Brian Aldiss, editor
A SCIENCE FICTION OMNIBUS
575pp. Penguin. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 141 18892 8
Science fiction does not lack for readers, and they constitute an
exceptionally engaged literary community. Major conferences, journals and
websites proliferate, exchanging information and producing rigorous analyses
of the genre’s themes and strategies. But the gap between its enthusiasts
and those who like to keep up with the latest successes on the mainstream
circuit is as wide as ever. Brian Aldiss has been worrying about this
separation for years. He began to publish science fiction in the 1950s, and
his first Penguin anthology of stories appeared in 1961. Two further volumes
were combined in 1973 to make the much-read
Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, now re-issued with additional contributions
from recent writers, mixing celebrated names (J. G. Ballard, Frederick Pohl,
Isaac Asimov, Aldiss himself) with those that are less well known. The
imaginative scope of this updated collection is a reminder that the energy
of science fiction shows no sign of fading. There are good reasons for
looking again at what the genre has to offer.
One reason for scepticism is a lingering feeling that the texture of
science-fiction writing is sometimes thin. In this respect, youth is not on
its side. Defined by Aldiss as “the fables of a technological age”, its
stories cannot draw on the centuries of authoritative precedent available to
drama, poetry or romance. Although its roots lie in Romantic literature,
with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as a founding text, its flowering
depended on the rapid development of the technologies that also supplied its
subject matter. New methods of mass communication – cheap magazines, film,
and then television – gave those whose lives had been liberated from
drudgery the means of access to stories that contemplated the implications
and the costs of scientific revolutions. Its early consumers, often newly
literate, were not much interested in the traditions of religion, or in the
long-standing authority of classical literature, or in the history that had
oppressed their ancestors.
They wanted fiction that would help them to think about the future. Aldiss
quotes the tag-line of the pulp magazine Stories of Super Science: “Read It
Today! – Live It Tomorrow!”. Science fiction was not driven by the
specificities of the past, but by abstract ideas whose time had not yet
come. Alien galaxies provide an apt setting for these ideas, though they do
not always take us into worlds other than our own. Katherine Maclean’s slyly
comic “The Snowball Effect” (1952) considers what the new science of
sociology might mean. A professor in that discipline embarks on a covert
experiment to prove the practical potential of his theories, and within six
months he has transformed the Watashaw Sewing Circle into a movement
aspiring to global domination. “And maybe a total world government will be a
fine thing.” Playful and shrewd, Maclean’s story is also surprisingly down
to earth. But it has the capacity to provoke serious thought about our
collective future.
This is the enduring strength of the genre, but it also counts among its
difficulties. Though speculative thinking is exhilarating, it will lead to
cold and desolate places. Fiction generally moves through a retrospective
landscape, solid with the detail of personal and social memory. The future
is not its natural territory. The boundaries of history may be a constraint,
but they can generate a communal warmth, from the compromised happy endings
of domestic or romantic narratives, or the elegiac records of historical
struggle. We remember a shared past, but conjecture usually grows in
isolation. It is here that the origins of the genre in Romanticism are most
persistent, for Romantic solitude is the dominant note of science fiction.
It is not an accident that Frankenstein ends with the image of the haunted
scientist pursuing his nightmarish creation alone, through a barren waste of
snow and ice. Nor is it coincidental that Mary Shelley’s final contribution
to the genre, The Last Man (1826), describes the sufferings of the only
survivor of a universal pestilence that has wiped out the rest of mankind.
Loneliness shadows science fiction, and is made more acute by its customary
settings amid the emptiness of space, with solitary voyagers or beleaguered
bands of adventurers encountering the hostilities of planets that deny the
consolations of familiarity. The opening images of Walter M. Miller’s
brilliant “I Made You” (1954) are typical:
It sat on the crag by night. Gaunt, frigid, wounded, it sat under the black
sky and listened to the land with its feet, while only its dishlike ear
moved in slow patterns that searched the surface of the land and the sky The
land was silent, airless. Nothing moved, except the feeble thing that
scratched in the cave.
The “feeble thing” turns out to be a man, about to be destroyed by the
suffering robot that he has created. The story is recognizably a reflection
of Frankenstein. It serves, like Frankenstein, to caution against the
dangers of scientific progress pursued with no thought of moral
consequences. This bleakly admonitory tone repels many readers. It is the
business of science fiction to alarm, in the sense of providing the
excitement of thrilling dangers, and of scaring readers with the prospect of
a future in which human values are threatened. Ruthless invasions,
apocalyptic plagues, wars and famines, dying stars, mechanized intelligences
and predatory civilizations, have been its favourite devices. Fredric
Brown’s “Answer” (1964), a piercingly brief story, points to the hazards of
the internet, years before it was invented. Scientists link every computer
on earth in order to ask a single question – “Is there a God?”. The answer
is immediate: “Yes, NOW there is a God”. The warnings of science fiction are
endlessly inventive, often witty, and sometimes salutary, but they do not
make for comforting reading.
The brick wall that seems to divide its products from mainstream fiction for
readers crumbles when it comes to writers. The American tradition tends to
be more specialized, but the list of major British novelists who have
produced ambitious science fiction alongside other kinds of work is a
formidable one, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, Rudyard
Kipling, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Kingsley
Amis, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin
Amis, J. G. Ballard and Iain Banks. Because these authors have secured
reputations elsewhere, their science fiction attracts those who would never
identify themselves as readers of the genre. Yet the powers of thought
behind George Eliot’s grim The Lifted Veil, Martin Amis’s provocative Time’s
Arrow, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s deeply compassionate Never Let Me Go, are not
distinct from what has made them household names. Science fiction is richer
and more various than our lingering assumptions about the adventures of
silver-suited spacemen wielding ray-guns would imply.
Writers continue to be drawn to the genre because it allows them to find
subtle ways of exploring cultural anxiety and desire. As we leave the frosty
air of the Cold War behind, innovative modes of science fiction reflect on
the nature of religion, the fluidities of sexuality, the dizzying
potentialities of computers, the relation between animals and humanity, the
precarious coexistence of human weakness and environmental fragility. Women
science fiction writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Judith
Merril, have found these opportunities particularly fruitful, generally for
political reasons. The genre offers a seductive freedom to transform
cultural expectations that have been used to confine women’s creativity.
Science fiction has always asked frighteningly big questions; and, as some of
its early projections become the facts of our everyday lives (organ
transplantation, the exploration of space, assisted reproduction, climate
change, genetic engineering, the mobile phone), it is developing ways for
those questions to be addressed in a more human context.
One of the striking features of Aldiss’s extended anthology is the fusion of
speculative enterprise and domestic intimacy in some of the more recent
contributions. Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” (1998) is in many ways
a conventional piece about the arrival of creatures from another world, and
the patient unravelling of their puzzling speech. But this is juxtaposed
with a simple account of human loss, finally illuminated and made bearable
by patterns of thought suggested by the alien language. A sober optimism
stems from this more open understanding of what scientific strangeness might
reveal. Eliza Blair’s exuberant “Friends in Need” (2006) imagines a world in
which a cheerful adolescent, speaking the electronic dialect of her
generation, makes common cause with a genetically enhanced ginger tom, who
is endowed with English of the most formal and fastidious kind. Together
they dream of a revolution. “I’ll need some books on civil law”, ponders the
cat. Blair’s story takes itself and its readers seriously, without a trace
of portentous solemnity. The evolution of science fiction is one of the most
heartening aspects of contemporary literature. Old prejudices should not
deter new readers, and this anthology offers abundant material for anyone
wanting to make a start.
Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at the University of
Liverpool. She is the General Editor of a forthcoming edition of the Oxford
Companion to English Literature, and her new book, Our Victorian Education,
was published late last year.
