The Detached Retina

Contents

Title Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

THANKS FOR DROWNING THE OCELOT

‘A ROBOT TENDED YOUR REMAINS …’

The Advance of the Mega-machine

A NOTE

BETWEEN PRIVY AND UNIVERSE

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

THE IMMANENT WILL RETURNS—2

A WHOLE NEW CAN OF WORMS

SCIENCE FICTION’S MOTHER FIGURE

I

II

STURGEON: THE CRUELTY OF THE GODS

THE DOWNWARD JOURNEY Orwell’s 1984

PEEP

CULTURE

Is it Worth Losing Your Balls For?

WELLS AND THE LEOPARD LADY

Lecture delivered at the International Wells Symposium

THE ADJECTIVES OF ERICH ZANN

A Tale of Horror

JEKYLL

ONE HUMP OR TWO

Lecture given at the IAFA Conference of the Fantastic

KAFKA’S SISTER

CAMPBELL’S SOUP

SOME EARLY MEN IN THE MOON

KALIYUGA, OR UTOPIA AT A BAD TIME

Talk given at the Annual MENSA meeting in Cambridge

UTOPIA: DREAM OR PIPE DREAM?

THE ATHEIST’S TRAGEDY REVISITED

THE PALE SHADOW OF SCIENCE

Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science

DECADENCE AND DEVELOPMENT

THE VEILED WORLD

A Lecture given to the Oxford Psychotherapy Society

A PERSONAL PARABOLA

Speech delivered at the Natwest Fundación, Madrid

About the Author

Also part of The Brian Aldiss Collection

Copyright

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes its origins to two volumes published by Serconia Press in 1985 and 1986, The Pale Shadow of Science (hereafter PSS) and … And the Lurid Glare of the Comet (ALGC). The former volume was designed for my appearance as Guest of Honour at Norwescon, Seattle, March 1985. Both were the brainchild of Jerry Kaufman of Serconia Press.

Almost all the original articles have been greatly revised, thrown out, supplemented, or at least tampered with. New articles have been added. Their provenance is as follows:

‘Thanks for Drowning the Ocelot’—as Afterword in Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook Two (1989), edited by David S. Garnett.

‘A Robot Tended Your Remains …’—new.

‘Between Privy and Universe: Aldous Huxley (1894—1963)’—expanded from an article in Nature, August 1994.

‘The Immanent Will Returns—2’—new, but based on ‘Olaf Stapledon’ in The Times Literary Supplement (1983) and the Foreword to Robert Crossley’s Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (1994).

‘A Whole New Can of Worms’ (PSS, expanded)—published in Foundation (1982).

‘Science Fiction’s Mother Figure’ (PSS, expanded)—developed from ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’ in Science Fiction Writers (1981), edited by E. F. Bleiler.

‘Sturgeon: The Cruelty of the Gods’ (ALGC, expanded from ‘Sturgeon: Mercury Plus X’)—as an obituary in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (1986).

‘The Downward Journey: Orwell’s 1984’ (PSS)—in Extrapolation (1984).

‘Peep’ (PSS, expanded)—as Introduction to James Blish’s Quincunx of Time (1983).

‘Culture: Is it Worth Losing Your Balls For? (ALGC, expanded from ‘When the Future Had to Stop’, Vogue, 1986). Plus Introduction to The Alteration (Easton Press ed., 1993).

‘Wells and the Leopard Lady’—lecture given to the International Wells Symposium (1986) and in Parrinder and Rolfe, eds., H. G. Wells Under Revision (1990).

‘The Adjectives of Erich Zann: A Tale of Horror’—new.

‘Jekyll’—new.

‘One Hump or Two’—lecture given at IAFA Conference of the Fantastic #12. Reprinted as ‘Fantasy: US versus UK’ in Damon Knight’s Monad (March 1992).

‘Kafka’s Sister’—Introduction to Brian W. Aldiss, ed., My Madness, The Selected Writings of Anna Kavan’ (1990).

‘Campbell’s Soup’—new, based on a review in SFRA Review (1993).

‘Some Early Men in the Moon’—based on ‘The Raccolta of Filipo Morghen’ in Life on the Moon in 1768 (1990).

‘Kaliyuga, or Utopia at a Bad Time’—a talk given at the annual MENSA meeting, Cambridge, August 1994. Based in part on an article appearing in Locus (1994).

‘The Atheist’s Tragedy Revisited’ (PSS)—revised.

‘The Pale Shadow of Science’ (PSS)—address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1984.

‘Decadence and Development’—new.

‘The Veiled World’—based on a talk given to The Oxford Psychotherapy Society, 1991.

‘A Personal Parabola’—adapted from a speech delivered in Madrid, January 1994.

INTRODUCTION

WARNING: These essays are written by a man who produced his first SF short story at the age of eight. Writing has brought him joy and possibly saved him from a life of crime. The unifying theme here is his belief that all literature is a criticism of life, or someone’s life. Even when that was not the intention behind it.

Among the great range of talented artists working in the SF/fantasy field, the name of Jim Christensen is particularly cherished. Not only is he marvellously inventive, he is a man of great charm and courtesy. And an obsessive.

I watched him during a signing session at a conference in Houston. As people came up to his desk with a book to be autographed, Christensen gave them something extra, something more than the bare signature we novelists extrude. He would swiftly draw beside his name a cameo: a fish, or a boat, or a dwarf, or a boat-fish, or a fish-dwarf-boat, or something entirely new. That’s obsession!

This particular IAFA conference was being held at the Hobby Aiport Hilton Hotel in the mid-eighties. The Conference of the Fantastic is organized by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, for many years under its energetic president, Marshall B. Tymn. Another obsessive.

The term ‘obsessive’ is used in complimentary fashion, since I must clearly be obsessive myself. My involvement with creative writing and criticism and science fiction has led me into the shallows of academia. Being a creative writer and a critic at one and the same time is somewhat convoluted, but I have certainly learnt from the academics.

The two similar writing processes impede but also cross-fertilize each other. I rejoice that it is so, and late in my writing career—if career it is—wish to give grateful thanks to the IAFA, one of the two major bodies to which SF academics belong. The other, and longer-established, body is the SF Research Association.

Before these two well-organized bodies set up shop, a certain amount of chaos reigned. The teaching of science fiction was in its infancy, with no one clear as to what to teach or how. Early SF curricula were described as Utopian Studies, or Futurism in Literature, or went under similar disguises. Most of the thought on the subject could best be described as muddled, though early lecturers on the subject, such as Jack Williamson, Tom Clareson, and Willis E. McNelly were fighting the good fight by dawn’s early light.

In 1971, when my wife and I were staying in California with Harry Harrison and his wife, I was called upon to lecture at the J. Harvey Mudd College. SF had become all the rage as a degree option, and unqualified persons were being coerced into teaching courses for which they were ill-prepared.

A woman came to me in distress. ‘I was due to hold a course on Dryden’, she said. ‘But no one enlisted. It was cancelled yesterday. Now I have to teach Science Fiction. Can you tell me anything about a writer called Robert Heinlein?’

Billion Year Spree was devised to attend to such problems. My hope was, by a little clarity of thought, to supersede some of the sillier theories of SF then floating about, and by so doing to focus on the intrinsic nature of the beast. Also, of course, I wanted to write of SF from my own experience as writer and reader with a half-lifetime’s enjoyment behind him. While preserving as much detachment as I could muster.

The IAFA—I hope I have this right—was founded in the late seventies, by the revered Dr Robert A. Collins of the Florida Atlantic University, among others. Their first conference was held in Boca Raton, Florida, at the University, in 1979—a year after the SFRA presented me with a Pilgrim Award for Distinguished Contributions to Science Fiction. Dr Collins invited me to the third conference (referred to in the Sturgeon chapter). Since then I have attended all conferences bar two, and have attained the valued status of Special Permanent Guest.

The conference moved to Houston in the eighties, and is now (1994) convened in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It has become the most pleasurable event of the SF year. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the executive board, whose skills I view with awe. This annual plunge into the rather hard-pressed academic world of American scholarship acts like a refresher course, while the continuity of the relationship, with all its challenges, is invaluable.

The board invited me in the first place because of the SFRA precedent, and also because I was one of the few writers actively to support the idea of academic criticism and study. In England, by contrast, there seemed to be only one lone scholar of SF, the feisty Tom Shippey, and in Scotland Colin Manlove. If SF is to be a literature, clearly the scholarly side must thrive. Nowadays, others writers, such as Joe Haldeman, John Kessel, Jane Yolen, Tom Maddox, and Stephen Donaldson, and of course Frederik Pohl and his wife, Betty Anne Hull, write and teach. And attend the IAFA conferences. Veteran editors such as David Hartwell and Charles Brown are generally present, to remind scholars that SF also has to be lived right down to the toenails. Writers as diverse as Doris Lessing, John Barth, Stephen King, Leslie Fiedler, and Richard Ellman have proved successful and popular visitors.

In the nineties, science fiction has spread into media other than the printed word. Into movies and videos, and into all the ramifications of the still proliferating electronic world, towards that digital time in the twenty-first century when the entire globe is on Internet and we all have access to everything.

Billion Year Spree proved an asset to scholars. It gave them carte blanche not to have to study texts a million miles from the real thing unless they wished; they were not forced to lead their students through Gilgamesh or Dante; they could narrow their sights on Frankenstein and all the amazements which have poured forth since. That proved good news for all concerned.

Billion Year Spree delivered a dialectic in which SF could be studied as a literature dealing with mankind’s attempts to come to terms with new powers and to overcome those aspects of nature reckoned to be impediments to progress.

The success of the book meant that I was called upon to update it in the eighties. By that time, the field had greatly expanded and its parameters had become even more blurred than previously. I could not manage the task without my colleague, David Wingrove, another writer/critic, and the most diligent collaborator a man could wish for. So we produced Trillion Year Spree in 1986, with the able editorial assistance of Malcolm Edwards, then an editor at Gollancz.

Trillion met with less opposition than Billion, and even won a Hugo Award. It might be argued that this change in attitude was due to the establishment of academic bodies in the States like the SFRA and IAFA, where discussion is taken for granted.

In succeeding years, critics have perceived an increasing difficulty in writing what is referred to as ‘hard SF’—that is, SF closely involved with technology and the sciences. The fantasy aspect has become predominant. As I try to indicate in the essay entitled ‘Some First Men in the Moon’, it is not always easy to separate scientific speculation from fantasy. Our wishes and fears are wild horses not easily tamed. The one often comes wrapped in the other, as truth in an ordinary novel can arrive, as Iris Murdoch has said, in an ambush of lies. Kepler, the great Kepler, used the one to enliven the other, in his Somnium.

This is my fourth selection of essays and reviews to appear in print. In This World and Nearer Ones, the essays were deliberately diverse. I had in mind as a model two small collections of essays which delighted me at a time when I was even more ignorant than I now am. Both books were by minor British poets: Tracks in the Snow (1946) was by Ruthven Todd, and The Harp of Aeolus (1948) by Geoffrey Grigson.

Todd introduced me to a number of artists I should have known and did not, such as Henri Fuseli and John Martin, both early exponents of the Romantic and the Fantastic. Todd’s volume also included a reproduction of that marvellous painting, Joseph Wright’s An Experiment with an Air Pump, which David Wingrove and I were to use many years later in Trillion Year Spree. It represents the introduction of a scientific principle to ordinary people—some of whom appear more interested in the medium than the message.

Grigson talks about a painter, Samuel Palmer, a favourite of mine—a man who turned the Thames Valley into Biblical illustrations. Grigson claims that Palmer, and the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson were the first people to admire the horse chestnut. Before their day, in the eighteenth century, that century of the landscape gardener, the horse chestnut was despised as ‘a heavy, disagreeable tree’, much like an overgrown lupin.

Later in the nineteenth century, we find Coventry Patmore remarking admiringly how quiet stood the chestnut with its thousand lamps.

Tastes change—and not only in trees. Perhaps even mad Fuseli is not fashionable any more. And perhaps in time the writings of certain science fiction writers—not all of them, not all of those ‘thousand lamps’ we find lighting current publishers’ lists, by any manner of means—will come to be admired and studied as we study, say, the prolific Balzac.

I mention painters only because, for me, much of the pleasure of SF lies in its imagery, in the bold pictures it paints. The ancient woodland invading the mansion in Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, the alien landscapes of Earth at the end of Bear’s Blood Music, the infernal city of Dis rising up from Death Valley in Blish’s The Day After Judgement, the wonderful forbidding planets and moons in which we all indulge from time to time—this visual side of SF is apt to be neglected by critics, and taken for granted by readers. Even a poor SF movie can generally be relied upon to deliver visual fillips. Isn’t this techno-romantic sense one of the special developments of our century?

The big question is, as ever, why is SF not more readily absorbed as part of the general diet read by a literate public? It is accepted that that audience may read crime novels without thereby losing status. Police procedure is an interesting subject: but is it really more interesting, of greater worth, than the procedures of planets, or the future of mankind? To which critics might respond, ‘Is SF about the future of mankind? And if it is, is a popular literature the proper place in which to discuss such a serious subject?’ Popular literature has always been about serious subjects: courage, love, adultery, failure, heroism, death. The argument that because something is popular it must be in some way debased gets us nowhere; it is a statement merely of prejudice.

Science fiction is not so much a forum for new topics, as some claim; rather, it is itself a new way to discuss old topics. The sense of the alien. The unease generated by religion and the failure of religion. The quest for meaning. Notions of the Sublime. A hope for the better miscegenating with a misgiving about the worse. Our ambiguous feelings concerning technology. The longing for security and its obverse, adventure. And more recently the importance of gender roles.

And science fiction seems to offer an elusive something more, a Martian sense of looking at things and finding the familiar strange, of finding novelty in this world, and nearer ones. For this it needs the SF writer’s gift, a detached viewpoint, a detached retina. Perhaps ordinary readers are not comfortable with detached retinas. As Samuel Delany pointed out, you have to train yourself or be trained to appreciate the tropes of SF.

We in the West worry about the blemishes in our societies, and about their failures, remedies for which can be perceived but not applied. To paraphrase Percy Bysshe Shelley, we enslave much of nature, yet ourselves remain slaves. Horse chestnuts may go in and out of fashion, and the drawings of Fuseli likewise, but war is always with us, destroying humans, homes, monuments, histories and environments. Our societies become increasingly politicized; yet as politicians become increasingly a part of showbiz and mediabiz they grow less and less able to offer leadership. Engendered by this situation, alternating fits of exhilaration and depression pour into science fiction.

Cool reflections on the state of play are offered by many contemporary writers. Karen Joy Fowler, for instance, in her novel Sarah Canary (1991), has this to say:

Sanity is a delicate concept, lunacy only slightly less so. Over the last few centuries, more and more of those phenomena once believed to belong to God have been assigned to the authority of the psycho-analyst instead. Some of the saints can be diagnosed in retrospect as epileptics. St Teresa was almost certainly an hysteric. St Ida of Lorraine seems to have suffered from perceptional insanity … The prognosis for such cases in our own age is excellent; saintliness can often be completely cured.

The essays which follow might seem not to deal with such weighty matters. I no longer attempt to emulate Todd and Grigson. My belief is that much of SF’s interest and importance lies in what it does not say. Or rather, that we like mainly what it corporately has to say about what it sees through that detached retina. Hence our addiction. It scratches where we itch.

I am no academic, as these essays show. For that reason, I use my own experience when it illuminates an argument. Academics do not behave like that; unlike me, they have careers to protect. I can scratch in public …

And, just as opinions may change regarding the attractions of the horse chestnut, so the place where we itch changes. I remember the days when all we needed to stir our imaginations was to read of a landing on the Moon. The very idea challenged the limits of what was possible. Then men went and landed there, and spoilt everything (maybe they spoilt it even for themselves, because I notice they’ve not been back since …).

So nowadays a Moon landing must have a different emphasis if it is to scratch in the right place. Terry Bisson would presumably concur with Fowler, as quoted above. In one of his deceptively relaxed stories, The Shadow Knows, he tangles up his Moon landing nicely with other contemporary elements. The major is homing in on Station Houbolt:

Situated on the far side of the Moon, facing always away from the Earth, Houbolt lies open to the Universe. In a more imaginative, more intelligent, more spirited age it would be a deep-space optical observatory; or at least a monastery. In our petty, penny-pinching, paranoid century it is used only as a semi-automated Near-Earth-Object or asteroid early-warning station. It wouldn’t have been kept open at all if it were not for the near-miss of NEO 2201 Oljato back in ’14, which had pried loose UN funds as only stark terror will.

Here’s our old familiar Moon landing, wonderful as ever. But nowadays it crawls with social commentary.

We devotees of SF enjoy its diversity of opinion, the bustle of bright and dark, the clash of progress and entropy, the clamour of theories about the past, the future, the ever-present present, everything.

We doubt: therefore we are.

B.W.A.

Boars Hill

Oxford

November 1994

THANKS FOR DROWNING THE OCELOT

England, 1989

Dear Salvador Dali,

It’s a real sorrow that you died in January of this year, and I expect you were upset as well. I wanted to say thanks to you; let’s trust I’m not too late. I hope this letter will reach you as you rest in Abraham’s Bosom. Rough luck on Abraham, though.

But that can’t be right. You must be in some surreal place—perhaps in the heaven the ancient Egyptians dreamed about, by the summer stars. Or simply in orbit. Somewhere unorthodox. You liked breaking taboos.

Remember you once tried to prove that ‘the whole universe comes to a focus’ (as you put it) in the centre of the railway station in Perpignan? That was a good stunt. Perhaps you’re there in Perpignan, awaiting a celestial diesel to somewhere.

You were crazy. Or you acted the part. The remark about Perpignan railway station came in an article you wrote in 1965, extolling the virtues of the great Salvador Dali. Like Caesar, you referred to yourself in the third person—though in your case you were the first and the second person too: there were scarcely any others.

Your article involves the miraculous flies of Gerona, the cleanliness of Delft, the visceral eye of Vermeer, van Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope, several revolutions, the atomic bomb, and a swarm of priests dressed in black. It’s incoherent. You never wanted to make sense of the world; that had no part in your ‘critical paranoia’ method. Yet there was a tawdry magic. Take one sentence from that article:

Thus the blood of the dragoons and the hussars who hibernated at Beresina mixing directly with the blood of the new technologists of the always Very Holy Russia caused a historic mutation, producing the true and new mutant beings—the astronauts who, propelled by the templates of their genetic code, could not have a more positive way to direct themselves toward heaven than to jet straight toward the moon, which we will see happen from one moment to the other.

Even van Vogt couldn’t manage prose like that. So let’s just think of you in orbit somewhere in the summer stars. Greetings to Hieronymus Bosch.

You may not remember this, but we met on one occasion; an event was held in the London Planetarium, when you and I helped to launch a book of Fleur Cowles’s poems and paintings. You were working hard on giving an impression of great eccentricity. Without wishing to complain, I was slightly disappointed—only, I hasten to add, in the way that one is generally disappointed by meeting one’s heroes in the flesh. It’s the Napoleon-was-a-bit-short syndrome. When I met Jeffrey Archer, another of the greats, the same thought flashed across my mind. There was a kind of rotting Edwardian stylishness about you. Whereas Archer’s unmitigatedly eighties; the Hush Puppy school.

But you were a hero. At my school, in Form IVA, it was taken for granted you were the great artist of the age. We liked rotting carcasses, elongated skulls, soggy watches, crutches, and the rest of your props. One of our number, now a Labour backbencher, could act out your canvas, Spectre of Sex Appeal, naked, with the aid of a couple of hockey sticks. We chortled over your Life, so full of disgusting facts or fantasies that it would have meant expulsion had we been caught with the book in our lockers.