This World and Nearer Ones

So what are all these angels and devils doing, flitting so anachronistically through modern science fiction? The answers are complex, and spring from the complex nature of James Blish, who contained in himself much of the crabbed knowledge and temperament of his star, Roger Bacon. Sometimes, we are meant to take the devils literally, as in Black Easter and The Day After Judgement; sometimes, they are deployed more metaphorically. As for the vast distance wherein we are purified, where we may meet with angels, they also represent passages of time, during which knowledge and judgement can be achieved. Several Blishian heroes make at least part of the journey, and acquire part-purification.

One who makes it all the way is Mayor John Amalfi. He becomes more than angel, God (a reversal of the way in which the Devil becomes God by visiting Earth in Day After Judgement – here the factors of the equation are transposed). For it is Amalfi, of all Blish’s human characters, who travels farthest; and the anti-agathics which make him nearly immortal ensure that he can travel almost forever. So in Blishian terms he has to head away from Earth. At the end of Clash of Cymbals, he reaches metagalactic centre, where a new universe is coming into being. Amalfi virtually creates that new universe, in one orgasmic burst of parthenogenesis.

This climax is Blish’s most daring reach for balance, for a treaty between good and evil, armistice between love and death. But the longing for treaty, for balance, is continually expressed, often in metaphor. There is a wish to see standard religion take its place beside a rigorous science (typically, in A Case of Conscience); then demons will become mere humans in armour and humans angels without armour.

The contradictions between antipathetic systems are ones Blish is constantly driven to bridge. In a memorable story entitled ‘Bridge’ (later incorporated into the tetralogy Cities in Flight, as part of the novel They Shall Have Stars), he dramatises the journey of a man across a perilous ice bridge on Jupiter, a bridge which represents the joining of two incompatible systems, since the man is not on Jupiter in actuality but illusion. An actual crossing of the ice bridge can never be achieved. Oppositions admit of no real bridges, or not under any math at present accessible to us.

It was towards such a bridge that Blish worked. His writing slowly becomes more concentrated towards the problems of knowledge and evil (that is, if we exclude the volumes of Star Trek which Blish turned out – for money but also, presumably, for relief from his pursuit of his dark quarry). The devils become thicker, the angels fewer.

In two renowned stories, Blish subsumes the symbolic angels and devils into mathematical functions.

In ‘Common Time’, Garrard is the pilot of an experimental inter-stellar vessel, capable of accelerating to near-light velocities. He finds himself undergoing extreme time-dilation.

‘During a single day of ship-time, Garrard could get in more thinking than any philosopher on Earth could have managed during an entire lifetime. Garrard could, if he disciplined himself sufficiently, devote his mind for a century to running down the consequences of a single thought, down to the last detail, and still have millenia left to go on to the next thought. What panoplies of pure reason could he not have assembled by the time 6,000 years had gone by? With sufficient concentration, he might come up with a solution to the Problem of Evil between breakfast and dinner of a single ship’s day, and in a ship’s month might put his finger on the First Cause!’

The passage carries a reminder of Sir Thomas Browne, physician of Norwich whose writings Blish enjoyed (‘Julius Scaliger, who in a sleepless fit of the gout could make two hundred verses in a night, would have but five plain words upon his tomb …’). The quotation from ‘Common Time’ gains vigour from deployment of similar antitheses. It is the mark of a genuine writer that, in the fibres of one characteristic sentence, he delivers a minute image of his whole thought, much as physicists once believed the whole solar system was modelled in the atom.

Without being aware of any contradiction, Garrard leaps between sentences from dreaming of ‘panoplies of pure reason’ to solving the Problem of Evil, as if he (or rather Blish) believes Evil could be resolved by Reason; the two questions are presented not as oppositions but complementaries. ‘Common Time’ was published in 1953, in the same year as first publication of A Case of Conscience. In A Case of Conscience also, Evil seems curiously to be something only discernible by tortuous reason. How fortunate, then, that Ruiz-Sanchez happens to combine the function of scientist and priest.

One of the tokens of Lithian evil is the mystery surrounding mating and birth on the planet. Chtexa, a Lithian with whom Ruiz-Sanchez talks, explains that he is living alone because no female has chosen him to fecundate her eggs that season. The priest asks, ‘And how is the choice determined? Is it by emotion, or by reason alone?’

‘The two are in the long run the same,’ replies Chtexa.

If emotion and reason are the same ‘in the long run’, then so it seems are religion and science. ‘Clouds and clouds’ of angels follow the Ariadne back to Earth, riding the same Standing Wave as the ship (but the Standing Wave was in a field which ‘relatively rejected the universe’). In that same novel, The Star Dwellers, the children have a tiny transistorised transceiver often unusually employed; as young Sylvia says, ‘Dad uses it to talk to Lucifer.’ (Similarly, the characters in Black Easter listen to Armageddon taking place over Radio Luxembourg. We have to assume that Blish thought such feats possible if there are wholly new ideas of number yet to be revealed.)

Such formulae are passing strange. Therein lies their attraction; they force us to recall the intimate connection between mathematics and reality. Blish’s vision encompasses remote equations where the sedimentary strata of reason are indistinguishable from the igneous deposits of emotion.

He works towards a universe Milton accepted with one that Dirac envisioned, to justify the esoteric problem of evil with the recondite spin of the electron. This is not a problem one meets with regularly in science fiction, yet many people confront it daily. There is always a demand for a New Jerusalem among our dark satanic mills.

As Blake saw eternity in an hour, so the great Mary Somerville, translator of Laplace, saw a proof of the unity of the Deity in Differential Calculus. The American Edward Everett declared, a bit more gushingly, ‘In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together.’ Perhaps Leslie A. White came nearer to Blish’s position – and to Spengler’s – when he remarked that ‘Mathematics is a form of behaviour.’

So could belief in a Dirac transmitter, like absolute trust in God, free us from sin? Such seems to be Blish’s assumption in his justly renowned story, ‘Beep’, published the year after A Case of Conscience and ‘Common Time’. ‘Beep’ builds a remarkable bridge between love and judgment.

In ‘Beep’ we have with a vengeance a culture coming to an end and a fresh idea transforming culture, wrapped up in numerology. The peculiar structure of the story is designed to exhibit these transformations to best effect. (I refer to the original novella, not the slightly revised version published under the Browneian title, The Quincunx of Time.)

One of the pleasing ingenuities of ‘Beep’ lies curled up within its title; like a Samuel Palmer chestnut tree alert within the confines of a conker, so a forest of implications unpacks from the title’s meaningless seed of noise. Here we encounter ‘Common Time’ Garrard’s dream come true: the ‘panoplies of pure reason’ can be unravelled in less than ‘a single day of ship-time’ through the Dirac computer. This achievement results in a universe of rigid causal laws; the banishment of Chaos, the imposition of an Order more rigorous than anything we could achieve today with our inferior math.

‘Beep’ contains a central image, which, being a numerological incantation, banishes all devils:

‘I’ve heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, [says one of the characters] travelling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light years – but what kind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension.’

Communication, however, mysterious at first, is achieved; help is forthcoming.

Communication begets communion. ‘Beep’ concerns one of the central problems of a galactic civilisation, how to overcome those immense lines of communication stretching across space and time. Blish’s Dirac transmitter provides a remarkable solution to the problem. For not only does it in part abolish space and time (bringing the metagalactic centre to our doorsteps, so to speak) but it proves to be, in effect, a machine which abolishes the Problem of Evil, root and branch. Heisenberg-Born-Dirac wield more clout than the Holy Trinity.

The story goes on to demonstrate what good effects follow – including having one of the characters married almost forcibly to a transvestite lady of mixed ancestry (to his great benefit).

Unravelling the skeins of this strange tale, Blish posits that if freewill could be removed from human affairs there would be no sin (a contrary assumption, if I have my theology correct, to the ones in A Case of Conscience – and, par example, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange).

Determinism shapes all activity: human consciousness is ‘just along for the ride’, or ‘helpless’. An embodiment of this is the Richard Strauss persona, resurrected to create a masterpiece, in ‘A Work of Art’. Again, events rule. Blish manages to make this hellish proposition sound utopian. The world of ‘Beep’ is the happiest one in the Blishian canon; as one of the characters remarks, ‘The news is always good.’

This connection between instant communication and freedom from sin is bold – yet we commonly equate non-communication (secrecy) with wickedness. Blish makes the situation real by showing what tender care is taken by the Service to see that lovers always meet as planned, thus maintaining future events in their predestinate grooves. Never before did Secret Service so closely resemble Marriage Bureau.

Most SF writers, slaves to catastrophes, portray instant communication as something which can be seized upon and perverted to further the aims of the conqueror. In ‘Beep’, it is seized upon to bring further peace. Is Blish trying to equate instant communication with perfect communion? There seems no other way to explain why his all-powerful Service is so incorruptible. The Event Police have become veritable Angels on Earth.

Other riddles attend us. We puzzle at the way Blish has planted two people in disguise – one in the inner, one in the outer story. They assume their disguises for devious purposes, yet neither meets with so much as mild disapproval when they are discovered.

Perhaps deception carries no penalties in a utopia. The deceit is maintained for benevolent ends (though theologians, not least Ruiz-Sanchez, would look askance at that). But, in this utopia, deceit cannot be feared, since there is no aggression. If you remove reasons for aggression, will aggression vanish? Does the wish to throw stones disappear on a perfectly sandy beach? Useless to ask such questions about the world of ‘Beep’, since the Dirac transmitter makes cause and effect inoperative by rendering the whole universe totally open to scrutiny. After such knowledge, there is no room for Judgment Day.

If you grant that ‘Beep’ is of a utopian disposition, then you have to grant that it is a rare sort of story indeed, even among Blish’s cabinet of curiosities. I know of no other galactic empire which could be remotely regarded as utopian; in general, the sewers of these glittering Trantors are clogged with the dismembered bodies of the oppressed. Yet, given angelic guidance, even Trantor could be made to blossom.

James Blish, in his wisdom, did a lot of strange things. He was a thinker, a maker, until the day of his death. Unlike so many science fiction writers – enslaved by editors, formulae and prospect of riches – he did not grow less interesting as he grew older, as he engaged in a daily fight with death and the night shapes. One of the themes that ‘Common Time’, ‘Beep’, and A Case of Conscience have in common is immortality: immortality of thought, immortality of material things, immortality of evil. When the city of Dis makes its dreadful apparition in the seared lands of America which Blish had by then vacated, we feel it as an eruption of a dreadful cancer – largely forgotten, yet ever-living.

In the volumes of the Cities in Flight series, along with the spin-dizzies go the anti-death drugs that confer extreme longevity on all. In the years when Blish was writing of Mayor Amalfi and the cities, he was carefree enough to use the idea as no more than a plot-device. But the evil days would come, and what was merely thought would be entirely felt. Reason and emotion would unite.

Like Mayor Amalfi, James Blish has made the perilous crossing into another state of being, where perhaps little survives but mathematics. In the words of Browne, he is ‘by this time no Puny among the mighty Nations of the Dead; for tho’ he left this World not many Days past, yet every Hour you know largely addeth unto that dark Society; and considering the incessant Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive that there dieth in the whole Earth so few as a thousand an Hour.’

As for the works Blish left behind, there were, as we might anticipate, several that will remain incomplete and uncompleted; for those that are complete we must be grateful. At their best, the cadences of his prose are spare, capable of keeping us alive to the unsparing intellect behind them. His originality, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, must always ensure that we remember his name when the rolls of leading science fiction writers are called; but he would seek no finer epitaph than that which one of his characters bestowed on mankind: ‘We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.’

Dick’s Maledictory Web

‘The trail levelled out and became wider. And all was in shadow; cold and damp hung over everything, as if they were treading within a great tomb. The vegetation that grew thin and noxious along the surface of rocks had a dead quality to it, as if something had poisoned it in its act of growing. Ahead lay a dead bird on the path, a rotten corpse that might have been there for weeks; he could not tell.’

Arnie Kott is on his way back into a schizoid variant of the recent past. Philip K. Dick is in the middle of one of his most magical novels, Martian Time-Slip.[1]

The setting is Mars, which is now partly colonised. Colonists live along the water system, where conditions of near-fertility exist.

This web of civilisation is stretched thin over utter desolation. There is no guaranteeing that it can be maintained. Its stability is threatened by the Great Powers back on Earth. For years, they have neglected Mars, concentrating dollars and man-hours on further exploration elsewhere in the system; now they may interfere actively with the balance of the colony.

Behind this web exists another, even more tenuous: the web of human relationships. Men and women, children, old men, bleekmen – the autochthonous but non-indigenous natives of Mars – all depend, however reluctantly, on one another. When poor Norbert Steiner commits suicide, the effects of the event are felt by everyone.

Behind these two webs lies a third, revealed only indirectly. This is the web connecting all the good and bad things in the universe. The despised bleekmen, who tremble on the edge of greater knowledge than humanity, are acutely aware of this web and occasionally succeed in twitching a strand here and there, to their advantage; but they are as much in its toils as anybody else.

These three webs integrate at various coordinate points, the most remarkable point being AM-WEB, a complex structure which the UN may build some time in the future in the FDR Mountains. The structure is visible to Steiner’s autistic son, Manfred, who sees it in an advanced stage of decay.

Its function in the novel is to provide a symbol for the aspirations and failures of mankind. The structure will be a considerable achievement when completed; which is not to say that it is not ultimately doomed; and part of that doom may be decreed by the miserable political and financial manoeuvrings which form one of the minor themes of this intricately designed novel.

Martian Time-Slip comes from the middle of one of Dick’s most creative periods. The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962. In 1963 came The Game-Players of Titan and then, in 1964, The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth, Clans of the Alphane Moon, and the present volume. Although Dick is a prolific author, with some thirty novels appearing in fifteen years, his production rate is modest when compared with many other writers in the prodigal field of science fiction.

One of the attractions of Dick’s novels is that they all have points at which they inter-relate, although Dick never reintroduces characters from previous books. The relationship is more subtle – more web-like – than that. There is a web in Clans of the Alphane Moon, made by ‘the world-spider as it spins its web of destruction for all life’. The way in which Mars in the present novel is parcelled up between various nationalities is reminiscent of the parcelling up of Earth into great estates in The Penultimate Truth, and The Game-Players of Titan. The horrifying corrupt world of Manfred’s schizophrenia, the realm of Gubble, reminds us of the tomb world into which John Isidore falls in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or of one of the ghastly fake universes of Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. When Jack Bohlen, in the first few pages of the novel, awaits the arrival of his father from Earth, change is about to creep in; and change is often paradoxically embodied in someone or something old, like the Edwin N. Stanton lying wrapped up in newspaper in the back of Maury Rock’s Jaguar, in the opening pages of We Can Build You. And so on.

Such building blocks are by no means interchangeable from book to book; Dick’s kaleidoscope is always being shaken, new sinister colours and patterns continually emerge. The power in the Dickian universe resides in these blocks, rather than in his characters; even when one of the characters has a special power (like Jones’s ability to foresee the future in The World Jones Made) it rarely does him any personal good.

If we look at two of the most important of these building blocks and observe how they depend on each other for greatest effect, we come close to understanding one aspect of Dickian thought. These blocks are the concern-with-reality and the involvement-with-the-past.

Most of the characteristic themes of science fiction are materialist ones; only the concern-with-reality theme involves a quasimetaphysical speculation, and this theme Dick has made peculiarly his own. Among his earliest published stories is ‘Impostor’ (1953), in which a robot believes himself to be a man; the faking is so good that even he cannot detect the truth until the bomb within him is triggered by a phrase he himself speaks. Later, Dickian characters are frequently to find themselves trapped in hallucinations or fake worlds of various kinds, often without knowing it or, if knowing it, without being able to do anything about it. In The Man in the High Castle, the world we know – in which the Allies won World War II and the Axis Powers lost – is itself reduced to a hypothetical world existing only in a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which the victorious Japanese and Germans have banned.

And it is not only worlds that are fake. Objects, animals, people, may also be unreal in various ways. Dick’s novels are littered with fakes, from the reproduction guns buried in rock in The Penultimate Truth which later are used, and so became genuine fakes, to the toad which can hardly be told from real in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, to the androids masquerading as human in the same novel. Things are always talking back to humans. Doors argue, medicine bags patronise, the cab at the end of Now Wait for Next Year advises Dr Eric Sweetscent to stay with his ailing wife. All sorts of drugs are available which lead to entirely imaginary universes, like the evil Can-D and Chew-Z used by the colonists on Mars in Palmer Eldritch, or the JJ-180 which is banned on Earth in Now Wait for Next Year.

The colonists on the Mars of this present novel use only the drugs available to us, though those are generally at hand – in the very opening scene we come across Silvia Bohlen doped up on phenobarbitone. Here the concern-with-reality theme is worked out through the timeslip of the title, and through the autistic boy, Manfred.

Manfred falls into the power of Arnie Kott, boss of the plumbing union which, because water is so scarce, has something of a stranglehold on Mars (a typical piece of wild Dickian ingenuity). Arnie worries a lot. He asks his bleekman servant, Helio, if he has ever been psychoanalysed.

‘No, Mister. Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness.’

‘Howzat, Helio?’

‘Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what Mister.’

‘I don’t get you, Helio.’

‘Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black night-without-bottom lies, the pit …’

Of course, there are many ways of falling into the pit, one of which is to have too much involvement-with-the-past. Dick admits a fascination with the past, quoting lines of Henry Vaughan:

Some men a forward motion love

But I by backward steps would move …

Whilst saying how much he enjoys the junk of the past, Dick adds, ‘But I’m equally aware of the ominous possibilities. Ray Bradbury goes for the Thirties, too, and I think he falsifies and glamourises them …’ (Daily Telegraph Magazine, 19 July 1974). The casual remark reveals much; Dick perceives fiction as a quest, not a refuge.

Arnie Kott has an innocent fascination with objects of the past – he possesses the only spinet on Mars. In the same way, Robert Childan’s trading Mickey Mouse watches and scarce copies of Tip Top Comics to the victorious Japanese (in The Man in the High Castle) is represented as entirely innocuous. Trouble comes when the interest with the past and all its artifacts builds into an obsession, like Virgil Ackerman’s Wash-55 a vast regressive babyland which features in Now Wait for Last Year.

And this is indeed where Dick parts company with Ray Bradbury, and with many another writer, in or out of the science fiction field. If he sees little safety in the future, the past is even more insidiously corrupting. So dreadful is Manfred’s past that you can die in it. The past is seen as regressive; one of the most striking Dickian concepts is the ‘regression of forms’ which takes place in Ubik, that magnificent but flawed novel in which the characters try to make headway through a world becoming ever more primitive, so that the airliner devolves into a Ford trimotor into a Curtis biplane, while Joe’s multiplex FM tuner will regress into a cylinder phonograph playing a shouted recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.