Three Chimneys Ferring
September 1994
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Inside Outside
David Langford
It is well known in certain circles that all science fiction is trash, since it’s always possible for an ‘outside’ critic to give it the quick once-over and discover a book that doesn’t meet selected literary standards. Like travel journalists summing up an entire country’s unmistakable state of decline after a 24-hour stopover and two conversations with taxi drivers, such visitors unerringly find what they expect.
The converse argument that the bad non-genre books X and Y and Z condemn all ‘real’ fiction by their mere existence is never seriously advanced, but is worth keeping in mind as a parable or thought experiment.
Now there are a number of well-worn debating points to be made here about the dread walls of the sf genre ghetto, but this logomachy seems outdated. Sf these days is a fuzzy circle on an imaginary Venn diagram of literature. Some writers play around in its broad, ill-defined borders and are called ‘slipstream’: Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation (1981) is an excellent example. Some stand just with’n the border zone, but with much still depending on which way they happen to face: Robert Harris in Fatherland (1992) uses the traditional sf device of an alternative history but aims his story more into the overlapping Venn circle of thriller/detective fiction.
And certain writers wander deep into sf while resolutely claiming that they are doing no such thing. Whitley Strieber, for example, writes about literal flying saucers and presumed aliens in Majestic (1989) but has been heard to argue that this novel is by no means nasty old sf because, being based on the ‘true’ story of the ever-controversial 1947 Roswell UFO incident, it’s set in the past. P.D. James once insisted on TV that her The Children of Men (1992), despite inhabiting a recognizable and indeed over-exploited niche of bleak near-future speculation, is not sf since it contains neither spaceships nor robots. One rather assumes that the late great Anthony Burgess might have had his own sf excursions slightly in mind when he praised Brian Aldiss’s 1978 Enemies of the System (set 1.09 million years hence and featuring faster-than-light interstellar spaceships) as ‘ ...rich, allusive, full of real people and unfailingly interesting. It is not, then, real SF.’
Turnabout is fair play. Critical tourists in sf reasonably insist on applying literary standards. Literary visitors to the genre can hardly complain if we apply the related sf standards, those rules of thumb that codify gut feelings about what makes sf work. Some of the pitfalls, in no particular order:
• Information feed. Writers accustomed to telling the reader highly subtle things about characters’ relations, through natural-seeming nuances of narrative or dialogue, can go bananas when confronted with the task of conveying a new chunk of history, a new society, a new world. They may not descend to lines like: ‘Er, tell me again how the present war came about, as though I knew nothing of it’ ... but some come fearfully close.
Robert Harris in Fatherland has a relatively easy task in this area; the alternative history where Hitler won is all too imaginable. Harris handles the mechanics well, neatly allowing a tourist guide to describe the ghastly architecture of Albert Speer’s planned post-war Berlin - including a genuine sffrisson concerning the Great Hall of the Reich, largest building in this world, which when crammed with a rally of 180,000 Nazis develops its own internal rainfall. After which the book heads off into thriller territory and the sf critic says farewell.
• Consistency with natural law. This largely means internal consistency rather than slavish adherence to physicists’ current snapshots of how things are. A faster-than-light spaceship is a legitimate plot device - this is fiction, and General Relativity may not be the last word on the cosmos. Writing about a spacecraft that lands on the surface of the Sun (which has no surface) is harder to justify.
A oft-cited example is that of Piggy’s glasses in William Golding’s remotely science-fictional Lord of the Flies (1954). Piggy is short-sighted; his spectacles thus have concave lenses which will spread rather than concentrate sunlight, and can’t be used to start a fire. This is a peripheral blemish, a small solecism which by no means destroys the book as some sf pedants have claimed. Oddly enough, the problem was solved better on another fantasy island which Golding surely knew: that of J.M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton (1902), where resourceful Crichton plausibly contrives a lens from two watch-glasses with some water between them.
• Consistency with the present. This could also be called common sense. Much writing about tomorrow seems instantly archaic because the author hasn’t assimilated the ‘givens’ imposed on the story by today. It isn’t necessary to take this as far as those cryonics enthusiasts who are so keen on their plans for frozen immortality that they will rubbish any imagined future which fails to centre on an ever-growing reserve of corpses in liquid nitrogen.
But today’s proliferation of personal computers and the Internet does strongly imply a data-riddled millennium where virtually every literate person with an income will be linked into the global web. (As I write, a million new users are joining the net each month.) Near-future sf can’t afford to leave this out of the reckoning - unless, as in The Children of Men, a convenient disaster or social collapse can help sidestep the issue. So many writers have devastated half the world in order to produce a future sufficiently crippled to be easily imaginable. I’ve done it myself. We are all guilty.
Another author praised outside sf is Kathy Page, whose Island Paradise (1989) comes with a warm plug from Malcolm Bradbury. It’s well written; the low-key dystopian scenario (of which more below) is convincing enough; and then we learn that this over-governed world has a secret nuclear arms dump into which large, informal parties of dissidents can wander at will to carry off the conveniently miniaturized doomsday weapons, in backpacks. The only thing missing is a sign saying ‘Please Take One’. To the innocent eye of the sf reader, this is plotting that simply will not do.
• Futurespeak. Jargon - especially scientific or pseudo-scientific jargon - must be worked over and subjected to plausibility tests until something reasonably credible emerges. Slang is folk poetry: perhaps the real thing can be created only by poets (later on we’ll remember that Marge Piercy is a poet of some note). The real-life tendency of capital letters to fade into the lowercase undergrowth should also be noted.
Here’s a fine novel studded with micro-lapses of invariably capitalized terminology: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood, of whom the SF Encyclopaedia remarks that her ‘attempts at the language of genre sf are not unembarrassing’. There are religious outbreaks called Prayvaganzas, the poorer chaps’ women are Econowives and the democratic tearing-apart of a victim by a mob is Particicution. People don ‘ t phone but use the Compuphone, not to mention banking at the Compubank and sticking their credit cards into a Compubite - all reminiscent of those pseudo-futuristic prefixes in pulp sf, like ‘space-rations’ and ‘plasti-boots’, or the omnipresent ‘synthi-’ in Judge Dredd comics: ‘synthinylon’.
Island Paradise, already mentioned, has a humane voluntary-euthanasia programme whereby they don’t cart older folk off to lethal chambers, but, instead, a social worker comes round and nags you to do the decent thing. This is portrayed in terms of Timely and Untimely Deaths, the former being the Price of utopia - awkward capitals again, as though today we went on about Pensions and Bus Passes. This book also speaks of power (that is, Power) being imported from ‘Planet Three’. Ignoring the impossible economics of shipping power across interplanetary space, the suspicion here is that Kathy Page somehow got the idea that mentioning Venus or Mars would be too sci-fi - and so she substituted this colourless yet deeply unbelievable name.
• Unrepeatability. If an sf story depends on an event or discovery that is billed as unique and never to be repeated, there had better be a good reason why. ‘The secret of the deadly Wibble Ray, which could so easily have ended all life on Earth, died
with Professor Jones. The horror is over for ever.’ No, it isn’t: some other damned researcher in some other country is busy inventing the thing all over again. Scientific genies are not so easily coaxed back into the bottle. Examples will follow.
• Uniformity. Sf often deals with the actions of large numbers of people: a whole population responds to global threat or the apparition of Elvis in the sky. The point here is that people are very diverse. Only lazy writers give us stuff like: ‘The entire world was convinced at once by President Spong’s call for universal overtime without pay in order to defeat the Vegan economic assault.’
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Our remaining specimens deserve examination at greater length. The following selections were made by a computer randomization process not wholly uninfluenced by what I actually had available.
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The Children of Men by P.D. James was a UK paperback bestseller in spring 1994. Essentially this is the standard sf novel of sterility, strongly reminiscent (to genre readers) of Brian Aldiss’s 1964 Greybeard. The book is well written - perhaps too much so in places; as John Grant observes, some of the more mannered passages would definitely have rated three stars if included in Cold Comfort Farm.
Strangely, there is a terminological glitch on the first page. After a striking enough opening about the death of the last-ever man to be born, the narrator mentions hearing this on the ‘State Radio Service’. Later we meet the ‘State Security Police’. But this is Britain - Britain under a dictatorship, admittedly, but even a very stupid dictator (and this one is reputedly a genius) won’t go around changing institutions’ names merely to make them more science-fictionally sinister. Of course the State Radio Service and the SSP - note that SS! - would be soothingly called the BBC and the police.
Next comes a whopping information dump. The protagonist begins a painstakingly literate diary and records in merciless detail the history of the world from now to his present day of 2021. Not for posterity, because there won’t be any - and just in case, he announces his firm intention of burning the diary. Meanwhile, he shows an uncanny ability to give just the background information that might be required by a reader situated in the early 1990s, almost as though his hand were being guided by some omnipotent Author...
The story he tells is pretty odd, too. All human sperm ceased quite suddenly to be fertile by 1995, now subtly renamed ‘Year Omega’. It’s a possible premise, though such absolutes in biology are to be distrusted. The cutoff has to be absolute for James’s plot, which requires a Last Generation and no distracting kids around for the big event, subtly hinted by the fact that while Part 1 of the book is called ‘Omega’, Part 2 is called ‘Alpha’. Therefore, testing our credulity to the limit and beyond, it is stated that even artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization using frozen sperm from the potent days won’t work. One fights to resist the image of an offstage fleet of alien spaceships manned by robots and broadcasting infertility rays.
We also have a touch of what I’ve called the fallacy of uniformity when it comes to the Omegas, as those born in Year Omega are subtly named. Every member of this Last/Lost Generation was, it seems, thoroughly pampered (unbelievable uniformity of parents world-wide), and now in their maturity they are without exception unusually beautiful (no explanation for this) and menacing, the epitome of the Youth Problem. Credibility would be much enhanced by permitting a reasonable percentage to be overweight; have acne; prefer rock-climbing, tiddlywinks or reading detective stories to the bouts of orgiastic violence so necessary for a further kink in the plot of The Children of Men.
Unrepeatability is another of the sf touchstones listed above. Warning bells ring under this heading when we hear of the one remaining secretly fertile man in the world: what, just one? And gosh, he’s dead now, so we have to hope the one pregnant woman’s baby is a boy. But after the abrupt way human reproduction was halted, there’s a broader implication that the displeasure of God has now ceased, or the aliens have turned off their sterility rays, and that if one chap is functional then lots more probably are. This detracts somewhat from the tension of the final chapters - though there’s a wonderful pulp-sf bit where the dictator himself, who personally controls the entire security forces of Britain, turns up alone to shoot it out with the protagonist.
The book is often finely written; there are excellent character touches and poignant images of Oxford in decay (‘just like Greybeard,’ mutters the unregenerate sf fan); but there is also this nonsense cluttering up the plot. Nonsense, too, which one would expect an sf editor to sort out before publication. Is it significant that The Children of Men was first published by Faber (‘just like Greybeard’), which no longer has an official sf list or editor?
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Martin Amis avoids the difficulties of dealing with the future in Time’s Arrow (1991) by running his story backwards from the present day into the past. This is not a cop-out (Amis knows his sf) but an attempted tour de force, the telling of an entire life from a time-reversed viewpoint.
Time running backwards is hardly a new sf idea. Brian Aldiss - that man again - toyed with it in An Age alias Cryptozoic! (1967) but cannily avoided taking the actual narrative into reverse; Roger Zelazny, J.G. Ballard and others wrote short stories on the theme; Philip K. Dick’s unusually eccentric and flawed Counter-Clock World (1967) revolves around life-spotters rescuing the awakening dead from their graves and librarians erasing texts to expunge knowledge for ever. There was even a 1989 episode of Red Dwarf called ‘Backwards’.
The familiarity of the idea is no obstacle here: Amis is gifted enough to get away with a great deal, and it’s good to see him come to grips with the technical challenge of time-reversal... for a while. What he sinks into might be called the pitfall of the prolonged conceit - as with those early sf writers who so much loved the ingenuity of their One Big Idea that, to them, the story seemed to require only that this notion be laid out at length on the page and admired from every angle.
Thus whole chapters of hyperkinetic Amis prose and clever postmodern bits come to seem a desperate waltz of distraction, smoke and mirrors to obscure the fact that uneventful decades told backwards are not really more interesting than their forwards version. Successive shocks of reversed bodily function have a diminishing effect (and we are spared nothing, not even the preliminary to a good backwards puke as the protagonist pulls the toilet handle and ‘The bowl filled with its terrible surprises.’). The sf reader begins to shuffle slightly, remembering perhaps that Counter-Clock World also had a plot going before the end of chapter one.
The identity of the narrative voice who inhabits the protagonist is a dodgy philosophical problem. Like all those convenient amnesiacs in sf, this personality’s memory (none) and abilities are determined solely by the story. He is not the protagonist retracing his own timeline, since it is required that he should not know the appalling past that is his future. Equally, he’s not a brand-new soul whose reversed experiences begin with the protagonist’s death, since like a computer he comes prepackaged with useful functions: English, general knowledge, moral views, the sense that things are going backwards, and a tiresomely constant capacity to be surprised by this. Well into the narrative he’s still referring to post-coital languor as foreplay (which is quite witty) and mentioning that the protagonist has ‘jumped the queue’ (which seems dumb: joining the queue at its head is the norm in retrograde time and the narrator should by then be entirely used to it). An important nightmare of the protagonist’s, foreshadowing or postshadowing that nasty area of the past, is played in forwards time for no apparent reason other than to give the reader a better chance at understanding. There are other small niggles. Backward ran dialogue until reeled the mind...
At the heart of the book, when time has rewound to 1944, comes the short story for which the rest of Time’s Arrow is an elaborate frame and apparatus of translation. It is the reversed story of Auschwitz, made hideously lyrical by its presentation as a sort of joyous creation myth. Men of infinite comp
assion and power cause a whole race to be born from flame, etc.
I truly don’t know whether all the rest of the laborious backward narrative is justified by this segment of ironic distancing taken to a point beyond irony. a. The Holocaust is one of the major arcana of the twentieth-century cultural pack, a card that may be devalued by playing it too often - at risk of spreading a further blur of familiarity over the reports of people like Primo Levi who were actually there.
(Yes, this card is also played in Fatherland, but very discreetly; not, as it were, face up.)
Nietzsche said: ‘ if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,’ although I believe he said it in German. Perhaps my worry is that if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss begins to look ordinary or even boring.
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The winner of the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award amid some slight controversy, Marge Piercy ‘ s Body of Glass (1991) comes from an author already known in sf for Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) - though most of her work lies outside the genre and, for many, the sf bits of Woman ...were the least convincing.
Most of Body of Glass works rather well, with its free rendition of the story of Rabbi Loew’s golem in seventeenth-century Prague linking nicely with the exploits of the 2059 cyborg Yod to whom the old tale is being told, and who like the golem is created to defend a threatened Jewish community. The historical resonance is effective enough to quell carping critics who might suggest that Yod, being primarily designed as a self-acting AI weapon to be deployed in cyberspace, hardly needs a perfect humanoid body at all - let alone one capable of tireless yet tasteful sex. John Sladek’s argument is also valid here: that we will create anthropomorphic robots when we can, because the idea is so fascinating.
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