July SF
Alex de Jonge
It is, I find, one of life's little comforts that science fiction does not really lend itself to lit. crit, crit in the sense of 'Please sir, I couldn't write my essay because the first years have taken all the crits out of the library'. True, at a particularly bad moment in the middle of International Breastgeding Week, when anything seemed possible, it occurred to me that perhaps academic establishments throughout the free world, and Poland, contained young persons writing papers on Asimov's narrative technique, or La structure du desir chez Arthur C. Clarke, but the black mood soon passed.
I know that some books are written about sci-fi, because I am sent them, but these are modest affairs reminiscent of old fashioned literary history or lit. hist. — 'If all the crits are out why dont you read some literary history?' But is it really relevant?' Classification by genre and date is, admittedly, at the best of times the stuff of dull books for duller minds. It does little enough to the most pedestrian science fiction and is use' less when it comes to anything decent.
I suspect that the pointy-headed authors of sci fi critical guides might even waste space to debate whether D. M. Thomas's The Flute Player (Gollancz £4.95) is really science fiction or not. Whatever it may be I can only tell you that it is one of the most skillful!, moving and imaginative pieces of fiction I have read in years. At this point I should declare an interest. The book deals with themes, and indeed people that are very close indeed to my heart. However, this means that had Mr Thomas made a box of things I would have wanted to tear him limb from limb for lese-majeste and sacrilege. But he hasnt; he has written a tremendously moving book dedicated to Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, a fantasy based sometimes loosely, sometimes very directly upon their lives and works, and above all on the survival of poetry, love and humanity in an imaginary city that bears a striking resemblance to Leningrad.
We are taken through a series of revolutions, NEPs, purges and thaws: history being re-written as myth. Although it uses Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs, and various poems, notably Akhmatova's 'Requiem' with its shattering epigraph, this is in no sense a roman a clef, and nor, more to the point, is it either pretentious or an act of hubris. The central character, Elena, model, muse, nurse, prostitute, becomes something very close indeed to the spirit of music, and her survival through a series of ordeals that might appear exaggerated to those unfamiliar with 20th-century history is the story of the survival of poetry itself. Another musical book, On Wings o fSong (Gollancz £5.95) has Thomas M. Disch on good form. This apocalyptic version of the American dream features a poor dentist's son from the Bible Belt who goes to prison, marries a millionaire's daughter, becomes a famous singer and is finally assassinated by his Bible Belt school marm. He also realises his greatest ambition which is to leave his body and fly, a thing some people can do if they achieve the appropriate spiritual velocity by singing — hence the title. There is much to like about the book, notably a superbly comic section about bel canto castrati set in a decaying New York. The only trouble is that the apocalypse is fast losing the capacity to excite which it used to possess when J. G. Ballard was young. Nowadays it has a certain ring of, sorry, déjà prevu about it, but that is my only reservation about an otherwise excellent book.
Roger Zelazny is another favourite writer, when he is not writing about Amber. His latest, My Name is Legion (Faber £4.95) is not, as its title might suggest, another of his splendid re-workings of mythological material. The book consists of three ingenious stories about a kind of private detective who has achieved total anonymity by erasing his particulars from the Central Data Bank. The stories are highly imaginative, concerning such matters as possibly criminal dolphins and the interplay between artificial intelligence and artifical original sin. All good stuff.
Finally two excellent funnies. Profundis by Richard Cowper (Gollancz £4.95) is about a large nuclear submarine containing the only community known to have survived the holocaust, waiting for the world to cool down. It is not exactly Noah's Ark but it includes some more highly articulate dolphins, a mad admiral who decides he is God and is on the look out for a Son to sit on his right, and a prankster computer who sort of sees itself as the Holy Ghost.
Blackpool Vanishes by Richard Francis (Faber £4,50) is what it says it is. Before being kidnapped by aliens the town has been visited for years by small flying saucers. One of its inhabitants has kept a careful record of his sightings, sending them, oddly enough, to the Foreign Office. He also writes quite interesting poetry about them. All this material comes in very handy when Blackpool disappears. This is an odd little first novel with plenty of atmosphere and no whimsy.
Lastly a word of warning. If, as I have done recently, in fact twice and both times sober, you should happen to see something in the sky quite unlike any star, aircraft, satellite or anything else you can think of, keep your mouth shut. If you don't you will make a lot of undesirable new acquaintances; your women, and anyone else who have doubts about your mental stability, will view you with even graver suspicion, and you will quite lose your taste for books about little green men, since one of their charms is the sure and certain knowledge that none of it is for real.
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