The Detached Retina

Far more worthy of expectoration was the medieval behaviour of the Ayatollah Khomeini in pronouncing the death sentence on Rushdie for his novel. Even in World War II we never witnessed such behaviour. The situation is far more bizarre than even Rushdie’s mind could think up—bizarre and horrifying.

It was my misfortune to appear on the BBC TV programme ‘Kilroy’ which discussed Khomeini’s death threat. I felt very strongly that both the freedom of speech and Rushdie must be protected—the former on principle, the latter from his foolishness. The majority of those appearing in the Kilroy-Silk bear-pit were Muslim. The atmosphere was thunderous. Many, though not all, of the Muslims present agreed vociferously with the Ayatollah that Rushdie should be killed. Some of these men held high positions in the Muslim community in Britain. When asked directly if they would murder Rushdie themselves, the men fought shy, knowing the television cameras were upon them. Two women had no such qualms. Both said they would murder Rushdie themselves.

To have to listen to such madness was almost unbearable. Fact and fantasy were again confused. No one in the vociferous belt could—or would—distinguish between a novel and a theological work. These people and millions like them, had surrendered their consciences into the keeping of the mad old man in Teheran. The most recent similar case we experienced was the fever of the Cultural Revolution under the Great Helmsman (you didn’t meet him, did you, Dali?), when two million people stood in Tienanmen Square and waved their Little Red Books.

Rushdie began his writing career with Grimus, once categorized as SF. I tried to give it the award in a Sunday Times SF Competition, but it was withdrawn. Later, I tried ineffectually to bestow the Booker Prize on D. M. Thomas’s White Hotel, rather than on Midnight’s Children. No one then imagined that Rushdie’s name would become more widely known over the face of the globe than any author since Rosetta wrote his Stone.

In the matter of freedom of speech, writers must be for it. On the whole I’m also for blasphemy—it proves the god spoken out against is still living. You can’t blaspheme against Baal or the Egyptian goddess Isis.

Some of the bourgeois like being épated. As I enjoyed Henry Miller’s writings when he was forbidden, so I enjoyed your carefully executed shockers when they were disapproved of. To my mind, some of them have a long shelf life. Longer than yours.

Your old friend Luis Buñuel proceeded you into the realms of darkness. He too did his share of shocking us out of apathy, and would have recognized in the bigotry of the Ayatollah the intolerance he mocked in the Roman Catholic Church in Spain. With Buñuel, if you remember, you made that celebrated surrealist film, L’Age d’Or. It certainly opened a large door in my consciousness.

But it’s a silver age. ‘The New Dark Age’, as a headline in our beloved Guardian calls it today (1 February 1989). Singing yobs are in vogue, Dali. Pre-pubescent voices. Tribal drumming. Over-amplification. Your exit was well-timed.

And for SF too it’s a silver age. True there is some sign that a few of the younger writers are impatient with the stodginess of their elders. (During the time of President Reagan, patriotism became a way of life and patriotism is always a blanket excuse for stifling the critical faculty, as if there were no other use for blankets.) Paul di Filipo and Bruce Sterling are names that spring to mind in this connection, and the group of writers who centre round the magazine New Pathways, with their subversive artist, Ferret.

You weren’t particulary patriotic. When the Civil War hit Spain, you sensibly refused to take sides—though you had a good precautionary word for General Franco—and went to live in Italy, continuing to flirt with psychoanalysis and sunlight. When Europe sank down on its knees in the fury of World War II, you hopped over to the New World, where the Americans embraced your flamboyance and dirty mind with open purses. Orwell blamed you for those two desertions. Silly of him, really—such an English chap, he should have remembered the words of another Englishman, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

Those words were quoted in 1973 in the pages of Analog. (Did you ever see Analog, Dali? In its better days, the covers might have appealed to you.) They were quoted by the late Robert A. Heinlein in a guest editorial. He referred to Johnson’s cautionary remark as ‘a sneering wisecrack’. Johnson never sneered. Heinlein then compounded his philistinism by referring to Johnson as ‘a fat gluttonous slob who was pursued all his life by a pathological fear of death’. Several readers cancelled their subscription to Analog on the spot.

You see what I’m getting at? It is a mark of civilization that one criticizes one’s own country. Hemingway said that a writer should always be against the government in power. Whatever their faults of exhibitionism, your paintings spoke out against the mundane, the dreary, the received. Like the other surrealists, you were up in arms, though you preferred yours covered in mink and diamonds.

American SF writers have not been slow to write about their Vietnam War. The British have had little to say about their adventure in the Falkland Islands at the start of this decade. A thousand pardons—as a Spaniard you probably think of those shores as Las Malvinas. Our neat little war!—won through the bravery of the common man and because the French sold the Argentinians dud Exocets.

We captured the Falklands from you Spaniards back in Johnson’s time. And what did Johnson have to say about that victory, in his ponderous, humorous fashion?

… What have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional …

How the words ring on!

Garry Kilworth has gone to Hong Kong. Perhaps we shall have a similar devastating bulletin from him in the next Yearbook. SF in England has settled down to comfortable squalor, relatively unmoved by dirty needles, inner city decay, and the prospect of union with Europe. At least you preserved the clean contorted rocks of Figueras and the drypoint desert as background. Your air was clear.

You may not have been in the very front rank, Dali, but you stood up to be counted. At the least, you kept us amused throughout a lifetime, like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor rolled into one. You replenished that small vocabulary of images which shapes our imaginative life. You are the great international SF writer in paint.

And you chucked that bloody ocelot into the water.

All the best in the summer stars,

Your admirer,

Brian Aldiss

‘A ROBOT TENDED YOUR REMAINS …’ (#u2be261e9-644b-552a-8704-51109a847daa)

The Advance of the Mega-machine (#ulink_edcb3be4-901b-5c32-af2b-150030fe1e99)

Every so often, someone writes a heart-rending book about science fiction. To say how bad it is. Perhaps to say how good his or her writing is and how little appreciated. That needs courage.

The most academic journal in the field, Science-Fiction Studies, in its issue #61 (November 1993) listed my name among the five or six most neglected names of authors. So I suppose I am also entitled to lament. However, cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

There remains that comment of Samuel Johnson’s in his letter to Lord Chesterfield, which no doubt speaks to the hearts of many authors: ‘I had done all I could’, Johnson writes, ‘and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little’. The elegant English art of litotes! All the same, I have had a fair run for my money. More particularly, perhaps, in the United States than in my own country. Three books on my writing, plus a wacking great 360-page bibliography of an unprecedented accuracy (being the work of my wife Margaret Aldiss) have been published—in the States, but not the UK.

In that same Science-Fiction Studies article, Gary K. Wolfe, one of our most acute and active critics, lists topics he feels are neglected, such as the contributions of SF editors other than Gernsback and Campbell.

Another topic rarely discussed goes to the very roots of SF—the drift towards the impersonal, towards humans as units, as machines. Towards rule by machine. Towards the sort of giantism in corporations and architecture such as Nazi Germany preferred. Towards anything which rules out of court the quiet dissident voice of the individual. Towards crushing the anima. Towards the immense—which is always cruel.

Towards metropolis and megalopolis.

Towards galactic empires.

Towards artificial intelligences taking over from us.

Towards, in sum, most of the gaudy goodies on the front counter of SF’s supermarket …

Are not these items which reinforce anomia and spiritual impoverishment among the prevailing dreams of SF? Approached ambivalently, yet rarely rejected out of hand. Our SF culture springs from nations with most power. So power is naturally a prevailing theme.

A Czech playright by the name of Vaclav Havel spoke out on this threat in the days before his country threw off the Communist yoke, and before he became president of the Czech Republic. Here is an extract from what he said:

In my view Soviet totalitarianism is an extreme manifestation—a strange, cruel, and dangerous species—of a deep-seated problem which equally finds expression in advanced Western society. These systems have in common something that the Czech philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky calls ‘the eschatology of the impersonal’. That is, a trend towards impersonal power and rule by mega-machines or colossi that escape human control.

I believe the world is losing its human dimension. Self-propelling mega-machines, juggernauts of impersonal power such as large-scale enterprises and faceless governments, represent the greatest threat to our present-day world. In the final analysis, totalitarianism is not more than an extreme expression of that threat.

My first SF novel, Non-Stop, aired this theme. The big battalions, the grandiose ideas, have taken over from individuals and, in the words of the prologue, ‘gobbled up their real lives’. The theme finds expression in much of my fiction since then. Less than a decade ago we were being confronted by that ‘eschatology of the impersonal’ in one of its most dreadful guises, Armageddon brought about by nuclear destruction, and by the belief that the Enemy was evil and had to be destroyed.

My fondness for Orwell’s old novel, as noted elsewhere, is because for him utopia is just a note saying I LOVE YOU, a rather seedy bedroom, a girl, and privacy … great things to set against a megamachine. Clifford Simak was against the mega-machine; time and again, his characters seek something better—in City, his best-loved novel, it is a place where men do not have to be humans or dogs dogs. Philip Dick also fought against the mega-machine. His novels were for so long more popular in France and England than in the USA.

Every decade, SF changes as the world changes. The most popular SF/Fantasy author of the nineties is Terry Pratchett, with his wonderful Discworld comedies. They adroitly side-step any megamachine back to the invention of the wheel.

More typically—SF is a solemn business—the novels of the nineties often strive to accommodate themselves within ‘the eschatology of the impersonal’, perhaps in an attempt at domestication. The machine manifests itself as cyberspace in the popular novels of William Gibson and others. Cyberspace has become a popular buzz word, with the Internet a manifestation of its neural structure. In Tom Maddox’s novel Halo, several characters are ingested by Aleph, a controlling artificial super-intelligence installed on an orbiting satellite.

Jerry Chapman is one such character. He asks Aleph what became of his body.

‘It was … recycled. A robot tended your remains with loving grace.’

‘So I am nowhere.’

‘Or here. Or everywhere. As you wish.’

Here the limits of human individuality seem to extend to infinity—but within the limits of the machine.

One of the unspoken divisions in the SF field lies between those who delight in the mega-machine and those who mistrust it. Rich and acclaimed authors, the L. Ron Hubbards of this and other worlds, are generally those who subscribe to and propagate the easy belief that bigger means better, that larger is lovelier. Happily, we know how God despises wealth, since we can see the sort of people on whom he bestows it.

Well, friends, there is much in the world to lament. What tales we could all tell about our involvement with SF! Which brings us to Barry Malzberg—unafraid to say how bad he believes SF to be, unembarrassed to use SF as his wailing wall. I admire Barry (since we’re speaking personally, like individuals) and also somewhat dread encounters with him. We always fear those who speak truth. Or even half-truths.

Should not Barry Malzberg rank among the great neglected on the Science-Fiction Studies list of martyrs? He has many books to his credit, including two books which reach right to the heart of the field—in order to stab it and himself to death. One book is a novel, Herovit’s World, one is a collection of essays, The Engines of the Night. These are the books to read in order to understand something about the pains of a writer’s life—not necessarily an SF writer’s, or a New Yorker’s, or a Jewish writer’s life. Or even a writer’s life.

Malzberg once took my wife and me on a literary tour of Manhattan, showing us where each incident in his novel occurred. Here’s the doorway where Herovit masturbated himself. That’s the window of the room where X shot himself … How we laughed as we drove along!