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Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Category Archives: science fiction

Out of the inferno: Kepler

10 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Andy Sawyer, Joan Cox, John Banville, Joseph Nicholas, Phil Stephenson-Payne, Russell M. Griffin

Way back in the late-1970s (coincidentally, about the time I was myself starting, hesitantly and awkwardly, to write book reviews) Phil Stephenson-Payne persuaded the BSFA to run his personal review zine as a sort of adjunct to the BSFA’s own critical magazine, Vector. Even though it was published under the auspices of the BSFA, Stephenson-Payne still seemed to regard the tweely-named Paperback Parlour as his own personal fanzine. One copy reached me with a scrawled note asking to exchange it for a copy of my own fanzine at the time.

Around the end of the decade, the BSFA seem to have decided to take the fanzine entirely in-house. Paperback Parlour acquired a new editor, Joseph Nicholas, and a new, more aggressive, title, Paperback Inferno (this was, remember, the heyday of the so-called KTF – Kill The Fuckers – school of fanzine reviewing). In that form, Paperback Inferno, first under Nicholas and later under Andy Sawyer, lasted well into the 1990s before it was reabsorbed into Vector.

The other day, sorting through some old boxes, I came across my stash of old Paperback Infernos. It was a curious and not always comfortable experience to leaf through them. There were a number of my reviews in there, of course, but fewer than I remember. And there are books I reviewed, and even authors, of whom I have no memory whatsoever – Joan Cox? Russell M. Griffin? – and even reviews of books I would have sworn, if asked, that I had never read.

At various times during the sporadic lifetime of this blog I have used it to republish old reviews of mine, specifically those that otherwise had no online existence. So the obvious question to ask myself when I rediscovered these ancient reviews was whether I should republish them here. And in the vast majority of cases the equally obvious answer was: no. Paperback Inferno was never a venue for the long and thoughtful consideration, most of the reviews were around 200-300 words, and to be honest have no lasting interest, even to me. But one or two longer pieces did appear, including the one I’ve republished below.

Please note, I make no great claims for this review as a review. There are places where I winced at how poorly written it is, the prose is often clumsy and the critical analysis I would do very differently were I to approach the same book today. And yet, from a personal historical point of view, it is interesting, to me at least.

It appeared in the August 1983 issue of Paperback Inferno, that is just over five years after my very first review was published in the January 1978 issue of Vector. In those five years, practically everything I wrote was around the 400-500 word mark, often less. But this review is over 1,100 words, twice the length of anything I had written to that point. Was I making a point, proving to myself that I could write at greater length? I don’t know. I have no memory of writing this review, and if asked I would have said it was some years after this that I started writing longer reviews. There are two clues I can draw from this review. The first is that I bought the book in hardback when it first appeared in 1976, and read it straight away. It was the book that introduced me to the work of John Banville, and I have been a devoted fan of his work ever since. I don’t know if there was a (belated) paperback edition in 1983, but the re-read I mention in the first sentence of the review would have been of the hardback. The second clue is that I make a repeated point of saying that the novel is not science fiction (looking back now I recall that at around this time, the late-70s and early-80s, there was a lot of mainstream historical fiction that dealt with scientific subjects, fiction about science if not science fiction, but curiously I make no mention of this in the review). It is, therefore, a very early iteration of my continued interest in the borderlands rather than the heartlands of science fiction. It is strange and oddly satisfying to see this theme, this interest, crop up so early in what I laughingly call my career. But that means it is not a review that is likely to have been commissioned; it is, therefore, something I wrote on spec, out of my enthusiasm for the book. Which may be why I felt called upon, and able, to go on at such length.

The book (have I not mentioned it up to now?) is Kepler by John Banville, one of my favourite novels by one of my favourite novelists. This review does not do it justice, just as it doesn’t really do me justice, but it is interesting to see how early the seeds were planted.


A mischievous thought occurred to me as I was rereading Kepler: is it science fiction? It is, after all, fiction about science.  Indeed, so central is the science that without it there would be to fiction. Yet I cannot see SF fans welcoming it to the hallowed ground of the ghetto. However, no one should miss this book simply because it doesn’t fit into some favoured pigeonhole.

Kepler is a book that defies categorisation. It is not, of course, science fiction.  In SF, the “science” element provides the setting for the fiction; in Kepler, the science forms part of the plot, and even the characterisation. But nor does it conform to the usual pattern of an historical novel. It is, I suppose, a form of fictionalised biography, but though it gives a remarkably vivid portrait of Kepler, no one should turn to it expecting to find the facts of his life on neat and unambiguous display.

In fact, the overall success of the book is made up of a host of successes in many different areas. To attempt to pigeonhole it in any way would be impossible. One of the reasons I take such delight in it is that it crosses all borders with such insouciant ease and to such devastating effect. Banville, in other words, has written a fine novel about science; an atmospheric novel about a particularly dramatic period in history; a sharply perceptive novel of character – and they are all together in this one book.

At its heart, of course, is Johannes Kepler. It may seem an easy thing to take a real person and put him in a novel, but many good writers have come a cropper doing just that. The known facts about a person’s life and career, the imposed chronology of recorded events, can rob the author of the creative impetus necessary to bring the character to life. It is a measure of Banville’s achievement, therefore, that he has not only managed to breathe life into his Kepler but also made him one of the most vivid characters I have encountered in any novel.

Truth to tell, I don’t think I would have liked to have known Banville’s Kepler: he is sickly, obsessive, self-centred, tactless, weak, obstinate, proud, brilliant; yet he commands our attention and sympathy throughout the book. He feels that anyone who does not support him has betrayed him, yet we are made to feel, too, that he deserved much more support than he got. He has an inflated sense of his own worth, boasting that he will solve the problem of the orbit of Mars in just seven days; yet when, seven years later, he does solve this tricky problem he not only reveals his true genius but also revolutionises our world-view. He is a mass of contradictions, but we are shown how the many facets of his character relate to each other and add up to one all too human man.

Banville has a special ability to create character and is unstinting with it. Many of the secondary characters are nearly as vivid as Kepler himself:  Barbara, his wife, who nags him and has no real comprehension of his work; his infuriating mother, who dabbles in witchcraft; and above all the gross, Falstaffian figure of Tycho Brahe. Nevertheless, it is Kepler himself who holds the book together, and it is through him that Banville manages what I consider to be the most remarkable achievement of the book: he makes clear the nature of Kepler’s discoveries and the scale of his achievement, he fits the discoveries into the pattern of contemporary belief, and he conveys the excitement of the discoveries.

Science rarely fares well in the hands of novelists.  Theory, and the patient sifting of minutiae that form such an important part of scientific method, do not make for great drama, and on the few occasions when they do appear in fiction they tend to be passed over quickly or else are just plain dull. That is not the case here.  My knowledge of and interest in science is virtually non-existent, yet throughout the book I had no difficulty in understanding the development of Kepler’s ideas and found myself as excited as he at each new discovery.

Banville is able to do this because by showing each step in the process in the context of contemporary belief he is able to set up a conflict.  Right from the start, we are shown that the impulse driving Kepler to study the stars is a search for order and harmony in a world and a life that are far from orderly and harmonious. In this, Banville recreates with masterly brevity a very convincing picture of daily life in Europe at the time of the Thirty Years War. Kepler’s quest for harmony leads him to posit the idea that the intervals between the planets correspond to the sequence of regular shapes – triangle, square, pentagon, and so on. The neatness and elegance of this theory so entrances Kepler that his later and major discovery that the planets follow elliptical rather than circular paths conflicts dramatically with his earlier and favoured belief.

The whole is presented in a rich and pleasing prose that is absolutely littered with fresh and delightful metaphors. There is a studied disregard for chronology, sending the story off on flashback after flashback, and flashbacks within flashbacks, which enable the sense of the character to be conveyed far better than any mere record of events. There are even audacious little stylistic tricks that work surprisingly well, far better than they have any right to. Around the middle of the novel, Banville suddenly presents us with a series of letters from Kepler to a variety of correspondents covering some seven years. Then he balances this with a second series of letters, in reverse chronological order, from Kepler to those same correspondents. In each case it is obvious that. Kepler has received a letter in the interim, and the pairs of letters neatly present different sides of his character, by turns braggadocio and injured pride, confidence and uncertainty, anger and hurt.  It is a remarkably effective device.

One other aspect of this diverse and hugely enjoyable novel should not be overlooked: its humour.  There is a constant thread of comedy running through the book, in the situations, the characters, the dialogue, and in the occasional joke that Banville slips in. I particularly enjoyed the way, towards the end, he suddenly and very briefly introduces two Scandinavian relatives of Tycho Brahe, “Holger Rosenkrands the statesman’s son and the Norwegian Axel Gyldenstjern”, who invite Kepler to join them on their mission to England.  Perhaps wisely, he declines.

Kepler is a novel that cannot be accurately or conveniently summed up in one slick phrase. But it is a novel that sets out to be many things and succeeds in just about all of them. I hold little hope for anyone who. cannot find something to enjoy in it.

At war with time

14 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Amal El-Mohtar, Fritz Leiber, Iain Banks, Max Gladstone, Nick Bantock

One of the Facebook groups I’m a member of has recently been discussing This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This was my contribution to the discussion.

I have finally, at the second attempt, managed to read This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It was a struggle that seemed to get harder the further I got through the book. And I remain mystified by the adoration it has received, and the fact it has won just about every popular vote award going. What is it that everyone else seems to see in this book that remains completely opaque to me?

Okay, it’s nearly Christmas, do I really want to play the Grinch here? But what the hell, this is why I felt so depressed, so alienated by the book.

For a start it felt wearily familiar. In the end I decided that it is a rehash of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (1958), a novel that is probably shorter than this novella. Any story about a time war is probably influenced by Leiber, and when the two characters talk of themselves as “Change agents” (60) it is, I am sure, an explicit acknowledgement of Leiber’s Change War. The Big Time is then mashed up with Transition by Iain Banks (2009) which, if anything, is probably a bigger influence than Leiber, though it goes unacknowledged. And this unholy melange is then recast as if it is part of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine (1991). Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of these origin stories, but a half-baked and sentimentalized rehash does nothing to thrill me with a sense of the new.

[Among the comments on my original post was the suggestion that readers today probably haven’t read the Leiber, and perhaps not even the Banks (he’s on a lot of TBR lists, someone said, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is read). All of which is perhaps true. But my comment was about the authors of the work (and about this particular reader). The passing reference to “Change agents”, a formulation that I remember encountering only once in the novella, is so at odds with every other reference to the time war that I feel sure it is meant to be a nod towards Leiber’s Change War stories. So I think there is that influence in there, and anyway these were the things that leapt out at me as I was reading the story, so they certainly affected my own response.]

But this familiarity is not limited to the so-predictable source material. The story structure plays exactly the same riff over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The book is made up of pairs of chapters, each pairing following an identical pattern. In a chapter told in third person, one of the two central characters takes part in what is presumably a mission within the ongoing time war. This mission may involve lots of deaths, though any brutality is off screen and the dead are so anonymous that they could as easily be a mass of shop window dummies lying in the field of battle; or it may involve saving someone, though again the people involved are so anonymous that we cannot care whether they live or die. Either way, the exploits are so shorn of context that they tell us absolutely nothing about the war, other than the fact that it is an incoherent mess of unconnected incidents that reveal nothing of any aims, abilities or strategy that either warring side might possess. When, at one point, Blue writes: “what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I” (36), she tells us precisely nothing about either the war or the characters. This first chapter in the pair invariably ends with the viewpoint character discovering a letter that is encoded in the most ludicrous way imaginable, in the feathers of a bird, in seeds, in water bubbling in a kettle.

The second chapter of the pair is, of course, the letter. There are only two characters in the book: Red is an agent for one side in the war, Blue is an agent for the other. The exchange of letters spells out the developing love story between the two putative enemies. Honestly, if I were exchanging letters with an enemy who, moments before, was tasked with killing me, I might be rather more suspicious of their motives than either Red or Blue seems to be. But then, the cards are heavily stacked in favour of romance in this novel; that the background is a war seems to be an incidental matter, there for nothing more than local colour.

I did, at first, imagine that in an epistolary novel written by two authors, each would take one character to give her a distinctive voice. Well, if it happened here, the chapters were then edited to within an inch of their life, yielding up a smooth voice without any distinction between the two characters. This, of course, is at least partly intentional (really, if you don’t spot the only possible way this story could play out within the first three or four chapters, you’re simply not paying attention), but I think the greater intent is to give the whole a romantic, poetic feel. Though in truth the language is poetic only because none of it is rooted in anything concrete. The actual within this work is so tenebrous that it eludes anything remotely resembling a referent. That lack of substance, the sense that there is no solid world to anchor the airiness of the romance, extends to the non-letter chapters also, so much so that there is an unforgiveable sense that exactly the same voice is providing the narration as well as both of the letters. I suppose that part of the fun of the story lies in the extravagance of the scenarios through which the two characters move as they seek out the next letter. Though it does bother me that none of this makes sense, so that when you get “a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go” (109), for example, I really don’t have any idea what that is supposed to mean.

[Some of those who commented on my post said that they discerned a distinct difference between the two voices. To each his own, but that certainly didn’t come across to me.]

Actually, this use of language for effect rather than for sense, this notion that if you bundle enough images together somehow they will create an impression of something awesome, brings me to another problem I have with the story. There is a carelessness here that is evident both in the way the language is used and the story that the language is used to tell. When we are told, for instance, that “Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future” (98), you wonder, given that the characters wander freely back and forth through time, what is meant by far future? Far future of what? That is thoughtless writing. But then, on the evidence of this story, I don’t think that either El-Mohtar or Gladstone has sat down to work out what a time war might be like and how it might be structured. Presumably Red and Blue are immortal (or at least as near immortal as makes no difference) agents who travel backwards and forwards through time changing events in order to create a different future that favours their side. So far so simple, but then Red tells us that “strands bud Atlantises to thwart her” (47), that 30 or 40 times she has walked away from a different sinking island. So there are multiple timelines; changing one event doesn’t change the future, it just births a new timeline. In which case, what are they fighting for? What could possibly constitute a victory, or a defeat, in such a situation. If everything goes wrong, then there is another timeline where everything has gone right. And if there can be no victory, there can be no cause for war. How do you go to war with an enemy who has just got everything they want in a different timeline? Over and over again throughout the novel I came up against the same notion: that none of this makes sense. There is a time war not because there is any functional purpose in the war, but because the authors need their two lovers to be on opposite sides in a conflict. This is Romeo and Juliet with two Juliets but otherwise no change: starcrossed lovers on either side of an age-old quarrel they cannot repair, needing to keep their affair secret, and leading to seeming death. Make the houses of Montague and Capulet into the enemy camps in a time war and lo you render the whole thing science fiction.

In other words, all of this, the time war, the battles and escapades, the ludicrous devices for hiding a letter, are meaningless. They are the one-dimensional, crudely-painted scenes designed to be pushed out onto the stage behind the star-crossed lovers so we can pretend their romance is being played out in something that passes for a real world. Anything actual, anything that might involve the crude and the cruel, the bloody and the miserable, the things that go wrong and the things that raise doubts, is banned from this world. This is all about the feels – “Red likes to feel. It is a fetish.” (4) we are told right at the start of the novel – about the sweetness, about things not going wrong, about happy ever afters. It is a story for children who want to be reassured about the world, not for those of us who want to explore and understand and confront the world. It is saccharine and it sets my teeth on edge, and that in the end is what I really dislike about this facile fantasy.

Writing about Christopher Priest

29 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks

In his blurb for my book (The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest – did I mention I’ve written a book?), Adam Roberts notes that Priest’s work is resistant “to conventional critical approaches”. That is only too true, and it contributed to the problems I had writing this book.

My first idea when I set out on this project was to follow essentially the same plan I had when I wrote my book on Iain Banks, that is a more or less chronological account of his career. I even started a draft of the book on this plan. It didn’t work, I knew it even as I was writing it. Everything that Priest has done in his fiction works against any straightforward chronological reading. I don’t just mean the way he returned to the Dream Archipelago twenty years after The Affirmation, though that introduces complexities enough. There is also his habit of revisiting and revising his earlier work. Do you write about Indoctrinaire in 1970 or its revised edition of 1979? What about Fugue for a Darkening Island, first published in 1972, which reappeared in an extensively revised edition in 2011. Or The Glamour, which went through several different iterations between its original publication in 1984 and its revised edition of 1996. Since the past is fluid in Priest’s writing, it is only logical that it is fluid in his bibliography also, which tends to make a nonsense of a straightforwardly chronological approach. And that is not to mention the way themes, devices, and even occasionally characters, recur throughout his career. The more I went on this track, the more I realised I was going to end up tying myself in knots as I necessarily referred backwards and forwards in time.

But if not chronology, what structure could I use for the book? Thematic? Years ago, writing about Priest (which I’ve been doing, off and on, for something like 40 years now, lord help us), I noted that there are recurring devices that run through most if not all of his oeuvre: the island, the double, the book. So I began to plot out how I could construct my book by taking each of those themes in turn. And again I ran into an immediate problem: a novel featuring islands is as likely as not going to feature twins also. Keeping strictly to a thematic structure would entail constant repetition.

I was stuck. Both approaches seemed to offer benefits in discussing Priest’s fiction, but there were just as many problems. And whichever I chose I could foresee that by the end I would be tying myself into such convoluted knots that even I wouldn’t be able to see a way through, let alone the poor reader.

Then I had a silly idea: why not do both. It is easy to periodize Priest’s career: his engagement with the New Wave as he was getting started; what we might call the science fiction years from Indoctrinaire to The Space Machine; the noticeable stylistic change in his writing that takes us from “An Infinite Summer” to The Affirmation; the period when he seemed most distant from science fiction from The Glamour to The Separation; and the return to the Dream Archipelago with The Islanders. Each of those would work as a coherent, unified chapter, providing a context for his career. And I could intersperse those chronological chapters with thematic chapters taking, in turn, career-spanning ideas such as islands, the nature of reality, doubles, and the arts.

There are advantages to this. By providing thumbnail sketches of the books in the chronological chapters, I wouldn’t need to keep repeating them in the thematic chapters; while devoting individual chapters to each of the main recurring themes, I wouldn’t need to spell these out every time they came up in another work. So I would obviate a significant cause for repetition throughout the book. But there would still be repetition, of course. Some key works, such as The Affirmation, The Prestige or The Islanders, might need to be discussed in anything up to half a dozen different chapters. But maybe, I thought in a self-justifying way, this need not be a major problem. If I take as my thesis, as I do, the notion that Priest’s work is unstable, that there is no consistent and unified reading of his work, then by approaching each of these works from a different perspective, by emphasizing different characteristics in them, I could illustrate this very point. Here is not one reading of Priest’s work, but a variety of different readings. After all, I’ve read The Affirmation more times than I can count, and it seems like a different book every single time.

I admit, one of the reasons I finally went for this somewhat convoluted structure is that, when I started putting it down on the page, I found I could make it work. Whether it works for anyone else, of course, is not up to me, but this is the structure I ended up with:

Author’s Note
Or mea culpa, in which I explain that Priest is a long-time friend, but also try to lay out the complexity of the way he revisits older work.

Abbreviations
To be more accurate, this is a bibliography of his books. But the quotations I use throughout the body of the book are identified by abbreviations, which are spelled out here.

A Complete List of Short Fiction
The second part of the bibliography basically does what it says on the tin.

Chapter One: Ambivalence
The book is published as part of a series called SF Storyworlds, so I begin by laying out the troubled and complex (two adjectives that seem inevitable wherever Priest is concerned) relationship between Priest and science fiction. He is ambivalent, often antagonistic, towards science fiction; science fiction is ambivalent, often antagonistic, towards him.

Chapter Two: Accounting
The first of the chronological chapters takes us from his failed career in accountancy to his part in coining the term “New Wave”, to his early stories and eventually the first novel, Indoctrinaire.

Chapter Three: Insularity
Islands play an inordinately large part in Priest’s fiction, from the island in time of Indoctrinaire to the island city of Inverted World to the psychological and ontological distortions of the Dream Archipelago, all covered here.

Chapter Four: Inversions
For a time Priest was primarily and intentionally a science fiction writer, with Fugue for a Darkening Island, Inverted World, and The Space Machine, but in this chapter I trace how quickly a conventional approach to sf exhausted the advantages the genre offered to his ambitions as a writer.

Chapter Five: Instability
As a schoolboy Priest was knocked off his bike and suffered amnesia, with several days of his life that have never been recovered since. This created a sense that reality is unstable, a theme that crops up repeatedly from “Real-Time World” to The Islanders.

Chapter Six: Dreaming
Opinions differ on when the change came in Priest’s writing, but I date it to his story “An Infinite Summer”. There can be little doubt, however, that a more austere and literary approach to his fiction gathered pace through A Dream of Wessex, the early Dream Archipelago stories, and The Affirmation.

Chapter Seven: Doubling
Priest’s own children are fraternal twins, a curious example of life following art since he had been writing about twins and doubles throughout his career, and they would continue to be a symbol of the uncanny nature of reality.

Chapter Eight: Authorities
In the 30 years between The Affirmation and The Islanders he produced fewer books than in the first ten years of his career, but these complex and challenging works established a literary language for dealing with the issues of unreality that have been central to his work.

Chapter Nine: Authorship
It is very rare to find a novel by Priest that does not involve a stage magician (The Prestige), a painter (The Islanders), a musician (The Gradual), a photographer (The Adjacent), or more frequently a writer (The Quiet Woman, An American Story), so in this chapter I explore the symbolic weight of these artists.

Chapter Ten: Revisiting
Late style in the case of Christopher Priest seems to involve a new urgency (the last ten years of his career have been as productive as the first ten); an increasing simplicity of language tied to a complex and often oblique structure; and above all a return to the Dream Archipelago.

Chapter Eleven: Stories
A return to some of the questions I was asking in the first chapter, in which I try and fail to resolve what sort of a writer Priest is.

Works Cited

Index
And here, after 235 pages and 80-odd thousand words, the book comes to a close. Is it some sort of a victory that after all of this I still love Priest’s work?

How did Hitler win?

16 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Adam Roberts, Harry Turtledove, Hilary Bailey, Jo Walton, Keith Roberts, Len Deighton, Owen Sheers, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Gott, Sarban, Ward Moore

I am reading Adam Roberts’s essay in the new critical collection Sideways in Time, which is giving me pause for an awful lot of thought. I don’t always agree with him: I tend to view Nova Solyma by Samuel Gott as the first book-length fiction specifically set in the future rather than a form of alternate history. But mostly I do agree. Two things that particularly caught my eye were his central thesis – that science fiction tends, perhaps unthinkingly, to go with the great-man theory of history rather than what he terms the Tolstoyan approach which views history more democratically as a mass of things happening independently that together shape the world – and a casual aside, that the vast majority of alternate histories concern either the American Civil War or Hitler winning the Second World War. Now I knew this, of course, but seeing it in the context of the great man theory made me consider it in a slightly different light.

Now I know quite a lot about Civil War alternate histories; I’ve even written about it, for instance in my essay “The North-South Continuum” in What it is we do when we read Science Fiction. Most of these fictions are written by what we would now call history geeks. The civil war really was a period of happenstance, and the more you read about it the more chance events you come across where things really could have gone either way. The union really did stop a British ship in international waters in order to seize two Confederate agents, prompting Britain to send troops to Canada and almost turning it into an international war. Some union soldiers really did find three cigars wrapped in the Confederate battle plan on the eve of Antietam. On the second day at Gettysburg, Longstreet’s troops really did take an unusually circuitous route as they marched to flank the union line; and the 20th Maine really did get into position on Little Round Top only minutes before Longstreet’s troops began their delayed attack. There are probably incidents like this in any war, but they seem particularly prevalent in the Civil War. Given the moral weight of that war, the issues of slavery, freedom, the soul of America, it is tempting for anyone reading the history of the war to wonder what if they hadn’t found the cigars or Longstreet had taken a more direct route. Which is why most civil war alternate histories tend to focus on the hinge point. The moral consequences are huge and obvious, so it is less a question of what would result than of how it got there.

In Roberts’s terms, I tend to see these as more Tolstoyan, in that one small ordinary thing that is rarely the responsibility of any individual has a knock on effect on all the other things going on around it, until the tumbling dominoes result in some great moral change. Or maybe we should consider that the sergeant who found the cigars was a Great Man without him realising it, and what this theory is really saying is that one small incident is enough to transform history. Thus the Tolstoyan view would suggest that there can be no one identifiable hinge point, that one incident cannot effect that big a change. We can have this argument precisely because the focus of so much civil war alternate history is on the hinge point.

But Hitler Wins alternate histories seem to me, on reflection, to be a very different thing.

Okay, there are instances where we know the turning point. In “Weinachtsabend” by Keith Roberts and Farthing by Jo Walton, Hitler didn’t win but rather the appeasement party in Britain retained power. In one of my favourite novels in this genre, Resistance by Owen Sheers, Operation Sealion was successful. But these are exceptions. In The Sound of his Horn by Sarban and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick or “The Fall of Frenchy Steiner” by Hilary Bailey or SS-GB by Len Deighton, or any of a host of others, we don’t really know, or care, how Hitler won. In these stories, what matters is consequence not cause.

These consequences are, of course, as huge and moral as in the civil war stories, but there is a difference between white men considering the survival of black slavery which they can decry from a distance, and white men considering the moral corruption of Nazism and considering how they might be complicit or in peril. Among the best of the civil war alternate histories, for example, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee is more about the economic decline of the North than the fate of the blacks; while Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South suggests that when it comes to it slaveholding southerners are morally superior the white South Africans. How we got to that point is therefore more important than what it is like to be at that point. On the other hand, Hitler wins stories, such as “Weinachtsabend” and SS-GB are concerned with how easily the protagonist could become like their Nazi masters. Here the consequence is far more important than how we got to that point. So the hinge point in Hitler wins stories is largely irrelevant.

And it is precisely because the hinge point doesn’t matter that these are undeniably Great Man stories. By this I don’t mean that an individual is responsible for changing history, or that one single event changes history; we just don’t know. But rather, that the whole focus of the history is upon one man, or more precisely upon one institution, the Nazi state. Hitler is not the great man of these stories, it is the state for whose moral failings Hitler stands as exemplar that is the great man, the single figure that shapes and turns history.

SF before Genre

21 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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I have just read, with great pleasure, the chapter on Early SF by Arthur Evans in Roger Luckhurst’s Science Fiction: A Literary History. It reminded me of this piece which I wrote a few years back for a book that, in the end, never happened. My contribution was way too long, but we hadn’t got around to the editing stage when the project collapsed, so this is my piece in all its wordy glory.

***

It is possible that the origin of science fiction is lost. It is known that, at some point during the second century CE a Greek writer, Antonius Diogenes, produced The Incredible Wonders Beyond Thule which apparently included a voyage to the Moon. That much is known, and no more; the work is lost, we know of it only from asides in the work of others. It would seem that the rather better known True History by Lucian of Samosata, which has survived, may have been a response to the work of Diogenes.

Whether either of these works, which both include a visit to the Moon, might count as a source for science fiction is open to interpretation. Where we place the point of origin for science fiction depends very much on how we define the term, and identifying Lucian’s True History as a starting point would necessitate defining science fiction as a form of myth[1]. Other than its placement on the Moon, the story told by Lucien and, presumably, by Diogenes, is indistinguishable from the encounters with gods and monsters in strange lands that had been a part of ancient literature since at least Homer’s Odyssey.

Nor did either of these works inspire anything in the way of a literary tradition. After Lucian it would be getting on for 1,400 years before we come to another work that could be claimed, with somewhat greater justification, as a point of origin for science fiction.

Utopia, published in 1516, was the work of a young lawyer who had already attracted attention in court circles, and whose whole life was devoted to a quest for order. Thomas More had grown up during the chaotic later stages of the Wars of the Roses and worked always to promote a safe and ordered society structured on hierarchical and strictly Catholic lines. He was a close friend of Desiderius Erasmus and an intimate of the leading humanists of the day, and wrote Utopia as a work of humanist political philosophy, at the heart of which was the notion that mankind was inherently rational and so would benefit materially and spiritually in a society organised rationally.

That the book was intended to be at least partly satirical is indicated by several things within the text. The work is structured on the same lines as Erasmus’s own satire, In Praise of Folly (1509), beginning with a colloquy, a discussion in which More is introduced by his friend Peter Gilles to the traveller Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday’s stories include a savage attack on the church hierarchy in England as well as the first remarks about the land of Utopia, but we are signalled to discount his tales because his name means “purveyor of nonsense”. Yet against this satirical edge to the book, the second part is a long and detailed account of life in Utopia that is surely meant to be attractive and convincing. Everybody works, but far fewer hours each day than anyone in More’s England would have experienced; there is no poverty, no war, no famine; health provision is a hundred years in advance of what was then available in England; religious tolerance (for everyone except atheists) would have ended one of the major causes of internal strife. Daily life is communal, on the model of the monasteries, with everyone’s work being performed joyously because it brings collective happiness, harmony and order. There is an emphasis on the dignity of everyone, whatever their status in society, and, from an author who was unusual in Tudor society for the education he gave to his daughters, women had status as much as men. No matter how much nonsense Hythloday spouts, there is no doubt that this is an earthly paradise; one, moreover, that is not dependent on the second coming of Christ, or set in the fanciful realm of Cockaigne, but achievable here and now by human ingenuity. Despite the comedy of More’s picture of Utopia, from the punning title that merges “no-place” and “good-place” to place names such as “waterless river” or “phantom city”, he was at pains to stress the reality and accessibility of the state. Hythloday, for example, is identified as one of the 24 men that Amerigo Vespucci reported he had left at Cape Frio in his widely-read Four Voyages of 1507.

It is this insistence that the world can be remade by human endeavour, and that this new world is not fanciful but somewhere familiar that can be reached here and now, that encourages me to think of Utopia as science fiction. Certainly it had a tremendous influence on literature and politics throughout Europe, and the utopian thought that has been a distinct and important strand of science fiction to the present day had its origins here. Written in Latin, the common language of scholars at the time, and widely distributed among humanists, Utopia quickly established itself as a model for all works advocating a better world. These took many forms; there was the religious utopia (Christianopolis by Johann Valentin Andreae, 1619; Civitas Solis by Tommaso Campanella, 1623), the medical utopia (a tale of Taerg Niatirb incorporated into A Godlie Regiment against the Fever Pestilence by William Bullein, 1574), and the political utopia (The Law of Freedom in a Platform by Gerrard Winstanley, 1652). The fact that More made no effort to institute any of the ideas presented in Utopia when he became Lord Chancellor in 1529 suggests that he did not regard the work as a political blueprint. But with Winstanley and others, such as the educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, that is exactly what later utopias would become, eventually being incorporated into actual political systems such as that of Karl Marx. In science fictional terms, however, the most influential development in utopian literature was probably the scientific utopia, most notably New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, published posthumously in 1627.

There is disagreement on when New Atlantis was written; Brian Stableford[2], for instance, dates it as c. 1617, others put it even earlier, yet the fact that it contains a reference to the cause of his own fall from grace in 1621 suggests that it was at least being revised immediately before Bacon’s death. Certainly New Atlantis was incomplete (a continuation of the book was published anonymously by “R.H. Esquire” in 1660, turning it into a pro-Royalist tract), but it reflects the novel scientific ideas of experiment and theory that Bacon had espoused throughout his career. Salomon’s House, the institution devoted to the study of nature and the invention of technology that is at the heart of New Atlantis, had a major impact on scientific thinking during the 17th century, and was the model for the Royal Society when it was formed by Bishop John Wilkins in 1660.

The 17th century was a time of great scientific excitement, inspired by the major discoveries and theories of the latter part of the 16th century such as the Copernican Revolution, Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, Gilbert’s work on magnetism, as well as the continuing explorations of the New World. These ideas found their way in to the literature of the time, in parallel to and often incorporating utopian thought. Thus another possible point of origin for science fiction, as espoused for instance by Adam Roberts[3], is the beginning of the 17th century. Roberts, curiously, specifies the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno in 1600, Bruno having advocated the notion that there are many worlds in the universe, each with their own life form; though a more reasonable suggestion might be 1634 when Johannes Kepler’s Somnium was published.

The first drawing of the moon seen through a telescope was produced by Thomas Harriott in 1609, followed by the more detailed drawing by Galileo that appeared in Siderius Nuncius (1610). These established the notion that the moon was a landscape that might bear mountains and valleys, seas, forests and cities. The first literary work that was set upon the moon as a landscape was probably Ben Jonson’s masque, News of the New World Discovered in the Moon, first performed in 1620, though this was primarily used to extol King James I for staying out of the Thirty Years War then beginning in Europe. Even before Jonson’s masque was written, Kepler had been circulating the manuscript of Somnium to certain friends, although it wasn’t published until four years after his death in 1630. Somnium recounted a dream in which demons transport the dreamer to the moon which is used as an allegorical vehicle to explain Kepler’s own astronomical views and discoveries.

Probably of more interest in science fictional terms is another posthumous work, The Man in the Moon by Francis Godwin (1638). Again it is impossible to say exactly when this was written, though references to Queen Elizabeth in the text suggest that a draft at least may have been written as early as the 1580s, when Godwin may have heard Bruno teaching in Oxford. The Man in the Moon is a picaresque adventure in which the antihero, Domingo Gonsales, is trapped on the island of St Helena. In an effort to escape, he makes a carriage for himself which he harnesses to a flock of wild geese, but the geese, in keeping with a popular belief at the time, fly not to other land but to the moon. Godwin’s description of the journey to the moon displays an acute awareness of Copernican science, including, at the mid-point of the voyage, a period of weightlessness.

This is the first voyage to the moon by mechanical means in the history of science fiction, and as such it proved incredibly influential. In the same year that Godwin’s book appeared, John Wilkins had published a scholarly essay, Discovery of a World in the Moon (1638), detailed what was then known about the moon. Inspired by Godwin’s book, Wilkins republished his essay two years later with an additional chapter exploring the different ways that men might travel to the moon, the first scientific treatise about journeying to another world. Godwin’s book would remain pretty well constantly in print for the next couple of centuries, and led directly to stage plays such as Emperor of the Moon by Aphra Behn (1687) and The World in the Moon by Elkanah Settle (1697), and Thomas D’Urfey’s comic opera, Wonders in the Sun (1706), which was presented as a sequel to the novel. The major influence, however, would be felt in France. Cyrano de Bergerac incorporated Domingo Gonsales into his own L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune (1657) and its sequel, Les États et Empires du Soleil (1662). In a nod to Godwin, Cyrano also devised extravagant means of travelling into space, including the use of firecrackers and evaporating dew. In fact, so popular was Godwin’s anonymously published The Man in the Moon in France that by the time it became a major influence on Jules Verne, it was commonly assumed that the author was French.

Two other threads that would come to play an integral part in the warp and weft of science fiction over the coming centuries also saw their origin in the middle years of the 17th century. I.F. Clarke has identified as the first fictional vision of the future a pamphlet by the puritan firebrand Francis Cheynell that first appeared in May 1644.[4] Aulicus his Dream, of the Kings Sudden Coming to London was a propaganda piece warning of the terrors that would unfold should King Charles win the Civil War. It is not a work of future fiction that significantly explores the changes wrought by the passage of time. But Clarke misses a far more notable work of future fiction that appeared only four years later. Nova Solyma (1648) by Samuel Gott, a Presbyterian MP excluded from Parliament in Pride’s Purge, is a romantic adventure set some 50 years in the future. Although the story features pirates and bandits, kidnappings and mistaken identity, duels and cross-dressing and two heroes falling for what appears to be the same girl, it is also set in a Jerusalem from which the Turks have been ejected, where the Jews have converted to Christianity, and the Second Coming is at hand. At the time, it was a common belief among Britain’s Puritans that the conversion of the Jews was imminent and that this would herald the heaven on Earth of Christ’s return, an event that was confidently predicted for any time between 1650 and 1695. Setting his story in the future, therefore, is a natural choice for a writer trying to lay out the reality of these predictions. Nevertheless, Nova Solyma is the first substantial work of fiction to present a future that is noticeably different from the present.

Nova Solyma was hardly an inspirational work; it would be many years before writers again set their fiction in the future, and even the fact that Gott was the author was forgotten: when the book was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century it was initially ascribed to John Milton. The other key work of science fiction from this period fared somewhat better, though it would not be until the rise of feminist criticism late in the 20th century that its worth was appreciated, earlier male critics having tended to dismiss it as unreadable if they mentioned it at all.

Margaret Cavendish was one of the first women writers to publish openly under her own name, and is certainly the first woman to have written a significant work of science fiction. Part of the entourage of Queen Henrietta Maria who had fled to France just ahead of the Parliamentarian fleet during the Civil War, she spent well over a decade in exile. In Paris she met and married the Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle, and through her brother-in-law, the scientist Charles Cavendish, was introduced into a circle that included Thomas Hobbes, John Evelyn and Rene Descartes. She was particularly drawn to the atomist ideas of Epicurus which were just then becoming widely known in Europe, ideas which she incorporated into her essays and poems. Indeed it is possible that her collection, Poems and Fancies, published in 1653 formed the first atomist theory of nature to appear in England, preceding the work of William Charleton by at least a year.[5] Returning to England on the Restoration of 1660 she tried to parlay her interest in science into membership of the new Royal Society, but she was antagonistic towards the experimental method of Robert Hooke, arguing that you needed a combination of observation and reason to properly understand what was going on beneath the surface of things. She was especially critical of Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), and though she was a guest of the Royal Society on occasion, she was never invited to join. Nevertheless her sense of what goes on beneath the surface informed The Blazing World (1666) which she wrote as a reaction to Micrographia.

The story, originally published as an appendix to Observations on Experimental Philosophy, tells of a lady who discovers another world joined to this one at the North Pole. She then journeys into the interior of that other world (it is a “blazing world” because of the jewels that stud it) where she becomes the Empress. At one point, while engaged in putting down a revolt against her rule, the Empress enters into communication with the Duchess of Newcastle in our world, so that Margaret Cavendish thus becomes a character in her own novel. The trope of another world joined to this one at the poles, while not unknown, is not exactly common in science fiction and what there is probably owes little to Cavendish. However, stories set in the interior of the Earth would become particularly common during the next century, and Cavendish does seem to be a starting point for this trope. While the recursive self-reference of the book might even mark it out as a distant ancestor of postmodernism.

During the latter part of the 17th century and throughout the 18th century, two strands of fantastic literature became popular, both of which would feed into but be transformed by the science fiction of the late 19th century. The first and far and away the most important of these was the extraordinary voyage. We have already seem precursors of this in Utopia, New Atlantis and The Man in the Moon, but now such stories multiplied. In Britain in particular, where they were especially common, they often involved remote islands, as in The Isle of Pines (1668) by Henry Neville, in which a man and four women are shipwrecked and breed so many children that they divide into four warring tribes. This was an inspiration for the most famous work of the type, Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, not itself science fiction but in its description of a competent man able to turn the most unpromising of circumstances to his own advantage, it became the model for much of the science fiction that would follow.

Of equal importance was Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift. Swift was a savage satirist who turned his fire upon a wide variety of targets in this book. It is now, perhaps, best known for the first two voyages in which Gulliver encounters the tiny people of Lilliput and the giants of Brobdingnag, though in science fiction terms the third voyage, which introduces us to the savants of the flying island of Laputa (a satire on the Royal Society), and the fourth voyage, an encounter with the other in which humans are shown to be brutish in contrast to the civilised Houyhnhnms, are of greater interest.

While such adventures would continue to find wonders in the remote parts of the world right up to the novels of Jules Verne, a number of writers would pick up on the work of Godwin and Cyrano and send their travellers outward to other worlds. Examples include Voyage au monde de Descartes (1692) by Gabriel Daniel, Cosmotheoros (1698) by Christian Huygens and Iter Lunare (1703) by David Russen. These works often used the cosmic voyage as a way to present or examine philosophical ideas. The most successful example of this is Micromégas (1752) by Voltaire, in which a 23-mile-high philosopher from Sirius is exiled to our solar system, where on Saturn he encounters a scientist only one-twentieth his size, the two travel on to Earth where they decide the tiny humans are too small to be intelligent.

In parallel with these outward voyages, another strand of science fiction was going inwards. Almost at the same time that Margaret Cavendish was describing one journey to the centre of a world, the Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircher wrote a treatise, Mundus Subterraneus (1665), which suggested that the interior of the Earth consisted of a sequence of interconnected cavities. At this time it was problematic for Catholic writers to present other worlds. Church doctrine had not only put the work of Copernicus on the list of banned books and burned Bruno at the stake for advocating the idea of an infinite universe, it also held that the Earth was unique because no other world could have known Christ. To imagine another planet with anything resembling a civilization was therefore to risk the interest of the Inquisition. If they could not turn their imaginations outwards, however, writers in Catholic Europe were happy to turn inwards where a hollow Earth meant that the world they envisaged was definitively within a world that had known Christ. The 18th century, therefore, saw a rash of such stories, including the anonymous Relation d’un voyage du Pôle Arctique au Pôle Antarctique par le centre du monde (1721), Fieux de Mouhy’s Lamékis ou Les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptian dans la terre intérieure (1735-38), or Giacomo Casanova’s huge, sprawling and incoherent utopia, L’Icosameron (1788). However, the idea of a hollow Earth quickly spread throughout Europe, and before Jules Verne completed the sequence with the best and most celebrated example of the form, Le voyage au centre de la terre (1864), the more significant hollow Earth stories came from northern Europe or America.

The first of these, which was published throughout Europe and which helped to establish the author, Ludvig Holberg, as the best-known Scandinavian writer before Ibsen, was The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741). Modelled on the outlandish encounters in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Klim meets intelligent trees on a planet within the hollow Earth, then on the underside of the Earth’s crust travels from a realm of mercurial apes to one of warring birds to yet another of subhuman humans. A mixture of utopia, satire and outright fantasy, The Journey of Niels Klim made more of the hollow Earth setting than any of Holberg’s predecessors. Another variant on the theme came in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750) by Robert Paltock, another work which took Gulliver’s Travels along with Robinson Crusoe (1719) as its starting point. Wilkins undergoes a variety of picaresque adventures before being shipwrecked on an inaccessible island, where he encounters and eventually marries a flying woman, and is later transported to the subterranean world of her people in the polar regions where he brings the benefits of true religion and decent clothing.

The poles seemed to be a popular location for gateways to the underworld. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfall” (1835), for instance, the traveller glimpses what appears to be a hole at the North Pole, while in his more substantial The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) a colourful tale of shipwreck, mutiny and cannibalism ends abruptly at the South Pole as Pym and a companion approach an entranceway guarded by shrouded human figures.

Around the middle of the 18th century there was a renewal of interest in fictions about the future, though in most cases the social and technological status was unchanged from the year of composition, the only difference being in one usually political issue that the author wished to raise. In Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden it was a warning about the power of the Jesuits; in the anonymous The Reign of King George VI, 1900-1925 (1763) it was how a wise monarch is superior to a weak parliament; and in L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier it was how much better the world would be if the Enlightenment ideas of Rousseau were followed.

Yet even as this new strand of future fiction was gathering pace, another literary development was beginning that would, temporarily at least, have a more profound effect upon the development of science fiction. Starting in 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, gothic fiction was a popular, backward-looking form of literature that emphasised the baleful influence of the past, the gloomy, the mysterious, the supernatural. The aesthetics of the gothic tied it to contemporary ideas of the sublime, as defined by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, which in turn linked it to the romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was an aesthetic of wild places, of overwhelming scale, of mankind made small by their surroundings, all of which fed in to yet another starting point for science fiction.[6]

Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley began in a dream, and in a contest to write a new ghost story, a contest that also produced John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). The sense of dread that runs through Frankenstein, the settings amid alpine peaks or arctic wastes, all situate the novel squarely within the romantic tradition (and explain why it is also one of the ancestral texts of modern horror fiction). What marks the novel out, however, is its awareness of science. Around the end of the 18th century science had begun to enjoy the sort of popular interest it hadn’t had since the middle of the 17th century, an interest reflected in the poems of Erasmus Darwin and the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby. The radicals, in whose circles Mary Shelley had moved all of her life, held it as an article of faith that they should keep themselves informed of the latest scientific ideas, and experiments (as in Wright’s “An Experiment on a bird in an Air Pump”) were staged as popular entertainments. One such public entertainment occurred in 1803, when Giovanni Aldini demonstrated Galvani’s ideas of animal electricity on the body of a newly-executed criminal at Newgate, forcing an eye to open and a fist to clench. Galvanism was the guiding principle behind Frankenstein, in which the young student animates a creature made of corpses but then abandons it, so that his creation subsequently becomes his nemesis.

The novel was an immediate critical and popular success, more importantly it was quickly adapted for the stage. The earliest of these adaptations was perhaps Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake (1823), but variations on the story, often melodramatic and with only tenuous connections to the original, became a theatrical mainstay, leading up to the innumerable cinematic versions throughout the 20th century. It is probably these more than the novel itself that fixed the story in the popular imagination, so that even today the name is invariably invoked whenever someone wants to alert the public to what might be seen as the unwanted meddling of science, as in the use of Frankenstein Foods to describe genetically modified crops. Of all the works of science fiction, it is perhaps only More’s Utopia and Karel Čapek’s Robot (R.U.R., 1920) that have entered the language to the same extent.

Regardless of whether the source was the original novel or its many theatrical offspring, the inspiration of Frankenstein flowed through subsequent science fiction. One relatively early example is The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) by Mary Webb, but two of the most important variations on a theme of Frankenstein came late in the 19th century. Long before the ideas of Sigmund Freud had become widely known, they both located the monster within the self. In Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (which also drew inspiration from the psychological doubling that runs through The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by Stevenson’s fellow-Scot, James Hogg) tells of a man of science, Jeckyll, who concocts a potion that suppresses the civilised part of his character and unleashes the violence of Hyde. A parallel story is told in The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (1897), in which Griffin renders himself invisible and, freed from the watchful eyes of others, finds he is also freed from civilised restraint and embarks on a terroristic rampage. The Frankenstein theme would continue in 20th century science fiction, though there the creature would more often be transformed into the other of an alien or, following Čapek, a robot.

Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s first novel; her third, The Last Man (1826), also set in train a popular theme, particularly in British science fiction. Shelley wasn’t the first to touch on this theme. Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville had published his prose-poem, Le Dernier Homme, in 1805, presenting a vision of the Earth ending in sterility. But though a poor translation of Cousin de Grainville’s book had appeared in Britain in 1806, without the author’s name, it would be Shelley’s novel that had the greater effect. It is worth noting that two of the authors who picked up on the theme, Richard Jeffries with After London (1885) and W.H. Hudson with A Crystal Age (1887), were naturalists who seemed to view the collapse of civilisation with some approval, an attitude that may have contributed to the way the theme would be transformed into one of the characteristic modes of British scientific romance, the so-called “cosy catastrophe”.

The popular interest in science, that provided the context in which Frankenstein was written, continued throughout the 19th century, a great age of technological innovation and development. It was in 1833, for instance, that the word “scientist” was coined by William Whewell; in 1851, thousands flocked to London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition, a monumental display of new technologies and the consumer goods they produced; and in the same year, 1851, William Wilson coined the term “science-fiction” in A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject. Wilson’s “science-fiction” bears little resemblance to what we might understand by the term today, it was closer to a lyrical form of popular science (one of the works that gave Wilson the idea was The Poetry of Science (1848) by Robert Hunt), and the term disappeared from view almost immediately until it was reinvented in the late-1920s. But the fact that there was such a term is suggestive of the extent to which the ideas of science interpenetrated the literary and artistic milieu of the time.

Sir Humphrey Davy, who had done much to popularise scientific experiments as entertainment at the Royal Institution, presented a cosmological vision based on current knowledge in his posthumously published Consolations in Travel (1830). There is a similarly poetic view of the cosmos as revealed by astronomy in Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka (1848). Poe was, of course, one of the three forebears of “scientifiction” singled out by Hugo Gernsback in his editorial for the first issue of Amazing Stories (April 1926),[7] and much of his work did include scientific elements. “The Facts in the case of M. Valdemar” (1845), for example, about a mesmerist who puts a man into a trance at the moment of death, was presented as a factual scientific paper. But Poe was far from alone in his use of science. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined a chemist whose experiments with poisons rendered his daughter deadly to all who approached her; in “The Diamond Lens” (1858), Fitz-James O’Brien invented a microscope so powerful it revealed a beautiful woman in the world inside a drop of water; in The Brick Moon (1869), Edward Everett Hale created an artificial satellite in orbit about the Earth; in Lumen (1887), Camille Flammarion used his knowledge about evolutionary theory and astronomy to write convincingly about other worlds.

Many of the familiar strands of science fiction were clearly coming together at this time. It is significant, for instance, that the most important science fiction writer in the second half of the 19th century always insisted on the scientific accuracy of his work. However, the best and most lasting of the works of Jules Verne, the second of Gernsback’s triumvirate, took the form of what he termed “voyages extraordinaires”, in which the scrupulously researched technological aspects took second place to the vivid exotica of the journey. These highly colourful adventures took his heroes to a world underground (Voyage au centre de la terre, 1864); to the moon, aboard a space ship fired from a cannon in Florida (De la terre à la lune, 1865, and Autour de la lune, 1870); aboard an extraordinary submarine (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869-70); off on a comet that has struck the Earth a glancing blow (Hector Servadac, 1877); and aboard a massive flying vessel (Robur-le-conquérant, 1886). Those stories that were confined to one location or that concentrated on the technology more than the colour, such as his account of a war between the dystopian and utopian effects of technology (Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum, 1879) or the posthumously published novel of invisibility (Le secret de Wilhelm Storitz, 1910), are noticeably less successful works.

Verne had his rivals, of which the most interesting was probably the Belgian writer Joseph Henri Honoré Boex, who wrote under the pseudonym J.-H. Rosny aîné. Rosny wrote a very varied range of science fiction, whose freewheeling invention and sometimes cavalier approach to scientific plausibility made his work closer to that of Wells than to Verne. In Les Xipéhuz (1887) primitive men find themselves confronting enigmatic aliens; in Un autre monde (1895) a strange child in contemporary Holland sees a parallel world; and in La morte de la terre (1910) the last human civilisation gives way to a machine future. Like his German contemporary Kurd Lasswitz (Auf zwei Planeten, 1897), Rosny was a vigorous and engaging writer but his work was neither as widely translated nor as widely known as that of Verne. In fact Verne would not have a serious rival in contemporary science fiction until the emergence of H.G. Wells at the end of the century.

Meanwhile, even as Verne’s career was gathering pace, political events in the real world were having a profound effect upon science fiction. For half a century after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, while European armies had seen plenty of action elsewhere in the world, there had been no serious conflict in Europe itself, and an easy balance of power had developed between Britain and France. But both the peace and the balance of power were disturbed during the 1860s when Prussian wars against first Denmark then Austria led to the establishment of a new German Confederation, with Prussia as a new European power. This shift in the European status quo became particularly alarming in 1871, when Prussia invaded and defeated France. It was in direct response to these events that a new strand of alarmist fiction began to appear, first in Britain with The Invasion of England (1870) by Alfred Bate Richards and, more famously, “The Battle of Dorking” (1871) by George T. Chesney. Such stories would become a common feature in British newspapers right up to the outbreak of the First World War, indeed the constant drumbeat of dread and military unpreparedness that they sounded may have contributed to the febrile atmosphere that led to war. There were certainly stories that newspapers found their circulation increased in those towns that were named as part of the invasion route. But such future war stories, while popular in Britain (The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux, 1906; The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England by P.G. Wodehouse, 1909; When William Came by Saki, 1913), also spread to France (La guerre au vingtième siècle by Albert Robida, 1887), to America (The Battle of the Swash by Samuel Barton, 1888), and even to Germany (the anonymous Der Ruhm; or, The Wreck of German Unity, 1871). Such was the interest and fervent invention tied up in these stories throughout the half-century between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War that they mutated very quickly. M.P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) located its threat in the Orient and initiated a rash of “yellow peril” stories. The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903) was the hinge point that saw the future war story transmogrify into the spy story. And, most famously, H.G. Wells undermined the assumptions of cultural superiority found in so many of these future war stories by making London, the centre of Empire, crumble before alien invasion in The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wells, the third member of Gernsback’s triumvirate, was unquestionably the most influential of all the writers of science fiction before the genre. However, as the way that The War of the Worlds responds to earlier future war stories suggests, it would be wrong to present him as arising out of nowhere. He was, in fact, part of a tradition of scientific romance that was already well established when he arrived on the scene. The logical and mathematical games of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) had paved the way by showing a popular taste for complex ideas presented as light fiction. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was a highly successful example of the sort of colonialist fiction that Wells would react against. The Angel of the Revolution (1893) by George Griffith portrayed future aerial warfare, while The British Barbarians (1895) featured a time travelling anthropologist from the future casting a satirical eye on Victorian society. All of these fed into the work of H.G. Wells, but what came out was startling in its originality and vigor.

His first novel, The Time Machine (1895), was a harbinger of what was to come. Time travel stories before this point, such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1888) by Mark Twain, had tended to rely on magic or dream or some other sleight of hand to whisk their protagonist into another era; Wells was the first to treat time as a dimension that could be crossed by a machine. (In fact the Spanish writer Enrique Gaspar had devised a time ship in his novel El Anachronópete (1887), but the novel seems to have been little known even in his native Spain and had no influence on subsequent science fiction.) The seeming pastoral utopia visited by the time traveller that hides a canker born in Victorian class divisions is a direct response to the pseudo-medieval utopia envisaged by William Morris in News from Nowhere (1890), which was itself a response to the socialist utopia of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) which had inspired a host of Bellamy Societies across the USA. And at the end of the novel, when the time traveller goes forward to see a dying sun hanging over a lifeless beach, Wells made explicit the evolutionary ideas he had learned from T.H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science.

The Time Machine was followed over the next few years by The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) in which a vivisectionist attempts to transform animals into humans; The Invisible Man (1897) with its cinematic devices in which invisibility turns a man into a monster; The War of the Worlds (1898) which built on the idea of Mars as an older civilisation propounded by Percival Lowell for a tale of alien invasion; and The First Men in the Moon (1901) in which explorers find a dystopian hive mind society below the surface of the moon. Wells would continue to write occasional works of science fiction throughout his long and prolific career, some of which (The Food of the Gods, 1904; The War in the Air, 1908; The Shape of Things to Come, 1933; Star Begotten, 1937) are worthy of note, but after those five early novels he would never again display the same invention and power. In those five novels, however, he effectively laid out the template for 20th century science fiction.

All of the strands of science fiction we have traced through this chapter, from More’s utopian ideals to Bacon’s scientific invention, Godwin’s voyage to another world, Shelley’s man-made creature, and more, all came together in Wells and established the vocabulary of ideas and approaches that science fiction would employ thereafter. But one final strand needs to be considered. In 1868, Edward S. Ellis, the prolific author of Western dime novels, wrote The Steam Man of the Prairies in which a boy-inventor creates a man-shaped steam engine as a vehicle for adventures in the West. This paved the way for a series of highly coloured, quickly written, melodramatic dime novels by various hands that usually featured boy inventors like Tom Edison Jr or Frank Reade. These have been christened “Edisonades” by John Clute[8], and one of the more notable examples was Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898), a rapid response to Wells’s The War of the Worlds by Garrett P. Serviss. Cheap, crude and popular, dime novels such as these were the precursor of the pulp magazines in which science fiction as a genre would be born.

 

[1] Though Alexei and Cory Panshin, who do define science fiction as “the literature of mythic imagination” – The World Beyond the Hill (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989), p1 – still locate its origins in the 17th century.

[2] Brian Stableford, “Science fiction before the genre” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p15.

[3] “Science fiction was reborn in one year, 1600, the year that the Catholic Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno the Nolan at the stake for arguing in favour of the notion that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds.” Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p36.

[4] I.F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), p15.

[5] Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p160.

[6] Brian Aldiss’s definition of science fiction as “characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould” – Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree (1973; London: Corgi, 1975), p8 – effectively excludes any earlier work from consideration.

[7] Scientifiction is “the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” quoted in Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p6.

[8] See the online SF Encyclopedia: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/edisonade.

A Question of Time

29 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction, Uncategorized

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Christopher Priest, Claire North, Dave Langford, Eric M. Bosarge, Gary Wolfe, Gregory Benford, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, Ian Watson, Jack McDevitt, James Gunn, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Brunner, John Kessel, Kate Atkinson, Mark Twain, Paul Auster, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Washington Irving, Wolfgang Jeschke

Some time ago, I was invited to write an essay for a Chinese anthology of time travel stories. I was happy to do so, not least because the 2,000 words I wrote earned more than any other piece of writing I have ever done, more even than my Iain Banks book. Today a copy of the anthology, with a title that seems to translate as Time Non-Exist, arrived. I cannot read any of it, though I have found my article because my name is printed in roman letters after it. Because of that, I know I’m in there with Dave Langford, Gary Wolfe, James Gunn, Robert Silverberg and others. For those of you, like me, who cannot read Chinese, this is what I wrote.

It began with a question from the editor: Is it difficult to write about time in science fiction? Which time-themed science fiction story(s) impressed you most lately? Ever since The Time Machine in 1895, countless writers have touched upon time or time travel in their writing. Do you feel the ideas about time have been exhausted? In other words, is ‘time’ done as a long-lasting theme in science fiction narrative?

This is what I answered:

Let me start with a question you haven’t asked: why do people write about time?

Practically all fiction revolves around two fundamental issues: identity and death. Who are we? What are we doing here? How do we make sense of life given the overwhelming fact of death? And so on. You can understand everything, from a murder mystery to a love story, as nibbling away at the edges of these big questions.

The machinery that links these two issues is time. It is time that brought us to this point, and time that hurries us on towards death. Time provides the context within which all fiction happens, within which all fiction must be understood.

What is unique and exciting about science fiction is that it provides a variety of mechanisms for taking us outside time, for providing perspectives on the fundamental issues of fiction that are not available to other fiction writers. These mechanisms include, among others, setting stories in the future (whether it is the day after tomorrow or unimaginable millennia from now), immortality (which undercuts the notion of death, but then rewrites our relationship with time), alternate histories (which question the fixity of time), and of course time travel. With time travel, those two basic questions of all fiction – how did we get to this point? and what happens next? – both become answerable.

Time, therefore, is the foundation upon which all science fiction is built. So, to answer your last question first, is ‘time’ done as a long lasting theme in science fiction? No. Because if time were done, then science fiction would necessarily be done also.

Is it difficult to write about time? Yes, and it should be. Partly because worthwhile fiction is not something to be carelessly dashed off. But mostly because the author is required to externalise something that for most of us is subjective. We are aware of the passage of time when we cross off a date on a calendar, but in truth Wednesday does not feel that much different from Tuesday; on the day I turn 65 and begin to draw a pension I feel no different from the day before when I was only 64 and not a pensioner. We notice time in retrospect, the sudden awareness of how our children have grown or how our partner’s hair has turned grey, but in our ordinary day-to-day lives, time is something that impinges only slowly, obliquely. But in fiction, the changes wrought by time have to become immediate and visible.

Writing about time, in other words, requires attention to detail, and an awareness of the processes of change. If you are setting a story 500 years in the future, it might help to consider how much the world has changed over the last 500 years, and then work out how such change might manifest going forward. If you are sending your heroine back to an earlier age, then it is incumbent upon you to know what foods she might eat, what clothes she might wear, what buildings would or would not be standing, and even how the language would have changed in the interim. A modern day Englishman transported to Shakespeare’s London would have great difficulty making himself understood; a modern day American transported to the time of the Civil War would find that religious attitudes and transcendentalist philosophy had engendered a very different attitude towards everyday occurrences like death. Movement in time entails far more than simply slotting in a different highly coloured backdrop and leaving everything else the same. The difference is everything, and everything is different.

When Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” sleeps through just 20 years, he awakes to find a world that is changed utterly. It is worth noting that when H.G. Wells invented a machine for travelling at will through time, he spent no time on the mechanism itself, we don’t even have any clear idea what the time machine looked like, and other than a brief lecture on the then novel idea of time as a dimension, the philosophy behind it all doesn’t get much of a mention either. The story of The Time Machine is not about travelling through time, but about the changes wrought by time. The Victorian upper class, the 1% if you like, have descended into the feeble, childlike Eloi; the Victorian underclass have descended into the brutal, chthonic Morlocks; while over and above these petty human concerns, entropy sweeps all before it towards the desolate terminal beach.

Naturally, when science fiction writers took up the time machine that Wells had invented for them, the vast majority chose to send their protagonists into the past rather than the future. After all, it can be fun to take a different look at what the history books have told us, and those same history books give us enough research material to get at least the basics right. Not that such colourful adventures in time needed a time machine; well before Wells’s novel, Mark Twain had already given us A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, which set the tone for a certain kind of romp in the more imaginative portions of the past. But these are less stories about time than ways of separating a character from their familiar environment, whether in the past or the future, and then mining this situation for comic or dramatic effect. In truth, the history in such stories is usually no more accurate than the science, but they are generally entertaining and continue to be popular. Just in the last few years, for instance, we’ve seen such variations on a theme as Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt, The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke, and The Time Train by Eric M. Bosarge. These are not necessarily great works of literature, or even great time travel stories (though I would recommend the Jeschke), but at the very least they indicate a continuing vitality in the most familiar strand of time travel narrative.

Speaking personally, however, I feel that simply depositing someone in a different time, past or future, and then seeing what the culture clash will produce, is hardly the most satisfying way of exploring the possibilities and peculiarities of time. I find it far more interesting when authors use the freedom to move in time as a way of exploring more technical and philosophical questions. Though these tend to come in waves and then fade from view, perhaps because there are only so many ways you can ask the same question. Thus there was a time when the most interesting time travel stories revolved around paradoxes, most familiarly the grandfather paradox (what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before your father was born?). Probably the most complex and interesting such story was “By His Bootstraps” by Robert Heinlein, but after that what more is there to say? You do occasionally come across a story of time travel paradox even today, but they mostly feel overly familiar and derivative. After that there was a vogue for stories that examined the morality of changing the past, often introducing the idea of a time police (as in, for example, Times Without Number by John Brunner) whose role is to preserve the true timeline. Before long the idea of the time police was dropped and writers became more cavalier about changing the past, as in Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South or John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr Nice, but even these have become less common.

During the 1960s and 70s, when alienation became one of the dominant moods of new wave science fiction, we started to get stories in which time travel cut people off from their society and their sense of identity, as in Philip K. Dick’s “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” or Christopher Priest’s “Palely Loitering”. Avoid time travel, Ian Watson told us in what may be his masterpiece, “The Very Slow Time Machine”, because that way lies madness. Watson’s story also points us to another brief fashion in time travel, which located it in the laboratory just as we started to pay attention to some of the interesting properties displayed by tachyons. The best such story is undoubtedly Timescape by Gregory Benford.

More recently the aspect of time that seems to be inspiring the most interesting work, particularly and curiously among writers not normally associated with science fiction, is a variation on alternate history in which the central character relives their life repeatedly, sometimes learning from the experience, sometimes not. This has resulted in extravagant works such as The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, or in more restrained but psychologically acute works like Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, and 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. It is hard to imagine that time could be exhausted as a subject for fiction when it can produce work as astute and as satisfying as Life After Life.

It may be, because Auster’s novel is rather more pedestrian than Atkinson’s, that this particular strand of time narrative has run its course. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be other forms of literary experimentation with time coming our way in the future. And, of course, there are still some of the other approaches to time that still have life and novelty in them.

Thus, when you ask which time-themed sf story has impressed me most recently, the novel that immediately sprang to mind is The Gradual  by Christopher Priest, which in many ways returns to the equation of time travel with alienation that we saw in post-new wave science fiction. In fact it is not immediately obvious that The Gradual is a time travel story. It returns us, as so much of Priest’s recent work has done, to the Dream Archipelago, a world of islands that encapsulate nightmare and desire. To one musician living in a repressive northern society, the sun-blessed islands embody everything he desires, and when he has a chance to tour the islands everything seems to live up to his dreams. Until he returns home and finds, like Rip Van Winkle before him, that a stay of a few weeks among the islands has meant the passage of years on the mainland. Time moves differently in dreams, and to recover his equilibrium, to reconnect with his sense of self and with his family (in the person of his long-missing brother), he must follow a complex sequence of spiralling movements dictated by the wooden stave that he carries and that perhaps resemble the stave markers on the music he writes.

There is nothing conventional in The Gradual as a time travel story (though it is worth noting that time, in one form or another, has been a key element in everything that Priest has written this century). But then, time travel shouldn’t be conventional. Time is what shapes our lives, what carries us to our deaths, what provides the context for our understanding of each day that passes and each story that we read. There are as many ways of approaching time as there are lives on this planet, and we all constantly make anew our understanding of time. So there will always be new time narratives. The subject will be exhausted only when science fiction itself is exhausted.

The Moon and the Other

16 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews, science fiction, Uncategorized

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Ian McDonald, John Kessel

I wrote this review sometime last year, but so far as I am able to tell it was never published. So I’ve decided to put it here:

the moon and the otherWe begin with the title. John Kessel has already written several stories featuring the matriarchal Society of Cousins on the moon, one of which, “Stories for Men”, went on to win the James Tiptree Award. That story took its title from a book that played a significant part within the story. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that this novel-length work in the same setting (though some years later) also takes its title from a book featured within the story.

In this instance, the book within a book is something that was written after a mysterious youthful episode by one of the novel’s central characters. That book was called Lune et l’autre, and Kessel’s title here is a literal translation. But in the original French, Lune et l’autre is a pun, L’une et l’autre, which we might colloquially render as “one or the other”. In English, the pun is lost, but the spirit of the pun, the issue of choice that it represents, informs the whole book.

(Parenthetically, it is also worth noting that Lune et l’autre was the title given to a French collection of Kessel’s four previous stories of the Society of Cousins, so the repurposing of that title here has yet more layers to it: homage, wordplay, not to mention a nightmare for future bibliographers.)

But let us consider more carefully what the title tells us about this book. The moon, yes, has been a familiar setting for science fiction since the days of Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin, but for practically all of that time the moon we have seen has been a single place, a unified polity; if there is a moonbase, a lunar society, then it is all under one central government. But of late, where we see the moon presented declaratively in a title, in Ian McDonald’s Luna, for example, the moon is far from unified. And that is also the case here. Aside from the Society of Cousins, at least half a dozen other independent, self-governing communities on the moon are mentioned. And though there is an over-arching Organization of Lunar States, these polities are far from unified in their background, beliefs or governance. The moon here in the title, as in McDonald’s diptych, signifies a place of division rather than unity.

If the moon provides the setting, however, it is the second element in the title that provides the plot. Because throughout the novel we are confronted with different understandings of what the other might be. In the quietus of the novel’s coda, the one and the other are seen to come together in a marriage, but that is a rare show of understanding and commonality in a novel in which the one and the other are perpetually at odds with each other. Indeed, one of the issues that confronts the reader is deciding what, in this context, the other might be. The other is, of course, the outsider, the rival, the threat, the one who is not like us, and the novel is crowded with contenders for that role. Indeed, one of the things that the novel insists upon is that everyone is the other to someone.

Thus, on one level, the Society of Cousins is the other. The Society started in California as a utopian movement, but has now been established on the moon for many decades. It is a society in which women, specifically a Council of Matrons, rule, while men are denied the vote. Sex is liberally available and men are valued members of society, they just have no say in its governance. But this social structure is anathema to the other lunar states, where men are in the ascendant, and which are dismissed by the Cousins as the patriarchy. So, to the other communities on the moon the Society of Cousins is looked on as the other, a curiosity, a disturbance in the status quo, perhaps a threat. The other states are not exactly uniform; the one we see most of, for instance, Persepolis, is a liberal Islamic democracy modelled on pre-Revolutionary Iran, but that religious strain is not found elsewhere. Nevertheless, these states are united in their dis-ease in the face of institutionalized female rule, and so one of the novel’s plot strands involves the establishment of a commission by the Organization of Lunar States ostensibly to examine the position of men in the Society of Cousins, really to provide an excuse for the OLS to take over the Society, and secretively to act as a cover under which enemies of the Cousins might smuggle in the means to launch an attack.

All of which might provide the most dramatic moments in the novel, but it is hardly the most important plot element. The Society of Cousins is, inevitably, far less utopian than it might have set out to be. It may be more peaceful than other states, but not by much, and at a cost of resentments and dissension that are now coming to the surface, and incidentally playing into the hands of the OLS. For instance, the distrust that the Cousins feel for everyone outside their literal bubble (the Society of Cousins is established within a dome, unlike some of the other lunar communities which are established underground) leads at one point to them removing every scientific paper published within the Society from all public channels, which in turn fuels the OLS suspicion that the Cousins have developed a secret weapon. There are reform movements that are becoming ever more radical in their rhetoric, causing the Matrons to become more determinedly conservative, while an extremist Spartacist movement is turning towards sabotage. The cross-currents of these political tensions produce a variety of others. The reformers demanding votes for men are largely women, who thus put themselves at odds with their own society. Men are automatically others within this society, but en masse they are divided between those who demand equality and those who are happy with the way things are.

These political tensions are personified on the individual level by the novel’s three central characters. Carey, the author of Lune et l’autre, is a one-time sports hero and a member of the leading families in the Society of Cousins (despite its self-image, this is still a society of hierarchies). In most respects he is happy with his place in society, except when it comes to his son. Social practice among the Cousins is for girls to leave the family home early to learn independence and authority, while boys are retained within the family and in a sense infantilised by continued mothering. Any child of a liaison is automatically the responsibility of the mother, fatherhood has no legal status. But Carey wants to be a father to his son, wants to take on the rights and responsibilities of that role, and his legal challenge over the issue becomes a catalyst for the reform movement, even though he resists all attempts to recruit him into the campaign.

Mira is another at odds with her own society, in her case her rather formless resentments have their origin in her sense of guilt over the death of her younger brother some years before. She makes angry, polemical videos, issued under the nom de guerre of Looker, which are appropriated by the reform movement even though she herself resists any active engagement with the movement. She is an on-again, off-again lover of Carey, but testifies against him in his fatherhood hearing. None of the characters in the novel are one-dimensional mouthpieces for a singly position or perception, but even in these terms Mira is a mass of contradictions. She is other to those closest to her, and other to herself, but this does make her far and away the most interesting character in the book.

The final member of the triumvirate is Erno. Once a member of a radical movement in the Society of Cousins, he was involved in a terrorist act that unwittingly killed his own mother, and as a consequence he was exiled. Since then he has drifted from state to state, taking on a variety of menial roles, living hand to mouth, and moving on usually just one step ahead of the law. Then, in Persephone, an accident that severs his hand also gives him an opportunity to marry into the richest family on the moon, and to establish his own successful biotechnology business. As an outcast he is perpetually the other, and his experience of the patriarchy from the bottom has made him increasingly sympathetic to the Cousins. When he unexpectedly finds himself on the OLS commission to investigate the Society of Cousins, he is in an awkward position somewhere between his fellow commissioners who have made their minds up even before they arrive at the Society, and the Cousins who still regard him with hostility because of his earlier crimes.

This is an extraordinarily subtle novel. Characters act wrong-headedly for the best of reasons, or act sensibly for the worst of reasons. Our sympathies are directed towards the Society of Cousins only because its innumerable faults and flaws are clearly displayed. No individual or group acts according to a simple, straightforward motivation. Those whose desires and actions place them most firmly on one side or another, actually want nothing to do with either side. Violence does not work, except that violence may be the only way to end an impasse. It is a novel filled with contradictions, because it is a novel about the other, and everyone is the other.

Brian W. Aldiss

19 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

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Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks

I have just signed and delivered the contract which means I will be writing a book on Brian Aldiss for the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.

This will be my third volume on a British science fiction writer, following the Modern Masters of Science Fiction volume on Iain Banks, which came out last year, and the volume on Christopher Priest that I am currently researching for Gylphi. It is also, in its way, the most problematic.

The Iain Banks book was scary, because I had never written a single work of that length before (my previous books had been collections of much shorter essays and reviews). But it was not at all scary in the sense that I knew Iain and liked (most of) his work; also, there was a single coherent narrative thread to follow, which simplified the process a great deal.

The Christopher Priest volume is slightly more problematic. I’ve known Chris a long time (he was my best man when I got married) so there is the issue of retaining a certain distance in what I write. And I am not planning to follow the same basic chronological structure that I did for the Banks book, this volume is meant to be more thematic in approach. In other words I am giving myself a little more of a structural challenge in writing the book, and I won’t really know until I am writing it whether I am up to that challenge.

But Aldiss is different. For a start, I am far more ambivalent about his work. Some of his fiction is, I think, wonderful; some of it, I think, is terrible. This is partly because Aldiss was an inveterate experimenter as a writer, and in the nature of things some experiments fail. He was also, at his peak, far more prolific than either Banks or Priest, and the scattergun technique means that a lot of the work did not hit the target. Yet, at his best he was one of the most important writers in the history of British science fiction, and somehow I have to get that dichotomy across, and explain it.

Also, he was a prickly bugger at the best of times. I remember, once, mildly disagreeing with his notion of the cosy catastrophe, and I received a postcard from him which, in effect, said: why do you hate me so? That was far from being the only such postcard I received. This prickliness, I think, comes across in his extreme ambivalence towards science fiction: he would extol it and decry it at one and the same time; he would encourage others and then try and distance himself from the genre; he would celebrate the crudest, pulpiest sf and then insist on being considered by mainstream standards; he wanted to be down in the gutter and up with the literary establishment all at the same time. I don’t think he ever resolved these contradictions, in his work or in his life. Do I have to resolve them? I certainly have to present them and try to explain them.

And structurally I feel the only way to cover the variety and the contradictions of his work is with something that is half way between the chronological approach of the Banks book and the thematic approach of the Priest book. Which means I have given myself another formal challenge just when I am approaching my most difficult subject yet.

Right now, I am pleased to have this challenge, and I am delighted if a little daunted to have the next two years plotted out for me. But my overwhelming reaction is to wonder: what on earth have I got myself into?

Triage

18 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in awards, science fiction

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Christopher Brown, Dave Hutchinson, Eleanor Lerman, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Linda Nagata, Marcel Theroux, Paul McAuley, Tim Pratt

Every year around this time I have a debate with myself about whether I should retire as a juror on the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. I’ve been doing it for ten years now, which is long enough. It’s a time-consuming job (we’ve had over 100 books submitted this year, and there are a few more I’m hoping to see come in, and I am not a very fast reader), and when I’m supposed to be working on something, like the Priest book that I should be researching, it can be very difficult to find that time. It is also a dispiriting job; there are so many bad books out there, there are times ploughing through another pile of submissions when I wonder what is the point of science fiction any more. Yet it can also be exhilarating, when you happen upon a book that really is fresh and intelligent and exciting that you otherwise would probably not have encountered. A couple of years ago, when the prize went to Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman, was like that, and a couple of years before that when we gave the award to Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux. These few gems really are wonderful compensation, and I am grateful to have encountered them, but do they make up for everything else? That is what I find myself trying to decide.

The problem is sorting out the ones that deserve attention from the rest. The first submissions tend to arrive early in January (I’m sure it used to be earlier, but that’s what it has been for the last couple of years at least) and we need to have made our decision by the beginning of May. This means that the judging process is largely squeezed into a three-month period from mid-January to mid-April. Anyone who sees my annual account of the year’s reading that I post around New Year on this blog will know that I struggle to read 60 or 70 books per year, so how do I cope with reading 100 books in a quarter of that time? The answer is: I don’t.

Time for some cold hard facts about the judging process. This is not some romantic enterprise in which we’re all setting out to find good in everything, we’re not giving books the benefit of the doubt until we come across that aside half-way down page 265 that makes the heart sing. If the heart hasn’t been singing long before then, it’s already out of the reckoning. We’re not looking to find the good in the book; we’re expecting the book to tell us how exceptional it is. We know we’ll be lucky if we find two or three books out of the hundred we receive that truly are exceptional, and with each book we’re saying: prove to me that you are worth my time. And if the book can’t prove it, well, sorry, but there’s another book waiting for my attention. If you’ve ever seen M*A*S*H, then you know that scene where new wounded arrive and the surgeons descend on the bodies like carrion crows. In seconds they are making decisions: prep this one for surgery, this one can wait, this one’s too far gone already. That is rather how judging a literary award feels to me from the inside. It’s not exactly life or death decisions that we’re making, but we are using our experience and our judgement to make snap decisions about which books are going to be worth our attention.

How do we make that decision? The first thing to realise is that it is never one thing. For a start there are seven of us on the jury, we all have different approaches to the task, we are all looking for different things, we all have different responses to what does or doesn’t make a book work. The particulars that will inform my decision may well seem irrelevant to the other judges, and vice versa. That’s part of the strength of the system; if a book comes through all of that and still wins the approval of the jury as a whole, it’s going to have something going for it. On the other hand …

Judging is a collegiate business. During the months we are engaged in this process, we are frantically exchanging emails: what do you make of this, has anyone else read that, this is my take on such-and-such. If a couple of my fellow jurors say X is a bad book, then X is going to slip down your reading list because it’s unlikely it will garner the strength of support needed to put it in contention for the prize. Similarly, if a couple of my fellow jurors say Y is surprisingly good, then I’m likely to pay it more careful attention because it could be a contender. That’s what happened with Lerman’s Radiomen, which I initially thought didn’t look too promising until another juror said how good it was and it made me look again.

Sometimes, eliminating books from consideration can be quite easy. The Campbell is an award for Best Novel, so the three collections of short stories that were submitted this year were never seriously in contention.

The Campbell is also an award for science fiction. Now my definition of science fiction tends to be catholic and fluid, but for the sake of the award I tend to work to a narrower definition in line with the views of some of my fellow jurors. Suffice it to say that if we are presented with magic, dragons, and quests among pseudo-medieval kingdoms, the author is going to have to work hard to convince me that it is not fantasy. There were quite a few books this year that really didn’t work that hard.

After that, it becomes more of a judgement call; but that, after all, is what this is all about. I tend to read the first chapter or so, then flick ahead to read a few pages around the middle of the book. What I’m looking for is something that engages my attention, that makes me want to read the whole book. So far this year, and I still have a fair bit of reading ahead of me, I’ve read eight of the submissions through from beginning to end. That is actually a much higher total than usual, because it means that eight books are in contention so far as I am concerned. There are others where I read maybe half way through before deciding it wasn’t working as well as I would like. But the majority of the submissions don’t get that far, inevitably so, because judging is, after all, a process of elimination. (In my more fanciful moments, I think the term is not elimination but sculpting: you are presented with a block of literature, and your job is to chip away until you get at the wonderful figure within the heart of the block.)

What is it that makes me put a book down, that makes me decide I don’t see this as a contender for the award? Put simply: I am reading for pleasure, and therefore I am looking for a book that gives me pleasure; and I am reading science fiction, therefore I am looking for a book that does what I think the best science fiction should do. For the record, I think the best science fiction should make us see the world anew, should challenge our preconceptions, should encourage us to think afresh.

So, if the book I pick up has dull, pedestrian prose, it will not give me pleasure, and so is put aside.

If a book I am reading fails to excite me with a new vision of what science fiction can achieve, I put it aside. This can take many forms. If a book is volume umpteen in a series, the chances are that any novelty would have come in the first volume or two, and by now the best we can expect is that it features a moderately fresh exploration of a basic scenario that is already very familiar. This is part of the nature of series: if fans want to keep reading volume after volume, it is likely because they want to reacquaint themselves with familiar characters and return to a familiar world. It is not impossible for later volumes in a series to catch our eye, Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson, the second volume in his Fractured Europe sequence, and Evening’s Empires by Paul McAuley, the fourth book in his Quiet War sequence, both made our shortlist precisely because we felt they had moved things in a new direction. But this is not common, in general the greatest innovation comes at the start of the sequence.

Then there is a trend that seems to be becoming more common in sf, by which modern writers revisit and try to recreate the worlds of sf from a previous generation. Technically, I find this an interesting exercise, but I am very unlikely to consider such works as contenders for the prize. Their whole raison d’etre is to turn back to an older form of science fiction, so they are, almost by definition, not innovating.

Of course, it’s not necessary to try to relive the Golden Age or write an endless series to avoid innovation. Science fiction is full of cliches, and they crop up with alarming regularity. Frankly, when I’m reading for the Campbell Award, the moment I start thinking I’ve read this before, I close the book, unless the author has somehow already convinced me that they are capable of subverting or reinventing the familiar. Few of them are, because, to be honest, that’s not where the money is. It is easier to pick up sales by promising more of what we know you already like than it is to offer something you’ve never read before. But it is the outliers, the ones who do carve out a new territory, that I am most interested in. Again, it is not impossible to catch my attention with work that occupies familiar territory. This year, for instance, I was engaged enough to read all the way through The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt because I felt he was at least trying to edge away from the cliches of space opera, and while the surface plot of Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas was the sort of extended chase-capture-escape sequence we’ve all seen far too many times before, the complex underlying political character of the world felt distinctive and interesting.

There are, inevitably, prejudices involved here. How could there not be; we all have prejudices, we all have things we like and things we don’t like. For my part, I do not particularly like military sf or steampunk, so those types of book have to work extra hard to hold my attention. As I say, not impossible (Linda Nagata’s The Red, for instance), but vanishingly rare. And I have started to develop an intense dislike of any book in which the heroine is described as “kickass”. What this tends to mean is that the only thing to distinguish the heroine from a brutish, heavy-drinking, hard fighting male is the pronoun used, as if this were some gigantic victory for feminism. Prejudice, I know, though I have yet to read any novel with the word “kickass” emblazoned somewhere on the cover in which I could not substitute the word “he” for “she” throughout and notice no significant difference. But that, of course, is why we have a panel of jurors; they hopefully compensate for my prejudices as I compensate for theirs.

The thing is, we are not reading to hate books. We are genuinely searching for the book that stands out above all others. But that can only be one book out of the hundred or so we receive, so a large part of the task is finding reasons to eliminate books along the way.

The trouble is that with too many of the books, that elimination is too easy. When you spend your days picking up and discarding, picking up and discarding, books that are dull, repetitive, uninventive, the whole exercise becomes dispiriting. Has science fiction really come to this? Alas, for too many people too much of the time, the answer is yes. And so I start to ask myself: do I really want to keep on doing this? Is it time to call it a day?

I must go on. I can’t go on. I go on.

Reprint: The Fall of Frenchy Steiner

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Gregory Benford, Gwyneth Jones, Hilary Bailey, Keith Roberts, Len Deighton, Martin H. Greenberg, Owen Sheers, Philip K. Dick, Robert Harris

This is another of my In Short columns. It appeared in Vector 285, Spring 2017: Continue reading →

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