In the 1970s, Kingsley Amis, Arthur C Clarke and Brian Aldiss were judging a
contest for the best science-fiction novel of the year. They were going to
give the prize to Grimus, Salman Rushdie’s first novel. At the last minute,
however, the publishers withdrew the book from the award. They didn’t want
Grimus on the SF shelves. “Had it won,” Aldiss, the wry, 82-year-old
godfather of British SF, observes, “he would have been labelled a
science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.”
Undeterred, Aldiss has just published a new version of A Science Fiction
Omnibus, a fat collection of classic stories. In the 1960s, the original was
on everybody’s bookshelves, dog-eared and broken-backed. Aldiss says that
was SF’s one golden age, when Oxford dons were happy to be seen indulging
the genre. Now they wouldn’t be seen dead with a Philip K Dick, a James
Blish or a Robert Sheckley. Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
and Oryx and Crake, insists her books are not SF, but “speculative fiction”
or “adventure romance”. “She’s quite right,” says Aldiss. “She had this idea
that a certain amount of opprobrium always hovered around the title science
fiction. You might call it double-dealing, but I can quite understand it.”
I remember, as a young boy, overhearing a neighbour remarking snootily that
they were surprised such an intelligent man as my father should read
Astounding magazine, the greatest of all SF periodicals. I knew at once that
SF was the real deal. Yet it is the embarrassing uncle at the British
literary feast. He’s one of the family, but nobody wants to go near him. He
has, they say, disgusting habits, and his only friends are sad little creeps
who memorise Star Trek scripts. But we need the uncle now more than ever.
“The truth is,” Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF
scenario.” A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide
bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel
pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers –
it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I
disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is
threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.
The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial.
No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in
the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is
rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade
Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott’s film is, the seventh and
“final” cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It’s visually
enhanced and, says Scott, “tweaked”. It looks, and is, superb.) The further
oddity is that fantasy – Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman – is not
embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it’s downright respectable. Perhaps this
is because these are seen as children’s books that grown-ups can read,
whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact
that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.
“In a fantasy story,” Aldiss says, “there’s a big evil abroad, but, in the
end, everything goes back to normal and everybody goes home to drink ale in
the shires. In a science-fiction story, there may be a terrible evil abroad,
and it may get sorted out, but the world is f***ed up for ever. This is
realism. It’s certainly not beach reading, unless you can find a really
nasty, shingly beach.”
The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to
ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading
Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave
New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are
just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody
the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human
insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley
with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for
authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves.
Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.
For this is where it excels. It is the most vivid and direct chronicler of our
anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called “the
mysterious fears of our nature”. It was Shelley’s Frankenstein that was,
Aldiss argues in his superb history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, the
first true SF novel. Her big idea – and it is the big idea that haunts all
SF – was that our imperious ingenuity would backfire horribly.
Frankenstein’s monster runs amok, the Skynet computer in the Terminator
films decides to destroy humanity, Philip K Dick’s robots think they are
human, and his humans fear they might be robots. And when the scientists in
Fredric Brown’s one-page story Answer ask their new super-computer if there
is a god, it replies, “Yes, NOWthere is...”
This is why the genre is called “science” fiction. It deals with the effects
of scientific insight and technological application. A new book, Different
Engines by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook, makes this clear by showing how
closely SF follows scientific developments. The Copernican revolution that
displaced the earth from the centre of the universe produced 17th-century
space fantasies by Kepler, Godwin and Bergerac. Darwin, by showing how life
might evolve anywhere, generated a wave of alien-encounter literature that
still submerges us. The weird physics of Einstein and Planck made fictional
interstellar travel – such as the “warp drive” in Star Trek – seem possible.
And the rise of the computer-inspired “cyberpunk” SF, most famously in
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that preinvented the internet in, of
course, 1984.
But Brake and Hook go further. They suggest this is a two-way street: SF also
influences science. Brake points out to me that it was Wells who invented
the atom bomb in The World Set Free, in 1914, in spite of the fact that two
of the leading nuclear physicists of the day, Rutherford and Soddy, had said
it was impossible. Leo Szilard read Wells’s book in 1932. A year later,
Szilard discovered the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for
the traffic lights to change on Southampton Row, in Bloomsbury. “Wells’s
fictional bomb led straight to Hiroshima,” write Brake and Hook. I would add
that Astounding magazine led to the cold war. Werner von Braun had the
magazine smuggled in while working on rockets for the Nazis. His V-2 – a
pointy cigar with fins – was plainly inspired by an Astounding cover.
This is not so surprising. SF writers are free to speculate in a way that
scientists aren’t, and this can suggest the path ahead. Perhaps the best
example of this process is the way the idea of the alien has moved from
fiction to reality. The Nasa historian Steven Dick has pointed out that the
billions spent by the agency on investigating the possibility or likelihood
of alien life is a direct result of the invention of the extraterrestrial in
fiction. Furthermore, there is now an entire scientific discipline – astro-
or exobiology – that exists to study a so far entirely fictional entity,
life beyond the earth. In effect, science has accepted a terrifying,
uniquely SF insight that has been with us ever since the fantasies of Kepler
and Godwin: simply, that we are nothing special, and that the universe is
unimaginably large. There must be aliens out there, said the SF writers, and
the scientists now, on the whole, agree.
The point is that SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science.
How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual
innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom,
rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead?
Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever.
Unfortunately, as Aldiss and Brake agree, this does not seem to be a great
time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF. The classical age
– of Wells, Lem and Dick – seems to be behind us, and the emerging genre of
New Weird, led by Britain’s China Miéville, shades too much into fantasy and
horror to be strictly classified as SF, a genre that must remain true to a
certain level of logic and realism. But one can try Greg Bear, a
practitioner of old-fashioned “hard” SF, the kind that, like the work of
Michael Crichton, sticks most closely to real current science. Bear’s
celebrated Blood Music is a brilliantly horrible vision of genetics gone
wrong. Or there’s another Brit, Stephen Baxter, who writes hard SF strongly
influenced by HG Wells; or Iain M Banks (Iain Banks’s SF guise), who has
written a series of novels about the Culture, an alien civilisation existing
in parallel to the human. Banks’s emphasis is more philosophical than
strictly scientific, and seems to descend from the supreme practitioner of
philosophical SF, Olaf Stapledon, a man incapable of writing about anything
less than everything.
Aldiss is the great champion of logical SF – with good reason. He worked on
the film script of his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long with
Stanley Kubrick for 10 years, much of the time simply trying to persuade the
director not to bring in a Pinocchio theme of a robot boy seeking love from
the Blue Angel. “But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a
chair as persuade Stanley of anything. I should have known better.” Kubrick
died without making the film. Steven Spielberg took over the project and
made AI, a film that toppled over into whimsy and fantasy. “It’s crap,”
Aldiss says. “Science fiction has to be logical, and it’s full of lapses in
logic.”
But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there’s a
lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it’s badly written,
which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary
fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF
that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is
necessary. So, watch Blade Runner for the seventh time, or curl up with
Aldiss’s Omnibus. And remember, it’s all happening now.
A Science Fiction Omnibus edited by Brian Aldiss is published by Penguin at
£9.99. Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives
Science by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook is published by Macmillan at £16.99
