Monster Babies
Spectrum. Edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. (Gollancz, 18s.)
Consider Her Ways. By John Wyndham. (Michael Joseph, 15s.)
• A Fall of Moondust. By Arthur C. Clarke. (Gollancz, 16s.) More than Moon. By Laurence Clark. (Cen- taur, 16s.)
SCIENCE fiction is like pornography—the more it arouses us, the more it embarrasses us. I am sure even Kingsley Amis would rather read the second aloud in mixed company (i.e., including women) than he would the first in mixed com- pany (i.e., including dons). Both kinds of writing are usually recommended with rather defiant bellicosity by their addicts who elaborately avoid mentioning the real attraction of the drug.
The defence of pornography is literary—it is always the brilliant style which justifies the un- usual subject. The defence of SF is epistemologi- cal—the variety and originality of the ideas overweigh the thinness of the characterisation and the poverty of the language. But both in fact exist because they hit hard below the mental belt. Science-fictioneers and pornographers, as T. E. Lawrence said of D. H., have set them- selves the task of 'teaching the subconscious to speak English.'
This accounts for the nagging sense of guilt experienced by many who cannot analyse the thrills they get from SF. Much of the pleasure comes from wish-fulfilment on an infantile level —the monster-baby in all of us is able to dream that he is once again the omnipotent womb- dictator who ruled all he surveyed. The frustra- tions of the adult are compensated for by fan- tasies about battles with gigantic domestic ani- mals in outer space, by visions of minds which can move objects and destroy people by thought alone, by paradises for the flabby-muscled where new bodies can be made to measure with elec- tronic nerve-endings and supersonic reactions.
Once we admit the need for this kind of ego- boost, it becomes possible to indulge cheerfully in its intoxication. And we can agree that SF is an excellent arena for social satire, for juggling with ideas, for mental eurhythmics and for critical self-analysis. Of all the popular forms of entertainment, it most strongly insists that the mind be kept switched on.
The anthology Spectrum reveals some of the best and worst in the genre. Frederick Pohl's long story The Midas Plague' is an ingenious and entertaining parable about a society ruined by overproduction. Though the basic idea is little more than Veblen upside-down, it has a satisfy- ing neatness and precision. The best story is by Robert Sheckley. Earth becomes an ad- man's funfair selling anything from true love to real murder for those on holiday from saner planets. The impact is all the more devastating because the author makes no more than a token attempt to explain how his commercialised day- dreams are so convincingly manufactured—the fiction is stranger than science. The worst story, 'Special Flight,' is hardly literate enough for the Wizard: 'the glowering Schwab followed the still-silent Feathers up the ladder to . .
Two collections by two of the best-known SF writers, John Wyndham's Consider Her Ways and Clifford Simak's Aliens for Neighbours, are rather disappointingly below their best. Mr. Wyndham's are more in the eerie-anecdote vein (a little diluted) of John Collier or Roald Dahl than of science fiction. Three of them deal with accidental mix-ups in time travel, with almost the same gimmick and the same denouement, while one is a piece of heavy-handed, over- jocular fun about TV quizzes and Hollywood star-building. Mr. Simak has one first-class story, 'Honourable Opponent,' showing the bafflement of the brass-hats of earth when they go to war with alien eggheads who always play the game and win—politely returning the captured space- ships, like chessmen, after each round. But there is another, 'Idiot's Crusade,' which backs my thesis that SF appeals •to the horror-comic un- conscious, by postulating a cretin, possessed by a parasite from space, who goes around the vil- lage thinking neighbours into horrible agonies.
The last two volumes of the current crop are the most enjoyable—though hardly the kind which SF intellectuals admire. Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust is a straightforward adven- ture thriller which would make a riveting TV serial. Can the entire resources of twenty-first- century earth be mobilised in time to rescue the crew and passengers of the dust-cruiser Selene buried a mere fifteen metres down in the strange, unknown dust of the Moon's Sea of Thirst? Laurence Clark's title from Donne contains a nudge that the subject of his satire is not what it seems. Though he fits his tale out with a fair cargo of scientific props, his moon is really America, and his America is Britain, at the time of what he calls the Panama Incident. There are some sharp jokes about moon economics and politics which justify ploughing through an episodic and ill-organised plot. I specially liked The Moke, mysterious, half- mythical capitalist ruler of the moon, who greets the hero with the line : 'I just wanted to meet you because my wife has told you so much about me.'
ALAN BRIEN
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