This World and Nearer Ones

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Many of these stories use as their material the basic Shecklian preoccupations: the awfulness of institutions and corporations, the craziness of trying to establish a relationship with anyone, the arbitrariness of society’s mores, the difficulties one can get into with women, the sheer down-at-heel ghastliness of the galaxy. These, you might say, are almost anyone’s preoccupations; no disagreements or surprises there. The nice, the odd, thing about Sheckley’s preoccupations is that they are all counterbalanced by their very opposites. The television company that exploits you to the point of death is scrupulous to a pernickety degree; the girl genuinely loved you, but it was just a financial deal; it’s as efficient to hold citizens up in the street and rob them as to collect income tax, terrestrial fashion; your wife is perfectly nice, but when you find her in her lover’s arms, it’s because you refused to keep her in stasis; uncomfortable though we may find most worlds, there are races who are worse off, and leap from sun to sun complaining of the cold. In effect, Sheckley’s madness is presented with a disarming reasonableness. At least his future’s no worse than the present; and if you think the galaxy’s hell, try staying at home. He’s telling you a story, not presenting a case.

Of course Sheckley does have a case. His importance as a writer lies in his entertaining embodiment of the underdog’s viewpoint; his AAA Ace Agency stories in Galaxy represent a way in which human beings are forced to exploit each other under a capitalist system; indeed, they go beyond that – for this is science fiction, and Sheckley shows how human beings, even given great powers, will always exploit each other under any system. It is this understanding, paradoxically exhilarating and so much more to be prized than any cheap ideological identity tag, which powers his fiction and at the same time prevents more generous general acknowledgement of his strengths.

The madness is Blakeian, and so always unwelcome to the fearful. But for Sheckley it is a necessity that human relationships should continually break down, that Zirn should perpetually be left unguarded.

Somewhere in the Sheckley hierarchy is another pre-occupation. It would be too much to call it a hope. But ever and anon comes the thought that there might be a system of non-material things when circumstances fall out less laughably than in our world. Conquest introduces us to several stories of this nature. Immortality Inc. is Sheckley’s version of the Afterlife – several Afterlives, in fact. But the Afterlife is no more satisfactory than this life – Sheckley is no Bradbury or Finney, dreaming forever of a bright childhood world; he’s too much of a realist for that.

When a somewhat Asimovian machine is invented by a superrace which can provide answers to all the most baffling philosophical questions of the universe, there is nobody around to phrase the questions properly; the God is useless. Even the Almighty makes an almighty hash of things in one of these stories, calling all the robots up to Heaven on the day of the final Judgement, and leaving mankind below on the battlefield. Sheckley’s is a universe of makeshift lives – Kingsley Amis coined the perfect term for it: a comic inferno.

The story here I find most touching (I once anthologised it myself) is ‘The Store of the Worlds’. The protagonist finds happiness. He gets a whole year of it, and it costs him everything he has. Admittedly, the year includes a maid who drinks, trouble at the office, a panic on the stockmarket, and a fire in the guestroom; but it is a year of ordinary family life, containing, in Sheckley’s phrase, desire and fulfillment. Nobody’s on the run, nothing shoots at anything, everyone is comprehensible.

Like Orwell, Sheckley is a utopianist. Unlike all other utopianists, Sheckley’s and Orwell’s ambitions are almost dauntingly humble – just to be left alone, to have a girl, a drink, a stroll in the park, a room to yourselves. Only one fancies that more fun would go on in Sheckley’s shack than Orwell’s. (An eccentric parenthesis: I’ve always suspected that Orwell wrote 1984 after reading Van Vogt; maybe he wrote Animal Farm after reading Sheckley.)

Robert Conquest hopes to introduce the civilised pleasures of Sheckley to a readership beyond the SF audience; in his introduction he likens himself to Belloc introducing Ernest Bramah, or E. C. Bentley introducing Damon Runyon. Bramah is a good touch, for there is something of a Kai Lung about Sheckley. He reminds me too of another excellent story-teller, ‘Saki’, H. H. Munro.

Unless I am mistaken, Conquest also addresses himself to the SF readers. First he warms their hearts by telling them what they long suspected (but are reassured to hear from anyone with credentials as imposing as Conquest’s), that H. G. Wells is every bit as much the artist as Henry James; then he slips it to us that James is ‘a model of unpretentious clarity compared with many more recent phenomena’. Here, one experiences three or four bodings, in anticipation of yet another Conquest–Amis tract on the worthlessness of anything in SF written since Mike Moorcock attained the age of puberty. Fortunately, the crisis is avoided; Conquest is too adroit to attempt praise of Sheckley by dispraise of lesser breeds.

However, this volume is a great success, a product of Conquest’s dedication to the art as well as a celebration of Sheckley’s skills. Many a writer would wish as distinguished an anthologist – most of us have to patch our own stories together.

1. The Robert Sheckley Omnibus, edited & introduced by Robert Conquest, Gollancz, 1973.

Nesvadba: In the Footsteps of the Admirable Čapek (#ulink_056ba3e3-162d-5a13-b821-d0df7d0fae77)

Josef Nesvadba and I are about the same age. We have met twice, once when he was travelling through London, and, many years later, when I was travelling through Prague, where he lives. This seems entirely appropriate, since Nesvadba’s fictions are often filled with long and complex journeys. He is that compelling kind of writer who reminds us that our lives are really somewhat ramshackle fictions, full of unlikely coincidences and people who do not always behave in character.

The perfidious plot-lines of our lives first brought us together in 1965, when something Nesvadba said made a striking impression.

He was talking about his stories, and how he was attempting a sort of psycho-fiction, as he called it. We were agreeing, I seem to recall, that authors who called themselves science fiction writers should not regard science fiction as simply realistic simulation of an hypothecated future; we saw it more as a contemporary form of celebration of the mysteries that pervade human life. We admitted ruefully that the other kind was more commercially popular and, at this point, I underwent the experience of hearing Nesvadba say that a collection of his psycho-fiction stories had been published in Prague in a paper bag.

Prague is a magnificent city where High Baroque and Art Nouveau styles in architecture meet. At the entrance to Nesvadba’s flat in the centre of the city, two voluptuous caryatids, less demure than Artemis would have allowed, guard the door he passed through daily. In the celebrated Golem Restaurant, I bought a packet of Apollo-Soyuz cigarettes and smoked them, though I normally detest cigarettes. I stood in the apartment building where Franz Kafka was born, looking up the winding stairwell; by a lugubrious turn of fate, the building has now been taken over by one pseudopod or other of Communist officialdom. Sometimes I have nightmares, dreaming I am Kafka. So I was scarcely bowled over, or only slightly bowled, to hear that publishers in Kafka’s city should have issued Josef Nesvadba’s work in this unorthodox manner.

The more I considered, the more it seemed appropriate that his kind of fiction should receive such treatment, the more easily I could visualise readers dipping into the bag, bringing out a tale like a pastrami sandwich, and munching thoughtfully on it in one of the little cafés in the shade of Hradčany Castle.

As are many Czechs, Nesvadba is a cosmopolitan, as familiar with Hollywood as with Paris. He speaks several languages, and his English is good. However, on this occasion I had mis-heard him. His paper bag was in actuality the less unusual paperback. I’m sorry about that. I still feel that his food for thought, and his story-telling techniques, are remarkable enough to be singled out for special treatment. The present publishers have voted against the paper bag format also, but it remains a privilege to be introducing Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished science fiction writer to paperback readers in this country.

These stories

are set in the narrow alleyways of the mind. Black humour is scarcely dispersed by low-wattage electric bulbs. Whole life-cycles of ghastliness are displayed with gusto in very few lines.

‘The dragoons had been the pride of our town. They had ruuined my marriage. Two years after the wedding my wife ran away with Captain Imre Kovacs to Salgotaryan. Perhaps that’s what turned me against soldiers. Especially dragoons. I gave up my flat and never left my basement laboratory after that. I sleep there and a waitress brings me my meals from the restaurant. I have few demands on life.’