Brian Aldiss - The Detached Retina

Roger Zelazny came and stayed. A genuine baroque talent, often too much in love with the esoteric, but shining forth clearly with ‘Devil Car’. His story is a persuasive embodiment of the sixties’ passion for the automobile.

Keith Laumer rose to great popularity in the sixties, when his name was associated with Retief, his hero whose military adventures had a satiric edge.

The other authors include Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Gordon R. Dickson, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg and Mack Reynolds—distinguished names all, and old hands at SF. All manifest the spirit of the sixties in one form or another—Reynolds in his enquiry into capitalist economics, Vonnegut in his satire on equality, Pohl in his sparky creation of Day Million, Dickson in his preoccupation with the blindness of computers. Silverberg re-creates the past, the far past. Dick does his own thing on the Dickian subject of reality. Reality trembled in the sixties. As many of us discovered, when things settled back into place again and the music died, life ceased to be quite so much fun.

B.W.A.

1. Although the jacket of the first hardcover edition in 1954 quoted the perceptive Naomi Mitchison as saying. ‘It’s really super science fiction’.

The ambition of the literary artist is to speak about the ineffable, to communicate in words what words were never intended to convey … In spite of ‘all the pens that ever poets held’—yes, and in spite of all the scientists’ electron microscopes, cyclotrons, and computers—the rest is silence, the rest is always silence.

Thus claimed Aldous Huxley, in a small book entitled Literature and Science, published in the year he died, 1963. The silence needed many millions of words in explanation. Even on his death-bed, Huxley was busy explaining Shakespeare, ‘a human being who could do practically anything’. In Literature and Science, he is busy making connections, and in this case entering the debate between Snow and Leavis on ‘The Two Cultures’. As ever, Huxley builds bridges. ‘The precondition’, he tells us, ‘of any fruitful relationship between literature and science is knowledge.’

Which is all very well, but few of us set out in life with such cultural advantages as Huxley. He was the grandson on his father’s side of the great Thomas Henry Huxley, while his mother was the grand-daughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, niece of Matthew Arnold, and sister to Mrs Humphrey Ward, the novelist. Aldous grew up in a house full of books and the intelligent conversations which spring from (and into) books: where knowledge is as routine as good meals.

This privileged English existence, with its Eton and Balliol background, was to end on the coast of California, fading out in gurudom, on an LSD injection. The pop group ‘The Doors’ named themselves after Huxley’s short work, The Doors of Perception, advocating use of mescalin.

Here lie mysterious connections between the world of experience and the world of conjecture and speculation. Huxley took his title—he was always brilliant at fishing for titles—from William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.

Yet in the text, he makes reference to a different kind of writer, when speaking of our longing to transcend ourselves: ‘Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.’ The reference is to one of Wells’s most poignant short stories. So, via the pop group, the expression passed into popular life, and into the drug culture of the sixties.

Alas, behind the doors of Haight-Ashbury, the broken dreams and dead babies piled up. Even the Flower Children were only human. Transcendence is hard work, as Huxley himself was aware. He says, ‘To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.’

Behind this modest but complex statement, compassionate yet uncompromising, lies an extraordinary trajectory of a twentieth-century life, the long trek from Eton to the Mojave, prompted in part by that fearless curiosity which Christopher Isherwood called ‘one of Aldous’s noblest characteristics’.