The Book Of Ian Watson, page 10
Infamous to some, my friend! Caviar and champagne to others!
No, let him have his say!
You are naive, Sir. We have a duty to our readers that goes way beyond the provisions of Clause Thirteen. Clause Thirteen is the cornerstone of this duty. Without that cornerstone, where would the world be? This world—I say this without fear of contradiction—that we have saved and remade? The very quality, Sir—the purity, the unbridled spontaneity of our product, and the sanctity of our imaginations—crucially depends on our allegiance to Clause Thirteen. Of course we must agree, and keep our agreement, never to try to leave the Solar System. Should we ever actually travel to the stars or find out one substantial fact about the real alien community, why, we’d be ruined.
And don’t you forget it.
Thank you, all.
The German authoress Gisela Eisner wrote a novel called The Giant Dwarfs, a phrase which comes to mind when we consider the heroes of many SF tales …
Who Can Believe
in the Hero(ine)?
“James Tiptree Jr.” once remarked, à propos narrative technique: “Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then DON’T TELL THEM.”
This comment has a curious, askew relevance to so many SF heroes and heroines—for after reading a lot of SF, one becomes aware of a curious feature, which may be intoxicating at first, but which may eventually drive one screaming far from the domains of SF, or may compel one to ask a few searching questions. And this feature, I would say, becomes even more agonizing to the writer of SF than to the reader—who can always shrug and turn away. The writer is up to his or her neck in a narrative for weeks or months on end; the reader only for a few hours.
The curious fact is that, in book after book and story after story, it always happens to be the darned, ahem, protagonist who turns out to be central to (a) the explanation of the universe, (b) the rescuing of space-time from collapse, (c) the salvation of the human race, (d) the detection and defeat of the ravening mindhorde from Ursa Major—even if said protagonist is a nitwitted thug, or someone marooned on a space derelict near Arcturus, or somebody stuck in a space ark in mid-journey, or someone who has lived all his life in a deep cave, and who consequently starts out full of the most absurd notions about the nature of the world.
How often, and how arbitrarily, does the central enigma of the cosmos thus converge upon the central character, whatever his or her qualities! How seldom is the protagonist marginal to the events unfolding—as nearly all of us are, nearly all of the time, in the real world.
One may, of course, invoke such critical concepts as “cognitive estrangement” and “conceptual breakthrough.” Yet how often we feel: what a wonderful concept, yet what mental and social cripples inhabit it! And by what awkward contrivances are they jerked up by their bootstraps! Indeed, how often is it the case that by their blunders alone the plot is kept moving along, to be salvaged at the eleventh hour by something ex machina.
SF is a heroic genre, by and large, given its subject material. One might even say that it is in the business of heroes (and heroines). But oh dear: how many of its protagonists can really live up to it? And those who try to often provide the direst examples. (Better, perhaps, simply to get on with the hijinks—even if this is obviously a cop-out with regard to the material.)
I have a theory about this.
Any writer worth his or her salt knows that if a book is to be any good at all, one has to let it grow organically, as a separate living entity—whatever one’s prior vision of it. It has to make its own decisions, rather like a child growing away from the parent.
(Worth his or her sodium chloride? Ah well, we now know that NaCl is a subtle poison, to be avoided at all costs … But the metaphor lives on.)
This raises strange questions about the relationship of the author to the world which he or she creates, and the characters so created, who should likewise establish their own independent existence. It raises questions about the responsibility of the author toward those creations, and questions about the relationship between the book-reality and the consciousness of the author.
These are questions which are perhaps at the root of artistic creation—and which, if we posit for the moment the existence of a God, no doubt constitute a fundamental dilemma at the root of Her creation of a cosmos.
We are all little Gods, cobbling together our own little cosmoses, pocket universes in imitative variation upon the real thing. Well, most of us. Some writers, like Barrington J. Bayley, manage to come up with entirely different cosmoses—made, say, of solid stone with world-bubbles of air in them …
Anyway, Godly creation (whatever a God might be; and frankly I don’t know, though a number of my own books—in common with quite a lot of SF—are concerned with what a God might be) and artistic creation do have in common the paradox of the relationship between one’s creating consciousness and the reality created: a paradox, incidentally, which has become central to the cutting edge of modern scientific attempts to explain the universe coherently.
SF, which includes within its domain attempted explanations of the nature of the universe—and of the nature of mind and reality—is in fact particularly well-adapted to address this problem central to artistic creation.
Hence, indeed, there are many novels and stories which concern themselves with what we may call “the reality problem”—from such as Daniel Galouye’s Counterfeit World through to most of the works of Philip Dick.
In a sense, a lot of SF is already meta-fiction: fiction about fiction, fiction about the process of creation.
And I hazard the guess that so many SF heroes and heroines are deficient—no match for their material—because of this reality problem. Yet the convergence of the central crux of the universe upon the protagonist in so many tales is more than just a genre cliché or contrivance. It is a reflection of the reality problem, and of the artistic problem, tuned up to fever pitch in SF precisely because in SF one can invoke the whole rest of the universe—and indeed, once one has started, often one necessarily must do so. (Though, it being logically impossible to describe the totality, inevitably one fails.)
Yes, tuned up to fever pitch—and sometimes exaggerated almost to a point of parody or absurdity. (And how easily SF writers concerned with Big Things can produce self-parody! See some recent examples.) Consequently we may find the honest or desperate writer from time to time beating his or her brow and expostulating: “How the hell can I believe this shit I’m writing?” “How can this jerk possibly solve the riddle of the ages?” “How can this fool save the universe?” (But often it is only due to the protagonist’s “folly” that enough scene-setting can be introduced, to get the story under way.)
Yet, precisely what makes some SF unbelievable—even occasionally to the writer who is producing it—is one of the most potentially valuable and productive aspects of SF: the attack on the reality problem.
The writer who grows aware of this, in the course of a career, is now faced with a meta-problem: the need to incorporate awareness of the problem into the texts that reflect it.
Or the writer can try to ignore it entirely. Or hit the bottle, to stave off impending insanity and disconnection from the real world. (As in the case of Jonathan Herovit, in Barry Malzberg’s novel; indeed this is a dominant theme in Malzberg’s work.) Or one can refuse to believe it fully, as a deliberate strategy for carrying on—whilst accepting it in practice. Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is able to function because of chosen, sustained unbelief—which is why Donaldson’s books, to my mind, are so powerful, sustained and successful. Donaldson addresses the reality problem very skillfully and honestly. He does this by making his problem into the hero’s problem. But he does not—so far—let Covenant resolve the problem; which is just as well, since the problem is ultimately unresolvable. Putting it another way, Donaldson’s hero succeeds as a hero by refusing heroism—whilst nevertheless conducting himself heroically. (I think it was Schopenhauer who said something like: “On this firm foundation of unyielding despair must the soul’s salvation henceforth be safely built”—a fitting motto for Covenant.)
To speak personally for a moment, looking back on my own novels in this light, the first four were “innocent” ones—innocent of the problem, though admittedly the aliens in my fourth novel, Alien Embassy, had to be pretend-aliens, for me to believe in them fully. By the time I wrote my fifth novel, Miracle Visitors, the problem of the reality of events themselves demanded to be explored—which seemed best done through the UFO mythos, wherein events seemingly occur which hover tantalizingly between reality and irreality. By the time I wrote God’s World, published in England in 1979, the journey to the stars in that book was presented (and presented itself to me) necessarily as a journey through imaginative space. And I was able to reach an actual, “objective” alien world precisely because I envisaged a physical journey to it in a starship as also being a journey through the imagination—a journey which the characters had to create for themselves, as much as the author himself had consciously to create it. If the characters had suffered a failure of imagination, they would not have reached their destination. Thus, in a sense, the problem involved in the cry, “How can I, the writer, possibly believe this?” was shouldered by the characters. Thus I, and they, arrived at journey’s end, and returned.
I think that SF writers who decide that they are no longer really writing SF, or are no longer interested in writing it, or who can no longer bear to write it—SF writers who can no longer persuade themselves of the authenticity of what they are writing, or of the credibility or adequacy of their heroes or heroines—are in fact suffering from an unresolved reality problem, an affliction as dire as prickly heat or poison ivy rashes; and that this will be much more acutely evident in SF writers—particularly in the best and most thoughtful of these writers—than in writers in other fields … because of the nature of SF itself.
That SF presents this problem of belief—in authenticity, in a genuinely adequate hero or heroine—at its very heart, isn’t for me a cause for bemoaning the inherent deficiencies of the genre; but rather of excitement at the prospect of tackling the problem. For it’s a problem that lies at the heart of art. As, indeed, it is at the heart of the existence of the physical universe as such.
One cannot exactly solve the problem—any more than one can define the nature of God, or pin down an actual UFO. There’s no ideal SF novel which balances all the terms of the equation self-consistently and demonstrably, equivalent to Flaubert’s ideal of a novel which could sustain itself entirely by the power of style alone. John Crowley’s Engine Summer may seem, on the surface, to be a perfect example of the Flaubertian SF novel. Yet it isn’t really, since its crystalline perfection comes from its perfect mapping of the reality problem—by means of a technology—on to the text of the book. And of course Rush sets out to become a Saint—a Hero—and succeeds precisely to the extent that he is no longer a real person by the end of the book; and never has been.
This is, of course, to ignore a whole dimension of ‘heroines and heroes’ in the sense of childish wish-fulfillment figures—not to mention the whole side issue of heroic fantasy—in favor of the more encompassing notion of the protagonist. But I think that here we hit on the reason why so many heroes and heroines presented as such are actually far from adequate, in real terms; since as soon as one sets out to invent a problem-solving or action-resolving heroic figure in an SF tale, one is immediately involved in a race of the tortoise, trying to catch an unattainable Achilles.
Achilles, of course, was a genuine hero fortified by being dipped in the Styx. Yet that is not to suggest that so many protagonists and heroic figures in SF are ultimately sub-standard simply because we mostly dwell in the literary sticks. Our protagonists, including heroes and heroines, measure themselves against the universe—or at least a reflected part of it—and the universe flattens and dwarfs them.
At least, that’s one theory.
Here is one such ill-equipped hero, adrift in the void, suddenly pitched into one of SF’s cosmic struggles …
Showdown on Showdown
The miracle that saved me from madness in my survival capsule in the deeps between the stars represented odds that no gambler would ever have accepted. A trillion to one? Who could even calculate it?
The quasi-mass detectors of the Highspacer Euclid noted, momentarily, the faint echo of my capsule adrift in Low Space. The Highspacer dropped back down into the ordinary continuum two lights short of its goal of Eta Cass, the forbidden system of Ruby-Hoyle, and fished me in to human society once more.
Since the explosion of the Highspacer Herschel, I had spent nine months pitting my wits (and staking my sanity) on chess with the mini-comp, and on all the varieties of solitaire I could remember: Klondike, Canfield, Golf, Spider—and Napoleon at St. Helena, this last being the variety that Napoleon reputedly played to while away his last exile. I too, though no Napoleon, had met my Waterloo and was in exile, perhaps forever.
The pecularities of the Euclid—the sense of oddity—I attributed at first to my own nine months’ estrangement from human society. There was the lavish Games Room cum Casino that I thought I glimpsed: surely a fantasy distortion, a projection of my own late lonely rituals? There was the intent preoccupation of the crew, as though they were playing some sort of telepathic chess with each other. And there were the exhaustive mind-tests administered by psychofficer Rosamundi Bjornson almost as soon as I was brought aboard (instead of a slap on the back, and congratulations on my deliverance).
But then Rosamundi Bjornson led me to Highcaptain Wang’s cabin.
The Chinese Highcaptain regarded me with prim anxiety, well masked but not entirely. (I was hypersensitive to human faces after my time in the void without them. By enhancement of my own trade-agent’s skill at reading unwitting expressions, now every faint rictus even of a tight-stretched Chinese face seemed magnified a hundredfold, cartoon-like.)
“I am so happy to hear you are sane, Mr. Cortina,” he said by way of greeting. “We could not, of course, leave a distress beacon unheeded, but even so …” He let a hint fade away, that circumstances might have required that I be tucked back into my pod and jettisoned—or euthanased. “I am happy, too, to hear of the manner in which you occupied your time while shipwrecked.” (Was he being sarcastic? No …) “I would dearly love to place you under arrest for violating the forbidden space we are now moving into. However, all of a ship’s complement must play a role in the Hoyle system to dig us out of the mess our first expedition thoughtlessly got us into. That is how things are. Sit. Drink,” he ordered sharply, in a high-pitched voice.
Drinks appeared from the dispenser. Little cups of burning mao-tai, Chinese brandy.
“How much do you know about Hoyle?”
“It’s the brighter of the two suns of the Eta Cass binary. I’ve heard rumors that it’s got two or three habitable worlds with intelligent aliens on them. Maybe that’s why the system’s off limits?” I searched my memory for some celestial facts. “Hoyle’s a star like Sol. It’s named after a twentieth-century astronomer.”
“It is not. That is a convenient coincidence. The truth about Hoyle’s human name—dreamed up by the fancy and folly of the first expedition—is that it is named after a certain Edmond Hoyle, who lived from the late seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries.”
“Hoyle’s Rules of Games!”
“Precisely. The human names of its planets, three of them inhabited and a further one terraformable, as frivolously selected by the first expedition, are Chip, Pair, Flush, Showdown, Straight, and Jackpot.”
I coughed as the mao-tai caught in my throat. Rosamundi Bjornson regarded me unsympathetically.
“To give them their due, the first expedition chose appropriate nicknames. Chip is just a chip of hot rock, and Pair is number two—big, but hot and airless.” Wang paused.
“Showdown is … where it’s all happening?” I guessed wildly. “Between Flush—and Straight? For the Jackpot?”
For the first time Captain Wang smiled. “Very acute, Mr. Cortina. There is hope for you. Though you don’t yet know what is happening …”
And he told me.
“Three intelligent species co-exist in the Hoyle system, inhabiting Flush, Showdown, and Straight. Both Flush and Straight possess space travel on the interplanetary level. Straight is a cold, ice-girt world of low mass with spindly six-limbed hairy natives that look like dancing spiders with a couple of legs missing. The dominant species of Flush, a heavy, hot world, are six-limbed too, but burly and scaly like golden pangolins who stand upright. Showdown, however—in between the orbits of Flush and Straight—is a water world with only a few crests of land peeking above the deep world-ocean; its dominant lifeform resemble giant squid. Very giant squid: krakens. They communicate by light signals at close quarters, and at a distance by a kind of modulatable empathy, a sense of their placement around the globe.
“Dominant species, did I say? Already we are going haywire. No one is dominant in the system, as such. In fact, the Spider-men of Straight and the Pangolins of Flush are forever playing an intricate game between their two worlds—without war, without aggression or killing. They play it for stakes of territory on little Marslike Jackpot. The actual moves in the Game are enacted for them three-dimensionally throughout the world-ocean of Showdown—by the Krakens. Showdown is the games board; the Krakens are the willing pieces, and umpires. What their motive might be in turning their world into a games board, we have no idea.
“The Game has been going on for a very long time, though in recent E-decades the play has extended to take in Janus too: the solitary ‘double atmosphere’ world of the companion star Ruby, a world with primitive lifeforms of different biologies in both its hemispheres. Its territory is also contested now, far from Janus itself, in the oceans of Showdown.”
