Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

Notice Fiedler’s comment on the basic ambivalence which gothic writers feel towards their alienation. Leaving aside Instant Whip SF, one can perceive an ambivalence in science fiction which goes deep—perhaps one should say an ambivalence which is the subject. The emphasis of this ambivalence has changed over the years. Gernsback’s Amazing was decidedly technocratic in bias, and purported to demonstrate how the world’s ills could be solved by increased applications of technology—a reasonable proposition, if a century late—yet large proportions of the fiction concerned experiments etc. which went terribly wrong. Hubris was continually clobbered by nemesis.

Another fundamental ambivalence is less towards technology than towards science itself. Even technology-oriented authors like Arthur C. Clarke show science superseded by or transcended by mysticism and religion; such surely is the meaning of his most famous short story, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. It is not science but the fulfilment of religion which brings about the termination of the Universe. The world ends not with a bang but a vesper.

Another ambivalence is the attitude of writers and fans to SF itself. They declare it publicly to be far superior to any possible ‘mimetic’ fiction; yet privately they laugh about it, revel in the worst examples of the art, and boast of how little SF they read.

SF is a function of the Gothic or post-Gothic. So, for that matter, are the novels of Peter Straub, and they also—in such examples as the tantalizingly named Ghost Story —bestraddle customary definitions of the ghost stories and mainstream literature.

What I wish I had altered was the final word of my definition, to have said not ‘mould’ but ‘mode’.

One of the difficulties of defining SF springs from the fact that it is not a genre as such, just as the absurd category ‘Non-fiction’ is not a genre. Taking my cue from Rosemary Jackson, [13]I suggest that our problems in the area of definition will be lightened if we think of SF as a mode. Jackson says, ‘It is perhaps more helpful to define the fantastic as a literary mode rather than a genre, and to place it between the opposite modes of the marvellous and the mimetic’.

This may not help with the question of to what extent SF is a department of fantasy; ‘fantasy’ as a literary term, like ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, has come through usage to be defaced; but it helps us to appreciate SF as the obverse of the realistic mode, and to see that SF can itself assume various generic forms. There is, for instance, a fairly well-defined category of ‘disaster SF’ and this in itself can be subdivided into cautionary disasters (like 1984) and into what I have termed ‘cosy catastrophes’ (such as The Day of the Triffids), in which the hero ends with the power and the girl, and is personally better off than he was at the beginning. No form which includes more than one genre can itself be a genre.

The relevant dictionary definition of ‘mode’ is ‘A way or manner in which something takes place; a method of procedure’, and ‘A manner or state of being of a thing’.

While my critics argued, as well they might, with the BYS definition of SF, they rarely advanced a more convincing alternative. The same must be said for the response to my proposal for a great SF progenitor.

My search for ancestors went back no further in time than Frankenstein. The wide acceptance of this proposal by academics may have been prompted by relief—a sensible relief occasioned by their therefore not having to teach Gilgamesh, Dante and Otis Adelbert Kline to their classes.

One sees that this argument of origins can never be definitively settled, for conflicting genres have contributed to the modern mode. But it is an argument worth pursuing, just as palaeontologists and others pick over the so far insoluble question of the early origins of mankind.

When first claiming for Frankenstein a pre-eminent role, I intended to put forward an argument, not an avowed truth. In particular, I wished to present a counter-argument to those two entrenched views which claimed either that SF was as ancient as literature itself or that ‘it all began with Gernsback’. Some commentators managed to hold both assumptions at the same time. No names, no pack drill.

Claims for the pre-eminence of Frankenstein had been advanced before I wrote—rather long before, in one case. Rosalie Glynn Grylls’ Mary Shelley: A Biography (1938) is sympathetic to the author, less sympathetic to her most distinguished book. Grylls does, however, say in one of her appendices that it ‘is the first of the Scientific Romances that have culminated in our day in the work of Mr H. G. Wells’. This claim is advanced because of its ‘erection of a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial ‘‘scientific’’ fact’. These remarks are made only in passing. Grylls finds the novel ‘badly dated’.

Desmond King-Hele is both a scientist and a literary man, best known in the latter category for books on Shelley and Erasmus Darwin. In his Shelley: His Thought and Work, he speaks of Frankenstein as standing ‘in a unique position half-way between the Gothic novel and the Wellsian scientific romance’. In his Erasmus Darwin (1963), King-Hele is more positive, saying—with reference to Darwin as mentioned in the preface to Frankenstein —that ‘Darwin stands as a father-figure over this first and most famous work of science fiction’.

Having got this far, however, the case has to be argued out at some length.

If we claim as SF anything which includes a departure from the natural order, or which exhibits Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, we gather to ourselves a great body of disparate material, so disparate that it renders the term ‘SF’ meaningless and the material impossible to study in any effective way.

Beyond this argument of necessity is a philosophical objection to lumping together, say, Plato, Lucian, Paltock, Swift, Poul Anderson and Terry Pratchett. Although sophisticated analysis may reveal what these writers have in common, the sensible reader will be alienated; he will remain aware that the cultural differences are greater than any unifying thread of wonder, speculation, or whatever.

As Darko Suvin puts it, if such books as Hardy’s Two on a Tower and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone are SF just like Wells’s The Invisible Man, then in fact there is no such thing as SF. [14]

That there is a kind of tradition of the fantastic is undeniable, but it does not admit to easy study, possibly because many of the popular texts are missing, as we might imagine that much popular SF (the magazines of the 1940s, for example) would be missing, were it not for a few devoted individuals who defied a general contemporary neglect. Equally, the writers in this tradition had a nose for their predecessors, and generally reveal themselves as familiar with their writings—though to be familiar with was not always the same as to understand. Writers are impatient creatures and take only what they need; thus, H. G. Wells can say that Frankenstein ‘used some jiggery pokery magic to animate his artificial monster’, whereas this is precisely what Frankenstein does not do.

The argument that SF began with Gernsback hardly needs refuting any more; I will detain no one with the obvious counter-arguments. Yet when I wrote BYS, the refutation was necessary, and I had some fun with that old phrase about Gernsback being ‘the father of SF’. Edgar Allan Poe has received the same accolade. This quest for father-figures reached what we hope was its nadir when, in the same year BYS was published, Isaac Asimov wrote one of his Introductions, entitled ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, and nominated John W. Campbell for that role. [15]It was a relief to be able to appoint a mother-figure instead. A relief? An intellectual coup d’etat !