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I mention painters only because, for me, much of the pleasure of SF lies in its imagery, in the bold pictures it paints. The ancient woodland invading the mansion in Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, the alien landscapes of Earth at the end of Bear’s Blood Music, the infernal city of Dis rising up from Death Valley in Blish’s The Day After Judgement, the wonderful forbidding planets and moons in which we all indulge from time to time—this visual side of SF is apt to be neglected by critics, and taken for granted by readers. Even a poor SF movie can generally be relied upon to deliver visual fillips. Isn’t this techno-romantic sense one of the special developments of our century?
The big question is, as ever, why is SF not more readily absorbed as part of the general diet read by a literate public? It is accepted that that audience may read crime novels without thereby losing status. Police procedure is an interesting subject: but is it really more interesting, of greater worth, than the procedures of planets, or the future of mankind? To which critics might respond, ‘Is SF about the future of mankind? And if it is, is a popular literature the proper place in which to discuss such a serious subject?’ Popular literature has always been about serious subjects: courage, love, adultery, failure, heroism, death. The argument that because something is popular it must be in some way debased gets us nowhere; it is a statement merely of prejudice.
Science fiction is not so much a forum for new topics, as some claim; rather, it is itself a new way to discuss old topics. The sense of the alien. The unease generated by religion and the failure of religion. The quest for meaning. Notions of the Sublime. A hope for the better miscegenating with a misgiving about the worse. Our ambiguous feelings concerning technology. The longing for security and its obverse, adventure. And more recently the importance of gender roles.
And science fiction seems to offer an elusive something more, a Martian sense of looking at things and finding the familiar strange, of finding novelty in this world, and nearer ones. For this it needs the SF writer’s gift, a detached viewpoint, a detached retina. Perhaps ordinary readers are not comfortable with detached retinas. As Samuel Delany pointed out, you have to train yourself or be trained to appreciate the tropes of SF.
We in the West worry about the blemishes in our societies, and about their failures, remedies for which can be perceived but not applied. To paraphrase Percy Bysshe Shelley, we enslave much of nature, yet ourselves remain slaves. Horse chestnuts may go in and out of fashion, and the drawings of Fuseli likewise, but war is always with us, destroying humans, homes, monuments, histories and environments. Our societies become increasingly politicized; yet as politicians become increasingly a part of showbiz and mediabiz they grow less and less able to offer leadership. Engendered by this situation, alternating fits of exhilaration and depression pour into science fiction.
Cool reflections on the state of play are offered by many contemporary writers. Karen Joy Fowler, for instance, in her novel Sarah Canary (1991), has this to say:
Sanity is a delicate concept, lunacy only slightly less so. Over the last few centuries, more and more of those phenomena once believed to belong to God have been assigned to the authority of the psycho-analyst instead. Some of the saints can be diagnosed in retrospect as epileptics. St Teresa was almost certainly an hysteric. St Ida of Lorraine seems to have suffered from perceptional insanity … The prognosis for such cases in our own age is excellent; saintliness can often be completely cured.
The essays which follow might seem not to deal with such weighty matters. I no longer attempt to emulate Todd and Grigson. My belief is that much of SF’s interest and importance lies in what it does not say. Or rather, that we like mainly what it corporately has to say about what it sees through that detached retina. Hence our addiction. It scratches where we itch.
I am no academic, as these essays show. For that reason, I use my own experience when it illuminates an argument. Academics do not behave like that; unlike me, they have careers to protect. I can scratch in public …
And, just as opinions may change regarding the attractions of the horse chestnut, so the place where we itch changes. I remember the days when all we needed to stir our imaginations was to read of a landing on the Moon. The very idea challenged the limits of what was possible. Then men went and landed there, and spoilt everything (maybe they spoilt it even for themselves, because I notice they’ve not been back since …).
So nowadays a Moon landing must have a different emphasis if it is to scratch in the right place. Terry Bisson would presumably concur with Fowler, as quoted above. In one of his deceptively relaxed stories, The Shadow Knows, he tangles up his Moon landing nicely with other contemporary elements. The major is homing in on Station Houbolt:
Situated on the far side of the Moon, facing always away from the Earth, Houbolt lies open to the Universe. In a more imaginative, more intelligent, more spirited age it would be a deep-space optical observatory; or at least a monastery. In our petty, penny-pinching, paranoid century it is used only as a semi-automated Near-Earth-Object or asteroid early-warning station. It wouldn’t have been kept open at all if it were not for the near-miss of NEO 2201 Oljato back in ’14, which had pried loose UN funds as only stark terror will.
Here’s our old familiar Moon landing, wonderful as ever. But nowadays it crawls with social commentary.
We devotees of SF enjoy its diversity of opinion, the bustle of bright and dark, the clash of progress and entropy, the clamour of theories about the past, the future, the ever-present present, everything.
We doubt: therefore we are.
B.W.A.
Boars Hill
Oxford
November 1994
THANKS FOR DROWNING THE OCELOT (#u2be261e9-644b-552a-8704-51109a847daa)
England, 1989
Dear Salvador Dali,
It’s a real sorrow that you died in January of this year, and I expect you were upset as well. I wanted to say thanks to you; let’s trust I’m not too late. I hope this letter will reach you as you rest in Abraham’s Bosom. Rough luck on Abraham, though.
But that can’t be right. You must be in some surreal place—perhaps in the heaven the ancient Egyptians dreamed about, by the summer stars. Or simply in orbit. Somewhere unorthodox. You liked breaking taboos.
Remember you once tried to prove that ‘the whole universe comes to a focus’ (as you put it) in the centre of the railway station in Perpignan? That was a good stunt. Perhaps you’re there in Perpignan, awaiting a celestial diesel to somewhere.
You were crazy. Or you acted the part. The remark about Perpignan railway station came in an article you wrote in 1965, extolling the virtues of the great Salvador Dali. Like Caesar, you referred to yourself in the third person—though in your case you were the first and the second person too: there were scarcely any others.
Your article involves the miraculous flies of Gerona, the cleanliness of Delft, the visceral eye of Vermeer, van Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope, several revolutions, the atomic bomb, and a swarm of priests dressed in black. It’s incoherent. You never wanted to make sense of the world; that had no part in your ‘critical paranoia’ method. Yet there was a tawdry magic. Take one sentence from that article:
Thus the blood of the dragoons and the hussars who hibernated at Beresina mixing directly with the blood of the new technologists of the always Very Holy Russia caused a historic mutation, producing the true and new mutant beings—the astronauts who, propelled by the templates of their genetic code, could not have a more positive way to direct themselves toward heaven than to jet straight toward the moon, which we will see happen from one moment to the other.
Even van Vogt couldn’t manage prose like that. So let’s just think of you in orbit somewhere in the summer stars. Greetings to Hieronymus Bosch.
You may not remember this, but we met on one occasion; an event was held in the London Planetarium, when you and I helped to launch a book of Fleur Cowles’s poems and paintings. You were working hard on giving an impression of great eccentricity. Without wishing to complain, I was slightly disappointed—only, I hasten to add, in the way that one is generally disappointed by meeting one’s heroes in the flesh. It’s the Napoleon-was-a-bit-short syndrome. When I met Jeffrey Archer, another of the greats, the same thought flashed across my mind. There was a kind of rotting Edwardian stylishness about you. Whereas Archer’s unmitigatedly eighties; the Hush Puppy school.
But you were a hero. At my school, in Form IVA, it was taken for granted you were the great artist of the age. We liked rotting carcasses, elongated skulls, soggy watches, crutches, and the rest of your props. One of our number, now a Labour backbencher, could act out your canvas, Spectre of Sex Appeal, naked, with the aid of a couple of hockey sticks. We chortled over your Life, so full of disgusting facts or fantasies that it would have meant expulsion had we been caught with the book in our lockers.
It was the confusion of fact with fantasy which caught the imagination. I have cooled down a bit since those days in IVA, when the class debated whether you had an exceedingly large whatnot, a laughably small one, or possibly none at all. Since then, you have sunk down the list of favourite artists in my estimation, whereas Kandinsky, Gauguin, Tanguy, Max Ernst and de Chirico in his early period, remain firm. Odd how all the century’s most exciting art was achieved before World War II was spent.
We’ll return to the confusion of fact with fantasy later, because that is where your connection with science fiction comes in, but first, at the risk of disturbing that great calm into which you have flown, I want to remind you of what George Orwell said. Orwell wrote that your two unquestionable qualities were an atrocious egotism and a gift for drawing. Many of us have aspired towards either, or both. As a kind of corollary to that remark, Orwell said ‘one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.’ It is an oft-quoted remark. You must be proud of it.
Although he belonged to the NUJ, Orwell was a little, well, prudish. He objected in print to the way in which you consummated your love of Paul Eluard’s wife. That certainly must have been a Gala event: you covered yourself with a mixture of goat’s dung boiled in fish glue. Chacun à son goat, I say. It must have made something stick, since Gala remained your idolized companion for fifty years. Orwell has no comment on that aspect of your life.
To be honest—Orwell was another hero of mine—the author of 1984 is wearing no better than you. A new world has come up over the skyline since your heyday in the thirties and forties. Your paranoid harp-players and flaming giraffes have acquired period charm. You got too rich. You became religious, in a florid, Murillo-like, Madonna-worshipping way which sickens us more than the necrophilia sickened Orwell. It’s a common tragedy, outliving your epoch.
Still, you did paint Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of Civil War, and several other canvasses which will remain icons of their time.
You must always have worked very hard. Kept working, even when—towards the end—you turned to the kitschy religious subjects. Is Dali perhaps Catalan for Doré? Like Doré, you illustrated numerous books. But it was the early paintings which fed a young imagination, the images seen through a dry, pure atmosphere—some of them, like Sleep, where an immense sagging face is propped precariously above the desert, are now fodder for Athena posters, alongside Beardsley and Escher, other masters of illusion.
Your titles too took one into a new imaginative world. The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft which can be Used as a Table. Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp. Paranoic Astral Image. Convincing, as only the preposterous can be.
Some of the paintings held even more direct links with a mentality which questions what is real. The Invisible Man, for instance. Various visual puns where things appear and disappear, such as Apparition of Face and Fruit-Dish on a Beach, Slave Market with Invisible Bust of Voltaire, and the hallucinatory Metamorphosis of Narcissus, another of Athena’s victims. Well, I won’t auto-sodomize you with lists of your own canvasses, but doesn’t it strike you, as you take your astral ease, that it’s the past which is rich with life? It’s the future that’s dead, stuffed with our own mortality?
Naturally, all these whims and excesses of your imagination can be put down to revolt against upbringing, revolt against Catholicism, revolt against traditional dull nationalism. There was just a little too much showbiz. All the obits followed Orwell in speaking of your egotism. After obit, orbit—and there you swing, moody among the summer stars. We who remain Earth-bound look up. You probably have for company the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, once proclaimed a god, who achieved escape velocity a mere two weeks before you.
What a patriot that man was! Your very opposite. Never showed off. Kept a low profile. Good family man. Responsible for perhaps millions of deaths.
And even your egotism was relieved, or probably I mean made more roccoco, by your sense of humour. Perhaps you recall a stuffy English BBC type—it can’t have been a young Alan Whicker, can it?—coming to interview you in your retreat in Port Lligat, near Figueras? You sat with Gala by your blue swimming pool, your pet ocelot lounging on a cane armchair beside you.
The interview went on. You spoke English of such beauty and density that the BBC found it necessary to run sub-titles at the bottom of the screen. The interviewer, as I recollect, was just slightly critical of your notoriety, for in those days—this was in Harold Wilson’s time of office—we rather used to fawn on failure; whereas, now that Mrs Thatcher holds office, we have learnt to suck up to success.
So the interviewer came to his most devastating question. He had heard, he said, that Dali was unkind to animals. Was that true?
Do you remember how your music-hall moustache curled in scorn?
‘Dali cruel to ze animal?’ you exclaimed. ‘Nevair!’ And to emphasize the point you seized up your ocelot by the scruff of its neck and hurled it into the swimming pool.
That indeed is the way to discomfit the English.
We SF writers, in our own humbler way—for we live in Penge and Paddington and Pewsey, not Figueras—the very names shout the difference—we also try to discomfit the English. It is what SF is designed for, what Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells used it for.
Of course, we never discomfited the English very much; we have no luck at all in that respect.
I suppose you know that while you were posturing on your death bed, in a leg-over position with mortality at last, Salman Rushdie was having trouble here with his latest phantasmagoria, The Satanic Verses. It’s a fantasy which now and again makes fun of the Christian God and of Mohammed. The English dutifully bought their copies at Smith’s and Waterstone’s, to display them prominently so that friends would think they had read the book, and maintained a calm almost indistinguishable from catatonia. Not so the Moslem community in Britain (or in Bradford, which is near Britain). The Moslems descended on W. H. Smith with flaming brands, in the manner of those exciting final scenes in a Frankenstein movie. It’s the Spanish temperament, I suppose. The British are full of phlegm. Sometimes it makes you spit.
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!
