Brian Aldiss - The Detached Retina

And then follows one of those rapid contradictions which endow the narrative with its tensile strength and astonishment:

In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.

Under the cool tone is an almost animist belief in conscious life everywhere, a marked Stapledon characteristic. One of his last fantasies, The Flames, postulates a madman’s vision of fire with intellect.

Any similarity between Stapledon’s sweep of cosmic events and conventional SF is coincidental. After discoursing with the minds of the nebulae, his questing spirit moves on to achieve a discussion with the Immanent Will, the Star Maker itself. The finely sustained climax of the book is the Maker’s description of the series of universes with which he is experimenting, of which ours is but one in an almost infinite series. Where does one look in all English prose for an equivalent of the magnificent Chapter XV?

For here Stapledon describes a succession of flawed cosmoses, each one of greater complexity, yet each one in turn failing to satisfy its creator—who stows them away like old computer games on a shelf, their interest exhausted.

Our own cosmos is about to be shelved. The Star Maker resolves that the succeeding cosmos will be better. The beings who inhabit it will be ‘far less deceived by the opacity of their individual mental processes, and more sensitive to their underlying unity’. One thing in particular in this sharply agnostic cogitation sets it apart from Christian doctrine: the ruthlessness of the Star Maker. The point is made more than once. ‘Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy.’ And again. ‘All passions it seemed, were comprised within the spirit’s temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation.’

No hope here, as with Hardy’s Immanent Will, that ‘The rages of the ages Will be cancelled’… We’re getting cancelled—we and the whole caboodle.

It is this central perception, this refusal to compromise, this icicle in the heart, which makes Stapledon. C. S. Lewis, a charismatic Christian apologist (and author of memorable science fiction), rejected this viewpoint, which he regarded as shallowly scientistic. He pilloried Stapledon as the evil scientist, Weston, in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Stapledon never rose to the bait.

C. S. Lewis was a revered acquaintance of mine. But in this matter I must agree with Olaf Stapledon. It’s cold outside.

So we have the curious situation. Stapledon’s grand theme was communication. Communication between woman and super-beast, as in Sirius, between alien and human, between organic and inorganic, between soul and its creator, even between England and Australia. Yet we have to admit that—the world being what it is—he has largely failed to communicate. Not with the general public. Hardly with his fellow authors. And pretty rarely even with SF fans …

1. New York, Oxford University Press.

2. London, Eyre Methuen, 1978.

3. Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1987.

4. Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press and Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1994.

Philip Dick made me happy. I loved and still love his novels. Why be made happy over novels which show all too plainly how awful the state of the world is? Because they did just that, without flinching, without having soft centres and sloppy endings. And because of the way they were written—with a unique tang.

Cowardly critics have sometimes found my novels gloomy, but I never managed as much sheer silent disaster as Dick. He should have had a Nobel prize.

When Dick died, we held a memorial meeting for him in London. It was a heat-wave time, with temperatures in the nineties. The dogs were crawling into dustbins to die. Nevertheless, the faithful turned up at the old City Lit rooms and crammed into the theatre. Even the molecules jostled each other.

I was one of the three speakers from the platform.

Here’s what I said. And I hope you’re still listening, Phil.

We’re here tonight to rejoice. There is no reason to mourn—well, not too much. Bucket-kicking is endemic in the human race. Have you ever considered that it may be all of us who have gone, whisked into some terrible schizoid version of the present ruled over by Brezhnev, Mrs Thatcher, Pope John Paul, and the Argentinian junta, while Phil Dick remains where he ever was, in Santa Ana, still jovially fighting entropy and kipple with a new, eighth, wife by his side?

We rejoice because Dick is one of the few writers to defy the First Law of SF Thermodynamics. This law states that exploitation in the SF field is so great that the writers decay as they age instead of maturing, like bad wine, and that meaningfulness decreases in inverse proportion to number of words published.

Like all good SF writers, Dick was continually trying to figure out what made the universe tick. Even if there is a way to figure out the universe, it probably can’t be done through SF, which forever throws in its own ‘what ifs’ to flavour the recipe. Figuring out the universe needs long scientific training, the mind of a genius, and years of zen silence; three qualities antithetical to all SF buffs. Nevertheless such an attempt is worth making, and for the same reason that never quite reaching the peak of Mount Everest is better than not having climbed it at all. There really were times when it seemed as if Dick had the Universe in a corner.

The more you try and figure out the universe, the more enigmatic it becomes. You know that ingenious U-bend in a toilet, which used to figure conspicuously in Harpic adverts: it keeps the stinks down the drain instead of in the room? Since the universe you are trying to figure out includes the mind doing the figuring, then—as Sir Karl Popper may have said in a back issue of Planet Stories —that mind acts as its own U-bend and refuses to let you get down to the real layers of fertilizer where growth and destruction begin.