My morale was further boosted in 1987 when the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts gave me an award for Distinguished Scholarship, and by an invitation to be one of the “keynote speakers” at a Symposium for Young Scientists and Engineers held in Tokyo, initiating a day’s discussion on man’s relationship with technology. In between the two events I remarried, and I suddenly felt far more cheerful and positive than I ever had before.
Fired by renewed enthusiasm I completed the first of two projected sequels to Journey to the Centre, which I had decided to turn into a trilogy in order to obtain belated British publication. Then I spent the greater part of the year working on The Empire of Fear, a long alternative history novel which was by far the most ambitious project I had ever taken on. This sold well enough to encourage its publishers, Simon & Schuster (UK) to offer me a three-book contract, and I was also offered a three-book contract by Games Workshop, who had hired David Pringle to head a publishing division marketing novels and anthologies of stories set in their various gaming scenarios. These two offers, added together, offered financial security for three or four years, and a chance—but no more than a chance—to establish a position in the marketplace secure enough to allow me to ride out the recession which would undoubtedly follow the current boom.
The timing of these offers was inordinately fortunate in coinciding with my progressive disenchantment with university teaching. The teaching itself I had always enjoyed, and the less pleasant aspects of the job—administration, marking, and so on—had never seemed particularly cumbersome. With every year that had passed since 1979, however, conditions had got steadily worse. The size of the department had shrunk by a third; it no longer had any postgraduate students, and there seemed to be a possibility that it might disappear altogether. The new Head of the Department reacted to these ominous circumstances by trying to make the course more appealing to students, gradually reducing those parts of it which were intellectually challenging. Because I was working on a word-processor at home I was very sharply aware of the many ways in which such a machine would make it easier to work in my office—which was not even supplied with a typewriter.
All these dissatisfactions were fairly minor, but given that I had abandoned academic writing as a bad job and that my fiction writing seemed to be going so well, the temptation to get out was simply too strong. It could not be justified as a rational economic decision, but as a gamble it was simply too attractive for a man who was feeling more optimistic than ever before to pass up. I decided that I was old enough to do what I pleased, no matter what the risk.
* * * *
I think that I am writing far better now than I ever did before. My years of writing criticism helped enormously to sharpen up my sense of what works and what doesn’t, and I feel that I am at last competent to apply those lessons. The British SF market has now passed through its brief boom and is hurtling into deep recession again, but I am by no means as disheartened by that awareness as I once would have been. I am reasonably confident that there will be enough opportunities around to enable me to keep the wolf from the door, given that my needs are fairly simple. Perhaps more importantly, I now feel that I am doing what I want to do, and what I always did want to do even when I was terrified that I wasn’t good enough to do it well.
I remain uncomfortably aware of the fact that many of the writers I hold in high esteem, whose prose and plotting seem to me to work best of all, died virtually penniless and deeply disappointed. No one can possibly have any right to expect better, given the worth of some of those who have already failed to make fortunes as SF professionals. Nevertheless, I must reiterate that my long-delayed decision to be a science fiction writer was not a brave one, and might as easily be seen as a cowardly act. The profession of science fiction is, after all, one which liberates its followers from the awful burden of confrontation with that sad, tawdry and frustrating riot of confusions which we call (rarely knowing how ironic we are being) Real Life.
I suppose that the rigors of natural selection must have adapted a few members of the human species for the ludicrous pantomimes of Real Life, but I am not one of them—and I cannot, in my heart of hearts, regret it. I would rather be what I am: an insignificant creature of strained sight and eccentric artifice, odd and alien and out of place. I prefer to dwell, for the most part, in a private world of cool cerebration where I am not required to sustain an intense and unrelenting involvement with the claustrophobic hive of human fears and affections.
* * * *
Of course, this essay is all mere performance, with not an atom of authenticity in it—or so it seems to me. It is impossible for me to find any credibility in it even if I read it back to myself in a sarcastic tone of voice. Nor is there much in it which can really be of interest to anyone else, devoid as it is of plot or narrative drive or any sensible climax. Fortunately, there is no real need for me to try to explain myself, given that have I remembered and stated so confidently that every formal confession I have ever made, since the age of six, has been false. Even if one of them had been true, I know far better than to expect absolution from the sins which it recorded.
That is another thing which the profession of science fiction permits and encourages: ours is an art-form which attaches no value whatever to the truth; whatever is painstakingly descriptive of the actual is rightly deemed by the dedicated science fiction reader to be uninteresting (except, possibly, for such exotic follies of history as the French Foreign Legion).
I intend to spend the rest of my professional life telling lies, and will try as hard as I can to make them more credible than the dull and dire truth.
At forty, everyone has the future that he deserves.
NOTES
Chapter I
1Wilson, Colin. Science Fiction as Existentialism. Hayes, England: Bran’s Head Books, 1978, p. 2.
2Ibid., p. 4.
3Wilson, Colin. The Occult. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971, p. 10.
4Ibid., p. 579.
Chapter II1Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986, p. 144-145.
Chapter III1Jones, Gwyneth. Letter in Foundation #41 (Winter 1987): 72-73.
2Le Fanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine. London: The Women’s Press, 1988, p. 186.
3Ibid., p. 69.
4Ibid., p. 176.
5Ibid., p. 117.
6Livia, Anna. Bulldozer Rising. London: Onlywomen Press, 1988, p. 143.
Chapter IV1Britton, David. Reverbstorm #4. Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1995, p. 4-5 (not all the pages are numbered).
Chapter IX1Wells, H. G. The Discovery of the Future. London: Unwin, 1902, p. 1-3.
2Wells, H. G. The Shape of Things to Come. London: Hutchinson, 1933, p. 428.
3Bell, Neil. The Seventh Bowl. 2nd ed. London, Collins, 1934, p. 67-68. (The first edition was issued under the pseudonym “Miles”.)
4Wright, S. Fowler. Power. London: Jarrolds, 1933, p. 25.
5Houghton, Claude. This Was Ivor Trent. London: Heinemann, 1935, p.321-323.
6Stapledon, Olaf. Star Maker. London: Methuen, 1937, p. 333.
7Wells, H. G. Mind at the End of Its Tether. London: Heinemann, 1945, p. v.
8Ibid., p. 17-19.
Chapter X1Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: William Rider, 1913 (tenth edition), p. 226-227. The “working papers” and sources used by Stoker during he composition of the novel are extensively reviewed in Part 5 of Christopher Frayling’s anthology, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber & Faber, 1991, p. 295-348.
2Leatherdale, Clive. Dracula: The Novel and the Legend. Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press, 1985; The Origins of Dracula. London: William Kimber, 1987.
3Florescu, Radu, and Raymond McNally. Dracula: A Biography. London: Robert Hale, 1973.
Chapter XIII1Viereck, George Sylvester, and Paul Eldridge. The Invincible Adam. London:
Duckworth, 1932, p. 411-412.
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 21
