This World and Nearer Ones

In their modest way, these essays represent my lifelong interest in working in this ambiguous area. They could also be said to trace the path through the last two centuries which can be seen leading us towards a fruitful concept of the present; for our present is just someone else’s discarded future. We tread in the ruins of futures as well as of the past.

As for the essays themselves, they are also ruins in their way. They are salvaged from years of work I have done whilst not plying my trade as novelist and short story writer, expended in reviews and articles, mainly trying to educate myself. Everything has been revised or rewritten – or thrown out in disgust.

Although not every essay concerns itself with science fiction, this volume is being published in connection with a science fictional event, the Thirty-Seventh World Science Fiction Convention, Seacon, being held in Brighton, England, during August 1979, at which I am British Guest of Honour (the American Guest of Honour being Fritz Leiber).

Whilst the ordinary novel slumbers, paralysed perhaps by the gibbous awfulness of the twentieth century, SF makes its cislunar excursions. Year by year, its progeny grow. Science fiction now accounts for between ten and twelve percent of fiction sales. Yet it is very little discussed. When reviewed by newspapers and literary journals, it is either ‘done’ in a special issue, as a mad annual diversion, or else confined to small cemeteries on the fringes of a book page – semi-hallowed ground, the sort of spot where suicides are buried, its titles lying athwart one another like uprooted gravestones.

Other special purgatories are reserved for science fiction authors. They are invited to appear on BBC television with people like Uri Geller, Bruce Bellamy, or Dr Magnus Pyke. They are introduced at literary luncheons with jokes about their not having two heads or green skins (less of that lately, thank goodness). They have to endure conversations with people who assume automatically that they believe, as do their interrogators, in Flying Saucers and telepathy and Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle and God as Cosmonaut and acupuncture and macrobiotic foods and pyramids that sharpen razor blades. They are scrutinised closely by their neighbours for traces of android-like behaviour.

At festivals of literature, they are regarded askance by chairmen of panels, who may make jocular interjections if they chance to refer to either E. E. Smith on the one hand or Dr Johnson on the other. More orthodox writers present suspect them of earning far more money than they do, or far less. (Both are true, by the way.)

All this may suggest that I have reasons to dislike being labelled an SF author. I have my reasons; but I do not dislike being an SF author. On the contrary. Although my first loyalty is to literature, I owe a great deal to a field to which I have been able to contribute something.

I am regarded as a difficult author, because I write non-fiction as well as fiction, ordinary fiction as well as science fiction, and occasionally what is considered a difficult book; but in my experience the readership of SF, on its more informed level, is remarkably patient, and will always endeavour to comprehend what they at first find incomprehensible.

Let me name two additional advantages in being a writer of science fiction, apart from becoming pampered Guest of Honour at a Convention, since they are germane to these essays.

Firstly, over the last twenty years, the span of my writing career, science fiction has developed remarkably all round the world, the toothed peak of its progress rising like a population graph. Playing a role in that process has been tremendously rewarding.

Despite all the expansion, readers and writers have managed to remain closely in communication, as this Convention indicates. This may be in part because of the indifference of people beyond the field, and the condemnation of critics armed only with the antique weaponry of standard lit. crit.; but it more probably springs from an inner mystery – the attempted complex unity of art and science – in SF itself. Because of that mystery, which every writer tries to interpret in an individual way, and because of the indifference from outside, we have been forced to form our own body of criticism, our own canons of taste; we have established our own editors, reviewers, scholars, booksellers and publishers, in a remarkable burst of creativity for which I can think of no parallel. We have done it all ourselves and given the world a new literature, whether the world wants it or not.

Secondly, that close community of interest, that fascination with the mystery, is global, and not confined to Western Europe or the United States. Largely thanks to friendly connections overseas, I have been able to travel about the world a good deal in the last decade, as some of the contents indicate, and have wandered as far afield as Iceland, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, Japan, Brazil, Sicily, Mexico, Australia, Sumatra, and now Brighton. (Some of the trips were made by good old private enterprise, such as the Mexico and Sumatran ventures, but I should perhaps add that the Soviet visit was laid on by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the GB/USSR Association, to whom I wish to express my thanks.) Even the most casual traveller abroad must notice the way in which the whole world is caught up in a scramble of change.

In England at least, reviewing is very much part of a writing career, a valuable part; low pay and the general education give one a feel for the somewhat marginal job of authorship. As well as reviewing for the Oxford Mail, for which I worked for many years, I have written articles for a spectrum of journals, among them the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Punch, Penthouse, and the Guardian. To the latter, I contributed an irregular series on art, which I wish I had found time to continue. I have reviewed films for this paper and that, and for the BBC. I have read for publishers and for the Arts Council. I have contributed to countless fanzines. Millions of words, wind into the wind.

From all that material, I could have bundled together enough wordage to fill several volumes. But a book is a book is a book, and rarely a collection of old journalism. I have tried to reshape everything in order to make a new book. Only in the section entitled ‘Rough Justices’, where I appear primarily as reviewer, is the material almost as originally published.

‘Ever Since the Enlightenment’ is based on a speech given in Canberra, thanks to Colin Steele. The James Blish article is a development of an interview I made with Blish; earlier stages of the article appeared in Foundation and a critical volume for Queensland University Press edited by Kirpal Singh and Michael Tolley (to both of which gentlemen my thanks for aid beyond the scope of literature). ‘Dick’s Maledictory Web’ appeared first in Science Fiction Studies and then as an introduction to an edition of Dick’s Martian Time-Slip. ‘Why They Left Zirn Unguarded’ is based on a review which appeared in Vector. The Nesvadba article appeared as an introduction to an edition of Nesvadba’s In the Footsteps of the Abominable Snowman. The Vonnegut article is based on one which appeared in Andrew Mylett’s Summary. The ‘Barefoot’ article is based on an introduction for a Swedish translation of Barefoot in the Head which, despite gallant efforts by John Henri Holmberg and Sam Lundwall, never got published. ‘The Gulf and the Forest’ is based on an article with the same title which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

‘Looking Forward to 2001’ is based on a speech delivered to the Oxford Union, with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.

‘The Hiroshima Man’ is an extended version of a review which appeared in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. ‘The Hashish Club’ appeared as an introduction to a book of the same name, published by Peter Owen. ‘1951’ appeared in slightly different form in Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier’s A Tonic to the Nation.

‘The Sower of the Systems’ is based on a review of a Watts exhibition published in the Guardian. ‘The Fireby-Wireby Book’ appeared in a fanzine, Cidereal Times. ‘The Film Tarkovsky Made’ was first published in Foundation. ‘Kissingers Have Long Ears’ is based on an article written for Art and Story. ‘Spielberg’ began life as a lecture delivered at the ICA.

‘Sleazo Inputs I Have Known’ was published in Foundation. ‘It Catechised from Outer Space’ was published in New Review. ‘The Flight into Tomorrow’ appeared as an introduction to an edition of Harness’s The Paradox Men. The Burroughs article appeared in Punch. ‘Yes, well, but …’ appeared in Science Fiction Studies. ‘The Universe as Coal-Scuttle’ was developed from two reviews which appeared in the New Statesman.

‘California’ is based on an article in the Guardian. ‘Modest Atmosphere’ was broadcast in the BBC Third Programme, with George Macbeth and me playing all twelve voices, and later appeared in Encounter. Passages from ‘Cultural Totems’ appeared in New Review.

Two awards for criticism have been bestowed upon me. I am first holder of the James Blish Award for Excellence in Science Fiction Criticism (1977), presented for services to SF, with particular reference to my book Science Fiction Art (a revised version of the text of which is included here), and the introduction to Philip K.Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (which is included here). In 1978, the SFRA presented me with a Pilgrim Award in recognition of distinguished contributions to the study of science fiction, with particular reference to Billion Year Spree, and my anthologies.

To both these bodies, the British and the American, I offer my thanks for such encouragement. Come, gentlemen, what more fascinating subject for study is there?

Brian W. Aldiss

Oxford

December 1978

Ever Since the Enlightenment (#u769fe0b6-0aa0-515d-8526-25f1e4638119)

There is no finality in the current state of the world. The present power blocs within which we pass our lives in this posture or that will be gone in two hundred years as surely as the Holy Roman Empire or Byzantium.

Europe’s security was threatened by Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The removal of that threat in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries paved the way for a comparatively halcyon period for Europe (already prospering from its scientific discoveries and its ventures in the New World or round the globe) which we call the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.

The Ottoman Empire was once as mighty as China. In July 1683, Ottoman armies stood at the gates of Vienna, and Christendom itself was besieged. After sustained fighting, the Turks retreated, leaving behind colossal hordes of treasure, as well as piles of coffee which, disseminated through coffee houses, helped to make Europe a more civilised place. From this battle dates the rise to power of the Habsburg Empire.

A distinguished part in the battle for Vienna was taken by Prince Eugène of Savoy, a great general who was later to play a larger and more decisive role in the fight for the integrity of Europe.

If you sail down the Danube from Vienna, you come eventually to a place where the river flows round a dramatic outcrop of rock. Standing on top of this rock is a great fortress with green roofs. You can enter the fortress nowadays and eat an excellent meal in its chambers. This is Petrovaradin; before the country became Jugoslavia, these lands belonged to Austria, and the fortress was Peterwardein, but wienerschnitzel has given way to razniči and hajdučki čevap. Here, in 1716, Eugéne and his army defeated a great Turkish force, killing six thousand of them. The spoils were enormous, and enriched the European imagination as well as the pockets of Eugène’s men. Eugène himself retained the Grand Vizier’s tent, which was sumptuously decorated in gold and contained many apartments; it was so large that five hundred men were required to pitch it.

Sail a little farther down the Danube. Where it meets its tributary, the Sava, Belgrade stands, set in a great curve of the river, now a modern capital, once an Ottoman fortress. There, almost exactly a year after his victory at Peterwardein, Eugène of Savoy inflicted another defeat on the Ottoman Power.

There is never security without arms. Following the Turkish defeat, Belgrade itself, Hungary, sections of Bosnia and Serbia became part of the Habsburg domains, and the menace to western Europe was dispersed. Over the mounds of corpses and coffee, the way for the enormous progress of the eighteenth century was open – though of course the European states still squabbled amongst themselves.

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason sought for balance, the kind of balance enshrined in the great houses of the period, with East wing balanced against West, in the rapid advance of justice and civil order, in the antitheses of Johnsonian prose, as well as in the paradoxes and heroic couplets of Pope’s poetry. Humanism progressed, science progressed, all arts elaborated themselves – not least in music, where the pale counterpoint of Domenico Scarlatti was transformed into the complex statements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. And the industrial revolution gathered in a tide which still floods round the remotest shores of the world.

There now appears something slightly one-dimensional about the world of the Enlightenment, so greatly has social modification worked since then. In its peaceableness, its reasonableness, the Enlightenment lacks our painful perspectives on human nature. We can no more resurrect its values than read the poems of Ossian. Captain Cook was allowed to sail where he would in time of war, unmolested by his enemies, who recognised the value of his scientific research. G.B.Tiepolo painted the Queen of the Nile in High Renaissance costume, being concerned not with anachronism but with what looked best. In the eighteenth century you dressed up for science, as you did to have your portrait painted.

It is less with Tiepolo than Cook that we are concerned, although art and scientific discovery are closely linked during this period.

Tiepolo, luminary of a maritime republic, like Turkey in eclipse, died at virtually the same time as Cook was setting up his observatory in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. The old painter’s day was done, his style superseded by the classicism of Mengs. James Cook also represented a new style. His painters, under Sir Joshua Banks, had no truck with queens or goddesses; they were trained to scientific observation. Cook himself was an excellent cartographer, and carried on his voyages new-style theodolites and accurate chronometers to chart his way.

Nor was it only in instrumentation, in the gadgetry, that things were changing. Other mariners, such as Samuel Wallis, had sailed the Pacific before Cook, and sought the mysterious Southern Continent; but they had been too ill on reaching those far waters to carry out their proper duties. Scurvy and dysentery claimed their crews. Cook observed proper diet, proper hygiene, and his crews stayed fit.

The South Seas acted as counterbalance to what enlightened Europeans experienced as the smallness of Christendom. Eighteenth-century security bred boredom. A new world was needed. In fact, what was eventually discovered was unsought: new dimensions of time, evolution, Romanticism and the complex of ideas which dominate our own times, whether we realise it or not.

We have a sense of the future very clear in our age, but all ages have their infancies in previous ones. Romanticism, evolutionary theories, speculations on time, were none of them new to the nineteenth or even the eighteenth century. While the bells of Rome and every other European capital were ringing for the relief of Vienna and the defeat of the Turks, Thomas Burnet in Cambridge was translating into English his Telluris Theoria Sacra; it was published in 1684 as The Sacred Theory of the Earth. In a sonorous style which imitates Sir Thomas Browne, Burnet reveals his cosmological theory, which states that, before Creation, Earth was perfectly smooth like an egg until such time as it hatched and released a universal Flood. Burnet remarks, in a striking phrase, that we ‘have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins’.

Despite his egg theory, Burnet was no fool, and believed that since we had been endowed with Reason, we should exercise it to discover and understand the world in which we found ourselves. This is the doctrine of the Age of Reason.

Burnet continues, ‘The greatest objects in Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold … Whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.’ Perfect Romantic doctrine, looking forward to Burke – and back to Lord Bacon: ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’

The great philosophers of the time, Berkeley in particular, were more effectively working changes in perception. But new philosophies filter only slowly through the general populace; it was the voyages of men like Cook in undiscovered places which immediately caught the public imagination.

The motives behind the exploration of those distant regions were mixed, as man’s motives generally are, as the motives for the Apollo flights to the Moon in the sixties were. Unlike the discovery and opening up of the North American continent, the story of the South Seas must remind us of our own generation’s experience of space travel – not least in a remark Cook makes in one of his letters; in his reference to his ‘ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go’, even the phraseology forges an unsought parallel between the Endeavour and the starship Enterprise.

To an eighteenth-century man, that distant part of the globe was the equivalent of a new planet, a watery planet like Perelandra. In some respects very like Perelandra; for, as in C. S. Lewis’s novel the inhabitants of Venus act out a religious drama, an allegory, so the inhabitants of the South Pacific served to act out some of the preoccupations of eighteenth-century man. Were they models of what the Ancient Greeks had been, enlightened people in a state of grace with nature; were they corrupt savages in need of a missionary; or were they sinless, Adams and Eves before the Fall, inhabitants of multitudinous Edens?

More than one construction can generally be made from one set of facts. Just as SF writers become accustomed to hearing from uninformed reviewers that they are ‘new Wellses’ or ‘latter-day Vernes’, so Europeans, striving to focus on the essential qualities of newly discovered races, claimed that they were ‘what the ancient Britons were before civilisation’, while the Australian aborigines were compared with Gaelic bards. Not analogies only but morals were to be drawn. As William Cowper put it, in the first book of his poem, The Task:

E’en the favoured isles,

So lately found, although the constant sun

Cheer all their seasons with a grateful smile,

Can boast but little virtue; and, inert