Brian Aldiss - This World and Nearer Ones

As the imagination needed new planets for its proper exercise, the new tools of theoretical science could supply them. This is revealed in the chief literary use to which new planets were put in early science fiction. Satire and utopianism, favourite ploys of the eighteenth century or earlier, were no more. The new planets did not form stages on which man could enact his social problems; instead, they were themselves the centre of the action, working models of scientific thought.

For to imagine out the full implications of evolution, geology, Malthusianism, and the famous Second Law, one needs to construct either a time machine, as Wells did, or a planet that represents Earth in an earlier or later stage of its life history. Even existent planets were converted for this purpose. By common consent, Mars became a dried up senescent version of Earth, and Venus a model of earlier terrestrial history, hot and steamy, sweltering under a Jurassic dream. Both models totally ignored astronomical fact, but fulfilled the need to act out in imagination current scientific theories.

The other element that assisted in the model-making was Infinite Lay Time. That also was a nineteenth-century invention. All time machines are ILT vehicles. Before their invention by sceptical theoretical scientists and mathematicians, anyone venturing back in time to 4004 BC would have banged his head on solid rock. The new speculative element, which rendered time immense, allowed the time traveller to go back far beyond page one of Genesis or forward beyond Armageddon to the ultimate heat death of the universe. SF writers had the job of making both accessible to the lay imagination. No-one else would touch the daunting task.

The connections between our world of today and the Enlightenment are now faint, erased by the horrors of our century, two world wars and the long-planned, long-term massacres of millions of people by Hitler and Stalin and their willing agents. Yet there are echoes. Europe has shrunk again, and is threatened by a new kind of Turk, though we are hardly likely to finance a new Prince Eugène.

Science fiction is here to stay, or will stay as long as we can at least speak of progress and dare to look at the future. In the West SF writers are still not mouthpieces of the state; one can see for them a unique function as disseminators of philosophical and scientific thought. Writers like Wells and Huxley excelled in that role, as did Olaf Stapledon, with his imaginative transformations of combined evolutionary and cosmological theory.

But the great commercial success of science fiction in the seventies diminishes the possibility that it will be treated even by its practitioners with proper seriousness. Money is not the enemy, but the greed for money. SF has become a sort of cultural reflex like the mother-in-law joke, used to sell cars and biscuits. Every time it is so used, it is drained of challenging ideas. Eventually it may become so trivial, so light, that it will sink below the intellectual horizon.

Paradoxically, this new commercial success comes at a time when its prime base – the grand gloomy ideas I have described – has worn thin, as genre material always does. As it becomes or tends to become less a literary genre, so – paradoxically again – it is being greatly taken up by universities, especially in the States, and the first international congress of SF critics has been held in Palermo (for SF is now an international pursuit, endowed by UNESCO).

But, science fiction has always been contradictory, and its best creators of a sturdily independent kind. This is perhaps the time of greatest potential for them and for the genre.

Even in a popular film like Star Wars , admittedly a mammoth with the brains of a gnat, one perceives at least latent thought. Although Star Wars was widely condemned by SF writers for its triviality, one can see how easily the idea of the Force as a spiritual weapon, rather than Robin Hood’s stave, could have been developed and deepened. The rebels would then have been fighting against the evil of the Empire with values on their side with which a general public would readily have identified; it could have entered scenes upon which, instead, it merely gazed.

The Force is a sort of corrupt version of the Samurai code. To have inserted the true thing with all its ritual of fasting and self-discipline and chivalric intent into the film would have increased immensely the film’s significance without spoiling the pace. Admittedly, Luke Skywalker would then have become less of a Disney kid; it is not sufficient to have togged him up with a shorty Roman toga instead of giving him a character.

Star Wars was pretty, but underestimated its audience’s intelligence. One of the lessons of the Enlightenment is that people are, on the whole, glad to learn and take pleasure in knowledge. Criticism should never be too prescriptive, but my hope is that science fiction will retain its old magic, and its sturdy if gloomy philosophical basic.

We did not have the time to learn

everything that we wanted to know

Retma’s epitaph for Man in A Clash of Cymbals

The science fiction of James Blish presents us with a number of pleasurable dichotomies. Under the cloak of technological activity, he is a visionary of an old-fashioned kind, able, like Blake, to hold infinity in his hand. Such visionaries usually speak out against technology; but Blish saw in technology a chance to bring us nearer to the seat of knowledge, which – I hope to show – he equated with wisdom. Technology and the advance of science, in Blish’s view, bring us nearer to the ends and beginnings of things which loom so largely in Blishian cosmologies.

Windows on eternity open in all his novels. I knew Blish well for several years before his death in 1975 and he often spoke fondly of his early novel, Fallen Star ( The Frozen Year , US title). A window on eternity opens early in that novel: