Читать книгу The Detached Retina - Brian Aldiss - Страница 7

Every so often, someone writes a heart-rending book about science fiction. To say how bad it is. Perhaps to say how good his or her writing is and how little appreciated. That needs courage.

The most academic journal in the field, Science-Fiction Studies, in its issue #61 (November 1993) listed my name among the five or six most neglected names of authors. So I suppose I am also entitled to lament. However, cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

There remains that comment of Samuel Johnson’s in his letter to Lord Chesterfield, which no doubt speaks to the hearts of many authors: ‘I had done all I could’, Johnson writes, ‘and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little’. The elegant English art of litotes! All the same, I have had a fair run for my money. More particularly, perhaps, in the United States than in my own country. Three books on my writing, plus a wacking great 360-page bibliography of an unprecedented accuracy (being the work of my wife Margaret Aldiss) have been published—in the States, but not the UK.

In that same Science-Fiction Studies article, Gary K. Wolfe, one of our most acute and active critics, lists topics he feels are neglected, such as the contributions of SF editors other than Gernsback and Campbell.

Another topic rarely discussed goes to the very roots of SF—the drift towards the impersonal, towards humans as units, as machines. Towards rule by machine. Towards the sort of giantism in corporations and architecture such as Nazi Germany preferred. Towards anything which rules out of court the quiet dissident voice of the individual. Towards crushing the anima. Towards the immense—which is always cruel.

Towards metropolis and megalopolis.

Towards galactic empires.

Towards artificial intelligences taking over from us.

Towards, in sum, most of the gaudy goodies on the front counter of SF’s supermarket …

Are not these items which reinforce anomia and spiritual impoverishment among the prevailing dreams of SF? Approached ambivalently, yet rarely rejected out of hand. Our SF culture springs from nations with most power. So power is naturally a prevailing theme.

A Czech playright by the name of Vaclav Havel spoke out on this threat in the days before his country threw off the Communist yoke, and before he became president of the Czech Republic. Here is an extract from what he said:

In my view Soviet totalitarianism is an extreme manifestation—a strange, cruel, and dangerous species—of a deep-seated problem which equally finds expression in advanced Western society. These systems have in common something that the Czech philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky calls ‘the eschatology of the impersonal’. That is, a trend towards impersonal power and rule by mega-machines or colossi that escape human control.

I believe the world is losing its human dimension. Self-propelling mega-machines, juggernauts of impersonal power such as large-scale enterprises and faceless governments, represent the greatest threat to our present-day world. In the final analysis, totalitarianism is not more than an extreme expression of that threat.

My first SF novel, Non-Stop, aired this theme. The big battalions, the grandiose ideas, have taken over from individuals and, in the words of the prologue, ‘gobbled up their real lives’. The theme finds expression in much of my fiction since then. Less than a decade ago we were being confronted by that ‘eschatology of the impersonal’ in one of its most dreadful guises, Armageddon brought about by nuclear destruction, and by the belief that the Enemy was evil and had to be destroyed.^[1]

My fondness for Orwell’s old novel, as noted elsewhere, is because for him utopia is just a note saying I LOVE YOU, a rather seedy bedroom, a girl, and privacy … great things to set against a megamachine. Clifford Simak was against the mega-machine; time and again, his characters seek something better—in City, his best-loved novel, it is a place where men do not have to be humans or dogs dogs. Philip Dick also fought against the mega-machine. His novels were for so long more popular in France and England than in the USA.

Every decade, SF changes as the world changes. The most popular SF/Fantasy author of the nineties is Terry Pratchett, with his wonderful Discworld comedies. They adroitly side-step any megamachine back to the invention of the wheel.

More typically—SF is a solemn business—the novels of the nineties often strive to accommodate themselves within ‘the eschatology of the impersonal’, perhaps in an attempt at domestication. The machine manifests itself as cyberspace in the popular novels of William Gibson and others. Cyberspace has become a popular buzz word, with the Internet a manifestation of its neural structure. In Tom Maddox’s novel Halo, several characters are ingested by Aleph, a controlling artificial super-intelligence installed on an orbiting satellite.

Jerry Chapman is one such character. He asks Aleph what became of his body.

‘It was … recycled. A robot tended your remains with loving grace.’

‘So I am nowhere.’

‘Or here. Or everywhere. As you wish.’

Here the limits of human individuality seem to extend to infinity—but within the limits of the machine.

One of the unspoken divisions in the SF field lies between those who delight in the mega-machine and those who mistrust it. Rich and acclaimed authors, the L. Ron Hubbards of this and other worlds, are generally those who subscribe to and propagate the easy belief that bigger means better, that larger is lovelier. Happily, we know how God despises wealth, since we can see the sort of people on whom he bestows it.

Well, friends, there is much in the world to lament. What tales we could all tell about our involvement with SF! Which brings us to Barry Malzberg—unafraid to say how bad he believes SF to be, unembarrassed to use SF as his wailing wall. I admire Barry (since we’re speaking personally, like individuals) and also somewhat dread encounters with him. We always fear those who speak truth. Or even half-truths.

Should not Barry Malzberg rank among the great neglected on the Science-Fiction Studies list of martyrs? He has many books to his credit, including two books which reach right to the heart of the field—in order to stab it and himself to death. One book is a novel, Herovit’s World, one is a collection of essays, The Engines of the Night. These are the books to read in order to understand something about the pains of a writer’s life—not necessarily an SF writer’s, or a New Yorker’s, or a Jewish writer’s life. Or even a writer’s life.

Malzberg once took my wife and me on a literary tour of Manhattan, showing us where each incident in his novel occurred. Here’s the doorway where Herovit masturbated himself. That’s the window of the room where X shot himself … How we laughed as we drove along!

Particularly poignant is the last essay in The Engines of the Night, a piece called ‘Corridors’.

Ruthven is an SF writer, accorded the honour of being made Guest of Honour at an SF Convention. He delivers the GoH speech. For the first thirty-two minutes of his thirty-five minute address, he sticks to the script. His anecdotes of such editors as H. L. Gold and Campbell are appreciated. There is applause when he speaks of the Apollo landings on the Moon. ‘We did that’, he says. ‘We did that at three cents a word.’

Then Ruthven loses control and deserts his text.

‘We tried [Ruthven says]. I want you to know that, that even the worst of us, the most debased hack, the one-shot writer, the fifty-book series, all the hundreds and thousands of us who ever wrote a line of this stuff for publication: we tried. We tried desperately to say something because we were the only ones who could, however halting our language, tuneless the song, it was ours.’

He rants bravely on. And then—‘in hopeless and helpless fury, Ruthven pushes aside the microphone and cries’.

But I have become carried away from my main theme. One admires the music of protest, at least when played on such a fine instrument as Barry Malzberg.

I have produced about thirty anthologies of other people’s stories, many of them with Harry Harrison. The most successful is the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, which began life in 1961 and has rarely been out of print since. Something of a record, I would imagine. I have written well over three hundred stories, and published several novels, maybe thirty, among them—as mentioned earlier—Barefoot in the Head, so kindly referred to by Lester del Rey. I would be less ‘neglected’ if I always wrote the same book; but that choice was made long ago.

In the seventies, Harrison and I produced a series of three anthologies, dividing up SF by decades. The third and last was Decade: The Sixties. It dealt with the SF of that anarchic, sublimish decade when we discovered the Present, and therefore it featured the New Wave. If there was ever a blind spot among American SF readers, and many British ones, it concerned the New Wave, even though American writers such as Norman Spinrad, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline, and Thomas Disch came to England at the time and were involved with it and with its flagship, the magazine New Worlds. The New Wave aroused as much hatred as if it had been a Commie plot; in reality it was only a revolution. There was even a move afoot to boycott any New York publisher who dared publish New Wave authors; the names of Sam Moskowitz and Isaac Asimov somehow became involved in this shamingly practical zoilism, which happily got nowhere. If ever there was a time to weep in the Malzberg way, it was then.

Perhaps those various people were right to be suspicious of us. It was all a bit of a snow job. We danced on the fire of old stories. Icefloes in society were breaking up. One thing uniting the loosely coherent group centring round New Worlds and its flamboyant editor, Michael Moorcock, was an aversion to that vast impersonal mega-machine of which Havel speaks. Nor were they alone. That aversion, and the embrace of personal fulfilment, were hallmarks of a memorable decade, the sixties.

I was writing such stories as ‘Poor Little Warrior’ and ‘The Failed Men’, and novels like Report on Probability A, some while before the New Wave was a ripple, yet somehow I became entangled in its coils, and was on a sinister blacklist.

However that might be, only two of Harrison’s and my decades anthologies were published in the States. The third one, the sixties anthology, was turned down. Looking through my Introduction to that volume, it still seems a fair summing up in two thousand words of how we viewed the whole matter then. By far the best book on the subject is Colin Greenland’s scholarly The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction (1983). It is a key document in the history of that brief epoch.

I attempted to bring that Introduction (which follows) up-to-date, but finally considered it must stand as it was when first published in 1977.

The eighteen stories in the anthology, to which the Introduction makes reference, are:

J. G. Ballard: The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a Downhill Motor Race

Harvey Jacobs: Gravity

Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron

Gordon R. Dickson: Computers Don’t Argue

Will Worthington: The Food Goes in the Top

Mack Reynolds: Subversive

Thomas Disch: Descending

Brian Aldiss: The Village Swindler

Keith Roberts: Manscarer

Keith Laumer: Hybrid

Pamela Zoline: The Heat Death of the Universe

Roger Zelazny: Devil Car

Michael Moorcock: The Nature of the Catastrophe

Robert Silverberg: Hawksbill Station

Frederik Pohl: Day Million

Philip K. Dick: The Electric Ant

Norman Spinrad: The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

Kingsley Amis: Hemingway in Space

Of all these stories, it is only the Zelazny I would discard today. The Ballard, Zoline, and Pohl stories remain brilliant, and are among the best to emerge from those few brief years before the Oil Crisis of 1973—another manifestation of the world machine—when the world took another of its not infrequent turns for the worse. (More litotes!)

All the stories would get a clean bill of health under the Havel edict. None pays a subscription to the glamour of power. They are fine SF for all that.

1. Here is an opportunity to recommend H. Bruce Franklin’s 1988 War Stars, the sub-title of which is The Superweapon and the American Imagination.