REVIEW OF BOOKS

Richard Luckett on whatever happened to the Man in the Moon

One of the few genuinely astonishing things about science fiction is the way in which it has universally come to be regarded as a self-contained genre — a genre, moreover, that operates according to its own potent if obscure laws. Those within its orbit experience a gravitational pull so strong that the greater principles of the literary solar system cease to have any effect. They still retain some sense of what is good or bad, but judgements of this kind no longer have prac tical consequences: they would rather remain in a state of suspended animation than face the hazards of further travel. Equally, there are others for whom science fiction is purely repulsive, who believe that nothing inside the charmed orbit could possibly have the sligh test merit. For them, also, the laws of the literary solar system have ceased to work. In fact this power of attraction and repulsion is

so strong that true addicts are forced to redefine all other visible stars, planets, and meteoroids in terms of their own chosen resting place, and to assert that anything of any merit from Genesis through Paradise Lost to Ulysses is in reality science fiction, whilst those who have resisted the attraction are equally at pains to assert that 1984 or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have nothing to do with the genre. The disenchanted seem to have the better case, but the fact that the debate can exist is itself significant.

When the extremists of the science fiction world state their case, outsiders can only lis ten with astonishment and incomprehension.

Robert A. Heinlein, for example, believes that "for the survival and health of the human race one crudely written science fiction story containing a single worthwhile new idea is more valuable than a bookcaseful of beau tifully written non-science fiction." Only in science fiction, we may observe, would anybody hitting on a new and worthwhile idea decide to put it into a story, rather than take it to the Patent Office. In any case

Heinlein conveniently ignores the message of several of the finest examples of the genre: the only new and worthwhile idea is a moratorium on new and worthwhile ideas. Then there is the defence offered by Colin Wilson, discussing the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft, he argues,. is admittedly a terrible writer, whose literary skills are scarcely more than rudimentary, but his central and obsessive concerns are of the greatest importance despite the crudity of his writing; future generations, Wilson tells us, may come to feel that Lovecraft is " symbolically " true. Finally there are the more modest claims made by Brian Aldiss, who has just written a history of science fiction'' in which he redefines it as a sub-genre of Gothic," though he manages to give the lie to such moderation when he gets down to discussing individual works. For Aldiss science fiction is fantasy with relevance; it can do something to bridge the division between art and science, and by telling man

about his dreams it can cast a new light on his present condition.

All of this is splendid; the difficulty comes when particular titles are adduced as demonstrating the excellencies of science fiction. They prove, almost without exception, to be by authors who write equally well outside the genre: H. G. Wells is an obvious case in point, and today his ' comedies' have far more relevance and a far greater power to move than anything that he achieved in the science fiction line. There are a handful of works by science fiction specialists that have genuine merit, though these are generally flawed; W. Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz is a characteristic example. Three-quarters of the book — the description of the monastery which is the sole repository of learning in a world that has sustained a nuclear catastrophe, and in which the inhabitants have in consequence turned against all manifestations of scientific knowledge — is brilliant; the remaining quarter, surely conceived as fodder for the science fiction addicts who provided the obvious market, is a disaster. Yet in the world of science fiction Canticle for Leibowitz streaks like a rocket through the limitless inane.

Brian Aldiss is a writer of science fiction who, the jacket of his history tells us, has won "many of the prizes in the field, including the Hugo. the Nebula, and the BSFA award." It is

reasonable to expect that when so acclaimed a practitioner of a type of writing offers us an account of its past we should gather. from the way he handles it, some sense of what is best. both in the genre and in his own work: One of the fascinations of science fiction is that it has a past, it is not — as might at first seem likely — exclusively the product of the last century and a half. In 1687 Aphra Behn (much and unjustly mocked in these pages of late) wrote a splended farce called The Emperor of the Moon, in which there is a true lunatic, run mad "with reading foolish books, Lucian's Thalogue of the Lofty Traveller, who flew up to the moon, and thence to heaven; an heroick business, call'd The Man in the Moon, is you'll believe a Spaniard, who was carried thither upon an engine drawn by wild geese; with another philosophical piece, A Discourse of the World in the Won, with a thousand other ridiculous volumes too hard to name." But Mr Aldiss is broadly dismissive about these early manifestations, and does not mention Mrs Behn, any more than he mentions the space flight in Chaucer's Hous of Fame. His interest is almost exclusively in the post-Romantic era, though as a literary his torian he does not seem any more secure even there. He gets the date of Jefferies' After London wrong, describes works written by Shelley when an undergraduate as having been written when he was a "schoolboy," and implies that Beckford's Fonthill collapsed because it was architecturally "too daring." when in fact what happened was that a dishonest workman failed to build a strengthening arch which he had been paid to construct, and so rendered the architect's calculations useless. These are trivial mistakes, but they do not encourage confidence in Aldiss as a guide.

The matter would be less serious if his pages were not bedecked with a parody of a scholarly apparatus. A curious and unreal effect is produced when footnotes are carefully keyed in to a text which contains gems such as this: ' Voltaire, a French philosopher who wrote over ten million words, and produced a voluminous correspondence besides, had indulged his sense of surrealism before writing Candide. . .'. The fact that he wrote over ten million words is no doubt mentioned to bring home to Aldiss's readers that quantitively, if in no other respect, Voltaire was in the Edgar Rice Burroughs class, and it is touching to know that, in the great wordage stakes, correspondence doesn't count (perhaps including correspondence might have been a handicap to Burroughs, who one doesn't imagine as a great letter-writer). If Billion Dollar Spree is written for people who require to be told that Voltaire was a French philosopher then it could profitably lose its superfluous and misleading trimmings. Yet its whole con

struction is, in the last analysis, symptomatic.

Just as so many science fiction authors erect a complicated and improbable scaffolding of technological wizardry only to use it as the basis for some absurd and banal story appropriate to a teenager's pulp magazine. so Aldiss hedges his own discussion of banalities with appropriate flummery. There is a comforting hardness to it which, like the complexities of futuristic technology, serves as a sop to the self-indulgence of both author and reader that it ultimately sustains.

It is significant that the best part of this book, to which it is otherwise hard to allow

even passing merit, is the discussion of the great age of science fiction that followed the foundation of Amazing Stories in 1926. This was the period when the popular science fiction magazines, the innumerable novels of Burroughs and his imitators, and the transcendentally boring effusions of the mephitic

Olaf Stapledon came together to form a' compulsive hierarchy. within which tyros could graduate from silly but comparatively readable escapist fiction to the realms of the

higher nonsense. It seems likely that the present day highbrow cult of science fiction in this country has a great deal to do with the belated popularity of this material in England during the war and the days of austerity, when it became so powerful an opiate on juvenile imaginations that a number of its victims were never weaned from the drug.

A history of science fiction would be worthwhile if it was fun. The obvious man to embark on such an endeavour was Mr Kingsley Amis, who admires the genre whilst recognising its limitations. But after reading Mr Aldiss it is hard to retain a sense or proportion, or even to remember that science fiction can be fun, that Arthur C. Clarke, in his role as Plumber's Mate to the universe has written some rattling yarns that should appeal to all who enjoyed meccano, and that two highly competent ladies, Ursula le Guin and Angela Carter have proved that there is life and even poetry in it for those with the skill and self-discipline to concentrate on the areas which offer possibilities not easily to be found in other forms. Mr Aldiss makes the appropriate noises about the limitations of the genre, but it is hard to believe, when he comes to illustrate and quote, that 'he really believes them, or that his literary sensibilities, whether as writer or reader, are other than compulsive. It would not matter, were it not for the fact that he provides evidence that the kind of argument that he uses to justify an exaggerated response to an activity in itself no more harmful than a taste of Housewives' Choice, ducks on the wall or Mars bars can apparently gull those who should know better. The Arts Council have extended their munificence to a form which, above almost any other, should be, self-supporting, and it appears that superannuated writers of science fiction, the fuses of their minds finally blown by a sudden surge of cosmic afflatus, teach science fiction in the universities. Which takes us back to the world of 1984.