A Better Place

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Brian Aldiss, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Roger Penrose, Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia

Two roads converged in a dark wood.

Or, to be more accurate, two pieces of reading converged in the darkness of my mind. They are distinct pieces, unrelated, but the coincidence of reading them at about the same time untethered connections that, I suppose, have meaning to me more than anyone else.

The first was an essay in the Paris Review: Michael Chabon writing about Ursula K. Le Guin. What struck me in this essay was when Chabon talks about Le Guin’s attitude towards reading, and literacy in general. For Le Guin, Chabon tells us, literacy was “defined not simply as the capacity to read a text but as a means of training the imagination—and ultimately of constructing an authentic self—through sustained encounter with literary art.” In other words, literacy and imagination are the same thing: to read is to imagine; and it is through our imaginations that we become who we are.

Taking the next step, therefore, the function of any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, is to excite and exploit that imagination. Literature that does not engage the reader imaginatively, that does not make us think, see, wonder, learn, enjoy, is failing in its most basic purpose as a piece of literature.

Which takes me onto that second road, a novel I was reading before I chanced upon that Chabon essay, and that I have finished reading now only after having put aside the essay. This is White Mars, written by Brian Aldiss in collaboration with Roger Penrose. Now, it has to be said that Aldiss could be, shall we say, hit and miss as a writer. He wrote a number of things that were extraordinarily good: beautiful, vivid, engaging. But he also wrote a number of things that were simply bad. However, this is the only one of his novels that is not just bad, it is dull. It is only as you engage with the tedium of this book that you realise that even novels that were catastrophically bad, like The Eighty Minute Hour, were never actually boring.

But it is not the faults of White Mars as an individual novel that concern me here, but rather as an exemplar of a type of novel.

White Mars, which came out in 1999, is a utopia. In fact it is a utopia of an almost classic form, a form that generally hadn’t been written throughout the preceding century. The model of the classic utopia stems from Thomas More’s ur-text: the perfect society has been established some time before in the image of its progenitor, King Utopus or his avatar, and has since remained fairly static as a society since once perfection has been achieved there is nowhere else to go. H.G. Wells began to challenge that formulation at the beginning of the 20th century with A Modern Utopia, which suggested that utopia was not a destination but a process. Wells would continue to develop this notion in his subsequent utopia writings, such as The Shape of Things to Come, but already the environment in which utopias prospered had been changed. The technological consequences of modernism, evident in the First World War, made people start to distrust the future. And then we saw the brutal and authoritarian consequences of utopian political aspirations in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan, China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Utopia gave way to dystopia as a vision of the planned society.

One of the things that is odd about White Mars is that it is a utopia at at time when the dystopia is in full flood. The few utopias that were being written were ambivalent about the notion (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia or more tellingly “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”), or imagined radically changed circumstances, such as the universe of plenty in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Nobody was writing the sort of guided tour of the institutions that were making everybody’s life better. Oh there is some scientific hand-waving in the novel, but it is at its core the sort of political, social, cultural utopia that Wells and his predecessors used to write. The sort of book where dealing rationally with everything makes everything perfect.

Take such ideas alongside Le Guin’s dictums about how vital the imagination is, and it seems a natural fit. Shouldn’t we all find our imaginations stirred by the notion of making a better world? But in fact, it is dystopias that have better engaged with our emotions through the simple device of telling a story about someone caught in the laocoonian coils of a dystopian system. Utopias fail so often because that is precisely what they do not, what they cannot do. There is no story in utopia. There should be: imagine how exciting it is in a crime story or a science fiction story to read about someone solving a puzzle, working their way towards a position that makes sense and that makes things right. Isn’t that exactly what a utopia should be: solving a social puzzle and making it right.

But that is not the story that utopian writers (and I am definitely including Aldiss in this) have chosen to tell. Thomas More had two models to draw on for his original Utopia, the traveller’s tale typified by recent books by Amerigo Vespucci, and philosophical disquisitions typified by the work of his friend Erasmus. Those who use More as their model have concentrated almost exclusively on the traveller’s tale, and that model has barely changed in the centuries since. More presented an argument; his successors present a status quo, a fact that has to be explained, described, but not dramatised.

Aldiss (and I am assuming that Penrose’s contribution is largely connected to the handwavium concerning the search for something beyond the Higgs boson) sets the story up as if it is going to be a sort of intellectual detective story. Economic collapse on Earth leaves a small Mars colony stranded, so they have to start working out how to govern themselves. That should be fine: a succession of social issues (what to do about sex, about crime, etc) become the puzzles to which utopian thinking provides the solution. But having set the situation up, Aldiss immediately resorts to the standard utopian model of the traveller’s tale, as if that is the only way that anyone can think of presenting a utopia. So we get the puzzles, but as soon as a rational response is suggested everyone falls in with it, nothing is complexified, nothing is made dramatic. It is the besetting sin of utopian writers that they consider their own particular utopia so obvious that everyone will immediately see its rational wonderfulness. Aldiss is no different from anyone else in being unable to see why anyone might disagree with his oh-so-rational solutions.

There is imagination in utopian fiction, but the imagination is expended on the idea, not on the story. In that respect it fails Le Guin’s test: it is an engagement with the imagination of the writer, a sort of literary onanism, not with the imagination of the reader. Just as the utopian writer cannot imagine an antagonist who might, for perfectly rational reasons, work against the version of the perfect state they have just invented, so they cannot imagine a reader who will not instantly see the sense of their invention. So the classic model of a utopia is a series of showcases for different aspects of the perfect state, it does not attempt to dramatically win the reader over to the benefits of such a state. The argument is assumed to have been won before the reader even opens the book. Which is why so many utopias, and White Mars is just such a case, are dull, because the literary engagement is not an imaginative engagement.

Brian W. Aldiss

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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?

Roots and Branches

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Ben Jonson, Brian Aldiss, Francis Bacon, Francis Godwin, Henry Wessells, John Clute, Joseph Hall, Margaret Cavendish, Samuel Gott, Thomas More

Yesterday evening, I began dipping into A Conversation Larger than the Universe by Henry Wessells, a very personal history of science fiction, or, more broadly, of fantastika. It’s a wonderful book, engagingly written and delightfully illustrated, with just the right level of idiosyncracy to convince you that you are engaging in a long conversation with someone who is widely informed but also has his own distinctive views and tastes. It’s a lovely book, I recommend it strongly.

But I have one small niggle, set off by an almost throw-away remark. He comments, aligning himself with Brian Aldiss and John Clute on this, that fantastika had its roots in the Gothic.

No!

This is something that Aldiss began peddling when he started to claim that Frankenstein was the first work of sf. He very carefully worded his definition of science fiction in order to make this case. His definition has long been superceded, but you still see the claim about Frankenstein being trotted out. Most recently, given that Frankenstein was first published exactly 200 years ago, I’m seeing people suddenly announcing that science fiction is now 200 years old. Nonsense!

And Clute’s claim, in Pardon This Intrusion, that fantastika began with the French Revolution is part of the same thing. (I remember arguing in a review of that book that the French Revolution wasn’t the start of anything, but the end point of a process, the delegitimizing of a particular form of aristocratic rule, that began over 100 years earlier with the execution of Charles I. If Clute said that fantastika began with the English Revolution I might be slightly more inclined to agree with him.)

Let’s take fantastika as catch-all term for a variety of non-realist literatures that include science fiction, fantasy, horror, probably postmodernism and a few other less readily identifiable forms. To say that they began in the Gothic, that their roots lie there, is just plain wrong. It would, I think, be more accurate to say that the Gothic was when the various branches of fantastika began to sprout out from the trunk. That’s not the whole story, of course. Postmodernism is a form of the fantastic that only began be a distinctive form in the last half-century or so (and, to make the arboreal analogy more complex than it needs to be, was possibly grafted on to the root stock from elsewhere). In other words, I’m saying that the Gothic was when the separate elements of fantastika began to take on their separate and distinctive forms, but it was not when they were born.

To say that a branch is born when it separates out from the tree trunk is nonsense, trunk and branch are of one substance, and that’s what I feel about the various elements of fantastika.

The trunk itself, when science fiction and satire and horror and fantasy were all inextricably united, probably grew during that radical reimagining of our place in the world that was the renaissance and the reformation. But the roots reach back much further, to medieval legends of Cockayne and Christian symbolism and ancient Greek novels and all sorts of other places. Fantastika is a world tree, its roots possibly reach back to the very beginnings of human consciousness. But its emergence into the light, its rise above ground into a shape that we can recognise today, happened long before the rather petty little upset in literary history that was the Gothic.

All of which is an expression of my ongoing distress at a rather pernicious view of literary history that Aldiss foisted on the sf critical community. But to say that science fiction only began with the Gothic is to dismiss a whole string of earlier work that was essential to the making of sf:

The first Utopia – Thomas More 1516
The first anti-utopia – Mundus Alter et Idem, Joseph Hall, 1605
The first aliens – Newes from the new world discover’d in the Moone, Ben Jonson, 1620
The first scientific society – New Atlantis, Francis Bacon, 1627
The first mechanical voyage to the moon – The man in the moone, Francis Godwin, 1638
The first novel set in the future – Nova Solyma, Samuel Gott, 1648
The first parallel world (with distinct postmodern elements) – The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish, 1666 (Aldiss dismisses Cavendish as unreadable, she is not.)

And so on. I would hate to say that any of these was the first science fiction work, but collectively they constitute an active and engaging science fiction long before the Gothic came along.

What I’m saying is, there’s a need to see the whole tree rather than just concentrate on the branches

Reprint: The End

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Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Carolyn See, Clifford D. Simak, Douglas Adams, Edgar Pangborn, Elizabeth Hand, George R. Stewart, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Morrow, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Nevil Shute, Octavia Butler, Peter George, Philip Latham, Piers Anthony, Raymond Briggs, Richard Jefferies, Ronald Wright, Russell Hoban, Stephen Baxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I had great plans for my Cognitive Mapping series that ran in Vector between 1995 and 2001. At one point I envisaged producing 100 of the columns, which could then be gathered together as a decent-sized book. But at some point the project ran out of steam. I had maybe another half-dozen columns started but never completed. Apart from a parody piece (written by another hand, not naming names Mr B****r), the column was over. But at the end of 2005 I produced one last hurrah, appropriately enough on how science fiction deals with the end of things. This last column was published in Vector 244, November-December 2005.

Reprint: Modernism

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Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Henry James, Honore de Balzac, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, John Dos Passos, John Sladek, Josephine Saxton, m john harrison, Michael Moorcock, Philip K. Dick, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Sturgeon, Thomas M. Disch, Virginia Woolf, William James

This was one of my Cognitive Mapping columns. It first appeared in Vector 196, November-December 1997:

you sat on the bed unlacing your shoes Hey Frenchie yelled Tylor in the door you’ve got to fight the Kid   doan wanna fight him   gotto fight him hasn’t he got to fight him fellers? Freddie pushed his face through the crack in the door and made a long nose Gotta fight him umpyaya and all the fellows on the top floor were there if not you’re a girlboy and I had on my pyjamas and they pushed in the Kid and the Kid hit Frenchie and Frenchie hit the Kid and your mouth tasted bloody and everybody yelled Go it Kid except Gummer and he yelled Bust his jaw
The 42nd Parallel (1930)
John Dos Passos

No, it’s not Donald I should show the door to. It’s Victoria. He’s told me a score of times about my preoccupation with paleass shiggies, and I never listened, but he’s right. Prophet’s beard, all this talk about emancipation! Just one of the shiggies who’ve been in and out of this apartment like doses of aperient was stunningly beautiful and solid-ground sensible and marvellous in bed and a whole, rounded, balanced sort of person. And that was Gennice, that Donald brought home, not me, and I was unappreciative because she was a brown-nose. I must be off my gyros. I must be busted clear out of my nappy old plantation-bred skull!
Stand on Zanzibar (1969)
John Brunner

Realism is a relatively recent literary invention, though it has been remarkably far-reaching in its influence. It was only in the middle years of the last century that, predominently, French writers such as Balzac began to play with the notion that their writing could somehow encompass the world. True realism lasted only a very short time, it was a political fiction in which the plight of characters was demonstrated by a painstaking recreation in prose of every aspect of their lives, circumstances, environment and work. The idea of realism, however, has lasted a lot longer: the notion that words provide a recreation of the world, that fiction tells of something as it is. It has provided the basic fictional form ever since; even today, whether we are reading a crime novel or a historical romance, a mainstream novel or a work of fantasy, we are meant to assume a one-to-one relationship between the words on the page and some actual world being described.

This is an approach to fiction that was being undermined even before the end of the nineteenth century. The development of theories of psychology by Freud and by William James popularised the notion that all of us see the world differently, that whatever the consensus reality through which our bodies move the interpretation of that universe is always unique, always idiosyncratic. And if there is no one true world, then there is no realism that prose can mirror. It was William James who coined the term “stream of consciousness”, and it was his brother, Henry James, who was among the first to bring these ideas to bear in fiction. Rather than the world of the characters, what mattered primarily in the modernist fiction of Henry James, Virginia Woolf and others were the characters themselves. Their perceptions and cognitions became the focus of the work: the world was not truthful, there was no absolute reality, truth now had to be found in people. (At the same time other scientific developments, such as relativity, were starting to seep into the literary consciousness, further undercutting the solidity of the external world and lending weight to the idea that truth could be found only in the relative realities of individual characters.)

Various literary techniques were developed by the modernists to explore and represent this relativism. Viewpoints shifted from character to character; stream of consciousness carried us on a rushing, tumbling ride through the immediate, unanalysed perceptions of the characters; the first-person narrator became more common than the god-like, all-knowing third person; neologisms started to creep in and grammer to depart to represent the individuality of the perceiver; extra-literary devices appeared in to the text and unreliability in the narrator’s voice. The early decades of this century, and particularly the years after the First World War, were rich in literary experimentation as modernism gave a new freedom to the writer’s voice. One of the most representative writers of the period was John Dos Passos, whose vast record of national decline, U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel, 1930, Nineteen Nineteen, 1932 and The Big Money, 1936), is a concatenation of all the modernist techniques designed to make us distrust the world. It was, as so often with such experimental works, a political novel indicting the rise of big money and the decline of the ordinary man in post-First World War America. In sections headed “Newsreel” he presents a dizzying sweep through headlines, newspaper reports, fragments of incidents; in sections headed “The Camera Eye” (as in the passage quoted) he takes us into the stream of consciousness; still other sections carry the narrative forward or explore one character outside the timestream of the story, often using radically different narrative voices to move us from one view of the world to the next. The result is disorienting and disturbing, this is not a way of viewing the world with which we are comfortable, even in our normal lives, but like the vorticist paintings of the same era it is onrushing and liberating.

Although much of the serious fiction from the turn of the century onwards (at least up to the upsurge in postmodernism over the last couple of decades) has shown modernist tendencies, little of this technique has leached into popular fiction. This is understandable, if modernism is designed to upset our world-view then it is not going to work within the essentially reassuring and comforting confines of popular fiction. Thus, although by its very nature science fiction cannot be a truly realist form, it has continued to use realist techniques throughout much of its history. This is partly because describing an unreal event or situation in a realist manner helps to underpin the believability of the fiction, and partly because modernism demands an experimental approach to the writing which few early sf writers were willing or able to follow.

However, during the 1950s and early 1960s writers came into science fiction whose backgrounds were as much artisitic as scientific or technical while editors began to encourage a more literary approach. It was at this time that writers such as Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon and most particularly Philip K. Dick began to write stories that questioned the secure solidity of everyday reality. Although Bester was one of the great literary experimenters in science fiction, notably in The Demolished Man (1953) and Tiger! Tiger! (1956), this didn’t really translate into a modernist approach to science fiction until the New Wave emerged during the first half of the 1960s.

It was the British New Wave, an iconoclastic movement centred on the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock and reflecting the liberated attitude of the Swinging Sixties, which brought the disturbing and questioning style of modernism into science fiction. Writers such as Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard used stream of consciousness and unreliable narrators, they used the disintegration of the world as a symbol for the mental disintegration of their characters, they shifted between viewpoints to affirm that there is no one, secure, true interpretation of events. Again, as so often with modernism, it was often used for political purpose: undermining the security of our belief in the world also undermined the establishment viewpoint.

Writers as varied as Aldiss, Ballard, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Josephine Saxton and the Americans John Sladek and Thomas M. Disch have been identified with the British New Wave (the American New Wave, which began a little later than its British counterpart, was more concerned with questioning values and beliefs than in literary experimentation), and their works during a fairly brief period between the early 1960s and the early 1970s provide a good representative sample of the mode. Nevertheless, the one work which stands as an exemplar of the British New Wave, in the same way that U.S.A. stands as a symbol of modernism, is Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, for this, too, is a work that brings together the various literary techniques by which the New Wave re-invented modernism. In fact, in many ways Stand on Zanzibar is a mirror of U.S.A. Sections labelled “The Happening World”, like “Newsreel”, clump together newspaper cuttings, quotations, fragments that add up to a kaleidoscopic impression of the near-future world. Sections labelled “Tracking with Closeups” and “Continuity” would use a variety of viewpoints, stream of consciousness (as in the passage quoted), and differing voices to carry the narrative forward. While other sections, called “Context” would be snapshots designed to provide just that. Brunner was clearly and consciously bringing the technique of John Dos Passos into science fiction, and it worked. If received opinion previously had been that a realist style of storytelling was essential to allow suspension of disbelief in the non-real setting or events of a science fiction story, Stand on Zanzibar disproved that contention once and for all.

Modernism, in the form of the British New Wave, flourished in science fiction for only a short period, by the mid-1970s science fiction was going through a period of retrenchment, a re-establishing of traditional styles and subject matter. But it had had its effect, and ever since then science fiction writers have been able to employ an ever-increasing arsenal of literary techniques to tell their unreal stories.

Reprint: Gormenghast

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Brian Aldiss, Carter Scholz, Cordwainer Smith, Daniel Defoe, Elizabeth Hand, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, James Lovegrove, Jorge Luis Borges, Lucius Shepard, Mervyn Peake, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Silverberg, Steven Millhauser

It is, I promise you, pure coincidence that today’s reprint begins with the same writer featured in the last one, Steven Millhauser. But then, it is time to come to another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was first published in Vector 213 (September-October 2000).

Reprint: Backwards

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Andrew Sean Greer, Brian Aldiss, David Hume, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gordon Eklund, H.G. Wells, Jay Lake, Lewis Carroll, Malcolm Ross, Martin Amis, Philip K. Dick, Soren Kierkegaard, T.H. White

This example from my Cognitive Mapping columns was written and first published in 1999, in Vector 207, September-October 1999, to be exact. At the time I was writing about a rarely used science fictional device (as I say in the column, it is an easy and comic thing to do in film but not so easy, and certainly not so comic, in fiction); but since then it seems to have become somewhat more common. There was, for instance, the film of Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Benjamin Button’ (a story I had missed), there was a rather fine novel by Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, that came out in 2004, and I remember coming across the device, or something like it, in a story by Jay Lake. So maybe there is something about the device that speaks more to the 21st century than it does to the 20th?

Reprint: Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

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A.E. Van Vogt, Adam-Troy Castro, Alexei Panshin, Allen Steele, Anna Kavan, Anthony Boucher, Arthur Sellings, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Charles Stross, Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Frederik Pohl, Groff Conklin, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Jack McDevitt, Jerry Oltion, John Wyndham, Katherine MacLean, Lesley What, Megan Lindholm, Mervyn Peake, Michael Swanwick, Molly Gloss, Neil Gaiman, Peter Jackson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Richard Chwedyk, Sharon Lee, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Willis E. McNelly, Willy Ley

I haven’t actually included any anthologies in my reprints so far, even though I have reviewed an awful lot of them. So I thought I should include one today. This review of Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 edited by Vonda N. McIntyre was, I think, written for The New York Review of Science Fiction, but I can’t find a record of it being published. So this may be its first appearance.

Reprint: The Heat-Death of the Universe

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Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Norbert Weiner, Pamela Zoline, Virginia Woolf

Yesterday was a bit of a shock to the system. I got more than three times as much traffic on this blog as on my previous best day. Obviously the way to get more traffic is to say something vaguely polemical about hard sf and politics. Who knew hard sf was still such a burning topic? I will probably return to the topic in a few days, when I’ve had time to think a little more on the subject. But for now, a complete change of pace. This is another of my ‘In Short’ columns, this time on Pamela Zoline’s utterly wonderful ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. The column was first published in Vector 268, Autumn 2011.

Histories

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Adam Roberts, Algis Budrys, Brian Aldiss, Donald Sassoon, Gary Westfahl, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, Lester Del Rey, Mark Bould, Nicholas Ruddick, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Sherryl Vint

I seem to have been immersed in various histories of science fiction lately. Or rather, since I still have my mind on the project I started but sort-of abandoned many years ago but can never quite bring myself to forget, I’ve found myself hyper-aware of historical perspectives on sf.

For a start, I have been working my way through Donald Sassoon’s monumental work, The Culture of the Europeans, a book that is so heavy it is almost impossible to carry, but that is unfailingly fascinating to read. And as I read through it, I keep being startled by ideas or bits of information that would belong in my own history of British science fiction. So I start to jot down notes. Unfortunately, my notes for the project are not actually in good order, there are three or four notebooks, scraps of paper, odd cuttings, and god knows how many pages of One Note, and I need to wrestle it all into some sort of shape.