Is there a point to science fiction?

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A.J. Ayer, Anne Charnock, Arnold Toynbee, Beatrice Webb, Bertrand Russell, Carlo Rovelli, Christopher Priest, Colin Murray, Garry Charnock, Gary Westfahl, J.D. Bernal, James Joyce, John W. Campbell, Karl Popper, Ken MacLeod, Lisa Tuttle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, M. John Harrison, Niall Harrison, Niels Bohr, nina allan, Richard Overy, Vandana Singh, Virginia Woolf, Werner Heisenberg

I didn’t intend to write this. Hell, I didn’t intend to start thinking along these lines. It’s just the pernicious effect of coincidence.

The trigger was reading a review of a Vandana Singh collection in Niall Harrison’s All These Worlds. But that just seemed to connect odd thoughts that had accumulated from very disparate sources over the last couple of weeks. For a start there was The Morbid Age by Richard Overy, a social history of Britain between the wars. In those 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people across Britain would regularly attend lecture series, summer schools, Workers’ Education Authority events, conferences, and more. There was a seemingly inexhaustible hunger for knowledge on everything from eugenics to the origins of the Spanish Civil War. You get the impression that people needed to learn because they were desperately trying to make sense of a world that increasingly seemed senseless, terrifyingly senseless in fact.

What also feeds into this picture is something that is not mentioned in Overy’s book, but which is the focus of the very next book I started reading after the Overy: Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli. This is the story of the development of quantum mechanics, a direct result of ideas formulated by Werner Heisenberg on the remote island of Helgoland in 1925. Quantum physics grows out of a whole string of scientific and philosophical ideas that were being formulated during the early years of the century. Most of these ideas would not filter through to the general population, at least not in detail, but broad notions would seep through (think of all those educational organisations, along with regular lectures on the BBC and popular books on science by people like J.D. Bernal which were reliable best sellers). What was known about these mysterious scientific developments was identified by the broad terms that were being applied to them: Relativity, Indeterminacy, Uncertainty. Contemporary philosophy didn’t help either. Even if most people knew no more about Ludwig Wittgenstein than they did about Niels Bohr, the ideas were filtering through in accessible and best selling books by Bertrand Russell, in A.J. Ayer’s (mis)interpretations of the Vienna Circle, in Karl Popper’s notions of Falsifiability. And while most people had probably never read Freud or Jung, their ideas were constantly being expounded in talks on the BBC, and were known to be behind the works of well known writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, with their unreliable narrators and their sense of the unknowability of the world. Everywhere you turned, therefore, from fiction to philosophy, from science to psychology, the general impression was the same: the more you knew about the world the more unknowable it was. And that tied in with the sense that the social and economic and political world in which people found
themselves was similarly unknowable and unreliable and mad. There was a frightening uncertainty where people were desperate to find a reassuring certainty.

The other part of this equation came while I was on Bute. During my holiday there I had long, fascinating conversations with Chris Priest, Nina Allan and Anne and Garry Charnock, and briefer but still enjoyable encounters with Lisa Tuttle, Colin Murray and Ken MacLeod. With Chris and Nina in particular the conversation often came around to Chris’s forthcoming novel, Airside, Nina’s forthcoming novel, Conquest, and Mike Harrison’s anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here. (For the record, I haven’t read any of these books. Conquest is on my desk waiting for me to review it after the Niall Harrison; Airside and Wish I Was Here are both on order but haven’t arrived yet.) Without using the words, these discussions tended to turn on questions of generic identity: could the novels actually be considered science fiction; is an anti-memoir also a memoir? Niall’s review reminded me of this because throughout his book he uses the novels and stories he considers as a springboard to discuss broader questions of identity in relation to science fiction. What it is? What it does? Why?

These questions of genre identity resonated with my readings of Overy and Rovelli. It suddenly occurred to me that although what we now term science fiction has a history that stretches back centuries, its generic identity was actually forged in the inter-war years. This, I suspect, lies behind Gary Westfahl’s otherwise lunatic argument that science fiction began in 1926. Between the launch of Amazing in 1926 and John W. Campbell’s assumption of the editorship of Astounding in 1937, what we think of
as the inherent characteristics of science fiction, from space opera to hard sf, were established. They became further set in stone during the 1940s and 1950s, and it was only with the emergence of what became known as the New Wave in the early 1960s that these assumptions began to be challenged. Since then there have been intermittent attempts to re-establish the centrality of those
characteristics – the new Space Opera, the new Hard SF, the puppies – but on the whole the hold of those generic characteristics on our imaginations has been steadily weakened. Looking at science fiction today, and at the spread of what, in Clutean terms, we might call fantastika across what were once seen as genre boundaries, I think questions of generic identity are now largely irrelevant.

But what occurred to me, as I started putting these disparate bits and pieces together, is that I don’t think it is a coincidence that the generic identity of science fiction was fixed during those interwar years. In some ways, the establishment of the familiar tricks and tropes of science fiction in those years was a response to the doubts and hesitations and uncertainties of that unstable time.

In saying this I am not trying to make any great claims for science fiction, and particularly not for the generic sf of the 1920s and 30s. The people who wrote these sf stories, in the main, knew no more about the outer reaches of contemporary science than the average person in the street. They weren’t in a position to explain the workings of quantum leaps or logical positivism to their readers any more than they could explain those things to themselves. That wasn’t what science fiction was for, or at least it wasn’t what they were doing with science fiction. But they bandied about scientific terms with a confidence that suggested these terms weren’t frighteningly uncertain but rather straightforwardly explicable. They sketched futures in a way that suggested that all the terrors of the moment would come to naught and there might actually be a future. Campbell’s insistence on the figure of the “competent man” suggested that the complex issues facing the world might be dealt with by any handyman with basic technical skills. Moreover, the competent man was, of course, a reliable narrator, saving the world was a task for a no-nonsense type with none of that Freudian nonsense. Everything that science fiction was doing in these genre-shaping years ran counter to the hesitations and uncertainties that contemporary science and politics and literature implied.

I’m not sure how conscious any of this was, probably not at all. But somehow science fiction was touching on all those things encountered in the real world, in newspaper reports from Germany and Spain, in BBC talks by Bertrand Russell or Arnold Toynbee or Beatrice Webb, in best-selling books from Gollancz’s Left Book Club, and in weekend schools with the Workers’ Educational Association, and defusing them. Relativity wasn’t some disturbing vision of the unreality of the real world, it was just a strange effect you might encounter if you were to travel in a spaceship.

The generic identity thus forged was made concrete in the post-war years. After all, the mysteries of quantum mechanics had been replaced by the devastating horrors of the atomic bomb, and the headlong rush to war that everyone remembered from the 1930s had been replaced by the Cold War, a conflict that never quite went away and kept flaring up in unexpected places like Korea and Cuba and Vietnam. None of the terrors of the interwar years had gone away, they had just become actual. And science fiction responded much the way it had before. There might be a little bit more literary sophistication about it, but it was still the same old story about competence and confidence. The readership was still relatively small and relatively specialised, but they were still reaching for the same reassurances and certainties, the same story that the world, however far away in space or time, is still knowable.

And I suspect, by the same token, that it is also no coincidence that the first challenges to the generic identity of science fiction came in the wake of the Cuba Missile Crisis. After all, the old reassurances were no longer reassuring.

Openings

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Adam Mars-Jones, Christopher Priest, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leonard Woolf, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Philip Norman, Rose Tremain, Virginia Woolf, William Boyd

The first of the Book Marketing Council’s “Best Young British Novelists” promotions in 1983 came at an odd time. The British publishing industry was struggling, mostly due to outdated methods, and a quick and dirty fix was needed. Hence the promotion. And it worked. Well, it did for me at least. Christopher Priest was the only one of the featured writers whose work I was already familiar with (by this time I’d read Philip Norman’s book on The Beatles, Shout!, but I’m not sure I associated the Philip Norman featured in the promotion with the author of that book), but I read the associated issue of Granta cover to cover (one of the few times I can say that of the magazine) and discovered a good handful of writers whose work interested me. For a while after that I would religiously buy each new book by Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, and Graham Swift. I’ve read, with pleasure, the occasional novel by Rose Tremain and Lisa St Aubin de Teran, without consistently following their work, and though I’ve tried the occasional book by Martin Amis I’ve never really got on with his writing. Over the years, I stopped following most of these writers (Ishiguro I dropped quite quickly, then picked up again later and do now follow him). So today only Boyd and Swift are writers whose new work I religiously buy and read.

Which brings me to the latest William Boyd novel, Trio. What I like about Boyd is his storytelling, which is why it is no surprise that along the way he has written a couple of very effective spy stories. He does come up with some quite arresting metaphors and descriptive passages, but in the main his prose can be a little pedestrian. But his control of pace, revelation, drama, is powerful enough to keep you reading even if the writing might limp a little. Even so, I was a little startled by how flat the opening of this novel seemed:

Elfrida Wing stirred, grunted and shifted sleepily in her bed as the summer’s angled morning sun brightened the room, printing a skewed rectangle of lemony-gold light onto the olive-green-flecked wallpaper close by her pillow.

Yeah, that reads like someone trying too hard, like a writing-class exercise in stuffing as many descriptive words as possible into a single sentence. Then you turn the page to the start of chapter two (the chapters are short in this novel, mostly only two or three pages, which is one reason that the lumbering, over-emphatic description feels too much), and you read: “Talbot Kydd woke abruptly from his dream.” Then another couple of pages and another chapter begins: “Anny Viklund woke up and, as she did every morning as consciousness slowly returned, she wondered if this day was going to be the day that she died.”

Three successive chapters beginning in exactly the same way: the full name of the character followed by a description of them waking up. It is laboured, repetitive, and it is hardly the most inspired or inspiring way to introduce the three central characters who make up the Trio of the title. I’ve come to expect fancier footwork than this from Boyd, even at his most pedestrian.

We are well over half way through the novel before it begins to dawn on us what Boyd is doing here. Elfrida is an alcoholic one-time novelist who hasn’t written anything other than fanciful titles for never-to-be-written books in over ten years. At the height of her fame, and to her perennial disgust, she was always called the new Virginia Woolf. It doesn’t help that she can’t stand Woolf’s work, which may be one of the reasons why she stopped writing. But now, between drinks of vodka from the countless old Sarson’s Malt Vinegar bottles she has stashed around the house, she gets an idea for a new novel, one that will lay the old ghost while getting her back into print: She will write a novel about the last day of Virginia Woolf.

Inevitably, she gets no further than the first paragraph, which she rewrites over and over again. A typical example reads:

Virginia Woolf was sleeping. On the wall by her bed a pale parallelogram of lemony early-morning sunlight crept towards her face. When the sunlight hit her eyes, she grunted and turned over, but consciousness had indisputably dawned in her brain and was urging her awake.

The openings of the first three chapters are all variations on the opening of the Virginia Woolf novel. Elfrida herself grunts and shifts with the lemony light. Talbot’s dream figures in several of the putative openings, and his own story that follows will take the form of an awakening to a clearer understanding of what is going on around him (he is a film producer out of step with the modern world of the late-1960s, coming to terms with his own homosexuality, and also coming to recognise that his trusted partner is defrauding him). And Elfrida’s various opening paragraphs always end with Woolf recognising that “this was going to be the last day of her life”, echoing Anny’s own premonition. Anny is a young American film star brought to Britain to add cachet to the film Talbot is currently producing, but she also brings with her a host of troubles, mostly initiated by her former husband who is now a wanted terrorist, and the more she tries to run away from things the fewer places she has to turn, until the story does indeed end in her death.

So we have it: the three interweaving stories that make up this trio are all variations on the last day of Virginia Woolf. Elfrida herself is, of course, the most Woolf-like. At one point, frustrated that no publisher wants the novel she is planning (1968, when most of the novel takes place, was the nadir of interest in the Bloomsbury crowd) and beginning to suffer from DTs, and therefore in a mental state closely resembling that of Virginia Woolf in March 1941,she buys a secondhand fur coat, stuffs stones into the pocket, and plans to march into the Ouse near Woolf’s home at Rodmell. A farcical intervention stops this happening, and she ends up drying out in a religious establishment outside Taunton.

If Elfrida offers the closest parallel to Woolf, Talbot and Anny are the more engaging characters. This is because Elfrida has been defeated, knows it, and is complicit in her own downfall. Talbot and Anny are both bemused by events but are still trying to keep ahead of the game. Talbot succeeds, Anny doesn’t, perhaps ending as Woolf herself did (thought there is an unresolved mystery here), but at least there is more sense of them playing an active part in their own lives.

Thinking of Elfrida, I wonder how Boyd pitched this novel to his publisher. Things have moved on since 1968, the Bloomsberries are fashionable again, so to that extent he had an easier job. But still: “It’s a novel about the last day of Virginia Woolf, only it is set in 1968 and Woolf never appears.” Actually, Leonard Woolf is seen at a distance once, still living at Monk’s House and irrascibly chasing away would-be sightseers. In the end it’s a clever book, but perhaps more clever than good, a satisfying intellectual confection rather than something more engaging.

Modernisms

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Anthony Powell, Constant Lambert, D.J. Taylor, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Hueffer, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Muriel Jaeger, Peter Quennell, Sarah Cole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Walton

When I read Lost Girls by D.J. Taylor last autumn, I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the book only really came alive when Taylor was discussing the London literary scene during the 1940s, and the four young women who were the titular subject of the book were at best only peripherally involved in that scene. So I decided to try a book that seemed to more directly address his interests. Which is how his 2016 literary history, The Prose Factory, appeared on my Christmas list (very many thanks, Maureen).

At the moment I am only into the second chapter, but already it is obvious that this is a subject he is much more interested in writing about. The book is a literary history of Britain from 1918 until, more or less, the present, and it is as general and has the sort of blinkers as one might expect. A cursory glance, for instance, suggests that H.G. Wells is the only science fiction writer to appear in the index; which is fine with me, I wasn’t really expecting anything else. As a broad account of literary movements it is providing exactly the sort of historical context I was hoping for, and at times it can be quite revealing.

When you look at literary history from a science fiction perspective, for instance, modernism tends to come across as a monolithic force, an instant literary establishment that, as the result of a quarrel between Henry James and H.G. Wells, conspired to exclude Wells and, in his wake, science fiction as a whole, from serious academic consideration. It wasn’t exactly like that. Reading Taylor’s chapter on modernism in the 1920s I wasn’t surprised to find that it was quite a fragmented movement, but I was surprised to learn how tribal it was.

The father of literary modernism, as I suppose we might put it, was Henry James, who is barely mentioned in Taylor’s book primarily because he had died in 1916. He brought a number of his Romney Marsh friends and neighbours, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, into the modernist camp on his coat tails, though it has to be said that at the time Conrad and Ford were more readily seen among the Georgians, the conservative, traditionalist literary movement that began with the end of the Edwardian era and fizzled out during the First World War.

It was after the war that modernism really got going, often lauded within the pages of the plethora of small magazines that were published throughout those years. These are magazines with famous names – Criterion, The Athenaeum – but they were still decidedly small. Even the best of them were lucky to have a circulation of 1,000, and those subscribers were fickle, if they grew weary of John Middleton Murry’s jeremiads in The Athenaeum, they would switch to T.S. Eliot’s austere pronouncements in Criterion. And though Taylor doesn’t say so, I get the distinct impression that this readership primarily consisted of academics in Oxford and Cambridge, and would-be writers in London plodding from the offices of one small magazine to the next in the hope of getting published. Despite this, the magazines were influential, at least in terms of how later academics look back on the modernists.

Middleton Murry was the cheerleader for one tribe of modernists, endorsing a number of the newer writers. But he seems to have been at war with everyone, and fairly soon lost his influence. Another tribe centred on the Sitwells, who were early advocates of the work of Eliot. Their circle included the composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, and they brought into their branch of modernism something of the polyrhythms and improvisation of jazz, the other great artistic movement of the decade but one that was not otherwise widely taken up by modernists. But the Sitwells were self-obsessed, idiosyncratic, and argumentative. Edith Sitwell in particular seems to have delighted in her feuds. There is one delightful vignette in Taylor’s book in which someone came upon Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf sitting side by side on a settee during one of their periodic truces, and I got a vivid impression of two tight-lipped women each preparing to spit venom at the other. Woolf, and Bloomsbury, introduces another tribe, one that encompassed the artistic as much as the literary, and whose publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out books by writers like E.M.Forster, Peter Quennell, and Muriel Jaeger, who weren’t all normally classed as modernists. Though the most notable title from the Hogarth Press was probably the first edition of “The Waste Land”, which brings us inevitably to Eliot himself, buttoned-up and puritanical, whose early poems, and especially “The Waste Land”, made him the torchbearer for post-war modernism. He inspired reverence – Taylor tells of a young Anthony Powell gazing in wonder when he chanced to spy Eliot dining alone at a Charlotte Street restaurant – and there were any number of would be writers trying to copy his work (as successfully as such copyists invariably are); but he also inspire mystification and condemnation, especially from critics like J.C. Squire, the last of the Georgians. Though Eliot himself, politically conservative and religiously inclined, probably had more in common with the Georgians than with the new generation of would-be revolutionaries who followed in his wake.

And this, I suspect, barely does justice to the internecine conflicts that characterised the first decade or so of literary modernism in Britain. I mean, where does one fit James Joyce, championed by Eliot but hardly the clubbable type one might find in Bloomsbury or at a Sitwell country home? So when Sarah Cole, in her truly wonderful book, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, argues that Wells was a modernist writer all along, the response has to be: of course, but what brand of modernist?

Siri Hustvedt

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Iain Banks, Margaret Cavendish, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Virginia Woolf

The Kent Literature Festival, which started lo these many years ago (though after most of the country’s other literary festivals) has gone through a fair number of name and location changes over the years. It now seems to be settled as the Folkestone Book Festival. One thing has been consistent over all this time: it has been something of a tail-end Charlie of book festivals, coming late in the year and drawing on a number of participants already familiar and tired from a year on the circuit. There have, from time to time, been somewhat misplaced attempts to live the thing up. I remember one notorious occasion when they had Iain Banks, and the organiser therefore decided it would be a Scottish Evening with himself and all the staff in tartans.

The more recent incarnation of the festival does seem rather more adventurous, however. This year, the cast included Siri Hustvedt, which felt like a real coup to me, though I did wonder if anyone else in Folkestone would have even heard of Siri Hustvedt (it didn’t help that they misspelled her name in the programme). I am inveterately early for things like this, and for a while my worries about how popular she might be seemed to have borne out: I was sitting outside the auditorium for over 20 minutes before anyone else turned up. Still, in the end there were around 40 of us in the audience, though I hadn’t taken on board that she seems to have become something of a feminist idol, and the only other few men in the audience were accompanying more intense wives.

Initially, I confess, I was disappointed. It turned out that we were not having an audience with Siri Hustvedt, we were having a Skype chat with her: she was sitting in a sunny room in her home in Brooklyn, we were in a dark theatre in Folkestone. It is, admittedly, a creative way to broaden the range of writers we might get to see at our tired little late-year book festival, but at the same time, bang goes my hope of getting her to sign The Blazing World. And I was a little annoyed that this wasn’t made clear in the programme: the Siri Hustvedt talk was under a heading “Words from a Wider World”, and if you worked your way patiently through the programme book you would find, several pages away, a note about this thread that, mid-paragraph, included a passing reference to “live link-up”, but that wasn’t at all clear.

On the plus side, her head filled a six-foot screen, which meant we had a wonderful view of how animated she is. Her eyes were particularly expressive, opening wide, rolling, glancing away to left or right. Her face was never still, and she laughed a lot; maybe, being in her own home, she was more relaxed that she might have been on stage. When we came to questions from the audience, someone asked inevitably about what conversations were like over the Siri Hustvedt/Paul Auster dining table. I saw Auster once at a reading, and I suddenly had an image of the light and lively Hustvedt against the dark and static Auster, and nearly burst out laughing.

The real problem was the interviewer. She wasn’t a writer or a critic, or even a psychiatrist (Hustvedt is a lecturer in psychiatry, so that might have been an interesting dynamic); she was an artist interested in “text and image”, the sort of bland phrase that means nothing. I’m not sure she’d had much experience interviewing, because her questions were rambling statements to which she somehow managed to append a question mark. And she had a habit of still hesitating and qualifying her question long after Hustvedt had started trying to answer it, which for me is a capital offence among interviewers.

But Hustvedt was gold: full of perceptions and ideas that moved effortlessly and revealingly from the structure of writing to the history of science to the character of memory to the role of women to the fluidity of gender. Everything was grist to her mill, everything interweaved with the way she wanted to write her novels. It was fascinating.

From the audience, after the usual fluffy questions from people who don’t really know how to talk to writers (the Hustvedt/Auster dining table, can you tell me something about that picture on the wall behind you) I managed to ask how she came to Margaret Cavendish. She immediately started on an excited five-minute talk about researching 17th century science and how the name Cavendish kept coming up and how she knew it from Virginia Woolf’s dismissive comments and how she therefore hadn’t read any Cavendish (because, well, Woolf), but then she did and how the scientific ideas still resonate with ideas we’re asking about today. When she finally wound down, she added: “And thank you for asking that question.”

So, a good evening. But I still don’t have my copy of The Blazing World signed.

Reprint: Postmodernism

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Brian McHale, Christine Brook-Rose, Christopher Priest, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Frederic Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry James, Iain Banks, James Joyce, John Fowles, Katherine Dunn, Kathy Acker, Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut, Laurence Sterne, Miguel de Cervantes, Paul Auster, Richard Jefferies, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, William Vollman

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one appeared in Vector 219, September-October 2001. As with the column on Modernism, my views are likely to have changed somewhat in the interim.

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: 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.