the ship that snorting rhinoceros Bidworthy gives me an order. And I give him the frozen eye and say ‘I won’t.’ What happens? It follows as an inviolable law of nature that he either drops dead or throws me in the clink.”

“That would do you a lot of good.”

“Wait a bit, I haven’t finished yet. I’m in the pokey, demoted and a disgrace to the service, but the job still needs doing. So Bidworthy picks on someone else. The victim, being a soul-mate of mine, also donates the icy optic and says ‘I won’t.’ Into the jug he goes and I’ve got company. Bidworthy tries again. And again and again and again. There are more of us crammed in the brig. It will hold only twenty, so they take over the engineers’ mess.”

“Leave our mess out of this,” requested Harrison.

“They take over the mess,” insisted Gleed, thoroughly determined to penalize the engineers. “Pretty soon its filled to the roof with I won’ters. Bidworthy is still raking them in as fast as he can go—if by then he hasn’t burst a dozen blood vessels. So they take over the Blieder dormitories.”

“Why keep picking on my crowd?”

“And pile them ceiling-high with bodies,” Gleed said, deriving sadistic pleasure from the picture. “Until in the end Bidworthy has to get buckets and brushes and go down on his knees and do his own deck-scrubbing, while Grayder, Shelton and the rest take turn for guard duty. By that time His Loftiness the Ambassador is in the galley busy cooking for the prisoners and is being assisted by a disconcerted bunch of yessing pen-pushers.” He had another look at this mental scene. “Holy smoke!”. (11)

Just imagine! Isn’t that what SF is all about?

And finally—Allamagoosa. Russell’s writing career reached its peak in 1955 at Cleveland where he obtained his only Hugo. The story is impossible to summarise without giving away the whole point of it—and that is far too brilliant a thing to spoil. Granted it depends on a trick ending—take away the O. Henry twist and there is little or nothing left. But I don’t care. A story so brilliantly funny needs no excuse. I won’t quote from it—it cannot be quoted from. It is purely and simply brilliant—ephemeral, of no lasting literary merit, but brilliant nonetheless. It never palls on me. I cannot be objective about this story. I love it far too much.

That was the ultimate; the peak of a career. By and large, the later stories do not bear examining. The best was over. Russell’s humour had run out, and there was little left.

There were more publications and republications, but the bolt was shot, the well had run dry and there has been nothing new from his pen in fifteen years or more.

But he has survival value.

Anyone who republishes his “classic” books will make a killing. Russell has a permanent place in the hall of fame, and his reputation endures despite the fact that so much of his work is unobtainable. He deserves a better fate than this. An awful lot of SF is being reprinted at present, riding on a wave of popularity. The letters SF on a book cover seem to mean a guaranteed minimum sale, whatever the quality of the book between the covers, and that means money in the bank.

So can we have Eric Frank Russell back? Please?

Footnotes

1. Who’s Who in Science Fiction by Brian Ash. Elm Tree Books 1976, p. 172.

2. The Hugo Winners. Isaac Asimov (editor). Penguin Books 1968,p. 91.

3. A Requiem for Astounding by Alva Rogers. Advent, Chicago, 1964.

4. Ibid. p. 86.

5. The Space Willies by Eric Frank Russell. Ace Books, 1958, p. 21.

6. Wasp by Eric Frank Russell. SFBC No. 49, 1961, p. 121.

7. Wasp by Eric Frank Russell. SFBC No. 49, 1961, p. 10.

8. Seekers of Tomorrow by Sam Moskowitz. Hyperion Press Inc. 1974, pp. 133-150.

9. The Space Willies by Eric Frank Russell, Ace Books, 1958. p. 31.

10. Ibid. p. 87.

11. The Great Explosion by Eric Frank Russell. Avon Books, 1975, pp. 134-135.

A Packet of Tomato Soup

by Maggi.

The Nestle Company (New Zealand) Ltd.

39 cents (Colour added.)

First published in Warp 28, May 1982.

The plot, unlike the soup, does not thicken. But the literary lessons are there.

The wonderfully lyrical cooking instructions demonstrate an elegant prose style. Short sharp sentences that come straight to the point, deriving their effect perhaps from a combination of the stylistic mannerisms of Ernest Hemingway gently beaten with a soupcon of A. E. van Vogt.

One detects a certain existential angst reminiscent of Jean Paul Satre (La Nause springs immediately to mind) stirred together with the subtlety that made the reputation of E. E. “Doc” Smith.

Once we have recovered from the delighted frisson engendered by these instructions we come to an appendix to this major work of culinary communication.

A recipe.

The particular edition in my kitchen discusses “Italian Chicken Saute” in a manner that owes nothing at all to Aunt Daisy, but much, perhaps, to Aunt Lucretia. I feel that this addition to the original, simple, cooking instructions is a satirical embellishment. Certainly the style of the two is very different. Compare the straightforward “Mix thoroughly” of the first section with the more philosophically refined “Combine” of the second. This suggests, to me at least, that here we have a much later interpolation to the primary text serving as a counterpoint to the original in order to emphasise the terse but evocative (and complete) nature of that original. Consequently we may disregard it.

Investigate your kitchen cupboard. Unsuspected literary delights lurk. And you may be able to eat the words.

A REVIEW: The Song of Phaid the Gambler

by Mick Farren

Published by New English Library

First published in Warp 28, May 1982.

They used to say of Graham Greene that his books evoked an atmosphere of grim seediness. You could almost taste the grit, the gloom, the decay. They called it Greene-land, and it was instantly recognizable. Perhaps it is invidious to compare Mick Farren with Graham Greene (though I will not say to whom) but certainly Farren’s characters live and move through a Greene-land of the future where culture is decayed, morality is egocentric and people are only tools to use. Happy is the man who can say, “Screw you Jack. I’m alright.“

The book opens cinematographically with a close up of a hotel; half-swallowed by the jungle. Gradually the viewpoint pulls backward and more detail slowly appears in the picture. A riverbank, a broken dock, an overgrown clearing. Hot and humid; the back end of nowhere. Phaid is a gambling man, stranded in a torrid zone without the price of the long ride back to civilization. And so the plot begins. An old and classic one. Homer called it an Odyssey, and it was old even when he pinched it from the Babylonians. We have a quest, a mighty journey with adventure all the way.

We travel with Phaid as he lies, cheats and steals his way along the slow and rocky path back to the good life (for there must be good life somewhere). It’s a struggle. Farren’s villains are right bastards and so are his heroes. Even the bright light of Revolution is dimmed by self-seekers trying (and succeeding) to milk the idealism for a fast buck. If you want to sum up this odyssey, consider it as an exercise in applied cynicism. (Even the Androids have off days.)

Like Greene before him, Farren has a genius for evoking atmosphere and character. You will not like or admire the people in the book (I hope you don’t anyway), but you will admire the skill with which Farren manipulates them throughout the course of this long and absorbing tale.

(By the way—the blurb on the back has even less than usual to do with the story. Four specific incidents are mentioned in the blurb, together with one generality. Three and a half of the incidents do not appear at all in the text and the generality is only vaguely applicable. I think the blurb writer’s lunch must have disagreed with him.)

A REVIEW: The Princess Bride

by William Goldman

Published by Ballantine 1979, $3.60

First published in Warp 25, February 1982.

Despite the introduction, this book wasn’t written by S. Morgernstern and it isn’t a satire on Florinese politics. Neither does it portray accurately the relationship of Guilder and Florin. The truth of that relationship is buried deep in the Dutch monetary system.

A better description is found in the subtitle. It is A Hot Fairy Tale. It concerns Romance and Errantry; Peril and Torture; great deeds and deadly creatures.

Buttercup is (eventually) the most beautiful girl in the world and is betrothed to Prince Humperdink, the heir to the throne of Florin. However, she loves Westley, the Farm Boy…

So far, so predictable, and it must be admitted the plot is not entirely free of cliche. That, however, is the whole point. It takes the stereotypes that always act out such stories, and pushes them right over the edge. The result is a delicious farce, and the Heroic Romance is most unlikely to recover from it.

What are the motives of the Man in Black? Who is the Dread Pirate Roberts? What is an R. O. U. S. and what do you do to escape from it?

From the impossible climb up the Cliffs of Insanity to the climax in the Zoo of Death where we learn the nature of the Machine, the pace never flags and the tongue protrudes firmly outwards from the cheek. (Don’t laugh too hard—you’ll bite it off and even the Miracle Man Max won’t be able to help you then.)

Will Buttercup marry the evil prince? Will there be war with Guilder? Will Inigo find the six-fingered nobleman?

I defy anyone with a sense of humour not to enjoy this book. And once you’ve read it, heroic tales of derring-do will never be quite the same again.

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 0: Harry Harrison

First published in Warp 29, July 1982.

Consider Harry Harrison.

All the way from the sombre, frightening scenario of Make Room, Make Room to the brilliant farce of Bill, The Galactic Hero. This is Harry Harrison—a skilful, talented writer who has explored most of the major highways of SF and who has usually managed to illuminate them in strange and exciting ways by virtue of the sheer artistry he has applied to his vision.

All of which makes his latest novel, Planet of No Return, all the more disappointing. I can only recommend that you read this one with your eyes shut. That way you might get through to the end without throwing up. If it wasn’t for the name Harry Harrison on the cover, I would swear from the evidence of the text that this was a book written by a complete beginner, totally unskilled in the art and craft of writing. All the mistakes are here. Characters ask each other dumb questions to which they already know the answers, simply to provide an excuse for a lecture to bring the reader up to date on plot points. The lecture usually begins with some such phrase as, “As I am sure you remember…” and then goes on to boldly split infinitives that no man has split before. There is no excuse for this. The best way to explain a plot point is to dramatise, not lecture about it. But Harrison does even worse. Having dramatised some of his plot points (in Chapter One, Hartig is killed by an alien war machine) he then has his characters recapitulate what we have already seen. In Chapter Four, Brion Brandd and Lea describe Hartig’s death to Carver (“Do you remember how Hartig died?”). Presumably Harrison was paid by the word, and this way he got more words without having to think too hard about finding new ones.

The plot is routine. Selm-II is covered in alien war machines, robots fighting each other and ruthlessly exterminating anything that gets in the way, like Hartig in Chapter One. Brion Brandd and Lea must discover the reason for the fighting robots and bring the war to an end.

So far, so banal. And the banality continues. There are no surprises here, no clever plot twists. All is routine space opera that could have been (and often was) published in Amazing Stories in 1930. SF has grown up since then. Today it should be more mature and sophisticated.

The whole book is packaged together with appalling black and white illustrations by someone called Rick DeMarco. The pictures consist mostly of bulging muscles (Brion Brandd), big tits (Lea) and lumps of metal (alien war machines). The general level of artistic skill is about on par with Harrison’s lumpy prose, and they complement each other well. Which says a lot about both of them.

Harrison’s earlier work seems to be undergoing a resurgence of popularity at the moment. Tor Books are republishing a lot of stuff. And that means that if you choose carefully, it is possible to pick up books from the period when Harrison was writing with both hands on the typewriter and was firmly in control of what he was doing. For instance…

How do you get from England to the American Colonies? You could go by aeroplane, but aeroplanes are very slow because of their coal powered engines. We have all complained of this at one time or another.

No, the best way to travel to the American Colonies is to take a train through the transatlantic tunnel. It is a fast and comfortable journey—and it is positively the only way for a gentleman to travel.

But, dear reader, when you travel through this marvel of modern engineering, spare a though for the great men who built this most sophisticated of railway systems. Ask yourself just how this eighth wonder of the world came into being. Who were those mightily thewed colossi who braved the very worst that Nature (or the conspiracies of mankind) could bring to bear against them and won through against incalculable odds to build—the Transatlantic Tunnel?

Maybe, gentle reader, you could while away the hours of your journey with an improving book. A suitable one being, perhaps, the biography of the men who laboured so mightily on the tunnel. Such a book is now readily available to you. From the pen of Mr H. Harrison (gent.) comes A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! It shows just how all the obstacles were met—and how they were overcome. Within the pages of this work, all those heroes whose names are now household words, come stirringly alive. Here is Captain “Gus” Washington, the direct descendent of the traitor George Washington who was shot, you will recall, by our gallant armies in the Colonies when the abortive revolution of which he was the leader, failed. Here also is Sir Isambard Brassey-Brunel, one of the greatest engineers of the age, and his beautiful daughter Iris, whom Captain Washington loved.

This is a noble tale. A tale of bravery and dedication to an ideal—the Transatlantic Tunnel itself. Mr Harrison’s prose warmly recaptures those pioneering days. He has performed his biographical function perfectly. Those people who previously were mere names in our history books are shown by Mr Harrison to have been real flesh and blood with real human drives and ambitions. So is history brought home to us.

Planet of No Return by Harry Harrison. Tor Science Fiction $4.10.

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! by Harry Harrison. Tor Science Fiction $4.10.

Print It Small

First published in Warp 30, September 1982.

I like to read the small print in the front of books, the publishing details and dedications. It’s amazing what you find.

I have a copy of What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown, published by Bantam in 1978. In the front it says:

This low-priced Bantam book has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading and was printed from new plates. It contains the complete text of the original hard cover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

(capitals in the original). Now, I also possess the first edition paperback of this novel published in the States by Bantam again in 1950, and the British hardback published by Boardmans in 1951. Both of these latter two mention Idlewild airport. The 1978 edition updates things a bit and gives the airport its present day name of Kennedy. Therefore the one word Idlewild has been omitted and maybe I could sue the publishers under the Trades Description Act?

But some bits of small print are more cryptic. What would you make of

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

on the bottom of the page of publishing details? It actually means that this is a first edition, the number on the extreme left corresponding to the edition. Unless, that is, the book is published by Elsevier/Nelson in which case one more number is added and the sequence is reversed:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

and the edition is the rightmost number.

Harper and Row include date codes:

80 81 82 83 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The left most number is the year of the printing and the right most number is the edition.

When a book goes into subsequent printings, numbers corresponding to previous printings are dropped. Thus in the above systems, a second edition might read:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

81 82 83 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

except that sometimes as a number is dropped off the left (or right) another is added on the right (or left):

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

There is another complication. Often a book is published simultaneously in the USA and Canada. Both publications are first editions and will be numbered (say)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

However some publishers (particularly DAW) count this as two separate printings of the edition and when the second USA printing is published it is considered to be the third actual printing and is numbered

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

and bibliophilic completists go nuts trying to find the non-existent

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

So much for crypticism. What else is in the small print?

Titles often change between printings and this too can often be found buried here. For instance, I have the 1976 Arrow paperback of Chronicules by D. G. Compton which informs me that the hardback was published in 1971 by Michael Joseph and was called Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper sides of used Matchboxes and Something that might have been Castor Oil. Presumably they couldn’t fit that on to the spine of a paperback. Kronk by Edmund Cooper was originally Son of Kronk. All that is fairly harmless, but sometimes the information hides something a bit more tricky. For instance I have on my shelves a dozen or so books by John Brunner which have statements to the effect that “…a shorter version of this book appeared under the title…”. In other words, Brunner is putting a lot of his earlier works through the typewriter a second time and republishing them under a new title. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Second thoughts are often better. But be careful. Be sure you know what you are buying. You may already have it.

Following the printing details is often a dedication. And these too can be rich sources of information.

In Breakfast in the Ruins by Michael Moorcock, one James Colvin writes that: “Michael Moorcock died of lung cancer, aged 31, in Birmingham last year”. Interesting information, if untrue. Why was this done? The reasons go back to the 1960s when Moorcock was editing the avant garde magazine New Worlds. James Colvin was the pseudonym that Moorcock used to write book reviews and the occasional short story. Eventually Moorcock tired of him and New Worlds published Colvin’s obituary in issue 197, January 1970. Colvin, it appeared, died when a filing cabinet full of manuscripts fell over on top of him. The obituary was signed William Barclay—another of Moorcock’s pseudonyms.

And so the wheel comes full circle.

The Word Outside

First published in Warp 31, November 1982.

There is good SF and bad SF. For the purposes of this article, good SF may be considered to be SF with artistic merit. Bad SF is everything else. Artistic merit implies some concern with the human condition and/or attempts to explore the literary boundaries of the field.

Having defined my terms, I am forced to the conclusion that very little SF can be considered good, and that too much respect is paid to the rubbish. I am sick and tired of hearing people refuse to admit that any criticism of whatever imbecilic thing they happen to be into can be valid (how can you criticise perfection?), while at the same time dismissing out of hand the items in the field that can hold their heads up proudly in any literary company whatsoever—all for no particularly good reason.

I have no quarrel with a liking for crud. God knows I read and enjoy enough of it myself. But I can eat a hamburger without pretending that it is haute cuisine. Far too many SF fans consider that the hamburgers of SF really are haute cuisine; and when they come across the real haute cuisine, they spit it out in disgust. A diet composed solely of hamburgers ruins the palate. This is not just narrow-mindedness, it is closed-mindedness, and it is indefensible. Whatever happened to tolerance?

Much of this attitude stems from ignorance. A great number of SF fans read nothing but SF and have no awareness of that thing called Literature or any knowledge of the traditions that shape it and the purposes that call it forth. A good example is Brian Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head which the lumpenproletariat pushed to one side, completely missing the homage paid to James Joyce within a truly science fictional (however you define it) framework. It is impossible to have any appreciation at all of the book unless you can see that link. And that means you have got to go and read Joyce, whichever way you look at it.

Hand in hand with this ignorance of the world outside SF there often goes a total inability to appreciate that most subtle of concepts—style. My favourite example of this was an English fan I met once who was completely incapable of seeing any difference at all between the works of Cordwainer Smith and E. E. “Doc” Smith, writers about as stylistically similar as pot plants and belly-button fluff. (“They both write about spaceships and things”, he said. Ye Gods!) This attitude is the only explanation I can think of for the enduring popularity of so many SF authors who simply can’t write. I cannot read James P. Hogan, for example. The words get in the way of the story.

And finally in this catalogue of sins, there is the innate conservatism of fandom. How odd that in a literature whose main raison d’etre is a devotion to the concept that the future will be different, that change is in the air, there should be so much resistance to change within itself. Too much modern SF is rooted firmly in the past, to the styles and ideas of thirty and more years ago. This is comfortable—it is what we are used to. We don’t have to think about it. We know about space ships and time machines and linear narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end. But it seems to me (as it seemed to the avant garde new wave in the 1960s) that SF requires more than this if it is to grow and prosper and not merely stagnate. The only thing we really know about the future is that it will be new and strange and different. So we need new and strange and different ways of talking about it. We need to take the techniques developed in other fields as well as within our own, and to build on those techniques, refining and extending them. And if that leads to broken narrative and fractured prose—then so be it. At least it stretches our minds. Don’t reject William Burroughs because he is hard to understand. Make the effort, for God’s sake. Don’t condemn him because he doesn’t write safe trivialities like Edgar Rice used to.

I have said a lot of nasty words. I have said fans are ignorant and scared of new things, bigoted and only comfortable with what they know, that they have no sense of discrimination.

But think about it. Doesn’t that apply to most of the world at large? Maybe SF fans are not as different and as special as they like to think they are.

Categories

First published in Warp 32, January 1983.

One of the more interesting things about SF is that it doesn’t exist. Outside of the fevered imaginations of the media manipulators—the literary and filmic controllers of the game—there is no such thing.

Let me explain.

Anybody in the business of selling to the public has, the theory goes, to be able to tell that public just what it is he wants them to buy. To that end he packages his product nicely and writes all over it in big bold letters exactly what is inside. That way nobody is under any misapprehension. If you buy something with BUTTER written on it at the dairy, you won’t get CHEESE. Similarly, if a label falls off a can of corn—it doesn’t matter how long the naked can sits on the shelf—it is most unlikely that anyone will buy it.

In one sense, publishing and film making are just like selling groceries. You package your product and you label it clearly because it sells better that way. And besides, the boys in the advertising department can use the label as a launching pad for brilliantly original marketing gimmicks to make the product sell like hot SF books. (“SF? Gee, we’d better put a phallic spaceship on the cover!”)

And so we are labelled and stuck all together on a shelf so we all know just where to go to get our goods.

Or do we?

In 1959 an American newspaper published a book review which said in part:

…It will be so satisfactory to the right reader that I think a warning is in order: though the action takes place in the future and though a spaceship takes off on the final page, this should not be confused with what is usually called science fiction…What he has really written is a highly imaginative and basically joyous celebration of humankind’s instinct to keep going.

In other words, this is a good book so it can’t possibly be science fiction! The novel was A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller—perhaps one of the few unarguable literary gems to come out of SF (and I don’t care how you define SF as a concept—it still fits).

But the book as originally published did not have the convenient category “SF” stamped on it. Science Fiction was not mentioned in the blurb. So it was picked up and reviewed simply as a book in its own right. Nobody knew it was SF; they hadn’t been told. And it reached a much wider audience because of it.

To label is to ghettoize. SF has a certain image in the popular mind. So do “Western”, “Detective”, “Romance” or any other generic label you can think of. Never mind how true that image is. It is sufficient that it exists. And so the genre label will repel (or attract) depending on an individual’s image of what it really means. This is called prejudice.

But if it was just a book without a generic tag, what then? Would it be like the can of corn whose label fell off? Would no-one buy it? I think not, and I think the case of A Canticle for Leibowitz proves it. Without the label there is no prior “image-prejudice” (if I may coin a description) and you can pick the book up freely and leaf through the pages, read the blurb, see if it appeals. You can’t look inside an unlabelled can, and therein lies a world of difference.

But the publishers have always done it that way because there is a superficial logic to the whole deal. Labels and packages make a product. If it’s good enough for the groceries, it’s good enough for the media mafia. They remain blind to the wider picture. It would be a good experiment, I think, to take the categories away, take the spaceships off the cover (or the cowboys, or the corpses, or the lovers, depending on whatever genre we happen to be concerned with) and get a few more reviews like the one I quoted above. We don’t need the stigma of the SF label. It only ties us down and restricts our audience. We need to get rid of those ties.

In the last analysis, there are (or should be) no such things as SF books and films. There are only books and films.

If It’s Bigger, Is It Better?

First published in Warp 33, May 1983.

One day, God willing, Philip Jose Farmer will finish one of his many series and the SF world will go into a state of shock. (If you think that The Magic Labyrinth completed the Riverworld series, go and read the last page again.) One day, Piers Anthony will write a trilogy with only three books in it.

SF seems to generate series, trilogies, streams of related stories. Everything Michael Moorcock has ever written is related to just about everything else that Michael Moorcock has ever written—often at very trivial levels; but sometimes the relationships are much deeper than that. It isn’t coincidence that Jerry Cornelius shares his initials with Jesus Christ. Now go and count the JC’s in his books and think about the roles they play.

Moorcock is perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon, but others are rapidly catching up. Publishers love a trilogy. If they can con you into buying the first book, they’re certain you will buy the rest—just to find out what happens in the end. It’s the closest you can get, in marketing terms, to a sure thing. And that’s why Stephen Donaldson writes BIG BOOKS. Big books that split into three mean three times as much money in the bank for the publisher.

The phenomenon isn’t new, of course. Like a lot of things, you can trace it back to the magazines. They always run serials to help guarantee continuity of sales. Everyone, the theory goes, needs to know if (or, more realistically, how) the hero will escape from this week’s cliff hanger. And the more issues you can spin it out over, the more the money rolls in.

But don’t forget the other side of the story either. The longer the author can spin it out, the better it is for him as well, particularly if he’s paid by the word. At 1˘ a word, very few characters simply “say” anything (1˘). They usually “speak slowly and carefully, enunciating every word” (7˘) or perhaps they “scream and rage in a paroxysm of anger terrifying to behold” (11˘) or maybe they “speak gloomily while staring out of the window at the depressing vista of concrete buildings, all exactly alike” (18˘ and a bit of social comment to ease the author’s mercenary conscience a little). And that’s another reason why Stephen Donaldson writes big books.

And it’s escalating. Everyone these days seems to be writing series. Sometimes it is valid, of course. I seriously doubt whether Gene Wolfe could have said everything he needed to say in less than the four books that make up The Book of the New Sun; and the basic premise of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories virtually forces them into the extended shape of a series.

But far too often, the concept is used simply to inflate the prose and to pile meaningless incident on meaningless incident just to get another book out of it. The end result of that is not a series. It is just an overwritten book.

Any copy editor worthy of the name could have condensed Stephen Donaldson’s hyper-inflated ramblings into one book (or at the most two—given that he’s produced two trilogies); and made a tighter, more compelling work out of it.

And if you doubt that, consider Lord of the Rings. My copies of the three books total 973 pages, not counting the Appendices. My copy of the Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings has 160 pages (84% smaller!) and yet it deals with every single major plot point in the original. Someone, somewhere, pulled a fast one.

My Early Life

First published in Warp 36, September 1983.

I remember it very well. I was about ten years old, and I’d been flirting mildly with SF for some time, but I still wasn’t hooked. Captain W. E. Johns’ stories about the asteroids, Angus Macvicar’s stories about Hesikos, the lost planet, the Kemlo books (does anyone remember Kemlo?). I found them vaguely entertaining, nothing more. What I was really interested in was aeroplanes, particularly their early history. Cody, the Wright brothers, Louis Bleriot.

Then my mother went and spoiled it all. “Alan,” she said, “I’ve just read this marvellous book. I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s called The Day of the Triffids”. So I read it, and the world was never the same again. Magic had come into it. For the first time, my sense of wonder had been turned on, and the only thing I wanted in the world was to repeat the sensation. I was hooked, and I have never lost the addiction.

About the same time, I persuaded the librarian to let me into the adult section. (I’d long ago exhausted the children’s section, and I was on my second time through.) I knew what I wanted, I wanted SF. I found H. G. Wells, and scared myself with War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Wells was an SF writer, so I took Love and Mr Lewisham out, and discovered that Wells also wrote things that weren’t SF. They were boring. I read omnivorously. I fought the green tharks on the dead sea bottoms of Mars with Captain John Carter, I voyaged around the world in 80 days with Phileas Fogg. I read a book whose title and author my subconscious has (mercifully) suppressed. I vividly remember one episode from it. The hero was a giant chicken mining radioactive dust. I loved it. I had to have more.

There was SF all around in those days. Once a week on television, the entire British nation huddled around their television sets and grooved on Quatermass and the Pit. Pub landlords complained about how slack business was when the programme was on. I wasn’t allowed to watch it in case it gave me nightmares. Tony Hancock did a satire of it. Since that was a light hearted comedy program, I was allowed to watch it. It gave me nightmares. The Goons did a satire of it, but I didn’t find that until 20 years later. My father didn’t approve of the Goons, so we never listened. But there was always Journey Into Space. Andrew Faulds played Captain Jet Morgan, and Alfie Bass was Lemmy. Later Faulds went into politics and became an MP. Alfie Bass became Bootsie of The Army Game and “Bootsie and Snudge”. I wonder which was the better decision?

By now I’d discovered that Gollancz had a whole series of books with plain yellow covers that were all SF. I devoured them avidly. Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein. It took me ages to discover Brian Aldiss and James Blish. They were published by Faber, and the books didn’t have yellow covers. Proper SF had yellow covers. Again, my mother came to the rescue. She found Hothouse by Aldiss. Whole new worlds opened up. Yellow covers, I realised, were not the only criterion of excellence.

On the television, more SF appeared. Four Feather Falls and Supercar. There was a series about the Moon, Mars and Venus. I recall nothing at all about it except that in the very last episode, an actor called George Colouris stayed behind on Venus when his friends blasted off for home. He liked it there. For years afterwards, whenever I saw him in anything, I was always puzzled. How the heck had he got home? Then there was Doctor Who, with William Hartnell glaring fiercely at the camera as he tried to remember what his next line was. Sometimes he succeeded.

By now I was into my early teens, and for a while SF took a back seat. I never wholly lost the taste, but more and more I was turning to other things. Kafka held me for a while. I enjoyed the feelings of surrealistic paranoia his books evoked (a very SF sensation, I realise now). I read Sartre and Camus (the former sent me to sleep, the latter woke me up again. Maybe he had a better translator). I discovered Somerset Maugham, and devoured everything he had written, which took considerable time, because he was very prolific. I turned to the American Novel, and plowed my way through Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, Jones and Dos Passos. I made the first of many unsuccessful attempts to read the great Russian novelists. I got bored. I read the Foundation trilogy. SF grabbed me by the scruff of the neck again. From that time on, it has never let me go.

Why? What is there that grabs me so? From time to time I have attempted to answer these unanswerable questions. For my own peace of mind, if for no other reason. I like to know what makes me tick. I think the closest I have ever come to an answer was when I began to think of SF as applied surrealism. It often gives me the same feelings that I get when I look at a painting by Dali or Magritte. Dali’s soft watches, Magritte’s shattered landscapes in a broken window, Moorcock’s moody decadent fantasy worlds, Pohl and Kornbluth’s Wolfbane and the ring of fire that grew, Blish’s Triumph of Time (also published under the title Clash of Cymbals)—they all give me that funny shiver in the pit of my stomach that we all recognize as a signal of the “real thing”. And that is the closest I can come.

What about you? Do you have any answers?

Nostalgia Today and Tomorrow

First published in Warp 37, November 1983.

Once upon a not so very long time ago, in conversation with a friend, the opinion was expressed that much of the SF written today was nowhere near as good as the SF of the so-called “golden age”, whenever that was. We had much fun with this topic. Names were mentioned. Larry Niven was scorned, James P. Hogan was castigated (you have to do them young, before they start spraying), Arthur C. Clarke’s latest novel was torn to shreds. Now this was enjoyable, and it passed an hour or two, but essentially it was a meaningless exercise because the basic premise was false. I don’t really think that the standard has dropped (which is a good thing). On the other hand, I don’t think it has risen either, and that most certainly is not a good thing. The only thing that has changed over the years is me. My built in shit detector (as Hemingway called it) has developed a much more sensitive nose. And the smell is everywhere. It always was. I just didn’t notice before.

Last time I told you how The Day of the Triffids hooked me on SF. I told you how my sense of wonder turned on and tingled under the spell of this wonderful book. And it did. It was all true. What I didn’t tell you, however, was that about six months ago, smitten with a surge of nostalgia, I reread the book for the first time in mumble mumble years. I found it dull and pedestrian. The magic was gone. My first thought was that someone had removed all the good bits while I wasn’t looking. I checked the page numbers and the binding. The pages were all there; no gaps in the numbering sequence. The binding showed no signs of disturbance. I was forced to conclude that the book was whole and entire. What had gone wrong?

The trouble, it seems to me, is that in the intervening period I have read too many SF books, and my sense of wonder has become overloaded. Like a heroin addict, I need stronger and stronger doses to produce the same effect. And so nowadays it takes something extra special to turn me on. Where once I would thrill to the tribulations of Gonad the Barbarian as he fought the evil demons, nowadays he only induces an urgent desire to take up book burning as a hobby. In short, I have grown older and (I hope) wiser; more discriminating, and less inclined to put up with trash. The trash was always there, just as it is today, and it still serves a useful purpose. It is a good introduction to the really mind-expanding possibilities that SF can (and sometimes does) offer. The nursery slopes, if you like. SF always was mostly rubbish, and it still is.

Eventually, however, we all have to come out of the nursery and face up to the real world. Unfortunately, far too few SF fans ever make it that far. Most of them are still in there, sucking their dummies, and grooving on mind boggling banalities, predigested pap. It’s safe and warm and familiar in there, and they don’t have to put too much strain on whatever it is that they use for minds. (The last time I said this, I got what I think was a vituperative letter from a Blake’s 7 fan, but I can’t be sure because he hadn’t sharpened his crayon and it was quite impossible to read.)

But to return to my original point—almost the only difference I can see between the SF now and the SF of (say) twenty years ago is that now there is a whole lot more of it. These days, it seems, the demand is such that almost anything of an SF or fantasy orientation can get itself published. Obviously the demand is there, and equally obviously it is growing. But it is still written with one eye closed and one hand tied behind the back. Twenty years ago it was Volsted Gridban and Vargo Statten, and today it is E. C. Tubb. All he’s done is use his proper name this time. (Remind me one day to tell you the story of Badger Books and R. L. Fanthorpe, the man with ten million pseudonyms.) Other changes are equally cosmetic and unimportant (there’s a lot more sex nowadays). The aim has not changed at all. The stories are still pointed firmly at the lowest common denominator, the mass mind, and I don’t think that will ever change. It’s a commercial world, after all, and as long as success is measured in terms of money, popular art will continue to be mediocre.

And because of all that, in twenty years time, I expect to read an article in Warp bemoaning the fact that the contemporary SF scene is nowhere near as exciting and interesting as it was back in the good old days of the 1980s. This article will be written by one of you trekkies out there (but you’ll be embarrassed that you used to be a trekkie, and you won’t admit it). There is too much rubbish being published, you will say. And you will be right, but for all the wrong reasons. After all, it was the rubbish that first got you interested, wasn’t it? What a shame that you had to grow up.

Everything Happens in Threes

First published in Warp 39, March 1984.

Now that I’ve seen Return of the Jedi and the middle trilogy of the project is complete, it is probably time to say something about the Star Wars phenomenon. Let’s begin at the end with Return of the Jedi itself which is without a shadow of a doubt the worst of the three films. The plot threads left dangling in the other films are tied up in the most obvious of ways with little or no thought being applied to them. It is totally unsubtle. I’d say it was hackneyed and cliche ridden, but that would be a hackneyed and cliche ridden thing to say. The film is riddled with logical inconsistencies, and the ending is so sickly sweet that I could feel my teeth rotting as I watched. And did you spot the spelling mistake in the subtitles? At one stage, when Jabba the Hutt was jabbering, the subtitles told us that he was talking about a “Wookiee”. One would have thought that several millions of dollars would have bought a subtitler who knew that Chewbacca was a wookie. And (Oh God) those cute little furry things. Specifically designed to make you say “aaaaaah”, with their great big round bushbaby eyes (so why weren’t they nocturnal, damnit?) and their endearing clumsiness. Darth Vader turning into a good guy (he lost all my respect when he did that—he was a villain, for heavens sake; and I like my villains nasty). The Emperor with blue lightning in his fingertips. Answer me this—if Luke Skywalker, who was a mere beginner in manipulating the Force, could levitate himself as he did in the battle against Jabba the Hutt, why couldn’t the Emperor (with so much more training in the use of the Force) levitate himself to safety when Darth Vader chucked him down the hole?? Well?

I could go on, but you get my point, so why bother. The film was crude and unpolished. God knows, the other two weren’t sophisticated, but they were head and shoulders above this one.

You could probably date the current SF craze, or boom or whatever to Star Wars. 2001 was too cerebral, but Star Wars caught the Star Trek generation with its pants down, and suddenly SF was busting out all over. (Why oh why didn’t the wookie get a medal at the end of the first film? Everybody else did, and he deserved it as much as they did. Is the message of the film a statement that we are going to take racial prejudice out to the stars, or am I reading too much into a simple oversight? Either way, the wookie should have got a medal.)

There were attempts at something better—Solaris for example. But the kindest thing you could say about Solaris was that it was terminally boring, so that never amounted to much. The avant garde had been doing it for years, of course. But nobody went to see Last Year in Marienbad, and even if they had gone, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference, because it probably wasn’t SF anyway. I think. Maybe.

So blame it all on George Lucas. You could say that he was indirectly responsible for Battleship Galactica. I hope the thought gave him nightmares.

If it wasn’t for this last film which casts a dark shadow retrospectively over the other, I would heap praise on Star Wars. The first two films really were astonishingly good, even subtle sometimes—and that is unusual in this sort of area. The famous scene in the bar in the first film, for instance, was a beautifully understated film clip. (I think Lucas listened too much to the praise on this scene. If a few aliens are good, he must have thought, then a lot will be better. Hence all those damn muppets in the last film. Someone should have told him that aliens are like salt on your fish and chips. A few grains makes them tasty. A salt cellar full makes them inedible.)

I recently saw the first two films as a double feature, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I would be happy to repeat the experience. For all their faults, they do have a magic about them. But the last film is tired, and the magic isn’t there. If Lucas ever makes the other films in the series, I hope that he can revitalise his ideas. If he doesn’t, then all we will end up with is a repeat of the 1950s B-picture. Only this time in colour instead of black and white. Cinemascope and surround-sound instead of gloomyscope and flicker-vision. And that will be a shame. Lucas has already proved that he can do it. The question is, will he?

A Review: Eye of the Queen

by Phillip Mann

Published by Gollancz

First published in Warp 40, May/July 1984.

Gollancz rarely publish books by unknown writers, so that when they do you can usually be sure that the book will be something special. Phillip Mann is a New Zealand author, and this is his first novel. It is without question one of the best novels I have read in a long time.

The book takes the form of a diary interspersed with comments by the diarist’s friends (both human and alien). Marius Thorndike, whose diary this is, is an expert in alien linguistics. He comes out of retirement to investigate the language and culture of the Pe-Ellians, an alien race who seem to be controlling or circumscribing the technical development of humankind. So far so straightforward. In nine million other books that start from this premise the plot and development would be stunningly obvious and trivial, much involved with space battles and espionage and mysterious coloured rays. It is to Phillip Mann’s credit that he does not take the easy way out.

The Pe-Ellians are truly alien. Just ask yourself what that means. Most SF aliens are simply Joe Bloggs next door with a green skin and the occasional tentacle. Their motivation is essentially understandable in human terms. This is not surprising. After all, writers are people too, and it is much easier to write about things you understand than things you don’t. Hence real aliens are few and far between in SF. But the Pe-Ellians do things for their own reasons, and they are not human reasons, and Thorndike must try to make these things comprehensible.

The book begins simply, and becomes steadily more complex. There are layers within layers here. Pe-Ellia is a marvellously realised world. The problems matter, and there is no easy answer.

I have only one complaint, and that is a minor one. To the Pe-Ellians the concept of the Mantissa is a vitally important one. It is a state of being towards which they may (or, more probably may not) evolve. In one sense, it is godhood. But Mantissa is an ordinary English word, and it means the decimal part of a logarithm. It does not mean what Phillip Mann chooses it to mean in this novel, and every time I read the word, I was annoyed, and the spell was briefly broken, and I was back outside the book again. The willing suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing, and a necessary thing for the true enjoyment of a book such as this. To describe an alien concept, the writer should have used an alien word (he did it with Karitsas—even though it sounds Greek, and therefore slightly familiar), and he should have done it with Mantissa.

But that aside, I have no complaints. The book is a marvel and a wonder, a work of art, beautifully written. Give it a permanent place of honour in your collection.

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 1: R. L. Fanthorpe

First published in Phlogiston One, April 1984.

This is based mostly on my memories of a talk I heard Fanthorpe give once. But it was long ago and in another country, and besides, the wench was not sober. So I won’t vouch for chapter and verse. However the gist is correct, and the anecdotes are true in general, if not exact in detail.

Once upon a time, John Spencer and Co. in London began to publish some of the tattiest SF magazines ever seen in the known universe. The young R. L. Fanthorpe picked one up in a moment of boredom, and read it. His first thought was, “I can write better than this!” His second thought was, “Hey! I can write worse than this.” And thus were the seeds of a brief career sown. From 1959 until 1966, virtually everything that Spencer published was written by Fanthorpe (under countless different names). At first he contented himself with simply writing the entire magazine, but later, when Spencer branched out into books (Badger Books—you may have seen them around) he wrote those as well. Millions of them.

The scenario worked like this. Spencer would ring Fanthorpe up on Friday and demand a fifty thousand word novel by Monday. Fanthorpe would take out his trusty tape recorder and yammer into it any nonsense that sprang to mind, and his family and friends and (later) various secretaries would take the tapes and transcribe them. On Monday morning the typescript would be delivered to Spencer, Fanthorpe would collect a cheque for Ł25, and then go to sleep for a while to recover. He kept this up for seven years…

Since he worked on the hot tape recorder principle, it was not unknown for the tapes to get lost, or mixed up. Indeed, once a secretary found herself transcribing a tape that seemed to have no connection whatsoever with the book she thought she was writing. But she carried on anyway, the typescript was never checked, and the book got published. No-one ever complained about it—which shows you the standard applied to the Badger operation.

The word limit on the novels was fifty thousand. Since Fanthorpe never counted the words he yelled so prolifically down the microphone, he often found himself near the end of his word limit with the plot (such as it was) only half resolved. Thus the endings of his books tended to be somewhat rushed as he tried to tie up the dangling threads. His favourite example of this concerned a book whose title even he has now forgotten (he claims to remember virtually nothing about those years of garbage). The book had reached its last page, and the crew of the spaceship were trapped. Outside the ship, hordes of ravening aliens were preparing to close in and do nasty things. The situation looked grim. Not only had Fanthorpe got to rescue his heroes, he had to do it in about two paragraphs. The ending of the book went something like this:

Grim faced, the captain went to the safe and opened it.

“We have no choice now,” he said as he removed the dreadful weapon and primed it.

“No, captain,” protested the crew. “Not that…”

“It’s the only way.”

Without further ado, the captain fired the terrible weapon at the alien hordes. Instantly they were all killed.

“We can go home safely now,” said the captain as he put the weapon away. “It’s all over.”

Needless to say, that was the first mention of the weapon in the whole book. And the last. That is probably the most blatant use of the deus ex machina in the whole SF canon. That he got away with it can only be attributed to the fact that Badger books were so uniformly awful that nobody ever read them anyway.

Badger Books went out of existence in 1966, and Fanthorpe fell silent. He claims that during those years he was the world’s most productive writer in the genre. A partial listing of his works in the Nicholls SF Encyclopedia takes up almost two columns of closely packed print, so perhaps the claim is not exaggerated.

I began this article with “once upon a time…” and I would like to end it with “they all lived happily ever after”. But unfortunately the ending is a sad one. When I heard Fanthorpe speak at a convention in England a few years ago, he told us that his hack past was behind him, that he had spent several years now writing a serious fantasy novel which was soon to be published. He asked us to forget his old reputation and to judge the book on its merits, which he thought were many. In due time, the book was published, but I think that few people heeded his plea. The last time I saw mention of the book was in the catalogue of an SF book dealer. He was offering to give away mint condition hardback copies of Fanthorpe’s novel in exchange for various items on his want list. It would seem that even the specialist dealers couldn’t sell it. Sometimes a reputation can be an impossible thing to transcend.

A Major Reason for Continuing to Read That Rubbish They Call SF

First published in Phlogiston Two, July 1984.

Every so often, and usually when you least expect it, a book comes along that just reaches out and grabs you by the scruff of the neck, and shakes some poetry and wonder at you. It happens very infrequently (and these days it happens so infrequently that I am starting to suspect that my palate is becoming jaded), but when it does happen, it makes it all worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found one for a long time; but just recently I found the next best thing. I was browsing in a bookshop, and they had a whole pile of hardback SF books remaindered and selling very cheaply. So I bought them, and for the next few days I got a minor tingling in my sense of wonder. None of the books were world beaters, note of them were major works of literature, but they were well crafted and thoughtful. They told a good story, and they told it well. That is no small talent, and it deserves to be encouraged.

The books were The Golden Space by Pamela Sargent, Transfigurations by Michael Bishop, and Songmaster by Orson Scott Card.

The surprising thing is that for quite some time I have been very biased against all three writers, and I would never have bought the books if they hadn’t been sold so cheaply that I didn’t think I had anything to lose. Pamela Sargent annoyed me by her seemingly feminist polemics, Michael Bishop by his difficult, murky prose style, Orson Scott Card because he seemed to get consistently bad reviews. And so I avoided them, one and all. I had better things to read.

I was wrong.

The Golden Space deals with immortality and dramatises the evolution of society assuming that advances in genetic engineering will guarantee immortality for all mankind. Not like the trivial manner that Heinlein dealt with the subject in Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough For Love, but with imagination, and skill, and depth. Her characters live through the events she describes, and so do her readers, albeit vicariously.

Transfigurations is an expansion of a novelette called Death and Designation Among the Asadi. Indeed, the novelette forms the first section of the book, laying the background, as it were.

Superficially, the novel deals with the anthropological mysteries of the planet Bosk Veld. What is the meaning of the strange rituals of the Asadi? Why do their eyes flash and spin like pinwheels? Were they once a technologically sophisticated race reduced to primitive simplicity? The questions are explored through the investigations of three anthropologists and an intelligent ape, and the answers that they find could, perhaps, be easily guessed by most of you SF buffs out there who’ve been reading the stuff since 1926. But the answers aren’t really important per se, what is important is the reaction of the characters to both the answers, and the process of finding out. Both are presented with skill and ingenuity.

Songmaster is perhaps the most complex of the three. The ruler of the galaxy wants a songbird. He gets Ansset—a nine year old orphan who has been trained into a singer unequalled in history. The novel follows Ansset’s experiences with the ruler of the galaxy—and in time he himself takes over and rules the universe. In the hands of an unskilled writer, we all know how the story would go. It is to Card’s credit that he can take this old story and do new and skilful things with it. Ansset’s singing ability is not simply a gimmick—it is central to, part and parcel of the whole complex nature of this very clever novel.

Do you see the point that I’m making? Here we have three novels, each one of which takes a science fiction cliche and turns it into a minor work of art. And that is the major reason for continuing to read that rubbish they call SF. Down among the hacks are a lot of very skilful craftsmen—people who can take ideas so old they have foot long beards, and turn them into something new, simply by sheer technical virtuosity. They reinforce the theory that there are no new ideas in literature, merely new points of view. But to present those points of view, it is necessary to have a thorough grasp of the tools of the writer’s trade and also the ability to manipulate those tools. If you can exercise that degree of control, you might produce a minor work of art (as these writers have done) or, once in a thousand times, when everything goes exactly right, a major work. This last happens very rarely—but until it does, the more common minor works of art are a good reason to keep on reading. They happen more often than you might believe.

The Naming of Names

First published in Phlogiston Three, November 1984.

Names are very important—they have to be right. For example, think about the tale of Beren and Luthien. It was Tolkien’s favourite tale—it was poetry and romance, possibly even Romance. It was a tale told in High Heroic. Think about it for a time, and then consider the same story told about Kevin and Jennifer. (The tale was a poem, and to be fair, we must keep the rhythms of the names. Let’s make that our New Year resolution—keep the internal rhythms.)

Well? How about the greatest romance of Middle Earth? It just doesn’t work with Kevin and Jennifer. The names don’t fit; they are too mundane.

And then there was King Arthur. With his magic sword Excalibur, he ruled a mighty kingdom. Now there is a tale to stir the heart. But what if the sword had been called Irving? Suddenly there isn’t any magic any more; just laughter.

Those of you who have read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley and/or The River of Dancing Gods by Jack L. Chalker will probably know where I am heading. But to get there, I want to take a winding path, so let’s digress a moment.

To me, words have shapes, and they fit together with other words to make patterns. If the pattern is pretty then the sentence is elegant. If the sentence is elegant then it will sound right. And if it sounds right, it is right. I always feel the shapes of words and sentences in my mind, and that shape always defines my feelings towards the piece of writing. The shapes aren’t specific. Samuel R. Delany is on record as saying that to him the word “the” is a greyish ellipsoid about four feet high that balances on the floor a yard away. I wouldn’t go that far, but nonetheless I understand exactly what he means. I don’t think I see the same word in the same shape twice; and the shapes are always abstract. (Can a shape be abstract? Yes damnit. I can’t help the way my mind works.)

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the way I see word shapes has to do with Maori place names. As most of you probably know, I’m a Pom, and so Maori is very foreign to me.

I didn’t grow up with the names and the sounds as most of you did, and it is all quite strange. And yet, when I drive my car and a signpost flashes by in less than a second, I can tell you the name on that signpost, while my passengers are still asking each other what it said. I have the whole shape of it in my head, and I simply run my tongue up and down its hills and valleys. I do it without thinking. (Interestingly, I can’t do it if the word has more than about a dozen letters in it. Maybe the shape is too complex?) It helps, of course that Maori is very phonetic; but that isn’t the whole of the story. If it were, everyone would be able to do it.

Because I have such an extreme obsession about the shapes of words and the patterns they make in a sentence, I find that for me there is no such thing as a synonym. Only one word will do. Even if another word has almost the same meaning, the shape will be wrong, the pattern ugly. Alfred Bester has said much the same thing (though he sees words as colour, and context defines the shade), and I go all the way with that.

Hence of course, my antipathy to a lot of writers. They make ugly patterns. My particular hate (I’ve mentioned him many times in this column) is James P. Hogan. He writes with two left feet, beating the words into submission, sawing off the edges to try and make them fit together. There is no harmony in his writing; the patterns are wrong, and they bleed.

All of which brings us back to The Mists of Avalon and The River of Dancing Gods (remember them?)

Let me confess first of all that I could not finish The Mists of Avalon. Because of that I have no right to criticise the book as a whole, and I won’t. I just want to talk about Kevin. He turns up quite early on in the book, and immediately the book was spoiled for me. I am not well enough versed in the customs of the time to know whether or not Kevin is a typical name of the period. Perhaps it is. Bradley’s book seems well researched, and she would be unlikely to use a name out of context. But I wish she could have paused for thought. You see, Kevin is also a modern name, and it has unfortunate connotations. It is so wimpish. When you pick the members of your rugby team, isn’t there always one person that you don’t want at any price because he will be more of a liability than an asset? And isn’t he always called Kevin?

It is the wrong name. It has the wrong shape. Jagged and sharp, it cuts through my mind and I can’t believe in Kevin at all. For me, he doesn’t fit into the world of the story, and I get the same feeling that is engendered by The Lay of Kevin and Jennifer that I talked about back at the beginning.

Generally writers know all this by instinct. After all, why do you think that Tolkien never actually wrote The Lay of Kevin and Jennifer? If he had written it, it could have been very funny. The right shape for a serious story is seldom the right pattern for a farce. Hence, of course, a sword called Irving. I have no quarrel with this choice of name. Chalker knew exactly what he was doing in The River of Dancing Gods. If the sword had been called Excalibur, the book wouldn’t have been half so much fun.

Shakespeare asked “What’s in a name?”. He felt it was unimportant. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Perhaps so, but if it was called a spider-wort, I wouldn’t give it to my wife for her birthday.

Perhaps It’s Time to Transmogrify

First published in Phlogiston Four, February 1985.

Note to the reader: This column has an unconventional structure.

Indeed, (The English Assassin) is so logical an end to the series, I’m not clear why Moorcock plans a fourth. I take it that his enthusiasm for the fourth, provisionally entitled The Condition of Muzak, must have ebbed, inasmuch as it has not appeared in the last three years, while he is known to be working on other projects.

Peter Nicholls, Foundation 9, Nov 1975

The Condition of Muzak by Michael Moorcock

Allison and Busby Limited

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1977

Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize

“Of course”, said Alan, “it’s really all a question of lifestyle. There isn’t any alternative when you only have one choice”. In the background the Beatles sang Ticket to Ride at low volume on the stereo, and Alan hummed along as he loaded ammunition into his Imperial 200 typewriter.

“I see what you mean”. Alex found this amusing. “It all comes down to fashion in the end. You can’t buy the costumes any more”.

The Entropy Tango by Michael Moorcock

A Jerry Cornelius Novel

New English Library

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1981

Jerry Cornelius was born into the magazine New Worlds. Over the years, in a series of novels and short stories, Moorcock and many other writers (notably Norman Spinrad—see his The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde) took Jerry through a series of apocalypses. He was perhaps the most successful metaphor of entropy, that guiding principle culled from thermodynamics that the new wave writers paid so much lip service to. (See Pamela Zoline’s The Heat Death of the Universe—one of the metaphor’s most extreme manifestations, though totally unconnected with Jerry. And that is probably the most profound connection of all.)

He is beautiful, ageless, bisexual, multi-talented, murderous, drug-sodden, an eternal adolescent who is privy to the secrets of time travel and semi-immortality. He is both ruthless and sentimental, equally at home in a squalid crash-pad or the exotic palace of an obscure Indonesian potentate.

Neil Spencer

Review of The Condition of Muzak

New Musical Express, 2 July 1977, page 56.

The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius

by Michael Moorcock

Allison and Busby Limited

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1976

The flying boat settled at its cruising altitude of 50,000 feet. The reverberations of the four huge engines shook the cabin. Alex stropped his knife gently backwards and forwards, testing the edge occasionally to see how keen it was. “What are you going to do now?”

Alan looked out of the window at the swell of the sea far below. “I thought I might go to Australia”, he said, “but the Israelis won’t give me a visa”.

Alex shrugged. “Perhaps it’s time to transmogrify?”

“I don’t think so”, said Alan. “I’ve done it too many times. It doesn’t look any different from the other side”.

“You know best”. Alex began to shave the hairs on his legs, one by one. As he shaved, he whistled Dixie.

The Alchemist’s Question

Being the Final Episode in the Career of

The English Assassin in

The Opium General and Other Stories

by Michael Moorcock

Harrap Limited

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1984

Jerry Cornelius is the paradigmatic native of the inner city; his roles constitute a genuine paradigm set of strategies for living there.

John Clute

The Repossession of Jerry Cornelius

The Cornelius Chronicles

New York: Avon, 1977

From the streets below there came the sounds of M16s as the revolutionaries played with their victory. Alan moved the curtain gently over the window and took the telephone off the hook. “From each according to his abilities”, he said softly, “To each according to his needs”.

Alex looked up with a puzzled frown. “Was that the one who played the piano?” he asked, “Or was it the one with the greasepaint moustache?”

“Both”, said Alan.

The whimsicalities to be found in all the books are, in fact, not random, not mere conceits, but make internal references. That is to say, while I strive for the effect of randomness on one level, the effect is achieved by a tightly controlled system of internal reference, puns, ironies, logic-jumps which no single reader may fairly be expected to follow…

Michael Moorcock

In Lighter Vein

Sojan

Manchester: Savoy Books 1977, page 156

Jerry was a creature of the 1960s who hung on into the 1970s. By the time that the 1980s came along he was a bit of a has-been, almost a member of the establishment. The 1980s were the wrong time, the wrong place and full of all the wrong people. And that seems to be the reason for subtitling the new Jerry Cornelius novel as the final episode in his career. The mood of the book is sad, shot through with nostalgia. Most of the characters are there on stage; but many are not. Frank Cornelius, Karen Von Krupp, Mrs Cornelius. They are dead. Not as they have died so many times before, but permanently removed. The times are all wrong, and they won’t be back again. They’ve closed down the roof garden at Derry and Toms.

“Give Catherine my love”.

“She’s always had it, hasn’t she?” Una softened. “Or what you call love. You’re getting feeble again. I had some hope of you in the sixties. Even the early seventies”.

“Well, I can still make it then, can’t I?” His awkward attempt at machismo was awful. “I think I’ll hit Prague next”.

“Leave it out Jerry. Instant gratification will be the death of you. Try growing up”.

“But I don’t want to be a might-have-been”.

The Alchemist’s Question

The Opium General and Other Stories

Goodbye Jerry. It was fun while it lasted.

The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock

Allison and Busby Limited

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1969

A Cure for Cancer by Michael Moorcock

Allison and Busby Limited

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1971

The English Assassin by Michael Moorcock

Allison and Busby Limited

Copyright Š Michael Moorcock 1972

Let Me Tell You About My Fantasies…

First published Phlogiston Five, May 1985.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of fantasy recently, and I’ve had a few thoughts about it which I’d like to share with you, if I may.

There’s always been fantasy, of course. All the way back to Gilgamesh the Sumerian, and probably further if we only knew it. (Incidentally, Robert Silverberg has just rewritten the story of Gilgamesh, and the reviews say it’s a very good book—keep an eye out for it.) There was a brief resurgence of what you might call Romantic Fantasy in the Nineteenth century; largely inspired by William Morris, but it never really led anywhere significant. Meanwhile, Poe, the great American hack, was producing his classic psychotic delusions, but failing to make any money at it. Morris never made any money either, but he didn’t need it—he had a wallpaper factory and influential friends.

In the early twentieth century, we had Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, the jokes of Thorne Smith, the moody fin du siecle novels of James Branch Cabell, the inspired lunacy of Robert E. Howard. But really they were all minor writers, known to only a small audience. Essentially, they were writing in a cul de sac, and very few people came down it to investigate, because it was quite well hidden and you couldn’t see it from the road. Perhaps they were carrying on the great tradition (though in the case of Howard this is open to question, he didn’t operate by the same rules as other people and every time he counted his marbles he got a different total) but it began to seem more and more as if the tradition had little or no life left in it. The stories became tired and derivative. They all seemed to be about Conan, under a variety of different names. Boredom set in.

And then there was Tolkien. Any discussion of fantasy has to divide itself into two parts. Before Tolkien and After Tolkien. He built a six lane motorway right through the cul de sac, and things have never been the same since. I’m not going to talk about Tolkien, you all know that tale far too well. Let us instead consider what happened after Tolkien.

It soon began to seem as if you couldn’t go into a bookshop without finding the shelves sprawling with books with swords and elves on the covers. The blurb writers had a special key built into their electronic typewriters, and when they pressed it, it typed “Not since Tolkien’s Middle Earth…” (add your own ending). This fantasy thing was easy. All you had to do was take a bunch of goblins and dwarves, add a few elves and walk slowly from one end of a crude hand drawn map to the other. Simple.

The stories stopped sounding like they were about Conan, and they all started sounding like Frodo instead. There was a William Morris revival, and the bookshelves began to groan under Morris pastiches. Now while you walked across your map you talked in thees and thous. It added atmosphere (and unintentional humour. Very few of these new wave fantasists knew that the phrase “Get thou to a nunnery” was grammatically incorrect, and we got some beautiful infelicities of phrasing. My English teacher would probably have called them horror stories!).

In many ways it began to appear as if the Tolkien books were the worst thing to happen to fantasy in the last six thousand years. When there had only been a small trickle of works being produced, you could usually find something, somewhere that was half way decent—and most of it was written for love, dedication and a knowledge of the traditions on which the work was built.

In short it was often worthy even if flawed. But now everyone was getting on the bandwagon and now it was flawed and very seldom worthy. Tolkien was the standard against which everything had to measure, and nobody measured up. It seemed that the six lane motorway didn’t really go to any interesting places. Even the journey wasn’t worth making. The road was littered with broken swords that punctured your tyres, and weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete.

Then there were three novels published which changed everything. You have already been told about the wonders of The Belgariad—the five volume novel by David Eddings. The Belgariad is the most significant work of fantasy to be published since Tolkien; it took the corpse of the genre and breathed life into back into it. Buy this book and treasure it—and when you have absorbed it, keep your eyes open for The Magician by Raymond E. Feist and The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett.

The former is a straight fantasy novel, equally as enthralling as The Belgariad and the latter is the funniest thing since the custard pie got Sauron.

The Magician has a lot in common with The Belgariad in the sense that it shows a boy growing up to the knowledge of the hazards of the world. And like The Belgariad it is a pleasure to read, because you are taking part, in a very real sense, with the characters in the events of the book. Both books have an old and threadbare plot as their basis. The Belgariad is a traditional quest novel. The Magician is the traditional world in peril novel. Both themes have been done to death and beyond by a myriad of writers. But there are probably no new fantasy plots. Eddings and Feist demonstrate again that there is no idea so hoary and covered in whiskers that a good writer cannot use it in his book.

Eddings and Feist are masterful writers and their books are a joy. Only the vagaries of the alphabet puts Eddings first.

And what of Terry Pratchett? This is the wizard Rincewind describing the character of the tourist Twoflower:

Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting “All Gods are bastards”.

When a genre can laugh at itself, it is a sign that it has sufficient confidence in itself to face the world proudly. It is a sign of maturity, of growing up. Eddings and Feist have shown that it is possible to overcome the handicap of writing after Tolkien. Pratchett has shown that we don’t have to take it seriously all the time. After a great many years, I think we can finally say that fantasy has come of age.

Okie Dokie

First published in Phlogiston Six, August 1985.

Once I saw a TV interview with a man who was directing a new production of Hamlet. He was a bit of an arty-farty idiot; and the principal novelty of his production was that the actors swung backwards and forwards on ropes while declaiming their soliloquies (God knows why). However he did say something that made me think. He said that there was a collective knowledge of Hamlet in the world at large. Even people who had never seen or read the play knew what Hamlet was all about. There were mutterings about new Jungian archetypes. As with everything else that he said in the interview, this simply proved that he wasn’t rowing with both oars in the water. But there was a nugget of truth buried in there.

Everybody knows that Hamlet is a “better” play than (say) Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, though very few people could tell you why. I don’t think we need to invoke the shade of Jung to explain this—I think there are better reasons behind the intuitive knowledge, and I think it would be valuable to explore these reasons and to relate them to a discussion of SF. In other words, I want to ask the question “What distinguishes great literature from other fictions?”. And when we have an answer to that question, we will be in a good position to determine whether or not SF has ever produced anything that we could call great.

So as not to keep you in suspense (nervous tension is bad for the heart), I will say right away that I am pretty sure SF has produced some true works of great art (whatever that may be). But unless you are one of those nasty people who always read the last page to find out whodunnit, you’ll have to bear with me while I take you through my reasoning (nervous tension keeps you alert).

The best test of all is of course the test of time. Hamlet has been around for more than four hundred years. It must have something going for it. But we are concerned with twentieth century writings, and it is still too soon to apply that test. Yet the accepted wisdom has it that the works of D. H. Lawrence fit the criteria that we are searching for. Lawrence died in 1930, but for all that he is still a contemporary writer. People who knew him are still alive. I used to live in Eastwood (the Nottinghamshire village where Lawrence was born), and my landlady had known him and some of the people and places he wrote about. She didn’t like him much. She thought he had been very unfair in what he wrote.

I think that what we need to define is what the books we are concerned with are really about. And I don’t mean the plot or the story. That’s not what they are about. There is an old Woody Allen joke where he explains that he has been on a speed reading course, and it was really very good. He’s just read War and Peace. It took twenty minutes. It was about Russia.

Now that is true—as far as it goes; but it is a very facile thing to say, at least in terms with which we are concerned. The surface things, the things that happen, the twists and turns and incidents which move the story along—these are not what we should be talking about. They are window dressing; albeit important. Neither you nor I would bother reading the books in the first place if they weren’t there. They hold our interest; we want to know what happens next, how it all works out. We even want to know if the hero gets the girl or not. If such things are not there we end up with what the school of “anti-novelists” produced in France. Go and find a translation of something by Alain Robbe-Grillet if you feel like an interlude of terminal boredom. The closest English example I can think of is Report on Probability A by Brian Aldiss. Try that one too. It is almost devoid of incident. In my opinion, such experiments are artistic failures because they alienate through boredom.

Sometimes too the work is destroyed when the writer ceases to be concerned with his art and becomes too concerned with his reasons for writing—H. G. Wells often used his novels to explore his political ideas. Eventually he got more interested in the politics than the novelising, and he started writing tracts instead. That is an ever-present danger, and too many potentially great works fall into the trap. You must not preach. If you do, you start appealing to the brain instead of working on the emotions and that is too much of an overt intrusion. It is bad art. Let the thoughts come later, let them be generated naturally by the emotions. Don’t tell people—show them. It is much more effective. The drama on the surface is like the paint on a house. If it isn’t done properly, the wood rots.

Most books of course are all paint. There isn’t any wood underneath. No one in their right mind would contend for a minute that Rio Guns by J. T. Edson is anything but a soap opera with bullets and horses. The literary equivalent of candy floss from a fairground. It looks pink and solid, but eat it and it vanishes into nothing at all.

So I think we are agreed that we must have the surface happenings. Hamlet is quite exciting in parts. Lots of gore. (I just had an outrageous thought—wouldn’t it make a great Sam Pekinpah movie?.) But there must also be hidden depths; things to which we often respond more emotionally than intellectually, so we sometimes don’t even realise that they are there in any cerebral sense. True art, I think, goes straight for the gut. It bypasses the forebrain. How else do you explain the impact of something like The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck?

It seems to me that on this deeper level the great works of art are concerned with a close exploration and definition of man’s relationship with his environment. The environment differs of course. It may be social in the sense that many of Lawrence’s novels focused on the class differences he found in the world. (Lady Chatterley’s Lover is perhaps the most extreme example of this.) Or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with its sharp portrayal of wealthy American society and the exposure of the false glamour and moral emptiness of the so-called Jazz Age.

The environment could be political. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the great political novels of our time. Nothing else shows up the stupidity of our leaders as well as this book does. It is profoundly funny and dismally depressing (because it is all so true) at one and the same time. A wonderfully clever work.

There are as many environments as there are writers who wish to explore them; all that they have in common is that they are a definition of some aspect of what you might call the human condition. An attempt, if you like, to answer the old cliche—“Why am I here? Come to think of it, just where is here anyway?”

Often a book will show us a microcosm. The protagonists find themselves up against the immoveable object, the irresistible force. The Joad family (in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) had no control over the economic and political forces that made them move out of the Oklahoma dustbowl in a desperate search for work. But their tragedy, explored in the microcosm of their life on the Okie trail, is a pointer to the grand picture. You can’t stand back from it. You have to see the detail to appreciate how it all fits together. Steinbeck didn’t preach. He didn’t have to. The Joad family said it all for him.

The effect of an environment on our lives and our ways and methods and philosophies of living (as revealed in the experiences of the characters in the book) is the true nature of literature, the true purpose of art.

How does that apply to SF? Is there anything about SF that suggests it has a contribution to make? I think that there is. I have said that great art is concerned with the human condition in relation to an environment. In one sense, you could say that SF is concerned with the human condition in relation to the universe itself! That is one hell of a large environment, but think about it carefully. In the last analysis, isn’t that the only environment that there is? Everything else is just a subset of it.

We can call that the SF viewpoint.

It is also interesting that SF has something that no other literary form has—the ability to hold up a mirror to life by projecting it onto other societies, other points of view (and don’t we sometimes look distorted in that mirror?). It is instructive to observe how many “mainstream” writers have used it when their subject matter demanded it—Jonathan Swift, Washington Irving, Ambrose Bierce, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Gore Vidal—the list goes on and on. The SF viewpoint is a uniquely useful tool for exploring the depths that we have been discussing because the environment that is set up is the best answer that we can get to the question “What if…?”. Indeed, any answer to that question is always (in literary terms) ipso facto SF because it shows a nonexistent (but often plausible) world arising out of the author’s premises. If that question is not asked, you are always left with a description of the here-and-now, the situation-as-is (or sometimes the situation-as-was). Only by posing the question “What if…?” can you show just where that situation leads.

As a result of this, it is fair to say that Steinbeck showed us the Okies as they were (and showed how they got there), but he did not really say anything about what happened next. As far as we can see, the Joad family has a past and a present that is somewhat gloomy, and for all we can tell, a future that is exactly the same. Steinbeck showed us the reasons for their plight and he dramatised exactly what it meant but he offered no solutions to the problem either in terms of the Joad family themselves or in the greater terms of the world at large.

This is not to denigrate what Steinbeck did. It is quite valid to ask questions without posing a solution. Sometimes we are not even aware of the right questions to ask until someone points them out to us. But it is possible to take it further. James Blish extrapolated the situation and asked what the Okies could do about it. The result was the Cities in Flight novels where he used the Okies (even the name was the same—surely a good clue as to what Blish thought he was doing) and the historical theories of Oswald Spengler to suggest some developments of the social/economic/political forces which caused the Okies to be created.

We can call that the SF technique.

The SF viewpoint and the SF technique are the two literary tools that no other writing style has, and they are the two strengths that should of themselves mean that SF is very well suited to the production of great art.

But all too often SF fails to measure up to expectations (generally, I would submit, when it does not use the SF viewpoint or the SF technique; when it is, if you like, more mundane. But that is another Bearded Triffid).

Let’s face it, we shouldn’t be surprised. Sturgeon’s law applies to everything. Very few books outside of SF have any lasting claim to merit. For every War and Peace there are thousands of ordinary books; books of which you could quite legitimately say “It’s about Russia”; and when you’ve said that, there is nothing more to say. Why should SF be any different?

So there is no art in Doc Smith’s Lensmen or Jack Williamson’s space legionnaires. They have no life and no real concern. There is no form to Flandry, no soul to the Stainless Steel Rat.

But in my opinion, there are at least six SF novels which approach greatness; at least in the terms in which I have defined it in this little essay. In no particular order, the books are:

Martian Time Slip by Philip K. Dick

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

I doubt that they will pass the test of time. No one will read them in the twenty-first century. No school children will write essays on them and curse the day they were written. I have fulminated before about the literary mafia who ignore the genre fictions. These books will never come to the attentions of the arbiters of contemporary taste and they will never become part of the common cultural heritage. But nevertheless they are profound and sometimes moving works, and I will forgive a million Star Wars for the sake of them.

Tissue, Tissue

First published in Phlogiston Seven, November 1985.

Last time we were discussing measures of literary excellence. The only really hard and fast rule was that there were no rules—which is why we have critics, and why they never agree with each other. Now however, after much research, I can report that I have finally discovered a sure fire method of measuring scientifically the merit (or lack of it) of any particular book. As of now, critics are out of a job and subjective criticism is dead.

It all began in the pub—as these things often do. A friend of mine confessed that books often made her cry. Close questioning elicited the fact that she sometimes cried a lot, and sometimes a little, and sometimes not at all depending on the book and how it affected her. It immediately occurred to me that here we might have a quantitative measure of the merit of any given piece of writing. Simply supply her with a book and a box of tissues, count the number of tissues used (and measure the degree of saturation of each one) and there you are! The book is rated unequivocally. No more will the unsuspecting reader be misled by the blurb on the back cover. All we need is a law requiring that the tissue factor for any given book be printed in large figures on the cover and we can make our choice of books to buy logically and scientifically.

I am currently in the process of putting together a petition to Parliament to enact such a law, and to have my lady friend declared a National Resource. (She is precious, and must be guarded carefully—we must all Think Big here.)

If she will collaborate with me, I will report the tissue factor of any books I review in future. (I’m allowed to collaborate—my wife says so.)

Talking of collaborations; have you noticed how many there are in the SF world? (Pohl and Kornbluth, Pohl and Williamson, Pohl and Del Rey…) It does seem to be a purely SF phenomenon—examples from outside the field are very few and far between. In the thriller genre there is Ellery Queen of course, and I’m about 80% sure that the rather obscure writer Manning Coles was a collaboration. John Sladek and Thomas Disch collaborated on a thriller called Black Alice—but they are SF writers, so perhaps that doesn’t count. (And then there are the husband/wife collaborations in SF—Kuttner and Moore, Van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull, Moorcock and Bailey…)

In the mainstream of literature, collaborations are conspicuous by their absence. Dickens worked with Wilkie Collins on a few short stories, Ezra Pound worked closely with T. S. Elliot on the final draft of The Waste Land—and rack my brains and my reference books as I will, those are the only two examples I can come up with.

(Meanwhile back in the SF world, Harlan Ellison collaborated with everybody in sight and published Partners in Wonder—a whole book of collaborations.)

I’m not referring to posthumous “collaborations” here. A writer (or one of them anyway) has no control over this process. So we can forget all the attempts to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (but that’s getting too close to SF again—and besides, it wasn’t unfinished anyway, no matter what Jules Verne may have thought). We can also forget those seemingly never ending Conan stories and the Lovecraft pastiches. They don’t really count. (But there is still L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Avram Davidson and Ward Moore, Judith Merril and Cyril Kornbluth…)

Why is the phenomenon so common in SF and so rare everywhere else? I think it all comes down to the fact that the SF field is a world wide fraternity. The readers and the writers know each other in a way that just doesn’t happen in other fields. People meet at conventions—they talk together and get drunk together. So many SF writers are just plain friends with other writers because of such meetings. And among friends, what is more natural than to do things together, to explore mutual interests? So we get collaborations. (Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, Piers Anthony and Robert Margroff, James Blish and Norman L. Knight…)

Put it down to fandom if you like. Not only were many of the writers grubby little fans themselves at one time, they have never really lost touch with their roots. It isn’t only to placate the great god of marketing that they turn up at so many conventions, you know. Of course that is a part of it. Putting in a presence, pressing the flesh, certainly doesn’t do any harm to their sales; and a lot of useful deals can be made at conventions if you catch your agent at the right convivial moment (which reminds me—wouldn’t CONviviality be a good convention name?). But deep down, a major reason for writers attending conventions is the same one that motivates you and me—a desire to renew old acquaintances, and make new ones. So the writers get together, and ideas are born. Collaborations happen simply because everyone knows everyone else. (Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen…)

What this is all leading up to, of course, is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and their new novel Footfall. (For the moment we’ll forget about Larry Niven and David Gerrold, and Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes.)

I must confess to a fair degree of ambivalence about the Niven/Pournelle books. I have a mild interest in Larry Niven’s solo works; they generally entertain me. However I have a marked dislike of Jerry Pournelle’s writing. It seems to me that too many of the things he accepts as axiomatic are debatable, to say the least, and so we have little common ground. By these lights, therefore, it would seem that I ought to be at best lukewarm (and at worst downright freezing) towards the Niven/Pournelle collaborations. Interestingly, this is not the case. Together they seem to reinforce each other’s strengths and perhaps the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—and I don’t care if that violates the law of conservation of energy.

The Mote in God’s Eye was interesting, though I found it badly flawed in the first sections where the authors insisted on describing the organisation of the “space navy” in terms that best applied to the nineteenth century sea-going navy. The book seemed to be little more than Hornblower in space, and I kept expecting them to issue cutlasses prior to sending out a boarding party. However once they reached the mote and discovered the aliens, it picked up a lot. Niven and Pournelle seem to be good at aliens (I’ll be returning to this point later with reference to Footfall). On balance, I guess we can give this one a tissue factor of 65%. A good first effort.

Inferno, on the other hand, is such a weird book that if I didn’t know better I’d swear they were both ripped to the tits on something illegal when they wrote it. Essentially it is a rewrite of Dante’s Inferno, but in science fictional terms. Goodness only knows why they chose to do it—it is so unlike anything that either of them have done before (together or apart) that it stands out there alone on its limb shouting “Read me. Read me” at the top of its voice. I liked it a lot, and I have returned to it several times. It is a very, very strange book and I’d give it a tissue factor of at least 90%.

Lucifer’s Hammer was a disaster movie pretending to be a book. It concerned a comet striking the earth, and the disruptive effects thereof. The marketing men aimed it at the general market rather than the SF genre market, and that seemed to be a good ploy because it shot into the bestseller lists. For you and me, old and jaded as we are, it contained no surprises—but I guess the lumpenproletariat found it exciting enough because they bought it in huge numbers. There is really nothing in the book that you can point to and say “this was badly done”—so I have no right to sneer. It’s just that I have read so many disaster movie books (Earth Abides, Day of the Triffids, Greybeard, The Drowned World, On the Beach—the list is endless). This one was a good example of its kind, but because it had nothing new to say, I can only give it a tissue factor of 70%.

Next was Oath of Fealty set in a huge (and I mean huge) tower block in Los Angeles. The block was virtually self contained and self supporting (they called it an “arcology”; a clever word. I’m not sure if it was original with them or not). The story concerned the conflict between the arcology and the city of Los Angeles proper. Again, I found this book seriously flawed—the story of the conflict was told in thud and blunder terms. In effect the book was a cliched American cops and robbers story. It could have been (and should have been) a lot more than that. The presence of the arcology rescued the plot a little simply by its presence, but the overly dramatic (not to say melodramatic) thriller plot dragged it back down again. Tissue factor 50%.

And now we have Footfall. At first sight of the blurb I was disappointed. An alien spaceship is spotted in the solar system. At first everyone is sure they will be friendly. But it turns out that they are not…

My immediate reaction was oh god, not another aliens invade the earth story—take me to your leader. Then I started thinking as opposed to merely reacting. Just how many aliens invade the earth stories have you read? Despite the fact that it is a supposedly old and hackneyed SF cliche, I was very hard pressed to find any examples of it. The classic War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, a very old and very obscure Brian Aldiss novel Bow Down to Nul (sometimes called The Interpreter), L. Ron Hubbard’s new book Battlefield Earth. That’s about it, except for the occasional short story. It occurs to me that the theme is only thought to be a common one (perhaps because it is such an obvious plot). And since everyone thinks it has been done so many times, nobody does it. Therefore it is actually a very rare plot. Score one for Niven and Pournelle for recognising this.

What of the book itself? Structurally the novel has much in common with Lucifer’s Hammer. An enormous cast of characters work out their individual destinies. There are a lot of stories in this novel; and they are not all human ones. I said earlier that Niven and Pournelle were good at aliens. Here they are magnificent. Their aliens are people too, but they aren’t human people. They do the things that they do for their own reasons, and they aren’t human reasons. Far too often the aliens in SF are simply eccentric people with green skins and the occasional tentacle. It is my contention that alien implies difference—we can see this to a huge extent even here on earth. How much do you have in common with the people of the Ayatollah’s Iran for example? Not a lot, I would venture to guess. Your motivations and theirs do not interact and each would find the other difficult to understand (although to themselves each is behaving perfectly normally. But what is normal? It depends on your cultural imperatives). How much more so then does this apply to a truly alien being? I’d have thought that was an obvious point to make, but so many writers fail to make the connection so often, that perhaps it isn’t really as obvious as I thought. Niven and Pournelle, however, have recognised this fact and have really come to grips with it. Both in The Mote in God’s Eye and in Footfall they have dealt with the aliens in the aliens’ own terms.

The book swings along. It is a vast novel both in terms of physical size and in terms of the subjects it deals with. I found the ending a little rushed (partly, I suspect because the book had grown so large, and the authors were so far behind on their deadlines that it really was rushed) and I do not really believe in the scenario that leads to the eventual resolution of the problem of the invasion. (I am being purposefully vague here because I don’t want to give a vital plot point away.) Let’s just say that I think the timescale is wrong, and the improvisations unlikely.

Also I dislike the way that the government calls in a team of SF writers as special advisers on the alien menace and defers to them all the time. Neither do I like the way that the SF writers in the advisory team are so right so often on so little evidence. That was just plain silly. Neither governments nor SF writers are like that.

But such trivialities aside (and they really are trivial in terms of the book as a whole), I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. As with Lucifer’s Hammer, I suspect that the marketing men will point it at the general market. I also suspect that again it will be a blockbuster best seller. I’m all in favour of it. The book is true “sensawonder” SF and giving it the widest possible exposure can only be good for the field as a whole. It is a magnificent piece of work, and it completely eclipses anything that either Niven or Pournelle have done before, separately or together. Sod the laws of thermodynamics. This one is about 120% of the sum of both of the writers. I don’t know how they did it, but I give them a tissue factor of 95%, and I hope they do it again soon.

(Meanwhile there is Michael Bishop and Ian Watson, James Gunn and Jack Williamson, James Blish and R. A. W. Lowndes…)

To end with, here’s a little conundrum. Can you name the SF writer who collaborated with himself on a book? I’ll give you a clue—he was English.

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 0a: Harry Harrison

First published in Phlogiston Eight, February 1986.

In New Worlds Quarterly No. 4 published in 1972, Alfred Bester in an interview with Charles Platt revealed the secret of writing a good article. Start with your second best anecdote, he said, to attract the attention of the reader.

The first time I saw Harry Harrison in action was at a convention in England some years ago. He had a pint of beer clutched in one hand and a microphone in the other and he prowled around like a tiger in a cage, taking long reviving draughts of beer and yammering into the mike. “I want to talk about two things,” he said. “Something that interests you—sex, and something that interests me—my new book.”

He spoke for well over an hour, and the talk was full of bad jokes that amused Harrison even more than they amused his audience. He laughs a lot and very infectiously too. But the mood swung wildly and the jokes about the Hollywood moguls who took his novel Make Room, Make Room and ruined it as the movie Soylent Green were bitter jokes indeed. He was hurt by the way they had trivialised what he had to say for that book was very close to his heart. He told them about overpopulation and pollution; about the world running out of natural resources. They were dubious and shook their heads. It didn’t seem important enough to make a film about. Then someone produced the idea of cannibalism, and the moguls took fire. “Hey yes—that’s something we can really get our teeth into.” Harrison shrugged his shoulders eloquently and he raised his eyes to heaven. Then he told us about the bit that hurt most of all. He was willing, he said, to forgive them the rubbish, to put up with the trivialisation because the film did have its good parts. There was the gritty naturalistic way it was shot, showing the harsh realities of life in the overpopulated world just around the corner. You could smell and taste the poverty in the images on the film. That was worthy and it was worthwhile. And there was a most wonderful scene that summed up the point of the movie for Harrison, that gave it a reason for existing in his eyes. One character asks another, “How did we get into this mess anyway?” The reply was “Because no government ever had the courage to force a policy of birth control on the people.” Harrison paused for a moment at that point. It was a great scene, he explained. Of course you don’t remember it, he said. You never saw it. They cut it out of the movie in case it offended the Catholics. Jesus Christ!

For a moment the bitterness and the pain showed.

Harry Harrison is an infuriating writer. So good and at the same time so bad. He can be brilliant when he puts his mind to it. Just look at Bill, The Galactic Hero or West of Eden to take the two extremes of his writing style. The one is a comedic tour de force, the other a beautifully imagined and immaculately written biological/sociological speculation (true sense of wonder). Yet this same writer also turns out such unutterable rubbish as Planet of No Return, a book so bad, so vile that I once suggested that the only way to get through it without throwing up was to read it with your eyes closed. How do you answer the riddle of such a man?

He started his professional life as a commercial artist. In an autobiographical article published in Hell’s Cartographers in 1975 he recalls the assignments he got from various editors:

Harrison, I want a three by four of an eight tentacled monster squashing a girl with big tits in a transparent space suit, line and none of your zip-a-tones or damned Benday, twelve bucks by tomorrow afternoon.

What more natural then that when he graduated to writing, he went to the editors to find what they wanted, and then he wrote it. Men’s adventures, that’s what he wrote.

I Went Down With My Ship.

I Cut Off My Own Arm.

Magruder—The Wooden Cannon General.

He wrote true confessions.

He Threw Acid In My Face.

My Iron Lung Baby.

My Husband Gambled My Body Away.

(All titles mentioned in that article in Hell’s Cartographers.)

I think this explains a large part of the paradox that is Harry Harrison the writer. He makes his living at it, it pays the bills. Despite his love of SF (and he does love it, that shines like a beacon through everything he says and does) he knows that hackwork, the action novel will always sell. He has always been very commercial in his attitude. If it will sell, he will write it. He has even ghost-written. The novel Vendetta for the Saint by Leslie Charteris was written by Harry Harrison. Bills have to be paid.

But despite all this, the artist breaks through on occasion. West of Eden is a long complicated book. It is deeply felt. I doubt that it will sell well—it is too complex, too slow moving to appeal to the great unwashed. It assumes that the dinosaurs did not die out but continued to evolve and develop a civilisation. It examines what happens when the dinosaur culture meets that upstart mammal man. If you read nothing else by Harry Harrison, you should read this one.

In person Harry Harrison talks like a machine gun, spraying ideas and jokes like bullets around a landscape. His talks are never scripted (or if they are he pays no attention to his lines). Ideas spark off one another in a continual stream of consciousness which is one reason why this article is so anecdotal. Harrison the man illustrates his points with anecdote and barbed wit. The same method is the best way to approach Harrison the writer. There is a lot of the man in his books. The passionately held beliefs of Make Room, Make Room and the humour of The Technicolour Time Machine.

There is a convention as old as science fiction. At some point in the book the hero asks the mad scientist to explain his wonderful galaxy saving device. That question then becomes an excuse for the writer to fill the next ten pages with pseudoscientific technobabble, while the hero nods knowingly and says “Gee, that’s right. I forgot.” At half a cent a word, you need all the words you can get. This is a good way of getting them. In The Technicolour Time Machine, Harrison explained to us, he decided to have some fun with this convention. In due course one of the characters asks the mad scientist to explain his time machine. The scientist, who is rather irascible, takes a deep breath and says words to the effect that “Aaah, you’re too stupid to understand.”

As I said before, the artist continues to show himself. Although himself an avowedly commercial writer whose books are conventional and often formulaic, when he wears the guise of editor he allows the writers that he publishes more artistic freedom than he ever allows himself. In collaboration with Brian Aldiss (an old drinking pal) he edited for many years The Year’s Best SF. By himself he edited the Nova series of anthologies. Both series are dead now (alas) but while they lived they published some marvellous works—stories which (had you read only Harrison’s published fiction) you would never have believed he would have countenanced. It was there that I first encountered the fabulations of Josef Nesvadba and J. G. Ballard’s The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race. Strange and wonderful stories.

Again with Aldiss, he edited a series of novels (the SF Master Series)—books which the editors considered were classic and important works in the field. With supreme egotism, he chose one of his own novels for the series (A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!). That is typical of the man.

Aldiss popped up again as co-editor of The Astounding-Analog Reader; stories chosen from the golden age of SF when Campbell was king. Then there was the Decade series where the two of them chose the best and most representative stories of the given decade—the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s. These books were a labour of true love.

I seem to be mentioning Brian Aldiss a lot, so let me digress here in true Harry Harrison lecture style. At British conventions they always start by introducing the celebrities who are present so that everyone will recognise them and be able to pester them for the rest of the convention. The MC, who is slightly nervous because he’s never done much public speaking before says “Now I’d like to introduce Brian Aldiss.” Everybody applauds and looks round. No Brian Aldiss. A small voice from the back of the hall says “He’s in the bar!”. The MC clears his throat and says, “Well—let’s introduce Harry Harrison.” More applause. This time there is a chorus. “He’s in the bar!”. They aren’t stupid. They know that everyone else is in the hall for the opening ceremony and the bar is quiet and the best place to be. They can get in some serious drinking and talking. Harrison and Aldiss are inseparable at conventions. Each wrapped around a pint of beer, they talk and they talk and they talk. As writers they are poles apart but they are nonetheless kindred spirits and they both love the SF genre they have worked so hard in. Aldiss the iconoclast, Harrison the commercial writer. Aldiss and Harrison—fans. Aldiss wrote Billion Year Spree, arguably the best literary history of SF to date, full of stimulating ideas. Harrison wrote Great Balls of Fire, a history of sex in SF illustration; a clever joke and a tightly argued thesis at one and the same time. The symbolic development of SF art takes a radically different approach from the prose that it illustrates. Together the two of them edited Hell’s Cartographers, a collection of autobiographical essays by various SF writers. As I said, labours of love. Only an SF enthusiast could have taken those projects to completion.

I once asked Robert Silverberg for his autograph. Embarrassingly I didn’t have a pen, and neither did he. He looked around in desperation. Seated at a nearby table were Aldiss and Harrison. “Harrison,” said Silverberg, “give me writing machine.” Harrison looked round. “Silverberg,” he said, “you are a writing machine.” He went back to his beer.

Being a commercial writer is not necessarily a bad thing. Other writers operating under the same economic stimulation have produced profound and moving works. Philip K. Dick did it consistently. Michael Moorcock, once he got rid of his more rough-edged prose style, also did it. There is no reason why Harry Harrison should not have done it too. But he fell into the trap of the sequel. I’ve just counted and there are now six Stainless Steel Rat books, each one worse than the one before. There are three Deathworld books and the strain begins to show in the last one. The awful Planet of No Return is a sequel to the equally awful Planet of the Damned. The To the Stars trilogy is a three volume cliche. Sometimes even the singletons fall into the continuation trap. Skyfall is just too damned long for its length. At half the size it could have been a tense and exciting book. As it is, it is just plain flabby and rife with coincidence. But buried in the dross of Harrison’s work is just enough gold to keep me reading even though I am disappointed so many times. Captive Universe is a hoary old idea very cleverly put together (would you believe Aztecs in space?). In Our Hands the Stars (also published as The Daleth Effect) is a clever satire on government funded research and an exciting thriller to boot. A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!; The Technicolour Time Machine and Bill, the Galactic Hero are novels that never fail to make me laugh no matter how many times I read them. Make Room, Make Room and West of Eden are pure gold in anybody’s currency.

Damn the man. He is so inconsistent. He is also very prolific. During the course of this article, I have mentioned perhaps half of his output—the best and the worst. What remains is a halfway house. Books which are merely competent, books that are simply marking time.

In that same interview in New Worlds Quarterly that I started with, Alfred Bester reveals that you should end your article on a high note with your best anecdote.

I asked Harry Harrison to autograph my copy of Make Room, Make Room. He glared at me. “John Campbell liked this book,” he said. “Do you know who John Campbell was?”

“Yes,” I said. “The editor of Astounding.”

Harrison nodded. “He used to write long letters to all his authors telling them the best way to write their books. The letters always bulged at the seams with ideas. They were very useful. I got a lot of letters like that. The letters always ended the same way. Do you know how they ended?”

“No,” I said.

“With a signature!” said Harrison, and he laughed with vast delight at his joke. “With a signature, like this.” Then he signed my book. John W. Campbell.

Politics and Science Fiction

First published in Phlogiston Nine, May 1986.

Many shops have collecting tins on the counter—you’ve all seen them. Give to the Lions; Support the SPCA. When I lived in England I used to visit an Alternative bookshop called Mushroom. It had a collecting tin too, but because it was an Alternative bookshop, it collected to help victims of VD. Goodness knows what the system was. Presumably they put all the donations together and ferried them round to the local pox doctor once a month or so. Clap hands, here comes Charlie.

In the back of the shop was a “Free Cupboard”—if you found anything in it that took your fancy you could just take it away. You were also encouraged to donate things to the cupboard—but I never saw it happen. (I never saw anything taken out either. Few people have a lot of use for one gym shoe or a broken fork.)

Being an Alternative bookshop, Mushroom was heavily into radical politics (I bought my copy of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao there) and the occult (I bought my copy of the I Ching there—this was years before it became respectable) and because of this it attracted many of the local weirdos. I once heard someone ordering a book that wasn’t in stock. That was no problem. Then he said, “How about if I like lay some bread on you as a deposit?” I made a strangled gurgling noise, collapsed against the collected works of Kropotkin and laughed myself silly. I got glared at.

One of the reasons I liked Mushroom was that it had a very good stock of SF. I visited it regularly. The stock turned over quite quickly—SF was very popular with the heads. It always gave me a weirdly surrealistic feeling to know that the radical freaks were so heavily into such a reactionary, conservative literature as SF. I suspect that all too often the medium got in the way of the message—they really were blind to what they were reading. That upset me a little because I don’t like wilful stupidity.

Tangential to SF has always been the political allegory, the social satire. That’s why we point admiringly to books such as 1984 and Brave New World and try and use them to justify the seriousness with which we take our rather perverse hobby. If Aldous Huxley did it, the argument goes, then it must be alright. However I think we are comparing apples with pears. There are very strong reasons for saying that Huxley, Orwell, all the rest of them weren’t writing SF at all. When there’s an “r” in the month, I often believe it. After all, just look at the abysmal standard of the real thing when it tries to take on the same targets.

Politically SF has always been very naive, not to say unimaginative. Galactic empires abound; feudalism rules OK. It makes an interesting irony that the literature of the future should choose its trappings from the politics of the past (in many cases the quite remote past). Does anyone seriously think that the universe will be governed by the chinless wonders from Debrett or the Almanach de Gotha? I suspect we have a case of subconscious wish fulfilment here. Most SF is written by Americans—and they were always suckers for a title. When you haven’t got an aristocracy of your own, you envy other people’s (God knows why—as far as I’m concerned they can take ours home with them any time they like).

Dune is perhaps the most extreme example of this with the Padishah Emperor lording it over all and rank upon rank of courtiers, politicians and “priests”. There was a good opportunity here to make some points about the split between church and state. Just how much power did the various aristocratic houses have and how much rested with the more commercially oriented guild or the religiously oriented Bene Gesserit? This was left rather vague; Herbert had other furrows to plough and the overwhelming impression left in my mind was of the sixteenth century writ large. Also the complexity of the plot and the Machiavellian intrigues all combined to make me think of it as I Claudius in space. Incidentally, did you know that A. E. van Vogt’s novels Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn are virtually a direct rewrite of I Claudius? The Roman Empire becomes a galactic empire and instead of revolutions in Gaul or wherever, they have revolutions on Mars. There is a one to one relationship between the characters in the van Vogt novels and the Robert Graves. And to quote Damon Knight: “even the coinage is in sesterces”. Nonetheless the books are quite fun provided that you can turn your critical faculties off while you read them—in common with most van Vogt novels, they don’t make any sense, but if you want a book that makes sense, what are you doing reading van Vogt anyway?

Very few SF novels are overtly political. Mostly it is just window dressing—a mechanism to allow the book to get on with what it is really about. But there are some books whose major concern is political. A Torrent of Faces by James Blish and Norman L. Knight is an examination of what Blish has called a “fascist utopia”. A major reason for writing it was that other utopias (and dystopias, come to that) are generally from the other end of the political spectrum and Blish wanted to show the opposite side of that coin. Despite the apparent contradiction in terms of the phrase “fascist utopia”, he succeeded admirably. Not only is the book fun to read on the action and “sensawonder” level, but it actually makes sense on the political level as well. It sounds as though it might work—might even be fun to live in, in some ways. You would think that the book would be guaranteed to curdle my left wing friends’ cream. Not at all. “Far out, man.”

Heinlein of course is the major sticking point for me. He isn’t always what he seems, though. Double Star is a wonderful novel about being a politician, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. I often wish that more politicians realised the truth of that. It won a Hugo, and it was thoroughly deserved. However Stranger in a Strange Land also won a Hugo, so perhaps that’s not a good measuring rod. This book really is the great acid test. The freaks went overboard for it—even before Charlie Manson adopted it as a bible and used it as justification for his bloodier excesses. Over the years it has sold steadily and is probably one of Heinlein’s most popular works. In every crashpad or ashram, basement flat and backpack there always seems to be a dog-eared, broken-backed very well read copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. Ken Kesey loved it—it is mentioned by name in Tom Wolfe’s biography of Kesey: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And I’d be willing to bet that the Radical Chic mob thought just as highly of it; in public anyway. In private they were probably too dumb to understand it. Not that the radical freaks showed much of an understanding though. Very few seemed really to listen to what Jubal Harshaw put together in his education of young Smithy. The end result was understandably attractive to the free love generation. Superficially it mimicked their life style, and perhaps it seemed like a good justification for what they did. But Jubal’s reasons were subtle and seemed largely over the heads of the heads.

I’d hesitate to call Heinlein fascist, reactionary or right wing. I’ve heard these pejoratives used enough times to know that often they are simply mouth noises and don’t mean very much. A close reading of Heinlein convinces me that whether you agree with him or not (and I most certainly don’t) he doesn’t arrive at his opinions from nowhere. He argues them well. Unlike most extremists (of either persuasion) he does actually have a brain in his head; he doesn’t just yell slogans.

The positions his characters espouse are often justified by appeals to rationality (Heinlein is a rationalist supreme). Too often the radical freaks seem to lack rationality (perhaps they don’t understand it—too long a diet of non-sequiturs out of little red books maybe) and respond much more at the gut level, the level of feeling, a close attraction to the superficialities and surface gloss. I can find no other explanation for the vast popularity that Heinlein’s books enjoy among people who really should be burning and banning them. I’m not immune to it myself. I don’t know how many times I’ve read Starship Troopers. It swings. (It also sucks.) I hate and love the book at the same time (could that be the attraction of it?). I suspect that it may be the closest thing he has produced to a work of art. It seems to push so many buttons simultaneously in so many people that he must have stumbled on some universally applicable symbols to clothe his message in.

It was the first of his preaching novels in the sense that it was the first time that his characters stood up on their hind legs and talked about things outside the direct scope of the plot. It wasn’t so much a case of “then we went out and stomped the nasty aliens”; rather it was “this is why we are going to go out and stomp the nasty aliens”. Once that had been explained, we could relax and do the stomping. And if we survived that, we could talk a bit more about the privileges accruing from being an ex-stomper. That was actually the major thesis of the book—that the franchise had to be earned, it was a privilege, not a right. In the universe of the book only veterans had voting privileges, only veterans could hold office. Not necessarily combat veterans, I hasten to add. Heinlein made it very clear that the right could be earned by many different forms of service. He chose to tell the tale from the point of view of the fighting marines because that made it more interesting as a story. (And the only good alien is a dead alien.) It was interestingly argued and a fun story, but opposition to the ideas was squashed by fiat—if Heinlein said it was true, then it was true. Full stop, no argument. That was unfair and infuriating, an underhand debating tactic. There were so many times that I wanted to take the hero’s History and Moral Philosophy teacher by the scruff of the neck and shake him that I often feared for my blood pressure when reading the book. Apoplexy rules. So I’d finish reading it and then immediately go and read Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero which is a wonderful satire on Starship Troopers and which never fails to make me laugh out loud. That always made me feel better.

Despite all of that, time and time again, those were the books that I saw vanish off the shelves at Mushroom, those were the books I saw many of my weirder friends reading. I never saw them reading what I would have thought of as political orthodoxy (by their standards at least).

Mack Reynolds wrote a lot of socialist SF. I’ve never met anybody who knew that fact—indeed I’ve never met anybody who’s read any Mack Reynolds. Even I’ve never read any Mack Reynolds (except for something called—I think—The Rival Rigellians which was just as bad as it sounds) and the only reason I know that he wrote from a left wing viewpoint is that I happened to read an article which told me so. Strike one.

The best example though just has to be Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed is one of my all time favourite books. It discusses a true Kropotkin-like anarchist state and compares and contrasts it with a more capitalist viewpoint. In the hands of someone like Heinlein there is no doubt as to how the development of such a theme would be handled. It would all be red and white, and there wouldn’t be any shades of pink to be seen. It is to Le Guin’s credit that she does not fall into this easy trap. The Dispossessed is thoughtful and sympathetic (at both ends of the spectrum) and is an intellectual tour de force. I love it very much. Unfortunately, again I’ve never met anyone else who shared my enthusiasm. Most people who have started reading it seem to leave it about half read. They find it boring (an attitude that amazes me). Often they do appreciate what Le Guin is up to but they just can’t maintain the enthusiasm to follow her. “Worthy but dull”, I once heard someone say. Strike two.

So what about the socialist writers (in a geographical sense)? SF is not a purely western phenomenon (though sometimes you might be forgiven for thinking so). What about Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers? (These are the most immediately available to western readers.)

I have to say straight away that I dislike their writing (and from discussion with other people I know that I am not alone). I suspect that it has something to do with different literary traditions since the works of these writers that I have read seem to me to be direct descendants of the traditions of Dostoievsky, Kafka et al. The “eastern” viewpoint if you like. I find it tedious in the extreme—they never seem to know when to stop, they never know when they’ve said enough. Lem is particularly infuriating in this regard. The Futurological Congress and Manuscript Found in a Bathtub are so boringly repetitive that I could scream. He makes his point, makes it again, underlines it, shouts it from the rooftops and then (just in case you weren’t listening) starts over again from the beginning. His novels read rather like short stories that simply go round in circles until the page count is long enough. Interestingly, his short stories do not show these faults. The collections The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries contain much that is good. Perhaps he is really a short story writer who has never grown up into a novelist. Perhaps so—but on the whole, strike three.

It doesn’t look good for the opposition does it?

Collectively though, books and viewpoints with any serious political implications are very rare in the SF canon. I think I’ve touched on most of the existing ones in this brief essay—there are one or two more, but they simply reinforce what I’ve already said. The devil has all the good tunes, and the fascists have all the good stories. “Far out man. Can you grok it?”

I suspect that what all the above is leading to is to confirm yet again the intellectual shallowness not only of much SF but also of many SF readers. Even when the depths are there as in all the books I’ve discussed above, the readers often will not swim in them. I’ve complained about this before, and I’m not going to go over old ground again, but I think that the example I’ve chosen to illustrate it with this time is perhaps the most dramatic I know. The sight of the Mushroom customers grooving on their intellectual enemies was a sad one.

One of the last books I bought from Mushroom was More Joy of Sex. The proprietor confided in me that he wished he’d ordered a larger stock. He said he could have sold them many times over and made quite a bit of loot out of them. That annoyed me, because it wasn’t what Mushroom was all about, and I felt ripped off. I never went back.

The Horror of It All

First published in Phlogiston Ten, August 1986.

My books are arranged on my shelves alphabetically by author. The vagaries of the alphabet and the size of the shelves are such that the letter “K” is at eye level as you go through the door and turn left. As a direct result of this, a question I am asked more and more often these days is “Why on earth do you read so many books by Stephen King?” The questioner usually has a sneer in his voice and I reply by mumbling something and changing the subject.

As it happens, however, I know exactly why I read so many books by Stephen King. It’s a strange little story in itself, and I thought you might be interested. It starts with fluffy baby ducklings (aaaah!).

I think it was the biologist Konrad Lorenz who first described the phenomenon of imprinting. A newly hatched duckling will assume that the first moving thing it sees is mum and will behave accordingly. Lorenz was often to be seen striding around his garden followed by a long line of cheeping ducklings brimming over with mother love. They were imprinted with Lorenz, and nothing would convince them otherwise. I seem to recall a couple of Tom and Jerry cartoons on the same theme.

But ducklings are not the only things that get imprinted. So do Bearded Triffids. I remember it very well indeed. I was about seven years old…

About once a week, my mum and dad and I would go and visit my grandmother. This was a little dull and so I always made sure that I took plenty of toys with me. Once I made my dad carry my whole meccano set. It was large, made of metal (no plastics in those days) and stored in a heavy wooden box. My grandmother lived about twenty minutes walk away. For the rest of his life my father walked with his knuckles dragging along the ground.

One particular week, whichever toy it was that I had with me failed to hold my attention, and I wandered into the back parlour where there was a cupboard with a glass fronted door. The cupboard shelves were full of boring looking books, and I’d never investigated too closely. But today I did, and I struck gold. Two very thick books: The Mystery Book edited by H. Douglas Thomson, published by Odhams Press Ltd (1934) and The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries edited J. M. Parrish and John R. Crossland, published by Odhams Press Ltd (1936). I have no idea who these editors are (or were), but the collections that they put together were inspired—every classic horror and ghost story you can think of was there: The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs, The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford, The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, the list is endless and I scared myself silly reading the stories. I was imprinted. The ghost story, the horror story had entered my life, and my life was totally changed from that point onwards. You will know what impression those books made when I tell you that today, nearly thirty years later, I still have them, I brought them with me from the other side of the world, and nothing would ever induce me to part with them. Every week, when we went to visit my grandmother’s, I made a bee line for that cupboard. I think my father was very grateful. He didn’t have to carry meccano sets any more.

For me, the golden age of the horror and supernatural story will always be the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The stories were fresh and new and exciting then and they still are today. They don’t scare me now as much as they once did (perhaps familiarity has lessened their effect), but I reread Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James just before sitting down to write this essay and it frightened me all over again—the magic hasn’t gone away.

I was imprinted, you see. The stories in these two books define the genre. If they aren’t in these books, then they can’t possibly be successful as horror stories. If pressed hard, I will admit that some of the stories are better than others. (The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is just as unreadable today as I found it to be thirty years ago—I totally fail to understand James’ honoured place in literature. I’ve always found him to be a pompous old windbag.) I think this probably explains why I never had much time for H. P. Lovecraft and his legions of imitators. They weren’t in the books, you see. The fact that they were piss poor writers and story tellers was of secondary importance.

The names of these writers in these books were written in my mind in letters of fire, and over the years I sometimes came across other works by them buried in dusty corners of the public library, books long out of print by writers long dead. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. F. Benson, E. Bulwer Lytton. Other names, more famous names had books more easily available: Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Walter De La Mare. Generally I was disappointed, which is not really to be wondered at. After all, if these other works had been any good, they would have been in my definitive books. (By now my grandmother had tired of never seeing anything but the back of my head as I bent over her books so she gave them to me to take home so that my parents could put up with it instead. They were my books now, and for years, I took them with me to my grandmother’s every week. It didn’t seem right to read them anywhere else. I think my grandmother must have found me an exasperating grandchild. But I was the only one she had, so she put up with it.)

In many ways those two books had a deeper and more long-lasting effect on me than did the later addiction to SF. I was never imprinted with SF as I was with these two books. SF was merely an addiction. These books were a fundamental part of my life. Just as Konrad Lorenz would always be mum to generations of ducklings, so would these books occupy a very special place in my affections.

But children and ducklings grow up and both eventually leave the nest. I stopped reading the stories in the books—I knew most of them almost off by heart anyway—so it didn’t matter if I gave them a rest for a while. SF was taking a prominent place in my affections. From time to time I would pick up a “horror” book and thumb through it (this was a relatively easy thing to do as they were often shelved alongside or mixed in with the SF), but generally I sneered and put them back. They couldn’t possibly be any good.

I was vaguely aware that someone called Stephen King was making a big name for himself, breaking out of the horror genre into the best seller lists. That was two strikes against him before he even started, so my eyes just skipped over his books whenever I saw them on the shelves. One bored afternoon I went to the pictures and saw Carrie, it was okay. The blood was a satisfying shade of red, and the ending made me jump in brief shock. But I thought no more about it, and continued to ignore King’s books. The years passed, as years do, and then one day disaster struck. I ran out of things to read.

When I don’t have anything to read, I am unlivable with. I twitch and drool and pick fights in pubs, my wife and pussy cat run away, my hands tremble. Taking her courage in her hands, Rosemary pointed me in the direction of a bookshop, “Go in there” she said, “and don’t come out without a book”.

There was absolutely nothing worth reading in the whole of the shop. So in desperation I bought the only thing that looked even vaguely interesting. It was Danse Macabre, a book of essays by Stephen King. He talked about the horror genre, and his philosophy as a writer. He mentioned names that I held in respect from my two anthologies. He discussed stories that I had read and loved. I began to think that he might not such a bad person after all. He discussed some of his own books and the next day I brought one of them: The Stand.

It is without doubt one of the best “after the holocaust” stories I have ever read. The world is decimated with a flu epidemic. Most people die. The book examines what happens to some of those who don’t. Pure SF, solidly in the SF tradition, and very, very well written. I loved it. Towards the end it gets a little mystical: two of the characters may (or may not be) supernatural powers, it’s hard to tell. But it is no bad thing and does not detract from the book. It’s 734 pages long and I read it in one sitting. Afterwards I went back to the bookshop and bought every book by Stephen King that I could find. And I have continued to buy every new book of his since.

King has quite a wide range as a writer. He is classed in the horror genre by the media Mafia who have to label everything for the sake of their filing systems. On the face of it that is understandable, many of his books do set out to shock and horrify. Exterminating most of the world population (as in The Stand) is a pretty horrifying notion if you stop to think about it. But outside of this broad classification he is hard to pigeon hole. Firestarter and The Dead Zone and Carrie are novels about psionics—telepathy, telekinesis and similar powers. (John W. Campbell once got a psionic bee in his bonnet and for a while Astounding was full of people thinking at each other. All three of those Stephen King novels would have fitted perfectly into Campbell’s magazine.)

Cujo is a perfectly naturalistic novel about a rabid dog. No SF, no supernatural events. The Shining is about a haunted hotel with telepathy with a subplot. Salem’s Lot is the definitive vampire novel (the only good one since Bram Stoker wrote Dracula). Christine is about a haunted car. And so on and so forth. The basic subject matter is not particularly exciting perhaps; but neither is any book when considered only at this very basic level. As I once remarked in another essay, you could say that War and Peace is about Russia.

A surprising large percentage of King’s stories have young children or adolescents playing a central role. But don’t for a minute make the mistake of thinking that this makes them children’s books. Oh dear me no. One of King’s major strengths is his ability to get inside the heads of these young people. They come alive on the page, probably because they are you and me. They are very easy to identify with. If you remember the desperate need to belong to what in these days the jargon calls the peer group (but in my day and I suspect in King’s as well was simply “the gang”), then you will understand these books. Stephen King knows how to put on the skin of these people. Indeed one of his books (Pet Semetary) is so believable, so easy to identify with that I don’t actually own a copy. It upsets me too much to read it. Honestly; I am not exaggerating; this is no hyperbole. The book hits all my emotional buttons one after the other. I have only read it once. I will never read it again. It is too draining. That is writing skill of a very high standard indeed. No other book has ever had that effect on me.

Stephen King does not write about anything that a million writers before have not written about, he is no innovator. What he is, is a craftsman. That is why his books are so effective. They do shock, they are full of horror on both the subtle psychological level and the gross bucket of blood level. Normally you can dismiss that in a book. It’s only words on paper after all—Stephen King’s strength is that he involves you so much in his story that you can’t dismiss the words on paper. You are there in the story, taking part; and that makes the shocks hit so much harder. Do not make the mistake of lumping Stephen King in with the rest of the hack rubbish that has “Horror” printed on the spine of the book. He is very different. He doesn’t fit there. That is why his books are best sellers; that is why they transcend the category. I used to make that mistake; I used to sneer. I was wrong.

At the end of The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries are nine stories sealed off from the rest of the book. They are so scary, so horrible that the publishers felt obliged to put them in a group by themselves and to warn any readers with weak hearts not to read them because of the effect they might have. For many years I took these words at their face value and refused to read the stories in this section. After all the ones in the main body of the book already scared me stupid. What would the ones in the special section do? I was well into my teens before I dared to read those stories. I read them in broad daylight in a spacious and airy room. They still scared me sick. I was imprinted you see. Dispassionately, I suppose the stories are not really all that scary. I doubt if too many other people would get the same clammy palms and pounding heart that I get when I read them. But I can’t help it. The imprinting is simply too powerful and it is not under my conscious control. There are probably still a lot of ducks around who take their offspring to see old grandfather Konrad.

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 2: Phillip Mann

First published in Phlogiston Eleven, November 1986.

I have just moved from Wellington to Auckland (ever the trendy!) and the process of shifting has given me a new insight into exactly why Roger Zelazny introduced the Courts of Chaos into the Amber books. He had just moved house—a process which consists largely of standing vacantly in the Courts of Chaos and going “Wurble, wurble, wurble” as the universe disintegrates into cardboard boxes.

In between nervous breakdowns, however, I’ve been reading the new novel by Phillip Mann—Master of Paxwax.

Phillip Mann, you will recall, is the New Zealand author who wrote Eye of the Queen a few years ago. That book received general critical acclaim. In a sense it was probably unfortunate that his first book was such a critical success, since it provides far too good a yardstick to measure his subsequent works by. Critics love to do this and authors hate them for it, because they never seem to realise that they aren’t comparing like with like. To say that Master of Paxwax is or is not as good as Eye of the Queen makes about as much sense as saying that Michelangelo’s David is not as good as (or is better than) the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Such a statement implies the existence of an absolute standard, and of course there is no such thing. Nevertheless, for thirty years, whenever poor old Frederik Pohl published a new novel, everybody told him that it wasn’t as good as The Space Merchants. Then he published Gateway and started the whole cycle off again. I suspect that Phillip Mann is going to find himself in much the same situation. For his sake, I hope it lasts less than thirty years.

Having just proved that I haven’t got a leg to stand on, I will now put my foot where my mouth is and say that Master of Paxwax is not as good as Eye of the Queen. But what do I know about it for goodness sake?

At this point however, I want to qualify the previous paragraph AT THE TOP OF MY VOICE—I thoroughly enjoyed Master of Paxwax. Saying that it is less “good” (whatever that means) than the previous book does not imply that it is bad. On the contrary, in fact, I intend to praise the book with very faint damns indeed. It is a book the author can be very proud of.

I think that my major reason for saying that it is not as good as Eye of the Queen is (paradoxically!) that Master of Paxwax is much more straightforward, much more of a “good read”. There is more concentration here on pure story, on plot happenings and events, and less on the multilayered levels of subtlety and development that characterised Eye of the Queen. As a consequence, Master of Paxwax seems thinner to me, it lacks body, but it moves; and that makes up for a lot.

The book is the first in a series of two (diptych? dualogy? How dare the man write a book that belongs in a class I don’t know the name of!) The sequel, The Fall of the Families, will be published next year.

So what’s Master of Paxwax all about?

At some time in the past, during humanity’s expansion among the stars, the alien races that were encountered have been systematically wiped out. Genocide on a vast scale. The worlds of humanity are now ruled by eleven families. Society is rigidly stratified and a person’s position in the pecking order is determined more by the predefined status of his family than by his own intrinsic merit or worth. This status is not subject to change, at least not in an absolute sense. Power and influence may vary as the families jostle and manoeuvre for advantage, but social standing does not.

Meanwhile, unknown to humanity, the remnants of the alien races hide out on the remote, barren world of Sanctum and plot and conspire to bring about the downfall of the human power base.

Pawl Paxwax, the second son of the fifth family, is the alien’s chosen instrument in their struggle. Pawl, of course, knows nothing of this. All he wants to do is marry Laural Beltane—but she is of the fifty-sixth family and he is of the fifth. It is unthinkable—such a scandal.

Pawl’s elder brother and father die suddenly and Pawl (rather to his surprise) inherits the Paxwax domain. It proves to be rather a burden, his father left things in a mess! His passion for Laural Beltane doesn’t help matters either.

Pawl must hold Paxwax against both his human enemies (specifically the family of Xerxes de la Tour Souvent who have engineered many of the mysterious incidents leading up to his inheritance in order to have some chance of securing Paxwax for themselves) and also against the aliens who would use him and his power for their own purposes. The first threat is obvious, the second less so as the aliens and their mysterious “Inner Circle” manipulate both Pawl and the Xerxes de la Tour Souvent.

The details of the two conflicts are the major plot threads of the book. The first, the machinations of the other families against the Paxwax domain is resolved in the novel. However the ramifications of the alien power plays are more far reaching. These are not resolved (or, more accurately, they do not reach a conclusion; they simply reach a breathing space) and will obviously form the subject of the second novel.

The story is well and excitingly told. The details of both plots, the interactions of the eleven families with each other (and unknowingly with the aliens) have a pleasing complexity which itself adds to the feeling of realism. Many years ago James Blish coined the term “idiot plot” which he defined as being the sort of plot which can only take place if all the characters involved in it are idiots. It is a very common fault and is not confined solely to SF although it crops up within the genre with alarming regularity. There seems to be something about spaceships and time-travel that turns off the critical faculties of otherwise good writers. Shikasta by Doris Lessing is a perfect case in point. That reads like it was written by some 1950s flying saucer contactee. But I digress, the point I started to make was that Master of Paxwax definitely does not fall into that trap for young players; which is an excellent point in its favour. It is one of the book’s major strengths and I was very pleased to see it. The other major strong point is the solid characterisation—and are the characters weird!

Again it is very common within the genre to find that the inhabitants of the far future are simply Mr and Mrs Smith next door. They commute by spaceship rather than by bus; but you’d know them if you met them. Their ideas and life styles are very familiar—after all, society and social mores don’t change, do they?

Well they do, and Phillip Mann knows that and takes account of it. The nature of the beast is not really subject to fundamental change (“A man’s a man for a’ that”) but society and societal manners are. Could your grandmother have envisaged punk rockers?

The eleven families are bizarre in the extreme. It would seem, for example, that at some time in humanity’s history customised genetic tailoring has become the norm. This is never explained in the novel—it is simply one of the givens of the society and everyone takes it for granted and doesn’t really talk about it—which is exactly the way it would be treated in “real life” of course. I was reminded of the Robert Heinlein novel Beyond This Horizon where, as the hero approaches a door, it dilates to let him through. Nothing more is ever said about it anywhere in the book, and it is thrown off so casually that your eye skims past it and then does a double take. The door has an iris in it? Suddenly you know that you are living in the future and that this future is lived in. Other people have made exactly this comment about that door—it is probably one of the most famous doors in Science Fiction. After that door dilated, the Gernsbackian travelogue of the future where the reader is shown around by some future incarnation of an Intourist guide (“Today we will see the velocipede factory where they fit the anti-gravity engines and I will explain everything about the process to you”) was dead. The door dilated and let in reality. As Mary Poppins said, “I never explain anything”. The characters of Master of Paxwax take these sort of things for granted, just like you and I take microwave ovens for granted. (When did you last explain a microwave oven to a visitor? Come, to that, do you even know how a microwave oven works? What is a microwave? Is it something microbes do when they say goodbye?) Consequently it comes as a little bit of a shock when the reader eventually realises that Clarissa Xerxes de la Tour Souvent has feathers, that Laural Beltane is piebald and that Pawl Paxwax himself is a crooked legged hunchback.

Then there are the aliens. In Eye of the Queen Phillip Mann created some of the most alien aliens in SF, and in here he has done it again. The Gerbes, the Diphilus, the Spiderets and the Silver Tree are all very nicely odd (I’m highly suspicious of the Silver Tree—I think it may be up to no good. But that’s the next book, so I’ll just have to wait).

I said I had some faint damns to praise the book with. Pawl Paxwax is given to writing poetry when the muse takes him. We are treated to some samples of his verse during the course of the book and I rather wish that we weren’t. He is not much of a poet (though the other characters to whom he reads his poems think that he is—more fool them). However there is some doggerel verse included, and that is really very good. When Phillip Mann is not being a serious poet, he isn’t a bad versifier—and they are two very different things as I’m sure he would be the first to admit. One disappointment—I heard Phillip read some extracts from the Paxwax book a year or two ago (while it was still being written) and one of these was a delightful parody of Eskimo Nell (among other things). I was sorry not to see it in Master of Paxwax. I suspect that it may well be in the sequel however, since it concerned the history of the exploration of a region of space called Elliot’s Pocket. This is mentioned in passing in Master of Paxwax and it is hinted that Elliot’s Pocket becomes very important in later developments of the aliens’ plot. If it is in the sequel, then you all have a treat in store for you, because it is a very clever (and funny) piece of verse. But poetry it ain’t.

One of the major alien characters is a Gerbes called Odin. Now here I get very annoyed. If you call a character Odin then whether you wish it or not, you immediately invoke all the cultural associations that have accreted themselves onto that name over the centuries. Now the Gerbes may be many things, but one of them is not a Norse God. Every time I read “Odin” the magic spell was shattered and I was outside the book again. Zelazny did the same trick with his Egyptian and Hindu deities and I didn’t like it there either. It just doesn’t work. If the name is meant to suggest aspects of Godhood or something, then show them explicitly in the text. Don’t rely on a name because there are too many irrelevancies associated with it—they get in the way and block your view of what is going on—one black mark.

Pawl Paxwax father is called Toby Paxwax—but as far as I was concerned he was really Baron Harkonnen from Dune. He had many of the Baron’s attributes and for me the correspondence was too close. I kept expecting Paul Atreides instead of Pawl Paxwax; and again the spell was broken. I suppose that you could argue that any novel which is concerned with political complexities (as are both Dune and Master of Paxwax) is bound to have some sort of Harkonnen figure in it: the unprincipled manipulator. And I would agree with you, but does he have to float around in a harness? The reasons for the harness are completely different in both books (indeed they are almost exactly at opposite poles; which may or may not have been intentional) and the final effect of the harness on Toby Paxwax is nicely nasty—but I still don’t like it. It seemed derivative—and one thing that Master of Paxwax as a whole is not, is derivative. Therefore this one little touch of it annoyed me.

But in the end, these are niggles, Master of Paxwax is a thoroughly enjoyable, exciting and interesting story. Eye of the Queen was all that and a bit more besides. Some days however, I prefer story values to any other; and the day that I read Master of Paxwax was one of those days. On that day I didn’t want to read Eye of the Queen. My mood was all wrong. It is the mark of a first class writer that he can produce different books for different times. Too many people write the same book over and over (Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Princess of Mars about fifty times). That is a small talent. It is to Phillip Mann’s credit that his talent is a large one.

And now my cardboard boxes are calling me. I must go and unpack.

Food, Glorious Food

First published in Phlogiston Twelve, February 1987.

I am currently suffering from a tummy-bug whose symptoms are so startling, that I’ve had to hide the garden hose away in a dark corner in case it gets jealous. I haven’t eaten anything at all for four and a half days and I’m feeling a little peckish. Therefore the subject of this particular article is one which is currently very dear to me—food.

Many years ago, in England, there was a television series called The Clangers. It was a puppet show, and it concerned a race of aliens (the Clangers themselves) who lived on soup and blue string pudding. Soup was obtained from the soup well which was guarded by the Soup Dragon. I forget how they used to placate him in order to get the soup. The origins of blue string pudding were never satisfactorily explained—but there was no doubt at all that it was very nutritious.

The program had a huge cult following, and I was once invited to a Clangers party where they served soup and blue string pudding. Soup is straightforward, of course, and the blue string pudding was merely spaghetti which had been turned a rather sickening shade of blue with food colouring. You would be amazed how many people refused to eat it simply because of the colour (Clangers notwithstanding). There seems to be some sort of psychological imperative in our minds which requires that our food be the right colour—if it isn’t we get suspicious. Fortunately, this instinct appears to have atrophied in me, I enjoyed my blue string pudding, and went back for more; much to some people’s disgust.

Damon Knight reports a similar experiment in his book The Futurians:

On Cyril’s birthday the Futurians surprised him at dinner with mashed potatoes prepared beforehand with food colouring carefully arranged in layers. When he took a helping, under the white surface he found green and red mashed potatoes. Then they poured him a glass of blue milk.

Another time, they used Cyril to test a report that it was scientifically impossible to eat a fried egg under red light because when you broke the yolk it looked black. Cyril couldn’t eat it.

The Cyril of this story is Cyril Kornbluth; and the Futurians were a group of fans in New York in the 1930s. You may have heard of some of them: Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Isaac Asimov…

Later in the same book, Knight gives us the recipe for Futurian Chop Suey : …spaghetti, hamburger and canned cream of mushroom soup: it was best when it rotted a day or two in the refrigerator.

Food is tremendously important at conventions. When you are glassy-eyed at four o’clock in the morning it is quite often the case that all that stands between you and sudden death by starvation is a pork pie. Those of you who visit “Conspiracy” next August in England will meet a British fan called Brian Burgess who will sell you a pork pie and a glass of milk whenever you require it. Uneaten pork pies (and sometimes eaten ones) are traditionally thrown at Harry Harrison. I urge you not to let this custom die.

Within the genre itself, however, there is little mention of food. The authors are generally too concerned with the action to slow things down for a meal and I sometimes wonder if John Carter lived on thin air and thoats. An exception to this rule is Jack Vance whose characters are constantly sitting down to lovingly described feasts:

…a salad of delicate herbs, twists of fragrant paste and silvered pepper-crusted meat; a skewer of small broiled fowl, hot and sputtering on a slab of grain-cake with a garnish of sour melon-balls; a parfait of five fruit flavoured frosts.

Maske: Thaery

Vance is a sensuous writer, and one of the senses that he delights to titillate is the sense of taste.

A footman rolled in a buffet and offered trays of sweet wafers, salt-bark, cubes of spiced meat, decanters of wine, flagons of essence.

Servants of the Wankh

Sometimes the ingredients of a feast by Vance are familiar, but at other times they are not. Vance’s worlds are alien; strange places and just as the strange places of our world produce odd, disgusting foods, so do Vance’s.

Bending her head, she busied herself with the appetisers; dishes of grey grapes, biscuits, smoked sea-insects, pickled fern-pod.

Servants of the Wankh

And sometimes they are…well, like this :

…they were served a meal of bread and thick dark soup, the ingredients of which Reith did not inquire.

City of the Chasch

The evening meal was a platter of dried fruit and pickled fish which no-one ate.

Servants of the Wankh

“What will you eat?”

“What is to be had?”

“Bread and steamed eel with hilks”.

“Then this must be our fare”.

The Dirdir

Passages like this make me suspect that Vance must have spent some time in England. Nobody in the whole wide world can ruin food like the English can ruin food. In the Midlands and the North there is a delicacy called mushy peas which you can buy at fish and chip shops. The name is very descriptive, this gourmet dish consists of peas boiled for hours until they collapse in on themselves in a steaming heap. This is not your ordinary pea though; no, this is a special variety of pea bred over the years to produce the slimiest, most hideous shade of mush green that you ever saw. Mushy peas look like dragon vomit, smell like biological warfare and I have no idea what they taste like because I have never found enough courage to put any in my mouth. But that is not the worst. Tripe is the worst.

If I ever said “UCP” to my father he would go all nostalgic for his lost youth in the depths of Lancashire. “Tripe and onions,” he would sigh, “cowheels”. UCP stands for United Cattle Products, an organisation dedicated to making money by selling the bits of cows and pigs that no other organisation would touch. Of those bits, tripe is without doubt the nastiest. For those of you unfamiliar with tripe, I should explain that is consists of the stomach and intestines of the cow. Depending on the sort of tripe you require, it varies in shade from off white to a sort of decomposing grey colour and it feels like dead snakes smeared with soap. Again, I can’t tell you what it tastes like because I lack the courage to find out. But my father loved it and so did my dog and they are both dead so you can’t ask them. I’m not saying there’s a connection, but…

To continue into this digression into nausea for a while, it might also be instructive to tell you about Danish Pig Melts. I didn’t earn very much when I first started working and so my food purchases tended to be based on price rather than on what I felt like eating. I discovered a lot of new tastes that way. On one particular occasion I was wandering around the supermarket comparing prices when I discovered some meat wrapped up in transparent plastic and labelled “Danish Pig Melts”. I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was, and neither did any of the supermarket staff that I queried, but it was so cheap they were practically paying me to take it away, so I bought it, took it home and looked it up in my cookbooks. Nothing. They didn’t know what Danish Pig Melts were either. Well never mind. I got out the pans and turned on the stove and cooked myself Danish Pig Melts and mashed potato, with a nice thick gravy. It smelled a bit suspicious as it simmered, but I ignored that. It was cheap, that was the main thing. I served it up, and I took a slice. The texture seemed a bit rubbery as my knife cut it. Never mind, it was cheap. That had to be a good thing. I chewed it.

My teeth bounced around off it for a while before I managed to regain enough control to spit. My whole head filled up with the taste of Danish Pig Melts, and I didn’t care however cheap they were, they were horrible. I’ve never eaten reconstituted dinosaur droppings, but if I ever do, I will laugh gaily, swallow them and ask for more. I have had Danish Pig Melts in my mouth and lived.

Pausing only to drink a gallon or so of water, I went around to see a friend who had even more cookbooks than I did. We spent a happy afternoon searching for Danish Pig Melts, and eventually we found it.

Pig Melts are spleens. I chewed a spleen! Aaaagh! I am a little unclear as to exactly what function the spleen serves in the body, but whatever it is, it doesn’t taste too good afterwards. Take my advice, don’t ever eat a spleen.

Boy you can buy some weird food in England, if you choose carefully.

Reith became aware that he was ravenously hungry; at a small restaurant they ate boiled sea-thrush and spore-cake.

The Dirdir

Different countries, different customs, different foods. In a small town on the border between Belgium and Holland I ate a boiled ball. To this day I don’t know what it was, but it was about the size of a tennis ball, a dirty brown colour, and it was boiled for a while before I was served it. Later that same day, my friend showed off his command of the Dutch language by ordering mussels in fluent Flemish. He got a bottle of Moselle, and ordered subsequent courses by pointing to the menu like the rest of us. In Switzerland I ate raw beef and raw bacon and we were asked to leave the restaurant because we were singing She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain too loudly and disturbing the other diners. In Fiji I ate curry with my right hand and it tasted just as bad as it would have done with a fork. In a Japanese restaurant I discovered that there are an infinite number of ways to cook raw fish.

After a meal of stewed hackroot and mealcake the three repaired to the library…

The Dirdir

In England I have never eaten jellied eels, whelks, pig’s trotters or black puddings. I have eaten haggis and was mildly surprised to find that it wasn’t at all bad. Probably because it was Scottish—mind you, so is porridge, but I have yet to be convinced that porridge is a food. In New Zealand I have discovered that sausages do not exist. The things sold under that name bear little resemblance to the real thing. A friend visited me once from overseas. “Whatever you do,” I told him “don’t have the sausages”. I should have known better—he immediately ordered sausages. Once.

I had a business colleague who used to get a cup of hot water out of the office coffee machine, drop a frankfurter in it for a couple of minutes and then eat the frankfurter. That was lunch; every day. In his early forties he resigned his job on the grounds of ill-health. He had an ulcer.

…new dishes were set before them: croquettes in sweet jelly, toasted sticks of white pith, nubbins of grey sea-flesh.

…cakes of pilgrim-pod meat, candied plum-shaped objects which might have been fruit or possibly leech-like insects, bars of meat paste, sweet and salty wafers of a delicate, crisp white substance…

The Pnume

Once, at university, I ate in the student canteen and they gave me a stew. It was green.

Alienation

First published in Phlogiston Thirteen, May 1987.

One of SF’s more traditional preoccupations is with ravening alien hordes of one sort and another. They are generally concerned with raping Earth’s fairest daughters (never Earth’s fairest sons—there is nothing gay about your traditional alien). The reasons for such behaviour are rather hard to understand.

Harry Harrison once considered it from the alien’s point of view and this is what he wrote:

Let us travel in our imagination to the fifth planet of the star Alpha Centauri. This is a watery world whose dominant race has a rough exoskeleton very much like that of terrestrial lobsters. One day on a pleasant beach where the royal princesses are sunning their crunchy green shells, a roaring spaceship lands. From it burst hideous EARTHMEN MONSTERS, soft damp creatures with wet eyes and fingers like worms. One of them rushes to the prime princess, tears off her girdle of pearls and…

And what? All I can think of, attempting to put myself into the boots of a rocketship-riding, lobster grabbing interstellar sex fiend is to do—what? I don’t get many sexual vibes from the princess. Maybe I can take her pearls back to the rocket and hock them at the nearest comet cathouse. But that is about all.

Great Balls of Fire—A History

of Sex in SF Illustration

by Harry Harrison

However, just to prove that nothing is impossible, Philip Jose Farmer (the enfant terrible of SF) actually provided reasonable grounds for such miscegenation to work. In the novel The Lovers and the short stories collected in the book Strange Relations he examines every aspect of the human-alien sexual relationships that you can think of; and a lot that you can’t.

H. G. Wells defined the archetypal bug eyed monster in War of the Worlds. His Martians were simply ravening beasts (at least as far as Earth people were concerned). The novel suggests that they were actually more subtle than this (Wells was an artist and he knew better than to make them that simple) but he started the trend and for a long time the alien in SF was simply a Wellsian monster engaged in the alien equivalent of rape, pillage and conquest. The alien spaceship was the SF equivalent of the Viking longship and in story after story, the alien was simply an amoral animal with no redeeming features. It was all surface, of course. Even the writers of this rubbish, if pressed, would have admitted that they were not attempting to be realistic. But it moved, it was action and excitement. Surely, the argument went, that was all that was necessary to keep the audience happy?

Then there was Stanley G. Weinbaum. In the short story A Martian Odyssey he introduced an alien who was actually a well rounded character who did very bizarre things but obviously had his own very good reasons for doing them—even if we had no idea what those reasons were. The story is horribly dated now, and the prose style makes you shudder (it reeks of the pulp tradition) but despite all that, it did show that an alien did not have to be a Wellsian Martian (or a BEM), it could be a person in its own right.

Weinbaum died young, and there was little more from his pen, but he had pointed the way, and this was back in the 1930s!

Few writers followed the path that Weinbaum pointed out. There was more superficial “excitement” from the Wellsian aspects of the alien. There were tales of mighty space battles and deeds of derring do to write. E. E. “Doc” Smith led the way, and a whole generation of writers followed.

But as SF grew up, the writers outgrew their childish beginnings and began to experiment with something more than a simple story. Space battles are all very well, but there has to be something else. We started to get isolated examples of a more mature approach to the topic.

Eric Frank Russell, for example, in a wonderfully funny novel called Wasp, described aliens who were purple and had sticky out ears. What his novel was “really” about was racial prejudice, and if you examine it closely, his aliens are really Japanese in heavy character makeup. But he was trying, and he did rise above the cliche, albeit briefly. Another example is the short story by Murray Leinster (First Contact). It is a thoughtful consideration of what the first contact between humanity and aliens might really be like. The characterisation is not very good and ultimately the story really depends on the gimmick in the ending, but again, he was trying.

There are other examples. There is no point in listing them. The point is that ever since Weinbaum proved it could be done, the writers knew that they could do something else with their aliens. They just often lacked the skills to do it. But they did try, and we must give them points for effort.

Perhaps the very best of the Wellsian derivations was Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. A more modern viewpoint on the same subject is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game which won umpteen awards a couple of years ago. It also is essentially Wellsian and the aliens are not particularly imaginative, but somehow Card puts together a magical novel which richly deserves all its awards. If the Wellsian approach gives us novels like these latter two, then I’m all in favour of it. Unfortunately, far too often the aliens have been a Wellsian surface without the depth that both Heinlein and Card saw was really there. Don’t read Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. You will weep if you do, and they will be tears of pain.

With the demise of the magazine and the rise to prominence of the paperback, we started to see a new emphasis. All the pulp genres were starting to reach a wider audience and all of them began to attract better writers. The reasons for that are complex, but briefly, good writing is a better investment than bad writing, and publishers prefer good investments. The larger the potential circulation, the more the publisher is going to try to fit the best he can into it. It all comes down to money, but it seems to work. The better writers have staying power, the weaker fall by the wayside. The wider audiences are nowhere near as tolerant as the (smaller) pulp audience was. So, in a somewhat Darwinian way, the field improves itself.

We get works such as John Brunner’s The Crucible of Time and Robert Silverberg’s Time of Changes, whole novels told strictly from an alien point of view. And if your viewpoint character is not human, you damn well better make him well-rounded and convincing because if you don’t you’ll lose your audience and the book is dead.

We get short stories such as Larry Niven’s Known Space series (Tales of Known Space is the definitive collection) where Niven the author has sat back and done his damnedest to invent believable aliens mainly (as far as I can gather) for the sheer fun of it, but in the process has bypassed the Wellsian aspects and emphasised the “human” (bad word, but I can’t think of a better) aspects.

Then there is Fred Pohl, ploughing the allegorical furrow in novels such as Jem, where the aliens are used simply as puppets to carry a message. But Pohl is an artist and he knows that messages need a sugar coated pill—you still have to tell a story, and so the aliens (of necessity) have to be convincing or else they will collapse under the weight of the significance the author makes them bear.

As the field has grown up, so the stories have become more subtle. The writers are trying to do things with their material that they would not have dreamed of thirty years ago. A wider variety of purpose is by definition a recipe for deeper, more subtle works where everything is more rounded, not just aliens. It is all a question of focus. That is itself a function of maturity and treatments such as those mentioned above are therefore becoming more common. But I say again, the writers have always known it was possible. They just weren’t always capable of doing it. Maybe they had to grow up too.

But approaching the subject at that deeper level raises the interesting question of alien societies themselves. Is it possible to create a truly alien being? After all, these stories are written by Earth people (at least, I think they are) and Earth people have no direct experience of the truly alien. Is it not true that any alien society devised by a writer will simply hold up a mirror to our own? Anything else would require the writer to step outside of all the cultural imperatives that they have absorbed in a lifetime; that may be possible on a conscious level, but the subconscious will always betray you and sneak in some familiarity when you are not looking.

In a sense, this argument has a lot going for it—it is the reason why so many aliens are simply the man next door with a green skin or a tentacle for effect. However it doesn’t have to be true, at least not in any absolute sense. That’s why we have anthropologists. (At this point I was going to make a Margaret Mead joke, but I decided that would be cheap, so go and read Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein instead—it contains the best Margaret Mead joke ever told.)

We have a great many cultures here at home, and all of them are alien to each other (both in the true sense and in the SF sense of the word). Could you, for example, understand the motives of a Muslim fundamentalist? Or a deep southern bible belt Christian fundamentalist for that matter. It isn’t only geography that divides east from west and it isn’t only money that defines the difference between the poor and the rich countries of the world. There are so many societies here at home, so many reasons for doing things in a certain way (and for not doing other things at all). Even transposing some of them one for one onto some tentacled nasty or other would give a well rounded and pleasing wholeness to an alien society. However, that would be cheating. A much better way is to use it as a starting point and extrapolate from there. Anthropology may not be a science, but it is a descriptive recipe.

It is just such an approach, such an awareness of the rules (if you like) that govern societal growth that account for the richness and subtlety of novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. In some ways this book can be considered definitive. It is the most detailed examination of alienness (if there is such a word) that I know of in the whole of SF.

Other approaches are possible of course. You don’t have to define a culture by its members. You can define it by its artefacts. In terms familiar to us, this is the archaeological rather than the anthropological approach. We know next to nothing about the sociology and culture of many of the pre-Sumerian cultures of the Middle East. They were illiterate societies who left no record of themselves. Nonetheless, we know they existed because we have the things they left behind them—their weapons, their pottery, their jewellery and their houses. You can deduce a lot from these. Even in the cases where the societies were literate we cannot always read the writings they left (some of the Cretan writings are still undeciphered today, and if we had never found the Rosetta stone we might never have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics). Nonetheless, we still know a lot about how these societies worked. Frederik Pohl took this approach in what is probably his best novel, Gateway. We never see the Heechee aliens on stage at all during the course of the book. All we ever see are alien artefacts and all that we know about the Heechee is what we can deduce from them. The deductions may or may not be correct. It is this element of mystery and uncertainty that gives the novel its strength. In sequels to the book, Pohl makes the mistake of answering some of the questions he poses so cleverly in Gateway. Eventually the Heechee themselves appear on the stage. Inevitably they are disappointing. These later novels are much weaker as a result.

Speculations of these sort are only legitimate within the SF framework, and they are one of the distinguishing features of the genre. It is sad that the great unwashed, force fed on a diet of “B” movies, generally equate the SF alien solely with its more Wellsian characteristics. That is one of the things that cheapens and tarnishes the genre in the minds of those who approach it from outside rather than from within.

But you and I know better, don’t we?

Technical Knowledge

First published in Phlogiston Fourteen, August 1987.

I studied chemistry at university. It was three years of very hard slog and I came out of it convinced that the best way to lose interest in a subject is to study it intensively at a tertiary level; which is why I’m a computer programmer rather than a chemist these days. My urge to go out and shake a test tube has atrophied somewhat. As far as I can tell, the only advantage I have ever gained from my study of chemistry is that I can say 2, 4-dinitrophenylhydrazine at parties when I’m drunk, which most people find pretty awe-inspiring since they can’t even say it when they’re sober.

So there I was, studying chemistry, surrounded by supposedly intelligent people who were also studying chemistry (and physics, and metallurgy and pharmacy—we had a lot of courses in common) and I discovered that the only person I could talk to about anything except chemistry (or physics or whatever) was the guy studying English who lived down the corridor in the Hall of Residence.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that these people were stupid. They certainly weren’t that. In their subject of choice I had to struggle hard to keep up with some of them; and there were quite a few whose brain power put them way outside my league. But they were intellectually narrow minded. The only books they ever opened were their course texts. If it wasn’t part of the course it just didn’t impinge on their minds. Some of them didn’t even read newspapers! If I wanted to discuss enzyme kinetics or gas chromatography, I couldn’t find a better crowd of people. But if I felt like discussing the novels of D. H. Lawrence they would mostly just stare at me in puzzled incomprehension until I went and found the guy studying English. (Mind you—he didn’t know anything at all about enzyme kinetics or gas chromatography—it worked both ways.)

Now, I’m not claiming to be some sort of Renaissance Man, a Leonardo figure bestriding C. P. Snow’s two cultures. Anything but. I think I’ve just got a pack rat mind. Like the elephant’s child I have an insatiable curiosity. I don’t believe for one minute that there was any conscious prejudice on the part of my friends. They didn’t think there was anything intrinsically wrong with being interested in the novels of D. H. Lawrence (or whatever). It was simply that there wasn’t room in their heads for more than one idea at a time—so if it wasn’t chemistry then it didn’t matter as far as they were concerned. Consequently I was regarded as a little bit of an oddball. I read books that didn’t have anything at all to do with the courses that I was taking. I read books for pleasure, for goodness sake. Talk about eccentric!

Well, I suppose they were entitled to their opinion, but to me their attitude seemed needlessly narrowing. I agree with Snow that no person can consider themselves to be truly educated without having some sort of foot in both camps. It is all very well being able to devise an experiment to measure the loss of activity of lysozyme after bombardment with gamma radiation from a cobalt-60 source and to explain the results, but if you don’t know that cobalt compounds have often been used to give the blue colour in paints and glazes then you miss something when you look at the sky in a picture by Constable. And vice versa of course. (If you are interested, the radiation breaks the sulphur linkages that hold the outside bits of the molecule together and it goes “sproing” and becomes a totally different shape. Since enzyme activity is often a function of the shape of the molecule for reasons which are far too complicated to fit in between these parentheses, the activity of lysozyme decreases under gamma ray bombardment.) Most of my chemistry friends had probably never heard of Constable, and I doubt if my English student friend knew what gamma rays were. But I had, and I did, and filling the odd corners of my mind with that sort of junk makes me very good at Trivial Pursuit even if it has no other use.

One of the disadvantages of this sort of polarisation of interests is that someone on one side of the fence often has an unrealistic view of the other side—a lack of appreciation of just what is involved in that area. The “artistic” (as opposed to the “scientific”) view of SF provides a very good example of the dichotomy.

This point of view argues that much SF can be regarded as a sugar-coated pill to teach you about science. Normally this arrant nonsense is spouted by someone who is fairly scientifically illiterate, but who doesn’t realise just how ignorant he really is; someone who is attempting to bridge the gap (and who deserves praise for that effort) but who is probably looking for an easy way out. Unfortunately there is no such easy solution and choosing to read SF is not a good way to gain an insight into science per se. Anyone who considers otherwise is suffering from exactly the intellectual blindness that I have been discussing.

I will agree that SF can and does teach an awful lot about the philosophy of science—the meaning of the phrase “scientific method” if you like. It teaches the idea that science can be as rigorous and as intellectually stimulating (if not more so) as anything on the artistic side of the curriculum; and that is in itself a very useful lesson to learn, but if you really think that after reading a few “Hard Science” novels you are going to understand relativity or quantum mechanics, then you have a very naive view of what science really is.

Even having said this much about what SF can teach I suspect that I’m out on a very thin limb. A true appreciation of the subject of the last paragraph is more properly achieved by reading books specifically concerned with the philosophy and history of science—Karl Popper, for example—rather than by reading an SF novel. But let it stand.

Such a lack of appreciation of what science is really all about was brought home to me quite forcibly shortly after the publication of Larry Niven’s Ringworld Engineers. That novel, as I’m sure you recall, was much concerned with the stability (or lack of it!) of the Ringworld structure. Now that is a very complicated subject, and it seemed to me that Niven handled it quite well. Maybe he made some mistakes of detail or maybe he didn’t—I don’t know. Despite having had some quite advanced training in physics and mechanics I do not feel qualified to discuss the technical aspects of what he did with the Ringworld. I know enough to know that I don’t know enough—if that isn’t too Irish for you. So I am quite prepared to go along with what Niven tells me simply for the sake of the story. Notice that I am not saying that I necessarily believe what he is saying. I have an open mind.

However, I overheard two SF fans arguing about that book. As it happens, I knew both the people quite well and I knew that neither of them had any formal scientific training of any significance. Both of them were very well read in SF (particularly hard SF) and both seemed to think that it qualified them to discuss the physics of the Ringworld. One argued that Niven had done it correctly, one argued that he hadn’t. I found it interesting that the only arguments that either of them could bring to bear on the subject were vague waffles culled from God knows where. I don’t think they’d even read the same books because they used terms which (from the context) neither of them seemed to understand and which sometimes appeared to mean different things to both of them. When one person said “angular momentum” the other seemed to understand it to mean “kinetic energy” and the argument got more and more heated as each failed to convince the other.

Not once did either of them attempt to define the problem mathematically because neither of them knew mathematics. (SF doesn’t have very much to say about mathematics.) Both of them failed to realise that the only possible arguments that could be brought to bear were mathematical ones—English was simply not precise enough. And having defined the equations that governed the situation to each other’s satisfaction (not hard in this case provided your physics is up to scratch), plug in the values of a few physical constants (and estimate the nonexistent ones that apply to the Ringworld substance itself—I suggest you take a course on “Strengths of Materials” first) and see what it tells you. End of argument. At least on the level they were discussing the problem. There are other levels, but we won’t go into that.

I derived a lot of amusement from this argument. It whiled away what otherwise had promised to be a dull afternoon. But I didn’t join in—partly because I didn’t consider that I knew enough (my physics and maths were definitely not up to scratch. I no longer trust my mathematical abilities beyond the level of very elementary calculus, which somewhat limits the physical arguments I can bring to bear as well) and partly because I knew that I would never be able to convince either of the two of them just how silly they were being. They had been indoctrinated with the “SF can teach you about science” message. The sugar-coated pill had slipped down a little too easily, I think.

You can turn it on its head of course. How about the “artistic” aspects of SF? Are there any? Well, yes there are. But again you cannot expect to pick up a liberal arts education from a literary diet consisting solely of SF.

The absolutely appalling ignorance of other fields of artistic endeavour shown by many readers (and writers!) of SF is a constant source of irritation to me. I once started to write an essay comparing Robert Heinlein, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham (three writers with, it seemed to me at the time, a startling amount in common). I quickly abandoned the project when I discovered that nobody in my circle of SF acquaintances had ever heard of Maugham and their only knowledge of Kipling was through the Disney cartoon of the Jungle Book. I was reminded yet again of my university days. The same narrowness of viewpoint. (Incidentally, my wife is the only person I’ve ever met who has read more Kipling than I have. She introduced me to the delights of Stalky.)

Heinlein himself is a good example of this blinkered approach. In Stranger in a Strange Land he introduced a (fictional) piece of music called The Nine Planets Symphony. This irritates on two levels—it suggests that Heinlein thinks that a symphony can have nine movements, and it ignores Holst’s Planet Suite which would have served his purpose much better! Normally I admire Heinlein’s erudition even when I hate his writing—but his knowledge does sometimes seem a little thin outside of science and engineering.

It is interesting that we seem to expect this sort of intellectual blindness from engineers. I’ve never met anybody who had a good word to say for them (including my father—and he was one!)

I once went on a programming course during which somebody asked the lecturer a question. She paused and thought for a moment and then said, “That’s really the sort of question you should ask an engineer”. She thought a little longer. “If you can find one that can talk, that is”.

Perhaps we need a new T-shirt that says “Ignoramuses do it without thinking”.

The Great Windycon ’87 Fan Guest of Honour Speech

First published in Phlogiston Fourteen, August 1987.

When the Windycon Committee asked me to be the fan guest of honour, my immediate reaction was that they must have taken leave of their collective senses. Me—a fan guest of honour? Everybody knows that I am eminently unsuitable for that position as I am not a fan, never have been a fan, never will be a fan; I despise fandom and refuse to have anything to do with fannish activities in any way shape or form. Me a fan—nonsense! I’ve written dozens of fanzine articles pointing this out to anyone who will listen. The Windycon committee obviously had no idea what it was up to. I began to have serious doubts about its ability to organise a convention.

And then I met my wife’s sister.

Now that is not quite the non sequitur it might appear at first glance. Wishing to make conversation, and knowing that I had an interest in SF, she asked “What is this science fiction thing? What do you do at conventions? What is a fan?”

I waved my arms around in an eloquent manner, rolled my eyes towards Rosemary in a desperate plea for help which she desperately ignored, made a sort of strangulated half moan deep in my throat and said, “Well… you know”.

Now as a means of conveying information, I would be the first to admit that this response lacked a little lucidity. It began to dawn on me that if I couldn’t even give my sister-in-law a satisfactory answer to the question “What is a Fan?” then I obviously didn’t know anything about fans. This in itself raised the terrible possibility that perhaps the Windycon committee really did know what they were doing when they asked me to be fan guest of honour. Perhaps they knew what a fan was; perhaps I really was one after all and didn’t know it. All sorts of terrifying possibilities presented themselves.

I decided to do some research to find out what a fan was and to decide once and for all whether I was one or not.

The place to start was obviously the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 9, Extradition to Garrick.

Immediately I got distracted. Where was Garrick and why did people get extradited there? Was it some sort of Central European breeding ground for criminals who committed dastardly crimes, fled to foreign parts and were constantly being extradited back to their homeland? Perhaps Rosemary and I could pass through it on our way to England in July. Did we need a visa?

Have you ever noticed that whenever you look something up in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, everything except the topic of concern immediately takes on an attractiveness it never had before?

But I refused to let myself get too distracted. The topic was Fans: that was what I needed to know about. There it was, on page fifty-nine, immediately after Famine and just before Fang. This is what it said:

Fans may be divided into two main groups—the rigid fan and the folding fan. The rigid fan has a handle or stick with a rigid mount. On a folding fan is mounted a leaf which is pleated so that the fan may be opened or closed.

Since hardly any fans have survived from ancient times our knowledge of them is based on pictorial evidence. The shape varied enormously. The ladies of classical Greece carried small rigid fans and their example was followed in the Roman world.

From time immemorial the fan has played an important part in Chinese and Japanese life. They were carried by men as well as women and there were many classes, each reserved for a special purpose. With so much significance attached to the fan, a great deal of attention was paid to its decoration and the exquisite taste displayed in the embellishment of Chinese and Japanese fans has never been equalled.

Surviving fans of the baroque period in Europe are rather rare but are all of high quality. During the middle decades of the seventeenth century the folding fan came into prominence in Europe. The fans are usually quite narrow with a slight swelling below the leaf. They may be plain or inlaid with silver pique work in delicate patterns.

By the eighteenth century the fan was an indispensable part of any lady’s toilette. The finest fans of this period are exquisite objects. They have long been sought by collectors, and dealers have satisfied this demand by providing many not very convincing imitations as well as actual forgeries, particularly in the nineteenth century.

The fans of the rococo period of the late eighteenth century are generally larger than those of any other period. There is more charm but less gusto about their decoration.

Very small fans with a radius of about eight inches were in favour during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, but fans were apparently not carried much during the 1840s. About the middle of the century fans became larger again and fan sizes continued to increase during the latter part of the century, some late Victorian fans being more than 20 inches long.

After about 1900 the fan began to die out. The busy woman of the twentieth century found it an encumbrance and to some extent its place was taken by the cigarette.

The next heading was Fan (Mechanical) which I took to be a discussion of robotic fans which was not really applicable. It was followed by Fanfare which is obviously just another name for a fan convention.

That was all the encyclopaedia had to say on the subject of fans. I found it fascinating. Fans obviously went much further back in history than I had previously been aware. I was still a little hazy as to exactly what a fan might be—the descriptions were contradictory. I determined to do a bit more digging into the historical aspects of the subject and I went back to my reference books.

The earliest mention of fandom in history was uncovered by that indefatigable researcher into times past, Bob Shaw. His studies let him to the conclusion that the first fan of note was a Frenchman called Norman who travelled to England in the year 1066 looking for an SF convention. Because he was looking so hard for a con, his search is generally known as the Norman Con Quest. History does not record how successful Norman was in his search, but the fact that he came all the way from France suggests that there was already a widely established network of fan communication in place, even though it is not well documented. We can probably put this failing down to the fact that William Caxton hadn’t invented the Gestetner yet since he wasn’t born until 1422.

The next three hundred years are shrouded in mystery. All we know of the period is that fans gathered together in groups all over England. We assume that this was for mutual protection—perhaps there was some sort of fannish persecution going on at the time. These fan groups were known as monasteries and the fans were known colloquially as monks—the derivation of the words is obscure.

All we know of fandom during this period is that the monks produced many thousands of fanzines which were stored carefully in the monasteries and never sent out to anybody since the post office wasn’t due to be invented until 1840.

Some of these early fanzines are most beautiful works of art. They were all produced by hand, and it was at this time that the practice of drawing bug eyed monsters all around the capital letters was introduced. The practice has largely fallen out of fashion now, and I find modern fanzines much less illuminating as a result.

The major SF event of the year 1387 was the publication of the first episode of “Doc” Chaucer’s epic of old Stonehenge, The Canterbury Tales, published in Flabberghasting Fiction of Olde Englande, Volume 1, Number 10. Although many critics feel that the work was inferior to his later Foundation Garment trilogy, nevertheless it almost singlehandedly led to the revival of fandom and brought it out of the monasteries where it had languished for the last three hundred years.

The first convention of which we have documentary evidence was held that year at Stonehenge and contemporary prints make much of the event.

The monorail track around the top of the edifice was specially refurbished for the occasion and a secret master of fandom was ritually disembowelled on the altar stone and won the fancy dress competition posthumously. One judge refused to vote for him however on the grounds that his entrails were offal. But this was put down to sour grapes, and the business session passed a motion to restrict the sale of wine at the bar in future in favour of beer.

Despite this convention, however, the monasteries continued to be the centre of all fannish activities until about the year 1530 when Henry VIII began the fan feud which history calls the dissolution of the monasteries. The origins of this feud are shrouded in mystery. We know that in 1521 Henry adopted the title “defender of the faith” (or in Latin, Frankus Macskasium) and there has been some speculation that the power and influence associated with this title had something to do with it. But whatever the reason, fandom was divided in two and the feud continued long after Henry’s death and well into the reign of his daughter Elizabeth, culminating in 1588 with the terrible Fannish Armada.

This was caused directly by Francis Drake who was a lazy man, constantly sleeping in his hammock a thousand miles away and refusing to come to room parties. This annoyed the fans of the time, and they challenged him to a game of Trivial Pursuit. He refused, and everybody said contemptuously that it was because he didn’t have the bowls for it.

The fleet action was fast and furious with the fans struggling hard to tie pieces of string together. Statisticians who analysed the string after the battle discovered that the fans were averaging six knots to the galleon.

The air seemed to clear a bit after this, possibly because Elizabeth’s arms were harder than anyone else’s, and nobody wanted to get thumped. The fannish feuds died down and in the relative peace that ensued, fandom flowered as it had never flowered before. The highlight was the publication in 1592 of Sex Pirates of the Blood Asteroids, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works.

The play is seldom performed these days—I have no idea why—but it caused a sensation at the time. Locus printed a rumour that it was to be filmed and Anne Hathaway changed her name to Sigourney Weaver in anticipation of stardom, but when she realised that she would have to wait four hundred years for Hollywood to be invented she retired to the second best bed and sulked.

The next two hundred years are generally referred to as the Middle Ages since the majority of fans of the time were in their forties. It was probably this unusual fannish maturity which lead to the invention in the early eighteenth century of the industrial revolution.

Without the industrial revolution and the impetus it gave to scientific research it is more than likely that science fiction would have remained a minority interest at best, appealing only to scholars in search of a thesis topic. But SF and the industrial revolution grew up together arm in arm, the one reinforcing the other, so to speak. We owe our very appearance here at this convention to the industrial revolution, to the steam engine that powered it and to James Watt, the man who invented it. It seems to me that if any man can be called the father of SF that man is James Watt. Without him and his steam engine there would be no science fiction as we know it today.

Once I had reached this conclusion I wrote immediately to the British Science Fiction Association, explaining my reasoning, presenting my evidence and suggesting that perhaps they should do something to honour this man.

They wrote back by return of post. Apparently the idea was not original with me and they had in fact been working on it for some time. Indeed, they had recently exhumed the body of James Watt and put it up for auction, the proceeds of which they proposed to donate to the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton. Had they known of my research, they said, then they would have invited me to represent New Zealand at the auction. They were sorry they were too late for that, however they were sure that I would be pleased to know that the highest bidder at the auction had been a certain Nigel Rowe who was presumably even now on his way back to New Zealand with the body.

Since they had neglected to put any stamps on the envelope, the letter had travelled sea mail via Alpha Centauri and took nearly three months to reach me. Nigel and the body of James Watt were presumably long back in the country. I went round to see Nigel immediately.

He let me in, and I explained why I was there. He looked a little sheepish (which is very appropriate for a country like New Zealand, when you think about it); and he admitted that yes, he did have the body. Would I like to see it? Well of course I said I would, and he took me into the kitchen, opened up the deep freeze and showed me the wee preserved body lying there. “I declared it as Educational Material on the customs form,” he told me. “So they didn’t charge me anything”.

He was ever so proud of himself, but as I was leaving, he made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anybody what he had done. I was puzzled, but eventually I realised that he didn’t want anyone to know about it because he wanted to give his friends a nice surprise when he invited them for dinner and served Watties.

I wondered what the entree would be. Campbells soup, perhaps?

But I digress. The eighteenth century turned imperceptibly into the nineteenth century and a lady called Mary Shelley published the novel which Brian Aldiss considers to be the first modern SF novel—Frankenstein, a book about a New York Jewish pawnbroker called Solomon Frankenstein whose hobby is making science fiction writers out of the bits and pieces that people pawn in his shop. A pair of false teeth, an artificial limb and a typewriter—Piers Anthony!

It was about this time that the craze for apple bobbing at room parties swept through fandom. It appears to be largely due to one particular fan who, because of his fondness for apples, was nicknamed Isaac after Isaac Newton. Isaac was often to be seen at room parties munching on a Granny Smith. Sometimes he ate apples too. He introduced the game of apple bobbing at a convention and it caught on immediately. Isaac was ecstatic. He was the centre of attention. Everyone was playing his game. He enjoyed the praise and the adulation, but deep inside he knew that it was only temporary, that the craze would soon die and that he would be forgotten again. Moodily crunching up a Cox’s Orange Pippin and spitting the seeds at the budgerigar, he began to wonder how to keep himself in the public eye a little longer.

And then he had the idea which assured him of immortality. Nude apple bobbing!

Up to this time, Isaac had always acted with perfect decorum. Give him a box of apples and he would decorum perfectly. But now it was time for a change. Nude apple bobbing would allow everyone to show off their talents. It couldn’t fail.

Pausing only to remove all his clothes and pick up a crate of Golden Delicious, he raced off to a room party. He flung wide the door and charged stark naked into the room.

“Hey look everybody,” yelled a voice from the crowd, “Isaac as’em off”.

The nineteenth century was principally noted for the charge of the light brigade which was fannish jargon for the large electricity bills they had to pay to keep their printing presses running. These bills were the main reason for the decline in fannish activity in the latter years of the century. Indeed there were so few fans around by the start of the twentieth century that absolutely no interest at all could be generated in the fan feud that started at the time. The feud was so dull as a consequence that it has become known as the Bore War.

The twentieth century is noted mainly for the invention of Hugo Gernsback. He was invented in America in 1926 and it is generally agreed that without him fandom as we know it today would not exist. This may or may not be a good thing, it is very difficult for me to tell since despite all my research into the subject, all the long hours spent delving into the archives of fannish history I have still been unable to make up my mind as to exactly what fandom is and what distinguishes fans from people. I have been completely unable to answer the question that has plagued my every waking moment for the last twelve months ever since the Windycon committee asked me to be the fan guest of honour here. Am I a fan? I have no idea.

So I suppose I will have to leave it up to you to decide. What do you think?

With thanks to The Encyclopaedia Britannica whose article I slightly abridged; to Bob Shaw, one of whose Eastercon speeches provided a joke which I stole; and to Brian Aldiss, one of whose jokes (heavily modified to suit local conditions) provided one of the central ideas.

The God Out of the Machine

First published in Phlogiston Fifteen, November 1987.

Arthur Koestler wrote a book called The Roots of Coincidence about Paul Kammerer’s search for meaning in random events. Two persons saying the same words together, two friends having the same birthday. In Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of Seriality), Kammerer lists a hundred strange coincidences. A concert goer has seat number nine and cloakroom ticket number nine. The next night he attends another concert, sits in seat number twenty one and has cloakroom ticket number twenty one. Two soldiers were admitted to a hospital in Silesia. Both were nineteen years old and both were called Franz Richter. Kammerer saw these sorts of things as being under the control of some sort of mysterious law. Koestler too looked for meaning in these improbabilities. Jung coined the word “synchronicity” to describe them; which is a lovely bit of jargon to confuse your friends with. I’ve never seen a satisfactory definition of the word. Jung has a long essay in the front of my copy of the “I Ching” which he devotes to a discussion of synchronicity, but it appears to be written with a pen dipped in muddy water; it makes no sense whatsoever.

You’ve experienced it, and so have I. The strange, silly coincidences that you would never put in a story because no one would believe it. Life may be like that, but art is not. In Friday by Robert Heinlein, the heroine is desperately in need of money. Guess what happens? She wins a lottery! I hated that in the book, but I’d accept it in life. Isn’t that silly?

When I decided to come to New Zealand to live, I went to see one of my friends and told her what I was going to do. “Oh good,” she said. “I’ll give you the address of my daughter. She lives in Wellington. I’ll give you the address of her ex-husband as well. They got divorced a while ago. He’s called Jack Briggs.”

She gave me the names and addresses and I noted them down and in the fullness of time I arrived in New Zealand. I was met at the airport.

“Hello, I’m your new boss. My name’s Jack Briggs.”

My flabber was (as they say) ghasted.

This year I returned to England and attended the World SF convention in Brighton. Rosemary and I were taking the air on the sea front when we bumped into an old school friend of Rosemary’s whom we hadn’t seen for years. We didn’t even know she was in England; and she certainly didn’t know we were—we’d lost touch with her ages ago. But there she was on the Brighton seafront.

This sort of thing seems to happen to New Zealanders much more often than it happens to anybody else. Many of my friends have reported it—there is nothing odd in these oddities. A quantum mechanically inclined friend of mine to whom it has happened far too often for comfort summed it up quite neatly. “Kiwis”, he said, “warp probability waves”.

As an explanation, that is probably far too science fictional to be true, but it is nonetheless very elegant.

(Having brought up the subject of quantum mechanics, let me just spend a sentence or two telling you my favourite quantum mechanical jokes. If you don’t like quantum mechanical jokes, just skip the next two paragraphs. I’ll join you there in a minute.

The tunnel effect was once described to me as: If you walk up and down outside Buckingham Palace for long enough, eventually you’ll find yourself inside.

My other favourite is: If photons had mass, we’d all be stoned to death.)

The literary term for this is “deus ex machina” which is Latin for: I’ve written myself into a corner; what the hell do I do now? It describes the arbitrary and the unprepared for, coincidences and downright unbelievability.

SF (particularly when written by the beginner or the amateur) can often be a prescription for the deus ex machina. There is a terrible temptation to whip out a miraculous machine to defeat the ravening alien hordes. One of the reasons that I dislike E. E. “Doc” Smith’s stories so much (apart from the appalling writing style) is his over-fondness for pulling “high-tech” stunts out of his hat like a stage magician with a rabbit. (“Now suppose we weld another busbar on here and connect it in parallel with the atomic defibrillator here…”.) Harry Harrison parodied this attitude beautifully in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.

In the days when John Campbell was God, it was generally assumed that it was impossible to write a science fictional detective story since there seemed to be nothing to stop the hero from whipping out his device (!) and, after examining it closely, arresting the villain. If you allow such things, the argument went, the resulting story would be no fun to read; and besides it wasn’t fair on the reader.

You can’t argue with the conclusion, but you can argue with the premise. Why allow such a thing in the first place?

Isaac Asimov is on record as saying that one of the reasons he wrote The Caves of Steel was in order to prove Campbell wrong; to show that it was possible to write a classical detective story within a science fictional framework without falling into the deus ex machina trap. (Which may of course have been Campbell’s plan all along. As an editor he was a genius, and he did this sort of thing all the time.) Asimov wanted to play fair, present all the clues, give the reader a chance. He wanted to play the same game that Agatha Christie played (despite the fact that the old dear cheated outrageously); and once he’d proved it was possible, the floodgates opened.

Randall Garrett wrote a whole series of stories about Lord Darcy, Chief Investigator for the Duke of Normandy. The stories are set in an alternate world where Richard the Lion Heart did not die in 1199, but lived to found a mighty empire. Magic and the laws of extra sensory perception have been codified, but the laws of physics remain unsuspected.

You might think that this is even worse. If the super scientist can ruin the story and trap the criminal simply by turning on his big bright green pleasure machine, how much more leeway does a magician have with access to demons and all manner of supernatural agencies?

I wouldn’t bother mentioning it at all except that Garret is perfectly well aware of these dangers, but despite it all he succeeds in telling a rigorous, classically crafted detective story within his chosen framework. Just how well he succeeds is demonstrated by the fact that a friend of mine in England who was a detective story freak in much the same way that you and I are science fiction freaks, liked Garrett’s stories very much indeed, and went out of his way to read them. Normally he went out of his way to avoid SF and similar mind-rotting junk. Unclean, unclean!

Just as an aside isn’t it strange that Fredric Brown and Jack Vance, both of whom have won awards and prestige in the detective story world have never (as far as I am aware) mixed that side of their writing lives in with their SF with which they have also won awards and prestige? I have no idea why. Can anyone solve this little conundrum?

The man who is always falling into the hole and dragging his deus ex machina after him is, of course, A. E. van Vogt. He is my very favourite bad writer. I’ve just counted, and I have forty van Vogt books on my shelves which is at least thirty-nine too many by any sane reckoning.

Damon Knight, in an essay called Cosmic Jerrybuilder (available in In Search of Wonder, Advent, 1968) comprehensively takes van Vogt apart, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never be able to take the man seriously again.

The essay was first published in 1945. It marked Damon Knight’s debut as a major critic of the field and also the start of van Vogt’s decline as a major writer.

To choose just one example, Knight proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the short story A Can of Paint is actually a giant deus ex machina from beginning to end and has no justification for existing at all! Now that has class.

The hero of the story has a problem; he must discover how to get the perfect paint off his body before it covers him completely and kills him. The problem is solved when the hero discovers that the “Liquid Light” in the paint is “absorbed” by a bank of “photoconverter cells” which he just happens to have on hand. Put any jargon phrases you like in between the inverted commas, and you won’t change the story one jot or tittle.

In his summing up, Knight says of van Vogt’s stories that:

…every hero packs a .32 calibre improbability in his hip pocket.

and I really cannot argue with that conclusion. However I still continue to read van Vogt, despite the fact that his books make no sense whatsoever, because I admire the sheer unmitigated gall of the man. No one else would even begin to attempt anything like it. He is a genuinely inspired madman. Who else would dare have a character cry “Hey, I’ve figured out the true nature of the Universe!”? Van Vogt did it in Rogue Ship and went on to demonstrate the truth of the statement. In a fair contest, no genuine universe has a chance against van Vogt.

It is interesting to consider exactly why outrageous coincidence and the like should be barred from fiction. Just why does it irritate? After all, fiction is supposed to hold up a mirror to life, and we are supposed to see ourselves reflected in the glass, however darkly. Since such things are an unavoidable part of life (particularly in New Zealand!) why can we not admit them to the realm of fiction?

I suspect the reason has a lot to do with the way the thing is presented. How often have you seen or heard something which knocked you out? It might have been a drama or a hilarious joke, a picture or a poem that moved you deeply. You explain it to your friends in the pub, you describe the picture, you tell them the joke, and you get (at best) only a polite smile. No guffaws of laughter, no tears where you were expecting them. Your explanation tails off and you start to feel very silly. You end up by saying lamely, “I suppose you had to be there to appreciate it”. Maybe you blush a little and offer to buy another round to take people’s mind off your faux pas.

That has happened to every one of us. It is very hard to share a second hand experience. No one can really appreciate it, and the more outrageous it is the less appreciation there can be. You really do have to be there. And fiction, no matter how well written, is a second hand experience, and must ipso facto follow the rules in the same way that you must when trying to tell a joke to your friends. It is in the same position you are, and is likely to produce the same effect if it isn’t careful.

So that, in the end, is why the deus ex machina doesn’t work. I suggest that every time you spot one you write to the author and ask him to buy you a drink. After all, you had to do it in the pub, didn’t you?

The Rotting of the Mind

First published in Phlogiston Sixteen, February 1988.

The film Creepshow opens with a child reading a horror comic and his father getting very annoyed with him for wasting time with such unutterable trash. After a bit of yelling and screaming, Dad confiscates the comic and throws it away.

Most of us can probably point to similar scenes in our own lives when parents or teachers have told us off for reading comic books or listening to pop music or any of a million things that (in their opinion) keep us from doing the sensible things that we should be doing—whatever they may be. It seems to be the generally accepted wisdom that crap is bad for children; it pollutes their bodily fluids; it prevents them from maturing into sober, sensible people. It is harmful to the intellect and the psyche. Exactly how it is so harmful is usually left very vague.

Furthermore, the object of derision itself tends to change from generation to generation. My parents were castigated for reading the pulp magazines. I used to get told off for reading Superman comics and listening to Rock and Roll on Radio Luxemburg. Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Adam Faith, Don Lang and his Frantic Five, Lord Rockingham’s Eleven with Cherry Wainer (and her poodle) on piano—now there are names to conjure with. The first record I ever bought for myself was I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It was a 78. Now go and work out how old I am. Today similar scorn seems to be reserved for television instead. I never got that. I was part of the first generation of television children. I was only three years old when we got our first ever TV, and my parents were even more fascinated by it than I was. Rubbish on TV was obviously a different class of rubbish, somehow. Not to be compared with ridiculous, mind-rotting, time-wasting things like Superman comics. I wonder what the b’te noire of the next generation will be?

Interestingly, many years later, my mother admitted that after I’d gone to bed, she and her father often used to read my Superman comics themselves. How’s that for a double standard!

The judgement of what does and does not fall into the category of rubbish is so arbitrary that it is impossible to deduce any rules at all. I used to subscribe to three comics as a child (with full parental approval, I may add). They were Adventure, Rover and Wizard. The reason my parents approved of them was because they did not have any comic strips in them at all. They were solid prose from cover to cover. They had proper stories in them. I suppose comic was a bad name—they were really fiction magazines. They don’t exist any more—at least not in that format.

I still remember many of the stories. Some of them were even SF. There was one I recall which concerned an explorer in a remote part of Africa. There he came across a native tribe who mined uranium ore and made crude atomic bombs by chucking lumps of it into tubes so that it reached critical mass and exploded. Today I could fly several very large ICBMs through the holes in that idea—but at the time it was wonderful. It was my very first exposure to the idea of critical mass. So perhaps it was worth while. The story contained some good harrowing descriptions of radiation seared landscapes. Generations of genetic mutation allowed the natives to withstand the radiation. All very heavy stuff for a child.

Sometimes the comics were singularly gruesome. The hero of one particular story had at various times in his life broken every bone in his body. Therefore he was so used to it that it didn’t bother him very much any more. In one particular episode the baddies caught him and broke both his legs by tying them to a fallen tree and belting them with crowbars. I remember vivid descriptions of cracking bones—I’m surprised it didn’t give me nightmares. Having performed the dastardly deed, they bugger off and leave him there to die. However our hero is made of sterner stuff than that. He splints his legs by dunking them in a hot mud pool and letting the mud dry and then totters off in search of revenge. Presumably he succeeded—I don’t remember.

There was an interminable series called I Shot Hitler concerning an English Assassin (pun intended on my part but not theirs since Moorcock hadn’t been invented yet) in wartime Germany attempting to shoot Hitler. He was parachuted into Germany shortly after war was declared in 1939 and spent the next six years failing to do the job on Adolf. Every episode ended with him just escaping from the clutches of the Gestapo as they closed in and foiled his latest attempt. Since I don’t think they ever caught him, I guess they must have been about as inept as he was. In the last episode, as the Russian tanks rumbled into Berlin and when it was far too late to make any difference at all, our hero sneaked into the bunker and shot Hitler just seconds before he committed suicide. Of course the rest of the world thought that the suicide attempt succeeded, but us readers of the comic knew differently. What an odd moral attitude to induce in a small child—the thought that assassination could be as honourable as the story made it seem to be (the hero, by the way, never questioned his mission).

There were far too many football stories. I seldom read them (Roy of the Rovers is one I recall). They were all the same and all ended up with a kick by kick description of a seemingly endless game where the eponymous hero invariably scored the winning goal. They were so formulaic that they could have been (and probably were) written with a rubber stamp.

As must be perfectly obvious to you by now, these comics were the English children’s equivalent of the American pulp magazines. The stories were crude and hastily written. They were the prose version (if you like) of the comic strip. Nonetheless, because they were prose rather than comic, they received parental approval. My parents seemed to have some vague, never properly articulated idea that reading prose would sharpen and improve my reading skills whereas reading comics would blunt and destroy those same skills.

However, there was prose and there was prose. At the age of about twelve I discovered, rather to my surprise, that not all prose was equally acceptable on all occasions.

In an English exam at school, I was asked to describe the best book I had ever read. I chose a science fiction novel I had recently devoured which had impressed the pants off me—The Man Who Owned the World by Charles Eric Maine. (Don’t bother searching it out. Only a twelve year old could thrill to it.) I waxed eloquent for several pages about this book and went home and proudly told my parents what I had done. They were horrified, and I was in deep shit. I had to promise them that if I was ever asked such a question again I would not choose such rubbish. What on earth would the teacher think?

Actually, looking back, I strongly suspect that the teacher was so pleased to find someone who had read something outside the prescribed course texts that any old rubbish would have done. English teachers are a lot smarter than my parents gave them credit for. I’d be willing to bet that virtually every other kid in the class chose one of the books we’d read in class as the “best book ever read” and lied through their teeth as they eulogised it. After twenty or so of those stultifying essays, to come across an essay by a child who had read something of his own free will and actually enjoyed what he had read would have been like a breath of fresh air.

My English teacher was a great guy. He spent his evenings playing clarinet with a jazz band and I would not be in the least surprised to find that he also read science fiction. He used to run a sixth form General Studies course on the history of science, which is a very odd subject for an English teacher to teach. Maybe his interest in it was stimulated by SF? I never thought to ask him—I wish I had. Incidentally, he is also the only person in the known world to have sent in a contribution to the Life’s Like That column of the Reader’s Digest and had it published. Inspired by his success, I’ve sent a few, but they just seem to fall off the edge of the universe and are never seen again.

The incident of the exam question was the first time I had consciously realised that there was a difference between the writings I was devouring so avidly at home and the writings I was being forced fed at school. Perhaps it was the triggering mechanism for what Hemingway used to call the “shit detector”. Certainly it was not very long after that I cancelled my subscriptions to the comics. On a conscious level I rationalised it by saying that I was growing out of the sorts of things I was reading in the comics. They were just for kids. In retrospect, however, I think that may have not been the real reason. I did have to move on to other things. I had learned all that the comics had to teach me. Perhaps it was just kids stuff on one level, but on another level entirely I think there was a lot more going on than I ever realised at the time.

Let me explain by digressing again, for a moment.

A common denominator in the early lives of many well respected SF writers of today is that they were all constantly exposed to the mind-rotting junk of the pulp magazines. In the introductions to their books, in interviews, in autobiographical texts of one sort or another, writers such as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw and countless others wax nostalgic about beautiful Martian princesses and deadly multicoloured rays, tentacled aliens abducting Earth’s fairest daughters, and space combats galore.

Considering that people such as these are now some of the most respected writers in the field (and in some cases out of it—Asimov has written very widely in other fields) it seems to give the lie to the accepted wisdom that we have been discussing so far. Indeed I would suggest that exposure to such things, far from being harmful is actually necessary for the true development of science fictional imagination and creativity. The images (“ideas” if you like) generated by them seem to unlock a door in the mind which leads into an area that would remain unexplored otherwise. The people we refer to as “mundane” have never unlocked this particular door and remain ignorant of the territory behind it.

Eventually, in the course of exploring the territory, we find another door at the other end of the land. This one isn’t locked. We can open it whenever we want to, provided that we reach it. It leads into less junky areas and the doorkeeper hands us our portable shit detector as we pass through.

We have to go through this second door to reach what you might call literary (or artistic) maturity. My parents were right to think that much of the stuff I wanted to read was junk. What they failed to appreciate was that it was only a step along the way.

I’m not just saying that the junkyard is the only route to that second door. I haven’t seen the map, there may be many ways of getting there. Indeed, since Marshall McLuhan has assured us that the map is not the territory, we can legitimately assume the corollary that the territory is not the map which implies that there must be many other trails leading to the same place. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have art and poetry, we’d only have pictures and verse. But I can only tell you about the journey that I made and that so many of the writers that I respect also seem to have made. It is a well trodden path in the SF world. I cancelled my comic subscriptions when I went through that second door. They had served their purpose and they were no longer necessary.

Because of this, I find it hard to condemn an interest in today’s equivalent of the mind-rotting rubbish of my youth. Star Trek and Star Wars, the puppets of Gerry Anderson, Transformers™ and Masters of the Universe™, MarvelŽ Comics and fantasy role playing. It seems to me that these sorts of things are very much a part of the territory behind the first door and therefore a liking for them is simply a valid exploration of that territory.

The only thing that worries me is that too many people seem to consider that the territory is closed; a dead end, complete unto itself. They never go exploring; they never find the second door. In extreme cases they deny that it even exists.

I would never do what my parents did and forbid these pulp equivalents. That is censorship. But I would like to see the people who are locked into this sort of thing take their blinkers off and look around a bit.

In the poem pity this busy monster, manunkind e. e. cummings said;

listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door;

let’s go

Come exploring. There is a tremendous amount to see and do. You can always go home again afterwards, if you want to.

It Isn’t Only Ramans Who Do It In Threes

First published in Phlogiston Seventeen, May 1988.

The fantasy writer Jennifer Roberson has published five books of what will eventually become a seven book series. So far each book has been thicker than the one before. At the current rate of progress, book number seven will be about two feet wide, contain five million pages and will require the purchaser to take a Charles Atlas muscle building course before reading it.

I have not read the books, and I do not intend to, largely because of Michael Moorcock. In 1973 he published the second volume of the Count Brass trilogy (which itself carried on directly from the four books of the Runestaff series—a seven book series is not new, Ms Roberson). I quite enjoyed the Runestaff/Count Brass books (except that I will never forgive Moorcock for killing off the Warrior in Jet and Gold); and I reached the end of the book panting with impatience to find out what happened next. I had to wait two years. The final book in the series was not published until 1975. I never really recovered from the nervous tension induced by that wait and I have cordially disliked multivolume novels and never ending series ever since.

But it wasn’t really Moorcock’s fault, I suppose. Personally, I blame Jane Austen.

The novel as a literary medium really came into its own in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reading was a very popular way of passing the time (I can only assume that the TV programmes were even more boring than they are now) and because people demanded a “good read” novels tended to be very long and were published in multiple volumes. The so-called three-decker dates from this era, and it is one reason why all those old writers that you studied in school seemed to be so long winded. I recently saw an early edition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in a local antiquarian bookshop. It was in three very substantial books.

Interestingly, the decline in popularity of these multivolume novels exactly parallels the growth of the rail networks and the consequent increase in travel. For the first time the affluent middle classes (who actually bought most of the books) had a relatively cheap and comfortable method of travelling between the major centres both for business and for pleasure. Not unnaturally, they required some means of amusing themselves between stations. A book was a natural choice, but who wanted to risk a double hernia by lugging a three-decker novel about? The luggage was heavy enough without that. By the end of the nineteenth century the multivolume novel was dead. A whole network of railway bookstores catered to the traveller, selling cheap one-volume editions. The reading habits of a nation changed. The books got shorter.

At the same time, there was a huge growth in literacy. Compulsory education in the three Rs meant that even the “lower classes” were now demanding things to read (even if it was only the sports pages) and the publishing industry was not slow to tap this new market. The so called “dime novel” or “penny dreadful” dates from this era and it was aimed directly at this less sophisticated market. To begin with the books were mostly westerns: Edward L. Wheeler wrote Deadwood Dick on Deck or Calamity Jane, The Heroine of Whoop Up in 1884. Ned Buntline (whose real name was Edward Zane Carroll) wrote Magdalena, the Beautiful Mexican Maid (1847), The Black Avenger (1847), Stella Delorne or The Commanche’s Dream (1860) and more than 400 more. He was frighteningly prolific. He claimed once to have written a 600 page novel in 62 hours, and the only word processor that he had was a pen! All you technophiles take note. He founded one of the first pulp magazines (Ned Buntline’s Own) to publish his huge output. The trend continued unchecked into the twentieth century and the genres proliferated. We got detective series (Nick Carter and Sexton Blake); science fiction/fantasy series (Doc Savage, The Shadow, Tarzan); super criminals (Fu Manchu, Sumeru, The Saint)—the list is endless, and the one thing these series all had in common was that they never ended. At least not until the author died (and sometimes not even then—there were more Bulldog Drummond stories published after Sapper died than he ever published himself), or the books became unpopular and stopped selling.

I think it is important here that we distinguish clearly between the series and the multivolume novel. The superficial shelf-browser (and sometimes the publisher) does not always recognise the difference. But it does exist.

The multivolume novel is a continuous narrative which is so large that it has to be published as several books (the first American hardback of Shogun by James Clavell was published in two volumes). The series is a collection of novels each complete in itself (more or less) but linked together by virtue of having characters and/or locales in common. The dividing line is often blurred, but by and large it is possible to distinguish between the two types. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a typical case. Despite the fact that it is almost invariably published in three volumes each of which has its own well known title, it is not a series of books. It is a continuous narrative which, for reasons of size, is usually published as three separate volumes. There is no natural break point at the end of the first two books; they simply stop. Furthermore the stopping places have been artfully chosen to maximise the reader’s frustration levels. Anyone who can read their way to the cliffhanger at the end of The Two Towers and then not read The Return of the King is simply not human. In complete contrast, something like Thieves' World or Heroes in Hell is just an ongoing series. You can stop (or start) reading anywhere.

Lord of the Rings is a direct literary descendant of the nineteenth century three-decker (though containing more wordage than some). Thieves' World and similar series are descended straight from the dime novels.

The series has never died. From its inception in the dime novels of the nineteenth century it has always been popular, and it remains so today. Apart from occasional sports such as Lord of the Rings, the multivolume novel seemed to die with the three-decker.

Even reading itself became less popular with the rise of other entertainment media. Radio, the movies and lately television have all made inroads on the habit. Fewer people read for pleasure now and, if reports are to be believed, fewer people are even able to read. Consider, for example, what you see every day on the haunted fish tank in the corner of the room.

Once it was a cinematic and televisual cliche to show the passing of time by zooming in on newspaper headlines. When a ransom note or a love letter was received the recipient held it in full view of the camera so we could all read it together.

It still happens—though nowadays the words are more likely to appear on a computer screen or similar high-tech trendy device. But a new thing has been added. Nowadays the characters invariably read the words out loud (either that or a voice-over reads them to us) so that all the illiterates in the audience won’t feel left out.

I always find these scenes disturbing—partly because I am irritated at having something read to me when I can read it perfectly well myself; but mostly because the fact that it happens at all is another finger pointing at the ever increasing trend towards functional illiteracy in modern society. A few years ago everyone watching a film or TV program was perfectly happy to read whatever clues appeared on the screen. Nowadays the director cannot afford to make that assumption if he wants to keep his audience.

Furthermore, what about the credits at the end of the show? They flash past so quickly (particularly on American programmes) that you often don’t have time to read them. Contracts require that the credits have to be there—but since a large part of the audience can’t read them anyway, why bother slowing them down to normal reading speed? Get them out of the way fast.

And yet, paradoxically, the bookshops are stuffed with more fat books than ever before. The last two decades or so have seen a partial return to the fashions of the last century. The multivolume novel has become very popular again. Virtually everybody seems to be writing trilogies or greater, and they are often continuous narratives rather than simple series. Those few of us who do read are, if anything, over supplied with material. Why? What is happening; and why is it happening now?

(At this point I am tempted to stop and tell you to wait for the next issue of Phlogiston to find the answer. After all—I would only be following the fashion!)

Let’s start by talking about television again.

Television is a huge absorber of material. It used to be that a musichall artist could travel the length and breadth of the country for fifty years playing in local theatres and never once changing his material. It was always new to the audience even if it was old to the performer. That is no longer true. Play it once on the box, and it’s over for ever. Everyone has seen it. Next time you must do something fresh.

Also, by its very nature, not only does television require new material all the time, it requires lots of it, in a tearing hurry. After all, there are some places in the world where many TV channels broadcast 24 hours a day. There are striking parallels here with the operation of a pulp magazine. It has to be produced regularly, to a deadline, and it has to have its quota of material ready by that deadline. Hack writers love television and it is no surprise that many television programmes are the visual equivalent of the pulp magazine and the dime novel—cheap, quick and nasty. The soap opera, the horse opera, the cop opera—all the genres that we know from the pulps are there and so it is no real surprise to see the series as well. Coronation Street is as open ended as E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest series and for very similar reasons. In one sense, they are both exactly the same phenomenon.

Week after week on our screens we see the same characters going through the motions of their lives. There are few if any plot resolutions in any one episode of any one soap. There is an illusion of leisure, of the passing of time, much as in real life. If an engagement is announced, we will not see the wedding until many weeks have passed, both in screen time and in real time. We are psychologically conditioned into accepting such ongoing dramas for our entertainment and we easily carry long story lines and complex plot threads in our minds. We accept that the story does not necessarily stop when the credits roll. If Derek turns up to pester Mavis again, we remember what happened six months ago and we just pray that she has more sense than to get involved again. (Yes, I watch Coronation Street. I’m not ashamed.)

In an extreme case like Coronation Street, the program has been going on for longer than some of you have been alive. If art does hold up a mirror to life as is popularly supposed, then the sheer timescale of a never ending soap opera, and its relatively lifelike dynamics suggest that it at least holds up a pair of mirrored sunglasses. You see the reflection clearly until you get quite close. And then you see right through it of course.

Notice the big difference between an episode of a typical soap opera and an episode of something like The Avengers which is a complete story in itself, even though the series goes on (and on, and on…).

The mini-series is a compromise between these two extremes of form. It is not complete in an hour, it is complete in three. Events are compressed (you don’t wait physical weeks for the wedding) but the story line is nonetheless leisurely (it goes on a long time). The psychological conditioning I spoke of earlier allows us to accept such longer and longer narratives. The single-episode-complete-in-itself grows into the mini-series. Again, art imitating life if you like. Stories really are long—mine started thirty-eight years ago and it is still going on.

The fashion for such growth and the way of thinking about the stories that it implies reflects back into all the other media as well. In the cinema we have seen longer and longer films. There was a time when you went to the pictures and you saw the second feature (the ‘B’ movie), had a break and then saw the main feature. Now the main feature is often the only feature, but you still spend as long in the cinema. The ‘B’ movie is dead and the main feature is twice as long.

In literary terms, we have seen the revival of the long novel of the nineteenth century. The three-decker has returned as a trilogy. The publishers are only following the trend that television started. (It isn’t just an SF phenomenon—all the literary genres are going the same way.) The mini-series and the three-decker are exact equivalents.

Whither now?

There is a danger, of course, that as the stories grow longer, they simply grow flabbier. Look at Stephen Donaldson. A trilogy (or whatever) should not be used simply as an excuse for over writing. Big stories are not simply small stories with more words. The freedom of the form means that now you can tell the really big stories. Unfortunately very few writers have the skill for it.

There is a fashion for three-deckers again. I for one am growing very tired of it. I have neither the time nor the patience to wade through so many of them. The Jennifer Roberson books that I mentioned at the start of this article may be very good—I will never know. They are simply too big for me to want to find out.

Fashions change and die. At the moment everybody is writing big books. Because everybody is doing it, I suspect that before long nobody will be doing it. The market is saturated and the rot will set in. I will be sorry to see it die completely—I enjoy some of the big books—but I will be very glad to see it slim down a bit.

Cyberpunk…punk…unk…nk…k…

First published in Phlogiston Eighteen, August 1988.

If I knew what cyberpunk was, this article would be about it. Since I don’t know, and since close examination of the texts that are generally agreed to be it has failed to reveal the secret, the article is instead about what cyberpunk would be if cyberpunk was what I said it was.

So what do I say it is?

Cyber is easy of course. It derives from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Weiner in 1947. He defined it as the science of control and communication in animals and machines. Today, according to the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, cybernetics is defined as:

…the science of effective organisation.

Most people think it has something to do with computers and indeed it does, but only peripherally. One can talk of computer cybernetics as one branch of the science. But it is a small and not very important part. Interestingly, it is closely related to General Systems Theory, which is usually abbreviated to GST. New Zealand Government please note!

Now, what about punk? What on earth is that? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as:

prostitute (archaic);

rotten wood; fungus growing on wood used as

tinder; worthless stuff; rubbish; tosh.

Obviously therefore, cyberpunk is literature about the effective organisation of worthless archaic prostitutes who have fungus growing on the rotten wood beneath their beds. I suspect that the popular appeal of the books derives from the fact that the fungus may be used as tinder and is therefore highly inflammable and liable to burst into flame if too much friction is applied. The sources of such friction and the gory descriptions of burning beds that it engenders are, as far as I am concerned, the highlights of most cyberpunk novels.

Now that I have defined cyberpunk to everybody’s satisfaction, let’s look at it a little more seriously.

Whenever you start to talk about a literary movement of any kind, the argument nearly always falls between the Scylla and Charybdis of style and content. Both are important and they overlap to such an extent that critics often spend so much time arguing about what they mean when they say style (or content) that the piece of writing whose content (or style) they are supposed to be discussing is totally forgotten. So before we start let’s define content as being what a piece of writing is about (a computer) and style as being the form of words the writer has chosen to describe that content. (“Yes, now there is a God”—Answer by Fredric Brown.)

To me the most immediately obvious thing about the style of cyberpunk books is how terribly old fashioned it all seems. Generally cyberpunk appears to have a cynical, amoral attitude. Protagonists are often either wheeler-dealers, or else they have some sort of manipulative hold over the wheeler-dealers or (at the bottom of the heap), they wish they had such a hold. This very cynical, sometimes wise-cracking style is straight out of the “hard-boiled” era of detective fiction. It was the sort of thing that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered in Black Mask magazine in the 1930s. It enjoyed a brief revival in the 1960s when John le Carre and Len Deighton applied the same formula to the spy novel and dragged it kicking and screaming into literary maturity out of the ghetto where Ian Fleming had left it. The San Francisco Chronicle called Len Deighton “The Raymond Chandler of the cloak-and-dagger set”. With equal justification, I think I could call William Gibson the Raymond Chandler of the spaceship-and-rayguns set.

The other common stylistic denominator is a heavy reliance on so-called brand name realism-sticking in identifiable names and products that actually exist in the real world (or, in the special case of SF, that sound as if they ought to exist in the real world). The whole point of this, of course, is to make the world view that the writer is presenting to you feel more lived-in, more natural and real. It all helps in the willing suspension of disbelief. But again, this stylistic trait is not new. Ian Fleming spent pages discussing genuine golf clubs, cocktails, motor cars, cigarettes and clothes. Michael Moorcock parodied the whole thing delightfully in his Jerry Cornelius stories, took it completely over the top, and effectively killed it forever as a valid writing technique. Whole pages were devoted to minute descriptions of Miss Brunner’s designer clothes and Jerry’s designer music, not to mention Bishop Beesley’s sweets and the never-to-be-forgotten chocolate coated nun.

Even the pop charts of the time were not immune to the syndrome. Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To My Lovely is probably the archetype (“…your clothes are all made by Balmain…”), but he was not alone in what he did.

On the basis of this analysis, the only conclusion you can come to is that cyberpunk is so old fashioned that it creaks when you turn the pages. If that was all there was to say, it would be easy to dismiss cyberpunk as just another fad like the yo-yo and the hula hoop (and clackers-do any of you remember clackers?). Fortunately, there is a lot more. The content of many cyberpunk books is generally very interesting indeed.

William Gibson, a tall thin man with a wit that is dryer than a martini, has admitted that before he wrote Neuromancer he didn’t know very much about computers. Sometimes that shows in the text. There is a section about modems that is straight out of the steam age and which doesn’t belong in a futuristic setting at all. However such small errors of detail are not important in the wider context. Out of ignorance, Gibson has produced what is probably the cleverest metaphor for the electronic age since Marshall McLuhan coined the concept of global village. He invented cyberspace.

Never mind that the word is nonsense, that it doesn’t mean what ignorant Humpty Dumpty critics have chosen to make it mean, Gibson invented it, and it is powerful.

Essentially, cyberspace is a visual picture of information (in the abstract) and at the same time an indicator of both the effect of properly organised information on society and a comment on the nature of information processing itself. That is a hell of a lot to pack into one small concept. That he succeeds is in itself a comment on his writing skill.

Properly organised, information is probably the most valuable thing that our society produces. Without information and access to it, we are nothing at all. If I didn’t have a dictionary and various other reference books lurking on my shelves, I would have been completely unable to make the joke that opened this article. But because I could easily find the definitions of cybernetics and punk, it took little effort. The work had all been done for me. All I had to do was find it and put it together in the right way.

That is just a small and fairly trivial illustration of the problem. However if you expand it into the real world and start asking questions like “What steps can I take to keep food fresh without using chemicals that poison the people who eat it and without violating legal statutes in the countries I intend to sell my food in” you can start to appreciate the scope of the problem. The answer to this question is what keeps New Zealand solvent since it is the fundamental problem facing all the producer boards. Their success in answering it (and in keeping their answers up to date) is measurable by how well they perform. Could you answer the question? Would you know where to look to try and find the answers?

In a quotation that I can never locate when I need it, Dr. Johnson said something on the order of: “There are two kinds of information, the information that you know, and the information that you know how to find”. The corollary is that if you don’t know it, and don’t know how to find it, it might as well not exist, because it is useless to you.

The mechanisms of information retrieval are of fundamental importance. Questions about the nature of information and the methods of keeping track of it and retrieving specific items out of the mass of information that surrounds us are the concern of that curious discipline called information science.

Many people seem to consider that information science is synonymous with computer science (the confusion about cybernetics raises its parallel head again). It isn’t, of course. It grew out of librarianship, out of the study of the never ending tasks of cataloguing, indexing, storing and retrieving which are the life blood of the librarian.

By the middle of this century it was becoming obvious that the traditional librarian was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. It was simply impossible to handle the vast amounts of information that the world was generating. The old tools couldn’t cope any longer. There are 23 volumes in my 1966 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The subjects range from A to Zygote; and all the information contained in all those thousands of closely printed pages bears the same relationship to the totality of man’s knowledge as a spoonful of water does to the Pacific Ocean.

That’s where the computer comes in. The disciplines of information science and the power of the computer combine to form the most powerful tool we have for organising the information we possess, for interrogating that collection of information and for retrieving the answers to our questions.

If I had to answer the question I posed a few paragraphs ago about preserving food and not violating legal statutes in different countries, I would go to one of the several organisations who have computerised data collections, and I would interrogate the Chemical Abstracts database to find out about chemical food preservatives, and one (or more) of the legal databases (perhaps Lexis) to find out about the legal situation. I would have my answers in minutes.

There are other sorts of information collections of course. Your tax records, your medical history, your criminal record, your car registration, your credit rating, your bank account. What guarantee do you have that I can’t get at that information with my home computer?

As things stand, you don’t have much of a guarantee at all. Recent publicity about so-called hackers accessing supposedly secure and private information collections, and films such as War Games have shown that information cannot be regarded as sacrosanct.

Computers talk to each other. Information passes up and down and round about. Information, the right to access it and how to keep secret the bits that should not be accessed without limiting access to the bits that should be freely available are deeply important questions, and they are questions that are currently very fashionable.

Information is the life-blood of the twentieth century and computers are the veins through which it travels. If the blood ever ceases to flow, if we are denied access to the information we need, then by Dr. Johnson’s definition it is useless and might as well not exist. Whether it is looking up a word in a dictionary so that we spell it correctly, or whether it is looking up a legal precedent to avoid a miscarriage of justice, or whether it is finding out what work has been done on hepatitis so that we can save the lives of our children, we must have information, both as individuals and as a society (which is only the totality of individuals after all). But we must also have safeguards. The secret service dictum of the need to know applies here. Trespassers will be XXXXXXXed (word deleted in the interests of public morality-editor). Some information is more secret than others.

That is why I think William Gibson’s novels are so important. The cyberspace picture he paints of the interconnectedness of information and the guards and traps that enclose it, all have their parallels in the real world. He has elucidated a fundamental problem, one which affects us all, and he has encapsulated it in a clever and very powerful image. We can see it. Before, we knew it existed but we had no picture of it as a whole. Now we do. Gibson is a synthesiser, and he has brought together all the disparate bits that I have alluded to above into one cyberspatial whole.

The rest is window dressing; the art of the novelist. It is simply ordinary technical proficiency. The heart of the content of whatever cyberpunk may be is the invention of the way of looking at the world that the cyberspace metaphor provides. Apart from that, it is very ordinary and imitative.

But the prostitutes and their fungi are fascinating…

Boldly Going

First published in Phlogiston Nineteen, February 1989.

The last Tommy Steele fan club closed its doors years ago and nobody makes pilgrimages to the Two I’s coffee bar any more.

The beatniks are gone and Jack Kerouac is a member of the literary establishment. His books are taught in English classes. He’d have hated it.

The great hates and the great loves of today will one day seem just as quaint, just as silly. They are only fashions and fads. Fashions die, fads die out.

So why is Star Trek still with us after nearly a quarter of a century? It seems to break all the rules and it won’t go away.

As far as I can tell there are two sorts of enthusiasms. For want of any better words, I call them wide and narrow. A wide enthusiasm embraces a whole range of things (science fiction). Conversely, a narrow enthusiasm is concerned only with one thing (Star Trek). Now don’t get picky and tell me that science fiction is just one thing—it isn’t; at least not in the sense in which I am using the term here.

The wide enthusiasms just seem to go on and on. Sometimes they stagnate; often they grow; but they are always with us. The narrow ones either disappear entirely (like Tommy Steele) or get absorbed into the wider ones (like Jack Kerouac).

The ephemera, the ones which vanish, tend to be the more moronic ones. The ones which last and which become part of the establishment usually show at least a glimmering of intelligence. Pop stars and soap operas are perfect examples of this. Who now remembers Don Lang and his Frantic Five or The Grove Family? (Which one was the pop group and which one the soap opera?). I remember them, and I wish I didn’t. But the Beatles and Coronation Street have transcended the dictates of mere fashion and have become the standards against which other aspirants are judged. In a sense, they are the field, and they have jumped the enthusiasm gap and transformed narrow into wide. Not an easy trick.

Again, Star Trek breaks all the rules. It is a narrow interest in the sense that it is only one thing, one programme. It is undeniably intelligent; and yet it continues to go its own way and stubbornly refuses to become absorbed into a wider field of interest. Why?

Television and film are the new boys on the block. Film is only about as old as the century, and television is less than half that age. The other arts have histories going back for (in some cases) thousands of years.

When the newer media try to compete with the old established ones on their own ground they often come off second best. They are bucking too large a weight of tradition. The film versions of Romeo and Juliet lack the frisson of a theatrical performance. In the fifties a new generation of playwrights gave the world a new phrase to play with. The angry young man was the paradigm and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. But the film version of Look Back in Anger, although it made Richard Burton a star, simply does not work. It is loud instead of angry and the difference destroys it. Therefore while the play remains one of the landmarks of twentieth century literature, the film is largely forgotten.

Film and television are at their strongest when they display their own unique attributes instead of trying to mimic others. The surrealists knew what they were doing when they made Le Chien Andalou. It could not have been done at all in any other medium. (Just as an aside, I recently learned how they made the donkeys in the film appear to be in such an advanced state of decomposition—they covered them with paste so that the flesh looked all smeary. Isn’t that fascinating?)

On a less cerebral level, films such as Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933 work so brilliantly because they portray stage acts which simply could not take place in a theatre. The sheer extravagance of Busby Berkely’s sets make it physically impossible; and yet the film still insists that what we are seeing is a stage show. The contrast is superbly handled and is a perfect example of film being used in its own terms instead of in the terms of other artistic media.

But again, Star Trek breaks the rules. It is solidly rooted in the old SF traditions. (In many ways it resembles nothing so much as a pulp magazine serial, albeit a rather superior one.) It is not really televisual, just visual, and towards the end of its life showed distressing tendencies towards the banal and bathetic as Captain Kirk fell in love (again) and saved the universe for God and The American Way Of Life (boring). Despite this, it refuses to die. Why?

The so-called media fans pay homage to a wide variety of programmes. The vast majority of these exhibit all the traits that I identified in the above paragraphs and they will not last. Things such as Robin Hood with its half-digested mysticism nicked wholesale from Frazer’s Golden Bough and its unimaginative and derivative plots. Abortions such as Space 1999 in which Gerry Anderson, having previously exhibited real technical genius in making puppets behave like people, succeeds in making people behave like puppets and falls flat on his wooden face.

This is not to denigrate media fans. I fully approve of many of their enthusiasms (though I often wish they could discuss them rationally instead of reacting with such hysterical unthinking passion to any hint of criticism). Television programmes such as The Prisoner have long passed beyond mere media fandom into a wider artistic acceptance. Again, virtually the only exception seems to be Star Trek, with a weird half-life all of its own.

In his poem The Second Coming, Yeats asked:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I believe that Star Trek is one of these rough beasts and it was born in the Bethlehem of the Desilu studios at exactly the right time. The reason for its longevity is simply that its hour had come at last, and it suited the mood of the times. It all goes back to 1957, the International Geophysical Year…

In that year, Sputnik 1 went into orbit and America went into shock. The Russians did it first! How could that be? The American space programme was under the direction of the Navy at the time, and in the searchlight glare of television, the American nation watched the rockets of Project Vanguard blow up on the launching pad. How come the Russians could do it when Americans could not? America felt humiliated and the space race was on.

Until this national disaster, America had proceeded complacently, certain that this was the Golden Age and America was the Golden Place, Eden come again. The American way was a universal rule and anybody who disagreed was a commie pinko. America, love it or leave it.

Because it was so secure and complacent, America was insular. As a nation, it didn’t really take anything outside of itself terribly seriously. It played with the idea of launching a satellite in the International Geophysical Year and was sure that it could do it (this was America after all), but there wasn’t any real hurry.

The national heroes were baseball stars not scientists. Intellectual achievement was sneered at, considered wimpish. Real men didn’t study, they drove cars and played football and went to drive-in movies and made out in the back seat during the second feature. (I’m sorry if this sounds sexist, but the times were sexist.) People who studied stayed home on Saturday night had spots and didn’t get the girls.

But in the years following 1957, America was forced to abandon this view. It was a time of national trauma. It quickly became obvious that any society which denigrated brain power didn’t stand a chance in the latter half of the twentieth century. As they looked for an excuse (any excuse) to explain their failure to keep up with the Russians, the spotlight fell on the German rocket scientists liberated from Peenemunde at the end of the Second World War. Their Germans, said America, are cleverer than our Germans. That’s why the Russians did so well. It wasn’t true (if anything, America got the cream of the Peenemunde scientists) but it would do to be going on with.

Almost overnight, America changed. Brains, specifically scientific brains, were in. America stopped looking inwards and started looking outwards. Specifically, it started looking towards space and it stopped being a dilettante. This was serious.

It was in this atmosphere of a national rethinking and redefinition of what was important that the idea of Star Trek was first conceived. According to The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, the idea first occurred to Roddenberry in 1960. It would be several years before the idea bore fruit and the show came to air (the first series was broadcast in 1966) and by that time the generation raised on the new ideas that followed from the catastrophe of 1957 was of an age to appreciate what it was seeing.

A few years earlier and the show would have been dismissed as either incomprehensible or (more likely) irrelevant. The national mood would have been against it. A few years later and it would have been dismissed as commonplace. In 1969 Americans landed on the moon. What was all the big deal about space? It was all routine.

But the timing was exactly right. Star Trek caught the national mood, and because it was in the right place at the right time it became enormously popular. It helped, of course, that the show was intelligently conceived and well produced. It had strong story lines and interesting themes. The characters were well portrayed. However the timing was the most critical factor. Public consciousness was so attuned to the ideas that the show was promulgating that it couldn’t help but succeed. It was the icon of that generation. It showed where we were heading and justified the effort needed to get there. It was about important things and it held up a mirror to the national mood.

Because it so exactly fitted into the spirit of the times, it probably is not really relevant to ask why the programme survives despite its disregard of the rules that seem to govern other superficially similar programmes. Star Trek breaks the rules of fashion that I started off talking about and succeeds because it is a social phenomenon rather than an artistic one. A different set of rules apply.

Trekkies are an experiment in applied sociology.

The Roll of the Dice and The Role of the Player

First published in Phlogiston Twenty, May 1989.

I’m often asked why I don’t like fantasy role playing. Usually I just mumble and change the subject. However in view of the enormous popularity of role playing, I think my inquisitors deserve better than that.

My first exposure to role playing was about fifteen years ago. I’d been playing a lot of military simulations-hex games from SPI and Avalon Hill. The one we played most of all was called Wooden Ships and Iron Men. It was a nineteenth century naval game. You could play anything from single ship engagements to vast fleet encounters. We spent one entire Christmas playing the battle of Trafalgar. There was nothing subtle about Nelson. He just went storming right through the middle of the opposing fleet. His battle orders for that day are most easily paraphrased as “Get stuck in there lads, and make nuisances of yourselves“.

It was wonderful fun, and playing such games taught me more about history than I ever learned in school. You see, if you were fighting at Borodino with Napoleon, or breaking out of the double encirclement in Gaul with Julius Ceasar, it was more than just a game—you simply couldn’t play it properly without knowing something about why it happened in the first place. For several years I devoured history books—suddenly, because of SPI and Avalon Hill, I was expanding my mind and knowledge as well as my game-playing skills. It was fascinating, and I was enthralled. I had an uncle who fought in the First World War. He was a stretcher bearer on the Somme and he won the Military medal at Passchendaele. Quite apart from the light he could shed on those (for me) remote times it gave me a very eerie feeling to know that if he had shared my interests in history he could, as a small boy, have interrogated his old uncles about Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The timescale was tight, but it was just possible. The reality of what we were doing as we moved our bits of cardboard through the hexagons on the maps we spread all over our houses was never far away.

We began to hear rumours about something called Dungeons and Dragons. There were articles about it in the magazines we subscribed to. Fantasy games were becoming fashionable. SPI published something called Sorcerer whose rules were so confusing that we filed it away in a dark corner and forgot about it. Empire of the Petal Throne was one of the most beautifully produced games that I’d ever seen. Just to look at it was a pleasure. However it seemed to require that the players learn a new language in order to play it properly (the author, it seemed, was a philologist and the game was mainly a vehicle for showing this off). We filed that one away too.

Dungeons and Dragons, when it finally turned up, consisted of three small pamphlets tucked into a white cardboard box. Later a fourth pamphlet (Greyhawk, or perhaps I should say Grayhawk since it was American) was added. All were badly printed, on cheap paper, and they didn’t have an index so you could never find anything you wanted in a hurry.

We played virtually nonstop for several years. At one stage we tied our adventure into a naval campaign in order to allow ourselves to play Wooden Ships and Iron Men again (we were getting withdrawal symptoms), but by and large we were heavily into fantasy role playing.

Other games appeared, some good, some bad. We investigated them all, though the interest was starting to die. I still possess a copy of The Creature that Ate Sheboygan. Draw your own conclusions as to which category that one falls into.

SPI was rumoured to be in financial difficulty. Its production of traditional military simulations dropped off, and the standard of the few that did appear was low. The company’s hopes appeared to centre on something called Dragonquest. You couldn’t open a magazine without seeing adverts for it, all saying how wonderful it was going to be. The media hype was sickening. I was already losing interest, and this blatant attempt to manipulate my wallet was the last straw. Dragonquest, when it finally appeared, was no better (and no worse, let’s be fair) than everything that had gone before. My love affair with fantasy role playing games was over.

Partly it was saturation. I had simply overdosed on the whole thing and I needed a rest. But that rest has lasted for quite a few years. I have never gone back, so there has to be more to it than simple over exposure.

Just what is fantasy role playing? How many times have you tried to explain it to some outsider who wants to know exactly what it is you do on Wednesday evenings? It is very difficult, because there aren’t any short pithy definitions. One tends to ramble.

My various attempts, over the years, to provide some sort of an answer slowly began to convince me that I didn’t really want to be there. There are a lot of reasons, some trivial, some quite profound. But I want to make it perfectly clear right from the start that just because I don’t like role playing does not mean that I condemn it or disapprove of it. Nor do I disapprove of the people who play it. On the contrary, there is much that I find admirable about the concept. Unfortunately there is often a huge gulf between the idea and the application of it.

The mechanics of role playing irritate me. The whole silly business of character generation is profoundly annoying. Attempting to define a person by assigning numeric values to personality traits leads to caricature rather than to character. It is a hideous over simplification. It reminds me very much of the approaches taken by pop-psychologists like Arthur Janov (the “primal scream“ guru) or the engineering approach to the way that the mind works which led Ron Hubbard to invent Dianetics. It is an application of behaviourism, straight out of Skinner or Pavlov. I find it simple-minded.

The counter argument, of course, is to say that this is just a guideline. The skills of the players are what really matter. A good role player will put flesh on these bare bones and make the character real. Initial character generation is just the beginning.

There is some truth in this argument, but unfortunately not enough. It is one of the ideals of role playing, but it is seldom or never realised.

A role playing session is, in one sense, an exercise in improvisational theatre. The actors (role players) are playing out the game master’s scenario. They usually know where they are heading and have some rough idea how to get there, but they are ignorant of the details. They are rarely sure what is to come next. However it is vitally important for the integrity of the game, that their reactions to whatever happens to them are the reactions of the characters they are playing—not their own. That is what is meant by putting the flesh on the bare bones of the character sheet. However anybody who has ever studied acting will tell you that improvisation is one of the most difficult of skills to acquire. Very few actors ever learn to do it well. There was a film made in the 1960s called Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice which was almost entirely improvisational, and I urge you to avoid seeing it. It is terrible!

Because of this, I find role playing sessions exquisitely embarrassing. Few if any role players have the theatrical skills necessary to carry off a challenge of this magnitude. I have done enough acting on the stage to know that I do it very badly (I am not blind to my own faults) and I have enough insight to be able to see the errors in other peoples performances—though again I don’t have the skill to be able to help them correct those errors. In common with most people, I don’t like to be embarrassed—it is uncomfortable and it makes me squirm.

I believe that role playing is a genuine art form and it deserves to be taken seriously. It is a participatory art (intellectual theatresports, if you like) which means that everybody taking part has some degree of input. However the most important source is the game master. This is the person responsible for the success or failure of the session. The game master (God) defines the rules, describes the scenario and the society and is the ultimate arbiter. A good game master can elevate the session into art, a poor one can turn it into trash. Good game masters are very rare; bad ones are very common.

It isn’t really surprising when you consider the sort of skill required of a game master. In order to effectively control a session, the game master needs a vast knowledge of sociology, politics, economics, psychology and history (how do societies function; what motivates people, how do they react?). On top of that it is necessary to have good story-telling skills. Nobody is going to play if the scenario is boring. Who has all these multiple talents? I don’t. Do you? I doubt it.

As a result of this, very little role playing aspires to art even though the potential is there. Most role playing is trivial; it doesn’t mean anything (in any intellectual sense). And a lot of it is plagiarised. Game masters desperately seeking ideas rip them off from the books in the recommended reading lists at the back of the rules. In itself that doesn’t matter too much. Playing out a fantasy in someone else’s world is perfectly legitimate—it is the inspiration behind things like the Thieves’ World novel cycles. It is a process of exploration and expansion. There is a fascination about it which I find perfectly understandable. I too would like to know more about Silverberg’s Majipoor and role playing is a very good way of finding out. Certainly it is infinitely preferable to wandering around inside the pathetic imagination of a fourth rate game master without a constructive thought in his head. With a solid foundation to build on the game is off to a much better start. But it is derivative, not original, and that cheapens it somewhat.

In order to get the most out of a session, it is necessary to believe in what you are doing. On some level you know it isn’t real, but the further away you can push that level then the more involved you are, the more exciting, the more worthwhile the whole thing becomes.

It is very common in role-playing circles to sneer at the type of role player (usually very young) who is in the game because of its more bloodthirsty aspects. The let’s-go-out-and-kill-a-few-more-orcs attitude. That is not what it is all about, they protest. There is much more to it than that. I would phrase it somewhat differently—there should be much more to it than that. Frequently there isn’t because the thought applied to the scenario is at the same trivial level. I don’t mean that the players spend all their time killing orcs, but they do spend it looking for a hidden magical talisman or whatever, and to me that is exactly the same as killing an orc, albeit slightly more rarified. It is just as unreal, just as silly.

There is always a reason for a game session. The participants always have a motive (even the least skilled game master knows enough to provide that) but the motive is seldom exciting enough to persuade me to suspend my disbelief in the essential unreality of the whole enterprise.

I make the same demands of any art form; the books I read or the films that I watch. I require them to absorb me, to make me believe in them for the brief time that I am involved in reading or watching. If they don’t then I don’t read the book, I don’t watch the film. Let’s face it, they are all artificial constructs. None of them are real. A book is only paper with black marks on it. It is necessary to transcend that barrier, to make the reading or viewing experience real. The ability to do that is what separates the artist from the journeyman. Role playing, by and large, does not crack the reality boundary. I find it too hard to see past the artificiality.

Finally there is the sheer bloody complexity of it. All those tables to look things up in, all those rules in very small print.

I am not afraid of complexity. I make my living persuading computers to behave themselves and there are few fields of endeavour more complex than that. I am not put off the idea of role playing games just because the systems are complex. However I am not convinced that the complexity is justified.

SPI once published a set of games called Blue and Gray. They are fairly simple games about the American Civil War. They belong in a genre of wargames known as “beer and pretzel“ games. You can play a game in an evening over beer with some friends. Serious war gamers sneer at them.

A few months after Blue and Gray appeared, an article was published in Moves (SPI’s house magazine) entitled Adding Complexity to Blue and Gray. The article consisted of a set of additional rules for the games together with some specious casuistry about adding reality to the system. The nett effect was to turn a very enjoyable game into something totally unplayable.

There is a type of mind which cannot see virtue in simplicity.

I find that much of the complexity detracts from the enjoyment of the game and adds to the unplayability. It seems to be there simply for its own sake (how can we make this magic system “real“? I know—we’ll make it complex). Role playing is not alone in this; many “wargames“ share the same fault. If you let it, it turns a game session into an exercise in bookkeeping. It becomes quite sterile. It also produces that most obnoxious of players—the rules-lawyer. You all know him—every game session has one. The campaign is going great, everyone is having a ball when this guy points out that rule 564 subsection 42 prevents a fifth level magic user from casting invisibility spells when there is an “r“ in the name of the food he had for breakfast. Someone else points out that “porridge“ doesn’t have an “r“ in it in Elvish. Everything comes to a dead stop and the rest of the evening is spoiled while you argue about rule interpretation and whether or not elves eat porridge.

In some respects the original D&D was the best of all the role playing games. The few rules that it did have made no sense whatsoever. It was easy to ignore them, and everybody did. All that was important was the idea.

Like all really clever ideas, the concept of a role playing session is very simple, very elegant and very powerful. It is very important to hold on to that and not to get bogged down in detail.

Now you know why I don’t like role playing.

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack

First published in Killer Kung-Fu Enema

Nurses on Crack, June 1989.

Before we start, it is probably worth emphasizing that all the anecdotes in this article are true—I haven’t made a single thing up. Now are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Aah, the nostalgia.

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack.

What happy memories those words evoke.

My friend Geoff was a martial arts fanatic. We all thought he was a spy—he was majoring in Slavic Languages and spending all his spare time breaking tiles with his forehead. What else could he have been? He used to make beer money by hiring himself out to parties where he would kick lumps of wood to bits for a fee.

Although Geoff was a perfectly nice person, he had one failing. He couldn’t walk past a wall without thumping it. It was most disconcerting to stand with him in a bus queue. Only half his attention would be on the conversation. The rest would be concentrated on his fist as it thump, thump, thumped into the wall. There was always a large nervous space around Geoff. Nobody ever wanted to get too close.

One day we were walking down a corridor in the house where we lived, and Geoff absent-mindedly thumped it as usual. Several months worth of concentrated kung-fu came home to roost, and a brick shot out and landed on Malcolm who was in the room behind the wall and who was at that moment engaged in some serious fornication. He pretended not to notice.

Everybody gathered round to watch, and we made the interesting discovery that clapping in time to the rhythm quickly caused the rhythm to disintegrate. It was my first practical demonstration of the quantum mechanical principle of the observer affecting the course of the experiment.

Geoff eventually got a first class degree in Slavic Languages and went to Japan to teach English and study karate. Malcolm married the girl in question and the brick lived happily ever after.

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack.

Lindy was a nurse. She worked in a male surgical ward and her job was to prepare the patients for their operations. These were normally minor operations, appendectomies and the like, and Lindy’s task was to shave the patient’s genital area and paint it with antiseptic.

Not unnaturally, the men whose genitals she was playing with had a tendency to become aroused. Most were embarrassed by this, and Lindy (who was a kindhearted girl) did her best to make things easy for them.

But there were always one or two who would try to take advantage. Convinced that the mere sight of their arousal would cause Lindy to go weak at the knees and drop everything, they would make crude remarks and try to take advantage.

Lindy loved it when that happened.

She would hold the man lovingly with one hand. Perhaps caress him a little. Then with the finger and thumb of the other hand she would go flick as hard as she could, right on the tip.

“You never,” she told me with glee, “saw an erection collapse so fast”.

Eventually Lindy stopped being a nurse and went to work for Rentokil.

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack.

I never had any exposure to crack. By the time crack arrived on the drug scene I had long since left it. But I was at an interesting head party once…

I wasn’t all that sure of the address, so I wandered up and down the street for a time listening for party noises. I didn’t hear any, so eventually I went into the place where I thought it might be.

As I opened the door everyone turned to look at me.

“Ssssh!” someone said. “Don’t wake the baby”.

The stereo was playing very softly, and the room smelled bewitchingly of dope overlaid with incense. I had a large bottle of home made gooseberry wine which I hid in the oven. (Always check the oven at parties. You’d be amazed what you find there.)

I’d brought the gooseberry wine because once you open a bottle of wine you have to drink it all otherwise it goes off and that’s a waste. Unfortunately this particular wine was so strong that one person couldn’t finish a bottle without falling over. So I thought I’d share it.

Beside the oven where I hid the bottle was a three-legged dog and someone who looked like a bank clerk. He was smartly dressed, suit and tie—it made an amazing contrast with the standard uniform of scruffy jeans and tee shirts that everybody else was wearing.

The dog was a black labrador. One back leg was missing (presumably amputated after some sort of accident) but it didn’t seem to mind. I shared some wine with the bank clerk and stroked the dog.

The bank clerk was fascinated by the fact that the wine was home made—he seemed to think that made it far more dangerous than the various other illicit substances that were circulating around the room (he may well have been right). He clasped his plastic cup in the approved manner with his little finger stuck out, and drank the entire cupful in one swig. Then he smiled.

“Not too sweet,” he said. “Not too dry. I like it”.

I poured him some more, put the bottle back in the oven, and circulated. Not much was happening. Everyone was petrified of waking the baby.

The usual collection of lunatics asked me what my sign was—astrology was very big that year. I had my birth sign on a medallion round my neck and I waved it at them.

“I just knew you were Capricorn,” someone assured me as they blinked blearily at the rather stylized pair of fish on the medallion. “I can always tell”.

I just nodded. It didn’t seem worth the effort.

Back in the kitchen, I found the bank clerk snoring, face down in a pool of vomit. It was smeared all over his nice suit. The dog, for reasons best known to itself, was sniffing his bottom and it growled at me when I picked up the bottle of gooseberry wine.

The bottle was empty, and so was the bank clerk. Billy Connolly once remarked that when you throw up after too much booze, it always looks like diced carrots. That’s not quite true. When you throw up after gooseberry wine, it looks like chinese takeaways.

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack.

I’ve never had an enema. But I have had chicken vindaloo, which has much the same effect.

When I was a student, back in England umpty ump years ago, I used to eat at a very cheap Indian restaurant called “The Purple Elephant”. The food was not of the highest quality, and among ourselves we referred to the restaurant as “The Purple Effluent”. Once, for a bet, I ate the hottest curry on the menu.

I won the bet—I finished the curry. There was steam coming out of my ears, and you wouldn’t believe how much beer I drank to try and put out the flames.

But the next day…

I got a simultaneous attack of Rangoon Rot and Delhi Belly. The Rajah’s Revenge had me in its grip. Chicken vindaloo smells like biological warfare even before you eat it. Afterwards, it is guaranteed to blow the lock off the lavatory door.

But that’s not the worst. Oh no! The worst thing is that coming out, it is twice as hot as it was when it went in. Oh the agony, the pain, the terrible perverted joy of it.

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack.

Thank you for reminding me of all those happy times. I wish the journal every success.

Social Attitudes

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-One, June 1989.

The first computer game I ever saw was tennis. It came in a little unit which plugged into your television set. Each player manipulated a stylised bat which moved up and down one side of the screen. A slow-moving “ball” rambled across the screen, and you had to move your bat so as to intercept it and knock it back towards your opponent. Briefly, the game was all the rage and the newspapers were full of dire warnings about how if you played the game too long the design of the tennis court and the bats would be etched into your television screen, thereby ruining Coronation Street.

Then we got a PDP 11/70 computer in the office and I found the original Adventure (sometimes called Colossal Cave). The hours I spent after work (and sometimes during work) exploring those caverns. The maze of little twisty passages, the twisty little maze of passages, the maze of twisty little passages, the little twisty maze of passages—it drove me to my Witts End. And how on earth are you supposed to remember a spell like xyzzy?

Incidentally, if any of you who have played Colossal Cave ever get access to a Data General computer running the AOS/VS operating system, try typing xyzzy at the operating system prompt. It isn’t documented in any of the manuals, but it is a valid system command.

The first space invader machines appeared (and pinball machines began to disappear—the Who got it wrong. Tommy now sounds very dated). Electronic sound effects and dead aliens were all the rage. Zapping Pacmen or Klingons seemed to be everybody’s favourite pastime. “What’s your highscore?” began to replace “What’s your sign?” as an opening gambit at parties.

The space invader machines introduced an entirely new short story format for magazine editors to reject. It used to be that the slushpile was filled to overflowing with shaggy God stories about the last two survivors of a nuclear war who have to start the human race anew. He is called Adam, and she is called Eve.

Now that is old fashioned. Now the slushpile is filled with space invader machine stories where the punchline (yawn) is that it isn’t a game after all, it is real and the brave kid in the corner dairy has just saved the Earth from a fate worse than death. Pathetic, obvious and boring, isn’t it?

However it is only fair to point out that Orson Scott Card managed to win a Hugo with exactly that plot (Ender’s Game). It only goes to show that no matter how old and bearded and dull the plot may be, a writer with skill and talent can still bring it alive.

Space invader machines and their clones are a fascinating social phenomenon—nobody from the highest to the lowest seems to be able to resist the lure of these mindless games (I even caught my boss playing Pacman). They are impossible to win—the beasties always get you in the end. The only challenge is to see how long you can survive. I very quickly reached my boredom threshold and apart from a few forays into the so-called adventure games, I have left them alone ever since.

But you can’t ignore them. They even bleep at you in the corner dairy and the takeaway Chinese.

And they are nearly all science fiction.

They provide the most visible evidence of the way that science fictional tropes have permeated the whole of society. Even if you’ve never touched a space invaders machine, you know what it is, and you see nothing foreign or peculiar in the idea of ravening alien hordes from Galaxy Nine attempting to evade your trusty laser beams and ravish the Earth. It’s a perfectly normal everyday occurrence, not worth raising an eyebrow over.

Why science fiction? I’d be willing to bet that if they’d had space invader machines a hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have been alien monsters from beyond the stars that you were trying to kill, it would have been wave after wave of niggers, or fuzzy-wuzzies or Indians or Jews. I strongly suspect that the little alien beasties on the screen are, as far as the collective unconscious is concerned, simply a metaphor for whatever minority group is currently out of favour. We just aren’t as blatant about it as we would once have been.

The combination of violence and science fictional images is a worrying phenomenon, and I don’t like it at all. I like the unthinking acceptance of it even less. Even SF fans, who ought to know better, don’t seem to realise just how sick and perverted it is. Look around at the next convention you go to. Count the number of guns.

In the Foundation stories, Isaac Asimov coined the saying “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. (On the radio just the other day, I heard this paraphrased as “Violence is the last repartee of the illiterate” which I think is even more clever and pithy.)

The phrase is the guiding principle of the Foundation stories. In story after story, Asimov shows that no matter what the problem is or how bad it gets, there are always better methods of solving it than by lashing out at it.

The best method of all, however, is described in the book Seamanship: Jottings for the Young Sailor, by a man called Callingham:

Perhaps the worst plight of a vessel is to be caught in a gale on a lee

shore. In this connection, the following rules should be observed:

1. Never allow your vessel to be found in such a predicament…

There is no denying that violence is a solution. Zap the aliens with your laser beams, eat a power pill and stomp a pacman and the problem goes away. But it isn’t the only solution. What are the alien’s motives? Can they be satisfied any other way? What else do Pacmen eat? The space invader machines and the jackbooted, weapon-laden fans at conventions are both aspects of the same totally mindless gutlevel reaction to problem solving. It is so much easier to react instinctively than it is to think a problem through.

It is the publicly acceptable face of violence, and it is publicly encouraged. When television and newspaper reporters turn up at conventions, the photographs in the papers and the films on the TV news invariably concentrate on the cretins with guns and camouflage jackets.

The phenomenon is driven by social acceptability. As long as only eccentric idiots like me find it sick and perverted, nothing is going to change. Only a society-wide condemnation will make any difference. The definition of what is and is not acceptable public behaviour has to change. There was a time when I would have said that was unlikely. Now I’m not so sure.

It used to be socially acceptable to smoke. The first thing you did when guests arrived was to offer them a drink and a cigarette. Everybody smoked, and there was no social stigma attached to it. Count the number of cigarettes handed around in old Hollywood movies. Read the extensive descriptions of smoking in “hard-boiled” detective novels.

Over a period of about twenty years, that attitude has undergone a complete reversal. Nowadays the smoker is a pariah. You ask permission before you light up. In restaurants you are often roped off in a special section. Many places ban smoking all together.

Because it is no longer acceptable social behaviour, fewer and fewer people are taking it up, and more and more smokers are giving it up. There is kudos in being an ex-smoker. People congratulate you on your will power and encourage you not to relapse.

This revolution in social attitudes has been brought about by education, not by legislation. People are simply more aware of the harmful effects of smoking. The impetus has come from below rather than above. The bans on smoking have come after the fact, not before, and are a response to a perceived need. They are not an attempt to impose rules and regulations.

In the same way, I don’t believe that the violence inherent in the space invaders machines and jackboot fandom can be legislated against. There is no point in banning these buffoons from conventions, or turning off the electric power on the machines. The only way to eradicate the sick tendencies is by a process of education. The people who glory in these dangerous notions need to be ridiculed and made to feel like the fools that they are.

It is our responsibility. We have to stop regarding this sort of behaviour as acceptable. We need to change our own social attitudes.

The Technophile and the World’s Pain

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Two, August 1989.

Technophilia is a common phenomenon. I work with computers; I am in the business of implementing computer solutions to problems, and I come across the attitude all the time. Sometimes the best computer solution is not to use a computer at all—but do you think I can ever convince people of this? I once recommended to one person who insisted he just had to have a computer that a much better solution to his problem would be to hire a clerk with a quill pen. (I lost a few brownie points doing that, but what the hell!) However there was no glamour in that approach and he insisted that it had to be done his way. The customer is always right, even when he is wrong. It cost him untold thousands of dollars for a computer system that he uses for about five minutes every week. But he was happy; he had a high-tech solution; he looked good in his own eyes and could hold his head up proudly in the company of his peers (they all had computers too). He was (and is) an idiot.

Science fiction has always been technophilically inclined and has always tended to attract that kind of mind. Even in the days before Hugo Gernsback coined the word “scientifiction”, H. G Wells and Jules Verne and others of their ilk were revelling in descriptions of new and wonderful machines—technological applications that were sure to solve all our problems (or perhaps exacerbate them). Then Gernsback came along with his never-ending descriptions of television sets and similar devices and he set in motion a trend, a style which has never quite gone out of fashion. (If you ever come across a copy of Gernsback’s novel Ralph 124C41+, do read it—it’s hilariously awful. A perfect example of the cult of the bad.)

The technophilic SF fan really grooves on this. He (they are generally male, though not exclusively so) revels in descriptions of engineering marvels and applications of scientific principles as yet undiscovered. There is a certain amount of this in all of us (I still remember the enormous thrill I got when I first realised that stories about spaceships existed) but most of us grow out of it as we grow up. These days about the only technological achievement that still generates any sense of awe in me is the ever-increasing number of gadgets they can fit into a Swiss Army knife.

However my sense of wonder and love of gadgets is not completely dead—I have a watch which I bought in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. Apart from telling the time (how boring), it has a built in calculator, stop watch and alarm, and it also allows me to store telephone numbers and a calendar of events. It has a little keyboard attached and at the beginning of the year I type in the dates of the deadlines I have to meet for production of this column and every three months it beeps at me and I feel embarrassed because I haven’t written anything yet. So I look up Alex’s telephone number in it and ring him to apologise.

A friend at work found it fascinating. He couldn’t believe a watch could do all those things.

“Is it IBM compatible?” he asked.

The twiddly bits are all very well but what happens when the batteries run out? All the information stored in the watch vanishes, that’s what happens, and when the new battery is fitted you must laboriously type it all in again.

I explained all this to my friend one day when the batteries went flat. He was vastly amused.

“Fortunately,” I said, “I had all the information backed up.”

I was thinking of the piece of paper on which I had carefully written everything down in anticipation of just such an eventuality.

“Oh yes?” said my colleague. “Backed up in the grandfather clock, is it?”

A few years ago such a device was pure science fiction and that little anecdote would probably have been an incident in a story in a magazine. Nobody would have raised an eyebrow, and the gadget freaks would have loved it.

In its heyday, Astounding (later Analog) was particularly noted for publishing works of this nature. John Campbell, the editor, was always on the look out for a new gadget, a new bit of science, and when he found it, he was often so overwhelmed with the cleverness of the idea that he let the normal story values fly right out of the window. More artistically minded fans often accused Astounding of publishing wiring diagrams rather than stories and there was a certain amount of truth in the accusation (there still is).

The phrase usually used to describe this sort of story is “hard science fiction”; and there is an inbuilt assumption that stories of this type concentrate exclusively on the so-called hard sciences-physics, chemistry, engineering—the mathematical disciplines.

There are two things wrong with this assumption—firstly it assumes that there is a close relationship between science and science fiction; and secondly it assumes that there is a relationship between fiction and reality. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily true and if you examine them closely you start to suspect that hard science fiction has no reality outside the fevered imagination of a few technomaniacs.

For a story to succeed on any but the most trivial of levels it is necessary for the author successfully to invoke a “willing suspension of disbelief”. While you are reading the story you have to be completely immersed in it, to weep at the tragedies and laugh at the triumphs. The author must convince you of the reality of the story. Inducing that mood in a reader is one of the most difficult tasks a writer faces. To fail is to lose the audience.

There are many tricks of the trade which the skilled writer will use to induce this mood. One of them is to project an air of realism by describing technological fantasies in such a way as to force you to accept them (at the time of reading). Only later when the magic spell is broken, do you start to question it… It really is just a trick, a writing technique, one of many tools which the skilful writer has at his beck and call. In the hands of a master it can be wonderfully convincing and leads to story experiences that are truly mind-blowing. In the hands of the less skilled, it breaks the spell in mid-sentence. The story fails and dies.

The relationship between science and science fiction is minimal. It is only a manifestation of this tool of the trade and therefore should not be take too seriously. The map is not the territory. No one in their right mind seriously believes that speculations about slow glass, for example, have any scientific validity (if they did then Bob Shaw would be a millionaire many times over). However to read the novel Other Days, Other Eyes is a truly moving and satisfying experience because as you read Shaw convinces you of the truth of it all. He is not a millionaire, but he is a truly talented writer and he uses his toolbox like a master.

But it isn’t science, even though it sounds like it.

Hard science fiction is rarely, if ever, about scientific facts or principles. It is fiction, a story. If you like, it is a beautifully told lie. It is not true. Therefore to assume that the world of a hard SF story has any congruency with the real world is a dangerous conclusion to come to and is rarely valid.

The opposite tack is equally as silly. Technophobes are modern day Luddites and anything that smacks of science or engineering is anathema to them. Quite often this is a product of fear of the new and unknown. I often have to install computer systems in offices which have never seen a computer before, and I have to train the people who are going to use the systems. Initially there is hostility and a reluctance to type anything in on the keyboard. There is a feeling that it is all too complicated, that the system is impossible to learn. Perhaps if the wrong thing is typed in everything will break irretrievably and everybody will laugh at the buffoon who did it. What a dingbat! The fear is very real, and it must not be sneered at or dismissed as silly. It is not silly. Computers are complicated and frightening, and the fear of ridicule is something which all of us share.

I generally show people where the games are and let them loose. There is nothing quite like zapping Klingons to remove the fear of the keyboard!

I suspect this attitude partly accounts for the popularity of fantasy stories (as opposed to the hard SF variety). Fantasy is easily assimilated, no arcane knowledge or deep training in an academic discipline is required. You can just soak it up through the pores. Of course the genre has even less connection with reality than the hard SF we were discussing before. It takes two steps backward, if you like, whereas hard SF takes only one. (At least SF pretends to have some connection with the world of the senses. Virtually no fantasy stories would or could claim this for themselves.) That is not necessarily a bad thing though.

Of course things are not really as clear cut as all this and the two extremes merge into one another. Clifford Simak, for example, wrote stories such as Way Station or Time and Again, or (his most famous) City, all of which were easily classifiable as hard SF but all of which also made critical judgments about the technology they employed. Poul Anderson has written pure fantasies such as The Broken Sword and The Merman’s Children which have technological “explanations” intimately woven into their fabrics.

The point I am making is that the unthinking acceptance of either view is indefensible. Technophobia and technophilia are opposite sides of the same coin whether we are talking about implementing computer systems (or whatever) in the real world or whether we are talking about the kind of books we like to read. I like some hard SF books (I detest others). Equally I like some fantasy books (and I loathe some as well). The important thing is not to be frightened of it, whichever side you approach it from, and to accept whatever is best suited for the moment and the purpose at hand. That is quite a trivial thing to say but it is by no means an easy thing to do. Just remember all those long sterile arguments about: “which is better, fantasy or science fiction?”

Technology for its own sake is dangerous. But so is rejection of it simply because it is technology.

Think about that next time you praise Robert Heinlein (or sneer at him).

The World Beyond the Hill

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Three, November 1989.

I have recently returned from a trip to America where I travelled from sea to shining sea on a Greyhound bus. During the course of this epic journey I stayed in nineteen hotels and discovered fifteen different ways of taking a shower.

Some shower fittings you twisted, some you pulled, some you pushed. Some had two taps, some had one. Some went clockwise, some anticlockwise. Several had something called a massage setting which produced jets of high pressure water that you could use for stripping the paint off the walls or boring holes in your skull, whichever attracted you the most.

It all struck me as being quite unnecessary. Once you have the basic principle of a shower established; once you have some simple method for getting the water from there to here, what more do you need? The fancy gadgets are just window dressing that add nothing to the simple act of washing off your smelly bits. (Indeed, they often detract from it since the intellectual exercise involved in figuring out how the damn thing works this time can be quite time consuming.)

In other words, why bother?

I used to think that this was the reason why so much SF bored me rigid—like my showers, it all seemed to be just twiddly bits lashed on to the same basic framework. Who really needed another space opera, another time travel story? When you got down to brass tacks, if you had read one then you had read them all. In some ways SF scarcely seems to have advanced at all in the last thirty years which, coincidentally, is almost exactly the length of time I have been reading the stuff. That may not be a coincidence, of course. It may be a symptom of growing up.

It is very dangerous to generalise like this. Damon Knight, the writer and critic, once reached a similar conclusion and announced that the time travel story was effectively dead. Nobody could write another decent time travel story, he said. As a punishment for such presumption, God sent him the plots of four new time travel stories …

Actually, there is rather more to the whole picture than the analogy with shower fittings might suggest. Just how much more I only recently discovered when I read The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin (Elephant Books, 1989). It is a book I cannot recommend too highly.

The book is subtitled Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence which is a perfect description of its theme. It is a critical history of SF (yet another!) but it differs from every other one I have read. It has a unified critical theme, a constant point of view. It has a thesis to prove. This unity makes it a much stronger book than the more rambling histories of other authors who have examined the genre.

The world beyond the hill is the Panshins’ analogy for the transcendental world which it is the proper business of SF to explore. On this analogy our world, the mundane world from which we start, is the village. Beyond its borders lie wonders and marvels and myths. In order to explore this world we must leave the village behind and travel beyond “the fields we know”, to quote Lord Dunsany. The literature of science fiction is the log of these travels.

Not only do the Panshins define SF in terms of this exploration, they also show the process of myth making in action. SF is the twentieth century myth and we live in a world formed by its images. I am using a computer as I write this article. Now there’s a living piece of science fiction if ever there was one.

The book is absolutely fascinating. It is stuffed with enough arcane information to satisfy all the trivia freaks (did you know that the last execution for witchcraft in England took place in 1685?). It records the first tentative steps taken into the world beyond the hill, it shows where these early explorers faltered and turned back (perhaps through a failure of nerve) and it details the way the pioneers opened up the territory.

The road map is familiar to most of us. Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells. The descent into the literary ghetto in 1926 when Gernsback started publishing Amazing Stories, the long struggle back up again. Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. Many books have been written detailing these events and discussing these authors. But none has been written with such intellectual rigour and insight as this one. It is magnificent.

I feel that the authors rather play down the influence of Olaf Stapledon (though I do agree with their criticism of the “small-mindedness” of some of Last and First Men). I suspect this is because they are looking at SF from an American viewpoint—Stapledon was much more influential in his native Britain than he ever was overseas.

I also remain unconvinced that the writing team of Kuttner and Moore were as important as the Panshins say they were. They did not write enough to be important. Henry Kuttner died far too early with much of his promise unfulfilled. They could have been important writers—what little they wrote was excellent, but I do not think it was very influential.

But these are quibbles and have little relevance.

The Panshins end their story in 1945 with the publication of Asimov’s The Mule, the longest and most complex of his Foundation stories. In this story the psychohistorical plans of Hari Seldon and the First Foundation are overthrown by a mutant who could not have been predicted by the plan itself. The Panshins regard this story as the capstone of the quest for transcendence. The world beyond the hill, to continue the analogy, is now part of the village. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the village has grown. It is now a suburb, or perhaps even a city.) They argue that The Mule was a guarantee that determinism, as personified by Hari Seldon, has no ultimate grip on humanity. In this sense, they say, the articulation of this idea means that this story marks the end of science fiction. Progress is shown to be possible only through altered states of thought.

This argument explains a lot of my dissatisfaction with much of the SF of the last thirty years or so and gives a bit of philosophical depth to my showers. If it is true then ever since 1945 SF has simply been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s—essentially a trivial exercise. There is no exploration of the unknown here, no progression beyond the ideas of a generation ago. There is merely a filling in of the blanks in the map now that the borders are in place. To this extent the Panshins and I share a common ground. However we also have our differences.

The Panshins see in The Mule a statement that the future of man will be found in “higher states of consciousness and not in higher science”. They say:

If the material science of the First Foundation is not sufficient to deal with the problem of Asimov’s galactic future then by implication the scientific understanding of our modern Western world cannot be a universally valid and adequate approach to existence either. At best, it is just one possible state of mind among many, and by no means the most advanced.

I cannot agree with this. I do not regard the phrases “higher states of consciousness” and “higher science” to be as mutually exclusive as the Panshins seem to think they are. Indeed I fail to see any significant difference between the two at all. A higher science is ipso facto a higher state of consciousness (or at the very least leads to it) because of the way it opens the mind’s eye to so many wonderful things—by itself it is a transcendental experience. The two go hand in hand and I cannot isolate them one from the other.

When I went to university, the first ten weeks of my chemistry course were concerned with the study of quantum mechanics. I had never in my life before been exposed to such wonderfully powerful and fascinating ideas. I was on an intellectual high for almost a year as I explored these mind-expanding concepts. At that time and for that time there is no question in my mind that the “higher science” I was studying was simultaneously a “higher consciousness” because of the different ways of thinking that I had to bring to bear. The one was simply not possible without the other. It was, as the Panshins so rightly state, a quest for transcendence and for me it was quite literally an epiphany. I was not the same person after that course of study as I was before it.

Kipling said:

There are six and ninety ways

of constructing tribal lays.

And every single one of them is right.

I agree completely with the Panshin’s thesis of the quest for transcendence but the “science” of SF is not the only road through the village to the world beyond the hill and neither is that road a cul-de-sac. It goes further on into more unknown lands. Therefore The Mule is not the end of science fiction (though it is a high point on the exploration) nor is it the end of the story of the myth of science fiction. It is only the end point of The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin.

This does not invalidate their thesis. On the contrary, I think it reinforces it. However I do think that in one respect they themselves are guilty of the “sin” of which they accuse many of the early SF pioneers—they have turned back too early in their exploration of the world beyond the hill.

They themselves recognise this to an extent. They say:

In the meantime, the transcendent spirit

underlying SF moved on…

But that is another story to tell.

I, for one, would strongly urge them to tell that story.

The World Beyond the Hill costs $US 50 and is available from:

Elephant Books

RD 1, Box 168

Riegelsville

Pennsylvania 18077

United States of America

You should include extra money for postage and packing when you write to order it.

Feel the Loving

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Four, February 1990.

For once, this doesn’t have anything to do with science fiction. But Alex asked specially for this one—so here it is.

One of the formative influences of my youth was a film I never saw. The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, was considered to be such a violent and frightening film that it was banned in England. It was concerned with the depredations of a motor cycle gang who terrorised a town somewhere in the back blocks of small-town America. Brando had an Elvis Presley sneer and a black leather jacket. You can still buy posters of him astride his bike.

We knew the film only by reputation and because we could not see it, the violence associated with it grew in the telling and the motor cycle gangs were regarded as the epitome of evil; violence personified. They were scarcely human and we shivered with delicious fright, secure in the knowledge that not only didn’t we have them here in England, we couldn’t even see the film anyway.

(Years later when all the fuss had died down I saw the film on television. Predictably, it was very tame. Brando got the girl and turned into a good guy.)

The motor cycle gangs had a bad press and the uncontrolled violence associated with their name together with the almost ritualistic (and vaguely militaristic) organisation of the gangs gave them the excitement of pornography. Chapters being chartered, rules about how to conduct initiations, the “all for one and one for all” attitude (if you stomp on an Angel, twenty of them will stomp on you)—all these things were undeniably exciting. There was also the romance of the outlaw, the rebel against society. Ironically an attitude that was encouraged by that same society—it was the age of the beatnik; Jack Kerouac was On the Road and James Dean was a Rebel without a Cause.

It was in this frame of mind that I got my first exposure to Hunter S. Thompson. Penguin Books published Hells Angels, the book which, promised the blurb, told the true and violent history of the motor cycle gangs. I bought the book expecting lots of lurid descriptions of rapes and beatings. I had never heard of Thompson. I expected pulp and pornography and cheap thrills. What I got was probably the most fascinating description of a society within society that I have ever read. (If you never read anything else by Thompson, read this one. It is his masterpiece.)

Thompson joined the Angels. He rode with them, partied with them and eventually got beaten up by them. He wrote it all down. He investigated the history of the motor cycle gangs and showed where they came from (they have a longer history than you might believe) and he described the personalities, bringing the Angels alive as people.

The book was a huge success in the 1960s. It made Thompson’s reputation and was instantly fashionable. Hollywood even made a film (called, if memory serves, Hells Angels ’69) which starred the actual members of the Hells Angels chapter that Thompson rode with. It is a terrible film (it’s available here on video if you want to try it out, but honestly I can’t recommend it). The Angels are obviously enjoying themselves hugely as they get paid real money to roar up and down on their bikes with great big shit-eating grins on their faces. They have make-believe Hollywood fights where nobody’s eyes get gouged out, nobody’s teeth and jaws shatter and no broken bones stick out through the flesh. It is just a traditional western on bikes, and just about as real. Hollywood Angels are made out of tinsel.

Thompson was a journalist for Rolling Stone at the height of that magazine’s influence. In the 1960s and the 1970s Rolling Stone was the arbiter of contemporary taste. Thompson, and other journalists of the time, were exploring the language. They were concerned with getting it said in ways that it had never been said before. They called it gonzo journalism and the language held up a mirror to the times. It was wild and highly coloured, full of drug images and occasionally incoherent. But it was always exciting. The gonzo tradition gave us Tom Wolfe and radical chic and the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamlined baby. It gave us Michael Herr and Despatches which, despite all the recent outpourings on the subject, remains the best book yet to come out of the war in Vietnam.

In a way, the gonzo writers were attempting to do for journalism what the poets and songwriters were doing for music.

There was a perceived need to strip away the false coverings, to tell it like it is. What you needed was total involvement. You had to be your material. You couldn’t see it from the outside looking in. That was too distant. You had to be inside looking out.

Tom Wolfe was probably the best of these writers. He got more closely into the heart of his subjects than any of the others. The cynicism he displayed in Radical Chic, the essay which exposed the shallowness of fashion, high society and the beautiful people has never been bettered.

Interestingly, while Thompson was riding with the Angels and gathering the material for his book, Tom Wolfe was investigating Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the two would cross each others paths. Kesey seemed to see in the Angels a wild, free spirit that needed cultivating. He turned the Angels on to acid and they prowled menacingly around his parties intimidating people. Their grip on reality was never all that strong at the best of times. With a head full of psychedelics who knew what would happen? The Angels, characteristically, over-indulged. It was not Kesey’s most popular move.

Thompson relates one episode which epitomised the Angel’s reactions to drugs. An Angel, visiting the bathroom, investigated the medicine cabinet. Finding some pills in an unlabelled box, he ate a handful or two on the theory that they might prove to be interesting. He spent the next forty eight hours unconscious and barely breathing. Everyone assumed he was dead. When he came round he declared that doing what he had done had taught him a valuable lesson which he would never forget. It didn’t matter how many or what sort of drugs he indulged in. The experience had taught him that his body would be able to cope.

Thompson’s book and Wolfe’s biography of Ken Kesey (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) share a common ground in this meeting of the Angels and the “hippies”. They tell the tale from both sides, and it makes interesting reading to compare the two.

In his experiments with language, Thompson coined a phrase all of his own and applied it to the things he saw around him.

That phrase is now inextricably associated with him (and he’s probably sick of it). It is the Hunter Thompson trademark and it is “Fear and Loathing”. He attached it to a town and gave us what became one of the biggest cult books of the era—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I think it’s a novel—I hope it’s a novel because if Thompson ever really did ingest all the drugs which the first-person hero of the book pours into his body with such gay abandon it is no surprise that his prose is as brain-damaged and deranged as it is.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the epitome of the drug era. It says everything that needs to be said about that wild time. Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary said it first of course, but they were too deep down serious about it all. There was always a sense of missionary zeal about the Merry Pranksters which tended to get in the way. Thompson had no such inhibitions. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, if it is about anything at all, is about getting totally wasted, and staying that way for as long as possible.

It is also, without question, the funniest book I have ever read. I suppose I must have read it at least a dozen times now; probably more. However it still reduces me to helpless hysterics. Even just thinking about it makes me smile.

Everyone has their favourite scene, and everbody’s favourite scene is different. Take, for instance, the hotel bar, observed through a haze of drugs:

Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge—impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck—that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

And a little later, in a Las Vegas nightclub where he finds a machine that will project his magnified image on a screen in the sky:

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas, twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

For a long time after that Thompson seemed to go quiet. There were no more books. There were still articles in Rolling Stone and other journals, but I seldom saw these. I was a very erratic magazine buyer. The next time I really became aware of Thompson was the publication of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail which is an account of the Presidential campaign of 1972. Thompson was heavily into politics. He hated Nixon, of course, but Nixon liked football and so did Thompson. He reports that he has many pleasant memories of discussing football with Nixon. (Incidentally, Thompson had the measure of the man well before any other American journalist. He recognised the immorality that lay behind the facade and predicted the scandal that was Watergate years before it took place simply from his knowledge of Nixon’s personality.)

This is probably Thompson’s most difficult book, particularly if you are not very interested in the minutiae of American politics and presidential campaigns. Nonetheless, it still sings with Thompson’s own peculiar vigour and his skill in concocting memorable aphorisms is just as strong as ever. (“When a man comes off drugs he needs big fires in his life”.)

It is almost impossible to talk about Hunter S. Thompson without also talking about Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of his books and Thompson’s deranged alter ego. The two of them go together like sado and masochism. Who will ever forget his sketch of a stark naked Samoan attorney vomiting copiously while a hotel maid looks on in horror?

Once, newly introduced to acid, Thompson accidentally spilled some of the drug (and its substrate).

… one of the musicians came in. “What’s the trouble?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “all this white stuff on my sleeve is LSD.”

He said nothing: merely grabbed my arm and began sucking on it. A very gross tableau. I wondered what would happen if some Kingston Trio/young stockbroker type might wander in and catch us in the act…with a bit of luck it’ll ruin his life—forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favourite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know. Would he dare to suck a sleeve? Probably not. Play it safe. Pretend you never saw it…

Thompson’s later work is disappointing by comparison. He never really dared go in there and suck the sleeve again. His political acumen deserted him; his comments on the George Bush campaign in his latest collection of essays Generation of Swine show no great insights, reveal no great truths. His prose style remains as brain damaged as it ever was, and just as funny. But there is a tinge of sadness to it now. He has not changed in thirty years and he is almost an anachronism now—the voice is still the same but it begins to sound a false note. Tom Wolfe, his great contemporary, has not been left behind by the times. His latest book (the novel Bonfire of the Vanities) was a best seller all over the world, and deservedly so, but I don’t think he could have written it back when he was mau-mauing the flak catchers. Wolfe learned from his experiences and put them to good use; he sucked the sleeve. Thompson closed the door and went away again.

The Wooden Force—Escape With SF

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Five, May 1990.

Science Fiction is often accused of being an escapist literature and its readers are sneered at for running away from reality into the fairy tale world on their bookshelves. In a sense, there is a lot of justice to that accusation. The dead sea bottoms of Barsoom and the semi-mystical powers of the Grey Lensman don’t, on the face of it, have very much to do with every day living.

I’m quite sure that there really are people to whom SF is a safety valve, an escape, a world to hide in away from the nasty realities of life the universe and everything. But you can say the same sort of thing about all the genre literatures. Phillip Marlowe is no more real than Kimball Kinnison and the seedy streets he inhabits are just as much a figment of the imagination as are the streets of Helium where John Carter roams. So why should SF bear the brunt of the escapist accusations? Probably because it self-avowedly deals with unrealities, things that never were and (probably) never will be. It does not claim to have connections with reality—indeed, often it glories in the lack of such claims. Other generic forms are much more familiar to us and no matter how distorted the picture they present, it is still recognisably home.

But I’m not sure that such surface trappings are really important. I think the very nature of the unreality that SF portrays is still deeply rooted in the contemporary reality that produced them in the first place. I think it is facile to dismiss the exotic, alien landscapes of SF as escapist. The truth is much more subtle than that. Let me tell you why.

I suppose the idea first occurred to me when I was in my early teens. I was reading a lot of historical fiction at the time and among my favourite books were the Hornblower novels of C. S. Forester. The books were grittily realistic depictions of life aboard ship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and they were enormously popular. However the viewpoint character, Horatio Hornblower himself, was somewhat odd. Forester used him to analyse the making of a man, and followed his career from midshipman to admiral. We as readers shared Hornblower’s thoughts and feelings. We knew the deep insecurity of the man, his hopes, his fears and his worries. That, in a large measure, explains the popularity of the books—it was the character of Hornblower which was so attractive; he was everyman. All of Forester’s readers could identify with him (we all feel just as insecure inside ourselves). And that is where, to some extent, Forester cheated because Hornblower was a twentieth century man. Many of the ideas he espoused and the feelings he had were quite alien to the time in which he lived (particularly his views on shipboard discipline). I’m not sure that Forester could help it—every writer puts a little of himself into his works—and it certainly made the books much more interesting to a contemporary audience. Nonetheless it detracted from the realism and it anchored the books much too firmly into the twentieth century, into Forester’s reality rather than Hornblower’s.

I suspect it is almost impossible to divorce yourself so completely from your surroundings that you don’t put anything of yourself into the things that you write. Whether the novel is set in the past or the future is not really relevant. The important thing is that it is created in the present.

Once I’d spotted that fact about Hornblower, I started to keep my eyes open for similar sorts of things in other books. It was almost invariably there. No matter how weird, other-worldly, science fictional or escapist the book was, there was always a firm grounding in the contemporary here and now.

Many books, of course, do it on purpose. The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth is a perfect case in point. The book is principally concerned with satirising twentieth century American advertising practice and the science fictional trappings are there mainly to prop up the satire, rather than the other way around. It would be hard to imagine a less escapist book (unless the satire bypasses you entirely—but if you’re that dim you probably don’t live in the real world anyway).

The same effect is visible even in books that deliberately set out to be “futuristic”. It is probably most noticeable in space operas of the Doc Smith variety. Kimball Kinnison’s moral code is a direct reflection of the boy scout mentality of E. E. Smith’s youth. Smith has (probably deliberately) set Kinnison up as an icon by giving him these admirable characteristics. We identify with the hero (that’s why he’s a hero for heaven’s sake) and so we have to be able to relate to him. If he was too outre we couldn’t do that.

These examples are the most blatant ones, of course. Often the effect is much more subtle, but it’s usually there. If it wasn’t there at all, we probably wouldn’t be able to understand the story anyway because we wouldn’t have anything to hang our mental perceptions on. In his critical study In Search of Wonder Damon Knight discusses the book Murder in Millenium VI by Curme Gray in which the writer has deliberately attempted to tell the story without contemporary references. In Knight’s words “…there is not a word in the book that might not logically have been written by the narrator for the edification of his own posterity”. Some of the background can be worked out from the context, but a lot of it is never explained at all, and because we lack the referents, there is absolutely no way at all that we will ever understand it. This may well explain why most of you have probably never heard of the book. In a very real sense, it is incomprehensible. So why bother reading it in the first place? It didn’t sell well and has never been republished. The only place you find it now is in rare book stores where it sells for vast amounts of money.

In order properly to understand a book you must ask yourself “What is this book about?”. Only the most naive reader will answer that question by saying words to the effect that “It’s about this bug-eyed monster which invades the earth and eats up people”. A simple catalogue of the events of the plot gives little insight into the things the book is talking about, provided it really is talking about something, of course. In the better books there is usually quite a lot going on under the surface. If there is nothing going on then the book is often unreadable; at least as far as I am concerned. I simply cannot read books which are all surface—they bore me to distraction. Again, Damon Knight coined a beautiful phrase to sum this up. Talking about a particular writer, he remarked that “all his depth was in shallow places”. As an aside, I feel that this aspect is one which often lets role playing down—there is so much concern with the surface glitter and gloss that too many times there is a failure to realise that underneath the glitter is nothing at all. In cases like this my major reaction is to ask plaintively—what is the point? The point (in literature as well as gaming) is generally trivial. So why bother?

If you extend this analysis too far you run into the very real danger of being called an intellectual snob. (I have been called exactly that by my father, among other people) and I suppose that I have to admit to it. I seem to look for things that other people barely notice—and even if they do notice, they often consider them unimportant. However to me these are very real concerns and all the space opera derring-do in the universe can’t attract me if the whole point of it is simply itself, its own values, the “reality” of a false space-time continuum. That’s simply science fictional navel gazing. To that extent therefore I reject the charge of escapism. To me SF is not escapist (and the SF that is escapist is shallow and I don’t read it).

If we accept that the subtext of a piece of literature is concerned with contemporary twentieth century living (because it was written by a contemporary twentieth century living person) then escapism becomes a non-issue since it simply doesn’t exist, at least not in the derogatory sense that the word is often employed.

Nevertheless, the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom continue to haunt me. Doubtless you have your own favourite places, your own spine-tingling delights. It is that experience, the good old-fashioned sense of wonder, which keeps us reading the stuff isn’t it? Given the things that I’ve been saying in this essay, how can I possibly justify the fact that I still read Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why am I currently reading a book whose major villain is a Nazi mind-vampire? (Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons; if you are interested.)

I could get very Jesuitical here and point out the satire which Burroughs buried in his earlier books (it surfaced again in his later works—Tarzan and the Ant Man is a masterpiece of social comment). It is really only the works of his middle years that are dull and boring, a total waste of time. I defy anybody to read Tarzan and the Leopard Men without falling asleep round about chapter four.

I could talk about the way Dan Simmons’ novel examines the morality of violence and poses (and attempts to answer) the question of how corrupting absolute power really is. How would such feelings express themselves? What motivates a man who has total control?

I could be accused of casuistry. Perhaps I am attempting to justify my liking for these essentially escapist works after the fact. I like these books therefore they must have merit because I don’t like books which do not have merit. The syllogism is obvious. On the surface, they really do seem to be exactly the sort of escapist trash which I have spent most of this essay denying the existence of (except in a minority of cases). Aren’t I trying to have my cake and eat it too? Another person could deny that the subtext exists. Isn’t it just subjective?

I like to believe that I’m not that intellectually dishonest.

To say that the distinctions which I have attempted to draw do not exist seems to me to deny also the existence of any yardstick by which to measure the merit of a book. To lump it all together and call it escapist rubbish makes it impossible to distinguish between E. E. “Doc” Smith and Cordwainer Smith. I chose those examples quite deliberately because I used to know someone who, quite literally, could not tell the difference between works by these two writers. For someone as brain-dead as that, it probably is true that SF is just escapism because that sort of person simply cannot see beneath the surface. Subtlety is not a word in their vocabulary.

The fact that I deliberately choose to read books by particular writers is just as important as the fact that I deliberately choose not to read books by other writers. My reasons for making the choice are the ones I’ve spent the last umpteen hundred words attempting to justify. But I must emphasise that it is a conscious and deliberate choice which is not based on feelings (“I don’t like it” or “It’s boring” or “I’m frightened of purple monsters”).

Therefore, for me at least, SF is never escapist.

Who Wrote What?

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Six, August 1990.

These days they call it sharecropping—someone writing a book set in a world created by another author. There are quite a lot of them around—Thieves’ World, Heroes from Hell, the Wild Cards series, Bill, the Galactic Hero.

At least these books are honest about what they are. Much more dishonest are the books which proclaim in very large letters ISAAC ASIMOV (or ARTHUR C. CLARKE, or whatever other big name you care to substitute) and then underneath in minuscule print that merges into the cover because it’s almost the same colour you get a phrase that says something like “presents a novel by Bert Brown”.

It’s all marketing of course. You, the reading public have never heard of Bert Brown, but you have heard of Isaac Asimov, therefore, so the theory goes, you will buy the book. However I strongly suspect that the SF book buying public is not that gullible since the Isaac Asimov line is no longer being published and the Arthur C. Clarke line is moribund. I suspect only E. E. “Doc” Smith will go on for ever.

There has always been a certain amount of this sort of thing. The Oz books, for example, were so enormously popular that even after L. Frank Baum was dead they continued to be published. Written by other hands, it is true; but Oz books nonetheless. (Philip Jose Farmer wrote one not so very long ago. It’s called A Barnstormer in Oz and it is well worth looking out for.)

I remember as a child finding a book on the library shelves called The Adventures of Ben Gunn by R. F. Delderfield. It was a companion piece to Stevenson’s Treasure Island and detailed the circumstances by which the castaway Ben Gunn had arrived on the island. I enjoyed it immensely. Ben Gunn had always been one of the more interesting characters in Treasure Island, much more fun than the rather wimpish Jim Hawkins (indeed, virtually everybody in the book was more interesting than Jim Hawkins) and I thought the book was much better than Treasure Island. I must have read it at least a dozen times. Just a few months ago, I found a copy in a local second hand bookshop and I fell upon it with glad cries of glee and brought it home and reread it immediately. I am happy to say that I still think it’s better than Treasure Island.

Just after the First World War, the pseudonymous “Sapper” made a big name for himself with his thrilling stories about Bulldog Drummond. So popular were these books that a friend of Sapper’s continued to write about Bulldog Drummond long after Sapper himself had died. One critic once sourly remarked that Sapper published far more books after his death than he ever had when he was alive. There are some cultural icons who, it seems, just will not lie down and die.

Typical of these is James Bond. This phenomenon reached its peak of popularity in the 1960s. Partly it was the Saltzman and Broccoli films (those names always make me think of well seasoned vegetables), and partly it was the fact that President Kennedy once remarked in an aside that they were his favourite reading. Whatever the reason, Ian Fleming was promoted to superduper mega-stardom and the public just could not get enough of “spy” novels in general and James Bond in particular. One of the best of the subBonds was Adam Diment’s Dolly Dolly Spy books. You still see them occasionally in book exchanges. Try them—they’re not at all bad.

Fleming never really knew how to cope with the adulation. He produced two or three more increasingly despairing Bond books and then died at the height of his fame. (According to his biographer, Fleming had an inordinate fondness for curried goat. It probably explains an awful lot about his life and his death.) Almost immediately “Robert Markham” (who was really Kingsley Amis in a skin) wrote and published a new James Bond novel called Colonel Sun. John Gardner is still writing James Bond books today. And the films just keep on coming, of course.

Another phenomenon of the sinful 1960s was the emergence of a genre of sex and slavery stories set in America’s deep south before the Civil War. They were written by Kyle Onstott and novels like Mandingo and Drum titillated a whole generation of teenagers. Actually, Onstott’s books weren’t at all bad and they can still be read with pleasure. However after Onstott died, his “friend” Lance Horner continued the series and dragged it down into the genre gutter where it languishes today, a sort of pornographic soap opera with whips. (It was very interesting to see just how closely Alex Haley’s blockbuster Roots mirrored the world that Onstott created in his novels. This is a pointer, I think, to Onstott’s not inconsiderable skill.) These days, however, the whole thing is unreadably bad.

C. S. Forester was perfectly well aware of the phenomenon of writers jumping on another’s creation (and, as he saw it, cheapening the original vision). In Horatio Hornblower, he had created one of the most popular and original characters of contemporary fiction, and he was determined not to let Hornblower out of his control. He took legal steps to ensure that after his death nobody else would be able to write Hornblower books; and he was eminently successful in his aim. Nobody ever has. There are some people who may regret this, but I think he made the right decision. If he hadn’t set things up that way, we would probably have seen somebody like Alexander Kent playing Lance Horner to Forester’s Kyle Onstott, and Hornblower would have vanished into soap opera. As it is, we have seen a whole slew of pseudo-Hornblowers (from Richard Bolitho on downwards), but none of the writers have ever even come close to matching Forester and Hornblower still rates as the best. (Patrick O’Brien has probably come closest to taking Forester’s crown, and the major reason for that is that he was not even trying for it. Stephen Maturin and the other heroes of his naval adventure books are totally original creations. They owe nothing whatsoever to Hornblower.)

One reason for the whole phenomenon is the lure of the sequel. It was said of Edgar Rice Burroughs that he could resist anything except temptation. Hence the seemingly neverending stream of Tarzan books. (Burroughs, incidentally, would seem to be a prime candidate as a bandwagon for other writers to jump on and start sharecropping like crazy, but it never happened because the Burroughs family kept very tight control over the rights to Burroughs’ creations.) At the moment, this particular mania is manifesting itself as trilogies (or greater). It is a very short step from there to sharecropping proper, and it is easy to see how it all happened. What is not so easy to evaluate is how successful the whole thing is (in artistic rather than monetary terms). The phenomenon itself may be slightly suspect because it can be regarded purely as a cynical ploy to milk capital out of big names, but despite that, there is no question that it has produced some excellent books. Surely it can’t be all bad?

Well, yes and no. It is rather like salt in your stew. Just because a pinch makes it taste good, you can’t extrapolate and say that a couple of shovels full will make it taste better. The whole thing is growing out of control and is in danger of swamping us.

Within the SF field, it has been going on for quite some time. Sharecropping is not new—only the name is new. It happens much more frequently now than it used to because the publishers are actively encouraging it, but it was always there.

Fred Saberhagen has written several vampire books based directly on Bram Stoker’s work. Of these the best is almost certainly The Dracula Tapes which shamelessly retells Stoker’s original story incident for incident—but from Dracula’s point of view instead of Jonathan Harker’s. It is a brilliant piece of work, and if you go back and reread Stoker’s original after reading the Saberhagen, it throws a completely different light on things. He attempted a similar exercise with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (called, I believe, The Frankenstein Papers) but it was less successful. Brian Aldiss did it much better with Frankenstein Unbound.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle got into the act with Inferno, which just has to be one of the oddest books ever written. Does anybody outside of university literature classes still read Dante? Niven and Pournelle seem to think so, and it has to be admitted; Inferno is a superb book. But terribly strange.

I gave up reading the Heroes in Hell series after four reasonably enjoyable novels when I realised that despite there having been a lot of incidents, nothing of any lasting significance had happened. Julius Caesar did a lot of marching and fighting but at the end of four books he was no further forward than he had been at the start of the first. Contrast this with Wild Cards (which is seven books old as I write) where lots of very significant things have happened and the characters have learned and grown, changed and died. Every Heroes in Hell book is utterly indistinguishable from every other Heroes in Hell book. Since I have read four of them, I’ve probably really read them all—even the ones I’ve not read.

In an article called Science Fiction: The Crisis of its Growth, published in Partisan Review in 1967, the French critic Michel Butor wrote:

…let us imagine that a certain number of authors instead of describing at random and quite rapidly certain more or less interchangeable cities were to take as the setting of their stories a single city named and situated with some precision in space and in future time; that each author were to take into account the descriptions given by the others in order to introduce his new ideas. This city would become a common possession to the same degree as an ancient city that has vanished; gradually all readers would give its name to the city of their dreams and would model that city in its image.

Here, it seems to me, Butor is using his science fictional city as a metaphor for a shared world. He describes the sharecropping process and suggests that it is a good thing. He goes on to say:

SF, if it could limit and unify itself would be capable of acquiring over the individual imagination a constraining power comparable to that of any classical mythology. Soon all authors would be obliged to take this predicted city into account, readers would organise their actions in relation to its imminent existence, ultimately they would find themselves obliged to build it. Then SF would be veracious, to the very degree that it realised itself.

Butor’s suggestions are largely coming true. The bookshelves are inundated with books that share a common premise (and which are all but indistinguishable from each other as a result). Far from liberating SF and making it grow into a powerful mythology, as Butor would have us believe, the recipe seems to lead inexorably to stagnation, dullness and open-ended books with no resolution.

In 1968, in Riverside Quarterly, James Blish published a rebuttal of Butor’s ideas in which he said:

The prescription would freeze the very worst elements of routine commercial science fiction—its paucity of imagination and its tendency to conventionalise the future—into a set of dogmas much like thirteenth century canon law.

There is little doubt, I think, that Blish was right and Butor was wrong. The sooner the SF world stops sharing worlds the better. I am bored with sameness. One reason for reading SF is a liking for change, for difference, for originality. Sharing worlds destroys all of that. We have seen other genres outside of SF ruined by the crass commercialism of sharecropping. We don’t want it to happen to SF.

Let’s make a middle-of-the-year resolution. Let’s all stop buying sharecropped and shared world books.

To Tree or Not to Tree

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Seven, November 1990.

I spent most of last Saturday underneath my house in the company of cobwebs and spiders and the occasional cat, chopping down a tree. After a while, the torch battery got quite weak and I started to feel like Indiana Jones exploring the Temple of Doom while nasty creepy crawlies dropped down on him from a great height and slithered underneath his shirt. To take my mind off things, I began mentally to construct a column for Phlogiston.

You could legitimately ask why I was chopping down a tree underneath my house. That’s a very interesting question, but the answer is quite complicated. It all started when Rosemary decided that the house needed painting…

But before we go into that, let’s talk about science fiction. There are two questions that people who get introduced to my library almost invariably ask (apart from “Why do you go underneath your house to chop down trees?”—I’ve never really understood why the sight of a room full of books should induce such a question). The first (very stupid) question is “Have you read all of them?” I’m often tempted to reply “Of course not—I’m illiterate”. The other (and much more interesting) is “Who is your favourite writer?”

I find that question almost impossible to answer because I’m not sure I really know who my favourite writer is. Indeed, I’m not sure I have a favourite writer. However I have recently realised that it is actually possible to deduce just who my favourite writers might be by examining my book buying habits. Like most of the rest of us, I tend to buy mostly paperbacks simply because of the price. However there are a handful of authors whose books I invariably buy in hardback as soon as they are published. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I have to assume that these are my favourite writers. As a rule of thumb, it is as good as any other, though like most good rules I’m fairly sure that it has exceptions. Interestingly, the writers have absolutely nothing in common, other than the fact that I buy their books in hardback. Riddle me that one if you can!

Once Rosemary decided that the house needed painting, we thought we’d go about it in an organised and logical way. We’d get some quotes from several painting firms and choose the best. Best, we decided, was probably a synonym for cheapest. Several people turned up and measured and calculated and quoted. Interestingly an equal number of people did not turn up, despite having promised that they would (it has been my experience over the years that a great many New Zealand businesses appear actively to discourage people from trading with them by neglecting to keep promises, missing appointments, refusing to answer letters or return phone calls and generally being sloppy and unprofessional—no wonder the country is in such an economic mess). The quotes were very interesting—the cheapest was $2000 and the most expensive was $9500. Given such a vast range, there was only one thing to do, so we did it and chose the median value. (Not the mean, and not the mode. I’ve read Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics; I know all about averages.) The trouble started the day they turned up to water blast the house…

Philip K. Dick has published almost as many books since he died as he did while he was still alive. Over the years, he wrote a lot of mainstream novels, none of which were published in his lifetime (except for Confessions of a Crap Artist and that was marginally SF). However after he died, these books started to appear, generally in hardback and often published by small press houses. By following up rumours buried in the small print of specialist magazines and by spending rather more money than I should have, I have managed to track all of these down, and I own a copy of all the Philip K. Dick works that have been published to date. The effort I’ve expended in gathering these together suggests that Philip K. Dick must be high on my list of favourite writers. Was it worth the effort? Most definitely! There are some real gems among those books. I will never understand why they were rejected during Dick’s lifetime. Mary and the Giant, for example is a very brave novel of miscegenation written at a time when the subject was all but taboo in polite society (maybe that’s why it never saw the light of day before). A brilliant, brilliant book. (So is The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike—the other thing Philip K. Dick was good at was titles.)

“That tree,” said the water blasting man, “has got to go. It’s too close to the house. We can’t paint behind it.”

We looked at the tree. I thought it was quite pretty, but there was no denying that it grew right up the side of the house. When the wind blew, we could hear the tree scrape on the weatherboards. Reluctantly I agreed—the tree would have to go. I got out my trusty saw (the Sacred Silver Saw of San Sebastian, or SSSSS for short. This sibilant saw has put the fear of God into many an innocent plank of wood) and prepared to attack.

A lot of people dislike Michael Moorcock’s books, and those who like his stuff often say that they prefer the fantasies he was writing in the 1960s to the stuff he is producing now. I can understand that point of view to an extent, but I can’t share it. I find those early fantasies clumsy and derivative and almost unreadable (mind you, I will never forgive him for killing the Warrior in Jet and Gold). Moorcock himself feels much the same way about them. He freely admits that many of them were commercial books written to a commercial formula. They were written solely for the money, and the money was used to help support New Worlds magazine which Moorcock was in the process of turning into an avant garde literary journal. That was where the so-called “new wave” of SF was born, and it was for New Worlds that Moorcock produced his best work. The fantasies were largely hackwork, but Jerry Cornelius was art.

The Jerry Cornelius stories mark the beginning of Moorcock’s maturity as a writer (the fourth Jerry Cornelius novel, The Condition of Musak won a literary award) and the start of my real interest in Moorcock’s work. He has written in a vast range of styles about a vast range of subjects. The Gormenghast-like fantasy of Gloriana—the Unfulfilled Queen, the fin-du-siecle wit and energy of the Dancers at the End of Time stories, the feminism of The Adventures of Catherine Cornelius and Una Persson in the Twentieth Century and the allegorical The Warhound and the World’s Pain, to mention just a fraction of his huge output. My own particular favourites are the historical/sociological novels centered around Colonel Pyat—Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage. I look forward with eagerness to the next book in this series.

His latest novel, Mother London, is an elegy to the city he loves above all others and is likely to bring him new respect in the mainstream literary world. He is moving further away from SF with every book he writes, but the journey is so fascinating that I fully intend to follow him all the way. Those of you who are still stuck with the stories of the Eternal Champion should give his later works a chance. Who would ever have believed that the hack writer of the Runestaff stories could have produced a book as brilliant as The English Assassin?

That was when I discovered that the tree wasn’t growing in my garden—it was growing right out of the side of the house, between the chimney stack and the wall. Oh dear.

I sawed away as much of the tree as I could get at, and gloomily prepared to go under the house to find out just what was going on. I postponed the expedition for a few days because I needed to buy some new batteries for my torch. Meanwhile the painters turned up and started to slap paint on everything (when I got home one evening, my ginger cat had a blue head). Eventually it could not be put off any longer and down I went. The tree had taken root in the most awkward place imaginable. It was growing up between the wall of the house and one of the posts that support the house on its piles and it had pushed the post about three inches backwards, and it was teetering on the edge of its pile. Obviously the whole tree had to come out before it grew any more and pushed the post right off the pile and the house fell down. Equally obviously there was no way that SSSSS was ever going to get at it—there simply wasn’t enough room to manoeuvre. A pretty puzzle.

I’ve been buying Frederik Pohl’s novels in hardback ever since Man Plus in 1976. In that time he has published eighteen books (I’ve just counted them—I have sixteen of them in hardback. The other two appeared in paperback before they appeared in hardback) and the latest issue of Locus contains adverts for two more to be published soon. The man is a terrible danger to my wallet. Nonetheless I keep on buying them, and I have never been disappointed. In many ways Pohl is a traditional golden age writer and he writes about the traditional golden age subjects (even if he does disguise it sometimes with “modern writing techniques”—the novel Gateway, for example, is very fragmented, and I think it is all the stronger for it). Of all the survivors of the golden age, Pohl is the only one who can still turn on my sense of wonder; the only one who still gives my spine that particular tingle that we all keep searching for so avidly. There is nothing wrong with tradition.

This particular Saturday, one of the painters (by name Fred) was very hungover. He informed me that he had enjoyed himself hugely last night and he would never do it again until the next time. He did a lot of supervising that day while his colleague slapped the paint on. Meanwhile I was under the house with a hammer and chisel (the only tools that would reach the tree). It turned out that I had to cut the tree both above and below the beam it was growing behind—it wouldn’t come out any other way. It took me about four hours and the chisel was significantly more blunt when I’d finished than it had been when I started. Every time I hit the chisel the whole house reverberated to the sound and (said Rosemary) Fred winced as his hangover throbbed in sympathy. After four hours I crawled out covered in cobwebs and proudly clutching the demolished tree. Fred eyed me sourly. “Persistence pays”, he grunted, his face white and strained. I don’t think he enjoyed that particular Saturday very much.

There is a tendency to sneer at Stephen King—probably because he is so popular. It never seems to occur to the knockers that he is popular simply because he is very good at what he does. King himself has no illusions—he has often said that he considers his books to be the literary equivalent of a big mac with fries. Well so they are, and in a book review I read recently, the reviewer took King at his word and started referring to his books as “fearburgers”. I strongly suspect that King would enjoy that joke almost as much as I did. I’ve bought the last eight of King’s fearburgers in hardback, and I have another one on order even as I write (and if it arrives before I finish this article, you won’t be reading my deathless prose in this issue of Phlogiston). King writes scary books—it is that simple. They grab you by the scruff of the neck and they never let go. Sometimes they are gross (“Oh yuck!”) as he describes something best not described and sometimes the psychological tension reaches screaming point and carries on upwards from there. And always he finds exactly the right image to carry the maximum punch. The clown figure in It, for example is terrifyingly apt. (King was interviewed shortly after It was published. “Would you like to say something about your new book?” asked the interviewer. King thought for a moment. “It’s awfully big,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to drop it on your toe.”) He is the best of the horror writers and is rapidly becoming a cultural icon. (Mick Farren, in his novel Mars—The Red Planet describes Stephen King’s rather unusual death.)

The painters did a first class job and the house looks very proud in its new colours. The tree beneath the house is successfully chopped down and the house isn’t going to fall down this year.

I’ve just bought Arthur C. Clarke’s latest last novel The Ghost From the Grand Banks, a novel about the Titanic. In hardback, of course, just like all the rest of his last novels.

BACH

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Eight, February 1991.

Those unenlightened mundane souls who don’t read science fiction think that BACH was a composer. We illuminated ones know better, of course.

BACH stands for Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke—the four writers who essentially defined modern science fiction. They took it kicking and screaming out of the pulp gutter it had languished in since 1926 and gave it some respectability. For a long time, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, they stood head and shoulders above the competition. They were SF and to a great extent they still are.

It is particularly timely to talk about them now. Bradbury has been silent for many years and is largely forgotten by today’s audience. However his books are being republished by Bantam in very handsome editions. With any luck a whole new generation will discover his very special magic. Both Asimov and Clarke have published major new novels (Nemesis by Asimov and The Ghost from the Grand Banks by Clarke) and the unexpurgated edition of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is now available for the first time ever. How do the four Golden Age masters measure up today? Were we right to sing their praises as loudly as we did? Are they still important or has time passed them by?

These questions first raised themselves in my mind when I was browsing around the Science Fiction area of one of the New Zealand computer bulletin boards. There was a message on there complaining about the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. The writer said that it was unreadable, full of old fashioned and discredited scientific ideas and far too pulpy. He only read modern writers—the old ones were boring and out of date. They had nothing to say any more.

It is easy to understand his feelings (I have been heard to say much the same thing about writers of the generation prior to BACH) and it is impossible just to say “Humph!” and dismiss what he said out of hand. So let’s look a little bit more closely…

During the period we are discussing, the doyen of hard SF magazines was, of course, Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell. I have been unable to find any reference to Bradbury ever having appeared in this magazine (if he did, it must have been for very minor work). The reason is not hard to find—there is no science in Ray Bradbury’s SF. He simply isn’t interested in putting it there. His most famous work, The Martian Chronicles (published in English editions as The Silver Locusts) deals with repeated attempts by humans to colonise Mars. So far so science fictional. But the Mars of Ray Bradbury owes nothing at all to the Mars that the world of science was exploring at the time; neither does it owe anything to that earlier Mars, the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs with its beautiful princesses, evil monsters and deeds of derring do. It was a new Mars built largely from the fancies of Ray Bradbury and modelled loosely (if it was modelled on anything at all) on small town America. In a series of brilliantly contrived and closely interwoven stories linked by recurrent themes and images Bradbury showed how humanity brought all the old prejudices with them from Earth. Repeated meetings with the somewhat ambiguous shape-changing Martians merely reinforced all those prejudices and humanity was unable to cope with this different world view. The mood of the stories is lonely and nostalgic; there is a constant feeling of dying and decay and falling apart. Many of the stories are slight (even trite) but they are told in a language the like of which there never was before on land or sea nor ever will be again. Bradbury had a power with words to touch the heartstrings. To read his stories was to be moved and changed. That was his secret and that was the whole of his power.

In story after story he painted images in the minds of a generation that all the years in between have been unable to dim.

The space ship hit by a meteor spilling its crew out into space like wriggling silverfish. The shadow of a child burned onto the wall of a house after the nuclear holocaust. The tattoos of the illustrated man. Fahrenheit 451—the temperature at which book paper burns.

Those were the images that haunted our dreams and we kept coming back for more. Bradbury was, if anything, an antitechnologist. He distrusted science. He used the images and trappings of SF but his heart wasn’t in them. He was a fantasist and a fabulist, not a technician.

He shot through and out of the SF ghetto at the speed of light. The Martian Chronicles was only his second book but it came to the notice of the literati (God knows how) and no less a person than Christopher Isherwood praised him. After that he could do no wrong and his stories appeared in the slick magazines, in Esquire and Saturday Evening Post and McCalls and Colliers and he made pots of money. He wasn’t writing SF any more but we still read the stories because his wonderful way with words still weaved its unforgettable magic spell. His was probably the most spectacularly successful non-sf writing career of any of the SF heroes until Kurt Vonnegut followed in his footsteps a generation later. But unlike Vonnegut, Bradbury never denied his origins—like the rest of us he started life as a grubby little fan publishing his grubby little fanzine (called Futuria Fantasia if you are interested. If you find a copy, hang on to it—it’s as good as money in the bank), and he was proud of his fannish beginnings.

The stories have not dated in any way because they were timeless stories (Bradbury once edited an anthology called Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow—I think he knew exactly what he was doing). The thrills, the spills and the magic are just as powerful as ever they were and to read Bradbury today is just as wonderful an experience as ever it was. He still deserves his reputation as a great writer and the fact that he was less prolific and more “artistic” than his three colleagues does not detract from his reputation at all.

But be warned—unlike the other three members of BACH, he didn’t write technological science fiction.

Just in passing here’s a fascinating bit of Ray Bradbury trivia. One of his very early stories, called Lorelei of the Red Mist (written in collaboration with Leigh Brackett) has a character called Conan who has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Reading the story is terribly disorienting and nerve wracking because of it. I can never decide whether or not he did it on purpose.

Let’s skip past Asimov and Clarke for the moment (we’ll come back to them, I promise) and talk about Heinlein. In many ways his career is just as interesting as Bradbury’s and parallels it in many ways as well. Like Bradbury he took SF into places it had never been seen before. Like Bradbury he sprawled all over the slick magazines but unlike Bradbury he never really left the SF field at all. I don’t think he ever published a novel that wasn’t science fiction, nor did he ever show any inclination to do so.

Heinlein had two reputations. At the height of the golden age when BACH could do no wrong, he was generally regarded as the best writer of the four. He led, others followed. In the 1960s, when his reputation both inside and outside the field was such that anything with his name on it guaranteed a certain minimum number of sales, he grew sloppy and careless and earned another reputation as a once good writer who was no longer capable of producing the good stuff.

I think both reputations were exaggerations of the truth.

The last time Alex (the guy who bullies me into writing these things) visited me, we played a little game. We went through my shelf of Heinlein novels and picked out all the ones we thought were worthy of respect; all the ones we had enjoyed reading. We were not allowed to use our disagreement with the philosophical position espoused by the novel as an indication that the book lacked merit. For example, we both hate Starship Troopers for what it stands for but we’ve both read it many times in the past and will probably do so again in the future. It went on the list as a good book.

Interestingly, there was a surprising degree of agreement in our choices. The only book we disagreed on was The Puppet Masters which I enjoyed but Alex didn’t. The end result of the experiment astonished me—thirty-one out of the forty books on my shelves were judged worthy. That’s a success rate of 77.5%. I think any author in the world would be proud to think that he satisfied his readers 77.5% of the time. There was nowhere near as much trash as I remembered nor as much as the critics seem to think.

I was so intrigued by the result of this experiment that after Alex had gone, I went and tried it on the writer whose name immediately pops into my mind when people ask me who my favourite SF writer is—Philip K. Dick. Again, the results were very surprising. Out of the fifty-four Philip K. Dick books on my shelves I found only thirteen that I could honestly point to and say these are exceptional books. That’s a success rate of 24%. The selection rule I used this time (since I had nobody to discuss things with) was to choose only those Philip K. Dick books that I had read more than once.

I didn’t believe it and so I checked again, but it’s true. Despite the fact that I invariably cite Philip K. Dick as my favourite writer only 24% of his books have inspired me sufficiently to make me want to read them on second or subsequent occasions. But Heinlein, a writer I generally sneer at, managed “successful” books more than three times as often.

How do Heinlein’s books stand up today? Has the science been invalidated as my friend on the bulletin board claimed?

Heinlein was rarely on the cutting edge of science. By temperament and training he was an engineer and he brought an engineer’s perspective to the science he used. He was interested more in practical applications than in neat theories. Consequently his extrapolations tended towards the conservative and I think that has stood him in good stead. His space stations and rocket ships and moon colonies are well engineered environments which break no fundamental laws of physics or mathematics. Indeed Heinlein often interrupts his story for a brief lecture on how things work (one of the very few authors who managed to get away with this successfully—again a measure of his great writing skill), and you won’t find any mistakes in those lectures. They are just as accurate now as they were the day they were written. I once thought I’d discovered an error in Space Cadet. One of the cadets is set a problem in celestial mechanics which, as it happened, was a subject I was studying at the time. I thought the answer he gave looked funny and so I set out to solve the problem myself. It turned out to be considerably harder than I first thought it would be, but I got there in the end. Heinlein wasn’t wrong—I was. There’s a lot of homework in some of Heinlein’s novels and he did it conscientiously.

But generally this was just window dressing. Like all great novelists, what Heinlein was writing about was people (and sometimes pussy cats) and their reactions to the situations they were involved in. I think the only novel in which a “fabulous invention” played a major central role was The Door Into Summer and again the household robots he postulated were just a very logical engineering application. (I don’t really count the super-science of The Day After Tomorrow since that book was written to order and the idea was supplied by Campbell and Heinlein is on record as saying he disagreed with virtually every scientific extrapolation in it—which is why he worked twice as hard to make it sound plausible of course.)

As a general rule I think it is safe to say that Heinlein never really wrote science fiction, he wrote engineering fiction. His wilder speculations were reserved mainly for social, political and economic situations. Stranger in a Strange Land (in my opinion his masterpiece) shocked everybody for more than twenty years, and now that it has been republished in a new, longer edition it will probably do it all over again.

You can’t say the same about Arthur C. Clarke. If anybody ever wrote science fiction, he did (and does).

Someone once described Arthur C. Clarke as a brain on legs. The man’s intellect is as awesome as his sense of humour is wicked (I can never read Earthlight without chuckling out loud, and most of his novels make me grin widely. The man has a very cutting wit). Age shows no signs of diminishing his cleverness and no one can deny that he keeps up to date with things. His new novel (The Ghost from the Grand Banks) is primarily about the Titanic, but has a fascinating subplot connected with the Mandelbrot Set.

Clarke has never been afraid to extrapolate from current scientific theorising and to Think Big. All of his SF novels push back the envelope, though generally in an aside or subplot, seldom on stage as a main theme. As Clarke knows perfectly well, when scientific advances are the main theme of a novel, far too often the novel turns into a lecture or a tract (look at James P. Hogan for a perfectly horrible example of exactly that). Clarke is far too much of an artist to fall into that trap.

Nonetheless, some of his books have dated because scientific advances have caught up with him and passed him by. The Sands of Mars was true to the picture of Mars as the planet was understood at the time the novel was written (Clarke always did his homework) but the space probes of the last dozen years or so have invalidated much of that picture and Clarke’s Mars is now no more real than the Mars of Ray Bradbury. The difference, of course, is that Bradbury did that deliberately and so his stories still work. Clarke did not do it deliberately and so there is at least one sense in which The Sands of Mars no longer works at all.

Does that make it any less of a novel? In some ways it does, because it obviously falls short of its writer’s intentions for it. It is no longer the reportage that it once purported to be. But the problems that it examines, the personal problems of the hero and the larger social and political problems that the fledgling colony faces are still valid because they had no connection (except peripherally) with the now out of date scientific truths. They were human and cultural problems and humanity has not changed in the generation since the book was published. Because Clarke is an artist as well as a scientist, there is still a sense in which the book does work.

But it doesn’t feel completely right, and the complaints on the bulletin board message have a lot of truth in them in this case. (And to be fair, I am sure that Arthur C. Clarke himself would agree as well.)

As time passes I think this is going to happen to more of his books. Fortunately, for the majority of them, neither he nor I will be alive to see it; so we can still keep our illusions.

Asimov, the final member of BACH, is a very peculiar case. On the one hand he is justly famous for the three laws of robotics, for the original three Foundation books, and for novels that teased and puzzled such as The End of Eternity (my favourite of all his books). However, on the other hand, much of his vast output gives the impression of carelessness, as if it was hacked out just to add another book to the list. The later Foundation novels are particularly guilty of this. There is page after numbing page of dialogue as the characters gnaw and tease endlessly at a small idea that ends up thoroughly chewed and as limp as a wet rag. Some of his books are very hard to read.

Like Clarke, Asimov’s science is always impeccable. He knows exactly what he is doing and saying and why he is doing and saying it. Again like Clarke, he is sometimes overtaken by events. His juvenile Lucky Starr novels which all take place in our solar system are perfect examples of this.

Many of his novels, however, take place in a future so remote that it is hard to point the finger and say this, this and this is scientific nonsense. Asimov invariably has the skill to make even the most outrageous things sound plausible. His “science” is likely to be longer lasting than Clarke’s because of it.

But there are other criticisms that can be brought to bear. Of all the members of BACH, Asimov has found it hardest to cast off his pulp origins. His is the least skilful writing style and he is the least in control of his medium. Bradbury, Heinlein and Clarke are eminently skilful language technicians and it is at least possible to claim that all three are artists in their own right. Asimov cannot claim that distinction. He is simply a technician and his reputation has grown largely from the cleverness of his ideas rather than the sophistication of his prose. This separates him from his three colleagues.

The bulletin board criticism of “too pulpy” fits Asimov much more than it fits the others (it doesn’t really fit the others at all) and despite the fact that Asimov is one of my heroes I have to admit the justification of it. The language, the style, and the situations that he describes are pulp, and if you don’t like pulp then you won’t like Asimov.

Bradbury’s reputation has been eclipsed because of twenty years of virtual silence. Asimov’s literary style has failed to grow with the field and his popularity (though not his reputation) has suffered because of it. Heinlein has been unjustly condemned. A few bad books late in his career have cast a shadow retrospectively over his more worthy books. His contribution to the field needs to be reassessed. Clarke just gets better and better.

That’s what BACH means, and those are my opinions of the men who made science fiction grow.

A Collective Noun of Dragons

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Nine, May 1991.

We were sitting having a quiet beer and desperately trying to remember the name of an award-winning novel about dragons written by Jack Vance.

“Dragonflight?”

“No, that was her. You know. Thing.”

“Oh yes.” A long pause. “Dragonsong?”

“No. That’s her again.”

“Oh yes.” We drank some more beer. “Damn the woman. She’s taken over completely!”

And she has. Eventually we remembered that the Jack Vance novel was called The Dragon Masters, but it took a lot of beer and a lot of thought to banish the spectre of Anne McCaffrey.

It wasn’t always thus. My first exposure to Pern was in an anthology of Hugo award winners. In 1968, the novella Weyr Search won a well-deserved Hugo. The story was well structured and tense and the dragons were sufficiently archetypal that they loomed over the tale satisfyingly. Weyr Search later formed the first section of the fix-up novel Dragonflight.

As a novel it wasn’t bad at all. It still reads well today even though the plot no longer surprises because she has done it to death so many times that just about every detail has entered the folklore. It was quickly followed by a sequel—Dragonquest—and already the rot was setting in. The British edition was abridged and cut out much of the saccharine. The novel ended with a cliff hanger; the birth of the white dragon. It seemed obvious what the next book would be called and what its subject matter would be.

It wasn’t, of course. The next book was Dragonsong, the start of a whole new series. The years passed and McCaffrey gave us Dragonsinger and Dragondrums. People began turning up at conventions with fire lizards on their wrists. I heard a fan ask Anne McCaffrey when she would be writing more about Pern. “Never!” she thundered. “Aren’t five books enough for you?”

Well, she didn’t keep her word (I wish she had). The White Dragon eventually appeared and shot to the top of the best seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, heaven knows why. The earlier books had been at least tolerable, The White Dragon was so sickly sweet and sentimental that I couldn’t finish it. It positively oozed treacle. Michael Moorcock coined a lovely descriptive phrase for books like these—he called them Epic Pooh—and it sums them up perfectly. The books are as cosy and sheltered and protected as the nursery world of Winnie the Pooh, but they attempt to deal with great epic issues and fail miserably because of the swaddling they are wrapped in. No book as twee as this can succeed on any but the most infantile level.

I lost track after The White Dragon. There were several more books in the series. An Atlas of Pern was published—dragons were now sufficiently firmly established that a whole subindustry could grow up and wrap itself around the concept. Every convention had jewellery stalls selling sterling silver dragons at ever more ridiculous prices.

Over the years, Anne McCaffrey has written many good books. I am particularly fond of The Ship Who Sang and The Crystal Singer (if you ever get the opportunity to hear her read from The Ship Who Sang don’t let it go to waste. She reads it magnificently). However McCaffrey will be remembered by posterity as the dragon lady and I suspect that her other books will largely be forgotten. The dragons that she created have a momentum all their own now and I doubt she could stop them even if she wanted to.

Because of all this, if you want to talk about dragons you have to divide SF into two periods. Before Anne McCaffrey and After Anne McCaffrey. Because of the McCaffrey phenomenon, dragons have suffered a sea change. I don’t think we can ever go back to what they were before; and that’s a great shame.

Traditionally the dragon was a fabulous monster; a fire-breathing, scaly lizard or snake, a collector and guardian of treasure hoards who was often placated by sacrifice. The dragon was so monstrous and evil that the slaying of a dragon was often the crowning achievement of great heroes. Beowulf slew a dragon, and so did Siegfried (much to the delight of Wagner).

Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur, took his name from the dream of a flaming dragon in the sky and the dragon ensign was borne proudly by many a British King. Richard the Lionheart took it on his crusades and it formed the battle standard of Henry III when he fought the Welsh in 1245. Even today, the dragon is incorporated in the armorial bearings of the Prince of Wales…

The Christian tradition held the dragon to be symbolic of sin and paganism. Christian art often shows the dragon prostrate beneath the swords of saints and martyrs. The legend of Saint George encapsulates such thinking quite neatly.

It was against this background that the traditional science fictional (or, more properly, fantastical) dragon emerged.

Tolkien was completely traditional, of course. Smaug (in The Hobbit) was a proper fairy tale dragon, monstrous and evil with a hoard of ill-gotten treasure. However in Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien introduced the dragon Chrysophylax Dives and had a great time lampooning the more traditional Smaug-like dragons. (Very few Tolkien fans seem to have read Farmer Giles of Ham which is a great pity. It is much more fun than his solemn, more famous works.) Even the iconoclastic Michael Moorcock stuck fairly close to tradition with the dragons of Imrryr in the Elric books (though there is a prescient echo of Anne McCaffrey’s dragons—the dragons of Imrryr can be ridden!!)

In her Earthsea books, Ursula K. Le Guin also stayed close to the traditional model for her dragons and the beasts she created are probably the noblest and most memorable in the whole of fantasy.

Sometimes dragons were used for humorous effect. Gordon Dickson’s The Dragon and the George, for example, or Roger Zelazny’s short story The Monster and the Maiden. And Terry Pratchett has entered the arena with the delightfully Barbara Woodhousian Lady Sybil Ramkin, a dragon breeder from Ankh-Morpork.

More science-fictionally, dragons have been equated with aliens (or, more accurately, the aliens encountered on some planet or other have looked like dragons). For example two novels by Avram Davidson: The Kar-Chee Reign and Rogue Dragon. Another science fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp, wrote a pseudohistorical novel called The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate wherein he argues plausibly that the eponymous Babylonian dragon (the sirrush) was derived from a combination of a large African lizard and a confidence trick played by the priests to make it appear other than what it was. Despite being published as a historical novel, the book owes more to sword and sorcery fantasy than it does to history. The rationalisations about the sirrush, though, tend to push it in the direction of science fiction. In many ways it is an uncomfortable book; very hard to categorise. I enjoyed it immensely. (De Camp wrote several fine historical novels. However one of them, An Elephant for Aristotle, I found to be unreadable because all the Greek soldiers—for inscrutable reasons—spoke with Scottish accents! It broke the spell.)

Jack Vance, in his Hugo winning book The Dragon Masters postulated a world where dragons were specially bred for various qualities in much the same manner that Anne McCaffrey bred her various dragons up from fire lizards. But whereas McCaffrey’s dragons are boringly named after their predominant colours, Vance’s dragons are called termagants, juggers, striding and long-horned murderers, fiends, blue horrors, basics and spider dragons. So much more evocative, don’t you think? Vance’s world of Aerlith could, superficially, be compared with Pern (though the publication date precedes that of Weyr Search by at least two years, so it might be fairer to say that Pern could be compared with Aerlith) but the resemblance is only skin deep. The story is a true epic and is anything but Pooh.

Lucius Shepard, in his 1984 story The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule uneasily straddles two worlds. The story was nominated for a Hugo which makes it science fiction. It was originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which tells us only that it is beautifully written and has nothing to say about categories). It reads like a fantasy (it has wizards and magic) but the events take place in 1853 in a parallel world. However, no matter how you classify it, it is a return, albeit briefly, to a pre-McCaffrey dragon. It is a welcome breath of fresh air.

It is obvious from the context that Anne McCaffrey would consider her own dragon books to be science fiction as opposed to fantasy. Indeed she has lately written about the original colonisation of Pern and the first attempts to breed from the fire lizards.

These are superficial trappings however. She is really writing Mills and Boon fantasy (often wish fulfilment fantasy) and her dragons owe more to the horses she herself breeds on her Irish farm than they do to the traditional dragons of fantasy and legend. Despite the scales, the fire breathing and the ability to fly between, I get an almost irresistible urge to call them all Dobbin.

The overwhelming popularity of McCaffrey’s dragons is not really surprising. Epic Pooh has always been more popular than grittier, more adult works. Somehow, somewhere, Anne McCaffrey has hit upon exactly the right emotions to evoke in order to make the people queue up in droves. They feel warm and snug and “nice” after reading a dragon book. I hate that. Good literature should be full of sharp edges, not stuffed with cotton wool. It should make you feel uncomfortable, damnit.

You simply cannot mention dragons any more without Anne McCaffrey’s name cropping up; and in the process of taking them over and making them her own she has cheapened them and stolen away their magic. She has made dragons soft and almost cuddly. In taming them she has turned them into pets. You couldn’t have done that to Smaug. You wouldn’t even think about doing it to Fafnir.

I don’t like dragons any more.

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 3: Edgar Rice Burroughs

First published in Phlogiston Thirty, January 1992.

They say you always remember the big world-shattering events. You remember where you were and what you were doing. Well it’s not true. Intellectually I know that Kennedy was assassinated, that Buddy Holly’s aeroplane crashed, that the Cuban missile crisis almost plunged the world into nuclear war—but I don’t remember any of them. I just know.

However I do remember when I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I’d not long been a member of the adult library (it took all my powers of persuasion, I was far too young and the librarian was dubious). I was browsing through the shelves and I came across a rather strange looking book. The dust cover across the spine (which was all I could see) was pure white (quite a contrast to the multicoloured spines that surrounded it), and in pale blue letters it said “A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs”. Odd. It looked so innocuous compared to the other books. Something made me take it down and look at it, and I was immediately rewarded. The front cover showed a garish picture of a green, multiarmed thing brandishing a sword. Oh Wow! It hit me right where I lived—I had to read this book. So I took it home and from the first sentence, I was an addict for life.

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect, I have always been a man, a man about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that someday I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.

Who could resist an opening like that? I certainly couldn’t.

Running from Apache Indians, his partner dead, John Carter takes refuge in a cave. He is overcome by a vapour seeping from the back of the cave. A low distinct moaning fills the air and the pursuing Indians flee in terror from whatever it is that inhabits this strange cave. Carter himself is overcome with fear, but is unable to move. The gas appears to have paralysed him. Making a supreme effort, he exercises all his will—and suddenly he is standing naked looking down at his seemingly dead body. Fearful of exploring the cave, he leaves and wanders out into the Arizona night. He reaches yearning arms to the stars, almost praying, and his eye is caught by Mars, the red planet, God of war. Immediately he feels an almost magnetic attraction, and he is drawn up through the vast reaches of space by mysterious Blavatskian mechanisms. When next he opens his eyes, he is on Mars—Barsoom.

For the first time I roamed the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom in the company of John Carter, Dejah Thoris—his Martian princess, and Tars Tarkas, the green monster who had first attracted me to the book. I came back to those dead seas many times over the years. I swung through the upper reaches of the jungle with Tarzan, I journeyed to Pellucidar with David Innes and to Venus with Carson Napier. And it was all a wild and woolly journey and the fever of it has never ceased to burn in me. Even now, after all these years, it makes me tingle. Edgar Rice Burroughs really hit the spot.

He himself was an archetypal failure. He fancied that he was something of an entrepreneur and he started business after business. They all failed. He was poor and starving. He had a wife and a child. He had even had to sink so low as to pawn his wife’s jewellery to feed his family (I know it is a cliched situation—but he did it!). One day, in his office, surrounded by the letterheads of failed businesses and watching another one die, he stacked some of the waste paper together and on it, out of sheer desperation, he began to write something he tentatively titled My First Adventure on Mars. Later he scratched it out and inserted The Green Martians. This too he did not like. He tried again—Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess. Not bad—it would do for now. Under the title he scribbled a nom-de-plume: By Normal Bean. Perhaps this was a measure of his insecurity, a desire to emphasise that despite the fantastic settings of the strange tale he was telling, he was really, under the skin, just as normal, just as human and you and me. He wished to stress how ordinary, how mundane he was.

Amazingly, he stuck to it and finished the story. He submitted it to All-Story magazine for no very good reason other than that he had read and enjoyed some stories in the magazine in the past. Rather to his surprise, it was accepted (subject to a few changes—editors can’t help but suggest changes) and it was published in February 1912 with the title Under the Moons of Mars. Infuriatingly, the typesetter for the issue refused to believe that anybody could be called “Normal Bean” and unilaterally changed Burroughs’ pseudonym to Norman Bean, much to Burroughs’ disgust. In a letter to the editor enclosing a new manuscript he noted:

…I have used my own name as author. I have done this because what little value was attached to my “trade” name was rendered nil by the inspired compositor who misspelled it…

This next novel was called The Outlaw of Torn. It was a semi-historical novel set in the time of Henry III. He had great difficulty getting the story published (it didn’t actually see the light of day until 1927. It is still seldom seen, mainly because it’s rotten). Burroughs paid little attention to that, however, because late in 1911 he began work on a novel with a plot so outrageous and engrossing that he could not leave it alone. The words flew like magic across the page. The story was fully shaped in his mind. He called it Tarzan of the Apes.

Once again, he opened it with lines of magic prose. Who in the world could resist a tale that begins like this:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own sceptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

He goes on to tell the tale of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke and his wife marooned on the coast of Africa. Of the child she bore and how she died and how John Clayton himself died when the great apes attacked his cabin as he lay grieving for his dead wife. The child was taken by the apes and raised as one of their own. They called him Tarzan (“white skin”) and he grew to maturity knowing no other family but the apes…

The story was published in All-Story magazine in October 1912, and with it Burroughs’ career took off like a rocket. The novel was published in book form in 1914 by A. C. McClurg & Co. and in one edition or another it has remained in print ever since. His first novel, with the new title A Princess of Mars was published in 1917, again by A. C. McClurg & Co. It too has never gone out of print.

To read A Princess of Mars with an adult eye is to see a quite astonishing progress. As the book moves forward, you can actually see Burroughs learning his craft. The hesitant, rambling style of the earlier sections changes and the action becomes crisper. The overly long exposition and explanation give way to dramatic interpretations that tell their own story without the need of lectures. The stilted dialogue begins to flow more naturally as the plot takes wing and flies. In the space of one short novel, Burroughs moved from being a rank amateur to being a fully fledged professional, a master of his craft. It is an astonishing performance (would that some of today’s overblown writers could master it). By the time he came to write Tarzan of the Apes he was completely in control of his medium and the book is a flawless gem. It has a complex plot which is carefully and excitingly told. Burroughs does not put a foot wrong and the book holds you enthralled from the opening paragraph to the final heart-rending scene when Tarzan gives up the woman he loves. Tarzan has just learned that he is the rightful heir to the Greystoke estates—estates which are currently managed by another man. He has to make a choice—if he reveals his true parentage and reclaims his inheritance he could do untold damage to this unsuspecting man’s life.

Here was the man who had Tarzan’s title and Tarzan’s estates and was going to marry the woman whom Tarzan loved—the woman who loved Tarzan. A single word from Tarzan would make a great difference in this man’s life. It would take away his title and his lands and his castles and it would take them away from Jane Porter also…

…“If it’s any of my business, how did you ever get into that bally jungle?”

“I was born there,” said Tarzan quietly. “My mother was an ape and of course she couldn’t tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was.”

Both of these novels spawned sequels. Burroughs would have been perfectly at home in the publishing industry of the 1980s and 1990s where every book you come across seems to be the first novel of a series. He always left a hook at the end so that if the book was a success he could hang another story on to it. The most blatant of these was in The Gods of Mars (the direct sequel to A Princess of Mars). Dejah Thoris (the heroine) and two other women have been imprisoned by the villain in a cell which is on the circumference of a gigantic wheel that takes a year to revolve once upon its axis. The cell is visible for only a short time. Soon the revolution of the wheel will take it out of sight into the hidden chamber through which the wheel revolves. It will not reappear for a year.

…I saw her raise a dagger on high and then I saw another figure. It was Thuvia’s. As the dagger fell toward the unprotected breast of my love, Thuvia was almost between them. A blinding gust of smoke blotted out the tragedy within that fearsome cell—a shriek rang out, a single shriek as the dagger fell. The smoke cleared away but we stood gazing upon a blank wall. The last crevice had closed and for a long year that hideous chamber would retain its secret from the eyes of men.

…whether the assassins dagger reached one fair bosom or another, only time will divulge.

And that is the final sentence in the book. You can almost hear the howl of rage from the readers. What happens next?

Did the dagger hit Thuvia or Dejah Thoris? It was a year before the answer was delivered, and publication of the sequel (The Warlord of Mars) was guaranteed. Everyone wanted to know what happened.

Conversely, the sequel to Tarzan of the Apes (rather boringly called The Return of Tarzan) wrapped up the story nicely. After lots of adventures (in both the jungles of civilised cities and the jungles of Africa) Tarzan reclaims his estates and marries Jane Porter. You could almost say “and they all lived happily ever after”. It was a perfectly finished story and there really seemed to be no more to say. Burroughs had worked the theme out to his satisfaction and would have been content to leave it there. But, like Conan Doyle before him, he was not allowed to leave his most popular hero alone. Tarzan was far too popular for that. For the next thirty years, Tarzan novels kept appearing in an interminable stream, most of them absolutely dire. It was obvious that Burroughs had long since lost all interest in the character. The nadir of the series was probably Tarzan and the Leopard Men (1935) which is unreadably awful. Only a completist could love it. But even in the stream of tripe there were one or two gems. Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) is a wonderfully clever satire and The Son of Tarzan (1917) and Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1919) are also thoughtful, clever and exciting books. Towards the end of his life, Burroughs seemed to regain interest in the character. Tarzan and the Castaways (1941) and Tarzan and the Foreign Legion (1944) both stand out as excellent works. There is also a touch of humour—Tarzan auditions in Hollywood to play Tarzan in a film. He is rejected as not being the right type. The foreign legion of the title of the last novel refers not to the famous French legion, but rather to a motley crew of Americans, British, Dutch and Indonesians retreating from the invading Japanese army in the jungles of Indonesia during World War II. Tarzan, as Colonel Clayton of the Royal Air Force, is unrecognised by his comrades. Then:

Sudden recognition lighted the eyes of Jerry Lucas. “John Clayton”, he said. “Lord Greystoke—Tarzan of the Apes!” Shrimp’s jaw dropped. “Is dat Johnny Weismuller?” he demanded.

(For those who don’t get the reference, Johnny Weismuller was probably the best of the screen Tarzans. He made a whole series of films in the 1930s and 1940s and most of them still stand up reasonably well.)

When Burroughs died in 1950 he left behind eighty-three manuscript pages of the next Tarzan novel. The book was incomplete and the pages have never been published.

There were many other books—few of which have survived in the popular consciousness. Some of them were in genres other than SF and fantasy. The War Chief (1927), The Bandit of Hell’s Bend (1925), Apache Devil (1937) and The Deputy Sheriff of Commanche County (1940) were very good westerns obviously written from personal experience—Burroughs spent some of his youth in what was left of the “wild west” as a cowboy on the family ranch in Idaho, and briefly in the cavalry where he saw action against the Apache.

The Mucker (1921) is a wild and fast-moving contemporary adventure involving pirates, revolution, shipwreck, murder, mayhem and a few kitchen sinks. A confusing novel that can never quite make up its mind what it is going to be. The Mad King (1926) is a mediocre book which is practically a rewrite of the then-popular Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. Set in a mythical European kingdom, it has much intrigue, romance and far too many doubles and twin brothers.

I am a Barbarian was published posthumously in 1967. It is a fictionalised biography of the Roman emperor Caligula told by the slave Brittanicus. It is a radical departure from the normal Burroughs book in both style and content—unfortunately it was published only in a limited edition and is virtually impossible to obtain. This is a shame—Richard Lupoff (one of the few critics who has managed to read a copy) claims that it is one of the best things Burroughs ever wrote. If anybody has a copy for sale, I would be willing to pay lots of money for it!

By and large, though, Burroughs was most at home in the fantasy worlds of Venus, Mars, the centre of the earth (Pellucidar) and the impenetrable jungles of Africa. Once, (in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core) he combined two of his series and Tarzan journeyed to Pellucidar with Jason Gridley in an attempt to rescue David Innes (first Emperor of Pellucidar) from the dungeons of the Korsars. The experiment was quite successful—it breathed new life into the Tarzan character and by introducing this new character into Pellucidar he managed to remove some of the staleness from that series as well. The book is one of the highlights of both series.

The idea of taking a character out of his normal surroundings in order to inject new life into the stories about him seems to have appealed to Burroughs. Towards the end of his life he attempted to do the same thing to John Carter, the hero of his Martian stories. Again, the series had become stale and in one of the novelettes published in the posthumous collection John Carter of Mars it is perfectly obvious that Burroughs is about to take the hero off into fresh fields on the moons of Jupiter (which are inhabited, it seems, by skeleton men). Unfortunately these future stories were never written, and all we have are hints.

One of the reasons that Burroughs is so famous is because of all the Hollywood movies and terrible TV series that have been made from the Tarzan books. Few of these films bear any relationship to the character that Burroughs wrote about in his books. The Tarzan of the novels was an English Lord, witty, urbane and erudite. He was fluent in dozens of languages and was equally at home in high society or the primeval jungle. He was happily married to Jane Porter and they had a son called Jack. The Tarzan of the movies, on the other hand, can barely speak English (let alone anything else—“Me Tarzan. You Jane!”), and is not married to Jane. They have a son called Boy who they found in a crashed aeroplane (since they are not married, it is obviously impossible for them to have children by any other means). The screen Tarzan spends much of his time killing fearsome beasts and people and would have no idea how to behave in polite society.

It is the screen Tarzan rather than the book Tarzan who has entered the popular mind—so much so that there have been attempts to ban Tarzan books and comics from children’s libraries on the grounds that they are immoral since Tarzan and Jane live together without being married and are therefore bad role models for impressionable children. All this despite the incontrovertible fact that in the books, Tarzan and Jane are very happily married indeed. Moreover, Jane’s father is a minister and it was he who officiated at their wedding ceremony! Perhaps I am being naive in expecting the critics actually to read the books instead of merely watching the films?

As far as I am aware, the Martian stories have never been filmed and that is a pity. I think that they would make wonderful kung-fu movies! All through the books, John Carter makes much of the fact that the reduced gravity on Mars gives him almost supernatural strength and gymnastic abilities beyond all measure. Indeed, one of the first things he does in the first Martian tale is leap over the head of an opponent (with one bound he was free…). With a skilful director I really do think that the Martian books would sing on the screen. They have romance and action, all of which can be filmed in delicious slow motion to simulate the effects of reduced gravity. And what is more they have reasonably sensible plots (unlike most films of the genre). I am quite serious in this—I am not being sarcastic.

Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950. He died quite alone, lying in bed, reading the comics section of the newspaper. I can’t think of a better way to go. He died very rich and very famous with a myriad of fans all around the world. He was a very prolific writer. Sixty books were published in his lifetime, and another nine were published posthumously. Virtually all are still in print today. Not bad for a failed businessman.

There is a terrible tendency nowadays to sneer at Edgar Rice Burroughs. People call him a hack writer, a product of the pulps catering to the lowest common denominator. They accuse him of hasty, shoddy work, of poor characterisation, bad writing, weak plots. All of these sins can be laid at his door and strong evidence can indeed be produced to back them up. But don’t ever forget this—his two most famous novels have been continuously in print for nearly eighty years; and virtually every English speaking person in the whole of the world knows the name of Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan is one of the great cultural icons of the twentieth century, way up there at the top of the list with Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Everybody (everybody) has heard of them.

How long will your favourite writer stay in print? How many people will recognise the names of your favourite heroes and heroines in eighty years time? I think most writers today would give their right word processor to duplicate those feats.

I’m a sucker for ERB—I got imprinted at too early an age and I’m probably the wrong person to praise him because I forgive him for far too much that I wouldn’t forgive another writer for. But nevertheless his accomplishments are real. They are matters of record and they cannot be taken away. And that makes him an important writer. Somewhere deep inside himself he knew what buttons to press to excite the good old sense of wonder. And when he pushed them all at the same time, there was nobody else to touch him, and there never will be.

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 4: Joe Haldeman

First published in Phlogiston Thirty-One, May 1992.

Let me tell you about Joe Haldeman, the man who taught me how to cook bacon.

Bacon has always been very important in my life. When I was a small boy at school umpty ump years ago, we had a “Thank You” book in which we were supposed to show off our brand new skills with joined together letters by writing down all the things we wanted to thank God for. The teacher gave us a few suggestions—trees and animals, our parents, our school—and all the little sycophants wrote down twee things that they would squirm with exquisite embarrassment over today if their secret was ever revealed.

I wrote:

Thank you God for lovely liver and bacon and all the thick gravy that goes with it that you soak up with your mashed potato.

I’m not sure how the teacher kept a straight face, but she did, and she showed the entry proudly to my parents at the next open day and all the rest of my life my parents have pulled my leg about it unmercifully. Oddly, though, I’ve never felt the slightest shame or embarrassment about it. I meant it when I wrote it and I still mean it now. Bacon is very important.

It shouldn’t be overcooked, but it must be very crisp with the fat just the right shade of golden brown. The texture should be slightly brittle, and the flavour should explode like a taste bomb in your mouth. That’s proper bacon.

In the introduction to a story called Summer’s Lease in a short story collection called Infinite Dreams, Joe Haldeman wrote:

…an infallible method for cooking perfect bacon every time. Cook it in the nude. This trains you to keep the heat down so it won’t stick or splatter, and it can’t burn.

When I read this, I knew that here was a man I could admire without fear or favour. Us bacon fetishists have to stick together. I tried his recipe, and it worked. Instant hero-worship!

This wasn’t the first time I had come across Joe Haldeman’s name. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison were editing a series of books called The Year’s Best SF. As the name implies, the books were annuals, and in Number 6, published in 1973, there appeared a 64 page novella called Hero by a new writer called Joe Haldeman. In their introduction, Aldiss and Harrison wrote:

In 1968 Joe Haldeman was on combat duty in Vietnam, an experience that he drew upon for War Year, a close-to-autobiographical novel about that experience which has just been published in the United States. Now here is Hero, the story of a future war which is frighteningly real, frighteningly possible.

The story was a first person account of a soldier in training. He would soon be going to fight the Taurans—nasty aliens. About three quarters of the story concerned the training that this soldier was receiving and the last quarter detailed his first action against the aliens. It was a ho-hum story in some ways—the plot details were standard SF fare. But the style of the telling was very attention grabbing. It was cynical, shot through with black humour, and half way down the second page were lines that raised my eyebrows up into my hairline (there was more of it in those days), made me laugh out loud and turned me into a lifelong Haldeman fan (a Haldemaniac, so to speak):

“Any more questions?” Nobody raised their hand.

“OK—Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.

“Fuck you, sir,” came the tired chorus.

“Louder!”

“FUCK YOU SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

The story finished far too soon for my liking, but a little note at the end, from a fictional book called Human History, A Hundred Scans (Baldwin, Sed 3, 2019 SA) pointed out that:

… the following descriptions are excerpted from The Forever War, the autobiography of William Mandella, one of four soldiers who through time dilation, experienced the full 1200 years of war …

There was obviously going to be more, and I wanted it now.

A whole year later, Harrison and Aldiss published The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 7 and there was We are Very Happy Here which was described as the sequel to Hero. The same style and humour, though the hero was tempered by his experiences. He was a sergeant now and more drawn and weary. Time dilation is having its effect and the Earth he returns to is starting to seem more and more strange to him as society moves into an odd new future that he hasn’t grown up with and doesn’t really understand. He feels dislocated and is generally regarded with contempt by those whose natural milieu this is.

The story was a little more introspective, and there were obvious hints about the sorts of things that were to come. I was intrigued. This thing was turning into so much more than a superficial plot outline would suggest. There was real depth here, real meat, and I desperately wanted to see how this new writer would handle the material.

A year later when The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 8 was published, I picked it straight off the bookshelves, bought it without even opening it and rushed it home.

There was nothing in it by Joe Haldeman. I was angry!

I’m not sure if there ever was a Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 9. Certainly there was never a number 10. It seemed I would never find out how the whole thing turned out.

Then early in 1976 I was in London on a business trip and I popped into my favourite science fiction bookstore. It was called Dark They Were and Golden Eyed (named after a story by Ray Bradbury). It was in Soho, in Berwick Street, and it was virtually the only shop on the whole street that wasn’t a sex shop or a dirty book shop. I always made a point of going there when I was in London and I always timed my business meetings so that I had time to browse through whatever the shop had in stock before I had to catch the train home.

The shop is long gone now (largely, I suspect, because nobody could ever find enough room to write “Dark They Were and Golden Eyed” on a cheque), but over the years I spent far more money with them than I could afford. (I had a credit card—who needed cheques?)

This particular day they had a huge display in the window. Vast piles of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I still have the book. The cover shows a man in a space suit sitting down on nothing at all. Resting across his lap is a cutlass in a scabbard. Behind him, vaguely drawn clockwork mechanisms tick and hands on clock faces show different times. The title is displayed in a lurid day-glo green in very large letters (with the name of the author in very small black capitals). The blurb calls it “A dazzling and powerful science fiction Catch-22” and an excerpt from the New York Times proclaims it to be “A Vastly Entertaining Trip!”

All these things were almost guaranteed to turn people off. The author was unknown, the cover was silly in the extreme and the green letters were sickening. If I hadn’t already read those two excerpts in the Aldiss and Harrison anthologies, I never would have picked it up. But I had, and I did and it was even better than I’d hoped it would be. This man was obviously somebody to watch out for.

And I still didn’t know we had bacon in common.

It is almost impossible to get decent bacon in New Zealand. Almost invariably it is undercooked—barely shown to the frying pan or the grill. It comes out wet and soggy. The fat is translucent and it leaks fluid. The lean is often greyish and the whole thing tends to be lukewarm. It tastes slimy and is very unappetising. In a recently published travel book (Tramp Royale) Robert Heinlein says much the same thing about New Zealand bacon. I always knew there was a good reason why I liked his stories so much. Us bacon fetishists can recognise one another at a hundred paces with the gas under the frying pan turned down.

The sausages aren’t up to much either…

Once, on a visit to New Zealand, Harlan Ellison was warned not to order the sausages for breakfast. Never one to ignore a challenge like this, he immediately ordered sausages—but he lived to regret it. The New Zealand sausage is dire, and like the bacon is generally undercooked and oozing goo. The only decent sausages in New Zealand must be bought from a delicatessen and are made by Europeans.

I’ve never been able to make up my mind whether it is just the sausages themselves that are inedible or whether it is the method of cooking that makes them so. Certainly there isn’t much wrong with the bacon when you take proper care with the cooking of it. But no matter how much I try, I’ve had very little success with cooking the average NZ banger.

The next Joe Haldeman book I came across was a novel called Mindbridge. It concerned the investigation into reports of alien presences in the region of the star Achernar. Again a very standard SF plot, but again the telling of the tale was what mattered rather than the tale itself.

It represented a radical departure from what had gone before (in terms of style anyway) since the author chose to tell his tale using the stylistic tricks developed by John Dos Passos for his USA novels. John Brunner had successfully borrowed the same style for Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. I was never all that fond of Mindbridge. Technically speaking the style was faultless and the sections dovetailed together well. But I felt a little let down—the book just never seemed BIG enough; neither in length nor in subject matter. I think perhaps there wasn’t enough material. Maybe I’d been spoiled by Brunner’s enormous books and by Dos Passos himself (USA is quite a monumental work even though it is made up of smaller novels). I think I’d have liked Mindbridge a lot more if there had been three times as much of it, and a lot broader canvas. (It felt claustrophobic at times.)

Meanwhile I kept eating bacon, and so too, I trust, did Joe. I’ve been a bacon fanatic since early childhood. Every year the family would go for our summer holiday to a small fishing village on the Northumberland coast. It was called Cullercoats. We always stayed at The Bay Hotel. The very first time we went there (I think I was about four years old) we went in to breakfast and there was only one rasher of bacon on my plate. My face puckered up and I turned to my father. He knew exactly what was wrong and immediately summoned a waitress and explained how much I liked my bacon. My plate was whisked away and came back piled high with lovely crispy bacon. Much to the waitresses’ surprise, I ate it all; every scrap. That was all the encouragement they needed. For the rest of the holiday they plied me with bacon. (I think they had a competition among themselves to see who could fill me up. They all lost.)

Every year after that, when we returned, they immediately remembered me and my fetish without having to be told. I thoroughly enjoyed my holidays in Cullercoats, though they were so long ago that I remember virtually nothing about them except for the bacon. Isn’t it odd, the memories of childhood that stay with us?

It is more than thirty years since I was last in The Bay Hotel, but somehow I just know deep inside that if I was to walk in there tomorrow they would immediately sit me down and feed me bacon. One needs these little certainties in life.

After Mindbridge, Joe Haldeman found himself in the position of having written a phenomenally successful novel (The Forever War) and was beginning to suffer from critics who kept telling him that his latest book was nowhere near as good as that first one. He isn’t the only author that has happened to. If you listen to the critics, Joseph Heller has never written anything as good as Catch-22 and Robert Pirsig’s new book Lila is currently being compared unfavourably with Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance. There is only one way out of this vicious circle and that is to write something demonstrably better than the first icon they keep comparing you with. In between bacon sandwiches, Joe wrote Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983) and Worlds Enough and Time (1992)—a trilogy of novels which I think are the best things he has written to date. Trapped again! Now the critics have new standards of comparison. What comes next?

The books are about the life of Marianne O’Hara, a citizen of the Worlds—orbiting colonies above the Earth. We see her on Earth, in the colonies, on Earth again after the holocaust and finally on a ship sent to colonise a planet of another star. Yet again there is nothing special about the elements making up the tale. It is all standard SF fare. But Joe Haldeman’s special genius is that he can take these stock elements down off the shelf and like a great chef who uses all the same ingredients that we do, he can cook a gourmet meal with them. All we get when we try it is bacon sandwiches. (And the infuriating thing is that he does better bacon sandwiches than we do as well.) This is called skill and talent.

Normally I hate trilogies. If a book tells me that it is volume one of a new series I generally refuse to buy it on principle. Either the thing will be rotten (in which case buying it is a waste of money) or it will be good in which case life becomes unbearably frustrating because the chances are subsequent volumes haven’t been written yet (let alone published!) and I can’t stand the nervous tension of waiting to see what happens next. Therefore I virtually never buy series books until all of them are available. Of course, the publishers conspire against me and by the time volumes two and three appear, volume one is generally out of print and is quite unobtainable. Consequently, because of such asinine publishing practices, the number of series books that I have on my shelves is vanishingly small. I’m sure I’m not the only book buyer who does this—if publishers would only make sure that when a series is complete all the volumes are in print and available (preferably in matching editions, though I don’t insist on this) I’m sure they would sell more copies. There are days when I am more than half convinced that publishers go out of their way to sell as few books as they possibly can. Their marketing practices seem deliberately designed to minimise their sales!

Anyway, for some reason that escapes me now, I broke this rule with the Worlds trilogy. I bought the books as they appeared and I made a very interesting discovery. It was not necessary to have read earlier books to enjoy and appreciate the current book.

This was a real eye-opener. Another reason I have for disliking series so much is that if I do read book one, a year later when book two appears I find that I have forgotten all the intimate little details of the first book (though I generally have retained the broad plot outline) and book two depends so much on these details and nuances that taken alone it makes no sense whatsoever. The blurb will often insist that the book is complete in itself and stands alone, but generally this is a bare-faced lie. I suspect that Joe Haldeman not only shares my love of bacon, he also shares my dislike of this particular practice because the Worlds books are beautifully crafted so that they really do stand alone and the long gap between their publishing dates is therefore not important. It is best to read them in order (though it is certainly not necessary) but you most definitely do not have to reread earlier ones in order to appreciate later ones. I wish more authors would pay attention to this point. There are several seemingly never ending series that I have now completely given up on because I’m damned if I’m going to go back and reread nine books simply in order to figure out who is doing what to whom and why in book ten. It isn’t worth the effort. Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony and George Martin please note.

So where does Joe Haldeman stand in the SF field? How to judge him? Obviously I’m biased (how could I criticise a bacon buddy?) but it seems to me that he has produced two outstandingly brilliant works (The Forever War and the Worlds trilogy), a technically brilliant but ultimately disappointing novel (Mindbridge) an outstanding work of literary scholarship (the short novel The Hemingway Hoax) and a lot of thoroughly enjoyable short stories and novels that never really amounted to more than just thoroughly enjoyable short stories and novels.

That is no mean achievement in itself (a lot of writers would give their floppy disk for as much), and I own virtually all of his books (at least half of them I bought in hardback, which I think speaks for itself). The only ones I do not own are a few that were published under pseudonyms which I didn’t find out about until long after they had gone out of print, and that first novel War Year which I have never seen and which I would give a lot to read. I would be particularly interested to see how it compares to the plethora of Vietnam novels that have appeared in the last few years; ever since it became politically correct to write about that sad and misguided conflict. How does a Vietnam novel from circa 1970 stand up in 1992?

I have never found a Joe Haldeman story to be less than entertaining. I wish I could say the same for some of his contemporaries. Also, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is not all that prolific. This is, in my view, a virtue rather than a vice. I would much rather have a small body of carefully thought out and invariably entertaining books than a welter of dross with the occasional gold nugget.

I feel hungry. I wonder if there’s any bacon in the fridge…

Guttersnipe

First published in Phlogiston Thirty-Two, November 1992.

It has been said that it is time that science fiction went back to the gutter where it belongs. No more anguished self-analysis, no more doctoral dissertations. We want purple tentacles and brass bras, we want our science fiction real.

Most of today’s more distinguished practitioners of the craft were attracted to the field back in the days of the pulp magazines when it was crude and coarse and everything was in primary colours. It was those early tales of derring-do in the spaceways that thrilled the Asimovs and the Pohls and the Silverbergs. That these writers subsequently went on to write skilful, subtle tales of wonder with none of the crudities of style that their reading backgrounds might have suggested is a tribute both to their sense and sensibility.

Those early pulps, the formative reading of a whole generation, are often what we mean when we talk about real SF. How else can you account for the overwhelming popularity of E. E. Smith, a writer moulded firmly in the pulp tradition. Even L. Ron Hubbard’s monumental Mission Earth dekalogy, though recently written, is redolent of its pulp roots and quite popular despite that.

What is the reason? Why is such trash so widespread?

Just turn on your television and watch the daily soaps. All human life is there, overdrawn, overwritten, badly acted by barely articulate robots who emote all over the spectrum at the drop of a hat. They are crude and simplistic and overwhelmingly popular. They quite unashamedly cater to the lowest common denominator. This has always been a winning formula ever since the days when Og son of Fire captivated his audience in the cave with tall tales about the neanderthals next door. In the 1930s, the American pulp magazines stuck closely to this formula and attracted exactly the same audience that today’s TV soaps do. You could probably make a good case for Kimball Kinnison and Clarrissa MacDougall being the Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue of their day.

Do we want to go back to that gutter? Do we really belong there? To a certain extent I think we do. I haven’t read an exciting adventure story in ages. They don’t seem to write them any more. Oh, I’ve read lots of worthy books, good books, beautifully written books, and I’ve enjoyed them, by and large. But there is something missing (anybody who says I’m pining for my lost youth will get fed to the Arcturian Octopoids).

I’ve raved on in this column before about the crudity of those early pulps, the terrible writing styles, the hackneyed plots, and I haven’t really changed my mind. Nevertheless there was a vitality in those stories, an excitement and a wonder and a fire that seems mostly to have died out now. I still can’t read the originals without getting a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side, but I can’t deny that I miss some of the thrills.

I think what I’m really looking for is a literate space opera. Where are they all?

Frank Herbert did it with Dune, but then he blew it in the sequels. It is possible that he blew it in Dune as well—after reading Dave Langford’s parody of it I can’t take the original seriously any more. (The parody is called Duel of Words and will be found in The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two.) Philip Jose Farmer had it in him to write one and he came very close with the Riverworld books. To Your Scattered Bodies Go definitely has that authentic gutter excitement. But again he blew it in the sequels.

Jack Vance actually wrote a book called Space Opera. It was about an intergalactic opera company. A delightfully conceited notion. Sometimes it helps to take an idea completely literally. L. Sprague de Camp wrote a story about a mad scientist. He was an absolute genius, but utterly insane so the authorities kept locking him up. But since he was a genius, he kept escaping again…

Some of the modern writers are obviously thinking along similar lines. I commend to your attention a young man called Allen Steele. He has written three novels, with more on the way (Lunar Descent, Clarke County—Space, and Orbital Decay) and he shows great promise. The books are very traditional, gutter science fiction (though better written than most). Predictably the blurb writers go into paroxysms of passion and proclaim him the new Heinlein, which is rubbish of course. Also, you could try ME by Thomas T. Thomas (I wonder what the T. stands for? Thomas, perhaps?) which knocked my socks off a few weeks ago.

The best of the moderns, though, is undoubtedly John Varley who has been depressingly quiet for far too long. He writes beautiful gutter SF and he writes it beautifully. No introspection, no messages, no PhD. Eng. Lit. postmodernisms. Just a story, pure and simple. Quite often, that’s the way I like ’em.

The one who straddled both worlds very uneasily was A. E. van Vogt—my very favourite bad writer. I own far more of his books than are good for me. Like the other “Golden Age” writers, he grew up in science fiction’s gutter and like them he did his best to transcend it. I don’t really think he succeeded. There was a time when his name was mentioned in the same breath as Asimov and Heinlein. He was one of the most popular of the golden age writers. Yet now his star is almost totally eclipsed. I think that’s a shame. He came raving at you in story after story, with plots that were just too large and too paranoid to comprehend. You always had the feeling that gigantic manipulations of plot were taking place off stage on the part of characters unseen and unheard. It made you wonderfully paranoid. His stories were utterly nonsensical (particularly the Null-A stories) and I often felt slightly ashamed that I seldom understood what was going on. I thought the fault was in me. It was only when others admitted that they too had no idea what was happening (or why) that I realised I wasn’t alone. Van Vogt was a truly inspired madman, and he made the gutter sing.

You can probably trace the decline in his popularity to an essay written by Damon Knight (available in In Search Of Wonder published by Advent) where he demonstrated quite conclusively just how bad a writer van Vogt really was. It is a wonderfully vicious hatchet job that leaves the victim naked, quivering and sliced to shreds.

But I don’t care. He painted images in my mind that time has never dulled—Jommy Cross running from the Slans, the evil Granny, Coeurl prowling his dying planet, the Mixed Men, and Gilbert Gosseyn himself. Only in a van Vogt novel could a character cry out “Hey! I’ve finally figured out the secret of the universe!” and really mean it (Rogue Ship. Terrible book. I loved it).

I think he failed to make the transition out of the gutter because ultimately he was only capable of writing in the images of gutter SF. When he was firing on all cylinders nobody, not even the great “Doc” Smith himself could hold a candle to van Vogt’s lunatic ravings. That is not a characteristic that the more sophisticated SF that came after him could cope with.

I started thinking along these lines recently after reading S. P. Somtow’s Moon Dance which the blurb promised me would do for werewolves what Ann Rice did for vampires. Well I read it and it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have a lot to do with werewolves. Oh they were major characters, but the book was much more a novel of manners and society than a tale about werewolves. How can a werewolf novel be slow moving for goodness sake? Well it was. Don’t get me wrong—I am not accusing Mr Sucharitkul of writing a bad book. I was actually very impressed with the novel. But I was in a gutter mood that day.

One of the nice things about my childhood was reading books with lurid covers. Utter trash that my father strongly disapproved of even more than he disapproved of rock and roll. (“If you don’t stop listening to those twanging guitars you’ll never pass your exams…”) The stories inside the lurid covers were invariably prim and proper (Kimball and Clarrissa would no more have engaged in premarital sex than they would have flown to the moon! Hmmm. I wonder if I mean that?) but there was still the attraction of the exciting ideas. These writers were thinking the unthinkable. Space travel, time travel, overpopulation, pollution, robots, aliens, black holes, computers. All sensible people paid no attention to that sort of rubbish. Everybody knew that it was silly and stupid and laughable. The New York Times had proved that space travel was impossible because there was nothing in space for a rocket to push against, and Britain’s very own Astronomer Royal had pooh-poohed the whole idea. We’d never see it in his lifetime.

Now of course all these things are common coin. They are not dangerous thoughts and neither are they silly. They don’t need to hide inside lurid covers. They are ideas whose time has come and they have been taken away from us and given to the world, the sensible world, the mundane world. That too, I think is part of the reason why SF is no longer down there in the gutter. They took the gutter ideas and legitimised them, touched up the chrome and gave them a coat of paint. That’s OK, but nothing replaced them.

Even the gutter is empty these days. There is a little stream of dirty water trickling past (L. Ron Hubbard) and it helps to cure the thirst a bit, but you can’t take it seriously any more.

When the ideas became legitimate they left a vacuum behind and nothing rushed in to fill it except for some half-baked mysticism—New Age rubbish, runes, crystals and pyramids. I don’t want any part of that; it is offensively empty minded.

Like any parent I am fiercely proud of the way my offspring has pulled itself out of the gutter and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Very proud and a little bit sad. We really did belong down there in the gutter together. Do you blame me for wanting it to continue?

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer

Part 5: Isaac Asimov

First published in Phlogiston Thirty-Three, February 1993.

Isaac Asimov is dead.

I never knew how much pain those words would cause me until I heard them on the radio. They hurt deeply and I am not being light-hearted or disrespectful when I say that they ruined my day. How could the death of a man half a world away upset me so much? Let me tell you why—let me tell you about the time I met Isaac Asimov, and let me share with you the love and respect that I have for the man.

It was at the World Convention in Boston in 1989. Even though Asimov did not like to travel, I was sure that he would be there since Boston is very close to New York and he could easily get there by train. (He didn’t mind trains—it was flying he hated.) I laid my plans carefully. I had bought a beautiful edition of an omnibus volume with the first three Foundation novels in it. It was bound in blue leather with gold tooling and marbled end-papers—a truly beautiful book. I packed it carefully in my suitcase and took it with me all the way to America. If Asimov was at the convention, I was determined to get it autographed.

Boston was lovely. I went whale watching and I saw fourteen whales one of which dived deep into the sea and waved its tail in the air and gave me a cliched photograph which I treasure. They are such wonderful animals. I explored the city and enjoyed the sense of history as well as the modernity. I was eager for the convention to begin.

The programme showed that Isaac Asimov would be giving a talk. There was no title, there were no details, just a bare announcement of the time and place.

The hall was full. Hundreds of people crammed themselves in to hear him talk. He apologised for the fact that no details of the talk had been announced, but said that it was all his fault since he had not told the organising committee what he was going to talk about. He hadn’t told them because he didn’t know himself—he always made these things up as he went along.

And then he talked. I don’t remember what he said—just this and that, whatever occurred to him. I do remember that it was screamingly funny (as his talks often were). If he hadn’t been such a successful writer, he could have made a living as a stand up comic. He was much funnier than many people who do make a living as stand up comics.

Towards the end of his speech he got serious for a moment—and these words I do remember. I do not have them verbatim, but this is the gist of what he said:

I have written more than 400 books and only about 75 of them can truly be considered to be science fiction. That is a very small number; a tiny fraction of the total. And yet I always think of myself as a science fiction writer; I tell people who ask me what sort of books I write that I write science fiction. It was my first love and my last love. I am truly a science fiction writer and I am pleased and proud to be here today and say this to you.

As I said, that is not a quote—but it contains the sense of what he said and I hope it gives you a feeling for the emotion with which he said it. It was perfectly obvious that he meant every word sincerely.

The audience gave him a standing ovation. I clapped and cheered along with everybody else and I had a lump in my throat. Nobody had asked him to say those things, nobody expected him to say them. They came from the heart and like everybody else who heard them I was moved.

At the end of the talk the audience charged en masse to the front, waving books to be autographed. It seemed to take the organisers by surprise—no formal autograph session had been planned for then, and they wanted the room for the next programme item. We were moved out into the corridor. The queue snaked and hummed with conversation as we patiently waited. I have no idea how many hundreds of people were in front of me or how many hundreds more were behind me, but there were a lot, believe me.

The person immediately in front of me in the queue was clutching a very battered and obviously well-thumbed and well-loved paperback. He explained to me that this book was very precious to him. It was the first book he had ever bought for himself with his very own money. As a child, he had saved up a few cents here and a few cents there and then he had bought the book. It was a collection of short stories (I don’t remember which, I’m sorry) and it dated from the 1950s. There was a photograph of Isaac Asimov on the back. He would have been in his thirties then and he looked handsome and distinguished.

The queue moved slowly, but it did move and eventually my friend presented his battered paperback for signature. He explained its origin, and Asimov was obviously touched by it. He looked at the photo on the back.

“Gee,” he said. “Did I really look like that once? I guess I must have. It all seems so long ago.”

He signed the book, and it was my turn.

He looked thin and drawn and his hair was dry and lacklustre. He was obviously very tired, but equally obviously he was thoroughly enjoying himself. Nobody was compelling him to sign autographs. He was there because he wanted to be there, with all his friends. There were many, many people still to go. I presented my book and said “Hello.”

He signed my book and I said, “Thank you very much.”

He said, “You’re welcome.”

That’s it. That is every word I have ever said to Isaac Asimov. It isn’t much of a dialogue, but I treasure it. And I treasure his signature in my book as a memento of that meeting.

Why did I admire and respect him so much? Why was he a boyhood hero and an adult hero as well?

If pushed, I have to admit that I do not think much of his novels, by and large. He never really seemed happy with a large canvas. His most successful works of fiction were short stories and novelettes. It is noteworthy, I think, that his most famous “novels” (The Foundation Trilogy, I Robot, The Gods Themselves) are all fix-ups built from shorter works. The only time I think he really was in control of himself was with The End of Eternity—a very complexly plotted and skilfully rendered novel. Over the years it has consistently been underrated by the critics and currently seems to be out of print, which is a shame.

His shorter works, however, are almost invariably excellent. Whether he was writing a humorous punch line or an excruciating pun (often the same thing as far as he was concerned—I remember fondly his story about an invasion of giant aunts) or whether he was writing something serious and meaningful such as his attempt to define humanity in his story The Bicentennial Man, he always seemed happier working at this shorter length. Certainly I always felt happier reading the shorter works. I will never forget the sheer excitement and spine-tingling wonder when I first read the Foundation stories, or the sheer cleverness of the robot tales. Had he done nothing else, these stories would have assured his literary immortality.

But he found his true home when, in the late 1950s, he began to write non-fiction articles and books. As a communicator, an explainer and a teacher he was second to none. I have done some teaching and I know just how hard it is to communicate understanding, to explain complex ideas in an interesting way. He made it all seem so easy. I remember reading his Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. I was studying the same subjects at school at the time and (theoretically at least) I was supposed to understand them. Certainly I could write down Newton’s equations of motion and solve problems using them. I knew about entropy and latent heat and watt an ohm was (sorry!). But Asimov’s book added greatly to my understanding, both broadening and deepening it.

I loved his journeys down the hidden byways of science. It was Asimov who taught me, for example, that three of the elements are named after an obscure village in Switzerland (Yttrium, Ytterbium and Terbium if you are interested and the village is called Ytterby).

But he did not restrict himself to science alone (though it was always a large part of his output). He took the whole field of human endeavour for his playground. He was a polymath, a renaissance man. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing he was not an expert in; though if you read his autobiography you will find that there were some things which left him cold. He found economics boring and incomprehensible and I couldn’t agree with him more.

He wrote a commentary on the bible and a guide to Shakespeare. He wrote a book of limericks and a history of the telescope. He wrote about the Greeks and the Romans and he wrote The Sensuous Dirty Old Man. And always, no matter what the subject, he was wise and witty. I never read a book of his that didn’t teach me something.

Yes he was a boyhood hero and he never lost my hero worship as both he and I grew older. I admired his knowledge, his skill at imparting that knowledge to others, and his wonderful sense of humour.

Isaac Asimov is dead, but millions of people throughout the world remember him with fondness and admiration. People yet unborn will read his books as I did and he will fire their imaginations as he fired mine. There is immortality, and this is it.

Horridus Horridus

First published in Phlogiston Thirty-Four, May 1993.

I like a good horror story just as much as the next pervert. Unfortunately I’m not really sure what I mean by the phrase “horror story” (though genre publishers don’t seem to have any trouble with the concept. I’m not sure if that is a reliable guide, though).

Is a horror story a tale of the supernatural or the occult? Well it might be—many good horror stories are; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance or Stephen King’s Christine. However equally as many good supernatural and occult tales are not horror stories. Consider Kipling’s Puck of Pooks Hill and Rewards and Fairies for example, or what about J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan or Thorne Smith’s Topper stories? Also many commonly accepted horror stories have nothing to do with the occult at all. What about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or if that is too science fictionish to be considered horror, what about Stephen King’s Cujo?

All right—is a horror story supposed to frighten or upset you? By that definition Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and John Harris’s Covenant with Death are both horror stories though you will always find them filed under War Fiction in the library because they are both about World War I. But they both of them frighten and upset me.

Is a horror story supposed to gross you out and make you feel ill? Try reading the very graphic description of crucifixion in Nicholas Monserrat’s The White Rajah or the vivid and detailed episodes of human sacrifice in Gary Jenning’s Aztec. And yet both these books are classified as historical fiction.

Generally a horror story tries to invoke fear in the audience (if it can’t manage fear, it will settle for loathing instead). It often uses greeblies of one sort or another as props, hence the preponderance of white-sheeted people manifesting themselves behind the arras. But the stage props do not define the appeal of the genre. The effectiveness of a horror story depends more than most on what is behind the scenes because horror is in the eyes of the beholder.

To illustrate it from a literary example, in George Orwell’s science fiction novel 1984 Winston Smith is taken to room 101, there to be confronted with his worst fear. In room 101 rats are set free to gnaw at his face, his spirit is broken and the system takes him over. That is pretty horrifying but what is more horrifying is the idea of room 101 itself. What is found in that room varies from person to person. I think I could stand rats, just. But I would be reduced to screaming helplessness in an instant if there were wasps in that room. I have an unreasoning dread, a phobia about wasps. I cannot bear to remain in the same room as one—if one flies in, I have to leave. If I am not able to leave; if for example the wasp is between me and the door thereby effectively blocking the exit, I break out into a sweat and my heartbeat goes off the scale and I start to feel faint. Like the contents of room 101, the contents of a horror story vary greatly in their effectiveness on individuals. All you can really bring to bear is a personal point of view.

I read a story once which so scared and nauseated me that I have no memory of the title or author any more. If any of you recognise this plot outline please do not tell me the title or who wrote it. I don’t want to know, ok?

The story is set in a tropical country and some horrible centipede or other has crawled into the ear of one of the characters and is eating its way through his head. There are several quite graphic descriptions of the creature gnawing at various anatomical structures, and the feelings of the character as the centipede chews are vividly invoked. Eventually the centipede breaks through into the brain and begins to chew slowly across it. The character can feel it chomping slowly across the inside of his skull. After a long time, the centipede breaks out at the other side of his head (through his other ear) and he is very relieved that his terrible ordeal is now over. Then a colleague examines the centipede. It was a gravid female and it has laid hundreds of eggs in his brain. Soon they will hatch, and the hatchlings will begin to feed.

I think that is probably the most effective horror story I have ever read. I don’t care what criteria you use to measure horror, that one has it in spades and it gives me terminal willies. Yet there are none of the usual trappings, there are no Transylvanian Counts or white-sheeted gibbering hauntings.

There are no serial killers, homicidal maniacs or things rising from the grave. Just a man and a centipede.

As you may have gathered, I have a thing about creepy crawlies which is why this story is so effective for me. It will probably do nothing at all for you, unless our phobias overlap.

Last night my cat brought home a weta, an insect that looks and behaves like a cross between a cockroach and Tyranosaurus Rex. She ate it with every evidence of enjoyment. It waved its antennae frantically as she chewed on it, then it vanished into her mouth. She munched thoughtfully for a while and then spat out its legs. Legs obviously don’t taste nice.

Wetas look like something H. P. Lovecraft might have conjured up after some bad acid. A friend of mine was once chased by a weta. It had him bailed up in a corner of his garage and he couldn’t get past it. So he dropped a brick on it. He swears it shouldered the brick aside and continued to chase him. There you are—two real life horror stories and not a ghoulie, a ghostie or a long-legged beastie (apart from the weta) to be seen. Who needs special effects?

Definitions are difficult. Horror stories wander over the whole spectrum of literature and their effect depends on individual psychoses. The things that horrify me leave you cold and vice versa.

Currently the film of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is doing the rounds. I asked a friend what he thought of it. “It was a good film,” he said. “I enjoyed it.” He thought for a while. “But it wasn’t scary!”

That sounded like a complaint. “Would you have preferred it to be scary?”

“Oh no.” He was quite vehement. “If it was scary, I’d have had nightmares. It’s much better not scary.”

There are people who get very involved with the films they see and sometimes with the books they read. I know someone who refuses ever to read books by Stephen King or Dean Koontz because they frighten him too much. I know someone else who will not watch any films or TV programmes because she identifies so closely with whatever is on the screen that she goes into deep depressions at their tragedies and has bad dreams about their sorrows and their fears.

Admittedly these are extreme cases, but they do exist. Personally I have never been frightened into nightmares by a film. I can watch any amount of gore and guts and horror and pain. I don’t have nightmares and I don’t throw up because, in the final analysis, it is only a film. It isn’t real and no matter how skilful the film maker I will always know it isn’t real. I’m not sure if this makes me abnormal. I have seen real life injury and death and it sickens me as much as it sickens anybody else.

I am trained in first aid, and I had to use that training once on a man who had walked through a plate glass window. He was quite cut up about it. I won’t apologise for the pun—sometimes the only way to cope with a situation like this is to joke about it. The doctor who taught me first aid gave me a very good lesson on how to treat someone who had fallen out of a tall building and impaled themselves on a fence. “Don’t try and remove the fencepost,” he said. “Leave it for the ambulance men to saw it off. They always leave a fair length projecting out of the body. After all the poor person has to have something to hang on to when the ambulance goes round a corner too hard.”

In some ways that is another real life horror story. . .

But I digress. For me there is always a distancing effect with a film. The knowledge of its unreality is always present, probably because I don’t have to work at it. All I have to do is sit there comfortably and absorb another person’s vision. It’s easy, perhaps too easy. There is too little work involved on my part.

Books are different. I can get bad dreams from a story. Words on paper move me more powerfully than images on a screen and with a horror story they are so much more effective. The pictures the words paint in my mind are so much more vivid, more horrible than anything the film maker can do because they are personal pictures, creatures scrabbling up from the id, my very own nightmares.

I have to work harder with words than I do with pictures because I am more involved, and the end result is always more frightening, and moving as a result. If they filmed the story of the centipede it would leave me unmoved—but the story itself still scared me.

However that does not mean that I dislike films or that they always leave me cold. Sometimes if the film maker is skilled enough it is possible to approach the same frisson of fear engendered by a story. Usually this happens with images that leave a lot unstated. Film tends not to be a subtle medium and often leaves little to the imagination. That is where the medium falls down. The monster you see is always less fearful than the monster you imagine. But sometimes they get it right. I remember vividly the closing scene from one of Roger Corman’s films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories (I think it was The Pit and the Pendulum) where a woman is bound and gagged and hidden inside an iron maiden in a torture chamber. The other characters do not know she is there. As the film closes, they leave the torture chamber, remarking that the room will be sealed and nobody will ever enter it again. The film closes with a close up shot of the terrified eyes of the woman. Then the credits roll. That is a most effective and frightening scene and it made my imagination work overtime. It isn’t easy to capture me with a visual image, but that one managed it.

Paradoxically, I think you can also make a reasonable case for censorship to tighten up a film and make it more effective. When I first saw Conan the Barbarian in the cinema, the scene where the young Conan’s mother is beheaded by the invader was shown in full graphic detail. You saw the head fly from the body and blood spurt from the neck before the body collapses. I’ve seen it a few times on television since, and the scene has invariably been cut. Now you just hear a meaty thunk as the sword connects, and there is a vague impression of a body falling (and I think a brief blur as something that might be a head falls to the ground). The horror and impact of the scene now comes just from the expression on the face of the young boy. It is much more powerful as a result. Horror sometimes lies more in what you don’t say than in what you do.

All of this is a very personal point of view. I’ve tried to share with you my impression of what horror fiction might be about. It is vague because the concept itself is vague. It’s facile to say that horror is in the eye of the beholder—but I don’t think I have any other choice than to be facile. The concept is slippery and every time I try to sneak up on it and take it by surprise, it still notices me and runs away. I find myself in the position of the person who doesn’t know what art is, but knows what he likes.

I“d like to ask you some questions. What swamp-things crawl up from your nightmares? Share them with a friend. How much common ground have you both? Now you each know how to write a horror story to gross out the other. But what will it do for me? What will it do for Mr Brown, a commuter on the Johnsonville line? If you really know the answer to that one, you could be the next Stephen King.

The End

Table of Contents

Publication History and Credits

Foreword

Introduction

A Truly British Yankee…

A Packet of Tomato Soup by Maggi. The Nestle Company (New Zealand) Ltd. 39 cents (Colour added.)

A REVIEW:The Song of Phaid the Gambler

A REVIEW:The Princess Bride

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 0: Harry Harrison

Print It Small

The Word Outside

Categories

If It’s Bigger, Is It Better?

My Early Life

Nostalgia Today and Tomorrow

Everything Happens in Threes

A Review:Eye of the Queen by Phillip Mann

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 1: R. L. Fanthorpe

A Major Reason for Continuing to Read That Rubbish They Call SF

The Naming of Names

Perhaps It’s Time to Transmogrify

Let Me Tell You About My Fantasies…

Okie Dokie

Tissue, Tissue

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 0a: Harry Harrison

Politics and Science Fiction

The Horror of It All

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 2: Phillip Mann

Food, Glorious Food

Alienation

Technical Knowledge

The Great Windycon ’87 Fan Guest of Honour Speech

The God Out of the Machine

The Rotting of the Mind

It Isn’t Only Ramans Who Do It In Threes

Cyberpunk…punk…unk…nk…k…

Boldly Going

The Roll of the Dice and The Role of the Player

Killer Kung-Fu Enema Nurses on Crack

Social Attitudes

The Technophile and the World’s Pain

The World Beyond the Hill

Feel the Loving

The Wooden Force—Escape With SF

Who Wrote What?

To Tree or Not to Tree

BACH

A Collective Noun of Dragons

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 3: Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 4: Joe Haldeman

Guttersnipe

The Lesser Spotted Science Fiction Writer Part 5: Isaac Asimov

Horridus Horridus

The End