BOOKS
Adam Beyond the Stars
BY ALAN BRIEN EVEN old addicts of the Science page of Time today find it hard to keep up with the Jonahs any more. No sooner do I get used to one nice, safe, compact view of nature than along comes a whippersnapper from Cambridge or California who cracks it like an eggshell. And inside the egg is an egg inside an egg. Every time I settle down confident that science has at last controlled our environment, the environment suddenly expands again beyond science's reach. I keep my mind so elastic that one day I am afraid it will snap.
The facts of science are enough to depress any- body. But fortunately I have faced them all before In science fiction. Now I am inoculated against disaster.
SF—as we mad scientists call it—is still barely respectable as a genre. But now the boom is over is possible to see whether SF really is more than just Mickey Spillane among the planets or Wyatt Earp lopin' along the trail of the galactic frontiers. As the market shrinks, today SF must be more than a blood-and-sex daydream spattered with words like androids (robots made of flesh and bone), mutants (humans whose jumbled genes have equipped them with extra organs), telepaths or espers (people who broadcast and receive. thought-waves), cybernetics (the electronic science of thinking machines), and anti-gray. and Propul and PyrE (frankly magic forces whose operation is usually left deliberately vague). There is still a tendency, even in high-class col- lections like Best SF,* for a story to open with a leaden slug of dialogue like : 'The shot I'm going to give you is a gamma globulin specific against squill and it ought to moderate the symp- toms until you've developed a high anti-body titer of your own.' New readers often begin, and end, here halfway between a giggle and a yawn. But as a space-veteran who once triggered a ray-gun with Flash Gordon, let me advise you to read on.
The science in science fiction is no longer just physics and electronics. Economics, psychology, semantics, medicine, anthropology and etymology Take SF the most erudite branch of popular literature ever published. Even theology is en- throned again as Queen of the Sciences with Jules Verne and St. Thomas Aquinas cruising together fathoms below the Holy See. Two stories in Best SF, for example, explore a problem which would have fascinated the Fathers of the Church—what can Christianity offer to a new planet which exists, like Eden before the apple, in a state of perfect grace? SF demands from its addicts an exact eye, an agile mind and a sophisticated range of ideas. It cannot be skimmed like a detective story which Is perhaps why the dons and Prime Ministers still resist it. Those whose lips curl most condescend- ingly at science fiction preserve their superiority only by not reading any.
After the Nautilus, the H-bomb, the Sputnik, the Black Knight, the Fall-Out (even the names Of science fact are taken from science fiction), it is hard to fault SF on the grounds of improba- bility. As Brian Aldiss, the British author of some
highly imaginative SF, says : 'Everything is un- likely—the stars, the fingernails. Likely and unlikely are, the same word.' Not since the Ice Age has life on this planet been so precarious and SF is the literature of precariousness. Most of it is set entirely in the future. By its nature, it must be fantasy teeming with magic and monsters. It sets out to describe the impossible in terms of the improbable. But at its best SF is essentially the opposite of escapism. It is highly engaged, reso- lutely committed, with many more hits than myths. It puts man in his place—as a pinhead on an infinite landscape, as a pinpoint of light moving through a night that may last for ever.
Detection and SF share a common weakness. The characters are usually clipped out of card- board. In the murder mystery, the victims must be bloodless so that the reader will not be revolted when they bleed tomato ketchup. The more real the people become, the more they resist being shuffled around in the maze of the plot. The flatter the characters tke more easily they can be jerked in and out of the spotlight of suspicion. But SF characters are unreal and de-personalised for another reason. The recurrent theme is Man against Thing. SF authors do not attempt to pic- ture an individual Than tripping over, and rolling under, the things of everyday life like the couple in lonesco's The Chairs, Instead they show the ambassador of the whole human race meeting an alien challenge head on. Each hero is really a sawn-off version of Milton's Adam—Adam beyond the stars, Adam 5,000 years on, Adam in a new world where he is no longer lord of creation, Adam threatened by the machines he has invented. The future they imagine is a future .whose heels we are already treading. What makes the best stories of writers like Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, James Blish, Frederic Brown and the rest so exciting and satisfying is that they face the problems that lie piled ahead for us, and they face them honestly and ingeniously. If anything they are tending to become priggish do-gooders. They spend rather too much space and energy chanting, `ideas are fun. Get a thrill out of your brain as well as your body.'
Some of their propagandists even set up SF as a superior branch of literature—a sort of moral poetry in prose. It would be possible to claim The Faerie Queene as the prototype of science fiction with its monsters embodying political, ethical and sexual, attitudes in a world which is half Irish bog and half Martian jungle. The best science fiction film so far was The Forbidden Planet, which quietly but precisely paralleled the plot of The Tempest with the exiled scientist on a strange world, the daughter who had never seen another man, the robot which slaved like Ariel and the evil, sex-mad monster which rampaged and slobbered. The script-writer even slipped in a Freudian explanation for the whole dilemma— the monster was the Prospero-figure's own Id crazy to commit incestuous rape on Miranda. (A Dr. ErnestIones might have found there a plausible
key to Shakespeare's unconscious motivations in The Tempest.) But such grandiose claims for SF do not bear real examination. Edmund Crispin, the editor of Best SF, has a hollow, rhetorical ring to his voice when he condemns literary critics for finding 'greater interest and significance in the imagined adulteries of one out of 2,700,000,000 nonentities than in the death of a galaxy.' This is protesting too much. As Ford Madox Ford pointed out in The Good Soldier, when cancer invades a mouse it foreshadows the end of a
world. And the sad, messy, adulteries of Emma Bovary are far more real and memorable than a million galaxies spinning into extinction-- especially when the nonentities remain nonenti- ties.
SF must make its claim on the general reader by being a contemporary entertainment of ideas.
It cannot afford to be prosy, dull, moralising or pretentious, and it is at its best in the short, crisp, vivid story. John Wyndham's The Chrysalidst fails because it tries to inflate an intriguing in- vention to full novel length. The world beyond the last H-bomb where primitive civilisations live in terror of the mutants in their midst, destroying with religious zeal all biological sports, is a com- pelling creation. But the flat, Robinson Crusoe prose eventually makes it pall. Alfred Bester, the American author of Tiger, Tiger and The Demolished Man, is a romantic dreamer of mescalin dreams whose imagination never tires. His new earths are shaped and delivered complete with new fashions, new slang, new morals, and new catch-phrases. In Tiger, Tiger he invents `jaunting,' the power of teleporting the body by a trick of the will-power as long as the jaunter knows the LES (location, elevation and situation) of, the jaunting terminus and can visualise the landing stage. Then he builds, step by step, a, civilisation revolutionised by jaunting. How the rich were at an advantage because they had taken the Grand Tour by old-fashioned transport and could visualise so many more parts of the world. How women went back to purdah with window- less rooms entered through direction-confusing mazes to guard • against jaunt-rape. How the threat of the instant bombing was met by the defence of instant jaunting. And so on, though this is only one of the many sprouting ingenuities in the Rester novels. Brian Aldiss's Non-Stopt poses a problem in anthropology. The space-ship has been travelling for so many human genera- tions that the inbred population prowling and hunting into its vast corridors have lost all memory of its purpose and plan. Even the idea of a ship is alien and frightening to them. Their religion is a bastard Freudianism formalised in the ritual greeting between equals of 'Expansion to your ego,' to which the reply is, 'At your expense.' What happens to this debased tribal community when they discover that there is an open-air world outside?
SF is a real literature practised, so far, by a few master entertainers. Within its limitations—its hangovers from the Gothic horror novel, its gob- bets of sixth-form laboratory jargon, its tendency to preach non-denominational sermons—science fiction is a method of communicating ideas which cannot be contained inside the rigid mould of the naturalistic novel. When so much mass entertain- ment, for middle-brows as well as for low-brows, makes a perverse cult of anti-intelligence, of moronic self-satisfaction, SF is a heartening phenomenon.
* BEST SF. Edited by Edmund Crispin. (Faber paper-covered edition, 6s.) t THE CHRYSAL1DS. By John Wyndham. (Penguin Books, 2s. 6d.) NON-STOP. By Brian Aldiss. (Faber, 15s.)
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