Gulf-hopping
Paul Ableman
Enemies of the System Brian Aldiss Cape £3.50) There are two chief kinds of science fiction. 'The first, which I devoured in adolescence, billIght more suitably be called 'Technology romance.' It is essentially a branch of the literature of marvels, which includes fairy tales, fabulous voyages and adventures, IllYthical quests, Gothic and horror stories, Illndern phantasy etc. Characterisation is of sntall importance. The Grey Lensman need equipped with little more subtlety of Personality for patrolling the galaxy than J.eck required for climbing the beanstalk. It Is. nonetheless a vigorous and often rewarding tributary of literature that it is perhaps ormal, and even desirable, to paddle out of lh one's teens. I still find it surprising that the very same tales that I furtively pur sed in 'pulp' magazines during my boyhood in the US should now be re-issued by Pre,stigious English publishers.
• the other major branch of science fiction metaphysical. Perhaps it should be called
sotnething like speculative anthropology. It Uses selectively the machinery of science 4nd technology as a framework for an recalnination of social and sociological problns. The progenitor of this branch is Plato and the subject which obsessively recurs is the nature of the stable society with its concomitant polarity of Guardians and !bier& The horror embedded in it is perhaps est evoked by Hitler's phrase 'the t.holisand-year reich', i.e. a stagnant society ill Which stability has been purchased at the e2tPense of humanity. It is interesting that "le archetypal nightmare inherent in this 11e°11cept is not the savagery of Wells's Time 7,ac. hine or Orwell's 1984 but the vista of tuversal contentment found in Aldous 1„tll(leY's Brave New World or even Sir Llomas More's Utopia. The reason for this that oppression is by its very nature rIlstable whereas a truly harmonious socelY, whether induced by chemicals, geneellgtneering or consent-legislation, is in 'flCiple secure from change. It aspires to ,ettlg eternal. But the only eternal thing "Accessible to the human imagination is mcath. So the benign Utopia is essentially a Todd of death and this explains our funmaltlental revulsion from it. u 13rian Aldiss's new novel, narrated in eneharacteristically solemn prose, is an k3talnple of the second, or metaphysical Ind of science fiction. It is set a million tears in the future. Much of the galaxy has sheen tamed. 'Gull-hopping' makes possible ace travel at the rate of about a light-year ;yr hour. Homo sapiens has been surgically annended into Homo uniformis or 'Man
alike throughout', who lives in a state of bureaucratic stability known as Biocom. We are thus given the stagnant Utopia.
The novel opens with a party of lucky, elite men and women gulf-hopping to 'the classified planet of Lysenka II' for a holiday. On the two-day trip they are paired up by a kind of advanced computer dating and told to have plenty of sexual intercourse which is 'an approved social usage'. On Lysenka II they are housed in what sounds remarkably like a Costa Brava hotel. Soon they go off sightseeing in what is described as much like an ordinary excursion coach. Several hundred miles from their hotel, the coach is wrecked by an artificial crevice in the road. The stage is set for the confrontation.
Who with? Well, it seems that a million years ago, a space ship full of old-fashioned Homo sapiens crash-landed on the planet.
Ever since, the descendants have been mutating into strange forms which now constitute the only advanced fauna on the planet. Some of our luckless descendants have turned into zebras, some into kangaroos but a few retain a good many human qualities, including language. Ultimately a group of six holiday-makers is captured by the humanoid mutants.
What can be said is that Enemies of the System is essentially derivative, almost a lash-up of elements from Huxley, Wells,
Orwell, anthropological accounts of cargo cults and so on. It does not further either the analysis or the resolution of the problem of what happens to an advanced but stagnant culture when it meets a primitive but vital and evolving one. Indeed, Mr Aldiss weakens his central antithesis by revealing • that his Utopia includes 'the dreaded reason police.' The System must therefore be in a state of internal revolt, but the matter is never developed. Mr Aldiss seems to have found difficulty in resisting the allure of any theme that has proved its worth in other books, whether relevant to his own or not.
Possibly as a further consequence of the basic lack of purpose, the text is full of inconsistencies. All right, the culture is stagnant but, after a million years which has seen the introduction of interstellar travel, would holiday-makers still drive about in coaches with tyres and squealing brakes? Towards the end of the book it is revealed that much mom sopfiiitiCated transport systems are available. The coach is thus unmasked as merely a literary device to enable contact with the primitives to be established. Even more unconvincing is the mode of expression of the Biocom citizens. They continually regale each other with rustic saws such as: 'As the teat grows thinner, the kid sucks with greater vehemence'. Hardly what one expects from star-roving gulfhoppers. The truth is that the level of imaginative penetration of an alien, future society achieved by this book is about that of a routine episode of Star Trek The kid who consumes sci-fi will need to suck with great vehemence to get much nourishment from this teat. If you are one of those who fall about every week over Punch, you may well feel kindly disposed towards Alan Massie's comic talent. His is a loosely woven tale, short spurts of dialogue telling of Atwater, perennial drunk and misfit, revisiting old haunts after a prison spell, in an atmosphere that used to be called Fitrzovian. Interwoven is a vaguely revolutionary character, Horridge: you can guess the sort of thing by the names, can't you? Lots of opportunities for that special kind of humour which displays encyclopaedically and mercilessly misquoted Eng. Lit. (as a joke, you see). There are side-swipes at the newly media-saturated proletariat, trendy phrases in untutored mouths, and a seedy disenchantment with gloomier aspects of contemporary English life bludgeoned with glum over-kill.
Strain as he may, Alan Massie, never gets within spitting distance of the blithe, unintentional laughs in Paddy Chayevsky's deeply serious first novel. Jessup, a brilliant clinical psychiatrist is 'screwing around with altered consciousness', heavily into druginduced, isolation-tank experiments to delve into primal consciousness. 'I have a great deal of unfinished business with myself' — and indeed, he has, managing to change both physique and consciousness, and career around Boston zoo as a small hairy hominid, gnawing at gazelles. Luckily the love of a good woman helps to restrain this passion for in depth research and after a rather scary excursion into antimatter, they end up back on the living room carpet. Deadly serious scientific jargon is interlaced with tough vernacular: 'Okay, so we get all kinds of whacked-out pobyribosonal profiles . . . All the polymerases are labelling phenomenally high. I'm making protein at an unbelievable pace. I mean, let's face it. This whole thing is biologically impossible.'
Enough of this nonsense. Karel Schoeman's novel is a bleak, haunting projection of a South Africa, where 'they; have taken over and the inheritors of the Voortrekkers struggle to survive on the earth they once called thei own. 'What did we do wrong? What did we do to deserve this?' George, an exile, revisits his old home and relatives. The picture of rural life is probably not too different from conditions today, except that there are no servants. Like 1.,essing, Jacobsdn, Gordimer, Schoeman shares and celebrates the overpowering love for the country, of all African writers. No great conclusions are drawn; issues are hinted. But the answer is probably tragic: 'There was no answer. . . there was life itself which had to . be continued. . . perhaps as one would ever get to an answer . .
Mary Hope
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