This World and Nearer Ones

It may be that part of the stigma still attaching to science fiction lay originally in the fact that the men who helped create it as a form of expression were themselves outsiders, or regarded themselves as outsiders; examination of, say, one hundred typical texts would probably reinforce the theme of isolation (prominent for instance in Frankenstein). Even in overpopulation novels, which proliferated in the sixties of this century, the solitary individual occurs, almost in defiance of his context.

Isolation is manifestly one of the problems liable to crop up on a newly discovered planet, where you can find yourself alone except for a computer, a captain who has got religion, and the ship’s cat. It was particularly to the concept of new planets that American SF writers turned when they entered the science fiction lists with the launching of the pulp magazines. This phenomenon is generally explained as the Quest for the Last Frontier. It is less glib to consider imaginary planets as evidence of the fear and attraction of isolation.

Just as Hollywood on the West Coast of the USA was largely run by émigrés – Hungarians and the like – so was the pulp industry, peddling dreams and traumas on the East Coast. The émigrés came from the over-populated cities of Europe to another over-populated American city. Many SF writers, editors, and publishers were strangers in a strange land, autodidacts like Hardy and Wells. Isaac Asimov is a case in point. Born in a suburb of Smolensk in Russia, he was brought over to the United States at the age of three. His family settled in Brooklyn; his father ran a candy store. By the age of nine, Asimov Jnr was reading SF and educating himself by it; since when, with great single-mindedness, he has been trying to educate the rest of us. There can be few sciences which have not escaped his net. (The abrupt uprooting in early childhood sets him in a class with Mary Shelley, Nerval, Wells, Stapledon, Ballard, Aldiss, and many others).

Although we can point to the new science-fictional planets as logical extensions of such fictitious lands as Laputa and Butler’s Erewhon, we should bear in mind scientific considerations as well as literary ones. True, as the terrestrial globe shrinks, it is increasingly difficult to convince readers of the probability of finding even a satirical utopia in some undiscovered nook. Arthur Conan Doyle’s siting of the Lost World in the Amazon was plausible in 1912 (Professor Challenger’s ‘journey to verify some conclusions of Wallace and Bates,’ and his discovery of scientifically accurate and astonishing water-colours, designedly remind us of Cook’s and Darwin’s expeditions to undiscovered regions). After World War I, the increasing range of flying machines made similar caches of evolutionary anachronisms less and less likely. Science, a creative part of man’s mind, banishes literature, another creative part. One could chart the banishment of Doyle’s dinosaurs down the scale of fiction, down the scale of likelihood, to the boys’ magazines of the thirties, to the comics of the forties and fifties, to the Hanna Barbera cartoons of the sixties, and from the Matto Grosso to inside Everest, and from Atlantis back to – for in the most desperate fantasies credulity is neither here nor there – South America.

As the imagination needed new planets for its proper exercise, the new tools of theoretical science could supply them. This is revealed in the chief literary use to which new planets were put in early science fiction. Satire and utopianism, favourite ploys of the eighteenth century or earlier, were no more. The new planets did not form stages on which man could enact his social problems; instead, they were themselves the centre of the action, working models of scientific thought.

For to imagine out the full implications of evolution, geology, Malthusianism, and the famous Second Law, one needs to construct either a time machine, as Wells did, or a planet that represents Earth in an earlier or later stage of its life history. Even existent planets were converted for this purpose. By common consent, Mars became a dried up senescent version of Earth, and Venus a model of earlier terrestrial history, hot and steamy, sweltering under a Jurassic dream. Both models totally ignored astronomical fact, but fulfilled the need to act out in imagination current scientific theories.

The other element that assisted in the model-making was Infinite Lay Time. That also was a nineteenth-century invention. All time machines are ILT vehicles. Before their invention by sceptical theoretical scientists and mathematicians, anyone venturing back in time to 4004 BC would have banged his head on solid rock. The new speculative element, which rendered time immense, allowed the time traveller to go back far beyond page one of Genesis or forward beyond Armageddon to the ultimate heat death of the universe. SF writers had the job of making both accessible to the lay imagination. No-one else would touch the daunting task.

The connections between our world of today and the Enlightenment are now faint, erased by the horrors of our century, two world wars and the long-planned, long-term massacres of millions of people by Hitler and Stalin and their willing agents. Yet there are echoes. Europe has shrunk again, and is threatened by a new kind of Turk, though we are hardly likely to finance a new Prince Eugène.

Science fiction is here to stay, or will stay as long as we can at least speak of progress and dare to look at the future. In the West SF writers are still not mouthpieces of the state; one can see for them a unique function as disseminators of philosophical and scientific thought. Writers like Wells and Huxley excelled in that role, as did Olaf Stapledon, with his imaginative transformations of combined evolutionary and cosmological theory.

But the great commercial success of science fiction in the seventies diminishes the possibility that it will be treated even by its practitioners with proper seriousness. Money is not the enemy, but the greed for money. SF has become a sort of cultural reflex like the mother-in-law joke, used to sell cars and biscuits. Every time it is so used, it is drained of challenging ideas. Eventually it may become so trivial, so light, that it will sink below the intellectual horizon.

Paradoxically, this new commercial success comes at a time when its prime base – the grand gloomy ideas I have described – has worn thin, as genre material always does. As it becomes or tends to become less a literary genre, so – paradoxically again – it is being greatly taken up by universities, especially in the States, and the first international congress of SF critics has been held in Palermo (for SF is now an international pursuit, endowed by UNESCO).

But, science fiction has always been contradictory, and its best creators of a sturdily independent kind. This is perhaps the time of greatest potential for them and for the genre.

Even in a popular film like Star Wars, admittedly a mammoth with the brains of a gnat, one perceives at least latent thought. Although Star Wars was widely condemned by SF writers for its triviality, one can see how easily the idea of the Force as a spiritual weapon, rather than Robin Hood’s stave, could have been developed and deepened. The rebels would then have been fighting against the evil of the Empire with values on their side with which a general public would readily have identified; it could have entered scenes upon which, instead, it merely gazed.

The Force is a sort of corrupt version of the Samurai code. To have inserted the true thing with all its ritual of fasting and self-discipline and chivalric intent into the film would have increased immensely the film’s significance without spoiling the pace. Admittedly, Luke Skywalker would then have become less of a Disney kid; it is not sufficient to have togged him up with a shorty Roman toga instead of giving him a character.

Star Wars was pretty, but underestimated its audience’s intelligence. One of the lessons of the Enlightenment is that people are, on the whole, glad to learn and take pleasure in knowledge. Criticism should never be too prescriptive, but my hope is that science fiction will retain its old magic, and its sturdy if gloomy philosophical basic.

James Blish and the Mathematics of Knowledge (#u769fe0b6-0aa0-515d-8526-25f1e4638119)

We did not have the time to learn

everything that we wanted to know

Retma’s epitaph for Man in A Clash of Cymbals

The science fiction of James Blish presents us with a number of pleasurable dichotomies. Under the cloak of technological activity, he is a visionary of an old-fashioned kind, able, like Blake, to hold infinity in his hand. Such visionaries usually speak out against technology; but Blish saw in technology a chance to bring us nearer to the seat of knowledge, which – I hope to show – he equated with wisdom. Technology and the advance of science, in Blish’s view, bring us nearer to the ends and beginnings of things which loom so largely in Blishian cosmologies.

Windows on eternity open in all his novels. I knew Blish well for several years before his death in 1975 and he often spoke fondly of his early novel, Fallen Star (The Frozen Year, US title). A window on eternity opens early in that novel:

‘My post gave me a direct view of the magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in the act of blowing up – as, in miniature, it was; the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower of more than two hundred mesons.

Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that – a record of the undoing of one of the basic building blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe – could have resisted asking for a closer look.’

In asking for a closer look at the photograph, Julian Cole becomes involved as a journalist on the International Geophysical Year expedition to the Arctic. A member of the expedition, Joseph Wentz, dies, and a short oration is made over his dead body by Farnsworth, the leader of the expedition. The oration includes these words: ‘If You [God] … exist, and if You are still thinking about men, think of Joe Wentz. He admired Your fine workmanship in the stars, and never reproached You for spoiling him.’

Another member of the expedition responds angrily, ‘It is proven: He never punishes crime; He cares nothing for stars; why should He care about man?’ Much of Blish’s work is devoted to answering this question. Is there a God? Does he care? Can we achieve answers to these vital questions by pushing science (knowledge) to its extremes?

Juxtaposed, these questions form a central riddle, the nature of which changes slightly throughout Blish’s long career. Blish never satisfactorily answers the riddle himself. This may imply a failure as a theoretical novelist, but the riddle is often embodied in an image of great power; this is his success as a poet. The riddle is given form in Fallen Star, for instance, by the little pebble which Farnsworth embeds in an ordinary ice cube.

The pebble is a tektite fallen to Earth from the region of the asteroid belt, and consists of sedimentary rock. The implications of this find are tremendous. An asteroidal protoplanet once existed which supported oceans for a long period. So its climate must have been warmer than Mars; it must have had an atmosphere. A later discovery carries these theories further. There was life on the planet. And it was destroyed by the Martians within the period of Man’s span on Earth. There has been War in Heaven. As Farnsworth says – ‘Cosmic history in an ice cube!’

These and similar preoccupations explain why Blish felt such admiration for C. S. Lewis, to whose memory Black Easter is dedicated. Yet Blish is of what we may term the Campbell Generation; his work bears at least superficial resemblances to the other writing forged on John W. Campbell’s anvil. The Okie series, for example, gathered into book form as Cities in Flight, ran in serial form over a number of years in Campbell’s Astounding. Beneath the galactic gallivantings, however, lies something more hard-headed than anything in Heinlein, more intellectual than anything in Asimov, and more immense than anything in Van Vogt. Moreover, that something has little in common with the two SF writers Blish most admired, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth, for he rarely attempts the romantic and satiric modes in which Kuttner and Kornbluth are most successful.

In their spirit of enquiry, Blish’s novels are centrally science fictional. It is in the direction of that enquiry that Blish’s originality lies. We can only hope that some critic will come along and investigate his whole considerable oeuvre for us, revealing Blish’s true stature. I hope to point to a few lines of enquiry in this essay.

One main topic in the Astounding to which Blish contributed his early stories may be summed up in that striking phrase of Winston Churchill’s: ‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science.’ Campbell’s writers, whatever they might profess on the surface, were ambivalent regarding the virtues of the future world to which they saw themselves progressing as the outriders of culture. Time and time again, their stories dramatise experiments which – like those of Wernher von Braun in real life – metaphorically aim for the stars but hit London. Only in the stories of Isaac Asimov do we glimpse some kind of ordered and rational future. Yet, in the most popular of all sagas to emerge from Campbell’s forge, Asimov’s Foundation, (the title of that civilisation which Hari Seldon must preserve against the forces of decline) culture has nothing to do with the arts and humanities: it signifies merely an extrapolated twentieth-century technology which encases Trantor in metal, opposed by a barbarism which rides in spaceships.

Blish’s conception of culture and of science is more profound: he sees beneath them to their warring source. He perceived how every civilisation is dominated by a few major ideas and how these ideas become gradually outmoded, dooming the culture concerned; the fate of the Martians in Fallen Star is not that their planet has lost its atmosphere, but that they ‘have gone frozen in the brains’. Blish appreciated the seminal value of the pre-Classical culture in Greece, and dismissed out of hand Campbell’s assertion that ‘Homer was a barbarian’. Ideas infused from other sources can regenerate older cultures, as is demonstrated in Dr Mirabilis, the biography of the ‘miraculous doctor’, Roger Bacon, over which Blish laboured so long. The same seminal thought moved Blish to yoke four totally distinct books, A Case of Conscience, Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, and Mirabilis, together as an uncomfortable tetralogy entitled After Such Knowledge. His obsession with the true scientific nature of cultures is dramatised in The Seedling Stars which owes much to Olaf Stapledon. There an Adapted Man is not so much a man as an Idea from Earth, inserted into an alien environment to regenerate it (the reverse of the situation in Fallen Star).

The Seedling Stars is ultimately crude because the grand experiment of seeding stars takes little account of the feelings of the living beings forced to participate in the experiment, despite the moralising about the venture which goes on. Blish was interested in morality as a consciousness structure, while singularly lacking conventional moral tone. Individual lives rarely moved him. What concerned him was connecting together incompatible structures; he had come to believe, through Oswald Spengler, that there were no eternal verities, not even in the mathematics which is the basis of culture; hence his pre-occupation with eschatology.

A passage in Spengler’s Decline of the West must have attracted Blish’s attention, and certainly is relevant to the present day.

‘The modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the “true” – to wit, the Classical – mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.’

Our culture, sensing that the numbers in the Renaissance hour-glass are running out, is now trying belatedly to derive notations from other cultures previously ignored. Hence such manifestations as Tao Physics – and possibly SF itself.

Throughout Blish’s writing, we find two predominant preoccupations: that some culture or phase of culture is coming to an end (generally with a new beginning implied in that end) and that fresh ideas transfigure culture. Both these preoccupations find resolution in concepts of number. What excites him is not the individual – how could it, given those preoccupations – but the alembic of mathematics.

So his books conclude with cryptic sentences, the like of which never was on land or sea.

‘Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.’

God is dead.

‘And so, by winning all, all have I lost.’

Creation began.

Then he, too, was gone, and the world was ready to begin.

This last is the final line of one of Blish’s less appreciated novels, A Torrent of Faces, written with Norman L. Knight and, like Dr Mirabilis, a slow growth. It concerns – so the author tells us – a utopia of over-population. Blish did not regard this as a contradiction in terms. Again, numbers exercised their appeal. He says, ‘Our future world requires one hundred thousand cities with an average population of ten million people each. This means that there would have to be seven such cities in an area as small as Puerto Rico, about twelve to sixteen miles apart, if the cities are spread evenly all over the world in a checkerboard pattern.’ This culture survives only because a large portion of mankind lives under the oceans.

A Torrent of Faces is a cascade of figures. Every conversation seems to flow with them. As Kim and Jothen fly towards the mountain range of Chicago, she tells him, ‘Somewhere inside is the headquarters of the Civic Medical Services. I was born there. Every day approximately fifteen thousand babies are born there. The nine outlying regional centres produce about the same number daily …’ And so on. It is all rather like the scene at the end of A Clash of Cymbals where, heading for the collapse of the universe at the metagalactic centre of the universe, Hazelton borrows Amalfi’s slide-rule to do a few setting-up exercises.

This is not just a ploy to baffle us with prestidigitation; the power of numbers is a real thing for Blish. In A Clash of Cymbals, it creates a new universe. Amalfi, the hero of the Okie saga, becomes the godhead, the very substance of the new universe (‘the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into pleasure …’). Never was life everlasting achieved on such a scale.

This apocalyptic idea of one state of being leading to another is fundamental to a number of Blish’s novels and stories: one system of thought similarly supersedes another. Poor scientific Roger Bacon, arriving at Westminster, occupies a room foul with marsh gas from the sewer below; when he ignites it and blows himself up, he believes it to have been a visitation by the devil.

Blish’s work as a whole is remarkable for the visitations it numbers from both devils and angels. They were perhaps his way of injecting a conflicting irrational idea into the rationalism of Campbellian SF. Such creatures earn themselves a book title – The Night Shapes. This is not one of Blish’s best novels; perhaps Darkest Africa, with uneasy references to Rider Haggard – though E. R. Burroughs is nearer to the mark – suited the Blishian temperament less well than the Arctic. A terrible valley, likened to Eden, ‘burns out’ (and so becomes Hell?), releasing the night shapes. ‘The night shapes aren’t animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They’re the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They’ve always lived there. They always will.’

The context does not support the premise. But the premise of such night shapes often supported Blish.

Not only did he see them as convenient shorthand for an alien system of thought intruding itself on the cartesian universe, he had a markedly individual belief in Good and Evil. Through his windows on eternity he watched the Fall re-enacted. His purest version of the Fall is played out on Lithia, the planet in A Case of Conscience, the first volume of After Such Knowledge. That ponderous title, After Such Knowledge, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ Nobody earns forgiveness in Blish’s worlds; the math is against it. Religion’s no help. Even the Devil has to suffer by taking up the burdens of God at the end of The Day After Judgement.

Not that Blish believes in or asks us to believe in actual devils. But he has an interest in them which some might find excessive. He likes to hold the proposition open, if only as one of ‘the multitude of great ideas belonging to other cultures’ (devils being far from a Christian prerogative); perhaps he teased himself by the quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters used in Black Easter: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.’