The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  Yet when I picked up The Rebel of Rhada, I didn’t think, ah, how familiar. It was a grim, peculiar book that fascinated me. I never met anyone else who had even heard of it. The author, Robert Gilman, took the traditional Fall-of-the-Galactic-Empire scenario (another idea so elderly it had practically grown a long white beard), and imagined the dark ages afterwards, as they might be if the empire’s starships were effectively indestructible, and could be used by a Charlemagne trying to put the whole thing back together without any more than the faintest gleam of understanding of how anything worked, or how far apart the stars were. The plot was nothing special but Gilman made the barbarousness of his story sensually vivid and specific: it was there in walls crusted with salt, and soldiers being called ‘warmen’, and in kilometre-long vessels glowing in the night sky being used to drop heavy stones on enemies, and in the songs of harpers and in chants that preserved garbled remnants of science. He made me see the steel and glass of modern cities becoming indescribably old, and settling into the ground forgotten; and New York becoming a fort on a mound at the mouth of the Hudson piled deeper with layers of ruins than Troy. Because I read his book, I felt the vertigo of centuries yet to come. He put new pictures in my mind, spiked and rusty, loud with war, cracked like old concrete. None of this had anything to do with being universal like myth; perpetually re-running Gilgamesh with lasers.

  If George Lucas is right, then for most written SF (as opposed to film) he’s right in a way that is beside the point. Much SF uses simple and time-honoured plots, not because they are the ones that have a permanent place in humanity’s vocabulary of emotions, but because the emotional situation in a science fiction novel is not necessarily the centre of attention. Far from calling you urgently to identify with a hero, they’re often cool or cold, emotionally speaking, offering you instead a kinetic barrage of images. The Rebel of Rhada, page one. I read: ‘The interior of the great vessel was close and smoky, for the only light came from gymballed torches and lamps. Once there had been light without fire, but the life-support systems had failed time out of mind. Deep in the hull the chambers housing the inoperative systems were stables for the muttering war mares.’ A starship lit by flaming torches! I thought: Can you do this? Is this allowed?

  What The Rebel of Rhada produced in me was a composite sensation that could not be reduced to any single one of its elements. It was plot plus tone plus ideas plus visuals; it was the cumulation of the thought of immense power being used clumsily, and ignorant armies clashing by night, and Gilman’s atmospheric voice, and the fragmentary quotations he put at the head of every chapter to give you the sense of a culture of incomprehensible shards. C. S. Lewis wrote in an essay about his boyhood pleasure in ‘Redskinnery’, a fused amalgam of American-Indian-ness he had found in The Last of the Mohicans and knew could be distinguished entirely in mood from other fusions in books which offered a superficially similar kind of danger and adventure, like pirate-ness, or quest-ness. This was the same phenomenon, except that in science fiction there was the possibility of a completely new fused experience every time. It changed like a kaleidoscope. Whenever you read Robert Heinlein, you were listening to the patter of a pink-cheeked, fresh-faced snake-oil salesman from St Louis, with a slide rule in his pocket, who promised to lift you from the Mid-West to the Milky Way for a mere five dollars down: it was as if one of the talents of Mark Twain had got away and made a new career on its own. Whenever you read Arthur C. Clarke, you got plain carpentry and sublime views. In SF, a kind of combinatorial explosion took place. The genre’s freedom from the tyranny of probability applied to all of the pieces it was built from.

  After all, these were stories about imaginary people in imaginary places in imaginary times. Any degree of strangeness that the author could carry through was allowed, or any combination of strangeness with familiarity. And fiction’s looseness in space for the reader was now enacted for real space, outer space, the stars-and-planets kind. Where the emotional core of the plot was genuinely involving, and you felt strong identification with a character, you still had the usual freedom to choose your perspective, and to put yourself into the flexible domain of fiction as a floating, bodiless dot of attention. In those cases (perhaps the majority) where the story only needed to work well enough on an emotional level for you to assent to it, the spatial possibilities went wild. All bets were open. Your attention could be focused inside a virus, diffused through the pulsing traffic flows of a city, expanded to the size of a nebula. You could loop your attention between future and past, not once but several times in a complex knot, as you explored the paradoxes of time travel. You could treat an idea as a presence more significant than any character. You could be enfolded by forms as insubstantial as the aurora borealis is, in Wordsworth’s metaphor for the lightshow his reading mounted in his mind. Curtains of coloured air rippled constantly into new geometries as I read: I was here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.

  At its limit, the genre approached the condition, stranger than it first sounds, of telling stories about something other than people. In some SF short stories – from the ‘Golden Age’ of the forties in particular – the humans were only there as furniture for an interesting notion in celestial mechanics. Space opera, with its numerical overload of stars and battle fleets, might as well have represented its casts with circles and arrows. Grandeur shrank people too. The cylindrical alien spacecraft five miles long in Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama got more of the author’s care than any of that book’s characters – its almost vestigial characters. And when geological time, or cosmological time was brought in, humans vanished altogether, abolished by the scale. Perhaps the sensation of considering human life from a million-year perspective should be counted as one of SF’s cognitive trophies. It’s analogous to the humbling change of reference points brought on by considering evolutionary history, and realising how many millennia of indifferent natural processes produced the little solipsistic bubble of human society, which mistakes its concerns for the agenda of the universe.

  Piaget supplies a rationale for reading stories with such an abstract pay-off at this particular stage in your life. It is, he says, the era when you master the last elements of adult rationality by learning to deal with ideas in the abstract. You no longer need logical operations like class-inclusion to be clothed in the flesh of examples. At eight, in your time of ‘concrete operations’, if you had been set a problem involving ten car-owners, you might have pictured them, been curious about them, given them ten different noses and a scattering of flared trousers. Now you know that all that is irrelevant; you just think ‘ten owners’, or even 10x. You can see through the differences and irregularities of cases to the unchanging principle beneath, the bare grid of the idea they have in common, and the exercise of this new power is, of course, pleasurable. It makes the world a giant step more graspable – more yours.

  In practice, though, I avoided SF that dealt out aeons like pennies. For me a kind of balance had to be maintained between ideas and emotions. A novel could be as inhuman as it liked in terms of what interested it about a situation, but it had to maintain something like the familiar human scale where time was concerned. If hundreds of thousands of years began to pass – as in the great original of all such stories, Wells’s Time Machine, where the traveller watches the last creature on Earth die under a dim red sun on a featureless beach that had once been Richmond Hill – then for me, some necessary acknowledgement was crushed of what size I was, reading. The idea which stories like that realised more pressingly than they realised any of their characters, was the idea of death. They brought me all too directly into the presence of the gap through which the world is sucked away, the hole in the air into which everything created, fictional and real, would vanish in time: babies, bathwater, my sister, and finally, unimaginably, myself.

  *

  None of these books, though, made me yearn as Narnia had done. Although the passionate desire to be in the world of the book had faded out of the stories that or
iginally inspired it in me, it remained my most coveted emotion – my definition of the best thing that reading could give. SF interested me, entertained me, occasionally frightened me. Sometimes it ran a rivulet of true wonder through me. Ray Bradbury, his rhythms mercurial, twirling the shivelights and shadowtackle of the vocabulary that made him the Gerard Manley Hopkins of science fiction, showed me a crystal house by a red canal, in The Martian Chronicles; in Fahrenheit 451, a wall-sized TV that sweetly sings inanities all day long, like a giant seashell with the whole ocean of commerce resounding inside it. I did not, though, think, ‘This is what I needed without knowing it, this has sent me a message from an unsuspected address inside me, this is where a part of me is going to be living for a while.’ But since the late 1960s, another generation of SF writers had come along to supplement the pulp pantheon of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Blish and Bradbury, and they were much more ambitious than their predecessors about things like characterisation. One of them was Ursula Le Guin, who I’d known as the author of the Earthsea trilogy for children: excellent, resonant books but in the second rank of favourites for me at the time because of my preference for other worlds that connected to this one through accessible doors. Back at home from school the summer I was fifteen, and poking about as ever in Newcastle town library, I stumbled across her novel The Left Hand of Darkness in the adult SF section. Plain library binding, no dustjacket, no clues to the contents.

  I remember waiting in the rain for the same old bus up the hill to the university, feeling a mild replete satisfaction that the problem of what to read was taken care of for the next twenty-four hours. What a geological age had passed, I thought with a consciously adult air, since I made the same journey as a seven-year-old, and how completely different I was, now that I stood six feet tall, wore a flapping greatcoat from Oxfam, and had a collarbone like a swallowed coat-hanger. The bus came in, a green Potteries Motor Transport single-decker; I folded myself into a seat at the back, over the wheel arch. As the engine re-started, the judder in the chassis transmitted itself up my legs, and incited a rat-a-tat-tat shake in my knees, which I ignored. Recently, while this new body of mine was bedding itself in, I’d got used to a whole class of spasmodic buzzings and flutterings and twitchings. The new nerves would fire on their own, and a shiver would convulse my shoulders, or my heels would drum on the ground in the same spasm – called ‘clonus’ – that dancers in Java, apparently, use in order to oscillate faster than you can choose to do consciously. Also, my blood did not seem to have got completely used to the longer distances it had to travel around me. If I stood up suddenly, it drained out of my head, and my vision went with it for a moment or two, replaced by a pulsing weave of cream-and-grey squiggles, like the abstract pattern on a not-very-attractive plastic tablecloth.

  I opened the book. I read: ‘Rainclouds over dark towers, rain falling in deep streets, a dark storm-beaten city of stone, through which one vein of gold winds slowly.’ The trials of an adolescent body went away, the literal drizzle falling on the real streets of Newcastle-under-Lyme receded, the passing streets of red-brick terraces and slate-clad maisonettes were abolished. This was the voice I hadn’t heard since Narnia; the lovely, sure storytelling voice which, because of some temporarily perfect fit between teller and hearer, can talk a world into existence, and have you crave a fictive life that seems clearer in its lines and stronger in its colours than your own un-narrated existence. Immediately, I could see it, the line of bright gold creeping in a view like a smeared dim crystal, and as the book drew me in through this porthole to elsewhere, and carried me closer, so that I could make out that the gold beneath the rain’s tarnish was a procession, of yellow-clad jugglers and merchants and musicians, led by a king ‘with leggings of saffron leather and a peaked yellow cap’, I discovered that as well as being visually vivid in a way that made the rest of SF look like a stack of charcoal briquettes, this story, compared to most SF, returned me to emotional reality too, where actions had consequences that mattered, and situations were not as flimsy as thoughts, to be crumpled up and replaced by another if they displeased you. But the emotions in question were of a kind that needed SF’s freedom to invent, in order for them to exist: SF’s power to stipulate a whole worldful of probabilities, this time governing, not just the flashy stuff, but the subtle logic gates controlling emotional cause and effect.

  The Left Hand of Darkness was about gender, and about perceiving the unity of humanity beneath the male–female difference. On the wintry planet of Gethen, however, where the procession wound through dark streets, this unity was made into a physiological fact. The narrator, an offworld diplomat named Genly Ai, was the only man on the planet; the Gethenians, red-brown, with faces as impassive as a cat’s or an otter’s, were human but androgynous. For twenty-two days of the month they were neuter. Then, for one week of oestrus, they could be either male or female, and every individual had been both, unpredictably, many times over in the course of their adult life. They see the permanently male Mr Ai, sent to make first contact with them, as an ugly and perverted being, locked into one small phase of sexuality like a person with, say, a foot fetish. In turn Ai – perhaps more than is quite credible in someone selected for this particular mission – finds it almost impossible to hold their doubleness in his mind. For him, they flicker backwards and forwards between being men and being women; and in the single case where he has a relationship on the planet that approaches intimacy, with the king’s Prime Minister, Estraven, he is repelled. ‘As I sipped my smoking sour beer I thought that at table Estraven’s performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture …’

  Of course, the novel is constructed so that, after many political misadventures, including a labour camp for Ai and exile for Estraven, the two should end up making a desperate escape together across the planet’s northern icecap, in a tiny tent in which there is no room for evasion or misunderstanding to continue. The moment of reconciliation that completes the arc of the story comes when Ai looks across the stove and finds that Estraven’s face

  in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak. And then I saw again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was …

  Now he sees the wholeness of his friend, a whole set of apparent dualisms that have puzzled him in the mythology and religion of Gethen resolve themselves. White and black, snow and the human shadow on the snow, prove to be halves of a single yin-and-yang-like unity. The gulf between Ai and Estraven is only the elemental difference between Self and Other. The left hand of darkness is light.

  This was a piece of symbolism I found very powerful, and Le Guin had inlaid it in the details of Gethen’s invented culture with a beautiful intricacy, so that they made a gloriously congruent sense in retrospect. Now it was clear why the Gethenian word for ‘pride’ also meant ‘shadow’; why it was taboo on Gethen to offer advice. But the clarity of the recognition Le Guin had arranged between Ai and Estraven was designed to be so symbolically resonant that it went well beyond what you could imagine happening to people, of any gender, off the page. It went beyond conventional characterisation. Solving the friendship solved the world. Le Guin used the fullness and power of her storytelling voice to get here. It was eloquent, elegant, slightly old-fashioned. Where most SF prose aimed to be instant and colloquial, hers was ceremonious; it deliberately borrowed authority from the kind of storytelling that this-worldly diplomats and explorers and anthropologists used to do, in the days when it was assumed
that interpreting strangeness was a literary task as well as an academic or a purely practical one. Ambassadors to the court of the Tsar have waited for audience in icy antechambers, as Genly Ai does. Explorers in the Arctic and Antarctic have crept across icecaps under the iron laws of necessity, as Ai and Estraven do. Le Guin used the authority of her voice to make sure that the events she described were vividly present for the reader, thoughts and actions and sensations unspooling confidently into existence, denoted as crisply as footprints in snow; but when she wanted to fix the meaning of a situation, she pushed description, and pushed it and pushed it, not exactly into the abstract, but until it attained a state of rich pattern. This suited me. It was a way of arriving at emotional depth and complexity that did not depend on being able to apprehend them from less stylised, therefore more fragmentary realities.